SUMMER 2019

Parkway

My wife, midwestern, calls the strip of grass between the sidewalk and our street a “parkway,” but I don’t know if this is regional naming or not. Before Britt named this public lawn, I had no name for it; I did not see it. This progression, me not seeing, her teaching, me questioning, silently accepting, is familiar. That is, when I am able to allow for this process to occur; which should be always but is not. Our block in Evanston, immediately north of Chicago, is nearly hundred-year-old brick courtyard buildings and large trees whose names I have slowly been learning and misassigning aloud as I pass them with our dog, Mo: Hill’s Oak, Princeton Elm, Village Green Zelkova. It’s spring. Cloudy mornings, dawn and afternoon rain, the sky over the lake giving away nothing. Maybe you don’t know Evanston. It’s a university town. A combination of always-residents and students in-and-out, and liberal “open-mindedness.” Not the city, and not quite the suburbs, though it is. I’m embarrassed by how much I like living where we do. 

It’s not true, but it feels like all I know has been told to me, repeatedly, or quickly read. That nothing in my thoughts is earned. I take and take. I misremember and misspeak, and am absent, lost in my head, and in this way also, take endlessly. 

We are less than a mile away from a part of Chicago that is routinely dangerous. We are less than a mile away from a part of Chicago that is routinely safe. We are alive. We are also pregnant. A baby girl, soon. 

If I stand in the intersection at the end of our block facing east with Mo, crossing diagonally as in Toronto or Tokyo, I can see a thick hyphen of Lake Michigan, five blocks away. I don’t know what Mo can see. He’s usually looking up at me. 

I speak to my dog on these walks but I do not speak to other dog owners or dogs, and I avoid eye contact with both. My avoidance is not impatience, it’s ingrained, and behavior not taken as hostile by others because my frowning smiles directed elsewhere at least are received in profile, or something near, and understood as partially for them. 

Our language and tensions are our own, me and Mo’s, and having to give a summary of what is welcomed by my dog and what is not to a stranger we are passing and their own dog, is, I would say, never worth it. A few years back a shepherd mix bit Mo through his cheek because I tolerated some hello time from strangers. No eventual dog friendship was negotiated. 

My wife is less dramatic. She avoids no one. Except sometimes me. She allows my despairing, drunken moments to exist mostly unseen. Or at least allows me to more easily believe such times are private. A baby is incapable of pretending to not see. Those of us with less substance have to dress up our decisions and their enaction. I do. And so, I run from people, grant my avoidance like a gift, and expect everyone to understand, encourage. 

I can clearly see my fear regarding Mo. I can look at it, process it, hide in it, make decisions based on my thinking. This clarity of thought does not extend to all that scares me. I won’t be able to shuttle my daughter away from others. I won’t be protected from her telling me what I don’t want to hear. There will be no hiding. Eventually, or maybe instantly, we’ll share a language infinitely more complex than I share with Mo. Language that, in part, I’ll give to her. But, I’m not solely afraid. Speaking with my daughter, someday hearing her thoughts, not guessing at the person she will be, but seeing, hearing that person, makes me want to live. 

Down our whole block’s green parkway, on either side of the street, there are raggedly straight yellow spray-painted dashes indicating the location of a natural gas line. Summer utility upkeep. Roughly every three yards, a small yellow flag on a wire pole is planted. It seems there are hundreds of these flags and though I could work the numbers to confirm or deny—length of a city block, a flag every three yards—I will tell you more about myself by saying I would rather fucking leap off the roof of our building than do that math. I’ve been doing nothing that requires attention for the past too many months because our first child has been on her way. Is on her way. Is now six weeks or so from landing. Half learning trees, asleep through the NBA playoffs, dead through work, and at home forgetting to do that which I have promised to do, all that. I could never carry a baby. What man alive has ever been strong enough, rhetorically asking. But, unease, forgetfulness, both are forgivable. 

Where I’ve been able to focus, think, is on our dog walks, but I can only focus on the walks themselves, on Mo, the grass, the little flags, on rerouting, avoidance. 

I am known outside now in a way I wasn’t previously because Britt is pregnant and much friendlier than I am. As she describes her husband, the listening stranger and the listening stranger’s dog look to Mo and remember, or reconstruct, the other person that walks him, the loping swings into the parkway or the darting across the street. These strangers, neighbors, accost me with shouts, “How much longer until that little girl?” 

