Archive

Issue 17

28 November 2016

X

A shattering silence. And then the crude language of machines. Lying on the table I am flat as the table. I am lying. The body…

The Forgotten Face in the Crowd

Birthing the room

Open bellows bloom birch beams. Pump cottonwood stain, spin linen slips, varnish raffia. Mill walnut planks, cedar shiplap. Shake the soffit, prime the doors. Sheath…

Dominion

In the fourth year of the drought, Boyd built a rain barrel.  She was technically a senior in high school, but she was homeschooled, as…

Colony Collapse

It’s ridiculous. Alice rummages in her bag and extracts a Marlboro while she steers with one hand. Well, that’s one word for it. It’s actually…

Friday Night

and I am half-scuffed with grief                   a red diamond on a red ground drop of condensation from the brandy glass                   my mother would give me…

The God of Vestiges (Cauda Draconis)

Of leftover things. Of the place the bus used to stop on the corner, here, before the express route and how, dry or no, we…

Femme Noir

Other Lives

I am standing in line at the French Broad Chocolate Lounge in Asheville, North Carolina, a place as exotic as it sounds. It is late…

Euclidean

Last week a pair of oversexed tree frogs oozed a huge jelly ball of eggs on a branch of the young pine too tall for…

Letter to My Mother from the Shuswap

At the lake, the water is still. It doesn’t retreat as we do. Here, I learned how to bury the dead within myself. You scattered…

The Eye at Night

By the time she finally made it to The Lazy Eye there were a good half-dozen cars in the parking lot, all of them crowded…

The Moon Prophecy

For years, our Moon spins away from us in inches, as if to slip out of orbit, unnoticed. We can’t have that— who would we…

Pluck

If you should make a bitter wine from my yard- tear pieces of fuzzy green neck. Pluck only the hair husk and gather sun-cracked lace…

Magic

Night Train ignored the squeeze of his wrestling mask by thinking of how badly he wanted to beat up Magic. The silver mask, adorned with…

Old Women

Pensacola

All year, vacation houses goose their skirts up housewife legs, their stilts a tiptoed recoil from the ocean edging toward them like disgrace. These homes,…

THE LOBSTERS IN LAS VEGAS

A plague of crickets or an endless game of Yahtzee. Neon rainstorms and rat-pack martinis. Tin-foil hats and moon landings. She knows the game: you…

A Welcome to the 17th Issue of Waccamaw

28 November 2016
Categories: Editor's Note

Welcome to the 17th Issue of Waccamaw,

It was a fall when rivers got rowdy, flooded us harder than ocean. What was supposed to happen is not what happened.

The coast after our hurricane was fine. It was inland that got it, the heart of the place twisted and soaked, a skeleton canopy of trees arching closed roads.

Then there is this other storm.

These fleshy bodies of ours. Pitched against one another in illusion. We are really beside of course. It is our only position. Clear if you see from the sky. Literature knows this. Knows the complexity of this. Invites you in. We invite you in too. All of you.

These stories and poems were picked from before, from out of that other land in that other time of moons, super and super duper and plain moons, wrists and plants and silence. The wolfblips we were. Believing what we wanted to believe was so adorable. Until it wasn’t.

There is no comfort in confronting what actually is. The truth is an old hag in a house of bones. Few ever find her beauty because her tests are harsh. But here we find hope in the chance. We find hope in each other and how we huddled on the floor over these pages listening for their sounds and were brought together in a kind of melody. We find hope that in the many lives these words tangle with you may catch a glimpse of the hearth.

We find hope in being more than one thing.

We welcome you to be both with us. More. Actual.

Time is just another relationship. Bring it in close.

With Love,

The Waccamaw Editors

X

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

A shattering silence. And then the crude language
of machines. Lying on the table I am flat as the table.

I am lying. The body was born to obscure, to commit
by its being the sin of omission. What blue floats inside

of it, an interior of sky as unseen as the seen. When
the doctor says turn, I turn. My body follows.

The doctor is a technician. His language is calm metal
coiled as tightly as the coils that thrum through their work

above myself. Into my self. When Röntgen discovered the x-ray
he saw it first as a shimmer around his wife and her body. Then

inside his wife. She was her body and her body was
as visible as any hand. And then her hand became

a curled white cumulus of bone lit against the grisaille
of silver salts on a glass plate. I have seen, she said, my own

death. It gathered in the spaces and not-spaces inside
of her, then on the film that revealed her self to herself

as light, which was no longer a metaphor. Which is what we use
to see. There is an I inside every I. There is a shadow, a sea.

Birthing the room

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

Open bellows
bloom birch beams. Pump
cottonwood stain, spin linen
slips, varnish raffia. Mill

walnut planks, cedar shiplap.
Shake the soffit, prime the doors.
Sheath the windows in pewter
nimbus & wool skein. Hone

the lace white, blow mercury
lamp, glass beaker. Wire holes,
trim bulbs. Polish nickel knobs,
pulls poised. Silent

oiled bronze levers—keyed,
bolted. Eyebrows at the back
gable, seal the flat-felled seam.

Dominion

28 November 2016
Categories: Hybrid

In the fourth year of the drought, Boyd built a rain barrel.  She was technically a senior in high school, but she was homeschooled, as her mother thought it a better educational model to read Wendell Berry in the woods, Edward Abbey in the desert, Thoreau by the receding shore of their lake.  Their next door neighbor, half a mile up the road, made organic soap for a living, and had oils delivered in drums.  An empty drum washed ashore one afternoon in March, and by the beginning of April, Boyd had scrubbed it, coated it with waterproof paint, and set it at the corner of the house where the garage gutters drained.  

But it did not rain, so Boyd had time to study the barrel.  She did not like the green she had painted it, as the house was on a down-slope and the green cut into the sky, so she repainted the drum, blue this time, the matte blue of the bonnet, of the vein in the crook of her wrist.  There was a scrim of water one morning on the lid, and she knew that mosquitoes laid eggs in nothings, in slips, in waters the depth of eggshells.  She turned the barrel on its side, cut a hole and lined it with wire screen, built a stand so that it would not roll down the hill.  Dew no longer collected on the top.

That was the year a mosquito could shrink a baby’s head, the year we poisoned our children in Flint, the year we sprayed millions of gallons into the ground to loose the gas instead.  That was the year we were arrested for looting when lakes fell and towns emerged.  There was a fire just east of the capital and the smoke dusted everything.  The wind took the fire and unfurled it, a motion like the casting of dice.

Still no rain, and so Boyd worked instead on the network of gutters, lining the eaves of the entire house so that one half inch of rain would fill the fifty gallon bucket.  She did not wait for the rain but planted anyway.  She planted Big Boy tomatoes, celebrities, yellow pear tomatoes, all from starts, all already bearing fruit on the branches.  She planted rosemary and oregano, the fragrance attaching itself to her fingers, then to her clothes, then to linens and furniture and dishes until she tasted the herbs in meals when she had not added them, smelled them in her shampoo.  She scattered a handful of pole beans across a cleared patch, the beans clicking as they hit the parched earth.  “Be fruitful,” she told the beans.  “Multiply.”  She watered them into their new home with the hose, and still it had not rained.  

There were no bees that year, so the blooms wouldn’t fruit.  She took a paintbrush to the plants early one morning, spreading pollen from blossom to blossom.  The grackles gathered and she built a scarecrow from an old pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, and she attached a pair of her mother’s old Nikes to the empty holes at the ankles.  

When the drought broke in the third week of May, when the rains finally came, they broke every river for hundreds of miles.  Houses floated off moorings and children were never found.  When Boyd returned to her garden, the scarecrow was missing one shoe, and there were footprints in the mud, circling, circling.  In the ball of the footprint, the swish symbol of a running shoe, and the other shoe, the one the scarecrow still wore, crusted with mud.

But the barrel was full and when the mud dried, she watered the garden.  As she knelt over the tomatoes, the pole beans wrapped tendrils around her shoulders.  “Yes, yes,” she swatted the beans and broke the tendrils.  The next day, the tendrils wrapped around her wrists.  

And then the bees came, having been called, a cumulonimbus of bees that enveloped her head.  They stung her on cheeks, in the hollow of her neck, in the rise of her collarbone.  In the sky, the mockingbirds.  In the earth, the stone.  

Colony Collapse

28 November 2016
Categories: Fiction

It’s ridiculous. Alice rummages in her bag and extracts a Marlboro while she steers with one hand. Well, that’s one word for it. It’s actually humiliating, taking a job. An old benefactor, the Vulture Capitalist, funded the position at Brainard Academy with the provision they offer it to her, and yes, the college seems thrilled—she’s a catch—but doesn’t he get it that this rescue operation implies she’s through?

Alice Whipple is a New York City art star. More precisely, Alice is, or was, one-half a New York City art star. For twenty years, her work has been a collaboration with Gordon Lessing. But even the smashing success of the Central Park piece—the New York Times called it astonishing—could not, for Gordy, outweigh years of watching their colleagues buy summer cottages while they wrangled with permitting and fundraising. Five months ago he’d announced it was time to “bow out.” He said the bureaucratic bickering—which Alice managed—had sucked him dry. He forgot to mention the wealthy Houston socialite.

Since then, Alice has come up with nothing, nada, zero, zilch in the way of new work. Her gallery, and certain friends, have begun avoiding her. She’s exiled herself to California. Alice gropes for a lighter. The ridiculous thing is that the job is three thousand miles from New York. Or maybe that’s just sad; the whole thing is just sad. Alice squints, looking for Bear Creek Road.

What truly is ridiculous is that, in the service of said job, she is now wandering the hills above Oakland, California trying to find the Bee Man. Perfect, she thinks. Lost, trying to find some man.

 

Matthew herds a dozen art students onto the stubble. Beginning Sculpture has read “Living with Weasel,” constructed wildly interpretive bee boxes, and now it’s time for field work. He drops his duffle, squats, unpacks an elegant white box, looks around, puts it back and stands up. He scratches his head. The teaching assistant, a second year grad student called Shakespeare, is smoking behind the van next to the ‘No Smoking’ sign.

A black CRV zooms in and brakes sharply beside the restroom. A tightly-packed woman hauling an enormous mustard-colored bag hops out, strides to one side of the redwood building, twirls, strides to the other side, and disappears. Matthew figures she must be the new Endowed Chair for Special Projects, one of those bullshit positions the board cooks up so the students—and they—can rub shoulders with Art Stars. This time it’s the female half of Lessing & Whipple. What would she want from Brainard?

 

Alice has heard of the Bee Man, of course. Matthew Chance has been in all the majors, and the gorgeous footage of his break-out piece, Swarm, is still shown at MoMA—quivering honeybees creeping the head and bare chest of a beautiful barefoot boy. Her best friend, Casey, who she talks to every day, asked if he was still a babe, but Alice didn’t know. He didn’t sound like a babe, he sounded like a robot: Beginning Sculpture in Briones Regional Park—beeep—Join them if she wished—beeep—MapQuest directions—beeep.

Like Alice was a hostile invader. Which, she supposes, she is.

So then Casey asked what “Hunting the Wild Bee” had to do with teaching art and Alice had piffed, Come on, girlie, this is fuzzyland.

East Coast artists casually disparage the other coast: it’s mellow, meaning boring; the people lack edges. Thirty years ago, when Alice and Casey were red-hot art students at U.C.L.A., they’d both loved California, but they’ve forgotten.

Alice thinks, Beelining. Shit. Maybe I should take up Buddhism, too.

 

The woman reemerges. In black boots, black denims, and a black leather jacket with industrial zippers, she looks like she must be hot. Pale skin, red lips, blowball hair—she also looks like Art. And she looks rattled, clawing in that ridiculous bag.

