BROTHERS by Susan A.H. Grace
Henry Noble’s nine-year-old self wears a bright green canvas cap with a half-moon bill that shadows his eyes. His brother Jesse’s eleven-year-old self has a hat made of straw with a rolled-up brim that circles his head like a halo. Long-sleeved shirts and overalls, bare feet, young hands as big and worked and callused as men’s. Till soil. Plant seeds. Harvest crops. At dusk, run wild in the woods – a forbidden still and sips of shine; sickle moon and pinprick stars; wade in the river but race away home when the fingerless ghost comes humming his mournful dirge.
Henry Noble dreams. On the monitor above his head, lurid green numbers flicker – a hundred ten, a hundred thirty-two, a hundred fifty-three and climbing. Down the dimly lit hallway, orthopedic shoes whisk over cracked linoleum. The night attendant braces herself, eases through the door, notes the time: 4:29 a.m. She is young and new and not eager to encounter her first dead body. Luck is with her. The heart rate has already begun to drop. Tubes snake into the old man’s nostrils, delivering oxygen in mechanical, measured streams; a needle taped into his vein doles out peace. This is what it looks like, thinks the girl, if they suck everything out and the bones and skin are left behind. He is hardly bigger than a child. Beyond the window a net of thin clouds captures the setting moon. Her shift, thankfully, is nearly done. Stable at seventy-one, she notes. Then: blood pressure, oximeter, temperature, time. On the cramped nightstand, between lamp and bible, a small easel-backed picture frame catches her eye. In the glow of the nightlight, she sees two young Black men in military dress, no older than she is now but from decades ago. Their uniforms are different but the men are similar. Brothers. Which one, she wonders, lies here?
Jesse, the old man whispers. What was that, Mr. Noble? she says. Mr. Noble? Tenderly she touches his shoulder – it is like holding a door knob. She glances at his numbers one last time before she decides he must be wrapped in a dream.
A thousand coins swirl in the sky. One falls through the clouds. It lands on edge in autumn rain spatter, rolls through winter freeze, turns lazy circles around spring dew, settles on a rising, summer sun. Reba Sue Pretlow. Henry can see Reba Sue’s ten-year-old self – pink as a new rabbit, teeth like little pearls, sun-freckled, sun-dappled – lobbing dirt clods at red-winged blackbirds and hitting not a one. You see that, Jesse Noble? she hollers. I almost got him. Jesse shakes his head and rolls his eyes. Henry grins, utterly distracted – patchwork dress, errant hem, knobby, coltish legs. Jesse calls, Swing it high! Henry responds, Swing it low! Their axes graze the Virginia sky. Split wood, stack wood, fill the stove. Butcher a hog. Pick some greens. On Sunday put on your shoes – clap your hands; stomp your feet. Sing your praises to God.
The night shift clocks out; the day shift clocks in. On a stained Formica counter in the basement kitchen, a cook in a hairnet scoops oats from a vat and brown sugar from a tub. In no time at all oatmeal is ladled and juice is poured. Carts wheel away one two three four into the elevator, down the halls.
In a field of brown grass, Henry’s thirteen-year-old self pries rocks from the body of the earth. Jesse’s fifteen-year-old self gives each rock a name and returns it to its grave. This one’s Levi Harrington. This one’s Sam Hose. This one’s July Perry. On and on. Seven in all today. They cut em off, says Jesse, and passed em out as souvenirs. That’s why he’s fingerless – that ghost. Same with the toes. Henry shudders and averts his eyes. It’s a retold story as monstrous as the lynching itself. For a while they sit in solemn silence. A chevron of geese glides high overhead. From her father’s collard field, Reba Sue Pretlow calls out to Jesse and waves. Henry sees her drop everything and bound their way; and her sunhat, snatched by the wind, cart-wheels across the sky; and her hair made of buttermilk ripples past her waist. Jesse smiles broadly and waves. A shot rings out. The chevron shatters and a single goose falls from heaven. Jesse leans toward Henry, a hand cupped at his mouth, a secret ready to spill. But in that watery interlude when sleep begins to melt and the mind to stir, the dreamscape falters. Wind-shaped words from his brother’s lips sift past his ear like feathers decoupled from a wing.
Morning. Alone. A rented bed, a shoebox room. A window no bigger than an open bible. The eve of his one hundred and fifth birthday – a detail he will not remember until the White woman who changes his sheets reminds him, and the doctor who boomerangs through salutes and tosses out, Well done, Henry, good for you, as the door swings wide and whispers shut. Through the window he can see a granite sky and a faraway hawk riding thermals. Wind bellows. The building creaks. Henry Noble laughs. He pictures a train barreling down the walkway, come to take him home. The clatter-clack of wind-whipped branches could be metal wheels on loose rails. The swoosh of runaway leaves could be plumes of smoke billowing from the stack. Rain, his bones shriek. Gonna spill buckets of rain today. The kind that falls sideways and drags rivers over their banks. Good, thinks Henry and he laughs again.
His fingers find the small box at his side and feel for the center button. He presses it with his thumb and the bullfrog in the bed motor croaks. Used to be when he was young, sleep was the disruption. Couldn’t wait for the day. Soon as he got old, soon as his world got smaller, soon as he wound up here, that truth spun on its heel. When the bed gets to the sitting angle he favors, his thumb relaxes. Silence ensues. Even the wind that could be a train holds its ferocious breath.
On his bedtable he sees a bowl of oatmeal and he laughs. Oatmeal because he’s got no teeth. Oatmeal to keep him regular. What a hoot they’re worried about his bowels. Once when he was in his thirties, at a meeting meant to make great progress in the world, surrounded by friends, acquaintances, and unknowns, someone – he can’t remember who now – asked him why he laughed so much. Don’t know, he’d said. Must be I get it. The man he can no longer recall said, Get what? And that made Henry howl.
The hawk is gone. A passing shadow. The drone of traffic, the purr of oxygen – sounds that soothe. That shutter his eyes. That send faces flashing across the in-between on the way to the gallery of dreams. Room by room, like a hawk riding a thermal. Forms, figures, scenes: some he knows; others, a mystery. In time he lands: Summer of 1932. Still images stir and ripple to life. Here, the Depression rages. Here, despair ravages souls. From the back platform of a special train fitted with microphones and speakers, a candidate called Franklin Delano Roosevelt belts out hope to a bedraggled crowd: I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. The men murmur. They kick the dirt and rub their chins. Listless applause. The wheels begin to turn, the train rolls out, on to the next town, the next weary throng.
Henry is fourteen when his father sends Jesse and the cousins down to the Grange to pick up their allotment of seeds. There is no telling how long they’ll be gone. They will line up behind the building with other Negroes and wait until the White farmers out front have received theirs. It could be an hour; it could be three. While they wait for Jesse, Henry’s father points out the cylinder head on the old Wallis Cub tractor and applies a wrench to the nuts. The tractor barn smells of oil and metal and the ghost of livestock long since sold or eaten. On a pegboard fixed to the back wall are too many tools for Henry to count. Most homemade. Who can afford new?
Henry leans against the drive wheel and watches his father – a lean man with strong hands, muscled forearms, and skin marbled with dozens of scars. Each scar, his father has told him, contains a bitter chapter in a brutish story. Ordinarily, silence runs through his veins. But in his weaker moments, when his tongue will not be corralled, the elder Noble laments out loud. A juggler, he tells Henry, a genius at straddling the line. With a waggle of his fingers he motions Henry over and drops nuts and bolts into his cupped hands. Believe it or not, he says, the Northern Negroes turned out for him. The progressive Republicans, the Jews, the Catholics – they marked his box too. Not us, Henry – we Southern Negroes still got no vote. Off comes the cylinder head. At the work bench, Henry’s father begins to grind the valves. We’ll see, he shouts over the noise, which promises get kept and which’ll be forgotten. Tell you this, if we get anything it’ll be crumbs. They’ll sweep us their crumbs and call it progress. You watch. When he finishes the valves, he goes to the pegboard and selects another tool. Set those nuts and bolts over there, Henry. Let me show you how to get the carbon off the pistons, then you try it.
