“The doctor hisses a small yesss
that lingers and I see a bird,
worm in its grasp, the body
in and out of the earth,
except it’s my leg and my vein
and I should look but I’m learning
I don’t always have to.” 

“there was much
steepling of hands
as if the surgeons
were trying to build
a church to house
their inoperable religion”

“I have the same disease my family does.
I try to tell stories to make things right.

I keep trying to tell our stories right
because I want to understand our past.”

“It’s almost September again.
I sit stiffening in the wide
wicker chair, watching
my line break while late summer folds
the garden like a spent libretto, edges
shredded to a slatternly fringe.”

“It all starts, Margaret will see later, with the old voicemail that plays through her earbuds on the train to work one morning in the first September Cara is gone. In that moment Cara begins to be resurrected, meticulously pruned, like a bonsai. I have some exciting news, she says, not really Cara but only the captured sound waves that are all that’s left of her by then. I need to tell you about it. And I want to hear what’s up with you. Okay, love you. Call me.”

“There are worse fates.
At least we didn’t end up
as some nacreous gimcrack souvenir:
‘Greetings From San Fran’ in mother-of-pearl.” 

“If I could just get one thing done
If I could set the to do list on fire                                 
If I could create a clearing
I might hear the Japanese maple outside the window
           whispering in stillness and light”

Rare is the child, or adult for that matter, who doesn’t wonder what it would be like to lose a sense. I was six or seven the first time I wondered—lying on my stomach in the front yard of our house in San Mateo, the grass cool, prickling against my bare belly, the light stippling through the leaves of the elms that ringed our yard and round a circle of children, siblings and friends, heads close together, whispering,
“What would you rather be: deaf or blind?”

“Beyond the windows the sun was buckling off paving stones, off shutters and white-painted walls, and even in here where the air was antiseptic and cool we talked slowly, moved slowly, cleaned wounds and took blood slowly. It had been long enough since the door had opened that we paused at the squeal of its hinges, noticed the parched breath of the desert sweep in.”

“You are two and each day is a world
in which to peel gold pawpaw leaves

from the path; to plunk pebbles
in water, one by one; to trace tar

ribbons on cement in watermelon
rainboots”

“What if mourning is my engine? Sound almost muted, just a whir, behind the T-shirt and jeans. My hands do what is expected—wash dishes, answer emails—instead of reaching down to thump on the dirt or dig.”

“When you open the door to Toni Morrison, the book begins, you look genius in the face. The multiple facets of the phrase open the door are characteristic of the linguistic dexterity Verdelle and Morrison enjoyed. Over two-and-a-half decades, Verdelle literally opened the door to Toni Morrison many times, a surprising development in Verdelle’s life as a young novelist, and her memoir figuratively opens the door on Morrison as a writer, mentor, and friend.”

“A friend texts to ask for ways to keep
     her four-month-old occupied
during “tummy time”—a sweet name for the exercise
     that will prevent her child from wearing
a helmet while the now-doughy skull forms:
     an assortment of dry beans in a plastic bag”

“I hear it before I see a mass of gulls
dive-bombing the channel at the foot

of the falls, where a dark smear
roils like a storm cloud underwater.”

“prayer beads and a well and cow dung and smoke and coal and flag plastered on a hill and olive trees and olive trees choiring and an olive seed smacked onto a plate by my grandmother and sheepish eye and a rug in the bedroom from Bulgaria and yogurt fermenting and ashtray with a stomach full of ash and cevşen read thrice and halo of television and plastic covered couches and kahvehane and kahve and Müslüm Baba hunkering hangimiz sevmedik? on taxi radio and Atatürk street and my uncle looping a rope around the awning as a swing for me and kittens and chickpeas and chickpeas dried and collected in a pile and chickpeas on fire”

“The aches in your back spread in springtime, 
breaths caught in each twist. What have I
been? you must ask me. The sheen in 
your eyes stolen by dark, it punches 
circles onto bone maps, on pelvis, 
ribs. I will write you, I offer.”

Katey Schultz speaks at the Corvallis Museum March 9th, 2024, on the topic of research’s role in the creative process.

“Try to remember the actual
moon is never less than full.
The evening cashier has a secret
sorrow and plans for the weekend.”

“Dear eyes
like breaking stars,
some days I hear your voice
in the trees, some nights
I send you half my dreams.”

“I thought it was just opening, he says. I thought
the petals were just unfurling.”

“Tonight, I am going to push
the Susquehanna away with my body,
ignore the waning moon’s fractioning
of light.”

“Still awake believing our silence might leave us,
desperately needing to make ourselves heard,
every girl told a story before parents came for us.”

“I imagined us drinking tea
sugared with honesty,
laughing till we turned soft
as fallen apples.”

“Some days
almost everything’s about sex, and maybe
this as well: groan of old boards, joists
and beams remembering, music
of breaking glass.”

“Then, when the black nightingale returns to the forest,
when the audacious sun is high,
I wonder, beneath the waves,
where a few more wing beats would have taken me”

“Trash-can colored and rusty, it was a car all throat,
all fits and stutters, a guttural language

choked at every breakneck shift of gears,
a devil’s-in-hell kind of loud, so buzz-saw loud

you could feel the fuel catch fire inside it, its inner life burning
with something I was too small to name.”

“It wasn’t until my fourth or fifth sip of tea this morning that I noticed Miss Nancy Carson was missing her eyebrows. I promptly set the cup down and stared at her across the breakfast table. I wanted to make certain she had not simply hidden her brows under too much white pomade. The girl is at an age where she has begun to prepare her toilette, and painting takes practice to master. But her brows were not covered up. They were gone.”

“I knew who Tim Davis was in high school, but I didn’t introduce myself to him until my mom ran him over with her car. And this is not some kind of “meet-cute” story, where her tires caught his foot as she slowly backed out at the grocery store or something. Rushing home on a drizzly November evening, from a place she should not have been, my mother mowed Tim down as he rode his bicycle to work, paralyzing him below the waist.”

“Today another patient
chokes: Don’t
let me die—

When her heart stops, there is so much
noise in the room—so many people
swarming, and then things
inserted—

Her legs jerk with every compression.”

“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.”

“Paper gowns are not as soft as cloth gowns are not as soft
as silk        as milk     which is only soft until it sours”

“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.”

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

“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”

“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.”

“’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.”

“Today I celebrate my only bangle
my one-hand applause
the gold leaf on my family tree
my hand-hammered heritage
my blood.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“one was peering at a recipe
for risotto, the other
at the microscopic script
in an obsolete telephone book.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”