Nimrod International Literary Journal : Muse of Attachment

Patricia Caspers

La Historia

So it was you then?
Mí querído, even then.
You worked dark mornings
until the fields of com became sunlit,
and when your hands cracked and bloodied
you worked in those fields until you couldn’t see
your blood on the corn.

I worked for Tía Zamora
in her dress shop in Matagalpa
cutting cloth from the bolt,
learning the selvage and the fold.
Seven days I worked, quitting only for Mass,
and in the evenings I walked five miles home to you.

We made tortillas y sopa
from bruised, stolen corn
and dreamed of Califonia.
We were twenty-five then.

In 1906 Zalaya took the farms.
There was no work.
We spent all we had saved,
traveled by cargo boat
all the way to San Francisco.
My first time from home,
and I was sick with the salt,
the screeching gulls.

The city still burned when we arrived
four days after the earthquake.
We walked through the tar-stink of fallen homes,
slept in the streets and ate apples
until we found a boarder home in Fruitvale
at the end of a beautiful, potholed road.

In this life
Fruitvale has no wildflowers
only barred windows,
stolen grocery carts.
We are twenty-five again.
You have lost your language,
and I am no longer de Nicaragua,
my skin as pale as moonlight,
but we are together in this overcast city,
where the smell of fresh corn
makes us home-sick.

Thomas Gough
from Idleness, Justice, Kingship, Love

Two mothers come into the Mercury Café this morning. I know they’re mothers because they talk about the fingers of their babies. How tiny fists close on lumps of bread only to set them free in sleep. How you handle a skull until the business of bone is over. While Simon makes these mothers decafs, he doesn’t say a word, but once they’re gone, he accuses them of self-indulgence, of sentimentality, of turning their backs on the world’s bona fide gloom. Having descended into an attack on mothering, he turns against me and all the world’s professors of tenderness.
It’s 2004. Two days before the presidential election, and Simon says the incumbent will get four more years. He says the young will go on dying in their boots. The endangered animals will be forgotten and the sky will wear clean. Let in all the black matter of heaven.
Simon’s right. He’s always right, but I love him, so I don’t listen. This morning, I’m paging through the paper as he unleashes scorn upon me and the futile art of hoping. I’m not reading the paper. I’m barely looking at the pictures. In the mirror next to us, I see the vein in Simon’s forehead growing more pronounced with each page I turn. But I also see his lips, wet and rich red as any toddler’s.
Simon says, “You think I don’t know you’re hanging on every word I say? Believe me, I know. You haven’t the faintest idea how to dissemble. Let alone lie.”
I take a look at myself in the mirror next to us. My face is rumpled, white, as if I were wearing flour. Simon reaches across the counter and rests my cheeks in his palms. He says, “Look at me. No, in the eye. Now go ahead and lie.”
Simon’s father, Reverend Raymond Recrue, died this past summer, but Simon doesn’t subscribe to Kübler-Ross. He believes in before grief and after. And after is so wretched, I forget before myself. Sometimes when I watch Simon grinding his teeth and raging, he strikes me as an inhuman force, the river of lava burning a boulevard into the forest.
My face grows hot in Simon’s hand. I say, “You are the most miserable person I’ve ever known.”
He says, “I told you, lie.”
I consider acknowledging that he may be right about the vanity of hope. That we’re doomed and losing ground. That the world-pushing greed is nothing we can fight. But then I consider his mouth, his lips forming each crushing word of his predictions, and I can’t bring myself to feel hopeless as I know I ought to. I finish the cold coffee in my cup. Look at Simon standing there with his arms crossed and the apron tight on his chest.
Simon’s face is stone. Only there’s something a little softer than he’d like around his mouth. My first instinct is to tell him so, but I’d rather he not know how transparent he is.

Rosalyn Driscoll

Psyche’s Lamp

As a child, Louis Kahn lifted embers in his apron
to look more closely. His face remained scarred for life.
His father said, let him die. His mother said,
he will be great because of it.

The gods admonish us: No fire.
Don’t eat the apple. Don’t open the box.
Don’t look at me. They pray we will disobey.
And we, being human, are all eyes, hands, mouths.

I take you, my beloved, to love and to cherish, in burning,
in wounding, in wandering lost over the earth.
I cannot see you, nor you me. We strike matches
over and over, scraping them on our roughness.
Each one flares up, shines on our faces,
into our eyes, mouths. Then the dark
swallows us again. We touch each other,
remembering—or not remembering— what we know.

