CREATIVE NONFICTION
When the Bee Stings by Lisa Romeo
The Archivists by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

FICTION
Voussior by Eric Darton
Grown In Cracked Turf by Deborah Di Bari
Safe by Judy Gerbin
The Oracle by Susan O'Doherty
Dog Days by Thaddeus Rutkowski
Baby Fever by Diane Shakar

POETRY
Fire Escape by Oscar Berneo
The Couch by Donna Brook
Why We Don't Live Here Anymore by Donna Brook
Kill the Monkey (a tango to entertain guests to) by Robert Calero
Another New York Poem by Christie Casher
Celan: The Quest and the Bridge by Cyrus Cassells
Grisaille: The Roll Call by Cyrus Cassells
How To Choose a Career by Mary Christine Delea
Early Heat by Robert Hershon
Tourist Walked Right In by Robert Hershon
Just East of Vine by Ry Kincaid
A Potted Plant in June by Lynn Martens
This Morning in Woodside by Cathy McArthur
A Dozen Ways He Says Good Morning by Michael Morical
Bone, Shell, Plate by Rena J. Mosteirin
To Ovidiu, Whose Voice I Still Don't Remember by Mihaela Moscaliuc


 CREATIVE NONFICTION
 
WHEN THE BEE STINGS
by Lisa Romeo


         I had towering crushes on all of my sister’s boyfriends, who were all correspondingly smitten with me too. Brad always hugged me tightly, Patrick kissed the top of my head and fingered my hair, Mark winked at me, and Allan often told me I was pretty. A few even took me along on their dates, sitting beside me to whisper secrets at the movies or ice cream shop. Those kinds of things can happen when your sister is 12 years older than you are, when your sister is more or less your mother too.
        Our newly affluent Italian American family included our real mother, of course. But much of the nurturing, the nuance, fell to Cathy, either because of our mother’s early menopausal vexations, or because of the way eldest daughters in the 1960s buoyantly accepted the mother-helper role. This was fine with me, terrific in fact, since I knew nothing else and loved my sister in a fierce way that sometimes scared me.  
        The summer before I started kindergarten, Cathy and I plopped down on the lumbering green and white slider swing in our suburban New Jersey backyard, sucking on root beer ice pops. 
        “Why do you have to live at college?” I asked.   
        “To have lots of time to study and to learn. I want to learn everything there is to know about math.” She told me how her college was in the prettiest part of Massachusetts and how much fun we would have on the drive up in the fall.

        Cathy was a contemplative and pious teenager who intermittently avowed that she wanted to be a nun. My parents insisted she attend a coed Catholic college for at least two years before binding herself to a novitiate. I worried whether nuns – or college girls – visited their little sisters. Held their hands? Shared peanut butter and jelly on crackers? Or sat on the front steps chanting “he loves me, he loves me not” and plucking daisy petals, as we did that summer.
        “Who loves you? Billy?” I asked her. The boy across the street once came to our door three times in one afternoon selling Boy Scout popcorn.
        "And who do you like? Paul?” she teased.
        “He’s the cutest Beatle, right?”
        Cathy did not shrug me off or push me away. She never said, “She’s so annoying” or “Leave me alone!” the way it was with my cousin Emma and her older sister Patty. Cathy did not shush at me when she was on the phone with a girlfriend, or jilt me when she and her friends walked to Bond’s for ice cream.
        So why did she want to abandon me now? My older brother was already away at New York Military Academy. My father worked six days a week at his polyester manufacturing company and spent many evenings and weekends reading The Wall Street Journal or visiting his parents. I trailed along with my mother to the beauty shop, the seamstress, upscale department stores, and her bowling league. But at home, without Cathy, I wondered what I would do, who would play jacks with me.
        “Why do you want to learn about math?” I asked her.
        “I think numbers are really neat, and I want to be a teacher,” she said. “What do you want to be?”
        “I want to be a writer,” I declared. “I want to write newspaper stories and books and poems and everything. On a typewriter, like a real writer.” 
        One afternoon that August, Cathy returned from her part time job as a sales clerk at E.J. Korvette carrying a big blue and white box. “It’s for you, so you can write me lots of letters.” Inside was a manual Junior Secretary Smith Corona typewriter. She had already taught me, when I was four, how to read and print words.

         I stood beside Cathy when she packed a low green trunk with white socks, hair rollers, and two new pairs of penny loafers. I idly fingered the dusting powder and jewelry box and other items remaining on her side of the bureau in our shared bedroom.  
        “Are you taking your slippers and robe too?” I asked.
        “Of course, silly. What would I wear in the morning and at night?” Cathy ruffled my pixie haircut.
        “You’re taking the pictures, too?”
        She considered the formal 8 x 10 high school graduation portrait, and the smaller framed and slightly blurry snapshot beside it. A statue of Mary stands over the two of us on the church lawn, Cathy still in her graduation robe. My arms are clutched around her waist, crushing and pulling up her robe so that an inch of white dress shows at the hem. She leaves the large one, lays the small one in the trunk atop a pale blue sweater, her hand emerging with her favorite bottle of Christian Dior perfume, setting it gently back on the dresser. “Can you keep this for me till I come home?” she asked. “You can wear a drop sometimes.” I burrowed my face in her long chestnut hair, breathed in the Dior, and squeezed my eyes tight.

        Every afternoon after getting home from kindergarten that fall, I typed a letter to my sister on plain white paper. Real writers did not use the kind of flowery stationery my mother had bought me. I reported the day’s news – how Mrs. Bartosh’s dog Sir Bum got loose and pooped in Mr. Hufnagel’s driveway, that we had veal cutlets for dinner and Mommy didn’t burn them, who was on The Ed Sullivan Show. They were one or two-page, single-spaced missives, long for a six year old, but good training I figured for a future world famous writer, and lengthy enough I thought so that Cathy would not forget me.
        About once a week, I got a thick envelope back, neatly printed on several pages of daffodil stationery, stories about her roommates Kay (Katherine), Pat (Margaret), and Liz (Elizabeth), and about which boys were cute (many). The cafeteria food was good and she had two favorite teachers, including Professor Peterson. “He has hair like John Lennon and he never combs it and it’s always in his eyes and we wonder how he can see what he’s writing on the board!”
        I missed Cathy in every corner of the house – in the bathroom when I brushed my teeth and used to perch on the narrow sink ledge so I could watch her in the mirror doing the same. I missed her in the kitchen where we filled bowls with milk and dropped in ripped doughy chunks from yesterday’s loaf of Italian bread. In the backyard where she always turned on the sprinkler for me on stifling summer days, and did not care if I splashed her.
         Mostly I yearned for my sister in the big double bed we had shared since I was two. My mother said I could stretch out now, but that was where Cathy used to lie with me almost every night, singing songs from movie musicals or Broadway plays. When the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I’m feeling sad, I simply remember my favorite things….
         I missed all the things we used to talk about. So what happened on I Love Lucy today? I bet you would love to work in a chocolate factory! Are horses still your favorite animal? Were there any good games at Margie’s birthday party? Now my mother brushed a kiss on my forehead, clicked off the white lamp with pink flowers, and closed my door, jobs that once belonged to Cathy.
         In one letter, Cathy asked about the boys in my class, but I only pined for My Three Sons, Beaver, and even Mr. Ed, all of whom I had heaps of time for now. The television was always switched on in our house, but Cathy had always been there, inviting me to play board games or go on the swings, suggesting we draw hopscotch grids in the driveway, or read new books. Now, I spent a lot of time meandering around.
         “Moping again?” my mother asked and offered me some chocolate chip cookies.
         In church on Sundays, I silently prayed my sister would decide she hated college and come home.  When she did come home for a weekend in October, and it was time for bed, Cathy lay down on top of the covers. I wanted to tell her how Miss Hauxwell was teaching me to write in script when the other kids were coloring, and that Laurie and Cindy, the new girls who moved in next door, were nice after all. But before I said any of it, she kissed my hair, said goodnight, and left.
        That Sunday morning, I put a fresh piece of paper in my typewriter, banged the keys: Reasons Why I Miss You So Much. 1.) You love me more than anyone. I folded it neatly and slipped it into her suitcase, near her underpants so she would be sure to find it that very night back in her dorm room.

       The afternoon Cathy was due home for Christmas break, I ran full speed from the bus stop. I knew that when I opened the front door, there she would be, arms open. I wanted to know why she was not writing back every week anymore and when I could stay overnight in her dorm room, as she had promised.
        My mother and her mother, my Noni who was staying with us now that she had had her right leg amputated, were at the kitchen table rolling out dough for Italian Knot cookies. “She’s not here,” my mother said. As I walked slowly up the stairs to my room, I heard her say to Noni, “Did you see how fast she went back out with her college friends? I guess we’re too dumb for her now.”
        When Cathy arrived, laughing and waving to the friend who dropped her off, she came up the front steps slowly, her hair reflecting the winter sun. I wondered why she was not running to find me. When she finally came through the door I bolted at her, hugging and hopping on stocking feet, wet from the snow she had tracked in.
       “Guess what, I asked Santa for goldfish, a whole tank of them,” I blurted. “And a Creepy Crawler set to make icky bugs,” I added, giggling and scrunching up my fingers at her neck.
         “You still write to Santa?” she said.
        “Sure. So when I see him at Aunt Doris’s house every year, he already knows what I want.”
        “That’s Uncle Frankie in a costume.”
        “Liar! Cathy’s a liar.” I ran to the kitchen where my mother was stirring tomato sauce. “Make her stop lying.”
         Cathy followed, hands on hips.  “Mom, you shouldn’t allow her to believe in man-made icons.” Then she went up to our room and closed the door. My mother slammed down the wooden spoon and pressed me to her. She told me my sister was confused by the new things she was learning at college and that of course it was the real Santa Claus at Aunt Doris’s house and why didn’t I run along now and color.
        I found the glittered paper angel I made at school that week and brought it up to show my sister, who said, “It’s truly lovely,” and hung it from the lamp switch. Later, Cathy went out, I got into bed alone, and tried to sing.
        “Summonchanted evening…” But I gave up and cried, and before I fell asleep I thought I knew just how my Noni must have felt about her missing right leg.

