Issue 42 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

SO m e f e a S t
FICTION -
SAMANTHA GILLISON 24 The Upper Canada Holding Company
He could no sooner have been the rabbi his
mother wanted than a warlock.
STEPHANIE DICKINSON 50 Dalloway & Hannah
His robe clings to his breasts, and they're
aset of perfect tennis balls.
KIRSTY GUNN 70 The Pass
All you can imagine is the way ahead,
who'll be there, who's waiting.
LYDIA DAVIS 135 Enlightened
She is 54 years old and no more enlightened,
as far as Ican see, than when I first knew her.
DALIA AZIM 144 By Way of Toronto
It was what she had come to think of when she thought of
America: endlessness, emptiness.
POETRY- -
JAMES DOYLE 23 The Banquet Master
mead and cider streaming from the table's / edge
JE NIFER MICHAEL HECHT 32 The Way-Out Way Out
to our surprise, the mess of lines / forms an image
ALLEN GROSSMAN 34 Winter at the Sea Shore
Timor Mortis, Inc., ASwitchboard Memory

MARY ZOO 48 Twin
Of all the street's windows, only yours dreams.
EAMON GRENNAN 65 Feast
New Year's Day: Looking for a Sign
Morning under Muckish
What Shadows
Weather Artists
In the dormitory of the oak, the saint tended the flame
THYLIAS MOSS 80 Ghee Glee
Fork Addiction
The Culture of Reena and the Bear
The Culture of Mr. Wonderful
Promise her anything: give her foia gras:/stuff it down her throat
L1AM RECTOR 97 Our Hero Galliano
New York City
Soon the City
On the fire escapes / In asleeveless T-shirt / Smoking acigar
ERIN BELIEU 104 from In The Red Dress I Wear to Your Funeral
Your coffin is atough room. / Mourners talk through my set
LUCIA BRYANT 124 La Cabre
Oh, he trimmed stalky blades, for sure, / but erratically, whimsically
PRISCILLA BECKER 142 Villanelle
The Sound of the Closing Door
Ihave come to regard the wide arms / of the chair as an only mother.
NONFICTION II
JOE WENDEROTH 100 from Agony: Agony and the University
Theater People are special; their nearness to Agony is unique.
Their sadness sometimes overwhelms them.
HAMILTON WALTERS 108 Steel Smoke
In Subic, mere enlisted rubes metamorphosed into godkings,
such was the blessing and curse of being an
American with asteady paycheck.
JAMES DAVIS 126 Gigi
But that year, we left early with our packaged dog, fully
upholstered in white curls except for bands of apricot in her ears.
EULA BISS 136 Watch Out for Land Mines
Teachers have the terribly difficult job of controlling large
groups ofpeople who haventyet fully learned how to be controlled
STUART LEWIS 157 Pants
It was an odd scene because, in the slot, there is asudden
absence of social nicety. Patients are attacked on all sides.
INTERVIEW II
NONFICTION II ART II
MARSHA RECKNAGLE 11 When You Walk from This Room
Stories that spring from the unconscious sometimes
speak the truth.
PETER TRACHTENBERG 38 from The Book of Calamities
In Rwanda, the killing took place in public. Everybody saw it.
All you had to do was look out through your garden gate.
.....It........ ..
AMY BLOOM 116 interview by Leyla Ertegun
Idon't care if it took the author 10 years to write that
shitty sentence or five minutes. If it's not good, it's not good.
JACK PIERSON ii Self Portrait #15
iv Self Portrait #11
vi Self Portrait #4
x Self Portrait #19
xiv Self Portrait #17
xvi Self Portrait #1

ART II
ANTHONY GOICOLEA ii Pool Pushers
v Tree Dwellers
vii Dead Forest
viii Boys' Room
xii Still Life with Pig
DINOS & JAKE CHAPMAN iii Fuck Face
ix Tragic Anatomies
xiii DNA Zygotic
xv Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic
De-sublimated Libidinal Model
(enlarged x1000)
II II
Editor's Note
rankl)', it's hard to believe the number of pigs in this issue. Every
time there was an opportunit)T, we seemed to sa)', but how might we
get another pig in there? Can we bring in Charlotte's Web? Though
one of the editors noted, "I love pigs - they're delicious," many
don't even eat The Pork. For instance, I was raised by a macrobiotic
vegetarian who went so far as to strike night-shade vegetables from
our fridge due to their resemblances to flesh. No eggplant, tomato, or
avocado. In teenaged rebellion I ate Whopper Juniors and left the
receipts in the key dish, in my pants pocket, in the drawer with playing
cards and batteries. Once, after a particularly nasty fight I cooked
bacon in my mother's iron skillet -left the residue to cake, her next
com pone was my delicious secret and resulted in stomach cramps
for the whole family. But mostly my diet has been free of sentients.
Another editor's favorite picture of herself is standing next to a giant
hog in Ecuador. She wanted to use it on her license. Another claimed
that even the smell of ham caused her stomach to wrench. And yet
after reading James Doyle's poem about the banquet and Thylias
Moss's about clarified butter we found ourselves wanting more.
What we need is a pig on a spit - can we make it turn as the reader
flips through pages? The idea was that each stof)T, poem, photo, and
essay would be a part of a massive and growing feast - the kind
where something bleeds then gets slow-cooked to perfection over
lightly smoking hickory or cherry. There are shifts to tend the fire.
It is only the way we carne to understand this, Columbia's 42nd Issue.
We set out with no thematic directive, put no constraints on what
content to look for. There are essays about Rwanda, a good dog,
teaching, whoring in Phuket; stories about camping, old friends,
growing up, and getting the hell out; poems about fashion, a goat,
Manhattan, and quietly watching; art that is wetter than words, seas
of bodies, a town in the trees, and portraits of men growing young.
And a lot of pigs. Thank you for picking up this issue, for subscribing,
for flipping through at the library: It is all for you dear reader,
enjoy the feast.
Very Truly Yours,

II
When Augustus came out on the porch the blue
pigs were eating a rattlesnake - not a very big
one. It had probably just been crawling around
looking for shade when it ran in to the pigs. They
were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its
rattling days were over. The sow had it by the
neck, and the shoat had the tail.
II
- LARRY MCMURTRY
from Lonesome Dove
\
by Marsha
Recknagle
so m e f e a 5 t
When You Walk
from This Room
he students crowded around a conference table made
of the same particle-board brown as the Ouija board
I'd touched lightly, but often, as a child. When first I
walked into the classroom, I was irritated that there
were no windows, no space for me to pace around in
my cowboy boots, swirl my gauzy skirts.
My teaching techniques - swirl, pace, match the momentum of my
thoughts with hands flying as if I were in a game of charades ­
would be restricted this semester by setting.
I looked up at the blank faces: John with the curly hair and
sneaky eyes, Megan, skin luminous, Brenna, her teeth and the
whites of her eyes startling in contrast to her olive skin. Shiny sleek
seals, I thought, and imagined tossing a beach ball into the air, saw
it in my mind's eye - round and rolling and colorful, creating a
stir, like my words that I hoped would bounce from student to student,
forming balloons of ideas above their heads.
I touched the table with my fingertips, saw the traces of my
prints on the cheap surface, thought of making a mark in the
room. Tried, by tapping my fingers on the tabletop, not only to
predict the future but form it. Rock/Paper/Scissors. The class is
destined to hatch like a brood during the gestation period we call
a semester. Brazen or beat-down, all in the future, up to me, up to
us, how we nurture, what we need.

were my own, a strange turn of phrase, the possessiveness that took
root. She told me later that after the first day of class she thought she
wanted to grow up to be me. A compliment, a complement, Kelly.
In Kelly's freshman class I'd taught her Mrs. Dalloway. Stories
and poems by D.H. Lawrence. The Left Hand of Darkness. The
Ghostwriter. By her senior year I'd taught her how to eat before she
drank wine, how to dance alone without self-consciousness, how to
dance with a woman with total self-consciousness, how to flirt with
her ice-blue eyes, how to think about the maternal, separation individuation,
the porous boundaries between mothers and daughters,
thinking this would help her with her mother, who couldn't stand
that I had taught Kelly to read, flirt, and drink wine.
I would embrace "differance," as the French theorists called what
we usually resist. I would be the good mother. I would banish the
bad mother. It was fierce, in fact, the battle between us, Kelly's
mother and myself, though one fought behind the scenes, behind the
conscious scrim that held us back, kept us from crossing - the line,
each other.
My dissertation had been psychoanalytic: women's autobiographies.
I'd read Winnicott, Freud, Melanie Klein. Books with wondrous
titles: This Sex Which Is Not One, The (M)other Tongue. There
were lots of parentheses in the titles, in the configuring of the way a
woman writes herself into relation. Writing a book is compared to
giving birth, ink compared to milk, a mother entangled forever with
the daughter and vice versa. I was born to my mother late - she
already had three children, and her first-born had a baby too soon,
out of wedlock, as they say. Overwhelmed with children, my mother
railed out loud to me, who sat on the kitchen floor quietly turning
the pages of my Golden Books. Children! Children having children!
This, she told me time after time, robs one of childhood.
I was frightened of children, the idea of children. Those thieves.
Kelly's boyfriend delivered the news of her car crash. He was so
slight in build that he looked like a teenager. Born in Hawaii, he was
exotic, had burnished skin, almond eyes. He walked into the room
that contained the fall class: a Ryan, a Tyndall, two Johns, Brenna,
Megan, and 12 others. It was the second week of the semester. A
year before - or maybe even in the freshman class four years before
- Kelly had decided to pursue a Ph.D. in literature. Accepted to
Michigan with a large scholarship, she was thrilled. The trunk of her
car was filled - she didn't plan on going back to where she was
from for a long time; maybe she was thinking, not ever. While in
Ennis packing for Michigan, she called me each day: the car wasn't
ready; her father was dilly-dallying; she was antsy to takeoff. Finally
the father asked her: Would she take her mother along on the trip?
Make it girls' night out. A road trip. Kelly and her mother hadn't
been getting along for several years; Kelly was turning into a creature
her mother didn't know - and didn't really like. She let something
happen to me, Kelly tells me one day while we are having coffee. Her
eyes darted back and forth as if she were watching a movie. She talks
to me as if she is doing a voice-over for the movie before her eyes. It
was an old man at the gas station. Down the feeder road.
Did she know? I asked.
She knew and didn't know, Kelly said.
It will be dramatic, the wreck, the telling of the wreck. An appearance
at the classroom door - Kelly's boyfriend, so full of arrogance
with the news that he wears a half-smile, proud that he has such a
story. He will paraphrase what Kelly, and then I, will elaborate on:
Kelly's mother drove off an overpass. The car tumbled and turned
three times, landing upright.
Her mother died.
Kelly lived and lived and lived. The implication of that sentence,
what seems to follow naturally, is that she lived happily ever after.
Her mother had mentioned the movie Thelma and Louise when they
waved good-bye to the father who stood in his cowboy hat and boots
in the gravel driveway and raised his hand in the way ranchers do, a
small salute, then the tap on the car door as if it is a horse in which
they are entrusting the safety of the rider. Then Kelly and her mother
were off - just like Thelma and Louise, her mother repeated, laughing,
tossing her hair back, as if tossing something away from her.
Kelly's mother didn't like being a rancher's wife, "out in the sticks,"
she complained to Kelly the night before the accident, in the small
motel. She always thought she and her husband would move to
Dallas, buy one of those houses with white columns outside, walk-in
closets inside. She spoke of the fictional house in detail, the sparkle,
the wonder of it, especially compared to the dusty dirt-yard of their
home of 20-some-odd years that was filled with stray dogs and
tractor parts, the place Kelly had described in her essay for graduate
school as authentic, regional in a world gone homogenous, a place
that made her unique, a standout among the Northeastern applicants,
a place appealing in memory, on paper, but a place to be left behind.
Kelly's real life was just about to begin - in Ann Arbor, far from
WHEN YOU WALK OUT OF THIS ROOM 17

(the only living son of the 12 children his wife would give birth to)
and was confronted by his father-in-Iaw's blue eyes gazing up at
him. Manusz tried to beat his father-in-Iaw's ghost out of his son,
but it refused to budge. Instead it stared out at Manusz from his
young son's face, mocking, judging, making him wild with aggravation
so that finally Oskar was not allowed to look at his father. His
mother had hoped that her father's troublesome ghost wouldn't be
able to follow them on the difficult, confusing trip to America, but it
was worse in New York between her son and husband than it had
ever been between her husband and father in Hungary.
His mother had hoped Oskar would be a rabbi, which Manusz
thought was a great joke. Every afternoon before he went out,
Manusz Tiklowicz beat his son and then locked him in their apartment
with its nailed-shut windows. Study hard, you wretch, he'd
shout, you monkey, as he walked down the hall.
By the time he was 14, Tiklowicz had taught himself to read
English poetry; with money he earned carting coal for a mikvah on
Ludlow Street, he bought leather-bound books of Shelley, Keats and
Byron. He spent restless nights in the tiny tenement apartment listening
to his coughing, snoring, muttering, whimpering sisters
sleep while he mulled over a line of verse; Beauty is truth, truth
beauty, - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. How
easy in the early dawn to pull the nail out of the window frame
and climb up the fire escape and greet a startled Alberto sipping
watery hot milk.
There was no question in Oskar's mind that God didn't exist; he
could no sooner have been the rabbi his mother wanted than a
warlock. He started a coal-carting business with Alberto, and the
two of them dragged the heavy sacks up and down narrow tenement
staircases and fire escapes from dawn until nightfall.
And then, when he cut off his peyess, his father broke his nose.
He overheard a friend of his father's talking about the fur business
in Canada. Oskar decided to go and take Alberto with him.
"It'll be like back in Mauritania," Oskar teased his solemn friend.
"When you rode with Berbers across the Atlas mountains. And, you
know, those Berbers are Jews. Like a lost tribe."
But Alberto followed Oskar to Canada the way he had followed
him through the New York ghetto his entire adolescence without
a second thought like the Sephardic brides weighted down with
silver, their palms tattooed in henna curlicues, their fingertips blood-red,
and cheeks decorated with black kohl triangles, that he had watched
trail after their grooms along the cobbled streets of the Fez mella.
Alberto was Oskar's shadow: a quiet, motherless, fatherless child,
preoccupied with the memories that had followed him from Morocco,
the visions that crawled into his eyes when he slept or breathed in
the smell of horse dung in the hot sun or listened to the clang ting
clang of the blacksmith's hammer on Delancey Street. But Oskar was
a star in the blacked-out sky, allowing light, possibility into the world
for Alberto. Oskar conjured money, supplies; wrote to his mother's
cousin who had a seed-exporting business in Montreal. Then he flew
north to Canada like an eagle, with Alberto under his wing.
The two of them camped and travelled through Upper Ontario the
summer of 1907; they hired a dour Ojibwa man to canoe them from
lake to bog to lake, along freezing, rushing rivers, past beaver dams
and Indian settlements, under swarms of geese, clouds of mosquitoes,
and black flies. They were Champlain and Frontenac, Oskar declared,
pushing along in birch canoes, the wealth of the forests unfolding
before them. They bought beaver pelts from Huron and Ojibwa Indians
and baskets from a Cree woman with a swollen, goitered neck for
Alberto's little sister, Mila. Oskar heard about a nickel mine near Dorset
and they went to visit. Tiklowicz had an uncanny gift for business: it
frightened Alberto a little (his own mother's superstitions with her
Hand of Fathma and magic necklaces of colored glass still lurked inside
him.) He had always known that Oskar had Sight. He could overhear a
sentence, a detail, and know if something would work, if a trapper was
lying, what would make money, what they should do. Oskar gave
their business a name, too, on the third night they camped out: The
Upper Canada Holding Company.
The night they spent on the shores of Lake Erskine was cool. Alberto
waded into the water and caught three rainbow trout. Oskar fried them
in lard with thick slices of yellow onion, black pepper and potatoes. He
made coffee and they drank it sweet with condensed milk and had a
fishy-tasting cake of frying-pan bread. Oskar had borrowed money
from his mother's cousin in Montreal and he had invested it now,
almost all of it, for the Upper Canada Holding Company. They
owned that night, the two of them, a quarter interest in the Dorset
nickel mine they had visited, fifty shares in the Baptiste-Kearney cadmium
mine, a tiny stake in a timber company out of Dwight, and 70
beaver pelts. Almost everything was leveraged against each other, a
house of cards waiting to be pushed over. But Oskar didn't Inind. He
understood what he had invested in.

