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Jennings, Brittany

Two Poems by Colin Pope

Willow Springs 75 Cover shows pink pressed flowers on rough paper.
Willow Springs 75 Cover shows pink pressed flowers on rough paper.

Found in Willow Springs 75

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Phone Call to Plan Abortion, as Flood

 

She says she's lost so much weight

since our breakup that she can see it,

she can feel her hips spreading out

as though her womb were a river

and the water was rising around

a lump of clay caught in its path.

She can't keep from crying. She tries,

 

knowing how hard it is for me to hear

her pain, but her levies are broke and gone:

waterlogged-teddy-bear gone,

family-photo-album gone, gone

as the christening gown blown

into a tree two towns away, gone. She says

 

in Texas, now, they make you listen

to the heartbeat. They take your ultrasound

and show it to you and make you hear

the twice-quickened rhythm against

the backdrop of yourself. She says

 

what hurts most is that it's a piece

of me she's losing, the last piece, and if

there was any part of me that wanted

to pull from the wreckage this family,

I should do something. I should do

 

something, but I can't. If you need

any help, I say, let me know. If you need

any, any help, anything at all, I'm here.

I am so artful in my evil, it takes

three of me to keep myself

 

from running back into the house

and lying down on the linoleum

to wait for her to swallow me alive.

Okay, she says. Okay. It's like searching

 

for bodies. Out there, somewhere,

the ragged corpse of goodbye

is waiting for us to find it, but instead

we stay on the line, petrified

that when we hang up it will be the last time

we'll ever hear each other breathe.

 

Suspect

 

Now I remember how the policeman

asked me where I was

at the time of your death, and I thought

how nice of him to try

to cheer me up,  joking that way

as the waves in his shoulder radio

crashed and whispered.

And then I listened to the frequency

of his lips and there wasn't a quiver,

not a single crest in the flatline

of his face and I knew he was seriously asking

whether I had killed my girlfriend.

 

lf l had been a smarter man, a man

whose grip on the exposed wiring

of shock had not been so tight,

I would've seen it coming.

I would've inhaled and swallowed

the rotten, sulfuric taste of the entire

administrative holocaust to come,

papers exchanging hands

in distant offices, workers flitting

through the safety of their honeycomb

with their dirty feelers scraping our names,

and folders, finally, eating us whole.

"Why?" I asked instead,

 

knowing why, but wanting

to hear him say why. "We're just trying

to get all our ducks in a row," he said. "We

only want to understand."

Oh, officer, I never knew his name

but what a gift he was.

There was only so much understanding

to go around, and he wanted to drink

every drop of it, he wanted

to pound nails through the feet

of those ducks and drown them. "Home,"

 

I kept saying. Home, home, home.

He seemed to believe me,

which was funny because I knew

you were on the loose out there, fresh

as a cyclone crossing a prairie,

hovering, splitting and replicating, and

wherever I went or whatever I told him,

home had run away, dissolved, the way a word can,

the way a person can, the way facts and dates

and places end up blaming us, stupid us,

the ones who took the trouble to make them.

 

Four Stories by J. Robert Lennon

Willow Springs 75 Cover shows pink pressed flowers on rough paper.
Willow Springs 75 Cover shows pink pressed flowers on rough paper.

Found in Willow Springs 75

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Owl

HIS SON WOULDN'T TAKE the garbage out to the barn because there was a bat, the boy said, flapping around out there; so he muttered an oath, cinched the bag shut, and crunched across to the gravel driveway and through the dusk-darkened open door, only to find that the boy was right, there was something out there, not a bat, he realized as the thing swooped over his head and came to rest on the seat of a disused bicycle leaning against the rear window- not a bat but a small gray owl, its back to the gloom, batting itself futilely and halfheartedly against the still faintly lambent glass. It's confused, he thought, confused and lost, so he set down the sack of trash and took the owl gently into his two hands, planning to release it through the open door, which he would have done immediately had the owl not dug its claws into his fingers and puffed itself up inside his cupped hands and said, in a high, strangled croak like a sick old woman's, I'm not lost or confused and I'm not an owl, I'm the  part of your son you don't understand, and I beat myself against the glass not because I want to escape but because I want to know how it feels; and while this little speech from the owl gave him pause, he walked the rest of the way across the barn to the door and freed the thing into the night air, because he didn't know what else to do and because it frightened him to have the creature in his hands; then he dropped the bag of trash into the garbage can as planned and went back into the house to apologize to his son.

 

Marriage (Sick)

SHE'S LYING ON THE SOFA. She says, I think I feel sick.

You think? he says. How can you think you feel sick? Either you feel sick or you don't feel sick.

I don't know if I feel sick, she says.

He says, You don't know if you are sick. But surely you know if you feel sick.

I feel something, she says. And I don't like it. But I don't know what it is.

Well, again, he says. How do you know you don't like it if you don't know what it is?

She says, Fine. It's a bodily unease. It's the vaguest hint of nausea, coupled with the faintest headache, which might be the result of my posture, or not getting enough sleep. Or it could be the first sign of illness. These sensation s are unclear. They fade in and out of perception as the patterns of my thoughts and actions change. Okay?

Maybe it's all in your head, he says.

I just told you it isn't. I just told you it is in my body.

Well, he says, you think it's your body. But it could be that it's your mind planting ideas in your body.

In other words, she says, it's my fucking body.

If you were really sick, he says, you'd know it. Believe me. There's no mistaking it when it comes on.

I've been sick before, you idiot, she says.

Well, he says, remember what that was like. Are you feeling that now? I might be.

He makes a face.

You make me sick, she says.

He says, I get that as a rhetorical tactic. But in truth, it's pretty unlikely that--

She vomits. It takes a while. A minute, at least. She makes no apparent effort to move to the toilet or to contain it to a small area.

She says, I'm sick.

You're sick, he says. He leaves the room and comes back with a wet washcloth, a roll of paper towels, and a bottle of spray cleaner. He cleans off her face and then the furniture and floor. He leaves the room and comes back with a cup of tea and a blanket. He sets the tea on the coffee table and covers her with the blanket.

I'm sorry, he says.

She says, Are you sure? Yes.

Maybe you're feeling something but you don't know what it is. That's a real phenomenon, she says, weakly. Maybe you're saying you're sorry because it's socially appropriate, but you're feeling something very different. Something you are too dense to have bothered to examine. Maybe you are feeling nothing at all.

He says nothing.

You're sorry, she says, making quotation marks with her fingers.

After a while, he goes upstairs. After a while, she starts to cry. She doesn't know why.

 

Eleven

ELEVEN: THE NUMBER of days until he'll see her again; the number of times he says her name into his pillow every night and again when he wakes; the number of letters in her full name, spread over four syllables, one three four three; the number of steps from his bedroom to the bathroom where he balls eleven Kleenex in his fist, one by one, and sails them across the room and into the wastebasket, starting over at one if he misses, and in the morning his father asks who in the hell is using all the goddam Kleenex, and his mother says shush, don't make him feel bad; eleven times he touches the light switch when he leaves the bathroom to return to bed, eleven seconds he counts before he can roll over in the bed, eleven scratches on his itchy ankle, eleven insert ions of his finger in each nostril when he gets the urge to pick his nose. Eleven is his age, and hers, and when she asked him, during math, what was with the tapping, because he had been making himself tap his desk eleven times on each corner with a pencil every time he imagined reaching across the space between them and stroking the dark skin of her resting hand, he said, it's a project I'm working on; and instead of rolling her eyes and turning away as most girls would she looked straight at him and said, with the faintest hint of a smile, Well that has got to be some project; and before the teacher yelled at the two of them to stop talking--the two of them, reprimanded together!--he thought, Oh, God, why tomorrow, why does winter break begin tomorrow , because when they returned in January she would be twelve and the one thing that connected them, the one thing that was real to him, would be gone, and she would never speak to or smile at him again; she would be part of a new world, the world of twelve, which at this moment as he lay in bed on the first dreadful night of Christmas vacation , seemed as distant to him, as cold and imaginary, as the North Pole.

 

Marriage (Love)

SHE SAYS, DO YOU LOVE ME?

He appears to consider the question.

Well? she says.

I'm thinking about it, he says.

She says, We're married! What the fuck is there to think about?

You're rather difficult, he says.

So what! So are you!

He appears surprised. I'm difficult? In what way?

Are you kidding? she says. Your passivity. Your stubbornness. The way you pretend that things are simple when they're not. Like right now. You're acting like I just asked you a simple question. You're sitting there trying to actually answer it!

But you're the one who wants it to be simple, he says. You just want me to say yes. I'm acknowledging the complexity of the issue.

She says, No, see, that's the simpleton's idea of complexity. It's actually not complexity, it's oversimplification. If you were smart, you would have answered the question as though complexity wasn't even a thing, and kept your idiot notions to yourself.

So, he says, when you say you love me, you're lying?

No, you moron. I do love you, but I'm privately acknowledging, to myself, that love is not simple. Then I am vaulting over that layer of complexity and giving the rhetorically appropriate reply, because I am a higher fucking mammal capable of complex fucking reasoning.

Hmm, he says.

Okay, she says, how about this. Do you think I'm fat?

No, he says.

All right then.

I mean, he says, you're fatter than when we­--

No, no, no, she says.

But I like a woman who--

No! No. You haven't heard a thing I said.

I can only be myself, he says.

False, she says.

I don't see what other choices I have.

False.

I love you, he says.

I hate you, she says.

He strokes his chin for a little while. What layer is that? he says, finally.

I'm not at liberty to say.

I was right about your being difficult, he says. Admit that.

Saying that I am difficult is an insidious form of flattery to yourself, she says. By saying that I am difficult, you are saying that you are man enough to handle me. When in fact you are a fucking pussy.

He says, By saying that you hate me, you are flattering yourself You are saying that you are woman enough to be married to someone you hate. Who is a fucking pussy.

Touche, she says, four days later.

“Fire Artist” by Karl Zuelke

Willow Springs issue 79 cover shows photo of a pink dress against a concrete background.
Willow Springs issue 79 cover shows photo of a pink dress against a concrete background.

Found in Willow Springs 87

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OUR FATHER and one of his buddies burned down the lumberyard back in the forties. Grandma told the story a hundred times: "The whole neighborhood was headed up the street toward the commo­tion, and here come Vernon and Richard moving the other way. I knew they was mixed up in it right then." She thought it was funny.

So maybe it's been running in the family. My brother, Phil, the fire artist. Dad the adolescent arsonist.