Jen Larsen

from What It Is You Know

Bambam was the one who called to tell me my wife was dead. I realized, while we were on the phone, that I had never asked my wife why we called her sister something like Bambam. It never occurred to me to ask why. I flew into Newark on Tuesday, close to midnight. I drove down the parkway in a crappy rented Neon, with Manhattan at my back. There was no one else on the road. On either side of me, Jersey rushed by. I opened all the windows to get rid of the wet smell of sweat, the ashy smell of cigarettes. There was a lot I would have given for a cigarette. Banging my palm on the wheel of the car. Radio broken. Gas stations on either side of the parkway, they passed too quickly.
My suit, in a garment bag, battered the back window, filling with air like a black sail. I watched it in the rearview mirror. It was a thousand-dollar suit. An eight-hundred-dollar suit. An expensive suit. Sometimes it looked like it would just be sucked right out onto the road, splatter across six lanes. The bag whipped against the door. I would not get up to say anything at the wake. Even if they asked me. What is the man who was left supposed to say about the woman who left him?
I remembered the exit, though it had been four years. Verona. I remembered the tight streets of suburban New Jersey, the vinyl siding of suburban New Jersey, the pinwheels in the lawns. Neon only on the Bud Light signs in the windows of rotten little bars where men with shaky hands sloshed their bottles over their coasters. Smoking Parliaments. No place to stop for a cigarette, at one in the morning, in suburban New Jersey.
I found the hotel—two stories high, mildew smell and Coke machine. I found the bed. I found my tie, my cufflinks, the funeral home the next morning, everything smooth and easy. My tie straight.
When I slipped into the back, her mother and father, her aunt, Bambam, they knew I was there. They all turned around, one after the other. They all tilted their heads in sympathy, one after the other. The mouths of the women pursed, Bambam and her mother, and their heads tilted, tilted, tilted. They thought they looked benevolent. They were the ones who told her Margaret, you’re doing the wrong thing. They looked nothing like Maggie—they were highlighty blondes, tanning-bed brown, thighs running to fat and faces sagging. The flesh of their asses pressed through the rails of the folding chairs. They were the ones who called Maggie once, twice a week.
Who called and told me she just needs a little time. She just needed a little time. I had always meant to ask how much, exactly. How much time does she need? You say that—she just needs a little time—you say it like you know. I always meant to call her and ask her—exactly what does that mean? But she never came to the phone. Rows ahead they turned and they made sad smiles. They gave me sad smiles.
Her friends, though—she had a lot of friends. It was what she was good at, people. Rows and rows of them, clumped like soggy tissues together, their hands spidery and clutching at one another. A grasping hand on a shoulder, a grasping hand sliding down to an elbow, tugging on one another. They tugged on one another like they could open each other up and crawl inside. They bobbed at one another like chickens in funeral drag. Those voices, those shrieky grief-pitched funeral voices.

Margaret J. Hoehn

When Even the Stars Have Fled

The spirits of those who once sat
by fires at night and gave
thanks for the land,
have left. Gone too,
are the trails of the black-tail deer,
of coyote and quail.
Bulldozed and buried,
memory has been cleared away.

At dusk, I walk down a street lined by silken lawns,
and watch a boy stand on the pedals
of his bike, and ride as hard
and as fast as only a ten-year-old can.
A mother and daughter
are planting zinnias on their porch;
in the park, a softball game is winding down.
And who wouldn’t feel content
in this sultry hour as it slips from the sky?
But at the end of the long summer day,
who will call us home again,
when even the stars have fled?

Janette Turner Hospital

from The Prince of Darkness is a Gentleman

On one night, the worst one, and the last one before Katie ran away, there were eighteen of those calls. They were not all the same. If our mother answered, there would be heavy breathing and silence. “Why are you doing this?” our mother would ask in a soft puzzled voice, as though she really expected an answer, as though it might explain the past months. “I don’t understand,” she would say. “Why are you doing this?”
Then Katie would come hurtling down from her bedroom—I would flinch at the drumming on the stairs—and she would kill the call with one finger.
“Why are you doing this?” she would ask our mother coldly. She would pull the phone jack from the wall. “Why do you keep plugging us back in?”
“The lawyer has to be able to reach me, Katie.”
“You can call him,” Katie said. “Or he can send you the stuff by FedEx.”
Our number was unlisted. We had changed it three times. We had an answering machine. Yet still our mother, with a hungry look on her face—the look of children in CARE posters—would pick up on the first ring.
“She’s waiting for the lawyer to tell her it was all a mistake,” Katie said, furious, as we hung out between the Dumpsters at the back of the shopping mall. We’d pretty much given up on school by then. We’d taken up chain-smoking although neither of us was very good at it. Katie had invented a game. We would bite the burning tips off our cigarettes and see who could spit them the farthest, and then we would watch the sparks glow and die on the parking lot. “She acts like it’s going to be God every time,” Katie said. “She’s waiting for Him to give her an explanation. Or a miracle. She thinks He owes us.”
He does, I thought. But I knew whose call our mother was waiting for. That was the worst part. She missed our father. “You don’t understand,” she kept telling us. “You don’t understand how much we mean to him. You don’t understand what he went through.”
“What he went through.” Katie would roll her eyes. She would thump on the Dumpster with her fist until her hand bled. “She’s in denial, you know. If she hadn’t been so deep in denial all these years, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

Patricia Clark

The Poplar Adrift

“I live between the heron and the wren.”
—Roethke

Not so bad, after all, to lie down in water, drifting off
from the others with no chance of coming back.
At least, today, the river runs green, the silt
having cleared, and wherever the mallard floats,
so go I.

Back along the path, there’s one I call the harp tree,
not to be found in a field guide, having gotten its name
from a pruning job with a chainsaw by two old guys
who puttered up one day in a battered orange truck.
Its talent is to sound,

now, all the grief that passes it—a divining rod
of sorts for that below-radar tune that’s lodged
in muscle and bone of those who go strolling by.
The hurt that can’t be shared, it shares,
without a word.

Not so bad, after all, to be fatally on the move,
facing the dam downstream. The mad used to be tied to trees
along rivers, in hopes the water would cure them.
The sound here? Their voices melded with silvery leaves,
making this sharp air.

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last updated : 06/12/06