a journal of literature and fine arts

Faculty EditorNick Flynn

EditorIan Stansel

Managing EditorRebecca Wadlinger

Business ManagerJoshua N. Turner

Art EditorKurt Mueller

Fiction EditorsChristine Ha

Eric HowertonEd Porter

Nonfiction EditorsThea Lim

Jessica Wilbanks

Online EditorWill Donnelly

Poetry EditorsSamuel AmadonLiz Countryman

Janine Joseph

Reviews & Interviews EditorLaura Eve Engel

Assistant EditorsJason Daniels (f)

Ryler Dustin (p)Ashleigh Eisinger (f)

Aja Gabel (f)Eric Higgins (nf)

Sophie Klahr (p)

Eric Kocher (p)Jameelah Lang (nf)

Zachary Martin (f)

David Tomas Martinez (p)

Karyna McGlynn (f)

Meggie Monahan (nf)

Kelly Moore (p)

D’Lynn Rubio (f)Polina Slavcheva (p)

Elizabeth Tapia (f)

Poetry ReadersChuck Carlise, April Goldman, Karyna McGlynn, and Russel Swensen

Fiction ReadersWill Donnelly, Colin Garretson, Jameelah Lang, and Thea Lim

Nonfiction ReadersJason Daniels, Zachary Martin, and Elizabeth Tapia

InternsPamela Buszek, Andre Habet, and Sasha Khalifeh

Editorial AssistantsJustin Carter, Melissa Dziedzic, Joshua Lopez, Chris Oidtmann, Sarah Ondras, Mercedes Polanco, Nicola Smith, Randall Tyrone, and Vanessa Villarreal

a journal of literature and fine arts volume 24, issue 1

Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts is largely funded by the Brown Foundation, Inc.; the Cullen Foundation; Inprint, Inc.; Houston Endowment, Inc.; the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance; the Texas Commission on the Arts; the University of Houston English Department; and the National Endowment for the Arts.

ARTWORK: The cover art is a detail from Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor), 1994, by Cy Twombly. Photo © Hickey-Robertson, Houston. Artwork is courtesy of Cy Twombly Gallery; The Menil Collection, Houston; and the artist. The paintings found in the foldout are also by Cy Twombly. Photos © Hickey-Robertson, Houston. Artwork courtesy of the Cy Twombly Gallery; The Menil Collection, Houston; and the artist. The images on pages 113–124 are © Duncan Ganley, courtesy of Houston’s Inman Gallery and the artist.

OuR ThAnKs TO: j. Kastely, Kathy Smathers, and the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston; Wyman Herendeen, Carol Barr, Judy Calvez, Nancy Ortega-Fraga, George Barr, Julie Kofford, Natalie Houston, and the Department of English at the University of Houston; University of Houston Provost John Antel; John W. Roberts, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Houston; Renu Khator, president of the University of Houston; Rich Levy, Marilyn Jones, Kristi Beer, Lee Herrick, and Krupa Parikh of Inprint, Inc.; Jane Moser and Brazos Bookstore, Houston; and the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.

Published twice yearly in October and April. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the editors. Send queries to Gulf Coast, Department of English, University of Houston, Houston, tx 77204-3013. For postal submission guidelines, or to submit your work online, visit www.gulfcoastmag.org/submit. Response time is 4 to 6 months. Gulf Coast does not read unsolicited submissions from March 15 to August 31.

a two-year subscription is $28a one-year subscription is $16

back issues are $8

nEW! E-book versions are $5 per issue a one-year E-Book subscription is $8 ePub (iPad, iPhone, nook, etc.)

PDF (PC and Mac) mobi (Kindle)

Subscribe online or send subscription requests to Gulf Coast, Department of English,University of Houston, Houston, tx 77204-3013

Gulf Coast is listed in the Humanities International Complete Index.

Distributed in North America by Ingram Periodicals Inc., 1240 Heil Quaker Blvd.,

Executive Board

PresidentSasha West

Treasurer Elizabeth Harper

Vice PresidentMisty Matin

secretaryMimi Crossley Detering

Franci CraneRamona Davis Mary S. DawsonLew EathertonRichard FingerLynn GoodeAlison de Lima Greene

Manuel GutiérrezTerrell James

Karl KilianEric LuedersVance Muse

Evelyn Nolen Michelle White

Members

Michael BerryhillElizabeth Brown-GuilloryKathleen CamborMark DotyAllen GeeRachel HeckerRichard HowardJulie Kemper

Rich LevyCynthia Macdonald

Rubén MartínezAntonya Nelson

Valerie Cassels OliverRobert Phillips

Gael StackAndrea White

Adam Zagajewski

Advisory Council

DonorsGulf Coast would like to thank the following people

who have generously contributed to the magazine:

underwriters

Marion Barthelme & Jeff Fort Franci & Jim CraneRichard & Martha FingerLynn Goode & Harrison WilliamsMisty & Surena MatinAnne & John MendelsohnEvelyn & Roy Nolen Lillie RobertsonHinda Simon Mark Wawro & Melanie Gray

Benefactors

Toni & Jeff BeauchampKathy & Glenn Cambor

Benjamin CohenLew & Marsha Eatherton

Carolyn & Matthew HennemanElizabeth & Albert Kidd

Karl & Kathy KilianStephanie & Ed Larsen

Eric & Jill LuedersNancy Manderson & the estate of Bill Coats

Barbara & Louis Sklar

Terrell James & Cameron Armstrong Bettie CartwrightSusie & Sanford CrinerHerman & Mimi Crossley Detering Rachelle & Terrence DoodyAlison de Lima Greene Marc GrossbergElizabeth & John HarperFritz Lanham & Kellye SanfordMarilyn Jones & Brad Morris

Julie & Jim KemperCourtney & Tony Kim

Robin McCorquodale Ed & Gaye McCullough

Kevin Prufer & Mary HallabSam (Beverly) & Manuel Ramirez

Lenox & John ReedJaqueline Andre Schmeal

Josephine & Richard SmithLois & George Stark

sponsors

Tracy & Glenn LarnerRich Levy

Vance MuseLaurie Newendorp

Judy NyquistJohn Parkerson

Elizabeth & Robert W. PhillipsEllen & Steve Susman

Don ShockeyCarey C. Shuart

William Stern Doreen Stoller & Dan Piette

Sasha WestLois & Stephen Zamora

supporters

Gail AdlerJohn AntelTravis & Suzann BroescheElizabeth & Richard CarrellLaurie Ann CedilnikRamona Davis Nancy S. DunlapO. Howard & Rachel FrazierAllen GeeJames Gibbons Cynthia HarperKathleen & Malcolm Hawk Sis & Hasty JohnsonAnn Kennedy & Geoffrey WalkerMimi Kilgore

Contents: vol. 24, issue 1Editor’s note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

2011.Gulf.coast.prizes

Amaranth Borsuk. . . . . . . . . . A New Vessel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33poetry

Brian Van Reet. . . . . . . . . . . . The Window . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34fiction

Arianne Zwartjes . . . . . . . . . . This Suturing of Wounds or Words . . . . . . . . . . 49nonfiction

fictionRav Grewal-Kök . . . . . . . . . . . Prisoners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29Ann Tashi slater. . . . . . . . . . . Travelers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80Michael Czyzniejewski . . . . . The Brother-in-Law and the Beach . . . . . . . . .186Teresa Milbrodt . . . . . . . . . . . Mothers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225Mario Rosado. . . . . . . . . . . . . Calm Edge of the Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .247Danny Thanh nguyen . . . . . . Engrish Lessons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .276

nonfictionLorraine Doran. . . . . . . . . . . . A Film of Our Life, Played Backwards . . . . . . . 11Kristen Radtke. . . . . . . . . . . . History of Rock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68Joe Bonomo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Live Nude Essay! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .169Katherine Dykstra . . . . . . . . . Sum of His Parts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197Chidelia Edochie . . . . . . . . . . Sugar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217stephanie harrison. . . . . . . . Toadal Chaos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267

poetryAusten Rosenfeld. . . . . . . . . . Um— . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21Graham Foust. . . . . . . . . . . . . OK Full Professor, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vicarious. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24David Rivard. . . . . . . . . . . . . Freedom in the Midst . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25Matthew Olzmann. . . . . . . . . The Skull of an Unidentified Dinosaur . . . . . . .26

poetry.(continueD)L. s. McKee. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Notes on the Healthy Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28Laura solomon. . . . . . . . . . . . What’s in the Broth? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60Christopher Buckley . . . . . . . Katmandu Ars Poetica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .61solmaz sharif. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . Master Film . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dependers/Immediate Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . .65Geoffrey G. O’Brien. . . . . . . . Six Political Criteria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71Elizabeth Arnold . . . . . . . . . . Trees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76Carolyn hembree. . . . . . . . . . The Goner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78Mike White. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79sherman Alexie. . . . . . . . . . . Punch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175Andrew Feld. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Quarters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176Elaine Bleakney. . . . . . . . . . . Day for Years of Distress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .180Paul hlava . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kingdom Of . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . There’s a New Sheriff in Town . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182Alex Lemon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Of Love Hot & Enormous . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .183stanley Plumly. . . . . . . . . . . . The Sand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199sharon Olds. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Left-Wife Goose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200Dan Rosenberg . . . . . . . . . . . Eat the Bones of the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .202Ishion hutchinson. . . . . . . . . News From Florence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .204 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Harlem Summer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .206Robert Ostrom. . . . . . . . . . . . A Dedication to the Rich Is in the Ark . . . . . 208Charles harper Webb. . . . . . . Things We Know . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .236Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch. . . The Logos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237Dot Devota. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sarah Hand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240sally Wen Mao. . . . . . . . . . . . XX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241Lynn Melnick . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wallflower . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .242nate Pritts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . On Knowing How It Feels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .244Lily Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bee Belief . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .245 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . We’re in the Ocean, Or I’m Alone . . . . . . . . . .246

interviewssjón . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poetry Redressed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83with.jason.ranon.uri.rotstein

Anna Moschovakis. . . . . . . . “Just Give Me a Bit, You Know? Just Fragments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . of Things” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

Aaron McCollough. . . . . . . . Zombies, Our Culture, Christ, and Christianity . .209with.joseph.chapman

Yahia Lababidi. . . . . . . . . . . To Go and Seek the Twilight Hour . . . . . . . . . .259with.alex.stein

with.anDy.fitch

featurea.selection.of.writinG.in.translation.

Pilar Fraile Amador. . . . . . . . From Hedge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124translateD.from.the.spanish.by.forrest.GanDer

niels Frank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . From Picture World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129translateD.from.the.Danish.by.roGer.GreenwalD

Tahir hamut. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Returning to Kashgar .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .131translateD.from.the.uyGhur.by.joshua.l ..freeman

Pierre Peuchmaurd. . . . . . . . It Will Come in My Left Lung. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

Dorthe nors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hair Salon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136translateD.from.the.Danish.by.martin.aitken

Tristan Corbière. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..Diurnal Paris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139translateD.from.the.french.by.noelle.kocot

Edgar Bayley. . . . . . . . . . . . . Clarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Memories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142

reportaGe.on.writers-in-exile

Aviya Kushner. . . . . . . . . . . . Give Me Shelter: Refugee Writers and the Idea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . of America. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105

artRachel Cook. . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Placeless-ness in Duncan Ganley’s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Location Shots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95Duncan Ganley. . . . . . . . . . . . Location Shots Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97sarah A. strickley . . . . . . . . . Cy Twombly: Colors From His Own Heart . . . 165Cy Twombly. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Three paintings by Cy Twombly . . . . . . [Foldout]

reviewsJesse Donaldson . . . . . . . . . . Faulty Magic: E. C. Osondu’s Voice of America. . .284Lytton smith . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beyond the Word Exchange: Translation and

the Travel of Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .287

Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 292

translateD.from.the.french.by.e .c ..belli

translateD.from.the.spanish.by.emily.toDer

A Few of the Words I Was […] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .134

Gulf Coast Fiction Prize, 2011Judged by Frederick Reiken

WInnER:

Brian Van Reet, “The Window”

hOnORABLE MEnTIOn:

Cara Blue Adams, “At the Gates”Sue Staats, “No Hero, No Sharks”

The deadline for the upcoming contest is March 15, 2012. Each contest winner receives $1,500 and publication in Gulf Coast. Second and third places receive $300 and $200, respectively.

