Poetry: R. Flowers Rivera

Illustrations by Max Mose

I.

My parents are quite literally gods.
         Abnormally beautiful and self-
absorbed. And like all beautiful,
self-absorbed men and women who make
the mistake of marrying one other, they have
their faults. Plural, possessive.
(I must take my time. Go slow.)
First,
         although they married
each other, they always thought they could
do better. You know. Someone
taller, perhaps, with straighter
teeth and better opportunities.
Next,
         the only opinion that ever really
mattered to them
is how they would fare in a rival’s estimation.
Then,
         the one that explains
this laying bare
of family business is this. The only reason
my mother had children was because
she desired
proof, some life-size tangible
to remind her how
sublime she once was.
Finally,
                   everything I’ve said,
am saying, will say,
is
harsh but true. Harsh.
but so true.

II.

Sometimes, like now, the best place to start
is the beginning, but where is that?
How does one get there?

III.

The woman who gave birth
to me,
         I suppose some might hazard the word
Mother, had a difficult time. The pain must have been
enough to make her delusional, for she swears
I came from her thigh. This is nothing usual
in the way of history
below the Mason-Dixon. The façade
is always more important than what’s underneath.
Consider this. Not one, but two,
parents who’ve made a point
of not remembering
their children’s birthdays. No months, no days.
Zounds,
         they can’t even keep straight
who was born, much less who was born
when and in what order.
Another testament to
the power of the vain to shroud
the scandalous.
                   My father
says he gave birth to my sister
Athena—and that I helped. All this
from the top of his head. No, not that one.
The unimaginative one
on the top of his neck. And not to be outdone,
the woman biologically responsible for my being
insists on believing she bore me to spite
my father, that I was
immaculately conceived. Of course,
she uses the term parthenogenetically.
(I wonder if that’s anything like in vitro.)

IV.

So, blood is spewing forth like lava
and what limps forth but a squat,
hirsute, thick-necked
boy with two clubbed feet.
Needless to say that the woman
who claims to be my mother
isn’t pleased. Immediately
she thinks my father will point
an iron finger at her side
of the gene pool. She forgets the gothic
bent of what it means to be Southern,
(Our family tree has no branches.),
and promptly tosses me over
the balcony, the proverbial
baby with the bath water.
Everyone has a crazy relative or two.
But this nut cleans herself up,
powders her nose, and goes out
for the evening to play bid whist and tell gossipy
anecdotes about cheating husbands and ugly babies with those adders
she calls friends.
                   Round these parts,
people say that if your daddy
don’t claim you can “get in line,”
but if your mama don’t want you,
“You’re messed up for life.” I suspect
that that’s true,
                   because much too much
later I thought about
paying money to consult
a psychoanalyst,
but my parents said that sort of foolishness
was for mortals. All I know is
the greatest falls always happen
just beyond your mother’s sight
and, no matter how sincere
the remorse, the regret
—later, if it comes—
is quite useless,
once the damage is done.

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Fiction: Lisa Gordon

In the morning, Miranda comes into the kitchen where I’m making coffee.

“They’re back,” she says. “What?” I say, even though I know. By the time the hot water starts to drip, she’s gone again. I sip my coffee and wait for my brain to burst, for that skip-and-jump feeling in my heart. If she’s in the shower, we’ll be okay. If she’s in bed, or worse yet, in bed with the curtains drawn, we’re in for another round.

I know I am supposed to be supportive and encouraging and resilient, but no one ever considers what it’s like for the other person. No one ever says, but how are you? I picture some stranger saying this to me as he rolls down the window of his car. Picture him yelling, “I know about Miranda, but how are you?” In traffic, at stoplights, I find myself looking expectantly out the window.

But Miranda doesn’t have cancer. She’s never lost a baby and she’s not dying. She has birds.

At first, the attacks were occasional. In an instant: fast breath, racing heart, dizziness, darting eyes. Then more frequent, with numbing after-effects that left me feeling like I had a sick dog, not a wife. Now, they’re never about one specific thing. She fears nothing and everything at the same time; she fears she’ll never accomplish her dream.

“But what is your dream,” I say. If only she’d tell me, I’d make it happen.

“Exactly,” she says.

She watches sitcoms, wears sweatpants, won’t drink anything caffeinated. She keeps her hand on her heart, trying to time its pacing, trying to untangle the tightness she feels there. I yearn for the sound of her voice. Sometimes she sits in the shower, knees up, eyes unblinking. I know because our shower is made of glass.

People change, I tell myself.

When I tell her I’m leaving her, it comes out easy, like I’m on stage. She looks at me for a long time with more words than have come out of her mouth in days and says nothing. We both know I love her too much to ever leave her, so threatening it was worse than actually doing it.