WE WERE LIGHTING little grass fires, seeing how big we could get them and still stomp them out. One got away, of course, and some­body called the Fire Department. Flames thirty feet high, smoke in brown coils racing for the blue, sirens on the way. It burned itself out in five minutes. A minute before the trucks rounded the corner, Phil lit the field again and we took off. "Shame if they come running all the way over here with nothing to show for it," he told me. We hid out in a tree house peeling open wet Playboys and drying them in front of the fire built on flagstones we hoisted up there. Phil could control a fire when he meant to. We both knew how to do that.

IN THE PORCUPINE MOUNTAINS the bears were thick. One walked through the middle of camp and crapped in front of Curt's tent. There were peanuts and a purple foil granola bar wrapper in it. So we took care and hung the packs properly, and the bears were up the trees all night, swiping at the packs and grunting, frustrated. We saw where they tried to bite through the rope. They watched us from the woods, red eyes sparking back the firelight.

PHIL GOT IN A WRECK on a motorcycle and graduated high school in the ICU. His friend died in that wreck, a good kid too young to be heading off in that fashion. It still hasn't left, that vision of my brother's face—I mean smashed—the wires and tubes, the equipment all whistling. Phil got a pile of money from the settlement. The plas­tic surgeon rebuilt him, and he looked the same. That in itself was amazing. He and Curt went backpacking down a canyon in Medicine Bow that August. Dad couldn't believe it, couldn't think of a thing to say. I don't remember why I missed that trip. An elk tripped over their tent rope and bugled. The stream had deep, clear pools crowded with trout they could see but couldn't catch, so Phil tied an M-80 to a rock. Ethical angling was hardly my brother's forte, but he and Curt had cutthroat trout every meal for six days. They buried the fish in icy patches of old snow that kept them fresh.

WE DID THE SMOKIES A LOT, and once a big sphinx moth flew into the circle of the firelight, eyes glowing like they had electric filaments. It got too close and went down in flames like a little fighter plane. It was dramatic and terrible because it was heavy-bodied and five inches across, and the smell wasn't good. After it happened again, we learned how to pull them away from the flames. We'd see their little red eyes shining as they buzzed in from the woods, then we'd grab them with a flashlight beam and park them safely on our shirts. They sat like gray corsages, vibrating. We each had four or five. Once the fire died down they flew off, one by one.

PHIL DID THE GRILL at Mom and Dad's barbeques and was good at salting and seasoning the roast and cooking it to perfection. He had a feel for how flesh and fire work together. Cooking is the con­trolled breakdown of the molecular structure of food, so it’s all about destruction from the beginning. The art of it is permitting the disin­tegration to only progress so far.

THE THREE OF US MET some Lakota guys in the Black Hills, same age as us. Everyone you meet in mountain country is friendly. East or West, almost always. We hung out a couple days, shared their vodka and our bourbon and cigars and each other's food, and it was great fun. Caught fish, and one guy was deadly on squirrels with a pellet pistol, so there was fresh red meat and plenty of it. Phil cooked up those squirrels, and our Indian friends had to admit that here was a guy with the touch. They told us their tribe's white buffalo woman story around the fire one night, and the moral basically was that you should have a good heart and be respectful of the things that come your way. These dudes could party, but they weren't joking about this. It was easy enough on that night. Spicy pine-roasted squirrel, good company, taking turns sipping a bottle of Four Roses, around and around. The fire all lively, spitting and popping.

WE TRIED OUT TAR HOLLOW in Ohio because we didn't feel like driving so far and we heard it was worth a look, and it was. Great woods, lots of genuine backcountry in the middle of nowhere, good trails, and hills not so high but rugged. And no people. We had good topo maps and needed them. There were spider webs every six feet, the spiders so thick we hiked with branched sticks waving in front of our faces, and they clogged up with the webs, studded with all these thorny little spiders you couldn't flick off because they were buried in the web mass. We stuck the sticks in the fire, and there was this siz­zling white flash for about a second, then the webs melted into goop. When we were hiking Curt pointed to something on a rock and said, "That moss has taken a lichen to that rock," and we heard it five hun­dred times more on that trip, and on every trip after. I still think it's funny. "That moss has taken a lichen to that rock." You'd think you'd get sick of it but somehow you don't.

ONE SPRING just before the leaves opened, me and Phil did a weekend in Red River Gorge, in Kentucky, and it snowed this heavy, wet spring snow. It was beautiful, the soft clumps of snowflakes drop­ping fast, piling up on the heavy evergreen rhododendron leaves next to the lacy green hemlock needles and the cliffs. So lovely, but it did completely soak everything, and it was the one time I ever saw when he couldn't get a fire lit. We tried every trick. Everything was wet. Nothing burned. It was that five inches of warm, soggy snow. He hated that trip and always talked about how sopping wet and miserable it was—we were equipped, it wasn't that bad—but I know it was because he couldn't start a fire. Nothing would catch. I finally said fuck the fire. I walked down to the bank of Swift Camp Creek as it was getting dark, and he was back in camp carving up all these wet sticks with a knife to expose the dry wood inside. I took off my glasses and closed my eyes and put my face up into the strip of quiet gray sky narrowed by canyon walls and let the warm snow sifting down through the tangle of twigs and branches fall all over me. My fleece and Gore-Tex shell were warm, and my feet were dry in my boots, and there was the chill tickle of snowflakes melting on my face, and it was one of those moments you get sometimes when you're out there. Just happy. Blood flowing through your ears.

IT WAS A DRY HOT SUMMER at home, and when you're a fool you assume that's how it's going to stay everywhere. Well, it rained. It always rains in the Smokies. It's the wettest place in North Amer­ica outside of the Pacific Northwest. Curt couldn't find his rain suit because all his stuff was in boxes from moving and getting evicted all the time, so he cut a hole in a garbage bag for his head and two more holes for his arms and that was his rain suit. He went sloshing up the trail in his ludicrous green garbage bag, and he got soaked, and his lips turned dark purple, and he got even slower and denser than nor­mal. We stopped early, stuffed Curt in his tent and sleeping bag, and he was down there shivering like a poodle and getting all sleepy and delirious, worried about Shawnee Indian attacks, then slipping into fog, and it didn't look too good for Curt. Hypothermia is no joke. We got a roaring fire going in the rain and spooned hot instant chicken soup down him and saved his life.

ALL OF US WENT TO COLLEGE, but Curt didn't last. He met a girl and married her with no warning. There was no hope he would graduate. She had grown up in some mean-ass trailer park and want­ed to accomplish more with her life than eight kids before thirty and another trailer. I give her some credit. So why did she marry Curt? Bad judgment. Delusions. Look, he didn't wear a tie at his wedding. He had never worn one in his life, and it's not like it was some kind of statement or anything; it just never occurred to him. One time she hosted a dinner party for all three of us, with our wives, and it was nice, and silly, and there were too many candles on the table, and I felt bad for her. The cooking was unbelievable, but the whole night was still one long la-de-dah until we started telling camping stories. The women rolled their eyes at each other but at least it wasn't Zom­bieland anymore. I'm happy for her sake their marriage didn't last more than a year and a half. She has some good-looking husband now whose whole life she arranges like a vase of chrysanthemums. I see her around now and then and she's nice to me and seems happy to talk. Her daughter is so pretty you have to deliberately drag your eyes away.

BACKCOUNTRY RANGERS in the Smokies carry shotguns they use to shoot feral sows and razorbacks on sight. We were struggling up Eagle Creek, and near the top—boom!—a gun went off and the slug tore through the brush not thirty feet from us. Guns have a bad sound when they're aimed in your direction. Something extra in it. It'll turn your spine to jelly. Before we could yell, a second shot hit its mark, and here this squealing pregnant sow came rolling down the moun­tain and died right next to us. The ranger was a good guy, and he was embarrassed about a near miss with hikers, so he pulled a knife from the sheath on his belt and carved both back straps out of the dead pig, washed the blood off with his canteen, and wrapped them for us in a clean cotton bandanna. That night we were careful to choose maple and hickory for the fire, and we dug up some wild ramps, boiled sas­safras roots for tea, and I hiked halfway back down the mountain and gathered the colony of chicken of the woods mushrooms we had spot­ted earlier. Phil knew exactly how to treat those straps. That was a feast!

PHIL MAJORED IN FINANCE. I majored in biology, then English, then both. We took turns studying in France. We didn't see much of Curt in those years.

THE MOSQUITOES ON ISLE ROYALE were fast, aggressive bit­ers and thick as smoke. Repellent, gloves, and head nets kept them at bay, but you had to lift the net to eat, and you can't put 98% DEET on your lips and eyelids. That’s where they found to bite. Some wolves were after a moose calf. We heard them talking as they hunted in the woods near and around us but couldn't get so much as a glimpse. A great brown gangly cow moose burst out of the pines onto the trail above us, and swung that big long head around, with her red calf trembling between her legs, and it would have been magnificent except that you could see the fear in her eyes, and the poor calf quiv­ering in terror. Do you try to run the wolves off? Good luck with that. The spruce wood campfire that night was bright and flamy and crackly, and we could hear wolves howling.

AFTER HIS MBA, Phil got a position in the finance department of one of the big oil companies and moved to New York, then New Or­leans, then Wyoming, then back to New York, then to Atlanta, then Houston, then New York for the third time.

"What's with fucking New York?" I asked him.

"I hate it. But you go where they tell you." He used his power to fire people. Responsibilities got reallocated according to him. He had a great track record and got noticed.

THE TOURISTY ATTRACTIONS in Yellowstone are ringed with fences, warning signs, and wooden walkways, partly to keep the vacationers safe, partly to keep them from filling the pools with pen­nies and cigarette butts, but most of the fences and warnings were designed by attorneys to preempt lawsuits. Hike fifteen minutes into the back country and there's plenty more hot water, without the fences and boardwalks—geysers, clear hot blue pools, sulfur vapors hissing out of a little hole in a rock. It takes a special kind of crazy to stand at the edge of a thousand-foot cliff with your toes hanging over, but standing at the edge of a hot spring is easy. It doesn't matter that falling into it will cook you as dead as a jump off a canyon wall. Curt was lucky that the stream he tripped into had cooled a bit after flowing a quarter mile across a meadow. His boot protected his foot, but the skin on his lower leg above his ankle turned red and blistered. Phil had tossed a couple plump aloe leaves into the first aid kit, like always, and their juice kept the pain away. In the pool where the hot stream joined the cold one, a dead snake floated, its meat boiled by the volcanic heat it had blundered into.

WE WERE IN THE MOUNTAINS in Montana, and Phil wouldn't pay attention to the plants—these tall parallel-veined plants in the lily family with tiny green flowers. Looked like they grew out of spots where patches of snow had recently melted. He kept knocking the ones in camp over, not on purpose, just didn't notice. "Be careful with those, man."

