Melusine, The Blog

Review: Margaret Bashaar's Letters From Room 27 of the Grand Midway Hotel

2012-01-22T15:30:00.001-05:00

Letters From Room 27 of the Grand Midway Hotel
by Margaret Bashaar
Blood Pudding Press, 2011
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Margaret Bashaar's second chapbook, Letters From Room 27 of the Grand Midway Hotel, is an unforgettable ride through a landscape that has frozen in time one particular summer, seen through the eyes of two young women, Mary and Claire, and the man or men who inhabited this space with them at a time when their lives were altered. The space in question is a haunted hotel in a "dead coal mining town" in which the only attractions are seedy bars, cemeteries, junkyards and abandoned train stations. It's Bashaar's intensely original, erotic lyricism that reanimates the denizens of this haunted summer and makes us care about them.

The chapbook, from Blood Pudding Press, is an object of art visually as well. Mine was bound with soft purple ribbon to match the fleshy-purple marbling of its pages. It's always fun to open a chapbook from this press to see what flutters out: in this case, a delicate blue heart and a sexy, creepy little booklet.

"Sexy" and/or "creepy" can describe a lot of the poems here, though many are also tinged with notes of shame or wistfulness at the memory of a certain kind of loss. Others affirm the strength of a survivor who has absorbed the power of the once-powerful entities she has eluded or defeated.

In "The Girl Who Lived at the Hotel," Bashaar writes of Claire, "When she tries to remember a name, the feeling/ of sun on her neck, her throat is suddenly open./ Water spills out of her mouth and it is the remembering/ that loosens her joints, makes flowers bloom in her palms."

Mary, "The Girl Who Kept Secrets," is as hermetic and self-determined as Claire is spontaneous and vulnerable:

She gets a hold on everyone she meets,
fingers gentle hooks, folds up tiny boxes,
whispers into all of them the secrets she can't keep.
She ties them up, stacks them to the ceiling in her closet.
She's six deep by now.
She holds the answers to questions under her tongue
before she breathes them into boxes,
before she learns how to forget them entirely.

In "The Unmaking," we are introduced to the mysterious figure of Claire's lover, the demon hunter, who "... wraps around her wrists and he pulls her along,/ he pulls her along and her feet barely touch the ground./ They go up the hill, up over the sidewalk,/ the stones,/ up to the water tower, up to the cemetery in its shadow/ and he leads her between the headstones and it is dark and it is cold."

In "The Leaving of It," Claire begins to slough off the influence of the haunting, viewing the hotel now from a more distant vantage:

She is half way home from where she balled her fists and prayed
for a garden three years ago, but she was something else then,
a linen thread, an unlit candle. Her lover told her she was in his walls,
that she was a part of him he could not carve out and she did not believe him.
She is still not certain if he handed her an apple or a peach,
if she's been tossed out into the ocean like a caught fish
or if she is still on a boat somewhere, gasping,
but she has gasped so long she no longer remembers
what it is like to breathe.

But in the next poem, "Claire Visits the Old Hotel," she is drawn back to the place: "... She could never separate/ these dark rooms from the summer/ and summer went to hell/ with its honey wine and monkey breeding."

It's Mary who makes a clean break with the hotel in the poem that follows, "Baleen."

... She laid the road out in
front of her and drove and drove until she came to an ocean that gnawed the
land with foamy white teeth and she waded out into the surf with the cat in his
crate in her arms, lifted him up over her head as the waves rolled over her, and
when she was shoulder-deep she dropped the cat into the water and he was, in
and instant, transformed into Eden's whale, fur sucked into his mouth for baleen
and Mary startled only for an instant. She leaned against his bulk.

She pushed him out to sea.

The cycle's longest poem, "Meditation on Ichthyosaurus at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, PA," leaves the setting of the hauntings and their aftermath and speaks to Mary/Claire's growing sense of universal awareness, but perhaps there is an allusion to the demon hunter here as well when Mary/Claire addresses the ancient marine reptile: "I have eaten you in every lifetime and yes,/ you have devoured me and now/ I stand here and we are both bone and we/ are each monsters the other could not quite imagine."

In the poem that follows, "Claire writes a letter to the demon hunter upon learning about the God Dimension," Claire seems to make peace with the situation that "There is no shaman,/ no road woman,/ no man reincarnated/ 14 times with hands/ dry as old paper,/ no surgeon,/ no vow that can root out/ the sliver of the hotel's wall/ I carry under my skin./ My heart has grown around it./ I think of you/ when I realize this."

The poems in this chapbook are variously sensual and introspective, mysterious and candid, vaguely lurid at times, yet always captivating. Like Bashaar's heroines, her readers will find it difficult not to return again to the haunting landscape she creates in these poems and try to understand just what happened there and why they can't seem to forget it.

Review: Marilyn McCabe's Rugged Means of Grace

2012-01-09T18:57:00.000-05:00

Rugged Means of Grace by Marilyn McCabe
Finishing Line Press, 2011

Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Early on in her powerful first solo collection, Rugged Means of Grace, Marilyn McCabe establishes a direct voice with the capacity to address the unthinkable instant of sudden loss.

She writes in "If Beauty Is Just the Beginning of Terror":

where we stop short and are gone:
like the way the wind came
one day after Dave died
in a flurry of bike and deer
and clouds built themselves
an empire and the trees
bowed down and roofs fled,
barns collapsed,
sewers spewed
and all was gray and green,
then gone too blue
and the ghastly sun
like an operating room lamp
on the glowing insides of the patient,
the place where no light should go.

Quiet. Take the soft heart
from the body streaked
blue, white, red,
cup it like a bird in your mortal hand,
but it can't fly, as time does.

Time has the power to move on, the speaker implies, but the heart is in time's thrall and must wait.

At the close of "Marie," about Curie's loss of her husband Pierre, the narrator states: "I am held by this luckless substance./ The luminosity cannot be seen./ It is the end of everything./ Tell me how to live."

In the next poem, dedicated to Mme. Curie, the scientist is asked, "What drives you, woman, to melt/ and weigh, melt and weigh,/ distill yourself (a glorious poison)?"

The poem that follows, "Burning Bush," begins by addressing the mystery of life on earth, once the exclusive realm of religion: "The Genome Project guy thinks God works/ in deoxyribonucleic acid/ His wonder to behold."

It closes, "How we parse this profane world,/ find smaller, smaller/ sacraments,// holy fire,/ spiral of smoke/ from which we can't avert our eyes."

"Holyland" continues the contemporary speaker's search for meaning in a landscape which carries the heavy weight of history but is subject also to the indifference of a chaotic universe:

Be lost. No place more perfect: dry sea of tides,
vortices and waver of the ancient dead
home here on holiday, old rivalries and piques.
Stars on which to navigate shift against the bloody night,
some shooting swift as shots. Everywhere I see
myself and its opposite in mirrors made bleary
with time and a strange silvering that comes of air
and water's persistent search.

The varied natural subjects of "Bestiary" allow the more playful side of McCabe's voice to emerge. "Lettuce" laments: "Such sturdy substance/ at my source, one seed,/ but risen rosette, now/ this labile, sea-/ like self, I'm silly,/ frilled as a lizard. Unsolid,/ I'm salad. What the hell's/ happened to my head?"

In this brief collection, pilgrimages for meaning are interspersed with more mundane anecdotes, like a trip to the dentist's office in "Open Wide."

Throughout, McCabe relates in direct and detailed, sensory-rich language a succession of earthbound, sensual encounters with the profound. The title comes from the closing line of "Lac du Saint Sacrament": "... This/ is my body, visible sign of invisible/ reality. You dissolve me:/ earth's impulsive intentions,/ its inadvertent and slow evolving violence./ You are a rugged means of grace.

Each encounter permits a little more illumination, even if no conclusions are reached beyond recognition of the artist-seeker's role of transient observer. "Signs of Passerines" begins: "I try not to think. All the things I've left behind./ My name on a white page, clack of my words clattering down./ The window: taking it apart. The center."

Guest Review: Patricia Lee Lewis's High Lonesome

2011-12-18T14:22:00.004-05:00

High Lonesome by Patricia Lee Lewis
Hedgerow Books/Levellers Press, 2011
Reviewed by Claire Keyes

Spinning worldsout of language, writers require us to attend, to read, to listen. The best writers are also those who listen,whether it be to the speech of others or to the messages they hear in thelanguage of leaves or rocks or ocean. Patricia Lee Lewis enters that rank of skilled listeners with High Lonesome, her second book of poems. In this book, Patricia forefronts the art oflistening as a dynamic act of connection.

“Jazz,”an emotionally intense poem, enacts ascenario where a 21-year-old musician-daughter asks her mother to “listen tothat” jazz. But, more importantly, tolisten to her say, “I am pregnant and I am not ready.” The mother is non-judgmental andconcerned. Desperate, the daughter asksher mother’s help. “And you knew that I would,” the poet writes. They leave the jazz club and walk home,“parts of one song, one knowing/ remembering, one telling, one listening.” The narrative of this poem is interlacedwith imagery from modern art (“Blues like Picasso’s blue figures”) and jazz(“high notes on clarinet, shrieks of the horn”) which help weave the strong emotionsinto a wider aesthetic tapestry.

In “The Reader,”the poet again becomes audience, this time for a six year old girl. Attentive, she “listen(s) for the clues, howshe’ll write the story/ of her life.” Thepoet knows that “it’s up to [the girl] to choose/ which words to love and whichto fear.” In one of my favorite poems,“This Day of Being Born,” the poet writes of a woman who “speaks to herself” asshe cooks some potatoes. The poemevolves into a meditation on a beloved son who “went out” one day but “did notreturn.” In her first book, PatriciaLewis also wrote about her son who committed suicide. In this poem, she admits that she may havelost him, “but things/ he loved carried him to her as if he had asked themto.” The poem then breaks into a lyricalpassage about the very potatoes she is preparing:

Lovely,smooth, full of life, he is in you, she sings.

Fromthe ground we dig and hold, we wash and boil,

weput you in a blue glazed bowl the color of his eyes,

wethank you and we thank the ones who brought you here.

The simple, homely task of preparing a meal becomes asacramental act. Once the potatoes arecooked, she puts butter on them, “lets [it] melt across smooth skins, watchespepper/ float in light/ pours salt into her palm and sprinkles/ as her fathersprinkled holy water on her newborn’s head.” Reading Patricia Lee Lewis welearn to appreciate the simplest daily tasks. She makes such duties magical.

“Kayak” takes onmore adventurous material with the poet becoming separated from a loved one inher kayak. In this poem she doesn’tlisten because she can not hear. Sherues this: “if your voice had carried from the pier/ as through the one remaingseagull’s wings,/ perhaps you would have kept your place beside/ me in thesudden storm.” Becoming separated fromthe voice she wants to hear, she grows desperate: “drowning/ is the only sound, the cutting offof air/around your face, the silencing of movement/ toward me now.” Clearly, shehas more adventure than she wants to deal with: “the kayak learns the river,/and the heart the rushing cataract.”

Patricia LeeLewis structures this poem beautifully, employing the device of a series of“Ifs” which function to build the necessary suspense. The narrative elements are kept to aminimum, allowing the emotional material to take the primary position. She’s not a story-teller; she’s a priestessof the heart’s passions. In “Standing BySong,” she employs her voice to engage some standing stones, possibly in Waleswhere she locates another poem. Thewoman in her poem comes to a “kneeling place between/ two great stones,” Once there:

. . . shesends her voice,

lowat first, the way she thinks a stone

mightsing. It reaches something original,

strong. She feels it more. The stones

beginto rumble in response. She singslouder,

atthe lowest frequency she has. How else

tospeak to them? Something pushes

fromwithin the standing stones; pushes

throughher spine to make her stand,

make her start again.

What’s remarkable about this passage is its depiction of thepower of the woman’s voice, so powerful that the stones listen. Their listening and responding reinvigoratesthe woman. She takes some of theirstrength into her own being: something “pushes/ through her spine.” She no longer kneels; she stands.

With this newlyacquired strength, she offers herself to others in “Leopard Frog.” Once again, she structures the poem aroundpossibility with a series of “What ifs”: “What if you should find me/ on a windy day, my body curled/ around ared oak trunk, my head/ at rest on granite, my hands in prayer.” She encourages the “you” to notice what shelooks like, to feel her cheek, to reach her hand inside her pocket and not tobe afraid: “do not pull back, but pull within yourself/ and listen.” Listening to Patricia Lee Lewis has itsbenefits:

Perhaps you’ll hear the echo

of my voice, leopard frog, acorn,

panting of the bear, and you will rise

and walk to where the world

is waiting. You will say, I found

a woman in the woods.

I left her there.

The engagement the poet offers is magical, just as this bookis magical in its essence. Become agood listener, she advocates, and the world will open to you. As it has opened to her in these artful,compelling poems.

Claire Keyes is the author of The Question of Rapture, a collection of poems. Professor Emerita at Salem State College, where she taught English for thirty years, she has also written The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich, published in paperback in 2009 by the University of Georgia Press. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Calyx, The Valparaiso Review, and The Women’s Review of Books, among others.

Hey, Guess What!

2011-12-11T23:39:00.001-05:00

You probably guessed right, much appreciated readers, if you guessed that our Fall/Winter issue, Volume 3.2, is now available, just in time for your holiday reading pleasure.

If you haven't already, you can check it out right here.

And have a happy one!

New Issue Delayed, But Coming Soon

2011-12-02T18:01:00.001-05:00

Our "Fall"/Winter issue will be appearing while it is still technically fall (astronomically if not meteorologically) but it will be a little delayed from when I was originally hoping for it to appear, by the first week of this month.

Aside from the server migration issue with the hosting service setting me back a full day's work or so, a shocking loss this week has made it difficult to focus on the work I had planned to do, and frankly, I've gotten pretty much nothing done in the last five days.

But as long as this annoying cold I'm fighting doesn't turn out to be the flu, with a little work this weekend and over the next week, hopefully the issue will launch by the end of next weekend, December the 11th. It's going to be a pretty good issue, content-wise, I think, so I'm looking forward to being able to finally get it out there.

Review: Ann Cefola's St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped

2011-11-20T23:58:00.001-05:00

St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped, by Ann Cefola
Kattywompus Press, 2011

Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

In her new chapbook, St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped, Ann Cefola begins by exploring the transformational potential inherent in the ordinary moments of a woman's life: having girlfriends over on a summer evening, kissing her husband goodbye in the morning, enduring a long commute to a downtown job, shopping, getting a makeover, reading a daily horoscope, celebrating an anniversary.

As the collection progresses, the subject matter grows weightier, in poems that deal with loss, grief, and the capacity of human belief systems to address the more elusive mysteries of human existence.

In "Girl's Night Out," the child-free hostess of a garden soiree for friends glad to be relieved for a night from the responsibilities of motherhood imagines her uterus "untraveled as a new triple-digit Interstate,/ a wide boulevard Hausmann might have built,/ tree-lined and unpopulated, a passage I walk every day,/ sometimes fast, blindly; other times singing,/ My avenue, my very own.

In "The Boys of Iona Prep," who spy on the narrator and her husband's goodbye kiss from a coffee shop window, a daily ritual is charged with new erotic significance: "Mid-kiss I catch his eye — unblinking —/ and I am no longer being but body, marriage no longer a distant vow".

In "Dance in the City," the darker voices of the narrator's family history won't be silent even amidst the most joyous moment of her life:

At our wedding, the dead, close as my lace stroking the red

church aisle, chanted: Lovrien's breakdown over grandfather's

affair. Great uncle's depression-era suicide.

My father soon dead from drink.

All my life, I read their lives like so many required

tragedies, the twists to come or avoid. We were like

that painting by Renoir, me creamy fragile in your arms,

you all black poise. Music and color blotted out their voices

and we danced. Anniversary after anniversary. I tell

the dead to return to their tombs, but they won't,

they want our breath, they call it inspired.

"Teint Pur Mat," a poem about the seemingly frothy topic of a woman's lifelong romance with cosmetics application, hints at something deeper in the epigraph, a French proverb which is translated, "It's hard to be pretty."

In that vein the poem closes, "To swim toward grace, she knew what must be applied."

The title poem takes its name from a news headline, "Hospital changes name to Westchester Medical Center, White Plains Pavilion" and finds the formerly eponymous saint forced to roam the grounds, looking for new employment. "Now she understands the dilemma of the dying:/ how they don't want to turn their backs on/ the sun-edged bloom, how one human spring/ can ruin paradise."

"Kerning" offers a pause for comic relief from the more somber tone of the collection's later poems with a defense of the punctuation-followed-by-two-spaces convention, comparing the white space they create within a page of text to "Twin beds made up perfectly./ Binocular lenses that form one image. Miles/ of thought after reading a billboard. The weekend./ Systolic and diastolic pumps. Good fences/ that make good neighbors. A swim lane's/ quivering blue lines. Deus/ ex machina", exclaiming in the next stanza, "Save/ the double spaces!" (For the record, this reviewer agrees.)

"February" speaks movingly of death in winter: "If you must escape,/ the angel of late winter counsels/ my comatose father, do it now/ before the strength of green reappears.// Do it now before light floods day,/ before hope pierces maroon tree buds./ Before you see the unboxable blue sky/ and believe in beginning again."

"After" lyrically examines the moment at which the enormity of grief begins to give way to a certain curious haunting by what remains of the deceased:

Behind the opaque glass. Not memory, not

bone — but unspoken balloons in a cartoon,

what would have been said, certain times.

We were quick to get rid of the clothes,

and she has not appeared in dream.

But the jellyfish that follows —

squooshes underfoot, takes in

salt water and sunlight.

That harms no one. That floats.

The luminescent edges of its circular spine.

Finally, "Velocity" depicts the moments immediately before death, when it still seems avoidable, describing the Kennedys in the seconds before the assassination: "His square head, jacket bunched at the neck, her wide delight/ as she turns to the camera. Joy fills their bodies like/ an anesthesia that will fail them./ There is a prayer that says// Shield the joyful."

Despite Cefola's ability to look squarely in the face of human vulnerability and the chasm of grief, the poems in "St. Agnes, Pink-Slipped" tend to wind up accentuating the positive, crystallizing the moments of joy, wonder and clarity to be found in even the most tragic or banal circumstances, but in a truthful way and in clear, graceful language, without resorting to the convenience of window-dressing.

Review: Jessica Cuello's Curie

2011-10-29T20:39:00.000-04:00

Curie by Jessica Cuello
Kattywompus Press, 2011

Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Jessica Cuello's debut chapbook, Curie,is a biographic poem cycle devoted to the Polish-French chemist,physicist and twice-honored Nobel laureate who became one of the mostfamous women of the 20^th century.

Cuello's lyrically spare yet sensualnarrative style is well-suited to the subject matter of a serious yetpassionate woman who spurned frivolity and adornment and pursued herwork with absolute rigor but who also loved deeply and was fearlessin her intellectual curiosity.

Curie, as shown in these poems, wasdriven by enthusiasm for her life's work in chemistry and physics aswell as by her devotion to her husband and lab partner, Pierre Curie.

Other pivotal events and catalysts inher life included the devastating early loss of her mother andsister, who died within a year of one another; her romanticdisappointment when the son of a couple for whom she worked as agoverness obeyed his parents' wishes to reject her because of herpoverty; her lifelong loyalty to her father and her native homeland,Poland, for which she named one of the elements she discovered,Polonium; and an affair she had with a married colleague after thedeath of her husband which made her a figure of notoriety in theFrench press for several years despite her international acclaim.

Cuello treats all of these topics withan agile grace restrained by understatement.

In “Schoolgirl,” we read how theyoung Maria Skłodowska“stands for the Russian inspector” and recites the names ofthe czars while her Polish-language books lie hidden in her desk: “All my life there was a motion/ outside me, and under the desk,/the saved page. I performed/ at will. My little arms grew.”

The poem ends, “Then it crystallized–/ our shelves were full of specimens,/ burning outward in thedark./ They could not be contained.

In the final part of “Casimir,” apoem about her early suitor's rejection, Cuello's narrationdispassionately relays the young scientist's mindset as she embarkson her studies:

InParis I arrived

withouta girl's desire.

Iused my memory

forfacts. With a porous

mindI woke,

tinroof slanted

overme. Alone

Imade my myth

witha cup

oftea and radishes.

In a poem about the miscarriage thatended Curie's second pregnancy, “Fifth Month,” Cuello writes:

Thechild had been living.

Iknew her like the form

ina sideways glance,

likethree words

ina whisper before sleep

notordered for sense,

theway we know everything

somewhere: the salts we will find

atthe bottom of the ore,

myhusband awake

inthe kitchen, stiff with pain

whenmy eyes open.

The next poem, “Pierre,” whichevokes Curie's despondency after the loss of her partner and husband,begins by recalling the tenderness of earlier times:

Slow,careful

aswords, you climbed

thesteps our wedding night.

Fingerscradled the railing as I would cradle

yourhead – no one else

feels. Has ever felt.

Iwish I had no daughters,

nowork. No garish daffodils

ina cup of water.

Iwas an eye climbing the stairs.

Myeye saw out of my chest,

myhead heavy

withemptiness.

“Rented Room,” a poem about theaffair with Paul Langevin, Marie's colleague, ends, “Yesterday, Iasked myself/ as though you were a compound/ why his body?/ Myfirst answer: to merge.// But my second: to annihilate/ the self. I hate/ that you must plan your life.”

The cycle's final poem, “Last Day: July 4, 1934,” describes the hospital bed where Curie was nursed byher younger daughter, whom she had loved but never fully understoodbecause of their dissimilar personalities:

Herfingers turn the sheets

andthe static coat

mybody walked in everywhere

loosens. Our bodies hum

togetherin a way

theydidn't in our lived lives.

Themetal bed glints

likeGallium warmed in hands.

The poems in Curieoften begin by holding their treasure at a distance from theunfocused eye, but as the reader is drawn closer, she catches firsta glint and then a growing sense of an underlying radiance. Iwish more poets wrote like Jessica Cuello does here.

Guest Review: Carol Smallwood's Compartments

2011-10-02T17:30:00.002-04:00

Compartments: Poems on Nature, Femininity and Other Realms by Carol Smallwood

Anaphora Literary Press, 2011

Reviewed by Aline Soules

In our modernworld and complex lives, we live in "compartments"–home,school, town, nature – the kind of compartments and realms CarolSmallwood explores, giving us what we know and questioning what wedon't. "The Morning Warbler" may be seen "if onewalks the bogs," she writes, "but does it sing in themorning?" What do we really know? Smallwood raises questionseven as she leads us into a consideration of our own world with adirect, matter-of-fact approach. "Why Do Women Ask First abouttheir children / when meeting other / women?" or "After a/ hysterectomy did they package your remains in a / paper sack likethe gizzard, heart, liver, neck, / inside a roasting chicken?

Everything isdelightfully jumbled, but beautifully detailed. "The SewingBox," just like Smallwood's compartments, is filled with its ownsub-compartments – thread bag, needle assortment, tray, andothers-each, in turn, filled with its own details, whether a "myriadof spools," "potholder loops," or "a ring ofwhite crocheted pineapples." She ties these objects together inthe poem and also from poem to poem. For example, she sews the ringof pineapples on a "new J. C. Penney's case"; later, in the"Town" section, she gives us a poem called "J. C.Penney litany" with its "Flannel, Poplin, Wool, Cotton,Chambray, Chamois, Corduroy, Micro-suede" shirts and its "Amber,Indigo, Basil, Blue Abyss, Oatmeal, Olive, Espresso, Mushroom"colors, all in the "men's section" with "not a man insight."

The joy of thesecompartments is that they are all linked: the women's objects from"The Sewing Box" and the array in the men's section of the"J.C. Penney Litany"; the ants and spiders from the"Nature" section and the "Black Holes" from the"Science" section; and the questions that range through thebook from "What'd happened to the Chinese damask / robe Nicolethad worn greeting the Winnebago's at Green Bay?" to all theanswers the poet would "like to know"--"why snow'swhite" or "Why we know more of / the surface of the / Moonthan ourselves."

Everything buildson her prologue-how we live between "the highest mountain / andthe deepest ocean" and how we are all these compartments rolledinto one. In this collection, the reader can experience a journeythrough our shared world, a journey beautifully guided by thisskilled and generous poet.

Aline Soules, California StateUniversity, East Bay faculty member, has appeared in journals such asKenyon Review, The Houston Literary Review.

Susan Knox: Baby, Baby

2011-09-18T18:40:00.000-04:00

The maternity ward. Alliance City Hospital. Alliance, Ohio. July 3, 1941. A new mother, twenty-five years old, stares out the window.

Is she remembering her lascivious grandfather, the rape, the termination ten years earlier. Is she picturing a small, windowless room, a man in a white coat, the mass of tissue he dangled in front of her face like a warning. Does she believe the sins of the father are visited upon the son and she will pay a penance for her grandfather’s perfidy. Is she worried because the nurse hasn’t brought the infant to her. Was it a difficult labor, a long labor. Was she sedated before the baby was born, a mask clamped over her face. Is she afraid her newborn is not normal, that she will be punished with a blemished child. Will she undo my pink receiving blanket and will she untie the ribbon holding the white plisse kimono and will she remove the safety pins closing the cloth diaper and will she bare my body and find a flaw, a deformity. Will she call for the doctor, show him the stigma, ask him what it means. Will the doctor reassure her, it’s only a missing toenail, nothing to worry about, or, not knowing her deep concern, will he laugh at her silliness.

Questions for my mother that I never asked.

Susan Knox's book, Financial Basics: A Money Management Guide for Students, was published by the Ohio State University Press in 2004. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in CALYX, Monkey Puzzle, Pisgah Review, and Sunday Ink.

