The Gravity is Strong
The gravity is strong in this new house;
everything I touch is pulled to the floor.
In this room, especially, the gravity is strong.
The thump of the Marlboro pack
against his palm means
he will smoke another cigarette
while waiting for the lamb,
slowly roasting in the broiler.
He looks at my sandals at the foot of the bed
and knows I will soon be
only a shadow in his history.
I walk again through the hanging orange and red beads
separating the one room from the kitchen.
The clinking of the beads makes him raise his head.
All the beads fall to the floor; he knows
he will be pulled down, too, in time.
If I wander around this dark empty room,
screaming mournfully,
my neighbors will never know why.
The gravity is strong in this room.
Toni La Ree Bennett’s verbal and visual work has appeared in Cimarron Review, Gold Man Review, Gravel, Poemmemoirstory, Puerto del Sol, Hawaii Pacific Review, december, and Memoir with a poetry chapbook to be published by Finishing Line Press in February 2019. She is also a photographer and lives with a flock of feisty finches. Photography and writing samples can be seen at tonibennett.com.
My Refuge
For many years, L was my refuge,
when I grew tired of being the butt
of an endless stream of fatty jokes.
I could find some solace in H or F,
but L was a special place, where
so many things could be found
that I had never, ever considered,
much less paused to carefully view
from every possible known angle.
My L was older, born in 1903, and
it sat comfortably in the midst
Of its peers, hiding in plain sight.
L and all its cousins are now
long gone, donated or hauled away,
I wasn’t consulted, one day
it was simply gone, and nothing more
was said, and with it went my 14,989 friends
that lived in that volume of our OED.
Louis Faber is a poet and retired attorney and college literature teacher, residing in Rochester, New York and Coconut Creek, Florida. His work has previously appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle, Eureka Literary Magazine, Borderlands: the Texas Poetry Review, Midnight Mind, Pearl, Midstream, European Judaism, Greens Magazine, The Amethyst Review, Afterthoughts, The South Carolina Review and Worcester Review, among many others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
This grieving process has not been allowed to take its course,
free flowing river dammed up til it slows to the drip-drop of a rapidly slowing heartbeat.
I make the trek to the grave site at all hours of the day
to dig through the loose dirt with quickless fingernails.
I reach the remains and cradle them as if newborn,
stroke the bones as if they were still smooth flesh,
ask the leaking marrow yet again where it all went wrong.
The length of my mourning should not surprise me.
I have never left anything alone long enough to fully heal,
picked off every hardened scab and have
nothing to show for it but a body full of pockmarks.
I call upon every love goddess, Aphrodite, Freya, Bast,
pluck the newborn hairs from my brows,
and drop them to the earth as offerings.
I beat my closed fist against my breastbone
and demand for it to be my turn.
Let the crepe lift from my neck and be replaced
with layer upon layer of starched lace.
Let me trace the lips of another and finally have the gesture repeated back.
Hallowed be thy names, thy facets.
I maintain belief long enough for the wish to be granted
then I blow out all the candles,
rebury the remains,
and place a newborn sapling atop.
Seldom Did the Heart
Rachael Gay is a poet and artist living in Fargo, North Dakota. Her work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Ghost City Review, Rag Queens, Déraciné Magazine, Gramma Poetry, FreezeRay Poetry, Rising Phoenix Review and others.
Once in a Lifetime
She wants to shop Chico’s for what she calls
her special event outfit. Dad tags along lost in the swim
of the fall collection—cardigans and dark lean pants.
The salesclerk, all cheeks and teeth, approaches us
but my mother needs to glide past her to begin her search.
I shadow her. I can’t yet imagine the perfect find.
With smiling lips, she tells me, The price isn’t an issue,
as she drapes my arms with jackets for the dressing room.
I help her slip into the sleeves, swap sizes, move swiftly
to please her. She knows what she wants. Then she sags
to a bench as Dad and I admire the periwinkle jacket
with a satin sheen, and she sends me off for a tank top.
The clerk shadows me now, asks if we’re having any luck,
can she help us. I feel compelled to tell her that the outfit
for this special event is what my chemo-haired mother
will wear in her casket—date imminent, still unknown.
Gail Goepfert, an associate editor at RHINO Poetry, is a Midwest poet, photographer, and teacher. She has two published books–A Mind on Pain, 2015 and Tapping Roots, 2018. Get Up Said the World will appear in 2019 from Červená Barva. Recent or forthcoming publications include Kudzu House, Stone Boat, Postcard, Poems and Prose Magazine, Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, and Beloit Poetry Journal. More at gailgoepfert.com
Deepening
……………….“There is no progress, only a deepening.”
…………………..—Marianne Boruch
Like the lines that bracketed my mouth, now
folds so deep that one conceals a scar—a very polite
cancer, the surgeon said as he tucked the stitches
inside my face.