Federal prohibition ends; Virginia drags her feet. She’s still working out how to regulate, oversee, and supervise the sale and consumption of alcohol. No matter. The still in the woods cooks like a dream and there’s always a jug kept behind. Henry is fifteen, Jesse, seventeen, and they don’t need much to get woozy, to stretch out on the duff after a grueling day, to watch treetops spin riotously. Suddenly, venomously, Jesse shouts: We got to change the world, Henry. Henry laughs. He is nearly cross-eyed looking at two moons shimmyshuffle over a patch of black sky. I mean it. I truly do. Okay, says Henry. Okay. The brothers sober up a little under the weight of that pledge. Harlem, Henry. There’s a place in New York called Harlem. That’s where we should be. Henry spools Harlem through his tipsy brain and says, Just us? Jesse rolls over, a hand cupped at his mouth, and leans in to deliver a secret to his brother’s ear.
Henry, you awake? Henry? The White woman who changes his sheets sits in a chair wedged in the space between his bed and the wall, a mound of clean bedclothes in her lap. Henry drags a hand across the corner of his mouth where gummy spittle has gathered. Oh, hell, he mumbles. Help me up then. How about, she says, we go outside for some air and maybe you could finish your story from Monday. Henry Noble laughs. He has no idea what story he started Monday that needs finishing. He has no idea when Monday was or what today is. What he knows is that it’s going to rain. The woman follows his gaze to the blackening sky and tells him that on second thought it might be too cold. She says, Right here will have to do. Then she says, But first. With a flourish, her hand disappears into the folded linens and out comes a small, cardboard box tied with a yellow silk ribbon. Henry’s eyes brim with confusion. Her laugh is just like Jesse’s, joyful as a sparrow; not at all complicated like Henry’s. It’s a gift, Henry. I can’t come by tomorrow, so I brought it today. She leans over and places the box on his lap. Happy day before your one hundred and fifth birthday.
For a moment they are quiet. The wind in the eaves, the hum of oxygen; and an old woman’s wail far down the hall: Take me home, oh please take me home.
Henry raises his bed another notch and chuckles: A hundred and five? Time’s fun when you’re having flies. She says, Did you just quote Kermit the Frog? She has such a fine laugh, this woman. Nope, he says. Greenie cribbed it from me. He cannot remember the last time anyone gave him a gift. He cannot think what this White woman who showed up one day out of thin air to change his sour sheets could have brought him that he might need. Or want. The touch of her hand at the back of his elbow coaxes his arm; his big hand floats forward; crooked fingers pull the ribbon’s end.
It falls away like petals on a primrose.
In the early morning hours of his seventeenth birthday, Henry Noble wakes with a sensation of doom. He jerks up in the bed he shares with Jesse, but where Jesse should be is cool as glass. The squeal of the woodstove door, the whump of wood shoved in, the clang of the iron poker – and voices: Anger? Agony? He sprints lightfooted to the end of the hall and peers through the dim living room to the lamp-lighted kitchen. A half-dozen Nobles surround his brother who is naked but for his flour-sack undershorts. His left eye is swollen, nearly shut; a gash on his forehead pulses blood down the length of his cheek, his chest, leg, floor. Nothing makes sense. A low keening rises from Jesse’s throat and his body quakes and his head jerks each time Henry’s grandmother dabs at the wound with a rag gone red. Oh Lord Jesus God in heaven, she moans, while Henry’s mother laces her fingers and weeps. Their uncle Jasper, a victim of lightning, cries to the ceiling: L-l-l-lynch us all, b-b-b-burn the place down and l-l-l-lynch us all. And Jasper’s boys, Henry’s cousins, both in their early twenties, curse Jesse, curse Reba Sue, curse their Maker and shake their heads in growing alarm.
Amid this nightmarish spectacle, Henry’s father says nothing. Feet and back bare; yesterday’s workpants thrown on in haste. In the lamplight, his shoulder blades shine with sweat. The stoker of woodstove flames. A twist of the poker, a quick jab. The last remnants of bloody overalls vanish in the belly of fire. The eyes in the back of his head find Henry: Get your brother some clothes. He’s got a train to catch before sunrise.
From the cardboard box, Henry gently extracts his gift – an old photograph peeling around the edges, as though it has never found a home in the sleeve of an album, as though it has been passed, hand to hand, down through the years, cherished. On the bottom right corner, the photographer’s stamp: L&M Studio, Tuskegee, AL – 1942. Henry sees none of this without his glasses. But even without his glasses, he knows the man in the picture.
Jesse’s good eye goes wide. Train? What train? Where am I going? To the cousins, Henry’s father says, Go find that Pretlow boy’s body, haul it as far into the hills as you can, bury it so deep it’ll never be found. To Jesse he says, Alabama. He says, They got a New Deal program. He says, You’ll go plant trees till your arms fall off. After that enlist. Silence gathers and falls like ashes. Then: Be best if you don’t find your way back here.
The gift rests in Henry’s palm. It’s Jesse all right. And it strikes Henry just then that his brother seems to be dressed in the same service uniform as the picture on his nightstand, the picture from Italy, 1944, the Negro section on the American base.
Jesse? Henry? Oh Lord, look at you. Got myself into the Tuskegee Army Air Corps, Jesse says, the 332nd Fighter Group. Henry laughs and claps his brother on the back. A pilot? Since when do they let the Negroes fly the planes? Says he’s proud of him, admits he’s support staff with the 370th, just a driver running a deuce-and-a-half loaded with supplies to the front lines or wherever they’re needed. That sounds about right, brother – you save lives, I end them. Smile, flash, click. They hug fiercely. They promise to keep in touch, to reunite after all these years. Not now, though. Back home. After the war. Salute. Salute.
Outside the clouds split open and spill rain. Thunder cracks like artillery. The woman retrieves Henry’s glasses and places them on his face. Now he can see clearly – Jesse’s crooked grin, dark eyes filled with promise, mottled scar across his forehead like a retold story. And someone else? Henry draws the photograph closer. He examines it with parted lips and creased brow. A young White woman. Pink as a new rabbit, sun-freckled, sun-dappled. And in her arms is a blanket. And in the blanket, a tiny baby. Henry can hardly breathe.
All week he has been bump bump bumping along on the old Wallis Cub tractor, acres yet to go. They cannot afford the new FergusonBrown, one with hydraulics and a three-point hitch. Instead, at the end of each row, it is up to Henry to get off the Cub, raise up his three-furrow plow, climb back on, make the turn, get off again, drop the plow back in the soil and proceed down the next row. The year his father sent Jesse away, he fashioned a hoisting contraption to make the job easier; it is still tedious. The engine growls; the blades rattle. Bump bump bump. Abutting this field is another – a sea of cornstalks ready for harvest. He reaches the end of his row. The pale green light of the cornfield shimmers. Stalks sway; leaves rustle. As though two young brothers hide, chase, eat raw corn until their bellies groan. An echo of laughter light as mist. In his chest an ember smolders and the searing pain of Jesse’s absence flares. He gets off the tractor, lifts the plow, and like a wraith Reba Sue Pretlow steps out of the corn. A stopped heart; a seized breath. It is her and not her. This version is taller. Thinner. Childhood features all but gone. In her hair, flutter strands of corn silk.
You’re all grown up, Henry. Somewhere, I suppose Jesse is too.
At the sound of her voice the years turn to quicksand.
Do you think of him?
All the time, he whispers.
Do you miss him?
All the time.
They fall quiet. Rooted to the ground. No wind. No crows. Only a single white butterfly swims wide circles in the morning light between them. He wants to tell her of the hole in his soul, that it will never heal, that she is to blame. He is glad just then that he says none of this.
They believe, she confides, that my brother ran away with an Indian woman. They say Jesse’s somewhere planting trees. They never put the two together. Where is he, Henry? Not here in Virginia.
It’s been such a while. I don’t. I mean I doubt –
Please. Oh please tell me.
It is as though every molecule of oxygen has left the world. Never breathe a word, Henry, not a word. The pooling in her eyes; her quivering lip. His gaze falls to his feet, to the freshly cut clumps with upended green grass now dying by the blade of his plow.
Alabama, he breathes.
