“Rapunzel w/ Head Half-Shaved” by Canese Jarboe

Issue 87
Issue 81 Cover shows Chris Bovey print of Spokane's famous garbage goat in teal and yellow with Willow Springs in decorative font.

Found in Willow Springs 81

Back to Author Profile

Rapunzel w/ Head Half-Shaved

This peony too heavy to hold itself.
up. This great blue heron in slow-mo, opportunistic
feeder. This rash. This calamine lotion. Be vibrating
my skull. I am looking for sick fish. No,
algal bloom. There wasn't any juice in the fridge
so I drank the cattle vaccine. Let me
come back as an orange flag marking a utility line or
a rain gauge. Let me come back as aluminum, tetanus,
a Sure-Jell. I am listening for the last seal
to pop. Vacuum. Long-legged or nesting 100' above you.
This fiberglass insulation like pink
cotton candy. This angle. This respirator. I don't think you can hear me
over the air compressor. At 10:04 p.m. National Weather Service
Doppler Radar indicated a severe

  

capable of

 

                           an        interior room

 

 

 

            use blankets       or pillows

 

 

 

         your body

  , in the nearest ditch.

“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.

“Manatees” by Elizabeth Gold

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

Back to Author Profile

Maybe those sailors who mistook them for mermaids

liked their women with a little meat on them,

gray green skin patchy with algae.

Maybe they liked them almost hairless

except for a few spiky whiskers

on a homely-cute tush-shaped face.

Or maybe they were just men

who had been away from home a really long time.

Maybe they had almost forgotten

what it was like to cup a woman's breasts

or smell the oil of her on their fingers.

Or maybe they had never known. Some of them

were so young. Twelve. Thirteen. Cabin boys.

I think of them in the dank hulks of their caravels,

sketching a woman in air, tweaking her-

hair, eyes, hips-to their liking.

Or pulling a tooth from the jaw of a whale,

scrubbing it clean and inking a sweetheart on it.

Or scanning the water for manatees.

Who hasn’t done a thing like that?

Invented a lover out of air or bone or water?

All those years on my own in New York­-

sometimes a blind date, couple of drinks

and desultory conversation with a stranger.

I remember walking into a room and seeing

whoever it was for the first time, hoping for-

I don't know. That something kind would swim up

to the surface. That I could nudge him into a human shape.

“Sin-Tra-La!” by Diane Lefer

Issue 69
Issue 69

Found in Willow Springs 69

Back to Author Profile

My FATHER HAD BEEN DEAD going on four years when his widow phoned from Portugal.

"I'm sure you don't want to talk to me," she said, "but I need to know where you live these days. I'm sending you something I never should have kept."

I was still in the same apartment in Santa Monica. She had kept everything.

What Olive shipped to California was my father's disinterred remains.

The coffin was made of heavy and beautiful wood with brass ornamentation. It took four somber men to bring it in. What is the etiquette for this? The men seemed surprised when I reached out to shake their gloved hands.

 

OLIVE AND I HAVE NEVER MET. She's apparently what's referred to as an "English Rose," though from her name and my distaste for her I've always imagined a sickly greenish tinge to her skin. I wasn't invited to the wedding. I’d never been to their home in Sintra. When Dad and I talked via Skype, from what I could see of his expat study, it looked lugubrious-no other word for it-though I realize the gloomy shadows behind him might have been due to the webcam. The city itself? In the album Dad posted, Sintra glows all pink and gold, magical geometries and crenellated towers. It looks ancient and unreal as a folktale and it was hard to imagine my rational father there. A professor of sociology, he had deprecated his own field, calling it "common sense with footnotes," but in our time apart, who knew how much he had changed? My plans for a visit were postponed again and again, usually at Olive's request. So I looked at photos and tried to picture my father walking steep hills past churches that resembled fortresses-buildings that didn't point the way to heaven, I thought, but were built to confine the faithful and hold them in.

I did not attend his funeral. I didn't even know he had died till Olive sent me an e-mail with a link to her Flickr photos from the wake and the mausoleum in Lisbon, and so it was easy to believe he wasn't really dead. He was in Sintra, far away, retired amid the palaces, on perpetual vacation. But the fact remained that I was an orphan, both parents gone now, an existential state of being that should reverberate in a person's soul. And it didn't. I'd been deprived of the immediate shock of his heart attack, of keeping vigil till the moment he died. If you don't know you've been orphaned, if your life goes on, unruffled, if you only find out after the fact, it seems histrionic to feel what you feel. I sent Olive an angry e-mail.

She replied with equal anger: "For you, death is a hobby. I am in mourning and I did not want or need your morbid attentions."

 

I DON’T KNOW what sort of service Olive arranged in Portugal, but she shipped my father's remains to an Orthodox Jewish mortuary in L.A. What was she thinking? My father--defiantly irreligious, militantly rational. He had changed since my mother's death, but this? When the man from Chevra Kadisha phoned to announce the arrival, I insisted they relinquish the casket at once and deliver it to me.

 

DAD ALWAYS SAID I WAS TOO CLEVER by half. Being single, I used to irritate my parents by making pronouncements about marriage-that you don't really understand what marriage means, for example, until you've committed adultery. I encouraged them to see it as their rite of passage into being adult, and I repeated this nonsense to justify my own affair with a married man and to encourage Dad to cheat on my mother. He loved her, of course, and so did I, but Mom grew up in a series of foster homes, at least one of them Mormon, and that may be why the wildest thing she ever did, at least in my presence, was drink a cup of tea after making us take note she had dunked the teabag only once. I thought my father deserved more fun.

So did I. In our home, once I reached adolescence, my mother kept the curtains drawn, blinds shut. You couldn't be too careful with a daughter. She feared I might be standing by the window when the "wrong kind of person" passed by. The house stayed closed-in and gloomy while I was plain and overweight, though I preferred to call myself "chubby'' or "pleasantly plump."

Later, I spent years convincing myself and telling her that fucking was like shaking hands-the polite thing to do when you first meet. "Remarkable," said my mother, "No guilt, no shame," in a tone so sour it must have been spiked with envy. I explained that once the sexual tension was broken, everything was smooth and I could focus again on work.

But once upon a time before I equated sex to a handshake, I fell in love with my professor. Intro to Statistics, of all things, hardly English Romantic Poetry. In his arms I could be carried to a place outside myself, outside of time. In bed with the married man I loved, all my longing and waiting and hurt were instantly erased or, at least, assigned to someone else's past, some unknown person's life.