They wore sweaters and knit wool caps and smoked cigarettes
while they drank their coffee and looked out at the dark settling on the
lake. The whole place pulsed with the night: frogs and cicadas chorusing
back and forth, black clouds of bats shivering above the tree
canopy and then melting into the black night sky. Oskar kept a diary of
their trip in a cardboard-covered notebook. He fished it out of his pack
and flipped through the pages, stopping to check a list, write a note in
the firelight. Across the front cover he had written in black ink: UPPER
CANADA HOLDING COMPANY O. Tiklowicz, A. Levi props.
He had pasted maps onto its pages, train tickets, labels from
the first tins of condensed milk and navy beans they ate,
receipts, bills, a hand-written contract,
a snapshot of the two of them with
Your great-greatgreat-grandfather
probably spit on
Columbus and
de Torres as he
ran to make the
boat to Tangiers.
their packs strapped on at Haliburton
station. He sketched the lakes they
paddled over, jack pines, Alberto fishing,
Ojibwa birch canoes bobbing in the
waves; he wrote notes about the mines,
trappers, traders they met, the diarrhea,
poison ivy, and stinging black fly
bites that plagued them both; he jotted
down poems that echoed in his mind
when he looked out at the smoky bluegreen
forest that flowed like a river
over the mountains and lake-studded
valleys of Upper Canada. He had carefully
pasted in a cutting from The Globe
& Mail about the future of the Hudson's Bay Company and
wrote tiny notes in pencil along the margins.
"You see, Europe is a lady of advancing years," Oskar said, shutting
the book and shaking his finger at Alberto's smiling face.
"Sophisticated. Gorgeous. But when you bend down to kiss her, the
sweat in her armpits, the breath in her mouth she smells sour, of
Death. But Canada!" He was shouting now, his voice a high-pitched
squeak in the night, clapping his hands to punctuate his sentences,
performing for Alberto and the crackling fire and the slick-furred
otters who peered at them from the lake shallows. "Canada is the
beautiful virgin girl bursting with the life! With swelled, firm
breasts. She is ready to clasp a Jew to her warm body! Her breath is
sweet, her mouth hungry!"
Alberto laughed at the impossible image of his skinny, toothless
friend with his face in some girl's chest.
"What a rabbi you'd make," Alberto said. ''It's not too late, you know."
"It's so funny, ha ha, my fall from grace," Oskar said, smiling, his
face covered in the smile, his small, delicate hands stretching out to
embrace the whole night. "But this is exactly the place for us, Bertie.
Up here with the Indians," he gestured, pointing at the creatures
watching them from the lake, "with the animals."
Alberto siniled and nibbled on a piece of the frying-pan bread.
Oskar's voice, the fire, the smell of smoke and the spruce needlecovered
earth made the night unfurl in front of him: he could see his
life as a series of places - Ontario, New York, the steamship, his
father's store in the melfa with its hundreds of hammered tin and
glass lanterns hanging from the ceiling, lined up on rickety shelves
gleaming in the North African sun. He sawall those places eInpty of
people, quiet, only angles and shadows, turning them over in his
mind like a child with a seashell. Oskar nudged the coals in the fire
with a stick, sending sparks and crackles and a puff of smoke into the
blue-black night.
"You know, we're like the Jew Columbus who set sail on the
ninth of Ab looking for cinnamon sticks and discovered the world,"
Oskar said.
"What are you talking about?" Alberto laughed. "Christopher
Columbus was a converso?"
"Of course he was. Don't you even know that? Why else were
there only Jews on his trip as his advisors? You ever heard about
Luis de Torres? Why were all the investors Jews? Tell me, my
Spanish-speaking friend - why did he choose to sail into the great
blue beyond for the Indes on the very same, exact day the Grand
Inquisitor had sent every Jew in Spain packing and all the ports
were clogged with weeping and wailing yentas? Your great-greatgreat-grandfather
probably spit on Columbus and de Torres as he
ran to make the boat for Tangiers."
"Stop it," Alberto laughed. "Next it's going to be - you know that
English Jew, Henry Hudson? This guy would not drink a cup of tea
with everyone else on Yom Kippur! No, not a sip!"
"Believe, don't believe. It's true." Oskar shrugged his shoulders.
Alberto, still laughing, began to stack the pans, the enamelled tin
plates and cups, the flame-blackened lard pail. Tiklowicz was quiet as
they cleaned up from dinner, all of a sudden seized with one of his
somber moods. He squatted at the fire, smoking and peering into the
smoldering purple and red flames, the orange coals. Alberto went
into the tent, shook out the blankets. He heard Tiklowicz moving

around, boots scraping on the rocks, the fire stoked. He heard the
cooking pans clang together as Tiklowicz strung them up onto the
branches of the huge spruce tree. And then Oskar's squeaky voice
declaiming into the darkness, his voice full of emotion:
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
As he lay down under his blankets, a blister of happiness burst
inside Alberto, trickling through him until his entire being was
warm from it. Everything around him, the faint sound of waves lapping
at the shore, the cool, tender summer air covering them like a
duvet, the sound of Oskar's voice, a crying loon flying over the lake,
the rustling breeze and jack pines that grew gnarled and bent along
the shore, all felt part of him. Tiklowicz was right - of all the places
he had moved through, this was the only one he had ever wanted to
stay in. It was as though for the first time since he was a boy in the
mella and had watched his father, all beat up and bleeding, die that
Alberto's nerves had become untangled and were loose and free,
drifting inside his soul like the fingers of a sea anemone fluttering in
underwater currents, letting him feel the universe as it spun by. He
fell into sleep that night like he was diving into the lake, buoyed by
happiness, the happiest he'd ever felt.
When Alberto woke up, Tiklowicz was swhnming. Mist rose from
the gray-blue water. Night still hung in the air and faint clouds
stretched between skinny poplars and spruce trees like webs of cotton
wool. Oskar waded out of the lake up onto the narrow stone
beach naked, white from the cold, his penis curled between his legs.
Steam evaporated off his warm body into the dawn. He began shivering
when he was drinking his coffee; soon he was burning with
fever and crawled back into the tent. Without thinking what he was
doing, Alberto picked him up and carried him through the sundrenched
morning along the overgrown logger's path, startling the
wood thrushes and orioles in the understory. The day became suffused
with the smell of pine needles and the sun-warmed earth.
Alberto left Oskar at the road-head under an aspen, lying on his
side in the shade, and went back to their campsite. And it was then,
as he retraced his steps and gathered up the two packs, stuffing them
with pots and pans and blankets and cans of food and their loaf of
bread and wax paper-wrapped cheese and clothes and Oskar's diary
- then carrying everything, sweating in the bright, unfiltered light,
that he learned that time was liquid; that it runs in a great rushing
forward that sometimes gets diverted into pools that swirl in endless
circles. That a person can spend his lifetime, caught, floating in a
moment. By the time they got to Toronto, to the Royal Eglinton hospital,
Oskar couldn't speak from the chattering of his teeth.
Alberto sat in the hospital with Oskar. The influenza ward was
long and full of muted sunlight, quiet except for the padding of wool
felt slippers on the rubber-tiled floor, and the coughs and moans of
febrile men. For the three days before Oskar died, Alberto was overwhelmed
by his friend's raging fever. It seeped into Alberto and
exploded in his mind until everything was clouded. A pretty Scottish
nurse came and wiped Tiklowicz down with ice water. She wiped his
thin body with a flannel, carefully tracing his bony knees and hips,
the hollow of his collarbone. Oskar was flushed deep red, his skin
raised in goose pimples.
On the dawn of the third day that Oskar was in the hospital, it
began to rain. Alberto watched the rain drip down the windowpane
all day. He thought of his mother, the Hand of Fathma around her
neck, her beautiful brown eyes wet and round watching him, sending
him away forever as he stood on the crowded deck of the steamship
next to his sister, Mila. In the early evening, just as the rain stopped
and the sky above Toronto turned orange and pink and red from the
sunset, he knew that Oskar was about to die; he knew it with as
much certainty as if it had already happened and he were remembering
it. He bent next to Oskar's hot, flushed face, breathed in his sour
fever and kissed his cheek "Oskar," he said, and then quickly, without
thinking, he whispered into his ear, "don't worry, I'll stay here
with you. I won't go back I won't ever go back" III
Tllr IInnrn nllllni IInlF'\lUn nnllnlU\f

y Allen
Grossman
Winter at the Sea Shore
"Nightfall.
Journey's end.
Having come this far,
we are at the shore.
Look up. Over there!
That high tower
is mind.
Look down.
This world below us
is a furious coast.
Think back over
the straightening
of the seasons. Remember!
Sowing, then burgeoning,
then seed-fall. And now
this harvest:
winter
wheat."
"Allen, what is that flail
on your shoulder?
What is it for?"
"It's the oar
that brought us
to this night
and furious coast
among winds."
"Look! The high tower
strews signals.
Listen! Zeus, the counsellor,
decrees snow."

(Clticago/ 19£8)
Timor Mortis Inc" ASwitchboard Memory
The business plan of Timor Mortis, Inc.
required reconstruction of its switchboard.
As soon as it was cOlnpleted, Beatrice
appeared from her grave to man a position.
Outgoing - from below, local- requires
that she reach down, pull up a plug, and then
throw the plug into a socket above
her head, so that she can say to anyone,
with a nUlnber, a long way off: "It's time."
Incoming - from above, afar - requires
that she reach up above her head, grab a
plug, and throw it into a socket with
the corresponding number beneath her knees.
"Somebody is calling, calling, calling, calling..."

y Peter
Trachtenberg
5 0 m e
f e a 5 t
from The Book
of Calamities
e'd heard the announcement on the radio that people
weren't allowed to leave their homes, and we thought,
okay, no problem. We heard gunshots around the
neighborhood. We heard yelling. The house was
surrounded by soldiers. I saw the commanding officer,
he was one of our neighbors. He beat down the door.
He said, lIyou, K. II - my husband's name was K. - IIWhat are you
doing here when everybody else is outside being checked by security?
Come out with your identity card." My husband went outside with his
card, and then from April 7th till the 14th they held him at the roadblock,
right nearby. So he would have seen them torturing other men and young
people, young boys. They cut off men's genitals and fed them to the dogs.
They hacked people to death with machetes. He watched all of it. And at
two or three one morning, it was his misfortune to be tortured, too. He
died on the 15th, very early in the morning.
Not "he was killed," but "he died." Rwandans often used that
innocuous phrase when speaking of loved ones they'd lost in the
genocide. I took it for an attempt at normalization. During World
War II, the Nazis had committed most of their crimes away from
eyewitnesses, herding their victims to remote killing grounds or
sequestering them in death camps whose function was betrayed
only by the pillars of smoke that rose from their chimneys.
Afterwards it was possible - if not particularly credible - for
people to say they hadn't known. In Rwanda, though, the killing
took place in public. Everybody saw it. All you had to do was look
out through your garden gate. All over Kigali, bodies lay piled on
the roadside like sacks of refuse until they were picked up by
garbage trucks. Hutu office girls in white dresses picked their way
to work between spreading puddles of blood. General Romeo
Dallaire describes seeing one such girl slip and fall. She got up
quickly, but still, he writes, "it was as if someone had painted her
body and her dress with a dark red oil. She became hysterical looking
at it, and the more she screamed, the more attention she drew." I
What need was there for anyone to be more explicit? I hadn't been
in Rwanda long before I was taking it for granted that when anyone
spoke of a death ten years before, he meant a death by violence.
Murder had become a natural death.
On the 18th, at nine in the morning, a group of soldiers and militiamen
came to my house. They told me, IIGive us the money your husband left
you. 1I
My husband's body was being dragged through the street, no one had
buried him. They formed mountains, the bodies of all the men and boys
they'd killed. And I said, III don't have any money. We don't have any
money." They carried me from the living room and took me into a bedroom;
my mother-in-law was shut up in another room. And from that day until
the end of the war, the soldiers raped me. They were at it day and night, day
and night, all of them. They came in all together, they dropped their pants at
the same moment, and they raped me, jostling each other. There was always
another group waiting in the living room. If one man left, another one came
in to take his place, one after another. In the fifth month of my pregnancy, I
aborted. They took me to the hospital for the abortion, and they told me, "We
killed your brothers and sisters with machetes, but you, we're just going to
rape you till you're dead." That whole time I was naked, I never had clothes
on. I was completely swollen. I had infections, I kept vomiting. I couldn't
even cry because I wanted to die and I couldn't die.
In the midst of violence, especially if that violence is prolonged, a
relationship sometimes forms between perpetrators and victims. It is
not a true relationship, in the sense of something freely chosen, only
the simulacrum of one or, more accurately, a parody. It may come
into being because the victims implicitly understand that their survival
depends on winning the good-will of their captors or because
even killers - maybe especially killers - need to feel that they are
good people and will seek validation of their goodness from the very
ones they are about to kill. It may simply be that when human
beings are forced together, over time, they fall by inertia into the
lulling rhythms and protocols of society. For such reasons, a group of

soldiers and militiamen might interrupt months of rape and sexual
torture to take their victim to the hospital for an abortion of her
husband's child. It's startling to realize that at the height of the
genocide Rwanda's hospitals were still functioning, treating old
people with pneumonia, children with broken arms. And, of course,
delivering babies.
What was the meaning of that gesture? On one level, the abortion
was a continuation of the violence these men were inflicting on their
captive, an intensification of it, a rape committed in the deepest
parts of her body. As a Catholic, the woman would experience it as a
murder of the life within her, of her husband's life, because it was
his baby they were killing; they were killing him all over again. And
at the same time, she would know that she was being spared, since
it wasn't uncommon for genocidaires to terminate the pregnancies of
Tutsi women by cutting them open and ripping their unborn babies
from their wombs. And so, at some point in the procedure, perhaps
only for a moment, she might feel a trelnor of gratitude, and in recollection
this gratitude would be the most terrible thing of all.
If I go before the court, if I tell them what happened, ifI say what was
done to my body, people will mock me. All I want to say is that they made
me suffer. I want to tell the story of my suffering. And I want the one who
raped me to understand that he tortured me, that he's guilty. I want him to
understand what he did - freely, without being forced - I want him to
admit his blame.
The woman who told me this story was named Athanasie M. She
was 45, with a handsome oval face that had begun to soften with
age and very large dark eyes that looked even larger because of the
dark circles beneath them. The whole time she spoke she held my
eyes with hers. Once she had been a girl on one of the thousands of
haystack-shaped hills that make up the Rwandan landscape ­
Rwanda, pays des milles collines - destined for a life of farming beans
and sorghum. Against all expectations she had gotten an education
and become a gym teacher at a polytechnic in Kigali. She had married,
borne children. And then the life she had won for herself had
been torn asunder and she had been turned into a sort of domestic
animal, naked and speechless, kept alive only to be abused until it
would be time to kill her. It seemed a miracle that she could speak.
But she could write; she had a journal that she had written about her
ordeal. "Each page," she said, "is a thousand tears." Now Athanasie
worked at a women's center counseling other survivors of rape and
sexual torture, many of whom were sick with AIDS. In this regard,
she considered herself fortunate. As a result of what had been done
to her she could no longer perform any kind of physical labor, not
even sweep a floor, but she didn't have the virus and could look forward
to a long life. Perhaps it's better to say that she could anticipate
a normal lifespan, which for a Rwandan woman in 2002 was
46.8 years. 2
I had been recommended to Athanasie by someone in the
States, and when our interview was over she told me, "When you see
David, you must remember to tell him how fat I've gotten." The
pride in her voice took me aback until I remembered the possible
connotations of thinness.
The clinic was a complex of low grey cinderblock buildings decorated
inside with the drawings of the clients and their children, crude
productions of crayon, glitter and con- ..
struction paper mounted on the walls
with yellowing tape. When I left, a group
of women was dancing in the earth yard.
They were welcoming some visitors from
a Canadian aid organization. The dancers'
movements were fierce, strutting; they
held their arms out from their sides, their
fingers splayed and quivering, and lifted
their knees high, like wading birds.
Drums sounded. The women dipped,
took a step forward, a step to the side, a
step back, each pent inside her square of
an invisible grid drawn on the red earth.
Some of theln looked quite old, their faces
seamed, their eyes dim. Their limbs might
have been made of twisted rope. One
woman had only one leg, on which she
The women
dipped, took a
step to the side,
astep back, each
pent inside her
square of an
invisible grid
drawn on the
red earth.
hopped unceasingly, as if trying to pound a stake into :he ground. Up
and down she leapt, grinning and triumphant and ternble. I suppose
she was trying to proclaim victory over her disfigurement, but to me
she seemed like a reproach to the world of the whole.
A few weeks earlier, at a cocktail party at the American Club in
Kigali, I'd been introduced to a man who worked for a Christian
conflict-management organization. He was running reconciliation
workshops. Reconciliation was a word you heard a great deal in
Rwanda. You heard it from government officials, including elnployees
of the eponymous Unity and Reconciliation Commission, and the
spokespersons of victims' groups, from ex-detenus, perpetrato:s who
had served their time in prison, and, more rarely, from rescapes, the

itself," Athanasie told me. "True justice."
I thought I understood this, and not just because what had happened
here suggested a Platonic archetype of injustice, a crime so
immense as to make any response to it seeIn pathetically, even
insultingly, inadequate. (Hannah Arendt was speaking of genocide
when she said that we "are unable to forgive what [we] cannot punish
[and] we are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable.")4
In the hierarchy of human needs, justice may be only a
tier below shelter or mother-love. Maybe it represents father-love, a
love that, unlike the magnanimous, blanketing kind mothers are
supposed to give us, is based on distinctions, boundaries, equivalency,
one thing for another. One symbol for such love is a staff,
which leads some people to think of it as merely punitive. But a
staff is also used for pointing. Human justice, in Biiber's formulation,
is each person getting what he deserves, while divine justice is
each person getting what he is. By this formulation, divine justice
began on the first day of creation, when God parted the heavens
from the earth. When He cast Eve and Adam out of paradise, He
wasn't punishing an act so much as decreeing that this, henceforth,
was what it would mean to be human - that is, mortal, homeless,
and ashamed.
Human justice is human: it applies to relations between human
beings or between human beings and the man-made artifact of the
State. The afflictions sent by God or nature don't trouble us the
same way wrongs committed by other people do. The very word
"wrongs" is indicative, since it isn't used of nature. A tidal wave
may kill a quarter of a million people and a man with a knife only
one, yet it's the murderer who inspires not just horror but outrage
and it's the murderer we seek to punish. King Xerxes flogging the
sea is only an image of the folly of power. I do not think this difference
stems solely from the human capacity for malice. Eichmann
appears to have sent millions to the gas chambers without feeling
much of it. Men know that God and nature are bigger and more
powerful than they are (though in our time, this knowledge may be
fading), but we think of other men as our equals, not in the social,
but the creaturely sense, as beings moved by the same desires and
aversions as ourselves and subject to the same laws of pain and
death. Every crime shatters this equality. When one man kills
another man, he declares that he is big and the other is small, is
nothing. If the victim's wife and children are forced to witness this,
they too are made nothing. When a chemical plant discharges poison
gas that wipes out a village, all its people are made nothing and
their annihilation is compounded when the officers of the chemical
company are allowed to live on without consequence. Among the
things I heard during my time in Rwanda, one of the most painful
was uttered almost incidentally by a rescapee after I asked her if she
believed Tutsi and Hutu could ever truly be reconciled. "It is impossible,"
she began, and I think she meant to explain, methodically,
impersonally, why this should be so. But suddenly she clutched her
head and blurted, "l'etais tres abaissee." I
would translate it as "1 was so degrad­
ed" or "abased," except the French
more clearly expresses the idea of being
lowered. At that moment everything that
had been done to this woman snapped
into focus with such clarity that I could
no more stand to look at her directly
than if she had been the sun.
From the state's perspective, justice
has multiple functions, froIn ensuring
that the criminal cannot harm others to
deterring future wrongdoers. To victilns
of crime, however, or to their survivors,
the purpose of justice is to restore the
Thousands of Tutsi
women were dying
of AIOS, which the
rape squads had
deployed as a
weapon of delayed
biological warfare.
equality between themselves and the persons who wronged them. s
That this equality is spiritual is evident from the fact that it may be
restored even to the dead. It's precisely when justice is denied that
people most long for it, even if they can only ilnagine the world in
which it exists. Hell was invented because on earth men commit
crime after crime and grow fat while their victims' children go hungry.
And perhaps the belief in hell - hell even more than heaven ­
was enough to console entire nations during the thousands of years
in which they suffered at the hands of others without redress, without
even the acknowledgment that a wrong had been done to theIn.
Personally, I doubt it. And I think that societies that fail to
address the great crimes in their past remain blighted by them. The
long backwardness and impoverishment and brutality of the
AInerican South, conditions that afflicted whites as well as blacks,
must have had something to do with the unburied corpse of slavery,
a corpse that wasn't a corpse at all because in some ways it was still
alive, the haint at the crossroads, the hellhound on everybody's
trail. Russia may have emerged from the 80-year sleep of communism,
but it is still dreaming of the crimes that were committed in
communism's name; only in dreams can it name the crimes out

y Mary Zoo
Twin
selected poems
Of all the street's windows, only yours dreams.
Barely twenty the child you were
clitnbed the spiral staircase toward the moon
seeking ocean, its twisting
scorched by moonlight.
You too felt the pull of it,
that heavy seed filled with time.
Waves dragged in your ear,
chained, unchained, the slow war
flowing froin some eternal center.
A future waiting to be yours
lay beyond a bridge of stars.
You watched them pass,
the long animal shadows of youth,
partner to the dancing coin
that rose and spun and would not fall.
Candle
Deep in its mantle,
the arrow that rises
from the cliff
of its own cutting
descends through
flesh and fat,
climbing the hungry
root whose flame
feeds the round
light that eats
its way up.

