Your social class has piano lessons as a feature of childhood.

And the lessons are meaningful.

They teach you about inequality.

Because piano lessons are a privilege of your class.

Why piano? I am sure you did not choose piano.

It is an impressive movable good: piano.

An heirloom: piano. A place to store your wealth.

And because skill at piano isn’t determined only by class.

If you practice, if you have decent teachers, you can get better at piano.

And there are levels of skill that can be attained, with practice, only by a few; for the rest of us, practice will not avail, lessons will not avail.

I was a child with this privilege. I could have gone further and learned more (I did not reach the limit of what I could have learned) but I could not have learned to play piano for an audience.

But piano lessons reveal their meaning only when people hear the difference between levels of skill.

Piano lessons are wasted if no one knows how the sounds of the piano ought to feel.

Ross, do you know this?

You want to say that Stevie Wonder’s albums from the early 1970s are “among the finest stretches of artistic production in history.”

In this you’re doing your job: finding resources for art in the music of the past.

You also want to say that “anytime someone says something stupidly categorical like that I always think what an asshole and stop listening.”

Because you are an ambitious poet, you can’t help making judgments.

Because your judgments interfere with other people’s ambitions, you can’t help feeling there is something wrong with judging.

Something unseemly, something insulting.

You said that you “give almost nary a shit” about the fact that people hate poetry. That can’t be right.

Because you wrote an essay about it.

Because you were replying to an essay by Ben, your contemporary, with whom you have been competing.

Because, you said, “I live in a Midwestern college town where once a month the line into the poetry slam at a bar actually wraps around the block and inside all variety of people share their poems to an audience of a couple hundred.”

You want poems to do something like the kick step in House Party.

You want to celebrate the dance and your skill in imitating it for the talent show in ninth grade.

You want to say you won with the kick step, but you want to say the school was right not to declare a winner.

“I agree with the middle school pedagogy,” you said.

No. That can’t be right.

If they don’t declare a winner, people aren’t looking at the same object.

They don’t see the kick step.

They don’t know what they are looking at.

The dancers know this in House Party.

Because the scene where they demonstrate the kick step has a tournament format.

—Now. This is very complicated.
—What are you doing?
—This ain’t aerobics class!
—You can’t do it!
—Is that a challenge?
—I think it is.
—You better come on out here.
—Come on, come on.

At the poetry slam, they know this.

Because they declare a winner.

That’s why the event is called a slam: they are fighting to sort out which poem is best, or at least which performance is best.

Stevie Wonder knows this. He knows how a song should feel.

“Just because a record has a groove,” Stevie Wonder sings, “don’t make it in the groove.”

“Time will not allow us to forget,” he sings, “Basie, Miller, Satchmo, / And the king of all, Sir Duke.”

Shakespeare knew this. He was a member of a society where whole classes of people wrote short poems.

Ariana, do you know this?

“I read the sonnets,” you said, “of Shakespeare today. Not all of them are great.”

This much is true: great sonnets are in short supply, even in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

The great ones depend on the less great ones. And the reverse.

Because they are watching each other and competing with each other.

That’s sweet.

It’s suitable for a talented poet to challenge Shakespeare. To try to invent more interesting solutions than Shakespeare found in the sonnet form.

Don’t use what Shakespeare left unachieved to justify your commitment to dissolute living!

Subscribe now

NORTHERN

Snap. The wooded fire
of red. Orange.
Sift-air sifts
through the branches.

ALBION, ID

Green, the valley into duller hills whose jutted rock
shows slower time. The dipped sun
whisped by fraying clouds, curved toward
deeper sky.

Below.

Cattle graze what the machine has mown.

Subscribe now

Irene wanted resurrection. It didn’t seem like too much given the state of things. The state of things was that for a long time she had been in bed. She was told that if she moved, something inside her might burst. And then there was Pollard. The state of Pollard was that Pollard was dead.

“But how do you expect a resurrection without even a body here?” asked Reverend Slate.

An odd place to draw the line, Irene thought.

When he was alive, she had received visits from Pollard on Sundays and Wednesdays. Mostly he sat bedside, eating the hot meals he brought and growing increasingly bothered. Irene tried to calm him down. She told him his head was like an apiary, like a box with slats and bees inside. He talked about riding bulls. Bull riding was his purpose, he told her, his calling, and sometimes he listed everything it would take to achieve his goals. It was not only staying on the bull, he explained, it was matching the bull’s movements with your own. When he wasn’t talking about riding bulls, or denouncing the many people who did not support him in his calling, he sometimes read to her from the scriptures, a thing he seemed to think was part of his responsibility being there.

Her body was beyond saving, and her soul, such as it was, was a flickering thing. She could feel the bones in her legs beneath the blanket. She could feel the blanket on her bones. She hoped only that she might evacuate her body, bit by bit, until there was so little of her left that the body could die while she looked on idly. She wanted to abandon her body, to move discreetly away like she had once moved when she was still young and lovely, her legs, incomprehensible, carrying her silk-footed across the cracked back porch, down the steps, into the alleyway lined with garbage cans and rosebushes.

Pollard told her who was having babies and who was getting married. He held pictures of smiling families in front of her face.

Sometimes she woke to Pollard’s chest as he reached across. “Oh,” he would say. “I thought you were asleep.”

She could not remember when he first arrived, or how long he had been visiting. He came on Sundays and Wednesdays, but the days were wobbling. Tuesdays and Thursdays seemed to have disappeared entirely.

“Don’t put yourself out on my account,” she told him more than once. “I’ll call if I need anything.”

If he heard, he ignored her. He was still there, and when he wasn’t there, she sometimes wondered if it was him around the corner in the next room mumbling.

“You have as much to offer me as I have to offer you,” he told her. “And I don’t say this to just anyone. I don’t want you thinking this is the sort of thing I do, say this kind of thing to just anyone I visit. I am generally a very closed-off person.” This last thing he said like it was a thing once told to him that he was now repeating.

There was a window beside the bed and when a fog settled over the yard, Irene could hear the clip of her mother’s sharp voice arriving as it would arrive through a fog. Come along and stop dawdling, and following the fog’s retreat—her mother’s voice guiding her—Irene was led to the lake not far from the country house, where the fog settled on the water like a plume of smoke, and there, standing in the lake: her mother, the image of a woman from a storybook, a distant woman, a wax statue with button eyes, mossy stones for waders weighing down the hem of her skirt as she washed cabbage and carrots in the steaming green waters.

She had done it, Irene thrilled. She had died without fear, without knowing she was dying, and now her body was gone, good riddance, away, and she had found her mother’s second body in the lake, and in the fog, surely, her father too and all the rest of them waiting.

But then she felt his hand on her arm and smelled Pollard in the room and knew she had only closed her eyes and that it wasn’t over yet. And it wasn’t even Pollard—Pollard was dead. Pollard had beaten her to it. “Irene,” Reverend Slate was saying. “Did you hear what I said? There are others who can come visit you. You won’t be left alone.”

When she was young, just a small girl in the basement of the church, a boy had come to her and asked if she wanted a touch from God. She said yes. The boy said for her to lift her dress and show her stomach. And so she did. She felt a rush of blood in her cheeks because she knew what she was doing was untidy, but she couldn’t help herself in case the boy had some secret knowledge. The boy bent while she stood with her back to the cinderblock wall, pressing herself against the drawings of green and blue crosses on sheets of white paper taped to the wall, hosts of angelic forms hovering over scribbled mangered babies. And though she couldn’t see him, she felt the boy blowing a thin stream of air over her belly. She imagined his puckered lips. She felt warm all over. She imagined him imagining the Holy Spirit riding on his breath. When he stood, the boy was radiant.

“Did it work?” he asked eagerly. “Do you feel any different?”

Yes, she told him. She felt new.

“But how will we know?” the reverend asked. “How will we know without a body here?”

She could hardly stomach this man. They would know when Pollard returned, of course. When, on Sunday or Wednesday, Pollard strode once again through the door looking at least alive, with slight traces of the afterlife behind his eyes. That’s how they would know.

“Father,” the reverend prayed, and she felt his clammy hand on the back of her own. Maybe this was all others wanted, she thought, to be appeased, to be clammyhanded and held, but what she wanted had nothing to do with that. “Father,” he prayed, “we ask that it be done in accordance with your will—” It was like sitting with wet bread, his words like soggy bits of it dissolving on the surface of the water.

As far back as she could remember, Irene had a way of distinguishing souls. There was this life, and there was the next life—both of which received too much attention, she thought. Not enough attention was paid to the life between the two, the place where souls stayed.

Pollard’s soul was chalky and strained, with marks like pin knots all over it that would easily cave if pressed. His soul was like a crumbling, misshapen fingerprint cookie. That’s how she thought about it in physical terms.

On one occasion, he brought her pictures of a bull. “See this here,” he said, pointing to the upper foreleg. “1,700 pounds of muscle.” A real honker, he called it, a head hunter. The bull was named Two Places At Once. Irene looked at the pictures as he held them in front of her. The bull’s hide was white all over with golden shades, vicious little horns curved down the sides of its massive head. A fatty mound rose between the bull’s shoulder blades. The slanted, almond eyes of Two Places At Once were tired and resolute, and the patch of hair between the eyes was darker and curly and more golden than the rest of the bull’s pale body.