Then it was over, twelve years ago, and I took the Big Blue Bus from UCLA to the beach and I walked out on the pier, along the boardwalk, out past the souvenir stalls and the Ferris wheel and the Latinos with fishing rods, up and around to the juggler and the stand-up comic and the magician calling a little girl out of the circle of spectators and over to the barrier at the pier's edge. I wasn't going to commit suicide. I was just going to think about it. The water was flat and black and I thought it was strange that a person drowns by swallowing seawater when what you want is to be swallowed by the sea.

Jenna called my name.

I turned and saw her, golden tan, her cut-offs slung so low I could see the little ring in her navel.

She said, "Don't you remember me?"

I could hear my own breath and my heartbeat and the cries of the gulls, the water lapping against the pilings. When we were in high school, Jenna had died in a car crash.

"It's me," she said. The pilings creaked. "Leni."
How could I not have recognized her? Jenna had been my age but it was her sister Leni who fascinated me. Leni of the exaggerated swaying hips. "That's what men like," said my mother, in a tone that made it clear that whatever men liked was not something she wanted me to emulate.

On the pier, not a sound came from my throat until I managed, "Oh."

Leni reached as if to hug me. What was I supposed to say? I'm so sorry for your loss? How do you bring up death years after the fact to someone with a belly button ring? She asked about me. I noticed her toenails were painted silver. I answered in monosyllables, still trying to figure out what I was supposed to do.

A sexy Filipino-looking guy put an arm around her waist and she bumped her hip against his. "Wanna see if they can get both our names on a grain of sand?"

That's when I finally spoke--“On a grain of rice"--to correct her.
She went off with him, giggling. I watched them go, hating myself for leaving Jenna's name unspoken, angry at Leni for being at the beach with a boyfriend when her sister was dead.

That's when I began to haunt (so to speak) graveyards and funerals. Is that what my father told Olive? Is that all he told her about me? Olive, I wasn't morbid. I was ashamed at how the fact of death left me silent and so I had to observe how decent people behave. At first I looked down on all the stock phrases and gestures of sympathy, but I learned.

By the time my mother died, I was able to accept condolences with good grace.

 

BOTH OF MY PARENTS DIED MUCH TOO YOUNG, but of course it’s easier to lose a parent than a child. And the vigils I went to were for children, and I thought of Jenna's parents and wondered how they were getting on.

We stood outside the precinct house after an unarmed teenage boy was shot dead by police. Even the media has taken to calling this sort of thing "OIS" for Officer Involved Shooting, rather than tragedy or homicide. We chanted the usual words, No justice, No Peace, gathered in front of the school where a six-year-old girl had been caught in gang crossfire. The mother wailed, "I gave birth to her! I gave her life!" In some neighborhoods, this is almost routine, but that doesn't mean anyone ever gets used to it. People held the mother as she cried, and the flowers and candles, crosses and teddy bears lined the pavement and then grew into a mound, and I thought there had to be more to all this than etiquette and I thought that my body had never given life and I hoped it never would. My father's first wife, the one he was married to when he met my mother, had no children, which makes it as though she never existed. "I gave her life!" cried the mother and she called for those responsible to come forward. "Please, please, give yourselves up," and then she said what they all say: "I hope no other mother ever has to go through this."

I went to work with my mind full of pictures of carnage and grief and I thought how pointless my work was-a statistical analysis of the likely effect legalization of California's marijuana industry would have on the Mexican cartels. I stared at graphs and curves and numbers and kept thinking about the little girl and what killed her and how once a criminal enterprise exists, it goes on existing. It can always diversify. And I thought that cartels and gangs aren’t created by drugs or the demand for them but by poverty and inequality, humiliation and corruption, and that the solutions are obvious and that no one would implement them while I would continue to draw a salary, watching footnotes overshadow common sense.

Dr. Levitsky called me in. He slapped my report. "This is a political agenda."

I'm not sure whether he fired me or I quit but I went from doing something meaningless to doing nothing at all.

 

IF I HAD TO HAVE A ROOMMATE to make the rent, I wanted no drugs, no drama, no vegetarians. In fact, I wanted someone very much like my mother. Kelly is sober and earnest to a fault. Even her cat is exemplary­ a courteous animal sensitive to my feelings. When I stroke his ginger fur, he licks himself clean to get rid of my scent, but waits until he thinks I'm not looking.

The coffin came, not "disinterred" from the ground but merely removed from storage in a Lisbon crypt. It took four men and a gurney to roll it in.

Kelly turned out to be superstitious. "I'm not sleeping under the same roof as... him."

 

MY FATHER'S DEATH WAS SUDDEN, my mother's slow and the weeks when she was dying may have been the happiest of her life. I don't think I ever heard my mother laugh-really laugh-until those euphoric days on morphine. I was with her almost all the time and only saw two occasions when her mood changed and then it wasn't to grief but to anger. The first time was when the hospice worker came and held her hand and asked in gentle tones who she wanted to see, who she wanted to forgive, and was there anyone from whom she needed to ask forgiveness. My mother summoned up her strength to rasp, "Get this person out of here."

Those days, my mother was greedy for all the pleasure she'd denied herself or been denied. I'd never before seen her so lighthearted or, when she wanted more drug, seen the scheming look in her narrowed eyes.

The morphine kept her happy until the nurse came. "She's not in pain anymore. Your mother has become an addict."

I said, "At this point, it hardly matters."

"Oh, yes it does."

My mother's face, pale with impending death, for a moment turned red with rage.

*

RIGHT AFTER DAD RETIRED and before Mom was diagnosed, he booked passage for them on a cruise to the Mexican Riviera. I sometimes thought that was what killed her: she got sick immediately after he announced, "Let's have some fun!"

My father and I were at her bedside when she died. He threw his arms around me. "My darling!" He sobbed into my shoulder and held me tight as if forgetting for the moment who was who, and I realized that, improbable as it seemed, my parents had loved each other.

My father never thought of giving up his trip. He asked me to cruise to Mexico with him in her stead but the thought of sharing a small state room-well, that was just impossible and would have been even if not for that moment's desperate embrace. I couldn't imagine being trapped on one of those floating cities that go out on the ocean pretending it’s as safe as land. So he went alone, though he did not remain that way long.