The rattling stalks. The gentle ticking of the leaves. Only corn now. Corn and the rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains quiet as a graveyard.
Jagged light scorches the sky. The lamp on his nightstand flickers, dims, restores. Words fall from his lips like stones: This baby? The White woman who changes his sheets and pries stories from his lips takes his hand. Jesse’s daughter, she smiles. My grandmother.
Hours later Henry lies awake on clean sheets. He has refused dinner, swallowed his pills, assured the young attendant he does not want his bed lowered just yet – there are things to think about. How long has it been since he has had such a bone as this to chew on? Years? Decades? Never? The wall clock insists it is minutes before midnight. On the television a man in a yellow rain slicker stands in front of the Food Lion and reports on the storm. Henry laughs. Outside his window the storm reports on itself. You left off, she’d said, with a flood that almost cost the farm. Their hands still clasped and him nodding, I remember now, I remember. Everything aches. He can feel the rumble of an eighteen-wheeler trudge past on the highway; then it is gone. Rain clatters. Wind gusts. Relentless.
When the Rapidan River climbs her banks and sweeps over farms along the old state route, Henry is in his seventh year. He stands on a berm and watches his father survey the destruction. Tin-colored air smells of sour soil and reeks of dead fish stranded in barns, on roads, under porches. Up ahead Jesse is transfixed by a rope of flesh dangling from the beak of a turkey vulture. In the middle of the field, his father paces, mud to his calves, arms limp. Lost, he cries, and waves of fear roll off him, crippling, caustic. In Henry’s young heart, a dark glee coils: Maybe now we can move to town. Just then he spies movement, a glancing prism. He crouches. In a puddle no bigger than a dinner plate, a young trout looks at him through its startled, glassy eye. Its gills open and close in desperate pulses. Minutes later it is still.
Wednesday mornings they lug baskets to town. Get off the walkway, their mother scolds, and they leap into the street until the White folks pass. A rap at the back door of a lovely brick home. The next back door. The next. Fresh laundry exchanged for soiled. Their mother takes what’s offered. If not money – a bag of buttons, a glass bird, a piece of chocolate cake. By the time they finish supper, the cake is a sticky mess. Henry’s grandmother goes first. When it gets to Jesse, he drops his fork and runs. Henry’s mouth waters; tears cloud his eyes. All day he has dreamt of this cake. He sets his fork with Jesse’s and follows his brother out to the woods, the still, the pledge. We got to change the world, Henry
In soft lamplight, at the kitchen table, each evening before bed, they learn to read. Their mother waves a wooden spoon and whaps them on the shoulder if they bungle a word. Henry traces his finger along a verse in Isaiah and labors, But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint. Now Jesse, says their mother, spoon hovering and ready. But Jesse’s voice is sure and steady, resonant, musical in Psalms. They that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of mine head: they that would destroy me, being mine enemies wrongfully, are mighty: then I restored that which I took not away.
Humid nights they sleep on the porch. They drowse on cots and listen to a ruffed grouse drum his wings five miles deep in the woods. Insects chirr. The moon winks between passing clouds. Henry stirs from a dim sleep to the sound of feathery footfalls and the tender laugh of a girl. From the edge of the porch, he tracks their silhouettes until they are swallowed by shadows. Hours past midnight: a whiff of river grass and sweat, the whisper of a rustling cot. It feels as though a roving devil has slowed and turned its face in their direction.
That was a couple years before Alabama, he had told her. And my remembrance after Alabama is like broken glass. But then the war arrived. If we could prove our worth overseas, wouldn’t things change for us here? I knew Jesse would sign on. For me it was as much to escape the farm as anything else.
I forbid it, says his father. But Henry is twenty-three and has lied to the White recruiter. No he is not the last of his line. Yes he has six younger brothers at home right now. They examine his eyes, his teeth, his feet. They draw blood. Can he read? Write? Yes, yes. Exams are taken and graded. Papers stamped – Colored. Twenty hours later he boards a Jim Crow rail car with a hundred other Negroes and watches the Blue Ridge Mountains shrink to nothing.
The horror. White, Black, Brown. When covered with blood, men are men. Limbs with no bodies, bodies with no heads, faces erased, burned, unrecognizable. Henry drives his truck from the base to the front lines to the base to the front lines, and each morning at reveille, this is in his mouth: Lord, bring me back alive, dead if I’m maimed.
May 1945. Henry comes home on a Liberty ship and boards a Jim Crow rail car with ninety-one other Negroes. Nothing has changed. Don’t wear your uniform, someone says, they’ll tear it off you. And don’t dare swim in the public pool, says someone else. Don’t drink from the White only fountain or try to eat in restaurants or sit anywhere but the balcony or in the back or outside in the alley. Vote? snarls the conductor. Who do you think you are? The victory overseas does not equate to a victory at home. Nothing has changed. Not a goddamn thing has changed.
Plow, sow, harvest, church. Seasons progress in a ceaseless spectacle of color and weather and memory. Sixteen hours a day, sometimes eighteen – the farm is a kind of hell. On her deathbed, his grandmother says, Don’t cry, Henry. Living is the hard part. Death is easy: Claim your sins, forget your sorrows, count your blessings. Welcome to the hereafter.
He is angry at Jesse. Jesse the pilot. The maker of pledges. Jesse who has not contacted him. Who has not reunited with him. Who is probably in Harlem or Chicago or DC doing important things with important people – We got to change the world, Henry – while Henry is left behind, laboring miserably in his father’s fields. After months of writing the wrong letter to the wrong people, asking about Jesse Isaiah Noble of the Tuskegee Air Corps, 332nd Fighter Group, USAAF, and receiving not a word, Henry, at last, mails the right letter to the right person and two weeks later his world goes dark.
With the heels of his hands he wrings tears from his eyes. He slips on his glasses to find hardly any time has passed. Three minutes to midnight. He’d love to press the button, ask the young attendant to up the morphine. But as it is he is having trouble breathing and he knows she’ll make a fuss. He clicks off the TV. The night pours in through the window. Sins, sorrows, blessings. Fallen leaves scattered across the floor.
Years pass. A thousand times he has read the Missing Aircrew Report and the We regret to inform you letter until two words swim off the pages and lodge themselves onto the underside of his eyelids: REMAINS UNRECOVERED. On a Sunday afternoon, in his thirtyfourth year, he sits in a field of brown grass. He sets the report and the letter on fire and waits for the ashes to settle. He pries a rock from the body of the earth, gives it a name, returns it to its grave. This one’s Jesse Noble.
Plow, sow, harvest, church. Sometimes a jook in the back of nowhere, Delta Blues, a hand of cards. Sometimes a lover. Sometimes two. An able-bodied man, a crippled soul. Plow, sow, harvest, church. Plow, sow, harvest, church.
The storm surged and lulled. The afternoon stretched. At some point she had moved to the edge of his bed and reclaimed his hand. All those years, he had said. Fallow. I don’t know why I stayed. Guilt? Fear? A thousand times I packed a bag and a thousand times I emptied it. Jesse had been dead about ten years. I hadn’t hit forty yet, but I could smell it coming. And then in 1955 a terrible thing happened. It was August . . .
A fourteen-year-old boy leaves Chicago for Money, Mississippi, and comes home to his mother in a pine box. The world rocks on its axis. Henry feels as if someone has dropped a live grenade in his lap. No bag, no goodbye, he shakes the dust off his feet. In Chicago he weeps over the open casket, the brutalized lamb, a sight more horrific than any in the war. At the funeral he bows his head. At the gate he remembers a forgotten pledge.
In Ohio every odd job means money for food; money to send home to his father. In New York writers, singers, painters, philosophers, great and powerful activists – Muslim and Christian, Marxist and Progressive, militant and peaceful – baptize him into the struggle. In DC, his first demonstration, The Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, he learns of a ruling called Brown v. Board of Education. He is one of thirty thousand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. One of a million to hear the first national address by Martin Luther King, Jr.
It takes him four tries to get into law school. He is the oldest student they have. Are you saying, he had challenged the Admissions Committee, I’m too old to change the world?