mother was an academic over there and now works at Nails Nails
Nails. She taught her daughter first-class English. Ziva likes to talk
about the blizzards of St. Petersburg, and how as a girl she skated
the frozen Neva, ice cocooning the 60 rivers and canals. She talks
about 30-below-zero temperatures as she paints tiny stars on inchlong
fingernails. Hannah inherited her mother's love of winter. Fat
snow, not the pitiful stringy snow we have here. I remember snow
like that from when I was little little and my father carrying me.
"1 hope your father has those maple cookies."
"It's Kim. Remeinber that, Hannah."
Daddy opens the door in a peach-colored satin robe and hugs and
kisses me, the towel around his neck
smelling of lavender. "Happy Valentine's
We used to go
to Central Park to
watch the swans
but lately Hannah's
been spending
every minute with
her lipstick.
Day." Then he takes Hannah's hands and
pulls her inside for a hug. "Happy Cupid
to you too."
At first I don't look at him because I'm
afraid. When he had his chin surgery he
went battered-woman black and blue for
weeks and when he reduced his Adam's
apple, his voice changed.
"Guys, what's different?" he asks in
his whisper, pivoting for us in the foyer.
His robe clings to his breasts, and
they're a set of perfect tennis balls. He
must have had the gummy bear implants.
He hasn't said anything about mine that finally are budding like the
green tomatoes Mrs. Hertzberg grows in her classroom.
"From the towel around your neck I gather you're about to take a
shower in the afternoon," I say, knowing what he wants me to notice.
"When you lived at home, you took showers in the morning.'.'
He places his hands on his hips. "I'm going to a party tonIght.
Something else has changed."
"You're growing your hair out, Mrs. Cadorine?" Hannah says. She
is smart and can blab about Pavlova, Nijinsky, and the ballet. But
mostly it's lip liner and short or long strokes and how to apply
foundation to blend and conceal. She's set on becoming a make-up
artist for TV.
"Daddy wants to be called Kiln," I reinind her. "Even Grandma
calls him that. He's going to a clinic where they sew hair plugs into
your scalp."
"Hair is hard," he says, his mouth losing its smile for an instant.
His hair is strawberry blond and long thin wisps of it are arranged
over the top of his head. Not even estrogen helps, and the hair plugs
are a money tar pit. I remember when Daddy lived at home his hair
would fall out and stick to the sides of the tub like slivery goldfish,
and Mommy would laugh. His skin is ultra-smooth from electrolysis.
Hannah told me about the white nights back home where dusk and
dawn meet in summer skies. That's what Daddy's face reminds me
of, or a mute swan whose plumage is gone.
He turns, pulling his robe tighter, sucking in his stomach, raising
his chin. "The results were very pleasing."
"You've grown a chest for the party," I blurt out. "You've had the
gummy bears."
Daddy grins. "That's right, but for more than just the party. For
forever."
"Can we go with you to the party?" Hannah asks.
"Chairman Mao wouldn't want that, Hannah. You know how
Dalloway's mother is. Her brain might appear to be tofu and eggplant
but she manages to find out everything."
"Oh, please," Hannah begs.
I wonder how many potential customers she thinks she might
meet. Hannah is taking an Internet cosmetology course. This week's
lesson is brow makeover make-up tips. Nothing at Bronx Science
interests her as much. We used to go to Central Park to watch the
swans, but lately Hannah's been spending every minute with her lipsticks.
I used to fill notebooks about migrating birds. The birds are
confused. They don't know summer from winter and they're not sure
when to fly. The trees are just as bewildered when green buds appear
in February. I think I'm the only one who's worried about the birds.
"Dalloway and parties don't mix," Daddy explains, ushering us
into the dining area where the table is decked out and waiting. "It
wouldn't be any fun for you guys. It's an adult Valentine gala."
Daddy shouldn't have said gala, now she will want more than ever to
go. He's practicing his feminization walk: use hips not whole body, foot,
thigh, leg. "Let me show you the dessert course. You can have your own
soiree right here."
Hannah's lips turn down.
"Sounds great to me," 1 say, following Daddy into the dining area.
On the table, maroon napkins are folded like sails of yachts, spoons
and forks rest against the silver moon of the chafing dish, which is
filled with Godiva foil-wrapped Valentines. Fresh cut flowers sprout
from a vase, leaves like red pepper rinds that have been shined.
"Dutch apple and strawberry rhubarb pies. Maple cookies with an

inch of frosting. This way for main courses and appetizers," he
says, whipping open the refrigerator to show off individual tins
from Good-N-Plenty. "Chicken tenders, vegetable pot pies and
empanadas. You could snack and have a movie marathon. I got
three Hitchcocks! Dalloway's favorites."
It would be heaven to sit with a Dutch apple pie between my
knees and watch Vertigo, to pick apart the walnuts and brown sugar
while Jimmy Stewart hangs by his fingertips from the edge of a
building, to crunch pieces of crust and pluck out syrupy apples as
Kim Novak drifts like humidity at the florists around the peonies
and lilies. Hitchcock doesn't show, but suggests, the gnats halfheartedly
circling the blooms. To be back in time with basically a
whole pie and no school the next day. What could be better?
I drop my overnight bag and go for a fork and plate, the glass
ones in the shape of sunfish. "Do you want rhubarb or apple,
Hannah?"
"Both," Hannah says.
"Me too." I stab the rhubarb with a pie cutter. "What about you,
Daddy?" I've always loved Daddy's sweet tooth.
"I can't, Dalloway, I have to watch my waist."
"I miss seeing your love handles," I say, balancing a heaping slice
of apple pie on the prongs of my fork. "Hannah, he used to have a
hula-hoop of fat right above his belt and when I was a little girl I
grabbed onto it thinking it was his hand."
"Hula-hoop, what is that?" she asks.
"It was a plastic hoop that you threw your hips around inside of."
"Throw your hips, how?"
Daddy gets himself a glass of water from the sink and pulls out
a drawer. Both of us automatically close in. The drawer is full of
punch-out pill cards, samples, the kind doctors give away. I pick
up a pill card. Under plastic in neat rows are purplish tablets the
color of vitamin B-12. Two of them are missing. He snatches the
card back.
"What's all this, Mrs. Cadorine?" Hannah asks.
At first, he doesn't answer. Then he pushes another tablet from
the punch-out card and pops it into his mouth. "It's Kim, remember?
These are hormones."
Hannah dislikes drugs. She saw her father make syringes out of
sewing needles and ballpoint pens, inject over-the-counter cough
syrup directly into a muscle. Near the end, her father lived in a
packing box with a mongrel and when he begged on the street his
sign read, "Please help me buy food for my dog. ff
Hannah said
Russians love animals much more than people.
Daddy washes down what was in his mouth.
"Are they making you a woman?" I ask.
He nods.
Hannah licks at her new hyper-shine lipstick. The teentastics at
school are leery of her, as if one of their eyes might go blind if they
hung around her.
Daddy takes another drink of water, and then holds out the glass
like he's toasting Hannah. "What I wouldn't give to look like you."
"If I can make you look like me will you take us to your party?"
she asks Daddy.
I want to kick her.
A smile spreads across his face. "Let me think about it while I
shower," he says, heading toward the bathroom. "Dalloway, go check
out the guest room. There's another surprise."
In the spare bedroom Daddy has his roll-top desk, his kite and
windsock collection, all his research and development orange juice
containers, his hydroponics files, and now he's set up the igloo tent.
Inside are maroon sleeping bags, and on each pillow is a package
wrapped in shiny red paper and tied with silver ribbon. I feel tears
growing in my eyes like weeds. I crawl into the tent and fetch the
packages. "Here, Hannah, this one's for you." I rip mine open, but
Hannah uses her fingernail to loosen the tape making sure she doesn't
tear the paper.
"This is beautiful," she says, holding up the cowhide shoulder bag,
petting the swirls of brown and cream-colored hair.
"I hope no anhnal had to die to make that stupid purse," I say,
peering inside. "Hey, there's a $50 bill and a key. I bet it's the key to
this apartment." I stuff the fifty and key into the pocket of my jacket,
throwing the purse on top my day pack.
"Dalloway, I got a $50 bill too. I can't believe it."
"But no key?" I ask with a catch in my throat. I'm the daughter.
"No key." Then she folds the foil gift wrap and slips it inside the
purse, a solemn expression on her face like she's thinking of her
father who is buried in Russia.
I sit at the roll-top, tugging out the drawers. The bottom drawer is
hard to pull, and no wonder - it's filled with envelopes, the flowerprinted
stationery kind, not the business ones. There must be hundreds
of love letters. Hannah grabs Vogue from the entertainlnent shelf and
plops into the beanbag chair. I lift a packet of envelopes, smelling
perfume. Letter after letter I slip under my nose like a fading drug

paintings. Hannah offers to do his makeup and we crowd into the
bathroom. Daddy hauls in an ice chest filled with makeup, at least
five of everything. Gloss sticks. Pressed powders. Concealers.
Brushes. On the sink is a head wearing a wig of soft curls past the
shoulders, the color of late August cornhusks. "It's called the
Challay blond," he says, pulling it on. Then he sits on the toilet seat.
I'm frightened. He's almost pretty.
"First, Kiln, we start with the moisturizer." Hannah finds a triangular
sponge and dots his cheeks and chin. There used to be
hair there and when Daddy kissed me goodnight I felt his bristles.
Then she presses the sponge and begins to connect the dots.
"Blend upwards, under the eyebrow, and an inch below the jawline
and chin. That's something not everyone knows. To mature
eye skin we don't apply foundation." She bites her lip because
she's concentrating.
"Looks, what are looks?" Hannah blurts out suddenly, pressing
foundation over Daddy's lips. "Who cares? My father was handsome
but when he died and his hand turned cold, I dropped it." She
picks up the lipstick pencil. "On the lower lip work from the center
to the corners. Now blot."
II II
When a cab stops, Hannah and Daddy sit in back and I take the
seat in front. I stare hard out the window as 10th Avenue flies by,
the Yemenite delis and Chinese takeouts, the Puerto Rican auto
repairs and the boarded-up public library, a worn-out stretch before
the Starbucks of Amsterdam Avenue. At a stoplight, a turbaned
woman kneels before a chain fence pushing a plate under it, and
then pulling the plate out, and then pushing it back. I haven't said
anything to Daddy or Hannah about California, not a word about
the jobs Mommy has applied for or how she goes online every
morning to find out the temperature in San Francisco and input it
into a spreadsheet.
The cab driver keeps looking into the rearview mirror to admire
the two lovelies.
"Left side, near corner," Daddy points to 78th Street.
The building rises from a canyon of dirty brownstone.
Daddy taps my shoulder. "Don't be shy, guys. Remember to
smile."
The lobby floor is polished marble, and on the walls Art Deco
mirrors hang alongside a reproduction of Warhol's Chairman
Mao. "There's your mother, Dalloway."
"He was a pig/' Hannah growls. "When he croaked his people
said God has died. Can you believe that?" She has her new purse
stuffed with business cards. Some say Hot. Extreme. Make-up Artistry
Call Hannah. To See Your Wrinkles Disappear Make Appointment with the
Tchaikovsky of Makeover. Beautiful Brides: Your House or Mine.
Daddy ushers us by the security guard who checks his list for the
name Cadorine. "The penthouse elevator's in back." He gives Daddy
an approving once over, and then his eye slides onto Hannah who
floats past him like a cloud in black jeans and a blouse with seethrough
sleeves. I have on the same outfit but it fits me differently.
The elevator makes me feel I'm inside a jewelry box where the French
perfumes are fighting. The doors slap open, and we step out into a
sunken living room filled with people. "Kim," someone says. I recognize
Dr. Peeler, Daddy's therapist, rushing toward us. It was her
beach house where the fiasco happened.
"That's her," I whisper to Hannah, who is already digging in her
purse. "That's Dr. Peeler."
Daddy gives Dr. Peeler a kiss and squeezes her hand. Her pixie
face shines so that I wonder if she applied floor polish instead of
moisturizer. "Ah, Dalloway, I'm so glad to see you," she greets me,
her nostrils quivering as if she's sniffing the burning bathroom. "Is
this your Russian friend? Why she's lovely." When she turns toward
us, so does her perfume, a bouquet of stale meadow flowers.
Hannah has a card ready. Bridal Parties to Headshots. Futurist Full
Treatment Make-up. Dr. Peeler examines the business card, and then
asks for a handful. I don't know where to put my eyes. "Hannah,
please don't leave me. I don't want to stand alone," I say but I don't
know whether she hears me or not.
Then Dr. Peeler has Hannah by one hand and Daddy by the
other, and is pulling them away. Madonna is singing "Lucky Star"in
a voice like a white trout being gutted. It is an old people party, the
music proves it.
"Nice blouse," says a man shorter than me with a wispy mustache.
He taps his cigarette on his watch, and offers me a Pall Mall. "You
don't have to inhale," he advises. "We can stand next to a window."
"Ish," I tell him. I guess he figures if I'm taller than him I'm old
enough to smoke. He apologizes and then tries to light his cigarette
before he puts it to his lips.
Hannah and Daddy and Dr. Peeler are sitting on the piano bench.
In the middle of the room a red-bearded man with horn-rimmed
glasses is pontificating. He holds a plate piled high with desserts.
liThe bottom line is... women are the philanderers, not men," he

a bird had dropped it there, feels like walking into a heated house.
"You've been drinking," she snaps. "Stupid."
"Tardmuffin."
"You sound like thein. Nothing is worse," Hannah accuses.
"Do you really think sounding like the kids at school is worse
than dancing with that ding-head red-beard?"
"By a technochasm. By ten shades of termite."
"Okay, diggity dank," I say.
"Where are we going?" she asks.
"Central Park"
"The duck pond?"
"Yeah, the sooner the quicker."
"All the swans and ducks are roosting, Dalloway."
"Doesn't matter."
At Trump Plaza, a blonde in a skimpy dress sways like Red Sea
hair coral. Guests slip out of the hotel and into silk limousines. Some
clamber into carriages. There are more horses in their pitiful blinders,
survivors of a magnificent line kidnapped from the grass. A carriage
driver holding a six-foot switch cries, "Twenty bucks for a romantic
tour of Central Park," and a girl and boy climb into his carriage.
Hannah hurries to hand the couple one of
her business cards. Hannah, we should
I think he and
Dr. Peeler like each
other. That makes
Daddy alesbian I
free the horse. She's far away giving out
her card, Prime FX Lip, to a girl with a man
at least twice her age.
"Come on, come on," I call out.
The couple has settled into their seat,
and the carriage driver lifts the reins. The
white horse struggles over the cobblestone
street. Hannah's false eye reminds
me of the horse's blinders. Do the hours of pulling the carriage pass
slowly for the horse? You can hear the answer in its step, one clop
and a hesitation, and then another clop. We follow the carriage into
the park, but the horse is picking up speed. It must smell the trees
and think there's rest here.
"Run," I shout. "We have to catch up."
"Dalloway, stop. We'll go to the pond, and then home. If we get
into trouble, your mother will never let you see Kim again."
If Mommy has her way I won't see Hannah much longer either.
There's mist in the trees and homeless men huddle next to each
other on stone benches. The streetlight throws smeary images of
their faces on the wet pathway. I almost don't see them because
they're always there. Like the static you used to hear between TV
channels. One of them wears a hooded sweatshirt and Kleenex boxes
on his feet. I reach for Hannah's arm. She offers me her jacket, but I
tell her no. Is she talking as we walk deeper into the park? I can't be
sure that I'm not hearing her thoughts. This, Dalloway, this misery is
what St. Petersburg feels like. They're sprucing up the palaces but
the city was built on a swamp by force, stone by stone, and workers
died like flies. It's still there, all the hell.
"I told Kim we'd take a cab," Hannah says. "I promised we'd go
straight home."
"I think he and Dr. Peeler like each other. That makes Daddy a lesbian."
"Big deal."
"Did I say it was? Let's go over there."
We plop down near the pond and wait for the swans. On the next
bench, a man sits in a flak jacket without an umbrella or hat. A grocery
cart filled with folded newspapers and Duane Reade sacks is
parked near him. I nudge Hannah. "That guy is sitting up so straight
he looks made out of stone."
Hannah shrugs. Rain is beginning to fall harder, the skinny drops
getting fat. I rest my head on her shoulder, and then she takes off her
jacket and covers me with it. "See, stupid, I told you swans sleep in
their nests at night. The only ones that swim in moonlight are the swan
maidens. When they take off their feather shirts the birds becOIne
beautiful women." She spreads her hair behind her so the rain can soak
it. "You brought us on a wild goose chase."
I study the brown surface of the pond. Empty. Then I close my
eyes and concentrate on making two graceful shapes appear, I think
swans, their necks together, talking in whistles. When I open myeyes
the water is still naked. The man in the flak jacket hasn't moved.
"I think that man is dead," I say.
Hannah snorts, "Dead drunk"
"Bet."
"Five dollars."
Hannah gets up and goes over to the man. "Hello? Would you like
a facial?" she asks, a hank of her hair falling against him, "I'll show
you, Dalloway. One touch and he'll grunt and maybe even wakeup.
Then you'll owe me five U.s. dollars." Her fingertips touch his cheek
like she is applying dots of foundation. "Oh, no," she whispers. Rings
of moisture drop from the streetlight over her shining head. "Come
here, Dalloway. Come," she says, quivering. "Give me your hand."
I let her press my hand against his cheek Her fingers stay wann
on top of mine, while under them the chill spreads. "Do you feel it?"