Diane Hoover Bechtler: Do It Yourself Project

2011-09-04T12:46:00.003-04:00

It was not the kind of job tackled without help. But we did it ourselves, alone.

We had to. We were the single mothers of sons. Chloe was a widow. Her husband died in a car accident when the child was a baby. When our son was three, my husband left to chase other women.

Chloe received Social Security checks for her son. I collected sporadic child-support. Neither was enough to support us. So it was up to us to both work and raise those small men.

We forged our careers and raised our sons when two dope-smoking draft-dodging former hippies occupied the White House.

We knocked our heads against the glass ceiling as we climbed and left scratches as markers for our sisters to come. We pushed forward in sickness and in health. No one else was going to pay our rent or help us teach our small men to ride bicycles, to sail, play baseball, or later to shave and drive. When we had to work extra hours or travel, we placed our sons with caretakers often of questionable abilities, so we could do our jobs and make money to feed our growing children. As in the beginning of time, a single cell split and made two. We were mother and father, caregiver, and provider. Chloe was in sales. I provided customer support, both of us in the graphic arts industry.

We brought home the bacon and fried it up in a pan and did not think that commercial was funny. We were tired. In the summers, Chloe sent her son to spend time with her parents. I sent mine to basketball camp, archery school, tennis camp and whatever else I thought could shape him into a good man.

Together, Chloe and I bought tropical wool navy blue suits chosen with the Women's Dress for Success recommendations. Briefcases flapping against our Jane Fonda-firmed hips, we wore our serious suits and muted lipstick to appointments with our clients. At home, we assembled model cars and studied the scales of train sets.

After late business meetings and only a Powerbar dinner, we attended PTA,wearing those ridiculous ties – like fake silk scarves for women with little anchors and turtles dotted across them. We drank our scotch neat. We smoked an occasional cigar. We already smoked cigarettes. We placed our MasterCards by our plates to signal wait staff that we were paying. Occasionally, we abused our privileges from our places of business by treating ourselves to dinners placed on our meager expense accounts. We took lunch at 3:00 so we could go to school conferences with our sons’ teachers.

Chloe grew her hair to her waist. My hair was cut in an easy chin length bob quickly and cheaply trimmed at SuperCuts once a month. These were economical hairstyles.

For business, Chloe twisted her hair or clipped it in a barrette. But on weekends she'd let that hair flow and fly. It was like wheat. Mine was black as sin. She was a color like lemon. I was not a color. She had the golden hair. I had the midnight black hair. She looked great standing in a cornfield and I looked great over candlelight. Night and day.

She painted and I sculpted in the bit of free time we had. We never expected our painting and sculpting to put food on the table.

Rather than be second-rate struggling fine artists we applauded the works of others by attending gallery openings. So after a week of doing double duty, Chloe and I drove to the arts district and strutted. I have a photo of us standing on a red carpet after an art gathering.

She and I did not walk. We swished and bounced. "Thriller" blared in the background and we danced, planting one foot and stomping around it with the other foot. We let go the tensions of the week.

Many boyfriends came and went. Few stayed very long. We were incredibly picky about who got close to our sons, our best creations. Some men saw our sons as possibly being their sons. They missed the window of creating a family so looked to us as potential providers.

I eventually married again only to choose another womanizer.

Chloe broke my heart more than any man could have. After vowing to grow old together and sit side by side in rocking chairs staring at ocean waves, until death did us part, Chloe renounced her vow and moved away without me.

Years have passed. I see Chloe occasionally. She comes to my town. Or I go to hers. So in a way we have grown old together, but my rocking chair is here and hers is hundreds of miles away. Our sons have not seen each other in a decade.

Our careers ended. We passed our business torches. We have reverted to one person rather than two.

Our children have grown into men-good men. We did a fine job of raising them alone, of doing it ourselves. Raising our little boys into tall men made us grow taller and stronger.

We still do most things ourselves. The pace has slowed. We have the time.

I miss weekends with my best friend kicking back and having fun. I miss the little boys who now bring home women who may join our lives and provide grandchildren. One and one will equal three. Chloe's hair is very short now and streaked with gray. Mine is too black for a woman my age.

I miss our journey.

Diane Hoover Bechtler lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband, Michael Gross, who is a poet with a day job, and with their cat, Call Me IshMeow.

Review: Thirteen Designer Vaginas by Juliet Cook

2011-08-22T01:04:00.013-04:00

Thirteen Designer Vaginas, Juliet Cook

Hyacinth Girl Press, 2011

Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Juliet Cook's provocative new chapbook, Thirteen Designer Vaginas, presents the author's 13 takes on, well, exactly what the title suggests. Each poem in the chapbook is entitled "Designer Vagina" and explores this unique material for inspiration from a slightly different angle.

Many of these poems explore body image issues, the Western worship of youth and airbrushed perfection and the objectification of the female anatomy. Others are labyrinthine body/self-reflections. As in all Cook's work, there is wonderfully dynamic wordplay, an undercurrent of horror and little tolerance for the candy-coated comforts of euphemism but instead a tendency to err on the side of candor. Visceral imagery is used to conjure mood, often a sense of suffocation or paralysis under the cosmetic surgeon's knife.

One poem sums up the aim of a combo "vaginal rejuvenation" (as the surgery is clinically termed)/lobotomy: "... It's all about pleasing/ pink squiggles and tiny flightless wings."

The previous one begins, "I should switch to a robot model. Snip, snip, pivot/ on oiled button mums. Siphon out sputum;/ enter hot datum. Flora approximated/ with keystrokes. In this cube, I am perfect;"

In these poems Cook's signature motif of the "doll injection mold" is applied to the one aspect of anatomy the cookiecutter-variety plastic girl's doll explicitly lacks but which, for the adult woman, has nevertheless failed to escape the influence of the "injection mold" philosophy of shame for any sort of deviance from an arbitrarily prescribed ideal.

This chapbook is the first title from Hyacinth Girl Press, which describes itself as a feminist micro press.

Review: Lyn Lifshin's All the Poets Who Have Touched Me

2011-08-02T17:11:00.003-04:00

All the Poets Who Have Touched Me by Lyn Lifshin

World Parade Books, 2011

Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Lyn Lifshin's latest collection All the Poets Who Have Touched Me is an intimate whirlwind tour through literary history in the company of the perfect confidential guide. Lifshin, prolific "queen of the small presses" for the last several decades, must have been at least casually acquainted with some of the poets she writes about here, but to what extent only she could tell us, and this isn't a tell-all. One poem is entitled "The Poets I Know the Best Are the Ones I Could Never Write About" and begins, "It would be betrayal..."

And it would be, wouldn't it? Any poet, novice or established, tends to feel the necessity of that rule instinctively. So, having set those parameters, Lifshin puts us at ease that these poems are primarily works of the imagination, with maybe a few smuggled-in details, a few sly observations thrown in here and there. Many of the poems, like "Eating Chocolate With Edgar Allan Poe," are playful; others are candid, meditative, sensual, melancholy.

As with all of Lifshin's work, these poems are self-revelatory, but they also offer insights into her sources of inspiration, often in stunning imagistic language. In "New York With Dylan Thomas," she writes:

     ... I hated it when he
     wrote his wife, Caitlin. Though he
     called her a fishmonger, he still wrote
     with one arm shadowing the page. Light
     through jade glass, days burning
     fireflies in September. I knew they
     could not stay

In "When Being Awake Seems Agony After Disappointing News," she shares Sylvia Plath's last hours in that cold London flat, where the two of them...

     ... drank hot chocolate with some
     Sambuca, talked about how the worst time
     of day was 5 am, early morning, the
     depression time hardest to endure. It seemed
     funny, her daughter’s name, my mother’s,
     Frieda. On the last day together it was
     so cold. Even in 3 sweaters I was shaking.
     Maybe I sensed what was ahead though
     Sylvia chattered, her lips a wild red,
     her cheeks rose. Maybe it was the fever
     hanging on since December...

Other poems tell of shared moments (often courtesy of time travel) with Byron, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Millay, Sandburg (who got it all wrong about the fog and cats) as well as Sexton, Ginsberg, Bukowski, Kenyon, and the list goes on.

A few sources of inspiration are lesser known, even unknown poets, like an unnamed fan with more than his share of demons, recalled in "He Said He Saw My Picture in a Magazine":

     ... I never liked his
     poems as much as I pretended, not even
     the ones he stole. But I loved the stories,
     how he made love in coffins, stood on the
     roof of his house screaming at stars. But
     he kept breaking into places. Once I
     held him four hours while he cried.

In the sensual "Sleeping With Lorca," she writes, "There’s/ more you might coax me to say but/ for now, it’s enough I can still smell the/ green wind, that 5 o’clock in the/ afternoon/ that would never be another time".

"There's more you might coax me to say" sums up the charm of this collection. With all that is revealed of reverie and anecdote, fantasy and (possible) reality, there is always another delicious detail that might have been added, another poet who might have been befriended and revealed. It's easy to get caught up in the infectious fun as we teleport with Lifshin through pivotal moments in the lives of poets who have touched us as well, imagining with her what well might have been.

Read Melusine's interview with Lyn Lifshin in our debut issue here.

Six Questions, etc.

2011-07-25T19:43:00.007-04:00

It seems we have experienced another rather lengthy hiatus, which I guess I'll attribute vaguely to "summer" with all its distractions and triple-digit temperatures + humidity (yes, it is the humidity, and also the heat) sapping our strength. As a consequence of the lapse, we have a pretty healthy lineup of new reviews that will be coming as soon as we can read and review all those books, hopefully beginning with a post next weekend. We may even post two weekends in a row just to catch up a bit, but I better not make any promises... it is still summer, and more triple-digit temperatures are coming, after a short reprieve of only the low 90s.

Meanwhile, here are some questions I answered about what we're looking for editorially over at the "Six Questions For" blog.

Guest Review: Susan Scarlata's It Might Turn Out We Are Real

2011-06-11T14:09:00.002-04:00

It Might Turn Out We Are Real by Susan Scarlata

Horse Less Press, 2011

Reviewed by L.S. Bassen

A quotation attributed to William Butler Yeats can be found in cyberspace, "What can be explained is not poetry." At least 63 people have ‘liked’ this quotation, but not me. I appreciate explanation. Susan’s Scarlata’s new collection is bookended by both an introductory “Proem” and end “Notes”. The “Proem” explains that her 64 poems are: “A recoup of the Sapphic Stanza form … They are strung… linked without attempt to present any sum total.” The first poem, “What Is Your Business Here?” begins, “I dreamed I carried a snake/ to a burnt cracked tree/…Our needs and wants…” include “a plectrum” and we are advised to “throw these bits/ in two directions at once.” “Plectrum” is explained in the end Notes, “A plectrum is a spear point used for striking the lyre…).”

Those “two directions” introduce twosomes appearing early that become landmarks. The phrase that reappears most, echoing Homer’s “wine-dark sea,” is “the red behind my ribs.” “Phantasmagoria” takes us further to when “it was all/Arcadia that whole day long,” and where “satyrs…/ …are…dancing” the “Hoof crunk.” Explained in the end Notes, “Crunk is a type of frenetic, urban, contemporary music and dance that fuses elements of hip-hop and electronica.”

In the familiar modern quest to polarize the definitions of artifice/art, rejecting civilization in order to rediscover a more authentic reality in the archaic past, Susan Scarlata is studiously un-lyrical and rejects at the same time she invokes earlier forms of lyric, narrative, and epic poetry. It Might Turn Out We Are Real is a marvel of expression of modernist tension between Classical/ Romantic inspiration and Ironic self-consciousness.

Midway in the collection, there is delight at “What Part Reached?”:

Listen, words were once carved on wax tablets

then placed in jars for safekeeping.

And what’s strange about

the hippocampus is how it’s both

a sea creature of whimsy, part fish and part horse;

and the ridged part of our brains where our

shortest of memories spend time.

By “Of Pelts And Cuff-Links”, you can feel yourself hoof-crunking along. In “To What Do I Most Compare You?” (post-modern echo of not “to a summer’s day”), the poet juggles rapture & reason: “… the knife was blunt/ the ram caught in thicket, or a deep appears…/ that will suffice. Synecdochic day. Part for the whole, and ‘civilized’ starts.”

Synecdochic Day ought to be an international holiday.

This collection also works as a precis course in the history of poetry & post-modern criticism. The syllabi for three recent classes are at http://www.susanscarlata. com/teachings/. Anyone creative in the post-modern period – certainly in the Academy – has been ironically constrained by a century of critical rules of rebellion and rejection of past formalities. The hostile antithesis of art and artifice has not yet found synthesis. With Ferlinghetti, we await a rebirth of wonder. It happens in some moments in It Might Turn Out We Are Real, the title a Romantic wish expressed in Ironic terms. In “A Living,” the poet writes, “The honey the bees made from almond flowers was/too bitter to eat.” Now there’s a perfect metaphor for the modern poet’s predicament.

L.S Bassen's The End of Shakespeare & Co. was the winner of the 2009 Atlantic Pacific Press Drama Prize. Ms. Bassen also won a Mary Roberts Rinehart Fellowship and has been published in several print and online publications, including Kenyon Review and American Scholar. She is a produced and published playwright and commissioned co-author of a WWII memoir.

New Issue!

2011-06-04T02:18:00.001-04:00

Check out Melusine 3.1, our Spring/Summer 2011 issue, right here.

Review: Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein and Lisa Marie Basile's Diorama

2011-05-25T01:10:00.004-04:00

Diorama by Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein and Lisa Marie Basile

Wisp Press, 2011,

Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein and Lisa Marie Basile's collaborative chapbook Diorama presents two parallel threads of a lyrical progression — at times starkly haunting, at times lushly sensual — through scenes of intimacy and eroticism, loss and death, set against a backdrop shifting in locus between the deserts of the American Southwest and the valleys and rainforests of Central and South America, with occasional detours to the Old World of the Mediterranean.

Morhardt-Goldstein's poems are informed by her background in classical music, including one presented as the first movement of a requiem mass, with parts in English and Latin.

Her poems move gracefully between dictions, painting moods with landscape and imagery.

One poem, "Piece for solo quena," begins:

We wear mustard-dust.
We sprouted saguaro antlers.
It sounded like the crackling of clay skeletons
             running on the back of the sun.

The wind shot through holes in our bodies:
             a violet diction of harmony.

The closing lines of her final poem exemplify an open-endedness that marks all of her work here: "the rolling of his cigarette/ the way a potter throws a teacup."

At first reading we see an image of effortless craftsmanship, and yet, two lines before, we had the image of "the foot that knocks over the fan at night," implying a drowsy carelessness; and reading the lines again through that lens, we can see a finished, painted, even well-loved teacup being carelessly shattered. It can be read either way, like much of the best work here.

Lisa Marie Basile writes with both startling immediacy and a taut reserve. Her image-rich poems retain an undercurrent of mystery beneath a disarming veneer of candor.

Her section brims with dazzling, at times devastating lines.

In "Letters," she writes:

When my mother spoke at the podium I felt
a wide angel fly from her head, crack against the rafters
and fall to the floor.

She covered the place in wing.

I imagined myself bending over her, preparing her like a
butterfly jaggedly descending toward a calm death.

Each poet carries her weight in this joint effort with technical skill and a voice refreshingly unabashed in its directness. This slim volume is a good introduction to two complementary yet distinctive new voices.

Sorry We Were Out...

2011-05-17T17:50:00.003-04:00

We apologize for our lengthy hiatus from the blogosphere. Vacation, random personal crises, and just plain laziness may have interfered with our ability to post much over the last month and a half.

We would like to just blame the gap on our flurry of preparation for the Spring/Summer issue, which will launch by the first of next month, but that doesn't completely account for our lapse.

However, we might as well take the opportunity to mention that the Spring/Summer issue will launch by the first of next month! It's looking to be a good issue, and we look forward to wrapping up production on it soon. The issue will include the top three poetry contest winners and much more literary goodness.

And, finally (finally, indeed) look for a new review here in the blog next weekend.

2011 Poetry Contest Finalists

2011-04-03T19:17:00.004-04:00

We're pleased to announce the 10 finalists for our 2011 Vivienne Haigh-Wood Prize for a single poem. The prize winner will receive $500 and the winning poem will appear in our Spring/Summer 2011 issue, out next month. The second and third place poems will also appear in a special section of the issue, and all non-winning finalists will be listed there as honorable mentions. Finalists will be notified of the status of their entries shortly before the issue appears. Congrats and good luck to all!

*Finalists are listed in alphabetical order by name.

Lou Amyx: Roses
Connie Boyle: An Inheritance
Pat Hurshell: Elegy (in 3 movements)
Pat Hurshell: Leda Tells It Again
Tomasz Mielcarek: I Was Waiting For You
Jenny Sanders: Mama's Little Heartbreaker
Lorraine Schein: The Hanged Woman
Lorraine Schein: The Lady in the Lake
N. A’Yara Stein: For the Rest of Our Lives, That Far Place Waits
Julie Stuckey: Watching the Door

Review: Melissa Crandall's Weathercock

2011-03-21T00:46:00.007-04:00

Weathercock by Melissa Crandall

Tortuga Loca, 2010,

Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Melissa Crandall, whose short story collection Darling Wendy was reviewed for our debut issue, sent me a copy of her first non-series novel, Weathercock, a fantasy set in an alternative-reality medieval world where gender roles are directly inverse to traditional gender roles in the majority of known human societies. In other words, men's lot in life was rather bitter.

I admit I'm not very familiar with the fantasy genre, so I asked for some feedback from my partner on this, and it was interesting to get a male perspective on the story. He found the female characters easier to relate to than the male ones, simply because men in the world of this novel are so unlike the typical picture of a man in our society, while women in the novel's world do resemble men as we know them, exhibiting both what are perceived as positive as well as negative typically masculine traits. It seems the reversal in behavior stems from the respective genders' stations and the effects of those roles over generations, through a feedback loop of heredity and environment

For reasons unknown to the lead characters, men were born more rarely in this society, and they were often sterile. "It was just the way things were in Duine, the way things had always been."

The result of this scarcity is for men to be treated like commodities, essentially as breeding studs. Women set up "households," which are comprised of several wives, one of whom actually "owns" the husband and therefore wields most of the power, and others who exist lower in the hierarchy and have less say in household decisions.

Kinner, the lead male character, son of the "Firstwife" of a household, finds his future in jeopardy when it's discovered that he is apparently sterile and therefore cannot contribute to the household in the manner expected of him. The only alternative to execution for a sterile male is monkhood, and so Kinner's mother undertakes with him a long journey across the country to a monastery where he can live safely among other men in his predicament — although we later learn that Kinner's mother, Holan, who is a blacksmith, has misled the other wives about her son's sterility because she wanted a pretext to travel with him to this distant place of refuge as part of her quest in relation to a special sword she has forged in honor of a god, the Weathercock, whose worship is forbidden in a society that instead worships a triune goddess.

The inverted parallels to medieval European Christendom are obvious, but the questions this allegorical adventure tale raises are provocative and compelling.

Has our own society, even today, afforded equal worth to half its members even if they do not assume traditional procreative roles?

And, political measures like affirmative action aside, what would women today be achieving in non-female-dominated professions if they had not been treated as second-class citizens since time immemorial?

Kinner, raised to be docile and not trained in battle because he is a man, does not emerge as a hero in the war between the corrupt queen and her discontented subjects that provides much of the action in the novel. (Many of the subjects are miffed that the queen keeps stealing their husbands in pursuit of an heir.) In this way, the story is realistic, unlike anachronistic Hollywood films that cast every other ancient or medieval heroine as a Boudica, rather than portraying them within the context of their time, where courage did not necessarily manifest itself in dazzling swordplay.

And political feminism didn't win all of its early battles, either, but the closing of Crandall's tale allows for hope that change is in the air for men like Kinner, not from martial victories but from mutual understanding between the genders one person at a time, which is how all true and lasting peace and progress tends to be won.

I admire the author for tackling this territory and think she has written an original, idea-driven adventure story worth checking out.

The book is available directly from the author, as well as in ebook form here.

Editorial: Relic From The Mix-Tape Years

2011-02-28T00:16:00.003-05:00

Sorting through a box full of cassette tapes that survived my handful of moves from over the last decade, I reread the story of my adolescence and early adulthood, spelled out on the handwritten covers of my mix tapes.

Ah, the mix tape, a short-lived, essentially obsolete art form. A few of my eighth and ninth-grade classmates had made them for each other, with photocopies of kittens or puppies as covers. As an introverted chick with few friends and less confidence in matters of influencing others' taste (but plenty of confidence in my own ability to know what I like) I made tapes for myself.

In high school the tapes, titled "Hits of 1980/90-whatever (I'm going to pass up the chance to show my precise age here)" and adorned with hastily ink-drawn musical notes, were songs I caught off the radio, recorded on the fly. I depended on my not particularly quick reflexes to catch the songs in their entirety, and so they appeared in no particular order.

Then in college I got a bit more sophisticated. I titled the series of tapes "Sonic Potpourri" and made them only from other tapes or (increasingly) CDs that either I or my brother owned. I could only make them when I was at home from school, where my treasured once-state-of-the-art stereo stood in my girlhood room. On the frequent occasions when I was home for a weekend, a new tape would be my major weekend project. I labored over the tapes with the attention I should have directed to my homework -- the attention and the passion. Maybe it wasn't coincidence that the only A I received my first freshman semester was in the history of jazz.

The tapes told the story of my life -- not from day one, but what was going on right at that time, in narrative form, although the narrative would probably have been comprehensible only to me. Much of it was centered around my relationship at the time, my first serious one, and my efforts to find my own voice in the world. Typical college stuff. Speaking more recently to friends, I realized that almost everyone made mix tapes in those days. My boyfriend at the time had made some for me, stuff he thought I might like, or hoped I might like, or thought I should like. I lacked the confidence to pass on my own finds to him.

Later on, my tapes began to tell the story of my burgeoning feminism -- since this was the '90s, a Second Wave, Riot Grrrl-influenced feminism -- my own untattooed, still-introverted but increasingly confident version of it.

I found one tape that captured this moment in time, a "special edition" called "27 Songs by Women." One of my signature ink-drawn notes is encircled by a Venus symbol. Reading the list of songs really took me back. Some remain staples of my playlists. Others I haven't heard since the '90s. Tori Amos, Veruca Salt, Shonen Knife, Hole, PJ Harvey, the Breeders, Belly, Throwing Muses, Heather Nova, Bjork, et cetera.

"Silent All These Years" leads off, and Indigo Girls' "Language or the Kiss" closes with a question, one never answered, but replaced with different questions.

Yes, I have my playlists now, but I can tweak them with a quick right-click of my mouse -- a bit too easy. In comparison, those tapes have staying power. Like the spiral notebooks I scribbled in as a kid, they're immune to hasty single-fingertip deletion. And every once in a while, I'll probably find myself combing through that dusty box of tapes and retrieving a gem.

I had faithfully kept journals in spiral-bound notebooks and later more attractive blank-paged hardcover books, up until my last year or two of college. I don't know why I stopped journaling. I continued to write poetry and dabble in fiction, but at some point I stopped allowing myself the luxury of written self-reflection. The mix tapes filled the void, and allowed me to tell my story (if only to myself) in music.

I never did go back to handwritten journal-keeping, but eventually (after a few resistant Luddite years) started up a live journal, which offered the slightly unnerving opportunity for me to share my personal thoughts with other human beings, albeit at a safe distance. Eventually, I replaced my highly personal blog with others more topical in nature. I suppose sites like Facebook filled the more personal niche, or maybe, once again, I stopped believing I have the time to journal. And I'm probably right, unfortunately. It's difficult enough to make the time for poetry and fiction. But occasionally, I jot down a quote or a few lines and file them away in a safe place.

And I have my playlists. The one entitled "Melusine" does, oddly enough, share a few tracks in common with my rediscovered feminist mix tape. All is not lost.

Melusine is a Hibernating Creature

2011-02-13T22:22:00.006-05:00

Hello — just a note to say that Melusine is headed on vacation shortly.

Don't worry, we're not going anywhere warm. Winter will remain very much with us in our travels.

In any case, our nonfiction/review series will be on a two-week hiatus until we return.

Look for a new post the last weekend of this month, and have a lovely Valentine's Day!

P.S. Don't forget about the poetry contest — just two weeks left before the March 1 deadline: http://www.melusine21cent.com/mag/contest

Merlaine Sivels: Daddy Issues

2011-01-30T17:30:00.013-05:00

When I was younger, he stuck around. He got an apartment nearby, dropped in whenever mom went to work and my brother went to play basketball. He would rent movies, a new one every week. We would watch them together. Eat all the frozen pizzas in the house together.

The next day, mom had warned me not to let him do that again. She’d said it was bad for his blood pressure.

As I got older, he drifted farther away.

Location-wise, he was a nomad.

Parked his truck in empty fields and slept in it. He only parked in places where he knew he wouldn’t get a ticket, and he would call me, telling me the newest place he’d managed to fall asleep. It was dangerous, his like of work. People robbed trucks and shot truckers, I was told, and for the longest time I would spend nights awake, wondering if I would get a call from him the next morning. He always seemed to make it, and by day, he emptied the truck to the designated store. Then be on his way again.

He had sent me postcards.

Alabama, Washington, Las Vegas, Utah, Texas, Maryland, California.

I still have them. My favorite was Virginia. He would call and ask me if I’d received the latest postcard, and I would reply with a yes, I had, but Virginia will always be my favorite. For a while, she let him come back, my mom.

She let him stay with us and we played house again for a while. He was the daddy. She was the mommy. I was the daughter and my brother was the son. The roles were intricate. My part was easy, but everyone else struggled. Eventually my mom got sick of pretending. She wanted him out. He left. She apologized to me.

