Volume 49 2016 Issue 2
Editors: John Gallaher, Luke Rolfes
Associate Editor: Daniel Biegelson, Richard Sonnenmoser
Editorial Assistants: Hannah Kludy, Korbin Jones, Maddie Pospisil, Reid Latimer, Kayla
Simmons, Melody Grooms, Morgan Wagle, Kaylie Sorenson, Kennia Lopez
Cover Photography and Design: Korbin Jones, Maddie Pospisil
Typesetting: Maddie Pospisil, Korbin Jones
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accepted via Submittable. No manuscript can be returned nor query answered
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e Laurel Review is indexed in e Index of American Periodical Verse, e Annual Index to
Poetry in Periodicals, Humanities International Complete, and e Index to Periodical Fiction.
e views expressed in e Laurel Review do not necessarily correspond to those of
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not be seen as an endorsement of any philosophy other than faith in free expression.
Copyright 2016 GreenTower Press
All rights reserved
ISSN 0023-9003
GreenTower Press
CONTENTS
FICTION
Dinah Cox Just Saying Hello 20
Margaret Hermes e One Who Le 30
Alex Poppe Room 308 62
Roger Sheer Warninger’s Likeability Test 90
Michael Webster ompson Yellow Jackets 104
Caroline Zeilenga Two Hundred Words for Love 126
NONFICTION
Lance Larsen e Man Whose Blood 44
Ross Wilcox e Lights Are Always On Inside 111
POETRY
Janelle Adsit As the News that Cannot Leave You 1
Jerey Allen An Obituary 2
An Obituary 3
Toby Altman Arcadian Rhetoric ( ) 4
Sally Ball Who Would I Show it To? 6
Bruce Bond Golden Ratio 7
Maxine Cherno Untitled 11
Christopher Citro Right Like Yellow Along a Banana 13
Rob Cook In the Season Now Known as “Today’s Shooting” 14
Family 16
Matthew Cooperman 32 Variations on Billy the Kid 17
Emily J. Cousins OCT. (all night) 19
Kristina Marie Darling Salvage 21
Awe 22
Gorgeous Nothing 23
Dennis Etzel Jr. from My Grunge of 1991 24
from My Grunge of 1991 25
from My Grunge of 1991 26
from My Grunge of 1991 27
from My Grunge of 1991 28
Shawn Fawson Night Comes On 29
Peter Leight Small Scale 53
Alex Lemon But Being So 54
I am inking that You Are inking 56
What I’m inking
Jennie Malboeuf Wilding 57
Oscar Oswald From the Chapbook e Precepts (A Postscript) 58
From the Chapbook e Precepts (A Postscript) 59
From the Chapbook e Precepts (A Postscript) 60
Simon Perchik L18 61
Michael Robins You Know It’s Nearly Spring 74
Without Streets We Can’t Go Anywhere 76
Kathleen Rooney Les Vacances de Hegel 77
Stan Sanvel Rubin Apostate 78
Chris Santiago Counting in Tagalog 79
Veronica Schuder Alexandria 83
Kent Shaw e Denition of Curtail 84
What Happens to a Sentimental Animal 88
ese Days
Martha Silano Address from the Konga River, 95
Wild Waves eme Park
Ingela Strandberg [In the Moment] 97
[e First Touch] 98
Adam Strauss Hapless Transport 99
Jason Tandon e Engine Has Stalled 100
Moon Poem 101
Kerry Tepperman Campbell Dreaming of France #107 102
Tony Trigilio Catholicism 103
SPECIAL INTERNATIONAL TRANSLATIONS
René Char e Mana of Lola Aba 143
Poem 144
e Climate of Hunting or How Poems are 145
Made
Female Historian 146
Yang Mu Flowing Rhythm 147
As Yet Unattained 148
On Meeting 149
Kjell Espmark “If” in Spring 150
Summer Without Words 151
Summer Solstice 152
Surface 153
2016 was a dicult year.
2016 sucked, in fact.
We will continue to do what we can
and to make and present what art we can.
Troubled that you are not, as they say,
Working—
I think we try rather to understand,
We try also to remain together
There is a force of clarity, it is
Of what is not autonomous in us,
We suer a certain fear
~
George Oppen
Volume 49.2 | 1 Janelle Adsit | 1
Janelle Adsit
As the News that Cannot Leave You
when you try to think back into time
to enter the pulse you had then
the rushed lunch hour, the sudden
news, the uncertainty of when to resume
the daily motions of biting and loving
the onslaught of sensation and the things
that have no call to be done
a tumult of headlines and words that cannot be said
let us lie down now and pray for a windless night
we can’t help but look for them
2 | e Laurel Review2 | Jerey Allen
Jerey Allen
An Obituary
Nose bleed. 6’0 ., 190 lbs.
Reading Roderick orp’s
e Detective. Leaves behind
His dog “Francesca” and turtle
“Roberto” (animals will be rescued
At estate sale). Wife passed
2006—broke neck eating
Dinner in a hammock. Melancholia,
Alcoholism, barbiturates.
TV LAND and TV dinners.
Arrested in 02’—exposing
Birthmark of Oklahoma
To crowd of Virginia Historians.
Intelligent, disingenuous, sly,
Remarried four times. Two
Died of natural causes—two
Missing. Platonism scholar.
Found in jogging clothes.
Volume 49.2 | 3 Jerey Allen | 3
Jerey Allen
An Obituary
e way she leaned a chair.
e manner in which she danced
At her father’s funeral. e club
Sandwich she spent ninety days
In jail for. Did anyone ever ask her
How she felt about the falling asleep
And waking up routine? –
en the way her piss turned dark yellow.
Her children moved out
And SVEDKA moved in. Clumps
Of her golden hair in the shower drain.
By summer she looked like winter.
By winter she was nearly invisible. –
A broom stood on a front porch.
A oor lamp ate its dinner to the blues.
e way she took on the shape
Of a dehydrated g tree.
e manner in which her teeth leapt
When she talked about grace.
4 | e Laurel Review
4 | Toby Altman
Toby Altman
Arcadian Rhetoric ( )
scene: having tasted the law, Steelman unthreads himself, permanently.
Steelman: Tomorrow is insatiable April:
the ruined ear, expressing in broken
its voluptuous water. e fatal
glass, replete with you, which opens
a sharp misgiving in the tendon
and turns into torment and weariness:
mansion of form, tender and deep engine
that moves in nature to shape its less.
Still, I did not know desire: its dressing
in the dark. Its plastic cra. Brewing coee
in bank and lung of the river. Its dwelling
in things where things unrest. For a body
where April was spacious (and its lack),
the question is: how to use pleasure as
[he dies]
Volume 49.2 | 5
Toby Altman | 5
Ego: Is he unfolded—poor, foreclosed creature,
fraught with there is and heavy with forget?
Still, the harmony of his young compass
persists: a little milk to house the body.
And where he was: a ledge of nerve,
a swelling in the glass, still charged with breath
and dressed in sour curd of his inward
where love and I rest, April-heavy and wet.
Do I know the body now? I know its
loss: how love makes a sonorous nothing
dusk and stubborn, dome of man-colored glass.
Its language lingers in the eye, pregnant
with pleasure, crushed. Love was so early in us.
No writing can repair it. Love was so
evening in us. No thinking can frame its
exhausted making to song again.
How do we know the aer making? “Making,”
he said, “the tent of blackberries in which
your sex is dressed. I sing its loss, its lack:
incessant oil, massaged into music.
Now if ows out of our hands and becomes
delicious reading: nothing without not,
thought without thinking, hugely politic,
exact in love. I nd no trace of it.”
et in arcadia ego
6 | e Laurel Review
6 | Sally Ball
Sally Ball
Who Would I Show it To?
[Merwin]
I so much trusted your capacity for delight.
Some suicide I’ve been able to see as an end of deep suering. Your
suering was not to me invisible but outweighed by your curiosities, your
sweet absorptions. Birds, nephews. Dancer pose.
I’ve tried, but I can’t see your death as an extension of seeking.
Come back. I felt this also aer my father died. Come back. Plea at the base
of the diaphragm. Low-down. Come back. It frightens me, everything
caving toward death’s sealed halo. A halo in the gut—
Our last conversation was about my father’s body in the hours aer he
died. Because I got to sit with him. And you described a moth you’d
watched fold itself up for death. Am I an idiot? I found you cheerful, as
ever your associative pluck and empathy and generosity alive between us.
Man of sorrows. Your white hands, your frail shins. Red hair but soly
red, a shell-color.
One night I was cooking alone in the yard, small re, small steaks. A
nighthawk swept into the light between the trees, two sweeps, two lines
it cut, and just as my mind ickered toward recognition, sending up your
name, —it disappeared into the dark. If that was you, then why did my
father send no sign?
Volume 49.2 | 7
Bruce Bond | 7
Bruce Bond
Golden Ratio
It’s in there, the fetal curl of the sea
in the shell. And the cochlea that hears it
fold, whitened under its own design,
and though the pattern collapses into shore,
the ocean keeps insisting on another,
drawn to what we understand to see.
*
e golden ratio has no water in it,
no Vitruvian posture, no animate
sunower with its vertigo of seeds,
though it provides a language, not for one,
but for the many in the thought of one.
Not the blossom, but the blossoming.
*
Gold as the siren’s call in the fog
of the physical, pleasure’s rectangle
that frames the eye, the lips, the rst teen crush
cut from a magazine. Gold the choice
that singles out the rare that would choose us
in return. e many in the thought of one.
*
8 | e Laurel Review8 | Bruce Bond
To chose and be chosen is to be one
small gold breathing machine in the arms
of another. Long ago I was nameless,
and then one of a kind, and then both
and neither, and I lay my puzzled head
on a girl’s chest in the silence aer.
*
e gold rush of the mathematical eye
sees what it desires most everywhere,
in the helix of genes if you look hard
enough, zero in, make the connections.
Or in the minesha of the eye in eyes
it sees, loves, then does not see, then sees
*
more clearly. e abstract angel is no
evening in Kansas beneath the chirping crickets.
Let alone the girl I knew there. Gold
measures on the radio and in her ear,
they had no girl in them although I heard them,
incorruptible as angels, passing.
*
Satie wanted a music that counted out
beats in gold ratios among the portions,
his Sonneries for the Rose-Cross a mine-
eld of seeds that petal when you touch them.
Volume 49.2 | 9 Bruce Bond | 9
Gold as the rst Rosicrucians imagined:
as the coming together of blooms and crosses.
*
Rose: the sexed ephemera of weddings
and funerals. Cross: the pin that goes
through them like a gold-plated number.
Oh, do not be so boring, says the music.
Beautiful, as mindless acts of kindness,
passing: singular and therefore nothing.
*
at girl and her radio keep shaking
o their principles. ey are the youth
that gold frames. Eternity the headache
of some better tune. I once saw desire
as a piano whose hollow place would oat it.
en as the overow in a bed of strings.
*
Satie knows. A light hand lls a room
with emptiness. e glasswork of voices
gives us the water to clarify our thirst.
Numbers that sing to one another, once
they were nameless, then a gash, pulled
through a cloud where the sunlight owers.
*
10 | e Laurel Review10 | Bruce Bond
e gold ratio of the crucix
takes its measurements from one man.
You can go mad with the tiny nails
and hammers that pin a world together.
But something suers. A man turned gold dies.
And then the stories. Changing. Into songs.
*
Where there is no God, there is always
her double. By design, the echo chamber
gives a sky in movies the voice of wells.
Satie knew the stitch of counterpoint
understands less than it knows. e gold
rose is only as good as it imagines.
*
It is neither rose nor dead. But unborn.
Like the death of a child in the singing
that a mother cannot bring herself to join.
It is hot in the chapel. Flies in the windows.
A candle weeps. It centers everything
for now. Most gold where the wax burns down
Volume 49.2 | 11 Maxine Cherno | 11
Maxine Cherno
Untitled
“Runaway thought, I wanted to write it; instead, I write that it has run away
- Pascal
Not the day for the false alarm,
the robin-breasted moment,
the double entendre in the mirror.
Nothing spells knowing as a sea of foam,
dress of tears or is it tears?
How can we know, given your worried
eyes and surrogacy of words, dwindling?
Go with your clothes tucked
in a sack, your jewels hidden in sand,
your stale loaf that once smelled of creation.
What hammers you into a shape
is blunt and uninformed.
Hit or miss , our course of hours ,
planet carrying its load of stones and
tissues and small green notions.
Eyes closed to the view, you listen to
12 | e Laurel Review12 | Maxine Cherno
your thoughts spin lace. What you don’t see
evaporates with the next cold breeze,
the next harm, positioned to descend
when least expected. What we endure
is our story. Words,abjured, are
a forest oor, thick with patterns,
le for seasons to bury as the dead
we know so well their breath is
outline and cold witness.
Volume 49.2 | 13 Christopher Citro | 13
Christopher Citro
Right Like Yellow Along a Banana
e bird on the step is in shadow until
it twitches and suddenly parts of it are lit
a golden brown. Sometimes it’s the tail,
sometimes the le half of beak and tail.
e clouds are rolling the wrong direction,
but I’m not going to be the one to say.
I had my usual nightmares last night, but
I’m not having one now, which I cling to
the way the atmosphere grips the earth.
Have you ever paid close enough attention
to the whooshing sound it makes rushing
into a vacuum-packed jar of peanuts?
When I woke this morning I immediately
felt pounds lighter. Upstairs on my side
of the bed now there’s an impression
of me, dozens of pounds of meat-weight
pressing down that you can’t see, but if
you place your hand there, you’ll feel
the coolness of my absence. e bird
whose noise is making the noises
all the other birds do is behind me
in the cottonwoods above my shoulder.
Sunlight’s landing on everything now,
my knees, my tea, the grass around me,
and it isn’t making any noise as it hits,
not a plink, not a quiet little crush.
14 | e Laurel Review14 | Rob Cook
Rob Cook
In the Season Now Known as “Today’s Shooting”
e boy making a commotion on his parents’ lawn. At rst it seems like
he’s playing. He’s tearing up his mother and father’s polite Bakerseld
yard. Grass and dirt coming up in short, quick bursts. He seems to be
concentrating on his digging, trying to get it right.
What are you doing? his mother asks in the glow of her cell
phone pod.
She has no idea what’s gotten into her son.
ey said I would be safe, that nothing would change, he says.
Driving by, it doesn’t look like much:
a boy ripping out the grass . . . he could be burying his gerbil, still blinking,
or a dead molar, or live avocadoes, and not frantically digging a tunnel to
the moon, muttering, out of breath . . .
ere has to be something to breathe here.
ere has to be something to breathe here.
But no one really looks.
He is not a boy.
He is thirty years old.
And the moon is in the sky, where it always is.
And the oxygen is in his head, where it always is.
Driving by, it’s impossible to know how many days he’s been digging.
No one digs anymore
Volume 49.2 | 15 Rob Cook | 15
ere is no earth. Just a phrase (taken from a blown-open
or mostly evaporated document) for
which no one takes responsibility:
“More and more rounds of awed
humans.”
e son, sweating by now, digs beyond the point when nothing else is
le to dig. And the mother, as soon as her son asks her, no longer knows
where anyone is, though she says the sky and its lemon trees still seem real
enough, straight above the torn-up landscape where they belong.
16 | e Laurel Review16 | Rob Cook
Rob Cook
Family
My mother calls me “Fred” all the time. My father’s name is Fred. What
am I to make of it?
My mother and I have a son. He is my father.
My mother and I have a son. He, it turns out, is not my father. But his
name is Fred, and my mother lends me his name from time to time.
Even before we had a son together, my mother called me Fred, though
only on Mondays and Wednesdays, especially if she’d said goodbye to
him more than once during those particular days, or “I love you” or even
“Why won’t you ever listen?”
On some aernoons my mother has just spoken with my father and is
thinking of him—his height, his favorite sweatshirt, his place at the table,
his residue, which smells like the wrong words at the wrong time—and
calls me by the name normally meant for him, except during this one
moment that soon passes, this “all men are the same” moment.
Someone else’s mother called her son by his father’s name and it was
unacceptable. e child, not the father, would have to go, the mother
insisting that what we call each other is vital.
My mother does not tell me such stories. She just gets my father’s and
my name mixed up. It happens every day, and without fatalities. Since
nothing else goes on where I am still allowed to stay, my mother calls me
“Fred” and catching herself, corrects my name back to Robert, which it
sometimes is.
Volume 49.2 | 17 Matthew Cooperman | 17
Matthew Cooperman
32 Variations on Billy the Kid
Prairie and desert and prairie and desert
is shirt itches I stink
I smell a bank!!
--------------------->
I like to feel guilty since if I am guilty it all depends on me,
but hell and damnation and Missouri weather conspire
Wanna see my gun?
Trains are fast, but I’m faster, I’m
Billy the Kid!!
e inexorable line of conquest drags over me
like Frederick Jackson Turner
e lugubrious aernoon haunts the cattle
I sure could go for an Orange Julius
What are you looking at?
Is that a bagel?
++++++++++++++++++ I hate progress
Many people don’t know I was born in the Big Apple
Trigger really likes this here short grama grass...
is steak’s a little tough, but I love cattle!!!
18 | e Laurel Review18 | Matthew Cooperman
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Don’t fence me in!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I thought you’d be taller too
|
|
|
|
|
|
at rope don’t look that strong
°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°
Many
a day
with
my head
down
in the tall
grass
Volume 49.2 | 19 Emily J. Cousins | 19
Emily J. Cousins
OCT. (all night)
still won’t sleep well anywhere but in the eld desperate
want for want to be swallowed by open mouthed stars
then quiet like a blanket w/o a blanket like peace w/o
peace & then you say do you ever think about seeing someone
again like when it gets bad? b/c if we don’t call it panic
it won’t cause panic right? maybe we won’t have to think
about that one time on the kitchen oor in the bedroom
at the grocery store that time I couldn’t go into the mall
b/c the lights + consumerism + the crowds maybe if we
just stick to talk I won’t be such a little mouse & how much
free will do we need to hang us the more choices I make
the more I hate myself too many turns in the maze & can’t
tell which way is up but who cares b/c somewhere the sun
is shining when a shooting star parts grey matter w/o warning
it gives us the impression we exist then gives us the impression
existence is meaningful but who cares b/c somewhere there is
an ice cream truck just down the block I should really be
crunching numbers but it’s nearly Sun. & I’ve written abs.
nothing in over a week I know something is wrong w/ me but
it’s so easy to ignore between the stress & how angry I am
all of the time
b/c really
what is the point?
maybe I will listen to vinyl & drink wine all
night stare at the ceiling all night pray to dream
of stars all night all night still won’t sleep
20 | e Laurel Review20 | Dinah Cox
Dinah Cox
Just Saying Hello
Bonnie and Ray were retired, though Ray took a side job selling small
appliances at Sears, and Bonnie, though she’d worked at the public library
for thirty years and was pretty well sick of the place, continued to work
Saturday mornings doing story hour for the kids. Ray was at Sears one
day when Bonnie decided to get in some exercise and take her bicycle for
a spin out in the neighborhood, the “gayborhood,” they called it these
days, since all the same-sexers had moved in. ey were ne people,
really ne people, except for Davey and Jonas who had no children but
greyhounds instead. Jonas, the younger one—she thought he was some
kind of graduate student—was tolerable, friendly in a generic sort of
way, but Davey, who worked in nance and made sure everyone knew
it, was a creep. And they allowed their greyhounds to shit in everyone’s
front yard, and no one, not even Ray, who was ordinarily both bold and
diplomatic, had the guts to confront Jonas and especially not Davey about
the dinosaur-sized turds. e greyhounds were named Rebel and Saint,
which Bonnie thought was stupid. Her own dogs, before they died, had
been named Peaches and Harley, not perfect names, to be sure, but better
than average. On her bicycle now, she saw Davey practicing his golf swing
in his front yard. e big decision: to wave or not to wave. At the last
minute, she thought of Ray working overtime at Sears so as to have extra
money for their winter trip to Florida, and something about the vision of
the white sands before her made her decide to go ahead and wave, but she
immediately regretted it when Davey, though he was looking right at her,
did not wave back.
Volume 49.2 | 21 Kristina Marie Darling | 21
Kristina Marie Darling
Salvage
Because I shouldn’t have to say it—
You know the little arc your hand makes in the air. And when I look
away, the smaller knife the paper
(No matter which room we’re in, the
question just seems to multiply:
In the lm version of this story, his mistress witnessed the second in a
series of air raids. e plane refusing to land in that eld. First the dead
poppies, now the cut wires. e houses on the coast already gone dark.
e nal scene actually shows the burning building, which had been
waiting for her on the other end of a telephone. rough its wooden
doors, we hear the sound a harp would make in a cathedral.
(Which is to say, of course there were
other res that year
22 | e Laurel Review22 | Kristina Marie Darling
Kristina Marie Darling
Awe
From the very beginning, he wanted a house in which the landscape
becomes dreamscape, each of the windows shot through with light:
Some men were born without that numbness
in the hands, the little warning to tell them not to, so nothing they do
should surprise us. What I meant to say is, I don’t care, or I wouldn’t care,
if the word “ardor” were to mean something else entirely.
(at same day, the captain of the small white
ship forgot to notify the harbor of his approach,
so when our vessel was rst spotted, the raid
sirens went o and all of the houses on the
shore darkened.
In the other version of this story,
he was pouring a glass of water
and the light then was only half
light, striking the tops of the
buildings with such intention—)
Volume 49.2 | 23 Kristina Marie Darling | 23
Kristina Marie Darling
Gorgeous Nothing
ough they met at the edge of a silver garden, hands tracing the curve of
the gates, they never loved each other.
Which is to say: a wish not to continue on a moving train will eventually
be granted.
When they speak over the telephone, she can’t understand his
pronunciation of the word “ghost.” Goest. As in thou. As in buttoned
past the graceful arc of the throat.
(Meaning, the breaths between
their words are long—)
Days later, he sends her a little book through the post. In a darkening
room at the top of the stairs, she tries and tries.
Translation: e cathedral only refuses to open for her
* * *
* * * *
* *
{ }
24 | e Laurel Review24 | Dennis Etzel Jr.
Dennis Etzel Jr.
from My Grunge of 1991
Four-walled world. Fred Phelps begins with the signs in June on the
corner of Gage Park. Fred Phelps faxes awful messages to any Topeka
business he can nd the fax number to. Fruit of the tree of such knowledge.
Sentence 1: Song title from Temple of the Dog’s self-titled album released on
April 16, 1991.
Sentence 4: From Rae Armantrout’s poem “e Garden” from Necromance,
Sun & Moon, 1991. Used with permission by author.
Volume 49.2 | 25 Dennis Etzel Jr. | 25
Dennis Etzel Jr.
from My Grunge of 1991
Galaxy’s child. Garden. Gather the team for a talk. Gene Roddenberry
passed away days before Halloween as a sign that old days are over.
Give straightforward, high-energy performances to hide my low times.
Sentence 1: A title of a Star Trek: e Next Generation episode from 1991.
Sentence 2: Song title from Pearl Jam’s Ten released on August 27, 1991.
26 | e Laurel Review26 | Dennis Etzel Jr.
Dennis Etzel Jr.
from My Grunge of 1991
Given the gap between feminist theory and everyday struggle,
the utopian mode is both useful and logical for writers who self-
consciously place themselves within a feminist (i.e., partisan)
literary practice. Ground forces are not engaged, says George Bush.
Grunge music, comic books, and Star Trek clothed me. Half a life.
Sentence 1: From Frances Bartkowski’s Feminist Utopias (U of Nebraska
Press 1991). Used with permission by author.
Sentence 2: From President George Bush’s Desert storm speech, January
16, 1991 .
Sentence 4: A title of a Star Trek: e Next Generation episode from 1991.
Volume 49.2 | 27 Dennis Etzel Jr. | 27
Dennis Etzel Jr.
from My Grunge of 1991
Hard to say where / this occurs. He commanded the great powers of the world
to disarm their nuclear weapons. He Said, She Said. Here recorded voices
are / coy about dismemberment. Here the sullen / come to see their grudge
/ as pose, modelling. High contrast / enhanced by expression. His history
is replete with hostile acts. How about your defensive systems?
Sentences 1 and 5: From Rae Armantrout’s poem “Necromance” from
Necromance, Sun & Moon, 1991. Used with permission by author.
Sentence 3: A lm from 1991.
Sentences 4 and 6: From Rae Armantrout’s poem “e Panoply of” from
Necromance, Sun & Moon, 1991. Used with permission by author.
28 | e Laurel Review28 | Dennis Etzel Jr.
Dennis Etzel Jr.
from My Grunge of 1991
Huge pine / a quarter-mile o / oats. I am committed to achieving these
goals while meeting the basic human needs of all the people of this state. I am
convinced not only that we will prevail but that out of the horror of combat
will come the recognition that no nation can stand against a world united, no
nation will be permitted to brutally assault its neighbor, says George Bush.
Sentence 1: From Rae Armantrout’s poem “Necromance” from Necromance,
Sun & Moon, 1991. Used with permission by author.
Sentence 2: From Governor Joan Finney’s (D) rst State of the State Address,
January 22, 1991.
Sentence 3: From President George Bush’s Desert storm speech, January 16,
1991.
Volume 49.2 | 29 Shawn Fawson | 29
Shawn Fawson
Night Comes On
Remember, we told stories
on the way to sleep. When the cat
le the room we felt the darkest dark
enter. Of the world’s laments we heard
something elemental. Water trickles
on its own weight. Bees rework
the hive. In bonres we age,
in lichen we stay the same.
Wind rises in the hawthorn,
and a dream comes true.
I saw a freighter stilled by small cra,
the night unbaling pepper
still warm from the East China Sea.
You saw a team of horses coming
to the eld’s edge to meet you
on your way home. Other nights
we woke to mistakes––in part
our own doing––leaving a door unlocked,
cutting o a phone call too soon
and saying aloud, I’ve decided
how I want to live and it isn’t this
when we meant don’t go.
30 | e Laurel Review30 | Margaret Hermes
Margaret Hermes
e One Who Le
e night before, Vanessa had gone to bed longing for children. She
awoke certain she did not want Kevin to be their father.
While he had never raised a hand against her in the last eight years,
Vanessa worried that x-rays of a child of theirs might one day reveal a
hairline fracture like the ragged seam in the bathroom washbasin that
appeared last week on the night she had forgotten to tell Kevin she was
having dinner with the dean. at chilling speculation was the impetus
to end this proximity that passed for a marriage. Vanessa congratulated
herself on escaping in the nick of time. Had there been children, she
might never have gotten away.
She had married Kevin straight out of college as a hedge against
uncertainty. ey had their journalism degrees in common; each had
been raised Catholic; they both liked dim sum. Eight years later, they had
evolved into strangers, their bed grown too small, the dinner table too
large for the two of them. He had changed. Or not. Perhaps she was the
transgured one.
Kevin rose steadily in middle-management at the brewery, while
Vanessa skittered from one job to another until landing comfortably
in the admissions oce at their alma mater. Kevin had argued for a
postponement of children until he reached a level where they could aord
to do without her salary. She had consented, able to envision and envy
her own future. To speed its arrival, Vanessa centered their social lives
around his job. Her dinner parties were designed to give him a leg up the
corporate ladder. Kevin’s taste ran to sushi and sashimi now while she
had replaced Catholicism and her catholic diet with veganism, but she
cooked against her principles when the situation demanded and she knew
to serve good wine to the beer barons.
“It’s like you’re the judge,” Kevin said that morning to her retreating
back, “a hanging judge, and I’m not even allowed to speak in my own
defense.”