        After that, I wrote only weekly news reports that omitted the curlicues, hearts, and x’s, and when an occasional letter arrived from Cathy, I placed it on the dresser next to the Dior bottle until bedtime. That winter, Noni moved into my brother’s empty bedroom. In the afternoons she played Go Fish with me, let me watch The Edge of Night with her, and unwittingly taught me swear words in an Italian dialect my father didn’t understand.
        One Thursday morning in March, I spotted Cathy’s eyeglasses in their usual spot on our double dresser. I rushed downstairs, shouting, “Mom! Is Cathy home?”
        The living room coffee table was in the dining room, the piano bench crammed beneath the baby grand. My sister and her roommates were on the floor, blankets overlapping, hair askew, their flannel-draped, flower-flecked arms this way and that. Small suitcases rimmed the scene, four pairs of loafers were lined up on the Italian tile in the foyer.
         They had driven four hours the night before in my sister’s green LeMans, unannounced, with plans to drive the 15 miles into Manhattan for the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. I ate a bowl of Cap’n Crunch at the kitchen table while Cathy told my mother, “Don't worry, we’re only missing one class. It’s an adventure.”
        Before my father left for work, my mother wondered aloud if she should allow them to go, to drive on their own into New York, these naïve girls whose parents probably did not even know where they were. “They’re over 18. Let them do what they want,” he said. Noni stirred her tea and shrugged. My mother asked Cathy if the girls wanted Pop Tarts or English muffins.
        “Neither, we’re going to eat green bagels in New York,” Cathy said, dropping a quick kiss on the top of my head. She waved for the girls to grab their suitcases and follow her upstairs, where she pointed out the bathroom, and led them into our bedroom, closing the door.
        My mother seemed to have forgotten about my getting ready for school, so I laid down on the crumpled blankets in the living room and turned on the TV. As the girls drifted back downstairs, Kay asked what grade I was in and Pat tried to guess my favorite TV program. Liz said I was cute and showed me a photo of her little sister back in Rhode Island. Then Cathy grabbed my foot and shook it. “Get dressed kiddo. Mom says you can come too.”
        Whether it was permission my mother gave or a mandate, I didn't know. I only knew I was going to New York City, without my parents, like a real college girl. I scrambled to my room and pulled on green knee socks, green corduroy pants, and a green and white sweater. In New York, the five of us gobbled green bagels and hopped up and down on the cold sidewalk to keep warm. When I needed a bathroom, Cathy found a coffee shop and ordered a hot chocolate to go so we would be customers. When I couldn’t see over the crowds, she picked me up, and even talked to me almost as much as she talked to her girlfriends, who took turns holding my hand. Before she drove back to college, Cathy wrote on our kitchen calendar, “Lisa visits Cathy” over a weekend in April.
        My mother helped me to pack, unpack, and repack my little plaid suitcase several times in preparation for my big trip. My mother said to bring sweaters, but Cathy had promised me a real college sweatshirt. I thought about bringing the Dior perfume, but it was a glass bottle and I was worried I would drop it on the floor in her dorm room, which Cathy said was not even carpeted. I resisted my mother’s advice to bring something to do if I got bored, to pack a toy or some crayons and coloring books. I was going to college.
        My parents drove me two hours to Hartford, halfway, where my sister and her roommate Pat met us in the parking lot of the Silver Dollar restaurant. “Make sure she eats properly and brushes her teeth,” my mother told Cathy. My father slipped a folded twenty-dollar bill into my sister’s purse and patted my head. “Knock ‘em dead, kid.”
         Cathy set my too-short hair with hot rollers and let me watch TV in the student lounge with her until ten. I got to sleep on the top bunk since Kay was home for the weekend. “This is my little sister,” Cathy said in the cafeteria the next morning, introducing me to the dorm matron (this was a small Catholic college in 1966), to a few other girls, and even some boys who, I noticed, noticed her. With her shiny hair curled into a flip, smooth skin, shapely figure showing through the cashmere sweater set and high-waisted tapered capris, and her smile of straight sheet-white teeth, my sister looked just like Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show.
        One boy in particular, a big guy with a brush of spidery red hair, freckles, and an easy smile, moved awfully close to her, and put his hand lightly on her back. I thought he was going to kiss her, and wondered if he had already kissed her in secret.
        “Lisa, this is Patrick,” Cathy said. I liked him. He told me jokes I could understand, tickled me but not too much, and watched I Love Lucy with me that afternoon when Cathy had to study. I saw the campus from atop his shoulders when the three of us walked to church on Sunday morning and heard about his four little sisters back home, an hour away.
        “Are you going to marry Patrick?” I asked my sister the next morning, expecting her to say, No, silly.
        “He already asked me, because he graduates next year. I think I’m in love with him, and I know he loves me. But I would have to quit school and I don’t know about that,” she said.
        “Will you have a baby? Can I babysit?”
        She mussed my hair. “Shush, silly. And don’t tell Mommy or Dad.”  So I shushed, but I did tell my parents, near the end of the ride back to New Jersey. The next weekend, we drove right back to Massachusetts and I played checkers with Kay while my parents and Cathy took a little walk. Later the four of us, and Patrick, went out to dinner at a restaurant near his house, and then instead of ordering dessert, we drove to Patrick’s house. I played with his sisters in the front yard, while the grown-ups had coffee inside and Cathy and Patrick sat on the porch.
        Back at the dorm later, Cathy took me to the vending machines to get a snack for my ride home. “Why did you tell Mommy and Dad that I was getting engaged?” she asked.
        “I don’t want you to not come home anymore. You love me best.”
        “God loves you best,” she said.
        “I mean in our house.”
        “Mommy loves you best. Anyway, we will always be sisters. Even when I do get married, even when I have a baby,” Cathy said, and stroked my hair.
        “OK.”
        “Even when you get married and have a baby.”
        Cathy graduated and moved to Boston where, unbeknownst to our parents, she was sleeping on a foldaway cot in a dingy cramped apartment with five other girls, where they ate rice and beans, stayed out a little too late, and sometimes smoked cigarettes. I knew, because about every six weeks or so my parents let me take the Eastern shuttle to Logan where Cathy was always waiting, arms open. Back home, I didn't tell.

         A few years later, when I was 12, she got married, but not to Patrick. (He married Cathy's good friend Brenda, who then had an affair with her father-in-law.) As we got dressed for her wedding back in our old shared bedroom, Cathy gently stroked pink lipstick on my quivering lips, and just as she finished, I started to cry and hugged her tight. She hugged back, tightly as well, too tight. When I lifted my head, a sticky pink stain was spreading on the bright white fabric over the left shoulder of what I understood to be an extravagantly expensive custom wedding gown. Panicked, shamed, I cried harder.
        "Shh. We don't want Mommy to hear," she said, grabbing tissues and the container of Johnson's Baby Powder, and concocting a tincture of talc and spit. With the veil pulled just so, my big sister, whom I loved more than anyone, once again looked as pure and good as I knew she was. She smiled at me in the way that had always held me safe.
        Sixteen years later, on the day of my own wedding, I waited under a windy hotel portico for the limousine that was late to take me to church. As I turned my head from side to side, I rubbed my pink lips against one of the oversized puffy sleeves of my own expensive designer gown and felt a prick of panic rise. Then I remembered, and motioned for my sister, and this time we laughed through my panic, and of course she knew just what to do.
        Cathy and I both got to be mothers ourselves, and godmothers to each other’s first sons. Most of the time we stayed close, as close as two sisters born more or less a generation apart and living 250 miles from one another can be. Sometimes, we pulled apart:  I'd get tired of her earnest strive for goodness, and I'm sure she was sometimes frustrated by my single-minded career ambitions.
        We write to each other about once a week now, poorly punctuated e-mails with six-month-old subject lines. They are often serious missives: She's worried about her grown daughter, a missionary living in Peru. I'm anxious about one son's new school, the other's Wii addiction, and a client insisting I learn HTML. We exchange ideas about new books we've read and how to best deal with our widowed mother's health. We never discuss the men in our lives – her ex-husband with whom she endured a decade of verbal abuse, or her new sometime-fiancé; or my husband of 20 years whom I deeply love, and often cannot tolerate.
        Occasionally there is the oddball inquiry, like the one I sent this morning: “What did we call that concoction with the Italian bread and milk?”
        “Soggy soup,” she wrote back.
        These days, it's Cathy who visits me, often to watch one of my sons mark some milestone, playing drums in a school concert, receiving his first Holy Communion. Perhaps like me she notices, though they are only four years apart instead of 12, my sons' developing relationship, the way the younger one looks at his big brother, how the older one absorbs the sticky adulation, shirks it off, and settles a look on his little brother equal parts acceptance and acquiescence. They are establishing the dance, patterns that might sustain them, challenge them, fortify them, for decades, though of course they don't know that yet.
        When she's visiting, Cathy and I sometimes sit together on my patio, three blocks from the street where we grew up. Billy, the boy who had a crush on her so long ago, is my next-door neighbor, recently retired from his plumbing business. Cathy's retired from teaching math now too, and I'm starting a new kind of writing in midlife. So we talk, as it seems we have been doing all our lives, about what's next, what's changing, the things we love, hate, and fear about what's ahead. We give each other advice, and we often think the other is silly or wrong. But we usually always ask.
        For a while, Cathy talked about moving back to New Jersey when she retired, a state she never really loved. I am the only one from our family who still lives here and for a time I wondered and worried how we'd do, living close to one another again. Then she met a new man in Massachusetts. She might or might not marry him, or teach a college class, or visit her son in Illinois next month. As for me, a 12-years-younger married woman with two school-age kids, I'm slightly jealous of what look to me like her wide-open options, until I remember about her divorce, the retirement savings based on a teacher's pay, and her tricky lower back. Last time she was here, we talked about all of it and nothing, and about what will happen to us, flung across states, time zones, and life stages, when our aged mother is inevitably, one day, gone.
        Following such a visit, after Cathy leaves, I occasionally find a note tucked into my date book on which she has written, “God loves you more than anyone.”


THE ARCHIVISTS  
by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

 
          The book first appears on page sixty-one of the document that is us. It is in one of my e-mails to him. “Please go read The Archivist,” I write. And though he has never met me, he listens.
         He tells me later, on page seventy-five, that he stopped by a bookstore to read the first few pages and bought it immediately. He writes, “I started mentally composing what I was going to write to you and decided in the end that it was best summarized by, ‘Damn.’” This is how we spent our days, mentally composing e-mails to each other. I am twenty-seven and living in Boston, where I will graduate law school in one month. Then I will move to New Jersey to live in my parents’ house and be cared for as I undergo jaw surgery. He is twenty-seven also and one month from graduating medical school in St. Louis. When he finishes, he will move to Boston to begin his residency.
          So we are both on the edge of a transition, and this is how we come to each other: teetering, a little unsure what the future will hold. I place a note on an online bulletin board seeking a pen pal, a bit of distraction in the mind of another. He sees it. He writes, “You will leave Boston before I get there, but I had to write.” I write back, and then he does, and then I do again. When it is time for me to leave, I ask my landlord to let me stay another two weeks. I am curious.


        The book that makes its appearance so early in our history is a novel, average-sized in the edition I own, a little over three hundred pages and bound in burgundy with the author’s name, Martha Cooley, shrunk small to fit horizontally across its spine. Its front cover depicts a stack of books, their titles teasingly out of view, only their volume of pages visible. A stack of pages, printed atop pages. The cover was what I saw first, one day years ago. It was its profusion that drew me in, the suggestion of words upon words upon words.
        The novel is about an archivist: a collector of something that does not belong to him, a curator, a professional tender-to. His name is Matthias, and he looks after the letters exchanged between the poet T.S. Eliot and his lifelong correspondent Emily Hale. He is the keeper of their words and through those words, their relationship.