I stayed home and dreamed about my mother and her death and thought about how she never knew anything about living and had so little of it, neither quality nor quantity, her lifespan so much less than the actuarial table predicts. My father brought back photos. Him with his arm around a former Vegas showgirl, now eighty years old, who was not wearing her bikini top. I thought it charming that he chased elderly tail instead of young flesh. On a Mediterranean cruise he met Olive. She was English and apparently well off and I admit I wondered if my father hooked up with her for her money and I wondered what a wealthy woman could have seen in him. I loved him, of course, but he was a very ordinary, educated, middle-class American, a man who taught a subject he disparaged at a community college.

And Olive-rich and upper-class and British. Maybe she subscribed to stereotype, that Jewish men are good to-and ruled by-their wives.
They first thought to settle in Slovenia and looked at property near Lake Bled, but Olive was put off by the Slavic tourists who paraded around the lake in the skimpiest of swimsuits, obese and unabashed. My father, who'd been content to ogle eighty-year-old breasts, could not have found this so distasteful, but on they went to Sintra, yellow and rose, Romanesque, Moorish, of the winding roads through the mountains and the vistas of the crashing sea; Sintra, or as he put it, they were unmarried and living in Sin-tra-la!, making their home in Portugal because Olive was married to a man permanently confined to a mental hospital and in England (or so she claimed) one cannot divorce a person incapable of comprehending the proceedings .

Unlike my mother, my father didn't believe in sin. When she was alive, he liked to throw the word around to tease her. After she died, it still had use as irony.

So: Sintra, pink and gold and princely. And Olive, not exactly a double widow-her lunatic husband still living, I believe, though she did marry my father at last after a questionable Portuguese divorce­ Olive among the "rocky crags" (per the tourist office website) on the Portuguese coast where fishermen are lost at sea and the Portuguese widows wear black and the coastlines begin in grief, only to be transformed sooner or later into resort hotels and real estate for the likes of Olive.

In her e-mail she wrote, "I hired the very best tanatopraxia and
tanatoestetica." In Portuguese, or at least in Portugal, they have very elaborate words for what they do to a corpse. "The embalming tables are made of marble," she wrote. "It's more hygienic."

The men who carried the coffin into my apartment were probably from Chevra Kadisha but I imagined they were Portuguese too, her henchmen or retainers, those four somber men in their black frock coats and respectable hats who belonged in a painting and not in my foyer, stepping out of the rain looking serious as I thought only Europeans could be.

 

IN MY COLLEGE DORM, that joyous den of iniquity, someone hung a sign that read Sin Lair. When my mother came to visit, she stood rooted to the spot before it. "Sin," I said, "the Spanish word for without. Lair, an -ir verb," though if Mom ever checked the Spanish dictionary, she would not have found it.

And it's not true that the wildest thing she ever did in my presence was dunk a teabag once. I was very young when one day in Vons she uncharacteristically allowed me to put Sugar Pops in the cart. Then she methodically made her way around the store sticking a straight pin into cartons of milk and orange juice and bags of flour. She was smiling and humming, her eyes glittery the same way they were years later when she said she was in pain. (Oh, no you're not, said Meryl the nurse; you're dying, but you're not in pain.) When the security guard caught her she cried, but she held my hand and I could feel her pulse beating wild and fast and her whole body humming with what I took for fear and now believe was pleasure mixed well with her shame.

My mother had been my father's student-the waif he wanted to save and instead seduced. Olive nursed him through a bout of food poisoning on board and, once he stopped vomiting, seduced him. How romantic. From her photographs, Olive looks like Ingrid Bergman which means some would find her regal and attractive while I used to stare at Bergman on the screen trying to make sense of her appeal. I found her heavy-boned, with oxlike wrists and ankles, of coarse provenance compared to the birdlike frame of my mother.

Me? I was never a waif I was the stocky, serious girl, studious, fascinated by Jenna's sister who one day touched my face and said, "Don't worry. Someday you'll get yours," and I thrilled at the promise or the threat that someone would someday want me.

"Oh, she's not interested in that," said Jenna.

She was right, I wasn't interested, but desperate, imprisoned in a teenage body wracked with all the desire that should have brought joy. No one was interested in me, the good girl, till there he was, my professor in front of the classroom, his dark eyes behind glasses, his nervous energy. When he chose me to click through his PowerPoint, he didn't need to signal. We were perfectly in sync. He spoke of "multiple regression" and "cyclical component" and-I blushed-"goodness of fit." All it took to get us started was one afternoon, his hand, my pleasantly plump bare arm.

 

SIN-TRA-LA! WAS MY FATHER BEING IRONIC or singing out the joy that had long been buried deep inside him?

 

KELLY TAKES ME to ARLINGTON WEST where every Sunday on the sand just north of the pier Veterans for Peace install an anti-war memorial to the American dead in Afghanistan and Iraq. Kelly volunteers every week, but I've never gone with her before.

The veterans set up booths and exhibits. Kelly shows me how to use wooden stakes and string to mark off straight rows. I like the logic of it, being so well organized. We start to plant crosses and Stars of David and Islamic crescents in the sand. Kelly says at first there was a marker for each fallen soldier, but soon far too many had died. Now a red cross represents ten, a blue cross a recent death.

I'm about to ask if suicides are included when a skinny white guy makes his way toward us down our row. "Sorry. Hate to disappoint," he says, "but I am not Jesus Christ." I stare at the food residue in his beard and he adds, "I am Barack Obama. And I'm not going to produce my birth certificate."

"Well, that explains everything," says Kelly as he lopes away. She stabs a Jewish star into the sand and I wonder if this is how she buries disappointment.

We tie the names of the fallen on the crosses and crescents and stars, though we have no idea what religion, if any, goes with each name. Families come and add photographs and messages. Mothers cry.

Year after year fewer volunteers come to the beach, Kelly tells me, till now there aren't enough to keep the project going. Yet on it goes, just like the wars.

"How long are you going to keep this up?" I ask her. "When do you quit?"

"I won't," she says. Then, "Look at him." There's a photograph of a young man in uniform, attached with a note-love, always. "He's so young."

I point out a photo of a man as old as my father. "Young," she repeats.

"So are we."

When I was young- younger- I would think about sacrifice, about giving my life. What would I be willing to die for? For whom? Maybe it's hormones at that age, the way the life-spirit just zips about your body, not connected firmly enough for you to understand what it would mean to lose it.

"Oh, come on," she says. "You're what? Thirty-five?"

"Thirty-two."

