ear River Review

AnAnthologyofPoetryandProse

byBearRiverWriters2008‐2009

Bear River Review

BearRiverWriters2008‐2009

KeithTaylor

RichardTillinghast

MaryKathleenAngel

arwulfarwulf

NormaBishop

MiraBowman

LeeWarnerBrooks

ElaineBurr

JacquelineCarney

RichardH.Coupe

KayeCurren

JimDaniels

JerryDennis

SusanL.Denny

MartiDodge

EricEderer

JeremyEfroymson

KellyFordon

JoyGaines‐Friedler

ChristopherGiroux

LeighC.Grant

PennyHackett‐Evans



DonHewlett

EstherL.Hur

witz

Jeff

Kass

DorianneLaux

MardiLink

ChrisLord

DianeMarty

JohnMauk

KathleenV.McKevitt

VickiMcMillan

BrendaMeisels

JenniferMetsker

PegPadnos

SueMariePapajesk

KerryRutherford

BarbaraSaunier

MelissaSeitz

SusannahSheffer

KenShelton

RobertE.Smith

HollyWrenSpaulding

JenniferSperryStei north



EllenStone

PiaTaavila

LaurenceW.Thomas

BillTrevarthen

AngelaWil

liams

AnthonyZick



InMemoriam

JaimeCourtney

JudyReid



Paintingsby

AvaGilzow

H.AnneThurston



Coverartby

DonHewlett

Bear River Review

ISBN: 978-0-9795404-2-4

jÉÜwËÇ jÉÅtÇ cÜxáá

AnnArbor,Michigan48103

[email protected]

ear River Review

An Anthology of Poetry and Prose

by Bear River Writers 2008-2009

ear River Review

An Anthology of Poetry and Prose

by Bear River Writers 2008-2009

Editor

Chris Lord

Managing Editor

Kaye Curren

Associate Editor

Jennifer Metsker

Art Editor

Don Hewlett

Editorial Board

Lee Warner Brooks

Catherine Calabro

Cindy Glovinsky

Esther Hurwitz

David Penhale

Greg Schutz

Richard Solomon

Published with the support of an anonymous donor.

Published May 2010

by Bear River Writers’ Conference and Word’n Woman Press

Word’n Woman Press,

and the authors, who retain all copyright to their own material.

Cover art by Don Hewlett

Paintings by Ava Gilzow

and

H. Anne Thurston

For information on the Conference and to read

on-line issues of the Bear River Review, please go to

http://www.lsa.umich.edu/bearriver/

Printed by Kolossos Printing, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan

jÉÜwËÇ jÉÅtÇ cÜxáá

Ann Arbor, Michigan 48103

[email protected]

ISBN: 978-0-9795404-2-4

Introduction

he reason the Bear River Writers’ Conference exists is to

encourage new writing. It only makes sense that we do what

we can to help some of that work find an audience. Luckily, we've

been given some financial support to implement that idea, and

also the important support of donated time. These incredible gifts

have allowed us to create a space for people to share their writing

with their Conference colleagues and with any other reader who

may stumble across it. We hope people enjoy the work and find it

helpful with their own projects.

~Keith Taylor, Director

Paintings on this page

Ava Gilzow

s one of Bear River’s founding fathers, I am proud to assert,

a full decade on, that we have stayed true to our original

intention. To paraphrase William Faulkner, we have not only

endured, we have prevailed. Through a healthy connection with

the University of Michigan, supported by good and generous

people in our state, we have brought to our participants the best

writers and teachers in the world. At the same time we have never

stopped being an “up north” outfit. We have seen the green heron

in flight, have spotted the indigo bunting on the finial of a jack

pine, and have sat around a campfire by the lake listening to the

wild pack-music of coyotes in full cry.

~Richard Tillinghast, Founder

e thank our anonymous donor for supporting the

publication of this issue of the Bear River Review. And as

we celebrate our ten-year anniversary, we thank the founders of

the Bear River Writers’ Conference, James McCullough and

Richard Tillinghast, for charting and captaining us on this literary

voyage, and we thank Keith Taylor for his excellent direction as he

continues to keep our poetic pontoon on course. The writers in

this issue began their work at the Conference, workshopped it

there, were inspired there. Welcome to the words that flowed

from the clarity of Walloon Lake onto these pages.

~Chris Lord, Editor

vii

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION .................................................................................. v



~Keith Taylor, Director ...................................................................... v

~Richard Tillinghast, Founder ........................................................... vi

~Chris Lord, Editor ........................................................................... vi

KEITH TAYLOR ................................................................................... 1

Canines ............................................................................................... 1

A State-threatened Species .................................................................. 1

If You Want to Find a Hummingbird Nest........................................... 2

Our Matinicus Island Seal Bone ......................................................... 2

RICHARD TILLINGHAST .................................................................. 3

Two Blues ............................................................................................ 3

MARY KATHLEEN ANGEL ............................................................... 6

A Map of the Universe ........................................................................ 6

arwulf arwulf ........................................................................................ 14

bach .............................................................................................. 14

um mitternacht .................................................................................. 16

NORMA BISHOP ................................................................................ 17

Sifting .............................................................................................. 17

Seed Stitch ......................................................................................... 18

MIRA BOWMAN ................................................................................ 19

The only way to have an organic death these days

is to be eaten by wolves ..................................................................... 19

LEE WARNER BROOKS ................................................................... 21



Matrimony ......................................................................................... 21

Flash Fiction ..................................................................................... 22

This Was Us ...................................................................................... 22

ELAINE BURR .................................................................................... 23

Aunt Lucky ........................................................................................ 23

JACQUELINE CARNEY .................................................................... 33

Close Your Eyes ................................................................................ 33

viii

RICHARD H. COUPE, Ph.D. ............................................................. 42



Elvis and a Wedding in Mississippi .................................................. 42

KAYE CURREN .................................................................................. 46

Zilka and Me ..................................................................................... 46

That Blank Page ................................................................................ 46

JIM DANIELS ...................................................................................... 47

Packing My Own ............................................................................... 47

Pyramids, Mexico ............................................................................. 48

Delivery Room .................................................................................. 50

JERRY DENNIS .................................................................................. 51

An April Shower ................................................................................ 51

SUSAN L. DENNY ............................................................................... 54

Graduation Day ................................................................................ 54

An Audience of One .......................................................................... 55

MARTI DODGE .................................................................................. 56

House Cat Rules ................................................................................ 56

ERIC EDERER .................................................................................... 61

Coffee and Cauliflower Soup ............................................................ 61

JEREMY EFROYMSON .................................................................... 63

Excerpts from “Shall We Accept this Pizza?” .................................. 63

KELLY FORDON ................................................................................ 71

Go-Go Boots ..................................................................................... 71

JOY GAINES-FRIEDLER .................................................................. 73

A Pheasant is Crossing I-75 North of Grayling ................................ 73

Assisted Living .................................................................................. 74

CHRISTOPHER GIROUX ................................................................. 75

Garden .............................................................................................. 75

Uprooted ........................................................................................... 76

LEIGH C. GRANT .............................................................................. 77

A Cradle for Small Things ................................................................ 77

PENNY HACKETT-EVANS .............................................................. 81



Computer Love .................................................................................. 81

DON HEWLETT .................................................................................. 82

North of Dublin, Michigan, 2001 ...................................................... 82

ESTHER L. HURWITZ ...................................................................... 84

Olive Branch Gold ............................................................................ 84

Donna Rocks (for Donna White) ....................................................... 85

JEFF KASS ........................................................................................... 86

I Don’t Know Much About You ......................................................... 86

The Long-jumper ............................................................................... 89

DORIANNE LAUX .............................................................................. 93

Elegy .............................................................................................. 93

MARDI LINK ....................................................................................... 95

Chicken Trilogy ................................................................................. 95

CHRIS LORD ..................................................................................... 104

The River Is Yours ........................................................................... 104

DIANE MARTY ................................................................................. 106

Doomsday ....................................................................................... 106

JOHN MAUK ..................................................................................... 108

No Offense (Chapter 31 from 2004) ................................................ 108

KATHLEEN V. MCKEVITT ........................................................... 112

The Ice House ................................................................................. 112

VICKI MCMILLAN .......................................................................... 120

Thunder Mug ................................................................................... 120

BRENDA MEISELS .......................................................................... 123

Push, Pull, or Get Out of the Way ................................................... 123

JENNIFER METSKER ..................................................................... 130

Excerpts from “Backyardsy”

Rainwater & Gin ........................................................................ 130

Bird Bath Lyric ........................................................................... 131

PEG PADNOS .................................................................................... 132



Shipwreck ........................................................................................ 132

Zig-Zag............................................................................................ 133

Trekking LGA .................................................................................. 135

SUE MARIE PAPAJESK .................................................................. 137

Two Hearts ...................................................................................... 137

KERRY RUTHERFORD .................................................................. 142

Toe the Line .................................................................................... 142

BARBARA SAUNIER ....................................................................... 145

Displaced ........................................................................................ 145

MELISSA SEITZ ............................................................................... 146

Apple Orchard ................................................................................ 146

SUSANNAH SHEFFER ..................................................................... 151

Deciding .......................................................................................... 151

A Knowledge Like Glass ................................................................. 152

How He Chose It ............................................................................. 152

KEN SHELTON ................................................................................. 153

Baptism at Bear River ..................................................................... 153

Heroin in the Heartland .................................................................. 154

ROBERT E. SMITH .......................................................................... 156

The Sacred Mounds ......................................................................... 156

HOLLY WREN SPAULDING .......................................................... 163

Not Having the Affair ...................................................................... 163

Maybe the Hemlock ......................................................................... 164

JENNIFER SPERRY STEINORTH ................................................ 165

Late Day, Traverse Bay—Sun, Acutely ........................................... 165

My Girl, Lay Down Your Burden .................................................... 166

ELLEN STONE .................................................................................. 167

Maple Leaf Life ............................................................................... 167

PIA TAAVILA .................................................................................... 169

Memorial Day ................................................................................. 169

Service Call ..................................................................................... 170

LAURENCE W. THOMAS ............................................................... 171



Ghazal for a Dull Day ..................................................................... 171

BILL TREVARTHEN ....................................................................... 172

The Effort of Flying ......................................................................... 172

ANGELA WILLIAMS....................................................................... 174

What Can Save Us .......................................................................... 174

For Hard Cider in January ............................................................. 175

Saturday at 4:00 p.m. ...................................................................... 175

ANTHONY ZICK .............................................................................. 176

On the Way Back from Bear River .................................................. 176

In Memoriam ...................................................................................... 179



JAIME COURTNEY ..................................................................... 181

The Fiddler of Kumsong ................................................................. 181

JUDY REID .................................................................................... 185

Cause and Effect ............................................................................. 185

Painters ................................................................................................ 187



H. ANNE THURSTON .................................................................. 187

AVA GILZOW ............................................................................... 187

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................. 188



xii

Keith Taylor

Keith Taylor’s most recent book, If the World Becomes So Bright, was published

by Wayne State University Press in 2009. He has published ten earlier books,

collections of poems and stories, chapbooks, edited and translated volumes. Over

the years his work has appeared in a couple of hundred places, ranging from

Story to the Los Angeles Times, from Bird Watcher's Digest to the Chicago Tribune

to Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Ireland, and The Southern Review. He has

won awards for his work here and in Europe. He works as the coordinator of

undergraduate creative writing at the University of Michigan.

_____________________________________________________________________

Canines

The coyote on Temperance Island

off Waugoshaunce (which might mean “Small Fox”)

seems young. Perhaps he’s desperately

hungry, leaping above tall grasses

after red-winged blackbirds and robins

or tearing across sand under gulls,

but he looks playful, a dog bounding

on the beach, filled with innocent joy.

A State-threatened Species

for Sara Alderstein-Gonzalez

The wavy-rayed lampmussel, yellow

or almost green, needs the small-mouthed bass

to host its young. Females siphon sperm

floating randomly in the river

then lure the fish with a fake minnow,

squirting fertilized eggs into gills.

In a month the juveniles fall off

into sand. They try to start again.

If You Want to Find a Hummingbird Nest

for Dave Ewert

lie down on a long abandoned road

in a northern forest—a warm day

with just a few insects—and look up.

With luck you might see a hummingbird

stopping between dead twigs of red pine

collecting shimmering gossamer

from spiders. With more luck you might see

her carry it off to line her nest.

Our Matinicus Island Seal Bone

for the Owens

I’d love to say we discovered it

while walking the south beach, opposite

Crihaven, out in the Atlantic

spray and wind, buried between cobbles.

But we found it bleached on your back porch,

this white, wing-like shoulder blade of seal.

You let us take it for our window

ledge, safe now, shaded by our humid oaks.

Richard Tillinghast

Richard Tillinghast co-founded Bear River and was director through 2005. Richard

writes and publishes poetry, essays, travel writing, and translation. He is the

author of ten books of poems and three books of essays. In 2008 a collection of

poems, The New Life, came out from Copper Beech, along with a collection of

essays, Finding Ireland, from the University of Notre Dame Press. In 2009 he

published Sewanee Poems and Selected Poems, which collected his work from a

forty-year career and, with Julia Clare Tillinghast, he published a book of

translations from the Turkish poet Edip Cansever called Dirty August.

_____________________________________________________________________

Two Blues

Two blues—one called serenity,

one looks like the gathering storm.

I had a tube of each in my paint box in art school.

Colors spoke.

Two blues,

the bland and the profound.

The ho-hum of a sky over Southern California—

you could call it bleu celeste or Egyptian blue.

Canaletto ground it out of lapis lazuli

for his Venetian skies.

That other blue might

paint the scary ocean depths

off the Cape of Storms,

the color of the sea in Winslow Homer’s “Gulf Stream,”

terror in the black castaway’s eyes

almost blanked out with titanium white—

perhaps the same pigment

Homer daubed on as turbulence

atop the cobalt blue waves

running battleship grey through the comfortless Gulf Stream.

Sharks circle, knowing they will eat red meat

when night falls.

Those two colors tutor us in disaster,

at first as we have no hint of anything gone amiss,

anything to threaten our obliviousness,

our sense that life sparkles,

that there is such a thing as a career,

goals to be set and achieved.

Sometimes existence becomes a substance so depleted

one says to oneself:

If I can just make it across while the green walking light

stays illuminated,

then I’ll walk halfway down the block

one step at a time,

watch the footing,

then back to the apartment,

make tea and, grasping the tray firmly with both hands,

inch back upstairs.

Though surely existence is limitless—

the spirit’s measureless reach,

all the mind does,

memory’s scope and inside-outness.

All that one understands now

which one previously had not.

To look out at traffic,

hear a taxi honk its horn,

and not have to venture out into otherness.

Recovering from an accident where one is obliged to

get both feet onto a step before moving

down to the next,

how enlivening it is on such a morning

to sit by the radiator and read sentences like these:

Drake had him beheaded alongside the gibbet from which

Magellan hung his mutineers, Quesada and Mendoza,

fifty-eight winters before. Wood preserves well in Patagonia.

The coopers of the Pelican sawed the post and made tankards

as souvenirs for the crew.

Two blues open the world.

I’m almost glad I fell.

How else would I be made aware

of those realities the staff in the emergency room

see nightly

and gladly try to hide

behind their talk of Valentine’s Day?

And these bruises on my face—

purple of the two black eyes

rainbowing to the mood indigo Duke Ellington wrote about.

Next an unsavory yellow

like the rind of a gone-off Persian melon

scattered among coffee grounds and empty raki bottles

outside a waterside restaurant in Istanbul

on the last day of August.

Burgundy blooms under my eyes

like the velvet of a sultan’s caftan,

and then they glow with that

red in the morning

where sailors take warning.

Mary Kathleen Angel

Mary Kathleen Angel recently completed a bachelor’s degree in English at

Oakland University. She is new to fiction writing, and is grateful to the OU donor

whose scholarship award allowed her to attend the 2009 Bear River Writers’

Conference. The lessons she learned in Eileen Pollack's fiction workshop at

Bear River will remain invaluable guides. Her short story, “A Map of the Universe,”

had its origin in a character-driven writing exercise from that workshop.

_____________________________________________________________________

A Map of the Universe

alt crouched down on the floor in the spare room and lifted

the dust ruffle on the bed. He pulled out a clear plastic box

of Christmas wrapping paper and a long, cardboard box with

some of Phyllis’s sweaters in it. Then he extracted a small,

powder-blue suitcase and popped the silver lock. When he lifted

the lid, he saw that it was full of long-forgotten, black-and-white

photos. On top was a picture of Phyllis standing in front of the

house with their son, Michael, in her arms. The date on the back

was 1954, the year they’d moved into this house. Walt shut the

suitcase and struggled to his feet. It was an interesting find.

Most Sundays, Walt’s daughter, Barbara, visited with her

husband and kids. Last Sunday, she had made dinner at his house.

While it was cooking, she went into the hall closet to look for a

tablecloth and discovered Phyllis’s coats still hanging there.

“Why do you still have these, Dad?”

“I don’t know. They’ve just always been there.”

“Maybe you should start going through the house,” Barbara

suggested. “I’ll bet there are a lot of things you could get rid of.”

“What, you think I’m gonna die soon? Are you planning to put

me in a nursing home?”

“No, Dad. But why wait until the last minute? Look what

happened to Mom.”

Neither he nor Phyllis had expected the heart attack that left

her dead in front of the stove that night nearly two years ago. Not

that either of them were at an age where death was unexpected.

It’s just that you never really think it’s going to happen that day.

Barbara was right. He should be the one to clean up his own

mess. So he had begun looking into closets and cupboards and

places he had never bothered with before. Phyllis had always been

the one to locate things, and now he realized that much of his own

home was a mystery to him. That was how he discovered the

secret of under-bed storage.

Walt carried the newfound suitcase downstairs to his den and

set it next to his comfortable chair. He groaned as he sat down,

sighing once he was fully lowered. A weak, winter sun slanted in

through the window.

The den was Walt’s haven. When he was a commercial

illustrator, he had spent nights and weekends working in this

room overlooking the backyard. Now long retired, Walt painted

for his own pleasure. His latest creation took up most of the wall

opposite his chair. Its subject was big—the entire universe, as he

conceived it—a collage of knowledge, inspiration and imagina-

tion. He had painted all of the major galaxies and some important

stars and black holes. When he worked on this project, nearly

every day adding little points of interest or embellishments, he felt

as if he were putting together the pieces of a puzzle. Of course,

things were distorted. His own solar system was much larger than

any of the others, and if a particular quasar or red giant interested

him and he wanted to paint it intricately, he would illustrate it on

some art board, cut it out and fasten it by a stiff wire that

protruded from the canvas. The evolving three-dimensional

painting fascinated his grandchildren who, whenever they came

to visit, would run in to see if anything new had appeared.

At the very edge of the canvas was the most distant object in

known space, A1689-zD1, a galaxy about 13 billion light years

from earth. Tacked onto the painting, just outside the edge of that

furthest boundary, was a picture of Phyllis that Walt had taken

when they were in Florida the winter before she died. Her smile

was as broad as the comfortable body she had built around herself

over the years, and she looked like a sun shining over creation.

Settled into his chair, Walt popped open the suitcase and put a

pile of photos in his lap, just beyond the perimeter of his abundant

belly. He shuffled through the photos: Phyllis riding a bike in

Bermuda, on their honeymoon; a picture of himself on the island

of Guam during the war in the South Pacific, the palm trees

behind him swaying in the hot wind; his brother, Pete, who had

died in the war; his whole family when he was about eight years

old, standing on the porch of the house on Belmont. He was the

youngest-born and the only one left. He stood up and pasted the

family photo along the border of his painting. As the afternoon

went on and Walt continued going through the suitcase, he added

more photos of the deceased until the painting was wreathed by

people.

Near the bottom of the suitcase, Walt came across a picture of a

young woman kneeling in the sand. It was a photo that he had

taken of Edna Beauchamp at Jefferson Beach, back when it was

still an amusement park. It must have been about 1946. The old

wooden roller coaster loomed in the background. Walt could

almost hear the far-off screams of the people on the ride as they

hung at the top of the big hill for an eternal second, the tracks

below dropping out of view as they rounded the top and then fell,

slowly at first, until the pull of gravity made them race toward the

earth.

Walt had nearly forgotten about the photo. He hadn’t seen

Edna since not long after that and for that reason, she looked the

same in his mind as she did in that picture—slightly sunburned,

fresh and healthily young. She was smiling the Marilyn Monroe

smile that all the blondes were copying back then—head slightly

back, eyes half-shut, lips parted just a little. Pieces of her wavy

blonde hair were upset in the nicest way by the wind.

Walt left the photo on his lap for a long time, remembering a

few things about the day—the bus ride and the walk down the

dusty road to the beach, the picnic basket full of lunch, dancing at

the pavilion after dark. It was as if Edna had stepped out of the

fog, just inside that area where things were visible again. She had

surprised him that way once before, when she had sent him a

consolation card after Phyllis’s death. At that point, she’d been out

of his life for nearly 60 years. He wasn’t sure how she’d heard

about Phyllis’s passing or how she’d found him. His guess was

that she was a diligent obituary reader. He had read the card and

put it in the drawer of his desk, keeping the envelope with her

return address. About a year ago, he had dialed information and

penciled her phone number onto the envelope, but for some

reason, he had never called her.

There were a few other photos of Edna in the suitcase—in front

of the lighthouse on the island, leaning against his sage green

Pontiac Torpedo, wearing a New Year’s hat and blowing a horn.

Phyllis must have gone through these photos at one time or

another. She must not have minded them, and she shouldn’t have,

of course. They were just pieces of his past.

Walt went to his desk drawer and pulled out Edna’s card. He

did this quietly, as if trying to avoid observation, and then he

went back to his chair to read it again. In it, Edna gave a short

synopsis of her entire life. She had moved back to Windsor in

1951, married, had one child, a son. She listed the events without

revealing the emotions that accompanied them. “My husband

killed himself when Jack was nine years old.” She had never

remarried. At the end, she apologized for running off in 1948.

“A twenty year old girl can’t know what it is she wants in life,”

she explained. There were a lot of details missing.

When Walt’s stomach began to rumble, he took the photo of

Edna to the kitchen with him. On the little table by the window

was the vase of flowers that he refilled each week in honor of

Phyllis. While he ate his dinner, he leaned the photo of Edna

against the vase and looked cautiously over at the space that

Phyllis had always occupied at meals. “There isn’t anything

wrong with wanting to know how she is. It’s hard to be alone,

you know.”

After Walt rinsed his plate, he went back to the den. As Phyllis

watched from her perch at the top edge of the painting, he dialed

the number on the envelope. A generic answering machine

message told him that he had the correct number. His voice shook

a little. “Yes, this is Walt Wieczorek, calling for Edna Beauchamp.

If you’re there, I’m just wondering … just wondering how you’re

doing.” He left his number and hung up, thinking he should have

said more. That was his problem, he thought, suddenly. He

always said less than he felt.

After all these years without a sound from Edna, Walt was

impatient for the phone to ring. He read the paper, watched the

news and went through the mail. There were a million reasons

why she might not call back right away. Perhaps she was out or

staying with her son. She could be sleeping or sick in the hospital

or…

At 7:30, Walt put on his boots and coat, slipped the photo into

his pocket and trudged through the slushy snow to the bar on the

corner where he met Herb Goetzke on Fridays for a beer. The bar

was one of those dark places that have little use for windows or

atmosphere, built into the neighborhood over half a century ago

as a place for auto workers to drop in on the way home from work

and spend some of their paycheck.

Herb was sitting at the bar, hunched over, his eyes on the

television behind it. Walt sat down next to him and ordered a

beer. Then he pulled out the photo of Edna and set it on the bar in

front of Herb.

“Marilyn Monroe?” Herb asked, pulling out his reading

glasses.

“No, a girlfriend from long ago.”

“You know she doesn’t look like that anymore, don’t ya?”

He told Herb the story—how he’d met Edna at the dance

pavilion on Boblo Island just after he’d come back from the war;

how he’d been crazy about her, but for some reason he had never

gotten around to asking her to marry him. It was too long ago to

remember why. He had been busy in art school and working as an

usher at the United Artists movie theatre. Then she had left,

suddenly.

“Did she run off with a guy?”

“I don’t know. I only know she went to California. She called

me when she got out there, crying I remember, saying she was

sorry. We never spoke again.”

“California, huh? Maybe she had dreams of becoming an

actress.”

Walt agreed that was possible, but it didn’t really matter. “If

my heart was broken, I hardly remember that now. I suppose I

just got busy doing other things.”

After Walt finished his beer, he went home. Without removing

his coat, he went to the phone to see if there was a message

waiting. Strangely impatient, he dialed the number again. The

same generic voice greeted him.

He was restless. He didn’t know what had come over him.

After all the time that had passed, he suddenly wanted to waste

no more of it. He went back out onto the front porch, not sure

what to do with himself. He thought he must look foolish to

anyone watching, but there was nobody around. The neighbor-

hood was quiet except for a dog barking somewhere behind one of

the houses across the street. He walked out to his car and stood

next to it. Then he got in and just sat inside it for awhile. Not sure

what he was doing, he started it up.

Twenty minutes later, he was on the bridge that linked Detroit

to Windsor. Far below, stray sheets of ice floated lazily on the

surface of the slick, black water streaked with bright lights from

the city. When the bridge began its descent, he saw a sea of snow-

covered rooftops beneath him. One of them belonged to Edna.

At customs, the officer asked the purpose of his visit. He

stammered, feeling as if he were hiding something. “Going to visit

an old friend,” he said. The officer was kind enough to give him

directions to Rosedale Avenue.

Edna’s neighborhood lay in the shadow of the bridge, beneath

its dark undersides and the ever-present sound of cars passing

overhead. Her house was a brown-brick bungalow with a large

porch and a small yard. Walt parked in the street and looked at

the dark windows of her house. Was she really still living there? If

so, was there anything left of that girl with the spark of life in her?

He thought about knocking on the door, but it didn’t feel right.

She might be sleeping.

He decided to write a note, but he searched his car for paper

and found nothing. The only thing he had to write on was the

photo from 1946. He hoped that seeing the picture again would

bring good memories rather than a sense of loss. He turned it over

and wrote, “For everything there is a season.” Then he put his

name and phone number on it. He felt poetic, romantic, not quite

himself, and he sat there for a long time before he gathered the

nerve to approach her house. His steps rang out on the old wood

floor of the porch, and the mailbox creaked as he lifted the lid to

drop in the photo. He lingered there a moment, feeling the

warmth of proximity. After that, he drove north along the river

toward the heart of the city, thinking about everything that had

changed since he was a young man.

Walt kept busy the next day, but he was careful to stay near the

phone. In the late afternoon, after the house had been silent all

day, he called the number again, and a man answered. Walt told

him he was looking for Edna Beauchamp. The man said he didn’t

know an Edna Beauchamp. The man almost hung up, but Walt

said, “Wait!” and asked if he had called the address on Rosedale

Avenue. No, he had called a house on Wyandotte. He had been

given that number when he moved to Windsor last year.

Just before dinnertime, the phone rang. The young woman on

the other end asked Walt if he had left the photo in her mailbox.

She said the woman was very beautiful. She did not know an

Edna Beauchamp, but she suspected they had bought their house

from her son, Jack Beauchamp.

Walt asked if she knew what had happened to Edna

Beauchamp—was she still alive? The woman didn’t know. He

asked if she had Jack Beauchamp’s phone number, and she

hesitated. “Yes, I do. I suppose it’s all right if I give it to you. I can

see you’re just an old friend.”

As soon as she hung up, Walt dialed the number. A woman

answered the phone and he asked for Jack. A moment later,

Edna’s son was on the phone. Walt got right to the point, telling

him he had known Edna years ago and wanted to get in touch

with her.

“I’m so sorry, Walt. My mother passed away almost a year

ago.”

Walt sat down. It wasn’t that he hadn’t thought it was possible,

but he had hoped there was still a little time.

“Was it a peaceful death?” he asked.

Jack said it was. She had been sick but comfortable, and it

seemed as if she had just fallen asleep.

After Walt hung up, he sat in his chair in the corner of the den,

watching day turn to evening. As the sky became a pink backdrop

to the bare, dark branches of trees, the snow turned a soft blue.

Walt could see the dried remains of his garden peeking up

through the snow. As the room dimmed, the angles of the furni-

ture softened and Walt melted into the shadows. He could barely

see his painting now. Its flat patterns and protruding shapes were

indistinguishable; its dark areas, absorbing what little light

remained, became that unfathomable space they represented.

Walt reached up to turn on the lamp. The yellow light shone

on the dome of his head, shadowing its furrows and liver spots

that might look like the ridges and craters of a barren planet to

some small insect circling him. The canvas leaning against the

opposite wall came back to life, the crowd of people along its

edges looking at Walt.

The photo of Edna in front of the lighthouse lay on top of the

suitcase. She was squinting in the sunlight, smiling an eternally

youthful smile. It was spring when he took that photo, still a nip

in the air. He remembered riding home on the old riverboat that

night, leaning against the railing and watching the homes of

Amherstburg pass by while people danced to big band music on

the wooden floor in the center of the boat.

Walt rose slowly from his chair and brought the photo of Edna

to his desk. He smeared some glue onto the back of the photo and

then walked over to the painting, looking for an open space along

its edge. He pasted Edna just beyond the Boötes Supercluster. He

hoped Phyllis wouldn’t mind. After all, she still had the highest

position on the painting.

Then, he stood back to look at the state of his universe. There

was hardly an empty space in it.

arwulf arwulf

arwulf arwulf was involved in performance poetics at the original Performance

Network and at public readings in Ann Arbor, Chicago and Detroit. Poetics are an

essential element in his radio programs on WCBN, WEMU and WFMU. arwulf

attended the Bear River Writers’ Conference in 2007, 2008, and 2009,

participating in workshops led by Bob Hicok, Keith Taylor, and Richard Tillinghast.

The effects of each of these workshops are in evidence whenever he writes

shopping lists, poems, essays or musicological schemata. The Conferences taught

him to consult with the natural history of Michigan to discover deeper meaning

and relevance in this life.

_____________________________________________________________________

bach

not far at all from the trailhead

near where you been sleeping every night

a brook is undulating through the forest

what has stopped me here for awhile

as i near the end of this particular

peregrination, is the perfectly

balanced polyphony of the

bach chorale made by the same water

as it tumbles over roots, rocks

and fallen branches

upstream of here

the basso continuo

while the gentlest altos

and sopranos imaginable

sing from each bend of this

baby rattlesnake brook

the place where it ultimately

passes under the forest path

to continue through fern

loam and swamp grass

generates a complementary

bass line so that the full length

of the segment of the brook

that is visible & audible to me

from where i stand

becomes one ensemble

or, given the fact that the same water

plays the entire brook, one instrument

the brook, as a chorale, is scored for

soprano, alto, tenor, bass and continuo

may it continue

um mitternacht

from eduard mörike & hugo wolf

through sviatoslav richter & dietrich fischer-dieskau

Alkman, who lived in Sparta during the seventh century Before

the Common Era, wrote hymns, preludes and songs to be sung by

choirs of young women. One fragment describes a world where

everything is asleep. Mountains and ravines, worms, moles and

centipedes; mammals that live in the hills and entire societies of

bees; behemoths, krakens, leviathans, deep sea creatures that

never see the light of day; birds of every size and feather, all are

fast asleep.

In nineteen hundred and twenty nine Federico Garcia Lorca came

to New York City, just in time, as he put it in so many words, to

see a great sheaf of dead money go sliding off into the ocean. The

big city seemed altogether too big for this Andalusian, who said

that back home everything was tiny by comparison. Here the

buildings were impossibly tall, and people were jumping out of

them because of the money.

At four o’clock in the morning, Federico stood in the middle of the

Brooklyn Bridge staring out at the countless lights burning just

everywhere as far as the eye could see, and there and then he

wrote: everyone everywhere is wide awake. Nobody anywhere is

asleep. The iguanas will come to bite the unsleeping men who do

not dream. Everything is awake, said Federico Garcia Lorca to the

Brooklyn Bridge at four A.M. in the jet black dawn of the age of

insomnia.

Norma Bishop

Norma Bishop, a native of the Great Lakes region, spent 20 years in California,

where she was a feature editor for the magazine Coastal Woman and a feature

contributor to the Santa Barbara News-Press. She returned to the Great Lakes in

2005, where she is a museum director, writing poetry and working on a novel set

in Wisconsin. Bear River in 2009 was Norma’s first writing conference. Sharing

tribulations, inspiration, and insight in a community of writers and being

nourished by the serene setting gave her a charge of energy. Norma thanks Laura

Kasischke and those who attended her workshop.

_____________________________________________________________________

Sifting

Tracing your name

on steam-scrimmed, silvered glass,

I watch each letter weep.

And I become ribs

caught in sand and sifting time

from a sea opaque with silent grief,

lungs filling with brackish breath

of rivers,

of mudflats of oysters

sucking silted time.

Corridors pearled

in nacreous light reflect

your shadow bent by tides.

Glistening crescents,

scales refract a thousand moons:

a mosaic of light in drifts of silt.

Time, falling as sun on sand,

fills harbors

near headlands, there sheltered

from rock and frothing seas—

where you wait for me.

Seed Stitch

She holds the yarn in fingers

slim and white as birches lining the shore.

The yarn, a twist of colored strands, forest duff—

green spruce,

brown, scaled cones,

russet lichens,

gray, water-worn granite,

bitter-yellow beech leaves,

and silvered blue of the lake’s wind-swept mosaic.

She knits the colors into a forest fabric,

soft purled hills like ever-traveling swales that ripple inland from

lakeshore,

knit stitch vees, crotches of forked aspen and elderberry where

orioles nest.

She shapes sinuous sleeves

and a windbreak collar deep as the cedar copse.

A dandelion seed, piloting the wind,

lights on her wrist.

Deftly she grasps it between moon-white nails of forefinger and

thumb

and plants it in the next stitch, one furrow from the finishing.

She’ll wait for the first rain and,

in the meadow, slip it over branch-boned arms.

Mira Bowman

Mira Bowman has recently graduated from the University of Michigan with a BA in

English and creative writing. She was privileged to participate in the 2009 Bear

River workshop with Jerry Dennis where she learned to hone her skills in using the

surrounding wilderness as a source of inspiration. This is Mira’s first published

work.

_____________________________________________________________________

The only way to have an organic death these days

is to be eaten by wolves

Imagine it. At first only the vague inkling

of danger followed by your usual skepticism:

“Relax. You’re fine. Nothing bad

is going to happen.”

But then it does happen,

as bad things tend to do.

There will probably be snarling.

You’ll probably do something futile:

pick up a stick, throw rocks, maybe

try to climb a tree.

Adrenaline will show up too,

only it’ll be different from previous experiences.

It won’t stop when you get off the roller coaster.

You won’t be able to soothe it with a corn dog.

And soon you’ll stop thinking

“Fuck, I’m being eaten by wolves!”

stop comparing it to novels about the wild

because, fuck, you’re being eaten by wolves.

Pouncing. Biting. Slurping.

And bam, you’re dead.

But think about it:

better than a nursing home or another car crash,

you get to feed some creatures, which,

face it, you’re probably part of the reason

they’re hungry now anyway.

Then whatever’s left will decay

and flowers will feed there,

popping up in your skull holes,

and your soul, or whatever,

doesn’t have to worry about escaping

heavy coffin lids, and maybe,

way out there away from all of that

ghastly make-up and embalming fluid,

you’ll have enough space and peace

to turn into a caterpillar,

which wouldn’t be so bad.

Lee Warner Brooks

Lee Warner Brooks has been at Bear River every year except for one since 2003.

