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Two Poems by Elizabeth Tannen

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Found in Willow Springs 90

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Liz Phair, fifteen weeks

 

On the same morning I learn
the fetus is developing folds that

will become ears I also hear
that Liz Phair has a new album

which makes me weepy because
special sentimentalities go along

with being pregnant and with being
a teenager and hearing her name now

converges these chapters, makes
me reminisce about being fifteen

and in the back of Webster Hall,
swaying because I was so uncomfortable

in my body and so taken
with excitement to be at my very

first concert beside a very
pretty friend whose taste in music

I let mold mine. Liz’s voice
has stayed the same but her heartache

hasn’t aged well. She sounds
less fierce, more codependent.

We were both supposed to stay
youthful forever. We were both

supposed to remain as cool
as we felt in the 90s. I listen

to the new album again to try
and like it better but it just

makes me want to hear
Exile in Guyville, and I belt out

the lyrics like the fetus
can hear, like it might forgive

me and Liz for the imperfect
ways we’ve aged.

 

Riddle, six weeks

 

Are you sure you want to switch
to pregnancy-tracking mode?

my period-tracking app asks and a purple
circle with a peanut-shaped image of an embryo

at the center stares up at me as I stand
in the white-walled laundry room

of my apartment building basement
where I have come to hide

from my partner who does not want
a pregnancy or a baby or a child

and to retrieve a load of wet washing
and in the process I’ve hit what now

appears to be a very significant button
whose pressing will activate an endless

stream of content warning women what

to eat and what not to eat and what skin

products to avoid and which to use and
on any given day, whether your embryo

is the size of a sesame seed or a lentil
and which exercises you should try

and which never and whatever you do,
don’t stress out, it’s bad for the baby,

but I don’t know that yet and in the moment
I’m not prepared because it’s Friday

and I’m between Zoom meetings and
it’s been only minutes since I removed

the pink wrapper on the First Response test
and peed into a glass jar that used to hold

a pine-scented candle but today
holds my yellow urine which apparently

contains the hormone that the test
says means positive which means

that today my body is pregnant and yet
my body is also over thirty-five and has

never, to my knowledge, carried a pregnancy
and there are too many emotions to process

all of which will conflict directly with those
of my baby-hating partner and so it seems

strange that the app whose job I thought
it was to simply track my menstrual cycle

should be so bold as to ask whether
I’m sure about anything

“To Appreciate Squirrels” by Joan Murray

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To appreciate squirrels
you have to walk toward Peterborough with Eric Gamalinda,
down the steep part of High Street
where there are woods on both sides of the road.
It should be a day or two before the summer solstice,
you must be discussing feng shui—
when you suddenly see a squirrel on its hundredth daily crossing
from one side of the road to the other.
Forget that Eric is an important poet in Manila—
Eric says that everyone in Manila is an important poet—
this isn’t a matter of authority.
What matters is that Eric sees the squirrel and shouts,
Look at that amazing thing!

And immediately you notice that the tail of a squirrel
is the incarnation of impulsive grace,
and you stand there motionless as it maneuvers that tail,
shaking off your received opinions, your discriminatory
attitudes, until it has disrobed itself
of you, and is only itself.
And you recall a morning when you were new,
when you still believed you could float through the window
if you pleased, when a squirrel came in from the fire escape
and stood on your crazy quilt, contemplating you eye to eye,
the only thing that’s ever come to your bed unbidden.
Oh, but then it was your mother, screaming, screaming,
as if she’d caught a molester.

But now that squirrel’s there again, starting to cross over,
and you’re standing with Eric Gamalinda,
seeing that thing, as if you were in Eden and
it had no name, as if it were the first one,
unspoiled by the success of its adaptation to your world,
and you think, my God, it is amazing—
a word you never thought you’d see in a poem,
much less put in one yourself,
but you’ve just been walking with Eric Gamalinda,
who comes from a place where there are no squirrels,
who spoke without irony when he praised the squirrel,
who gave you permission
to appreciate it.

“Gossamer Girl” by Lauren Osborn

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ONCE, THERE WAS A GIRL. But she wasn’t a girl, she was a spider. But she wasn’t a singular spider, she was a thousand: tiny spindly legs tucked and tangled, clustered eyes dancing, twinkling, bodies nestled in silk cocoon, hidden beneath the disguise of a girl with a slick black ponytail and ten fingers and ten toes and a dotted freckle, just beneath her left eye.

ONCE, THERE WAS A GIRL/SPIDER/CLUSTER who wanted to find love. But being made of spiders made lovemaking difficult. Men, in her experience, even the ones who claimed to be fearless, were scared of anything smaller than they were. Scared of anything
unknown or unknowable. Plus, when she peeled back her soft skin to reveal a writhing mass of arachnids, she couldn’t quite understand where a vagina was supposed to be, or how deep a burrow to make inside herself, or where hands were supposed to grab or hold or squeeze if not for her breasts, which were also spiders, who did not want to be pinched, in any case.

The cluster/spider/girl did not like the idea of letting another invade her, redefine her, as anything other than what she was, a multitude of miracles. So, she found things to love that weren’t men, such as the way night slipped down across the horizon and turned the sky inky black, or the way small bugs would skitter from hiding corners and tickle her tongue during dinner, or the way silk webs wrapped so softly around her feet at night.

ONCE, THE CLUSTER/GIRL/SPIDER MET SOMEONE. He was tall and thin and reminded her of the best tree branches, and his eyes were the ochre of grasshopper guts, and his teeth so much like smooth sea-pebbles.

“Hey,” he said, admiring the way her fingers worked a skein of yarn as she was knitting on a park bench, looking as if she were wondering if it would be considered rude to molt in public.

She looked up, fingers missing a loop and tangling the thread. He didn’t notice as one of the spiders crawled out from her blouse and
quickly untangled the knot with practiced pedipalps.

“Hey,” she said, the spiders which worked her tongue creating the perfect pitch, the ‘ay’ as soft as breath.

The man asked her for coffee, because she looked so lonely and so beautiful, so she said yes, and he didn’t even question why she didn’t drink her skim-milk latte or touch her scone, which was too warm and smelled like artificial vanilla, too sweet. The spiders who occupied her brain whispered worries about the way his eyes never met their own, and how something with his smile was off, and why he never asked her questions about herself but rather focused the conversation on his job as a part-time bartender on the south side, and the string of ex-girlfriends he left behind in Philly, and his preference of ankle socks over midcalf (not on him, but on her, of course). But the spiders crowding her heart-space gossiped about true love and nights spent caressing warm lips and where they would lay their collection of eggs as abundant and fragile as froths of seafoam.

The girl/cluster/spider gave him directions to her apartment, which was modest and dim and smelled like cobwebs, cedar-scented candles, and expensive parfum. He commented on her collection of crickets housed in glass terrariums, which she explained was for a science experiment about the benefits of ambient noise indoors and not a key ingredient in her morning smoothies.

“Hmm,” he said, and left it at that.

He was all too quick to kiss her, lead her into her bedroom, tug at the skin which covered thousands of legs and eyes and spinnerets nervously spinning their sticky web in her stomach. The spiders whose job it was to make the lips weren’t happy with the way he bit down on their cephalothoraxes, and the tongue-spiders were less than pleased with being slicked with spit.

“Stop,” she said.

He ripped at her blouse, which she’d knitted herself from proteins consumed and recycled and remade, and toppled her onto the bed.

“Stop,” she said.

He wasn’t dissuaded by the lack of opening between her legs, or the few spiders that rushed to escape the holes of her ears in fear of what might come next.

“Stop,” she said.

But he didn’t. He wouldn’t. He tore away her skin and pressed his fingers into the cloud of trichobothria and wispy web. In fairness, the bravest of the bunch threw their legs into a threat posture, swaying back and forth, showcasing fangs meant for cleaning and catching and anything but this. He laughed, mumbling something about how beautiful it was that even their threats looked so much like dancing.

The spider/girl/cluster didn’t want to force herself into the man’s lungs. They didn’t want to occupy whatever filth hid beneath his flesh and sinew, muscle and bone. They didn’t want to eat him, but otherwise he might have gone to waste. The cluster/spider/girl closed their eyes and thought of anything other than what was happening. They thought of warm beds wrapped from gossamer and dew, not of the gooey wet behind his eyes. Of nights weaving stories from threads, not of the tangle of his unwashed hair. Of drinking together with their millions of sisters, not of how warm his blood tasted, bitter iron and butter, thin before coagulating into jelly.

“and thank every hour” and “prayer” by nicole v basta

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"and thank every hour"

 

the small yellow gods that are warblers
are skimming the scum at the top with their wings
and may all words be like the name of this bird
the mouth trampling over the tongue to make sound
of our naming, an honest attempt to do justice
to what has no concept of justice and thank every hour
for each breathing honorable thing not making a mess
of another, no crooked law or wicked judge needed
to mitigate wrongdoing—and remembering the wrens
the tiny eyelashes on the cheek of the field
and how these birds throw the eggs out of the nests
of other birds instead of building their own
and so is instinct, in a way, like a soldier
who follows an order from the top?
can you tell me please where is it written
how to forgive

 

"prayer"

 

no one is watching and then, i watch

 

a praying mantis ladders the window screen

and i don’t believe in mistakes

 

so my looking at the moment she shimmies

herself upside down, as i understand it,

is a kind of signal for a new year

 

one where when a dusty god in the lowgrass

nips at my ankles, it translates to kissing

to a welt in honor of pleasure

 

what i am trying to say is there’s some sort of heaven

in her triangle head

 

in the way she turns toward me

rocking as if weeping

 

how motion can soothe

how power can arrive on naked wings

without warning

 

i do believe in sequences

how things belong to sound and meaning

a place from which we can measure

 

mantis, from the greek word for prophet

 

i want to be the butterfly

in her mouth

 

a silence snatched from the air

Two Poems by Emily Schulten

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Found in Willow Springs 90

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Dismantling

 

They’re taking off the head of the snake,
and we are watching to remember

what we worry won’t exist once we can’t
see it anymore. First, they remove the tongue,

slippery from its metal mouth. This is
one of the last of these metal giants,

towering so great that it marks its place
in our memories, doesn’t change quick like

the landscape around it. They have packed up
the left edge of the cobra’s hood and are moving

their crane to the right. You can see now
that it is empty inside, but when we drove by

again and again—because we wanted to be
taken back to another time—that time—

it was solid and permanent. Now
we feel empty, too. They are down

to the coils of the body, the place where
the snake is rooted to the ground—

was rooted. We mourn the soldered bones.
Next door, there used to be an open-mouthed

fish, sucking in the whole sky until the palms
grew unruly and branched into its mouth.

