The Blue Pencil Online has issues.

Issues, plural. Last fall we inaugurated our new, issue-based format: a selection of accepted poems and stories bundled in the same publication. Now, I am proud to present to you the Spring 2012 issue. With the seasonal change, it is only fitting for The Editorial Board to produce something new: our Table of Contents flowers with fresh works of poetry and prose.

The new issue of The Blue Pencil Online in a way mimics the seasonal change. Renewal, growth. Consider the reading experience of Adriana Van Manen’s “Accidents,” the way connections are like roots: threadlike and able to be unearthed. Or, the story-telling voice in Mika Kligler’s poem, “Containment,” and its portrait of local progression through the seasons. We spring into this new issue in reaction to our surroundings: to grow, to progress, to thrive. Since December, the editors have received nearly six hundred submissions; we reviewed and accepted and edited through the chilliness of the winter months. March marked the turn from winter to spring and we selected the winners of The Elizabeth Bishop Prizes: Van Manen in fiction and Peter LaBerge in poetry, published herein. Here in Natick, Massachusetts, we break into May, blooming — enjoy what we have sown, and please keep posted for our next harvest come autumn.

Sophia Martins
Creative Writing, Class of 2012,
Managing Editor

1. 

The emergency room doctor fainted at the sight of my lacerated shin. My mom caught him gently and screamed for someone to shoot me up with lidocaine and epinephrine.

To this day, I fear that I will start to spew blood or words that will make everyone swoon to the carpet.

As we drove back from the hospital, my dad turned. “We’ll have you back up and running soon, Locomotive.” I refused to answer to my actual name. I followed a track of endless light that no one else could see. At night, I stayed up just to hear the wail of distant trains.

My mom took a photograph right before the accident, before metal rakes or sharp fantasies of being a garden fairy could puncture my skin. The light is violet and furls into darkness. My little sister’s face is blurred, edging towards the camera as if to swallow it. My homemade dress is slightly too large and my head tilts to my shoulder like a lily of the valley. Although I always face the camera, I never quite look at it.

2.

I crouched in the cherry tree as my mom leaned against it, smoking and talking on the phone with my grandmother, a hoarder who watched shows about hoarders and said: Oh, how sad.

I interrupted and asked her to take me to a junkyard.

“Why Locomotive?” she asked, tossing her cigarette up into the cherry tree.

“Because I’m done here. I don’t like strip malls.”

She tried to calm me down, tucking me into bed with my unicorn Beanie Baby. Then, she left to set up for a dinner party. I covered my body in fifty-five Post It notes that said ‘Kill me’ and hobbled downstairs like a martyr in a puritanical town square.

3. 

My grandpa was diagnosed with cancer. An Italian cigar burning, burning out, the memory of him scoffing at a magician on my sixth birthday. Then there was only the magic of morphine, his pain hidden like a trick. I had dreams in which my stitches unfurled and doctors stuffed the sky down my throat like endless silk Houdini scarves.

He was my mom’s daddy and we scattered his ashes in the park. 

That night, I did my homework at the kitchen table. “I’m making eggs, Locomotive.” Then my mom turned toward the sizzling pan and slammed her palm down upon it, as if she was making one of those baby handprint keepsakes. My dad pulled her out of the kitchen, chugging: ItsokItsokItsokItsokItsokItsokItsok.

4. 

I had one friend. Her name was Olivia. I often looked at her and said, “You’re weird.” “No, you’re weird.” And then together, “We’re both weird.”

Olivia and I liked to break things in order to understand them.

We went into her parent’s room and found an alarm clock. For about an hour, we took turns hurling the clock against her wall until it cracked lovely and horrifying silver insides. I sat on the stairs of her loft with a metallic cog in my mouth, trying to feel the idea of breaking the clock run down from my brain into my hands.

Then, I jumped and it felt like a train was rushing through a tunnel in my stomach.

I did not break when I landed.