Online submissions only. Submit one previously unpublished story or essay (7,000 words) or up to 5 poems (10 pages max). Your name and address should be included on your cover letter only.

Your $23 reading fee will include a one-year subscription.

for.more.information.about.this.year’s.contest,.including.judges,.stay.tuned.at.www. gulfcoastmag.org.

Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, 2011Judged by John D’Agata

WInnER:

Arianne Zwartjes, “This Suturing of Wounds or Words”

hOnORABLE MEnTIOn:

Laura Hartenberger, “Three Tales of the Extraordinary”Daisy Pitkin, “An Algorithm”

Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, 2011Judged by Ilya Kaminsky

WInnER:

Amaranth Borsuk, “A New Vessel”

hOnORABLE MEnTIOn:

Allison Hutchcraft, “Lampshade Cue Stick Acrobat Dust”Carrie Chappell, “[Silver & I in the yellow kitchen, cruel in paper]”

Editor’s Note

9

Dear Reader,

It is with a combination of great excitement and heavy sadness that we present this issue of Gulf Coast. March 2011 saw the passing of Marion Barthelme, a pillar of the Houston arts community. To try to put into words what Marion meant to us at Gulf Coast is to inevitably fall short. She was an ardent supporter of the journal and its student editors. She was a member of the Gulf Coast board from its inception, serving as President for a decade. When I first moved to Houston I heard her referred to as the patron saint of the city’s arts, but I had no idea to what extent this was true until I met her. With an ever-present smile, Marion worked to improve and expand the literary and visual arts communities of the city, never wanting much credit, always deflecting attention back on those writers and artists about whom she cared so much. This issue is dedicated to Marion Barthelme, but in truth every issue is implicitly for her.

The cover of this issue is graced by the work of Cy Twombly, who also passed away in recent months. Twombly was one of those wonderfully divisive artists whose work could get even the most passive art observer into heated debate. His paintings and sculpture display a tension between order and disorder: the sem-blance of chaos laid by the hand of a most caring behind-the-scenes providence. Without him, the art world faces an expansive lacuna. Luckily, for those of us living in the city of Houston, we have a permanent and awe-inspiring tribute to the artist’s work in the Menil Collection’s Twombly Gallery, whose generosity made this issue’s feature possible.

In addition to the Twombly fold-out feature, this issue includes many pieces that we hope Marion would have enjoyed. We have the work of London-based photographer and video artist Duncan Ganley, whose work, in this series, moves from place to place, positioning the witness to the world as subject. We have a special section of work translated from Danish, French, Spanish, and Uyghur, and we have Aviya Kushner’s piece on refugee writers and the organizations that

10

Editor’s Note

support them. There are interviews with Icelandic poet Sjón, and poet and French translator Anna Moschovakis. And we have poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from a collection of new and established voices.

We went into creating this issue of Gulf Coast with an impulse to think glob-ally; the circumstances surrounding the creation of the issue compelled us to see locally. We hope to have satisfied both drives, and we hope that the result is some-thing that you, the reader, will enjoy.

Ian Stansel, Editor

Lorraine Doran

11

A Film of Our Life, Played Backwards

When I was being born, the doctor had to fold me in half to get me out. It was 12:58 a.m., my mother’s pelvis was too narrow, I was too anxious to be delivered. The doctor broke my clavicle, made me smaller, to bring my body from hers. The whole process took less than an hour. Weeks later, my mother found the break while changing me, and took me to see Dr. Williams, who had inherited the family practice from his father, William Carlos Williams. He told her to keep nursing me. Her milk, he said, would bind the soft bones.

n n n

I still like the world best just after midnight . I believe we come into this world knowing the difference between good and evil . What do you think happens in the mind the moment just before birth?

When I emerge from my waiting place, through the keyhole-shaped doorway of the Guggenheim Museum’s Aye Simon Reading Room, I am given a visitor to follow. The visitor is talking with a college student about progress. It is my job to follow without being seen. I listen to get a sense of what is on the visitor’s mind, and devise a way to intervene in their conversation, in a way that feels natural and connected to her own thoughts, yet somehow foreign. It amazes me that they never seem to sense me there, behind them.

I follow, I eavesdrop, I dash around an elevator bank and run ahead, I wait for them to catch up, I interrupt. The student introduces me, then slips away. I tell my visitors about scientists in Antarctica, listening to the songs water makes as it travels through icebergs, or the man I saw in Prospect Park wearing purple flannel pants and a clown nose, carrying a briefcase. I talk about a novel that revolves around a film the viewer cannot look away from, one the writer never describes. I ask, “What would that film look like for you?”

32

Rav Grewal-Kök

him at the door. I put my face in my aunt’s lap. She’s soft but she doesn’t hold me. Everything is faint. The blows fall like heartbeats.

Home, at dusk, I eat pickles and fish on the verandah. The first bats rustle in the bamboo. Raja, my Alsatian, tracks something through the weeds. At the foot of the garden, the pond fades in the gloom. I wonder if the carp can still see the flies. My father steps out in his white dinner jacket. He pats my head before he squats to light the mosquito coils with his cigarette. I have the comic books he brought me from London but it’s too dark to read.

I leave half the fish for the amah. Upstairs, I help my mother wrap her sari. It’s blue, like the stones on her neck. We rush because my father is calling from below. My mother’s always late. She’s laughing when she runs down the steps. My father has gone out to the car but his cologne stays in the hall.

Later I watch the amah write a letter while I drink my curds and water. She has a cotton slip and bare arms. Gospel songs play on her radio. Her contract ends in a month. She wants to stay but my father has sent for another. When my glass is empty she tucks me into her bed.

I can’t know what will happen, until it does. In fourteen years, when the British leave, we will too. The summer after that, on a different island, my father will have a bottle of Scotch before he drives his car into the sea. My mother will pass her days with photographs and the highballs he taught her to drink. One cousin will have his third wife and the gout, the other will be in trouble with drugs. My uncle won’t let anyone say their names. I will never see my aunt. I will move to a city where the bars, the streets, are hushed. I will fly from them all, in time.

Amaranth Borsuk

33

gulf coast poetry prize winner, 2011

A New Vessel

A special commission looked into my lungs, crystal chandelierof swifts, a city, like Lwow, built around a leaven, ornate organ,pronounced me sound for study, body ready as the school’sfor cultivation: conservatory: greenhouse with breath music starting. Both were occupied, but my lungs only pretended to the commons, encompasseda lovely absence, a space of thinking over space.Professor S., famous baritone, deepened one. Widely-admired, whiskered, one of us, he threatened to leave when they forbade my return (Father’s business known)and sang an acrid aria at the assembly. The fourteen chambers of my glass house openedand the bears let me walk around in my own body, testing its resonance.He saw in me someone where I saw only wind. He would teach me to control it.

Brian Van Reet

34

The Window

Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick tried to hold the memory, his eyes moving from the menu to his fiancée, to a rusty freight passing through the outskirts of Marathon, dotted with trailer parks and cement factories, into the Chihuahuan Desert. Overhead, the late-morning sun heated a corrugated tin roof, supported at the corners by twisting columns of mesquite. In the distance the train clicked lazily through a crossroads, bell clanging, the sound of steel on steel taking its time to echo and reach the little café where Fitzpatrick and his fiancée, Sadie, sat at a table on the flagstone veranda.

“I’ll have the chicken enchiladas,” he said.The waitress nodded at him. He should have gotten a salad, had put on a few

pounds since his days playing high school ball, but what the hell. Sadie, more beautiful than he was handsome, remained absorbed in the menu.

“I think I need another minute,” she said. “Sorry.”After the waitress left, Sadie set down the menu and sighed in exasperation. “I

never know what I want. What’s wrong with me?” “Nothing,” Fitzpatrick said. “Take your time.” He watched her study the selec-

tions intently, as if what she ate for lunch today might actually make a difference in the grand scheme, wondering about the contrast between the morbidity with which she regarded this decision, and the spontaneous, joyful proposal she had made a month ago, after only knowing him for the winter.

“Okay.” She folded the menu as the long train receded over the horizon, becoming inaudible. A ratty mockingbird landed nearby and approached their table, turning its head from side to side, strutting with avian confidence. Soon the waitress returned.

“I’ll have a fajita salad and a beer,” Sadie said. “You want a beer?”“Sure,” Fitzpatrick said. “I’ll have a beer.”

n n n

gulf coast fiction prize winner, 2011

35

Brian Van Reet

They ate, finished their first round, and ordered another. The waitress popped the tops with an opener from her apron and set the bottles on the table. An SUV, one of the newer, hybrid models, mountain bikes racked in tow, passed on the road and pulled into the dusty lot beside the café. The doors opened and a couple got out. Fitzpatrick chewed his final enchilada and washed it down, observing the approaching twenty-somethings. The driver was a thin guy wearing a large red beard and a stocking cap; his passenger, a woman with pale skin, a bob haircut, and a stud through her nose. They claimed the other table on the veranda. Sadie glanced over while continuing the conversation.

“I’m thinking of hiring my cousin for the photography,” she said. “Or is that a bad idea?”

“Her stuff online was good. Maybe she’ll give us a deal.”Sadie nodded and made a note in her planner. The waitress arrived to take the

newcomers’ order. The mockingbird followed her to the threshold, and she shooed it off when she returned with the drinks.

The tables of sun-bleached wood were large and close. As they drank and talked, Fitzpatrick overheard the guy with the red beard ask after the pierced girl’s brother. What caught his attention was the mention of boot camp.

“I don’t hear from him too much,” the girl said. “He never was much of a writer. They’ve only given them phone time once or twice so far. But yeah, I can tell he’s already turning into a real jarhead. The last letter he wrote, he mostly bragged about how many pushups he can do now.”

There was sarcasm and resignation in her voice, a mix of lament and attack. She sounded like she regretted everything she was saying immediately after saying it. “I hope he doesn’t make it through. For his own sake. Jesus. Dumb kid—some people need saving from themselves.”

Fitzpatrick and Sadie made eye contact. He grinned, a funny half-sneer he sometimes made, then squinted at a far-off point in the desert. With a look of beautiful ferocity, she tilted back her second beer and finished it.

“Ready.”He nodded and got the waitress’s attention. They split the check and walked

past the other table to the parking lot. He started his jeep and pulled onto the

36

Brian Van Reet

road. Sadie frowned out the window at the veranda, the transmission eased into second, and they passed out of view of the café. Fitzpatrick turned on the radio. She turned it down.

“I hate that you have to go back there,” she said, “and they get to sit around and play armchair quarterback. Never making one sacrifice for all this.”

“You don’t know that,” he said. “Whatever. They’re hypocrites.”“So’s everyone.”“Why are you always taking other people’s sides?”“Because, you’re being unreasonable. Can you please buckle your seatbelt?”She scrunched up her face, changed her voice and did her best impersonation

of the pierced woman. “Jesus. Stupid kid. Some people need to learn the art of sniping irony. Some people need a Xanax lobotomy. Some need to be spayed or neutered for their own protection.” She dropped the act, reached behind her, and buckled her seatbelt. “I’d rather be unreasonable than a pretentious bitch.”

n n n

An hour later they passed through the gates of Big Bend National Park. The beer buzz from lunch had turned into a mild headache, dry mouth, a general feeling of dehydration. Over the course of the hour Sadie had not let the argu-ment drop, going silent for a while only to begin again with complaints about their narcissistic, callow, ungrateful generation—the worst yet, she claimed. Fitzpatrick agreed people were generally self-centered to the point of being evil—take the Stanford Prison Experiment, for example, or the one where the researchers had little difficulty convincing subjects to administer what they believed were lethal electric shocks to fellow human guinea pigs—in the name of science, of course. But he doubted our nature had been getting much worse over time.