A genie marked the next town over, his blue
face waking the streets from nighttime each day,

until he was taken from his magic carpet,
until the magic was gone altogether. The snake

has been stacked onto a flatbed trailer,
the dirt damp with earthworms beneath

where his body sat before being driven
to a junkyard between stretches of Florida

farm town. We stand on the roadside
and draw with our fingers on the sky

what used to be there, far more looming
now that it is made of emptiness and cloud.

 

Motels We Stay in While Trying to Get Pregnant: The Gables

 

A fresh coat of paint covers everything
and hides nothing, stubby Roman columns
zigzag like teeth along the banisters
and they cut, too, inside my hip bones.
And inside the rooms the walls are empty.
There is nothing beautiful anymore
about my body. We will try again
tomorrow and tomorrow. And we’ll fail.
All three nights a child’s wail swelters through
the courtyard, and on the third night I leave
our room propped open and put my ear to
door after door frantic to find the cry.
But I don’t. I crawl back to bed, my whole
torso a clenched jaw waiting to let go.

 

“Growing Like Houses” by Julialicia Case

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Found in Willow Springs 70

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THE RED AND BLACK BEETLES COME FIRST, settling in swarms on the white plaster of our Arnold Street row house. We come home to find them basking in the sun, a thousand black specks, twitching their legs and adjusting their wings. They find their way in through torn window screens, fall to  the floor in writhing clumps when we open the front door. At night I imagine the whisper of their bodies brushing against the walls of my room in the dark. Mornings I find them suspended in my water glass, some drowned, others paddling mechanically at the smooth transparent sides.

Thin vines creep in through cracks in the foundation and twist down the hallway, their tiny leaves hidden in the shadows. Outside, the plant grows sturdy and green in the flowerbed, while inside, its pale, waxy leaves slither across our painted floorboards. I pull the intruders up quickly, the way one might pluck unwanted hairs.

It doesn't take long for Katie and me to learn that life twists through our Philadelphia row house, changing it in unexpected ways. This is our first time as roommates in a grown-up house in a grown-up city. We fumble through our first grown-up jobs, and we note, like biologists, nature's tenacity.

EVENINGS, I TEACH AT THE ADULT LITERACY CENTER.  ''Adult" means the sixty-five-year-old woman who wanders the hallways and tries every door handle as she searches for free  food. It means the sixteen-year-old girl who squats with her boyfriend in an abandoned building, or the woman with a baby Chihuahua hidden in the inside pocket of her coat. The only thing my students have in  common is that they didn't make it through high school. They had children early, skipped too many days, found drugs and boyfriends and more important occupations. I teach them to write business letters in a windowless classroom.

"How do you spell 'parents'?" one man asks.

"Don't worry about spelling for now," I say. "Just sound it out the best you can."

This is his first night and the man is jittery. He wants the paper to be in exactly the right place, his elbows to rest on the table just so. He's tall with a creased leather jacket and too-tight cowboy boots that make his gait jerky and lopsided. He's hairless, completely bald, and already I've had to yell at some teenage boys who have nicknamed him "the dick."

I go over to the man to see how he's doing. His paper is filled with letters, lined up, squished together, no punctuation, no spaces, no recognizable words. "bympazinjhg," he's written.

I sit beside him. "Will you read me what you've got so far?" I say.

"I want to be a better man," he begins.

"WE NEED TO MEET PEOPLE," Katie says. "We need to go on dates."

"Okay," I say. "How should we meet people?"

We both know where this is going. First, we'll consider taking classes in things like auto mechanics or web design. Then we'll wrinkle our noses at the bar scene and internet dating. Eventually, we'll mock the suggestions of our friends in committed relationships: "Put  yourself out there." "Don't be so picky." ''Are you sure you're not gay?"

Tonight though, we are organized, goal-oriented women; we pull out colored markers and pieces of blank paper, and we draft a plan. We will become regulars at coffee shops, join extracurricular activities that involve people our own age. By the end of the evening, we've constructed a checklist of weekly assignments like a training schedule an athlete might prepare before a race. We stick our charts to the refrigerator using inspirational word magnets. Katie anchors hers with "no" and  "hope." I use "will" and "not" and "succeed." We think this is outrageously funny.

IN  FALL, OPOSSUMS MOVE INTO THE BASEMENT. Katie goes down at night to find one staring at her, its furry face and black eyes peeking from behind a cardboard box. The exterminator shows us the hole in the foundation. From the basement, we can see the blue backyard fence, the deep green moss on the brick outside. The landlord tells us not to worry. He'll come by the house to patch the hole himself.

We avoid the basement for weeks, until the landlord wedges a cinder block and a section of chain link fence into the hole.

"I don't think they'll get in now," he says as he's leaving. He hands Katie a mousetrap  the size of a shoebox, the metal catch bar as long and thick as a pencil.

"Just put some peanut butter on there," he says.

We don't wait to make sure he's closed the door before we throw the trap away.

IT'S SAINT PATRICK'S DAY, AND I'VE LEFT A MESSAGE on an answering machine in California, saying I am  delighted to accept my placement in the graduate program, and that I look forward to moving there in a few months. To celebrate, Katie and I go to the Trocodero where a band from Newfoundland plays Irish music. The place is packed; people sit on the stairs and block the fire exits. Next to me, a man wearing a red sweatshirt beats the drum rhythms on his thigh. It's a relief to be leaving the city, to no longer have to initiate witty conversations with strangers. By the fifth song he has asked me three questions. By intermission, he's written his phone number on a business card.

"What's it say?" Katie asks as we're leaving. "Did you even look at it?"

She and I squeeze our way out of the  theater as the music pulses behind us. When I'm sure he can't see me, I pull the card from my pocket and look at it.

"He's some kind of computer technician. Lives all the way in New Jersey."

''All the way," Katie laughs. "It's only across the bridge."

"I'm moving in a few months," I say. "There's really no point."

"That's not until summer. And what about our goal sheets?"

I want to explain, but can't figure out the right words. There's the way I think my life should be, and there's the way it is.There's the feeling of dread in my stomach, and then there's the refrigerator and our chart with all those white spaces.

EVEN WITH THE STORM PANES lodged firmly in the windows, the wind blows through the frames and into the kitchen. The dishtowels sway and the cups hanging on hooks above the sink rattle against one another. We pull the basement door from its hinges and move it to the doorway between the kitchen and living room, and the kitchen becomes part of the outside.

The teapot whistles a permanent song from the stove. We cook in our scarves and hats, our frozen dinners and bowls of canned soup sending trails of steam into the air.

I buy plastic window covers at  the hardware store and climb on the cabinets to hang them with duct tape and a hair dryer. When I'm finished, the windows are covered in clear plastic blisters that mute the snow-colored light.

Outside, ice clogs the gutters and grows in masses around the rusty pipes. Water begins to drain in through the kitchen ceiling, soaking into the drop ceiling and making the panels bulge, yellow and sodden. Katie pulls them down and covers the openings with white plastic garbage bags. From underneath, we can see the water pooled inside the plastic. When the wind outside is particularly strong, the pieces of plastic on the ceiling and windows billow, protesting against the duct tape like trapped spirits.

ON OUR SECOND DATE I END UP at a zombie movie with the man in the red sweatshirt. Doug prefers not to plan ahead. He enjoys going to the theater and watching whatever movie is starting next. We get there late in the evening and there's only one movie left. I think of the nine nights of nightmares I had after seeing The Ring. If we don't go to a movie though, we have to think of something else. I decide to just dose my eyes.

Being overly sensitive to horror movies is a weakness, I tell myself as we're watching the previews. Next to me, Doug pulls out his cell phone to check the time. He enjoys comparing the actual starting time of the movie with its advertised start time.

"Ten forty-seven," he whispers.

The movie begins.

I pretend I'm a sarcastic film critic who has seen so many zombie movies that she finds them all boring. A zombie bursts from the janitor 's closet. A woman turns into a zombie and rips off a man's face. A soon­ to-be zombie woman gives birth to a zombie baby, and Doug's hand emerges like a pale fish from the darkness and rests on my knee.

You've got to be kidding, I think.

"It's hard to forget the zombie anxiety after the movie," I say as we're walking back to the car. "Do you know what I mean?"

''Are you asking me if I'm worried about getting attacked by zombies right now?" he asks, smiling a little.

I peer into alleyways and behind parked cars. In the glow from the streetlight Doug's eyes seem glassy and vacant, and his smile moves too slowly, the upturn of his lips and the wrinkles around his eyes eerily mechanical and controlled.

Stop it, I think to myself. I rest my hands in my lap all through the ride home. When we reach the house I make myself wait until the car has stopped completely before getting out.

BOBBY RUTKOWSKI ALWAYS COMES TO CLASS LATE and brings nothing, not even a pencil. While other students pull out their workbooks, or rifle through folders, Bobby sits staring at the smooth, empty brown of the table.

At break he disappears, leaving his chair pulled out.

"When you leave at break, you miss the most important part of class," I tell him. "I know," he says, "I mean to stay, I really do. Then at break, I decide to go outside, just for a minute. I take a few steps down the sidewalk, and it's like I can't stop, I just keep walking. I watch myself from my head as I walk away." He begins to sketch a circle on the tabletop with the pencil I've given him. "Maybe we shouldn't have a break," he says.