The pier looms above us to the south. Who was the girl who stood there? Who was the man who made statistics so improbably erotic? I can still feel his body on mine, his breath in my ear. I hear his pulse but when I dose my eyes to see him, he's changed, transparent as a ghost. He never promised me a future, but in bed we erased time. When he erased my past, he also erased any thought of the future and without one there was no death. There was no me. I look to the right, north up the beach, to where the land curves and offers a view of the cliffs and mountains rising from Malibu. Rocky crags.

"Whatever," says Kelly. "It's not too late."

But when I look at her, she's listening to a woman who stands with her arms full of flowers and I'm not sure Kelly even spoke to me.

The woman walks the rows placing a flower at each grave. One foot in front of the other. Me, I would rather have flowers than any religious marker, though I have to admit flowers are ambiguous. The crosses, stars, and crescents? I can think of no better way to signify death.

The memorial stretches down to the water's edge, stopping just short of beached seaweed and the tides. The woman with the flowers is crying, though no one is buried here. There are no bodies beneath the sand. And for me to claim my losses match all this carnage, I might as well be one of the people strolling on the pier, looking down on this simulated graveyard, enjoying the sun, falling in love and giggling.

 

THE COFFIN WAS MADE of heavy and beautiful wood with brass ornamentation. The men carried it in with surreal formality. Dad's funeral was held in Lisbon where I've never been. I know Sintra only from the web. Photographs of the World Heritage Site, the palaces of Monserrate, Castelo da Pena, Queluz, fanciful, roman tic, and so I believe the somber people Olive sent were only showing sympathy for my grief and didn't suffer from a constitutional lack of joy.

In my apartment they laid the coffin down on the mahogany table I inherited from Mom.

Kelly left, as did the somber men, and I phoned Olive.
"I took care of all the paperwork and the transport," she said. She waited for me to thank her and I didn't. "I've remarried," Olive said. "I want my new husband in the mausoleum with me. Your father should be buried with your mother."

My mother wasn't buried. My father had her cremated- something a good Jew is not supposed to do. Dad and I took the ferry to Catalina so that he could scatter her ashes en route. Our passage was so smooth, you couldn't even tell we were on the water. Even so, I got seasick. He got disgusted. My father dropped the urn overboard and it sank in the sea like a stone.

 

RAIN SHEETS THE WINDOWS. The room is dark and I sit with the cat in my lap, looking at the box that holds my father's remains.

I'm not surprised when the front door opens and it's Kelly. I knew she
wouldn't leave me here alone. She drops her umbrella on the step, puts down a bag. "People are coming," I say. "They'll cremate the whole thing." We both wince at the word thing. I tell her I will throw him overboard to join my mother.

"I'll go with you," she says. I'm so sorry for your loss." She takes out the candles she's brought and she places them around my father and lights each one, a circle of tiny flames that glow like portholes, and she touches my shoulder-gestures familiar enough to keep me grounded but that do nothing to alleviate my grief.

Somewhere else: the breath of eternity.

Brass gleams with reflected fire. I'm left with the box and with motions to go through, routine enough that even I can get them right.

“Six Poems” by Laura Read

Issue 80
Issue 80

Found in Willow Springs 80

Back to Author Profile

THE SPELL WE CAST

 

She wore white flats and her feet always

looked cold. I invited her to my house

and we spread our homework all over the couch

and ate all the graham crackers

and drank all the milk my mother

had watered down with powdered

and made something between us just from the hours.

Her mother took us to the thrift store

and bought us cardigans and rhinestone rings

someone dead had worn.

Some nights we drove to Cheney

and stayed with her dad who let us drink

and smoke and wear his army jackets and camo

pants when we went outside

in the middle of the night to see what dangers

we could find. Her face and neck

got blotchy when she cried.

She made me buy black boots with slits

on the sides and listen to the Violent Femmes

and Annie Lennox. We had nothing in common

except Annie singing Oh we were so young

as we drove down her street under

the yellow maples. I liked the way the leaves

flew around the car, and I liked listening

to the sounds of the diner where Annie

was singing, the spoons hitting the coffee cups

and the people talking.

I thought maybe this is what it was like

to have a sister, someone not like you at all

but who had sat in the same car and heard

the same songs, someone whose threadbare

sweater you'd worn. Someone who had kissed

the boy you loved so you couldn't talk to him

anymore. Someone whose body slept

next to yours in your bed and hers,

and all night you could feel the sighing

space between you, where you almost touched.

Wayward sister, weird sister, weird as in

not pretty like the other girls with the soft

hair and nice clothes. Pretty is a word

that hurts, its ts like staples. Pretty

like a camouflaged girl, like the sound

of fifty silver bracelets clanging together

on an arm, saying I need to make this sound

so you will know I have something inside of me,

how else can you explain the way I can make

this cigarette bloom with fire? Weird as in

we could see the future. For example, the boy.

We put him in the cauldron.

 

SELF-PORTRAIT AS FRESCO

 

Fresco means fresh,       means the plaster is wet               and you paint on it

and what you paint     becomes part of the wall,                    means a crack in the wall

becomes a crack in a face,       a beautiful face.           Let there be a girl on the ground

in a plaid uniform jumper,              the skirt lifted up.                   Let there be a knife

hanging over her from a thread.          We need a tree,                apricot for the one

in her backyard.           Her mother sliced them in half.           Their skin tasted

like her own.   One year the tree                          dropped all its apricots at once.

Paint something in the corner for death,            a full moon            perfectly still

and then its reflection on the water, moving.                      Paint the long dress

she wore that day.        Long like a girl from long ago.            Like maybe

she wasn't even there.                   I bought her a suitcase           to keep her letters

but it's only big enough           for her old dresses and coats.              They are mute

so she can't give them away.                   Let's paint the suitcase.          A yellow dog

a patchwork sheet                   a skein of hair              the wind's fingerprints on the lake.

The other day I saw a child cry.          The tears just came over her,  there was no

stopping them         and I remembered being young            and how you can't help

anything           how someone can touch you   and make you feel good          and bad

in the same moment,            how your body is always flooding          and cracking open.

 

GIRLIE GIRL

 

It's what we call a girl who likes lipstick

and dresses and what my son has to call

a girl in the play when he is coming on to her,

playing Charlie Cowell, a salesman

who sells anvils. He doesn't have the time

but he sure has the inclination.

