Nimrod/Hardman Literary Awards
Featured Issue: 29th Annual Awards Issue
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| The Healing Arts | Crossing Borders |
Awards 28:
Doing the Hundreds at Fifty
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Natalie Diaz
No More Cake Here
When my brother died
I worried there wasn’t enough time
to deliver the one hundred invitations
I’d scribbled while on the phone with the mortuary:
Because of the short notice no need to RSVP
Unfortunately the firemen couldn’t come
(I had hoped they’d give free rides on the truck).
They did agree to drive by the house once
with the lights on—It was a party after all.
I put Mom and Dad in charge of balloons,
let them blow as many years of my brother’s name,
jails, twenty-dollar bills, midnight phone calls,
fistfights and ER visits as they could let go of.
The scarlet balloons zigzagged along the ceiling
like they’d been filled with helium. Mom blew up
so many that she fell asleep. She slept for ten years—
she missed the whole party.
My brothers and sisters were giddy, shredding
his stained t-shirts and raggedy pants, throwing them up
into the air like confetti.
When the clowns came in a few balloons slipped out
the front door. They seemed to know where
they were going and shrank to a fistful of red grins
at the end of our cul-de-sac. The clowns played toy bugles
until the air was scented with rotten raspberries.
They pulled scarves from Mom’s ear—she slept through it.
I baked my brother’s favorite cake (chocolate, white frosting).
When I counted there were ninety-nine of us in the kitchen.
Everyone stuck their fingers in the mixing bowl.
A few stray dogs came to the window.
I heard their stomachs and mouths growling
over the mariachi band playing in the bathroom.
(There was no room in the hallway because of the magician.)
The mariachis complained about the bathtub acoustics.
I told the dogs No more cake here and shut the window.
The fire truck came by with the sirens on. The dogs ran away.
I sliced the cake into ninety-nine pieces.
I wrapped all the electronic equipment in the house,
taped pink bows and glittery ribbons to them
remote controls, the Polaroid, stereo, shop-vac,
even the motor to Dad’s work truck—all the things
my brother had taken apart and put back together
doing his crystal meth tricks—he’d always been
a magician of sorts.
Two mutants came to the door.
One looked almost human. They wanted
to know if my brother had willed them the pots
and pans and spoons stacked in his basement bedroom.
They said they missed my brother’s cooking and did we
have any cake. No more cake here I told them.
Well what’s in the piñata they asked. I told them
God was and they ran into the desert, barefoot.
I gave Dad his slice and put Mom’s in the freezer.
I brought up the pots and pans and spoons
(really, my brother was a horrible cook), banged them
together like a New Year’s Day celebration.
My brother finally showed up asking why
he hadn’t been invited and who baked the cake.
He told me I shouldn’t smile, that this whole party was shit
because I’d imagined it all. The worst part he said was
he was still alive. The worst part he said was
he wasn’t even dead. I think he’s right, but maybe
the worst part is that I’m still imagining the party, maybe
the worst part is that I can still taste the cake.
Gretchen Flesher
from Our Sister Opal
When we were children we sometimes tried to play with our sister Opal, but we were too many voices for her and she always wandered off. She loved night, when we all went to our beds. We stopped running in and out of the back door, stopped racing up and down the path to the rocky beach, stopped shouting “Look, look!” louder and louder than each other the way you have to do when there are seven brothers and four sisters in a house, even if one of them, most days, doesn’t say a word.
Mom and Dad hardly ever asked us to be quiet. They wouldn’t have made so many children if they didn’t like the noise and crowd. What they said to us most was “Go play outside in the air, Loves,” or Mom might say, “Come and sit a minute,” before catching a young one of us up onto her lap. We played together on the beach, in November with our feet stuck into rubber boots, in July barefoot and long-limbed in cut-off shorts. Opal sometimes wore boots in summer, or in winter might be seen running away along the curve of the shore, the white soles of her feet slapping against wet stones. She was always going away from us. We never caught her looking back.
We were too many voices for Opal, we knew, but we followed her still. At such a distance we followed that perhaps it can’t be called following. We followed by watching from the windows. Or by standing on the shore, throwing stones, braiding seaweed, collecting little heaps of pure white stones and oyster shells, waiting for her to come home from wherever she wandered alone.
One early spring we all stood in a scattered line on the beach facing the bay. Sis, the oldest, held Baby. Hazel and Colin had their hands in each other’s coat pockets, the only thing they did that really gave them away as twins. Samuel, Christopher, and Michael poked at the stones with short sticks. James and Una kept an eye on the clouds. Mostly, we all just stood staring at the cold sun on the surface of the water, and we were sort of quiet, the way February and March could make us. Tom stood by Sis and handed strands of wet seaweed and empty crab shells up to Baby. We had rocks in our hands and we fumbled about with them, passed them from one palm to another, rubbed them with our thumbs. We heard Opal’s voice come to us from behind.