A MUSHROOM IS GROWING in the bathroom, Katie's written in a note on the whiteboard. I left it for you to see. It's sprouting from a crack in the floor next to the toilet. The stalk is thin and white, three inches high, the cap a dingy, orange-brown color. Underneath, delicate gray folds radiate from the center.

"Mushrooms are only the reproductive part of the fungal life cycle," Katie's mother tells us. "You can expect more every twelve to fourteen days."

The mushrooms are surprising in their variety. Sometimes they are tiny, the size of M&M's. Other times the stalks are long and thick, the caps the size of nickels or quarters. We take pictures so we will remember.

KATIE TEACHES in one of the most dangerous schools in Philadelphia. In the winter her classroom has no heat, so she teaches in sweaters and long underwear, her bulky bright red coat. She comes home with stories about riots and fights, the student who threw a bottle of chocolate milk and shattered her classroom window, the administration that did nothing, not even replace the glass.

"Today Dante Phillips said he'd pay a woman a million dollars to clean his dick," Katie says. "I told him that was an awful lot of money for such a small job."

This year Katie's students are dying. Two boys in her class, both named Raymond, are shot in separate incidents within months of each other.

"What kind of place do I work where I have to differentiate between the first Raymond who was killed and the second Raymond who was killed?" she says.

Her high school loses four students before the Inquirer runs an article. There have been thirty-five student deaths in the district this year, the most ever. The newspaper  prints pictures, lists ages and causes of death. Katie has her students conduct interviews and prepare presentations about the possible causes of violence: poverty, drugs, media, unemployment. She organizes a group of students to create a mural and takes them to conferences where they present papers.

Afternoons, she curls on the couch in the glow of the television. One night I find her with a pile of graded papers, homework assignments the Raymonds turned in.

"What am I supposed to do with these?" she asks.

We eat real dinner together twice a week: pasta and vegetables, black beans and rice, chicken fajitas. On those nights, we watch sit­ coms, reality shows, lighthearted  movies. Some nights we laugh so hard we can't speak, and I hope that it's possible to store moments like this. I hope that  people can carry warmth with them, can dole out little parcels to themselves as they stand  bundled  up at the front of a classroom, as they hold the cold chalk and address the empty chairs. Some nights I think of all the people in this city, moving inside the glowing squares of their houses and apartments, and it seems like protecting a life should be a simple thing. I think this even as the wind sweeps through the kitchen, even as the plastic flaps and twists above my head.

IT RAINS EVERY DAY FOR THIRTEEN DAYS. Driving home, I study the river, try to track with my eyes the progress of its rising. First the water covers the boulders under the freeway overpass. Water rushes white and furious between the pilings, obscuring the dark stones.

In the basement, water pools, murky and eerily serene. I imagine I hear it lapping at the base of the shelves, oozing into the fibrous cardboard of the boxes stacked on the floor. It would be easy to wade in, to rescue the cartons of old things that will surely be ruined. Neither of us can bring ourselves to do it though. A part of me is certain the floor has been sucked away, that I would step into water and find nothing there.

The water rises to the top of the riverbank and waits there for days as the rain continues. It's night when the flooding begins. The water covers most of the road, sits sullen and obstinate as the traffic lights continue to scroll through their colors for  non- existent traffic. The city sends a truck to pump the water back into the river. It grumbles and shudders from the middle of the intersection, water rippling around its massive tires. People stand across the street and heckle. Great idea, pump all that water back into the river. A man catches a catfish the size of a small dog. Spectators clap as he heaves it shiny and flapping onto the sidewalk. You're not going to eat that, are you?

Finally it stops raining.

The water has rotted the wood at the bottom of the stairs leading into the basement. When I go down, I hold tight to the banister as the stairs dip and sway beneath me. Thick mud and ratty wisps of vegetation cover the floor, and the dank smell of mildew makes breathing an aching, difficult thing.

DOUG AND I DRIVE ALONG THE RIVER in the rain, headed downtown with our concert tickets and rain jackets. The radio is playing, but I want to say something. The quiet is thick and ridged, and I try not to squirm in my seat.

"Mushrooms grow in our bathroom," I say finally. "They come up overnight and we find them there in the morning."

We've stopped at a red light, but he doesn't look at me.

''Are you sure?" he says. "Mushrooms don't just grow overnight."

''A mushroom is actually only a small part of a large organism that lives beneath the surface," I say. ''And they do grow overnight. Sometimes whole circles of them appear overnight, and before people knew anything about why that happened, they called them fairy rings and believed they were magic."

He looks past me at the rain falling into the river, and I imagine he must be watching the water pour from the drains in the freeway overpass, thick chains of water like miniature waterfalls among the threads of rain. I think he must be thinking about the engineers who designed the freeway and how they had to think about what to do when so much rain fell on nights like this. I wonder if they suspected how beautiful it would be, all that water falling from the sky, how rare a thing it would be to see.

The light changes and we pull ahead, following the curves of the road toward the lit-up city. A train crosses the river on a trestle, the people blurred spots of movement within yellow windows.

This will never work out, I think to myself, noticing the way the water has covered long sections of the sidewalk. Then I stop myself, because I'm not even sure what "working out" would mean.

*

THERE'S  SOMETHING  DIFFERENT about my student, Orlando. He's got a glimmer around him, a kind of halo of luck and self-knowledge. He's young, Puerto Rican, with gold chains that drape around his neck and a do-rag. On his first day, I am wary. He looks like the kind of student who will convince the guys in drug rehab to smoke pot  with him in the parking lot, who will take all the condoms from the condom box, who will disappear and then come around at the end of every month asking me to sign the attendance form for his P.O.

Instead, he completes entire chapters in his algebra book overnight and arrives early to ask questions before class. He writes clear, brilliant essays and explains adverbs and reducing fractions to the students having trouble.

"That kid is different," an older student tells me one afternoon. "There's something special about that one."

When he passes the GED, Orlando is the only one of his thirty-one family members to finish high school. He becomes a celebrity around the literacy center, wears his beige velour tracksuit to our annual fundraiser and tells his story while people in ties and cocktail dresses drop bruschetta on the carpet. Of the hundreds of students who attend classes at the literacy center, Orlando is the only one to apply to community college, the only one to be awarded full financial aid.

Just before summer vacation, he's arrested for dealing drugs outside a middle school: a felony. He should be sent straight to  prison, but the social worker goes with him to court, testifies to his character and he's let off with a fine and community service. The felony conviction stays on his record, though. He's ineligible for financial aid and can't go to college.

Outside, dandelions grow in cracks in the sidewalk. Downtown, in the shiny glass buildings, politicians write laws to each other like love letters. Who could meet Orlando and deny his worth? The legislature is barren and lifeless. At night, I dream of trees sprouting among cubicles and copy machines, lifting their branches and shattering glass.

I HAVE JUST GOTTEN OUT OF THE SHOWER when I hear Katie yelling downstairs.

"Oh my god," she says. Shouts. "Oh my god."

"What's the matter?" I come down the stairs, feeling my hair drip down the back of my T-shirt.

She's in the kitchen and points to where tiles from the drop ceiling have collapsed and fallen onto the stove. Water drips from the hole, and the PVC pipes and metal tubes glisten with dampness. What's most puzzling is the soil that covers everything, the stove, the counter, the linoleum floor, thick, rich dirt like what's sold at garden stores, a cubic foot of it scattered everywhere. A perfectly sharpened No. 2 pencil rests on top of the debris.

"That fell out of the ceiling too," Katie says.

THERE'S NOTHING WORSE than crossing the Ben Franklin Bridge from New Jersey into Philadelphia at two a.m. on a weeknight. Tonight is the last time, and I try to feel sad about something other than never being able to see the city again from this angle. Across the water, buildings slice into the sky, and on top of City Hall, William Penn extends his hands to the deserted streets. Down the river, I can see the small huddles of buildings in the neighborhood where I teach, and I try to imagine what my students might be doing now, try to picture them working or drinking or talking on telephones. For most of them, I can't even guess. Trying to imagine their lives beyond the square of our classroom is like trying to picture the constellations that I know are there, somewhere, above us all, in the orange-tinged sky.

The booths gape empty at the toll plaza, red lights blinking over all but two, which sit lone and illuminated at the far end of the bridge. The man reaches for my money with his latex-covered hands, waves me on to negotiate four lanes of emptiness suspended over water.

THE LAST WEEK OF SCHOOL I am a slack teacher. We do some math, some spelling, but then my students and I order pizza, watch movies, play games of Uno.

"Why are you going all the way to California?" they ask me. "Can't you write here?"

I look down at the fan of numbers and colors in my hand, and I can't answer the  question. I want to tell them about the vines and the insects, to explain how well everything is living. Even here, a student's child draws a school of fish on one of the chalkboards, and a cockroach trapped in a fluorescent light struggles with the slippery plastic. I would like to tell them about the man with the straw hat who stands in the middle of traffic on Lehigh and asks for money each day, or about the way the stained glass windows of churches glow at night beneath protective sheets of Plexiglas. I want to tell them about the man smoking cigarettes on a stoop surrounded by caution tape, about condemned houses with the fronts pulled off so that the insides of all the rooms are visible, like giant dollhouses.

They know these things, though, better than I do. I think they know too how much I like sitting here with them, listening to them call each other names, listening to Ben as he changes the rules of the card game with the same quick patter I imagine he uses selling bootleg DVDs on Spring Garden. I can't explain to them in this moment why I am walking away, even as I'm losing the game and am left with half the deck in my hands.

SEPTEMBER, I CALL KATIE FROM THE BACKYARD.

"How's California?" she asks.

"This morning," I say, "there were sheep bleating outside my window." My friends are burning plant debris in their yard. The bonfire spits smoke into the sky as one friend feeds it armfuls of leaves. The other one keeps the flames in check with the garden hose.

"Is the weather nice?" Katie asks. "Do you like it there?"

"The weather?" I watch one friend wipe at her eyes, smudging ash across her face. "It's just sunny all the time," I say.