My stomach did not open like the glass belly of the clock. I could not reach into the slit on my shin and pull out timetable to understand why a shrill alarm had not yet rung for me.

How strange it was be alive when so much around me (my toys and pages of homework and light up sneakers) was dying.

Half harvested in late August.
Baked yellow husks hang off stalks. It is hot.
It is dusk and dry chutes
stretched and shrunken
whisk the moisture from our sticky skin.
They bend in close and whisper along
our arms, our backs, our thighs
as we army crawl through cornfields.
Our summer-swollen bellies are caked with dirt,
and stalks press in close all around.

In September, we get under our desks.
We hunch and fold ourselves in, cannot move a muscle.
Heads bent into our knees we listen for a whistle;
through fat Mrs. Crump’s hummed “How Sweet the Sound”,
ears strain to make out the whisper of the end of the world.

After school we hole up in the tree house over by Cottonhollow.
Four of us collect, angular limbs strangely
interlocked. Our bodies are hot and lanky.
We are hooked on Life—we fill our cars with kids and pass paydays.
Wood surrounds us like a cocoon.

The Wrenches live down the road, and in November, Rusty runs
into me with his mouth wide open and his teeth split my forehead.
“Jesus” says Rusty Wrench and runs with his mouth still open.
Hot blood slicks and steams, I’m black-faced red.
Shame that Halloween’s gone past.

In December, we hear that some high school kid
swan-dived off the rocks into the river behind the middle school,
and it was too shallow.
We hear that now he’s stuck
in the hospital, and stuck
inside himself.
We hear he tells his legs to move but they’re stuck
too. Pa says: “Dumb kids.
If you ever…”

In January, Christy Cooper next door starts saying “Goddamn.”
Her mother screams at all hours.
Christy says “Goddamn it ma,
you’re suffocating me.”
Lying in bed with the covers over my head my breath condenses.
In the darkness I can’t make out anything beyond my belly button.
“Christy,” I say, “I’m starting to feel suffocated too.”

to the cavity:

living in  burning-up lands, the summer

fumes and pouts, brands our stripped skin a sore scarlet—

you have made me sweet on lucid, fine firmaments; the proud zenith

of white-haired mountains; and flaxen grass.

we are softer lovers by the sea, quicker by roaring cliffs

where the stupor of the deep reminds us of loss. still

in the desert we are careful, wary of rarity and famine,

hoarding the rain, the pines, and our nuclei—

clutching.

to the ventricles:

with what quickness i move to pinch new veins and give them names,

swell my chance of bleeding out, in, and all over—

blue-skinned and particular, all of you, I would cradle you in watchful hands

and keep you close; warm, thin breathing thread of frailties and dreams,

how close you are to the real thing, the big mass; how easily

you could die, and cost me my red life.

to the stitch:

you breed strangeness across such a heaving sore, you should know

my insides flinch, quiver, and then turn over like sunning snakes

more vivid in my sleep, a rare helix of scars. would you nod

if i were to tell you about the white pang roving around as if it were lost,

howling, in the dark of my body?

would you know if i were to rupture

in the middle of your sweet avowal, or break open when you took my fingers?

i can’t quite seize it in my hands, abashed

as they are to be hunting for this warm mania within me—

i know by the close my heart will be furrowed,

corroded by such booming want, and, from the bluest of blues,

you’ll have been the first to start that unsafe ticking,

those drums in the deep.

to the real thing, the big mass:

weeping, clawing, and collapsing, such a perfect bloody thing

my hand tender over you, you’re a newborn, crying in a blind voice

assuring me of your life and stubborn, stupid strength.

you roar at the wavering laments of cellos, and falter

at almost every vision: the picture of soft hanging fabric,

the rose-pink entryways (or exits)—and at the orange heat of conflict.

how trite you’ll be later, you sweet, violent engine

dog-eared, dog-tired,

as you are, roadmap of mêlées, capturings, whims, and burden.

weedy, callous, you are both anonymous and renowned

i like you, dear heart, with your cavities and ventricles and stitches;

your wet pulse, your sharp, besotted whipping

even as you breathe inside me, bruise, and lead me into the dusk.

