10.00 USA $15.00 CAN o 74470 86764 - Columbia: A Journal of ...

$10.00 USA $15.00 CAN
I I 31
o 74470 86764 7

COLUMBIA
A Journal ofLiterature & Art

Assistant Editor
LYTTON SMITH
Poetry Editors
KRISTIN HENLEY
& IDRA ROSENBERG
Editor-in-Chief
S K. BERINGER
Layout Editor
JENNIFER F. ESTARIS
Nonfiction Editors
KELLY McMASTERS & MACKENZIE PITCAIRN
Art Editor
Production/Managing Editor
QUINN LATIMER
S K. BERINGER
Assistant Poetry Editors
Subhashini Kaligotla, Lynne Potts & Yvette Siegert
Assistant Fiction Editors
Alena Graedon & Andrea Libin
Assitant Nonfiction Editor
Mary Phillips-Sandy
Assitant Art Editor
S K. Beringer
Assistant Layout Editors
S K. Beringer & Lytton Smith
Web Site Manager
Tami Fung
Poetry Board
S K. Beringer,Tom Haushalter,Tom Hummel,
Quinn Latimer, Ben Miller, Lytton Smith & Craig Teicher
Advising Editor
TIFFANY NOELLE FUNG
Fiction Editors
CHRISTOPHER HACKER
& MOLLY ANTOPOL JOHNSON
COLUMBIA: A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE & ART is a not-for-profit literary journal committed
to publishing fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art by new and established
writers and artists. COLUMBIA is edited and produced bi-annually by students in the
Graduate Writing Division of Columbia University's School of the Arts and is published
at 415 Dodge Hall, 2960 Broadway, New York, NY 10027. Contact editors at
columbiajournal@columbia.edu. Visit our web site at www.columbia.edulculartsljournal.
COLUMBIA: A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE &ART welcomes submissions of poetry, fiction,
nonfiction, and artwork. We read manuscripts year round and generally respond
within three or four months. Manuscripts will be recycled. Please include a SASE for
a response. No e-mail submissions are currently accepted. Please visit our web site for
submission guidelines, contest information, and notification of upcoming readings.
COLUMBIA: A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE &ART is indexed in American Humanities
Index (Whitson Publishing Company). National distributors to retail trade: Ingram
Periodicals (La Vergne, TN); Bernhard DeBoer (Nutley, NJ); Ubiquity Distribution,
Inc. (Brooklyn, NY).
The Editors would like to thank those who made this issue possible.
For Generous Financial Support:
SIRI VON REIS
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF THE ARTS WRITING DIVISION
For Advisement and Technical and Creative Support:
EDWARD DEL ROSARIO JUSTIN DODD
TOM HEALY DORETTA LAU
ERICA MARKS PATRICK O'CONNOR
ANNA DELMORO PETERSON ALICE QUINN
MICHAEL SCAMMELL LESLIE SHARPE
JOANNE STRALEY MICHELLE STEER
JULIA VICINUS ALAN ZIEGLER
For Contributing to Readings:
JACOB M. ApPEL
ALLISON HOFFMAN
GARY LUTZ
SAM WITT
Cover Design:
S K. BERINGER, JUSTIN DODD & QUINN LATIMER
SOPHIE CABOT BLACK
MARY LACHAPELLE
TOM THOMPSON
Front Cover:
Seydou Kei'ta. Untitled #82, 1956-1957. Silver gelatin print, edition of 10, paper:
24 x 20". Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.
Back Cover:
Seydou Ke'ita. Untitled #411, 1950-1952. Silver gelatin print, edition of 10, paper:
20 x 24". Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.
Reprinted with permission:
Joshua Beckman's excerpts from YOur Time Has Come (Verse Press, 2004).
Robert Mezey's poems from Collected Poems: 1952-1999 (University ofArkansas
Press, 2000).
Lydia Millet's excerpt from Everyone's Pretty. Originally appeared in Radical Society.
Epigraph for Issue 39 is from Miranda Field's ''Arnica / Arnbien / Absolution."
Epigraph included with "Portraying Beauty: The Portrait Photographs..." is from
Thomas Newton's (1576) Lemnie's Complex, 1633.

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION:
Single Issues are available for $10. Annual subscriptions are available for $15 (two
issues). Two-year subscriptions are available for $25 (four issues). Recent back issues
can be purchased for $5 (while stocks last). International subscriptions add $5 per
issue.
SUPPORT COLUMBIA:
We encourage you to support fine literature, fresh voices, and continual growth in
our magazine. We rely on the generous support of readers like you!
EDITOR'S CIRCLE
For $500 or more, Editor's Circle receives a two-year subscription to COLUMBIA,
a COLUMBIA canvas tote bag, plus their name listed in the journal.
PATRON
For $100, Patrons receive a two-year subscription to COLUMBIA
and a COLUMBIA canvas tote bag.
ASSOCIATE
For $75, Associates receive a two-year subscription to COLUMBIA.
MEMBER
For $50, Members receive an annual subscription to COLUMBIA.
Please make donations to COLUMBIA: A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE & ART payable
to Columbia University, with "Columbia Journal" indicated in the memo space of
the check. Allgifts are fully tax-deductible to the extentprovided by law.
Printed in the U.S.A. by BOOKMASTERS, INC.
COLUMBIA Tote Bag
This elegant black and white canvas tote bag was
designed exclusively for COLUMBIA by KIM WHITE and
manufactured by ENVIRO-TOTE. There is a limited run
of 500 bags. Each Tote is 13"w by 14"h by 3"g and has
25" black cotton handles.
PRICING:
Single Tote:
Tote + Issue:
Tote + 1 Year Suscription:
Tote + 2 Year Suscription:
$15 ($12 Susbcribers)
$20
$24
$32
Domestic orders add $2 for shipping and handling. International
orders add $8. Checks should be payable to COLUMBIA: A JOURNAL
OF LITERATURE & ART.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Rebecca Wolff
Cynthia Cruz
Tracy K. Smith
Venus Khoury-Ghata
(trans. Marilyn Hacker)
Robert Mezey
Miranda Field
Timothy Donnelly
Dark Roads
Self Portrait with Froehlichia
The Report ofHorses I
Seventy Times Seven
Borderlines
-POETRY-
Hardy 55
Tea Dance At The Nautilus Hotel 56
Arnica I Ambien I Absolution
Pastoral With No Umbrella
His Agenda
The Night Ship
Joshua Beckman
excerpts from YOur Time Has Come 75
Bridget Cross
Still Life with Remorse
76
Paul Killebrew
Kicking Corporate Ass in the Foosball Arena 77
Kathy Fagan
"What she could do, Medea did..." 89
Becka Mara McKay
Letters to a Minor Prophet
90
Kimberly Meyer
A Theory ofSpirals
109
Nikolai Oleinikov
(trans. Eugene Ostashevsky)
Charles Darwin
110
12
14
15
16
44
57
58
59
60
Maurice Manning
Joan Houlihan
Lydia Millet
Micah Perks
Heather Slomski
Peter Christopher
Paul LaFarge
GS Phillips
Odie Lindsey
Katie Kirchoff
Robert Mezey
Camille Paglia
The Poem as a Chasm
The Poem as a Bridge
Injury
137
138
139
-FICTION-
excerpt from Everyone's Pretty 19
Dear Lucille 62
The Chair 73
Let It Loose 92
Walter Benjamin in Ibiza 130
-NONFICTION-
Girl Loves Boy 29
Two Days Gone 66
Autumn in Rockford 100
Interview One
Interview Two
-INTERVIEWS-
47
79

Any oblivion is afield or maze a creature grazes in
for private reasons.
- Miranda Field

Dark Roads
In a continuing
for now
by hand
with just the sounds
it is truly
a dangerous mission
tragic and heroic
lone traveler
Overall, the sounds
pertain-more importantly
the sound
obtains
and all is not quiet today
on these dark roads
just one extra face
and cloaked
and not saying anything
on foot-importantlyhand
follows foot
this time.
12 What you see here, above
the blackened trees
their tall spiny future
are the annals ofa dark
blue inadequate
-RebeccaWolff- This way I say
"You made it through"
a seemingly narrow passage
Only I
darkening
for years and years
and now
is it not disturbing
to ask a question
against a book
with quiet footfall
with hooded
imposter.

Self Portrait in Froehlichia
I was out with lanterns
When you arrived with a torch in the night.
In evening weather, I resisted.
In the evening water, I rested
A diadem ofcotton
Upon the wet crown ofyour head.
A locket ofOklahoma summer and the blond
Leather back seat of a stolen '68
Studebaker.
Outside the broken window,
A nodding field of rocket and a shot­
Gun ofstarlings, scattering.
After you vanished,
I waited for the heat to prevail.
Then I prayed.
-Cynthia Cruz-
I wish to be unhinged ofall the systems.
I want flocks oflow flying swan, brutal windstorm, feathered
Lamps by the thousand, dirt
In the hand. And you
14 My little winter, I do
Not believe I ever
Imagined you might leave, and
I shall never wish
To see another springtime, ever.
The Report on Horses I
Then I was back at the old house, my brother
Still alive.
The two of us racing through the yellow sagebrush,
Dust rising from the earth like mother's
Drunk words, spies in the hallway.
Shadows in the orchard.
Michael's hand in mine, leading me into the wood.
A boy's, beginning, as iffor the first time, Come on,
He said, Let'sfind something still alive
Left to kill.

16
-Tracy K. Smith-
Seventy Times Seven
For Catalina Bruno, San Nicolas, Guerrero, Mexico
1.
You look out through blue-blind eyes
And grab a shadow with your gaze: pigs.
Nosing the bird bones you've picked dry.
What you've eaten already, twice,
Making music ofit-fingers fastidious in flesh.
Little wing of remembering.
They can have it, you think, not
Bothering to form the words in your mind.
No time. No: time is the only thing.
No thing. You're older than a crow,
And when you lie down in your little room,
Crooning to yourself, voice adrift,
Something tugs at the scrim ofdaylight
And you see things as they are. Air ajar,
World a coin in spin. It will falL
2.
Talk to hear what you want to hear.
The one about the devil dancing into town,
The children who followed-you were one­
Girl with a gauze waist and the good sense
To use it. What did he teach you that day?
The devil was a man, you say. Nothing
Beast about him. Nothing but his feet-
One like a rooster, the other a bulL
But by then we were already dancing,
WTeren't we?
3.
But Cata, you're hungry. Dying ofit,
Body laid bare by it, corseted
Into itself, bent. Brittle engine
That keeps going, too tired to stop.
And Cata, the pillow ofyour belly­
IfI lay my head there, you'll disappear.
When you are quiet, miniscule birds
Sigh out from the cage ofyour chest.
You break an egg into a plastic cup.
Alchemy of necessity.
Little drop of plenty.
And beat and beat it.
4.
The body ofSaint Nicolas is heavy.
Because it does not want to be lifted,
Does not want to tip forward again
And fall onto the battered temple
That has already been blessed
By clumsy thieves. Saint Nicolas
Like a dancer in second position,
Happy for the pretty morenitas
Whose bare feet he would anoint
With beads from his own pious brow
Could he but bend.
5.
How many times must you forgive
Your daughter her beauty. How many
Times must she fill your fist with dirty bills
And bags oflemons. You wanted

18
To watch her dance the artesa, hips
Flickering like shattered glass. To lean back
Into your age and begin to forget.
How many times must you believe her
When she promises to return. How many
Days let drop, quartered by an X
To prove you've lived them.
excerpt from Everyone's Pretty
-Lydia Millet-
Chapter the First
Introducing a Prince among men, a Holy Woman, and a sheep
Tuesday evening
10:11
Fat men were often powerful, thatwas true. Their girth did not
appear unseemly, flanked by the pillars and arches ofstate. Thin
men, however, were the revolutionaries and the seers. Che Guevara
had not been a corpulent man, nor had Mahatma Gandhi. Also,
the thin ones lived longer. Emaciation and longevity went hand in
hand. For this reason Decetes had, from time to time, considered a
regimen ofstarvation, but he was always too hungry. -Now I will
starve, he would say, and his resolve would carry him from one day
to the next. Then there would be his stomach, an abandoned child.
He took pity on it.
Still, he knew the pride ofself-restraint. A thin man was a
lone wolf on the prowl.
Decetes applied himself to reading the graffiti on the toilet
stall. He was an amateur archaeologist-or perhaps, since he rarely
dug holes in the ground, merely an anthropologist. For he often
studied mankind. Yes, he devoted himself to their study, so he
could better know them.
Know thine enemy, it was said.
I fucked yer sister, read one line. In another script beneath
this, Go home Dadyour drunk.
Decetes admired the homespun candor. It was here, above
the rust-washed urinals, across the slate-gray metal doors of public

20
bodily relief, that the psyche of the underclass found unfettered
expression. The underclass was canny and astute. Decetes lauded
their efforts.
He was hiding out in the restroom after a minor altercation
with another bar patron, who had threatened him with
injury. -Len, pour me another one, he had said. That was all. A
not unreasonable request. -You've had enough, said Len. Len was
not the garrulous, hearty bartender glorified by urban folklore. Len
kept himself to himself. At times his surly furtiveness was irritating.
Decetes had acquired the habit ofpoking at Len with the stick of
his banter, trying to nudge him out of his hole.
But Len, like all burrowers, could dig himself quite deep
beneath the surface. He had reached up for a bottle ofGordon's and
poured a drink for someone else. Decetes had to follow his course
to the end. -Len, you will pour me another one, or my army will
roust your family from its home, rape the children and plunder the
women. We will steal your valuables Len, and write with blood on
the walls.
Sadly Len had no sense ofhumor. And Len had friends
among the other regulars.
Decetes opened the restroom door slowly, eyed the exit
sign and stealthily made his move, slinking low like a cat. Yes! He
set off down the street in the dark. Houses started up: the block
became residential not fifty steps away from The Quiet Man. Here
was a well-lit house with people drinking on the front lawn. A fresh
and gratis keg, wellspring ofliquid truth? Possibly. He would investigate.
Some ofthe people outside stood drinking from clear plastic
cups: a favorable sign. A blond woman in a short-sleeved minidress
chafed one bare arm with the other hand as he walked past. Scantily
clad, the floozy! Bless her soul.
He would talk to her later, drink in hand.
He headed up the front walk, a placating smile to his right
and to his left in case the host was present. He waved an eager
hand, as though catching sight ofa friend, and mounted the porch
steps two at a time. There it was: the Grail, on the hardwood livingroom
floor. A man in a pink shirt stooped over its tin spout, cup
tipped almost horizontal, manipulating the hose with a deftness
familiar to Decetes. The keg was low. He had arrived in the nick of
time. He removed a clean cup from the top ofa pile.
-You would be? asked someone. He turned to face the
interloper. It was a severe looking woman with glasses and short
hair. Her long skirt bore a pattern offlying ducks.
-Dean Decetes, friend ofJohn's, he said easily, and held
out his hand for her to shake.
- ...Ramon's friend? she asked. -I'm Darlene.
He was already at the spout.
- Nice place here, he said. Bent over the keg, he was at
her waist level. The bulge ofan abdomen constricted by cotton.
Distracted by a shriek from the rear of the house, she passed him
by. The ducks were flying south for the winter. Clutching his cup,
heavy with tepid Miller Genuine Draft, he followed her back to the
bedroom area, whence came the shriek that augured free entertainment.
Where humbler men would have hedged and tiptoed, Decetes
strode with confidence. His gatecrashing skills had been honed
through the lean years, and were now at their apex.
A porcine man stood at the bedroom door. He too was an
onlooker. A cigarette drooped from his mouth.
- Bum a smoke? asked Decetes.
-All out, said the fat man, and retreated grunting.
Decetes peered into the bedroom. On a double bed a man
lay on his stomach, with his pants around his knees. Darlene the
duck lover bent over him and another woman hovered with her
hands fluttering. Decetes ambled closer, taking a swig from his
cup, and peered down. The man's bare buttocks were awash with
blood. A gaping wound at the top ofhis crack was flowing freely.
-Vince what were you thinking? asked Darlene. -Surgery
two days ago and he dances. Ofcourse the suture's going to
split.
She looked up.
-Stand back, said Decetes. -I'm an emergency medical
technician.
Many guises wore the Holy One.
-What a coincidence! said the other woman. Her lipstick
was smeared. -It's like hemorrhaging!
-Gotta ice pack? queried Decetes. Authoritative. -Put
some ice on there. It's not serious.
- Let me check the freezer, said Darlene, on her way out
the door. -Are just regular cubes okay?

22
- Ice is ice, lady, said Decetes with calm contempt. He
didn't like the man's looks. His face was ashen and he had thick
lips. It figured. He strolled in off the street and right up to a man's
bloody rectum. It was the luck of the Irish, though Decetes was
certainly no Mick.
He chuckled and gave the guy a rough pat to the
shoulder. -You'll be fine, bud, he said.
- He had a cyst removed, said the woman with
lipstick. -Benign, but it was causing him discomfort.
-They'll do that, said Decetes. -A cyst will do that. I'm
no big fan ofcysts. Personally, I can take'em or leave'em.
-You're an EMT? asked the bloody man. The side ofhis
flabby face was pressed into the pillow. -Where'd you get your
certification?
-UCLA Medical School, said Decetes. -Back in '83.
Career change since then, but I still know my stuff.
-Hey. Are you even sober?
- Here we go, announced Darlene, bustling in with a
handful ofice in a rag. -Hold tight there Vince. We're all here for
you.
-Has that been sterilized, duck-lover? Decetes asked her
sternly.
-Huh? No but it's clean, she protested. Decetes shook his
head firmly.
- Uh uh uh, he intoned. -Paper towels are the way to
go.
She exited again.
-I didn't know they had EMT training courses at UCLA,
said Vince.
- Learn something new every day, said Decetes. He had
taken control, yet the beneficiary ofhis baronial goodwill was ungrateful.
It was too frequently the case. Ingrates peopled the earth
in obscene abundance. He quit the room, tapped the keg for a final
few drops and went outside.
The blond floozy had a jacket draped over her shoulders. It
had evidently been donated by the man shivering beside her in his
T-shirt. Decetes approached them with a sure step; it was too sure.
He tripped over a flagstone and toppled into the woman, spilling
his beer on her chest and arm as they crashed to the ground.
-Christ, said the wimp in the T-shirt, extending a sallow
hand to raise his pom-pom girl from the compacted turf. She was
pinned beneath Decetes and he did not willingly relinquish his
position. Through her thin dress he felt hillocks and valleys. It was
a frontal paradise, a lush country.
Decetes was becoming aroused.
-Get offme, she ground out through clenched teeth, and
pushed against his chest with her palms. Decetes dared to hope she
had not noticed his tumescence.
-Sorry, I was stunned, he said, and raised himself onto all
fours.
The woman struggled from beneath him, scooting backward
on the ground. He saw her legs. They were tanned and slim,
though imperfectly shaven.
-Stunned? You had an erection!
-Madam, you presume. I am a man with high standards.
That was my lighter you felt, said Decetes.
- Big goddamn lighter, she said, and picked grass off her
arm. -Shaped like a mushroom.
-Alice, let's just go, said the 98-pound weakling, stooping
to pick up his jacket.
-Jesus, said Alice, squinting at Decetes. -I know you.
-You know him?
-You're Bucella's brother, the one who was falling down
drunk at Thanksgiving. I saw you fall onto a poker.
- Bucella is my sister, yes. But water is thicker than blood.
-I work with Bucella. Alice Reeve. This is Lonn.
She reached out to shake his hand, but he was patting his
pockets as though for a business card. There were none in existence,
ofcourse.
- Dean Decetes.
-We're in AA, said Lonn stiffly. -I'm Alice's sponsor.
I think you should consider joining us at the next meeting. On
Wilshire, near Lincoln.
-Oh ho, oh ho, said Decetes, withdrawing his hand to
raise it in protest. -Missionaries, zealots. Proselytists! Please leave
me. I would be alone. Peddle your picture Bibles elsewhere. I am
content to dance my heathen dances and sharpen my weapons on
stones.

