There is a tremendous amount of ‘seeing -to’ that our male counterparts never
experience.

The terrifying and sacred moments of intimacy that daughters endure and
subsequently cherish; the anointment into womanhood with the blood of
our predecessors.

My cousin, James, was steadfast and sensitive, concerned and sweet, always.

“It is hard to see Nan like this”, he confided in me on the porch, turning his head from
the May sun and my eyes.

I nodded, “I know, bud.”

And I did know.

I knew the tenacity it required to even kiss my grandmother hello without weeping.

………..To his credit, I have seen James carry an infant’s coffin on his nineteen year old

shoulder, and that is a weight which I will never know.

He will never know the weight of caring for someone,

the ache of being the maker of meeting ends,

the reader of omens and omissions.

James will never know the weight of carrying a living body from room to room,
weaving together the fragments of a routine from scraps of frivolous matters to
create a semblance of what was once her life.

He will only know what comes after the slow march towards death.

As attuned to the universe as he is, James will only know how to carry the
physical manifestation of our failed efforts to sustain she who always has
sustained us.

- Kate Healey

“It’s summer again, Papy,” we yelled in his ear. “Where to this time?”

Every June 21, his birthday, it was the same thing. Most of the time
we didn’t get through or when we did we couldn’t understand him and
we’d wheel him around the park, telling him what the flowers and the
sky looked like.

This time he said “B-bordel” and we laughed and poked him, very
gently, and yelled, “Where else do you want to go, Papy?” After a
while he said, “C-craix. B-boat.” He used to talk about it years ago
when he could still talk: young, stripped to the waist in the sunshine,
drifting past nice things. That was way back, before the war.

So we placed him in a rowboat at Craix. He sat between us, bundled
up, blinking behind his thick useless glasses. He looked happy as the
boat drifted, along with belly-up breams, oil-slicks and plastic bags,
past cement-works, scrap-heaps and run-down council houses. We
yelled at him the things we remembered from his memories: banks
bristling with fishing poles, wheat fields with poppies, neat kitchen
gardens, couples dancing in the riverside café under the garlands. The
blue sky was no invention. He kept saying, “N-nice, n-nice.”

We brought him back to the Home. We yelled in his ear, “Enjoy
yourself, Papy?” He processed it and said, “N-nice, n-nice g-girls, nnice,
n-nice g-girls.” Drifting down the river he hadn’t heard us. He’d
been to the bordel after all. Maybe we should have taken him there for
real. The girls are renewed, not like the river. But I guess outside
things don’t matter much if you can’t see them and if you’re able to
hold on to the way they’d been.

Note: This piece originally appeared in the July 2006 issue of Gold Dust

- Howard Waldman

The first time you get on a bike is an exhilarating and debilitating experience, and in this
regard so is your first real relationship—which does not include sitting next to your crush at
lunch in the 6th grade and sharing a bag of Vinegar Lays, which you abhor. It’s the
obnoxious giggly conversations about classes and professors you don’t care about and
movies that you saw that one time, vaguely, maybe only half of it—this is you placing
your feet on the pedals and kicking off for the first time. Once you kick off, you’re
conscious that this is the one and only time you can feel the thrill of your first bike ride—
and the terror that follows as you realize you can’t keep rehashing the same conversations.
You know you need to ask him to watch a movie with you—because, let’s face it, he’s too
dense to ask you himself.

This is you letting go, letting go of the total control you have on the flat, safe earth in
exchange for the sensation of gliding—no, soaring!—down hills, over dirt paths, and
in places bikes ought not to be. When your heart leaps into your throat as you hit
your first big hill, as he leans in to kiss you outside of the ice cream parlor after the
movie, you seek comfort with the butterflies in the pit of your stomach. He’s faster
than you, but chooses to stay at your side. He looks back, smiling, and says, “Let me
know if we need to slow down, okay?” His black road bike links with your banana
yellow cruiser, bikes from two different worlds, and yet he chooses to ride next
to you for the companionship you both crave.

