Kara Oakleaf
 
from Loving Marie
 
 
          I am in love with Marie Antoinette.
 
*  *  *
 
          I found her during free period. The teacher saw me looking at a comic book and took it away because I was meant to be studying. I took my history book out of my bag and dropped it on the desk from a few inches in the air so it made a loud thud. The other boys looked at me. I ignored them and did not look back. I stuck my finger between some pages in the middle of the book and opened it and she was staring up from a picture in the corner.
          In some paintings, the ladies’ eyes follow you wherever you go, but in this painting, Marie Antoinette looked me in the eye like all along she’d been waiting for me to look back.
          In the painting, she wears a blue dress that pinches her waist and her skin is so pale that it blends into the lace at her collar and her sleeves. Her cheeks, though, are pink, and when I noticed, I felt my own cheeks turn pink, too, like we were nervous to be meeting for the first time.
 
*  *  *
 
          My brother says you fall in love all at once, and you know you’re in love because it’s like getting hit with lightning. Most people don’t fall in love from just a painting, but that’s how I felt when I found her. Like I was hit hard with a bolt of hot energy, and all of my insides sizzled and crackled.
 
 
 
Peter Munro
 
Prelude
 
Craggy as the shell of a dog whelk,
these prayers spiral outward, ordered,
disordered, devised to help me live
with what I do not know:
When I was a boy something happened.
I am not being coy.  If I knew what it
was, I would tell you clearly.  I know
that I knew more about tide pools and the beasts
that grapple to pilings, about gulls buckling
their songs to the rain, and about the storms
that swept across the Gulf of Alaska
to crash against my little town, than I knew
about the tide and the weather rising through me.
Because it happened when I was a boy, as a boy
I noted the purple slow sea star, how it killed,
striking imperceptibly between low tide and low.
I watched the basket cockle speak ridges into its heart-
shaped armor, secreting added strength
against the claws of the dungeness crab.
I studied the names of those creatures that stayed alive
by hiding or by clamping down or by building walls
or by taking the phrases of camouflage into their skins
and striking the unwary. While I was still a child
I taught myself to hunger quietly, under cover of drama.
I taught myself the language of not knowing
and subjugated my tongue to the tongues of sea gulls,
leaving for the Holy Ghost only gibberish
out of which to carve the Word aflame,
out of which to carve the words for rain.
I taught myself to extrude my gut like the sea-star,
vulnerable and deadly and unrecognizable
and the rain veiled it all
and I worshiped the rain.
 
 
 
Susan Dworski Nusbaum
 
 Psalm
 
Without a word, you did this for me:
gathered my whites, my darks,
 
spot-cleaned my green sweater, sorted
my underpants, underwire bras, nightgown,
 
separated out the gray-soled gym socks,
removing crumpled tissues from my black jeans,
 
turning them inside out, set aside my red blouse
with the pearl buttons for special attention.
 
All the while, I wrote poems upstairs
listening to the whoosh of hot water,
 
the tumbling of snaps and zippers,
heard you shake out the wrinkles,
 
your wedding band clinking on the folding table
as you straightened my shoulders, buttoned my fronts,
 
felt for dampness, tenderly pressing cottons and silks
with your dry hands, as the scent of cleanliness
 
released from the drier drifted up the steps.
You let me be; my throat catches in gratitude—
 
my things laid out on our bed, folded square,
crotches tucked, cups nestled inside one another,
 
bleached soles, matched in pairs and rolled, 
arms bent at the elbow hugging my spotless torso.
 
Without a word, all accounted for, shining.
 
 
 