When crossing the distance separating her from her husband,
Vanessa navigated warily. She suspected she was at the root of Kevin’s
too prompt anger when he cursed a poky driver or berated a waiter for
failing to rell his water glass. Increasingly over the years, he lashed out
not just at innocent but even insentient stand-ins: the halogen lamp next
Volume 49.2 | 31 Margaret Hermes | 31
to the computer, the sh-shaped vase with zinnias in its gaping mouth,
the teapot from Occupied Japan that had belonged to her great aunt, the
framed photo of his parents in their wedding nery. He claimed the
breakage was never intentional. He ailed helplessly rather than struck
out maliciously, which made him the victim really. And when the burst of
fury or frustration was spent and the trigger examined in the aerhush,
the ngerprints seemed always to be hers. Some unkindness on her part,
some lack of consideration had driven him to desperation. e underlying
message was that she should be grateful for his restraint.
“Like you’re God Almighty,” he added when she told him her
decision.
Vanessa agreed she was unfair and decamped to her friend Holly’s
sofa-bed.
“Nobody had an aair. Nobody has any bruises. We just married
too young, that’s all. Before we were fully formed. We don’t belong
together.” Having suered through the divorces of her parents and two
sets of neighbors, Vanessa resolved to say nothing more on the matter.
She had promoted Holly fourteen months ago to ll an opening in
admissions and, soon aer, recruited her to take a just-vacant apartment
near their townhouse. “e landlord is great. We’ve known him since we
moved to the neighborhood. Gay but still sort of old world. Bow ties and
argyle socks. He lives in the building. Which is a good thing. e living
room faces the park. Did I already tell you that? And we could drive to
work together.”
Holly reminded Vanessa of herself, only a little more impressionable,
a little less guarded. She introduced Holly to cribbage and Holly returned
the favor by teaching her backgammon. Most nights they lounged on
the fold-out couch streaming episodes of West Wing with a bowl of
microwave popcorn between them. e weeks she spent at Holly’s were
almost a reward—she found a sisterliness that had been missing from her
only-childhood and a comradeship missing from her marriage. Holly
even rode shotgun with her to the townhouse on her raids to retrieve her
belongings. At rst the younger woman tried gamely to help with the
sorting and packing, but she soon caught on that she was valued more as
buer than assistant.
Kevin had declined to absent himself from these hurried invasions.
As he told Vanessa in a clipped, manicured voice, the tenancy of their
things was joint, their ownership debatable. So Holly’s service was in
chatting with Kevin while Vanessa deposited blouses and table linens and
32 | e Laurel Review32 | Margaret Hermes
books and CDs in stacks upon the bed. Occasionally, a dispute over the
provenance of a candlestick or kitchen implement would are, but not
oen, as Vanessa was careful to claim only those things she was sure he
had no attachment to.
ere was an urgency to this division of goods. On her rst trip back,
Vanessa opened her jewelry drawer and found her mother’s pearl choker
scattered like mothballs over the contents. Aer that, she couldn’t shake
the conviction that Kevin would soon begin systematically attacking her
stu in lieu of attacking her.
“It’s really inspiring,” Holly panted as they loaded Vanessa’s car with
plastic laundry baskets brimming with crockery nestled among socks and
T-shirts, sweatpants and cardigans, “how respectful you two are of each
other. I’ve always thought Kevin was a sweetheart, but he’s the one who’s
been le and, honestly, I’ve been holding my breath—expecting to hear
bitchy comments each time we’ve come over. Kevin and I have talked
about the Cardinals. We’ve talked about bee colony collapse. We’ve
talked about single payer health insurance. e one subject we never
touch on is you.”
“Glad to hear it,” Vanessa said lightly.
“e only thing he’s said about you or divorce or anything is that he
hopes you nd whatever it is you’re looking for. I thought you’d want to
know.”
“Mmmm.” Vanessa closed the trunk with a slam.
“And you never say anything negative about him,” Holly added
approvingly.
“What would be the point?” Vanessa turned the key in the ignition.
“I’ve got what I wanted.”
“Exactly,” Holly nodded as she buckled herself in. “Once again, you
are my role model.”
As there was no dispute over property—he paid her a lump sum for
her half of their scant equity in the townhouse and they each kept their
own cars—and no children over whom to wage a custody struggle, the
divorce was less complicated than most. She wasn’t asking to equalize the
value of their retirement plans or for a share of the restricted stock options
he was so proud of, so he agreed to a quick settlement.
e morning of their hearing date, he called to suggest that he drive
her to and from the courthouse. “Parking’s impossible around there.”
She thanked him but, haunted by a vision of Kevin steering the car
into a lamppost, said she would be meeting a friend downtown for lunch.
Volume 49.2 | 33 Margaret Hermes | 33
“To celebrate?” he asked, and then, when the phone remained silent,
closed with “So, I’ll see you in court.”
To counter the impersonality of the proceedings—aer all, they had
lived side by side since their junior year—she took his college yearbook to
the courthouse. “I managed to abscond with your copy as well as mine,”
she apologized.
“Right,” he said, and shoved the yearbook back into the plastic
grocery bag she had brought it in, ending her fantasy in which they
would ip to the page with the collage containing the photo of Kevin,
undetected by the yearbook faculty advisor, rappelling up the mock
turret of Brookings Hall, in lederhosen yet. As Kevin’s photographer and
partner in crime, she had imagined him turning toward her and sharing
a wry smile before the judge formally released them.
Outside the granite and limestone building, Vanessa said goodbye
and aimed herself purposefully toward a café several blocks away where
she lingered over a cappuccino and biscotti until the coast could be
presumed clear.
It had been a slow day at the courts and she had found a parking
space in the municipal lot, as apparently had Kevin. Walking toward her
car, Vanessa noticed a little urry above the pavement, a swirling of paper
stirred by a gust of cold air. And then she saw the cover, in the improbable
school colors of red and green, ripped away from its contents and lying on
the concrete beside a now empty parking space. She shuddered at the rage
and pain needed to tear the yearbook asunder.
Some months back Vanessa had shied herself into a at in the De
Mun neighborhood. She couldn’t keep crowding Holly and she didn’t
want to stay where she was likely to cross Kevin’s path. Besides, it wasn’t
her neighborhood any more. She had le all the old friendships to him—
the unspoken part of the divorce settlement. She knew rsthand how
hard it was to remain friends with both halves of a divorcing couple. And
that it was natural for outsiders to want to be supportive of the one who’d
been abandoned.
She saw Holly mostly at work since moving away from Lafayette
Square. In fact, she saw few people outside of work these days. “Come
with me to the Focal Point tonight,” Holly coaxed. “ere’s going to be
this great old blues guitarist. We can have dinner next door at the Maya
Café.”
“Sounds really nice, but I’m beat. And on a diet. I wouldn’t be good
company anyway. ese days I even bore myself.” e euphoria she had
34 | e Laurel Review34 | Margaret Hermes
felt when she rst le Kevin for the giddiness of an extended slumber
party at Holly’s had evaporated, leaving a clumsiness in its stead.
Cut out of her customary circles, she enrolled in a yoga class and a
bookbinding class in continuing education. She decorated her apartment,
scavenging six mismatched dining room chairs from three thri stores.
She gave each a new seat cover of patterned crewel work that she made
aer teaching herself the stitches from library books.
She thought she was nesting, but came to recognize it as withdrawing,
choosing solitary preoccupations to spare herself from having to venture
out. At work, barricaded behind stacks of les, Vanessa kept people at a
safe distance by email and the phone.
One morning she stopped at Holly’s desk, thumping down a pillar
candle she had bejeweled with dried ower petals glimmering under a
rumpled sheet of wax, an apology for all the invitations declined or
ignored that had nally ceased to be oered. “Holly, if you ever feel like
going to a concert or a movie, even if it’s last minute, just call me. It’s time
I bust out of this cocoon.”
But the calls didn’t come. So she extended invitations of her own,
which Holly had an array of reasons, or excuses, for not accepting. Vanessa
understood that she had wounded Holly by relying on her friendship and
then retreating from it, much like the male dating pattern of approach-
avoidance Vanessa had heard single women lamenting during the years
of her marriage. eir interactions had become stilted, gone from whole
hog to half-hearted.
She phoned Holly on a Saturday morning. “I’ve missed you,” she
said, sounding to her own ears like an estranged lover.
At rst Holly unreeled a string of alibis that grew increasingly
elaborate. Vanessa stopped her before she could produce witnesses. “It’s
my fault,” she interrupted. “I’ve been what my mother used to call a Bad
Friend. And aer you were such a good friend to me. I don’t have any
excuses. Only apologies. I’m sure you’re busy this weekend, but let me
dazzle you with a home-cooked apology next Saturday night.”
“I can’t. Not Saturday.”
“Sunday, then?”
Holly hesitated. “I’ve got a commitment on Sunday.”
Vanessa could feel her cheeks ushing. “Well,” she said, inating
her voice a notch up to hearty, “you’re right to be cautious. I haven’t done
any real cooking in ages. All salads and carry-ins. ank God for the deli
counter at Straub’s or I’d have starved this last year.”
Volume 49.2 | 35 Margaret Hermes | 35
“Vanessa,” Holly cut through the awkwardness, “if you can put it o
another week, I could come the following Sunday.”
“Great. Two weeks from tomorrow it is. Shall we settle on a time
now?”
“Let’s talk about it at work, a little closer to the date.”
Vanessa wondered if she was being overly sensitive or if Holly
preferred now to have most of their contact, even conversations, conned
to the workplace. Well, she thought, Holly feels rejected. And a little self-
protective. And so would I in her place.
At work, things were neither cool nor particularly warm between
them. Tepid, thought Vanessa. She hoped to heat things up with the
Moroccan stew she was making: chunks of turnip, carrot, onion, raisins,
slivers of dried apricots, and pine nuts in a broth of fragrant spices. She
wondered why someone didn’t distill a perfume from cardamom.
When Holly arrived, Vanessa handed her a beer and took her on a
tour of the projects with which she’d lled her time and her apartment.
She showed o the gossamer curtains she’d made from a sari purchased at
the Indian market on Page Avenue and the duvet cover she was fashioning
from vintage tablecloths. “I’ve discovered the secret Martha Stewart
within me.”
“I’ll say. Any stock market tips?” Holly asked in a stage whisper.
Holly had made appropriate, appreciative murmurs at each stop on the
tour. She took a long pull from her beer and said, “I’ve been busy, too. I
know you thought I’ve just been making excuses lately, but, actually, I’m
in a relationship now. And, well, it’s taking up all of my time.”
“Holly, I’m so pleased for you! I want to hear all about him. You
never said anything. Not a word. Oh,” Vanessa’s voice dropped in
recognition, “you were probably trying to spare the Newly Single from
your coupled bliss.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.”
“You have every right to be angry with me. And hurt. But it wasn’t
you I was avoiding—it was everyone.”
“I was angry all right. And I was hurt. But I also didn’t want to have
this conversation before I was sure it was a conversation we needed to
have.”
“And we need to now?”
“e guy in my life. It’s Kevin.”
“Oh.” Vanessa turned o the ame under the stew pot. She
wheeled to face Holly. “You aren’t joking? is is real?” Vanessa dimly
36 | e Laurel Review36 | Margaret Hermes
remembered strange looks in the oce and water cooler chat that died
away at her approach.
“ere didn’t seem any reason to bring it up at rst. I mean, at rst
I was just seeing him around the neighborhood. And then I invited him
over for a couple of ‘pity dinners.’ Aer we’d stopped socializing. In a
way,” Holly said with some cruelty, “I suppose he was a substitute for you.”
“Well, I’m back!” Vanessa said with a girlish, false brightness.
Holly shook her head. “At rst I think I just missed going over
to your house. en I missed you. Maybe there was even some sort of
crazy revenge mixed up in it, maybe I felt you’d dumped both of us. I’d
probably have to go into therapy to gure that one out. But whatever my
motives back then, it’s dierent now.”
“Dierent.”
“It’s serious now.”
“I don’t know what to say.” Vanessa lied the stewpot with oven
mitts then lowered it back onto the burner as if she couldn’t manage the
weight.
“Maybe you should go with that.”
“And say nothing?” She took o the oven mitts and wandered out of
the kitchen.
With a sigh, Holly went to the stove and emptied the pot of couscous
into a waiting serving dish and carried the steaming bowl to the dining
room. Vanessa watched as Holly balanced the stew pot on a cast iron
trivet equidistant between the two places set at the table. Vanessa sat
gingerly on the creweled fabric, an uneasy guest in her own apartment.
Holly returned to the kitchen to fetch salt and pepper, in full charge
of the situation. “I’m not looking for your approval,” she warned, and
dropped into the chair across from Vanessa.
“at’s good,” Vanessa mumbled ambiguously.
“is is good,” Holly said, her mouth crowded with vegetables. “You
know, until I got to know you, I thought anything ‘vegan’ had to taste like
reconstituted astronaut food. Well, this time you’ve outdone yourself. I
want the recipe for this.”
“Sure,” Vanessa said, stabbing a hunk of turnip. “What’s mine
is yours. Damn. Why did I say that? I don’t think of Kevin as mine.
Haven’t since before I le.”
ey ate on in silence.
“Look,” Vanessa ventured as their eyes stayed on their empty plates,
“I have to ask: how serious?”
Volume 49.2 | 37 Margaret Hermes | 37
“Very.”
“Do you know about his temper?”
“What temper?”
“It’s why I had to leave.”
Holly eyed her coldly. “at’s not what you said at the time.”
“I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“But now you do? You said you married too young. at you just
weren’t right for each other.”
“at’s true.”
“And now you say it was because of his temper?”
“at’s true too.”
“Listen, I think I’d better skip dessert. I know this has to have been
a shock. Maybe aer a while we can get together again. Figure out some
kind of friendship. At least a good working relationship. But we have to
face the fact that we’re not likely to be close again.”
“You think I’m jealous.”
“Why not? You’re human.”
But he’s not, Vanessa wanted to say. Instead she protested, “I was the
one who le.”
“Yes, but people are pretty complex. Maybe you enjoyed the feeling
of control that gave you. And now you’re not in control. Maybe you’re
jealous not being the central gure in Kevin’s universe anymore. Maybe
you liked the idea of him out there pining for you.”
“And maybe he’s scary as hell.” Vanessa thought back to their
honeymoon. For the year and a half before they married, they had shared
an apartment with a changing assortment of students and everyone
had gotten along. But their rst night in Puerto Vallarta, the rst time
she and Kevin were ever truly alone—without roommates, without
family, without baristas who spoke their language—he had turned on
her. Vanessa had laughed at him—at something he had said or done, a
mispronunciation maybe?—and he had reached across the table on their
balcony overlooking the Bay of Banderas and grabbed her long, loose hair
and twisted it until she cried out. She had shivered through the rst night
of her honeymoon alone on the hammock out on the balcony. e next
morning she stood over Kevin until he opened his eyes. She told him that
if he ever laid a hand on her again, he would never get another chance.
“Touch me once more like last night and it’s over. I mean it, Kevin. Just
once more and I’m gone.”
She turned back toward Holly.
38 | e Laurel Review38 | Margaret Hermes
“We’re getting married, Vanessa. It’s better you don’t say anything
more.”
Vanessa recoiled. But isn’t this when I should say everything? Speak
now, or—She held her peace.
Weeks went by, and accumulated into months. Vanessa had held
herself—not aloof exactly, but apart from her ocemates. She believed
intimacy with sta complicated oce politics. Holly had been the
exception, and that turned out to emphatically prove the rule.
Vanessa felt a chill in the admissions oce caused originally, she
supposed, by her obvious preference for Holly. But by now the sta
had probably all accepted invitations to Holly’s wedding to Vanessa’s
ex and they were having their own problems separating the personal
from the professional. Whatever the reason, Vanessa’s response was
to institutionalize the distance between her and the others, avoiding
interactions until sta meetings, eating lunch at her desk behind a closed
door.
She took up knitting, creating her rst sweater in eye-popping
combinations of texture and color. She adopted a puppy, a jangle of
terrier and greyhound, according to the best guess of a vet who worked
with Stray Rescue. Bartlett—the training of him, the walking of him,
the conversing with him—lled most of the holes in her schedule, when
he wasn’t making holes in her belongings. She subscribed to the Netix
DVD service and made a practice of ordering three lms by one director
at a time. She had just nished Preston Sturges—her favorite was e
Lady Eve with Stanwyck and Fonda—and was about to embark, warily,
upon Jim Jarmusch. She had slipped Night on Earth into the DVD player
when the bell for her apartment sounded. She pressed the intercom.
“Yes?”
“It’s Kevin.”
Vanessa was startled into silence.
e bell sounded again. She pressed the intercom again, this time
without speaking.
“We need to talk,” he said.
Vanessa hesitated, then pressed the button for the outside door.
No one had told her the actual date, but from the looks she was
getting in admissions and the looks that took a detour at her approach, she
calculated there was going to be a wedding very soon. So Kevin wanted
to clear the air, start his new marriage with a clean slate. Who could
blame him for that? She would rather have met him elsewhere. It was
Volume 49.2 | 39 Margaret Hermes | 39
probably childish, but she didn’t want him to see how she lived, inspect
her appliances, comment on the dog bed next to hers or the candles in her
bathroom.
She opened the door to the hallway so he wouldn’t have to knock.
en she went into the kitchen and poured some French roast beans into
the coee grinder. He must have come in and closed the door while she
was grinding the coee because she didn’t hear him or see him until she
turned to get a paper lter. He was standing an arm’s length away. A little
scream burst from her and then she laughed apologetically. “Coee,” she
shrugged, as if explaining something. As she edged past him to reach
for the box of lters, the balcony in Puerto Vallarta ashed through her
brain. It suddenly occurred to her to be glad she was wearing her hair
short these days.
She thought about that morning when she had vowed she would
leave if he ever laid a hand on her again. at had been their contract. So,
for the next eight years, he had laid his hands on substitutes and she had
walked on tiptoe. But he had held to their contract and still she le him.
She had made him hold himself in check and then she had le anyway.
His arms hung down at his sides, but she saw his sts opening and
closing. Just as Vanessa decided to keep on going, through the kitchen
and out of the apartment, one of those sts opened and took hold of her
arm.
She stied a gasp. “I don’t think this is a good idea.” She made
her voice rm. She tried to shake o his grasp, but his ngers tightened
around her upper arm. Quicksand, she ashed. Mustn’t struggle. “Why
don’t we sit down?” Make it normal, she instructed herself. Before it
goes too far. Kevin didn’t move. “What do you want?” She regretted the
question instantly, saw it as an acknowledgement of the supremacy of his
wants, of his power. “Let go of me.” She couldn’t stop the escalation. “I’ll
scream.”
“No,” he said, “you won’t. At least not more than once.”
Vanessa froze, her blood turned to ice, unmoving in her veins.
Kevin bent her arm behind her and propelled her from the kitchen.
She stumbled as he pushed her like a plow before him. ey lurched
through the dining room with its creweled seat covers, and she thought
both He can’t even see his surroundings and I’m glad he can’t see my
surroundings. And then she was furious with herself for wasting thoughts
on anything but escape.
With her outstretched hand and one foot, she tried to brace herself
40 | e Laurel Review40 | Margaret Hermes
against the frame of her bedroom door, but Kevin twisted the arm he held
until she crumpled against him, then he pivoted her forward and onto the
bed. She strained to turn her face to the side, out of the smothering pus
of damask-covered eiderdown.
Bartlett awakened and leapt from his bed to join in the play. “Your
watchdog?” Kevin said, his lips unbearably close to her ear. “Your
protector?” She felt his body shi atop hers, and, though she couldn’t
turn her head, she could picture as clearly as if viewing a screen Kevin’s
leg shooting out and connecting with the puppy. Bartlett shrieked and
scuttled out of the room, his nails scraping and clicking against the
hardwood oor. “Maybe you should trade it in for a Rottweiler.”
Still pinning her arm to her back, he raised himself and positioned
one knee at the curve of her spine. With his free hand, he reached around
beneath her and undid the tie of her drawstring pants. “No!” she shouted
but stopped as the redoubled pain in her arm and shoulder and back took
away her breath. He snaked the pants past her hips and then yanked
her underpants down to her knees. “Please,” she pleaded, tears squeezing
from her closed eyes.
He settled himself along the length of her, his breath moving her
hair. “Say it again,” he whispered.
“Please.”
He released her.
She rolled over on her back, wincing from the ache in her shoulder,
and drew up her pants. She knew she should keep her mouth shut. “I’m
telling Holly,” she said.
“You won’t say a word to Holly,” Kevin said. “You won’t say a word
to anyone.”
“I’m calling the police as soon as you’re gone. Unless you kill me
rst.” She saw herself as a victim now, of one thing or another—all the
variations seemed strangely the same. Could she be any more violated?
Lack of penetration was a mere technicality.
“is time, I’m the one doing the leaving,” he said.
She could hear the dog whimpering in another room.
Kevin stood in the door frame where they had struggled minutes
ago. “Holly knows I’m here.”
Vanessa jerked herself up to a sitting position and tried to understand
what he was telling her.
“I told her you called and asked me to come over. at you wanted
to talk. Something about ‘completion’ or ‘resolution’ before the wedding.
Volume 49.2 | 41 Margaret Hermes | 41
Of course she wasn’t really buying that.”
Vanessa snorted.
“No,” he continued, “she’s pretty sure you have designs on me, what
with the previous calls and all those invitations to come and see your new
apartment.”
Her mouth dropped open. “Lying bastard,” she managed.
“At least you know I’m not the weak bastard you thought I was.” He
smiled nally. “And you’re not the queen you thought you were.”
“I-I’ll get you.”
“You won’t though. Holly believes in me, but even stronger than her
belief in me is her belief in you, in your queenly sense of possession. And
the cops will believe me—and her—when we explain that you’ve made all
this up because your attempt at seduction failed. And keep in mind, if
you do talk to anyone, I won’t be so easy on you –“ he raised his eyebrows
theatrically, expanding into the role –“the next time. I’ll tell Holly I was
able to resist you today even though you did come on pretty strong, but
she knows I’m not a choir boy. She worries I might succumb to your
charms in the future, as I did in the past. You ought to worry about that,
too.”
He le the doorway and moved o down the hall. She heard the
apartment door open and close, but she didn’t trust that he was gone.
Aer several minutes of absolute stillness, she rose from the bed and went
into the hall. As she inched her way along, she half expected Kevin to leap
out from the entrance to the dining room or kitchen. When she reached
the apartment door, she turned the deadbolt and hooked the chain, a sob
wrenching her small frame. She pressed both hands against her abdomen
to stop the wave of panic coursing through her.
e dog was silent now so she called to him in a thin voice, “Here,
Bartlett. Here, boy. Here, baby,” but he didn’t respond. She found him in
the living room, cowering behind the couch. Vanessa pushed the couch
away from the wall with her hip and her good arm, and lowered herself
onto the oor. e puppy was shivering, but didn’t recoil in pain when
she felt around on him, petting and probing. “Nothing broken, little boy.
It’s all right now,” she soothed. “e bad man is gone.”
But of course nothing was right, and she could feel Kevin’s presence
everywhere in the apartment. She had to think.
She couldn’t let Holly marry that monster. But Holly believed that
Vanessa had been chasing aer Kevin for months out of—what?—spite?
And she’d probably shared her outrage with the people at the university
42 | e Laurel Review42 | Margaret Hermes
who worked under Vanessa. If she went to Holly with this story just days
before the ceremony, it would be passed around as a last ditch eort to
destroy the happiness of the second Mrs. Kevin. Soon, perhaps only
minutes from now, Holly would be listening to Kevin’s vile story about her
friend Vanessa. Her mentor. And still she would believe him. Vanessa
willed her hands to stop shaking. All right then. She had tried to warn
Holly. Holly made her choice. To hell with her.
For a moment Vanessa wondered if Kevin prized Holly more as a
wife or as a weapon. She bent her head in an eort to suppress the bile
that had risen to her throat and Bartlett took that opportunity to lick her
face, returning some of the comforting she’d given him. “What about the
police?” she asked the puppy in a voice neither of them recognized. “If
I explained everything—the way he was while we were married, the way
he’s used Holly to get back at me, the way he faked calls from me –“ Her
words trailed o because she was imagining how such a story would be
received. Nothing in the apartment indicated a struggle; she was sore but
not beaten; there was no semen to be harvested as evidence; no neighbors
had heard cries for help. Aer they talked to Kevin and Holly, the police
would write her o as a scheming bitch.
She could just keep on. She could. Just. Keep on. Showing up for
work surrounded by suspicions and disapproval. Coming home to this
apartment which was no longer her haven but the site of her debasement.
e locus of her fear. Her heart, which had been banging inside her
ribcage, decided to skip a beat, then another. Her hand ew to her chest,
trying to hold everything in place.
She would get a new job, a new apartment. Doing what? Going
where? He would know she was running from him. Unless she le town,
what was to stop him from showing up at the next apartment, or in the
parking lot of her next job? What was to stop him?
She had never felt helpless before. She knew that feeling was exactly
what he wanted from her.
She could kill him. Yes. at would be best for everyone. But she
doubted she could get away with it. Suspicion would fall on her, his lies
had seen to that. And how would she do it? Could she do it? She had
always hated violence, hated it in him. Could she love it in herself?
She could kill herself. He’d claim that as victory, but she knew he
would miss her. He’d feel cheated. She pictured herself dead and Kevin
and Holly taking Bartlett to live with them.
Steadying herself against the wall, she stood and extended an open
Volume 49.2 | 43 Margaret Hermes | 43
hand to the dog, coaxing him out from behind the couch. Bartlett nuzzled
her palm, following it like bait as she backed away. Vanessa nudged the
couch into place and sat down on it, patting the cushion next to her. e
dog jumped up and presented his belly for a rub. She stroked him for a
minute or two, then reached for a basket near her feet and took up her
knitting needles and a skein of yarn. e last shards of daylight ltered
through the sari curtains, steeping the room in an orange glow. Vanessa
switched on the harsh light of the lamp next to the couch, then looked
down at the pointed metal rods in her lap, turning them over and over.
For the life of her, she couldn’t remember how they worked.
44 | e Laurel Review44 | Lance Larsen
Lance Larsen
e Man Whose Blood
1
We followed the yells out of the Santa Lucia subway station to their
source: a pair of shoe shiners on the sidewalk hurling obscenities at each
other like knives. is was downtown Santiago, mid-March. Drunk shoe
shiners—a category new to both Elder Pickering and me. As Mormon
missionaries we’d seen more than our share of inebriated men, certainly,
but never a pair ghting over clientele. A small crowd gathered to see this
nonsense up close: just what weird turn would this ursday take? Bleary-
eyed, unsteady, they circled like circus bears, one wielding a bread knife,
the other a bike chain. And screaming accusations. Something about
squatter’s rights and stealing customers, something about one hundred
pesos, their tinctures and brushes and rags scattered as if a windstorm
had zigzagged through the city. I may as well invent names for them. e
stocky one, with a bread knife: Tito. e one wielding a bike chain, the
drunker of the two, with oily hair that hung to his shoulders: Gonzalo.
Elder Pickering made like he wanted to leave. “Hang on,” I said. “But we
have an appointment,” he said back. Tito made a few half-hearted stabs. In
response Gonzalo ipped the chain like a whip, catching then wrapping
around Tito’s knee. Tito bellowed. A taxi hurtled past, honking. Gonzalo
looked away just long enough for Tito to pick up a spindly stool where his
customers would sit and bring it down over Gonzalo’s head. is street
ght was nothing like Hollywood, with a pair of toughs trading death
blows, each rising like an unkillable phoenix. e stool broke on contact,
packing enough wallop to knock Gonzalo to the ground and opening a
mean gash above his eye.
2
Gonzalo tightened his grip on the chain and tried to get up. No small
task, with blood sheeting down the le side of his face. Nearby, Tito shook
what was le of the stool, as if to say, You come at me, I’ll hit you again.
Where was a green uniformed carabinero with a machine gun when you
needed one? Tito stepped closer. Before I could think it through, weigh
implications, I jumped between them, these polishers of shoes. My back to
Gonzalo, I faced Tito and held my hands up, an impromptu peace ocer
making things up as he goes. “Oiga,” I said, “can you give him some
Volume 49.2 | 45 Lance Larsen | 45
room?” And I motioned for Tito to return to his scattered supplies on the
sidewalk, some twenty feet away. He looked me over in glassy deance.