Work, school, protest, church. He volunteers with others to sit at lunch counters and wait respectfully to be harassed, beaten, jailed or all three. In time they are served.
In Alabama a bus is burned. Henry cries Count me in. When the jails are near bursting, Parchman makes room to Break their spirits, not their bones. But the Freedom Riders do not break, and at last the Interstate Commerce Commission does. Every hateful sign comes down. Yet hate stubbornly persists. In a cell on death row, next to a “convicted murderer,” something akin to a crisis in faith pierces Henry’s soul: no march, no sit-in, no demonstration, will ever change the heart of a racist. No sir, says the “murderer,” heart-changing is for God and time. Laws, justice, equality – do that. And when you get to lawyering, think of the fair trial I never got. The one that a million others won’t get. In forty-one days Henry is released. In seven months the “murderer” suicides. Upon his grave Henry lays seashells, and around the shells he plants rows of periwinkle. I will. I will.
And I did, he whispers. Trials – more won than lost. Overturned death row convictions – more than expected but never enough. A thousand Black faces whorl through his mind. A thousand mothers. Alone, pain migrating through his bones, a frenzied storm, and a clock that says a minute to midnight, Henry Jeremiah Nobel sighs.
At an NAACP convention, his law professor makes introductions. 93 Merle McCurdy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy. A pleasure. A pleasure. Later a man called Robert L. Carter drops a warm hand on Henry’s shoulder. When you graduate, get in touch, hear?
In Birmingham he attends sit-ins and meetings and boycotts designed to undermine Jim Crow. He is slammed with a high-pressure fire hose and attacked by police dogs. Like everyone else, weeks later – King in a cell penning Letter from Birmingham Jail – Henry goes back for more. The world looks on. In sorrow. In outrage. That’s me, he tells his current lover. That leg with the dog hanging off it. The effect of images broadcast nationwide galvanizes the world.
The Lincoln Memorial – two hundred fifty thousand souls March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and listen with ardent hope to the noble, heartfelt I Have a Dream. Tears stream. The applause is deafening. Oh Jesse.
When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is signed, he is eating pie where he once held a sit-in.
One Bloody Sunday, Henry is not in church. He is on a fifty-mile march from Selma to Montgomery to protest the gunning down of Jimmie Lee Jackson, ongoing police brutality, and the outrageous violations of civil rights. Mere blocks from the start, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they are gassed, trampled by horses, beaten unconscious, whipped, hospitalized. The courts, the National Guard, the President get involved. Two weeks later they march unmolested those fifty miles, twenty-five thousand strong. On the steps of the capital Dr. King calls out, How Long, Not Long.
Voting Rights Act of 1965: What is he doing? Studying the 15th Amendment for class.
It takes seven years to graduate. Cap and gown. Magna Cum Laude. The woman he lives with is already a lawyer. She helps him study for the bar. She is on a first-name basis with Stokely, Bobby, Huey – and Malcolm before he was assassinated. It is a Long Hot Summer. Race riots erupt all across America. Break time, she says and they head for Detroit. Tear gas, bullets, bombs in bottles. She is armed with a .45 caliber semiautomatic. He is armed with a pledge. In the war zone they get separated; tanks roll in. He prays she is not among the dead. Weeks later a letter arrives: Dear Henry, ship my things to this address. It is an apartment in Los Angeles. I’m glad you are alive, he pens. On a cold Tuesday in September he passes the bar. I will, he assures his mother and father, never give up.
In a crowded bar, under a veil of smoke, he drops change in a jar on the piano; his eyes meet hers as her fingers walk the keys and she cries, Strange Fruit, blood on the leaves in a voice that drips with blood. He walks out into the night and sees the road is paved with bodies. Centuries of lynchings, decades of executions. Stolen treasure. Funerals, flowers, tears.
Another surge. Another lull. She had kissed his hand and then his cheek. The photograph, she left on his lap.
Outside his window no bigger than a bible, silence has fallen. Sins claimed, sorrows forgotten, blessings counted. He can hear the hiss of oxygen, the drip of the IV. Somewhere far away, church bells ring midnight and all three hands on his clock point up. Clouds part for a sliver of moonlight and shadows crowd the room. I kept the pledge, he murmurs. Jesse smiles. Did you know you have a greatgranddaughter? And I have a great-grandniece? From miles away, he can hear orthopedic shoes on cracked linoleum racing down the hall. Jesse, he whispers.
Susan A.H. Grace’s work has appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, Fiction International, and Orca Literary Journal.
FROM PLAY DEAD by Winter Grasso
THREE TIMES
I am a waitress. Sometimes on the drive home from work I want to stop at the liquor store by my house and get a six-pack of cheap beer and drink it on my porch. It is an appropriate time of day and a normal thing to do. I remind myself that I cannot do this because when I drink I get raped. I do not drink at all anymore, not because I have a problem but because I do not know exactly how much alcohol it takes for a man to decide that he will rape me that night and no one else seems to know either. Not that it matters necessarily. I have been raped drunk and tipsy and dead sober. But I miss the stupid complicated drinks. Just ordering them. Long Island Iced Teas taste like rape. Tequila Diet Cokes in tall glasses taste like rape.
Sometimes I think about how hard it will be to love. I will not ever again be a simple woman with whom love is easy. No one will write a January Wedding about me. It will be pulling teeth.
You do not get to be a simple woman when you are raped three times before you have turned twenty-two, and two of them by people who have claimed to love you. Who you really thought loved you. If you love me you could still rape me is what I have learned. The sex can be not rape the first hundred times and then the next time it is rape is what I have learned. I am a person who wants badly to forgive but knows nothing about what is right to forgive (and forgives anyway) (and forgives without an apology).
Some therapists will tell you there is another person living inside of you: a child who can be made pure again. You’ve just got to open the wounds back up and clean them out and hope to heal the right way this time and then your current self and the child, who is you, will come together again and you will finally be the Whole. That is what some will tell you. When things don’t happen to the child of you it is much different. There is no other person living inside of me, no distance to x, there is only my orange heart, with the mesocarp so thin that the acid seeps through and scorches the earth of my insides. The promise and the nature of rotting happens quickly, and then there are the fruit flies and this new heart feels nothing like a metaphor.
To love me you will have to consider your touch. How from behind you could be B**** or C**** or (I didn’t catch his name) for all I know. How the line between good touch and bad touch has blurred together in some ways and is sometimes the same thing or just the prelude.
To love me you will have to know the gun is always hot. That I am scared of you in the animal way of knowing you can hold me down, trick me, love me.
When I am at the bank or the pharmacy (or any public place where there is not much to distract you while you stand in line) and there are only men around me I think about my safe bets:
My dad My brother Wyley John
And then I think, people get raped by their dads and their brothers and their Wyleys and Johns and I assume they did not see it coming either.
Some people say it is good to suffer. But you get to a point where you don’t want to be strong if it means this. I don’t want it if I have to get raped for it. I know that what doesn’t kill me does not actually make me stronger because I am becoming very weak to it all. I want to go on a walk at night, how about that? I want to cry until I die. I don’t want to learn how to use a gun or how to shatter a kneecap. I don’t want to run through the dark with eyeball under my fingernails. I don’t even want to go on the walk at night if it means I may only consider guns and kneecaps and eyeballs the whole time.
I am twenty-two and have been raped three times. I think How many more times will this happen to me in my life if it has happened three times in twenty-two years? I think in formulas and quotients and algorithms. I think nine times is what the math says.
BEAU
Beau is six-foot-four and pretentious for a firefighter, though the hollowness of the display is evident. He is naturally slim but getting older and slower and has not allowed himself to accept this yet, so he has a first trimester beer gut and his body sort of resembles a malnourished child from a third world country but much taller and white of course. I imagine someone filling his stomach with air using a bike pump. He is only in town for three days. About an hour before, we sat on a rock at the cell towers, and he told me how his parents are writers for The New York Times culture section. Now, suddenly, we are in my room, and he holds himself over me awkwardly, balancing on one elbow that trembles and sinks into the mattress, the other arm precariously arched over my shoulder, not touching me, though I don’t believe this is intentional. It is just ungrace. Actually, the only part of him that is touching me is his huge (huge) erection, which is pressed into my thigh. So then I know where this unearned ostentatiousness comes from: his only real offering locked away like that day in and day out.
