Autumn/Winter 2020 ��

AUTUMN/WINTER 2020

Autumn/Winter 2020

JOIN OUR GLOBAL works mostly on a volunteer basis, and mostly on a volunteer staff works hard-working expenses. Our We'd love. our publisher as a labor of primarily paid by expenses are is a way there If involved. be more you to have so love to contribute, please email us at would like you [email protected]. e word "tiferet" means heart, compassion, and reconciliation of opposites. of opposites. means heart, and reconciliation compassion, "tiferet" !e word world. in today's divisive traits to nurture Vital and into our global community of readers you look forward to welcoming We to be heard. long-silent voices to foster peace and allow writers working to www.tiferetjournal.com please visit a subscriber, not already are you If author interviews have we Talk Tiferet free subscribe or to listen to the and continue to run. archived Yahia Dunn, Stephen Houston, Jean Stavans, contributors include Ilan Past ffen Ste Hirsch, Ed Linh Dinh, Pinsky, Robert Lababidi, Alicia Ostriker, Prize Pulitzer and so many more. Hirshfield, Jane Rachlin, Nahid Horstmann, faiths, races, genders . . all unique of different Writers winners to newcomers. humanity. cross-cultural in our shared, voices is a meaningful gift. Journal Tiferet too, that a subscription to Remember, depend We or outside grants. any university not funded by magazine is Our at least part of our supporton your as a subscriber or donor to help cover READERS NOW! READERS COMMUNITY OF AUTUMN 2017

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ISSN: 1547-2906 ISBN: 978-1-7348940-2-8 SPRING/SUMMER 2020

FOUNDER & PUBLISHER Donna Baier Stein

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Donna Baier Stein

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POETRY EDITOR Adele Kenny

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STAFF INTERNS Anu Mahadev Mariel Zena Matthew Green Natalie Hirt

COVER ART "Sounds of Heaven" by Orna Ben-Shoshan FEATURED COVER ARTIST: ORNA BEN-SHOSHAN

"Alternative Realities lie parallel to the world we are familiar with..."

Orna Ben-Shoshan's artwork gives the viewer a rare and insightful visit to places beyond consciousness. Her paintings release the imagination and extend the limits of ordinary perception. In her colorful scenes, which take place in a distant world, creatures and objects interact in unpredictable ways and are uninfluenced by the laws of physics.

Artist Orna Ben-shoshan receives the images she paints through channeling. Unlike most artists, all of her paintings are completed in her mind before she transfers them onto the canvas. Orna's works infuse deep spiritual experience with subtle humor.

During her career as a fine artist for the past forty years, Orna has created a large body of work and is presently focusing on oil paintings. In addition to oil paintings, she creates computer art. These images are transformed into hand-decorated prints on canvas. Currently she also works as a freelance illustrator and textile designer.

Orna Ben-Shoshan was born in Kibbutz Yifaat, Israel, in 1956. She received her training as a graphic designer in Tel-Aviv. In 1982 she moved to the U.S. where she lived for fifteen years. Since her first one person show in 1983 (Lancaster, PA) Orna has exhibited her work in museums and galleries throughout the U.S. and abroad, including "ART EXPO N.Y." in 1996. She has received several awards, such as the "Grumbacher Award" from the Copley Society of Boston. Her work was published in "Yoga Journal" and by "Recycled Paper Products". She is also featured in the 10th edition of "The Encyclopedia of Living Artists".

Orna returned to Israel in 1996 where she is continuing to work from her studio in Ra'anana. Her first one person show in Israel took place at "Tzavta", Tel-Aviv, in 1998 and won remarkable reviews. Since then, she has been exhibiting her art at numerous one-person and group shows in Israel and Europe. TIFERET CAN… Inspire you to write Connect you to a global community Lead toward peace in you and in the world

SUBSCRIBE TODAY to enjoy beautiful, inspiring poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, interviews and visual art from some of today's best writers.

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ROBERT BLY JEAN HOUSTON ROBERT PINSKY RAY BRADBURY STEPHEN DUNN ED HIRSCH ILAN STAVANS ALICIA OSTRIKER JANE HIRSHFIELD

and so many more . . . Pulitzer Prize winners to newcomers!

You are welcome to submit your own work (poems, stories, essays, interviews and visual art) for us to consider for publication. We also run an annual Writing Contest and award $1500 in prizes. More details can be found at www.tiferetjournal.com.

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9 IBRAHAM/ABRAHAM NULL HYPOTHESIS Nadia Ibrashi 36 C-19 John McDermott 11 SIX WAYS OF LOOKING UPON BUDDHA NATURE 37 DURING THIS PANDEMIC Laura Boss INSTEAD OF COUNTING SHEEP, THE BUDDHA TRIES TO COUNT STARS AND SURRENDERS 38 LIFE AT ARM'S LENGTH Beth Walker Michael T. Young

15 RUBY 39 WHEN THIS IS OVER, Ellen Prentiss Campbell WHAT THEN? Nancy Lubarsky 30 SUNDAY MORNING WITH SAUL ON THE HOSPICE UNIT 40 TANKA Franches Richey Pamela Babusci

32 POEMS ABOUT THE PANDEMIC: 41 IN GREEN TIME 33 SHELTERED IN PLACE, APRIL Penny Harter 2020 Adele Kenny 42 THE LATE AUGURIES Philip F. Clark 34 REMEMBER THE ALAMO Bob Rosenbloom 44 THE BEES ARRIVE AT DUSK 35 THE REAL STORY Rogan Kelly Jessica de Koninck 45 THESE ARE THE DAYS Ray Cicetti

46 TRANSFORMING FEAR IN THE WAKE OF A PANDEMIC Raechel Bratnick "Thank you for this journal which combines spiritual issues, imaginative issues, esthetic issues. All of those, I think, need to be in the mix for the richly lived life, the richly observed life.”

– MOLLY PEACOCK, former President of the Poetry Society of America

56 THE HOUSE ON 66TH STREET Esther Mizrachi 84 GRANDMA TUCCI NEAPOLITAN TOMATO 62 WHY I TALKED TO MY DEAD SORCERESS FATHER Joan Daidone Lisa Romeo 89 MAKE THE WORLD A 66 BIRKAT HABAYIT: A WOMAN SENTENCE: AN INTERVIEW IS A BIRD WHEN WITH ROBERT VIVIAN Steven Wingate Jen Karetnick

67 IRIS 96 ROQUEFIXADE Sallie Bingham Kris Faatz

72 DEAR MRS. WHAT'S-HER-NAME 103 NAMING WHAT GOES AMONG THE Amy Champeau THINGS THAT CHANGE Susan Jackson 114 TOYS ON THE FRONT LINE Betsy Woodman 76 WHY WE ISOLATE BY CHOICE Grace de Rond 120 MAPS TO MECCA WHY EATING AN APPLE IS 81 JESUS GIVES THE KEYNOTE LIKE EATING THE WORLD ADDRESS AT THE NATIONAL Pervin Saket SPEECH & DEBATE TOURNAMENT 122 NOMAD'S HYMN Benjamin Bagocius Jed Myers

82 POEM-FINDING 124 TRAJECTORY: FIVE Kim Hansen ERASURE POEMS Amanda Berry 83 WHEN WE HAVE FINALLY SURRENDERED TO THAT BEAUTY Nancy K. Jentsch

126 SURREALISM IN POETRY: SOMETHING OTHER ? Adele Kenny

130 CHOICES MOVE CLOSER TO ME Jawanza Phoenix

132 MIYURI Michelle Ortega

133 ZOOMING WITH QUAKERS Jude Rittenhouse

135 BOOK REVIEW: REVOLUTIONS OF THE HEART: LITERARY, CULTURAL & SPIRITUAL Benjamin Bagocius

141 BOOK REVIEW: HER SISTER'S TATTOO Jacqueline Sheehan

143 BOOK REVIEW: KISSING THE LONG FACE OF THE GREYHOUND Adele Kenny POETRY Ibrahim/Abraham Nadia Ibrashi

“All stories told have been told before.” Brandon Sanderson.

My great-grandfather was rich with his knowledge, and a farm by the Nile. When his wife died, he wed a Sudanese woman. His six children crossed the house to avoid their step-brothers and sisters, usurpers of attention.

My side didn’t mingle with the Sudanese side. We wore skirts, scorned their Jellabiyas.

We didn’t invite them to our weddings, only funerals. Our grandfather rode a carriage, counseled to the King, their grandfather rode a donkey.

Our common ancestor was an Honorable Theologian who taught how the earth feeds us, how we should unite like threads of a rope. He gave his children a photograph where a fez crowns his head, and calligraphy cradles his sides. I shall pass and my likeness remains after my demise as my bones rest in dust And when I die ask mercy for me from sins, from a forgiving divine

Like all prophets, his progeny tries to decipher his words, syllables still flapping through our house of war.

9 POETRY Null Hypothesis Nadia Ibrashi

I’ve become like the God-mad mystics who haunt St. Hussein Mosque in Egypt, wearing amulets, singing to the beat of drums,

“He’s Alive, He’s Alive.”

I’ve recruited a pantheon of saints, talismans and medals in my fight against my son’s seizures,

St. Jude’s medal gifted by my hairdresser, glass talisman from Israel, its blue eye fending evil, sent by a friend,

holy oil from an abbey in Lebanon, courtesy of a travelling monk, Novenas, Moslem chants, medicines, blood work and doctors,

because I’m a scientist

who believes in the Null Hypothesis, all things being equal till proved otherwise,

so I show parity in my devotions, burn Frankincense, watch its fumes lift my pleadings to the sky. 10 POETRY Six Ways of Looking upon Buddha Nature Beth Walker

1. Buddha probably knew but forgot to mention someone has to pay the bills buy eggs and milk drop the kids at school and remember them later.

Center yourself in that, he’d say.

2. Nothing is important and everything matters: this mystery that keeps you awake.

3. Collect your tears in colorless jars. Line them up.

See how their cracks bend the sunlight.

11 4. Don’t sin against your talent.

Let teaching be your penance.

Let silence be your teacher.

5. Don’t give up on what’s here. The love you desire dwells in no other place.

Don’t forsake the man in the den. The love you seek lives in his face.

Don’t throw away what you have, thinking it’s not what you have always wanted.

We all live in empty houses, afraid and haunted.

6. Loneliness

is a long-faced stranger who stands in the corner.

We hang old clothes on him, thinking of another.

He prowls about the house late into the night.

We shiver for warmth and find him cold come morning.

12 POETRY Instead of Counting Sheep, the Buddha Tries to Count Stars and Surrenders Beth Walker

Then the Buddha squinted one golden eye and pinched the moon between his forefinger and thumb. The moon acquiesced. Buddha snapped his fingers

and the moon resumed its watch over the shadow world, unperturbed.

Buddha winked his other, blue-rimmed eye and the moon shifted its great white weight silently on its black couch, dusty with souls masquerading as stars.

Moving and immovable, the moon allowed Buddha to clap his hands shut, as he was fond of doing when he was a boy out catching fireflies

13 (then letting them free as was in his Buddha nature). When Buddha uncupped his palms,

there was the moon. Still the moon but a gift of pearl

in his outstretched hands, his thankful bowing hands.

14 FICTION Ruby Ellen Prentiss Campbell

Pete sat in the furnished room, bland as a motel. Here he was, unpacked, cut loose, almost as though he’d died already. But Ruby had been the one to do that. Cooking had been the first sign, or the first he'd let himself see, five years back. Just in from turning over the garden, the wet smell of spring on his shoes and his hands, he found her staring at the chicken in the Styrofoam tray, blue eyes blank as Orphan Annie’s. He followed her recipe in the church ladies' cookbook for Ruby’s Fried Chicken. He did everything, the Crisco, the paper bag with the seasoned flour. It turned out, not the same, but okay. “Eat sweetheart,” he coaxed. Perplexed, a crease of worry on her brow as though figuring out a difficult problem, she said, “I just don’t seem to have much of an appetite.” Night after night, taking little bites like an obedient child, then chasing rice and peas around her plate with an intensity reminiscent of her hover above the cribbage board—competitive and intent on beating him. He wasn’t her opponent though, and this game was dead serious, odds stacked against them both. But he was smug at first, about the cooking, old dog with his new trick. Who would have thought an out-to-pasture shop teacher would end up learning home arts? He never attempted Ruby’s Sweet Rolls, daunted by the mystery of yeast, though he craved caramelized sugar and butter the way he yearned to have her back. Stroke took her, after the rest of her wiring had burnt out. Stroke: what a soft word for a bolt of lightning out of the clear blue in an open field, though there was kindness to it. But the second stroke in the hospital carried her off alone into the dead of night while he was home asleep, eyes closed, back turned. Leaving her alone to meet it, no kindness there for either of them. He let her down. Failed to pull her back from the line of fire. She should have died in his arms like his buddy in the Bulge. Her niece Sheila rented a car at the airport and drove out from Indy. He could have picked her up. He was fine mostly, knowing the grid of long straight roads blindfolded (which he just about was now). Sheila seemed to assume that she 15 would do the driving for their errands—church, funeral home, cemetery—and Pete accepted. Just as well, really. He’d be nervous, driving with Sheila in the car, more likely to make a mistake. “You think you’re pulling the wool over her eyes?” Ruby said, in her sweet-tart voice, that teasing soundtrack in his ear, recovered now that she was gone, teasing him again. “She knows you’re blind as a bat.”

Sheila set up an account for him with the taxi company. (Easier to let her, but he wouldn’t use it. Waste of money. His eyes weren’t that bad). And Sheila fretted about the empty bungalows on either side, the house across the street where people came and went all night. His neighbor two doors down brought a casserole (helpful) and told Sheila about finding a body in her hot tub (not helpful). The neighborhood decline had been gradual. Like with Ruby, seeing her every day, he hadn’t quite seen how far down she was going. When you lift a calf every day, it’s not heavy. “I don’t like leaving you, Uncle Pete. Move east. There’s that nice place near me.” She’d been pushing it, even before Ruby got bad. “Independent, assisted living, nursing care.” “No insisted living for me,” Ruby had said once, right to Sheila’s crestfallen face. Sometimes she’d scrambled her words in an oddly accurate way, making Pete believe, or hope, that she understood more than she got credit for.

Sheila left, reminding him to be sure to use the taxi account, and to consider the place near her. It was easier, and kinder, to nod, though there really was no need for either, just yet. And he wouldn’t want to leave Ruby alone out here. Once Sheila was gone, it felt fine being on his own, like ripping off a band aid— quick pain and then relief. Pete slept like he was making up for the past years of Ruby up and down and up and down. Slept hard through the night except for getting up to pee (standing half asleep waiting for his plumbing to work, grateful to stumble back to bed). And he began to get Ruby back, now that she was gone. Her occasional pert commentary like a secret soundtrack just for him, and bright flashes across his mind like the first floaters in his eyes. Bending her head, exposing the soft nape of her neck, “Get this zipper for me, honey? Now don’t snag it on the placket.” Kneading bread, arms dusted in flour, looking up, blowing out a breath to lift her fringe of wispy bang. “Scratch my nose? And get this hair out of my eyes? There’s sweet rolls in it for you if you do.”

16 He’d always done her bidding: zipped, scratched, tucked, and dropped a kiss while he was at it. Thinking back, he couldn’t remember refusing any invitation (part flirtation, part practical). He’d let her take the lead, initiate. Until she could no longer act or ask, and (uninvited but essential) he came ever closer with the increasing daily intimate necessities of life. Until the very end, when he sneaked away, and he wasn’t there to help her leave. A month out from her death, he made the drive to the cemetery fine. Man- aged to find her. The stone was nice, big and substantial. He ran his fingers over her death date. Carved in stone, like they say. It reassured him, knowing they got it right. Mistakes happen with these things. His reservation was still open. Peter Arthur Stewart. February 7, 1920 —. Everything ready for him, but apparently he wasn’t quite done yet.

She’d often turned in first, calling down the cellar stairs to the workshop. “Can’t keep my eyes open. I’ve ripped out this seam twice. See you in the bye and bye.” When he turned in, she’d be asleep already, neat and quiet on her side of the bed, with her book dropped, reading glasses still on. He’d crawl in beside her, catching the whiff of rosewater and glycerin with a tang of rubbing alcohol—hand lotion special mixed at the pharmacy. Now she was at rest, that final rest before whatever (if anything) came after. Soon he’d come settle beside her in the deep dark. Pete heard a lawn mower in the distance, smelled cut grass and raw dirt. Being mid-week, no funerals, he had the cemetery to himself. It got dark all of a sudden. Which was how he ran the red light; red being hardest to see. No one got hurt, but his car was totaled. Everyone drives too fast on long straight roads. Not that he said that to the police or to Sheila. But he did mention it to Ruby, telling her about what had happened, seeing her pursed lips, the worry crease between the brows. “Whatever possessed you lamb, driving after dark, with your immaculate degeneration?” Sometimes he could smile at the unintended humor of her word scrambles. Sheila returned. “We’re not replacing that car. What if you hurt someone?” He didn’t fight her. He’d thought of that, too. And she insisted he move. “Please, Uncle Pete, I’m so worried.” He might have dug in his heels, but Ruby shook her head with the stern half- smile she reserved for rebuke. “Don’t be stubborn, Mr. Independent. Think of the burden you’ll be to her.” Even so, he might have put up a fight but for the eyes. It was like knowing winter was coming, days getting short. Soon it would be night all the time for him. 17 “We’ll hire movers. I measured your suite, there’s plenty of room. The corner cupboard you made for Aunt Ruby, take that.” “You take it,” he said. What he wanted was Ruby, and her dressing table with the kidney -shaped top, the legs he’d turned so carefully. But it was dainty, a woman’s piece, and he had Sheila keep it, too. He did take the cherry jewelry box he’d made Ruby on their first anniversary, twined initials burnt into the top. His goods and chattels fit in two big rolling suitcases. Pete didn’t ask Sheila what she did with his tools. Such a long time since he’d been able to do the stairs to get down cellar. But now, in this blank room back East, at the end of this long first day, closing his eyes he smelled damp cellar air and the hot sawdust churned up by his band saw.

Sheila had put the house on the market, and on what she called a List Serve. The realtor offered to “stage it,” for an extra fee. Pete refused. It was Ruby’s house. He remembered her contented fussing and nesting, when they moved in, kids playing house. Now no matter what the realtor did or promised, it would stand empty until the windows were broken and the steps rotted and one of the kids from across the street left a cigarette or whatever they smoked burning on his porch. Sheila told him not to worry about money. Well he knew that! Hadn’t he been the one to make it and invest it and save it? He knew better than anyone how it had piled up, in what the young man who did their taxes called his doomsday invest- ments. Not such a bad strategy after all, though he wasn’t one to say I told you so. He had what he needed and then some, to pay for this assisted living place. Con- tinuing care, Sheila called it. One stop shopping, he thought. Insisted living, just as Ruby said. The air conditioning felt cold as a grocery store dairy case. Where had Sheila put his sweater, the last one Ruby knit? “What am I supposed to be doing with these?” Holding the needles like she’d never seen any such implements before. He pawed through the drawers his niece had filled and found the sweater. As he put it on, he heard the industrious click of her needles, and her mutter counting stitches under her breath, her victorious exhale as she turned a heel. Wearing the sweater was close as he could come to holding Ruby. He found it harder to summon her up, in this place she’d never been. Sheila had offered to drive him out to the cemetery one last time; he declined. He wished he’d gone. He wished he’d stayed at the hospital that night. You couldn’t have known, Uncle Pete, Sheila said. But he had. He’d been afraid to say good bye. Sheila brought take out Chinese to the house the last night. She read him the fortune in his cookie. “You regret more what you don’t do than what you do. That’s not a 18 fortune, Uncle Pete!” Maybe not, but it summed things up. A chime rang in the hall. An aide came, smelling of some heavy oil. “Dinner- time, Mr. Pete.” She hung his key around his neck on the lanyard with the emer- gency call gizmo to use in case he fell. "Lock up. There’s people on the floor who are confused. Things go missing.” He had nothing left of value to go missing. Her hand was warm and strong as she guided him to a railing in the corridor. “Just follow this. Takes you straight to the dining room.” Don’t go, he almost said, like a kid on the steps of a new school. How many of those had he taken care of? How many newbies (raw as just born mice) had he shown the way to the cafeteria? Pete almost collided with a metal walker suddenly in his path. His eyes were bad enough paying attention, let alone wool-gathering. “Excuse me,” he said. “My fault, I never drove before having this thing,” she said. A voice like doves under the eaves, rain on the porch roof. “You’re my new neighbor. Helen Czerny. Onward to dinner, shall we?” He would learn there were good tables and bad, like at school. Here there were tables where no one talked and tables where no one could talk. Her table was best, and since he was with her (and a man), they made room. “This is Peter Stewart,” she said in that soft, firm voice. Helen was in charge. He was the new boy and he was with the prettiest girl in school. Faces were the hardest to see, blurry as though he were pressed too close to a fine mesh screen. But he could see Helen in that way he’d developed, what kids at school would call his secret superpower. As his eyes got worse, the second sight (or whatever it was) sharpened. So he saw her, this Helen Czerny, her oval face and wide-spaced brown eyes and hair (softer brown) in a page boy to her shoulders. And a soft sweater, a cardigan buttoned up the back the way the girls wore them when he was in high school. A strand of pearls around her neck. “He’s still wearing his hat,” one of the ladies at the table said in an angry voice. He didn’t beg pardon or explain that the baseball cap cut the glare. Helen read the menu out loud without his asking. “Tomato juice or pear and cottage cheese? Broiled cod or meatloaf?” She filled out the chit for him, too, no questions asked, as though they’d been a longtime couple. Later he heard Helen’s television faintly from next door. What would she be watching? A nature show? Her clock chimed through the wall. He sat in the recliner chair, listening. Saw her in a chenille robe. Smelled rosewater and glycerin lotion. 19 The aide brought his drops and pills. Helped him to and from the bathroom. Would have helped him into bed but he wasn’t ready. He fell asleep sitting up in his chair, like an astronaut in his space capsule spinning around the earth, way up above.

Helen was at his door when he stepped into the hall, heading to breakfast. “Just reading about you.” She explained about the little bulletin board by each door. Read the write up about him, described his last school picture, the one from the year he retired. “My niece must have done it,” he said. “It’s like hearing my own obituary.” She laughed, a sound like doves in the eaves. “Nieces! Mine’s the boon and the bane of my existence. You’re from Terre Haute? We lived in Bloomington, when my husband was first teaching.” After breakfast he walked her home. Well, to her door. Asked her to read him her bulletin board biography. She’d called her husband a teacher; turned out he was a professor. He liked that she didn’t put on airs. Helen had taught junior high history. If she’d taught in Terre Haute, they might have had coffee together, in the teachers’ lounge. He asked about her picture. “It’s ancient. But the one my niece will use in my death notice, so why not?” That laugh again, doves in eaves. “Yearbook picture, senior year in college. I’m wearing a sweater and my add-a-pearl necklace. My hair was a long bob to my shoulders. Brown, like my eyes. I was considered beautiful,” she said, matter of fact as though speaking of someone else. You still are. Knowing it as if he could see her face clearly. “Mrs. Helen, I’m here for your shower,” said the aide, startling him. In the shadowy darkness he carried around like weather, he’d forgotten they weren’t alone.

Sheila came to lunch on Sunday. Dinner, they called it on the announcements. Helen wasn’t there. He was glad not to make any introduction. To keep her his secret piece of pocket gold. Would Ruby mind? Would Sheila? They went outside afterward. The air was fresh, but the glare hurt. He’d forgotten his dark glasses. Pete felt uneasy in the unknown landscape. Becoming an inmate, he thought. He’d been the outside person, Ruby the inside: industrial arts and home arts. “There are geese on the pond,” said Sheila. “A little island with a tree.”

20 Back inside she bustled around making labels he’d not be able to read. “Anyone you’d like to call, while I’m here? I’ve ordered a phone with a big dial. And an easy remote, for the TV. There’s someone who can come and give us advice about things that will make it easier, with your eyes.” She meant well, but her anxious voice and hover, her eagerness to solve his problems (and solve her problem: Pete) wore him out. What he wanted was to sit in the lounge chair and close his eyes. No one he wanted to talk to back home but Ruby. No one, except for Ruby, he missed. The first September after retiring he expected to miss school. But it turned out like a snake shedding its skin. His world narrowed down to his shop down the cellar, the garden, and Ruby. Simple and sufficient. Sheila fiddled with the radio, finding a classical station. That seemed to make it easier for her to go, leaving him with some noise in the room. He closed his eyes and was an astronaut again, floating in the dark looking down on the world left behind. Just needed to get a little farther up and farther out. A knock roused him. Helen’s soft voice. “Pete?” He was careful, going from sitting to standing, slow going to the door. Called out so she wouldn’t give up and leave. “I’m going down to vespers,” she said. He must have looked blank because she laughed. “Evensong,” she said. “It’s nice, depending on who does it. They rotate. I’m Methodist, that’s why I’m here. But I like the Catholic priest best. This is his Sun- day.” “Do we have to go outside?” He wanted to take it back as soon as he spoke, not wanting to look timid. “Tunnels,” she said, laughing again. “We don’t ever have to leave this place, isn’t that an awful thought?” From the elevator they walked until the carpet ended on a tile floor. There was a scent of hospital. “Where are we?” “Crossing the border between assisted living and nursing home. Don’t worry, I’ll get us back.” The chapel was small, dim, and too warm. He took off his hat. Her voice singing the hymns was dry and reedy, like the sound of holding a blade of grass between two fingers and blowing across. He closed his eyes and smelled summer sun and breeze and cut hay.