I felt there were rats inside me trying to gnaw their way out. Slowly he
stepped back. I turned to Gonzalo, the le half of his face a mess of red,
more blood than I’d ever seen up close. It dripped onto his light blue
shirt. He wiped at the wound and attempted to stand up. “Tranquilo,”
I said, “keep yourself quiet.” I tried to use a missionary voice to hide
my stammers. ere must have been thirty, thirty-ve people circling
us now. I grabbed the cleanest rag I could nd, folded it three times, and
pressed it against the gash.
3
is was 1982, the ninth year of the infamous Pinochet regime, and
Chile was awash in blood, if you bothered to look. Dogs lying in gutters
in puddles of blood. Newspapers tracking in blood, accidents and
murders, new installments daily. Blood dripping from a butchered pig in
someone’s back yard. Blood and entrails in a rusted pickup sliding along
the highway. A charm dipped in pigeon blood pinned to a baby’s bib to
keep o the evil eye. “Whose evil eye?” I asked, with less than a week in
the country. My companion shrugged. “Could be anyone’s, including
yours,” he said. “To a peasant mother, we’re gringos, extranjeros, evil
doers, wicked magicians. Look at the baby wrong, you could curse it for
life, at the very least give it a bad fever.” And underneath visible blood,
ghost blood. Blood spilled by conquistadors, coup blood, blood of the
new regime, blood of the desaparacidos. Blood a mere three blocks
away soaking the turf at El Estadio Nacional where soccer greats once
pounded the eld and pop stars sang their lungs out, where in 1973,
following the Golpe, Pinochet and his military conjunto herded dissidents
into the stadium, then tortured and shot resistors—some 7000, by certain
accounts.
4
When I re-tell the story of Gonzalo ghting Tito, I think, is time, this
time I will nd the right narrative thread. And then I attempt to sneak a
loop around each listener’s ankle and two or three loops around mine,
tie the other end of the rope to the saddle, then slap the horse’s rump,
hoping to be taken for a tortuous ride from which I will extract clarity
and wisdom. Maybe this time I will explain that splattering blood
makes archipelagoes on the sidewalk or that in Spanish “hero” has three
46 | e Laurel Review46 | Lance Larsen
syllables, heroé, and ends with an accent that leaves you with your mouth
open, as if waiting for a fair damsel’s kiss. But such ights violate linear
storytelling, draw an audience dangerously close to bad poetry, not to
mention my own narcissism—Come to think of it, I’ve always thought
of myself as a hero—so I veer back toward straight narrative and reduce
my conundrum in blood to mere anecdote. My listeners nod and say,
“Amazing, amazing,” as we’ve all learned to do, then they launch into
their own anecdotes. at’s when I want to shake them by the shoulders:
Wait, you don’t understand. e man was bleeding, his blood like paint.
He was so drunk he hardly knew life was gushing out of him. Two men
without names, and I jumped between them, a gringo with an accent.
5
Usually what passes as drama in a missionary’s life hinges not on blood,
but something embarrassingly mundane. Something like cologne.
Rewind to my rst Christmas in Chile, one year and three months before
I’d laid eyes on the drunken shoe shiner I’ve come to call Gonzalo. No
tracting or teaching on account of the holiday, so we visited church
members instead. We dropped by the Ortegas, who complained at church
that we had neglected them. True, I suppose. We didn’t mind Sister
Ortega, but Brother Ortega was the type who bears some grandiloquent
testimony about God’s goodness and an angel descending from the sky
with a glowing book, then hours later he wanders the neighborhood
plastered, confronting neighbors and cussing the bleary moon at the
top of his lungs. Not exactly Let-your-light-so-shine material. Brother
Ortega welcomed us to his house. “Bienvenido,” he said. A tiny place
dressed out in Christmas, but reeking of something god awful and spicy.
Once we were settled, he le the room, returning shortly with a bottle.
“Cologne,” he said, as if we’d never heard the word. He unscrewed the
top and splashed some on his neck. “Beautiful smell,” he said, “try it.”
My companion declined, I declined. Brother Ortega oered again. ank
you but no, we said. He thought we were being polite. On the third try,
my companion relented and allowed Brother Ortega to splash some on his
neck. I felt myself gag, cloying spiciness everywhere. “Muy bien,” Brother
Ortega said. He tried to hand the bottle to me. “Beautiful smell, beautiful
smell,” he said, to which I said no thank you. Back and forth, till our
exchange was not about cologne, but about my asinine refusal to christen
myself with his gi. My voice climbed and climbed until something broke
in the room. I wish it had been the bottle, which would have given me a
Volume 49.2 | 47 Lance Larsen | 47
tangible mess to clean up. Brother Ortega retreated to the opposite side
of the room, and Sister Ortega served so drinks, but the broken feeling
stayed. I knew in this life I would always smell slightly rotten to Brother
Ortega—and myself. Why, why didn’t I just dab on the damned cologne?
6
“Hay un medico? Llame una ambulancia,” I yelled. “Call an ambulance.”
Why wasn’t anyone helping us? “Oiga, Elder Pickering,” I said, “I could
use some help.” Couldn’t he see the rag was sopping with blood, squeezing
out between my ngers and dripping down Gonzalo’s face? He hustled
over. “Get me another rag,” I said, “a thicker one.” He lied one from
the ground, as if it were diseased. Maybe it was. “Sure, that one will
do,” I said. “Fold it, now fold it again.” What is it they teach in rst aid
classes—the skull is one of the most dangerous places to get hit? Straight
bone under the skin. Pickering handed me the rag. I slapped it down on
top of the rst and applied more pressure. Had you asked me to begin
CPR that aernoon or treat for shock, I would have proved useless. But
apply pressure to a wound: that I could do. Newcomers stopped and
pointed, Gonzalo groaning and trying to twist away from me. “Está bien,
hermano,” I told him. He calmed a little. Or perhaps he settled into a
more mellow level of drunkenness. Let Elder Pickering and the others
represent the Levite who crossed to the other side of the wounded man
on the road to avoid getting involved. Not me. I pushed on the wound
with one hand, pushed the back of his head with the other, and thought
virtuous thoughts about myself.
7
One evening, a few weeks before that rst Christmas when I refused
to wear nasty cologne, we dropped by to teach a young family, only to
nd ourselves in the middle of a wake. e couple’s rst child, born
prematurely, had thrived for weeks at the hospital, but had taken a sudden
bad turn. Now neighbors paying their respects crowded the house, and
curious children hung around the front door, eager and not eager to go
inside. No bigger than a doll, the dead child lay in a tiny wooden box,
with a piece of glass over the top, to keep ies o and the smell down.
His body was lled with blood and the blood was going bad. Except for a
hodgepodge of burning tapers, the room looked as it always had: a radio,
a couple of chairs, a television with rabbit ears crookedly poking to the
heavens, a re-touched marriage portrait built on contradiction—a couple
48 | e Laurel Review48 | Lance Larsen
looking preternaturally young in an old-fashioned sort of way. Under
glass, the baby appeared shriveled, as if rescued from a pond. I had been
to exactly one funeral in my life: a grade-school basketball coach. What
did I know about losing a child? I couldn’t even say grief in Spanish. My
Chilean companion taught an impromptu lesson on mercy and God’s
love, then on bended knee oered a prayer of consolation, and we slipped
out of the house into the dark.
8
Oh, the rich paradoxes of blood. It owed no more in this infant but
carried forth in the parents, fueling the accusations they aimed at God.
According to certain theologians, Eden fell into wilderness at the very
moment that Adam and Eve partook of the forbidden fruit and blood
replaced the celestial elixir in their veins. Not only did the Israelites
believe that “the life of the esh is in the blood,” but they prohibited
any eating of it—a pragmatic health restriction yes, but also a symbolic
religious prohibition. To eat blood was to eat death. Isn’t the Bible a kind
of book of blood? Cain spilling what owed in Abel’s veins, rst murder.
Moses turning innocent water into ponds of blood and vexing Pharaoh’s
court. Believers smearing a little of the red stu on the lintels and saving
their rstborn. You sacrice a lamb, you ingest the Lamb of God. Oh,
Man of Sorrows whose shed blood swallows my blood, take us up and
drink us as we drink you.
9
How many people gathered around the bleeding shoe shiner at Santa
Lucia? Say thirty, a conservative estimate. irty adults times ten pints
of blood, I’m rounding down for the sake of simplicity, so 300 pints
gathered on a sidewalk in Santiago, Chile in March a few days before my
birthday. Among us, men who cut themselves shaving, women who bled
themselves fertile three or four days a month—in short, adults used to
blood and the way it leaks out. We lamented it, monitored it, denied
it, tried to stanch it, swore by it and swore at it, rinsed it away, walked
around in public fueled by it. What were we but movable vases of blood,
all that salty red stu behaving according to rules—at least most of the
time. None of us thinking: skin is a gi, skin lets me take my nine or
twelve pints of blood for a walk, lets me buy hot bread at the corner bakery
or stop at the cathedral to light a candle for my ill daughter, or canoodle
with the one I love. None thinking, this skin in which I am wonderfully
Volume 49.2 | 49 Lance Larsen | 49
wrapped keeps blood in and the world out. And yet, when a portion of
one pint of 300 collective pints spills on skin and clothes and dirty cement
and keeps spilling, we collect like sharks. My blood, we reason, knows
enough to stay where it belongs, why doesn’t his? What is it underneath
suits and dresses, under lust and revenge and heartlessness and curiosity,
underneath underwear, under skin, what is it inside our blood that gives
blood pause?
10
One of my last assignments in Chile was to visit a dierent group of
missionaries each Friday and give them gamma globulin shots—to curb
racing hormones, local members believed. e truth was a good deal
more mundane: to bolster antibodies and keep missionaries on their feet.
I had expert training in this task, which is to say, another missionary
gave me a needle and an old orange one aernoon and said, Practice
with water till the orange bursts or you get it right. I debuted the next
day. e task was simple enough: warm the gummy gamma globulin
to room temperature, ll the syringe, get the air bubbles out, pinch the
missionary’s tricep, plunge the needle in at an angle, inject slowly, and
talk up the work. “Hey Sister, you’re really tearing it up in San Bernardo.
Twenty-three discussions last week.” Or, “Elder, you guys still playing
soccer on Mondays?” ough I never liked giving the injections any
more than missionaries liked receiving them, I fell into the ritual of it—
small talk, rolled-up sleeves, the sting of the needle, tired jokes to scare
o weariness. And underneath the camaraderie, a smorgasbord of blood:
he blood, she blood, anorexic Sister Munoz blood with her eshless arms,
the blood of Elder Rock (his actual name), a weight lier with cantaloupe
biceps so big he had to take o his shirt for an injection. Blood smearing
each cotton ball held to each arm, cotton balls collecting in a wastebasket
at my feet. A, B, O positive, O negative, what are we, who will we become
when we are beyond blood?
11
One of my favorite responsibilities: interviewing candidates for baptism,
especially young kids. Beribboned or cowlicked, faces scrubbed, eager
to say yes no matter what the question. Adults—a trickier lot. We
talked about faith, repentance, white tunics, burying the old self in a
grave of water, the Holy Ghost like sweet re. I reminded them it was
not me receiving their burden. I was merely an agent. Sometimes their
50 | e Laurel Review50 | Lance Larsen
confessions bled from them in a torrent of tears and regret: violence,
drunkenness, drugs, thievery, unfaithfulness, abuse. A woman who had
three abortions, a man who beat up a rival gang member and le him
for dead under a bridge—no idea whether he pulled through. I recall an
investigator in her early twenties. Aer weeks of lessons and an interview,
she was ready. Now, the day before her baptism, she turned jumpy and
distressed and wanted to speak in private. Under a darkening sky, we
stepped outside her parents’ house. “Are you having second thoughts?” I
asked. She shook her head no, she wanted baptism in the worst way, but
there was this thing. Her hands turning in front of her like paddle wheels,
this thing inside her. What thing? I said. is thing, muy adentro, she
said, her eyes welling up, this contraceptivo, and somehow I understood
she meant an IUD. She had gone to a clinic to have it removed, but her
doctor was on vacation. Would she have to postpone the baptism, with
this mala cosa, this bad thing nestled deep inside, like a crow’s foot? Of
course not, I said, you’re as ready as anyone, and I thought of the woman
in the New Testament, how she reached out her hand in a jostling crowd,
and was cured of twelve years of blood.
12
e story of Gonzalo was a story of blood, but also other things. I rst
tried writing it as a poem. To create a little distance, I made the narrator
an exchange student, not a missionary. Instead of scriptures, I gave him
a violin in a black case. Instead of supplying a missionary to travel with,
I let him wend his way home alone aer a violin lesson in Las Condes.
In the poem I never nished, the narrator, aer holding a dirty rag to
Gonzalo’s head, drops into the subway and travels the bowels of Santiago
to emerge in La Cisterna to study math with his sort-of girlfriend. She
was lled with blood, and so was he, and their bodies were not broken and
aer he told the story of holding the bloody man, she called him a hero,
her mouth partly open. I wanted to slow things down as they slipped
outside. I wanted her to massacre English and him to stumble through
the subjunctive. I wanted her to notice blood on his shirt and him to taste
lemon on her mouth when he kissed her. I wanted him to follow the River
Maipú back to his host family. I wanted him to stop to urinate and look
up at the moon, the same moon spilling indierent light on his house
back in the States. I wanted him to add his water to the water of the river
and laugh out loud at nothing in particular, then shiver against the cold.
Volume 49.2 | 51 Lance Larsen | 51
13
I held Gonzalo’s head for how long, ve minutes, maybe six? I don’t
remember an ambulance pulling up, just two men in white carrying
medical supplies. ey nodded at me. eir nod said, So you intervened,
Pal. Big deal. Go back to your silly missionary life. Real help has arrived.
I held Gonzalo’s head a moment longer. Part of me thought, No, I’ll keep
him to myself. But it was a small part of me. I stood up and walked away.
Gonzalo said nothing, not thank you, not goodbye. e crowd stared
for a moment, as if I were leaving a stage, then turned their attention to
the medicos who were guaranteeing that Gonzalo remained the center of
attention. When I replay this story now I don’t think of myself as heroic
so much as laughable. A boy, a young man, not used to blood. Laughable
but lucky. I blew my rst chance at embracing a country when I refused
the smelly cologne of a drunken man, but not my second. I can still smell
Gonzalo, his unwashed body and the seepy stink of alcohol, his mouth a
gash of unbrushed teeth. As much as I recoiled, I also felt a erce purpose,
my hand pressing his forehead, keeping the blood inside him where it
belonged. “You better wash up,” Elder Pickering said. I must have looked
pretty mangy—blood on both hands, splashes on my shirt and pants,
great drops like toe caps on my shoe. We found a water faucet at a nearby
park and I washed. e red disappeared from my shirt but le a halo, wet
and pink. “Well?” I said. Elder Pickering looked me over. “Not bad,” he
said. We walked the three blocks to the bus stop, my shirt cold and wet
against my skin.
14
When I think of Santiago in the early 80s, I think of towering glass
buildings downtown and open-air markets that explode with trade each
morning, I think of squatters and ramshackle slums and battered buses,
I think of soldiers toting machine guns, I think of empanadas and the
greening foothills of the Andes, I think of kids playing soccer in the street,
and I think too of the hundreds of memorials to spilled blood dotting the
city. ese are cobbled-together aairs at best—more like cairns than
monuments. Where the train tracks veer south and a freighter hit a child
ying a kite, a tiny shrine. ere in the eld, at the base of a giant electric
tower, three shrines. At a dangerous intersection, four or ve shrines,
each tethered to a dierent ghost, a dierent accident. We will not forget,
these shrines seem to say. And in the process, these shrines convert victim
into supplicant, supplicant into advocate, advocate into a local saint who
52 | e Laurel Review52 | Lance Larsen
might curry favor with the Virgin and her wounded Son. A theology so
primitive and naive that I can’t help but feel drawn to it in memory. At
night, a candle burning inside a shrine beside a picture of the deceased,
kept company by a Virgin the size of a doll. I can x you, says the candle.
And take away your struggles, says the photograph. ere’s room for you
here, says the Virgin. Shrink yourself down, she says to me, to everyone.
Shrink yourself down and crawl inside this refuge station, curl up on a
dollhouse bed, rest your legs, poor mules. Let someone so small He is
immense rock you till morning.
Volume 49.2 | 53 Peter Leight | 53
Peter Leight
Small Scale
My room is big enough, and also small enough, I like to be able to touch
everything in reach, of the four corners how many do we actually use?
Sometimes I lean one way or the other, reaching out in order to extend my
reach, when I touch the wall it’s my wall-span. e light comes from the
le, as in Vermeer’s rooms. ere is a window across from the door, on
the opposite side of the room, before I open the window I close the door,
before I close the door I turn on the lights, not all the lights but the lights
that are normally on when I’m inside. Every day I move the furniture
around until it’s in the right place for that day, as if I’m moving in with
myself. Telling myself please move over. My drawers are full of what I
want near me but closed in, conned, things I don’t use but can’t bear to
give away. I’m not even opening my favorites—sometimes I think we pay
more attention when there’s less to pay attention to. I have a program
that cleans up all the other programs, making room for everything I need
to have room for, for now I’m sticking to the basic exercises with broad
applicability, the slide is an example, or changing positions. Picking a
little, as when you deadhead the irises. Everybody knows the nuclear
family has been split up.
54 | e Laurel Review54 | Alex Lemon
Alex Lemon
But Being So
e veil between
Worlds is paper-
in—Home-
Made rooster
Coop vanished
Of chickens,
Untouched blow-
Torch whooshing
On, the bulk-bag
Of yogurt covered
Almonds smashed
To the nest
Powder—& some
Times the dead
Reach over to
Break & borrow
Our stu, to lick
Our cheeks with
Frostbit tongues.
Each of us has
Something hidden
Beneath the layers
Of perfect lacquer
We’ve second-
Skinned our esh
With—there is,
In us, a piece we
Can not get rid of
Or explain. No
One & everyone
Wants to be
Dierent, to nd
Pleasure waiting
For them when
eir eyes open
Volume 49.2 | 55 Alex Lemon | 55
In the morning.
It is perfectly
Fine if all you
Want to do is
Cry & you have
No idea why.
56 | e Laurel Review56 | Alex Lemon
e night sky is over-
Whelmed, bullying
With stars & I am gargling
A full hive of livewire bees
While I wait for the sacred
Blood & esh to be
Administered. It is a dirty
Trick—this being alive—
But the body does not
Lie. Arthritis. Heart
Murmur. I am a room
With too-loud music,
With three doors, each
at open to a janitor’s closet
In which an antlerless
Deer is snout deep
In a blood-winking
Apron, hung.
My head explodes with
Light because I have
Allowed myself
To forget all of the trouble
My skeleton carries
Deep in its marrow.
e time is nally
Right—the blackberry
Brambles need to be
Rolled in, naked.
Alex Lemon
I am inking that You Are inking What I’m
inking
Volume 49.2 | 57 Jennie Malboeuf | 57
Jennie Malboeuf
Wilding
I should be able to recall
the reason I was touching
that cat. Daddy asked why
I did it. He told me not to.
I do remember where I was:
the little corner when the house
forms an L, before the addition
walked you to the outbuilding,
before the bedroom of our cousins’
countryhouse had caught re—a dry pump
and bucket on one side and gravel lot
on the other. I always had a skirt on,
so most likely I had a skirt on then.
I squatted down, I know that,
held out my hand for her.
ought I could gentle her fur.
She broke the skin; I tried to cry so.
She looked full of kittens. Daddy said
we’d have to wait a couple weeks
to watch if she turned up dead.
To make sure I didn’t catch something bad.
58 | e Laurel Review58 | Oscar Oswald
Oscar Oswald
From the Chapbook The Precepts (A Postscript)
Your renegade, in citrus buds she icked
aloof, ed. And so a pox is wiped
across the lips of thousands for the rst
of us to cleanse. Did she do it? is
will answer that and more: the kerosene
of coding. It’s you, with the genders never
spawned. You rigged the opposition with
a sky, a public bathroom, and the rest:
e whimpering errata in the law.
Our acceleration. Our end, like stones
inside our throats. Our solitary nests,
scung space, your yield of many peaches
tossed into the air. Immediate
unconsciousness. Your pung brow, a point
without a compass, directions billowing
through foggy rays. Calling battleships
to roost. Good graves. Patiently, to press.
Volume 49.2 | 59 Oscar Oswald | 59
Oscar Oswald
From the Chapbook The Precepts (A Postscript)
Hold on to what you spur, its future is
your chance, a precious droplet entering
a gallery from pleasant rain. No
description. Our satisfaction imitates
the being there, will suture to the world
we brook. Torn angel, humbled by the grass
growing underneath a attened world.
I’m there, upstairs, acclimated quickly
like soldiers, selling sugary cartoons
of gravity. How can it feel to y
away? To respect the dead, a kite
of right, a glitch? e baritone of shrinking
fetches sound to thinking (curfews from
the bank). But you read like empty women,
the milestone I was, frontier abruptly
privatized for fracking. Let’s be vital
bonds, crystallized by freezing law.
60 | e Laurel Review60 | Oscar Oswald
Oscar Oswald
From the Chapbook The Precepts (A Postscript)
Asymmetrical star, vibrantly
renewed. In comparison to waking
up a cloud, or rather walking up
the street. ere is no universe but ours
and theirs. Our common song is optional.
Holy puddle, distilling Adam’s time
with Eve’s collage. We will fail, like
a summer toque, one that falls below
the nose. Micro-moral. Paradise
of picked teams, in eeny meeny miny
rows. Away we go: Let’s build it all
again. e vote will be announced in psalms.
Volume 49.2 | 61 Simon Perchik | 61
Simon Perchik
L18
Not a chance! the gate
tries to open though rust
was already mixed in, driing
till the Earth lay alongside
too weak to turn back
the way the lines on your palms
still ow close to riverbanks
and longing, struggle to pull
this mud soaked ironwork
into the darkness and turns
that stayed in the air
aer it became the sky
even in the daytime
–you almost see the gate move
and with both hands, yell
you’re working on it, yell
anything! how the latch
is just about to loosen, yell
so the fence breaks apart
wading in dirt no longer the rain
that never lets go all the way down.
62 | e Laurel Review62 | Alex Poppe
Alex Poppe
Room 308
Sunlight streaked through the orange-red leaves, illuminating the dust
motes hiding in the pale air. Bridget, the student nursing aide supervisor,
was helping a chubby toddler feed the ducks in the articial lake at the
center of the grounds. Her gentle cooing skimmed over grass blades and
oated up to the window, where I stood. My forehead was slick with a
layer of oil. My scrub top was crusty with dried oatmeal, and my pockets
were bloated with wadded Kleenex. Visitors’ Day was winding down. On
Visitors’ Day, we got a lot of extended family and clergy and shiny people
who came because the other people who came were shiny and felt guilty,
and no one was too ashamed to cry big tears, and stay for a few hours to
feel good about themselves and the time they had just put in, and they
needed extra Kleenex from the student nursing aides who were always
there.
I was watching Bridget skip across the so lawn to deliver the child
back to his mother. Like me, the mom stood apart, watching Bridget and
her son. Beyond clarifying the intricacies of patient sponge baths, I never
spoke to Bridget. We were separated by experience and by the fact that
she pitied me. Bridget was twenty-four, which was four years more than
my age, and we had spent every weekday of the autumn here. I did it
because I was addicted to Xanax and Bridget did it because her brother
was still deployed, and she believed that her helping someone over here
would increase the chances of someone helping him over there. Bridget
swung the toddler high before placing him at his mother’s empty side and
nodded towards the window as she walked back to the main building of
the VA hospital. e mother bent down to retie her son’s sneaker laces and
her skirt rode up, revealing a dancer’s legs. I le the freshly-cut grass smell
of the open window and entered the Clorox air of the linen closet to check
my stash, pausing to grab an alibi of bleached sheets. Bridget, trailing
sunshine, passed me as I exited and crooked her nger for me to follow.
Over her shoulder she told me there was a Teaching Point, a new patient,
still unconscious from surgery, and we needed to monitor his vitals as he
had just lost both his legs from the hip down. I didn’t ask what’d happened
to his in-between. She entered room 308 and led me into the stale dark.
A fraction of a man lay in the bed. An endotracheal tube snaked past a
faint harelip scar above his upper lip into his mouth, and even though
Volume 49.2 | 63 Alex Poppe | 63
his eyes were closed, I saw that this head and torso belonged to my ex-
commanding ocer. I stepped into the bedside table and knocked over a
silver-framed photograph of a beautiful mini-skirted woman with ballet
legs holding a baby upright against her chest for the camera.
I’m sorry, I said. I was sorry I had said sorry.
Bridget’s face wrinkled through a chain of causality. If A leads to
B, and B leads to C; A results in C aer which she said nothing, as if to
say, Can you handle this? with an element of, You’d better handle this
because he and others like him have sacriced so much, so that you and
I can stand here with our whole selves fully intact, so I said, It’s okay, to
mean I’m okay, I can handle this and so much more, so please continue to
instruct me.
e next day was the start of Marine Fest, a three-day bacchanal
during which thousands of marines would arrive and celebrate being
marines in our very stately and very gracious town. On the last night of
the festival, when the marines were decked out in their best Blue Dress A’s,
sipping cocktails in the Potomac Ballroom Library to celebrate the 239th
birthday of the Marine Corps, I would be cleaning bed pans of loose stool
because during that day and the one before, able-bodied marines would
have visited their disabled half-bodied brethren and snuck them tastes of
all they had been denied. During my rounds, the visiting marines would
tell me to take extra good care of their boys, and they would laugh fatly
to say, You are here to service, or they would wrap their ngers around
my wrist to say, I could break you; except for those marines who exhaled
briskly through their teeth as soon as they stepped back into the hallway.
ose marines would slip me a y and say thank you with their eyes
glued to their shoes and I would wonder at their imprudence and give
the y to Dr. Bob, a fourth-year resident with a gambling problem and
a liberated prescription pad. Dr. Bob lived in a high rise near the marina
and claimed to know what every nursing aide tasted like.
Bridget knew about Dr. Bob but couldn’t do much. She was small
and Christian and dyed her hair blond and kept two extra pairs of
ironed scrubs in her work locker so she could change if a guest had an
unfortunate accident. She called the patients “guests” because she felt it
added an element of optimism to the VA. e VA was very clean and very
cold. Bridget led seminars on Turning and Positioning, and kept an eye
on us. Most nights aer her shi ended, she headed to the hospital chapel
to log in a half-hour of prayer for the worst-os. I overheard her tell an
unconscious “guest” she did it to stock up brownie points with the Man
64 | e Laurel Review64 | Alex Poppe
Upstairs, and would be happy to put a word in for the mummied man
in the bed before her. She couldn’t control the nursing aides in their free
time, but she could make them clean bed pans on her time. All of the
nursing aides did yoga and were blond and had Botox. Once a month, they
pitched in and bought some black market syringes of ller and bribed a
cosmetology technician to smooth their foreheads or plump out their lips
and hands. Aerwards they’d hit Chihuahua’s to sip frozen margaritas
through extra-wide straws.
