SPRING 2018

Three hours and twenty minutes early for my flight.  There is no line. Two pounds under weight, I remove a few books from the leather bag I received on “New Dad’s Day” about seven years ago, cram them into my suitcase. The less weight upon my frame the less shock to my knees. 

“Can I put my jacket in my bag? It might make me a bit overweight?” 

“Do not worry sir,” overly formal, but nearly perfect accent, she smiles, and I am not sure if there is pity in her eyes or if I am only imagining it.  I look around, and am almost surprised that nobody is watching me bend down to lock up my suitcase. I am unsteady, and I feel so very slow. 

* 

I walk to the money exchange; I have about seventy dollars’ worth of pesos. The line: filled with Colombians who are grilled about their professions, how they came to possess so many American dollars, why they are exchanging money at the airport, a few other questions to which they respond with anxious, careful nods. When the interrogation is over, they search bewildered across three pages for where to sign four times, and finally press their right thumb on a pad of ink and lower it onto squares on each page. The final two exchangers, one at each open window, swap multiple currencies. 

Seventy dollars is too much to toss, but I have nothing to hold onto, and given that my legs are starting to twitch, I consider handing my bills to the woman behind me holding two small children, even though my turn is next. 

* 

The immigration agent examines my aging passport with a jeweler’s loop, her eyes convulse from my picture to my face, her hands strokes the pages- I am a fragile, ancient scroll. She escorts me to a supervisor’s window where I wait with several others. I try to resist leaning on the ledge of the glass window that divides us, but after some time, my left knee begins to shake, so I push my right hand onto the ledge to release a bit of pressure. Disability, I say, in Spanish, an intentional gaze slowly traces a line from my hand to my eyes. He stamps my passport quickly, and waves me beyond. 

* 

The black sign shows a walking stick-figure, and a circled 7 Minutes to Gates 38-45. 7 minutes. How did they arrive at this answer? An average of some sample of walkers, young and old, strong and weak? An overestimate to encourage those who are late to sprint to catch their planes? Three minutes later I approach the next sign, 6 Minutes to Gates 38-45. 

* 

Three years ago, I would have shattered their pitiable guidance, laughed at the absurdity of moving so slowly through life. Now my unsteady amble, more side to side than forward and advance, knees that no longer listen. 

* 

Almost incomprehensible that I cannot simply command my body, an arrow, slicing toward my destination. Now I am a duck, no matter how much will I attempt to muster. 

* 

The cleaning woman stands over me with her mop in hand. She says nothing, but it is clear she is waiting for me to move. I feel my face twist into an angry snarl. I push hard on the vinyl backrest of my seat to propel myself vertical and walk away without a word. 

* 

Two yellow vested workers glide four collapsed, folding wheelchairs, one in each hand. 

Moving toward me, they are dark shadows slithering along a midnight path, they span the entire width of my walkway. I step off as quickly as I can, almost falling into the row of black seats just before they run me over. It is time to buy a cane. 

* 

I stop in front of the Café Britt shop, almost the size of a supermarket. Chocolate, dark chocolate covered cashews, milk chocolate covered passion fruit, white chocolate guava, espresso beans of all three. How many airports, how many trips, how many samples have I eaten, bags brought home to my family, for how many late-night binges together while watching Grey’s Anatomy?  From about fifty feet away I peer in; I don’t see the hand-sized wooden sample cups, only the brown, blue and green bags on the walls. I only want a few pieces, but the extra steps? I continue to limp toward my gate. 

* 

I walk slowly down the long, intersecting ramps that lead to the jetway. I am surrounded by children, some in strollers, others walking in front of their parents, waddling forward with newfound legs and freedom. Some invisible force appears to prevent them from overtaking me, from running past. A squat two-year-old waddles just behind to my left. He wears a Micky Mouse t- shirt, his shoes are small, so small his feet seem cramped to me, and point at forty-five-degree angles from his center, and while his legs are marbles of gushy fat, it appears that he is about to pass me. But against all odds, I dig deep, am given the gift of speed, and arrive at the jetway before him. 

