Welcome to the 19th Issue of Waccamaw
Welcome to the 19th Issue of Waccamaw,
We are almost a decade. We are almost. We are a reach that with its open extended hand may catch a loblolly in its grip and not let go. Our eyes in the night were replaced with a giant’s and we are digging down now, excavating, ablaze. Some of our categories are classic: ribbons, antifreeze, undiscovered facts. Some scrape at the film of class with clever little ham soft fists.
We have been sent into a frenzy of chalk print dances listening to how we thought of ourselves as the static of speckled debris.
The whole piñata gut of the world has been hazed.
Despite it we are brazen. Vibey. Locating us where we try to be.
This issue gets us subcutaneous, where we dream wealth in a drain of stars, our giant’s eyes wide with mutter. We search the pronoun mouths of your firsts where I turns on itself. This issue bows toward the frost of our ignored homes and with its head to the ground, points us on our way.
We are on our way.
Join us.
Love,
The Waccamites
Masthead
Student Editorial Team:
Managing Editor – Lanessa Salvatore
Co-Managing Editor – Ben Counts
Design Editor – Khrysta Boulavsky
Fiction Editor – Gabriel Miller
Non-fiction Editor – Sadie Shuck
Poetry Editor – Victoria Green
Poetry Editor & Digital Content Partner – Alisa Alice
Reader & 10th Anniversary Print Edition Editor – Maggie Fernandes
Faculty Editorial Team:
Digital Content Coordinator – Alli Crandell
Editor – Jessica Lee Richardson
Fiction Editor – Jeremy Griffin
Non-Fiction Editor – Colin Birch
Poetry Editor – Hastings Hensel
If there was one thing I could say I knew, and felt, and could get subcutaneous with
it would be the distance between me
and the small insects who do errands
coming through the loblollies,
the tough blue bird
on the telephone pole
and how he makes the mountain
behind him seem glued-on fake,
maybe just myself in the mirror, it would be
that one shoulder slopes a little down,
that I always forget which one
(because it’s in a mirror; because
I forget things that require direction,
like which way to turn the window cranks
or put the toilet paper)
or that one of my sad things
is to be accustomed to fear,
to birth it and room with it,
like when I read about Great Diseases
in YA at the library and
convinced myself, for years, and so silently,
and with great passion,
that I was dying of Lyme disease,
mostly that the only way I can escape the air
is by enumerating the vegetation,
pulling each up by a floss of name,
bright shocked aisles of trees
mountains birds flowers roads,
assailed with my names,
lacquered, punch-and-judied
and that the landscape out this window
leads to really nothing, in me,
is all objects I can categorize,
in the most basic of ways, not
in new striations,
new vibey colored folders in the room of someone
who’s happy about it
A Series of Improvements
We were sleeping the first time we heard the alarms. We woke up in fright and went to the window. The alarms came from somewhere in the middle of the city, somewhere near the fire. Later we heard a continuous, mechanical roar circulating in the sky and sometimes vanishing in cycles. The sound grew louder and louder, then it seemed to be inside our house. The room was shaking and our parents came running down the stairs. We looked at the city and there it was, the huge helicopter pouring water over buildings consumed by flames.
Our house stood at the top of the hill. From up there we could see the city and the river. At night the city was lit by yellow and red lamps. By day it seemed to be surrounded by a translucent haze. We stood at the window, staring at the city. Our parents did not take us there and we never understood why. Over there, we knew it, there were amusement parks, candy stores, and movie theaters.
The next day everything was normal again. In the morning we played cards and at night we watched the news. But when the journalists started talking about the fire, threatening us with groundbreaking, new information, that’s when our mother took the remote. She turned off the television and sent us to bed. We lied down and closed our eyes, but we didn’t sleep. Still we could hear the muffled voices of journalists talking about last night’s disaster.
The alarms rang once more that week and again at night. But this time no helicopter appeared in the sky. The flames spread rapidly from one building to the other and we heard a massive explosion. The fire lasted all night and only stopped burning the next morning, when there was nothing left to burn.
It was then that the first of them appeared. Suit and tie covered in ashes, his face full of scratches. He was slowly approaching our house, hugging the leather briefcase where he kept all of his personal belongings. When he saw us, he asked to speak to our father. He said he was a lawyer and that he needed help. The city, the entire city, had been destroyed. I just want a place to sleep, he said. Our father was willing to help him as long as the lawyer worked for it. Since we were not involved in legal imbroglios, our father offered him to look after our kitchen garden. We still did not have a kitchen garden, of course, so our father asked the man to cultivate one.
The gardener wore flannel shirt and jeans and worked from six in the morning to five in the afternoon. After work, he would fall on a pile of leaves and sleep there until sunrise. Inside his briefcase, among letters and contracts and bills, there was a cell phone, a photo album, and a flashlight. We took the flashlight and the phone to play. We left him with only the photographs.
Throughout that week, three more appeared. An engineer, a pharmacist and an artist. Their clothes were covered with ashes and they wanted a place to sleep. Since we did not need bridges, drugs, or beautiful paintings at the time, our father offered them to take care of the garden’s irrigation system. We still did not have an irrigation system, of course, so our father asked them to build one.
The three men joined the gardener. That week they erected walls of cardboard and garbage bags around the piles of leaves. Each of them slept in a cubicle. Sometimes, when the weather was cold, they cuddled each other. That week we got new toys: pencils, notebooks, test tubes, canvases, and brushes.
Two weeks later, there were seven men living and working in our yard. They took care of our vegetables, managed the irrigation system, and set up cages for birds and small rodents. That’s when our father asked them to build a wall around the hill. He said our house was an oasis of prosperity in the neighborhood. Who knows what could happen if we stood exposed and unprotected? There was so much going on, so many people fleeing from the destroyed city. They had nothing left and now they wanted what we worked to achieve. The workers argued cautiously with our father. They had come from the destroyed city and never did anything wrong. They worked hard. That’s when our father got emotional and said: you no longer belong to the destroyed city, but to this family.
For ten days the workers took turns on long trips along the riverbank. From there, they brought rocks to be broken and stacked around the hill. It took them another fifteen days to finish the wall. When the construction was completed, our father placed a chair next to the wall and asked a man to stay on guard. Tell anyone passing by they are about to trespass forbidden area. That man used to be a doctor.
At night, our father announced a celebration. The wallmaking was done., We were now safe and should be happy. He killed a chicken, which our mother roasted and served with some vegetables from the garden. We and our parents had a wonderful evening and the giblets were offered to the workers.
In exchange for the food, they washed our dishes.
Eclipse from Clayton, GA 2017
The Mediterranean orange fruit bowl I’d hear your ring kiss
has hovered over our dinners since you died, even though it doesn’t hold
enough orzo pasta or clam chowder to feed the family.
–
I’ve always imagined babies this sharp, curled up around organs, perfectly
round, save a bladder. I couldn’t have kept you because I have a history
of good fingernails, so you’d be able to scratch me from the inside out.
–
I picture the glinting, gold necklace circling
my mother’s neck or the way she cradled her arms
for months after she lost it in the ocean when I was twelve.
–
The white-feathered halo settled into my sister’s hair like a nest,
perched as if she were born to molt until she was punished
in Sunday school for saying she didn’t believe angels existed.
–
Toenail clippings used to line our nightstand; after you left
I’d chew on them as if they were a collection of voodoo dolls.
I was grinding bones. You could be hurt by the smallest part of me.
–
The handle of the mug you threw for me was still
wrapped in my palm as the yonic body shattered
on our hardwood floor and covered it with coffee.
–
An antique oscillating fan blade sliced off the tip of one of your fingers
when you were 6. Rusted, it rests like a shrine in my living room
I worship on off days. What could you have done with all ten of them?
–
If I didn’t say I saw a honeyed peach my grandmother may call
my poetry morbid again, and she’s been disappearing into the dent
of her bed so I’m afraid all of that darkness might kill her.
Order and Reflex in North Jersey
This was back during a period of my life when I thought of myself as having things. What did I have? In no particular order, the same things a lot of people have: a smartphone; an apartment; a monthly MetroCard; a Facebook page and an Instagram account; a checking account and a savings account; student loan debt; a steady, well-paying job that wasn’t too good or too bad; furniture; books; records; access to HBO GO and Netflix; neighbors; a doorman; a closet full of respectable middle- to upper-middle-class clothing; an IRA; a 401(k); stock in a once-great-but-now-pretty-much-obsolete film and camera company located in Western New York State; parents; siblings; an antique mirror; a baseball signed by Larry David and the cast of Seinfeld; countless other things.
Currently, I do not have a spouse or partner, but I do have a three-year-old son. His name is Noah. For a while he lived with me all the time because his mother, my ex-wife, is no longer living. She died a year-and-a-half ago. It was nobody’s fault. We had already separated and figured out how to be on “good terms” (her words). We shared custody then; now we don’t. She had an aneurysm and passed away, alone in her apartment. It was a difficult time. I understood the situation. I even accepted it. Nevertheless, it’s strange for me to say that something I have is not just an ex-wife but a dead ex-wife. Neither are things I ever thought I’d have. Nor did I anticipate having a son. But I do have a son.
The story of our family goes like this: Jack and Jill met in college. Jack and Jill started dating and quickly became inseparable. Jack and Jill were an item: not just Jack or just Jill, but Jack-&-Jill-Together—a single thought. Everyone who knew them agreed it was perfect, including Jack & Jill themselves. Jill was a poet (or wanted to be) and Jack was a fiction writer (or wanted to be). Instead, they both became teachers and moved out of Jersey into the City. They would write in the summers. They would publish a poem here, a story there, and eventually they wouldn’t have to teach anymore because that’s how that story goes. And there was to be no children. Children as children were fine as long as those children were someone else’s children. Children got in the way. Children replaced writing. Children were for everyone else. Poems were children, stories were children. Books were children. Actual children were not children. Until one day they were: one day, children were children again, and where were theirs? Jack & Diane had them, as did Jack & Joan, and Jack & Jack, and Joan & Joan. Who were they to be different? Who did they think they were? It was time to put away childish things and make an actual child.