Wind blows through the branches of the citrus trees, and even with the smoke, I can smell the lemons.

"What if moving here makes me soft?" I say: "What if I get used to how nice it is and don't ever want to leave?"

"Do you mean happy?" Katie asks after a moment. ''Are you asking me what happens if you're happy?"

MY LAST NIGHT IN PHILADELPHIA, Katie helps me pack the last of the boxes, closing them carefully with packing tape, writing my name in big, dark letters on the sides. We finish after midnight; a large stack of boxes looms in the empty living room.

After she's left for her new apartment, I lie in bed and listen to the sounds of the traffic, the dogs barking, the low rumble of the train as it passes. I concentrate on breathing, on the feel of my body against the mattress, and I try to imagine myself growing like a plant, somewhere, perhaps, where the soil is softer and warmer. All I can think of though is the wall at my back, the life teeming beneath the plaster. It is dark and warm and quiet, but I can't sleep, can't think about the future. I can't pretend I've learned even one clear thing about what life is, or who I am, or how to grow roots in asphalt and cement. I can only recognize nature's determination, the life in my own skin, and the futility of trying to build something that will last for always.

 

“Mrs. Schafer Gets Fit” by Miranda McLeod

issue70

Found in Willow Springs 70

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MRS. SCHAFER IS GETTING FIT. Women don't lose weight anymore, or slim down, or tighten up. They get fit. This is all according to Mrs. Schafer's daughter, Jessica, who learned it from a man named Butch, who will soon become Mrs. Schafer's personal trainer. To simply want to lose weight is vain, apparently. Getting fit is about taking responsibility for yourself and your future. Ensuring more of the good years. It's about not becoming a burden on your children or society, as much as anyone can.

The gym is two blocks from Mrs. Schafer's East Village apartment, and though she's walked by it hundreds of times since it opened a year ago, she has never been inside until today. Today she put on a pair of old sweatpants and an oversized pipefitters union shirt that belonged to her husband. She also put on her brand new sneakers— garish, huge shoes as awkward and light as lifejackets, with swoops of color crisscrossing each other in imitation of what? Straps? Laces? But why imitate laces on a lace-up sneaker? The man at the Nike store had been unable to answer her. Everything, he said, was designed by scientists. As if that settled it.

The gym is nothing like Mrs. Schafer imagined, though she has never actually been in a gym. The music is deafening when she pushes open the door. She looks around, alarmed, and sees a DJ booth to her right, where a girl, so tiny she's barely visible over the turntables, flashes Mrs. Schafer a miniscule thumbs up. Purple and pink spotlights chase each other across the floor. There is no desk, no reception area that Mrs. Schafer can see, just a number of chairs scattered around the lobby, each crafted from plastic bones to look as if you're about to sit on the lap of a human skeleton. Electric candles flicker in a huge chandelier, and plaster busts of—is that Mozart? Bach? And why would it be Mozart or Bach?—line the walls. Each has a purple plume glued behind its ear. The place has the cheap, Styrofoam feel of a haunted house. Everywhere are incredibly thin, incredibly young women dressed in black spandex.
One of these women approaches Mrs. Schafer and says something she can't hear. Mrs. Schafer points to her ear and shakes her head, but the woman just smiles, takes Mrs. Schafer's hand, and leads her through a thick velvet curtain behind the DJ booth. They walk down a flight of stairs, the woman still holding her hand, giving it encouraging little squeezes as they descend.

"Butch, this is Mrs. Schafer." The woman passes Mrs. Schafer's hand to Butch, who takes it in both of his. He is a short man, stocky, with the sort of heavily muscled arms that stick out a bit from his sides, and a long blonde ponytail that Mrs. Schafer thinks is ridiculous. "Great to meet you! Name's Butch! Ha ha!" Mrs. Schafer isn't sure what is funny exactly, unless he's laughing at the coincidence of his name. Or at her.

The gym is quieter down here, the music masked by the hum of treadmills and the clanking of weights, but there is still the odd decor, the pink and purple lighting, and now a smell, something Mrs. Schafer can't quite put her finger on. Sweat, of course, and some sort of scented industrial cleaner. Raspberry? Mrs. Schafer tries not to feel disheartened. First the complicated shoes, then the disorienting lobby, now the unexplained laughter and Butch insisting that she answer the question, "Why are you here?" even though he must know the answer. "To get in shape," she mutters, but that's not good enough. Butch makes her repeat herself, again and again, louder and louder, until she is shouting, nearly yelling in this dark, humid gym, before he corrects
her phrasing, repeating under his breath what her daughter Jessica has already told her—that no one gets in shape anymore. They get fit. It all seems unnecessarily, almost aggressively, obscure. As if the real goal here is not to help Mrs. Schafer lose forty pounds, but to strip her of her orientation in the world, to convince her that her tastes, whether aesthetic or auditory or idiomatic, should be discarded in the face of such irrefutable corporate styling.

The actual exercises are surprisingly familiar. Jumping jacks, leg lifts, attempted pushups—all stuff she did years ago in gym class, or half-heartedly on a girlfriend's living room floor. Which is fine. She doesn't need her mind blown by a cardio routine. She isn't even all that interested in getting fit— at her age, it seems faintly ridiculous, like getting a tattoo. The sessions with Butch were a gift from Jessica. A going away present, actually, because nine days ago Jessica left New York and moved some great distance. Mrs. Schafer does not know where. Jessica wouldn't tell her. She hinted that it was out of the country, someplace hot and difficult to get to, where cellular service would be spotty and the internet nonexistent.

Mrs. Schafer imagines Africa. She envisions swirls of yellow dust, bright, patterned cloth, the ribs of a lone goat. She sees Jessica—fair, flushed—pouring the last drops from a canteen onto her shriveled, white tongue.

"It'll be good for you, Mom," Jessica had said, pressing into her hand a purple gift card with the word DIESEL written across it in pink bubble script. "This guy's a monster with old lady fat. He's famous for it."

Mrs. Schafer asked but Jessica refused to provide an address, or even a phone number for where she could be reached. She said she wasn't sure yet, that her housing was still coming together, that she was suspending her cell service for the time being, because it probably wouldn't even work where she was going. She did eventually concede that she could be reached, only in the direst of emergencies, by e-mail. Though who knew when she'd be able to check it?

That was enough. Mrs.Schafer would cling to the possibility of e-mail just as she was clinging to this plastic gift card. By the time her daughter had gathered her things to leave, Mrs. Schafer had already composed in her head the thank you e-mail she would write after she visited this gym.

Jessica hugged her mother and allowed herself to be kissed, but after just a few moments she pulled back. She smoothed back her thin blonde hair, avoiding Mrs.Schafer's eyes. ''All right, Mom. See you." Mrs. Schafer had insisted she would not cry, but suddenly her shoulders were quivering and she gripped the plastic card tightly, digging it into her palms, rolling her eyes up to catch the starting tears.

"God, Mom." Jessica sighed and patted her mother once, awkwardly, on the shoulder. "It's going to be fine."

AFTER HER FIRST SESSION WITH BUTCH, Mrs. Schafer kneels down and begins pulling dusty board games and boxes of Christmas decorations from under her bed. She finally finds the scale, shoved back against the wall, but the effort of reaching it exhausts her and she lies on the cool wooden floor next to her bed, the scale balanced on her belly. Butch is no joke. Her entire body quivers like a plate of high Jell-0, the kind you set in a Bundt cake mold and stud with canned fruit. The kind no one makes anymore.

From the apartment next door comes a shriek, then another, and then a peal of happy screams. The new neighbors. Three of Mrs. Schafer's five rooms look out onto a narrow air shaft, and it's possible to see into the apartment across the way. It hasn't always been. An old woman used to live there, some sort of recluse who had papered her windows with newsprint, so that no one could see in or out. It was convenient, actually. Mrs. Schafer had never bothered with curtains in those rooms. But then the old lady must have moved or, more likely, died, because a crew came in and renovated the entire space, replacing the papered-over windows with new glass in sturdy metal frames. Now you can see into the apartment across the way, and it 's a bit startling how close it is, how if she wanted to Mrs. Schafer could lean out her bedroom window and snatch a vase off her neighbors' dining room table.

The new neighbors are a woman and child, a little boy. Most likely a single mother, or one of those long-suffering military families. And Mrs. Schafer's apartment, which for years housed its own noisy young family, now holds just a widow. It's as if the two units somehow swapped places, and one day she woke to find that the busy familial warmth she was so accustomed to had moved next door. And here she is, an old woman living alone, no doubt strange and a little sad to the young family across the way. Maybe this is how it happens. One minute you're a wife and mother, and the next an old woman living alone. Pitiable. Maybe that's how you find yourself struggling up
a stepladder to your window, a glue stick in one hand and The Village Voice in the other.

But not Mrs. Schafer. She is getting fit. She is not going to paper over her windows. She is going to install window shades. Bright curtains maybe, or those lovely wooden blinds, the tea-colored ones you see in magazine spreads of modern, Asian-inspired homes.

She sets the scale next to her and rolls to her side. Maybe she'll paint her walls. Lord knows it's been years. She takes a deep breath and heaves herself up, the room flashing dark for a moment before she steadies, exhales. Maybe a nice yellow. A nice creamy yellow with bright white trim. She undresses there in the bedroom, dropping her clothes onto the scale, then takes a shower. She forgets to weigh herself.

*

HERE'S THE THING: Jessica was not an unhappy child. If anything, she was cheerful and opinionated, sliding through the apartment in white socks, her cornsilk hair slipping from its tie, the whole skinny length of her ecstatic at biscuits for breakfast or a new plastic bracelet or her father, home from work.

