WINTER 2014

She likes her white shoes, so she never wears them. They sit on a shelf high in her closet with the lid placed neatly on top to keep dust and other unwanted debris from entering. Her wallet is fifty-three dollars lighter because of those shoes, and she’s put them on her feet for approximately five minutes and three seconds if we’re being generous. Four of those minutes were in the store, before she’d bought them, just to make sure they would fit just right. Does it matter whether they fit or they don’t when they’ve never left the house on her feet?

It doesn’t bother her, you know, that there are fifty-three dollar shoes in her closet that never see the light of day. And I think sometimes that I’m those shoes, too. That perhaps she likes me so much that she’s afraid of soiling me if she’s allowed to wear me for too long. And that’s why she doesn’t ring and doesn’t write and only sneaks to my door when it rains and the ceilings leak and her hair clings to her neck like the tentacles of an octopus.

I think that maybe I am those shoes, and she loves me more than all of the others, and that’s why she can take the others out of their boxes and bring them to dinner and take them dancing and toss them off. And I think that from time to time she does take them out of the box, the white shoes. She sits on her bed with her whipped icing legs bare and her frosting coated toenails, and she slips the shoes on her feet and looks at them dazzle like she would a painting in a museum.

She never lets them touch the ground. They hover just inches above the floor, and she kicks her legs and she smiles and she runs her hands over the black stitching in the white shoes like she runs her hands over the stubble on my chin, afraid to touch it but afraid not to, too. Then she puts them back and grabs another pair, the ones she’s already scuffed, the ones that give her blisters and aches and make her take long, hot baths to sooth her soles.

She lost her favorite jacket once. It was green, it fit her well, and when the man in the crisp suit asked kindly whether he could take her jacket before she sat down, please, she almost said no. But she didn’t. And another lady with a green coat that didn’t fit her nearly as well made off with it.

People are always taking her things, or she’s always losing them, or they’re breaking or getting old. Sometimes I don’t blame her for keeping the shoes in their box. At least they’re safe, you know? But what a waste, right? What a fucking waste.

Melissa Campbell gets inspiration from binge watching movies about sharks. Currently, she works in a jewelry store selling necklaces to opinionated patrons who like to impart their worldly knowledge on her before they leave. Two of her one-act plays have been performed in the past year.

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What a waste, reading casual encounter personal ads on the internet. Who are these people? Why does she admire their daring and freedom? But come to think on it, eating can feel like a poor use of resources, as can taking a shit, changing tampons, even sleep. How many precious hours of her life had she expended on self-care, she wondered. How much of her consciousness spent fretting over survival? She sometimes thinks she will get to the end and all she will have accomplished is getting there. How many mornings used up merely recovering from the night? How many nights rehashing or remediating the day? She liked Craigslist, loved shopping on eBay, but it recently dawned on her that she’d been duped, that people were preying on her assumptions and goodwill, that just because a gewgaw is marked great deal, Vintage, or RARE, doesn’t make it so. People, it turns out, will lie in hopes of fleecing you. Just because a dude claiming to have a monster schlong offers hot no-strings-attached sex doesn’t mean he’s not a pencil-dick serial killer. Still, people need stuff—need jobs, food, and love, need to re-purchase an occasional childhood toy—and demand will be met. She’d remind herself: live like you’ll live forever, or else you’d never leave the house or worse become maudlin about plain facts. You’d be forced to approach every taco, every goodbye, every kiss like the last you’ll ever know. You can’t cherish every moment, can’t greet each day like a gift or long-lost friend.

It’s better to let the end come unaided and unabetted, she thought, without reminiscence, without closure, without kneeling prayers. She wasn’t terribly concerned about farewells in general, usually ghosted parties, though she’s punctilious about expiration dates on the 2% and studiously avoiding her father’s gaze. She marveled at how few people, statistically speaking, killed themselves or met terminal illness without pugilistic rhetoric, how obvious, how inevitable, life appeared even to those in great pain with nothing to live for but the continuation of being. This struck her as backwards, unnatural, reverse-engineered like decaffeination. She remembered suddenly the boy who in 9th grade, inexplicably and without warning, she had kicked hard in the groin. Tommy Something-Or-Other. As the sole unprovoked and irrational act of malice she’d ever committed, it remained her touchstone for comprehending the mysteries of evil. So when a mother drowns her children, or a clown-masked rapist roams a small Guatemalan town, or a kid shoots a woman while buying Oxy—she knows deep down how the body with its itch of emptiness (of what else could the soul be comprised?) can get away from us. She feels an appropriate amount of empathy for dime store villains. She remembers walking by a stroller carrying a hammer while volunteering at a community center with her school group and seeing with an artist’s moral vision: I could bash this infant’s skull and change my life.

John Estes‘s recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, Crazyhorse, AGNI and other places. He is author of Kingdom Come (C&R Press, 2011) and two chapbooks: Breakfast with Blake at the Laocoön (Finishing Line Press, 2007) and Swerve, which won a 2008 National Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America.

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The sixth snow day in January alone. I learned the way I always do—Chris hearing the news on the radio, on low in his room for the purpose, screaming, “Hurray, snow day! Snow day, snow day, snow day!”

After six such days in three weeks, I’d ‘ve expected his excitement to cool, so to speak, but every time he sounded equally delighted.

He came bounding into my room and bounced onto the bed on his knees. “Snow day, snow day!”

The last time, I’d explained to him that snow days weren’t so great for me—I could walk to work, sure, make it down to the village post office, but the whole time I was working I worried about him on his own. So when he added, “I’m going to Mark’s. That’s good, isn’t it?”, I knew he’d arranged it because of me.

Still, I knew I had to pretend to be grumpy. I rolled my head on the pillow and groaned loudly. Chris giggled. ‘Not another snow day!” I moaned, and Chris giggled again. I wanted him to be ten forever—he’d never been such a friend to me or so easy to please. Perhaps I was equating the two.

“How will I ever make it to work?” I added with a more authentic grumble. “I bet the drifts are taller than you!”

“Aw, Mom,” he said, falling next to me and trying to tickle my neck. He twisted his fingers this way and that, and I faked laughter. I was ticklish, but he hadn’t the skill yet.

I met his gaze. Oh, he looked too much like his father, who I hadn’t seen in eight years.

“Mark, eh? When did you work this out?”

“After the last snow day,” he said. “Then we said I’d come over the next time.”

“I think I should talk to his mother first, to make sure it’s okay.” Now Chris groaned, but I was relieved that of his friends he’d chosen Mark, whose mom was the only other divorced, single mother in the village. Somehow it wouldn’t seem such a big favour to be asking her instead of one of the other mothers.