My wife has told these strangers the sex of our unborn baby and I still refuse to look them in the eye. Partly this is superstition: not wanting to admit a new life is coming. Superstition is another word for fear. 

Mo’s a rescue terrier mutt that barks occasionally at everything and often at nothing. He prances more than walks. He’s lightly medicated. A month ago, Mo had a seizure. Britt was walking him, I was at work. Mo stopped walking, made a wet choking sound, and collapsed frothing at the mouth, tremoring on his side in the grass. My pregnant wife, seven months pregnant at the time, my Britt, began carrying him, trying to run four blocks home until our downstairs neighbor Cam intervened and drove them to the animal hospital. This neighbor, Cam, an unintentionally genderless woman, healthy in her early sixties, is not one of the shouters but is enmeshed with them; she has the bearing of a friendly accountant with an active mannered social life. She knows the business of all the shouters, the museum member, the Polish jazz fan, the towering shih-tzu owner, and all our other neighbors, and she knows this business and relays some while still articulating love for these people. Her dog is a Klein poodle named Larry that leaps into her arms and nests in a seated position or latches into a human-like hug depending on the pitch of the initiating whistle. Britt called and struggled with a few words that included “seizure” and I left work and met downstairs Cam, my wife, and Mo at the hospital. I hugged Cam, who I daily avoid without cause, twice in the small room at the animal hospital. After the second hug I could see in her face that what she had done was instinct for her, to help, and all the hugging was, for her, unnecessary. She accepted even the second hug, but I could see, she understood that I was weaker than she ever could have previously imagined, praising and thanking her for doing what was baseline human. Her look said, asked me, “Do you not know we are alive?” 

I do forget sometimes. 

So, dog walks are now layered with a new fear of seizure reoccurrence. Reoccurrence coupled with, in my case, new recognition as the husband of the pregnant woman on our block. 

Britt tells me what to look for again: Mo not drinking, stopping short, losing balance, his head lolling. I don’t question, and I should already know. I was in the room with her when the vet told us these warning signs, but I was watching my wife: I wanted to know how I should feel, how strong I was capable of being. 

Another seizure may never come. The rest of his dog life, clear. When I say I’m afraid of seizure reoccurrence, I’m using “seizure” as a placeholder word, because undoubtedly there will be a reoccurrence. Some violence. It’ll be me, my wife, my marriage, my daughter. That’s coming. I can’t stop that. 

I am out with Mo circling on the parkway. Light rain five blocks away over the lake, the beaches dampening, couples walking quickly in windbreakers, children growing anxious outside. The dog circles before he poops. Mo cannot simply squat and release as so many dogs I have observed can. He must circle and situate and shift and grunt and then haltingly, release. As most terrible couples with dogs do, my wife and I have a private created language surrounding our animal. This is different than the language I alone share with the dog: that language is stunned gawking, nose-to-nose. That language is helping him situate between my calves in bed as I lay flat on my back. But the act I am witnessing, the pooping, is something we call “grumping out a Stephen.” If the process is quick, “gruff a Steve.” I don’t remember the origin. I reach into the red fire hydrant-shaped poop bag holder so I can move this entire process towards its return inside and the couch and find, no bags. As for trash, there is nothing in my immediate vicinity that is newspapery or broad enough for shit retrieval. There are hundreds of yellow flags wearily not flapping. I rip the yellow plasticky flag portion from one of the wire poles, it’s the size of a folded square napkin, and pick up the poop, like three breakfast sausage links. 

From across the street I hear, “Nice nice!” being yelled in my direction. “Ingenuity around shit will help soon!” 

Cam is wearing sneakers and a well-tailored suit. I realize I don’t actually know what she does for a living, though I’m sure I’ve been told. Larry, her poodle, groomed and schooled, and Cam are both grinning at us, the scruffy set. I shout, “Thank you,” and turn to begin walking back inside, but Larry and Cam are already next to us, have already bounded across the street and she’s handing me a poop bag to put my ingenuity into. Cam’s speaking like we are familiar, and, my god, we are. 

“Here you go, wrap it. Don’t want to have to carry that folded, need the freedom of the hand.” 

I think: repeat your line and leave. “Thank you,” I say and I smile at her, as if to express how long my day has been, how great my thanks, and how infinite my desire to go back inside. 

