Author Archives: Qu Literary Magazine

9 January, 2017

ENJOY THE CLAMS

When Claire traveled, which she did often, she left a message in the bathroom of every hotel room she slept in, for the eyes of whoever stayed there after she had gone. She would write it on the mirror, in big letters, with a bar of soap, smearing the soap thickly onto the mirror, then gently cleaning most of it off, with the care and precision of an art historian cleaning a painting, or anyone cleaning something that actually mattered. When she was done, it looked as if there were nothing written on the mirror, but left behind was a residue that would be invisible until the next guest took a shower, filling the room with steam that revealed to him the hidden message. That person, whoever he was, would pull the shower curtain back and see what Claire had left for him to read.

Sometimes Claire would write just one word, whichever came to mind when she had the idea to write a word, like LIAR, maybe, or PONTOON, or NOUGAT, or RAPIST. 

More often, she wrote entire phrases, like LEAVE IT BEHIND and IT MIGHT BE BENIGN.

YOU KILLED THEM, she wrote on a hotel room mirror in Ann Arbor, to excite the conscience of whoever saw the words she wrote. Who knew? Maybe the next guest was an actual murderer. Maybe he would be moved by her message to confess his crimes to the authorities. 

He might be guilty of a figurative murder. Maybe he had killed someone’s hopes and dreams.

She’d had the idea to start doing this thing one morning in Sacramento, when she’d emerged from the shower to see streaks left in the mirrorsteam. The streaks she saw did not form words, they were mere streaks. But she formed words there, after searching online for the best method for writing words on a bathroom mirror that would be invisible until the onset of steam. The best method involved the use of soap, said the internet. And so she used soap.

The first words she wrote, in that Sacramento hotel bathroom, weren’t much to look at. She wrote CLAIRE RULES. 

It was the first thing she’d thought of, when she had the idea to write something. 

It did not communicate much. It communicated CLAIRE RULES.

She knew that sometimes the women of housekeeping must have cleaned her words off the hotel room mirrors by washing the mirrors as soon as she was gone. She also felt confident that at least some of the time they didn’t clean the mirrors. So often, when she stepped out of the shower herself, streaks were left there, providing no meaning but offering evidence that someone had touched the mirror with greasy fingers and the mirror had not since then been cleaned. 

At a Radisson in Cleveland, she left behind a mirror message that read, HOPE IS BAD, which she hoped would be seen by someone who knew a woman named Hope. It wasn’t what she meant when she first wrote it; she had only meant to communicate that hope is bad, not for any particular reason.

In the bathroom of a room on the 4th floor of a Hilton in Chicago, she was met with a mirror much larger than the ones she was used to. Surely, she’d thought, when she’d seen the hotel on her itinerary, there has been some mistake. This room is too much. It cost too much. Just look at this mirror. SURELY, she wrote on the mirror, THERE HAS BEEN SOME MISTAKE.

Claire traveled often. She had to, for her job, which was to travel to different offices across the country and hire people on behalf of whatever company had hired her to deliver the news. She was an intermediary, a middlewoman, a professional hirer. Her job was to give good news to people who needed good news—not to give them jobs, but to tell them they now had jobs. She was a messenger who only ever delivered one message, to many people.

She liked her job. She got it when the recession ended, just as she finished college and people started getting hired again, usually for less money than they’d made when they lost their jobs at the start of the recession. 

She never thought for very long about what message she would write. It would have been contrary to the spirit of the thing. She had to write the first thing that came into her mind when she saw the mirror, just before she wrote on it. If she did it any other way, it would mean that she was taking the whole enterprise too seriously. It would mean that what had started as a lark had become a hobby. 

Claire had no hobbies. Her only hobby was not about to be the writing of messages on mirrors that were meant for strangers she would never see.

And she wasn’t the only one who did this thing with mirrors. She learned as much after months of mirror writing, at a La Quinta in Kansas City.

She took two showers in every hotel room she stayed in: one as soon as she arrived, usually, to get the plane grease off her skin, the other the next morning, before she left to do her work and left on a plane later in the day, to whatever city someone was to be hired in next. 

In Kansas City, she was especially eager to leap into the shower, for a woman on the plane, or a man on the plane, had left some hand sanitizer on the handle of the door to the airplane bathroom, for the next plane bathroom patron to deal with. It had gotten on her fingers, on her way out of the facilities, and she was deeply worried that it had traveled to other parts of her body, when she later put her hand on her neck or her leg or her face. Claire was no germophobe; she was reasonable; but she had no proof that what had been on the door handle was in fact hand sanitizer. As soon as she’d felt something on the handle, she’d wanted to go back in and wash her hands again, and again and again, but another woman had already pushed past her and shut the door. 