“Look at the Assyrians,” he said. “They used to skin and boil their enemies alive.”“What’s that got to do with anything?”“All I’m saying is, it’s not that things aren’t bad now. But at least they’re less brutal.”Sadie laughed like she felt sorry for him. “And you say this, a twenty-six-year-

old about to go fight your second war. Will you at least admit maybe you’re wrong? Maybe things are worse.”

37

Brian Van Reet

“Maybe. But I’ve only seen what I’ve seen. And I’ve never seen anyone skinned alive.”

She shook her head and watched out the window as the road took a long curve. Thirty miles in the distance, the clustered, towering spires of the Chisos came into view, a fractured volcano rising in a hazy plain. The intermediary landscape was possessed with the stark majesty of vast, empty places. Fitzpatrick found it beauti-ful but also troubling, a landscape composed mostly of nothing.

They passed through the badlands of the park, the road snaking by sandy washes and ragged arroyos. The car hummed along and blew cool air on them. Ocotillo plants rose from the earth like inverted brooms, growing in clumps along-side the occasional yucca, cousin to the pineapple, fitted with a rosette like a crown of waxy knives. Neither plant was much taller than a person and would provide no shade. It was spring, but even so, crossing this desert in the heat of the day would be a task he would not wish on anyone. There would be no resupply of water for twenty miles. In an earlier time the prospect of the arduous crossing would neces-sitate a long detour through chains of mountains encircling the plain on either horizon. As it was, the car made the direct route effortless.

n n n

Arriving in the basin a thousand feet above the plain, surrounded by peaks and ridges, they bought iced tea at the general store near the visitor’s center. Leaving the car for a new place lightened the mood, and the earlier argument was dropped. They sat on a bench in front of the store, sipped their drinks and watched a school group dressed in neon being shepherded into an exhibit on desert wildlife. A stuffed mountain lion perpetually snarled through the plate glass behind them. After stretching their legs, they checked in, got the key to their room, and drove around the cul-de-sac, scanning the ring of lodges for their number. They parked nearby and began unloading the car.

“All right, there’s a grill,” Fitzpatrick said.“I told you there would be.”In their room they set to work putting away their stuff.

“What do you think about going to the hot springs? Then we could check

38

Brian Van Reet

out Terlingua and get some dinner. It’s a ghost town—a tourist trap, really. But charming in a kitschy sort of way.”

He said that sounded fine, and they dressed in swimsuits, massaged sunscreen into each other’s backs, and took off down the blacktop out of the basin. They descended to the desert floor and followed a gravel road to the trailhead set in a grove of cottonwoods. From there it was a short hike to the river, passing stone buildings abandoned a century before, once a health spa run by a German immi-grant until Pancho Villa killed the tourist trade. Tamarisk trees with bright green leaves bobbed in a light wind, and Fitzpatrick remarked on an enormous stand of palms growing in a tight circle. He and Sadie followed the rocky trail, the Rio Grande to their right, a sandstone cliff to their left. The cliff overhung the trail and was dotted near the top by insect-like constructions, the mud nests of an unseen flock of swallows. Before long they reached the hot springs, a single pool twenty feet in diameter, built into the riverbank with stones and cement.

In the pool sat a balding man in his forties, strapping, sunburned, with a gap-tooth. Beside him, his wife, who had a face like Miss America. They drank from a magnum of red wine, raising plastic flutes to lips stained brown and purple. Their two boys, who looked to be identical, blond twins, waded in the river below the pool. Fitzpatrick and Sadie set down their gear, removed T-shirts, and kicked off their shoes.

“Look, Dad, he’s doing it again!” One of the twins pointed at his brother, who had crossed the international boundary and climbed the opposing bank, peering into a dense, jungle-like mass of cane, giant reeds topped with white flowers.

“Boy, get back in that river,” the man called, setting down his drink. “Ranger’ll lock your ass up.” The boy crowed and splashed back into the water, rejoining his brother in the geopolitically liminal shallows. “Shoot,” the man said, shaking his head at Sadie in an indirect, western greeting, a mix of wariness and affection.

She and Fitzpatrick eased into the pool. A slight steam came off its surface, smelling of sulfur. Fitzpatrick lay back, submerging all but his buzzed head, which he rested on the side of the pool. He dug his fingers into the soft, black sediment on the bottom, taking up handfuls of the stinking mud and dripping the warmth on his chest. Then he sat up and turned to look over the edge. A cut in the retaining wall funneled the constant outflow of the springs down a little channel, making a water-

39

Brian Van Reet

fall into the Rio Grande. He straddled the wall and climbed over, careful not to slip on rocks overgrown with algae. He sat in the middle of the waterfall and watched the twins play, enjoying the incongruousness of hot and cold, the springs cascading off his back, his feet dangling in the river. Sadie poked her head over the side.

“Whatcha doing?”“Dare me to run to Mexico,” he said.“You wouldn’t.”He stood on the mossy rock and took a low dive into a hole near the bank,

stroking perpendicular to the current until it became too shallow to swim. He picked his way over the polished rocks onto the Mexican side, stood there for a moment, crossed his arms and looked with ironic pride at Sadie, challenging her to something more. The twins made clucking, whooping noises.

After he swam back to the United States, they gathered their things and hiked to the trailhead. They changed in a facility and made the drive to Terlingua, where they sat on a creaking porch of grey planks and watched the horizon as the sunset overtopped mushrooming thunderheads. Later they ate chicken-fried steak inside someone’s idea of an old-time saloon, while locals played sad country songs. Full of drink and dinner, they made out in the parking lot, pressed against his jeep. By the time they returned to their lodge the moon had risen over the Chisos Basin. Fitzpatrick piloted the car into an empty space. Beside them was the SUV from lunch.

“Look,” he said.“Great. You sure it’s the same one?” “Unless someone else has a ‘Born Again Pagan’ bumper sticker.”

n n n

They woke early the next morning and did it again before showering and eating breakfast. He was in great spirits, cooing to her, pinching her ass when she turned her back. They did the dishes together, packed lunch, and headed out. The plan was to hike to the Window. The trail began in the basin near the cul-de-sac of lodges and traversed a steep, exposed slope covered in patches of blind prickly pear and allthorn like living barbed wire. The century plants were Fitzpatrick’s favorite.

40

Brian Van Reet

“They only bloom once,” Sadie said. She stopped to point out one whose giant stamen had emerged from the center of low-slung agave leaves. Buds like cauli-flower sprouted laterally from the upper reaches of the stalk, twenty feet in the air. Sadie explained how after blooming and scattering its seed, the plant browned and died but did not wilt, its fibrous skeleton standing as evidence of a final, repro-ductive effort, the simultaneous transformations of sex and death. The slope was dotted with any number of these brittle corpses.

Fitzpatrick photographed one of the larger ones from several different angles. Hearing someone approach on the trail, he stopped, and the family from the hot springs, absent the mother, passed going the other way. Fitzpatrick said hello and asked the man if he would mind taking a picture of himself and Sadie. His twin sons running amok, the man finally snapped the picture after fiddling with the camera, and at the same time his boys succeeded in toppling the century plant Fitzpatrick had just photographed. It might have been standing there a decade or more, longer than the boys had been alive, a fact their father pointed out while scolding them as they went on their way. Fitzpatrick felt a short-lived but powerful swell of hate after the dead plant fell, hatred of people, generally, their destructive urges, but kept his mouth shut and channeled it into motion on the descent of the hillside.

They moved fast and had gotten in a good workout by the time the trail leveled-off near the bottom of the basin, running beside a dry creek bed shaded with oak and juniper. The air was still at the bottom. Sadie led. Far above, fang-like peaks were joined by panoramic battlements of igneous rock. Dark stains on the mountainside marked the path of dry waterfalls. Near the trail, a boulder as big as a house had fractured off Emory Peak during the last ice age and tumbled to rest in the lowest point of the basin. The final quarter mile, they walked over the slickrock canyon, the soil eroded to reveal scalloped stone polished to a waxy sheen.

The canyon grew deeper and narrower until they rounded a bend and were confronted with the Window, a rectangular notch in the rim of the basin. Through this aperture one could see fifty miles and a thousand feet down, wind and air.

“Dare you to fly to Mexico,” Sadie said.Fitzpatrick looked at her.

“Hey,” she said. “Kidding.” She walked closer to the edge. “Isn’t it something?”

41

Brian Van Reet

He grunted in agreement and sat down, catching his breath, leaning against the canyon wall to unpack lunch. The slickrock was cool and pleasant to the touch, and the view was amazing, but as he ate he kept imagining a wall of water bearing down on them through the narrow canyon, descending past the low-point boulder in a rush of flash flood, ending in a column of whitewater jetting through the Window like a colossal rainspout. The fall would be long and terrifying. He ate his sandwich and tried not to look bothered; it was a stupid thought. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

n n n

That evening they fired up the grill in front of their lodge. In a cooler they’d brought steaks, beer, and the makings of potato salad. Fitzpatrick cracked a beer after washing his hands of the rub he had patted into the meat: olive oil, black pepper, and truffle salt. He was lighting the charcoal when the SUV pulled into a nearby space. The man with the red beard smiled graciously and approached the grill. His female companion went the opposite way and disappeared inside their room. Fitzpatrick didn’t realize it, but he was scowling nervously. The man nodded at the burning coals and introduced himself as Vern.

“Richard.” Fitzpatrick extended his hand, and the two shook. “I think we crossed paths in Marathon, the other day.”

“Right, right. Small world. But I guess most people who stop there are headed here. How many are you cooking for?”

“Two,” Fitzpatrick said.“You mind if we share the grill? Doesn’t look like there’s another one nearby.

We can contribute coals.”

n n n

Vern took a sip of the beer Fitzpatrick had given him and slid his spatula under a soy burger, laying it on the grill opposite steaks that sizzled and dripped trails of liquid flame. He did the same with a ground beef patty for his girlfriend, Liz, who sat watching from the steps to their lodge.

42

Brian Van Reet

“Smells great,” he said. Liz rose and ambled over to mix herself another drink from the bottles of bourbon and Coke sweating on a nearby picnic table. The sun had just finished setting. An aircraft moved overhead in twilight, blinking near Mars above the rim of the basin.

“Good stars tonight,” Fitzpatrick said.Liz agreed and moved beside Vern at the grill. Sadie came out of the lodge

holding a battery-powered lantern which she set on the picnic table, taking up the beer she’d left, shooting a glance at Fitzpatrick. He could tell she wasn’t happy about sharing the space, although nothing had been said. He finished his third of the evening, crumpled the empty can, and tossed it in the bin chained to the grill. Watery blood began to rise from the tops of the steaks, and he flipped them.

“Those look good,” Liz said, frowning a little. “We should’ve done steak.”

n n n

The Milky Way stretched across the black sky like a smear of bioluminescence. Empty plates and beer cans littered the picnic table where the two couples sat and watched moths feverishly batter the cool blue lantern. The level in the bourbon bottle had dropped by half, accelerating its decline after Fitzpatrick switched from beer at Liz’s invitation. Sadie sat between them. She had not said much over the course of the evening. The talk ranged from the idiosyncrasies of Texans to the best brand of mobile phone, to favorite books and movies, to how much they all looked forward to trips like these. Lately it had died down and they drank silently, watching the stars and listening to the wind in the desert, the dark flutter of bats preying overhead.

n n n

In addition to her brother in the marines, Liz had a father who was retired navy. She’d guessed Fitzpatrick was military by the security decal on his wind-shield: “DOD,” a bar code, a serial number. Then came the usual questions—where had he been stationed, for how long, and what was it like?

Then, “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”Fitzpatrick said no, drawing the word out in polite cautiousness, beginning to

guess what might be coming. He experienced a twinge of déjà vu; something like

43

Brian Van Reet

this had happened several times before, but never with such a casual acquaintance. Blame the booze. He crunched an ice cube between his teeth and resigned himself to being a natural curiosity.