He has published sonnets in journals like The Iowa Review, Light, and Passager.

In 2009, his book Novlets: 67 Sonnets was published by the Legal Studies

Forum, and later that year an excerpt from the Journal he has kept since 1977

was published as part of a book called Keeping Time: 150 Years of Journal

Writing, by Passager Books. At Bear River in 2009, Dorianne Laux challenged Lee

to write poems that were not sonnets; hence, the three free-verse poems in this

issue.

_____________________________________________________________________

Matrimony

You asked me

How did we end up married back then?

There was no license no church no ceremony

But there we were

living the same life

owning the same car

And then there was a long twilight time

It was as if

we both married other people

We did

We both married other people

You gave me jazz

Eric Dolphy on flute

playing “You Don’t Know What Love Is”

But we knew

We both knew

Didn’t we?

And I’m asking you

How did we ever end up divorced?

Where’s the decree?

Dammit—I married you first

Flash Fiction

I can’t resist you, she said. So I must go back to my husband.

He doesn’t exactly love me, but he needs me.

But—I need you, he said.

I know, she said, but you know how to cook.

This Was Us

Two beetles coupling

on the last flat surface

of a mostly eaten rose leaf

while the hummingbird kisses

into the orange flowers

behind the red barn—

inserting himself

and sucking in

one quick

hunger.

Elaine Burr

Elaine Burr received a Hopwood for a collection of short stories when she was a

student at the University of Michigan, has had stories published in many

magazines, and four novels published under her married name, Elaine Stienon.

She was in Richard McCann’s workshop at the 2009 Conference, and revised

“Aunt Lucky” after she returned home. Elaine learned to consider the actual

writing and the act of publication as two separate activities, and not to give up on

a work until it has been submitted to various places at least thirty-five times,

maybe more.

_____________________________________________________________________

Aunt Lucky

alk about weird childhoods. You try growing up in a dinky

little Midwestern town when you’re half-Chinese and half-

British, and see how you like it. What with the hassles at school,

the scuffles on the bus, and my being chased home from the bus

stop half the time, my parents must’ve wondered if they could

even raise Eurasian kids to adolescence in that place.

Most of the persecution took aim at me. My brother George

was quiet, a good student, and my little sister Beth was sweet and

pretty. Me, I was the fighter, the feisty one, scrappy, always in

trouble.

How did three Sino-British hybrids end up in southern

Michigan? Man, I really wondered. The way it happened, my

father managed to make it out of China just ahead of whatever

civil disturbance was going on at the time. It was a big deal,

according to him—a harrowing journey, but I bet it took him twice

as long to tell it as it probably did to happen. He did time at the

University of Michigan, a graduate student in philosophy, and

started on a different journey—marriage to an undergraduate

from London.

But I wanted to tell you about Michigan. We had this small

plot of land just outside Ann Arbor, a sprawling frame house in a

little farming community. We raised vegetables—beans, tomatoes,

lettuce, squash. George and I would’ve liked some chickens too,

but we were all vegetarians and had no use for chicken meat.

George, being the oldest, was sent every week to buy eggs from

the Luckners down the hill.

I remember my mother Margaret, slender, taller than my

father, moving briskly around the kitchen as she prepared the

mid-morning meal—whole grain rice and cooked vegetables

flavored with soy sauce. She would scold in her clipped accent:

“Jeffrey, now try to behave. Get your fingers out of the bean cake.

And stop tormenting the cat. Go wash your hands, right this

minute.”

She really worked up a sweat, chewing me out (not that I

didn’t deserve it). She would threaten to send me down to Aunt

Lucky: “She knows how to deal with you.” I tried to make noises

about what a drag that was, but I was secretly hoping she’d do it.

Her real name was Emma Luckner. A retired school teacher, she

lived with her brother the poultry farmer. She was not Chinese or

British, but about as American as you can get. For one thing, she

had Native American ancestry—Ojibwa, she told us once. She had

one of those full faces, dark eyes that crinkled at the corners when

she smiled, and short, grayish hair, not kinky, but full; it seemed

to frame her face like a wreath. She was stocky, not too tall—about

the same height as my father—although I remember the time

when she seemed about as tall as anyone I’d ever seen. The main

thing I recall was this look of expectancy, as if she was waiting for

something. If it was marriage, she was still waiting.

My sister is whimpering, clutching the towel to her chest with

both hands. I hold on to her shoulder as I ring the doorbell.

“Come on, Beth. Try to stop now. How can we tell her if you

keep crying like that?” Thinking please be home Aunt Lucky. Please

let it be you coming to the door and not your brother.

When she opens the door, I try to think how to tell her. Finally

I say, “Beth won’t stop crying.”

By this time Lucky is stooping down, taking the towel gently

from Beth. She turns back the corner of it, and there is the tabby

kitten in a pool of blood, its head smashed in. I avert my eyes, not

wanting to see again, feeling the sickness spreading in my

stomach like the first time.

Lucky quickly closes the towel, looks at me. “When did it

happen?”

“Right after school. Out in front of the house—this truck—”

Beth speaks, the first time since the accident. “Please make him

well.”

“I can’t, honey.” Again looking at me. “Did she see it happen?”

“No. Just after. But I saw it. The truck never even slowed

down.”

“Beth, listen.“ Lucky’s voice is soft like faint music. “Your

kitten is no longer here. He’s gone to another place, and he’s not

hurting anymore. This body is all that is left, and we’ll take care of

that right now. Come with me. I’ll just get the shovel.”

I marvel at the way she takes us through the burial process. I

marvel in the first place that Beth is no longer crying—I thought

nothing would make her stop.

“We’ll put him right here, under this big pine. Now, Jeffrey,

you dig us a grave.”

When it is deep enough, Lucky stoops to put the kitten in,

towel and all. We take turns filling the hole, Lucky with the

shovel, Beth and I with our hands. I feel bad, disgusted at the

weakness that makes my legs feel like giving way.

“How can someone see a little cat crossing the road and not

even slow down?”

“Well, Jeffrey, maybe they didn’t see him. It was an accident—

something that shouldn’t have happened. I’m sorry. Now...”

Lucky leaves the shovel, straightens up, invites us to take her

hands. “I’m going to say something—it’s like a prayer. We’re

going to put him into the hands of the One who takes care of all

creatures—the Great Spirit. I’ll speak in a language you don’t

know—it’s my first language.”

It is a language of woods and meadows; the tone is calming,

cleansing, like a fresh breeze blowing over us. Then her voice dies

away, becomes part of the rustling of trees, of wind in the tall

grass. We sit together at the edge of the woods, and she shows us

things—the light falling in bright pools among the tree-shadows,

shining on a strand of spider’s web, moving in patterns on the

pine tree trunks.

“When you see the light dancing on the tree trunks, you will

remember your kitten and the good times you had with him—you

will think of life and how good it is to be alive now, and how we

should treasure every good moment while it is happening.”

A few days later Aunt Lucky is at our door.

“Now, Jeff...listen, Beth. I’ve spoken with your parents about

this. This kitty stays indoors—she’ll never go near the road.” From

under her coat she produces a kitten the color of wheat, of straw

with sunlight on it, the face tinged with dark brown.

“It’s a special breed of cat—it’s Siamese. I have a former

student—an old friend now—and her cat had a litter. See how

little? She was the runt, the smallest one, and my friend just gave

her to me.”

So we had a cat from the Orient, thanks to Aunt Lucky. We named

it after her. And that cat stayed with us all the years we were

growing up—even moved to Seattle with us.

Just as the war started, our aunt and two cousins came over

from England as refugees. My cousin Stanley had eyes as blue as

our Lucky cat, and hair so blond it was white. He was six months

older than me, sort of in between George and me, and he was still

upset about leaving England and all his friends.

“In a convoy, Jeff. With a battleship at the front—a big one.

And one at the back.”

War makes people crazy; I begin to sense it then. My cousin,

sharing my bed with me, wakes me up every night that first week.

“The Germans are coming. Hear the planes?”

Rushing to the window. “It’s got a Nazi insignia. Look.”

“Stanley, there’re no German planes here. This is America.”

“No—look! Can’t you see it?”

“Those are just planes. Hitler can’t get this far.”

Sunday afternoon. The grown-ups are having tea in Aunt Lucky’s

front room—my mother, my aunt and my English girl-cousin,

who is older than George and wants to stay with the big people.

She is kind of stuffy anyway, so we don’t mind. I am out in back

with my sister, my cousin Stanley, and George. I am just noticing

that both Stanley and I are taller than George.

Stanley looks around. “There’s no bomb shelter.”

“We don’t need one,” George says.

“What do you do when the planes come over?”

“There’re no bombs, Stanley,” George explains.

“But in case—”

George looks at me, raising his eyebrows. I say, “Maybe

Stanley’s right. You never know. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to have a

bomb shelter or two.”

George shrugs. Stanley gets Aunt Lucky’s shovel. I get the

pick-ax. He and I spend the next hour and a half digging holes in

her back yard. George does not help.

“You guys are gonna get it.”

I am curious to see what a bomb shelter looks like. We don’t

get that far. But I do get to see what my aunt and mother look like

when they discover the holes. My aunt has a proper fit.

“Stanley, how could you do such a thing?”

While he is explaining about the shelter, my mother gets after

George and me.

“You know better than that. Why did you let him dig up her

garden?”

“Just a moment,” Aunt Lucky says. “Let me speak with him.”

My female relatives are fuming, tearing into George, of all

people; his face is red behind his roundish glasses. I chew at a

hangnail, watching as Lucky takes Stanley by the hand, leads him

over to the end of the yard. She is leaning over, listening to him,

then speaking earnestly, looking into his eyes. She talks a long

time. Finally he smiles.

When they come back, Lucky says, “He’s apologized, and now

the children will fill in the holes.”

They make George do it too. He is so pissed he can’t even

speak. I wonder what Lucky said to Stanley; he will not tell us. But

he no longer talks about the Germans coming, and the sighting of

Nazi planes stops for good.

They stayed with us for a little while and then my aunt found a

place in town. We saw them on weekends and holidays. When we

went to a movie theater in Ann Arbor and heard the audience sing

“Deutschland Deutschland über Alles” during the newsreel, I

thought Stanley was going to barf popcorn all over the row in

front of us. My mother explained.

“There’s a strong German community here. A colony of

immigrants.”

But the big trouble didn’t start till America entered the war. A

kid at school called me a Jap, and I knocked out one of his front

teeth. My mother cried; she thought I was already on the path to

juvenile delinquency.

Aunt Lucky’s voice: “Now, Jeffrey. Do you know what a Jap

is?”

“Well, sure.”

“It’s an epithet. A nasty name. It really doesn’t mean

anything.”

“Well, I didn’t like the look on his face when he said it.”

My mother was afraid; I could sense it. When they thought I

wasn’t listening, I heard Lucky tell her, “I think he’ll be all right.”

“Yes,” she replied. “But will we?”

On the night they have the meeting, my father comes home early.

We have our meal of rice and vegetables, and my favorite—

deviled eggs with yeast extract. A little later, around eight o’clock,

Aunt Lucky walks up the hill to our house.

“Margaret,” she says as she comes in. “I just got wind of

something. There’s a bunch of the neighbors coming by. I want to

be here when they do.”

My mother glances at me. “What about the children?”

“They can go into the back bedroom. They don’t need to hear

this.”

So George takes Beth and the cat and heads down the hallway.

I refuse to move from the table.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Before they can argue with me, someone pounds on the front

door. Then we hear the sounds outside, voices, feet crunching in

the gravel. My father gets up, and I see suddenly that he is

stooped, his head bent, like an old man. He goes to the door and

turns the knob. My mother is just behind him, and Aunt Lucky

moves so that she is standing to his left when he opens the door. I

move too—I go to the front window so I can see what is

happening.

Neighbors are standing in a half-circle, their flashlights shining

in the semi-darkness. Some are strangers, but others my father has

worked for, repaired houses, built sheds and shelves.

A man named Nathan Richards steps forward out of the

group; all I know about him is he has this snotty daughter,

Angela, and they live in this fancy house up the hill. He is of

medium height, taller than my father, and the extra fat sort of

hangs on his jowls and around his neck. You can tell he hasn’t

missed too many meals in his life. He goes into this throat-clearing

routine and looks around. The rest of them fall silent.

“‘Evenin’, Chang.”

“Good evening,” my father says.

Richards gives this nervous little cough, then says, “We’ve

been having sort of a little meeting, yes, a meeting down in the

church—just the local people, and we—”

“We know all about your meeting, Nate Richards,” Aunt

Lucky says from the doorway.

“Now, Emma, you stay out of this.” He harrumphs again.

“Now, what we’re trying to say—”

“Well, say what you have to say, then,” Lucky says. “Get it out

into the open.”

Mr. Richards grips his flashlight with both bands. “Well, you

see, we’re all patriotic Americans around here, and we’ve just

decided we don’t want anyone living here who isn’t one hundred

percent united with us, now that war’s been declared, and, well,

you see—”

“Just what makes you think this family isn’t patriotic?” Lucky

demands.

“Oh, hang it all, Emma, you know as well as I do they’re

Asians. And we just don’t want any Japanese around here.”

By this time Lucky is out the door, standing on the steps beside

my father. “All right. Listen, everyone. Especially you, Nate. Clean

the cow dung out of your ears so you can hear.”

There is hooting from the circle. Lucky is using her school-

teacher voice, which really projects.

“In the first place, Chang is a Chinese name. He is Chinese, in

spite of what you thought. There is a difference. But even if he

were from Japan, he would have as much right to this piece of

ground as you or anyone else.”

She explains how my father is an American citizen now and

pays taxes the same as they do. She even puts in how he was a

refugee from the revolution in his old country, and had come to

seek safety in America. She asks what kind of example they are

setting for him and his children. By this time they’re looking

uncomfortable, glancing around, stepping backward so the circle

doesn’t seem as tight.

Then she really tears into them. Says stuff about how the land

first belonged to the Chippewa anyway (“That’s ‘Indian’ to you,

Nate Richards,”) and how maybe the Chippewa should just kick

the whole lot of them off. How would they feel then?

Mr. Richards’ face is turning a deep pink; he is breathing fast,

as if he has just lost a game of tennis. But Aunt Lucky is relentless.

She goes into this song and dance about how each person is equal

and of worth, even if he comes from a part of the earth most of

them haven’t bothered to learn much about.

Oh, she is magnificent, my Aunt Lucky. There is fire in her

voice, and passion. Not easily impressed, I stand with my mouth

open, thinking I would not like to be in that circle of men with

them looking less tall, less sure of themselves and more ashamed

every minute. And then I see something. My father is no longer

stooped; his head is high, and he is even smiling a little, admira-

tion and amazement on his face as he looks at her. And that’s

what I meant when I said I’d seen her stand as tall as anyone you

care to mention.

“I suggest you go and leave these good people alone. But

maybe you should apologize first.”

Richards turns then; I sense he is ready to get out of there.

Probably more than ready. Another neighbor, Mr. Judson, steps

up with his hat in hand.

“It looks like we’ve made a mistake. Mr. Chang, I’d be pleased

to have you for a neighbor for as long as you care to stay. Sorry to

trouble you, ma’am.” He nodded to my mother.

One by one they come to stand before my father and mumble

their apologies, some shuffling their feet in the gravel. The circle

disperses; they leave, disappearing into the darkness. Only Aunt

Lucky is left. She turns as if nothing has happened.

“How about some tea, Margaret? I can’t take this much

excitement every night.”

Years later. George and I are walking on the beach just at sunset.

To our right stretches the Pacific Ocean, hazy, with a bluish sheen

on the water. Just up the hill to the southeast are straggly stunted

trees, then a stand of evergreens.

I am still taller than George by a head and he is as mild-

mannered as ever, a professor of math at the city university.

Ahead of us are our families. George’s wife is Chinese, from San

Francisco; mine is Anglo-American. The children, four girl cousins

kicking sand at each other, all look similar—black-haired Eurasian

kids. Beautiful girls. George wants to visit China someday and try

to find more family, but I have no desire to go.

“I probably wouldn’t fit in there either.”

George and I speak freely of what happened. Since he was in

the back room with Beth and the cat, he had to rely on me to tell

him.

“I almost didn’t believe you,” he said once. “Until she got

sick.”

You see, when Aunt Lucky’s brother died and she lost their

farm, my parents took her into their home. She was old then, old

suddenly, it seemed, and crippled with arthritis. They cared for

her, and she was part of our family until she died.

“You know what she said once?” I say to George. “She said

something about how good it is to be alive, and how we should

treasure things while they’re happening.”

“She was quite a gal,” George says.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

They’re all gone now, my mother and father, and Aunt Lucky.

My British cousins, now American, are scattered in various parts

of the country, and my little sister Beth became a veterinarian. I’m

the only one without a real profession. I work as a substitute

teacher, just enough to support my family and keep on with the

freelance writing. Summers I crew on a sailing vessel that takes

tourists on midnight cruises. I don’t make tons of money, but

somehow I think Aunt Lucky would have approved.

We leave the water’s edge and head up toward the trees and

the parking lot, our bare feet making hollows in the sand. As we

enter the stretch of woods, I feel the breeze at my back. I smell the

pines and the sea-scent, a faint whiff of fish and gasoline from the

harbor.

Both George and I pause for a last look at the water, the

reflected sunset still sparkling on it in tiny points of light. He calls

out to the family, “All right! Let’s go!”

The girls scurry to get into the car, the mothers fumble with the

seat belts. The children are laughing. I am suddenly seized with

affection for them, for daughters and nieces, wife, sister-in-law,

even George—although it would embarrass him no end if I were

to acknowledge it. Strange thoughts—as if the old ones are still

with us, my parents, Aunt Lucky, ancestors I never even knew, all

hovering unseen in the hazy air of dusk. I turn, wishing the

moment would go on and on, this brief walk through woods, and

then I marvel that I have come across half a continent to see the

light dancing on the tree trunks.

Jacqueline Carney

Jacqueline Carney has been an independent bookstore owner, reported for and

edited newspapers, and written for Women’s Day and other national magazines.

She wrote mostly non-fiction before attending Elizabeth Kostova's workshop at the

2008 Bear River conference. Elizabeth’s workshop revolved around writing as

influenced by art. One of the assignments was to begin a story that had a

particular painting at its core. Klimt's The Kiss was the painting Jacqueline

selected and “Close Your Eyes” is the story she wrote. Since the workshop

Jacqueline has completed a novel and sent it to several “beta” readers.

_____________________________________________________________________

Close Your Eyes

llen stood just inside the tiny bookshop. It was exactly as she

remembered—the tomes of literary fiction, poetry, philosophy

and art consuming her like goldfish that in a feeding frenzy tore

off bits of her then darted away. It was such delightful agony and

she laughed out loud. A teenager—a boy with spiked hair and

leather pants—flashed her a pained look as he passed.

“That’s one odd old lady,” was what Ellen could almost hear

him say.

She didn’t care. Already she’d exhumed herself from the place

where recent nightmares held her sleep hostage.

A wood deck, worn but welcoming, surrounded The

Bookworm’s rear entrance and overlooked a steep, sharp-stoned

gully and its creek. Ellen loved that creek—its sounds that

changed with the seasons. In the fall, the thinned waters clinked

over stones like change in a vendor’s money belt. Ellen would sit

and listen as she flipped the pages of the latest art book. She’d be

reminded that a slower season was at hand—one that offered time

to reflect on what life had offered.

A different creek flowed in the spring. It was deep and full

from the rains—its rush disconcerting but swollen with the

promise that life will again renew itself, that change is always

possible.

Along the deck’s rails, tables and chairs fashioned from pine

branches still clustered, a bit grainier and more stained by the

weather. They bustled, as they always had, with coffee-sipping

bookaholics. Reminded of her mission, Ellen straightened and

hastened to “Religion and Philosophy.”

She never intended to browse, much less stop in the aisle of

oversized art books, but one cover in particular—a plated print of

“The Kiss”—thwarted her resolve and lured Ellen back.

It was during her high school art history class that Ellen first

viewed Klimt’s masterpiece—a poster on a wall of this very shop.

Her teacher, Miss Saunders, was a young woman so full of facts,

dates, timelines and plate titles she could have taught advanced

computer science except that, back then, there were no computers.

“You can learn something here,” Miss Saunders had railed to

her students at the end of one class, “about the difference between

the artist who merely hones a skill and one who masters true art.

Klimt’s designs are pretty, yes. And so are his women. But they

are also pathetic sex objects—especially his dear Emilie.”

From behind her black-rimmed glasses the teacher’s face had

reddened and her voice had elevated as she said the muse’s name.

As Ellen took a seat with the Klimt biography in hand, she

could still hear Saunders’ distinctive cackle.

Saunders went on. “Klimt and his Secessionist pals had little

use for anything beyond chauvinist eroticism—totally ignored the

fact that industry was the golden egg of progress—that it ensured

the world a prosperous future and women their fair share.”

An angular woman with short-cropped hair—a grackle’s

iridescent black—she had cut a sharp thin silhouette against her

shelves of art books. She’d removed her glasses as if to highlight

the gravity of her message.

“It is the artist’s task,” Saunders had droned on, “to reflect

such remarkable times, not mire in sentimental opiates. Klimt’s

rampant sexual symbolism was at best a waste of paint. His

paisleys of rich colors were lovely, yes, but what universal truth

did their application impart?”

Since fifth grade, Ellen had harbored hopes of making art her

career. Sketching was how she filled her time because girly

friendships intimidated her. Ellen went home that night and

studied Klimt further and a much different painter emerged. One

who, like herself, craved the soft, sinuous sexuality of the human

form and the transcendence it offered the soul. She’d read of

artists that paired off with their models—their muses—not just

Klimt and Emilie Floge but Rodin and Camille, Siddal and

Rossetti; and Picasso with his endless cortège. Ellen wondered

whether these muses saw themselves as enslaved sex objects or as

complicit lovers. Were Emilie’s downcast eyes in “The Kiss” full of

submission or of dreams? Did it matter when she was such an

inspiration to him?

When it came time to write her year-end thesis, it was Klimt

that Ellen selected as her subject.

“And now, in the Sixties, his eroticism has re-emerged,” she

noted in her conclusion, “nurtured by my generation’s free-love

festivals, hallucinogenic euphorias and folk-come-electric music.

We’ve even rediscovered the same magnificent hues, equally

delicious florals and star-studded skies. Who can say if Klimt

chose to ignore untouchable truths? Who cares? Give me the

unbridled passion that swam beneath his brush any day. Give me

Emilie’s dreams.”

Evidently appalled and with a mocking caw, Saunders said,

“What liberated mind—what modern woman would ever

acquiesce to that—would see value in being an object?”

How surprised Ellen was when the woman gave Ellen an ‘A.’

She knew Miss Saunders would never get it—Klimt’s passion.

Would probably never get it either—sex, that is. Actually, Ellen

wasn’t sure if she’d ever get it, given her nervousness with her

peers.

That summer Ellen took a modeling job at the university and

met James, one of the graduate students.

“I’ve never seen such curves,” he said to her the first day. He

was smiling as his strokes wisped across his canvas. “And that

hair. My god girl—don’t ever cut it.”

As perfect as Michelangelo’s David and six years Ellen’s senior,

James brought something out of her she’d never felt before. He

laid claim to her curves and her blond tresses and hailed her as his

inspiration. Within weeks Ellen surrendered herself to the same

selfless rapture that she saw entrancing Emilie.

By fall, Ellen was brave enough to try her hand at sketching in

public. Mostly she drew James’ perfect body and face while he

sketched other models. Many critics commented that her pieces

were even superior to his—something about the emotions they

imparted. As she sketched, Ellen often thought about Miss

Saunders—wondered if she ever found love because now Ellen

had. A year later, James and Ellen married and she ignored his

jabs that she’d lost her brush’s gifted touch.

“You might try your hand at something else,” he said.

She wasn’t sure if the darkness in his eyes was jealousy or

some other secret. When Ellen became pregnant James turned to

younger models, tonier ones with more energy and wit.

“Don’t be angry, darling,” he said. “You’ll always be my

muse.”

Ellen turned her feelings back inside her heart.

“It hurts to live like this,” she told Abby, their little girl, though

she was too young to understand. “But I will always love him. If

Klimt’s Emilie can brave a precipice, so can I.”

Abby just gurgled and Ellen tried to lose herself in her art but it

was no use.

Soon it wasn’t enough that Ellen stay away from James’ attic

studio where, she was certain, he often took his newer models to

bed. She needed, he told her, to find a job. The family needed

money because he hadn’t sold enough paintings. She hired in as a

secretary with a large accounting firm and found a nanny for

Abby and, with a great deal of pain, shut her eyes to what went on

in the attic.

These were very long days for Ellen—meetings and filing and

accounting—and at day’s end she was unable to offer precious

embraces to Abby, didn’t even have the time, and James was often

either on the West Coast hawking his art or deep into some new

creative binge.

The morning of her fifth birthday Abby plucked a dandelion

full of fluff from the back yard. It was early spring and Abby raced

back to her mother on the driveway, her eyes full of delight.

“Close your eyes, Mommy. I have a surprise.”

Ellen was late for work but held the car door open and,

stepping on the hem of her silk skirt, knelt to Abby’s height. It

almost seemed as if in the moment Ellen closed her eyes and

stretched out her palm for Abby, twenty years flew by. When

Ellen re-opened her eyes, Abby was walking the aisle of St.

Stephen’s Church on the arm of her new husband, Jake.

For Ellen and James, when it was just the two of them again, there

seemed to be a bit of a turn-around in their relationship.

“They’ve started serving breakfast at The Bookworm,” he said

one Sunday morning. “What do you say we go?”

Though it had once been a weekly routine, they hadn’t gone

out for breakfast in years. Hope flickered in Ellen’s chest and she

agreed. They ordered their coffee—black for him, skim milk latte

for her—and James said, “What do you think is happening to this

world of ours? 9/11, AIG, Shearson Lehman, Madoff—it’s crazy,

don’t you think? All the greed. Where is the love, the social

conscience we used to dream about?”

There was a time when this—real conversation—would not

have surprised Ellen. But for years their mornings had disinte-

grated into mindless babble over this gallery, that show, the

week’s audits and yesterday’s tax seminar—the disconnect

between them so huge a mountain could grow there—and it had.

Hearing him now, Ellen wondered what she’d missed. Had James

changed back his stripes?

“Maybe you and I should chuck it all,” he said. “Move to a

cabin in the woods. Remember when passion was more important

to us than god?”

More than he’d ever know, Ellen thought.

“Are you suggesting we sell the gallery and our home?” she

said to him over the rim of her mug.

“And our furniture,” he said. The lumbering tone in his voice

excited her and the deep, rich brown of his eyes reminded her of

the love they once had. From its perch in her chest, her heart

fluttered to her throat.

James said, “Why are we putting ourselves through this hell

anyway? We’re not getting any younger, Ellen. What do you say?”

“It is very tempting.”

She rationalized the divide that had separated them. Perhaps

he’d been humbled by the stress of the downturn. Galleries were

starving, auction sales had plummeted. Perhaps he knew Ellen

missed the simple life of their courtship. Perhaps she was equally

guilty—tossing love aside like an old felt hat. He wanted to spend

the rest of his life with her—not a twenty-something fraud!

“Then you put in for your retirement and I’ll work on the rest.”

She was certain that’s what he’d said. Maybe she took too long

to gather up the loose ends at work. Maybe he was toying with

her all along. Weeks later when she asked him how it was all

working out, he gave her a puzzled look and laughed.

“How’s what working out?” he said.

“Selling your gallery.”

“Why would I do that?” he said.

Ellen went on with her plans to retire anyway, assuring herself

that halving the stress in their lives would bridge the widening

abyss. She’d have time to tone her body to its former firmness and

tempt James with candlelit evenings, gourmet meals and sexy

innuendos. She’d even try to soften the acrid distance between

herself and Abby with intimate lunches and frivolous shopping

trips.

Two weeks after Ellen stopped working, James and Abby

found a night to quietly celebrate, though Ellen’s retirement

hadn’t yet taken her back to the dreams she sought.

“We need to talk, Ellen,” James said when Abby left the table

to take a phone call from Jake.

“About?” Ellen said as she sliced into the grey flesh of her

swordfish.

“About us,” he said, his voice nearly a whisper.

She looked up for clues in his eyes but he’d turned them away.

“What about us?”

“I’m getting my own place.”

She swallowed the mass in her throat and waited for his

explanation.

“I’m leaving you. You’re still as sexy as hell and I’m sure you’ll

find someone else. It’s just that we seem to have lost what we once

had. You’ll be fine, darling. Your portfolio is twice the size of

mine.”

When she thought back now, his words still tasted bitter. “But

why?”

“I can’t explain why. It’s just that I want something more and I

don’t see it here. I’m probably just blind.”

She watched his eyes, how they flitted like fireflies on crack.

Then they stopped.

“Actually, I can explain. I have fallen in love with someone

else.”

“Who?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“I think I’ll learn eventually.” She tried to take a bite of her fish

but her hands trembled.

“Well then, it’s Sara Gladwell. The girl I’ve been painting.”

It was in her kitchen a week later that Ellen dug up the nerve to

tell Abby. Miracle of miracles, she did not find fault with her

mother. Despite Ellen’s maternal shortcomings, her sixty-hour

weeks and endless carryout dinners, Abby had simply said, “I’m

sorry.” For the first time ever, Ellen cried in front of her daughter,

and it was then that Abby recommended the book that had

brought Ellen to The Bookworm.

“The author’s more an advocate for improving personal

relationships than practicing a particular religion,” Abby said at

Ellen’s kitchen counter, waving a brownie in her hand. “He says

relationships don’t have to hamper your happiness if you channel

them in the right direction.”

Abby, who’d matured into a beautiful woman, bit into the

confection. “These are delicious.”

They were waiting for the coffee to finish brewing before they

set in earnest to find Ellen a smaller place to live.

Almost embarrassed, Ellen laughed. “Really. I’ve never made

brownies before.”

“Tell me about it, Take-out Queen,” Abby quipped with a

smile. It was the kind of smile Ellen used to get when Abby was a

toddler—innocent and sincere.

“You can take the rest back with you. I mean—I’m alone now.

Right? Who else…”

Ellen’s words almost staggered. Abby turned away and busied

herself in her purse but her punctured movements gave her away

and they peeled from Ellen a latent maternity.

She stroked her daughter’s forearm. “I’m going to be fine,

Abby.”

Ellen then took a box of Saran Wrap from the drawer and tore

off a piece. It immediately crumpled and she tried two more times

and the vile material kept sticking to itself and finally Abby patted

her mother’s hand, took the box, pulled a fresh swath and laid it

over the brownies before making the tear.

Now Ellen was here at The Bookworm on this bright May

afternoon, stalled on her way to find that book. Some white-robed

guru (Ellen couldn’t remember his name) offering metaphysical

answers to relationships that had lost their luster. The title gave

Ellen a headache but she sought it out because she hoped doing so

would solidify her reconnection with Abby. They’d had their

differences—maybe more than most mothers had with daughters.

Ellen replaced the Klimt biography on its table and the spike-

haired teenager walked by again. What she was wearing seemed

stupid—her red wool suit that hugged her softening curves and

the deep V of her jacket that exposed a white lace triangle from

her camisole. A far cry from the denim skirts and Monet t-shirts

she used to wear. An elderly woman, thin and hunched with

osteoporosis, leafed through the very book that had stopped Ellen

earlier. The woman’s white hair was cut short at her nape, which

she fondled with long milky-blue fingers.

“Are you finding everything?” a young clerk asked her.

“Dearie,” she replied, “I found everything so long ago I’m

starting over.”

What snatched Ellen’s attention and held it was this ancient

woman’s laugh. A distinctive caw.

“Miss Saunders?”

Craning her wrinkled neck like a tortoise, the older woman

said, “Yes?”

“It’s me, Ellen Peters. You taught my senior year art history

class.” Ellen stopped. “1967. I was a bit of a handful.”

“I remember you, Ellen. Yes.” She paused to gather strength,

which Ellen could see was in short supply. “Actually you were

one of my favorites.” She ran her thin fingers across the book’s

cover. “What a coincidence that we meet with this piece once

again between us.” She lifted the book and smiled. “You were so

young and full of passion and I envied you for it. I wished I had

had half your verve. How has it been for you—your life?”

Ellen struggled to recollect those feminist covenants of her

youth, the spirituality she’d pursued and the tempestuous desires

she’d craved. She wondered why they all couldn’t share the same

garden of selfless harmony. The euphoric oneness of her early

marriage tugged her heart as a toddler would a coat-sleeve, she

entrusting everything to James, he radiating promise like a sun

rising over the horizon. The night had darkened and stars had

filled the sky and, for the first time in her life, Ellen feared the

edge of that precipice.

She was about to say that lately her life had disappointed her—

that her dreams, like old photos, had faded to blank pages—when

the teenager opened the door to the deck. Ellen heard the creek’s

roar and remembered the words her teacher had just spoken.

“Miss Saunders, let’s just say you’re not the only one starting

over. Care to join me on the deck? They’ll be closing soon.”

“Thank you, yes,” Miss Saunders said. “But please call me

Samantha.”

Ellen found a spot on a bench next to the deck railing large

enough for her and Miss Saunders. She thought about how her life

had, after all, taken the path Miss Saunders promoted. Ellen had

given up too easily. Now, the spring rush of the ravine’s melted

snow sounded like a hurricane and Ellen worried she’d been

mistaken about its promise—that nothing could change the past

and its abandoned roads. She stuffed her hands into her coat

pocket to warm them from the evening’s first chill.

“Do you think it’s too late?” Miss Saunders said as if reading

Ellen’s mind. “For me, that is.”

Ellen had rolled her head back and closed her eyes. She saw a

similar ravine behind her house—indeed the same creek—where

she and James had often walked as lovers. She’d take off her

clothes and lay on the grass and he’d sketch her for hours, caress-

ing her first with his eyes and then, when he could no longer

resist, his hands and his heated body swallowed hers on the

damp, mossy carpet. She could taste him now, sweet and green

and complex like the fragrance along a woodland path. She

relished what the half-frozen ground could never cool.

“I certainly hope not,” Ellen said, her eyes still closed.

Then she opened her eyes and lost it—the exhilaration—and in

its place was a shadow so close to her she lurched back. The

spongy fibers of the worm-holed wood rail gave way and Ellen

lost her balance and fell towards the roar of the waters below. She

was floating and a quieting relief gathered and filled her. She

could hear the rush of the icy spring waters in the creek and a

number of memories danced in her head and she understood

Emilie’s trust.

“Close your eyes,” Ellen thought as she slowed her breath.

“Dream once more.”

Richard H. Coupe, Ph.D.

Richard is a supervisory hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and is

currently located in Jackson, Mississippi. He has been with the Survey for over 30

years and has worked on water-quality issues in Virginia and Illinois before moving

to Mississippi in 1993. He has an undergraduate degree in Mathematics from

George Mason University, a Master’s and a doctorate from Mississippi State

University. Richard’s area of research for the past 20 years has been the study of

the movement of agricultural chemicals into ground and surface water and the

effects of agriculture on water quality.

_____________________________________________________________________

Elvis and a Wedding in Mississippi

groaned as my wife asked, “Will you go to a wedding with

me?” Now usually weddings are my favorite rite to attend.

They bring out the best in people, and the air is magical with

promise and beauty; the emotional lift from attending one can

continue for many days. People still tell us that our wedding,

some 25 years ago in Virginia, was the most enjoyable wedding

that they have ever attended. But since moving to Mississippi, I

have attended some weddings that have left me emotionally

drained and despairing for the future of the bride and groom.