JUST ENJOY THE CLAMS AS THEY ARE, the Kansas City mirror said. 

She hadn’t written it. She was not the author of JUST ENJOY THE CLAMS AS THEY ARE. 

What she had done, upon bursting through the hotel room door, was wash her hands for the second time since exiting the plane, and with the soap write EATING IS BAD FOR YOU, elsewhere on the mirror. She would have known it if she’d written EATING IS BAD FOR YOU and JUST ENJOY THE CLAMS together as a kind of if/then statement, like, as long as all eating is bad for you then you might as well enjoy the clams. 

She stood in the shower, dripping and watching the words slowly disappear from view as the steam left the room. As the words faded, her own body appeared before her in their place, fuzzy at first and then less fuzzy. She watched the words go for a long time, and she didn’t especially like to see her body, enough that before dismissing the idea as absurd she wondered for a moment if writing messages on all those mirrors across the country was a figurative way for her to write over the space where her body would otherwise appear, a means for her to claim authority over a space where she was otherwise faced with her lack of control, with her body the features of which she’d had no hand in deciding. 

In spite of the man she’d brought back to her room at a Holiday Inn in Seattle, three months prior, who behaved toward Claire as if she had revealed to him at last what a woman was, she did not consider her body to be something to admire. She felt strongly that her hips didn’t quite match her legs, and found she could not explain just what she meant by that in Seattle, to her gobsmacked admirer, who said her body was perfect, which made her laugh.  

She couldn’t explain to him what she meant; nor could she explain to herself convincingly the presence in the La Quinta of the words she didn’t write. 

Did someone else have the same idea she’d had? It was possible. It seemed likely that someone else would think, at some point, to write things on bathroom mirrors. 

It seemed less likely to her that whoever this person was would choose to write messages as nonspecific yet evocative as hers were. That’s how she thought of them, at least.

Did another guest write the other words? Was it a hotel employee who’d done it? Was the hotel itself sentient; had the La Quinta become self-aware, or been outfitted with an artificial intelligence that had predicted she would write something, not knowing what that would be, and preempted it? Was the place fucking haunted?

All of these things she considered as she dried off and wrapped the towel around her weird hips. As she continued thinking—something she did more or less constantly, even when she’d tried and failed to meditate, with that guy in Seattle the second time she went to Seattle, looking him up before she arrived, since she was going to be in town anyway—the words disappeared from what then appeared to be a plain mirror without any writing on it.

When she returned to the room, later that evening, after hiring an ecstatic man who overreacted to being granted a customer support position at a corporate headquarters where, without a college degree, he would never make more than $28,000 a year—$30,000 if he was lucky—the mirror still looked like nothing. 

When she emerged from the shower the following morning, no new words had been written there.

She bid them goodbye, and left for her flight to somewhere North Dakota, where a fracking company was hiring a new engineer. 

Engineers were the most fun to hire, because they rarely seemed very pleased to be hired. Almost to a man they were stonefaced, and they were nearly all men.

For another eight months, she continued to write messages on hotel room mirrors.

In that time, she stayed at 111 hotels in 28 states. She hired almost 200 people, and was growing tired of her job. As joyful a thing as it was to hire people, she was beginning to feel a little pointless, to feel somewhat or very purposeless, like a tool that was invented not because there was any need for it but because it hadn’t been invented yet. She felt like the human equivalent of a piece of metal that would help screwdrivers drive screws.

She felt also like a midwife who delivers a thousand babies but never has any of her own. After hiring so many people, she wanted to be hired herself. She wanted to partake in some of the satisfaction she saw on the faces of the people she hired. It had been long enough since she’d been granted her current position, she’d forgotten what it felt like.

Mostly, she wanted to get a different job that made more sense to her. 

She had asked men and women at the companies that brought her in why they’d bothered bringing her in, why they hadn’t just done the hiring themselves. 

It’s not hard to do, she’d said, imperiling her livelihood. You just tell them they’re hired.

Most of them said it was something they were required to do by their corporate higher-ups. Others explained that it was just better this way, that many of the people they hired wouldn’t be with the company long, and so if an intermediary did the hiring it would make the separation easier, later on. Not much later on. 

Having you here, said a man to Claire in Albuquerque, is like pulling off a Band-Aid. It’s always better if you can get Mom to do it. 

Claire didn’t like that the man had essentially just said that she was playing the role of his mother. There was nothing about it that she liked. But she knew she would never see him again. So, whatever.

She had had enough, by then, of the job and of the travel. 

It was no coincidence that she had gotten tired of writing messages on mirrors. Usually, now, when she looked at a mirror, she felt utterly uninspired. 