“Throw ’em in,” she called.
We twisted our heads around, to make sure she had really spoken. We saw her standing on the cusp of the hill that bends down from the yard. Her dark hair had grown long, all the way to her elbows, and it blew to one side in the slight breeze. We only looked for a moment and then pulled our eyes away and threw our rocks into the water like she wanted. We threw our hardest and our best. We threw with elegance and gusto for Opal who never played with us. When we turned again to see if she had loved the throws our arms had made, she was nearer, sitting on a big, beached cedar log behind us.
“Throw them so far,” she said, waving one thin-fingered hand in a wide arc over her head.
We squatted in loose jeans and scooped up the most we could hold. Tiny pebbles and flakes of shell stuck in the creases of our palms, larger stones rested on top. Even Sis knelt down to reach for rocks with one hand while she balanced Baby. All together we swung our cupped hands forward through our knees and released the rocks into the air. They fell as a chorus, Una’s and Tom’s, Michael’s, Samuel’s, all of them, dashing the sun’s light on the surface of the saltwater. Circular pulses traveled outward in large rings.
We were proud of the beautiful motions. We would have made them again, thrown with more force and grace for this sister. We wanted to please her even though she wasn’t the oldest, or the baby. When the last, lightest rocks had sunk to the bottom we waited for her call. We looked back to the cedar log, up to the top of the bank, and both ways down the beach, but she had escaped us. Sis shifted Baby and said, “Well.” We turned back to the house, poking each other’s backs on our way up the hill, smiling, and dusting the knees of the little ones.
We still forget which of us Opal would have shared a room with if she had continued to sleep inside. The pairs and groups in bedrooms shifted over the years. It is like having a pack of puppies around and thinking back you can’t say which is which, but we remember perfectly the day she stopped coming indoors at night.
Keetje Kuipers
My First Lover Returns from Iraq
After all these years of not loving you,
you’ve become the man I build
every poem from, your naked shape
the clay I mold to place at the base of a tree
or in the soft folds of a morning bedroom.
I make your hands into fruit and set them
in bowls, your feet flower from the ends
of frayed pants. In my poems I’m unable
to mend them. Sometimes you walk, usually
you don’t speak. I can’t seem to give you the words
though all I want is to hear your voice.
What I’m afraid to write is what I dream
at night, when you seem to come to me of your own desire.
And I’m ashamed to want you still, inside me
now as you were then, though you’ve been
dead these three months, the shrapnel
strung through your lungs like ribbon,
dust filling the reddest caverns of your flesh.
I was the last to be told. And yours
is the only body that visits me now:
your sweat-laden skin, the light it makes
for itself, as if in that darkened room
you had gathered every burning object
to you and you alone shone.
Dan Kelty
Two Worlds
And what would you be in the other one?
The same engine, that stick of grass, the
same smoke rising over town? A shadow
in a window, composing itself, outlining
the answers to July, and August
and the entire beguiling season?
What would you step into and how do you
imagine it? Colorful, as flower prints
or more like a negative with all its secrets
cryptically encoded?
And though you have watched one or two
close friends fade slowly into the August light,
and imagined a hush and a slight swaying,
you think it may also be
loud and garish and unbearable.
But always it must be in August, this entryway,
because August sways and leans its back
on doors, and on the cottonwoods, issuing
its goodbyes day after day, into a light
that has begun to recede from this one.
Ioanna Carlsen
from Karate
Karate means empty hands. A woman sitting on the big black couch at the back of the gym lobby looks down at her hands lying in her lap. They are not as beautiful as they once were; the index fingers on each hand slightly swerve in the wrong direction, the joints are knobby, and they hurt. She gets up and buys herself a cup of coffee.
She is upset because she is not getting along with her sixteen-year-old daughter and she feels she is the way Sylvia perceives her: bad-mannered, with despicable eating habits and stupid opinions, and not a flat enough stomach. She feels like a person who does not know anything—how to dress, please a daughter, or buy the right soap.
This morning she walked into the kitchen in her blue silk robe with the torn pocket. Sylvia wanted to know why she didn’t throw it away.
“Because I love it.”
“If you love it so much why don’t you sew the pocket?”
She reacted to this not in words, but with her body, slamming a cupboard door. After she slammed it, she said—she couldn’t help it—“Have you eaten breakfast?”