Mississippi has one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in

the country, and most of these weddings were young people,

pregnant and much too young to get married and obviously

headed for disaster. “Who is getting married?” I asked.

“The son of one of my coworkers; the bride is 35 weeks

pregnant. It is this Friday night at a small country church and they

are serving pizza at the reception,” she said.

“Who gets married on a Friday night, serves pizza at the

reception, and who gets married 35 weeks pregnant?” I asked,

thinking there goes Friday night.

The church was one of those nondescript metal buildings on a

lonely country road that you find so often in Mississippi. It was

fairly small, and the congregation was dressed rather casually.

Many looked as if they had come straight from work, as had I. The

mothers of the groom and bride both wore pant suits. Just before

the wedding began there was a slide show of the bride and groom

depicting their lives transitioning from newborn to adult and then

their lives together, finishing with stills from a sonogram of a very

developed little girl in utero. I thought to myself, well I suppose

you can’t hide being 35 weeks pregnant, and why not celebrate the

issue. It gave me hope.

The mother of the bride entered on the arm of a skinny teenage

boy with long blond hair covering half of his face and wearing a

florescent blue shirt untucked in the back, with no jacket or tie. He

escorted the mother (his mother?) of the bride to her seat, left with

obvious relief, and beat a hasty retreat to the other end of the front

row. The pastor, dressed in a black cassock, and the groom in a

tuxedo (chewing gum like he was creating electricity) walked in

from the front without a groomsman. Huh, I thought, they are

doing this their way; good. Preceding the bride was a beautiful

young woman wearing a knee length peach colored spaghetti-

strap dress, which would not be out of place at any high school

homecoming dance. She was chewing gum and dropping flower

petals as she sashayed in, obviously unused to heels. Following

her was the bride in a sleeveless white gown which reminded me

of the outfits worn by Cleopatra in the movies, very pregnant, and

escorted by another teenage boy in a tuxedo.

Uncharitably, I thought to myself that no wonder this pastor

was in some forsaken country church as he spoke rather haltingly

and with a voice pitched a little too high for a public speaker.

After the usual pleasantries and prayers, the pastor spoke to the

congregation and told us that he knew that the bride and groom

had wanted to get married in Las Vegas and that he had a surprise

for them. He then exited the dais saying that he would return in a

moment. That was pretty weird I thought, as I had never before

seen a pastor/priest/minister leave during the ceremony. And the

reference to Las Vegas was odd for a religious ceremony.

It was a long few moments with us all looking at each other in

the silence wondering what was going on. We were on the right of

the sanctuary, and he had exited on the left through a door that

we could not see from where we were sitting. After a few minutes

there was a collective gasp from the congregation on the left and

Elvis’s “You Ain’t Nothing but a Hound Dog” started to play on

the sound system. The mother of the bride reflexively put her

hand to her mouth, and yes, believe it or not, there was the pastor,

walking up to the bride and groom in a one-piece jumpsuit

bedecked as Elvis, complete with dark wig and sunglasses. I

thought, “what in the hell” as he shook his leg to the boisterous

laughter and cheers of the congregation. I was stunned. Never

would I have ever believed such a thing.

The pastor, still dressed as Elvis, continued with the service,

explaining that he would have to lift his sunglasses occasionally to

read from the book as the light wasn’t that good up front. He

delivered his homily and pronounced the vows, telling the bride

to give the King a kiss, and he would be the last man she was to

kiss other than her husband. As I watched the spectacle I found

myself listening to the pastor/Elvis and it occurred to me that the

dignity and earnestness of the pastor was carrying the day. Who

would have thought that one of the most important rites of

passage in a person’s life could be carried off by a middle-aged

man wearing an Elvis costume? This had not turned into a

spectacle but rather was a teaching moment for all of us, as this

man connected with these young people (and the congregation),

making himself vulnerable to derision as he did so. It was

something that everyone in that church that night would never

forget.

At this point, the newly minted couple walked over to the

Unity candle to the right of the dais. Plucking the candles (that

had been lit by their parents) from their holders, they jointly lit the

Unity candle. Then the groom picked up a wireless microphone

and, as Rascal Flatts’ “Bless the Broken Road” began playing on

the sound system, he took out his gum, placing it on the pedestal

holding the Unity candle; he began to sing along with Rascal

Flatts. He could hardly be heard. His voice cracked with emotion

and what could be heard indicated that he was not trained, but the

atmosphere was electrified and magical and no one dared breathe.

Here was this swaggering, gum-popping, grinning young man

trying to express his devotion to his bride in front of his friends

and in a very public and personal way. It almost seemed wrong

that we were there to watch.

“Every long lost dream led me to where you are

Others who broke my heart they were like Northern stars

Pointing me on my way into your loving arms

This much I know is true

That God blessed the broken road

That led me straight to you”

As he sang the chorus with Rascal Flatts, the bride with her left

arm propped on her very pregnant belly reached out unsteadily

with her right hand as if she were reaching for air. Their hands

met and clasped together, fingers intertwined, as the tears ran

down her face and he finished the song. It was the most touching

thing I have ever seen. The young woman in front of me wiped

her eyes and I had to do the same (several times); it was as real as

it gets.

As we left the church that night (skipping out on the pizza), it

occurred to me that Mississippi had surprised me again. An

evening that I had dreaded had turned into pure magic, in a way

not possible elsewhere, and allowed me the pleasure of being part

of the sweetest thing that I had ever witnessed.

Kaye Curren

Kaye Curren has been the University of Michigan coordinator for Bear River

Writers' Conference since 2006. She has a degree in English and has taken every

writing course she could get her hands on from California to New York—in an effort

to avoid actually writing. Kaye used to write computer manuals and has had

some success being published in children's and adult nonfiction.

_____________________________________________________________________

Zilka and Me

Zilka means resilient. And that you are. We are.

We are a pair, we are.

Melting of East and West.

Calcutta and California.

Michigan and Mombai.

My gimpy Western left knee, your painful Eastern right leg.

We appear to be limping to our destinations, but they don’t see

the rock inside.

I from near, you from far.

Still not fitting in.

Assimilate they say. “We have,” we say. “Can’t you see it?”

“No,” they say, “you are different.”

That Blank Page

Oh that blank page

How can I get around it?

Wash my hair, walk the dog

Scream and have a fit?

Oh that blank page

How can I avoid it?

Sew a dress, make a mess

Rearrange my closet?

Oh that everlasting blank page

How can I escape it?

See a movie, call a friend

Let my cat abscond with it?

Jim Daniels

Jim Daniels’ next books, Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry, Carnegie

Mellon University Press, and From Milltown to Malltown, a collaborative book with

photographer Charlee Brodsky and writer Jane McCafferty, Marick Press, will both

be published in 2010. He has received the Brittingham Prize, the Tillie Olsen

Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the

Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prize

and Best American Poetry anthologies. Daniels is the Baker Professor of English

at Carnegie Mellon University. He led workshops at Bear River in 2008.

_____________________________________________________________________

Packing My Own

Three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches layered daily

like sticky sheets in the bed of my black-hooded lunch box.

I washed them down daily with a gallon of red koolaid

in the communion rite of the UAW and Ford

where no haloes were tolerated. Wonder bread

of three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches finger-

printed with grease and grit and the salt of my sweat.

The sameness, a comfort—like our gray coveralls,

like the face of Jesus. I gulped koolaid till it stained my mouth

with a lurid moustache, a crazy lover’s lipstick,

the kiss of the bargain, evidence of daily betrayal.

Trinity triplets: peanut butter (plain) and jelly (grape).

The paycheck, my weekly napkin, the cleansing

certificate of baptism—for the money was good

washed down with a gallon of red koolaid

and, later, beer at the Mustang bar. Even that, named for a car.

Summer factory heat spoiled meat, liquified cheese. Bummer.

Thus: Three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Ice rattled

like snakes in the gallon of red koolaid, then melted into blood.

Pyramids, Mexico

(for Ben and Hilary)

A teacher and two students.

Gray dusk, soft rain. We climbed

the Pyramid of the Sun, our toes

tentative on wet narrow steps.

Ben's voice, calm as stone,

gave us history. Two years later,

his nameplate lingered on an office door,

an artifact of a gentle life.

The other student, Hilary, his daughter,

practiced Spanish with me on the bus

as we sweated silhouettes into our seats.

I stumbled over English

when our shoulders touched.

A stranded dog circled on top, wagged

greeting, pushed his paws into my chest

till I led him down. You climb all that way,

expecting something. We create our own

views, I know now. And sacrifices

for the altar. I know now, I know now.

It could be my animal cry.

On top of the Pyramid of the Moon,

the rain stopped. Behind haze

we saw the sun diffused. Down

the long road between pyramids

the dog ran. I stood forever

in the silence of that small, flat space

with Hilary, Ben. We watched the dog

turn into a black spot and the spot disappear.

I wanted to hug them both, to press

our wet skin together. A little embarrassing,

love just welling up on that great height

where nothing could stop it. Maybe it hovers

there still. Maybe I was dreaming,

am dreaming still.

Our deaths pile up inside a pyramid.

The first one lands with a thud

on the dry, packed earth.

I know now, I know now.

A black spot disappearing, gone.

If he were alive, he would still be

disappearing, like Hilary, alive

and disappearing from memory.

I was nineteen—the wild roar

of love washed over me like the pure wind

of that great height.

What must we have looked like

from up there, walking back to the bus,

contrast hazy in that gray light

on those gray stones?

Dear Love, Dear Grief—

Dear Sun, Dear Moon—

Dear Ben, Dear Hilary—

wasn’t there an altar for human sacrifice?

Didn’t I put my neck down on the slab?

I kept a diary in Spanish for the class.

I can’t even read it now, black dogs,

black dogs running across the pages.

Delivery Room

The long sigh of the bald man initiates

the awkward silence in the church basement

full of addicts in various stages of undress

and recovery. In various stages of address

and telephone number and next of kin

and don’t call me I’ll call you. Kin

redefined, refined, abstracted, expanded,

dripped from a big urn and called coffee.

Delivery, a dream that’s born here

and dies here. Hand-stamp us gently.

Deliver us from the metal chairs, metallic stares.

Silent, bloodless drilling. The bald man

constructs his name, letter by letter.

Jerry Dennis

Jerry Dennis has lived in northern Michigan most of his life and has earned his

living as a freelance writer since 1986. His essays and short fiction have

appeared in dozens of publications, from Smithsonian to River Teeth to The New

York Times, and are frequently anthologized and reprinted. His ten books, most

recently The Living Great Lakes, have been translated into a half-dozen languages

and have received many honors. Two new books are forthcoming: Winter in the

Bones: A Season in Attendance; and a collection of essays titled The World at

Hand, in which “An April Shower” will appear.

_____________________________________________________________________

An April Shower

e had the season's first thunderstorm the other day, and it

couldn't have come at a better time. I was in my canoe, on

the river, drifting with the current, when a belly-rumble sounded

over the hills to the west. It was a pristine day in late April—a

little too pristine if you asked me—and I was in the mood for

some uproar. A good, rollicking storm was just the ticket for

launching us into summer.

I'm old enough now to be grateful for spring, and young

enough still to be a little giddy with it. Though I can still get

dewy-eyed about autumn—those crisp nights, the frosty

mornings, the brassy afternoons tinted with the knowledge that

winter is coming and can't be stopped—it’s increasingly

impressed upon me that only the young can afford to romanticize

decline. Once you get some gray in your hair, spring starts looking

better every year.

I like it for all the usual reasons. Because of the rebirth and

renewal without which we’d be screwed. Because it's optimistic.

Because it fills me with some of the leap-in-the-air enthusiasms of

my youth and makes me want to grab my pretty wife and a

backpack and a fly rod and set off for the mountains. A sort of

caffeine energy surges through my veins, until I can't sit inside

another moment. The first warmish day in March I always climb

the south-facing hill behind our house and try to catch sight of

spring. It's been marching north for weeks by then, making sixteen

miles a day, according to the authorities, and taking its damned

sweet time about it. It smells sweet, too. And clean. And

temporary.

Rivers also are temporary. I keep forgetting. This first trip of

the season I was two bends below Brown Bridge before I realized

that it was not the same river I had known in October. The

Boardman is quick and spirited, a classic northern-Michigan trout

stream: spring-fed, clear as air, its bright riffles sun-drenched and

its pools shaded green by the leaning cedars we call “sweepers.”

I've known this river intimately for forty years, yet it is always

both familiar and unfamiliar, which is why, of course, I keep

coming back. The poet Ted Kooser, that proud homebody, insists

that if we can discover the new in the familiar, there’s no reason to

leave home. The trick, of course, is finding the new.

On a shallow gravel bend where I have often stood to watch

for trout, a hemlock had fallen in the winter, its roots torn from the

bank and its black trunk deep in the flow of the river. The current,

diverted, had gone to work dredging a new channel through the

gravel, creating a dark running pool where the water was previ-

ously ankle deep. At the next bend downstream I found a new

logjam of smaller windfalls that will serve as sustenance and

shelter for generations of micro- and macro- river dwellers. And

on one of the last undeveloped sections of the river below

Garfield, someone had finally broken ground for a house. That

spot is within sight of an artesian well that spouts a fountain of

sweet cold water as if from an opened hydrant, where I have

refreshed myself every time I’ve been on the river for five decades.

It's a nice piece of property. I'd always secretly planned to

someday own it myself.

After the sensory deprivations of winter, spring bursts upon us

with an overwhelming bounty of color, scent, and music. On my

way down the river I saw wonders: Mayflies riding the surface

with their wings upright and canted like tiny sloops. Small trout

breaking the surface with tentative bulges and rings erased almost

instantly by the current. On the banks were tender green fiddle-

heads and white trilliums and vibernums sprouting their mauve

mouse-ears. With the breeze came mixed odors of fertility and

decay and the cut-grass scent of approaching rain. Again, beyond

the hills but closer now, came rumbling. Then it rolled across the

sky with the sound the upstairs neighbors make when they’re

moving their furniture around.

I paddled into slack water and took shelter under a cedar. A

few raindrops fell. Then a few more. A rushing came through the

woods, and raindrops as heavy as nickels plummeted around me

and struck the river with percussive notes and raised a thousand

spouts an inch above the surface. Soon the cedars were saturated

and began to drip on me. The air grew fragrant. It smelled like a

greenhouse.

As abruptly as the storm arrived, it passed. I pushed into the

current, dug deep with my paddle, and pulled the river toward

me. The canoe jumped as if it had been spurred. The sun came out

and lit the riffles with spangles and glitters of light and warmed

my wet clothes until they steamed. I wanted to stand in the canoe

and shout. All around, birds sang insanely. Along the banks,

swollen buds burst into leaf. The trees, the river, the birds, even by

god the middle-aged guy yodeling in his canoe—the whole world

was growing younger by the moment.

Susan L. Denny

Susan L. Denny received her undergraduate degree from Kent State University,

did graduate study at Ohio State University, and coursework at Lourdes College

and The Toledo Museum of Art, where she read one of her poems after it was

awarded honorable mention in the National Poetry Contest of the NW Ohio Branch

of the National League of American Pen Women. Artful presentations of her

poems have been carried by Toledo, Ohio galleries. In 2008 she completed a

collection of poems, Yesterday. 8 AM. Susan worked with Keith Taylor at the 2009

Conference and benefited from the experience of faculty and staff.

_____________________________________________________________________

Graduation Day

June 2009. Years have passed.

I recall the day’s stillness, its sunshine.

The vacant seats. The National Guard.

I recall former classmates, students no longer,

In line once more, the grasses bright with spring.

In silence.

The distressed campus had been cleared of people

Since May the 4th.

Cleared by decree. Cleared by fear.

To homes. To satellites.

The Class of 1970 called back for graduation.

Some came. I was there. My friend was there.

We do not remember one another

On that distraught Saturday morning.

The media watched.

No Campus Day this.

No ROTC buildings.

No Blanket Hill.

The Commons now the place memory

Of tragedy already made.

Spoken words followed. Distilled images.

None adequate to heal the broken. The changed.

An Audience of One

He could peel an orange

Leaving its skin in a single piece.

He started with his teeth

At the stem, then nudged his thumb

Underneath the membrane.

Round around all the way.

I watched this quiet work

And waited for the treasure

To be mine. Once received,

I held the vacant and fragile

Whole like a fallen baby bird.

“

Marti Dodge

Marti Dodge’s first serious writing experience came in the eighties when, as an

English teacher, she attended The New Jersey Writing Project; her essay "Lugging

Heavy Buckets," written at the conference, was published in a Texas English

journal, TJCTE, which also published her poem about writing. She has had three

nonfiction pieces published in Dressage and CT, and has been intermittently

working on an autobiographical young adult book—the first 20 pages placed

second in the Woodlands Writer's Guild Contest. Her workshop leader at Bear

River was Eileen Pollack, who answered Marti’s key question, “Where should a

story start?”

_____________________________________________________________________

House Cat Rules

et outa my chair, Minnesota Fats!" Ted shouted again at my

gray and white tabby cat.

Every Sunday for six months since my wedding, I 'd cooked a

good traditional farmer-wife breakfast, and every Sunday

morning, Minnesota had plopped onto his pre-nuptial place at my

table. There he sat, his nose quivering inches away from a plate of

bacon, well-done but not burned, and scrambled eggs, firm but

not dry. As ever, Minnesota remained calm, cool, and visibly

pondering a grab and dash. I admired him as a survivor. Even

after being torn up by a fan belt, left at the vet's, then sent to the

shelter with his surgery scars, he could stay focused on an

immediate goal. And right now, it was Ted's breakfast, especially

the bacon.

Ted liked to subtly point out how much I had spoiled my cat.

Like most farmers, he thought that cats belonged in the barn,

whereas his suburban wife wanted at least one house cat sitting in

that sunny spot by her purple African violets. As far as I was

concerned, there was to be no compromise. This was a non-

negotiable point.

Still, he shouted at Minnesota, and even though it was in good

humor, it unnerved me; lately, not much escaped my nerves. Six

months of marriage had worn on my good humor. After all, at 24 I

was more accustomed by the six-month anniversary to visualize

and rehearse the break-up scene where I would salvage enough

remnants of dignity to allow me to lose and love again. But here I

was married, and I came to realize Minnesota and I shared

something. We both liked to remain cool and at the same time get

our own way. Minnesota never budged; in fact, he habitually

closed his eyes whenever Ted hollered, as if this intruder might

just disappear. The cat maintained command and position until

Ted tilted the chair to a perpendicular angle, forcing Minnesota to

plop to the floor then trot off to wait to be let out through the

sliding glass door. Ted accommodated.

“I hope he doesn’t jump my barn cats. He rolled Willy right

over yesterday just by his weight alone.” Then Ted went back to

digging into his breakfast, not waiting for me to sit down first.

I can still remember the number—17. I had 17 grievances

secretly lodged against my husband who used to be my lover and

friend. For starters: Instead of having my handsome husband join

me on Friday to enjoy a drink with friends, I had to go right home;

he was too tired; instead of relaxing and riding my horse on

Saturdays, I was cleaning while he taught lessons. And if I tried to

take a nap between work and dinner, he’d show up. He was

showing up when I didn’t need him and gone when I did.

And over and over, he’d throw my easy suburban childhood

against his: “I had to carry water to 40 ponies when I was

seven…” And the list went on: staring at a slab of meatloaf (his

grandmother’s recipe) getting cold while he tried to close a horse

deal on the phone; his be-right-backs-just-checking–the-horses

only to wait hours because one was sick. My cowboy prince and

city-girl princess union was having a rough ride.

Lucky for him, I had already accepted that the burden of an

ideal marriage belonged to me. All the woman’s magazines said

so. That’s why I had kept those red Valentine panties after reading

“Keeping your Underwear Drawer Lively.” Ted was really pretty

good when his underwear came out pink after I tried “Saving

Those Marital Pennies” with one wash load. I knew I needed to

keep trying and remembered how Dad had taken us to the Fisher

Theatre. We got to sit in the fourth row to see Camelot. During

Carousel, the heroine sang out to the audience to the unseen hero.

When the spotlight came up, he was standing next to my elbow.

With these fond girlhood memories, I bought tickets in advance to

get good seats to Chorus Line, coming to Detroit in August. Ted

didn’t resist; I took that for agreement.

By August, the farm sizzled into the 90s, cooking crops, beasts,

and man. I hated this heat, which was so unlike that of my

parents’ lakeside home, where I could sunbathe, swinging my toes

into the cool water whenever necessary. I looked forward to this

romantic evening of theater, daydreaming about an exquisite

dinner before the play at a downtown Detroit restaurant. Then on

to those deep scarlet seats of the Fisher Theatre, where I’d sit

beside my handsome husband, who would be out of his farmer

bib overalls and into best his jacket and tie.

Dressed and made up, I waited and waited. Where was Ted? I

remembered I needed to feed my cat early. When Minnesota

didn’t come sauntering at the sound of his dish’s first rattle, I

looked for him in one of his spots. I found him on top of the sofa,

transfixed on some outdoor entertainment. I looked to see if it

were his favorite pair of cardinals flitting in the shrubs. Instead, I

discovered why Ted wasn’t in the house showering and shaving.

Like a huge Tonka toy, the tractor linked to the bailer linked to the

hay wagon rolled off over the horizon.

I had forgotten the hay. All week, Ted had listened to the

weather forecast. “Making hay while the sun shines” wasn’t a

cliché for him. All week, every time the weatherman mentioned

more heat, Ted had grinned, slapped his hat on and headed out

with no word as to when he’d be back. Now, my romantic evening

was dissolving.

I calculated that we could still make the play if we left within

an hour. Giving up on dinner, I set out to salvage those theater

tickets or else. Locating massive machinery and men was not as

easy as I thought. Each swell of the acreage hid them, though I

could hear the rumbling and the thumping of the hay baler. My

dress pumps sank into the mowed rows, causing me to wobble

more than walk. The stalks and burrs destroyed my stockings; my

big toe punched through with the nylon, strangling its circulation.

The sun liquefied my face; I knew I’d have raccoon eyes before I

found him. My mood grew darker against the blazing setting sun

in front of me.

I spotted him. He rode high on his tractor, smiling back at his

“help,” who were sitting high on rows upon rows of square bales

rocking behind the baler. As the baler pushed out yet another

rectangular wad of grass for one man to grab with his hay hook,

he looked like a country pirate as he swung this magic square to

another man to hoist to the top. I hadn't seen Ted this happy in so

long, and I had nothing to do with it. As soon as he saw me, I hid

my disappointment as usual.

He didn't even stop the tractor. I walked by its side. Ted

proudly pointed to the counter. "Two thousand bales,” he shouted

over the crashing machinery with a huge self-satisfied smile.

"We're late." I said, hoping my dress might be self-explanatory.

"Late? For what?"

"The play." I tried not to whine.

"OK. Be there in a half hour."

We made the play, even though we couldn't be seated until the

second act. We had more than enough time to appreciate the

Fisher building’s towering ornate, gold cathedral ceiling like two

abandoned tourists. Ted didn't snore, though he might as well

have for all his enthusiasm. I didn’t say anything, but I was

disappointed in the show. Maybe being raised on Rodgers and

Hammerstein had spoiled me. I drove home. He went straight to

bed and to sleep. I was married and alone. Minnesota and I shared

a sandwich. I had to admit his big cat eyes did look beady staring

over the table’s edge from Ted’s chair. I set a piece of chicken for

him on the floor. He plopped and gobbled. I guess he was a little

short on manners.

Nevertheless, the injustices still totaled 17. Of course, I didn't

tell Ted that. He was supposed to guess. The next evening, I began

my cooking ordeal with my burden jostling around inside me.

While I politely restrained myself verbally, I couldn’t keep from

slapping down silverware, banging pots, and slamming

cupboards.

The enemy approached and came behind me at my sink. He

put a hand on each of my shoulders. He snuggled my ear. I froze.

Then he whispered, "Wanna fight?"

The invitation I longed for. I blurted out my first ten grievances

then the next five. Minnesota hit the floor running to the slider.

Except for letting the cat out, Ted didn't move, didn't argue, just

stood there as if I were a strange creature brought home from an

auction sale, and now he wondered if he could do something with

it. But I knew I had him dead. I had rehearsed over every soapy

dish, over every wet floor and every dusty carpet. I had been

wronged and neglected. Like a climactic scene on stage, all the

lights shone on me, and I was ready. Each cherished grievance

rolled forth, all 17.

“And look at these breakfasts, talk about spoiled. Look who’s

spoiled now?" I stopped. I was tired. I had planned well. But I

hadn't planned for,

"I'm sorry. I don't remember,” he said like a schoolboy not

knowing an answer.

"What do you mean, you don't remember. You have to

remember."

"I mean, if you're upset, you need to tell me sooner. And if you

don’t want to cook me breakfast, just sleep in.”

And that was that. How could I get even with someone who

didn't play my grudge game? I couldn’t think of a thing, not one

snappy comeback came to mind. I looked at him in a blue and

plaid shirt I had picked out for him. It brought out his rosy color-

ing and blue eyes. He stood so still, fixed to his spot, strong like

he’d stand waiting for a young frantic horse to settle and decide to

get along.

I was deciding when he spoke the magic words.

"Where would you like to go for dinner?"

The next morning, I slept in. Ted did chores.

I cooked breakfast.

Minnesota watched from the floor.

Eric Ederer

Eric Ederer edits translations of short stories and poetry from Bulgaria, and is on

the board of directors of Absinthe: New European Literature. Eric led Great Books

discussions of Western classical writing and respected modern writing for six

years. At Bear River 2008, he participated in Anne-Marie Ooman's workshop on

Creative Non-Fiction, learning to use all the human senses to create living writing.

His creative non-fiction piece, Coffee and Cauliflower Soup, was cooked-up in her

class. At Bear River 2009, he participated in Keith Taylor's Short-Short Story

workshop and learned how to cut his writing down to the bone marrow.

_____________________________________________________________________

Coffee and Cauliflower Soup

s I enter under the "Restaurant Mediteran" sign, the smells of

butter and cream greet me. The tables are blanketed by

maroon and green cloths. On the left wall, brown penciled

sketches of chefs and caricatured customers line the top. On the

right wall, brown penciled sketches of a hand holding different

cafe objects line the top. Large, green artificial plants are in every

nook and cranny. On my left side is a dining bar. At the far right

corner of the bar, there are more plastic green plants. Below them

is a huge, brown, woven basket filled with shellacked white,

wheat, and rye rolls. Ornate white and chocolate frosted cakes and

light-golden fruit pies fill a glass display refrigerator. Staccato

accordion music plays in the background.

A skinny, brown-haired, middle-aged man, dressed as a

European café waiter, greets me in a thick Balkan accent:

"Welcome, Eric, sit where you like." He is Mirko. Mirko, his wife,

and two sons fled the blood and barbed wire of the Bosnian civil

war. First they went to Germany, and then they came to Lansing,

Michigan. When he arrived, he knew so little English that the only

place he could find a job was on an assembly line. When his

English and finances improved, he and his family opened

Restaurant Mediteran. He is always there, and his wife cooks. His

two sons, now in college, wait lunchtime tables. They are now

living a very small American dream.

When they lived in Bosnia, they were living the Bosnian

dream. Mirko graduated from a top-notch culinary and hospitality

institute. He ran a highly-rated restaurant and hotel. Mirko had a

radio show where he talked about the culinary arts. Then, there

came ethnic cleansing; the Srebrenica concentration camp was

nearby. If you ask him, Mirko will show you a postcard of his old

hotel. When asked about the open guts and bodies of the war, he

responds in a gentle voice, "You have to accept that life can be

unfair."

I sit down and order a Bosnian coffee and cauliflower soup.

Bosnian coffee is a special, very fine grind. The coffee is stirred

directly into a cup of hot water. Some of the grounds almost mix

into the water, some sink into the bottom, and a few grounds (easy

to drink) float to the top. The strong, rich, coffee smells are

matched by the strong caffeine content. The stuff has a real kick.

It is a far cry from carbon coffee crystals.

The cauliflower soup is filled with white cream. Pieces of

cauliflower gently float throughout the soup. Some chives are

sprinkled on top. Mediteran’s creamy soups are famous.

Restaurant Mediteran is often bursting at the seams with

customers eager for its Central European food. Mirko maintains

a strict recipe code of silence.

When the order arrives, creamy cauliflower and rich coffee

smells fill me and surround me. Sipping the soup and coffee,

I taste Bosnia’s richness.

Jeremy Efroymson

Jeremy Efroymson is a University of Michigan graduate and received an MFA in

Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago. He is a reformed lawyer and is

trying to teach others so that they do not repeat his mistakes. He is also a

photographer and sculptor. Jeremy attended Bear River in 2009 and took part in

Richard McCann's workshop, where he learned to have confidence in his own

voice, and to approach his writing from different points of view and perspectives.

Jeremy was impressed by Richard's ability in his writing to interest people from

different backgrounds in what he was saying.

_____________________________________________________________________

Excerpts from “Shall We Accept this Pizza?”

Dad

y dad did this information-withholding thing with all sorts

of trips. If we were flying somewhere, flight information

would be withheld, as would hotel information, rental car

information, and schedule information. He was in control, and he

wanted us to know that.

There was also the matter of the little notebook which always

rested in the glove compartment of each car that we owned. This

had been going on since before I was born, I think. There was a

small spiral notebook in each car and every time you filled up

your car with gas you had to write down the number of gallons

you purchased, the amount you paid and the mileage of the car.

There was another column to the right where you would plug in

the average miles per gallon for the car which you calculated

using the miles you had driven divided by the number of gallons

of gas you had purchased. Dad would always check your

notebook to make sure you were keeping up with your record

keeping. You were also supposed to list on a separate page all of

the oil changes for the car.

I asked about the reason for this and, surprisingly, got an

answer. If you kept track of the miles per gallon on your car you

could head off serious trouble if for some reason your car suffered

a precipitous drop in miles per gallon. So, for instance, if you went

from 21.2 miles per gallon to 10.8 miles per gallon, you would

know that something was definitely wrong and you could

immediately take the car in to the dealer. This doesn’t quite

explain why we needed to keep track of the price of the gas or

why you could have these hidden problems that would go

completely unnoticed except for miles per gallon, but . . . Despite

our intense record-keeping in this area, I do not remember a single

time when the small gas mileage notebook saved one of our cars,

nor did I ever hear Dad tell a story about when this had saved him

from disaster in the past. It actually took me until I was in my late

twenties before I could break myself of this habit. Even then, I felt

really bad about it. It was like I was cheating or something when I

fled a gas station without writing in my notebook.

My father, never the sentimentalist, did have one small chink

in his armor. It was something kind of small, but for him maybe

not so. He carried in his wallet, I believe until the day he died, a

photo of his childhood dog, Brownie. Brownie was an average-

looking, beaglish kind of dog. Brownie is for me similar to

Rosebud in the movie Citizen Kane. Was this the secret to my dad’s

lost emotion? Did it all rest with that one little beaten-up photo of

Brownie which he would reluctantly pull out the two or three

times we asked about it directly?

Whenever we would get a bill at a restaurant, my father was

quick to check the math. This was not a one-way street. If the bill

was in his favor, even for twenty–three cents, he would be the first

to alert the waitress. He just couldn’t leave a restaurant with the

discord of a bill being added up incorrectly. I’m not so sure he

thought he was doing anyone a favor, it was just that the bill had

to be added up correctly, or he couldn’t rest. Often, the waitress

would actually be annoyed at my dad for pointing out these

minor discrepancies because it meant she had to go back and

refigure the bill. This never fazed my dad.

When I was younger, my dad would fly Cessnas and take me

with him. He would go through the pre-flight checklist, checking

the fuel in the wing to make sure there was no water in it. We

would walk around the plane, doing a visual inspection. Once

again, though, my dad didn’t seem to understand the highlights of

these trips for a child. What I really loved about these trips was

stopping in strange new airports for hot chocolate and candy. I

kept asking my dad to land and he really didn’t understand me.

He actually started to do touch and gos. This meant we barely had

our wheels on the ground before he put in the power and we were

back up in the air. Obviously, there was no hot chocolate or candy.

Grandpa

My grandpa used to take me fishing all the time. I remember

digging up worms with him in the backyard of my grandparents’

house in Silver Spring, Maryland. He would shovel the dirt and I

would pull the worms out of the soil he had overturned. My

grandpa was a pretty serious smoker of unfiltered Pall Mall Reds,

and I remember him often standing in the entrance of his

basement shop smoking a cigarette. He was also a serious sports

fan, something that I inherited from him. We would sit in the

basement watching the Washington Redskins on TV. The

Redskins still hold a place in my heart.

When we moved to Indiana, my grandfather took a liking to

Indiana basketball. He did not like Notre Dame, and thus I did not

like Notre Dame. This dislike of Notre Dame carried through into

my thirties. I finally realized that I had been hating Notre Dame

all of my life because they played zone defense in basketball. I

have only recently been able to begin talking myself out of this

dislike for the Fightin’ Irish.

We would go fishing, the two us, in Maryland and in Indiana.

In Maryland we usually had a much greater chance of actually

catching something. In Indiana, no matter where you went, it was

more of a Zen exercise in patience and silent meditation, though

obviously my grandpa was too old-school to think of it that way.

For Grandpa, fishing had an honor code to it. You released fish

quickly that you weren’t going to eat and you always shared bait

if you had some left over.

I remember one time when another fisherman offered us some

minnows he had left over.

“Sure,” Grandpa said.

“I’ll give ‘em to you for three dollars,” the guy said.

“No thanks,” said Grandpa.

“I’d rather throw them in the water than give them away for

free,” the guy said.

After the guy left, my grandpa said that that was no way for a

fisherman to act. You always gave away your leftover bait. For my

grandpa, fishing was an experience that came with an honor code.

If he had luck catching fish somewhere, he wasn’t possessive—he

would share the information with other fisherman. I’m sure he

would have liked to catch fish, but that just wasn’t going to

happen in Indiana. He wouldn’t have that opportunity until he

moved to Florida later in his life. After my grandpa moved to

Florida, I never saw him or spoke to him again. He died when I

was in high school. He had gone out fishing and not come home

for dinner. I guess he had been fishing and they just found him

slumped over with the pole still in his hands. He had had a

massive heart attack and probably never knew what hit him. I’m

guessing if he could have chosen a way to die, fishing would

probably have been his choice.

George

We used to play war a lot. This involved playing with our toy

guns and a helmet, if we were fortunate enough to have one. We

would hide behind trees and ambush each other.

It was about this time that I saw Tora, Tora, Tora. I forget what

that means in Japanese, but I was mesmerized by the movie. It

was about the Japanese attack in World War II on the Midway

Islands. I must have gone with George, who was way more

fascinated with the military than even me. There were real

Japanese actors speaking Japanese (with English subtitles), lots of

planes, aircraft carriers and lots of dogfights. Unfortunately, the

USS Yorktown was lost in this battle, suffering from many bombs,

torpedoes, and even a kamikaze attack.

After viewing this movie, I got my mom to buy me a model of

an aircraft carrier. I’m sure she thought I wanted to build an

aircraft carrier, but what I really wanted was all the little plastic

planes which fit on the deck of the carrier. This was because I felt I

was ready to take on George’s older brother in a battle. George

could never beat his brother in a battle. Battles consisted of lining

up your planes in a couple of rows against his planes and yelling

things like:

“Machine gun fire, took out those two.”

“You missed, counterattack with missiles. I got those three.”

“Whoosh, I dropped three bombs on you.”

“Rat-a-tat. Your plane is down.”