To my brother. My brother took her sorry to heart, as if he was the one who’d been wounded.

I remember going into another room and calling him, tell him that she apologized. He never picked up. Never called back.

I am a girl of false hopes, my mother told me once. He promises me things. I cling to them with all my heart, all my soul. When he doesn’t deliver, I am heartbroken. But he makes more promises and I cling some more.

Nowadays she tells me that I don’t remember the old him. The one who sent me to bed without food. Who pushed me to the ground whenever I would kiss her goodnight. The one who pinched me so hard he split my tender six-year-old skin in half for biting on a straw.

She says that if I remembered the way I would cry in her arms while he was outside mowing the law, the way I would wail in my bedroom at night after he went to work, the way I would shake in his presence when I did something he didn’t like. If only I remembered that side of him then I wouldn’t hold on the way I did.

But all I can say to her is that he is my dad, and you can never let your number one fan go.

He doesn’t call me on my twentieth birthday. I don’t wake up waiting for it, but at the end of the day, I realize there is one voice I haven’t heard from. When I call him, he assures me, yes, he did call, and he even left a message. While he is speaking, I check my phone for the voicemail sign.

It’s not on.

I ask him when I will see him again. It has been almost a year. We make plans for Sunday. He has a delivery in Miami for Monday, so he will pass through Orlando for a few hours.

I am excited. Not just to see him, but just to be in his presence. To hear him talk in person, for once. To see his facial features, that huge smile I got from him. I miss it all. He does not call me on Saturday.

On Sunday, I wake up early, dress, and put my keys in the ignition, as my phone buzzes with a new text message. I don’t need to read it. I pull my keys out, go back inside, undress and go back to bed.

At my door, my mom, is on the verge of tears because she can hear mine. False hopes, honey. False hopes.

Three days later, I read the text message. We have new plans for Sunday again. He will be there, my phone assures me.

He does not call me on Saturday. On Sunday, I wake up early, dress, and put my keys in the ignition. My phone is silent the entire drive.

Since sixteen, we have met at the Navy Exchange, even though I am twenty nothing has changed. I drive around the parking lot, looking for him. I find his truck.

The purple eighteen-wheeler is tall behind the old lawn and garden building. When I pull up he is not there. I park behind it and go look for him. I find him exiting the barbershop. From faraway, he is my dad. My daddy.

The man that woman would swoon over at my brother’s basketball games, at my job, in restaurants, in theme parks. He is tall and poise, walking with his back straight, like the military taught him. His hair, which has been balding since before I could remember, is cropped closely to his head. From far away, that smile is bright with memories of his little girl, and momentarily I expect him to run to me and scoop me into his arms like he used to. But he doesn’t. He keeps walking, and when we are standing face to face with each other, I realize that I have made a mistake.

This man is not my father.

His hair is salt and pepper instead of black. His eyes, usually vigilant and alert, are tired and baggy, as if they threaten to close at any moment. His stomach, once flat and muscular, is now heavy with the threat of a gut. His muscular arms are skinny.

And his face.

He is handsome still. But his face is accented with heavy lines around his mouth, around his eyes, on his cheeks, like origami art that has been deconstructed.

I stare because I don’t know what to say. What do you say to a stranger?

He speaks first; a loud obnoxious greeting that if I was still thirteen would have made me laugh hysterically. Now it makes my bottom lip quiver.

I greet him, closing in for a quick hug. He embraces me and even manages to lift me off the ground an inch or two. I do not stay airborne for long, and it scares me to think that there will come a time when he will no longer be able to do that.

When he releases me, my cheeks are wet. I tell him it is allergies. He believes me.

We walk and he tells me about the allergies he had while in Alabama. He throws his head back in a laugh and says that I wouldn’t last a minute there. I nod, still looking at him, never looking away. I want to be able to see when this man will turn back into my dad. I want to watch the metamorphosis. He asks me what’s wrong? It’s my birthday.

I should be happy.

I reply that I am old now. He laughs again. That same laugh that sounds like my dad’s. He asks me how I have been. How is my boyfriend? How is my brother? How is my car (he can’t help but comment that it still looks like shit)?

I tell him everything is good. Everyone is fine.

I don’t tell him about how I have moved in with my boyfriend, how my brother has moved out because of fights with mom, how my car stopped working in the middle of the highway the other day, how my heart stutters when I laugh too hard or sleep on my stomach, about my puppy, about my grades.

He doesn’t pry.

He tells me about his fiancée. He calls her Mrs. Sivels.

When he says this, I laugh for the first time. I picture my mom. She isn’t, but to me, she will always be the only Mrs. Sivels. It is not as funny to him as it is to me. To him it is not funny at all.

We walk around the exchange for an hour. When he finds something he likes, he gets my attention by calling my name and begging me to look.

It reminds me of our road trips when I was younger. When we would pass a field of horses or cows, he would nudge me repeatedly.

Look! Look! Cows!

I indulge him by feigning interest.

In return, I point to things I like. He merely nods, continues walking. Makes a comment about my mom buying me something if I want it bad enough. When we pass the jewelry department, he shows me the ring he plans on buying for the new and improved Mrs. Sivels.

It is five thousand dollars. He informs me that she is worth every penny.

He does not have time to take me out to my birthday lunch as we planned. He admits that I took too long getting there. We eat at a sub shop.

I do not like subs, but I don’t speak up. He doesn’t ask.

He eats quickly, almost swallowing his sub whole.

Mouth full, he confides in me that he loves their subs. How does mine taste? As he is speaking, mine slips out of my hand on to the floor. He laughs. My stomach growls. I did not eat breakfast that morning in order to have room for lunch.

He says oh, well. He shrugs.

We are silent as we walk to my car and his truck. I cannot help but still look at him, but this time I know he is not going to change. For me, there will be no metamorphosis into the man I knew.

He pats me on the back as I stop in front of his truck. He tells me that he has something for me. I cannot help it, I get excited. I did not expect anything from him. He dashes into the cab of his truck and rummages around for a few minutes. The longer he takes the more my heart sinks. He yells down to me that he might have lost it—Oops, he found it. He steps down the cab with two envelopes. One blue. One yellow.

Both of them read To My Favorite Girl.

Before I can open them, he tells me that he has to get going. He’s sorry he can’t stick around.

I understand, or at least that’s what I tell him.

I admit to him that I had a good time. It had been too long since I last saw him.

He is already in his truck, turning his keys, and pressing buttons. He pulls the string that hangs by his head, and the sound of his horn reverberates through the parking lot as he exits on to the highway.

When I can no longer see him, I open the first envelope. The yellow one.

It is a Valentine’s Day card. When I open the card, it sings a quick song and to the side he writes a simple message telling me to be good, don’t do anything he wouldn’t. I smile, close the card. Slip it back into the envelope, and slip the envelope in my bag.

I open the second card, the blue one.

There is a small postcard inside. There are big city lights and people smiling, showgirls dancing, casinos and gambling all on the front. Las Vegas, it reads in pink lettering.

When I flip it over there is a small greeting. To the right is his scribbled handwriting: I always remembered that this one was your favorite. Happy 22nd birthday, young lady.

Merlaine Sivels is pursuing a degree in English education and has promised her mother that she would publish at least one story during her lifetime (her mother's, that is, not that she plans on passing anytime soon.)

Lisa Gurney: The Mane Mutiny

2011-01-16T22:11:00.002-05:00

Being bald is at the very top of my mother’s lamentation list. By age sixty, her crown was completely naked, hugged at the base of her skull by a Franciscan-like ring of thinning wisps.

Within an hour of meeting someone, my mother will invariably pull off her wig and say “Isn’t this sad? Look at what happened to me, and at such an early age, too.” Annoyed, I promptly respond, “Stop it! Your circumstance could be far worse.” Her face falls from the pain of being misunderstood, though she does mutter a weak “I know.”

At the onset of my fortieth year, however, I’ve become more sympathetic to my mother’s plight. My hair is starting to follow the same ebbing path hers took. My locks are losing weight, becoming anorexic, exposing a bed of bright white skin. I can clearly see where my follicle future is heading, and it is all down-scalp.

I’ve begun to understand that it is more than just about diminishing hair. The loss speaks of waning beauty, growing old, and about losing a tool in the feminine wiles arsenal. It is a sign that I am on the “other side” of my life. There is a breadth of emotion packed in those dwindling strands. What else is going to thin and eventually disappear?

Now, I no longer get annoyed or frustrated when my mother sits with a sad look in her eyes, head bent so my husband can shave the remaining and tired tufts that poke through her wig. I feel sad too. And I wonder why my response to her has been insensitive when she raised me to be kind of heart, empathetic, and generous in relationships. Perhaps I am putting up hard words to shield me from unpleasant realities, my mother’s aging and her inability to view it as anything other than a heavy burden.

Luckily, I have the aptitude to view my own aging differently, and I will have a say in how I let the mutiny of my mane affect me. When the time comes I won’t whip off my wig to near strangers. Instead, I’ll discover if blondes really do have more fun and if red-heads are fierier. Brightly patterned turbans will adorn my head, accompanied by large hoop earrings, sweeping bohemian skirts and sandals. Who knows, maybe I’ll get a tattoo that says "Bald is Beautiful" and just go commando.

Lisa Gurney quit her Fortune 500 job in 2007 to pursue her dream of writing full time. Since then, her fiction and essays have been published both in print and online in the U.S. and Canada. She is the recipient of the 2007 National PRNDI Award for Commentary for her essay "A Witness to Violence." She resides in Worcester, MA and welcomes comments at lisajgurney@gmail.com.

Editorial: More Light?

2010-12-31T17:46:00.006-05:00

Because it's the holidays—at least for another day or so—and because the holidays mean that submissions tend to slow down toward the end of the year, I thought I would write an editorial-type piece in this blog on a holiday theme. I've been meaning to write an editorial-type piece on something or other, and this seemed as good an excuse as any. I knew it wasn't going to be something warm and fuzzy, although the impulse sprang from a holiday sort of place—the desire to offer something, however modest in value it may turn out to be, for the sake of offering it.

That seems to be one of the most consistent impulses surrounding the Winter Solstice holiday that has evolved into our Western Christmas and concurrent religious observances, often lumped together as "the holidays" as if they all occur at precisely the same time, even on years like this one when Hanukkah concluded on December 9th.

Gift-giving is obviously paramount to the holidays these days, since without retailers to remind us of our obligations to our loved ones and mere acquaintances as early as late September, what would a modern holiday season be? But an even more basic and ancient impulse was simply to ward off the darkness a little bit by lighting a candle.

It's hard to imagine a time when things like candles on a tree—or the safer alternative of flashing LED lights—were not merely symbolic holiday tropes, but there was such a time, and I think the deal of how it all started was as basic as this. Year after year, after the harvest and first frosts had passed, people noticed that the days were getting so short that it seemed, at the rate they were going, they would eventually disappear (thus the need to appease the sun gods) and the growing cold from the retreating sun only exacerbated the feeling of darkness. People huddled inside around their fires much of the day, and probably grew more guarded and fearful of the world outside—and they had reason to be. Their children may not survive the winter.[1]

It was a brazen, foolhardy and generous impulse to run out into the cold, dark village lane or town square with a torch and an amphora of wine or horn of mead to share with one's neighbors. But after enough of the stuff had been imbibed, and with everyone glutted on the slaughtered livestock who wouldn't be surviving the winter, anyway, a merry mood was inevitable.[1] It all must have happened quite naturally.

And that's the problem with the modern Christmas, lamented by Bethlehem-minded observers like "Peanuts" creator Charles Schulz in 1965 as well as more secular-minded critics holding an equally dim view of commercialism today: Nothing about it seems quite real.

But the thing is, it isn't that the rest of our modern lives feels solid and substantial, and only our Christmas is phony. It's that our comfortable, everyday world is made of aluminum, polystyrene, and silicon (or silicone), and our Christmas is no exception. Our Christmas is part and parcel of our time, just like it was for the Victorians (and it's hard to say now exactly how the Victorian Christmas was before its repackaging by nostalgia) and yet our Christmas still seems somehow wrong to us—because it doesn't match up to Dickens or even to that 1965 "Peanuts" cartoon. Everyone (or so it seems) wants to be old-fashioned at Christmas, but very few know how, and the uninitiated are afraid those few will take their secret recipes to the grave.

Who would be familiar with the work of Currier and Ives these days if they weren't enshrined in a familiar carol? What the heck is a wassail, anyway? If it's spiked, as I presume it is, I'm game, but I hope someone else knows the recipe. (Yes, it is, and here is the recipe.[2]) But who has the time to bake, construct and decorate a gingerbread house? A few very dedicated purists here and there, and some TV pastry chefs.

To most of us, it's just another trope, like the holly and the ivy (medieval symbols for male and female, "when they are both full grown"--and you can guess which medieval gender is the bright, upstanding holly and which the clinging ivy) or Santa Claus (an incarnation of the Norse god Odin later melded with a 4th Century Greek saint [4]) and Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, who at least makes the misfit in all of us feel more at home at a time when it seems everyone else knows where they belong in the scheme of this holiday thing.

The two-to-three-month buildup to Christmas has a way of making the most romantic among us feel like Grinches. On December 23rd, I found myself humming "Eleanor Rigby" instead of "Deck the Halls." I knew so many people newly or long-single, geographically distant or estranged from their families for whom I could only imagine this season to be a long, grim slog.

Should we tag as foul-spirited Grinches anyone who feels a bit cranky at all the product-peddling clichés whirling around them? I don't think so. Even with family to go home to and with a loving partner at my side, the pressure of the season had been grating on my nerves, aided by a perennial case of seasonal affective disorder. This year, I hoped for a light therapy box under my tree.

For the reluctant among us, instead of just "Consume, consume," the advertisers have to sell the idea of Christmas first, and often do so by implying that all would-be consumers have a dormant sense of Christmas buried deep inside them that is just waiting to be sparked. Maybe one of their more scientifically-minded consultants convinced them there is some kind of Christmas gene, and one of the ways it's expressed is by making the phenotype in question rush down to the Apple store or Jared, The Galleria of Jewelry.

If Charles Schulz were still around and someone managed to convince him to make a second sequel to his famous "Peanuts" Christmas cartoon, what might he have to say about the way commercialism has truly blossomed since 1965, and even 1992, when the first sequel was aired—about how it's exploded into the full-grown monstrosity that it is today?

What might he say about all the ways we've found to imitate items once found in nature or even the factory with digital, virtual representations of them? (At least a pink aluminum Christmas tree exists in three dimensions.)

If he were a paleo-pagan instead of a Protestant, (although it's interesting to note that later in life he referred to himself as a secular humanist [5]) what might he, speaking for our ancestors, say about what has happened to the simple impulse to light a candle rather than cursing the darkness, and to share a little of what makes a person merry with one's neighbors and friends?

Oh, sure, it didn't take long even for the ancients to pin down this impulse into stagnant ritual. That's one of the things groups of humans do best—suck the feeling out of something and replace it with a "how-to" manual, and then put the manual up for sale, along with some devotional trinkets. That's no modern phenomenon.

What we've managed to innovate in the last century or so is a world where, due to our cleverness, our success as a species, we don't need candles to light our dark nights anymore, and so we've logically come to believe that all we need is the idea of a candle, the trope of a candle cut into a rough shape for a cookie or synthetic fabric mold.

I have to emphasize that I count myself as someone who is in favor of the future—meaning that I detest the idea of cursing progress, proclaiming all that's modern to be corrupt and decadent, because much of what we have built for ourselves over the millennia has proven light years better than what we started out with, and not only with regard to technology. Much of our way of thinking about our fellow human beings is more inclusive and tolerant and less self-serving and violent. Although we obviously have a long way to go along that path, on the whole we are kinder and gentler.

But I do think we might do well, in the midst of hunkering down and wishing coziness and comfort for me and mine, to remember the despair, and disparity, that persists in the world outside our weatherproof doors—in the parts of the world map lit up by the electric grid and the parts that as of yet are not—and light a candle with that darkness in mind.

Apparently Goethe's apocryphal last words "More light!" turn out to be a posterity-minded paraphrase of his more banal instruction to "Open the second shutter so that more light may come in."[6] Does it really matter, though? Letting the sun in is one way of letting the world in, and maybe the reverse is also true.

Thanks for reading—here's wishing you a happy and luminous New Year!

Because there's much in the world I don't know (but the World Wide Web does) I consulted these sources:
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/opinion/20cohen.html?_r=1
2. http://www.accidentalhedonist.com/index.php?title=wassail
3. http://davesgarden.com/guides/articles/view/2731/
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_M._Schulz
6. http://www.utne.com/2002-07-01/famous-last-words.aspx

Review: Marsha Mathews' Northbound Single-Lane

2010-12-20T02:33:00.011-05:00

Northbound Single-Lane by Marsha Mathews

Finishing Line Press, 2010,

Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Marsha Mathews' first chapbook Northbound Single-Lane was recently published by Finishing Line Press in a lovely handcrafted-looking edition with a cover illustration of a magnified grasshopper that immediately drew me in.

Mathews' disarmingly accessible style kept me turning the pages through this 19-poem collection, and I appreciated the arrangement of the poems both chronologically in terms of the speaker's personal narrative but also, true to the title, directionally northward, albeit with a detour here and there.

And, of course, the final poem brings the speaker home both to her native Florida, the point of departure, but we also realize by this point in the collection that "northbound" has another meaning as well, as does "single-lane." The speaker's decades-long journey, taken in the company of two daughters who occasionally aggravate but more often inspire, ends when she finds herself sitting alone but un-lonely, finally free from the domination of two powerful griefs, first for a father who passed away and second for a husband who walked away, on the dock her father built: "On this dock I once watched/ the horizon through my father's eyes./ Cigar scent choked the salt./ I now see the ladder at the end of the fill."

By this point, the speaker has come a long way since a poem early in the collection, "Merry-Go-Whorl," in which the dissolution of a marriage was portrayed as a slowly dawning horror:

You snuggle

into this complacency

till one day

the person you love most

averts his face.

Living room walls open

& out prance

blue unbridled hyenas.

Your house crumbles

into a powdery rubble of questions.

In a later poem, "Lone Goose," Mathews shows her skill for crafting an interwoven conceit when she compares the goose's morning call and its disruption of the fragile security of a tranquil lake to the fragile psychic security she has tentatively begun to build while taking refuge at the lake, also shattered by the same noise, like a jarring meditation bell.

The daughters appear as constants in the narrative, comfort amid the uncertainty. In "Abigail's Antiques," one daughter panics her mother by practicing ballet steps oblivious to the breakable merchandise in the eponymous store, but Mathews gracefully turns the poem to make apparent what is ultimately of value to the mother: "... for her, there's no breaking./ Even if she leaps."

This territory is risky when it comes to avoiding the maudlin, and Mathews doesn't always manage to steer completely clear of it, but she does avoid going over the edge.

And occasionally, a more caustic tone emerges, as in "The Sectioning," a pitch-perfect and in fact one of the strongest poems here:

The first time you see her

she is crying. For weeks,

screams tear the air.

As you drive to the grocery store,

her voice rides in your temples.

You check the mirror,

sure that she is following.

The relatively long final poem is the natural culmination of the collection, and it begins compellingly:

On the dock my father built

I watch lights from beach houses

quiver toward me,

streak across Boca Ciega Bay.

The moon shoots itself

to the water. Light spins, flashes

like Spanish doubloons.

They dazzle, tempt me with miracle.
Yet the neighbor's dog howls.
A gull pounds the air with its wings.
A mullet slaps the surface.
The grainy boards beneath my feet
are real enough. What then?

Halfway through, the breakthrough: "I remembered laughter."

The closing lines of the final stanza leave us with the collection's most luminous imagery:

Tones draw into seawall's hollows,

lamp shells. They cluster

& shine like pearls,

holding off everything

empty.

The speaker's quest for identity began in the opening poem, in which she as a girl injected a grasshopper with red dye because "I ached for something/ to inject myself with/ to make me shine."

In the final poem, the world makes its presence truly felt to the speaker, and is moved in turn by what she discovers in the penultimate stanza, "... music never before heard:/ my notes."

Review: Karla Linn Merrifield's The Urn

2010-12-06T00:00:00.015-05:00

The Urn by Karla Linn Merrifield

Finishing Line Press, 2010,

Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Karla Linn Merrifield's new chapbook The Urn is dedicated to her husband Roger Weir, whose prostate cancer is in the final stage although it appears to have been in remission when at least some of these poems were written. She presents the chapbook's twenty-three poems both as a tribute to a still-living loved one (as opposed to a posthumous elegy, which can only be appreciated by the bereaved) as well as an exploration of her own grief as she comes to terms with the deferred but certain loss of her partner.

It is a brave undertaking, and the poems Merrifield shares with Roger and with us are especially moving in light of the circumstances we know inspired them, but most would stand alone even if we didn't have this knowledge.

Merrifield was an Everglades National Park artist-in-residence in 2009, and her fluency in describing nature is evident in the most finely crafted of these poems. Many describe the life in Florida that the author and her husband share.

The strong opening poem, "No Mainland Visible, Islands Only," ends with:

who else falls prey?

husks of spider crabs strewn
on this beach with candor
reply the chain is out of order

two red-shouldered hawks
eye me twice curve into
morning shredding mackerel clouds

When the author's tone occasionally falters or overreaches, the grieving speaker returns to nature as a source of strength and solace, and both form and content are back on sure footing.

"The Calling" begins:

The dapper clan of backyard avians
            comes calling to celebrate
                     with me your cancer’s remission.

Chickadee, titmouse, junco, downy—
            quartet in a spectrum of grays-to-black—
                     feather the sun this mild November morning.

One exception to the nature rule is the breezy poem "Soundtrack for the Man Who Wore Bow Ties with No Camera..." which hitchhikes up the coast and back in time to the New York of the '70s, deftly weaving Simon & Garfunkel song references with semi-nostalgic reflections of a carefree, dissolute past:

Those were my beret days of truant, sleazy hours
at play as ex-hippie-exiled-to-the-city,

tripping out on jazz combos at Storyville at noon
or late-night Bleeker Street blues,
with wine and a joint, a screw.
It was another November morning,
lifetimes ago. The promo man from Playboy

drove me in his slick ’59 machine
down by the schoolyard in Corona, Queens,
past the police station, over to Julio’s ’hood.
He snapped in the cassette and we listened
to Paul sing the gospel, believing we’d never

burn out; no one was ever going to die
because no one had, no one we personally knew.

But she returns to nature in the final two poems. The very last is set in Florida, but the one before, "Wake," is set in another wild place on the other side of the continent, where she describes an urn much larger than a mantle could hold, where ashes are scattered "in choppy waters off Orcas Island."

Still, I fancifully wish for the man
I have loved; so I whistle
for a kingfisher to chant this passage
with blue-spangled feathers and blue-
crowned calling above waves.
He will behold my bright bird up and down,
along, over his deep home,
this fjord where I give him living blue.

The best sort of gift is one given at the right time, and that's the beauty of this timely labor of love.

Pushcart Prize Nominations

2010-11-27T17:05:00.010-05:00

We are nominating three pieces for the 2012 edition of the Pushcart Prize anthology, as follows:

"Discoveries" by Sandra Kohler (poetry)
"Eight Prayers For Cobalt-60" by Karen An-hwei Lee (poetry)
"Natural Order" by August Evans (short fiction)

These pieces all appeared in our Fall/Winter 2010 edition which was published earlier this week.

Congrats and best of luck to our nominees!

We are taking a one-week hiatus from the blog series for the Thanksgiving holiday and will be back next weekend with a review of Karla Linn Merrifield's chapbook The Urn.

Fall/Winter Issue

2010-11-23T00:22:00.002-05:00

If you haven't visited the mag lately, check out the new Fall/Winter issue, which is now live!

Ke Huang: On Matchmaking

2010-11-14T23:42:00.003-05:00

My mother refused the first marriage offer presented to me. She would not tell me about it until years later and there are days I wish she had consulted me before the refusal.

Overlooking the 18th floor to the city that still clings to its maritime exploration of the past, tendered from one window a hill hoarded with russet-tiled chalky buildings cloaking the crown of the São Jorge Castle and, on the other, an assortment of variegated condominiums framing the blue wavy Tagus and its white hairband Vasco da Gama Bridge.

While I swept the faux plank flooring, mother waved the mop for the watery finish. We ended our discussion of the plan to visit the house of my parents' best friends.

"You know," mother began, "Lizhen a-yi once told me that you and her Shengguo should have gotten together."

I forgot about my dust-gathering duties: "When did that happen?" The least of my doubts was questioning the veracity of her comment. Since I saw several Chinese films and TV shows where parents made the marriage arrangements for their children, my inquiry concerned why mother had left me out.

"Don't know," she answered more focused on making a smudge on the floor go away, "she mentioned once. He isn’t right for you, you're going abroad for college and he barely graduated high school."

Was mother right? Did my fate make me that different from Shengguo? Maybe he went on excursions to Paris and Rome but would not share my years of studying media and mingling with aspiring filmmakers in the two liberal American Meccas. While he stayed in Europe and dealt with the cardigan sweater trading, I went on writers' workshops where all our knitted goods were the interlacing of plots, characters and dialogue.

The marital arrangements for Lizhen a-yi and A-Zhong buobuo’s sole progeny doesn't end here. A few years after, mother would go on a business trip to China and run into a distant female cousin. Ma came back praising Lihui jiejie as if she were the Chinese Grace Kelly and introduced Lihui to Shengguo. The two had their inter-continental courtship and have been happily married for five years.