21 He hadn’t gone to church with Ruby, hadn’t said the Lord’s Prayer since they stopped doing it at school. This priest used “debts” instead of “trespasses,” which tripped Pete up. “I prefer trespasses, too,” said Helen as they walked to the elevator. “Quite a different meaning than debts. You can pay off debts. You need forgiveness for trespasses.” The nurse with the medicine cart greeted them upstairs. “I was looking for you two,” as though they were a couple of kids sneaking out. She dosed them and rolled on. “I like to have a sherry on Sundays,” Helen said. “Join me?” Sheila had read him the rules, on the papers he’d signed. Helen laughed. “Don’t look so disapproving! It’s allowed, if you’re quiet about it. My niece Meg smuggles it in. I have cranberry juice if you’d rather.” She left her walker by the door; surer here, on her turf. The apartment smelled of spice and flowers, like Ruby’s pomander balls, oranges stuck with cloves. “Smells nice in here.” “Potpourri. From our roses. My last batch, the fragrance is almost worn out.” He had a blurred impression of shelves filled with books, the glint of gold frames on painted pictures, pools of lamplight. Sitting at her table, Pete stroked the wood: smooth and fine grained, well taken care of. Her skin would be, too. “Cherry,” he said. “I made Ruby, my wife, a cherry jewelry box.” Reminding himself he was married, yet feeling he’d confided something he should have kept private, mentioning that jewelry box. The glasses were small, thin stemmed crystal. Helen clinked hers against his. The drink tasted sweet and smoky. Pete wasn’t teetotal, but he’d never had much of a taste for beer or liquor. This was nice. “Tell me about Ruby,” she said. Her voice, the dim room, felt warm and intimate, as if they were lying together in bed, talking in the dark, the way he and Ruby sometimes did if she’d roused when he came to bed, after they made love. “We met at the school where I taught shop. She taught home arts till we got married. Almost sixty years ago. Her favorite color was red, like her name. She never wore black, said it made her look dead.” Why did he say all that? Helen laughed. “Oh, I like her. Black’s the most boring color, non-color, under the sun. Do you have children?” “No.” “Nor did we. How long has she been gone?” “Four months. Dementia, then a stroke. I’d gone home just before she died.” 22Why on earth did he tell her that? “Likely made it easier for her to let go. My husband died alone. I think he wanted it that way. He belonged to the Hemlock Society.” “What’s that?” “Socrates. Suicide, basically. He had his stash, he had his plan. But he was too weak to do anything except just stop eating and drinking.” Pete didn’t know what to say. “So, I wasn’t there when Lou died. Though it’s not just about the last moment, is it? There’s all the life you had before. Joy. Sorrow.” Her voice made his heart ache the way certain music did sometimes. Made Pete picture Ruby, lying in bed under the faded quilt, still and composed after each mis- carriage. Waiting until she thought he was asleep to cry. And while she wept, he lay there, pretending to sleep, afraid to touch her. All the things she’d asked him to do, the little touchings, and she’d never said, "Hold me please. I’m sad." Why had he waited to be asked? “Another drop?” Helen filled his glass. He drank it down, quickly—it was a very small glass. “Tell me about your husband.” “Lou and I met in college, in the drama club. Married when he got out of the service.” “When did he pass?” “Oh, a long time ago. Thirty-seven years. He was only fifty.” She paused, took a sip. “He had AIDS.” Why did he need aides, he wondered for a moment, then understood. He’d never known anyone that happened to. Ruby had had a phobia about dirty needles, injec- tions, blood work, after all that started. Mercifully, she forgot that, too. “He was bisexual,” she said, voice weary, the light gone out of it. “Have I shocked you?” “No,” he said, surprised to find it true. “I had gay students, but I was slow, figuring that out. It was hard for them.” “Well, love is. Love is love, Pete. Complicated. You know what Shakespeare said.” “I don’t.” Somehow not ashamed to admit it, to her. “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” She filled his thimble-size glass again without asking. “It does infuriate me, people thinking because we’re old, we’re innocents.” “If you laid everyone’s experience in this place end to end, it’d cover a few miles,” he said. “Exactly,” she agreed. “My new friend. My last friend, I think.” 23 Falling asleep he listened to her clock chime next door. He had never had a woman friend, except Ruby. It had been a while since he really had a friend, if you didn’t count Ruby.

At breakfast the activities director came by the table. She was brisk and enthusias- tic, reminding him of a woman gym teacher at his school. “We’re going to the National Gallery downtown on Wednesday.” “I’d love to go,” said Helen. “If it weren’t for the walker.” Such longing in her voice. “No problem,” said the activities person. “Loaner wheelchairs there. I’ll push you.” “Why don’t you come too, Pete?” Helen asked. “It would be wasted on me, these eyes.” “Push me and I’ll tell you what we’re looking at.”

They sat together on the bus. “Last time I went on a field trip, I was chaperone,” he said. She laughed. He felt like he’d grabbed the gold ring on the merry-go-round, amusing her. Helen described what they passed. The Washington Monument, the new World War II monument (which she didn’t think much of and was glad her husband never saw), the White House. White marble glittered against blue, blue, blue. Pushing the chair was easy on the marble floors. She told him when to stop, when to turn. “Good thing you’re leading. I never could dance,” he said. Again, her laughter like a prize. Wanting more, Pete started to say something about chaperoning the middle school dances. But saw Ruby at the punch table, catching his eye. All dressed up in her red chiffon, her pumps. They never danced on duty in the gym but afterward, home, turned on the kitchen radio and swayed around the room in the dark. The special exhibit was a painter from Pennsylvania, Andrew Wyeth. He’d heard of him. Helen read the brochure aloud. “The show’s called ‘Looking Out, Looking In.' He was interested in windows. Because they framed the world he painted.” They took it slow, stopping in front of each picture. The rest of their group left them behind. Her descriptions were so clear Pete could see the slant of a roof, the streaked gray of the sky, paint blistered on clapboard. The activities director came. “We’re going down to the cafeteria now.” 24 “I’m not hungry,” said Helen. “Park me in front of this picture. I’ll be more than content.” “I’ll stay, too,” he said. And be more than content. “So, it’s called Wind from the Sea,” she said. He saw a block of light against a block of dark. “There’s a curtain, a thin curtain blowing in.” “What color?” “No color. Translucent, filmy. Nylon. That’s what’s amazing. How he does it. Makes air visible. People says it’s like a photograph. But it’s better.” As a kid, he’d listened to ball games on the radio. After he and Ruby had television, he watched. But he’d always preferred the radio, listening to the announcer’s description, filling in the picture for himself. “There’s a field outside the window, tracks in it, a curve of two tire tracks.” Pete closed his eyes, easier to see without the distraction of glare and shadow. They sat there, quiet. Helen looking at the painting he supposed; Pete looking at the idea of the painting which became stepping into it, one of those tricks his mind played—pretty good consolation, for what he couldn’t see. “More than content,” he said. “Good,” she said. Footsteps echoed on the marble floor; people paused and murmured and passed on. They weren’t alone, but it felt like just the two of them. “We’re inside looking out,” he said, daring to rest his hand on the cracked vinyl armrest of her wheel chair, like the first time he went to the movies with Ruby, his arm snaked across the velveteen top of her seat, working up his nerve.

Pete fell asleep in the recliner after they got back. The aide woke him. He hadn’t heard her knock, or the sound of her key. She loomed over him, a cloud of white uniform, dusky face, some tropical fragrance. Helen had told him the accent was from a French-speaking country in Africa. “Dinnertime, Mr. Pete. I have your drops.” He blinked on the drops and saw wind blowing a sheer curtain. Pete knocked on Helen’s door before going to the dining room. She didn’t answer. She must have come for him and he’d slept through her call. They’d skipped lunch, she’d be hungry. It was good to be hungry for a change. Pete had fallen out of the habit of three meals a day when Ruby lost her thermostat for hot and cold, didn’t seem to register empty and full. But here you no sooner pushed away from the table than it was time to eat again. 25 He sat down with a lurch at the table, without Helen to guide him. “Where’s your girlfriend?” said the woman next to him. She always sounded angry. Maybe she was. The young waitress read him the choices too fast. Helen had been on the committee to choose a waitress for a scholarship to the community college. She knew them all by name. After dinner he knocked again at her door. An aide passed by. “She fell this afternoon. Took her over to Shady Grove.” Shady Grave, Helen called the hospital, laughing. “Hope I never go there again. This apartment is my final resting place.” Pete sat in his recliner, listening to her clock through the wall.

Carmen, his favorite, came to help him in the morning. She never rushed, sat outside the bathroom door while he perched on the plastic shower bench in the stream of water she’d adjusted to just the right temperature, let him soap himself with the wash cloth she’d left ready. Never yanked the shower curtain open before he asked. Stood waiting with his robe. He wished he’d been half as good with Ruby. Sometimes after her shift, Carmen sat in Helen’s apartment, just visiting. Helen had told him the woman’s son was in prison; she was studying for a nurse’s aide cer- tificate but couldn’t pass the test though she was the best of them all. “Everyone tells you their life story,” he’d said. Like me, he thought. “Oh, we invisibles have to stick together.” “What?” “We’re invisible because we’re old. They’re brown.” “It’s the way you pay attention.” “That’s a very nice thing to say,” she’d said, not laughing. He had that feeling again, of catching the gold ring prize.

Carmen told him Helen had broken her hip. When he’d been in the service, they joked—and it wasn’t joking—about the golden bullet, the hoped-for injury bad enough to send you home but all in one piece. His own grandmother had talked about pneumonia as the old folks’ friend, a different kind of golden bullet, taking you out, sending you home. Now a broken hip just meant staying on for pain and difficulty and work. She’d never said, if she belonged to the Evergreen group, too. Did Helen have something laid by, to ease her out? Smuggled in like her sherry?

26 He asked Carmen to place the call to the hospital. Patient information connected him to her room. The phone rang and rang. Carmen told him when she was brought back to the rehabilitation unit down- stairs. She showed him the way there.

Her room was right across from the nurse’s station. Pete got tangled in the curtain between the beds. She lay on the quiet side; her roommate had her television on. The glare of the fluorescent made it harder to see. “Could you turn that light off?” he asked Carmen. He made out a small body in bed. “How are you, Mrs. Helen?” asked Carmen. No answer. “I’ve brought Mr. Pete.” No answer. Carmen pulled a chair up next to the bed for him. “I’ll come back for you.” Her shadowy form swooped down over the bed. He sensed rather than saw her kiss Helen’s forehead. “I miss you,” the aide whispered. The roommate’s television droned on. A therapist came for her. “Could you turn that off? While you’re gone?” he called out. Blessed quiet. Ruby had been in the new hospital in town, all the rooms private. He hadn’t even known how lucky that was. Pete heard Helen breathing, ragged puffs. “It’s too long,” she whispered, more exhalation than voice. Lunch came. “Maybe she’ll eat for you,” the aide said, positioning the rolling table over the bed. “Do you want to try?” he asked, after the aide had gone. “I may make a mess.” “No,” she said. Refusing, her voice was steady, stronger. He sat there all day. Stopped hearing the television, the background buzz of noise in the hall. He found it was possible to just sit and be there, not dozing but drifting, wandering between here and there, now and then, Helen’s bedside and Ruby’s. Carmen tapped his shoulder. “Time to go up, Mr. Pete.” “I’ll stay awhile. I can find my way.” Later, someone came in. “Who are you?” Pete heard surprise, protection in the woman’s voice. “Pete Stewart,” he said. “Her neighbor from upstairs.” 27 “She’s mentioned you. I’m her niece, Meg. Thanks for being here.” Pete knew he should leave. But Helen herself might leave while he was gone. Well, fair enough if she did. The niece was here. She should be with family at the end, no matter what she said about the last moment not being so all-important. He groped his way down the hall, rode the elevator upstairs. Carmen must have left the tray with the sandwich and carton of milk. Helen was still there, the next day, and the next, and the next. Using what strength she had to refuse to eat, to refuse to drink, to pluck out the IV delivering fluid. “Her heart’s strong,” her niece said. Meg came every day before and after work. The two of them met bedside morning and evening like a change of shift; walked down the hallway toward Pete’s elevator together. “She’s given up. But if she’d just drink, eat, get strong enough for physical therapy.” “She says it’s been too long,” Pete said. “Said the same thing to me, too.” “Maybe she’s right,” he said. He found her bed empty the next day. She’s done it, he thought. Without me. Why had no one called? He would have come. He could have come. Said good bye. This time he could have said good bye. “The family had her moved upstairs,” the nurse said. “Ninth floor. Hospice.” Pete took up his daily vigil there. Drank the small cans of apple juice, ate the cottage cheese the nurses brought him. Slept in the reclining chair by her bed till Meg came, evenings after work and spent the night. He relieved her in the mornings. Helen no longer spoke. But one morning, just after her niece left, Helen whispered, “They’ve locked the gates. If I turn sideways, I can slip through the fence.” He had a hunch then and he could have called Meg. Knew he should. But he didn’t. Decided not to, though not entirely sure why. Maybe because he didn’t want to share? Maybe because this time he wanted to do it right. Or maybe because Hel- en had told him there were some things easier to do, without a loved one present. Anyway, selfish or not, he chose, and he was there that afternoon when she did slip through. Not talking, not touching her, just sitting. Making sure she was not alone but not encumbered by anyone too close. He took off his cap and said the prayer very softly, using trespasses not debts before he called Meg on the number she’d given him, before he rang the buzzer for the nurse. Meg knocked on his door that evening. “Pete, come have a sherry. Aunt Helen wouldn’t like me drinking alone.” The room smelled of roses and spices but felt different with her gone. Rooms, bodies, are just containers after all. When they’re empty, they’re empty. 28 They drank from the little glasses. “I should have been there,” Meg said. “They don’t give you leave, for aunts. Why didn’t I just take it?” He felt a pang. He’d trespassed. Taken the place that should have been hers. “Maybe having you away may made it easier for her to let go.” “I never said goodbye.” “It’s your whole life together, not just the last moment,” he said, hoping she’d take more comfort in Helen’s words than he had. Meg made a sound, halfway between crying and laughing. “That sounds like something she would say.” “It’s what she told me,” he admitted. “I wasn’t with my wife, when she passed.” “Oh, so you know. Thank you for telling me. And being with her. She wasn’t alone.” He almost apologized. Was about to explain. But the clock chimed, musical and soft as Helen’s voice interrupting him, hushing him. What’s done is done. No do- overs. “She wanted you to have the clock,” Meg said. “To keep you company.” “I couldn’t. You should have it.” “It’s what she wanted, and I do, too. Please. It does have to be wound once a week. I did it on Sundays. I could come out.” “Please show me how.” Meg wouldn’t want to come, or not for long. And besides, Pete’s fingers antici- pated the pleasure of tightening the spring, keeping it going, keeping the voice alive, hearing the chime. Good to be useful, right up to the end.

29 POETRY Sunday Morning With Saul On The Hospice Unit Frances Richey

The nurses warned me before I went into his room— he didn’t have a nose. A wet, plum-colored crater revealed its inner workings, all the little tunnels poignantly exposed. His left eye crusted shut, his right eye, opened wide—dark, luminous— his lower lip swollen as if pummeled. It stunned me to see how cancer eats away parts of the body; an ear, a heel, a profile; or swells up a tongue until the patient can’t close his mouth.

“Say, is it snowing yet?” His voice, deep, raspy— like Jimmy Durante’s on TV in the fifties. Saul was eighty, spirited to be in the end-stage— as it happened— his last day on earth. No Saul, it’s raining.

“Raining? It’s raining? Say! I wish I could find somebody to pick me up and carry me to the sky!” He sounded like a mystic, his dark eye fixed on the ceiling, his voice, conspiratorial, as if we could work together to propel him through the roof.

30 “Could you get me a soda?”

I went out to the kitchenette. The head nurse told me soda would give him gas. “He’ll like apple juice,” she said.

No nose, one eye, his skin translucent. You won’t believe me— he was beautiful. I held his cup of juice, helped him with the straw. “Thanks,” he said, “That’s nice. How can we get up to the sky?”

31 Poems about the Pandemic Adele Kenny, Poetry Editor

In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) a pandemic. Whatever our place in society might be, this virus has, in one way or another, affected all of us.

History will remember this pandemic, and generations that follow us will read and learn about it. The facts and statistics will be recorded and preserved. The poetry written during this time, however, will do far more than simply tell what happened—it will convey and remember how people felt.

Human civilization has survived pandemics before, but never one quite the same as this one that has devastated our modern, intensely connected world. By nature, human beings are creatures of community and companionship. For those of us who have been isolating and working at home, sheltering indoors, social distancing and wearing masks, attending classes and meetings online, and dealing with the stresses and anxieties brought about by Covid-19 (not to mention all the other unsettling things concurrently going on in our world), there is no precedent to which we can refer, and many of us have felt alone, frightened, and lost. This terrible pandemic has shaken our lives and our world. The human spirit, however, is one in which persever- ance and hope have always prevailed—and we will prevail.

Following is a selection of poems that deal with Covid-19 and express how its presence among us was felt by some of our poets. These poems are part of literature’s record of this challenging time, and reflect a range of poets’ ways of defining and clarifying our fears and uncertainties. They also show how we look for comfort through written language.

Our place in history dictates the emotional truths of our poems, and our poems show how we observe and negotiate the psychology of this new and unfamiliar landscape. Robert Frost wrote, “Poetry is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.” We hope that our sampling of “Covid poems” will provide a momentary “stay” for each of you.

32 POEMS ABOUT THE PANDEMIC Sheltered in Place, April 2020 Adele Kenny

April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, (T. S. Eliot, from “The Waste Land”)

I forget the date—13th, 14th—one number more than yesterday. There’s a box of masks on the kitchen counter, a container of wipes under the sink. Local funeral homes rent freezer trucks to hold the dead. I think of the Monty Python movie— bodies piled into carts, the sound of wooden wheels on cobblestones—Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead! This might as well be the fourteenth century. My dreams are strange, filled with people and details I forgot years ago. One is recurrent—in it, a young girl flaps her arms like wings in crazy moments that clatter like stone birds. Her hands are dirty. Sometimes I see her blocks away, at the edge of a field, legs lost in nettles. She knows I’m unnerved, that I watch her, afraid that she tracks me the way demons track human souls. When she stops in front of my house, I turn to the left and look down as if there’s something to find between the garbage cans. A man walks his dog on the other side of the street. The dog lifts its leg on a neighbor’s forsythia. Suddenly, the girl screams (and screams and screams), her voice like numbers rising. The man pulls his dog away, walks around the corner and down Crest Lane. From the back, he looks like my father. Squirrels disappear into leaves; a chimney swift, high in a spiral of wind, is strung with the dust of a different light. Lilacs begin to bloom. In the end, we reclaim this world or leave it behind.

33 POEMS ABOUT THE PANDEMIC Remember the Alamo Bob Rosenbloom

I’ll be ready for Santa Anna’s army when it climbs the Alamo’s walls with its tree-lad- ders. I’ll be ready with my rifles. I’ll be ready with all the paper goods I’ve hoarded since this pandemic started—toilet paper rolls, paper towels, boxes of tissues, and table napkins. I’ll throw the toilet paper rolls at their heads—pow, pow, pow—and paper towels. I’ll drop them like flies. I’ve been to the Alamo. I’ve read the history boards there. I know the battle was unnecessary. And now I’m ready for whatever Armageddon hunts me down. Let all of Santa Anna’s men scale the walls. This is why I’ve been saving all this paper. If I’m not ready to die now, I’ll never be ready. (And, while we’re at it, let’s agree to resolve the voting problem because this is what America’s all about: we the people should drop our ballots off at fast food drive-up windows—Mc Donald’s and Burger King, all the major chains—Here are your fries. Here’s my ballot.)

34 POEMS ABOUT THE PANDEMIC The Real Story Jessica de Koninck

It wasn’t awful our seder on the screen me at one table, the others small squares elsewhere. Almost felt like when we are together.

Someone hung up early. Somebody’s picture froze.

So grateful for company we avoided arguments and uncomfortable topics. After dozens of years I began to understand. Passover is not about liberation, salvation or God.

Passover concerns patience. I had not paid sufficient attention to the Haggadah though we read it every year. Its words do not promise a happily ever after. The book says wait, wait until next year, next year in Jerusalem.

35 POEMS ABOUT THE PANDEMIC C-19 John McDermott

No sun, no moon No you

Humans distancing. Three deer share my yard unafraid.

Bedroom kitchen Bedroom, kitchen, bedroom. Ah, Matsushima!

No faces, no crowd, still petals on a wet, black bough

Cicada cries, “They quarantined Basho’s frog!”

Good restaurant East Fuxing Road; not this year.

36 POEMS ABOUT THE PANDEMIC During This Pandemic Laura Boss

My older son takes over during this Pandemic when he recognizes my worry about his missing brother “I’ll talk to the detective,” he says when I tell him I filed a Missing Person police report with a local detective “I’ll deal with the rental car company,” he tells me after my numerous calls to see if the car has been found He gets the stolen car report done after the car has not been returned by its due date He checks each week with the head of the rental car security to see if the car has been found He deals with ascertaining the police have the information on my younger son ( his social security number and finger prints) in a national data base He gets help from my ex-husband’s step daughter, a Manhattan lawyer who specializes in investigations He calls me everyday in his soothing and caring way But he still says, “ Expect the worst.”

37 POEMS ABOUT THE PANDEMIC Life at Arm's Length Michael T. Young

Walls are higher than they’ve ever been, a brick and mortar mix of disease and distance.

A man on his own in the park, removes basketball rims from the courts to discourage anyone from play.

Park entrances are blocked off. Police cars circle the blocks, scanning the paths through the bare ash and elm trees.

Magnolias down the street light pink fuses in the gathering warmth. My daughter lifts one from the ground.

A small lamp, perfuming her hand, promising the annual closer of distances, a promise that today can’t be kept:

all candlelit dinners, all relay races, games of tag, called off—everyone now is it and the door to every flower shop is locked.

38 POEMS ABOUT THE PANDEMIC When This is Over, What Then? Nancy Lubarsky

When this is over, I’ll grow my nails longer. I’ll get my hair cut shorter—return to the pros for polish and root touch up. Their masks won’t seem so awkward.

When this is over, we’ll make plans to go to the park, take our dogs. I will be close to you, our hands might touch. I won’t need to look over my shoulder.

When this is over, I’ll redecorate— use my mask and gloves to repaint my kitchen chairs. I’ll store the rest in case I ever need them.

When this is over, I’ll invite my neighbors. We’ll gather face to face, clink our wine glasses. The sound will remind us of a bell’s toll, as the gates open. 39 POEMS ABOUT THE PANDEMIC Tanka Pamela A. Babusci

the long day & night in isolation an empty prozac bottle

40 POEMS ABOUT THE PANDEMIC In Green Time Penny Harter

Each day green riots more and more along the roadsides, threatening to overwhelm my view into the woods with tangles of shrub oak, laurel, and burgeoning blueberry bushes.

Further on, the green wall of reeds has grown so tall I can’t see through them to the endless stretch of grass that used to host white ibis, or the horizon of bay water glinting blue in the summer sun.

Closer to home, this afternoon’s mallow blossoms along the edge of the park have already begun to fold inward, drooping from heat or drought. They close at night yet daily open pastel faces to the dawn.

A few days ago on my daughter’s birthday I dared to enter her house, pandemic mask in place, sat at table in front of a bouquet of roses from her husband, their red ruffles shouting beauty in the midst of isolation.

These long hot days, even as daylight has already begun to shorten toward autumnal dark and chill, this part of the planet doesn’t care, is too busy making everything green while it can. And we must do the same.

41 POEMS ABOUT THE PANDEMIC The Late Auguries Philip F. Clark

“We went our separate ways, but within walking distance of one another.” - Patti Smith, from ‘Just Kids’

Only nature is unmasked; the trees breathing their green. A man on my side of the street, considers me, and crosses to the other side.

A knock on my door, a neighbor — I hear his muffled, "Don’t open the door! You have a package! Don’t open the door!” I wait until he has gone.

Another is terrified when I retrieve the mail; she backs away to the wall. I quickly take late bills and letters, and look at her; she gives me a wide berth. We are all only eyes now.