“Go on, get dressed,” I said, hitting the top of the clock as the alarm sounded. “We leave in forty minutes.”

Bundled up and out the door, Chris glanced up at me for permission to go, and I nodded. He bounded through drifts at least half his height while I lifted my legs step by leaded step through the snow.

The roads had yet to be salted or plowed, so I tried to walk where I thought the sidewalk was. Past the hyper-religious Alexanders, I hurried, remembering the looks Martin Alexander gave me in church. I always had the same thought: So much for Christian forgiveness. Maybe it’s harder to forgive when the sinner didn’t offend you personally.

Even with haste, I felt as though I were walking through jelly. I tried to go faster, then, striking ice, my left foot slid forward, and I fell back.

I lay there, looking up into snow-heavy branches. I thought of Jon, Chris’s father, my ex-husband, and wondered where he was: New Mexico, which he’d always talked about moving to, or Kentucky, where much of his family was?

It occurred to me that if anyone came upon me, I could pretend to have decided to make a snow angel—but maybe to the Alexanders, that would be worse than having fallen. I stretched out my arms and legs and halted. I wondered if I’d ever see a living starfish and caught myself laughing, really laughing, for the first time that morning, but it wasn’t enough to raise me from the snow, not yet.

Carrie Etter is originally from Normal, Illinois, but has lived in England since 2001 and is an associate professor in creative writing at Bath Spa University. She has published three collections of poetry, most recently Imagined Sons (Seren, 2014), and her stories have appeared in Flash, New Welsh Review, Oblong and elsewhere. Since 2005 she’s kept a blog at http://carrieetter.blogspot.com.

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All he needed was a little more light.  The house was always dark, even on the sunniest days. It was not a house of his own choosing.

After the first marriage, he swore that he would never find himself in another situation that was not of his own choosing. He would never find himself stuck in the middle of a life which he did not really want. Yet, here he was in a dark house with small windows that were shaded in the front by a deep porch and on all other sides by trees. Trees that were large and messy and dropped things on the house all year long.

“It’s really dark in here,” he said. He and Gerry were watching a DVD.

Gerry was not Mary.  There was, of course, the disturbing coincidence of their rhyming names and the confusion this caused the kids.  Tommy asked his kindergarten teacher how she could be a mother when her name did not sound like Gerry or Mary.  And, well, yes, sometimes it was confusing even for him.  He had called her Mary once.  Maybe twice.  The two names sounded so much alike, what could you really expect?

But Gerry was different. There was no doubt about that.  They ended up in her house and not his, but that was because he didn’t have a house anymore.  He let Mary keep the house.

“Oh, is it?”  Gerry said.  He loved the way she sat, even when they were in their pajamas watching TV.  Her legs crossed just so, her hands resting on her knee, her posture perfect.  He wondered if maybe she’d been to finishing school or some place where they still taught women these things. When he asked her, she laughed.

The house he and Mary bought together had beautiful lighting.  Natural lighting.  It was an old country house in the middle of subdivisions.  The windows were tall and faced south.  Mary never put up shades or curtains.  She bought wood shutters that covered the lower part of the window where people could see in at night. The rest of the time, the windows were uncovered and the light came in.  It was something he never noticed until he’d been in Gerry’s house for almost a month.

“Yeah, don’t you think so?”  He couldn’t focus on whatever it was they were watching, some HBO show that wanted to be as good as The Soprano’s, but wasn’t.  He pointed that out to her several times when they’d sat down to watch.  “This is okay, but not as good as The Soprano’s”

She pushed a piece of hair behind her ear.  “Mmmm, it is dark.  But it’s night and it’s cloudy out.”  She re-crossed her legs.  “And we have the lights off.”

He fondled the buttons on the remote control.  He knew even in the dark which button was which, and he moved his thumb back and forth between pause and play. Pause and play.  “But it’s always kind of dark in here, don’t you think?”

She turned towards him and smiled.  “I guess it is,” she said and turned back to the TV.

“Yeah, it’s definitely dark.  Maybe we should take the curtains down.”  His finger caressed the pause button, moving it back and forth without quite pushing it down.

She stared at the screen like she was really into the show.  Like maybe she hadn’t heard him because she was so absorbed in what was happening.  He nodded to himself in the dark. They would take the curtains down.

#

“What’s this check for $150 to DCGA?” he asked one night as he bent over Gerry’s indecipherable handwriting in the checkbook. It was still light outside, but so dark inside the house he had to turn on one of the lamps.

She was engrossed in a reality TV show she recorded and watched every night after the kids were all in bed. He had to ask her twice, and then bring the checkbook over and put it right in front of her face to get an answer.

“Oh, Dunhill Community Garden Group.  It’s for the community garden.”

“Community garden?”

Gerry glanced over at him and then began to search for the pause button on the remote control.  She always had to look for the buttons, but was still annoyed when he tried to show her where they were.  “It’s right there–.”

“I’ve got it.” She paused the show, the actor’s face froze on the screen in a grimace.  “The community garden.  We’ve been doing it since Sophie was little.  It’s down Laurel Rd.  Surely you’ve passed it before?”

“No,” he said.

He was developing the creeping sense that things were out of control.  There was no refuge. This check was just the latest example.

He watched too many nature shows on PBS and even now, he could hear the calm voice that spoke over every beautiful image of the ocean or the rain forest to remind you how they would all be gone in fifty years.  After one particularly poignant show about how the grizzly bears were being driven north by the warming temperatures into polar bear territory and all the bear chaos that ensues, Lily looked up at him with tear-filled eyes.  “I don’t want the world to be all messed up when I’m grown,” she said.

“What do you mean?” He ran his fingers over the remote control buttons and realized he’d raised his voice.  “Nothing’s going to be messed up.”  Lily nodded and snuggled up against his arm, her grip tight enough to make him wince.

Then the stupid hippie couple down the street let Gerry’s ten-year-old watch that disaster movie where the earth froze overnight.  It was PG-13, but they let her watch it anyway.  “And then there were wolves in the streets of New York City, and everyone had to hide in the museum.  And almost everyone was dead, and the dad was trying to get back to find his daughter.”  The kid went on and on and on about it.  Out of the blue, they’d be sitting at dinner, and he’d be telling Gerry a really funny story from work, and boom, the girl would launch into yet another endless recitation of the plot line, getting many of the details wrong. He knew because he’d seen it himself; there were no freaking wolves in that movie.

“Is she going to stop talking about that?” he asked Gerry.

“She’s nervous,” Gerry said.  “She talks about things that make her nervous.  It’s how she processes things.”