In a society that preaches women to follow the three obediences of father (before marriage), husband (when married) and son (in widowhood), I see mother's meddling in other couples as her subversions to patriarchy. Like an executive producer of a dating reality show, her role as matchmaker gives her carte blanche to access the life of a family, interviewing immediate relatives, arranging a meet of the two young contestants and waiting for the season to unfold. Granted mother doesn't get the paycheck of a Mike Fleiss but the set of bed linens she receives every time her matches end in marriage must have a sentimental value equivalent to the pay of any producer of a hit ABC show.

Mother's "dating show" seasons have had a mixed success. Her first couple, which she matched when we still lived in China, had a rather gruesome end. The newly married husband lost control of his bike while on a commute and plunged down a river. According to mother, when the corpse was hoisted out, the swollen body still clutched on to the bike. Personally, I would have taken the tragedy as a sign that I am no matchmaker material but not mother, she has introduced four times more couples than the times she has birthed children.

Ma doesn't even sound that different from TV executives I have heard speak at entertainment industry seminars and panel discussions. If they had a credit in hit shows, they were more than willing to admit they contributed for the success, but when a program flops, they will be the first to voice out they were not to blame. Mother will tell you how many of her matchees have evolved in blissful marriages and produced healthy children but most likely omit the river-bike misfortune.

Despite being aware of her limitations, I was always convinced that her method was for me. Maybe mother did stop my first arrangement but she could know a single man in her social network that could be a suitable prospective husband.

"You want a what?" A good American friend of mine blurted out. Elise was driving us down the leafy section of Santa Monica Boulevard for bar-hopping on the neon-blinking Sunset Strip.

"An arranged marriage," I answered, surprised that Elise and I had never addressed the topic before.

"What if you don't love him and end up miserable?"

"You're talking about forced marriage, an arranged marriage is when a man and a woman are introduced by someone else but have the choice to decide if they want to get married."

"That’s matchmaking! Your mother is a matchmaker," Elise continued while turning down her car radio, "still, I would try finding someone I love myself before I took on matchmaking."

“That’ll save you from buying a set of bedsheets for the matchmaker.” I tried to joke while hiding what really puzzled me. Could Elise be right? Just because mother could help me find a man didn't exclude me from trying other ways. For six months, I gave dating a try. It included the more "traditional" ways like flirting at Halloween parties, signing-up for a couple of online sites, cultural events for Chinese UCLA grad students and even the more unorthodox methods such as speed dating and going out with someone who picked me up at the Big Blue Bus stop.

For the benefit of those who don't take the public transport in Los Angeles, let me apprise you that there is a tacit hierarchy for the omnibus network. I would have never spoken to a man while riding an orange or red Metro bus but the lime-colored Culver City and royal blue Santa Monica vehicles are in another category. Since CCB and BBB cover the suburban and beach residential areas, their riders are less likely to have a putrid smell and more prone to wear unsoiled attire than the counterparts of the L.A. Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Another excuse why I trusted Mr. BBB was that he was a fellow UCLA grad student with Israeli parents but raised in South Africa. My maternal chromosome envisioned that if we were to pursue a relationship, it could mean that our combined international backgrounds would birth children who could call homes the regions of North America, Western Europe, Subsaharan Africa, The Levant and East Asia. But like the man who preceded and the one who succeeded him, Triple B decided that we should just be friends. I don’t mean to bitch. These males had a good reason to fear a serious relationship. In a town where they can play with voluptuous aspiring actresses and Playmates wanna-bes, a flat-chested vegan creative writing MFA-candidate whose only asset is her adequate legs doesn't make her premier girlfriend material. Fall quarter ended, holiday lights fettered L.A. vegetation and I gave my romance adventures a rest to return to Portugal to my Christmas-and-Hanukkah-less jia.

I dug through my leather-less closet and picked out items that could be donated to the collection box at the Buddhist association to which mother belonged. Her soft voice yelled out: "Come here, quick!"

Mother had told me that she would call me once she got connected to a female cousin from Shanghai to discuss my plan to return to China once my American student visa terminated.

I sped down the chilly hall, advancing past the alcove shimmering crimson and golden Buddha figurines; stepped into ma and ba's room and plunked on the chair beside her. We faced a humming desktop computer and an E.T.-shaped webcam. On the left corner of the screen, the image of Cousin Gulan's oval face framed by an ebony bob cut fluttered, her eyes casting down as she could only be avoiding her webcam to watch the screen.

We exchanged pleasantries, conferred about my living arrangements if I were to settle in Shanghai and cut into the tofu meat of the conversation.

"A friend from my office. Now he’s back to school for a Ph.D. in engineering... The only thing is that you’ll tell me he’s too old."

"He is too old," mother interjected as she adjusted her dewy green beaded jade necklace.

You've been talking through this without telling me? I parried my annoyance and asked instead: "Is he over 30?"

"Thirty-two," cousin nodded. The remote connection mismatched her voice to her image.

"But he's quiet," mother tapped my forearm, "listen to your cousin, she knows what she's talking about."

"He has great temper," cousin added and I couldn’t help to imagine that she reminded me of a pirated poorly-dubbed novela.

"You don't need to worry about me now."

Mother cut in: "You think this is worrying? You can’t have deadlines for these things. When you get to Shanghai, it's not like there’ll be men lined up after to marry you."

My head continued to cogitate and heard words pour out of my mouth: "With the time I have left from my visa, I'm going to apply for a Ph.D. in America."

"You're not coming home to teach English?" Cousin's flickering screen image frowned.

"It could be a good idea," mother said and then took a sip from her clay-textured tea mug, "then if she wants to go back home to teach, she’ll be qualified for universities."

I decided not to tell them that what mainly swayed me to stay in America for a handful more years was that I was hooked with the idea of finding love; of spending time with someone not because a matchmaker said we were suitable but because we were lucky to have found each other. Maybe L.A. wasn't the place to meet a serious male but I would move to a small college town and give it another try. Most single women snicker when I tell them that I realized that being in L.A., it's easier to get accepted into a doctorate program than meeting a future husband. A less of a laughing matter was that I was seduced by the American ways of coming across a beau that isn’t just an amenable partner. My plan would, as the Chinese expression goes, "one arrow double vultures;" by completing research in an area of interest while questing for romance on the side.

Cousin and mother were not to blame for the likelihood of their misunderstanding me. If etymological roots can suggest the origin of an idea, then it is revealing that the term "romance" in Mandarin is lanman, a close transliteration of the Latin word. As much as we Chinese pride ourselves for our five-millennia-long history, the idea of romantic love is most likely an European import. While devotion and duty for families is customary in our culture, the feeling that moves St. Valentine's Day may come from the "exotic" Western world, an idea that had lured me.

As a Portuguese of Chinese decent, Ke Huang learned most of her English from watching Hollywood movies. She has a B.S. from Syracuse and MFA in screenwriting from UCLA. Her writing consists of comedy, drama and horror stories about ethnic experiences.

Guest Review: Contemporary American Women: Our Defining Passages, Carol Smallwood and Cynthia Brackett-Vincent, editors

2010-10-31T12:49:00.021-04:00

All Things That Matter Press, 2009
Reviewed by Marian Matyn

This well-written, easily read, and interesting book is a compilation of articles by women, all well-educated. The themes of the book cover passages of the average woman’s life. This includes physical, emotional, family, career, empowerment changes and challenges, reconnecting, dealing with, and accepting parts of our lives and histories. Importantly, it also covers the relationships women have with others, friends, family, and foes, that cause us to change, or evaluate our options. Some of these topics, such as one’s aging body, or the stress of career choices, difficult relationships and positive, affirming relationships, are those to which all women can relate. Other topics, such as surviving sexual abuse or the loss of a spouse, and the accompanying emotional traumas, are topics some of us have suffered, but all of us can feel empathy for those who endure.

Why read this “women’s book” and not another? Hope. The hope that is so affirming and omnipresent in this book is an essential thread that runs through the entire work, binding the stories together. Through all the changes and challenges of life, all the people who help and affirm, and those who seek to denigrate women, the authors not only endured their experiences, but moved forward into the future with hope.

This is not a depressing victim story from the past, and while the stories are autobiographical in nature, it is more than that. A strong sense of spirituality, and of empowerment, accompanies hope throughout the book, encouraging the reader. “That despite what weighs us down, even the tiniest movement or the smallest decision moves us closer to the light.” (p. 152, “Closer to the light,” Hope Payson) This is what the book is all about: that each of us, with hope, can make a choice that empowers us to move towards a brighter, happier, more fulfilling future.

Two of the stories which I continue to ponder long afterwards are “I couldn’t walk, talk or read: becoming a crow again” by Katie McKy, and “Returning to Russia: Returning home” by Yelizaveta P. Renfro. Both of these stories illustrate a turning point in the life of a girl or young woman. Katie McKy notes the moment she chose not to ridicule, but rather to befriend, a girl who fit in neither physically nor socially at school. Previously ostracized because of speech and walking challenges into a lowly school reading and social group called the crows, McKy chose to befriend another crow. As she notes “Suffering can bequeath us compassion. Of course, it can also curse us with bitterness. We get to choose. Of course, choosing well might mean becoming a crow once again, which I did. Rather, I just admitted to what I’d always been.” (p.7) McKy became a teacher, helping damaged children who had themselves become crows, and their parents.

The second story, “Returning to Russia: Returning home” by Yelizaveta P. Renfro, is the story of a self-destructive fifteen-year-old girl who is drinking, using drugs, smoking, destroying her bedroom, and flunking school. With her mother, Renfro traveled home to her ill Russian grandparents. She lived with them for a summer in a tiny, cockroach-infested apartment, lacking air conditioning or privacy. Here, she became aware of others and their dismal living conditions. Renfro kept a detailed diary and, later, typed her observations. She returned to California greatly affected, began writing, and left her old ways behind. Later, with her own daughter, Renfro recalled returning to her destroyed teenage bedroom to find her mother had cleaned it and spread a bedspread on her bed to welcome her home. “Only now do I realize that through such small actions we impose order, which is a kind of love… [Of her daughter, Renfro notes] “She will run away from me, too, literally perhaps, but certainly figuratively, I can only hope that she will return home again.” (p. 95) To me, this story demonstrates another individual making a choice, becoming aware of others around them, and choosing hope for the future, and hoping for the next generation.

Too often, the books I read in college women’s studies courses were about a woman’s endurance, and acceptance of an unhappy life with a father who did not appreciate or respect his daughter, a husband who did not understand her, or a dream abandoned. Her life was misery. It was all about negative relationships with men, no options for work or life, not having choices, working for less pay than a man, working in an unsatisfying job, and being discriminated against in many ways. My male college housemates once commented on how all the books in women’s studies were sad and blamed men. Well, it is a new century since I took women’s studies, and clearly the women in this book are more self-aware and have more options than the suffering women of the past. Part of that difference is education, providing women a chance for a quality job with pay and benefits, and laws preventing gross discrimination and allowing a vote. Like the book’s cover image of a woman looking towards the rising sun, the authors figuratively and collectively look towards the new day with hope, for an improved, empowered life, not just for them, but for all women.

Overall the writers tell us that highly educated, modern American women have options that allow us to determine our future and follow our dreams. It would be interesting to read stories from the life of women who are not as well educated as these writers. What do the women without a degree working at Wal-Mart, trying to pay their bills, think of their lives? Or, what about the women who make negative choices? Do they find their lives inspiring enough to write about for the benefit of other women? Do they have hope? Perhaps that is a topic for a future book.

Marian Matyn is the Archivist of the Clarke Historical Library and an Assistant Professor at Central Michigan University. The author of a number of archival and history articles, Marian is currently writing a book on Michigan circus history.

Best of the Web Nominations

2010-10-28T15:11:00.009-04:00

We are proud to announce our first Best of the Web nominations. If any or all of our nominees are selected, they will appear in Dzanc Books' 2011 anthology.

I have to say it was a tough decision narrowing three issues' worth of work we're really proud of down to only three pieces. All three poets appeared in the Spring/Summer 2010 issue, and two of them were also our top poetry contest winners. The list is:

Jessica Cuello, "In the Spired House"
Whitney Vaughan, "O Joy, Mouths the Muse to Her Suitor"
Clare L. Martin, "Winter Brought Out All the Knives"

Congrats and good luck to all of our nominees!

And on this topic, although we informed the nominees, we're very sorry that we neglected to announce our Pushcart Prize nominees for 2011 here on the blog. (The prizes were announced earlier this year.)

Our selections for Pushcart were two short stories from the Summer 2009 issue that we really loved, as follows:

Janey Bennett, "Eeva Dreams of Falling"
Teresa Peipins, "That Underwater Place"

We will be announcing our 2012 Pushcart nominees later this year.

Review: Kristine Ong Muslim's A Roomful of Machines

2010-10-17T23:20:00.024-04:00

A Roomful of Machines by Kristine Ong Muslim
Searle Publishing, 2010,
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Kristine Ong Muslim's first full-length poetry collection reminds me of the first useful definition of good writing that I heard, which was my father's (intentional or inadvertent) paraphrase of Samuel Johnson's quote, "The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new."

In A Roomful of Machines, Kristine Ong Muslim demonstrates her ease with the latter by taking for her subjects inanimate objects and viewing them from the inside out, making a reader care about their isolated, sedentary existences and even mourn their seemingly redundant demises.

This sort of project requires a fearless leap of imagination -- the kind of agile imagination that adult writers often struggle to access, and so it's no surprise to read that the author has a previous collection of children's poems to her credit, making it easier to understand why she is not afraid to take the leaps necessary to really see things -- non-sentient things -- with new eyes and offer real surprises.

Over and over again, I found myself envying the poems in this collection, not for their success, although they do succeed, but for the originality of the spirit that animates their subjects.

In "Tea Cup," a chip signals that the object in question is headed for the dumpster, and so it is warned: "Chances are, you will break yourself/ sliding down the garbage chute./ At least, you will not be alone./ Your shards will share your pain." As in many of these poems, the lines sound straightforwardly simple on a first reading, and take on depth with each rereading.

"From Scratch" takes a slight departure from elucidating the secret lives of objects to elucidating the secret lives of authors, and it seems oddly fitting to place the authorial voice in this context: There is no way/ to stop me from/ confessing to murder/ in poetry.// It is all right with me/ to have the tunnel inspected;/ it is where all/ the secret blood must go." In the same way that a handmade implement cooperates with its owner by surrendering itself for the sake of its intended use, the author cooperates with the reader, surrendering herself for the sake of the text's intended use.

We return to this territory again in a later poem which asserts a role for the author that is self-protective as well as nurturing to the reader, ending with "Voice is a city that pilfers pain,/ quiets us with its tiny lights."

In another poem about language, "The Distant Tongue," the immediacy of "Each uttered word will smell of rapture,/ of the insistence of suicide," while in the silence that follows "... we will all be shrunken to the size/ of a box of salt, a mouthful of dead fish..."

The next poem, "And," captures just as movingly the larger, more oceanic feeling from which a poem is seized and then whittled down to size.

In "Still," for another twist on the main theme of sentient objects, a man on a bench is compared to "... a glove fashioned out/ of winter's skin. Spent and hardened. Like an/ unfinished interview. His right hand is shaking." Somehow the picture from each angle is the same: the reader is jarred into empathy.

Other poems jar in other ways. "Sudden Elsewhere" begins, "Assume you have/ nothing to lose/ and cannot dwell in/ a favorite memory." That is the sort of beginner's mind that permits an author to share a new way of seeing things, and it explains what make this collection so enjoyable, as well as haunting.

"Departure" imagines death as a soft place of deferred fulfillment: "One day, the hills in the distance will disappear,/ and the sunset will explode into reds and grays--/ the only real colors we know. We will walk,/ hand in hand, out of whatever room we have wanted/ to own. Each wish will become a want./ Each finger will unravel the cold/ until there is nothing else left to touch."

The poem that follows, "Balancing Act," is taut with dread: "Summer is a snapped twig/ glued back in place./ But it will dangle again./ You'll see."

The final poems, placed in the section entitled "Eulogies," are also disparate in stance and tone. Written from the point of view of the object in question, "Death of a Firefly" is personal and heartbreaking. Written from a demolisher's perspective, "Death of a House" is observant and analytical, even as it speaks of scooping out and swallowing hunger; and "Death of a Cereal Box" is sensuous and whimsical.

The eulogy to "Nothing" is the least moving among these (good riddance to Nothing, I'd say ... who would miss it?) until the final stanza: "For years, no one has ever heard of Nothing/ and what has become of its body, the husk/ that is so empty every one thinks it is/ impossible to destroy."

Nothing, antithesis to sentience in all its manifestations, real or imagined, still permeates the realm of objects and beings. But naming it seems to put at least a temporary dent in its power, and that's just one good reason to give these bravely original poems a look.

Review: Lisa Marie Basile's White Spiders

2010-10-03T17:48:00.005-04:00

White Spiders by Lisa Marie Basile

Gold Wake Press, 2010,

Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Lisa Marie Basile's five-poem chapbook, White Spiders, appeared in September as part of a fascinating ongoing series published online in PDF format by Gold Wake Press.

The image of a playfully childlike statue framed by the vibrant colors of a tropical locale is a good visual introduction to these vivid, energetic poems, animated by the dynamics of sexual passion and rich with exotic language and imagery.

The opening poem, "Opera," compares the nuances of a volatile relationship to a cabaletta, an operatic term often referring to an impassioned duet, describing it as "half the tamed greenery of love but more the wild/ jungle where ghosts kill men on foot."

The point is possibly overstated in the final line, "loud, bloody, broken shimmering." But even when they overreach a bit, as when the next poem, "Us," extends the metaphor of a belly dance from a lover's attentive advance to a larger relationship toward "life" and "humanity," these poems captivate with their bold diction, unabashed sensuality and the sheer way they revel in language, as in the third stanza: "I swirl circle eights against you,/ you becoming per sempre,/ as I need you. You say you are/ für immer."

"Patasola" provides an example of Basile's well-controlled command of diction, beginning with "The moon has enough decency/ to wait as I finish removing my clothes. Only men/ light candles when eager" and ending with "I look like all the women/ you have ever loved. Death! you cry./ Yes, it is me."

The final poem, "Double Negatives," returns from the female speaker's relationship with a male lover to that of a daughter's with her mother, perhaps intentionally echoing the line in "Us" that asked, "Ever wonder why the cats do it, kneading?/ Because they remember their mothers." Although not the strongest of the five, this poem hits the right note to close this brief but satisfying collection.

Mira Mattar: Beirut 2010

2010-09-16T00:04:00.005-04:00

We met in a restaurant in Beirut, overlooking the sea, December, perfect crisp warmth. A rock jutted violently out of this particular patch of sea, known, my aunt told me, to be a favored spot for suicides. I can see why. Turning back from there would be embarrassing and difficult. Crawling back squeaking sorry guys I changed my mind, life is worth it after all.

I hadn't been to Beirut for thirteen years and had bad memories of diarrhea and cold chicken. It was some time in the early nineties when I saw my father's weeping reflection in the car window as his hometown sped and stopped in ruins outside our little yellow cocoon. Scrappy pre-teens in donated t-shirts reading Coca-Cola or Nike flicking cigarette butts and kicking footballs. This time as we walked through new, reconstructed parts of the defiant city he pointed out the bullet holes still in buildings, distinct from the new embellished facades of recovery.

My aunt, at lunch, nervous with sickness and intelligence and excited to see us after so many years of letters and birthday cards scrawled in French-educated, shaky script having been tampered with by doctors for an inconvenient condition. Years of internal and external shocks, treatments. It always seemed, from the stories I'd heard, to be the most likely or honest consequence of the situation she was in. Dreaming of husband and children, seeing strange men in the corners of her eyes, bombs crashing where the sea should be. Now she jumped from memory to memory, leapt into the present, into the tabbouleh and hummus, her brother allowing her half a beer for the special occasion, then back into her long-haired, slim-waisted past, I was a beautiful woman you know.

I stayed with her, listening, trying to make contact, holding her hand. She gave me random objects from her tiny flat as presents and showed me photographs of her in Russia as a young woman, where she ran away and had to be recovered. She proudly showed off the luxury shopping districts in her town and laughed at the Lebanese capacity to rebuild. Her hair is still black, she reads fiction and makes tea in dirty cups. When I hugged her goodbye I fell for Beirut.

Mira Mattar is a tutor, freelance writer and reviewer for the TLS and other publications. Her fiction has recently been published in Spilt Milk Magazine. She is also one third of Monster Emporium Press. She lives in South London where she is currently working on her first collection of short stories. You can read her at http://hermouth.blogspot.com

Guest Review: Carol Smallwood's Lily’s Odyssey

2010-09-05T21:09:00.004-04:00

Lily's Odyssey by Carol Smallwood

All Things That Matter Press, 2010,

Reviewed by Jan Siebold

Some authors use the word “odyssey” to simply represent a journey or a passage of time. In Lily’s Odyssey author Carol Smallwood takes a more literal approach. Just as Odysseus spends years making his way home after the Trojan War, Lily struggles to find her true home in the world.

She has encountered her share of cannibals, lotus-eaters, sirens and monsters along the way, but it is her abusive Uncle Walt and his Cyclopic wife Hester (who turned her one good eye away from the incestuous situation years ago) that have haunted Lily’s thoughts and dreams since childhood.

Smallwood’s Homer, like use of a nonlinear plot, is well-suited to the story since Lily’s journey is rather like trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle.

With intelligence and humor Lily navigates the passages of her life which include marriage, motherhood, psychotherapy and education. She even spends time in Ithaca while working on a Master’s Degree in Geology. In fact, geological references are abundant as Lily explores her lifelong fascination with the formation of the earth and her place on it. Readers can feel Lily’s sense of frustration at the ever-shifting underground plates that prevent her from finding solid footing.

Orphaned at an early age and sent to live with her aunt and uncle, Lily later explores her obsession about abandoned animals and plants, and eventually discovers its root in her childhood. What may seem obvious to the reader is not as easily seen by Lily, whose vision of the past has been obscured by the trauma of abuse, insensitivity and denial.

The book begins with the death of Uncle Walt and Lily’s return to the house where she had spent her childhood. It is there that Lily begins to think about reinventing herself without the existence of Uncle Walt in her life.

The author’s use of imagery is at times stunning. “I heard the train whistle. I saw myself as a bird following the train as it wound its way through the landscape, leaving only smoke as evidence that it had passed.” Referring to her aunt, Lily thinks about “Tulips closed as tightly as Aunt Hester’s lips.”

Smallwood’s many cultural, historical, scientific and religious references are a nod to her readers’ awareness, intelligence and curiosity. They elevate the story and allow us to discover more about Lily’s world and our own.

On a basic level the reader can relate to Lily’s awkward attempts at relationships, and to her wickedly funny observations about people. We cheer for Lily as she leaves behind her dismissive husband Cal, the lecherous Dr. Schackmann and other toxic people whom she encounters. We understand as she questions the tenets that were instilled during her strict Catholic upbringing, including “the duties and sufferings of women as wives.” We yearn for Lily to find the illumination and peace of mind that she seeks.

In a particularly vulnerable moment Lily pens a letter to God. In the letter she writes, “Women need new paths. To find our way out of the old labyrinths requires more than one lifetime.”

Through Lily’s Odyssey, Carol Smallwood gives us hope that one lifetime might be enough for Lily and others to find their way.

Jan Siebold, a school library media specialist in East Aurora, New York since 1977, received her MLS from the University of Buffalo. Jan has served as NYLA Secretary and received the NYLA/SLMS Cultural Media Award in 1992. She is the author of Rope Burn (Albert Whitman, 1998), Doing Time Online (Albert Whitman, 2002) and My Nights at the Improv (Albert Whitman, 2005), three middle-school grade-level novels on numerous award lists.

Guest Review: Nuala Ní Chonchúir's You

2010-08-21T16:32:00.008-04:00

           You by Nuala Ní Chonchúir
           New Island Books, 2010,
           Reviewed by Rachel J. Fenton

Nuala Ní Chonchúir's début novel tells the tale of a young girl who interprets the life she and her siblings inhabit in their urban gothic surroundings with simple yet insightful prose. Set against the ominous and symbolic backdrop of the River Liffey, You contrasts the seeming simplicity of the girl's conclusions about her eventful life with the deeper and more complex ramifications of her mother's behaviour.

There is a central, and somewhat obvious, tragedy to Ní Chonchúir's story, and readers who are unfamiliar with her work may see this as the core of the novel itself; however, Ní Chonchúir is a quiet intellect and You is far more complex than the breezy, fast-flowing, colloquial narrative suggests. The real tragedy of You is its framing of society's criterion for a failed woman.

Woman, in all her broken states, is embodied in You's character tour de force, and each has her patriarchal compare. The protagonist's mother takes up with the picaresque Kit, local butcher and lad about town, and in a scene redolent of Joseph Ferdinand Geuldry's The Blood-Drinkers, he takes her a meat offering which the protagonist turns away from in revulsion. In accepting the bloody gifts, the protagonist's mother is made a prostitute in her daughter's eyes, even if the young girl does not yet know that word, and perhaps an addict in the reader's. The mother's seeming inability to direct her own course in life is a source of consternation to her daughter, yet, in the novel's pivotal scene, it is the inaction of three males which brings about what will be regarded as the books most memorable tragedy.

Ní Chonchúir's skill is her ability to subvert and to break down labels, racism and sexism included, into their core traits and to show they are seamless, as an estuary. She makes accessible to a wide audience what has often hid in the dense prose of high-end literary fiction and been the seminar agitator of choice for academics. Her prose is both dignifying and empowering to her subjects, and it is her psychological ableness which will mark Ní Chonchúir as a writer of significance.

