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| POETRY | CREATIVE NON-FICTION | FICTION |
Them Apples
Before the rain, yellow and green leaves
teetered on the branch like nightingales and crows
balancing opposite ends of a clothesline.
All those years, you hated field trips;
I lied, promising you a ride in a car.
There were dozens of bushels and ladders,
obstacles in the Cornell Orchard where you,
an undeniably growing boy-child,
careened between other race-around kids.
Maybe I need to re-christen those days
Sunset rather than Gala, the defining cultivar
for my years of mothering alone.
It seems like no time
since the child-rearing manuals failed
even when I revisit that slow
shuffle-dance through triage, after the car hit you,
drunk on your bike, in the moment
you somersaulted over the windshield,
the down from your jacket liberated,
your back a drag strip road rash, and me,
in my white linen dress
bloodied where I gathered you up.
Late Succession Deciduous
There were hostages in the news those days
after she fled, carrying the doll
one customer left instead of a tip.
For twenty years, she slept on beds in houses
owned by strangers. She was certain exile
bettered home, her home.
where the birch trees fought
to root on slag heaps, where church steeples
were all that reached for the sky.
Back for her father's funeral, she walks a trail
recently paved on the top of the levee. The wind
inside the metal walkway above the flood gate
is solitary as a flute. In a puddle,
a brochure advertises a new church,
Chapel of Hope, sharing the love of Christ
with the poor, forgotten, and hopeless of the Valley.
There stands a forest on both banks of the river.
The trees no longer birch
but hickory, maple, and oak. They move
like a great, green exhalation re-arranging
her memory, forcing her to revise
the way she tells the story
of what it was she ran from.
Origami*
Tea wrappers folded become cranes,
a dozen birds strung along floss and sold
for a dollar by the woman who runs
the food cart at Sacramento's Union Station.
Made by my daughter, she says. Our fingers
touch as she hands over my change.
A lost angle, I slump, fuse with the hollow
along the waiting room bench. I can't stop
this burning for the California Zephyr to bear me
nameless into the mountains. I'll hang the cranes
in my window and watch them swing with the miles
and me, below them, folded into my berth.
Caesura
Between the morning’s colony of bee-meets-sky
and earth the quilt of a salt water floor--
Between hat-tipping clouds and tip jars
and a trailer hitching to Route 66--
Between trapeze to the terra cotta pot
and water a spillway from the saucer beneath--
Between the cold metal deck chair and my
first flick of Illy’s Italian Roast--
Between the pound of rain on the skylight
and the ounce of air in flight from warm to cool
Between the photos mailed and the panoramic swoop
inside the house the way his sister found it--
Between the flutter that is my heart beating
and my heart braking--
hummingbirds in the red begonia’s droop.
Ritual
The doctor gave me the placenta—all I had to do was ask. His nurse slid it from the stainless steel bedpan where it lay—gelatin massive, an oversized liver—into a blue plastic hospital bag she knotted with a thick rubber band. I made room for it in the freezer where, forgotten, ice cube trays of homemade baby food towered, bricking it in.
The book never said how long you should wait after the birth to plant the tree. You were supposed to stand in a circle, join hands with family and friends and sing turn, turn, turn to your man and your beatific baby in the center of the circle, serene and asleep on the crib-sized patchwork quilt you would, of course, have sewn by hand.
Four months later, the baby I failed at nursing keens in his bassinet. I’m on my hands and knees pawing through the previous tenant’s garden in the back yard with the crooked clothesline, the frozen placenta on the ground beside me, one with its blue plastic skin. I touch the plastic, wish I could see inside to the filigree of umbilical loops that lashed this marvel of oxygen and blood to me and the baby to it until the doctor did a flat palm push on my belly and out it slid with a rip and a squish.
I rain a thin layer of dirt over the placenta and set the spongy potato I found in the vegetable crisper on top, eye to sky. Sculpt dirt around the potato until all that’s left is that stubborn yellow sprout, beggar for sun, and I’m my red-faced Irish ancestor. Poking her finger through the rot. Tying clothes into a kerchief. Walking the ramp to board a ship, desperate for some new world.
from Personal Effects: A Novel
The best time in Meander was at night, after the bars closed and the traffic lights stopped changing and switched to blinking yellow instead. The storefronts dark, the sidewalks empty, you felt like you were nowhere, or maybe in a new place. A place where no one who'd known you since you were seven would stop and ask if you were Helen Malloy's granddaughter, the one who'd moved away and since come back and all the while you knew they knew every detail of what had happened because they rode the bus to work with your second cousin Joan.
Howard and I walked in silence, past the library with its window display of Betsy Ross flags and fifth grade readers about the Constitution, past Fainberg's where a posse of lounge chairs circled a big-screen TV in the center of the showroom floor. Past the Mar-Cee dress factory where there was a fire ten years back and the owners, a company from New Jersey, never got around to tearing the building down and now a yellow plastic sheet covering the burned part of the roof flapped, in shreds, over the rust-stained entrance sign.