“She’s making me nervous,” he said.

Between the disaster movie and the polar bear show, he felt the house was moving around him in ways he didn’t understand.  It was five months out from the wedding, and after almost a year of having to date around custody schedules, he had anticipated that “the merge” would solve all their problems.  One household instead of two meant more money and more sex. Now the extra money disappeared and the sex dried up. He would be happy just not to hear about the wolves one more time.

“Well, you pay a fee and get a plot and plant whatever you want,” Gerry explained. Her finger hovered over the pause button on the remote. “We do it every year.  It’s great.  The kids get to play in the dirt, and you get to raise some vegetables.  You’ll love it.”

“Will I love it?” he said.  “Will I?”  He gave her a full blast of sarcasm in that “will” and it felt good.  It felt familiar.

“Yes, you will,” Gerry said. She turned back to the TV and released the actor on the screen from his extended frown.

#

The next day he tried to think it all through more rationally. It wasn’t the money. A hundred and fifty dollars was not that much money.  It was that decisions were being made without him.  Maybe Gerry and her kids had always done the community garden with the ex.  But she was with him now.  Wasn’t the slate wiped clean?  Wasn’t there a reset button that had been hit somewhere?

Jim had said that. Jim had called him up and asked him out for beers a few weeks after he left Mary.  He didn’t call him back at first.  It was hard to tell on whose side Jim would fall.

At the bar, he told Jim how much better Gerry was.  What a great mother.  How unlike Mary, she wasn’t an academic.  She wasn’t all ivory tower.  “Gerry works to pay the bills, you know.  That’s it.  It’s a job.  Mary’s job was like her whole life, you know?”

Jim had nodded. He wondered if Jim was thinking about what it would be like to ditch his own wife and start all over again.  Then Jim drained the last of his beer, turned to him and said, “You know there’s no reset button in life.”  He signed his credit card slip and stood up from his stool.  “And you probably wouldn’t like it as much as you think even if there were.”

He’d chuckled.  “What, like Adam Sandler in that movie?” But Jim hadn’t seen that movie.

Of course, there was no reset button, but you could start again.  And he had.  Why hadn’t Gerry?

“How much do you think an average family spends on fruits and vegetables every year?” he asked his receptionist, Lorraine, when he got to the office.

Lorraine didn’t look up from her computer, though he noticed she wasn’t typing. She had angled the screen in a way so that any attempt on his part to look at it would be obvious; he had to resort to inconspicuous glances out of the corner of his eye.

“I can’t say I know.” She had a soft, country accent. When he interviewed her for the job, he thought she’d be the kind of receptionist who would tell him down-home, country stories about her uncles and make biscuits she’d bring in to share. She was not that kind of receptionist.

“Can you look it up for me?” He picked up the day’s mail and shuffled through it.

“Sure,” she said.

“It’s for some investment research.”

“Sure.” He had one last glimpse of the computer screen before he closed his office door.

The amount an average family spends every year was, in fact, $550.  Lorraine prepared a folder with a detailed yet concise report on the fruit and vegetable eating habits of Americans, including the annual increase in the number of farmer’s markets and CSAs, the annual profit of an average small fruit and vegetable farmer, and an item-by-item comparison of some basic fruits and vegetables purchased in a grocery store, a farmer’s market or grown in your own garden.

At lunch, he sat looking at the neat little file folder and thinking there was something passive-aggressive about the amount of detail Lorraine put into her report. Still, it was useful to have all the information before making an informed decision.  This was what he was always telling his clients.  The world had grown far too complicated for the average person with a job, a house and two kids to negotiate.

From an investment standpoint, community gardens were a booming business. The cost/benefit analysis made perfect sense. But he found himself thinking not about the bottom line of the community garden, but about the polar bears and grizzly bears, two species that had only ever caught whiff of each other in a zoo.  Now here they were wandering around the same forest, inter-breeding, even. There were polar bears now with dark, grizzly-like fur. Bear mutants, so to speak.

He called Gerry at home. “Hey, babe. Been doing some research.”  He waited but heard only silence on the other end of the line.  “How much do you think the average family spends on fresh fruit and vegetables every year?”

“I can’t say.” Exactly what Lorraine said.

“$550. $550 a year for the average family.”

“Hmm.”

“So, $150 for a plot looks pretty reasonable, doesn’t it?”  There was another silence.  What was she doing?  She was always doing something else while she talked to him.

“I guess it does.” There was a pause while he waited for her to say something else. “But it doesn’t include the labor.”

“What?”

“The average family might spend $550 on fruits and vegetables a month, but they also don’t have to do anything to raise them.  If you spend $150 on a community garden plot, you have to work to raise the vegetables.  Shouldn’t you include the cost of labor?”

He frowned down at the report on his desk and shuffled some of the papers around.  “The labor’s free,” he said.

“Ah,” she said, and he could hear a smile in her voice.  “We’ll see about that.”

“What does that mean?” he thought, but he didn’t ask.  To ask would be some kind of surrender. He drummed his fingers across the folder.

“Right,” he said. “So, let’s do the community garden, then.”

“Okay.” He could tell she wanted to get off the phone now. She was done.

“It’s quiet here this morning,” he said.  He wanted to ask her if she thought Lorraine hated him, but she’d only met Lorraine once.  “Quiet.”

“Hmm.” She wasn’t even listening.

“Lorraine says hello.”

“Oh, well tell her hello,” she said.

“Okay, well, I’ll see you tonight, then.”

“Love you, honey,” she said. “Miss you.”

He fought the urge to keep her on longer. To keep her talking. To make her listen. As he thought of what he might say next, she hung up.

“Nice report,” he said to Lorraine as he walked out for lunch.

“Thanks,” she said, her computer screen still carefully angled away.

#

The community garden had a kick-off event every year.  There was a picnic, with vegetables provided by the early planters.  “We could’ve already planted?” he whispered to Gerry. He didn’t know a lot about gardening and now he was already behind.

It had been unseasonably cold all week, so cold that he said at least three times to Gerry, “If it’s cold on Saturday, we’re not going up there.”  She nodded.  He had seen early on in their relationship that she was not an arguer.  She did not disagree with him and he wasn’t sure what this meant.

“Sunny and high in the 70s,” Gerry announced when he came trudging down the stairs.

“Alright, then,” he said.  The kids were excited, even the ten-year-old, who was increasingly incapable of being excited about anything.

Standing in the bright light of the sun, surrounded by green grass and trees, he had to concede that the community garden did seem like a good thing.  There was so much space.  There was space in their backyard, too, but the kids never seemed to want to go out there.