And they raised her well. She could sit at a table full of adults and not fidget, answering questions in full sentences and always coming up with some anecdote about school, something endearing and short, before letting the adults get back to their talk. She was equally good with other children. She could run and shriek and make friends at the park, unlike her dour best friend Marabell, who was also an only child but raised by psychoanalysts, and as a result was always appearing solemnly in the kitchen when the girls were supposed to be making crafts, her gaze unsettlingly direct, calling Mrs. Schafer by her first name and wanting to know how long she and Harold had been married before having Jessica, or whether Mrs. Schafer was fulfilled by her work. If Mrs. Schafer had been asked to put money down on which of the two girls would cut off all ties with her mother and fly to Africa, it would have been Marabell. Obviously.

But Marabell seems perfectly adjusted. Each Christmas she sends Mrs. Schafer professionally-lit photos of her three young children, with funny, self-deprecating anecdotes written on the back. She lives in Park Slope, two blocks from her analyst parents, while Jessica sleeps in a mosquito­ filled hut across the world, no doubt already feverish with malaria.

Mrs. Schafer wonders when Jessica will come back. She is certain that she will. Jessica, while adventurous, is a creature of convenience, fond of delivered food and late night nail salons. Mrs. Schafer does not allow the cold oil slick of doubt to bubble up, the persistent certainty that, when Jessica returns, it will be in secret.

MRS. SCHAFER'S SECOND SESSION WITH BUTCH is much like the first. She is required to shout at the start and then jog in place, lunge and squat, sit up and pull up and push up. She is also given a lecture on posture. "Posture," Butch says, "is your way of showing the world you're ready for anything." Now, before each exercise, she is to plant her feet as wide as her hips and square her shoulders. She is to communicate with her body that she is ready to get fit.

As far as she is able to tell, Mrs. Schafer is the only person over forty who frequents this gym. Everyone else is very young and very fit, with attractive outfits and coordinating sweatbands. The women wear makeup that never smears, and the men have astounding muscles that Mrs. Schafer finds herself staring at, trying to determine how they could possibly correspond to her own largely invisible ones.

Still, people are kind. They nod at her as they pass. They let her go ahead at the water fountain. They rack her weights for her, though Butch discourages this. A young man even winks at her as she slides her free weights back into their colorfully labeled slots. She finds herself nodding back, smiling, even chatting with two young ladies in the locker room about their stylish gym bags. The decor, while still ridiculous, does not bother her so much this time. She sees in it a playfulness, a lack of seriousness, that is almost charming. She wonders if it's possible that she might like the gym.

Only Butch seems a little subdued. He still high fives and fist pumps and growls at her when she slows, but a few times when he should have been counting her reps she catches him staring at the floor, biting his lip with his short, thick arms crossed at his chest. She has to keep herself from asking what's wrong.

SHE GETS HOME from her session with Butch and lies on her bedroom floor, the wood cool against her sore body, the scale under her head like a pillow. Then someone screams. It's the family across the way and the screaming is so abrupt, and at such a desperate pitch, that Mrs. Schafer knows at once that this fight started much earlier. There was a pause maybe, a silent seething refueling just as Mrs.Schafer came home, but now things are warming up again.

"Bitch!" the boy shouts and his voice is high and girlish. "Bitch, I hate you!"

"Oh yeah?" the mother shouts back. Her voice is also high, but there's a rasp to it, as if she smokes. "You think you hate me?"

And then there are sounds of impact, books being thrown or chairs knocked over. Or maybe the boy is being beaten.

Mrs. Schafer rolls onto her hands and knees and crawls to the window. She brings the scale with her and sets it against the glass, hoping it will shield her as she peeks into the apartment across the way. Really, she should go out. There's a movie she's been meaning to see. Instead, she stares at the blank wall of what must be her neighbors' living room, half-hoping, half-dreading that the fight will move into view.

Something does move, a shadow sweeping across the wall, and the boy screams again. There is a heavy thud, a long, pleading whimper, then silence. All of a sudden there is the boy, crying, sulking, throwing his body around the living room in fury and dismay. The mother appears, a bulky brunette. She swipes at her son, but she appears to have some trouble moving, something in her hip or knee, and she is too slow to catch him. The boy begins to whimper again, backing away from her. Mrs. Schafer closes her eyes.

Harold used to send Jessica to bed without supper after some undeniable infraction. Mrs. Schafer would wait until he went out for his evening cigar and then crack open the door to Jessica's room. Are you sorry? she would whisper and Jessica would whimper, the same pitiful, animal keening she hears now. She would make a plate of leftovers and tell Jessica to hide the dish when she was done. She would sleep easily that night beside Harold, lightly, sure she was able to hear Jessica's contented breathing.

Mrs. Schafer opens her eyes. The mother is gone, but the boy is still there. He is still, quiet, his head cocked, listening. He is blonde and slight, nothing like his mother. He could be Jessica's brother. He is wearing red shorts and a blue and white striped shirt. One hand trails down to his knee. He scratches, still listening, as a rare column of sunlight winds down the air shaft and through his window, making the pale white of his knee glow.

Then he jumps, whirls, his whole body turning in the air and slamming against the living room window. The sound is tremendous, the glass shakes, and Mrs. Schafer gasps, falls back. She crawls quickly into the kitchen, then the living room, where her windows look out onto the street and she can't be seen by her neighbors. She doesn't know if the boy saw her. It's possible. It's also possible that this was all for his mother. A display. He might have had some hazy idea that by throwing himself against the window he could break through. Not to kill himself—Mrs. Schafer doubts he made it that far in his thinking, five flights down to the bottom of the air shaft—but to wrench himself from his mother in the most dramatic, most magnificent way possible. He might have been trying to fly away.

MRS. SCHAFER TAKES THE N TRAIN UPTOWN and walks west to Home Depot. The building takes up a full block, the sort of cavernous space only the most massive chain stores can afford. It's late September and already starting to get cool, but air conditioning blasts her as she pulls open the heavy glass door. She wishes for a scarf. Directly ahead is the lighting department, and past it is Kitchen, then Bathroom, then Flooring. She wanders the store, unable to find window dressings or a salesperson for an impossibly long time. After her third loop through Lighting, she is about to leave when a skinny young man asks her if she needs assistance. His nametag says José.

"I need some curtains. Or maybe some blinds. I'm not quite sure."

"Of course, ma'am. I can assist you with that. Do you have measurements?"

Measurements. Of course. This is not the first time she has redecorated. There were phases, several of them in fact, when she immersed herself in a flurry of design, carrying in her purse at all times the dimensions of her apartment down to an eighth of an inch, buying tables and art and lamps that fit just so. But today she has come to Home Depot with nothing. She shakes her head, embarrassed.

"Maybe I should come back later."

"No need, ma'am. If you'll just follow me."

José leads her to an elevator she had not noticed, and then they are upstairs, standing on some sort of narrow catwalk overlooking the store. The air is warmer up here. The separate departments—Lighting, Bathroom, Kitchen, Flooring, Garden, which from down below felt labyrinthine, as if every turn were only winding her deeper into the cold fluorescent heart of the store—are suddenly laid out on a neat grid. Home Depot salespeople in cheerful orange aprons are spaced evenly throughout. The shoppers look casual, unhurried, from this height.

Mrs. Schafer sighs, letting the air stream slowly through her nostrils. "This is amazing," she says.

"Yes," José nods. "I know."

Window blinds have been installed onto fake windows along the catwalk. Lightbulbs shine behind the blinds, simulating daylight, Mrs. Schafer supposes, or perhaps the maddening electric light that now pours from her neighbors' windows into hers far too late into the night. José leads her to each display and encourages her to pull the various cords and sticks and ergonomic levers. He explains that each set is made of all-natural, environmentally-sustainable wood—cherry, teak, bamboo, cedar—and he lets each name hang in the air for a moment, as if the very syllables of cedar imply a customer service experience of shocking quality.

José stops after the last display and turns to Mrs. Schafer, sweeping his arm to take in the catwalk, the window blind displays, the pleasantly warm air, the humming, well-ordered grid below. "This is Home Depot's Regal Windows Measurement and Installation Service, ma'am."

Mrs. Schafer nods encouragingly. What a good idea this all is—the catwalk, the private tour, the blinds installed over fake windows, the thoughtful touch of the lightbulbs.

"You work with a Home Depot Regal Windows In-House Stylist to realize your window vision. We come to your domicile and take custom measurements. We place any orders. Our skilled technicians do the final installation." José pauses, his arm still hovering in the air, as if he is considering whether or not to continue. "It's a premium service, and while it's not for every customer, for you I could not recommend it strongly enough."

Mrs. Schafer knows that José probably uses this line with everyone. But there is something in his low voice, in the way the lids of his eyes slide down and his chin tips up as he speaks, that makes her wonder if there is something a bit premium about her. Between Harold's pension and her 401(k) and the apartment, fat with equity, she does have a bit of money. And she's getting fit. Butch said it would take two to three weeks to begin seeing real results, but maybe not. Maybe it doesn't take nearly that long.

When she gets home, she's going to e-mail Jessica. Jessica loves premium services.

"Okay," she says, and she plants her feet as wide as her hips and squares her shoulders. "How do we proceed?"

MRS. SCHAFER TRIES TO BE HONEST WITH HERSELF. Particularly first thing in the morning, when she sips her coffee by the open living room window and her mind is sharp and probing, slicing back swaths of vanity, needling down to the hard nut. What could have done it? There were the times when Jessica was young and Harold said a firm No, only for Mrs. Schafer to sneak into her room a few hours later to whisper Yes. There were adolescent difficulties—the normal struggles over authority, the
punishments that were perhaps too zealous. There was Harold dying much too young, when Jessica was only seventeen. There were Jessica's unfortunate boyfriends and cigarette butts in the toilet and the discovery of a little baggie of cocaine that was probably too much of a shock to Mrs. Schafer. She had probably overreacted.

But after Jessica moved into an apartment of her own, their relationship had entered a peaceful phase, or so Mrs. Schafer thought.

For years now there have been weekly phone calls and dinners three times a month and quiet, lovely holidays.

She is not a perfect parent. She would never claim to be. But even on these honest, brutal mornings, Mrs. Schafer cannot find a reason. None of it seems like a good enough reason.

Unless.