“Britt told me the name. I’m just thrilled for you both. Mae Grace. It’s beautiful. She said that’s your paternal grandma’s middle name and her maternal grandma’s middle name? Such order there. Carrying down from each side, bravo.” 

“Thank you, thank you.” 

Our two dogs, I haven’t been paying attention, but they are licking each other’s faces. I’ve never seen Mo do this with another dog and I’m horrified. The gentle licking. I feel I might have the seizure. I say something else, “The fuck.” 

Cam laughs, “No, that’s kissing. We don’t do more than that on the first date, do we now?” 

I’m smiling like a person who can’t live on his own, watching the dogs. I step backwards towards home and Mo stands firm. The dogs are probing more deeply into each other’s mouths. I must still be making a face as I finally tug Mo backwards from the long tongue of the poodle, because Cam says to me, “It’s OK. I’m sorry. But, it is OK.” 

We’ve managed to retreat a few steps. I take in the tree near us, the wind breathing noisily through its dense upper branches, leaves. I venture “American Beech” out loud, and think of how many others know the names of three or four trees and spend their lives wrongly categorizing that which surrounds them, bewildered, sharing and teaching that information with animals that don’t speak their language, with daughters not listening, always listening, to neighbors showing care, and wonder if the wrong name is better, if any name is better than not seeing the tree at all. Cam says, “What?” and I look at her and say, “You’re right.” I laugh the laugh I try to laugh when I am trying to charm and Mo and I walk away. 

A clear logic behind making the wrong choice means nothing. But there are more harmful actions than being gently wrong: acting like years of decisions that have led to this day and the days coming are someone else’s choices. Someone else’s choices that can be ignored, denied. 

Our apartment in the brick courtyard building is full of half-assembled baby equipment. Half-assembled by my wife. I cook the meals I can, wash the dishes, rub her feet, but this is nothing really. I’m signaling here, too. Signaling genuine love, but, it feels not enough. She’s at work. It’s a day off for me. I try and pick up a little. We have a dog trainer coming tomorrow in preparation for the baby, trying to get Mo to a point where the entrance of a baby will be more manageable for all of us. I straighten boxes, vacuum poorly, fill and run and empty the dishwasher, clean the rusty buildup at the bottom of our toothbrush holder, wipe the minor mold from the shower curtain, remove my wife’s long hair from the corners it clings to in the bathroom, near her nightstand, near where she sits on the far end of the couch near the window. I wash Mo’s bowls. I look at what I’ve done in total and see almost no difference. I write a note for Britt on printer paper, “I don’t understand the jargon you use when telling me about your day at work, but I love it and you,” a line I’ve had in my head for several hours, and then she’s home, in through the front door changing the entire atmosphere of the rooms that we live in. 

I begin telling her about picking up Mo’s poop with the yellow flag, the neighbor, and as if she’s hearing a different story, puts a hand on her round stomach, smiles, and walks into the other room. 

The baby comes and I forget the dog. 

This Far North

There is no love this far 
north 

nor pride in one’s children. 

I’ll concede that the fountain 
is beautiful, 

its water frozen and reflecting 
headlights. 

We ask permission. 
Most of the time 

the answer is “no.” 

The edges of things are meaningless: 
consider soup. 

I no longer want to meet 
women. 

Consider the misinformation 
spread 

by discontents. 

Ecstacy

On acid, in my other life, I’d seen leviathans 
on carrousels, ghost-beasts from the pelagic dark, 
breeching and immortal looking. Or their equivalent. 
And once you’ve seen that, the rest is rock ‘n roll. 
So when another airman held out his hand, offering 
a capsule the washed-out blue of skies in the Midwest, 
I didn’t ask. I paid him. Borrowed a swig of his beer 

and swallowed. MDMA, he called it. I was off to 
listen to Roger Daltrey sing, Can you see the real me? 
They didn’t call what I took Ecstasy. Not in Rantoul 
in nineteen seventy-three. You ask, What was it like? 
Like entering the Afterlife, if your idea of afterlife 
is the Air Force—Rantoul, Illinois in November 
and an ancient, wood barracks with dim corridors, 

the War in Vietnam a world away and winding down, 
though body bags never stopped arriving from there. 
Daltrey sang, I work myself to death just to fit in. 
Years later, I read Pete Townsend discovered 
the whistles of the diesel trains near his home 
could suggest adolescent pain. They said, Watch. 
I wish I could say the Air-Force-regulation-haircut 

golden boy I was is still there somewhere, still dying 
to one world and rising into a far finer, cleaner one. 
I can’t. And this life makes less sense all the time. 
When winter came that year to Illinois, it snowed. 
Deep snows that blew across the roads. On base and 
off. And I was astonished at what we survive, though 
marveling at the drifts I may not have thought that then. 