My son who is only fourteen

and who has never come on to a girl

or a woman, who knows

that girlie girl is a way to put girls down

for being too much like girls

and tomboy is a way to put girls

down for not being girl enough,

my son whose first kiss is on stage

when this girl tries to distract him

to make him late for his train

not because she likes him

not because he's the hero

but because he's in the hero's way.

My son who says he's a character actor

not a hero, that his drama teacher said

It's good to know who you are.

But this is The Music Man, the play

with a swindler for a hero,

with the message that it doesn't matter

if you lie as long as you lift the spirits

of the drab people of Iowa.

It's good to believe in something

even if it isn't true.

I was a girlie girl. Still am.

Look at my shoes. I always buy

Mary Janes as if it would be disloyal

to choose something else, something

with a pointed toe and a heel,

something that somehow suggested

a dark room with a piano, ice cubes

in short glasses, smoke swirling

like the possibility of sex,

only briefly visible.

By girlie I mean like a girl

and not like a woman. Which is what

my son means when he propositions

Marion--he means she is still innocent,

which he likes and wants to ruin.

I mean this is what Charlie means,

not my son whose body used

to live inside mine. But my son is the one

saying the line.

 

NEITHER BRIDE NOR DAUGHTER

 

Once I went to a kegger at my childhood home.

I didn't know I was going but Jen was sitting

on her dresser listening to the Eagles

and curling her hair and then we were walking

through the dark neighborhood and then

we were on my porch and someone

was handing me a plastic cup.

I said This is my porch and he laughed

and said Mine too, but it wasn't.

He didn't know there was supposed to be

a brown-flowered couch in the living room

and over the mantle, a print of a Rembrandt

called The Jewish Bride, 16 67.

For all of childhood, it hung there

and I never knew what it was called or why,

how an art dealer said it was a father giving

a necklace to his daughter for her wedding,

but how most art historians now think

it is actually Isaac and Rebecca.

There was another keg in my room

in the basement. Strangers were moving

between my invisible bed and my stereo,

stepping over my clothes on the floor,

staring at themselves in my mirror,

wondering if they would ever be good enough.

The water rushed through the pipes

and the furnace made that sound

like it used to. I had to stand in the corner,

drinking and singing both parts

of "Total Eclipse of the Heart,"

holding the note at the end of Turn around

bright eyes long enough to imply it was still

going when I started Every now and then

I fall apart. This was the song I listened to

late at night while I waited for my boyfriend

to come pick me up so we could drive through

the empty streets in the dark.

Years later, that same boy will go back

to that house to show me he remembered

where it was. You know how they say

the wind gets knocked out of you,

like there's wind blowing through your ribs

all the time and then suddenly it's quiet?

In the painting, the man and the woman

are not looking at each other.

I like it when one thing covers another

but not completely, like fog.

Rembrandt was famous for his ability

to concentrate light. In the painting,

the light shines on the man's hand

touching the woman's chest.

Everything else is dark.

 

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH SEAWEED AND MICA

 

I am sitting on the porch on our house on 19th

staring at the tree I am too frightened to climb.

I am amazed by my legs. They are short and round

with little blonde hairs that shine in the sun.

I like them. I have a scar on my right hand,

close to my thumb, where a mother Dalmatian

bit me when I tried to pet her puppy.

The scar looks like a crescent moon in the daytime.

 

I am sitting in my desk at school, looking down

at my stomach, thinking it wouldn't be that hard

to just slice it off. But how will I hide what I've done?

 

I am swimming in Mica Bay with my boyfriend.

He can't float so I put my hand under his back.

You have to let yourself fall into the water, I tell him.

He can't. Mica is shining slivers in a rock.

The stars pull their needles through the water.

 

In the water, my body is secretly beautiful.

I am a seal who has to wear the body of a woman.

No one has touched it and said don't tell anyone.

No boy has kept his picture of Tina on his dresser,

putting it facedown when I come over.

I have never met Tina but I picture her driving

down a California freeway in a red convertible

that matches her red nails and lips.

She is tan and thin, but in the water,

 

our bodies are the same, our limbs light and swaying

like a willow tree's branches.

I loved willow trees when I was a child.

You could go inside them and no one

knew you were there.

 

I have a C-section scar.

Sometimes it still hurts when I roll over in bed.

When I open my eyes underwater,

for a moment I can't tell the difference

between the seaweed and my hair.

 

PROOF FOR MY SIDE

 

What you need to know is that a Lincoln-Douglas debate requires

three judges in the final rounds. And that we waited in the room

for a long time for the third judge who then sauntered in

 

and said he would keep time and the other judges should share

their paradigms first because he liked to go last. You also need

to know that my son is one of the debaters and the other one

 

is a girl with beautiful hair. The resolution this fall

is The US. ought to limit qualified immunity for police officers.

I remember when it was the right to be forgotten and all

 

we were talking about was erasing ourselves from the internet.

Not black men being pulled over and shot one after another.

My son drew the affirmative and argued that the tyranny

 

of the majority over the minority results in the Trail of Tears

and he said the girl with the beautiful hair was abusive

when she said he had to change the whole legal system

 

to end racism, which I agreed with because how could Ben

do that, standing there in his first suit, reading his case

from his laptop with the stickers on the back that said

 

Hey Moon and Transcend the Bullshit At the end of the round,

the judges filled out their ballots while we sat in silence

and the third judge again declared he would go last.

 

The first two judges sided with my son and the Cherokee

walking from Georgia to Oklahoma in 1838 who needed

no one to have any more power over them than they already

 

did and the girl with the beautiful hair who looked like

just a few years before she was lying on her basement floor

playing with plastic horses and dreaming they were real

 

and she could climb on one and it would take off running

and her hair would fly behind her seemed to understand

that she had debated well but had come up against

 

what was right. And then the third judge said he was voting

for her and even though his vote didn't matter because it was 2-1,

he made us listen and we were trapped in that high school

 

Spanish classroom, staring at Day of the Dead

posters and thinking of the 234 black men who the cops killed

this year while he said her argument was the Eiffel Tower

 

and Ben's was that upside-down building in Seattle

and I thought what upside-down building and doesn't

an upside-down building still have an architectural design

 

and speaking of Paris, had he seen the Centre Pompidou

with all its pipes on the outside so it looks like the inside

of a clock or a pocket or a fantastic mind and then he said

 

the Trail of Tears didn't seem to fit and I thought seem?

and why am I hating this man who is telling all of us

that we have just witnessed Lincoln-Douglas at its finest

 

as if that is what matters? Of course, he is not the first man

who has ever told me what he said was the most important

and his argument is so phallic and shining and pointing

 

straight up to the sky where we keep the clouds and reason

and God and why can't I see it and all I have

are the blue veins in my wrists as proof for my side.