New Year's Day: Looking for aSign
From the vast blue bouillon burning a dome over us
to the ice petals in their miniscule exactitude - Inillions
on the twiggy branches of every bush -
or the tiny frost-ferns printing the bedroom window;
from the high wavering call of the geese getting the stormy message
and moving south
to the friendly bark of the dog with one white husky eye
stopping to lick my hand when I stop at the sun-dial;
from the big infinities to all slJch local color
I'm clawing about with my eyes
to find the right sign - steam
off the frozen stream, tabula rasa after a night of snow -
but nothing will serve:
not even the cries of marsh hawk and kingfisher
as hunger keeps gnawing them and they look down
on only the white world frozen below;
and not my own black cashmere cap when it starts running blood
staining my forehead like a Kashmiri Sikh,
nor the ladybird on my window come out to test
the New Year light - who scales on six mini-legs
a mile of glass and is for a moment falling back illuminated.
Morning under Muckish
Between rain and shine a kestrel stretches on the wind,
flapping fast and casual to stay still. Assassin. Negotiator
of gales. Cows lie in the lea of a hedge of honeysuckle.
Tall phlox nod in a sea-breeze. A sudden wood pigeon
rises from the green grave of a potato field - its language
clapclapclap - vanishing. Two ash trees huddle frOln rain,
trunks and branches hugging one another. A loopy line
of wet washing limply dangles: quotidian brilliance
of shirts, towels, flashy underwear. A stroppy dark dog
harries my heels and a hidden voice calls Mungo!
Mungo! And one almost ripe blackberry in a bushful
of bitterness, its onyx eye winking. Margins
where meadowsweet meets loosestrife. A thorn tree
putting on new leaves. Trekking clouds. Empty hills.

What Shadows
Needles of rain. Ground makes no moan.
Sigh of wind in the sycamore. What's passing.
Haw berries rusting the hawthorn trees.
Don't look back. Think Orpheus. Pillar of salt.
One breath, then another. Sweat of apprehension.
Still life with wind and breadcrulnbs.
But I keep wanting to turn around.
No whimsy in it, running the gamut
bright red. And as deadly, she said, as nightshade.
Still I went on. Looking at her lips.
Sea verge to cliff edge, no shaking off
what shadows me.
After seeing the rain-swollen torrent at Gurteen,
I dream I want to give myself over
to its foamy, stone-broken dissolution of salt.
What then? What's not possible?
Weather Artists
In a jagged patch of blue
Pontormo might caress
across the tank-top of an angel
(a wide-eyed beauty
staring challenge or invitation
from under the lemon-green
heavy legs of a dead Jesus)
morning light is shining.
It shatters to a pelting shower
clattering the flat roof
like the mad hand
of a bodhrdn banger, high
on the quick shifts of light,
the slant mercury-bright
shoots and stems of rain
cueing him. After it passes
silence seeps in, brimming
the garden: provisional
absolute and absolution
Leopardi came to terms with:
its inauguration of small voices
(robin tongue, raindropplink
through the sycamore
leaf to leaf, a sudden gush of wind
translating every syllable
into tree-speech)
till light breaks back,
coating grass with that
yellow the pleine air painters
patented, so when I look
out this eastern window
I see, suspended
from a fuchsia twig, three
tiny blown-glass globes of lighi
in which, if the twig shivers
in any exhalation of air or
I incline to left or right,
the spectrum stays visible
a glimmering instant, as for
C'ezanne on his riverbank,
so he saw, and kept going.

Something about the light does this, works this kind of spell.
Approaching the Bealach, he looks out and it's as though the entire
sky of the world is open, poured out, let loose all down upon the
hills. Like there was never such a thing as darkness here, like there
could be no darkness, only this bare, clear air. There are the clean
open flats of the moors, pale gray and dun and heather-streaked
with dark and peat, and blackish watery burns some places coming
down cut with broken stones, rocks, and all of it, the sweet
land, available to you somehow, that sense of reaching out to it like
you might take it, be able to gather it into yourself and make it
yours, a universe of endless land and sky and distance and pick
out the mountains for your stars.
But it's the road that keeps him from disappearing. The gray of
it, and thin, with no place much for passing. Since childhood, the
memory's been in Callum all of the years, coming along here with
his father, lagging behind caravans or
estates hitching trailers, or boats and his
It's the road that
keeps him from
disappearing.
The gray of it,
and thin, with no
place much for
passing.
father's frustration, Christ, get a move on
man! His hands gripping the wheel, and
those eyes of his trained on distance.
First Drumochta. Then Bonar Bridge.
Dornoch... All the places he was wanting
to get past, to get through, to get
there ... And terrifying, I know myself,
that cry of his: Christ! Like the man
would himself put a sword through
Christ's side, Callum could see it all, as a
boy. His father's profile as he sat beside
hiln in the car, seeing his father out of
the side of his eye, not daring to say a
word, not wanting to breathe even. And where was his mother
then? It was always only ever him making the journey with his
father, enduring that silence of his, or the frightening cries, and the
sense of him, that man in the car beside him, the sense of him
wanting out, into the hills and the water, seeming to be pushing
him along, pulling him, great pieces of the sound of the place
unfurling in his mind, like there may as well be someone coming
down off the hills now with a set of pipes to call him in.
It's going to take a couple more hours to get up to us here, much
easier now than back in the old days, still, the particular emotion

through to the main house, to the small sitting room where his
father will be.
This time, though, my mother does not take him. He goes
down the hall by himself to where the old man is waiting, sitting
in his armchair by the fire, alone. My mother busies herself
in the kitchen, heats through soup, rolls, puts the water on to
boil for tea. When I come down from my bedroom to take the
things through she's away upstairs herself and Callum's sitting
in the chair before his father, his father not saying a word. The
lamps are on, and the fire's bright this darkish afternoon with
snow in the air and still one or two old dogs barking, poor
beasts, not understanding why it is they've not been allowed to
see him, to come rushing in and fall upon Callum to lick him
all over his hands. They know alright that it's Iny brother who
is here.
But it's not for me to go - to release them. I set the tray down
on the small table by the window and Callum says, "Hello, Helen"
then, and I turn to him, for the first time in a long time I'm looking
on his face again.
Then his father speaks, "He took his time getting back to us,
Helen. Didn't he? Our boy?"
He smiles, first time I've seen the old man smile since he's been
back up here, a smile, a real smile. He takes a sip from his dram.
"Don't think I'm going back with you though," he says, "Callum.
I'll not, and you should know this fine, I'll not be taken."
"Dad..." Callum says, "Hello..."
It's as though there's light all around the pair of them. I can
see it, in this room with its deep wooden walls and windows
set, this late afternoon, with all the little panes of glass. To see
them, together again, my father and my brother, these men
who, though they will never know it, have a daughter and a
sister, too...
"That'll be all, I think, Helen," the old man says then. "You
can leave us now. Tell lain we'll not be needing the guns in the
morning..."
And I turn to go. Leave them, the one facing the other, by the fire
I set this morning.
"Wish your mother goodnight from me," my father says to me
as I go out the door, back into the dark hall, yet the sense of light,
this gorgeous piece of light still present, with me, at my back.
From this man who's come from where he was, come up that long
road that's behind him, crossed the Pass, and returned to us, to
Nowhere, "Falabh." Our Aite Aon Arech, our End of the Road. Our
home.•

what was lost to surface. For maximum fun with butter,
that part of legacy (my father an unsalted butter-color man):
a fresh tub for each impression. One for chin, one for hand, another
for foot, each bite mark. No problem: there was always
another butter. Exceptional mortar butter, plaster of butter
every year
Easter butter lamb to butcher gently with polite knives
the shape of oars, shape of skinny hooded priest profiles.
slick with
You stuck your hands in and the butter softened cuticles, repaired
dishpan hands, soothed scrapes, minor burns -Matna ran butter-fisted
when I fell off the bike - was elbow grease
if you wiped it there, and let rings come off as if it was before:
softness back
and some of your innocence
in family tradition of Blue Bonnet, Mazola, Land 0' Lakes'
Indian maiden coming at me sometilnes in a canoe taken as rescue
craft I was too big for; I could open my mouth, and she, Princess
Whatchamaca1ll1er could float right in, down
my throat that with tonsils and tongue offered a take
on southwestern land formations. We used Big Chief
baking powder and sugar, had Minnehaha Water delivered
in jugs big enough to have held fleets of sunken toy ships,
and sold what we called bog water (taken from vases
and saucers under potted plants, spruced up
with Listerine) to those who wanted adult drinks prematurely;
- jO Deirdre! -
bog water of premature wine not done fermenting had to be
priced by proximity to process completion. After any of this
we freshened the air with Indian Blessing Spray #41
that stank a little bit
and also smelled a little bit like cherries.
- jin your stinking grave
rotting sweetly: no
complaints -
By not partaking of any butter, not indulging, not giving in
my toast was sandpaper, the usual slice of fossil-sponge
Martian terrain close-up. But it could crumble, could
become dust in my fingertips, could look as if I crumbled
with it, tobacco like, filler for my father's Pall Malls
that he smoked to death, and as if I were butter
had that responsibility time to time I opened cigarettes
scraped the paper clean and wrote haiku riddles that I rolled up
tightl)T, my words burning from his lips easily
gone gone gone
All four slices of my wooden bread
are sanded smooth grain. Old English
protected - that oil like supremely clarified butter.
What fine head and foot boards for beautiful small beds
no one fits, only if the size of cigarettes, pack of white-robed sisters
from Virginia what fine understated tombstones.
This bread may be waxed. 0 shine. I know who Shine was.
Its lines are durable labYrinths our father
fingers and tongue may follow in cursive spell-out.
That wax, that sheen of get-away
from the path shines my fingerprints
where I grip the bread as loose pages, loose leaves
of suspicious adaptation. Loops under the arches
are a green onion bulb
cross section, innermost loop
like the eye of an elnbroidery needle
or like sperm-head
or like the hook
that scrapes out early pregnancy
depending on who's looking. The loop made
when tying the ribbons of a blue bonnet
under the chin. II

Fork
Addiction
his is a tale of the birth of Limited Fork Poetics.
The birth announcement, actually, of the inevitable
offspring of a poet who becomes so immersed in
awareness of the dominating presence of dynamic
systems in every facet of her observable existence that
poetry and the structures she studies merge.
Dynamic systems, processes of interactions, produce active structures
that populate the landscapes that exist simultaneously at all
scales. Mutability, multiplicity, and adaptability are stunning traits
of existence that occur everywhere, on different scales of place and
time. Most of these structures escape human notice, but continuing
advances in evidence capture (for instance, better and better microscopes
and telescopes) reveal more and more information in every
location examined with these devices that extend the limited range
of human perception.
Within revealed areas, previously unknown structures offer
enough connections, enough similarity to previously encountered
patterns that metaphor not only becomes possible but is
also encouraged. We catalog these new things with links to
what we are reminded of, even as the science of these things
emerges in the data, enabling recognition of the galactic within
the microscopic, the sombrero within the galactic. This is the
dynamic texture of existence. Patterns repeat on all scales, in
whole and in part, and the poet seeks them in those neighborhoods
that have become local (so available for access) by that
poet. This dynamic texture is particularly prolninent in internet
searches where thousands of links can appear almost instantaneously,
but since we cannot follow all of them all at once
(though they are there), we move through the options one at a
time instead, never pursuing most of them, yet we remain
aware of the vast network of connections that the ones we
choose to follow are part of. That influence remains and shapes
responses to pursued search outcomes - perhaps only subtly,
even only imperceptibly (at first; impact might become more pronounced
as it builds through further connections made in other
locations at other times).
Active structures resist (models of) geometric perfection with
bulges, bumps, punctures, wrinkles, folds, zigzags, nicks, crinkled
contours (think of the pocked moon, of planetary rifts,
tectonic buckles, valleys), and these appear even on those things
that are generally smooth (a feature that generally increases with
distance). Departures from smooth ideals tend to be revealed as
powers of magnification (including thinking) are increased. So
within limits (skin is such a limit), there is (apparently) endless
variation such that specifics cannot be predicted precisely. Every
day my eye is drawn to those shapes it considers interesting
(such as clouds, flowers, mountains, birds, trees) because my
brain is shaped that way also, is generally cumulous, bulging
with recognition, possibility; cerebral folds like aerial maps of
river systems, tributaries like liquid branches and liquid nerves,
like three-dimensional portraits of an idea and its tributaries
making multiple connections simultaneously, both consciously
and unconsciously.
Yes, the circulatory system is an inner tree. The nervous systenl
is another tree within the human forest, capped with a jellyfish
of brain from which nervous tentacles sprout and house
everything imaginable. That the products of dynamic humanity
would themselves be dynamic makes sense; they already are
without our knowing it, but when realized, possibilities previously
dormant with potential become activated, and my understanding
of poetry expands as it seeks to apply principles of
behaviors of dynamic systems to itself. Limited Fork Poetics is in
the blood - that's how basic and essential it is; already there,
but needing to be named in order to be perceived. It embraces all
of my humanity, so of course is fully compatible with how thinking
behaves, and makes predictions that my work actively
attempts to fulfill. To understand poetry as a dynamic system is
to allow poetry to see itself in many different mirrors, each distortion
accurate. Each contribution taking a crack at improving
(the reliability of) the sum.
One such mirror is the elm, outside my office window, that (on
the day I looked at it as the dynamic system that it, like poetry,
already was) offered more possibilities than it ever had. I remember
thinking how the aesthetic appeal of tree would be weakened
for me if there were only the trunk to consider. I would not call

trunk alone tree. It was the fuller package that defined it, making
it recognizably ehn - the visible width of bifurcating elm, the
uncompressed departures from trunk including those twigs,
branches, and roots culminating in dead ends, terminal locations
which happened to locate points in the sky and the earth - and
made me want to look at it again and again - each elm within
the general limits of elm but with unpredictable specific branch,
bark, and root patterns, even such variation in the general structure
of the leaves - I love the fatness of the system of branches. I
love those things whose generalities are predictable but not their
specifics, some of which can exert so much influence, the general
structure is changed - And I did need for that itnpressive
branching width to slim down to trunk
(respite) as I journeyed both outwardly
Thinking is more
like time itself, a
vehicle transporting
us, that meanders
as it moves
generally linearly.
to what branches pointed to and
inwardly to what roots pointed to:
everything. I had access to everything
through that ehn.
It was an ultimate fork. I held up a
plastic generality that happened to be
on my desk, finding the placement in
which my eyes allowed the plastic fork
handle to become proxy elm trunk, the
idea firmly in my grip, the plastic tines
there to help me access more of the pos­
sibilities of the idea, but with gaps between them because I could
not possibly grasp everything. Hence (some of) the limitation.
a those lovely gaps! - like those between elm branches, offering
a ragged, irregular beauty not available to something completely
filled in. I could see, fork preventing me from seeing anything
else, that gaps were preferable to a solidity that I couldn't think
of, considering space between the components of and the atoms
of everything. Space between my thumb and plastic, between
plastic and window, window and elm, between (the system of)
elm and the bifurcating system of lines (branches) on my hand
that branches from my trunk of arm that branches from my trunk
of body (that branched inside my mother).
In using a fork, the user who would digest what the fork
manages to lift and move through space to the mouth (the danger
of losing some or all of what is speared, draped across, or
dangling from the lap of tines always present) becomes an
extension of fork, the arm branching into body so that the
collaboration of user and fork gives birth to another form of tree,
another branch of larger structure. The act of writing is largely
linear in that it tends to happen sequentially; word follows word.
Forking paths my poems pursue are conceived of simultaneously
(consciously and unconsciously) but are captured one by one, linearly,
even if placed irregularly on a page. Sometimes only one
path is captured, or part of a path. Thinking blossoms, sometimes
explodes in a temporary"Aha!" of knowing only to be funneled
sequentially and trimmed, but blossoming can again occur
each time the poem is experienced. Each encounter offers opportunity
for enhancement or amendment (including dynamic decay
and recycling).
That which pulses and flows is myriad, that which throbs,
including, possibly, big bang residue in the form of subtle vibration,
maybe even deep-space signals transmitted in hopes of chance
interaction with those able to recognize and find meaning in structure.
A consideration of dynamic systems is a consideration of how
the mutability of structure intensifies at boundaries where there are
greater opportunities for new structures to take shape whether or
not they succeed. Where more variables are present whose interactions
can reshape the interacting systems in subtle ways or ways
that approach profundity. The full range. Motion, the dynamic
necessity of dynmnic systems, is also journey, at the very least
through time. Things move for the most part, apparently linearly
through time, but thinking and imagination can also move in any
direction while basic linear progression is underway. Thinking is
more like time itself, a vehicle transporting us, that meanders as it
moves generally linearly, creating different implications for each
location in time. Multiple streams of time, such as past and present,
apparently head toward future streams, but at any time, any of
these can be twisted, merged, or folded - if only in the thoughts of
those moving with time. Consider that sunlight that illuminates the
present on earth is light from the sun's recent past. And sunlight
emanates from all the sun-sphere all at once, so a radiant mane (not
a single line) travels a widening path in time.
Because LFP emphasizes fluidity, implications for the LFP page
can be startling. I am Proforker and Text Choreographer as I work on
identifying and understanding how moving products of LFP
occupy moving space. Poems may happen at any stage in cycles
of structure formation, decay, and reformation; and any part of
these events may appear in any location of the LFP page simultaneously,
some parts imperceptible, some variably revealed and