32 Degrees North: Alabama

………..I heard a music struck 
from the dense shadow of houses, 
the line of fields stretching out, 
and on the river’s muddy bank, 
the scurrying crayfish. 

Where the hummingbird 
………..supped, the trumpet vine’s 
red flower resounded, 
tremolo of the fig tree, eaten by ants. 

………..A white magnolia 
blazed forth in the meadow, 
petals falling on my shoulders like snow, 
without its cold. Trees remained green, 
their leaves unfailing: 
………..a summer without end. 

I ran barefoot through Bermuda grass, 
………..the chortle of children playing 
in every yard. Cavalry 
pounded past, with bugles blaring, 
………..elephants heaved tree trunks, 
panting, a lion burst through 
a sumac thicket, gold in the sun. 

………..That music captivated me, 
raised me from torpor, unknown voices 
ripped through air, stars 
………..scripted their white language. 
Beside me, a continual blossoming. 

An arbor of honeysuckle sheltered 
garbage cans, pumpkin school buses 
lay abandoned in cotton fields. 
………..I raced in freedom 
through the long, slow days, 

unknowing. In Rousseau’s painting 
a gypsy plays his pipe in the shadows 
and the sower spreads a handful of seed 
………..over the fields, his body bent 
by the weight of what he carries. 

………..In a deliberate sun I stepped, 
heedless, into the rose garden, 
Helen Traubel and Peace, 
………..dawn-colored, pink and gold, 
loosed their exuberant fragrance. 

A pizzicati of stars 
burst through the black sky. 
………..Lost in that music, 
oboes throbbing like hearts, 
I knew nothing of all that would happen: 

years of drought and silence crouched 
………..in the bud of the white 
camellia beside the house. 

Two Poems by Rachel Aviva Burns

Japanese Maple Tree

This is the tree whose leaves are red 
on spindly black branches in spiky clumps 
their new buds look like raspberries 
skewered on the dark extended twigs— 
something sinister in the way 
they pierce the sky and sometimes 
the new growth looks like clotted blood 
and in one of them a blackbird sits 
and occasionally croaks out a natch-natch cry 
as a soft breeze stirs his tail feathers and 
if I made a cry like a natch-natch cry 
I would make it in displeasure. 
His beak is sharp, like the twigs of the tree. 
Somehow his eye is both dark and bright. 
He watches me watching him, wings half-raised. 
He lifts one foot, replaces it there. 
And the leaves at his feet are red, blood-red. 
And here spring is neither soft nor green. 
And there are no blossoms or finches or jays. 
And the branches are black, the leaves are red. 
And the blackbird cocks his head and stares. 

Cut Yellow Flowers 

I think that I will wait tonight 
after the sun has set and the last lights 
turned off in every house on the block 
and watch by the streetlight slanting 
through the high window to see 
what in the orange half-light 
twelve tulips might do. 
As light fades, a painter’s eye might see 
how in the yellow of the petals 
there is violet, blue, and red. 
How in the leafy shadows 
burnt umber and mahogany. 
How in the dark, the flowers cannot 
stretch up towards the light and so 
reel and sway and shift and cast 
beneath them moving, mottled shadows. 

It Tastes Like Nothing

The fruit, fixed. A precision, dissolve of wither 
and bruises. 

When produce is political, the government shuts down 
safety, as a weapon. 

Food becomes borders. 
A portal of flavor and people furloughed, 

a bare minimum. 
Long sly bargaining with rogue. 

The tables turned over. 
Everything inside of us, hidden. 
A wall switch clicked on gospel, a pistol with choices. 

My youngest son asked, what if we cloned our food? 
I told him we already do. 

Maybe I press down too heavy; 
make too many dents inside of truths. 