 

Three Poems by Elizabeth Austen

Issue 62
Issue 62

Found in Willow Springs 62

Back to Author Profile

Her, at Two

 

Sometimes a bone

at the tender back of the throat

requires a wracking, indelicate

cough to survive it. Sometimes

a bone is plucked -- still

 

fully fleshed --

from the platter and brandished

like a baton, a magician's wand.

She transfixes every guest

gluttonous tyrant

 

in miniature. Is this how we all

began, thrilled to hold the meat

in our tiny fists, sure

the feast was laid for us

alone? Soon she will want

 

what she cannot reach

will be told it's not for her

that's not ladylike

wipe your fingers

put down the bone.

 

Oh, let her be lucky

and rare, let it be years

before her gender is learned

as limitation, a fence

to circumscribe her life.

 

 

 

For Lost  Sainthood

 

because when the Virgin

appeared she said nothing

 

just waved    less hello than

come this way

 

a third-grade girl   a faith-fevered

fervently Catholic girl   I longed

 

for sainthood

 

I pledged my unknown

ungovernable body

 

consecrated my virginity to Hers

 

but already I knew

I burned

 

before knowledge before

even the barest mechanics

 

before the trancelike tidal pull

of sweat and flesh

 

I burned I burned

and already

 

I knew

I was not good    for all my hot

 

true tears when the host

was raised as Jesus' flesh

 

for all my prayers and carefully

counted rosary beads I knew

 

I burned I burned

 

 

What We Would Forget

 

ties us to the past

and, like roots beneath pavement, cracks

 

the  surface we would pass across,

though the tree lies some distance away.

 

Once heaved up and split

how can the path be smoothed

 

unless that living thing -- we must remember --­

is uprooted?

 

For these things sometimes happen. Though

the details differ, ours is not a unique story.

 

And if, as my lover enters me, my brother's

face intrudes, what am I to do

 

but open my eyes and name this man

who is not my brother, name myself, who am not

 

that girl, and continue the embrace

of these our bodies, now?

         No perception comes amiss --

 

my senses learned their scope

in that child-body. Who was I then?

 

And what of that girl lives tonight

in my skin? Do I carry her

 

always about me, ready to rise

and bind the present -- this touch --

 

to the past? Will I ever say

the thongs are burst that the dead tied?

 

 

Lines in italics are from Virginia Woolf's writings, as taken from Jocelyn Clarke's

play Room.

“Neurosurgery Sonata” by Brooke Matson

Issue 82 Cover shows Chris Bovery print of a bridge in pink and blue with Willow Springs in decorative font.
Issue 82 Cover shows Chris Bovery print of a bridge in pink and blue with Willow Springs in decorative font.

Found in Willow Springs 82

Back to Author Profile

Neurosurgery Sonata

 

I've imagined it many times and still, it jars

like a fist to the jaw. There will be music

despite everything, you quoted, and yes, my pulse

quickens at Zoe Keating's electric

cello even now, enough to need tissues.

I imagine it so often, it's as if I saw

 

the surgeon, swathed like a priest, drive the saw

into your skull. Like popping the seal of a mason jar,

he unhinges blood and bone, exposes the gray tissue

of his trade. The nurse presses play on your music

as instructed (cue the cello); nerves bathe in electric

oceans of anesthesia; the pulse

 

of cello strings drop like plumb lines through the pulsing

Z of the heart monitor. I believe you hear it. But that saw

haunts me -- some real Frankenstein shit. Where's the electric

bolt of lightning? you'd joke, but I can't laugh. The jarring

raze of its serrated music

cleaves my tissue-thin

 

bravery. Time, I have learned, is a flexible tissue

and the muscled pulse

of your  neurons strums its own shining music:

our first kiss on a darkened street; the see-sawing

oars of kayaks on the bay; whiskey sipped from jam jars

on the Fourth of July; fireworks glowing electric

 

as you rise between thighs, electrified --

years of time folded tightly in a cortex maze of tissue

where somewhere, my body wanders through synapses that jar

and flicker like Vegas highways, pulsations

of neon in contiguous, cursive constellations. Tell me sawing

stars from the sky is impossible, that music

 

can't be severed from melody, the cellist from the musical

oscillations of her instrument, the wild electron

from the nucleus it loves. Say there is not a saw

for every bond. Say that our minds are not lanterns of tissue

paper, easily torn. Your pulse

holds you together a while -- a fragile jar

 

of stars humming their music in the dark tissue

of space, an electric dance of neurons. Like hope, they pulse.

O  trade me a saw for a spoon, that I may scrape the sides of that jar.

 

 

“Second Molars” by Bailey Gaylin Moore

Issue 82 Cover shows Chris Bovery print of a bridge in pink and blue with Willow Springs in decorative font.
Issue 82 Cover shows Chris Bovery print of a bridge in pink and blue with Willow Springs in decorative font.

Found in Willow Springs 82

Back to Author Profile

I.

YOU LOOK MATURE FOR FOURTEEN: high cheekbones, arched brows, classic face muddled from dark makeup. When your older brother's friends smile in your direction, he gives them a steady eye, mouth firm with warning. And when your mother sees men glance in your direction, she reminds you of your age, patting the crown of your dirty blonde head like she did when she said goodbye on your first day of kindergarten.

 

Swat her hand away, just as you did on that first day of kindergarten. It's okay, you tell her, drawing on thicker eyeliner the next morning to hide your age. Thicker eyeliner to impress older friends, friends like Jillian, cigarette hanging out of her mouth, fists raised against the world. Thicker eyeliner to make boys sitting on high school hall­way vents look at you the same way as the men your mother warned you about.

 

II.

VAGINA DENTATA, /v 'd3am drn'te1t / [< Latin dentata, adj., having teeth, toothed]

n. (Cultural Anthropol. and Psychol.)

  1. A vagina equipped with teeth occurring in myth, folklore, and religion. Vagina Dentata symbolizes fear of castration, the dangers of sexual intercourse, of birth or rebirth, etc. Makes penis either: 1. shrunken, afraid, or 2. altogether obsolete. Additionally, Vagina Dentata gives new meaning to Tupac's words, I ain't a killer, but don't push me. Revenge is the sweetest joy next to getting pussy.