So we did: we made our son, Noah, and from the moment of his birth we pretty much gave up on writing. Later, we gave up on each other, and later still her brain gave up on her, leaving me and Noah alone in the apartment.
There was me and there was him. He was a thing I had. And me: I was a thing he had. He probably didn’t think about our relationship that way—he was only one-and-a-half—but I did. He was part of the list, the inventory of my life. When I think of that time now I’m not always sure I loved him as much as I loved my books or my apartment—our apartment—but I did care about him a great deal, and I did love him most of the time. Other times I did not. Other times he screamed if he was unhappy, and then he became nearly identical to a car horn: someone or something is in his way and he knows he simply must alert this person or thing to his presence. Because this will fix things. Screaming fixes things. The person or thing will move, he thinks, and he’ll be happy because he’ll have what he wants, whatever it is. It’s the having that matters most to him, the having and the happiness.
As an adult, I know this is true only sometimes. I know there are just too many of us to be happy all the time. I also know that even if you get what you want, you’re just as likely to be unhappy. Especially if you’re a U.S. citizen or someone who grew up in the U.S. He doesn’t know this yet; he doesn’t know what “the U.S.” is or what a “citizen” is and he doesn’t care. He doesn’t know that everyone dies and that no one has any say in their birth or the circumstances of their birth. He lacks knowledge and experience of almost everything. He is basically helpless, and yet he’s lied to me—a lot. I know that he has. All the foods he likes are bad for him, but he would eat them all the time if he could. He’s never shared anything, never been a sharer. I’m sure other parents dislike him; it was always difficult for me to arrange playdates. I didn’t think of this then but now I think it’s because Noah is a difficult child. My son, Noah, is one of those kids other parents look at on the playground and go, “Wow, that is a difficult child.” He wants everything in the store. If he sees it and is interested, he thinks it should be his simply because of his interest. Money is a concept that means as much to him as Existentialism or the Cloud or being on time. He is an excellent drawer; I wouldn’t be surprised if he grew up to be an artist. His favorite song is “She Loves You” by The Beatles. He used to hate it when I played jazz in the apartment or if I decided that tonight’s one of those nights we wouldn’t watch anything. He hates taking a bath and going to the bathroom and changing his clothes and keeping things neat. This is how I know he’s a young person. He would die if someone didn’t make him do all the things he hates to do and he’s never thanked me or anyone else for keeping him alive.
Sometimes I think he thinks his mother is dead because of me. This may very well be true. It’s one of the first things I thought about when she died: did I give her an aneurysm? Was my personality somehow responsible for her death? Obviously, it wasn’t, but what if it was, in some small way? It’s possible, isn’t it? I don’t know.
Noah used to like to “lose me” in the Park. “Losing me” meant that he’d pretend to be invisible right in front of me. He’d cover his eyes and then maybe hide behind a tote and think that that was all he needed to do to lose me. Even if we were sitting on a blanket facing each other he’d somehow think he was invisible to me if he put his hands over his eyes. Why are children like this? (Many of my students are like this too: they seem to believe I can’t see them looking at their phones during class if they look at their phones beneath the table—we all sit at four tables arranged in a square—even though they know anyone can see what anyone else is doing beneath the table. It’s very strange.)
One time, Noah said to me, “Dad, you’re crazy!” and I said, “I am?” He said, “Yeah, you’re crazy!” and I said, “How come?” He said, “I don’t know,” and then went back to playing with his toys, as if he hadn’t said anything at all. When I said, “‘I am?’,” part of me wondered if he was right; and if he was right, how did he know? But of course he was just repeating something he’d heard somewhere else. He could’ve just as easily said, “Dad, you’re a cat!” or “Dad, you’re late!” or “Dad, you’re an apple!” or “Dad, you’re my dad!” I wondered if he’d ever told his mother she was crazy, but then I remembered he couldn’t talk like that when she was alive.
Neither of us are—were. Crazy, that is. In fact, of the three of us, I’d say Noah is the most likely candidate for craziness. If not on his own merit, then perhaps by way of circumstance. The world he’ll inhabit as an adult is a world I’m glad I’ll never see. This world here that we live in right now is rapidly becoming the kind of world I don’t want to live in. Everything has so much weight. Everything matters all the time, from the second you’re born. Appearance is everything, impression is everything. The judgment of others is constant—every day is Judgment Day because living is public. Every day I almost fail. Every day I wonder if this will be the day I give up. I don’t think quitting is bad. Sometimes it’s required. I quit playing baseball in the second grade and it was definitely the right thing to do. I didn’t enjoy it; I wasn’t any good at it; my teammates disliked me because I was no good; the coaches disliked me because I was no good; I quit and it was right. Everyone was pleased with the decision. My parents weren’t, of course, but they got over it because I started playing basketball instead and I was much, much better at that. At the time, I thought they were pleased simply because I was a better basketball player than I was a baseball player. Now I know that’s only partly true. Now I know the real reason they were pleased is that they had a story to tell: “He quit baseball because he wanted to concentrate on basketball instead, and anyway he’s much, much better at it.” That’s how that story goes. It’s very short, and very easy to understand. A lot of people like that story. If nothing had replaced baseball, things would’ve been much more difficult for me. They would’ve sat me down to talk about why I wanted to quit, to explain to me that quitting isn’t something people respect. They would not have said that quitting didn’t work for them because they wouldn’t know what to tell their friends, and I understand that now. As a parent, I get it. We are being judged all the time by all the other parents. I garnered a certain amount of sympathy among the other parents at Noah’s daycare because my wife—ex-wife—died. I garnered almost no sympathy at all when we were separated, but now that she’s dead, there’s a story and I’m the protagonist; and whatever backstory there might be that might make me appear one way or another, no one really seems to care about that anymore because someone has died, and that someone is a person who used to love me and with whom I created this little boy they see and know, this Noah. I am Noah’s bereaved father to them. The sad, slumping, pathetic fortysomething widower and occupant of a one-bedroom apartment. Bereavement: also a thing I have (to all the other parents, that is). Also a thing on my list. Their list about me is different from my list about me, just as my lists about them are different from their lists about themselves.
What I’m really talking about here is secrets. That’s no surprise. We all have them. Some of them are worse than others. Some of them are meaningless. But that’s not a very good story. No one wants to hear a story about a meaningless secret. For example, a secret I have is that I wasn’t all that sad when my ex-wife died. I was certainly shocked and saddened, but I wasn’t overcome with grief the way I might have been if our marriage hadn’t already failed. The other parents don’t know this about me. Noah doesn’t know this about me. I would never discuss it with him, for one thing—you can’t really have a discussion with a three-year-old—but there’s also the fact of the funeral. I cried at it. In public, in front of my son and my ex-wife’s family and my own parents and a small gathering of our closest friends, I looked sad and overcome with grief. I hadn’t been faking it, but I happen to know that I was crying more out of confusion and the overwhelming sense that my life was now going to be lived in a constant state of being overwhelmed. Everything was overturned, nudged out of orbit. Whatever metaphor works. All I knew was that there was me and there was Noah, and I was completely responsible for his life.
That’s how that story was all set to go. That’s how that story was all set to go until it didn’t. Something changed. Several things happened. Most of them weren’t all that important. First, there was a siege of rabbits in Brooklyn and Queens. Nobody knows why or where they came from, but for about a week it was true that a thing Brooklyn and Queens had was a rabbit problem. It got so bad that they stopped traffic during the morning commute one day. Rabbits flooded the Battery Tunnel. I’m not kidding. The tunnel was a parking lot full of angry drivers honking their horns and so many rabbits that the cars couldn’t move. Imagine that scene. It was incredible. The footage on the news was like something out of a disaster movie. I remember I thought of Watership Down and that very strange sequence with the domesticated rabbits in David Lynch’s Inland Empire. Animal Control had to be called in to round them up and get them out. Who knows what they did with them all.
The other thing that happened—the thing I’ve been driving at all along here—involved me and Noah and a Zipcar and my ex-in-laws’ house in North Caldwell and a somewhat regrettable but totally necessary scene in their driveway. They never liked me that much anyway. I don’t know. What are you gonna do? You stay or you go; that’s all there is to it. That’s all there is to anything, really. It’s a classic American story. I don’t feel very good most of the time now, but that’s OK because this is what I’ve chosen. This is the life I’ve decided to lead. I feel better about this life that I don’t feel very good about than I felt about my life the past year-and-a-half since the funeral. That’s just the truth, I’m sorry. So there you go: at least I have that. It turns out I still do think about myself in terms of having things. Or not having them, I guess.
