NarrativeNortheast

Singing and Sailing to Save a River – Jan Barry

on January 30 | in Creative Nonfiction & Memoir | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

When folk singer Pete Seeger and some friends launched the Clearwater sloop nearly 50 years ago, the Hudson River was a fish-killing open sewer from industries and municipalities along most of its majestic sweep from the Adirondack Mountains past Catskills views immortalized by the Hudson River school of painters. Raw sewage sloshed with the tides lapping against former swimming beaches below the towering Palisades cliffs in New Jersey, decimating a declining shad fishing industry. It sloshed and bobbed amid the ocean liner piers framed by Manhattan’s postcard scenic skyscrapers. The massive flow of pollution continued into New York Bay, sloshing in wind-tossed waves rocking Staten Island ferries, churning past the Statue of Liberty and out to sea, slimming the striped bass fishing areas off Coney Island’s amusement park and ocean-view beaches.

But then, the sight of a full-sail sloop tacking up and down the tainted river with a crew of excited kids and adults picked up at docks from Albany to Jersey City sparked outbursts of activism that produced cleanups of major sources of pollution.

The inspiration for this hearty environmental activism was a beanpole-thin, blue-jeaned guy who tramped around with a banjo singing old-fashioned folk songs. For decades, Pete Seeger energized hand-clapping, standing-room-only audiences of all ages in jam-packed high school auditoriums from White Plains to Montclair, in throngs at the annual Clearwater Festival/Great Hudson River Revival in Croton Point Park, and in a star-studded crowd at a 90th birthday bash cum Clearwater fundraiser in Madison Square Garden. Seeger’s career as the pied piper of environmental activism was capped by leading a television-watching nation in singing “This Land Is Your Land” at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. during the first inauguration celebration for President Obama.

“I’m more optimistic than I’ve ever been before,” Seeger said at an Earth Day fair at Columbia University’s Teachers College in April 2009, where he was the keynote speaker. His optimism was fueled by the computer-generated “information revolution,” he said, which has sped up the process of exchanging good ideas. “I now speak with people I never used to speak with—some on the left, some on the right. I think, I believe, we will see more miraculous things happen,” Seeger said. And then he launched into his trademark patter of story-telling songs with an activism hook. Among these chestnuts was Seeger’s infectious channeling of Martin Luther King Jr. and the hymn-based anthems of the civil rights movement. The refrain of a favorite tune goes:
Don’t say it can’t be done
The battle’s just begun

Another of Seeger’s infectious songs was inspired by a zero waste campaign in Berkeley, California, which led to this memorable lyric:
If it can’t be reduced, reused, repaired
Rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold
Recycled or composted
Then it should be restricted, redesigned
Or removed from production

Cheerfully singing even as his health declined, Pete Seeger died at 94 in January 2014. A World War II army veteran, he was an ardent peace activist as well as environmentalist. In his view, the two issues were connected. When the Clearwater campaign began, a major polluter was the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which flushed raw sewage into the Hudson River at its picturesque, historic site in the Hudson Highlands. In his war protest songs, Seeger prodded the Pentagon to clean up its contamination acts—bombing, shelling, napalming and use of Agent Orange and other chemical warfare—in Vietnam. Among other accomplishments, the innovative Clearwater campaign provided potent, popular incentive for Congress and President Richard Nixon to pass the 1972 Clean Water Act, which forced West Point and Hudson River cities, including New York City, to build upgraded sewage treatment facilities.

Singing and sailing up and down the Hudson, Pete Seeger encouraged people to enjoy working to change things for the better. He invited diverse people—rural people, city people, young people, older folks—to join him in an exciting project: Build and launch a replica of a 19th-century river sloop. Take volunteer crews and groups of school kids and community leaders out on the river and show them the pollution and where it’s coming from. Raise funds to hire scientific experts to testify at public hearings. Mobilize crowds of well-informed citizens to attend and speak at public meetings. Organize festivals where musicians, activists and audiences energize each other.

At Clearwater Festivals, concertgoers happily tramp through mud and rain to hear a Woodstock-style weekend of musical acts—including Arlo Guthrie, Richie Havens, Taj Mahal, the Hudson River Ramblers—and to check out the wares at scores of tents set up by activist organizations, handicraft makers and solar energy merchants. At a Clearwater Festival a few years ago, a group of New York City high school students proudly showed their newly learned skills in boat building and offered tours on the river in hand-made wood reproductions of classic sailboat tenders. Nearby, a spritely, eighty-ish Pete Seeger slipped into a rain-drenched tent with a banjo and joined in a round of sea shanties with a motley crew of bearded old salts, one of whom was wearing a battered Vietnam Veterans Against the War cap. With a tip of his hat to the activist vet, Pete Seeger was off to his next networking gathering, joining a stage full of folk song luminaries and belting out some more of his favorite tunes.

Behind the scenes, the famous folk singer also oversaw a continuous array of outreach expansions of evermore extensive Clearwater campaigns. These included, in recent years, its Next Generation Legacy Project and the Clearwater Center for Environmental Leadership, a youth education camping program in Beacon, NY, the riverside town where Pete Seeger lived with his wife, Toshi, his partner in organizing and in life since their marriage in 1943. Toshi Seeger died at 91 in 2013. Under their leadership, the Clearwater festivals, sloop sail rides and other outreach activities challenged people in the Hudson Valley to find solutions to seemingly intractable pollution.

The group’s stance in opposing a license renewal for the Indian Point nuclear power plant–its cooling towers and radiation chambers sucking in millions of gallons of Hudson River water and fish looming just upriver from the music festival site—sparked an investigative project by environmental students at Ramapo College of New Jersey, for instance. The student report concluded that an energetic energy conservation program combined with increased wind and solar power could replace the aging nuclear power plant and negate its potential dangers of radioactive contamination of the river and the region. Riding an increasingly popular environmental wave, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo successfully pressed last year for the closing of Indian Point’s two reactors by 2021. “The plant has grappled with 40 safety and operational events and unit shutdowns in the past five years,” The New York Times dryly noted.

Despite all the activism stirred up by Clearwater campaigns, there’s still a New York State advisory warning about eating fish from the Hudson River. But a major source of contamination was greatly reduced when General Electric dredged tons of PCBs from a heavily polluted stretch of the river north of Albany, a reluctant clean up done due to a decades-long battle by environmentalists. Manna Jo Greene, Clearwater’s environmental director during much of that battle, noted the campaign to clean up hazardous PCB pollution was “a classic grassroots effort, achieved in large part due to the tireless and scientifically-based work of past and present Clearwater staff members and volunteers, our collaborative partners in the Friends of the Clean

Hudson Coalition, and the hundreds of thousands of people who wrote letters, signed petitions and cared enough to take action.”
Pete Seeger’s obituary in The New York Times channeled the spirit of this down to earth folk singer: “Through the years, Mr. Seeger remained determinedly optimistic. ‘The key to the future of the world,’ he said in 1994, ‘is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known.’ ”

Jan Barry is an environmental journalist and poet whose books include A Citizen’s Guide to Grassroots Campaigns, Earth Songs: New & Selected Poems, Life after War & Other Poems. A Teaneck, NJ resident, he teaches Environmental Writing at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
Read More »
ANAXYRUS AMERICANUS LAZARUS – Judith C. Mueller

on January 30 | in Creative Nonfiction & Memoir | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

One spring Saturday in York County, Pennsylvania, my husband Fred picked up a five-gallon aluminum gas can he’d left on the asphalt by our garage over the winter. I was cleaning out the vegetable bed when I heard him call to me. Expecting to see some small wonder, of which our acre yields many, I dropped my rake and headed across the yard.

