The Bookends Review

In the weeks following the B-cell, non-Hodgkins Lymphoma diagnosis, Mom sat up in the adjustable hospital bed, lucid, and chipper. Except on shower days. She was distraught about contending with her freshly permed hair. Beside herself on how unnatural kinks following a shower and shampoo would spoil her look.

“I should have my hair straight like yours. It would be much easier to take care of.” You did not just say that. After all those humiliating home perms you inflicted on me? After a lifetime of imitating your burden of having splendidly coiffed hair? Obsessing over split-ends, cowlicks, curl flattening humidity, chemically over-processed frizz, butchered cuts, and mismatched dyes from color blind stylists?

I dried her hair and shaped it with the curling iron, watching out so I didn’t brand her neck or singe my fingers.…

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It was barely noticeable when it began, no more than a zephyr, sighing, stirring the dusty ochre earth to eddy around the soles of her boots.  She paid it no mind, the restless air.  Not in this country.  Not in this season.  The sun?  That was different, and she raised a weathered hand against its onslaught as she stepped from what little shade was offered by a torn scrap of faded canvas canopy that hung askew above the entryway.

A red car, a two-door import by the look of it, had rolled to a stop beside the only working pump.  The radio, blaring rock music, went silent when the engine was cut and the driver’s door swung open.  Out stepped a young man, on the shy side of twenty-five, she guessed. …

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Walt takes no comfort reminiscing about his youth. Tales of simpler times and way back when settle like pits in his stomach. For those with nothing to hide, perhaps long-ago decades truly were simpler. But for those free only in shadow, secretly living beyond acceptable societal standards, those memories breed only misery.

His grandchildren bring him pictures they find in his wife’s “treasure” boxes. They shove crinkled black and white images in his face and ask him questions about “olden days”. Each one slices open an unhealed wound, a shattered dream, a life dismantled. When he’s on the edge of tears, he picks up a newspaper and pretends to read. Walt’s wife steps in, nudging the children away from his recliner. Grandpa is old, she tells them, his hearing isn’t what it used to be.…

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pollen drifts from the oaks, floats down
to the lawn, travels on the breeze

across the grass, turns from yellow-
green to brown, collects in clumps, balls

at the foot of retaining walls
loses stickiness, turns crunchy

blocks gutters & drains, fills cracks
between concrete sidewalk slabs, coats

parked white cars & black trucks, drapes
itself over bushes, hedges

& fences, sticks to black letter-
boxes, clings to the fur of cats

attaches to running shoe soles
& laces, stealthily enters

homes through back doors, insinuates
itself into living rooms, kitchens

bedrooms & bathrooms, irritates
eyes, attacks nostrils, triggers

histamines, sneezing, headaches
brain fog, dripping noses, transports

male oak DNA into gaps
& fissures, fails to fertilize

– Nathanael O’Reilly…

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“I’ll call you Tre.”

There’s a little plaque, welded into the base of #273 with its number and a company name. I look up and up at the monstrous pinwheel. I put my hand against its trunk and feel it hum.

Two plus seven is nine plus three is twelve and one plus two is three. Tre. Like the youngest in a line of oil heirs. Only it’s wind power and has no parent. “Hmm.” But a burden. It has a burden, just like the disappointing James or Howard or Colin that can’t even be called his own name because his namesakes live and glower down. I nod at Tre.

I walk back to my car, still running and perched on the gravel shoulder.

***

I often think I’m a piano player but moving words and punctuation around.…

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1. Places in Time

Yoga came early to the world. The outfits came much later.

2. Womb

It is 1952. My mother—my about-to-be mother—is 43, awaiting me. She takes yoga classes, long before prenatal yoga and spandex.

3. West Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC

My mother, in her 60s, adores Hannah, her considerably younger yoga teacher. Hannah is mild, gentle, with a long braid down her back. I accompany my mother to a handful of classes. I’ve injured first my foot, then my knee, and cannot dance for some weeks, so I’m on an extended visit to my mother.

            I strain to prove myself well versed in stretching, in body elegance, even though my body is tight and somewhat unyielding. I glance over at my mother on her blanket, and I see her wide, flat bottom, her narrow hips resting in her hands, and her misshapen feet—the result of surgeries almost 20 years earlier—angled up over her face as she practices shoulder stand.…

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           Tobacco-stained fingernails dug into Radha’s flesh.

           She started to protest, but he squeezed her wrist. Her words shrank into a yelp that bubbled from her lips. She didn’t understand why he was so angry; then again, he never needed a reason.

           She struggled against his grip, and he twisted her wrist as hard as he could. There was a muffled crack, and her vision went white.

           Radha woke with tears in her eyes. She glanced around and realized that she had fallen asleep on the couch in her living room. She dried her eyes and massaged her throbbing wrist. It should have healed by now, but it still ached whenever a storm was coming.

           She sat up and stared out of the window.…

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