                                     for my father

In that shallow silence that all breathing takes,
Forget drowning seeds that once grew:
The wild birds of your son’s adolescence
That flew North instead of South,
Hearing nothing                                at all

From you. Where does this stand?
The fringes of passion, of rage, for which we wait,
Come without notice. They continue our lives’
Tender fires. The ashes tempestuously expect
Sounds geese make yanked down from the surface.

A snapping turtle will understand
These moments’ skins, how they assure his pulpy center,
The seeds within the pit: another room hidden from life
And its grit. Leave these moments behind; rip the peel, crack the core,
Drop the bitter seeds—a mouse will eat them.

Pink-veined vapors churned in Elie’s eyes on the night he smoked what he had bought from the redneck who lived next door. We sat across from each other in Elie’s barn as I watched my dearest friend lose all of his inhibitions. I laughed as Elie complained that his mouth felt like chili peppers were crawling inside of it and an elastic band was cutting off the circulation in his liver. His left arm was clutching a little too firmly to the arm of his shabby orange chair and his jaw was completely slack. He assured me not to worry about him–he was still the toughest gun-slinging hero this side of the Mississippi, after all; John Wayne was the toughest on the other side, but Elie reckoned that he could best him.

“Some of his films were terrible, anyway, like In Old Oklahoma. Catherine Allen didn’t deserve a house on the river bend, and John Wayne shouldn’t have promised her all of those things.  He should have known that putting up his gun would be the worst thing to ever happen to him,” he said. “Goddamn, these chili peppers had better fall asleep soon. I can’t handle their wiggling.” He took another sip of warm Miller High Life.

Part of me wanted to argue with him, to say that everyone should have a house on a river bend where the serrated edges of crackling cottonwood leaves tickle your bare feet in the autumn. That Elie and I could spend our lives in rocking chairs on front porches, growing old and sipping sweet tea like my grandparents did. That maybe it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing to watch the snow melt with the same person every year. But I knew that it was an exercise in futility to tell him. People didn’t live that way anymore.  I fumbled for a Pall Mall in hopes of using the tobacco smoke to trap the words that clawed at my lips.

*

Before we were struck by adolescence, Elie and I would sit on the dirty floor and I would listen as he spun stories of phantom horses. He swore that they haunted the barn with vicious intent and tragic memories of glue factories. I painted worn leather bridles onto the warped wooden walls in my imagination on those hot afternoons. Cross-legged and wide-eyed, I heard horse whinnies and pig grunts accompanying Elie’s ramblings.

Elie’s favorite story was about a ghost of a man whose calloused hands carried animal feed and harvest rituals with practiced ease until pale men from Connecticut came and toppled everything the man knew by building a tobacco factory.

“The man cried and wandered around in the sun until his back was blistered with sunburn and his feet were red from the clay mud,” Elie whispered, his green eyes closing reverently. “Exhausted, he crawled into this barn and wept for his lost family and his own barn. If you listen closely, you can still hear him.”

*

Even now, when I sat in the darkness and listened to the crickets’ soft chirps, I could hear the ghost man sobbing. I could also sense the immeasurable joy that radiated in this barn so long ago. I could feel the drunken festivities of square dancing and the silent wonder in the moments after the birth of a colt.

Elie had forgotten how to appreciate the beauty after his father left a few years ago. He created a profane sanctuary within the walls of that southern temple. Ever the pragmatist, he used the barn as a place to smoke whatever he could get his hands on, and to spend late evenings with Cassie, the redneck neighbor’s younger sister.  He had been recklessly hung up on her the past few months. He was all melancholic sighs and nervous laughter, restless pacing and brilliant smiles. I didn’t understand why he was moping; Cassie was wrapped around his pinky, and her shapely legs were wrapped around his waist.