“Feel this?” Pollard held her hand against his arm where the muscle, beneath his shirt and his skin, formed a small fibrous hump. “I stayed on for ten seconds,” he told her.

It took great effort to get the reverend to understand what she wanted. “Oil,” she said, stretching the single syllable into two, and after repeating it like this and repeating her instructions, he rose, finally, and brought her a cup of cooking oil from the kitchen.

Sometimes, when Pollard was cruel, moving her too roughly, tucking her sheets tightly beneath the mattress, flattening her legs to the bed, she would look in his eyes and see many other souls mingling with his, and she knew then that he was not looking at her alone, that many others were with him, watching her in the bed, watching her and daring her to keep on living a little longer, looking at her from a place without good footing, these other souls mingling with Pollard’s soul and all of them on the verge of slipping and falling away.

The cooking oil was yellow and sludgy in a clear glass jar. “Is that all?” the reverend asked, and Irene waited for the click of the latch before she tilted the jar so that the viscous, yellow surface of the oil broke into a stream over her cupped palm, coming faster over the lip of the jar than she’d anticipated.

Not having a body to anoint or anywhere sensible to spread the oil, she drew a sign of the cross in the air with her thumb. The oil was running down her wrist and across her forearm. Oil drops stained the bedsheets green.

When she had done it and chosen words that matched—as nearly as she could remember them—words spoken in the scriptures—she lowered her hand to the mattress.

No tongues of fire, no winds. If it worked, and Pollard returned, he’d be in no shape to ride. He’d be weak, undoubtedly, and what kind of life would that be?

Irene folded the sheets below her knees. She looked at her skinny legs and, with the aid of slippery hands, lifted one after the other and slid them over the edge of the bed. To the window, to wait.

Then there was light—too much of it. Everything in the room bright and swimming, stabbing light like a new kind of darkness, glittering at its edges, throbbing and distorted. She steadied herself on the table—on her knees now—next to the bed, feeling for the window sill. A clap of thunder, a descending cloud, waiting for the trees to catch on fire or for the ground to shift beneath them, the rush of a hawk or an owl’s wide wings approaching, anything like this would do, but all she heard was the clattering of the jar and something else falling—the clock maybe, a soft thump. The leftover oil pooled at her knees, darkening her gown. She heard the sound of the door behind her and turned, dazed, half expecting Pollard to come through the door dressed however he’d been dressed for burial, or if not Pollard, her mother then, with stringy wet carrots hanging at her side, her father even, his shirt unbuttoned to the waist—but there was no one at the door and the room was empty and dark. The walls of the room were untrustworthy and cut off from one another. The only light was the light from the window and the fog out the window pressed toward the house. Somewhere within the fog was the swaying form, dashed white against the white fog, trudging unhurried beneath the indifferent weight of its immense muscled body—Two Places At Once. It stood in the fog watching the house with beady almond eyes, its pale flanks wet with water and dripping.

Subscribe now

The tourists who come

Didn’t come this year

The restaurants are empty

The motels are vacant

The water on the lake is still

In the park, a passing Accord says

What we’re all thinking:

What y’all really want

*

But all this is subject to change

The length of a day

The size of a tee

The quality of methamphetamine

The love, and not love

Made within us

*

The sound of a fist on a man’s face

Is the body’s great gift

It’s hard to believe—like fear

You watch the energy ripple

From fist to cheek

From fist to rib

From sun to earth

Body to mind

And back to body

The book of today wasn’t written

But now it is:

Two cousins, heavy and red

Swollen fruit

Oozing on the ground

*

In a world without heaven

The body forsakes the mind

So the mind jettisons the self

Church bells ring through the woods

But do they move the trees?

Do they cause the birds to cry?

Wander within yourself

And see the people kneeling

See how few answers our dreams contain

*

In college, I learned big words

Then we’d give each other

Black eyes for fun

The assigned texts asked

Are men forged in strife?

Or self-directed leisure?

But who maintains

The great ledger of our lives?

Us?

Or the seven men

Standing around a rotted picnic table

At the edge of the park?

*

You might ask how I know

The two men are cousins

And the answer is—

I just do

The tall, thin one walks around

But the younger, heavier one

Doesn’t get up

He stays down, dirty and defeated

Spitting rehearsed threats

Mirrored, catalogued

And carried over to his new form

*

But the self, so long composed

Won’t return on its own

Not that easy—

Ask the heart, ask the body

Ask the mind

Real men don’t know what they want

*

They say if men move as water moves

And the lake is still

Their energy produces a film

A face can be opened

And a face can be closed

Trapped in this thought

God’s not dead

But he is getting older

And he was never young to begin with

*

Some men finish what

Other men start

And some men love to start over

Look close enough

And the edge of the park

Has everything in it—

A tree, a rock, an old boat

Battle hymns rattle the bandshell

With no one listening

The seven men turn blue

And the air turns green

A new shadow raises

Its hands in victory

Subscribe now

Shuffling this width of white
We are and must be hush
Mustering some private word
Up the tender steps of porch
Your living cheek melts life
From faces on the running flake
In glass a shape grows to the door
Mother willing there in wait

Subscribe now

Amid the holiday bustle of an outdoor shopping center, Sister Agnes stares up. Layers of interlocking metal shopping carts forming the shape of a Christmas tree tower above the busy shoppers. The weighty monument commands the otherwise stark space.

“That’s disturbing,” Sister Agnes adjusts her veil as she nudges the sister next to her.

Sister Faith gazes at the work of art for a moment and then agrees, “Yeah, that thing could come toppling down on us at any moment.”

Sister Agnes laughs. “That’s not what I meant.”

Sister Faith pauses. “Oh . . . I see what you mean.”

Several other sisters exit a nearby ice cream store, cones in hand. They join the two sisters gazing up at the metal tower. Everyone else quietly concentrates on their ice cream. Some take pictures of their perfectly sculpted ice cream scoops for social media until their ice cream melts over on their fingers.

Sister Edith points upward at the garish Christmas tree sculpture.

Several sisters look up and grimace at the stacked, shackled metal carts pointing heavenward.

Sister Edith frowns, then laughs.

A stream of raucous laughter escapes from the briefly-opened doors of a nearby bar. Several sisters turn their heads. Nearby shoppers look curiously at the group of young sisters, their habits a shock of blue amid the gray stores around them.

The bar door slams again, but it does not quash the laughter this time. A group of men in muscle shirts and the glitter of gold on their necks noisily makes their way down a ramp into the common area. The sisters are now debating whether mint chocolate chip is better than birthday cake ice cream. The men eventually regard the women with a cool, silent stare. Then they huddle together. After some whispered discussion, one of them begins to remove his shirt. He is short and muscular, his chest covered with tattoos.

The man springs toward the sisters and crouches down behind them. Inches away from Sister Edith, the half-naked man grins viciously. In his hand he holds a stiff, half-circle fan of hundred-dollar bills. The air in the shopping plaza sparks with tension. A few bystanders sitting on benches nearby no longer conceal their interest. While “Holly Jolly Christmas” crackles over the loudspeakers, all eyes rivet on the crass unfolding scene. The man notices the attention and physically deflates for a moment but then raises his chest, avoiding the sisters’ expressions. “Come on, take the picture,” he shouts to one of his friends. The man’s friend laughs uncomfortably as he frames the scene. The group of sisters look stunned and upright like tapers in a candelabra.

Then Sister Agnes shoves her chair back and roars, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

The half-naked man blinks several times. He is still crouching, gripping the stiff green pieces of paper. Avoiding Sister Agnes’ eyes, he yells insistently to his friend taking the picture, “Come on, man!”

Sister Agnes turns and scowls at the photographer and the group of men behind her. They look away and then down at the ground. Her face shining like a Christmas star, Sister Agnes walks toward the crouching man.

“Okay, man, I got it,” the friend with the camera yells anxiously.

Satisfied, the shirtless man tucks the bills in his pocket and begins to walk back to the group of men. Hunched over again, he mutters something beneath his breath.

Sr. Edith remembers how her mother used to arrange the shepherds and wise men in a huddle in their family nativity, as if they were whispering secrets to one another. Sister Agnes’ cheeks are flushed red like two Christmas baubles. The metal shopping cart tree glistens behind them like an intricate altarpiece.

Subscribe now

Blues Clues
(Under every rock I turned I found God)

Open my heart that I might love
And my mouth that I might sing of it
Open my soul that I might live
And my hands that I might give of it

Escape Me

First thing
Identify the killer—They are the key
Love them to Death,
Where you are free.
Now In the valley,
Ever Alone
Ensure you are safe from yourself.
Pull the sword out and break it
Like bread
Into a million pieces.
Hide each one in a friend
Until We hold a rose in common.
The petals return
To You, The Focal Point
And surround you,
complete.
Eventually
you remember me
Seeing you,
Perfect.