The sun casts a cheerful glow as you explore Boston together, both the tourist-filled
sections, like Newbury Street, and the places that only city-dwellers share, like the bike path
around Jamaica Pond, where you once snuck away together for a quickie in the woods. The
exhilarating feeling takes hold as the wind plays with your hair the same way he does. You
laugh at his pink winded face and he laughs at your winded sex-hair.

In your excitement over first love, you tell yourself that your hands “fit perfectly together”
like books say, but really you quietly deal with the awkward wrist-cramp you suffer in the
name of books and romance. You smile because you’re happy to keep up with him;
secretly, as other girls fail to maintain the speed you ride at, you think it means you’ve
won, that you deserve to share the bike path with him over anyone. Soon you can keep
up with him quite easily, occasional burning muscles aside, and the relationship plateaus
as you leisurely travel with one another, content with the silence that only the engines of
cars and trains can break through.

The others have long since dropped off the path, too tired or slow to keep up, and you
think that it means you’re perfectly paired off. But the silence now permeates even the
moments when you aren’t immersed in the rush of the ride. Perhaps you are sitting by
the water, quietly reading books next to one another during the pit-stops in your journey.
Your bikes lay in a heap on the browning grass. The only sound you can distinguish from
the incoherent sounds of the world is the crisp turning of pages in the book he bought you,
one that you don’t even particularly enjoy and are reading just to be polite. It’s in this
moment between the sounds of page-turns and the wind’s bitter lullaby that you realize
the silence isn’t the peaceful, comfortable silence you thought you had. The strain slowly
creeps in, sinking into your bones and stealing into your mind. This is just how
committed relationships work, you tell yourself. Uncomfortable silence doesn’t mean
anything.

But it does. And you know it. You know it by the way you start to tell him a funny story
and he cuts you off to say, “You’ve told me this before.” You know it by the way you no
longer find his stories interesting, but you pretend you do. You know it by the way he
treats you like his little brother, patting you on the head when you say something silly
that should warrant a laugh instead of a sigh. You know it by the way he starts pushing
you away slowly, and you pretend it’s normal in a long-term relationship. You know it
by the way he’s lying to himself when he looks right through you and says, “I love you,”
and the way you lie to yourself that he means it. You know it by the way you say “I love
you” back, eyes on his forehead, and feel the pang of guilt.

You’re riding in the dark now, in the middle of Boston, in the pouring rain, and you chide
yourself for forgetting your helmet just as you’re entering an intersection. In a moment too
quick for your brain to register, your tires skid over a rain-filled pothole and your body—
still on that damned yellow bike—is suddenly horizontal, sliding through the intersection,
bloodying and bruising your hand, elbow, and thigh as you scrape against the pavement,
still straddling the bike. Your mind freezes, blacks out, thinks of nothing else besides the
cold rain, and you’re not even sure if you’re breathing. Fear pins you to the ground, your
ripped pants soaking up the puddle you lie in. Once the blaring car horns and the worried
pedestrians get you off the road, you phone him, choking back hysterical sobs, and tell
him about your near-death experience.

“Wow, that’s too bad,” he says. He says he’s riding to your apartment now and will meet
you there. When you don’t say anything, he sighs and asks if you need him to get you.
Hurt by his blunt tone—something you thought you loved about him—you mutter, “No,
I’m fine,” and end the call. It isn’t until you’re home and wearing shorts that he notices
the bruises and blood and realizes you weren’t being overdramatic. He asks, with too
little concern, “You’re okay, right?” and you smile, nod, and tend to your wounds.
When you’re alone in your room, the tears come, hot and sudden, and you mourn
something you still have, because the pain is fresh and you’re bleeding now, and he
can’t see it.

