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Ten Poems by Alexandra Teague

Willow Springs 71
Willow Springs 71

Found in Willow Springs 71

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Transcontinental

10 Poems

 

"In a railroad to the Pacific we have a great national work, transcending, in its magnitude, and in its results, anything yet attempted by man."

  • American Railroad journal

 

 

"Gunpowder and Chinamen were the only weapons... builders had with which to fight the earth and stone through which they had to pass, laid in their path centuries ago by the Creator."

  • Engineer for the Transcontinental Railroad

 

I. Crazy Judah (1859)

 

They said he might as well build a railroad
to the moon, his maps laid out like lakes
in the desert. What is needed is a proper survey.
His maps laid out like a whorehouse Bible.
Who would touch it? Who believed a man
who made a mountain range a molehill,
who tunneled and gun-powdered granite
fact to lay his tracks out of the ruck of things?
Who promised tightrope-narrow ridges
holding trains--not years from now, but
now. What's needed are the men and money,

not just plans. Who charted routes across
the Long Ravine and Donner Pass where
fear split open: black oak in a lightning
storm, where rivers spilled like thought
too fast to follow. His wife said, You're giving
away your thunder. He said, This country is
a house divided. Who would join it? With
what hammers and stakes could men cross
a continent he had to sail around to say,
There is another way. It is a well-known maxim:
The gods wait for a beginning before they lend their aid.

 

II. The Big Four (1862)

 

Because they were men of vision,
which meant men of money, believers
in the Northern route to the new free West,
believers in the pocket-creased maps

of surveyors, the bare-armed muscles
of strangers, the sledgehammer strikes,
the new flanged rails, the country healed
in its iron lung--they invested funds

to sail from the Eastern seaboard and
around Cape Horn: shiploads of crowbars,
hammers, dump carts, rails, switches,
spikes, tents, hitches, plows, drills,

everything but camels (the Confederate
plan to cross the Southern desert):
the country an infinite snake: mouth
gaping around the future's iron tail.

 

III. The Workers (1866)

 

The records admit no record of the hands
and fingers lost in the blasting: the grand

and every day explosions of granite into light,
the times they tried to hide in time

but couldn't (something in the way: a horse,
loose rubble, exhaustion). Or the loss

from sledgehammers. Eighteen pounds rising,
striking, rising. The first heat of day slicing

cold muscles--that swinging til only opium
could hold them still for sleep- the pig-iron

snow-plow pushing even then through
dreams--splitting continents, families, youth

into heaps beside it, or the train steaming off
its tracks through their bones: their coughs

like nails in tamarack trusses, their ribs
full of gunpowder, as outside the iron ribbon,

as history would call it, shone. As if
all they were doing was stitching

along the country's seam: shimmery, simple,
whatever fingers they had, safe in thimbles.

 

IV. The Sierras ( 1867)

 

Already dead of yellow fever years before,
Judah never saw two thousand men from China
work for weeks inside those long white tents
of snow: the tunnels they lived inside, ate inside,

blasted, and tunneled further, the walls
they hard-packed against gravity, the dank smoke­-
haze and fear of falling sky in which they learned
to move like snow itself: a stiff suspension,

particulate, a joined numbness. Only the steam
of tea, a bit of corn meal. Talk of eating
the horses. Silence for days after the avalanche,
a weighted quiet like every white key

on a piano played at once, then never played.
The survivors working faster now: black powder,
rails, reed-thatched baskets, in which, when spring
came, they would dangle over chasms--afraid

of the air now--blinking in the rain-bleached light:
the river below gleaming like another railroad
built while they burrowed: all rushing wheels­--
what the dead, when they thawed, would ride.

 

V. Sherman's Peace Council with the Indians (1867)

 

We
built
iron
roads
and
you
cannot
stop
the
locomotive
any
more
than
you
can
stop
the
sun
or
moon.

 

VI. Ferguson's Diary (1868)

 

And then we passed through a dismal
and desolate country: a terrible country:
all sagebrush and grease weed and the mules
out of their depth in the river, swiftly
carried by currents: the awful look of terror

and despair as two men went down. My level
tangled in the wagon box, so I had to drop
it or be dragged under. I never found it
or the guns or men we'd lost. No matter

the death toll, the engineers are concerned
with the bridge and making some money.

Some Indians made a dash on some pilgrims
at sunrise. Later we were attacked by Indians
and succeeded in shooting one. Four men
were killed and scalped. I have no sympathy

for the red devils. May their dwelling places
and habitations be destroyed. May the greedy
crows hover over their silent corpses.

Two men were shot this evening
in a drunken row. Another man and four
mules drowned. A man was wounded, another
killed: occasioned by some personal difficulty.

The carelessness and reckless disregard
for life and limb, the promiscuous shooting
is perfectly outrageous and alarming.

Still, the bridge is a success.

The first passenger train crossed
the ridge at noon. The time is coming
and fast, too, when
there will be no West.

 

VII. Hell-on-Wheels (1868)

 

Hell, one foreman said, must have been raked
to furnish them: these men and women

who rolled from field to field: the buildings slap­-
dash built: canvas and shanties: the Germania House

with its whiskey and 50 cent meals, its hurdy-gurdy
dancing: skirts hiked up to God-Knows:

and the rail crews' hungers sledgehammer heavy:
lanterns and legs and the hip bones of strangers:

a few slung-down hours: something stronger
than iron: Benton, Laramie, Bear River City,

Corrine: which is fast becoming civilized-several men
having been killed there already: the alkali dust

ankle-deep and shifty as gunpowder: the men
white as roaches in a barrel of flour: the women

powdered sweet over filth: the one bookstore
(in one photograph) maybe a joke: a den

of antiquity: the broken spines, loose pages
caught in these crosswinds like the cottonwood

where Dugan--hands cuffed by vigilantes­--
had begged to leave the country, and he did,

when the rope pulled taut, and the wagon drove
away: the corpse of Damocles dangling

over scrub weed: the trains unloading
their own future rails: a bitch birthing whelps

in the dust: bones under bourbon floorboards:
it was monstrous, wondrous, hideous inside those tents

and buildings: transitory as soap bubbles:
everything rainbows and scum.

 

VIII. Jack Morrow and Friends (1868)

-After the photograph by Arundel Hull

 

After Hull climbs his camera down from the windmill-half-built,
rickety as light on this dust-storm morning--
after he climbs down from a boxcar--the station sleeping
in the drunk dawn--the barrels of gunpowder Morrow stole
from his own wagon trains emptied (for later sale), then filled with sand
to sell to strangers: this moment: Morrow seated on a barrel, long legs
draped over the hoop, pinstriped, casual, palms against thighs,
his elbows jutted out to show he knows his body's value: twice the space
of other men's. His posse--even the man in front--a backdrop: creased-up
brims and crumpled suits and watch fobs shining in this flat light
that is not about shining but staring straight like the man who chose
not to steal this camera when he robbed Hull's stage. Who can
perform at will the miracle of gunpowder into sand into money
into (short-counted) ties to sell the railroad. Who lights his cigars
from burning bank notes while the workers wait.

 

IX. Roving Delia Fish Dance (1869)

 

This telegrammed challenge from Hopkins to Huntington
which meant, decoded: We're laying track at a rate of 4 miles
every day. The U.P. pioneers with their shovels at dawn
aligning the night-laid ties as more men moved behind:
pairs with tongs to lift the rails, position them, drop
them. Position them, drop them. The foreman calling
Down! The fields tamped and graded for their iron crop­
U.P. to C.P., C.P. to U.P.--that must outrace its own growing.
The trains caught in snowstorms. Stalling. The papers
calling the Union Pacific an elongated human slaughterhouse.
The foreman calling out Down! The papers asking Where
and when will they ever be joined? ROVING DELIA FISH
DANCE. We are working as fast as is human- headlong
as slick fish. We are dancing with sledgehammers, tongs.

 

X. The Golden Spike, Promontory, Utah (May 10, 1869)

 

Even then--noise, confusion,
crowding. The reporters
couldn't see. History says
Hewes (a baron of sand dunes)
presented it. 13 ounces approximate
gold. No sledge marks to show
if it was struck at all--if Stanford
missed, as they say. No marks
from removal. Laurel and gold.
As if the railroad had always been
a simple shining. What's needed
are the men and money. A simple
striking, like luck in a pan.
What's needed is a proper survey.
The country laid out like a map
of its future: a whorehouse Bible,
a house united. Judah's
widow (by coincidence,
their anniversary) not invited.
I refused myself to everyone that day.
Those two trains waiting to inch
nose to nose: The No. 119,
The Jupiter. Smash of champagne
(or wine) against the cattle catchers,
strike of blows (or silence
of the silver maul's misses).
Thar spike bristling like an oak
in lightning. The live wires flashing
that one bright signal
coast-unto-coast. It is done.

(Not years from now, but now.)
Cannon fire in Salt Lake City,
D.C., San Francisco. That spike:
a single rail to the sun.