Dr. Bob rolled ve marijuana cigarettes for a twenty in the dry-
goods storage room behind the cafeteria in the basement, which is where
Bridget would nd us on the night of the Marine Corps Birthday Ball,
and she would be in an uncharitable mood that evening because some
of the marines who celebrated the Corps’ birthday every year, a group
of dog trainers for the Corps and not actual combat soldiers, husky, and
raucous and braggadocio drunk, had cornered her by the hospital gi
shop and sung her the Marines’ Hymn with altered lyrics and Bridget had
to smile like a girl unwrapping an expensive present she knew she was
getting and shue over in her regulation shoes and thin cotton scrubs to
shake each enormous calloused palm and gush You are our heroes! You
are our heroes! and let the handshakes turn into full body hugs while
each marine took his turn feeling her up. When Bridget found Dr. Bob
and me lying across plastic-wrapped cartons of adult diapers smoking
a joint, she would have some things to say about my blackened soul and
some more things to say about my degenerate character, which was worse
than a gutter-tramp’s, and only one thing to say about the prospects of my
future training as one of her Certied Nursing Assistants.
But this shi was winding down. I’d spent the last bit of it sitting
with the patients who hadn’t had any visitors, watching reruns of e
Price is Right and betting on the over or under. Lance Corporal William
Philips won a new car and my Caribbean cruise vacation in the Showcase
Showdown, which made him happy because an ambush in the Anbar
Province had taken his sight, so he didn’t drive anymore. I ued his
pillows during the commercial break and folded his ngers around a
chocolate true because I remembered when I was a kid how excited I
was when someone paid me a bit of special attention just because. e
true was wrapped in fancy foil with a famous quote printed on the
inside. When we were little, my sister had a desktop calendar with a fresh
aphorism printed on each page of the year. Lying shoulder to shoulder on
our stomachs with our bare feet dangling o the edge of her twin bed,
Volume 49.2 | 65 Alex Poppe | 65
we’d look for meaning in the convoluted words. We’d look for signicance
in anything, we wishers upon eyelashes.
e trues came from a store-within-a-store inside the hospital
gi shop. ey were sold by Sonny who’d spent four years in a federal
penitentiary for drug smuggling, following seven years on the lam. A
DEA ocer spotted him in the background of a Bud Light commercial,
which is how he got caught; and then a local church organization led by
a former New Orleans Saints’ cheerleader, thirty years past her prime,
organized a petition drive, which is how he got out early, two years ago at
age seventy. Sonny oen asked me how I could eat so much chocolate and
still be as skinny as dripping water. He’d ask, Where do you put it? In my
pocket, I’d say, and this much was true, so I didn’t say anything else. He’d
tsk his tongue against the roof of his mouth, but put a few extra pieces
in my bag. People who knew about Sonny’s past compared him to Gene
Hackman, and I think he liked that.
I righted the silver-framed photo which still had its worn price tag stuck
on the back. My ex-commanding ocer was my ex-adjudicator and had
signed o on my discharge without benets. He was once a strong and
beautiful man. His wife, probably his wife, entered as I was recording his
pulse and respiration rate. I say probably his wife because, although he
wore no ring and had never had at the School of Infantry, Camp Geiger,
she did. e two-carat solitaire caught the last rays of sunlight streaming
around the edges of the blinds covering the window. I gured this ring to
be a neon announcement of worth, a quantication of how much she was
loved, to the world, and I felt sorry for her, and for myself, to be caring
for my ex-commanding ocer here, in this place of broken people, and
for her to see that her handsome husband was now a half-man, and no
amount of prayer or medical miracles or stored up good deeds was going
to restore the other half. She was in a lose-lose situation because if she
stayed with him, she would grow to hate him, and if she le him, she
would hate herself, at least for a little while, and if she stayed and had
an aair, then all his comrades-in-arms would hate her, unless the aair
was with a fellow marine that her husband had pre-approved. In the right
now, she’d need a robust mental Blu-ray collection because he would never
again be with her in that way a man is with a woman, similar to but not
the same as the way he was with me, which was why I was no longer part
of the Marine Corps. I was an excellent misjudge of character; this ability
was, in part, why a year ago I was nursing broken ribs and a bruised back
66 | e Laurel Review66 | Alex Poppe
at the Camp Geiger inrmary.
I was standing with the patient clipboard against my chest. e
wife slid into the spouse-spot on the window side of the bed. Bridget was
watching to make sure I didn’t upset her or anything else in the room, and
I thought about excusing myself so I would not have to watch the wife’s
fragile shoulders move up and down like creased wings, but marines are
taught to suck it up and move forward, and if I le now, Bridget would
think I was delicate, and she had little regard for me as it was.
Bridget oered to check on the wife’s toddler, who was probably
being fed chocolate fudge brownies from the Get Well Soon! baskets that
piled up in the nurses station, to give her some moments alone with her
husband. Because Bridget regarded me as an extension of herself when
she was teaching, I returned the clipboard to its naked tack and prepared
to leave. But the wife blinked with incomprehension so I doubted she
equated the still bundle in bed with her understanding of husband. She
introduced herself as Ashley and said that we should stay, she didn’t wish
to inconvenience us, and we should go about our business as if she weren’t
there. en she told us what good people we were to be doing what we
were doing, and because I don’t like to talk, Bridget said thank you and
regied her praise to all the men and women in uniform who serve this
great nation and to God, who always got praised by Bridget in case he was
listening. I don’t think Ashley was on speaking terms with God because
that’s when she interrupted Bridget with a snorting cough and turned her
eyes on me, looking at me for a long moment. Bridget followed Ashley’s
stare to the dried oatmeal dotting my shirt and suggested I excuse myself
to change my scrub top.
I nodded at Bridget’s advice and exited. I didn’t want to feel sympathy
for Ashley. I didn’t want to fold her jeweled ngers around trues
wrapped in inspirational foil because she had been loved and cherished
by my ex-commanding ocer and he had broken me. I walked past the
nurses station where their son was sitting on a desktop boxing with a
Tweety Bird balloon tied to a gi basket handle. He cried Duck! every
time he hit the bird’s face, and it arced low to the oor before coming back
for more, and the little boy would laugh a sound like splashing water.
Bridget probably knew I didn’t keep an extra scrub top in my locker.
No abandoned shirts lay on the changing room oor. I rubbed at the
dried oatmeal with some wet paper towels, which shed a layer of soapy
paper dandru along the institutional green-colored cloth. Standing in
my bra to wash my shirt in the sink, I imagined how Bridget and Ashley’s
Volume 49.2 | 67 Alex Poppe | 67
patient-care conversation would go:
New trainee?
Yes.
Any good?
No.
ink she’ll improve?
Probably not, bless. But God never gives us more than we can bear.
I visited Ley, an artillery gunner who liked when I read to him. We
were working our way through Something Wicked is Way Comes when
Bridget stopped by his open door and beckoned me. Bookmarking our
place with a true, I laid the paperback beside his pillow and told Ley
I would see him later. When I stood, Bridget pursed her lips at the wet
patches on my uniform top.
I thought I told you to always have an extra uniform at work.
I forgot.
Do you know the new patient?
I bent down to pick up some invisible lint so I would need to wash
my hands. My scrub pants were too long, and where the hem dragged on
the ground was outlined in a gray. I straightened and crossed to the sink.
Over the sound of running water, Bridget recycled her question.
Do you know him?
No.
Bridget checked Ley’s chart and exited. I followed about half a pace
behind.
I’ll need to pray for him tonight.
Yeah.
Aer you do a bed pan check on the oor, you can go.
Okay. Great.
Are you going out tonight?
I don’t know.
You’ve still got slop on your shirt. Since you’re not going out, you’ll
have plenty of time to launder and press two fresh shirts for your next
shi. I want to see them before you go on the oor. Am I understood?
Yes, I said. I wondered if Bridget was going out aer her all-inclusive
chapel stop and if she had any friends either. Even though she meant
well, in her own way, the other nursing aides kept their distance. Bridget
was pretty in that conventional style that women found reassuring and
men found non-threatening, so she’d probably never had a locked and
68 | e Laurel Review68 | Alex Poppe
loaded .45 held at the base of her skull as someone older and of a higher
rank than she pulled down her pants against her will and made her cry. I
could imagine Bridget marrying one of the charity cases in wheelchairs,
an ocer candidate friend of her brother’s, someone with a short life
expectancy and a generous pension payout, someone who told blond
jokes and could not fuck his wife but actually liked women.
I went into the supply closet where I kept my stash. With the door
shut, it was colorless and quiet inside, and I liked it because then I was just
a person in a supply closet in a hospital. My ngertips grazed the stacks
of starched, clean sheets, some of which were rough and some of which
smelled like a Chinese dry cleaner’s. From my stockpile of Xanax, I slid an
orally disintegrating tablet under my tongue and waited for my blood to
stop crackling and for my conscious mind to settle into that zone between
drunkenness and consequence. I took only half the dosage, in case I ran
into Bridget again, and stored the other half inside my bra cup.
To the bed pans. In Sta Sergeant Mohammad Aksari’s room, a lively
poker game was in full swing when I came in. Sta Sergeant Mohammad
Aksari was a career ocer with seven tours of duty split between Iraq
and Afghanistan under his belt. Many of the marines who cycled in and
out of the VA had served with or under him, and he was popular because
of his knowledge of Arabic and his commitment to the Corps. He sat in
bed with his knobby potato toes sticking out from under the blanket.
Sometimes when I gave him a sponge bath, he’d tell me to do my duty
and suck him o. I’d say, Habir, which I thought meant “dick” in Arabic
but which I later learned meant “expert.” e poker game cloaked me in
invisibility so I le his bed pan where it lay before marking zero output on
his chart and slipping away.
Dusk had shied to stars. From room 308’s doorway, I saw that
Ashley had gone, maybe to take her son home or to get something to
eat, so I entered. e room felt womblike. In its so opacity my ex-
commanding ocer looked as dignied as he had on that rst day of
School of Infantry training. In the corridor, footsteps were ushering the
full-bodied outside, back among the living. e headlights on their cars
were guiding the drivers away from the VA hospital, probably towards the
marina. At midnight, there would be amateur reworks you could watch
from the promenade. is was in anticipation of the Corps’ birthday. It
was part of the town’s eort to make the visiting servicemen and women
feel appreciated in a world grown weary of war. Since my discharge, I had
Volume 49.2 | 69 Alex Poppe | 69
been living in a nearby beach town, renting a room from a medicated
bipolar heiress who dabbled in interior design and was a devotee of face
yoga. When her parents divorced early the next year, and her father’s new
girlfriends began refurnishing his many residences, she would nd herself
out of a decorating job and move to Los Feliz to try to break into stunt work.
She’d try for movies, and then for television, and then for commercials,
and nally for computer games. I’m still waiting to see her Claymation
head being decapitated from her anatomically-enhanced body when I
play Assassin’s Creed on my PlayStation. I would like for something big
to happen for her because she never said a word when I sampled from
her bathroom’s well-stocked medicine cabinet, and particularly because
on the evening of the Corps Birthday Ball, when Bridget discovered my
prone body across boxes of adult incontinence products, a Dr. Bob at my
side and his joint in my hand, and aer clearing out my locker and being
escorted o the premises, I would arrive home to an empty apartment
with full pill bottles which I’d empty, and because the emergency medical
technicians would smell marijuana on me, they’d call the police who’d
search the house and nd my roommate’s hidden cache which I hadn’t
known she had, which would make this the last autumn she lived in this
beach town.
I settled into a chair in the corner of the room and marveled at where
my ex-commanding ocer’s legs used to be. He had practiced martial
arts and used to deliver a mean roundhouse kick. is man, my former
commanding ocer whom I would have risked my life for once upon a
time ago, was so still, so motionless that I felt a certain grief. Because he
was no longer the Man In Charge, he no longer owned the truth.
We’d met on the rst day of School of Infantry classroom instruction.
He epitomized the ideal marine: courageous, honorable, committed.
He told me what to expect during the twenty-nine day Marine Combat
Training Course and promised to impart the knowledge and ability
necessary to operate in a combat environment. He made me feel at home
and said he’d show me the ropes to get me qualied. Later, he spoke to
me privately about not wearing makeup around the other recruits or
running in jogging shorts because some marines viewed the women on
the base as walking mattresses who were there only to be fucked, and I
would be asking for it if I did either of those things because who doesn’t
capitalize on an opportunity that’s presented to him, and I didn’t want to
be charged with conduct unbecoming did I, and to remember that boys
and girls and alcohol just don’t mix and from that point on only he would
70 | e Laurel Review70 | Alex Poppe
be able to sign o on my qualications and I should come to his barracks
for those signatures. I might have sneered a little, I don’t know because
I can’t control it, and in times of great tension or danger I sneer. at’s
when he started sleeping in my bed. I’d come in from training to nd
him sprawled across my mattress, and then I’d have to wait inside my car,
which was the only place he didn’t have a key to, until he woke up and
went away. When I nally reported him to the higher-ups, I was asked if I
had a boyfriend and was told that I was weak to complain about him just
because I didn’t like him. One of them suggested I was a hot little mess
who was trying to destroy the Corps, and maybe I should be tested for a
personality disorder.
e door to the room opened. I should have jumped up and
pretended that I was doing something other than sitting in the semi-
darkness with a rehearsal corpse, but that Xanax had kicked in so I didn’t.
It was Miss Patty the Tex-Mex oor nurse who was on husband number
ve and therefore impossible to surprise. It’s bath time, was all she said,
and then, Give me a hand. I lled a small bowl with warm, soapy water
and gathered some supplies. Miss Patty leaned over the bed and pulled
my ex-commanding ocer towards her. Get the tie, she said.
I didn’t want to get the tie because then I might touch him, and I
didn’t want to see a spread of esh that was both strong and weak at the
same time, and I didn’t want to be close enough to smell his dead-weather
smell, but I got the tie because that is what student nursing aides do, and
more important, that is what marines do, and it wasn’t as bad as bringing
him his coee aer he kicked my legs out from underneath me when I
had gone to his oce to retrieve the supply closet keys so I could feed
the station dogs as part of my nightly cleanup duty at Camp Geiger. Miss
Patty gently laid my ex-commanding ocer back against his pillows, then
drew the gown up past his shoulders and chest. ere wasn’t much le of
the area below his belly button. e part that wasn’t covered in plaster
and bandages looked like it had been through a shark attack. Tiny beads
of perspiration formed above my upper lip and I used my lower lip to
wipe them away. Ok, Miss Patty said, but she was looking at me, then Ok
Handsome, and she was looking at him, We’re going to give you a little
spa treatment so you can rest more comfortably during the night, even
though he wasn’t conscious to hear her, and then she sponged at his face,
neck, chest, and arms as one would a newborn. I took away the damp used
cloths and gave Miss Patty clean ones before I rolled my ex-commanding
ocer onto his side so Miss Patty could clean his back. I was surprised he
Volume 49.2 | 71 Alex Poppe | 71
seemed as heavy now as he had then, when he had used his body to pin me
down on the barracks’ oor, because there was so little le of him. Is there
anything else you need me to do? I asked and when Miss Patty shook her
head I exited into the mall-lit hallway.
Ashley had just stepped o the elevator and was walking towards
my ex-commanding ocer’s room. Oh, you’re still here, she said but she
didn’t sound surprised, to which I said, Yes, and then we stared at each
other like two people who don’t know each other and therefore have
nothing to say. e whites of her eyes were hacked by tiny broken blood
vessels. Well, I said and took a step around her, which she countered
with, Wait, and then, I am so sad, which was said so quietly that I wasn’t
sure if it had come from her or me. I took a true from my pocket and
held it out to her. is might help, I said. When she didn’t respond, I
explained, ere’s an inspirational message on the inside. Ashely didn’t
take the candy so I added, It tastes good too, and then lied her le hand
from where it hung at the side of her body and formed her ngers into a
tiny cup. It might help with the sadness, I said as I dropped the chocolate
into her palm and closed her ngers around it. I turned and walked away
because I had just lied to her. Nothing eased the sadness.
ank you, she said as she caught up to me. You must be tired aer
such a long day. Would you like to have some coee? I told her I didn’t
drink coee and needed to get going, which was another lie because there
was no one and nothing waiting for me anywhere. She opened her mouth
to say something, but her words got caught in her throat, which made her
face look like a sh’s. I smiled at this, and she must have taken my smile as
reconsideration because she closed her mouth and swallowed and looked
at me the way a pretty child looks at the new kid before she invites her to
play. en she said she would like, if it wasn’t too much trouble, for me
to sit with her in the hospital cafeteria while she worked up the nerve to
enter her husband’s room. She said she had asked me because she could
see that I was a kind person, a good person, a person her husband would
like, and my giving her the true had conrmed this. I kept my face very
still, and tried not to think, as I followed her into the elevator and we stood
side by side silently watching the oor numbers light up in descending
succession, about what her husband might say if he knew his wife had
decided to conde in me, or if he’d worry that I might share a few secrets
too, or if any of what he’d done to me had aected his life at all.
I sat at an out-of-the-way table as Ashley stood in line. At this late
hour the cafeteria was almost empty, and most of the kitchen sta were
72 | e Laurel Review72 | Alex Poppe
smoking cigarettes in the alley beside the delivery dock as they played
Frisbee with their hair nets. e place stank of tater tots. e chime of
china shattering against ceramic tiles pierced the chicken-fried air. A
litany of Spanish swear words rang out from the dishwasher. Across the
uorescent bulb dining room, Miss Patty momentarily lied her head
from the romance novel she was reading, and then sipped discreetly from
a black chrome ask she kept tucked away within her ample bosom. She
exed and pointed her toes, which were propped up on the chair across
from her. My stomach growled. I unwrapped a chocolate. An eye for an
eye leaves the world blind, is what the wrapper read, which was said by
Gandhi, which gured. I crumpled it into a ball and shot it across the
table at the bottoms of Miss Patty’s feet. Ashley returned with a coee and
a bottle of water. In case you change your mind, she said as she placed the
water in front of me and slid into the adjacent seat. anks, I said but I
didn’t mean it.
I don’t know why but I’m afraid to see him, she blurted.
Because you don’t want to face what your life has become, but I
didn’t say that. Instead I said that it had to be hard.
You must see patients like him all the time. Does it get to you?
No, I said and for the rst time I told her something true.
How not?
I lay the bottle of water on its side and spun it on the table.
Why do you work here? Do you have family in the military?
My father was a Chief Petty Ocer and my grandfather retired as a
Sergeant Major. Where was your husband deployed? I didn’t tell her that
the last time I had seen him was at Camp Geiger.
He went to Afghanistan seven months ago, she said, twisting
her diamond ring along her delicate nger, as if to say, You made me a
promise, but not very forcefully so as to say, You betrayed me; obviously
you can’t be trusted; obviously you failed me and your country.
C’mon, I said as I stood, Let’s go. It won’t get any easier.
We stopped shoulder to shoulder outside room 308. Do you want to go in
alone? I asked to show her she couldn’t back down.
No, she said. Could we enter together?
Ok, I said as I opened the door and gave her a little hard shove
forward. I hung back as she approached my ex-commanding ocer. His
body added contour to the upper two-thirds of the bed, while the lower
third of the bed was at.
Volume 49.2 | 73 Alex Poppe | 73
Ashley stood in the spouse-spot shaking her head.
What, I asked, but I did not go to her.
He doesn’t look like himself, she said.
I wanted to laugh a little, but I didn’t.
It’s the facial hair. He would never let himself go like that.
is much was true. I had never seen him look less than recruitment
poster-ready, not even when he grabbed his loaded .45 and chambered the
round inches from my ear.
Do you think we could shave him?
I imagined holding a sharp blade next to his jugular.
Do you think you could show me how? Are you trained to do that?
the wife asked.
I’m trained to do that, I said. I raised the head of the bed so my ex-
commanding ocer was in a seated position. Imagine if he had awoken
right then. Imagine his surprise. I could not look directly at his face, but
I thought about holding the skin under his jaw rmly and tightly as I ran
a razor along it. I need to get some supplies, I said as I turned toward the
doorway.
I exited.
I walked down the hall past the supply closet to the stairs.
Once inside the stairwell, I sat down on a step and pressed my
sticky forehead to the metal railing. en I extracted the other half of the
Xanax from my bra and placed it under my tongue. I waited for a while,
during which I am sure, Ashley found another nurse’s aide to gather
shaving cream and towels and a razor, and show her how to shave her
half-husband.
I took the stairs to the garage park and headed for my car. As I was
fumbling for my keys among true wrappers and used Kleenexes, I heard
a familiar God-praising voice. I ducked down between my car and the
next, just as Dr. Bob strolled by, ruing Bridget’s hair and then cupping
her behind.
You did good today, he said.
74 | e Laurel Review74 | Michael Robins
Michael Robins
You Know It’s Nearly Spring
I’m downright glad to be here with friends,
old & new, before you in this space &
when I say glad, what I mean are moments
back, one minute then two, two & three
you get the picture. You’re a smart listener,
very good in understanding & when I said
here, when I say, I am of course writing
private, select clouds of my head & the best
mustering that I can into words. My lit
& scrolled phone is boring, I don’t need it
I have poems & you are here, my future
with yours, your past brought out to answer
or to ignore. I have no convenient way
conveying Monday, how my dreaming swerved
& thinned to crying & thoughts of a beard,
not the child’s, not my son who had awoken
but my chin pretending more sleep & not
numbering its days, nervous, my hand up
over my face. Hair out the door & like string
when it goodbyes the balloon, the balloon
its air. Watch it in the poem, small things
I’ve seen, more real than real. I stare out
among puddles, each oating dollops of snow
& save the image in a distant room. Morning
Volume 49.2 | 75 Michael Robins | 75
wakes from yesterday, the crown of the sun
peeks & melts what’s focused, all I gure
I know, so little. Still I adore the objects
memory never lands, clipping from a head
at the barber pole, ball sprung & forgotten
by its bat, prayer invisible with oh god & yes
joining wishes wished but not yet blown
high between branches to the hawk, mid-halo,
one white eld below & forever ignoring
happy strands of mice & rabbit, squirrel bone,
syllable of pillowed moss where a shadow
meets the ground & visited, revisited I’m there
& now its… Okay. I’m glad you’re here
I truly am. It’s ursday, far from my son,
his sister & mother, closer to you, you who
li your own private caption. I want our clouds
playing numbers, to warm in a single language
& saying hello, thank you, let’s you & me,
us & everyone not be through, not so quickly yet.
76 | e Laurel Review76 | Michael Robins
Michael Robins
Without Streets We Can’t Go Anywhere
is living could go either way. I have to say I
needn’t say anything, merely time all grown
forward, in due course how we come to resemble
everything. No idea less than one invented in the sky:
blue pencil, pretend a rocket & aer the strung plume
some moaning, someone found down the sand asking,
Do you smell burning, Does any re exterminate
its shadow alone. Worth a swimsuit hung, I’m thinking
the airway, take it, should this like the tide settle
nearsighted. Or the wood & pieces of twine, enough
buoyancy to be always pelagic, beach in the shoes
of nine year olds hiking their sails aer the show.
I was landlocked, lit paper bags for the lacking
reworks, early stance in the way of me midstumble,
my hand in the stranger hand, apdoodling his 20s
& sped crabwise toward the bridge. I’m lucky
being alive, haggard, terried for liking only the week
oating six years ahead, teeny bikini I’d never had
much luck on my own before, now buttoned
to a collared, domestic life. Hard to pull the tattoos
o & no more I, kid speaking of posture, no girl
who knew in summer rain her chalked name blurred.
We’d a good party, stupid. I turned le & should’ve
right, couldn’t yell myself to a bed that loved me.
Distraught, shy of 30, I drove through a second
idling car but this year, the cookie’s fortune assures,
my highest priority will be family. I rock the chair.
I’m dwindling. I forget things the rst time I am told.
Volume 49.2 | 77 Kathleen Rooney | 77
Kathleen Rooney
Les Vacances de Hegel
Is the sky the pink-orange of a drink, or the orange-pink of a sunset?
Is it Hegel’s vacation, or Hegel’s holiday? e black umbrella holds up
the clear glass of water, okay, but what holds up the umbrella? While the
master was working on this painting as the answer to the question “How
to show a glass of water in a picture so that it is not uninteresting, fanciful
or arbitrary?” Loulou the Pomeranian read all of Hegel. People doubt
him when he says this, so then he has to add that the master sketched
this same water-glass like, 150 times, and 150 times, he tossed down his
pencil, unsatised. But he always put a mark on the glass, and in the 151st
sketch—just as Loulou was memorizing his favorite of Hegel’s sayings (“In
art, as in all man’s works, the content plays the decisive role.”)—that mark
expanded into the shape of an open umbrella. Loulou looked up from his
book and laughed because it was so dialectic! And Magritte said, “Ah,
my Loulou, I knew you would get it.” en they talked about how Hegel
would have responded to that object with two opposing functions: to keep
out water and to contain it simultaneously. Perhaps he would have been
delighted, hence: the title. ere is no such thing as thinking too hard.
78 | e Laurel Review78 | Stan Sanvel Rubin
Stan Sanvel Rubin
Apostate
Waking from fever doesn’t give
the truth of what fever was,
reaching for you with weird hands,
wrapping you to its chest
the way a lover wraps
someone so tight the dierence
between love and hate disappears,
the way scarlet peels from certain sunsets,
leaving only spent sun.
Nights of burning, days
of trance waiting for night.
What’s le is aermath, a cooling
where there was burning, the knowledge
that steamed through you
no longer needs you, so that
the only emotion is indierence
—the way a forest stripped
by a ve-day re lies waiting
for the next rampage, the new intruders—
Volume 49.2 | 79 Chris Santiago | 79
Chris Santiago
Counting in Tagalog
isa
you say
each sound back to me
gliding up under ash & sycamore
dalawa
a game echolalia
I’m trying to make up
for lost time
[not time exactly but music]
[not your loss but mine]
tatlo
echolalia a kind of trinity—
a. echoes like yours; acquisition
b. ravings of the damaged or ill
c. a poet’s obsession with sound
apat
I started teaching myself last week
& even called my mother
to say so.
But she said two was not dalawa
but duha.
80 | e Laurel Review80 | Chris Santiago
Ilongo vs. Tagalog. Not mother tongue
but mother tongues.
lima
I try
too hard, overpronouncing,
I want to pass so you’ll pass
but for who? When
I was ve she brought home a colleague
a Polish RN with no family, who swore
profusely & well
& loved my mother dearly, especially her singsong
accent.
But you don’t have an accent
I said. e way she said words
was the best way. e right way, the rst.
anim
You’re getting drowsy, & who wouldn’t
the park still thick with night blooms
even though it’s almost eleven.
Jasmine: sampaguita. Dad says
the scent reminds him of home:
not Minneapolis, but Samaploc
near the Dangwa Market in Manila.
ey sell owers there but I couldn’t nd it
working only from stories he’d told.
pito
A harder pity: sputum
a bystander hawks sideways
Volume 49.2 | 81 Chris Santiago | 81
warding o bad luck
aer crouching to peer in his face—
the struck biker, sprawled. My last day
in Manila. Mad trac
brought to a standstill; even my lunatic
cabbie held his tongue.
walo
is close to wala—none, nothing.
Even extinct.
When we get to ten or eleven
something begins to slow
& harden in the mind
—if the organism does not receive
the appropriate stimulus during this critical period—
siyam
Soon I’ll have to stop
or start over
switch to English, Japanese. Tomorrow
I’ll gure out how to turn
1 into 11, 2 into 12, a formula
we’ll both unpack as sound.
Nabokov lost sleep
because he couldn’t stop counting his heart beats
& subtracting them from an estimated
total.
Wild parrots shriek past in a swarm.
82 | e Laurel Review82 | Chris Santiago
I’ve never seen
how far I could get in this tongue.
sampû
You perk up, almost holler; you love the stressed plosive,
the stoppered air.
I can almost hear you pronounce the diacritic
a roof
pitched against rain
although I’ve gotten lost & looked
for taxis in it
although it doesn’t fall straight & takes
more than cardboard, more
than a sheet of corrugated iron, & my accent
altered the fare.