        My correspondent and I meet on a blue-black May night under torrential rain. We have exchanged photographs – mine carefully culled from those with flattering angles, depictions kind but not untrue – and I already know from his that he will be large. In pictures, he dwarfs in stance and stature whoever stands with him, sometimes crowding them right out of the frame. Still, I am unprepared for the size of the body before me. Lined up with shoppers and students, all of them crowded under the shop’s awning with their heads bowed, seeking shelter from the rain, he looks as though he has wandered into a world cut on the wrong scale. It is a little like meeting the Hulk. His body seems on the verge of exploding with excess: his face just holds at bay the coarse hair that engulfs his head, stubble breaks through his cheeks so high only his eyes are free of it. His calves bulge and strain against his pants. In construction, he stretches the limits of nature. His voice, too, is unexpected, high for such a large man. I don’t like it, or the way his arms swing in the air as we walk. Strangers duck out of his way and shoot glances at us, but he doesn’t notice. When we reach the bar we are seated at an intimate table for two and just by sitting he reduces it to kindergarten furniture, something ridiculous.
        Still, though, there are his words, the words that are all I have known of him, and as long as I don’t look at him they are all I have again. We have been waiting for the gift of sound, waiting to be freed from the tedious peck of our fingers at the keyboard. Now our words pour out in torrents as free flowing and engulfing as the rain outside. I sip my wine and force myself, slowly, to look at him. I remind myself that his is the brain I have been writing to, that his is the body it comes in.
        And so we talk, and drink, and loosen. I slip in remarks, some sly and sharp, feeling witty and alive and liking it and the wine. He keeps score on an imaginary chalkboard located on the wall above his side of the table, tallying our conversational points with a flourish the shape of a checkmark. If I make him laugh, I get a point. If I tell him something new or delight him, I get a point. If he makes me laugh, he gets ten – he is making these rules, after all. I want to be annoyed, I want to protest that this is unfair and anyway how can the evening already be a contest, but mostly I want points. So I trot out the best thing I can think of: a bookstore not two hours from Boston, tucked deep into the woods in an old mill that lies alongside a river.
       “Books and water!” he says. “A million points. We’ll go in the morning. On the drive we can talk about The Archivist.” Just like that, it begins.


       We never do talk about the book. Instead he pulls his iPod out of his backpack and uses a radio transmitter to send Old Crow Medicine Show over my convertible’s stereo system and out into the open air, a bunch of twenty-something Nashville boys singing modern day come-ons set to old-time bluegrass music, rock me mama like a wagon wheel, rock me mama any way you feel, hey mama rock me. I laugh and tell him that I know the band, that I’ve seen them live while lying on my back in the grass at folk festivals, and I counter with Radiohead covering an old Wilco song. But it’s too easy, he’s heard it, and again that’s it and we’re off, each with four or five songs on cue before it is our turn. When we get to the Bookmill, we are the same way, running impatiently through its aisles. From the start, the five hours we have until closing already feel too few. We pull books from the shelves and show each other passages, reading aloud the words that have wormed their way into our hearts. We tell stories of ourselves as children and the heartbreak and wonder of realizing how many books there were in the world, how many more than we could ever read, and that there were people writing even as we were reading, that we would never catch up, never read it all. Neither of us has ever gotten over the vastness of the unknown.
        Then the pain in my jaw comes, as careless and complete as if someone had flicked a switch. I can’t hold anything in my head when it’s like this, all the stories and worlds and even this one just fade to black. I can’t talk either. I move my hands like a wheel, hoping he will understand. He’ll have to drive home. “That’s okay,” he says, “but what about the pain?” I mime downing a shot from a glass and when he doesn’t understand, I write it on a napkin. I need a drink.
        At this he takes his hands, rough from the sun and straw of his Nebraskan boyhood, and lays them gently on the sides of my face, cradling me. I brace myself, expecting pain, but do not pull away. His hands are warm; there is no pain. Then he sweeps his arms wide open, as though beckoning the world in to come join me. “Tonight,” he says, “you shall drink in four states.”
        He drives, I drink. We find a college bar with dark wood and the table carvings of lovers and drunkards past before we even leave Massachusetts. The gold flakes in my shot of Goldschläger are the brightest things in the bar, and with a single gulp I finish off the first state. Rhode Island provides a decent martini. The sky has gone black by the time we reach Vermont, but I notice the words Ricky’s Roadhouse by the side of the road. Inside the bar is dark and thrillingly true to type, with men in biker’s chaps and bandanas talking in low voices, their biceps carrying the possibility, at least, of a brawl. A lone, wrinkled old woman in an oversized Assumption College sweatshirt plays pool by herself. I sip a vodka-soda and he whispers threats to break a pool cue over the woman’s head, to start a fight not with the men but with her, until I have to tell him to stop making me laugh, it hurts too much. The only lights we see when we reach New Hampshire are the neon signs on a place that looks like a diner but has a Mexican name, and it is there that we stop. The craggy-faced, chain-smoking waitress is already sweeping up and glares at us, but we are too close to our goal to stop now. I do a tequila shot and load quarters into the jukebox. I choose Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” He opts for John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane.” We are living our own movie. We dance, and for a moment I think we might kiss.
        As the car speeds along the blackened highway and he charts our course for home, I put my seat all the way back and stare up at the night sky. The car dips and careens like our words and my head, everything earthbound moving so quickly but the sky above so still. At four o’clock in the morning we stand in front of my apartment, ready to say goodnight, and he hoists me into the air. I stare down at his face, drunk and teetering and heady as the stars above. I tell him we can’t date. I tell him that I’m sorry, but I’m not attracted to him. I tell him I already know I won’t fall. What do you mean, he says, of course you won’t fall. I’ve got you. He dips me then, to prove his strength, the surety of his grasp. No, I say, I mean I won’t fall. For you. As the words leave my mouth their cold and calm cruelty cuts through even my drunkenness. I am shocking myself, but he doesn’t even flinch.
       In the morning I give up my apartment. Later, he will joke that I broke up with him and then moved in. Not true, I will say. We never dated. “Spoken like a lawyer,” he says, and I can’t disagree.
        We are not together. We share a bed. We share a house. We share meals we cook together and eat them on his balcony with shared coffee in the morning and shared wine at night. When we read, we call each other over and share passages, thoughts that tumble together until they are the product of us two and not the product of one mind working alone, and still I refuse to say that we are together. Nowhere in the document that is us, all 284 pages he gave me when I finally left, 284 pages in which he’d collected every e-mail we’d ever written and transcribed every text message we’d ever sent, do I admit to what he wants, to what another might see. These pages are our story, but also the battle for it. In the text experiences are reshaped within days, sometimes within seconds, by our retelling, by the battle of words and minds and meanings that has been going on since before we met. We are volatile this way, but also steady, consistent.
        On my favorite page of the document, he texts me to say that he has just left death class, he asks me how my death work is going, and he reminds me to leave an article on dying from The New York Times on his pillow so it’s there when he gets home. It is absurd, this focus, this redundancy under the hopeful June sunlight. Ours is the summer of death. He has patients dying and at the hospital they are teaching him how to deliver this news gently, how to be the conduit to help sever the connections between his patients and their loved ones. In his world death is something that stalks, a darkness that lingers in the corners of overly bright white hallways sterilized against it. At times he despairs that so many patients die that death seems almost inevitable – and then he recalls, as though coming newly upon the human, that yes, it is. I am spending my days parsing execution transcripts, continuing a project I began in law school. In my world death is the known outcome, not fended off but imposed. We make each other so high with life and all that mental energy, for both of us, is going into understanding death. It is our work but also our obsession.
        One morning we wake in his – our – his – bed and lay side by side, listening to the hymn coming from a neighbor’s radio. It is Sunday. When the song finishes, its exultation ending at last on one long, drawn-out note, he rolls himself onto an elbow so that he is above me, and stares down into my face. He is unshaven, and his eyebrows are thick and dark and unruly, as brash as the rest of him. He touches my forehead and says, “I want to be there when you die.” I understand, I do not think his words strange, but I fight against them with words of my own, words I do not say: No, I want to be there when he dies. I want to be the one who gets to have the intensity of that experience. This, too, is a race. We are greedy for experience, always wanting more, always aware that life is finite and scared we won’t get it all in. We sleep little and talk much. Sometimes I try to wrap my arms around him. It is impossible, I know – my arms will not reach, even as his fingers can encircle my wrist once around and then half again – but I try anyway. In these moments I bring my lips to his ear. “Please let’s live forever,” I whisper. I know it isn’t up to him. I say it anyway.
       He doesn’t forget about the book. It is near the top of his list of the things we have not done, the promises he thinks we have left unfulfilled. At the very top of the list is my refusal to say that I am in love with him, my failure to be sufficiently won over by his mind to overcome my aversion to his body. “You should,” he accuses me often, “want to kiss my brain.” I want to mine his brain. I want to scramble through it like a playground of best childhood dreams, I want to pick up every idea he’s ever had and examine it, turn it over, a shiny bauble to delight in and turn up to the light. I want to get high off his brain, but no, I do not want to kiss it and I do not want to kiss him. Sometimes when we make love I catch him staring at me. His eyes linger over my skin, trying to find a way in. I look at the wall. For this I make no apology. He has been warned, I think. I harden.
        On one of his rare days off we go for a hike. For four hours we climb up a mountain, finding foot holes in the ungiving rock. He is nimble, and quicker than I am. The sun over his head should be casting shadows but it’s not, it’s just blinding me, and I have to shield my eyes with my hand and squint just to see his blurry form. At the top we stop. There’s nothing there, really, and the view isn’t all that different than it was on the way up. He takes red wine and cheese from his backpack, the cheese made pungent and runny by the summer sun. I take a blanket, a corkscrew, and a knife from mine. I have forgotten the crackers and the sun has turned the wine too hot to drink, but we spread the runny insides of the cheese on the rind and eat it that way, licking it off our own fingers and not each other’s. We will talk about The Archivist now, we say, but we don’t. Instead we talk about why we both love a Mason Jennings song and what it would be to live in California and how I have failed him.
         By the end of the summer we talk about this last thing so much that we don’t talk about anything else.


        In the novel, the letters between Hale and Elliot are not yet public. The rules of the bequest dictate that they may not be read yet, it is not yet their time, and it is Matthias the archivist’s task to keep the curious at bay. Roberta, a graduate student, wants access to the letters. She wants to read them, to analyze them. She wants to know if Hale and Elliot were lovers. In the dried ink scrawled across the pages, she thinks, she will find the ineffable, what emotion spun the expanse between the two. Even if nothing is explicitly stated it will still somehow be there, its meaning emanating from the spaces between the words for all to see. In the collected document, she thinks, she will find both what the two were, and what they were not.
       That is the thing about archives: in their haste to relay all that was realized, in their urgent love of the litany of fact, they are a summing up not only of what we are, but of what we are not. Whatever riches their depths may hold, whatever truths may be mined by the curious and the observant, those depths are finite. Eventually limits are reached. Eventually the archive runs out. And it is there, in the inevitable final blank, that the archive holds its full meaning. It is as much a list of what never will be, as what was.