"Oh, you're right, yeah." But he didn't care. It was just me and him that week because Curt couldn't afford the flight. I needed a break because we hadn't seen a single other person in four days, and wreck­ing those tall fragile lily plants was pissing me off. So I climbed way up the side of the cirque and lay down in the thin grass and watched the shadow of the mountain behind me crawl up the mountain in front of me as the sun set. When it got dark the stars fizzed over the silent sky. I lay for hours just digging them, whirling slow around the black dome of the firmament when suddenly they popped into three dimensions. I wasn't looking at them like paint splattered on a ceiling but was in their midst, in the stars and of them. It was totally mystical. Although I expect anyone with the patience and attention span to lie on his back for three hours in the mountains zoning out on the stars can have this experience. Hardy has Tess talk about the same thing, which is when Angel first notices her. There's nothing special about it and yet there's everything special about it. We're not observers, we're part of it, that's all it means. The wind shifted and some clouds blew in, and I caught a whiff of the cigar my brother was smoking. I worked my way back down to camp in the dark guided by the strange orange glow of the fire five hundred feet below. A cold misty rain started, but he had camp squared away tight. "Where you been?" he said.

HE ORGANIZED TRIPS to Iceland, Italy, Patagonia, and he climbed to the summit of Grand Teton, all while I was grinding my way through graduate school. I went to Alaska with him, charging the expense. You’d think with all the time off he took that he'd get in trouble, but apparently a guy with the know-how and cojones to organize expeditions for the money boys, and sometimes with the power to fire them, and who looks good in a suit in New York City, a guy like that will thrive in an oil company. We hiked up  this valley to a glacier, and there was no color: no green plants, no red plants, no blue sky. No flowers. Just rock, scud, ice, shadow: infinite gradations between dense black and dazzling white. A spruce tree in Denali at­tains a diameter of three inches after a century of growth, but that night he found wood enough for a small, clean fire.

IF YOU ASK A RANGER anywhere in southeast Ohio about moun­tain lions in those big stretches of national forest, they'll clam up and shrug and act like you're dreaming. The rangers know they're there, but it's not official so they won't acknowledge it. There's plenty of deer, surprising miles and miles and miles of nothing but low, rough hills, and vast endless trees, and hardly any people. They're there, though. One followed us all day. We never saw it. Just heard it rustling in the leaves always about the same distance behind, way too close for com­ fort, heard its belly gurgling once, heard something like a cat purring but two octaves deeper, got a ghostly whiff of its dense, musky meat-­breath. And there's that feeling you can't put your finger on, you just know something's back there, your neck hackles tell you. If a cougar doesn't want you to see it, you don't see it. Doesn't mean it's not there. Them eyes burning a hole through your shirt.

CURT HAD A JOB with a tree-trimming company. He was pushing a wheelbarrow piled full of leaves and sticks to the chipper and the wheel caught a branch on the ground. He kept coming, just enough time for a long thin stick to work its way just like that up his shorts, through the flaps of his underwear and right down deep through the slit at the tip of his penis. A one-in-a-million shot. It broke off. He had no health insurance. It took him a year before it hurt bad enough to go to the ER. The laser procedures, surgery, recovery in the hospi­tal, ran him a bill of forty-five thousand dollars. I'd have paid that bill for Curt myself, but I didn't have it. 

PHIL'S WIFE, Rachel—beautiful, intelligent, supportive, accom­plished in watercolors, plays the piano. Willing to move half a dozen times in ten years. When she took the girls and left him, for the usual reason, it was a week after a major promotion. He came clean with me after the divorce." So I burn through women," he said. “Can’t help it." Both his daughters seemed fine with it. I wonder if they knew him better than I did.

SUMMERS WHEN WE WERE STILL KIDS, we'd carry our gear to the big park across the road and set up the old pup tent in the woods where we knew it wouldn't be seen. It was dark green canvas, and had a smoky, mushroomy smell and wooden poles. We would sleep there, sometimes for weeks on end, often with our heads out watching for meteors or inside with rain pattering on the taut fabric. Curt would climb out his bedroom window and join us. We smoked cigarettes, sipped warm beer and bourbon we stole from garages, ate through bags of donuts, and read our Playboys by firelight, comparing what­ ever scant information we could gather about what it meant to be men. I would retell stories from the books I'd been reading. Huck and Jim on the raft. Captain Nemo using treasure for ballast. Boys cast away on an island, the emergence of humankind's innate savagery. All kinds of stuff gets shot at you like flaming arrows, and what they carry ranges from saintly and wholesome to venal and violent. It all hits. What spreads will depend on what's flammable in the target. While those fires lit in him way back then were contained, they kept on smoldering.

CURT NEEDED A SHOT, but the nurse felt there wasn't meat enough on his ass to hold it, so she tried his upper arm, which was worse. She had to run the needle into his thigh.

CLIMBING UP THE VALLEY of Hazel Creek, we were amazed at the height of the trees, eighty, ninety feet before the first branches. We hit this spot where the creek plunged over a waterfall, and it was hot, and we hadn't seen a soul in three days, so we dropped our packs and stripped our clothes off, put our water-shoes on, and waded in the pool below the falls. It was all very sylvan and frolicsome. I looked up, saw this young bear looking down on us, and it walked around the falls and stood next to the pool we were splashing in. Something happened right there. Like, something crossed through the air be­ tween me and that bear, a psychic wind, and I knew the bear wanted to come swimming with us. I was going to let him if he behaved. There's way more to animals than we give them credit for, and I think if you have the capacity for it, the empathy or whatever you might call it, you'll see, and once you catch sight of the spirit for the first time there's no going back. That was my first time. You'd think living with cats and dogs would show most people, but most people either really don't care about them, or they turn their pets into cutesy-poo, so they're blind forever after. My brother turned around, saw this bear standing not fifteen feet away, staring at him, and he about leaped out of his shoes. It’s understandable. He fell backward into the icy water and got up spluttering, and the bear ran off. It looked over its shoulder at us before it was gone, and this is going to sound flaky, but I don't care: That bear's feelings were hurt. It was the funniest thing ever, but there was also a sadness to it. In your whole life you only get a handful of openings like that, and that's if you’re lucky.

YOU DEVELOP A LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIP with your pack, but Curt lost his. We had all bought them when we were sixteen and seventeen, used them for almost forty years. We got him a new one, set him up with our spare gear, paid his share of the food. He wasn't sick with anything specific, but I'd known him since we were nine. Seemed like he was withering. Lost his thump. We had to take his load on, he barely carried anything. The big wildlife stayed hid, but the little creatures of the Smoky Mountains were there like always, the tiger swallowtails, the Diana fritillaries, the salamanders, the big pink and gray millipedes and the smaller yellow and black ones that give off a sweet smell of cyanide, and there were the same streams clogged with downed trees and round, dark, wet rocks with bright patches of moss, the gurgle of tumbling water, the warm air fragrant with sap and mushrooms, the endless dark and bright shades of concentrated green. Curt got nostalgic about this trip before it was halfway over, and it had to be because he sort of figured it was the last one. He dropped dead at work a month later with a rake in his hands. Just fell over dead. As a memorial gesture, my brother paid off all his bills.

WE WERE IN COLORADO, too high for me. I was sick with the altitude on top of a two-thousand-foot drop off, with the wind blow­ing straight at us but deflected straight up by the cliff face. Here came an eagle from way below riding that wind, wings spread, not flapping, rising straight up and fast. He went tearing by and saw us, and it was one of those moments you can get when you know to stay open for it: absolute astonishment on the face of an eagle. We didn't belong there. But as he rose, my spirit, I suppose you might say, followed after, and the eagle was looking down at me like, sure, come on. You can do this too. I snapped back when I started losing my balance, and he and Curt grabbed me and probably kept me from going over the edge. But, oh gosh. I flew with an eagle—just for a second, but I did it. Anyone can. Eagles fly with their bodies, and we can't do that, but it's all about the spirit, really. The eagle showed me that. I tried to share it, but they just listened politely and shook their heads at me. They both thought I was an airhead anyway, but it's okay. I am. I didn't expect anything different.

HE CAMPED ALONE MORE OFTEN. He still led exotic trips with the execs, but fewer, and he was pulling down more money than ever. But so what? All we know is that he should never have built that fire where he did. If you use these places and don't try to under­ stand them, you make mistakes. The Coast Range in August is not the soggy Appalachians. I try to make myself believe that smoke did the work, not the flames. You can't control where smoke goes. To one with fire in his heart, flame is loyal.

OUR FIRST TRIP EVER was with our dad, in a canoe. I was maybe ten. It rained like crazy, and I can't forget one moment: 4:00 a.m., the worst of the thunder moving past but with lightning still flick­ering above a heavy downpour, the tent leaking like it was made of rice paper, the three of us sitting up shivering at each other through the last of the storm flashes in our wet sleeping bags, miserable as cats in a washtub, and our old beagle dead asleep and snoring like a lumberjack. It was so ridiculous we started laughing. In the morning, eight-year-old Phil took it on himself to get the fire going. He found dry tinder someplace, after a long night of rain, and some live coals under the main log in the fire circle. It was a timid, smoky fire, but he already knew the life of flame and nursed it to strength enough to fry three full pounds of bacon and a whole box of Bisquick pancakes for us and the dog. Thirty years later, Dad said it was still the finest breakfast he ever ate.

THERE WERE THOUSANDS of sassafras seedlings scattered through the understory, so I suggested we might make tea. I told my nieces that since the little plants kept breaking off when we tried to pull them up, it was probably because we hadn't asked the tree for its root, shown it proper respect, and given it proper thanks. If you do that, I said, one might just offer up a root.

Your dad would have been proud to take you camping, I told them. Young women, both. Filled like brooks with the laughter of waters. A nice fat root had given itself up. It was plenty for a pot of tea. We washed it off in the creek and put a pan of water on the fire.

Issue 79: Karl Zuelke

Karl-Zuelke-150x150

About Karl Zuelke

I, Karl Zuelke, earned a BS in biology and BA in English literature at the University of Cincinnati. I attended the writing program at Indiana University and earned an MFA in fiction. My doctorate is from UC as well, in American lit. with an ecocritical focus on nature writing and science writing as literature. I moved to Budapest, Hungary for awhile with my wife, Elizabeth, where we taught English at the Közgazdaságtudományi Egyetem (Budapest Economics University). I have also taught at Northern Kentucky University and the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Currently I am the Director of the Writing Center and the Math & Science Center at Mount St. Joseph University, in Cincinnati, where I also teach literature, writing, and environmental studies.

I have a Facebook page but no Web site yet, and I haven’t tweeted in years.