It’s the way you both start drinking more, because drunken conversations are easier than
sober ones. It’s the way you “hang out” by playing videogames or reading independently
in the same room. It’s the way everyone says, “You are the cutest couple!” that taught
you how to perfect your fake smile. It’s the way you even fooled yourself. It’s the way
you realize your destination doesn’t have to be determined by him, your bikes chained
together, out of convenience and not love. It’s the way you start to shed pieces of him
from your life. You throw away the pile of penguin-themed presents he kept giving you,
even though you’d told him your favorite animal is a giraffe. You remove the littlest
pieces, like the ring with the super-glued stone that always fell off, or the embroidery
thread bracelets you made yourself while you were dating, something that had nothing
and everything to do with him. But you keep some of the pieces, like the Hufflepuff scarf
and the Doctor Who sweatshirt, because the memories they hold don’t hurt and aren’t
strong enough to matter.

It’s the way he starts pedaling faster, with no concern for you. It’s the way you shout,
“Slow down!” that he fails to hear—or ignores. It’s the way you know you’ve held on to
hope for too long. It’s the way you realize that letting him ride off without you feels right.
It’s the way you take a sudden left down a street you don’t know. It’s the way it doesn’t
occur to you to look back.

- Raven Heroux

I reply it was a storybook childhood no not as in Princess Bride
just money enough for food piano lessons a dog new clothes
a yearly vacation that kind of thing and naturally there were
the few times in the middle of dinner my mother drew a knife
from the drawer in order to end herself but I don’t remember
those well maybe not at all though I do recall the shininess
and little points yes serrations I later learned and my father
with his hands out in a stop stop and and also a more than
usual problem in getting our broccoli down the three of us
wide-eyed in steakus interruptus and the dog sniffing terror
a bit less tantalizing than snippets of scrap cushioning himself
suddenly in a collective unconscious of couch our father still
pleading no please let’s just … there that’s good just smile
and pass the ketchup and it was over until the next time
going smoothly to cleanup with the floor vacuum
and its wicked wonderful sound signifying another meal
successfully ingested and popcorn on the way the machines
so comforting being in the end all under her control
one night bleeding into the next and in the morning the usual
coffee aroma the dark savior awakened from slumber in the
cupboard all night long above the you-know drawer and off
to school with us after the first cup and then on to all the rest
it was quite full that pot so I knew what she was doing as I boarded
the bus and undid my locker chatting away on a storybook day
never thinking what might happen if she jumped suddenly to grab
the phone and spilled the coffee one doesn’t in retrospect think
that far ahead or behind and truth is anything can be part of
anything like the tiny reflections and refractions dancing like
so many gemstones right there in a kitchen in storybook suburbs
where a woman who wants to die lives the same day over and again
for decades as there are rules so she swallows them like bitter beans
and gets on with fixing beds and tossing laundry and now
she lives and thrives and my father relaxed now
his hands clasped as with some cherished book
upon the chest his final chapter gasped long long ago.

Author’s Note:

“At Times Upon a Time,” title of which is a take-off on “Once upon a time,” which often begins children’s fairy-tales, is a slam prose-poem, and a true story. A friend asked about my childhood, and I remembered this particular part. My whole childhood didn’t consist of these scenes, but of course they are memorable. My mother was a suburban housewife, with a college degree in Art, and in the 1950′s, if women worked outside the home at all, it was as secretary or nurse. So, enormously frustrated, often angry and depressed, she did her domestic duty as wife and mother.  It has been said that expressing anger is good for health; it has been said that not doing so is also good for the health. My father passed away at age 61; my mother has outlived him by 22 years to date, and each battled cancer. This poem perhaps may not hold up well on the page; it is meant to rely on body language moreso than exemplary word-choice; again, it is a performance piece.

- Julie Shavin

We were huffing rubber cement behind the hunchback of the art teacher when the
principal opened the door and told me that Dad was dead. She whispered
something into the purple ear of the teacher and ushered me away from my
table. A few minutes of commiseration beside the kiln, the smell of onions on
wrinkled lips, warm against my pimpled flesh, she told me Dad died in a plane crash.

The kids could not see me. Their laughter was subdued because the ominous
ponytail of the principal loomed: its coconut shampoo sculpting atoms. I could smell the
bagel she was digesting from lunch, her deodorant, the cream cheese. Obstinate sesame
seed was lodged between her upper incisors.