Once we dreamed perfection, questioned how
each line could alter to appear more like
the smooth beauty we wished to find. Hard
reflections still mirrored possibility.
Now I stare out windows to glimpse the bruise
of time. Shadows, purplish beneath a glint
of sun off trees, the tilting roof, a kingfisher back
on his piling. Memory, grown deep, is tidal—
it bares the rocks and ruts that mired us—then tucks
them all beneath the water’s rising blue.
Meredith Davies Hadaway has three published collections of poetry—most recently, At the Narrows, winner of the 2015 Delmarva Book Prize for Creative Writing. Her work has also appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, Harpur Palate, New Ohio Review, Rhino, Salamander, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, among other journals. Hadaway has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and from the Maryland State Arts Council and multiple Pushcart nominations.
Tongue
She brought a rock
to show-and-tell—
pink and marbled
like baby’s skin.
A salt rock, she said.
Taste it.
She licked first,
said we should lick it too.
The others passed,
afraid of Terri’s spit
or was it because
the rock looked like flesh?
When it reached me,
I hesitated.
But I touched it with tongue
because hers had touched first.
Touched it with tongue
wanting to know more about
rock, salt, spit
and flesh.
T.C. Jones is an associate editor at Cleaver Magazine and a contributing editor at Burrow Press. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Green Mountains Review, Hotel Amerika, Pacifica Literary Review, The Atticus Review, Forth River, Dos Passos Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and others.
Death's Practicum
Sometime between dinner and sleep
one more man insists on dying.
Death gathers her jacket and hat
to journey into the cold night
and find him—a Thompson or Smith—
draped over a plate of pasta.
She pauses, follows protocol,
checks at the neck for any sign
of a gentle throb or pulsing,
lifts open his eyelids to see
his eyes are growing dry and dim,
checks his wallet for relatives,
plays all of his phone messages.
Death thinks about skin, how its map
stretches like a drum over the
body’s topography of scars,
before folding this man’s slack arms
across him and lifting what’s left
onto a table for loading
into her quiet black sedan.
Rebecca Macijeski holds a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has attended artist residencies with The Ragdale Foundation, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Art Farm Nebraska. She has also worked for Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” newspaper column, as an Assistant Editor in Poetry for the literary journals Prairie Schooner and Hunger Mountain, and is the recipient of a 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Nimrod, The Journal, Sycamore Review, Potomac Review, Storyscape, Fairy Tale Review, Puerto del Sol, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Gargoyle, and many others. Rebecca is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana where she teaches creative writing and literature. Visit her online at www.rebeccamacijeski.com.
When the Breathless Throw Down
Clearly you can see I’m not spirit born unlike those
………………..Jesus said don’t know where they’re from
or where they’re going I understand the wind the rising
………………flying falling apart the wreckage remaining
in ascensions wake as Dorothy crushes evil’s broom
…………..that swept Kansas from my heart on one side the
prairies leather Daddy chest makes me feel safe until it doesn’t
………..until the ocean’s maternal exhale rips all living things
up from the ground leaving me to write it all down
…………….I understand why wind & stone slap each
other around earth mothers sky fathers place your bet
………….its anyone’s mouth when the breathless throw down
Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His poems have been found at Spoon River Poetry Review, Rattle, Columbia Journal, Western Humanities Review, and others. His poems are forthcoming in West Trade Review, Duende Literary Journal, The Inflectionist Review, Isthmus Review, Glass Mountain Magazine, Columbia College Literary Review, Yemassee Review, Cumberland River Review, The Meadow and Coachella Review. His books, This New Breed: Gents, Bad Boys and Barbarians Anthology and Confessions of a Pentecostal Buddhist, can be found on Amazon. Visit Daniel at DanielEdwardMoore.com.
MY SCAR
my scar is a second navel…………………. ………… a crooked smile
sketched by a child……………………………………….. a mismatched note
on a blank white sheet…………………………………. the missing chord
out of tune on the torso……………………… ………..drawn outside the lines
I figure it’s time…………………………………………… I try to compose
to tell my own version………………………………….. an acceptable lie
to fill in this hole………………………………………… .to hide the damage
torn in my skin………………………………………… .. .the hole in the story
on the morning I almost…………………………………lost the plot
drew the losing straw…………………………………….not quite but almost
cut short a shortcut………………………………………. the signature wound
back to the beginning……………………. ….. ………..my scar is a second navel.
Mia Sara’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in PANK, Animal, Helix, Superstition Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, The South Hampton Review, Penmen Review, poemmemoirstory, The Write Room, Smartish Pace, and The Cossack Review, among many others. Her chapbook Mid-life with Gorilla was published in 2014 by the Dusie Press, and her column “Wrought and Found” ran for two bracing years on the PANK blog. She now contributes to the fine folks at Barrelhouse with “Not Your High School Girlfriend,” which was just nominated for Best Of The Web.