Harram
my mother was 100 miles south of Death Valley when
Amba Karras grazed her belly
you’re going to give us Antony
the monastery was modest still
a couple coptic churches peppered
across a few dozen acres of the California desert
You are the treasure
Of Goodness and
Giver of Life
life is not safe in Masr
martyrdom is mundane
America is a place where we can pray away from persecution
away from static poverty in service of the Lord
Your peace, our Savior;
Save us
And spare our souls
my father was proud of my skin when I was born
my mother says he showed me to everyone in the hospital
a brown man with a son white as an ostrich egg
the American dream
Merciful eyes
At my weakness
At my disgrace
And my humility
Amba Karras traced a cross with oil on our wrists and foreheads the last time my father visited the dayr
He tried to kiss Amba Karras’s hand
but the bishop pulled away before his lips warmed meek flesh
we pushed home in hush
the sun sunk into my skin by the time i was five
my father felt betrayed
he hated the tint of his own flesh
how it was resurfacing in his kin like a bloated corpse
Amen
Queer Haibun
Dear Mom,
I don’t know how to tell you. She was about 5’2.” An inch or so taller than me, brown eyes, dimples, petite yet strong and handsome. I could describe her skinny jeans, her tight-fit shirt, her slender body, the tattoo on her shoulder. I stalked her Facebook and drew her profile picture, her dark shades, her big nose, a chill smile, just drinking another beer on tap, her brown curly hairdo, her sweet spot and I knew it. Or here’s that one with her modeling the suit jacket, blue specs, a white blouse, and slick black pants. We met at the buffet table over cookies. I said, “Go for it. Who cares how many you eat?” She chuckled and said, “I like her.” And with it, what a smirk. I didn’t know anything else about her, I didn’t know then if she wanted to go by they or he or she, but I really liked her, and damn it now I don’t feel bad at all saying so. We went on a few “dates.” I met her for Vietnamese. I don’t know what she knew of what I was feeling, and we never talked about it. Well, we maybe texted later about the way I was from a sheltered childhood. I remember wondering how to even show her I liked her, maybe it didn’t matter, maybe it was obvious, she seemed to sense my curious eye—how I worshipped her like a dame attracted to a prince in shining armor and here she was here we were together not playing not performing just being ourselves in that moment that moment that would fade, two women with nearly flat chests, one in baggy shorts, one in a skirt. I didn’t know who to be. Then I’d learn she had a femme, and she was her boi. So-
I cut my hair short,
start to wear vests;
I’ve yet to kiss a girl.
Transit
Fourth grade frightened I carried a stick to the bus stop
and swung it like a mace,
stabbed the empty stomach
of an Asian chestnut
and topped that haft with spines.
Three towns over another backpacked child
had the ham-soft tip of his thumb snipped off
by a rabid raccoon.
They only come out in the day
if they’re sick. Weeks of gut-punch needle-pricks
or for one bright morning before the choke and the spit
and the frantic body strung to the air
with elastic bands, I could
walk brazen through sunlight
to piece apart the world in clever little hands.
Feast
Om grew up in Loka village, beside mountains, wheat fields and orchards. Sometimes a late spring frost stunned the apple trees, and the young fruit bore thick brown bands that they wore into adulthood.
The tainted apples were no good for the market. Om and his brothers would be invited into Old La’s orchard to collect the gumdrop-sized jewels for their mother to make jam and jelly. The boys held contests to see who could eat the most. The tart little fruits puckered their lips and sapped the saliva from their mouths. Om always won. He slept soundly those nights with victory on his numb tongue.
His father raised sheep and his mother sewed, and together they brought up seven children. Om went to school in the next village, but only when they had money. When it rained too hard or not enough, he stayed home, and sucked on roots to distract his mind from the awful gnawing in his stomach.
When Om turned twenty, he traveled to the nearby township and attended classes for metalwork, and it was here where he met a girl who waitressed at a noodle shop. She had long, gentle eyes and a small mouth that pursed when she took orders. Her name was Lin.
One spring festival she took him home to spend the holiday with her family. He could just afford to bring plum wine, a frozen leg of lamb and a barrel of apples from his parents’ orchard, and the only way he knew to combat his humiliation was to drink and smoke until he forgot his name.
The men played cards until the early hours of the morning, and the night took him in a blur. He remembered very little, besides the steam that rose off the frozen cobblestones when he retched on the way back to his sleeping quarters, and the shame he felt the next morning when he saw that his mess had disappeared.
He married Lin that winter. By the following spring festival she had given birth to a girl, and they moved to town, where his brother found him a job as a clerk in a bank. Om never finished fourth level math. He didn’t know the first thing about numbers, but the pay was enough to give them a start. He began to trade liquor, and Lin sold hair accessories. Soon they accumulated enough stock to fill an entire corner of their one room home, beside the baby crib, radio and mini-freezer. The future looked bright.
After dinner, the leader’s booming voice piped into their warm little room. The voice told them that the national harvest was good that year, better than the year before. The voice said that their people were pushing back invaders and would soon add another twenty-four kilometers to the northern boundary. If they just tightened their waist belts a little more, they would surely be out of the dark times and by next year the streams would once again be filled with fish, and the meadows with flowers, the sky with birds.
Soon their little family grew from one child to four. The thought alone kept Om up at night and sapped his strength during the day, but it never diminishing his spirit, which soared with the leader’s confident words as he congratulated comrades for another week of honest work that would surely build their empire to new heights.
On Om’s thirty-third birthday, the leader unveiled his new plan. They were in need of men—young, strapping men, older men with skills, men who could apply their minds, men who loved their country, men willing to give their bodies. They asked for volunteers, but everyone knew that it was mandatory. Om bade Lin and his children goodbye, and left with the first round of recruits.
Within a fortnight he and sixty other men found themselves stationed at the north wall. Mostly they did nothing. Om whittled pieces of wood into figurines that he salvaged from the furnace. He made a fox for his eldest girl, fish for the middle ones, and a curved canoe for his youngest boy, who had Lin’s long eyes. The pile of figurines only grew with the months. The soldiers ate steamed white buns and boiled roots, and washed them down with melted snow. Every morning and night, they listened to the leader’s voice come on the radio, encouraging them and heaping on praise, as they shivered and thought of their warm beds back home, of good food and good wine, their wives growing barren and their children becoming adults.
Om learned two new dialects. He learned to prefer Anna Karenina to War and Peace. He found his knack for keeping peace.
Gradually it dawned on Om that there was no threat of attack. The men at the north wall were kept there not to defend the kingdom against a warring tribe, but to trap them and age them like bulls in a pen until they softened into withered and harmless beings. Om held the betrayal quietly in his heart, and he did not speak of it to anyone, but when the leader’s voice came on the radio he no longer greeted it with joy, but with growing resentment and anger.
Six years passed. News of the leader’s defeat finally reached the north wall. After the string was cut, the troops quickly disbanded. Om arrived home to find his town destroyed and his youngest dead from pneumonia. Lin’s hair had turned silver and hard as fishing wire. Within a month, she passed. Om took two stones to the nearby tarn, tossed them into the clearest part and slept for two nights on the mountain. Then he took his three remaining children back home to Loka.
The village was nearly empty. Most people had gone to the city, leaving only the elderly, so Om pedaled a tricycle and delivered milk to the toothless lot. In the afternoons, he repaired bicycles and alarm clocks and stereos to send his children to school. He buried his father in the late summer, and his mother in early fall. Two more stones in the tarn. His brightest girl caught a hard winter fever, and he had to wait until spring for the tarn to thaw before he could properly commemorate her.
He needed help; he was desperate. He took a poor, dark-skinned village girl for a wife, and she soon bore him another daughter. He cursed her for making another mouth to feed, and he went off to the city to look for work.
It took Om four months to find a job as a guard for a new mall. He slept in a six-person dorm in town and returned to the village on weekends. His dorm smelled of rancid oil, urine and unwashed bodies. He could not rid his blankets of the stink. He longed to see the stars of his childhood village, which were now snubbed out by plumes of coal factory soot. He dreamt of running naked through the millet fields that had become highways and parking lots. He wanted to feel small and protected by the mountains that now guarded his parents’ gravestones. He even missed hearing the great leader’s voice as he ate canteen food with the other men. He dreamed of returning to school to stimulate his mind, but there was never enough money or time for that.
The new government encouraged spending and trade, and soon all kinds of goods appeared. Om returned to the village every week with bright toys, new snacks and shiny gadgets that he found in the brightly lit stores. He bought his children a globe of the world and watched them mouth the names of places they heard at school: Moscow, Karachi, Barcelona. Their little fingers spread wide and spanned the distance from their home to these faraway lands. Om had never heard such places spoken aloud, and hearing them from his own children took away his breath.
His young wife fell sick so often that Om lost his security guard job in the city. He took to wandering the streets of town, knocking on doors, looking for work. He gravitated towards the river and often found himself in the middle of the bridge.
Om could lose himself in the rippling mass, seeing feasts and wine and the firm flesh of pretty young maidens. He would stay until policemen harassed him. “Go home, old man,” they yelled, and only then Om would think of his children, about their sticky hands and their wide eyes, and he sulked back to his pitiful sleeping mat, ashamed and anxious.
That winter was harsh, and the freeze had settled for weeks. He was cold, but could not afford coal for the heater. His ulcer burned, and his throat ached like a raw wound. The city was growing bigger and glossier all the time, with new buildings and roads appearing overnight, and cheery new shops where new signs and toys rotated constantly.
Om peered into restaurant after restaurant. He saw families huddled around steaming bowls of soup. Where was all this wealth coming from, and why didn’t he have any? He felt the river rise and the tarn overflow, and imagined himself being carried off by the rapids.
Om entered the next noodle shop he saw and sat down beside the window. A small plate of pickled radishes sat on the table. He picked up one vinegary sliver and put it into his mouth. Its tartness jerked his muscles awake, and sent him straight back to the stunted apples of his childhood, the ones ruined by their brown rings of frost.
A waitress appeared. Her cheeks were flushed from the heat of the kitchen.
He couldn’t leave now. He was too embarrassed. As she pursed her lips and tapped her foot, he took his time with the menu. He finally settled on a big bowl of noodles with two meat dishes, one mutton and one beef, and a plate of winter squash with boiled carrots, to which he added stewed beets, mulled wine and roasted peanuts. He watched her as she took down his order, but she revealed no reaction. She’s a village girl, he realized.
“Add another bottle of mulled wine,” he commanded, warming up now. He clinked the last of the coins in his coat pocket to an old patriotic tune and studied the other customers as if he were the shop-owner.
Later, left alone with his feast, he looked down at his purple hands. He cupped them around the hot noodle bowl and brought it up to his face. The hot broth scalded the tip of his tongue, but no bother. Slowly, ceremoniously, he began to eat.