I insisted on returning to class, and upon my arrival, hit the bottle hard. The warning
label made it more desirable. Girls with mosquito bites were watching while working on
projects: pasting tonsil sticks with newspapers. We had refused to participate. We didn’t
want to get our hands icky. We said we were against war. The girls were using black and
white images of fighter jets apt to be deployed during Operation Desert Storm. Saddam
Hussein was staring at me from multiple angles.

The girls asked what the principal wanted. I did not tell them. We offered them a
hit. They refused. I could smell the principal through the rubber cement. She was talking to
the art teacher by the door. Every now and then, one of them would look in my direction
and nod empathetically as I clutched the adhesive. One of the girls dropped the sports
section on the floor and must have been staring at my junk beneath the table.

The principal disappeared. Dizzy, the art teacher strolled over to our corner. I had
Michael Jordan in the midst of a slam dunk, covered with rubber cement, embedded in the
table. The brush was in my hand, clutched intuitively like an alcoholic to a beer bottle. The
bristles were beaten from my repeated attempts to soak the edge of the table.

The art teacher was bullied but always able to bear the grunt of insults with wit and
mockery. We had liberties in this class which would be unfathomable elsewhere: we could
curse, talk back, and basically get away with deplorable behavior we would never
contemplate in any classes closer to sea level. We were dragons nursing mosquito bites,
nefarious maggots soaring through a porous cumulonimbus, high on art products,
belligerent and free to our own abstract orbits.

Beneath the art room was where the real artwork was attempted. This is where we
wrote epic poems avowing constipation on the walls. We penned odes to phalluses while
contemplating difficult bowel moments with profanity and swastikas. This was our dirty
secret. The choir teacher would find out one afternoon during Fiddler on the Roof when she
decided to urinate in the coed bathroom. The choir teacher was a Jew. Many of the vandals
were Jewish as well. All were self-proclaimed anarchists with a fondness for satanic
symbols and Spin the Bottle.

The choir teacher did not discover our stall until months after the funeral. By that
time I had filled the vaulted ceiling with decadent scribbles about my father falling from the
sky. The girls would excuse themselves to go stand on the toilet bowl to weep beneath my
messages. I scribbled sums of the most macabre near the crapper so they could cry as they
wiped themselves. I wanted the prettiest ones to pity me as they flushed. They often wrote
back with pencils, scraped the boogers left by my enemies with the ribbed aluminum
encompassing their pink erasers to preserve the language. We had become archeologists
and poets, and as more parents died that year, the bathroom became a shrine.

Weird thing about my father’s wake was that the art teacher sat in the back pew. Dad’s coffin
was empty. His chariot was buried in the desert. At school the following morning, the art
assignment involved obituaries and paper airplanes. The art teacher was fucking with me.
She had to pay for her insult to my old man.

We approached her house in camouflage dizzy on rubber cement with stockings on
our faces. We took dumps on her welcome mat beneath the porch light where moths
gathered. We toilet-papered her maple trees and mailbox, tossed eggs at the windows,
covered her Toyota with shaving cream swastikas and satanic stars. We sprayed an
excrement pyramid with lighter fluid and ignited it. The flames shot against her white door.
When her husband opened, we ambushed him with paintballs until he was forced to retreat
into the house. The flames followed. We faded into her frozen Rhododendrons.

The art teacher did not return to school. Then she did. Her arms and neck were
bandaged and her hands were blistered and her eyes were bloodshot. After class she called
us over to her desk and offered a huff of rubber cement. She held the brush beneath her
nostrils. Three of the hairs pasted themselves together. She unscrewed a second lid and
double-fisted, her chest and stomach expanding in her smock. Beating her chest in imitation
of a baboon, being pumped with rubber cement, stretch marks disintegrating, mind lost
amid an ambitious inhalation. We waited for her return. We followed her example with
mighty huffs. We swaggered down the spiral staircase, brain cells none the worse for the
wear.