Matthew gathers the kids. Time for his Artist’s Talk: how he got his first hive when he came to live with his grandmother at age ten, and then, at Berkeley, switched from engineering to art not because he liked art—he does not—but because that way he could pursue what interested him, namely bees. (No explanation for why he didn’t just study entomology.) Did they know that every culture in history kept bees? He adds, inexplicably, that every culture also had a village idiot. Idiot-boy, he repeats, scanning the field.

The students chuckle. They think of Matthew as a throwback, but they admire him. He’s different. He’s Important.

 

The breeze lifts a strand of Bee Man’s hair and Alice pulls out a small video camera. She carries this camera everywhere. It gives her something to do, and also a place to hide; it staves off panic. Bee Man spreads his arms. Alice zooms in. Remarkably untouched face, excellent skin, straight nose, squinting hazel eyes; blue-plaid shirt and, no kidding, Carhartt overalls; slight paunch, touch of crotch, and then the flaxen-haired arm. She focuses: a tanned hand with long fingers, also glistening with bright tiny hairs. She pans back to the slow-moving mouth.

“One queen and roughly 50,000 workers, every one female. Excellent set-up, because females share. And they give, honey to eat and wax to burn.”

A girl in Doc Martins flashes her homey a look.

“I know,” Matthew says, “but never mind. Femaleness is the crux of the hive’s perfection. I find political correctness repulsive, don’t you?”

 

The kids shift and shrug. Matthew glances toward the parking lot. Now The Artist is filming him. He turns his back, squares up, and recites more of the hive’s virtues—communication, population control, and division of labor. “Cooperation,” he says, “a lost art.”

“So no idiot bees?” a kid asks, laughing at his own wit.

“Not even the drones.” Matthew coughs, a nervous noise. “Once the mating flight is accomplished, the drones’ work is done and the girls kill them off.” Someone giggles. “No idiots.” Matthew looks around again.  “Just bees.”

“So is the Artist the Idiot? I mean, in your work?”

Matthew scrutinizes the kid. Matthew has always preferred not to over-think his stuff, let alone pin words to it. And how many artists would appreciate being called an idiot? Though for some, it would be a step up.

 

Mr. Bee Man in the flesh—and all he can manage is one quick look? Maybe her calling this a field trip pissed him off. Alice herself has never wanted to teach, not after watching it sap her friends of time, and more importantly, of focus, until their work, if they still made work, became rushed, rote, and self-derivative. She hopes this Special Project thing will not divert her too much—ha ha, that’s a joke. Right now Alice wouldn’t care if her work were rushed, rote and self-derivative, she just wants some.

There was the tough spell after college in 1977, when she couldn’t figure out how to be an artist. But then she’d had an epiphany in the Sonoran desert and taken off to New York with her sweet boyfriend James, where she made a name for herself doing performance—cages, parakeets, and her nude body. After James died in 1983, she stalled again, almost two years. But in 1985 she’d hooked up with Gordy. They started small, guerrilla actions, like sheathing abandoned tenements in black balloons. Their piece about the Amiriya massacre, 408 white shoes in Times Square, like a flock of ghostly doves, brought attention, and attention brought angels, and gradually, their work evolved into vast temporary installations, culminating in risings: miles of tiny pink parachutes drifting like airborne jellies over the paths of Central Park. Now Alice wonders, did Gordy realize there’d be no way to top that piece?  She hadn’t been willing to see it, but they—their work and their love—might have run its course.

But how is one supposed to start over in middle age? Late middle age. It’s not like she has wealthy Houston socialite. The Vulture Capitalist is gay.

 

“An individual bee might live only three weeks, but the hive can live forever. What else do we have that’s forever?”

“Art?” The kids snicker, but they believe it.

Matthew is a good example of forever. A seminal Bay Area Process artist, he achieved instant fame with the 1977 performance, Swarm. He worked only with bees. In one large atrium, as bees filled their honeycomb with nectar, Matthew painted the windows with beeswax until the entire space was a dim, sweet-scented amber chamber. In a later piece, he trudged into the hills with a hive strapped to his back, slowly enough to avoid losing foragers. In 365 days he covered one-half mile. He seemed satisfied. The art world raved.

But after Matthew’s wife, Sally, died in a car crash in 2002, he stopped. He would go into his studio and rearrange cases of butterflies, fly-fishing lures, bricks of beeswax, duck decoys, ancient lead weights, woodworking tools, milled lumber. Nothing.

No one pushes him. Though the board prefers their professors be working artists, no one is going to query Matthew Chance about his next piece.

Matthew turns to beckon The Artist. She’s got her head in that bag again so he gestures to Shakespeare and starts the herd moving.

As Alice pulls out cigarettes, a high-spirited nebbish oozing tobacco, sawdust, and young fresh manhood appears.

“Hi, I’m Shakespeare,” he says in a melodious tenor. He widens his chambray-blue eyes, prettily framed by luxuriant black lashes, and flicks at his nut-brown bob. “The hair. And who might you be, my Lady?”

“Hello, Shakespeare.”

“Actually, there’s no smoking here. Fire danger.” He spreads his hands apologetically.

“Fine,” Alice says. “Well then, shall we catch up with the others?” and she strides off. Shakespeare trots after her.

“…yarrow, and clover?”

The word “clover” rises, a conversational thing Alice attributes to a duplicitous attempt to disguise one’s natural aggression. A West Coat thing.

Matthew is studying her.

Alice extends her hand. “Hi. Alice Whipple.” She smiles. Matthew doesn’t. His hand is warm.

“Right. Okay.” He releases her hand, his gaze still inquisitive.

“Is there a question?” Alice asks.

Matthew glances away as though embarrassed. “See that?” he says, gesturing toward a fluffy, magenta-tipped floret. “Clover.” He pauses. “They call it something different in New York?”

Someone snickers and Alice blushes, which pisses her off, which makes her blush more. “The streets of Manhattan do not, alas, customarily sprout clover,” she enunciates, “but I did get out to Central Park one time, and they had it there! Clover! That’s exactly what they called it! As for—what did you say? Yarrow? I don’t know yarrow.” As though she had not been raised in Kansas.

Matthew points to a faded coral pad on a two-foot stalk.

“Oh,” Alice says. “Achillea. I see it, yes. It’s all over, actually. Terrific, we’ve established clover and achillea, or yarrow, as you prefer. Excellent.” She spreads her dazzling smile around the circle of spellbound students and reflexively pulls out her camera.

“You mind putting that thing away?”

For a tense moment they stare at each other, a tall, lean hayseed in overalls and a small, pear-shaped hipster in mirrored wraparounds. A crow caws in the distance, three hoarse beats.

“You’re going to need both hands for the bees,” Matthew says in his uninflected tone.  “You’re going to want to pet them.” He smiles and turns. “Hey, see that? See?” There’s a bee on a clover blossom. He speeds up, “I’ll just, uh, finish…” and launches into the list of killers, ending with the most deadly, the varroa mite, which showed up in 1986—

 The ten-thousand roses piece, Alice thinks.

First Journeys, Matthew thinks.

—and then lambastes monoculture, which he calls a disease-dispersal-system, the end of bees, which means the end of almonds, apples, avocados, blueberries….

Alice wonders when he’s going to associate any of this with art.

 

She’s lying on her back filming flying black spots. It’s actually great. First she placed honeycomb in the upper chamber of Matthew’s 19th-century bee-box—no, first she shed the leather jacket and the messenger bag—and then she stalked a foraging bee, set the box over it, and removed the trap door. Exactly as predicted, the bee crawled to the upper chamber to gorge on honeycomb. When Alice gingerly lifted off the lid, the bee flew off, came back with reinforcements, and now lots of bees are coming and going.

So pleasant, the smell, the breeze, the happy holler of art students becoming kids again. Even the sticky fingers aren’t awful. Still, despite the fact that it’s so nice—or maybe because of it—Alice’s eyes fill. What will she do here?

Suddenly Matthew is kneeling beside her and Alice scrambles, dropping her camera to reposition the sunglasses. A black disc, the aftereffect of staring toward the sun, hovers where his face should be. “What color would you like?” she hears. “Ochre and cad red have been taken, but you can have aqua or cobalt or—”

“What?” Alice blinks.

“You need to mark your bees.” Matthew is offering an old cigar box with twelve compartments containing twelve jars of powdered pigment. “What?” he says, as if she’s said something but he didn’t quite catch it. “You want purple?” He lays a Lilliputian brush and tiny jar beside her leg. “A dot on the thorax. There. And don’t forget to time the round-trip so we can compute the distance.” When Alice doesn’t respond, he reiterates, “There. On the thorax. They don’t mind. Look.” He leans closer, and she breathes in his woody smell as his finger strokes the bee.

When he rises, Alice feels him touch her head. But it’s the breeze. Surely Matthew Chance wouldn’t pet her.

 

Alice has stopped by classes, met students, attended board meetings (bored meetings), faculty meetings, and the alumni, faculty, and student shows. Lots of art being generated at Brainard. Not by Alice. She feels as though she has some sort of aphasia, like her artistic language is gone. It would be interesting if it weren’t so terrifying. When people ask what she’s working on—and they do—she waves her little camera and says something indecipherable about video and process. Alice, who is known for carefully-scripted installation, senses skepticism. She imagines them circling for the kill.

On their next phone call, Casey says Alice should return to performance; make use of the Endowed Chair gig. Talk about beginning where you are! Start with one plain wooden chair. Which she could endow with…?

“I think Shakespeare has a crush on me,” Alice says. “He’s stopping by my office every day to tell me how amazing my work is. He seems especially interested in the early stuff.”

“Can you blame him? You were gorgeous. And naked. How old is Shakespeare?”

“Come on, Casey. I’m done with men. Seriously. I don’t even miss sex. Besides, he’s like twenty-eight or something.”

“Perfect! You might not be done with sex if you had a twenty-eight-year-old to do it with, Al.”

“Just—no.”

“Hey, what’s that sound? Are you outside?”

Alice is on her little lanai overlooking a dry creek bed. “It’s eucalyptus. They murmur.” She’s been filming the thin blue leaves. She likes eucalyptuses, the smell, the sound, those sickle leaves, though apparently she’s not supposed to. They’re invasive, they burn, the Californians scold. But did they transport themselves from Australia? She refrains from responding. “It’s 70 degrees here, Casey.”

“It’s dumping here. So what about going back to your early work? It could be so layered, commenting on yourself commenting on your beginnings.”

“Come on,” Alice snorts. “I can’t go back to that unless I want to change the intention from interrogating the male gaze to erasing the male gaze.”

“Perfect,” Casey says, and laughs her wifty heh-heh-heh..

“No,” Alice says. “So you saw Gordy in last week’s Sunday Style? You think it’s a promotion, from Arts to Style?”

“He just wants her to finance his film.”

“That stupid movie. There’s no way he’ll get it together to make a movie without me to organize him.”

“They say she’s now organizing him.”

“Really? Don’t those rocket-ships on her chest get in the way?”

 

Alice visits Beginning Sculpture a second time. Bee Man seems to think she will show her slides, but she didn’t bring her slides—had he asked her to bring her slides?—so he queues up a video called The Way Things Go, a gargantuan, comical chain-reaction piece, and disappears. Some crisis with bees. Afterwards, Alice nods politely while the students discuss Process: Begin Where You Are; Trust in Accidents, Trust in Yourself—trust, trust, trust, trust, trust. Like it’s easy. Like every one of them is just a little bag of jewels ready to be spilled onto the rich black velvet of the waiting world.

Okay, she can mock them, but what if these raw beginners actually know something, or have something, that she doesn’t? Like hope. When Alice gets home, she sits outside and films eucalyptus. She doesn’t bother to look at the footage before erasing. She’s still not sleeping.

At November’s cocktail party, Alice gazes at the view of San Francisco Bay and chats with a painter named Michelle, who looks like Anjelica Houston. Everyone at the party looks like Hollywood. Alice wishes she were home on her deck.