Two Poems by Joseph Millar

Issue 73
Issue 73

Found in Willow Springs 73

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Next to Godliness

I like to sit with the door wide open
listening to March rain gush down on my street wearing a blue hat
from the Outer Banks
and pondering the cleanliness of porn stars,
John Holmes and Traci Lords,
their pale bodies hairless as sea creatures
glistening with K-Y or Astroglide
under the render lights.
Sometimes the storm drains
jam up with leaves
and the blonde neighbor
who lives by herself, whose                                                                        too old to be a porn star,
wades forth in galoshes
and a silver slicker
brandishing a steel rake.
This time of year you can leave
the door open.
The mosquitos haven't come out
though the cherry trees bloom, the red                                                camellias and the pure white pears.
This time of year it's good to swallow
black tea with honey and split the pink
shells of the salted hallucinatory pistachios.                                  Watching the young mother in sweatshirts and jeans,
who is just the right age to be a porn star, bundle her                  children into the green van and drive away through the rain.

 

1972

There's nowhere to go
on Mondays now
like O'Brien's on Lancaster Pike.
With its smoke-stained booths
and cracked naugahyde seats,
its dartboard and single TV
showing Eagles-Redskins
or Pittsburgh-Houston.
The dark wood of its phone booth
where you could call in bets and drafts were a dime,
shots were sixty cents, Four Roses, Calvert, Seagram's.
Guys coming back from Vietnam brought reefer so strong
you had to go outside. Where you could stop and think,
where you could hear the pavement rumble under the buses and trucks, where you could lean against the back fence and watch the oak trees breathe.

“Tobacco Road & A Proper Elegy for My Father” by Gary Copeland Lilley

Issue 73
Issue 73

Found in Willow Springs 73

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A Proper Elegy for My Father

 

He is the black Marlboro man, the oldest son of a one-legged, gold­ tooth rounder. Abandoned homes down the road have fallen into ruin. Everything dies hard here, collapses into the kudzu pulling it down. This is the low-ground, the land of the maroons from the Great Dismal Swamp. Nothing lasts forever. The honeysuckle from the ditch bank and from the woods behind the house is in the air tonight, with the croaking of frogs and the waxing moon. A soft touch of Southern intoxication and I almost don't want to light my cigarette, but I do. This is North Carolina, the tobacco state, even though most farmers nowadays are paid to not grow it. Here, traditions die hard. Out of the fog, plantation ghosts and Jim Crow walk tall, persistent as the oppressive kudzu, as old as the Dixie lost cause. We are born into this, and if we are lucky our fathers prepare us to live in it. Show us how to stand and throw down. Food for the table: they teach us to fish and hunt, to enjoy setting the hook, the recoil of the  shotgun, the striking of the target. The rural cycle of life, everything dies hard here. Except  my father: a scowl and a growl, a piney woods drawl, a drinkero f dirty water, a two-fisted church deacon, a logwood man, a long-haul truck driving Korean War veteran whose face was set so serene in his coffin that it was evident he'd died in his sleep. Unafraid as death approached, he'd said he was going to take a nap. His thick-fingered friends: a gathering of old crows weeping into their handkerchiefs at the wake. I say to myself, look at him, old­ black-man-cool in the blue suit that he will wear forever. Who doesn't want to die like that, nothing coming down the road but eternal rest.

 

Tobacco Road

I.

I am fourteen, two years into my social isolation
after we moved from the grime and blacktop
basketball courts of my New York neighborhood
back to the piney woods and struggling farms of the                       North Carolina coastal plains.
I was the funny talking city boy that every local boy
wanted to fight, until they accepted the fact
that I would fight dirty. I would pick up anything,
and my favorite was a smooth fist-size rock. Nobody
wants to get cracked side the head with that.
I spent summer mornings bare-chested, shirt tied
round my waist, running through the woods
with my dog, and if they were ripe, eating wild grapes
golden in the daps of sun, the vines hanging
from some low branch of a tree; running through
the deer beds, scaring up rabbits, and avoiding
the occasional snake or bear. Every day
my voice changing, back and forth, from a soft lilt
to the scratch inhabiting any song I try to sing.

 

II.

Mr. Luther Grant
was coming through
the field between
our houses doing
his old pirate step.
His youngest brother
had chopped three toes
off his right foot
when he'd put it
on the block and dared
him to swing
the double-bladed axe.
I was peeling
potatoes on the porch
and when he saw
me he spit
the plug of tobacco
from his mouth
and the way
he set his jaw
indicated he had
something bad to say.

 

III.

Queenie killed five of Mr. Luther Grant's chickens,
they say a dog that does that never stops.
She then laid herself among the dead birds,
surprised that they had stopped squawking, a game
of chase and catch where each chicken stopped
trying to fly away into the early afternoon heat.
She'd killed five in the treeless yard before she grew tired
of them and came back across the field, dropping
the last one halfway between the two houses.
I know Mr. Luther Grant had a right reason to be
upset; they say a dog that kills chickens never stops.
She was a city dog, my Uncle Willie's dog,
which he'd placed in my care after he was drafted
and knew he was going to Vietnam. His one­-
bedroom apartment had been Queenie's home.
She slept at the foot of his bed and they went
on daily runs in the park. When Willie gave his dog to me
I'd begged my father not to put her on the chain.
One of the few times I've seen him agree to anything
that wasn't his idea. And now, my dog Queenie
killed five of Luther Grant's egg-laying chickens,
and they say a dog that does that won't ever stop.

 

IV.

My father was drinking in the kitchen while
reading his Bible. He comes out, and greets
Luther Grant in the yard. They purposely
keep their eyes off me but are talking loud
enough to ensure that I can hear them. They are
formally polite. My mother washing dishes, watches
everything through the kitchen window and
looks her sorrow down on me and begins
a hymnal song, We' ll Understand It Better
By and By. Queenie, on the porch panting
in the late afternoon corner of shade, is not allowed
in the house. My mother says all animals belong
outside. She dries her hands with the dish towel,
drapes the soft cloth on the kitchen sink.

 

V.

My mother steps out on the tilting porch,
Let me help you peel those taters.

 

We sit together on the glide and work silently.
A crow lights on the willow near the porch and calls.

 

Queenie perks her ears, waiting to see if it would
come to ground. I am glad that it does not.

 

Luther Grant stops talking, pulls out his chaw, and turns
to leave. My father promises to take care of it.

 

VI.

We are in  the woods and the sun
is shining on the loblolly pines,
twilight, a hint in the near distance.
Not a cloud in the Carolina sky.
We pass a tree of wild golden grapes,
the vines hanging heavy off the low branches.
Flirting birds chatter at the abundance.
My father walks a quick-step ahead
while my dog trots beside me; he has
ordered me to come along, but I refuse
to carry the shovel or the loaded gun.

“The Putting Down of the Mint Julep” by Matthew Gavin Frank

Issue 73
Issue 73

Found in Willow Springs 73

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THIS SORT OF SIPPING has nothing to do with the martini, or anything as astringent as olive, resinous as juniper. This is drink as barrel, as honey, as toothpaste. This is how we satiate our nervous hearts, prepare to kiss our lovers and nephews, as we watch the round, oaken feet of such muscular animals pounding our earth, compacting everything we walk on and take inside us, with hardly a whinny.

Your uncle muddles three leaves of spearmint with two pinches of white sugar into the bottom of a rosy rocks glass, using a miniature Ebonite International bowling pin, the toy he received as a trophy for twenty-five years of "striking" service at the bowling ball factory in Hopkinsville. He twists the essential oils from the mint leaves, the menthol and menthone streaking the sides of the glass, then pours more than a splash of bourbon, less than a splash of water, and mutters into the burly tobacco field of his chest hair, anticipating his first sip of the morning, "Turkey . . . turkey . . . "

Uncle curses the horses on television. Tells them they'll soon be lunchmeat in Lexington. Out the window, you watch the tobacco leaves brighten from what Uncle calls off-white to yellow. You wonder what it is that makes a color off. Uncle swallows the last of his julep and burps, cleanly.

You wonder if there's something wrong with the light here. Those horses on television look reflective. The tobacco leaves shrivel, the air does the curing. The earth here seems to howl, as if pressed of its own juice, as if giving itself to the muddler. It is the light that does the crushing.

Uncle says it is the light that makes things taste good, that releases the flavors in things. He says, in spearmint, is the spear. Before he makes his second drink, he mutters something about the hierarchy of violence. How, here, to puncture a thing is to release its flavor.

He mutters something about fighting back.

Another name for the mint julep: the mint smash.

Uncle talks himself back from his hangover with racehorse deaths. Ruffian, he says, 1975. Sesamoids in her right foreleg snapped. Went on running. Pulverized her bones, tendons. Went on running. Ripped the skin off her fetlock. Ligaments trailing behind like a bridal train. The jockey—Vasquez—desperately trying to pull up. It was the sound of it, he later said. The hoof flapping about. Useless. At the end of it, all this thrashing, this spinning in circles. They tried to cast her, but she kept knocking the cast against her good legs, smashing those, too. All that was left was the gun. Dumb motherfucker went on running, Uncle says, stirring the julep with his good pinky, his fingertip reddening, the mint oozing its oils, heaving like seaweed, and ripped herself open to win. Boy, he says, you should have seen it.