With a breath that is American Spirits and lunch meat and somehow primally sexy, he whispers from too far away to constitute whispering,
“Don’t worry, I won’t try anything. I know you’re not the kind of girl that fucks on the first date.”
This is less sexy. I have to hold back a laugh. Because I am the kind of girl who fucks on the first date. I know the contract I sign. Really, I am not any kind of girl except a weak one. Too tired for the theatrics of “no.”
This thought distracts me, and I get all forlorn about it inside my head, so I don’t even notice that he has moved down my body, on his knees at the edge of the bed. I don’t really care to engage with this current condition of reality either, so I continue my internal social critiques but with a polite alertness and a touch of drama. I manage a calculated series of gross porny whines, though my body doesn’t move at all. I fake it, not well. I give just enough, not more.
Isn’t it strange how a man will continue to prod pleasure into you as you stare at the ceiling like there is a very serious question written on it? Instead of looking at the question too? He looks up at me complacently, like a shrug but with the eyes, caresses my arm like a rapist (weird, not violent.) I think there is probably some rape in him, something that knows it will disregard certain pleas in ode to his enormous want. He tells me he usually doesn’t do that because one time a girl gave him throat gonorrhea and he should have known by the smell. So, he must really like me. He is unduly sweaty for the labor performed, which agitates me for some reason. I bet he will leave a stain. I fall asleep facing away from him thinking about washing my sheets using the “Heavy Duty” preset, instead of my usual “EcoWash.”
The next day, I promise to mail him a copy of a Joan Didion book I like, which I never do. I drop him at the college dorms where his crew is staying, and he waves me off like a girl. I delete his number as I drive away.
“Three Times” and “Beau” are excerpted from Play Dead, Winter Grasso’s memoir in progress. This is her first publication.
POEMS
THE FABULOUS SZIGETIS by Ira Sadoff
The Fabulous Szigetis play the violin for a living. In every great city, on every boulevard that sidles up to great rivers, in cities with thriving markets of fruits and flowers, in tiny wine shops where obscure Dolcetto d’Albas are savored, you won’t find a single Szigeti. The Szigetis lock themselves in their hotel rooms to practice a Stravinsky melody, if you can call it a melody. You could say they are blessed with a calling, a mission. Oh yes, they are driven, as we sometimes wish we were driven. And their music is so metrical, uplifting, transcendent, it crowds out your dark thoughts, the crudest of your desires, your many shaggy disappointments.
Some might find an entire family playing violins exotic, ethereal, distressing. And we can imagine what disdain discarded Szigetis must suffer. The untalented Szigeti, the rebellious Szigeti, the disabled Szigeti, Szigetis who ring doorbells as Seventh-day Adventists. And the shame for any one of them if a wrong note is played, for then they must proceed as if their performance still had its halo around it.
They might remind a few of Josef Szigeti, the patriarch who fiddled through the last century. But these Szigetis have no ancestors, no attachments: they don’t come from Budapest, they never knew Bartok, they never coughed up blood in a Swiss sanitarium. No Nazis ever chased them to southern California. No, these Szigetis serve no god, savor no recollections: they are unscathed and unwearied.
Whereas we of the laundromat and stacks of paper work, we who open our hearts so foolishly and so often, who are surrounded by car horns, children shrieking, and a few pecking sparrows under the park bench, we who only dream of becoming Szigetis, wouldn’t we miss stumbling upon a blooming amaryllis in a neighbor’s window, attending the funeral of our beloved uncle Phil, falling in love with the wrong person?
Ira Sadoff is the author of the novel Uncoupling (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1982), many uncollected stories, and eight collections of poems, most recently Country Living (Alice James, 2020). His poems have appeared widely in magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry, Field, The Paris Review, Iowa Review, and American Poetry Review.
RIVER IS ANOTHER WORD FOR PRAYER by Triin Paja
a lynx’s underbelly grows ragged
crossing a field at dawn
when the flora is quarter dew
and wild strawberries grow
where a forest was cut,
as if the earth wants to comfort us.
light falls on hay bales.
I want to look at the light and not speak.
now a line of geese sails above,
known only by sound
for they are so far,
small like eyelashes taken from death.
the river is one field away.
I ask you, as from a beloved,
to come to the river, a place that does not need
to be protected from you,
for you are a beloved
and the river is another word for prayer.
I want us to look at the river and not speak.
now the cranes howl, widening the sky,
and the moon, a simple egg,
lowers into an empty stork nest.
there is no visible cup of life to drink from –
there are wings, wings.
Triin Paja is the author of three collections of poetry in Estonian and a chapbook in English, Sleeping in a Field (Wolfson Press, 2025). Her poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Thrush, Rattle, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.
PRIMORDIAL by Charlotte Pence
Your first memory is of water
colors. A failed painting.
The red couldn’t be stopped.
The yellow wanted
the blue. And the water
softened the paper into
a hole.
You learned early:
There is never a single cause
for why things go wrong.
Why wouldn’t you fear
the thunder, the night,
the ocean?
After all, a tiny mosquito
is deadlier than a great white.
There exists a jellyfish
that is also a box
and more painful than fangs.
The ways of ruin are everywhere.
When a breakage occurs – a dam
or levee – you notice
how the water,
once contained and named
into assured shapes onto maps,
becomes nameless, amorphous
as it grows. Becomes multiple
names of who it killed. How many.
You cannot paint this,
then or now, so you swirl the water
a hurricane brown. No pure color.
No single cause.
There is, though,
your first memory, fat
as the paintbrush, wanting to be
dipped into the pan of dried color,
ready for transfiguration.
Charlotte Pence is the author of two collections of poems from Black Lawrence Press, Many Small Fires (2015) and Code (2020), and two chapbooks. Her work has appeared in Epoch, Harvard Review, North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry.
LUNA by John Bargowski
In his room looking up
the names of bugs we’d collected
with our long-handled net
in the fields along Ravine Road,
my friend told me about a sister
he wasn’t allowed to talk about.
We’d caught a jar full that day,
all still alive, trying to climb
the glass sides, or flapping wings
against the hole-punched lid
for more air and light as we flipped
through his field guide.
She lived with a bunch of other kids
in a hospital on an island
they crossed a bridge to get to
on Sundays, he whispered, and once,
as they walked through the gate
back to their car he saw
something he’d never seen before
under a floodlight clinging
to the brick wall that surrounded
the grounds, a beauty he wanted
to bring home to show me,
with long pale wings
tinted the color of moonlight
and a fringe of gold powder
that rubbed off onto his palms
when he cupped his hands
and tried to capture it
before it flew away.
John Bargowski is the author of Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway (Bordighere, 2012) and American Chestnut (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Poetry, and Ploughshares.
THE ROUTINE by Michael Mark
I lift what’s left
of the bantam weight champ.
Air Corps, Korea, 1949. Once
from the kitchen linoleum, once
slumping off the couch next to me – once
eyes closed holding the bath towel bar
while the glaucoma drops sink in.
Champ, I call him, and he says,
Of what? and I say, Falling
and he says, Undefeated.
It’s a routine.
Sometimes, when I get him somewhat
steady, we dance. Make light
of his uncharted dips, sags, collapses –
his 96-pound body obeying
malicious gravity.
I am flying back home.
Tomorrow.
Early.
He knows
he can’t come. You wouldn’t want me to,
he said once, when I asked. I didn’t fight.
He can still spot a weak feint. I sweep
his floors, vacuum the carpet’s don’t-ask
where-those-came-from stains, dry
and stack the dishes, dust, leave.
They’ll just keep knocking me down
anyway, he’ll say out of nowhere, reliving
the bouts, each round, blow
after blow. The numbing. His heart
shouting, No! Stay on your feet!
somewhere between falling and dreaming.
Michael Mark is the author of the chapbook Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet (The Rattle Foundation, 2022). His poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Ploughshares, The Sun, 32 Poems, and Verse Daily.