Shakespeare ambles up and ogles Alice. “Hi,” he says, his eyes shining.

Michelle hugs him. “Where’s the Boss?” It’s a joke. Apparently Matthew never comes to these things. In fact, it’s been over a week since he’s been on campus.

“Oh, man,” Shakespeare says. “You keeping up with this Colony Collapse thing? Tons of bees just disappearing and no one knows why. They leave behind a bunch of supercedure cells like they’re trying to raise new queens. Like the trouble was the old queen.”

Alice feels affinity with those old queens.

When she gets home, she Googles “Colony Collapse.” Shakespeare wasn’t exaggerating; it’s catastrophic. How can they all just die for no reason? She considers telephoning Matthew, but what would she say?

 

“So what are you doing for fun?” Casey asks.

“Oh, sitting at Cody’s scribbling endless crap in my journal. And drinking very good coffee.” Alice is writing about her work with Gordy, and about her early work—blah blah, trying to get herself going. The only truth she’s discovered, and this mortifies her, is that she’s always had a man to work with. Is that where her ideas, not to mention confidence, have gone? Well, she’s determined to move forward on her own. She’s a feminist, for crying out loud.

“You’re writing now?”

“It’s nothing. So have you heard about this bee thing? Colony Collapse Disorder?”

“What?”

“Bees are dying, like in droves. They may all be wiped out. Seriously.”

“Bees?”

“Honeybees.”

“Are you hanging out with Bee Man?”

“Shakespeare told me about it at a party. It’s like their immune system has failed, like bee-AIDs. It reminds me of James. He would have loved this guy.”

“Shakespeare?”

“The Bee Man.”

“Was it a fun party?”

“Not particularly. The people are polite, and pretty, and thin, and everyone hugs. It’s unsanitary.” Alice laughs. “And no one smokes. So what’s the latest with Gordy?” She lights a cigarette.

“I don’t think he’s having fun. Boob-Job seems to have moved on.”

Alice wonders what she would do if he called.

 

In the dark, industrial, high-ceilinged space, the Works on Paper instructor gestures toward a six-by-eight-foot abstract drawing called Sunday Afternoon with Chamomile Tea. Matthew, as guest artist, slips in the back and perches on a stool. He looks tired. He nods at Alice. She lays her BlackBerry in her lap.

“I like how sort of huge it is,” a girl says. “Like I could sort of get lost, you know?”

“The line is beautiful,” says another. “One continuous, um…?”

All the heads bob.

“It reminds me of those ghost drawings by Barbara Heston.”

“Okay,” Matthew interjects, “yes, but let’s be careful with comparison. You know, ‘it’s been done?’ I know you weren’t saying that, uh…”

“Georgia.”

“Solzhenitsyn called it the ‘tyranny of the new,’ this fanatical drive for invention. I really think it’s death to young artists.”

“Wait,” says a student from under the hood of an oversized sweatshirt. “You have to do something new. How else do you get attention?”

Alice is cranky. Still not sleeping. She butts in. “One could say that if it hadn’t been for Duchamp’s Urinal—a very new idea—you yourself wouldn’t even be considered an artist, Matthew. Am I right?”

He shoots her a look she can’t decipher.

“Nor would I,” she adds with false modesty.

Matthew says, “Did you know that ninety-five percent of students are no longer making art five years out of school?” He stands. “Our job is to prepare young artists for a life.” Alice flushes.  Her job is to make art.

Matthew strolls to the artwork, bends down, and runs his finger along a torn-off corner. He looks to the student.

“Oh,” she says. “That’s not part of it. I mean, I didn’t want to waste the sheet.”

“How can something—Ms. Whipple? You mind?”

Alice had started filming. “Of course,” she says, and lays the camera next to her BlackBerry.

After a moment, Matthew says, “Excuse me,” and marches toward the massive door. He glances at Alice. “Could I have a word? Please?” Alice doesn’t move. “Outside?”

Alice takes her time stowing the camera and BlackBerry. When she slides off her stool, her sweater catches on a screw. She yanks it loose and follows Matthew through the door.

“Filming me? While I’m teaching?” He’s leaning over her, close.

Alice squints into the sun and says, “I’m not filming you. I mean, I film everything. It’s what I do.”

“It’s what you do? It’s what you do when? It’s what you do when you’re Endowed Chair, or what you do when you’re Alice the Artist?”

Alice’s scalp prickles, every follicle electric. “Alice the Artist” is that horrible character in the Robert Bruch chapbook, a shrewish, cutthroat, promiscuous, and worse, supremely banal person. No one calls her that to her face, of course, and Bob always insisted the character had nothing to do with her, but Alice knows it’s not true—she never got along with Bob—and she knows that everyone knows it’s not true.

She says, “You of all people should appreciate the Art-as-Life, or is it Life-as-Art, practice—”

“NO. I do not. I take my job seriously. I do not use my students as fodder.” Two feet from her nose, he crosses his arms.

“Fodder? Fodder? I’m not their teacher. Anyway, filming actually deepens my engagement.” Alice fishes in her empty pockets. She crosses her arms. She fiddles with the loose loop on her sweater.

Finally, Matthew says in an even tone, “It’s hard to think with that thing following me around, okay? And Janet’s work deserves our full attention.”

Alice wonders if he’s suddenly too tired for a fight or simply bored with her. “Jen,” she says. “The girl’s name is Jen.” When she glances up, he’s got his eyes fixed on her. Her arms tingle, and she blushes, but she doesn’t avert her gaze.

“Fine. Jen.” Matthew turns away.

Back in the studio, he starts again, “Bright white, large-scale, 100{0d6c0367c8c8ce3328d7385a3995d880bbc0bef238b7f2a91697c38c5b607893} cotton artist’s paper hand-sewn onto galvanized pipe, grey thread…dark rough wall, dirty grey floor…” He nods. “So this bright piece floats in this dark space. Intentional?” He studies the work. “Wandering line, watered-down, sumi…Asian art, and the past—intentional? …artist’s process…gentle puckers—intentional?”

Alice leans forward. She’d forgotten it could be fun to talk about art. Like, when nothing’s at stake.

Matthew holds out his hand. “Now I would argue that once you hang something on this wall in this space, everything must be by intention. So this ragged bottom edge, missing a corner—violent, or careless? How does this,” he bends over to touch it again, “interact with the floor, with the other edges, with the meanderings of the line and the puffs? What does this do to what has come before?”

Matthew backs up a couple of steps, stares, nods, leans forward again and fondles the missing corner, as though to make it whole. “Violent, or careless,” he murmurs. Alice thinks, The Man Who Doesn’t Like Art sure does care. But he’s right, the torn corner is bad, though violent may be a bit extreme.

He faces the class. “Okay then. Um, Janet, is it?”

“Jen,” she whispers, eyes round.

“Okay, nice work. Um, any questions?”

 

Over coffee in the Lair, Alice asks Shakespeare if Matthew has always been such a fanatic.

Shakespeare says, “Not fanatic. A purist. Matthew thinks intention must precede process. Makes you think. Makes him a great teacher. Not to mention his work is incredible.” Shakespeare pauses, and then says, “Maybe performance uses intention in a different way?”

Who’s doing performance? Alice thinks.

 

The week of Thanksgiving, Shakespeare shows up at Alice’s with a six-pack of Coronas to celebrate Indians—he claims he’s one-quarter Choctaw—and to tell her there’s a BFD—Big Fucking Development—proposed for the pastureland adjacent to Matthew’s place. He gestures toward the camera on the glass table. “How goes the work?”

“Fine,” Alice says. “Really well.” She films and erases, films and erases. In psychiatric circles, this would be called self-soothing.

“I could load your footage onto your laptop for you. I’d love to see what you’re up to.”

“No thanks. I’m trying to, you know, stay fresh with it?”

After she scoots him out Alice Googles “Oakland, development, permit,” but she can’t find anything. She wonders when—if—Matthew will come back to campus. She thinks again about calling him and again decides it would be stupid. She would look stupid.

 

Winter break, Alice is not ready to face New York, so she drives herself down to Monastery Beach, south of Monterey. When she hops onto the golden sand, she spies a dark shape at the end of the cove and drifts toward it, filming.

It’s a long-necked grebe tangled in turquoise fishnet, rolling in the surf. Alice stuffs her camera into her jacket. When the bird washes in, she snags it, hikes to higher ground, and sits. She stares at the tangled bird in her lap, preternaturally calm. She will need scissors for the tough filament, or knife, or even a nail clipper, but she’s got nothing. And there’s no one in sight. Finally, she grasps one leg and weaves it through the filament, and then ducks the head. The bird doesn’t resist. It has to hurt, but she makes herself keep going, occasionally swiping at her forehead. When she finally lifts the last line from the bleeding shoulder, the bird just lies there, cold as stone. Alice cradles it to her chest, and cries.

Eventually, she carries the bird back to the water. She’s doesn’t know what else to do. The first wave floats it out; in and out, it floats. Alice brings out her camera. When the bird gets deeper, things go bad. It can’t stay upright. It rolls and bobs, its neck undulating, head dipping under the rough water. But it’s out too far now. She should’ve taken it somewhere, to a shelter or something.

 

Later, when she talks to Casey, Casey insists that Alice couldn’t have known what to do. Then she says, “Didn’t you have your phone?”

Alice doesn’t admit that she had her phone but no one to call.

When she looks at her footage of the tangled bird, she weeps again. But she doesn’t erase. It stays with her, ways she might use the footage, what kind of piece these images could turn into.

 

One evening in January, Gordy’s number pops up. Alice doesn’t answer. He doesn’t leave a message. She pours a glass of wine, picks up her cigarettes, and goes to sit with the eucalyptuses.

 

Shakespeare tracks her down. “It’s supposed to be my final critique, and Mr. Big Deal Guest Artist is all, ‘I don’t know anything about objects’—the fucking guy’s a sculptor. Then some shit about the twigs on the pipes, how they filter light. It’s not even a piece. What an asshole.” And Shakespeare hasn’t heard from Matthew for three weeks, and he hasn’t been on campus for literally months.

“I have an idea,” Alice says. “Let’s go find him. Aren’t I sort of his boss?” She’s not his boss. But she’s still not working, and she’s not sleeping, and the man is at least more interesting than her deck.

“Well, no. You are my Special Projects Chair.” He gazes at her, adoring and high. And pretty.

“In which case I should speak to your mentor about your Senior show. Let’s go.”

As soon as they turn off Canyon Road they spot a roiling white plume.

“Shit.”

“Shit.” Alice accelerates. She grabs the Rescue Remedy, a gift from Michelle, and spatters her tongue. “Where do I—?”

“I don’t—wait.” He leans forward. “Slow down. This is it.”

Alice swings onto a rutted road and guns it up the hill. Beyond a stand of live oaks, firemen in black-and-yellow vests shoot geysers from a ladder rig onto a smoldering building. Ten feet beyond that, a white clapboard bungalow sits unscathed, and standing between the bungalow and the burning building are Matthew, George Ginsberg, and Lou Stickley, old art buddies from the ’70’s. They’re swigging homebrew while they watch.

Shakespeare leaps out before the car stops. “Hey, man. You okay?” Matthew, in shirtsleeves, salutes with his 22-ouncer.

Alice steps out, zipping her jacket.

“Ms. Whipple!” Matthew calls. “Now where is that damn camera when you need it?”

“What?”

“That was my studio. You could have recorded the ending.” He looks relaxed, maybe a little drunk…

George cries, “Welcome to the retirement party of Mr. Matthew Chance, artist, bon vivant, and Bee Man extraordinaire!” They hoist their bottles and holler “Rest in Peace!” clearly not for the first time.

“I’m glad you got the butterflies out,” Lou says, “but I’m going to miss those ducks.”