Now, they ran around in ever-widening circles away from he and Gerry.  “Born, free,” he leaned over and sang in Gerry’s ear, and she laughed. She told him that was one of the things she liked about him when they first started dating.  She made him laugh.  The ex never made her laugh.

They signed up at a small table for a time to tour their plot and to hear all the rules. He worried about the kids wandering around the sprawling territory of the old farm that had been turned into the garden; weren’t these kinds of places dangerous? He pictured rusty farm machinery, sharp metal protruding around every corner. “They’re fine,” Gerry said. They did seem happy as they formed a roving pack of wild children.  It finally looked like what childhood should be, what childhood was before scary movies about wolves and environmental disaster.

Their tour had just started, the bright and hippy-like young woman explaining to him and Gerry the concept of a buffer between plots.  “Good fences make good neighbors, even in the garden!” she was saying, when he heard the shrill, high-pitched voice of a small child squealing, “Mommy!”  It sounded like Lily, but they all sounded like Lily.  It was only when he felt Gerry tug his hand that he turned to see her staring in the direction of the old farmhouse.

There he saw Lily, in the last few steps of a clumsy five-year-old run towards a woman dressed in stylish jeans and pumps, with a perfectly tailored jacket over a fitted blouse.  She hadn’t dressed like that when they’d first married; she was frumpy Midwestern in the beginning.  At first he liked the change, but then it came to signal something–the way she gradually became someone different.

“Mary?” he asked.  “Mary’s here.”

He stuck his hand in his jacket pocket and felt around. Sometimes he found the remote control tucked inside there with his car keys and his cell phone. It was funny at first, when someone would sit down to turn on the TV and find the remote gone. “Have you got the remote in your pocket again?” Gerry would say, and they would laugh. But she didn’t laugh about it anymore. She frowned and shook her head as she gently took the remote from his outstretched hand.

He wasn’t doing it on purpose, he wanted to explain. He had no idea how the remote came to be in his pocket; it was a surprise to him every time. He was only forty years old and already doing things he couldn’t remember. Sometimes he lay in bed at night and wondered what was next.

But his pocket was empty. This time he’d left the remote control at home.

The wind picked up and blew the white petals off a tree that was planted beside the garden. It looked like snow, and it was late in the spring for that, but anything was possible. He thought of the polar bears and grizzly bears. He imagined the two of them meeting on a barren mountaintop somewhere. They would reach out to sniff each other’s noses, tentative like dogs. He drew in a quick breath of air and it was sticky sweet with the smell of the blooms.

He was frozen to the spot, watching Mary cross the space towards him and Gerry. An elderly couple brushed by, following the hippie tour guide. “The garden is a micro-climate,” the guide was saying. “If you save your seeds, the plants adapt over time.”

The elderly man pointed to the patch of dirt below the blossom-covered tree. “Don’t pick that spot,” he heard him whisper to his wife. “It’s in the shade. The plants won’t get enough light.”

She leaned in close to him and whispered back, their wrinkled hands clasped together at their sides. “I don’t think we’ll have a choice.”

Robyn Ryle started life in one small town in Kentucky and ended up in another just down the river in southern Indiana. She teaches sociology to college students when she’s not writing and has stories in CALYX Journal, Stymie Magazine, Bartleby Snopes, and WhiskeyPaper, among others.  She’s currently working on a collection of short stories which take place in a community garden. You can find her on Twitter, @RobynRyle.

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A friend offered to take my address book and call everyone to give them the news. It relieved me since I no longer knew what to say after, hello. Just a few days prior, all phone calls began the same way, “How are you feeling?” or “It’s gotta be cool as hell having two babies kicking around in there. I bet your belly is getting really big now.”

I didn’t know what to do with the silence on the other end of the phone after I repeated the same abbreviated story.

Preterm labor. No stopping. Dead babies.

But I had to make this call. My mom offered to help; so did my husband. No, this call would be different. No surprises. The person on the other end expected to hear from me. Death was his business, and now he had my babies.

I tried not to think about how Nolan and Simone got to this man, just as I tried to avoid the hand-painted box on the coffee table, which held the tiny knit hats and sweaters that still smelled of Johnson’s Baby Powder. The nurses had dressed my twins in the preemie outfits before gently placing them in my arms, and then hours later placed the lacquered box in my empty lap.

I wanted to ask the man on the other end of the phone if my babies were still swaddled together in the flannel blanket with the blue and pink striped trim.

You’ve got to keep their heads covered. They might get cold.

I couldn’t stand the idea of putting my babies in the ground, and a traditional funeral seemed a colossal waste of money. I also couldn’t imagine standing in front of two tiny caskets during calling hours, recounting the entire story for all the people who came to pay their respects, comforting them when it was I who needed someone to keep me upright.

Lyle and I decided on cremation and an in-home memorial service for just our family, but I needed specifics about my twins’ bodies and how they would be cremated. I didn’t know then that details wouldn’t make sense of the senseless.

“I want my babies cremated together,” I said to the funeral director on the other end of the phone.

“I’m not sure I can do that. There are laws we must consider,” he said. “Would you like to come in to discuss the arrangements?”

I imagined him in his office, full head of dark hair, graying at the temples. Black suit. Muted tie. Cuff links. He probably straightened the papers on his antique mahogany desk as he spoke into the receiver. If I came in, he would greet me with fake concern as he led me to pricey baby caskets.

“No. They have to be together. They’ve always been together.”

They might get scared.

“Are you burying, scattering, or keeping the cremains?”

“I don’t know.”

He went on to describe the types of urns and options, and he offered again to sit down with Lyle and me to go over everything. I wanted to scream, “Why didn’t my doctors give me this many choices when they told me I was in preterm labor? Where were these considerations when my babies were still alive?”

Instead the nurse came to my room before the delivery and told me the only choice left was whether or not I wanted to hold my babies until they died.

Now sitting on my creamy, white leather couch, I wished I had let my mom make the call. She watched me across the room, saw me blink back tears and heard my words begin to stammer. She mouthed, “Do you want me to handle this?”

I shook my head and swallowed hard. She walked over, sat next to me, and put her hand on my leg.

“Well, you don’t have to decide now,” said the funeral director. “But it helps to know so we can suggest the right type of container. If you think you may scatter the cremains, I would recommend a temporary container, and that would be less expensive.”

“Okay. I guess we’ll scatter. What does ‘temporary container’ mean?” My mind flashed to something flimsy that I’d knock off the counter, ashes shooting across the carpet. A bad SNL skit shot through my head and ended with me pulling out the vacuum cleaner.