The Elephant
his massive posterior
his creased and crevassed hide
his long and serviceable tail
his proboscis swinging—don’t
be afraid, you see: he is
walking away on towering legs
regaining his natural gait
—watch how he
diminishes as he strives
toward the distant horizon
—what are we going to do
now that he has left the room?
Eva-Maria Sher’s poetry has appeared in After Happy Hour Review, The Adirondack Review, Big Scream, Cadillac Cicatrix, California Quarterly, Cape Rock, Door Is A Jar Magazine, Dos Passos Review, Drunk Monkeys, East Jasmine Review, Euphony, Forge, Front Range Review, GW Review, The HitchLit Review, The Hollins Critic, ken*again, Old Red Kimono, OxMag, The Paragon Journal, Penmen Review, Prism Review, riverSedge, Rougarou, Ship of Fools, Slag Review, Soundings East, Third Wednesday, Vending Machine Press, Westview, and Willow Review.
She Remembers the Garden
It was just us and the animals then,
no cobbled streets of Paris, no glass skyscrapers,
just primeval forest full of foxes, elk with pronged horns
prairies of antelope, silence endless as grass.
No Augustine, no Milton. Not a single storyteller.
The animals don’t tell stories. Not the squirrels
scrambling up tree trunks twitching their bushy tails,
nor the foxes that mildly observed them disappear.
The best of the liars convinced Adam himself—
who once knew me—
to believe. I remember the graze of fur,
the brown gaze of cattle, the swiveling ears of horses.
The animals were real. Two bears waded a stream.
Raccoons turned over rocks. The horses
crowded close, slobbered over my palms,
gobbled the same quartered apple I offered Adam.
Katherine Smith’s poetry and fiction have appeared in a number of journals and reviews, among them Cincinnati Review, Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, Ploughshares, Measure, Shenandoah, Fiction International, Poetry, The Southern Review, Appalachian Heritage, Atlanta Review, Gargoyle, The Baltimore Review, Poems and Plays, and The Louisville Review. Her first book, Argument by Design, won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House Poetry Prize and appeared in 2003. Her second book, Woman Alone on the Mountain, 2014, is available from Iris Press. She currently teaches at Montgomery College in Germantown, MD, where she is poetry editor of the Potomac Review.
Two Poems
Fate
He’s chosen darkness again
……..nothing has prepared me
not even my Weltschmertz-lined cradle
……..no preparation for the downturn of fate
glowing coals in the left ventricle
……..nurtured by the cock’s crow
his dark black sting of sorrow
……..innocence was chocolate
easy to swallow
……..nothing prepares one for darkness
not even darkness
……..not even lullabies
not when sung by a vulture
……..masquerading as a morning dove.
I swallowed the fragment of an insane rooster
……..my son no ordinary bird.
Rituals of Birth and Death
Arise with the possibility
of gliding over bones of sorrow.
Persevere. Connecting dots leads to
recognition / three-dimensional octagons.
Lethal berries from a forest of odds
mix with the sweet yellow of hope.
Phyllis Strock is a chaplain in a Philadelphia children’s hospital, and passionate about the role of music in the healing process. She teaches deep listening, chanting, and the use of Tibetan bowls as prayer and relaxation. There is a song in her soul that finds wings through writing poetry. She has studied memoir and poetry with Kathleen Bonnano and Amy Small-Mckinney.
Sea Princess
“Sounds like a stinker.” Wayne sucked the olive from his martini spear, dropped the program on the end table. He wasn’t looking at anything in particular.
“It might be.” Hector uncrossed his legs. “But that’s the best kind. Sometimes, I mean. If you’re in the mood for a stinker.” He tipped his glass left, right, watched the ice shift.
They were in room four hundred eighty-six, aboard the Sea Princess, somewhere on the Atlantic. They decided to see the show.
In the dimness of the Sea Princess’s theatre—ushers in red vests, red velvet seats, a red curtain that had opened to reveal the stage—Wayne and Hector, though separated by twenty years, looked identical. Each wore their hair cropped short enough to show scalp, and their heads reached the same height above the seat-backs. Their sport coats were blue. Wayne felt powerful like that, sitting next to a man so stern, proud, and so clear a model of future possibility. He felt the pressure of their arms and shoulders wedged against each other in the small seats.
Wayne stayed awake, but drinks and the ship’s motion brought him close to sleep. He found the lull pleasant, mesmerizing. He watched the show with soft, dim eyes. The figures onstage blurred, became not actors or characters in a story, only spotlit streaks of color.