Flattened to the asphalt where the can had rested all winter lay a large, gummy-looking, desiccated toad, about the size of Fred’s palm. “How did it get under the can?” we wondered. It seemed impossible. After marveling with me for a while, Fred walked off to tinker with the tractor, leaving me to contemplate the grim expired thing, its corpse a shade of yellow-orange that I associated with the can’s gasoline. Though I saw no sign of a leak, I imagined the creature petrol-soaked, its bones dissolved, its muscles goo.

Perhaps to wash away the strange, sorry sight, to loosen the thing for removal, I fetched the garden hose and ran water over the flattened amphibian. Something happened, some shift, and I doubted my eyes. The animal was plumping, un-flattening, inflating with life as the water showered down.

The toad’s metamorphosis took only a few minutes. Not only did its splayed two-dimensional form morph into compact three-dimensionality; its color shifted from that sickly yellow-orange to speckled grey and brown, becoming recognizably Anaxyrus Americanus, the eastern American toad. Now animate, it hopped its way across the drive to the leafy debris beneath an old tulip tree. Amazed by what I witnessed, I followed it with the hose, dripping water on its back until it seemed to hunker against the flow, annoyed. It had had enough. Eventually I turned my attention back to the garden. Later, when I checked to see if the toad was still where I’d last seen it, it was gone.

The eastern American toad hibernates in winter, usually digging backwards to a depth below the frost line. This toad had hibernated under a gas can, it seems, well above the frost line during a winter that had seen a prolonged, hard freeze, and it had survived. It afforded me a rare sight—a toad’s emergence from hibernation, hastened by my showering garden hose.

Although the toad seems to have been safe from gasoline contamination after all, I associate its revivification with the remarkable unpredictability and resiliency of life, even against the threats posed by that most lethal species nature has known, homo sapiens, with its oil spills, drift nets, radioactive waste, fracking chemicals and, as it turns out, five gallon gas cans.

About a quarter of a mile from our acre, we have a daily and mighty reminder of that lethal power: the ailing southern reaches of the Susquehanna River flowing toward the similarly ailing Chesapeake Bay. Along the trail above the river in springtime we see dark vernal pools dense with BB-sized frog eggs and, later, boiling with tadpoles. Across the River, on the Lancaster County side, we see afternoon light on the Chiques Rock outcropping, a kind of miniature Half Dome. Sometimes we see turtles sunning on the rounded rocks that rise above the powerful flow, sometimes bald eagles floating over the Route 30 bridge, or herons and ducks by the river’s edge, though fewer than before.

For all its life and beauty, the river always carries a weight of loss for us. Melancholy accompanies us on our river walks. Twenty years ago, my husband would reel in small-mouth bass all the day long, most released, a few pan-fried. He hasn’t caught one in more than fifteen years. Just stopped trying. His bass boat sits idle in the carport.

Multiple stressors, including pharmaceuticals and agricultural run-off, have decimated the Susquehanna’s bass population. If you catch a rare smallmouth these days, it’s likely to have open sores and sexual deformities. For years, the Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, John Arway, has appealed to a succession of Governors and the state Department of Environmental Protection to designate the Susquehanna an impaired river. The designation comes with costs, of course. In 2015, the Pennsylvania DEP designated only the four southern-most miles of the river “impaired,” and those only with regard to PCB’s in catfish. They pointedly avoided and deferred action on the smallmouth bass problem. No will.

Last August we took visiting relatives up Chiques Rock for a magnificent view of the river. From high above, in the hot sun, we watched curtains of neon green algae sway in in the rocky shallows. Fed by agricultural nutrients, in some places algae choke the river. When I pointed them out to the new husband of a niece I hadn’t seen in years and mentioned the sad state of the river and the bass, I sensed what seemed like something stronger than indifference. He asked no questions, offered not so much as a “Hunh,” even turned a few degrees away from me. I stopped talking.

Fred reminds me in my hours of gloom: smallmouth bass were barely there a century ago; they swam into a new niche some time after the Susquehanna’s native trout died off from the warming and polluted waters left by the coal and logging industries of the previous century. An almost dead river rebounded. It became a new river, vibrant with new life. “It’ll happen again,” he tells me.

Indeed, rumor has it the Susquehanna smallmouth bass population has started to grow again. And crab numbers are rising in the Bay, though its oysters show no sign of recovery. The rise in bass and crab numbers owes much to two changes in agricultural practices in our region: the increased planting of cover crops for winter and the adoption of no-till farming, both of which stabilize the soil and reduce toxic run-off. Every farmer we know in our township, even the most conservative old-timer, has adopted no-till practices. “It just makes sense,” Jed tells me from behind the counter while I peruse the potatoes at Lehman’s farm stand. “You save a lot of water that way.” As bass numbers begin to creep up, some local anglers are pushing the state to lift a ban on bass fishing in the Susquehanna. Arway agrees that the numbers have risen slightly in the past few years but sounds a note of caution: the “young-of-the-year” smallmouth still show signs of disease; the river is still impaired, regardless of angler’s wishes or political will.

But the increase in numbers of bass makes clear what the geologic record shows again and again: given the chance, after devastation, life recovers. I cling to this fact. Finding solace in life’s regenerative capacity often requires taking the long view, however—longer than the timescales we naturally conceive and inhabit. Recovering biodiversity from the grave losses that characterize this age of ecocide will take more than a spring day or a season or even a lifetime to see. But this isn’t the first mass-extinction Earth has seen, I tell myself.

Since the election, with dispiriting news of swift action to weaken protections for air, water, species and places, future losses are sure to be even greater than what many of us had already expected with dread. It feels like someone lifted that can and, catching a glimpse of the toad, just slammed it back down again, maybe even piled on a few rocks for good measure, insisting with petulance, “Here I will rest my can!”

We must push those hands away, scatter those rocks, shower the revivifying waters to the extent that we are able. But the world will never “recover” exactly what was, what is. Trout will probably never repopulate the Susquehanna. Its smallmouth bass might finally go the same way. Just as their numbers start to rise, the new Board of Supervisors in our township has decided to repeal an ordinance requiring a buffer zone around rivers and streams, against many voices in protest. Old June Evans, erect, clear-eyed, formidable, came to every meeting with a binder full of facts. She stood and spoke. I watched and listened with something like awe. And when I spoke, I thought of June as much as anyone in that room. She seemed to know these lands for generations. Last week, she collapsed, a massive stroke: another face of nature’s unpredictability. I’m not the only one of this place who feels orphaned in her absence. I had hoped to know her better.

Still, the memory of that toad’s astonishing transformation, which turns out to be an ordinary thing for toads, soothes a bit my ongoing grief and worry. I imagine a warmish evening in early November when Fred put that five-gallon gas can down on the asphalt by the garage, not noticing an inconspicuous grey-brown creature resting there. Once the pressure lifts—if it lifts in time—life rebounds. Of course, things might have gone otherwise for that toad had Fred lifted the can who-knows-how-much later. Things go otherwise for countless creatures and systems the world over. Many an organism, pack, school, flock, herd, habitat, species will see no resurrection. In time, however—and probably much longer than I’d like—new life will emerge to crawl or slither or hop its way upon a new Earth.