Rachel J. Fenton is an English writer who paints and lives in Auckland. Her flash piece "Rogue Trading" was shortlisted for the Fish 2010 One-Page Prize, and links to more of her published work can be found at her blog: snowlikethought.blogspot.com. She is currently seeking representation for her novels.

Cecily Tripplehorn: The Six Percent, A Survivor’s Story

2010-08-15T14:10:00.007-04:00

Maybe it was just mother’s intuition. In retrospect it seemed like a premonition. We couldn’t have predicted that my mother’s advice would eventually give me the courage to save my own life.

“If anything ever happens to you, if you’re ever attacked, scream your lungs out and resist with all your strength. Your chances of attracting attention and getting rescued are better while you’re still in a public place than if you’re taken,” Mom would lecture every time a news report popped up covering someone like Natalee Holloway or Chandra Levy.

“Sure, Mom,” I always replied, humoring her and thinking, what are the odds?

May 17, 2006. Twenty-six years old. It happened in Amarillo, Texas, at a park in an upscale neighborhood referred to as the good side of town. I didn’t have the patience to sit through my boyfriend Jim’s softball game, so I rollerbladed around the field in the humid spring air under the bright stadium lights. The sounds of softball fans cheering drowned out everything else, and the smooth, even rhythms of my stride calmed me and erased the stresses of daily life.

Finally, muscles aching, I headed toward the parking lot to grab my water out of Jim’s truck. That night the fields were so crowded we had to park on the front row. “Perfect,” Jim had muttered earlier as he squeezed his black Dodge Ram into the tight space. “Right in the fly ball zone. Might as well paint a big target on my windshield.”

I climbed back into the tall truck and gulped down some Evian like I’d just crossed the Sahara. My breath returned to normal and I stepped out of the truck to make my way toward –

Someone grabbed me in a headlock from behind. Surely just one of the teammates playing a joke, I rationalized. Not Jim though. He’s busy pitching. Whoever it was threw me into the driver’s seat of another truck beside Jim’s Dodge. A leering face in a red, white and blue doo-rag hovered over my wide eyes and gaping mouth, and it was definitely not Jim, or one of his teammates, or anyone I knew. All logical thought processes froze at that moment as he pressed up against my dangling legs so close I couldn’t move. “Don’t scream,” he snarled as he put his hand over my mouth. Those words made me snap back to reality, and I started screaming as hard as I could. But my screams were indistinguishable from the cheering fans just about 50 feet away.

Then, a flash of silver in front of my face. “Shut up and get in the truck or I’ll slit your throat.” His voice was full of rage. Images of everyone I loved flashed through my mind. In that instant I knew I wasn’t afraid of death, but I was deathly afraid of what he might want to do to me first. Thoughts of Jim, alone and frantically searching for me after the crowds dispersed before having to call my parents when he realized I was gone were too much to bear.

In a move Jason Bourne would envy, I grabbed the blade of the knife with my bare hand and went Billy Blanks on him. The blade sliced into my palm and fingers, but a rush of adrenaline suppressed the pain. Driven by survival instincts and the determination not to cause my family suffering, I resolved that this man could not, would not control me. There was no way I could kick him with my legs restrained by the weight of his body, but with the keys in my hand I went for his eyes. Never again do I wish to feel the primal urge to kill someone in defense of my own life.

Frustration began to overcome me with the realization that I wasn’t inflicting enough damage. His 5 foot 9, 195 pound construction worker’s build was stronger than my 5 foot 6, 130 pound frame, no matter how many cardio kickboxing classes I’d taken.

But then I sensed that the element of surprise was shifting. He didn’t want to be caught; that much was obvious from the look of shock on his face when I started to resist. And although we hadn’t attracted any outside attention yet, clearly I was more trouble than he had bargained for.

Nevertheless, the punches kept coming and stars danced in front of my eyes. Don’t pass out, I thought to myself. Keep fighting. Don’t pass out.

At last I got in a hard jab to his temple, and as he shook his head, I gathered all my strength to force myself out from underneath his grasp, falling and scraping my knees on the rough asphalt.

But it wasn’t over. He went to grab me again. Just then I looked up to see someone walking into the parking lot. Relief flooded my entire being and I suspected he was an angel disguised as an umpire. Somehow, with my hands shredded and still on rollerblades, I managed to scramble to my feet. Then I was standing near the umpire, Alvino Alvarez. Tears clouded my vision as I gasped, “Please get his license plate.”

My attacker jumped in his work truck with the construction company logo on the door and peeled out, almost running over a couple who tried to block his escape.

Then, a blur. Crowds of gawkers. Police statements. Ambulance. Hospital.

At the hospital, the shock wore off slowly, in layers, like scrubbing ink off skin. A detective was taking yet another statement while doctors and nurses buzzed around. I couldn’t remember my address. I wasn’t even sure about my age at that point. “It’s okay,” the officer said. “Temporary memory lapses are typical after trauma.”

“You did the right thing by fighting back,” a nurse commented as the doctor carefully inserted nineteen stitches. “Did you know only six percent of victims manage to escape like you did?” I feigned cheerfulness to assure my boyfriend that I really was okay. Jim stayed at my bedside until we were released an exhausting seven hours later at 5:00 a.m. After a quick stop at the 24 hour pharmacy for some pain meds, at last I could rest.

The next year seemed endless. My relatively sheltered and comfortable life was now interspersed with periods of anxiety and apprehension. The day after the attack, I identified the attacker, Dewey Mack Evans, from a photo lineup at the police station. Other witnesses corroborated. The following month, in June, U.S. Marshalls surrounded a gas station across the state border in Oklahoma and took Evans into custody. That September, Jim and I got engaged. The next June, we were married. Then in August, 15 months after the attack, the trial began. Evans and his attorney concocted an elaborate story claiming I attacked him. The poor guy was just defending himself, the slick lawyer explained. When they accused me of perjury it started to feel like I was the one on trial.

The jury deliberated for an excruciating four and a half hours before convicting Evans of aggravated kidnapping with a sentence of 80 years in prison. Since he was on parole for armed robbery at the time, he also had to serve the rest of that 10 year sentence. Evans wouldn’t be considered for parole again for at least 40 years at the age of 86. By then he would be too old and decrepit to harm anyone else.

The courtroom trial was over, but my emotional trials were ongoing. My emotions were a confusing mix of pride and guilt, vindication and cynicism, strength and vulnerability. While I tried to deal with the situation without dwelling on it, not a day went by that something or someone wouldn’t remind me of it. Never again would I feel comfortable alone in a parking lot or exercising outdoors by myself. But I was also bizarrely thankful that it had happened to me. If he had chosen a different victim, I might have turned on the T.V. that night to see another Natalee Holloway-esque story, and a predator might still be free.

The haunting faces of missing girls are a repeat occurrence on the nightly news. Each time their parents appear begging, pleading and crying for the return of their daughters, my eyes brim with tears and I feel an inexplicable kinship with these young girls and women I have never met. That could be my family, heartbroken and searching for closure they might never receive. My tears are followed by waves of guilt because I survived and they didn’t.

My happy ending could have been another victim’s final ending.

Cecily Tripplehorn is a survivor, a wife, a daughter, a sister and a high school English teacher. For this article, she consulted the work Kidnapping: An Investigator's Guide to Profiling by Diana M. Concannon, 1st ed., London

Review: Susan Slaviero's Cyborgia

2010-08-01T23:46:00.028-04:00

Cyborgia by Susan Slaviero
Mayapple Press, 2010,
Reviewed by Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom

Susan Slaviero's first full-length poetry collection, Cyborgia, takes on the ambitious project of imagining what "female" would look like at the dawn of a post-human age, and her playful, cerebral, at times demanding poems rise to the challenge, densely packed and fully loaded with visceral imagery and wickedly inventive wordplay. These poems are worth reading because they are fun, provocative and at times disturbing but also because they have something to say about a moment in our collective future that may come sooner than we think and what it could mean for one gender in particular.

The epigraph by Donna Haraway is a quote I'd come across as a college student, when the territory of feminism was much more familiar to me than that of cybernetics, and it made an impression on my evolving feminist consciousness, as well as the way I viewed technology, having been one of the last in my class to hold on to her Smith-Corona word processor rather than trek down to the computer lab: "I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess."

That statement opens so many areas of inquiry surrounding the dynamics of power between genders, the nature of the choice to claim a sexual identity or identities versus androgyny, and the fundamental question of what it means to be human. It prompted a shift in the way I viewed technology and its relationship with my gender, past and future. Slaviero's collection explores all of this territory with a welcome balance of optimism and caution.

In the two sections that comprise the first half of the collection, "The Red Queen Hypothesis" and "Celluloid Marionettes," Slaviero imagines the genesis of the female cyborg. In "Agalmatophilia," she is an animated doll, who "sees you as architecture, as blue libido," and in "Parthenogenesis," she is a mother of mutinous clone daughters.

The cyborg creations in these sections are largely passive, deriving what power they may possess from what they lack, the vulnerability of human flesh and how that shades consciousness. Violence is enacted upon them, but they only respond insofar as they are programmed. In "Bride of Frankenstein 2.0," the cyborg speaker hears "the cadence" of her "own dissection" but is indifferent: "... This flat/ affect is characteristic of my vampire/ < species > / I will not burn, even at blue temperatures."

"Consider the Dangers of Reconstructing Your Wife as a Cyborg" ends on a different kind of note, in which self-awareness implies grave danger for the would-be cyber-Svengal addressed in the poem: "... You are superfluous. This house is fully of zygotes, the tran-/ sister radio, the refrigerator. Lampwire and smoke detectors. In the/ twenty-six minutes since I've been resurrected I have devised about/ ten different ways to disassemble you. Imagine what I could do with/ an hour and a box of power tools."

The third section, "Boolean Fairy Tales," was the most fun for me, as I've admired Slaviero's unique takes on folklore and mythology for several years.

There is a millennia-old tradition of myths being adapted and re-adapted to accommodate new questions that crop up as a culture's technology evolves and its prevailing values somewhat laggingly absorb the shock, and here Slaviero brings familiar tales and tropes into the Cyber Age. It's a brave new world of robot wolves, cybernetic mermaids and gynoid armies.

And again here there is a progression of the poems' cyborg heroines from animated dolls to self-aware agents. The section begins with "Bluebeard's Clockwork Bride," where the familiar villain grows bored with his new creation because she cannot suffer, and so he remakes here so that "This time, he gives her skin./ This time, he programs her/ to be afraid of fire."

However, in "Gretal Discusses Her Prosthetic Arm," the heroine delights in what she can do for herself: "... Now, this/ mechanical limb works better/ than flesh. I chop onions for stew/ with a built-in chef's knife, open/ wine with my corkscrew thumbs./ I have become more than mere/ girl; I am an armory/ dressed in gingham and lace./ You would never suspect/ that my ulna is a loaded gun,/ that the bend in my elbow bears teeth."

In "A Cybernetic Mermaid Dreams of the Sea," the speaker claims to have "... no interest in catching sailors/ or cliff diving. I have become something different/ than what you intended...."

"The First Cyborg Epistle: Mythology," from the final section, "Ontology of the Virtual Body," addresses the curiosity of a corporeal race toward our inscrutable successors: "You try to understand me as ergonomic, the random flickering of cir-/ cuits for this dolls' apocalypse. Yes, I dream, but not of sheep, electric or oth-/ erwise. I am the corkscrew universe, my eyes metalmoons, the planets/ hidden between aluminum rods of warped spine. What monstrous/ couplings and recouplings make this avatar of steel ships and colored/ wire? You ask for clarification but I am not programmed to answer/ your metaphysical questions...."

It's not a new problem. How can anyone fathom the universe behind another's eyes, whether the computational machinery ticking there is carbon-based or silicon? We're all enigmas to one another at the same time as we're reflections of the star-stuff of which we're all made. But in the post-human age that Slaviero imagines, in which one self-aware being can fashion another, turn her on with a switch, and then run for cover, things get just a little more complicated.

Diane Glancy: A Rocky Shelf

2010-07-18T21:28:00.004-04:00

I’m not sure when it occurred to me. Maybe it was while traveling between St. Paul and Kansas City. Maybe it was the early retirement program at my college in Minnesota, though I was old enough to retire. I wanted to be closer to my three grandchildren. I had been commuting anyway. Some semesters, leaving after classes, it was dark before I made it to Iowa. There also was the weather, snow and ice.

I signed the retirement-agreement contract, which required the exiting professor to give up tenure and enter a four-year sabbatical at half-pay, and wrote a prospectus of what I planned to accomplish during the four years. It was mostly writing projects. Nowhere was the real reason listed—to be a grandmother.

I wanted to enter that world of young grandchildren that is only there for a while—because it fit in this situation—because it was possible—before they are so engrossed in their activities they tell me to wait in the car. Soon they will be on with their lives and I imagine myself a backdrop, less important in their lives, as it should be. Already, I am the outsider; once in a while, an insider. I know the tightrope between, and the frustration of dealing with three young children each one going their own way. I already have felt estrangement with the oldest because of his insistence on dominating his two younger siblings. I don’t like the meanness they thrust on one another when they fight.

Sometimes I return to my house and sit by myself in the quiet. Sometimes I even feel a slight anger. I was a tenured professor.   I could do what I wanted. What I eventually wanted, was to be with my grandchildren. I gave up my beloved position of 17 years, and tenure for which I had worked hard, and worried over just a few short years earlier.

I wanted to be a part of their lives because I began to see that being a grandmother was a continuity. What I couldn’t do for my children, or didn’t know to do, or was too harried, or unhappily married, I could re-do. Being a grandmother is a revision. A chance to rewrite. A privilege to add to what their mother is doing very well, though her husband travels for his work, and she is under the stress and pressure of young children, and as with current life-style a hundred activities a day. One Saturday alone is filled with soccer games, birthday parties, a multitude of errands.

I wanted a chance to be a better grandmother than mother, in an unsatisfying marriage, impatient, hurt, longing for a way out.

I wanted to provide stories for my grandchildren. “What book did you bring me, Grandma?” They ask when I return from a trip.

It is in stories, oral and written, that I have my being. On a recent sleep-over, I read six books to Libby, who had opened a 7th when I turned out the light. I want to provide stories for my grandchildren. I am buyer of books, a filler of bookshelves.

A grandmother’s story-telling is cartography. It is map-making. This is where we have been. This is where we can go because of words. Cherokee, which I do not speak, is a language like a lake with its rippling edges, the water, moving, sometimes restless, always with fish in it, mysterious, the submerged meaning, the reason for water is a holder of fish, as language is the holder of words to tell us where and how we are going.   I also want to instill them with a sense of faith.

There are times with my four-year old granddaughter, Libby, especially, that I feel the concept of time space in physics. A connection back to my grandmothers born in the 1880’s. A continuum of voice, of story. A physical presence of the past that I give my granddaughter, not in words, but in essence, in connection to something larger than the two of us.   It is not in words, as I said, but a sensed distillation of time in a small shape that is the moment between us.

On Fridays, sometimes, I take Libby to art lessons at the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.   It is where I went as a child. It is where I took my children. Afterwards, Libby and I go to Winstead’s on the Plaza for fries and a milk shake. This week, when I read her the flavors, she says, “cherry.”   As she is drinking it, she tells me she likes cherry shakes, “but not a cherry in a circle.”   I want to be there to receive that kind of information from her. I want to be there when she takes a risk of a shake she may not like.

At the Nelson, Libby works with clay. “It isn’t ready to bring home yet,” she tells me with a sense of importance, but she gives me a collage she made. It is a piece of black paper with fragments of colored paper glued to it, and a few crayon markings on the fragments. I like her work because I am a worker in fragments. I am separated between cultures, places, languages. I have the grandchildren’s drawings in my house and at my cabin. At my house, Libby chooses to add her collage to a paper-construction robot made by the boys, which they taped to my dining-room wall. Actually, her collage improves the robot greatly.

While she is at her art lesson, I walk through the museum. There are several of Henry Moore’s pieces at the Nelson. I identify with one in particular, Draped Seated Woman, 1957-58, because I am draped with the heavy covering of grandmother. In a note beside the sculpture, Moore wrote that he wanted to “connect the contrast in the size of the folds, here small, fine and delicate, in other places big and heavy with the form of the mountains, which are the crinkled skin of the earth.” Moore’s sculpture is a nearly life-sized woman cast in bronze, her face a wedge without features. Almost like the beak of a bird. But when I look at the folds in the drape covering the woman, I see the folds as waves on a lake.

I want to say that grandchildren make you selfless.   It is all them. Their clothes. Their toys. Their furniture. Their happiness. But it is selfishness. They are mine. Mine. All mine. No one else can have them. They also are where I meet defeat in my importance/unimportance in their lives. I used to walk into class and students listened. I marked papers and gave out grades. “Do you know, grandchildren, what your grades would be for today?” I have wanted to ask.

Even in the early days, when I was writing at my small desk and my children were young, I felt the pull between work and children. I want also to be there for my daughter, to give her a break now and then, to help her with her load.

Now, when there is a battle of the wills, I know it is their lives that are important. Their road ahead. I step back where I could have lead the class. I could march into it, but instead I follow. What I have now is a departure from history. A center that a grandmother had. Not it is auxiliary. It is beside the family. They have their own lives. I can contribute and not get in the way.   I give the reins to them. It is the new definition of grandmother because I want them to be independent and responsible for themselves. That is the new direction. I have to let go. I return to my house with relief. I can sit at my word processor and write. I can read. I can go to the lake by myself. I can get lost in my own projects, which is what I want to do for the afternoon. I can plan for my next writer’s workshop. I can pack for a trip. I can still drive. Sometimes I don’t see them for days.

My own maternal grandmother lived on a farm. We had visits there in the 1940’s when I was growing up, but I remember her as distant. Practical. Once I took a chick into the farmhouse and was petting it when she saw me, and asked what I was doing with the inference I was silly. It was a chick she later would behead with an ax for supper, when it was bigger and covered with white feathers. I remember those little Ann Boleyns of the barnyard. I have found my own beheading in giving up part of myself for my grandchildren. I want to provide that presence for my grandchildren. I want to have an awareness of themselves in the world.

Often, in the past, the Indian grandmothers named the children and had a definite authoritative role. It is something I wouldn’t think of doing with the independent daughter and daughter-in-law I have. It would cause trouble. Resentment. I feel I have information that sits at the center of the world, yet I am left with duties I have at the moment, shortening a penguin suit for my granddaughter for the current Halloween. Last year, it was white feathers I sewed back onto her chicken costume when they kept falling off.   Sometimes, I also read to Libby and Charlie while they mother helps their older brother, Joseph, with his homework.

My purpose as grandmother is to cause fun to form in the daily routine, to distract from trouble, to console, to call to look up. Sometimes I am aware of the weariness children feel as they move along in school, busier all the time with homework and activities: soccer, basketball, baseball, gymnastics, art lessons and all the dancing lessons for Libby, the doctor and dentist appointments, Cub Scouts and piano lesson.

When I take Libby to gymnastics and dancing lessons, I stand at the glass watching her. She in turn, watches me to make sure I am watching what she can do. If I look away a moment, she is at the glass to get my attention back to her. I visit her pre-school. I take her on errands. I am a prop instead of the center pole. It seems to me that is the way it should be. It is worth the price.

Recently, when Charlie was sick and unable to go to a basketball game with his family, I sat with him while he cried in the misery of his illness and in being left behind. I want to commiserate when his parents are too busy. I want to be a spark, an incentive. A light. Being a grandmother is an act of prayer against the terror of the world, a grounding of faith for this solitary road.   It is the times I am overwhelmed with the noise and confusion, and have to withdraw to my quiet house. I have had 25 years on my own. But I want to stand up and join the battle. I want to ignite. To call to journey. To tell them, see how the petals of the orange roses on your mother’s table are like flames.

My grandchildren are in a new world. I have to stand back and watch, as maybe my paternal grandmother saw me and remained silent. It is the separation that holds us together.   I think of the secret things that will die in my world as the world of my father’s mother died with her. The other day I wanted to call the grandchildren to watch a storm, but they were watching a video when all the mystery of the natural world passed by.

I have taken Charlie to the lake with me. He is wedged between siblings, and needs a larger space at times, a space for himself.   I have seen him interrupted so often by older brother and younger sister, he gets frustrated and breaks out in anger when trying to say something.

At the lake, I have a Jon boat, which is a small, brown fishing boat, though I don’t fish, with a battery operated motor. We explore the end of the cove. When the water is low, there is a rocky shelf we call Charlie’s Island. Usually it belongs to the ducks. We motor there, a trip of two minutes from my dock. We get out of the boat and walk the entire length of Charlie’s Island, four or so yards. We throw rocks in the water. They are more like pebbles. We find a walking stick. We move rocks around with the walking stick. We talk. I listen to every word he says.

Even when Charlie’s Island is underwater, we know the rocky shelf is there.

In a spirit dream, where all things are possible, I sew the fragments of pebbles into a small island. My needle penetrates the rocks. My threads hold them together.

The role of the grandmother is a rocky shelf.

Diane Glancy is professor emeritus at Macalester College. Her 2009 books are The Reason for Crows, SUNY Press, a novel of Kateri Tekakwitha, a 17th century Mohawk converted by the Jesuits, and Pushing the Bear, After the Trail of Tears, the University of Oklahoma Press, that follows her 1998 novel of the Cherokee Trail of Tears. She was the Visiting Richard Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College in the winter semesters of 2008 and 2009. This piece first appeared in Melusine's Fall 2009 issue.

Devon Ward-Thommes: Becoming the Pelican

2010-07-04T14:14:00.005-04:00

During my second fall semester in college, the sorority house where I lived hosted one of the largest date functions on campus, “Assassins.” Each couple was given the names of another couple – these were their victims. The goal was to find your victims in the dark, and when you did, they were “killed” and called out of the game; the last remaining couple was the winner. I don’t remember now what the prize was for winning, but I’m sure it came with lots of popularity and respect. My roommates and I spent months preparing for it – all through September and October we talked about who we’d invite, what the best hiding places were, how to know your victims in the pitch black darkness. One of my best sorority friends, a Korean girl named Sun, designed the t-shirt – black with white silhouettes of three skinny, big-breasted girls in mini-skirts and platforms holding guns like Charlie’s Angels framing the word ASSASSINS on the back. We were so pumped for this shindig.

We decorated the dining hall with streamers and made “better than sex” cake – a dangerous concoction of vanilla ice cream, peanut butter, crumbled Oreos, and M&Ms all smothered with chocolate sauce – for our dates after the event; I certainly wouldn’t eat the stuff. What I remember of the actual night is fuzzy, out of focus like a bad photograph. My date was Andy Miguel, my beautiful Filipino boyfriend, star quarterback, secretary of Phi Delta Theta fraternity, student body president. We wore our black shirts with pride, and painted our cheeks with stripes of greasy black paint like football players. Everyone wore black bandanas, strips of cloth tied around their arms, anything to make them look bad-ass. Then we turned off all the lights and the chaos commenced.

There were screams and heavy breathing and pounding footsteps down the hallways. I grasped Andy’s hand – my palms were sweaty – people were groping and gasping and screaming. We hid under one of the bunk-beds in the dormitory for awhile, tried to distinguish feet running by, the sounds of people banging around in the dark. We ventured out and ran through some rooms, and then hid in the costume closet, but that was all. Soon, we heard some loud wailing, all the lights came on, and the game was called off.

The dining hall’s fluorescent lights were blinding. People sat around on chairs, wiping sweaty foreheads and smearing their make-up. At least two or three girls were crying – someone had a bloody lip, another girl had banged her forehead into the corner of a wall, the popular soccer player, Karen Lewis, had sprained her ankle. Stacey mopped Liz’s bloody forehead, Megan blamed her boyfriend for her broken glasses, and they argued until he left, yelling angry words behind him. I don’t remember where Andy was. I sat in the corner, heart beating fast, watching the streamers sway and drift around all the angry, red-faced people. Most of college was like this.

At nineteen, I still believed the truth was that not eating lunch, running a marathon, and joining the crew team would bring lasting happiness, the truth of who I really was. If I just worked hard enough then all that pain would bring looser clothes, a flat stomach, pure, unadulterated satisfaction in hard work paid off. I’d learned that beauty equaled happiness - thin, graceful, tan, toned beauty – the people I wanted to be inhabited the pages of Seventeen. Some were even in my calculus class. My peers who seemed happy all weighed less than 130 pounds; they had long, shiny, straight hair and big smiles and popular boyfriends. I thought if I could just control my frizzy curls and have one of those hard-ass stomachs, I would be well, and able to relax, and feel fully alive. At nineteen, this is what I believed.

But I did know a few true things, underneath all the layers of spandex: I had the sneaky feeling that there was more to life than what I could see and hear and touch and taste. I suspected that God probably existed among all of us stumblers. And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That’s what all the clothes, make-up, elliptical trainers, and string bikinis were all about. I knew that I wasn’t alone in the dark – I could hear others fumbling around just as awkwardly as I was. The trouble was that nobody knew where the light switch was. Nobody even seemed to care.

By the time I joined the varsity lightweight crew team during the spring of my freshman year, I’d developed a curious and wildly ecumenical faith stitched from scraps I’d gathered in reading and participating in various wisdom traditions – Native American, Taoist, feminist, Buddhist, even Catholic, in those sweet, slow days cherry-picking with my ex-Catholic priest father, who taught me to meditate and believe that we are all sons and daughters of God, whoever that was. According to him, she was most likely female.

My closest friends were my competitors – my best friend Annie Chesnut who turned anorexic our last year of high school, all the girls skinnier than me who rowed on the lightweight team, the sorority sisters who hoarded bagels and granola bars and never came to house meals, my popular, manipulative boyfriend. What I didn’t know was that my strictest competitor (and my best teacher) would turn out to be the person I hated most – me and my body.