       
         Six months before I met him I’d been dating a woman, an opera singer whose laugh, deep red lips, and long, grand name were all scaled for the stage. I loved to twist my tongue around its syllables, their round mouth-feel as seductive as the waxy twist of her hair around my fingers. She smelled like apples, words that mean nothing until you meet a woman who actually does.
        We were the exact same height and weight, yet different. Naked before me, her body seemed an alternate possibility, cells and skin and bones and muscle that had arranged itself into another configuration, as though the same material had, by chance, given rise to another object entirely. I am small on top with hips. Her hips were as slender as a boy’s, but her breasts were large and round. The scent of skin was what we were, sex always and everywhere, talking little but kissing much. She was addictive to kiss, sugar-sweet with her whole warm body rising into it, nothing held back. She was like this about everything: all emotion pushed forth, cultivated for display and intended for the record. Nothing held in reserve.
         Once I asked her how she’d known to pursue me when we’d met, when, shy and uncertain of my sexuality, I’d tried so hard to cover up my attraction to her. Was it my body language? Had that given me away? No, she said. It was my words that had betrayed me. “No gender pronouns,” she said, and smirked. “It was always they this, and they that. I knew something had to be up.” When she said this I thought of legal terms: to expunge from the record, to strike. It’s a common litigator’s trick to say something inadmissible in front of the jury. The judge can instruct the jury to obey the strict rules of evidence and not consider what they’ve just heard, but memories aren’t wiped as easily as chalk from slate, and the instruction only serves to highlight the offending, revealing comment in the jurors’ minds. The judge will tell the court reporter to erase it, too, but a mark always remains on the transcript, the blacking out of words that were once there that is, in its own way, proof of their existence.
        The last time I saw her was a Sunday morning in late August. The summer heat hadn’t yet begun to yield to autumn’s encroach, and the defiant sun blazed bright enough to burn. I’d called her, ready to leave Boston and wanting to say goodbye, and she’d come. We arranged to meet in the center of Harvard Square, but I saw her from across the quadrangle’s leafy shield and almost turned away. She’d worn the top from the first night I went to bed with her, the top I knew she’d made her best friend go shopping with her to buy just three hours before our date, after she’d tried on and discarded everything else in her closet. The top that pushed her breasts almost up to her chin and dipped them in liquid hi-beam silver, so that on a sunny Sunday morning in August she looked a little like a gilded statue and a little like a bedraggled club kid the morning after, one still wearing the crusted hopes and smeared mascara of the night before. On her feet were sparkly gold heels she’d bought for another date with me. Her first girl shoes, she’d called them at the time, and I noticed she still couldn’t walk in them. Around her waist she’d tied a pink and green striped men’s necktie I’d used to pull her into me for a kiss, for many kisses, when it was still properly loped around a crisp shirt collar. Nothing matched. It looked like it had been pulled from one of those Goodwill bags marked Please use for discards, an outfit culled from other people’s lives. But it hadn’t been; instead it was culled from ours. Her body was a catalogue of the physical experiences of us, our short history compressed and organized and pressed against flesh, the same flesh I’d pressed and breathed in and kissed and lingered over. She’d gained weight since the last time I’d seen her. The cloth memories no longer fit. She smiled at me, nervous. She tugged at the silver sequined shirt where it had ridden up over the new, white fat of her belly. I left quickly.


        But that, bodily, was hers, and this is his: a stack of white paper thick as a book, thick as a story, something with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The day I finally leave he hands it to me. I am standing in his living room, surrounded by the books that line his walls, their straight, colorful spines overflowing the floor-to-ceiling wooden bookcases. Each room in his apartment is clothed in this way, draped in the stories of others. I have spent the summer surrounded by these stories, these voices, every one a world unto itself. Standing here now, with the sun streaming in through the windows, the room seems bathed in a dusty, achy glow, and I know I will leave. I regret every book left unread.
        Then he walks up behind me, places a hand on my shoulder, and presses a stack of papers into my hand.
        I don’t understand what it is at first, only that he holds my wrist a beat too long and I want to pull away but can’t. But then my eyes fix on the top page of the stack, and I recognize, slowly, the words printed on it. They are ours, they are his and mine, our exchange. I understand what it is, then. I understand what he’s done. And now I do try to jerk my hand away, but he is so much stronger than I am and holds me fast. I think, now, of Helen Keller, and of the stories I read as a child in which her teacher took her hand and formed words on her palm, concepts on her flesh, forcing her to see the world by painstakingly pressing it into her skin. He bends my fingers through the pages, making me feel their heft and volume. Here we are. Here is us.
        When he releases me I walk out, leaving the document behind. At the end of the book Matthias burns the letters. I’ve ruined it for you now, done the one thing you never should and given away a story’s ending, but stay with me and listen. Though he is an archivist, though it is his life’s work, his identity, and his obsession to catalogue and to remember, he burns the letters before Roberta ever gets to see them. He destroys the only physical record of their words so that the question of definition – what the relationship was and what it was not – can never be answered.  
        One week after I leave Boston I get a final e-mail. It contains no text, no warning, just the little paper clip symbol that signifies an attachment. It might be a picture, it might be a forwarded cartoon, it might be a mournful Elliot Smith song or a note telling me to go to hell, but it isn’t any of those things. Instead it is the 284 pages of us. I sit at my desk and stare at it for a moment, unmoored. It is there and I know only that I want it not to be. But what can I do? I consider deleting it, but stop short with my hand still on the mouse. I could, it would be easy enough, but then what? It would still be here, in its way. It would still have been here, and there is no undoing of that.
        So I don’t delete it. I don’t even try. Instead I start at the very beginning, with the first words he ever was to me and the first words I ever was to him, and I read. I read the story of us. I see the shapes the words make as they fall across the screen. I see the white space between them grow larger, longer, as the summer wanes. I am reading us, then, and I think I see his hands and mine, separate, each of us typing, each of us spinning our stories out of what was and what never would be.




DOG DAYS 
by Thaddeus Rutkowski

        At the writers’ retreat, one of my housemates was a woman who had a dog. The dog wasn’t a seeing-eye animal, but it was more than a friend.  It was a therapy dog, and the woman kept it with her at all times. “I have this dog for my mental health,” she said, “for my sanity.”
         The dog’s name was Dylan, and so was the woman’s. But Dylan wasn’t the woman’s real name. Her real name was Shirley. The dog, however, had no name other than Dylan.
        I could tell when Dylan the woman was home because I could hear Dylan the dog on the stairs. I could hear the scraping of his nails and the panting of his lungs. The rule of the house was not to disturb the other guests, but Dylan’s clicking and breathing weren’t so loud. No one seemed to mind when he came and went.


        One of the other residents was a senior woman who had a lot of poet friends. She kept telling me about Bill Nut. “Bill Nut is a great poet,” she said.
         I went to the public library to look up Bill Nut. I couldn’t find him anywhere. After some investigation, I realized his last name was Knott, not Nut. Bill Knott was a respected U.S. poet.
         Another time, the senior woman told me she’d been to a serious colony. It wasn’t like the frivolous one we were at now.
        “It’s a very mature, civilized place,” she said.
         I asked her if she would give me a ride to the serious retreat. I wanted to take a look at it.
         “No,” she said. “We can’t just show up at the gate. That wouldn’t be serious enough. They would turn us away.”


         Another resident, a man, told me he’d been to the serious colony. “I’ve been to the most serious colonies in the country,” he said.
         I wanted to ask him what he was doing at the rinky-dink place we were presently occupying, but I didn’t. I just listened while he talked.
        “I met a woman at the serious colony,” he said. “We were living in a cabin in the woods, and our meals were delivered by a girl who looked like Little Red Riding Hood. It was a real romance.”
        “That’s great,” I said.
        “But I’m seeing someone else now,” he added.
        “Who?”
        “The veterinarian from across the street.”
        I remembered seeing the vet on the sidewalk. She was young, and she had a ponytail. I was impressed that a guy who was just visiting the town had moved so fast with a permanent resident.


         Another houseguest was a young woman who wasn’t old enough to buy alcohol. One night, I offered to get a bottle for her. Oddly, she was old enough to drive, so she gave me a ride to the wine store.
         We were the only ones in the shop, so we browsed the aisles with confidence. “What kind do you want?” I asked my new friend.
         “Anything strong will do,” she said. She pointed at a label, and I picked up the bottle.
         The man at the counter would not sell me the wine. “I heard you talking,” he said. “Your friend is a minor. It’s illegal to buy alcohol for her.”
         I could have kicked myself then for speaking so openly. I also could have kicked the counterman for his refusal. But instead of kicking anyone, I went with my new friend to a different store.


         While we were drinking the wine, my young friend showed me her pierced belly button. She lifted her shirt so I could see a gold ring hanging from her puckered skin.
         “Did it hurt?” I asked.
         “At first,” she said. “But now it just tickles.”
         She pulled her shirt down so the ring was no longer visible.
         I wondered if she had other hidden piercings, other secret rings or studs. But I felt I couldn’t ask, because I wasn’t a piercenik. I hadn’t attended any pierce meetings, hadn’t marched in any pierce parades. I was a piercing virgin.


         In the morning, I walked into the kitchen and saw the senior woman cooking at the stove. She was frying bacon.
         “I talked to that man,” she told me, “the one with the veterinarian. He claimed he went to the serious colony, but I didn’t believe him. So I asked him about the place. He actually knew things that only a resident would know.”
         “Like what?” I asked.
         “Like the person who brings food to your door looks like Little Red Riding Hood.”
         “That proves it,” I said.
         I didn’t ask her again for a ride to the serious place. I resigned myself to serving out my time at the goofball residence.


         While several of us were sitting at the kitchen table, someone asked, “What does ‘tumbrel’ mean?”
         “I don’t know,” someone else said.
         “Is it some kind of conveyance?”
         “No, it’s a Fugazy,” Dylan the woman said. “A Fugazy limousine.”


         During the day, I heard Dylan the dog barking in Dylan the woman’s room. Dylan the woman must have shut the dog in and left. Dylan the dog sounded like he was having a nervous breakdown. He kept barking for what seemed like hours. Shortly after the incident, the colony officials asked Dylan the woman to take her dog and leave the house.
         In the evening, we gathered for a going-away party for the Dylans. For the occasion, we decided to compose haikus on the spot. During one round, the challenge was to use the word “rain” in a seventeen-syllable piece. Dylan the woman wrote a haiku that went:
         “Turn on the wipers,”
                                     
                                       I said, not realizing
                                       the RAIN was inside.
      