That’s sick, Melissa.

“Well, it will probably be the same kind of container we use for small pets.”

I dropped the phone in my mom’s lap and burst into tears.

###

The ashes arrived or maybe Lyle picked them up. Neither of us can remember that detail. Much of those early days and weeks ran together in a cloudy-cold haze like the January days I stared into from my living room chair. But I won’t or can’t forget the small rectangular cardboard box. Inside, bubble wrap surrounded a round tin twice the size of a dipping tobacco can. The tin held a knotted plastic bag of lumpy ashes. More angry tears slid down my cheeks. The funeral dude was wrong – the temporary container wasn’t suitable for a cat or a dog.

###

Mom always looked put-together, often dressed in a bright paisley or geometric blouse with a tailored blazer that pulled out one of the colors in her shirt. Expertly creased slacks and pointy sling-back shoes rounded out a polished outfit, and shiny lacquered nails and spiky short hair completed her smart look. But on this day, her outfit was dark, subdued, and serious.

She stood sentry as people came in the house. I remember hushed conversations, but held no interest in eavesdropping. I imagine my mom greeting my dad and his wife at the door.

“How’s she doing?”

“It’s hard to tell. So many people have been calling, but she’s only talked to a few,” Mom said. “But you remember how hard it was.” In a silent flash, their memories fused on their infant son who died 40 years earlier.

Dad answered only with the throat clearing and coughing that I knew meant he was choking back tears.

My dad and his wife joined Lyle’s parents, sister, and a cousin in the living room.

We all waited for the minister to arrive, and I half listened to the small talk. Three days prior, I would have participated and thought nothing wrong of the idle chatter. But on this day, I clamped my lips tight to prevent shouting, “It’s stupid to be talking about how much snow we expect in January when I just gave birth to twins and held them until they died. Why does it fucking matter that it’s colder than the weatherman said it would be? My life is ice.”

Chit chat mingled with condolences, but I didn’t know then no words or conversations existed that would make that day okay.

Instead, Lyle and I huddled. I needed his touch, not metaphorically, but his physical heat and support to keep me steady. I leaned into his shoulder, sometimes tucking my head into the dip of his collar bone, comforted by the brush of his lips across the top of my head. I inhaled the familiar spicy-clean smell of Irish Spring Soap. Our fingers laced, knuckles draining of color, fingertips pulsing pink.

I watched Lyle’s sister across the room treat my son, Russell, like a turd as she taunted him through a game of Candyland. “Yeah! I get a pass on the Rainbow Trail. I bet you get stuck in the Lollipop Woods. I’m going to make it to King Kandy before you.”

Did I say, he’s five, you are 45 or just think it?

I heard my mom say, “Your Aunt Lisa isn’t a very good sport, Russell. Maybe we should put her in a room for a time out.”

Thank you, Mom.

Eyes and nose, itchy and puffy and sore. Arms and legs, lead heavy. Heart beat banging in my ears. Grief pushing down, heavier than gravity. I wanted to believe things would get better once I could put this day into a little box and tuck it way forever.

###

If only I could find the right place for the ashes.

Not the lake where we lived. We might move.

Not mountains or ocean. Too far to visit.

Not the state park a half hour away. Too many people.

Every time I looked at that tin of ashes, I thought of the funeral director picking up my babies from the hospital. Did he hold Nolan and Simone with kind hands? Did he take them back to his work room and leave them on a stainless steel table and roll them into one of the many refrigeration boxes lining the back wall, or did he immediately slide them into a glowing incinerator? I squeezed my eyes shut.

On a trip to Tucson to see my mom, I went to the Tohono O’odham Nation and found a clay pot with an ink-black maze painted on the round vessel. These native people were known for their creation of the Man in the Maze drawings. Many iterations of the story exist, but all center on the Iʼitoi who traveled through the maze of life. Wrong turns. Dead ends. Route changes. Many believed the I’itoi searched for the Sun God, and when he found him, the Sun God would bestow blessings and understanding.

I carried the pot home in my lap, happy with the find, but wanting more to hold bouncing babies.

###

I pulled the small cardboard box from the cabinet, opened it, and saw the tin. I took the baggy of ashes and placed them in the clay pot. I threw the tin in the trashcan. Fuck you funeral dude and your temporary container.

The new container found a place on the fireplace mantel. A friend would ask about the maze painted on the Native American pot, but I would only recite the story of I’itoi. I kept the contents hidden.

On the days when I would catch myself looking at the clock at 11:24 a.m. remembering the morning in the hospital when the guttural sounds escaping my body sounded more beast-like than human, I would look at the maze and hope tomorrow would bring a new turn.

###

In the early days, I dreaded standing behind the pregnant woman in a long check-out line at the grocery. I’d watch her massage her lower back with one hand, and with the other, rub small circles around her swollen belly.

Please don’t turn and talk to me.

“This is killing me. This baby is outta-control big. I can’t wait ‘til it’s over.”

I’d chew my lower lip.

Be careful what you wish for.

I’d load the groceries in the back of the van and climb in the front seat. Sobs would rack my body as I sat in the parking lot gripping the steering wheel, head pinned between pallid knuckles.

I didn’t know then hearing a pregnant woman complain would always cause my stomach to flip-flop. Months (okay, years) later, I would still sit in the same parking lot after a similar encounter, but the intensity waned, leaving only few quiet tears sliding down my cheeks.

###

Years passed. In the mornings, I would send Lyle off to work with ham sandwiches, granola bars, and miniature cans of V-8. I prepared steaming bowls of oatmeal blended with spicy cinnamon and tart, granny smith apples for our son, Russell, as he crammed his backpack with homework completed the night before. Xeroxed math worksheets morphed into middle-school trebuchet projects.

I looked at the clay pot sitting on the shelf. I saw the years of twists and turns.

I felt ready to scatter the ashes, but for so long Lyle avoided the topic with things like, “I can’t think about this right now, Melissa. I’ve got deadlines to meet.” Occasionally, we would talk of scattering the ashes in the mountains, deserts, oceans, but without an official container, we weren’t sure a baggy of ashes would pass through post-911 security at the airport in a carry-on bag, and neither of us wanted to take the chance of losing our babies again.

###

The summer before Russell entered high school, we planned a trip to Tucson. I broached the subject again.

“What do you think about taking Nolan and Simone’s ashes and scattering them at Mt. Lemmon or Sabino Canyon,” I said.

“How are you going to get the ashes there? What about airport security?” Lyle said.

“I’ll pack them in my luggage. I think I’m okay if my bag gets lost. Are you?”

“Yeah, me too.”