Atlas

It did not resemble my father
As nothing did
My father sparkled
Yes, like the sea
And He drank the whole thing
That my path might be dry

Subscribe now

*These poems appear in Bunny’s new collection Sadly Glass, now out from Cycle Press.

You’re thinking of the feeling flown
When language asks and asks.

You’re thinking of the knowledge
Won by every Godknown loser,

Coin sun in the pupils of
Albino children in Nagpur,

Orangutan’s fun hour on
The rainbow tower puzzle.

This isn’t about parentage,
Porn, or Eden’s watershed.

Molars soft with chocolate,
An ivy swallows up your door.

Subscribe now

They want me to be
the dark, wild songs of childhood.
And I loved those songs, I loved

that infinite singing.
I loved to set my locked-barn heart
on fire, all the horses tossing in their halters. I loved

to hear the moon inside the moon.
Friends, I have found out
the secret. I am powerless

as the river is
in flood-time, changed
by the work of its becoming, going

where it has to go, in coldness.
My loves, my dust, my no one,
I kneel now

in the dark of the cathedral
of all the absences in my little life
and I hear it now, the work

that I was made for. I hear
it now, the god
inside the moon.

Listen. Come near to me
and listen. I promise, I swear
this is the mystery:

There are the first, wild silences of childhood
that break us
with the weight of them, the staying,

and the song we sing
to hide those wild silences,
and the final song, the greatest song

of all of them, the one that comes
so clear and lived and simple
it makes the silence stay

until it changes, and it knows
no ghosts, and opens, opens wholly,
and blooms like things with nothing left to prove.

Subscribe now

Let’s not get into whose father’s face he had,

or how sunset through the spare trees

lit the oak-panelled bar so splendidly

a tin spittoon japanned with roses

became a flowerbed with dirt and bees,

match cut to a dream sequence of harps.



The sheriff is gut-shot, doomed, just strong enough

to whisper who made off across the blue plains

on two paperweights thumping a phone book

(a ring of house keys for stirrups and spurs),

towards a camp of crinkling envelopes

and not steak, but its sizzle for rain.



The undertaking takes place off-screen:

sponge and bucket, lather and straight edge.

Since no one ever sees the craft, there’s no point

pretending my razor isn’t real and sharp.

Where wind concentrates in the churchyard

I use shovels and earth for shovels and earth.



This is how it goes: one day you’re the sheriff

running wide-sleeved card cheats out of town,

golden hour elbowing the swinging doors.

Meanwhile over the ridge, a weather system

of opening credits rolls across the sky.

Your life, you learn too late, is backstory.

Subscribe now

The following is an excerpt of the novel PAN by Michael Clune, which he read at our Cluny Journal event in Chicago, IL in April. PAN is available now from Penguin Press.

Home? Mom’s house was far more exposed to impermanence than Chariot Courts, even including the dire prophetic open spaces of the neighbor. The idea that in returning to Mom’s house I could be returning home was a satire. It was a satire on the very idea of home. Mom’s house was like a theater in which my essential homelessness would be broadcast through every level of my being. Chariot Courts may not have been a home. But it was at least a deferral of the question. Its shapes—the thin walls, the cheap furniture—an evasion of the revelation of homelessness.

But this danger to my condition wasn’t something Dad could see. It wasn’t on the surface. You had to live at Mom’s house for at least a week to understand. And Dad had forgotten. The world of suburban adults didn’t offer a vocabulary for understanding the uncanny desolation of Mom’s house. And so he forgot. Now, years later, he couldn’t see any reason why I wouldn’t want to live there.

On the contrary, he could, if asked, point to many alluring features that made Mom’s house appear far more homelike than Chariot Courts. First, her house, a stand-alone residence, was much bigger than Dad’s. It had real wooden floors in the living room and hallways. It had a separate dining room, a living room with a stone fireplace, lots of windows. A vast yard—nearly two acres. And a brick pathway that led from the driveway to the front door. To the casual observer, the place emanated spaciousness, privacy, rest, elegance.

Dreamless sleep.

But appearances deceive. For instance, when you first drove up, you didn’t realize that the yard was completely treeless. Rows of trees screened each of the neighbors’ houses, another line of trees demarcated the back of the property. There seemed to be plenty of trees around. But in fact the house and yard sat atop a completely treeless hill.

The consequence was that there was nothing to stop the wind. Standing outside, it blew the words back into your mouth. It dried the tears on your face. Inside, it spoke all night and day in three syllables: the scream, the whine, and the thump.

Viewing the property from within a car with windows raised, Dad didn’t experience the wind. Still less could he understand that the wind—bad as it was—actually served to conceal the very worst thing. The worst thing was always there, but you only came to know it when the wind stopped, something that happened maybe twice a day.

When the wind stopped you heard a highway.

At first, you’d think you were hallucinating, that your mind was manufacturing the sound of traffic out of the unfamiliar static of windless silence. No highway, after all, was visible. You could even go to the trees at the back of the property and peer through. All you’d see was the gentle rise of another hill.

But eventually, through intermittent spells of windlessness—accumulating over a period of weeks or even months—your ear would begin to pick out traffic sounds that you knew your mind couldn’t have invented. The muted, distant, high-pitched grind of an accelerating motorcycle, for instance, rising through the dull roar of traffic, then dropping back.

There’s nothing in my mind like that, you’d think. If I was imagining a highway, I wouldn’t imagine that.

Soon you’d start to hear the highway through the wind.

So I’m hearing highway sounds, you’d think. So what? Route 94 is somewhere nearby, maybe half a mile away. Over that hill perhaps. Maybe a little closer than a half mile. So? Ignore it. Get used to it.

But it’s like getting used to the tiny chunk of unidentifiable brown matter that drops into your glass at the restaurant. It’s much too small to make a fuss over, and anyway, the drink already dissolved it. What are you going to do, demand a new drink? Because of something no one can see? Raising your voice at the waiter, while your date eyes you, clutching her purse…

You take a sip. It doesn’t taste any different. Does it? Maybe it does, a little. Well, but you don’t feel any different.

Do you?

Maybe you do, a little. So you don’t take a second sip, and you don’t ask for another drink, and you have nothing.

The sound of the highway was like that. Something you think you can get used to, but actually you can’t. It was like an underground river, undermining the foundations of the property’s claim to seclusion, respectability, and permanence.

Everyone has seen and pitied those who live directly on a major interstate highway. The tiny houses, the open yards. You drive past them—the world drives past them—the highway is an element of speed, a conduit of distance—and here are those who have made their dwelling amid endless frenzied motion. The signs of middle-class aspiration—the porches, with metal awnings, the occasional above-ground pools. Tricycles. The small, open, treeless yard twenty feet away from an unending torrent of steel, a river of cold eyes.

The government aluminum chain-link fence between the houses and the road. And sometimes, a second fence. A heartbreaking fence of white pickets laid down three feet from the government fence. The highway breathes through it.

The highway. The ultimate public place of American civilization. Our plaza, our town square, our marketplace, our agora, our forum, our seashore. When we visit a city we pretend we are seeing the public, but the city is a quaint nineteenth-century picture of the public, in a yellowing photo album in an attic.

The Highway is the public’s modern presence. Each person enclosed in their speeding shell of plastic and metal, with the stereo and sometimes even the television turned on, insulated from the others. They see only the few shells around them, and they hear them not at all. They are inside the public place, but not of it. A dynamic paradox of our civilization. The members of the public, inside the public place, concentrate exclusively on private affairs.

But what of those just outside the public place? Those who live near it? They have no private lives. Their private lives are exploded—the public rushes through their conversations, their thoughts, their pauses, their perceptions.

And you, who are always in the public space or else so far away you can’t hear even a whisper of traffic—you who enjoy the expensive illusion of a closed interior, of a Home, you who think I am in here, and the People are out there, you who imagine that no one can hear another person’s thoughts, let alone drive through them by the thousands—you think you know what the public sounds like?

No. You can’t hear the sound of the American public on TV or the internet. Are you kidding? No one would willingly listen to it. No one can bear it. The sound of the American public is a deafening, monstrous roar, without syllables, without pauses, without increase or decrease. It is the constant bellowing and thrashing of a beast.

The beast is People. The People. Then thousand times more of them than you can talk to on a megaphone. Forget trying to talk to the People, no one does, no one can. The People can’t even see you. You are nothing. The People move at a different speed, occupy a different time. You’re like a single frame of a film.

No one can see a single frame of film, not even subliminally.

That’s what you are when you live by the highway. You are a single frame of film. You see your nothingness glinting off the scales of the People as they slide by roaring. And when you close your eyes you hear your nothingness as a space the People roar through.

The trees at the back of Mom’s property. Nature is a thin crust around the People. The People is the total monster. The People is time. The People are there in your body too.

Sleep is a highway.

Sleep is a public place, it is a highway. Now—standing on Mom’s property that very first day and remembering how to listen, catching the knack, hearing the highway inside the wind, it’s like riding a bike—I understood. I understood why for me the fear of almost falling asleep always took the form of the fear of being hit by a speeding car.