Michele Ruby
 
fromSouvenir
 
          The text message on Will’s cell was the old one:  “Gerhardt: Java Jones, 11:00Saturday.  You’ll receive your instructions then.”  Will considered texting him back with a “No can do, man,” but damn, it’d be good to revisit the old days. At 10:45on Saturday, Will bought a coffee, selected a spot near the entrance, and jackknifed himself into the plastic seat to wait.
They hadn’t played the game all spring, not since Scott had abandoned Will to join the tennis team.  Last semester they’d played it nearly every weekend, but now Scott practiced with the club pro on weekends—returning to his blond roots, Will had called it after Scott had ditched the brow ring and let the black dye grow out.  Scott was now muscled and tan.  Will was still pale and too tall for his musculature, as if he’d been built from Tinker Toys.  His t-shirt flapped around him when he walked.  He hung with the theater crowd and Scott hung with the jocks.  The last time Will saw Scott, he had his arm draped around the shoulder of Preston Sterling, and the two boys were laughing about something.   
          Will didn’t begrudge Scott the new jock identity.  As a military brat, Will had been in the habit of reinventing himself every year or so—new town, new crowd,new Will.  When Will moved to Arlingtonjust as his junior year was starting, Scott had been his acting partner in Mr. Seabry’s theatre class.  Now Scott frequently acted as if he barely knew Will.   Evidently, for Scott, the history field trip to the SpyMuseum was just that—history, along with the aliases they’d been given when they entered the museum—Gerhardt and Ferguson.  Scott had invented the game on the ride home.
“Guess which?”Scott had begun it.  He slumped against the seat, holding his backpack to his chest, closing his eyes and bobbing his head.  Will looked around the metro car.  Across the aisle, an older woman was nodding off over her purse; Scott had nailed her exhaustion, down to the mouth hanging just open.  Observation exercise number two from Mr. Seabry’s class.  “Research,”Mr. Seabry had called it.  “Stealing their souls,”Scott called it.  Then he did Will: somehow he folded his frame into the seat so his elbows and knees seemed to protrude everywhere.  He hummed under his breath andcocked his head to the right—Will’s pose of concentration.  Will laughed, grateful for the opportunity to see what he’d look like if he were as blond and perfect as Scott.
Will did a fidgety kid a few seats up and then his scowling mother, but Scott was unimpressed.  “Do your research,”he said in Mr. Seabry’s voice.  “Follow that woman until you know her every quirk, her movement vocabulary, her very soul.”  Mr. Seabry was big on movement vocabulary.  Will took the challenge and got off the subway when the mother did.  Scott hurried after him.  They followed the scowling mother to the grocery where she bought a candy bar to keep the kid quiet, a roasted chicken, a bag of salad, a half-gallon of milk, and a generic pain reliever.  Back on the sidewalk, Will built into his take the woman’s headache and the incessant chatter of the kid, and Scott was impressed.  “Well done, Gerhardt.  Now it’s Ferguson’s turn.”   And they tailed a man in a turban into the store. 
The game evolved; they built backstories for Gerhardt and Ferguson, and increasingly complicated spy histories for the people they followed.  They followed their marks for longer, and sometimes split up, going solo to avoid notice, making a contest out of it.  Eventually, the stakes were raised, and some proof was required.  That was Scott’s specialty—raising the stakes.
 
 
Carol Was
 
Photo of a Caterpillar
               Cimbex femorata
 
Her plump body curls, pale green spiral,
black ink spots on hairless flesh, 
 
bare as gingko branches in winter,  
as a needy heart. She looks like she crawled
 
from an ancient urn, camellia petals,
or cherry blossoms in Arakwa.
 
She’s plunged headlong across
our desktop from Siberia’s LakeBoikal
 
where it isn’t the frigid world we imagined,
but summer with finch wings, daffodils,
 
a background unlikely as the hideaway
Ferlinghetti kept in RainbowCanyon,
 
his cabin shrouded in fog hanging
over hairpin curves that seem to fall
 
into the sea, on the brink, insatiable
craving, like a wingless larva latched
 
to a bamboo twig, and she is
an Asian watercolor, little ambassador
 
waiting to transform, like the chasms
we cross blind as the Snake River
 
rushing where it must, every turn
unknowable as the path of a whooping crane
 
on the verge of extinction. How determined
she is, her silky skin glistening,
 
and we still teeter on the edge
between risk and want.
 
