Amelia is on my back when I hear that the reverse volcano is coming back together.“I don’t see any other explanation,” Genevieve calls down from the lip of the crater. I climb almost on all fours, hands clawing at the earth for balance. Amelia’s arms are roped around my neck, and her little fists nestle…
1.
Dowsing the rain crow,
I walked late of old habit.
Black strap molasses
night strolls—sweet
with a bite of bone
marrow at the center.
I was chasing upmountain,
out hunting the margins—
Scarce Creek
absconding down
the north face of Si
where I once sniffed
a sorrel colt’s birth drop.
The turquoise watch
I walked in wearing
swapped with garish
plastic bangles signaling
risk of fall and rejection.
2.
Playing the dozens
inside the canals
of my nerves, one hand
tapping out against
the safety rails
before fainting
like bailing off
a green broke horse
along rodeo arena rails.
I entreated flush walls:
Where was my son?
Rappelling bedward
on the very lick
of midnight’s leaving,
I reaped arrows
from the courage watch
ticking along
the perimeters
of my corneas.
3.
Scape wheels crenelated
the alarum mechanism at my navel
with clean new fangs.
I didn’t have any say in all this,
but I begged for it. Let any ancestor
string me like an arrow then loose me
from exile’s spit-soaked bow.
Where is the IV pole
so I might walk three
mincing circuits along
the twilight hallway?
Where is my benevolent
guide? Where is my call
button? Where is the buckskin vest traced
with my auntie’s lazystitch hummingbirds?
4.
Bandages, pillows, then towels
braced against my guts. My joints
stove up crackling with scar tissue.
Who can I speak with
about bartering
back the minutes?
I can’t think about it now
without my hands shaking.
5.
Battering my legs
back to rhythm
my stride laid
phantom tines,
tracking a sharp o’clock.
I once walked miles
to see the intricacies
of a plaza clock
engraved with symbols
of the twelve-gated city;
so singular it apocryphally
cost the maker his dominant hand.
Exiled, skirting, probing
the ascetic territories
of eminent domain.
Where is the heavenly city’s weakest gate?
Where is the clockmaker?
Where is my cutting horse with the bright white medicine hat?
6.
Slender silk cords
veiled inside the mechanism
compel table clock automata
to dance, eat, converse, butcher,
kiss, swim, rape, harvest.
The cherub traces
the sun’s peregrination—
fingers trailing zodiac symbols,
closing the day standing
above incised memento mori.
The running maiden
evades the galloping soldier
so long as the fingers wind.
She’s kissing a man on the subway platform when you pass by and she’s on the train you’ve boarded, still kissing the man, his hands traveling up and down her off-shoulder blouse while you pick up a left-behind, weekend edition of The WSJ and try to concentrate on the Sudoku puzzle, your pen pressed at…
“What, are you nervous?” he asks.“Well,” I shrug. It feels like the dark is pulling my voice out of me, unwinding it like a thread from my chest: “Kind of, Noel. I’ve never done something like this before—”The shape of his hand presses warm into the small of my back. Not exactly comforting. Steadying. Holding…
November 10, 2037Outside the wind chime tinkles. She pictures the glittery metal butterfly, a small stained-glass leaf dangling in the middle of the weathered chimes. She remembers putting it up the day she bought the house, all on her own. Mama, can you hear me? Murmurs. She opens her eyes. There, inches from her face…
Words Without Walls serves currently and formerly incarcerated writers in Pittsburgh through a variety of initiatives and programs, including ongoing creative writing classes at the Allegheny County Jail and Sojourner House, a residential drug and alcohol treatment program for mothers and their children. Their newest initiative, the Maenad Fellowship Program, provides master classes and a…
Before Aparna disappeared, we made pretty much any excuse to stop by the Subway around the corner from the basketball courts.Man, I could go for one of those turkey footlongs.Flamin’ Hot Cheetos sound good right about now.You think they’ve still got that cookie deal going?But it wasn’t about the food. It was the swell of…
abecedarian
twenty-six letters, each one a compact unit of communication, a twisted riddle, a maze of red tape from well-lit offices; the only means of containing my sorrow now that all I have left of my brother are memories and letters.
brother
at five, wearing a fringed cowboy shirt, he fires at stink bugs with a dime-store six-shooter; as his older sister, I stick out my tongue and wish he’d wear something more Steve McQueen in Wanted Dead or Alive.
[see: s, below.]
certified mail
provides the sender—Bullhead City Police Department—with a mailing receipt for $9.28 and an electronic verification that an 8×10 padded envelope was delivered; inside, I find two plastic bags: one with key rings to a mailbox and house and a key fob for a car, and another containing a cheap bifold wallet.
[see: w, below.]
demon
fiend, monster, diabolical tormentor;
our father, who drank cheap beer bought with rent money until he was sloppy drunk and cruel (why couldn’t he just put a lampshade on his head and tell dumb jokes like that lush on TV?); in the case of my brother: alcoholism, gambling, and the perennial avoidance of employment.
[see: g, below.]
edge
jagged, sharp, single-sided; on the brink, as in the precarious state right before something unpleasant occurs; a letter that arrives on my doorstep with a list of detectives investigating my brother’s claim that I poached from Mom’s estate; You’re a sad story, Sherry, and I hope you get the help that you need. Love allways, your brother (far from oblivious, in Arizona).
flies
winged insects of the suborder Cyclorrhapha, most likely evolved during the Cenozoic era; driven to lay eggs in decaying matter in order to provide their soft-bodied legless offspring a food source; a black curtain of them on the inside of the living room window of my brother’s mobile home.
