“Dad and Mom got divorced two years ago. Mom says they split up because Dad is selfish and wants to sow his wild oats, two decades too late, and doesn’t want to be burdened by the demands of a family. Dad says they split up because of Sarah. Dad says that the death of a child strips the skin off a marriage, and if the bones underneath aren’t strong, everything falls apart.”
“the women turn pages slowly, so slowly
unsure if that is the vest Katya knitted for uncle
before he went for milk, never came back
each numbered photograph a too-bright gasp of light
the book, a first step with each mass grave
do you recognize this apron? this belt? these boots?”
“Paper gowns are not as soft as cloth gowns are not as soft
as silk as milk which is only soft until it sours”
“But still it was done,
the last thing, really, they made
together. When the morphine
wasn’t enough, I said to her,
Think of those lilies,
all the colors they’ll bring.”
“In her old life, Grammy shelved books via the Dewey Decimal,
never imagined she would need a YouTube video on how to probe a vent.
So much science reduced to the withstanding of unease,
an ISA Brown hen upside down under her arm.”
“I looked myself over, the version of me across the table. I was a year younger then, but I was in rough shape. January was obviously only shaving once every few days. His face was covered in that awful black stubble. His hair was a mess. His eyes were tired and vacant behind the glasses. He slouched in the chair, thinking me over. He tapped his fingers on the table, the gears turning, trying to figure out what to say.
‘This doesn’t make sense,’ he said. ‘It’s not possible that we’re trans. It shouldn’t be possible.’
I nodded sympathetically. ‘I get what you’re saying. I understand. Yet here we are.'”
CALYX Celebrates Fire, Fury, and Resilience with Oregon Artist Betty LaDuke Please join us in ekphrastic appreciation of the artist Betty LaDuke, whose most recent exhibition, Fire, Fury, and Resilience: Totem Witnesses and Turtle Wisdom, will be at the Corvallis Museum from October 7, 2022 – January 22, 2023. The exhibit opens with an artist’s
“Two women in hijabs and abayas approach us. One of the women asks, ‘How long will this be going on?’ ‘It’s the community that’s doing this,’ Zenzele answers. ‘So, I guess, as long as the community keeps coming. This is all different people. There’s no one group organizing it.’ The draped women speak to one another in a language that sounds like the wind over the surface of water before they smile at us, nod, and walk on.”
“You nudged me with a whisper,
to rise an hour before azan,
from under the thick
of dove feathers warm with your love
for God, and me, the musty grandchild”
“Hideous beauty, I shake you loose
from a cushion of the wicker chair
where, it seems, you’ve gone to die.”
“There are many versions of the American Dream, I want to tell my parents. The one involving a large house with a picket fence and two-car garage is just one of them. Just as there are many versions of your daughter. There’s a version that prays four times a day and recites the Quran. There is a version that enjoys hanging out with friends, including men, on Saturday nights with cans of beer and board games. There is a version that fasts during the month of Ramadan. There is a version that gets pepperoni on her pizza during the rest of the year.”
“Announce me, let them know I am coming. Carry me into the arena on a King Carrier. I come from a lineage of linebackers. My knuckles are a mountain range. Your booing only makes me more powerful.”
“’Two weeks,’ Tamara echoes, like she’s mulling it over. Her legs are dangling over the arm of the chair. ‘Why don’t you just break up with him the normal way?’
‘Because that would require confrontation,’ I explain.
‘And knitting an entire sweater is easier than confrontation.’
‘Yes.’
Tamara turns to Lark for support, but he’s nodding solemnly. ‘Yeah, that holds up,’ he says.”
“Something reminded me today that a parent of mine had died
and the barometric pressure fell, and rain began to touch the river.”
“Today I celebrate my only bangle
my one-hand applause
the gold leaf on my family tree
my hand-hammered heritage
my blood.”
“‘How come they don’t ask about costumes?’ Carly Beth asked.
‘Costumes?’
‘This one guy I was dating a while ago only wanted to do it if I wore a pantsuit and he wore a Donald Trump mask.’
Karen kept her head down and said in a voice she hoped was neutral, ‘You can always type in your own comments. Just press F4.'”
“a white moth arrives rising and falling
on the warm breeze, lingers on the headstone
then on my bare arm, clinging as if
searching for moist skin or the scent of me.”
“I imagine Evelin, her flour-sack print dress, brandishing stick dolls with her younger cousin, whose rash and persistent fever earlier that month no one mentioned. I imagine Evelin waking near dawn, whimpering, coughing, hot to the touch. Grandma takes her into their bed, Grandpa having left to cart fuel to farmers. The child sleeps fitfully, radiating heat.”
“I stare out the window
over the sink, the citrus soap promising
something pure as we shelter in place.
A rolling fog smokes the green
grass. The vixen glides her grizzled gray
between orchard and rock wall border.”
“Milk passes through me like liquid moons,
wet stars on her tongue. She sucks
till I’m emptied of all the white
cells in my celestial body.”
“Because this is endearment not indictment
I’ll say that I admire the commitment you’ve recently made
to eating your berries with the knife used to clean them
rather than using a spoon.”
“Bored, my children open me up, like a fridge,
to find out what’s inside. I glow and show them
leftovers, mostly, some of them over a week old.”
“The expression that rubbed Luz raw was the one her mother used more often than all of her Ave Marías and all of her Ay Benditos—and she said those a lot. The one proverb that always made Luz feel ill at ease—and she was not too sure why—was: Con la boca cerradita te ves más bonita: you look prettier with your mouth shut.”
“Your voice slips like smoke
between prison bars,
a jailer lights a cigarette,
considers the burning stub.”
“one was peering at a recipe
for risotto, the other
at the microscopic script
in an obsolete telephone book.”
“Each with a man
that stuck, waxy & scarlet as their lips on my
cheek, anointing me with gentle warnings &
measurements for the perfect chicken soup.”
“You salt the egg anticipating
the salt. Count on the hill
for the view, and, when you get to the top,
there’s the view.”
“This is a place, I thought,
where words cannot bring us
safely back home.”
“We approach
middle age as undiscovered country when
really it’s the same old alley, the bowling pin
that wobbles like a drunk but won’t go down.”
“Polyglot wind: her too many voices,
her tangled tongues,
all of them sharp.”
“In quietude I feel I am everywhere at once—my own body rehearsing its wintering act, too. I look up from the table to the far side of the lake to see a buck limping, his hind legs sixteenth-notes in the dry leaves. From far off, a shot sounds like an encyclopedia falling to a wooden floor and like the echo of its striking.”
“One of my first shifts in the ER, I looked down the throat
of a young boy and saw a nail. The boy smiled. He coughed.
The nail quivered.”
“It’s too good to last, this early sunshine in April,
this smell-of-cut-grass morning
and this body, with its mirage of infinite breaths,
its lie of immortality.”
“My own heartbeat
neither wants or doesn’t want to live.
It just does.”
“It’s official: dementia and medication. Not unexpected. But getting the ICD code is like being pinned. Mom does not protest.
The transitions before me are not unique, I know. Yet the fact that they’re universal and part of life matters as much to me as cocktail party chitchat.
What I treasure are tiny pearls that appear in mundane surroundings, a particular moment between particular people.”