Uncle knows he's supposed to sip his julep from a silver cup, or one made of pewter. He's supposed to hold the cup only from its bottom, to allow the cold bourbon and water, the ice cube or two, to grow frost on the vessel's sides. He knows this even as he blows bubbles into the rocks glass, grasping it desperately with all of his hands, muttering something about the aunt you never met, and how heat is better, heat is better. How he will make his juleps smooth as a bowling ball. How, at bottle's end, he will turn this entire living room into goddamn Pro Shop Gold.

The word julep derives from the Persian golab, meaning rose water. Early versions of the drink saw rose petals, rather than mint leaves, muddled with sugar at the bottom of the glass. On the television, it looks as if Uncle's horse will win, then lose. Either way, he says, stirring cube to cube with the toy bowling pin, I'm drinking a fucking corsage.

He tells you about the man from Louisville who wanted a rose embedded in his bowling ball. You should have seen his sunglasses, Uncle says.

Rhinestones and shit. You're about to say something about all that glitters, about how beautiful it is—the way the light catches his glass, the ice there, the tobacco shadows on the sheetrock, inspiring the mint leaves to lift themselves from their suspension, give themselves to this man's mouth. Uncle breathes deep of the julep. He tells you that glass is too clean, that he misses the smell of plastic.

Uncle knows: there's more folkloric romance inherent in the mint leaf than in the rose. In this way, we are trying to coax a kind of love from the drink whose own name resists it.

The mint julep should be sipped in a dark, cool room, or while stepping carefully down a spiral staircase, and the splash of water should be a splash of limestone water, and the sugar should be loaf sugar, and the ice crush ed, and the mint should be young, and laid over the coffin of ice until muddled, and, before the muddling, the drinker—anticipatory, discerning—should test the softness of the foliage against his, or her, ear.

Here, we listen to the mint for its youthful cooing, before smearing its guts over pewter.

In the compound fracture, so many broken things. The sound of it . . .

The silver cup, Uncle says, should have a copper core to keep the julep frozen and frothy. He takes off his undershirt. The tobacco outside—like his third drink, like his skin, like all things copper, eventually—goes green.

Uncle thumbs through Blood-Horse magazine, then uses it as a coaster. Old Rosebud, he says, 1922. A windy day Couldn't tell if those were the tendons blowing, or some awful head of hair . . .

Uncle says the julep makes the man. The more the mint, the more feminized the drink, but the more the mint, the more likely the drinking man is to be kissed. It's your classic dilemma, he says , as he tries in vain to use the bowling pin as a telescope, staring beyond the television and the silent horses chewing at their bits, staring beyond all things Kentucky—its number-one status in production of non-alfalfa hay, its bluegrass and cardinals and tulip trees and goldenrods, and all things capable of muddling birds and petals and leaves and lawn—factories that produce bowling balls with names like Dyno-Thane and PowerHouse and Hammer, strong things thrown by good Kentucky men to knock other strong things down; balls your uncle gave his fingertips to; balls he made of wood, then rubber, then plastic, then urethane, then reactive urethane, then particle, then epoxy. Balls whose cores should never be muddled from them, balls who, in your uncle's hands, become oddly sentient—the mint predicting the kiss—remembering the original sport, when human skulls were used as pins.

Uncle stirs his julep with the toy, and you think of the stuff inside his head, your head, as eminently crushable.

When he misplaces the toy, he uses the last good fingertip he has left. That pinky. Then: Dark Mirage. 1969. Raced only twice. It was the fetlock joint that went. The cannon bone exploded. The ligaments of the pastern rolling up like a window shade. He looks at his left thumb, the way it hangs there, sips his julep, silently curses the bowling ball. You know he'll soon start speaking of euthanasia, and all death we call good.

It's easy to forget that to muddle means to confuse, to make indistinct. You suppose that crushing something likely confuses it.

Here, in the pulverizing of a thing, is that thing's best expression. We think of our own bodies. How else to let the sweetness out?

And Uncle, like the state that refreshes itself with bourbon aged in wood, with the sort of mint that allows the nation's highest concentration of deer, and turkeys, and coalfields to scatter, to disappear into tobacco fields and the cave behind the pins, pulls the blanket over his head . . .

. . . beyond all things Kentucky—its Mammoth Cave, named, Uncle reminds you, for yet another giant extinct thing.

That Kentucky derives from the Iroquois word for meadowlands is quaint enough. That the Cherokee called the land a dark and bloody ground compels your uncle to lose himself in the muddling.

You know your uncle can only wish he had a bone named for a cannon. What else can he do but crush some skinny leaves until, in his mouth, they are allowed to refresh, until he believes he is strong, or strong enough.

The pastern bone of the horse is the thing in nature most anatomically homologous to the largest bones in the human finger. Uncle probably wishes he had a knuckle left to crack.

Go for Wand. 1990. Leading by a head when her right cannon bone openly fractured. Threw the jockey—fuckin' Randy Romero—then limped across the finish line. Right into the winner's circle. They say she broke her leg just as she passed the flagpole that they buried Ruffian under. How crazy is that? Because she was screaming, they euthanized her right then and there. Right in the fuckin' winner's circle. Because she was screaming, he muted the TV, listened only to his own mouth slurp at the ice cubes as they buried her in the middle of the fuckin' infield, and the wind took a banner bearing her name into the air, and the crowd held—just held—their plastic cups.

The tobacco whips, and that thing you feel in your chest communes with the thing we all feel in our chests, and we imagine the sound of it as a bone breaking at full speed, as pins crashing against pins, as a skull, like pottery, smashing against epoxy, as Uncle hushing himself as he whispers, lustily, to the glass bottom.

In sugar and alcohol and mint is not the toothpaste we expect, but that doesn't mean our clean-seeming mouths are illusory.

Illusory: the putting of a bone back together. The expectation of velocity, of a mane becoming a blur. The mint as an expression of affection. The small sipping. Uncle's voice growing smaller. The handshake he once called the firmest in Christian County. The living room through the glass bottom. All recovery.

Dulcify. 1979. Crushed Pelvis. Mummify. 2005. Foreleg. Lamb Chop. '64 Broken body is all they said Cryptcloser. Ha. 2000. Fell past the wire. Crushed shoulder. White Skies. '55. A bullet horse, they called her. A tobacco eater, because she was bought by some tobacco farmer outside Lexington, I can't remember the name. Compound fracture. Right hind cannon bone. Couldn't get to the volume fast enough. Who could predict these things?

Anyhow, you should have heard the ripping sound That's the important thing . . .

Here, like the sip before the swallow, the ripping precedes the scream.

We inherit this sweetness into our mouths, our bodies onto these couches. We inherit these shadows on the wall, the wind that allows them movement. We stay inside with our juleps and curse the weather, though there's not a cloud in the sky.

. . . George Washington. 2007 Ankle. Crushed ankle.

We close our eyes. We sleep it off. We have crushed things inside us. We have things inside us waiting to be crushed. We dream of horses. We name them after forefathers. We can't tell if they're cheering or screaming. So, we keep running. In this kind of wind, bullet can mean so many things. In this kind, we are the things we try to outrun.

“Harvesting Crows” by Doris Lynch

Issue 74
Issue 74

Found in Willow Springs 74

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Only women can
snag them and only females
wearing red. Erroneously,
many believe that you must
prove yourself first by flying
off firehouse roofs. Also,
clearly untrue--the need to wait
'til rain mud-pocks the fields.

Our men don't really eat them,
merely pretend to broil and barbecue
them on fancy rotisseries
and stone-arched fireplaces.
If you glance sideways
you will notice your husbands and fiances
analyzing the crows' purple
wings, or painting fake mustaches
with oil from their dead black chests.

No truth exists to the rumor that politicians
ingest them in order to duplicate
the obnoxious rumble in their throats.
To capture Corvus, dusk is best.
That's when oaks and sycamores levitate
and teenage girls--surely virgins--leap onto
the lower branches and climb skyward,
nabbing several in their roosts
before the rest fly away.

Oddly, the more that you capture
and kill them, the bigger the flock will be
bombasting your window each morning.
To whiten the black of your sins, you must
sing them to silence. Later after you've lulled them
to sleep, you can cradle them; feel their wild beating
hearts in the palm of your remaining hand.

“Bandana” by Tom Howard

Issue 74
Issue 74

Found in Willow Springs 74

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OVER DINNER ONE NIGHT I told my dad about the League of Scorpions, just to break up the deathly silence. I told him how the League was a kind of school club, except instead of doing activities and sports and charitable things, the boys in the club mostly punched kids and wore black bandanas and inspired dread. Told him how the leader of the Scorpions, Tripp Nolan, had a tattoo of a scorpion killing a dragon that was eating a shark. My dad said sounds like they're top dogs in the school and I said yeah that's the case. He said tell me more about the black bandanas and I admitted they were fierce impressive. He said why aren't you in the League of Scorpions and I said they only take one new kid each year, and he said sorry I didn't realize you were so unexceptional and lacking in ambition. That didn't make me feel great, so I said you have to beat someone up just to get an application, and I never even threw a punch before. He said you'd better stop talking now because my love for you is diminishing. Said he was glad my brother Quinn was dead so Quinn didn't have to hear me make that comment about how I'd never thrown a punch before. Quinn killed a dozen Talibans with his bare hands before they strapped an IED to his head and blew him all over Kandahar. My dad said Tripp Nolan could probably kill a dozen Talibans with his bare hands too, sounds like. He said maybe you should focus less on books and more on being worthy of the League of Scorpions. Then he went to his bedroom and turned out the lights and listened to Vic Damone records, which was the only thing that gave peace to his grieving heart now that Quinn was dead and my mother had run off with the bastard Kit Crawford, our former exterminator.