Rich Furman, PhD, is the author or editor of over 15 books, including a collection of flash nonfiction/prose poems, Compañero (Main Street Rag, 2007), Detaining the Immigrant Other: Global and Transnational Issues (Oxford University Press, 2016), Social Work Practice with Men at Risk (Columbia University Press, 2010), andPractical Tips for Publishing Scholarly Articles (Oxford University Press, 2012). His poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in Hawai’i Review, Coe Review, The Evergreen Review, Black Bear Review, Red Rock Review, Sierra Nevada Review, New Hampshire Review, Penn Review, Colere, Pearl and many others. He is professor of social work at University of Washington Tacoma.  He is currently a student of creative nonfiction at Queens University’s MFA-Latin America program. 

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I am a Mennonite, taught in youth the cornerstone of religion is faith not works.  Thus one must first believe upon the work of Christ and then act upon that belief in works of love and kindness, being born anew by the sacrifice of Christ, by the power of God and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.  After accepting this, one is baptized by water baptism as a statement of faith, being taught before one chooses Christ all are equally sinful before God; and no holy water, nor other rituals can alter this.  There is only faith in Christ and the fruits of such a faith that separate the sinner from the saint to a Mennonite.  Any church which practices rituals, and defames baptism by sprinkling babies and then says: “Behold, a Christian,” this is blasphemy, the working of the “AntiChrist”, and a lie. 

I admit, when I read the scriptures and I listened to the clean-shaven men and the white capcrowned women, while in four part harmony we sang our old hymns, I said “Amen.”  I say it still.  But I have lived long enough to see plainly the kind acts which are the fruit of the Spirit and the centerpiece to the teachings of Christ are found in men and women throughout the world with or without a Mennonite faith, or a Christian faith, or any faith at all. 

I suppose a Mennonite with his or her devotion to nonviolence is as horrified by the Baptists praising of military service or American patriotism as a Baptist is horrified by a gay man saying he’s a devoted Christian living in the will of God, although the Baptist is the more “left leaning” of the two established religious groups in my view.  A separatist such as a “Plain Mennonite” has a much longer list of sins the world at large is committing than the evangelical churches do.  Being so removed from cultural norms, and so small a number of the population overall, there is no collective belief that we should force our codes of conduct on non-Mennonites.  The result of adult baptism, and training our children to see themselves as no different than children born anywhere else is the world, is that one must choose his or her faith.  For a Mennonite, it is a central dogma that no one should come into conscious awareness of themselves as already being Christians.  Everyone must first come to the awareness they are sinners before they can be saved from their sins.  For this training we received I am very grateful. 

There are other resonating joys growing up in a rural, separatist faith.  Not one in our large youth group smoked anything.  Not one of us drank alcohol.  There was no drunkenness, no hangover, no substance addiction beyond sugar and caffeine.  We were taught to work hard before we knew what we were doing was hard work.  It was sexuality alone that we were incapable of eliminating from our “single” lives.  What a setback for our puritan endeavors when we discovered the girls of our age were just as curious and interested as us!  I suppose if we were starving we would have been equally as helpless to instinct, but as it was is as it is: the American countryside when infested with Mennonites is a fat land, with lush gardens and green pastures of cattle for milk and meat.  Most of us have parents who endeavored to love as Christ taught us to love.  We grew up learning from nature and the “gospel truths” we heard our parents and grandparents tell us. 

The rains came and the rains failed to come; we prayed, we were thankful.  Some lived on, some died.  We prayed, and we were thankful.  We knew happiness, and the double bitterness of sorrow and helplessness.  We prayed, and we found reasons for thankfulness. 

Somewhere along the way faith became about as meaningful as ritual to me.  All that remained of doctrinal tenets in my life was summarized in an admission that self-preservation was my chief aim, and kindness towards others was vaguely framed in acts of either helping their self-preservation or at the least not interfering with it.  Because we are conscious creatures, and believe we choose the path we are on to a greater extent than most life on earth, for happiness’s sake I acquired at least one true ideal: we should aim to have definable, achievable purposes that bring meaning to the sensory pleasures that gratify our self and create expectation.  I do not believe this abstract idea is any better than the ones given to me to believe.  In fact, at times of pain and loss, which come more often than they used to, I feel it is far inferior. 