Before every crew regatta, we’d all had to weigh in, each girl peeling her jersey over her head and stepping on the scale. Sonja, our team captain, weighed 132, two pounds over the lightweight cut-off. So she ate only rice cakes the day before each weigh-in, and then spent hours dressed in five layers of clothing, sweating off the pounds on a stationary bike in the boathouse. One time, she was just a sliver over – 130.4 pounds – so we’d all watched as another teammate took Sonja’s long cashew-colored hair in her left fist and a pair of scissors in her right, and sliced off the beautiful swishing bundle. It turned out her hair weighed a measly .1 pounds. She’d still not made weight, so she’d fasted all day in order to be allowed to row in the morning.

Although I’d started college 15 pounds over the cut-off, by that spring I weighed 122. I had learned to multi-task: I took my reading homework to the gym. I spent afternoons there sweating on the stair climber, trying to feed both parts of me – the curious student asking big questions about spirituality and the dissatisfied sorority girl who obsessed about exercise. I must have seen some incongruity in this, reading about Jung and his collective unconscious while participating in the sad body image soup that was almost tangible in the steamy air, my fellow sorority sisters pedaling beside me, nose-deep in their Shape magazines.

Poetry often helped. When I read Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” or anything by Rumi, quick bursts of sunlight streamed through my darkness. At those times I knew that if you had the eyes to see, there was beauty everywhere in nature, even when it rained spittle rain like God was sneezing, or when sewer stench rising from the river mixed with the sharp odor of wild onions. I could even see beauty in my girlfriends with large, round bottoms. I was just glad I didn’t look like them. Even though I knew some truth somewhere in my body, it wasn’t what I wanted to believe. I didn’t want to listen to wisdom, I just wanted to have a fast ergometer score, and to be thin.

This time was not so long ago – I was nineteen 7 years ago, a sophomore in college at a small school in Salem, Oregon, where the students were more conservative than the faculty, and ninety percent of social events happened at Greek houses. I was a new member of Alpha Chi Omega, the jock sorority, I was the girlfriend of the hottest boy in school, and I went to Tuesday night Christian worship services during which young men with soulful eyes strummed guitars with gusto and fervent girls sang loudly, palms open, hands held up to heaven. My friends were the ones who looked like they had the most fun – the ones who wore disco clothes to school and danced with abandon and laughed a lot. They weren’t the ones drinking themselves sick every weekend. They were mostly part of Campus Ambassadors, a large, evangelical Christian youth group.

For a few weeks during the fall, I met with three Campus Ambassador girls on Wednesday nights at 9:00 pm, down by the millstream. We’d stand in a circle, hold hands, pray together, and tell each other our deepest secrets. Beth Sweeney talked about how she was slowly beginning to eat again after a year of being too skinny and too sick. She still wanted to be thin. She knew it was a problem, but she was doing her best to be healthy. She was taking a dance class, doing yoga and singing in a women’s choir. She asked God for help a lot. I stole glances at her in the moonlight, her bony fingers and painted toes laying atop foam flip-flops. I understood the voice telling her that she would never be good if she was not thin. The same harsh voice echoed in my ears, but I never told her that. I talked about school and crew and Andy, and kept stealing glances at Beth’s waist. I envied that waist.

Beth was one of my only Christian friends with an eating disorder. Campus Ambassador parties always included lots of food, which everyone ate with gusto. My best Christian friend Tracey started a club called Monday-Nice-Day. Every Monday night, we gathered in a campus kitchen and baked treats – brownies, lemon bars, coconut macaroons, peanut butter bars – and handed them out to kids around campus, who, unlike us, were studying hard. I nibbled these treats, licked the spoon when we were done, but always felt guilty afterwards. According to those Christian girls, God was full of grace. He spoke any time anywhere but could be heard most clearly on windswept beaches and wet forests, through morning fog and burning sunrises, places far away from asphalt and cars. Christ wanted to be my savior, God wanted to accept me into heaven. But this promise was not unconditional. I had to believe that people were originally sinful, that Christ had died for my sin, and that only He, and no other god, could lead me to heaven. At the service, following lyrics projected onto the overhead screen, I prayed to Jesus to speak to me. I thought my heart was open, but no message ever came. Most Tuesday nights after worship I ended up crying in my dorm room, frustrated that I didn’t fit into this nice group of people. I just couldn’t stop asking questions. What about all the other people in the world, the Hindus, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Jews? Didn’t they have as much right to the truth as anybody?

For Christmas that year, my parents took me to Puerto Vallarta, where we visited Posada Roger, the hotel where they had stayed 25 years ago on their honeymoon. From there, we traveled north up the coast to a small fishing village called Sayulita, famous for its long-haired surfers and ex-pat artists dwelling in clay-tiled bungalows scattered over the seaside hills. Sayulita was a great place for rituals and celebrations – it was nearly as exotic as India, including the dying animals and polluted streams that smelled of defecation. Dudes with rotting dreadlocks smoked hashish on cement porches, naked babes lounged on the beach, and feral cats dug in the garbage. There were festivals almost every night – New Year’s fireworks, fire-breathers and gypsies in the town square selling hoop earrings and jingle-jangle bracelets. Women in sarongs sipped martinis in the bars next to greasy men, children played with kittens along the cobblestones and corn fields, artists set up easels on the hilly roads, and surfers congregated in beach-side restaurants to gorge themselves on fried fish and flan. There was the village church, full of candlelight and poinsettias and beatific, bleeding Christs, there were orgies and mangy dogs and belly-dancers and people in small bits of exotic clothing redolent of spirit and dreams – not to mention tacos grilling in the heat and left-out watermelon, so much juicy life oozing out around the edges. It was enough to make me nauseous.

I got up every morning at 7:00 am for my hour-long run. My parents noticed when I returned red-faced and sweaty and did not want to go downstairs for the abundant breakfast of salted and limed papaya, banana, watermelon, pastries from the corner bakery, perspiring flutes of orange juice. They noticed when I left three quarters of all my meals on the table, the sticky flan attracting flies, and when I studied my profile carefully in the mirror before tying on a wrap-around skit and sliding a sweatshirt over my head for the beach. I did most of this quietly, and they watched quietly, until my stomach aches got worse. Every time I ate, my belly erupted into furious gurgles and grumbles, louder than my rare complaints.

At first we thought it was just turista, Montezuma’s revenge. But my parents had seen me through a grueling year of lightweight crew racing; they knew about Sonja’s impromptu haircut. The world is so full of pain, and it’s contagious around people you love. I think my mother suffered more than I as she watched me run and pant and pick at my food. She had always been my confidante. But I didn’t want to talk to her about my body; I was listening to that voice residing in a deep, intimate place too tender to expose. But we also loved to read together, so when her attempts to talk about things ended in more silence, she gave me a book for Christmas.

On the cover, rows of aspens stood out against a yellow background, the forest floor thick with their leaves. The title, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, surprised me. Was my mother saying I was falling apart? Did she think I needed heart advice for difficult times? When I first opened the package, my mother must have seen my distress at being given such a book; she said her secretary had recommended it, that she wanted to read it after me, that it wasn’t really as self-helpish as it seemed. The picture on the back intrigued me – an American Buddhist nun dressed in maroon and yellow, shorn hair fuzzy around her head. “Pema Chödrön is the resident teacher at Gampo Abbey, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the first Tibetan monastery in North America established for Westerners,” I read, curiosity piqued. One morning in Sayulita, I packed the book in my backpack and after my ritual profile-examination in the full-length mirror, headed to the beach.

I spread out my towel, whipped off my sweatshirt, and flopped down on my tummy lickety-split, so nobody would see my round white belly. I lay there for awhile, watching all the tan, skinny girls around me brush sand from their oiled thighs and wave at their boyfriends, wet and salty in the pelican-strewn surf. Then I took the book from my bag, careful to keep the title hidden from view, and started to read. I don’t remember if I really hoped this book would help me, but I do remember how I was soon mesmerized, agape. Pema Chödrön didn’t seem to say anything I didn’t already know about fear and truth and the present moment, but it was the first time I’d heard this information given in such a kind, funny, wise, human voice. She spoke from that same dark, tender place where my neurotic voice resounded, but her message was gentle. It said: relax. Be kind to yourself. You don’t need to do anything else, you’re already awake, precious, whole, and good. I thought: of course, yeah, I knew that. But now I could really believe this truth, this truth that spilled out in the quiet relationship between writer and reader.

As I read about calm abiding meditation, that profound practice of watching the breath, I noticed my belly pushing against my ribs, the sand beneath me every time I inhaled. My body responded viscerally to this wisdom, I felt each cell settle and stretch, feeling itself as if for the first time. People say about experiences like this that “the veil lifted,” but for me, it was as if I’d been clutching the edge of a cliff and I’d just let go into space. But it wasn’t a scary free-fall, it was a loosening into innate freedom, space that had been there all along. Pema Chödrön wrote about discovering what is brilliant and confused in our own hearts, about what is bitter and sweet, and how when we discover ourselves, we discover the universe. And I felt as though my lungs had just doubled their capacity for breath, for inspiration.

I read all afternoon, belly down on my towel, toes curling in the sand. There was only me, the book, the sun warming the earth; sunglasses on the sweaty bridge of my nose, the smell of sunscreen, the shush of pages turning, the occasional shift of light or limb. The wrinkly flower of my heart was opening in slow motion. I felt I was universes away from those women sprawled on their towels a little ways off.

Pema Chödrön said meditation is a good idea. So I did it. I began meditating every morning, right before going out on my run. I would sit cross-legged on the brick patio of Tía Adriana’s Bed and Breakfast, palm fronds striping shadows across my legs, and I’d listen to my breath, feeling my stomach push in and out, just like Pema said to do. When my mind got all tangled and distracted, I tried to relax with whatever arose. I said “thinking” in my mind, and tried to come back to the breath. I felt air scrape against the inside of my nostrils, my dried-out lips slightly open with the tongue touching the roof of my mouth. My parents observed me without saying much; I think they were relieved, maybe bemused by my sudden change of habit. Sometimes I sat with my running shoes on, afraid I would not go running if I was not completely prepared beforehand, like somehow my meditation would calm me down enough to see the truth I did not want to see. I was afraid that if I saw truth I would accept myself for how I was at that moment, which would mean eating a chocolate bar instead of running, and then just getting fatter and more miserable again.

One day I went running in the afternoon. In the golden light, I ran past watery-eyed cows and dull-eyed men hanging out at the local bull-fighting ring. I ended up at the beach. I felt sick to my stomach, sick of how it stuck out against my tank-top if I did not hold it in, sick of the garbage and dirty dogs and rotting fish all over this god-forsaken paradise. I went down to the water and sat on some big boulders and watched large black pelicans fishing. They were humongous, more like pterodactyls than birds, wings stretched reptilian against the sky, and then boom! They’d jack-knife and plummet toward the waves, beaks wide and scissor-like. God knows what I’d do if one of those things came at me like that. After scooping up their catch, they’d settle on the waves, scuttling their feathers back into place, like everything was hunky dory. No cause for concern, no big deal, I’m fine, everything’s just fine. Not like I just took the biggest hara-kiri bullet-trajectory path out of the air from twenty feet up and just landed with a PLOOSH in the waves, mouth full of fish. No, no big deal.

I cried big, heaving sobs, snot running down with sweat and tears into my cleavage as I watched those birds dance. And then when I was done crying, God was everywhere. I breathed God in the wind, tasted divine salt on my lips, looked down to see God’s hands resting on God’s skinny legs, blotchy and red from running. God pounded out rhythms in my chest, and when I looked down at the sandy shells at my feet, there God was staring back at me, from eyeballs protruding on long antennas on a frightened, side-stepping crab. I collected as many of the purple and orange half-shells as I could and made my way back to Tía Adrianas, white teary flakes still sticking to my cheeks.

That was the day I pecked a hole out of my dark eggshell and saw the world full of birds and fishes, the parts of God that would guide my spiritual path. This was the day I knew the ingredients that would serve me – wind, water, love, color, prayer, meditation, community. I knew that resurrection of the heart was possible.

I started praying, not the usual old prayer of “God, send me a sign” or “God, may I be thinner,” but new ones – like just feeling the scrape of my breath or the stretch of my hamstring and delighting in sensation. The divine was everywhere whether we called it God or Goddess or Buddha nature, poor old Buddha nature, just waiting for me to notice and say hello. Pema Chödron said “what makes self-kindness such a different approach is that we are not trying to solve a problem. We are not striving to make pain go away or to become a better person. In fact, we are giving up control altogether and letting concepts and ideals fall apart,” and I finally understood that this was no platitude. People were going to come into my life. Many of them would leave. Most of the people, even my family and close friends, would roll their eyes and laugh nervously when I mentioned meditating or anything Buddhist. My sorority friends would stop calling when I moved out the next semester.

My parents weren’t there when I got back to the bed and breakfast, so I went into our room, spread out a towel, and did 200 sit-ups and 60 push-ups, half on my knees. It would be two more years before I took vows of refuge and officially became a Buddhist student, three years before I went on pilgrimage to India and began 100,000 prostrations in the traditional preliminary practices of Tibetan Buddhism. Seven years after that day with God and the pelicans on the beach, I sat down to write this story. But I still remember sitting up from that dirty towel, stretching my quads and calves, and then walking out onto the veranda to watch the sun go down beneath a hazy veil. I felt euphoric and exhausted, as if I’d just plummeted right out of that dark sky, eyes wide and black wings spread, and hit the water with a crash.

Devon Ward-Thommes is a graduate of George Mason University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction program. She has previously published in Willamette University's Precision Munitions, a journal of French poetry translations called Rien Rien, and Spirituality and Health magazine. Her translation of Véronique Tadjo's book-length poem, Halfway, is due out from HOST Publications this year. She currently lives and works at a Tibetan Buddhist Retreat Center in southern Colorado devoted to honoring the sacred feminine. This piece first appeared in Melusine's Summer 2009 issue.

Beate Sigriddaughter: Endangered Sunrise

2010-06-20T17:16:00.009-04:00

It is dark when I leave the hotel, though I know we slowly rotate into the light. I run faster than the earth is turning to get a better view.

I am at a juncture in my life. I have no children. I have no lover. Will I live the rest of my life alone?

Though I have a lot of yearning, I am comfortable being alone, vacationing or otherwise. I can eat a mango for dinner if I want to, or a boiled egg. I can bite into a block of cheese if I want to, or make oatmeal with hot coffee. The coffee oatmeal I cannot recommend. Once in a lifetime is enough.

Each morning I run into the dark, past the far end of Waikiki Beach, up Diamond Head Road, then into a park with three white plumeria trees, then down to a narrow stone walkway by the water where small black crabs scuttle down the side of the stone into the safety of the ocean wall when I approach. Do they see my huge shadow? Do they feel the tremor of my footfall? I am part sorry to disturb them, part grateful for the show they put on for me with their scrambling.

The air is fresh, mostly salt water scented now, rather than the midday tang of sun on wilting flowers or on fallen fruit. There is no dust yet in the air.

I run back out to Diamond Head Road, and squeeze through one of two gaps in a tall metal fence at the second park, so as not to lose time by backtracking to the open gate. Then down Beach Drive where I start scrambling over lava rock. I stop running now because the rock is slippery and I want to arrive at sunrise safely.

Then, breathless, I stand on the sandy beach, waves lapping to my right. I face east. My heart beats wildly. And she rises. For me, raised in the German language, the sun will always be feminine. I am jubilant. I am enthralled. I bring both my hands to my chest and watch the rising, gold into water, rounding out into a disk, then lifting away from the sparkle of the waves. The horizon is pure watercolor swirl and magic.

I see dark silhouettes of surfers way out in the water. The birds make their excited ruckus on the hillside in their bushes and trees. Two roosters crow above me. A few rats dash in and out of hillside crevices.

One man in a black wetsuit, not very tall, hunched over, comes jumping my direction among the rocks. Sometimes his bare feet are in the water. He fishes for something with a small black handheld net. He moves in quick jerky motions. When he passes me, he holds up the net to the side of his face as though shielding himself or hiding from me.

He is there every morning at sunrise, shielding his face and scuttling among the rocks. He looks young, maybe in his thirties. He is small, but looks strong, a gnarly kind of strength. He makes me uneasy. There are others on the beach, but he is the only one I remember distinctly from one day to the next.

One time there are two beautiful girls with surfboards and bikinis, one with blond braids, the other with golden Hawaiian skin and soft brown eyes. Another time a couple with surfing gear jogs down the winding path side by side. There are men in twos and threes. I don’t recall any of them from one day to the next, only the one unnerving man with the wetsuit and the net that shields his face.

On the way home I pick up a fallen plumeria blossom or two to keep in my budget hotel room which does not face the ocean and does not have a lanai.

On the fifth day I pass the gnarly man with the wetsuit on the water side. He doesn’t raise his shield net to his face as before. Instead he raises a stick in his left hand and points it at me and waves it like a menacing wand. I feel it like a curse, an attack on my peace.

I came here in innocence to pray my morning prayer of thank you to life, to beauty, to being part of this magnificent show called existence.

Now I feel sad and forlorn and robbed of my pleasure. His face is intent. His brows nearly join over his nose. He looks angry. Why would he be angry at me?

A little while later, I notice him shaking his stick wand at two men a short ways down the beach. Apparently I am not the only one to bother this gnarly young man.

I try to shake off the feeling of threat, the punch of the angry interaction. I imagine those two other men probably never give the shaken wand another thought, and I want to be able to do that, too. But I cannot.

On the sixth day, the sun rises, too, but behind a veiling bank of thick clouds, and the tide is in. Scrambling on the lava rock is a little more tricky. Once a wave washes right over my legs, soaking my shoes, my socks. It makes me smile--a caress of the sea in a climate where wet socks and wet sneakers aren’t a big deal.

Then I see the man close by in the water, jumping about with his net and his hunched shoulders. I don’t see anyone else nearby. Fear grips me by surprise.

I try to laugh at myself. He looks smaller than I am, or at least not much bigger, and he is more than fifty yards away from me, his feet in the water on lava rock. He certainly can’t move any faster than I can. But he is a man and yesterday he has made a threatening gesture. That is enough for full blown fear.

I scuttle by him as fast as a can. As soon as I reach sand I start to run.

I run until I see surfers further out on the beach, getting ready to go into the water.

It occurs to me, if I screamed, the roar of the ocean would drown out my voice.

I wait for the sun, but it rains today. I huddle in a little sandstone shelter, big enough for a life-sized statue of a saint, but empty, and I pray my prayer of thank you and also of sadness because of the fear. I thank life for its beauty and grieve for the sadness that beauty and pleasure can be stolen from me so easily because I am a woman and I am alone.

I have been raised in fear. I have bloomed in fear. And I have grown quite old in fear.

Nothing else untoward happens that morning. Must I now be grateful for the reprieve? That my worst fears didn’t play out in reality? I take a different way back to the hotel. My usual route over the rocks, which I have come to love, would take me once more past the man with his net in the water. Instead I run up the official winding path back up to Diamond Head Road, consoling myself that even from way up here the ocean looks magnificent. I see the two roosters heard from below, surrounded by six busy hens, up where the beach access joins Diamond Head Road.

A man once told me women are weak, and I quietly challenged him, “Why do you say that?” He hesitated. Yet he was on to something. How can I be strong when I have been coached for fear every day of my life?

There is a quarter of a rainbow in the sky and I take a vow. I will work the rest of my days in this gorgeous life to serve women, to do all that is in my power, little as it may be, so that women shall once more be honored in this world, so that they can once again walk the holy ground of this earth without fear wherever they may wish to go, and no matter who goes or does not go with them.

I count the rainbow in the western sky among my blessings for that day, a consolation gift, a jewel to distract me from the stolen sunrise, and a covenant.

Now I have two more days left to dare to run on the beach like a woman who has the right to make her life her joy. I am not yet sure how I will spend them. Will I run on the safe path? Will I mull over fears I have never chosen?

Then I will go home to my mainland city life, where I will work on keeping the promise I have made.

Beate Sigriddaughter is three times a Pushcart Prize nominee and has published prose and poetry in many magazines and ezines. Her most recent book, The Unicorn And… was published in 2008. She is the fiction editor of Moondance and founder of the Glass Woman Prize, on which details can be found at www.sigriddaughter.com. This piece first appeared in Melusine's Summer 2009 issue.

P.B. deLarios: The Last Betrayal

2010-06-06T13:43:00.015-04:00

The summer I was twelve was a Swiss-cheese-liverwurst-and-mustard sandwich summer, lunch eaten perched in the high branches of an old pecan tree. I’d spend hours up there with my best friend Pam, or I’d sit alone, not wanting to be found. I’d tuck my legs up. You learn.

Those dog-panting, hot summer days in Oklahoma, the tree leaves were as still as my breath. Some days I’d spend in the watery shade of cottonwood branches draping into Medicine Creek angling for slick, fat catfish, armed with only my fishing pole, a Tupperware container of grape Kool-Aid and a cut-up chicken neck for bait, the only sounds the hypnotic buzzing of cicada or box turtles occasionally plopping into the silty, red water off their sunning rocks. Only hunger, thirst or dusk would drive me home.

Home. Oklahoma is as much home, to me, as any Army brat can claim. I’ve lived there more years than anyplace I lived as a child.

This morning, I carefully pack the new outfit I bought for my fortieth high school reunion, the sleek black pants that fit like a second skin, the fluttery, low-cut silk top, the gold necklace and matching earrings that glow against my tanned skin. I’m only staying one night, missing the pre-party the night before, opting for the dinner and dance instead. I have no idea who’ll be there out of the six-hundred or so who graduated with me. I haven’t seen any of them since my tenth reunion thirty years ago, a real disappointment.

Sharon was the kind of girl who wouldn’t warn you if you were about to sit on an electric fence. She and her pod would cough curse words at me as I passed in the hall: “Fu-cough-ck you.” If I talked about a boy I liked to another girl in the ladies’ room while Sharon was hiding in a stall eavesdropping, she’d spread it throughout the entire school. If I hadn’t done anything stupid, she’d make something up. School was hell back then. So was home.

I was required to eat breakfast with my family every morning—a sit-down affair with all the yes-ma’ams and no-sirs of a military academy. After my Major General father left for work, my stifled mother would criticize my hair, my dress, my friends and finally satisfied with me in tears, send me out the door to catch the bus to school where Sharon and her friends would howl with laughter at my puffy eyes and blotchy red face.

As I was filling out my name tag at the ten-year reunion, Sharon, with her lip curled in a sneer, looked me up and down. “You can’t come in because you didn’t pay in advance,” she said.

Cheeks burning, I threw a twenty dollar bill I had crumpled in my sweaty fist on the table, and walked inside to join my friend Pam. I was sixteen all over again, and in that moment swore I’d never go to another reunion. I didn’t. Until now.

I think this pull I feel to go back is a masochistic urge or some warped sense of nostalgia. I can’t put a finger on it. All I know is, I can’t keep myself from it.

With my parents in an alcohol-fueled argument, usually about us kids, but sometimes about my father’s attentions to other women, Pam and I, with my brother in tow, would duck out after dinner. We used a car to boost ourselves up on a garage roof, asphalt tiles still releasing the heat of the day into our hips and shoulder blades. I’d gaze into the frigid blue vacuum of night, tethered to Earth at my feet, the only thing keeping me from flying into outer space. God’s up there, I thought. Sometimes we’d doze-off, lulled by the warm roof on our backs.

Our parents ruled the days. But the night was ours.

When I first got news of this reunion, I tossed the invitation, keeping my promise to myself. But the note tugged at me from the recycle bin. Two days later I dug it out.

Now, I apply my mascara, taking my time. Even though it’s almost a four-hour drive, I put on my make-up now because I don’t know how the light will be in the motel bathroom. I want to look good. I want to look so much better than Sharon.

I wear shorts for the drive, plug-in my iPod. My car sparkles like new from its waxing yesterday. I crank up the stereo, and merge onto the highway.

Time flies at 75 miles per hour on a flat Texas highway heading for Oklahoma. My mind wanders and I think of my friends the summer I was twelve. Friends who, like me, dreamed of escape, friends who, by now, have mostly disappeared.

We didn’t sip the night daintily like refined young ladies and gentlemen. We greedy children sucked and gulped the brown velvet night until it suffused and transformed us. We became predators, prowling along hedges like young wolves, cutting across lawns off-limits during daylight, calling greetings to owls blinking in black-lace trees. We turned elemental after midnight while our parents and siblings dreamed in their warm beds. Peeling off civilized skins down to bare wildness, we donned shorts and canvas Keds and climbed out our windows to join our pack.

We ran through the night, ran from our parents, from adulthood, from confusion, from a world stripped of magic where choices were simply about survival. Nothing frightened us then. We coursed like rivers down hills and around rocks, jumping and whooping with the pure joy of unfettered childhood. We were too fast for death. Our legs, streaked with dew and blades of grass, flashed through fields and over tarmac, carrying us beneath stars so thick and low, they tangled in our hair. We could jump to one if we wanted. We possessed the night like a hurricane, commanded it like sorcerers. We’d rouse the sun with our shouts.

Panting and nodding to each other with exhilaration for once again slipping our parent’s grasp, we split up and returned to our domestic dens, crawling back over rough windowsills. I’d kick off my wet sneakers and swipe my legs on my chenille bedspread before slipping between cool sheets. In the morning I’d be bound by adult expectations. In the sweetness of the night, though, I felt my face relax in a smile, my heartbeat slowing down, hiding my wildness again until the next nightfall.