So we lined up our planes, and I have to say that I was

optimistic. I realized it was my first battle, but Pete, George’s older

brother, looked beatable. After lining up our planes, we began, or

rather Pete began. It was a bloodbath. Because of his expertise in

battle and also the fact that he was three years older than me, he

just seemed to be able to talk way faster than I could. He took out

seven or eight of my planes right off the bat with a frontal

machine gun attack, then when I counterattacked he moved his

planes up into the air and bombed me before I could get going. As

I became more frustrated, he bore down with all his resources and

finished me off. This all took about twenty-three seconds. I was

crushed. I asked for a rematch but he told me it would be pointless

(he was right) and that I should go practice for a few weeks or a

few years and come back later. I never actually re-challenged him.

It felt kind of hopeless.

My mom used to make us snacks, George and me. One of my

favorites was cucumbers or carrots with special seasoning salt. My

mom also used to roll up salami, summer sausage, and cheese and

serve it to us like appetizers. It wasn’t until much later that my

mom told me that George would actually come to visit her and

watch TV and eat snacks at our house while I wasn’t there.

Compared to my house, George’s house was rather cold and

unwelcoming. His parents were stern disciplinarians. It just didn’t

seem like much fun over there, despite our airplane battles. I

remember that George went to bed every night at seven. During

the summer, it wasn’t even dark at seven. The reason George was

over at our house watching TV was that TV wasn’t allowed at his

house. Also, I never remember getting a snack at George’s house.

One thing that will let you know just how tough George’s

house was that one day, George had gotten a sliver of glass in the

end of his finger. He told his mom about it and was told to wait

until his dad got home. Despite George’s mother not being the

warmest person in the world, his dad was even harsher. It wasn’t

a fun time when George’s dad got home. George was called

upstairs, and I proceeded to hear a blood-curdling scream,

followed by uncontrollable sobbing. Pete, George’s brother came

down with a smirk on his face.

“My dad couldn’t get it out,” he said, “so he just cut off the tip

of George’s finger.”

George came down later, a bloody bandage covering the end of

his finger. I was told it was time for me to go home.

Law School

I remember my granddad telling me that law school was a great

foundation for anything you wanted to do in life. He may be right,

but I’m not sure it was worth three years of my life. I oftentimes

think I was a little too overcome with respect for Granddad. He

deserved respect, but I was and am such a different person, I

should have gone my own way. I am a third-generation lawyer—

Granddad did his undergrad and law degrees at Harvard. My dad

did his undergraduate at Harvard and his law degree at George

Washington. My Aunt Mary Ann and Uncle Rob were lawyers, as

was my cousin Robert.

Strangely, while coming from an educated family, I never

knew there were any other kinds of graduate schools. Or at least I

didn’t know you could have a career other than a professor if you

got a graduate degree in something else.

I think that I thought a JD was just a rite of passage I had to go

through. Law school in general is not fun. There isn’t the camara-

derie and friendship of undergrad. It’s definitely a school for

people who want to get a job in a big firm and make lots of

money.

The purpose of law school is to break down all the concepts

you have of right and wrong. You then learn the arguments to win

in a legal sense. That replaces your morals and ethics. You are

filled up with a new set of rules that allow you to argue on either

side of a case with equal ease. You can hardly remember the sense

of right and wrong you started out with.

An example: In my criminal law class, the professor asked how

many of us would rescue a small child drowning in a pool. Only a

third of us raised our hands. This may seem puzzling, but we had

been taught in torts class that if you negligently rescued a child

you could be sued. So at least in the context of law school, we

were not sure whether you should rescue a drowning child.

It took me years after law school to regain my moral compass. I

would always think of the opposing argument for every cause I’d

once believed in.

I quickly figured out that in my family going to get another

degree was always the right answer. No one questioned me as

long as I was still in school. So I ended up with a BA, a JD, an

MFA, and an MBA. Who knows? I may not be finished.

Reno

So I decided to go to the pet store at the mall. That’s where I first

saw Reno. He was a puppy. He was really cute. He couldn’t even

stand up on the vinyl floor; his legs kept giving out on him. I

really just fell for the whole pet store thing. They know that once

you get to playing with a puppy, there is a good chance you’re

going to take him home no matter how unwise the decision and

how unprepared you really are. This was before I knew anything

about Amish puppy mills or dog overbreeding, though I did

know at some level that it was not a great idea to buy a dog from a

pet store.

So I shelled out my five hundred dollars and I took Reno

home. Those people were so much nicer than the Animal Control

people. I have since learned a little about the Irish Setter breed.

They were obviously developed in Ireland as a bird dog. The

problem with most modern purebred dogs is that they are bred

for looks as opposed to temperament. With Irish Setters, they were

bred to have longer snouts, which were considered more

beautiful. Unfortunately, in the process, they accidentally shrank

the brain case and thus the brain. So Irish Setters are the not the

smartest dogs.

Reno did come with an impressive certificate from his breeder.

He hailed from Missouri and a fine line of Irish Setters. I often

thought of travelling to his home in Missouri to ask those people

just what they were thinking when they created a dog like Reno. If

I wasn’t the most patient person in the world, Reno wouldn’t have

made it more than a few months. He just really had no brains. It

wasn’t his fault. He just wasn’t born with any. The best decision I

ever made for Reno was to have him neutered. This assured that

the line ended with him.

Don’t get me wrong, Reno was my favorite dog ever. He was

my “life dog.” He was my best friend a lot of times. This is

sometimes hard to reconcile when you come home and your

brand-new couch has been emptied of all its stuffing or several

pairs of your shoes suddenly are torn to shreds, but he was a good

friend.

Among the things Reno ate were a 64-ounce bucket of Country

Crock, two pounds of sugar cookies, and an entire Entenmanns’s

apple pie. The last was extremely impressive, since the apple pie

was in a cardboard container on top of a microwave on top of the

counter. I would never have thought a dog could even be

interested in apple pie. Reno managed to pull down the container,

rip it open and devour the entire pie. When I came home, all I

found was a completely licked clean, shiny pie tin and a few

scraps of paper, meaning he must have eaten most of the paper

and plastic container.

I bought a crate when I got Reno, but that proved to be a waste

of time. The first night Reno was in the crate, he barked all night. I

got no sleep. He then barked all day long when he was in the crate

while I was at class (so my neighbor informed me). I tried to put

him and the crate in the basement, but I could still hear him

barking. I tried putting him in the crate in the bedroom, but he still

barked. I tried shaking pop cans filled with coins, which was

supposed to annoy him so much he’d stop barking. None of it

worked. Finally, Reno got what he wanted, which was to sleep in

bed with me. My legs were cramped every night for the next

thirteen years, as Reno’s favorite place to sleep was directly on top

of my feet. Despite the dog book that says Irish Setters range from

40-55 pounds, Reno weighed in at a solid 75 pounds. Reno still

thought that he was a lap dog.

Kelly Fordon

Kelly Fordon credits Bear River with saving her writing life. A manuscript of hers

had landed in the hands of an agent and Kelly never saw it again. At Bear River,

Kelly met other writers who had not only survived this experience but had gone on

to publish. A piece Kelly wrote that was critiqued at the Conference was accepted

by Flashquake. Kelly’s other stories have appeared in various journals including

The Windsor Review and Red Wheelbarrow. She is working on a second novel.

_____________________________________________________________________

Go-Go Boots

n 1952, my grandmother was bitten by a fly. She was standing

in the back yard talking to the neighbor across the fence when it

happened. The neighbor noticed that she was bleeding. My

grandmother went inside to clean off her forehead. After that,

everything changed. She got into bed and stayed there. Up until

then, my mother said, she had been perfectly normal. She wrote

poetry and long impassioned letters to various politicians. She

was concerned about communism.

The doctors could not find anything wrong; perhaps it was a

virus, a touch of encephalitis, African sleeping sickness. When it

was clear she wasn’t going to recover, they moved her to the

couch in the living room. They set her up there in the middle of

the room like a planet. She was very good at listening, according

to my mom. Neighbors would come in, sit down, talk. When I was

older and hammered into the ground by my own children, I

envied my grandmother prone on the couch, a book of poetry

opened on her chest, planning meals but not making them,

pointing out dust bunnies but never having to crawl underneath

the settee to pry them out.

Things went along like that for thirty years.

By the time I met her she’d moved up in the world. By that I

mean that she was sitting up instead of reclining. She was sitting

up in a red velvet armchair, a rosary coiled around her gnarled

fingers. We visited her every week in her apartment for about ten

minutes. My mother was busy and she penciled these visits in.

They took place on Saturdays. My grandmother wore cardigan

twin sets and knee-length skirts. Her white ruffled shirts were

buttoned to the neck, a gold brooch pinned to her collar. She had

no teeth; her beaked nose was punctuated by a sizeable iridescent

drip which she never seemed to notice or wipe away. Her iron-

gray wig perched on her head like a downturned bird’s nest.

She lived with her son—my mother’s brother—the compulsive

gambler. He was a failed professional golfer who’d embezzled

money from a golf course where’d he’d been head pro out in

Pennsylvania. My parents and aunt and uncle had bailed him out.

That hadn’t stopped him from stealing from my grandmother

until my mother cut her credit cards up. They slept in the same

room in twin beds. As far as I could tell he didn’t speak. He was

tall and brown-haired, had supposedly once been quite dashing.

In the bathroom there was mold seeping up through the grout.

Several of the ceiling tiles had crashed down into the tub and lay

there broken on the floor of it. It wasn’t clear how or if either of

them ever bathed. I don’t remember a smell except the one

emanating from the refrigerator. My grandmother—because of the

tooth issue—only ate canned peaches. She put whatever she

couldn’t suck down in the refrigerator, where it promptly

sprouted white fuzz. Every week my mother had me clean them

out.

In those days my mother wore go-go boots and mini-skirts.

Years later, when she became religious, I caught her coloring in

old photos of her exposed legs with black permanent marker. But

in those days she liked to preen. Coming and going from my

grandmother’s apartment, she’d hum “These Boots Were Made

for Walking” by Nancy Sinatra. She made it seem like she was just

a woman who had happened on a horrific car accident, one who

had peeked in to see if she could be of assistance before

continuing merrily on her way. Later, when she was old, when her

own house grew choked with mold, when she sucked on her lips

and her nose developed the persistent ever-present drip, when she

cautioned me not to touch her for the germs and spent hours, then

mornings, then whole days praying, it became clear that those

boots had not been able to take her far enough, that at some point

when I wasn’t looking she’d pitched them instead of handing

them down to me. Perhaps she realized I needed a better form of

transportation, something that would take me farther, faster,

something that would propel me far enough that I’d never have a

chance to turn back.

Joy Gaines-Friedler

Joy Gaines-Friedler made her living as a professional photographer in the Detroit

area for twenty years. Currently Joy works for Springfed Arts—Metro Detroit Writers

as a teacher for the Oakwood Creative Writing Workshops, and at the Farmington

Hills Public Library. Her writing is widely published and has earned numerous

awards. She is the author of Like Vapor, a book of poetry published by Mayapple

Press in 2008. In addition, Joy works in the Academic Literacy Program at Oakland

Community College, tutors privately, and runs creative writing seminars

throughout the Detroit area.

_____________________________________________________________________

A Pheasant is Crossing I-75 North of Grayling

where the highway is a line penciled between trees.

I am changing lanes to avoid it.

It is the last day in the month of expansion;

purple iris, peony fleshy and plump as Mae West.

Today marks one year like pollen stain,

that my father began his lousy check marks

on a schedule of medications he cursed,

then swallowed. Behind me now that bird,

has become a sparrow.

My father told me how he almost drowned

three different times - someone always saved him.

I put Bruce Springsteen into the CD player

O thunder road, O thunder road,

and imagine myself dancing on the porch

in a summer dress, barefoot. I would have left

with Bruce if he would have asked me.

Last year, on this day, I asked my father

if I could call Hospice. Get him some relief.

I’m thinking of that god-forsaken bird.

I hate it for not knowing it could have died.

Assisted Living

A woman downstairs is speaking Spanish on a cell phone.

She hasn’t taken a breath in forty minutes. Her task is to guard

the rice pale women that sit beside her in wheelchairs asleep

in the shade. They are like the shredded skin of exotic insects,

exquisite. They are feathers and cotton. They are kites.

They once had New Year’s Eve to think about. They had lovers.

They had many shoes. Today my mother showed me pictures of

herself.

It was 1944. She was black and white gorgeous, her eyes dark

pillows

among the uniformed men all devilish and legible, the tenements

and

walk-ups plump with community. There were no shopping malls,

no endless rows of freeway lights. There was no sorry in her eyes.

One frameless night while my father was dying

I heard a hum of voices through the wall. It was very late.

I loved the sound of them talking—the rise of question,

the pause, the rise of answer.

They spoke in the language of walls.

As they faded from black and white to color

my father died. Now my mother curses the near deaf,

the spoor of sparrows, the blossoms that slip from the dogwood,

the memory of kisses, the thing that lifts the wind.

Christopher Giroux

Christopher Giroux is a lifelong resident of Michigan and an instructor of English at

Saginaw Valley State University. He considers himself fortunate to have taken

workshops at Bear River with Laura Kasischke, Thomas Lynch, and Jerry Dennis.

The poems "Garden" and "Uprooted" were done in Jerry Dennis's workshop in

2008.

_____________________________________________________________________

Garden

Collecting dandelions that glow white, globe-like,

the spiked crowns of chives,

violets with purple tongues wagging,

my daughter flits about the yard, my peripheral vision.

She finds joy in the straight lines of borders, dreams

of being big enough to drive

the spade’s dull edge downward.

For now, I alone commit this silent act of violence;

still she tries: her feet between mine,

we balance, tilt, topple to our tasks—

I divide and conquer (sod, soil, weeds, grubs);

she executes the search-and-rescue of worms.

She exults in night crawlers’ raised ridges,

these black bands that cross her palm,

ends that point back to themselves.

I imagine their weight, like rain, on her hand.

To them she whispers secrets

(something else that dies in my clay soil),

shares them with our neighbor,

urges them back below ground.

Uprooted

Chatting over chain link,

I laugh at my neighbor’s praise,

knowing our yard thrives on laziness, limitations,

recognition of five things I can grow;

we talk over rusting diamonds

and mottled lamium that

lives low to the ground,

mixes with mothballs.

Ardelle shuffles closer, in white socks,

her bottom dental plate missing;

her wedding ring floats

between knuckle and finger joint

as she stoops to dig out, pull up, hand over

the bleeding heart I’ve coveted for years.

She chuckles at my ignorance—

no seeds are involved,

just a severing of stalks, roots—

and as the plant moves between homes,

blooms swing in pink unison;

petals, like wings, pulse under green arcs.

Her husband watches behind patio doors,

veiled by glass, reflections, shadows.

I imagine the steady hiss, the cadenced hiccup

of his oxygen tank,

inquire whether he’s agreed to the surgery.

She blinks, once, twice, again,

smiles at the five-year-old clinging to my leg,

the garish orange tulips

that will yield to Indian paintbrush,

fingers the blackened seedheads,

a series of swords, of our coneflowers

that have trespassed among her silver-tinged salvia,

that tower over her white-tipped bishop’s weed.

She nods her goodbye in silence,

moves away through patches of sunlight,

leaves us to our weeding, to our work.

Leigh C. Grant

Leigh C. Grant teaches writing at Macomb Community College. She has received

Wayne State University’s John Clare Prize for Poetry, endowed by the Academy of

American Poets, and an honorable mention from the Springfed Arts—Metro Detroit

Writers for prose. Her poetry and fiction have been published in The Bear River

Review, Controlled Burn, The Paradidomi Review, and Cardinal Sins. She credits a

great deal of her inspiration to Laura Kasischke and her fiction workshops at Bear

River in 2002, 2005, 2007, and 2009.

_____________________________________________________________________

A Cradle for Small Things

y brother called today, and a cardinal’s song made its way

through the tangled phone lines and digital signals. He told

me someone had stolen his guitar, that it had happened overnight,

snatched from the passenger side of his truck. When we were

teenagers he showed me how he could play, one hand moving up

and down its neck. He said you had to whisper to it, lean in close,

let it know you wanted to play for real. He would whisper, his

breath cool and moist and smelling like our grandmother’s cough

drops, like eucalyptus. He’d said that every song there was to sing

came from the same place and could be played with the same

three chords, that you only had to tell her three things: A7, B7, E7.

Mostly he told me that sleep is overrated. I’m not sure whether he

was talking about a girl or a guitar, but I was sure I was proud of

him, the way he closed his eyes and moved his fingers and played

“Hotel California.”

Chris swore he’d died that day, the day someone stole his

guitar. Restless in bed he awoke in a cool sweat, a ghost looking

much like our grandfather whispering things like “hope” and

“song” by the closet doors. The cat had been spooked, he said,

digging claws into his boxer shorts, and then in one great leap,

stirring hair and particles of dust in its wake. Polly, the cat, had

always known, had always believed: Chris had the gift of song.

At ten years old we decided we’d become writers. One

afternoon I’d been sure I saw something worth writing about, a

white dove darting in and out of trees, branch to branch, glowing

almost, so white as to seem unnatural, a white stain against a blue

sky, bright white light flickering on pine boughs, almost an

illusion, a ghost. I’m sure my mother, the artist, could have

captured the movement; I am sure I could find its outline in black

ink, separating his existence from the blank paper, his flight

flowing from my pen, felt-tipped, permanent, each arch a commit-

ment to the page. But the bigger question was why—why was he

there, flying with all the others? Why not safe in a pavilion at a

wedding, a bronze cage, a magician’s hat?

When I told Chris about his flight he hardly believed me—but

he should have. All manner of mystical birds had found their way

to the pond by our house—white cranes, blue herons, tiny baby

ducks, whole families of goldfinches. That’s why it was no

surprise to find a strange man making his way to our doorstep

one day. We watched him walk up the stone path, one arm full of

something, boxes maybe, the kind roses came in, long and white

with crisp edges—in the other hand: a cage. Chris grabbed a

clothespin to pin back the edges of the kitchen curtains, ugly

things, moth-eaten, things our mother refused to replace since

“they still worked,” still shut out the Southern sun, still shielded

her tomatoes when they sat on the sill to ripen, freshly picked

from our father’s garden.

We stared out the window; this man walked slowly,

deliberately, locking his car and going back to run his fingers

along the windows. The man was nearing us, stepping carefully

around our father’s marigolds. I loved the smell of them—strong,

potent—like the earth.

We did not know yet whether or not we should fear him. He

couldn’t see us, I was sure—but I still ducked down below those

curtains, pulling lightly on Chris’s sleeve. I held my breath,

willing the sound of our father’s car into existence. My brother

was huddled into a tight ball, hugging knees to chest, yellow t-

shirt too cheery for a moment like this. I reached for his hand and

closed my fingers tight. The man came up to the kitchen window

and placed his hands on the glass, blinking furiously, peering in.

Years later the only thing I remember clearly is the light—a

clean, white brightness travelling through our mother’s kitchen

curtains. I remember the way it lit up Chris’s hair, hair as golden

and bright as the light once it touched upon him. We didn’t

scream until he reached the window, his breath steaming the

glass, his large hands framing his face. I squeezed my brother’s

hand in mine, causing him to cry out. The man craned his neck

downward—he’d heard. With a step backward he turned and ran

away, past the marigolds, past his car, arms free of whatever he’d

been holding. We stood: on the ground below the window was a

rusted, empty cage and a box spilling forth the brilliant blue and

green feathers of a peacock.

Our mother never really gave a good explanation for the

events of that day. In my mind a million possibilities flashed

before me: a childhood friend’s smuggled canary, a vase of faux

peacock feathers in my piano teacher’s house, an eagle soaring on

a poster in a psychiatrist’s office, my cat’s mouth full of down

from a baby bird’s flesh. These flying things took up residence in

my mind—clear, perfectly formed memories—but that man’s face

was all but mist and shadow.

I wish he’d been invited in—a story to go along with his lost

things, a houseguest like in Carver’s “Cathedral”—someone

mysterious, wise. Instead, my father’s car had finally pulled in, his

shiny shoes stepping out, smashing a few marigolds, walking up

to the window, standing a moment, and then walking those things

to the roadside trash.

That night, after dark, Chris and I stole away and rescued that

cage from the trash bin, taking it with us up into the woods, down

the ravine, and into a tangled mass of midsummer briars, a place

safe enough for the time being. Days later, in the woods, a blanket

of sparrows fled our footsteps as we searched, in vain, for the

birdcage. Their bodies darkened what remained of the evening’s

light, their cries a frenzied mass of sound. As an adult I like to

think that something took up rest there, lying still in a bed of

undergrowth, creeping vines of wild grape binding to the top of

the cage, sheltering some small and breathing thing.

It wasn’t until we were adults that we learned of our mother’s

secret—that she hadn’t always been an artist, that she once held a

job we knew nothing about. She’d been a nurse in Vietnam,

something dangerous for women, something my father wished to

forget. As a child I’d found the evidence resting in our garage: a

plastic crate full of things I did not understand, things that

conjured up all sorts of stories in my mind. It was up high and

beyond her easels, pallets, heavy boxes, and quarts of acrylic

paint. The crate was bright yellow, something we should’ve

noticed sooner, or could have, perhaps, if it’d ever seen daylight.

In it was a bag full of bandages, pills, and iodine, smelling

pungent, metallic. The bandages were yellowed, old, stale

themselves, suggesting years of disuse, the iodine thick and dried

and useless. I imagined our mother hovering over a cot, a man

coiled up from pain and anger, our mother’s soothing voice in

deeper registers, arms carrying trays of sweet, dark, hot tea and

those bandages. The man, moaning, with skin covered in welts.

It was my mother who’d taught me to cradle the small things.

I said goodbye to my brother and hung up the phone. Stepping

onto the porch, I thought about an unseen sparrow that might be

nestled in those woods, about the men my mother had helped

through the ravages of war, about my father’s fears of her secret

life, of those men. How one might return years later to thank her

and leave a trail of mystery in the form of rusted metal and soft

jewel-toned feathers for two children to find, two children who

had not yet spread their own wings, learned their own songs. And

I said thank you for those flying things, the kind of hope that

alights every now and again, dancing in the wind, calling us

home.

Penny Hackett-Evans

Penny Hackett-Evans wrote the poem "Computer Love" in a workshop with

Dorianne Laux at the 2009 Bear River Writer's Conference. In this workshop, the

group worked often with a list of random words that needed to be included in the

poem. Though resistant at first, all came to enjoy this challenge. Penny has

written poetry for her own amusement for many years and has had two poems

published in small online journals.

_____________________________________________________________________

Computer Love

In the center of our house

stands neither a hearth nor a stove,

but a mighty Dell computer.

The one thing I would wrestle

out of the house in case of fire.

It is my electronic heart,

the ground of my being,

the deep well of words that sustain.

It hosts the messages that fly

in daily like migratory birds.

It is the alluring lover I turn to

first thing in the morning—

give my last kiss before bed

every night.

It is the boat taking me to far shores,

my widest window. It’s blue ember

always glowing, turned on

so easily by the flick of my finger.

Orgasmic in its full response to my

lightest touch. It ejaculates words

into my lap—all spelled correctly.

No awkward moments, no

hesitation to do any weird thing I ask.

It remembers my every word, my birthday,

loves all my poems equally.

It is devoted,

available,

responsive.

in its lush gray case

just waiting for me.

Don Hewlett

Don Hewlett is a retired design engineer. He began writing in 1997, took classes

at Schoolcraft College, and had private tutoring. From 1999-2005 he monitored

“Your Poetry Group” at the Plymouth library. His poems appear in the Wayne

Literary Review, Poetry in Performance and Poetry Tribe Anthology. In 2002 he

attended the Heartlande Playwright Retreat; in 2004 had a play performed at

Oakland University and a staged reading at “Village Players Theater.” Don’s visual

art is in The MacGuffin, Bear River Writers Respond to War, and Writers Reading

at Sweetwaters, and on the cover of this issue. He has attended and enjoyed six

Bear River conferences.

_____________________________________________________________________

North of Dublin, Michigan, 2001

With Christine, Returning from Bear River

Except for us

with fingers entwining

on the beach, then at the table,

Sand Lake is alone.

Only for that single crow,

on the far side,

birds and fish are silent.

You say you could write

all day in this place.

And my mobile home still stands,

anchored to the cement pad

surviving heavy winter snows.

Even the mice haven’t entered.

Though new chains are needed

to fix my name sign downed in front.

Then smells of ozone from the dam’s

humming electric transformers and

musty loam from the damp woods

One hundred seventy-seven steps down

to Tippy Dam’s roaring white water

cascading over the rock weir

where anchored fisherman cast.

But you, Christine, are absorbed

in the trickle of water gently

oozing out of the rock strata.

Sliding down to the river

on stone it has worn smooth.

We take pictures.

Back seventy-seven steps up

an almost newborn opossum

no bigger than a hand,

tries to climb high stairs.

It stretches

we don’t interfere.

The old Oak Grove Tavern

has cold beer

and still on the ceiling is paper

money with dated names.

A tack piercing the president

weighted with a silver dollar,

is thrown at the ceiling.

Only the silver returns.

And we take a chance

on the Flea Roast Ox Market raffle.

Esther L. Hurwitz

Esther L. Hurwitz has appeared on public radio, and she was once voted “Ms.

Under Appreciated” at a regional poetry slam. Her poems have appeared in

Exquisite Corpse, The Huron River Review, Ann Arbor (W)rites, Poetry in

Performance, and The Recession Nation Project. Soft as a Beagle's Ears is her

first collection of poems. Esther co-hosts the popular downtown Ann Arbor

“Writers Reading at Sweetwaters” poetry series. Esther has attended two Bear

River conferences. “Olive Branch Gold" and "Donna Rocks (for Donna White)" were

inspired by workshop leader Jim Daniels’ prompts in 2008.

_____________________________________________________________________

Olive Branch Gold

Most of us aren’t on the short list

for the Nobel Peace Prize.

But we who harvest

the fruits of our labor

with our own hands

must cure the olives

and ferment the grapes

before the end of the day.

Only then do we

put up our feet

and look each other in the eye.

Donna Rocks (for Donna White)

It’s easy to build a dream

on a steady foundation of bedrock,

but to raise a community from

the shifting stones of a gravel pit

is another matter.

A balancing act of prudence and nerve.

So many questions:

How high can you climb without

awakening an avalanche?

How do you soothe the sand

so it accepts topsoil?

Sometimes you don’t wait for answers,

just start moving

things around, rolling boulders

aside, staking plots, sowing seeds,

building trellises in anticipation

of vines.

Eventually, things take on

their own lives with a flourish.

And at the end of the day

you harvest the fruits of labor

with your own hands,

then sit down with your loved ones,

looking deep into each other’s eyes

over glasses of champagne,

golden bubbles rising

toward the evening light.

Jeff Kass

Jeff Kass teaches creative writing at Pioneer High School, Ann Arbor, and at

Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, Michigan, and directs the Literary Arts

Programs at the Neutral Zone. He is widely published, and his new chapbook of

poems, Invisible Staircase, was released by Winged City Press in January, 2010.

Jeff has attended the Bear River Writers' Conference for several years. In 2008,

he workshopped with Jerry Dennis and began "I Don't Know Much About You,"

which became part of his one-man show, Wrestle the Great Fear. In 2009, Jeff

workshopped with Laura Kasischke and learned a new approach toward both how

to teach writing workshops and his own writing, which generated the story "The

Long-jumper."

_____________________________________________________________________

I Don’t Know Much About You

but I know this—before

the bell sounded its anxious

cackle—you just trudged

through a muck no human

being should ever be

forced to experience

seven times a day

to slog through Pioneer High’s

swollen hallways is to navigate

kids who attempt to send a text

while simultaneously munching french

fries, flipping off a former Facebook friend,

grooving to an iPod bootleg and holding

a conversation with three other people

a face-length away—none of whom

they really like

is to slither past hundreds who huddle

and clog the corridors, blocking clusters

of surgers, heads bent and determined,

spines and necks burdened by backpacks

bigger than my bedroom

there are shouts too of fuck you, ho

and no way, bro; and the bruising

shoulder-bump of low-throated man-hugs

and boys who stand arms crossed, chests pumped

and teachers pulling rolling suitcases stuffed

with vocab quizzes; and kids like gangsters toting

violins; and the constant commentary of toilets flushing

and hand-dryers shwooshing; and the murmur and slap

and skitter of sneakers and sandals and high heels and bodies

and bodies and bodies at rest and bodies in motion and bodies

as art and bodies as function—bodies, bodies, bodies; freshmen

with acne; sophomores hiding bulges (or not) behind notebooks;

girls tugging at hems and straps of skirts and shirts; boys wishing

they could; juniors quick-copying homework; seniors plotting

the next caper and hall monitors—those beleaguered souls we call

community assistants—assisting the community the only way

they know how, pushing, prodding, urging along

the churning horde until—

here you are

bag on the floor

beside you

bells quiet

you peer at me, or with the seething tense

of a cornered leopard, do not peer at me

you might be pregnant, or maybe you

just discovered your dad’s new wife is

or maybe there’s a burn on your neck

where your mother lashed you

with a cigarette or maybe last night

you didn’t eat or get heat or you worked

’til 3 delivering take-out, or maybe you

just failed a math test or an HIV one or saw

your boyfriend’s tongue exploring the gully

of another lover, or maybe you just

got propositioned for homecoming by

that huh-huh-huh, ho-oh my, hockey hottie,

and maybe the chaos in the hallway is nothing

compared to the tempest roiling inside your torso

and maybe I stayed up till dawn arguing with Karen

or soothing the terrors of my children, and maybe I

think I’m a failure—why isn’t my novel already

a bestseller—and our basement’s a quagmire

and it’s about time for the calamity

when the pipes back up and that’ll be

another four hundred bucks and I got

two hundred essays to mark and a

principal hassling about paperwork

and a parent cursing in a text message,

and maybe I worry I can’t do this

but here we are

whether you’re looking at me or not

we are a collision, and we can retreat

to our corners of cowardice and comfort

or we can investigate the crash

The Long-jumper

pparently, she hit her head on the sand, got brain-dead and

married a bozo. Now she refuses to change the light bulb in

the hallway adjacent to our bedroom, which makes sense, actually,

because it’s a bitch-and-a-half to fix. It would be easier for me to

handle the task if I were not the bozo she married, or at least if I

were tall and had the long-jumper’s muscular legs, like twin

pillars with pistons. But I’m shorter than she is and don’t have

those legs so when I stand on the chair I dragged upstairs from the

dining room, I need to balance on my wobbly tip-toes and stretch

one arm upward like I’m dunking a basketball—which, as I’ve

already mentioned, I’m short so I don’t have any experience

doing.

It’s not actually the light bulb that’s the bitch, but the glass

globe around it. The globe is attached to the fixture through an

incomprehensible, perhaps-utilizing-fairy-magic system. Your

outstretched fingers have to rotate rusted hand screws that don’t

have any desire to move and also don’t have any grooves notched

into their heads, and you have to twist and tug and somehow

simultaneously exert enough pressure against the rim of the

globe’s mouth to keep it from falling and shattering on your head.

Or my head, actually, because I’m the moron messing with it,

which I’m only doing because the long-jumper and I both know it

serves as penance.

I should not have slept with the shot-putter. I understand this.

But the shot-putter has thicker, meatier thighs than the long-

jumper and hips that feel more solid, more grounded. She grunts

when she spins and lets that weighty ball soar and, listen, it’s

pretty cool what the long-jumper does—I’m not questioning that,

her springy flight—but there’s no release, no letting go of

something, no grunts, just this enormous violent feet-first thrust,

and there was a lot of tension at the Trials—who was going to

make the Olympic team and who was going to hang-dog it back to

Sacramento and work at the home improvement franchise—so,

yeah, that’s a really bad time to cheat on your wife when she’s

trying to jump far enough to merit government-sponsored health

insurance, but that was stressful for me too because face it, she’s

mega-vitamin healthy and I’m the one with the adult-onset

diabetes, and so that release, that shot-putter’s earthy grunt and

the pushing up from those campground hips as she lets the

cannonball fly, I’m sorry, that was extremely difficult to resist and,

okay, I can change light bulbs with some measure of competence,

but difficult resistance, no, not my strength.

So I must pay for my sins.

There’s some argument there too because I slept with the shot-

putter more than once, eleven times actually over a three-day

span, but it was still the same person, so I maintain it’s just a

single sin, a single affair, but the long-jumper, who calibrates

every step so she can time her leap to commence only centimeters

before the great white line that says foul or no foul, insists each

instance of intercourse is its own separate sin, so I expect—if I’m

lucky enough to have each light bulb count as canceling out one

sin—that I can look forward to ten more light bulbs.

If there could be a public accounting, a closed-door meeting

where the shot-putter and I apologize to the whole team, maybe

there’d be a release, some clemency, but the long-jumper prefers

to keep secrets. It’s for my sake, she says. She doesn’t even care so

much that I cheated. She expects idiot men like me with no jobs to

be rotten. But with the shot-putter, really? That troll? she says. That’s

embarrassing.

She thinks if other people knew about the affair, all eleven of

my sins would shroud me forever, stain me with the kind of

spatter that explodes from the pit when she lands after her springy

flights. The shot-putter? That’s humiliating for you.

Humiliating for her, too, I suspect. Maybe that’s the bigger

secret. That she’d be embarrassed to be married to an unemployed

fool who risks the best thing about his life, his relationship with a

potential—let’s say, silver—medalist in order to sleep with a

shorter, squatter, pug-faced woman who’s actually not even—

unless she throws the miracle shot of her life—anywhere near

medal contention. So I’m stuck trailing the long-jumper from

practice to practice and video-taping her flights from multiple

angles so she can analyze them later, and unscrewing unscrewable

screws with my outstretched fingers, balancing the awkward glass

globe as dead moths and dead, crispy larvae bequeathed by dead

moths fall from inside the globe into my prematurely white hair

and remnants of the wings of dead moths and shards of skins of

dead larvae flicker into the nostrils of my too big and sharp-

angled nose and at this point it might be appropriate to ask—aside

from his obvious light-bulb-changing skills—why would not one,

but two Olympic-caliber athletes be willing to accommodate the

desires of a short dude with a big nose, prematurely white hair, no

job, adult-onset diabetes and bad judgment?

A cogent question.

Fuck me if I can figure it out.

Other than to say these athletes are busy and don’t have time

to explore the marketplace. Which on some level, I think, should

absolve me of blame for my infidelity. A guy who generally can’t

expect to have a lot of success with women should be permitted to

follow through whenever he can sniff some. The long-jumper,

oddly enough, doesn’t buy this logic, so she stands there

critiquing as dead bug-parts fall into my hair and nostrils. Use

your other hand to hold the globe, she says, as if that’s an option that

never occurred to me. Unscrew it in the other direction, she suggests,

even though both of us know there’s only way to screw, one way

to unscrew. Why are you wearing those ridiculous shorts? she says,

even though she doesn’t know, I think, that the shorts are the shot-

putter’s shorts because our hips and thighs are roughly the same

size and I like her smell on me.

Listen, I tell the long-jumper, I’m sorry I messed up our lives, but

you need to let me fix this light-bulb without being the peanut gallery

over there. You need to let me screw and unscrew all by myself.

No, you listen, she says, and her voice is a high squeak. You

don’t even know how to screw. I bet the shot-putter hated it. I bet all

eleven times she was wishing she were somewhere else. I bet she was

wishing she could use those troll hips and those troll shoulders and shove

you off her.