At a Holiday Inn in Columbus, she had written on a mirror I AM OUT OF IDEAS. 

Soon, somewhere in America, she would probably end up writing CLAIRE RULES again. 

At a La Quinta in Kansas City, the last La Quinta she would ever stay in for work, she wrote on the mirror EATING IS BAD 4 U. 

The news of Prince’s death had just arrived. She was trying to process it.

She looked at what she’d written, sighed, and took a shower. 

When she stepped out of the shower, minutes later, the entire mirror was covered with writing. 

Holy shit, she said aloud, brushing back her hair. 

DON’T TELL ME THAT EATING IS BAD 4 U, it read. JUST ENJOY THE CLAMS AS THEY ARE. The words overlapped in some places; it was a clumsy mess, up there on the mirror. 

But the message was clear.

The message that lay behind inside the written message grew even clearer, the longer Claire stood there, the more the words and the steam faded and her hips and the rest of her body grew less obscure. If she had stayed in this room three times in the nearly three years she’d had her job, and had written on the mirror on each visit, and hadn’t recognized the room on her return visits, and in all that time no one had cleaned the mirror thoroughly enough to remove the words she had written, then it was time to switch careers, to settle down and stop staying in hotels, or at least to find work with a company that would put her up in better hotels. 

There would be no tip for housekeeping that morning. As she waited for the Uber she ordered, she gave notice in a terse email to her supervisor, whom she had only met once, when he’d hired her. He had done it himself. The rest of the time, she had been on the road. 

She would travel to hire only eight more people in the two weeks that followed, at the end of which she would be done hiring people on behalf of the cowards who couldn’t face the temporary employees who didn’t know they were temporary. 

Her final mirror message, written in the bathroom of the apartment she moved into in St. Louis after quitting her job, because she had family in St. Louis, was written for herself. 

It was EGGENPLATZENSCHLATZ. It was a word she had made up on the spot, but she swore that when she found a job she wouldn’t travel for, except when commuting, she would decide what it meant. 

Or maybe she would have someone over. Maybe the guy from Seattle would visit, and he would take a shower in her rented bathroom, and see the message, and together they would decide the meaning of EGGENPLATZENSCHLATZ. 

It probably wouldn’t be the guy from Seattle. 

There was no telling what might happen, though, in St. Louis.

9 January, 2017

THE DIAGNOSIS

From the winter’s blue dark, the crows

floated in through the open window

where my mother and I slept in our shared bed.

They came and burrowed under the quilts,

one on my chest, embracing my heart.
My mother laid motionless. She did not cry

and in the blackness I strained to speak

but my breath froze in the glacial air.

I tried slipping out from beneath the cobalt weight,

as if this burden were a baby

nursing until desiccation.
Corvus lay atop me. Iridescent claws

clasped my sternum, tightened their hold.
Her shadowy feathers only ruffled in reposition

like a mother nesting on top of her clutch,

assiduous and de nite,

until something fragile finally cracks.

9 January, 2017

ONLY ONE

He’s the original Adam, cable-knit sweater pulled down

over his missing rib. He’s thinking about ending things

with Eve—not because he doesn’t love her, I mean God,

look at their history—but because he can’t remember

what it was like before he had this slack fleshy gap

in his bones, a tender fontanelle that seems to invite

every sharp counter corner and heedless bicycle handlebar

and other glancing jabs, like the absence of notches

on his bedpost and numbers in the little black book

with page after page of inkless lines. It prompts him

to prod the hollow lamella over his cartilaginous cage,

to wonder if this perpetual stitch will ever ossify

and heal the horrible discomfort of knowing

there is only one woman who was made for him.

9 January, 2017

GRANDMA CHINOOK

The weather forecasters called it an Arctic Dome, but those of us who lived in northwestern Wyoming that winter pronounced it colder than a well digger’s behind.  For seven days the mercury in our thermometer never ventured above zero, even at high noon.  Snow squeaked beneath our boots.  Ice draped windows so thickly one had to rub a viewing portal to the great white way beyond.

All of this was very bad news for me, the family woodchopper.  Our primary source of heat was a freestanding wood stove whose shallow breath warmed the living room.  A cast-iron cook-stove in the kitchen chased ice from the corners of that room.  Both ran on wood scavenged from the county dump where my little brother and I spent each Saturday loading our old Dodge truck with the detritus of other neighbor’s lives.  We scampered over frozen grounds like sparrows, snatching up wrecked floorboards, grizzled fence posts, and a variety of warped and weathered sideboards from fallen outbuildings.  Each evening I labored to transform the wood into firebox-sized morsels for our hungry stoves.