AFAKASI | HALF-CASTE
What can I tell you about this body but that it is mine?
Not my mother’s though she tried harder than any to mold
its soft form. Not my father’s though I carry his color.
Often I wish I were an already discovered fact.
My body and its histories known like the mapped,
the chronicled, the clichéd phrase at home in every mouth.
I wish to give you my shovel, my miner’s helmet, lamp affixed.
Will you take these words – every word – until all I have
are ten fingers to trace my lines at this exact moment?
So that for once I will have a whole being beneath my hands—
all that will ever be and never be again.
A Leaky Bag of Water
In the warmer months, my humid and lush suburban backyard becomes a battlefield for my war against slugs. I would have expected this seasonal plague of slugs in the country or a rainforest. Yet, slugs roam this area that is just about ten miles west of the skyscrapers of downtown Baltimore. And I want the small patch of land I own to be free of them.
It all started on October 3, 2014. The temperature was in the upper 50s, cool enough to require long pants and a flannel. Sitting in our backyard, my partner Dan and I were enjoying a small fire in our terra cotta chimenea and drinking cold beers. Thirsty for another sip, I reached for my can, which was by my feet. I gasped. Hanging out by my can of Miller Lite was a slug the length of my palm. I abandoned my seat as if it were on fire and fled indoors.
Our backyard light had illuminated this leopard slug, or Limax maximus as it is known in Latin. These slugs are light brown with dark brown spots, evoking an army of slithering leopards. And their bodies grow to be at least four inches long by early fall. Dan says he’s seen one in our backyard that was about seven inches; he has a picture, which I have yet to dare peek at. Ever since our first summer in Baltimore, when he sighted these low-lying mammoths, he has been intent on ridding them from our yard.
Slugs meander freely after sundown, a time when most people are tucked indoors, but not Dan. A smoker, he especially enjoys the tranquility the night offers as he inhales and ruminates on his writing, teaching, and research — that is, until a giant slug tries to drink his beer or climbs onto his pants or otherwise distracts him, such as by scaling the outdoor basement steps on which he sits or crawling into and out of the drainage grates.
Before I’d seen the Miller Lite slug, I thought he’d been exaggerating about their size or number. Now, their very presence shocks and disgusts me, and I feel guilt at the lack of support I had given Dan when he’d lined our outdoor basement steps and drains with pennies. He’d read that copper deterred slugs — gave them an electric shock — and we had lots of pennies in our coin jar. After each rainfall in the spring, summer, and early fall, he would sprinkle salt — sea salt, salt with iodine, rock salt, or salt pellets — around the areas where we liked to sit and enjoy the warm evenings. I’d lectured him for contributing to our watershed’s ruin, but I would reprimand him no more. I accepted the slug as our common enemy and prepared for their eviction from my land. First, I studied them; I needed to learn about my enemy. Then, I evaluated my options to force their exodus. Finally, I took action.
The Limax maximus, an invertebrate in the phylum Mollusca, and belonging to the subclass Pulmonata that also includes snails, has evolved over millions of years. Unlike its water-reliant cousins with gills, this land slug breathes with lungs. Though its ancestors once had hard shells covering their bodies, the modern offspring of the Limax maximus has shed this armor. Perhaps it did so to move at a quicker pace, and it does move faster than a snail, for example.
“Slugs are like a leaky bag of water that survives [on] dry land,” says Dr. Timothy Pearce, assistant curator and head of the mollusks section at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It’s no surprise, then, that the land slug prefers wet or humid landscapes with lots of hiding places (like under mulch, inside drain pipes, and under piles of fallen and decomposing leaves). And the Mid-Atlantic, as well as other stretches of land east and west of the Mississippi River, provides this oasis for the leopard slug. Its embrace of America is perhaps not surprising given that it has been here for over a century. As a result of global transport of organic commodities, the leopard slug first sailed to the North and South Americas about a hundred and fifty years ago. The leopard slug is aggressive and will bite slugs native to the Americas, such as the banana slug, to get what it wants — food or territory. The leopard slug will even eat a dead slug. To stay hydrated during the day, they lurk under stones, decaying tree trunks, or under the wide leaves of plants such as the hostas that line my front patio’s edge.
Because it is not indigenous to the Americas, Pearce calls the leopard slug an invasive species, “like the python to the Everglades.”
Slugs prefer to hang out with people.
Megan Paustian, a researcher with the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, says leopard slugs have an affinity for urban areas, suburbs, and other disturbed places near people. It turns out that this is a common trait of invasive species. “People incidentally provide shelter (drainpipes, woodpiles, gardens, walls with cracks in them, etc.) and food (e.g., in trash cans, food left for pets), which is why they do so well around us,” she says. These slugs make do with what they can find and stick close to their familiar surroundings. Their apparent low-maintenance attitude seems to have helped them thrive as a species.
Leopard slugs eat a lot. Pearce describes them as being “a stomach on one large foot.” Paustian says leopard slugs “are omnivores and scavengers; they’ll eat dead plants and garden plants, fungus, and carrion.” They’re aggressive when it comes to acquiring their food and shelter, enough so to bite their competition to hold ground as King or Queen. But what they eat, they release to the environment. “Slugs and snails, in general, are important as decomposers, helping to return nutrients to the soil,” Pearce says. Their waste is rich in nitrogen, providing a beneficial nutrient to the land that nourishes and nurtures them. And when the slug’s life cycle ends due to the tongues of frogs or the beaks of ravens — some of their natural predators — it too becomes part of the dead, organic earth.
Though hermaphrodites, leopard slugs prefer to copulate with a mate, and they reproduce fiercely. Indeed, I have seen two slugs consummate this need. It was that same October, but a few days later on a Saturday afternoon. The sun’s rays shone the brightest on the copulating pair. The bluish slime their lust produced created a halo around the pair as it swayed, suspended like a double helix from a bent flower stalk that towered about two feet above its parent hosta plant. So entwined, the pair looked like miniature snakes preparing ritualistically to wreak havoc on their fellow beings.
Farmers and gardeners perceive the leopard slug as an omen. This slug destroys crops, eating seedlings whole. In my garden, they have been an obstacle to growing kale and mustard greens from seeds. The few plants that do sprout barely make it to the size of a three-by-five index card before a leopard slug bites into the leaves, making them look like slices of Swiss cheese. Pearce shares my frustration. He’s a gardener, too, and, though he loves mollusks, he is irritated that the leopard slug competes with him for his garden’s greens. But there’s no “silver bullet” for getting rid of them, he says. Whenever he finds slugs, he kills them by “cutting them in half.”
II. Explore Strategies to Deter Slugs from My Yard
- Salt keeps slugs away, but pouring it on soil harms other plants and the freshwater. Pouring salt directly on slugs’ bodies causes them pain. I don’t want to cause any sentient being that agony.
- The leopard slug that hung out by my beer that October day was probably drawn to the yeast in it, or the hops and barley. Gardeners sometimes use this yellow brew to attract and drown slugs. But beer, even in a can, costs money, and I prefer not to share my beer with a slug or use this otherwise therapeutic beverage as a murder weapon.
- Pesticides, while effective for some pests, may not work on the leopard slug: its slime can actually protect its skin and innards from chemicals. And these chemicals, as Rachel Carson cautions in Silent Spring, don’t just hurt the intended target; they hurt other living creatures such as the frog that enjoys the occasional slug for dinner.
- Copper, as Pearce substantiates, is perhaps the best deterrent because it gives slugs an electric charge upon contact. I’ve considered laying large strips of copper over my entire yard. The oxidation could be interesting to observe. At about $3 per pound, buying enough copper might not bankrupt me as my yard is small, but my property value might decrease with a copper lawn. Moreover, I would worry about the errant slug (or its family!) trapped forever under the copper sheeting.
- I could beseech the slug’s natural predators — ravens, frogs, beetles, snakes, cats, and owls — to populate my yard en masse and eat their season’s fill of these mollusks. Yet, I know how futile this mental exercise would be.
III. Act
Though slugs prefer to hang out with us in our ever-changing urban scenery, they knew a time when we didn’t drive cars — maybe we are their collective curiosities and maybe they want to know how long we can last as we alter one landscape after another. And given their aggressive nature to be Kings or Queens of the terrain they claim, I know they are sure to survive other Earthly calamities, such as the eventual extinction of the modern human.
Even so, Dan and I were determined to claim our parcel on Earth. So, in the summer of 2015, we decided to try to outwit the leopard slug. We dug out the hostas, whose large leaves had shaded the slugs from the desiccating sun. In their place, we planted ornamental grasses (which slugs abhor) and laid down jagged rocks (which slugs do not like to slide over). Instead of planting vegetables in my garden, I grew flowers that slugs dislike: coral bells, lavender, peonies, roses, and hydrangeas. I opted to grow vegetables in containers, and the yield was slightly more satisfying.
But even after that effort, the slugs lingered. In the harsh sunlight, the brick walls and tree trunks where they had slithered upon glistened like shellac. And there were holes in the leaves of my container-grown kale. One even entered our basement — probably having taken a ride on Dan’s pants legs — leaving behind a shimmery trail of slime on a black rug. We mapped its movements and saw its shriveled body at the trail’s end, near the entrance to our sump pump; it was so close to being free of our dry air.
So we bought salt and lots of it. Nowadays, before each sundown, Dan’s routine includes sprinkling salt around the perimeter of where he will be sitting for smokes during the evening hours — usually our basement steps.
We also bought plastic tongs. In spite of the salt, one or two (or more) slugs rebel and venture into the slug-free zone. That’s when he uses tongs to grab and chuck them into a neighbor’s yard.
I still freak out when I see a slug, and I seldom go outside after sundown for fear of sighting the Limax maximus. I’ve learned that I’m a coward.