I’ve traveled back in time and feel that otherness now, the old wildness, as I cross Medicine Creek just before one o’clock. I attempt checking in early at the motel but they tell me to come back later, so I head out to the cemetery where my parents are buried.

As I walk through the toothy rows of granite, I don’t see my familiar landmarks. It’s grown so much, so many have died, I can’t find Mom and Dad’s headstone and cross back and forth between rows and over graves. I look a little more, and then begin to panic. I’m walking around in circles, clutching the plastic flowers I purchased until I see a name I recognize and find Mom and Dad nearby.

Flowers droop in the vases flanking their headstone. They’re mums, I think, but bleached white, the only hint of color near the stems. Who put them there, I wonder. The fabric disintegrates when I pull them from the Styrofoam they’re anchored in and as they crumble in my hand, I feel the amount of time that has passed since anyone has visited this site. I stare at the wire stems, tarnished arrows, cradled in my palm, then lay them on a bare grave three headstones down. I crouch down and divide the lilies and roses between the two stone vases and bend the stems so they’ll be the right height. Then step back to eye them. They look paltry. Four more would have made a nice display but they were so expensive: fifteen dollars a stem. But as I look at them, I know, if I’d had four more, I’d have wanted six more, and if I had six, then eight. Still, my stomach twists with shame for not spending a few more dollars on my parents, who allowed my childhood magic, my wildness, in the face of their own reluctant domestication. When I kneel on their graves in the blazing sun, the sere grass snaps and breaks under my bare legs. Tears and sweat run down my face. I want to tell them now, what you gave me was perfect. It was enough.

My pack split up with budding breasts and breaking voices, awkward now around brothers and boys we used to think nothing of running naked with. Gangliness and sharp angles smoothed into rounded hips, a body’s first betrayal but not the last. No longer content sharing my dreams with only girls, Jesse replaced Pam as my best friend. Jesse, with a half-smile dimpling one cheek and caramel-colored hair wild as a mustang, didn’t walk, he swaggered. He was irresistible.

Jesse was my first love. Eyes closed and holding our breath, we bumped noses, shy but electric in our first embrace, like the shock of cold water on goose-pebbled skin. His mouth tasted of ripe peaches and sunshine, his eyes blue as Oklahoma twilight. I adored him. He gave me his ring with a stone of golden tiger’s eye that I wrapped with tape to make it fit. We vowed to spend eternity together. We passed the days like Siamese twins, connected by clasped fingers, heartbeats pulsing in our eyes. At night we laughed and ate dripping ice cream cones, fielding moths drawn to our radiance.

I never saw Jesse again after that summer.

I wander between the head stones back toward my car, the noise of a freight train in my head. I’m disoriented and amid the rolling acres of tombstones I can’t find my car. I finally see it by spotting and following the dusty tatter of road that winds through the cemetery. I climb in. The leather seat sizzles my bare thighs, and I blast the air conditioning. I glance at myself in the mirror. I’m a mess—white runnels down my cheeks where tears and sweat washed away makeup, raccoon eyes from smeared mascara, wet hair plastered to my neck and forehead. I cry anew, pull out my cell phone and call my brother at work. He hasn’t been back to Oklahoma since Mom and Dad died. I drive, and we talk about our time as children, then teenagers in Oklahoma, how we’ve been hurt by what our parents called love, how we disappointed them time and again, how they disappointed us. Be like us; see how happy we are, they said. Were they happy? Neither one of us really knows. We discuss how little we knew them, how we coped with this distance with crushed hearts—me by spending hours in a tree, him by shooting out street lights with his BB gun.

In this moment, we feel the peace of forgiveness.

When I hang up, I don’t care about attending the reunion. In its place burns a desire to do it all again, better this time, with the benefit of hindsight and, God willing, some wisdom. Now, all I want is for my parents to see I’ve made it, turned out okay. I want to use my classmates’ eyes to see myself better, to relive those feelings of endless possibilities. For just one night, let us reverse age, disease, loss and disappointment.

I walk upstairs and find my classmates in a ballroom. Many now are unrecognizable: bald, fat, wrinkled, ravaged by illness. They look like I feel: like prey. They look like they long for the days when the hunt still twinkled in their eyes, before they knew what lay at the end of those desperate nights of make-believe. Many missing are dead, including Pam who died of stomach cancer leaving a husband and three children. No one knows what became of Jesse. Sharon shyly stops me and asks for my phone number, says she lives near me in Texas and wants to be friends. I smile at her and sit down to talk. Time and life mark and humble us. In the end, it’s enough for us all to reconnect with classmates who lived with us for a brief time in the distant universe of our youth.

At midnight, I leave several revelers still drinking and dancing to our old high school rock-and- roll band and walk, spent, back to my room. If I had a cigarette, I’d smoke it.

Next morning, I check-out of the motel at 7:00 a.m. and drive four hours back to Dallas. Since then, there’s been internet talk of having the next reunion in five years, instead of ten.

Maybe I’ll go. But probably not. Nothing could eclipse this trip. I know where I’ve been and where I’m going.

I have my memories. As for my past and future, I’ve made my peace.

These days, I’m more straggling antelope than wolf. Still, sometimes when I open my window at night and breathe in fresh air, a certain smell hits me and brings back those childhood nights in a flash of movie-picture brilliance, complete with scent-o-vision. My heart thumps in my ears, my legs and arms twitch, restless to be off again, running, with the cool night air skimming my body.

And my ghost chases the echoes with impunity.

Let forgetting be the last betrayal.

P.B. deLarios is a retired attorney who now spends her time writing and staring out the window at birds. She thinks flying might be easier than writing. This piece first appeared in Melusine's Fall 2009 issue.

Launch of Spring/Summer Issue

2010-05-27T01:09:00.002-04:00

Check it out ... here.

Carrie Visintainer: Naked in Sauna World

2010-05-23T12:53:00.007-04:00

The sign on the white swinging door at the Taunus Therme spa shows three stenciled pictures: a cell phone, a camera, and a bathing suit. Each item is circled in red paint and then crossed out. I look down. The bows on my bikini are taut, but my hands are empty. Two out of three? With the tips of my fingers, I inch the door open, fully aware that I am in Germany, where the rules are as solid as the cars.

At first I only see bare floor, and I wonder if Sauna Welt, the world of saunas, has been spontaneously evacuated. Suddenly, a wooden door bursts open, and a crowd of sweaty men clamber out. They clutch wet towels and chat in throaty phrases. One man stretches his arms over his head. I force my eyes to his face: gray mustache, rosy cheeks, dimples. He smiles, eyes roving from my bikini top, to my bottom, then back to my breasts. His buddy follows suit.

I think of the Halloween party I attended in college a few years back, when I burst through the door in a bee costume, and everyone else was wearing jeans. I cringed, red-faced, navigating beer cups and slurred murmurs in search of my friends.

Today my costume screams “I am an insecure American!” Although I want to embrace the traditional European sauna ritual, my only experience with public co-ed nudity happened last year in Colorado in a sprawling hot spring pool on a moonless night. Even then I used my towel as a shield.

I squeeze my eyes shut, and open them again. The men are still naked, and they are still staring at my breasts. I sigh. Bikini or not, there must be a rule against this? In the three months I have been in Germany, I have discovered a new rule every day. First I didn’t bring my own bag to the Supermarkt, then I filled out the wrong form for a work permit, and then my chronic, accidental rule-breaking became almost comical. But at Taunus Therme it seems utterly obvious, even to an American, that staring is verboten.

Aware that a bikini holds more power than a striped yellow T-shirt, I snicker and decide to trump these tongue-lolling men. I tighten the string around my neck and pull the cloth tight over my butt. Like a cowgirl riding bareback, I move toward them, twirling a rope of my dark hair. They cower. I glare down at their penises and toss a smile into wide eyes.

As I navigate the maze of Sauna Welt, flip-flops slapping cobblestone, I take in my surroundings. The saunas are fully indoors, yet each one is tucked into the facade of a quaint European dwelling, complete with a peaked roof, curtained windows and arched doorways. Wrought iron lamps punctuate the winding path. In the center sits a working stone fireplace surrounded by a semi-circle of tree stump stools, inviting one to rest a minute. Fake snow adorns the mantle. I feel like Little Red Riding Hood traipsing through a Bavarian village, except that the air smells like sweat tinged with honey. And everyone is naked. Sauna Welt is a bustling neighborhood of puckered bellies, knobby knees, dimpled thighs and wiry hair sprouting from wrinkled, dangling flesh.

This nonchalant display of “every body” should make me feel comfortable, but instead I am baffled. In Germany, naked neighborhoods may be as mainstream as Mr. Rogers, but in America I can only imagine them in pornos or rare nudist colonies. I can’t help but fear an impending orgy, the air thick with flinging sweat, muffled moans and pulsing limbs.

When I told Annika, my host sister, that I wanted to try the cleansing sauna ritual at Taunus Therme, she frowned.

“Saunas are FKK,” she said.

“FKK?”

“Naked?”

I remembered reading something about this in my guidebook. FKK was an acronym for something like “co-ed nudity without sex.”

“This is natural in Germany,” she stated.

I forced a smile. The concept, although intriguing, bucked all of my knowledge about the biological realities of human nature.

Before I could respond, Annika’s boyfriend, Tomas, strode in from the bedroom wearing jeans and a tight T-shirt. He rolled his eyes. “Why do Americans make everything sexual?”

My mind filled with images of the half-naked, fake-breasted women that blanket virtually every American fashion magazine. Hundreds of articles describe how to look good naked and please men in bed. If you don’t have the former, you can’t accomplish the latter.

My father warned me about the realities of the male psyche before I even had breasts. “If you show too much skin,” he warned, “boys will get the wrong idea.”

All through high school I wore knee-length skirts and fully-buttoned blouses, despite the teasing of my boyfriends. But then, at our playful pre-graduation award ceremony where students are voted “Most Likely to be Successful” and” Best Sense of Humor,” I received the “Miss Derriere” award. I was too embarrassed to tell my dad.

On Trip Advisor, there were two reviews of Taunus Therme, both from American men.“BillTraveler” from New Jersey wrote that the best part of the spa is that it is “all nude upstairs, and unisex.” You could practically see him wink and belch.

Later, as I walked through the Frankfurt red light district on my way to the train station, I remembered that prostitution is legal and thriving in Germany. How is it possible that Germans have the unique ability to shove sexual desire out of their minds in the sauna?

Despite the faux fairyland setting, I have to admit that the saunas sound enticing. They have names like Yin-Yang, Aroma, Gemstone and Feng Shui, and some of them are infused with moisture, which makes my dry skin tingle with delight. A sign on the wall describes an appealing hourly ritual called Aufgasse, the pouring of the water, where a spa employee enters the sauna, whooshes out old air with a towel, pours scented water over the stones, and then swings a towel overhead to move the hot air around.

I stop outside of the Gemstone sauna and read the bold-typed sign. The focal point of this sauna is a dazzling amethyst, designed to neutralize negative energies. Maybe this experience would fill me with enough giddy joy to quell my inhibitions? I grab my “sweat” towel from my cubbyhole in the wall, slide the door open and spot an open space in the corner, directly in front of the amethyst.

The four other people inside the sauna are sprawled out at various angles, every orifice bathed in the positive glow of the pink gem. One woman is lying flat on her back, her enormous breasts sagging like lumpy pillows at her sides. Her arms are draped overhead. Despite the swollen beads of sweat covering her body, her mouth is curved up in bliss. Next to her, a skinny man with acne sits cross-legged, eyes roving like a lifeguard.

Each person is situated on their towel. No flesh touches the wood benches. I survey my own towel, which is only a fraction of the culturally appropriate size.

Grasping each end firmly, I stretch the cotton until it puckers in the middle. Keeping it taut, I place it neatly on the bench and attempt to hold it steady as I wiggle my body onto it, legs tucked close to my chest, until I am pretty sure I am within the confines of the rectangle. When I look down, I see that my toes are poking onto the wood, but it’s the best I can do. I glance around. The lifeguard’s eyes poke the flesh of my thighs, and then rest on the large woman’s belly. I try to keep Annika’s words in mind. Maybe he is simply admiring feminine beauty.

Sweat beads on my forehead, and I wipe it away with the back of my hand. I check the clock on the wall: 11:10. Annika said to stay in the sauna for ten minutes, take a cold shower and rest for twenty minutes. Then repeat the cycle three times.

By 11:14 my bikini is soaking wet and sagging off my hips and shoulders. Waves of sweat pour off my forehead, stinging my eyes. Even my toes are sweating, leaving wet circles on the wood. I think of hot places: Texas, Costa Rica, hell. This sauna seems hotter than all three combined. The sparse cloth of my bikini feels like a sticky cocoon, and I resist the urge to scratch and pull at the strings. I glare at the clock. The big hand is an arthritic finger inching forward, and I want to shove it along.

I count to sixty in my head as slow as I can, and then I curse the clock, peel my towel from the bench and stumble out of the sauna and into the tiled shower room. There is one other woman inside. Her blonde hair is splayed out over the rolls of her back, water pouring over her face. I turn the knob. Icy water pours down, and I pant and squeal, heart racing. Germans are masochists. Defeated, I tug the bows of my bikini and let it fall to the ground.

I wander out of the shower in a light-headed daze, stumble toward my cubby hole, and grab my much-larger bath towel, wrapping it around me. Nearby is a quiet corner with chaise lounge chairs. I ease myself into a chair. A man in a blue robe is lying next to me, reading a magazine.

My skin is tingling, and my vision is slightly blurry. I breathe deeply, letting the chair support the full weight of my head, abdomen, thighs and feet. Suddenly, I feel like I am floating among billowy clouds. My fingers are feathers. I half-dream about fresh berries and chocolate. I realize the full benefit of the cleanse.

After twenty minutes, it is hard to think about standing up, but I want to try another round. One. Two. I roll to my side and slump out of the chair. As I move toward my cubbyhole, I remember that I am naked under my towel. My bikini is lying in a wet heap on the floor, and I cannot fathom sliding into the soggy cloth. Exchanging my bath towel for my sweat towel, I peek around the corner. The Herbal Sauna is close by, requiring little exposure.

I step out onto the winding path. Immediately, I encounter a mass of octogenarians. Their flesh hangs loosely from their angled bones, liver spots covering their bodies. One man has a huge scar on his thigh. Accidentally, my eyes graze his penis: folds of pink skin and a maze of purple blood vessels. Disgusting. I cross my arms over my chest.

The sign outside the Herbal Sauna says it improves mental clarity, but when I open the door, all I see is haze and flesh. There are nine people lining the two benches. The air smells like stale sage. Shoulders tense, I squelch my urge to run, find an open spot on the bottom bench and quickly assume my crouched position, toes facing the man next to me. He leans against the top bench, feet planted on the floor below. His nose is bulbous and he sounds like he’s snoring, but his eyes are wide open. He stares at me out of the corner of his eye.

I summon the clock for support. Nine minutes to go. It is slightly cooler on this lower bench, but the crowd is claustrophobic. Again, everyone is sprawled in various positions, and I can’t help but expect a low, sultry rhythm to spew from the hot rocks.

The man next to me shifts. His legs fall open to the sides, one hairy knee grazing my toes. I crouch tighter. He exhales and reaches an arm over the top bench, fingers touching my knee. I slide backward. He gives me a sleepy smile, and moves his other hand to his thigh. I swear I glimpse a mass of expanding flesh...

Maybe the heat is deceiving me, but I don’t stay around to find out. I swing my legs to the ground, grab my towel and throw the door open. I find myself once again in the shower room, and this time the harsh water feels good.

Resting in the same chaise lounge chair, my heart beats fast and my arms are heavy. All I can think about is sweat swishing around on the floors of the saunas, germs multiplying, crawling up onto toes and thighs and...

I grab my belongings from the cubby hole and stride toward the locker room, where I cannot wait to put on my jeans and raincoat and trudge out into the gray afternoon. On my way I pass a juice bar. Two women are sitting on stools sipping orange liquid from glass mugs. One of the women waves her hands as she talks, earrings jingling, breasts thumping against her belly. She looks perfectly comfortable, as if she is clothed and sitting at a cafe on the plaza.

Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse a door that says Damen.

“Hmm,” I mumble, wondering why I didn’t see this before. Maybe it is simply a restroom. But as I slide through the door, I realize I missed a hidden gem. The Damen area is a collection of saunas designated just for women, complete with plush lounge chairs, a private outdoor patio and individual tanning beds decorated with ornate Asian designs. Everything is clean, bright and shiny. Why didn’t Annika tell me about this?

Dozens of women are using this area, and the only language I hear is German. Affirmed, I sit down on a chaise lounge, dropping my bag to the floor. A waif-like woman strides by, holding a blue striped towel. In the corner, two round women crouch together, giggling at something in a magazine. Next to me sits a woman in her sixties, white curls tickling freckled shoulders. She is engrossed in a novel, eyes wide, pink fingernails gripping the pages.

I smile, realizing I can finish my third round of sauna. Pushing my bag under the chair, I shed my towel and wander around freely, saying “Hallo” and “Guten Tag” to women as I pass.

As I sweat in the Venus sauna, still crammed onto my hand towel, I find that my breath comes more easily when I am not concerned about where to look or what men are thinking. I close my eyes and let the sweat drip from my chin to my toes. My mind drifts back to the FKK area. I shrug. To Annika and Tomas and all those who truly believe they can separate nudity from sex, I raise a Beck’s to you and say “Prost.”

Carrie Visintainer is a Colorado-based freelance writer. Her essays and travel tips have appeared in the Travelers' Tales: The Best Women's Travel Writing 2008 anthology, Cahoots magazine and Journeywoman online. She received an M.S. in genetics from the University of Minnesota. This piece first appeared in Melusine's Fall 2009 issue.

Diane Payne: Politics of Mothering

2010-05-09T11:50:00.015-04:00

Because I’ve never married, for some reason, I feel like there are many people who view me as a guerrilla mother of sorts. Long ago, when I was unemployed, I was probably lumped as one of those hippy welfare mothers who have their babies out in the backyard like the cows. Now that I am gainfully employed, and my daughter is fifteen and quite normal, I still get the feeling people look at me differently for not dating, for not being more whatever is considered normal motherly. I have a hunch people think I have remained single as a form of political activism. I also realize very few people know me.

In many ways, Ania and I have it made. It’s just the two of us and our dogs and cats. No squabbling. Yesterday she returned from a weekend trip to an amusement park in Branson, Missouri with a family friend and told me, “That was fun. It was never quiet. I liked it like that.” Normal trip with normal family, at least in what Ania envisions to be normal.

Years ago, I remember shopping with food stamps. It wasn't the same as shopping with real money. Every time I placed an item in the cart it felt like I was being scrutinized by the other shoppers. Before I even get to the cashier and had to ask how much of my total was in food stamps, I’d feel like the other shoppers already knew I was using food stamps.   Those beholders of the real cash looked at the contents of my cart to see what their tax dollars were buying for me, and not without criticism.

I'm a rather healthy eater, but admittedly, I have my weaknesses. Take ice cream. For less than a buck, I could buy a half-gallon of the store’s brand of Neapolitan ice cream.   For a little less than three bucks, I could buy a tiny pint of some exotic flavored Ben and Jerry's ice cream.   If I hadn’t always been a food stamp recipient, or just happened to be one of those ridiculously cheap shoppers, I may not have ever tasted Ben and Jerry's.   Because I was using food stamps, I tended to feel guilty buying the good stuff, knowing those working folk were watching my cart as if I was picking their pockets in broad daylight.

In line, shoppers would tell me how surprised they were to learn that food stamps paid for ice cream. "It's a shame," they’d say.

I had the feeling their day would improve if I would return the ice cream and make sure our cart was filled with only potatoes, beans, and rice; but even the poor deserve a treat. I had a three-year-old daughter. Tofu just didn't do it for us every day. Though it could have, I guess, if I wanted to be more conscientious. Being conscientious all the time is just wearisome!

One day my daughter and I were shopping at the supposedly Bovine Growth Hormone-free supermarket, doing our part in conscientious consumerism. After driving home across the hot desert, I discovered that the bag boy forgot to put one of my bags in the cart. Oddly enough, it was the one with the BGH-free items. The ice cream we were just going to dig into.

So back to the store we went for another dose of humility. I explained about the missing bag and the clerk actually believed me. To my amazement, the clerk also told me to grab a bag and get those items. He gave me full rein of the store. I wondered if this was a test and I was really under surveillance. I didn't even need to return for his approval. Such an honest clerk, I, the customer, believed. Such a worthless clerk, his boss must have believed.   He probably saw me as a kindred spirit of sorts. He, too, may have shopped with his mother while she dished out the food stamps.

By the time Ania was three, I started teaching in the public schools again. Newt Gingrich was ready to eliminate all us welfare mothers and I wanted to remove myself before he had the joy of doing it to me.

When Ania was six, she was busy writing invitations to her Girl Power birthday party on Spice Girl stationery, and I noticed the words: "Wear something Spice Girls wear." Then I remembered the last birthday party we went to, where I heard the parents talk about how happy they were that their children wore uniforms to school.

"Look at how kids dress today," one of the parents complained. It turned out that most of these parents went to parochial schools and maybe they figured because they wore those horrid uniforms, they were going to make sure their children wore them also. I attended public schools during the 1960s and '70s, and it seems to me that I wore the same things the kids are wearing today.

Deep down, I think uniforms are for parents, not for kids. Adults are always complaining that the children are too distracted by clothes, but I teach at a public school and think they're more distracted by tedious lessons and overcrowded classrooms than by what someone else is wearing.

Like the teenagers today, I remember wearing baggy bell-bottoms and flannel shirts, then listening to my parents whine, "How are you going to get a boyfriend dressed like that?" And when I wore hip-huggers and a halter-top that was held shut by two strings in the back, they'd scream, "Why do you want to go out looking like a hooker? You're never going to get a boyfriend looking like that!" In my parent's opinion, my clothes were supposed to be used as some kind of discreet mating call. But in my view, my clothes were for my girlfriends. We huddled in our bedrooms modeling them, swapping our clothes with each other. It was a female thing. We didn't discuss clothes with boys, or expect them to comment on our attire. They may have responded to it, but not nearly as much as our girlfriends did.

I preferred the Spice Girls to all those Barney tapes we listened to for years while driving down the freeway. The lyrics aren't profound, but neither were The Monkees - the all-male group that catered to kids when I was young.

Some may have argued that the Spice Girls wore clothing that was too seductive, and write them off as not having the capacity to make a feminist statement of any quality, but I don't see why a seductive-looking woman can't also be a feminist. My daughter was only 6, and Girl Power seemed to be making a feminist impact on her.

We lived in an old adobe house out in the desert and for quite some time it was infested with mice. One day, there was a dead mouse in the cupboard, and Ania swept it onto the dust pan chanting, "Girl power!" It helped that I bribed her with money, and assured her it was twice the money a boy would earn for doing such a nasty chore. I can't stand dead mice and I was more than happy to offer such a large sum that I didn't have to reach in there and sweep it out.

One day Ania came home from school and told me that her principal had gathered the entire K-2 school in the cafeteria to remind them not to wear any clothes that left the belly exposed. The funny thing is that my daughter's father is from India, and I wondered what would happen if I sent her to school in a sari. The only body part showing is the belly. Strange how our cultures respond so differently to the navel.

When Ania was eight, she started getting excited in pop music. I remember when she used her money to buy her first CD. , I not only helped her count out all her dollar bills and change at the music store, but I helped her find the latest CD she wanted. The one she could afford to buy after losing two teeth in one week and saving all those nickels and dimes.

It wasn't until we stopped at a friend's house, and she asked to play him our CD that I realized the CD had a parental advisory warning: explicit content. I quickly read the titles of the songs. The same way it's hard to judge a book by a cover, it's equally hard to judge the content of a song by the title, but, by the time I made it to the last title "Don't Pull Out On Me Yet," I started imagining what the lyrics would be, and felt my somewhat open mind closing rapidly.

Our friend, who is a musician, said it would probably be rated "R" if they had printed the lyrics. He shook his head, quietly wondering how this could be considered music, and why I'd let my daughter listen to it.

Back in those days, Ania didn't pay much attention to the meaning of the lyrics, so I didn't point out the significance of the words. She'd be embarrassed if she knew what those three ladies were singing about, and it'd lessen her enthusiasm about her CD collection if she started worrying about the lyrics. Listening to the music that's advertised in all those teen magazines is what makes Ania feel a part of our culture.

At one point, Ania decided to make a tape that was a compilation of her favorite songs. After she had a sampling of Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, ‘N Sync, Robyn, TLC, and the rest of her collection, I heard her add music from my pile: Aretha Franklin, Doc Watson, Joni Mitchell, Michelle Shocked and a variety of others. She labeled one side "Old Favorites" and the other "New Favorites." I think of this cassette when I fret over letting her buy a CD with a parental advisory. None of her other music has had a parental advisory, and since I was with Ania when she bought this one, I'm responsible for the purchase. I should have noticed the label at the store, not afterwards.

Throughout the years, Ania has become quite fashion-conscious. Friends say it’s her act of rebellion to be the opposite of her mother who dresses like a slob and never wears make-up. She’s making her statement, apparently, the same way I am by not putting effort into my looks. When I remember Ania and the mice, I think about how squeamish she has become today. Sometimes it’s maddening the way she screams when she sees a cockroach or worm.

The other morning, right after Ania left the house to wait for the bus, I sat down in the porch to enjoy a cup of coffee, and the phone rang. “Mom, you need to hurry! There’s an injured cat lying next to the garbage!   You need to help it before the garbage men pick it up! Please! Her head is bloody and she can’t move.”