24
-One day you'll be ready, said Lonn.
-That'll be the day-hey-hey when I die, said Decetes. -I
know your kind. You bring religion and you take away the wealth.
You and your fellow pioneers are waging war upon my people, but
for now I will hold out. I have my savage rapture and my ancestral
lands. Goodnight sweet ladies. The keg has been duly drained. Me
and my mushroom make our merry way home. Fungus, bungus,
fungus. Hale fellows well met.
Four houses later, he·positioned himself at the base ofa dying
jacaranda and unleashed himself upon the weeds. As he craned
his neck to study the sky his trajectory altered, spraying porch, soil
and doormat. Glancing back at the party on the lawn, he saw a
bespectacled woman twirling shirtless on the sidewalk and regretted
his early departure. But it was a barren waste there, breeding no
Miller out ofthe dead land. And the lilacs could fuck off.
10:57
-That woman is troubled, said Lonn. -We should help
her.
-I don't think it's really our business, said Alice. -Maybe
she's just having a good time.
They watched as the woman, glasses askew on her face,
flapped her arms and danced giddily on the pavement, a solitary
dervish. Alice stared at the breasts, drooping pears slinging right
and left. The woman had her eyes closed, and her mouth hung
open.
- Babs, honey, come in now, rushed Darlene, coming
down the front steps. -Honey, you need to rest. Come on in with
big sister.
-I'm a streaker, squeaked Babs. -I'm a belly dancer!
-Come on now.
- I'm going to the little boys' room, said Lonn, and followed
them inside.
- Little boys' room?
Lonn made her wince on a regular basis. He was the author
of many winces a day.
She sat down on a step and lit a cigarette, thinking of
Bucella's drunken brother. He was a puffy vagabond, a staggering
WC. Fields rated xxx. Minus the dignity. But regardless of the
source, insults bored beneath her skin and laid their eggs. She could
never disregard a cruel word; for all she knew Bucella's drunken
brother was an idiot savant. For all she knew he was right, she had
turned into a sheep. Maybe she was walking in circles with her
nose in a feedbag. Maybe one day she would drop from exhaustion;
cloven hooves would flatten her fleecy carcass.
Guests chattered and nodded. There was the illusion of
contact, but she was always untouched. They talked about one of
two subjects: themselves or nothing at all.
It had been years since people surprised her.
The end ofroutine, now that would be a surprise.
A laughing woman came out the front door, tapping Alice's
back with a raised foot as she stumbled down the steps. -Oh that's
so interesting! she squealed at the man behind her.
-What is interesting? What the fuck is interesting? said
Alice, and crushed her Camel butt on the wooden porch as she
stood. It fell between the slats, sparking. The woman giggled, the
man shrugged whispering a word-bitch-as Alice walked past,
and she was clear ofthem. The faces changed but not the quality of
light beneath them, the dim flat light. And she was static too, like
the rest, always a disappointment. She made light into silence.
Sobriety was like this: useless. What did you do to tempt
yourself onward? Where was the carrot?
She walked away. Lonn could wander the place looking for
her; it would keep him busy.
At the corner of the street was a dive called The Quiet
Man. Inside, in the dark, she could barely make out a pool table,
a jukebox and a burly bearded man in leather vest and turbulent
chest hair with a parrot on his shoulder. He was doing shots at the
counter. She sat down two stools away and ordered a club soda.
-Jack the Sailor, ask Len for another Kamikaze, said the
man with the parrot, and belched.
-Get this man a drink, squawked the parrot.
-Coming right up, said the barkeep.
-Good boy Jack the Sailor, said the man, and fed the
parrot a peanut from his pocket.
-What else can he say, said Alice.
-Shut up Juanita, said the parrot. -You goddamn
two-dollar Mexican whore.

26
-I see!
-Don't take it the wrong way, said Jack the Sailor's owner,
stroking the feathered head. -He had a bad childhood. The club
soda's on me.
Alice smiled at him. He did not smile back, but he would
smile soon.
She envied beehives and anthills. The glue ofinstinct kept
them together; they did not lie alone in the dark.
11:39
Having rested for an interlude between a Dumpster and a fence,
Decetes staggered toward his Pinto as sirens shrieked and a fire
truck careered past, narrowly missing his foot. He took a swig from
his half-empty fifth of Black Label, turned the key in the ignition
and talked to himself as he drove. -Greater love hath no man than
this, that he should lay down his wife for his friend.
Soon a black-and-white flashed its bawdy colors behind
him. Decetes considered the options, which included a high-speed
chase; but the time was not fight. He pulled over and was subjected
to an informal test. Toes, toes, wherefore art thou, unseemly digits?
They were, sadly, beyond his reach. He was no longer the young
and limber cavalier offormer days. Black holes! The universe contracted
like an angry sphincter.
He collapsed onto the street.
-Officer, he said when he was able to sit up, -this is
not necessary. I'm way below the legal limit. One beer, that's it. My
father was a member of the Temperance League. We are Mormons.
To a man.
-Sir, your license has been suspended twice for this offense,
said the cop.
Sir? The cop was clearly a rookie. Decetes saw him graduating
from high school not two years ago, a mortarboard askew atop
his pimpled brow, and decided to implement Plan A.
- Listen Officer, maybe you'll take an interest in my work.
I'm a freelance editor, said Decetes. -Review movies for a national
magazine. Fact you may be familiar with some ofour publications.
The rookie let him bring out a copy from the backseat, but
one look at the nudity inside and Decetes's ass was grass. The officer
was a fundamentalist Christian ofsome stripe, clearly. Perhaps a .
Promise Keeper, even. Family values up the wazoo.
-We also publish a magazine for the law-enforcement
community, fact I've done quite a lot ofwriting for it, started
Decetes, reaching for the gun magazines spilled over the vinyl. But
his hands were cuffed behind him in a trice. Ifhe was not greatly
mistaken they would be suspending his license for good.
In the squad car he attempted to draw the rookie out on
the subject ofvalue systems.
-Are you of the Pentecostal persuasion? he asked. -Your
brother or father handle snakes? Snake-handling in the family? I
handle one myself. Frequently.
-Shut up, please.
-Your sister speak in tongues? Glossalalia? My sister does.
Once a month on the rag. I'm not kidding. Armenian, Swedish,
what have you. Officer, I swear to the good Lord it's true. You
should come over and hear her sometime. I can get you in free of
charge.
-Shut up! snapped the rookie again, agitated. His radio
was squawking out an emergency. He picked it up, spoke into it
and spun the wheel.
-I have to take a leak, I'm going to mess up your upholstery
here, said Decetes.
They pulled up behind two fire trucks. The house previously
visited by Decetes was ablaze. A small crowd milled in the
street; into the night air triumphant arcs ofwater spewed. Decetes
was reminded ofhis needs.
-Don't leave me here Officer, he begged. -I'll piss on
the seat. Leave the cuffs on, just let me take a leak. You think a man
in my condition could get far? You have my license Officer.
-All right, just shut up I told you, said the rookie in a
high-pitched voice, sweating profusely. He popped the back door
open and ran toward the firefighters. Decetes opened his flies to the
gutter, looked over his shoulder at the cop and then wended down
a driveway and through someone's backyard.
The Pinto was elsewhere. He called home from a payphone.
-There's a possibility, he said, -the Los Angeles Police
Department may have impounded my vehicle.
-Not again, you lowlife, said Bucella.

28
-Not again, you lowlife, said Bucella.
-Just pick me up, he said.
-Forget it, said Bucella. -I told you, the next DUI I do
not bail you out.
-Wait, wait, said Decetes. -No bailing, no nothing. I'm
here in my shirtsleeves on the side of the road.
-So what, said Bucella. -You have legs.
-I may meet with physical harm, said Decetes. -There
are several potential assailants in the area. I mean here I am on
a dark street with homeless individuals and Mrican-Americans
hooked on crack cocaine.
-You're a racist Dean, said Bucella.
-Racist, schmacist. I tell it like it is. This isn't Disneyland
Bucella. Do you want to be responsible for my stabbing death?
Here I am with a guy who I think may have a switchblade, Bucella.
He smells like a 40-ounce. He's coming closer. Jesus. He's here! Oh
help Bucella! Help!
-I'm sure you'll hit it off, said Bucella. -No means no.
She hung up.
-Goddamn Bucella, said Decetes aloud. -Not worth
the ribonuke-oxyribe-...DNA she's made of.
There was no one to hear him, since the street, which was
well-lit by the orange glow on the horizon, housed no vagrants or
addicts. He wrested a broken cigarette from his pocket, the cuffs
chafing his wrists, and lit it. Pinching it tightly at the fissure, he
started off in the direction of Santa Monica Boulevard, to catch a
bus. But then he stopped in his tracks. Something had captured his
attention. He stood swaying and gazed up at the firmament. Vast it
was, but void ofstars. Instead ofcelestial bodies the night sky was
dappled with representations ofhis own face. How benevolent, how
like a God! But how human. He was willing to admit it. A patriot
and an American.
-A patriot, sir, and an American.
Let them come! His weapons were invisible but potent. His
armaments were splendid. For he had what other men could only
dream of having: a conscience clear as firewater.
Girl Loves Boy
-GS Phillips-
The first time I saw Leonard he was leaning against the
wall outside One Life to Live's basement dressing rooms on West
66th Street. He had one battered sneaker hiked up on the wall behind
him. He'd leave a dirty scuff there; Leonard left marks everywhere.
The stage manager Ray called my name over the loudspeaker,
which meant I had two or three minutes to get touched up
and on set to shoot my scenes. When I came out ofmy door, I saw
this guy - I wouldn't have called him a man yet - at the end of
the hall. He was square-jawed handsome and he was staring at me.
He'd been on the show, fired just before I got there, and I'd
heard things about him - his terrible acting, his reckless dressingroom
pot-smoking, his untamed moods. He was back to visit. I
shuffled through my script pages and frowned in fake concentration
on that long walk down the hall, my standard policy ofignoring a
cute guy I knew was wrong for me. I was everything he wasn't: educated,
sensible, ill at ease with the unknown. With him staring, the
hall stretched on for miles, and my legs looped and stumbled like a
drunk's.
Last year, when they handed me my daughter for the first
time, I had the same sense ofinstant recognition. Certain people
have arrived in my life as inevitabilities, and Leonard was one of
them.
I was late to set that day.
He never understood that New Yorkers stared at hilll
because he looked like James Dean's handsome brother, 6'2" and
stunning, golden-haired, long-limbed, red-cheeked. He thought

30
they stared at him because they were lonely, so he'd hold his hand
out and introduce himself and stun them into conversation. Everyone
in the neighborhood ofWest 73rd Street seemed to know
Leonard. He knew them too, and called out to them as he skated
up and down the streets. He knew the local Columbus Avenue
homeless couple, Bunny and her toothless boyfriend Gummy, and
invited them to camp in the shelter of his front door; he knew
the wealthy divorce across the street; he knew Joe, the Greek deli
man, and would throw himselfspread-eagled against the plate glass
window to make Joe jump; he knew every model; he knew the
single mom upstairs and took her two kids presents ofcandy and
waterpistols; he knew the dog trainer across the street and each
of the dogs she tended; he saw Carly Simon in the drugstore and
introduced himself, and when he offered her rollerblading lessons
she didn't refuse. They all knew Leonard as fearless and beautiful
and somehow awry.
Here is how I knew Leonard: the saucer ofsauteed garlic he
ordered on our first date, each clove glistening like sea glass. His TV
tuned to the Weather Station, Leonard's ear tuned to perfect wind
speed and direction. Leonard teaching Joe to rollerblade the hills
of Central Park by clipping Girl's leash to Joe's belt loop. Leonard
making a muscle for my camera, his biceps as big as a grapefruit.
Leonard smoking pot every morning to curb his anxieties, and the
Visine bottles hidden like Easter eggs in his apartlnent, his bag,
his pockets. Leonard's New Year's resolution to read the New York
Times every day, dictionary at hand; two months later, the dictionary
wedged between the language tapes and vocabulary builders
languishing on his bottom shelf. Leonard climbing the rock wall
in the front window ofhis gym, passers-by gasping at the glistening
sweep ofhis sweat pooling on the floor. The three years of taxes
I found in his fireplace Hefty-bagged and unfiled. The stream of
bounced-check notices from the bank. The $400 vacuum cleaner
he bought for his $600 studio apartment. The long dim hallway
outside his dingy basement apartment, the reason he'd rented it at
all.
The last actress who'd played Sarah Buchanan had gotten a
better offer from Another World, so the character was pronounced
dead. The fans objected, and, in the time it took for the producers
to find an actress with a "suitably patrician" air to play her, viewers
discovered that Sarah's death had been faked by the man who
kidnapped her, a hirsute anarchist named Carlo. In the meantime,
Sarah's husband, Bo, did what any bereaved soap husband would
do, and proposed to her archrival.
On Bo and Cassie's wedding day, after three grueling days
at the hair parlor, I started work startlingly blonde. Coincidentally,
Carlo freed Sarah the same day. We, Sarah and I, appeared the moment
Bo said "I do." We were wearing a short red dress. We were
skittish and amnesiac. Our hair was coiffed so large that, when my
mother saw the show, she asked why they'd put me in that puffy
yellow wig. Over Sarah's embrace with her now-bigamist husband,
an announcer whispered that the character ofSarah Buchanan
would now be played by me, as though her transformation were a
carefully guarded secret. Luckily, Bo didn't seem to notice.
In the hall outside Leonard's front door, chained to the
heat riser, lay a long, shrouded object that looked like a wrapped
mast. It was his hang-glider; this was the only apartment he found
with a space long enough to hold it. Space for his hang-glider was
one ofhis two criteria for choosing where to live.
The other was his dog, whom he'd trained to leap into his
arms when he opened the door. Girl, a sleek, bat-eared black mutt
the size ofa whippet, was starving when he found her on the 42nd
Street subway platform. She returned his kindness with nervous wet
eyes and undistractable devotion. He took her everywhere. Ignoring
her anxieties, he crammed her into his pack, buckled the top
loosely over her head and took her on the subway, into cabs and
restaurants, into auditions. He wanted someone to invent a dog
sling so that she could go hang-gliding with him. I stood in the
doorwayfeeling like a third wheel and asked him if it wouldn't be
unnatural for a dog to fly. He said she'd be happy as long as she was
with him. I imagined her delicate paws peddling the air, scrabbling
for purchase where there was none.
It was awful being both the good girl and the new girl on a
soap. I wanted to be anyone else: the diva complaining ofthe tennis
elbow she got slinging her purse into her Porsche; the aging heartthrob
with a bandage over the sutures on his forehead muttering

32
"fender bender"; the hot young actor someone would later spot
wearing a pineapple on cable porn in Berlin; the cute teen collagen
rendered unrecognizable several years later. Best ofall would be to
be the bitch, the giver ofgrief, like Bo's other wife. My good girl
was the dewy-eyed recipient ofevery horror the writers could dream
up for the next eight months; after each horror, Sarah would fall
apart and Bo would nurse us, spooning us chicken-and-rice soup
in bed. Sometimes we would lash out at him, as we did when we
were suffering hallucinations, and fling soup allover the sheets. The
next time we were in bed with Bo we would feel shards ofdried
rice underneath us, and see glittering streaks offat encrusted on the
bedspread. We started doing our bed scenes fully dressed.
Almost immediately after Sarah's well-timed reappearance,
her sister Megan came down with lupus and died a protracted,
painful and highly-rated death. In our last scene with Megan we
sang "Eensy Weensy Spider." For years after, strangers on the street
broke out in that song when they saw me, their eyes misting as their
hands traced a spidery climbing motion.
We were on my dressing room floor. It was Saturday, so we
were the only people in the building. Leonard was on top ofme, his
sweat covering my body. We had been painting the walls buttercup
yellow to cheer up the windowless room where I spent most of my
days, but it seemed like time to have sex, so we did. We had the
athletic, rambunctious sex ofyoung people. We made lots of noise
and laughed out loud. I stared up past him at the acoustic tile ceiling.
We were both happy in our restless ways. We were having sex
with someone we loved and there was no one to hear us. It was only
Leonard and I, on top ofthe world down there in that basement.
We were locked together like Dr. Doolittle's Pushme-Pullyou:
opposites joined at the hip, looking over the other's shoulders, hollering
into the view.
Sarah didn't grieve well; she became addicted to pills she
stole from her job at the hospital, pills that looked and tasted
suspiciously like Tic-Tacs when we crammed fistfuls in our mouth.
Carlo, the bald, hirsute anarchist, decided he wasn't done with
Sarah and that he needed to scare her, literally, to death. His sweaty
pate gleamed with menace as he hunted us down. We fell into the
arms ofour therapist, played by a man with chest stubble. Therapy,
even romantic therapy, didn't help.
As Sarah, I cried and cried. I cried so much that my left
eye ran dry and I'd have to angle my right one toward the camera.
Before my scenes, I'd listen to a Shostakovich piece a friend had
guaranteed would make me sob. When it failed to, I'd dab mentholated
Ben-Gay on my tear ducts.
Every day, in every scene, someone else, usually a bitch,
would say the last line, the "tag." I'd get stuck with the "egg" - the
long extra close-up that closes every soap scene - and send a welltimed
tear to tumble down my pancaked cheek. I wanted tags so
badly, but eggs were my fate.
Eventually, when I realized I'd had to cry every day for
eight months, I mentioned this to the Executive Producer. The next
morning, she told me she'd had a dream that she had to fire me. In
July, she sent Sarah on a solo trip around the world to loosen viewers'
allegiance while she and the writers arranged Sarah's imminent
demise.
Leonard and I went on a trip, too. We dragged his glider
up to the top ofa ridge in New Mexico. Sandia Peak breached the
high desert like the rounded spine ofa sea creature, jutting a vertical
mile up from the hot Albuquerque plain below. At 10,600 feet
it was on a different scale than the worn Catskill hill he flew most
weekends. The ridge lift, the desert wind pushing up the side of the
mountain, was so strong my long hair stood up like a brush cut.
The few, leathery hang-gliders launching from Sandia had parkas,
masks, goggles, gobs ofgear; they looked at Leonard's bare hands
and flannel shirt, warned him about the afternoon thunderheads in
the summer desert, and shrugged at his lack ofresponse. It was late
by the time he got set up. He was feverish with excitement. I was
freezing. He gave me one walkie-talkie and strapped the other to his
control bar.
Three hours later, I was in a field looking up, cursing at
the walkie-talkie solid with fuzz. He was an hour late and it was
nearly night under the thick clouds. I scanned the huge clouds and
saw each flash oflightning with growing panic. Finally, there was a
squawk in the static and a dot, a detail, came diving out of the high
darkness.