I still go to hear the farmers of our valley teach of the gospels, and I sing with my neighbors, and at times—rich, and meaningful times—when we rise from our silent prayer there are tears in the eyes of the elders, and their closing testimonies are a confession of life’s unpredictability, of man’s selfish heart, and of Christ’s love for all.  The old husband holds his wife’s hand down the steps after the service into the summer night air with insects singing in the row of old pine trees he and his friends planted as youths.  My friends, my childhood playmates, hair thinning on top, dads like myself, gather after the services as we have since we were old enough to be away from our parents.  Alongside talk of harvest yields and laughter about family life and our children, sober regrets work their way in.  We share with one another our response to our children’s behavior, and talk in mutual agreement of a woman’s spitefulness when overwhelmed by work.  We confess of postponing a new appliance in order to buy a better hay baler or a new fan in the barn with the justification it will “make money”.  We speak of trips to chiropractors for this or that.  At last death has taken one of us, and the void and inevitable stings us all, and for the first time, sometimes, we stand around one another and do not talk at all—feeling. 

We greet one another with a firm handshake and a smile of happiness at meeting old friends.  Our happiness is not constant, but we all have our moments when our cup runs over in joy.  And we say with the Psalmist: Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name, worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness—and feel, believe, much is due in thanksgiving for the contentment we have in the week just past, knowing the storm of separation and sorrow is yet before us and our place shall one day be not this old church pew but across the pines, “to the earth from whence we came, and our souls take flight to eternity.” 

The old men speak of how full the cemetery across the row of pines has gotten over the years.  Those that were the old men when we were yet children said the same thing, while we saw all the empty lawn and thought of how much there was for us to mow. 

This past Sunday my friend Luke and I were on one side of the church steps, where we could see the gravel driveway and the cemetery before us.  We have farmed together, planted produce together, overhauled tractors together.  We have hashed and rehashed all types of ideas and happenings over the years.  Last Sunday, however, he brought up something different. 

“It does seem to be filling up a good bit in the cemetery lately, don’t you think?” 

I looked out and noticed the newer gray gravestones filling in the family plots of Martins, Hursts, Millers, Burkholders, and others.  “Yes, it is,” I replied.  “It really is.” 

Dante Tropea is an Ohio grain and mint farmer.   His literary pursuits focus primarily on researching and writing about American farm life.  He can be contacted at dantetropea@gmail.com.

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One knee set in a wooden wagon, my dad, as a boy in Maine in the 1930s, 

would scoot downhill from the farmhouse to the local railway station for 

no good reason but that things happened there, and the larger world, 

steaming with purpose, would rollick past, headed from elsewhere to 

elsewhere, which made his feet feel in nowhere, though occasionally 

a train would pause enough for a few elsewhere people and goods to 

disembark and disperse so become part of his nowhere world, though 

not of his yet lesser world of chores and chickens and grandparents, 

the hill back up a steep, lonely climb to the attic room that held his cot, 

a room allowed to him, he knew, from love, yet one far from the midnight 

rumbles of the trains that invaded, then dominated, his steaming-elsewhere, 

Maine-forsaking dreams. 

Mark Belair‘s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Alabama Literary Review, Atlanta Review, The Cincinnati Review, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry East, and The South Carolina Review. His latest collection is Watching Ourselves (Unsolicited Press, 2017). Previous collections include Breathing Room (Aldrich Press, 2015); Night Watch (Finishing Line Press, 2013); While We’re Waiting (Aldrich Press, 2013); and Walk With Me (Parallel Press of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, 2012). He have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize multiple times. Please visit his website at  www.markbelair.com. 

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Roy Bentley is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and the Ohio Arts Council. Books include Boy in a Boat (University of Alabama, 1986), Any One Man (Bottom Dog, 1992), The Trouble with a Short Horse in Montana (White Pine Press, 2006), Starlight Taxi (Lynx House Press, 2013); as well as Walking with Eve in the Loved City, a finalist for the Miller Williams Prize and due out from the University of Arkansas Press.

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Mary Jo’s boy Paul died last night 
in a Lincoln Mark on a flooded Florida road. 
Her voice warbled and broke 
as she told me over the phone. 

~ 

The Lincoln was Edsel’s brand, 
gifted him by his father to keep his 
flamboyant design ideas away 
from the utilitarian Ford cars. 