On this particular morning, one hour before her third session with Butch, sitting in the chill by the open window with her coffee mug warm in her hands, Mrs. Schafer remembers something. It is something small, something practically insignificant, but as it rises up—as the batting of time falls away and it is there before her, purple and somewhat tender, like a bruise—she thinks, Unless.

Some twenty-five years ago, while Harold was away on a union retreat, Jessica had a nightmare. It was one of those stifling August nights and they didn't have air conditioning at the time, just a loud metal fan they dragged from room to room. Mrs. Schafer lay on top of her sheets in only her underwear. Jessica was just six and had not yet developed the shrieking disgust, the aggressive adolescent shame that would later bully Mrs. Schafer into buying pajamas. On hot nights Mrs. Schafer was still free to sleep naked, or nearly so, not even bothering with a robe when she padded to the bathroom.

Mrs. Schafer didn't hear Jessica come in, just woke with a start to see her daughter standing by the bed, her face shiny with snot in the dim light. She was so small, even for six. Practically still a baby.

"I was in the hair nest," Jessica said.

Mrs. Schafer rolled to Harold's side of the bed and patted the damp sheet. "Oh dear. Were you all alone again?"

Jessica had been having this nightmare for a few weeks now. Her bed would dissolve beneath her so that she plummeted into a huge, awful nest of human hair. This worried Mrs. Schafer, but Harold dismissed these nightmares as par for the course. Life is full of horrible shit, he said. If all that cluttered the darkest corners of their daughter's mind was a hair nest, they were doing all right.

"No," Jessica said, climbing into the bed. "There were baby birds in there with me."

"Well, that's nice."

"No, it was not nice. They were mad at me. They pecked my head."

"Mean ol' birds." Mrs. Schafer pulled her daughter close and pressed her nose into that thin, sweet hair. "They should know better."

Jessica sighed and scooted closer to her mother, nuzzling her wet face against Mrs. Schafer's breasts. Mrs. Schafer shifted slightly, trying to give her daughter more room, but Jessica followed her, rubbing first her cheek, then her mouth, against her mother 's nipple. And then she began to suck.

Years later, alone in her living room, Mrs. Schafer is able to explain it. Jessica was vulnerable, she was scared, and so she had regressed back to her babyhood, back to when her mother's body was the source of all comfort. And Mrs. Schafer had been half asleep herself. Had she been awake, had it not been three in the morning, had there not been a full day of work behind her—nine hours processing billing at the hospital and then to the babysitter's to pick up Jessica, to the store because there was nothing in the fridge, dinner cooked and served and cleaned up, lunch packed and homework checked and bath and story and bed, all by herself this week with Harold gone, and tomorrow just a few hours away, tomorrow when she would somehow do it all over again—it never would have happened. She would have stopped it. A gentle correction. A defining of boundaries. A distinction made between baby Jessica and big-girl Jessica. She would have stood up, put on one of Harold's oversized shirts, and carried Jessica back to her own bed.

But instead she let her daughter nurse at her dry nipple. She did not think of repercussions, how they might stretch decades into the future, how this unexpected intimacy might create a tiny ripple in their relationship, how such a ripple could amplify over the years into great, shuddering waves—Jessica pressing the gym gift certificate into her hand, wrinkling her nose as she said old lady fat; Jessica hugging her awkwardly, at a distance, refusing to let her chest press against her mother's; Jessica
gone, vanished, having ruthlessly, almost gleefully shed her old life, the one that included Mrs. Schafer.

It had felt good. And so what? Could she be blamed, should she be punished, for feeling as she drifted to sleep that her daughter's mouth on her breast was still a mouth, her daughter's body hot against hers still a body? Wires had been crossed in those moments. She had arched sleepily, murmured, and as she passed over she did so with the languid, purring pleasure of a woman whose body has been used.

It was not her fault, Mrs. Schafer thinks. She did nothing wrong. And Jessica was fine. That night she fell asleep, Mrs. Schafer's nipple sliding from her mouth, and the next morning she woke cheerful and well rested, excited about the birthday cupcakes a classmate was bringing to school, seemingly oblivious to her mother's sneaking glances. They never spoke of it. Mrs. Schafer never told Harold what happened. It is likely Jessica doesn't even remember. It is likely that night had nothing to do with what was to come.

Mrs. Schafer's coffee has gone cold. She reaches to set it on the windowsill, but the ledge is taken up with her scale. She put it there yesterday, to get it out of the way while she swept. She sets her mug on top of it, watching its thin red arm shudder before settling back on zero.

DURING HER THIRD SESSION WITH BUTCH, Mrs. Schafer is stepping on and off a knee-high orange box, feeling somewhat like a circus animal, when Butch asks, "So, how's Jessica liking Tucson?"

Aha! It is obvious from Butch's tone that he is trying to be casual, but then he clears his throat, coughs into his fist, pats his chest as if he's coming down with something. Mrs. Schafer had assumed that Jessica found Butch on the internet, or saw an ad on the subway—Butch: A Monster with Old Lady Fat!—and jotted down the number. But now it's clear that Jessica knew Butch personally. Maybe she had trained with him? Or-could it be possible that they dated? Could Jessica find such a man attractive? Jessica, who may not have been beautiful but was tall and slim and young, all of which seemed to pass for beauty these days.

It is only then, trying to picture Butch and Jessica together, walking arm in arm, the top of his head reaching only her shoulder, that the full meaning of Butch's question hits her. How's Jessica liking Tucson. Tucson . Not Africa. Not Antarctica. Arizona. They surely have cell reception in Tucson. They definitely have the internet.

Mrs. Schafer plants her huge right shoe on the orange box and steps up. What could possibly be in Tucson? A job? A man? A cult? She brings her knee to her chest, then steps down off the box. No. If there was something to know, Mrs. Schafer would've known it. She knows all about her daughter's life—her friends, her dates, her triumphs and blunders, the trends of her interests, her flirtation with veganism, the awful four months she recited poetry at spoken word readings.

Mrs. Schafer steps back onto the box, this time with her left foot. Her heart is pounding and sweat slides down her forehead and into her eyes. If there were somebody or something in Tucson, Mrs. Schafer would have had some hint. She would have known.

"Keep it movin'!" Butch growls. Mrs. Schafer is standing on the box, breathing hard through her mouth and blinking, trying to clear the sweat from her eyes. She brings her right knee to her chest and then steps down off the box.

She wants to squeeze Jessica. She wants to take her by her narrow shoulders and squeeze and squeeze until her silly elusive entitled daughter pops like a bag of chips. Deflates. The air hissing out of her until all that's left is skin, a pelt, a long golden flag Mrs. Schafer will fly from her window as a warning.

She plants her right foot on the box and uses the sleeve of her T-shirt to wipe her face. Her skin is hot, unbelievably so, and blood pounds in her temples. She tries to heave herself up, but she has misjudged the edge of the box. She wobbles, swinging her arms, as a high animal yipping escapes from inside her. Butch reaches for her but is too late. Mrs. Schafer falls, her ankle rolling beneath her, her wide, soft body with its copious fat hitting the blue mat with a tremendous sound, a loud, echoing slap that reaches the dim corners of the gym.

"Jessica's fine," Mrs. Schafer says. She is gasping, she can barely breathe. She is lying on her back squinting up into the purple lights. "Having quite an adventure, I imagine."

THAT AFTERNOON, MRS. SCHAFER WEIGHS HERSELF for the first time. She
knows she was supposed to do this before she started exercising—Butch was adamant about establishing a "base weight"—but she has avoided it until now.

She carries the scale to the bathroom, hugging it to her chest so that the red arm climbs and climbs. She's able to get it to one hundred just by squeezing. She sets the scale down carefully, on the flattest part of her crooked tile floor, and turns on the shower. She removes her clothes and faces the scale, her feet as wide as her hips, her shoulders squared, and then steps on.

Two-hundred-and-seven.

She steps off, then back on.

Two-hundred-and-seven. The arm quivers with her weight. She tests it, bouncing a little, watching it swing up to two-fifty-two, then down to one-eighty, then settle back on two-hundred-and-seven.

She knows this number is high, though she's not sure how high. She doesn't know what her weight should be, what would be considered healthy for her height and age, what would alarm a doctor. She waits, for shame, for disgust, for any emotional
recognition of all this old lady fat weighed out in front of her. But nothing comes. If anything, she is relieved. Two-hundred-and-seven, a nice number. The warm, round two and oh, the handsome slash of the seven. A number that seems affectionate somehow. Accepting.

The shower is heating up, the air around her growing warm and moist. Jessica, of course, would not find two-hundred-and-seven acceptable. If anything, it would make her angry. That Mrs. Schafer weighs this much to begin with, that Mrs. Schafer does not care. That, by the cruel logic of genetics, Jessica herself could weigh two-hundred-and-seven someday.

Mrs.Schafer begins to bounce again, harder this time, trying to swing the arm up to three hundred. She can feel her flesh quivering, the mottled landscape of her thighs, the heavy knocking of her breasts. Steam drifts from the shower, slicking her skin. She lifts her hands and waves them, setting the hammocks beneath her arms swinging. Two-oh-seven! Here it is! All of it shaking! All of it ready!

"Hey!"

Mrs. Schafer freezes.

"I see you!"

The voice is coming from behind her. She turns, slowly, and bends to look through the narrow crack that is her bathroom window. The glass is frosted, though she's propped the bottom portion open with a screen, now thick with dust. She would never have thought anyone could see into her bathroom. But there, across the way, are the unmistakable blue eyes of a little boy, peering out of his bathroom window. As soon as she sees him he ducks, and she can hear the muffled laughter, the ecstatic withheld giggles of a child.

She ducks too and sits on the lid of the toilet. It's wet from the steam and feels incongruous, even a little illicit, against her bare bottom. She wonders if the boy did indeed see her on the day of the fight, if her gawking has invited this attention.