Sister, I know this is not what your mouth meant — these late auguries of a new alphabet. The world seems a mandala now, waiting with breath held, for breathing.

Every night at exactly seven, the applause begins; tin, metal whistles, cheers in the empty streets. Windows filled with celebrants for the hospital workers. Always, the one same woman remained, never stopping until she tired. 42 From my room, I see a young child and her father; masked, they watch over a bed of flowers under the trees. Her words are woolen stones.

I stay up late each evening, trading light and sleep for grievance, extending hours that I do not have. Every hour is a warning.

My mouth is not for kissing, my arms are not for this errant embrace. My lips work a strange language now, filled to the brim with leaves.

43 POEMS ABOUT THE PANDEMIC The Bees Arrive at Dusk Rogan Kelly

I embraced Mark’s wife, Connie, outside Veggie Heaven. Fine dining with a diner-sized selection of Chinese, Thai and Japa- nese food one would imagine awaits us when we die. The fake chicken tastes like chicken. The fake beef tastes like beef. The texture of everything is spongy which suits the faux shrimp and ruins the feigned eel. It was an absent hug. I was carrying too many things. Lunch leftovers, my glasses case, glasses, keys. I dropped the case and keys. In my rush to pick up things, I hurried through a goodbye I didn’t think twice about. We will have you over the house soon, she said. It was the end of February or early March. The last time I touched another person. There were speakers under the streetlights and the town pumped music from them. Peter Gabriel singing Book of Love played. In the yard, I till and rake the garden bed. The dog asleep in a cushioned chair. I plant the tomatoes and cucum- bers. Prep the side bed now for wild flowers. I pull back everything but the meadow clover. The bees arrive at dusk. The young couple down the street, always holding hands, walk by in a staggered line like relay runners after the race is lost, still in an argument over who’s fault for the dropped baton.

44 POEMS ABOUT THE PANDEMIC These Are the Days Ray Cicetti

You’ve stacked all the wood neatly for winter picked the last weeds from their brown beds when a quiet arrives that takes you far beyond the silent weight of your stories.

These are the days you realize how in a moment the sky and the fragrance of wild grasses can wake you from the mind’s turnstile.

To see how small things, teach, carry light, remind you how long you’ve hovered above your own life miles away from the indivisible sky.

It’s a lesson we all need to learn:

how the day stretches out as you do here, among the fields and sidewalks, the way the half-buried rocks shine in the moonlight.

45 NONFICTION Transforming Fear in the Wake of a Pandemic Raechel Bratnick

Fear is contagious. It’s passed from one person to another, sometimes naively. Some- times to control the behavior of others. Right now this invisible, contagious feeling is being triggered by the pandemic of the invisible Covid-19 virus, political upheav- al, racial injustice, sluggish public services, and destructive fires and storms. Fear is seeping into the air we are breathing. Seeing one another as enemies exacerbates fear in all of us. It can be as subtle as seeing the man who is standing too close to you in the store, oblivious to the signs that say keep your distance, feeling he is your enemy. It can be as potent as hating the person who sits in the Oval Office. Transform- ing fear at the root of our feelings is one of the essential spiritual challenges of this time where there are multiple triggers. Without attention to our fear, we are a target for lies masked as truth. Natural fear is not the problem. Natural fear comes with catastrophic storms and fires, or a sudden unexpected illness. I want to address the more invasive, hidden fear. If you are feeling more afraid these days, there is a possibility that somewhere in your history lies a trigger of fear that you probably weren’t thinking about in your daily life. Much as we would like life to be ordinary, this is a non-ordinary time. It is a time to repair and heal long forgotten wounds and barbs that are still lurking beneath the surface. All of us are vulnerable to fear. When a fear is being triggered by something not directly impacting your life, it’s a sign that you may have a trauma in your history that hasn’t been digested and integrated, no matter how much therapy, bodywork or systems work, like family constellations, you’ve done. Recently I experienced a jolt of fear that led me back to a pivotal experience having to do with one religion fearing and despising another. In the last few years we’ve witnessed people fearing the Other, whether of a different religion, a different culture, or a different skin color. More than ever we need to know how to be present to what is happening around us. We need to know how to balance and harmonize our systems. We want to know how to live in a true state of equanimity, not a sem- blance of peace. It’s time for us clear away any false cobwebs from our history.

46 This spring I read several conspiracy theory posts on Facebook that elicited a visceral dread and fear in me, flooding my emotional body. I felt angry: I wanted to challenge the writer. This primal fear startled me. I knew by my reaction that it was coming from a place in me that had not been resolved or integrated. I knew this because my body was registering anxiety when I read these disturbing images, videos and declarations, the kind that are running rampant through American social media now. I was taken aback by the person posting these, who I thought was more spiritually-minded and balanced. I traced this fear back to my junior year of high school. I spent my high school years from 1957-1961 in a Seventh-day Adventist boarding school along with 300 other teenagers from eastern Washington and northern Idaho. My freshman year I was completely unafraid of the dark. My roommate and I both felt trapped by being locked into the girls’ dorm at night after a day regulated by bells, classes, work schedules, and morning and evening worship services. We longed to be free, so one night we decided to open the old paned-glass windows of our room and climb onto the wide front porch. Outside in the crisp air, we ran from tree to tree across the ex- pansive front lawn, hiding from the night watchman, a senior boy who rode a horse around the property at night, ensuring everything was safe. Dashing the last yards to the deserted paved road, we turned towards the railroad track. Without highway lights the sky was full of stars. We felt free and alive, our lungs filled with freedom. Here there was no restriction or accountability for every minute of the day. We felt completely at home in the night sky and the crisp air. But we knew we had to return before our friends in the room at the end of the hall fell asleep. They had agreed to open the locked door to let us back in when we tapped on their window. Then we crept down the hall, trying to avoid the squeaky floorboards. We knew that Mrs. McNeil, the petite girls’ dean, was walking the halls of this four-story building, checking to make sure that all 150 of us stayed in our rooms, stopped giggling, and went to sleep. Why did we choose the road and not the school grounds? We wanted to avoid being caught. We had heard stories about the kinds of punishments meted out to students breaking the rules. Rarely had we seen a car traveling the old highway. On Sabbath afternoons after church and lunch we were encouraged to walk along this road, girls one way, boys the other. Groups of boys and girls dressed in their best clothes, getting fresh air before sitting through another church service, this one focused on missionary work. We managed these nightly escapes for a few weeks before Dean McNeil learned of our escapades and had our old windows replaced with new ones that per- manently locked. 47 I tell this story because what happened in my junior year destroyed my sense of safety. That year I became frightened of a dark force determined to take away our religious freedom, a Satanic power wielding the threat of an eternal dark night. How did I become so frightened of Catholics that the fear of being dominated by the Other, is still coded in my nervous system? In my junior year of high school our daily religion class was devoted to the study of Daniel and Revelation, books of the Bible filled with intense stories and dreams and visions. The book of Daniel focuses on Daniel and his friends who are exiled to Babylon and tested on their faith in one God. The book of Revelation is a vision of the end of the world. The dramatic imagery in both books is disturbing to a sensitive imagination. We were 16 years old, still going through emotional and physical changes. Like all teenagers, we were trying to figure out who we are and what we would be, and our brains were still developing. Current brain development research shows that the pre-frontal cortex, source of rational thinking, is not fully developed until around age 24. All Adventist educators knew then was to keep a tight rein on their teenage students, to protect them from the dangers of the world because rock and roll was taking hold of the teenage psyche. Today’s teenagers fight battles in video games that are very dramatic and violent, but in 1960 the internet did not exist; TV shows were innocuous; and Ad- ventists did not have televisions so their children were sheltered from the world. Each year of high school and college we studied the Bible daily as part of our school curriculum. We were instructed in the “correct” interpretation of the Bible: The Bible as a literal text comes directly from God. We were taught how to explain Adventist beliefs to non-believers. In our sophomore year of high school our biology text devoted six weeks to proving that the world was literally created in seven days, spoken into existence by God. That year we learned how to debate those who believed in evolution. Adventists did not encourage debate or discussion about the text of Revela- tion. They didn’t look at the imagery with an open mind and wonder what these images meant to John of Ephesus, a Christian preacher, possibly exiled on Patmos. They didn’t explain that stylistically Revelation is apocalyptic literature, common in 96 CE, a time when many Christians, persecuted by the Roman Empire, understood the language and iconography. In 1863 the Adventist religion, built by Ellen G. White, her husband and others, based much of the teachings on her visions, dreams, and interpretations of the Bible. So we were taught how to find the exact prophetic links in the Old Testament, particularly in the book of Daniel. Both Daniel and Revelation are crucial to the fundamental beliefs of Adventists; they define the fu- 48 ture and interpret the past. According to Adventist teachings, just before the Second Coming of Jesus, in addition to many horrific troubles, the Roman Catholic Church will dominate the whole world and force everyone to worship on Sunday. Those who are followers of God, who accept Jesus and keep the Sabbath, will be saved; they will live for a 1,000 years with Jesus in Heaven; then the wicked will be judged along with Satan and annihilated in a lake of fire, the earth will be cleansed and Jesus and the righteous will live forever on the New Earth, free of suffering and sin. Interpreting the Bible in this absolute way is hard to absorb: A literal lake of fire consuming people, Jesus literally being seen all over the world at the same moment, and the righteous who faithfully follow Christ, literally being lifted up into the sky to meet him. In my mind I was always afraid of not believing strongly enough to be saved at the end of my life: I was afraid to be who I truly am and discover my own beliefs. Yet how could an absolutist approach to the text have coated my nervous system with fear? Fear that could suddenly erupt while reading Facebook posts that said we are being secretly manipulated by powerful negative forces intending to control the world. This visceral fear must be arising from a direct transmission of emotional fear. On many occasions Adventist ministers in their sermons would warn us about the dangers of the Catholic Church encroaching on religious freedom. We were reminded that the New Testament is full of stories of apostles being persecuted for preaching about Jesus. I remember one Saturday night when the whole school watched a film about Saul of Tarsus, who was persecuting followers of Christ, when he was suddenly blinded by the light, enlightened and renamed Apostle Paul. We were often told that the best path you could follow in life would be to become a missionary minister, doctor, nurse or teacher. We were guided to become apostles for Jesus Christ. I was a hungry teenager, overweight, having been put on steroids the year before to fix a thyroid imbalance, which had disrupted my metabolism, eating candy bars sold in our girls’ dorm shop, hungry for a boyfriend, and home cooked food, not the vapid vegetarian diet our cafeteria served (Imagine sandwiches of thick slices of onions, mayonnaise between two slabs of whole wheat bread, or fake meats made of wheat, soy, milk, and eggs.) Now in 1959, I am told that my world is in danger: For the first time in American history, a Catholic is running for President of the United States. Our beloved President Eisenhower, who led the invasion in Normandy and was Supreme Commander of the Allies in World War II is leaving the helm. If Kennedy becomes President, the government will enact Sunday laws, forcing Adventists to work on Saturdays. Since we were told we were God’s chosen people, this fear of the power 49 of a Catholic president threatened those of us who followed what God said in Gen- esis: On the seventh day He rested. In fact, for the first 25 years of my life I didn’t know that Jewish people were still a living people. Having been raised in a remnant church, I thought we were God’s only chosen people. There was a precedent for this fear of Catholics, which I did not know at the time: In 1830-1890 many states passed laws called Sunday laws, which legally barred work, shopping, and other activities on Sundays. One congressman from New Hampshire tried to make a Sunday Rest Bill into a national law. For years Ad- ventists were afraid of being imprisoned for their faith, and as a result became strong advocates of religious freedom for all religions. Today, the Adventist Church still advocates freedom for all religions and is more progressive and less fearful than it was in the years when I was growing up, but you can still hear a prominent Adventist minister warning people that the Catholic threat has not disappeared; Pope Francis is setting the stage to use the pandemic and climate change to establish a world Sunday law to give the environment a vital rest. This test will be a sign of the end of the world. Now that I have access to my intuition and the inner worlds of dreams and imagination, I realize how sensitive I have always been. Yet in high school I didn’t have a clue about how my psyche was being invaded. I implicitly trusted our minister, the father of a close friend. One day he played an audio tape to a few chosen students. He said it was a secret audio tape made by a Catholic nun who’d escaped the convent, one of many who were kept against their will. She told stories of having been punished and forced to do terrible things, like being forced to crawl on hands and knees, licking crosses for hours on the stone floor. This recording horrified me. I remember sitting in a shadowy dark office, along with the minister and two or three students, listening to the scratchy voice of a young woman. Logically I know the office must have been lighted, but what I absorbed was the disembodied voice of a fearful woman who had been punished by the Mother Superior and the priests who presided over the convent. She had somehow escaped and recorded this tape, which had been passed on to my minister. In school the Bible was presented as a literal text of God’s word. Being an avid student, I memorized everything. But it was my nervous system that was recording the energetic atmosphere that afternoon, or several afternoons, as I listened to the voices of innocent women, trying to escape the Catholic church. From the book of Daniel and stories of the apostles in the New Testament, I learned that followers of Jesus will be severely tested. Refusing to bow to “false gods” will test you by fire and lions. If your belief in God is strong and pure, you 50 will emerge unscathed. But my faith wavered. I loved dancing, I loved movies. I loved freedom of expression. I lived straddling two worlds, the Adventist side of my mother and her lineage, and the secular side of my father and his lineage. Flash forward to the spring of my senior year of high school. Kennedy is now President of the United States. My parents have come to visit one Sabbath to take me for a long afternoon drive. My father drives up Mount Spokane, a place I have never seen. At the top of the mount, we come upon a monastery: The road drives past the front gate. As we approach, a priest comes out. I am instantly terrified. I dive onto the backseat floor of the car, knowing I must hide because they have guns and I am not safe. My mother laughs nervously. My father drives. They never ask me why I’m so scared. They never help me process this. They don’t know that I’ve been warned that the Catholics are storing up guns in convents and monasteries. Writing this essay, I wonder if my memory is correct: Is there a monastery on Mount Spokane? That drive was 60 years ago. I do a Google search and find there has been a monastery on this mountain for 100 years. I gasp when I read the introduction to Mount Saint Michael: “Visitors who come to St. Michael's Traditional Catholic Parish often say they feel as if they have stepped back in time. That is because here at the Mount, not only is the Mass celebrated according to the traditional Latin Rite, but we have remained faithful to all of the teachings of the Catholic Church as they have been passed down through the ages, not out of nostalgia, stub- bornness or ‘disobedience,’ but out of love for our holy Faith and for the Papacy… since John Paul II has manifestly taught heresy, promoted ecumenism and fostered interfaith worship, he clearly cannot be recognized as a successor of St. Peter in the primacy.” This monastery is exactly what the Adventists feared: the original powerful Papacy. Inside me is the belief that the Catholics are the devil, a fearful dark force we must face near the end of Time. Before I went to the Academy, did I know any Catholics? Children of Catholic parents went to their own school until high school so the only Catholics I knew were my father’s cousin, Bill, his wife Lee and five children who lived across the alley from us. The alley was a significant boundary. It was a dividing line between the better off [our side] and the poorer people [their side]. Bill’s father and my grandmother, who lived next door to us, were brother and sister yet I was well aware of the unspoken social hierarchy between her and her brother. During WWII Bill was stationed at the naval base in Providence, Rhode Island, where he met and fell in love with Lee, an Italian woman. He married her and brought her home to Moscow. Lee came from a large Italian Catholic family, here she was a foreigner because Mos- cow, Idaho, was 99% white Protestant, descended primarily from Scandinavia, Ger- 51 many, and the British Isles. Lee was a deeply religious, effusive Italian, who grabbed you and kissed you on both cheeks even as we recoiled from her physical touch. My brother and I were always welcome in their house, but my mother discouraged that. How did I lose my fear of Catholics? I ran straight into the Catholic Church. Love overtook me, but before that happened, I had some ground work to complete, called growing up and getting educated. By my senior year of high school, I had thrown everything I had into being an Adventist. With high school graduation on the horizon, I learned that my mother decided she would not pay for any more Adventist education. She was still angry at the way my brother had been treated when he broke his leg the first year of Academy and in retrospect I can see she was also angry that I refused to return home and go to public high school when that happened to him. I knew it had been a challenge for her to pay for Academy, even with my working 60 hours a month [every student worked between 20 and 120 hours a month in addition to our academic studies]. I agreed to attend the University of Idaho instead of Walla Walla College, the Adven- tist college where all my friends were going. When my Academy classmates learned of my decision, our class president and vice president came to pray with me in the Dean’s parlor. Down on our knees they prayed fervently that a way be shown for me to continue studying in an Adventist school so that I would not lose my way. The result was that I moved to the college a week after graduation to work in the book bindery which would cover my tuition and expenses through my freshman year. I worked full time that summer and 20 hours a week through my freshman year. By the end of that year I was weary of the rigidity of my life, including being locked in the girls’ dormitory every night at 9:30 p.m. as all the women were, even if they were 22 years old. I left college, returned to Moscow, and enrolled in the University of Idaho. I had never been to a football game. That was my first Adventist test as football games were played on Saturdays. I had a date with a handsome young man and off I went, breaking the Sabbath. I joined a sorority. I was nominated to run in the Miss U of I pageant. I formally resigned from the Seventh-day Adventist church. I dated, I went to dances, I had fun. And I was doing well in my studies because I was well prepared academically and had ingested the “puritan” work ethic. The summer before my senior year of University, I fell in love with a young man from Australia, who came to do a masters’ degree in chemical engineering. Within a few weeks he asked me to marry him. I said yes, but he was a Catholic and at that time Catholics could not marry non-Catholics. We faced a problem. He was an only child who did not want to offend his parents. I was no longer going to any church, so being the kind of person who runs into the fire, I decided to convert. 52 Why was I so willing to convert to a religion that was so feared in my up- bringing? My Adventist grandmother had died, and my mother no longer attended church. But most likely, because I had been told over and over again by my mother and mothers of the ‘50s and early ‘60s that if you didn’t get a husband by the time you graduated college, you’d end up being an old maid. In those days, that meant you were doomed to be poor and a burden on your family. My friends all found their husbands in college. After all, we wanted a family, laws still prohibited women from things like having credit cards of their own, and we had been groomed to believe we had only three career choices besides marriage and motherhood: nurse, secretary, or teacher. So I was following the path of a traditional woman: I was studying to be an English teacher, and now I was getting married. Marriage to a foreigner certainly seemed like an adventure to me. My mother seized the opportunity for her daughter to make a good marriage which meant a man who would make a good sal- ary. She pushed us into getting married before the fall semester began. And I made an appointment to study with the local priest to be baptized. Studying with the priest was a challenge. Catholics don’t read and study the Bible; they go to catechism and study doctrine. Here I was, after five years of Bible study, able to debate every point the priest told me by quoting verses from both the Old and New Testaments. Halfway through my meetings with the priest, I realized that at the rate we were getting through his curriculum, I would not get baptized, so I stopped arguing. I was baptized, and we got married: Our wedding was the last Latin mass in our town. After our honeymoon year, when we both focused on our studies, I began teaching in a nearby farming community and threw myself into leading a married student group at the University church. I learned that Catholics are not to be feared. I found myself loving the rituals and being part of a community once again. When I returned to the University to get my masters’ degree, I spent even more time at the campus church with the other young families. I even helped create a Sunday school for the children. When summer came and the majority of students left the campus, our small group of married students became very close with the priest. Eventually I saw the weakness of the priest, who was afraid to ask deep pen- etrating questions, preferring instead to live on the surface, having dinner with a few married couples on Saturday nights, serving altar wine that hadn’t been blessed, but not asking the questions that were being asked in the awakening that was happening by the hippies and young people of the mid-60s. Five years later I left this church, not knowing I was in search of deeper spiritual questions. Yet the experience of being a Catholic has remained within me. I am still comfortable attending a Catholic Church service. Living in a small medieval hill 53 town in the south of Italy for the last three years I often visited the Cathedral a few blocks from my house, and felt at home following the archetypal re-enactment of the Passion, as crowds of us wound our way through the narrow winding streets back to the Cathedral plaza for the crucifixion and resurrection. I have also updated my view of the Adventist Church as my high school roommate and I are still friends. Still an active member of the Adventist Church where we went to college, she has shared with me the ways in which the church has modified the rigidity we experienced in Academy. Adventists are all over the world and their health consciousness precedes the health movement of today. While I do not share her theology, we do not see each other as enemies. In fact, we never have. When I married my Catholic husband in 1964, she and another Adventist friend came to my Latin wedding ritual on their Sabbath. We have a friendship beyond borders. Thirty years ago an intuitive astrologer told me that in this lifetime my soul is to learn how to become transparent like the wind passing through without being caught by all of the turbulence. Fear is a turbulence. Seeing the other as an enemy is a lie born out of fear. To transform fear is our human challenge if we are to grow individually and collectively. What triggered my current fear and led me back to this root fear were the conspiracy posts from a trauma therapist, yoga and mindfulness meditation teacher. I have seen similar posts from other self-defined “spiritual” people, often using the phrase “wake up now” which sounds spiritual, but what they are posting as catalysts are based on misleading and false information that threaten us with being enslaved or controlled by men in power. Yes, we need to be awake and discerning. Fear is not discerning. When I am in a calm centered place within, I am not triggered. I can see how anxious this person spreading fear is feeling during this tumultuous, uncertain time. I see the projections that are flying everywhere when fear and anxiety are disowned. I see how desperately people want solutions. Conspiracy theories have barbs in them; when they are thrown over our minds and hearts, the spikes of fear rip our hearts. They are pitched into our fields as if they are the future, the hell we are going to burn in. Those who are pitching them are blinded by fear, perhaps a fear in their childhoods that they have not resolved or integrated. Whenever I feel a shiver of fear and dread run through me and the thought “they might be right” pops into my mind, I know I’m being trapped by the old dreaded fear that created a religion, promising a world cleansed of evil and a heaven for the faithful. Without our finding the places inside us that divide the world into safe and not safe, we are a target for conspiracy theories. We become vessels for fear running 54 through our communities. We do not know what the future will be, but I want to notice when fear begins to creep into my nervous system. I want to take a deep in- breath and a long exhale. I want to listen to what arises in my body, my mind, my feelings. I want to ask myself what is authentic here? What is arising from my unconscious? As Thomas Hubl, the spiritual teacher, says, “When I see the unconscious effects of trauma arising in me, I discover more about myself.” In the process of exploring this topic and writing this essay, I have renewed a lifetime desire to restore my original relationship with God: a relationship with God, not based on someone else’s ideas and rules, not as an antidote to fear, but one that resonates with the vibration of my heart, that fills my heart with joy, gratitude, hap- piness and the gift of kindness to others. This transforms my fear.

55 NONFICTION The House on 66th Street Esther Mizrachi

“How did you know where to find me?”

This is the first thing my father says when he picks up his landline and hears my voice.

“I dialed your number, Dad,” I say.

“But I’m not at home.”

“Yes. You are.”

“No, I’m somewhere else. Where am I?”

I hear him shifting, looking around.

Finally, he says, “I don’t know where I am.”

My father lives on East 8th Street and Avenue T in Brooklyn, in a compact two- story house that is squeezed between two others. He spends his waking hours in his living room with his caregiver, Yvette, nearby. The neighborhood surrounding him is predominantly made up of Syrian Jews or SYs, as they call themselves, and the area is filled with SY synagogues, schools, and grocers who stock their shelves with bags of fragrant cumin and turmeric; tubs of dried white beans; jars of grape leaves and tahini paste; and huge barrels of olives. Numerous restaurants on nearby Kings Highway serve the food my father has always eaten—the food I was raised on—freshly fried kibbeh stuffed with beef; skewers of sizzling kababs; baskets of warm pita; mounds of hummus and babaganush; plates of pink pickled turnips; and squares of baklava smothered in rose-scented syrup. But, these days my father rarely leaves his white overstuffed chair.

56 “Look around, Dad. What pictures do you see on the walls?” I ask.

“Hold on.”

A few seconds pass and then my father notices a small faded reproduction of a painting of his father—my grandfather—Haim Mizrachi. For the moment, the image convinces him that he must be at home even if he cannot recognize his surround- ings.

The original painting of my grandfather was larger-than-life and took up an entire living room wall in my childhood home on 66th Street—the house my father might be searching for when he becomes disoriented. Haim, who was born in Syria in 1875, purchased the house on 66th Street shortly before his death in 1925, eight months after my father was born. Haim himself never lived in the house, but my father lived there for over five decades—first with his mother and then with his wife and two daughters.

57 As a child, I knew my father to stare into space as conversations swirled around him. A man of few appetites, he often confused waiters by mumbling, “whatever you want to bring,” instead of selecting a menu item. (To the waiters’ relief, my mother would usually step in to order for him.) But in the house on 66th Street my father settled into his body, moving through its rooms with the confidence of a child too young to realize that he is irrelevant in the larger world. On weekends, he worked in the front garden, pulling weeds, trimming bushes, and tending to his roses, sometimes cutting a bouquet—yellow or red—for our dinner table. Afterwards, he sat in the living room immersed in Beethoven or Bach while conducting an imaginary orchestra with a finger in the air. And each night he sat at my bedside making me giggle with nonsensical stories until I finally relaxed enough to sleep.