Judith C. Mueller, teaches courses in literature and environmental studies at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster PA. Her essays have appeared in The Journal of Wild Culture and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, among other venues. She lives and writes in an edible forest near the Susquehanna River.
Read More »
THE SACRED GROVE – THE ART OF ANA FLORES

on January 10 | in Art & Photography | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

Ana Flores is a sculptor and ecologist. Her work is informed by how place and geography shape who we are. Her projects over the past three decades have taken the format of sculptural installations in galleries, museums and the outdoors, public art projects, private commissions, and park designs. These have been shown nationally and internationally and are included in private, corporate and institutional collections throughout the United States. Flores is the recipient of many grants and fellowships. In 2008 her innovative work in arts and ecology was brought to national attention when she became one of 40 leaders and the only artist to selected for a TogetherGreen Conservation Leadership Fellowship sponsored by the National Audubon Society. Most recently she worked as an artist in residence at Brown University at the Center for Slavery and Justice to create the installation and exhibit entitled “Makers Unknown/Material Objects and the Unslaved” This spring of 2018 she is the first Schumann Fellow/ Visiting artist for the Environment at the University of New Haven’s Lyme Academy School of Fine Arts. She is the principal of Earthinform Studio located in Charlestown, RI. For more on her work visit: www.earthinform.com or www.poetryofthewild.com

Read More »
PORTLANDISHNESS – Michael Montack

on January 7 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

= San Francisco
÷ Brooklyn
x Vermont

Or …

It’s walking your adult miniature goat Jezebelle
down the street in the drizzle—umbrella-less—
to pick up your favorite direct-trade organic
El Salvadorian Kilimanjaro-Kenya Process blend
special ordered for that evening’s Cycling Club soirée.

It’s chit-chatting with the barista politely
about a potential barter—your goat cheese
for his chickens’ eggs—even if you’re steaming
because he’d forgotten (again!) to place your order.

But it’s inviting him to consider joining the club anyway
although he hasn’t biked since becoming a Buddhist
(for reasons you don’t entirely follow).

And his declining. Because, well … His girlfriend’s band
has a fundraiser gig that night, all proceeds going to
the Indigenous-Eco-Sativa-Redwood Sanctum Foundation.

Then it’s accidentally leaving behind Jezebelle’s poop bag
between the register and the kosher vegan ‘What’s Up-cakes’
and his safe-keeping it until your next visit (five days later)
in case it was a sample for I dunno … Jezebelle’s Vet?

Michael Montlack is the author of the poetry book Cool Limbo (NYQ Books) and the editor of the Lambda Finalist essay anthology My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (University of Wisconsin Press). Recently his poetry appeared in North American Review, Barrow Street, Hotel Amerika, Tupelo Quarterly, Poet Lore, The Cortland Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. He lives in NYC.
Read More »

TWO POEMS – Michael Fallon

on January 2 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

SHRINKING ISLAND (Assateague)

Looking Inland, beneath

A rising vapor of cumulous,

An agony of trees.

Beyond the killing tide,

Low dunes. Here,

The mosquito is queen,

The island a changeling,

Creature of wind, surf,

Currents, undertows;

A flow of sand and shells,

Of winged and rooted things.

FOUR HORSES

A wild blue horse is galloping,

Out of the sun and down the green hill.

Everyone inhales its sweet breath;

The beautiful blue horse with a cloud for a heart,

With a stride wide as noon,

Leaps over malls, power stations,

Parking lots, the wandering stains of rivers,

Over wheat fields, plains of corn,

Cities, highways, and towns;

The red snake of cars smoking

Out of the valleys.

No one looks up through the thickening air,

At the pale blue horse, sun

Set for an eye, as it flies over

The last of the trees,

The darkening mountains,

And under the earth.

The thundering white horse,

The gray, forever

Chasing its tail,

The black one to come.

Michael Fallon is a poet and essayist and a Senior Lecturer in English at UMBC where he has taught creative writing, literature, and composition since 1985. Poems have appeared in the American Scholar, The Antietam Review, The Potomac review, Sin Fronteras, the Oyez Review, and in many other literary magazines. Essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in the Maryland English Journal, The Loch Raven Review, the New England Review and other magazines. Fallon was a winner of 2 Maryland State Arts Council Fellowships in Poetry in 1988 and 2009 and is the author of 3 collections of poetry, A History of the Color Black published by Dolphin-Moon Press in 1991; Since You Have No Body, winner of the Plan B Press Poetry Chapbook Competition and published in 2011, and The Great Before and After published by BrickHouse Books in 2011. Recently, Fallon’s nonfiction essay, The Other Side of Silence, was selected by lithub.com, The Best of the Literary Internet and posted on its website. His book of poems, House of Forgotten Names, was accepted by Salmon Press of Ireland.
Read More »

TWO POEMS – Simon Perchik

on October 24 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

Empty and the sand
follows you along Broadway
as if some dampness

was left for shoreline
moves the IRT up
then down the way clammers

use their feet to rake
–you walk on tracks
careful not to miss

while the train underneath
breaks open its doors
all at once –-no, you don’t jump

nothing like that
–these shells are the same
the mad feel for

though their sweat takes the place
water grieves into
and their mouths are the same

let you yell down
and not a mark inside your body
to call you by.

This cup grows nothing
and though you add more water
it boils away, half

tighter and tighter, half
wants you to get some sleep
has become your darling

found a home for your lips
used to fever, smoke
and the slow climbing turn

that stays moist
waits for the rim to cling
left open and shaking.

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is The Osiris Poems published by box of chalk, 2017. For more information, including free e-books, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.
Read More »

THREE P0EMS – Marisol Baca

on August 15 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

SPIRAL

Three spirals bound

to one another

Three sisters

At the edge of a stone

what is the cosmos but a radial movement outward?

to touch the fabric of one

to see the astral projection of their other

to forget for one moment

that it is only a projection

Spiral is not spire

Not arrows

Not shields

Not shells

It is a movement

the circles inside the corpus of a great tree

A slice of granite

A loop of river-bone

Our family of memory

The lost reflections of our arms and hands and our cheeks and our eyes

the reflection at the edge of the mirror

The sound of a voice as it travels up from a basement

into the drawing room

absent of folk—absent of fire

a cold dream the dark earth has of clouds and air

The spire, the sword,

embrace all ways

to enter

touch the life force

touch that which only momentarily scrapes up

against

spiral that bleeds a shaft of light

as dust in a ray of sun floats in a doorway

THE FLOODING

after Gerald Stern

On all these parched paths, in all this tattered landscape

and arid wind and sapless woods

I have never seen a drought

which made the ground so cracked

nor heard “Flores Negras” the way I did

in 1980 in that cherry tree house

on Sarah Lane, nor sang as I did

then, my stars all flickering, my hair all singing

my mother full of teeth, my father holding his

voice out laughing, doing the dance

of guitar and spirits, the sound of the strings, half cry

half chuckle, the world at last a river of ice melt

the three of us meandering and rippling,

as eager as the flash flood as if we rushed towards unknown—in 1980—

in New Mexico, strange thirsty New Mexico, desert

of the Rio Grande, an hour away

my aunt’s house—

the overwhelming course of birth

oh God of rivers, oh swiftly running God.

VELELLA VELELLA

It was the sight of death we saw first.

The long silent beach and the warm carcasses of the jellies—

thousands of them—camped—waiting for the end.

Little cellophane boats entangled in kelp.

The sail-like appendages had the suggestion of sliced ginger.

The clump-float was once buoyant on the water.

Some became nests for sand fleas.

Some lay in a pool of salt and brine.

Their clear sails shivering against the day’s breeze.

Some piled,

letting their color leak into the sand below,

a crackle of blue fire and purple ooze.

And some still sailing in the afternoon tide—

humming to themselves,

drifting songs for zooids.

How long did they wander?

Their hollow tentacles were ghost hairs

collecting the floating life beneath.

Slowly they maundered into death, guided by the wind.

My father filled his pockets with them

and walked along the ocean throwing them back.