Matthew says, “I feel bad about the wax. Todd, you want to grab a couple of brews for you and Ms. Whipple?”

 

After some final questions—no idea how it started—the firemen issue a citation and chug down the dirt road. After some last laughs, George and Lou also take off. When Shakespeare heads into the house for another round, he calls, “Hey, man, show her your hives.”

Matthew looks to Alice, whose cheeks sport two strawberries from the strong ale.

“Oh, yes. Are the hives okay?”

“No,” Matthew says. “It’s just a matter of time.”

She follows him down the hill, slipping on shiny leaves. The stacks of white, green, and gray boxes surrounded by a wire fence remind her of a military installation. A few hardy foragers are flying, golden in the low sun.

“When they go, I go,” Matthew says.

His hair is the color of the bees, of corn tassels, which stirs in Alice a sharp nostalgia for warm nights and fireflies, thunderstorms and supper on the porch. She touches his arm. “Listen,” she says, “we—Shakespeare, Brainard—everyone misses you.”

“I don’t know what I’ve got left in the tank.” He glances at her.

“But you’re such a brilliant teacher. And your work…”

“My work is over. Done. Haven’t got the heart for it.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“No, you don’t.”

Alice’s chest tightens. “Yes, I do.” The sun is tinting the stacks pink, like flesh. She says, “They seem alive.”

“They are.”

“Right. But I mean, the stacks. They’re like actual beings.”

“That’s right.”

“Okay.” She sets her empty bottle on the dirt. “You know, I do know. I’ve been stalled all year. I mean, ever since Gordy, you know, the work with Gordy was over. No idea what to do. No ideas at all. Like I’ve forgotten how to be an artist.” Alice’s heart thumps—fear? Relief.

“Like it’s something you are rather than something you do. Kiss of death.”

“What?”

“I thought you were making a video piece.” He stoops to deposit his empty.

“I’m not. Seriously, I’m stuck.”

Matthew wipes his hands on his thighs. “I thought you were filming me. For some kind of New York joke.” He glances at her. “You know, making fun of the West Coast dope.”

“Oh, no. I was just filming so people would think I was working.”

“People?” He chuckles. “It’s a hard world out there, isn’t it?”

“It would be so nice to just start over. But how do you do that when you already have a presence?”

“How do you do it when you can’t remember why?”

Alice doesn’t answer. She’s distracted by a sound, like two dry hands rubbing together. It’s the oak leaves, but the sound still niggles, reminding her or something.

“Ever heard of ‘telling the bees?’” Matthew says.

“What?”

“Long ago, it was believed that bees would thrive only in harmonious families. ‘Telling the bees’ was essential—good or bad news, even everyday happenings, but especially about the deaths. The bees had to be told about a death before sunrise of the following day or they would die too.” Matthew’s gaze is fixed; his hands dangle like he has no use for them. “But I never told them— about Sally. I should have told the bees.”

“Oh Matthew.” His face is so plain. She looks away.

Matthew startles her by tapping her shoulder. “Yep. That’s it.” He stretches, drops his arms with a humph, and mutters, “Idiot Boy. I bungled it. You have to be as interested in the life as the work.”

Alice stares at him. She laughs, almost a bark. “Ha! That would require the life be as interesting as the work.” Hers certainly wasn’t. And really, it’d been a while. What used to interest her? She says, “So are you going to build a new studio? Start over?”

He squints her way, and then looks at the hives. She hears that subdued rustle again, and now Alice knows what it reminds her of: rattlesnakes moving across sand, the sound she heard thirty years ago in the Sonoran desert, standing naked in the moonlight on a rock in the middle of a rattlesnake migration, a crazy night on a misbegotten road trip during the bad time after graduation. That night had changed everything: she and James had fallen in love, and she’d found her work. But it’s getting late; Alice can’t just wait around for another miracle.

She says, “Let me rephrase that. I am starting over.” Blushing, “I’ve got a bit of footage.” She nods at him. “I’d love someone to talk about it with. Also, I’m interested in the honeybee.”

“You are?”

“So it would be great to, you know…”

“Have a West Coast dope to talk to.”

“Have a West Coast friend, Matthew.”

Friday Night

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

and I am half-scuffed with grief

                  a red diamond on a red ground

drop of condensation from the brandy glass

                  my mother would give me for a sore throat

have you heard of Raoul Dufy and is it said like Duffey?

                  and I haven’t heard of The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889 in too long, like, 18 years. No one’s spoken of it in 18 years

Franz Marc’s Blue Horses, though. Someone’s told me about them, someone said, “They look like half-plums or men’s butts in bed.”

                  and then the grief was like a yardstick sutured to my spine with baling twine

or like a truss to my resolve, which splintered in a million moon-sherds

                  and about my grief, someone said, “A child could have done it.”

Someone said it was like a bean rubbed so the skin sloughed off in the bowl

Someone said, “Your grief is Rousseau’s lion looking over me as I sleep.”

                  Someone said, “The Four Elements looked better with older cars behind it.”

Someone said, “I see now why this book was free.”

                  and how I feel about Philip Johnson is

he designed the worst and best buildings in town

                  and how I feel about this brandy is

it’s the color of a soaked bean and my throat is half-soaked in it

                  and the other half feels like a red, broken stick

and all I want to do is sit in the grass at St. Thomas and bitch about its buildings

                  because that’s what Philip Johnson would want me to do

                                       because I think we both regret how much we’ve made glass

The God of Vestiges (Cauda Draconis)

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

Of leftover things. Of the place the bus used
to stop on the corner, here, before the express
route and how, dry or no, we would step out
into a puddle, the exhaust doing fog karaoke
around our ankles. Of the sensation of taking

a bath before my legs grew too long, before I
grew some silly dignity that wouldn’t let my skin
feel bubbles. Of Trinidadian roti on my tongue,
the warm potato smash, spices decorating my lips, you
using a knife because you’d need to be a snake

to open your mouth that wide. Of my jump shot
and my herky-jerky crossover. Of those early days
of independence, before the civilizing force
of hampers, when clothes lived in trash bags, when
antennae TV still could be had with the right

hanger. Of case studies. Of late night
paper sessions. Of cheap diner coffee
and long-term retail. Of 4 a.m. eyes,
wide before sleep. Of sleep.
Of the weight your head left
on my neck, how if I turn
it just so, I hear your breathing.
Of your breathing. Of these pocks on the ground.
Of the querent and the quesited. Of augury, impatient
divinations, the tail of the dragon.

Other Lives

28 November 2016
Categories: Nonfiction

I am standing in line at the French Broad Chocolate Lounge in Asheville, North Carolina, a place as exotic as it sounds. It is late March, and I am in desperate need of this vacation. Back home, a small town tucked high up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I work for our county’s domestic abuse and rape crisis agency, and the ache of the work is ever with me, saturated with tales of violence and terror. Winters are brutal, too, snow-laden skies and cutting winds often hanging around well into May, but when roads are passable, more temperate weather is available within a couple hours’ drive.

 

Today in Asheville the thermometer has reached seventy degrees, and I am giddy with something that feels very much like hope. City workers are cleaning out the flower beds that surround the downtown squares, and I breathe in the warm perfume of newly-turned earth.

This morning I roamed the streets and ended up in a downtown bookstore where I stayed for a while, sipping coffee and jotting notes in my journal, unwinding into the open day.

   

Now, some hours later, I am here at the Chocolate Lounge. The menu lists a dizzying variety of truffles like Homegrown Lemongrass and Lavender Crème. In addition to plain brownies, already decadent enough in their own right, there are Cacao Spicy Nib or Coconut Macaroon Brownies. Any of these confections I can wash down with a creamy Guinness stout or a silky Pinot Noir. 

I feel deliciously unmoored, overcome with a sense of having been lifted out of my life and deposited into another one altogether.

In line ahead of me are a man and two women, all appearing to be in their mid-twenties. One of the women, a dark-haired girl with blue eyes, is talking with her tiny blonde friend while the man places their order.

The dark-haired girl says, “I mean, I saw him get his first kiss. I was in his room.”

“Yes,” says her friend.

I incline my ear, leaning forward to listen while appearing as if I am not listening, one of many sinful writerly habits. 

“We skinny-dipped when we were in seventh grade. I watched him grow up.”

Her friend responds, “I know.”

“In high school he started dating this girl and they got married, but then she cheated on him and now they’re divorced.” 

“Right,” says her friend.

“And I just keep wondering if we have a chance now.” She glances at me, and I incline my ear back where it belongs.

They move ahead, pay for their order, and leave. 

 

Listening to their conversation, I have been catapulted back forty-some years to a dark lake on a summer night. My high school boyfriend slips out of his t-shirt, lets his cut-off jeans and briefs fall onto the wooden dock, barely making a sound as he dives, his long beautiful body white in the murky water. 

“Come on in,” he calls.

“No!” I whisper, pulling my sweater around me. “Someone will come!”

“Chicken!” 

I hear him swim away and out of my life, and my heart races for a moment, snagged on the tripwire of memory. 

 

 “What can I get for you today?” The boy taps his pen on the granite counter, bringing me back. 

“A Coconut Macaroon Brownie,” I say, but one foot is still in the past, and I can swear I hear the distant splash of lake water as I take my change. 

Recently I joined a group of women who call themselves “Woo-Woo.” I am not so Woo-Woo. I wish I could be, but I have not yet been able to get the hang of it.

These women are a little freaky with all their fifth-dimension-higher-vibration-energetic-beings talk. Still, they invite me to their circle and I come, in part because I adore them and their creative bent as well as their tendency to produce red wine and chocolate for nearly any gathering. And because they allow me to dance around their sparky little fire, where I keep some distance but am nonetheless drawn to the light.

The women sometimes speak of past lives – as ancient Egyptians or sea captains or Greek soldiers. They talk about who they have crossed paths with in this life that they have known in other lives, discussing the issues they are working out even now, all these millennia later.

Past lives pose a problem for me. For one thing, I have the nagging sense that I’ve made enough of a mess of this one – two marriages, two divorces, a failed love affair, lost friendships, and far too many financial snafus to name – that I would rather not envision a string of previous painful sagas from eons gone by.

It also seems sadly unimaginative of any Creator – for the notion of reincarnation seems out of necessity to include a Creator, or at least Someone in charge – to make only a relative few templates and keep recycling them.

I know there are traditions that adhere to a doctrine of reincarnation. I have not been able to embrace it for myself, is all I am saying. Still, as I have been pondering the notion, it has occurred to me that when people ask about my background it is not unusual for me to disclose, “In my other life I was a pastor.”  Light years away from where I am now, having if not completely lost my faith, then misplaced it pretty well, leaving me to toss around rimless questions that call into doubt the very existence of God.

In another life, on Sunday mornings I donned my robe and vestments, led confession, preached the Gospel, presided at communion, and blessed the congregation on its way.

“In my other lives,” I really should say, for I have had a number of them. I have been a baby sister, gazing with adoration at my older siblings, and a wild college student hell-bent on self-destruction. I have been a receptionist for a lecherous dentist, a stock trader for a Midwestern state pension fund, a preacher of the Gospel, a teacher of composition, a writer of grants, a teller of tales.

Reminiscent of an archaeological dig, like the Jericho Tel I visited when in Israel many years ago, I am able to toss a stone and show you the layers – there is the year I first rode a horse, there the year of my first kiss, and there the year I left home for college. There, a decade of desolation, there an age of rebuilding, and that bright layer there a time of creativity and babies and hope and delight. Layer upon layer, year upon year, loss and gain buried, folded – all past but all present, too.

It is now evening, and I am walking to dinner at a Caribbean restaurant. When I arrive I find it has not yet opened. I sit on the bench outside and open a book I’ve been reading, a memoir by an author whom I am coming to admire more with each new chapter.