My mother filled our home with music, laughter, and chatter. She loved entertaining guests and always made sure to point out Haim’s portrait to newcomers, speaking of it in a hushed tone as if Haim himself might overhear.

“His eyes follow you,” she would say. “Walk. Go ahead. Go anywhere in the room. Now look. Look at his eyes! You see! He’s looking at you. No matter where you go, his eyes follow.”

She would then tell how the portrait had refused to be left behind in England when Haim’s widow—my grandmother, Tera—was preparing to move to Brooklyn. “The painting fell off the wall on the day of the move!” my mother would say as though she had been there to see it. “Tera hadn’t been planning to take it but apparently he didn’t like that.” At this she would dramatically point upward at my grandfather and pause for effect. “So, of course, she had no choice but to bring him.”

To me, Haim’s portrait weighed down the room with a dark seriousness that put me on edge. Dressed in a formal black suit and tie, with a stern expression on his face, my grandfather seemed judgmental and harsh. In addition, there was something disconcerting about the way the ornate gold frame encircled his body in a giant oval and his black suit melted into the black chair as though he was sitting on air, a leg- less floating god who watched from above. When my mother asked me to dust the nooks and crannies in the portrait’s elaborate frame, I averted my eyes so as not to meet his. But his gaze was palpable on my back as I practiced on the second-hand upright piano my mother had purchased on lay-away; or sprawled on the shag carpet watching reruns of I Love Lucy; or stood on the plastic-slipcovered couch spritzing Windex on the huge living room mirror in preparation for Shabbat. 58 In the 1920’s, when Haim purchased the house on 66th street, the SYs lived in Bensonhurst. One block away was Magen David, Brooklyn’s first SY shul, where I spent Shabbat mornings as a girl, sitting on a dark-wooden bench behind milky white curtains that clouded my view of the colorful stained glass windows, and the aron hakodesh where the Torah was kept. But, Magen David was near empty in the 1960’s—barely achieving the minyan of ten men needed for prayers. The SY community had already migrated to larger, more expensive houses in the Ocean Parkway area and it was there that they built new synagogues with elaborate chandeliers and huge social halls for community weddings and bar mitzvot.

My family moved away from the house on 66th street in 1985 after my mother became worried that my sister Joy, who was four years my junior, would not find an SY husband while we lived so far from the community. My mother had given up on my prospects of marrying an SY man since I was already 23 and considered well past marriageable age. She took some comfort in the fact that I was dating Jewish men, even if they were Ashkenazi, but she was determined to save my sister from a similar fate.

In an unusual act of defiance, my father resisted the move, his eyes filling with tears at the thought of selling the house on 66th Street. But my mother began house- hunting anyway and soon found the rowhouse on East 8th Street which she deemed “perfect.” My father, resigned to the sale of his beloved home, pleaded with her to let his older brother, Ben, help them with the murky financial details and my mother reluctantly agreed.

Late one night, when I returned from law school, my mother cornered me on the stairs preventing my nightly disappearing act into my bedroom to bury myself in books. She was upset.

“Ben made a ridiculously low offer and lost the house for us,” she told me. “I have to call—”

“Give them a day to consider,” my father interrupted. “Please, Sophie.”

My mother was soon on the telephone agreeing to pay the asking price. Ben, furious at being asked to help and then undermined, swore he would never assist my parents again.

59 Next, my mother began a cleaning frenzy in preparation for the move. Things began to disappear and among them, Haim’s portrait. I didn’t notice until one Sunday when Ben called my father and I heard his raised voice through the receiver that my father held away from his ear.

When he got off the phone, my father hurried to the kitchen where my mother was cooking with Spanish music blaring from the radio. He shut it off.

“Where is my father’s painting?” he demanded.

“In the basement?” my mother said, more a question than a statement.

“No, it’s not,” my father responded.

“Oh, I don’t know, Ralph. I threw it away, I guess,” my mother answered. “It won’t work in the new house.”

“Threw it away, where?” my father demanded. I had never seen him so angry.

“I left it outside, by the trash can.”

“How could you?”

“What do you want me to do now? It’s gone.”

“It’s not gone. Ben has it.”

My mother’s eyes widened in awe.

“He bought it in an antique store in Far Rockaway. Apparently, he was walking by and it was outside on the sidewalk. For sale.”

“I don’t understand,” my mother whispered, sinking into a kitchen chair.

My mother’s act of discarding the portrait solidified the enmity between her and Ben and they never spoke again. Still, the tale of the painting’s resurfacing in Far Rocka- way—of Haim finding his way from one son’s house to the other son’s house—became my mother’s new favorite anecdote for visitors. 60 “Someone must have picked it up from the trash outside and sold it,” she would speculate as she wrapped up the story. “But how it got to Far Rockaway, we will never know. Right to the neighborhood where Ben lives!”

Several years after the ordeal, Ben sent a copy of the painting to my father who— without asking my mother—hung it on the living room wall. The copy takes up only a small part of the wall, its ornate gold frame now flat and made of photo-paper and my grandfather’s eyes no longer capable of wandering the room.

Years later, on a frigid February morning in 2008, my mother had a heart attack in bed in the house on East 8th street. When my father found her there, he made the requisite calls. To EMS. To Joy. To me in Austin. And all he could say was “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know. I don’t know. . .” She died a few hours later at a Brooklyn hospital.

“I’m waiting for someone to pick me up and take me home,” my father says at the end of our phone call.

“Okay,” I say. “I love you, Dad.”

I hang up and I realize that maybe it is not the house on 66th Street that my father longs for after all. Perhaps, he is preparing to be with them: with Sophie, his wife; with Tera, his mother; and with Haim, the father he never knew.

61 NONFICTION Why I Talked to My Dead Father Lisa Romeo

I talked to my father more in the three years after he died than in the five years before, and it wasn't just because we had lived 2700 miles apart. Of course, in those post-death conversations, he had no choice but to listen to me. I chose to listen to him. We talked because I needed those conversations, and because it took me that long to figure out what I needed to understand about him, about us. Talking to my dead dad wasn't about wanting to "move on" (whatever that means) or find "closure" (another word I don’t understand—and I work with words every day), or "make peace" (there was never any big fight or estrangement). What I was after was an opening only possible for me in the aftermath of the death of this parent whom for decades, I had mistakenly thought was so unlike me and therefore so difficult to know. The joke, it turned out, was on me. In fact, we were only too alike in life, but it was only in his gone, talkative presence that I understood this. You’d think I’d have a sense of this being “too little, too late," but the opposite was true. In the early post-death years, as my father and I talked, I came to understand that relationships don't end with the death of a loved one. That it was still possible to get to know someone better. The only disturbing part of this was to realize that he had, all along, known me better and more deeply than I would have ever guessed. When I first mentioned to other people that I was talking to my dead father, a few scoffed, but the overwhelming reaction was nodding agreement.Been there, done that. My husband was skeptical, attributing it to my overactive writer's imagination, though I've never written fiction. Ten years after my father died, and three months after his father died, Frank turned to me one evening and said he'd been talking to his father—with whom he worked side by side for several decades—that very afternoon while he was in the warehouse trying to figure out a challenging work problem. "I guess it's true, then," Frank said, by way of apology. I merely nodded and kept my oh-so-now-you-believe-me smirk hidden. Mostly though, I was glad for him; losing a parent is bad enough; he had also lost 62 his business partner and best friend. But at least he knew what he'd lost, knew the strength and shape of their bond. He wasn't, like me, searching for a father-adult child relationship that had seemed missing in life. Many other people also told me stories of talking with their own dearly loved deceased, typically a parent, child, or spouse. They seemed happy and relieved to know someone else who had a similar experience and would listen with an open mind and compassionate heart, and not try to convince them that communing with the dead is either a symptom of maladjusted grief or a sign of living in the thirteenth century. Those who hadn't had this experience themselves, but who seemed at first to believe me about my conversations with Dad, had questions. Most wanted to know if I actually heard his words, aurally, out loud, in his own human voice? Or did he sound like a ghost? Or was it in fact, silent speech, revealed to me via some mental connection? I think what even these supportive, compassionate people were saying was: It's nice, dear, that you feel this way, but really isn't it all in your head? Others were more concerned with where I thought Dad's spoken words actually came from. Was it all just scenes from a play I was mentally writing in the moment, me in charge of his stage lines? Or were Dad’s lines out of my control? It was, I had to admit, a fair question, one I'd asked myself. What I came to believe is that it was both; that Dad really was speaking with me, but also ultimately that it was me sitting in the director's chair. Yet it never felt as if I was making stuff up, creating lines for an actor-father that would match only what I wanted to hear. Many times, after-death-Dad said things that were tough to hear, but I knew were formed only of truth. I saw myself as a coach, coaxing out of this scene partner some version of what made sense for who he really was, his lines crafted out of what I knew about him in life and—this is important—what I learned about him later. What I mean is that, beginning almost immediately after he died, much of what I thought I knew about this man went under the microscope, and I was surprised at what I saw through that lens. He came into focus even more when I began asking new questions of my siblings, mother, and Dad's friends and extended family, when I read his favorite poetry and his own writings, as I examined his scrapbooks—considering, from afar and anew, many of his influences and behaviors. The more we talked, the more curious I grew about him, the more I went on those “research expeditions.” The more that happened, the more frequently we “conversed”. I got to know Dad better in those first couple of years after his death than I ever had before, than I ever could in life, given his taciturn conversation style, my own stubborn disinterest, his impulse to respect my privacy, and my unwilling- 63 ness to sit still long enough to push through those obstacles. So yes, maybe I was scripting, though in my deepest gut I believed it was crafted from the nuanced preci- sion of being intimately, wordlessly connected in a way that wasn't possible when I was avoiding him for much of my adult life. During our other-worldly discussions, I was most interested not in my father’s exact words but in what happened when I listened. Experts who study human conversation posit that most of the time when someone else is talking, we aren't really listening—not actively, not deeply. Rather we are thinking of what we are going to say in return. Truly active, deep listening is the opposite; it's staying quiet in our minds, thinking only about what that other person is saying, even purposely taking silent pauses before our turn to talk. This is what it felt like, profoundly, when I was listening to “dead Dad”. What I was doing was on the one hand what I rarely did in our lifetime conversations: giving him credit, taking his words to heart, actively trying to learn something from those words—about life, about him and what he believed and had to teach. Perhaps that's why much of our postmortem dialogue was peppered with me mumbling things like Huh. Really? I didn't know that. Oh, I see. So, I listened. To the words, and the spaces between, and what might be behind the words. As I was doing that, I was remembering. Remembering when he had tried to communicate and I wouldn't have it, when I was not present, aware, open, available to him or to the possibility of us. I was remembering things about our relationship, important and sometimes painful things; but even those not-pleas- ant things were good to remember, because in the remembering was a kind of kinship, a kind of cracked-open door inviting me to explore. This remembering wasn't sentimental or nostalgic; instead it felt a little like work, like something important. I learned from reading the scholars of grieving that the act of remembering—and not the act of forgetting—is the real work and purpose of grief. Forgetting is virtually impossible, and "trying to forget" pushes against every human instinct. So, if I was remembering, as Dad and I were talking in the first three years of his post-Earth existence, then I was relieved to discover that I was indeed doing the hard and important work of grief. What's the difference if my remembering was triggered mostly by those conversations, rather than say, hearing a loved one's favorite song on the radio, or smelling the aroma of his favorite dish from someone's kitchen? At some point in year three, the time between conversations grew longer, and then they came to an end that felt right—not long after I began to write about the experience. Eventually, there was an entire book about my grief experience, about the father I thought I had, and the one I came to see in full. Many have suggested that writing it, that seeing it published, must have helped me “get over” grief 64 or push some kind of guilt "out of my system". I have no idea what they mean. Grief goes on, changed and not. Guilt is not even part of the equation. I don’t need to cleanse my system. My father has been gone now for 14 years, and yet he is also still around because the father I talked to after is not gone. When I’m very quiet, when I listen, I hear him still.

65 POETRY

Birkat HaBayit: A Woman Is A Bird When Jen Karetnick

wood under feet, dressed in flower parts, she surveys her private garden, ragtag, but everything in it equal to her heart.

Downsize, they tell her. It’s only a start. Learn to bolster what’s beginning to sag. Wood under feet, dressed in flower parts,

a woman is a thorn, poisonous dart. Planes fly away from the kite of her back, everything in them equal to her heart;

convertibles accordion, roofs hard. Oh, to feel again the pain of the egg. Wood under feet, dressed in flower parts,

a woman goes rogue, winging wide, apart, her flock caught in a current of jet lag, everything in it equal to her heart.

One eye doll-wide, one squinting an alert, she talons her home like a prized handbag, wood under feet, dressed in flower parts, everything in it equal to her heart.

66 FICTION

Iris Kris Faatz

My father says the surgery will ruin his hands. He says he won’t be able to make the flowers anymore: his body won’t want the new joints, he’ll never get his muscle tone back. He won’t have the control that lets him put each perfect crimp and twist in the bright-colored paper so that the magic happens. Over the years that he’s neglected the arthritis, his thumbs have gotten so stiff that he can’t button his own shirts or pick up a glass, but he still won’t let the doctors help him. That’s why he needs me. I spend every day at his house, thirty miles away from my apartment in the city. I bring him sandwiches, wash his clothes, put straws in his iced hibiscus tea. The flowers are his life. They matter more than everything else. I’m twenty-three. My father’s life has always defined mine. His business – Thomas Glescot, Florist – is forty years old. I can’t take it over from him, because I don’t have his gift, so he says he can’t retire. Neither can I. I have to hold the rest of his life together so he can make the flowers that make him famous. Sometimes I imagine the doctors opening my father’s hands. A scalpel incising the skin to lay the knuckles bare. Forceps lifting out the ruined joints and sliding in the black pyrocarbon. I imagine that there’s no recovery time. The doctors finish, my father opens his eyes, and his hands are a young man’s again. And I’m free. Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror to remember I’m a person with a body, not a flat shadow joined to my father’s feet. Sometimes I talk to myself out loud, to remember I have a voice. ** When I was a little girl, I thought the flowers were a game. In my first memories, I’m sitting on my father’s lap. He’s showing me how to make a rose: petals folded from pink tissue, a deep green stem rolled tight, paler green leaves. Even tiny cones for thorns. He shows me each of these things, step by step, letting me try with my small clumsy fingers and fixing my mistakes. The finished rose looks so real that I put my nose in it to sniff. My father laughs. “Not yet.”

67 He opens the door of the tall wooden cabinet in his workroom. Inside, paper flowers of all kinds sit in small glass vases. This is his garden. “We put it in here,” he says. He puts the rose in its own vase and closes the cabinet door. “Then it’ll grow.” The next morning, he opens the cabinet. I smell the rose before I see it. He takes it out and I run a finger along its living petals, touch the point of a sharp thorn. I don’t remember my mother, but she must have been quiet, like me. My father decided when to have a child, decided to name me Iris after his favorite flower. While she lived, my mother went quietly along with everything. She probably hoped I would grow up with his magic and certainty. I didn’t. He wanted me to learn the magic, but however many flowers I made for him, crumpling and tearing a rainbow of tissue, I never got them right. For the magic to work, the flowers must be perfect in every detail. Morning after morning, I opened the cabinet to find his living blooms next to my paper mistakes. My father makes every kind of flower you can imagine. Roses, lilies, hyacinth and hydrangea, Birds of Paradise, starry alstromeria, gracious orchid. Every kind except an iris. ** Yesterday, my father went to the hand surgeon in the city. I took him, because his hands don’t let him drive. The surgeon, Dr. Kane, has met with us many times already. This time, he laid things out flat. “Mr. Glescot, you’re running out of time.” Our last name is actually Glasscourt. We have an ancestor who, as my father puts it, “wasn’t entirely human,” who left us an otherworldly name and the gift with flowers. I inherited one of those things. Dr. Kane said, “The recovery only gets harder the longer you wait. The muscles don’t respond to therapy as fast.” He flexed his own hands, where age spots were starting to show. “I’m younger than you and I’d have trouble. Pretty soon, you won’t be able to use your hands at all.” My father said, “I can still work.” Dr. Kane looked at me. “You can work if your daughter does everything else for you. Is that fair to her?” I don’t ask questions like that, but the doctor’s words caught like a hook in my stomach. Fair? I don’t have a job or life of my own. My father pays me to be his shadow. My father said, “She’s glad to help. She’ll have time to do what she wants when I’m gone.” 68 When he’s gone, I’ll be lost. I’ve never known how to want anything. Dr. Kane said, “Mr. Glescot, I understand you care about your work. Your flowers are extraordinary.” They are. Each one is a perfect specimen. They last for weeks before they fade, even the kinds that usually bloom and wilt in a day. “But,” Dr. Kane said, “you have to realize that the risks involved in not doing the surgery far outweigh the…” My father cut him off. “The risks involved in doing it?” His voice was sharp. “You have to realize that I can’t take any risks. I won’t take any risks while I can still work.” “But your hands – ” “If my hands give out, they give out. I won’t let you cut them up so it happens sooner.” I kept my face still. If his hands give out and even surgery can’t help him, what will that mean for him? For me? No one can argue with my father when he’s made up his mind. We left Dr. Kane’s office. When we got back to the house, my father shut himself in his workroom alone. He was still in there three hours later, when I called through the door to tell him I was leaving for the night. ** This morning, when I get to my father’s house, I find his workroom door still closed. Normally he’s waiting at the kitchen table in his bathrobe and pajamas, so I can help him with his clothes and fix breakfast for us both. I knock on the workroom door. “Dad?” Last night, he only called “Good night” back to me when I told him I was leaving. This morning, I hear, “Don’t come in.” His voice sounds thick. Tired? Upset? Drunk? He wouldn’t have had a drink when I wasn’t here to uncork the wine bottle. Anger runs up my spine. He could have managed “Good morning.” I leave the workroom door shut and go to the kitchen. His kitchen is much nicer than mine: new appliances, smooth wooden cabinets, and most of all, counter space. My apartment has a galley that I can barely turn around in, but I don’t use it much anyway. Every morning my father and I have bacon sandwiches on rye toast, with half a grapefruit each. I fry the bacon on the stove, thinking its smell will bring him out of the workroom. It doesn’t. I fix the sandwich, sugar the grapefruit, and carry the plate to his door. “Dad?” I knock again, louder this time. “Breakfast.” 69 No answer. I can hear what sounds like paper crinkling, and my father’s voice muttering. He’s always been obsessed with his work, but not like this. His sandwich is getting cold. So is mine, back in the kitchen. “Dad,” I call again. “Come and eat.” “Leave me alone, Iris.” For one heartbeat, I think about winging his plate down the hallway to shatter against the far wall. I don’t do things like that. Instead I carefully set the plate down on the floor in front of his door. Then I go back to the kitchen and eat my breakfast alone. The workroom doesn’t open by the time I clean up the kitchen, or finish a load of laundry, or make tuna salad for lunch. My father’s bacon sandwich is cold, two pieces of flabby toast with a slab of congealed grease between them. I knock. “Dad. Are you all right?” No answer. No sound from the other side of the door. Again, for a heartbeat, I imagine doing something I never would. Leaving the house, getting into my car, driving away and not coming back. Instead I try the workroom door handle. It’s unlocked. The door swings open. My father is sitting at the big wooden worktable where he makes the flowers. He’s still in his clothes from yesterday. Scraps of white and green and purple paper litter the floor around him. He has his back to me, his head down in his stiff hands. His desk lamp is on, the bulb bright behind the magnifying lens. In the light, his hair is perfectly white. “Dad?” He doesn’t answer. I come into the room. Now I can see the scraps of paper more clearly. He’s been trying to make something, trying and failing again and again. I pick up what looks like a flower that he finished and then crumpled and threw away, the same way I used to wad up my failures. I smooth out the petals. At first, I don’t realize what I’m looking at. My father speaks without raising his head or turning around. “I can’t do it. You don’t know how many times I’ve tried.” Then I see it. The flower in my hands is an iris. A white iris with purple flames at its throat. My father says, “I’ve tried every day since you were born.” I go over to the table, my body strangely light, my throat tight. When I put my hand on his shoulder, he looks up. Tears stand in his dark eyes. I’ve never seen him cry before.

70 “Any other kind, I can do,” he says. “Any kind at all. But these are never good enough.” The flowers have to be perfect in every detail. “I don’t know why. The only one that matters, and I can’t do it.” I look around at all the times he’s tried since last night alone. I never saw any of his failures in the cabinet. He must have tucked them in the back, out of sight, afraid of what he’d find when he opened the door. The same way I was afraid to look at my own failures. He says, “I can’t let them operate on my hands, Iris. In case I don’t heal. I can’t let them do it until…” He doesn’t finish, but I understand. Until he does this one thing. I set the paper flower gently down on the desk. “Can I help?” After lunch, we work through the afternoon. Cutting, folding, rolling, joining the flower petals and stems with tiny drops of glue. His hands can’t control the scissors as well as mine can. I can’t fold the paper as perfectly as he does. We finish a flower, study it from every angle, shake our heads and try again. Finally, at the end of the day, we have a single specimen. The purple-throated white iris looks so real I can’t help holding it up to my face, expecting to catch its faint, sweet scent. My father laughs. “Not yet.” We put it in the cabinet. Our eyes meet as we shut the door. Tomorrow, on the shelf, we’ll find a single proud white iris. Its living petals will feel as soft and smooth as a baby’s skin. My father will see the one thing he always wanted to do: the only thing that mattered. Then he and I can both be free.

71 POETRY

Dear Mrs. What's-her-name Susan Jackson

Do you even remember the assignment you gave us 5th graders? I remember sifting through the pages of Life Magazine and National Geographic because you wanted us to write about an image, a piece of art, something of meaning to us.

Why did I choose “The Pieta?” A mother holding her dead son in her arms… I think I must have longed for something I felt in the cradling or I felt crucified by what made me different

and needed to know the mother would never stop loving. Did I know about resurrection? I don’t think so… but I wonder now what quivering my words set moving in you for you to be so harsh.

I don’t remember exactly the comment you wrote on my paper. I do remember the sting that made me feel ashamed, ashamed of what I wanted, ashamed of what I saw, what I couldn’t see but somehow knew.

When I handed in my paper I had said something true - maybe the words were clumsy or trite, but still… if only you could have understood the language I wrote in, the child’s language of heart secrets. If only you could have seen

the place in me that just needed to be told everything would be okay. Mrs. What’s-her-name, your job was to fucking empower me. If I wrote badly help me learn to express my thoughts. You could have told me

how the Italian “pieta” means “pity” in English… talked to me about the light inside Carrara marble and why Michelangelo chose it for what he called “the heart’s image.” Or help me examine Mary’s closed eyes, her face bent above the dress’s flow

72 but no, instead you threw sand in my face — those grains got in my eyes and nose and mouth. I choked as I swallowed it, but swallow it I did. It’s been there all these years gravelly, raspy, constricting my voice, until now.

I spit it out now — this impediment embedded in me so long ago and look! it flies away like a creature released from its own cage and to my surprise I realize I don’t even wish you ill.

I wish for your freedom as much as for my own. May some kindness be your bridge or help your door to open, both of us being children together here on the earth.

73 POETRY

What Goes Among The Things That Change Susan Jackson

from a line by William Stafford

I always thought it was the breath, the faithful breath coming in and going out and when I followed it with my heart it calmed me. Then the sound of sirens on narrow streets and wide avenues of the great cities so many people with the sickness not able to breathe; then one man:

I can’t breathe he cried

calling for his mother

but the knee is still on him

I can’t breathe

please

calling until he couldn't anymore.

74 We weep, but now it’s the world must breathe for him. It’s the breath of change that walks the streets at night in the silent dark, or shouting by the light of a thousand bonfires and burning cars. The breath of prayers and the breath of voices; they speak the words enough, dignity, justice, the human talk of peace in this time of people breathing together.

75 NONFICTION Why We Isolate By Choice Grace de Rond

Utrecht is a medieval city in the Netherlands, known for its centuries-old city center and its lively cafes and terraces at water level along the canals. Records show that in 47AD, Roman emperor Claudius had a fortress built on the Rhine River, and it eventually grew into Utrecht. During the Middle Ages, it was a religious center of the Netherlands, with dozens of church towers making up the skyline. Today, eight of those medieval churches remain, including the Buurkerk (the neighbor church), built in the 10th century.

I live nearby, and over the years, I’ve walked, biked and canoed into Utrecht. Recently, I went in by bus to take a look around. While wandering through the Buurkerk, I was fascinated to discover that an Anchoress had lived there in the 15th century. Sister Bertken was the illegitimate daughter of a priest. And at age 30, she requested permission to be walled up in a corner of the nave, where she remained 57 years until her death in 1514.