 

Jacqueline Guidry

 

fromFlirting with Normal, Flirting with Crazy                                                 
 
Elissa and I were in the same grade only senior year. She didn’t graduate with her own class, a year ahead of mine, because she’d missed so much school, hospitalized in Pineville and too busy being crazy to focus on chemistry or anything else.
The summer before that school year started, the state decided to blacktop the country road running in front of my house. Parades of dump trucks, overflowing with gravel and dirt, streamed past the front porch where I sat and watched. The source of all that dirt and gravel was a mystery, but the supply was endless. Trucks traveled north with full loads, then returned empty.
Charlotte, who changed her name to Charley sophomore year because it sounded like a person ready for fun, called when the trucks were dumping their loads miles from my house. “You’ll never guess,”she said.
“Probably not.”I was never one for smart retorts. I blamed my parents, who gave me a name, Belinda, which didn’t lend itself to clever transformation and forecast a plain life, not a brilliant one.
“Guess who’ll be in our class in September.”
“Elissa Barberot,”I said. My mother had heard the news that morning during a visit to the corner store where our as yet unpaved road met the highway. I’d already been admonished to be friendly whenever I saw Elissa. My mother craved friendly children and I was the disappointment of her life.
“You know.”Charley’s voice went from breathy excitement, her groundbreaking voice, to the “poor me”tone I found so irritating. When she wasn’t first with news, she drew consolation from being ahead of me. This time, there wasn’t even that. “You should’ve called. I called you right away.”
 “Mama’s been on the phone until this minute,”I lied.
“Well all right then.”She was only partly mollified, as if I should’ve snatched the phone from my mother in the middle of the conversation I’d just invented.
Since Charlottebecame Charley, she was more demanding in what she expected of our friendship. I was used to being the foil for her looks and personality. She was small-boned and had hair that hung in thick, straight strands. I was too tall and while my dark, almost black, hair was occasionally an asset, it frizzed at the first hint of rain. Charley got jokes right away, gauged what was required of her in most situations and reacted without hesitation. In contrast, I was often caught off balance, my responses a fraction off the beat. Standing next to me, Charlottelooked better than when she stood alone. But now that she’d become Charley, more was required of me and I wasn’t sure I was up to it all. “Anyway,”she said, “can you believe it? I didn’t think they’d let her out so soon.”
 “Why not? She’s been gone months.”Last year, just before Thanksgiving, the news had spread across school, person to person, class to class, until the halls blazed with the latest misadventures of our own crazy girl.
“But this time, she cut her wrist. In the bathtub.”Charley was breathy again, as titillated as if the news were brand-new.
 “Her wrist,”I repeated. Had Elissa dropped the razor in the tub or tossed it over the side? I blinked away the picture of blood and water and Elissa in the middle of it all.
“You wouldn’t think they’d let someone back in school after she did something like that.”
“It’s the law,”I said. “They don’t have a choice.”
“Really?”The question wasn’t a challenge. Charley didn’t mind being the one not knowing anything about laws.
“If she wants to come back, the school has to let her,”I said. Outside, a truck rumbled past, blew its horn at my ten-year-old brother, Eugene, who’d pumped his arm furiously to win the blast.
“Do you think anyone will let hersit at their table?”Charley asked. “There’s no law about that.”
Cafeteria tables were claimed by various cliques, an arrangement making our lives simpler because you always knew where you belonged, even if it was at the three-girl table of leftovers. “Maybe Vicky’s table.”I named one of those three. Where else would Elissa fit?
 “Right. Vicky’s table. I should’ve thought of that.”She sounded relieved. Had she been afraid of Elissa choosing our table, forcing us to study the faint scar on her wrist, her left because she was right-handed like most of us?
Back on the front porch, I watched trucks—full, then empty, then full again—roll past. Unlike Eugene, I didn’t draw attention to myself, but sometimes, even unsolicited, a driver spotted me and blew his horn. When that happened this late July day, I waved. Acting as expected is usually the smart way to go. I learned that a long time ago.
 
H
 
Erinn Batykefer
 
Against Restraint
 
for Delaney, b. 9/7/08
 
Next door, the blackout shades are drawn
by seven, as if nothing were left to be seen,
neither lowering sky nor wind in the poplars.
 
Even now, as you are shaking slowly free
of another body, the stoops and balconies stand empty,
the windows shuttered, the cars garaged.
 
What little breeze moves through yards
of regimented flowers and grassblades seems to say:
Come, be reasonable.  Want less. 
 
Somewhere in the neighborhood, someone burned
yard clippings all afternoon.  Now sundown
sets the sky and empty streets alight
 
and a low fog of smoke drifts blue-white
among the trees like passion, like mercy. 
If I ask you how many skies
 
before you no longer wish to see sky,
promise me your answer will always be
No number great enough.