34
When I got to him, his hands were purple. He'd been
caught in a violent combination ofridge lift and thermal lift,
heated air shooting geyser-like from the desert floor into a thunderhead.
He was spiraled up into the clouds - even in a nosedive he
couldn't lose altitude. He figured he'd reached fourteen-thousand
feet before he was cycled out and was amazed he hadn't blacked out
in the thin air. I sat in brittle silence while he chattered, waiting for
him to notice I was white with upset fury. His ecstasy was intense
and private enough that he didn't.
Leonard talked, bragged, about his wrestle with death over
Sandia for weeks. When he did I shut my eyes against the picture
ofhis clumsy blue hands clutching the control bar, the tails of his
plaid flannel shirt flapping in the murderous darkening air, his face
clenched in fear and delight.
In August, when Sarah and I came back, Bo was at the
little soap airport to greet us. Like every good soap husband, he
gave us an enormous diamond ring to welcome us home. In the
car from the airport, with stagehands rocking the car to simulate
motion, the ring slipped from our finger. We giggled and undid
the seatbelt to retrieve it. Suddenly, headlights appeared out ofthe
darkness. Bo screamed and cranked the wheel. The stagehands
hoisted one side of the car up and Sarah died ofunspecified, invisible
injuries. The driver ofthe other car had a concussion and
became, ofcourse, Bo's next amnesiac wife.
I spent my last day at the soap in a coffin. Between the
hard springs, hot lights and full mal{eup, not to mention the
humiliation of being fired from such a crappy job, it was hell. The
mouth-breathing stage manager, a devotee ofcrinkly warm-up
suits, tied a string to my toe to let me know when my camera was
on. He panted and crinkled and tugged and I lay as still as I could,
the surprising sharpness ofthe steel springs in my back malcing me
an advocate ofcremation. The open casket was the producer's way
ofsaying Sarah wouldn't be coming back to the show or back to
life anytime soon.
Ten days before Christmas, Leonard got a phone call from
his mother. His sister Laurie was dead. She'd been arguing with her
drug-dealer boyfriend when she tumbled from his moving car. Before
his fatuily thought to call him, she succumbed to massive head
injuries in the Salt Lake City ICU. She left two little girls. Like
Leonard, her only sibling, she wasn't raised to last long. His heart
snapped in two.
He flew to Salt Lake City. At the funeral, the funeral home
director pulled him aside. Leonard's parents had both refused to pay
for the funeral. Leonard, broke, pulled a stray blank check from his
wallet. The cost ofhis sister's funeral emptied his account.
When I went to pick him up from the airport, I wasn't
prepared for his anger at me. He was sure I'd been unfaithful while
he was away. Through January and into February, in the midst of
a desperate search for work, he stormed drunk into my apartment
late at night to berate me. He frightened me badly enough that I
decided we needed to take time off, and took my key back.
In late February, he got a break. Gillette selected him for a national
campaign: he was to be the shaver in their next commercial,
the chin. He also found a therapist, and I hoped these two things
together would restore him.. Over the next several months, his
efforts in therapy did the opposite - he got into fistfights on the
street, once with a crew ofchain-swinging cabbies, later with some
meathead on the subway. Drunk, he had sex with a woman he'd
just met, in a banquette at an East Side bar. He drank more every
night and smoked more every day, and in a frenzy ofguilt would
fast to make up for it. I started hearing about women he'd had sex
with, women he barely knew and told me later, sheepishly, he never
wanted to see again.
In the middle ofall this, and two months after Laurie's
death, the soap opera Guiding Light did a widely-publicized
national search for a new male lead, rascally Hart Jessup. They
auditioned over eight hundred actors.
Leonard got the job.
Hart Jessup was a hit. He was paired up with the two
popular good girls on the show, pitting them against each other
in a battle ofdoe eyes. He fended off the other men in their lives
with his muscular bravado. He accused one of the girls, the truly
good one, ofbeing in love with someone else, a charge that left her
wounded and weeping. He strode through his scenes with aplomb,
unaware ofhow stilted his dialogue, how self-conscious his gestures,
how unvaryingly angry his expressions. None ofthat mattered to

36
the fans. The letters started arriving days after his first scenes aired,
and none ofthem talked about his acting. What they cared about
was how handsome he was, how handsome, how hurt, how misunderstood.
Leonard had one minor accident in June, bruising his heel
after crash-landing in an elm, and had to limp through his scenes
at work. He called and told me about it during a break. Without
meaning to, we'd gone from being lovers to something more
like siblings. I stood in my tiny kitchen on 68th Street, an elbow
wedged into either wall, and I scolded him not just for his flying,
but for his growing wad ofspeeding tickets, his heavy drinking, his
fistfights, his sexual indiscretions. I told him with a sister's bossy
affection that ifhe didn't stop, he'd end up dead or in a wheelchair.
And like a sister's, my nagging had no discernible effect.
Six weeks later, on the last day ofJuly, the intersection of
72nd and Columbus was thick with Sunday brunchers, pad-trussed
bladers, sleepy-eyed parents ambling with strollers. I waited for
the payphone to check my machine, fumbling with change in the
piercing July sun. The only message on the tired tape was from my
singing teacher, who lived in the Catskills. He'd heard something
on the local radio about a soap actor in a hang-gliding crash, and
wanted to know if Leonard had gone flying that day. I remember
how, as I strained to hear his muffled words, noisy Manhattan fell
silent around me. I closed my eyes and against the soft pink of my
eyelids I could see what had happened like it was a movie. Early
on that calm and beautiful morning, with the wind direction and
speed he lived for, he'd launched into the soft, Catskills air and
done a loop-the-Ioop. He wouldn't have seen the dead pine tree rise
up behind the veil ofhis wings. His orange helmet smacked into it
at the bottom ofthe rotation like a ball finding a bat.
Later that Sunday I stood amidst fixed rows ofhard orange
chairs in the ER waiting room. The social worker was talking,
frowning kindly. Leonard was somewhere behind the swinging
doors ofthe ER, brought in by helicopter. He was severely injured.
The impact broke his helmet and shook his brain loose in his skull,
shearing impressive numbers of neurological connections. Amazingly,
the hit was so centered that his spine didn't break. Neither did
his skull, which seemed like good news until she told us that the
trapped swelling would probably do more damage than the impact
had. As she said it, sweat began pouring down the sides ofmy body.
I listened to her tell me that, unless I was his wife, no one could see
him until his mother arrived from California. I nodded, sniffling
and sobbing and wanting my casual prophecy undone; when she
left I put a hand to my stomach, sure I would feel it turned inside
out and dangling, like an oyster, shucked and raw-nerved, outside
my body.
Three weeks after his accident Leonard was still on lifesupport
in the ICU. His mother was at the diner next door drinking
early afternoon gin-and-tonics. I waited next to his stilled body
for his show, Guiding Light, to start, and I wept. His neurologist,
a nice enough woman, had just mentioned casually over his prone
form that, given the extent ofhis brain damage and the fact that
habitual pot smoking inhibits brain healing, he'd most likely be
a vegetable. The news was devastating; worse to me was that she
judged him absent enough to say it in front ofhim.
The Glasgow Coma Scale scores traumatic brain injuries
from a vegetative three, with no response to pain, touch, sound or
sight, to fifteen for a patient alert and oriented. Ofthe almost half
a million traumatic brain injuries in the US each year, three-quarters
register nine and better; over half of these occur in males aged
fifteen to twenty-four. Leonard was, technically, in both minorities;
newly twenty-nine, severely comatose, he was lucky to earn a
Glasgow score of three.
His respirator sounded like the white noise maker I used
to help me sleep. It made me want to lay my drowsy head on the
edge ofhis thin hospital pillow. Instead I looked up at the television
suspended over the foot of the bed, carefully angled down so
the patient, were his eyes open, could see. I turned up the volume
in the handset and put it next to his ear, wondering if the sound of
him as Hart Jessup, his soap character, would do what the doctor's
words did not - shake him awake, convince him to return to me,
his dog, his job, the bits oflife he left behind.
I held the tiny speaker to his ear and marveled at how
wooden an actor he was, how lucky to have been making money
in a tough business. Then I felt his doughy hand in mine, and

38
remembered where I was, and why. Overhead, Hart Jessup accused
his good-girl girlfriend ofwhat the audience knew were outlandish
infidelities. She got the egg; her limpid, aching eyes filled the tiny
screen.
I took Girl to see him. This was one ofmy many attempts
to make him wake up from his coma like they do in movies - bing!
Look! He's awake! I was resisting the idea that comas were slower and
messier than that. I put her in his rucksack and lugged it up, hoping
the nurses and orderlies would ignore my squirming package. He'd
been moved to a private room; his eyes were open, though unaligned
and unfocussed. I shut the door and let her out. I put her nose on
his wrist. She sniffed once or twice, and then looked away. One
ofhis roving eyes caught her in its sweep and my heart jumped.
It brushed over her sleek black head and moved on. I pushed her
closer. She sniffed him again out ofpoliteness, then looked up at
me as ifto ask: Are we done here?
A few weeks after his accident, the producers of the show
found his replacement. Over his first appearance an announcer
whispered that the role ofHart Jessup would be played by a new
guy. The fans, mostly women, didn't care that he was a better actor
than Leonard, sturdier and capable ofemotional subtlety; they
didn't like this smaller, less square-jawed, less tragic Hart, and let
the network know. They were loyal to Leonard, sending him stuffed
animals and pastel cards about Jesus in a steady stream. The producers
kept the new guy long enough to wrap up the story line and
then quietly didn't renew him. Hart Jessup left town around the
same time that Leonard tasted soft food for the first time.
By then it was late fall and he was breathing on his own,
for the most part, though the hole in his throat was still open. After
ten weeks with a feeding tube first down his nose and then through
his side into his stomach, it took him most ofthat season and daily
therapy to get his swallow back. While he was trying to retrain it,
he would choke and the food would sputter out around the edges
ofthe bandage covering his trach hole. It gummed up with whatever
soft muck he'd been spooned that day till the nurse swabbed
it clean. It was a good safety valve, I suppose, but I never got used
to it hovering beneath his face like a gauze locket. I wasn't eating
much because when I did, I would feel food slip past that spot in
my own throat, and imagine it tumbling, instead, down into my
lap.
Just as the snow started, Leonard was kicked out of the
hospital and moved to Gaylord, a longer-term rehab facility. His
mother was gone, so my sister came to help me with the move.
Since she couldn't drive a stick shift, she rode with him in the
ambulance while I followed behind with his belongings. The move
upset Leonard's delicate equilibrium. Confused, he started gnashing
at the sheet on the gurney, ripping it with his teeth. By the time we
arrived at Gaylord my sister was a trembling mess and Leonard's
cheeks were wadded with sheet.
Upon his arrival there he was loose-eyed, wordless, diapered,
and had such severe pneumonia that each day the nurses
strapped him to the bed, tilted him upside down and poured out
the mucous. As the nice neurologist from the hospital took a special
interest in Leonard, driving two hours each way to check in on her
former patient, the head nurse at Gaylord did as well. She spent
extra time talking to him and made sure he was assigned the best
therapists. She kept him in the one room with a surveillance camera
in case he had a seizure. Apparently, the neurologist didn't know
about the camera: on her first visit, the head nurse caught the doctor
in bed with her former patient, cuddling; on her second, the
nurse found her standing next to Leonard's wheelchair, holding her
skirt up around her waist and pushing his rigid, ungoverned hands
against her ass. The head nurse reported the doctor to the hospital's
governing board. A month later, the neurologist, a single mother of
two, was fired from the hospital.
When the head nurse told me the news, I just nodded.
It made perfect sense to me that, even comatose, Leonard elicited
special attention from the women who cared for him.
It was November, three-and-a-half months after his accident.
I was running a fundraiser for Leonard that I set up between
trips to the rehab center. Hundreds ofpeople showed up - soap
stars, neighbors, fans, even the out-of-work neurologist. Leonard's
mother flew in for the event; Guiding Light loaned her a sequin
dress.

40
I was very skinny, the skinniest I'd been in a long time.
I was wearing very high heels, black palazzo pants with the cuffs
stapled up, a black and red polka-dot shirt, and a hair-do too big
for my body. I was trying to run on my high heels but couldn't, so
I shuffled and clacked through the crowd. Occasionally one ofthe
heels caught in a stapled hem and I stumbled. Carly Simon, famous
for stage fright, was crying her way through a song on stage. I was
not crying. I was too busy. I'd found a vodka company to donate
vodka and a brownie company to donate blondies and gotten a
hip party spot, the Puck building, half-price, and had thousands of
invitations and tee-shirts printed with "GIRL LOVES BOY" and
a picture ofhis dog; I'd hit up Leonard's friends, fans and celebrities
for either money or anything that might earn it and then had
forgotten to hem my pants. By the end ofthe night I raised, with
much help from many people, a hundred thousand dollars for
Leonard's uncertain future.
I was dependent on sleeping pills. I was unable to keep
anything down except chicken soup and watermelon. My body had
only recently stopped its excessive and uncontrollable sweating,
something my shrink told me was a fight or flight response. My
shrink bills were twice my Manhattan rent; my bank account was
hemorrhaging the soap money I saved. I did not work the entire
year after his crash. I burned through my savings and spent my
time taking care ofLeonard, ofLeonard's stuff, ofLeonard's dog,
ofLeonard's upset friends. After years offoundering, I was bloated
with purpose. I felt like I could barely keep one foot on the ground,
like a strong gust could have lifted me up past Manhattan's rooftop
water huts. I was a new and uneasy complex of behavior: by night
a wrecked insomniac, by day a dazed and brazen woman who knew
to hold a fundraiser while the tragedy was still fresh.
Leonard progressed slowly and unevenly, thwarting every
doctor's predictions. Finally, nine months after his crash, I moved
him from Gaylord to the only other place that offered long-term
therapy, the brain injury wing ofan old age home in Trenton. I
took the train from Penn Station two or three times a week to see
him. To make up for the halls that stank of urine and his view
ofthe pot-holed parking lot, I took him food from his favorite
Mexican restaurant, I took him brownies, I carted out his collection
ofCDs. I took him anything I thought might trigger a memory.
He was able to sit up by then, and feed himself, and was learning
how to use a toilet again. He could think words but couldn't get
his mouth to say them; when I asked him a question it was easier
to guess his answer from his expression. His short-term memory
was gone, while his long-term from before the crash got clearer
and clearer. From time to time he'd get frustrated, realizing things
were suddenly very different; I, on the other hand, strenuously
resisted the notion that the old Leonard wasn't ever coming back.
Like many people with frontal-lobe damage, Leonard's personality
was entirely changed - the striving, restless Leonard was gone,
replaced with someone able to find shards ofcontentment in his
newly-constrained condition.
In the early summer of the year after his crash, my savings
ran out. I needed work. Since I couldn't audition in New York
without someone in the casting office asking me for a Leonard
update, I moved to Los Angeles. I left him in the long-term rehab
home supposedly in the care ofhis mother. She came to visit from
Northern California when she could.
In the fall of that year she decided to move him to a
home in Southern California, Casa Colina, near me and one of his
aunts. She dropped him offand stayed for a day or two, eventually
retreating to the shack where she lived with a mechanic boyfriend
the same age as her son. Leonard's father, Len Sr., rarely visited,
which was best: Leonard was alternately too brain-damaged or not
enough, depending on his father's mood. He chastised Leonard for
his slurred, limited speech, for his clumsy hands, for using a sissy
wheelchair, for tilting his head when he read to see around the
blind spots in his vision. I could see how someone like Leonard's
father might want to think his son was falcing - his ex-crookedcop,
ex-coke-addict father who used to shoot Leonard's pets to
teach him who was boss and who once hit his two-year old namesake
hard enough to break his collarbone.
Three years after his crash, his insurance company said it
was time for him to move to a state-funded home. Judy, the sixtyyear
old woman who ran Casa Colina, saw something in Leonard
she didn't want abandoned, so she offered to take him to live at
her house. Leonard's mother finally agreed. Leonard moved in to
Judy's guest room and was immediately embraced by her five grown

44
Borderlines
1.
It was Elsewhere
it was yesterday
the father's anger overturned the house
-Venus Khoury-Ghata-
we would hide behind the dunes to shred his shouting
the Mediterranean prowled around us like a dog circling a beggar
the mother called us until sunset
it should have been beautiful and it was merely sad
gardens departed this life more slowly than men
we would eat our sorrow down to the last drop then
belch it in splinters in the face of the cold
the suns spirit kept the sun from warming us
a sun that eventually ran dry from so much concentration
It was elsewhere
it was a very long time ago
tired ofcalling us the mother left the earth to enter the earth
seen from above she looked like a pebble
seen from below she looked like a flaking pine-cone
sometimes she wept in sobs that made the foliage tremble
life, we cried to her, is a straight line of noises
death an empty circle
outside there is winter
the death of a sparrow has blackened the snow
But nothing consoled her
who is the night among all nights? she asked the owl
but the owl doesn't think
the owl knows
We would think about her every day
then once a week
then once a year
In the sole photo found between two bills her hair
was yellow sepia
The dead age like paper
2.
it could only have been elsewhere
my father and the sun overturned the country
men who came from the wounded side ofthe river knocked on our border
I say men so as not to say locusts
I say locusts so as not to say fetuses ofstraw
their hands had the sourness ofcorn
their breath the bitterness ofcypress trees
they arrived at night
arrived every night ofevery month
dragging their houses on leashes
their children planted at the foot oftheir olive trees
in her dark cupboard my mother counted their steps
counted the wing-casings of their rustling bodies
my mother sympathized
their tongues thickened by the salt ofthe Dead Sea
their throats filled with the wind ofGalilee
they dug their trenches in our bedrooms

46
stretched their rifles out in our beds
squatted our sidewalks for the length ofa man's life
for the length ofshame
their torpor, once they were dead, did not follow them
their torpor continued to doze facing our houses invaded by a nameless vegetation
as high as their mosques
as silent as our churches carved in the slopes ofvalleys
Visible through the washing on our clotheslines, their country turns its back on them
we keep its cast-off noises
some leftover snow walking more quickly than men do
more slowly than cemeteries
3.
Our backs against the cold air
we see things approaching
I say things so as not to say shadows
but they are not shadows either
they are the unlikely shapes of the living walking their confusion
one night
a man with white eyelashes appeared in our doorway
the water in the faucets froze when he left
Translatedfrom the French by Marilyn Hacker
COLUMBIA interviews Robert Mezey
In November 2003, the poet and translator Robert Mezey conducted
a graduate seminar on Thomas Hardy at Columbia University. The
following day, Lytton Smith interviewed him in SOHO.
It is the Fall of '51 and only Bob Mezey's second day in
Ohio. He has exchanged the streets ofworking-class Philadelphia
for the lawns ofKenyon College where he is studying on a writing
scholarship. As he walks through the campus that evening he
practically runs into a burly guy in Army fatigues going in the other
direction. The guy stops and says to him: 'hey kid, I hear you write
poetry. Listen to this.'
As the final sounds ofThomas Hardy's 'To Lizbie Browne'
grow quiet it takes a few moments for Bob Mezey to return from
1951 to the present day. 'I was wiped out, and didn't know then
it was James Wright,' he recalls with a fond smile. It is fitting that
Mezey begins his talk on Thomas Hardy with a story about Wright,
his long-time friend and a lasting influence, like Hardy. Though
Wright bemoaned the fact that Hardy, who had a profound effect
on him, was so little discussed, he never completed an anthology,
and Mezey describes his own Selected Poems ofThomas Hardy
(1998) as 'an act ofhomage to Jim, the anthology he should have
done.'
Mezey, who in 2000 won the Poet's Prize for Collected
Poems 1952-1999 and whose other awards include the Robert
Frost Prize and the Lamont Selection, started to write poetry under
the influence ofOvid. 'I began writing poetry in Latin class at high
school,' he remembers. 'We were required to translate forty or fifty
lines ofOvid each night-we were only required to do a prose

48
translation, but as I already loved poetry I thought I'd do a verse
translation.' The elements ofthose initial forays-an ambitious
enthusiasm, an appreciation of meter, a joy in translation-have
remained with Mezey throughout his poetic career. John Hollander
has written ofhis 'mastery of the relation between deep and surface
rhythms oflanguage,' and this is evident from the wide range of
formal modes Mezey uses. He is quick to quote Auden's view that
no English poet employed so many and such complicated stanza
forms as Hardy, but it is difficult not to have similar thoughts about
Mezey's own work. 'I would get bored ifI found myself writing a
poem very much like a poem I'd written a few weeks or few years
before,' he says by way ofexplanation.
Formal diversity is not crucial to Mezey, who points out
that 'within very narrow limits [Emily Dickinson] wrote some very
great poetry-as good as any ever written within America.' However,
he personally sets great value by variety: 'ifwhat I'm doing is
any good at all, I'm being surprised, I discover all sorts of things. As
vividly remembered as the original memory is, worthy poetry is a
new experience.' This outlook necessarily colors his view of modern
poetry: 'A lot of people writing today are repeating themselves; I
think ''I've read this poem already." This seems to be the result of
being told to "find a voice" or "know your own voice." I read poets
I liked 20-30 years ago, but I don't get excited by their new collections
because I've read them, 20-30 years ago. I'd like to think that
someone might look at my work and find unity somewhere, but
God forbid that one poem should sound like another. What's the
point ofwriting poetry unless every poem has its own tone? Merwin
and Levine are writing the same now as they used to-Levine
ofcourse never had Merwin's talent.'
He is certainly not afraid ofexpressing opinions. The day
after giving a lecture on Hardy to Columbia M.F.A. students, he
suggests that M.F.A. programs might be 'a cancer.' His comment
is not intended as an unhelpful and sweeping condemnation. He
refers to Donald Justice, to whom he dedicated Collected Poems,
and who held teaching positions on several M.F.A. programs. 'It
made him uncomfortable when people talked like this about writing
programs but he too came to realize a few would be a good
idea but thousands and thousands would be a bad idea. They're too
often run by writers who don't themselves know how to write. They
perpetuate-increasing the need to publish earlier, in order to get a
teaching position.'
Such openness lends support to Hollander's view that
Mezey possesses 'an unyielding poetic integrity that is itself like a
beacon against a darkening literary horizon.' However, Mezey's
frankness has led to problems. With Stephen Berg he co-edited
Naked Poetry, an anthology of 'Open Forms' which caused some
upset, possibly because of the forthright tone of the introduction:
'There are a few poets who would seem to demand inclusion by
virtue of their enormous and dazzling reputations [...] but they are
not here because they are not good enough, or worse.' Remarkably,
given his present love offormal poetry, he signed his name to the
statement that 'the strongest and most alive poetry in America had
abandoned or at least broken the grip oftraditionallneters and had
set out, once again, into "the wilderness of unopened life.'"
Mezey has moved away from Nal