At Mom’s house, when the wind stops, you hear what is always there: the sound of the highway. It is very soft. Soon it replaces silence. It becomes what silence is in the richer suburbs: the background of your life, the place from which your breaths arise, and to which they return.

Subscribe now

Buy PAN here.

where once was three / now is but only two / where once was we / now is but only you - “Walk Through the Dark” by Pajo

I rush to pack up and leave to beat the weather.

The news said tornadoes, all over the place.

The dog watched me. He didn’t know. I put him in the car, went back into the lobby, filled two paper coffee cups with hot water and left—I had some instant coffee in the car.

When I saw a gas station that I felt like I had time to stop at, I did. I got ahead of things so far. I parked at a pump facing the road. And when I walked into the store, I noticed the back of the truck. The tailgate was wide open. Had been for a hundred something miles and nothing had fallen out. Not the dog’s food, not my bag, not the weights I brought along for exercise. At least twenty over up some long hills and no other car had tried to warn me. No one flashed their brights, honked, pulled up next to me and shouted signaling to the back or to put my window down or to pull over. I couldn’t believe it. I shut the tailgate. I opened it again and slammed it. I looked up and I said, Thank you.

The dog started barking, like he was saying, Relax and cut it out.

I shushed him. I said, We’re alone in this world! I said, Okay, one second.

I came out of the store with fresh Mississippi milk for him. He didn’t want any water earlier at the hotel and he never said no to milk. I didn’t want him dehydrated. We had a lot of driving ahead. I didn’t know when we would stop.

I had to go back into the back of the truck. The dog watched me from the back window. I had to open the tailgate to get his bowl. He drank up all but two tablespoons of milk. I said, Come on, finish it.

He looked at me, Yeah, right. He curled up.

And again we headed out.

Almost immediately we drove past three cows walking together up a hill under a gray-bright sky.

Lookit—cows, I pointed them out to the dog and he got up to watch them.

When I see things like that, I miss him. We’d seen an owl cross the front of the truck. And a puppy sitting at the edge of driveway-rain stained red from the clay. It was watching cars. It was a small, fast road.

I couldn’t and still can’t believe how long it’s been. The day before, things seemed hopeful, and the next day we walked into the room, all the machines beeping like they always did. But this time they prepared us for goodbye.

And I’m always thinking about him. I say hi. I leave him notes. I leave him things in places. I don’t think I’m living as good as I can for him. But I’m trying, I think.

It’s been an uphill thing everyday and I try to imagine that moving uphill gets me closer.

And I try not to think about how no one gets it. Because even if they did it wouldn’t fix it. I wonder if the other babies’ families saw the priest come up and go into our room through pulled-closed curtains. I can imagine any number of their thoughts.

I’m worried that my dad is sad because of what happened to me, that he’s afraid to talk to me because it gets him down.

And that gets me down.

I’m honest about how I am when he asks but I always try to follow it up with something trivial.

Talk about the dog moping around. Whether he’s really moping or if he’s just being dramatic. He’s a funny dog, I tell my dad. And he agrees.

Or I bring things up like, You notice that commercials haven’t changed much in twenty years? Plaque brushed away easily or more efficiently than other leading brands? Ibuprofen capsules dissolving even faster for even faster relief, breaking open, gel or granules rushing out? I keep seeing them on the hotel or motel TVs.

He’d told me he had to sell his truck. Transmission issues. Got a great price to sell it so we did, he said, I’ll miss it. I could tell he was sad about it. I was sad about it too. I remember the ride back home. 21.8 miles.

When he calls me I don’t tell him where we are.

I tell him how many miles we’ve done so far that day.

I say, Of course we’ll come by when we’re up there.

But sometimes I feel guilty and I’ll give him a rough idea. I say things like, In one of several Henderson Counties, I saw a red-headed woodpecker.

Which is true, but it was just a glimpse.

I said, Hi, buddy.

And the dog got up from his nap. I snapped, Not you. Then I said, Sorry.

Thousands and thousands and miles since.

Time moves in such a terrible way. Here we are still moving through. I keep looking at the odometer. As long as I didn't accidentally reset it, we’d have the means to measure differently and could fall out of time. Well and I know what mile we started on, so as long as I knew where we were at, I could do the math and go from there.

I know, right now, it’s been 23,126 miles since.

The dog’s good in the car. He likes to look out for cows. He likes to get little bowls of milk from the store. I like to listen to the way talk radio changes from place to place and think about that old trick, driving in reverse to rewind the odometer.

And I’m thinking about it now.

I pull off and head back the way we came. To an empty parking lot that we passed a little while ago.

I note the number on the odometer, shift the gear into reverse, look over my shoulder through the back glass, and go.

Subscribe now

1

Choo chooo—the train conductor!
Oh no! He has searched me out!
I do not care! I’ve crashed around on the tracks behind me,
And I will crash around on the tracks in front!
Maybe he found me splayed out like a slob,
my feet up where they shouldn't be.
But when he leaves the car again he won't know what I do with my feet at all.

2

“If I take wing with the dawn
And come to rest on the western horizon,
Even there, Your hand will be guiding me.
Your right hand will be holding me fast.”1

But God, how I want to be known,
To be expected,
To be something you have faith in.

But I am voiceless, stopless,
I can not disembark myself.
I can only wave from the window.

Goodbye—did you see me?
Goodbye

3

“Know that sometimes there are men who choose death because they wish to escape this wretched earth, which first bears us but then devours us.” 2

And what if there is blood on the tracks
In some cities it is common practice
For those who do not wish to ride
To instead hurl themselves before a moving train.
And when they do, train service stops
Sometimes for several whole hours—

Subscribe now

Imagine a guy in the mafia called “Smartphones.”

They call him “Smartphones” because he got made after stealing a bunch of smartphones off a truck.

Success came with all the usual perks for “Smartphones”: a new car, a new fiancé, and new respect from his peers.

Things move fast with the new fiancé, and soon “Smartphones” is getting married in a huge wedding in a beautiful church with all his friends and family.

A few weeks later, the feds bust “Smartphones” for stealing all those smartphones.

Turns out, he had been the target of an elaborate sting.

The authorities were not only aware that the heist was going down, but their agents had even taken actions to encourage “Smartphones” to “mastermind” it.

With “Smartphones” facing a huge prison sentence, the feds try to get him to flip.

The feds tease him during their many attempts to interrogate him by calling him “Flip phone.”

But “Smartphones” doesn’t flip.

Repaying this loyalty, the mob arranges it so that several key witnesses in the federal case against “Smartphones” undergo mysterious accidents that result in their deaths before they can testify at his trial.

As a result of the weakened case, “Smartphones” ends up doing two years in prison instead of fifteen.

For the first few weeks of “Smartphones’s” prison term, he’s elated, but then he starts having trouble sleeping.

He eventually goes to see the prison chaplain about it.

According to the chaplain, the cause of “Smartphones’s” insomnia is guilt.

“Smartphones” feels bad about the innocent witnesses whose “accidents” enabled him to spend less time behind bars.

“Smartphones” leverages his mafia connections to smuggle sleeping pills and other prescription drugs into the prison.

With these, he medicates his way to a good night’s sleep and emerges from prison only slightly addicted to pills.

Once he gets out of prison, however, he finds he has another problem.

People around the neighborhood are still calling him “Smartphones,” only now it’s completely sarcastic.

It seems his disastrous smartphone heist has become a kind of dumb, urban legend he can’t escape the legacy of.

Hey Smartphones, bring me a beer.

Yo Smartphones, what’s shaking? You had any big ideas lately? Hahaha.

Every time he hears that nickname, “Smartphones” bristles.

And for the rest of his narrative arc, his battle against his own sense of inadequacy is on full display.

As an audience member, you root for him, at least a little, because, at the end of the day, he’s not a horrible person, relatively speaking.

He was loyal to his friends, he never wanted to hurt anyone, and he even suffered insomnia out of guilt over those who died for his benefit.

“Smartphones” is a pretty good guy for his own time and context!

And his internal conflict is painfully relatable.

In the last scene he’s in, “Smartphones” gets a chance to redeem his reputation in the mob by whacking someone who is completely innocent but whose death is required for the mafia to accomplish its broader objectives.

Although “Smartphones” is gung-ho to do this for several scenes prior, in the heat of the moment, he can’t pull the trigger on this innocent person.

As a result, “Smartphones” is mercilessly ragged on by his fellow mafia members.

Eventually, he retreats from the scene to be alone.

Sitting on a bench a short walk from the location where he couldn’t pull the trigger, “Smartphones” is mulling over his second major failure as a hardcore gangster, and his general inability to fully embrace the role he seems to have been cast in.

That’s when the oldest and wisest mafioso in “Smartphones’s” circle walks up, and, finding “Smartphones” crying with no one else around, sits down and tells him that maybe he’s just not cut out for being in the mafia.