I went to school thinking about who I could beat up without repercussions, main problem being that I didn't hate anybody too much, other than maybe Gary Compton. Gary Compton was already six feet tall in the seventh grade and had to shave twice a day. He was skinny and colorless and gangly like a skeleton, and he had black eyes that shone like demonic marbles. When Gary slapped you or punched you, which was often, he'd look at you with such hatred that you'd start apologizing because you'd think there's no way anyone could look at someone else with that much venom without a god damn reason. After he punched you, Gary would wait a second and then say, "You're a dumb abortion baby." Which didn't make any sense, but it made you feel bad. I wouldn't have minded punching Gary Compton. But Gary was second in command of the League of Scorpions.

I settled on Wesley Bloom. Wesley was small and thoughtful and delicate looking. His mom got her hair caught in the mixer blade while working at the salsa plant in Bridgeport, and after she'd been mixed pretty well Wesley's dad jumped in after her, which most people considered more a suicide than a rescue attempt. After that, Wesley moved in with his grandmother who was blind and half-deranged, and started school at Richfield where he was unpopular because he wore glasses and had a wall-eye and everybody said Wesley was a gay prince's name. Despite all that, Wesley didn't seem bitter. He made a point of being nice to kids who were even weirder and less popular. He gave half his lunch away to the Posner twins, whose lunches were regularly stolen by Gary Compton as punishment for them living in a houseboat and being albinos. Wesley just seemed happy to still be alive and part of the world, maybe because he knew that at any moment he or anyone else could fall into a salsa mixer. He spent most of his lunch hours by himself at a picnic bench in the school courtyard, eating the raisins that were left over from his lunch after the Posner twins received their distribution. He sat and ate and sometimes read a comic book or put his head on the table and watched bugs crawl through the grass around his feet. My point is that he was probably the sweetest and least antagonistic person I knew. He forgave everybody for everything. That's why I decided he was the one I should beat up.

I waited at lunchtime until I saw Tripp and Gary Compton and Teddy Nantz walk into the courtyard, wearing their bandanas. When Wesley walked past me with his raisins and carton of milk, I was nervous, but also angry. I hated Wesley's glasses and his wall-eye and his sad little box of raisins, and the more I looked at him the more I hated him. I hated how defenseless he looked more than anything else. It ended up being pretty easy to sock him in the gut. Raisins flew everywhere ans Wesley doubled over and fell to the ground. When I tried to get out of the way, I accidentally stepped on his glasses. I felt a little bad about that so I jumped off right away, but I landed on his milk carton and sprayed milk all over his face while he clutched his stomach. I looked around and Tripp Nolan gave me the nod. Everybody else just laughed at Wesley who had been dumb enough to be punched in the stomach and have his glasses broken.

Wesley rolled onto his back and didn't move. I said just get up now, kind of whispering to him, but he didn't even look at me. That made me angry, too. Him just laying there, not even bothering to wipe the milk off his face. My dad would've been furious if he'd seen that. So I kicked him one more time because I was so full of hate.

Next day I opened my locker and there was a note inside: "Nice job with the waley. Retorn applecation ASAP." The application asked for my name and social security number, and for me to list the top seven most terrible things I'd ever done.

"Well, what are you waiting for," my dad said when I showed him the application. I'd already described the scene in the courtyard, with the raisins flying everywhere. "Sounds like this Bloom had it coming," he said. "Quinn's ghost is probably somewhat less mortified by you being a blood relation today."

I said thanks but was having misgivings. Wesley hadn't shown up for school and I'd had nightmares all night long. I knew better than to admit this fact. Instead, I made up some things for the application that I thought would impress Tripp Nolan, mostly involving bitterness and ethnic hatred, and I slipped the note into Tripp's locker vent the next morning. Wesley still hadn't come to school. By the end of the day there was a black bandana waiting in my locker.

My dad wanted to celebrate, so he told me to wear the bandana and drove me out to the field behind our old house, which we'd had to sell due to hard times etc. after the divorce. Now the bastard Kit Crawford lived in the house with my mother. My dad shot beer bottles off tree stumps for half an hour until Kit came down from the house and said he was going to call the cops this time for sure, while my mom stood at the top of the hill holding her new baby, the Demon Bastard. I waved but I don't think she saw me. My dad shook his fist at Kit and we got in the car and drove away. Even so, he was in pretty good spirits. He said now that I was a member of the League of Scorpions he could stop referring to me as the one who should've died. I said I appreciated that. He turned on Vic Damone and I tried not to think about the squishy sound Wesley's stomach had made when I punched him.

My first week as a Scorpion was quiet. We met afternoons in Tripp's garage and he flipped through girlie magazines and talked about people who deserved grievous punishment. This included the President of the United States and lefthanders and the Principal of Richfield and the gay couple who owned The Guided Swan taproom and the blacks and a lot of girls he knew and most people named Todd or Jayson with a Y. I just listened. Sometimes I stared at the bandana and reminded myself how important it was. I imagined Quinn standing there with his arms folded over his chest, his clothes covered in Taliban guts, smiling at me. He said, "Someday you might grow up and kill people with your bare hands, too." Then his head blew up again and I flinched, and the others stopped what they were doing to stare at me. I tried to explain about Quinn killing a dozen Talibans and getting blown up over in Kandahar, and mentioned seeing him there in front of me from time to time. Gary Compton punched me in the shoulder and called me a weird doofus pussy. Tripp said he liked that I hallucinated, that it gave me character. Gary said whatever. Tripp said maybe Gary could take a few lessons in being a badass from the weird doofus pussy,since the roomer was Wesley Bloom was out of school because he'd overdosed and tried to commit suicide. Meanwhile, Quinn's head was back together, but he kept reaching around behind him to check for explosives. I closed my eyes and ignored him.

A week went by and I went to see Wesley at his house. His grandmother answered the door and I said I was Wesley's friend and she said that was the dumbest thing she'd ever heard, but she told me the was probably at the dump if I wanted to see him. I asked if she needed some help since she was blind and she said fuck off. So I went out to the dump and found Wesley sitting on an old broken console television, holding a gun to his head.

"What the hell are you doing," I said.

"I'm thinking its better this way," Wesley said.

"It's ass-stupid," I said.

"I'm tired," he said. "Go away."

That would have been the perfect time for me to apologize for beating him up in front of everybody. Or to say that if he could handle his mom and dad falling into the salsa mixer and having a blind grandmother who talked like a pirate then he should be able to handle something like this. Instead, I felt all this anger well up in me. I said, "You wall-eyed coward. Nobody cares if you're tired. You want to go out like that? You think people talk about you now, wait till they hear you couldn't handle things and blew your own idiot head off."

Wesley lowered the gun and dropped his head and said yeah, that's probably true, and then he lifted the gun and shot me in the chest.

My body was still falling when I slipped free from myself. It felt good to be out of it, like shrugging off the snowsuit my mom used to make me wear on snow days. I wasn't angry or worried about anything anymore. I thought maybe I'd go see the world, especially the Eiffel Tower and the Great Wall of China and the aurora borealis. I'd always wanted to see the borealis. I figured I didn't I didn't have much time before I was sent to hell for being a hateful son of a bitch and turning Wesley into a child murderer.

Then I looked down,  and it was a sad little scene to behold. Broken appliances and and scraps of lumber and tile everywhere, the ground littered with candy wrappers and raisin boxes and other trash. And me lying dead with a bloody hole in my chest and a dumb look on my face, with Wesley standing over me with a gun.

He stayed like that for a bit, frozen. Then he stood up straight and put the gun to his head, and I yelled out don't you dare blow your brains out. But if he blew out his brains I was responsible.

He looked up and spotted my celestial form with his good good eye. "You're gonna haunt me till the end of my days then."

"I'm not gonna haunt you," I said. "I just need to make sure you don't kill yourself. My soul's filthy enough."

Wesley nodded and sighed. "Well, I'm just going to jail then anyway."

"They'll put you in juvenile," I argued.

"I imagined I'll get raped there," he said. Not so much complaining as just reporting a fact. "After a while I'll develop some weird personality disorders I guess. I'll be fine medicated most of the time so I don't injure myself or others. Then when I get out I'll be a homeless person and eat garbage and live under a bridge."

"You're not going to eat garbage and live under a bridge," I yelled.

"Well do you have to expect the worst?" Then I thought about it a bit more. I lowered my voice ans said, "Never mind. That is probably what'll happen."

"It's okay," Wesley said. "I'm going to call the police now. Thanks for not letting me kills myself I guess."