Within several minutes the door opens and I am invited inside. I find a spacious table in a front corner and settle. I have my book and my journal and a tall glass of herbal iced tea, and in front of me a menu featuring a heart-stopping variety of entrees.

Several more diners wander in – two young couples who are seated far to my left, and then a young boy, around seven years old, and with him a woman who appears to be in her thirties. The boy is slim with dark hair and keeps his hands tucked in the pockets of his khaki trousers. He is wearing a neat button-down white oxford cloth shirt and moves with self-assurance. The woman with him is tall and willowy, with long wavy reddish hair. She treats the boy with a kind of deference that causes me to think she is not his mother – maybe an aunt, maybe one of his mother’s good friends. They sit off to my right, chatting easily.

For a while I am lost in my book. The author is in France. She and her lover drink brandy in the middle of the day and hop on a train that takes them into the lush countryside. I am in the process of being swept away with them when my Roasted Pork Quesadilla arrives.

I set aside my book and give full attention to the food, savoring the pineapple salsa and the caramelized plantains.

Then I overhear the woman to my right saying in a clear voice, “I lived in Pennsylvania for a while.”

And the young boy, the seven-year old responds, “In 1968 I owned a hardware store in Trenton, New Jersey.”

I stop chewing.

The woman says, “I lived in New Jersey, too.”

I incline my ear.

They continue their conversation as if they are discussing the boy’s swimming lessons or the last movie he saw. They continue to talk as if this child is not offering details about the nails and washers and nuts and bolts that he would sell for a nickel apiece, about the people who frequented his store in a previous life.

There comes a sudden sensation, as if I am floating.

Later I headed back to my hotel, tacking along the city streets amid the sounds of traffic, a soft breeze on my arms and dusk just beginning to lower.

Along the way I passed a group of street people, three men and three women scattered across the sidewalk, singing and laughing. One man in particular, with long matted gray hair and a tangle of beard, trained a wild stare on me. As I drew near he waved and caught my eye.

“It’s all about quantum mechanics!” he shouted at me.

“It always is,” I shouted back.

The group laughed and applauded.

For some years I have been feeding a fascination with quantum physics. I don’t recall what first sparked my interest. I majored in English and American Studies in college and shied away from the more brain-taxing sciences.

Still, I suppose I have always, in some fashion, been wondering about how and why the universe works. I have a long-standing friend with a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Physics, and he and I have shared many boozy late night discussion about the String Theory and the God Particle and a host of other notions that in previous centuries could have gotten one locked up as a lunatic. Educated and learned scholars and researchers are having these conversations, too, with perfectly straight faces, theories so wildly challenging that they call into question our very concept of Reality.

For example, noted British astrophysicist Lord Martin Rees speaks of “origami” universes, multiverses that exist on planes much the way folded origami paper creates multiple surfaces. Some multiverse theories posit that we are having many lives in many dimensions all at once. One may even pass one’s energetic “self” on a city street but never know it, the dimensions overlapping or intertwining or existing side by side in the same way that AM and FM frequencies occupy the same airwaves.

“We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a special announcement.”

It is only in the writing of this essay that I have recalled a curious incident that occurred several years ago when I was driving from Ohio, where I had just sold my house, to North Carolina, where I was moving to serve another church. I had pulled into a McDonald’s parking lot somewhere in the hills of Virginia, in need of a restroom, hot coffee, and something to munch on. It was summer and the place was crowded with travelers. As I walked toward the entrance I noticed coming my way a heavyset middle-aged man, and an older and younger woman, between them a little girl, about two years old. The little girl looked at me with something very like recognition, her face lighting up with a wide smile, and I stopped and looked back at her as something shifted somewhere – the ground or my gut or the sky.

The child’s hair was a cloud of peach colored curls, her face round, her brown eyes large – a clear description of me at age three. The child gazed at me, rapt. My breath caught.

The two women slowed to see what their little girl was looking at, all the while she and I staring and staring at one another. Then she tore herself from them and ran to me, her eyes bright with joy.

She uttered a soft happy cry and looked back at the women, grinning at them, as if to say, “Look who I found!” Then she reached her arms up to me.

“Have we met?” I asked her, half laughing, half trembling, checking a sudden insane urge to pick her up and run with her.

The women came rushing, apologizing. One of them said, “We don’t understand,” and the other, “She never just goes up to people…”

The girl kept reaching to be picked up while the women kept reaching for her, and at last she wrapped her arms around my legs for a few seconds before letting go, and as they took her, she began to cry. I stood trembling, watching as they carried her away.

When the four of them had gotten to their car, the older woman stopped to turn and look at me, her brows furrowed. I thought she might wave but instead she reached into the back, fastened the child into her car seat, and shut the door. As the car pulled away I could see the child’s small face looking out at me through the rear window.

I watched the tiny dot of her head all the way to the interstate, and then watched until the car itself was a speck that disappeared around a wide curve, watched the busy freeway a long time after as the sun lowered itself into the emptying sky and the light faded into the low droning of tires on pavement.

Euclidean

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

Last week a pair of oversexed tree frogs oozed
a huge jelly ball of eggs on a branch of the young pine
too tall for eventual tadpoles to find the nearby pond
I thought but the pregnant pine bends a bit each day
with the weight of its foster frogs droning
until by now it compasses a line intersecting
the circumference of the water waiting to break.

Letter to My Mother from the Shuswap

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

At the lake, the water is
still. It doesn’t retreat as we do. Here,
I learned how to bury the dead

within myself. You scattered my father
at my feet as the sun bowed
its head. The sky, still. I remember

your hands closed around the boy
he was, skin once browned
in the summer sun as he played

with us near shore. You moved
around me then, low prayers
plating your mouth. His name, said

like he was accident, not
the accident we all are. You taught me
how temporary water levels are

as you moved within me, Chanel No. 5
lingering after you passed. O how I want
to be less tired of wanting

what’s lost. In water, nothing returns.
But you gave me a name
before I knew I needed one. A girl,

fraying with the intentional motion
of bodies—, the water moving us
further from ourselves.

The Eye at Night

28 November 2016
Categories: Fiction

By the time she finally made it to The Lazy Eye there were a good half-dozen cars in the parking lot, all of them crowded against the building, every one covered with a light dusting of snow. Steam leaked from the tavern’s rooftop vent into a black sky. Pulling her Buick under the streetlamp Tina locked it up tight and stepped to the back door, fanning cold into the damp circles under her arms.

Merle was behind the bar when she came in, leaning on his elbows and looking at her as if he’d been waiting all night for her to arrive.  “I was starting to get worried,” he said. The neon lettering above him glowed blue onto his bald head.

“I’m early, Merle,” she said. “I don’t start for another fifteen minutes.”

“Weather’s shit.” He reached under the bar and produced an apron, and laid it on the counter in front of her. It was a bicentennial rag, one of three still left in the place. Three more weeks and she could finally throw the ugly things out. “There’s drunks and idiots all over out there.”

“And about seven of ‘em still in here,” she said. She snapped open the stars and stripes apron and held it against her waist, looping the ties around her body twice before tying them off.

Merle straightened up and drummed his fingers on the bar. He looked at her like he did the first time he ever saw her, his eyes rolling up and down her body, stopping at the ‘Spirit of ‘76’ at her lap, teeth chewing on the stray hairs of his mustache. It was not sexy or salacious. It was as if he was the team captain, still deciding which side of the field she ought to play on. Finally he said, “I gotta ask you a hell of a question.”

“What is it, Merle?”

“You ever been in a fight?”

“That’s a hell of a question all right.”

“I wanna know. You ever been in one?”

“You mean, like, ever?”

“Yeah, ever.”

Tina tucked her hands into her apron pocket and looked at the floor, flipping the entirety of her life through her mind. There wasn’t a lot down there for her, outside of the peanut shells at her feet, and a few cigarette butts, snubbed and crushed. “I don’t know,” she said. “In school I guess. Once or twice.”

“How’d you do?”

“I did all right.”

“You’re a little gal,” he said. “You must be quick on your feet.”

Tina looked him over. He held her eyes in his, red-ringed and unblinking. “I’m quick enough,” she said. “What do you want to know for?”

He walked away from her then, paced down the bar collecting empties from the three old codgers spaced out among the stools. One of the men held up two fingers. Merle went to the fridge and pulled out a couple cans of Rainier and slid them down the bar.

“I threw Freddy the Sailor out of here about an hour ago,” he said, walking back to her.  “Belligerence and general vulgarity.”

“And this is news?” Freddy’s disagreeable effect was not surprising in the least.

“He was worse than usual. Took a swing at me and almost clipped me in the head. I sent him on his way with a split lip and a little bitty patch of hair gone from the side of his head.” He reached a finger up and touched himself, just above his temple.

“Well, that doesn’t sound good for him,” she said.

“It wasn’t. Thing is, Freddy’s old lady called about ten minutes ago, screaming all kinds of shit at me saying, How dare I touch her husband and he’s a honored vet and blah, blah, blah.” He leaned against the back counter and folded his arms over his chest. They were wrapped in tattoos, of an eagle and some words that Tina had never been able to read. “She says she’s coming down here.” He looked down at those arms of his. “So you need to be ready for her.”

Tina coughed out a laugh, a kneejerk reaction that was unexpected even for her. This, she’d already decided, was not her problem. Six dollars an hour paid for drink serving and small talk, not drama over something she’d had no part of.

“Ready for what?” she said. “I got no beef with her.”

Merle cocked his head at her. “I can’t hit a woman,” he said, as if stating the obvious. “If that broad comes in here raising hell, you’re gonna have to lay her out.”

“Do I have a choice in the matter?”

“Not really. I hate to put it that way, honey, but that’s the way it’s got to be.”

Tina felt her knees sigh, and she steadied herself on the bar. She didn’t have it in her to be without a job again. There were two mouths to feed at home, counting her mother’s. Christmas was around the corner and her car was running on only three cylinders. Merle stared at her with those reddened eyes. There was nothing else she could say.

“How big a gal is she?”

 

Over the next 45 minutes the door opened and closed at least a dozen times. Some people left and a few more came in already tipsy, including a couple rough-looking coots Merle knew. Every few minutes Tina passed by the front window and took a look outside to see if anyone new had pulled into the lot.

“What kind of car does she got?”

Merle shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “A Ranchero if she’s driving Freddy’s rig.”

She leaned over the booth and looked out at all the cars crowding the space under the tall, lit sign. There wasn’t a Ranchero and what was there looked empty and dark to her.

“Don’t tie yourself up in a knot, honey,” Merle hollered. “Freddy’s wife is a big talker. Probably won’t even come in.”

Somebody got up and changed the channel on the television to an old movie that was already in progress, a black and white western. A woman was standing with her back against the bare logs of an inside wall, a rifle held at her side. A man called something from outside among a band of sagebrush, huddled with a group of men squatted behind a low ridge. “You’re a bunch of liars!” the woman screamed back at them. “Every last one of you!”

Tina pushed off from the table and forced herself to wander the bar, collecting empties from the booths and making small talk with the guys she knew, tucking the occasional dollar tips into her pocket. They talked about basketball and last year’s shipyard strikes and she nodded along with them and teased them about their long beards and thin hairlines. Still, she stole glances out the window when she could. At some point Merle began running the blender, and a couple of young gals who had come in earlier started screeching over the pinball machine, cocktail glasses on the spindle table behind them, paper umbrellas scattered around the stems. Things were picking up and people seemed to having fun, forgetting all about what had happened with Freddy.

By 11:30 the parking lot was a field of white. Faint tracks snaked gray from parking stalls to the main road, some darker than others. In a cone that fell from the tall post lamp, flakes drifted and spun, and Tina found herself thinking less about Freddy’s woman and more about how good the tread might be on her own tires, and whether the plows would be out on the highway by two o’clock. She’d been there for three hours and there were only a few more drinkers in the place than there had been when she arrived. By now it was proving to be a slow night probably thanks to the weather, which was fine by her.