“Did you ever, you know… kill anyone?” she said. “Over there.”Sadie let out an incredulous hiss.

“Yeah,” Vern said, rising to his feet. “I don’t really—”“It’s okay,” Fitzpatrick said. “I don’t mind.”

n n n

He awoke the next morning trying to piece together the fight that had erupted after he and Sadie had left the picnic table for their lodge. She had wanted to know why he had answered that horrible woman—he’d never even told her that. Fitzpatrick said she had never asked and he would tell her whatever she wanted to know.

“I don’t need to know the details,” she said, shutting and locking the bedroom door. He asked her to open it but she wouldn’t. Soon he heard her running a bath, and was too tired to carry it any further. That was about how it had gone.

The morning light shining through the kitchen blinds hurt his eyes, and he itched himself, worn springs sighing below his bulk as he shifted on the unfamiliar sofa. A blanket lay mussed around the cushions. It hadn’t been there before; during the night she must have come out of the bedroom to cover him. He wondered why she didn’t want to know, whether he had done wrong by answering.

He thought about the story he didn’t tell them after answering Liz’s question with a simple “yes.” He didn’t volunteer any more than that, and neither Liz nor any of the others had the balls or the desire to ask further. The party had broken up soon after. But if they would’ve asked, he would’ve told. Told them of another morning patrol on a four-lane highway north of Baghdad, every klick of it by now familiar. His platoon clearing the road for a supply convoy due in a few hours. They drove slowly past donkey carts laden with plastic jugs of gasoline, crumbling tenements painted blue and white, rocky fields dotted with squatters’ shacks of mud sculpted over empty tins of vegetable oil. Through a palm grove and across an irrigation canal smelling of sewage, and they came upon a man walking the side of the road, trailing an AK-47, its barrel dragging in the dust.

44

Brian Van Reet

The man was not wearing any uniform and went barefoot, dressed in brown slacks and a collared shirt left half-untucked, yellow stains in the armpits. He paid no attention to the grating rumble of vehicles suddenly trailing him. The barrel of his rifle clattered over the dusty asphalt in a snaking trail. Fitzpatrick got on the platoon net and ordered the other two trucks to block the road while he and his wingman followed at a distance. He switched up to battalion, reported their loca-tion, a sit-rep, and asked for guidance. The order came down to disarm the Iraqi.

They halted and dismounted, all but the drivers, and the two gunners who watched down their sights as the trucks crept along.

“Tell him to stop,” Fitzpatrick said to the interpreter. Abdul-Azeem, tall and thin, shouted with gusto over the noise of traffic

slowing to gawk in the opposite lanes: “Oguff!”The man with the rifle continued down the shoulder of the highway, his back

to them. He began to babble a stream of Arabic which Fitzpatrick could not understand, but which struck him as different from the cadences he had become familiar with after five months in country.

“What’s he saying?” he asked.“He is crazy,” Abdul-Azeem said, his tone disinterested in the way of someone

who’s seen it all and wants you to know he’s not afraid, not even of this. “Maybe he is drunk. Whatever. What he says is shit.”

“Can you understand anything?”The interpreter listened for a moment as they trailed at a cautious distance.

Fitzpatrick kept his rifle low and ready, buttstock in his shoulder, the muzzle pointed at the ground between them.

“He is talking to God,” Abdul-Azeem said. “Asking for forgiveness, but it is not the way a Muslim should pray. It is a… what is it, the opposite?”

“Blasphemy?”“Yes,” he said. “Blastphemy.”“Tell him again to stop,” Fitzpatrick said.The interpreter uttered more threats, and this time the man did stop. He knelt

and touched his head to the ground benevolently. He did not release hold of the rifle. Then, in one deliberate motion, he spun and began to lift it. Barely hesitating, Fitzpatrick shot him twice in the gut.

45

Brian Van Reet

The man bled in the humvee as they sped to the aid station. Until very near the end he cried vigorously. The gunner lost it and began to kick at him and shout for him to shut the hell up. Fitzpatrick turned in his seat as much as his body armor would allow and said he would court martial him if he didn’t stop, and the gunner cursed some more but stopped. The medic rode along and did what he could, start-ing an IV, applying pressure, but the suicide-by-cop—how Fitzpatrick had come to think of the man over the years—went into shock. When they dragged his corpse from the truck his olive skin was grey and his pupils dilated, frozen open in fear at the moment of death.

n n n

That morning it was like the argument had never happened. They didn’t speak of it, though an undercurrent of tension lingered in their conciliatory lovemaking, in the overeager way they clung to each other. Afterwards they showered and dressed, and he cooked bacon and egg sandwiches. It was the final day of the trip, and though neither was feeling great, they decided it would be a shame to let the opportunity go, and they went ahead with their plan to hike the Lost Mine Trail. Sadie studied the guidebook at the dining table.

“Listen to this,” she said, reading aloud. “‘Supposedly, at certain times of the year, the rising sun shines on Lost Mine Peak, marking the entrance to a rich mine developed by the old Spaniards.’”

“There’s no gold in them hills,” Fitzpatrick said, bringing their sandwiches and glasses of orange juice to the table. “The Spanish found out the hard way.”

“This is why it’s a legend. Anyway, it’s supposed to have some of the park’s best views.”

They ate, drank coffee and water to ease their headaches, and packed a lunch for the trail. On the way out of the lodge they ran into Vern and Liz loading their SUV.

“You guys outta here?” Fitzpatrick asked.“Back to the grind, brother,” Vern said.Fitzpatrick made a joke about his grinding hangover, which did a little to ease

the awkwardness of the morning after. Liz came forward and said goodbye; she

46

Brian Van Reet

needed to go inside and finish with her suitcase. She waved to Sadie and shook Fitzpatrick’s hand, touching his shoulder.

“Thank you for your service,” she said.He never knew what to say when people did it like this, ghoulish and self-

absolving.“Don’t thank me, thank my recruiter.”

n n n

They left the trailhead and ascended a rocky path through a forest of juniper, oak and piñon pine. At about a mile the path reached a saddle above a canyon. They stopped to take in the view, looking far into Mexico. Casa Grande Peak stood to the southwest like a rotten molar, its jagged sides dropping sharply into fields of scree and talus broken by patches of clinging scrub. Gradations in brown and red revealed the location of past rockslides, the forces conspiring to shape this frozen landscape. They didn’t speak. It was strange. This place was once the bottom of a great ocean.

After the saddle the going became steeper. They climbed a series of switch-backs maintained by terraces of split logs. The last few switchbacks were very steep, treacherous sections made of steps carved in the rock. Fitzpatrick followed, breath-ing heavily, struggling to keep up. The portion of his shirt covered by the pack was damp with perspiration but the sweat evaporated from uncovered skin before he could feel it. Finally the switchbacks ended and they emerged above the treeline to the flat rock of the ridge, exposed more than a mile above sea level. The wind, which had been a mere breeze in the canyon below, became much stronger, and at times he had to hold one hand to his head to keep a particularly forceful gust from lifting the brim of his canvas hat and carrying it off. The last half-mile to the top sloped gently on the broad ridgeline, the way marked by cairns. Sadie, confident and energized, practically skipped over the pitted rock. Fitzpatrick chose his steps more judiciously. She stopped and turned to see where he was.

“Come on, slowpoke!” she teased, calling over the wind. “We’re close.”He hurried over the last bit and came to the end of what could be reached on

foot, a shelf of rock jutting out of the mountain. At the far end of the shelf, the rock sloped up and curled into a formation like the lip of a toboggan. Sadie headed for it.

47

Brian Van Reet

“Watch out,” he said. “It’s a straight drop on the other side. Five hundred feet.”A feeling which had started in him when they’d emerged above the treeline

grew much more intense, the sensation of being ineluctably drawn to the edge, moving without moving. He felt unsteady on his feet though they were planted firmly at shoulder width. He did not shift an inch but felt himself rotating, spin-ning through the cosmos at a million miles an hour on a dozen different axes. The wind buffeted him on all sides, bursting and flurrying unexpectedly, the intimation of an unknown gravity that could exert itself fully and wipe him off the face of the mountain. His head spun. Sadie reached the elevated lip of the outcropping, grasped it with hands stretched overhead, took a toehold, boosted herself up, her head craned over the edge, looking down. Then she inched higher.

“Hey!” Fitzpatrick shouted. The muscles in her shoulders jumped, and she slid back, her sneakers rasping on the rock. He was embarrassed and turned away, but she caught the look in his eyes.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m feeling… it’s a funny feeling. Vertigo, maybe.”“I guess we should go down.”He nodded, knowing she was disappointed not to spend more time at the top.On the return trip they walked hand in hand over the ridgeline until they hit the

switchbacks and it became impractical. Then they went single file but remained close, descending into scrubby juniper. In the shade a brace of jays with blue-gray breasts sidestepped in an antagonistic mating dance, holding wings aloft and bristling in a display of false size. Locked in ritual, they paid no attention to the people watching.

The saddle was flat with stones convenient for sitting. They decided to stop there to eat. He dropped his pack, unzipped it, and rummaged through packages of food. Sadie scrambled to the top of a boulder and stood with hands on hips.

“It’s just gorgeous,” she said. “Look, you can see the Window.”“Where?”“Down there, the bottom of that cut.”“Uh-huh.”She climbed down from the boulder. He handed her lunch, and they ate and

talked. He took a drink of water and breathed deeply, smelling ozone clean and

48

Brian Van Reet

sharp. The vertigo, or whatever it was, had dissipated after they’d descended the ridge, by this time fading to a memory of itself, the ghost of a premonition. He didn’t ask, didn’t want another argument so soon, but couldn’t help thinking maybe some part of her was hoping for the worst, if that could be the nature of the attrac-tion. He tried to put the worry out of mind and follow her plans for the future, turning his face to bask in the sun. Far below, blooming creosote covered the plain in eerie yellow points. It was spring and nearly perfect weather.

Arianne Zwartjes

49

gulf coast nonfiction prize winner, 2011

This Suturing of Wounds or Words

I. Skin

My friend Nina archives and restores old films. Their bodies accumulate everything from dust to mold to dirt, shrink and become brittle, crack or start to break apart. They’re decaying from old age. The sprockets along the edges rip open.

They store the old films in what basically amount to caverns in a cliff wall. The temperature is kept at thirty-six degrees, moisture at ten percent. The archive is buying time. Trying to keep the film-bodies from aging, from decaying any further, before they can be copied onto another body.

There are so many ways we try to buy time as well. Not caves at thirty-six degrees, but almost everything else you can imagine has been attempted at some point.

Serums made from placentas. Cell injections from the tissues of fetal animals. Elixirs, ointments, drugs, hormones, dietary supplements. Cryonics. Alchemy and the use of precious metals for eating utensils. Monkey gallbladders, bathing in beer, bathing in special springs. Injecting human growth hormone, or injecting botulinum toxin into the skin. Rubbing in honey, or balm, or ejaculate, to keep the skin soft.

The prospect of brittleness is terrifying.

n n n

The collagen microfibril—left-handed helices twisting into a right coil, triple-helix filament—this protein crosslinks into the weaving that is our skin. In growth and repair, in development and disease, our skin stays soft, elastic, supple because of

50

Arianne Zwartjes

collagen. When the body is damaged, it lays down new collagen fibers and makes a scar: a pale, thin, vulnerable layer of skin.

As we gather years to us, some of the collagen in our bodies is lost, and some becomes more rigid, decreasing function.

Collagen’s life is cyclical like most other things in our bodies. We produce it and break it down all our lives. At some point, though—somewhere around forty years in—the balance tips: more breaking down, less producing. On top of that, collagen in the skin can be damaged by outside factors, distorting its coherent, orderly structure. The sun’s UV rays, chlorinated water, smoking, and other types of pollu-tion all do their damage. Nature takes us from conception through our years of procreative possibility with robust vigor. After that, our body’s role, in an evolutionary sense, is done.