          The poem had the right number of syllables and lines. It was a perfect haiku.


         I knocked on the young woman’s door in the evening and asked her to go to the bar down the street with me. She was in bed when I knocked and didn’t want to get up, but somehow I convinced her to put on clothes and walk outside.
         When we got to the bar, we asked about the selection of beers. “We have only one kind of beer,” the bartender said.
         We each took a bottle of the one brand and worked on it. As we sat, I thought about bringing up the topic of piercing. I wanted another look at my companion’s perforated navel. But I had nothing to show in return. My eyebrows, tongue and septum were intact. My leather hadn’t been tooled. I couldn’t enter into any pierce negotiations.
         On the way back to the house, I saw a meteor. I pointed overhead, and my companion looked up. We both saw a white streak that flashed across a segment of sky before it burned out.


         In the morning, I met the senior woman in the kitchen. She was finishing her cooking, and the smell of bacon was in the air.
         “I’m going to my room,” she said. “I feel a story coming on. It’s inside me, and it’s going to come out.”
         I started to make a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich.
         “I can’t stop it,” she said. “When the story’s time is here, I have to let it out. I just hope it shows up alive.”
          For the rest of the day, I heard her hitting the keys on her electric typewriter. The sound was so loud it came through her closed door.
         But it was not as loud as Dylan the dog’s barking had been.                                          



BABY FEVER 
by Diane Shakar

         Paula left her young neighbor drinking tea while she went to get the gun. She felt a twinge of guilt over how easy it was. Rosalina enjoying the fragrant orange-cinnamon tea and chocolate chip scones, probably thinking how nice Paula had been to make them for her. And she had been nice, using the delicate Chinese porcelain teacups her mother had collected and passed down and the silver swan-tipped teaspoons. The tray of mini-scones, chocolate chip and pecan (her husband’s favorite), was especially fetching all decoratively piled into a delicate pastry pyramid. And there the young woman sat, licking the melted chocolate from her soft fingers and the pink corners of her mouth, picking the crumbs off her pregnant belly and eating those too, unaware of her need to savor them. Paula swept the crumbs from her own pregnant belly, which was no more than a pillow stuffed into her stretch pants, and excused herself to the “little girl’s room.” She felt badly but continued down the hallway past the sweet yellow nursery to the bedroom and her husband’s dresser drawer, the narrow middle one between the two wider drawers. Unwrapping his service revolver from the black bandana, she felt the familiar weight and coolness of the metal and carried it back along the hallway. She walked quietly; it would be better if Rosalina didn’t hear her and turn. She would shoot anyway but the girl’s stare might unnerve her and spoil her aim and she felt one shot would be best. Not for the noise so much, as most of her neighbors would be at work or have their TV’s blaring, but because it would be messier and it was going to be messy enough cutting the baby out. The thought of the surgical instruments readied on the white dresser scarf steadied her. Wouldn’t Derrick be surprised arriving home to a new baby and scones? It occurred to her that the aroma of orange and chocolate and buttery pastry would no longer be floating in the air. It was really too bad.


VOUSSIOR 
by Eric Darton

        I awake to find my visual field transformed into an evanescent hexagonal mosaic.  I don’t remember if this is a memory or if I constructed this remembrance.  I know that every memory is supported by columns and that the heaviest rest on piers.  Some memories are domes, others are vaults with and without intersecting vaults and, or, lunettes.
        I know that memory is all about transferring thrust into dead weight so the pillars can support it.  And I know that arches, ribs and bays are good at this.  As are buttresses.  And that you need – I need also – to build a scaffold so that each stone in the arch can roll against the next without falling through.
        I know that if you’ve done your job right, you can take away the scaffold and the keystone will lock the arch in place and the web of stones will hold up everything as it needs to be.  And I also have observed that for some reason, though it is no more important than any other stone, that the keystone will be the one we carve an image into.
        Perhaps, and this is only a conjecture, it is the memory that leads us both toward and away from remembrance.
                                                  


SAFE 
by Judy Gerbin

         You’re fairly young now, still on the before side of most things. But anything could happen... Perhaps you’re moving through the tunnels beneath Manhattan, riding the downtown #4 train, as you do each day, and unbeknownst to you it passes through an odorless, invisible, lethal chemical cloud planted by a terrorist. You get off the train and it doesn’t even occur to you that anything foreign is in your body, and a little later you’re home, and you start to feel sick and think you must have the flu, you must have picked up some virus. But what you don’t know is that all across the city others are experiencing the exact same thing, thinking that they have suddenly come down with the flu. You feel really sick and plan on going to the drugstore later to get something, or calling your doctor tomorrow, but for now you lie down, not realizing that you’ll never get up.
        Or perhaps it’s a windy day. You’re taking a walk on your lunch hour, and are only a block from your office. On the other side of the street there is construction taking place. Scaffolding obscures the entire front of a building. You don’t pay too much attention, lost in thought and planning what you will do when you get back to the office. You have to remember to call so and so. And just as you’re thinking about the report that’s due, a wood plank is blown off the scaffolding by a sudden gust, and takes your head with it. You were only out enjoying the weather.  In nearby offices people discuss the tragedy at the water cooler: “Never even saw it coming,” they say, shaking their heads.
        Or perhaps the economy falters and the company you work for goes under or lays people off and you are out of a job and you can never get another one. What would you do? How to live? Passing by the homeless you wonder if that could ever be you, believing deep down that of course it couldn’t. But through a series of events and mismanagement of money, it is you. And there you are, looking for a bite to eat in the overflowing trash basket on the corner, or collecting empty bottles in a large plastic sack slung over your shoulder. You find yourself on the lookout for a stray shopping cart, to help move the growing paraphernalia of homelessness more easily. Leaning against the side of a building, all your stuff contained in two bulky bags, you hold out a cup in supplication for change. The people rush past you on their way to work, and they don’t even seem to notice you are there.
         Or at some point you meet one of those people who leave their mark on your life forever. But of course you have no idea of the significance of the moment when you first meet. You are at a party given by a friend, one that you reluctantly attend because you don’t care too much for her and her other friends. But somehow you promised to bring a baked good and you feel guilty for your unkind thoughts toward your friend so you go as a kind of penance. A kind of making up for things of which no one else in the world is even vaguely aware. You are standing there holding your first glass of wine, observing your friend and again having those unkind thoughts but also feeling deep down inside that the thoughts are true. And you are standing next to her and she introduces you to a friend of hers you have never met. A few days later the two of you run into each other. It happens a couple more times, and then you go out on a date with this person. And the two of you become involved and you feel really happy. You think you are in love, you are walking on air. Things are really great. You decide to move in together. But almost right away things begin to change. There seems to be a lot of tension. Your lover has become cold and distant. But you keep hoping, remembering how happy you used to feel, believing it may be recaptured. But it isn’t recaptured, and you finally agree to part. You stay at a friend’s place for the weekend while your former lover moves out. But when you return not only is this person gone, but so is some of your stuff. Just out of spite, this person has stolen your favorite big sweater, your most comfortable chair, your coffee maker, rolls of tape you stored in a kitchen drawer, and even photo albums going years back, from before the two of you met. And it’s all because of that dumb party you didn’t really want to go to in the first place, but did only to avoid feeling guilty. And you begin to wonder.
        Or tonight you get a phone call. Your heart thumps as the phone rings and wakes you in the middle of the night. The alarm clock reads 2 a.m., but you get up and answer it anyway compelled by the thought, “What if something happened?” The “something” in your mind involving injury or death to a family member. But it’s never that. It’s always a wrong number, or a drunken friend, and you go back to bed annoyed but relieved. Well, what if this time the phone rings late at night and it’s not a wrong number or a drunk friend but it’s your sister calling with the news that your brother has been in a car accident and has suffered severe brain damage and is in a coma?
        But you’re still fairly young. You have not found an alarming lump, or received a dreaded phone call. You have not been in the wrong place at the wrong time when a terrorist bomb exploded, or something accidentally fell from a building. You were not the man pushed in front of the subway train by a discharged mental patient, or the woman whose car was hijacked and who now can’t be found, and whose picture appears on the evening news in a family photo with husband and young child. You have not yet met someone to whom you give yourself wholeheartedly and who, bit by bit, dismantles your self-confidence. You still have a job, still have an apartment. On a couple of occasions you were nearly run over by traffic because you weren’t paying attention, you were lost in thought. But it didn’t happen. It only almost happened. For now, you’re safe.