That’s not how I remember it, I want to say. But I don’t say that. I

just keep unscrewing and stretching and teetering and swatting at

wafers of bug-parts floating toward my nostrils and when the

globe slips and falls and I duck, it splits against the chair-back into

two perfect halves, like somebody cleaved Humpty-Dumpty with

a laser. I stare at the broken globe for a moment and the long-

jumper does too. We’re quiet. Then I turn and snap at her, Is that

what you want to happen to us? Because that’s where we’re headed.

Don’t you dare, she says, don’t you even dare.

But I do dare, because daring, at least, is something I’m good

at.

It wasn’t just the shot-putter, I say, climbing down from the chair

and facing her, trying to establish my crime as huge, as monstrous

and abysmal, like the yawning pits she’s obsessed with plunging

into. It was the javelin-thrower, too.

This, we both know, is a lie. The javelin-thrower will barely

look at me. Same with the 5000-meter runner. She, with the long

loping strides, has the best chance for gold and, I’m betting, the

most stamina on the futon, so I’ve attempted to hit on her many

times. Nice laps, I’ll say, divine laps, as she circles the track while

I’m filming. She never acknowledges my praise, keeps on running,

chasing her medal.

You’re pathetic, the long-jumper says. The look on her face is the

same look she gets when she readies to spring, when she juts out

her lower jaw, and flexes her calf muscles, then counts silently to

herself 1-2...and then she’s off, headed for the launch, for the great

white line, the journey through the air, the explosion of dirt in the

pit. She’s astoundingly beautiful when she readies herself to

spring, and I’m immediately sorry I cast aspersions upon the

javelin-thrower, that I slept with the shot-putter, that I have no

job, that the glass globe split.

It was just the shot-putter, I say. Only the eleven times. It won’t

happen again. I don’t say, you’re right, the shot-putter hated it,

because that’s not how it was.

Just fix the light, she says. Just fix the goddamn light.

The question is how egregious is my foul.

Am I worthy of disqualification?

The answer is, I will be forgiven.

Because I am always forgiven.

Because my hair is prematurely white.

Because I am short.

Because I have flakes of dead larvae in my nose.

Because I know how to use the zoom feature on the video-

camera to great effect. Because it’s too much of a time commitment

for the long-jumper to find someone else.

Just fix the damn light, she says again. Just get back up there and fix

the goddamn light.

Dorianne Laux

Dorianne Laux’s fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon (W.W. Norton), is

the recipient of the Oregon Book Award. Laux is also author of Awake, What We

Carry, and Smoke from BOA Editions, as well as Superman: The Chapbook and

Dark Charms, both from Red Dragonfly Press. Recent poems appear in Cimarron

Review, Cerise Press, Margie, The Seattle Review, Tin House and The Valparaiso

Review. Her fifth collection of poetry, The Book of Men, will be published by W.W.

Norton in 2011. Laux teaches poetry in the MFA Program at North Carolina State

University.

_____________________________________________________________________

Elegy

We were children nobody knew

or wanted to know,

our hands and faces

pressed to the glass octagons

of the greenhouse

where rare columbines

were being invaded

by the heavy bodies of bees.

This is for the weeds

we ripped from the beds

bordering the park, throwing

their bruise-colored petals

as we roamed among the ancient

picnic tables, the names

of lovers carved

into the bleached wood.

This is for the way

we exhausted our bodies

with laughter then fell asleep

in the crotch of a tree,

for the leaves

we hid behind, the birds

we displaced, the few hours

we left our mother

in the car, her head pressed

against the steering wheel,

the raised letters

of his Studebaker imprinted

in the delicate flesh of her brow,

a strange Braille

we touched with our fingertips

the day we returned from the chilled dusk

without being called.

Mardi Link

Mardi Link attended Bear River from 2005-2009 and is the author of two non-

fiction books, When Evil Came to Good Hart and Isadore's Secret, both published

by The University of Michigan Press. Isadore's Secret is a "Michigan Notable Book"

for 2010 and a GLIBA "Great Lakes, Great Read." A former crime reporter and

former editor of ForeWord Magazine, Mardi is at work on a third true-crime book.

“Chicken Trilogy” is from the essay she read at the 2009 conference and was

published in the Spring 2009 Bellingham Review as a finalist for the Annie Dillard

Creative Nonfiction Award.

_____________________________________________________________________

Chicken Trilogy

ractor Supply, the farm store south of town, is an unexpected

place to experience a revelation, but I have been looking so

hard for spiritual moments in my everyday life that I go with it.

It is early spring and I am here to order chickens. I walk past

the pallets stacked with 50lb bags of goat chow and the rows of

John Deere lawnmowers. I glance at the bargain bin of tools and

then move quickly past the rack of vegetable seeds. The Holy

Grail I’m seeking is the Help Desk in the back of the store where

Larry presides like the Pope. The Pope of Farming.

I don’t know Larry’s last name and he doesn’t know mine, but

from him I have learned any number of useful skills: how to

estimate the amount of electric fence needed for a two-acre

pasture, what the secret is to growing mammoth pumpkins, a

sure-fire repellant for Japanese beetles. I follow each of these

suggestions like the good little agricultural acolyte that I am. They

all work. Larry is a real farmer, not a suburban wannabe like me.

He is the son of a farmer, the grandson of a farmer, and the great-

grandson of a farmer. I am the daughter of schoolteachers. He has

hundreds of acres and hundreds of head of cattle to match. He

butchers his own pigs. He is a judge for the 4H. I have a

farmhouse that is a century older than all the houses around it,

and I’m hanging on to its last six acres by my dirty fingernails.

With warmer weather coming, I need a project. I am ready to

try something small. Something practical. Something weak and

docile and inexpensive. Like chickens. My kids like the idea, too. It

will be something to tell their friends. “Rule over all the livestock

on the earth,” God said to man in the first chapter of Genesis. I am

so new to thinking about God that Genesis feels like a good place

to start.

I don’t know about ruling over all livestock, but I think I can

handle chickens. Of course, I don’t tell any of this to Larry. What I

do say is, “I want to buy some chickens. How do I do it?”

He reaches under the counter, pulls out a thick four-color

catalog, opens it up in front of me and right then it feels like the

whole earth just downshifted. The chicken-and-egg question

becomes immaterial: chickens and, if you want them, fertilized

eggs, too, come from the post office. The way to buy chickens is

through mail order.

“Good thing you came in today. It’s the last week for orders

and the hatchery is closed tomorrow, but I called and they’re open

Saturdays.”

I look up at him, his scratched eyeglasses, his pocked and

bluish nose, and at that moment I think to myself that he must be

the most enlightened being on earth. Chickens from a catalog. On

a Saturday. You can order them up on the sixth day of the week,

just like God ordered up all the animals on the sixth day. The

closer I get to a real farm, the closer I feel to my purpose, my

reason for being here. I would not have expected the way to my

purpose to wind through Tractor Supply, but I am trying to let go

of expectations. I am getting back to basics—what could be more

basic than an egg?

I look back at the catalog. There are light-brown chickens and

black-and-white-striped chickens. There are chickens with fancy

feathers cresting the tops of their heads and chickens so small they

look like quail. There are celebrity chickens, too. Foghorn

Leghorn, the Kellogg’s Corn Flake rooster, and Nathaniel

Hawthorne’s Chanticleer. In each vivid rendering, a rooster and

hen is shown, the rooster erect and proud, throwing out his chest,

the hen calm and plain and friendly looking.

“Meat or egg?” Larry asks.

“What?”

“What d’you want, meat chickens or egg chickens?” He says

this quietly, and with the patience of a kindergarten teacher.

Which came first, chicken stir-fry or egg foo young? Barbequed

chicken or deviled eggs? I don’t even have the birds yet and I

already feel inadequate. I had no idea meat chickens and egg

chickens were two different birds. How could I not know whether

I was going to raise chickens for their meat or for their eggs?

Everything, I learn later, depended on that decision. What kind of

feed you bought, what kind of coop you built, how long you

planned on keeping them, and how they would get from coop to

stove. Under the watchful eyes of Larry, I decide not to decide and

tell him I want both. He nods. This is called a “mixed run.” A

straight run is all hens, also called pullets. The hens, the girls, are

more expensive. I’m not sure why that is, but I like it.

“Ok, now you gotta pick your breed.”

“Hmmm,” is all I can muster.

Larry suggests Leghorns for my meat chickens and Ida Browns

and Araucanas for my egg chickens. All three breeds can tolerate

the cold northern Michigan winters. Before he closes the catalog

and puts it back under the counter, he tells me there’s something

else.

“Them Araucanas are called the Easter Egg chicken, because

their eggs are light blue and light green. Isn’t that something?”

Can it get any more spiritual, I wonder, here amongst the

galvanized toolboxes and salt blocks and rolls of chicken wire? I

place a minimum order – ten egg and fifteen meat. They are $2

each for the mixed run, $2.75 each for the straight run of hens. I

write a check for $57.50 plus tax and shipping. Not a bad deal for a

Saturday-morning revelation.

Six weeks later, I get a call on my cell phone from a clerk at the

post office. “Your chickens are here!” she shrieks. “I’ve got them

on my counter and they’re peeping like crazy!” I picture the

chickens from the catalog hopping and clucking around the post

office. In this imaginary scene I have just conjured, they are

pecking the stamp machine and the packages. They are scratching

at the linoleum floor, looking for food. I’ve got to get over there.

I call Cherry Knoll Elementary School, where my youngest son

is in the third grade. I tell the school secretary that I will be

coming to pick him up and will be taking him out of school for a

couple hours.

“Everything’s ok, I hope?” she asks, probing. She is like a cross

between Inspector Gadget and White Fang— goofy and smart,

with a nasty bite.

“Everything’s fine,” I tell her, and leave it at that. I don’t want

her to know that I think he will learn more with me in the next

two hours than he will in school, memorizing times tables.

When I get there, Will is sitting on a chair in the office, his face

a chubby question mark. I smile but say nothing, sign him out,

and we walk silently out to the van. Once inside, the doors safely

closed, and all authority figures out of earshot, he asks me what

I’m doing at his school in the middle of the day.

Right now, I am not an authority figure. I am an accomplice. I

turn around and look at his small frame dwarfed by the big back

seat. He is expectant. Innocent still, thank God. Surprises for him

are always good ones. So much of childhood fades; I want this to

be a day he’ll remember as an adult. I want this moment to be the

way he remembers the whole of his growing up with me —

unconventional, earthy, fun.

“The chickens are here,” I whisper, as if we could still be

overheard. “Cool,” he whispers back.

The post office looks normal enough. A line of people waiting

to mail a package or a letter. Three clerks at their windows helping

customers. There is no evidence of a chicken infestation. Every-

thing smells clean. Industrial. We get in line and soon are up at the

counter.

“We’re here to pick up our chickens,” I say, as if this were the

most common thing in the world. “Right,” the clerk says, and

heads to the back room. A minute later she returns with a box that

is making tiny cheep, cheep, cheeping sounds. The box is small,

because they are baby chicks, not full-grown chickens. “Be careful

when you open the box, it says the directions are under the

shipping label.”

Directions? She pushes the box toward me, our business

concluded. I take it and we walk out the door and get into the van.

I can’t believe that they just let me leave. I’m being trusted with

twenty-five innocent lives. I felt the same way when I left the

hospital after my first son was born. Are they really going to let

me just take a newborn baby? What are they thinking? Don’t they

know I have no idea what I’m doing? Will holds the box on his lap

and gently pushes his pinky through one of the air holes. He

giggles. “They’re pecking me, Mom! They think my finger is a

worm.”

Once home, we take the box into the kitchen and open it up.

Inside is a pile of yellow cotton balls with eyes. They look up at us

in unison, then scatter into a corner. They’re terrified. “Eww!” Will

says. They stink. This doesn’t deter him from petting their fluff.

The directions are titled, “Basic and Emergency Care for Baby

Chicks.” I do not want to consider any emergencies. The basics are

this: keep the temperature between 90 and 95 degrees for the first

week, five degrees less per week down to 70 degrees; keep chick

starter—special food—available at all times; provide water with

three tablespoons of sugar per gallon mixed in for the first three

days, dip the chick’s beak in the water because they may not know

how to drink yet; pray. This last bit of advice does not appear in

the written directions, but I think it should. They are so fragile,

and my barn is so drafty and big.

We put the lid back on the box, leave them on the kitchen

counter and drive back to the source, Tractor Supply. Larry is

nowhere in sight. We buy a bag of chick starter, a heat lamp, a

clip-on thermometer, a chick watering pan, and a chick feed

trough. Grand total, $46. Are chicken accessories tax-deductible? I

make a mental note to check with my accountant. Behind the store

by the dumpster, I find an empty cardboard box with the words

“Farm Play Set” printed on the side. Perfect. I rip the top flaps off

as cleanly as I can and shove it into the back of the van.

Back home, we assemble a chicken condo that would make

even Chicken Little feel secure. Our work finally done, we kneel

down in silence, place our hands in our laps and watch as the

chicks get their bearings. They hop around, peck at their food,

peck at the newspaper, peck each other, and peck the cardboard.

Their seed-sized hearts are beating fast and the only sound is their

cheeping. The barn is dimly lit, and I can feel the cold sneaking up

under the back of my sweater. Warmth and light radiate from the

heat lamp. The light reflects on Will’s face, and with his freckles,

his blond hair, his oversize hooded sweatshirt, he looks like a

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modern-day cherub. For a moment, in the filtered light, with the

hay dust glistening, he has grown wings.

He looks up at me and his iridescent eyes smile. “Safe and

sound,” he says.

III

It is September now, and after a summer of doing nothing but

eating and scratching and clucking and fertilizing, the hens are

finally laying eggs. Larry was right—their eggshells are blue and

green. The yolks, though, are bright orange, and I am feeding the

kids scrambled eggs every morning. They taste the way fresh

grass smells and are better than any supermarket egg ever. And

the hens seem content. They cluck softly during the day and sleep

in the coop at night. They stick together, and the same one is

always sitting on top of the water trough. The alpha hen, I

suppose. Together, they are sisters, and with the kids back in

school, I spend a lot of time just watching them. It’s nice to have

some girls on the place.

The meat chickens are another species. An unsuspecting visitor

might think they dropped into the set of a horror film starring a

cast of zombified birds. The meat chickens will not be contained

by the coop and have taken over the yard. Their bodies are the

size of steamer trunks and bulge as if unmentionables were

hidden inside. They weigh as much as bowling balls and their

skinny legs wobble under the strain. There are piles of chicken

crap everywhere you step, and if you bend over to wipe off your

shoe, expect an attack from the rear. They are evil cartoon

chickens brought to life. These, I am convinced, are the fowl

descendents of the rooster whose crowing in triplicate signaled

Jesus’ impending betrayal. They have to die.

I begin making arrangements. I cut recipes for chicken pot-pie

out of the newspaper and plan on a stuffed chicken instead of a

turkey for Thanksgiving. I know exactly which chicken I want to

invite for the holiday. I sit down with the Yellow Pages and look

up “butchers.”

There are none listed. The accepted listing is, “Meat-retail.”

There are fourteen listings here, and I start by calling Anderson’s

Market in Glen Arbor and work my way through every last one

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until I get Sonny of Sonny’s Torch Lake Market on the line. He

takes the time to explain to me why no one will butcher my

chickens. In the past year my state outlawed farm calls. Now, you

either have to kill your livestock yourself, or take it to a U.S.D.A.-

inspected meat processing plant. The closest one to me is in Grand

Rapids, 150 miles south.

I’ve got to talk to Larry. That night I pay another visit to

Tractor Supply. The Help Desk is open for business. “Land sakes,

girl! You can kill a chicken! Get a funnel, stick the heads in, chop

‘em off, let ‘em drain, par boil the feathers off, gut ‘em, bag ‘em,

and toss ‘em in the freezer for the winter!” Now, I might be able to

kill a chicken if it had on a black balaclava and was coming at me

in my bedroom in the dark with a knife, but I know myself, and I

know I cannot kill twenty-five chickens. Not without years of

therapy, anyway, and I don’t have that kind of time. Instead, I buy

another 40lb bag of chicken feed.

The next day, I try the Cooperative Extension. I get a woman

named Carol on the phone and she says she knows exactly what I

need and that she’ll send me some information to look over. A

week later a large envelope arrives in the mail. It contains a flyer

with safety tips for Thanksgiving Day food preparation, a caution

notice about the Ash Borer infestation, and an invitation to a

diabetes support group meeting in my area. Now I’m frustrated.

My children are being attacked in their own yard, our entire

wardrobe of footwear is ruined, and, at $11 a bag for feed, the

costs are mounting.

I call the 4H, the local food co-op, an organic rabbit farm, and

the commune in the next county. Will anyone butcher my

chickens? “Too late,” “Don’t do it,” “Too messy,” and, “Dude,

we’re vegans,” are my answers. I’m getting desperate. The Meats,

as I have come to call them, stray to the neighbor’s yard and

scratch up her brand-new mulch. She no longer waves when she

sees me at my mailbox. Their drumsticks, I am convinced, are

getting tougher by the day, and they have pecked all the grapes

off my grapevine. They drink the water out of my landscape pond

and terrify the goldfish. Even the cats fear them. Then, on the day

I shoo the Meats out of the road where they have stopped traffic,

my brother arrives for an impromptu visit.

“Those are pit bull chickens!” he says when he walks in.

I hug him. “Please kill them,” I say.

102

Finally, a solution. Why didn’t I think of it earlier? My brother

is the consummate hunter. If you go to his house for dinner, you

will be served wild game. Might be squirrel, might be lake trout,

might be venison, but it will be something he shot or hooked or

trapped or snared. He is not a working man whose hobby is

hunting, he is a hunting man whose hobby is working. Butchering

chickens should be like swatting mosquitoes for him. “No

problem,” he says.

Three days later, the Meats are still roaming the countryside

like a gang of Nazi youth. While I’m running errands, my brother

packs up and leaves for bigger game. All the beer in my

refrigerator is gone. That is the way of the hunter.

I have now been betrayed by my government, local merchants,

the 4H, the hippies, Larry, and even by my own family. “God,” I

pray before I go to sleep that night, “please smite the Meats. Smite

them hard and smite them now.”

The next morning when I open the front door, they are on the

threshold. I call the newspaper and pay for a one-day ad to run on

Saturday in the classifieds. It reads:

Free.

Live Meat Chickens.

You Pick Up.

On Saturday morning at 6:30 the phone rings.

“You still have chickens?” a man asks me.

“Yes, I still have chickens. Please, in the name of all that is holy,

come and get them.”

“I will,” he replies.

After dark, just as I have given up hope, a small pick-up truck

pulls into the driveway. My dogs bark as if signaling the apoca-

lypse, and there is a knock on the door. I open it and see a

muscular and handsome middle-aged man in jeans and a trucker

hat. He has black hair and black eyes. He is my savior.

“I am here,” he says.

I grab a flashlight. The door to the pick-up truck opens and

two young men, an old woman, and a little girl get out. The

apostles, I think. We walk to the coop where the Meats are

sleeping. They have taken over the nesting boxes and the floor.

My poor hens are huddling together just outside. The two

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younger men look like they are in their twenties and are dressed

as if they are about to appear in a hip-hop music video. Oversized

leather jackets and baggy jeans, chain wallets, baseball caps turned

to the side. They cross their arms over their chests. They so do not

want to be here, boxing up free chickens. One look from the

savior, though, and that is what they do.

The old woman is expressionless, but she nods to me and I nod

back. I smile at the little girl and she turns her face into the fuzzy

hood of her jacket. They speak to each other in Spanish. The man,

my savior, is the only one who speaks to me. “My family eats well

tomorrow,” he says, and shakes my hand.

All spring, all summer, all fall, I was raising meat for them and

I didn’t even know it. I thought I was doing something for myself

and for my family. I wasn’t. I was doing it for him and for his

family. My savior, the apostles, and the Meats all get back in the

pick-up and drive away. I watch until their taillights disappear at

the end of my driveway. I shine the flashlight into the coop. The

hens have moved back in and snuggle together in the nesting

boxes. I think back to when they were baby chicks, those yellow

cotton balls with eyes. I wonder if God thinks of me and my sons

this way.

“Safe and sound,” I say to myself. “We are all safe and sound.”

104

Chris Lord

Chris Lord’s poetry has appeared in numerous publications and won places in

several competitions. She founded Word’n Woman Press in March of 2007 and

edited and published the Bear River Writers Respond to War print edition, and the

Writers Reading at Sweetwaters anthology. Chris was also editor of the four online

issues of Bear River Review and is honored to be editor and publisher of this Bear

River Review. Chris’s chapbook Field Guide to Luck was published by Pudding

House Publications (2007). Chris is co-host of the monthly series, “Writers

Reading at Sweetwaters,” and has recorded poetry readings for internet radio.

_____________________________________________________________________

The River Is Yours

She, dark deceptive woman, is yours—

and you, black-crowned night-heron,

forage her old world moon snails

as dusk preens her bruised purple plumes.

She, backwoods bay woman, is yours—

and you, red-shouldered hawk, wheel

over her undulating treasures, pierce

ballooning bullfrogs with shrill screams.

You want to go with her where salmon spawn,

follow her upstream into the nest of night—

you want to lie in her riverbed of rain,

enter her feathered first light.

She, fluid flower-child woman, is yours—

and you, sandhill crane, leap in the air,

bow and call, admire her tie-dyed ribbon

of hair, sing to her of fate and free love.

She, royal refined woman, is yours—

and you, gyrfalcon, pursue as one used to war,

fly the long distance of her noble body,

chain yourself to her arm as sun drops its spear.

105

You want to bend her echoing sound waves,

follow her upstream into the nest of night—

you want to lie in her riverbed of rain,

enter her feathered first light.

She, elusive elegant woman, is yours—

and you, earless great gray owl, turn her

head toward day’s dignified voice,

woo her from a low perch in a wintered tree.

She, rapid running woman, is yours—

and you, rough-legged hawk, chase her

downhill, tear apart her surging fears

with your hooked bill and dissecting claws.

You want to drum her bony fish rhythms,

follow her upstream into the nest of night—

you want to lie in her riverbed of rain,

enter her feathered first light.

She, narrow-necked woman, is yours—

and you, mute swan, entice her wanderlust

with your s-curve into a swirling basin,

cull serpents from her snaking tributaries.

She, distressed disappearing woman, is yours—

and you, bald eagle, skim her surface,

snatch your prey from her choking mouth,

lift what is left of time with your talons.

You want to embrace her time-like direction,

follow her upstream into the nest of night—

you want to lie in her riverbed of rain,

enter her feathered first light.

106

Diane Marty

Diane Marty is a retired English teacher whose career included teaching in New

Hampshire, California, Wyoming, and Michigan. Diane has attended several

writing conferences in her pursuit of a new career as a writer. At the Bear River

Writers’ Conference in 2008 and 2009, she attended Laura Kasischke's Poetry

and Fiction workshop and received inspiration and unconditional support for her

writing. Diane is attending the Conference and Laura’s workshop again in 2010.

Her piece "Doomsday" was written after she returned home in 2008.

_____________________________________________________________________

Doomsday

bolt upright from a sound sleep in our king-sized bed. What

has awakened me? My sleepy brain notes the digital clock on

the nightstand says that it’s 5 o’clock in the morning. Immediately,

all my senses go on high alert. It’s not my natural pattern to

awaken spontaneously at five o’clock in the morning.

The dark room is deadly silent, so silent I can almost smell the

stillness. Too quiet, too quiet, my brain says. What night sounds

am I wanting to hear? The shudder of the water pipes? The purr of

the humidifier fan? The night wind of April in the trees outside

our bedroom? Seconds tick by as I sit there in the silence, expect-

ing some sound to cut through the black curtain of night, assuring

me I can lie down again and go back to sleep. But then my brain

commands me to act, to find the missing sound I am waiting to

hear. Almost reflexively, my right arm and right hand shoot out to

reach and touch my husband who is lying, still as a statue, on his

right side, his back to me. I touch his motionless, warm back with

my open palm, letting it rest there a few seconds, anxious to feel

my hand rise and fall, but there is no movement. I hear nothing

but my own accelerated breath. Fear lodges in my dry throat, and

I swallow repeatedly as I realize the missing sound is that familiar

noise and movement of my husband’s customary, irregular

breathing. It’s then, too, that my brain registers another

component to the deadly silence in the room. I can’t feel the

rhythm of his breathing on the mattress. The sudden lack of that

small vibration catapults me out of bed. I race around the end of

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the bed, flipping on the wall switch for the ceiling light on my way

to his side.

In the now-lighted room, I see that my husband looks very

much as if he were asleep with his mouth slightly opened, his eyes

closed, his skin smooth and warm to my touch. I kneel beside the

bed, clasp his slack but still-warm hands, saying, “Harold,

Harold,” and there is no answer and he doesn’t stir on his own.

Panicked, I pass my forefinger under his nose and there is no air

coming from his nostrils. I then feel his right wrist for a pulse…I

feel nothing. I cradle his face in my hands, kiss his closed eyes, his

forehead, call his name, repeat, “No, no, not yet, you can’t leave

me yet,” and I cry as I bend over him at the edge of the bed,

knowing I need to call 911. I stand up, pace around the room in

my nightgown, talk to myself and cry: “Dear God, what will I do

without you?” Then in my head, I hear him: “Someday the day

will come when I will have to leave you, probably before you

want me to….I knew this the day we married with the ten-year

age difference and all….but you’re a strong woman….and that

strength that I have always loved will carry you on.” I force

myself to slow my breathing, swallow the fear that threatens to

stifle me, order my brain to take charge and let me think clearly. A

calming thought surfaces in my mind, followed immediately by a

compulsion to act. I think: as long as I have my memory, I can

summon him to me at any time. But right now, I have to call 911

and the kids.

I head for the wall phone in the kitchen, grab a Kleenex from

the kitchen counter, blow my nose, mentally order myself to stop

my crying; I need to be able to speak clearly. Brain in control now,

as I reach for the phone, I tell myself he is as near as my forty

years of memories and I know what he would say at this very

minute: he’d say, “Buck up, girl, you’ve got a job to do!”

108

John Mauk

John Mauk teaches Communications at Northwestern Michigan College. He

attended the Bear River conference in 2009 and worked with Laura Kasischke.

The experience prompted him to attend the 2009 Interlochen Writers’ Retreat and

the Ludington Writers Conference. In the fall, he made his first short story

submission. It was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s contest for new writers. Most

recently, he was named one of the winners in the Michigan Writers Cooperative

Press chapbook contest. His collection, The Rest of Us, will be published this

spring.

_____________________________________________________________________

No Offense (Chapter 31 from 2004)

’m trying to decide if I’ve ruined everything. Holly is freaked

out. If I’d thrown up or sneezed on the cheese ball, at least it

would have been involuntary. But you can’t say Gesundheit to a

political tantrum. Maybe tantrum is a strong word, but from their

perspective, probably not. And the thing is, Holly’s Uncle Walt

doesn’t seem like a bad guy—just one of those normal uneducated

plebes through the ages who buys the national narrative about the

Normans or the Indians or the Samaritans. For people like Walt,

this is victory week—the pictures of Saddam in court, stripped of

his army fatigues, ushered around in an overly nice Western-

looking suit. For Walts everywhere, it’s the culmination of logical

Neo-con policy. Their president has vindicated the country, taught

us liberals that Evil can be brought to justice. “They caught the

head tarisch, and put’m on trial.” That’s what he said before

shoving a plastic spoon of potato salad in the word hole. Aunt

Shirley said something about 9/11, and then Holly’s mom said,

“Thank God.” That’s when I popped. That’s when the good old

Bettendorf genetic reflex kicked in. “Yeah, except Saddam’s not a

terrorist and never has been.” That’s what I said. No one said

anything back, but Walt harrumphed into his chicken, which is

something I could never tolerate. It’s an old guy thing. If you think

someone’s full of shit, you don’t even look up or muster the

politeness to utter a real word, much less a whole sentence.

Instead, you just gas out some air and snap your neck a little. In

my family, coming from my dad or one of my uncles, that sound

109

means something like “I can’t believe we let you out of the house

without a helmet,” so I couldn’t help but respond. A crowd of

good little meta-Simons were running in slow motion for the brain

lever. Behind my eyeballs, I could see them making the last

desperate Bruce Willis lunge for the red emergency shutdown, but

I was too fast, or maybe all the pot I’ve smoked has made my

metas more reflective—and really, really slow. “But people

who’ve been brainwashed probably don’t realize it.” That was my

response to Walt’s noise. And now for the giant cymbal crash: “No

offense.” I actually said, “No offense.” You can’t beat that. It’s the

worst thing you can say in any situation. It indicts everything

you’ve said prior. It makes something perfectly innocent sound

creepy and it makes something stupid or mean sound stupider or

meaner. Man, I sure like those pants, no offense. I hate idiots, no offense.

After that, the barbecue went silent. Outside of chewing

sounds and calls for seconds, it was pretty mute. I sat there trying

to conjure up something nice to ask Uncle Walt or Holly’s mom,

but I imagined it was too late, that I’d made my first impression,

that anything more would be interpreted as a veiled attack. No

one’s going to play fetch with Spot if he just bit Dick.

For the rest of the time, and it was probably a full hour of

tension, they all kept dodging me. I’d look up over the rim of my

little plastic Dixie cup and catch a cheek turning away, part of one

eyeball headed in the other direction. I was Medusa. Evil liberal-

ism with snaky hair. I think the only other full-throated sentence I

offered was, “Wow, that’s good chicken.” So let’s review: Saddam’s

not a terrorist and never has been. But people who’ve been brainwashed

don’t realize it. No offense. Wow, that’s good chicken. That was my

debut for the Matthews family. Thank you, good night.

I don’t know if I’ve ever been the party pooper—the guy who

ruins everything. Sure, I’ve said some stupid shit in my life—

probably mountains more than I can admit to, and I’m willing to

admit plenty. But I don’t think I’ve ever dropped the big bomb.

There was that one time with Debbie’s mom when I said “Why I

oughtta” á la Jackie Gleason, like I was gearing up to sock Debbie

in the head. Her mom was clearly put off, and there was nothing I

could do to erase it. She didn’t know that it was a one-liner

between Debbie and me—that it was fun and games, that the last

thing in the world I’m capable of is voting Republican, and then

the last thing after that is punching a girl. If I’m honest, and this

110

seems pretty unmanly, I’ve never punched a guy either. Sure, I’ve

had my share of shoving matches, and in junior high, I had a few

hugging scuffles. And one time, I got Greg Hancock in a headlock

and then threw him on the ground. But I’ve never balled up my

fist and pounded someone in the cheek. My knuckles have never

busted flesh. I couldn’t really say all that to Debbie’s mom. It

would have been creepier yet—her daughter’s boyfriend giving a

resumé of bellicose behavior.

But this was way worse. I basically impugned Holly’s whole

family and their worldview. No offense. I knew she was leveled

by it. She got blotchy and ate fast. I thought she was going to

break her plastic fork trying to pull meat off the leg, and I was a

little freaked at how hard she stabbed the potato salad. I almost

said, “Easy, Ahab, it’s just a potato” or something like that, but I

guess I’d run out of gas. I just buttoned up, chewed my own

chicken, and watched the emotional effects of my dipshit explo-

sion. When I felt like we’d all endured enough of me, that it was

appropriate to remove my carcass from the premises, I got up. I

made one last attempt by offering to take Holly’s and then Aunt

Shirley’s plates, but Holly’s mom sat up straight and shooed my

hand away like a fly. At least I tried. I said something about

getting home—even though it made no sense because everyone

knew that I had nowhere to be, unless it was a Conservative

Haters Club meeting. But maybe they understood that I was

leaving with my tail between my legs—that I was a bad dog.

In the driveway, with the house between us and them, Holly

kept saying it was all right. But I could tell it wasn’t. She kept

clasping her hands and rubbing her thumbs, which I’d never seen

her do. And she stood about forty yards away from me. I

apologized a bunch, but what’s an apology going to do? How’s

that going to help her go back and deflect the family vitriol—the

disappointment that she’s running around with a liberal grill

cook, not a nice athletic patriot who wears button-down shirts

with white collars? I created a little political shit storm and then

drove off into the sunset.

I couldn’t really go home. I’d just sit there and stew. So I’m

here instead—at the ol’ drinkin’ hole. Lana says it’ll be fine.

“Holly’s her own woman.” “It’s not about her family.” “She

doesn’t care what her crazy Uncle Mort thinks.” She kept calling

him Mort, which kills me. Lana’s probably right in some ways, but

111

she wasn’t there. She didn’t see all the heads turning toward me—

even the little brothers who hear one-tenth of everything outside

the roar of hormones.

Now I’m into Guinness number three. I’ve got four open seats

on either side of me. CNN is on. The evening brunette is giving us

her best post-nasal vowels about Cassini finally making it to

Saturn. Seven years after blasting the hell out of here, it’s locked

into orbit and sending back images of the rings—those things that

have been drawn a million times on colored school paper. Now,

we’re seeing them for real. The glowing soft halo is a giant field of

ice, gas, and space rock—mountains somersaulting in a perpetual

circle. They just showed an interview with a NASA engineer who

sounded like she’d seen God. “I have no idea what it is!” she

said—talking about some formation in the rings, some gaseous

blob waving at us through all that emptiness. We’re probing

space. We’re shooting robots into the final frontier. Meanwhile,

interest rates are going back up and Saddam’s in a suit.

112

Kathleen V. McKevitt

Kathleen V. McKevitt was an editor and PR writer at Michigan State University for

25 years, finishing her career there as director of University Publications.

Afterwards, she launched IDIOM, a writing and publication service. Upon

retirement, she decided to try her hand at fiction. She attended Bear River for the

first time in 2008, where she studied with Elizabeth Kostova, began a work of

historical fiction, and now has four chapters more or less complete. At the 2009

conference, Kathleen worked with Eileen Pollack and applied the nuts and bolts

of writing Eileen taught to her short story "The Ice House."

_____________________________________________________________________

The Ice House

fter Father died, we could finally give the party we’d been

planning for years. We’ve given lots of parties—the 1920s

flapper ball, the 1930s hard times party, the 1950s New Orleans

barbecue, annual apple-pie Independence Day picnics, just to

name a few. We never got enough of hearing Father’s friends say,

“Why this is just like it used to be” when they entered the old-

fashioned worlds we created. For an afternoon or evening, we

could live there ourselves.

But the worlds were never big enough. We wanted to expand

them into our entire acre yard, but Father would hear none of it.

His bellowing still rings in my ears.

“I hafta get my own breakfast and go down to Clifford’s for a

beer and brat pretty near every night ‘cause you girls won’t fix me

a decent meal, while you sit with them old-fashioned magazines

nearly passin’out over frills and fixins from your gramma’s time.

Well, you ain’t diggin’ up the backyard while I’m still livin’ here

under my own roof. And them cats of yours ain’t never comin’

inside neither.”

In March, we found Father dead on the kitchen floor of a stroke

when we came home from work. He was 98. We decided right

then and there to retire, since we hated the department-store-

basement mailroom jobs we’d had since our twenties. Our parties

were our only way to escape that suffocation and Father’s day-in-

day-out complaining. We could be queens for a day, or at least a

few hours.

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It was right that Eithne and I got to keep the house after all

we’d done for Father since Mother died almost 20 years before.

But he surely did hate our cooking. Eithne and I don’t eat food

that comes from animals, and Father didn’t much like our canned-

pea-and-cottage-cheese breakfasts or late-night broccoli linguini

suppers.

Eithne’s my identical twin—identical in all but the way we

wear our long, gray, frizzed hair—but, let me tell you, we don’t

always do everything identical. Once, for instance, Eithne ate a

slice of smoked salmon that Ed brought over. Ed’s our neighbor as

we look out the west window. He and his wife Jezzann live in a

house the same age as ours, built over one hundred years ago in

1900, but brought up to date.