But I was already thinking. On the one hand he was a murderer, sure. But on the other hand I'd provoked him. I didn't see how it was going to make things any better for anyone by having Wesley get raped in juvenile and then end up eating garbage and living a bridge.

"You'll have to bury me," I said.

It took some time convincing him that this was the best solution. It also took me threatening to haunt him mercilessly of he didn't follow my instructions. I'm not proud of that. But eventually he gave in. Took most of the afternoon to dig the hole. When it was done and he'd covered my body up, I had him push an old refrigerator over to hide the grave site.

It was getting dark by then. We stood together in front of the refrigerator and Wesley said a couple of nice words. He said he was sorry for stealing the lives of all my potential children and grandchildren, which hadn't occurred to me until he said it. I told him it was okay and they would probably be monsters anyway.

"Now what," he said.

"Lay low," I said. "People will think I ran away. Eventually they'll forget about me and you can go on with your life and be happy."

"As a murderer," he said.

"It's best if you don't keep saying that," I said. I told him to go home and get some sleep. Things would make sense in the morning.

Once he was gone, I hung out for a while at the dump. Mournful cries rose from the graveyard on the other side of the hill. I walked over and stood behind the fence listening to the dead. They were a regretful bunch, and there was considerable moaning. The town librarian, who drove into a like with her three girls a few years back, came over and said I was welcome to join in the morning if I wanted to, even though I wasn't buried on consecrated ground. I said I appreciated that but needed to think. I told her I was trying to redeem myself a little so my soul wasn't so rotten. She said that always works out well, then rolled her eyes and walked away ringing her hands.

I went home and snuck into my house and spent the night in my room. But I didn't sleep. My dad was up the whole night pacing, which made me feel guilty. Every now and then he looked in my room and I waved a little, but he didn't see me and even if he had, I thought seeing me waving like that would've been creepy, so I stopped. I had enough to worry about with Wesley. I needed a plan to salvage his soul, or at least to keep him from getting raped and developing weird personality disorders.

In the morning I found him on his way to school. "Just don't be anxious," I said. "Everything's going to be fine."

"I'm thinking it isn't," he said. "Plus, I feel like it's bad that I can see you. Like it means I'm a lunatic and I'm likely to shoot up the school in the near future."

I said that was the exact wrong way to think. I said we were a team. I'd help him put his life back together and become happy, and he'd help me not have such a filthy soul. First thing, I told him, was to deal with the rumors in school that he'd tried to kill himself. I suggested he tell people he was recuperating all week from a rattlesnake bite.

"Or I could just tell the truth," he said quietly. "Maybe people would be compassionate if I just say I'd had enough and didn't know what else to do."

I said as his spirit guardian I had to strongly advice against that.

We argued all the way to school, and right away when we walked inside kids started calling him names. Only instead of Wall-Eye and Salsa Boy they called him Prince Valium and said he wasn't even good at killing himself. Wesley went to his locker and didn't say anything. Then Gary Compton showed up wearing his bandana, overflowing with rage, as per usual. Other kids came over to watch. Gary pinned Wesley against the locker and said only cowards took pills to kill themselves, and he asked why Wesley was so damn weak and pitiful.

Wesley said he didn't know why. He said he missed his mom and dad and couldn't help the way his eye looked. Said he wished the world was different, and that other kids liked him or at least left him alone to find whatever happiness he could find. Said he tried to kill himself because nothing made sense anymore and he couldn't see things getting any better. And then, finally, he asked Gary Compton for mercy.

Nobody said a word. You could tell Gary was thinking, even while he was holding Wesley up against the locker. You could tell he knew this was a moment of some importance. I really wished something good would happen for a change. I tried to emanate powerful waves of kindness toward Gary, hoping he'd see the opportunity here. I thought it could be like one of those movies where the bully realizes how rotten he's been, and it turns out he's only rotten because he's secretly sad and miserable and a welfare kid. Then he and Wesley could become friends and everybody would learn a valuable lesson.

"Scorpions show no mercy," Gary said.

He punched Wesley four times in the gut and Wesley cried out that really he'd been bitten by a rattlesnake and was recuperating all week. The kids laughed and Gary punched him again and took his glasses and stuffed him in the locker and called him a dumb abortion baby. Everybody cheered, and Gary stalked away full of rage.

When the hallway was clear, I stood next to the locker and asked Wesley how he was doing. He didn't answer. I asked if he hated me and he finally said no, he didn't. But I knew he did. He'd never hated before, but he hated me. And I knew that hate would bloom in his soul.

That night I went home and found Quinn sitting on the floor in my bedroom, fieldstripping his rifle.

"I think I'm making a mess of things," I told him.

"What'd you expect?" He said.

"Thanks," I said. How's Dad doing?"

"He went up to see Kit Crawford today. Accused him and mom of kidnapping you, then tried to jump Kit. Got knocked around pretty bad and Kit put a restraining order on him." He finished with the rifle and set it down. His hands started shaking right away. Then he looked up as if he'd just remembered I was in the room. He said, "You want a hug or something?"

"Appreciate it," I said, "but no thanks."

"We could go see the borealis. Before things get worse."

"Things aren't getting worse," I said. "I'm going to fix this." But he'd already forgotten me and was back at work on his rifle.

Wesley was smiling the next morning when I saw him. A weirdo smile, but still a smile. "I know what to do," he said. He said if he became a member of the League of Scorpions all his problems would go away. No one would lay a finger on him again, including Gary Compton. Tripp Nolan would make sure of that. And he'd have a black bandana to boot.

"This idea," I said, "is an abomination."

"Do you have a better one?"

"You could run away," I said. "You could become a train hobo and travel around the country playing your harmonica." He said he didn't play the harmonica and I said he was making it difficult for me to save his soul. I pointed out that everything terrible had happened as a result of me wanting to join the League of Scorpions. I asked who the hell he was planning to beat up. Someone with even more tragedy in his life? A paraplegic maybe? I said I heard Will Spinner's brother didn't have any bones in his legs. Maybe Wesley could knock over his wheelchair. I said more of the same, pretty furious.

Wesley waited until I was done. Then he said, "I was thinking about Gary Compton."

I said I didn't realize Wesley had a sense of humor. But he said he had a plan, and worst case was that the plan backfired and he'd be killed. I said that was a terrible worst case, and the whole point of talking about the worst case is that it's not supposed to be all that bad.

When Gary arrived at school, he headed straight to Wesley again. Lifted him up, punched him in the gut, and stuffed him in the locker in the locker to another round of cheers. But when kids started walking away, Wesley called out to Gary through the locker vent and asked him if he wanted to make five thousand dollars.

I shook my head and groaned.

Gary waited until the hallway was clear and then he opened the locker. He said if this was a game he'd have to do something considerably more horrible to him, as per the Scorpion code of honor. Wesley said it was no game. He told Gary he had some insurance money left over from the salsa tragedy. All Gary had to do, he said, was let Wesley knock him down in the courtyard at lunch. Gary said if Wesley thought he was getting into the League of Scorpions , then he, Wesley, was a moron in addition to being a wall-eyed orphan. Wesley said no, he didn't expect that. But at least other kids would leave him alone then. Gary said he'd think about it. Said he'd give Wesley a signal if he was going to do it.

After Gary left, I said it was too risky. I was skeptical that Gary would settle for five thousand if he thought there was more insurance money waiting for him.

"Won't matter," Wesley said. "I don't even have five thousand."

I said I'd stop haunting him if he reconsidered immediately. He ignored me. Lunchtime came around and he went to the courtyard and handed the Posner twins their sandwich halves and their fruit. He ate his raisins and sat quietly under a tree. When the Scorpions showed up, he got to his feet. Gary looked over at him and nodded, and then he and the other Scorpions walked away to practice their hateful glaring. I said there's still time not to do this. But Wesley walked straight over to Gary and shoved him from behind as hard as he could, which wasn’t particularly hard.

Gary didn’t fall down. He barely moved. He turned to face Wesley and his marble eyes burned. “I changed my mind,” he said, and he punched Wesley in the stomach harder than I ever saw anyone punch. Only, when the punch landed it didn’t make the weird squishy sound I expected, and Gary’s fist bounced off as if he’d punched a brick wall. He clutched his hand and howled, and fell to the ground. Kids came over to watch as Gary curled up and held his busted hand against his chest and cried like a baby. The hand was already swelling something awful.

Tripp leaned down and said he completely understood that Gary was in a significant amount of pain, but he was going to have to take Gary’s bandana now, no hard feelings. Just that a crying Scorpion was unlikely to inspire dread. Then he handed the bandana to Wesley without a word.

Back at Wesley’s locker, when he was putting away the tile he'd stuffed inside his shirt before lunch, I said I was disappointed. I said this was turning into a tragedy and it didn’t have to be like that. He said things don’t always work out the way we want them to, like, for instance you don’t want your mom and dad to fall into a salsa mixer but it happens anyway. Then he tied the bandana around his head and turned away from me.