A THEORY OF PERSONAL IDENTITY by Owen McLeod
It’s been one year since my mother
was uploaded to the cloud. According
to John Locke, we’re not material bodies
or immaterial souls, but unified streams
of consciousness, which would also mean
I didn’t actually get a new phone last week
if my phone isn’t a physical object but a set
of photos, videos, texts, songs, and apps
that simply migrated to this new device –
sort of like Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
If we preserve her data, maybe my mother
can migrate to a new device. My father
still charges her phone once a week. She
was attached to that phone, particularly
toward the end when she couldn’t garden,
needlepoint, do crossword puzzles, walk,
or speak – but she could text, more or less,
even if it was a just a handful of basic emojis.
Mostly smileys and hearts, but at some point
she shifted to praying hands only. We knew
what she was saying: I want to be uploaded.
Hospice came in, took care of all that,
and her body went out in a bag. My new
device takes amazing pics. I shot some
this morning while walking in the woods
and sent them to my mother’s phone.
She loved walking in the woods, especially
in the snow, so I used an app that adds
realistic-looking snowfall to pics. I’m not
a fool. I know the little hearts attached
to those pics are from my dad. I know
my mother is never coming back.
I just wish it had been real snow.
Owen McLeod is author of the poetry collections Dream Kitchen (University of North Texas Press, 2019) and Before After (Saturnalia, 2023). His poems have appeared in Field, Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, The Missouri Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review.
DEPARTMENT STORE ESCALATOR by Jessica Greenbaum
After Szymborska’s “Puddle”
I remember that childhood fear well.
If I stepped on the down escalator
which bowed outward over thin air between floors
to a destination I couldn’t see at my height
and, sadly, would never reach
the moving teeth would casually drop me into space
as it had almost done each time before
while mannequins stood blank-faced in their checked raincoats
a clerk fussed with a clothes rack
gay shoppers passed me rising, looking upward, without a care
this time no different: the tug of my mother’s hand
again, the most shocking.
Jessica Greenbaum is the author of three poetry collections: Inventing Difficulty (Silverfish Review Press, 1998); The Two Yvonnes (Princeton University Press, 2012); and Spilled and Gone (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, Plume, The Paris Review, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, and The Best American Poetry.
CARDS by Farah Peterson
It’s all I can do to
keep my peace when
my son announces
he has a good hand I wince
when he lets cards
tip as, well
as carelessly as a child
unschooled
of course I look
I can’t help that
I’m just passing an evening
the way he asked and
don’t I win meekly, with none of that
slapping down hilarity
or even the quiet, cruel collection
with one knuckle snap and a half smile
none of the good old fun that
went with my learning to
keep cards close and
expect dissembling
but the result is, all I have for him
is a muzzled company
and all of the ghosts
they crowd me and crowd me
Farah Peterson’s poetry has appeared in The Florida Review, Rattle, and Salamander.
LEAP OF FAITH by Richard Spilman
The new age descends like an axe.
There has come a revolution:
rooted things have learned to run,
though the crackling of underbrush
betrays their flight and the blade
descends where the rustling ends.
And you, neither new nor old,
balance at cliff’s edge, future
awash in the whitecaps below.
What lies there may be scree
or rapids or just a soft breech into
the slipstream of the imminent,
but it’s an answer, a way not
so much out as into a now
whose chaos is yours by choice.
You could make your way back,
but to what? Ruin and rubble,
and the stale taste of fear.
Instead, you make a steeple
of your raised hands, tense
and leap. It’s death one way
or another, drowning or rising
to shake your hair and follow
the current wherever it goes.
Richard Spilman is the author of the poetry collection In the Night Speaking (Sacramento Poetry Center Press, 2009); two chapbooks, Suspension (New American Press, 2006) and Dig (Kelsay Books, 2023); and two story collections, Hot Fudge (Poseidon Press, 1990) and The Estate Sale (Texas Review Press, 2011).
ALLEGIANCE by Elizabeth Bradfield
Each morning before light, in
season, Billy’s F-150 fires
up, grumbles in his drive,
heads for the pier. I hear it
through the small window above
my bed, and when I’m out,
I watch for him – Billy at the Race,
Billy off the Peaked Hills, Billy steaming
home around the point. Billy. Thick
glasses, accent, hands, wizard
of fiberglass and steam box, torch
and epoxy, whose loft holds all
the tools, any clamp or nail you’d
need, any saw or grinder. Who
coaches us as we fix our skiff in his
garage and doesn’t laugh
in a mean way when we
fuck up. How’s my favorite
whale hugger? calls Billy
as I drive my Prius past his house.
We call him The Boat Fairy. To his face.
He and his wife call us The Girls. We
avoid politics beyond weather
and fish, which we get into
big time, elbows out windows,
idling. We want to make him
a T-shirt, a badge, a sticker
for his truck. We tell him so. Listen:
there are silences between us. We
all know what whispers there. It’s ok
to not speak them here.
Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of seven books, including Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2008); Toward Antarctica (Boreal Books/Red Hen Press, 2019); and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry (Mountaineers Books, 2023). She is a contributing editor to Alaska Quarterly Review.
HER SHAME by John Morgan
Mist rolls above the river like a second river
and the piles of snow darken as she drives
toward town and sees an old woman,
dressed in a light vest and no parka, slumped
on the metal railing where the road winds down.
Thinking that the woman might be lost,
maybe senile, she pulls over, opens
the window, and says, “Do you need help?”
But as the woman stands she sees instead
that it’s a man. Short, with shaggy hair
and a stubble beard, he comes to the window
and says, “I’m looking for a ride to town.”
In these rough times it’s her rule
never to pick up strangers, so she says,
“Oh, sorry, I’m not going there just now,”
and pulls away, confused at how
her good intentions went awry,
and at the bottom of the hill
shame overtakes her like a massive truck
looming in the rearview mirror as night comes on.
John Morgan is the author of a collection of essays and eight poetry collections, most recently The Hungers of the World: New and Later Collected Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2023). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, and Kenyon Review.
NEAR ESTER, ALASKA by Jane Lott
Just under the sternum
there are so many words
for love I discovered
bitter-sweet
in the dictionary
resting on her knee
a solid sense of self
so many words for sea
so many words for bear.
But nowhere a word
for that time
when all that was left of daylight
lay pink and purple across the snow.
Jane Lott’s work has appeared in The Los Angeles Quarterly, Poetry Flash, Sonoma Magazine, and in the anthology Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace edited by Maxine Hong Kingston.
OBATA AT TENAYA PEAK by Ben Gucciardi
A whole year looking for the mountain
inside the mountain
before he tried to paint it.
And even then,
only when the light
off the granite
was tangible,
and with a brush made of mink
whiskers, the line
so fine it was hardly visible.
Ben Gucciardi is the author of West Portal (University of Utah Press, 2021). He is also the author of the chapbooks I Ask My Sister’s Ghost (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2020) and Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage (Quarterly West, 2021). His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, AGNI, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Poetry.
POTTED MAPLES by D.S. Waldman
The moon is a bone the shape of a hole.
She tries explaining this to you –
Boxes, on the ground, of her mother’s things,
a window open
in another part of the house.
Her legs are up the wall.
You are someone, then she sets her glass of water
on the floor,
and you are someone else – breath
let out the nose,
ghost pipe in the wall.
One is red with light bark, the other
a shade, entirely, of what you want to call maroon.
They take water on Sundays.
And in a month or two you’ll need
to put them in the ground.
D.S. Waldman’s poems have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Poetry Society of America, Narrative, and Copper Nickel.
YELLOWJACKET TRAP ATTRACTANT by Robert Wrigley
You know a sliver of lamb bone with a bit of gristle’s
way better than the cloying sweet commercial stuff
dribbled on a cotton ball. After half a day
the transparent trap’s so full the bastards have to eat their own
to make room for themselves in the death chamber.
May San Francesco and Father Walt forgive you,
but you relish what looks like yellowjacket panic.
From the porch’s other end the engine hum of them dying.
You take a seat and watch them crawl in legions
through the six bottom holes none ever leaves by.
Nor bonhomie among them anywhere. Here’s one
crawling round and round the crowded cylinder,
hauling another’s head and fighting off
the fellows that would seize it. Meanwhile,
among the dead, tiny nuggets, desiccate gristles of lamb.