The art teacher bought beer and drove us around in her hatchback. We would park
and make art in the backseat outside the roller rink. One of us watched while reprimanding
the hunchback for shaking her Toyota. She was violent and her burns rubbed against our
cheeks, smock wrapped around our necks, the blisters bubbling as we shook to the drone of
ambulances and fire trucks on the Interstate.

The day after the choir teacher discovered the bathroom shrine, we had one final
meeting in the shitter. During recess, we filled the room with as many bodies as possible.
Girls crouched on the shoulders of boys, bodies intertwined in memorial. The air grew thin
and somebody screamed that the door was jammed. We could hear the art teacher laughing
on the other side of the wood.

The girls were weeping. I told them to stay focused, keep reading my handwriting
on the ceiling. Their tears began to fall, then the sweat, and finally urine and vomit. This is
what it must feel like to know that the plane is about to crash. How the luggage above you
means nothing in the end.

The girls grew quiet as they drifted off to sleep. Their shrill screaming became a
subdued pleading. What I would have given for one last hit of rubber cement.
But then the principal opened the door and bodies wrestled themselves for oxygen.
Many did not move as the art teacher tiptoed down the stairs to catch a glimpse of
her masterpiece.

 - Matthew Dexter

One November day, just after he’d bedded Emily, his wife timidly suggested
planting a walnut tree. He was the one who planted, tended and knew.

He consulted his specialized books and explained, in simplified terms, the factors
that ruled out the operation: inappropriate soil, early frosts, the voracity of
squirrels, the walnut prone to sixty-four diseases. Anyhow the garden was too
small for something that size. Marie-Louise, Albertine, Agnes, Madame Hardy and
all his other precious sun-loving old roses (he called them “my ladies”) would take
umbrage at the intrusion.

His final argument was that the walnut took fifteen years to bear. He didn’t add
that with his heart condition he’d never taste one of the walnuts, unlike her, ten
years younger and never so much as a sniffle.

She listened respectfully as she’d done years back, a lovely C+ student in his
English Literature of the Age of Reason class. Her argument was touchingly
subjective: the sweetness of the fresh walnuts she’d savoured as a child. She
couldn’t invoke the annual gift to future generations. To her despair, they were
childless.

Each November she gently brought up the matter. Patiently he repeated his
explanations and came up with another argument. His heart tolerated puttering–
things like spraying, pruning and weeding–but not the backbreaking kind of effort
necessary for planting a tree. Of course he didn’t add that the image of her,widowed
(or, worse, remarried), savouring the fruit of the tree that had killed him was
unbearable.

She timidly countered his medical reason by suggesting that her husky brother
Roger could do the digging. But every single shrub and bulb had been planted by
his hand. Having to rely on someone else would estrange him from his garden, he
felt, and confirm his decline.

One November dawn a clattering outside woke him to an empty bed. From the
window he saw her pushing the wheelbarrow, the spade bouncing about. So finally
he tackled the job, although she begged him to have Roger do it. With the last
shovel heave of dirt in the hole his heart protested violently.

“Think of me when you taste the first one,” he thought angrily.

The tree grew relentlessly. In the fourth year its shadow encroached on his ladies.
Nymph’s Thigh began developing Black Spot, Green Fly started tormenting
Catherine Mermet, mildew disfigured Belle de Crécy.

While waiting for the tree to bear fruit, his wife often read in its skinny shadow.
When she coughed he reminded her, as a joke, of the superstition that the shade of
the walnut was fatal, not just to roses but to people as well. She smiled and went
on reading and coughing.

Years after, his brother-in-law came over and picked the first nuts and husked
them next to the bed of diseased and dying ladies. He brought them back to the
veranda, the shells and his big hands black with the acrid liquor. He cracked them
open and worked the nuts free. They looked like miniature brains. He patiently
unpeeled the bitter yellow membrane and savoured one.

“Sweet, as she always used to say,” Roger said. “She’d have loved them. Go ahead,
taste one.”

“No,” he replied, a bitter taste in his mouth, as if he’d alr eady tasted the black
acrid liquor and the bitter yellow membrane. “You can have them all.”