Marisol Baca is the author of Tremor, a full length collection of poems forthcoming from Three Mile Harbor Press. She was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and grew up around generations of family in an old adobe house with a horno in the back that her father built. Her family later settled in Fresno, California. She grew up within a family of educators, artists, and writers, and at an early age began writing poems and songs. Marisol received her bachelors in English from Fresno State University and won the Andres Montoya poetry scholarship prize. She received a fellowship from Cornell University, and in 2006, she received her Master of Fine Arts. While at Cornell, she won the Robert Chasen poetry award for her poem, Revelato. Currently, Marisol is an English professor at Fresno City College. She lives in Fresno with her husband in a house in the center of town. She continues to write and teach, and is busy working on her second book. Her poetry has been published in Riverlit, Shadowed: An Anthology of Women Writers, Asentos Review, among others publications.
Read More »

NEELA: BHOPAL,1984 – Chaya Bhuvaneswar

on August 15 | in Fiction | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

You have always trusted the forest. Here, danger could be seen and is known. The floor of the forest is layered with cool leaves that can be used to cover up faces. You’re lying here, laughing and out of breath; your brothers are lying beside you. The first one to move will be tickled by the rest, who will pretend to be monsters and fake-growl with the hunger of thin ghosts. All of you watch for the glint of teeth and the dazzling coils of predators.

The dense brush holds tigers, snakes, and water in a tiny creek that tastes fresh after the rain – your youngest brother knows the best places. The edge of the pretend forest, a neglected city garden, is where you and your brothers purchase time by tickling each other, or running and scrambling over rocks. As if the four of you never had to work. As if your father never accepted a packet of rupees and four quintals of wheat, one for each of you. As if he never told you when you were nine, Neela, go. As if he didn’t stop you and your brothers, including the youngest one, age five, from holding onto your mother’s sari, from nearly tearing it off her body when they wouldn’t let go.

Your hands could be washed of the clay, of the hard coal, and every day, your fingers moved more quickly than the legs of men who carried finished pyramids, fresh bricks for the furnace up and down steps. In summer, you and your brothers first broke coal, then walked without bending, as you learned to do, into the brick kiln, cloth covering your mouths from the smoke, December was joy and coldness, the fumes of the kiln more bearable when you could pour water into your mouths, which was not so scarce then. And after working, you and your brothers knew that you could leap over everything jagged you saw. In seconds, you could place many yards between the intimation of a threat, its small or large rustle, and yourself. You could easily outrun strangers’ hands, and in December, rejoice at less heat. Walking outside, into the kiln and back, then sleeping on the ground of the shanty, was still better than working in the factory.

Early one morning, while coming back from bringing a vessel of water, you notice a pile of bright folded cotton cloths on the ground. Because of the weight you carry, you carefully make your way toward it, even though you want to run.

December. Your birthday.

Maybe a pavaday from home – a dream. But all three half-naked little boys, the brothers who’d once thrown stones at palaces with you, or come at you with sticks for swords, are sleeping on the ground near the shanty. The angles of their arms and necks are not right. It’s as if they tried to escape.

Still hoping they’re playing a game, you set down the water, and tickle them. You listen for breath, but hear nothing. You’ve understood the danger too late. Eyes burning now, you run. To the place that you know as the forest. You reach there, stumbling and unsteady, but are forced to stop because you can’t see anymore, and are afraid.

Once, when you and your brothers were caught trying to run away from the brick kiln, the debt master who’d bargained with your father, punished all of you with no water for a day. How light your body had felt then, how small, how free, as if you had traveled in some unseen way to your mother.

December is cool and mornings usually feel fresh, but not today. Your lungs are scorched. Not for another thirty years, or maybe a hundred, will the water and land be safe again, as pure and unpolluted as they were hours before. Before the air burned and became a hateful thing.

Eight-thousand years ago, children huddled with their mothers in cool caves. Those caves are hidden deep in a forest, miles from here, and would have been so much safer to settle in, than shanty towns around the factory in Bhopal city, than the insignificant, easily-penetrated houses of corrugated metal and scavenged plywood. The walls of those shacks are sheets of plastic with small holes to breathe, set at the height of small children who are unable to refrain from peeking out.

All three of your brothers, limber and clever little boys, were gifted at nosing out delectable refuse, edibles in the garbage. Even though they nicknamed you Neelagai—antelope–for your thin quick legs–when they pretended to hunt you, none of them could find you here.

Other hunters have found you at the edge of your forest: methyl isocyanate, fleet-footed mercury and Sevin, the most experienced killer creeping like ground brush.

You remember rope, being pulled up into the kiln, then told to walk on bricks with your light feet since you could walk without breaking them. Now instead of rope, it feels like snakes coiling around your chest. Or dense vines tightening at your throat.

Water. You need water for the burning thirst, the invisible thief of your air. Your chest hurts. You push out poison air, but breath in more.

The death toll among Bhopal’s shanty-town families is estimated by the number of shrouds that were ordered. Twenty-thousand is a paltry number for memorials, excluding families who didn’t have money for shrouds. Fathers who didn’t receive reparation for dead children. Fathers and older brothers were coughing too much to bargain, their eyes watering. After the burning, many eyes turned sightless. Corneas clouded; ulcers branching like thin cacti.

Cactus are plants that you’ll never travel to deserts to see. You and your brothers saw some once in a comic book you found in the garbage. A small man with red beard and a large hat, standing next to a cactus. Your youngest brother laughed and laughed when you tried to imitate that frowning man.

You die knowing about your brothers, but not about the numbers of the many dead.

In death, you look like the image of a young girl, asleep after a bath, one of the emperor’s miniatures that was engraved hundreds of years ago by artisans so skilled that when they finished crafting monuments, Emperor Jahangir ordered them blinded.

The forest can be trusted to absorb you.

All this was caused by someone used to ordering something to be done somewhere else, the back of his head under a beam of light from a window that has been opened on a summer day, allowing the Houston air into the office for a few seconds while the air conditioning kicked in.

In flower pots near the entrance, some of them propped up by red bricks, there are bright-red small carnations, grown cheap in India with help from pesticides and fertilizers manufactured there, also for cheap, gotten with illegible signatures secured by government payments. In another corner, stands a Pac-Man arcade game of blinking lights and neon colors, more predators and prey. It is a game that you would have loved to look at, Neela, that you would have loved to play.

Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a practicing physician and writer whose work has appeared in Nimrod, Bangalore Review, Blue Lake Review and the Asian American Literary Review, and received a Henfield Transatlantic Writing Award as well as a Glimmer Train Honorable Mention and scholarship to Squaw Valley. She is at work on a novel and lives in the US with her family.
Read More »

RIB-CAGED BIRD – Laura Coe Moore

on July 16 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

I failed to remember
the swoop and swallow
of wings now sweeping
the bottom of the cage,
fluttering against the boney bars,
with no explanation offered.

How long does the mouth
have to be open
to eat a degree in ornithology?
How long do the eyes
shut out the world as
new ones open inside?

Some might say it’s
my romance with flight,
training my muscle to spasm,
a wisdom gained by pecking
at things, just long enough
before leaving.

Has it always been a part of me,
quietly sleeping in the dark,
until the skin was removed
that covered it?

Most of the time it seems at rest
until of course it isn’t. When
trapped it panics, beating
my lungs with feathers
that take it nowhere.

If I press my fingers hard
on the spot where all the
trouble begins, does it know
I’m trying to let it out, or
taking the pulse of a ghost?

I wonder if it’s always been there,
an egg in a warm interstitial
space between bone and muscle,
heart and lung, waiting to be born?

Thinking it might have been
there at birth offers a seed
of comfort. Thinking that it was not I
who inhaled it from the air,
or gulped it down like a ravenous beast.