Sister Bertken’s space had three small windows and no door. One window was high in the exterior wall to let sunlight in, another was used for physical needs like nourishment and hygiene, and the last was used by congregation members to communicate with her. Her only furniture was a chair, a desk and a mattress. She lived barefoot in her unheated cell and ate a frugal diet. And she spent her time meditating, praying and writing.

Since I crave at least eight hours of alone-time a day, when I saw her spot, I was like, “Sign me up!” Of course, when I told my husband, Ron, about Sister B, he thought my response was overly radical. He was like, “There’s no way I’m gonna bike into Utrecht every day to relate to you through a window in a stone wall.” This coming from the guy, who spent a below-freezing night, futilely trying to sleep, wrapped like a burrito in an old worn rug, on the floor of the drafty chapel on top of Mt. Sinai.

It is a curious choice. Why do ascetics set themselves apart? And why the need for self-denial? And how far is reasonably far enough?

76 And what about those of us who just need an occasional break from this unrelenting 24/7 world? What do we expect to find when we enter an empty room to meditate? Why do we close our eyes and go inside ourselves to find answers? What is it that we don’t seem able to find in the busy outer world that we believe we can find in an isolated inner world?

IS THIS ALL THERE IS?

Many of us are currently experiencing life-changing events, amid a global wave of divisiveness, loss of resources and direction, and a fear of “What’s next?!”

Two years ago, one of my friends had the career rug “pulled out from under him.” And, though the circumstances were challenging, he made a promise to himself to not go negative. He decided to buy a pizza oven and master the perfect dough. He learned how to bake bread and began delivering loaves to his friends. And he went back to meditating daily, something he grew up with but hadn’t done regularly in the last decade while working in the corporate world. He turned inside himself to get insight for making sense of the situation, and to find calm and peace-of-mind, and to connect with real value.

We tend to spend our lifetimes accumulating what we believe matters. We achieve the education, the career, the power, the money, the house, the family, the popularity, the image and the good reputation – all the things that society tells us we’re supposed to do and get. And still, sometimes we get to a point in life where we look at all the stuff, and we’re certain that we did all we were supposed to do. And yet, there’s a feeling that, “This isn’t really satisfying me anymore. I don’t feel fulfilled.” We miss meaning, and we long for something that matters more. And we ask, “Is this all there is?” Something inside us wants to grow and to express in a new way, and to have a new source of wisdom in order to go forward.

A NEED TO CONNECT WITH ORIGINAL INTENT

The need to understand who we are, why we’re here, and what we can contribute is a deep-felt driver for many of us. And it leads us to look beyond what we can accumulate and accomplish. Instead of identifying with what we do, it brings up questions, such as: “Which aspect of my expression is my intrinsic self?” and “How can I reconnect with my origin?”

77 Throughout history, there’ve always been enlightened people, showing up in all the races, cultures and nations, expressing different beliefs and faiths. We’ve called them saints, mystics, wise men, prophetesses, psychics, healers and miracle workers. A common point is that they didn’t seem to lose sight of who they were originally. And they made a difference in the world, by adding to the quality of life and by demonstrating a source of inspiration. What set these people on fire? And what was the source of their wisdom?

BACK IN THE BUURKERK

Throughout the decades that Sister Bertken spent walled up in her Anchoress cell, members of the congregation regularly showed up outside her tiny third window, seeking her wisdom and blessing. They believed she had a connection to a source of knowledge that they perhaps didn’t, a higher intelligence than what they could access. And she became an oracle in her time. What was Sister B’s secret? She seems to have relied on inspiration through thinking intuitively.

Most of our conscious thinking is linear and sequential, meaning that each thought is a conclusion drawn from a previous one. From early in life, we learn to make observations, assess comparisons and draw conclusions based on what we’re experiencing, especially through our senses.

A different direction from linear is vertical communication, where our thoughts seem to descend from out of nowhere. They’re not related to what we were thinking previously, and they’re not conclusions that we figured out.

Thinking vertically means switching from the logical, deductive, conclusive process over to intuitive inspiration, at will, by way of a disciplined mind. The word inspiration comes from the Latin inspirare, which means to blow into, to breathe upon, to animate. It’s as if the thought descends and lights upon us. It feels like a calm awareness of truth, an inner knowing that feels peacefully evident.

ACCESSING OUR INTUITIVE INTELLIGENCE

Thomas Edison used to sit in a chair until he felt so relaxed that he dropped a set of brass balls resting in his hands, and then he asked his question, expecting the answer to come from inside. Mozart said he didn’t compose music – instead, he listened for it. Albert Einstein liked to observe cloud patterns, while waiting for an answer 78 to come from inside himself, believing that “imagination is more important than knowledge.”

As we grow out of childhood, we tend to develop logical thinking at the expense of our intuitive thinking. If we can’t see it, touch it or feel it, it’s “just our imagination.” And as adults, we rely less on our intuition and learn to look outside ourselves for our answers – even though we have constant access to an intuitive intelligence inside us that can be a source of functional guidance.

HOW TO RECOGNIZE AN INTUITIVE THOUGHT

To recognize our intuition, we only need to ask one question. Is it the truth? If it takes away from our value, it’s not the truth. If it takes away from our future, it’s not the truth. If it takes away the value of other people, it’s not the truth – and that especially includes people we’ve been judging and condemning.

Most important to know about linear thinking is that it allows fear to get inside our heads. And it causes us to be worried, afraid, sick, incapable, paranoid, judging, blaming – all the unsupportive emotions.

Everyone follows guidance – and should, in order to be effective. The question to ask is: “What voice am I listening to for my guidance?” Whether the voices are originating inside our heads or coming from the people we interact with daily, it’s simple to sort them out, because they are basically of two types.

The voices come from either love or fear. And the way to tell the difference is this. The voices from fear are always degrading us, limiting us and warning us. And they never tell the truth, which means worry-voices are never correct. The voices from fear make us feel afraid, they convince us that we’re inadequate, and they become the boss of what we can and can’t do. It’s called unsupportive self-talk. On the other hand, our intuitive intelligence will never beat us up.

THE VOICE OF ILLUMINATION

It’s likely that there will always be ascetics, and they’ll continue to make mind- boggling choices, beyond reason and understanding for most of us. Only they know whether their decisions to adopt an isolated, frugal lifestyle turn out successfully for

79 them. Hopefully, Sister Bertken remained confident and peaceful while living out her choice.

I’m betting though that our need and desire to stay connected to our original, intrinsic self doesn’t depend on such radical steps. The messages of intuition, inspiration and illumination come when we’re in that quiet inner place where truth is the loudest. And they’re easy to recognize, because they have the qualities of love. That means they’re supportive of us, of our effectiveness in life, and of our ability to accomplish whatever we want. They cause us to feel capable in our relationships, our health, our career and our prosperity. And they encourage our belief that we can handle whatever comes along.

The chatter going on inside our heads is often happening at such a furious rate that the guidance coming from our intuitive intelligence can’t get through easily. So yes, it can take a decision to isolate, to set the world aside, in order to shut down the linear conversation for a while. It means quieting our racing minds and our fidgeting bodies in order to listen inwardly. And then an intuitive and inspirational thought can get through. And it will be a loving thought, produced by who we truly are.

If we do that regularly, we can build a functioning bridge between our conscious awareness and our intuitive intelligence. And in that way, we’ll always have access to the answers we need, and to the inspiration that animates our way forward.

When we enter an empty room, when we close our eyes and turn inside ourselves, when we return to our inner world, the truth of who we are can encompass us in the quiet.

80 POETRY Jesus Gives the Keynote Address at the National Speech & Debate Tournament Benjamin Bagocius

Growing up, boys had to speak up to win God.

Fathers wanted sons in Debate League. I joined and practiced announcing loopholes in other’s Talmud arguments. “Gotcha” for God.

But I was not selected for the Young Debaters.

I was more listener. I stood back and heard a whisper of suffering in the farthest corners of the winning arguments.

Only later did I recognize that listening is not disappearance but emergence.

Pausing to listen loosens a mist that obscures golden domes from ramshackle roofs.

Now everyone can come out about cracks and water damage.

People remember me as a healer of leprosy, demons, and even death. Really I just listened, patient with the odor of unwashed hair and with eyes watering from Hell’s heat.

This was the miracle: that leprosy, demons, and death were worth listening to and not defeating.

81 POETRY Poem-finding Kim Hansen

Inspired by “How To Pick and Eat a Poem” by Phyllis Cole-Dai

Stop whatever it is you’re doing and see how the bird feeder shimmies from the bluejay’s push. Bend down and push back the grass at the base of the seedling locust. Any buds hidden like rabbits in a burrow? Take inventory wherever you go. Maybe you can’t name it. Perhaps you can find the hidden names if your listening is velvety soft and your knees not overly loud. Stop whatever it is you’re doing to watch the walls of clouds. If you’re driving, pull over and put on the parking brake. Let them honk. It would be good for them to stop and see this too. Once you get to the hillside check out what grows on top. Then lower yourself to the ground and trace the waterways down with your rolling. How soft is the landing? What can you see from here? Once in a while stop what you’re doing at night, and take a small headlamp just in case. Go to the pond in the darkness; listen and smell the riotous party of life blooming and calling when we’re usually bedded down. In one of these places, you’re sure to find a poem. Usually, all you need to do to capture it is to wake yourself up and hold your hands palms-up in front of your chest. If you lower yourself the tiniest bit, they might be inclined to climb up and curl in your pocket, riding along collecting buddies – allies who can build a web of attention, a sort of praise and appreciation net. When you get home or wherever you end up going, be sure to find a safe place for your poems. You will want to be able to fondle them in the dark cold times. They’re also nice company in the hot too-bright times. Some of my poems have kept me company for so long, passed back and forth between loved ones, that now they are frayed deep into the folds.

82 POETRY When We Have Finally Surrendered to that Beauty Nancy K. Jentsch

- Title from “Zero Circle” by Rumi

In the soft stillness of a shaded summer creek bed it layers us in jasmine and cashmere pillows our dreams with zinnias and frankincense, dazzles us with laughter in a rainbowed key of glee, flows out onto life’s parchment in tinted inks as we march and reach and sow seeds in minds’ gardens, even behind eyes that were dull, water them with unstained streams of satin

83 FICTION Grandma Tucci Neapolitan Tomato Sorceress Joan Daidone

I grew up thinking that maybe I was born into the wrong family. I wanted to be anything but Italian. The women all wore dark, drab, old-fashioned house dresses, no make-up, and they cooked, yelled and feuded with each other from morning till night.

Except for Grandma Tucci, my mother’s mother, she was reserved, a bit mysterious. She was from Naples. Not Sicilian like my father’s family. She had a sort of regal air about her. 5 feet tall if you included the crown of tight braids on top her head, a simple blue-grey buttoned-up dress and a little gold cross around her neck.

To me, she looked more like a majestic nun, than a grandmother. She never smiled much except sometimes when she had a glass of wine and mom would play arias from Mario Lanza or Caruso on the old Victrola. Grandma seemed to be transported to another time and place. Her face would soften, her tight lips would part in a gentle awe.

Even though Nanna and I didn’t talk much, since we didn’t speak the same language, my mother said I was just like my grandmother. We were born on the same day. June 9th, 60 years apart.

“Beware of the quiet ones”. My mom would say. “I never know what either of you are thinking.” I didn’t like family dramas, but I did like mystery and I wanted to know Nanna Tucci’s secrets. I knew there was more to her than her secret sauce that everyone on Knickerbocker Avenue raved about. I wanted to be a fly listening to the thoughts inside her head.

I thought my old-world family was a little crazy, but I didn’t know that we were considered second class citizens until we moved from Brooklyn to Valley Stream, Long Island in 1964 and I was sent to Holy Name of Mary Catholic elementary school.

84 At first, I was the only Italian-American girl in this suburban Catholic school among Irish and German kids who seemed to automatically dislike me from day one. It didn’t help that I was painfully, painfully shy and didn’t say much except when one of the nuns called on me. Then I always seemed to have the right answer since I loved to read and was a good student. But, oh god, that only made the mean girls hate me even more. They called me “Greaseball” and “Wop” and “Dago”. Words I had never heard before.

I was teased and bullied mercilessly. The more they tortured me, the more devout I became. I found myself whispering prayers under my breathe whenever I went to the girl’s room or was in the school yard. “Mother Mary please give Kelly Ann the mumps so she’ll leave me alone. Sacred Heart of Jesus please make Ann Marie swallow her nasty tongue.

I thought things couldn’t get worse until my mom got pregnant with my youngest brother, and Grandma Tucci came to live with us for a few months. She became a sacred fixture at Holy Name of Mary, going to 6am Novena mass every day. She waited for me after school to walk me home. When the kids saw her looking as if she just got off the boat from Italy at Ellis Island, they got even meaner. Meaner! Especially Patty. “Who’s that witch Daidone? Boy she looks mean, better watch out she’s gonna put a curse on you since you’re so ugly, you greaseball.”

And when she called “Joni Elena, Joni Elena, we go home now”, they would scream with laughter at her broken English. She was the closest thing to a saint as far as I knew. But I was embarrassed by her and I hated myself for it.

Although all her praying seemed a little over the top, I hoped that maybe all her prayers would help to protect me from the bullies at school. But they only teased me more.

Until one day, I pleaded with her not to come. I told her that one of the other mothers would walk me home. I didn’t tell her that they were making fun of her, but somehow, I felt she knew. She asked me for the name of the tall girl with the red hair, and I told her “oh, uh, that’s my friend Patty.” But she knew Patty was not a friend. She looked up and whispered Patty and said something in Italian three times. Then she shook her head and walked away.

85 After that day Patty never bothered me again. She stayed clear of me. I didn’t know why but I was thrilled. Maybe Grandma was really a saint after all.

A few months after my brother was born, Grandma Tucci moved back home to Brooklyn. I saw here birthdays, holidays, weddings and wakes over the years, but we didn’t spend much time together until I was in my second year of college. She was living in Brooklyn in an apartment in my Aunt’s house, and I was going to college in Manhattan.

Since I was the only granddaughter who lived nearby, I was drafted to visit her every week or so. My mom was ill at the time and couldn’t make the weekly trip.

I’ll never forget the first time I visited her. I felt like I was entering a small chapel, and almost felt the need to genuflect as I crossed the doorway.

Even though I had been in her apartment many times over the years, I didn’t notice the huge Sacred Heart of Jesus that hung above the entrance way. Or how many statues of the Madonna and all the saints that were placed all around the small living room. There were scapulars hanging from her favorite chair, and rosary beads and a small angel on a small table with a photo of my grandfather.

As I started walking toward the kitchen where Nanna Tucci was making my dinner, I inhaled deeply expecting to be delighted by the aroma of her secret sauce but instead was assaulted by a rancid odor of rotting fruit or vegetables.

I was a little surprised since my grandmother’s apartment was always immaculate, as clean and pristine as an altar, since she spent most of her time cleaning and rarely had visitors.

I turned to her and said “Nanna where’s the garbage, something smells bad, I'll throw it out.” But she shook her head, and said, “No, no Joni Elena.” I went to the garbage can, but it was empty.

As I entered the kitchen the smell because stronger and I noticed two tomatoes on the windowsill in between the tin can planters of basil and oregano. I said. “Grandma, you left out those tomatoes too long, they’re rotting, let me throw them out.” 86 But as I went closer, I saw that they were full of straight pins. Like a pin cushion but with an intricate design, like a stick figure of a man but more detailed.

She reached over and grabbed my arm gently and said, “No, No child.” I looked at her and realized this was not some new secret recipe. “Nanna, what’s this?” She said, “It OK, it OK. Your Uncle Stephano, sshhhhhh. We make him good. He be bad. But we make him good.”

I looked at the tomatoes again, then at her. OMG, I suddenly realized I discovered one of Nanna’s big secrets. My devout Catholic grandmother was practicing some form of witchcraft or voodoo. I looked at her and laughed.

She looked up at the ceiling and did the sign of the cross. There was no love lost between me and my uncle. He always smelled of wine or cheap brandy and was sometimes became loud and obnoxious. He bullied my Aunt Connie and called my mother and my favorite Aunt Margaret crazy.

He even tried to warn me that if I wasn’t careful, I would end up just like them, reading too many books, filling my head with silly ideas and scaring men away. I just needed to look pretty, smile more, keep quiet, find a nice college boy and have babies. Sometimes he would hug me a little too tight. Every so often he would smack me on the butt when my dad wasn’t around. Once my mom smacked him in square in the jaw.

I didn’t believe in Nanna’s magic skills, but I appreciated her attempt to stand up to my uncle. I didn’t believe until several weeks later, when my uncle Stephano took a fall down a flight of stairs and broke his right arm and left leg.

The following week Grandma Tucci and I went to church together and prayed for his recovery. He would be good after that. From there on in, I never doubted the power of the Neapolitan tomato sorceress again.

I danced with Nanna on her 94th birthday at the Madonna Residence for Seniors in Park Slope. We laughed and laughed as I told her about the spell I wanted to put on my nasty boss at work. We raised a glass of wine and I thought, hmmm, maybe an anonymous letter to the company president would also do the trick.

I have kept my Nanna’s secret until the day she passed at 96. 87 I am grateful and proud to have been born the granddaughter of Italian immigrants. Especially the granddaughter of the Neapolitan Sorceress and my forever champion, Teresa Tucci.

It is her I pay homage to when I tutor recent immigrants at the International Community High School in the South Bronx. These teens are all first generation immigrants from Ghana, Pakistan, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Uzbekistan – over 20 different countries.

It is in her I meditate and pray to bring peace and sanity to this crazy planet. I am proud to be the granddaughter of Teresa Tucci, the Neapolitan Sorceress. And my saint.

Thank you, grandma.

88 NONFICTION Make the World a Sentence: An Interview with Robert Vivian Steven Wingate

Robert Vivian’s All I Feel Is Rivers is a raw, taut, beautiful, densely packed, and effusive book that is seemingly about many things—water, music, fishing, ghosts, language itself—but simultaneously about a single thing: the intertwined flow of spirit through human life and of human life through spirit. Each of its fifty-some pieces is short, with most in the 300-400 word range and none over three printed pages. Vivian calls this form the dervish essay, after the whirling, ecstatic dance of the Sufis.

Almost without exception, the pieces consist of a single sentence that sometimes rushes through its allotted space like a flash flood in a deep canyon, sometimes rolls along through a calm, languid curve. The collection develops from Vivian’s encounter with Rumi, but its spiritual influences—as you’ll see from our conversation below—range from the Catholicism of his youth to the Eastern Orthodoxy to which he recently converted. These spiritual traditions all flow through the text of the book as part of a single conversation about the nature of human-ness that, the book suggests, has been going on for at least as long as we’ve called ourselves human.

I was first drawn toAll I Feel Is Rivers because I, too, have been seduced by the power of the sentence that refuses to leave off when common sense tells it to. The stretched (or even endless) sentence has been my personal go-to for years whenever I’ve lost connection with my creativity and need a jolt to get out of my rut. There is simultaneously great freedom and great discipline in writing this way—freedom because you can leap anywhere, and discipline because you have to trust yourself as you bounce from one word to the next without knowing where the next move after that will take you.

Pulling away from the sense-making properties of the sentence is a spiritual practice, a specific act of attention to what is unfolding within you at the moment of writing, without the encumbrances of plot or character. It encourages a journey within,

89 which is a wonderful way to look at All I Feel Is Rivers. Vivian, floating on a rafts made of a single sentences, floats down many rivers into his own mindscape—which is, at the same time, the landscape in which all human life has always unfolded.

Robert Vivian teaches at Alma College in Michigan and has authored four novels and three other collections of essays. We conversed via email during the great lockdown of spring 2020, right after All I Feel Is Rivers was published by the University of Nebraska Press in March. His author website is http://www. robertvivian.org.

______

To set the context for this conversation, can you tell us a little bit about your experiences in Turkey and how they took you in the direction of Rumi?

I visited Turkey for the first time about ten years ago at the invitation of a dear Turkish friend who taught at the college where I currently teach. My first sabbatical was coming up, and he asked me, “Bob, would you like to teach in Turkey?”—and that’s how I ended up teaching at Ondokuz Mayis University in Samsun, Turkey on the Black Sea. For the next several months I received a personal tutorial on Mevlana (we call him Rumi in the West) from my friend Yavuz. It changed my artistic life forever—I mean a complete one-eighty. I started writing when I came to call dervish essays—headlong gallops of often ecstatic prose. I’m still recovering, though I hope to never recover: writing dervish essays has been the greatest artistic joy of my life.

At what point did these dervish essays start coming out of you? What was the impetus for writing them, and did they take the same shape at the beginning as they do now?

Really the above addresses the dervish essays, but they also have coincided with manic bouts of fly fishing in my home state of Michigan. Writing dervish essays and fly fishing mutually infuse each other: the old cliché how trout can only live in beautiful and clean water has certainly made writing the dervish pieces even that more urgent. These pieces tumble and rush like clean, flowing water! At least that’s my innocent hope. They come from the same mystical center, which is the astonishing beauty of the world.

90 Your work in this book is intensely musical, especially if read aloud. (“Bell” was one of my favorites in that regard—it felt very round and rolling in the mouth.) How did music play into your writing process? I’m also curious to know how heavily reading aloud played into your process, and whether you sang these?

A huge part of my process is reading my work to my wife when I think something is close to finished; she doesn’t have to say a word. She’s like a tuning fork for this work—and I know without words whether something “works” when she listens. I’m fairly obsessed with Turkish music—and music of all kinds, actually. I think of a line from the unbelievable book Aqua Viva by Clarice Lispector: “You don’t understand music: you hear it. So hear me with your whole body” (4). I don’t think about writing dervish essays at all; there must be some chemical urgency or musical phrase that gets me going. Then the writing mostly takes care of itself. I know the work has juice when I forget what I have written that morning; if I remember it, I’m too much in my head. And for me, the head is no place to be when it comes to lyrical writing—I mean ever.

What roots for your work do you see in the English language tradition? The creative nonfiction community has given a lot of energy to the lyric essay form in the past twenty years. How do the works in Rivers stand in relationship with that? Are there other strains of tradition that you feel you intersect with?

The truth is I read more poetry than anything else. And I’m also a recent convert to Eastern Orthodoxy and love the work of composers Arvo Part and Vladimir Martynov. My favorite movie of all time is Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. So my sense is that my own stuff is more informed by oblique influences not directly traceable in the English language tradition. Martin Buber once wrote/said that “Repetition is powerless before ecstasy.” I feel that way about the power of anaphora, casting a fly, certain repetitive prayers in the Eastern Orthodox Church.

So many of the pieces in Rivers are single sentence. They’re like canyons where words flow like—well, like rivers. What is the creative rationale behind this approach? Has that changed over time or remained consistent in this vein of your work?

I’m not sure it’s a rationale per se—as I mentioned above, conscious thinking doesn’t really enter into the process until longer after. I still don’t know what All I Feel Is Rivers is; I don’t actually remember writing a lot of the essays. In book form, though, 91 I’ll sometimes peek—with some weird trepidation—into one of the essays and say, Hey, that’s very strange. But you know, I kind of like it.

The spirit that runs through this book is accessible to practitioners of many different faiths—it’s very ecumenical. Among the traditions I’ve studied, I feel the connection to Taoism most. And within my own practice, I see strains of pre-Constantine Christianity that have been revived in the past century by Thomas Merton and others. How do you feel it’s open to other interpretations of faith, and was that part of your intention?

My journey to Orthodoxy has been very beautiful and strange; there’s a saying in Orthodoxy that the process of conversion never ends. So I’m such a rookie! But I was a religions minor in grad school and studied Gnosticism, Judaism, Christianity— and I’ve also studied Buddhism, Sufism and all the mystics. I grew up Catholic. But the one thing I’m slowly beginning to realize is that the spirituality from the East has always made the most visceral sense to me; there’s another saying in Orthodoxy that within Orthodoxy there’s no such things as heroes, only saints. When I read this, I just about fell out of my chair. Please don’t get me wrong: I’m certainly not talking about myself but how the tradition looks at such things in this world. Martynov’s rendition of the Beatitudes is one of my favorite pieces of music ever. Of all the world’s faith traditions, Sufism and Eastern Orthodoxy have made the most sense to me. Rumi has this line, “Live in the nowhere you come from, even though you have an address.” And the essential aspect of the apophatic way of Orthodoxy rings like a bell deep within me. This is also why I love Arvo Part so much—he does so much with such simple and humble materials. And so much of his music really is a kind of prayer. In a wilder and less disciplined way, I suppose, this is what some of the dervish essays seek to say or sing or even hum.

Even though Rumi is a major influence on this book, he’s quite a laid-back presence—in the shadows, almost, with the notable exception of “Black Sea.” How did that come about?