*

Cassie had lived at the end of Elie’s street all our lives, and her family owned a vast expanse of land there for as long as anyone could remember. As children, the three of us would climb the hill in her backyard and daydream as we admired the uncut grass and explosions of wildflowers. Cassie always called each flower by name.

“That’s a rain flower,” she’d explain, pointing to the white blossoms. “They’re my favorite.”

Elie and I spent days lying our young heads on her shoulders, listening to her pretty words. She sang folk songs to the dog-toothed violets and whispered secrets to the windflowers. I could never tell if it was Cassie’s soft voice or the summer breeze that caressed my hair on those spring afternoons.

*

Somehow, Cassie had not enchanted Elie with her honeyed hair or her bright smile. He had been largely uninterested in her. He had grown bored of her unyielding grace sometime in middle school, only renewing that interest when he became one of her older brother’s valued customers last November. Elie didn’t care about the quality of the weed; he loved to say that the jolt from unknown chemical substances flavored his transcendental experiences.

A sight to behold with his constant shadow stubble and greasy, sleep-formed hair, Elie stormed into Cassie’s home on a Sunday, desperate for a hit. Cassie didn’t spare a glance. He was captivated by her complete disinterest in his antics, and began to play little games in order to evoke her attention. The fairy-featured neighbor girl was gone, her fanciful thinking replaced by sternness and detachment. Cassie didn’t bat an eye as he blasted gaudy country songs. They were always about cheap whiskey and rusted pickup trucks, but Cassie wasn’t indignant at all. She hardly reacted when he stuffed worn posters depicting charming heroines of Alfred Hitchcock movies in her mailbox.  I think that Elie’s stories about Jupiter people with eyes like star-shine finally caught her interest. The way that his hands wove around his face as he told his stories made her smile. I recognized Cassie’s grin on my own face. I wondered if her fingertips tingled with misplaced energy when she was around him, too.

*

Elie was the first to break the silence. His voice shattered the silence that covered the space between us. I understood why he decided to speak, and forgave him for interrupting my reverie. Silence and sarcasm made him restless. Strangers were taken aback by Elie’s constant honesty. He didn’t merely converse; he charged each of his words with gusto—conducting verbal symphonies with frenzied hands, creating conversational discord.

“Suzy, you are the only person I know who could stomach John Wayne.”  He slouched forward deliberately in his shabby orange armchair. “You’d wait around forever for him to come back home. So he should have promised you that house instead, because you’re the only one who could understand him.”

There was something about the way that he said those words that left my body heavy with the task of deciphering the origin of his thoughts. Elie was tapping his foot, teeth gnashing on a hangnail.

Some of the words that I had been trying to trap sprung free. “You deserve someone who will wait for you on the front porch, Elie,” I said. A slight sheen of sweat rested on his brow, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down twice.

“Cassie’s pregnant,” he blurted, eyes too wide, looking like the child that I guess he was. “And I’m scared, Suze.”

I knew his eyes were seeking mine, but I couldn’t bring myself to remove my gaze from the old oak flooring. Each knot of the wood became a gaze far more soothing that Elie’s.  They whispered stories of a comforting past, instead of screaming about an uncertain future. I had to say something, but wasn’t sure what would comfort him.

“My favorite John Wayne movie is Operation Pacific,” I said, picking at a loose fiber on the hem of my sleeve. “I mean, John Wayne’s performances are far better in his Western films, but I think Gifford is a wonderful character. He sacrificed a lot, you know, and ships are really important things, and it’s a good thing that he made the choice to—”

“Suzanna, I need you to help me.”