50
in the street expects poetry to be in meter and rhyme and the only
place you get that now is in Hallmark cards.' In his view a central
problem for modern poetry is one ofcomprehension. He quotes
James Wright's insistence that 'Hardy is not difficult' and Stephen
Spender's comment that 'what made poetry 2000 years ago makes
poetry now.' In Mezey's opinion 'people have always read poetry for
pleasure, or to unleash Lethe [...] how can you do it ifyou don't
know what it's about? 980/0 of poems in magazines are impenetrable
to me and I am a sophisticated reader [...] Poetry lifts sorrow and
truth to a higher plain ofregard-like King Lear. We're missing
that higher plane of regard.'
Much of this, he feels, is caused by autobiographical
tendencies in modern poetry. For Mezey biography is 'endlessly
interesting [but] it doesn't much illuminate poetry.' Similarly, the
condition ofpopular culture does not inspire him. 'There have
been times when popular culture has been very exciting and one
wouldn't want to do without it. It seems now to be meaningless,
though I'm prepared to accept this might just be a function of my
age. Students of mine tried to get me to listen to Dre and Eminem,
saying "this is poetry." I did, and I guess you can call it poetry, but
it's about as weak a doggerel as you can hope to see.' Linked to this,
the valuing ofcontent over form perturbs him. 'Most readers are
interested in "content", whatever they mean by that-a poet like
Sharon aIds is extremely popular but when I talk to people about
what they like, it's how naked she is, yet that's true ofother women.
She has no idea what a verse line is, or how to go about writing
verse. I'm not saying you can't write about these subjects, but it still
has to be good poetry.'
His censure is not reserved for those still writing. While
Plath might be suggested as a poet who managed to write 'good
poetry' about the personal-she was, after all, included in Naked
Poetry-Mezey comments that 'I find her depressing, and I don't
mean sad, or bleak, and that's a bad thing. Larkin doesn't leave you
feeling bleak. Plath was an immensely talented woman who hated
life-other poets have somehow survived their psychic storms and
managed to write great poems. Her psychic disorder seeped into her
writing and ruined most ofit. I find 'Daddy' repulsive, partly because
ofher use ofthe Holocaust but also the lack of knowledge of
her father-she never knew him. The thing is, this is great poetry
for the classroom.'
As this remark suggests, the way poetry is taught concerns
Mezey. In his lecture, he mentioned that Hardy was largely selfeducated,
raising the idea that university can ruin poets. However,
he follows this with a witty anecdote in which Flannery O'Connor
was asked about that very problem and responded "in my opinion,
it has not ruined nearly enough."
Mezey's own conception of poetry, at least as far as readers
are concerned, is an inclusive, even democratic one. In his view the
only problem with understanding poetry such as Chaucer is the
passage oftime, whereas in the last 100 years poetry has become
inaccessible. In part, this is because of the 'perverse notion of the
modernists is that poetry has to be difficult.' Speaking about how
he chose which poems to include in his Selected Poems ofThomas
Hardy, he says, 'I wanted to invite as many people as possible.'
Indeed, Mezey directs his disapproval almost more at anthologizers
and teachers than at writers. 'I don't understand anthologizers-I
don't know how they all agree on the same eight to ten poems. I've
ideas for an anthology from Chaucer to the late 20th century­
I've put together a table ofcontents, not wanting to simply accept
received ideas, using my own judgment and putting in some of the
poems people have never read but are at least as good if not better.
I'm not optimistic-editors and teachers will resist it-they'd have
to learn more poems to teach, or in many cases they wouldn't need
teaching because they'd be accessible. I can only think that anthologizers
are lazy, that they don't read the entirety of people's work.'
It is easy to see how such a comment might rile those on
the receiving end, yet Mezey has a wide range ofexperience as an
anthologizer. As well as the Selected Poems ofThomas Hardy and
Naked Poetry, he has edited Poems of the American West, Poems
from the Hebrew, and Selected Poems ofEdwin Arlington Robinson,
the last in part because he felt that 'Robinson is another example
ofinjustice-he's no longer taught in the universities.' He also
co-edited, with Donald Justice, Collected Poems ofHenri Coulette,
another poet he feels has earned too little praise and whose corner
he is quick to fight.
Mezey is equitable in his poetic standards, as likely to
criticize his friend James Wright as Sharon aIds, though with less
force in the case of the former. He views Wright's decision to stop
writing in rhyme and meter as a 'pity' since 'he did not generally

52
have a good ear for free verse.' Similarly, Mezey opines that (Hardy
is an uneven poet, and capable ofmarring fine poems.' There is
consistency in what he chooses to find fault with-it is no surprise
that Ginsberg does not meet with much approval. (He transcends
his limits, and his limitations are severe, though there was some
good stuff-towards the end of(Kaddish' is lovely. Every poem he
ever wrote was an advertisement to himself (Please Master' has no
social value that I can see...it just makes me pity anyone who feels
that he must advertise this kind of thing. I have no problem with
the homosexuality.'
He judges his own work using the same strict standards.
(There are only three or four poems in the Collected Poems that
I feel really confident with, that I wouldn't tinker with.' The tone
is not that ofa lament: (Yehuda Amichai called poetry «a filibuster
against Death." I think ifyou've written one or two that survive, get
into anthologies, that's something.' Among those three or four, he
would include (Tea Dance at the Nautilus Hotel' and (Hardy', both
published in this issue of Columbia. The latter is a tribute ofwhich
he is particularly proud. It is a sonnet, a form Hardy himselfwas
never successful in. 'I'd had in mind to write a homage to Hardy for
years. The first 12 lines came in about 20 minutes, on an airplane.
The only thing I wanted was to have a Hardy rhyme, and very few
people have picked up on this-the (swallow/follow' rhyme, which
comes from (The Going', though of course the words are used in a
different meaning. It took the best part ofa year for the last 2 lines.'
Mezey's other central passion is for translation. Many of
the poems in his Collected Poems are either translations, or (variations'
inspired by and developed from poems originally written in
another language. For the final poem in the book he adapts Horace's
(Carmina III.30', which in Mezey's version begins (my hands
have created this monument.' The collection also includes amusing
modern versions ofsome ofCatullus's (Lesbia' poems, but it is Jorge
Luis Borges he is most invigorated by. (Borges thought ofhimself
first and last as a poet,' Mezey explains, comparing him in this
respect to Hardy. Mezey first began translating Borges' work in the
1980s. (Dick [Barnes] was at that time at Cambridge in England and
involved with a journal. A few days before he had had dinner with
Borges and asked to devote an issue to him, so we began translating.'
Their task did not stop with that one issue: (a year into it we
both felt that this was one ofthe great poets ofthe century.'
The tale, as it continues, is not a cheerful one. Mezey and
Barnes continued to carefully translate Borges until in 1996 they
had translated every single poem-over 400 in total. Their decision
to complete this arduous task, Dick Barnes has written, came after
«Michael Millman [ofViking Penguin] broached to us the possibility
that we might take over the editing and the translation ofthe
entire collected poems." There, however, the matter stood: the two
eventually found out that Viking Penguin had dropped the idea of
a Collected Poems and were proceeding with an edition ofSelected
Poems, edited by the late John Alexander Coleman and translated
by various writers, including W. S. Merwin and John Updike. After
correspondence with Coleman, Barnes and Mezey decided not to
contribute, a boycott joined by Richard Wilbur and John Hollander.
Mezey, who felt misled and unfairly treated by the whole
situation, talks about it with a philosophical sadness. (That [publication]
is not what I did this for. I spent my life reading and writing
poetry. [E.A.] Robinson, at the end ofhis life, and he had a horrible
life, commented, «as lives go this has been a very fortunate one."
That's exactly how I feel-I'm sure he meant he was given a great
gift.' Mezey reveals, surprised at himsel£ that he's currently writing
more than usual. (Ofcourse, it's pretty hard to judge my own stuf£,
he qualifies. (Emerson talked of those lines where it was true that
«cut this line and it will bleed." In a really good poem it could have
been said no other way. Wouldn't you like to have everything in the
poem contribute and be related to everything else in the poem? Isn't
that what form is?'
It is this joy in poetry that is most noticeable about Bob
Mezey. He has been publishing since 1953, but still leaves the
interview full ofboyish excitement as he goes into the Manhattan
evening with (a poem on the verge ofcompletion.' His stringent
feelings about poetry have in the past offended their targets, yet
his aim is to fight the cause ofwhat he sees as justice-promoting
Weldon Kees, E. A. Robinson, even Thomas Hardy. He gives praise
where he feels it is due-ofthe British poet Joseph Harrison he
says, (some ofthe lines I think, my God, he's better than I am, and
wish I'd written this line and passage, which doesn't happen often.'
He will not, however, yield any ofthat (poetic integrity.' His final

54
comments are offered to contemporary writers: 'you should be
unpredictable but you don't want to try to be unpredictable. A lot
ofnew poetry is a concern to be unpredictable-a worrying after
novelty, to be unlike everyone else. I don't think you can be truly
original until you've first been everyone else-play the "sedulous
ape." Don't make it new-make it old.'
'Make it old in new ways?' I offer as a summary. He pauses.
'Well, yes, surprise the reader, but 'astonish me'? Don't astonish
me.'
A few days after we meet, a letter arrives from him with a
Table ofContents for that planned poetry anthology. He mentions
again his pessimism about the exercise since there is no publisher
for it, and not likely to be one. Nevertheless, its existence serves
as a reminder ofhow he talked about his own poetry: 'I left home
very early and I've never felt that I've had a home. I don't think of
myself as a poet ofplace, more as a poet oftrying to find a place.'
The extensive range ofpoetic efforts he has given us possibly owes
something to this search for place. In his own words, from 'The
Wandering Jew'
I cannot now remember when I left
That house and its habitual old men
Bowing before the Ark. I was adrift
And much in need ofsomething I had seen.
Hardy
-Robert Mezey-
Thrown away at birth, he was recovered,
Plucked from the swaddling-shroud, and chafed and slapped,
The crone implacable. At last he shivered,
Drew the first breath, and howled, and lay there, trapped
In a world from which there is but one escape
And that forestalled now almost ninety years.
In such a scene as he himselfmight shape,
The maker ofa thousand songs appears.
From this it follows, all the ironies
Life plays on one whose fate is to follow
The way ofthings, the suffering one sees,
The many cups ofbitterness he must swallow
Before he is permitted to be gone
Where he was headed in that early dawn.

Tea Dance at the Nautilus Hotel (1925)
The gleam ofeyes under the striped umbrellas ­
We see them still, after so many years,
(Or think we do) - the young men and their dears,
Bandying forward glances as through masks
In the curled bluish haze ofpanatellas,
And taking nips from little silver flasks.
They sit at tables as the sun is going,
Bent over cigarettes and lukewarm tea,
Talking small talk, gossip and gallantry,
Some ofthem single, some husbands and wives,
Laughing and telling stories, all unknowing
They sit here in the heyday of their lives.
And some then dance off in the late sunlight,
Lips brushing cheeks, hands growing warm in hands,
Feet gliding at the lightest of commands,
All summer on their caught or sighing breath
As they whirl on toward the oncoming night,
And nothing further from their thoughts than death.
But they danced here sixty-five years ago! ­
Almost all of them must be underground.
Who could be left to smile at the sound
Ofthe oldfangled dance tunes and each pair
Ofyouthful lovers swaying to and fro?
56 Only a dreamer, who was never there.
after a watercolour by DonaldJustice
Portraying Beauty: The Portrait Photographs
of Collier Schorr, Seydou Kelta, Joel Sternfeld,
and Dawoud Bey
I willpourtrait and set before your eyes) a patterne and
image thereof first conceived in minde or imagination.
-Thomas Newton

ii
Collier Schorr. Beauty (KT:), 2002. C-print, 38 3/4 x 31 1/2".
Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.
Collier Schorr. I saw an image... multipleforms in the light, 2002.
C-print, 38 1/2 x 28 1/2". Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

iv
Collier Schorr. 1601bs. (ME), 2003. C-print, 37 x 48".
Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.
Collier Schorr. Reaching (H T.), 2002. C-print, 38 1/4 x 47 1/4".
Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

vi
Seydou Ke'ita. Untitled #277, 1956-1957. Silver gelatin print,
edition of 10, paper: 24 x 20". Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallely, New York. Seydou Ke'ita. Untitled #3, 1952-1955. Silver gelatin print,
edition of 10, paper: 24 x 20". Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.

viii
Seydou Ke'ita. Untitled #19,1952-1955. Silver gelatin print,
edition of 10, paper: 24 x 20". Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.
Seydou Ke'ita. Untitled #223, 1956-1957. Silver gelatin print,
edition of 10, paper: 24 x 20". Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.

xiv
Dawoud Bey. Muhammad, 2001. C-print, 50 x 40". © Dawoud Bey.
Courtesy Gorney Bravin + Lee Gallery, New York.
Dawoud Bey. Barbara, 2001. C-print, 50 x 40". © Dawoud Bey.
Courtesy Gorney Bravin + Lee Gallery, New York.

xvi
Dawoud Bey. Aileen, 2001. C-print, 50 x 40". © Dawoud Bey.
Courtesy Gorney Bravin + Lee Gallery, New York.
Arnica / Ambien / Absolution
-Miranda Field-
No mortal ever learns to go to sleep definitively. No baby, animal or vegetable,
intends to sink his vehicle in so soundless a lake. In such a cloudy house,
shadows take the shape ofsomething "put to sleep." Any oblivion is a field or
maze a creature grazes in for private reasons. The edible flower taken from its
bed to the table instantly expires on your tongue, and this is what we mean by
sense ofnight and utterly internal to itself.
To go to sleep I think ofthe bodies in their reservoirs, painstakingly changing
from opaque to phosphorescent. How all the while, distracted nature pours a
perfect solvent on their experiment. I take a half-pill, a paradigm ignites, a nee
sign in rain. I take a whole, the flame grows lower. One and a quarter, it's just
flicker. No sense asking who I am then. Fluttering on its incidental hook, a dea
twig in a bush, the aura-like cocoon lit up by winter sun the least ofyour
worries is the worm.
*

Pastoral with No Umbrella
Lake District, 1986
You stand among the lambs on the hill, you photograph the lambs on the hill,
who, after ashes settle on the hills, all go to slaughter. But being honeymoon,
that trompe l'oeil WELCOME sign in time, you let them come to you like lambs in a
children's zoo, and when they crowd round you on the hill, let them be
ambient around you, like lambs in a creche, in an antique aquatint. And now it
is you first conceive a strong desire for speechless creatures ofyour own. But
while you picture this, the rain, as usual so tireless and clear, comes close from
every angle. And doesn't it sparkle in the cross-wires ofyour eyes? Doesn't it
electrify? Water-our almost universal solvent-rises from the mud as mist, as
soon as the sun breaks through the cloudbanks it has already set hyper-physical
in their realm. This is the rhetoric and white noise ofthe air, which evetything
hears.
58
His Agenda
All these empty pages must correspond to the days
he devoted to lying in the bygone style, the head
buoyed for hours in a harbor ofjade pillows, the eyes
turned to the window where the hours bled from blue
to deeper blue then burned away-the whole day
dazzled into night without innovation, the sky again
the temple ofthe mind perceiving it, the clouds again
his thoughts like pilgrims chance had carried there.
I think of them arriving in the bygone style, in light-
-Timothy Donnelly-
colored robes and lamb-like manner, their springtime
fluctuations visible through the window's branches,
which would not have been in leaf or flower at the time;
I think ofhim attentive to the pilgrims' voices, the softest
silver audible to inmost ear, and also of the pleasure
that he must have taken there, recumbent as the clouds
attempted to assemble-a drove cohering into perfect choir,
its hymn unending-even ifthe wind opposed their plan,
or even if the night drew closed its purple drape and sent
his body back to sleep before the hymn began outright,
to his mind it had begun, as clouds aspiring to make
such music proved to him the point ofactuality, its peak.

60
The Night Ship
Roll back the stone from the sepulchre's mouth!
I sense disturbance deep within, as ifsome sorcery
had shocked the occupant's hand alive again, back
to compose a document in calligraphy so dragonish
that a single misstep made it necessary to stop
right then and there and tear the botched draft up,
begin again and stop, tear up again and scatter
a squall of paper lozenges atop the architecture
that the mind designs around it, assembling a city
somewhat resembling the seaport ofyour birth,
that blinking arrangement of towers and signage
you now wander underneath, drawn forward by the spell
of the sea's one scent, by the bell of the night ship
that cleaves through the mist on its path to the pier.
Surrender to that vision and the labor apprehensible
as you take to the streets from the refuge ofa chair
so emphatically comfortable even Lazarus himself
would have chosen to remain unrisen from its velvet,
baffling the messiah, His many onlookers muttering
awkwardly to themselves, downcast till a sudden
dust devil spirals in from the dunes-a perfect excuse
to duck back indoors. (The sand spangles their eyes,
the little airborne stones impinge upon such faces
as only Sorrow's pencil would ever dare to sketch,
and even then, it wouldn't be a cakewalk, you realize.
A dust devil at sea would be called a waterspout.)
You fear that you have been demanded into being
only to be dropped on the wintry streets ofthis
imagination rashly, left easy prey for the dockside
phantoms, unwatched and unawaited, and I know
what you mean, almost exactly. This cardboard city
collapses around us; another beautiful document
disassembles into anguish-a cymbal-clap-and we can't
prevent it. At one the wind rises, and the night ship
trembles, drowsing back into its silver cloud. At two it embarks
upon a fiercer derangement. We are in this together.
And we will find protection only on the night ship.

62
Dear Lucille
-Micah Perks-
I keep thinking about the things you said when you called. I'm not
talking about the part where you said I wear ugly shoes. I'm talking
about the other parts, where you said that I was a lying whore, and
you wish I were dead.
You know very well I'm a no-nonsense, get-back-to-work
kind ofwoman. I mean, hello? I'm a nurse. But I signed up for
guided meditation, just to stop the soldierly march ofyour words
from taking over my brain. The first day they asked us to stand
with our palms facing our chests, our left feet pressed against our
right knees, and silently repeat the mantra, I Am One With All
Sentient Beings. Unfortunately, all I could hear was your voice:
Whore, Wish You Were Dead, Whore, Wish You Were Dead. After
a few minutes the headache came, and I was guided to a very small,
very hard pillow off to the side. The master said my chi was too
powerful.
I realize now I have to take more direct action. Think of
this as an eviction notice: you need to vacate my premises. I will
respond to your accusations, calmly and clearly, one by one, and
that will be the end of it, forever.
1) I'm a whore.
First ofall, what do you have against sex workers? And secondly,
in what way am I selling my body for money? I mean, Scott
makes less than I do.
2) You wish I were dead.
I don't wish you were dead, because then Scott would
feel guilty, and he might blame me, and it would mess up our
relationship, but I do wish you would tal

64
tate prices, breastfeeding in public. Everything disgusted you. And I
remember thinking, Lucille has charisma.
Not like now. Your charisma has inverted, you're a black
hole. Lately, you look like a twenty-eight year old Italian widow.
You're going to be wearing a kerchief on your head next time I see
you. Your veins are filled with spoiled milk. Last week, when we
passed on the street, and you spit on the sidewalk, I swear your
saliva sizzled when it hit the cement.
You're so dumb, Lucille. You think this is about lying?
When I was nine or ten, my baby brother sliced his foot
on broken glass, and we rushed him to the emergency room. He
screamed while the resident sewed him up, he screamed No, No,
hurts, hurts, until my parents couldn't stand it and left the room.
But I just stood quietly at the bottom of the examining table,
admiring the neat sutures and keeping track ofeach one on my
fingers, all the way up to nineteen. That's always the story I've told
when I explain why I became a nurse, but now I see it's a story
about something else, too.
And I remember even before that, when I was a kid, and
we played Red Rover in the playground, I would always break
through the wall ofchildren holding hands, every time. It didn't
matter tome if they sprained their fingers or twisted their wrists
and cried. Nothing was going to stop me.
Probably when you played Red Rover you never got
through, and then you pitched a fit and the teacher had to wash
your face with a cool cloth in the girl's bathroom. Or maybe you
didn't play. Maybe you were one of those girls who sat on the
swings all recess, whispering with your best friend.
I know what you were thinking about, when you said that
swearing eternal friendship thing: you were thinking about that
time when we talked about marrying each other. I remember. We
were getting out of the car in front ofyour house. We could see the
lights ofSan Francisco across the bay, and we could hear the coyotes
in the hills. It was a dark night, I remember because you dropped
the keys and we were feeling around in the gravel for them. We'd
just been to the movies, it wasn't even a comedy, but we were in one
of those moods we used to get in, where everything was funny, like
when you're a kid and you drink too much soda. We were hushing
each other so we wouldn't wake Scott, sleeping inside. I must have
said something like, Lucille, your hair looks great in a ponytail. Or
maybe even, Lucille, you look pretty tonight, which made us laugh
again, since it was so dark there was no pretty to be seen.
We were on our knees, feeling around for those keys, and
you said, You always make me feel great. I should have married
someone like you.
And I said, practical, But what about sex?
And you said, I can't remember exactly, but something to
the effect of, It would be a spiritual union.
And I said, I'm not marrying anyone who won't have sex
with me. Something like that, and we laughed, and it turned out
the keys were under the seat of the car.
Anyway, now, even though we're not talking, I'm always
talking to you in my head. All the time. When I'm on my lunch
break, when I'm filing medical records, preparing an injection, it's
always, And one more thing, Lucille. And when Scott and I are
together, I think, is this the way he touched Lucille, just like this?
And when I touch him, I wonder ifI'm tracing the path ofyour
tongue along his body.
Speaking ofwhich, I was examining this patient yesterday,
and I noticed she had an indentation in her lower back. I asked her
about it. She told me it was the place where a surgeon had excised
her fetal twin. In utero, this woman had absorbed her twin into
her own body, and there it lay, curled inside her all those years.
When they discovered the twin through an X-ray, the woman didn't
blanch. She simply said, Get rid ofit. The woman said that after
the surgery, she felt great, like she'd lost ten pounds. And yet, I noticed
that while she talked, she touched the place on her back over
and over, a nervous gesture-smoothing her hand over the empty
bowl.
But you want the truth? Ifright now I heard him calling,
Red Rover, Red Rover, send Anna right over, I would run over the
bright grass, gain speed, and break through the clasped hands, all
over agam.