Ever since that first semester in Turkey, Rumi’s been in my writing through sheer osmosis—I think/feel it’s the way he handles ecstasy and grief and everything between and betwixt. I have no critical distance from him as an influence—nor do I want such a distance. My dear friend Yavuz Demir was the one who initiated me in the work of Rumi—this was the equivalent of a personal tutelage in the land where Rumi started his Sufi order. It’s one of the great privileges of my life—and led to an 92 utter rebirth as an artist. I have no desire to write the novels I used to write, which were pretty dark.

You talk about the “chemical urgency” or a phrase that gets you going. Now that you have some distance from these pieces, do you have a perspective on what makes a particularly fertile opportunity to float down the river of language?

When the writing has juice—has that chemical energy—it’s physical process, not an intellectual one. And it’s a result of many factors that don’t seemingly have to do with a writing desk, such as extended bouts of fly fishing and reading the work of other terrific writers. In many ways it’s really no different than the jolt of electricity I feel when I catch a wild trout on the fly, the same chemical urgency. I don’t consciously play with language; I let it use me and take me where it needs to go in the wildest sense possible. And as I get older, I’m getting wilder, not tamer. It’s hard to put into words. But when this chemical urgency happens, it’s better than anything else about writing—even publishing, accolades, etc. It’s the total epicenter, a self- fulfillment. More and more it’s the only real reason why I write—to experience that chemical urgency again. It never gets old.

Can you talk about the process of putting this book together? Did you write many more dervish essays and filter down, or start with a core set and add on? Did you play much with ordering them into a book?

These are great questions but hard to answer; I’m not a very linear or planned out kind of writer, especially with dervish essays. I suppose my goal in arranging the collection was maintaining a kind of verbal energy consistent or cresting from page to page; it’s more like a musical score in that regard. I didn’t think in terms of theme, etc. But tone was and is supremely important. I have hundreds of other dervish essays; I’m not sure why I didn’t put them in this book. It’s kind of like iron filings around a magnet—they gravitated and coalesced according to some mutually attractive power. I suppose twenty or so other essays could have easily been woven into the book, but they just weren’t is all. This is a terrible explanation and no real explanation. The dream that wrote these pieces is the same dream that arranged them.

At one point you write “I swear to you, dear syllables, I will do my utmost to become your worthy altar.” How do you know, in your writing process,

93 whether you are being that worthy altar? I’m thinking less about technical literary revision here than about your writing as a means of deepening your own spiritual relationship with life.

I guess I subscribe to an ancient way of looking at artistic creation, the importance of the Muse. Because I write every day, this is my pledge to the Muse that I will show up for work whether she or he decides to visit and sweep me away. Because I truly feel I co-create, that’s it not solo job even if my name ends up on the piece. We’re all going through such a surreal, difficult, and threatening time right now with Covid-19 and all the terrible (and some beautiful) fallout. My job (though it’s not a job, more like a calling) is to keep falling in love with the writing process wherever it takes me; then the work will largely take care of itself. I wasn’t this way as a younger writer; I had much more ambition. Time and failure have worn away those sharp edges, thank God. I don’t have much ambition as a writer anymore—that is, I don’t care about fame or prizes or selling well. I care about the moment-to-moment, piece- to-piece dance of this kind of lyrical writing. Everything else is mostly a distraction. I converted to Eastern Orthodoxy last November, and the beauty (and the rigors) of this religion are incredibly humbling. Arvo Part’s Veni Creator is the kind of work I aspire to—or rather that calls to me.

Finally, there’s one line that struck me (from “I Who Wake Beside You”). “I who still believe in the crucified power of poetry to save the whole world.” How does poetry save the world today, and is poetry up for the task?

In some ways, I think poetry is all we truly have as a response to the horrors of this world—the racism, the environmental horrors, the insanity of social media, the perpetuation of so many lies. In one of his poems, W.S. Merwin writes that “on the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree.” Right now in Michigan the early morning birds are so incredibly alive and singing: how can I not try to do the same? In my view, the world will always be crucified—and I along with it. But after the first death, there is no other, as Dylan Thomas famously wrote. I completely agree with him. It’s always the perfect time to sing whether in joy or lament or both at the same time. It’s the only real hope we have.

Soul Ink

Deep down in this ink of morning I write because I must, I write because the feelings overwhelm and the feelings inform in tender-most leaning, I write with the toppling staircase of my life and because the hours are short, the hours are burning with fever, the tiny magnets inside my head keep leading me to rivers and because here now is all I have, all I am given, writing the words that come to me like pre- cious wild animals out of the mists of the rampant forest and writing the sounds that bespeak me, become me, I keep writing with my dented forehead, my apoplectic fingers, my palms whose lines are star-crossed lovers, CDs that skip in the dark like Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, write, write, writing me oh, all my cherished beloveds and those who crawl on their bellies, infirmities I write and rife afflictions, addic- tions, sand- stones of great blocks of yearning and the lateral lines of fish gone blind in the darkness of Lear’s howling, still I write on alley walls, on my own forearms in invisible ink, soul ink, I say, the calves of former lovers in dreams who sleep beside me in small boats of gentle cooing, on the spines of those who came before me turning over gently in graves with eyes freshly woven into grass and sockets cradling the stars, write, write, writing still because today is here and fleeting and I have a plane and ocean to catch, a whole sky, this page, this page, and how much I love thee and black ink like blood that blots out (somehow) my many sins and errors, the follies that had me reeling out of bars and bedrooms piling up at the foot of my grave like broken wingless angels who have somehow been given the permission to soar once more out of my creaking lungs, as so many clouds in the breathing of this world who made me and the trampled ground beneath and the roots of this earth teem- ing beyond this song, this howling, this plea of grace among the tumbling stones, a hundred ways to leave your lover and come home bleeding with scraped knees and elbows, heaven-bent on having the time of your life over this page, this wet, brim- ming ink, the blood that drips onto the hot dry stone writing our names in the overwhelming dark.

95 FICTION Roquefixade Sallie Bingham

In 1944 I fell in love, not with a woman but with a landscape. I was a New York City private school kid, barely nineteen, determined to be an artist. I’d run off to join the army, primarily to avoid the awful necessity of going to Harvard. When I came into the valley of Roquefixade in southern France for the first time, walking down the long spine of the hills, with the ruined castle watchful in the distance, I felt I’d known the place before—the Buttercups and Forget-Me-Nots looked like those I’d see growing along streams in Columbia County, where we spent the summers. I stopped to sketch the gray cattle browsing along the hillside. A calf was pulling on its mother’s teat and in the distance a salmon-colored village, Roquefixade, lay in a fold of the valley. The war seemed not only finished, but as though it had never happened, and although I was in uniform, I was hiking on my own time. Did I say it was early summer? Rustling wind, a patter of rain, then stillness as the sun glared out, and raindrops glittered on the flowers and the long tufts of grass beside the path, and I was nineteen and the war was almost over. Six of us were stationed at Foix, on the other side of the mountain, looking around for Nazi deserters and hoping to meet the heroic partisans we’d heard about, or at least to rescue a young girl whose head had been shaved to punish her for falling in love with an enemy soldier. There was no partisans and no shaved-head girls either, but I was the only one who spoke any French, so it was hard to tell. We were too far from the big railroad towns like Toulouse and Lyons or the massive, bombed port at Marseilles to encounter visible signs of the war; the monument in the village square held a long list of names, sometimes three or four from the same family—“Nos Enfants, Morts Pour La France.” But that was the harvest of the First War. The Second was too recent to generate monuments. The people in those little towns in the Langued’oc hadn’t suffered so much because they were still self-sufficient; every neat detached stone house had a vegetable garden and a few chickens, and many people owned cows. As I came down the mountain to Roquefixade that day, I felt the quietness around me thicken. The rain stopped, but the sun didn’t glare out. Cowbells clanked on the mountainside as the herd moved off. 96 A few minutes later I came to a clearing where three paths met. It was a level grassy spot on a little plateau above the valley, hemmed in with trees. There were people there, women, four or five of them, wearing the dark clothes and shawls I’d seen so often in those villages. They were bending, kneeling, standing up again. I’d seen peasant women working in the fields and I thought at first these women were gathering something—a wild herb, perhaps, that only grew in that place. I’d grown up looking at a gloomy print of Millet’s “The Sower”—it used to hang over the sideboard at home—, and the gestures of the women seemed the same. I thought I was in luck: I’d come upon a memorable human scene. My eyes strayed down to the grass in the clearing. I saw a man’s leg, ripped at the knee—canvas britches and farm boots. Then, a hand, flung out, at the end of an unbuttoned sleeve. A bit of ear, and sideburns, dark gold, beside the skirt of a kneeling woman. Slowly she was gathering him onto her lap, slowly, with difficulty, groaning. A few feet away, a younger woman—her brown hair floated loose over her shoulders—was bending over a man’s face, her thumbs closing his eyes. She was so near I saw her tears on his face, leaving small splotches as they dried. Further in the clearing, a bent old woman was struggling to turn over a man with gray hair who’d fallen on his face. I didn’t see the blood until then. I’d never seen blood in any quantity, so I didn’t know what it would look like. I knew the way blood lines a deep scratch, or rises to the surface of a scraped knee. But here blood was spread, coating grass stems, pooling in pockets, glittering in the suddenly-returning sun. The dead men’s clothes were soaked with it in ways that looked artificial to me, as though red paint had been flung at them. No one had been shot in the face. The blood was on chests and backs. The men wore woolen pants, thick long jackets, mud-caked boots. It was the mud on those boots that astonished me. It was still wet, like the blood. It glittered and smeared as the women turned the bodies, soiling their hands. Now and then, the women wiped their hands on their skirts. They were too busy to notice me, standing trembling at the edge of the clearing. I could have helped to lift and carry, but I felt powerless to enter the scene. I was angling and distancing myself, not physically but emotionally,in order to assemble the scene for later use. There was a bright red splotch on one woman’s white sleeve, for example. Some time passed and then there was a rattle and jingle of harness, coming up the opposite trail, and I stepped behind a tree. 97 An old, lumbering horse pulled a wooden cart with huge wheels into the clearing. The big man who stood in the wagon with the reins in his hands shouted, and the horse stopped and began noisily chomping on its bit. The man jumped down from the cart and started to help the woman. It was clumsy work. The dead neither resist nor assist, and I, who’d known only the smooth assenting bodies of girls at a dance or the fierce wall of boys’ bodies in a game, was bewildered to see how much work it took to hoist those five dead men into the wagon. Two looked like boys, but the women and the man struggled with them as they struggled with the fat old man, whose cap fell off, or the giant who seemed all bones. By the time they’d wrestled all five into the wagon, the women’s dark dresses were soaked with blood; their skirts clung to their hips and thighs like the gauzy skirts of girls I’d danced with at the Stork Club. The man jumped into the wagon, shouted at his horse and began, ponderously, to circle the clearing, the big wheels creaking over the soaked grass. I stepped back into the woods, thinking I was witnessing some kind of procession, but the farmer was only turning his clumsy wagon around. The horse’s white fetlocks were stained red by the time they returned to the path directly across from me and headed down it, the women following behind, one leaning on another’s shoulder, two holding hands. ----- Three years later, I returned to France with my bride. We’d endured a June wedding at her parent’s place in the Roanoke Valley, then gone by train to New York where we’d spent the night at the St. Regis and finally performed the ritual that, I’d believed, was supposed to bind our marriage. I was as eager and as clumsy as any young man who has suffered through a year-long engagement, but as I entered her at last and heard her groan, I heard again the groans of the women gathering up their men. Then we labored at the task of finding something even more illusive than pain. We embarked the next day on the Queen Mary, and my parents and all their friends, who’d rushed to New York from Virginia, came to see us off. The cabin was full of flowers and candy; there was champagne and toasts and my father wept. Adrienne and I were a little dazed. This was supposed to be a summit, and I wasn’t up to it. I felt half-sick; even smiling was a major effort, and Adrienne looked drained. When the “All Ashore” gong came clashing down the corridor, the mob packed up and decamped. By then our faces and necks were smudged with lipstick; we laughed for the first time as we wiped each other off. “I always hated my kissy aunts,” Adrienne said, and I thought what a good sign it was for the years ahead that she sprang back from exhaustion so quickly.

98 The ship vibrated and began to move; the gray roof of the dock shed slid past below us. I opened the porthole and heard the slap of water, six stories down. “Let’s go on deck,” I said. “They’ll be watching for us.” “I’ve seen enough of them for one day. I want to unpack.” I sat down to watch. It’s difficult to believe now what a willow of a girl Adrienne was at twenty-two, her wispy blond hair cut short in a fashionable bob, her elbows and knees knobbed like bed posts, her feet almost child-sized in her gray suede pumps. She had on the going-away suit she had, after much consultation, chosen for our escape from the reception; it was dove-gray with a jacket that fitted her small frame closely. Under it she wore a frilled white shirt. As she struggled to separate the two halves of the upright steamer trunk—it was almost as big as a refrigerator—I knew I should offer to help, but I felt only lassitude and a kind of despair, as though we'd rehearsed the scene too many times. She pulled aside the blue patterned curtain that hid her clothes, hanging on wooden hangers, and began to display each one, holding it up, pinching in the waist, and dancing it around the stateroom. I saw colors—mauves and pinks and perhaps too many blues; she was (and of course is, though her hair has faded now) a classic blue-eyed blond who favored blues. After she hung the dresses back in the trunk, Adrienne began to open the drawers. A powdery smell drifted out. Her underwear was stowed in pink satin bags; as she took them out, she refused to show me what was inside, saying she wanted to surprise me. The number of satin bags told me I could expect to be surprised every evening before we reached Le Havre. Rereading this, I hear a smothered cynical tone I despise. I was in love with Adrienne, and I believe she was in love with me. We were both excited at the prospect of establishing a life together; my parents had presented us with a small, rather dark apartment in the 'eighties on Park Avenue, which would serve until our first child was born. I was finishing my final year as a law student at Columbia; we had money, youth and health. And yet the rituals of our pleasure, bathing, dressing, eating, walking the decks, making love (more successfully as time passed) continued to remind me of the rituals of death, the bowing, bending, gathering in, the jerking gestures of forearm and elbow. I knew then I needed to go back to Roquefixade. Friends of Adrienne’s family—those passionate Virginians, who’d heartily denounced me when I’d made some intemperate remark about the sexual mores of pre—Civil War plantation owners—had loaned us their villa at St. Tropez, with a maid and a cook and a sea view for the first week of our honeymoon, after which we were to take the train to Paris for a week of shopping. 99 We’d both been schooled in this form of traveling and neither of us, I think, had imagined an alternative. But now I only wanted to see that clearing above the village where three paths met. I’d never told my bride what I’d seen there. I didn't tell her when we were installed in the villa, mildly, almost pleasantly bored by the routine of formal meals and equally formal visits to beach and town. Instead, I began, slowly, to introduce the idea of doing something entirely different—an adventure, an escape from the life our parents had taught us to lead. Adrienne, spirited and eager to please, agreed almost at once, and went along enthusiastically to search out walking boots. None of her clothes were suitable for trekking; I dressed her in a French schoolboy’s navy shorts and pullover, and with her pretty legs she looked charming. As soon as she was sure her trunk could be safely left behind at the villa, Adrienne was ready to leave. “I hate the beaches here,” she told me. “You have to walk a mile to get in water to your knees.” With a change of clothes and raingear in our rucksacks, we took the train to Foix, in spite of its turreted castle even grimmer than it had been in ’44. Food was still in short supply, and the people in the streets looked beaten. I didn’t understand then how long it would take France to recover. At home suburbs and throughways were being built. Women had reassembled their families and left their wartime jobs. None of that had happened in Foix; people were deprived before, during and after the war- - deprived, silent, uncomplaining. I thought again of Millais’ dusky “Sower.” Walking out of Foix was hard for Adrienne. Her new boots blistered her feet, and the path was steep as we climbed up out of the valley; when I turned around to encourage her, I saw tears in her eyes. She was too good a sport to complain— she knew without my telling her that this expedition carried meaning—and she protested when I insisted on shouldering her rucksack along with mine. When we stopped for a lunch of baguettes, butter and cheese, I inspected her feet; her tiny toes, white as pearls, were bubbling with blisters. There wasn’t much I could do, other than to soak my handkerchief in a stream and wrap her feet in it. I told her this would help, and she seemed to believe me. It was late afternoon by the time we started down the spine of the mountain. There were no cattle on the hillside now and the village in the valley looked huddled and forlorn. A sudden rainstorm had soaked the leaves and the grass; as we came out into the clearing, the sun broke through and the grass began to steam. Where the paths met a large mass of purplish marble had been erected. It seemed to portray a hand grasping a sword. Above it, on an obelisk, five names had been engraved with the familiar “Morts Pour La France,” and the date I remembered: June 25, 1944. 100 Adrienne stood beside me, looking at the stone. “What a hideous monument,” she said. To this day and to the end of my days, I expect, I run over those names when I can’t fall asleep, or when we’ve been wakened by the current baby and Adrienne has gone to check (we have three children, two boys and a girl). I recite the list the way, I suppose, my parents recited the Lord’s Prayer. Alphonse Meurière Guy Meurière Alaïn Destemps Claude Moissy Roberto Sevilla Which one was the old man whose cap stayed in the clearing after the wagon had rolled away? Which was the young man on whose face I’d watched a woman’s tears dry? “I guess they were killed by the Nazis,” Adrienne said. “Wasn’t that right after D-Day?” “The Germans were retreating, mopping up. There are lots of plaques in Paris where they lined up the partisans against a wall and shot them.” Adrienne slid her hand into the crook of my arm. She was very tired. How small and light she was, hardly bigger than a twelve-year-old girl. Later, after her three pregnancies, she grew not stout but substantial; she planted her feet and took up space on the earth. “You were stationed near here, weren’t you?” she asked. “Actually it was at Foix.” There are moments of decision that pass unnoticed, like flashes of light. I decided then never to tell my wife or anyone else what I’d witnessed in the clearing above Roquefixade Maybe it was shame: the shame of the helpless observer who never takes part in the scene at hand; the shame of the artist, with his cruel choice of angle, his cruel distance. I’d fled from that career as though pursued by demons, but the stance remained. It had formed my bones, and all my years in a successful law practice would never reform them. We went on after that down to the village, along an old stone wall set with ferns like the ones my grandmother grew in her parlor in Boston. There were Buttercups and Forget-Me-Nots and Adrienne identified a small pink flower whose name I’ve forgotten. In spite of her blisters, she was cheerful as we entered the silent village where, in a house next to the church, a Monsieur André was said to accept overnight guests. 101 He was standing in the doorway, dressed in black, but his boots were not caked with mud. He was no farmer. Tolerating my garbled French, he led us upstairs to a spare, clean room with a crucifix on the wall and two narrow cots. When we were undressing that night, Adrienne looked at me curiously. “Why did you want to come here?” “I told you, I was stationed at Foix.” My brusqueness startled me. “That’s it? That’s the only reason?” I tried to think of words I could speak to her, words that would fit who we were and who we would inevitably become. I couldn’t find them. “Something about that monument,” I muttered. “But it couldn’t have been there then.” She fell silent and I was grateful.

102 NONFICTION Naming Amy Champeau

“We continue to speak, if only in whispers, to something inside us that wants to be named.” - Dorianne Laux, “Dark Chants,” Only as the Day is Long.

My name is Chaika Runya bat Yitzchak v’ Channa Gittl. This is my ‘Hebrew’ name, my sacred name, my Yiddish name, my hidden name, my underground name, the name that binds me to family lineage and tradition and to my people, going all the way back to the beginning of time. This is the name I am called in Jewish ritual, when I have an aliyah to give a blessing over the Torah or when I am invited to the pulpit to read the Torah, or when I am a witness to someone immersing herself in the sacred baths in order to convert to Judaism.

I am named for two great aunts who were murdered in the Holocaust.

Most mornings of my life, since I was younger than six years old, I’ve woken in terror, heart beating fast, body sweating. In an effort to calm myself I’d listen to music or focus on my breathing before opening my eyes to start the day. Each morning the fear would dissolve as I moved into the day’s activities, only to return the next. One morning, not long ago I decided to turn toward the fear and terror rather than away, to be curious about it, to explore it, to get to know it. I curled up in the fetal position in bed, tuning in to the sensations I experienced physically. I became aware of a feeling like electric jolts pounding and jumping in my chest and arms. I asked the sensations, “What is the message held in my body?” What I heard them say was this: “Life is not safe.”

My mother tells me my aunts, Chaika and Runya, the younger sisters of my mother’s father, were shot, killed and buried in a mass grave in then Austria- Hungary during the Holocaust. In my mind’s eye, here is how I imagine them: They are two young women, maybe in their 20s; their light brown hair hangs in braids down their backs, each wears a dark wool dress, a cream-colored pinafore, woolen 103 knee-high socks and sturdy shoes. They stand with their family and friends and fellow-townspeople, all of whom have been herded out of their homes, their beds, and lined up at the town’s edge, in rows, ahead of them the deep pit into which their lifeless bodies will be tossed, one on top of another, like sacks of potatoes, to be covered with dirt, and erased. I imagine dogs barking wildly and the loud yelling of male voices in a language my aunts and their friends and family don’t understand. They do understand what will happen to them. I imagine the rifle shots as faceless men mechanically shoot them from behind, one by one, and I imagine the unbearable, unimaginable terror of waiting as your turn comes, hearing the screams, hearing the heavy plop as each body falls into the pit, witnessing your loved ones’ deaths, knowing your inescapable fate, waiting to feel pain, feeling the bullet entering your chest from the back, breathing your last breath, collapsing and tumbling, finally, into the pit. In their names, their stories, their lives, their deaths take residence within the confines of my body, mind and soul, carried within me like a blessing, or like a parasite.

My mother tells me that everyone in the village was killed. Except for two girls, not related to my family, who hid and ran away, the only two people to survive from that small town in eastern Europe. My grandfather, having left his town, having emigrated to the United States, alone at the age of 13, located those two girls somehow and brought them to America. “The village was called Pullen or Pullyon,” Mom tells me. It’s still on a map. There are no Jews there now.”

Tradition: the naming of a Jewish child is a profound spiritual event. The Sages say that naming a baby assigns her character and her path in life. TheTalmud says that an angel comes to the baby’s pregnant parents and whispers the Jewish name the new baby will carry. TheTalmud tells us that in life people are called by three names: the name the person is called by her father and mother; the name other people call her; and the name she acquires for herself. A name can confer our standing in a lineage, our membership in a tribe, along with that tribe’s history. It tells people who we are and where we belong. It points to our identity. Jewish tradition teaches that through our own choices and actions, each of us can name and rename ourselves and that in the end the best name is the one we give ourselves. At the end of our lives, a “good name” is all we take with us.

Ashkenazi Jews, Jews who came from Eastern Europe like my family, name their baby after a relative who has died. With this name, the child is endowed with the 104 parents’ hope of who she will become and the memory of where she has come from. She is a memorial candle in this life, through which the deceased’s memory is kept alive. An intangible bond is formed between the soul of the baby and the dead loved one. The soul of the deceased can be elevated through the good deeds of the namesake; the child can be inspired throughout her life by the good qualities of the deceased. My name identifies me as the daughter, ‘bat’, of Yitzchak and ‘Channa Gittl,’ my parents, whose English names are Irwin and Connie. A Hebrew name is not just a convenient assortment of letters. In Hebrew or Yiddish (the colloquial language spoken in Eastern Europe which is a mix of German and Hebrew, but written in the Hebrew alphabet), each name has a meaning and the letters of the name reveal its underlying characteristics. The first of my Yiddish names, Chaika, is yiddish for ‘life’ and ‘living.’ The second name, ‘Runya,’ means ‘joy of God.’ My name situates me, connects me with the past, tells me where I belong in this life. Jewish tradition instructs that it is important for parents to choose a name that will have a positive effect on the bearer, since every time the name is used the person is reminded of its meaning. It also suggests not to use the name of a person who died at a young age or suffered an unnatural death - like my two aunts - so as not to bring misfortune to the new bearer of the name. I’m quite certain my parents didn’t know this when they bestowed my names on me.

Rachel Yehuda, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and the director of the Traumatic Stress Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, is a pioneer in understanding how the effects of stress and trauma can be transmitted biologically, beyond the cataclysmic events themselves, to the next generation and beyond. As a researcher in graduate school, Ms. Yehuda, the daughter of a rabbi, studied Holocaust survivors. She was surprised to discover similar chemical and hormonal profiles in them as had been found in American combat Vietnam veterans with PTSD. The Holocaust survivors interviewed by Yehuda reported all the symptoms of PTSD: nightmares, flashbacks, terror, panic. They'd been suffering with those symptoms for decades but never sought help. “Who could understand what we have gone through?” one woman told Yehuda. Eager to help them with their PTSD symptoms, Yehuda established a clinic for them. But rather than the Holocaust survivors themselves contacting the clinic, it was their children who called, describing the ways in which they had been traumatized by witnessing the symptoms of their parents and the expectations placed on them by their parents - expectations that they live so that the lives of the people who had died would have meaning. 105 These offspring had difficulties with relationships. Experiences that involved separation from a loved one - divorce, for example - were particularly difficult. These offspring felt vulnerable in life and were more than three times more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder than Jewish persons whose parents had not been affected by the Holocaust. In 2016, Rachel Yehuda and her colleagues found that Holocaust survivors and their children both had evidence of methylation - a process in which small molecules are added to genes, thereby modifying their DNA - on a region of a gene associated with stress, suggesting that the survivors’ trauma was passed on to their offspring. Epigenetics, according to Yehuda, is the theory that not only do experiences lodge in our bodies, but that these physiological changes can actually be passed on to the next generation. Sometimes psychic legacies are transmitted through unconscious cues that flow between adult and child. Sometimes anxiety falls from one generation to the next through stories told. Learning this confirmed and validated my suspicions that at least some of my anxiety could be due to intergenerational trauma. Knowing this, I felt less alone.