GROWN IN CRACKED TURF 
by Deborah Di Bari

         Janet and Louie kiss under the tenement lined street. The sliver of daylight falls between the cellar doors onto the top steps. The metal rattles when someone passes on the sidewalk overhead. I kick a loose clump of cement with the toe of my saddle shoe. My mother keeps an eye on Janet while her mother is at work. I am sent with Janet wherever she goes: to the corner grocery, the candy store, not the cellar. Janet and Louie kiss in hidden places. Other girls sit in their boyfriends’ arms on the stoop; some make out leaning against parked cars. Louie presses Janet against a metal pole, his thin black moustache covering her pink mouth. I wait on the edge of their shadow, afraid of the dark and worrying what my mother will do when she finds out. I tell Janet we have to go. Her voice sticks in her love-soaked throat. Janet and Louie kiss. Strange odors seep through the timber where a bodega has taken Chigimara’s spot. Green bananas and rice sit in the windows that use to be stacked with macaroni in blue boxes and cheeses hanging from string.
         Janet and Louie do not speak in rhyme. She does not whisper poems to him from her fire escape. Janet and Louie kiss in the dark with cloth tongues, scuffling feet, shushing and the scurry of rodent claws. Sister Mary Francis has told my third grade class that kissing is a sin. She said God blocks the light from reaching the fiery pit of hell where sinners are damned for eternity. I can imagine heaven and hell but not eternity. Janet and Louie kiss goodbye. Janet grabs my hand, holds on tight as we stumble up the wooden stairs and go out through the door in the back of the hall. After she brushes cellar dirt from my navy blue uniform, she tucks her blouse into her skirt. Her hands shake and her voice cracks. I cross my heart and swear not to tell. Janet fears what will happen if I do.
         Our mothers are neighbors. Janet’s mother comes home to her only child smelling of cigarette smoke and liquor. My mother does not drink, but she lives with her boyfriend. My two brothers and I cross Second Avenue to see our father. He works two jobs to pay for child support. My mother’s apartment is on the top floor of a six-story walk up. She moved up a flight after she told my father to leave. Janet lives with her mother in the apartment at the far end of the hall. The steps next to our apartment lead to the roof. The metal door, always open a crack, is on the last landing that smells ashy, is out of bounds, and forgotten. The roofing glistens like black sand in the hot sun that melts the crooked tarred seams. My mother and I found a bottle cap and needle on the landing. She told me that if I ever take dope she would beat the hell out of me.
         Our apartment is in an alcove between two other doors. Thick coats of paint smooth the beveled edges on the three panels. The banister’s dull sheen is tacky where dripped paint has hardened into beads. The hallway walls are queasy green.  My stomach hurts on school days. The nuns damn me for my sins. They tell me the devil can disguise himself as Jesus. If I trust him he will lead me into temptation. Louie has olive skin, a thin moustache and he looks nothing like the Jesus or the devil, yet he tempted Janet into sin. My mother pumps me for information on how this happened.
         Where did you see Janet and Louis kiss?
         On a park bench on the East River Drive under a scrawny tree.
         Where else?
         In the dark cellar under Louie’s building.
         What did you see?
         I saw them kiss.
         Are you telling the truth?
         I swear.
         What happens to girls that lie?
         They live in eternal damnation.
         I cannot explain to her how kissing put a baby in Janet’s belly. My mother’s shouting and my crying bounce off the hallway tiles, out the window, and down the six flights of stairs. The yelling begins again when Janet’s mother gets home. My mother hits me, not for the first time—it is her only defense. She tells me never to bring her home a surprise package. I remember how scared she got when our cat brought home a mouse and dropped it at her feet. The smell of damp concrete is still in my nostrils the next Saturday when I go to confession. Father Julian tells me to say ten Hail Marys and five Our Fathers for lying to my mother while I kept Janet’s secret. My penance wipes away my venial sins. Janet’s surprise package will need baptism to wash away its mother’s sin.   
         Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss like the white stripe of paper curling from a chocolate Hershey. Janet and Louie kissed; a baby is on the way. Janet’s white fifty/fifty poly cotton blouse pulls and gapes at the buttons. Afternoons spent in the dank cellar have fattened her thin body. Janet’s mother wipes the floor with her trying to get rid of the baby growing inside her bellyful of kisses. Janet wants to jump off a bridge even though she knows there are no bridges on 119th Street. The East River lumbers by the metal railing embedded in concrete. Dry grass breaks through the cracks in the ground around green splintered park benches where Janet and Louie kissed under the scrawny tree. She does not climb over the railing to jump into the green currents. She does not walk up the flight of stairs past the syringe and cap to jump off the ledge around the tar beach. She does not go under a butcher’s knife. Janet waits. She waits at the top of the staircase for her mother to reach the last landing. Her mother calls Louie a spic and curses him for knocking up her daughter. Janet watches her mother rest her heavy body against the wood frame of the large window. There is one window on each landing overlooking the courtyard. The dishcloths Janet put out to dry after another meal alone hang limp from splintering clothespins. Janet leans her fetus half way out the window to watch the clothespin she dropped land on shredded brown grocery bags. Her mother stumbles up the five remaining marble steps with worn edges translucent as the plastic mother of pearl pin on her housedress. Greasy clumps of black hair stick to her swollen face. Janet waits a long time for her mother to reach the top step.
         Janet serves her mother a pork chop with cold spaghetti. She braces for the slaps that comes when inside her mother’s reach. I close my eyes until the dull crack fades. I hear her yelp as if the blow was to her stomach. She drops the plate and grabs her belly. Shards, sauce, chop, tangled in spaghetti streamers crash on the floor. Her mother’s hands on top of her own move around Janet’s round belly as if spelling out the answer. I run across the hall screaming to my mother for the help I think Janet needs. She is half way down the long foyer in our apartment when I burst through the door. She turns me around pushing me ahead of her. I hear her count off the months since Janet’s belly bloomed in last May’s sunshine. All through June, July, and August I overheard my mother, her friends, Janet, and her mother talk about what to do. September comes in through the open window on the landing it still feels like summer even though school has begun. My mother tells me the baby isn’t due for another two months. Janet says she felt a kick. This time her mother does not say it’s gas. This time she agrees Janet must marry Louie. There is nothing else to do.




THE ORACLE 
by Susan O’Doherty

         When the beeps start, Maura jerks upright. She wasn’t actually asleep, though she must have been drifting, because at first she thought it was the smoke alarm, she was back in the fire, with Mamie Slattery screaming that Jamal was somewhere in the house, and Katie and the firemen pulling her back from the door, yelling at her not to be crazy.
         The whole point of the watch was so she wouldn’t have to worry about waking up on time, Maura knows this, but instead she worried all night that she hadn’t set it right or that she wouldn’t hear it going off through the pillow. She switches it off now, quickly, the way she practiced in the bathroom last night.
         It’s too late. Katie is staring at her from the other bed.
         “Where’d you get that from?”
         “Get what? Go back to sleep.”
         “You know what. That watch.”
         “Somebody gave it to me.”
         “Who?”
         “Janelle.”
         “Huh. You took it.”
         Maura curls her hand into a claw and threatens to rake it down Katie’s cheek. The room is just light enough for Katie to see and flinch away. Maura fishes her backpack from under the bed and heads for the bathroom.
         “Might as well stay here, I’m up now,” Katie says.
         Maura considers this. Her sister is just a dumb ten-year-old who can’t understand anything that takes complicated thinking or imagination, so she acts like Maura is the stupid one.  Maura should be above being bothered by it. But when Katie horns her way into one of Maura’s secrets, she invades Maura’s brain, too, so that Maura ends up thinking like Katie does. Things that Maura knows are true and important start to seem ridiculous. She can’t afford that.
         On the other hand, if she stays in the bathroom longer than it takes to pee, one of the real kids might wake up and need to go.
         She pulls the blanket off the bed and covers the crack under the door with it, then turns on the light. “One word and you’re dead,” she says to Katie. Katie makes a zipping sign over her lips.
         Maura opens the backpack and pulls out a copy of the Village Voice. Katie’s eyes widen. This is a Christian household, and the children are not allowed to bring filth in. “You promised,” she reminds Katie. She flips through the pictures of naked people, the headlines that make no sense, until she comes to a section labeled Women Seeking Women. This must be it. I aim to please, she reads. Discreet encounters. There is no heading for Women Seeking Girls.
         “It’s here,” Katie says, pointing at the back page. Maura turns the paper over. Katie scrambles over and huddles next to her.
         Maura is careful not to skip ahead. She reads each ad twice, combing it for possible code words, before letting herself look at the next one. She loses her breath when she comes to one that reads, Am I Your Mother? It takes a minute before she can make her eyes focus. But it turns out to be about mothers who gave their children up for adoption, who don’t know who their kids are. “This isn’t her,” she tells Katie. “Don’t get excited.”
         “I’m not excited,” Katie says. “She’s not writing to us.”
          There she goes, getting into Maura’s brain. Maura wants to pinch Katie’s arm to keep her out, but Katie would yell and wake everybody up.  She repeats Trident, trident, trident in her mind to shut Katie out, and it works, for now, at least. If she slips up and lets Katie take over, they could lose their only chance.
         The code word is Trident because this is how Maura always knows their mother is following them, looking out for them. Sometimes Maura sees her, standing in the shadows outside the school, even here at Mrs. Cranston’s house sometimes, peeking through the windows. She disappears when Maura comes too close. Maura understands that. Ed would kill her if he knew she was hanging around here, and now the child people are mad at her, too. So, she has to send messages in code, and it’s up to Maura to figure them out. She used to make mistakes, but she has learned to tell a real sign by the smell of Trident Sugarless Gum, her mother’s favorite.
         Once she left a newspaper on Maura’s seat on the bus. Maura always takes the 7:50 B41 to school, and always sits in the same seat; obviously, she watches them and knows this. The paper was folded to an article about a housing project in the Bronx, to let Maura know where they are. The next morning, Maura told Mrs. Cranston she was trying out for chorus after school, and took the subway to the Grand Concourse, but she couldn’t find either Skelly or Kennedy on the buzzer system, which is Ed’s doing. Now, whenever Maura hears the word “Bronx” she pays attention. She even watches the Yankee games with Steven and Matt Cranston, and she has to admit they’re okay about explaining what’s going on. They like to flip the channel at the most important part, though, when the teams have a time out and the camera moves around the audience. It’s their TV, so Maura can’t ask them to stop without explaining why.
         Another time, Maura smelled the Trident and found a pearl on her desk at school, with two little holes in it, meaning that she and Katie are precious to her mother. Maura already knew that, but it was nice of her to remind them. She knew she was supposed to tell Katie, because of the two holes, so she did, but she had to punch Katie in the stomach for saying it dropped off somebody’s broken necklace, and it was a fake anyway, look how the shiny stuff peels right off. Since then she keeps the messages to herself, and she hopes her mother understands. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what she wants Maura to do.
         “Maybe we should try this St. Jude thing,” Katie says now. “Hopeless causes.”
         Maura does pinch Katie then, and of course Katie yells and Mrs. Cranston comes stomping down the hall. Katie is quick, Maura has to give her that. The blanket is off the crack and on Maura’s bed, and Katie is back in her own bed, by the time the steps reach the door. Meanwhile, Maura tries to cram the newspaper into her backpack, but it’s all spread out and it won’t fit. She kicks it under the bed. “The watch,” Katie hisses. Maura can’t get the strap undone fast enough, so she throws herself onto the bed with her right hand under the pillow.
          Katie yells again. “Get away from me, Ed!” She squints her eyes shut as Mrs. Cranston comes in. “Help!” Maura has to pretend she’s crying, she’s laughing so hard inside.
         “Oh, honey,” Mrs. Cranston says. “Oh, you poor thing.”
         Katie half-opens her eyes. “Was it a dream, Mama Julie?” That is what Mrs. Cranston wants the children to call her, except for Matt and Steven, who get to call her plain Mama. She hates that Maura calls her Mrs. Cranston, but Maura won’t say the other word, and children are not allowed to call adults by their first names in this house.
         “It was just a nightmare,” Mrs. Cranston says. “It’s all over now. Go splash some cold water on your face.” Katie gets up and pads out.
         “You okay?” Ms. Cranston says to Maura, not as nicely.
         “I was just scared,” Maura says. “I’m okay now.”
         Steven sticks his head in. “What’s going on?” Maura doesn’t want a boy in her room but she knows better than to say anything.
         “Might as well start breakfast,” Mrs. Cranston says. “No point in going back to bed now.” She thumps back out, leaving the door wide open, Maura
huddling under the blanket in her thin pajamas. Steven is still standing there, looking, hoping she’ll move and he’ll see something.
         Katie comes back in and shuts the door. She sticks her tongue out at Steven through the closed door. “Pervert,” she says, not loudly enough for him to hear.
         Maura jumps out of bed. She dresses quickly in case someone decides to open their bedroom door again. She sticks the watch into the pocket of her jeans. She tries rolling the Village Voice, but it still won’t fit in with all the books and her notebook.
          The paper fit in perfectly when she found it, right after that Oprah show about the couple who broke up over something stupid and the man put an ad in the Village Voice every week for six years before she finally saw it. And then the watch, sitting right on the sink in the girls’ bathroom just when she was wondering how to get up early enough to look through the paper. But now she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do. This is going to cost her at least ten strands of hair, maybe twenty.
         “Just don’t burn it,” Katie says.
         “Shut up.” Maura knows better than to start a fire here. Any more trouble and it’s a group home for her, without Katie. And who knows if their mother could trace her to a new home? It’s a miracle she found them here.
         Her mother knew her way to the Slatterys’, of course; she even came to see them there, right out in the open, before Ed got complete control of her. But after she disappeared and the Slatterys started meeting with the child people about adoption, Maura had to take action.
         She didn’t mean for things to get out of control. She never imagined that Jamal would hide out in the broom closet, scared of the firemen in their big boots and face masks. She tried to run back in for him, but she wasn’t strong enough to fight off the firemen. She is really sorry about Jamal’s arm, she pulled out her whole left eyebrow over it, but she had no choice.
         The Cranstons are a better family. They’re not all lovey-dovey like the Slatterys; it’s plain they’re in it for the money; but that’s a good thing. They’re not making any moves to keep Maura and Katie permanently, to make them change their names so they won’t belong to their mother anymore.
         Mrs. Cranston doesn’t like Maura much, that’s clear, and not just because of the name thing. She doesn’t hide that she thinks Maura is sneaky and dangerous, even though Katie is the real sneak, acting all lovey-dovey, like she doesn’t already have a mother, just to get what she wants.
         Mrs. Cranston hasn’t hit her yet, though. And Maura doesn’t blame her for favoring her own kids, Maura’s mother would do the same. Best of all, there’s no man to come poking around them. Maura has no idea where Mr. Cranston went, if there ever was one, but the family doesn’t seem to miss him, except for the money, and Maura and Katie are helping with that. The boys look at her too much, Steven especially, but it’s just looking.
         When Maura first told her mother what Ed was up to and her mother slapped her and called her a liar, Maura didn’t get it. She thought her mother didn’t understand what she was saying. So she tried again: He comes in after you’re asleep and touches me.
         But then, later, Maura did get it. Ed had taken over that part of her mother’s brain, the way Katie takes over Maura’s brain when Maura isn’t careful. She and her mother are the same, except that her mother didn’t realize what was happening, so she couldn’t protect herself, and Ed got all the way in.
         After Ed took over, her mother was still her mother, but anything that had to do with Ed was under Ed’s control, and there was nothing Maura could do about it. So she just tried to turn her mind off while it was happening, until he went to Katie’s bed. When Maura saw him, she jumped on him and clawed his neck. The next morning Katie had bad bruises on her face and arms. Other places, too, but the teacher asked about the ones she could see, and then Maura and Katie were both called into the guidance counselor’s office, and Maura told. That’s when the child people got involved, and Maura and Katie went to live with the Slatterys.
         Their mother came to see them at first, but she wouldn’t talk to Maura, only to Katie. Katie cried and wanted to come home. So did Maura, but her mother didn’t pay attention to that. The child people said they could only come home if Ed was out of the picture and they all went for counseling. Mrs. Slattery took Katie and Maura for counseling, but their mother never showed. Maura can’t blame her for that; what a waste of time. The counselor was a pervert who wanted the girls to tell him everything Ed did, and even to draw pictures. But when her mother didn’t show up, the child people got mad at her, and then she didn’t come to the Slatterys’ anymore, either. That put the idea into the Slatterys’ heads that the girls were up for grabs, which led to all the trouble.
         After they have finished their Kix, and Mrs. Cranston has swatted Steven for slurping milk from his bowl, she says, “Actually, it’s a good thing we’re up early. There’s something I need to talk to you girls about.” Matt and Steven lean in, hoping the girls are in trouble, but Mrs. Cranston says, “You boys go to your room now. And shut the door.”
         To the girls she says, “Ms. Ali from the agency called last night. She had some news.”
         Here it comes, Maura thinks. She can feel her face getting hot. Maura didn’t mess up after all. All of it—the Oprah show, the paper, the watch—was part of the plan to get them up early, to hear the news in time to say good-bye and pack before she gets here. Maura doesn’t want to waste a minute.
         “The Slatterys are willing to give you another chance,” Ms. Cranston is saying. “It’s generous of them, considering.”
         Maura forces herself to think. Ed arranged this. She has to be careful. “That’s nice of them,” she says. It’s hard to make her lips move. “We want to stay here with you, though.”
         “Why, that’s sweet,” Ms. Cranston says, “but I can’t adopt you.”
         “We don’t want to be adopted,” Maura says. “We just want to be with you.” Ms. Cranston looks at her, wondering what Maura is up to. She takes a breath. “Mama Julie,” she says, her fingers crossed under the table.
         “I had no idea,” Ms. Cranston says. “That’s so sweet. I don’t know what to say.”
         “I’m going,” Katie says.
         Maura jumps to her feet.
         “She’s not looking for us,” Katie says. “She never was.”
         Trident, Maura screams inside her head.
         “She thinks our mother’s coming back,” Katie says.
         “Oh, honey,” Ms. Cranston says. “Your mother gave up her rights long ago. I thought you knew that.”
         Of course Maura knew. “Ed made her.”
         “She doesn’t want us,” Katie says.
         Maura grabs Katie’s hair. She cracks Katie in the face with all her force.
         Mrs. Cranston stands up now, her own hand raised. Katie breaks away and curls into a ball under the kitchen table. “This is a Christian household,” Ms. Cranston says. She says other things, too, but Maura doesn’t hear them; doesn’t feel the blows. She stares out the kitchen window, scouring the empty street for a sign.