Volume 49.2 | 83 Veronica Schuder | 83
Veronica Schuder
Alexandria
Prior to the burning, they kept themselves
occupied by huddling on candle tips
and resting in the int of Caesar’s Zippo
but gathering a breath and licking one
ship’s mast they got hungry, wanted a taste
of everything in sight cypresses goats
half-timbered warehouses stued with swag grain
scrolls librarians snoozed over body
armor broadswords leathers chainmail
for the poor not to mention the armada
scattering its own ashes into the sea.
e world was small then and it needed stories
and that was a good one, especially the part where
Caesar said if I can’t have it, nobody can.
84 | e Laurel Review84 | Kent Shaw
Kent Shaw
e Denition of Curtail
e mirrors were inside the theater. Pointing at mirrors. ey put in a sky.
And they painted the sky using a Marc Chagall that was the same color
as Marc Chagall,
but more sky-like. It was Light! Which is a part of the theater community.
As are prepositions. And applause.
And the people attached to applause.
Imagine if Marc Chagall had painted a sky inside a theater.
And the theater was beautiful.
Would it be possible for me to have the name of the theater painted inside
me?
Like I was a European. Or I had European inside of me.
Or I was spelling out all my possible shades of voice and demeanor.
I was projecting myself.
As in, that impression of myself that involves carving out whole parts of
myself.
“at’s where the sky is” is all that I’m saying. It’s inside the theater
that is inside me opening out to the other people, glamorous people,
expensive people, anonymous people, too.
Mainly anonymous people. Maybe Marc Chagall.
Like if a mirror were pointed at other mirrors and what we were really
trying to do
is see what our emotions looked like from every possible angle,
and at rst it might seem like it’s tragic or disastrous, because our emotions
are such serious business,
but the emotions we think are possible must be more possible
when there are so many ways of looking at them. I am a theater. I am
mirrors
on so many parts of my insides. And the audience loves me.
ey love me so much, because they can see themselves while they’re
doing it.
*
Volume 49.2 | 85 Kent Shaw | 85
I am a jealous man. I was grown a jealous man.
As in the seeds were planted early.
If psychology was a soil that grew continually darker and richer and
evenly polluted as time goes on,
if psychologies grew into one anther like the knotted capital letters that
begin an illuminated manuscript,
or the brasswork at the top of a capitol dome, or the murals on the under
part,
where airs are circulating into each other,
and the airs are psychology for each other, holding each other when they
need to be held,
for inside any psychology another psychology should be t,
so psychology could be used to psychology the psychologies making
psychology so dicult,
then everyone will feel at last a deeper side is really even deeper than they
had rst imagined.
e top soil is so rich in this country,
but that’s only the beginning of a very long agricultural history.
*
86 | e Laurel Review86 | Kent Shaw
ere is a system of strings I have attached to my insides.
On nights when there is a performance, I organize them into a canopy
coming out of my chest.
With all the other strings attached to those strings.
How would you feel if you heard a map was leading an audience into your
insides
with diagrams describing consequences, and string sequences,
and tangents in all directions at the ends of strings that couldn’t possibly
be the same strings anymore
if they have that many places they’re going to.
Aren’t all strings engineered to come to an end?
I am someone who needs to feel like he’s been connected to whatever is
“backstage.”
Maybe there’s an elaborate grid back there that the strings are tied on to.
And that’s how I’ll nd my way home, where it’s just me and my wife.
We’ve been dealing with strings tangled beneath the sink.
And strings hanging above our mattress connecting me to the home that
we’re living in.
Can I bring the audience to this performance space? Have they been here
all along?
Try waking up in here. All you can see is the middle of the night.
Try keeping track of everything living in this house.
It may be the strings aren’t me connecting me to me as much as they are
me pulling me closer
like a jealous lover. Jealousy is so smothering.
I am inside me. I am a ball of string. I am bundled with string.
I am one of those map-diagrams that keeps expanding so fast it might
even surpass the three-dimensional capacity of the warehouse they’re
housing diagrams in,
so they’re building a warehouse to house that one.
I assure you, there will be a Singularity, I will be there, with strings strung
to even stronger strings and more capable strings,
and they’ll be waving themselves at my face.
*
Volume 49.2 | 87 Kent Shaw | 87
Most days you can nd me at home lling out forms online.
ey are so kind to me at the end. anking me with exclamation points!
How many new strings can I tie around my wrists?
And if the strings are phrased in the form of a question,
should it give me the feeling my life is rich with possibility?
I could be tied in a chair and held under house arrest.
I could be suspended above my life waiting for it to pass me by.
ere is an audience inside me waiting to come out. I have locked them
inside.
Please, audience, what’s going to happen next?
Is it a comedy? A dark comedy? A tether that just keeps holding me right
here the whole time?
88 | e Laurel Review88 | Kent Shaw
Kent Shaw
What Happens to a Sentimental Animal ese Days
I was le alone one night with a large machine. e machine was always
moving.
Many parts were moving together.
ey were very large but not living.
e machine was mainly an internal machine that was pushing other
machines to get going.
With the larger machine staying in one place.
It kept me from going outside.
I was the one who would be required to move it.
Or ask it would it consider taking a little break.
is is one method for being lonely. My wife had le.
My living room had le with her.
e edges of all the pictures we had accumulated were trying to hint at the
picture that was missing.
But, generally, all I noticed was the machine.
It wasn’t an engine. Or it wasn’t shaped like anything I am willing to
describe.
Everything that I might have wished existed on the machine didn’t.
Levers. Valve stems. A meter with readings that indicated “Level of
Involvement.”
I was trying to nd something I could hold onto. I wanted to get closer.
Not that it’s dicult to sleep next to a machine. But it is dicult to hold
it inside you.
My wife is very tender. She’s even more tender to me when she’s so far
away.
I can’t tell her that I caressed the machine one night.
But it meant nothing.
I didn’t know where it was sensitive.
“Machine.” I tried to talk to it with my tender voice.
I tried pulling it inside me to get the attention of the smaller machines!
“Machine.”
Volume 49.2 | 89 Kent Shaw | 89
A large machine would make a little more sense if it looked like a human.
Preferably someone I know.
Or maybe a tall building. Or maybe a footprint.
Machines are inert. Even with a loud disgusting rutting-sound inside it.
A violence that I tried painting on the outside.
But the machine could not be expressed.
Machines are made of unusual metals that are more intense versions of
whatever temperature is around them.
*
I arranged outings for my machine using an online prole. “Machine.”
My wife would be glad I was concerned.
I showed the machine pictures of construction sites. Perhaps that would
be interesting.
“ose machines are very busy.”
ey had lives to contend with. And large corporate concerns.
I tried to nd petite machines. Big-voiced machines. Staged production
machines.
Everywhere I looked other machines had already moved in.
One of the machines was programmed to crawl on its hands and knees
wherever it went.
at was Cain.
And once I started to notice I saw Cain was everywhere.
An inert machine in one direction all its life multiplied by whatever the
corporate world could aord.
Are we to be populated by Cain machines?
Are we to realize a direction of the world that is undeterred?
Are we to realize the idealism of undeterrableness?
90 | e Laurel Review
Roger Sheer
Warninger’s Likeability Test
[Note to the 2013 version of the test: although Dr. Isadore Warninger
died in 1977, of a mysterious head trauma, and although testing protocols
have evolved since then, his likeability test has remained unchanged and
useful, particularly to HR recruiters and counselors. It is important for
test-takers to answer every question and not “over-think” their answers,
nor should they try to come up with answers they believe will make them
appear more “likeable,” which would defeat the purpose of this test. ere
is no penalty for wrong guessing.]
1. Do you nd me to be likeable?
a. Yes, I nd you to be very likeable.
b. I don’t know who you are. It’s a silly question. I don’t trust you.
c. No, I don’t nd you to be very likeable.
d. You seem desperate to be liked, whoever you may be. Why is this
about you?
2. Let’s say that a person is walking down the street—not necessarily in a
clown costume (although he has that option), looking reasonably normal.
He has just learned from the police that a gang of teenagers has robbed
him of all his possessions, but he doesn’t want anybody to know about
it, and his neighbors and friends approach him and ask how he’s doing.
What should he say and/or do?
a. Keep walking, smiling, pretending he’s deaf, or extremely self-absorbed.
b. Ask for help, in a sincere way.
c. e robbery never even happened, but if it makes him more likeable, he
should tell people that it did.
d. None of the above.
3. Did the second question on this test make you like me more?
a. Yes.
b. No.
c. Maybe.
d. All of the above.
90 | Roger Sheer
Volume 49.2 | 91
4. e neighbors seem to be quite concerned. ey oer sympathy,
casseroles, but no money. As a matter of fact, this very same thing
happened to me—Dr. Isadore Warninger—not so long ago, and at rst it
seemed as if my neighbors, especially Tom (not his real name), were only
pretending that they liked me. For example, Tom gave me an expensive
belt made of alligator skin, but the belt turned out to be much too small
for me. I am a portly man. Do you still like me?
a. Yes.
b. No.
c. I feel sorry for you.
d. I loathe you.
5. I am so portly that oen, while I am walking down the street, in my
normal tent-like garb (a one-piece oversize poncho printed to look like a
gray suit, vest, white shirt, and tie), the neighbors will run inside and pull
down their shades. One neighbor will even set o a civil-defense-type
siren, which he believes is funny. He has a far-reaching raucous laugh,
which long ago began to get on my nerves. I certainly found him to be
unlikeable. Whom do you like more—that neighbor, or me?
a. I like the neighbor.
b. I like you.
c. I like you both equally.
d. I like the supposedly insincere person who gave you an alligator-skin
belt that was too small for you.
6. A rock comes ying out of one of the neighborhood windows, like a
meteor. It lands at the feet of the gentleman, somewhat portly, who is
walking down the street minding his own business, grieving the loss of
his worldly possessions. He may or may not be wearing a clown costume.
He bends over and picks up that rock. Choose one of the following as the
next line in this narrative:
a. He places the rock in his pocket.
b. He pulls a scientic scales from his voluminous pants pocket, sets it on
the sidewalk, and weighs the rock.
c. He prays for the person who threw that rock.
d. All of the above, but in a dierent order.
7. With this question I am informing you that the person in the previous
question was actually me, and that I did wear a clown costume that day,
Roger Sheer | 91
92 | e Laurel Review92 | Roger Sheer
including a red fright wig and honkable nose. I carried a seltzer bottle.
Do you still like me?
a. Yes, I still like you.
b. Somewhat, although not as much.
c. No, but it has nothing to do with the clown costume.
d. No, because of the costume.
8. What would be the appropriate prayer to oer on behalf of a rock-
thrower?
a. Since prayers are supposed to be private, I see no relevance to the issue
of likeability.
b. I pray that he/she will eventually come to like me.
c. I pray for his/her soul.
d. I pray that the rock-thrower will always miss.
9. How about that alligator-skin belt, huh?
a. It might make a good noose, if your neck isn’t too thick—in the event
that you wish to put an end to all this misery.
b. It should be returned to the giver with an appreciative note, apologizing
for your enormous girth.
c. Sell it.
d. Sell yourself.
10. At this time, I would like you all to take a ten-minute rest break.
Lean back, close your eyes, and meditate. Try to block o the distractions
of the every-day world, any nancial burdens, health issues. Although I
am not in a position to oer you a candy bar, I certainly would do so if
I could. It would be dark chocolate, with almonds. Does this make you
like me any better?
a. A lot.
b. Not much.
c. Not at all.
d. I resent having to answer this question during my so-called “break.”
11. I was recently sitting in a coee shop that faced a busy sidewalk in a
medium-size Midwestern city not known for the quality of its coee shops.
Let’s say that it was Saint Cloud, Minnesota. It could just as easily have
been La Crosse, Wisconsin. Seated next to the window, slowly sipping,
I was able to keep track of the foot trac out there. Everybody looked
Volume 49.2 | 93 Roger Sheer | 93
the same: bouant hair, too much makeup, paisley aprons, a hundred
pounds overweight. How does this observation aect my likeability?
a. It would depend upon whether this “everybody” you observed included
men. If so, then I like you for your inclusiveness.
b. If you were using this question as a sneaky way of insulting women
without being specic, then I hate you.
c. If you think being clever entails nasty observations about people who
can’t help how they look, then you’re not very clever, but I like you anyway.
d. You woke up and discovered that it was only a dream, and you weren’t
sitting in a coee shop in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, but lying on the ground
somewhere outdoors in central Florida, inland, an abandoned cattle ranch
or failed golf course. e paisley people did not exist. A vicious alligator
was approaching you, head-on.
12. Do you need another break already?
a. Your empathy is not genuine. I hate you. What’s with the “already”?
b. I like the built-in familiarity, but that doesn’t mean that I necessarily
like you.
c. I like you.
d. I would prefer more options.
13. e man who was referred to in several earlier questions (possibly
an out-of-work clown, not necessarily me) continued walking down the
street, not using the sidewalk (because it was in poor condition), carrying
the rock in his pants pocket. e rock was so heavy that it made him
appear lopsided and either likeable or unlikeable. ere is a blank page
at the end of this test where you may record explanations or elaborations
of answers to any of the questions, or any problems you might have had
while taking the test.
a. ank you.
b. I’m ne with the short-answer format.
c. No amount of blank pages could satisfy me.
d. You didn’t give me a chance to say whether the clown was likeable or
unlikeable due to his lopsidedness, or due to his stupid decision to carry
that meteor in his pocket when, clearly, it was the only reason for his
lopsidedness, and he could have done something about it quite easily. I
have no sympathy for people like that. I see them everywhere, dangling
small dogs from their earlobes, growing their ngernails on one hand so
long—aer, say, ten or een years—that the unequal weight dislocates
94 | e Laurel Review94 | Roger Sheer
their shoulder. I am oblivious to how this statement might aect my
likeability score.
14. A girl from the neighborhood, only sixteen, with just a learner’s
permit, pulled up in her bright red convertible—a recent birthday present
from her stepfather—and oered a ride to the clown, who seemed to be
struggling, genuinely disabled, and making very little progress on his
walk through that neighborhood. Please choose one of the following
as the next event in this narrative—from which the test evaluators will
determine your likeability:
a. e clown removes the rock from his pocket and hits the girl on the
head, causing a serious accident.
b. e girl removes the rock from the clown’s pocket and hits him on the
head, without serious consequences.
c. ey aim the rock at a streetlight and miss, due to lack of arm strength
and mutual cooperation.
d. ey aim the rock at a streetlight and cause an explosion.
15. ank you for spending time on this test. Please choose one of the
following:
a. You’re welcome.
Volume 49.2 | 95 Martha Silano | 95
Martha Silano
Address from the Konga River, Wild Waves eme
Park
e natives tattooed, profusely pierced.
On the le pec, Nicole. On the right pec, Kris.
All day my daughter shouting Another belly
button ring! In line for an ICEE, a woman’s
back entirely inked. Too far away to read it,
but I’m betting it’s omas Stearns: Time present
and time past / Are both perhaps present
in the future / A time future contained in time past
So many peach-fuzzed paunches. Innumerable
boobs, innumerable asses. So many ip-ops
here beside this river of pipes and cement.
I am the only person over een without a tattoo.
If I had a tattoo what would it say? It would not say
Nicole. It would not say Kris. It would not be T.S.
Maybe it would be a page from Roberts English,
how to nd books in a library: A card is made
for each book; these cards are led in a catalog.
Maybe a review question: What’s the etymology
of exit? Sometimes so much water drumming down
on our heads we cannot see. Sometimes longing
for the Big Gulp. Our human world pelts us with either/
or, with eternal present, the past foggy like a pair of goggles
96 | e Laurel Review96 | Martha Silano
in a steamy pool. We can’t recall what our friend recalls,
why we decided not to apply to Barnard, doesn’t know
the eternally present time past now future
of incessant like dripping water you stupid dummy,
insists what I tell her isn’t true. Eliot is so right.
No wonder she suered the needle for that tattoo.
I watch my daughter climb to the purple slide, holding
tight to her ra. It’s almost unbearable, the sun
bearing down and no book: I had come to the house
in a cave of trees; sun and reection wheeled by. I’ve never
seen so many men with stretch marks. It made my girl
so happy to ride in the One of Hearts, to gorge herself
on chicken tenders. Power-Ade and garlic fries. To ride
in front, hands above her head like a genuecting wave.
e newborns and the lost, the just falling, the long-
married, the teens and tweens and middle-aged,
all waiting their turn beneath the convoluted tubes,
all entrusting themselves to the ones in charge,
all believing what’s written on a body persists.
Volume 49.2 | 97 Ingela Strandberg | 97
Ingela Strandberg
[In the Moment]
In the moment
between being and not being
the world appears in front of us
in a at-bottomed boat
We dream that we are steering
it standing upright in ash suits
Even as embryos
we slowly move out of
swirling ashes
In the instantaneous
transits we soon notice
that we are completely alone
e animal runs beside
Our bodies are non-measurable
But something is sewing
our bodies together one aer the other
e seams are beautiful
Fragile
And we will never know
when where or how long
we are human
98 | e Laurel Review98 | Ingela Strandberg
Ingela Strandberg
[e First Touch]
e rst touch
over the gear box
Tempting
Irresistible
e last one
when he sets my hand free
walking away
and I discover a ship
lying at the anchor
I have never seen
this ship before
and I know it will take him
away from me alive
And when we meet again
I´ll be a stranger
I´ll be a nobody
Just as I´ll be a nobody
before myself too
on a long long row of islands
Volume 49.2 | 99 Adam Strauss | 99
Adam Strauss
Hapless Transport
I hope this
Interview with
Prediction becomes
One more day not
at of myth.
I resist wearing
Pig. No bladder serves
As vessel for poaching my chicken.
is cloth is all
Cheese: so stinks
Stupefying stony.
is world is huge
Room I dither through—
Skip to my doom;
If lucky I’ll
Prove gloaming’s loom
Weaves Mach 7 carpet
Jets past Goblin Market.
100 | e Laurel Review100 | Jason Tandon
Jason Tandon
e Engine Has Stalled
And here we are
in the middle of the bay,
the evening sun
like an egg
cracked on the mountain range,
the broken yolk
sliding towards
a couple bits of burnt fat.
Volume 49.2 | 101 Jason Tandon | 101
Jason Tandon
Moon Poem
It hangs in the night sky
like a thumbnail—
the hand of God waving
to the other side of the earth.
Or perhaps the hand is elsewhere.
e opposite pole,
a parallel universe,
and this is a bit of His body
chewed o, spit out,
and lying on the bathroom tiles.
aer Harry Martison
102 | e Laurel Review102 | Kerry Tepperman Campbell
Kerry Tepperman Campbell
Dreaming of France #107
Windows. Windows that are doors, French doors. Since childhood she
has admired French doors, equated them with gracious living and beauty,
with a mysterious aspect of elegance. As a design element, they can
function the way a turn in the path does in a Japanese garden, arousing
curiosity and urging the viewer on.
e night her father died, she slept in the chair beside his hospital bed.
He did not believe in God. For some, she knows, God is the French door,
the glimpse, a partial view of what lies beyond. She could not exactly
introduce her father to God so late in the game, but she thought a French
door might be helpful.
at night she imagines she and her father are together in France, standing
beside enormous French doors looking out at an ancient garden. In the
distance she sees an armillary sphere centered in a perfectly square knot
garden. Just beyond the door a sprawling lacecap hydrangea is partially
visible. Its milky petals echo the moon. For her the desire to see the pale
violet at the center of each petal is almost unbearable.
She and her father stand together at the door, but still he does not take
the handle. She knows she cannot turn it for him. e room is suddenly
cold. She looks down at their bare feet, side by side on the stone oor, and
remembers how the likeness of their feet fascinated her when she was a
child. When she looks up, a cloaked, hooded gure stands on the other
side of the door. He holds a lantern in one hand, and opens the door into
the garden with the other. “Hermes,” she says.
is word nudges her father’s memory, and she sees the sudden
recognition as he grasps the meaning of a text read long ago. As he crosses
the threshold, she is le alone at the open doorway. e fragrance of
honeysuckle rushes in to cover her.
Volume 49.2 | 103 Tony Trigilio | 103
Tony Trigilio
Catholicism
e motive
wasn’t loneliness.
It was silence
with a little
chastity, static
in the chasuble,
the choice to
hang the cross
facing the audience
or with its back
to us. Our table
clean of everything
but a spider plant,
its fronds pecked,
punctured by the cats.
A voice repeating
instructions through
the transistor radio.
104 | e Laurel Review104 Michael Webster ompson
Michael Webster Thompson
Yellow Jackets
Yellow jackets have dug a nest at the base of the low stonewall that edges
the eld across the street from the boy’s home. He’s known about the nest
for weeks now, but today is the day he decides to attack it. Mr. Bruno, who
owns the eld, as it is technically part of his yard, le early this morning
on a salmon shing trip and won’t return until Monday. He told the boy
about the trip while they changed the oil on his vintage Mustang last
week, the boy holding the drip pan.
Mr. Bruno is a nice man but boring, always xing up his house
and working on his car. He helps everyone with their lawns, fertilizing
and edging them, making them nice and green. e boy regrets that
Mr. Bruno saw his parents ghting and it makes him feel uncomfortable
that Mr. Bruno told him he could come over anytime if he needed a “safe
place.”
e boy crosses the small suburban asphalt street. e newly laid
crack-lling tar, melting in the late summer sun, sticks to the bottom of
his sandals and suctions them briey to the street before they slap up and
hit his heels. Heat emanations wiggle in the air like transparent smoke
trails. e boy considers scrounging for change in the couch cushions to
buy a Mr. Misty at the DQ aer he’s done with the nest.
On the rise above the stonewall pink and white peonies teem with
ants seeking the sticky clear uid that drips down their stems. e boy
hates these owers, thinks they smell like sugary sweat socks. He wishes
he could rip them all out of the ground, but he tried that once; his hands
got all gummed up and he hated that more than the owers.
So for now, they live. Maybe I’ll come back with a bat, he thinks, or
a tennis racket. A tennis racket would be perfect.
But today is for the wasps.
In the evergreens near Mr. Bruno’s house the boy nds a stick about
the length of his arm. He bends it over his knee, gently at rst, then
harder. It is strong.
e boy knows quite a bit about yellow jackets, as well as other wasps
and bees. He had, the summer before, accidentally stepped on a mud
wasp nest during a game of Capture the Flag at day camp. e swollen
red stings dotting his legs intrigued him. For Christmas, his mother
bought him e Illustrated World Encyclopedia of Insects.
Volume 49.2 | 105 Michael Webster ompson | 105
e underground nest is most likely larger than a gallon milk jug
this late in the summer. Yellow jackets are not only one of the most
aggressive wasp species, but are also most aggressive in late summer and
early autumn. Unlike bees, yellow jackets only infrequently lose their
unbarbed stinger, which allows them to attack again and again.
From above the hole, he watches the yellow jackets y in and out.
ey leave the nest in zooming diagonals, and return vacuumed back on
the same erratic paths. Before leaving they look around as if the light
blinds them and they need to get their bearings. ey pause in a similar
fashion when returning, letting their eyes adjust to the dark. Although
the boy knows the wasps’ eyes don’t adjust to light, he likes thinking that
they do, that the wasps are more like him.
e boy sits near the hole silently, listening to the yellow jackets zip
past his head, imagining he can feel the vibration of the hive through the
earth. e sun burns the back of his neck and his muscles begin to ache.
He needs to move.
He stretches out his le leg and then his right, trying not to draw
attention to himself. e act of slowly standing brings a rush of blood to
his head. He tastes the metallic taste and his neck clenches. When the
rush passes, he leans over the hole in the dirt.
With the stick he draws large circles around the hole. None of the
wasps take notice and he begins to spiral in closer. As he approaches the
nest entrance he begins to lose his nerve. Shivers run up his arms despite
the heat.
Quit being such a pussy, he says to himself.
e boy wakes to the sound of glass breaking in the kitchen. He smells
his sweat sunk into the mattress when he wakes. He ips his damp pillow.
e humid breeze lis his curtains but brings little relief. Normally, he
would lie there and wait for it to be over, sometimes wrapping his pillow
around his head to drown out the sound, kicking his heels into the
mattress, listening for his dad’s car to peel out of the driveway, or for
his mother to lock herself in the bedroom and his dad to creak onto the
couch.
But this ght is louder, more urgent, and he emerges from his
bedroom and is embarrassed to be wearing only briefs and a t-shirt.
Although his dad oen walks around the house in his underwear, the boy
doesn’t want either of his parents to see him so uncovered.
“Get. Back. In bed,” his dad says.
106 | e Laurel Review106 | Michael Webster ompson
e boy just stands there, transxed, unable to move.
His mother takes a few steps towards his dad. She shoves her index
nger in his face. Her long hair thrashes as she speaks. Her voice, despite
her trembling, remains calm.
“He doesn’t have to listen to you. No one fucking listens to you,
Randy.”
His dad, equally calm, says, “I could kill you both right now, you
know? I could burn this goddamn house down and sit in it laughing
myself to death.”
His mother moves in very close, so close his parents’ noses almost
touch. e boy backs into the corner between his and his parents’
bedrooms.
She whispers, “If you had the balls to do that, which you don’t, but if
you did, maybe you wouldn’t be such a fucking loser.”
She spits in his face and some of the saliva clings to the end of his
nose.
Slow motion. His dad grabs his mom by the shoulders and her
eyes grow wide. Her feet leave the oor, his father’s hands hooked under
her armpits; he spins and tosses her through the full-length screen front
door, the screen cracking loose from the doorframe and clanging on the
concrete stoop.
Seconds later, she plunges back though the hole. His dad sulks,
looks o into the kitchen. He doesn’t see it coming. But the boy does.
He sees her cock her st, grab his father’s shoulder, spin him around and
punch him in the face.
A deep split gapes beneath his eye, disappearing as it lls with blood.
His mother runs into the kitchen. His dad touches his hand to his face
and a trail of red runs down his ngers and onto his arm. His mother
returns and hands his dad a terrycloth towel.
“I didn’t mean to,” his mother mumbles. “is fucking ring.” She
takes o her engagement ring and places it on top of the television.
She approaches the boy, who is quivering in the corner, half-sitting
like the endurance tests he does in gym.
“Put some pants on, baby, we gotta take Daddy to the hospital.”
She tries to hug him, but he curls up tightly into himself, wedging
into the corner. He smells the red wine smell on her breath. He squeezes
against the wall, crab walks past her legs, and goes to his dresser for
sweatpants. Catching a glimpse of himself crying in the window
reection, he wipes his tears. en, for strength, he touches his st to the
Volume 49.2 | 107 Michael Webster ompson | 107
warping Darth Vader poster taped on the wall.
He pushes dirt into the hole. A wasp comes out and looks confused, like
a dog climbing out of water, shaking itself o. When that wasp leaves he
pokes more dirt into the hole. Five or six yellow jackets y out at once and
swarm his face. He runs in zigzags towards the shade of the pines, pin
wheels his arms, slaps at himself.
In the trees he loses them. He inspects himself and nds a sting on
his forearm. Not bad. He examines the bump for a stinger. Not nding
one he spits on the sting and rubs dirt in the saliva. He waits there in the
relative cool for the wet dirt to dry on the sting and heal it.
He decides that the sting wasn’t worth merely agitating the wasps.
e wasps deserve to be punished. What he needs to do is destroy the
nest, so that he won’t get stung again. To protect the neighborhood, to do
something good.
At the very least, he should cover the mouth of the nest with enough
dirt to make it a pain in the ass for the yellow jackets to dig themselves
out.
Emboldened, he walks back across the grass.
His mother drives to the hospital quickly. Too quickly. e Explorer
teeters around corners. At times it seems only two wheels are on the
ground.
“Cool it, Sheila. Slow down. You’re gonna kill the three of us.”
“What would you care, Randy?”
“Just slow down.” His father leans towards his mother, bloody towel
wad pressed on his face, and though his teeth says, “You’re drunk.”
“So the fuck what?” She jams down on the gas, powering through a
yellow light by the Jewel/Osco. “You’re bleeding your face o and I want
you out of this car.”