My Grandpa David, my mother’s father and older brother of Chaika and Runya, was a stern, harsh and scary man. He had a booming voice and a strong accent. I was afraid of him. As a girl, my mother had been afraid of him. He’d traveled to the United States alone, on a boat at the age of 13, before the killings, knowing the killings would come, following an older brother and sister who had arrived in this country before him, each sibling vowing to rescue the next in line from certain death. I never heard Grandpa talk about the Holocaust or the deaths of Chaika or Runya. He just yelled in his booming voice and scared us. That he didn’t talk about it didn’t mean he was not affected, or that others around him didn’t feel and absorb the grief, anger, fear of the unspeakable wound. His brain, altered by the absence of a safe place to which to retreat, his unpredictable rages, his fierce protection of his children, his fear of others, spoke for him. I don’t know how his anger and sadness and losses affected my mother; she never spoke about that, either. I do know that she was terribly paranoid and prone to extremes of angry outbursts and depression and that my siblings and I lived in daily terror of her moods and her meanness and the occasional physical abuse she doled out. Our father told us she was the way she was because she had suffered so much abuse as a child.

In my own childhood, I felt safe in our synagogue, Temple Menorah. Unlike at our public school which had only three Jewish students in it, at synagogue all 106 the kids celebrated the same holidays and sang the same songs. My parents tried to help us feel safe by moving from our house near the Pacific Ocean in Torrance, California, to Beverly Hills, California, a small city in which the majority of students were Jewish. The schools were closed on Jewish holidays. Non-Jews were in the minority. Most of us went to religious school on the weekend and Hebrew school after public school three days a week. Many of us were studying for our bar or bat mitzvah. We socialized through B’nai Brith youth dances and summer camps for Jewish teens. Most of us were second generation immigrants and we worked hard and were expected to study and go to college and accomplish a lot. We had books in our homes and knew how to debate (“two Jews = three opinions”) and we didn't feel out of place or ashamed if we interrupted someone because we felt passionately about our point of view. We were all liberal; our parents voted Democrat. We dated Jewish boys and girls. We were expected to marry within our faith. We were competitive with each other for good grades. It was ‘cool’ to be smart. I felt a sense of safety in our modern ghetto, insulated from the prejudice of the larger world. But outside our Jewish enclave, I quickly learned I could not hide from the ignorance, prejudice, hatred and fear of anti-Semitic belief. It was always lurking, like a shadow, like a thief hiding behind a building who would jump out at me from around a corner. I was never prepared for its appearance. Like when I was eight years old and the mother of a little boy my age wouldn’t let him play with me because I “killed Christ.” Or when people would tell me that someone had “Jewed him down” in a deal, not realizing those words were offensive. It appeared when my son visited Sunday school with a friend and saw a film depicting Jews as disgustingly ugly Christ-killers. It appeared when people asked me where my horns were, referring to an old belief that Jews had them.

Decades later, as a psychotherapist living and working in southeastern Wisconsin, I was vigilant about how ‘out’ to be as a Jew and tried to keep my religious background out of any publicity about me or my work. But at one point in my career, a local newspaper wrote an article about me and about my work of integrating psychotherapy and spirituality. The Kenosha News ran the story on the Religion page of the Sunday paper with a nearly full-page color photo of me. The article mentioned that I was Jewish and worked as a therapist in a pastoral counseling center with a number of Christian clergy. The week after the article appeared, a long-time client, a woman in her 40s dealing with depression and marital problems, came in for her regular appointment. We greeted each other in the waiting room and she took her usual place on the brocade couch adjacent to my chair. Before I was able to say anything to her she begain, “I saw the article about 107 you in the Kenosha paper on Sunday.” I acknowledged the article. Suddenly, she jumped out of her chair, opened her mouth wide, and yelled loudly at me, “You killed Christ. You are a Christ-killer.” I sat in my chair, my heart beating fast. I was stunned, paralyzed. I didn't know what to say. The client sat down. She looked at me. I fumbled with my words. “Yes, I’m Jewish,” I acknowledged. “Can we talk about what it’s like for you to know that?” We struggled to make some conversation. She never came back.

From my earliest years I felt the burden of carrying the names of my great-aunts. I “felt” the weight but I never mentioned it to anyone. I didn’t know whether I could put it down or whether I was doomed to carry it, like a sack of rocks or a bag of flour, for the rest of my life. It felt like an obligation but I wasn’t sure what that obligation was. Should I become a devout Jew, taking advantage of the freedom in the United States to worship as I pleased, since they had not had that right? Or should I run away from Judaism out of fear of being terrorized or killed? This dilemma haunted me when I went to the nearest reform synagogue where I begged the female rabbi to teach me how to chant from the Torah and conduct services, honors previously bestowed only on men. Week after week, I sat with her as she taught me to read the markings of the ancient trope that accompanied the Hebrew script, transforming it into melodies that have been passed down for thousands of years. I became a lay leader in our small congregation, presiding over services when the rabbi was away. Every time I stood on the bimah with the Torah scroll opened in front of me, as I opened my mouth and chanted the ancient texts, I felt my aunts behind me nodding in approval.

Decades later, when I was in my 50s, I trained to become a Jungian psychoanalyst. As part of my training I’d chosen to study with Dr. Carl Greer, a psychologist who was both Peruvian shaman and Jungian analyst. Every couple of weeks I’d meet with Carl at his office in downtown Chicago to learn about shamanic journeying and practices, energy work and the power of the earth and her symbols. During our work together, Carl invited healing professionals and shamanic practitioners to meet twice a year to learn tools and practices borrowed from the Jungian and shamanic traditions so that we could offer them to our clients and communities. Our gatherings took place at a retreat center operated by the Episcopal Church, set in the hills outside of St. Louis, near the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri and Illinois Rivers. Not far from the retreat center is Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, a pre-Columbian Native American city which existed from 600- 1350 CE. 108 Cahokia contained several burial mounds. At one of them, Mound 72, more than 250 skeletons were found. These included four young males, missing their hands and skulls, their arms pointing to the four directions; a grave containing skeletons of more than 50 women around the age of 21, most likely a ritual execution, with the bodies arranged in two layers separated by matting; and a mass burial containing 40 men and women who were violently killed, like my aunts in Austria-Hungary. Some of the Cahokians were buried alive. According to one researcher, the vertical position of some of the fingers of these skeletons appeared to have been digging in the sand. Some had been trying to pull themselves out of the pit, out of the mass of bodies. The skeletons at Mound 72 date to between 950 and 1000 CE, almost 1000 years before the Holocaust and the deaths of my aunts and millions of other Jews.

At our final group meeting, Carl announced that we would be honoring our ancestors and the ancestors of those who had lived on the land throughout history. At our first meal, I carried my tray through the cafeteria and sat at one of the round tables. Carl sat down next to me. I looked at Carl, took a breath, and said to him, “I have something that I’ve been carrying from my ancestors that feels like a burden. I’ve never told anyone about it.” He looked at me, encouraging me to tell him more. “I was named for two aunts who were killed in the Holocaust,” I told him. “I’ve always felt like I was carrying them as a heavy pack on my back.” I looked down at my hands, then turned to look at the low shrubbery outside the window to my left. The afternoon sun was already weakening. Carl turned his head to look at me. His wavy gray hair and searching eyes were visible from the corner of my right eye. “Would you like to work with that in front of the group?” Carl asked me. I didn’t know. I felt my chest closing up. I was an introvert, shy. I hesitated. “You’ll be helping everyone,” Carl encouraged. “You’ll be helping everyone in the room.” I wanted to help, so I said yes.

It was the third day of the retreat when Carl finally decided the time was right for the work to take place. The day was cloudy, threatening rain, the room dark. In the dim light, thirty professionals, mostly women and some men, in their 40s and 50s, some older, most wearing blue jeans, sweaters and running shoes, some wearing ponchos woven in South America, sat on gray folding chairs in the large meeting hall. Carl placed his ceremonial mesa on the floor in front of his chair, along with his drum, rattles, and eagle feathers. I glanced around the circle, felt the familiar rumbling of my stomach, informing me of my fear. This was the way my nerves always showed up when I was going to speak in public. 109 Carl announced to the group that I was going to do some energetic work. He called my name, motioned me to sit in the folding chair to his left. I stood automatically and began the walk to the chair next to Carl. It was only ten feet from me but it seemed miles away. What I most remember now was the feeling of a big smoky gray cloud surrounding me, extending two feet from my body in every direction. In that cloud, I walked as if pulled by a magnet. I took my seat. “Amy told me about an ancestor story she’s been carrying. She’s willing to work with it here in our circle. Please give her your respect,” Carl began. I felt the attentive eyes of everyone on me. Suddenly I felt important. “Can you tell the group what you told me?” Carl asked. “I’m named for two great aunts who were killed in the Holocaust,” I began. I heard my own voice speaking the familiar story from a place far away. “They were my grandpa’s sisters. Their names were Chaika and Runya and those are my Hebrew names. Everyone in their town was killed.” The room became more silent. I said those words the way I’d always said them before - like a report of historic fact. But on this day, as I imagined Chaika and Runya in my mind, there in our circle their stories came alive. It felt as if the light shifted, like a spotlight was shining down onto the center of the circle. I could not see anyone else in the room. The light in the middle of the circle grew brighter, like a campfire. The only ones who existed then were me, Carl and my two deceased aunts. Carl’s voice called me back. “Tell the group what you told me,” he coached. “They were killed by the Nazis. Ever since I can remember I’ve felt like they are a burden I’m carrying on my back. They’re heavy, like a backpack full of heavy books.” As I spoke these words, I relived in imagined memory the horror of my aunts’ last moments, their terror resonating as a painful tension in my back. My breath stopped momentarily in anticipation, as if contracting could keep the unthinkable from happening. On top of that tightness rested the twenty-or-so pounds of weight that had been hanging from my shoulders for over 60 years. Carl asked if he could remove the pack from my back. In a daze I nodded agreement. Carl gestured for me to stand. Following his direction, I rose from my chair and stood behind it, my legs wobbly, facing the middle of the circle. Carl stood behind me, facing my back, his thin six-foot frame towering over my five-foot tall soft round grandmother body. I heard him reach into a pocket. From the pocket he removed a small leather sheath that cradled a sharp small knife. He stood at my right side, showed me the knife and indicated that he would be removing the pack from my back. I stood firm, felt my feet on the floor, solid in my tennis shoes, my belly relaxed, no longer afraid. I heard the knife whooshing back and forth in the air as if

110 cutting the cords and straps from my shoulders, my mid-back and my low back. I felt the straps loosen. When his job was complete, Carl said to me, “Now I’m going to remove the pack from your back.” I nodded. I felt the pack loosen and a lightness like a cool breeze as Carl pulled the pack away from my body. I felt immediate relief, air filling the back of my body, as if my back were taking a deep breath in, my lungs expanding. Carl handed the pack to me. It felt solid and heavy in my hands. Pointing to the floor in front of my chair, he gestured for me to set it down. Holding both sides of the pack, I carefully laid it on the floor. With his right hand, Carl wordlessly suggested I open the pack and look inside it. I felt the familiar anxiety churn in my stomach. I didn’t know what I would find. Bending forward from the waist, I leaned my head toward the pack. My fingers fumbled with a drawstring that had held the pack closed all these years, clumsily grasped the smooth woven strings and coaxed them apart. My eyes searched inside the pack. It was pitch black in there at first, but as my eyes adjusted to the dark I saw something white at the bottom of the pack. They were bones, glistening white, gleaming toward me and beckoning me. “Their bones are in there,” I whispered to Carl, a sensation like butterflies fluttering in my chest. “Can you remove the bones?” Carl asked. A slight gasp escaped my lips, then a deep breath to steady myself. I reached my hands into the dark cavern of the pack and gingerly, reverently pulled out each gleaming white bone. I set each one on the floor in front of me, then sat still, looking at them. Seeing and touching those bones took my breath away. I felt it catch in my chest. Dare I say I felt love? Wonder? Awe? The room was almost completely dark now. Nothing existed for me except the white bones of my aunts and Carl sitting next to me. “What do the bones want you to do?” he asked. I looked at the white bones sitting on the floor in front of me. I listened for their guidance. I listened in the silence for the guidance of my two aunts. The silence filled the room. The edges of my body seemed to expand beyond the boundaries of my limbs, my body’s atoms joining the energy of the silence. And suddenly I knew. “They want a burial,” I whispered to Carl. My stomach settled in calm certainty. In the Jewish tradition it is customary for a burial to take place within 24 hours after a death. These bones had been wandering for sixty years. “They want to be put to rest,” I added.

111 Carl was still for a moment. He wanted to honor the bones’ request. But we didn’t have any dirt or earth there in the meeting room. “Can we bury them with fire?” he asked. “Fire is a way to return them properly to the Earth.” I didn’t answer right away. Jews were supposed to be buried in the earth, not by fire. I wondered for a moment if this would be acceptable, to my people, to my aunts. But my life had brought me to this moment and I knew I needed to honor it. After a moment, I nodded my head yes. Carl lit a candle. I picked up each white bone and passed it through the flames until the bones dissolved into the air, into the Earth. I opened my mouth and chanted the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, over the bones. Then I heard a voice. A lone body-less voice from the darkness chanting the shema, the central prayer from Judaism, from the book of Deuteronomy, proclaiming the oneness of all creation. It is traditionally prayed as the last words before a person dies. Another voice joined in, then my voice was added to them. Thirty voices then, Jewish and non-Jewish, in spontaneous unison, chanted the shema together. Those who knew the words took the lead, followed by the others. I had forgotten that those other people were in the room with me. “Look around,” Carl told me. I looked up. For the first time, since I had begun this work with Carl, the cloud lifted completely. I recognized the bodies of the people sitting in the room with me, witnessing and participating. My eyes rounded the circle, surveying and touching the faces of each person in the room. Every single one of them was crying, the soft prayer wafting from their mouths. I cried, too, moved with an indescribable joy. It felt as if my arms grew to encircle them all while I felt held gently and firmly in the arms of those present. After a few minutes, Carl called us back to our lives with his drum and flute. Someone turned the lights on in the room. Carl and I embraced.

I didn’t immediately know whether the effects of the ritual would last, or even what those effects were or would be. Now, eight years later, I can say the burden has never returned. In its place is a freedom, a spacious emptiness. Even today I can feel the lightness of breath in my back which was released when the pack was removed. “Everyone has ancestors,” Carl said. “We all have stories that need to be buried. We all have trauma that has been passed down to us through the generations. We are all carrying these burdens. We all want to put them to rest.” When we do our own work, we do more than heal our own stories. Energetically, in some mysterious way, we heal the stories of others, some of whom we know, many whom we do not. 112 The act of naming is a powerful thing. In the Old Testament, God gives human beings the ability and power to name the animals and plants around them. Through the process of naming, we seek to bring order to our chaotic and dynamic world. Naming something - be it anxiety, terror, anti-Semitism, prejudice - gives meaning to it, and without meaning we wither. As Eve Ensler wrote, “naming things, breaking through taboos and denial, speaking the unspeakable and struggling with the unknown is dangerous, terrifying, and crucial work.” It is the act of naming that gives birth to something new. These days I don’t struggle with my Yiddish names. My name is Chaika Runya bat Yitzchak v’ Channa Gittl, daughter of Irwin and Connie, granddaughter of Ethel and David and Sidney and Bessie. I don’t worry about whether I am living up to those names. I don’t wonder if I am honoring them in the best way. Freedom begins with naming things.

113 NONFICTION Toys on the Front Line Betsy Woodman

I stroll the Barbie Doll aisles at a local toy store, trying not to look too obvi- ous as I eavesdrop on a woman shopping with a little girl, maybe five years old. “We’ll get the Barbie swimming pool,” the woman says. “And a Swimsuit Barbie. Do you want the Doctor Barbie?” The child doesn’t appear interested, but the mom keeps tossing boxes into the cart. I suspect that she is the customer. A lot of adults are. In a typical June, there are at least 17 doll conventions scheduled in this country and the second Saturday of the month is World Doll Day. Or take Hot Wheels, the model cars. Hot Wheels collectors’ annual conven- tion is held in October, in Los Angeles. If you miss it, you can go to exhibitions in England, Germany, China, Mexico, Australia—all over the world. For both children and adults, miniatures are…well—huge. I wonder if dolls and miniatures and toy versions of the adult world are compelling because they make us feel safe and powerful. It’s reassuring to create and manipulate small, finite worlds where you are in control. Gone are the dangers and the constraints of real life. You get to play God. So much for putting away childish things. We love toys. And, as with any other religion, we get passionate, self-righteous, dogmatic, political, anxious, and upset about them. When giving our child a toy, we ask: is it safe? Is it sturdy? Will it damage my child physically or emotionally? If I give my son a toy gun, will he turn out to be a serial killer? Choosing toys gets to us in an intimate spot, since it’s so tied up with our ideas of being a good parent. But even if you aren’t a parent, toys still resonate as symbols. Pick an adult issue—gun control, women’s issues, animal rights—and you will likely find a stance on some toy that’s related to it. A longstanding question: Should boys play with toy guns and cannons and soldiers? Absolutely, said 19th and early 20th century European leaders. It was good training for running empires. Absolutely not, cried the pacifist opposition: tin soldiers should be banned. This debate goes on to this day.

I’ve been reading a lot about World War I, and a funny little issue caught my eye. The newspapers of the time mentioned the “toy famine” that the entry of

114 the United States into the great European war was causing. Toys were becoming a hot political issue in this country. This was because, before the war, Germany had dominated the toy industry, with close to 60% of toys sold in America made in Germany. German dolls, with their jointed bodies and beautiful porcelain heads, were especially prized. (American dolls were mostly novelty rag dolls, floppy things that weren’t very realistic.) German factories also churned out millions of tin soldiers, in elaborate sets that celebrated one historical battle or another. In addition, the Germans were a leading maker of toy trains and whole landscapes—bridges, fields, villages, and forests—to run them through. In fact, toys were the number two import from Germany. But after we entered the war in April 1917, imports from Germany were restricted, and toys made in America became symbols of national pride. Up until then, the American toy industry had been puny; now, it had a chance to develop. The government’s Ameri- can Defense Committee told toy retailers to get the remaining German toys off their shelves. “Demonstrate your 100 percent Americanism and show Germany that goods made by her bloody-handed baby killers will not be tolerated in America.” The Committee also urged the toy makers to ramp up production. The toy industry thrived, increasing from 290 toy manufacturers nationwide in 1914 to 1,800 in 1920—a six-fold increase. Why encourage toy production? During wartime, wasn’t every man, woman, and child supposed to be practicing thrift, and not buying needless stuff? Fami- lies practiced meatless Tuesdays and wheatless Wednesdays. With the money people saved, they were supposed to buy War Savings Stamps or government bonds, and then make a donation to the Red Cross or Salvation Army. In fact, some bureaucrats proposed banning the celebration of Christmas—the biggest time of year when toys were given as gifts. The toy makers rose up in righteous wrath. Toys, they said, were a national priority, essential to developing children’s bodies, minds, and values. Why, along with home, school, and church, they ranked as one of the most important influences on children. Dolls, the toymakers claimed, taught little girls to be good mothers. Blocks and chemistry sets taught boys about science and engineering. Hoops and sleds helped both sexes build healthy bodies. The “cancel Christmas” movement didn’t get very far. Far from banning toys, some government officials even called for more toys to be developed. In 1918, a delegation of toy manufacturers called on the Chair- man of the Shipping Board to discuss new games and toys based on the mercantile

115 marine and foreign trade. The toymakers argued that miniature steamers and sailing vessels would interest children in American shipping, an essential defense industry.

After the war, toys were again in the spotlight, when German toy imports flooded back into the US astonishingly quickly and the fledgling American toy industry was thrown into panic. How was it to survive? There was already a 35% import tax—a protective tariff—on toys, but in 1921, toy manufacturers asked the House Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. Congress to raise it to 60% . Their language took on the overtones of a holy war. They poured scorn on German toys-- “hanky-panky, flimsy-flamsy” things. They raged that the Germans were dumping vast quantities of toys on the international market, pricing them below manufac- turing cost. They said that the toys were produced under sweatshop conditions, by whole families laboring for a pittance from early morning until late at night. In contrast, they praised the American toy industry as modern and enlightened. American toys, the said, were produced in modern factories, where sanitation and wages were regulated. Workers in the industry had an eight-hour day. To the Congress, the toy manufacturers stressed their high-minded goals to make toys the country would be proud of, toys that would develop virile men and women and future leaders. Dolls were critical. “The doll mothered by the American child,” said one toymaker, “should be American in every respect…. The early ideals of the little woman citizen should be directed and influenced by the handiwork of American artisans.” The pitch worked. The toymakers got their high tariff.

Today, would the phrase “American toys for American girls and boys” even have any meaning? Toys with American trademarks are largely made somewhere else in the world. Close to three-quarters of toys sold here are imports, overwhelmingly made in China. Barbie—that American icon—has been produced at various times in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, and China, too. In 2007, a US Senator called for a ban on imports of Chinese toys, but Sara Bongiorni, a Los Angeles Times correspondent, metaphorically rolled her eyes. She and her family had tried avoiding Chinese products for a year and found it comically difficult. Associated Press journalist Siobhan McDonough reported that Americans pay lip service to “buy American”—but then they go for the best price.

116 Trying to leave the political issue (although I found I couldn’t do that), I browsed around on the Internet for toys that were supposed to belong to one religion or another. “Hindu toys” brought up colorful stuffed Ganesh dolls and action figures out of the epic poem the Ramayana. Even Santa Claus popped up, having somehow made it into the Hindu pantheon. “Jewish toys” produced dreidls, blocks with the Hebrew alphabet, and a stuffed bear with Happy Chanukah on its tee shirt. A company called “Mensch on a bench” offered a Can of Plagues to stage a Passover play. “Christian toys” ranged from kazoos stamped with “Jesus Loves Me” to Noah’s ark sets and Samson and Goliath action figures. A “Tales of Glory” set pro- vided a figure of Jesus and a basket of loaves and fishes, for staging the feeding of the multitudes. “Unitarian Universalist toys” were not numerous, but included jigsaw puzzles, teddy bears and dartboards decorated with a flaming chalice. A wooden cribbage board had “Peace Love Unitarianism” inscribed on it. “Muslim toys” brought up games to teach the Arabic alphabet, and jigsaw puzzles and brain teasers similar to Rubik’s Cube. Plus, there were a few dolls, which brings us back to Barbie, culture, and politics.

The Barbie doll started out in 1959 as a “teenage fashion model,” with an hourglass figure and a striped swimsuit. In the 1970s, feminists loathed Barbie. They argued that Barbie set up an unattainable ideal of beauty and made a couple of generations of girls hate themselves and develop eating disorders. Plus, in multi-racial America, Barbie was very white. Barbie’s designers listened to these complaints, introducing different body types and several skin colors. To counteract the charge that they promoted only retro stereotypes of women (such as cheerleader or nurse), they brought out Career Barbies. These days, Barbie is a veterinarian, airline pilot, eye doctor, zookeeper, firefighter, tennis coach, dentist, film director, and spy. She’s even a paleontologist, putting her way ahead of a lot of adults who aren’t too sure what a paleontologist is. Moreover, in 2012, Mattel introduced Barbie for President, and in 2016, an all female ticket of two dolls in the same box, one running for President and the other for Vice-President. One consumer raved that the “BEAUTIFUL AND IN- SPIRING!” dolls had persuaded her daughter that she could be President when she grows up. 117 In 1916, the Louvre Museum in Paris had an exhibit of 700 types of Barbie. Globally, Barbie has lots of fans. But she also has enemies. In Teheran, a toy seller described the buxom, blond Barbie in revealing clothing as "more harmful than an American missile” and worried that if young girls played with Barbie dolls, they could grow into women who rejected Iranian values. The Iranian government was worried enough to sponsor, in 2002, the production of a Sara and Dara sister and brother doll pair to counter the influence of Barbie and Ken. Sara and Dara were seen as strategic to preserving national identity. Sara and Dara didn’t take off, but a more popular Muslim alternative to Barbie did. In 2003, a Dubai manufacturer brought Fulla to the market. Fulla is about the same size as Barbie, with beautiful long hair, a wide-eyed lovely face, and an unrealistically slim figure. Her clothes, unlike Barbie’s sleeveless dresses and bathing suits, observe Muslim standards of modesty. For going outside, she wears a full line of cloaks, caftans, and veils. Her accessories include umbrellas, watches, swimming pools—and a tiny pink felt prayer rug. Advertisements and Youtube videos show Fulla praying, baking a cake, phoning her friends, and doing other home and family-oriented things. But Fulla’s message about sex roles isn’t entirely conservative. A dentist Fulla comes equipped with dental chair and a tray of tools. Fulla, it turns out, can be a career woman, too.