We’ll call this guy the “Don” for simplicity’s sake, although, in truth, this particular group of mafiosos doesn’t have a true “Don” at this particular moment in their long unfolding saga, of which “Smartphones’s” story is only one sliver.

Regardless, the “Don” suggests that if “Smartphones” wanted out of the “family business,” he would happily help him come up with an exit strategy that would preserve his dignity and honor.

At first “Smartphones” seems as if his manhood has been insulted by the mere suggestion that he might want out of the mob, but, after a while, “Smartphones’s” face reveals immense existential relief.

He tells the “Don” that although he would be lost without the mob, he also genuinely wishes that there was something else for him in this life, since he’s so obviously not cut out for being ruthless and skilled enough to do the dirt that a true criminal soldier needs to be able to do.

The “Don” nods at “Smartphones’s” precise articulation of his predicament, then, without “Smartphones” noticing, lifts a pistol that he’d had in his hand the whole time up behind “Smartphones’s” head.

Then with his free hand, this seasoned mob guy gestures at the horizon.

There’s a charismatic twinkle in the “Don’s” eye as he speaks:

I want you to close your eyes and imagine a life, any life you want, just over that horizon, waiting for you. Keep your eyes closed. Now, when you got a good, solid picture in your head, tell me, and I’ll tell you to open your eyes, and you’ll tell me what you pictured, and not only will I listen, I’ll help you make it happen. That’s my promise to you, “Smartphones.”

“Smartphones” looks at the senior mafia guy with tears of gratitude in his eyes, then looks at the horizon long and hard, then closes his eyes.

Okay, boss. I got it.

Go ahead, “Smartphones.”

But just as “Smartphones” eyes are opening, the “Don” pulls the trigger.

The bullet flies through “Smartphones’s” brain.

The beautiful future “Smartphones” had been envisioning star-wipes to nothingness.

The “Don” frowns at some spots of blood on his collar, then stands and rolls “Smartphones’s” body off the bench with his boot.

He looks down at “Smartphones,” whose eyes are open wide, and there’s a huge, stupid smile on his face.

After a long stare, the “Don” offers mordantly:

“Smartphones.”

A trace of bleak yet cosmic empathy threads the “Don’s” one-word eulogy—as if it is dawning on the “Don” how, on some level, “Smartphones’s” fate is ultimately the fate we all share.

The “Don” performs a sign of the cross with his gun-hand, then tucks the gun away.

The “Don” stalks back to the place where his mafioso semi-subordinates are loading the body of the innocent person they successfully murdered to advance their objectives into the trunk of a car.

One looks up, then looks around.

Wait—where’s Smartphones?

Dead.

After a moment, in which they all looked shocked, the “Don” orders them to go get “Smartphones’s” body and cram it into the trunk with the body of the other, objectively innocent person.

The two entangled corpses shift and settle against each other in the darkness as the vehicle hits potholes and the bumps of various roads and bridges.

By the time the bodies are weighted and dropped into the river, their rigor mortis has made them difficult to separate.

The gangsters peering over the edge of the wharf are momentarily haunted by a big bubble of air that escapes from “Smartphones’s” mouth as he sinks, unblinking, into the ink-colored water.

The bubble of the dead man’s breath bursts as it crosses the threshold of the surface of the water and joins the air.

The gangsters stare speechlessly at the waves, suddenly stricken by the pathos of what they have just done.

They reach for humor to cope with the discomfort.

They start ragging on each other about which one of them will be the first to try to put the moves on “Smartphones’s” widow, who everyone agrees was always out of his league.

Little do they know that the “Don,” who comforted and murdered “Smartphones” is already at the widow’s house, telling her the news.

The news is wrapped in a lie about the circumstances of “Smartphones’s” demise.

This lie preserves “Smartphones’s” honor and reputation for the benefit of his widow.

For as long as she lives, “Smartphones’s” widow will believe that “Smartphones” died in a heroic fashion.

It’s easy for the “Don” to tell this lie with conviction because he himself genuinely believes it.

Although he keeps this particular reflection to himself, the “Don” believes that “Smartphones” preserved the sanctity of his soul by refusing to murder the innocent person.

“Smartphones” heroism was the rarer, Christlike kind of heroism, the “Don” reflects.

Going to bed that night, the “Don” wishes he lived in a world where he could have divulged to “Smartphones’s” widow the true nature of his heroism.

What if we do live in that world? he thinks.

What if I really could have told her the truth?

Would that change anything?

Why are we so ashamed of ourselves and each other when we are truly, literally self-sacrificial?

Why are we only proud of ourselves when we exhibit heroism in an aggressive or acquisitive sense?

If one person knew how I truly felt about “Smartphones,” he thinks, surely “Smartphones’s” story would mean more.

What if the only thing keeping the world from becoming more loving, less enslaved to the moral compromises of power, was the reluctance of people like me to share the stories of those like “Smartphones’s”?

The “Don” is furious with himself for indulging in such thoughts, even as he feels proud of himself for thinking them, which makes him feel faintly saintly.

Why am I even having these thoughts when I am the least likely person to ever do anything about them?

I have the most to lose when it comes to spreading a message of radical love, of choosing innocence over power.

I would have to change my whole life if I really believed any of this.

What’s wrong, honey?

This is the “Don’s” wife, who is also trying to sleep, but her husband’s lack of sleep is keeping her awake.

Nothing, sweetie. Go to sleep.

I’m trying to, but you keep tossing and turning.

I’m sorry.

Every time I close my eyes and almost fall asleep, you move or sigh again, and it wakes me up!

I’m sorry.

I can tell you’re worrying about something. Why don’t you just tell me what it is? You’ll feel better after sharing, and I’ll fall asleep while you talk.

I don’t want to talk about it.

Then for Christ’s sake be still and let me sleep!

Sorry. The “Don” feels a flash of self-righteous anger. I didn’t know I was moving around.

How can you not know? I know when I’m fidgeting. See? She starts fidgeting dramatically to make a point. You don’t know your own body? You don’t know what it’s doing? Just be still.

I said I was sorry. Jesus Christ.

His wife rolls over onto her side with her back to him. I can’t sleep on your sorries. I can sleep if you’re still. Just be still and feel about it however you want.

Subscribe now

Dylan at High Speed

Because my bed was in the countryside,

the few taxi men cruising junctions

would not take me there

for the dead miles back to town

and the swirling, equivocal snow.

Like silver velvet, hoar frost grew

around the trees, frost

the streetlights insisted be amber.

A winter Sunday, the city almost deserted,

the buses cooling in their dormer towns.

At the zebra crossing on Botanic,

shrunk with time, doddered the bones

of my old French teacher. His wife

led him by the hand.

                                   Those days,

he was hushed, classical power—

tailored suits the iridescent green of peacock breast,

black turtlenecks, a pat of ginger hair.

He lost it at the blackboard once,

and smashed a chalky duster into the subjunctive.

A few weeks later, between the SNCF

(billets, carets, obsolescing francs) and

a year abroad in Bergerac in the eighties,

where this girl served him coffee

under a parasol on the river,

he wept at his desk

until the principal sent him home

for the first three seasons of the new millennium.

His neighbor, my friend,

watched him rake a single pile of leaves for hours

back and forth across the lawn all mid-term break,

and his wife retired early from the prison. In his class

language happened to me: I saw corps

resemble corporal, guerre guerrilla. Suddenly

dawn broke purple on a youth hostel—

aubergine, aubergine!

Too late now to say thank you.

                                   Courtesy Cabs

is more speakeasy than taxi depot.

From the back room stocked with warm, cheap beer

and counterfeit spirits, Dylan came swinging his keys,

seventeen at most.

                         He took roads narrow and new to him

at high speed. Foxes whipped under hedges

into the green out-of-sight they live in, the all-night

fauna were lowing and hunting, corncrakes called

the calls of their impersonators. We sang along

to show tunes, he offered me the

joint he dropped between his legs

and remembered a dream he’d had the night before

where he called his dad a cunt. What would he say

if he knew, I said. I don’t know, he said.

I paid him double the fare because I had it.

I couldn’t bring myself to think what I thought

he was supposed to do with it.

                                   And indoors,

my father was asleep in his chair. On the television,

divined here and there by rumors of rain,

herds of bearded blue wildebeest

stampeded across the eastern savannah.

Subscribe now

“Come and hear, and I will describe to you, all who fear God, what things He did for my soul.” - Psalm 66:16

1.

Friday Good Friday. No spade in the ground. His hand lay open to the sky. His other hand cups his glabella. The good day getting by without him. Tired skipper. Shaved head tar black. Lines of sweat dry up and stain rivers from his receding hairline to his eyelashes—there’s a teary border around the whites of his eyes.

His trials, Lord, soon carry forth. Vanguard etched into a 21-inch scaffold tube bracket laying on its side in the shade. A steadfast idle burn of purpose. Stretched out arms crack his back bones as if lit up by bullet hail. He pats the tailgate and goes into the shed. Large scatter of rods and unspun line, he finds one rubber knee boot. He pulls out of the hollow boot a white button shirt blind to the Saturn ring stains under the pits and round the collar.