“I can tell you’ve decided that she ain’t coming.” A woman leaned back on her barstool and looked over at Tina, eyes glassy and seated over ruddy, puffed cheeks. “You think the snow’s gonna keep her at home.” She wore a man’s sports jacket with the cuffs chopped and frayed. She pointed a twig finger at Tina. “That bitch turns into an alley cat if she thinks she’s been screwed over,” she said. “I seen her in action.”

“I’m not worried about her,” Tina lied. Merle looked up from a glass he was cleaning.

“I didn’t say you was,” the woman said. “Alls I’m saying is that you better be ready for her if she does show.”

“Nobody asked you to weigh in, Hattie.” Merle walked down and took an empty glass from the space in front of her. He held it up and she nodded. “I wouldn’t make a five dollar bet on anything Freddy’s woman says she’ll do,” he said. “Chances are she’s dead asleep on the couch burning a hole in the upholstery with her cigarette. Either that or she and Freddy are up at the casino spending their rent.” He titled a bottle of gin over a tumbler and winked at Tina.

The woman shrugged her shoulders and tipped back to the bar, taking a scoop of peanuts into her hand.  A guy next to her leaned in and said something into her hair and she laughed, cracking a peanut in half and tossing the shell onto the floor.

“How old is your kid?” Merle asked. He produced a towel and wiped down the counter. Tina took a seat on the stool opposite him.

“She’s eight,” Tina said. “My mom watches her when I’m here. She cries every time I leave.”

“Your mom cries whenever you leave the house?”

Tina laughed at that. “God I wish,” she said. “My daughter, Merle. She doesn’t do well with my being gone, especially at night.”

“She’ll outgrow it,” Merle said. “She’s only eight.”

Tina leaned over the bar and took a glass, and filled it with water from the faucet. Thank God, she thought, that he didn’t ask about the man in her life (or lack thereof). She didn’t have the energy to get into the particulars, dredging up stories of late night battles with her ex, the screaming. The unevenly placed pictures, hung for the sole purpose of covering the fist-sized divots left in the drywall. It was all months behind her and she was in a better place, even if it meant being under the same roof as her mother all over again. Even if it meant working nights serving well drinks and cheap beer to a bunch of bottom-rung alcoholics.

Tina asked, “You have kids?”

“Somewhere,” he said.

“You don’t know?”

“They’re grown and gone,” Merle said. “The boy, he’s twenty-six and in California. Moves about every six months. His older sister, I ain’t heard from in some time.” He stared past Tina at the wall behind her, where the picture window looked out into the front parking lot. “It’s complicated.”

The ice machine kicked up, like the low rumble of a passing train. Fewer people were asking for refills now. Maybe they figured they had plenty of time until last call and they were saving their dollar bills, or they were thinking it might actually be a good idea to get somewhat clear-headed for the drive home.

One of the pinball girls whooped and smacked the side of the machine, and Merle shot a look over at them. Tina said, “You want me to go kick their asses too?” Merle laughed at that and right then somebody sitting over at the window called out, “Hello Merle. Here she is.”

 

Tina stood just outside the front door with her hands in her coat pockets, watching the figure seated inside the darkened Ranchero. It had stopped snowing, though tiny glasslike specks still drifted and swirled in the air. The car was dirty white with gray paint splotches covering the fender, and there was no license plate where it should have been on its front. After a minute or so the driver’s door opened, and a plume of blue smoke rose up into the sky.

It occurred to Tina that Freddy’s woman might have thought to bring a gun with her, or maybe a knife, and at the same time those same men that had announced the Ranchero’s arrival were likely still staring out that window, waiting for all sorts of shit to come down out there. In fact, the whole bar was probably in there watching them, laying bets on the table and taking down names. Still, she kept her eyes on the car, and the woman climbing out of it.

As Tina had anticipated she was a rough-looking woman, heavy all around with sweat pants that hugged her wide hips too tightly, bunched down over slip-on canvas shoes not smart for the ice and snow. She wore a thick parka on top, its fur-lined hood cradling her pink, round, moonlike face. She could have been thirty or fifty as far as Tina could tell, with a long mane of crow-black hair that fell down over her broad shoulders.

“I just about ran my goddamned car off the bridge,” she called out. “I can’t fucking believe I made it here in one piece.” She walked over toward Tina, stepping on the concrete like she was learning to walk for the first time.

Tina said, “You look like you’ve been put through the wringer.”

“I feel like it.” She approached Tina and stopped, and slid her hands into her coat pockets. Her lips curled down at the sides and she drew her eyes into slits, peering like she was trying to see her through a fog. “You a lady bouncer tonight?” she said. “Merle send you out to knock me on my ass?”

Tina straightened herself up tall, as if the change in posture might give direction to the way things might go. Something rolled in the pit of her stomach and her fingers itched and crawled inside her pockets.

The woman laughed. “You don’t look like much,” she said. “I got a twelve year-old niece with more shape than you.”

“I can take care of myself.” Tina pushed her voice down into her chest, hoping the sound of it might carve itself into the air. “It’s a cold night to end up on the ground.”

“No shit,” she snapped, and then her face fell together again, the lines drawing down like lightning from the sides of her mouth. “Tell that to Freddy. He’s got a rash all upside his head and for all I know his shoulder is knocked out of joint again. I’m probably gonna have to run him to the ER tomorrow.”

“Merle says he was out of control,” Tina said. “Said he had to toss him out before someone else did a lot worse to him.”

“Bullshit.”

She stepped back from Tina and yanked her hand from her pocket. It was only when she waved it in the air that Tina could see she had a ball peen hammer in her fist, the round metal head glinting from the lamp overhead.  Tina pulled back, put up a hand in front of her.

“Look lady, I’m just doing what I’m told so I can keep this job,” she said. “I got a kid at home.”

“So what? I got two.”

There was no way of knowing what Freddy’s gal would really do, how serious or crazy, or high, she was. But Tina knew if that hammer came at her she would have a half a second to figure it all out. She looked at the woman’s legs, at the sagging gray cotton that hung like old skin. She could kick her squarely in the kneecap, knock the leg out from under her and send her falling to the pavement. That would not be hard to do.

“I’m sick of this,” the woman said. “I tell Freddy to stay the hell out of here but he won’t do it. Goddamn Merle in there, sucking up our money night after night, standing by while Freddy pisses our rent away on beer and pool. We got kids, for God’s sake. I don’t even know if he can work now with his shoulder the way it is.”

The hammer rocked back and forth in her hand as she went on, punctuating every cuss word she threw out. “This is bullshit. I gotta come to this goddamned place and fight his battles for him.”

Tina looked down at her knees again and moved in a little closer. Her feet dragged so heavy with each step, concrete cinderblocks fused to the ends of her rubber band legs.

“I could go and bust out that big window right there,” Freddy’s woman said, stabbing the hammer toward the front door. “And maybe while I’m at it I might just knock you on your skinny little butt. Knock you right out.”

Tina’s own knees shifted but she held herself still, frozen. Like a statue. What they were saying inside now, she wondered. Was Merle there with them and could any of them even see the hammer? It was possible, she thought, that she was standing in such a way that the line of sight between she and Freddy’s girl was completely blocked. She could have a gun pointed at my face, she thought, And nobody would be able to do a goddamned thing. Six dollars an hour plus tips suddenly felt like a hell of a lot less money now than it had the day before.

“You know they’re all just in there watching us,” Tina finally said. “Probably laying bets. Waiting for us to have at it.”

“Yeah, that’d be like them wouldn’t it? Fucking pigs.”

“That’s men.”

“Don’t I know.” Freddy’s woman stretched onto her toes. She squinted her eyes and craned her neck, as if those few inches would allow her to make out what was already impossible to see. “We could give em a show if you want to. Take a swing at me. See what happens.”

Tina looked back over her shoulder. Figures and shapes lingered in the glass, but she still couldn’t make out what was what.

“I say this whole thing is a lousy idea,” she said. “Even if you tossed that hammer on the ground to even things up it’s too damned cold out here to start punching on things.”

Freddy’s girl swung her arm slightly from her side, tapping the hammer against her leg. Her jaw clenched, and her eyes began to well up. Dropping her head back she gave out a rush of air then reached her free hand up to her face, wiping at her cheek.

A breath of wind kicked up, taking an icy hold on Tina’s bare neck.  “What’s your name?” she asked. “Anybody in there just calls you ‘Freddy’s woman’.”

She looked Tina up and down, one edge of her lip curling. “You first.”

“Tina. Short for Christina.”

“Tina,” she repeated. “It figures.” She rocked back on her heels a few times then said, “I’m Sammy.” When Tina didn’t say anything she added, “I know it sounds like a man’s name.”

Tina said, “No it doesn’t.” Then she said, “I say it feels like a goddamned freezer out here, Sammy. How about we duck into your car for a bit? Warm our hands up.”

Sammy looked back over her shoulder at the Ranchero and stared at it as if she worried that the car itself would not allow such a thing. “Freddy still ain’t fixed the heater.”

“Come on,” Tina said. “It’ll take us out of the freak show we’re putting on just by standing here.”

Another gust of wind picked up and tiny flakes swept from the ground up into the air. Sammy shrugged her shoulders and slid the hammer back into her pocket, then reached up and wiped at her nose. After looking past Tina at the tavern once more she turned and walked back to the car.

The inside of the car reeked of dirty oil and stale cigarette smoke and man sweat, and the backseat was strewn with rags and clothing, and crumpled brown paper sacks and crushed soda cans. Tina sank down in the passenger seat, kicking aside candy wrappers and curled pull tabs from beneath her feet.

For a time they sat in near silence, Sammy’s rattled breathing the only sound filling the space between them. The spread of gauges on the dashboard were cloudy with grime but Tina could see that there was less than a quarter tank of gas sitting beneath them. She thought of how, even if she wanted to go, if she wanted to pull out of that parking lot and just keep on driving Sammy would likely not even get as far as the county line. She was just as stuck as any of them.

“I don’t know what the hell to do,” Sammy finally said. “He ain’t gonna be able to go to work tomorrow and we got bills due. Merle had no reason to beat on him like that.”

Tina turned in her seat and leaned against the door, the metal handle cold against her back. “I don’t know anything about it,” she said. “Maybe he didn’t. But like I said, I heard Freddy was pretty riled up.”

“Oh big goddamned deal,” she snapped. “He gets like that cause he drinks too much. Besides, Merle’s the one that serviced him. If he wouldn’t of poured the booze, Freddy wouldn’t of drank it, right?”

A curtain of fog began to draw down over the windows and Tina found her stomach finally settling. There was something good about being in this space with this woman, a comfort in spite of everything: the garbage, the hammer. The unknown. There was something to be said about a simple conversation, even a sharp one, possibly winning over a public brawl.

Sammy sniffed. “You think it’s easy for them boys to see their daddy all beat up?”

Tina shook her head. “It’s not good for them to be seeing him dead drunk all the time, either. That’s hard for a kid to take.”

“I know that.”

“I speak from personal experience on that one.”

“Well so do I, so I guess that makes us even, doesn’t it?” Sammy reached out and flipped the ashtray tab a few times. “What the hell else am I supposed to do? It’s too hard on my own. No man out there wants a woman who looks like me, and two kids as a bonus.”

“None of this here feels all that easy to me,” Tina said. “But then what do I know? The last man I had pitched the TV through the front window just because he couldn’t remember where he left the remote.”

“You’re shitting me.” Sammy pushed air through her teeth, a real grin pulled across her face. “Now that’s something I ain’t seen, and I have seen a lot.”