Thoreau wrote of his fuel gathering, “Every man looks at his wood pile with a kind of affection.”  I viewed mine with dread.  For the uninitiated, it’s important to know the difference between wood splitting and wood breaking.  Splitting wood is for those fortunate enough to possess the means to slice up logs or boards into woodbox-sized lengths, usually accomplished with a large, tractor-driven buzz saw or a chain saw.  This cuts across the wood’s grain, stealing its structural integrity.  One need only drive an axe-head or a wedge down into the pale meat of the wood to split it.

Breaking wood is entirely another matter.  Instead of going with the grain one must bludgeon the wood along its latitude where there is no predilection to cleave.  The cells interlock as a bulkhead, an impeccable feat of natural engineering to keep trees upright against whims of wind.  To my woodchopper’s chagrin, many of the timbers seemed designed also to resist my own terrible storm of blows.  A length of oak could seemingly transform the ruthless steel of the axe head to rubber. 

Night fell before I finished lugging buckets of grain and water to pigs, chickens, cattle, horses, and sheep.  I scattered fresh straw for the animals to insulate themselves against the long sub-zero night ahead.  I then went inside for a last moment of creature comfort, turning my backside to the wood-stove.  Squeals and shouts from somewhere deep in the house told of my younger brothers and sisters at play.  Mom’s empathetic hand found my shoulder.   “It’s supposed to blizzard all night and maybe all day tomorrow.  The stoves will really gobble the wood.”

I nodded glumly.  The tall windows of the kitchen were black as carbonized wood.  Points of white flashed by like miniature meteors to signal that the advance guard of the big storm had arrived.

Alone on the edge of our hill, I was nearly blinded by snow driven from the north.  I needed shelter for my task so I commandeered a tin meter house we had hauled in earlier that summer from an abandoned oil field.  Six feet to a side, the shed nonetheless afforded me protection from stinging darts of snow.  I hung a flashlight from the ceiling with a corkscrew of baling wire and went to work in the jittery cone of light.  The first board was a ten-footer from an old granary.  The board stuck out through the open door and snow sifted in to flour me like a pan-fried trout.

The little room echoed with the whunk, whunk of the falling axe-head as slowly, very slowly, boards succumbed.  One piece of hardwood played hard to get so I attacked it with special fervor.  It broke with a sound of a donkey bray.  I pinned the remaining length with my boot and brought the axe down hard.  The axe-head caromed off the board and smashed sideways into my inner ankle.  I screamed every foul epithet in my lexicon while I rubbed the contusion growing under my skin like a summer strawberry.  

On and on I chopped under the pale light, my ragged breaths were spumes of frost filling the claustrophobic hut.  Ever so slowly the pile grew to fill my wood basket and I trudged through the icy veil toward the house, which appeared as a faint yellow blur–a lonely star fallen to ground.

Mom received me into the cozy kitchen, instructed me to warm up by the woodstove.  She pried up a stove lid over the firebox and stuck in several pieces of my newly chopped wood.  She took them right out of the box I barely had set down.  The wood lay in the bed of orange coals for seconds and then its pale flesh caught fire.  Every moment I stood there was witness to five minutes of my labor gone up the chimney in smoke.

“Okay–bring us more wood!”  Mom enthused.

I was a madman of axe-wielding intensity.  Steam gushed from my coat sleeves and collar.  My disappointment spoke for me and it was not a good advocate.   “How come you’re using it up so fast?”

Mom smiled.   “Hear the wind whistling down the chimney?  It’s sucking up heat like milk through a straw.”  An awful truth presented itself.  The fires were gobbling up the wood fast as I chopped it.  The night was deepening and the storm was getting worse.  The trek back out to the hut was interminable.  Wind slammed me and pelted my face with pellets hard as thrown rice.  The pile of boards was now a skein of snowy lumps.  Anger heated me from stomach to ears.  I yelled into the white night.  “This is nineteen sixty-SEVEN!”  I also wanted to shout that this is the age of Apollo astronauts circling the planet in spaceships.  Not to mention the age of people in town summoning warmth to their rooms with a mere twitch of a thermostat.

The next box took longer to fill because of the search to excavate boards from the snowy heap at the edge of the hill.  I arrived in the kitchen weary and chilled to the bone.   “Better get a hustle on, honey.  We’re almost down to the last stick.”  I dropped the box.   “It’s not fair!  Everybody else in here is nice and warm and I’m out freezing my a–”  Mom’s eyes widened and I throttled the expletive mid-tongue.

“It’s your job, son.”

“Yeah but Jim doesn’t have to do anything.”

“He has his chores, but he’s younger.  He doesn’t have your strength”

I recoiled at having my own qualities turned against me.  I sunk into self-pity cold as the drift just outside the back door.