Note: This piece originally appeared in the June 2006 issue of  Verb Sap

 - Howard Waldman

“My father was born on this day,

Though I know not the year,

I have never committed my name to a birthday card for my father,

Nor did he elect to commit his name to me.

I have compiled a concise collection of facts:

As modest as a grocery list,

As neutral as bread or jam.

His brother’s name is Martin.

his penmanship was a tragedy.

In my possession are two photographs,

Taken from a distance and an odd angle,

But still I see the strange, striking resemblance,

and it is striking to resemble a stranger.”

- Kate Healey

I was there, a witness, saw the long-haired holy man
perform miracles in between ranting and raving.
Who cares if he smells like sheep, when one wave
of a scarred hand can bring a bus after I’ve been
waiting half an hour. Or a half-hissed prayer through
rotting teeth can provide a beautiful young woman
in a slinky red dress, also going the same way.
And what a phenomenon he has produced with
just the twist of a blood-shot eye, the squirreling
of a red nose… I have exact change and she does too.
So it really doesn’t matter that he speaks in a language
neither of us understand or that the Bible in his hand is
so battered, so dog-eared, that it begins with Psalms
and 1 Corinthians must do for Revelations. The woman and I
sit together, the bus moves on, we even start a conversation.
Okay so it’s not the Kingdom of Heaven, it’s the 127A.
And there’s probably as much devil in her as angel.
Same for me, as I can’t help staring at her slim legs, full chest.
Behind me, the holy man is still preaching
the crap out of the sidewalk, the store windows.
It’s a wonder sin survives. No it’s a miracle.

- John Grey

Before she wants to leave, life goes.
She dies a shrinking death.
Alone, asleep, no one comes close.
A tube gives her last breath.

One more walk, more vitamins, more pain
and she’d be here still– alive.
But every healthy act in vain.
Her wish: do not revive.

A quiet explosion scorched her cells.
Dividing tumor, too fast.
Her lips like broken shells
and face a sunken mask.

Hair gone and shivering in the sun
her skin as smooth as stone
she said, “Though chemo was fun,
I’m ready to be gone.”

Her lover on a plastic chair,
his hand strokes paper skin.
He’d fight to death if he could scare
the tumor from within.

One more walk, more vitamins, more pain
and she’d be here still– alive.
But every healthy act in vain.
Her wish: do not revive.

- Cara Schiff

Consider the embryo.
—no limbs at first, oval,
translucent, watery comma
—not a sapling stick,
more, its rain-soaked seed.

You said they were all boys,
—-those minuscule dead possibilities
swirling in a dark dysfunctional womb.
—They had to be,
as females are stronger.

Not quite convinced,
—-I dreamed pink party dresses,
tutus, first solo rides
—–on two wheels, giddy swimmers
adoring the ocean, sun, sand.
—I saw castle upon castle.

The first “birthed” in the john.
—-We looked for something with which
to fish it (him?) out – hospital’s orders.
Human, they said, and stuck me in a hallway
—-to bleed alone for half a day.

The second time, my mother visited,
—–but was uncomfortable with such despair,
———could not gather herself
fully into a chair.
—-I sent her away
she thanked me.

The third time I adopted the basement
——for weeks, avoiding light, sound, solace.
I had to alone with ….my son?
——-He was the best of company,
both of us leaving, leaving.

My dead sons are three.
—–Sometimes I ponder them shrimp-like,
——pulsing, suddenly still.
But mostly, I think of them as trees,
—–no longer seed, but thick with trunk.
Leaves unfurl: hands, roots, their feet,
—–their maturings secret as concentric rings.

I know my boys best when branches
—-bend in the breeze –
not wholly here, not wholly there,
—-but their tiny issue in the cosmos,
somewhere –
—in the air, on the air, against the air.

Author’s Note:

“Against the Air” was written after 3 miscarriages in five years. I had always been haunted as to the gender of the babies I had lost; years later, my husband informed me they must have all been boys. I had a chronic illness, and had had to choose between career and family. I chose family, but building it was not so easy. He felt that females would have survived, despite my body’s dysfunction.

- Julie Shavin