Upon your bare toes they light and commence
to chiseling away a divot of flesh, having it half
piranhaed off before you feel their sawtooth razory jaws.
Yes, they feed on certain destructive fruit moths
and flies, and they seem almost brilliantly rugged, as they must be.
But eventually you have to empty the traps and rebait,
and always a few have miraculously survived
among hundreds of cadavers – does that surprise you?
Such a fierce life force in carrion eaters. May it never end.
The morning’s dumped survivors, I crush beneath a boot.
Robert Wrigley is the author of twelve collections of poems, including Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010); Anatomy of Melancholy & Other Poems (Penguin, 2013); The True Account of Myself as a Bird (Penguin, 2022); and a collection of essays, Nemerov’s Door (Tupelo Press, 2021).
ONE OF THE LAND MINE BANDS by John Willson
Ta Prohm Temple, Siem Reap, Cambodia
Named for its likeness to a crocodile’s head,
the zither’s hollow body rested
on two cut sections from a tree trunk.
The fingers of the player’s left hand
pressed ivory frets—
the crocodile’s teeth.
Fronting the band, a low blue table,
a brass bowl holding currency,
a tray with a sign, CD 10$:
at home, I listen to the sweet music,
hand cymbals, gongs, bamboo reeds,
the xylophone’s wood keys, struck brightly.
They performed beside the straight wide path
toward the temple where strangler vines
clutched blocks of stone,
pulled down ancient columns.
Below his knee, the crocodile player’s
left leg was plastic, hollow.
One of his bandmates sawed an upright
fiddle, its body a coconut shell.
He gripped the bow
in the fold between forearm and bicep.
All seven players missed limbs or their sight.
In this photo, blue shade cast by a tarp
suspends them between one chord
and the next,
like the moment each stepped
on something planted that bloomed.
John Willson is the author of the poetry collection Call This Room a Station (MoonPath Press, 2020). His poems have also appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Kyoto Journal, Northwest Review, Notre Dame Review, Sycamore Review, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, and Terrain.org.
SONG OF A STORYTELLER by Qag˙g˙un Chelsey Zibell
A man will journey the river
in a kayak, armed with magic akutuq1 mother made,
looking for uncle and answers, coming out
of strange happenings in order
for his human way of knowing to understand
that uncle’s bones are planted in the tundra.
He will be seduced by a woman with teeth gnashing between
her legs
and will not be consumed.
He will be pursued by a foolish man made of copper
and will set him afire.
He will catch a mermaid
and become an aŋatkuq2 ,
He will hear the bird speak
and become a prophet.
1 akutuq: [uh-koo-took] “a mixture of fat and berries,” Kobuk River Iñupiaq
2 aŋatkuq: [uh-ngut-kook] “shaman,” Kobuk River Iñupiaq
CANNED PEACHES by Qag˙g˙un Chelsey Zibell
Dad told you
Opa used to count out
his peas
one
by
one
just so he’d eat vegetables.
Once a year, the barge
came to town
and unloaded a year’s supply of goods.
Auntie said
“whether something was expired or not
before the next barge came, we had to buy it.”
Dehydrated potatoes
Flour
Hard candy
Eggs
Cans
and cans and
cans.
”Your dad doesn’t even
like the taste of frozen veggies now,”
Mom said.
Now you love the softness of pears in a can:
slightly grainy interior,
disintegrating in the mouth,
giving way with each bite.
Canned peaches, on the other hand,
have a slight bite,
a sharp taste of sunshine
coated in syrup.
They were in the small
compartment of your school lunch tray.
Saved for last,
while you made sure
to sit with others of the same gender.
You lost your taste for them
some time after that.
And switched back to pears.
“Song of a Storyteller” and “Canned Peaches” are Qag˙g˙un Chelsey Zibell’s debut poetry publications.
TOMATO DIVINATION by Doug Ramspeck
Like a thumb smudging across the wet ink of her mind,
the doctor said. And in the weeks after that,
a cardinal began battering with territorial insistence
at our kitchen window, leaving behind, sometimes,
small offerings of blood. That this was connected
to my mother seemed to me, at age seven, as clear
as the white robes of sky. I pictured what was happening
inside her as like the mute erasure of winter snow,
or I imagined that her voice was now the dead wisteria
at the yard’s edge with its poisonous seedpods, or like
the yellowjackets flying in and out of an open fissure
in the ground. And I remember my mother telling me
once before she lost herself that everything that stank
was holy: the goat droppings and goat urine in her garden,
the rake making prayerful scrapes amid manure.
And last night she returned to me out of the sky’s rain,
knocking on some unseen door inside a dream – knocking
like that cardinal pecking at our window – her voice like concentric
circles inside the yellow kitchen I’d forgotten. And in her palm
was a tomato still clinging to the nub of a vine. And reaching it
toward me, she said, These aren’t store bought . . . taste.
Doug Ramspeck is the author of two collections of short stories, a novella, and nine poetry collections, most recently Blur (The Word Works, 2023). His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, The Sun, and The Georgia Review.
LATE FRUIT by Daniel Halpern
I thought you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere.
— William Bronk
I should have foreseen
this defeat of the heart,
but I insisted
on believing that it would beat
forever, and never
cease bearing fruit.
I was a believer.
I thought there was a territory,
a lingua di terra of febrile soil
that survived the harvest,
whose fruit was sweet with a juice
whose color and scent were perennial.
I was a believer. I believed.
I grow older, I bear the weight,
I carry home the sack of that late harvest.
HER DREAM by Daniel Halpern
Susan’s, a found poem
I woke from a dream this morning
We were dating
We weren’t dancing
But there was rhythm
You asked me to live with you
You were so thoughtful
You made a place for me
Where you lived
A collection of my memories
Were placed on three shelves
They remained there
In a kind of permanence
We kissed
I had red lipstick on.
Daniel Halpern has written nine books of poetry and edited more than 15 books and anthologies. He founded the National Poetry Series, Antaeus, and the Ecco Press, now an imprint of HarperCollins.
AN OLD FEAR by James Davis May
The snake you saw that was at first just a thick strand
squiggling from the frayed kitchen rug is a problem
because it slid so soundlessly beneath the fridge
before your wife could see it and you both know
what concussions can do, even decades later,
that your brain can make you see what’s not there,
and feel what you shouldn’t, and that’s before
factoring in the illness that lives in it somewhere
like a queen wasp dormant all winter and the medication
that is supposed to save you from yourself
but can also make you act and think “unusually” –
so many chemicals go into the making of reality,
after all – and when you roll the fridge back
and find no snake but see instead the small hole
for the waterline that could have allowed the snake,
if there was a snake, a route to escape, you know
you’ve entered at least a month of ambient terror,
where every room will be a potential haunting
and you won’t know whether to sigh or gasp
when the drawer you open shimmers
with your face patterned over the quivering knives.
James Davis May is the author of two poetry collections, both published by Louisiana State University Press: Unquiet Things (2016) and Unusually Grand Ideas (2023). His poems and essays have appeared in 32 Poems, The Georgia Review, Literary Hub, New England Review, and The Sun.
ETHERIZE by Amber Flora Thomas
My mother says the wrong word.
The place that has held her tongue coasts,
relieves unthinkable territory: space and hollow
under the curds of night, invisible and endless.
She’ll take her old dog there when it’s time.
If we remember,
we know what she means: after the body,
in the cool stretch of stale air in a white room;
put out away from us, not even ash, but a sphere above the flame,
the mind when we step outside and look at the stars
so the dog can do her business, the ear training itself
to listen in the trees for what might be
another creature smelling us on the air,
but farther out.
So, I don’t correct her.
No needles or cremation estimates. Only the ethereal.
Temporary forces between us and floating off into space
when we walk out somewhere.
Farther still.
Amber Flora Thomas is the author of Eye of Water (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005); The Rabbits Could Sing (University of Alaska Press, 2012); and Red Channel in the Rupture (Red Hen Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in Georgia Review, Colorado Review, ZYZZYVA, Callaloo, Orion Magazine, Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, and Ecotone.
LUNKERS by David Starkey
On the big, once blank wall
of his room in assisted living,
I have mounted his largemouth bass.