 
HOW TO CHOOSE A CAREER
by Mary Christine Delea

The choice is easy, once you have some facts:
Ballerinas are known to chain smoke skinny cigarettes,
and dentists have a high rate of suicide.
Not all veterinarians love animals—some just hate people,
some flunked out of med school, and some just fell in
to their vocation, as happens with a lot of jobs.
Tourism is the world’s largest legitimate employer;
if your thrills run a different direction,
try drugs or pornography. You can train for six hours
to dust dinosaur bones in a museum,
or have no training to work in day care. Stewardess is the only
English word to be typed entirely by the left hand,
but they don’t exist in that form anymore.
Boxers can earn millions per fight, but fight
is the operative word there, not millions.
Poets can earn tens per year, and can
is the operative word there. Someone will always be needed
to clean up after homicides, hospital stays, prison riots,
animal rampages, and chemical spills, and death,
in general, will always pay the bills. Hollywood doesn’t
make big budget movies about high school teachers,
street cleaners, research librarians, or traffic cops,
unless they are helping a spy, or being killed
in a brutal way, or unknowingly transporting
something important for national security.
The woman sitting in the butterfly exhibit at the zoo
making sure none of her charges is harmed or escapes,
is secretly dreaming of a life in politics.
Winston Churchill had a famous life in politics,
and was born in a bathroom during a dance
where the bandleader could have been dreaming
of a job watching butterflies at the zoo.

 
THE COUCH
by Donna Brook

If one accepts the premise that lives are, among other things, co-constructed narratives—stories we tell ourselves, with family and friends, about who we are, how we came to be, why we are troubled, where we fail—then it is not difficult to also accept the premise that both articulating and revising these narratives can lead to productive change.          - Lauren Slater, Blue Beyond Blue, page 4


Two grown men, father and son. The father remembers the couch in the living room where the son spent hours watching TV while growing up. The son does not remember the couch. He resents the absence of a couch in his childhood.  But, the father insists, there was a couch.  Do you remember the couch, the father asks her. Yes, she remembers the couch. She remembers discarding the couch when it was beyond repair and hope, a tattered thing.
She remembers the son on the couch, hour after hour, surrounded by discarded and half-eaten snacks and empty soda cans.  I even have a snapshot of him on the couch the father says.  How can he deny a fact the father asks her. The son insists there was no couch. There never was a couch he maintains and nobody can tell him there was a couch. It is a hot subject. An old cold couch.

This is what she thinks: there was a couch, and there wasn’t. There was a piece of furniture provided for the son by the father’s earnings, hard to come by monies sweated out from companies run by hard men, and there was not a couch where a family gathered with popcorn, where they all laughed together arms around each other at old movies and current sitcoms. There was no Leave It to Beaver couch.  There was no emotional set of cushions. The father sees the couch in his memory but the son feels no softness in his. Did the mother spend drunken nights on the couch? Then there was no couch perhaps. Especially if the son will not share his narrative. Will allow no editors.
                       
As for her, she remembers how her parents could fit in one easy chair to watch TV, and often did.  And she remembers her father’s fury when her mother fell asleep on the couch watching TV.  Her parents’ codependency, the couch of her childhood. But for his son, there was no couch. A couch that is physically there may not be emotionally present. And as for the rage and disappointment and guilt: a therapist’s couch? A new couch? The couch of the future? Two grown men.  Maybe a couch?





 
WHY WE DON’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE
by Donna Brook

Because of the great respect I
have for Paul Violi’s work I waited
for the perfect moment to read Overnight
and when it came and as I read
I thought I’ve read these poems
before and then I thought how often I’ve
heard Paul read them aloud and
maybe that was it but no I knew
I’d read them before and as I went
through the whole book again with
great pleasure I thought maybe
I’d found the manuscript on the couch
where Bob piles reading materials and his
clothes or saw the bound galleys in the boxes
in the hallway on the parlor floor so I enjoyed
reading it again anyway

and just then an avalanche of 5,000
back issues of The Nation buried me
alive and as I crawled my way out
a box of exchange copies knocked me
unconscious so that’s when we

moved to the campus of Oral Roberts
University or Bangladesh where they
don’t get The London Review of Books.




 
CELAN: THE QUEST AND THE BRIDGE
          in memoriam,  Paul Celan (1920-1970)
by Cyrus Cassells

Soulhollows
where even the smallest deportees

were obliterated
without pity,

“madnessbread” of lagers linked   
to myriad, humming

Parisian shops,
with their pert, exquisite engines

of this-and-not-that.
Innovative Celan’s

musk and idiom:
urgent realm

of wrath-built watchtowers;
the specter-thin and the brackish

deftly wedded,
by sheer questing will,

sheer music,
to the modest anodyne

of the everyday:
the fast-asleep, blue-hour kiosk,

the terse, brusque hurry
of a moondrenched barge;

to believe these worlds
were bridgeable,

polyglot poet,    
Romanian seer, and yet—

waterfugue,
rusthook,

corescream, red
as mountain ash berries—

leap from the mistgripped bridge--




 
GRISAILLE: THE ROLL CALL   
           for Charlotte Delbo
by Cyrus Cassells                    

In that quell,
when the trains,

the inexorable tracks,
the laddered earth became

innocuous again,
you nestled in a Montparnasse café,

with an adamant pen
and a bit of foolscap,

to resurrect the implacable past
from its ashes, to evoke

fifteen thousand women in the snow:
a grey checkerboard of deportees . . .     