While an invasive creature to the American landscape, the leopard slug is, I admit grudgingly, just trying to be. Pearce says he doesn’t know why the leopard slug likes to be around humans. I, however, will venture a metaphysical reason born out of my Hindu upbringing: karma — slugs are punishing humans for not wanting them nearby when humans are responsible for the slugs’ geophysical displacement. And I was taught to respect karma.
So I’ll only venture out into my yard at night once the frost hits. That’s when the slugs won’t be out, and it will become safe for me to enjoy the evening air, however cold.
##
Sources:
Megan Paustian, PhD; Contractor at the National Museum of Natural History; Mollusk collection. April 3, 2015, and November 26, 2016. Email interviews.
Timothy Pearce, PhD; Assistant Curator and Head of the Section of Mollusks at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. March 28, 2015. Email Interview.
Timothy Pearce, PhD. March 30, 2015. (See above for his credentials). Telephone interview.
Bland C. 2013. Why are snails and slugs are repelled by copper? Huffington Post website. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/quora/why-are-snails-and-slugs_b_3155291.html. [Published April 25, 2013.] Accessed November 30, 2016.
Casey C. 2009. Feeling sluggish. Slate. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/green_room/2009/04/feeling_sluggish.html. Accessed October 13, 2017.
Gaitán-Espitia, Juan Diego, et al. Repeatability of energy metabolism and resistance to dehydration in the invasive slug Limax maximus. Invertebrate Biology 131.1 (2012): 11-18.
Gordon, David George. The Secret World of Slugs and Snails: Life in the Very Slow Lane. Sasquatch Books, 2010.
Naeve L. 2006. Slug it out with slugs in your garden. Iowa State University Extension and Outreach website. http://www.extension.iastate.edu/news/2006/jun/070201.htm. [Published June 5, 2006.] Accessed November 30, 2016.
Pacific northwest nursery IPM: snails/slugs. Great gray garden slug, tiger slug, spotted leopard slug. Oregon State University website. http://oregonstate.edu/dept/nurspest/Limaxmaximus.htm. Accessed November 30, 2016.
Pacific northwest nursery IPM: snails/slugs. Slugs. Oregon State University website. http://oregonstate.edu/dept/nurspest/slugs.htm. Accessed November 30, 2016.
Pests and disease: slugs and snails. 2014. BBC website. http://www.bbc.co.uk/gardening/advice/pests_and_diseases/identifier.shtml?snails. Accessed November 30, 2016.
Phylum Mollusca. Florida State University website. http://bio.fsu.edu/~bsc2011l/sp_05_doc/Mollusca_2-22-05.pdf. Accessed November 30, 2016.
Scrap Register. Price of copper. Scrap register website. http://www.scrapregister.com/scrap-prices/united-states/260. Accessed November 30, 2016.
Slug and snail FAQs. All about slugs website. http://www.allaboutslugs.com/faq/. Accessed November 30, 2016.
Slugs: appearance and life history. Purdue University website.
http://extension.entm.purdue.edu/fieldcropsipm/insects/soybean-slugs.php. Accessed November 30, 2016.
HOW CAPITALISM ENDS
It kills others before it turns on itself.
In faraway lands, a bomb scatters
debris like a flock of startled birds.
A drone creeps on its civilian target like a stealthy cat.
Bats, from their hanging cocooned slumber, emerge
from the damp mouths of caves, infest
its homes.
At its border, mass, unmarked graves
where children tried to mount a train
they call a beast. It flings them off
its steel, well oiled back:
before it ends, apathy will be mechanized
just like everything else.
In refugee children, their eyeballs
have been replaced by miniature worlds.
Here, some people wear flags
as blindfolds, beat the piñata world
in its gut.
When it ends here, it will be like an ax,
hacking slowly at an ancient tree, its roots,
claws tunneling under every landscape,
still taking whatever it can take for nourishment.
Ruination, sowed by man.
Gripping his gold handled ax,
wood chips will pool at his feet for centuries,
until the final creak squeals like a newborn
as it slumps over, a defeated bull.
HOW CAPITALISM FUCKS
It depends on if you’re its type or not.
If you’re not, it’ll tease you like you’re an unripened
plantain dangling on a branch, wishing for its calloused
palm’s pluck and buffer. It’ll leave you bathed
in your own night sweats dreaming of teeth.
Bruises will appear where you swear no one has ever touched you.
You’ll wish you could be flayed, peeled
layer by layer back to a girl, the way she gulped
air with such ravenous swooning.
For others, it’ll turn you addict,
pinned permanently under its thrusting gut,
thrashing under its traffic of fingers
and tongues and limbs and cocks.
The mirror will begin to lie to you, unable to reflect
the wreckage its made of your home or your
needled nest of bones—you’ll spit on your thumbs
and wipe trails of shame from under your eyes.
You’ll fall in love, staring yourself to death.
Orphic
At least once every generation
the hewn but living head of Orpheus
pauses mid-song to spare a thought
to his body, still winding its way
among Europe’s ganglion of rivers.
No animal would touch such offal—
a heart flanged in concertina wire,
lungs pumped with mustard gas
from the Somme, kidneys fattened
with lead. There is a hole in the gut
where the Ciconian women scooped
his entrails as if hollowing a pumpkin.
A ring of teeth have grown in this gash,
& where there are teeth, appetite surely
follows. This living maw is always open,
waiting for something to swim inside, or
for a hand, offered freely, to reach in,
& then the maw will snap shut.
& wherever Orpheus’s head is, he will
pause mid-song, to smile & lick his lips
with their sweet residue of antifreeze,
& then on with the next verse.
no city left behind
Walking across 14th street, rumor
of August is a factory facing
Union Square station and
Broadway collapses before us
stripped of desire, immense in
its beat, like a giant’s eye.
The furious paragraphs of postpunk
the speed of summer in this
Friday that began in the inner part
of your thighs, your back lined up
with all the southern buildings.
To long suddenly for a family business;
everything we yet ignore is home.
The Lady of Dien Bien Phu and the Senegalese Giant
She sat by the window of her hillside stilt house with a puddle of afternoon sunlight in her lap, her hands resting on a spindle across her thighs. The wall clock chimed five times. In another hour, the fog would move in now that it was the month of March, and the warmth of the day and the last glimmer of sun would be gone. She would wake up in the early morning and the fog still hung in the valley and the cold made a film of ice in the basin out back.
Her left hand holding a pile of fiber white as cotton, and with her right hand she pulled the fibers whose end was tied to a hook on the tip of the spindle’s shaft, pulling and stopping to twirl the spindle, and the fiber spun gaining its length and the spindle slowly dropped. She paused and wound the twisted yarn onto the spindle. A deep, drumming sound had her look out the window. Down by the creek that flowed around the foot of the hill a ruffed grouse, dappled and gray, was beating its wings rapidly. She listened to its maddening drumroll as it stood on a log and realized that it was its breeding season. It got down from the log and started feeding on the coarsely-toothed leaves of the blue boneset. They grew on the moist edge of the creek, bursting violet and blue with their fluffy-looking flowers, mixing in with low-mounded bluebeard that was flowering in a profusion of blue mist.
The creek flowed through a ravine between two hills. The water was running low before the rainy season which came in April and in the creek’s shallow riffles, water willow grew in large colonies. The banks were rocky and slippery. Years ago, she had broken her ankle when she came down to fetch water. In their rock-strewn crevices and weathered crust, limestone fern sprung out in masses, verdant fronds a somber green in the deep damp shade.
Beyond the rocky bank where the next hill dropped gently to an arc, the sun reddened the dip of the hill above the valley floor. She squinted into the glaring hillside as she heard children’s singing. A giant silhouette followed by five small silhouettes descended the hill in single file. The children’s singsong voices drifted across the air:
Father’s presence
Immovable mountain
Mother’s love
Vast ocean
A healthy tree
Always lush with leaves
A child’s legacy
The giant stopped upstream at the foot of the hill and the children broke off running back toward their hamlet. The seven-foot-tall man always attracted the hamlet children when they saw him. Come look! Mr. Ibou is here! He would stop and speak to them, the Viet children, the Thai children, in their mother tongue. Yet he spoke French when he conversed with her because he did not trust his Vietnamese—pitiable, he said—to make an intelligent talk.
It was Wednesday. His son would arrive at this time, carrying water in two metal pails to fill her earthen vat, always fetching water upstream, as told by his father, where the creek’s water was clean before it got soiled by the washing of clothes and the scrubbing of cooking utensils from the Thai families who lived on the other hill. Ibou had let his son bring her fresh water every week since he became older. He must be sixty-five now, five years older than she. His son was slightly taller than an average Viet or Thai man, but he was ox-strong. Coal-black and strong. She had heard that when the baby was born, people screamed at the tiny creature not red as a normal baby but soot black with dark, frizzy hair. The medical cadre who midwifed the childbirth said, “He takes on his father’s gene and not a tiny trait from his Thai mother. This is normal, I assure you. Nothing evil.” They called the baby, “Dam.” Black in Thai. A healthy baby and now an incredibly strong man in his thirties. Once two buffalos locked horns, grinding and ramming each other. Hamlet people thronged around them, yelling and beating drums to break them up, and then they dumped straw on the beasts’ heads and burned the straw. But the buffalos stayed locked. Dam walked up to them, grabbed their horns and pushed them apart.
Now she climbed down the wooden ladder outside the house and stood under the shade of the Ylang-Ylang tree. She could see Ibou crossing the grassland toward her lone house, the tall red grass blazing in the setting sun, his silhouette bobbing as he moved along the creek’s bank through a grove of blood banana, the dark red splotches on their fronds bloodstained-looking in the brightness. It was so quiet she could hear the creek, and the air was suddenly tinged with a custard fragrance, heady and clawing. She shivered as she would every time she stood in the tree’s shade and its scent would come, light and momentary.