Later, I went to Gary Compton’s house to see what he was planning.  I thought maybe I could at least give Wesley advance warning. The house was gray and dirty on the outside, and I figured it would be a mess on the inside too. Figured he'd have parents who screamed at each other and called Gary names, like Shit-for-Brains. Probably it was always like that, since he was little. Probably when he came home from kindergarten with a macaroni sculpture, his dad tossed it in the garbage and said thanks for ruining our dinner, Shit-For-Brains. I felt bad about that, but Gary was still a monster.  Just because his dad threw away his macaroni sculpture and called him Shit-For-Brains didn’t mean he could punch kids and call them abortion babies and cause so much fear and dread.

I stepped inside, and it was even filthier than I expected. Garbage covered the living room floor, but in the middle of the garbage was a young kid I figured was Gary’s brother. He was hugging his legs and watching a cartoon with no sound. I heard voices down the hallway so I went to investigate, and found Gary in the back bedroom standing next to a hospital bed. One of his hands was bandaged and he was using the other to wash his mom’s arms and legs with a sponge. When he was done, he checked the levels on her oxygen tank and her morphine drip. He asked her if she needed anything. She said she needed a new liver. She asked if he was trying to poison her and he said no. She asked what day it was and he told her, and then she asked what year it was and he told her that too. She apologized for asking if he was trying to poison her, and he said that’s okay. She asked if it would be okay if she slept for the rest of the day, and he said yes. He came out of the room and closed the door behind him, then went to the kitchen and washed a few dishes with his good hand. He microwaved a TV dinner, and while it cooked he cleared a space in the garbage for his brother. He set down the TV dinner and told his brother he had to run some errands, but he'd be back and maybe they'd play Crazy Eights. Then he stepped outside and the rage came back as he stormed towards the Bloom house.

Wesley was at the dump, sitting on the refrigerator that was covering my grave. The gun was on the ground a few feet away.

“You need to run,” I said. "Your grandmother will tell him you're here."

“Scorpions don’t run,” he said, and he adjusted his bandana.

“You’re not a scorpion!” I yelled. “You’re a sweet kid. Beneath the murderer, I mean.”

“Not anymore,” he said.

Gary showed up shortly thereafter. Brimming with rage. Hatred flowed out of him, and for the first time I realized there was nothing I could do. Not for Wesley, not for Gary, not for anyone.  All I’d done was make things worse.

“There was never any five thousand dollars, was there?” he said.

Wesley shook his head. “You broke your promise anyway.”

“I know,” Gary said. “And I’m sorry about that. But at this point I still have to kill you.”

"I understand that," Wesley said.

Gary picked up the gun from the ground and pointed it at Wesley's chest. I put my head in my hands and closed my eyes.

The gun went off. When I opened my eyes I expected to see Wesley’s ghost. But Wesley was still on top of the refrigerator. He was looking down at Gary's body. The gun had backfired, or else Wesley had jammed it. Either way, most of Gary's face was gone and he wasn't moving.

Gary’s ghost rose up and looked around, dazed.

So I had to tell Wesley about Gary’s mom and about the sponge baths and the the morphine drip, and about Gary's little brother sitting at home in a pile of garbage and bout Crazy Eights. I said now there was nobody to take care of them.

"That means it’s your responsibility,” Gary said.

Wesley’s face went gray, and he said, “I guess that’s true.”  He turned to me and admitted that he was beginning to hate me now.

He dug another hole for Gary's body as the rain started to fall. Gary and I tried to be encouraging. Wesley tipped the refrigerator onto its side so it would cover both graves, but the refrigerator got stuck in the mud and wouldn't move. By then it was getting dark and Wesley had to go take care of Gary's mom and play Crazy Eights with his little brother before putting him to bed.

Gary told Wesley he'd check back in from time to time, but for now he just wanted to hang out someplace else and empty all hatred from his soul.

I went home and curled up on the bed and listened to the thunder, while Quinn sat at the foot of the bed and played the harmonica. He wasn't any good, but I didn't mind. Every now and then my dad walked in wearing my bandana, eyes hallowed and bruised from the beating he'd taken from Kit Crawford.

In the morning the phone rang. Quinn and I listened in. One of my dad's drinking buddies said he heard the rains had dredged up our two bodies at the dump. The gun was nearby too, he said, hidden under a pile of empty raisin boxes. I closed my eyes and hoped my dad wouldn't remember.

But he did. "Bloom," he said.

He hung up the phone and slipped the bandana back on his head. Then went to get his gun. Quinn shook his head and said we should really just skip town at this point and see the borealis.

Instead, we rode in the car with my dad to Wesley's house.

“There’s still time for this not to end horribly,” I said.

“As horribly,” Quinn corrected.  “And he can’t hear you.”

We’d have comical adventures together, and daring escapes, and moments of sublime, homely grace. Wesley said that really did sound good, especially the grace part.  Then he walked outside and went to face my dad, holding his hands out to his sides.

My dad got out of the car and raised his gun. His hands were shaking. He said I've got you now, you coward. You can't run from me.

Wesley said I know. He said I'm ready.

They met in the middle of the yard. My dad pointed the gun at Wesley's head. Quinn stood next to me and put his hand on my shoulder. Rain was falling and I thought this was it, this would bring about the ruin of everyone I knew.

Wesley closed his eyes, and waited for the end.

But his head wasn't blown off. My dad dropped to his knees on the wet grass. The gun fell from his hands, and his shoulders trembled. I'd never seen him look so old. Rain splattered his bald head, and he stared down at the earth and sobbed. Oh, my son, he said, my son, what have I done to you. What have I done? The words seeped into the wet ground. Wesley stepped forward and said no, I was the one who killed your son and I'm the one that deserves to be punished. My dad shook his head. Wesley said I just want to be good again, the way I used to be. My dad cried out that he wished he could be good again, too.

Quinn and I stood there, still and silent in the rain.

Sirens sounded, far off. Wesley said at last he had to go. Said he'd call the police and turn himself in before the end of the day. My dad sat on the grass and rocked like a child, and the rain fell harder.

Wesley cleaned up Gary's house the best he could. He looked in on Gary's mom and said goodbye, and she said thanks and said she'd miss his wall-eye. He sat on the living room floor and Gary's brother leaned his head on Wesley's shoulder, and they watched silent cartoons as the last of the daylight slipped away.

I didn't say goodbye. The two of them looked nice sitting together on the floor and I didn't want to bother them. I walked outside with Quinn and he said you sure you're ready, and I said I guess I was. And then we were gone, and everything fell away below us.

And even though I'd made a mess of things, I ached for what I'd lost.

Quinn knew the way. We went north until we couldn't go farther. Overhead, the night sky shimmered, ghost-like, full of color.

Gary Compton was already there, sitting with his head tilted back so he could stare up at the lights. I was pretty tired by then, and ready to sleep. I walked over and sat next to Gary. He looked like he'd been crying a little. I didn't say anything, just watched along with him.

"I never knew," he said. "How beautiful it was."

And I said I know, I know, I know.

Four Poems by Devin Becker

Willow Springs 76
Issue 87

Found in Willow Springs 76

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Ben Lerner

 

Ben, my high school best friend, Ben,

is nothing like you except

you look

very much like brothers.

 

You are both Midwestern too,

as I am, (as everyone is)

so I bet,

Ben,

 

you grew up with the same excitement

about the new Applebee's and other

late 20th century upheavals in

monetary and food cultures.

 

Ain't it all the same, Ben,

aren't we all

like all

like each other

 

like

one another      like

one, and the simulacrum of one,

which is two,

 

if you believe in the Other,

which you do, Ben,

you do, I know you--

or I don't, really,

 

I just read you but

I know people who

do know you like Ed

& Elizabeth and Erika.

 

They say you're smart, Ben,

and you are,

it's obvious--

your books are like A+ papers,

 

they won't give a red pen

grip--so

I have trouble

continuing

 

to address you

in your absence

(fearing you'll think this

stupid)

 

but I keep

doing it because

doing it

as both our childhoods taught us

 

is really, really important.

Supremely so.

It was almost our first lesson,

save for our first

 

first lesson, which was:

Envy all the fruits

of your neighbors,

and didn't your backyard

 

back up to a golf course

and didn't you hit the errant balls

back at the yuppies

who sliced them

 

& who were not

yuppies

you realized later

(when you learned how

 

culturally irrelevant

your hometown really was)

but just people

like you

 

who had no hunger

that wasn't fed to them

years before their weekly

45-minute waits

 

with the buzzer

that lights up red and

shakes when your table's ready--

 

We grew up with it all

coming to fruition, Ben--

they quantified and quaffable

and made it profitable,

 

their logic

becoming so

essential, so undeniable

that now

 

we hardly question

why the buzzing

makes us      (each time!)

feel as if we've won something.

 

Koan Head

 

I'm trying

what I can to learn

to unthink, Ben--

 

Not to

not think

(mind you)

rather

to understand

the reason

I say

 

I think

 

but not

I beat my heart.

 

Lerner

 

Growing up, we cut down

everyone,      Ben

we exhausted

into hilarity      the material

of our failures

 

And like any sort of

love

this marked us      inferior

to the point that

now  we only know

we're friends with someone if

each of us can say      something

so accurate about the other

it devastates, emotionally

but stays funny.

And this is

good laughter sometimes (sometimes

even restorative)                 but it catches up to you, Ben

turns inward when you're older and your

guy friends dry up

and you have                 adult friends,                 which are worse.