His dad just stares out the window.
e boy knows about driving drunk. He remembers a party at his
Aunt and Uncle’s apartment. He was little then. ree or four. roughout
the party, he stayed with his cousins in a back bedroom watching Disney
movies and eating microwave popcorn. All of the adults in the place were
drunk and stumbling by the time they le. His dad drove home, using
the curb to guide the car, his mother yelling at him the whole way: You’re
crazy, Randy! You’ll get us all killed!
His mother navigates the Explorer towards the large red E hospital
108 | e Laurel Review108 | Michael Webster ompson
entrance.
“Get out”, she says.
“Love you, too, honey.” His dad slams the car door behind him.
“Dad,” the boy cries, opening his door. His dad leans in to the
backseat to hug him before turning and walking through the automatic
doors. e boy pulls the car door shut.
“I’m sorry for this, baby. All of it.” She reaches back and runs her
ngers through his hair. “Do you want to sit up front?”
e boy climbs over the storage console between the front seats and
sits down, buckles the belt. Something cool touches his le thigh. He
pulls at his sweatpants. ere is a small crescent bloodstain. His father’s
blood.
His mother notices. “Don’t worry. I can get that out,” she says. ey
glide back home in the cooling late night air, windows down, listening to
the oldies.
When they get home Mr. Bruno is working at their front door.
e screen insert reattached to the frame, he duct tapes the torn bottom
corner of the screen back into place. e boy watches Mr. Bruno pull one
last length of tape from the roll and gently apply it to the screen.
“Why is Mr. Bruno up so late, Mom?”
“I don’t know, honey. He’s a strange man. Always trying to x
everything,” she says, and he knows it’s true. Mr. Bruno has a tool for
every job. He helped his neighbors put up matching fences.
ey get out of the car. “Everything okay, Sheila?” Mr. Bruno calls
down the side of the house.
“Go home, Harry! It’s goddamn midnight!” she yells back.
Mr. Bruno nods to himself, admiring his work, before switching o
his utility light, picking up his toolbox, and walking back to his house.
As the boy is about to jam the stick into the nest’s opening, he pauses. He
tells himself that this will end badly, that no good can come of it. But then
he jabs the stick into the nest anyway, not destroying the opening, but
opening it wider. Yellow jackets pour out. He knows he has been marked,
that now every wasp in the nest will be aer him.
He retreats, alternating between pulling at his clothes and waving
his arms around his head. e yellow jackets y into his shirt. ey sting
his neck. ey burrow into his hair.
He runs away in zigzags, pulling his shirt o and over his head while
crossing the street, blind to trac. He trips over the curb and falls into
Volume 49.2 | 109 Michael Webster ompson | 109
his front yard by the maple. Dozens of wasps circle him and dive in to
sting the bare esh of his back and neck. ey don’t even hurt anymore;
there are too many.
He pulls himself up and stumbles through the duct tape repaired
screen door.
“Mom!”
“What is it?” she calls from her bedroom. Probably watching her
stupid game shows, half asleep.
“Mom!” he yells louder, almost screams, his voice breaking.
Her bed creaks and she comes running out. “What’s the matter?
What happened?”
“Yellow jackets. ey got me.”
He stands shirtless, a few yellow jackets y in circles around him.
She grabs a magazine o the coee table and swipes at him, brushing
away the wasps.
“ey’re in my hair.”
“What?” She pushes her own mussed hair down, using her free
hand to try to work one side at.
“e wasps.”
“Come here. Come here. Sit down.” She guides him to the kitchen
table. “I’ll be right back,” she says, jogging away. “How did this happen?”
she yells back.
He rests his head on the cool tile table, tracing the owery pattern
on the corner with his nger, like he did the night before while his mother
and father told him they were separating. He had gone to bed and tried
to cry, couldn’t sleep, started fake crying. His mother told him to be quiet
and go to sleep.
Sometimes he hates how well his parents know him and wishes he
were more mysterious.
Life isn’t fair. His dad always says that.
His mother returns with a brush and calamine. She scrapes the
brush through his hair, pulls out a few yellow jackets that limp around
slowly, unable to take ight, half dead on the tiles. e boy puts his thumb
on the abdomen of a wounded wasp near his face and pushes down. e
stinger and some greenish yellow guts squeeze out onto the white tile.
“Don’t do that,” his mother says, applying calamine to his stings.
“ey fucking deserve it,” he says, knowing he’s crossed a line. He
pushes down again, but the carcass is empty.
“What was that, Mister?”
110 | e Laurel Review110 | Michael Webster ompson
“ey. Deserve. It.” He lis his head from the table and stares at his
mother angrily, but then looks away. He feels heat come to his face. His
eyes burn and he knows he is going to cry.
“Baby,” his mother says and leans down to hug him. He pushes her
away. She grabs his arm and hugs him hard. His breathing strains under
the pressure. He begins to sob, unable to catch his breath.
She kisses his hair where the wasps used to be. “ey do deserve it,
honey,” she says. “I know they do.”
But she doesn’t know anything about yellow jackets.
Volume 49.2 | 111 Ross Wilcox | 111
Ross Wilcox
e Lights Are Always On Inside
I’d been in a week. I was the newest inmate, and at nineteen, also the
youngest. I was in the dayroom waiting for a phone call from my parents
that I was promised would come on my rst night. ere were only
six other inmates in the Clay County Jail—seven counting Rob. ey
welcomed me by including me in the cribbage and rummy games, the
Monopoly and Yahtzee playing. Everything was pretty good, except for
the fact that my mom and dad wouldn’t talk to me and I faced ten years
in prison.
I obsessed on the ten years. ey were holding me indenitely until
my sentencing—anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple months. I
was just a harmless, nonviolent drug user, I reasoned, who’d been caught
with some pot and pills. I was even enrolled in college, the hallmark of
someone who intends to do something with his life. You don’t send a
guy like that to prison. Except that, with this last arrest, I’d violated my
probation. Probation was my second chance, so this would technically be
my third, were it to be oered.
As I said, I was in the dayroom, seated at the scratched-up metal
table with the foldup legs, playing Doug Rummy with Chip, Manny, Jerry,
and the game’s namesake, Doug. Doug, who rst showed us this version
of Rummy, was a fat, bald, mustached man who was serving ten months
for orchestrating a fraudulent Donate-to-Victims-of-Katrina scam. It was
basically the same as normal Rummy, only with a bunch more wild cards.
We were all reasonably clean, had showered at least once in the last three
days—Clay County required you to—yet the dayroom still reeked of
the stale, sour fumes of a men’s locker room. e place looked like the
year 1976 had chewed it up, puked it out, and le it to rot for the last
thirty years. e carpet was half snotty green, half grubby blood orange.
Brown lines of unknown origins snaked the yellowed walls like muddy
rivers. A huge bookshelf full of Louis L’Amour paperbacks and Maxim
magazines lined one side. A dust-covered treadmill stood erect in one
corner, but it had neither a cord nor a plug-in. A stack of games rested
nearby, among them Risk, Sorry!, and Yahtzee. e real centerpiece of the
dayroom, though, was the old bunny-eared television. It was in the corner
opposite the treadmill, and around it were a few padded chairs and one
squeaky recliner. Chip, the lanky Lakota Sioux who, whenever we played
112 | e Laurel Review112 | Ross Wilcox
Risk, proudly chose the red gurines, was a xture in that recliner, and he
alone controlled the TV.
We only got channels 3, 4, 9, 11, 14, and 44. On a given night, Chip
would put on some combination of shows—e Shield, at 70’s Show,
M*A*S*H—but always COPS. He loved to critique the criminals for
taking wrong turns in high-speed chases, for hiding their drugs in overly
obvious places within their vehicles, for failing to outrun or overpower
a police ocer when chased on foot. “at guy’s so stupid he deserves to
get caught,” Chip would say once they’d snapped the cus on the man’s
wrists. He claimed to be the only guy to ever break out of the Pennington
County Jail out in Rapid City.
Manny, who shaved his head and was the second-youngest aer me,
explained one night in our cellblock, “He broke out and led them on a
high-speed chase. He made it down to Hot Springs before they got him.”
And then he said, with wonder in his eyes, “He’s the only guy to ever
break out of the Pennington County Jail.”
“at’s like a world record,” I joked. “What happened aer that?”
“He got sentenced to nine years in the pen. He was serving a sixty-
day sentence.”
“Jesus Christ,” I yelled. “Sixty days?”
Manny shrugged. “You know you can make meth by lling a sh
tank with charcoals and pouring formaldehyde on it. You cover it with
a plastic sheet or glass or something and then aer a while, it evaporates
and crystals form on the top and then you just scrape it o and you’ve got
meth.” Meth was why Manny was serving six months.
Jerry was in his mid-thirties with thinning hair and a thick brown
beard, and on that night he slapped his last set of three cards down on the
table to go out and said, “Bam!” We all muttered “fuck” or “damn it” and
counted up how many points we got dinged with.
I reached seventy when suddenly Chip said, “What the fuck is he
doing here?”
I looked up and there was Rob, the guy who had molested his seven-
year-old niece. At least that’s what he was charged with and currently
awaited trial for. He was in his ies, a bit chubby, and had shitty teeth.
He looked at us longingly, his brown eyes moist and hopeful.
Chip jumped up, knocking his chair over behind him. “Get the fuck
out of here before I beat the fucking shit out of you.”
I sat frozen in my chair, never having known anyone who molested
a child and never having witnessed anyone beat the fucking shit out of
Volume 49.2 | 113 Ross Wilcox | 113
anyone. Rob looked at Doug, whom he shared a cell with. Doug nodded
defeatedly, and Rob pedaled back to the door and knocked. In a few
seconds, one of the jailers opened it and Rob told him he wanted to go
back to his cell. Chip remained standing, poised to attack, and before the
door shut he said, “Go fucking hang yourself, Rob.”
Once Rob was gone, Chip sat back down. Jerry dealt another hand.
Chip said, “at motherfucker is going to get stabbed in the joint.” Chip
was always fondly calling it the joint, because, he said, that’s what people
who’d been there called it.
I half-believed there would be some way I could just tell them, “Hey,
my mom’s a librarian at the school in Roosevelt. My dad works for the
Department of Agriculture. Can I go now?” And they’d say “Sure, right
this way,” and there would be the sun and the trees and my mom and dad
and maybe even cable television.
I half-believed that if I full-on-believed this, that it might actually
happen—sort of like believing your belief can shrink a tumor.
e place was all concrete. Concrete oors, concrete walls, concrete
ceilings. And it was this brownish-green concrete, like the color of
expired guacamole. And everything was all steel. Steel bars, steel bunks,
steel sinks, steel toilets. And it was all rusty, the grey paint peeling o in
akes. Sometimes when I was bored, I picked at it like a scab.
e base of each bunk was two soldered-together road signs, some
diamond-shaped, some octagonal. Our mattresses were these tattered
green canvass bags stued with something vaguely cushiony. e pillows
were the same, only thinner, with less cushion. ey gave us a spread to go
over the mattress, a sheet, and a thin wool blanket. You had to have your
bed made before you could go to the dayroom.
We’d all have our beds made well before 3 PM, the time they’d let us
go to the dayroom. It seemed like we always had a long hour or so to kill.
Someone had pulled out a Maxim, and Greg, the only one who wouldn’t
say what he was in for, was raving about a woman in an advertisement
who had on a certain pair of blue jeans. Greg was in his ies, the oldest
among us. So-spoken, he wore glasses, was in good shape, and seemed
like an all-around nice guy. Like he’d be a good father or something. For
these reasons, he creeped me out.
“Right there,” Greg said, his nger over the girl in the ad. She stood
in a golden eld with arms outstretched, her ass facing us. “at’s what I
like. A girl in blue jeans. Woohoo!”
114 | e Laurel Review114 | Ross Wilcox
“Really?” I said. “You see girls in blue jeans all the time everywhere.
What’s so sexy about that?”
Greg shrugged, his eyes on the magazine page. “It just does
something for me.”
“It’s what he likes, man,” Jerry said and slapped me on the shoulder.
Jerry got caught transporting a bunch of guns he didn’t have licenses for.
“I like a variety—black, white, red, yellow,” Chip said, sweeping his
hand from one side to the other across the spectrum of women.
“Yeah, we know you like a variety,” said Manny, referring to Chip’s
practice of stashing and closely guarding the majority of the Clay County
Jail’s Maxims under his bed. From the ground, it almost reached the
bottom of his bunk mattress.
“I’ve been trying to get that one with Christina Aguilera on the
cover,” Manny said, “the one where she’s in the pool with the oaty thing
and her big ass is sticking out of the water. But Chip won’t give it up.”
“I told you, Christina’s my favorite,” said Chip, smiling. “You can
have it when I get out.”
“We’re never going to let you out,” laughed Tiani, the only female
jailer. She was making her rounds, and she’d snuck up on us, her red hair
tied in a bun. She always seemed to be half-irting with Chip, making
little jokey comments like that. She smiled at everyone and no one and
disappeared.
“Come on, let me borrow the Christina mag for one night,” Manny
pleaded. ough we never discussed it among each other, nighttime was
when we all jacked o. Of course, we were quiet and respectable about it,
stroking at only a fraction of our full range of motion.
Being the newcomer, I had the one Maxim no one else wanted, which
had Lindsey Lohan on the cover. I didn’t feel as though I’d ascended the
social hierarchy enough to ask someone for one of theirs that they’d, you
know, stopped looking at. But in the one I did have, I’d discovered Kristin
Cavallari. I didn’t know who she was before, had never seen Laguna
Beach. She was all I had, and there was a kind of delity we’d developed,
myself and those pictures.
We were all silent for a bit until Jerry hit me on the shoulder. “Yuck,
stanky ass!” he giggled, and waved the air in front of his nose. I’d farted
silently, hoping it wouldn’t stink. But Jerry snied me out, and he and the
others cleared out of my cell.
Except for Manny. He remained, holding onto his orange from
breakfast. “You know if you leave an orange set for like three months
Volume 49.2 | 115 Ross Wilcox | 115
or something it’ll ferment or whatever and get all these psychedelic
properties and you can eat it and trip balls.”
“What?”
“Seriously.”
Manny tossed the orange to himself and caught it. en he le. ere
was no fact-checking in the Clay County Jail. You could say whatever you
wanted and no one could prove you wrong.
ere were hardly ever any female inmates in the Clay County Jail. But
on this particular week, there happened to be two, and when that was
the case, the jail’s policy was to rotate the dayroom schedule each week
between the male and female inmates. Normally, we’d get the dayroom
from 3 PM to 11 PM, when all the good shows were on. But now we were
stuck using the dayroom during actual daytime hours, from 8 AM to 3
PM, so that the women could have primetime hours.
“It’s bullshit because there’s only two of them and there’s seven of
us. Six not counting Rob,” Chip said, though it went without saying that
he didn’t count Rob. Rob, who resided back in the second cellblock with
Doug, hadn’t set foot in the dayroom since Chip intimidated him. “We
should get the dayroom at night. We’re the majority. It’s undemocratic.”
“Part of democracy is protecting the minority from the tyranny of
the majority,” I said.
“I don’t even give a fuck about the dayroom now,” Manny said. “I’d
rather sleep than watch Oprah.”
And that week we slept like cats. Fieen, sixteen hours a day. It’s
a weird way to experience time, being conscious only to eat or use the
bathroom, read a chapter of a book and fall back asleep. We already had
no sense of time because we never saw the sun or moon, just the constant
buzzing of uorescent lights. But it was an eective way to pass time,
which is ultimately what we were doing anyway.
Despite the schedule switch, each morning, right aer breakfast,
Chip deantly went to the dayroom to watch TV. For the rst few days,
no one went with him. On the third day, Doug joined him but came back
aer an hour or so and went back to sleep. e fourth and h days,
Manny broke down and watched a few hours of TV with Chip. But on the
sixth day, Chip was back to going it alone. at is, until I joined him.
I hadn’t slept the previous night. My court date was coming up, and
all I could think about was going to prison. It had all started innocently
enough with a DUI here, a marijuana possession there. But I couldn’t nd
116 | e Laurel Review116 | Ross Wilcox
anything to do in South Dakota except go to college and try new drugs.
And I couldn’t stop once I started, not even when I started failing classes,
not even when I got arrested, not even when my mom begged me, three
times, to go to treatment. I gured I’d quit when I turned twenty-ve or
thirty or got a girl pregnant, whichever came rst.
Possession of a controlled substance is a Class C felony, punishable
by up to ten years in prison, and as I said, initially they were nice to me.
ey put me on probation for a year. ey said if I completed probation
without any hiccups, the felony would be wiped clean from my record.
But I hiccupped. I got another DUI and marijuana possession. It’s scary
how unimportant drugs made everything else, but it wasn’t as scary as the
thought of prison. As a peaceful, skinny white guy, to me prison meant
I would get my ass kicked and raped. I desired strongly to prevent this
from happening. I needed sage prison advice, and Chip was the only one
among us who had been.
“Hey, hey,” Chip greeted me when I joined him in the dayroom. He
was watching e Price is Right.
I took a seat next to him and launched right into it, “Chip, what’s
prison like?”
“Shit,” he said, leaning back in his recliner, considering. “It ain’t that
bad. As long as you got someone putting money on your commissary. It
ain’t bad.”
“What’s commissary?”
“It’s like the general store. It’s where you get food and snacks and
deodorant and soap and stu.”
“Speaking of soap, do they make you shower together?”
Chip smirked, sensing my fear. “Yeah.”
“Fuck,” I said. “I thought maybe they had individual showers by
now.”
“No, they still have the big communal ones. ere’s just rows of
shower heads along the walls.”
“Just tell me straight up. Is there really, like, any rape that goes on?”
Chip shied his gaze to the television. is was an old episode, and
Bob Barker, with his white ball of hair, was pointing at a red lawn mower.
“You know something funny?” Chip said. “All the soap, all the
deodorant, all the toiletries in the joint are provided by Bob Barker.”
“Really?” I said. Now Bob put his microphone up to the mouth of a
contestant.
“Yeah. All the toiletries come in clear containers that just say Bob
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Barker Soap or Bob Barker Shampoo in black lettering. You know what’s
even funnier? You can buy these shoes in commissary that look just like
Converse All-Stars but they say Bob Baker All-Stars.”
I chuckled because I imagined Kurt Cobain, instead of sporting
his signature Converse All-Stars, jamming in Bob Barker All-Stars. But
now a contestant was spinning the big wheel with the numbers on it and
the uncertainty of which number it landed on reminded me of my own
uncertain fate.
“But for real,” I said, “is there any of that stu that goes on?”
“What are you worried about, getting raped?”
“Yeah,” I said, not meaning to raise my voice. “I’m actually really
worried about it.”
Chip shook his head. “Don’t be worried about it. You’re bigger than
most of the guys who’re in there.”
“Really?” I said, examining my shoulders and chest. “I’m skinny,
though.”
Chip shrugged.
“What about gangs? I’m white, so does that mean I’m a target?”
He looked me over. “ey’ll probably leave you alone.”
I nodded condently. “So if I just keep to myself, I’ll be ne, don’t
you think? I’ll just read and that’s it. I won’t fuck with anyone.”
Chip shrugged.
“I’ve never been in a ght,” I said.
“Listen, when you go the joint, they put you in the hole rst.”
“e hole?”
“e holding cell. It’s this big ass cell with all the new inmates. ey
put you in there while they gure out which cellblock to put you in. Now,
they give you some clothes, a pair of sandals, some toiletries, shit like that.
But they also give you a pair of long socks and a can of tuna.”
“A can of tuna?”
Chip nodded. His eyes were widening. “ey always give you one.
Now, what you do is put the can of tuna in one of those big socks and tie
the end of it. en if anyone fucks with you, you just fucking whack them
with that tuna sock.”
I tried to imagine myself in the holding cell, which to me looked like
a haunted psych ward in a horror movie. I’m lying down on my bed, just
minding my own business, when all of a sudden someone gets in my face.
ey’re talking shit to me about, I don’t know, my haircut or something,
and I reach for my tuna sock and smack them. Problem solved.
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“at’s what my cousin did,” Chip explained. “He used the tuna
sock. He’s smaller than you.”
A woman jumped up and down and hugged Bob Barker because she
just won A Brand New Car! ey zoomed in on Bob’s face and you could
see all the makeup caked on, so much that his skin tone was orange.
I said, “Chip, is it true you were only serving a sixty-day sentence
when you broke out of the Pennington County Jail?”
Chip nodded.
“And then you got nine years in the pen?”
Chip smiled.
“What the fuck?” I said. “Why would you do that?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Going to the joint, it’s like a rite of
passage in my family.”
I wanted to tell him how fucked up that was. at in my family, going
to college was a rite of passage. at, in fact, right in this very town was
the agship institution of higher education in the state of South Dakota.
I, myself, had gone there for a semester and a half before winding up in
here. Perhaps he ought to give it a shot. But then I thought, maybe these
are the types of things white guys get beat up for saying. So instead I said,
“Is it true they allow conjugal visits in the—”
But Chip cut me o. “Shut up,” he said, nodding at the TV. “Judge
Judy’s coming on.”
A few days later, unannounced, my parents came to visit in the morning. I
hadn’t seen them or spoken to them since getting locked up over a month
ago. Tiani woke me up and—with my shaggy hair matted and jutting in
various directions, my body clothed in the baggy orange V-neck t-shirt
and orange pants—led me down the dank concrete corridor to one of the
visitor rooms.
Inside the seven-by-seven foot space, there was a beat-up wooden
chair, a plastic counter, and yes, a black phone resting idly in its hook on
the wall, its segmented steel cord coiling out like the body of a snake. e
thick glass had those intersecting lines forming little x’s and diamond-
shaped squares all throughout it.
On the other side of the glass sat my dad, doing his best to muster a
smile. His thin hair looked a bit whiter and uncombed, his typically well-
groomed beard a bit scraggly. Behind his glasses, his eyes were tired, and
bags hung beneath them, weighing them down, as if it were a strain to
keep them open. I could tell he hadn’t been sleeping.
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My mom sat next to him. Her brown eyes moist, her lower lip
quivering and enveloping her upper lip, she could barely hold it together.
I thought she would lose it at any moment. She, too, looked a bit greyer as
she had, for the rst time I could remember, allowed her roots to grow in
a quarter of an inch.
In addition to my parents, my Uncle Brad and his daughter Maria
were there. ey both gazed at me in what I could tell was an attempt to
repress any signs of fetishized awe. ere were only two phones on the
visitor side, so I talked to my mom and dad rst.
“Hey, Rossy,” my dad said in a toothy grin. He called me Rossy on
two occasions: when he hadn’t seen me in a while, and to ease tension in
the room. is time, it was both.
“Hey, dad. Hey, mom,” I said, my voice low and froggy, the rst
words I had spoken that day.
My mom made a sound but didn’t actually speak. Instead, she
covered her mouth, set the phone down, and cried. I looked at Brad and
Maria, angry and embarrassed that they’d come, that they were permitted
a front row seat to me breaking my mom’s heart.
And I knew that’s why I hadn’t heard from my parents. Because
it caused my mom too much pain. I hated that truth, but there it was.
She could love me beyond reason, and she did, but when I crossed the
threshold—the threshold being my transformation into the demon drug
phantom who appeared only on holidays or to ask for money—she had to
let go, for that was the point at which, for her, loving me became a black
hole she got lost in.
“How you doing in there?” my dad asked. “How’s the food?”
My mom covered her face and shook her head. I could hear her sobs
through the glass.
“e food’s ne. ey get it from Cherry Street Grille, you know that
restaurant when you rst pull into town? We’ve already had green bean
casserole twice this week, though.”
ere was a pause. My dad didn’t know what to say. I didn’t, either,
so I said, “ey let us go in the dayroom for eight hours each day. ere’s a
TV and a big shelf of books and some board games. Last night these guys
buzzed each other’s heads. It’s funny, but we’re always watching COPS.”
My dad stared blankly at me for a moment, then chuckled.
I said, “We don’t shower together, in case you were wondering. ey
have two individual showers in dierent locations that we take turns
using.”
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He only wanted to protect my mom. He only ever wanted that, yet
here they were. Somehow, he’d convinced my mom to come.
“at’s good to know,” my dad said.
My Uncle Brad picked up the phone from in front of my mom and said,
“We’ll miss you in Chile.”
My mom, my Uncle Brad, my cousins Maria and Camille, and my
Grandma Luisa were all going to my grandma’s homeland for two weeks.
I was supposed to go, up until I got incarcerated.
I shook my head. “I wish I could go,” I said, “but my furlough didn’t
go through.”
Brad nodded. Normally we laughed at the easy sarcasm in our
exchanges. He handed the phone to Maria and she said, “I hope you’re
okay.” She smiled at me. Growing up, in junior high and into high school,
I felt like she always looked up to me. I was popular. I was good at sports.
I got good grades with minimal eort. She used to ask me what were
then the important questions about life, like what bands to listen to, what
movies to watch, what books to read. But she had quit, a few years ago,
asking me for recommendations or advice.
Nevertheless, I said, to assert my worth as a cousin, “If you need
something to read on the plane, you should check out Mary Gaitskill.
Anything by her is good. Bad Behavior in particular, though.”
e conversation didn’t last much longer. I told them how I’d learned
to play cribbage. I told them how I’d read a book called Ishmael by Daniel
Quinn and Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, the only two books
that weren’t Louis L’Amour.
e last thing my dad said to me was, “It doesn’t feel good going to
bed at night knowing your son’s in jail.” e one and only thing my mom
said was, “Please read God’s word.”
Aer they le, Tiani escorted me back to the cellblock. She handed
me two cans of Grizzly wintergreen long-cut chewing tobacco—courtesy
of my dad—and a fancy new copy of the King James Bible with gold-
trimmed thumbnail indexes.
I sat on my bunk and opened the Bible and found inside a little
stitched-together green cross, accompanied by a note. e note said Ross,
Take this with you in court. I love you, Mom. I stared at the cross for
several moments before snatching it up and squeezing it. I closed my eyes
and felt my mom near me. We were at home on the rose-patterned couch
in our living room. We moved through the years of my youth and she sat
on the couch and I was in sixth grade and she listened to me tell her that
Volume 49.2 | 121 Ross Wilcox | 121
I liked Amanda and later, in high school, when Jessica dumped me, she
held me on that couch and she listened to me play a new song I’d made up
on the guitar and she told me it was beautiful and she listened to a new
poem I’d written and smiled and said she loved it.
I opened my eyes and my cheeks were damp. I stued the Bible
under my bed. I laid back on my bed and clutched the green cross against
my chest. I wished it was enough to deaden the fear.
I closed my eyes again and hoped that, when I opened them, it would
be dierent, that I’d see the sun or the moon or some form of outside
light, that I wouldn’t be alone. But I kept them closed and realized that all
of us were alone. Chip, whose family was back on the decaying, lawless
reservation in Pine Ridge. Manny, whose meth-running buddies were
still back in Belle Fourche, northwest of Rapid City. Greg, whose wife and
son were at his home up in Parker. Jerry, whose homeland was Minnesota.
And Doug and Rob, those of the second cellblock, I suppose they had each
other. Chip called them butt buddies. Surely, though, there was someone
on the outside who missed them.
Suddenly my head lled with everyone I knew and I wondered
what they were doing at that exact moment—my friends Jim and Randy,
my ex-girlfriend Jessica, my brothers Brett and Gabe, my cousins Maria
and Camille and Allison and Lisa, my former teachers Mrs. Hawley and
Mrs. Limoges, the girl named Samantha I’d slept with one night at USD
and who hated my guts aerward, Jimmy Page and ome Yorke and
Isaac Brock and all my favorite musicians, my Grandma Mary and my
Grandma Luisa, everyone.
I sat up, threw the green cross against the wall, and hissed fuck.
I hated this place because I wanted to be anywhere else but this place.
I realized this place was pointless because it wasn’t out there and by
extension I was pointless because I was in here and out there continued
on.