The old man finally emerged into her front yard after climbing a flight of rock steps. He carried the pails like tin toys by the wooden handles, as he headed to the earthen vat that sat in the shadowed space under the stilt house’s floor. He paused as he passed her. “Comment allez vous, madame?”
“Cava bien,” she said. “Et ta famille?”
He came toward her and set the pails down side by side in the sun. “The family is fine. I’m glad you asked because the wife is a grandmother and the son is a father now.”
“I was thinking about Dam when I saw you coming.” She looked up at his dark face glistening with sweat, a childlike face free of wrinkles. “When was the baby born?”
“Sometimes after midnight last night. The wife and a woman neighbor delivered the baby.”
“I cooked something for him. I thought I’d give it to him when he came. Can you take it back to his family?”
She meant the family of first and second generations living under the same roof.
“Sure, madam. The family will love it. The wife says, ‘That lady of Dien Bien Phu can cook Thai dishes so well I forgot that she is Viet.’” He bent so he could see her better in the shade because of the sun in his eyes. “The wife always says, ‘the lady of Dien Bien Phu’ when she speaks about you. I told the wife, ‘She has not aged.’” He scratched his white-stubbly chin. “True, madam, you have not.”
She touched her paisley headscarf in lavender wrapped tight around her rolled-up hair. Let loose, it would fall to her waist in a luxuriant curtain of black. “Merci.” She looked toward the vat under the house and back at the pails. “You don’t need to make another trip. We had a good rain last night and it filled the basin in the back.” It rained heavily in the previous night for a change. When the rainy season set in next month, she would not see his son again for some time until the dry season in October which lasted through March.
Ibou picked up the pails of water. “I’m going to fill the vat and I’ll be on my way.”
“Please come up to the house. The pot is heavy for me.”
“Yes, madam.”
Going up the ladder she could see him dip the wooden scoop into the vat and drink a healthy swig from it. He had to bend almost touching the ground with his knees just to fill the vat. Barefooted she entered the house, the bamboo-slat floor cool from the air rising up from the open space, uncluttered and clean, beneath the house. Momentarily she stood, feeling the coolness on her skin and then went around the floor loom to the kitchen hearth that sat in a corner near the second window. She liked a house airy and well-lit, so when she weaved during the day ample sunlight would come in through the two large awning windows, each propped open with a bamboo rod.
She lifted the lid on a tall earthenware cooking pot when Ibou appeared at the door. He ducked as he came through the door. The floor shuddered. His head brushed the traverse rod, clanking the metal loops from which dangled balls of colored wool. He stood, hunched, as if to make himself smaller.
“I have never come into your house before since I knew you,” he said, his white eyeballs darting left and right. “It must be thirty-four years now. Oui, madam?”
She believed it was. That year, 1960, she left Ha Noi and came back to the valley on the sixth anniversary of the victory of Dien Bien Phu. She did not come from here; but she had come here in 1954 to be a tiny, insignificant part of the military campaign against the French Empire during the siege of Dien Bien Phu as a 20-year-old singer and dancer of an entertainment troupe.
“Had it not been for the excavation in 1960,” she said, smiling, “you and I would’ve never crossed paths. And I would’ve bitten my tongue in two if I said it meant nothing to me to know someone like you who had shed blood on the soil of this valley.”
Ibou nodded solemnly, straightening his back. His head hit the rod and the metal loops clinked. “I came back here in 1959. It has been my home since. But I never thought I would find another soul here, like me, who had come out of that hell alive.” He wiped sweat off his face with the sleeve of his old army shirt, its original olive color now a dull yellow. “When I saw you in that crowd at the excavation, I knew you weren’t Thai. But there were no Viets at that time living on the hills, just Thais. I had to ask around.”
“I believe I was the first Viet making my home here.” She crimped her lips, remembering. “Some years ago, I heard about a man who claimed that he was a Dien Bien Phu war veteran. He had married a Thai girl and lived in Pom Loi hamlet.”
It sat in a cluster of hamlets along Pom Loi creek that flowed east-west. Westward it went as far as Provincial Road 41 dotted with hamlets, red dusted on a windy day from the surrounding hills. Ibou lived somewhere among those hills.
“So you met your compatriot, madam?”
“Yes. It turned out he’d seen French aircraft shot down repeatedly over the valley by our antiaircraft artillery. He was only a civilian living in one of those hamlets on the east side of Dien Bien Phu valley and there used to be a Viet Minh’s antiaircraft deployment ground nearby. He looked embarrassed when he told me the truth that when he was drunk, he’d tell hamlet children that he was an antiaircraft gunner and show them a long aircraft wing that now sat on the roof of his house. He told them it came from a French airplane he shot down. The wing had been converted into a trough to collect rainwater. Sometimes he’d take the children to a plain a kilometer from his home, where the children saw several wrist-sized cartridge cases among a handful of hoes. He told them the cases came from the 37mm antiaircraft projectiles and the hoes were the tools with which the bo doi—soldiers—used to dig trenches and their deployment shelters.”
She told Ibou most of the battle remnants as weapons could still be found aboveground, but not the human remains.
“I know that, madam.”
Between 1959 and 1960, she remembered, local authorities had begun moving the dead’s remains in the valley to the newly built cemeteries, one of them A1 Cemetery at the foot of the old A1 Hill. Most of the tombs had no names on the headstones. A few months after she had begun her new life in the valley, she heard news of the excavation. It was a hot and muggy summer day at the digging site where a large crowd of local people packed, watching the district reconstruction team digging an old trench, 30 meters long, near the western side of A1 Hill. Sometime before noon there came yells. A crewman had just shoveled a leg bone out of the dirt. Then more bones. In whole, in pieces. Then a human skull, then another. Past noon they had unearthed thirteen skeletons. One of them was still in sitting positions, clothes tattered clinging to bones, a PPSh-41 submachine gun held in his hands now bare of flesh, four grenades strapped to his belt, a Tiger Balm little jar in one shirt pocket, a fountain pen clipped to his other shirt pocket, and a pouch made of parachute cloth. Inside the pouch was a lock of hair. For days she kept thinking about the lock of hair. She imagined its owner, a girl, perhaps her age—for most of them who had joined the military campaign against the French in Dien Bien Phu were young girls. A girl still living with a fishhook in her memory day after day, from waking moments to haunting dreams that had no scents, no colors, only a lingering melancholy of a love story half real, half remembered.
Now she lifted her face to Ibou, her hand touching her brow as if to pinch a fleeting thought. “I didn’t tell you this. But I knew who you were when I saw you at the excavation site.”
Ibou drew up his shoulders. “How?” He grinned, his white teeth gleaming. “Before you met me?”
She left the hearth and went to the wall between the two windows. She pointed at the graphite-on-paper drawing framed in black bamboo. It was just after dawn in that 27cm x 20 cm drawing, when her entertainment team was performing in the heavy fog before the enemy airplanes would take to air. The ravine was the stage and the artillery men of the 45th Artillery Regiment, sitting on the hillside, watched. The 105mm battery units had toiled all night building out their emplacements and shelters and now sat, rapt, hugging their knees, watching the performers who sang The Ballad of Cannon Pulling, accompanied by a sole accordion. That only instrument was a war booty the commissar of the 351st Heavy Division had donated to the performers. It had a red color, she remembered, carved with the words: “Victory of Him Lam Hills,” the first French stronghold at Dien Bien Phu to fall on March 13, 1954. She could never forget the moment she stopped singing and bowed to the men on the hillside. Most of them had nodded off; others were dragging on their cigarettes to keep their eyes open. The accordion musician pulled her aside and said, “Let’s play something soft. Let’s not disturb their sleep.”
Now she waited until Ibou had studied the drawing up close. She could see his mouth move with wordless sound. The mouth stayed open because his gaze shifted to one side of the scene where three French prisoners, escorted by two small bo doi, were also watching the performance. One prisoner was a black figure who stood among them like a tree. The figure could have passed for a lone tree had it not been for the strong graphite lines that showed the contour of a man standing so tall and black like a giant in the land of the Lilliputians against a pale, translucent fog that, without him, the drawing would lose its charm.
She had expected him to say something as he fixed his gaze on the drawing, his legs bent, hands bracing his knees. Finally, half turning his face to her, he spoke, “I see you and me in there and I was thinking how forty years less one month have passed like a blink of an eye.”
“You surprised me,” she said, suddenly perked up. “Forty years less one month?”
“Mid-April, 1954. I don’t remember the day though. What I remember is the rain. I still hear its sound—not like when you are inside a house—no madam. Primitive sound. It made you shake like a leaf hearing it in the forest.”
She looked at the drawing. Just fog. Then, yes, rain would come. Morning, afternoon, night. It came without warning and fell for days on end. She remembered the black giant who drew everyone’s gaze as he was shepherded through the ravine at the end of the performance. “How did you become a prisoner?”
“Our emplacement was overrun,” he said, straightening up. He half-turned his body toward the framed drawing as though he did not want to be so nakedly tall facing her.
“You were an artillery man?”
“Yes, madam.” His eyes became still, like he had just recalled something but decided not to tell it. He blinked.
“You were captured on that day?” She motioned her head toward the drawing.
“Two weeks before that. It was on the first day of the Viet Minh’s second offensive. March 30. Our side called it ‘Battle of the Five Hills.’ Dominique 1 and Dominique 2, and Eliane 1, Eliane 2, Eliane 4. I know your side had different names for them.”
“Yes.” She nodded. “Eliane 2 is our A1 Hill. The terrible hill.”
“But on that day,” Ibou said, glancing at the drawing, “my fellow soldiers and I were taken to the rear, roughly fifteen kilometers away where every day we would no longer hear the sounds of artillery and fighter-bombers. Don’t ask me if I missed them, madam.”
She smiled. “The war might not have missed you either.”