After the show they went to a bar, which was nautical-themed. The black ocean was perfectly visible (and, because black, wholly invisible) through the portholes. Each porthole a stage, Wayne thought. He imagined miniature red curtains around the holes. He sipped his martini and told Hector about this idea. He said, “They’d have white trim,” and Hector said, “Lace?” and then, “Nature is the best show on Earth.” They had two more drinks, then they took the elevator down to the casino.
Wayne stood watching while Hector sat and lost at blackjack. He’d bust and smile and say “Rats” and look up at Wayne with his eyes full open and they’d touch their glasses together while the dealer cleared the table. “To losing, and to rats.” Hector pursed his lips around the rim of his glass and sipped. Losing seemed to make him happy. His shoulders were relaxed, and Wayne wanted to see them bare, to watch them expand and fill the room, which felt to him, in that moment, as if it could happen. They watched the dealer slide chips across the felt. “He’s like a machine,” Hector said. This was all on the third night.
The next morning the ship arrived at port and they found that after days at sea, being on land was intolerable. In the streets, on cracked sidewalks, and in buildings, a lack of motion was all-present. It was as if they’d run full speed into brick. They were smarting and dizzy with the stillness of land.
“Get me to the ocean,” Wayne said. “I can’t stand it.” They walked through an open-air lobby and felt the breeze along their chests, unshaven necks, and the sides of their faces. Then came a small boardwalk, grainy with sand. And then, finally, the beach.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Wayne said. He’d not been to a beach before. He rested his hands on his hips and looked outward, upward, in every direction. He inhaled through his nose. “What storybook am I in right now?” he said. “Which children’s book?” He bent to touch the sand with his hands and said, “My feet cannot be trusted.” Uneven sand, which made his feet slip left and right, was exactly the cure for cement.
The beach was enclosed, in a small bay, wrapped by steep hills covered by vegetation. The sand was churned. The water was the glassy color of depthless blue and green eyes.
“That’s something a young person would say,” Hector said. He stood behind Wayne and rubbed Wayne’s shoulders.
“I am a young person,” Wayne said.
“An old soul,” Hector said.
“Oh, no.” Wayne said. “My soul is twenty-two.”
They let the wind take up their white towels and smooth them. They kneeled to lower them onto the sand. They scuffed the sand from their kneecaps and rested on their backs, on the towels, in the shade of the shrubbery, which was trimmed to a sharp edge. They closed their eyes and let the sun push through their sunglasses, against their eyelids, and they dozed.
When they woke, each sensing the other’s alertness, Hector said they should have brought drinks. While they’d napped (neither knew for how long, except that it must not have been too long, because there was still the sun, seeming never to move), six people, in pairs, had arrived with blue chairs and matching umbrellas.
“What is this beach’s maximum occupancy?” Wayne asked. He stood, looking, and shielded his eyes.
Hector propped himself using his elbow. “I’ll call the Fire Marshal,” he said.
They rose and walked into the clear water, up to their knees. Wayne stood in the coolness. Hector slid under the surface. Wayne saw Hector’s body, woven into ripples under water, his yellow swim trunks gliding until he came up for air.
A small crowd had gathered at the beach’s left, in a shallow dip where sea wood, covered in algae, had been lodged, by the current, between rocks. They passed a pair of orange goggles, held the goggles to their faces, and placed their heads into the water. They pointed.
Wayne and Hector walked the short distance to join the group—three men and three women. They stood close. Their hands found each other’s waists.
A woman handed goggles to Wayne, and he pressed them to his face, not wanting to take time to fasten the strap around his head. He bent to look into the water.
When he lifted his head, he took a deep breath. Water ribboned his dark hair, flowed down his face, around his mouth, from his chin onto his chest, and he said, “I don’t see anything.” Another woman’s hand touched him on the neck, guided him into the water again. Her hand felt warm. Under the water, he saw her finger. It had accompanied him, and it was pointing.
The octopus was still. If not for the woman’s finger, for the group who had gathered, Wayne would not have discovered it. Its camouflage was nearly perfect. It looked like a glass bowl containing a clear soup—fragile, reflective, clean. Its tentacles sought each other, held each other, and seemed fearful. Small waves rocked the surface of the water, and the motion traveled below, where the octopus (was it young?) had compressed itself, become the size of a volleyball, stitched itself into the water so that it moved in perfect stillness, in synchrony with the current. Young octopus, sea wood, algae, all sharing in the ocean’s gentle rocking.
Wayne watched until his lungs forced him to stand, and when he stood, aching for air, he breathed and opened his eyes wide and looked into the sky, where the sun had become faint.
“There’s an octopus,” he said to Hector. “A baby, I think.” He spoke to Hector without looking at him.
Hector, too, was examining the horizon, the jagged strips of white and peach and purple that had become layered above the far water as the sun began to set.