He hadn’t called me Suzanna since the day we met. He had been shorter than all of the other boys in our third-grade class, and was the only one whose words weren’t blanketed by thick, Southern vernacular. But his smile had been cheery, and I was drawn to the enthusiastic way that he flung his hands above his head when he talked about his expansive Lego collection. He told me that Suzanna May didn’t suit me at all, and that I’d have to be Suzy if our friendship were to continue. He was the only one who ever called me that. At first, I hated being called Suzy, but after hearing Elie call my nickname with his unaccented voice, I relented.

“Are you sure?” I asked, not really wanting an answer.

I was being attacked by all of the things I had failed to say to Elie: that dinosaurs would always be interesting, but that his pterodactyl impression was rather terrible; that he shouldn’t have fought Jimmy Warren after school, because it doesn’t really matter what kind of snake could swallow the most mice; that all of his favorite rock musicians were killed by their own youthful optimism; that his proclamation about being a lone frontiersman for the rest of his days stung me; that I was worth his time because I would wait on the front porch for him until the sun was replaced by the moon even though I wasn’t as beautiful as Cassie..

He didn’t need to answer; the weight of the truth formed in my stomach when he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

“What are you going to do?” I hoped that he didn’t hear the tears that coated my throat or see my jittery hands.

“Marry me.”  His face regained some of his former boyishness and he finally met my eyes. There was something feral in his eyes, desperation maybe.

I couldn’t bring myself to say no, but there wasn’t any joy in his voice to convince me to say yes.

“We’ll move to Nebraska and watch the sandhill cranes migrate next April. We could live off the land. I’ve done some research, and it shouldn’t be too difficult. You can plant a garden with rosemary sprigs and tomatoes. I could do all the fishing, and bring the newspaper to you every morning. We’ll have an apple orchard and maybe even a cottonwood grove and I’ll make you happy,” he said. His voice cracked.

“Cottonwood trees don’t grow in Nebraska, Elie.”

“Well, we’ll just have to forget about them.”  He dismissed me with a wave of his hand and an eye roll. “We can’t just model our lives after promises John Wayne made decades ago. It’s practically archaic.”

“John Wayne is a better man than you are, then,” I said, my voice had found strength again, my hands resting peacefully in my lap.

“But you love me.”

Elie said those words as if they were meant to hold some special significance. As if the truth would bewitch me into becoming his wife and forgetting about my dream of a house on the river bend. As if they would eradicate the life of the baby he had accidentally created with Cassie. Without any delusions of cottonwood branches or of falling asleep to Elie’s soft snores without remembering Cassie’s gentle voice singing to the dogwood flowers, I knew that we could never be joined as man and wife.

I thought of our childhood friend, imagined a child swirling with Cassie’s solemnity and Elie’s flightiness growing inside her body.

“I still don’t think it’s a great idea,” I said.  “My feelings have nothing to do with this.” I bit my lower lip until I could taste blood, then taking another drag of my cigarette. It was reduced to a stub, but still smoldered between my fingers.

*

Cassie would have mocked me for letting a cigarette go to waste. She was the fastest smoker I had ever seen. She loved to dangle her feet from her front porch with a Newport between her thin lips, watching twilight. A slight smile would grace her lips as she let the menthol nip the buds on her tongue. I joined her some evenings, and we’d murmur about schoolwork or weather, exchanging quiet pleasantries. We did not share intimacies or speak of Elie, but part of me knew that this was the most honest interaction that she had ever had. She’d suck on the filter too quickly, desperate to fill her lungs with smoke. Her cigarette would be reduced to ash in minutes, and she’d carelessly toss the butts into a cardboard cup she stored for these occasions. Then she’d begin again, lighting another. She would tease me, saying I was too slow to smoke with her.

“You smoke like a Yankee, Suzanna May. You don’t stand a chance against an Olympic smoker like me.”

“Hey, I haven’t been training for life like you.”

Then I’d say good-bye, and Suzy would lift her hand gently. From my pickup truck, I could see the end of her Newport burn dimly, an artificial sun in the dusk. I wondered if she was having difficulty kicking the habit with the child on the way. I thought about asking her, but she would never mention any struggle to quit.