“I thought about that too. And about why we say that we never miss it.” He leaned on his arm with his fist resting on the wall above the drawing. He bent his head to a hand-span from the drawing. “Did he miss it? The artist who drew this. Are you a friend of him, madam?”
She put her hand over her lips, thought, then said, “We were lovers.”
“Oh-la-la.” Ibou turned his body and looked down into her eyes.
She laughed lightly when she saw his excitement. She still heard her spoken words trailing in her head. For forty years they had been locked inside her.
Ibou trailed his long forefinger across the drawing’s bottom corner where the artist signed his name. Le Giang. “I recognize his name.”
“You knew him?”
“If that’s his name.”
“His alias. We didn’t use our real names during the military campaign for different reasons. One of them is identity secrecy.”
“I knew him,” Ibou said softly. “He gave me a drawing he did—for me.”
“How interesting.” She inhaled deeply. “What did he draw for you?”
“A charcoal-on-paper sketch. Smaller than this here. I believe 15cm by 20cm. He gave it a title too.”
“In Vietnamese? Or French?”
“Vietnamese. But he told me what it meant.” Ibou frowned then smiled. “Portrait of Brother Tak-Mak.”
She chuckled hearing him in Vietnamese. “So he drew you. But ‘Brother Tak-Mak?’”
Ibou kept nodding then he laughed. His laugh sounded like a rumble. “That was the name they called me after my capture. During the two weeks in the valley they cross-examined me and I cooperated. I gave them the positions of our artillery emplacements in the valley and the concentrated firepower of our headquarters. But they already knew that. What they wanted to know was our mobile artillery. They had no knowledge of it until they launched their first offensive on March 13. We hid those mobile units and only revealed them when the Viet Minh came at us, and we inflicted heavy casualties on their infantry. During the interrogation there was an interpreter. The interrogator asked a lot about the deploying schemes of our ghost artillery. Our transit plan for it—where and how. He kept saying ‘thac mac’ and the interpreter had a hard time interpreting the words. Once I knew what they meant, I spoke the words when I had things I was curious to know about. They laughed and started calling me ‘Brother Tak-Mak.’”
His excitement made her feel lively. Forty years less one month. She smiled at the phrase just recalled. “I’d love to see that drawing he did for you.”
“I recognized his signed name. I thought that was his real name all of these years.”
“His real name? Tran Khang.”
Ibou mused. “He told me he was an artist-reporter for the newspaper of the 351st Heavy Division. He looked so young. But what a gifted young man.”
“We were of the same age. Both of us were twenty at that time.”
Ibou tilted his head as he looked down to seek her eyes. “Where is he now?”
“He was sent to the South shortly after our victory at Dien Bien Phu. The North had prepared for the infiltration of the South as soon as Viet Nam was divided into North and South by the Geneva Convention in 1954.” She looked back toward the drawing. “I have not heard from him since.”
Ibou dropped his voice. “You never married, madam?”
Her lips formed the word ‘No’ as she shook her head. She caught him gazing at her and he blinked.
“You’re most beautiful,” he said, his face and his eyes gone soft. “You must have loved him very much. Had he ever drawn you, madam?”
“I’d need to ask him that, wouldn’t I?”
Her fluty laugh had Ibou nodding, then he, too, laughed.
*
Ibou left carrying back in his now empty pails the food that Miss Dien Bien Phu had cooked for his son’s family. In one pail he had a lidded bamboo basket that held glutinous rice wrapped inside a banana leaf, having cooked with magenta-leaf plant’s extract which had a purple color that turned the glutinous rice into a deep purple. When he took the basket from her he inhaled deeply the banana leaf’s scent and, after asking her “May I?”, pinched a morsel of glutinous rice the color of red-violet and put it in his mouth. He shook his head as the ever-faint sweetness from the rice slowly cut through his taste buds. The famed Dien-Bien rice, plain or glutinous, that he had for years eaten and loved from his Thai wife’s cooking. In the other pail was a tall crock glazed in teal color. Inside was a whole duck, roasted golden, having been baked with sour wampee leaves packed in its gut which was sewn tight; and when he lifted the lid, a warm, lemon-tangy scent of the leaves seeping through with a darkly rich smell of cooked meat made him moan.
Her culinary flair always impressed him; but her weaving artistry was what left him in awe. In the early years she sold her tapestries on consignment at the market that convened at dawn on each Sunday along Provincial Road 41, where Thai women dressed in black satin skirts, coming from neighboring hamlets, sold poultry and pigs and sun-dried fish, wild tobacco and cottonseed and sugarcane. Then she made tapestries on order only. Once his son rented a packhorse to carry a large tapestry, rolled up into a long, heavy bundle and laid across the horse’s back, and rode along the twisted, dusty provincial road to meet a bus which delivered local merchandise to unknown places in the outside world. A few times, Ibou recalled, the addresses on the bundles read France, Japan, China. The locals called the famed weaver, “The Lady of Dien Bien Phu.” Her mother was a weaver in Ha Noi, who taught her how to weave when she was a teen. One of the intellectual few who joined the Viet Minh’s military campaign in 1953-54, she was university educated and had a sublime voice that she used to entertain the bo doi as a singer and dancer. Ibou never asked her why she chose Dien Bien Phu as her new home. Perhaps she wanted to return to the valley, he thought, because treasured memories of camaraderie—and perhaps love—manifested themselves in hills and creeks and in the pristine white of mountain ebony.
The sun was setting low behind the Pe Luong mountain as he went through a wooded gully. Near a bamboo grove he heard sharp whistled notes, tinkling, and looked up to catch a bamboo warbler, white-throated and brown, singing ti-ti-teer, ti-ti-teer, and its ringing cadence followed him until he went past the bamboo thicket and picked up the creek again. Ibou felt thirsty. The creek’s bank was crawling with birthwort, twining on the ground with their woody stems, and walking past he could smell a foul scent from their pale, trumpet-shaped flowers.
The creek, after meandering through the wooded gullies, came out into a grassland and scrub. Red grass, tiger grass, wild sugarcane. The trees and shrubbery ancient and tough. They were fire-resistant and drought-tolerant. The turkey-berry, the yellow-wood, the Indian gooseberry. In the distance he could see A1 Hill silhouetted against the red sun. He followed the creek hearing it bubbling as it coursed between A1 Hill and another hill angling from it. Phony Hill. The Viet Minh called it F Hill. Every time he passed by here, seeing where Pom Loi Creek ran through the gap of A1 Hill and F Hill, he felt an inexplicable gloom that made him often shake his head. That gap was a pre-registered spot by his two batteries when he was a gunner. Manned by West African gunners like himself, the two batteries sat on the hills of Dominique 3 and Dominique 4, looking southward to A1 Hill and F Hill. When the Viet Minh’s second offensive opened up on the evening of March 30, 1954, his batteries pounded the gap where the bo doi massed. They pounded until the spent shells piled up waist high around them. The carnage left countless bodies of bo doi along that infamous creek. He, too, narrowly escaped death when he was taken prisoner and trekked back to the rear, 15 kilometers away, to get food provision. They moved along the notorious creek that flowed through the gorge between the hills whose brows and flanks had been burned by napalm and constant shelling to a glaring red. On one pre-registered spot they got shelled. One bo doi was killed.
The sun just set behind A1 Hill and the hillcrest glowed red. The bare, red-dirt hill had taken years to come back and was now thick and green with teak trees. Gone from the hilltop were the bamboo crosses the Viet Minh had erected and draped them with white parachutes—those fell into their hands, courtesy of the French parachuted misdrops—to commemorate their dead in multitudes. Many of the dead, pounded repeatedly by the artillery to eternal damnation, were buried most of the time not in whole, in cavities that were hurriedly dug, for the diggers might get killed at any moment by thundering artillery.
When he reached A1 Hill, he stood looking up at the summit where a lone banyan etched its skeletal trunk against the sunset. Black on red. The skeleton of a dead tree. Beneath it used to be an underground bunker, large enough to hold an infantry company, built with bricks and ironwood from rubble of the old colonial governor’s house. During the siege, the French rifle companies who defended the hill, would retreat into the shellproof bunker each time the Viet Minh charged up the hill, and call for artillery. From D1 and D2 hills and from the central sector in the valley, Ibou remembered, the cannons roared and the bare banyan being used as pre-registered marker had stood miraculously untouched many times like a sinister witness of one slaughter after another. It had rotted over the years and became a columnar tree whose core was a hollow where birds and sometimes rodents sought shelter.
He went past the cemetery at the foot of the hill. In the misty dusk he could see the yellow blossoms of the dwarf Ylang-Ylang shrub lining the solitary path that cut through the burial ground. He thought their flowers were beautiful. Long-stalked, sea-star shaped, with each thin curly petal drooping. He thought of Miss Dien Bien Phu standing under the Ylang-Ylang tree waiting for him to arrive with the creek’s water. He couldn’t help thinking of that distant past 40 years to date. The drawing she showed had brought it back to life, and that past had quietly superimposed itself on the landscape that suddenly lost its familiarity around him.
Cicadas were singing in the clumps of camphor trees beyond the hill. Soon they would ease their chorus when the evening fog shrouded the valley. He had seen native visitors coming each year to the cemetery during the summer months, searching for the names of their deceased kin on each headstone, most bearing no names, looking them up in vain on the single stele engraved with a handful of names identified, the rest unknown. Many of the visitors came from distant places; yet, all came with a same wish: to find peace in an identified name. They found none.