Wayne turned to the woman who had handed him the goggles.
“Do you think it’s a baby?” he asked.
She moved a sopping strand of hair from where it clung to her shoulder and said, “I don’t know.”
+
“Grilled octopus,” Hector said to the waiter. “For an appetizer.” They had re-boarded the Sea Princess. It was nine-thirty p.m. exactly. The ship had left port and was Orlando-bound.
They were silent. Cocktails were on the way. Ice water was already there. The familiar sounds of the other diners and of the ship, and of the black ocean, blotted their speech. The air was saturated and heavy. Talking seemed difficult.
Wayne watched the waiter walk away from their table and said, “That isn’t funny.” His voice was louder than it needed to be to reach Hector.
“What isn’t funny?”
“That octopus was beautiful. I think it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”
“In all your twenty-two years, the most beautiful?”
“Yeah, I think so. One of them.”
“Have you ever eaten octopus? Grilled octopus? With chickpeas?”
“No,” Wayne said. And he was grateful for the motion of the ship. “I wish I wouldn’t have seen it.”
“He wishes to unsee the most beautiful sights,” Hector said.
A nearby diner began to laugh. It seemed to Wayne that Hector was not talking to him, but to one of the table’s two empty seats, to someone who could not be seen, but who had joined them there.
Eric Van Hoose‘s fiction has appeared in Sycamore Review, Bat City Review, Tweed’s, Fiddleblack, and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His essays have appeared in Salon, The Black Scholar, and Full Stop Quarterly. He’s pursuing a PhD in the University of Cincinnati’s creative writing program for fiction, where he’s an editorial assistant at the Cincinnati Review.
Stop the Pirates
Voices across the water, a quiet motor, the groans of pulled-back muscles as another lobster pot is hauled in. Summer laughter, sailboats linger on the horizon and cormorants lazily soar on updrafts. A shout with splashing hands remembers the cold Maine waters. I look at the seascape, rocks, island, and conversations as we motor from cove to cove, navigating through the fog—fifty-five years later the coast holds, loons bend their necks, and seals sun themselves on seaweed-draped rocks.
But the cannons burst and there is no escaping the shouting, the conflicts, the wars, the lost souls. Discordant deceits fill the air—how do we fight tyranny, the step away from our dreams? What are we to believe, what to do? Cowbells chime, scaring away the terribleness, the wolves out there, the demons; newspapers twist facts to the glee of their readers. The calm summer breeze cannot contain the calamities to come.
What are you going to do? Sit there and scribble? Who will man the barricades, protect the children? How many more must die? How many more lies must fill the air?
My head shakes, the dory rolls on the morning waves. I turn about in confusion. It was not supposed to be this way. The garden I cultivated with rose, flox, Russian sage, and lilies were not supposed to prick. My hand bled, my heart stayed calm, but my head still sees beyond the horizon and it is not happy. This was not supposed to be my world.
Who will lead the revolution—will you, yes, you, with lobster and toasted potatoes on your plate, will you heed the call? Plunge into battle and save us from tyrants?
No, not me, it is too tasty here at the table. The meal brings on drowsy ripostes—it cannot be that bad, really. It has been this way for centuries. Good and bad. Sometimes better, sometimes worse.
The tide draws back, the mud is thick—blue mussels and clams feed the birds. I drop alabaster oyster shells on rocks. Seagulls wait patiently above—our conversations turn dark. Still, the gift of love lets me see through rose-colored glasses—a faith that it will get better. Somehow.
I scream late at night. The stars overhead tell me that we are a small speck in the Universe, unimportant really. Fascism or not. I wake early with sun. The lobsterman is still here, they catch less. Today spins to another. I scribble, hoping for an answer, as my mind wanders.
Adam, the boy sitting next to me last night, asks, “Please stop the pirates, the men that rob, kill, and rape?”
“I will, I promise, I will stop the pirates.” But his mother reminds me that he likes the good pirates.
My eyes turn; what I am supposed to do? I look down the table; all are talking, laughing, and walking out into the night, sated with comradery. Must we give up our dreams to push back the pirates—must we keep our promises? I shake my head, hold Adam’s hand. “I promise, no more bad pirates, I will stop the bad ones.”
This is not a dream; the tide moves in again, calming the mind, yet all is not well. How do we fight back, how turn the dinner conversation from pirates and tornados turning over towns to garden flowers and peace? The desperate destroyers must be decapitated. But we must not lose our virtue or pretend that we have no blood on our hands. The black-capped pirates must not win. The tide falls back again; a boat cuts across the bay. The summer is quiet, even as the bird mocks my musings.
I fear what is ahead. We must rid the sea of marauding pirates, starve them and throw them in jail, and then put them on trial. It must be fair; a fair and just trial by a jury of their peers. No more bad pirates. The seas must be safe and our hands clean.