What would happen if flesh and bones
conspired to escape? Surely
the screaming alone would say,
I am not your nest.

Laura Coe Moore lives on Whidbey Island in Washington and is inspired by the isolated rural nature of life. Her poetry and visual art make connections between the individual human interior and the wild external world. Her work has recently appeared in Blast Furnace and she currently has work in The Coe Review.
Read More »

THREE POEMS – Marge Piercy

on July 12 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

HOTTEST SUMMER ON RECORD HERE

Too many eggplants and no rain
in past years we raised just a few
the parsnips withered in the heat
at least there are no mosquitoes

gypsy moths ate the trees bare
December in June. Frass rained
down on us instead of water
at night it sometimes fooled us.

mice sneak into the house looking
for water. Grass is dry dandruff
hard earth the sun pounds like a drum
This summer sucks

the energy from us, muscles
limp as the sagging leaves
senators debate climate change
the trees know all about it.

WE THINK WE ARE LESS FOOLISH

“All things are full of gods”is attributed to Thales, an early
Greek philosopher who was the first to predict eclipses.

Perhaps if we could just believe
this, we’d respect the earth more.
We would not frack or poison her
soil and air or set her water on fire.

in general, we lack respect
even for each other let alone
cats and dogs we execute a million
at a time in so called shelters.

We would not poison bees
so agribusiess could make more
money. We’d shut down nuclear
radiation plants before they shut

us down. We’d behave with an eye
to future generations How circum-
spect we’d be with our huge waste.
All things are far more godly than us.

THE WEATHER CHANNEL FAILS US

Longing for rain, wishing for it:
when the wind swishes through dry
leaves at night I imagine showers.

A month of drought, brown grasses,
even the marsh reeds tipped half
the perennials seared to stalks.

Dunn’s Run is just a trickle between
banks like sore gums. Pollen loads
the air and we sneeze convulsively,

humans, dogs and cats all, even
foxes. Crickets like an amateur
orchestra of slightly offkey piccolos

flourish but birds are thirsty too.
The air smells burnt on parched
mornings. Dust’s our changed climate.

Copyright 2017 Marge Piercy
Box 1473, Wellfleet MA 02667
hagolem@c4.net

Poet, novelist, and essayist, Marge Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, on March 31, 1936. She won a scholarship to the University of Michigan and was the first member of her family to attend college. She subsequently earned a master’s degree from Northwestern University. She has published numerous books of poetry, including Made in Detroit (Knopf, 2015), The Crooked Inheritance (Knopf, 2013), and The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010 (Knopf, 2012). She is also the author of a collection of essays on poetry, Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt (1982), and many novels, including Sex Wars: A Novel of Guilded Age New York (William Morrow, 2006). Piercy is dedicated to exploring the interstices of ideology and aesthetics by way of Marxist, feminist, and environmentalist strains of thought. “To name,” she writes, “is not to possess what cannot / be owned or even known in the small words / and endless excuses of human speech.” She edited the poetry anthology Early Ripening: American Women Poets Now (1988), and is currently the poetry editor of Tikkun. In 1990 she collaborated with Nell Blaine, a painter, on a book entitled The Earth Shines Secretly: A Book Of Days, which featured Piercy’s poetry and Blaine’s artwork. Piercy lives with her husband, writer Ira Wood, in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.
Read More »

THREE POEMS – Paul Genega

on July 12 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

FOR A FRACKING GOOD TIME

There is a general consensus among scientists
that the spike in Oklahoma’s earthquake activity
has been triggered by disposal wells used to dispose
of waste from oil and gas drilling operations.

Is their seismology
bigger than yours

do they get more
kick and buckle

out of earth, wider
smiles from fissures

stronger roll
and rain of rock?

Send today for
a no fault solution

to your state’s shame
Scott Pruitt’s

Oklahoma
Earthquake Kit.

Guaranteed to put
tremors back in

the humdrum
quicken what had

slackened, give your
bucks a bang. No

muss or fuss to cuss –
you just add water.

IN MIGRATION

Swyer Preserve
Stuyvesant, New York

Inside mud skin
heavy winter

run-off quickens
the creek into froth

Wet-footed
forest offering up

skunk cabbage
anemones

the seductive
blush of new vines

A phoebe calls
from a budding

alder where
one year ago

today stretched
over the sibilance

I held a wake
on the water

and let fly
my sister’s ashes

DOG AUBADE

The doe scissors
away from us

you, as always
a yard or two ahead

free of the lead
gay tail waving

Not so shy
these deer fly

orbiting our heads
like hungry halos

I swat
You sprint

At the far end
of the field

a fawn slips
through silver birch

The sun rises
A welt rises

Crushed flies
stud my matted hair

Paul Genega has published five chapbooks and five full-length collections of poetry. His sixth full-length collection, Sculling on the Lethe, will be launched by Salmon Poetry (Ireland) at the AWP Convention in Tampa, March, 2018. Over a forty-plus year career, his poetry has garnered numerous awards, including the “Discovery Award,” five Pushcart Prize nominations and an individual fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his work has appeared in leading magazines and journals such as New York Quarterly, Poetry, the New York Times, The Nation, and The Paterson Literary Review. As a playwright, he has co-authored two works with Emmy Award winning composer/filmmaker Patricia Lee Stotter: Haven’t We Met?, which was presented at the Writers Theater in New York, and Paging Doctor Faustus, which is currently being readied for workshop production. In 2014, Genega assumed directorship of Three Mile Harbor Press upon the death of its founding editor Antje Katcher. He taught for many years at Bloomfield College, New Jersey where he founded the creative writing program and served as Chair of Humanities. His legacy continues at Bloomfield through the Genega Endowed Scholarships in Creative Writing.
Read More »

A PORTRAIT – Aja Monet

on June 27 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

for Carrie

grace is a stretch you walk
sitting or kneeling after a stroll,
an exhale at a sanctuary of sounds
the string, the harp, the woodwind quartet,
a rhythm section plays for you
a cacophony cuddled in a chest
arms or wings blazing a poetic field
of tone, the forlorn sound of a trumpet
a constant refrain of resist
all daughters in movement
the gods of grief
a stream visited by wringing hands
at the foot of thirst, a wild mare on wounded knee
tending to self
not knowing to accept or let go
sister in the pews,
fanning, prayers, holding space
a skirt tail between fingers
overlooking, shredding,
whatever frets the eye

A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, Aja Monet received her BA in Liberal Arts and was awarded the The Andrea Klein Willison Prize for Poetry to recognize undergraduate students whose work in poetry “effectively examines relationships among women, especially in the context of justice for everyone.” She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011. Co-founder of Smoke Signals Studio, Aja Monet currently lives in Little Haiti, Miami and dedicates her time merging arts & culture in community organizing with the Dream Defenders and Community Justice Project. She spearheads an arts & activism initiative, “Voices: Poetry for the People” that provides free poetry workshops for grassroots leaders & organizers in South Florida. As well she continues to organize artist delegations, cultural, and political exchanges with communities at home and abroad. Aja Monet was a featured speaker at the Women’s March on Washington, D.C. in 2017 where she delivered the title poem, my mother was a freedom fighter from her first book, a collection of poems available of Haymarket Books.
Read More »

WAVES, WHILE SLEEPING – Rachel Eliza Griffiths

on June 25 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

Carry me waking across the world
where, in Nice, strawberries ripen
in a wooden cart. The morning yawns
azure beyond the fruit sellers.
The Mediterranean beckons
to fishermen & stones.
Pleasure bursts into froth,
white & cold enough to drink.
I’ll go everywhere. Why not? Kyoto,
Rome, Paris, Port-Au-Prince.
Back in Brooklyn, a woman murmurs
in her bed while I feast. What we taste
in sleep we carry back to our bodies,
lingering in the hunger the world
gives us. Each day like an eyelid,
a mouth still & open, wanting
oranges, earth, & strong coffee.

RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of three collections of poetry including Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry & Prose), which was selected for the 2012 Inaugural Poetry Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn. Please visit: www.rachelelizagriffiths.com.
Read More »

CONFESSION – Chelsea Dingman

on June 23 | in Poetry | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

Like you, I am built out of sky:
light & air I use to mend
the bones I owned before your body roamed
free & I made of myself this silence
large enough to multiply
in my womb where our daughter
died when I was afraid to be touched
by water or anything else. She was pretty,
wasn’t she? Our daughter, not your excuse
for vanishing. Her ribs, like folded wings.
I should’ve known faith is like a father.
Here. Not here. You are like the god
I called when the cramps came. You raise
the forests where sacrifices are the trees.
Not a baby. Not human need. I, myself, am
alien now. Something not quite realized.
A sentence missing its verbs. The blue
-bellied birds are back at the door, the sky
burned from their feathers. In the fields
of my body, a pond. So I may know
how to be full when consequence is a sea
-son. The sky refusing rain. The months
we’ve pretended to know ourselves.
But what is grief? A noun we can’t hold
with our hands? A Hallelujah? o ghost,
o mother-grave—, Hallelujah.

Chelsea Dingman is a Canadian citizen and Instructor at the University of South Florida. Her first book, Thaw, won the National Poetry Series and is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press (2017). She has work forthcoming in The Sycamore Review (Winner of the Wabash Prize), The Southeast Review (Winner of the Gearhart Poetry Contest), Southern Humanities Review (Finalist for the Auburn Witness Prize), Arcadia (Finalist for the Dead Bison Editor’s Prize), Ninth Letter, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, and Gulf Coast, among others.
Read More »

ROSES ALONG THE RIVER – Dan Gemmer

on June 22 | in Fiction | by admininfin8 | with No Comments

I don’t like to drive out here anymore. I hate to see what’s happening to the land. Most of the marshes and trees and family farms are gone. Flimsy houses built with particle board and warped plastic siding take on names like Bay Side Acres, River View Manor, and Ocean Park, to validate their presence. The closer to the river and the bay, the more expensive they become. In the bulldozed fields, with stump fires of the last of the trees still burning, signs say new homes from the low 400s and up. The prices go up as the properties encroach closer to the water. The homes perched next to the river are shown by appointment only.

The storm last autumn washed most of the waterfront homes away. The contractors are already rebuilding. They walk through the debris dressed in comical green rubber boots and yellow hard hats. They wear the uniform of white, sweat-soaked shirts; clip-on ties; and rolled-up sleeves, which are supposed to signify the determination to dig in and get things done. The contractors tell the prospective buyers that the storm was a once in a century event. “This will never happen again in your lifetime,” they say. “You’ll be dead by the time the next one blows in.” They tell the buyers that they’re going to rebuild Bay Side Acres better than ever. They tell them they’re going to tame the tides. “We’re going to build a seawall, as high as it takes. Nature can foam at the barricades. The gulls can circle the lapping tide, scavenging the fish smashed against the wall. It’s all in your brochure, page seven.”

The buyers follow the contractors through the muck with black, numb feet; feeling for their toes inside their boots. The biting flies follow the stumbling feast, swarming in to sip the red nectar they smell beneath the peeling pink skin. The flies dive for the legs and neck, chewing down into the flesh. The sores they leave behind run and will not heal.

I was on my way to Mrs. Lucas’s house. She called me and said she had a list of things she wanted done. She asked me if today would be okay and hung up before I could give her my answer. My answer would have been yes. My answer is always yes to Mrs. Lucas.

Her farmhouse looked the same as all the remaining rundown farmhouses left in the county. It was an ancient colonial with a rusted tin roof and peeling white slat siding. The yellowed curtains were drawn against the sun. Big wooden poles strained under the weight of the sagging porch. Limbs and rooted plants protruded from the clogged gutters. Pits were gouged into the soil at the corners of the house where the water ran off. Green algae-caped frogs hopped from the edges of the puddles when they saw my shadow. Mockingbirds were building a nest in a nearby bramble rose. Vines grew up onto the roof and into the chimney. Weedy, uncultivated fields stretched out to the river a half mile away.

I can remember when the house was a showplace, blended in an oasis of native flowers, manicured shrubs and roses, and a soft, soft emerald rolling lawn. The cultivated fields were a panorama of rippling wheat, soybeans, and barley. White clover pushed out of the seams of the soil, blooming into a downy white mass, speckled and diffuse behind a brown blur of honeybees.

I took my boots off on the porch and went inside.

The kitchen looked nothing like I remembered. Dropped food and broken dishes littered the floor. The odor of mustiness and incontinence was settling in like the smell of decay at the edge of a swamp. The ceiling was bulging in places from an unrepaired roof leak. The crimson flowers in the wallpaper were hazed over like amber fossils. An old glass slag lamp hung down over Mrs. Lucas, casting a bronze spotlight over her. She held her left arm in a crook against her body to control the tremor. The dangling hand writhed in the air blindly, purposeless, like a crab tangled in a net. Her face drooped and the eye was shut on the side that had the stroke.

“My children are coming home next week. All of them at the same time. They said they want to talk to me about something. This means they’re up to something. Little children do sneaky things they don’t think parents notice. Hiding cookies, hiding candy, telling little lies. They think they get away with things until they get caught. They look surprised when they do. How did she know, they think. I had everything planned, no one saw me, no one heard me, nobody noticed. I always told them I had an eye in the back of my head. I told them I had antennas out all the time to detect mischief. I never told them that when I was young, I tried everything they did and other things they hadn’t even thought of.”

“Big children do sneaky things in a different way. The other day, out of the blue, I got a call from Linda, saying she’s coming to visit. She said she hasn’t seen me in a while, is next week okay? I say: ‘Sure, I guess. I haven’t seen you for a while either’ (since you drove off with my bronze lamp in the middle of the night), ‘look forward to seeing you.’ I told her that, since my stroke, I might need a hand to take care of some chores and heavy housework. ‘Bring some elbow grease. Sorry you missed the funeral. See you soon.’ Linda got a little scared about the elbow grease thing. She always hated hard work and couldn’t stand to sweat. She spent her whole life scheming to get out of things, and she was goddamn good at it. I figured she must really want to see me about something, willing to take a risk of sweeping and dusting and all. Then, I get a call from Mark, a few days later, saying that he suddenly remembered how beautiful spring is in this part of the country, and he wanted to drop by next week. I tell him sure. ‘Sure, why not. It’s been three or four years since I saw you. I know you’re sorry you missed Sara’s funeral. I know you had a once in a lifetime chance to close a deal in Hong Kong or Japan, or someplace like that. I wouldn’t want you to miss out on that. Once in a lifetime deals don’t come along everyday.’ Mark’s a funny little turd. He’s always traveling around the world on business trips that happen to pop up right around the time you need him for something. And then David calls. David was always the sneakiest one. When he got caught doing something bad as a child, he always teared up, and told me how sorry he was and looked up into my eyes and told me that he loved me. Then he hugged me around the waist. He knew as long as he hugged me there would be a reprieve from punishment, like a beaten boxer tying up an opponent in the ring. David says: ‘You know Marge’ (third wife, I think) ‘and I were talking last night and we had a thought.’ (Not likely) ‘We were thinking we haven’t seen Ma since, well, who knows when and we said, why not stop in and see her next week. So, we decided we’re going to fly in and rent a car and drive down and see how you’re doing.’ I said: ‘Sure, I’m always glad to see my kids so I don’t forget what they look like. By the way, your brother and sister will be here too.’ David says: ‘Well for crying out loud,what a coincidence. How about that!’ (Yes, how about that.) I say: ‘You can stop on the way and pick up a nice bouquet of Sara’s favorite flowers for her grave.’ He didn’t say anything. I know that David has no idea that Sara loved the wild pink rambling rose. Sara used to pick me a bouquet every spring. None of the kids have any idea of this. They’re going to call each other and try to figure this out and end up with hothouse roses or mums. None of the kids have any idea of anything; like children, still. Transparent as baby fish in a tank. You can look right through them and see the shit inside working its way through the intestines and down and out the bottom. These little fish think their pale baby scales can hide what’s inside. My scales are hard and plated like a gar’s. Nobody can see what’s inside of me anymore.”