I put the baggy of ashes in a red silk pouch and tucked it in the middle of the suitcase, hoping it wouldn’t attract attention at the security check-in.

People talk of dry Arizona heat, but when you step outside of the airport in August, into 115 degrees, the heat knocks you back as you suck fire into your lungs.

We spent most of the days poolside with an endless vat of strawberry Eegee’s, Tucson’s famous frozen slushy and answer to the hellish heat. We spooned big scoops of the icy treat into Styrofoam tumblers and topped them off with shots of tequila, just enough to melt the frozen chunks to suck through a straw, inducing instant brain freeze.

I hadn’t wanted to surprise my mom and step dad with our plans to scatter the ashes so I told her before we arrived. I knew we’d all be thinking about it until we talked, so I was glad that she brought the subject up while we hung out at the pool.

“Have you thought about what you want to do?” she said.

“I kinda imagined a picnic and then scattering the ashes somewhere. I thought Mt. Lemmon or Sabino Canyon, but the canyon is going to be really hot. So, Mt. Lemmon? Will you and Paul come with us?”

“Absolutely. Paul’s already picked out a spot you might like.”

Mount Lemmon is the highest point in the Santa Catalina Mountains. At nearly 10,000 feet elevation, it provides relief from the heat of Tucson summers.

We stopped at a Church’s Chicken to stock up for our picnic before making the 20-minute winding climb in the Buick Century.

The mountains are bigger than what people expect to see popping up in the middle of the desert. Often, people don’t know that Tucson nestles within three mountain ranges. You won’t find the switchback twists and turns of the Rockies as you ascend, but the city grid below grows smaller and smaller with each turn up the side of the mountain.

The sun shone across the saguaros on the first look out, but by the next turn, scraggly desert replaced the giant forked cacti, which won’t survive at higher elevations. A couple turns later, evergreens began to sprout across the landscape. On this day though, we also saw charred-stick trees jutting from the ground, the remnants of a forest fire the winter before. Yet, life continued, and the forest would grow again.

We reached the shaded spot, grabbed a picnic table, and took a little walk. This time of year, the mountain offered the only natural respite from the heat in the valley far below. We pulled a box of fried chicken out of the car, set out the biscuits and potato wedges, and plopped one of the Cokes on top of the napkins to keep the mountain breeze from whistling them away.

We munched and laughed and inhaled the woodsy aroma. Paul tossed bits of biscuits and potatoes to the chattering mountain jays and skittish chipmunks that traded instinct for crispy nuggets.

“Right up there is the highest point of Mt. Lemmon,” Paul said. “There’s a pretty cool lookout.”

“Can I go check it out, Mom?” Russell said.

“Be careful. Dad and I will be up in a minute,” I said.

We watched Russell skitter across the boulder with the ease of the chipmunk that came from the same direction.

“Hey Mom, come over here. You gotta see this,” Russell said.

On top of this humongous rock, a break in the trees gave way to the azure-blue sky, which stretched for miles above the layers of mountains and trees below. A breeze breathed through the evergreens.

“Do you think this is a good place, Mom?”

“I think this is a perfect place. What do you think, Lyle?”

“Yep. I agree.”

“I want to say something,” Russell said.

Had I known Russell’s words would fade in my mind, maybe I would have jotted them down and tucked them away in their own special box. But today, I wonder if that day and all the others leading up to it were just a few more turns in the maze.

Melissa Fast is a nonfiction writer from the Midwest. She spins words during the day as a public relations professional in the nonprofit world. In her free time, she slugs large quantities of French-press coffee as she plays with words in hopes of making sense of the world around her. Minerva’s Rising recently published another one of her essays.

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For a sport that sounds so much like a vegetable, squash has awfully large degree of complexity.  It takes a lot of skill to get good.  Take the ball, for example.  Who would dream up a sport where you run around after a ball that simply doesn’t bounce until half-way through the match?  Or rather, a sport where you spend the first 15 minutes warming up not yourself, your muscles or your mind, but the ball itself?

Apparently someone.  I discovered recently that the name of the sport, squash, comes from the behavior of the original balls as they bounced off the wall.  I understand this to mean that the ball became squashed as it ricocheted of every imaginable surface in a tiny wooden room.  The current ball, however, does anything but squash.  It bounces.  It sputters.  It dies.

However, the use of the word ‘squash’ was initially intended, it seems, to distinguish this crazy racket sport from another, namely “rackets.”  So “squash rackets” was the sport played with the squashy ball, while “hard rackets” was the one played with the hard ball.  Now, anyone who has been hit by a squash ball knows that they are not exactly soft [1], but perhaps this only indicates that one would really not like to be hit by the “hard rackets” ball.  Apparently, the narrowing of the court led to the switch for exactly this safety reason.

Anyway, this split between hard and squashy rackets occurred during the 19th century and gave rise to the popularity of squash, and the subsequent demise of hard rackets.[2]  Between then and the 1920s, trial and error produced many balls.  Squash at that time was a rougue sport, not regulated by any organization, so people built courts of all shapes and sizes and they had balls suited to the particular court they had built.  The larger the court, the safer it was to use a hard ball, the smaller the court, the more squashy you would want to make the ball.[3]

In the 1920s, squash was adopted by the Tennis and Rackets Association, and hence subjected to institutional standards.  This meant an end to the idiosyncrasies of court dimension and ball type. Colonel R.E. Crompton of the Royal Automobile Club of London is accredited with devising the first techniques for weighing and measuring balls, as well as testing the amount of bounce of the various balls that were being circulated.  Popular manufacturers of the day included the East India Rubber Company, the Silvertown Company and the Gradidge Company, which marketed its so-called “nigger ball” in colors such as red and white, as well as the traditional black.[4]

In 1923, Silvertown won out over its competition and its “Wisden Royal” ball was voted the official squash ball of amateur squash.  Balls were subject to certain standards by the Squash Committee of the Tennis and Rackets Association and all other balls began to drop out of circulation.[5]

Squash players like to complain, though.  Much like professional soccer players, you will see squash pros arguing with their referees, throwing tantrums, falling down for no apparent reason, claiming “Ah, he tripped me!”  As early as September of 1923, not even a year after the ball had been officially standardized, players were complaining that the ball was too fast.  They needed the game to be just a little harder, and the committee began talking about making a new standard ball that bounced less.

A series of politics ensued.  The Squash Rackets Association (SRA) branched off from its previous protectors, the Tennis and Rackets Association.  New companies were brought in to make new balls.  In 1930, Silvertown again won out over its competition and was adopted as the official ball of the SRA, but in 1934, the newly formed Women’s Squash Rackets Association opted to use a ball made by Gradidge.  World War II bombings in London destroyed most of the ball manufacturers and also dried up the supply of rubber.  Silvertown went out of business, leaving squash ball production a major hole.  A company called Dunlop stepped in to pick up the slack.