This was not a pretty picture. I made a loud grumble, then promised I’d go check on the cat.     Before I saw the injured cat, I realized why the other cat had left looking so downtrodden. That gasping sound was horrid. I started walking back home, not feeling up to this task. Then I knew I could never face my daughter if I didn’t bring the cat to the vet.

When I picked Ania up after school, she never mentioned the cat. “Anything you want to ask me?” I hinted.

“What’s for dinner tonight?”

“What about the cat?”

“Oh, the cat. How is it?”

I told her the cat was at that vet, and the vet had never called, so I didn’t know if the cat was on the road to recovery, which I seriously doubted, or dead. “I felt sick listening to that poor cat struggle to breathe while kicking her legs around in that box as we drove to the vet. It was awful!”

Ania laughed. She loves it when something dreadful like this upsets me. She continued laughing. I wasn’t sure if this was a form of hysteria or purely pleasure. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. That weird, cyclic laughter.

I got a beer and returned to my chair in the porch, the same exact place I was sitting this morning when the phone rang.

Since Ania is in band, I go to all the football games.   Every game I take a book. Every game someone sits next to me and asks, “Is that a book?” I close the book while a mother snuggles close to me and whispers, so her boys won’t hear, “Yesterday Julie came home wanting to know if Ania was an atheist. She was truly worried.”

I say nothing. She looks confused, maybe hurt that I remain silent.

“She isn’t, is she?”

“I’ve never asked her.”

“Well, I went on to explain that her father’s a Muslim and they believe in a higher being, and you, well, you don’t go to church, but you know there’s a Creator, and Ania believes in a Supreme Being. That’s right; isn’t it?”

“Her dad’s a Hindu and his wife is a Muslim.”

“Well, it’s all the same. They believe in a Higher Being.”

She seems disappointed her father was a Hindu. Too many gods, too many possibilities.

“Ania has a religion, right?”

“She hasn’t mentioned it if she does,” I admit.

“Oh,” she says before moving away.

Then another mother moves next to me and explains how the kids were discussing their mock elections held at school while they were at church on Wednesday night, and how upset one girl was when a Catholic admitted he voted for Kerry. “He supports abortion. I teach chastity.”

Chastity? Sounds like something that may require a Chastity Belt.   “If people are so against abortion, why don’t they support the morning-after pill?” I ask.

“Isn’t that like contraception?"

“It is a form of contraception.”

“I support conception.”

Immaculate?

After the game, Ania wants to know what we were talking about. “The gum stuck on the bottom of my shoe, the fear you may be an atheist, and why one Catholic is voting for Bush, and another for Kerry, nothing too exciting.”

“You’ll miss not talking to these people. I know you will. No matter what you say.”

And in a weird way, she’s probably right. Again. Still, I’ll continue to take my book to the games.

The other night I started off feeling like a somewhat decent parent by meeting my daughter’s flag line team and taking pictures of them in their fright night costumes before they did their half-time show at the football game.

“Can you take the pictures after half-time?” the captain asked. “We’re almost out of time now.”

That made sense, so I agreed.

Then the girls gathered in a huddle. I thought they were going to do one of those team chants that included a loud grunt before running on the field. Instead they asked this other mother and me to join them. The other mother walked up and joined hands. I balked.

“I’m not really into hand-holding,” I said. “I’ll come back later to take pictures.”

The girls seemed desperate that I joined them. My daughter, Ania, was giving me the dirty eye, the look that both begs and threatens. Reluctantly, I joined them. First I was told I was holding hands wrong. There was obviously a protocol about crossing my hands first, then connecting with the others.    To my surprise, this wasn’t a gathering to do a spirit chant but to pray to some spirit. Ania stared at me the entire time, as did this other girl across from me. I said nothing but felt plenty.

We live in the Bible Belt. There is always at least one prayer before the game begins. For that reason, I rarely come to the games until after they start, unless I’m working in the concession stands where I can only hear food orders.

I watched their half-time show, then decided to leave the camera with my daughter, and simply go home. When I handed the camera to my daughter, I ranted.

“Did you know they were going to pray?” I asked.

“We always do before half-time,” Ania explained.

“Why? Don’t you think those pre-games prayer include you? Who are you praying to? What were you asking for? If someone had dropped a flag, does that mean God wasn’t listening? Why weren’t you praying for God to stop genocide? Praying for someone other than you girls?”

Ania looked horrified. “Would you rather I stand here by myself because I don’t pray at school events? Is that what you want?”

“That’s why they keep school and church separate, so people don’t have to feel left out or coerced. What were you really praying for?” I was relentless.

“Good luck.” Ania was close to tears.

“Bring that kind of prayer to a casino,” I said before stomping off, the epitome of irrational, lousy parent.

Unfortunately, during the third and fourth quarters, I didn’t cool off. I wanted to talk to my daughter about this prayer business after the game.

In tears, she screamed, “You’ve never taught me about prayer! How am I supposed to know how to do it?”

Ouch. She was absolutely right. Her father is a Hindu. I’m a nothing. About the only thing I believe is that there really isn’t a heaven or hell, and in my nothingness, I always add, “but anything is possible.” I tell Ania she’s more than welcome to go to church, but I’d rather not.

Guilt-ridden, I asked if her friends questioned her since I saw a couple watching us after half-time. Ania has told me how her friends tell her at lunch that they pray her mother starts going to church. I tend to make a nasty retort about how her Baptist friends aren’t even allowed to watch a movie if there’s a gay character. Remind her that the preachers in her friends’ churches think Hindus are sinners for praying to false gods. She told me her two friends wanted to know why I was so angry with the prayer. “I just told them you were mad. Then they didn’t ask again.”

I apologized for over-reacting and made a feeble explanation about how I felt only she could know what or why she wanted to pray, and praying for good luck was her business. I understood why she prayed. To not join in would mean ostracism. No holding hands. No huddle.

If I hadn’t been a holy roller during my teen years, I may not have reacted so vehemently. Back then, prayer was legal in the public schools but I don’t remember it ever occurring, unless my Jesus Freak friends and I were rallying together outside praying for the war to end or whatever our cause for the day happened to be. I was one of those people who addressed strangers walking downtown with the greeting: “If you die tonight, do you know if you’ll go to heaven or hell?” Most kept on walking. Some cursed first. I spent my teen years being a zealot. I operated purely on an emotional level, never intellectually.

At the football game, I felt like a zealot operating on both emotional and intellectual levels. More disturbing, I felt like a creepy parent muddling through one more religious experience. If Ania and the girls want to huddle to pray that they don’t drop the flag, that’s their business. I was most upset that my daughter never felt comfortable telling me that she prayed at football games, upset that I am too tyrannical to discuss prayer, frustrated that I was trudging deeply in the world of being imperfect at something I honestly hope to do well at, knowing every error I make will be locked away in my daughter’s memory, ready to be used against me when I make my next fumble.

No wonder it was so much easier just being a rapid-fire zealot on an untouchable quest. Back then I was certain I was right and simply plowed forward.

It’s not that easy anymore. Now I have to own up to my words and listen to my daughter’s.

I suspect Ania has long realized that I’m different from her friends’ mothers, especially since most of them are married Baptist women who have spent their entire lives in this small town.   Yet, somehow, I think all mothers by nature are political activists. We have to talk to our daughters about Gardasil, discuss the pros and cons, and let them make the decision if they want the vaccine. We have to keep them informed about birth control and hope they remain celibate a long while. We have to let them experiment with clothes, music, make-up, magazines, let them be a part of “their world”, not always stuck in “our world.” We have to blend, assimilate, and acculturate. It’s not that I’m politically active, it’s that I’m actively mothering all the time. I make mistakes. I do some things right. I’m just a mother trying the best I can. In some ways, I guess that’s politics.

Diane Payne teaches creative writing at University of Arkansas-Monticello, where she is also faculty advisor of the Foliate Oak literary magazine. She is the author of two novels, Burning Tulips and A New Kind of Music. She has been published in hundreds of literary magazines, which most recently include Fiction International, The Rambler, Tea Party, and Arkansas Literary Forum. This piece first appeared in Melusine's Fall 2009 issue.

Gail Folkins: Shoes

2010-04-25T22:32:00.014-04:00

In the snapshot, I wear purple Converse tennis shoes with reinforced toes, faint bell bottom jeans spilling over their sides. Our yellow lab ignores the lanky arms I wrap around her. It’s the shoes that stick out, too purple despite my pride in them. Teachers note their strangeness; grade school friends grin and point at their unlikelihood. Mom thinks they’re unique.

An art instructor finds the same magic in these shoes that I do, has me draw a new picture in gentle charcoal lines. I sit in my socks and sketch, think of trees scaled on a brother’s dare, icy creeks forged. As if they’re still walking, the shoes appear on starched paper, shoelaces draping free of my feet. Eyelets gape open, shoe tongues voice their remembrance, purple shoes roam eternal through childhood forest journeys.

A luggage carousel in Dublin snakes around the terminal. I watch bags tumble when the handlers let out too many at once, then laugh once I spot my own broken bag, its sides and zipper burst at last from age. Only airport duct tape keeps the contents intact; one black suede shoe tries to escape. From the carousel’s edge, I claim the mangled bag and shoe while others stare. Mom would’ve laughed.

The left black shoe stays behind in Dublin. Dissatisfied with adulthood and agendas, it roams, most likely to the corner pub where I drank velvet Guinness or to rest in St. Stephen’s lime-bright grass. It might venture another look at Yeats’ scribbled manuscripts in a hidden museum, or relive the tang of fish and chips on greasy paper. Choosing a random door in the afternoon, each knocker a different bronze animal, it joins whoever answers for tea. At night, it finds a bed and breakfast and keeps my travels endless.

I place Mom’s brown boots, fresh moss in their tread, outside the door. She died in the house where I grew up, surprising us with sudden departure and no goodbyes. Who knew if she might need the boots for a forest, maybe one with our usual clouds and rain. Trilliums would open for her, white petals like stars, or fiery vine maple blazing if it were fall. Dad sees her boots waiting outside and asks me if that’s realistic, the right thing to do. I consider his words, but leave the boots there just in case, while summer’s warmth lives on.

Gail Folkins' essays have appeared in Lifewriting Annual, The Fourth River, and other journals. Her creative nonfiction book Texas Dance Halls: A Two-Step Circuit (Texas Tech University Press) was a finalist in the popular culture category of ForeWordMelusine's Magazine's 2007 Book of the Year Awards. This piece first appeared in Summer 2009 issue.

Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar: What Happens at Ladies' Night

2010-04-11T21:05:00.007-04:00

Note: From time to time, we will post articles in this blog series that first appeared in Melusine's nonfiction section. This piece appeared in our Spring 2009 issue.

“What goes on at ladies' night?” This seems like an ordinary question; men are often mystified about those nights the trustworthy and stable women in their lives run out with girlfriends, dressed to the nines, with a shouted “Don’t wait up,” over the shoulder as the door shuts in their face.

In certain states in the Middle East, it is perpetually ladies' night since socialization between non-related women and men are gender segregated. For Muslim women, ladies' night means complete freedom, as they discard hijab, the veils that cover their hair in observance of Islamic dictates for female modesty.

The subject of this particular ladies' night inquiry, however, was the ladies only, invite only, evening of a fashion show hosted by Virginia Commonwealth University’s branch campus in Doha. The male faculty and staff were barred from this occasion for the entirety of the show’s annual run. They are all required to leave the building mid-afternoon the day of the show. As of spring 2007 there are no male students at VCUQ, though the first male students are allowed to enroll in fall 2007. They will likely also be left out of the ladies only evening, made even more precious by their inclusion into the school. The questioner, a male faculty member who had taught at VCUQ for three years, looked up at me and I was mystified.

“Well, not that much, really,” I said. This was true; as in any religiously conservative environment, Hindu, Christian, or Muslim, ladies' night takes on a much more sedated atmosphere.

“We just watch the show.… It’s the same show the next night too, right?”

My friend nods. He seems as frustrated by my inability to supply information, as though I’m holding out some secret, refusing to share it with him because of his maleness.

“Well, no one has their hair covered.”

He looks up again.

“Actually, no one wears abayas.”

He is suddenly really interested.

This is probably because every mall, restaurant, and classroom in Qatar is filled with abaya-clad females and this all you see of Qatari women unless you are related to them. (The designer abaya industry boasts top names including even Christian Dior.) Or unless you are invited to a ladies only gathering.

In Islam, a woman covers her hair only when around male non-relatives. For the student or working Muslim woman who chooses to, this can mean every moment that she is outside her house; or even inside her house if someone other than her father or brother is in the room. Women who “cover” (which usually means covering their hair, but can also extend to their whole face) adopt a variety of styles in how they carry out this practice. The Qatari approach to female “covering” is an abaya, a black robe with long sleeves, long enough to cover feet also and a shayla, scarf, about two to three yards in length, that warps around hair, ears, and neck, hiding any space down to the collar of the abaya. This is how ninety-eight percent of Qatari women dress.

I drove home that night and shook my head at my friend’s slightly dilated pupils. There are no cameras, not even cell phones with cameras, allowed at this or any other gathering where women will be “uncovered.” This ensures everyone can have a good time without worrying that photos of her hair, body, or face, will show up on the internet, or just as worrisome, blue-toothed around the country. After all, there are only about 150,000 Qatari nationals. It is a really small country and we all know how we feel about photos of ourselves … so a prohibition on photography might not be such a bad idea.

I thought back to my first ladies' night fashion show, the previous year, when I had only been in Qatar for about six months. I was shocked at what was underneath those abayas and shaylas. Behind the black of the robes and headscarves were designer labels I’d seen only in magazines or on the red carpet. This was the first night I saw my female students and almost didn’t recognize them because suddenly, instead of looking at a face, I was looking at an entire head, with hair, ears, neck, in short, everything “uncovered.” That night I was electrified and a little embarrassed at my own shock, given all my feminist sensibilities.

The women were … stunning. And I was staring at everyone and everything like a blind mouse given a promised few hours to see.

“Mohana, hi.”

I turned and smiled politely at a beautiful young woman. I had no idea who she was.

“It’s me. Hissa.”

“Hissa! Oh, wow. Look at you. Your hair is beautiful!”

Was there a more idiotic thing I could have said? Other than blurting, so that’s what you really look like, probably not. Clearly she wasn’t hiding her hair because she needed daily Rogaine treatments. She was observant of Islamic tradition; she was “covered” in public like a respectful Qatari female. And she was drop dead gorgeous.

It went on over the course of the night as student after student approached me to say hello and I was bedazzled by the mascara, bold shades of blue eyeliner, perfectly blow-dried manes, curled, straightened, artfully arranged, and satin evening wear. The actual models on the runway were only mildly interesting in comparison to the menagerie of women I knew, students, faculty, staff, who I literally saw in a different light that evening. They were chatty and friendly, eager to know what I was up to with summer only a few weeks away, boisterous. After the show, the murmur of voices rose to a dull roar as everyone piled into the reception area to eat, gossip, and compare jewelry.

The next day, back at work and in the daily grind, the previous evening seemed like a secret we shared, like I was having a dalliance with many women, all at once, because I had seen beauty behind closed doors.

This was all before I learned about the other variations of ladies' nights; weddings, as most wedding receptions in Gulf countries are single-sex, henna parties, where artists apply the dye in all designs and styles in a festive gathering, and of course, dancing lessons.

Of course, my friend can’t get into any of these.

And I, like a good friend, rub it in.

Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar is a writer and educator who currently works and lives with her husband in Doha, Qatar. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Florida with a focus on gender and postcolonial theory. She has published short stories, academic articles, and travel essays in a variety of journals and literary magazines. Her website is www.mohanalakshmi.com.

Announcing Our Finalists for the Vivienne Haigh-Wood Prize

2010-04-03T14:29:00.008-04:00

Yes, it seems we have 11 finalists rather than 10. What can I say? I was an English, not a math major. OK, that's not quite an excuse, since distinguishing between the numbers 10 and 11 came a bit earlier in my education (say, kindergarten at the latest.) Well, they are 11 great poems, I think, so no regrets on the counting error.

We wish everyone luck with the final selection, which will be announced in the Spring issue, out late in May. The winner and runner-ups will be notified before the issue appears and the prize will be awarded in May.

The finalists are listed in alphabetical order (since I'm fairly confident I've mastered the alphabet, at least ;)

Marcia Arrieta: "Days"

Jessica Cuello: "Donkeyskin" and "In the Spired House"

Deborah DeNicola: "Eve of my Evolution"

Katharyn Howd Machan: "When I Return to Sardinia"

Jane Olmsted: "Imperative"

Lorraine Schein: "The Crystal Fairy Book"

T. Stores: "If My Father Were a New England Poet"

Jari Thymian: "Radish Mother"

Whitney Vaughan: "O Joy, Mouths the Muse to Her Suitor"

Andrea L. Watson: "Reckless Light Ordains Each Leaving"

August Evans: Enough

2010-03-27T00:09:00.011-04:00

Mark Linkous killed himself two days ago. He sang about hammering out heroin cramps, humid creatures called painbirds, and the urge to sleep in a bed of apples. I made out to “All Night Home” in front of my new boyfriend’s apartment, him taking my lips in a tender high-school way as Linkous’s melded slide guitars made a womb for us. Snow pelted the windshield. I didn’t know yet about the life growing inside me, which this new man had planted, and so we could still smooth each other in doe-eyed wonder, watch the soft and painful way the other unraveled.

A few weeks later my new boyfriend and I saw Mark’s band live. He loved the music and that I had turned him on to it. We grasped for each other, uncaring of the public. Though the whole time, I felt a bitter, acrid gaze on us from behind. I didn’t need to turn around, I knew who was watching. Recently, without explanation, I had left him. He had first given me Mark’s music, and here I was with my new boyfriend at the show. The gazing man gave me things like music, and a reasonable amount of attention. Not the blind and stupid fervor to make a child.

When I found out I was pregnant, the gazing man found me crying on the front stoop of the building we shared, where we had fallen for each other as neighbors, me on the top floor, him below. I had just come from the abortion clinic, where Catholics had doused me with holy water on the way in. The nurse who ran the cold metal over my stomach found no sign of life. If I was really pregnant, she said, it was still too small to kill.

On the stoop the gazing man, being in medical school, told me if there was nothing to kill I wouldn’t be doubled over the way I was. So, even though I had abandoned him for this dilemma, thicker than Mark’s poetry, he drove me to the hospital.

We were in the waiting room for a long time. When I came back from the bathroom, he confessed to having read my text messages while I was gone. The new man had sent a series while I waited in the abortion clinic, good-intentioned fragments, meant to comfort—lyrics of Mark’s songs. I told the gazing man I was sorry, and I could tell he was, too.

The hospital people called my name and I donned another gown, the gazing man respectfully facing the corner while I did it. These doctors, too, couldn’t find a fetus. When they took me in for a more sophisticated ultrasound, the technician talked to us like we were the authors of the situation. The gazing man asked a lot of technical questions. I said nothing, only watched the black spot floating on the screen above. If left unchecked in a place too small for it, my fallopian tube, this growth would cause my death. I was led to another room. Damp cheek to operating room table, gown raised high behind, prick and fluid rush, methotrexate, like a tumor, ectopic child, shrunk.

Both of these men left a long time ago. But now that Mark is dead, his spectral music threads them, the doer and the gazer, again in meager union.

I pleasure in simple things now. Like knowing what to expect; and music. Yes, music is more than enough.

August Evans, a graduate of the University of Chicago MAPH program, teaches English and Humanities in Chicago. She is at work on a novel exploring the fragmentation of self in the age of cyber-identity crafting.

Elayne Clift: Shadows and Stars

2010-03-13T20:09:00.010-05:00

It seems to me that the shadows are of supreme importance in perspective.
-- Leonardo da Vinci

Key Largo is in a word, retro – a throwback to the 1950s. You might not realize it on a drive-through to Key West, but you get it if you stop overnight. You feel it staring at the African Queen, the actual boat in which Bogie and Hepburn made cinematic history. (The boat is unmistakable with its canopy and the boiler Bogey kept banging to keep her moving.) You sense it stopping in the late afternoon at the Caribbean Club where bearded guys with tattoos play pool and drink Coors surrounded by Bogie and Bacall pictures from the movie Key Largo. If this doesn't do it, try sun-downers at the Sheraton, a flamingo-pink pseudo-tropical getaway that shouts for pedal pushers and ruffled off-the-shoulder halter tops. Key Largo is definitely a 1950s kind of place.

We were in the mood for it when we pulled in for the night at The Blue Lagoon, post-war cottages nestled between the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Route 1. The guidebook billed it as a resort run by caring hosts who make mom-and-pop lodges worthy of your patronage. It was no resort, but it was pleasantly tropical. Driving into lush, overgrown gardens randomly surrounding the grounds with colorful bougainvillea and assorted orchid-like flowers was promising.

The woman on duty, Mary Beth, was friendly. But Lazlo, the proprietor, was hardly my idea of “Pop.” Deeply tanned, his Hawaiian shirt seductively open half-way down his chest, his square face chiseled as romance novels boast, he was remarkably handsome. His blue-gray eyes and equine nose were offset by a perfectly shaped mouth and straight, square teeth. Salt-and-pepper hair added to his good looks.

“Is this your daughter?” he asked my husband, as I approached Lazlo's pick up truck after we'd registered.

For a nanosecond I thought he was serious. Then I got angry: Lazlo had played with my ego and made me feel stupid. People named Lazlo, guys who had escaped Hungary in 1956, were supposed to be like Victor Lazlo in Casablanca, suave and chivalrous, not ridiculous or insulting.

Suddenly Mary Beth appeared. “I'm wearing your shirt,” she said, taunting Lazlo, cigarette in hand. “You put it in the give-away bag, but I got it out.” Then she said, “He was going to toss it and it's a perfectly good shirt.”

She drew on her cigarette, fingering Lazlo's blue denim shirt. “You wouldn't think he's my boss, the way I talk to him.”

Lazlo was telling my husband about his German neighbors. I don't know what triggered the conversation. Then, looking at me, he said, “You're Jewish, aren't you? You know what they did last April? They celebrated Hitler's birthday! Can you imagine!” He smiled conspiratorially. “Remarkable,” I said.

Mary Beth smiled at Lazlo as she drifted toward the office. She was clearly in love with him; her compulsions were such that she was incapable of hiding it.

The sun cast long shadows across the gardens. A chill permeated the air. I entered the cottage we had rented for the night. It was reminiscent of places my parents had rented on vacations before there were Holiday Inns. The kitchen had a porcelain table and two chairs in front of a window with Venetian blinds. Plastic flowers adorned the table. A tea towel hung from the refrigerator door. A coffeemaker and toaster sat on the Formica counter. In the bathroom, a paper mat with a map of Florida lay in front of a shower covered by a mildewing plastic curtain. Two skimpy towels hung from a towel bar above the toilet. Miniature Ponds soaps lay next to plastic cups covered in Saran Wrap. Yellowing wallpaper peeled away from the sink. In the main room, a television mounted on a shelf presided over a double bed made with overly laundered sheets. An open closet hosted naked wire hangers above a luggage rack. Two rattan chairs stared vacantly at each other across the room. Through screened jalousie windows, a breeze moved faded print curtains. I wondered if Bogie and Bacall had digs like this when they were filming.

I went to the office. Mary Beth was eating spaghetti from a Styrofoam container, watching TV. I fingered the brochures in a rack looking for a seafood restaurant.

“What can I do for ya?” she asked. She recommended Alabama Jack's, a vintage barge restaurant specializing in crab cakes, country-western music and clog dancing.

“Can you imagine Lazlo wanting to throw this shirt out?” she asked, smoothing it down over her breasts. I thought she must have been pretty once, even though her teeth were crowded and her face was sun-lined now.

“Don't forget about the comet!” Mary Beth said, jumping up. “Should be real clear soon. A friend of mine is comin' over with a telescope.”

The Hale-Bopp Comet had been making nightly appearances and was spectacular, even to the naked eye. So we fixed gin-and-tonics, grabbed sweaters and binoculars, and headed for the waterfront with other guests who were drifting toward the boat dock. Two French guys and a couple from South Africa had staked out the deck chairs. An elderly man and woman sat on a swing hanging precariously from beneath a thatch-roofed sunshade. We stood on the concrete jetty huddling against the chill. Waves rippled into the jetty and seagulls swooped into them like kamikazes. The sky turned pink, then purple. Mary Beth's friend arrived with his telescope. Mary Beth wandered onto the scene. Lazlo had disappeared.

Just before pastel hues faded into darkness, Hale-Bopp appeared. Its hazy glow looked like a star covered by thin cotton, a tail trailing at the end. It was amazing through binoculars, which we shared because Mary Beth's friend never invited anyone to look through his telescope. Then everyone talked about where they were from and what they had seen in Florida. Afterwards we dispersed into the night.

After dinner, when we lay in the too-soft bed with the faded sheets, my husband whispered, “This place gives me the creeps.”

The next morning when we drove out Lazlo was talking to some people. He waved. We didn't see Mary Beth.

Driving north, we passed the Caribbean Club. It looked like any other shack by the road. I hardly noticed the sign for the African Queen. The Sheraton stood, imperious, like any other over-priced hotel. The malls along U.S. 1 could have been on any strip in America. There was nothing distinctive about Key Largo.

Except maybe Bogie and Bacall, or Lazlo and Mary Beth.

Elayne Clift, a Vermont Humanities Scholar, is a writer, journalist, and adjunct professor. Her latest book is Achan: A Year of Teaching in Thailand (Bangkok Books, 2007). She is currently at work on her first novel, "Hester’s Daughters," a contemporary, feminist retelling of The Scarlet Letter. She lives in Saxtons River, Vermont.