Howard's face looked droopy and tired. He rubbed at the skin under one of his eyes. "Greg certainly hung around tonight," Howard said.
"He was waiting for Jackson to finish the pots," I said. "Plus he had a rough week, starting Sunday when he helped his brother roof the Wasserman house."
"Honestly, Irene, I don't know what you see in him," Howard said. "I mean, can he string a noun, verb, and object into a coherent sentence and make conversation? Or is he just another boyfriend-of-the-month?"
Howard pulled a plaid handkerchief from the side pocket of his black-and-white houndstooth chef's pants. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and his neck. "You have to watch your back now that you're back living here. I should know."
"It's not like that, Howard," I said. "I've known Greg since high school."
Howard folded the handkerchief in half, then in half again. "But you didn't really know him, you only knew of him," Howard said. He slipped the small, tidy square back in his side pants pocket. "Didn't we establish that fact, the morning after your night of too much wine at the reunion and a joint in the front seat of his car at, when was it, three a.m.?"
A car passed, slowed, the Meander Borough police in a sporty car with a hood that sloped down in the front. A kid who looked like he was barely Jackson's age sat behind the wheel, his neck craned forward to see if he could make out who was standing in front of the bank. Howard waved, and the kid cop waved back, then gunned the car's engine and raced through the blinking light.
"Let's go home by way of the dike," I said.
We crossed Main Street and walked the short distance down Ferry, a neglected stretch of asphalt where potholes had taken over and turned the road to gravel and dirt. It was cooler down by the river and the smell from the sewage treatment plant across the river was almost spicy, nutmeg or mace. The moon a little less than full made a circle of white on the dark of the Susquehanna-like the curtain had gone up and we were waiting for the first act-its light on the water the only way you could tell the river was moving at night.
There were a few buildings still standing at the end of the street, next to the spot on the dike where what was left of the Breslau Bridge- wrecked 29 years before in the '72 Agnes Flood-joined the street. The ruins of Shawnee Lumber: a small square building covered with fake brick shingles, the roof fallen in and the building's back wall leaning up against the dike. Behind the showroom, in what used to be the lumber yard, colossal objects wrapped in dirty gray tarps sat in front of open shelves where 2 X 4s used to be. A hand-printed sign FleA Market Sundays Vendors Well-CoMe hung from the rafters on the side of the building that was closest to the road.
Hank and I once screwed on the bridge. After it was closed, it must have been the year after the flood. We walked out into the middle in broad daylight, stepping over holes so wide you could see the crisscross of metal rods originally laid to support the bridge's asphalt surface, and the rush of the river down below that. What patches of pavement were left had been covered in graffiti, spray-painted hearts, initials, crude drawings of an erect penis and a woman with bowling ball circles for tits.
We did it against the railing. I was wearing a skirt with nothing on underneath. Hank lifted the hem and I felt a whoosh between my legs, then my back against the railing and Hank thrusting up. There was a look on Hank's face I'd never seen before, the flashes of light usually in the center of his eyes gone as if they'd burned out. I remember thinking even then that what he really wanted to do wasn't fuck me but throw me over the railing, a failsafe way to get me out of his life.
Howard and I turned down the narrow path worn smooth as the favorite cut on a record into the top of the levee. We passed the concrete workings that kept the river from flooding, the valves and levers padlocked with heavy chains. Below us, a row of houses, each one the same as the one next to it except for the color of their aluminum siding and the different clothes hung on clotheslines and the different-sized backyard pools, the above ground kind with rickety pressure-treated decks clinging to their sides, places for diving off.
"Do you think I should replace the chicken noodle tomorrow night?" Howard said.
"It does get boring," I said.
"The real question is: is Meander ready for my chilled tomato bisque?" Howard said.
Heat lightning lit the sky over the river and the sound of a loud foghorn, two long bleats followed by a pause then one more.
"Twenty-one," Howard said. "Isn't that Nottingham Street?"
"Twenty-four was ours when we lived in Albert's house on Blackburn," I said. "I have no idea what mine is now."
"Same as mine, fourteen. Or rather, one-four," Howard said. "Anyway, it's probably a false alarm."
The foghorn sounded again, another two-one, and then a siren, and then for some reason, even though it was a hot summer night, I felt a sudden chill. I touched Howard's arm. The soft blond hairs on his bare arm were standing up. "Hey, I didn't even notice. Who were you tonight?" I said.
Howard stopped walking. He put both hands on his hips and pushed his chest forward so I could read the name embroidered in shiny blue letters above the pocket of his bowling shirt.
"Buster Y.," Howard said. Howard turned to display the monogrammed name of the team across the back of the shirt.
"Chacko's," I said. "They closed after the flood."
"The Salvation Army on Hazle Street in Wilkes-Barre," Howard said. "Two dollars. Tomorrow I get to be Raymond. The good news is Raymond's already pressed. Thank God for Alastair. I love a man who irons."
Howard reached for my hand and squeezed. I rested the tips of my fingers in the smooth hollows between Howard's knuckles.
Maybe this was what I came back for.
Howard.
My oldest friend.
Copyright@2006-2008
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