I have critical work published or forthcoming on Terry Tempest Williams, Peter Matthiessen, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and more.

My creative work has been published in The Antioch Review, The Journal of Kentucky Studies, Willow Springs, ISLE, and elsewhere.

A major project I took on two years ago was the blog Dreaming, Singing: Meditations on The Dream Songs. It features creative and critical responses to 385 Dream Songs by the poet John Berryman. I responded to one Dream Song a day for 385 days, plus an introduction and a reflection. These responses varied widely from day to day, depending on the material the day’s poem brought, my mood, my interests, the news, and the weather. They range from close analysis and literary criticism to poems, political rants, anecdotes, and stories. Sometimes I gripe at Berryman and call him a loser (it’s okay—he treated himself the same way). These meditations are mostly brilliant and I highly recommend them, especially if you start at day one and read all 385 subsequent entries in one sitting, plus the reflection.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Fire Artist”

I have backpacked for years, so some scenes from this story are lifted from experience. The bear under the waterfall is told much as I lived it, including that ancient perception of communicating with an animal through what the story’s narrator calls a “psychic wind.” The scene with the moths and the campfire is written exactly as we experienced it. The moose and her terrified calf on Isle Royale bursting through the trees above as they were pursued by wolves is another unforgettable image straight out of my experience. Other scenes began in experience but were altered, others were a retelling of stories I’ve heard, and others are pure fiction. Curt is an invented character. Phil’s rule-breaking personality began in my own brother’s individualist tendencies, but grew beyond them in a way surprising to me. Ultimately, his rule-breaking is not what does him in. It’s the more profound diminishment of his respect—for himself and his loved ones, and for the natural world that had such a defining presence for him but toward which he turned to conquer. His career choices may have tempted him down that path.

Most of the time when I write a story, it takes effort—I have to push, I get tired, my brain feels hollow. On a just a few rare occasions, a story has simply fallen into place. This was one of those. The plot, which develops over a span of forty years, was not preordained. The narrator’s self-aware mysticism and Phil’s rise in influence and wealth, as his character diminishes, all developed out of the characters as their adventures back and forth through time unfolded. The story was a pleasure to write.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

Beach Boys. Steely Dan. Joni Mitchell. Bluegrass. I love a cold beer as much as anyone, but I I’m allergic to hops; I suffer for it—the hoppier the beer, the worse it makes me feel. I stick with red wine, and since I live in Kentucky, I also like a finger or two of good bourbon now and then, out of a sense of community-building and cultural solidarity. Horses, bluegrass music and bourbon lend a richness to the culture of Kentucky which I’m proud to associate with. I’m a pretty good painter in watercolors and acrylics, and I have some skill in woodworking. I can cook. I love cats and understand them, and while I never had one of my own, I grew up around horses. I love and admire them as well. But bees have my attention and heart these days. You wouldn’t think bees would evoke an emotional attachment. I’m just getting started and didn’t expect that. It’s not the individual bees, which are cute but expendable—the bees themselves would tell you that. It’s the hive, this pulsating collective of 30,000 fuzzy insects snugged into their warm, comfortable box. It’s consistently fascinating watching them. A couple weeks ago the temperature in December was in the 60s—too cold for foraging, but there were a few dead bees on the landing, dragged out the day before which had been even warmer. I flicked them away, and the colony heard me, gave off a deep, intimidating collective buzz, then sent out a single scout to see what was up. It was a drone. He hung in my face for a few seconds, decided, I guess, that it was only me, and went back inside. That was it—one scout to check out the disturbance and make a report. Amazing!

 

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“B.Y.O.B.” by Lilly Schneider

Willow Springs issue 79 cover shows photo of a pink dress against a concrete background.
Willow Springs issue 79 cover shows photo of a pink dress against a concrete background.

Found in Willow Springs 79

Back to Author Profile

THE HOUSE

 

The house is not too near the university. No buses come this way. In the garage, on any given day, anywhere from one to a dozen bicycles lean unlocked against the wall, and instruments––acoustic and elec­tric guitars, hand drums, a black varnished ukulele, a dented trumpet, plastic kazoos––lie on the sagging couches, on the squares of dirty, dis­embodied carpet. Tom's drum set, worth two thousand bucks, gleams gold and silver and glitter-flecked pearly white. The house is tucked back from the road in the rain forest––cedar trees and slick maples, blackberry brambles and ferns––and the garage door is always open, even in the constant rain; in the rain the open garage door makes a convenient roof under which it's pleasant to smoke. This is Olympia, Washington, and though bikes get stolen downtown, though laptops and smartphones are lifted from unattended bags on campus, the five residents of this large rental house believe no one would think to steal out here in the hills, where it's so peaceful, so green. When they have a party they move the bikes and clean the garage and divide the space into private hangout cells by tacking brightly printed textiles from the ceiling, gifts from those who've gone backpacking through Asia over school breaks. Someone will bake something to offer around, and it will be either delicious and decadent, or made from beets and seeds and not very good. Everyone will be generous with their drugs. Three of the residents are in a psychedelic rock band, and when they play they take the textiles down so the garage is open. They hand out the kazoos to the crowd, and the street outside is lined with cars a quarter mile in either direction.

Here the parties are always B.Y.O.B. That way everyone can have their preferred beverage; in this group, kegs, their connotations, are considered cheesy. The current residents are not responsible for the silver kegs tossed in the woods behind the house, half-sunk into dirt under toupees of thick moss. They all keep saying they're going to bring them to  the recycling center to see if  they're worth  money, but so far no one has because everyone is drunk when they say that and hungover when they remember having said it. Everyone thinks someone else should do it.

Inside the house, in the living room by the door, a watercolor sign reads, "No Shoes Please!!" Still, the sherbet-pink carpet is studded with pine needles, mottled with mud. A huge afghan knit in yellow, green, and red sags over a scuffed leather couch with smooshy cushions.

On this couch  sit  four  of the  house's  residents.  Rose  is weeping into a balled up sweatshirt. Kyle has his head in his hands. Mikey stands and leans against the wall by the door as if he's guarding it, pulling at his lower lip. Gilda stares at the coffee table, at the bright remnants of packaged snacks, Ho-Ho wrappers, Twinkie wrappers. A friendship bracelet, half finished, is taped to one end of the table, hanging off it like a tail. The three-foot bong that belongs to every­ one, sooty red glass swirled with clouded veins of yellow like fatty arteries, rises like the Washington Monument from a dirty city. If the EMTs saw it, they didn't care. They were in a hurry, pounding through the house, shouting into walkie-talkies strapped across their chests. One of the police officers definitely saw it; he gave them all a look. But the EMTs and police officers are in Tom's bedroom now, talking quietly.

Mikey speaks up. "Does anyone even have his parents' number?" He is tall and leanly muscular. All his clothes have holes in them. He is the singer and lead guitarist of the psychedelic rock band. He makes speeches at the beginning of each show about letting the music enter you, flow through you, take you into the beyond. At the end of the show he makes speeches about how lucky they in the band feel to be part of this community, how music brings people together, music reminds us that we are in fact One, swaying to the same rhythm, a shared heartbeat.

No one has the number, but Rose raises her face to say that it's probably stored in Tom's cellphone.

"Will they call them for us?" Kyle asks.

"I'll call them," says Mikey.

"Mikey," Gilda says without looking at him, "just shut up, for once."

I'm offering––"

"This isn't about you."

"I––"

"Shut up,"Gilda says, "please," and Rose wails for everyone to shut up, and everyone does.

One of the policemen comes out, the one who had given the look before when he barged in and saw the bong. Now he holds his body carefully, stepping over a pair of dirty canvas shoes tossed on the floor, respecting the space of this house that is, for the moment, their home. His shoes squeak as he squats on the other side of the coffee table. He clears his throat.

And the look he wears now is far more frightening than the look he wore before. No police officer has ever looked at them like this, as a man in a war zone might look at his children: like he would do anything for life not to be as hard for them as it's about to become.

 

GILDA

 

They move out of the house later that month. Gilda moves in with a couple of girls from around, Emma and Lu, whose last roommate dropped out to work on a farm. Emma's kind of boring. She's really into school, wants to be a social worker. Lu's main thing is that she's beautiful. Her black hair hangs to her waist. She wears short shorts even in winter, with ripped black tights and combat boots onto which she's painted cherry blossoms. Emma and Lu feel terrible for Gilda, that is clear, and they will not speak against her when she leaves her dishes in the sink, the trash overflowing, loose papers all over the living room. When they speak, Gilda forgets what they say as soon as they've said it. When, from the nest of her bedroom, she hears movement in the apartment, she does not give a thought as to who it might be, what they might be doing. When she makes herself a bowl of brownie batter and eats the whole thing without a spoon, sitting dazed in front of Sesame Street, they observe her, concerned, skinny, healthy, both of them, and she doesn't care. She cares that she gets each drop of batter. She scrapes the side of her hand along the curve of the mixing bowl and licks it on all sides, like a cartoon bear with a pawful of honey.

They are mysterious to her, or they are boring. She doesn't under­stand how anyone with the means to eat constantly could possibly stop themselves. They must go around, she sees now, in constant hun­ger and suffering. Every day she recognizes and takes her opportu­nities for relief: Emma makes a pie, or it's free guacamole Monday at Mama's Taqueria, or she's too tired after class to cook and ends up ordering a pizza and frosted dessert sticks. Emma's lactose intolerant, and Lu doesn't eat anything but rice and fruit. Gilda eats it all.

Gilda wears sweeping skirts, Egyptian eyeliner. Her combat boots are without cherry blossoms but she has threaded them with shoelac­es coated in purple sparkles. Her hair, for the moment , is pink. She has dressed like this since high school, and it has not cured her from feeling chronically overlooked. By her teachers, by her parents, by people she wants as friends, and by men she'd like to sleep with. There is some plainness to her, she fears, that cannot be disguised with any amount of color or flash.

Now she sees that death has put a flash upon her, but she doesn't want it like this. People staring, whispering to their friends. Or not whispering. "She lived with that guy who OD'd on pills," someone shouts in the middle of a crowd during a house show, and though ev­eryone who hears it looks around like something awful has been said, Gilda feels a flicker of rightness that might be called satisfaction. It's true, is it not? Truer than the looks on their faces.

Gilda gives a book report to her publishing class with a ramen noodle snuggled like a pale worm against the chest of her brown sweater. After class, in the hallway, a boy takes her by the arm and quietly, with self-conscious gentleness, tells her about the noodle. Gilda looks down, picks the noodle off and flings it at a trash can, but it won't come off of her fingers. She is still flinging as he walks away, but as soon as he turns the corner, she stops trying to get rid of it and puts it in her mouth, sweater fuzz and all, and swallows it.