Before Father died, Ed often came over to borrow some

unusual tool from Father’s collection of antique equipment in the

loft above the garage. He’d wave at us as we worked in the garden

and shout, “Hey, girls.” For heavens sakes, we’re not girls, but Ed

always called us girls. I guess because he’d heard Father call us the

girls. “Hey girls, don’t work too hard. And don’t hide your light

under a bushel.” Then he’d make a funny laugh, almost a boyish

giggle, and suck in his breath.

Eithne and I had been belly dancers in our twenties, but now

we wear only loose farmer’s coveralls most of the time, no matter

if we are sweeping the driveway, watering Mother’s old perennial

garden next to the house, or going to church. I suppose that’s what

Ed meant about hiding our light under a bushel.

Ed’s the kinda man that fills all the space around him, bigger

than life, as Mother would say. But he’s not fat. Far from it. He’s

more than six feet—taller than Father. Maybe that’s why Father

didn’t take to him. He looks a little like Clark Gable without the

moustache. We don’t know his exact age, but his son’s in college,

so 55 might be a good guess.

As for Jezzann, she was never friendly. In the long daylight of

summer nights, we’d holler “hellos” towards the screen above her

open kitchen window as we went out to work in the garden, but

she would just scowl and continue doing the dishes. It seemed like

she clanked the silverware even louder afterwards.

We were shocked to find boxes of Fat Boy condoms in the back

of Father’s dresser drawer after he died. We recognized them

because of the bodice rippers we read aloud to each other before

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going to bed, but we couldn’t imagine what Father needed them

for, since he and Mother slept in separate bedrooms and never

even kissed. As we examined the foiled packages, giggling

uncontrollably, we finally decided they probably belonged not to

Father but to our long-dead alcoholic brother, who had never

married either, but who always seemed to have a woman on his

arm. Anyway, it’s a good thing we didn’t throw them out because

they came in handy later.

We’ve lived in this house since we were born more-or-less 62

years ago. Not a single thing here has changed in that time, except

the colors of the garden. We listened to Father’s rants as the city

limits spread to within a mile of our front door, finally

imprisoning us not two weeks after Mother’s passing. And, let me

tell you, when the school wanted two feet of our land for a new

building where you look out our south window, and the sub-

division developer wanted us to take a wrecker to the garage

Father built for his first automobile in 1920 and the roofless stone

ice house and sagging chicken coop next to it because they were

eyesores, Father used his favorite expression on them: “Go stick it

where the sun don’t shine.” He hated change, even if it meant

changing backwards.

The day after we buried Father in the churchyard where he

had been the sexton for fifty years, we called our contractor friend

Joe. Our Victorian Christmas in July wasn’t going to be just one of

those parties with a pink-ribboned fir tree, chilled wassail, and the

plum pudding Aunt Doris put up six years ago. We wanted what

the magazines called Victorian infrastructure. And, let me tell you,

Father left us the money to pay for it, although you wouldn’t

know he had any from the looks of this place.

The first summer, Joe rebuilt the roof of the crumbling stone ice

house at the rear of our property, reglazed its diamond-shaped

windows, and from the rafters hung four rusty iron chandeliers

that Eithne found at a garage sale. He rehung the chicken coop

doors and added a porch and trellis at one end, where we hoped

to host sherry and tea parties one day. We spent eight-thousand of

Father’s money to have Joe lay a winding path of large flat stones

leading from the ice house to a small concrete pool that had stood

empty outside our back door for two decades, complete with a

broken waterwheel. Eithne and I spent every non-rain day

trimming overgrown bushes, sawing limbs off trees, weeding old

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garden beds and digging new ones to create what we called

garden neighborhoods: the medieval garden, the romantic garden,

the bishop’s garden, the water garden, and, of course, the

Victorian garden.

One sweltering August evening, Eithne went to the ice house

to light the fat beeswax chandelier candles so we could see what

they looked like after dark. I stayed behind on the back porch to

get the long view. Eithne was surprised to find the ice house door

ajar and Ed sitting on a bench in the cool dimness smoking a cigar.

“Hope ya don’t mind my trying out your new folly. Had to get

out of the house. Jezzann won’t let me smoke inside or out. Can’t

even keep my cigars in the house. This is delightful. Kinda castle-

like. Care to join me?”

Let me tell you, while Eithne and I don’t do everything

identical, we never do anything separate, not even drive to the

store for a quart of milk. Without so much as acknowledging Ed,

Eithne hollered in my direction. “Enya, come here this minute.

Bring the brandy and three glasses. And some cheese.”

We thought we knew men. When we were young, we had

charmed them with our belly dancing in the speakeasy Father re-

created in our basement. They were Father’s old married friends

of course, and it was always look-don’t-touch, although

sometimes I would sit on George or Andy’s lap afterwards so I

could feel the strangeness of rough hands on the skin of my belly.

The only human touch Eithne and I are well acquainted with is

that of each other as we snuggle in bed on subzero winter nights.

Eithne wanted no contact with these men, but grinned and blew

kisses around the room when we finished a number. The men

would cheer as they sucked on cans of Schlitz. We loved their

attention, but once we were dressed in street clothes and came

back downstairs to join them for drinks, their talk turned to the

price of corn or the crooks in city hall, and we felt invisible again.

That’s what we figured male companionship amounted to.

Sometimes Father would say, “Why don’t you girls go in to the

city to the dance at the pier tonight?” We went once. A brave

fellow came up to the table where we were drinking Old

Fashioneds, looked from one of us to the other at least twice, and

finally asked me to dance. At that, the handbag Eithne was

anxiously stroking fell out of her lap. When she reached to pick it

up, I saw tears in her eyes. Maybe it was because she wished he

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had asked her instead, but I like to think it was because if I

accepted, it would be a hole I could never stitch up again. So I said

no to the shy young man.

When I arrived in the ice house with the brandy and glasses,

Eithne introduced me to Ed as if I’d never laid eyes on him. “Why

Enya, this is Mr. Edwin Quentin Wallace,” she said in an affected

southern drawl like Scarlett O’Hara’s, “the owner of the fine

property to the west of us. He is admiring our improvements to

the ice house. Isn’t this quite grand?”

A man had entered our world and was appreciating it.

Eithne, I, and Mr. Edwin Q. Wallace, as we took to calling him

from then on, drank the rest of the evening hours away, entranced

by the overhead mating of his cigar smoke tendrils with those of

the candles. Sometimes he would purse his open lips as he

exhaled, forming smoke donuts that we tried to catch on our

fingers. Father had smoked cigars for decades, often with the

windows tightly shut when he took us and Mother on Sunday

drives in his Model A Ford. For us, the smell of cigars is soothing

and nostalgic.

We learned a few things about Mr. Edwin Q. Wallace that

night: he was bored with his job as a computer programmer;

Jezzann was a part-time bank teller addicted to reality shows on

TV; he wanted to research his family’s roots in England, but didn’t

know where to start. He did most of the talking and didn’t learn

much about us except that we were transfixed by him, I suppose.

When he confessed that he had never been able to tell us apart, we

explained almost in one voice that I usually wear my hair piled on

top of my head, and Eithne lets hers hang loose. But not always.

“You’re sort of the lord of the manor, aren’t you,” I asked him,

surprised at my own boldness, “wandering right over here

unasked to our ice house and making yourself at home?”

“Well, yes, I suppose. I can fantasize, can’t I? It’s peaceful here,

no television. I can enjoy a cigar and pretend I’m far away. Your

Dad smoked cigars, so I figured you wouldn’t mind.”

By the time Mr. Edwin Q. Wallace said he must get home

because Jezzann’s TV shows were over, he had talked us into

being his cigar keepers. That way he wouldn’t have to store them

in the garage, out of Jezzann’s sight.

The fall and winter passed, and Mr. Edwin Q. Wallace became

a regular visitor to the ice house, even on snowy nights as long as

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the temperature was above 20 degrees or so. We didn’t often join

him, but when we did, we took to wearing Grandmother’s fancy

dresses with their leg-o-mutton sleeves, cinched waists, and tall

collars. Let me tell you, he laughed mightily every time we

presented him with a choice of cigars on Grandmother’s silver tea

tray: an Arturo Fuente, a Padron, an Ashton, a Romeo Y Julieta,

and sometimes a lowly Dutch Masters. Eithne went out of her way

to bring him articles on genealogy and British lineage she cut out

of our Victorian magazines. I felt a twinge of something when he

got caught up silently studying these additional tidbits—

something I now see was jealousy.

Spring came, and with it our more serious undertakings for the

Victorian Christmas in July. In the ice house, we strung the

chandeliers with fir garlands, stood a Norway spruce in one

corner, and clipped 100 miniature candles on its branches. For the

chicken coop, we pricked eggs with a pin, blew out the innards,

and put them in nests we had woven under rubber chickens we

bought at the Halloween store. We finished off the coop with

strands of twinkling lights from the Chinese market. We lined the

path and filled the gardens with luminaria. We spent four days

preparing a British Twelfth Night supper: cold spiced beef;

watercress, beet, and orange salad; candied fruit peels; Jordan

almonds; and the King’s Cake, in which we hid a small china

figurine for some lucky guest to find.

At last, on a humid July twenty-fifth, sweating in our heavy,

cinched dresses, we received our guests: some of Father’s

remaining friends, most using walkers; many cousins, nieces, and

nephews, complaining about the weight and heat of their attire

when not chatting on their cell phones; and Mr. Edwin Q. Wallace,

who was among the last to arrive, dressed in a fancy, tailed

tuxedo. He bowed when he greeted us, took our gloved hands in

his, and declared us “lovely indeed.” But it was Eithne’s arm he

wound into his own as we stood in our receiving line.

At seven o’clock, Eithne lit the candles in the ice house. I

rounded up our guests and led them down the stone pathway

toward the ice house, encouraging them to sing “O Tannenbaum.”

The gloved and tuxedoed servers we had hired followed behind,

carrying platters of sherry in small crystal goblets, snifters of

eggnog, and that Victorian prune delicacy “devils on horseback.”

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I could see Jezzann scowling at her post over the sink, probably

Brilloing a pan over and over until it would have blinded her if

she had bothered to look down. How long had she been

watching? Jezzann had never come to any of our parties, but Ed

said she didn’t mind his coming. This time turned out to be

different.

As the last guests and newest mosquitoes squeezed into the

icehouse, Jezzann, her hands covered in blue Brillo scum, came

running across the yard, waving a dripping fry pan high in one

hand and two unrolled Fat Boy condoms in the other. When she

burst in the doorway, let me tell you, everyone got real quiet.

“I’ve had it,” she screamed at the whole lot of us. Then she

pointed at Ed, standing open mouthed next to the Christmas tree.

“You…you…you.” She could find no words to describe him,

despite her reality TV shows. “You’re over here all the time. And

now I know what you’re doing over here with your girls.” She

almost spit the word girls. “I have evidence. Hard evidence.” She

shook the condoms in the air. “I found these on your closet floor.

If you people think this is some kind of innocent parlor game,

you’re dead wrong. These girls are sluts. The genuine article.

Sluts.” With that, she heaved the fry pan at the Christmas tree,

missing her mark, turned smartly, and marched out.

Our guests, still hushed, began to file out, too embarrassed to

look at us. We three were silent as we listened to car doors slam

and engines start, a cacophony of disappointment all around.

Mr. Edwin Q. Wallace had collapsed on a bench in the corner, his

legs outstretched, and was thumping his forehead with the palm

of his hand.

“Girls, I’m so sorry. I’ve never seen Jezzann behave like this.

I can’t imagine what got into her. I’m afraid I must go home and

sort this out.”

We stared at him for a moment and then, in one breath, said,

“This party is over.”

“You’d better not come here any more, Ed,” Eithne added.

“We’ll get the rest of your cigars.”

We picked up our skirts, shoved back our bonnets, and walked

down the stone path to the house in silence, our ache and disbelief

felt in unison, our make-believe world made real, our innocent

flirtation snuffed out.

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In the kitchen, we opened the drawer where we kept Mr.

Edwin Q. Wallace’s cigars, now each encased and rubber-banded

in a Fat Boy. Let me tell you, Fat Boys make perfect humidors.

“Should we return them to Ed like this?” I wondered.

“Yes, let’s,” Eithne said, the corner of her mouth turning up in

the start of a devilish smirk. “Maybe it will help him sort things

out with Jezzann if he shows her what we used them for.” And

then I knew, surely, that Eithne and I would never be parted, at

least not by a man.

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Vicki McMillan

Vicki McMillan is an Assistant Professor of English at Aquinas College in Grand

Rapids, Michigan. She received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Western

Michigan University. Her work has appeared in Sky, Controlled Burn, Voices, The

Kalamazoo Reader, Fourth Genre and Grand Rapids Cosmopolitan Home. She

has attended Bear River Writers' Conferences in 2007, 2008 and 2009. In 2007,

she was fortunate to work with Elizabeth Kostova. The past two years she has

worked with Laura Kasischke.

_____________________________________________________________________

Thunder Mug

ifth grade was the best year of my life. My teacher, Mrs.

Mulligan, cared more about science than fractions, and when

she saw how much I loved biology, she let me read whatever I

liked about animals and plants when math was getting to me. I

passed to year six unencumbered by mathematics but fairly well

prepared to deal with Old Lady Babcock, the sixth grade terror of

Porter Street School. I had summer to enjoy first: three months

Babcock-free. I was still Mrs. Mulligan’s pet. She lived a block

away from us, and I spent afternoons at her house keeping an eye

on her son, Melvin. She paid me fifty cents, all the ice cream I

could eat and the right to read any book on the living room

shelves. All I had to do was keep Melvin out of her hair while she

worked on her Master’s.

Melvin didn’t really bother me. He was a six-year-old who

spent all afternoon turning over rocks and fallen wood looking for

salamanders while I tried reading a book I’d found with the

tantalizing title Sons and Lovers. On the last Friday afternoon in

June, I’d just finished a confusing chapter where a guy’s mom was

upset with him for buying his girlfriend new underwear. I was

trying to figure that one out when Mrs. Mulligan came and took

the book away.

“I forgot that one was on the shelf,” she said. “Maybe your

mother wouldn’t want you reading it. Why don’t you and Melvin

bike down to the library?”

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She gave us each a quarter so that we could stop at the corner

store for popsicles. It was a wonderful trip. We each picked up

enough books to fill our bike baskets and headed back, careful not

to drip popsicle juice on them.

In mid-July, just before my birthday, my parents embarked on

their Great Utopian Experiment. It was time, they decided, to

leave the leafy suburbs filled with friends, excellent schools and

public facilities within biking distance—“time,” they said in

unison, “to move to the country before city life turns all you kids

into drug addicts.”

The quest for farmland began. We visited the first place on

Saturday, a palatial estate with white board fences, modern stable,

even a tiny guesthouse that I pictured commandeering for my

own. Unfortunately, it was over-budget. Mr. Collins, the realtor,

was undeterred. He cheerfully showed us new properties every

weekend: the dairy farm with an antiquated milk parlor, a dog

kennel where a lady was raising squashed-nosed Pekingese, and,

my brother Ralph’s favorite, an ancient property with a leaning

farmhouse complete with an open well in the yard and a wall full

of bees.

Mr. Collins finally found the farm they wanted in mid-August,

a charming property with an old white house and an unpainted

barn out back complete with a rope swing in the hay loft. There

was a little granary between the two, constructed of painted

cement blocks and covered with pink, climbing roses. Sixty acres

of paradise complete with raspberry canes, an asparagus patch

and a pre-planted garden. “This is perfect,” my mother said,

pulling up a baby carrot to sample the produce. My parents made

an offer. It was cheerfully accepted. The owners, the Johanssons,

were ready to move on.

We made three tours of the house before my mother’s attention

moved beyond the lovely wainscoting in the dining room, the

cistern to collect rainwater for use in the wringer bound washer

and the beveled oval of glass in the front door. She finally noticed

that something was missing.

“I just kept thinking that I hadn’t seen something,” she’d said,

laughing over rum and Cokes with her friend, Val. “And I kept

trying to figure out what it was. It was the middle of the night

when it struck me. They’d never shown us the bathroom.”

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Somehow, miraculously for the Johansson’s resale benefit, our

entire family had visited three times without one of us ever

needing to pee. On visit four, my mother inquired as to its

location.

“Out back,” Mrs. Johansson said. “Behind the granary.”

I’d seen it before, but had thought it was a tool shed, not a two-

holer. There was no toilet paper. The Johanssons were early

recyclers. Last year’s Sears catalogue lay between the two holes. A

rat lived below. He popped his head out to greet me. I named him

Templeton after the rat from Charlotte’s Web and prayed that he’d

never bite my butt when I made a visit. My dad promised a new

bathroom ASAP.

“But not this year,” he said. “We’re moving in just before

winter. We can’t dig a drain field now.”

“Great,” I said, thinking Old Lady Babcock’s class was looking

better and better. “What are we supposed to do in the middle of

the night?” My mind was very much on Templeton.

“We’ll have to use a bucket as a chamber pot,” my mother said.

“We’ll put it on the landing mid-stairs. You’ll have to take turns

emptying it. It’ll be fun—an adventure, like going back in time. In

olden days it was called a thunder mug.”

We moved in early November, just before the first big blizzard of

the year. The wind sent the curtains standing straight out in every

room. If it hadn’t been a mid-storm occurrence, I would have

thought the house haunted. That’s when my mother noticed some

other missing things: storm windows, insulation and a proper

furnace. My sister, Darlene, a resourceful seven-year-old, believed

in dealing with one problem at a time. She made up the bucket-

emptying schedule and taped it to the stairwell wall. I had

Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Ralph had Tuesdays,

Thursdays and Saturdays. Darlene had Sundays.

“That’s not fair,” I said.

“You should have made the schedule,” she answered.

123

Brenda Meisels

Brenda Meisels retired in 2009 as a psychotherapist and published her first

novel, Family at Booknook. She is working on a second book, and also journals on

familyatbooknook.blogspot.com about writing, publishing and marketing. “Push,

Pull, or Get Out of the Way” was motivated by Richard McCann. In 2008 she was

in a workshop facilitated by Anne Marie Oomen, who skillfully focused on detail.

Brenda has attended the Bear River Writers’ Conference the past four years.

_____________________________________________________________________

Push, Pull, or Get Out of the Way

he year I turned thirteen, three years before Dr. Jonas Salk’s

polio vaccine became available, I contracted poliomyelitis, a

highly infectious viral disease that can cause paralysis in a matter

of hours. That year there were 58,000 cases in the United States.

Two thousand people died.

Parents lived in fear. Since the virus was thought to breed in

air and water, children were kept home and away from swimming

pools. Later, we were to learn that polio was spread by contact

with contaminated feces. But in the summer of 1952, people were

ignorant of the cause. I was not allowed to swim, which was then

and still is my favorite sport. Bored, I frittered away time in front

of the bathroom mirror, practicing what I thought of as a Doris

Day movie-star smile. Taken as I was with my face, I was not

pleased with my plump, pre-pubescent body. My girlfriends had

slimmed, blossomed and started their menses. Dissatisfied, I

declared to my friend Myrth, “I want to have a very light case of

polio and lose weight.” That fall, to my dismay, my “wish” was

granted.

The day of the eighth-grade square dance I am not feeling well

and know I should stay home. But I go and twirl up and down the

gymnasium, from boy to boy, in glorious delirium. For three days

afterwards, I am feverish in my parents’ bed, with my heroine

Nancy Drew, the can-do girl, unopened beside me. My mother

battles the fever with cold wet washrags and aspirin. She brings

me water and juice and offers me soup that I cannot eat.

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Then there is blood on the sheets—the menstrual period that I

have longed for. I am scarcely aware and too weak to secure the

gauze ends of the Kotex in the sanitary belt. Mother ministers to

me. She helps me out of the bed, guides me into the bathroom and

supports me while I ease into the soothing water. Gently, she

sponges my smelly, sweaty body.

When I try to get out of the bathtub, my body will not

cooperate. I think, Grip the side of the tub. Stand up. I lift my left

arm onto the rim of the tub; it flops back into the water. Mom puts

her hands under my arms, hoists me to my feet and steadies me as

I step out of the tub. She wraps me in a towel. Then, as though I

am a reluctant toddler, she coaxes me to lift one leg and then

another, until I am dressed in clean pajamas.

The next morning she bundles me in a housecoat and leads me

to the car. At the hospital, I sit swaying on a cold hard steel table

while an inexperienced intern taps my knees with a rubber mallet.

When my reflexes are normal, he shakes his head, uncertain as to

the diagnosis. But my mother is not. She lifts my left arm, releases

it and it drops to my side.

Within hours I lie, pajama-clad, on the backseat of a borrowed

Packard, my parents driving me two hundred miles through the

Nebraska and Colorado prairies to Children’s Hospital in Denver.

With my parents’ muted voices comforting me, I doze. When I

open my eyes and gaze out the window, I cannot see the road or

the small towns we pass through. I do see cotton candy puffs

drifting in a gray sky. Then I sleep again. I am barely conscious

when we stop midway and my mother helps me into the gas-

station restroom.

The hospital emergency room is a blur. “We’re going to do a

spinal tap,” the man in white says. “We’ll take fluid out of your

spine, and it will determine if you have polio. You must lie still. It

will hurt, but if you move, you could be paralyzed.” He takes the

largest needle that I’ve ever seen and thrusts it into my back. The

pain is piercing. But I do not move, and I do not cry out.

In the isolation unit, green-clad robots with white masks speak

little, but deliver meals and bedpans at regular intervals. There is

no cure for polio. Muscles atrophy and shrivel. In an attempt to

slow this process, there are hot packs. Twice daily a steaming

wool blanket is thrown onto my bare body and covered with a

plastic sheet and another wool blanket. I am firmly tucked in and

125

left to smart and sweat until my skin is angry crimson and the

wrappings cool.

The first day I lie unthinking, immobile on the hard bed. Then I

begin to fantasize about a certain blond-haired boy. I’m holding

his hand, feeling the tingle. With my right hand, I touch my lips,

pretend a kiss. I while away the hours imagining he is my

boyfriend, that we go to the movies, swim in the lake, and finally

marry. I do not miss my parents. It is the boy, this dream that I

long for.

Each day there is mail—get-well cards. Hundreds. All burned

eight days later, when I roll out of isolation on a gurney and

through the long damp tunnel connecting the isolation ward to

the hospital. With wheels clattering on cement, voices echoing

around me, we whiz through the underground. At the end, we

ride up in an elevator and enter the children’s ward, where the

virus germs have been vanquished. There are unmasked nurses

who talk, and kids, lots of kids. There are books, toys and a TV.

But all is not well on the ward. The nurse refuses to give me a

pillow. “The doctor must write an order,” she says. I wail, “I

cannot sleep without a pillow.” I ask other nurses, who also

refuse. They do not explain that for some polio patients it is

contraindicated to have a raised head. I am at war with the nurses;

I shun them, ask them for nothing. The next day I prevail upon the

doctor and get my pillow.

I am homesick. Mom makes the long drive to see me. She

comes with her oldest sister, Genevieve, who lives in Denver. My

mother wears her church clothes, a homemade suit: black skirt

and checkered jacket, jaunty hat to one side. Her face is lined with

worry. I plead for her to take me home. She holds my hand.

Finally, she can bear it no longer and leaves the room. Genevieve,

the formidable matriarch of our family, rises from her chair and

towers over me, her voice a whip. “You are okay. You are not to

bother your mother! She cannot bear it!” My aunt does not say,

and I do not remember that, when my eldest sister was thirteen,

she died.

My mother makes her bi-weekly visits. I no longer cry.

In physical therapy, canvas curtains separate tables. Children

scream as therapists try to straighten shriveled arms and legs. My

classmate Lloyd Hill has contracted polio and arrives at the

hospital two weeks after me. We become best friends. Our limbs

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are not contorted. For us, physical therapy is not particularly

painful, and we love the warm exercise pool. He with his crutches

and I with my sling run errands, fetch bedpans and ride the

forbidden elevator, exploring the hospital.

On our floor there is a circular, glassed-in room. Pale-faced

kids lie in iron lungs. Accordions without music, swishing

compressors forcing oxygen into emaciated bodies, keep these

children alive. By turning the pages with a cylindrical tool held in

their mouths, they read books, held open by brackets above their

heads. They also hold pencils in their mouths and draw on paper

bracketed above their heads—upside-down drawing. I do not

know that most of them will spend their lives in iron lungs, but I

do know that I am one of the lucky ones.

Two months later, my sling a badge of victory over the dread

disease, I return home and am permitted to attend school half-

days. Despite my protests, every evening Mom lays a blanket on

the kitchen table and pulls and stretches my arm. She counts to ten

as I attempt to lift the softball-sized beanbag that she has made for

this purpose. The nerve endings in my upper arm are dead, kaput,

killed off. Without them to trigger the muscles, I cannot lift my

arm above my waist. I hate the sling, the exercises and my mother.

The doctors indicate that surgery would increase range of

motion. So in the summer before my sophomore year, we return

to Children’s Hospital, where a team of doctors connect the

shoulder muscle to the forearm muscle. I sport a cast that wraps

around my body and rests on my hips. The encased arm is bent at

the elbow, the forearm crossing my body in front of my chest. It is

supported by a thin board, connecting arm to torso. The cast binds

my left breast but does not fully cover the right one. Later, my

mother will wonder if the tight wrapping at a time when I was

developing may have contributed to my pear-shaped figure.

Mom sews gigantic blouses, making openings for the board

and putting snaps down the sides. I wear the tops with my older

sister Monna’s maternity skirts. To cut down on body odor and

remove dead skin, Mom pours alcohol into a saucer-sized aeration

hole in the cast just over my stomach and swabs as best she can

with a rag and an immense Q-tip. The alcohol smells pungent, is

cool and soothing, but the Q-tip never reaches the worst of the

itching. I’m hot and cranky, and I miss swimming.

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I am certain no boy will date me—a girl in a barrel! But Stan

does—a giant, ruddy-faced, floppy-eared, big-hearted farm boy.

With Stan and the steering wheel on his side of the front seat and

me and my armor on the other, we find ways to touch. Stan is my

boyfriend. This in spite of the fact that, before my first date, Mom

rolls my hair in giant metal page-boy curlers, but winds the hair

around the clasp instead of the roller. I am a frizz-head and have

the klutziest mother in town.

The doctor promises that I will be cast-free before school

begins in the fall, but when we return in August, the x-rays show

that the muscles have not yet healed. The doctor indicates that I

will need to remain in the cast for another three months. This will

not do. I explain that I play first cornet in the marching band. I can

do this with one hand. But to be in the band, I must wear a

uniform. I’m certain that the director will never allow my mother

to dissect a band jacket. Still, the doctor refuses to remove the cast.

And I refuse to leave.

I plead, I scream. I cry. We compromise. Without the board, I

could wear an unaltered man’s-size jacket that would cover me

and my coat of armor. The doctor cautions that without the

weight-bearing board, the cast is fragile, susceptible to breaking. I

say that I will take the risk. The technician revs up a screeching

saw and whips the board away, leaving my encased arm,

extended at a right angle, with no additional support.

That fall, marching and tooting with the rest of them, I hold

and play my cornet with my right hand. I discover that the brick-

hard cast is useful in crowded hallways. With this weapon I am

invincible; I race through the school, plowing into anyone in my

path.

One wintery day, I bang into my locker; my suit of armor

cracks, splinters at the shoulder. Shivering with cold and fear,

steadying the disintegrating plaster cast with my right hand, I

wait for my mother in front of the school. At the emergency room,

the doctor reinforces the shoulder with wet plaster strips, ever

increasing its size. I look like a lopsided football player in a

padded jersey.

Six months after surgery, when the muscle has finally healed,

the tech takes his mighty saw, slices the armor in two, and pries it

off. I grasp my reeking, quivering stick of an arm and hold it as

though it were still in the cast. I’m terrified that if I let it fall, it too

128

will separate from the shoulder. As we drive the few miles to my

aunt’s Denver home, a sweater cloaks but does not quite cover the

stench.

I lock the bathroom door, fill the tub to the brim, soak in

steaming water and peel strips of gray dead skin from my arm.

After three tubfuls of water, my arm is cleansed—red and raw. I

dry off and dress carefully, grateful for the security of the cloth

sling.

The surgery is not a panacea. My arm is further weakened

from disuse and trembles uncontrollably. I have a huge, quarter-

moon scar across my emaciated shoulder. My shoulder blade

protrudes, similar to a bird’s broken wing. Atrophied muscles are

connected to functioning muscles, and I must work to strengthen

them. Evening exercises are reinstated, Mother diligent in seeing

that I perform them. But I must continue to hold and play my

cornet right-handed. I learn to finagle the books from the top shelf

of my locker with one hand. At a square dance, when it’s time to

form the Texas star, my boyfriend takes my hand and attempts to

lift my arm. It is an immovable weight. He stares at me in

puzzlement. I am ashamed and have no words to explain.

I was a typical adolescent, preoccupied with myself—my body.

Yet I denied my limitations and, when confronted with something

I could not do, was frustrated and wallowed in self-pity. I did not

appreciate or even recognize what my mother did for me. I

distanced myself from those who struggled with the ravages of

polio, pulling themselves around on crutches, confined to

wheelchairs, or worse, iron lungs.

At my fiftieth high-school reunion, fourteen of us, scrubbed

and dolled-up, gathered in the Imperial, Nebraska, Senior Center,

drinking cold coffee, eating cholesterol-filled triple-treat-chocolate

brownies and reminiscing. My polio buddy, Lloyd Hill, and I

chatted about how little polio had affected our lives. We laughed

about the cast, my suit of armor, which for years afterwards had

lain in two pieces on the top closet shelf.

Myrth joined in; she said she had been puzzled by my attitude.

“When you were in your cast, you seemed pleased, proud even to

be wearing it and showing off your sister’s maternity skirts.” Then

she laughed, “But that cast! It really hurt when you hit us.”

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Yes, I thought. It must have hurt. Oblivious, I was in an

adolescent frenzy, denying pain, theirs and mine. I had rammed

through the halls, determined to appear normal. It was I who had

chosen our class motto, “Push, Pull, or Get Out of the Way.” I had

raced through life, never looking back.

I was one of the fortunate ones. My impairment was small. I

was able to live a “normal” life. With consistent exercise, my arm

has grown stronger. Although I cannot move it above my waist, I

have full use of the forearm. The tremors have faded. I have no

pain. I swim regularly, a one-finned fish. Although I could not

become a physical therapist, my first choice of vocation, I am a

psychotherapist, a profession that does not require me to do

physical labor. I have given birth to and raised four children,

including twins.

There are small adjustments that I must make. When

confronted with a heavy object to place on a tall shelf, I do have to

think, how can I do this? At times I ask my husband, my children,

even strangers, for assistance. On the plane on the way to visit my

grandchildren, I cannot lift my suitcase to the overhead

compartment. I smile and say, “I have a bum arm. Can you help

me?”

Author’s note:

Mass polio immunizations became available in the United States

in 1955; by 1995, polio had been eradicated in North and South

America. An estimated 440,000 survivors remain in the United

States, with twenty-five to fifty percent suffering from post–polio

syndrome, a condition mainly characterized by new muscle

weakness. Approximately thirty people remain in iron lungs,

dependent on compressors for each breath they take. Polio is still

endemic in the third world countries of India, Nigeria, Pakistan

and Afghanistan. As of December 2009, 1,517 new cases of polio

were reported worldwide. Global immunization would wipe out

this disease.

130

Jennifer Metsker

Jennifer Metsker began these poems in Keith Taylor’s prose poem workshop at

Bear River in 2003 and this year turned them into the series she titled

“Backyardsy.” She said to Keith after that horribly rainy cold weekend at rustic

Camp Daggett, “I now realize I’m not so much outdoorsy as I am backyardsy,”

thus the title. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan in

2006. She has been published in Gulf Coast, the Southern Review, and many

other journals. She currently teaches writing at the University of Michigan.

_____________________________________________________________________

Excerpts from “Backyardsy”

Rainwater & Gin

It was a backyard wedding. Thunder played bass beneath

the wedding march, and by the “I do’s” the sky let loose.

A veil of rain opaque as kleenex moved the party inside.

Out by the pool, the drink cart went unmanned, which left

us children free to try our hands at the chemistry of mixed

drinks: this green one will make you grow stronger, this

golden one will make you grow smarter, drink this clear

one and you’ll never cry again.

That last one was for me, the flower girl to her mother’s

second wedding. I started crying that morning watching

my grandmother pin silk flowers in my mother’s hair.

I cried in the bathroom watching my mother blush her

cheeks, blotting my tears into the velvet flesh of a make-up

sponge. I cried going down the aisle, believing the rain

was my fault even though it was spring. And I didn’t stop

crying until I slipped on the patio and fell into the pool,

drunk on rainwater and gin.

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Bird Bath Lyric

Naked to the bone, with nakedness my shield. – Theodore Roethke

When the birdbath is brimming with house wrens and blue

jays that don’t break into song even when you remove your

bikini top, it’s enough to make you feel invisible. On your

backside, you see the world from their perspective—endless

naked blue, clear aside from some jet trail stretch marks;

the sky exceeds its horizons faster than you can handle.

Such is life off the pedestal. Gods didn’t raise you. You

don’t bathe in the pearly white shallows of an oversized shell.

You can’t glance in a mirror of water without a care for self

reflection. Instead, you sunbathe reading about Roethke.

Roethke bathed as he was prescribed in the lithium soaks of

hydrotherapy. Were those the moments he became invisible?

You remove the rest of your swim suit. Wishing he could

see you, you climb upon the diving board, but instead of

jumping off, you sing.

132

Peg Padnos

Peg Padnos is a registered nurse and writer of poetry and essays. Her work has

appeared in The American Journal of Nursing, Mediphors, Poetry in Performance

and Bear River Review. Last year "Apgar" (begun at Bear River, 2008) won first

place in the LitLife Chapbook competition. "Mayday," written with Colette

DeNooyer, was also published by LitLife. Thanks to an excellent prompt,

"Shipwreck" began in Dorianne Laux's 2009 workshop. "Zig-Zag" and "Trekking

LGA" got their start in 2008, thanks to Richard ("Brooks Brothers") Tillinghast.

Currently, Peg studies with Jack Ridl, who offered helpful suggestions for revision.

_____________________________________________________________________

Shipwreck

“The pity and the terror of babies born too soon.”

—a parent

“Pretty sick cookies,” the doctor says.

“Were we crazy or careless?”

This from snarky friends when we announced

we were having twins. No casual choice. No

oops! Planned as in Parenthood. One

April afternoon—a gripping and tightening

from inside out. Freighter on the shoals,

hardening contractions, arching waves.

The babies come out mewling—kittens in stereo.

And in respiratory distress, the old hyaline

membrane disease that years ago killed

the Kennedy son. Like him, our boys

in plastic boxes, doctors fixing holes

in walnut hearts, dripping in elixirs,

battling infections, reinflating collapsed

lungs, resetting respirators—this much pressure,

that much gas. I see only stick figures, scrawny

frogs. Their pity, my terror.

And the heart-lung-sat monitors

beeping ice-cream-truck anthems if the pulse

dips or the breath stops or the blood oxygen sinks.

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My C-sectioned belly swells like a blowfish,

and I roll the clumsy post-partum roll,

as if stepping on a coral reef or shattered shells.

Just out of childbirth, my mother would say.

Or just off the boat? As if that explains

the kelp of things.