~ 

Once, when the sun 
was left without a chariot, 
burning stallions lit up the rusting 
Cutlass husks, the chipped out 
isosceles of foundry glass, 
and the sunken phaethons of Model Ts. 

` 

You can have any color you like 
so long as it is black, 
said Edsel Ford’s father. 

~ 

Undulant fever leaves grey hives in the vision 
as though the sun has bladed 
from a Lincoln’s hood and stricken 
the pale eyes ringed by jaundiced sclera. 

~ 

The sky with an absurd fire on the skein 
of its ballooning udder spouts unpasteurized 
lambency that makes the fever worse. 

~ 

Edsel was no Phaethon. 
The day of his funeral the factory 
halted for five full minutes 
as the workers dangled gloves 
at their sides in silence. 

~ 

The worst bitterness is reserved 
for those who outlive their children— 

Phoebus darkening the east after 
his four stallions burned, Daedelus 
watching from the banks as melted 
wings dragged his boy under, unable 
to invent a device to resurrect him, 

that craven Henry Ford gaunt beneath 
a tin sky of flashbulbs as he exited the church. 
~ 

And Mary Jo, repeating how the road 
was just washed out, how he hydroplaned 
because the road was just washed out, 
as if by saying it enough she might 
bring herself to believe that he was gone. 

Cal Freeman was born and raised in Detroit, MI. He is the author of the books Brother Of Leaving (Marick Press) and Fight Songs (Eyewear Publishing). His writing has appeared in many journals including New Orleans Review, Passages North, The Journal, Commonweal, Drunken Boat, and The Poetry Review. He is a recipient of The Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes); he has also been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and creative nonfiction. He regularly reviews collections of poetry for the radio program Stateside on Michigan Public Radio. He currently lives in Dearborn, MI and teaches at Oakland University. 

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Marc Tretin is a retired lawyer who has published widely. His book PINK MATTRESS is available on Amazon. Currently he resides in a house that is rapidly turning into a petting zoo, with numerous cats, an obese rabbit, a deaf pit bull and a back yard filled with raccoons, possums and other creatures that should not be so abundant on long island. He also has two adult children who will never move out or load the dish washer. 

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I. 
There is something 
in this little town 
that has stayed with me, 

even after forty years. 
Not the meandering of U.S. 51 
from the north, nor 

the hot highway wind, 
its noise a cover for sibling rivalry, 

or the feeling of queasiness 
as you rode backward 

in a station wagon. 

Something in this little town 
has stayed with me, but 
not the water tower, 

invisible until the car reached 
the peak of the last hill 

and you slowed into town 
under the rumble of the train bridge, 

driving slowly under the elms that shaded 
West Emmet Street like the arching green 
roof of a cathedral. 

The elms are gone now. 
Her enclosed garden—gone too. Plowed over, 
seeded with grass. The wall around summer 
removed. 

II. 
There is something 
in this little town 
that has stayed with me, 

even after forty years. 

Perhaps her habit 
of digging in the dirt: 
burying coffee grounds, 
egg shells, potato peelings, peach pits. 

Perhaps the a memory of 
tall, stiff attic steps, 
the smell of moth balls and fancy party dresses, 
or the chatter of local callers on the radio talk shows. 

Perhaps it is the crusts she cut from 
my sandwiches at lunch 
or the apples, peeled from top 
to bottom, in one long ribbon, 
that ribbon, then, becoming a snack. 

III. 
There is something 
in this little town 
that has stayed with me— 

Her kitchen, perhaps, 

where we stood, face-to-face, 
she holding my hands, 
twirling me in front of the stove, 
she singing. 

The song is gone, for now, but 
not the prayer about the holy angel 
standing guard against the wicked foe, 

nor the memory of my mother’s 
narrow bedroom, 
she lying next to me 
in the heat of mid-summer, 
and the daylight fading into sleep. 

Laura C. Wendorff is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville.  She has published poetry in several journals, including Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine, and Minetta Review. Wendorff’s essay “Worth The Risk: Writing Poetry About Children With Special Needs” was nominated for a Best of the Net Award and the Pushcart Prize.  She lives in Wisconsin with her husband and two children. 

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