After the war, squash continued to increase in popularity.  But then, another disaster.  The Bath Club, which had been host to the Amateur Championships, was destroyed in a fire.  The Championships were moved to Landsdowne Club, where the courts were warmed and faster.[6]  Thus Dunlop developed a much less bouncy ball to counteract this effect.  Although other manufacturers continued to make balls, Dunlop had now stolen much of the market and remains the primary producer of squash balls.

Anyone who has seen a squash ball before will have noted the two yellow dots, like cat’s eyes, peering up from the black surface of the ball.  Further investigation will reveal other balls with different numbers of dots and different colorations.  In the 1970s, Dunlop introduced a system of marking different balls, indicating their degree of bounciness with the colored dots.  Squash ball connoisseurs know that a blue dot ball bounces more than a single yellow dot ball, which in turn bounces more than a double yellow dot ball (the standard tournament ball is the least bouncy).  Thus beginners, myself included, start with blue, then red, then yellow, until they have finally matured enough to use the prestigious double-yellow-dotted ball.

Much like predecessors who spoke of their “secret recipes” for making balls, Dunlop guards the ball’s identity like a dragon in a treasure-filled cave.  When I hold a Dunlop ball in my hand, ready to serve, I know that I am holding an object that has been to several countries and many different stages of development.  But where exactly has it been and how was it made?

The ball comes out of a small white, yellow and black box, suited to fit it as perfectly as a cube can fit a sphere.  The top of the box is emblazoned with the Dunlop trademark, a D in a circle in an arrowhead, flying off to the right.  The side of the box identifies this as the “World’s #1 ball,” which seems a bold claim for a company with a monopoly on the entire market.  The box also indicates that this is a “PRO” ball, subtitling that with “advanced players” and specifying yet again with a blow-up of the two yellow dots on the side of the ball.  Another side of the box shows a cross-section of the ball and a “micro scale” diagram that looks like something from a chemistry textbook.  I try to remember whether the black dots represent carbon.  Yet another side of the box declares (in four languages) that this is the official ball of three different world squash organizations.  The bottom of the box, in very small letters, indicates “Made in the Philippines.”

According to my research, however, the rubber for the ball is grown in Malaysia and shipped to the Barnsley factory (though it sounds like it should be in England, perhaps it is actually in the Philippines).  The rubber is masticated to a workable consistency and then mixed with a series of secret natural compounds and synthetic materials, giving the ball its characteristic feel and bounce.  Each ball type (red, yellow, blue dots) contains a slightly different combination of compounds.

The mixture is then run through a series of machines which turn it from a putty-like blob into pellets and then into half-shells.  The edges of these half-shells are roughened, coated with a rubber solution and an adhesive and pressed together in an operation called “flapping.”  The flapped balls are then passed through a series of further machinations to ensure that the join is firm and their edges are roughened to give them their characteristic matte finish.  Before the Dunlop logo is stamped on them, each ball is checked by hand for defects.  Thus every ball that reaches the consumer is perfect.[7]

[1] Though, I will say there is a sort of masochistic pleasure in watching that perfectly round bruise appear on the thigh or back.

[2] However, I do know of one club in Boston that still maintains a rackets court (larger than a squash court).  I saw people playing on it once, when I got lost on my way to a squash match.  And coming from someone who plays a pretty obscure sport myself, it was weird.  But, hey, whatever makes you happy.

[3] Examples of many early and rare ball varieties can be viewed at The Squash Racket Collection, a collection of rackets and balls from all different manufacturers and all eras.  If ever in Melbourne, Australia (I haven’t been yet, but will soon be planning a visit), you are welcome to take a look.  Contact bert@squashcollection.com for more information.

[4] Yes, I find this as disturbing as you do.

[5] Little, however, is known of the exact specifications of this particular ball, as the Silvertown Company’s records were destroyed during the Second World War.  Clearly the Germans were after more than just territory.

[6] A legitimate footnote: since squash balls are made of rubber, they bounce more when heated, due to the elastic properties of the material.  Friction heats them up, which is why the more one hits a ball, the more bouncy it becomes.  The same goes for warm courts, though.  On warmer courts, the ball bounces more from the beginning.  On many a cold winter’s day, I placed my balls on the heater before starting practice so that I didn’t have to put in the muscle power of getting them ready for playing.

[7] However, I still find the occasional imperfection in my balls.  Sometimes, you don’t realize that the ball is not perfectly round until you try to play with it and it careens crazily in a direction you never intended.  Sometimes, this is a benefit; when playing someone who understands the game and the way the ball should bounce, this may throw them off and win you the point.  Just expect the same kind of unpredictable reaction when your opponent hits the ball.

Olivia Tandon is a graduate of the creative writing program at Columbia University, where she specialized in creative nonfiction and short fiction. Her fiction has been recognized at the World Science Fiction Convention and she has work published or forthcoming in Creative Nonfiction, Gravel, Kudzu Review, The Eye, Lung Poetry, and Polytext. Her essays about teaching in New York City have appeared in numerous issues of New York Teacher.

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Lonely dinners in sullen dejection;
permanent as God, erudite with universe.
I have been the most absent; the gatherer of forms.

Lonely dinners…
The coldest shroud is oneself.

What is there to look for?
The pure crossroads where thunder dances
where it is always noon?

Lonely dinners in sullen dejection.
Bread and salt. Moans.
Thighs that leap; the exits of an entourage;
The hesitant light that comes down.
The last rights of a harmonious blacksmith!

To go; but to never leave;
a rooster’s song in the blue morning of my hope;
a continuation of Time based on pain.

I was a missing person, the most absent:
the gatherer of forms.

To wake untuned…

Jacobo Fijman immigrated to Argentina from Eastern Europe with his family at the age of five in 1904. He wrote three books of poems, Molino Rojo, Hecho de Estampas, and Estrella de la Mañana, along with a posthumous book of short stories, San Julian el Pobre: Relatos. He died in 1970 in the same asylum he was interned for the last 30 years of his life. Bluestem’s 2015 print issue will feature a number of his translated poems.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is a Canto Mundo fellow, a Zell post-graduate fellow and the first undocumented student to graduate from the University of Michigan’s MFA program. With CD Wright, he is also the translator of the Mexican poet Marcelo Uribe whose book of translations is forthcoming.