“Why don’t we have natural gas heat like normal people?” I pouted.

“You know why, son.”

Yes, I knew.  We were poor.  Poor enough to qualify for government commodities.  There was no one to blame.  My stepfather, Bill, worked hard at the grain elevator for low wages.  He swept grain spilled from big trucks (more sparrow work) as they made the sharp turn into the elevator.  He brought home the sweepings to help feed our livestock.

“I’m tired.  I can’t keep up.”

“You have to. You know Bill’s back is out.”

There was nowhere to turn except toward the door to the blizzard.  I grabbed the empty wood-box and trudged back to my prison shed.  Snow was so deep I was forced to liberate the flashlight from its wire harness to search for likely boards.  I dug like a dog and finally found one.  I lugged it to the shack, re-hung the flashlight, and began to chop.  It was another ‘rubber board.’  I gave it a vicious whack only to be rewarded by a flash of pain in my left instep.  I threw down the axe and hobbled backwards.  My heel caught on the door threshold and I pitched out backwards into a pillow of snow.  I lay stunned, arms outstretched like a child making a snow angel.  Pellets of snow wedged under my eyelashes and flew up my nostrils.  I limped back into the shed and grabbed the board, enraged sufficiently to imagine snapping it with my bare hands.  I swung it wildly, heard it smash into the flashlight.  The stricken light fell to the frozen floor and went out.

I stood in utter darkness.  Blinked.  Experienced for the first time in my life utter despair.  I pictured the fires in the house burning low, winking out ember by ember until the fireboxes were graves of cold ash.  The house would grow colder, still colder.  Then, one by one, my brothers and sisters, my Grandmother, Mom, and Bill, would begin to grow drowsy with the onset of disaster.

I could manage only one cogent thought.  Escape!  Flee the scene.  Throw my fate to the prowling winds and predacious snows.  Suddenly, a ray of light illuminated my dark reverie.  A beautiful voice floated in on a tide of snowflakes.

“You about played out?”

“Grandma!”

Here she was, clad in her insulated jacket and pants with a wool scarf tied over her gray hair.  She handed me her flashlight and I secured it in the overhead harness.  In its glow my four-foot-ten inch Grandmother looked like a denim angel of mercy–which of course she was.

We quickly worked out a scheme.  I retrieved my flashlight to excavate boards from the snowy hillside pile.  These were brought to the little tin hut where Grandma made quick work of them.  Once, after I propped a cedar post inside the door, I stood and watched Grandma work.  Though she was nearly sixty years old and so small she was forced to chose clothes from the junior’s section of mail order catalogs, my Grandmother proved to me that night neither size nor gender have much to do with success in the Herculean art of breaking wood.

I observed this master at her craft and noticed that before she attacked the board with muscle and steel she studied it.  She rotated it in her gloved hands, examined one end and then the other.  She told me what she looked for in each board–the pattern of the grain.  She said this was to understand the way the tree had lived its life and responded to challenges and opportunities from nature.  A more open grain suggested access through a well-aimed axe blow to split even a “rubber” board along its length.  Hard wood thus could be reduced in girth to be more easily broken into stove-sized lengths.  Other boards revealed knots, birthplaces of branches that could prevent a clean, longitudinal split.  Grandma would sink the axe-head in the end of one such piece, and then propel the other end into a solid object.  This whiplash effect used the helpful physics of momentum to force the axe-head in deeper.  A few taps were generally enough to cleave the wood.  

And so it went.  Grandma rendered ‘rubber’ boards so handily I worked up a sweat ferrying them in from the snowy pile.  We worked for an hour, our rhythm broken only by my dashes to the house to unload boxes heaped with freshly broken wood.  When Grandma finally straightened up from dispatching her last board she announced we had enough stacked along the wall of the shed to keep the fires happy all night.  I stood close by my Grandmother, surveying the tidy stack of wood.  It was a miracle.

“You must be ten times stronger than me, Grandma.”

She chuckled.  “No, but I‘ve had a few years to learn the hard way and then the other ways to do this.”  

Before she returned home to her ranch in Montana a few weeks later, Grandma showed me how to use the head on my shoulders as well as the one at the end of my axe.  There were little things like clutching the shank of the axe at varying points to gain appropriate leverage, or sizing up each board to locate vectors of vulnerability such as dry rot or natural fractures.  There were lessons about feathering knotty wood to make kindling sticks, rather than expending energy to render such pieces for mature fire duty.  Finally, Grandma taught me about the importance of working hard on fair weather days to chop a goodly pile of wood as a reserve against the inevitable blizzard.