unrevealed, some so stable that they are caught in acts of persistent
coherent revelation. Where structure forms on the LFP page
is a stabilizing area (page refers to the primary residence [home
base] of a poem or any of its components at any specified
mOInent and is not liInited to paper - a poem is able to travel,
even if it doesn't [seem to]). Where structure decays on the LFP
page is a destabilizing area fertile for reformation. Stanzas can
begin out of stabilizing gestures, and may progress in stability or
may deteriorate, warp, or transform as sOInething from the surrounding
flux (the substance out of which structure forms, the
ingredient pool) interacts with the stabilizing (or decaying)
structure. It Inay not be obvious whether a perceptible structure
is stabilizing or decaying as a similar fonn may occur in either
structural state. Structure may attempt to take shape in multiple
locations (rooms) of the house of the poem, and any number of
these attempts Inay take on enough structure to become perceptible
in part or whole, perhaps causing competing zones of influence
which may merge into one structure or may lead to one or
more quick or gradual demises. Or the stability of the poem's
structure may be so intense that it delays the stabilizing (of other
locations perhaps for so long, the delay mimics prevention), so
that nothing else (at that time) is visible.
A poem as print object documents the dynamic activity that
caused the poeIn to take on perceptible structure, which, like all
structure, is subject to further change, such as revision of a print
object and interpretations of a print object each time it is encountered.
The complete dynamic signature of a poem includes all
subsystems of the components of a poem (the published form a
magnification of one of the branches in the complete dynamic signature)
which include all drafts, all dead ends, all revisions and
interpretations (by writer and experiencers of the poem), all contributing
thoughts, forming a kind of evolutionary tree of the
poeIn, each branch, when examined closely (magnified, that is, or
considered on some intensified scale), full of other branches of
thought and connection. It is through the (so far) ceaseless movement
(transformation perceived and actual) of dynan1ic systems
that all becomes linked into one fabric of reality that is so faceted,
the saIne territory can reveal something different each time the
lens is shifted or changed. Depth in LFP becomes a way to refer
to that which is unexplored, for once encountered, that which is
encountered becomes the surface of that encounter. The surface is
hardly superficial but is where interactions between boundaries
occur. Surface after surface is scratched, layer after layer is peeled
back, and then there's that rosy resemblance. That elm.
Because poetry is a dynamic system, poems may be understood
as failed efforts to capture flux, as attempts to cause awareness
of something that may no longer exist (in that exact form)
by the time a poem is experienced (even during the writing of
the first line). LFP approaches desired capture of a poem as chase
only, so expects to capture only partialities of partialities. The
totality in which all apparently takes place can't easily (if at all)
be seen as totality from within it. The most that might be possible
is exquisite failure, and most poems fall short of that elm of
failure, some compellingly. II
The Culture of Reena and the Bear
Before the Bear: derived from a theory of gravy
(The neckline and hem of Reena's gown
were trimmed with real hummingbirds
[just a few tiny pins in the outspread wings
- she could feel the racing unison
that the tiny hearts fell into] and actual orchids.
The beak closest to it tried to extract nectar
from the small cleft - the suprasternal notch ­
at the bottom of her perfumed throat)
(Bees drew near; live jewels from the garden.)
She still had her eyes and others too
on a tray: unpitted olives
coated with a thin layer of meringue
as vitreous humor substitute
Breakfast Before the Bear: ocular effects

that she placed in each bowl of owlet soup
in which floated owl embryos braised
in butter and chives, sprinkled with brandy
just before serving, and skewered
with knife-length pieces of jicama,
tasting slightly of rodents
the parent owl had eaten, ambiance
of background radiation, a theorem of alternatives,
the microworld of taste, from here
the same as a comet's rat's tail
coming from between her teeth,
a glittering skeleton, tendon flex
of her reaction attaching Reena
to the muscle of how hard the universe works.
preceded by romance.
They exchanged rings
like the bands on goose legs.
Before the Bear: Reena's first marriage
Promise her anything: give her foie gras:
stuff it down her throat
The Culture of Reena and the Bear
Once she began wondering what it would be like to eat her way
out of something, she did something about it: came to bed
in an open-fire-roasted clove-studded carcass of beef
(the cloves are the dried unopened flower buds of a tree
called the Zanzibar Red Head).
Unfortunately, the bear though as hungry as it should be
after hibernation respected the presence of Reena's husband,
so with him there the bear alone wasn't illuminated;
Reena couldn't hold on to just its light
and lost sight of its darkness in the darkening evening's
Bear hug.
The Superior Love of the Macurap in the Amazon Without Reena
Who's Busy Looking at Ursa Major and Minor
For their efforts the Macurap of the Amazon have
viscous jelly destiny of the broth
maintained for a week as one by one
Macurap women kill their husbands: the intensity of their love
finally at a boiling point: the body everywhere: inside
and out, sensitive to what touches, digesting
intestinal love, cud climax, deep marriage
in the pit of heavenly bellies even more transformation:
husbands taken to limits of what can be taken
in: husbands becoming ultimate alphabet of pleasure: extracts
of A, B, E, vitamin K, crystalline pyridoxine: vitamin B6,
vitamin P: bioflavonoid from rinds and husks:
Macurap wives watch their husbands eat some.
Citrus whispers roasted into his lungs,
tincture of balsam, fermented boil, white peppered
with grubs and lice, lips smack on
how nothing else tastes like a man
loved to death. His cleaned rib cage
is a bone cape around her; her legs twine
around his femurs
as she makes love to ivory scepters.
Golden locks on the pleasure cupboards
can be polished or opened;
grand openings
so much more tasteful
Reena & the Three Bears

than the proprietor down the road
who called that first of several popular
while-you-wait tailoring shops
Jack the Ripper.
Meet Reena the Butcher.
Fresh bear meat for this girl hunter.
The braided rug's circumference is enlarged
by blood-spray
into an alien dahlia of blood
that is just right. II
1
The Culture of Mr. Wonderful
First there's innocence as professed
by his profession: selling boatloads of flowers
that out of his hands become adornment, snacks,
overtures that profit this dealer of vegetable matter,
some petals displayed around the flower head
like a hand of cards: the gamble in anything.
Then one must look more closely at that hand
the flower's been dealt as it becomes what
Mr. Wonderful's been dealt: the family
business, not lucrative all the time; he's not
in it for the money, but for the pure pleasure,
since there's often nothing else, of ferrying flowers.
Many tulips close up on him at twilight as if they hold small empty
eggs: elegant voids - or maybe some inner peace that probably
would be rounded, but not a ticket or passport to anything
outside the garden; pollen drops from what sky there is inside
onto impersonation of a velvet floor
and would be at home in an hourglass: the whole
night spent as gist of what I thought came out
of successful tonsillectomy.
At water's edge: a battalion of white peacocks,
the feathers the most elegant spines
blown back like umbrellas blown back
and contorted like supposedly double-jointed girls
in a circus desperate to be spectacular
but also like, as if the double-jointed were not enough,
partial jellyfish; that is: jellyfish that result
from lobotomy, the ragged half brain of tentacular nerves
or more decorative radar dish
to spy on celestial activity out of the ordinary,
to eavesdrop just as the plane trees just beyond
the startling white peacocks, even their eyes,
are doing: bare branches in the blown-back position
of the peacocks' feathery array
with which the plane trees collaborate, each
translating the other and transmitting mutual praise.
Mr. Wonderful is a captain completely unaware that I know of him.
His expansion that he knows of is a little Mr. Wonderful
whose resemblance extends to a smaller boat
on the other side of the lake.
Some of his petals, the ones most like daggers,
excusing the softness, are dipped in poison
because some poisons make the most beautiful ink
and are necessary to write the name of his lover
on the active surface of this lake; the water under his boat

than the proprietor down the road
who called that first of several popular
while-you-wait tailoring shops
Jack the Ripper.
Meet Reena the Butcher.
Fresh bear meat for this girl hunter.
The braided rug's circumference is enlarged
by blood-spray
into an alien dahlia of blood
that is just right. •
1
The Culture of Mr. Wonderful
First there's innocence as professed
by his profession: selling boatloads of flowers
that out of his hands become adornment, snacks,
overtures that profit this dealer of vegetable matter,
some petals displayed around the flower head
like a hand of cards: the gamble in anything.
Then one must look more closely at that hand
the flower's been dealt as it becomes what
Mr. Wonderful's been dealt: the family
business, not lucrative all the time; he's not
in it for the money, but for the pure pleasure,
since there's often nothing else, of ferrying flowers.
Many tulips close up on him at twilight as if they hold small empty
eggs: elegant voids - or maybe some inner peace that probably
would be rounded, but not a ticket or passport to anything
outside the garden; pollen drops from what sky there is inside
onto impersonation of a velvet floc
and would be at home in an hourglass: the who
night spent as gist of what I thought came 01
of successful tonsillectom
At water's edge: a battalion of white peacocks,
the feathers the most elegant spines
blown back like umbrellas blown back
and contorted like supposedly double-jointed girls
in a circus desperate to be spectacular
but also like, as if the double-jointed were not enough,
partial jellyfish; that is: jellyfish that result
froin 10botoIny, the ragged half brain of tentacular nerves
or more decorative radar dish
to spy on celestial activity out of the ordinary,
to eavesdrop just as the plane trees just beyond
the startling white peacocks, even their eyes,
are doing: bare branches in the blown-back position
of the peacocks' feathery array
with which the plane trees collaborate, each
translating the other and transmitting mutual praise.
Mr. Wonderful is a captain completely unaware that I know of him.
His expansion that he knows of is a little Mr. Wonderful
whose resemblance extends to a smaller boat
on the other side of the lake.
Some of his petals, the ones most like daggers,
excusing the softness, are dipped in poison
because some poisons make the most beautiful ink
and are necessary to write the name of his lover
on the active surface of this lake, the water under his boat

moving like her under him, so many underlings move him,
yellows, oranges, pinks, lavenders spilled here like congealed
volatile oil, wacky pie chart gone fractal
perhaps just to be popular
and on the up and up still rising, garnished with blush
of pollen that is dirty and nutmeg-colored from a rubbing
on Mr. Wonderful's fingertips before dispersal
and the impression that rubbed pollen
could be a grating of his skin for no reason at all,
and that could be why he'd do it.
The trick is to get his fingertips there; after that, there's no trick
to what's visible under the microscope: fortified spiked walls
of a labyrinth, the innermost curl somewhat a spirochete,
and saying that, it's clear just what to picture: artistry transfer
to brushes with syphilis, lues, late treatments, penicillin
success after gross disfigurement, many diseases
seem to establish blossoms on skin, leprous flowers
tended in special, colonirLl gardens.Pet vectors.
There are spikes and hooks
in the fortress of Mr. Wonderful's fingerprints, torture labyrinths,
caches of poisoned intentions unless this is taken another way:
beautiful loop of embroidery, the head of a seahorse from afar,
silk fins present though unseen.
Under the microscope some flowers have bones, there's druse
inside the cells, crystalline inclusions made of the stuff
of kidney stones, and in the flower cells
skeletal druse looks like starburst: an angular and pointed
sub-flower that gathers light.
There remains the simplicity of his selling flowers
not yet milked, still full of perfumes.
They live in marigolds. They live in cyclamen.
When customers sniff, they pray into the petals.
Some flowers are poisonous without this wonderful help:
Barbados nut, the seed of a hairy botanical thing,
at least 55 percent hell oil
and a taste that can be craved, almost sweet,
though belladonna, though the berries of lirio
so much more purple than plums - nearly black,
about to burst with coarse sugar - look sweeter
and are a source of Wonderful's ink
as are the ruddied orange sometimes berries of assumed
pure lily of the valley linked to devotion with bell flowers
each of which seems a chapel
where a corpse might lay drenched in flowers
all because the lily was thought to be wild garlic
and was souped for what turned out to be a last supper
of that soup and a salad of anesthetizing monkshood
leaves and radish-mimic roots so that the Dundee cake flavored
with the same to finish off the person finishing the meal
was not needed. Nothing was left to chance.
Fish are not stupid, that is not why they're hooked
on Wonderful's supply of flowers floating with him,
slapped occasionally with water Mr. Wonderful scoops up
until sequences of float, scoop, slap, dip, rub, disperse
blab and blurt out ritual, and the wonderful boat becomes
a church on waters of exile
where fish die with Wonderful's poison in them, white bellies
like sails no better off than the up-bellies, quite unsail-like sails
for being waterlogged inadequate islands
ideal for water bugs that don't need such refuse
to be refuge. Dead fish form plump alphabet:
a spell of Rima on the water.
Her name drifts with the bulk of fish belly

mounds like variations of mushrooms, stems sublnerged:
stubby legs: small white tables, even in such shrinking
Rima becomes part of everything
because there is such a thing as her signature
on everything, poisoned in a way of looking at love
that went nowhere, did nothing, was only what
Mr. Wonderful was in: a little box like the one
that contains diamond solitaires, sOlnetimes hidden
inside a flower to bypass ordinary circumstance,
not quite successful because it still involves dirty work:
the demolition of flowers to get the boat full of seeds:
so wonderful,
so much greatly magnified dust.
The situation can't be cleaned without ruining everything:
the thicker the dust, the more depth to wonderful living.
I I
Take-off from Sam Abell's photographic account of a Mr. Wonderful in Seeing Gardens.

'Tile ar'lists, courtnsv of jnv ,lonlirlQ/Whifn r:llho I nnrlnn I

GOU"tpcy 'H) (IIJ' PoslrnaslfH'S
New YOi'k

i GO!JI'tesy of Postmasters "The artists. Gourlesy of clay ,Jopling/White Cube. London i

mixod media 58,;)f"x7()"'''''x54';'U'' I
liThe artists, Gourtnsy or Jay Jop!ing/Whitn Culm, London I

y Liam
Rector
selected poems
Our Hero Galliano
When Galliano took over
Dior in 1996 (the Dior
Who said earlier that his
Dream was to "free women
From nature"), many viewed
Galliano as too "costumey,"
While others saw Galliano
Returning sex and theater
To the clothing. When a man
Looks at a WOlnan wearing
A Galliano, Galliano said
That man should think only,
"I have to fuck her."

New York City
Outside the window
Buildings, some
With awnings
And doormen (even
The occasional
Doorwoman now)
(l wonder if they
Are trained to kick
Someone's ass when
It comes to that)
(As it sometimes
Comes to that)
(Or if even the men
Are trained to do that).
Doormen coming out
Now and again
To cop a cigarette
Or help a tenant
With luggage,
The groceries always
Coming, going, feeding.
I hardly ever leave.
I seldom go now.
Hard to pull myself
Away from the entire
Circus just outside
This window now.
Soon the City
Soon the summer
Now the pleasant purgatory
Of spring is over
Soon the choking
Humidity
In the city
On the fire escapes
In a sleeveless T-shirt
Smoking a cigar
In tune with the tremor
Of the mindless yellow
Commercial traffic
Moving in the city
Where no one really
Buys a car
American
Or otherwise
Where we
As Rilke said we would
Where we will
Wake read write
Long letters
And in the avenues
Wander restlessly
To and fro
On foot in
The humidity
Where soon I'll shower dress
Take the dog out for a piss
And mail this

which is sometilnes referred to as What Cannot Be Said.
Agony decides the fate of Theater People. Theater People who
lose a loved one become Showfolks; Theater People whose loved one
enters into Laughter become Stolen Pets.
Upon the death of his loved one, a Showfolk is awarded a cash
prize equal to 100 times the average yearly salary. During Agony, What Can Be Said is alive with contradictory
Showfolks, because of their proximity to those who enter into
but never leave Agony, feel a legitimate need to be looked at
and/or heard. Thus, when they become Tenants, and so long as
they remain Tenants, they are required to work a job in the television
or radio industries as newscasters, game-show hosts, or talkshow
hosts. These positions allow them to be themselves, more or
less, and to be looked at and/or heard. Most will pursue training
in the field so as to compete with other Showfolks for the elite
positions, but many will eschew training
and thereby bring a variety of obstinate
Upon the death
of his loved one,
aShowfolk is
awarded acash
prize equal to
100 times the
average yearly
salary.
peculiarities to local media.
Television and radio stations, when
they are hiring for on-air positions, are
reqUired by law to hire Showfolks before
they hire anyone else. This means that a
Showfolk applicant will beat out all non­
Showfolks for the job, even if the
Showfolk in question has had no training
- indeed, even if the Showfolk in
question is not able to speak. His only
competition is other Showfolks. In the
beginning, when there have been relatively
few Agonies, there will be relatively
few Showfolks, and these few will be
inclined to seek out the most glamorous jobs at the most popular
stations. A smaller portion will no doubt yearn to stay close to home,
and some may seek out positions that allow them to maintain something
close to anonylnity. As Agonies accrue, Showfolks will become
less anomalous, though not necessarily less exotic - will become a
caste, almost - and will saturate all levels of TV and radio "talk."
A Stolen Pet, if his loved one arrives dead in Laughter, is known
thereafter as a Shock Jock. Shock Jocks are awarded a cash prize
equal to 500 times the average yearly salary. Shock Jocks, once they
have received their award, are allowed to apply for and to work at
any job they can get, but they may not receive pay for the work they
do. Stolen Pets who are not Shock Jocks remain Stolen Pets and
receive no monetary award.
wishes. II

y Erin Belieu
3.
I'm a borscht-belt comedienne
working the audience from behind
your headstone.
I shimmy onstage between Pam
And Her Magic Organ and
the gigantic poodle act.
Your coffin is a tough room.
Mourners talk through my set,
down schmutz-colored highballs, wait
for the fan dancer to pluck
her scuzzy feathers. But you
always loved
the livestock, didn't you?
I say, how many of you folks are in
from Jersey?
from In The Red Dress
I Wear To Your Funeral
The microphone sweats
like your cock did in my hands.