One day I take her to a therapist’s office I’d looked up online. She doesn’t even complain, which is the scariest part. Ten minutes in the car and I’m second-guessing. We can still turn back, I think. We can change our lives, but I know we can’t. I’m the stable one, and Miranda—my Miranda—is the one who once jumped out of a still-moving car to rescue an upturned flowerbed. The one who wanted to get married in Vegas and who gives $20s to homeless women on the street. The one who once, after witnessing a father hit his daughter across the cheek, came home and made harsh, hurtful love to me because it made her furious, she said, and fury is just another form of passion.

I didn’t understand, and when I told her I didn’t want to make love like that, I think it excited her more. It’s one of the things I think she likes about me the most: that I am the woman in the relationship, and she, impulsive and uncontainable, is the man.

We’re like that tether ball game you play in elementary school, I think. And love might not have anything to do with it at all.

Inside, Dr. Simon looks like Santa Claus. The hairs under his nose twitch when he breathes. He doesn’t ask questions, makes no pleasantries or small talk. He begins right away, and I am thankful.“You need to think of it in a way you can visualize,” he says. “Some patients like to think of animals. Animals with certain features that they think resemble their anxieties.”

Quack, I think.

“Animals?” Miranda says.

The sound of her voice is painful and I want to close my eyes and sleep inside her throat.

“I know it sounds a bit ludicrous,” Dr. Simon says. “But try to answer the question.”

“Birds?” she says, timidly.

I look at her, stunned. Birds? What the fuck?

“Good.” Dr. Simon nods approvingly. “Tell me why.”

“Miranda,” I whisper. She levels me with her eyes. I know she is thinking, you forced me to come.

“That’s what it feels like?” she says. “That’s what I picture? The beaks, the claws, the racing, beady eyes. The flutters and flapping.”

Something like pride flushes my cheeks. How hard it must have been for her to say that. How awful it must be to have a bird for a heart, or birds in your head, beating their wings and squawking and thumping like that. I think of their beady eyes, their pointy beaks, their creepy claw-like feet, the way they shudder and shift.

“Very good Miranda. I have a good sense now of what it feels like for you. And that is excellent news.”

“Yeah?” she says.

“Oh yes.” He leans back slowly. His eyes are everywhere on her. Miranda’s body relaxes. She has pleased him, and this pleases her, and I realize then that it might be him, not me, who will be the one to save her.

That night I stay up watching YouTube videos on how things are made. Jam, bulletin boards, light bulbs.

Whatever.

When I get in bed, I pick up one of her arms and slide under it. She doesn’t wake up, but then again, sometimes I think she’s sleeping only to look over and realize she’s just breathing slowly, eyes open. I put her hand on my chest, but it feels the way I imagine it feels for those soldiers who lose limbs in battle. Like their arm is still there, even when it’s not.

Or is it the reverse?

The next evening when I get home from work, I expect Miranda to be in bed. Instead, she’s gone, and the apartment is full of birds. Birds, everywhere. Parrots. Robins. Cardinals. Loons—couldn’t tell you. Red, blue, shimmery. Black. Brown. Feathers flutter down from places I can’t see. They perch on candlesticks, on the mantle, on the fireplace. Birds bob in front of my feet, all sizes, all kinds. There is squawking and chirping and song. I’ve never seen anything like it. My house is a zoo. It’s the birdcage at the zoo. It’s the sky.
I want to cry. Or scream. A scream like you’ve always wanted to let out but never had the opportunity, because opportunities like that are rare. But they’re also real, and mine was here, and I’d earned it. But all I can think and hear and feel are the feathers, the wings, the colors.

“Miranda?” It’s pathetic, what comes out, how un-loud it is. “Miranda!”

Then the smell hits my nose. I step on something and feel a concentrated, dizzying stir near my foot. A bird squawks and shakes its feathers violently. Then I hear her. At first, I can only see her bare legs until the birds flying in front of her clear out. As soon as I see her, my head empties. Her face is flushed pink, her eyes bright with something I haven’t seen since I used to come home and find her alive. Her face tilts up as she follows the flying patterns of the birds and when her head moves, I let my eyes rove from her face, to her neck, and down. She’s wearing just a T-shirt, naked, from what I can tell, underneath.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” she says. One of them brushes her cheek with its wing and speeds off, frightened.

She laughs. Tilts her head back and lets out striking, tinkling laughter.

I ought to demand to know where they came from, how she paid for them, if she stole them. Ask what the hell we’re supposed to do now.

I mean, they are everywhere.

But all I do is stare at her mouth, wanting to see inside it, wanting to know where that laugh came from, and what else could come from that place.

“Miranda,” I say, and she nods.