68
You'll send money tomorrow. Besides, health insurance
means medicine. And medicine will kill the old man. Better hold
off. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Tomorrow.
It's the day after the day after and he's out.
The Memphis paper runs his obit. Online.
"Funeral arrangements are incomplete."
It's the day after the day after, and you think about tending
to those huge, black iron kettles. Nasty things. How the old man
barked at you a little bit, told you to keep the fire steady. "Not
so much wood, boy." How you stirred the goat-bones with that
ancient pitchfork. Splinters lodged underneath the pink, weak,
whiteboy flesh as a knotty spine churned up, out ofthe boiling,
caramel colored stew like a muddy Mississippi thicket.
The snow spills, furious in Chicago.
Salvation, the very reason to pull yourself together and decide
to continue to try and fight this mechanized world ofsteel and
ice, to believe in some romantic liege ofhumanity, is because you
know that by God, come blizzard or drought, if the cotton burns
or the money runs out, somehow, you're always going to find a way
to get to North Mississippi, always, always, always, one weekend a
year, two days, just outside Senatobia; you will check-in at auburnflower-polyester-bedspread
Motel 6, then get lost in the patches
ofquasi-tenant farmland, cutting through flat-to-rolling parcels,
punctuated by double-wide trailers, boarded-up stores, earthen
rows ofbrown or green, then delivered to the farm near Gravel
Springs; always, you will do your best to go above and beyond
what any ofthe other tourists will: showing up first thing Saturday
morning, fighting Friday's hangover, to help police crinkled,
sun-struck cans and wadded, catfish-tinged napkins and to stir goat
bones and anything sweet Bernice tells you her daddy might need
help with, or to do whatever the old man tells you to directly, such
as carry cases of beer and load coolers with bags ofdripping, desperate
ice; you will grin at him, captivated, listen to his little growls
about feeding the fire, likewise, feeling the injection ofwisdom
as that glorious gentleman smiles and tells you to sit down in the
shade, because "Iss too damn hot out heah this mo'nin," and then
joins you for a cold one, at which point you both look out, blind,
into the gut of the glut the land, while you fumble to compose
yourself and ask "How the rains been round here lately?"
Salvation, indeed, is over.
It's all email now.
He lived on what you describe, romantically, as a sharecropper
farm. You imagine he fathered twenty something children
(daughter Bernice, always with royal blue sweatband haloed tight
over slick black skin, fire, being so kind, so involved in his music,
is the only one you've actually come to know). He gave every cent
ofevery dollar he made to everyone else. Must have, you guess.
Didn't bother with half the achievements Bernice told him he'd
earned. Surely. Inside his shack, which was for the most part, too
much too far beyond description, was a lumpy, iron-frame bed
with a beat up quilt and a single-barrel shotgun laid out on top, all
riding a grit-crumbling, warped wooden floor, and guarded by the
ghosts oftwo photos on the dim walls-one ofa black woman, one
ofa young white boy-hung loose by straight pins.
And the online paper runs the obituary.
One year, just after that weekend ofbarely-tuned Heaven,
after the deliverance of trance blues through sweat; generations of
North Mississippi family tutelage, all so eager to hit that side-porch
stage, all vying for the chance to moan the guitar alongside their
local heroes (all deferring, ofcourse, when Mr. Turner chose to cut
the crowd with fife-and-drum, to frenzy up a parade of Civil-War,
slave-honed marching musical tumult, African-born antiquity);
after that weekend ofyoung and old, bragging, determined yet
aware ofneighborly reprisal ifthey couldn't channel the very soul
ofthe past, ofthe area, the land; one year, just after that, there
was a 'North Mississippi-themed concert, featuring a few ofthe
Somewhat Knowns, some ofthe same bluesmen who'd shown up
at Mr. Turner's the week before, held at the Mercury Lounge, in
New York City. The crowd-co-white and co-interested, pursuing
thrift-store-master's degrees, and who seemed to be, well, not listening
really, but rather archiving-was NOT broken open by Othas
fife-and-drum. They did NOT drink themselves into hypnotic
stupor, did NOT discuss the Old Testament with an octogenarian
farmhand named Floyd.
The sound was spectacular. And this is and was fine, fine,
really. Ofcourse.
One year, down there, not in New York City, the old man

70
decided to let his grandson, Rodney, kill the goat. Dear Bernice,
Rodney's mother, told her daddy it's time. It's the boy's time.
Rodney plays the big drum in the old man's band. He's
been doing so for twelve years, since he was seven. It seems.
Rodney tells you, more than once, that he wants to maybe try and
play football again instead. Says he was a decent tailback at Holly
Springs High School. .fu is, he beats the drum at the old man's
back, follows the old man's line, the old man's march. The papers
snap photos of the old man. I've got a photo ofRodney when he
was about ten: pudgy, burr-headed, already staring up at his grandfather
out the sides ofhis eyes, leering, I guess, both of them next
to a horse-drawn wagon. Rodney sneaks a little puffofour grass
on occasion. Tells us that, "'Round Gravel Springs, kids call grass
'ghetti.",
Anyway. They stood, that day, outside the falling-down,
hand-propped rails ofthe pen, first purple light of morning. The
old man put the bullet in the ribcage. (He wasn't quite ready to let
Rodney do that part.) "Get on now," he snapped.
Rodney hopped the fence and ran, ran to the heaving
goat, lying on its side, white fur clumpy in the mud, suffocating
on its own hemorrhage. The boy pulled his silver-shine knife and
slashed the side of the beasts throat furious, upon arrival. His time.
Automatic, as he'd seen before, the boy then dragged the goat by
the horns: to the gate, through the creaky hinge, yanked up into the
rusted flatbed of the Ford, there, in order to easily bind the hooves,
to easily tie a piece of rope between the horns, in order to hang it,
in order to finish bleeding it before ripping off its head by spinning
the suspended carcass. At last, feeling powerful, he turned to
face the old man. Because it was becoming his time. Next year, he
would shoot the goat as well.
Now, Rodney's time.
But the goat thrusts up in the flatbed, somehow, kicking
legs bound, frayed noose between horns and begins to bleat like
all hell, to scream in horrible pain, bleeding a little bit out of the
muddy gash in the neck.
Rodney cut the wrong side. The blood don't flow out that
side. The goat's not dead, just coming out ofshock.
The old man moves without thought, emancipator, to open
the right side ofthe neck with his own, worn knife. Rectangular
slits in eyes, fade, as the animal lays to rest, truly, a few seconds
later. Amen.
The old man is furious. Somewhere down there, buried
under nine decades ofhard-time country life, so sad, he's crushed,
because that ritual just wasn't fair. Because unlike the boy, he respects
the piety of the soul, even when slicing it out of the throat.
You collect emails.
And you thank god for old bald-headed Bernice, who
always flirted with you and smiled heavenly and who you aw
shucks, dumbstruck-grinned back at, staggering around a little,
loose as a goose after twelve hours ofdrinking it up: melted into
black and white sweat on skin, dust-or-mud-covered, depending
on the clouds, on the year, trance-dancing to the busted-out public
address, cymbal-cracked drum kit, guitar perfectly out oftune,
motherfucking North Mississippi hill country blues. You smiled at
her, like a son would, really, and always, once a year, gave her big
squeezes and teases and flirted back cozily and asked ifyou could
help out and promised more than you would ever deliver, in terms
ofwanting to prove yourself to them; you, just another poormouth
hipster, gelded, name unknown by any that mattered, save Bernice,
who made an effort to notice the effort ofall; you promised the
desperate, drunken moon to let her know how much you loved being
there, this year, last year (next year), how much you loved them
both, worshipped them, did anything on this earth, ifonly to be
known to them, and...
Now, he's a fading entry in the Library ofCongress, an
esoteric soundtrack option. Conjurer for suckers who think they
know anything about Mississippi just because they're able to find a
back road, once a year.
Now, you really only know One True Thing: Bernice must
be whirling in chaos.
She's got to keep the old man's legacy going. She's the
horse. She's the fire. Without her, he would've been tending goats
and kicking one-eyed dogs and would've still been exactly the same,
only more invisible. There would be no us, no me, without her.
She, Bernice, is the reason the modern world knows about him.
She's got to keep it going. She's got to.

72
It's the day after the day after.
You get another email.
And the Memphis paper runs the online obit:
"Daughter Loved Turner, Nursed His Legacy"
As the daughter oflegendary fife instrumentalist
Otha Turner, who died
Thursday morning at 94, Bernice
Turner Pratcher was her father's link
with the rest ofthe world.
A skilled musician in her own right,
who labored to keep the fife-anddrum
musical tradition alive, Mrs.
Pratcher died ofcancer at Methodist
Healthcare-University Hospital
Thursday night. She was 48.
Joint services for father and daughter
will be at 1 p.m. Tuesday at Cistern
Hill Missionary Baptist Church in
Como.
It's so god damn cold, way up here in Chicago.
The Chair
-Heather Siomski-
We bought a chair at the flea market from an old man who was
selling all the things he did not want. It was a square chair, red and
white checkered-and although the old man had had the chair
for forty years, it looked brand new. My husband sat down in the
chair, patting the arms comfortably with his hands. I paid the old
man fifty dollars and since we had only a small Volvo and he, a
large truck-he said he'd deliver the chair to our house on his way
home from the market. I asked him was it out ofhis way to do so,
and was he sure he didn't mind? He said he only does things that
are out ofhis way-that this was his new approach to the world.
We appreciate it, I told him, and wrote down our address. Ifwe
weren't home, he said, he'd leave the chair on our front porch. My
husband shook hands with the old man, then we moved deeper
into the mixing colors of the flea market: what looked like smashed
stained glass windows glued into lamps; a bed frame made from
bamboo; a wooden train set with a red Whistle Works painted on
the caboose; a strawberry plant; an Italian stovetop coffee maker.
I'd be happy with a cup ofcoffee, my husband said, so we headed
back through the market. We saw that the old man's things were
no longer there so we figured he had packed up and gone now
that the sun was setting. We drove home through the city and on
the way I noticed a woman leaning out her apartment window
watering the blue flowers in her window box. There was nothing
unusual about this because we lived in a city where to have a window
box was to have a garden. I remember one summer watching
a man grow eggplants out his bathroom window. I think it may
have been the only window in his whole apartment because why
else should he choose the bathroom to grow vegetables? But this

74
woman for some reason made me grab my husband's hand which
rested on the shift and move our hands to stop the car. What is it?
he asked. Her, I said. Who? he asked, but at the time I didn't hear
him because the woman was whistling a tune that I knew I knew
but I just couldn't put my finger on it. Don't breathe, I said to my
husband. But the woman finished her watering before she finished
her song so I let my husband resume his breathing as she retreated
from the window. When we got home we saw the old man's
truck parked in front ofour house and we figured he was on the
porch-perhaps just setting down the chair. But as we stepped up
onto the porch we saw that he was in fact sitting in the chair, weeping.
Hands over his eyes he jolted with the sound ofmy heels and I
immediately apologized for startling him. Don't apologize, he said,
what do you have to be sorry for? And I felt like a mime at that
moment because my hands were moving but I had no words. My
husband awkwardly moved toward the old man sitting in his-no
our-red and white checked chair. Ifyou don't want to sell us the
chair, he said, it's all right (even though I knew how deep down my
husband really wanted the chair). But the old man said: it's your
chair-how am I to leave with your chair? I may have been a lot of
things in my life but I was never once a crook. At this point there
was a long pause-no one had anything to say, and the old man
kept weeping. You could come for visits-I said. You could come
and sit in the chair-Thursday evenings we could say. We could
mark it on our calendars. It could be official. But the old man said
why should I come to your house to sit in your chair? Well, I halfwhispered,
why did you want to sell the chair ifyou are so fond
of it? I sold the chair, he said, because I don't want it anymore.
Why should a man keep what he does not want? Again there was
a pause. Then why are you weeping? my husband asked. The old
man answered: what else should a man do when he has just sold his
chair?
excerpts from YOur Time Has Come
Sure
you're walcing up somewhere strange
but I do that every day.
On boat
with umbrella
feeling practical.
Sad story,
my shoes sitting at the end of the room
and me loolcing at them.
Hum of the universe
I'm trying to sleep.
-Joshua Beckman

76
Still Life with Occasional Remorse
There's you,
idling on my hand
down in the bar bathroom.
The cracked sink
over which I mishandle you.
Your little dressmy
every nightmare that red, tough slip.
-Bridget Cross-
And New York's twisted gallerybeach
and steel beam, behemoths at Coney Island.
All greenrooms to the heart's dark.
There's the watch I wear
when everyone returns to Michigan,
no questions, no orchestra ofany kind.
Our light that spreads just fitfully enough.
There's you,
some Sistine Chapel I'm fake-painting.
How you will waste in my absence.
Brushless,
with your terrible height.
And everywhere the damn echo.
-Paul Killebrew-
Kicking Corporate Ass in the Foosball Arena
Are the cities immoral or just dirtier?
I think the smell comes from the piles
of burnt comebacks offered to the mayor
in memory ofhis plebian roots.
It's a full and justified margins kind ofday,
but how do they do it in the sparsely populated
everywhere else? They don't, or isn't that the point.
So much for vomit in the bad-light train, that's not
my version ofbig city profound and socks
that secretly match your underwear.
I came to this table with a lot ofideas,
and none of them was losing.
It's so simple, though.
Ifyou have patience, you never have waiting,
but somehow such a pocket-change fact
slipped out of the hairbrush
that brings us from the intercom
to the pick-up window.
I don't need to know just now.
Knowledge is just facts after a few cups ofcoffee,
and I've seen my share ofnewscasters
taking a spill on the rubbery noses
they keep tucked away in their assimilators.
Out here in the confederated ideas,
it's not entirely clear that the poet exists,
but I've seen his shadow darkening the service
ofat least one internet Christmas.
Dance to streetlight
and lift the blankets off my good shoes
before all the world's polite little boys
run offand devote their lives to gas.
Generally speaking, it's easy not to murder,

78
difficult not to waste time being dumb.
Nothing's harder than being dumb,
not even itemized tax filings.
I'd like a piece ofpie
to lie under when the planes dip
into the margins skittering along the sides
of the world's stickiest bowl offried attention.
Are you in?
This is me in the blue scaffolding,
and this is the same bright orange night sky
I found under my skull
when I went looking for the interstate
I grew up with. It's not art ifit feels important,
but it might be ironic. You might be a football player.
The president might be a slow recitation
ofthe Buddha's misgivings.
Frankly it's all hopscotch and shoelaces to me,
but don't let Ine stop you from shining your flashlight
into the tremendous gap between the refrigerator
and the conscientious voter.
I don't mean to sound dismissive; I like people.
But what I really like is space.
COLUMBIA interviews Camille Paglia
For decades author, teacher, and culture critic Camille Paglia has been
a unique andfiery voice in the world ofsocial and media critique. She
is adept at synthesizing analyses ofhigh art andpop culture, classicism
and commercialism-for example, the connection she draws between
Stephen King and nineteenth century Romantics. In a time when bloggers
get book deals and the line between Literature and literature grows
ever more blurry, it seemed only logicalfor Mary Phillips-Sandy to
speak to Professor Paglia about the current state ofwriters and writing.
MARy PHILLIPS-SANDY: I'd like to start offwith a general question:
What are you reading right now? And do you find yourself reading
more fiction or nonfiction?
CAMILLE PAGLIA: I read almost entirely nonfiction, unfortunately,
because ofwhat I regard as the self-marginalization offiction in
America, at least following World War II. I'm afraid I've made some
rather extreme statements about this-that the cultural center in
letters has migrated into nonfiction. I tend to read politics, ancient
history, biography, that kind ofthing.
MARy PHILLIPS-SANDY: Who are some ofyour current favorite nonfiction
writers?
CAMILLE PAGLIA: I don't think I have anyone or even several favorite
writers ofnonfiction-aside from mysel£ ofcourse! I choose
books for their topic rather than the writer. In fact, that's one ofthe
problems I see. There's been a tremendous opportunity for young
nonfiction writers over the last ten or fifteen years, but while there's

84
MPS: I'm thinking of the so-called chick-lit that sells incredibly
well-books like Bridget Jones' Diary, The Devil Wears Prada, and
The Nanny Diaries. As a feminist and critic, what do you think
about these books and what they say about current reading?
CP: Look, throughout the entire nineteenth century, the main
consumers of novels tended to be women. So it doesn't particularly
surprise or disturb me. Anything that gets people to read, including
Oprah's Book Club, is positive. We are moving very rapidly toward
a post-literate culture, where most information is being conveyed
via the Web in very unreliable form. The entire practice of book
reading itself is seriously threatened. Mter all, it's pretty much a
blip in the history ofculture. We thought it was going to last forever,
but maybe it's not! So I can't get too worried about it-ifyoung
women who buy Prada are willing to buy a book with Prada in the
title, I can't complain.
MPS: What do you feel is the role ofa writer in a society?
CP: A writer is reflecting his or her own times and connecting it
to the past and the future. I feel that a writer has an obligation to
absorb everything, to take in every possible detail ofeveryday life
as well as the social and political scene. And then to constantly be
processing that into language, to try to adapt one's own private language
to English as it evolves. I'm an enormous admirer ofEnglish,
partly because I came from an Italian immigrant family. All four of
my grandparents and my mother were born in Italy, so English is
relatively new to my family. And I think it's one ofthe most superb
instruments ever invented. It's an American writer's obligation to
use that instrument, to find some way to sing with it, to make it
fully expressive of the writer's individual consciousness.
A writer must always think about being read in the future. That's
certainly one of my motivations. As I'm writing, I'm always thinking
how to make what I'm writing relevant not only to contemporary
readers but to someone looking at it ten, twenty, or thirty
years from now. In order to do that, I carefully study works and
passages of the past that I think still have resonance. The prose style
ofpeople writing in the 1920s, let's say-what in there has retained
its power? What in it has dated? I'm constantly subjecting prose to
that kind of test.
I am convinced that certain things remain constant in English.
One of the terrible problems that's happened to writers ofEnglish
in the last twenty years or so is that a French style ofwriting-very
contorted, self-conscious, and effete-became fashionable through
the exposure ofAmerican academics and the downtown New York
art scene to translated versions of French theorists like Lacan and
Derrida. You can find it in postmodernism everywhere, in fiction
as well as academic books. It has derailed highbrow American
writing-I mean seriously derailed it. There's a distanced irony in
French intellectual writing that's utterly inconsistent with the pragmatism
of the American style. American English is very close to
concrete reality-there are firm, vigorous speech rhythms in good
American writing that come from a real person talking. The cliche
in French theory is that there is no person behind the text, that
the text exists on its own and that it's questioning, sabotaging, and
dissolving itself. That kind ofstuff-all that pretentious posturing
that came over from Paris thirty years ago-is a recipe for suicide
for any aspiring writer. The American writers who tried to write
that way, servilely mimicking the French theorists, have completely
lost their own voices. They cut their own throats as writers, so
now they have no voice at all. It's just been done to death, and the
people who practiced it have faded fast over the past decade. Their
works are going to be consigned to the rubbish heap of history.
Coming from an immigrant family, I was fascinated by American
voices. I heard the American style, with all its vitality, and I tried to
absorb it. What I also try to do as a writer-and I would urge this
on young writers-is never to have just one voice. I adapt my voice
to situation, context, and audience. I have quite different voices
when I'm writing for Salon.com or the Wall Street Journal or the
Times in London.
When I pick up books today-fiction or nonfiction, except for
works ofhistory, which are often well-constructed if not particularly
distinctive in terms ofprose-I just don't see that people
are spending much time on prose style in America. Great Britain
is different: the British have a tremendous sense ofliterary style,
sometime to excess, so that it becomes glib or facile. Books from
England can be all style and no substance! But in America, I don't