Here’s what I want to do: grab those oysters

from their beds, escape the pirate’s den, push

aside the gawking strangers—“Oh, what tiny, tiny

things”—shove past the pity and the terror. Push

those babies back into the kiln: Refire breath

and blood flow, heartbeat, O-

two. Hot-pink the dusky, blue-black bellies—

the dusky, blue-black dying babies—and ship

out in a coracle to Waukazoo, where Indians

summered years ago—

putting distance between this day and the next

childhood that lies ahead.

Zig-Zag

…and connect

The landscape with the quiet of the sky.”

—William Wordsworth

“into the road just—oh, I mean just, in front of my car.”

—Mary Oliver

Midnight. A quiet Friday. Near summer.

Tulips turned to stems. Manure carried

on wind from nearby fields. From faraway

the hum of distant cars. We swung off

the Interstate past the Zeeland grain elevators,

past the Burger King that shares its driveway

with a funeral home. Past Island Express

and the carpool parking lot. Almost to the Oil

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Can and Craig’s Cruisers. Another ten minutes

till home. And we were

happy, driving from the neonatal unit

where our born-too-soon twin sons

had been living all that spring. Time’s tincture

proves the point: Babies growing,

breathing better, eating, keeping warm.

So along the miles dotting Grand Rapids

and Holland, our voices eased, and we told

the dashboard, the windshield, each other,

the nurses’ words: “Don’t forget car seats.”

And “Better paint the nursery.” And “They’ll be home

before you know it.” And two

deer straight ahead, pinned to our sight lines,

one in profile, the other face front,

inches behind the first.

We were close enough to touch them,

take in their close-cropped velvet,

caramel-colored fur. Close enough

to spot car lights in their sea-

glass eyes. Close enough to glimpse

pricked ears picking up the sounds

of distant stars. And then I’m clutching

the sides of the seat as we slalom first right

then left, then back into the lane.

Did I catch in an instant

the balletic kick of the legs,

the lifted haunches, the white-

striped tails streaming across

a median of grass?

I still ponder the message of this

encounter with—glyph, cipher, running

script? Just what were the planets telegraphing

that night?

135

Trekking LGA

“And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Katmandu.”

—Rudyard Kipling

“New York. Old school, gritty, real.”

—Michael Wilson

We climbers gather our carry-ons, crampons, ice-

axes, slide down the wobbly wire stairs to the tarmac,

enter the terminal basement, ascend to where the flights

take off. No matter this up-go, down-go. Mid-morning

light sneaks through the throng, along with riffs of jet fuel,

bazaar of boarding calls, CNN’s gabbling

heads. Who cares about the news?

Past Express Books where you can take a title

on your way out, return it on your way in for half-

price. Past the frozen yogurt stand where three bucks

will buy a cardboard bowl of cement fluff

the size of your cupped palm. Past Brooks Brothers,

where I want to ask, “Did your really forget

to pack your boxers or button-down collars?”

Aren’t BB types anal to a fault? I shouldn’t judge:

maybe they spilled a spot of curry on their ties,

or—gracious!—a dab of chutney on their flies.

Never mind.

Through the handprint-smudged security doors

where grey-suited, sour-faced TSA guards, by turns,

glare or ignore us mountaineers. Then down

the escalator with its worn metal ridges. (Hey, you

with the stiletto heels—Don’t get stuck!) No problem

for us with our sensible shoes, wheelies

lashed to our hands, Sherpas coming up the rear

as we descend. Perhaps a brief stop at the circus

carousel for steamer trunks. Then the gauntlet

of gypsy cab wallahs and snaky town car charmers

who’ll bring you in for a premium. Whatevah!

136

Finally, en plein air, perhaps raw as Everest,

perhaps soft as saris or cashmere shawls

warm enough to boil an egg, the caravanserai

of yellow cabs is there, honest rates painted

on their doors, medallions gleaming, on-duty

lights aglow, that look for all the world

like the crisp, sharp-angled nurses caps of old.

137

Sue Marie Papajesk

Sue Marie Papajesk writes poetry and short stories, and has participated in the

Bear River Writers’ Conference since it began in 2001, coordinating the Beaver

Island Lighthouse School Scholarship program, working with Barry Wallenstein,

Thomas Lynch, and Jerry Dennis. Sue works with youth at risk, using the arts as a

vehicle to open up their hearts and minds. She appreciates the support given to

the gifted youth who have participated in this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity at the

Conference to learn from the greatest authors and poets of our time.

_____________________________________________________________________

Two Hearts

t was in the springtime of my first love. Dogwood flowers

stretching like arms of a crucifix just before the blood berries

appear and six months after she sheds her dress in late November.

Creeks and rivers were swollen and still recovering from the

unusual heavy snowfall that swept down from Southern Ontario

and the Alberta Clippers that pounded us with over 300 inches of

snowfall that year.

My grandpa used to say, "Ontario is the province that takes its

name from Lake Ontario, which is thought to be derived from

Ontarí:io, a Huron-Wyondot word meaning ‘great lake,’ or

possibly ‘skanadario’ which means ‘beautiful water‘ in Iroquoian;

both languages are these days extinct," and I would marvel at how

he could know so much about extinct ancient languages.

It took me seven hours to find my way up and around about

the spine of the mitten, the lower peninsula of Michigan where

you can see God's left handprint from outer space as a promise

with steel blue water shaped like a horseshoe at the top for luck,

pointing the way to his most secret of secret places: the Upper

Peninsula. “Saving the best of creation for the last day,” Grandpa

used to say.

I stopped in small towns to buy homemade apple cider donuts

and $1.50 bottles of Orange Crush and Coca-Cola served in small

green glass bottles sweating with humidity. They were sold out of

ice chests that sat for decades on ends of warped porches of old

general stores in towns with funny names like Horton Bay, Elk

Rapids, and Walloon Lake.

138

As I drove further north, the strong scent of pine left me

breathless. It seemed to sink into every pore, and you could taste it

even when your mouth was closed, musty and cooling at the same

time. I looked for roadside signs that would show me the way to

the Hiawatha trail that Grandpa talked about and recited

Longfellow just like Grandpa used to do when we were kids.

By the shore of Gitche Gumee,

By the shining Big-Sea-Water,

At the doorway of his wigwam,

In the pleasant Summer morning,

Hiawatha stood and waited.

Even though I had never been on the trail—and never did find

road signs—I knew my way by the lay of the land and small sites

along the way. I was on my way to a secret place.

I recognized the small creeks, lakes, hills and old-growth trees

Grandpa used to describe when he and I stole away fishing, away

from the family throng and my five tormenting big brothers. For

some reason no one knows, he took a liking to me the day I was

born. He whooped, hollered and grabbed Grandma and danced a

jig. All eighteen cousins and my brothers were instantly jealous.

Over the years, my brothers eventually grew to love me, but

never did understand me. I was the only girl they knew who

loved to fish, hunt, gather bark and stones, then collect plump

nightcrawlers the size of hot dogs from Grandma’s garden in the

event that Grandpa would say, “Let's go fishing partner,” leaving

the family sitting mid-meal, jaws dropping, not believing he was

doing it again.

Grandma tolerated this disappearing act because I was the

only female and last grandchild in our entire family—"The best

bookends a family could have. Grandpa on one end and you on

the other.” All the boys would groan and roll their eyes.

She'd say fish was the only food God created entirely for our

brain, and the human brain needed it daily, or we would all go off

and kill each other. If all the generals and presidents would only

learn to take their enemies fishing, then there would be—just

maybe—one less war in this world. She was the kind of person

who could catch and eat fish three square meals a day if she had

139

to—just like during the Depression while waiting for Grandpa to

come home.

She swore eating fish made her heart strong enough to bear all

nine of her children, then knit the strong bones of her grand-

children through her own children. She thanked God at every

meal for the abundant fish in our lakes and rivers, even though we

knew she was thanking God for us with all her children, eighteen

cousins, my five brothers, aunts and uncles, squared up to the oak

table Grandpa built for her the week he came back from the war.

The story goes he whisked out the front door and disappeared

into the woods, only to appear one week later, strolling through

the front door with the table on his back.

It fit all of us around it no matter how big we got. We would

witness the two of them gazing at each other quite intently, each

brother down the line elbowing the other to take notice they were

at it again. One eyebrow on Grandpa’s strong square forehead

rising up so slightly, just after Grandma’s saying grace, and

Grandpa adding and “thank you for the Hiawatha trail” as we all

lip-synced those same words. Grandpa would wink through misty

eyes at her about their secret knowing of a time and place as all in

unison said Amen.

Grandma and Grandpa had traveled this trail to their special

place—the day before their wedding, two days before Grandpa

left for the war. The day of their wedding ceremony, the

Methodist church sponsored a pot luck-dinner where they prayed

for the boys of their community who were leaving for the war—97

couples recited their wedding vows.

That day, the families were saying goodbye to their boys, sons,

brothers and fathers, all 800 of them. With a wing and a prayer,

the train whisked them all away before dawn to Normandy. Only

108 returned, Grandpa the last.

(On their wedding night, they held each other all night long

wide awake without speaking—in the same bed they shared for 71

years, in the same house Grandpa was born in, the same bed his

parents slept in for 52 years, the same bed every grandchild in the

family was born in. The same bed that wrapped its arms around

Grandma as she sighed her last breath. The same bed waiting for

me to return to tell it the secrets of the Hiawatha trail.)

I was the one who could not get enough of the stories Grandpa

told. I memorized every detail, and every word of the ancient

140

languages Grandpa spoke. My secret. Even the wives of my uncles

shook their heads, waved him off, and said if even half his

adventures were true he would be long-dead.

Grandpa was a hardened stump of a man—emotionally

petrified—to everyone but me and Grandma. All of my aunts

talked in hushed tones in whispered shadows about the harshness

of his demeanor and the unwillingness to do anything with the

boys. He never took any of them to this figmented secret place up

north, and God forbid he ever put that f-ing bottle of JD away, his

constant companion.

Some say he was this way because of the war. At night, if you

slept in the spare bedroom under the stairs, you could hear soft

whimpering and floorboards creaking as he paced until after

midnight, trying to calm his spirit. Grandma would sit quietly,

waiting for the storm to pass, and when it did, she would rock

him like a baby. He would fall asleep, but you could still hear him

calling out in a strange language, warning of imminent danger.

On any given day, Grandpa would whistle, like calling in the

hounds, and this was my sign to grab my crawlers and meet him

at the end of the drive, jumping into his pride and joy, a 1969

candy-apple-red Cadillac convertible. We would cruise away the

afternoon from one favorite fishing hole to another, his stainless

steel Coleman cooler clunking in the back seat, fishing poles

sticking out everywhere, open minnow bucket sloshing fish whiff

and silver minnows on soft white leather seats.

He would tell me about secret places where birch trees grew

over 100 feet tall, each with seven branches coming out of the

trunk, each arm five feet around. “Untouched by man,” he'd say,

“that’s how it got to grow so big.” Rock formations and boulders

bigger than a VW Bug out of place right in the middle of the

forest; geologists still can't figure out how they got there. Each

with engravings of stick figures with eagle heads, hats and shafts

of light coming from their heads, placed in some sort of circle.

He always whispered when he talked about the oldest triple

junction rift zone known to exist on the earth's surface—where

seismic evidence indicates to this day that there are sediments

filling a crack in the earth's crust that extends more than 30,000

feet below Lake Gitchie Gumee.

I imagined Grandma and Grandpa used the same trail I was

now on. Repeating history, stealing away less than 48 hours before

141

my very own wedding, to everyone's dismay but Grandpa’s.

Winding through dusty little burgs, open convertible, music

blaring from my iPod and old scratchy speakers on the dash.

Stopping for water and thirsting for adventure, fearing the

unknown, reveling in love.

Along the way on stream banks and beaches I looked for rocks

and shells so I could form my own kind of wampum, to signify a

treaty or to codify my upcoming marriage covenant or as a

keepsake for making peace after an argument—never to let the

sun set on a marital fight, as Grandpa used to say and made me

promise I would do—when I became a grown-up.

There were pipes on the sides of dusty roads sticking out of the

ground with signs placed there by the locals: "Free Healing Water"

or "The cleanest water in the world." Some built elaborate agate

shrines and put engraved plaques on them to remember some

special local hero or those who served in the war.

I used Grandpa’s graying tissue-thin maps, barely readable,

the ones with stars next to his favorite places I made sure to visit—

creeks, waterfalls and natural springs where I filled up old milk

jugs from Grandpa’s garage and a green canteen war relic and

family heirloom.

Freckled along the margins of my prized maps, I found

unusual abbreviations; TRLM-Trillium, ASP-Asparagus, MM-

Morel Mushrooms, SH-steelhead, C for Carp, STGN-sturgeon,

MSKY-BTRT, W-EYE- SMLT, WF, PCH , JD-Jack Daniels, and a

few others I am still trying to decipher: TTS, ASS, JAIL.

These cracked and worn-thin maps are the ones he gave me as

we cleaned out his garage just prior to his moving into a home for

the elderly and two years after Grandma passed away. The "pool,"

Grandpa called it, the place where all the good ones are tossed

back when they are too old to chase the fly. A place where every

fishing story is real and everyone has time to listen.

Grandpa knew he would not be traveling again—handed my

dad the keys to his prized possession—and, with a wink and nod

in my direction, he reached out to me and handed over those

sacred beloved maps, holding onto them so intently, pulling back

ever so slightly as I eased them from his fragile, shaking hands, his

piercing eyes never leaving mine as he whispered, “Hiawatha is

waiting.”

142

Kerry Rutherford

Kerry Rutherford earned a degree in anthropology from the University of

Washington. After many moves and jobs (crab-pot webber, public school teacher,

grant writer, mother, musician, waitress) she moved to Indiana and worked for an

arts nonprofit. Since 2002, she has produced and published two CDs of original

music and one poetry book. After nine years away from the Pacific Northwest,

Kerry is moving to Portland, Oregon, to be closer to her family. Kerry attended

Bear River 2008. In her workshop with Keith Taylor, she created “Toe the Line,”

which will eventually be incorporated into her memoir in progress.

_____________________________________________________________________

Toe the Line

t wasn’t just the fact that Shelley owned a Doberman named

Lucifer and a tarantula that periodically escaped from its glass

case, which totally freaked me out. And it wasn’t just that she had

the cab driver bang on the door at three a.m. to wake me so I

could carry her drunk ass into the house along with her blue

wheelchair. It was not the fact that she started borrowing money

from me halfway through each of the three months I lived in her

house, even though I made $1.25 an hour, plus tips, as a waitress

and she’d gotten a $300,000 settlement from the city (plus $1000 a

month living expenses) because the cannon went off during the

Bastille Day parade in downtown Seattle and the wad of confetti

(which was supposed to be dry and festive) had become a heavy

lump of damp paper and hit Shelley in the abdomen so that she

had to have one of her legs amputated.

It wasn’t only the stream of colorful and sometimes dangerous

people I met who frequented Shelley’s Leg, the gay bar she started

with part of her settlement, or being introduced to my first drag

queen show as a guest of the most infamous Shelley Bauman. Nor

was I consciously alarmed by riding in the altered push-button

car, with a wild, unpredictable, one-legged, red-haired driver at

the wheel who would occasionally pull over and empty her urine

bag onto the side of the road.

It was not any of these things taken alone that defined that

time and place in my life. But taken all together, the intersection of

my life with Shelley’s is telling for its statement about how life just

143

seemed to happen to me. I had no idea of the potential for disaster

that hovered so close to my aura. I was living in a sort of fog, just

going along with everyone else’s life instead of creating my own.

Only recently have I discovered a clue of sorts—that a piece of my

personal puzzle ricocheted off a segment of my childhood,

embedded itself subliminally in my life, sending out beacons of

magnetic energy which then attracted danger and chaos, the

causes of which I could not decipher until that very clue was

revealed to me.

“The shaman did a journey and saw an incident when I was

about two years old,” I said to my eighty-five-year-old mother. “It

had to do with Daddy and a message that I had to toe the line. Did

anything happen back then? I remember the house we lived in

with all the woods, but didn’t we live in a different house before

that? I can’t remember anything from that time.”

“Well there was this one little thing that happened,” she said,

tentatively, like it was really no big deal. “The house we were in

when you were born didn’t have a fenced yard. The landlord

owned a Doberman and your father never liked that dog. When

you and your sister were toddlers, and played in the yard, he

always complained to the landlord about the dog coming too

close, and he wanted to build a fence. The landlord said no. One

day you were sitting in the yard in front of our house with your

sister and that Doberman started to come too close. Your father

went inside and got his shotgun and killed it with one shot, right

over your head.”

I was stunned. That same day I called my friend, Houston, and

told him about it and how it seemed to me that I may have

received an unconscious message that I better toe the line, and

subsequently held my true self in check, which created a sort of

black-hole-type vacuum, sucking chaos into my life. I was trying

to put into words the complex picture I was seeing of my

wounded psyche, since he was one of the few people I could talk

to about these things. His first comment was, “That’s just like that

short story Sam Shepard wrote in the book you gave me, about his

grandfather throwing a wrench and decapitating a rooster that

was headed toward Sam’s dad when he was just a baby in diapers

in the farmyard and the blood spattered all over him.” I had no

idea what he was talking about and was sure he was mistaken. I

read Sam all the time, his books of short pieces being my favorites

144

and being the books I most often purchase for friends. But I could

not remember that story. So I went to the bookshelf and paged

through the book. And there it was: plain and powerful as day.

It isn’t just the fact that I blocked out a traumatic childhood

memory, and that the message I received lived in my sub-

conscious, sabotaging my life for so many years. And it’s not the

fact that I may have totally misinterpreted my father’s fierce

protection of his daughters and instead, on some level, internal-

ized a warning that something bad would happen if I did not toe

the line. I guess what blows my mind is realizing that the ability to

protect myself from pain could translate into the erasure of a short

story from one of my favorite books, as if Obi-Wan Kenobi said:

ou will not see this story, young Jedi. And that, years later, life could

just randomly reveal the truth, unlocking a door that lets me walk

out into the brilliant sunlight where everything is finally clear.

145

Barbara Saunier

Barbara Saunier’s poems have appeared in Briar Cliff Review, Spoon River Poetry

Review, Dogwood, and Iconoclast; and Big Scream. Her poems have received two

Pushcart nominations, and in the ‘80s she received a Hopwood minor award for

short fiction. At the 2009 Conference, she worked with Thomas Lynch, and was

encouraged to … “well, uh … steal stuff.” She “stole” from R. Tillinghast’s Six Mile

Mountain “Ever” to use as a template for “Displaced,” and produced “Add to This

Such Comfort” after incorporating a line from someone else.

_____________________________________________________________________

Displaced

And though day arrives,

the curb holds no dewy promise;

the brick straight-edges light;

the grate grids dank air.

The apron hem

she lifts to her cheek to lean on

tells the story of brown hens spangling the road dust,

tells the secret of asparagus wild in the orchard

and bees frowzy with honeysuckle,

and none of it better now than lies.

146

Melissa Seitz

Melissa Seitz is a lecturer at Saginaw Valley State University. Her husband and

son are an inspiration to her. She enjoys sitting with her dog on her dock at

Higgins Lake and thinking about writing. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have

been published in the Bear River Review, Greenhouse: The First 5 Years of the

Rustbelt Roethke Writers’ Workshop

, and various other journals. She is currently

completing her first book of nonfiction. At Bear River 2009, Melissa attended the

Phillip Lopate workshop in essay and memoir. Lopate taught the importance of

“thinking against oneself” and “readers must find [us] amusing.”

_____________________________________________________________________

Apple Orchard

ugust days in Michigan are typically beautiful. The heat of

July has waned; flowers and fields bloom with rich blankets

of reds and gold. I have decided to take my mother for a drive,

and to visit a local apple orchard. My father needs a break,

because my mother is living with him again, and he needs some

time to himself. Even though he does not tell me, I am well aware

that he will be grateful and will find the time alone restful. He

smiles at me as I guide my mother towards the door.

My mother shuffles along on feet once strong enough to dance

ballet, her white walking shoes barely lifting above the carpet. She

turns at the last moment and says: “Is he going with us?” She

points at my father as if there is another “he” in the room.

“No,” I answer, not sure if she wants him to go, or if she is

concerned about being with me. For a moment I wonder if she has

forgotten who I am. I push the thought out of my mind. I say: “It

will be just the two of us. We are going to an apple orchard to buy

some apples and some very special cookies.”

She smiles at me, a child’s smile of happiness, and we begin

our slow trip to the elevator. Although the elevator is approxi-

mately thirty feet from my parents’ apartment door, and a route

my mother has been walking for several years now, the walk

brings unexpected discoveries. A painting on the wall catches her

eye. A woman passes us in the hallway, and my mother gives her

an uncertain smile, even though the woman sings out a cheery

“Hello, Margaret.”

147

In the elevator, we ride down quietly. My mother smiles as she

feels the rhythm and vibration of the elevator. We reach the first

floor of the building, wind through a maze of chairs and people,

and make our way outside. I guide her to my car and open the

door for her.

My car, an Audi TT, rides low to the ground, so my mother

lowers herself gently, as I hold her and help her bend down. In the

past, she has called my car “jazzy,” but she does not say this word

today. Instead she says: “Is the car new?”

“No, I’ve had it for awhile,” I say, smiling at her, now past the

need to remind her of what she has forgotten. When she first

started forgetting, I felt the need to remind her if I had told her

something ten times or a hundred times. Now I no longer care

about being right. Time no longer matters. How long I have

owned something is no longer important. Five years could be five

minutes.

My mother’s language skills have declined, and as we ride

along, I realize I am happy to hear her say anything. I ask: “Would

you like me to put the top down?” I point towards the roof of the

car. I can tell by the look on her face that I have made a bad

suggestion. In the past, I have taken her for rides with the top

down, but she always worried that her wig would fly off. At least

then she understood the complexity of putting the top down.

The trip to Bayne’s Apple Orchard takes about twenty minutes.

As I drive along M-47 towards Freeland, Michigan, she comments

on the fields, the trees, the houses, simple sentences, but

descriptive.

“Beautiful. Look at those fields. The sky is so pretty. I’m having

so much fun.” She smiles at me, nodding, happy. I almost believe

everything is normal.

I keep up a running commentary, feel as if I am on a first date

and have to impress some young boy I have just recently met. I

babble on about this house or that farm or the river, anything to

keep our conversation going. I say: “Isn’t this a beautiful day?”

She nods her head, and it is almost like we are floating away from

her disease and into the past.

We arrive at the apple orchard, and I help her get out of the

car. She stands for a few minutes, admiring the store, the trees, the

building where they crush the apples, the tables. She makes little

statements. “Beautiful.” “Look, apples.”

148

“Are you ready to go inside?” I ask.

“Sure,” she answers. She hesitates, wondering which way she

should go. I grab hold of her arm and guide her towards the

store’s main entrance.

My mother wobbles and shuffles her way in. The women

working in the store immediately notice her, and offer to help us

in any way they can. I love these women instantly. My mother

wants to pick up everything and look at it, inspect it, turn it over,

around and around. It is as if she has never been in a store like

this, or she is a child, seeing things for the first time. I believe I

have learned patience, finally, and I have learned it by spending

time with my mother. This is not really true. I have selective

patience with anyone outside my family. I think of the term “short

fuse” and realize it applies to me.

We start picking up things we want to buy. We admire the

goat’s milk lotion, one of my mother’s favorite things. When I ask

her if she would like some, she smiles, and I pick up a bottle for

her and one for myself. One of the women working at the store

tells me that we can put everything we want on the counter until

we are ready to check out. My mom gives them a wry smile as if

she has just been told a secret.

We work our way to the cookie and pie section. Cookies and

pies behind the glass of a large white display case overwhelm her.

She is confused, uncertain as to where she should focus. A nice

young woman behind the counter, a girl, really, begins to explain

every single kind of cookie and pie to us. We are in kindergarten,

and here is our teacher. We pay close attention.

The girl asks us what we would like. I repeat the question to

my mother.

“I don’t know.” She seems to be upset, ready to move on. She

looks at the cookies again. She smiles. “That fellow will want one.”

I am amazed. She has remembered my father, that fellow, and

he will want a cookie. I buy a dozen cookies, trying to cover all of

the bases, and I also buy my father a cherry pie to make him smile.

I would buy everything in the store if I could—as if it would make

a difference, make the ugly disease go away.

As we walk away from the display cases, my mother spots a

caramel apple wrapped in cellophane.

“What’s this?”

“A caramel apple,” I say.

149

“Really,” she says.

I show an apple to her, to show its beginning. She watches me

closely as I begin my explanation of the process. Strangely, I had

practice making caramel apples with my son’s hockey team when

he was sixteen. The parents of one of his teammates had an apple

orchard, and we helped make pies and caramel apples as a

fundraiser. I know what I am talking about for a change.

Explaining the caramel apple process to my mother takes five

minutes. The woman behind the counter, where all of our

purchases-to-be are now, watches us with a smile on her face. I

finish the tale of the caramel apple, and I ask her if she would like

to buy one.

She looks at me, looks at the caramel apple in my hand. “I

don’t think so.”

I wonder if my explanation has failed, or if it seems that eating

it would be as much trouble as making it. We walk to the checkout

area.

My mother stands next to me with her hands on the counter.

“What are we doing?” she asks, a look of uncertainty on her face.

It has been years since she has purchased something at a store. She

does not seem to remember how it works.

“I have to pay for our things,” I say. I hand the clerk my charge

card, and my mother watches with great interest. She does not ask

about the charge card. I wonder if she remembers money. She

loses interest at this point and walks off to pick up a hat she has

found. She runs her fingers over the material, turns it over and

over. I wait to see if she tries it on, but she does not.

“You are a wonderful daughter,” the woman behind the

counter tells me.

I burst into tears, and for a wild moment I almost believe her. I

can never shake the feeling that I am not doing enough. I mumble

a simple “thank you,” and try to pick up our purchases, realizing I

am going to have to get my mother into the car first.

“I will help you out,” the woman says. She carries the pies,

cookies, lotion, and other odd things we have picked up outside.

She talks about what beautiful weather we are having, and we

chat as I guide my mother along.

My mother slides into her seat with little trouble, and the

woman helps me load our purchases into the trunk of the car. I

thank the woman and tell her how wonderful she has been.

150

My mother and I travel back the way we came.

“Did you enjoy the apple orchard?” I ask.

“Oh, yes, honey,” she says, reaches over and pats my knee. We

ride in silence for a few minutes, until a field catches her eye.

“Isn’t that beautiful?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say. I try to focus on the road in front of me, but I

realize I want to focus on everything around me, everything that

is alive. The field of grass slopes downward towards a row of

trees. They edge up against the riverbank like red and gold

guardians. The river below flows, vibrant and alive.

I want to believe that the world is beautiful and I am a good

daughter. I want every day to be this day.

151

Susannah Sheffer

Susannah Sheffer is the author of three books and is at work now on a book

about the emotional experience of capital defense attorneys. Her essays and

poems have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, and she works

regularly with teenaged writers, both individually and in workshops. She worked

with Dorianne Laux at Bear River 2009.

_____________________________________________________________________

Deciding

Summer evenings when the opera singer

practiced and practiced her aria

I lay at the window listening

until the notes sounded like they came

not from any one body

but from the world itself

doing what it had to do: splitting open

into lament, the vowels

that would go on and on

if no one stopped them. By themselves

they would never resolve

into form; they would stay

in the open mouth,

the melody that cannot help itself,

scaling and continuous.

So what I had to do, lying there

on the bed, humid with wanting

and not wanting to listen, was

hold out my hands and

make myself into the shape

that something needs

in order to be

caught and cradled,

able to bear being told.

152

A Knowledge Like Glass

Afterward you reach for it

like a marble in the pocket,

a private certainty

that only your hand knows.

This is what you hold,

what you tell yourself,

what people cannot tell

by looking at you,

what the moon would be

if you took it into your mouth

and sucked it smooth,

what the fire has cooled and become.

How He Chose It

Because I came too early,

because I had had enough and wanted more,

they weren’t ready, they were caught,

they would have held me back,

said give us a little more time.

This was not how they’d pictured it,

but then who’s to say they pictured anything,

who’s to say they understood the longings

this third person would satisfy, or create.

So he left the hospital to stand in the park,

stepping out of the scene

in order to see it more clearly.

He thought it might come to him there

the way things sometimes come

if we stand in the right place,

hold ourselves the right way.

He thought he might learn to recognize

what he had been given,

what had burst into his life,

breathing and actual,

not an idea but something that had entered

in its own way and own time,

something that needed a name.

153

Ken Shelton

Ken Shelton is a singer-songwriter, an educator and pastor. He has written two

books, Covenant Talk, and Understanding Your Spiritual Intelligence. In addition,

several of his songs and musical narratives have been published and recorded.

Ken is a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers

and he resides in Brighton, Michigan. His first year at Bear River was 2009, where

he was honored to work with poet and author Thomas Lynch.

_____________________________________________________________________

Baptism at Bear River

I waded in

to weeds, waist high

and thick, heavy with

morning dew.

Came brushing up

against thistle,

milkweed, cattail, fern,

lacy webs.

Then stepping out

beyond them, I

found the river, chest

deep with words.

154

Heroin in the Heartland

ryan was a clean, almost preppy kind-of-guy who decided (for

reasons we’ll never know) to give heroin a try. He was already

dead when his friend, Matt, dropped him off at the hospital. Matt

told the lady at the registration desk that he decided to drive

Bryan himself, rather than call 911 or wake up family members—

asleep in the next room—because he panicked. The detective told

us that it was the third time in as many months that Matt had

dropped someone off at the E.R.

Apparently, heroin is migrating—moving from its former

urban digs and invading the otherwise pastoral setting of

suburbia and rural America—the heartland. I know this is true, in

part because of Randall Archibald’s New York Times article that

proclaimed, “WAR WITHOUT BORDERS – In Heartland Death,

Traces of Heroin’s Spread” (May 31, 2009). But I knew it

anyway—because Bryan OD’d. Call it what you like: dragon, hero,

Big H, China white, black tar, black pearl, brown sugar, Mexican

mud or plain old smack, it’s a big deal these days, and it’s more

lethal than it used to be.

As soon as I arrived at the hospital to be with Bryan’s parents,

we were escorted to the emergency room, where all five feet ten

inches and one hundred seventy pounds of Bryan’s lifeless body

lay—his collar-length, medium brown hair falling in strands over

his unshaven face. The detective said that a sample of his hair

would be tested to try and determine if he had been a long-time

user or if he was new to the drug.

To force myself to stay in the moment, I blocked out the

hospital surroundings and made believe that Bryan was a wax

figure in a museum—a coping mechanism I’ve taught myself over

the years as a local church pastor in a small Michigan town. It

doesn’t work. It’s the smell.

His father slumped in a heap on the backless physician’s stool,

then, dropped his head and folded arms on the dead boy and

sobbed like a baby. His mother and stepfather turned my way. I

was trying to comfort them when his older sister came in the room

and started yelling and calling him a stupid f’’r, because he was

only thinking of himself, and he was the fourth f’n friend to die in

six weeks. She pressed her fists together in front of her bowed

head, sobbed and drew her shoulders around in a standing fetal

155

position. She didn’t budge when I put my arm around her. Stupid

f’r, she whispered again.

Mr. Archibald’s article is about families in Grove City, Ohio,

who have been stunned by the drug’s arrival. It’s in small towns

all across Michigan as well. He reports that human smugglers

called coyotes bring the stuff into the States from Mexico. Then it’s

delivered to cells that move around every few weeks to avoid

detection. These days, the heroin is often laced with fentanyl,

which is cheaper than heroin, but a hundred times more powerful.

That way, the dealers make more money and the drug is more

addictive—and deadly—often on the first hit. Stupid f’rs!

When Bryan was still alive, he enjoyed acting and playing

practical jokes. Fittingly, to ease the tension and anger for a brief

moment, his mother instructed the undertaker to bury him in a

pair of red sparkly tights she found in his room. Truth is, the

entire week of Bryan’s funeral was totally cheerless—until his

sister stepped to the podium during the service to say a few

words. I think we all expected more anger, but she didn’t go there.

Instead, she recalled good times, like when Bryan and some

friends trespassed at a local ski hill for a midnight butt race, and

the Halloween he decided to dress like a tampon. In spite of the

awkwardness of the moment, nearly everyone in the church

responded with belly laughs at the memory of this otherwise

happy boy. It was the first deep breath any of us had taken, but

laughter won’t push heroin out of the heartland. We may have all

laughed, but we didn’t mean it.

156

Robert E. Smith

Robert E. Smith attended the 2009 Bear River workshop led by Laura Kaschiske.

He has been writing for many years but has never been published. He says if he

continues at his present pace he'll break the rejection record of F. X. Toole (author

of Million Dollar Baby). What he learned in Laura Kaschiske's workshop is to trust

his writing instincts.

_____________________________________________________________________

The Sacred Mounds

ut of the hazy halo created by early morning sun and fog, a

white-tailed deer bounded across the freeway, clearing the

front of Mitch Canfield’s car by an eyelid, but then colliding with

a metallic blue Honda, the impact throwing the golden-brown

deer to the side of the freeway. The Honda veered into the viaduct

railing at high speed, the collision decapitating the driver.

Mitch braked, swinging onto the left shoulder. He stopped,

thankful he hadn’t been rear-ended. Trembling violently, he

stared into the rearview mirror and was astonished to see the

bloodied deer lurch to its feet, shake its head as if clearing it of

pain, and continue on, entering the southbound lane right in the

path of a semi-trailer.

The truck driver veered his John Deere rig with two attached

trailers onto the median grass, overturning in his attempt to avoid

the deer. The long line of vehicles behind hurled themselves at

each other as if in anger. Twisted metal, cracked plastic, and

shattered pieces of glass were tossed into the air and pelted down

upon the freeway like oversized hailstones.

Mitch sat there in a daze, the engine running and audio-tape

playing the soundtrack from the Best of Bach. He turned off the

engine, unbuckled his seatbelt, and opened the door. Smoke

spewed forth from the long tangle of metal and broken glass as

dazed drivers and passengers began to emerge from their vehicles.

He leaned against his Bronco and felt numbed, but at the same

time all his senses became acutely keen. He saw the deer through

the haze of smoke as it bounded in the distance and disappeared

in fog over the Indian mounds. A stillness fell upon the freeway,

as if it were waiting for that first faint knock to awaken this

stunned mass of humanity.

157

The misty halo melted overhead as the rising sun lifted the

morning fog. Mitch walked back to the crash of the blue Honda

with the guardrail. The beheaded body lay sprawled over the

twisted hood. Mitch’s stomach heaved as he gasped for air.

Averting his eyes, he turned toward the median gully, only to be

confronted by the stare of her blond head lying on top of a pile of

discarded black tires. She glared at him, as if begging him to

return her to her body. Hypnotized by her fierce look, Mitch

descended the gully in a trance-like stupor. He bent down and

grasped a tangle of blond hair and raised the head off to his side

to avoid the warm blood which spilled out and steamed as it

splattered onto the cold, dewy grass, and he began to ascend the

gully. Halfway up, Mitch hesitated as the faint whisper of a

distant humming broke the quiet. He continued up the gully

cautiously and then quickly crossed the pavement and placed the

head on the mangled body, which was protruding from the

windshield of the metallic blue Honda. Mitch took off his maroon

mountain parka and tossed it over the united corpse.