“I don’t feel like it. And I don’t have time anyway.” Sylvia was screaming by now. Her hair—which she bleached so it would be different from her mother’s—glimmered in the morning sunlight, which streamed across the room.
She noticed how beautiful it was as Sylvia flounced out the door and drove away.
This evening she stayed in town for karate, in spite of a light snow, because she did not want to go home.
She wished she had wings like the dove and could fly away, or at least get away just for a while, the way her teacher says you’re supposed to when you come to class—drop the world, he often says, leave it outside the dojo.
* * *
He comes out of the snow into the orange warmth of the gym complex and stamps his feet, hard.
He is wearing his uniform under his ski jacket and he walks to the gym and turns it into a dojo by bowing himself in.
He is Nisei. His mother died when he was young. He particularly remembers her hair. She had never cut it. She used to let him wind it up and put it up on the back of her head in a roll like a snake.
When he was thirteen she was killed by a car that had hit her because it had been rammed by a bus. His father had been holding a tea cup when he got the news. The cup slipped from his hand and shattered. That is all he remembers. He doesn’t remember seeing her dead, just the cup.
The first time she came to class, he sized her up as a woman in her forties, prone to hysteria and still good-looking with straight long black hair.
One day she got annoyed at having her hair down. She rolled it up and went to her purse and got a hairpin and stuck it through the coil and made it stay there like a snake at the back of her head.
Okinawan Goju-ryu has a very high attrition rate and he was used to seeing various types come to a class or two—sometimes even come for a month or two—and then go, never to return.
But she surprised him; she became one of his most steady students. Every Wednesday and Saturday all winter she had been coming. She was very awkward with the language and the movements. And she let him know by facial expressions of exasperation and irony—she was very good at the ironic—that she thought she’d never get the hang of the training katas. Katas are ritualized combat exercises performed—in twelve variations—in the form of an I. At first it’s very hard for people to get onto this I formation, and for a long time he didn’t explain it in words, but let his students absorb it in their subconscious. He verbalized it later, after they had worked at it for a while. This was a trick he had learned from his teacher who thought it worked well with Westerners, who tended to be too verbal.
Only his cleverer students figured out he did things like that on purpose. She was one of his cleverest students. He knew that because she always verbalized any clever thing she had figured out, or any pattern she had finally recognized. For example, she would say it’s very un-karate to verbalize.
Lauren Wolk
In Which I Watch a Live Feed from the Nkorho Pan Water Hole While
Sitting at My Desk on Cape Cod
I am addicted to Africa.
To the high bob of a baboon’s tail,
the way he eats the muck from his hind foot.
To a dusty ton of rhino and her spud-faced son
forged of tungsten in the sepia dusk.
To the giraffe following the atlas on her coat
slowly through the fever trees,
the hot geysers of her giant heart.
The burrow owl that bids the buck take care
where he sets his cloddish hoof.
I am addicted to the mutton-chopped warthog,
wallowing in the brown batter at the water’s edge.
The hunchbacked gnu, his beard a fright,
the ravenous oxpecker that probes his teeming nostril
with her candy-corn beak.
I am addicted to all of this and more,
to the belching of bullfrogs in the
night, ticking as it cools,
the twang of love-sick bugs,
the rusty squawk of God knows what.
And God does know what.
What else a world like this could want.
What else to ask of this box of
filaments and miracles and Africa
that sits on my desk.
I wish there were a camera aimed this way,
so they could look at me as I have looked at them,
so I could be the stuff of their addiction, too.
So they could see, in the squirrel outside my window,
a phenom of pewter and grace, in the jay a deft orator,
in the woman at my desk something exotic and fine.
They would listen to her as if they’d never
heard anything so unusual
and wonder about the texture of her skin,
the smell of her hair,
what she is thinking as she sits quietly
in her little room of words and photographs
and waits for something wonderful to happen.
Donald Illich
Bedtime Story
Story time again, my parents make me
take off my suit, part the blue covers
to sail away beneath their irate voices.
Once upon a time there was a boy
named Don—like me! I interrupt—Shh,
he was good most of the time—they smirk—
but he also liked to date inappropriate women—
Nuh, uh—One day he met this sexy girl
in the city, her name was Melinda—
Almost like my ex, I say, kicking away
blankets they seal back on my body—
Yes, she looked beautiful, but she was
really a wolf. Don was supposed to be
going to the bank to pay off his bills
but he listened to her and they traveled
to a bar. Young Don was not a good drinker—
I’m as good as you two! I yell—Still,
several months later, after many more
such nights, expensive presents, jewelry,
lending her criminal sister money
for a trial, Don was broke and alone.