Adam looks at me with quizzical eyes. “Really, you believe those fairy tales,” he seems to say.
Yes, I will rid the seas of pirates. Like Peter Pan, I believe; I too cried out for Tinker Bell at six. I believed in goodness and love. No more bad pirates, no more Captain Hooks.
Then our table can be set in peace. Fruit, cheese, and bread will fill our stomachs. Songs will rise with the harmony of thrushes and morning doves. The snake lies crushed in the sands, the sheep munch on the dew-dampened grass. The tide comes in again.
I sit here with morning coffee and look out on the gray fog enveloping each boat; each dream visits me here. I sit, I scribble, I hope.
Is that our plan? Will we, will you have the courage to walk into battle with bayonets to scatter the bullets of tyranny, counter all the lies? Will you capture and throw the pirates into deep dungeons, put them on trial, and bring back the light? Truth must win out, I tell the morning fog; the sun will not rise on another day until we do something to stop the lies, the tyranny, the assault on our democracy—the tide ebbs and flows. The day begins.
It is time to fight back again and again and again. Some will die. No more bad pirates. That is my promise.
John Ballantine has taken workshops through The Writers Studio and the Concord-Carlisle Community School with Barbara O’Neil, following the “Writing Down The Bones” method. His work has appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Arkansas Review, Carbon Culture Review, Cobalt, Crack the Spine, Existere Journal, Forge, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Lime Hawk, Massachusetts’s Emerging Writers: An Anthology of Nonfiction, The Penmen Review, Oracle Fine Arts Review, Ragazine, Rubbertop Review, Saint Ann’s Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, Santa Clara Review, SNReview, Slippery Elm, and Streetlight Magazine.
The Undertow of Neptune
“So, if you just put your Joan Hancock here, and date it there, you’re all set,” Mr. Neptune said with too little gravitas, and too much impatience. He offered a “Neptune Society Pre-need” pen out of the pocket protector of his short-sleeved business shirt flat in his palm like a small weapon. “Any other questions?”
“Yeah, where’s the robe and the scythe,” I didn’t say. I breathed deep to calm myself. But, the frankincense, and flickering tapers I’d lit to infuse spirituality into the signing of my cremation contract was smoking up my living room (and the word “living” felt ironic) and burning my throat. This contract outlined the terms by which I’d be tidily reduced to ashes, interred in a baggie and box. For the rep, this was a routine he performed several times a day five days a week. For me, this commitment was momentous.
Yes, I had questions, but most I had struggled to answer on my own, like why now?
I’d recently ended a long relationship and decided to go it alone in life. I wanted to stop waiting for love to determine my future and my future gravesite. I wanted to firm up a plan with myself alone. At this halfway point, forty-nine years old, odds were more in death’s favor. Death was definite, reliable—something I could count on, and maybe before love came if it ever came.
Why not go underground like all my elders had? I had answered that, too.
If I got buried in the ground, there was no way of knowing what might happen to the site of me later– quakes, floods, landmines. My father happily chose his free burial plaque, provided by the VA, to be interred under its single grand spreading oak. My father felt this natural monument was one of his first lucky breaks and would make it easier for folks to find him. But the oak got root rot and died a year after he did, and without the landmark, he was mostly lost to us, sad to say. Ashes, at least, were portable, especially if packaged in a unique vessel. I wanted my remains to have a purpose in some form of permanence that could serve a function. I’d asked if Neptune’s staff could divide my remains into small decorative urns. Or, bake me inside paperweights or doorstops to be distributed amongst folks who cared about me–maybe with my picture on them. But he’d firmly reminded me that the early bird, no frills discount to which I was entitled for signing before the age of fifty would go away. And he suggested that my after-life, or after-death, might best be handled by my intimates.
At this moment, I hadn’t any. My sister’s proximity to our parents on the East Coast had already burdened her with the failing health of my father, and the maintenance of my mother. Although I, on the West Coast, was financing a lot of these deteriorations, she might find my leftovers distasteful. I had no significant others into whose care the bone meal of me could be placed. Where would I go? I’d been adamantly opposed to being cast out to sea by Mr. Neptune, as I was an aquaphobe
Mr. Neptune’s assertive eyebrows were assembling in the shape of a question mark. I wanted to ask how the crematorium functioned, if it resembled Auschwitz. But, this ample man, in his short-sleeved button down, tucked unattractively into wool trousers over loafers mid-July, was not Jewish. He might not understand.
Did I have any more questions about my demise that he could answer? Maybe. Would my ashes be as lonely as I was? Or were they oblivious? I had a starvation for love that seemed eternal, that even death would not deter. He was wearing a wedding band—he probably would not understand my midlife, never-married panic. He was not a cleric or a psychiatrist, nor was empathy in his job requirements. What, I might ask, even qualified him to have such power over my fate?