88
The only way to go forward as a writer is to go backwards-to
absorb everything that you most admire from twenty, fifty, or a
hundred years ago. There's another thing I used to do as a student
from adolescence through grad school: I would copy out passages
I found especially striking in anything I encountered-whether it
was fiction or nonfiction, contemporary or past. I have notebooks
and notebooks where I laboriously copied those things out, and I
tried to understand the way they work. What makes them work in
terms ofstructure, feeling, vocabulary, or rhetoric? Even an individual
sentence-what's so fabulous about this sentence? I think
ifyou pay that kind ofattention to the basic mechanics ofprose,
over time your mastery ofyour craft will steadily improve, just like
learning an instrument.
-Kathy Fagan-
"What she could do, Medea did. ·."
-Ovid's The Metamorphoses
When I cut
my blade was hardly redso
little blood was in him.
Less spill than suck,
his wound worked like a mouth,
and mouth and wound alike drank
what I fed him,
my husband's father,
eyes fluttering like an infant's,
until I saw in them
the sated look that women
mistal

90
Letters to the Minor Prophet
I'm in Oregon again. The jays
are just as strident here. A flock ofjuncos
punctuates the garden, dispersing if I speak,
like dandelions spent in a mouthful ofair-
*
Your mouth is always part river, part crossing.
We hear the morning light say reach,
but too many elevations fall and lift between us,
the country stopping to catch its breath-
*
I'm in Utah. A gull, knee-deep in the canal,
tugs at a sodden, white sock. A pair ofavocets
ailTIS for him, screaming-thin plates that slit the air
without shattering. The sock is not a sock,
but another bird, drowned and flayed.
The avocets are praying, ifprayer for water birds
means to fling the body at danger again
and again without hitting the ground-
*
I fear punishment for questioning God.
What was it like, your vines picked clean,
-Becka Mara McKay-
fields lost to locusts? I wish we'd met before the fears,
before my name was a cherry pit in the angel's mouth.
But I was a fool, then, too:
always expecting roses-
*
I'm in Oregon now. The world's too wet
for gardening. I want to send you a picture,
a single winged insect. Or do I want to be one,
my hands branching into things that fly?
I feel clean here, the way glass walls feel clean,
the way breathing feels clean
and helical, a scaffolding erected
between me and the impending eclipse.
This is not the first letter I've tried to write you-

96
monsters, all our fears. I sit on her pink bedspread and hug Polar.
His bear eyes are beady and do not reveal much. Pulling it out, I
slide the pistol down the knuckle bones ofmy spine, flip my shirt
back over it. Commercial after commercial, much canned laughter
and music later, I hear someone coming up the stairs, her bangle
bracelets taken offnow, or quieted.
"Doc," she whispers, standing in the doorway. "Doc, my
loose is tooth, I mean, my tooth is loose."
"Let me see," I say, and suddenly my body fits in the air of
this world.
She wiggles one, lower and to the side. She still has her
chubby baby fingers and hands.
"See?"
"Oh, yeah, but it is not going to come right away, work it
with your tongue every once in a while, but not too much."
"You hugging up Polar, Doc?"
"Yeah, giving him some until you got here."
Her arms squeeze around my neck. Her smell is even better
than I remember. Her living smell is every thing.
She lets go, looks into my eye close up.
"I can see it, Doc, does it hurt?"
"No, baby, not now it doesn't, but thanks for asking."
"I have to brush my teeth now and be careful not to wiggle
it too much," she says, skipping to the bathroom.
I am someone hunting his happiness. I am someone from
the past somehow allowed to come back.
"Angelene!" her mother calls from the foot ofthe stairs."Are
you in your soft clothes yet?"
"I am careful brushing, Mama!"
''Alright, but it is getting late."
She comes back cinnamon smelling, toothpaste dabbed
white at the corner ofher mouth, the same side as the wiggly one.
She tears back the velcro on her sneakers. She tugs up her longsleeved
shirt over her face, gets stuck. I help pull-"Watch out for
the wiggly one, Dod"-until fine baby hair falls back into place and
her head comes free. She puts on the pajama top all by herself, the
red one with the Disney Dalmatians, and the bottoms too.
"Okay, Mama, got my soft clothes on!" she calls down over
the bannister. ''I'm going to look at a book for a little while."
And we do, with her in the light ofthe bedside lamp. She and Polar
snuggle up in our heart cave under the sheet, blanket up warm with
my arm around her and Polar, her head resting on the bent card
under my shirt. Her hair moves with the words I read. The little
horse runs so fast that the horse flies. The little horse flies through a
velvet-soft-night sky tossed with stars. The little horse visits the stars.
She cinnamon breathes shmoogily-one ofher made-up first words
for when her stuffed animal babies were sleeping-by the time the
little horse flies past the moon on the way back home.
You have to have something snapped offsharp in you not to
feel wonder when watching a child's face as she sleeps, her baby face
returned, the mouth sucking the memory oftit, oflife itself, and the
way she reminds herself over and over.
I am reminded how there is still so much about love that I
need to know.
And the music in my head? None, no music now, there
only is.
The television laughter and voices turn to something sports,
a basketball game with the announcers giving the first halfstats. The
twins thump tired up the stairs followed by Cecilia's lighter step, by
her bracelet jingle as they come closer.
Clicking out the light, I lay Angelene's head on the pillow,
kiss her hair.
When the boys sleepy shuffle by followed by Cecilia, I am
watching from behind the door. How can they not know that I am
here? How can they not feel the black hole of my being in their
home? The air is different. The night is different. The texture, the
complexity, the simplicity ofwhere the breaks occur and where the
breaks do not occur are different. And I am different, the deepest me
until I am all will and want. Maybe that intent, desire, the very last
that is left us, is what others call a ghost, a real ghost, a ghost both
dead and alive in my own living.
Cecilia pushes at the door, enters the bedroom. She leans
over Angelene, soft strokes the hair from Angelene's face. Nothing
distracts her, not even the breathing ofher own body as she looks.
She is so close I can breathe the Chanel underneath the sway
ofher hair at the back ofher neck. I could touch her cheek, see the
skin whiten under my fingers, whisper how I miss the love we never
had.

98
Her face is burnished by the seashell light at the bottom of
the ocean ofour own making, not that that is an explanation, or an
excuse for anything, not a single fucking thing, okay?-but to me
she is beautiful, and it is all exactly there in her face: her enormous
brown eyes shining as she watches Angelene, her cheekbones, her lips
parted as ifin answer. I try to look at her now without the devotion,
remember her hiding away our photograph taken at the old Spanish
fort in St. Augustine, see her at the sink slamming broken bottle glass
under the suds. I look and see how she is still girlish: her slim, bracelet-adorned
arms coming from an oversized T-shirt tucked in, her
braided belt holding up the tan shorts, her slender legs and delicate
sandals.
As a ghost, I could haunt her forever.
She turns, hesitates. I can hear her held breath in the hesitation.
Perhaps she feels me, senses me, after all we have known and
been and done with each other. We have slept belly to ass, ankle
bone to ankle bone, waded together into that intimacy night after
night for years. And yet there are the places in her ofquiet and fear
and longing that I will never know, all the connections, the costs of
things living under things.
She breathes out. I hear her breathe all the way out as she
passes, pushing back the door along the carpet with a shhhhhh
sound until the door is a pointer finger's length from my face. She
pulls the door almost closed behind her, snatching the air from my
chest as she does, almost, but not all the way closed so she can listen
for her baby girl waking and wanting her.
I listen to water splashing in the bathroom sink, Cecilia
brushing her teeth. When she is done, she goes to their bedroom and
closes the door. Downstairs, the announcers count down the clock
offer up the game's post mortem. '
Angelene sleeps and I watch her sleep. There is nothing like
a child to put you in the present. Feel a child's belly skin, or the skin
on the inside oftheir arms, the little neck hairs. Feel that softness,
the smoothness, and watch as she sleeps, a part ofyourself, and yet a
mystery complete in herself, and me left with all my fierce wonder.
A moment, or hour, or lifetime later, he cuts off the television,
makes his way heavily, noisily, for fuck sake, step by steady step
full ofcourtroom menace, up the stairs. I could grab him by the hair
as he dick swings past and put the hidden and yet-so-convenient
Smith & Wesson in his mouth, jam it hard all the way to the trigger
guard while looking into his eyes, let him read and understand my
stipulations and power ofsubpoena and habeas corpus, motherfucker,
keeping a loaded pistol in the house with his boys, my one, numb
nuts, fuckhead.
I could, because it all becomes simple, and the way to sim-
plify is to get rid ofthings.
He pisses, flushes. He opens and hard claps shut-I almost
jerk around to see ifthe pistol went off-their bedroom door as if he
is the only one in the house, and I come close, the gunshot report of
the door echoing throughout the house, that dose, so help me God.
I close my eyes, steady it down to breath, one breath, and
then another breath, and another.
When I look again, there is the seashell light and the world
held in that light. The house has again become the breathing of the
living, her with her books and bear, the two of us. I lay what is left of
myself near her warmth, the solace ofher soft skin.
In the longer part of the night, drifting through the underwater
quiet, I almost know, almost believe, that I will never lose her.
Morning is the change in light between blind slats. I kiss
at her eyes, smell her milky self, unbutton my shirt. I pull out the
valentine card run streaky pinker and leave it on the pillow next to
her fingers curled as ifwanting to hold onto something.
My daughter is as magnificent as the sun.
Outside, the light already silts down through the tops of the
pines, the pine cones, the needles themselves. The breathing warm
wind barely moves the chimes to sound, the weakened music of
those beyond, the ghost voices, diminishing for now with the com-
ing of the light.
And the other music? Something by Bill Evans, easy as flow-
ing water.
At the pond misting up its own ghosts, I take the pistol
from underneath my shirt. I palm its weight. It is balanced, single action,
concentrated enough to put a hole in you so your life sprays out
and out and out. I underhand toss it out to where it becomes splash
becomes ripple becomes soft slapping where water meets the roots
naked at my feet.

100
Autumn in Rockford
-Katie Kirchoff-
It's an oxymoron, not the weather, but the idea. Leaves
changing; things don't change in small towns, any more than white
bread turns to wheat. The trees look like frozen explosives, freeze
frame on death. Except death doesn't happen in Rockford. A few
kids have died, no one you know, old people pass on but that always
happens. It's their fault they got old. People in Rockford don't
die. People in Rockford live forever.
Red uniforms mixed with green. Christmas on the soccer
field. We're playing Mound, Rockford versus Mound, the only team
we can beat. Except for Brooklyn Center, but they don't count. Everyone
can beat Brooklyn Center. This team is good. Not good, but
better. A challenge. We play hard, both teams, playing hard. Our
coach told us to pretend we were playing Benilde St. Margaret's,
the private Catholic school. They always beat us. By a lot. They
wear red too, but fancy red, expensive red, Pope red. God's on their
side. I almost went to Benilde, but then we moved. Too far away. I
always have looked better in red than green.
The ball's in the air. Popped up, pass to me, chipped. Our
defense is poor, the pass is high and too far, straight to Mound's
right defense. I run, I haven't scored a goal yet this season and I will
score a goal today. Need to. Running, watching the ball.
Mound is a cornfed town. Big kids, big girls. Aggressive,
too, that's a good trait in soccer. Everyone on the field needs to be
aggressive. Mound's right defensive player is the biggest girl on the
team; she's got some speed behind her. She's watching the ball; she's
already let me through four or five times, easy shmeasy. She's not
going to let it happen again. Can not.
Green and red collide, explode. The ball rolls past red, but
it's obvious green got the worst of the collision.
Trees spin into ground, kaleidoscope. Like going down a
slide but landing wrong, on your back instead ofyour butt, or falling
offofa swing. Can't breathe, wind knocked out, on the ground,
but not sure how it happened. Slow motion, slow. Close, open.
Close.
"Man, that was some hit you took there!" My coach
rubs my shoulders in that uncomfortable way he tends to have.
"I thought I might have to pull you!" I smile, not a real smile but
enough to assure him that yes, it was quite a hit and no, he did the
right thing in keeping me in the game. Secretly, though, I feel the
pull of the blow on my back, every move I make feels like someone
is poking me with a pencil, like the irritating kid who sits behind
me in English. Psst, Katie, what's the answer? That's disturbing. Not
a good sign. As I take offmy cleats and roll down my dark green
socks, picking offthe pilled material to prolong the process, one of
the other girls kicks a stray ball towards me, aiming for the pile the
manager has been collecting. Rockford soccer players are not good.
She hits my back instead of the small mountain ofblack and white
balls. It makes contact like a fire bomb, exploding my lungs again.
A small tap, hardly any force. I arch my back and gasp a little, keeping
it quiet. My mother is approaching. She can't see I'm worried.
There's a game in two days. I have to play again.
4 am. Bathroom is cold. The yellow track lighting overhead
casts the room surreal. A washcloth, hung over the showerhead,
drips an indistinguishable rhythm. Cranberry juice. The toilet is
full ofcranberry juice. The floor overhead creaks, the heater ticks a
few times in answer. I reach forward, meaning to flush but instead
grab the shower door. The crooked metal frame, waxy glass, shal

102
up and brings me a bowl and some cereal. I sit down slowly, wary
because my mother never serves me breakfast. She pulls a spoon out
ofthe drainer in the sink and tosses it to me. It skitters across the
table towards me like a shiny weasel. It hits my empty bowl with a
clatter.
"You were up awfully early this morning." My mom taps
her pencil against her crossword as I pour myself half ofa bowl of
Cheerios. I flatten the small mound ofcereal with the rounded part
ofmy spoon. The sound ofher clearing her throat blends with the
splash ofmilk hitting cereal. A small bit bounces up and makes a
little ink blot on my placemat, an explosion ofwhite on the red
material.
'ille you having trouble sleeping?" She presses, the intensity
ofher pencil taps increasing. "I know something's wrong."
I glance up at her without moving my head, my left hand
gripping the spoon. My eyes move back down to my breakfast, and
I move the top layer ofCheerios with the tip of the metal. They
bob up and down cheerfully. Cheerio! What would I say to her?
'Yeah mom, I woke up with the extreme need to urinate, but no
worries. I didn't have to pee! My bladder was full ofblood! Haha,
funny story, right?'
I sigh and get up, carrying my bowl ofcereal to the garbage.
My mom turns her body in her chair, hand perched on its
back. It creaks with the shift in her weight. I turn to her, emptied
bowl in hand.
I pull on the bottom ofmy shirt, avoiding my mom's eyes.
"Yeah. Something's wrong."
My mom and I wait in the small cubicle, constructed of
one white wall and three blue curtains. The guy in the fabric room
next to me is noisy. He tried to hurdle a thick barbed wire fence,
but his ankle got hung up. Somehow the metal ofthe fence nearly
severed his foot. When the doctors wheeled him, howling, past the
opening to my room, I saw the offending foot dangling from the
end ofhis leg like a worm on a hook. His nurses took his soiled
clothes away from him and then sat in front of my room, discussing
something in low voices. When they saw me watching, staring
at the drenched-red clothes, their mouths snapped shut and they
quickly closed my curtain with a resounding whoosh. Now my
mother and I are sitting in the room in silence, waiting for a doctor
to come. The whimpering and low cursing seeping from the cubicle
next door is distracting us, keeping us from making any sort of real
conversation. I check my watch. 10: 11, I've missed two hours of
class. My physics class. Not bad. I adjust myself in the narrow hospital
bed. I have an itch on my nose, but I don't want to touch my
face. The last time I was in a hospital was to visit my grandmother,
after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and I got a staph infection.
That was gross. I want to avoid that; there's a dance coming
up at school, and it would be a tragedy to have a big staphylococcus
wart on my face for it. I look down at my wrist; the thick IV needle
the nurses inserted is causing me pain, especially when I move my
hand. The emergency room waiting area had been a little
crowded when my mother and I entered, but it's amazing the kind
of preferential treatment one gets when one mentions "blood in
urine." The entry paperwork was quicldy filled out, my mother
and I were ushered into the small curtained room, and an IV was
immediately inserted into my arm. Then the nurses disappeared,
Moaning Man was put next to me, and we waited. Two and a half
hours. I enjoy missing class just as much as the next high school
student, but I have a test in my English class, and then the game
against Blake after that. The IV begins to itch.
11 :00. The doctor finally comes in, takes a look at the
metal clipboard hanging next to my bed, reaches into the pocket of
his starched white coat, and hands me a small cup.
"The bathroom's right over there. Go across the hall and
take a left. See over there by the nurse with the blonde hair?" He
points to a young nurse, who smiles and waves at him. I imagine
they're having an affair. "Right over there. When you're done, bring
it on back right over here."
Another nurse comes over and shows me how to walk
across the hall bringing along my IV bag. I feel like an invalid, a
girl with cancer, wishing to keep her hair, as I shuffle over to the
door next to the cute blonde nurse. I nod in response to her "Hiya
hun" and push myself into the small bathroom. I fall into a soon
to be familiar routine; three little wipes, pee into toilet just a little
bit, then finish up in cup. I carefully screw on the cap, holding onto
just the blue top over the sink to make sure it's on tight like I do at