4.
I help the Jews drape the mirrors. I peel the foil from
the Protestants' bleak casseroles. The Catholics and Agnostics
huddle in the parking lot, smoking a memorial bowl.
My dear, even the worst despot in his leopard-skin fez
will tell you: the truth doesn't win, but it makes an appearance,
though it's a foreign cavalry famous for bad timing and
half-assed horsemanship. History will barely remember that you
were yellow and a cheat, a pixilated bivalve who consumed
as randomly as the thunderheads pass, and yet, how strange,
how many of us loved you well. So tended)', I'll return
what you gave me - a bleached. handkerchief, a Swiss Army knife
bristling with pointless blades. Tended)', I return everything,
leaving my best evidence in your bloodless lap.
5.
I go to our Chinese take-awa)',
where the placemats say I'm a cock
and you were my favorite pig, though
astrologically you were a wasting
disease and I'm the scales of justice.
Coincidence?
Get down on your knees
and cross yourself all you want:
all systems are closed systems, dead man.
I keep IllY saltshaker holstered in my garter belt,
ready to spill.

the thick metal support posts, I struck it with a light jab. Surprisingly,
the jab caused me little pain, so I hit the post harder, progressively
throwing more of my weight into each blow. The post thudded and
hummed. Its deep-pitched moaJ;l rivaled the drone of the steering
units. The shock of the blows reverberated down my wrists and shoulders
like an arousing musical bass. With each strike I grew stronger. I
could stand up to steel. My boots smeared the blood as it dripped on
the grey decks. It coagulated on the heat of the floor, almost disappearing.
Seaman Romeras, my watch relief, stared as I slung my bloody,
taped fists into the steel beam. But that was just one of those things
that sailors see each other do on long night watches at sea, and nothing
is ever said about it. That night I almost broke. But I turned the whip
against itself, I bared my soul, dripping my
Seaman Romeras,
my watch relief,
stared as I
slung my bloody,
taped fists into the
steel beam.
blood on the steel decks, and in return, the
ship respected my resolve and gave me the
aftersteering room.
The owl had probably flown aboard at
our last port of call, Diego Garcia. Most
likely he made his living catching the huge,
greasy pier rats that infest tropical ports
worldwide. We had pulled out of Garcia
five days ago, so I figured he must be hungry.
The next night, I offered him bread
crusts and pieces of pork, but he showed
no interest. Maybe such food was carrion
to him, and he needed a fresh kill. He allowed me to gently touch his
wings, not because he had grown to trust me, but because he was too
weak and traumatized to resist.
Two days later, the U.S.S. Weitz anchored offshore Phuket Island,
Thailand - the official "R and R" port of call for our "hard work
and professionalism in keeping with the finest traditions of the U.S.
Navy" while patrolling the Persian Gulf. Before liberty call was
passed over the ship's intercom, Thai ferry boats loaded with
ice-cold beer and driven by cocky Thai youths who prided
themselves on their knowledge of English curse words ­
queued alongside our destroyer. Rickety, sky-blue crafts transported
us to the bright green island which emerged out of the
Andaman Sea like the back of a giant jellyfish.
Once aboard the ferry, I drank as fast as I could. Sitting beside me,
Seaman Fortman Whooped it up and I?F.C. Daniels cackled loudly. The
old I?O.'s and sergeants took long drags from their Marlboros; they
remembered the"conveniences" of old Subic in the Philippines. To
these guys nothing compared to Subic Bay, or at least that is what they
always asserted. If nothing else, it was an experience they could hold
over the heads of the younger sailors and marines. In Subic, mere enlisted
rubes metamorphosed into god-kings. Such was the blessing and
curse of being an American with a steady paycheck in the developing
world. They presided over retinues of girlfriends and the officious manservants
who polished their shoes and delivered whiskey wherever
they happened to be "laid up."
In town that night, I selected "Number 12," who sat on a bleacher
behind a huge window with about 30 other young girls. She wore a
gold dress, which - according to the pimps - meant that she possessed
special skills. Holding her hand on the way to the room was the
only intimate aspect of our hour-long encounter. First, we showered
together. She made it cute, but the pre-sex bathing ritual served mYriad
purposes. A clean man, free from the filth accumulated in a tropical
night excursion, made the act more bearable for her. She could also take
this tiine to inspect a man's body in a diplomatic fashion for chancres or
other obvious signs of venereal disease before intercourse. I tipped her
with a pile of coins from various ports of call that had accumulated in
my belly bag. She giggled at the shiny coins rolling on the bedspread.
I ducked through the rear door into a dark muddy alley. The
back of the whorehouse was different from the front, where Thai
pimps in silk shirts stood under the glow of blinking Christmas
lights. It was only now, with the sense of calm and disillusionment
following sex with a prostitute, that I could take in all the details
around me.
On the narrow road outside, five-dollar-a-night street whores
prowled and bar girls danced on the tabletops in a panorama of
open-air bars. Cheesy Western hard rock blasting from the bars,
smoke from the street vendors' grills, and the mugginess of the
rainy season created an overwhelming cacophony. It was like being
in a vacuum that stretched only a few hundred meters in circumference;
but that was just as well, for I saw many sailors from my
command, some of whom were married with children, fondling
prostitutes and receiving oral sex from them publicly within the
bars. Often a macho war cry or volley of high-fives followed these
open performances of fellatio. Such scenes disturbed me, even
though I was unable to discern exactly why.
Across the street I spotted Petty Officer Valdez drunk and walking
hand-in-hand with a cOlnpact, dark-skinned girl through the
human swirl of sailors, marines, and whores. Valdez could drink
twice as much as any of the whooping sailors or adrenaline-pumped

marines grabbing at the bikini-clad girls dancing on stage, yet
relnain perfectly calm. He'd seen it all before. Valdez grew up an
only child and fatherless in some gritty ethnic hellhole in New York
City. He learned early in life that selfishness and cruelty were
. virtues. Rough, ready, and never nervous, he loved his friends,
hounded his enemies, commanded and Inotivated his men, and
stayed as drunk as the Navy would allow. Soon after I CaIne to the
Weitz, he saw Ine beat another sailor viciously in a fistfight; Valdez
and I became friends soon thereafter. His youth as a street soldier in
a Puerto Rican gang conditioned him to appreciate such brutality
and recklessness. Unlike brawling while on liberty, fighting on the
ship carried a heavy penalty, and subsequently I was reduced in
rank, fined, and restricted to the ship with one month's extra duty.
Once Valdez told me laughingly of his participation in the rape-initiation
of "newbies" during his refonn school days. He entertained no
illusions about life or hiInself. I appreciated Valdez. Enlisted men
like him made the organized chaos of a combatant ship at sea work.
I trusted him and his word meant something, but I knew I could
never be like him.
Around 3 a.m., I grew weary of my solitude and walked into one of
the bars for a beer. As soon as I sat down on a barstool, three hookers
surrounded me. Reaching into my pocket, I realized that I had used
up most of my money. With my last Thai baht I bought Inyself a beer
and a gin-and-tonic for the most persistent of the three whores - a
striking WOlnan with long, wavy hair who was unusually tall for a
Thai. It was the rainy season, and we sat together and watched the
intermittent showers. The intense downpours caused the sewers to
overflow into the streets, and the putrid water rose to the level of the
sidewalks. Drunken sailors sloshed around in the liquid as if it did not
exist.
In broken singsong English, the whore continued propositioning
me. She thought I was just trying to get the price down by claiming
that I had no money. An hour elapsed, the bar was clearing out/ and
she gave up her efforts to secure me for the night. After I asked a
few questions about her family and her home village, her mood
changed. She spoke softly, wrapping her hands around Iny ann. 1'd
found over the years that most prostitutes could have their shells
broken very easily, or not at all. But despite her earthy village qualities,
her mannerisms proclaimed her profession. A few of the sailors
on my boat betrothed bar girls, and even when these girls rotated to
the States, something always betrayed their past. I never denigrated
prostitutes, as some of the other Inen did. They were just the cobras

that caught the rats that sought to rob the farmer's granary.
Sometimes they drugged sailors and stole all of their possessions,
even their socks. In my opinion, the hustlers only set the trap, for it
was the sailors who led themselves into such a visible snare.
Perhaps, this whore from a village in northeastern Thailand and I
faced the same dilemma: we worked closely with people all of the
time, yet experienced very little, if any, intimacy. "Okay," she said,
"if you have room with air con, it free."
The 72-hour liberty call ended uneventfully, orders were barked
"Anchors away!", ensigns were raised, and the U.S.S. Weitz was once
again underway. I decompressed quickly from a spastic comet of muscle
to a naval petty officer in a starched white uniform. For the time
being, I submitted quietly to "the way things are," but as always, I
yearned to stumble across a secret trail that would lead me to a sense
of well-being. The Navy provided me with consolation in the form of
duty and purpose; my men and my supervisor depended on me to
perform important and sometimes hazardous tasks at sea. I didn't
have much in common with the rest of the men in the division, but,
nevertheless, there were always a few of them around for conversation,
even on the nights when I couldn't sleep or when I returned to
the ship after a bout of drinking.
The afternoon of our departure, walking down the starboard
weatherdeck, I discovered the owl perched stoically on one of
the overhangs. How he made it out to the weatherdeck from
the depths of the aftersteering room was again a mystery. Why
didn't he fly off when we anchored at Phuket? That was his last
chance to be near land for a week. Perhaps he had been too
weak. But as I looked into his yellow eyes, he slowly opened his
tiny V-shaped wings.
He shot off from the overhang only to be slammed down to the
steel deck by the strong sea winds whipping alongside the ship. As
he tumbled down to the deck, I snatched him before he bounced
over the side. As I held the little owl in my hands, I could feel
Valdez's stare and turned. He was standing behind me, looking
serious and distant. When underway, he expected his men to work,
not goof off. But I could not allow the owl to die dishonorably, to
simply plop into the ocean like a discarded Pepsi can. Surprisingly,
Valdez stood quietly with his arms crossed. He looked down at the
deck as sailors did when one of their own was masturbating in the
toilet or sniveling in his rack when he got an "I am fucking someone
else now" letter from his wife or girlfriend.
After a few seconds in my hands, the owl opened his wings
again. Perhaps the heat of my hands strengthened him. I turned Iny
back to the wind, and the owl stood up in my cupped hands as if he
knew that I wanted to assist him in takeoff. I hoped he would catch
the wind just right and get a good gliding start. I lifted him above
.my head. When the time was right, he shot from my hands and flew.
He flew low, just skimming over the waves. I thought I saw him fall
into the water, but I aln not sure. II

I'd like to start with a few questions about
Normal. What were some of the assumptions
you had going into writing a book about
transsexuals, cross-dressing heterosexuals,
and the intersexed, and how correct did they
prove to be? Has the experience given you a
more extravagant sense of normal?
I like the last part of that question because I do think it has
given me a broader sense of the normal. It's also given Ine a pretty
strong sense that it is people and culture, not nature, that decide
what's normal. If it were up to nature, light would be as normal as
health and as common, and blue potatoes as normal as yellow
ones even if they are not as common. I think we tend not to notice
how much we take what feels comfortable to us for granted, and
how Inuch we tend to use that as the bar of in fact what is nonnal,
or even what is natural. I had just thought that women who had
sex-change surgery were very unhappy, self-hating lesbians; that
people who were opposed to surgery for intersexed babies were
just crazy people with a political, gender-free agenda; and that
cross-dressing heterosexual men were just kidding themselves ­
that they were of course closeted gay men - and I didn't
understand why they couldn't just be out and proud. I think I was
wrong on all three counts.
C: Do you find you confront the challenge of redefining your characters
when you're writing fiction too?
I'm never wrong when I write fiction. That's why we like to write

fiction. It's our world, as long as we are playing by rules that people
can accustom themselves to. That's why there are people who write
novels set in a time other than our own, whether it's the future or the
past - if you play by certain kinds of rules of normative behavior,
people can adjust. If you don't, it gets much harder to read. There's a
reason that great science fiction is a lot easier to read than Gravity's
Rainbow. Even if it's 3,000 years in the future and there is no gravit,y,
science fiction will still play by certain kinds of rules that you can recognize
in a way that language with Gravity's Rainbow, let's say, doesn't
really. You have to be prepared to accolnrnodate yourself to a whole set
of new rules which you are discovering as you are reading, which is
more work. What was easier about writing the nonfiction book was
that I had my characters. But it was harder to shape interesting dialogue,
because I didn't get to write it for them.
e: What does a narrative arc look like to you? Do you feel there
always has to be one?
Yeah, otherwise it's a sketch or an anecdote. I actively dislike and
sometimes even resent somebody handing me eight pages of character
description - and then the flower pot falls on her head - and
saying that's a short story. It's like, no it's not. One little weird event
taking place does not a story make. I think short-story writers tend
to fall under the category of the "interesting characterI good dialogue"
writer, and the "I've got a great idea and now I'll just try to
make up some cardboard figures to carry it around" writer. Those
are both disappointing, and I tend to be even less interested in the
"big idealcardboard characters" story. Things have to happen as
they do in life, in a way which gives people an opportunity to reveal
the depths and complexities of their character. The truth is, even if a
bus hits you and decapitates you, it doesn't matter much to me as a
reader if I haven't been interested in you as a character in the first
place. You want a depth of feeling to lead to powerful language,
and a depth of empathy and imagination to lead to characters who
are three-dimensional about whom you care. Three-dimensional
and sympathetic in the sense that they resonate with the reader - not
sympathetic in the sense one likes them necessarily.
G: Do you think that makes you more or less trustful of your readers?
You've said that you trust your readers to be as smart as you, but
otherwise you don't think of them.
It's easy for them. Two pages in, they can put n1Y book in the
waste-can - they can put it back on the bookshelf, return it to the
library, tell everybody how much it sucks. I'm prepared to think that if I
can't catch their attention in the first couple of pages, they will do with
me as they will. In terms of their trust, you're sort of in there pitching.
You keep trying to write the best sentence you know how about the
lnost compelling story you can. But they have no obligation to me. I
feel like it's my job to give my readers a world worth being in, and
then I hope that they can be in it. It's not that I don't want them to
think; it's that I don't want them to have to be painfully conscious of
the fact that the little black marks on the white page signify letters
which make words which make sentences, and you can see all that
sweat and effort on the part of the writer. I don't care when I'm
reading. I don't care if it took the author 10 years to write that shitty
sentence or five minutes. If it's not good, it's not good.
e: What makes a good sentence for you?
Lots of people have great opening sentences. But when you're in
the middle of a piece of fiction, I think it has more to do with how the
bricks are laid on either side of it. How sentence one leads to sentence
two leads to sentence three. And sometimes there are those sentences
that just leap out like dialnonds on black velvet. Those, for me, have
a certain restrained lyricism, restrained being the significant word. I
like to feel that there's all this feeling pressing against the shape of
the sentence. So that it has a nice integrity and muscularity, and this
pulsing, beating heart inside of it as well.
c: How much would you say you like experimenting, formally or not?
Are there any elements of fiction you stay faithful to?
I don't think that I'm much of an experimenter. Having had no
formal education in this, I don't ever have a sense of "I know I was
taught X, but now I'm going to try Y." Nobody ever taught me X.
When I wrote a short story in which all four characters' points of view
were present I didn't ever really feel like you can't do more than one
point of view in a short story. Why not? vVhy can't you walk around

the room and see what everyone's thinking? I am more cominitted to
being faithful to what I feel is good writing and a true sentence and
writing about the things that matter than I am to any particular form
or format. I don't want to make fast food. There's nothing wrong
with fast food - I eat it, I just don't want to make it. I feel it's very
hard to write a really good book with no heart. There's that great line
of John Gardner's in which he says the sin of 19th-century literature
is sentimentality, whereas the sin of modern literature is that it has no
heart. To me the besetting sin now is a mixture of sentimentality and
irony the worst of both worlds. You read some of this stuff and
you go: Oh my God, so let's see, it's all about you and how Inuch
you are better than everybody around you, but you don't want anybody
to think that so you write in a really self-deprecating way but
with enough irony that it will be apparent to us that the point of this
is poor me. I'd rather read Little Dorrit. Or something with a great antihero
like The Eustace Diamonds. She [Lizzie GreystockYs just bad to
the bone, but Trollope actually sympathizes with her. And she's not
bad to the bone in an arch, unrealistic, winking way. She's just a bad
person, and I think that's a great character. The truth is, we are not so
much aware of bad writers of previous centuries because they don't
last. And I can promise you, 75 years from now people are not going
to be discussing most of the books in that window and saying, oh
that was a bad crop. No one will have read it and nobody will care.
e: Would you agree that fiction is not true to life, but truer than it?
I think that's what one hopes for. You hope that people can't tell
the difference between the thing that happened and the thing that
didn't. I always take it as a great compliment when people argue with
me. They'll say, I know you must have a summer hOlne in Maine ­
I'm like no, actually, never been to Maine. When Come To Me came
out, there's a story in it about a girl with a psychotic sister. I have an
older sister who's a lawyer, a very slim, fierce, attractive brunette. I'd
read "Silver Water" and people would COlne up to me crying and
sympathizing and saying, "I'm so sorry you lost your sister." And my
sister'd be sitting in the back going, "I'm fine, I'm just fine." That's
why we call it fiction. But it's a great complhnent. You want people to
feel that it's truer than life only in the sense that you are given more to
hold onto and contemplate. In life things either happen so slowly one
can hardly bear to live through them, or so quickly you hardly notice
thein. In fiction, you try to split the difference.
G: SO doesn't that make changing characters Inore difficult than
changing the action in a story?
AB: As in real life. If somebody I know well does something that makes
no sense, I either have to say to myself I didn't really know her very
"well, or I have to conclude that I've misunderstood or misinterpreted
the action. In fiction, if I have my nice, quiet, good-hearted and generous
character take a kitten in off the street, give it a bowl of milk and
eviscerate it (I guess I think that would be interesting), I have a problem.
Because either the character is genuinely good-hearted - in which
case the action is impossible - or I have lied to you and led you to
believe that she is good-hearted but she is not - in which case I have
no business telling you she's good-hearted. I can indicate to you that
she appears to be good-hearted, but that's different. If the behavior
doesn't fit the character, then you have a responsibility to understand
who you have created. I think a lot of time, people don't create sufficiently
three-dimensional characters for it to even arise as a difficulty. If
you have a character that's sufficiently big, they can do almost anything
- which is great for plot, but lousy for staYing power.
G: Did you grow up in a literary household? Who were some of your
literary influences?
I didn't really experience it as such, but there were books in the
house, and we went to the library every week. Nobody cared what I
read. It was a literary household in the most passive way - in the way
it was a middle-class household, or in the way in which I had my own
bedroom. Most of the books in the house were in my Dad's library: lots
of Leon Uris and James Michener. I was very attached to his post­
World War II library - John O'Hara, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley,
S.J. Perelman, Ring Lardner, Saki, John Collier. I don't think I'm as
funny as S01l1e of those people, or as fey and adorably odd as John
Collier or Saki. But there is a fundamental sense in all of those writers
that it is better to call things as they are that sentiment actually was
pretty funny, but it didn't mean that it didn't matter. I'm very big on
dead writers, and poets. And I don't mind if the poets are living,
because their lives are so hard. You can always say to yourself, at least
I'm not a poet.
C: You began, and still are active, in the field of psychotherapy.
Yes, and I still have a small practice. Really I began as a waitress.
And I worked in a theater company for a while. Then I went to
graduate school, then I became a shrink, then I started writing.