I wonder what he will eat of what we leave him. 
Imitation wonders about perfect: 

an absurd bland sandwich, 
a buttered skillet, with high heat and abrasions, 
a plate equipped with plastics, 
meal ready fragments, well-seasoned and astute. 

The leafy rotten skins, trembling. 

……………………..The water ran black in the mornings. 
……………………………..The soil had plenty to say 
………………………………………after being 
……………………..silent for so long. 
………………………………It wasn’t even the color 
………………………………………..of water 
……………………..that propelled her 
………………………………into a downward 
……………………………………….spiral, but its 
……………………..fleeting action, 
………………………………its constant 
……………………………………….rushing away, 
……………………..as if leaving 
………………………………was all it knew 
……………………………………….how to do. 
……………………..Black wasn’t worse 
………………………………than the gaudy tints 
……………………………………….of that half- 
……………………..forgotten fall, when a careless 
………………………………wind 
………………………………………..licked her skin 
……………………..as she sat on the porch, 
………………………………watching him walk 
………………………………………..back toward his life. 
……………………..All those days spent 
………………………………in silent admiration 
………………………………………..of his voice 
……………………..were water 
………………………………under the bridge. 
……………………………………….Never again 
……………………..would she wait 
……………………………..for the sound of his 
……………………………………….key in the lock, 
……………………..would she bother 
……………………………..to look in the mirror 
……………………………………….at odd 
……………………..hours of the night. 
……………………………..Never again 
……………………………………….would she take 
……………………..his scolding for a sign 
……………………………..he cared. 
……………………………………….The squeal 
……………………..of his brakes as he peeled 
……………………………..out from her driveway 
……………………………………….was now, at best, 
……………………..a memory of something 
……………………………..she had lost, 
……………………………………….at worst, a regret 
……………………..for having had 
……………………………..that something 
……………………………………….in the first place. 

Voyager

1.
I used to talk
to my ex-husband

in Carl Sagan’s
voice, describe

to him the Pillars
of Creation,

with its orange
and yellow spires,

all that cosmic gas
and dust floating

in the Eagle Nebula
like goblins

of rock. He would
look at me the way

Ann might have
looked at Carl,

then continue
to wash the dishes.

I used to think
that whatever

tethered us
together would

be enough
for me, if it was

for him. That
maybe we had

some Ann and
Carl love.

That our trajectory
was aligned,

if not predictive,
constant.

2.
Voyager 1
is now at the edge

of our solar system
where solar winds

and shock waves
form heliosphere,

and I’m at the edge
of telling my friend

in my own voice,
own words,

that I want
to take her hand,

and point it
towards Venus,

towards Vega.
That I want

to travel with her
through the zip-codes

of the gods, peel
off her space suit,

then wrap her body
around mine

like an old blanket.
I used to think

I knew what Ann
felt, why

she recorded
her brain waves

on the Golden Record.
I used to think

that what I had
could sustain me.

Copper Bar, Price Tower

She can’t say what she kept,
or what she remembers leaving
in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

It could have been five sounds
or the color red, or just a film
of hotel soap on her skin.

She thinks she remembers
someone isosceles shaped
with two equal legs. But she

doesn’t remember if the person
was wearing a dress, or undressed.
She insists that there was an algorithm

to the night, that there was architecture
to her thoughts, that her actions
were wildly ordinary. But that of course

would be a lie. On the 15th floor,
of Wright’s only skyscraper,
she consumed beautiful red bell

cocktails. She listened to jazz.
And parallel to where she, herself,
was sitting, she told someone

Fallingwater can be defined
as a series of strong horizontal
and vertical lines. And that she

often imagined occupying Fallingwater.
Like calculus is the study of change
and geometry shape, that night

she came to think in numbers
and angles, and Oklahoma was
a vertex where two lines met.

It was something reached
in a fever dream, less than state,
more than a state of mind.

If the dead don’t know how on earth to live, 
How on earth can the living? Mistakes stack 
Up like nights. We get in over our heads 
Whether or not we truly love the ones 
We’re with. No one asks to be dropped 
Into the glass like this. We do not rehearse 
Our deliveries yet are delivered nonetheless 
Into these thin-skinned vessels we call 
The Self in which we love and lose and love 
Again, and must trust the stars are fixed 
In the ether despite our first fevers, our mothers 
Either wringing their hands through the night 
Or trusting our illness burns brightly, yes, 
But nowhere near as bright as us.