*

“Besides, what about your child?” I asked reluctantly as I tossed the butt of the cigarette into one of the empty beer cans that littered the barn.

“C’mon, Suze. Even the Buddha was a piss-poor excuse for a father. And Cassie can do just fine by herself. She doesn’t need me to raise that kid.”

*

Elie spoke about his own father only once, about a month ago, when we sat shoulder to shoulder.

“My dad’s an asshole.” Elie’s gaze was fixed on his elderly neighbor’s pasture, where dairy cows graze in the afternoons.

“Maybe it’s a good thing he’s gone, then.”

“You’re right,” he replied, playing with a blade of grass.

I swatted the tortured strand out of his angry hands. Left unoccupied, his shaky left hand grabbed mine, and he buried his head in my shoulder.

“I hate myself for wanting him around sometimes,” he said in a whisper, lifting his head, but maintaining his grip on my hand.

“I understand.”

*

“You are very far from enlightenment, so that doesn’t hold for you.”

“Yahweh killed his kid, Suze. Maybe abandonment is the safer alternative.” He slumped into the ratty armchair and crushed the closest empty beer can, with tears in his bloodshot eyes. The veins in his hands emerged under the strain; the blue passageways throbbed slightly as his face contorted with focus.

“You aren’t God, Elie.” I didn’t know what to do with my body. There was an unbearable weight in my stomach, and I was trapped under Elie’s fears.

“I can send floods and rainbows. I am alpha and omega. I will destroy cities and give people hope.” He hopped up from his chair, crushed the can in his hand, and started pacing like a man possessed.

“Cassie needs hope right now,” I replied.

*

Cassie believed in a different kind of hope, in humility and goodwill and feeding the Muscovy ducks at the park on Sunday mornings. She had abandoned church as a means to enlightenment a few months ago, choosing instead to toss bread to the water birds and watch them devour her offering.

It caused quite a scandal around town. Once a poster child for Christian behavior, Cassie was demonized by the church for her poor attendance. They cursed Elie, too, for corrupting the star of their community. They were ashamed, embarrassed to have once claimed a wayward child like Cassie as one of their own. Elie relished in the mistrust of the churchgoers, and often teased Cassie for being upset about the rumors.

“You Satan-worshipper, you.”  He grinned lazily as his hands wandered down her waist. “Those ducks are Beelzebub incarnate, and you’re just feeding them to make them strong. Your plan is world-domination, isn’t it?”

“It’s a divine act, you know,” she snapped defensively. “I’d rather help someone than sit around being made to feel guilty for my sins.”

Intrigued, I asked her if I could accompany her on her weekly escapades. She was hesitant to let me intrude upon her weekly ritual, but decided it would do no harm.

Three days later, I watched from a distance as she sat on the worn park bench. The ducks waddled over to her, flocking to the grave girl. They pressed against her with their rutted faces, but she was unperturbed by their ugliness. She became the fairy girl who Elie and I once spent our afternoons with, speaking in hushed tones to her yellow-eyed disciples. Her eyes regained her former gentleness when gazing upon their iridescent plumage stained by the murky pond water. I even caught a glimpse of her smile when the smallest duck hesitantly plucked the bread out of her open palm. She was reborn each week, if only for a moment, resurrected in the image of her girlhood.

*

My words stilled his frantic movement. The can fell from his hands. The cheap tin traveled across the floor, before finally resting next to a battered coffee table a couple of feet away from where he stood.

“Do you think she loves me?”

*

Cassie was probably sitting up in bed right now, completely unaware of Elie’s fanciful plans. She was probably listening to the Johnny Cash records her brother had given her last Christmas. She loved to hum along to the country singer’s sandpaper voice.

“It’s so romantic.”  She sighed one evening last winter, just after she had begun to see Elie. We were lying on the floor of her sparsely decorated bedroom, listening to the melody of the trumpet. “The way that Johnny Cash loved June Carter.”