The bank never received the deposits—
No way, I remember signing the slips—
At this they stop, promise to continue
tomorrow, turn on the Scooby Doo
night light. They walk through walls
and disappear. I miss my nightie.
No one’s next to me. My skin’s cold.
Figures crawl across the plaster,
numbers more frightening than ghosts.
Rachel May
The Blue Dart
He says, “Get in.” He is my father. I obey. We drive four hours north to Salem, Massachusetts, where my grandmother lives. A yellow house with two dormer windows up top raised like disapproving eyes. Inside, there is an orange tree. Grows its fruit in the kitchen window. My father and I get out. Feet swing over the side of the car. His door creaks shut. Long hard push. Slam. We walk to the front door, over the slate path. Until he died (at ninety), my grandfather mowed this lawn. Now my grandmother lives all alone. We come to visit. We bring her tea from my mother’s shop. We say, “Come live with us, Nana, how we would love you to.” She says no.
* * *
But I am not there now. This is a long way in the future. A different time. Winter in the West and I am all grown up (I tell myself). Looking out the little glass square in my front door, it is snowing. Has been all night. Two feet on the ground and more to come. I watch a man in a black wool coat walk hunkered from my door. We have spent the last three days in my beige apartment (the walls and ceilings and even the appliances: beige! Almost beautiful in its lack of imagination). The window has little criss-cross iron squares across it and the man bounces between them, his body all sliced up. Hands in his pockets. Triangles of snow between his arms and his torso. My feet on the linoleum; the heat kicks in. I keep the place at seventy-three. I live in an elderly person’s condo complex, sub-letting from some woman not yet ready to move in here, and I am surrounded by the old. I like them. They smile when they go to their cars. They look out for my apartment when I am back home for Christmas. They give me advice I do not need, sometimes, such as: You shouldn’t park so close to campus or you will get a ticket. Too expensive! I hate their advice. I love it. Upstairs, Mrs. Dwindlen starts up with her Nordictrack, thump-a-thump-a-thump. I wait for the man to look back. His name is Henry. Was. I will start thinking of him in past tense now. Maybe it will help. He is going back to California. I am going to forget him. (He does not look back.)
* * *
In school, I study art. Here is how you make a drawing. Long smooth lines down the woman’s waist. A sharper angle in the man’s jaw. Shading, Tillie, shading. Professor Givois pinches my cheek hard when he likes my work. Smiles big. A moody, often jolly man. His cheeks are always in a red-wine-flush, the blood cells bursting in his skin. “Merveilleux, Teelee!” He walks away laughing. My face aches.
* * *
Once, a long time ago, there lived a little girl who grew up in a town with many trees. Not quite a forest, though. Just very green. Even in the winter.
* * *
The hunkered man, Henry, has called me. It is late on a Thursday night, and this came unexpectedly. A week after he got back to California. Oh, I’ve been so busy, I say. It is snowing again. Fat flakes falling from the low gray sky. This is what is called inversion. It can happen in a valley.
He says, “I am lonely here. I miss you. San Diego screams your name.”
“How melodramatic,” I say.
“How melodramatic,” I say.
He says, “Tell me a story.”
This is what we did those three days when we were tired of sex. I told him stories like I did with my sister when we were small. Sleepovers on each other’s floors and we filled them with fairytales. She had night terrors. She said the stories made them go away.
“A very green town,” he says. “A good start.”
I sit on my green couch. One hand rests on my little orange kitten, who leaped from a drift the other day on my way home. Poor starving kitten. I imagine his little siblings still wandering out there. I searched for half an hour, but there were no more. Only him. I call him Tom.
In the courtyard, Mr. Simmons walks his bloodhound. Slow shuffling steps around the square. He stays under the overhang to keep out of the snow. He carries a red leash. The bloodhound’s ears sway back and forth as he goes. Upstairs on the second floor across the courtyard, Mrs. Neale turns on a lamp. Sits down on the couch to read. Four floors of people in the building on the other side and only one light on. Maybe they are sleeping. It is eight o’clock in the wintertime. Probably time for bed.
“She went to see her grandmother one day,” I say.
Henry interrupts, “And the grandmother ate her!”
“No,” I say. “That’s not how it goes.”
I lean back on the cushions. The snow blows onto the deck. I ought to take my old
chairs in, save them for Spring. But it is cold out there, and I am talking now. I lean back and think how maybe Henry doesn’t get it after all. Too soon to tell. We shall see.
“Go on,” he says.
.