The more Gilda eats, the more invisible she feels, safer. After a few months, her face looks different. This feels fitting, because a few months ago, Gilda knows,she was an entirely different person.

She walks down the hill in the afternoon to get ice cream at the by-the-ounce place. She will get all the toppings she likes. She  will get gummy worms that will turn hard from the cold and require tough chewing to release their sweetness. Oreo crumbles, hopefully chunky with white frosting. She will dig through the bowl with a spoon to the bottom where those good pieces are. Walnuts, peanuts, and strawberry syrup bright red and sticky like stage blood. The bay rolls out far below her, the tall bare trees like toothpicks in the dark water, waiting to be driven away on the trucks that are like a rainbow of hard candies flung along the shore. She knows it smells like diesel fuel down there, and dead fish, and wet wood, and stagnant salt water. Not very beautiful. But a young couple in windbreakers, seeing Gilda, crosses to her side of the street, and they want to know how to get down there, to the beach, to look at the big cut trees.

Gilda knows how to get there, but she peers at them as if they've asked directions to Jupiter, astonished by their eagerness, by the firm­ness of their desire to undertake this useless journey. What can they expect to find down there? What do they think will happen? What will change? How simple they are, she thinks, and as the directions fall from her mouth she looks at their hands, entwined and playing a game while they nod to her, fingers rolling around each other before interlacing, squeezing, and rolling over again. She watches as they stumble down the hill, their movement compromised by their refusal to let go of each other's hands, their laughter when they almost trip and tumble, headed to the beach, which as far as she is concerned is as terrible as any place, and smells of death, and doesn't have any shelter, and besides, there is no food there, and you will leave hungry.

 

KYLE

 

Dear Mike,

 

Hello and I hope you're doing good man. You are probably surprised to hear from me, or maybe not haha. First off let me say that I really hope you are doing well down there. Before I came here I was seeing your art on facebook––stuff's awesome man and I'm really proud of you going for it like that. I keep meaning to give your album a listen and I will soon when I get out of here! (Theres no internet here) anyway I miss you guys and have been thinking a lot about the Atlas Street days. Its been a long time. Well three times the charm haha. The people are ok here and this time my therapist is actually really cool. His name's Mel, and he's pretty young and a really awesome guy. He suggested I write apologies to people and everything but obviously I've done that before, but he suggested something new and I hope its ok with you, and if its not you can stop reading this letter and that's ok with me, I understand. Since I wrote you already last time you are probably wondering why I am writing again (besides because we go way back.)

Well this was Mel's idea like I said. If its ok with you I would like to write out some apologies I have to make to Tom. Like I said, no pressure if this seems weird to you and you can just throw this letter away. But people don't write letters very much these days so maybe you would want to keep it. I guess I'll just make a list. Thanks again if you read it (and ok if not.) If l am to be honest this is a hard thing to do. But if there is one dude who could maybe read it and maybe actually not judge me for this shit it would be you. So here goes.

 

  1. (The worst one) When you died I went into your bedroom and took your whole stash. Your hiding spot worked man. The cops didn't find it. But I didn't do them, in fact I sold them (for like $300.) But I did probably buy a bunch of the same shit back with the money, so I guess it 's all the same. I'm really so sorry and I felt like such a piece of shit about that for so long and still do. Like I was disturbing your peace and it wasn't right.

 

  1. Well maybe this is worst, hooking up with Rose after you died. Like nine months after, we were both all fucked up on coke too. Even though you weren't there I felt really bad and I know she did too. If it would make you feel any better we basically stopped being friends after that and that is something I really regret. I should have been strong and been a friend to her. That was one of the times when I se­riously wanted to kill myself, I'm so sorry. Its possible you don't know this (but maybe you do) that when you died so much shit happened, our community was in pain and lots of people were really bad, and even though I am not half the person you are and people wouldn't miss me as much I kept knowing that I couldn't do that and that's why I am back here now trying to get clean. I know you would nev­er have left all of us behind on purpose man. Some people think it wasn't a mistake, Rose for example. But I know you would never do that to your friends. It was one mistake that could have been avoided, and I was your roommate and should have been more careful. I feel so fucking bad about that now. I didn't pull you out of it or notice you were out of control. I miss you so fucking much I don't know what to do.

I guess I sort of forgot about the list I was making haha. I guess I have a lot to be sorry for. So 2 is actually 2 through 6 or something. I don't know. I hope you can hear me man. I bet you're skinny dipping with some really hot angels up there!

Ok well I  better go. Thanks Mikey for reading this (if you did.) I thought I would be out of here in 6 wks. but it looks like actually longer this time, oh well. Maybe I will see you on the other side. I hope you are doing good man.

 

Much love, your friend,

 

K-Money

 

ROSE 

 

From the front yard where he is on his knees planting tulips, his rap-blasting headphones clamped to the sides of his head, he can see Rose's mother washing dishes through the kitchen window. She works steadily, with an almost remarkable lack of expression on her face, as if she has not a thought in her head, nor a feeling in her heart. She is still like this when he finishes getting the tulip bulbs in the ground and goes to the side of the house to sit on the weathered bench there, a church pew they pulled out of some historic neigh­borhood church before it got destroyed. He smokes a cigarette in the late August heat. Rose's mother doesn't love that he smokes cigarettes on the property, but after all it's not against the law. Rose's black Saab is in the driveway, and on windless days like today there's a strong chance the smoke will sail right up into her open window. Sure enough, in less than a minute she comes trotting around the corner in a toothpaste-green terrycloth onesie, her pale legs long and slim as lily stems, her shining dark hair pulled back and so much lively yearning in her face it is impossible to believe she's the daughter of that woman in the house.

She is quitting cigarettes, which means she doesn't buy them but will smoke his freely. She is twenty-eight years old and has lived in her parents' house since she dropped out of college. He is nineteen. She amazes him. She has done so many interesting things. She has worked in coffee shops across Seattle. She has worked at the baseball stadium , ferrying cocktails and prime rib to rich people in the private boxes above home plate. She has had an internship, something about graphic design, in the second-tallest building in Seattle: the view was incredible, and she was so disappointed when the internship did not turn into an even part-time job. She can hula-hoop indefinitely; she'd show him, she teases, except that the hula hoops are absolutely buried in the garage. In college she played bass in a psychedelic rock band. After she dropped out, her parents bought her a two-week trip to Paris. She loved it and said fuck it to the return ticket and spent three months backpacking in  Europe, living on wine and shoplifted candy bars. For a skinny girl her breasts are enormous, and he wonders if her parents bought those for her, too. He tries not to stare at them. He watches how she makes the smoke come out of her mouth slow and thick, sort of holding it in place with her lips, as if the smoke is a cottony piece of something he could pick from the air and stow in his pocket to look at later. He's kind of seeing this other chick more his own age right now, but Rose is his number one jack-off fantasy of the summer.

But there is a man in her life, of course, already. Stupid Steven. He's never seen the guy, but Rose talks about him a lot.

She is talking about him today. Complaining. Tapping her ciga­rette constantly, even when there's barely a lash of ash over its glow­ing orange eye.

Apparently she and Steven were supposed to meet at this Thai place last night, but Steven was half an hour late, and then when he got there, he was all pissy because he'd already eaten, and he kept complaining about how much time she was taking eating her Buddha Bowl. When she finished he insisted on paying, but later that night, he said how stupid it was for him to pay when he didn't even eat anything, and she said well she never asked him to pay, did she, and why did he eat before in the first place, when they had dinner plans? And then he said, so sorry, he didn't realize he had to check in with her every time he felt like eating something . . . and it ended up the way all their arguments end up, with Steven yelling that he might as well go ahead and kill himself because he knows, he knows  he's such a piece of shit.

She asks for another cigarette. When she leans towards the light­er, her jutting collarbones are so close to him he could take them between his lips without hardly moving.

"So what did you do?" he asks her.

"About Steven?"she says. She doesn't continue. She leans back on the bench, looking like someone who has resigned herself to a long wait at a bus stop.

The tulips are planted, the privet hedge pruned. The flower garden is in good shape for fall and the lawn is mowed and  weeded. They will need his services less and less as the days get colder, and when the October rains come they won't need him at all. The afternoon is weighted with the finality of the summer, and every living creature feels it, the hopping birds, the squirrels streaming up and down the tree trunks, the children madly pedaling their bikes under the yel­lowing leaves of the maple trees on the sidewalk. This is perhaps why today he is finally brave enough to say, "Why do you waste your time with that guy?"

She turns to him, shocked. "You've never even met him,"she says.

"I know he doesn't treat you like you deserve, though."

Rose bites her lip.

"He's bullying you," he says. "He's bluffing."

The chick he's kind of seeing would definitely never put up with that shit, and she's not even as hot as you are, he wants to add. You're way too sensitive, he wants to say, but she starts crying before he can say it. Shit!

"Man. I'm sorry," he says.

"It's fine."

"I didn't mean to get you all sad."

"No," she says, wiping her eyes. "I made him sound way worse than he is. I was just venting. He's really great, actually."

"Okay," he says.

"But we can make out if you want."

He cannot believe this.

She takes his face in her hands and pulls him toward her.

He bikes home that evening in the first true dark of twilight, the bag of gardening tools strapped above the tire clattering when he goes over bumps in the road. As he pedals across the Fremont Bridge, all the colored lights of the city scattered around the land below him, he feels wonderfully free. If the mother calls him again for his ser­vices he will say he's going back to school, or he broke his leg, or something.

You don't have to live that long to know when a kiss isn't right. It was technically good, but it wasn't anything special. Not like he'd dreamed it would be. When they pulled apart after a minute, some thread between them had broken. Both could feel it. He looked at her and he thought, this girl is a headcase. Nothing bad has ever hap­pened to her in her whole life, but she's nuts.

He bombs down the hills of the city. He's gotta go home and text that girl of his, see if she's in the mood to kill time.

 

MIKEY

 

This new sculpture: it's the most exciting piece of art he's ever made. He's hard and good in love with it, and he's scared, because what if it doesn't work out, and he's left sprawling, stupid, again? But he's more scared not to cling to a love so hard and good, and everything else is falling into place, in the way it almost never does, the way he's hoped it could forever, so he falls with it. He pulls the blinds in his studio and forgets about time. Sometimes he flings himself onto the futon in the back of the room for a mangled rest. He takes one long sleep and several short. Wonders how many days is that. Sometime between the long sleep and the granite stage, when he stares for an hour at a sample piece of polished, richly glittering granite from the collection amassed in remodeling the kitchen, he is aware, in a state of ecstatic vagueness, of the face of his wife, her round hips rolling under the tightly knotted red silk robe she wears in the late evenings, but he cannot look away from his sculpture. Later, wearing daytime clothes, she brings him some green tea. He doesn't touch it because he doesn't need it for his sculpture. He is rolling eight hundred little terracotta spikes and he feels fantastic. Now he stands in the middle of the room biting his nails and putting the spikes around the smaller spire of the thing in his head. He can't think about this sculpture another minute. He should have hated it all along, never should have loved––yes, now he hates the thing completely.