I whip off her T-shirt and pull her down on the couch, touching her everywhere like she is new. The birds resting there startle and squawk, disrupting the silence that had fallen over the others. While Miranda and I roll around, the birds fly overhead, ducking over and under one another, their colors and sounds mixing together. At first it’s strange and chaotic, but then, after they settle down again, it really is quite beautiful.

All rights reserved to Lisa Gordon.

Poetry: Timothy Otte

I remember thinking that diseases
                were like a marriage

vow: I’ll give you mine if you
                give me yours—in sickness

and in lesser sickness,
                to have and to give

to any future lovers. A preemptive
                revenge against infidelity—

hope your new partner likes
                this strain, this infection.

New meaning brought to the phrase
                Cleanliness Is Godliness.

But diseases are no marriage,
                no promise, no pact.

Just proof that once we shared our
                selves with each other,

and carry those memories with us
                as evidence, scarring and

damning as they are.

All rights reserved to Timothy Otte.

Screenplay: Paul Foster

No. 1

Fade in on: a residential street, lined with trees. It is the quiet of an early summer morning. The houses are asleep. In the extreme distance, we see a figure moving toward us. Birds sing. As the figure gets closer, we see a stick thin boy with blond, combed hair and a dirty white T-shirt riding a dated bicycle and moving at great speed. When he is ten yards away, he begins to slow. He comes toward the camera, looking into the lens, until he is in close-up. Title appears across his face in a stylized font: The Eleventh Summer of Theo Loudermilk. There has been a correction made to the title such that a line is drawn through the word “Eleventh” and “11 1/2” has been written above it by a child.

Black.

No. 2

Fade in on: an ancient stone and cement wall capped with thick shrubbery. Theo’s bike is propped up against the wall and, through the gate, we can see that a cemetery lies within. We cannot see Theo himself, but every few moments, we can hear him spit. We move slowly into the bone yard, then dissolve to a close-up of Theo’s mouth. He is eating cherries: putting them in his mouth first, then tugging off the stems. He works the pit free with his tongue and teeth, takes a deep breath, and launches it from his lips. Theo rests his back against a particularly aged stone—moss-covered and worn featureless. When we find one of the pits he has scattered, we hold on this for a moment. The morning sun illuminates the blades of grass with gold.

Black.

No. 3

Fade in on: a close shot of a black umbrella popping open. When it lifts from frame, we see Theo’s face. We then cut to a wide shot revealing that Theo is standing on the lowest row of bleacher seats at an empty little league field. There is no sign of rain. He springs from the bench, the umbrella raised above his head, but lands harder than he’d anticipated. He moves to the next highest row of seats and tries the jump from there—the descent once again not meeting his expectations. He then climbs to the highest row and prepares for lift-off. He crouches and realizes he is a good six feet from the ground. Thinking better of the height, he steps down a row. He assesses the elevation, nods to himself, and jumps. He does, indeed, appear to float for a moment as we cut to: black.

No. 4

Fade in on: Theo standing on a broad lawn, drinking from a green garden hose. There is something abstract and isolated about the hose—no houses or gardens can be seen. When he has had his fill, Theo wipes his mouth with his wrist, drops the hose, and dashes out of frame. We hold on this a moment, then see his sneakers from his POV. They are running on an asphalt path, but take just a few steps before they stop short. Still in Theo’s POV, we move in on the path, where a colony of ants is excavating the sand from beneath the tar. They have created a circular mound and are removing the grains from the hole in the center one-by-one. Theo reaches a finger into frame and causes a tiny avalanche. The ants scramble to correct the damage, then settle back into their routine.

Black.

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Poetry: Caitlin Bailey

Repatriated

Shaky hands, costal bang. Blood poured from
a hole, repatriated to heart. Compensation is
an ugly word, creased skin pulled from an orange.
I gather small fish in a cup, my finger lightning
rod, little wobble. The room begins to smell
like juniper, dull coins. Stillness comes
in a thing like you, curled at my waist.
What I’ll do to protect this splendor.
I open like a lock, love the sturdiest verb.

Blood Garden

You are five and wicked with need. A dandelion
seed blown through the house. The grandmother
closet, change deep in the belly, the dress.
You colonize the too-big shoes, easy ingénue.
Thirsty at the top of the stairs, lapping
sugar water, silky tongued and brave until

one shoe catches the other, the smell of olives,
the way down. And so tumble two stairs, crush
glass beneath your body to slice the soft meat
of your fist open, a hush unraveled in red
across the carpet. Your skin a white flap,
a red plane. To you blood is a garden
where your future is sown, the red arc
a bright harbinger of so many wounds.

All rights reserved to Caitlin Bailey.