She also wonders what sort of impression she will make on this boy. She doesn't know if kids these days have any idea what women's bodies look like—real bodies—or if their only references are billboards and magazines. Is he thunderstruck by the pull and roll and flap of her? The fat? Is this the firm planting of a lifelong disgust? Maybe not. Maybe he's still too young. Maybe all he knows is his mother's body. Maybe Mrs. Schafer, all two-hundred-and-seven pounds of her, is appealing in her novelty. Erotic. Maybe she will be the somewhat questionable seed of the boy's first masturbatory experience.

She is surprised to discover she doesn't care either way. Disgust or appeal, aversion or allure. Or even nothing at all. Even the flat blue-gray of indifference. Either way a Horne Depot Regal Windows In-House Stylist is corning on Monday to measure her windows. Either way she is getting fit. She has booked a regular appointment with Butch for every Tuesday afternoon, even after her gift card has run out.

Mrs. Schafer stands, plants her feet as wide as her hips, squares her shoulders, and cups her long, flat breasts in her palms. She offers them to the boy, holding them up and out like a tray of sandwiches. The steam from the shower curls around her. She does not look to see the expression on the boy's face. She does not look to see if he is even still there, if her silence has drawn him out, or if he is like an exotic animal stumbled upon, frozen, a gasp away from bolting.

“Through the Womb” by Roxane Gay

issue70

Found in Willow Springs 70

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WHEN WE FIRST MET he told me how much he loves children. He told me how much he loves women because they can bear children. Motherhood, he said, is the truest expression of a woman; a woman is not really a woman until she bears children. The way to his heart is not through the stomach, but through the womb. He doesn't know there was once fruit in my womb that spoiled. He doesn't know they hollowed me out. He doesn't ask and I don't tell. I let him talk. I mete out rope, inch by inch. One of us will hang. Once, while we were drinking wine, I asked, "But what about women who can't have children? What about women who tried and things ended badly?" A look of perfect disgust crossed his face. I admired the honesty. He said, "Women like that are invisible to me." Then he smiled, said we would make pretty babies. I refilled my glass. I smiled back, even though he could not see me. I said, "Yes, baby." He would like me to find the way to his heart through my womb. I went to the bathroom and tried to find my reflection in the mirror. The edges were blurry. I was startled. I collect these moments--the sorrows, the petty betrayals of my body. I worry them between my fingers like stones until they are bright and smooth. I use these bright smooth stones to cover my rage, the hollowness of it, to weigh it down, to hold it close, to weigh me down. I cook him dinner and watch him eat. Sometimes, he grunts his appreciation, asks for more and I bring it to him. I say, "Eat, baby." I place one of my stones on the tip of my tongue. I satisfy myself with the blandness of it. Whatever he asks for, I give him. I want to fatten him until he is all flesh. I make sure his beer is cold or his martini stiff. He offers to wash the dishes, but I say, "Why don't you go sit on the couch?" I say, "Tell me about your day." I say, "Tell me everything you've ever wanted to say." I do these things so my resentment stays sharp and pure. He likes to sit on the couch stretching his legs. He unbuttons his pants and lifts his shirt, exposing his pale stomach. There is a slight bulge from the food he's just eaten. He slaps his belly and it echoes because my home is sparsely furnished. He says, "Look at my baby bump." I say, "Yes, baby." He says, "Feel it kick." I say, "Yes, baby." Sometimes, when we're in bed, he says, "If you get pregnant, we'll have to get married." He says, "Let's have at least five kids." He suggests names. I say, "Yes, baby." He is hopeful when he says these things. He touches me with purpose. We take chances. I should say, he takes chances. In the heat of the moment he sometimes uses the word breed as if I am livestock. I am an animal. He is an animal. I am a bitch in heat. We rut. When I am late, he says, "Maybe you shouldn't drink that glass of wine, just in case." He says, "Maybe you should take a test." I say, "Yes, baby." I let him run to the drugstore and while he's gone, I pour myself a glass of wine. I call him on his cellphone and say, "Bring pickles." I am a spiteful woman. I carry my stones. They grow heavier with his hope. They are cold. I name them---Greta, for a girl, Edgar, for a boy. His mother is in a convalescent home. We visit her on Wednesdays and Sundays. She pretends to forget my name every single time, always looks at me as if my features have changed. Her eyes make me uncomfortable. They are cloudy, the blue irises seeping past their edges into the white meat of her eyeballs. When his phone rings, he leaves his mother's room, always talking too loudly. He has no respect for the quiet of slow, lonely death. I sit in an uncomfortable chair with wooden arms. I try to breathe shallow. The smell of the place is terrible. His mother licks her lips. They are dry and the sound makes me cringe. She asks for water and I pour some into a plastic cup from a plastic pitcher. Her hands shake when she drinks. Sometimes she needs help so I stand next to her and hold my palm to the back of her head. I hold the cup in my other hand and bring it to her lips. She takes careful sips. If he sees this, he says, "You are so beautiful when you're being maternal." I say, "Yes, baby." He only sees me when he wants to. I worry more smooth stones--how he sees right through me, the chilly numbness when he touches me. I nearly worry the skin from my fingers, imagine nothing left but blood and bone. Once in a while, a nurse's aide breezes through the room to shift the arrangement of air molecules. She smells like cigarette smoke. All the nurse's aides sit out behind the convalescent home, smoking their way through their shifts. He is an only child, born when his mother was forty-two, an unexpected surprise. She likes to tell me, "There's still time for you." She thinks I'm waiting. I am much younger than she thinks. There is too much time for me. When he leaves the room to talk too loudly on his phone, he's talking to the woman who thinks she's his girlfriend, who doesn't know where he spends his nights, or knows and doesn't care. I have no idea what I am doing. They have a child together, a girl, she's three. I pretend not to know her name. "I'll always feel something for the mother of my child," he says, and I say, "Yes, baby." Sometimes, I see his girlfriend at the grocery store with her daughter. The kid looks like him, the same brown eyes, the same strange walk, toes pointing slightly inward, an extra bounce in the heel. The girlfriend is not as pretty as me, though her child is beautiful. The girlfriend wears loose clothing, often pants with block letters across the ass. She is much younger. Her hair is wild. She is radiant. She always smiles. She and her daughter walk through the store. The girl talks as much as her father, filling the store with chatter. She seems precocious. Precocious children can be irritating. Intelligence in a child is a delicate, dangerous thing. I like to follow them. I am invisible so they can't see me. I close my fist around my stones so they do not rattle. I follow the girlfriend and her daughter and make note of what the girlfriend buys to feed her child. I judge. I think, I would not feed my child such things. Sometimes the girlfriend and daughter are leaving the convalescent home as we arrive. When we walk past each other, she doesn't see me. She holds her head high. I do too. When he spends the night, which is often, I make him breakfast. He likes three-egg omelets, runny, so the eggs fold around his fork as he eats. While I cook, he stands behind me, resting his chin against my neck. He rubs my stomach and sways our bodies side to side as I add cheese, fresh mushrooms, green peppers, and fold the omelet in half He says, "Some day, it won't be just us." I flip the omelet, then slide it onto a plate with fresh orange slices and parsley. I fatten him. I say, "Yes, baby." I watch him eat. I keep his coffee hot. As he eats he nods happily, reads the paper. He asks, "Why don't you ever eat?" I never answer and he quickly forgets his question. I close my hand around a bright smooth stone, the weight of it growing heavier and heavier, holding me to this place. I press my fingers against my ribs, skin thin, and feel my sharp, hollow bones.

Three Poems by Laura Read

issue70

Found in Willow Springs 70

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Bureau

 

When my husband asks me where I put the keys,
I say they're on my bureau,

and he says you mean dresser 

and I say no, bureau. 

Your mother must have brought that with her
from New York, he says,

and I say, yes, she carried it with its three top drawers
for her silk panties and slips,

her stockings, the small sachets she always used
to scent them, embroidered like my grandmother's

handkerchiefs, my grandmother who came once
a year to see my mother and her bureau,

who poached her egg in the early mornings
on the kitchen stove. I didn't know poach,

didn't know pocketbook, the black bag
she opened at the metal, magnetic clasp

and drew out a gold tube of lipstick,
a romance novel with a picture of a man

with his hand on a woman's breast
like the print of the Rembrandt hanging

over our mantel
but that man looked like he had asked

permission, like he knew
he only had this small circle of light

and he should touch the fabric of her dress first
before feeling for what was under it,

the skin that had been sleeping
for years beneath a girl's nightgown,

like the ones I kept folded in my bureau,
and the one I took

from my grandmother's apartment in Queens
after she died. It was still in its plastic--

she must have ordered it from a catalog
when she could no longer go down

into the city but had to look out at it
from a great height so she was closer

to the telephone wires her voice traveled to my mother
like a thin road, winding and black, the kind

you drive at night, the moon always with you.
When she was gone, I unwrapped her nightgown.

It was pink and cotton and sleeveless.
I wore it standing on our porch

so I could feel the wind.

 

When You Have Lived a Long Time in One Place

 

things start to vanish. Like the old Newberry's
where I used to buy earrings that looked
like tacks, six pairs for a dollar, and then
go sit at the lunch counter with the old people
eating patty melts and drinking black coffee.
They stared in front of them like the women
on the bus with their plastic rain scarves
that they took from their purses when the bus
lurched toward their stop. They wore dresses
from the old country. Now I wonder
if they have nowhere to go. The building
stands empty like a mind that still clicks open
its eyelids in the morning but can't remember
the words that stick things to their places,
pants, chair, toast. How can we remember
if they keep taking things down, like the house
where I lived when I was young and waiting
for love? I lay there in the yard in my bathing suit
pink as a poppy and I could feel his shadow
when it touched my body. That body
is gone now too, hanging in the back of a closet.
Now there is only a clean slate of grass
where that house stood, the same grass
that covers the spot in Lincoln Park
where there used to be a wading pool,
where I took Ben until the day I turned away
to get a toy for him and then he was
face down in a foot of water and I pulled him out
and we looked at each other and I could see
in his eyes that he couldn't believe the water
was heartless, that it didn't know who he was.