 

III.

IN 2010, Dr. Sonnet Ehlers created Rape-aXe condoms to combat overwhelming rape statistics in South Africa. The toothed condom will latch onto a future attacker, jagged teeth clenching down harder if he pulls out of his victim. In an interview regarding distributing Rape­ aXe condoms throughout the continent, a Ugandan representative for Disease Control and Prevention told  CNN, "The fears surrounding the victim, the act of wearing the condom in anticipation of being assaulted, all represent enslavement that no woman should be subject to."

 

And if his intentions are pure, thoughts of Rape-aXe condoms may cause faltering breaths even if she only says, Well, just the tip. Momentary in comparison to the indefinite female anticipation, anticipation being the way she gauges potential trust in men she will meet, perhaps in men she may already know—in any man she habit­ually lowers her head to while passing by on the street. Her history of unnamed enslavement.

 

IV.

CANINE, /'kemAml, [< Latin caninus, < canis dog]

n. (Anat. and Physiol.)

  1. Strong pointed teeth, one situated on each side of the upper and lower jaw between the incisors and the molars. Predatory teeth––teeth to tear food. Teeth to bite back hard.

adj.

  1. Supposes an appetite, supposes hunger: voracious, greedy, as that of a dog.

 

V.

BRANSON, MISSOURI: Jillian buys cigarettes at a gas station with a tourist tax rate. You try a puff while she calls your mother pretending to be a parent chaperone on a trip just close enough from home. You hear her voice on the other end—Sounds like fun, she says. You unclench your jaws and breathe in the smoke.

 

When you return, your mother will ask about all the fun adven­tures you had: Waltzing Waters, Celebration City, perhaps Andy Williams singing "Moon River"—performances that will die within a decade. Branson's ghosts will leave behind chipped bright mansions and fallen neon signs, remnants of your childhood calling out in the night.

 

Instead of watching Andy Williams sing "Moon River," you go to a crusty hotel room off the strip. Jillian invites men who tell you how you look pretty in your red dress, men who ask how old you are, talking with Budweiser cans clutched in too-large hands. You say, I don't know how old I am, laughing through gritted teeth.

 

VI.

1926 — J. I. Suttie tr. S. Ferenczi Further Contrib. Psycho-anal. xxxii. 279. "Anxiety in regard to the mother's vagina (vagina dentata = birth anxiety)."

 

VII.

WHILE SIGMUND FREUD SHIFTS in his sleep, he dreams of his mother telling him to clean

dirty
dishes.

He dreams of his mother, a castrated woman, a woman smiling with her front teeth.

 

Sigmund Freud's mother says, Do your homework, do your math equations.

He dreams of his mother, tucking him into bed—tight,

safe.

He dreams of his mother carrying him with            her     hip out,

his      father

touching the arch

of      her     back.

His mother. All boys dream of      their mother,

Sigmund Freud says.

He dreams of his mother, the head of Medusa, laughing­ snaked-hair wild, their teeth

alive, teeth snapping.

Sigmund Freud dreams of his mother.

 

VIII.

MOLAR, /'mouler/, [< classical Latin moladris grinding tooth < mola millstone]

n. (Anat. and Physiol.)

  1. Each of the grinding teeth at the back of a mammal's mouth, typically having a broad occlusal surface and cusps, crescents, or ridges; a molar tooth, a grinding tooth, a tooth that grinds.

 

IX.

MILLSTONE, /'mil,ston/, [Cognate with or formed similarly to West Frisian molestien, Middle Dutch molensteen (Dutch molensteen), Old Saxon mulinsten (Middle Low German m8lensten), Old High German mulinstein, mulstein (Middle High German mulstein, Ger­ man Muhlstein), Norwegian (Bokmal) mollestein, Danish mollesten < the Germanic base of mill n.l + the Germanic base of stone n.]

(agricult.)

  1. Either of a pair of circular stones which grind corn by the rotation of the upper stone on the lower (or nether) one.
  2. (fig.)
  3. A heavy and inescapable burden or responsibility; esp. in "a millstone round one's neck."

 

X.

THE  LIGHTS ARE OUT, the red dress and Jillian gone. You're on the floor. One of the men is behind you breathing in your ear, whispering how your breasts look nice—young with perk. Nothing ever looks nice in the shadows, you think, and this is the one truth you will carry, the only certainty to hold onto, as you grow older. In the periphery, Branson's lights will fade along your side.

 

The man grunts as he pulls the hair at the top of your crown with those hands. He spits the question, Have you ever? until your ears and your neck and the side of your left cheek are wet from wet breath. You say No when he enters, deep and forceful, the teeth in your jaws rubbing together through the words please and stop. You aren't con­scious of time, but you are aware of the way he pushes back harder as you grab his face, digging nails into rough skin, repeating the words from the bottom of your lungs. His face will go unremembered, only his voice—low and short—when he spoke at you: Just a little longer, the voice would say. Good girl.

 

In the morning, you wake up with blood between your thighs and a missed call from your mother.

 

XI.

VAGINA DENTATA, /v::)'d3Am::) dm'te1t::)/, [< Latin dentata, adj., having teeth, toothed],

n. (Cultural Anthropol. and Psycho!.)

  1. A vagina equipped with teeth occurring in myth, folklore, and Vagina Dentata is a means to silence women, a means to instill fear of women, a means to encourage violence until submission; enslavement.

 

XII.

1980 - Jill Riatt The Journal of the American Academy of Religion. xlviii. 421. The Taming of Eve: Tertullian, as is now too well known, called woman the gate of hell. He was not speaking as a Christian theologian, although [I'm] sure he thought he was, and so others understood him to have spoken. No, Tertullian was voicing an ancient correlation of woman as "devourer." Female goddesses, driven underground, became hell's gatekeepers from Izangi of Japan to Kore/Persephone.

 

XIII.

QUEEN ELIZABETH I, the Virgin Queen, was rumored to suffer from Vagina Dentata. Perhaps she pled with Thomas Seymour to come back after their first shot in the sack. Let's try one more time, she might have said, his back to her as he walked away. Let's try one more time, she said to herself whenever he was gone. She sat on a bloodied bed, just shy of realizing how alone she would always be.

 

XIV.

HOLD THIS whenever you walk by the boys sitting on hallway vents—eyes down, eyes makeup free.