Years passed before I realized Grandma had taught me something else that frigid night.  She had helped me to gauge my own hidden textures and to learn the nature of my own grain.

There were moments during lonely afternoons of wood breaking when I encountered wood so resistant to my engineered blows I retired it for a day when it might be used as a pillar of support in an outbuilding.  Such inner strength, I reasoned, deserved more honorable duty.  It reminded me in turn of my Grandmother because she had become a pillar of my life education.  I was fortunate indeed to have her demonstrate skill and wisdom in action because it taught me that one might endure in the face of most any challenge–rubber boards or blizzards or storms of self-doubt.  That revelation, like a surprise Chinook wind, warms me yet, even on the coldest of nights.

9 January, 2017

THE FORTUNE TELLER

The ryokan owner brings our breakfast: morning kocha tea, loose, strong and floating in our own pot, rice bread two inches thick, our own orange toaster. My mother and I pick tea shavings from our tongues,

grasping at this needed taste,

nostalgia in silence, studying the Zen gardens in the courtyard, the sunlight,

the shadow-bodies on the balconies.

Then suddenly, the sound of her voice. “Don’t dump out the leaves,” she says.

“We can read them.”

A double clink as the liquid pours out, spreads over the saucer, squeaks drawn out with each turn, and then, brought to light.

(But where were these revelations before?) I’m straining to see stars, letters, anything in these brown constellations,

this new reversed sky of dark on light.

She peers into my teacup, her telescope, finding patterns. I study her bent head, redrawing maps in this moment, wondering at these opened routes,

this flush of enlightenment.

9 January, 2017

UNDERDOG SONG

Cicadas ambled

up the tree, branches

straining moonlight

on their glinting shells

left behind now,

clinging to the bark,

furrowed racetrack

abandoned for the air.

How the race

must have changed then,

above the squashed

red-yellow drupes. 

Think of the one 

who led, euphoric

in first place,

only to see another

soaring off, to hear

his taunting song—

or better, think

of the lowly underdog,

inches above soil,

and nearly giving up.

Perhaps he wondered,

I left the earth for this?

feeling strange

before the rupture,

the carapace

parting to expose

gossamer revelation.

Unfurled and flying,

he forgot the race—

said, No, no, 

this isn’t for me, 

said, No, no, 

I can sing like a saw.

9 January, 2017

BLIND DATE, PHILLIPS COLLECTION LUNCHEON OF THE BOATING PARTY (1880-81)

She is frightened. Surely,
something has happened. She has just come from somewhere
where something
has happened. Hands at her face,
holding her spinning head.

She is flushed,
pinch-browed, squinting hard out onto the water. She is
not alone: there are men

mere inches from her mouth, simultaneously shushing
and asking what has happened, shush, what has happened,

an arm around her waist, shhh, they don’t want answers,

they want an arm
around her waist, their beards by her hot mouth, and
yes, she is stammering,
but shhh, she
will not be for long,
this will blow over,
nothing has happened,
shhh, shhh, Jeanne, shhh—

One hundred thirty-five years later it
has not blown over,

the men are shushing still,
Jeanne, she is still frightened, something has happened, but
the museum guide will say the men “seem to be flirting”;

the museum guide
will not say
what Jeanne is doing,
or where she was before, or even that

something has happened

and when I, pinch-browed,
standing before the painting, spot her for the first time, I say
something has happened,
she is upset, and the man
mere inches from my mouth
turns from my pointing
and says,
Look at that adorable dog 

9 January, 2017

GARDEN PLANS

After the doctor
went over the scan
of her bulbous
right kidney,
I carried Mom home
on a jonquil-hemmed road.

I offered her water and dealt out
seed packets
like Tarot cards.

She selected arugula sugar snap peas
and white icicle radishes.

We decided to sow them on Saturday.

We’ll save spinach
and bok choy for August, I heard myself say.

She pursed her pale lips and attempted a smile.

And we both played along and made garden plans.

9 January, 2017

Jennifer Weiss

Jennifer Weiss is the Executive Director of The Hope Center at Pullen and an editorial assistant for Minerva Rising Press. Her poetry appears in the North Carolina Literary Review, KAKALAK, Minerva Rising, eno Magazine and Quatrain.Fish. She was a finalist in the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival 2014- 2015 Poetry Contest and the North Carolina Literary Review 2015 James Applewhite Poetry Competition. A lawyer and former North Carolina state representative, Weiss is passionate about reading aloud to children.