 

People Don't Die of It Anymore

 

We're driving up Carnahan, winding south
toward the Palouse, its fields of wheat

at our periphery like hair.
This is the road where Robert Yates dumped

the bodies on his way home
to his five children, hearing the door

click open in their dreams
so later they'll say they knew.

My dad says the retirement home
we just passed, brick and lit with the cold

sunlight, used to be a sanitarium
for women with tuberculosis

and my sons ask, What's tuberculosis?
We 're on our way back

from Greenbluff, constellation of farms
to the north where you go in the fall

for pumpkins and apples
and I can feel their beauty

in the trunk of the car, the thick fruit
beneath the ambrosia's skins, the seeds

we'll have to scrape out of the pumpkins
with a metal spoon and the strings

that will get under our fingernails
and hurt for days. St. Therese

of the Little Flower died of it.
She was so kind in her biography,

always opening the door
for the gardener. And then she started

coughing blood and I mourned her
in my plaid uniform

and my Peter Pan collar.
People don't die of it anymore, I say,

and we fall quiet for a moment and stare
at the houses on Carnahan,

their fences and dark windows,
their scribbles of smoke.

 

Ten Poems by Alexandra Teague

issue71

Found in Willow Springs 71

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Transcontinental

10 Poems

 

"In a railroad to the Pacific we have a great national work, transcending, in its magnitude, and in its results, anything yet attempted by man."

  • American Railroad journal

 

 

"Gunpowder and Chinamen were the only weapons... builders had with which to fight the earth and stone through which they had to pass, laid in their path centuries ago by the Creator."

  • Engineer for the Transcontinental Railroad

 

I. Crazy Judah (1859)

 

They said he might as well build a railroad
to the moon, his maps laid out like lakes
in the desert. What is needed is a proper survey.
His maps laid out like a whorehouse Bible.
Who would touch it? Who believed a man
who made a mountain range a molehill,
who tunneled and gun-powdered granite
fact to lay his tracks out of the ruck of things?
Who promised tightrope-narrow ridges
holding trains--not years from now, but
now. What's needed are the men and money,

not just plans. Who charted routes across
the Long Ravine and Donner Pass where
fear split open: black oak in a lightning
storm, where rivers spilled like thought
too fast to follow. His wife said, You're giving
away your thunder. He said, This country is
a house divided. Who would join it? With
what hammers and stakes could men cross
a continent he had to sail around to say,
There is another way. It is a well-known maxim:
The gods wait for a beginning before they lend their aid.

 

II. The Big Four (1862)

 

Because they were men of vision,
which meant men of money, believers
in the Northern route to the new free West,
believers in the pocket-creased maps

of surveyors, the bare-armed muscles
of strangers, the sledgehammer strikes,
the new flanged rails, the country healed
in its iron lung--they invested funds

to sail from the Eastern seaboard and
around Cape Horn: shiploads of crowbars,
hammers, dump carts, rails, switches,
spikes, tents, hitches, plows, drills,

everything but camels (the Confederate
plan to cross the Southern desert):
the country an infinite snake: mouth
gaping around the future's iron tail.

 

III. The Workers (1866)

 

The records admit no record of the hands
and fingers lost in the blasting: the grand

and every day explosions of granite into light,
the times they tried to hide in time

but couldn't (something in the way: a horse,
loose rubble, exhaustion). Or the loss

from sledgehammers. Eighteen pounds rising,
striking, rising. The first heat of day slicing

cold muscles--that swinging til only opium
could hold them still for sleep- the pig-iron

snow-plow pushing even then through
dreams--splitting continents, families, youth

into heaps beside it, or the train steaming off
its tracks through their bones: their coughs

like nails in tamarack trusses, their ribs
full of gunpowder, as outside the iron ribbon,

as history would call it, shone. As if
all they were doing was stitching

along the country's seam: shimmery, simple,
whatever fingers they had, safe in thimbles.

 

IV. The Sierras ( 1867)

 

Already dead of yellow fever years before,
Judah never saw two thousand men from China
work for weeks inside those long white tents
of snow: the tunnels they lived inside, ate inside,

blasted, and tunneled further, the walls
they hard-packed against gravity, the dank smoke­-
haze and fear of falling sky in which they learned
to move like snow itself: a stiff suspension,

particulate, a joined numbness. Only the steam
of tea, a bit of corn meal. Talk of eating
the horses. Silence for days after the avalanche,
a weighted quiet like every white key

on a piano played at once, then never played.
The survivors working faster now: black powder,
rails, reed-thatched baskets, in which, when spring
came, they would dangle over chasms--afraid

of the air now--blinking in the rain-bleached light:
the river below gleaming like another railroad
built while they burrowed: all rushing wheels­--
what the dead, when they thawed, would ride.

 

V. Sherman's Peace Council with the Indians (1867)

 

We
built
iron
roads
and
you
cannot
stop
the
locomotive
any
more
than
you
can
stop
the
sun
or
moon.

 

VI. Ferguson's Diary (1868)

 

And then we passed through a dismal
and desolate country: a terrible country:
all sagebrush and grease weed and the mules
out of their depth in the river, swiftly
carried by currents: the awful look of terror

and despair as two men went down. My level
tangled in the wagon box, so I had to drop
it or be dragged under. I never found it
or the guns or men we'd lost. No matter

the death toll, the engineers are concerned
with the bridge and making some money.

Some Indians made a dash on some pilgrims
at sunrise. Later we were attacked by Indians
and succeeded in shooting one. Four men
were killed and scalped. I have no sympathy

for the red devils. May their dwelling places
and habitations be destroyed. May the greedy
crows hover over their silent corpses.

Two men were shot this evening
in a drunken row. Another man and four
mules drowned. A man was wounded, another
killed: occasioned by some personal difficulty.

The carelessness and reckless disregard
for life and limb, the promiscuous shooting
is perfectly outrageous and alarming.

Still, the bridge is a success.

The first passenger train crossed
the ridge at noon. The time is coming
and fast, too, when
there will be no West.

 

VII. Hell-on-Wheels (1868)

 

Hell, one foreman said, must have been raked
to furnish them: these men and women

who rolled from field to field: the buildings slap­-
dash built: canvas and shanties: the Germania House

with its whiskey and 50 cent meals, its hurdy-gurdy
dancing: skirts hiked up to God-Knows:

and the rail crews' hungers sledgehammer heavy:
lanterns and legs and the hip bones of strangers:

a few slung-down hours: something stronger
than iron: Benton, Laramie, Bear River City,

Corrine: which is fast becoming civilized-several men
having been killed there already: the alkali dust

ankle-deep and shifty as gunpowder: the men
white as roaches in a barrel of flour: the women

powdered sweet over filth: the one bookstore
(in one photograph) maybe a joke: a den

of antiquity: the broken spines, loose pages
caught in these crosswinds like the cottonwood

where Dugan--hands cuffed by vigilantes­--
had begged to leave the country, and he did,

when the rope pulled taut, and the wagon drove
away: the corpse of Damocles dangling

over scrub weed: the trains unloading
their own future rails: a bitch birthing whelps

in the dust: bones under bourbon floorboards:
it was monstrous, wondrous, hideous inside those tents

and buildings: transitory as soap bubbles:
everything rainbows and scum.

 

VIII. Jack Morrow and Friends (1868)

-After the photograph by Arundel Hull

 

After Hull climbs his camera down from the windmill-half-built,
rickety as light on this dust-storm morning--
after he climbs down from a boxcar--the station sleeping
in the drunk dawn--the barrels of gunpowder Morrow stole
from his own wagon trains emptied (for later sale), then filled with sand
to sell to strangers: this moment: Morrow seated on a barrel, long legs
draped over the hoop, pinstriped, casual, palms against thighs,
his elbows jutted out to show he knows his body's value: twice the space
of other men's. His posse--even the man in front--a backdrop: creased-up
brims and crumpled suits and watch fobs shining in this flat light
that is not about shining but staring straight like the man who chose
not to steal this camera when he robbed Hull's stage. Who can
perform at will the miracle of gunpowder into sand into money
into (short-counted) ties to sell the railroad. Who lights his cigars
from burning bank notes while the workers wait.

 

IX. Roving Delia Fish Dance (1869)

 

This telegrammed challenge from Hopkins to Huntington
which meant, decoded: We're laying track at a rate of 4 miles
every day. The U.P. pioneers with their shovels at dawn
aligning the night-laid ties as more men moved behind:
pairs with tongs to lift the rails, position them, drop
them. Position them, drop them. The foreman calling
Down! The fields tamped and graded for their iron crop­
U.P. to C.P., C.P. to U.P.--that must outrace its own growing.
The trains caught in snowstorms. Stalling. The papers
calling the Union Pacific an elongated human slaughterhouse.
The foreman calling out Down! The papers asking Where
and when will they ever be joined? ROVING DELIA FISH
DANCE. We are working as fast as is human- headlong
as slick fish. We are dancing with sledgehammers, tongs.

 

X. The Golden Spike, Promontory, Utah (May 10, 1869)

 

Even then--noise, confusion,
crowding. The reporters
couldn't see. History says
Hewes (a baron of sand dunes)
presented it. 13 ounces approximate
gold. No sledge marks to show
if it was struck at all--if Stanford
missed, as they say. No marks
from removal. Laurel and gold.
As if the railroad had always been
a simple shining. What's needed
are the men and money. A simple
striking, like luck in a pan.
What's needed is a proper survey.
The country laid out like a map
of its future: a whorehouse Bible,
a house united. Judah's
widow (by coincidence,
their anniversary) not invited.
I refused myself to everyone that day.
Those two trains waiting to inch
nose to nose: The No. 119,
The Jupiter. Smash of champagne
(or wine) against the cattle catchers,
strike of blows (or silence
of the silver maul's misses).
Thar spike bristling like an oak
in lightning. The live wires flashing
that one bright signal
coast-unto-coast. It is done.

(Not years from now, but now.)
Cannon fire in Salt Lake City,
D.C., San Francisco. That spike:
a single rail to the sun.

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