“My kids are coming to try to force me into a home. Since my stroke they think I’m pretty well done with living on my own. Maybe I am, but this is my choice to make. I made up my mind that I’m not going to a nursing home. This is my home until I die.”

“The kids will tell me all that matters is my health and safety. ‘We want you to be safe, Mom, near doctors, near nurses, near other people your age. It’s dangerous to be unattended, old and alone trapped in a house at the end of a dirt road; out in the middle of nowhere. You should be in a Home roaming the halls in a gray pack with the others of your kind, hobbling toward the scent of food in the dining hall, shuffling toward the bingo hall. You shouldn’t be alone.'”

‘Oh, and the little matter about the property and the house and all that stuff. You don’t have to worry about it. We’ll take care of all this. We can lift the burden off your hunched little shoulders. We’ll handle things for you, Mom. We had some papers drawn up. A power of attorney it’s called. Just sign here, sign over here and initial here. Done and done. This will allow us to help you to make decisions for disposal of property, bank accounts, personal loot, and to pitch all the junk we think is junk. Way down in the fine print it says if Mom becomes incapacitated we can take over making all her decisions for her. The money has to go for her needs, of course, and used according to her wishes. That’s what it says. The leftover money we can gift to ourselves. We can sell the property if Mom isn’t in her right mind. That’s what it says. It says what we say it says.’

“Property means the land. I’ve had more than one developer sniffing around offering me money for the place. The offers keep getting higher and higher. One developer said he wants to subdivide and build condos on the river. City people love to come to condos on the weekends and watch the river rip into the tide like two saw blades working against each other. He told me last year they wanted to put docks in for the big white fancy boats. The boats are alway big and fancy and white. People used to name their boats after ladies, like an advertisement for a lifelong love. Now they think up names like Knot On-Call, Aquaholic and Knot Working: Names that let everybody know they’re on vacation on a boat they love away from a job they hate.”

“The first thing people think about old people is that they’re confused, deaf and stupid. They talk to you like a baby in a big loud voice. How do they figure that you grew up and took care of yourself and everyone else for all those years? Why would they think that you turned stupid and confused toward the end? You can’t watch a movie or TV show anymore without seeing some older person acting stupid and confused and not being able to tell their ass from their elbow. Some young person is always sitting there talking slow and loud right into the face of the dear old soul: ‘How… Are…You…Feeling …Today Honey? “Do…You…Want…Some…Nice…Jello? “Do…You…Remember…It’s…Time…For…Your…Bath? Hello. Hello. Hello. Do you remember anything at all? Is there anybody home? Is there anybody still inside that crusty noggin?’ Knock, Knock. Who’s there? Nothing. Nothing who? Just nothing. Nothing. Nothing.”

“On TV, when news is slow, meaning no important natural or man made disasters, and no dead Hollywood stars to report, the anchors sometimes do human interest stories. The young, bronzed stubble-faced man and the young blonde lady gush over the news of somebody turning a hundred years old. ‘It’s hard to believe she’s a hundred,’ says the blond cherub. ‘Yeah,’ says the man talking directly at the blonde cherub’s breasts, ‘she doesn’t look a day over ninety-five, ha, ha.’ Sometimes they interview the centenarians. ‘What’s your secret?’ ‘Secret for what?’ ‘For not being dead.’ ‘Oh, that. Just drink a glass of red wine for dinner. Helps build the blood.’ Another centenarian says: ‘no alcohol, ever; it destroys the nerves, gives you the palsy.’ Over the years, you hear all sorts of long life secrets from centenarians: ‘no tobacco, soots up the body like inside a chimney’; ‘a cigar a day, relaxes the nerves’; ‘plenty of vegetables’; ‘fish three times a week’; ‘no red meat’; ‘lots of red meat’; ‘olive oil’; ‘greens’; ‘getting up early’; ‘going to bed late’; ‘staying thin’; ‘staying plump’. Anybody can live to be a hundred. Just follow the rules. When Father Time comes around, just say no. Hide if you have to. Walk away. Run. Run faster.”

“The secret is that there is no secret. The truth is Mr. Death is a fallen angel on work release from Heaven, picking up trash with a nail-tipped stick along the highway of life. Maybe you weren’t noticed on the first pass, or even the second pass, but sooner or later here he comes along with the nail-tipped stick and into the maw of the black plastic bag you go. The flaps are tied shut.”

“Young people love to get over on old people. They’re secretly scared of the blue-veined, liver-spotted shrunken gnomes roaming the earth. They don’t like to be reminded of what they might see in the mirror some day if they manage to stay alive. They tell everybody that the old folks are senile and can’t think straight anymore. ‘She’s so sweet, a cutie pie, a dear, happy to be happy, and not to understand a goddamn thing.’ Old people know this isn’t true, but they can’t get out and about and tell people. Old folks are sometimes helpless and afraid. They press their panicked faces up against the glass in the nursing home day rooms like seals trapped under the ice in the Arctic. The weaker they get, the more desperate they get. They bargain away everything they have to keep out of a nursing home. When everything is sold off, they go into homes anyway. Paupers in a day room waiting for the rosy-cheeked keeper to tend them. ‘Hello, dear, I’m here to feed you pudding.’ Then I’ll wait and change your baby-shit diaper; then I’ll scrub every square inch of your sagging, parchment skin and put you into bed. And, lastly, here come the meds. Here come the meds! In little corrugated cups. Blue is a water pill; red is a heart pill; pink is for blood pressure; yellow is for sleeping; other colors are for other things. None of this is true, you know. We dye sugar pills like Easter eggs at the nurse’s station and shake them up in a specimen jar. Pot luck, dear. Take your pills, nighty-night, go to sleep, Goodbye. I’m off on my date, lusty, ripe and primped. If you’re still here in the morning, I’ll shake you awake and bend down, and talk into your face through a big toothy smile. ‘Good morning, dear. Good morning, honey.'”

“Bo, Sara’s only child, is a lawyer now. We helped put him through school. A lot of people around here at the time didn’t like that. Not many black children went to college back then. Bo was a sickly child, and we tended him together, day and night. We took turns nursing him. I was so young and afraid. I didn’t know if he was going to make it. I didn’t know if Sara and I were going to make it. Things were so different then and hard. I made a choice and offended everyone except God. Sara told me that love was the magic that would float us above the rough spots. If love leaves, the magic leaves, and the body falls out of a bubble onto the hard ground. She told me that would never happen to us, and it never did.”