He attends The Stations of the Cross. He flees…

Dead animal on the side looking up at the sky. His eyes roll back from the lumpy brown coat to the Chevrolet in front of him.

Now in his room he looks at the bed in curling light. Cur prints on the pillow linen. It’s almost supper. Ella you smell like a rot body. She must have been rolling in something. He takes her outside to the hose and unthreads where two ends meet. She sits and nods off. She closes her eyes and opens them to a bath of more light coming down from above. He gets her good around her neck and belly. Her head turns at bees in the clover as he leads her inside.

Watching People’s Court in his hands. An oriole outside sings as he watches the judge scold the babymama. Her long lashes cover the whites in her eyes. He smiles. Picking at a cigarette hole in the loveseat he puts his feet over the arm rest.

2

He dies and is brought back. Waking atop the florid sheet, night bugs land on his wet head. He crosses himself and moans. The trial begins. Cellophane and empty Parliament cartons litter the trailer. He lights something and traces his palm along his shaved scalp. He pulls two fishing poles aside. The rods bend on the narrow hall and small kitchen. Ella looks up but doesn’t move from her bed on the floor. He’s shoulder first into the broken door and the dew.

He backs up to the aluminum skiff, gets out and puts it on his back. His rubber knee boots thud as he aims the transom over his shoulder, fitting the 10ft boat between the wheel wells in the truckbed. The sun is still under as he drives down the hill through the marsh coming to the pond as the clouds turn red.

He unties the half hitch and gives the gunwale a few hard pulls and lifts it once more on his back. He spits out a mosquito and drops the boat on the bank, dragging the battery from the backseat and placing it in the stern. Then he winds the clamps from the Shakespeare trolling motor to the outboard. The wires run to the battery. It’s old and doesn’t work right. Swinging the oar like a sword into the hull, he starts it up. He goes, and he goes out, and he wants to die out there. Heartbent on a biggin he trolls a line and drowsily casts another.

3

A Carolina skiff lies lifeless in the slough. Red electrical tape peels a single stripe on the starboard side marking the waterline. A Willet in greywacke plumage flies from the beach plum.

Wading naked pinching a pebble on the brackish bed between his toes. He’s all in besides his nose and up. Eying the glass surface like the earth’s horizon itself. He gets out and drinks from the gallon. He picks up his button shirt and turns and treads back in with it draped like an orarion across his open forearms, like a baby being led to baptism. He washes it thoroughly so the smell of him might disappear.

A Herring soars. There’s a crack in the bulrush. He teases the minnows as he steps from his bath. Detonating Godsent water at each step, scaring the school off from left to right, and back to left, and back to right.

A single berry droops above his head. He pinches it. The crimson dye bleeds into the seam around his fingernails. The river is still and sediment-laden as he watches a man further down on the bank clad in white waders clean his striper and bluefish. He slices peeling scales into a tin can while a nearby work crew dredges into sand, and a butterfly lands on the excavator. He wonders if the operator knows he has been visited by something like that.

Khaki pants and white button shirt lacking a jacket. He’s uppin the hill, brushing aside buckhorn fans fit for a throned person. The gallon tilts. There’s nothing left. He’ll refill it at the church. In a spirit of resurrection, he lifts up his heart and turns the key.

He’s met by a flock of hearted smiles and he prays God will heal the poor ones who’ve met him. The line for Holy Communion begins and he starts to smell marrow and fat. He eyes her thin legs stepping with him. Ahead of him. He hasn’t been so frightened in his life. His eyes land on her hair. With three heads between the priest and him, he steps out of the line. The marsh rat runs from the chalice, back to the fenny grass.

4

His enemies come nigh and from the lowlands bedded with bluestem. He talks to God and God takes them by their heels. They fall down the highest hill and into the pit. From the brushwood, he hears a mule cry on Bob Johnson’s land. Arms up in the air, he sings to the Lord to pull him out of his bed in apt time. He sneers at a shape there in the room's corner. The dark shadow cast by a far light looks like wings. He prays to be a snail dissolving into slime. It’s night now.

5

He’s shaven and by the crossbuck sign slows down. Bumping over the crossties; thinks about Pennsylvania. He’s back to his passions, wishing up a good girl in a nice lot. Holly branches above her head, and red-wort behind her, draping there like a dossal. What can flesh do to him? Altogether, he has $22 and halfjar of milk. He goes back to the river and sets his rig. A while parked. Out of light and off the track.

Passing through stocks of Japanese Knotweed, pole in hand, something sharp whisks across his face. Thin line sliced under his left eye. Thorned by cat brier. Some blood runs on his cheekbone. He wipes the laceration like a teardrop. Licking his fingertip, he continues.

Got one on in no time. He lets it run tired for a half minute before fighting the fish and winning. As the trout flips about the rock, he grabs it by the tail and slaps the trout head against the bank. He cleans it right there on the bank and tosses the guts back into the water.

The meat is in a plastic zip-lock. He sings alleluia as he weighs it, extending his arm and jigging it up and down. O yea, alleluia. By the trestle off’ring sum up.

6

He goes under the moon as it sits pretty just before dusk. He picks up a weevil. Snout circling in fright, that it may all end here. He flicks the beetle into the dark and eve fully arrives. Above the fire, a grated piece of metal to cook on, chalked with black. He lays the trout meat and the scales glitter and spark and he wishes for some butter. There, an egret looks lost. But it knows how to hunt, how to kill. He watches the egret go about for a minute. A bony leg, a cricc in the sand. He weeps.

Some hours after dinner, he fights, he thinks, one of the seven princes of hell. And the demon laughs and shows him photos of girls in white lace. He tries not to look but he looks, and looks again. He doesn’t speak. He leaps and takes the ugly one to the floor, screaming in the name of Christ. And after a few blows it’s gone. Back to hell, or God forbid, a neighbor's home. And he lay there aching til morning.

He gets up and moves around. Feeds Ella breakfast. Atop his sodding sheets, he imagines St. Joseph and St. Joseph’s prayers and revelations on even ordinary matters. He can't imagine the burden of being a first-time father to the Savior. He wants to be a father but he’s brideless and tired. He drags and it fills his lungs. With Ella against his shin, he reads St John Chrysostom’s homily on Christ and the passing of the cup. The Father’s Will. What is the Lord’s will for this tired one? Tired shrew, running in and out of the marshland. He only knows how to fish. He can’t even skin a rabbit. He tried once…

And when he did it twisted like a rabid thing. And it kicked its hindlegs in a craze. He bit off a piece of the rabbit and tried to get his knife under the fur but he cut his thumb open. There, their blood spilled together and he made a mess. He took the tail off in one pull. He pulled it off angry and frustrated. He left the mess, the body, a portion for foxes.

7

Back in his truck he grips the steering wheel and rests his head on his knuckles. His soul faints inside him. He takes an exit and, after coming down the ramp, pulls aside the shining sumac. He shuts off the engine and finds some dirt. With his nails, he digs, and digs away. He digs up a little space for his head to rest in. Back against the earth, he covers his face with handfuls. His nostrils clog with God’s sweet dirt. He rolls in it. He flips like Ella would. He thinks of St. John the Evangelist. He thinks of staying there. He gets up.

8

Unclean again. He can’t look away. The passion comes and goes. His heart is fickle. His heart is like weather. God’s Light blinds him like St. Paul on the road to Damascus. And thin legs blind him like they blinded King David.

In the morning he goes out to the water and even the water blinds him as he casts another line and lurks there bowed down with hard labor, waiting for a sign of life.

9

At church, in the lot after, the boys circle his truckbed. It looks like an Italian fountain with the boys, clad in formal trousers, circling it. A fountain, yea. By the arches, a girl and her baby. He cups his chest and begs for Mary. He sighs on his truck, looking at the boys all hopeless…

Some went out onto the sea in ships, 
          doing business on the great waters;
they saw the deeds of the Lord, 
          his wondrous works in the deep.

He prays that he may be ready as can be, and strong. He prays, and then he ceases. And there’s a stirring in the fir.

Subscribe now

Meditating in sunlight grounded.
Dreamlets of chronic pain
on a spiraling blue planet.
My left vision is yellower
than my right. I’m becoming
a good role model for myself.
Masturbating and worrying less.
Maybe I’ll paint my roof blue.
Our most powerful telescopes
might be pointing down at Earth.
I forgot to meditate for a week.
I get upset when Mom tells me
to be careful. I love that
I invited her to stay with me.
Dad massaged her back.
I saw it through the screen.
16 ounces milk = 1 ounce butter
and directed energy weapons
are pointing down at roofs.
In my memory, moonlit verdure
seems almost colorless.
I have severe insomnia.
Cheese-tasting with my cats.
Soon I will learn vitamin A
is nonessential and toxic.
Dudu died late last month.
My parents cried. I cried
with my cat on my lap,
facing moonlit verdure,
thinking of Dad crying.
I’d never seen him cry.