Searching for a window of escape, he locates a slip of paper he has scribbled something on: "Heat broken Heart broken." God, what is this shit? What has he been doing with his life? Then he discovers the mug of green tea. It's long gone cold but he bolts it like a tonic, and runs down the stairs into the street and all the way to Merceda Beach, which is just the sort of trashy, smelly, end-of-the-line place he feels he belongs.

But it's beautiful––sunset and beautiful––one of those really orange sunsets, the people glowing like plums and peaches in the sun, so soft, ripely alive in the golden light of a sky of creamed fire. A surfer standing stoned in the sand scratches  at his wet­ly tangled head. He is as old as the sky and as new as the clouds splashed across it. Mikey perceives that he is not as soft and sweet and creamsicle-colored as all these beautiful people out here, to say nothing of the sky. He feels like if someone were to bend down and remind him he doesn't belong out here in all this heartbreaking beauty, he would believe them. He would hurry home and kiss his children and crawl into bed with his wife, a woman he doesn't de­serve. Because he has been so foolish. He's fallen into believing he can actually offer something of value to a world with a sky like this. Mikey turns his back to the sea. The street side hotels rear up face­lessly white before him, and before them the boardwalk, the shops that sell sarongs and T-shirts, the jugglers and the painted people who stand like statues for small change, the hot dog stands and ice cream shacks, the busking musicians, the waddling gulls, and all the people, and all the new shadows sprouting up in the floodlit night.

A tall girl about college age, blonde, in red-framed sunglasses, sits in a lawn chair on the boardwalk, so absorbed in plunking at a ukulele it seems as if she doesn't know she's in public. She doesn't have a cup out in front of her or anything. She's just messing around. She's not playing music, she's playing with music. Mikey is amazed to witness how apparently pleasant and peaceful her art-making is. Music can be like that, he remembers. He hasn't played in a long time.

He stops and watches her, the river of people streaming behind him, the tide rolling out before him, the sun a brilliant drop of hot wax sliding down to the edge of the horizon. She doesn't notice him. He doesn't want her to. The sun is ready to disappear.

And just as it slips out of reach over the ocean he hears her play a song of his own, a song he and Tom wrote long ago.

His nose floods with the smells of the garage: mildew, incense, ashtrays, weed, the sweetly aged sweat of his guitar strap. He can feel the strap cutting into his shoulder, the good, hard bite of the steel strings sinking into his callused fingers. Rose nods as she plays, that funny bouffant headband she wears bobbing like a quail feather on her head, the familiar wrinkle of concentration on her lovely face. Like an accompanying choir the hush of rain sings to them with love in the woods outside, raindrops clatter on the open garage door, and beneath the door a few figures stand with hoods up or hats on, shiver­ing, smoking, watching them rehearse. Gilda is dancing, shaking her green and blue hair all around, and Kyle is trying to get a short girl to dance with him, and Mikey is goo, melted into the music, safe to melt with the steady heartbeat of Tom on drums behind him, Tom twisting and thrashing and gasping on his gold and silver throne. Mikey looks back at Tom to smile at him and see the reassurance of that broad smile, and there is a boy sitting there at the drums, but it isn't Tom. It's some stranger with a face as plain as pudding.

And then he remembers.

The chords change. The air smells of hot dogs, of salt. The girl is playing something entirely different now. A song of her own, or someone else's, but not his. It was just those few seconds, a few notes played just so, not the whole song, but a mystically reclaimed shred of it. The girl has somehow conducted the notes right through her, like some kind of bizarre cosmic lightning rod. He used to believe in stuff like this. Now he doesn't believe or disbelieve. Either way he will forget again, will possibly never feel this loss again––it's closing over already, like mud over a dropped stone, and he lets this happen, being both the mud and the stone, being helpless.

The sun is gone and Mikey is exhausted. It's time to give up and go home. Right now his wife will be making dinner for him and the kids. It could be Mongolian beef. Or corn chowder. Before dinner his children take turns setting the table and sweeping the floor, and it's his job to make the salad. How many dinners  has he missed? Who has made the salad for his family? His noblest work will be this salad. He won't go to the sculpture tonight. Tonight he will make nothing more than salad. He does that very well. Tom is not stuck in a grid of days anymore, but Mikey is. The best he can do is go home.

He moves back down the boardwalk. The air will grow colder. The girl will leave for her own home, wherever that is. There's beer for sale, and cocktails in plastic cups you can take along with you, anything you like. The  mood is changing. The boardwalk will fill with strang­ers sharing this narrow plank that extends along the brightly lighted beach until it ends somewhere in darkness, and they may smile and say Sorry and Beautiful night isn't it and Whoops! when they brush elbows, but they will keep going. They must. It is a strange and dis­comfiting miracle to all be here together, right here, right now, living, thirsting creatures with nowhere to go but on.

“Sunday Morning Coming Down” by Jessie van Eerden

Willow Springs issue 79 cover shows photo of a pink dress against a concrete background.
Willow Springs issue 79 cover shows photo of a pink dress against a concrete background.

Found in Willow Springs 79

Back to Author Profile

WRITE THE WHOLE PAINTING and do not stop. Sunday is bitter cabbage and the glimpse of shapes down a brief hallway, involved and intent shapes. I am more cognizant of breath on Sunday–the way, as bodies lying on our sides like long-legged fetuses, we are aware of the heart thudding in the ear. On Sunday (a day welled up with the week past and the week to come, such that you experience all the days at once like a person set down, weary, before a painting) breath feels like the respiration of time, like God's breath. I am losing my morning heat from the down-pocket of bed, enclosing myself in sweaters, but still I cool and require the space heater this day early in Lent. Sunday is breath and chill and stillness, the bitter salted cabbage as I help make the kraut, its tangy smell hazing the hallway.

The directive is to write the whole painting.

My boyfriend R recently gave a point of view lecture on whole-painting writing: Give the story all at once as if you're trying to confront someone with an acrylic on the wall–can someone receive a story on all levels, not in narrative sequence, not in sequestered mo­ments of time, not from one point of view but a roving one? During the lecture a student in the front row yessed like a Baptist who has read the Scripture the night before and so already knows the parable, yes, how the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that grows into the largest tree in the garden, with all the loud birds roosting there as they might roost in the tree in his chest, so, yes, he said while each downbeat syllable of parable fell from the preacher's mouth, which was the lecturer's mouth, R's mouth, reading excerpts from Lawrence Durrell and Kay Boyle and William Goyen that traversed time and perspective in shock-color layers. Try to write the whole painting, R said, even though we can't ever write the painting, for all we have is language, but, yes, the student already knew the struggle that each writer in the room knew, the impossibility, and the insistence that we go forward, marching, toward failure, amen and amen.

The directive made me want to write about Sunday.

Perhaps it's because, as a child, Sunday was the day I felt an in­tersection of currents and a simultaneity of layers, I felt the eternal within time, a press of eternity's hand, because of the habit of church where all forms and patterns and braiding-back of my hair were in­tended as poor representations of realities timeless and glorious. The Sunday moment is sharp and prismatic in my mind: stepping a penny loafer down from the Dodge to the gravel, decked out in my moth­er-made plum jumper with flowers on it, with wooden buttons I'd picked out myself at Jo-Ann Fabrics, in the store-bought lavender shirt underneath and a jean jacket over top, a cheap silver locket se­creted against my chest bone. And of all Sundays, it is Easter Sun­day–so there is the sleepy shock of the Sunrise Service beginning in the dark, and somebody's lilacs slouch wetly and everyone's daffodils have either nodded or upturned their faces to the sting of frost and the  soak of its melting to follow. Maybe that childhood storehouse of Easter Sunday strikes brightly now, like red and yellow acrylic, because of today's cold Lenten air, though I don't know that a Sunday in Lent is any different from one in Ordinary Time. It seems, in our cyclical week, Sunday is a measure, a ritual of reckoning, an end, a be­ginning, full-bodied and populated. Things come to bear on Sunday, things you have borne, how things will bear out. All is with you, all you have loved, hated, vowed to never leave and yet left.

 

I HATE SUNDAYS, I TELL R. I dread Sundays.

 

SUNDAY SEATS YOU CLOSE TO A PORTAL. It's very like stomping the cabbage each year for the  kraut. A child is engaged in a chore that pins her to the kitchen bench facing the brief hallway of motion  and sound. Time moves more slowly here, or more quickly, or both. She turns to see her mother come through that front screen door portal with even more cut cabbages mounding in the granite washbasin propped on her hip, cabbages sliced from the stalks, from among the big blanket-furled leaves. The mother cuts out each core then shreds the cabbages, for a few years, with the  manual kraut-cut­ter that looks like a washboard only with blades, like an oversized cheese grater, then, in time, with the electric food processor in batch­es, then she dumps it all into the crock on the floor between the benched girl's knees. The mother salts a layer, dumps another–salt, sift, dump, salt.

 

I DON'T THINK IT'S LOGICAL, R says, not unkindly–it's just a day like any other. (And it's true that I am sometimes quite illogical­ly unmade on Sunday, in tears and wadded up with my dog on the couch. This is baffling.)

I say, But the past is always with us, like Faulkner said, you always quote Faulkner, it's like that, the days are always with us, and on Sun­day somehow you can feel the days well up.

Dreading two back-to-back, seventy-five minute gen-ed classes is logical, he says, which is why he dreads Tuesdays and Thursdays.

But he wrote to me once: Life of course is the whole story at once and our frustrations with it are the tiny boxes we try to force it into. In both writing and life we have weak artificial mediums to work with, words and time. So he does understand.

Should we have a baby? I say.

What?

I'm nearly thirty-seven, I remind him–my window of time is circumscribed, biological clock and so forth.

So that's what this is about. Logically, yes.

 

R READ EVERYTHING William Goyen wrote, read the newly re­ leased biography and included in his lecture how Goyen didn't write for self-expression but for the communal voice, in multiple frames, multiply nested tales, his words and paragraphs stick figures–black letters upon white pages–but flesh hangs from them like jellyfish skin, translucent sheets billowing, flesh and dress ballooning into color and light. Goyen's stories are festooned with other stories, or infested–it's like traveling down someone's  throat lined with  ru­bies. This is the Goyen who wrote inside a parenthetical in House of Breath–a book in which sentences sometimes don't stop for pages, or maybe never stop–who knows the unseen frescoes on the private walls of the skull? l don't know who knows, but he tried to write them, to catch the brightest color right when the fresco went up on the lime plaster, before it could dry.