Ibou often avoided coming this way, for the cemetery made him think of his compatriots—the West African gunners—and his fellow legionnaires. All the fallen ones. Thousands of them had become dust under the soil of this valley. There was no cemetery for them. So many had died just in the Viet Minh’s first offensive they were to be buried on the spot. No more ceremonial burial in the central sector’s graveyard, where one day shellfire burst open all the graves and the smells were so bad the rotted remains had to be re-buried alongside the new dead in mass graves excavated by bulldozers. He heard the Viet Minh prisoners call the mass graves, “Ma Tây.” The Tây Graveyard. Years later, after living with the Viet, he learned many slangs and coined words the Viet reserved for those they despised. “Tây” was a demeaning word they call the French. But the Viet was a peculiar race. They called him “Tây Den” when they captured him. Black Tây. That went not only for his Africans but also for his fellow Algerians and Moroccans. Their swarthy complexion, their coal-black skin scared the Viet, especially his own Senegalese whose faces were marked by tribal knife scars. “Tây rach mat.” “Scarface Tây.” When he had been accepted into their culture, the word “Tây” remained but took on a friendly meaning. The hamlet natives called him, “Brother Black Tây,” and when he got older it was, “Ong Tây Den.” Mr. Black Tây.
He went up the provincial road. In the twilight cricket frogs were calling from the vegetation bordering the road. Pebble-like clicks filling the air. A flock of bar-backed partridge were feeding in the roadside grass. At his looming sight they bolted, scattering into the underbrush. He went on. Moments later he heard the male partridge whistling. Ti-hu-ti-hu-ti-hu. The flock had run toward Nam Rom River in the distance. Parallel with the provincial road, the river ran north-south through the heart of Dien Bien Phu valley. The Thai who were the first settlers in the valley named the river “Nam Yum.” His Thai wife explained to him that the Thai word, “Nam” meant river, and “Yum” referred to the Spanish cedar. She said the river originated in the woods of Spanish cedar and thus bore the name Nam Yum in Thai and Nam Rom in Vietnamese. The River of Spanish Cedar.
The river crested this morning because of the heavy rain the night before. During the siege of Dien Bien Phu he had seen it overflowing many times. The swollen river would rush headlong and its cold water, the natives said, could wash clean the horses’ hooves and soak through the buffalos’ hide. One morning in late March during the siege the river crested. From D1 Hill, he watched through binoculars the cresting river and saw that all the shallow graves that had been dug the day before along the muddy bank to bury the dead legionnaires had been swept away.
Then in February of this year, shortly after Tet, workers of the National State Farm, whose task was to modernize the entire valley for farming and cultivation of edible plants, unearthed 17 skeletons on the bank of Nam Rom River. When he heard of the news his gut feeling told him those were legionnaires’ skeletons. There used to be barbed-wire fences along the east bank of the river, where the French High-Command headquarters sat. The legionnaires used to bathe and fetch water from the river before the siege began. After that it was suicidal day or night to venture outside the barbed-wire fences. Sometimes though patrols and sorties met their fate and the dead were quickly buried where they fell.
For two days Ibou visited the riverbank site where a pavilion was set up by the local authorities to hold the human remains in 17 tieu sanh—stoneware coffins. They had washed the bones, kept the tattered personal belongings in nylon bags, and burned incense sticks in a rice-grain filled bowl for each coffin. One of his close friends, a Senegalese rifleman, was killed in a bloody encounter during a patrol and was buried, he believed, in a spot on the Nam Rom bank.
On the first day Ibou saw a Vietnamese medical doctor overseeing a group of men washing dirt off the bones on a sieve, and Ibou believed that they were looking for teeth. The doctor told him that the dental remains would tell of the race and, based on their worn-down state, determine the human age. He watched them for half a day sorting through bone fragments—shine bone, thigh bone, wrist bone, skull—and observed them measuring the bones. On the second day Ibou came back when the examining team had just finished documenting each personal item which had been found with the human remains. Plastic sew-through buttons, brass buttons, diamond-shaped Legion insignias showing rank and chevrons, black hobnail boots. Then the medical doctor made his announcements. The skeleton remains belongs to deceased Caucasians, namely Europeans, based on the bone characteristics and dental records. The dead were not Vietnamese, evidenced by the combat boot size, the insignias, the French army’s driver licenses, the bronze wrist bangles carved with French names. The doctor estimated forty years for the burial, judging from the attrition of bones. Ibou thought of his dead friend and of thousands of dead legionnaires and believed it was a miracle that these remains had turned up. They would now receive a proper burial back home, wherever it might be, and their souls would rest in peace.
The male partridge called again. It was too far down the riverbank for him to see, just its whistling in seesaw rhythm rippling through the air. Another call, loud and crackling, echoed from behind him. It came up again among the coppice of teak on A1 Hill. Somewhere uphill a laughingthrush was calling as it foraged in the grove canopy.
A misty black shape loomed on the hillcrest. The black carcass of a wrecked tank. The Bazeille tank. He knew all the names of the tank squadron. His artillery crews covered for them with fire support. The 10-tank squadron each had its name painted white on the side of the tank. The black remains of tank Bazeille had become a landmark. Beyond A1 Hill stretched the bluish folds of Ta Lung Mountain on the eastern horizon. Mist was thickening. He tried to make out a thin line that in daytime showed through the green of the forested mountainside like a faded chalk line that dipped and rose, disappearing then re-appearing. The old cannon-pulling trail. Had the authorities decided to restore it, that remnant of war? Otherwise time and nature would eventually erase it. He had heard The Ballad of Cannon Pulling sung when an escorting bo doi proudly explained its meaning and inspiration to him and his fellow prisoners that morning in the ravine. The ballad and the epic achievement of such determination had become a lore. How they had toiled for days and nights manhandling the 2.5-ton cannons up that mountain range and then install them on those mountain forward slopes, fooling the French intelligence and its mighty artillery brain trust. Neither he nor his superiors know anything about this—how the enemy had pulled off such a feat.
The first time he had insight into the scope of this grand scheme was the night they were done with interrogating him. They had grilled him for two weeks. Sometimes the regular interpreter was filled in by another man. Ibou thought he was a boy. Thin, pale skinned, profuse black hair thatching his brow and his ears. He rarely smiled. Ibou never saw him laugh but smile on rare occasions. Then only his lips curled up, the eyes lost their steeliness, and the face melted into a pure, youthful vulnerability. Perhaps he tried to guard his vulnerability by not laughing nor smiling. The steely look in his eyes wasn’t unfriendly. But Ibou would feel like his soul was being probed whenever he met the young man’s gaze. The young man sat in the interrogation only three times. During the breaks he would remain on the chair and draw pictures of the battles, of human beings toiling and suffering in the trenches, the underground shelters. A war artist, a frontline reporter. He told Ibou in his soft, low voice. Ibou was drawn to him. The young man was reticent yet an attentive listener. He spoke very little only when he must, but Ibou found in him a kind soul who saw something beyond beauty and repugnance in humans and nature sometimes brought together in beautiful unison, sometimes in horrific destruction for both. One night they questioned Ibou on the French counter-battery fire, which they admitted, was superior to their own. After that Ibou said he was “tak-mak” to know how they had succeeded in lugging all the heavy artillery pieces up to the mountains, how they managed to dodge the French counter-fire artillery. The youth opened a notebook and showed Ibou drawings and sketches done in pencil and charcoal. He dated each work and signed his name. Le Giang. Ibou studied the drawings of the bo doi pulling or dropping ropes on the unwieldy guns—the 105mm field guns, the 37mm antiaircraft guns—on steep hill slopes, some at hair-raising 45 degrees. He looked at one pencil drawing entitled “Mock Artillery” which showed an open-field deployment of four crude-looking 105mm cannons. It dawned on him why they were not hidden in casemates like all of the Viet Minh’s heavy field artillery. The youth explained that each of the guns in the drawing was made out of a tree trunk, painted black, and set uptilted in an open field visible to the enemy. He said in his precise French, enunciating each word, “Those who deserve praise in our artillery division are not the forward observers, the watch tower observers or the gunners. They are men who live and die on the mock deployment ground, because they draw fire from your artillery and your fighter-bombers.” There were always people in each drawing, each sketch, Ibou recalled. And they stayed on Ibou’s mind. It must be their gestures or the look on their faces. Ibou could not forget them. Then as he took back the notebook, the youth said, “The people I drew are dead now.” Ibou thought then said, “Vous dessinez les fantômes?”
“Yes,” the youth said, “I drew ghosts.” Later that evening the youth returned when Ibou was resting. He gave Ibou a sheet of paper. “For you,” he said tersely. His mouth agape, Ibou stared at his own face in a charcoal sketch, at the faint lines across his cheeks, his tribal knife scars. Portrait of Brother Tak-Mak. He clasped his big hands around the youth’s. “Merci mon ami. Merci beaucoup.” At dawn he was taken to the rear. He wanted to say goodbye to the youth but was not allowed to. He asked for a piece of nylon and wrapped the drawing with it. He had felt something he never had before. He felt significant, a self-worth that had eluded him since childhood.
The red in the evening sky was gone and the hillcrests became thin lines in the fog. It cloaked the riverbank and the air turned chilly. Ibou could barely make out the manioc plots at the foot of A1 Hill. He felt the weight of the pails in his hands. He must get on home. His wife, his son’s family would soon enjoy Miss Dien Bien Phu’s cooking. Had the artist youth ever drawn her portrait? Ibou thought as he hurried up the provincial road. Was he still alive?
END
Teacup Bloom
I’ve seen a tree swim
the shallow pond
tentacle and suctioned
to the murk. If you peer
into it all, you won’t see
the reach and ribbon
of her slimed tail, the smooth pebble
shoreline spitting up
bullfrogs to balloon
gullets for her.
A Curse for Pressure
You say there is nothing as beautiful as the dry cracking,
the callus of a hard day’s work. My hands speak back through
creases, the folds you bury your face in. Every sound
pressuring flesh like a magnet, breaking skin, snapping
a rib that no longer carries current. I dive to
beat myself at the bottom. I comb
my hair strands with useful fingers. Anguilliform means
resembling an eel— nothing beautiful—
this slimy new ocean, this dark fertile magic, the scaleless serpent
air is all wrong here.