104
a coffee shop with the little plastic covers that cover my macchiatos,
then flush the toilet and wash my hands. I walk back into the ER,
a bustling realm separate from the sterile one I just left. I hesitate
after reentering the white world; it pauses and looks at me. In my
hand is a small urine sample. The atmosphere in the ER is like the
moment after a bomb's explosion; silence and stares greet my cup
full ofred. I've been peeing blood nonstop for three days, it takes
me a moment to realize everyone has noticed my unusual sample. I
walk back to my cubicle, continuing to pretend that bloody piss is a
usual occurrence. The pretty blonde nurse passes me, glances at my
hand, and speeds up her pace to pass me. No Hi hun this time.
I pull the curtain aside; my mom is sitting on the bed,
awkwardly chatting with an orderly. They look up at the sound of
the curtain rings sliding against the metal. My mother gasps slightly
at the sight ofmy sample, but quickly covers it with a cough. The
man jumps up, takes the warm cup from my hand and hustles
away.
"They want to give you a cat-scan and an ultrasound too,
so a nurse should be here soon to get you all set up for that." My
mom says, still coughing slightly into her hand. She won't look at
me. 11 :20. I'm getting nervous; my English test is at 1:30.
"Well, Katie." My doctor comes in through the curtain.
3:45. Cat-scan done, ultrasound completed. He holds the infamous
metal clipboard in his hand. Hem hem. Throat-clearing is not a
good sign. "WelL.well." He looks at my mother instead ofme.
Safety. "Well, good news and bad news. I imagine you'd like to hear
the bad first." He charges right ahead, ignoring my mother's look
ofalarm. I check my watch. "Bad news. I'm sorry to tell you this...
you have...well, the tests didn't come out too well." The doctor
is young. He's not like the doctors on ER. They're smooth at this
stuff. "You have Polycystic Kidney Disease."
My mother collapses, cliche, in a gut-wrenching sob. I
study the doctor's face. Well he kind oflooks like Noah WJle...
"Now, the good news is, it's excellent that we caught it so
soon. With a change ofdiet and a some good old scientific advancement,
by the time the disease really makes an impact in your
life, we'll probably have a cure. I'm sure everything will be fine." Or
maybe Edward Norton...
My mother grabs my hand and squeezes it way too hard. I
pull away.
''I'm going to go ahead and have you make some appointments
with a nephrologist, he'll be able to tell you better what to
expect. Also, let your regular doctor know about this. He'll (she'll)
want to know about this." Misogynist. His fingers playa pattern on
the clipboard. "A nurse will come by with a list of necessary dietary
changes. Oh, and we need to take care ofyour internal bleeding.
Apparently one ofyour cysts popped"-sob from mother-"and
has caused some of that blood in your urine. About two weeks of
bed rest should take care of that."
"Bed rest?" I sit up, using my hands to pull myself up.
Ouch. The IV needle pushes itself into my wrist even further. ''Are
you sure?" Soccer. Senior year. The dance. I can't miss. I've got
things to do.
"Oh yeah. You're going to need to stay in bed for a solid
two weeks. You can get up to go to the bathroom. That's it. But
after that, you should be all healed up. Okay, here comes the nurse,
she'll give you that sheet, and you can be on your way!" The doctor
smiles quickly and hurries away as my mother releases one more explosion
of tears. I touch her shoulder, figuring out how my life will
be affected by this 'bed rest.' Those words don't sound promising.
As we drive away from the brick of the hospital, my
mother calls her sister on the cell phone. Her tears have subsided,
now she's angry. She rants to my aunt.
"Polycystic kidneys! Can you believe this shit? First dad,
now my daughter! Yeah, I know. I know! I can't stand to lose another
person to this shit. Dammit!" My mother misses her turn, but
she doesn't notice. I look out the window, contemplating what 'bed
rest' (dirty words) might do to my standing as starter on varsity. I've
started every game since ninth grade. Hell, I haven't even missed
a game since ninth grade. Not good. Not good at all. My mother
honks at a Volkswagen that cuts in front of us, still shouting into
the phone. I check my watch. 5:00. Game's starting. Shit.
The computer hums at me as I click through websites. My
parents are at work, and they left me with the task to research this
new burden that has been placed on our shoulders. Google search:

108
But that's right-folks with kidney disease aren't supposed to drink.
After Allison's response to my 'disease,' I don't want people to know.
Preferential treatment? Forget that. I crumple the note into a small
ball and toss it into the garbage. Grenade. I walk into the bathroom
next to the office. I really have to pee.
I drive into the parking lot next to the practice soccer
fields. My teammates are arriving as well, a rainbow ofathletic
clothing walking through clouds ofkicked up orange dirt. I search
the field and surrounding grounds for something; I want some
aspect of the area to be changed, to register my absence, to register
the fact that things are different. Nothing. The bleachers are
still slightly bowed in the middle from the weight ofparents and
students, the field has the same patches ofworn, yellowed grass
like small blast radiuses, and the players are still separating into the
same social cliques, running their warm-up laps in packs. Nothing's
different, it's still autumn in Rockford. Nothing's changed.
A Theory of Spirals
Begin with galaxies, their luminous centers
unwinding, a vortex of brightly
flinging arms. Or take a graph,
-Kimberly Meyer-
constellation ofall points: mathematicians' spirals
curve out from the origin,
rays seeking each other across axes
though their variables never intersect. Consider flowers
like mallow, that remedy
for many ills, swirling within their buds
then opening to fringe the stem in curled
convolutions. Choose spider webs,
spirillum, the double helix ofour DNA:
the observable world is full of repetition.
Will we take notice ofsuch insistence?
See the nautilus shell
to which a daughter listens for the sound
ofwaves that is the pounding of blood
through the veins in her ear,
her ear which is itself a perfect spiral,
and, coiled cochlea, spiral within spiral
that vibrates to my voice
telling her, look at the shell and its turreted whorls
that tighten toward a center-
though they could as easily be straining
not to shred into widening ellipses of scattered dust.

110
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin, the noted biologist,
Took a titmouse into his grasp.
He observed it with great attention,
Its beauty was making him gasp.
He studied its serpentine forehead,
Its scaly and cloven fishtail,
The paws that resembled the Pleiades,
The mousy lean in its sail.
"1 must say," considered Charles Darwin,
"I must say that the creature's complex.
Compared to it I am nobody.
Just a birdie-but look at those pees!
Why, why was nature so cruel
To me when she doled out her pie?
Why did I get these ugly cheeks,
These banal heels, this chest like a wheel-why?"
The old man burst into tears,
He took out his pistol and ball.
Charles Darwin was a famous biologist,
But he wasn't good looking at all.
-Nikolai Oleinikov-
CONTESTS
COLUMBIA ANNOUNCES ITS ANNUAL SPRING
CONTEST WINNERS & RUNNER·UP FOR NONFITION
& POETRY. No WINNER WAS SELECTED FOR FICTION.
THIS YEAR THE EDITORS THANK ALL ENTRANTS
OF THE CONTEST. WE WISH TO EXPRESS OUR GRATITUDE
TO OUR NATIONALY-ACCLAIMED GUEST JUDGES: TIMOTHY
DONNELLY, JESSICA HAGEDORN & STEPHEN O'CONNOR
FOR CONTRIBUTING THEIR TIME IN READING SUBMISSIONS.
PLEASE REFER TO THE CONTRIBUTOR'S NOTES TO
LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR 2004 CONTEST JUDGES!

120
pink cup and bent the end ofit to position it between her lips.
"Get some paper and pen," she demanded. "While I'm
awake, I need you to write down what I want for my funeral so
there won't be no bickerin' about it."
Over the next hour, we talked about what she wanted.
Regarding her favorite personal belongings, she told me who should
get what. And she was very clear about her funeral.
"I wanna wear the navy blue and pink pant suit I got off
the home shoppin' network. It's in my closet, still wrapped in plastic."
She joked that she'd been saving it for a special occasion. "No
shoes. Ya know I hate shoes. And a light gray casket with baby blue
lining. White washes me out."
I stifled a giggle, which made her happy. ''And, please Lord,
keep the cameras away from my sisters. They always take pictures
ofdead relatives in their caskets and put 'em in their picture books.
I don't want nobody lookin' at pictures ofme dead. I'll look like
hell."
At that, we looked at each other and cracked up laughing.
When the nurse came in, we laughed harder. She threw us that "be
quiet" look and gave Mom her morphine shot.
The room had grown darker, but not so much that I
couldn't make out my handwriting on the paper before me. Within
minutes, Mom was asleep.
I stared at the list in my hands and cried.
Wade and I have finished our second pot ofcoffee when I
decide it's now or never. 1 pick up the peach-colored rotary phone
and dial Butch and Donna's number.
"Well, hey there," she says, sounding surprised. "1 heard
you was comin' to town. What's up?"
"Well, I'm only here for a couple ofdays. 1 was thinking we
could have dinner one night." I'm ashamed at how weak my voice
sounds.
"Well, this week ain't real good. Butch works nights."
"How about early, before he goes to work?" I ask, picking
up a pencil and drawing boxes on the notepad by the phone as fast
as 1 can.
"Well, I can ask him," she answers, hesitating. "He usually
sleeps till right before he leaves for work."
Bullshit. No way does the man get offwork at seven a. m. and
sleep till seven p. m. Do you think Tm an idiot?
"Well, maybe next year then," I say, not trying to keep the
sarcasm at bay.
"Oh, let me talk to Butch. I'll give ya a call back a little
later."
I put down the phone and the pencil. The notepad is cov­
ered in squares.
Wade stands up and turns to the kitchen sink to rinse out
his coffee cup. "Shoot-fire, kid," he says, looking over his shoulder,
"don't let them boys or their wives git to ya. The way they treated
your mom, not seein' her hardly at all that last year 'fore she died.
Them bastards can rot in hell."
Wade wipes the sweat from his forehead with a frayed, red
and black checked handkerchief "I'll let ya get to it. I gotta run
over to the other farm and feed the cattle. I put all your mom's
stuff in the front room, so you ain't gotta go through no drawers or
closets." He tucks a wad ofchewing tobacco in the side ofhis
mouth and grabs a dirty, green John Deere hat from the hat rack.
He adjusts it at least six times on his bald head.
"Bye, now," he says.
The screen door pauses. 1 anticipate the slam.
As soon as 1 hear the crunch of gravel under the wheels of
his rusty red pick-up truck, I enter the living room. Eleven towering
piles ofclothes are haphazardly stacked across the sofa like a
row ofdilapidated buildings. On the floor are several handbags
and pairs ofshoes. The coffee table displays a large plastic tray of
costume jewelry and two shoe boxes overflowing with make up, lo-
tions, hair combs and brushes.
My mother's whole life, 56years, piled on the living room
floor.
The phone rings. It's Donna.
"Hey, come on down tonight," she says. "Butch ain't gotta
work till ten."
The digital clock on the oven tells me it's almost five
0'clock. A bottle ofAdvil stares at me from the counter. 1 shal

122
By the time Wade gets home, it's almost seven o'clock. I've
settled into the attic bedroom and changed into tan shorts and a
sleeveless white t-shirt. When he asks where I'm going, all dressed
up, I tell him I'm going to Butch and Donna's for dinner. "Wanna
come with me?"
"Nah, you go on ahead," he says. "I ain't up for that bunch
tonight."
At Butch and Donna's apartment, I knock twice, but no
one answers. I let myself in. My brothers and a policeman are
watching TV: They're all the same size and have the same crew cut.
I hear Donna talking in the kitchen and realize that she's invited
her sister, Julie, and her police officer husband, Kevin, to tonight's
dinner. This doesn't surprise me. Donna never does anything without
her sister.
I say hello to the men in the living room. Barely taking
their eyes off the screen, they all say "hey."
.rea, good to see you, too. It's only been 16months. Don't bother
to get up.
In the kitchen, Donna is at the stove frying hamburgers,
grease splattering on her oversized, red and black "Linn Technical
College" sweatshirt.
"Hey, Teri,,, she says, a dish towel in one hand, stainless
steel spatula in the other.
Julie, in a skin tight, extra-large, black Nike warm-up suit,
stands in the center ofthe room holding a pair oforange-handled
scissors. Next to her sits a wet-haired toddler perched high on a
plastic stool. The baby's shoulders are draped with a fuzzy green
towel.
"No, Mommy," he says, dodging the scissors. "No cut."
"He's not big on haircuts," Julie says, turning toward her
son. "Dammit, Austin Joseph. 1. .. SAID... SIT... STILL!" She
grabs the top ofhis head with her free hand, trying to trim his hair
with the other. "Butch or Kevin - somebody," she says, leaning
around the corner, "can one 0' you git in here and help me?"
I sit down at the kitchen table. Butch lumbers by, turning
sideways to squeeze between me and Julie, rubbing his hands
together. He spits in the sink and turns the faucet on and off.
"What's a matter, boy?" he says, looking at Austin, taking
the scissors from Julie's hand. "You bein' a sissy, boy?"
Julie steps away, throwing both hands in air. She grabs a
handful ofchips out ofthe party-sized bowl on the kitchen counter.
"Can you believe how frickin' big I am?" she asks, ignoring her crying
baby. I don't know what to say, so I just shrug. "My doctor says
I cain't have that bypass surgery till I'm at least a hunerd pounds
overweight. I'm tryin' to gain 35 pounds before my next appointment."
Running out ofpotato chips, she grabs another handful.
Back on the stool, Austin has stopped dodging the scissors.
He's sobbing and kicking his feet.
"C'mon, boy," Butch says. "Sit still 'fore I cut your damn
ears of£1"
Julie drops her handful ofpotato chips back in the bowl
and brushes her hands together. "Knock it offor you're gettin' a
whippin',,, she says calmly.
Donna weaves her way around them to the sink, carrying a
hot skillet. I look at the tray ofhamburgers by the stove. I count at
least 20. How many people are coming to dinner?
Austin covers his ears with both hands and yells, "No,
Mommy! No cud"
Butch steps away and drops the scissors on the counter.
"That's it. That's all I can git," he says.
Julie yanks Austin off the stool by the arm and sets him
hard on the floor. Austin cries louder. "No, Mommy. I be good. I
be good." He repeats this over and over while his mother drags him
down the dark hallway by one arm. A door slams.
"So, you still in school?" Donna asks.
"Yea, it's only taking me 20 years to get through college," I
answer, staring down the hallway. I hear muffled little screams over
the din of the TV:
Butch sits down in the chair next to me. "Well, it ain't like
ya need to work there, Sunshine." He picks up an empty Pepsi can
and spits brown tobacco juice into it.
"So, like, what kinda classes ya got?" Donna asks.
Before I can answer, Kevin plods through the kitchen,
his big, black police boots thumping and squeaking across the
linoleum. He pushes the plastic stool aside, his boots scattering
his baby's soft blonde curls. He says he needs to get back to work.
They're setting up a drug sting operation tonight.
"Be careful, man," Butch says.

124
"Shit yea, don't get shot by no goddamn nigger," Chuck
adds from the living room.
"Fuckin' nigger crackheads," Kevin says, pretending to
draw his gun. "Fuck. They best not mess with my ass. I'll put a
fuckin' bullet in their fuckin' heads."
"That's what I'm sayin'," Butch answers.
"Fuckin'A," says Chuck.
Butch leans over and nudges me twice with his elbow.
"What's a matter, princess? Ain't got no niggers up there in Minnesota?"
For the next two days, I visit a few friends, as well as
my aunts Mary Ellen and Angie to whom I deliver my mother's
clothing. Every night I listen to Buddy howl on the front porch.
Mostly I clean the house and have coffee with Wade. He tells me
how much he misses my mom; how he hates to cook for himself,
pay bills and do the laundry. We gossip about my brothers and
their wives. We talk about the weather and how much he loves the
Church.
On the last morning, I pour myself more coffee and look
back and forth between the door and the digital clock on the oven.
I told Wade I was leaving at ten o'clock. At five minutes to ten, I
walk to the sink and rinse out my coffee cup.
"Now, don't be no doggone stranger," Wade says as he
carries my bag out the door, screen door pausing, then slamming
behind him. He's still stooped over with one hand on his lower
back. "Bring that husband 0' yours next time."
"Gimme that, now," I say, taking my suitcase from him
and pointing at his back. "You oughtta get that back 0' yours
looked at."
"Doc says I got a disk out-a-whack. And I ain't havin' no
dad-gum surgery on my back."
"Call the doctor. I'll give you a call in a week or so, see how
you're doin'," I say, opening the trunk of my rental car and tossing
in my suitcase. I slam the trunk closed.
"Sorry ya didn't have a good visit with your brothers,"
Wade says. "Them boys and their wives is somethin' else. Just
worthless."
"Well, what cha gonna do?"
"Ain't that the truth." Wade shoves both hands into his
overall pockets and shrugs his shoulders.
I turn the key in the ignition and turn on the air-conditioning
full blast. Rolling down the driveway, I look in the rearview
mirror to see Wade waving goodbye with Buddy at his side, barking.
I honk twice and ease off the gravel onto the blacktop road.
As 1 crest the hill and look back at the house, I wonder
when I'll see it from here again. In the middle of the road, I put the
car in park and reach into the bottom ofmy purse for the camera. I
get out ofthe car and snap a picture of the house across the halfmile
offarmland.
My last stop is the cemetery next to St. Augustine Catholic
Church.
I kneel in the warm dirt and freshly cut grass by my mother's
grave, tracing her name on the cold granite tombstone with my
fingertips.
Looking at the array offlowers surrounding the grave, I
recall a line my mother wrote in her journal, discovered amidst the
eleven piles ofclothes on the living room floor.
The page-posed question: "What is your favorite holiday?"
"Any time," she wrote, "when all of my kids are together."
After a few quiet minutes, I stand up and dust the dirt and
grass from my knees. I tal

126
Field's Chromatography
- after the color guide of 1869
1.
Mr. Field walks with a cane (granular,
brown on his palm), white-haired,
splintering. Every day a slower
stalking ofhis pillow.
Puddle-ducks
lap a spring thaw,
parasols flap up.
Mr. Field, the people nod. Ice is moving.
2.
How he had craved gloom's opposite
so long ago (boastful drake,
putting on dark hat, tweed coat,
dancing his way out ofthem,
eyelids sealed
tight for the streaks, flashes
like fruit on the tongue)
not knowing he would find its bright center.
Oh gloom, he'd said
accidentally to the dark horse,
-Kate Umans-
jumping astride. He'd
talcen the reins (oily
brown on his palms)
and dug his heels in hard.
Everything could be pressed on.
Summer would be autumn, aflame, deep in.
3.
Whenever he walked, he looked
for lusters. The carp in the pools
(when they swam out from his reflection
as he longed to do) were fissures
in that ordinary self,
having thrashed their forms
free ofhim, a tweed embankment.
He was a brown-cloth man, browner now without them.
4.
In his guide to colors
he worded carefully
his new orange pitched toward red
ideal for bird throats, blazes,
conspicuous flowers.
It is my job, he'd told his love, to look
at other women's dresses.
The sun cast a wan almond-flesh light.
The puddle ducks are green,
she had replied, with lovely, complex

128
feathers. My eyes are rarest malachite,
my hair burnt umber or sienna.
She'd embroidered her gown
with spice-golds and crimson. She'd twirled
in her parlor for hours, for him
(the chaperone dizzy with spinning beside her).
5.
When, during their long courtship, he slipped
midstream in reverent talk oflove
suggesting hues offlesh
and cheeks ofheightened pinks
she grew as
flabbergasted as she could
in corset. She flamed off.
The china orange vermilion bowl grew ruined in his kitchen
easing from its darkening fruits (some
solidarity, some link ofbeauty
going). And since, he'd painted
every woman in this shade, through gown
or headdress, exaggerated
hair itself and yes, by throat
when she insisted on herself
as poignant bird, by fact offlight, by fact of nesting elsewhere.
Mr. Field, the people nodded at his
solitary frame for years. They moved
in blurs, in faded floral mass.
So often a clear rain was in his eyes.
-Derek Pollard-
Watching S. rush by in a fit ofsimultaneity
I am sitting sun-blind
On the roof ofthe Marriott Library
A figure comes running
Out of the unintelligible glare
Moving past me
Almost indistinctly one hand
Held up in mute greeting
A blur that pulls me
Out ofmy reverie
I turn my head from the sun
Following the figure
As it retreats into the distance
Moving swiftly up the burnt-grass hillock
Leading away from the library
Only then do I realize who it was
That had just run past
In that same instant, the carillon bells
Ring out marking the new hour
Striking the very same notes
We would hear again and again
In my grandparents' home in Flint.
S.?Yes ofcourse-So

130
Walter Benjamin in Ibiza
for Talia
-Paul LaFarge-
Walter Benjamin arrives at the Ibiza airport. It is midafternoon, and
his shirt is soaked through. He can't believe he made it this far. Perhaps
from here he will actually go to a place that is safe, although
what that place is, where it is, he cannot imagine. Right now it is
enough to be here. The smell ofthe ocean, the sunwarmed rock,
the peculiar ripe smell oflocal vegetation that has always struck
him as strange, on an island with so little vegetation. As though life
were breeding within the island, not on its surface but deep down,
waiting for a volcanic eruption that will bury the rock in jungle. A
cataclysm that will jet life into the air, that will bury the world in
life.
A group ofpeople have gathered to welcome him to Ibiza.
There is Fernando Ferrer, the famous promoter, and a girl hanging
on his arm who can't be more than twelve years. old. And some
solemn young men in black shirts, who greet him without words.
They are Fernando's employees, he'll discover later, the musicians.
They drink enormously but very rarely speak. The girl looks at
Walter Benjamin through the gap between Fernando's arm and his
side. She bites her lower lip reflectively, then hides her face in her
dark hair. Is she Fernando's daughter? He doesn't look like the sort
ofman who would have daughters. We have brought you some
gifts, he is saying. To make your stay with us enjoyable. He hands
Benjamin a tote bag. In it, a sun hat, a black t-shirt, a package of
chewing gum and an electric torch in the shape ofa death's head,
that does not illuminate anything but itself. You'll have to tell me
what this is for, Benjamin says.
The island has changed since his last visit here, in 1933. Even San
Antonio is built up; the old houses are either gone or surrounded
on all sides by concrete pillboxes where they sell expensive clothing
and necklaces and candy bars and bottles ofwater. He cannot find
the first house he rented, the beautiful house, the house without
comforts. The second house, the one with the hot bath that so
delighted him when he arrived a year later, still stands, but he cannot
go in. It is full of Italians. There is nothing special about a hot
bath here any more, he tells himself. Even in his hotel, which is not
the fanciest on the island, there is a great onyx tub with four or five
individual nozzles that jet aerated water into the bath. It's strange,
Benjamin thinks, the world is broken, but the more things fall apart
the fancier they get. He imagines the day, not far off, when there
will be a special profession to keep this process going. The gilders of
rubble, the ones who make the ruins look fantastic. Then he thinks,
this is what I do already. Then he walks to the port. The bar the
Frenchman built, the first on the island, is gone, completelyobliterated,
in its place there is a black and silver box. Not Fernando's
place but one ofhis competitors, one ofhis rivals, he would say,
with his high romantic conception of his work. This is another sign
ofwhat the world is becoming: the more pedestrian an activity, the
more those who practice it feel compelled to describe themselves
in romantic terms. An age ofheroic streetsweepers, epic barmen.
While those whose work turns them toward the abstract and immaterial
mumble when they speak at all, and stare at their shoes.
A young woman takes his arm. Has he been on the island
long? She wears a feathered headdress, a bustier and a long white
skirt. She is from London, she says, where she works as a publisher's
assistant. Doesn't he love the sun? Benjamin is confused. The sun?
He looks up, shading his eyes, to see if there is anything special
about it here, but no, it is bright, hot and flat, as always. I like it
very much, he says. As she hasn't let go ofhis arm, he asks, can I
walk you somewhere? They walk past the black and silver box, to a
stand that sells fruit juice. Walter, the young woman says, I didn't
know there were still people called Waiter. We are a dying breed,
he says modestly. What publisher is it? he asks, hoping in this way
to bring the conversation around to his work. Oh, it's stupid, she
says. It's just that I know some English publishers, Benjamin says.
My work. .. Have you been swimming? the young woman asks.