A foreboding, mechanical, rhythmic chopping stormed onto

the cataclysm; Mitch glanced up and saw the med-evac helicopter

slowly descending onto a grassy knoll adjacent to the southbound

lane. He was now in the rice paddies of his eighteen-year-old

youth, among ghosts that would never cease haunting him. For

two eternal minutes he suffered, anticipating a helicopter’s rescue

from Vietnam’s jungles. He was frightened and yet exalted,

knowing that the helicopter like a descending angel would save

and deliver him, and he began to pray: “Our Father, who art in

heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be

done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us…”

“Do I have any cuts or bruises on my face?” A gray-haired man

shouted as he thrust himself upon Mitch’s stare and stunned

Mitch into reality.

“No, no!” Mitch stuttered as he backed away. “You appear

fine. There’s a scratch on your forehead.”

“How did all this happen?”

“Didn’t you see the deer?”

“No. I didn’t.”

“The deer ran in front of this blue Honda,” Mitch said as they

began to descend the median gully and walk up the south bound

lane. “Miraculously, it picked itself up after it was thrown off to

158

the side and then ran in front of that semi. I watched it disappear

over the Indian mounds next to the river.”

The med-evac helicopter crew disentangled the body of the driver

from the overturned semi with cool military precision, placed his

mangled remains on the pavement, and covered him with a

blanket. The team continued to search along the succession of

rear-ended vehicles that appeared like a loosely thrown chain

lying on the entire south-bound lane.

The med-evac team carried two litters past Mitch, who was

now directly in front of the helicopter. A grassy knoll allowed

space for its ascent as its whirling blades sucked up discarded

Styrofoam cups and leaves. Another National Guard camouflaged

helicopter landed on the periphery of the grassy knoll and its crew

set up a med station to care for the injured.

“This reminds me of my Vietnam days,” Mitch said as he

escorted a woman with facial scratches. “I was a medic and

seriously considered medicine, but after all the heartbreaking

trauma I saw, I couldn’t see myself as a doctor.”

“Who will pick up that body over there? I vowed that when I

left Vietnam that I would never allow a body bag to just sit there

and lie around.”

“It looks like only two are dead—the blue Honda driver and

the truck driver,” a guardsman replied. “How did this happen?”

“A deer ran in front of both the Honda and truck. They veered

to avoid it,” Mitch said. “I saw the whole thing. I even saw the

deer disappear over the Indian mounds over there.” Mitch

pointed at the mounds.

“There he is again. Probably browsing on acorns.”

“Where?” The guardsman asked as he looked over the hill.

“Right there on that mound between the two oaks.”

“Nothing there as far as I can see.”

The deer, its golden-brown coat radiant and antlers glistening

in the early morning sun, froze and peered fixedly at Mitch and

began to stomp the ground with its front hoof, as if it were

taunting Mitch.

“He’s probably in his full rut,” Mitch said, “completely

unaware of the accident.”

“What did you say?” interrupted the guardsman.

159

“Oh, I guess the deer would be at the peak of his mating. The

rut or the mating season reaches its peak the middle of October,”

Mitch said as the deer melted into the trees.

“Two cultures, two thousand years apart,” Mitch mumbled as he

turned toward the east side of the freeway and its rail yard with

long lines of rusty brown boxcars. On the opposite side, the west

side, was the Grand River Valley, a wilderness dominated by

giant oaks, maples, and basswood trees, which hid the river when

they were in full leaf. Adjacent to the river, and dating from

Christ’s time, were also the ancient Indian burial mounds—

rounded swellings of earth about the size of a two-stall garage.

The grassy knoll was alive this morning, as it might have been

two thousand years ago during some ancient ceremony to honor

the deceased, but blaring sirens, crackling police and ambulance

radios, and flashing red and blue lights were the High Mass now

being offered to appease the gods who had been disturbed on that

cool autumn morning. All the accident victims were drawn to this

enclave, a sanctuary of grief. They sat on the grass, now dry from

the sun, some lying down, turning their eyes from the accident

and staring blankly at the river in the distance. The Indian

mounds lay there peacefully in the shadows, the leaves from the

giant oaks and maples gently falling on the mounds and the lazily

flowing river. The sun from a cloudless blue sky beat down on the

grassy hill with its assembled congregation.

Mitch, drawn and exhausted, stood there, hypnotized by all

the natural rhythms.

“Look! There it is again,” Mitch said as an object emerged

from the mist and long morning shadows. But the deer didn’t

appear. Crawling out of the burial mounds, their hands clawing at

the dirt and grass, were the brightly painted bodies of woodland

Indians, arising in the beaded splendor of their burial garments.

Mitch shielded his eyes from the blinding glow radiating from

the tribe that was surfacing after 2,000 years of silence. He could

see the red terror in their eyes as they began to advance up the hill

toward the freeway. Chanting loudly, they were suddenly upon

him. A hand reached out and grasped Mitch’s hair. As the hatchet

swished though the air, Mitch lunged backward and ran toward

the freeway. Tripping and stumbling down the grassy knoll, Mitch

fell and lay upon the grass.

160

The surrounding throng, however, was unaware of Mitch’s

presence or his vision. This congregation, anesthetized by their

morning trauma, sat there entranced, waiting for their sacrifice to

consummate, spellbound by the softly falling leaves and the mist

arising from the Indian mounds and the river. An eerie, faint,

inhuman sound began to echo into the morning air, at first faintly

registering upon their consciousnesses—a pleasant, natural,

rhythmic beating which was unlike the sharpness crackling from

the accident. The sound was drawing closer, along with a rush of

gentle wind. The crowd of accident victims began to huddle

closely together like a herd of sheep preparing to fend off another

threat. A shadow darkened the ground, its blackness slowly

spreading, as if a rug were being unrolled over a blue sky.

Everyone turned their eyes toward the heavens and saw the

immense flock of Canadian geese blocking the sun.

“They probably rested in the gravel pits next to the gypsum

mines. They aren’t in their V-formation yet,” Mitch said.

All eyes were fixed on the flock of geese, now directly above

and gaining altitude as they flew south over the trees and along

the path of the river. They gazed upon their flight until the

distance swallowed up their image.

Mitch reached into his pocket and felt the smooth, planed

surface of his flint arrowhead—his good luck charm. He con-

tinued to stare at the mounds and the river, but slowly awakened

from his reverie as the departing congregation quietly dispersed.

The Mass had ended.

“Mitch, is that you?” Joyce asked. “And why are you home so

early? You forgot to put the garbage out again this morning.”

Mitch closed the garage door and walked into the kitchen.

“My God, Mitch, what happened? You’re a mess! What have

you been doing? And ah! You smell like some dead animal run

over along the road!”

“Didn’t you hear about the accident? I’ve been there all day,”

Mitch said. “There was a multiple rear-end collision on the Ford

freeway next to the Indian mounds. A hundred and twenty-seven

vehicles were involved. The worst rear-end collision ever in

Michigan.”

“Well, thank God you seem to be fine. You weren’t hurt, were

you?”

161

“No.”

“And don’t come any further, and take off those muddy shoes.

You’re tracking mud all over our new carpet. Take that shirt off,

too. It’s caked with gunk.”

Mitch tracked back to the garage, sat down on the concrete

step, removed his shoes and socks, took off his red chamois shirt

and t-shirt and tossed them onto the plastic garbage container.

Naked to the waist, he returned to the kitchen, only to be halted

by his wife’s frown.

“You seem to be fine. Maybe that Indian arrowhead…what do

you call it—a Norton-Corner notched point—was good luck this

time. You always carry it in your pocket. And it seems right, being

in that accident. You’re always taking the boys down there and

lecturing them on the merits of this wonderful lost civilization.

You love it. Well, let me tell you about my day, my day of teach-

ing, if you will. One of my little monsters vomited this morning

and then this afternoon another one, you know the Michael boy,

was having a drink at the water fountain and another monster hit

his head and pushed his teeth into the faucet. He broke off two

front teeth. Now we’re having violence among eight-year-olds.”

“He’s a nice kid. I had him in boy scouts.”

Joyce stood in front of the hall tree mirror, adjusting her

Mikimoto pearl necklace. “This isn’t too much jewelry for my

parents? I’m wearing your gift from Vietnam, Mitch. Remember

this from long…”

“No, no, no. Joyce, you appear fine.”

“My parent-teacher conferences won’t be over until about ten.

Todd and Ray are at band practice, so they won’t be home until

later. You’ll have to take care of yourself,” Joyce said, and left in

her always-hurried manner.

Mitch lingered in the kitchen, absorbing the quietness around him.

He stared out the bay window at the stakes that were standing

from last summer’s garden, then picked up the pint bottle of

murky Grand River water that stood on the sill and reread the

label:To Mitch Canfield, District Director of the Department of Natural

Resources, Fresh Grand River Water, Bottled and Unaltered by your

colleagues, Enjoy. He smiled and rubbed the bottle in both hands as

his memory filled with the pleasantries of his fifty-fifth birthday

party last Saturday. He gently placed the bottle back on the sill

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and staggered reluctantly down the hall, his bare feet absorbing

the soft carpet. He grabbed the railing at the bottom of the stairs,

ascended slowly, walked down the hall past Ray’s and Todd’s

rooms, and entered the bedroom where all this was conceived.

Mitch tripped on the carpet in front of the mantle mirror.

Raising himself, he was stunned by his reflection. He ran his

hands through his hair and squinted at the gray creeping into the

black mass. He moved closer to the mirror and looked down at the

assortment of his wife’s cosmetics scattered on the counter, picked

up Joyce’s plastic cosmetic bag, dumped the contents, and read

the labels on the lipsticks: “Smoky, Alana’s Apricot, Michell’s

Mirage, Maryanne’s Mist, Purple Passion, Vamp Red.” He picked

up the Smoky, removed the cap, unscrewed the base to raise the

lipstick, painted a line from the corner of his mouth to each ear

and joined these two lines above and below his lips. He picked up

the Vamp Red and painted a thick line on the bridge of his nose.

On each side of his forehead, he made two circles with

Maryanne’s Mist. He removed the cap from the charcoal black

eyeliner pencil and, starting at his right ear, drew a line to the

corner of his eye, extending the line above his eyelashes, across the

bridge of his nose, above his other eye lash and then to his left ear.

He picked up Joyce’s mascara, unscrewed the mascara brush, and

attempted to blacken his eyelashes. On his bare chest, he drew a

circle around each nipple with Purple Passion.

Remaining in front of the mirror, he smiled at his painted

image, but the smile abruptly disappeared. The trauma of the

accident, the deer, the Indians, the ghosts from Vietnam, his whole

life were now battling inside of his mind. Tears began to well up

uncontrollably in the corners of his eyes and roll down his cheeks,

smearing his painted image. Flowing freely, his tears became like

a river of red drops spilling onto his bare chest. His image faded

and then rose upon the glass; at first faintly were the rounded

heaps of mounds, and as he focused more intently, the deer

appeared. The first sob pierced the stillness, and then, crying and

trembling violently, he attempted to brace himself in front of the

mirror. The room was spinning, spinning like a top. Then the

wild, dreadful screaming began and the final breaking.

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Holly Wren Spaulding

Holly Wren Spaulding won five undergraduate Hopwood Awards (poetry and essay)

while at U of M and earned her Master of Philosophy in Creative Writing at Trinity

College, Dublin, Ireland. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The Ecologist, The

Dunes Review and other places. She won the 2008 Michigan Writers Cooperative

Press chapbook competition for her first collection of poems, The Grass

Impossibly. At Bear River, she wrote “Not Having the Affair” in Richard Tillinghast’s

workshop in 2008. She worked with Dorianne Laux in 2009. Holly teaches

creative writing / composition at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City.

_____________________________________________________________________

Not Having the Affair

This is the story version, the one in which both are characters.

His body isn’t hesitant and hers doesn’t strive to be modest.

They can avoid certain topics—the wife, the unborn baby—

and they begin to live more easily. As a character,

as someone other than himself, he calls her Kind Visitor

and Most Magnificent. She is tenuous and tender.

She is still cautious. They look away as often as they don’t.

He stands close enough to smell her: June and the last of the peonies.

Words are still extravagant. She leans into every word, not wanting

to miss anything. Rooms are day-lit when his white shirt flashes

in the periphery. His long body lopes over the property; it disappears

down two-tracks. Sometimes they hear loons in the evening.

Sometimes they go night swimming. They marvel at the surroundings,

the coldness of the water. Acute and silent at the end of the summer

dock,

they wonder at the thin air between then. They swell even in

austerity.

Even in the fiction, she doesn’t have to seduce him to know

that it would be brilliant. She calls it calm submission.

She calls it beautiful. This is new to her, this ardor even in abstention.

In the story version, they slow at this part to linger over the details.

It rains until supper. There is a mountain lake, acres of wildflowers.

There are phones ringing and no one wants to answer them.

164

Maybe the Hemlock

Two loons on a lake

in the evening fog,

the air thick with it,

pale water barely moving.

I'm like a days-old fawn

setting out for the grasses—

I'm nimble again;

I smell like the hollows.

Once, I wanted only sounds

and scents of another human—

I founded islands with my body

and we lived there, expectant.

Now, I want to take the whole

world in, bear it all back to brightness.

I linger in the sumac,

bury notes in the branches.

I want this suddenly—

like fire in high summer

or lightning. Like ferns unfurling

in time-lapse photography.

Maybe the hemlock will know me,

or the turtle in his shell of solitude.

Maybe the one brown fish

feeding in the shallows

will signal that we are relations.

165

Jennifer Sperry Steinorth

Jennifer Sperry Steinorth studied dance for many years with the Houston Ballet

and is graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy where she majored in dance. She is

a builder and designer for a small, green-building company in Traverse City,

Michigan, and the mother of two boys averaging about half a dozen adult teeth

each. Poems by Jennifer Sperry and Jennifer Sperry Steinorth have previously

appeared in the Dunes Review, and she is a frequent contributor to Foreword

Magazine. In 2010 her poetry manuscript Forking the Swift, was awarded

publication through Michigan Writers Cooperative Press.

_____________________________________________________________________

Late Day, Traverse Bay—Sun, Acutely

for Mark

Starboard— light refracts off the water—

that pewter platter—

sun casts a watery sliver

of incandescent pie.

Portside— light is swallowed—

by the blue, that berry—

it sinks into the deep, round sweep

of dusk.

We cut through well keeled—

children aslant in the hull,

walking on walls,

on water—

like a knife through hot pastry—

a generous slice,

the first, fruit

not yet set.

We heap our helpings into shallow bowls

and the whole fills in behind us.

166

My Girl, Lay Down Your Burden

—pour tout les sylphides Bournonvilles

My girl Christie says, "what if we was as small as these ants?

Those rocks ain't much bigger than my double D's, and they'd be

like mountains." Oh yeah, those days never wore panties,

trumped up cowboy boots or nothing at all—leant back on the hood

of the truck and napped for days. Those days had ways.

The steep slide from the shoulder where we parked

the pick-up. The gravel passage down deep in the ravine.

Everything green. August. Wednesday. Doubled over Elm

across the tread where I cracked my head. Christie says

maybe I got a concussion. Got a summit cross my brow.

Christie says I'm a goddess. She's a goddess. Or a queen.

Or a sylph. Yeah, we're sylphish.

Watch us climb the boulders naked and dance for our man.

Watch us swim the quick aqua like black water snakes,

lie on the hot stone, wet and shimmering. See her cups

of summer slick, moss and soft along the creek, my knees

like stony islands forking the swift—we set the world adrift.

We skim the tall, gorge wall like goats, skirt the mountains

with the creek. Christie's a siren singing down the sun.

I'm casting the moon to its moody blue. We hewn of silver,

amber, plum. We joy and glum. Christie pinch an ant out

the stones of rubble bed, says "what if we was as small as this?"

Awh, sweet girl, don't you know, we is.

167

Ellen Stone

Ellen Stone lives her academic life teaching at Community High School in Ann

Arbor, Michigan, but her poetry life begins each June in Laura Kasischke’s Bear

River workshops. There, Ellen is the student and works feverishly to keep up with

Laura’s prompts and assignments. It is the highlight of Ellen’s writing year. “A

Maple Leaf Life” was written late one night in June of 2008 at Bear River. She

heard Amy Hempel tell a story about Richard Howard during her lecture and was

inspired. Ellen’s poems have appeared in several magazines.

_____________________________________________________________________

Maple Leaf Life

—in honor of Amy Hempel, Richard Howard

and the writers of Bear River

I have lived a maple leaf life.

Sugar sap rise and fall

through harsh springs

with full frosts after they’re due

and too much heat in a rush

of sudden sun in chill March

that sends my thin blood pooling

into the hard small core inside.

The green of June has saved me,

kept me strong and able

to open out and fly to the

corners that constrain me.

A square proximity of logic

has kept me in my own yard.

Still, I look beyond from a height

that is contained, and shimmer

in the summer wind, burnished

into something soft and supple.

I have come to look for autumn

gladly, a last mad dash

of gathering all I find so sweet

and golden. Infused in me,

168

the songs of laden grasses,

swoop and cry of cooper hawk,

the deepest red berry edge.

September dawning so ripe

and full. Delirious.

Come November I have rested

flat on my back in gullies

under the rich yellow of the late

harvest moon. What more do

you want of me? Is it not enough

to filter down into soft piles of heft,

and fill the ditches and gashes

of the endless, cruel world?

Even in death, I will smell like a beginning,

the crumbled, rich scent of hubris, cider

brown and cinnamon. Layered, moist,

a subtle plume, skein of spidery breath

alive and dying. Warm. Pulsed. Ready.

169

Pia Taavila

Pia Taavila is a Professor of English at Gallaudet University, the nation's only

liberal arts university for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. She lives in

Fredericksburg, VA, and has a Ph.D. from Michigan State University. Pia’s

book, Moon on the Meadow (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2008),

is a collection of 126 poems published across thirty years' time. Pia was a

recipient of an Artist's Award as a writer in residence at the Vermont Studio

Center. She is at work revising her next collection of poems, Two Winters. Pia

attends Bear River as often as her schedule will allow.

_____________________________________________________________________

Memorial Day

Against the window, a cold rain spits,

relentless as boredom. Beachside gulls

collect and stand, hunch-shouldered

against grey waves that pound.

Sailboats and skiffs rock; the ropes pull

from pilings at the pier while a lighthouse

beacon wheels its charted course.

Fishermen slump at the bar, watch

hockey on the flickering screen. As coins

jingle in their apron pockets, barmaids

with pencils in their hair make change

and small talk. I sip a beer at a sticky table.

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald crackles

from the jukebox. Young couples erupt

in raucous laughter. My fingers find and trace

your initials, cut in block letters,

then mine, below the arrowed heart.

A veteran of the foreign wars wipes

dry the legions of dripping mugs.

The barkeep asks if I want another.

No, I say softly. No.

170

Service Call

A chip in the windshield now forms

a star, its end points indeterminate,

so a man named Tiny carefully paints

with clear polymer, dipping and wiping

the brush as if he were polishing

his grandmother’s gnarled toes.

I watch him work, his belly draped

across the hood of my vehicle like so much

sack meal bulging from burlap. It’s a small

car, but he’s up on his tiptoes, reaching,

wiping sweat on the back of his sleeve.

He hums a soft tune, which I recognize,

an Irish lull-a-bye, transplanted tune

here in the Tennessee hills. Tiny wraps

up his work, sets the bottle among its fellows.

He checks my roadside membership card,

has me sign smeared papers, ambles

back to the truck and waves goodbye.

As he putters away, a sign below the winch

reads: Murphy’s Service: We Tow To and Fro.

Murphy. My great-grandparents’ last name.

On my mother’s side. I stand and watch long

after the wrecker dips below the road’s horizon,

my glued star crystallized in mid-day sun.

171

Laurence W. Thomas

Laurence W. Thomas is the editor of Third Wednesday, a literary arts journal

(thirdwednesday.org). He has published ten books of poetry, fiction, creative

nonfiction, humor, and essays. For the last 18 years, he has lectured on poetry

and conducted workshops at the Lucidity Poets Retreat in Eureka Springs,

Arkansas. Thomas worked with Jim Daniels at Bear River and says it was an

experience of unfoldment, a time of exploring old forms, experimenting with new

ways of expressing ideas, finding unexplored ideas and capturing them in words.

_____________________________________________________________________

Ghazal for a Dull Day

I fill my coffee cup, butter a muffin, turn on the news

and watch as the sun readies my garden for another day.

After morning news and commercials seen ad nauseam,

television wafts me off to places I’d as lief not go.

Wandering through pages of the nearest book,

I find escape to anonymity from the world I know.

The hush of pages veils the noises from outdoors,

a distant plane, the thrum of traffic miles away.

I check the Internet to see what messages have been sent.

My friends, at occupations elsewhere, have better things to do.

My indefatigable cat nuzzles my hand, his hours as long as mine:

a tummy rub to vary the regimen of his day, at odds with ennui.

Scanning the channels for something to while away the time,

all I find are judges, preachers, Martha Stewart, Oprah.

I wait, but the telephone remains as quiet as my needs.

Even the crows have removed themselves to the tallest tree.

172

Bill Trevarthen

Bill Trevarthen attended the 2009 Bear River Writers Conference, working with

Keith Taylor. For over 20 years, he worked as assistant publisher and managing

editor at Baker Publishing. As executive director of Michigan Government

Television, a statewide cable network, Bill wrote and produced two document-

taries: Defining Moments: Frank Murphy, Fred Korematsu, and the Internment of

Japanese Americans During World War II, and Oh, Could They But Speak: The

History and Importance of Michigan's Civil War Battle Flags. He has been writing

poetry and short fiction for much of his life.

_____________________________________________________________________

The Effort of Flying

y father always dreamed that he could fly. He used to tell us

this when we were kids, and I envied him. I’d wished that,

like him, I could go out the window of my room at night, stand for

a moment on the sill, take off, and soar. Several times I did dream

I could fly, but I had to will it so. I never flew too high.

The mists of earlier in the day lifted; the sky over the lake

cleared. A fine light replaced the fog. We stood and watched the

birds swoop in the spring gift of late evening sun. Surely this must

be sport for them at this point in the day; their work was done.

I’ve always hoped that birds would have at least this compensa-

tion for their labor of surviving and raising young: that their lives,

though brief, would sometimes be ecstatic.

When I was nearly 40, I confessed to my father, finally, how

much I envied him his dreams. “How thrilling it must be,” I said,

“for you to open up the window, step out on the porch roof, and

just take off, a Chagall figure rising in the gray night of dreams.”

“No,” he said. “It isn’t like that. I hate it when this dream

comes on. It’s hard, it’s such a labor. It takes more effort than you

can know.”

When he was dying and the end got near, my older brother

called me several times to say, “You’ve got to come home now.

He’s waiting for you to come home so he can die.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “We said our goodbyes in

October when I was home. We’ll be there for the funeral.”

173

But I did go. They moved him to a nursing home the day my

wife and I arrived. Hospice at home was not working in the end.

He was alone in a room, a little sign from staff above his bed:

“Welcome, Bob,” it said. There was so little of him left that Munch

could have sketched him with just a few dark strokes. We held his

hand and spoke to him, not sure he heard a thing. After a while

what little breath there was just seemed to stop.

I hoped this letting go, this taking off, was as it seemed. No

effort at all.

174

Angela Williams

Angela Williams studied creative writing and theatre at Western Michigan

University. Her work has been in Mississippi Review, GSU Review, Driftwood,

Dunes Review, Writer’s Voice and other journals

. Her first book, an industrial

memoir about her work in the cherry industry, With a Cherry on Top, was released

in 2006 by Mayapple Press. Her first book of poems, Live from the Tiki Lounge,

was released in 2008. Attending Jim Daniels’ workshop in 2008 and Thomas

Lynch’s in 2009 gave her new perspectives and inspired a series of poems

influenced by Edward Hopper’s paintings.

_____________________________________________________________________

What Can Save Us

For Timothy

Your name is the soft grasses

for deer to bed down on that grows

between tree rows of apples

in orchards this side of the hill

from the big lake. These are

the grasses in which dogs prefer

to roll, rocking their blessed hips

and graced limbs in time to the wind.

The whippoorwills sing from

the shadowed phalanx of locust trees,

twilight blue and square-shouldered

as we wait for some answer,

for the moon to show its

upturned face, for the stars to

appear and call us to lie in the

grass to watch them dance.

175

For Hard Cider in January

The wind kept the sweat from streaking my sternum.

I loosened my shirt. It was almost November.

I gathered four bushels of grounders for pressing

before resting on the fieldstone fence, the same stone

as the farmhouse fireplace, the chimney climbing the clapboard

whose porch held no anger for the muddy-stepped children

tracing its boards off to chores, nor for the quiet feet of

those who knew it was better to raise up things, touch glasses,

finger a razor strop of hope this next harvest will be better.

Saturday at 4:00 p.m.

It’s become a precise dance of arms and legs;

the tea ceremony we learned so long ago, now part of us,

our muscles, our hearts.

It is your brow, your eyes now closed to me, I see

when I try to breathe properly.

I understand now why Chagall’s lovers floated, why I know the

scent of his flowers, how something can be enough if

we choose for it to be.

176

Anthony Zick

Anthony Zick was in Jerry Dennis's class at the 2008 Bear River Writers’

Conference. He is a second-year student at Washtenaw Community College. He

plans to major in either Philosophy or English. He has poems published in a

couple of anthologies and literary magazines, most notably Poetry in

Performance, Decibels, and The Huron River Review.

_____________________________________________________________________

On the Way Back from Bear River

We pass fire pits.

We pass pine trees.

We pass Walloon Lake,

flashes shift over the surface,

shop stoops, street lamps, fill up spots.

We pass an entire field of yellow flowers.

Jaime,

You stopped partway through

your poem, said you were dizzy,

head tilted up, squinting, sunstruck.

Some say there was a moment

the muscles in your face gave way.

The light shone hard through windows.

People jostled up to your side.

Forgive me, I did not. I'd never spoken with you before.

This Saturday—you passed,

during my graduation open house.

We were celebrating.

177

The sun was everywhere, I was wearing slacks

and a button-down shirt.

My Godfather came, brought me sunflowers and a card.

He has cancer, that's all I know about it.

The past week, he's bought me five books,

none of which I've heard of.

He's always had a hand for gifts.

We both know

we don't see each other much.

I'm unassertive,

he loves to work.

It's all right. When I see him

it's always a gift

and here he comes with a vase of sunflowers

and I give him a hug.

Later I tell him, “Thank you for everything you've done.”

I should have realized that this might sound insincere

because he chuckled,

said, “That almost sounds insincere.”

But I meant it.

Jaime.

Age 71.

You had a brain aneurysm

and a microphone

and a poem for the reading

in reverse order.

I tried to write it down as you read.

Part of it went like this:

“a party! ladies laughed at the sound of violins

I hear'em laughing and dancing down there.”

A man needs help easing you down

to your seat, to the ground,

says “Get the young men over here.”

Young men,

young man.

I got up but there was no room for my hands.

178

I thought of the way that faith heals,

I don't always know what that means.

I couldn't even manage to kneel in public.

Instead I descended the steps to the basement,

found a spot in the farthest corner.

On the way back from Bear River,

Mr. Kass is driving,

Ben's up front, Marshall to my right,

Kate sleeping in the backseat.

It's strange;

Ben playfully thwaps Mr. Kass on the head.

It sounds a little too loud for bones.

I see Marshall next to me, he's napping I think.

I think of how he is next to me and

has been for a little while and will be for a little while

and how, though we're both sitting,

we're moving

past hills, past lake, past the streetlights.

We pass an entire field of yellow flowers.

And I'm starting to feel like a flower, God.

I see them everywhere; I kiss them on the cheek,

let them do the same,

and I don't feel like we die.

I feel like we move and we move

with you,

like a flower,

like a gift.

179

In Memoriam

Jaime Courtney

2008 Conference Participant

and

Judy Reid

2005-2009 Conference Participant

Painting by H. Anne Thurston

180

181

Jaime Courtney

Jaime Courtney attended the 2008 Bear River Writers’ Conference. While reading

her poem "The Fiddler of Kumsong" for the assembled writers, she was stricken by

a brain aneurysm and passed away six days later. She passed doing what she

loved most: sharing her writing. Jaime was a veteran of the U.S. Army and a retired

newspaper journalist. However, her first love was writing poetry and short fiction.

She won the "Jorge and Sonya Just Award" for poetry at the 2006 Cranbrook

Writers' Conference. We are honored to publish one of the poems she was

perfecting at the Bear River conference.

________________________________________________________________________

The Fiddler of Kumsong

On cold, still Korean nights

on a hill above Kumsong

when the dark comes down and the rising moon

throws shadows bleak and long,

strains of merriment flood the air.

That’s Ching and his violin;

ladies dance through the moon-washed night

with Ching and his violin.

We’d set up a forward recon post

above the shattered wall

that circled the bombed-out, cratered ruin

of Kumsong, abandoned by all

but rocks and rats and the scraps of war

and snow that whipped in the wind,

rocks and rats and combat scars

and snow in the winter wind.

It was cushy duty this far from Kimpo;

the battle was miles to the rear.

We were the scouts for the brigade’s push;

We were their eyes and ears.

The snow stung down with a shrapnel bite

while the sentries walked their watch,

182

snowflakes as sharp as bayonets;

they shivered and walked their watch.

Then the dark came down and the moon rose up

and the wind quit firing the snow.

A fiddle played and a party began

in the war-scoured valley below.

Glasses clinked and ladies laughed

to the sound of a violin;

people danced and ladies laughed

to the sound of a violin.

“There’s a party down there,” the sentry said,

“and I’m freezin’ my ass off here on this hill.

I hear ‘em laughin’ and dancin’ down there

and fiddlin’ fit to kill.”

“There’s wimmin down there,” the sentry said,

“So what’re we doin’ up here?”

“I miss my moose,” the sentry whined,

“So what’re we doin’ up here?”

The Lieutenant asked two men to check it out

but Top led three of us down

through the rocks and ice and battered scrub

to the ravaged empty town.

When we reached the wall the fiddle stopped

as if it had never been;

only rats and rocks and the music gone

as if it had never been.

The next night the fiddle again scraped on

like an echo that couldn’t fade,

like a record stuck in a damaged groove,

like a mem’ry the mind replayed.

We’d searched that village and found no trace

of Ching and his violin.

We’d searched all day but we found no trace

of Ching and his violin.

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The Old Man thought we were pulling his leg

when the Topkick made his report.

He thought we were spooked by the quiet and cold

but he was a helluva sport,

so he sighed and put on his cold-weather gear

and waited with us for the dance;

with long johns under his snow-colored gear

he waited with us for the dance.

When the dark came down and the moon rose up

the fiddle began to play.

Glasses clinked and ladies laughed

till a new sound blew our way.

The music stopped, but a stealthy beat

was carried on the wind;

a clank of treads and a trudge of feet

came to us on the wind.

The swarm of Reds through the northwest pass

was swelled by the Chinese host.

We had to warn the troops at the rear

or the mission would be lost.

We were right in the path of their muffled march;

we had nowhere to go.

Soft duty had put us right in their path

with nowhere else to go.

But our M-1s locked and the clocks all stopped

and the comms went from static to dead.

We huddled and hunkered and watched our fate

roll at us from straight ahead.

We kissed our medals and whispered prayers;

Kumsong was where we’d die.

We kissed our medals and made our peace;

we got ourselves ready to die.

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But God or Ching heard prayers that night

and over the village slope

a miracle shaped like a dome of mist

spread out like a cloak of hope.

The column passed by on the left and right

and we were wrapped in the mist;

We heard them pass on the left and right

while we sheltered in the mist.

When the sun came up the mist was gone

and so was the enemy line.

The clocks ticked on from a midnight gone

and the radios worked just fine.

We called in a guess about numbers and speed

and HQ called in a strike.

We made a good guess on the numbers and speed

and the Mustangs made a good strike.

When the dark came down and the moon rose up

and the fiddle sang in the wind,

we sat on the hill and shared the fun

of a party we couldn’t attend.

We listened all night to the lilting saw

of Ching and his violin,

and phantom ladies who laughed and danced

with Ching and his violin.

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Judy Reid

Judy Reid was an inspiration at each Bear River Writers’ Conference with her

ready smile, bright attitude, and creative spirit. Judy had a Master’s in Education

and had always considered herself a visual artist, with painting, photography and

hand crafts, until she retired from Detroit Public Schools. Then she started

studying the craft of words, and became a self-proclaimed “poetry writing retreat

junkie.” Judy Reid came year after year with her husband William to Bear River,

and her poems were published in three issues of the Bear River Review. The

memory of Judy Reid’s smile will sustain us at the Bear River Writers’ Conference

for years to come. The poem “Cause and Effect” that follows was written by Judy

in January of 2005. We are honored to publish it.

_________________________________________________________________________

Cause and Effect

many flowers I’ve longed for

have hidden thorns of pain

many rough and stormy paths

have led to seeds of grain

clouds that cover the sunshine

cannot banish the sun

earth shines out its brightest

when the washing rains are done

must stand in the deepest sorrow

to see the clearest light

from the darkness of wrongs

comes the strengths of right

live through the weary winters

to value the spring

the woods must be cold and silent

before the robins can sing

flowers must be buried

before they can bud and bloom

some of the kindest rewards

come after storms of gloom

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hearts that learn from the hardest trials

gain the purest joy of all

lips that have tasted sadness

some of the sweetest words can fall

peace comes after suffering

love is the reward of pain

so after earth comes heaven

out of our losses the gain

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Painters

H. Anne Thurston

H. Anne Thurston studied at the Ohio State University and the University

of Southern California at Fresno where she graduated summa cum laude

in Fine Arts in 1945 at age twenty-two. Following her fourth Bear River

Writers' Conference (2009), she painted the acrylic sketch that appears

on page 177 of the shore of Walloon Lake at Camp Michigania, site of

the conferences. Anne has authored The Book of Anne (2008) and L O L

- Seniors Online (2010).

Ava Gilzow

Ava Gilzow is pursuing her lifelong interest in art after retiring from a

teaching career. She discovered a love for pastels that quickly grew into

a passion. Her intent is to interpret a sense of wonder in ordinary

landscapes, skies, and water. She is interested in enticing the viewer to

feel a longing for reconnection to the natural world. Ava has won three

awards in AAWA juried shows, participates in exhibits with the Ann Arbor

Area Pastelists, and was accepted into the Great Lakes Pastel Society

2009 juried show. Ava had a solo show at two Saline locations in 2009.

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Acknowledgments

arwulf arwulf: "um mitternacht" was published in Poetry in

Performance 36 in 2008, edited by Barry Wallenstein.

Jerry Dennis: "An April Shower" will appear in his forthcoming

collection of essays titled The World at Hand.

Kelly Fordon: "Go-go Boots" was published previously in

Flashquake.

Joy Gaines-Friedler: "Assisted Living" first published in

another version in RATTLE, Winter-2008. "A Pheasant is Crossing

I-75 North of Grayling" was first published in MARGIE, The

American Journal of Poetry, Volume Seven/2008; and was a Semi-

Finalist for the 2008 Paumanok Poetry Award. Both poems also

published in Joy’s book Like Vapor, Mayapple Press, 2008.

Esther Hurwitz: "Olive Branch Gold" appeared in Poetry in

Performance #36, edited by Barry Wallenstein and published by the

City College of New York.

Jeff Kass: "I Don't Know Much About You" is part of the one-

man show Wrestle the Great Fear and "The Long-jumper" is set to

appear in Knuckleheads, a short story collection forthcoming from

Dzanc Books.

Jennifer Sperry Steinorth: "My Girl, Lay Down Your Burden"

and "Late Day, Traverse Bay— Sun, Acutely" have recently been

published in her chapbook Forking the Swift published by

Michigan Writers Cooperative Press in 2010.

Anthony Zick: "On the Way Back From Bear River" was first

published in The Huron River Review, 2009, published by

Washtenaw Community College.

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