Hold this in: his low voice, how you cleaned the blood that morning with gas station toilet paper, how, when you finally got home, tears mixed with the warm water of the shower, running down your throat, between your breasts. When you get home, it takes three seconds for your mother to ask about your little vacation. It was okay, you say to her. You tell her, I just feel dirty, darting to the bathroom, a locked door.

Hold it in until you deflate, your throat dry when you will finally tell your secret during a confessional circle at church four months later. One guy will say he smoked weed, and another drank too much vodka one night. A girl will admit she's anorexic, but she's trying.

 

When it's your turn, you will say, I lost my virginity. You say, But I didn't mean to, face red, eyes looking beyond the edges of the circle. I lost my virginity, but I didn't mean to, because you didn't know the right words to communicate, ''A man raped me."

 

XV.

MAORI LEGEND tells of the gatekeeper of hell—the goddess, Hine-nui-te-po, whom Maui looked to conquer, granting men everlasting life. His father warns him, Her body is like a woman's, but the pupils of her eyes are greenstone and her hair is kelp. Her mouth is that of a barracuda, and in the place where men enter she has sharp teeth of obsidian. Maui is crushed by this obsidian, the fate of mankind scarred with mortality. Rather than a woman embodying the sustenance of life, she is instead blamed for mankind's finality.

 

XVI.

IN HINDU LEGEND, a Rakshasa lived as a tigress, yawning in the grass, itching her stomach while the cicadas churned. If the spirit happened to catch a man grabbing a woman's shoulders, pressing his body deep and forceful against hers, the tiger would evolve into something sleek, something desirable who could not go untouched: a beautiful woman with curvy edges, mouth corners flicking before seeking retribution. After she seduced the man, the Rakshasa bit back as he entered, treating herself to an erect snack. She fed the rest of the man's body to the other tigers when she was finished.

 

The Rakshasa went through seven brothers this way. A Hindu god spoke to the eighth brother in a dream. Get a stick, the god told the boy. Shove it inside. Make that Rakshasa, that wicked man-eater, bleed like a woman should bleed.

 

XVII.

THE CHURCH LEADER will tell your mother, who will sit on the edge of your home's stairs. Just let me have some space, you will say, arms limp whenever she hugs your body. Notice how your body will feel like a five-year-old girl's as her fingers brush the crown of your head. Don't swat her hands away.

 

Later, your brother will come into your room. He will not know what to do with his hands, frantic in the dormant air. You will watch him from your bed. You will tell him, I'm sorry.

 

No. No, no, no, no, he will say, the words staccatoed between sobs and finding his breath. He will walk over to you, putting his arms around you just like your mother did. I should have been there, he will tell you. I should have been there, saying it again until your comforter is damp with his tears and your pillow is damp from your tears and he can't breathe and you can't breathe, the room folding in on itself.

 

It's okay, you will tell your brother. It's okay, you will tell yourself.

 

And you will tell yourself the same as a grown woman, grinding your second molars whenever an honest man brushes the nape of your neck, the negative edges of your curves. You're so beautiful, the man will say, but his breath will be too hot in your ear, too wet for com­fort. So you will think of Elizabeth and the tigress, crossing your arms over whatever you can as you make your body—as you make yourself—smaller and smaller until he is finished.

 

 

 

“When I Am a Teenage Boy” by Erin Belieu

Issue 80
Issue 80

Found in Willow Springs 80

Back to Author Profile

I am like my parents' house, in a state

of constant remodel we can ill afford,

the noise behind a tarp producing little more

 

than dust. But the footprint must change

despite great expense. Large parts

need to move for the sake of flow. I learn

 

the trick is to appear intact, though recently

the problem of my torso is introduced.

My mother says I've always been a little

 

Jew around the waist. She had specific

hopes, shelled out for the stag tuxedo suit,

sent me for cotillion lessons. Mind like

 

a boardwalk jewelry store, heyday 1962,

she wears her hostess gown in the kitchen

while I creak along with the crock pot

 

pulverizing our Sunday stew. Because

I'm an only, she put a TV in my room

for company. It's a solid business, taping cable

 

porn to VHS. But when I'm caught extorting

the gym coach, meds are discussed at school.

My mother says we don't do meds,

 

my dad and me. And I’m not caught often.

Who would I be without this brain that itches

like the dragonflies I hose from the pool's filter?

 

Instead, I take myself in hand. I buy a trench

with birthday money sent by a childless aunt

we thought dead years ago. We don't use

 

the word "lesbian" because my mother says,

Who says that sort of thing? I perform my coat

darkly in a graveyard split by an interstate where

 

our housekeeper's son is housed. Here, I feel most

vivid, futurely, Peter Parker praying for his spider.

Oh, I am replete with plans. I'll be like that prince

 

In the novel I didn’t read in English class.

I don’t finish books, but I get the gist-

some sad lady who offs herself by train. Ballroom

 

Unpronounceable Russians suffering. Blah blah.

But that guy Stiva eating his sausages? Someday

I'll have a faithful servant, too. Or at least a wife.

 

I fear I'll always be a little piggy in the middle,

but that grease I'll lick from my fingers,

it tastes like everything now.

“A Prayer to Cathy McMorris Rodgers for the Preservation of My Health Insurance” by Kate Lebo

Issue 80
Issue 80

Found in Willow Springs 80

Back to Author Profile

Cathy, when you were a doctor

did you hate how our government bossed you,

 

how The Man just had to get his hand

in there? I need to know, Cathy. I'm scared. I wake up

 

counting my pills and the days I'll need my pills,

which are unknown, so let's call them endless.

 

I admit I wasn't living right.

I used myself roughly and I

 

enjoyed it,

drank milk and whiskey

 

and assumed these pleasures were normal.

I know--you've taught me to know--

 

my health is my responsibility. It is just

to blame myself for depending on the government,

 

just as I blame myself for choosing

the wrong profession.

 

Poetry. Ha!

Who thought that would work?

 

 

But I call this work, Cathy, I do.

I'm working right now, so hard,

 

writing you. It is work to consider

what a big job you have, and yet

 

it is not your job to meet me for coffee

or in the aisle, nor is it your job

 

to hear me, Kate Lebo,

above the throng I belong to,

 

(one woman on a block of women in a town of women­--

half of whom will pass your seventh term snug

 

in victory, their favorite Cathy on the job)

but I wish we could get a drink

 

anyway. You might find me ready

for the doctor, ready

 

to confess. I already know

what you’ll say. Don’t hate

 

your representative.

Hate what she represents.