“Sir, say I was to someday fall in love with someone with whom I wish to be interred in a shared plot or box–would Neptune give me my money back?”
“I’m afraid not,” he said. “Your investment covers our costs of keeping your records, making your arrangements, and being sure your initial wishes are carried out as quickly as possible after you pass on.”
The chemical constituents of dread were rising up my esophagus with a glut of more questions. Did I really want to know all the gory details about my aftermath, I asked myself? Like: If I continued my tendency to be this alone, how, specifically, would Neptune be notified to gather me? Was there a special cleaning service that took care of post demise fumigation? Judging from the increasing odor of me this moment, things might get much worse later.
Could I sneak a peek ahead at the epilogue? Would anybody foster a memorial service? Who would speak and what would they say? I wanted to take some time to philosophize with this good Christian gentleman about what lay beyond for a lapsed Jewess, a devout Atheist. My idea of heaven was that all the things I had lost in life—earrings, a ring, socks, a leather skirt, a green hat, books, a ghosted boyfriend, would suddenly be revealed to me in their hiding places. Oh, THAT’S where that went, I could exclaim, as a part of me still searching and mad at myself that precious things had left my life. I swear a piece of my mind has been seeking my old Filofax since the 80’s.
I was diving deep into the insignificance of my death and getting rather maudlin inside myself, when he coughed and wiped his eyes.
“I’m sorry—I have a lunch meeting at some distance. You could mail them in, if you need more time to think things through, but let me say this, off the record.” He looked deeply into my face. “There’s so much you can’t know now—when, where, how. However, were you to meet the love of your life, wouldn’t it be worth a few thousand dollars of loss to surrender your contract if need be? And, if you refer him to Neptune, this future love could get a discount on a matching basic container, or a container to be shared with you.”
Did somebody say discount? If my truest love got a discount, it would be just as good as my getting it.
“So, this is reversible?”
“Of course. No one will cremate you if you de-authorize our contract—you’ll just forfeit this fee. And we could renegotiate again later on.”
If there was any eternal in my future, I would be eternally grateful for Mr. Neptune’s insight, wisdom, mercy and kindness that fateful afternoon. I signed and dated the contract, now hoping against hope to lose the damn fee by falling in forever love. Then, I could share a queen-sized burial plot or get a double-sized ash box from Mr. Neptune to share with my beloved sleep mate-to -come.
Melanie Chartoff is an actor who hails from New Haven, lived in New York City, now resides in Los Angeles. She recently became a first-time wife and stepmother.
A Kind Disruption of the Heart
We are all of us misunderstood. No one can take in my words, your words, and hear them as meant. We cannot even mean them as we say. This is what we live in. This is what is understood. And we go on in our judgments and our openness, our apathy and our passion. Heard, unheard, judged nonetheless.
In this swamp of expectations and ignorance, self-righteousness and xenophobia, I try to raise my autistic son—with his father, who is disappointed, a twin sister who sees that whoever has the crisis owns the parents, and the outrageous luck to arrive in a world that cannot parse his value: They cannot monetize him.
Even his therapist, the area’s single willing specialist who accepts spectrum clients into his sanctum sanctorum of the couch and the notepad, tries in his highly educated way to make my son like everyone else. With enough training, maybe he won’t be noticed among the neuro-normals. Is that the goal?
Does my son ever wish, inside his deliriously brilliant and abnormal mind, “Oh gods, oh Freud, Jung, and Dustin Hoffman, please make me just like everyone else”? Is it his fervent wish to blend? Who would he be? Here is a crowd of neuro-normals. In their midst is my joyous, paranoid, odd, brilliant, obsessive, raw-hearted, and miraculously innocent son. But of course, no one can pick him out of the crowd. His esteemed therapist will have done his specialist magic on him. Good—he won’t make anyone uncomfortable. Now we can get him a job at the Safeway packing groceries. Sometime later, when we’re all dead and gone and our influence melted into the sweet, maggotted earth, he can think about what a held and celebrated, owned and adored life is.
You must get used to being stared at. And I did. They all know when they get their first glimpse of him and size him up, judge him so easily in their simple ignorance, that something’s wrong with this kid. By their postures, the dart of their eyes, the empty radius of space they leave around him, I know, free from the sting of giving a damn what anybody thinks, that someone out there is judging: “Retarded,” “Schizophrenic,” or, “Spastic,” and they’ve taken care of their discomfort.
“Have you ever seen an autistic adult?”
“No.”
“Yes. You have. You just thought, ‘Retarded? Schizophrenic? Spastic?’ and moved on. That was my son: intelligent, compassionate, principled, loving, unhealably lonely. He just doesn’t know what it means when you lift your left eyebrow a few millimeters, then look at your watch. Sometimes he has to hop, or moan. That’s why he lives in his world, you live in your world, and no one talks to him.”