As occasionally a master crafts
a grisaille, a painting composed

of myriad degrees of grey,       
Charlotte, what shades

were frank and marrow-deep,
what shades

were stark enough to register
staves for ribs,

rapacious dogs, shaming swatches
of urine and diarrhea in the snow,
     
as the shorn and numbered women stood
for demeaning hours

in minus weather?
For the insulted,

the attenuated,
there was no “parade rest”--

And the wan
hand of the scarecrow,

the skeleton who broke ranks
to steal a taste of anything,

like a grim, unalterable star,
reaching through the snowbank?

That December-meager hand
will go on daring,

daring your stringent palette  
to verify and anneal,          

with accumulated love
and revenant clarity,

the standstill women,
the roll call hours,                            

the glittering, freezing
nexus of the camp,                       

omitting nothing.





 
A DOZEN WAYS HE SAYS GOOD MORNING
by Michael Morical


My light bulb’s broken.

Why are you eating like that?

Why don’t you wear your glasses in the shower?

Doesn’t my hair look more mature?

Can we rearrange the closet again?

Where does the wind come from?

Will I have to study English every day
when I’m an English teacher?

My hair looked pretty good just now,
didn’t it?

I was just thinking. . .no. . .Why’s it cold?

Can’t the people outside my window hear me?

Should I take a shower?

My hair’s growing slower, isn’t it?





 
TO OVIDIU, WHOSE VOICE I STILL DON’T REMEMBER
by Mihaela Moscaliuc


Once I broke a window and for three months
had to share the first-row desk with you, Ovidiu,
Gypsy boy whose companionship
teachers used as punishment.
Twenty years later, I can say this:
I had forgotten you and your eight years
less than a rod away from the teacher’s desk,
till that 3:00 a.m. when the crowning baby
was no baby at all but the sharp push
of a new terror: when did I blot out
the memory of being cruel,
                      for I must have…
Did I make sure my leg never brushed against
yours, did I dodge your look by convincing
myself the ink stains on my palm required
full attention, did I believe the endless
accusations, wonder, at least once,  about your raw
bruises, about your mother, a nurse, admonished
publicly at the bimonthly PTA meetings?
I’d have had to care enough to make even indifference
matter, make it send forth its ghost. But there is
no ghost twenty years later, and I may say this:
we all suffered. At ten we each had at least one
alcoholic parent (though yours was the only one mentioned),
at twelve we used few words to seal friendships
for we feared each other—anyone could be the informer
—even this baby waiting his turn in the birth canal.




 
A POTTED PLANT IN JUNE
by Lynn Martens


smooth
grey
stones
spread
round
a
rusted
pot
sprouting
orange
blossoms
sweet
 




 
THIS MORNING IN WOODSIDE
by Cathy McArthur


Outside by the elderberry
red impatiens grow
cover ground;
groups of blackbirds
fill the yard
dig up the gutter dirt
and toss it.

I want to plant
words, flowers
in carnival colors
orange, yellow green;
kodak photos of my brother
collect in the old house.

All that drinking celebrating
in May and June
our father’s notes
on paper
firm handwriting
his will tells some of it.

Here’s our address
in Woodside
black hole we knew
a frame, Mom still lives there
birds in the air
whistle, repeat sounds
move through.




 
FIRE ESCAPE
         After Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Hidden Door”
by Oscar Berneo  

Fire escape quick exit
         Which is open scar
Fire escape quick exit
         Which is only choice
Fire escape quick exit
         From overcrowded existence
Fire escape vantage point
         Retreat, relief, and outlet
Fire escape without stairs
         Whose life is made of prayers
                   To the heavens for flight
         This life, this prayer, this flight!
Fire escape with bones for ladders
         With teeth for rungs
                   With ribs for railings
Fire escape breaking news  
         White flag in the wind
                   Signaling a new day
Fire escape ghetto garden
         What roots in your snowy stairwell?
Fire escape poet’s notebook
         Steel words on the terrace
Fire escape hollow metaphor
         Break from this cramped studio
                   Thin eggshell wall life
Fire escape line of roaches
         Marching to nest
Fire escape tecato fiend
         Out on the ledge
                  Looking for some more
Fire escape criminal highway
         Dirty deeds and clean getaway
Fire escape greedy fingers
         Caught in your catwalk
Fire escape falling fireworks
         Ignite, pop, startle, and whistle
                   On your holiday balcony
Fire escape of pigeon wings
         Pinioned to their heavy bodies
                   Grounded to the sidewalk
Fire escape loose branch
         And heavy shadow
Fire escape right cinder
         Pure menthol and slow pull
Fire escape Sunday promise
Fire escape Sunday sermon
Fire escape Sunday paper
Fire escape of dog eats dog
         Dogged out dog
                   Gone damn dog
And fire escape for mah dawgs
         Jaws open and leash tight
Fire escape reality check
         Cashed and spent
Fire escape schoolyard
         Hard lessons
                   Found in gravity
Fire escape inner city
         Past and piss
                   In the City
Fire escape gangster lean
         Getting right
                   With the clothesline
Fire escape rising South
         Grated border
                   Slammed and shut
                             Forming the divide
Fire escape ghost slide
         And lifeline
                   Torn limbs left behind
Fire escape half cross
         Offering exit in every language
                             Offering an extra minute
Fire escape dirty laundry
         On display
Fire escape shared knowledge
Fire escape eternal watchtower
Fire escape common axis
Fire escape constant rumor
         Secrets welded
                   Tight to the walls
Fire escape dance hall
         Narrow cage and crashing hips
Fire escape slatted beach
         Streetlamp tan and boulevard breeze
Fire escape aerial cozy
         Iron porch chill spot
Fire escape upper belvedere
         Pass the quarter juice
                   And blue icees
Fire escape winter refrigerator
         Milk and eggs keep fresh
                   On your frozen rails
Fire escape summer cradle
         Moms and kids sleep sound
                   On your cool palms
Fire escape muggy mouth
         The humid breath of August
                   On your lips
Fire escape Jacob’s ladder rising
          We count our blessing
                   As we climb your steps
Fire escape Saint Florian’s blessing
          Protect us with your holy 40 oz.
Fire escape Changó y Oshún
          Steaming up the rusted slope
Fire escape bleeding hung Christ
          Eyes bound to the heaven of
                    Cracked lead paint ceilings
Fire escape bronze gazebo
         With hazed out jibaros
                     Hunched over the lighter
         Coughing and laughing
                     Singing Benny Moré boleros
         To the corner bagladies  
Fire escape looking fly
         Fifty stories high
                      With a gunmetal overcoat
         And an overcast crimson cap
Fire escape grey rain
         Air conditioner sweat
                        Drips on the sidewalk
Fire escape open conceit
         Stitching skyscraper and treetop
Fire escape split City
         Winding stories
Fire escape
         which is itself the City
Fire escape
         which is itself the stories
And fire escape made of broken fingernails
         What remains of the City
Fire escape fitting farewell
         Smoke thick in my throat
                   Flames grab at my hands
         Heat sticks on my spine
Fire escape quick exit
         Which is final choice
Fire escape this weight
                   Too much
                   For you to hold
                   The air
                   An open door
                   I walk through
                   Into the frame
                   By the time
                   I land
                   The chalk line
                   Has been drawn
                   And erased




 
“KILL THE MONKEY…” (A TANGO TO ENTERTAIN GUESTS TO)
              after Gardel
by Robert Calero

Kill the Monkey is scrawled on the tired mortar walls
that dance slowly along lithe Buenos Aires.
The merchants sell amidst blue curtains.
The merchants sell amidst blue table cloths.

Bellesica feeds her children with the meat
embracing her bones in lonesome rooms.
Phantoms and little boys are discreet.
Phantoms that resemble the mirror.

Meridian rain
pursues citizens
beneath storefront awnings and
engulfs the gutters.

Meridian rain
persists on a dance
with the sons and daughters
of a seed tarnished mother

Cadaver dogs bivouac through the night;
putrid streets to amuse their pale appetites.
Within the intestines of women, men,
love blossoms and swells; a glutton parasite.





 
EARLY HEAT
by Robert Hershon

From the glare of July sun
into the shady delicatessen
clutching my mother’s rolled-up
five dollar bill which
I’d been pretending to smoke –
and suddenly Mr. Muller’s
big red face
leaning into mine
and demanding of my
eight-year-old self,
Hot enough for you!
which 1) scared the hell
out of me and 2) let me know
it was my fault, all of it




 
TOURIST WALKED RIGHT IN
by Robert Hershon

tourist walked right into my colon
came pouring out my ears
complaining about the prices

tourist wanted to buy my cousin
tie her to the bumper of
a gray line bus

how do you live here, the tourists
whined and shot us dead just to show
they ain’t no hicks

wall of tourists blocks the sidewalk
bike messenger kamikazes
turn them into Ohio jam

we’re all new yorkers now, they said        
let’s see them step over a drunk
a corpse a flaming cab

a pile of shit a pool of vomit
a pile of pigeons a pail of piss and
eat a banana on the f train




 
JUST EAST OF VINE
by Ry Kincaid

The dance of the drumstick on
oversized ride cymbals—that
is the jazz just east of Vine.

The bass starts his walk, trumpet
skips right beside.  Three sirens
scream loudly, just east of Vine.

Kick drum bang sing
Shot riff curse swing

Bird blew to New York, well east
of Vine. Then death blew him back.
We be proud, Charlie Parker.

The smokeless bar (now)—smoking
scat strikes us cats.  Can this be
the jazz that’s just east of Vine?




 
BONE, SHELL, PLATE
by Rena J. Mosteirin

Sahan’s electric orange
eyebrows in the motherland
words on the flat-screen flash:
Jesus…Loves…You…
Sahan…Best…Eyebrows…
Waxing…Facial…Massage…Haircut…
for women of the Hollywood, Sahan’s motherland…

There used to be a way to make wallpaper
by grinding up the leftover bones and shells and plates,
adding water and making it into a chunky paste, then
brushing it on the walls to keep the heat in.
That’s how important heat was.

I saw his corner cubicle once.
Once he took acid as soon as he got to work
and spent the whole day staring into flat-screen flash
of the concrete corner, staining it with his disgusting angry hallucinations.

I want to crush up important bones
and paint his walls over and over again. Until the pictures
he sees when he trips on those walls are sweet
like robins holding pale worms in their beaks hopping through the springtime grass
or perfect eyebrows, freshly waxed.



 
ANOTHER NEW YORK POEM
by Christie Casher

I

Across the table she is rambling about marriage,
houses, someone's ceilings, future living rooms.
These are things I forget to care about. Soon,

II

She mentions she's going away three nights
and he will be lonely. I'm always lonely,
spending more time without you than with.

III

Mornings I spill cream, missing the coffee.
Someone always leaves the window open
or the light on, someone, but never you.

IV

In the L, a man sings Oasis songs off key.
I am reminded of friends fighting, summer
camp, calm, how the skyline looms in fog.

V

On the platform, a couple exchanges breath;
gray air slips into my lungs. His left hand
tucks in the tag of her sweater. It is winter.