And then I realized that’s the fucking point of this place.
e Clay County Jail is actually just the basement of the Clay County
Courthouse. On my big day, I put on my orange suit and Tiani handcued
me and rode with me up the rickety elevator to the third oor, where the
courtroom was.
To me, the courtroom looked stately. High-ceilinged, lots of
intricately-carved wooden columns, painted images of gesticulating
Greeks in robes on the walls. e gallery was composed of several rows of
122 | e Laurel Review122 | Ross Wilcox
pew-style wooden benches, and I spotted my dad among those seated. e
baili let me sit by him, a courtesy, I was told, the court didn’t normally
extend to inmates.
My dad smiled and said, “Hey, Rossy.”
“Where’s Mom?”
He shook his head, lowered his eyes to his lap. “She can’t handle it.”
Friday is felony day at the Clay County Courthouse, where, in
addition to all the other cases on the docket, they hear the pleas of those
facing prison time. Unfortunately for me, they proceeded in alphabetical
order, which le me, of surname Wilbur, the very last one on the list. My
dad and I sat and watched as they paraded each criminal up to face the
Honorable Judge Art Rush, a handsome grey-haired man with a matching
mustache.
ere was a tattooed Mexican man who plead guilty to possessing
ve pounds of marijuana and got sentenced to twelve years in prison, a
nondescript middle-aged woman who plead guilty to insucient funds
and was ordered to pay two-thousand dollars restitution, a beefy young
country boy who plead guilty to reckless driving and was ned just short
of four hundred dollars. ey had a group of ve people all facing DUI
charges come up as a group and enter their pleas in near-simultaneous
succession. At one point, the court realized it had made a mistake and
that there was an inmate downstairs in the holding cell who was supposed
to be in court. Judge Rush spoke into an intercom and ordered Tiani
to bring the individual up, which caused, in my perception, a seemingly
inordinate delay.
Finally, aer three excruciating hours, it was my turn.
I still don’t know what exactly happened that day, or to be more
precise, why it happened. I can’t call it justice, and I don’t like the word
mercy either. I walked up the aisle, past the little wooden gate, and stood
in front of the bench next to my portly, court-appointed public defender.
I was given a chance to speak, and I gave the same speech I had twice
before, “I know I made a mistake, but I’m serious about staying clean this
time. I’m going to Narcotics Anonymous, and I’m going to get a sponsor.
I want to earn my degree and become a productive member of society.”
Judge Rush banged his gavel and said, “I sentence you to three years
in the state penitentiary, to be fully clothed, fed, and cared for, for the
duration of your sentence—to be suspended. In addition, I order you to
attend and successfully complete a minimum thirty-day inpatient drug
treatment program.”
Volume 49.2 | 123 Ross Wilcox | 123
And that was it. My ears rung with the words I sentence you to three
years in the state penitentiary, and I turned to my lawyer and he was
smiling and he whispered excitedly, “Yes! at’s what we wanted.”
I said, “But he sentenced me to prison.”
“But the sentence is suspended. at means you’re on probation for
three years. But you don’t have to go to prison. Only if you violate again.”
“Seriously?” I still didn’t believe him.
e court adjourned and Judge Rush disappeared to his chambers.
e stenographer and state’s attorney packed up their stu and jetted. e
baili said, “Okay, show’s over folks.” My attorney led me past the bar,
where my dad stood anxiously waiting.
“Is he going to prison?” my dad asked.
“No,” I said. “I got a suspended sentence. I’m on probation again.”
My dad shook hands with the public defender, thanked him
profusely. I told myself over and over, I’m not going to prison. I’m not
going to prison. It barely felt real. e relief came on in intermittent but
steadily more intense waves, like the eect of a powerful drug slowly
taking hold.
Was it because I’m white? Was it my speech? ere was no good
reason that Tiani escorted me back down to the cellblock to await
transport to a treatment center rather than the state penitentiary.
When I got back to my cell, I unclutched the little green cross and
stared at it. It was bent now from how tightly I’d gripped it. I thought,
Mom, did you do this?
I had to wait another week to be transported to Keystone Treatment Center
up in Canton, just south of Sioux Falls, bringing my stay to an even two
months. In that time, a skinny middle-aged man joined our cellblock. He
committed arson. But not throw-some-gasoline-and-light-a-match arson.
Elaborate arson. While his ex-wife was out of town, he burned her house
down by setting little candles all around the house’s base—one hundred
and nine in all—and lit them, one by one. en he stood by the sidewalk
and watched the candles slowly burn until they melted into the gasoline
he’d splashed all around the foundation.
When he told us that, I thought, You are fucking crazy, but what I
said to him was, “Damn, dude.” Chip just shook his head and chuckled, as
if it all made perfect sense. Manny told the guy a way to make meth with
battery acid and ammonia and some other shit from under your sink, but
I tuned him out. By this time, Jerry and Greg had been released.
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One of my last nights in jail was the night before Rob, the child molester,
would face his verdict and, if convicted, sentencing. It was pretty late,
past midnight, and I was playing Cribbage with Chip. e table in our
cellblock was right against the wall separating our cellblock from Doug
and Rob’s cellblock.
“Hey, you guys,” said Doug. “Does anyone have any chew?” Because
our cellblocks were adjacent, we could slide stu back and forth along the
ground—games, cards, but most oen chew. People were always running
out, but I always had an ample supply thanks to my dad.
“Rob could really use some chew,” Doug explained. “He’s got his
sentencing tomorrow morning and he’s real nervous.”
Ever since my suspended sentence I’d been giving stu away—
stamps, envelopes, a few dollars here and there, and plenty of chew. I
grabbed my can of Grizzly wintergreen and stood from the table. But
Chip stared me down.
“Tell Rob to fuck o and die,” Chip said. He kept his eyes locked on
me. I gripped my chew can. Chip had the same look in his eyes that he
did that night back when Rob tried to enter the dayroom. I legitimately
thought that if I slid this chew down to Rob, Chip would come at me. I
thought: I could really use a tuna sock about now.
But I crouched down and held the chew on the ground just beyond
the bars. I said, “Doug, I got some chew for you. Here it comes.” I gave it a
little push. It only had to travel ve feet or so. It glided scratchily for a few
seconds and came to rest.
“anks,” Doug said, sounding more excited than grateful. “anks,
Ross.”
“No problem,” I said, meeting eyes with Chip. e intensity in his
face was murderous. “Have the rest of that can.”
“ere’s over half a can here,” Doug said.
“Keep it.”
And then I heard Rob’s voice for the rst time. It must have been the
rst time Chip heard it, too, because the bad-ass, angry tightness on his
face loosened into a perky curiosity. A high-pitched, gravely-from-disuse,
peepy-sounding voice said, “anks, Ross.” I stared Chip down for a few
more seconds. I said, “You’re welcome.” And then I walked back to my
cell.
e next morning, Rob got convicted and sentenced to thirty-ve
years in prison. We caught a glimpse of him as he was transported from the
elevator to the jail’s entrance, where’d he’d immediately be transported to
Volume 49.2 | 125 Ross Wilcox | 125
the hole (you know what that is) up in Sioux Falls. His wrists and legs were
shackled, and two sheri deputies gripped either of his arms. We probably
saw him take ve steps, and aer that, we only heard the clanking of his
shackles, and then the steely slamming of a door.
I don’t know who found out Rob got the thirty-ve year sentence;
one of the jailors must’ve leaked it to us. Rob was y-six years old, had
diabetes, and took medication for high blood pressure. Chip stated the
obvious, “at motherfucker’ll die in the joint.”
Two days later, they released me to my dad. I climbed in the car and
asked, “Where’s mom?”
My dad shook his head.
He gave me a ride up Interstate 29 to Keystone Treatment Center,
where I’d get help for my drug problem. e sun was beautiful; the trees
were beautiful; the grass, the roads, all of it. It wasn’t bittersweet to leave
Chip, Manny, Kristin Cavallari, or any of them behind. It was just sweet.
Except that I sat in the passenger seat, and that seat belonged to my
mom. All I had was this little green thread-cross, which I clutched tightly
in my pocket. But she came up that rst Sunday for Family Day.
She cried again, and I held her, but she was there. I glanced over her
shoulder at my dad, and he nodded, hopefully.
126 | e Laurel Review126 | Caroline Zeilenga
Caroline Zeilenga
Two Hundred Words for Love
When Tony calls I am back home, standing in my mother’s kitchen with
my hands in a bowl of pastry dough.
“I thought you’d be at school,” he says. “I was calling your Mom
because I lost your number.”
I haven’t been in touch with Tony in months. I haven’t even thought
of him, not as much as I probably should have. He went to Iraq, I went to
college. We wrote letters for a while, until I gave up on that.
“But where are you?” I ask. He tells me that he’s in post-deployment,
headed home for good in another week. I ll a pastry bag and pipe out
dough in little kisses.
“How was sophomore year?” Tony says.
“It didn’t work out.” I feel like a derelict saying it. “How’s Jess?”
He hesitates. “It didn’t work out.”
ere’s a noise in the background and then Tony tells me he has to go.
Before he hangs up he asks if I will go with his family to the base next
week, and he gives me the phone number at his parents’ house. I pretend
that I don’t remember it from high school and write it down.
“I love you,” I say.
Tony laughs. “Yeah,” he replies, then he is gone.
When I hang up the phone, Tony’s voice keeps skipping on the turntable
of my brain. Hearing it jolts me backward in time: it’s like the real world
never happened, art history is just some other idiot’s major to fail out of,
and suddenly I’m living for free in my mother’s house again. Instead of a
letdown, life is just one big, blinding orb of possibility.
“You need to be careful,” my mother says, entering the kitchen. I
doodle on a scrap of paper so I don’t have to look at her.
“ey aren’t the same when they get back,” she says gently. “ey
want dierent things.”
ere is some story about my mother, some marine in California
before my father. An engagement that fell apart before her marriage,
which fell apart later.
“ey want to be settled. ey want something normal,” she says.
“He sounds ok to me.”
“at’s not what I’m saying.”
Volume 49.2 | 127 Caroline Zeilenga | 127
Pretty soon a cartoon arm is dangling over the side of a bathtub
and there’s a tiny quill pen. I’ve nished Death of Marat on the back of
my mother’s bank statement. e oven timer goes o and I set down the
pen. I’ve never made gougeres, but I hope my mother likes them because
there’s no way in hell I’m going to eat them. Butter, milk, cheese—that shit
makes you fat.
“It’s ne,” I say. My mother goes back to her desk in the den.
“I love you,” I say to the empty room.
It’s all over the local papers: Deployment Drawing Down, 96 Troops Due
Home from Iraq. e evening news starts a nightly countdown: 5 days to
go for guard! 4 days to go! 3 days! My mother hands me a sympathy card.
inking of you at this Dicult Time, it reads on the inside.
“Here,” she says. “It’s for Maggie and Bud. Sign your name.”
Maggie is a friend of my mother’s from work, and sometimes on
Sundays they sit in the living room knitting sweaters. Sometimes Maggie
puts down her needles and wipes her eyes, and my mother holds her hand.
Maggie’s son was deployed with Tony, then he was killed by a roadside
bomb. e war was still new then, and casualties got people’s attention.
e newspaper articles didn’t dwell on the specics of the accident, except
to say that he was driving in a military convoy. At the funeral, my mother
and I stood on the football eld with everyone else in town and bowed
our heads while a minister’s voice boomed out of some staticky speakers.
e marching band huddled on the twenty yard line and the brass section
played “Taps.” Amidst a lot of ocial gunre Maggie and Bud and the
son’s wife looked out atly from their folding chairs, and beside them the
state senators and the governor, and then a man in a dress uniform set
o a cannon. When it was done my mother walked onto the stage to hug
Maggie and they stayed stuck like that for a long time, while the snow
wandered down and dusted their dark wool coats. e son was a few years
older than Tony and I. He was not a man I remembered.
“Mom, I hardly even know them,” I protest.
She looks at me like she is surprised by all the ways I can nd to
disappoint her. “If everyone’s kid came home except yours, wouldn’t you
at least want someone to remember that?” she says.
Tony was my best friend in high school. Even aer he got together with
Jess we spent a lot of time driving around, watching movies, pondering
cliché ideas about life in big, starry elds or the tops of mountains at
128 | e Laurel Review128 | Caroline Zeilenga
night. In a cow pasture, Tony taught me to sprint barefoot on my toes. We
spent a whole summer hiking 4,000-footers in the dark. At the peaks, he
showed me the dierent ways to make a re—matches, sure, but int and
bow drills and wind and pelting rain, too.
“I’m going to teach you to survive,” Tony said.
e hangar at the base is a stuy sea of old couples and young women
and some men and a lot of children, balloons and posters hovering above
everybody’s heads. en they arrive, a river of sand-colored soldiers in
their combat uniforms and the place is like a car speaker blown out with
so much screaming and cheering. Tony hugs his mother rst, lets her cry
on his shoulder, and he shakes the hands of his father and brother and
grandfather so ercely he looks like he is delivering a mortal blow to some
invisible thing in the air between their bodies.
His blond hair is much shorter than it was in high school. Having it
cropped close to his head makes his face seem broader, his forehead taller,
his dark eyes sunk back in his head. He looks like maybe life is starting to
wear on him.
I stand back a little and smile because it feels like what I’m supposed
to do, and then he hugs me so tightly my feet come up o the ground for
a second and I like this weightless feeling. His neck smells like soap and
sweat, and having his arms wrapped so tightly around me, just below my
shoulder blades, reminds me that he used to do this at parties to make my
back crack.
“Welcome home,” I say into his scratchy shoulder.
He sets me back down and says with a big exhale, “Fucking-A, it is
good to be here.”
Everyone laughs and his mother cries some more while she is
laughing, and as they move toward the car in one chattering mass I follow
a few steps behind, feeling like the ghost of someone else.
You can tell what’s important to people by how many words they use to
describe it. Before I le school someone in my dorm told me this wasn’t
true, but you know the whole Inuit have 200 words for snow thing? in
snow under r trees. Windblown tundra snow. Dusting snow on sea ice.
Love. If something isn’t very important, there’s probably only one word
for it. Other than baking, this is my newest experiment: If we just have
one single-syllable word, how many dierent meanings can I give it? For
the last few weeks I’ve been emailing all of my friends just to tell them I
Volume 49.2 | 129 Caroline Zeilenga | 129
love them. One of them sent a reply asking if I was thinking about suicide.
When Tony calls a few days later my mother answers and invites him over
for dinner. He’s eaten at our table a thousand times before, but always
in the way that Moms end up feeding any of the kids that are hanging
around at suppertime. She puts on an apron, spends the aernoon rolling
out pasta dough, marinating chicken. ings are getting complicated.
“Mom, this is ridiculous,” I complain. “We could be eating frozen
pizza. It doesn’t have to be a thing.”
But she smiles like she hasn’t heard me—or worse, like what I have
said is very amusing—and goes back to dicing peppers.
“Mom, are you high?” I ask for eect.
She giggles. “Oh wouldn’t that be a riot.”
“You do realize I’m not going to like date Tony, r ight?”
“Of course, dear.”
So why is she still looking so pleased with herself? I picture me, and
Tony, and try to imagine how my mother thinks about us.
“You think Tony’s some kind of good inuence, don’t you?”
She looks up. “Well, you can’t say he’s a bad one.”
My mother holds the pasta bowl out in front of her while Tony serves
himself. He looks her in the eye when he says thank you.
“is is the most incredible pasta I’ve ever had,” he tells her.
My mother’s face glows pink.
“You should take lessons,” Tony says to me.
“Sure, maybe that’s what I’ll do,” I reply. “Live the American Dream
through pasta.”
“You could do that.”
“I could,” I say, “but I’d rather just live like a crazy person in my
mother’s attic for the rest of my life.”
My mother laughs in that persistently good-natured way of hers. “At
least you’re learning what you don’t want to do,” she suggests.
I shake my head.
“Well, you are a good baker,” she continues. “What about culinary
school? Or illustration—whatever happened to illustration?”
“I think school is bad luck for me.”
“Sweetie, you’ve got to make your own luck in this world.”
ere is only one word for luck, too. Suddenly I think I can’t possibly
shove even one of these rounds of bread in my mouth. Tony is watching
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me and not saying anything and my mother’s motherly optimism is
hanging in the air above the candles, and I look down at my napkin and
realize my eyes are watering. I am about to fucking cry over this plate of
pasta. I consider pushing my chair out and running from the room like a
little girl, or shooting my mother down with some quip about making the
best pasta in a town that’s not even on the map, but neither of these makes
any goddamn sense at all so I just hang my head like Marat posed in the
bathtub.
Finally my mother clears her throat at the same time that Tony says
“Well, I will say one thing about this place, the roads are a lot more fun to
drive than in Fallujah.”
is doesn’t quite work, but my mother forces herself to laugh and
then asks him if he remembers the time he found her stranded on the side
of Center Road; the time he slithered around in the April mud to change
her tire while she picked cowslips in the ditch for him to bring home to his
mother. Tony says it wasn’t as bad as she is making it sound, but that his
mother put the owers in a vase on the kitchen table, and then everything
is rolling again.
Aer dinner I tell my mother we’re going out. She seems a little
disappointed, but she hugs Tony and then she hugs me too, and Tony
and I stand in the driveway looking back and forth from my beater to his
father’s station wagon, the same one we always rode around in.
Tony points to the wagon. “I’ll drive.”
“You sure?”
“I’m driving,” he says, and I climb into the passenger seat.
“Where are we going?” I ask when we’ve been on the road awhile.
“Where do you want to go?”
I shrug. I wonder how many thousands of times these two questions
have crossed in this car.
“I know,” he says. I wait for him to go on but he doesn’t, so I shove
the dangling cassette tape in the stereo slot. It bursts into the dark space
that is the two of us inside this metal shell: old and stupid noise not as
tough as it sounds, the stereo turned up too high so that we both reach for
the volume at once. Steppenwolf or some lame shit like that. I eject the
tape and toss it dramatically into the back seat.
“My Dad’s gonna be pissed,” Tony says and we laugh.
I ip through the radio but it’s mostly commercials. e only thing
we nd is some sad country song. Not one of the usual twangy ones about
cheating hearts or poker but this man and woman crooning miserably
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against each other over something big they have lost. It’s better than
silence, so I leave it on, but there’s this weight on my chest and I keep
thinking about the maple trees without any leaves on the cover of Maggie
and Bud’s sympathy card.
“If you want to, you know, talk about anything, I’m over here,” I say.
“Ok,” he says back.
e man is singing again, burying stu in the yard. Memories or
bottles or something.
“So do you want to talk about anything? at happened?”
“No.” Aer a minute Tony says, “ey make you do a lot of talking
before you leave. ey don’t send you home until you’re pretty much
talked out.”
“Oh.”
Lullabies, funerals, pictures, something about drinking again. e
woman this time.
“Do you want to talk about anything?” Tony asks.
“Nope.”
“Ok.”
e song ends and another one starts and nishes, and then Tony
says with certainty, “You’re gonna y.”
His words startle me. I’ve kind of forgotten about him. I was
thinking about luck. What was the point of getting a degree or falling
in love? What good was making your own luck if you weren’t born with
any? “What are you talking about?” I ask.
But Tony is already signaling into the parking lot of our high school.
I haven’t been here since the memorial service, though I’m not sure if
Tony even knows where the service happened, so I try to think about the
last time I was here before that, which would have been our senior year.
“No way,” I groan.
“Come on,” Tony replies. “You don’t even know what we’re gonna
do.”
“I’m not getting out of the car.”
I unbuckle my seatbelt but stay put. Tony gets out without me, puts
on a backpack he has stashed in the backseat, then comes around and
opens my door. He pulls on my arm and when I still don’t move he ducks
into the car, wraps himself around my waist and hauls me out like he’s
removing a carcass.
“ere’s nothing le of you,” he says disapprovingly when I am out.
His hand lingers on my waist.
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We stand under the streetlight, but I feel like a moth battering itself
to death in this brightness and I am relieved when Tony takes my hand
and tugs me across the parking lot, like this is the most normal thing we
could do. And it is.
“Now!” Tony shouts, and I plunge the pole into the pit and kick my feet up
over my head. I balance mid-air for a second, thinking the scales will be
against me—I will slip back the way I came, brains splattered on the tar
runway. But Tony is spotting by the pit below with both arms on the pole
and he resists its falter. en I am hurtling forward again, over the bar,
plummeting down into the mat.
“Nice,” he says. “Do it again.”
I hold the pole like a jousting rod and jog back down the runway
toward the dark oval of the track, and when I get to the end of it I turn
and spring again, up on my toes like I am being chased. Like no matter
what else happens, I will not be caught. Tony cues and I spear the metal
pit again and arc myself upwards, but the timing is wrong and I barely get
o the ground.
“Do it again,” he says. “You can’t hesitate.”
I try a few more times without much success. I hate the fact that
Tony is down there spotting, waiting for me to miscalculate and crash, but
also I love it.
Finally, I get the speed and the timing and the push right again, and
up high I curve my body like a dolphin, shove the pole away from me and
land on my back on the mat.
“Perfect!” Tony calls. “at was eight feet!”
I am still sprawled on the mat, which smells like plastic and mildew,
when Tony picks up his backpack and ops down beside me. He pulls out
two cans of beer and hands me one.
“I can’t believe you never did track,” he says.
“Pole vault might be the best legal activity ever,” I confess. “You
used to do this, right?”
A oodlight is casting o the track shed, and in its dim twilight I see
him nod.
“Maybe you should coach or something. You’re good at it.”
“Maybe,” he says, downing the beer and opening another. “If I ever
make it to college, maybe I’ll vault then.”
“You should,” I say again.
Tony lies back next to me and I point out the big dipper, which is the
Volume 49.2 | 133 Caroline Zeilenga | 133
only constellation I know.
“You were supposed to get a book out on them,” he tells me, though
this is something I don’t remember at all. “You were supposed to learn the
constellations and then teach me on one of our hikes.”
“Really?” I am doubtful. “I’ll put it on the life list.”
“Why did you leave school?” he asks suddenly.
It’s like thrusting Steppenwolf into the tape deck, jarring you from
one kind of moment into another, something loud and pointless you
weren’t expecting.
“I don’t know.” I want to roll o the mat and slink down into the
sand of the shot-put pit like some kind of beach creature, but I lie there
and wait.
“What happened?” Tony persists.
is isn’t part of the plan. College is something that came and went,
some otherworldly experience that we did not share.
“Nothing. It never happened.”
“Fine,” Tony says.
I sit up and reach for another beer, and when I settle back in Tony
puts an arm under my head. If it were anyone else this would be some
unspoken breaking point—get away now, before this turns into a mishap,
or lean in and let things go like they sometimes do. But it is only Tony and
I know this is just another word for love.
We talk some more about the stars, and about the people we used
to know, and about the disadvantages of living again with our mothers.
Tony smells like cigarettes, though I do not remember him smoking, and
motor oil, like maybe he has been working on cars recently, and I lie still
with my head on his arm. I can feel his pulse there, knocking on the
back of my skull like he is waiting for me to answer, but we just lie next to
each other until I am drunk and sleepy. Being back here with him is like
reliving your rst snowfall.
A couple of nights a week, Tony and I drink beers together away from our
parents’ houses. When he drops me o I sit up watching reies out my
bedroom window, bursting into tiny explosions of light in the backyard.
“Did you meet any guys in college?” Tony asks one night. I know
that he means did I meet any guys he would approve of.
“ey’re not real,” I say, patting his knee reassuringly.
“You ever think about getting married?” he asks, and when I jerk my
head around he must catch my expression, because he shudders. “Jesus,
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not to me. I just mean in general. In life.”
I shrug. “Doubt it,” I say. “en again, yes, I probably will. Unless
I want to live in my old bedroom forever, it’s probably the only way out of
here. What about you?”
“Who knows. I thought I was going to propose to Jess when I got
back. I don’t really want to die alone.”
“at would suck.”
We are sitting on the steps of this old farmhouse where no one lives
anymore. Kids have smashed out all the windows. I grind a shard of glass
into the dirt with my shoe. Tony is looking out into the scrubby eld like
he’s waiting for life to materialize there again, but it’s so obvious the cows
are all gone and the barn is collapsed in a heap behind us that I feel sorry
for him.
“How about this,” I begin. “If we’re both still here at thirty, and
we’re both still single, we’ll get married. So we don’t die alone.”
“irty?” he says.
Even at twenty, thirty is another world altogether, something so far
away and unimaginable you’re not even sure you’ll live to see it.
“irty.” I hold out my hand. He shakes it the way he shook the
hands of the men at the base.
When July comes I paint the upstairs bathroom, which is what I promised
my mother I would do last month in lieu of rent, and I go to my gure
drawing class at the studio downtown on Friday aernoon. e model
is a tall, slender man, probably early forties, with a long brown ponytail
and a fascinating jawline. He stands with his weight shied to one hip, a
simple pose, but I can’t get the shadowing right on his face and his feet
won’t stay planted on the paper no matter how many times I draw them.
It is July 3rd, the day before Independence Day, though for some reason
this is the date the town chooses to celebrate, and the streets are already
lling with kids and ags and veterans in their customary caps. I have to
hurry out of class to get my car down the main street and away from town
before the parade starts.
e familiar little lump drops into my stomach on the drive home
and I roll down the windows so that the wind shakes me alive, and I
change the radio station a dozen times but still it doesn’t leave. e house
is empty when I get home. My mother has driven to Maine to visit her
sister for the holiday weekend. I open a beer and drink it in four big slugs.
I bake a batch of oatmeal raisin cookies to ll the house with something
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that smells good. I put the radio on in the kitchen and turn it up loud,
and when I still can’t throw the feeling of failure I go outside to the yard.
Darkness has fallen but I wheel the push mower out of the garage and
yank it alive to hear something roar. Aer a while I let the handle loose
and the motor coughs and the blades spin and spin for as long as they can
but then they lose steam and are still.
I pick up the phone and dial my aunt’s house. Who calls their
mother on a Friday night? Even losers have plans on Fridays. I try to
come up with a reason to call, some dumb question about the house or a
message on the machine for her. I wish we had a dog so I could ask if she’d
remembered to feed it.
“Hi honey,” my mother says when my aunt gives her the phone. I
hear the clink of a glass and my aunt laughing in the background.
“Hi.”
“Is everything ok?”
“Fine.”
“Just calling to chat?”
“Did you leave the stove on?” e words rush out of my mouth.
“What’s that?”
“Because it was on when I came home.”
My mother is slow to answer. She sounds confused. “I didn’t even
cook anything today. I le before lunch.”
I am suddenly furious with her. “You could have burned the house
down.”
“Sweetie, are you sure?”
“Why would I make this up?”
“Oh my God,” she says soly.
Some little triumph lls up in me and for a second I feel better. But
then I look around and I am still standing in my mother’s kitchen all by
myself.
“I have to go.”
“I’m sorry,” she replies.
I put my palm down on each of the four burners, one aer the
other like I am giving a blessing. I let my hand linger there, tempting the
universe to make one of them hot.
I go upstairs and open the bureau with the Hello Kitty stickers on it,
which once again holds my socks and underwear. I am about to get high
when I hear car tires crunching on the gravel drive. We don’t live near
a damn thing, and our driveway is so long no one would cruise up it by
136 | e Laurel Review136 | Caroline Zeilenga
mistake.
e darkness gets my mind sprinting, and as I walk downstairs my
skin crawls. I remind myself about the chapters in the library books. I’ve
been reading a lot about criminals lately—rapists, serial killers—and there
seem to be two conicting survival strategies when confronted. One: talk
jovially and incessantly, to humanize yourself. Two: utilize the element
of surprise. Step close and grab them by the throat before they can make
a move. Pull their face in close to yours and scream threats. But both
strategies say one thing the same—no matter what else happens, do not
show fear.
I am decidedly on the side of the second strategy when the doorbell
rings, but instead I nd Tony on the step. I oer him a beer and he comes
in and asks if my mother and I keep anything harder in the house.