”Bo helps me now when I need him with legal stuff, and he never charges me a dime. Right after I got back from the hospital, Bo drove out to the house to see me. He pulled a chair up next to mind and said to me: ‘Kate, you need to make a will.’ He sat across from me and looked me in the eye when he said this. ‘You need to make a will, because when you die all hell will break loose among your kids. It would take King Solomon to divide things out, and in the end the land would be parceled out, bulldozed, and ruined. The red clay would bleed down into the bay.’ He told me he was driving me downtown to make a will and wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

“He drove slowly over the rutted spots in the road, making sure the seat was comfortable for me, making sure the air was just right. I could smell the musk rose scent coming through the little vents, squeezing through the pores of the car. Nothing can keep the scent of musk rose out.”

“Bo took me first to see a psychologist. I call them head doctors. Bo explained that the doctor was a geriatric expert and would test my memory and thinking ability. Bo said that it was important to get an expert opinion to see if I was competent to make a will.”

“The doctor looked like how you would picture a head doctor. He was a small man in a striped suit with gray hair and a pointed, trimmed beard. He was friendly in a fake way, not naturally good with people, struggling with the struggle to be good with people. He was used to studying books. He didn’t like people up close. He wore thick magnifying glasses to examine the bugs that crawled under his office door.”

“The doctor started out by asking me if I knew where I was and why. I told him that I was with my attorney in a head doctor’s office because he wanted to get me tested to see if I was competent to make a will. The doctor asked me why I thought I needed an evaluation to make a will. I told him my attorney suggested this because any will I made would be contested by my children. I explained that I haven’t seen much of my kids since they were in their early teens because the state took them away. The state said I was an unfit mother because my partner moved in with me a couple months after my drunken husband got run over by a train. My drunken husband was my first and only boyfriend. He was a drunk even then and made me get drunk along with him. When I got pregnant I had to get married because that was what I was supposed to do. Then, I had three children, one after the other. When my husband died and Sara moved in, my kids turned me in to the child welfare agency. Two people from the agency came out to my house to investigate. The house was spic and span, not a speck of dust or dirt. I even ironed all the curtains. I introduced them to Sara, who sat next to me on the couch. I told them that I was running a profitable farm, paying my taxes on time, feeding and clothing the kids, getting them anything they needed, not abusing them, not neglecting them, or anything of the sort. The agency people asked me if I was living with another woman. I said that I had a lifelong companion who shared her life with me. Then they asked me if we were cohabitating, meaning sharing a bed and I said yes, one bed. The two agency people looked at each other, packed up their stuff, closed their notebooks, and left. They didn’t say a word. I told Sara that I shouldn’t have ironed the goddamn curtains.”

“The court can act fast dealing with issues like immoral people. Drunk drivers get multiple chances before they finally kill or maim someone. Politicians can misspeak and steal and get re-elected. Even wife beaters get second chances, third chances or as many as it takes to break a jaw, throw somebody down a flight of stairs and finally kill. They’re remorseful, crying, dressed in new blue suits when they stand before the Judge. ‘My client is a changed man, Your Honor, has no priors except for a few irrelevant DUI’s and one animal cruelty violation. The prosecution agreed to our plea of involuntary manslaughter. My client is ready to face his 18 months in jail. He apologizes to everyone. He’s sorry he can’t apologize to his dead wife.'”

“When the court deems somebody immoral, there is no second chance. No trial, no appeal.

The sheriff and two deputies came and took away my kids. The kids were put in foster care. They were told that they could see me, with supervised visits, if they wanted. They never did. The court didn’t bother with Bo though. There was no complaint and so he didn’t matter. He could stay.”

“The doctor tried to explain a little bit about domestic violence to me. He said something about deprived childhoods, rotten fathers and mothers, feelings of inferiority, the need to control and a whole bunch of other stuff. I told the doctor that some people were just born as mean bullies, carrying around a grudge for no particular reason. I said that most of the red-faced screamers packed tiny pistols in their tighty-whities that shot blanks most of the time. This was the real problem. A little rosebud hiding below a fuzzy beer belly causes all sorts of anger issues if the audience is laughing.”

“The doctor started testing me. He asked me what day it was, and I told him, ‘Wednesday.’ ‘What’s the date?’ ‘The 21st.’ ‘What’s the month?’ ‘July.’ (I got all this off his desk calendar) ‘Who’s the President?’ I told him. ‘Who was the President before that?’ I told him. ‘Who is this man with you?’ ‘My attorney, my friend, my son.’ Then he says he’s going to test my recall. ‘Here goes’, he says. ‘Ready? I’m going to read a story, and I want you to recall as much as you can. A man in Chicago gets ready to go out for the evening and checks the weather on TV before he leaves. The weather person reports that storms are moving in. The man decides to stay in and watch old movies and order pizza. The pizza was cold when he got it, and the old movies were boring. The man shuts off the TV and takes out his phone. He plays games until he dozes off. He doesn’t hear the rain sheeting against the window. He doesn’t see the white teeth gnashing on the surface of the lake.'”

“The doctor asks me how much I remember and I tell him the whole story word for word. I told the doctor that the story was easy to remember because lonely people pretty much do the same things. They get depressed; they run out of options; they get afraid and don’t take chances; and the walls close in. I told the doctor that the man should get out of his apartment, meet a nice person, have a shared life and a shared identity, get a better job, move out to the country, and take in the fresh air. There’s always fresh air in a new place.”

“The doctor writes down a whole bunch of stuff after more memory tests. Then he asks me to step out into the waiting room. Bo finally comes out and drives me to his office.”

“Bo told me that the doctor said I was competent, and that he would send the report as soon as he had it transcribed. Bo said that he would attach it to the will. He said the will would be meddle-proof. I put the land in trust to a preservation society. The will stipulates that the land will never be developed. The archaeologists will dig their square window panes into the earth and look through them to see into the past.”

“Sara and I dug a lot of old things out of the ground during the years of farming. Some of the things were colonial, but most were native artifacts. Arrow points, spearheads, fishing net weights and other things. I left them all in the earth. One old stone bowl was still yellow inside from ground corn. I thought of the woman holding the bowl a thousand years ago, making dinner for her family and singing to a baby. The baby watched with dark eyes and smiled at the woman. The woman smiled back. She sang the willow song: The willow tree is broken by the storm; the willow tree is no more; the willow branches drift to shore; they root among the Tuckahoe; the willow lives on and never dies.”

“Sara and I used to sneak out to swim in the river when we were young. We waited until the flood tide started to retreat back into the bay and waded in hand in hand. The water was warm in high summer, and the eel grass caressed our legs as we drifted. The musk roses grew in groves right up to the water in places, and the scent hung over us in a veil. We let the tide pull us toward the bay, pushing off with our toes in the shallows to keep afloat and treading water in the deeper spots until our toes brushed the bottom again. We floated for miles, watching the herons and ducks flush from the cord grass along the shore and breathing in the musk of the roses. Everything was alive in the grass in the river, and on the shore and in the sky. We drifted along, laughing and splashing, merged in a procession, two wet girls: part of the tide, part of the earth turning, part of the moon pulling, part of the everlasting, full of joy, in the water for the sheer pleasure of being there, and able to be there. Pure pleasure of being alive and in love.”

“We drifted for miles and stepped out into the shallows of the sandy beach near the bridge. This is the last place to get out before the water drops off into the deep over the oyster bars and into the ribbons of churning water funneled between the pylons. Beyond the bridge, the bay is wide and deep where the sleek-bodied fish school and dive into the dark filaments of shifting shadows. The flotsam, caught at the surface, bobs and swirls, captured by the tide, drifting and merging at the horizon and into the expanse of the sea.”

Dan Gemmer is a retired state adult protective service investigator and also an Army combat veteran. He has been published in the Belleview Literary Review and in Pembroke Magazine. He received the New Millennium Short-Short Fiction prize and was a finalist for the Iowa Review Fiction award and the Arts and Letters Fiction award.
Read More »