They sat quietly, Sammy still fiddling with the ashtray. Tina watched as a tiny drop of water slid down the slope of the windshield, leaving a dark stripe in its path where the blue neon of the Lazy Eye sign shone through. Finally Sammy dug into her pocket and pulled out a clutter of keys, and stabbed one into the ignition.

“You can go on in now,” she said. “I ain’t gonna raise any hell.”

“You sure?”

“Yes I’m sure. What am I gonna do? The minute I walk in there Merle will call the cops and my ass will be in jail before I can say How Do You Do. And then what? My kids with no mama, just a drunk ass man that can’t even reach around to wipe his own ass.” She produced a pack of Marlboros and tapped one out from the box. “I don’t know why I wasted the gas to come here. Like he’s worth all this.”

Tina leaned to one side and reached into her front jeans pocket, and pulled out a folded stack of bills. They were all her tips for the night, not much. Twenty bucks, maybe a few more. But she handed it over to Sammy anyway, laying it on the dashboard.

“What’s that for?” she asked.

“I don’t know. A tank of gas,” Tina said. “Maybe a cup of coffee and a hamburger on your way home. Whatever you want.”

Sammy snatched it from the dash and handed it back over to her. “Hell no,” she said. “You earned that fair and square. God knows I wouldn’t have the patience for them sons of bitches in there. Plus on top of that, being sent out here to duke it out with me. I coulda had a gun on me or something.”

“The thought did cross my mind.”

“What the hell kind of boss does that? I hope he planned to give you a bonus or something.”

Tina put her hands up in surrender, and Sammy took back the cash, tucking it into her pocket with the ball peen hammer. “Thank you, then,” she said, almost in a whisper. “You didn’t need to do that, but it will sure come in handy.” She produced a lighter from somewhere and lit up her cigarette, and just like that the car was full of smoke.

“I better get back inside,” Tina said. “You drive careful on your way out of here. There’s drunks and crazy people out there.”

“At least I don’t have to worry about the ones in there,” she said, nodding toward the window.

 

A half dozen pairs of eyes locked onto Tina when she came back into tavern, some swollen behind thick eye glasses, all of them searching her face for some sign of a fight, maybe bruises or fingernail marks, Tina figured. Someone called out, “Merle, you need to give that woman a raise,” and another voice answered, “Amen to that.”

“You all right, girl?” Merle asked from behind the bar.

“You care?”

“Sure I care.”

“That’s easy to say from back there,” Tina said. “She could’ve killed me out there, you know.”

“What? She have a knife or something?”

“What difference does that make now?” Tina said, taking a seat on the stool. “I didn’t see you coming out there to check my pulse.”

Merle walked to the coffee pot and poured a mug half full, then reached under the bar and took out a bottle of Irish Cream, adding a splash. “Here,” he said. “Warm yourself up and maybe we’ll talk about that raise. Fair enough?”

She nodded and blew across the rim.

He waited a minute or so, let her take a couple drinks, and then he started asking her about all that had happened, about why they had gone to the Ranchero and what she’d had to say to Tina. Freddy was a hard man, Merle said, but his woman was harder. She had to be, to stick with the likes of him.

“She’s a tough gal all right,” Tina said. “But that shouldn’t have to be a bad thing.”

“I guess not.”

Tina gave up a few things but found that she preferred to keep most of what had happened back where it happened, and before long they left the subject of Sammy alone altogether. Merle started to tell Tina a story about his old man and his bootlegging days. The old coots sitting in the booths, meanwhile, seemed to have forgotten all about the fight and had no concept of the lateness of the hour. And if they had people at home waiting for them, wives sitting on the sofa in a darkened living room or lying in bed, curled on one side glancing at the red glow of the clock, the men didn’t let on that they cared in the slightest. Merle just kept on talking and pouring and Tina kept on bringing it to the men, taking their money and their words and, on occasion, a quick glance out at the curling tire tracks that stitched over the snowy parking lot.

The Moon Prophecy

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

For years, our Moon spins away
from us in inches, as if to slip
out of orbit, unnoticed. We
can’t have that— who would
we blame for our midnight
cravings and bloody rags?
So the white coats in their labs
create the longest hook
reaching from Earth to Moon.
They splice new materials.
Pxumonia: soft lavender but sturdy
cousin of rubber that bends
through dust and gas. Konilium:
dark-matter metal that endures
flurries of debris and exhales eternally
as space itself. The puncture
we intend to be minimal, but Moon
cracks more, the closer it’s pulled.

On the open ocean, Moon’s
cracked carcass floats. Humpbacks
bump knobby heads on wet lunar
shells. The whales’ gusts of mist,
muffled to a hiss. Moon shards
burrow into blowholes and blubber.
The crash churns out tsunamis
across continents. Some humans
stop drinking and join Sun cults.
Others drink more to max out
the truncated, dizzy spin of days.
Silver light missing, corals sway
in limbo—their mass spawns
postponed. Discouraged, doodlebugs
dig shallow graves for their dwindling
prey, while deer teeter through forests
where nothing falls
on firs like tinsel.

Pluck

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

If you should make
a bitter wine from my yard-
tear pieces of fuzzy green neck.

Pluck only the hair husk
and gather sun-cracked lace leaf

because
cat piss has drowned
the mint.

Our feet
are swollen
like puff pastries
but at least the yarrow
pulp steeping in rum
beneath piles of bikinis
will coo them quiet tonight.

As 5pm
streaks molten rust
across your nape,
you suck Halls lozenges
for aromatherapy.

As if sweat-crushed
tomato vine
wasn’t a tincture
you’d inhale from your
own damp fingers.

As if wafts of
earthen worm spit
and freshly
baptized rosemary
make your nose bleed for
drugstore eucalyptus.

I lap melted popsicle juice
from palms that dug
demon root until blistered
and soggy
and watch you perform
what your sister
taught you
in the overgrown
weeds
of your old
schoolyard:

1. to pop
the babies’ heads
off
and then 2. drink
their sour milk
until 3. dry heaving
makes you feel like
a dog inhaling
old marrow.

Tonight
when I bury my
tongue in your mouth
your teeth will still
be buzzing.

Magic

28 November 2016
Categories: Fiction

Night Train ignored the squeeze of his wrestling mask by thinking of how badly he wanted to beat up Magic. The silver mask, adorned with a black locomotive on both sides, had been Night Train’s signature for nearly forty years, but now his chin oozed from the bottom edges, the lower ties left undone. Night Train parked his Lincoln Town Car in front of the Biloxi Bomber’s house and leaned across the bench seat to open the passenger door. The car had been a symbol of the prominence Night Train had achieved in wrestling; now the leather seats were cracked and faded, the cushions worn out and uneven. The creak of the passenger door reminded him of the snap of the ring ropes, drawing a smile from beneath the spandex.

The Biloxi Bomber moved slowly towards the car, wearing his World War I pilot’s hat, goggles sitting on the top, with a white three-piece suit. He leaned on a cane with one hand as he curled the other into a fist beneath his chin, contorting his face and snarling his lips as he had for decades.

“The train keeps a rollin’!” Biloxi shouted out Night Train’s catch phrase as he steadied himself against the door.

“I haven’t heard that in a long time.” Night Train smiled beneath his mask. “You look up for a brawl.”

“It’s been a long time since we had a good one of those.” Biloxi paused at the door to catch his breath.

“The suit’s a nice touch,” Night Train said.

“If we end up in the paper I want to look presentable.” Biloxi passed in his cane before lowering himself into the car. He still measured his movements, only now to protect himself instead of an opponent. “My daughter gave me this suit. If we make the news I want her to see it.”

“We’re going to be in the paper, just like in the old days,” Night Train said. Decades before, after twice-monthly shows at the Greensboro Coliseum, the wrestlers went to The Sucker Punch, a smoky poolroom with cinder block walls, poor lighting, and a greasy plywood bar. A few locals would try to test the wrestlers, to see if they were as tough as they claimed, and they always found out it was true. No one called a lawyer. No one called the cops. But the promoters called the papers, because an article about their wrestlers clearing out a bar of good old boys made for great publicity.

Night Train smiled at the memory. “We’ll not only be back in the papers, but we’ll be the biggest story on the World Wide Web pages.”

Biloxi let out a high pitched laugh. When Night Train was booking a territory he had never let him laugh on camera. A man over six feet tall and an athletic 300 pounds should have sounded like an angry bear, not an anxious horse.

Night Train looked in the mirror before he pulled back onto the road, the mask covering what it always had: cheeks too chubby to be intimidating, a face too round to strike fear into the good guys. In time it had come to hide teeth lost to misplaced elbows, a nose misaligned by errant punches, ears cauliflowered by headlocks held too tight.

Biloxi patted his old friend on the shoulder. “I’m amazed the mask still fits. Goes great with a polo.”

“It’s a little snug. But it’ll do for one more fight.” It had been over twenty years since they were last in The Sucker Punch, before the Global Wrestling Experience killed off wrestling’s system of regional territories, replacing them with a nation-wide product emphasizing entertainment over wrestling and body builders over wrestlers. “Here’s what I wanted you to see.” Night Train patted a stack of papers between them. The papers were pages from wrestling web sites that covered the GWE, chronicling not only current storylines but also discussing backstage politics, listing salaries, and spoiling future plans. On top of the stack was a picture of a muscular wrestler with long blonde hair, holding up a championship belt like a rock star would a guitar. “That’s Magic, the one I’ve been telling you about. He’s their top guy.”

Biloxi studied the picture before interrupting Night Train’s thoughts. “Nice looking. Great physique.”

“They all look like that now. They look good…”

Biloxi chimed in with his friend to finish the familiar line they had used for years in promos. “…but barbells don’t hit back.”

Biloxi let out his high-pitched laugh again.

Night Train adjusted his mask and kept talking. “Let me tell you what we’re going to do.” He was used to scripting events. Late in his career he had been the head booker in the Carolinas, telling wrestlers who was winning, who was losing, and where they could go if they didn’t like it. “We’re headed to The Sucker Punch. But now it’s not The Sucker Punch. It’s called the Gate City Tap Room.”

“That doesn’t sound nearly as fun.”

“The GWE had a show at the Coliseum tonight. From what I’ve seen on the computer Magic and his buddies hang out there after the matches, just like we did.” Night Train adjusted his mask around the neck. “This won’t be hard to get going. Look at how much money these guys are making. Six figures. Travel covered. And they only work 200 dates a year.”

“We worked 350 when business was slow. Double shots every Sunday.”

“This generation is spoiled. They don’t know what it means to be tough, to sacrifice, to work your way up. That’s the only way you learn to respect the business. We’ll tell them that, and a little bit more.”

“There’s no way they can respect the business.”

“Of course not. So we’ll teach them how, remind them whose coattails they’re riding on. Run them down and wait ‘til they make the first move. Then we can do what we want.”

Biloxi turned the picture of Magic towards Night Train. “How do you know a guy who looks like this will fight?”

Night Train looked at his friend, glad he had the mask to hide his exasperation. “He has to fight. He’s a wrestler. He’s not very good, but he’s still a wrestler.”

“He doesn’t look like much to me.” Biloxi held the picture of Magic up to catch a few flashes of passing headlights. “How many guys he’ll have with him? I can only take three or four now.” He rubbed a thumb across the top of his cane.

“It doesn’t matter how many.” He pointed towards the pages in Biloxi’s hand. “Even with all of this out there, if he gets his ass kicked by a couple of old men, it’s going to look bad.”

“We’ll cost him a few weeks’ worth of missed shows at least.”

“That’s the thing. They get paid when they’re hurt. Don’t even have to wrestle. Magic got two weeks off for a concussion.”

Biloxi shook his head and tapped the side of his bomber hat. “I probably had so many concussions that my grandkids will inherit them.”

They rode in silence for several minutes, passing by new billboards and unfamiliar exit signs. Night Train finally resumed the conversation. “What I can’t figure out is why they call him Magic. He doesn’t look like a magician or a wizard.”