c: How did that last transition occur?
AB: I was on my way to becoming a psychoanalyst. I had a meeting
with the guy who was going to be my training analyst; we had a very
nice chat. As I was coming home I drove past Wesleyan University,
which is where I'd gone to college, and I remembered how I had bartended
an event at the President's house when I was an undergraduate.
I remembered all these old guys sitting on the settee - 95-year-old
alums - and I thought it would be so funny if one of them just died.
That led to the idea for a mystery. My kids had left their McDonald's
hamburger boxes in the front seat, so I wrote some notes on the hamburger
boxes. When I got home I took out my little Olivetti typewriter
and I had about 15 pages of story and I was like, Oh look at that, story!
I guess I'll do that for a while. So I called the guy who was going to be
my analyst and said, "You know, it looks like I have something else to
do." So then I started writing this mystery, which I was probably
drawn to because I understood the conventions of a mystery - I wasn't
very good at them, but I understood them. And then the short stories
started showing up, so I wrote them. The very first story I wrote­
I don't even remember the name of it, it's in Come to Me, when Galen is
in love with Henry and decides not to leave her husband David. That
["The Sight of You"] is the first story I ever wrote. And the second
story was "Love Is Not a Pie," which got published, and the third story
I wrote was "Silver Water."
C: How should a story balance showing and telling?
AB: In a short story, you don't want to shortchange yourself. You don't
want to not have the great narrative moments, but still you want to
make most things happen right in front of the eyes of the reader. I
don't think any story is interesting unless more than one story is being
told. Otherwise it's missing the great thing that Will Durant said ­
that history is the lives lived on the riverbanks, the fire, the children
born, the old people who die, meals made, people making love, people
doing laundry, and the river of blood that runs between the banks of
the river, which is famine and war and catastrophe and cruelty. You
can't tell the history about the lives on the riverbanks and the river
without these.
C: At some point when you're writing about the riverbank and the
river, do you feel a story becomes its own story?
AB: It does become its own story. You leap off from the characters or the
impulse or the moment in your own real life. I feel perfectly capable of
getting my point across in real life without resorting to fiction. I don't
think a lot of people don't know what I think. So why would I have to
put it on the page if it's going to mess up the novel? Things can creep
into your fiction but by and large, I would rather protect my family.
C: In "Love Is Not a Pie," you begin with the narrator at her mother's
funeral and then go back to the summer when, as a teenager, she discovers
the dynamics of her parents' relationship, which happens to
include a lover. Why do you think it's important to have a reason to
set the reminiscence in motion in a story in which much of the narrative
is told in flashback?
AB: I think that story began with the opening line and emerged in my
head in the present. And there were two points of view I could tell the
story from. I could tell it from the woman having the affair, but she's
either going to be indifferent to the pain she's causing or she's going to
need a lot of self-justification. Whereas a kid for whom life is idyllic
and turns out to be much more complicated, that is more interesting to
me. I've always been interested in how we try to make sense of what
we've seen - where what we see is not what we thought we saw.
What people do in response to the event is how you know who they
are. It's never the event. Four people get hit by a bus - one of them is
going to be in a wheelchair, one is going to walk away unharmed, one
is going to walk away unharmed but be so psychologically struck he'll
be in a wheelchair, and somebody else will take it as a sign from God
that they should go become a priest. It's not the bus hitting you, it's
what people do in response. II

wheel. ''It won't drop any needles on the new carpet," we were told,
but we spent most of the season in the early American family room
with the look-of-brick linoleum floor, the gas-jet fireplace, and the
console television. Christmas Eve, as we always had and always
would, we went south of the river to Marge and Doc's. But that year,
we left early with our packaged dog, fully upholstered in white
curls except for bands of apricot in her ears and brownish clumps of
drying tears accumulating around the corners of her eyes. Gigi was
bound for Park Plaza.
She slept her first night on a blanket in the kitchen, surrounded
by newspapers, whimpering herself to sleep to the ticking of a
Baby Ben alarm clock. We wedged a lawn-chair box into the doorway
of the family room to confine her and her puddles to the
kitchen. The next morning, when she didn't eat, we coaxed her into
trying some raw egg, whipped into a bowl of milk. At first she
seelned canine enough, slipping across the waxed floor in pursuit
or evasion of fourth- and eighth-grade playmates. With all her hair
and some residual instincts, Davis's Gigi Canella Petite Monet, as
she was registered, seemed thoroughly inoffensive, even playful.
But as she grew, she developed the combined genetic weaknesses
of all the scrawny, sickly poodles who were forcibly mated to
Inanufacture the toy species. Gigi was not merely a dog but a purposefully
designed mobile ornament, fully compatible with earnest
suburban living. Not a blank slate at birth, but a living Rorschach,
mirroring our ambitions, our sentimentality, our confused early
60's notions of femininity.
The neutered dog regained her gender in monthly appointments
at the poodle salon. Mom called, "Gigi, want to go bye-bye in the
car?" Slipping and padding her way across the linoleum, Gigi
hurled herself, a nervous comet of white hair, into my mom's arms
for the Buick excursion to the Tapscott Groomers. Gigi returned to
Park Plaza a needle-nosed composite of geometric shapes, sculpted
into cotton balls and toothpicks, like atomic art. A sponge bow
adorned her vertical top-knot, matching ones tied to each of her
ears. A wide ring shaved around her belly gave her an hour-glass
figure. Legs were shorn, the pink and grey bony limbs ending in
white balls, like the one on her tail, just over her naked toes. Her
nails were painted red, alternating red and green at Christmas, and
she smelled of Chanel No.5 near her rhinestone collar. Newly visible,
her eyes were larger, still watering around the shaved bulges
beneath them. On her return, Gigi was meaner, maybe because we
could see her black lips, her red gums, her teeth newly cleaned.
She walked more tentatively, the cool floor annoying her paw pads,
their cushioning gone. "She's almost human," Mom would say as
Gigi minced across the gold carpet in the living room and posed,
front legs crossed, on the brocade sofa. Later, much later in dog
years, she simply refused to walk on uncarpeted floors, whining
from the hallway till we arranged a path of early American throw
rugs across the linoleum to the sliding glass patio door. Soon
enough her bows fell out, her hair returned, and she became a dog
again - but only to begin the process anew as a scented work of
topiary whining from the hall.
Gigi didn't eat dog food, no matter what Euclidean shape it
assumed. Instead, she ate fried haInburger, dutifully drained on a
paper towel, and an occasional ice cream cone: "Gigi weegee want
a dog yummy?" Slipping, clattering nails, soft collisions, red gums
clamping the cone. She didn't chew on the furniture. When life
produced poodle-stress, Gigi would sit and gnaw on her front legs
till they bled. Eventually we purchased special snap-on plastic
casts to save her legs and our upholstery. She didn't shed. When
she began to lose her puppy teeth and we found one under a bed,
we put it in sentimental cotton in an empty Inedicine bottle and
shelved it in the basement. Once trained, Gigi never peed on the
floor. We'd slide open the patio door: "Do you need to do your
job?" One winter night after a recent trimming, Gigi's feet becaIne
chilled in a drift, and she lifted them one at a time until she lay
down defeated in the snow. We collected her, brought her inside,
and put her in the pink, inflated bonnet of my sister's hairdryer till
she stopped quivering. We ordered a sweater for her to wear after
her winter trimlnings.
In the summer, she ran around the yard and even panted. Then
she jumped on top of a chaise longue, Inade of giant pink plastic
bands stretched around an aluminum frame, always forgetting that
her feet pushed through the bands, leaving her stuck to her annpits
in the chair. We made her wear sunglasses, just long enough to snap
her picture with our Polaroid Swinger in a tolerant but uneasy Lolita
pose, legs crossed into perverse poodle allure.
Gigi was never a very popular dog. Yapping at the neighbors
through the chain-link fence, or lunging toward the bay window
with poodle ferocity when the mail came, didn't endear her to her
casual acquaintances. Linda's high school friends, who rarely Caine
past the entry hall, regarded Gigi as a kind of biological satire. In
tie-dyed shirts, John Lennon sunglasses, and wide bell-bottoms,
they were stoned enough to view her with amusement, at best. They hadn't
nlnl 1'11

stopped the other day. Another bad name someone had ever called
me was Spic but I don't really care because I know the person is
playing with me and when he gets on my nerves I call him
Hamburger Helper. His name is Rajick."
"How is Manny getting called a spic like Daniel getting called a
faggot?" I asked.
Silence. "It's not," Shabazz suggested, ''being gay is totally different
than being Latino."
True. My lesson plan, I realized, was deeply flawed. It was also
designed to manipulate how my students thought. I wanted to make
them more liberal-minded - I wanted to make them think like me.
I remembered my discomfort when my supervisor had announced
that our goal should be not only to teach our students writing, but to
make them ''better people."
I.. II
A Union soldier serving in the South said of the freedman,
"Human or not, there he is in our midst, millions strong; and if he is
not educated mentally and morally, he will make us trouble."
We do not trust children to find their own morality. Too often we
educate them only so that they will not make us trouble. We want to
use their voices in our commercials.
When I argue with my students, I often have the sensation that I
am actually arguing with people other than them. I think I hear the
voices of their fathers, or the voices of their gym teachers. They
speak in slightly mutilated catch phrases. I speak cautiously, with
the suspicion that my students will repeat my words back to their
fathers and gym teachers. This is how children become foot soldiers
in conflicts between adults.
Jill III
"Okay, then just tell me this," I said to my students, "what is so
bad about being gay? What was so bad about your teacher, for
example. Why did you throw your markers at him?"
"If teachers are gay it is really bad because they can take you into
a room and try to touch you," Manny answered.
I stared at Manny, "I could take you into a room and touch you.
Anyone could."
He stared back, daring me to. I had gotten into all the wrong territory,
I had dropped the third person. He shook his head, "No." I
was beginning to worry about losing my job.
"What else, what else is so bad about it?"
"God made men to be with women, so it's against God," said
Marissalee.
Oh, no. I hadn't anticipated this. Students were agreeing, the room
was getting noisy. I imagined that flash point was creeping up on me.
I was destined to leave this room with Magic Marker on my face or
having, like another teacher, tried to throw a kid out the window.
"Yeah," said Shabazz, "and on that TV show the one man is gay
and he dropped a quarter so that the other man would pick it up and
then he could look at his butt."
I didn't understand the crime in this, but it was clear that my students
were moved. "Yeah, yeah!" They were all agreeing and laughing
and remembering more stories about gay people they had seen on TV.
How had I gotten myself into this? I had intended to teach writing.
K,.
During my first year of teaching, I found that I said, "Quiet!" more
than anything else.
I often heard other teachers using terms like "classroom management,"
"reinforcement," and "discipline." Surprisingly, "empowerment"
was also popular. Teachers misused that term all the time.
They developed "empowering" exercises like letting the students
draft their own rules, but the rules were always the same. True
empowerment of students, I realized very quickly, necessarily means
a certain disempowerment of teachers.
Teachers habitually abuse their power by wrongly defining words.
There is a sign in the math classroom where I used to work that says,
"Caring means learning the terms and remembering them." Other
signs in that school reminded me of the chapters of Brinskerhoff's
1864 Advice to Freedmen: "Be Industrious," "Be Economical," "Be
Temperate," and "Be Soldiers." II

y Priscilla Becker selected poems
Vil/anelle
Of all the creatures in all the worlds
You wrote when I had waited long
I think the prettiest thing is birds.
Among those beauties wrapped in furs,
From all the bodies sleek and strong,
Of all the creatures in all the worlds?
I thought your vision must be blurred
By dizzying flights of sparrow throng
To think the prettiest thing is birds.
Perhaps I'd been too long immured
To hear their slllall and separate song
FrOin all the creatures in all the worlds.
Your brown eyes often go obscure
And seem to nothing to belong
Unless the taxidermist's doe-eyed bird.
When all along I'd thought it words!
You wrote when I had waited long
Of all the creatures in all the worlds
I think the prettiest thing is birds.
The Sound of the Closing Door
There is a kind of cry at first,
not of pain but of warning
of pain.
I have come to regard the wide arms
of the chair as an only Inother.
Next a small suck of air.
I think my double is
the stone - fire-wrought or dripped
into formation. And there was
a third kind too.
Then two dry clicks, an interlocking.
It seems that it should be my lot
to look out on a line strung
from post to post,
and though it could be missed,
the dusk reminder of the small
daily apocalypse.
It is this third kind I relate to.
The first fragment of division,
the private room.

. ...
half like Selma and half like an abandoned doctor. Selma waved her
hand in front of her face, an attempt at scattering the pieces of this vision
about the air. As she was leaving and zipping up the door, Selma considered
scribbling out a note to Nabil, but what would she tell hun?
When Selma returned, the woman was already in her car, the
engine revving, tailpipe spitting a plume of exhaust.
On the way out of the forest, the women talked. Helga had emigrated
from Germany 30 years before and had been moving around ever
since. Egypt, Selma had offered in return. I
She glanced at
the speedometer:
45, 50, 55. She
had afold of bills in
her pocket, burning
against her thigh,
enough to buy a
plane ticket.
came from Egypt two months ago. "I was
there in the '60s," Helga continued now.
"And I fell in love with it. Just fell in love."
A road atlas with a broken spine lay on
the floor by Selma's feet. Selma gently
nudged two overlapping pages apart to
reveal a map of Toronto. Something
pinched her from inside, a sensation she
had been having frequently since she'd
arrived in Canada. The car smelled stale,
the air it contained, years, centuries old. It
reminded her of grade-school trips to the
Pyramids, crawling into airless tombs
where she'd held her breath, afraid that if
she inhaled she would die. The tombs had
been pillaged centuries before, the mummies long gone, still they had
smelled of death, Selma thought. Wind spilled in through the window.
The cool, constant slap of clean air against her skin made it numb.
''Will you go back there?" Helga asked. Her hair was long, blonde
and gray at once. She let go the steering wheel in order to gather her
hair into a quick bun on the top of her head. She had a small but
strong body. A muscle in her bare right thigh twisted against her skin
each time she switched froln the accelerator to the brake.
Lola sat on her lap. Selma knew this was dangerous, but wasn't life
itself dangerous? Precautions felt arbitrary. "I shall go back there now,"
she said with sudden, alien authority. The idea had only come to her
minutes before. When Selma had gotten into Helga's car, she'd had no
designs on a destination. Ofcourse! she thought now. I'm going home.
Warmth crept frOln the top of her head down through her stomach. She
glanced at the speedOlneter: 45,50, 55. She had a fold of bills in her
pocket, burning against her thigh, enough to buy a plane ticket. It was
the money Nabil never traveled without: emergency mone)!, he called it.
She had taken it from the inside pocket of his jacket on her way out of the
tent without remorse. If anything did, this pain that she felt constituted
an emergency.
"It becomes harder and harder to go back the longer you stay away/'
Helga said as they sped through unfamiliar landscapes.
Selma noticed a blurred fruit stand that looked like someplace she
had seen before. Then she realized that it was just like all of its counterparts
back home; many of the same fruits available in Egypt, the same
bright colors. The only difference was that here the price was by pound
and was written in English.
"Are you married?" Helga paused.
"Her father is my husband; he is back in Egypt, where we are going
now to be with him," Selma answered. The words filed out of her mouth
one-by-one; each one that came out surprised her more than the last. "My
sister lives in Toronto. She was having a surgery. I came to be with her."
"What kind of operation?"
Selma paused, conjuring images of her two healthy sisters back in
Cairo. She evicted them from her mind and invented a new one, a
woman with a malady of... "She was losing one eye. She made a surgery
to fix it."
"And did it work?"
''Yes. Now she see again." Selma turned to look at her new companion.
''Why you came here?" she asked.
"After the war," Helga said. She slowed her driving and glanced at
Selma. "That's when I left."
A few seconds passed. "It was terrible?" Selma finally offered.
''Well, I lived through it." Helga swerved sharply around an idling car.
"Of course. It is a blessing."
''Do you believe in God?" Helga asked abruptly after a pause, a long
curve in the road.
Last year, even last month, this would have been a question easily
answered: Yes. But now Selma wondered what she believed in. How
could your own life become something you couldn't recognize? Selma
caught a view of herself in the small, tilted mirror off the side of the car.
Her hair was long and loose and tangled. She hadn't washed it for
days. There were deep, dark shadows underneath her coal-colored eyes.
Her husband called her beautiful, but she could not see why.
The car filled with silence, like a balloon expanding to the point of
almost bursting. Helga unrolled her window and rested an elbow on
the open frame.
Finally Selma said, ''Why you were in Egypt?"
JlMy husband was a journalist, and Egypt was his specialty."