With my son, they don’t know what to do. Try to enter his world? Force him to ask permission into theirs?
I have learned not to care, or to push caring away, nor to waste my heart ceding judgment to the privileged same who perceive him as something gone wrong. That is a commandment. I cannot care what they think or dedicate my worries investigating whose fault this was: Was it my old sperm or your old ovaries? Was it a vaccination? A virus? Gluten? Immunodeficiency? If I do, then who am I to my son and who is he to me? If I am anything but my love for him, I would not have felt pure joy in this:
I was in the kitchen breaking the ends off of twenty stalks of asparagus, very fresh and freshly washed, two shades of green. My son, turning in circles, spiraled into the room and stopped by my side.
“You want to help me?” He was eight. Reading was still easier than listening, writing easier than speaking.
“Yes!”
I showed him how to break the stems off. “Right there, where they want to snap. See? You try.” He did. It snapped clean in his hand. His smile was ecstatic. We broke the rest together.
Then when we’d finished, we put them all in the steamer. I showed him how it worked.
“The water boils; the steam goes up through the holes, and the heat cooks it. Remember?” He looked at the refrigerator. He remembered. When he was four I’d had a pot on the stove and the freezer door open. He’d run between the two, then stopped in the middle to observe.
After scrutinizing, “Hot smoke up; cold smoke down.” It was a shocking burst of language. I’d picked him up, carried him back and forth, then sat down at the table and wrote it out so he could read it, fix it in place, visible, before it tumbled away to wherever spoken language went after it was spoken. He read it. “Hot smoke goes up. Cold smoke goes down.”
We put the lid on the steamer, and he followed me back to the sink, but was being called elsewhere. In slow circles, he spiraled around me, smiled up into my face as he curled to the door. Exultant, he said, “You love me so much.”
I explained him to the teacher with too many students. She only wanted order in her classroom. “He needs a smaller class, more challenging material. He taught himself to read at two and a half to get around the language problem. He does comprehend. But he won’t be able to take the commotion, too much stimulation coming at him from all sides, and he won’t be able to learn. He’ll go into overwhelm, put himself in shutdown. That’s bad for everyone. With twenty-eight six-year-olds, you can’t spend all your time on him.”
“This is an appropriate placement,” the Special Ed head repeated.
I had to fight the district and the special education department: documented proof, exhibit A, exhibit B, lawyers, months, money, aggravation. Shouldn’t they be on his side, provide what he needs to thrive? Well, yes, but for the funding. In the meantime, with no school placement, I kept him home. Three tantrums a day: not bad. My son and I could survive it, but the father walked out. It was too much for him: not good.
And that’s the way it all proceeds, staggering forward, progress and stasis, crisis and leaps ahead. He was never the problem. The greater context was. They cannot parse his value. So it’s mine to create it in figures they’ll understand. And what do I know about the world? That answer’s easier than what don’t I know. Either way, I’ll have to know what I don’t know so I can teach my son. He is lost in the world but for me.
The physician judged my stress level and ordered me to reduce it; she read on my chart that I had an adult dependent son with autism. She passed judgment in her certified doctoral thickness. “You need to get your son out of the home. There are many government facilities where he can get the care he needs. That’s the first thing you need to do.” She looked at me sternly. (This is a mother who cares too much and has an unfortunate case of hope.)
I cited Newton’s third law of physics: applications in real time.
“My son is brilliant, and he loves more deeply, more purely than normal people can ever bear. He is not sucking me dry. I don’t throw him out on the street.”
She cut me off. “You’re trying to give this back to me,” she snapped with a scholarly bark, “but I’m not having it.” She lectured me about county agencies, social services, placement in a group home perhaps, and why this hope problem was hurting me. I needed to let go and get on with my life.
She is an amalgam of concerned experts in the field. And some “friends.”
How could I understand her? Or do I just condemn her? Certainly she had condemned me. Should I try to explain, can I force her to know what she’ll never know unless her ignorance disrupts her own heart? Or do I just let it go and get on with my life?
I am disabled in that I find salvation everywhere—in my son, in myself, in words strung together in their proper order, even in the great fortune not to have been born as someone else. It can be held for the moment, but it can’t be shared. I will likely live and die in this brave confusion and mother’s love.
Tobie Shapiro is a composer and cellist who has also worked as a visual artist, cartoonist, graphologist, and professional chef. She was a columnist for the East Bay Phoenix and has been published in American Writer’s Review, Songwriter Magazine, The Monthly, The Coachella Review, and in the anthology Fire in the Hills: A Collective Remembrance (1992). She has attended numerous writing conferences with The Opening and studied with Andy Couturier. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her family.