Subscribe now

Miss Willerton always crumbed the table. It was her particular household accomplishment and she did it with great thoroughness. Lucia and Bertha did the dishes and Garner went into the parlor and did the Morning Press crossword puzzle. That left Miss Willerton in the dining room by herself and that was all right with Miss Willerton. Whew! Breakfast in that house was always an ordeal. Lucia insisted that they have a regular hour for breakfast just like they did for other meals. Lucia said a regular breakfast made for other regular habits, and with Garner’s tendency to upsets, it was imperative that they establish some system in their eating. This way she could also see that he put the Agar-Agar on his Cream of Wheat. As if, Miss Willerton thought, after having done it for fifty years, he’d be capable of doing anything else. The breakfast dispute always started with Garner’s Cream of Wheat and ended with her three spoonfuls of pineapple crush. “You know your acid, Willie,” Miss Lucia would always say, “you know your acid”; and then Garner would roll his eyes and make some sickening remark and Bertha would jump and Lucia would look distressed and Miss Willerton would taste the pineapple crush she had already swallowed.

It was a relief to crumb the table. Crumbing the table gave one time to think, and if Miss Willerton were going to write a story, she had to think about it first. She could usually think best sitting in front of her typewriter, but this would do for the time being. First, she had to think of a subject to write a story about. There were so many subjects to write stories about that Miss Willerton never could think of one. That was always the hardest part of writing a story, she always said. She spent more time thinking of something to write about than she did writing. Sometimes she discarded subject after subject and it usually took her a week or two to decide finally on something. Miss Willerton got out the silver crumber and the crumb-catcher and started stroking the table. I wonder, she mused, if a baker would make a good subject? Foreign bakers were very picturesque, she thought. Aunt Myrtile Filmer had left her four color-tints of French bakers in mushroom-looking hats. They were great tall fellows—blond and....

“Willie!” Miss Lucia screamed, entering the dining room with the salt cellars.

“For heaven’s sake, hold the catcher under the crumber or you’ll have those crumbs on the rug. I’ve Bisseled it four times in the last week and I am not going to do it again.”

“You have not Bisseled it on account of any crumbs I have spilled,” Miss Willerton said tersely. “I always pick up the crumbs I drop,” and she added, “I drop relatively few.”

“And wash the crumber before you put it up this time,” Miss Lucia returned.

Miss Willerton drained the crumbs into her hand and threw them out the window. She took the catcher and crumber to the kitchen and ran them under the cold-water faucet. She dried them and stuck them back in the drawer. That was over. Now she could get to the typewriter. She could stay there until dinnertime.

Miss Willerton sat down at her typewriter and let out her breath. Now! What had she been thinking about? Oh. Bakers. Hmmm. Bakers. No, bakers wouldn’t do. Hardly colorful enough. No social tension connected with bakers. Miss Willerton sat staring through her typewriter. A S D F G—her eyes wandered over the keys. Hmmm. Teachers? Miss Willerton wondered. No. Heavens no. Teachers always made Miss Willerton feel peculiar. Her teachers at Willowpool Seminary had been all right but they were women. Willowpool Female Seminary, Miss Willerton remembered. She didn’t like the phrase, Willowpool Female Seminary—it sounded biological. She always just said she was a graduate of Willowpool. Men teachers made Miss Willerton feel as if she were going to mispronounce something. Teachers weren’t timely anyhow. They weren’t even a social problem.

Social problem. Social problem. Hmmm. Sharecroppers! Miss Willerton had never been intimately connected with sharecroppers but, she reflected, they would make as arty a subject as any, and they would give her that air of social concern which was so valuable to have in the circles she was hoping to travel! “I can always capitalize,” she muttered, “on the hookworm.” It was coming to her now! Certainly! Her fingers plinked excitedly over the keys, never touching them. Then suddenly she began typing at great speed.

“Lot Motun,” the typewriter registered, “called his dog.” “Dog” was followed by an abrupt pause. Miss Willerton always did her best work on the first sentence. “First sentences,” she always said, “came to her—like a flash! Just like a flash!” she would say and snap her fingers, “like a flash!” And she built her story up from them. “Lot Motun called his dog” had been automatic with Miss Willerton, and reading the sentence over, she decided that not only was “Lot Motun” a good name for a sharecropper, but also that having him call his dog was an excellent thing to have a sharecropper do. “The dog pricked up its ears and slunk over to Lot.” Miss Willerton had the sentence down before she realized her error—two “Lots” in one paragraph. That was displeasing to the ear. The typewriter grated back and Miss Willerton applied three x’s to “Lot.” Over it she wrote in pencil, “him.” Now she was ready to go again. “Lot Motun called his dog. The dog pricked up its ears and slunk over to him.” Two dogs, too, Miss Willerton thought. Ummm. But that didn’t affect the ears like two “Lots,” she decided.

Miss Willerton was a great believer in what she called “phonetic art.” She maintained that the ear was as much a reader as the eye. She liked to express it that way. “The eye forms a picture,” she had told a group at the United Daughters of the Colonies, “that can be painted in the abstract, and the success of a literary venture” (Miss Willerton liked the phrase, ‘literary venture’) “depends on the abstract created in the mind and the tonal quality” (Miss Willerton also liked ‘tonal quality’) “registered in the ear.” There was something biting and sharp about “Lot Motun called his dog”; followed by “the dog pricked up its ears and slunk over to him,” it gave the paragraph just the send-off it needed.

“He pulled the animal’s short, scraggy ears and rolled over with it in the mud.” Perhaps, Miss Willerton mused, that would be overdoing it. But a sharecropper, she knew, might reasonably be expected to roll over in the mud. Once she had read a novel dealing with that kind of people in which they had done just as bad and, throughout three-fourths of the narrative, much worse. Lucia found it in cleaning out one of Miss Willerton’s bureau drawers and after glancing at a few random pages took it between thumb and index finger to the furnace and threw it in. “When I was cleaning your bureau out this morning, Willie, I found a book that Garner must have put there for a joke,” Miss Lucia told her later. “It was awful, but you know how Garner is. I burned it.” And then, tittering, she added, “I was sure it couldn’t be yours.” Miss Willerton was sure it could be none other’s than hers but she hesitated in claiming the distinction. She had ordered it from the publisher because she didn’t want to ask for it at the library. It had cost her $3.75 with the postage and she had not finished the last four chapters. At least, she had got enough from it, though, to be able to say that Lot Motun might reasonably roll over in the mud with his dog. Having him do that would give more point to the hookworm, too, she decided. “Lot Motun called his dog. The dog pricked up its ears and slunk over to him. He pulled the animal’s short, scraggy ears and rolled over with it in the mud.”

Miss Willerton settled back. That was a good beginning. Now she would plan her action. There had to be a woman, of course. Perhaps Lot could kill her. That type of woman always started trouble. She might even goad him on to kill her because of her wantonness and then he would be pursued by his conscience maybe.

He would have to have principles if that were going to be the case, but it would be fairly easy to give him those. Now how was she going to work that in with all the love interest there’d have to be, she wondered. There would have to be some quite violent, naturalistic scenes, the sadistic sort of thing one read of in connection with that class. It was a problem. However, Miss Willerton enjoyed such problems. She liked to plan passionate scenes best of all, but when she came to write them, she always began to feel peculiar and to wonder what the family would say when they read them. Garner would snap his fingers and wink at her at every opportunity; Bertha would think she was terrible; and Lucia would say in that silly voice of hers, “What have you been keeping from us, Willie? What have you been keeping from us?” and titter like she always did. But Miss Willerton couldn’t think about that now; she had to plan her characters.

Lot would be tall, stooped, and shaggy but with sad eyes that made him look like a gentleman in spite of his red neck and big fumbling hands. He’d have straight teeth and, to indicate that he had some spirit, red hair. His clothes would hang on him but he’d wear them nonchalantly like they were part of his skin; maybe, she mused, he’d better not roll over with the dog after all. The woman would be more or less pretty—yellow hair, fat ankles, muddy-colored eyes.

She would get supper for him in the cabin and he’d sit there eating the lumpy grits she hadn’t bothered to put salt in and thinking about something big, something way off—another cow, a painted house, a clean well, a farm of his own even. The woman would yowl at him for not cutting enough wood for her stove and would whine about the pain in her back. She’d sit and stare at him eating the sour grits and say he didn’t have nerve enough to steal food. “You’re just a damn beggar!” she’d sneer. Then he’d tell her to keep quiet. “Shut your mouth!” he’d shout. “I’ve taken all I’m gonna.” She’d roll her eyes, mocking him, and laugh—“I ain’t afraid er nothin’ that looks like you.” Then he’d push his chair behind him and head toward her. She’d snatch a knife off the table—Miss Willerton wondered what kind of a fool the woman was—and back away holding it in front of her. He’d lunge forward but she’d dart from him like a wild horse. Then they’d face each other again—their eyes brimming with hate—and sway back and forth. Miss Willerton could hear the seconds dropping on the tin roof outside. He’d dart at her again but she’d have the knife ready and would plunge it into him in an instant— Miss Willerton could stand it no longer. She struck the woman a terrific blow on the head from behind. The knife dropped out of her hands and a mist swept her from the room. Miss Willerton turned to Lot. “Let me get you some hot grits,” she said. She went over to the stove and got a clean plate of smooth white grits and a piece of butter.