 

Once established, our childhood defense/social systems

need to feed on something and this is you,

Ben, becomes you,      Ben,

which prompts that famous,       poetic discovery:

I is an other

and he's a dick

and he hates you

which seems wrong in this century,         when all the other others are all

like:

Like!               I Like it!         and       Look!          I like it!

like it was never cool to dislike everything,        which we all know it was.

 

I wish

I'd more enthusiasm generally,     more joy,

and maybe that will come, Ben, and maybe

I will take it easy       and vice versa:

maybe I and I we'll both                  follow each other,

read each other's walls as we text each other.

Eat each other's feeds.

 

10:05

 

Everything's been

made fun of

already,

Ben; been

 

mad funny.

What's left

but to praise everything,

anything,

 

post it all

so it

means something;

fix it all in bits.

 

I mean

what am I even

doing here

typing

 

when I could be

pasting this

into the internet,

embedding my picture--

 

Oh but who am I

to grimace

at this newest messaging.

 

“North Jutland Blues” by Wes Trexler

Willow Springs Issue 76 cover shows a rustic painted wall in yellows and browns.
Willow Springs 76

Found in Willow Springs 76

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I SEE MYSELF next to a freeway onramp, leaning against a guardrail in Denmark. I don't just see myself-it's one of those cinematic crane shots that starts way off in the distance among the miles of marshland, then pulls in close to reveal green, treeless hillsides tumbling up to a superhighway. There I am, twenty years old, undernourished, poorly dressed, being whipped by a nasty North Sea wind. Or it's more like an After School Special, a cautionary tale of excess and spiritual decline. Maybe a public service announcement that shows me, passed out, leaning against a signpost, clutching a faux-leather patchwork backpack, not a sporty one, not a school bag, but the kind of thing a fifty-year­ old woman would take to the beach. An x-ray freeze-frame shot shows the contents: Hershey Bar-sized blocks of hash, and a sack of sinister looking red-and-white horse-pill capsules. A voiceover says,  If  your son or daughter is hitchhiking across North Jutland with a sock full of pills like these... it may be a sign of serious problems with drugs or alcohol.

It's a movie, not a flick, nothing cheap. It's gritty and shaky, a student project. I would call it noirish but I don't think that word means anything. I'm in Aalborg at the university, living in the basement of the international student dorm, the Collegium, in a windowless corner crowded with boxes and bric-a-brac, a TV room with worn­ out couches. I wait until everyone goes to bed, then eat leftovers in the communal kitchen, bathe in the sink, crash on a couch. Mostly, I try to stay warm, wrecking myself with sentimental thoughts of that girl back in Florida.

Lonesome scene, I know, but I have this racket that keeps me going. Once a week I collect money from the heads in the dorm, the Italian guy, two phony American chicks, a biology major from France, then I hitchhike to Copenhagen and score whatever I can, buying my own provisions with the extra cash.

Klaus comes up with the plan. He's the other protagonist, the foil-a frizzy-haired Dane, named after an ugly German horse. His parents probably thought, Well, he's not a pretty baby; maybe he'll grow up to be strong.

He tells me about Christiania, the free town.

"It's free because you can do anything you want there, except take photographs."

A visual collage of Christiania shows me dazed and disoriented, walking through an urban park, a faded utopia in Technicolor, surrounded by squat apartments and warehouses, a few cafes, and, in the center, an open-air drug bazaar-rows of shoddily built plywood booths, all filled to choking with a variety of grass and hash and mushrooms, little brown ones from Iceland, cubensis raised in Holland, and of course, those lecherous red-and-white capsules.

I'm a mouse in a pop bottle.

The soundtrack is a live Kraftwerk bootleg, Berlin, 1986, boom... boom-chick.

I buy sixty-five capsules from a longhaired Eskimo fox. She winks and says, "Have a nice trip." But I'm out of money, and it's too late to start thumbing, so I hangout in the only all night bar in Christiania, the Woodstock Cafe, being abused and harassed by a loaded Greenlander; he's toothless and blind from cheap Danish beer: Tuborg in a can, "For Export Only."

The Woodstock is warm and crowded and I lean back on a rough­ hewn bench that's at least two hundred yearsold. By 2 a.m., large women are swaying belligerently by themselves, nodding off, being dragged by their collars across the barroom floor and out into the cold. I write a line in a spiral notebook: Don't fall asleep.

Later I meet a hippie, a white-dreaded Dane with a backpack full of dumpster bananas. My kind of guy. I ask him,"You know anywhere free to sleep?" He looks off into the ether considering, like it's a philosophical issue. Finally he responds in the affirmative and we're off to his place.

We walk to a shipyard warehouse down by the canals. Naval schematics and ship blueprints line the walls. He camps out in a side room. It's not even his squat but a practice room for a jazz band. I lie between a stand-up bass and the drum kit, the walls covered with this guy's canvases, scary psychedelic overdose images scrawled in menstrual hues. He tells me he was on welfare for seven years trying to make it as an artist; now he's off the dole, following this nobler path. We eat bananas and hairy carrots, smoke some joints, Danish style, fat tobacco cones laced with brown commercial-grade hash.

By the next scene I'm in the bathroom of a moving train, sitting on the sink trying to write in the notebook. Another bad pop song, it starts, Whats the difference between lonely and Lonesome... The ticket taker knocks and peeks in. No, I don't speak Danish. No, I don't have a ticket. Yes, I will gladly get off at the next stop. I cross the station, hop on the next train going north. After a few hours, my dignity is bruised and I'm forced back onto the road. I make it to the outskirts of Hobro, get let off on a dead exit. I walk to the onramp, stick out  my thumb, and go right to sleep. Boom boom-chick.

Actually, maybe it's not like that, not an art-house movie, but a foreign film, sort of surrealistic and pointless, with lots of subtitles and gratuitous nudity, only there is no nudity because I'm too strung out to get any action. So I stay up at night smoking hash out of homemade bamboo pipes, writing bad lyrics and pseudo-philosophy in  the dorm basement. In the background, Miles Davis plays, later Miles, experimental synth-jazz with weird overdubbed monologues.

Before sunrise I walk out onto wet Aalborg streets, listening to a Walkman, trawling for bikes. Sometimes I find them unlocked in a bike rack, or they've been stolen before and dumped in the hedges, or more often they're broken down and abandoned, so I collect them. I keep an eye out in front of super markets, looking for the ones that are always there. I pry apart their silly wheel locks and ride off on two busted tires, bring them all back to the International Collegium.

We'll call this one, The Bicycle Thief.

I collect about ten bikes, a half dozen wheels, and three partial chassis. Klaus and I split a gram of shitty danish speed, and he watches me plant each piece in the wind berm in front of the dorm. I partially bury them, some with the wheels down, some with the wheels up so you can turn the pedals, watch them spin, a couple doing wheelies, all in a line across the top of the little manmade hill. At three in the morning, Klaus pulls some speakers through the front door and blasts a Wagner suite at very unsubtle volumes. "Perfect," he says, then sits on a picnic table to take in my performance art.

When I'm done I ask him, "What do you think?"

He says, "Looks just like a sea monster."

"Supposed to be a pod of dolphins."

"That too," he says.

I sit beside him and check out my creation. There's a tight close-up on my face, then it gets all hazy and dissolves into a flashback scene.

It's black and white, a herky-jerky silent film motif, Chaplinesque.

Midwinter snow, like glass bullets, lashes me as I get off a train and walk into the deserted predawn streets of Aalborg for the first time. January, 1999. I haven't slept in two days. I'm jet-lagged and train-weary, and my baggage is en route to a country no one's ever heard of. I'm wearing matching corduroy head to toe, and the frozen slivers blow straight through me. All I have is a faux-leather knapsack, a spiral notebook, a half jar of peanut butter, one fifty-dollar bill, American.

I pace for a while looking for signs of life in the gritty little port town, ancient pubs, shuttered bistros, no one but me on the street, sad violins faint in the background. I shiver and walk until I see the first morning bus crunching through snow. I run to it and enter, looking shocked, numb. I try to explain I don't have any kroners, only dollars, and no change either; the bus driver tells me he can't understand a word I'm saying. I shrug and make my way to the back of the bus; it's too early to fight and he's already running late, so he lets me ride. I go on one whole circuit around the city before he boots me at the edge of town. The sun is rising but the cold slices in again. I see some well lit buildings, make my way to them. I try every door on every building until I find one open; I thaw out in the lobby of what turns out to be the International Collegium.

I pull a flyer off the announcement board and start writing a letter to Gina. I fill up half the page with scrawny, numb-fingered script before I realize I don't have an envelope, probably can't afford postage yet, but it doesn't matter--I write until the page is filled around the margins, then place it folded into the breast pocket of my corduroy jacket.

The flashback bleeds into the next scene, only it's back to the art­ house flick. I'm hungry-looking and ragged, my head shaved except for a small ponytail protruding from the dead center of my skull, Krishna­ style. Klaus comes to me in the basement, pulls a box from his pocket and hands it to me. Blister-pack pills.

"What's this," I ask.

"Painkillers," he says.