9 January, 2017

PHONE CALL

When the phone rang, Connie froze as if she’d been caught, her arm elbow deep in a family size bag of Skinny Pop. No one ever called Connie, and as she stared at the offending device she wondered, ironically, what type of person still called a landline. She ignored the jangling until it ceased and understood that this was a sign from whatever god was in charge to finally, two years after her mother’s death, get rid of the hard plastic touchtone with its clunky handset as her mother would certainly not be calling from where she was now. Just as Connie flipped the popcorn bag upside-down, yanking one side into a crease she would use to funnel the crumbs into her mouth, the phone rang again. Maybe it was her mother, calling from beyond the grave to remind Connie yet again that she needed to lose 20 pounds, that men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses, that Connie would die alone and unhappy.

When she leaned over the small table to unplug the plastic mouth of the cable from the wall jack, the telephone burst to life once more, screaming into her ear. She stared at it. Maybe something was really wrong. Mr. Bevel at the office always emailed if he had a problem or a question, but perhaps the building had burned down, the company had been sold, she was being let go. Connie reached for the receiver with a trembling hand and lifted it from its cradle with greasy fingers.

“Hello?” Her voice was a whisper, dust choked from lack of use.

“Edie?” 

“Who is this?”

“Edie, please don’t hang up. Please. Just listen. I’m really, really sorry. You know you mean everything to me. You have to forgive me.”

Connie’s heart thumped in her chest. She had never been apologized to by anyone, let alone by a contrite man.

“Why should I?” she ventured.

“I’m sorry. I will never do anything that stupid again.”

Connie did not recognize the voice but she heard the desperation, and it excited her. So this is what love did to you.

“Do what again?”

“You sound funny. Are you all right?”

“How would you sound if you’d been crying for hours?”

“Oh, Edie, please let me come over. I need to see you.”

“Not until you tell me exactly what you did. Everything.”

The ensuing silence produced a small panic in Connie; clearly Edie already knew what he had done.

“I want to put this behind us.”

“I can’t put it behind me until I know everything. All I know is…but I’m sure there’s more to the story.”

“There isn’t, Edie. It happened just once. At her apartment. I was drunk. It was stupid. I don’t even like her.”

Connie was speechless. Was this a teenager? A gigolo? A divorcee?

“I don’t believe you.”

“That it happened only once or that I don’t like her?”

“Both.”

“Please, let me come over so we can talk.”

“I’m too upset to talk.”

“I know you’re hurt. I promised not to bother you at work and I haven’t, but when you changed your number. Well, I freaked out. That’s when I knew I loved you. People don’t always arrive at love at the same time.”

“So you had to sleep with a bimbo to realize you love me?”

“No, forget about her. Please. I guess once I lost you—”

“How did you get my new number?”

“Promise you won’t be mad.”

“I’m not promising anything.”

“Josh. Last night at the bar. He was drunk and I was pathetic and he took pity on me. He agrees that we belong together.”

Connie wondered who Josh was, how drunk he must have been to convey the wrong number, what would happen when she was found out, though it didn’t matter. She would be getting rid of the phone, the evidence, anyway.

“I’m glad you’re feeling good enough to go out to the bar while I’ve been home crying myself a headache.”

“No, no, Josh felt sorry for me and took me out to get my mind off things. I had a terrible time. Until he gave me your number.”

“Why did you wait until tonight to call me?”

Silence. Connie wondered if she’d given herself away this time. Perhaps he worked the afternoon shift at a hospital and was just getting off, though that would not explain his ability to go out the night before. Maybe he was a freeloader who had relied on Edie’s money and was just waking up now.

“The damn project. But it’s almost done. Dave’ll be taking over next week.”

“You certainly found time to spend with…her.”

“I told you it was bad judgment. I was tired, drunk, stupid. And you were mad at me.”

“So it was my fault?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. Not at all. What I’m saying is that Janie is irrelevant here. She doesn’t matter to me. We don’t even speak anymore.”

Connie was now indignant on Edie’s behalf. Janie? The name alone made her furious. She thought of her mother then, eternally riding the spectrum from annoyed to incensed, and worked to channel her rancor.

“Well,” she said sarcastically, “that’s a relief. What about next time you’re tired, drunk and stupid, a combination you seem to have mastered? What then?”

“I love you, Edie. I don’t want to have a life without you in it.”

“Prove it.”

“What?”

“Prove you love me.”

“I’m trying, but you won’t let me. Look what happened when I waited outside your building. I won’t do that again.” He chuckled.

“You think this is funny?”

“If you call almost being arrested funny, then I guess so.” There was a pause, after which the pleading voice on the opposite end of the line said, “I know how upset you are. Changing your number, calling the police, threatening a restraining order. I get it.”