134
He sleeps for the first time in days, for the first time in years, it feels
like.
There is so much he wants to say about where he came from, and
what was happening there, about the things that must be stopped
and the things that must be saved, and the future, and the rubble of
the past. But the sun steals his thoughts, even though he now wears
Fernando's hat, after contracting a bad case ofsunburn his first day
on the island. The sun burns his thoughts off, and the ocean drinks
them, and he thinks that the island was different long ago, but
he can't remember, not with the music going all the time and the
feathered girls.
On his last night in Ibiza, he accepts Fernando's offer ofa pill. Give
yourself time to enjoy it, Fernando advises him, and drink plenty of
water. He takes the pill. For hours nothing happens, only the music.
Then he catches sight of the fringe of a palm leafwriggling in
the wind outside Fernando's nightclub, and he is seized by a desire
unlike any he has previously experienced. The physical possession
ofa single woman appears to him only as the preliminary work to
be got out ofthe way before the real work can begin, the clearing of
the ground, so to speak, before a pit can be dug and a foundation
laid for the great future edifice. He wants his flesh to be continuous
with all the other flesh in the universe; he wants his body to be
seamlessly connected to all other bodies, so that he becomes what
he really is, part ofthe vast construction ofwhich he and everyone
else are only parts, broken off from one another by a great catastrophe
that took place as much as sixty years ago. There is nothing
abstract about his thought; it is as warm and plastic as the handle
ofthe bag he appears still to be carrying. We are rubble, yes, that's
it. He steps toward the girl in the black wig, to whom he gave the
flashlight. How are you? she asks. An airplane flies overhead. I think
I understand the music now, Benjamin says.
At dawn they walk on the beach. The lobstermen are there,
pushing their boat into the water. Let's see if they'll give us a ride,
Margaret says. To where? Benjamin asks. She negotiates with the
lobstermen in Spanish. They say they'll take us for twenty pesetas,
she says, come on. He climbs into the boat. The lobstermen push
off, and run after the boat like characters in a comic film; then they
jump out of the water like dolphins and land in the boat. One of
them starts the motor and they set off, away from the island. When
Ibiza is nothing more than a tan bar on the horizon, they stop the
motor and haul traps out of the water. The traps are all empty. The
lobstermen curse in gutter Spanish. They think we bring them bad
luck, Margaret says. Tell them to take us home, then, Benjamin says
grumpily. His head aches and the sun hurts his eyes. Spanish is the
language ofcatastrophe, he thinks. When the world fell apart, it fell
apart in Spanish. But the motor starts again, and the wind cools his
face, and he lies with his head against the gunwale of the boat and
falls asleep.
Look! Margaret tugs his hand. They are headed for a beach like
nothing he has seen on the island since 1933, or even 1932, rocky,
undeveloped except for a single stone hut. Four women dressed in
black from head to toe stand at the water's edge, watching them.
They complete the composition perfectly, gathering the upward rise
ofthe stone hut and distributing it gently across the horizontal of
the beach, like columns, like black stitches along the seam between
sea and sky. Apparently Margaret is thinking the same thing: I want
to take a photograph, she says. They disembark and wade to shore.
They don't say anything to the women, because why would you
speak to a picture? The women don't say anything to them, because
why would a picture speak? God, this is hot, Margaret says. She
takes off her wig, her unpinned hair is long and blonde. He follows
her up a winding track paved with pebbles. They climb high above
the water, toward a village that has appeared suddenly as a white
incrustation on a distant hilltop. When they have climbed for an
hour, they encounter a man walking in the other direction, carrying
a small white coffin under his arm. He asks them something in
Spanish. Si, Margaret says, startled, and points to the beach. The
man hurries on, muttering to himself. What did he want? Benjamin
asks. He wanted to know ifwe had seen his mourners, Margaret
says. He hired four women to mourn for his son, and they ought
to be at his house by now. I guess they were mourning down there,
then they came out to see our boat. Strange, Benjamin thinks:
they were so perfectly in place on the beach that I didn't wonder
for a moment where they came from, or what brought them there.
Probably we overlook what is perfect most ofall, he thinks, but he

evises his opinion later, on the boat. The lobstermen have pulled
three enormous lobsters out of the sea, each one a grizzled beast
with a fearsome history encrusted on its green-black shell. Angry,
one ofthem says in English to Benjamin, pointing at the creels,
very angry. The trapped lobsters snap their claws and wave their
legs as ifthey were dancing. Probably, Benjamin thinks, we remember
what is perfect most ofall.
The Poem as a Chasm
when I don't use punctuation it's because
I'm head over heels with some ecstasy
I've got a heehaw in my heart that won't
let go and neither do I want it to
don't laugh it happens all the time it's like
a boy with a kite for instance who has decided
to let go ofthe string and see what happens next
in such a scene the boy who has loosed the string
has no idea what he's responding to
he only knows a response is called for now
and there's no point in crowing about it either
o who is calling and is his little deed
the thing to do such questions cannot come
at the moment with the kite only after
the kite has trotted like a horse across
the paddock ofthe boy's more subtle mind
you see what happens suddenly our subject
is a horse a consequence I would argue
of unmediated simile no mark
to indicate a change no time to think
about the shift or what it means I think
it's clear the boy is either brave or reckless
and the pity ofit all ifpity fits
this situation is the boy cannot
decide nor will he ever know for sure
who called much less the reason by now you see
our problem instead ofasking you to cross
the bridge I'm pointing out the mouth beneath it
and worse this time there isn't a bridge at all
this poem is about the happy teetering
that catches those of us who like the feel
you must believe the air below your feet
is firm and rising like a loafofbread
because I want you on my side my friend
which means this time I'm hoping you will leap
-Maurice Manning-

138
The Poem as a Bridge
When I do use punctuation, it's because
it really matters. That dot is asking you
to rest, as ifthe sentence were a hill,
a tiresome one, or some golly, golly vista,
and you, my friend, were walking all the way;
so, it's okay for you to catch your breath
and stop. My job, as far as I can tell,
is to give you things to see-the flitting wren,
the glass-eyed woman in the doorway, the wind
and its effect on clover tops-to name
a few. I have invited you over
to my place, and, considering where I liveit's
onlyfair to say it is awayyou
just might need directions (there's a left
to keep in mind, before the tree that's bent
in two, a keen example of the native arch!).
Look, I wouldn't want you tuckered out
on my account. Would I ask you over if
I didn't want you there? Whatever we
would say to one another needn't be
important, but, who knows, we might address
an ages old dilemma and feel we've made
a step. We would at least enjoy the talk.
Alright, I know, this poem is not a poem
about restoring human dignity
to the table ofour thoughts; that would suggest
a prior presence, and I'm afraid the past
has never been a gracious host, and thus
prevents such optimism. This is a poem
that simply makes a bridge between the two
ofus, a footbridge ifyou will. Though it
may be as thin as a straw, though it may lack
the classic architecture, I'm telling you
this bridge is the fruit of reason. Yes, it's sound,
and strong enough for you to walk across.
Injury
What made you, little slam and fury,
feisty cupboard, shut?
How kept, how meager, still as cellar
but with will and want to do-
What place hives you, studs you with,
as ifwith stars, your stings?
Ashen, my sweet history, pointing
and the slack wrist after-
you are the same except the shirt
no longer kept ofyou.
When evening feelers make a wreck ofsun,
how should I care?
I have my fraud,
that old and holy jewel of perfect days.
Be standing now and coated in the smash of that,
its tiny shinings, gracious as a rain.
You had a mind and it's a drift of fly.
I had a child-violent, unprepared-
who made ofwisdom something small
and smothered in the grass.
What we never guessed, and harder heard
is what the dirt says, how it will go on, outlast.
-Joan Houlihan-

CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
Joshua Beckman is the author of four books of poetry. His most
recent book is lOur Time Has Come (Verse Press, 2004). He lives in
Staten Island.
Dawoud Bey was born in Jamaica, New York in 1953 and grew up in
Brooklyn. After studying at Studio lvluseum in Harlem, he received a
degree from Empire State College and an M.F.A. in Photography from
Yale University School ofArt in 1993. Bey's work has been exhibited
worldwide in major museums such as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis,
the Barbican Center in London, the Parrish Art Museum in
South Hampton, and included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. Bey's
work is in the permanent collections ofsuch institutions as the Museum
ofModern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum ofAmerican
Art, the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the High Museum in
Atlanta, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Bibliotheque Nationale
de Paris. In 2002, he was the recipient ofa John Simon Guggenheim
Fellowship. Bey currently lives in Chicago, and is on the faculty
of Columbia College.
Teri Carter was born and raised in southeast Missouri. She is a
writer ofcreative nonfiction and will graduate in May 2005 from the
University ofMinnesota with a B.A. in English. She currently lives in
Minneapolis with her husband and son.
Peter Christopher is the author ofa short-story collection published
by Alfred A. Knopf. He has been awarded a grant from the
National Endowment ofthe Arts for his fiction. He has worked as a
fence stomper, bartender, greenskeeper and cop reporter.
Bridget Cross lives in Brooklyn, New York, and works at the PEN
American Center and as a freelance copyediting hack.
Cynthia Cruz was raised in Germany and Northern California.
Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Paris Review, Boston
Review, Grand Street, Chelsea, Pleiades, and others. She has received
fellowships to Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. She lives in New
York City.

42
Timothy Donnelly is the author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production
ofEine Lebenszeit (Grove Press, 2003) and the poetry editor of
Boston Review. He is a doctoral candidate in English at Princeton
University and currently teaches in the Writing Division ofColumbia
University's School ofthe Arts. He lives in Brooklyn.
Kathy Fagan is the author ofthree books ofpoems, most recently
The Charm (Zoo, 2002). She currently directs the Creative Writing
Program at The Ohio State University, where she also co-edits The
Journal.
Miranda Field's first book, Swallow, won a Katherine Bakeless Nason
Literary Publication Prize in Poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous
journals and magazines, and has been awarded a "Discovery"/The
Nation Award, and a Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York City with
poet Tom Thompson and their two children.
Marilyn Hacker is the author often books, most recently, She Says,
a translated collection ofVenus Khoury-Ghata's poems from Graywolf
Press, and Desesperanto, Poems 1999-2002 from Norton. She lives in
New York and Paris, and teaches at the City College ofNew York.
Poet, playwright, and screenwriter Jessica Hagedorn is the author
ofthree novels: Dream Jungle, The Gangster ofLove, and Dogeaters; a
collection ofpoetry and prose, Danger AndBeauty; and the editor of
Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology OfContemporary Asian American
Fiction and Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: AtHome In The WOrld.
Joan Houlihan is editor-in-chiefofPerihelion and author of Boston
Comment, a column that focuses on contemporary American poetry.
Her book, Hand-Held Executions, a collection ofpoems and essays, is
available from Del Sol Press and a chapbook, Our New and Smaller
Lives, was published by Black Warrior Review. Her poems appear in:
The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, VOLT, Poetry International,
Marlboro Review, and Boston Review among others. Her work has been
twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Venus Khoury-Ghata was born in Lebanon but has lived in France
since 1973. The author of a dozen collections ofpoems and as many
novels, Khoury-Ghata received the Prix Mallarme in 1987 for Monologue
du mort, the Prix Apollinaire in 1980 for Les Ombres et leur cris,
and the Grand Prix de la Societe des gens de lettres for Fables pour un
peuple d'argile in 1992. Her work has been translated into Arabic,
Dutch, German, Italian, and Russian, and she was named a Chevalier
de la Legion d'Honneur in 2000.
Paul Killebrew was born in 1978 in Nashville, Tennessee.
Seydou Ke'ita (1923-2001), one of the seminal artists of the Mrican
continent, was born and resided in Bamako, Mali. A self-trained photographer,
he preferred the direct control that black and white studio
portraits afforded. From 1949 to 1964, Ke'ita was a studio photographer
with a remarkable reputation. He offered costumes and props for
his sitters, although many arrived already dressed in their finest attire.
While both a historical and sociological record of life in Bamako, the
photographs capture with immediacy and intimacy the beauty of the
individual. Now internationally recognized as a master of the photographic
portrait, Ke'ita has exhibited widely in museums and galleries
worldwide, and his works are included in the collections ofmany
prominent museums.
Katie Kirchoff has had poems appear in the Wayfarer, a journal at
the University ofMinnesota, where she is currently working towards a
degree in English. After graduating, she plans to either attend graduate
school or sit at home eating chocolate ice cream and playing video
games.
Paul LaFarge is the author oftwo novels: The Artist ofthe Missing,
and Haussmann, or the Distinction, which was a New York Times Notable
Book for 2001. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002
and is currently working on his third novel, which is about airplanes
and winter.
Prior to earning his MFA/Writing from the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago, Odie Lindsey pulled stints in L.A. (script analyst/housesitter),
Nashville (music publicist), Shelter Island, NY (dog-sitter),
Umbria, Italy (olive tree waterer) and Saudi Arabia/Iraq (Desert Storm
the 1st). He co-founded the Chicago multi-disciplinary arts group
Telophase, and writes fiction, non-fic, one-act plays and bad country
songs.

44
Maurice Manning's first book, Lawrence Booth's Book ofVisions, was
selected for the 2000 Yale Series ofYounger Poets. His second book,
A Companion for Owls, is forthcoming from Harcourt. He will be
joining the creative writing program at Indiana University in the fall
of2004.
Becka Mara McKay is a student in the MFA program in translation
at the University ofIowa, where she translates poetry from modern
Hebrew.. She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University
ofWashmgton. Her poetry and translations can be found in recent
or forthcoming issues ofAmerican Letters & Commentary, eXchanges,
Third Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Florida Review.
Kimberly Meyer has had poems and essays appear in The Georgia Review,
Natural Bridge, Third Coast, and other journals, and she received
a Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry from Nimrod InternationalJournal.
An audio documentary she co-produced was aired on Public Radio
International's This American Life. An MFA student in the Creative
Writing Program at the University of Houston, she lives in Houston
with her husband and three young daughters.
Robert Mezey was born in 1935. His poems, prose, and translations
have been appearing since 1953 in numerous journals, including The
New Yorker, Paris Review, and Poetry. His first book ofpoetry, The
Lovemaker, won the Lamont Selection and he was awarded a P.E.N.
Prize and the Bassine Citation for Evening Wind (1987) as well as
the Robert Frost Prize, an award from the American Academy ofArts
and Letters, and fellowships from the N.E.A., and the Guggenheim
Foundation.
Lydia Millet's third novel, My Happy Life, won the 2002 PEN-USA
Award for Fiction.
Stephen O'Connor is the author of Orphan Trains: The Story of
Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed (biography
and history), Will My Name Be Shouted Out? (Memoir), and Rescue
(short fiction and poetry). He teaches at the graduate writing programs
of Columbia and Sarah Lawrence.
Nikolai Oleinikov, born 1898, was a Russian children's writer and
editor of children's magazines. He is best known, however, for his
purposefully awkward and very funny adult poetry ofthe nineteen
thirties, and for his association with the Russian absurdist circle of
OBERIU and the chinars, whose members made their living as children's
writers working under his direction. "Charles Darwin" reflects
Oleinikov's very real interest in biology; an inveterate prankster, he
once convinced a government official to certify his good looks in order
that he may apply to the Leningrad Academy of the Arts. Arrested in
1937 on the trumped-up charge of right-wing Trotskyite Japanese terrorism
and espionage, Oleinikov was executed by a firing squad.
Eugene Ostashevsky is editing an anthology ofwritings by Oleinikov,
Kharms, Vvedensky, Zabolotsky, Lipavsky and Druskin in
English translation. The anthology, entitled OBERIU and the Chinars:
Russian Absurdism, 1927-1941, is forthcoming from Northwestern
University Press.
Camille Paglia, the scholar and culture critic, is University Professor
of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in
Philadelphia, where she has taught since 1984. She has written four
books: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily
Dickinson (Yale University Press, 1990); Sex, Art, andAmerican Culture
(Vintage Books, 1992); Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (Vintage Books,
1994); and The Birds. Paglia was a Salon.com columnist for six years
and is a Contributing Editor at Interview magazine. She is currently
completing a study ofpoetry and a third essay collection.
Micah Perks is the author of we Are Gathered Here, a novel, Pagan
Time, a memoir, and is working on another novel. She lives in California
with her family.
GS Phillips lives in Los Angeles. This is her second appearance in
Columbia: A Journal ofLiterature andArt. Her story "Love Ladies" was
published in the Winter 2001 issue.
Derek Pollard recently completed his M.F.A. degree at the University
ofUtah, where he was a Vice Presidential Scholar. He is a contributing
editor at Barrow Street, and an associate editor at New Issues
Poetry & Prose.
Collier Schorr was born in 1963 in New York City, where she later
attended the School of the Visual Arts. Her work has been featured
in solo shows at the 303 Gallery, New York, NY; the Modern Art,

146
London; Consorcio Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain; Galerie Drantmann,
Brussels, Belgium; among other galleries; and appeared in the 2002
Whitney Biennial in New York City. Schorr lives and works in Brooklyn,
NY.
Heather A. Slomski has recent work in Poet Lore (where her
prose poem "Blue Door: A Collection of Passings" was nominated
for a 2004 Pushcart Prize); Lake Effect, Xavier Review; The George
Washington Review; and forthcoming in Along the Lake: Contemporary
Writing from Erie, PA; Third Coast; and American Letters and
Commentary. In August '04 she will begin studying for her MFA in
Fiction at Western Michigan University.
Tracy K. Smith is the author of The Body's Question (GraywolfPress
2003), winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Her poems
have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Boulevard, Callaloo,
GulfCoast, Post Road, as well as the anthologies Poetry Daily and
Poetry 30.
Joel Sternfeld was born in 1944 in New York City. The recipient of
two Guggenheim Fellowships, as well as the Prix de Rome, his recent
solo shows include American Prospects and Beftre, Luhring Augustine
Gallery, New York, NY; Treading on Kings: Protesting the G8 in Genoa,
White Box, London, UK; and Stranger Passing, The San Francisco
Museum ofModern Art, San Francisco, CA. Sternfeld continues to
live and work in New York City.
Kate Umans lives in Ann Arbor, where she received her MFA from
the University of Michigan. Her poems have appeared or will appear
in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Hunger Mountain, and The Tampa Review.
Rebecca Wolff is the editor and publisher ofFence and Fence Books.
Her two books ofpoetry are Manderley (U. ofIllinois, 2001) and
Figment (W W Norton, 2004). She lives in New York City with her
husband, the novelist Ira Sher, and their son, the baby Asher Wolff.
THE ONLY MAGAZINE
THAT MATTERS
NEW YORK CITY
SOUTH CENTRAL Los ANGELES
SALT LAKE CITY