"Awesome," I say. "Where'd you get 'em?"

"Stina had a procedure," he says.

"Oh?"

"A chemical termination," he says.

"Oh." I pause. "How's she doing?"

"Physically, not so bad." A minute passes.

"How are you doing?"

"This is not my best day." Another minute. "You know, I'm going to get pissed tonight. Absolutely pissed."

"Right," I say. "The best way to deal with your problems."

Then we're downtown in someone's third-floor apartment. Klaus is chain-drinking bottles of Carlsberg, and I'm matching him with painkillers. Every bottle he puts back I chew a pill like candy. He's talking nonstop, Danish and English, on the verge of tears.

"She said I'm not fit to be a father." He shakes his head.

"Dude, you're not," I say.

Klaus looks at me with venom and pity. "Well, I know that. But it is still rejection." He pounds another bottle, I crunch another tablet between my molars. This goes on until Klaus makes a run for the bathroom. I go in to check on him. He's face down in front of the toilet. He almost made it. I leave him be and go back to the living room, where someone hands me a bong. I take a hit, mostly charred tobacco. The nicotine hits me hard, goes straight to my head. I start sweating, get the swerves. I pull the blister-pack from my pocket, ask the guy what it says on the package. "Morphine," he says. I look surprised then double over, and just before I curl to the floor I see the city lights through a rain-streaked window. For a moment it's like looking at the sun through a Coke bottle, then it fades to black.

In the final scene, I wear an ill-fitting leather jacket, sit on the seat of a sunken bicycle. I'm bald as a stone, staring off at the cityscape, due north. I watch, dead still, as a certain circumpolar constellation skirts low across the horizon. The sky above the overglow is purple, like a crushed velvet canopy quilted by stars, each one radiating erratic beams. At my feet is a knapsack holding nothing but a notebook, and folded inside, a cheap, one-way airline ticket. An envelope full of green powder bulges in my breast pocket, the pulverized dust of dried Cambodian Psilocybes, the remnants of what was once sixty-five red-and-white capsules. I take pinches of the dust and gum them like snuff.

In a cheap movie this is where I would laugh a couple times, then break the fourth wall and enter into a soliloquy, to narrate my life as it happens.

I might say, "I dissolved into self-induced schizophrenia as I sat pinching the green stuff every few minutes until the word minutes lost meaning, becoming some hysterical epistemological abstraction: minutes."

It could go into ultra-hazy, deep-background flashbacks, all trippy and blurry, like the visions I'm having: It's me, or some towhead who might be me, five years old in a barn. I'm pulling an old pop bottle from the comcrib. Inside there's a live mouse that ate all the cob, got too swollen to escape.

Or it will end with enigmatic finesse: a close-up zoom of my notebook as I hold it to my nose, scribbling in low light the final line of a bad song... She knows the difference between lonely and lonesome....

I reach into my pocket and take a pinch of the green dust. There's another big crane shot, but this time it starts with my face--my eyes dilated into black holes--then pulls away to reveal the skyline as it begins glowing weakly in the east. The shot pulls farther back until the whole city is in frame, and a single contrail traces a jet as it takes off in the distance without me.

“Cheston!” by Jess Walter

Willow Springs 76
Willow Springs 76

Found in Willow Springs 76

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SOMETHING WAS THE MATTER with the baby.

“He seems depressed," said the father.

"I don't think babies can get depressed," said the mother. She suspected Cheston was mimicking the father, who sometimes affected the sort of spiritual weariness blues players exhibited, or aging gunfighters.

"Anyone can be depressed," the father said defensively. He wondered if the mother calling Cheston the baby wasn't the real problem; he was, after all, nearly four. The father decided to start calling him Buddy.

Cheston was playing Legos. The father walked over. "What are you building, Buddy?"

"Gallows," Cheston said.

The mother tried to sound cheerful. "Who are you hanging?"

"--Buddy--" the father added.

"Hope," Cheston said, the Lego man twisting in the still air.

 

"HOW ABOUT THE TRAMPOLINE PLACE for your birthday?" the mother asked.

Cheston was coloring.  He only used the one crayon: black.

Sponge Bob, Squidward, Patrick, he was coloring them all black. "I don't care."

"We could have the party here."

"Doesn't matter," Cheston said.

"Who should we invite?"

"Mother." Cheston dropped the black crayon in the crease of the coloring book. "I. Do. Not. Care."

"But it's your fourth birthday," she said.

"Yes. I am aware of that." Cheston's blonde hair swooped in a curling C on his forehead and his eyelashes batted like waking butterflies. Finally, he sighed. "Maybe Cameron-"

"Cameron, yes!" the mother said.

"Because I hate Cameron."

"Why would you say that, Cheston?"

"Why would anyone say anything?"

 

SOMEONE WAS NICKlNG THE FATHER'S SCOTCH. He drank only pricey single-malt! slays- Laphroaig, Ardbeg, Bruichladdich. The father suspected their housekeeper. The bottles were kept in a series of tall cabinets in a big closet off his study. The father had just decided to mark the open bottles with a Sharpie when he saw something under one of the liquor cabinets.

A sippy cup lid.

The father walked to Cheston's bedroom doorway. The boy had his back to the father, facing the window, and was palming his Batman sippy cup like a brandy snifter. He swirled the drink. Ice clinked.

The father was dumbfounded: who puts thirty-year-old scotch on rocks?

 

THE PSYCHOLOGIST REMOVED HER GLASSES. "Well, technically, there's nothing wrong with Cheston."

The way she said "nothing wrong" made the father think that having nothing wrong might be the worst thing that could be wrong with someone.

"We did standard testing, associative play. Cheston's a bright boy, as far as that's concerned." The psychologist looked over the frame of her glasses. "And there's been no recent trauma?"

"No," they both said too quickly, without looking at one another. They lived well, in nine rooms on Central Park West. The father had inherited a great deal of money and his "work" was managing his own wealth. The mother volunteered at charities.

"We should be careful," the psychologist said, "trying to diagnose what might just be a reasoned belief system."

My son is Jeffrey Dahmer, thought the mother.

"What I'm saying..." the psychologist took off her glasses, "... is that I don't think Cheston is depressed. I think... " she chewed her lip, "... your baby is a nihilist."

 

*

 

AT HALFTIME, Cheston's soccer coach pulled the father aside.

"Listen," the coach said, "I appreciate Cheston's unique personality, but he keeps shooting at our goal."

It was true. Cheston's condition had progressed to mereological nihilism. He no longer believed in the composition of things. For Cheston one goal post was just like another, in fact was no different than a telephone pole or a doghouse.

"Maybe play him at forward?" the father suggested.

In the second half Cheston no longer observed the random nature of sidelines. He dribbled through the parents, to the next field over, and booted the ball into the street.

"Good kick, Buddy!" yelled the father.

 

"MONKEY SHOESHINE LUMBER TRUCK, " Cheston said at dinner one night.

"What?" his mother asked.

"Balamagafu," Cheston said. Then he made a farting noise and stabbed himself in the leg with his fork.

While the mother put him to bed, the father looked it up online. "Epistemological nihilism," the father said. "He's denying the

validity of all knowledge: language, ritual, it's all lost meaning. He's given into complete abstraction."

The psychologist said to bring him in on Monday.

The mother gripped the phone. "What if Monday's too late?"

"Toddlers are incapable of that," the psychologist said. "Of harming themselves."

But that hadn't even occurred to her. The mother was afraid of something else.

 

THE FATHER CAME OUT of his study, holding in one hand Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and in the other Heidegger's Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being. "This is interesting," he said. "If we can get him to differentiate between being and A being... then maybe... maybe..."

Low clouds raced past the window. The mother sighed. "I've had a lover for two years."

"Me, too," the father said. "For almost four."

"And you're gay," the mother said.

"Yes," the father said.

"I turned tricks in college," the mother said. "I didn't need the money. It was probably the last time I was happy."

"I've never been happy."

"I know."

"I embezzle money from my sisters' accounts."

"I hate volunteering. I despise the poor."

The father searched for something else to say. "I wear your underwear," he said finally.

"Yes," the mother said.

The father held up the Heidegger book. "I don't understand a fucking word of this, Cecilia."

The mother began weeping.

Because her name wasn't Cecilia.

"Buddy!" the father cried.

"Turkey shoe blindfold," the mother said. But even as she said it, she couldn't remember what those words meant.

The father yanked down his pants and his wife's underpants. He peed all over the marble floor.

"Happy birthday,” Cheston said from the doorway.

“Latch” by Hadara Bar-Nadav

Issue 77
Issue 77

Found in Willow Springs 77

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I sense the metal
of you and gush

under your clamp.

A crushing dream,
blistering pulse.

Salty pressure
beating the blood

between lipped
implements.

The god-hold.
Holy seal.

A lunatic's zeal,
unseverable.

Carnivorous, you wrest
my will, pry

my glandular
affection.

I break my own
neck to see

your fatted face
erased by hunger,

obscured
by the lavender

gravity of the moon.

Both of us vanishing
in parts.

I am siphoned
by the ounce,

claimed: udder,
meat, meal.

Airlessly you lock
and pull.

Your mouth
all steel.

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