“She was his whole universe,” I said, nodding sadly in agreement. “They say he was lost without her when she died.”

Johnny Cash’s voice opened up deep-seated wounds in us. The masculine tenderness in his voice left us vulnerable.

“I want someone to love me like that,” she said, almost wincing at her confession.

I smiled sadly at her. “Me too.”

Elie loved Cassie in the desperate, clinging way that Johnny did June. As much as I wished that I could change myself into someone who could satisfy his restlessness, my gut ached with the awareness that Elie would never find me sufficient. That rosemary gardens and newspapers in the morning would not satiate his hunger. Only Cassie could.

*

“I know she does. And the baby will too.”  I offered him a weak smile, hoping that it was reassuring.

Elie flexed his fingers and placed them behind his head. He said, “I want to name him Sid, but Cassie said that no child of hers would have anything to do with the Sex Pistols. I guess I’m hopeless at this sort of thing, aren’t I?”

A bubble of laughter rose through his throat, and he couldn’t catch his breath. The anxiety that he pent up in his gut for weeks had been eradicated. I started to giggle with him, feeling the tangle of barbed wire in my solar plexus dissipate without a trace.

“So that rules out Nancy, if you happen to have a little girl,” I joked.

“No kid of mine would allow her shithead boyfriend to stab her in the bathroom at the Hotel Chelsea. If she’s related to me at all, she’ll be living it up like Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen.”

I never had the heart to tell Elie that Janis Joplin had died with the psychedelic age; that her death was as purposeless as Nancy Spungeon’s was. Nobody had ever corrected him when he spoke of his idols as if they were alive, pitying the Yankee boy with the pale skin for his naiveté. I told him the truth about the deaths of all of the psychedelic rockers that he admired so wholeheartedly.

“So, Tom Blessing is dead too?” he said, voice cracking.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t tell me Nick Drake is gone.”  He shook his head fervently, blocking out the inevitable affirmative answer.

And silence grew again, but this time I knew that Elie wasn’t uncomfortable. Some of the restlessness within his frame had died with his laughter. He was prepared to abandon notions of Nebraska. He could settle down with Cassie and grow accustomed to watching the snow melt from the rocking chair on his porch every year. I had never really belonged on that front porch anyway. Even Catherine Allen couldn’t have been contented with her memories of John Wayne as she waited for him. She must have explored other frontiers, grown her own cottonwood trees by the riverbend.

I lit another cigarette, imagining my own journey to California where I could plant that tree and watch it grow. When autumn came, I knew that my feet would be relishing the soft crunch of fallen, serrated leaves, and Cassie would be in her second trimester, happily preparing a home for the new baby. I sat across from Elie until the sun’s gentle rays splayed across the dew-tipped grass outside, glowing like nude limbs of young lovers. I knew that I would be gone by the time the rays grew weak in the wintertime.

Some girls collect marionettes
bubblegum wrappers, pocketbooks,
posters of John Cusack and sea glass
soft green as cat eyes. she
collects herself.

Bits were always dripping out
but she renounced buckets.
Hole in one sock, wheedling a way
through sun and moon and marionette.
Through drive-ins, so dreary, marooned
to the people you came with.

Her lover collects grievances:
gastrointestinal gnawing, drops through a leaky roof.
Pull all the marigolds out of the wet grass.
Marigolds collect reasons why they will not
bow to wet grass, while scavenging dogs collect their stems.

New mothers collect macaroni art, the odd hour of sleep
ping
ping
ping in the jar.
—  pavement must collect light.

Circuses save up tigers and teenagers, who,
if released, would collect only prey.
You’ve fallen in love three times today.
Not even the fireflies escape intact.

Now riddle me this: Imelda Marcos  with her thousand pairs of shoes
could not collect enough light to beat the pavement.