 

IT'S TRUE THE BABY QUESTION troubles me with a louder clang of longing on Sundays. A baby's tiny skull and heat and light and hair, do I want to try? Lots of women turning thirty-seven this year are fearing they will regret not having children, but is fear reason enough to have them? My friend K writes in a letter, Is the pang of knowing you will not know the profundity of that kind of love any reason to have a baby? Out of desire for profundity? K is a friend to whom I often write on Sundays, the practice of a Sunday letter being one of my coping strategies.

Ought I to have a baby, as though it were completely up to me and a matter of my will, like donating to Mothers Against Drunk Driv­ing when they call? And why do we say "window of time?" It  makes me think of Madeleine L'Engle's young adult fantasy A Wrinkle in Time, her lovely powerful Charles Wallace, the little boy ready to travel through time. I remember the word tesseract and my broth­er's science project on black holes, the model he built from a coffee can and a Yahtzee box, aimed just so at the mirror hanging on our parents' wardrobe that held things like our handwritten immuniza­tion records and Murphy's Mart bags full of material scraps for quilts Mom would make over the next forty years, preferring to sew them by hand. I suppose we say "window of time" because of the frame of   limitation. But what if it's another part of the metaphor's vehicle bearing forth a different tenor; what if it's because of the window glass to see through, to be seen through, like a portal? Like a passage? Like a hallway of time: What I am talking about is being a mem­ory for a child who looks into the passage of time, the memory mak­ing an imprint. Back to that same screen door, for instance, portal from indoor to outdoor, the girl child-me watching her mother who has boiled water for ear corn, now that kraut-making is done, remov­ing the corn then carrying the pot through the screen door that closes with its soft slap upon its spring, and tossing the silk-littered water off the side of the porch instead of in the sink, and standing a few beats after, listening to the  supper hour shift and adjust. The image of it through the screen mesh in the greening light will be forever recycled in the girl's mind by dream by dozing by grief by time.

So who will see and know me in that way? That is the question to catch in my throat. I am creating no tableaux of oddity and rit­ual upon a porch floor to wake in the mind of a child after me–I will disappear. I will have to be okay with disappearing. Or try to be recalled another way, and this is maybe why I'm writing a novel in which a woman remembers her mother just so, with the pot in her hands emptied of all but a few corn silks, so still. And if l can write in a way that comes up off the page in translucent sheets of flesh and color, billowing from the letter-bones, like absurd and wondrous jel­lyfish, like a slow ornate pop-up book, or full-face like a painting, all in acrylic of searing brightness–then maybe that is enough. Maybe that is how to spend my window of time.

I wonder, do I sit on a cold Lenten Sunday to simply write against my own disappearing?

 

TO THE AVERAGE AMERICAN MALE, R says, Sunday means one thing.

Sex.

No. Professional sports.

 

Right, I say. R may not understand the dread of Sunday, but my friend A understands. Another fucking Sunday, she says, AFS, we coin, Happy AFS! Here is a Ziploc of cookies to get you through AFS, I had AFS on Monday this week–so go our texts and emails in be­tween the classes we teach. PMS on AFS, double whammy. She gets the Sunday New York Times delivered and reads it all as palliative. And my friend SB understands, she's in favor of our new acronym, she's Pentecostal after all, she understands the kit of things needed for AFS survival. Sometimes she goes sailing.

At its most basic, it's the smeary weight of a sinner's penance, or, with the weekend almost over, it's Monday creeping close with its job-gloom. It's the knowledge that Friday's buried memory of failures will be Monday's pert reality, or it's the nostalgic chime of a church bell calling because you once wavered hot like a mirage with the rest of the faithful through the hymns and it 's been awhile. It's the mem­ory of family time, all the Sunday dinners, and now your siblings flung far across the world calling home on Sunday, if there's time. It's concomitance of vague emotions, sentiments layered together like filo dough.

At its utmost basic, it's the terror of one's annihilation.

 

JOHNNY CASH UNDERSTOOD, as he understood everything. I sometimes YouTube his hangover song, his cover of Kris Kristoffer­son's "Sunday Morning Coming Down." In the song, the speaker is on the "Sunday morning sidewalk" wishing he was stoned: "'Cause there's something in a Sunday/That makes a body feel alone," as alone as the dying almost, Sunday morning coming down like a fog, a cur­tain, a crumbling ceiling, an axe.

 

I LOVE "SUNDAY MORNING, 1950," a poem by Irene McKin­ney, the way I can slip into the background in my plum jumper from the 1980s:

In the clean sun before the doors,
the flounces and flowered prints,
the naked hands. We bring
what we can–some coins,
our faces.

 

I LOVE ROBERT HAYDEN'S POEM "Those Winter Sundays," which I have taught in several classes and which falls flat against the students' ears each time:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather
made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

Sundays too, in class always emphasizing that tiny adverb that's so heavy, for there was no reprieve for him from the cold that cracked his skin. Fires must be built on Sunday morning too, ashes must be shaken down; it is a day that is no different from any other but it was the  day on which he noticed the lack of gratitude. It was the day he was lonely. And the day his son remarked, memorialized, as having a palpable difference.

 

SUNDAY IS THE KRAUT-STOMPING because when you're stomping the salted shredded cabbage with a thick cherry branch, shaved and sanded smooth, you watch the patterns in the linoleum and wait. You have a sense that it will be the others' turn soon, later, long later it seems, because, as you lift your head, they–two brothers and a sister–blur through the short hallway to the bedrooms and bathroom and back out. The space swells with their bodies. They pass by to move through the screen door portal, out to the porch floor, then to circle the house on bikes on the path grooved and grassless. Time swells with their movement and faces and teeth come in crook­ed and hair curly like the Brillo pad your mom will use to make the floorboards shine, the whole floor, on hands and knees, once all her kids have left, still scrubbing at the years of drifting-down  skin cells and dirt. Now you smell the clean foam of the bitter cabbage and foresee the banded linen towel or old pillow slip that will shroud the crock for six months in the basement corner. Six months of waiting under a thick layer of mold and souring, almost rotting.

Stomp-stomp with the sanded stout branch, preparing the salted cabbage for waiting. Waiting too for your life to start, to join the blur of motion. Plunging the kraut stomper between  your knees down into the crock untapered, the sound of the screen door slapping shut. There is dread in the waiting, for you feel you will run out of time.

 

l'M NOT SURE YOU WANT TO HAVE A BABY. He tries to say this not unkindly.

Maybe desire and dread are the same thing.

 

IT HELPS SOMETIMES to write letters on Sunday. It' s a hopeful stutter of voice sounded before working on the novel. Today I answer my friend J's six dense pages of lovely longhand, all her news about the new rooster–He is all colors a rooster can be and looks hand paint­ed–and about Iris the feral cat, and Beloved the horse not yet trained well enough to ride, and J's own blurring eyesight.

Then novel work because part of my survival plan is to write on Sundays all the way through until noon. This time is demarcated on my weekly schedule color-coded with Prismacolor pencils from my childhood desk cubby, pencils that once shaded the eyes of a lamb on a newsprint Easter kite. Why noon, as though something magic shifted at noon? Because it indicates a fully committed morning, to give it everything, everything you remember and half remember and inexplicably love. Beside me hangs a painting–Georgia O'Keeffe's Cow's Skull with Calico Roses–a canvas replica I ordered online. I wanted to see the longhorn skull better because the section in the novel in which the character has a conversation with a cow skull was growing more and more confusing. I wanted to see the whole skull before me and I felt it important to get the one she painted with fake flowers as garland, and I felt it important that the skull look like a womb, and some of her longhorn skulls look shredded down to­ ward the nostrils, like pulverized cabbage. Why, I'm wondering, does my novel's main character miscarry, and why does another character throw her babies away? Why the thwarted womb like a portal, all banded in suffocating gauze? Why not write a mother? I don't know why. I'm writing in half dream, that is all a novel really is.

 

I  LOVE ABRAHAM HESCHEL'S 1951 BOOK The Sabbath. In Judaism, the Sabbath is Saturday and not Sunday morning like it is for the Baptists and Methodists, parking trucks at a slant in ditches beside overfull gravel lots, but the principle of the day of rest, the set-apart holy day, is the same. I remember dressing for Sunday ser­vice once and asking my mother, Why do we dress up for Sunday? Because it should be a different day, she said.

Heschel writes about the Sabbath as though it were something we go out to the porch to see in all its loveliness. It's a day released from labor, but its spirit is a reality we meet rather than an empty span of time which we choose to set aside for comfort or recuperation. It's a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time. It's a palace in time which we build. Time's passage again taking spatial di­mension: a stone passageway of ornate carvings and tile work as part of a palace. In the atmosphere of such a palace, Heschel writes, a dis­cipline is a reminder of adjacency to eternity. It's discipline and absten­tions are what it's known for–and so is the traditional Christian's Sunday Sabbath, never stopping at the grocery store to spend money after worship, never cranking up the Weed Eater. Reading Heschel on my Sunday Sabbath, an icy Sunday during Lent–the very season of abstentions–I feel a strong desire to run out to Go-Mart to buy some peanut M&M's, just to slip out from under the weight of all that beautiful principle. But I keep reading about Sabbath as a pres­ence, felt and arresting and palatial.

It's calming.

 

ON SUNDAY I FEEL the unbearable welling-up of time and see what the kraut-making girl sees: her mother and sister and  brothers in a blur of color as she stomp-stomps the crock floor and the abra­sion of the tough leaves makes them give way to juices that foam up rabid. What I see from the kitchen bench is  my mother's longing, my siblings' movement out into the world, as if the image of that hallway off the kitchen is a breach of time, an image conjured on a day, Sunday, which is a day when  time being culled out from eternity is understood as illusion. On Sunday maybe we see for a moment how God sees, without illusion. Maybe we try on the timeless gaze of God and try to breathe and bear it. What a dreadful, awful gift, to lose time's blinders.

There is the story in the Book of Genesis about Hagar, Abram and Sarai's servant turned concubine, turned surrogate. Pregnant with Abram's child, she flees the barren Sarai's jealousy and cruelty. Out to the wilderness Hagar goes, loosed and flapping in the wind, pregnant with the shifting blood of her boy Ishmael who will be cursed into terror like a wild donkey. She slumps by a spring seeping up from the dust. She is weary, but she is visited, and she calls the spring Beer-lahai-roi, Well of the Living One Who Sees Me. I have seen the one who sees me, she says, as though she suddenly understands what it means to be seen by such a gaze as God's. Hagar becomes one of the few to understand what God's gaze takes in: fetus unfurling, woman with a tooth aching at the root, for it's loosening, hair falling out, pelvic bones reconfiguring in the third trimester from marrow to foam rubber, and also her last gasp, burial, and lilacs on her grave. The whole painting, all layers at once, every window of time.

