The Bookends Review

– Helena Barbagelata …

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It never rained anymore—it sweated. Moisture hung like a curtain of milky cataracts over the day, waiting to be lifted. Dampness had oozed into the bricks of my apartment building, found its way into cracks of the bathroom, and turned the caulking black. Not quite black mold, not yet. The heaviness weighed me down, and I had to drag myself out of bed, no longer hopeful for the catharsis of a thunderstorm.

The painters had finished yesterday, and I needed to reassemble the apartment. Even after I had pointed out the blackness creeping up the walls and ceilings of the bathroom like a spider’s web, my husband Danny refused to admit he could see any problem. “The place looks fine. It’s too much work. And to do it now, ahuvati?”…

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There were plenty of reasons to be annoyed, Katell thought. The smell of salt in the air was the most immediate, nagging one. She noticed the stink of it clinging to everything. Her clothes. The awful pasty yellow walls of her new bedroom. Her stepmom’s overweight rescue pug, Sebastian. Katell missed Montreal deeply, but she was afraid to express this to anyone in the house. They would smother her with insincere sympathy. So, she pretended she was above homesickness and focused her energy on the other things that annoyed her about Foirer, Nova Scotia.

Sorting through her dead grandmother’s things was taking longer than anyone anticipated. Katell hadn’t known Granny Durkee very well. After her parents split, Katell and her mum had only come by Nova Scotia once a year or so.…

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With their gray iron limbs, long waxy leaves, and fat blossom clusters, rhododendrons are both stately and homey. Throughout my childhood, I crawled under their uneven skirts, their bodies sheltering me, their leaves shielding me. There, between a soil floor and naturally thatched roof, I relished my sanctuary, and, in my mind, nothing could reach me there.

Then my grandfather came to town.

*

Back in the seventies, our Southern Appalachian neighborhood hummed with life, especially in summertime. Kids swarmed everywhere. We buzzed around, feral and wild, as if following invisible beelines that lured us across the hot streets down into the cool woods, then back home at twilight.  

In the woods encasing our neighborhood, mushrooms gathered together, dark and silent like members of forest-dwelling covens.…

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This evening, I ended my walk
with a terrific skid.
Just as I recovered
the sun peeked out
from wherever it had been hiding,
to warm my neck and face
and the streetlights,
as if to share in my relief,
flickered to life.

It took me back,
to one of those flights
from Hawaii or Japan
that landed at LAX at dawn
We banked
and I could see
the sun’s earliest light
sharing the stage
with runway lights
backgrounded
by a city so calm
and gentle
I had to pinch myself
to remember where I was.

You and I no longer
worship the sun as god.
Yet doesn’t the sunset,
for all its colorful hallelujahs,
bring with it the same odd unease
that drove our
primitive ancestors to light
bonfires to coax
the sun back to life.…

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The holes in the heels of my shoes
admit snowmelt and tiny pebbles.
Slopping around the neighborhood,
exercising my fistulous heart,
I feel electric blue abstractions
riding the chill. Being alone

with the mist blown from the marsh
and the roadside puddles grinning,
I don’t have to explain to you
the absence that three quarters
of a century of living have imposed.

The short day draws on itself
like a gray man smoking a pipe.
I’d say, listen to the wind undress
the already half-naked trees—
but you’re at home stroking the cats
and reading about current events.…

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I met Lizzie when I was seven. If you’d told me then that 21 years later we’d be sat on my living room floor talking about whether she’ll ever get to try naan bread, I’d have been very confused. Firstly, it’s because we grew up on the Isle of Wight and naan had yet to cross the Solent in the 90s. Secondly, what we were talking about wasn’t naan bread at all.

Lizzie is getting married this year. She’s been with her fiancé for seven years. It’ll be a small gathering without any bridesmaids as otherwise there’d be no-one sat down. I’d like to start by stating she does want to get married. This conversation wasn’t so much a cry for help as a dawning realisation.…

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