[see: m, n, below.]
genetics
the study of heredity, or how the characteristics of living things are transmitted from one generation to the next; by which our father passed the monkey on his back to his firstborn son sixty-five years ago.
hyperthermia
a physical state in which the body can no longer release enough of its heat to return the temperature to normal; cause of death, according to the police report, which cites the temperature inside his mobile home as between 110 and 114 degrees.
[see: j, m, below.]
investigation
a systematic inquiry carried out to discover and examine the facts so as to establish the truth; How does a person remain in a body bag in the drawer of a mortuary for twelve months? What else is going on that I don’t know about?
[see: p, below.]
july
the hottest month in Bullhead City, Arizona, with an average of 112 degrees.
[see: f, h above.]
kafkaesque
surreal or nightmarish; the conversation with an employee at the funeral home who tries to explain why they filed for a “Special Administrative Appointment,” requesting $12,000 from my brother’s sparse estate. “You don’t understand the cost of preservation.”
[see: i, above.]
lament
mourn, grieve, weep, wail; not how I feel opening a bottle of wine at 2:13 a.m.
mobile home
able to move or be moved because it isn’t permanently grounded—though it has a mailbox where letters and bills stack up, a 1994 white Buick LeSabre in the carport, and a rock garden with driftwood from the Colorado River.
[see: u, below.]
neighbor
a person living near or next door, who is almost always better than their fellow neighbors believe them to be; a part-time resident who watches my brother pull weeds from his gravel driveway and warm up his Buick each morning before going to the store for a newspaper and bottle of booze; a good Samaritan who calls the police after seeing a mass of flies crawling on my brother’s front door.
[see: f, above.]
overwhelming
overpowering, paralyzing; the thought of tracking down his birth certificate from September 16, 1954, as requested by the funeral home, to prove that I’m his sister and therefore have the right to have him removed from the refrigerated drawer.
[see: i, k, above.]
perplexed
unable to grasp something clearly or think logically and decisively about it; puzzled, like when the Department of Code Enforcement explains that my brother’s mobile home has been taken from the property—“Neighbors complained of an odor”—and all of his personal property crushed by a giant claw before being dragged to the city dump.
question
what does this all mean?
[see: i, above.]
remembrance
the ability to bring to mind past experiences; things kept; recollections; blowups with my brother over our father’s ashes: Him: I want my half. Me: No way I’m dipping into the canister; our father’s ashes subsequently making a fourteen-hour Greyhound ride across state lines; my brother and I joking, after the fight, that we hoped Dad sat next to someone interesting.
[see: d, g, above.]
shame
remorse, guilt, regret; my soul slowly nibbling itself because I felt superior to my brother, because I own a permanent home, because I didn’t go see him in the last forty years.
truth
that which is in accordance with fact or reality; honesty, correctness, veracity; a certainty that his fucked-up life is somehow my fault.
underestimated
regarded as less capable than one really is; an assessment that is too low; I believed my brother lived in a trashy trailer park, but a satellite image shows a mobile home on a self-contained lot; a clerk at the county assessor’s office says my brother paid cash for the property and owned it outright.
[see: m, s, above.]
value
the importance, worth, or usefulness of something; “Your value does not decrease based on someone’s inability to see your worth.”
wallet
a flat, folding holder for money, identification, and credit cards; the last of my brother’s life force, containing: a neatly-printed list of phone numbers, his Arizona driver’s license (height: 6 ft., 1 in., weight: 190 lb., expiration date: two months after his death), an Ace Play casino card (“real rewards for real people”), assorted business cards for taxis, and a library card, all bathed in the funky stench of cigarette smoke.
[see: c, above.]
x
in childhood, “XOXO,” and Xmas; in adulthood, the way to identify a person who is not known, not really.
yardstick
a barometer or touchstone; a standard for making judgments or comparisons; my brother’s report card: no marriage, no children, no life; I filled in the blanks with two daughters who slid class photos into birthday cards for their uncle.
z
alphabetical position 26; the final destination from A to Z; a vocal consonant shaped like the zigzag of our messed-up relationship; ceaseless battles to be kinder to each other, botching it up time and again; the last of our phone calls, It’s just the two of us now, sis.
[see: b, above.]
When Evelyn stood from the car, she wasn’t sure she was seeing what she was seeing.Her husband’s bald head, not just cresting over the tall backyard fence, but rising. And rising.“Terry?” she called out.He was on the trampoline. The one their son Marty had assembled for his kids when they came over and had energy…
Way back in the 1920s, cognitive psychologists sat us down and gently informed us that all of our memories were lies. Apparently our brains hadn’t been recording events so much as “reconstructing” likely scenarios in a pastiche of experiences, biases, and details borrowed from other memories, making us the unreliable narrators of our own stories.If…
It was the “we” part that made Fletcher nervous, more than the reference to a problem.There are many ways to deal with a problem—you could avoid a problem, solve a problem, drink a problem away, ignore a problem, kill yourself and duck out under a problem—but a coerced “we” is harder to get clear of,…