The smallest weighed five pounds,
the largest was thirteen,
“Big Mama” he called her,
leaving the chartreuse spinnerbait
hooked in her taxidermied
lip. The centerpiece:
a twenty-pound steelhead
with bright orange paint
for the scar on its flank.
The only time he makes sense
these days is remembering
when and where and how
they were caught. He exaggerates
and changes details with the aplomb
of a politician, but that was ever
his way. Turn the conversation
to the recent past,
however, and his language
quickly falls apart,
like a plastic worm that’s been struck
too often, or a wooden lure
long snagged underwater
then discovered during a drought:
pinch its sides and . . . mush.
Soon, the nurses say, he’ll have to
downsize yet again – no room
in Memory Care for fiberglass fish.
On the day we wheel my father
into his final quarters,
the rest of him will be lost,
like the twenty-pound lunker
he claimed almost
to have netted before the line
snapped and, as he leaned over
the boat’s hull, it vanished
into his wavering reflection.
David Starkey is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently Cutting It Loose (Pine Row Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in American Scholar, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and Southern Review.
WHEN KNOWING IS THE SAME AS LATE WINTER WAITING by W.J. Herbert
Why is the body
still working, if it knows
what’s to come –
isn’t it cowed?
Sometimes, I think the blood
thinks,
the way these robins
must wonder whether the liquid
amber will leaf again
as they sit with their light-bulb
breasts glowing,
orange suns
among skeleton branches,
clots
in the deep-veined tree.
They flutter, as I imagine
my heart does,
just to see if it can feel
itself alive in the quiet
darkness of stiff ribs.
Regreening – that’s what the robins
want
but they can’t know what’s coming.
They wait,
as we do,
deaths tucked into a pocket of sky.
W.J. Herbert is the author of Dear Specimen: Poems (Beacon Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Boulevard, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, and The Best American Poetry.
GRACE by Robin Rosen Chang
The man plunged
into the muddy pond,
cradled the dog’s limp
but still warm body.
On land, he cupped his mouth
over the dog’s snout
and exhaled into it.
Over and over, a man
breathing into a dog,
his humid breath
like a zephyr,
its overblown promise
of a spring that won’t come.
And I think about my mother,
her emaciated body
in her pink nightgown
drowning in the ocean
of her bed, and how
I struggled to hold her hand.
I can’t imagine I’d have the grace
to swaddle another’s mouth
inside mine, offering life
to one whose wind was gone,
filling its lungs
with my trembling breath.
Robin Rosen Chang is the author of The Curator’s Notes (Terrapin Books, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Diode, The Journal, Cortland Review, American Literary Review, and Verse Daily.
ABECEDARIAN WITH ALS by Martha Silano
A little bit sane (a little bit not).
Blackbirds that turned out to be boat-tailed grackles.
Crows that cannot covert their fury of feathers.
Don’t say Relyvrio reminds you of hemlock.
Every wave reassuringly governed by the moon, but what about riptides?
F*ck a duck!
Glad there’s a joyful edge, though narrower than a Willet’s beak.
Hail in the forecast. A bitter taste:
it enables animals to avoid exposure to toxins.
Jaw stiffens, then relaxes. What will my body do next?
Kindness, we decide, is what we want to broadcast,
letting someone pull out in front of you in traffic,
make their turn, because the universe isn’t elegant,
no one’s really going anywhere important,
or running late to spin or vinyasa or
pilates. The neutral neutrons of the nucleus.
Quarks that are up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom, though
rehab in the CD, a lunch date in Leschi, PT in Madrona – it happens.
Socrates died of centripetal paralysis, a prominent loss of sensation.
Terminal: I wish it was more like waiting out a storm with an $18.00 glass of
Pinot.
Unbound bound.
Very much looking forward to overcooked orzo and finely chopped squash.
What was that you assured me – when we die we wake from a dream?
X marks the rear of the theatre – one shove of poison – into a pure realm.
You know we’re all getting off at the same exit, right?
Zooey’s wish: to pray without ceasing.
Martha Silano is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019) and This One We Call Ours (Lynx House Press, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and The Missouri Review.
HORSEHAIR ON HELMETS by Maura Stanton
An old-fashioned wooden storm window
placed across sawhorses in a backyard –
nearby a paint can – but the little girl
crawling under this delightful play space
did not see glass panes, only blue sky
She stood up. She shrieked. I saw it all,
for I was high on the swing set next door,
moving through the air in big swoops
like a flag unfurling in a gust of wind.
Adults rushed from the house, running, shouting,
brushing glitter from the girl’s dark curls,
scolding her, bandaging her forehead,
while I kept swinging, swinging through the sky
An older brother got a rake and raked
sharp shimmery pieces from the grass,
the rake tines dragging out daggers of glass
that might have injured a bare foot, but flew
instead into my memory – for today
slits of sun between some fence rails
crisscrossing the snow like light swords
call up that scene – the broken window,
agitated figures, blood, then clean-up.
I held tight to the chains of the swing,
watching it all from a terrified distance
as if I were driving a team of wild horses
into battle, horsehair streaming from my helmet.
PENELOPE’S CHAIR by Maura Stanton
In Urgent Care the TV’s always turned
to HGTV, and today the House Flippers
chat about house staging as I wait here
with groaning patients, and fidgeting family,
my husband called to an exam room.
The topic’s house staging – the lovely room
flashing across the screen’s an illusion
created by designers. A tall young woman
points out a curved white sectional sofa,
and, she says, “here’s a Penelope chair.”
Penelope’s chair? But I’ve missed it.
The camera’s moved on to the staged bedroom.
What’s a chair? A seat with four legs
and a back for one person, like this chair,
where I’m sitting near other chairs in rows
filled with hunched seniors, or Moms or Dads
rocking children on their laps, jackets
wadded behind them like pillows as they text,
no one watching the cheerful TV folk
as they chatter about their California mansions.
I shift my legs, straighten my aching back,
recalling facts about Penelope’s chair
from The Odyssey. Ikmalios carved it all,
chair and footstool, from one piece of wood.
inlaid it with silver and ivory. At night
her hands aching from a day of weaving,
the suitors still noisily drinking her wine,
Penelope spread a thick fleece over the chair
and sat back. Like me, she was waiting
for her husband. And to pass the time,
on my iPad, I Google “Penelope’s Chair,”
expecting Wikipedia or quotes from Homer,
but instead, bewildering visions of chairs
scroll across the screen – Penelope Chairs! –
each one different, offering style or comfort,
Penelope dining chairs in synthetic leather,
stacking chairs framed in bright chrome tubes
or clear molded acrylic with steel legs.
Penelope’s armchair comes in fleur-de-lis
upholstery with claw-like feet, but there’s
a designer version shaped like a puzzle piece
with a bulbous protrusion for Penelope’s head.
Penelope’s beautiful chair’s ubiquitous –
If you don’t stand, walk, or lie down flat,
you’ve got to sit, so why not choose the best?
Get it in Lucite, satin, or soft grey plush?
And what about this swivel version,
or Penelope’s rattan lounger with matching footstool?
The woman next to me groans and rises
when her name’s called. She grabs her coat.
A sighing bearded man lowers himself
slowly into her place, pulls out his phone.
I roll my coat behind my back, my fleece,
thinking of Penelope on her special chair,
her eyes closed as she dreamed of Odysseus.
Those raucous nights her chair became her boat.
She’d float off through the foam-flecked seas
rowed by invisible gods until she reached
that place beyond the sunset where he lingered.
But every morning she woke up alone.
And then I hear a familiar cough and voice
coming from the desk. It’s my Odysseus
arriving back from that uncertain voyage
clutching his chart, and his new prescription,
grinning at me, ready to come home.
Maura Stanton is the author of a novel, three collections of stories, and seven collections of poems including Snow on Snow (Yale University Press, 1975); Cries of Swimmers (University of Utah Press, 1984); Glacier Wine (Carnegie-Mellon, 2001); Immortal Sofa (University of Illinois Press, 2008); and Interiors (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Her poems have appeared in Plume, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Poetry East, Gettysburg Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Able Muse.