It is not really imaginable, that kind of gaze. Even on a reflective, moody day like Sunday, we can feel only the overwhelming layers of our own lives. The past is with us (said R to me, said Faulkner, said the experience of divorce, said the body returned home and sleeping in the childhood bed–I remember when it was the four of us, a heap of breathing, anxious and fertile and unstoppered  breath, and how our mother's voice now echoes, just once more, can it be that way, as she runs clothes through the wringer and the house thickens up with voicelessness, and she scrubs the floor boards to luminous glow with a Brillo pad to be in close proximity to the paths traveled upon them through time). Even just our own lives are unimaginable–think of all the others: maybe what the girl making kraut sees in the brief hallway is the blur of motion of the others, not only brother and sister but all the others, the eternal within time, the story nested in story, and the attempt she would one day make to write it down, the whole of it.

 

I DO NOT KNOW ABOUT A BABY. Sometimes the confused longing gets to be too much.

Sometimes it's just about wanting what we don't have, R says, and this helps.

I picture my heart opening–how wide it can open if l let it. That wideness is what gratitude is, and I think, on this cold Sunday, that practice of a Sabbath is a fight for gratitude in the midst of quiet pan­ic, in the face of your window closing or going dark. And gratitude is the stuff of eternity since it trains our eyes on time's abundance instead of on the illusion of time's scarcity. It's as if gratitude cre­ates time, lays it the way a hen lays eggs, little minute-chicks wide­ mouthed when hatched in the nest, and they trill and cry, try to add sound to the painting, for it should have sound too. Heschel writes about running to the Sabbath with sprigs of myrtle, as if to a bride. Wear your most beautiful robes, sing your most beautiful songs, bring your most beautiful acrylics.

Who knows whether it's true that, in the end, all we have are these minutes and hours to measure our lives, that all we have are these poor marks to work with, black symbols on white pages? It could be that we have everything.

“The Pleasures of Ruin” by Maya Jewell Zeller

Willow Springs issue 79 cover shows photo of a pink dress against a concrete background.
Willow Springs issue 79 cover shows photo of a pink dress against a concrete background.

Found in Willow Springs 79

Back to Author Profile

is one of the easiest kinds

of pleasure. Take this stack

 

of colored blocks built

 

by one child, rectangular green

on a red square with a yellow

 

triangle on top: crash,

 

the younger child comes

like a storm into a picnic,

 

like a story. Now someone

 

wants something to put

in the mouth: a small fruit,

 

perhaps, like a plum or just

 

the branches of a plum,

gathered into some girl's

 

arms. Now something

 

cannot be had. Oh, dear, and

some whole trees, and some more

 

trees, and water, oh, a baby,

 

or a lost job. A hangnail, a day

moon. A bowl of oranges,

 

molding. And the most acute

 

pleasure of some girl losing

her flowers in the stream,

 

she throws in those white stars

 

one by one, even the stems,

even the leafage,

 

the unopened ones, too,

 

she can hardly wait to forget them,

to begin the whole thing over.

John Sibley Williams! TWO new books of poems?

John Sibley Williams
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Exciting news! Willow Springs contributor John Sibley Williams has two new books of poems coming very soon! Winner of the 2020 Cider Press Review Book Award Scale Model of a Country at Dawn, and winner of the 2020 Elixir Press Poetry Award The Drowning House. Go check them out!

You can also check out his poems "My Heart is in the Mouth of Another Heart" and "Suture" available in Willow Springs 84, and/or his profile, here on our website.

Congratulations John!

“Bearing Witness” by Sonia Greenfield

Willow Springs issue 79 cover shows photo of a pink dress against a concrete background.
Willow Springs issue 79 cover shows photo of a pink dress against a concrete background.

Found in Willow Springs 79

Back to Author Profile

It rubs off on us like brushing up

against a dirty car or the way

a dusty window screen leaves

a crosshatch of black on our palms.

 

I remember my mother's boyfriend­

not him, but her head against maybe

mirror, maybe sliding glass door? I see

a shatter held together, but I don't

 

know where light came from to etch

splinters in what broke. I remember

hiding in my attic bedroom, kitchen

knife in hand, and the overwhelming

 

wood rot of that house when I

witnessed what made my mother

human in the way we say after all,

she's only human. She made extravagant

 

mistakes in a town I can't come back to.

Once, she was a barmaid in the shack

of the Shady Lake Tavern back when

they called them that, a place where men

 

nodded off at two in the afternoon.

I was just a girl who wore nightgowns

and was unable to sort out why I found

her in the kitchen with a wound

 

 

on her scalp like a bear clawing, some

ugly mugging, all for beery dollar bills

tucked into her apron. But maybe I'm

making this up—not the image of

 

her ruined scalp or her hair crusted

with the blood of an afternoon gone

to waste, but the reason for this image

branded on a childhood mile gone

 

and as faint as the delicate luminescence

of white Christmas lights on December

snow fallen on the Lutheran church

on Washington Street. I remember a girl

 

from high school who hid in my eaves.

We used to shoplift make-up in Rite Aid

though I thought it was wrong even if

it was the eyeliner I used for my careful

 

magic. She was beautiful like glossy crows

picking through trash, and we disguised

her from a mother who came looking for

that slut. I spent the night at her house once

 

when she wet her bed. She hated her

half-sister and stepfather, hated her mother­

a woman as hard and painted as graffitied

rocks along the rock-cut road leaving town

 

to the north. Tell me, what good was I

when I didn't know what I was seeing?

Like this girl's shame lost on me

who was lost in my own witnessing.

 

I want to say sorry for accusing her

of stealing a favorite shirt actually stolen

by my sister. Some of us make it through

untouched. Why was the night sky pink

 

when it snowed? Once, my mother's

boyfriend spray-painted my name

on those rocks next to the highway,

but I don't know why he did it or why

 

I cling to this memory although the paint

didn't cling very long. Anyway, it was

a town of scant employment and women

who never wanted to be nurses and annual

 

carnivals and a downtown of defunct

Woolworth's and antiquated streetlights

that may recall the lacquer of hairspray

wool coats and a bandstand happy

 

to host boys back from the Second

World War. A town now in the midst

of revival with fussy pubs and first world

coffee. But I can't go home because

 

the houses still lean on their posts like

wounded veterans, and chestnuts fall

from the trees like a hard knock rain.

And I can't carve FTW on my arm

 

with a hatpin or draw lightning bolts

from the corners of my eyes anymore.

I'm too tired to ward off spirits. I'm only

able to bear witness. My mother lived

 

with addicts her whole life in a town where

twelve-step programs filled church annexes

when winter shortened its days. They are

still in those annexes switching on percolators

 

and forming circles of smokers who double up

a cold fog exhaled from their mouths like

gutters shedding dirt-flecked icicles that fall

to pierce the skin of snow beneath. I blame

 

the dirty snow but not my mother,

who escaped finally to Florida's sticky

heat and tract homes, to its cheap

T-shirt shops and its tepid ocean.

 

A mother who wears her story in

a smattering of hazy tattoos and who bears

her mistakes in the resigned set of a mouth,

its hard line striking through any of this.

Issue 79: Sonia Greenfield

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About Sonia Greenfield

Sonia Greenfield was born and raised in Peekskill, New York, and her book, Boy with a Halo at the Farmer’s Market, won the 2014 Codhill Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in a variety of places, including in 2010 Best American Poetry, The Antioch Review, The Bellevue Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Cream City Review, The Massachusetts Review, Meridian, and Rattle. She lives with her husband and son in Los Angeles, California, where she edits the Rise Up Review and co-directs the Southern California Poetry Festival.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Bearing Witness”

I had been reading a lot of Larry Levis just before I wrote this poem, and I decided that it would be a good exercise to write what would be considered a long poem. Or, at least one that couldn’t be contained by a single sheet of paper. I had been trying to get at this topic in the past, but the poems were very piecemeal. I guess you could say that Levis showed me how a poem can be exploratory. In that regard, I wanted to explore what I see as the origins of dysfunction in both the town where I was raised—Peekskill, New York—and in my own family.

I believe my mother would be hurt by this poem, or would feel defensive, but I wanted the poem to absolve her of any errors she made as a mother. When I wrote “she’s only human,” I hope I made it clear that we’re all only human and, therefore, prone to mistakes, especially if prior family dysfunction basically sets one up to fail in one way or another. Something has to break the chains of dysfunction in a family, or the dysfunction gets handed down like a genetic mutation. So let me just say, “Sorry, mom,” and “I love you,” and “I’m glad you survived the shit you survived.”

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

It must mean I have settled into a kind of adult maturity if I say that I just want to listen to Pink Martini and Elvis Costello all the time, but for good measure, and to keep me youthful, sprinkle in some EDM. I have a seven-year-old son, and I must admit that I’m trying to influence his musical tastes. However, he’s not that into Pink Martini. He’s more of an EDM kid.

This space feels pretty safe, so I’m going to just put it out there that I have a pretty serious cookie addiction, and I’m constantly surrounded by temptation. We have an unusual living arrangement: We live with an 89-year-old housemate who is in decline in many ways—memory, cognition, sight, hearing— but he still has a sense of taste and a fuck-all attitude when it comes to eating. Thus, we have a full cabinet of cookies: Oreos, Wally Amos Chocolate Chips, and tubs and tubs of Trader Joe’s cookies. Our 89-year-old consumes half his daily calories in cookies. And me? I have to have regular dialogues with my inner-addict. So I exercise and brush my teeth. A lot.

Actually, this train of thought has made me consider getting a tattoo of a cookie. For reals. I could add it to my small collection. There is the really messy-looking Kanji symbol for poetry on the back of my neck; the sea horses wrapping around my left arm; the illustration of femme fatales from Chandler’s The Big Sleep on my right calf, the enormous passion flower on my lower back (funny story: my husband couldn’t remember the term “tramp-stamp” and all he could come up with is “hag-tag”); and soon, I think, a tattoo of a chocolate chip cookie on my upper back. Because, really, why not?

 

Willow Springs issue 79 cover shows photo of a pink dress against a concrete background.

“Bearing Witness” by Sonia Greenfield

Found in Willow Springs 79 Back to Author Profile It rubs off on us like brushing up against a dirty car or the way a dusty window screen leaves a crosshatch … Read more

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