Some girls collect sticks and branches
then let them splash in moonlit puddles.
Quiet, waiting for the ripple,
she collects herself.

while she and i watched grandma
in the bathtub we waited for the pruning:
she waited for the sagging
i for the other signs of aging.
and those were our jobs.

we limned and we limbed.
growing pains for overstretched ligaments and unstretched fibers.
knots.

there are handprints on the
steam of the mirror because one day we didn’t have a chance to
see grandma slip.
and we’ve lived in different worlds and swum in parallel pools of
pruning molding skin.

do you think they watch us?
(––hands do not cease but concerned lips purse)
she asked me while we were sudsing her white scalp
kneading it like dough
(––eyes, nearly cast down––)
sweating her like farm fresh eggs
(less than smooth today––)
i looked down and beyond the crust under my fingernails
I found what grandma had called a wrinkle.

My honey had sunshine in his legs. He walked plucky straight lines to work each
 morning, past the waterside and through the graveyards to my tired lungs. Bernace was cryptic in his words but weak in delivery. His hands were whittled and crooked from the years of handling fresh metals at the factory. A distinctive southern drifter, his body was no longer rosy white, but drunk with the pit of a Sun and rich almond eyes. I used to think of his head as an empty jar, aching from the wealth of air left behind. His air turned out to be me, scraggly-footed housewife with nothing but flyaway lashes to offer with two plain hands. We met in the bowels of a peach orchard in northern Raleigh. I remember the look of the handmade clouds in the sky that day, and grubby work-boots grinding through the fruit. I can still taste the feeling in our eyes. At the time it was undercooked and slight, but I knew better. He helped me pick peaches the entire afternoon as my heart grew full.

It was safe enough to predict our annihilation when the days began to whither like rain-
drenched dandelion stalks. In the stinging North Carolina sun one day, he grabbed me by the head and dragged me to the borders of his jaw only to fling me to the ground. A lady doesn’t retaliate, I thought to myself as I held a cold towel to the skid marks on my face later that night. I blamed the lack of stars for his outbursts. Then it was the rotten peaches. They were bruised and useless like I was. I feel the need to mention that my scars were not his fault. I cursed his knuckles, the beautiful dips in his hands like moon-rock at night and wondered how such delicate fingers could become angry fistfuls so easily. Was he really that simple to understand? No man is, except Jesus. My mother taught me how to hold a man’s heart under my arm and carry it, making sure not to cave from its weight. I wish she were alive enough to slap her daughter upside the head for crashing into love so quickly and furiously that I had no time to turn on my blinkers. I was caught in a snowstorm with a mouthful of honey and no way out of the incoming avalanche.

The morning was still when Bernace finally left. It was as if the earth was being scolded and hushed by its mother to avoid staring the stranger in its eyes. I kept my head low, being seen and not heard, while I watched him pack the past three years into his backpack. He wore his grimy work boots and flannel button-down like from back at the orchard. He had no one to impress, but women would love him all the same.

I asked God to make women smarter than I.

I think I asked for mercy too soon. He left and the house was an empty lung. I remembered the nights I had spent sleeping book-ended on his side of the bed, dreading his arrival. I recall his stomping through the living room, and the harsh push I’d feel as he edged into bed. The days rose and fell like his heavy chest.

We lost the momentum in our knees before we even got off the earth. My mother did not raise me as a false-hoped woman, but I believed in him more than I did myself at one point. I was his star, and it was my right as a country-born woman to assume responsibility for the things I break.

Were I a child beneath a pile of warm
Laundry, sheets yawning above me,

I would sleep, my body traced
In tea towels and bibs, a yellow tablecloth

Buttering our popcorn ceiling. Instead I plank
Here stiff, waiting for my vertebrae

To settle uneasily, like Lego blocks,
My spine twisting a cobblestone path among

The lumps and springs of a borrowed mattress,
On sheets that no longer smell like my mother’s soap.