There are varying theories about aging. One holds that aging events are random, cumulative, and microscopic. That there is slow accumulation of damage to cell membranes. That chemical reactions eventually bind together those molecular structures that work best when separate: proteins, nucleic acid, and collagen.

Another theory proposes that aging is simply genetically programmed into our cells: they have a set life span, a genetic timetable. When melanocytes, the cells that give our hair its melanin pigment, wear out during midlife, they are not replaced. Grey hairs ensue.

n n n

(The prospect of brittleness is terrifying.)

This year I watched my grandmother shrink. She’s forgotten how to eat, almost how to swallow; so tiny now, somehow she’s hanging on. Brittle. Barely in her

51

Arianne Zwartjes

bones. What tenacity keeps her there still, keeps ventricles moving, messages pulsing to nerves?

In the same year I watched my grandfather pass, unexpectedly, still so much more vital in his body than she. His eyes had gotten wider, his skin thinner; in the photos I look at now his smile seems a conjured motion—muscles of the face remember how, but the mind has started its own distance from the plane the rest of us walk on.

He was a firm believer in reincarnation and metaphysical knowledge. I remember, from very young, his stories about his submarine experiences in World War II. About the men who came to him and knew they were about to die. In the retelling, he would say my name, and then pause. “Arianne… I can’t tell you how many times I had one of the guys come to me before we went into battle, and say, ‘George, I’m scared. I think this one’s going to be it for me.’ And they were always right… they were always the ones to go.”

His voice plays in my head still. His younger voice, solid, just a little bit of gravel.

We pump tissues full of silicon, needles into lips to keep them plumped, as though they were pillows to be propped up. Even after bodies are de-animated, we push fluids through the veins, for some reason trying to hold them plumped, inflated.

II. Laceration

In older age, as our skin thins and becomes more delicate, more easily wounded, we may sustain “wet tissue paper” tears as a result of fairly minor trauma. But even before the skin thins and brittles with time, it is such a vulnerable body layer: soft, pliable, thin. We wound like ripe fruit, bruised and leaking open.

52

Arianne Zwartjes

Lacerations to the skin may be clean and linear if they are caused by a knife, glass shard, or other sharp object. They may be caused by slicing at an angle, separating an entire flap of skin like a peninsula. Crushing injuries, caused by a direct blow or impact, may cause a stellate laceration, irregular in its course. If deep enough, a laceration may reveal underlying tissues: fat, muscle, tendon, or bone.

Deep wounds sometimes accompany underlying bone fracture; it’s even possible for the broken bone to cause the laceration to the skin, sharp, splintered ends jutting through what was intact.

But broken bone is not the only way we are shattered or sliced. Whole worlds can fracture in an instant, leaving us reeling with lacerated ribbons of flesh or self. Whole worlds can fracture without a word of warning.

n n n

The most striking thing about fracture is the way it arrives. You can be going about the most mundane day you’ve ever experienced in your life. Nothing unusual. Nothing to give you pause. Indeed, it’s like every single other time you’ve ever done this particular thing you are doing—walking home in the evening, biking to work on a sunny morning, stepping into the car. You are thinking about other things. You are smiling at something your students said this afternoon. Or you are feeling your legs as they push against the pedals and extend, feeling your bike soar as you coast downhill. And then, suddenly. Like a dropped fruit splitting open.

A rough voice on the sidewalk behind you. Or the shrieking scrape of metal against metal. Or the unexpected thud of something heavy hitting the sidewalk.

Once I was biking home through a grocery’s parking lot in New Mexico. A large pickup truck hit me from behind. What I remember was the disorientation: an inexplicable physical impact, the instantaneous rupture of normal, the sense of being violently jolted apart from everything that I thought I was doing.

53

Arianne Zwartjes

Trauma is a shear in ordinary blacktop. A fissure in the everyday fabric.

Like flannel being ripped. The shredding of each fiber in a mostly-straight line. The frayed edges that result. The way the cloth loses its flat plane, becomes irregu-larly stretched and taut, gaping and baggy.

n n n

When you get there on the ambulance you can see it in their eyes. The shock of it. The rupture. Like everything they’ve ever known to be true just dissolved into nothing.

A snowy road in Wyoming with red rock upthrusts on all sides. And then the wind swirls and the road is gone and all you can see is white. You can feel you’re still moving. Posts swell into sight and then disappear again, just missed in the slide. Are you moving forward? Sideways?

Riding home and the bicycle and the ambulance in the street. The man with his patella torn open and apart. The foot so shredded it’s no longer a foot.

n n n

My brother’s girlfriend called him the three times she cut herself. Long streaking slices in the arms. He the bandage. The clotting agent. There are many questions raised of Quik-clot and other commercial clotting agents. One type has been known to stay in the bloodstream, forming clots long after the need has passed, traveling eventually to the brain and causing cerebral embolism and stroke. Another, in powder form, blew into the eyes of other soldiers in desert winds, damaging their vision. All clotting powder must be removed from the wound before physicians can suture, a lengthy cleaning process. Blooming wound on this terrain of skin.

n n n

Sometimes fracture is a clean slice . Sometimes it is ugly . Unbearable to look at .

54

Arianne Zwartjes

Unlike a house, there is something behind the drywall. When a hand is blown open there is so much tissue still hanging there. Bones and connective tissue, sponge of the flesh soaked in red. Looking nothing like a hand but in the space where a hand should be.

Sometimes you approach the scene and a man hangs upside down between the crumpled metal of two cars. Sometimes other rescuers are already walking past him, as though he were not hanging there, as though no body upside down and hanging had once contained a person, an individual.

Sometimes whole legs sliced open, like cut fruit, melons spilling out of their cask. In the calf is so much muscle and so much flesh. Skin rolled back like curtains to a theatre of what is beneath. The soft and furled shine, the deformity. Visit a meat counter and you’ll see what lies beneath.

n n n

Fracture is a sudden rupture in the skin of the afternoon. A crack, a tear, a render-ing apart of what once was whole. A violence.

III. Debridement

And after. After we are wounded, after our world is shattered by loss, reassurance is hard to come by. The precipice is still a precipice from the other side. From the bottom.

We find ourselves a shaky, knitted-together place to stand. Are, perhaps, a little purified, like rising from flames, by the absoluteness of it: by having lost what was unbearable, unsurvivable to lose, and finding ourselves still breathing.

55

Arianne Zwartjes

But that’s all we are, at this moment. Still breathing but broken, and at the bottom of this very tall precipice, with no clue as to how to ascend. Back to the flat plains of the living.

Back, with at least one foot, into the land of pretending again: we are safe, those we love are safe, there is no precipice.

n n n

Though some nights I wake fearful, wishing this city had less heroin and fewer gunshots, the truth is that fracture is everywhere. Our hearts are our whole bodies and our wounds are visible . We are atoms in a fragmented universe. Seen this way, individuals begin to blur. Journalists use the term compassion fatigue . What Ernest Becker called the denial of death is a kind of reality fatigue . And yet. And yet.

n n n

Doctors may choose to surgically remove dead or damaged tissue to promote the healing of a laceration. This is known as debriding the wound, and is most often done to create clean wound edges and decrease scarring, or to remove infected and necrotic tissue.

n n n

What is it that happens as fracture occurs. If it doesn’t entirely break us. Though sometimes it does. But. Sometimes the shattered vessel fills with light. Sometimes the fracture opens us. Sometimes we become not less but more alive. Like the discomfort of standing on a high ridge, soaked in slicing grey rain, scoured by wind. Bracing. Perhaps this scouring can shed what isn’t needed, sloughing off the dead skin built up over years of living, in fear of breaking, our faces turned away. Throughout my whole life, wrote Teilhard de Chardin, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it

56

Arianne Zwartjes

has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within. This is a man who has known fracture. We live steeped in its burning layers .

IV. Clotting Cascade

The human body has a vast, astonishing capacity to repair itself. To heal. Wounds to the soft tissues of our body, to the skin, heal through a number of complex, overlapping phases. The clotting cascade, in which a net of collagen fibers forms and is pulled tight to stop the bleeding. The inflammatory phase, to cleanse the wound of debris, bacteria, damaged tissue. The proliferative phase, in which all sorts of small miracles take place.

Fibroblast cells proliferate, and help create a rudimentary layer of new, living tissue in the wound. Epithelialization forms a barrier, the epithelial tongue, between the wound and the outside world. Epithelial cells actually migrate across the new layer of tissue, advancing in a sheet across the wound site and also rising from skin appendages such as hair follicles and sweat glands. They climb over each other in order to migrate. The next time you cut your finger, imagine these tiny cells, scrambling one over the other to help you heal. The more quickly this migration takes place, the less scarring will occur.

At the same time angiogenesis creates whole new blood vessels to carry extra sus-tenance to the cells fighting to repair you. This concentration of new capillaries is why the tender young tissue in wounds appears so deeply pink.

Finally, the maturation and remodeling phase, which can last a year or longer. In this phase, unneeded blood vessels gradually disappear, and the scar becomes less pink. The early, disorganized network of collagen laid down is replaced by a rearranged, cross-linked section of tougher collagen; as the wound heals, it becomes stronger, up to 80% as strong as the previous, normal tissue.

57

Arianne Zwartjes

n n n

Definitions for the word “recover” include: to get back something previously lost. To bring the self back to a natural condition. To return to a suitable or correct state. To return to a previous state of health, prosperity, or equanimity.

But healing from wounds actually changes us. We are a different cluster of cells, blood vessels, and tissue once remodeled.

n n n

How we choose to respond to the fracture all around us can be transformative. What we make of our own wounding. Which narrative we choose to believe.

One of today’s prevalent stories is that of no-narrative. That everything is simply fracture. But I believe a different narrative is also seeping into things. Starting to clot and thicken. We take these stories to make sense of things. We take them to give us meaning.

n n n

We are generations in conflict with ourselves: want to believe in a clear narrative and at the same time find we can’t. Or, we spent so much time not-believing. And not without reason. As we get older I think we begin to want—and to be torn. We understand fracture too well. Understand the shiftiness of any narrative, how slippery it is, how fickle. We’ve seen the places it can lose its hold, its meaning. The places where it’s hollow. The places it avoids saying what needs to be said. Like making love to reweave the frayed lace intricacies of a lie . We were skeptics from the beginning. Still, there’s this certain ache coming into place for us. An ache for something to supplant the narrative we don’t believe in? Something coherent instead of cynicism, instead of a kind of social and relational nihilism.

n n n

58

Arianne Zwartjes

The possibility that philosophical inquiry might confirm our worst fears (do we turn away). This heritage of relinquished blooms.

You can only relate what you saw a bold and almost incredible answer.

n n n

We’ve seen the speed with which images bombard each other, overlap, replace. The speed with which cultural amnesia takes hold. We know that self is a slippery thing. That the I can be no one, anyone, everyone all at once. Nonetheless, I think we’re slowly finding we want it still to mean—as we drag this anchor across the bottom we want it to catch somewhere.

n n n

If I say things thaw the tap of salt water am I trying to be optimistic. Though today a thaw is a frightening thing. There is the question of how to (hold to) optimism within the present world narrative.

Stitched and torn, cut and spliced, the surgeon’s hand is never empty. If you watch you can see the huge floes of ice, like buildings, come crashing down.

n n n

In the one hand I balance a brown egg: each generation has thought its world was going to end. Paul of Tarsus called his days “these late times .” He lived in the first century. In the other, a speckled blue: scientifically it seems this time around we have reason to believe it actually might.

Where do we put that in the narrative? If we are thinking say of children. If we’ve re-gathered that much faith. It all splits back open again. Sutures today are made of specialized thread that will eventually dissolve into nothing .

59

Arianne Zwartjes

Notes

p. 49: This is a very slight paraphrase of E.M. Forster, as he is quoted in Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being .