Biloxi squinted at one of the pictures blurred across the sheets of plain paper. “Why did they call you Night Train? Who were never a train.”

Night Train paused. “You’re still quick on the comeback. Verbally, at least.”

Biloxi smiled and held up his fists. “These are still pretty quick, too. Let those young bloods try something.”

Night Train looked in the rearview mirror. “It’s because I hit hard like a train. That’s why.”

Biloxi looked over his friend. “I never knew that. You were already Night Train when I met you.”

“You know why you’re The Biloxi Bomber?”

“I’m from Biloxi and I could fit into this hat.” He let out his laugh again. Night Train thought that maybe, in the car at least, it didn’t sound so bad.

They settled back into silence while Biloxi continued to read Night Train squinted against the headlights and listened to the familiar sound of tires running the road. He had driven to Greensboro hundreds of times over the years. It was much faster now with the new bypasses, but he preferred the old roads and highways they had traveled for decades.

Biloxi read through several sheets before looking up. “It says here that they’re not allowed to blade anymore.”

“It might scar up those pretty faces and scare the little kids they want watching.”

“How do you believe in a chair shot if there’s no blood? How does anyone figure that?”

“They don’t have to. The fans don’t think it’s real anymore. They do chair shots every week now, and the guys just get up. It’s not like we did it, when a chair shot meant something.” He patted the stack of papers again. “It’s these pages. The fans know what’s really happening. Everyone’s in on it.”

Biloxi looked at Night Train. “Why would they want to be?”

*

Night Train felt his heart pumping at the exit for High Point Road. As they passed the Greensboro Coliseum they saw the GWE trailers lined up behind the building. The crew would be tearing down the ring and getting ready to drive it to the next town. The parking lot was mostly empty, so the show had been over for a while. Magic and his boys would be well into their evening by now.

Greensboro had changed in the twenty years since monthly wrestling shows left. The Coliseum was renovated, and the area surrounding it gentrified to please the outsiders flooding the region. The Sucker Punch was razed and replaced with The Gate City Tap Room, a hip micro-brewery.

Night Train checked his mask in the mirror while Biloxi pulled himself up by the peeling vinyl top of the Towncar. He got out of the car and said across the roof, “They don’t get fired anymore for losing a bar fight. The big shot owner probably doesn’t even want them scrapping.”

“Maybe because he knows they won’t win.” Biloxi steadied his cane on the pavement. The gravel lot of The Sucker Punch had absorbed the blood of bruised locals decades ago. The newly laid asphalt was easier to walk now.

Night Train tugged on the cast iron handle of the front door and held it for Biloxi, who was reading a sign explaining how the new building’s floors were made of wood from abandoned barns.  

“You ever heard of ‘reclaiming’ before?” Biloxi asked as he shook his head. In the light coming out of the door Night Train noticed how much weight Biloxi had lost. He was a shrunken version of the man who could throw loud mouthed locals into the gravel dust two at a time.

“No,” Night Train quickly responded.

The Gate City Tap Room was shiny and polished. A chalkboard hung above the bar, covered in the names of strange beers: Fat Tire, Fox Barrel Blackberry Pear, Old Rasputin Stout, In Heat Wheat. The front of the room was filled with people sitting on high leather stools. The voices at the bar died down as customers turned to look at Night Train and the Biloxi Bomber, but the stares were momentary. A man with a waxed moustache walked by and said, “I like your style, dudes.”

There were no pool tables; instead a trio of skeeball machines occupied a back corner. The Gate City Tap Room was much larger than The Sucker Punch. It wasn’t filled with cigarette smoke or lit with flickering fluorescents. The air smelled clean, even as it passed over the nosepiece of his old mask. Night Train led the way through sections of tables, scanning the crowd, the mask making it hard to see.

Night Train recognized the figures playing skeeball. He saw them on Monday Maniacs, performing their high-flying acrobatics and posing for the camera. Some of the wrestlers playing skeeball were supposed to be faces and others heels, but here they were, in public, socializing as if good and bad no longer meant anything. In the middle of the group was Magic, the center of attention of his fellow wrestlers, his bleached blonde hair illuminated by the floodlights dangling from exposed ceiling beams.

Night Train made eye contact with Magic. He saw them standing across the ring from each other, waiting for the bell. As Magic moved forward, Night Train could feel their lock up, the push of their weight against each other, the heads close enough to whisper last minute plans before starting the match. He listened for the crowd to tell him it was time for the first move.

Instead Magic’s arm fell across Night Train’s back with a strong slap. Night Train jerked as Magic shouted, “The train keeps a rollin’!” His voice sounded clean like it did on television, with no accent, no conflict between the sound and its source. “I used to follow you in Pro Wrestling Illustrated before we got TBS in Omaha.”

Night Train stared at Magic’s deeply tanned cheeks and smooth forehead. The light reflected off of his white teeth, fully intact. Night Train had always been prepared for an opponent who would go off plan, or a star who decided he didn’t like the finish. But tonight he hadn’t planned on anything happening in The Gate City Tap Room that wouldn’t have happened in The Sucker Punch.

“Is that the Biloxi Bomber?” Magic stepped over to Biloxi, shaking his hand and telling him a similar story about wrestling magazines. He had even seen Biloxi once, on a card in Kanas City, in the dying days of the territories. “Let me buy you gentlemen a drink.” Magic waved down the bartender. In a few moments he returned with two bottles of beer.

“Thanks,” is all Night Train said. He looked at Biloxi, surrounded by several of the other wrestlers who had made their way over, all tan, well-built, and alike.

Magic stood opposite of Night Train. “So were you at the show tonight? What’d you think?”

Night Train thought of matches that had gone awry. He always used the noise of the crowd to figure out where he was in the ring, but the voices in the bar weren’t directed towards him. The sound was just in the air. He kept listening for a cue. “No, we didn’t make it.” Night Train grasped the beer without looking at the bottle.

Magic took a drink and kept talking. “That’s too bad. I’d love to hear what you think about the way I was working over the leg tonight. It’s old school, but at a house show you have the time to tell a story by working on a body part. You can’t do that on TV. Not enough time.”

Night Train felt like he was grabbing a headlock in the middle of a match to give a confused opponent time to compose himself. “That’s right. That’s what you should do.”

Magic stood in front of Night Train in an awkward silence before patting him on the back again. “Look – we love it when the legends come visit.”

Legends. Night Train listened to the word. The background chatter faded. He could see Magic’s lips moving but there was no sound. Night Train felt his mask tighten around his skull. He tried to shake off the blow. He wasn’t sure how much time passed before Magic’s voice broke back in.

“…I loved that angle you did with Dusty Rhodes when you turned on him in the cage. And the promo you cut afterwards. Whoa—that was the stuff.”

Night Train turned towards Magic. “You’re supposed to be an asshole.”

Magic threw his head back and laughed, the sound fitting and natural. He then leaned forward and rested his hand on Night Train’s back. “Nope. I just play one on TV.” He laughed again and the man and the character separated, the line between them clear.

He kept talking. “You’re welcome to come backstage anytime. Guys like you don’t need tickets. Here,” he reached into his pocket and pulled out a smartphone, “let me give you the number of Talent Relations. They’ll be sure you can get in whatever show you want.” He showed Night Train the number. “I’ll text it to you.”

Night Train paused. “I don’t text.”

“Ok,” Magic said. He picked up a napkin and waved to one of the bartenders for a pen. “We’ll do this the old fashioned way.” He jotted down the number and handed it to Night Train. “They’ll get you in backstage, too.  All the performers would love it. We’d all love it.”

“Performers?” Night Train listened to the word while Magic furrowed his smooth, unscarred brow. “Is that what they call you?”

“Yeah. That’s what we are. Me. You.” Magic pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “All of us. Right?”

“Thanks for the drink,” Night Train said. He could hear the crowd clearly now. The audience was alive. He sat the beer down, untouched, and looked around for Biloxi. He couldn’t find him, but he could hear his laugh, the high-pitched cackle that was out of place in a wrestling promo but fit well in a hip new bar. Night Train thought about where he would be standing right now if The Sucker Punch hadn’t disappeared into this strange room. He took a deep breath and smelled nothing familiar: no smoke, no cheap beer, no dried blood on his lip.

The only thing he knew was the noise of the crowd. He could hear the voices fill the Coliseum, restless, waiting for a reason to pop. It was the right moment to make his move, to create momentum. He looked at Magic, perfect, polished, slick like a movie star, the warm lights making him easy to see. He thought about the compliments, the acknowledgement, what he had expected and what had actually happened. He heard the sounds of the ring: the snap of the hose wrapped-cables, the thud of the canvas covered plywood, the cheers of the fans telling him what to do next. Night Train tugged on his mask, feeling the fit, and then charged his opponent. He heard the roar of the crowd, the rush of air, the scream of voices, revealing what was real, signaling the moment the match would get going, letting him know that soon there would be impact.

Pensacola

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

All year, vacation houses goose their skirts
up housewife legs, their stilts a tiptoed recoil
from the ocean edging toward them like disgrace.
These homes, though January lonesome, aren’t
about to let their garters down. Waves cowlick

the sand into a beach scarp, muss the shore;
gulls clump in water like white blood cells choke

a virus. In a coffee shop beside
the marina, locals mourn the loss of one
more fort, the road now disappearing, ghosting
their history, a barrier spit sizzing
to silence. The barista shares his sermon

notes with the regulars who skipped last night’s
service, the scraps that smack of parables

with unintended consequence. These out-
of-season men who kneel to Gulf and God
make mold of myth. The salt-clean air bows up
against their church’s stained-glass windows, then,
with mainland guilt, they still sit, pray, and rise.

I leave them for the shore again, sit blank
on sandy bas reliefs of wind erosion.

                                 ❧

Erode me. Be the bellows and the ballast
and the hull of me, and take me somewhere else,
not land-locked, burb-docked Birmingham, not home,
not industry and smoke, not brick and steel,
not the sweltering side of the color wheel.

A plane writes nothing in the sky, but I
still try to piece together letters in

the exhaust trail—noughts and crosses, dotted i’s.
A lighthouse vertigo blips every twenty
seconds through me, those miner’s-daughter veins
engorged with some hereditary need
to crawl and excavate. Since here I have

no past to enter, nothing I can ruin,
power’s stripped down to air and simple prayers,

a silence blanched like the cross stuck in these dunes—
another foreign object in curetted
land. I’m another set of empty hands
refusing water as the seabirds whirr
on scissor legs, their chaos testament

to motion, their lockstep some defense of rest.

THE LOBSTERS IN LAS VEGAS

28 November 2016
Categories: Poetry

A plague of crickets or an endless game of Yahtzee. Neon rainstorms and rat-pack martinis. Tin-foil hats and moon landings. She knows the game: you pays your money and you takes your choice. Enchiladas at Binion’s or veal Marsala at the Sands, a trapeze act overhead or Elvis at the wedding chapel, find the way to San Jose or just walk on by. The sun blooms like a nuclear blast. Someone draws up a plan for Paris. When the old hotels implode, such elegant debris, so many skeletons and shot glasses. The concrete billowing and glittering. For years a sky full of Liberace. For years a cart of dim sum rolling past. She sits beside the dancing fountain and says: it’s all a ghost town now. Heat shimmers as the Eiffel Tower leans in. She finds lobsters in a faux waterfall, in aquamarine pools of vodka, huddled on linen tablecloths waving feelers. Could anything be more alien to this world? She selects a queen from New Zealand and wonders about Trini Lopez, thinks about Caliban with his Sony Trinitron, feels exiled and washed up, like Paul Anka in a mezzanine lounge bar, singing to the drunks. She says Hunter Thompson was right, pulls meat out of the claw and dunks it in butter, flicks the brilliant shell with a fingernail, listens to it ring.

Array