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have you ever seen a one-legged goose
beige and black all feathers and fat
balanced on one desperate delicate leg?
I haven’t, but I’ve learned they can’t fly

so said my father who saw one
every Sunday on an island in the lake
where he goes instead of church

the goose, abandoned, he thought,
made do with succulents along the shoreline
trapped on land, he picked the island clean
of the seeds left untouched, of the fruit fallen, unrotten

until a March afternoon when my father pulled me aside
said he buried the one-legged goose who died
alone on the island, recently

he told me this and said I knew you’d understand
leaving me with the weight of needing to

he was always in charge of pet burials
the rabbits and hamsters in the backyard
the last words the found tombstones
the elegies of dandelions

I know I only have my name because someone died
and I wonder if it was strange for him
to shout a sister’s name and see a daughter appear
I know when I was four he became an orphan
but all I remember of that is this:
the funerals were in winter
I remember the snow but not the weeping
the flowers but not their colors
the frosted twigs that snapped gently
underneath my shoes

I know that he wrote a book of poems
– almost 200 in all – and only one
only one about dying

I know now how much he must have piled onto those little lines
how that poem must have felt like the leg of that goose
and me, now holding the fat and feathers of too many memories,
I find myself reaching out to put a hand on someone’s shoulder
not to grab or hold onto, but just to feel
something solid, unburied, and breathing.

Laurel Ingraham Aquadro, originally from Massachusetts, majored in English at Cornell with a concentration in Creative Writing. While there, she published eight poems in Cornell literary magazines and spent a summer taking poetry courses in Rome. Since graduating, she has taught high school English in New York City for eight years and continued writing, taking workshops at Writers Studio, Poets House, and the Unterberg Poetry Center. She has recently moved back to Massachusetts, settling in the Pioneer Valley with her husband and her dog, Gatsby.

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Michael Lauchlan‘s poems have appeared in many publications including New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The North American Review, English Journal, and The Cortland Review. Lauchlan’s collection, Trumbull Ave., is forthcoming from WSU Press.

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Of the attempts, I resent most not the one
that I myself derailed when I walked

in on you corpse-napping away an afternoon.
And how could I hate you for the ones I wasn’t

even born for? Though I do. How you tried
to taste volts the day my brother was born.

The one that’s hardest to forgive is that burning
Oldsmobile, the Sheriff who nearly died trying

to save you, the skin grafts, the methodone. Why?
I bet that day started with a sunrise as days do.

I bet it started with you opening your eyes.
It started with urination, medication, you shifting

the contents of the apartment where, you told me,
someone kept breaking in at night and mismatching

your closet full of shoes. I bet that day started with
a gas can. I’ve never known such certainty as you,

when you pulled into the spot where you meant
to die. Where you watered yourself like a little

daffodil, splash, splash, splash across your roots.

Patricia Colleen Murphy founded Superstition Review at Arizona State University in 2008. Each semester she mentors 30-40 students through all the steps of running a literary magazine. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals, including The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, and American Poetry Review. Her writing has received awards from the Associated Writing Programs and the Academy of American Poets, Gulf Coast, Bellevue Literary Review, The Madison Review, Glimmer Train Press, and The Southern California Review. She reviews literary magazines at Lit Mag Lunch and books on Goodreads. A chapter of her memoir in progress was published in New Orleans Review.

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Again and again, the boy falls through the ice,
starting from home once, twice, again.
Which house exactly?  The one by the lake

with the dripping pipes.  Mostly he leaves on time
and slides onto the lake for joy.  I remember
when he farted on purpose and Kevin laughed

 so hard he farted, too.  Sometimes he leaves
late and runs onto the ice to save time.
What pipes?  There are no pipes, just bicycles

rusting under the snow in the backyard.
It is always morning and cold.  Each morning
sleet stings his cheeks.  Didn’t we see him

 that day, Mom?  Didn’t we see him sliding on the ice?
That is not the route we take.  I thought the mother
kept the yard nice.  All over town

the ice breaks.  Twice in our own home
a child falls through, and twice her mother
freezes in the door well.  Each time the child falls

differently.  The world shifts under his left foot,
his right foot.  Sometimes he hears the crack
or feels it at the nape of his neck and fears.

Other times the world opens like a trap door,
no time for fear.  He had his Spider Man
lunch box.  I know he had his Spider Man lunch box.

No, that was last year.  The man who finds
the body the first time has a boy of his own at home.
For one of the rescue workers, this is his third

little boy blue.  He is furious.  “Get ‘em
out of the gene pool,” he tells his wife, “out
of the damned gene pool.”  Now the second-grade

teacher finds him—she is only two years out of school—
and the police station receptionist who could have
seen him from the third-floor ladies’ room.  Then

the mothers come and then the fathers. Mom,
I think he’s haunting the school.  Then come all
the neighbors and their neighbors who might have

seen him running out the door.  Each must find him
for herself.  Where’d he go, Mom, where is he now?
He’s right there.  He’s just coming out of the house.

Lauren Smith Traore lives in small-town Wisconsin with her husband, her daughter and her aging beagle.  She has a chapbook, Ornithography, and two books of nonfiction about intercultural families with cowriter Jessie Grearson.

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A.

Better to keep faith
in the mystery
of all this black ridge, rising to fog.

Better to walk the mind through the deep
gorge, cluttered with bitter apples,
the summer-rotten branches choked
pungent by the damp cold.

B.

Dear God,
let me get up. Let me crest this rain.

Let this wind becomes a kingdom;
the bindweed a prayer:

Let the sternum grow slack,
            the face stiffen,

            the ligaments, tissues, and all
organs break

            to stone. And let the stone
of the new body crack

            open to the diamonds of our blooms,
our silver veins pulsing.

C.

Two centuries ago, the horses fled.
The shed collapsed, and the farmhouse’s walls
grew ripe with mold. One stand of corn still grew, warped,
in the north pasture.

Crows snipped the ears bare.
Dogs skulked
to lower land. The family lay
ever in their beds.

D.

Once down
there, the brambled earth will cleave
loose my bearings.

Once down
there, my body will become a rapid
emptiness, steeped, detrital, strewn.

William Wright is author of eight collections of poetry, four of which are full-length books, including Tree Heresies (Mercer University Press, 2015), Night Field Anecdote (Louisiana Literature Press, 2011), Bledsoe (Texas Review Press, 2011), and Dark Orchard (Texas Review Press, 2005). Wright is Series Editor and Volume Co-editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, a multivolume series celebrating contemporary writing of the American South, published by Texas Review Press. Additionally Wright serves as assistant editor for Shenandoah. Wright will serve as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee in spring of 2016.

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