“Yeah, nice to see you too,” I say, but already he is following me into
the kitchen and I am pulling a bottle of gin down from the cabinet.
“Your Mom’s car is missing,” he says.
“Oh is it? at explains why I couldn’t nd her.” But the words don’t
seem to register with him at all, so I add, “she’s in Maine with my aunt.”
“Huh.” He is looking out the kitchen window, so that I’m not sure
if he’s responding to me or thinking about something else altogether. He
throws back the glass and asks for a rell. We get hopelessly drunk, sink
into the couch and ip through channels on the television.
“Want to see something?” Tony asks. I shrug.
He grabs my arm and pulls me up. I follow him out the door, past
the abandoned lawn mower to the driveway.
“Look,” he says, but I already am. A massive silver truck is gleaming
there, so polished the moon is reecting o the hood.
“No way,” I say, which makes Tony grin.
“I just got it today.”
I step closer to the truck. A piece of paper is still xed on the backseat
window, and my eyes blur across a heading, a price, a list of words and
numbers indicating fuel economy and four wheel drive and safety ratings.
“It’s new.”
“I didn’t spend 18 months in the desert for free.”
I circle the truck with a reverence that I can feel Tony enjoying. I
wouldn’t trust my rust-box to get as far as the highway.
“Joy ride?” he suggests.
“Fuck yeah.”
“When did you turn into such a sailor?”
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“When?” I reply, like I am just the me I have always been and there
is no beginning and no end to anything. “Do you even know me?”
Tony opens the truck door. “I’m driving.”
We cruise the empty back roads that skirt around the mountains,
and when I ask him to, he guns the truck around the loose corners so that
we skid and hang suspended between the shoulder and the trees before
Tony steers us, shtailing, back onto the road.
“Got a smoke?” Tony asks.
is surprises me, because as an entity Tony and I do not smoke. “A
smoke? What kind?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what kind? Cigarette? Joint?”
Tony seems to consider this. “Does it matter?”
“I don’t know. Would you smoke one and not the other?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well I have a pack of Parliaments in my bag, but that’s all I brought.
I didn’t know you smoked.”
“I don’t.”
“So why did you…” but I just give up. It’s like talking to the Mad
Hatter, which is not how being with Tony is supposed to feel.
He revs the engine over a little rise in the road, and for the tiniest
instant we are airborne. I don’t feel like riding around anymore.
In a few minutes we are heading down Center Road, past wherever
it is Tony found my mother stranded beside her deated tire, and Tony
slows the truck. We turn into the dirt parking lot beside the big white
village church, which is an ominous black rectangle in the night sky, and
I think I understand why churchgoers always congregate in daylight.
“Am I gonna get saved?” I ask, but he just reaches into the back seat
and doesn’t say anything, and I decide it is a good thing we have stopped.
Tony is too drunk to be driving this expensive new machine tonight.
“Come on,” he says stepping from the truck, carrying something. I
follow him, stumbling from the booze and the uneven ground, wishing
I had a ashlight. We approach the church, but then Tony veers o the
walkway and around the back of the building, and I notice the shadows of
headstones spanning the yard like orchard trees, enclosed by a hedgerow
so that the cemetery isn’t visible from the road.
Tony walks a perfectly straight course up the line of graves, turns
sharply in the middle and marches down another row in a way that tells
me he has been here before. He stops at a stone, thick and round and non-
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descript as the rest of them in this darkness, and sits down at the base of
it. He looks up at me and pats the grass. I sit cross-legged beside him and
try to see his face.
“Are we having a séance?” I ask.
“Shut up,” he says.
I wait. Time passes. He isn’t joking.
“Just shut the fuck up for once,” he mutters. Tony leans away from
me, fumbling with whatever he has brought, and then I hear a tiny snu of
explosion that my mind has to process because it doesn’t make sense here.
A streak of something hits the ground, rolls like a grenade, and I connect
it to the sound—the popping of a cork. I hear the sizzle of champagne for
an instant and then Tony sits back again and tilts the bottle to his mouth.
He pulls on it for a while, oers it to me. at pop, that sailing cork, they
are supposed to be all expectation and merriment and things are starting
to feel so fucked up I don’t even want to drink this champagne, but then I
decide I better just do it.
I am pissed at Tony and maybe way deep inside a little afraid of the
tone he has used so I sit silently and wait for him to make the next move.
We take turns with the bottle and when it’s empty he says, “We promised
we’d celebrate when we got home, so that’s what we’re doing.”
It sounds like something I would say, but I don’t remember this
promise—not in my letters or during that phone call or even way back
before Tony ever le.
I look over at Tony, but then I look away because I am worried he
will see how big and frightened my eyes must be. is is all wrong. I am
supposed to humanize myself or scream deadly threats or whatever it
takes to show I am not afraid.
“You know what the craziest part is?” he says.
I don’t say anything, but I don’t know if he even notices me anymore,
and he goes on. “e craziest part is I was supposed to drive that day.”
A rumble begins far o, and then there is a crack and Tony’s dry,
smooth face glows orange for an instant and fades out again. I look up and
see streaks of color melting back down from the sky. e reworks have
started in town.
Tony leans against the stone and draws his knees up. He watches, the
now-empty champagne bottle resting in his lap. en he begins to laugh.
He lowers his head onto his knees and I can feel his shoulders shaking
beside me. I consider putting my hand on his back, but the way he sits
there convulsing is like a fevered patient and I must be nervous I will
Volume 49.2 | 139 Caroline Zeilenga | 139
catch whatever he has, because instead I tuck both palms underneath my
butt the way children are instructed to do when they cannot keep their
hands to themselves.
He sits up suddenly, smiling. “It was like the Fourth of July every
night.”
Tony gets up and walks farther down the row of markers, shoulders
straight, bottle dangling at his side, feet slow and careful in a measured
line. When he is a good distance away from me, he turns and smashes the
bottle against a headstone.
It is a lot of work to half drag, half coax him back to the truck. e reworks
are still going o behind us as I drive us away from the graveyard. Tony
is slumped in the passenger seat and I don’t know whether or not he is
awake, but out of respect to the ride I am now piloting I steer around all
of the potholes on the drive home.
It is also a lot of work to haul his big body, slumped and staggering,
into my mother’s house that night. I move the remote from where we’ve
le it on the couch and cover him with a throw blanket. en I go upstairs
and watch the reies from my bedroom window. I must fall asleep at
some point, because I wake at dawn to gravel crunching. By the time I
open the front door Tony is gone.
e house has been tidied—the blanket folded at the end of the
couch, the glasses from the night before coupled at the sink. My mound
of ip ops in the entryway has even been straightened. It’s the kind of
thing you do to your parents’ house aer you throw a party you don’t
want them to know about. It’s like removing all the evidence you were
ever there. You ever existed at all.
I ick on a lamp in the shallow, grey morning light and bury my face
in the couch cushions. ey don’t smell like Tony, just dust. My head is
throbbing and I imagine my brain inside of it, aking and melting like
snow.
Suddenly I hear it, the tapping against the open window above the
couch. I sit up. I wonder if this moment will change me forever. But when
I look out it’s only a June bug trying to y through and reach the light
bulb. It bounces against the screen and hovers for a minute and then it
bounces again. Eventually it falls and lands overturned on the sill and I sit
and watch it for a while, upside down on its big awkward shell, sticky legs
waving around in a useless surrender.
140 e Laurel Review
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Special International Translations
142 e Laurel Review
Volume 49.2 | 143 René Char & Nancy Naomi Carlson | 143
René Char
e Mana of Lola Aba
e narrow black cross in the grass
was inscribed: Lola Abba, Age 17.
July. e night. is dead, drowned
girl had been playing in similar grass,
maybe she had been lying there,
perhaps to be loved…Lola Abba, Age
17. Hard to forget, yet unknown.
Two weeks later, a girl appeared at
the house: is my mother in need of a
maid? I don’t know. I can’t answer.
“Come back?” “Impossible.” “en
will you please leave your name?” She
writes something down. “Farewell,
miss.” e young body steps onto the
path of the park, disappearing behind
the wet trees (the rain has stopped). I
examine her writing: Lola Abba! I run,
I call…Why nobody, nobody now?
I have kept your somber clothing,
rayed and old. Here is your poem:
Let me comb my hair, you say, as the wreath of love
le to the earth.
e charcoal is still conned to jail, yet its violet ashes are scattered.
ose with truly a taste for the void burn their clothes before they die.
And if gathering mushrooms aer the rain is macabre somehow, I won’t
be the one to complain.
translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson
144 | e Laurel Review144 | René Char & Nancy Naomi Carlson
René Char
Poem*
Two people, both endowed with great sexual
honesty, one day get proof that their mental pictures
during orgasm vastly dier: continuous, graphic
pictures with one; periodic, chimeric scenes with
the other. ey dier to such an extent that the
layers of visions, as they are formed, have the
power to bring about a series of mortal disputes of
mysterious mineral origin, giving rise in the reign to
a change where denial of completely insoluble love
seems the natural expression.
“My saliva on your sex,” shouts the man to the
woman, “is still your blood that evades the control
of my hands.”
“e wind that begins to blow in your mouth has
already crossed the sky of our awakenings. I no
longer perceive the key line in the eagle’s ight,
great director of consciousness.”
During this new phase of their existence, the
lovers saw the start of an era of justice turned
upside down. ey withered crimes of passion,
returned rape to chance, increased indecent assaults,
genuine sources of poetry. e huge scope of their
movements—hope passing through the one
unmoved by the loved one’s despair—expressed the
accepted fate. In surrealism’s realm that cannot be
reconciled, privileged man can only be the gracious
prey of his ravenous reason for living: love.
*ere were two twin children in Germany; one would
open doors by touching them with his right arm, while
the other would close them using his le arm.
Albert-Le-Grand
translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson
Volume 49.2 | 145 René Char & Nancy Naomi Carlson | 145
René Char
e Climate of Hunting or How Poems are Made
My pure sob overcome by its venom: my love’s brain
wooed by shards of glass.
Ah! May the one who rules in the house of eclipses,
retreating, bring on the darkness. We’ll do well, in the end,
to keep in mind the direction some storms take in the rapids
of dusk.
In love, there is still the stillness, this giant organ of sex.
Late at night we went to gather the fruit essential to my
dreams of death: purple gs.
Archaic horse carcasses shaped like bathtubs pass and
fade away. Only the class of manure speaks, reassures.
When I nally take my leave for a faceless world, all the
pastimes of steam at the foot of the big orange tree.
In my extreme feverish states, a young woman, toadstool-
sized, appears, slits the throat of a rooster, then falls into
deep, lethargic sleep, while some meters away from her bed
ows a whole river lled with perils. Embassy carried o
course.
Love’s defense violence
e diamond’s insistent asphyxia
Paralysis wandering ease
translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson
146 | e Laurel Review146 | René Char & Nancy Naomi Carlson
René Char
e Female Historian
She who casts gold through the horn
at punctures the seed
Eats at the poles
Sleeps in the earth’s re
Terried look on the quarryman’s face
Hurled into quicklime
Asphyxiated right in front of a woman’s eyes
His back with quivering veins
His lips of river
His exquisite climax
All that convulsively breaks away from the oneness
of the world
Released from the mass by the simple shove
of a child
And swoops down on us at full speed
We who don’t confuse acts to be lived and
acts already lived
Don’t know how to desire through prayer
Nor procure through pretense
And at night over the sleeping girl’s shoulder
see
e day owering in full delight
In an indierent sky
e red bird of metals
Flies anxious to beautify daily life
e memory of love regains in silence
its place
Among the dusts
translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson
Volume 49.2 | 147 Yang Mu & Göran Malmqvist | 147
Yang Mu
Flowing Rhythm
e evening sun recklessly hits a snowline, in the empty forest
a ock of crows beat their frozen wings and y, stirring up confusion,
into the lost landscape; their dreary itting to and fro
causes the light to be dismembered
like memories on a nightmare’s thin coating
showing themselves as eeting images of uncertain forms; suppose
I were able to master my own self and know all that I know
the entire set−up would suddenly be transformed, I would turn to x my
eyes
on parts as yet unknown, and allow my senses
to stock up contrarieties in time and space, or abandon them in a sense
of frustration,
unresistingly follow the rapid current
and with owing rhythm enter into the oodtide of the sea.
translated by Göran Malmqvist
148 | e Laurel Review148 | Yang Mu & Göran Malmqvist
Yang Mu
As Yet Unattained
Waking up with a start: if there are old matters as yet unattained
in a remote region somehow
never properly investigated and now disappearing without trace, one aer
another…
Half are empty thoughts in this barely awake state,
the rest form hordes and surge forward, their backs against
the gigantic darkness, tearing it apart,
just as reies disintegrate in early autumn
to gather again around the pools or
at the farthest side of an embankment where undercurrents are born.
Sarons and the tastes of tropical fruits in brilliant profusion,
autumn ripeness so swelled that all senses tremble
—judging from my oblivious spirit, one way or another—
it’s only that this time waking up with a start makes me hesitate: stay put
or pursue the remains as yet unattained at the very moment it has been
foretold?
Stopping short, I turn and see myself, exhausted, conned
to suspended speed and inert metre
and raise my hand to assign the sluggish light to a place out of reach
just as the autumn reies twinkle faintly in the distance.
translated by Göran Malmqvist
Volume 49.2 | 149 Yang Mu & Göran Malmqvist | 149
Yang Mu
On Meeting
I wonder, that which le so quietly last night and was lost in the incomplete
parable, if it were able to manage the twists and turns of the road
and return, I might not be able to recognize it—
Just as two stray stars, having by chance encountered each other
on the slanting plane of the universe, without nding time to light up,
turned pale with anxiety and decided to rush to
an even more distant as yet unknown – but perhaps
they might appear on the scene at this very moment, bearing witness
that they had agreed to meet but failed to keep that promise.
translated by Göran Malmqvist
150 | e Laurel Review150 | Kjell Espmark & Robin Fulton Macpherson
Kjell Espmark
“If” in Spring
Crows keep their balance on bucking branch-tips.
Perhaps they imagine they´re on rough seas.
If they imagine.
Soaked birch-bark glistens, imagines the sun
has chosen to smile on it, if sun smiles,
if bark imagines.
I balance well on earth that knows its place.
e sun gives, the sun never takes away.
If I imagine.
translated by Robin Fulton Macpherson
Volume 49.2 | 151 Kjell Espmark & Robin Fulton Macpherson | 151
Kjell Espmark
Summer Without Words
In a grey part of summer I watch
a gull-shadow on harbour ripples:
an alphabet is splintered so fast
it could never be halted and whole.
In a sharp ochre part of summer,
with a taste of something that´s been stored
and a presence about to leave us
and another one waiting for us,
I watch a cypress twig-shadow write
on a red gable, a shaky hand.
ere´s no alphabet for the writer.
ere´s no alphabet for the reader.
translated by Robin Fulton Macpherson
152 | e Laurel Review152 | Kjell Espmark & Robin Fulton Macpherson
Kjell Espmark
Summer Solstice
Earth leaned south so soon this year.
I didn´t have time to save
darkness, the good kind that heals
undiluted by the sheen
of galaxies.
Earth leaned north so soon this year
and something like an angel
(unseen, of no xed abode)
has balanced one more weightless
stone on my cairn.
translated by Robin Fulton Macpherson
Volume 49.2 | 153 Kjell Espmark & Robin Fulton Macpherson | 153
Kjell Espmark
Surface
Yacht masts are dgety and zig-zag.
Crowding wings are black, belong to crows.
A world that can´t be still. And rumours
of an unspecied upper air
where the masts are straight, the crows are gulls.
translated by Robin Fulton Macpherson
Contributor Notes e Laurel Review
Contributor Notes
Janelle Adsit is the author of the poetry collection Unremitting Entrance (2015) and the
chapbook Press Yourself Against a Mirror (2015). Her poetry has appeared in publications
such as Sixth Finch, Confrontation, e Cultural Society, and Lalitamba.
Jerey Allen was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated with a BA in Comparative
Literature from the University of Cincinnati in 2013, where he was the recipient of the
Ta Research Fellowship. He recently received his MFA in poetry from George Mason
University, where he was the 2015-16 Heritage Student Writing Fellow. He has poems
published in Recap Magazine, New World Writing, and e Iowa Review.
Toby Altman is the author of Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017) and ve chapbooks,
including most recently Security eater (Present Tense Pamphlets, 2016). His poems
can or will be found in Crazyhorse, Jubilat, and Lana Turner.
Sally Ball is the author of Wreck Me and Annus Mirabilis, both from Barrow Street Press.
She’s an associate director of Four Way Books and an associate professor of English at
Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.
Bruce Bond is the author of een books including, most recently, For the Lost Cathedral
(LSU Press, 2015), e Other Sky (Etruscan Press, 2015), and Immanent Distance: Poetry
and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan Press, 2015). Presently
he is Regents Professor at University of North Texas.
Nancy Naomi Carlson has authored six titles (translated and non-translated). Hammer
With No Master (more of her translations of Char) is forthcoming from Tupelo Press
this fall. A recipient of grants from the NEA, Maryland State Arts Council and Arts &
Humanities Council of Montgomery County, as well as a BTBA nalist, her work has
appeared in such journals as APR, New England Review, and Poetry.
René Char (1907-1988) was praised by Prime Minister Jacques Chirac as “the greatest
French poet of the 20th century.” His literary career spanned over sixty years. Inuenced
by the surrealists, his love for his native Provence, and social activism, Char is known for
his economy of style, as well as the mystery and music that infuse his work.
Volume 49.2 Contributor Notes
Maxine Cherno’s 15th book of poetry will be published by Omnidawn in 2018. She
was recently a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Recipient of a 2013
Poetry Fellowship from the NEA and the 2009 PEN Translation Award, she is Professor
of Creative Writing at SFSU.
Christopher Citro is the author of e Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe
Books, 2015). His poetry was shortlisted for the 2015 Booth Poetry Prize, a nalist for
the 2015 Arts & Letters Poetry Prize, and he won the 2015 Poetry Writing Competition at
Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. He received his MFA in poetry from Indiana
University and lives in Syracuse, New York.
Rob Cook lives in New York City. Recent work in Hotel Amerika, Birmingham Poetry
Review, Epiphany. He’s published six books and has disowned all but one of them.
Matthew Cooperman is the author of, most recently, Spool, winner of the New Measure
Prize (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2016), as well as the text and image collaboration
Imago for the Fallen World, with Marius Lehene (Jaded Ibis Press, 2013), and A Sacricial
Zinc (Pleiades/LSU, 2001), winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize. A founding
editor of Quarter Aer Eight, he’s co-poetry editor for Colorado Review.
Emily J. Cousins lives, teaches, and writes in Denver, CO. Her poems have appeared in
Word Riot, Saltfront, Sugar House Review, [PANK], and elsewhere.
Dinah Cox’s rst book of stories, Remarkable, won the fourth annual BOA Short Fiction
Prize. Her stories have appeared in a variety of publications, including StoryQuarterly,
Prairie Schooner, Calyx, e Meadow, and online at Hayden’s Ferry Review and The Texas
Observer. She teaches in English Department at Oklahoma State University where she’s
also an associate editor at Cimarron Review.
Kristina Marie Darling is the author of over twenty books of poetry. Her awards
include two Yaddo residencies, a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, and a Visiting Artist
Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, as well as grants from the Whiting
Foundation and Harvard University’s Kittredge Fund. She is working toward both a
Ph.D. in Literature at S.U.N.Y.-Bualo and an M.F.A. in Poetry at New York University.
Contributor Notes e Laurel Review
Kjell Espmark is a poet, novelist, and literary historian. He has been awarded a
considerable number of prizes. Espmark has published 14 volumes of poetry, recently
Den inre rymden (e Inner Space , trans. Robin Fulton Macpherson, Marick Press).
He has also published ten novels, notably Glömskans tid (e Age of Oblivion), and ten
volumes of literary criticism.
Dennis Etzel Jr. lives with Carrie and the boys in Topeka, Kansas where he teaches
English at Washburn University. His chapbook e Sum of Two Mothers was released
by ELJ Publications in 2013, and his work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Indiana
Review, BlazeVOX, Fact-Simile, 1913: a journal of poetic forms, 3:AM, DIAGRAM, and
others. He is a TALK Scholar for the Kansas Humanities Council.
Shawn Fawson resides with her family in Denver, Colorado, where she hopes for change
and the courage to confront structures of injustice, intolerance, and privilege. Her book
Giving Way won the Library of Poetry Book Award, was published by e Bitter Oleander
Press in 2010, and won the Utah Book Award for Poetry in 2011. She has an MFA from
Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Margaret Hermes has stories in the current issues of Statement Magazine and Art Times.
Her story collection, Relative Strangers, received the Doris Bakwin Book Award and
second place in the Balcones Fiction Prize. Her published/performed work includes a
mystery novel, e Phoenix Nest, and a stage adaptation of an Oscar Wilde fable, e
Birthday of the Infanta.
Lance Larsen, poet laureate of Utah, has published four poetry collections, including
Genius Loci (Tampa 2013). His essays have recently appeared in Southern Review, River
Styx, Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. He has received a number of awards, including
a Pushcart Prize and an NEA fellowship. A professor at BYU, he will co-direct a theater
study abroad program in London in 2017.
Peter Leight lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. He has previously published poems in
Paris Review, AGNI, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Matter, and other magazines.
Alex Lemon most recent book is e Wish Book (a nalist for Best Poetry Collection by
e Writer’s League of Texas). He is the author of Happy: A Memoir (Scribner - a nalist
for Best Book of Non-ction by e Writer’s League of Texas) and three other poetry
collections: Mosquito, Hallelujah Blackout, and Fancy Beasts. Among his awards are a
2005 Fellowship in Poetry from the NEA and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. He
teaches at TCU and in Ashland University’s Low-Residency MFA program.
Volume 49.2 Contributor Notes
Robin Fulton Macpherson is a Scottish poet and translator who has lived in Norway
for many years. Maríck Press (Michigan) recently brought out his A Northern Habitat:
Collected Poems 1960-2010. Poets he has translated include (from Norway) Olav H.
Hauge (Anvil Press Poetry, London) and (from Sweden) Kjell Espmark (Marick Press),
Harry Martinson, and Tomas Tranströmer (both Bloodaxe Books, U.K.).
Jennie Malboeuf is a native of Kentucky. Her poems are found in the Virginia Quarterly
Review, Oxford Poetry (UK), e Hollins Critic, Epoch, New American Writing, Hunger
Mountain, New South, and Best New Poets 2016. She lives in North Carolina and teaches
writing at Guilford College.
Göran Malmqvist was born in 1924. He has translated some y volumes of Chinese
literature—Ancient, Medieval, Modern, and Contemporary. He has also translated
Swedish poetry by Ingela Strandberg, Kjell Espmark, and Tomas Tranströmer into
English, and some English poetry (by William Blake and T.S. Eliot) into Swedish.
Yang Mu has published 16 poetry collections, 15 prose collections, and one verse play.
No trace of the Gardener: Poems of Yang Mu (trans. Lawrence R. Smith & Michelle Yeh,
New Haven: Ct. Yale University Press, 1998.) and e Forbidden Game and Video Poems:
e Poetry of Yang Mu and Lo Ch’ing. (trans. by Joseph R. Allen, Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1993.) are two of his poetry collections available in English.
Oscar Oswald is a Black Mountain PhD Fellow at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
His poetry has appeared in the journals Blackbox Manifold, Colorado Review, Denver
Quarterly, Lana Turner, Volt, and Word For/Word, among others.
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, e
Nation, Poetry, Osiris, e New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is
Almost Rain, published by River Otter Press (2013). For more information, including
free e-books, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website
at www.simonperchik.com.
Alex Poppe is a teacher and creative instigator. A former actor/business consultant,
she has worked in Poland, Turkey, Ukraine, Northern Iraq, e West Bank, Germany,
and e United States. ese places and their people inspire her work. Her rst story
collection, Girl, World, will be out in late summer 2016 by Laughing Fire Press.
Contributor Notes e Laurel Review
Michael Robins is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently In Memory
of Brilliance & Value (Saturnalia Books, 2015). His recent poems have appeared or
are forthcoming in e Arkansas International, Diode Poetry Journal, Ghost Proposal,
Hubbub, Map Literary, Pinwheel, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. For more information,
visit www.michaelrobins.org
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and a founding member of
Poems While You Wait. e co-editor of Rene Magritte: Selected Writing and the author
of eight books of poetry, ction, and nonction, her second novel, Lillian Boxsh Takes a
Walk, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2017.
Stan Sanvel Rubin’s work has appeared most recently in Ascent, Poetry Northwest, and
e National Poetry Review. His fourth full-length collection, ere. Here., was published
by Lost Horse Press in 2013. He lives on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state.
Chris Santiago has received fellowships from Kundiman and the Mellon Foundation/
American Council of Learned Societies, and nominations for Best New Poets and
others. His debut poetry collection, TULA, was selected by A. Van Jordan for the 2016
Lindquist & Vennum Prize, and will be published by Milkweed Editions in December.
Veronica Schuder teaches composition and creative writing at Louisiana Tech University
in Ruston, Louisiana. Her work has previously appeared in e Formalist, Cream City
Review, and Black Dirt.
Roger Sheer teaches writing at Minnesota State University, Mankato. His stories have
appeared in ird Coast, e Missouri Review, Cream City Review, and other magazines.
Kent Shaw’s rst book, Calenture, was published by University of Tampa Press. His
poems have appeared in e Believer, Ploughshares, Bennington Review, and elsewhere.
He teaches at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.
Martha Silano’s most recent books are What the Truth Tastes Like (Two Sylvias Press
2015), an expanded reissue of her rst book; Reckless Lovely (Saturnalia Books 2014);
and, with Kelli Russell Agodon, e Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing
Practice. She edits Crab Creek Review and teaches at Bellevue College.
Volume 49.2 Contributor Notes
Ingela Strandberg is a Swedish poet and the author of several volumes of poetry, among
others, I Dreamt About Sam Shepard Last Night, Marick Press 2014, translated by Göran
Malmqvist, and Vid oro skog, Norstedts 2016, a volume with poems selected from her
works from 1984 - 2014. In 2014 she received the Bellman Prize from the Swedish
Academy.
Adam Strauss lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Most recently, poems of his appear
in Cricket Online Review, Word For/Word, the anthology Devouring the Green (Jaded
Ibis Press), Interrupture, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Lute & Drum, and Prelude. “Hapless
Transport” is from a manuscript titled Smoked Marrow Scream Cream.
Jason Tandon is the author of three collections of poetry including, Quality of Life (Black
Lawrence Press, 2013) and Give over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt (Black Lawrence
Press, 2009), winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award. He teaches in the Arts & Sciences
Writing Program at Boston University.
Kerry Tepperman Campbell is a writer and educator living in San Francisco. Her rst
book will be published by Blue Light Press in 2016. Her most recent project is a series
of prose poems based on the life of the famous British mutineer Fletcher Christian. She
recently traveled by cargo ship to Pitcairn Island, second most remote place on earth, to
meet Christian’s descendants.
Tony Trigilio’s most recent collection of poetry is Inside the Walls of My Own House: e
Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 2 (BlazeVOX [books], 2016). His other
books include, most recently, White Noise (Apostrophe Books, 2013), and, as editor, Elise
Cowen: Poems and Fragments (Ahsahta, 2014).
Michael Webster ompson was born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago. In 2013, he
received an MFA in ction writing. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and two
sons.
Ross Wilcox’s work has appeared in Gulf Coast, e Carolina Quarterly, and Nashville
Review. He lives in Fort Worth with his wife and two cats.
Caroline Zeilenga grew up in Vermont and earned an MFA at Cornell University, where
she also taught writing. Her ction has appeared in Tweed’s and received honorable
mention in the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Award. She lives with her husband and
two big dogs in a tiny yurt in the woods.