David Roy, “Dying and Death—Late in the Twentieth Century,” from Awareness of Mortality, ed. J. Kauffman

p. 49-50: Information on the collagen microfibril comes from Structure, Stability and Folding of the Collagen Triple Helix, by Jürgen Engel and Hans Peter Bächinger.

p. 51: Information on theories of aging comes from Human Growth and Development Through the Lifespan, by Kathleen Thies and John Travers.

p. 54: Journalists use the term compassion fatigue . What Ernest Becker called the denial of death is a kind of reality fatigue . (Annie Dillard, For the Time Being)

p. 55: Our hearts are our whole bodies and our wounds are visible . (Fannie Howe, Indivisible)

Dillard quotes Teilhard de Chardin as writing: Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within .

And Chardin on the divine: We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers .

p. 57: Like making love to reweave the frayed lace intricacies of a lie (Boyer Rickel, Remanence)

p. 58: Paul of Tarsus called his days ‘these late times .’ He lived in the first century . (Annie Dillard, For the Time Being)

82

Ann Tashi Slater

horse caparisoned with shiny beads glide past. A few months ago, her son asked if he could have her horse-shaped sandalwood letter opener when she died. She and her husband had laughed over it—how innocent children were, so unaware of what death really meant! It sickens her now to realize she’s been no different. In her tidy little palace, she herself has been a child with a little girl’s desires: a hand-some scholar husband, her own house, a baby, a dog. The same girl who on school breaks used to fly to visit her mother’s parents at the farm in New Hampshire, her father’s parents in Darjeeling. Going down the dirt road to the farm, taking the train up into the Himalayas, she’d never doubted that her grandparents would be there waiting for her. Absurdly, her grandmother’s funeral has caught her unawares, the sight of the body laid out in the altar room, butter lamps and incense burning, bringing home for the first time the inevitability—and finality—of death. Her husband doesn’t understand because no one he’s close to has died. She’s tried to explain to him but it’s like trying to explain what it feels like to make love.

Hours later, she’s startled awake by the radio broadcasting a flood warning, the slow, controlled voice at odds with the threat of disaster. How long has she been sleeping? Her stomach lurches at the sight of her hands, wrinkled claws, on her lap. She is alone, an ancient woman in a rocking chair. But here’s her son slumbering in his bed, and she sees that her husband is asleep on the floor next to her, glasses pushed up on his forehead, Basho manuscript on his chest, the dog curled at his feet. They are all together in this tiny room, sheltering in a hermit’s hut as the rain beats down.

Outside in the dark night, a figure holding a black umbrella emerges from the house next door. It’s the neighbor with Alzheimer’s—he’s started coming and going at all hours. The poor man shuffles across his yard, then wanders into the labyrinth of manzanita trees bordering his property. Down on the freeway, the traffic has thinned but is still passing in an unending stream, everyone on their way to some-where, just like her neighbor, her grandmother, her husband and son in sleep, she herself. The night is alive with travelers, this, then, the intrinsic truth of things.

Sjón and Jason Ranon Uri Rotstein

83

Poetry Redressed Jason Ranon Uri Rotstein sits down with Icelandic poet Sjón

Considering its size and population, Iceland’s impact on the world’s stage has been proportionately large in the area of the arts . In the past few years, Iceland has put itself on the map in the areas of design and architecture, and today “Iceland” is often taken as a synonym for hip and New Age, even Space Age, a place where Ivy League jetsetters go to party for a weekend . In poetry and art one frequently finds instances of manipulated images where Iceland’s space in the middle of the world and the middle of the ocean is made to physically join up via some immense oceanic bridge to Denmark, Scotland, and Ireland . This is not simply a re-coordinating of the jigsaw of the earth to fit Iceland within the rest of Pangaea, but rather an apt metaphor for what is afoot within the culture .

Rarely in Iceland do you meet a writer that has not dabbled in other pursuits, genres, or art forms . Rarely do you meet a barman that is nothing but a barman . The key to understanding Iceland’s avant-gardes is to understand the spark of idealism lying ready in the bosom of each and every Icelandic citizen when threatened with the odds . The Crash was one such challenge to their historically inviolable identity . If award-winning novelist, poet, and lyricist Sjón, who wrote the great song “Scatterheart” for the movie Dancer in the Dark, is right, a mobilized intellectual class is already rising up to meet the world’s demands .

Jason Rotstein: Where are the intellectuals today in Iceland and what is the intel-lectual need?

sjón: Well, I just wonder if there has ever been a real position for intellectuals in Icelandic society. Traditionally, we are a society where everybody has the right to voice his or her opinion about whatever is happening. It doesn’t matter if you come from the academe or if you come from the arts, if you are the foreman of the plumber’s union, or if you are simply a disgruntled or unhappy bank clerk some-where, everybody has access to the dialogue through the newspapers. I think this makes the situation here a little bit different from what you can expect in other countries. I mean, most of the voices you see in newspapers, for example, are the so-called ordinary people, the laymen, and I think for me this is a very healthy situa-tion. Of course, we have the tradition from the ’40s and ’50s of some key intellectuals, key writers, taking part in social discourse, mainly Halldór Laxness. So I think it’s

94

Sjón and Jason Ranon Uri Rotstein

a book?” “Yes,” I said. “You’re very courageous.” And I said: “I hope so.” Then he just said goodbye. But then afterwards—it’s a small town—every time I met him in the street he said hi. So in a way he had already said, “Okay you are taking the step, you’re courageous, it’s going to be dangerous, but hi, there you are.” But today I think that there is more distance between young writers and established writers. That’s why maybe it’s necessary. That’s why we have for the first time departments of creative writing. Because if you are a fifteen-year-old writer today, the chance of somehow getting into the same place as the established writer is more difficult than it was when I was growing up thirty years ago.

Rachel Cook

95

Place and Placeless-ness in Duncan Ganley’s Location Shots

A photograph records a place at a particular point in time; therefore, the pho-tograph is always pointing to the past in one way or another. The image becomes evidence to the fact that someone was there, someone stood in front of a spectacle and observed it. Acting as the human eye, photographs of sites represent the subject behind the lens as much as the site or the history of that particular spot and point in time. Vatnojokull Glacier, Loch Lomond, Westminster Abbey, Bridge of Sighs, The Alamo, Memorial Fountain, Ground Zero, and Sky City represent a constellation of locations, histories, memories, and events. This constellation conjures up a series of images both real and imagined and illustrates our innate human to desire to be close to the tragic as well as to the sublime.

Duncan Ganley’s practice dislocates the typical subject-viewer relationship to the object-place. His work examines the extent to which our experience of the real is informed by the language of fiction through visual narrative structures. Ganley’s projects—films, photographs, installations—overlap with one another, informing each other with their slant on reality. Drawing on influences from documentary film practices, nineteenth-century landscape painting, and even surrealist narra-tive experiments, Ganley presents a world that has a certain placeless-ness about it. Perhaps this is because even within these traditional documentary practices, memory and speculation are embedded within the frame. Ganley’s work manages to skillfully call these uncertain qualities into focus while remaining conscious of our desire to believe in the existence of something beyond what we can witness.

In the Location Shots series, Ganley presents each tourist-beckoning location by revealing the apparatus through which we typically experience these places. We see the viewers standing in front of us with the location merely existing in the background. The subjects’ identities are never revealed, and the backs of their heads are perfectly spaced in the middle of the frame. As a viewer, you might find yourself leaning to one side or the other to maybe catch a glimpse of what the person in the image is photographing. Bags are strapped over shoulders, arms are raised with

96

Rachel Cook

elbows bent, and you are forced to examine how the subject in the frame is expe-riencing the site. Location Shots (Memorial Foundation) is one of the few images where the subject’s camera is revealed. The site appears to be under construction: a fence surrounds the park area where the Memorial Foundation will be built. She stares into the screen of the camera instead of the site in front of her; you see the distance between her and the screen as similar to the barrier that exists in the Memorial Foundation location.

Notions of photography in space and time prompted art historian and photog-raphy theorist Helen Westgeest to conduct a symposium and produce a book titled Take Place: Photography and Place from Multiple Perspectives . In the introduction, she questions the difference between the experience of a place in real life versus that in a photograph, and how a photograph’s context and the characteristics of the medium influence our experience of place in a photo.

Ganley’s Location Shots series pose similar questions. By positioning the spec-tator into the photograph itself, Ganley challenges his audience to become aware of its own relationship to the act of looking, photographing, and the placeless-ness of the image in front of them. It is in this artist-constructed location of Ganley’s that we, as spectators, begin to understand how our own presence affects our sense of place in the world. Photography dislocates us from place and represents a non-place. Through the lens of the camera or the rearview mirror of car, our memory of the place becomes the location we are searching for over and over again.

from.LoCATioN ShoTS.by.Duncan.Ganley. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

. Location Shots (Vatnajokull), 2008 | digital c-print, 30" x 40"

Location Shots (Loch Lomond), 2006 | digital c-print, 30" x 40"Location Shots (Westminster Abbey), 2004 | digital c-print, 30" x 40"Location Shots (Bridge of Sighs), nd | digital c-print, 30" x 40"Location Shots (The Alamo), nd | digital c-print, 30" x 40"Location Shots (Memorial Fountain), nd | digital c-print, 30" x 40"Location Shots (Ground Zero), nd | digital c-print, 30" x 40"Location Shots (Sky City), 2004 | digital c-print, 30" x 40"

All images courtesy of the artist and Inman Gallery, Houston .

Aviya Kushner

105

The Fascinating, Quirky, and Deeply American Effort To Help International Refugee Writers Make New Writing Lives in the United States

OnE afternoon, the doorman to my building in Chicago stopped me with visible insistence and handed me a note from a Bosnian woman who lives on the fourteenth floor. She had heard that I was a professor of creative writing and wondered if I would be willing to read a novel that was very important in Bosnia and then introduce it at a book celebration. The wind howled; gusts of sleet blew against the building’s windows. I took off my gloves and looked away from the doorman and down at my tired, frostbitten hands: I was carrying several dozen student essays, I had a book review due within hours, and then there were the fifty-something graduate school applications I was supposed to be reading. Everyone, it seemed, wanted me to read something for them. But I was intrigued by the whole idea of a book celebration, and by the doorman’s stiff determination, so I said yes. The next day, a novel, Black Soul, was waiting for me at the doorman’s desk.

The novel was a best seller in Europe, but I had never heard of it. The doorman—Bosnian as well—assured me it was important. The author himself had translated it into English, and the cover, with red letters on a black background, looked self-published. The dedication was a diatribe against former President Bill Clinton and the United Nations.

106

Aviya Kushner

The story was a gripping, though uneven, account of a young man whose wife and child are murdered as he watches from just outside his home. War begins without warning, and the young man becomes a soldier. Slowly, his war experience teaches him not only what his country is, was, and might become, but also who his father and mother are. We learn that his father was a soldier too; he spent years fleeing

and fighting the Nazis and met his mother—an American nurse—in the dark moments of those years. The elderly father teaches his son how to survive, how to carry knives, how to kill. The book had a mixture of wartime fact—the sieges, the hand-to-hand murder, the maiming—and the soft, mournful, inexplicable tones of elegy and eternal, reverberating trauma.

The novel, like the author, moves to Chicago and offers a glimpse of the refugee

experience in America: the poverty, the struggling, the anonymity, and the recur-ring flashbacks. Walking down Michigan Avenue, he sees a Serb commander in a high-class café. I read it, wondering if it was real or an illusion, and instantly flashed back to I.B. Singer’s masterful short story “The Cafeteria” in which a young woman who had barely escaped Europe’s fires alive imagines that she sees Adolf Hitler in a cafeteria, right next to the other refugees sipping tea and eating man-delbrodt in Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

And so I found myself traveling across the city to a branch of the Chicago Public Library, which serves as the headquarters for the Bosnian-American Library (I had no idea it was there). Inside the library lay a spread—meat, cheese, fruit, and Starbucks coffee. There were several extremely straight-backed men in the room who reminded me of the army officers I had encountered as a reporter in Jerusalem. Military, I thought. All the way. They were generals, colonels, fighters, and they were coming out to hear a novel about being a soldier.