Connie wondered if the guy was a lunatic, a stalker, someone Edie had never loved, but then reconsidered. Edie changed her number after he had hurt her and as a result of feeling jealous. No, Edie had loved him, she decided, though she wondered if Edie had moved on, was now dating a man who sat with her on the torn cushions of the loveseat eating Skinny Pop while watching classic movies, a man who rubbed her feet despite their prominent corns, a man who insisted she wear her glasses while they made love.

“You don’t have to be near me to prove that you love me.”

“All right.”

“Write me a poem.”

“I thought you hated that romantic crap.”

“So now you’re making the rules? Now you know what I need? This is exactly what I’m talking about—”

“Okay, okay, I’ll write you a poem.”

“I want an original poem.”

“Sure. Of course. I will write you a poem tonight. Can I call you when I’m finished?”

“You’re going to finish it in one night? I’m sure that will be one deep and heartfelt poem.”

“My feelings are all on the surface now. I’m in touch with them.”

“It doesn’t have to rhyme.”

“Okay.”

But Connie did not want him to hang up. She wasn’t sure yet if she wanted this man and Edie to reunite or to be separated forever, but she saw an opportunity to influence someone’s life and enjoyed the heady feeling it gave her. Perhaps this is what her mother felt when Connie apologized, begged her not to be angry anymore.

“If your feelings are on the surface you can speak them now. In poetry form.”

“Boy,” he said, “you don’t even sound like you anymore.”

“You don’t believe this has taken its toll? After all we meant to each other? I mean, I thought we meant to each other?”

“You know what we had—have—is real. You know that I love you. Now you just have to let me prove it to you. I’ll write you a poem. I’ll take my time and make it perfect. But I need to see you, Edie. I love you. I miss you. I crave you.”

Connie went from feeling protective of Edie to feeling envious. She wondered who Edie was, what she possessed that made a man crave her. “Tell me what you love, what you miss, what you crave.”

“I love your eyebrows, the way you laugh when someone falls, your green lentil curry.” Suddenly Connie wanted to learn to cook. “I miss dancing in the shower and your jasmine perfume, I miss Ken.” Ken? A son? A friend? A ménage à trois? “I crave your supple tongue on my—”

“Well you can keep craving,” Connie interrupted. He had not earned the right to be so familiar with her after what he’d done.

“Meet me at Gould’s.”

“Now?” she said.

“Yes.”

She could hear the hope in his voice. Things were moving too quickly. “Things are moving too quickly.”

“Coffee. A quick coffee. That’s all. We don’t even have to talk about this.”

“I guess I can’t blow this off so easily.”

“Edie. We had something good. Something great. I know I have to win back your trust, and I will. I’ll do anything. I love you.”

“All right,” she said. “What’s my favorite candy?”

“Pop Rocks.”

Favorite food?

“Celery.”

“Guilty pleasure?”

“Godzilla movies.”

Favorite animal?

“Land, air or sea?”

This guy, this guy who asks Land, air or sea? in response to his girlfriend’s favorite animal question seemed to deserve something. 

“Sea.”

“Sand worm.”

Who was this woman? Connie wanted to know more about her, this person with compelling eyebrows who shared her feelings about sand worms.

“Favorite song.”

“Our song. Remember when we first met, how we spent hours texting these questions, how ridiculous they got?”

“Sing it.”

And without delay he launched into a wholly discordant rendition of “Auld Lang Syne,” stammering through the opening lyrics, which recommend that old acquaintances be forgot and never brought to mind. “That’s—”

“That was nice.”

“Not really, but thanks. Edie—”

“Here’s what you do. Write me a poem. Call it ‘Edie.’ Include the eyebrows and the curry, the shower dancing and the jasmine What the hell, throw in the tongue.”

“What about Ken? Does he miss me? Can you bring him to the phone?”

Connie realized she was gripping the receiver so tight her hand was sore. “He can’t right now.”

“Well, don’t wake him if he’s sleeping. Or is he in the litter box?”

A cat named Ken? Connie wished she had a friend like Edie and understood why the man on the phone was miserable without her. “Put him in the poem. Put Ken in the poem.”

“This will be too easy. You’re practically writing it for me.”

“I know,” Connie said. “Write the poem, buy some Pop Rocks and bring dinner to my place tomorrow night. Don’t talk about this phone call. If you bring it up I’ll act shocked, pretend it never happened. That’s how we start over. I mean, I will try and start over but I can’t guarantee anything. If I open the door just smile at me, though tears can’t hurt. Push past me if you have to and put the food on the table. Read me the poem, then look into my eyes and ask me questions: my favorite mineral, my favorite continent, my favorite constellation.”

Connie set the receiver gently into its cradle, running her palm down the length of the molded plastic before dipping her finger into the shallow valley of each button, the looped cord gathering beside the boxy relic into tidy pile.