“Gee, thanks,” Lot said and smiled at her with his nice teeth. “You always fix ’em just right. You know,” he said, “I been thinkin’—we could get out of this tenant farm. We could have a decent place. If we made anything this year over, we could put it in a cow an’ start buildin’ things up. Think what it would mean, Willie, just think.”

She sat down beside him and put her hand on his shoulder. “We’ll do it,” she said. “We’ll make better than we’ve made any year and by spring we should have us that cow.”

“You always know how I feel, Willie,” he said. “You always have known.”

They sat there for a long time thinking of how well they understood each other. “Finish your food,” she said finally.

After he had eaten, he helped her take the ashes out the stove and then, in the hot July evening, they walked down the pasture toward the creek and talked about the place they were going to have some day.

When late March came and the rainy season was almost there, they had accomplished almost more than was believable. For the past month, Lot had been up every morning at five, and Willy an hour earlier to get in all the work they could while the weather was clear. Next week, Lot said, the rain would probably start and if they didn’t get the crop in by then, they would lose it—and all they had gained in the past months. They knew what that meant—another year of getting along with no more than they’d had the last. Then too, there’d be a baby next year instead of a cow. Lot had wanted the cow anyway. “Children don’t cost all that much to feed,” he’d argued, “an’ the cow would help feed him,” but Willie had been firm—the cow could come later—the child must have a good start. “Maybe,” Lot had said finally, “we’ll have enough for both,” and he had gone out to look at the new-plowed ground as if he could count the harvest from the furrows.

Even with as little as they’d had, it had been a good year. Willie had cleaned the shack, and Lot had fixed the chimney. There was a profusion of petunias by the doorstep and a colony of snapdragons under the window. It had been a peaceful year. But now they were becoming anxious over the crop. They must gather it before the rain. “We need another week,” Lot muttered when he came in that night. “One more week an’ we can do it. Do you feel like gatherin’? It isn’t right that you should have to,” he sighed, “but I can’t hire any help.”

“I’m all right,” she said, hiding her trembling hands behind her. “I’ll gather.”

“It’s cloudy tonight,” Lot said darkly.

The next day they worked until nightfall—worked until they could work no longer and then stumbled back to the cabin and fell into bed.

Willie woke in the night conscious of a pain. It was a soft, green pain with purple lights running through it. She wondered if she were awake. Her head rolled from side to side and there were droning shapes grinding boulders in it.

Lot sat up. “Are you bad off?” he asked, trembling.

She raised herself on her elbow and then sank down again. “Get Anna up by the creek,” she gasped.

The droning became louder and the shapes grayer. The pain intermingled with them for seconds first, then interminably. It came again and again. The sound of the droning grew more distinct and toward morning she realized that it was rain. Later she asked hoarsely, “How long has it been raining?”

“Most two days, now,” Lot answered.

“Then we lost.” Willie looked listlessly out at the dripping trees. “It’s over.”

“It isn’t over,” he said softly. “We got a daughter.”

“You wanted a son.”

“No, I got what I wanted—two Willies instead of one—that’s better than a cow, even,” he grinned. “What can I do to deserve all I got, Willie?” He bent over and kissed her forehead.

“What can I?” she asked slowly. “And what can I do to help you more?”

“How about your going to the grocery, Willie?”

Miss Willerton shoved Lot away from her. “W-what did you say, Lucia?” she stuttered.

“I said how about your going to the grocery this time? I’ve been every morning this week and I’m busy now.”

Miss Willerton pushed back from the typewriter. “Very well,” she said sharply. “What do you want there?”

“A dozen eggs and two pounds of tomatoes—ripe tomatoes—and you’d better start doctoring that cold right now. Your eyes are already watering and you’re hoarse. There’s Empirin in the bathroom. Write a check on the house for the groceries. And wear your coat. It’s cold.”

Miss Willerton rolled her eyes upward. “I am forty-four years old,” she announced, “and able to take care of myself.”

“And get ripe tomatoes,” Miss Lucia returned.

Miss Willerton, her coat buttoned unevenly, tramped up Broad Street and into the supermarket. “What was it now?” she muttered. “Two dozen eggs and a pound of tomatoes, yes.” She passed the lines of canned vegetables and the crackers and headed for the box where the eggs were kept. But there were no eggs. “Where are the eggs?” she asked a boy weighing snapbeans.

“We ain’t got nothin’ but pullet eggs,” he said, fishing up another handful of beans.

“Well, where are they and what is the difference?” Miss Willerton demanded.

He threw several beans back into the bin, slouched over to the egg box and handed her a carton. “There ain’t no difference really,” he said, pushing his gum over his front teeth. “A teen-age chicken or somethin’, I don’t know. You want ’em?”

“Yes, and two pounds of tomatoes. Ripe tomatoes,” Miss Willerton added. She did not like to do the shopping. There was no reason those clerks should be so condescending. That boy wouldn’t have dawdled with Lucia. She paid for the eggs and tomatoes and left hurriedly. The place depressed her somehow.

Silly that a grocery should depress one—nothing in it but trifling domestic doings—women buying beans—riding children in those grocery go-carts— higgling about an eighth of a pound more or less of squash—what did they get out of it? Miss Willerton wondered. Where was there any chance for self-expression, for creation, for art? All around her it was the same—sidewalks full of people scurrying about with their hands full of little packages and their minds full of little packages—that woman there with the child on the leash, pulling him, jerking him, dragging him away from a window with a jack-o’-lantern in it; she would probably be pulling and jerking him the rest of her life. And there was another, dropping a shopping bag all over the street, and another wiping a child’s nose, and up the street an old woman was coming with three grandchildren jumping all over her, and behind them was a couple walking too close for refinement.

Miss Willerton looked at the couple sharply as they came nearer and passed. The woman was plump with yellow hair and fat ankles and muddy-colored eyes. She had on high-heel pumps and blue anklets, a too-short cotton dress, and a plaid jacket. Her skin was mottled and her neck thrust forward as if she were sticking it out to smell something that was always being drawn away. Her face was set in an inane grin. The man was long and wasted and shaggy. His shoulders were stooped and there were yellow knots along the side of his large, red neck. His hands fumbled stupidly with the girl’s as they slumped along, and once or twice he smiled sickly at her and Miss Willerton could see that he had straight teeth and sad eyes and a rash over his forehead.

“Ugh,” she shuddered.

Miss Willerton laid the groceries on the kitchen table and went back to her typewriter. She looked at the paper in it. “Lot Motun called his dog,” it read. “The dog pricked up its ears and slunk over to him. He pulled the animal’s short, scraggy ears and rolled over with it in the mud.”

“That sounds awful!” Miss Willerton muttered. “It’s not a good subject anyway,” she decided. She needed something more colorful—more arty. Miss Willerton looked at her typewriter for a long time. Then of a sudden her fist hit the desk in several ecstatic little bounces. “The Irish!” she squealed. “The Irish!” Miss Willerton had always admired the Irish. Their brogue, she thought, was full of music; and their history—splendid! And the people, she mused, the Irish people! They were full of spirit—red-haired, with broad shoulders and great, drooping mustaches.

Subscribe now

“The Crop” was originally included in Flannery O’Connor’s 1947 master’s thesis at the University of Iowa.

EVERYONE A PARSIFAL

You have just entered the room;
Our eye contact is a moment old
But my face retains the expression
It held long before you appeared;
There’s a flicker of actual time—
Persuasion in a void of reason
Or reality without consequences;
There’s an art to doing nothing
As something for something—
A revelation of ordinary love
In majestic images that cure me
Of art for art’s sake—a oneness
Of abstract form and feeling—
A spy forever in enemy territory.

HYPERION

Reverence for a lit match
Plays portal to the volcano—
The funeral pyre pulls us in,
Destruction in renewal charts
A course to force the door
Of a furnace open and enter
Into the mystery of its fire—
Burnt head a globe of pure
Intelligence freely wasted,
The body wears a burning
Gown with dazzling folds—
In the heart of fire, death
Is no longer death consumed
By fire saying farewell to fire.

—
Artwork: Brian DeGraw, "Drifter ( unquantized )," oil, tempera, flashe on unprimed canvas, 76 x 84 in., 2023. Photograph by Steven Probert.

Subscribe now

WRONG PSALM

A fawn stilled
in the red-leafed road, lit
magnificent by beams in the
hour leading dawn—Lord,
I’m in the wrong again.

I KNOW THAT LOOK

Nostrils big with want to know,
eyes pink with greed for image
—something unambiguously bright,
that you might finally lose your life and find it.

I wore it to the fridge, hungry for some fruit.

Then, peeling, I beheld
the architecture of the orange,
fragrant oil stored in the part I once discarded.

SOMETHING

   As I walk under a dome of almost snow,   
among the firs and shakes of pending deer,
        I see nothing resembling a book.                           

Subscribe now