I turned my head and saw a television camera: Bosnian TV was there. At times the event was called a “book promotion,” and at other times, a “book

celebration.” I had never seen anything like it. Various dignitaries—military, jour-

“But the force fighting the threats against writers is harder to measure: neighborliness. That ancient, amor-phous quality—the one evidenced by Abraham in the Bible—is exactly what is making it possible for a new generation of refugee writers to make it in the United States.”

107

Aviya Kushner

nalistic, literary—got up to the microphone and praised the book. I was asked to comment on it as literature, so I said something about The Things They Carried, which drew blank stares, and then about the Holocaust, which got a warm recep-tion. The head of the new Illinois Holocaust Museum was there; he soon made a short speech that moved and haunted me.

He had been a child survivor and never spoke of his experiences. But the rise of Holocaust denial pushed him to speak to children, and so he had encountered Dano, a fourteen-year-old boy born in Bosnia, when the boy was researching a school project. The two hit it off, and the older Jewish man promised to help educate American audiences about what happened in what was once Yugoslavia.

The book “celebration” included a discussion of what the Bosnian commu-nity could learn from the Jewish community’s response to the Holocaust. It then moved into ever-stranger territory for someone used to American literary culture, or someone like me who has friends and colleagues who discuss craft, style, and the beauty of a sentence. The spotlight fell on a woman whose child had been murdered nearly twenty years ago. She stood, someone said something in Bosnian, the audience clapped, and she cried.

I was surrounded by people who had lived harrowing stories. They read for dif-ferent reasons than why I was reading. They were reading for comfort, community, for a soothing of wounds.

“A lot of books got war wrong,” one of the straight-backed men said. “This one is right.”

At last, my neighbor sat me down with the novelist. He was a tanned man of medium height with thick hair and intense blue eyes, who was extremely proud of two things which he quickly mentioned in accented English: his successful business as a self-employed electrician, and his children, who spoke fluent English. I got a sense of deep kindness from his eyes and the creases around them, and the way his wife looked at him with quiet, gentle admiration; later, Bosnian after Bosnian mentioned the author’s decency, his unwavering personal sense of what was moral and what was not, and his conviction that this novel had to be written. He was shorter than the generals and seemed a little more everyday, a little more normal: an accidental soldier, if anything, a young Dad who got caught in some genocide going on in the backyard.

108

Aviya Kushner

PEn American Center’s Freedom to Write program keeps a watch list of journalists, novelists, poets—even historians—who are being threatened in their homeland. To snag a spot on the watch list, a writer has to be in jail or under death threat. Generally, there are seven hundred to one thousand people on that list annually, according to the committee’s chairman.

But the force fighting the threats against writers is harder to measure: neigh-borliness. That ancient, amorphous quality—the one evidenced by Abraham in the Bible—is exactly what is making it possible for a new generation of refugee writers to make it in the United States. While Europe has government-funded efforts to help writers at risk and a neat organization that is thirty-something cities strong and growing, in America writers are often welcomed by ordinary citizens, not government functionaries. Each American city of refuge and each effort to help refugee writers who make it here is, therefore, also the story of a raging, still-burning American individualism come to life.

It turns out that my story of getting involved in the world of refugee writers by chance, by fortuitous accident, is common. Americans involved in helping literary writers at risk nearly always mention neighborliness or connectedness: a sense that a writer from a far-off land is truly as close as the person living next door. For American writers who have devoted thousands of hours to helping international writers facing death threats, jail time, or other hounding persecution, it’s a story of understanding what community means. Sometimes, it’s about redefining com-munity: insisting that the community is the world itself.

“I can trace it to a period maybe twenty years ago,” the novelist Russell Banks told me in a phone interview from his home in upstate New York, “when I began to realize that I really belonged to an international tribe that transcended language, as a writer. Malaparte, the Italian writer, says I wear no flag but my skin. I had as much in common with a Chinese poet as with John Updike,” Banks explained. “My brothers and sisters are engaged in the same enterprise I am. Some are imprisoned, put in exile, beaten and sometimes killed because they are writers, and for no other reason. It was a no-brainer to say: what can I do?”

109

Aviya Kushner

Banks started by signing petitions, and eventually became president of an organization helping writers. “I had been a yearly signatory for the International Parliament of Writers, along with Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, and Kurt Vonnegut.” In 1999, Banks was approached to become president of Cities of Refuge North America. “They wanted an American,” he said. “We have a strong history of providing sanctuary to artists and people in flight.”

Banks took over with “the ambition of generating some cities in the United States.” It wasn’t easy; Europe had a system of government support, and America had virtually none. The writers had to make connections, one by one.

“You have to raise the money privately—it’s hard work,” says Banks. “It’s much harder to do in the United States. You’re putting together a fragile structure of individuals, sometimes corporations, and educational institutions. In Ithaca, they were having a bake sale. You can’t imagine having a bake sale in Paris.”

“It was binge work,” he says. “You work really intensely for two weeks, and then you don’t think about it for three weeks.”

And that’s how Russell Banks ended up flying to Pittsburgh to meet Henry Reese.

Reese is a Pittsburgh businessman who spent decades running a successful telemarketing firm and helped make Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) a viable organization, one phone call at a time. I wondered how he got involved in helping writers in danger, eventually founding a City of Refuge in Pittsburgh.

“It’s one of those things where you know exactly where and how it happened,” says Reese. “It was in 1997, and Salman Rushdie gave a talk in Pittsburgh. He was just coming out of a fatwa, being in hiding, and in the middle of the talk he mentioned a group called Cities of Refuge.”

That was the first Reese had heard of the European network of cities that help persecuted writers.

“My wife and I, we kicked each other. Our legs touched. We had a house that had once been a crack house. We were renting it at the time, and we both thought it would make a great house for a writer.” That house was on a troubled block

Edgar Bayley

140

Clarity

Clarity has always tempted meAnd clarity has at times denied meLike a bird that flies in dreamsAnd falls and keeps falling without flying like dead weight

Clarity has always tempted meEspecially the clarity of elder leavesAlso the clarity of the pebbleAnd of fir branchesAnd the fast and fierce clarity of the salamander

I have wanted to have clarity to see The clumps of newly-turned earthAnd also to see the plough itselfAnd the water that runs clear through the ditch

Clarity I have wanted to revisit so many dreamsAnd glories and powers and various circumstances and peopleAnd to be present in air and at the same time in fire

Clarity has always tempted meThe clarity of being wholly in each flowerIn each wound or ruling or seedI have wanted clarity to live

And when finally I could define the clarity that I soughtI realised how much fatigue and down and red earthAnd confusion and oblivion are necessary to comprehend clearly

Translated from the Spanish by Emily Toder

141

Edgar Bayley

And being here with total lucidity sitting on the side of the roadStoking the fire under the sky and the dust of the hours

And as clarity has always tempted meThat time when under an open and spread out sunThe waters of the bay began to grow choppyUntil acquiring a purplish tintAnd a large white bird suddenly emerged from between the cloudsBeating its wings and fluttering smoothly aroundI decided that it was the moment to toss these words to the seaBecause the clarity that I sought so muchIs only in certain silencesIn certain blank spacesBefore and after few and trivial words

164

Anna Moschovakis and Andy Fitch

AM: Oh there’s all the stuff about Scientologists. I’d developed this theory growing up that the reason Scientologists became successful in Hollywood—you know, I grew up in Los Angeles and always had this question: Why do people get paid so much more to act on screen than someone else does to waitress? Which I know is hard because I’ve been a waitress, and I came up with this theory that Scientology exists to create mental conditions so people—people who probably are nice guys, like John Travolta might be a nice guy—can feel okay about making such absurd money compared to other people.

AF: Yeah, that’s what Nietzsche says about corporations: that they’re organizations designed so people can do things they’d be ashamed to do on their own.

AM: Exactly.

AF: Well, have we covered enough do you think? I can’t tell.

AM: Well, if we need to follow up, from France I’ll have Skype. Though I’d wanted to ask you something too. Um, something about scope. I was thinking, when you’d mentioned the length of things, about the length of a conversation, or length of a walk… you know, the forms I know you use?

AF: And your long poems—they’re almost exactly the length of my printed conver-sations. You give aerobic exercise for my brain.

AM: Like I’m here. Like I’m walking around Tompkins Square Park right now. I’ve been wandering the past hour. And thinking how, when you go on a walk by your-self, or when I go on a walk by myself, there’s walking mode. Then at some point this walk may end before I get home, and then I’m in going-home mode while the walk’s [Glitch] over in some way. You’re no longer walking, now you’re just going somewhere. Your attention has changed. And conversations, too. You can be totally engaged in a conversation and it can be over, though still you’re with the person.

Sarah A. Strickley

165

Cy Twombly: Colors From His Own Heart Discover a fitting testament to a divisive artist’s life with a respectful passage through his work

The passing of Cy Twombly at the age of 83 in July of this year was marked with a flood of print and digital testimonials across the country and worldwide, a great number of which commented upon the artist’s uncanny knack for dividing opinion. Simply put, he isn’t an easy artist to categorize. His large-scale mixed media works on canvas frustrate the viewer’s compulsion to find meaning—in part by deliberately interrogating the fraught territory between mark and word. When celebrated, his paintings have been said to “touch upon something fundamental to a writer’s relationship with his or her language” ( John Berger). When condemned,

Phot

o ©

Get

ty Im

ages

166

Sarah A. Strickley

his paintings have been said to represent little more than “a few drips and splatters and an occasional pencil line” (Donald Judd).

The turbulent gulf between these positions serves only to exacerbate the task of explaining how exactly one of Twombly’s paintings could fetch a bid of $13.5 million at auction in 2010, while he continues to remain woefully underrepresented in American collections—especially when compared to his more widely celebrated contemporaries, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Treatments of Twombly’s role in the art world are populated with unsettling adjectives—discomfiting, difficult, truculent, and subversive, to list only a few—thus begging the question: how does one best pay testament to such a polarizing yet beloved figure?

During his lifetime, Twombly largely avoided the fray, settling permanently in southern Italy in 1957 and ignoring his critics. In the course of his long career, he wrote only one short statement and gave only two brief interviews about his paint-ings and sculptures. Given his preference for silence when it came to discussing critical reception, it’s worth noting that in one of those two interviews—conducted by Nicholas Serota in 2008—Twombly spoke somewhat effusively of his affection for one of the only places in the world where viewers can enjoy a retrospective of his work, the Cy Twombly Gallery on the campus of the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. “I think it’s a beautiful building [and] I love it,” he said. “Nice and warm and it sits there nice, with a big tree in front.”

The story of the little building that houses one of the largest paintings of Twombly’s career begins with a unique collaboration between artist, architect, and art collector. Renzo Piano made a career highlight of his design for the Menil Collection, blending gray cypress siding with the low-slung bungalows dotting the surrounding neighborhood and crowning the construction with an innovative system of light-filtering leaves. By the time Dominique de Menil invited him to add a separate building for a collection of Twombly’s paintings, Twombly had already sketched out his own detailed plans. Where one might expect a battle, an unusually productive alliance ensued.

Together, Twombly, Piano, and the Menil Collection built a demure, stone-wrapped block topped with a steel-trussed system designed to modulate the effects of the Texas sun. Inspired by Art Deco buildings in Paris, Twombly added canvas sailcloth to the ceiling—a choice that results in the soothing play of light on the

167

Sarah A. Strickley

walls and whitewashed oak floors inside. In the artist’s own words, “It’s light and happy and it’s not pretentious, it’s perfect for just what it is.”

By some accounts, the opening of the gallery marked Twombly’s emergence as a modern master. (His next major accomplishment was an invitation to paint the ceiling of the Louvre, which he adorned with a monumental wash of lapis lazuli populated by overlapping circles and Greek lettering.) But one imagines that the artist would be rather more interested to hear about the experience the Cy Twombly Gallery proffers—for free, as it happens—to thousands of patrons every year.