"What did he find?" Selma asked anxiously.
"He wrote on Egypt after the Revolution. Nasser and the rise of the
Muslim Brothers. Nationalization of the Suez ..."
Selma's own husband was among the young who had fought for
revolution in the early 1950s, who rioted against the British, who spent
time in prison. He knew about Egypt, Selma thought, surprising herself
with the sudden swell of pride in her gut; what could Helga's husband
possibly understand?
Lola bounced around on Selma's lap and laughed at a dog in a
passing window. "Darling," Helga cooed, glancing away from the road
and patting the top of Lola's head. Selma's stomach clenched, noticing
the stranger's hand on her baby.
''You have a child?" Selma asked, drawing her arms more tightly
around her daughter, who squirmed against the change in pressure.
Helga looked ahead and let a car pass in front of her. Selma
watched the side of her silent face. The car ahead sped into the distance
and disappeared. "I had one."
Selma rolled up her window - the streaming wind suddenly too
much, too loud. "What. What happened?"
"Mechanical failure. Something with the engine-" her voice
trailed off. Moments later Helga cleared her throat: "A plane crash. The
planehad been in the air for not longer than 10 minutes. I took them to
the airport. I watched it take off. I waved as it did. I always wondered
if they saw me."
"Maybe they did," Selma said feebly.
"Maybe."
"How long ago?"
"Fifteen years now."
"I am sorry."
A pair of dark sunglasses rested on the dashboard. Helga reached
for them and pushed thein onto her face.
"Are you hungry?" Helga said suddenly, as if this were the solution,
exactly what was needed to rescue them both.
"Yes," Selma said before taking a moment to consider whether or
not she was.
A young waitress approached the table that Helga had chosen. She
brought a wet cloth, which she used to wipe a smear of ketchup from
the wooden surface. Booths with bright red vinyl seats lined the
periphery of the diner. The surfaces of the tables were white, shellacked.
Yellow lamps the shape of inverted salad bowls hung low
above each table, and dim bulbs shone within them.
"Sorry 'bout that," the waitress said. ''Be right back with menus." She
left a wet, glistening streak on the table. Itformed a crooked line between
Selma and Helga, which Selma watched until it dried and disappeared.
''Your husband was also on that plane?" Selma asked hesitantly.
Helga nodded, but her expression was different from the one she had
worn in the car, now distant and veiled, as if it was someone else's
tragedy they were talking about.
Lola bounced on the seat, her small fingers gripping the window, leaving
tiny fingerprints. Selma wanted to make her daughter stop bouncing.
She pulled Lola firmly down, eliciting a small, high-pitched cry. Out of
the corner of her eye, Selma noticed Helga watching them, tilting her
head and observing each detail. Lola slapped at the air in front of her
while making angry sounds. She was alive. Everything she did suddenly
seemed potent, something to remind Helga of what she had lost.
Selma looked out the window, half expecting to see Nabil walking
toward theIn, his slow and careful stride. Instead she saw another man
in the parking lot. She thought again of Mustafa. The hood of the truck
stood open and the stranger bent his head over what it revealed. He
adjusted something. He lowered the hood. Once he was back in his car,
it started, and he drove away.
Selma turned to notice the tap of Helga's fingers against the table's
surface. If she went back to Cairo, would she move back in with her
parents, she and Lola back into the room she had grown up in, the
room she had shared with Nabil for those months after their marriage?
Noone would marry her now: a woman with a child who had left a
husband behind. The thought of it got her heart pounding, sent too
much blood to her head.
The waitress returned with menus. As Selma began to read down the
columns of laminated options, she felt the immensity of her sudden
hunger. She wanted it all, everything. Ketchup was one of the things
she liked about Canada - she ordered a hamburger, well done, with
French fries and a side salad. Helga ordered a tuna melt.
"I loved SOineone before my husband," Selma confessed to Helga
once the waitress was gone.
"Do you love him still?"
''I do not know." She had put Mustafa out of her mind through the rush
of her wedding, becoming pregnant, having the baby;. moving to America,
but in the past weeks he had moved back in again. Every night in the tent
after Lola had gone to bed, Nabil approached like a shy teenager, kissing
Selma's cheek for minutes before growing bolder. Each night it ended in
sex, and while Selma tried to focus on her husband's body careening above
her, she felt nothing until she closed her eyes and pictured Mustafa.

assortment of needles, catheters, tubing, drugs, and something called a
''basic tray." (A basic tray was a metal tray, sterilized and covered in
blue paper, that contained the instruments necessary to open up a person
and either take out or put in basically anything you wanted.)
The room smelled of antiseptic and the tile floor had been dulled
and eroded by the constant lapping of bleach. No matter how
bloody or messy this room got, it would always return to its original
state. It had no memory of what had occurred, whether lives
were saved or lost. And it operated outside the usual laws of UH.
The only hierarchy in the slot was a hierarchy of ability. In that
room there was no doubt about who I was or why I was there. And
that was where I found myself - still in the process of digesting
dinner - face-to-face with the man who
No matter how
bloody this room
got it would
always return to
its original state. It
had no memory of
whether lives were
saved or lost.
would not take off his pants.
The pants man - a semi-distinguished,
semi-disheveled, 70ish-Iooking man - was
seated upright on a stretcher desperately
holding onto his waistband. I had seen men
like him before; my Saturdays growing up
had been filled with them - the men I
would sit next to in synagogue, who my
father would laugh with, who knew all the
prayers by heart and would smile when
they saw my face constrict after tricking me
into tasting rye whiskey. Men who had run
from persecution in Europe to live in a nondescript
lower-middle-class New York City
suburb with my father and other men
who'd run froin the Bronx for different reasons.
The sight of this familiar-looking man desperately trying to stop
nurses and other doctors from removing his pants was an odd
scene because, in the slot, there is a sudden absence of social nicety.
Patients are attacked on all sides. The routine was: unbutton, rip,
or cut off all clothing, whichever was fastest. Remove rings, necklaces,
earrings, watches. Attach various electrical leads and oxygen
masks. Penetrate as many of the largest veins as possible with
large-bore IVs, and as quickly as possible.
Despite the maelstrom around him, the man was obstinate. He
clung to his pants with the strength of a drowning man trying to grip
a piece of floating wood. But he was not drowning in water, he was
drowning in his own fluids. Literally; Fluid was leaking into his lungs
because his heart was failing. He was in the midst of a Inassive heart
attack and unless he let go of his pants, gave us his anns and legs and
direct access to his arteries, veins and bladder, we were not going to be
of much help.
His myocardial infarction he had was caused by a blockage of his
left anterior descending coronary artery - an artery affectionately
known as the "widow-maker" because of how much vital heart
muscle it supplies. As we all surrounded him, pleaded with him to
let us take his pants off, he did not look all that scared. His shirt
was off, his shoes were off, his socks were off, his watch was off - I
even think a yarmulke had been removed - but still he would not
let go of his pants. He had a hairy chest, broad shoulders, and arms
that looked like they had been strong and had now found renewed
strength in their determination not to let go of his belt.
All he said was, "Get my son."
Bringing in family meinbers was not something you did in the slot.
Husbands, wives, children, friends, interested bystanders are not there
when chests are cracked or tracheas intubated. The slot is not a place
for the uninitiated, for people who do not know the rules of the hospital,
for those who do not wear a hospital ID. But this time I went out
into the waiting area and found the man's son. I was excited to usher
him in. I was going to be the face of the place that was trying to save
his father. I would be the first thing the son would see, and like a duckling
he would imprint to me - imprint that I was the doctor.
I walked him in and after they exchanged glances, his father
reached into his pockets and pulled out two wads of tissue paper,
gave thein to his son and then unceremoniously took off his pants. It
all happened so quickly. The drama vanished so abruptly that it
seemed to call its own existence into question. According to the son,
there were roughly several hundred thousand dollars worth of diamonds
in those wads of tissues, but as I retell the story, inflation
brings the total to at least several million.
My sons love this story. Perhaps it is the discovery of unexpected
treasure; perhaps it is that funny things can happen even in the most
dire of circumstances; or perhaps it is that when all seemed lost, I
brought the son in and saved the father. As my sons slip into sleep
they know that the diamonds are safe and the father lives. As I close
my eyes I hope that they imagine me a hero.
But finding the diamonds is not the end.
The geins are rescued, but we are still in the slot and in the midst of
a losing battle. The man may have waited too long for help. We are
pUluping fluids into him, trying to maintain his blood pressure. We are

giving him diuretics to get the fluid off, and morphine for the pain
and to help him breathe. But he is continuing to drown, his fingers
and toes are turning blue, his blood is stagnating, he is on the verge of
collapse. We infuse a medicine to try to dissolve the blockage in the
artery supplying his dying heart muscle. But this is also in vain.
Nothing worked as planned. The pants man's circulation continued
to fail; his lungs filled with more fluid as his extremities sank
into a deeper violet. He would not live the night if we could not open
that artery. He needed more than could be found in the slot. He
needed someone to go in and manually unclog the blockage. He
needed an angioplasty. So with a team of practioners in tow, we took
our patient up to the fifth-floor and slowly woke up the cath lab from
its weekend sleep.
The cath lab was was nothing like being in medical school, where
whenever I was gowned-up it was in an operating room, and I
always felt out of place. Back then, I held retractors. I held them so
long over open chests and abdomens that my neck cralnped and my
shoulders ached. I tried to give as much exposure to the operating
field as possible in the hope that I would disappear. I focused on trying
to help as much as I could. Get this, do that, keep moving.
Inevitably the chief surgeon would ask some mortifying question
like, "What do you make of the mouse model of hernia repair?" or
"What Shakespeare play does this line come from?" My inability to
answer was crushing. There could never be any doubt about who
wielded the power over me: the nurses, the other doctors, and the
open body in that room.
But that night in the cath lab, there were no impossible questions.
It was just business as usual. As dye was injected, we took pictures.
Pictures of the arteries and blockages, pictures of a small balloon
blowing up inside an artery, and then the trickle of dye that said the
blockage was gone. All of this recorded on what looked like old
Super 8 film, a sort of home movie of the heart.
When all was done that could be, and the catheters were
removed, it was my job to make sure that the large hole we made in
the femoral artery closed. This meant applying firm but constant
pressure on my patient's groin. I thought this was going to be the
final act, the triumphant denouement after the climactic angioplasty.
We had opened up his artery, and restored blood-flow back into:,
his heart, but the man was still dying. His heart muscle -like a '
child gone limp after a beating - had been so stunned by the sudden
and complete lack of oxygen that it would not contract. The
pants man's eyes began to dull and blood tests showed a dangerow:
buildup of acid.
A last attempt was made to save him by putting in an intraaortic
balloon pump, which actually did the trick. So after hours
of effort using the best available high-technology interventional
cardiology - something based on the physics of a party favor
that would save this man.
After what seemed like an eternity (but more like five hours), I
brought the pants man, his IVs and balloon pump up into the cardiac
ICU. He was stable; I was exhausted. By then I had spent hours
pulling, poking, prodding, and probing his body. I had made hiln uri
nate, thinned his blood, put my hands in his groin. I was intimately
aware of him, yet I knew very little about him. It was like I had been
looking at the photographic negative of someone. Details, size, texture
had all been perfectly represented, yet remained uninterpretable,
It relninded me of my own father.
When I was around my sons' ages, my father and I spent countless
hours together. Not just at synagogue, but doing many of the usual
father-son things available in a New York City suburb: mowing the
lawn while straddling a wheelhorse tractor, pulling weeds from the
garden at the front of the house, raking leaves, driving from place to
place looking for shrubs or plants or more mulch. In the summers he
wore ripped jeans and a white T-shirt. There are pictures of me on his
shoulders as a young boy, but I cannot remember being there.
What I do remember is his belly loosely hanging out over the rim
of his jeans, and the embarrassment of seeing his jeans fall down as
he bent over to plant seeds or bulbs. I can still see the patches of
psoriasis there and on his arms. The same patches that drove our
family from open beaches to desolate sandy places where he could
take off his shirt in private.
I was always aware of his psoriasis. I noticed how he never talked
about it, how lny mother would say, "We can't go there because of
your father."
I knew from quiet, careful surveillance that at night he wrapped
himself in Saran Wrap after covering his skin in cremns to try to abatl
the seemingly endless propagation of the thick plaques.
When we worked in the garden, I could see how the medicine
made his skin diaphanous in places. How cuts that on lne would be
mere scrapes would, for him, be bleeding wounds. Though we spent
many hours talking, we never spoke of this. We talked about soil and
dirt and rocks. We talked about water tables and the differences

etween cement and concrete. I worked hard, sweated, never asked
questions. I had logged many hours of observation but still he
remained a Inystery. The psoriasis encased him like layer upon layer
of a resin that would refract light in such a way that form could be
seen but all detail lost.
None of this was on my mind when I went out to find the pants
man's son 1'd met earlier outside the CICD.
The son was still wearing the same nondescript suit, but he looked
older and more frightened.
"Can I see him?" he asked.
We walked through the CICU doors and into the cubicle that
was CICU Bed One. I recall their eyes meeting and then the
expression on the son's face. They said a few words to one
another, then the son and I left.
As we walked he asked if he could ask me a question.
"Of course," I said. My patient - his father - was now stable. I
felt ready to assuage whatever pain or concern I imagined he had. It
was like being back at Bellevue. I was beginning to feel in charge of
things again. I prepared my usual statement: "He's stable but anything
can happen; we won't know much until after at least 24 to 48
hours." (The key is to provide hope and encouragement, but as little
actual prediction as possible.)
But I couldn't have been more wrong about what I ilnagined his
concerns to be.
"Do you see those two women sitting next to one another?" he asked.
I nodded.
"The one on the right is my mother; the one on the left is my
father's mistress. Neither knows the other. What should I do?"
I wish I could recall exactly what I said or did then. I cannot even
remember what either woman looked like. Did they look alike? Was
one blonde and the other brunette? One tall, the other small? Did
they make up two halves of one whole?
This was not a problem of navigating the complicated emotional
waters of wives or mistresses, or contemplating the reasons why
men find comfort or excitement in people other than their spouses.
If those were the questions I had to answer, I would have failed miserably.
I would have failed because - despite the fact that I had felt
the ribs of elderly women crack under the pressure of my failed
resucitation efforts, watched as surgeons dug their hands into the
open chests of boys who had been shot and marveled at bodies ravaged
by drugs, alchohol and sundry forms of ectoparasite - I was
still just a pastiche of hardened experience and pudding-like naivete.
At that time in my life, I had never even known anyone who'd had
an affair.
What I did know then was that life as a doctor was all about the
extremes. And extremes, to me, defined what was most human. In
that moment I understood that my job was to safeguard an extremely
vital secret. I was there to figure out a way to protect the father, protect
the life of the man I had just spent the last five hours saving. It
was a role I knew well.
The son and I quickly devised a strategy to have his mother visit
first. Then, as they were leaving, I would go out and get the mistress,
make sure that their paths did not cross
and bring her in to see her lover. It was a
plan formed from the distillation of the
advice my father gave me: "Tell your
mother you love her, then just do what
you want."
This is where the story ends for me. I
cannot recall anything after. It is lost to
me. I know what I did not do, though; I
did not ask the son what he was thinking
or feeling. Had he known his father was
having an affair, or was he completely
shocked? Had he even wanted his father
to live? Or was this just another one of
those times when it seems like children
The son and I
qUickly devised a
strategy to have
his mother visit
first. Then I would
go out and get
the mistress.
have an infinite capacity for forgiving their parents? That same kind
of capacity that finds children protecting those who hurt them, or trying
valiantly to placate the implacable.
It is difficult for me to imagine what I would have done in that
moment, confronted by a living, breathing, someone-who-washaving-sex-with-my-father
secret. This was not the secret life I
imagined my father had. It was inconceivable to me that he could
have had an affair, inconceivable that he could touch anyone or
have anyone touch him. His psoriasis was a barrier to all contact.
My father's secret life that I spent my childhood fantasizing about,
as I waited for him outside of closed office doors or in the aisles of
electronics shops, involved clandestine meetings between agents of
Middle East governments, or corporate espionage on behalf of rival
fuel-cell technology companies. I traveled with him everywhere,
even waiting alone in a nursing home parking lot when he went to

visit my grandfather whom I never met. I was his squire. I spent
hours with him doing things for people without knowing why. At
the end I would always promise not to tell my mother.
Of course, now I know there were no clandestine meetings, and
we did things for people because my father owed them money.
Saddest of all, I never saw my grandfather because my father was
too angry at him for putting my father and his brothers and sister
up for adoption.
I made up stories because I had to fill the void left by my father.
How would I have reacted to that misdirected primal scene taking
place in the CICU lounge if it was my own father in the hospital
bed? At that time, I imagine it would've been with the same air of
practiced pragmatism and detachment the son showed me. Now,
15 years later, I wonder whether I would be struck by how much I
have become like my father.
I was reminded ofall this when - as my sons and I were going
to sleep recently - my eldest said matter-of-factly, "Mommy told
me you had an affair and that's why you aren't married."
He was right; I did have an affair. But I was stunned by his
statement, and only later did I get the voicemail message from
my ex-wife alerting me to their conversation.
I felt cornered. What I wanted to say was a combination of, uTake
that question back right now; your mother did not have my permission
to tell you that; you are too young, I'm not ready to tell you;
don't talk about this in front of your brother!"
But what I said was, "That's a really long and complicated conversation
that we should really have tomorrow, not when we're
going to sleep."
But even as the words were coming out I knew both of us would
be unhappy with that, and that this moment represented a chance for
me to be something different from my own father. So while my
younger son distracted himself with some toys, my older son and I
got out of bed and started talking.
It had only been several weeks since I had asked him if he had
any questions about sex. All he said to me was, "No." So first I
asked if he even knew what an affair was.
"Sure" he said, "it's what Henry's father had." (Henry was one of
his closest friends whose father had already remarried.)
So, unprepared as I was, I began to talk.
I did not talk about what it felt like to be desperate in life or in
marriage. How it felt to deceive his mother, or how it felt to deceive
myself. I did not tell him how convenient it was that I was a doctor,
that excuses to leave the house were just a page away, each coded
beep a place and time. I did not say how delicious it was to have sex
with someone else, after not having sex for so long. I did not say how
I felt reanimated by the deception and danger. How good it felt to be
wanted, and how good it felt to want. I did not try to explain that in
some ways my affair was a brief, perfect moment of hiding in plain
sight. I did not reveal how lost I was at that time, how little I knew of
Inyself. I did not tell him how it felt to tell his Inother or how it felt to
have all of our friends and family find out. I did not tell him about
how it felt to have the mask of "good husband, good father, good
doctor" ripped from my face.
What I said was that at the time I was very unhappy. I was sad
and depressed. I told him that affairs generally do not cause divorces
but are symptoms of problems within marriages, and that I deeply
regretted having one. I told him that he and his brother were the happiest
part of my life but that somehow things were not right between
his mother and me. I told him that when people are sad or troubled
they sometimes make wrong decisions that can cause pain to the people
they love. I told him that I regretted what I had done and that
every day I think about the hurt it has caused him.
I'm not sure what he believed or did not believe but what he said
next was, "Why have an affair when you can just get divorced?"
uYou're right," I said, but that is a story for another night, I
thought to myself. And as I fell asleep, I was aware of the pictures on
the wall. Pictures of us on vacation, of us on my sister's boat, of us in
my small apartment. And pictures of my sons proudly holding up a
pumpkin grown in my father's garden. II

The New Yorker, TriQuarterly, Bomb, and on
NPR's "All Things Considered."
Hamilton Walters' (a.k.a. Saw Takkaw)
"on the ground" human rights reports and
photographs have been published by
Burmanews.net. Dictatorwatch.org, Karen
Human Rights Group (KHRG), and Burma
Human Rights Yearbook. They've also been
featured in Benedict Rogers' ALand Without
Evil: Stopping the Genocide of Burma's Karen
People. His poems and photographs have been
published by The Dilettanti, Marr's Field
Journal, and the Colere. He currently lives and
works on the Thai-Burma border.
Joe Wenderoth grew up in Baltimore.
Wesleyan University Press published his first
two books of poems, Disfortune (1995) and It Is
If I Speak (2000). His other works include
Letters To Wendy's (Verse Press, 2000), The
Holy Spirit of Life: Essays Written For John
Ashcroft's Secret Self and Agony: AProposal
(forthcoming, 2007). He teaches English at the
University of California, Davis, where he lives
with his wife and daughter.
Mary Zoo grew up in California and holds
degrees from the University of California, Los
Angeles and the University of Iowa Writers'
Workshop. She is the Book Review Editor for
Electronic Poetry Review. She lives and works in
Oakland, California. II
CONTEST
II II
2006
judges include:
• Amy Hempel, fiction
• Katha Pollitt, nonfiction
• Karen Volkman, poetry
First-place winners for each genre will
receive $500 and publication
of their entries in Issue 43.
(Runners-up will also be considered for publication.)
The entry fee is $12 and our contest
deadline is December 3t 2005.
For submission gUidelines, check out our
current issue or our web site at:
www.columbia.adu/cu/arts/journal.
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