While it’s difficult to put a value on the meaning and role of the gallery in the community since its opening in 1995, it’s safe to say that it has served as both sanctuary and inspiration to many—especially to writers. On the face of things, it might seem a simple equation: the writer is attracted to the seeming emergence in Twombly’s paintings of the deeply internalized and thus heavily obscured lyric. The gestalt of recognition might be enough to ensnare the literary-minded viewer, but any poet worth her salt knows clarity from opacity. Twombly offers an opportunity to contemplate the illegible, the obscure, the unsaid, the vast fields of abbreviation in which light and line dance unabated.

Twombly liked poets—Rilke, Pound, and Eliot in particular. They offered him the condensed phrase, the reference. To his thinking, it didn’t matter if he repre-sented the lyric precisely in his pictures; the important thing was that it was there for him when he needed it. A case in point is the massive, 13-by-52-foot painting, Untitled (Say Goodbye to Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) . The painting began with several volumes of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholia, but only reached completion after twenty-two years of work when Twombly wrangled the use of a warehouse, unrolled the canvas, and came to a beautiful line from a Keats poem. He changed plains to shores, but dismissed the disparity as unimportant: “For me, it’s just a fantasy, you know. I mean it’s a way the mind works; it can’t occupy itself with just a brush all the time,” he said in his interview with Serota.

The painting, a triptych, occupies its own double room in the Twombly Gallery. Often described as an allegory of Orpheus’ trip to the underworld, and an auto-biographical narrative, the work reads from right to left in the Chinese tradition. Bold whorls of color leave way to scribbled ships and despairing white expanses—a progression to ashy exhaustion that is, to say the least, powerful to behold. If

168

Sarah A. Strickley

you find yourself unswayed by its presence in these pages, consider its capacity to compel young women to strip nude before it. According to the New York Times, a stark naked Gallery patron respected a guard’s request that she dress and depart, but not before writing in the guest book, “The painting makes me want to run naked.”

Visitors to the Twombly Gallery will also play witness to paintings such as Triumph of Galatea, inspired by Raphael’s fresco masterpiece of the same name. Twombly resented his critics’ penchant for labeling him a graffiti artist—he felt his work was simply more lyrical and elaborate than graffiti—but the elements that drew such comparisons throughout his career are on display in such a painting. Though various anatomical and scatological iterations do appear in Triumph—a pink pair of breasts, viscous smears of paint—the eye is largely preoccupied by the sheer volume and variety of marks—fingerpainted, penciled, daubed onto the canvas in pinks, yellows, and blues. The energy is frenetic and, though unrestrained, considered and reconsidered.

Untitled (Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair; Part I) is one of a series of paintings that make references to passages in Rilke, Rumi, and Leopardi. The bottom-heavy composition (a vertical plane split in two, uneven horizontals by a thin, white slat) juxtaposes a petal-red inscription, “In his despair he drew the colors from his own heart,” and a successively aggressive layering of fist-smudged pigment and coagulating paint.

The series is a particular inspiration to poets, at least one of whom has published a poem referencing the lyrics Twombly engages. The experience of walking through the room these paintings occupy in the gallery can be an emotional one for anybody, but for writers it’s rather like passing through the pressurized field that sits forever behind the tongue. There’s something sorrowful about it, something divine. It may not always be easy, but upon the occasion of memorializing the artist once described as the master of verbal silence, there is perhaps no better journey to make.

Joe Bonomo

169

Live Nude Essay!

In the final chapter of his Greenwich Village memoir Kafka Was The Rage, Anatole Broyard describes the aching, joyous condition of sex in the years immedi-ately following the Second World War. Even in a neighborhood we associate with sophistication and robust experimentation, sex in 1947 was baffling to the longing, fiercely private girls and the roving, generally respectful boys, each operating under the twin demands of culture and hormones. For Broyard, there was as much drama and psychic weight in the prelude to sex as there was in the act itself. From the hindsight of the late 1980s, he writes:

One of the things we’ve lost is the terrific coaxing that used to go on between men and women, the man pleading with a girl to sleep with him and the girl pleading with him to be patient. I remember the feeling of being incandes-cent with desire, blessed with it, of talking, talking wonderfully, like singing an opera. It was a time of exaltation, this coaxing, as if I was calling up out of myself a better and more deserving man. Perhaps this is as pure a feeling as men and women ever have.

I can only wonder what Broyard would make now of the ease with which ado-lescents carry and view in their heads and on smart phones explicit sexual images and texts, unburdened by prohibitive, taunting imaginations and mid-century decorum. “In 1947, American life had not yet been split open,” Broyard writes. “It was still of a piece, intact, bounded on every side, and, above all, regulated. Actions we now regard as commonplace were forbidden by law and by custom.”

n n n

“There is an unseemly exposure of the mind, as well as of the body,” says William Hazlitt, the oversharer of the nineteenth century. This sentence is in my head now as I consider the emotional condition of the essay, its neediness, the way

Michael Czyzniejewski

186

The Brother-in-Law and the Beach

Oscar has stolen an eight-by-ten photo of his brother’s wife and keeps it with him in his house. The picture hails from Darla’s honeymoon to Jamaica, where Darla poses underneath a waterfall near a beach, clad in a forest green bikini, her arms splayed in the air in joyous celebration. The bikini, perhaps a tad too small for Darla, could not have withstood the water pressure for long, Oscar imagines. Soon after the photo is snapped, the top had to have been ripped from Darla’s breasts by the powerful streams gushing from above. Oscar also imagines Darla not caring, arching her back to allow the jets better access to her front parts. Darla soon peels off her bottoms, tosses them ashore with seductive nonchalance. Here Oscar is the photographer, is rugged and tan with blond dreadlocks. Oscar imagines Darla begging him to join her for a dip, teasing and prodding until he relents. Recently, however, the picture of Darla in her bikini in the waterfall in Jamaica has been telling this to Oscar. The photo speaks out loud, calling for him to remove his clothes and dive into the cove, to join her for all the pleasantries her world has to offer.

n n n

Oscar’s brother Bruno used to stand behind Darla in the waterfall, shirtless with a shark tooth necklace that mimics his jagged smile. Oscar has removed Bruno’s image with an X-Acto knife, the perfect outline of Bruno shadowing Darla, a hole Oscar cannot explain when she inquires. Photo Darla does not know Bruno, doesn’t remember the wedding, nor Real Darla’s entire life. She understands only this waterfall, her superfluous bikini, her lust for Oscar. It’s drafty back there, Photo Darla says, referring to the Bruno hole. Windy today, Oscar says, and fakes a shiver, pretending to feel the breeze, too.

n n n

When Oscar is home and alone, he props the photo of Darla next to him on his couch. Oscar watches TV with Photo Darla, eats dinner, tells her about

187

Michael Czyzniejewski

work, lunch, the commute home. Darla remains single-minded: Water’s great, she’ll say as he eats. Come in and work up that appetite. As she persists, Oscar imagines her quiet, pictures her swimming laps, posits her a fan of his favorite shows, a patient and attentive viewer. Darla counters by removing her bikini top, by jiggling her breasts, splashing at him with the warm, two-dimensional water. The more Oscar resists, the more provocative her taunts become. Why fight it? Darla says, blowing him a kiss. Why indeed, Oscar wonders.

n n n

Each weekend, Oscar hosts Bruno and Darla for dinner, football, and board games. Before they arrive, Oscar wraps the protesting photo in pillows, puts her inside the couch bed in the basement, turns up the TV. He works to keep the couple upstairs, which isn’t hard, nothing in the basement but dust. Discovering Photo Darla would devastate the real Darla, Oscar knows, as Real Darla is nothing like Photo Darla. While the two share appearance, one experience, and one item of clothing, Real Darla did not remove her bikini, did not invite the photographer to join her for a dip, has never shown a smidgeon of attraction toward Oscar. Real Darla bakes for church raffles, counsels teens on abstinence, loves big, handsome Bruno without waver. Darla once caught Oscar staring down her sweater as she reached across the Monopoly board to move her thimble. Every week since, she has arrived at Oscar’s in loose-fitting, full-collared tops. Bruno is a lucky man, Oscar knows, but wonders if Real Darla, in the privacy of their bedroom, ever takes on Photo Darla’s randiness. He’ll never know, he concedes, and concentrates on not looking at Real Darla when she visits his home. Photo Darla’s constant, desperate screams from the basement give him enough to worry about.

n n n

Oscar announces to coworkers he’s met someone. For years, these friends have shown concern, tried and failed to fix him up, called him “lonely” in front of and behind his back. Oscar has been attracted to several of these ladies, has thrown out feelers, finding nothing reciprocal, not in that way. Like with Real Darla,

206

ishion hutchinson

Harlem Summer

No bitterness comes out of thin slicesof lemon loaf you cut at the kitchenwindow as I watch from the sofa, thinking:‘the light catches and frames perfecteach object: bread, knife, and Dante.’

August bends on the stoop, paying anothervisit to my years, my fourth summer in New York.I haven’t learnt the metropolitan tongue,too provincial, I watch the hurtling lineof crumbs increase under the blade.

At home, some sea is ruining the reef.At peace with this caress; no onequarrels but the net that heaves back nothingthis finical year, the lone shark tears throughthe haze like a jagged-edge train and brings me

to this hiatus, desolate and vexed;same with Naso before your namesake, castaway to another land—this is America, though;trust the billboard’s promise, the offer of breadfrom the mount of a stool, your Sinai.

My fate is stainless as the knife that parteda friend’s wrist years ago, indigoed the clearsand tourists visit to watch the sun vanishinto the bay, a metallic reoccurring soap operachildren leap slow to into the sun-rusted water.

207

ishion hutchinson

The spill of yellow on the granite counteris the sand of home minimized to amnesia,friends dwindling like accounts, accountedfor in fragments, mentioned and forgottento the continent’s widening grasp.

America’s promise does not extend to Harlem.The Renaissance blows like garbage in the street,acid-eyed addicts stare through me, puzzledat how still I stand in the vomit of peoplecoming from underground, blinking out light.

I don’t know how they escape Charonand why they go back in the dozens,to be unloaded on the moving blocks,avenues that advertise panaceasfor their dark blues, their anxiety and hunger.

An ant takes a crumb on its black back.Once more Sisyphus strains across the sinkto my sea, all our seas, but the single seaof my point of view before knowing this world,or you, salt flitting my eyes, admiring

the smile in the blade, the last yellowpiece to leave your hand. A riddling absencefills me and the turn of the faucet bringsthe flood, crumbs brushed into the gurgling hole,pulling down from the window the summer light.

–for Dante Micheaux

winter/spring 2012volume 24, issue 1$10

POETRY BY Sherman alexie, elizabeth arnold, elaine bleakney, amaranth borSuk, lily brown, chriStopher buckley, jon cotner, dot devota, andrew feld, andy fitch, graham fouSt, carolyn hembree, paul hlava, iShion hutchinSon, alex lemon, Sally wen mao, l. S. mckee, lynn melnick, geoffrey g. o’brien, Sharon oldS, matthew olzmann, robert oStrom, Stanley plumly, nate prittS, auSten roSenfeld, david rivard, Solmaz Sharif, laura Solomon, dan roSenberg, charleS harper webb, and mike white.

FICTION BY michael czyzniejewSki, ray grewal-kÖk, tereSa milbrodt, danny thanh nguyen, ann taShi Slater, mario roSado, and brian van reet.

NONFICTION AND LYRIC ESSAYS BY joe bonomo, lorraine doran, katherine dykStra, chidelia edochie, Stephanie harriSon, kriSten radtke, and arianne zwartjeS.

WORKS IN TRANSLATION BY martin aitken, pilar fraile amador, edgar bayley, e.c. belli, triStan corbière, nielS frank, joShua l. freeman, forreSt gander, roger greenwald, tahir hamut, noelle kocot, dorthe norS, pierre peuchmaurd, and emily toder.

REVIEWS BY, AND INTERVIEWS WITH joSeph chapman, jeSSe donaldSon, andy fitch, yahia lababidi, aaron mccollough, anna moSchovakiS, jaSon ranon uri rotStein, lytton Smith, SjÓn, and alex Stein.

REPORTAGE BY aviya kuShner.

ARTWORK BY duncan ganley and cy twombly.