Toys. Adults think we can use toys to control the minds of kids. But can we? As responsible parents and grandparents, we try to give our children toys that fit with our values, but we never succeed 100%. Consider again the issue of whether to give kids toy guns. Many people have observed that even when they don’t get the guns, kids (particularly boys) fabricate them from the most unlikely materials. A blogger mom listed twelve household items her son has turned into weap- ons.” These included vacuum cleaner attachments, drinking straws, a window blind, an iPhone charger, a wooden mallet, plant hangers, a whisk, a spoon, a hairclip, a drill, a garlic press—and a piece of toast bitten into the shape of a pistol. Moreover, if dolls are supposed to make girls sweet and nurturing, good luck. In The Good, the Bad, and the Barbie, author Tanya Lee Stone says that “in addition to romantic role-playing, mutilating Barbie dolls is … commonplace…. Barbie has been burned at the stake, put under the wheels of a car, torn apart, de- limbed, and flushed down the toilet.” 118 You can’t dictate or predict how kids will actually play with toys. At age two, my son, Ben, received half a dozen Sesame Street people— which he spun round and round in the lettuce spinner. Later, he got Star Wars action figures. Becky, the little girl from down the street, would bring over her Barbies, and Ben and she would play under the dining room table for hours. Barbie and Luke Skywalker and Chewbaca had long conversations and acted out dramas largely unin- telligible to adults.

Ben and Becky were able to blur categories and create their own little plural- istic world. What if adults could do the same? I’ll indulge myself in a little daydream of other children playing under a dining room table. They’re using not one religious variety of toys, but many. A Fulla doll is teaching a Muslim prayer to a paleontologist Barbie. Star Wars action figures and GI Joes are spinning dreidls and lighting Hanukkah candles. A three-inch Noah is inviting a miniature Rama and Sita to tour the ark. Jesus and Ganesh are feeding the multitudes together from a basket of toy loaves and fishes. In my fantasy, the kids are mixing up their toys to make a new world and smudging out boundaries between people as they go. Now, that would make World Doll Day truly something to celebrate.

This essay is a version of a talk given at the Kearsarge Unitarian Universalist Fellow- ship in Andover, New Hampshire, on June 4, 2017.

119 POETRY Maps to Mecca Pervin Saket

I’ve seen maps to Mecca traced in the hands of old Mrs Singh holding a whimpering dog’s paw, and although the fingers live in a world of fog and rebellion, they will not shake until the splinter leaves the flesh.

I’ve seen the cartography contoured by the tap-tapping of beloved feet hurrying past puddle and pain so they do not miss a daughter’s first speech or a brother’s last.

Sometimes I find the paths in Amma’s crease of skin around eyelids squinting to thread a needle because no matter age or thinning bones, mending is necessary.

Other maps offer routes across elbow, thigh and belly past familiar midriff or limp hair each one calmly stating like those signs printed in malls: You are here.

120 POETRY Why Eating an Apple is Like Eating the World Pervin Saket

In the first bite, as you break through skin and red, you know what it is like to consume borders.

In the second bite, as the sap flows down your chin, you know what it’s like to touch earth and sky together.

In the third bite, as you inhale the fragrance of hands you’ve never seen, you know the acidic smell of loneliness.

In the fourth bite, you know hunger again the hunger of those whose apples are shriveled or rotten or vanished. You clutch your stomach with all its mushed fruit.

By the fifth bite, your mother is not someone you’re trying so hard not to become.

By the sixth bite, you remember to smile because your children will inherit a world with apples in it.

By the last bite, you’re counting the seeds of that single apple. As you pick each one up you realize that no one can count how many apples are in each seed. 121 POETRY Nomad's Hymn Jed Myers

I’ve walked past the cardboard huts in those downtown entranceways, seen the tents on their dirt patches where the avenues meet freeway, spotted the rumpled beddings on dead leaves yards off the urban path,

and skirted, at whatever removes I could, the panhandler, the busker belting out Dylan to a busted guitar, the wobbling drunk, the Ecstasy- monger, the apocalypse-crier, on my crossings to office or park

or beach or box seat. Oh I’ve practiced the civil art of dismissal, performed it well with a slight nod or a tight smile, to silent mantras like He’ll just keep killing himself or What the hell good would it do?

I’ve gone around the wanderer, parted with maybe a five if I’m held up behind the stop sign on my off ramp, and idling, hoped for some leveling tide, a landslide, a great hiring…. I’ve felt the lockdown of our lives.

It’s quiet now. From my front steps the world stretches out to a blankness I populate with impressions of such estranged cousins, each no address, no name. I daydream a face, another, a next, and call up the deep-eyed

company of my disowned tribe. No, two in one. There are traces of memory, actual—the soot-dark soles of a girl asleep on the sidewalk against that Santa Monica wall, a torn-shirted oldster’s toothless

mouth in a map of parched gulches, two coal shafts staring me down from the median strip—but the scene’s jammed with my attributions, stuff of my scattered self, banished worn underfed kin, disavowed

factions of my desire. And the acid surge I’ve learned to manage seeing the Starbucks alms cup signals a recognition—I’m still the kid who could vanish in deep Pennsylvania woods. I’m the one at the party

122 in Boston who drinks the red medicine, who might never exit the spin to step out under the night again. And in this quiet I wonder if all who are stranded in mortal bramble, caught in our contagions of choice, pulled to the earth in the funnel-force of the years, if we’re all singing a single guttural voice, that low rumble-hum of the wind and the blood in my ears the same ragged nomad’s hymn, from outside, from in.

123 POETRY Trajectory: Five Erasure Poems Amanda Berry

mingled alarm and hope

as if at any minute the Thunder

roaring

has stopped

The world

II.

The face of doubt.

I gave it up; O God, We’re simply in the way here.

III.

High above him some winged thing went through the air;

the pure balance of that distant flight in the blue sky 124 Haven’t you felt it scratching you again? IV.

Below the great bottomless pit there was somewhere in the darkness

below

The persistent faint wind.

Either reality or illusion;

the sunlight

grew brighter still

on the other side

of the window.

125 NONFICTION Surrealism in Poetry: Something Other Adele Kenny

During the last few decades, there’s been renewed interest in Surrealist poetry, and most recently, the genre has become more and more popular as our world is increas- ingly suspended among political turmoil, racial injustice, gender biases, and the crush- ing effects of Covid-19.

Most of us know the word surreal in a non-poetry lexicon, meaning weird, strange, incredible, or unreal. In the context of art, however, Surrealism began as an artistic movement in 1920s Paris. Although Guillame Apollinaire first used the word “surreal” in reference to the concept that an independent reality exists beneath conscious reality, poet and philosopher André Breton (1896-1966) is generally credited with being the founder and driving spirit of the Surrealist movement. Surrealism gained momentum with Breton’s 1924 publication of The Manifesto of Surrealism. In this work, he sought to combat the way art was viewed and understood, focusing on the “disinterested play of thought” and the “omnipotence of dreams” rather than on reason and logic.

Along with Breton and Apollinaire, other poets who advanced the Surrealist movement included Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Éluard, and Peruvian poet César Vallejo. Also prominent among the early Surrealists was Spanish poet Federico García Lorca who is still considered by many to be Spain's greatest poet and dramatist. During the 1920s, Lorca joined a group of avant-garde artists that included Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. Called “The Generation of ’27,” this group introduced Lorca to Surrealism and greatly influenced his writings. Noted woman Surrealist poet Gisèle Prassinos was discovered by Breton in 1934 when she was only fourteen years old. A photograph by Surrealist photographer Man Ray shows the fourteen-year-old schoolgirl reading her poems to members of the Surrealist group, including André Breton and Paul Éluard (National Galleries, Scotland).

Initially, Surrealism grew out of Dadaism, an art movement introduced in Zurich during WWI as a negative response to the horror and senselessness of the war. Deliber- ate irrationality and contravention of the traditional artistic canon were features of Dada. Surrealism developed as a mechanism of knowledge, and those who embraced 126 the movement believed that the subconscious contained true reality. They believed that the unconscious mind is deeper than the conscious mind. Early Surrealist poets focused on reality created by the “waking consciousness,” which unites the world of imagination with the real world—subjectivity and objectivity, and dream states and wakefulness. In The Communication Vessels, Breton stated that the real and dream worlds are actually the same and that the mind communes in each state like two connected vessels. This principle is also known as “point sublime” or the realization of surreal harmony—the point at which contrasts (life and death, beauty and ugli- ness, dark and light) merge.

World War I left its generation profoundly traumatized; the comforts and certainties of life as most people knew them were largely obliterated by the war. The world was bitter and broken, and very little seemed to make sense. In addition, during the final months of World War I, what would become a worldwide flu pandemic broke out in 1918. This would become a global pandemic much like the one that is devastating our world today. Catalyzed by the state of their world, Surrealist painters and writers began to feel that by embracing the world’s disorder, and the disorder in individuals’ lives, they might turn consciousness away from the war’s aftermath and the flu’s dev- astation. In a very real sense, the Surrealists, by recognizing the confusion and fear of their time, were able to offer a measure of healing from the damage wrought by what the world had seen and suffered. Most importantly, the Surrealist movement looked toward ways in which people might be freed spiritually and psychologically—free- doms that were much needed at the time, just as they are today.

Breton and his colleagues drew heavily on Freudian psychoanalysis and the power of unconscious thought, including such strategies as “automatic writing,” as they strove to open their imaginations to deeper truths. When Surrealist poets used automatism, or automatic writing, they wrote whatever came to mind without controlling their conscious thoughts. Breton stated that poets should not filter, edit or shape automatic writing because the words should be dramatic and unprocessed. This re- sulted in wild illogical vaults, elaborate imagery, and strong tonal shifts. Along with automatism, Surrealist poets also experimented with cut-up, collage, and other types of what we might call “found poetry” today.

Because Surrealism was first a Parisian movement, it also took hold among young students from Martinique (an insular region of France in the West Indies) who were studying in Paris. In the spirit of poetic revolt and social revolution, Black Surreal- ists, who shared the racial history of slavery, were touched by Surrealism’s defense of 127 human rights and its suggestions of creating change in the world. The first woman Surrealist of African descent was Simone Yoyotte. Active within the Paris Surrealism group, she was the only woman in the Légitime Défense (self-defense) group formed exclusively by students from Martinique during 1932. She published poems in the Légitime Défense journal. Sadly, only one edition of the journal was produced and virtually nothing is known of her life.

The advent of World War II and the rise of Nazism and Fascism was not an easy time for the Surrealists, and numbers of them came to America where they continued to shape changes in literary philosophy. After World War II, certain “diluted” forms of Surrealist poetry appeared, and a second generation of surrealist writers emerged in various parts of the world, especially in Latin America (where interest in Surrealism began as early as 1928 in Argentina). Poet Pablo Neruda wrote in various styles, including Surrealism, and Octavio Paz was also influenced by the genre. Surrealism has also interested many modern and contemporary poets such as Americans James Tate, John Ashbery, Dean Young, George Kalamaros, and Will Alexander, Englishwoman Helen Ivory, Romanian Tristan Tzara, and Slovenian Tomaž Šalamun.

Although the active movement came to an end after the Second World War, a substantial group of today’s poets turn to Surrealist imagery and ideas in their efforts to stretch the margins of literary art and to make readers think. Given the stresses of contemporary society and international relations, it’s hardly surprising that poets would turn to an aesthetic that looks toward ways of overcoming the inconsistencies of our conscious minds. Today’s Surrealist poets, like their predecessors, are produc- ing a body of literature with imagery that affirms the supremacy of fantastic and -of ten bizarre juxtapositions. They advocate contrasting images and ideas and embrace Freudian ideas of free association that move readers away from societal influences, thus encouraging readers to open their minds in regard to what reality is.

Metaphor and imagery are the main techniques used by Surrealist poets to cause their readers to think more deeply and to seek subconscious meanings in their poems. Readers are thus propelled to examine their unconscious and to analyze what they discover. Rarely is Surrealist poetry narrative; instead of telling actual stories, it is concept-forward and emphasizes dreamlike “settings,” nonlinear timelines, incongruous content, and unbound associative leaps in thinking. Typically, Surrealist poetry has a certain shock value that characterizes the form. Often, in today’s poetry, we see softly surreal qualities that speak to Surrealist influence.

128 Our place in world history is challenging at best; the current pandemic is taking a huge toll. Is it any wonder that poetry today is ready to contemplate realities other than what we read about in print media and see on Internet and television news? In this time that cries out for spiritual and psychological freedom, and for relief from harsher realities, Surrealist poetry, with its dark corners and its flashes of light, is a rich source to which poets and poetry lovers can turn to buttress their need for something “other.”

129 POETRY Choices Jawanza Phoenix

You wake up in a city which looks familiar but everything is grey. A little girl who you have never seen appears out of nowhere and hands you a letter. You rip it open and learn that your fate depends on a man who looks just like you in a parallel world, making particular choices at particular times. He must water an aloe vera plant every three weeks, he must say something kind to strangers such as nice dress, nice hair, nice shoes, or nice tie, at least once a week, and he must choose Maria during his final year of college instead of the woman you chose. You place your head in your hands and begin to cry.

130 POETRY Move Closer to Me Jawanza Phoenix

You are standing too far away for us to have a meaningful conversation

Your mind is too far away, distracted by social media and music blasting through your earphones

Move away from Instagram followers and Facebook likes, away from reality TV featuring unrealistic bodies and unlikely bank accounts, away from fried foods and energy drinks

Move closer to planting trees and praising the songs of birds

Move away from tragedies that continue to haunt you, closer to a present and future which welcome you with warm hands and open arms away from simply setting your goals, closer to fighting for them away from fantasies about perfection, closer to the blemishes that give us all character

131 POETRY Miyuri Michelle Ortega

after the artist’s thoughts on No. 1, Pastel, Charcoal on Paper, 2005, by Huang Chen-Yuan

follow the heart of the heart of the heart to the liquid-heat river, to the fish that glides down the mountain through lava, glides through lava, burns raven-black with topaz eyes; glides burns swims until feathers bloom and wings spread wide, back into the sky-ocean of ocean dropping stars like diamonds into a well, into a well, into the heart of the heart of the well where miyuri dwells.

132 POETRY Zooming with Quakers Jude Rittenhouse

April 2020: I met the eyes of a coy-wolf who breached our stonewall boundaries in morning’s long-shadowed light.

We stared into each other. Three minutes that ripple through my life. Twelve years ago, suspended with me at death’s threshold, floating in a vast black waterless sea, eyes of whales conveyed their grief: humans are not the stewards of earth we were meant to be. Pandemics demand re-visioning. Virtual space converts, turns dense as Friends sit in silent worship. Solid as our small sanctuary built by hope’s muscles before

1880. Near-one-and-a-half centuries: a place for our strange human lives, our hearts seeking, stretching,

133 contracting, expanding, breaking open like spring’s hard buds: relaxing, uncurling,

emerging as pure allurement, briefly, before falling. Letting go of their, of our,

of time’s temporary splendor. Transformed to earth’s nourishment.

134 A Review of Revolutions of the Heart: Literary, Cultural & Spiritual by Benjamin Bagocius

REVOLUTIONS OF THE HEART: LITERARY, CULTURAL & SPIRITUAL By Yahia Lababidi Resource Publications/Wipf and Stock (March 31, 2020) 270 Pages $24.63 Paperback ISBN: 978-1725264946 To order: https://smile.amazon.com/Revolutions-Heart- Literary-Cultural-Spiritual/dp/1725264943/ref=tmm_pap_ swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1601057381&sr=8- 1sr=8-2

Yahia Lababidi’s Revolutions of the Heart—his collection of essays, poems, short stories, interviews, and aphorisms—is a coming-out story, but not the kind you might expect. He writes “to come out” as a literary artist with mystical sensibilities in a modern world whose imagination on mysticism often extends no further than quackery at worst or nonsense at best (163). Lababidi does not identify as sexually queer: he is married to a woman. Yet Lababidi shows that coming out as someone attracted to mystical thought is possibly queerer than coming out as gay. The mystic might be someone whose primary love affair is not with a person but with the soul, the divine, or God. Mystics, Lababidi writes, are “lusting for that contact and the immediacy” with the holy, with which they experience “meshing” and “union” (163). This erotic merging with the divine, Lababidi explains, is the love“ that dare not speak its name” (83). Just as queer subjects often sense they may be queer entering their teens, Lababidi explains his mystical sensibilities emerged as a teenager. His first love affair was not with a person but with inner life as a reader: his “first love” was “for Letters,” Lababidi writes; “people tend[ed] to come second” (3). As Sven Birkerts writes in the preface, “Finding a way to talk openly about the soul or revelations of beauty is very difficult,” almost taboo (xiii). Lababidi’s book forges this way, and thus is a vanguard of what might be called mystic pride. Public conversations about mysticism are rare because there are few “out” mystics in our public life together. While many of us can name present-day LGBTQ+ influencers (presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, comedian Ellen Degeneres, producer Ru Paul), fewer of us can identify 135 mystics who are household names. But Lababidi shows that the mystical life is bustling with company—on the page in the form of books across geographies and time. Lababidi is a generous writer, inviting a multitude of voices to his festival of introspection. Lababidi’s sentences are a version of pulling up chairs for writers who influenced his mystical orientation, from Oscar Wilde to Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Artur Rimbaud, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (also known as Rumi), and Ahmad Al-Ghazali. One of the book’s greatest pleasures is the way it expanded my reading list, introducing me to new writers and books, including Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun’s By Fire and Syrian novelist Osama Alomar’s The Teeth of the Comb. Lababidi’s writing voice is at home when honoring beauty’s treasures of art, poetry, and spirit. At this time in history when violence— what Lababidi calls a “failure of imagination” and “an emotional cliché”—is broadcast nearly 24-7, Lababidi’s focus on “revelations about beauty” redirect our attention toward our essences as creatures of beauty-making (51, 212). This book creates space for these conversations to unfold, as expressed in the interview section toward the end of the volume, in which Lababidi sits with other writers and editors to discuss the vocation of a writer, someone who reminds readers of their inborn “ancient wisdom” (181). These intimate conversations bring to the fore one of the book’s greatest gifts: its reverence for the small, whether short essay, poem, or aphorism. The aphorism is Lababidi’s special love. An aphorism is “what is worth quoting with the soul’s dialogue with itself” and reads like “micro-poetry”; aphorism “belong[s] to the tradition of wisdom literature,” which has a long history in the Middle East and Egypt, where Lababidi was born and spent most of his youth (201, 200). Lababidi’s aphorisms infuse a world into one line, much like Emily Dickinson’s poetics. Similarly to the ways Dickinson fits a cosmology into a single line, Lababidi’s aphorisms are journeys taking readers from planet A to star B and galaxy C: “Eye contact: how souls catch fire”; “Take two opposites, connect the dots, and you have a straight line”; “Self-image: self-deception” (195, 207, 209). In pausing with the small, Lababidi opens universes otherwise overlooked. While the aphorism is a long-reverenced genre in Arab literature and culture, it enjoys a less robust following in North America. Lababidi’s attention to the tiny is a welcome relief in North American culture where a mania to occupy as much a space as possible—whether on the news or social media—is the rule of the day. Lababidi’s quietly powerful aphorisms invite us to pause, like the mystic does, and taste the divine close at hand. The holy waits patiently in a phrase. Lababidi’s writing grips the reader when he engages his natural mystical tendencies and sees beauty and oneness where others tend to see threat and 136 separateness. Lababidi includes a number of essays on the Egyptian Revolution or Arab Spring, a historical event “not merely overthrowing an old regime, but ushering in new ways of thinking and being” (96). Lababidi’s writing on the revolution is most impactful when it leaves the uprising for hidden moments in the nooks and crannies news cameras do not find. When he takes us down alleyways and side streets, Lababidi’s writing resembles Rumi’s teachings, inviting us to free our imaginations from tired political categories of good versus bad and see another way. Rumi famously writes, “Beyond ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” Lababidi explores this field in an imaginary interview with the city of Cairo in a piece called “The City and Its Writer.” Lababidi guides us through a tour of bustling Cairo and gives us “an artist’s story” of the city today, pointing out what “goes unnoticed by most”: “the innocent joy we take in dancing”; the “wit and verse” that are “always sport”; “house parties, where literary life thrives," uprising or not (179, 174-76). Lababidi’s short story “Encounter” is perhaps the most moving piece on the revolution though it never mentions uprising. An “I,” a wayward self, meets a “longed-for-self” who represents inborn dignity forgotten (241). I imagine the two selves symbolizing two Egypts: a magisterial Egypt waiting patiently for the present- day, tumultuous Egypt to return to its birthright of ancient wisdom. Lababidi has a rare gift for offering mystical perspectives on the revolution. I would’ve liked to have seen him place greater trust in those gifts, that is, leave the uprising à la Rumi and write more pieces resembling “Encounter" and "The City and Its Writer.” Lababidi aches to leave the battleground, too, for he shares toward the end of the volume that he is “wary of tackling politics, directly, and commenting on every twist and turn in the news” (198). Leaving the political battlefield is difficult, because writers with mystical sensibilities feel pressure to keep their mystical insights quieter than their political discourse if they want their work to be accepted or even published. Some thinkers accuse mystical writers of apathy or irresponsibility if they do not engage politics in legible storylines of protagonists and antagonists. Lababidi seems to make this charge as well, stating, “I think it unconscionable for the artist to fiddle while Rome burns” (185). Some mystical artists might respond that it is unconscionable not to fiddle while Rome burns. Mystics see directly into the divinity of all humans— tyrants and victims alike—a vision equipping mystical writers to leave tired political storylines of good versus bad and trace the thoughts of God, who, like the sky, takes no sides, and instead covers and unites everything and everyone, like the narrators of "Encounter" and "The City and Its Writer." Lababidi uses the language of soaring above the battlefield to describe mystical perspective: “Religion might be the runway and the mystic has taken off, . . . intensifying what it means to wing it on your own. 137 . . . Once you decide the open sky is your home, then it becomes trickier to find somewhere to perch and make your nest” (164). Lababidi’s essays on Egypt show he is torn: one foot stands on the political battlefield, wanting to “perch” and be on the right side in a revolution. The other foot ventures out of the mystical closet toward “sky.” I would urge writers with mystical sensibilities to loosen their perch on the political battleground and utilize their gifts to follow “the higher law of beauty” with confidence (168). From this detached but radically loving perspective, mystics leave the conflagration of good-versus-bad and kindle a different radiance: everyone-is- innocent, including so-called enemies. The public aches for stories of healing like “Encounter,” a song tuned to tenderness even for the villain. Mystical writers are fiddlers equipped to play this music. Brevity is Lababidi’s gift in the form of aphorism. The essays, too, are short, but often too short, leaving readers not quite ready to leave the rich conversations Lababidi’s exquisite writing has started. One area that deserves more attention is the spiritual and mystical writing of women. The book is highly masculine, quoting male poets and mystics robustly, from Rumi to Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard. Lababidi mentions Susan Sontag as an influence on his work, as well as includes short essays on Irish singer Sinead O’Connor and Kuwaiti visual artist Shurooq Amin. His primary love, though, is for essayists and poets, and he devotes an essay to two women spiritual and mystical writers: presidential candidate and writer Marianne Williamson, and writer, psychologist, and poet Helen Schucman. Yet he dismisses both women’s work, calling their writing “distorted theology” without quoting Williamson and downplaying Schucman as a “helpless scribe” (28, 27). Instead of engaging with these women’s voluminous work directly, Lababidi turns to “time-honored and respected spiritual and philosophical traditions” championed by men (27-28). He robustly quotes men’s ideas about these women’s writing, choosing to quote one of these women only once, and dismissively, in a short quotation from Schucman’s A Course in Miracles. It is certainly fine to disagree with Williamson’s and Schucman’s ideas. But to discredit the women’s writing as a “hoax” and brush their work off as “self-help talk” unwittingly betrays Lababidi’s call, later, to “leave room for [others] to participate” (29, 172). In disparaging these women’s versions of mysticism, Lababidi unintentionally furthers the shame surrounding mysticism that perhaps can make it so “difficult” for our culture, collectively, to “talk openly about the soul.” Inviting women spiritual writers and mystics into the conversation might lend particular insight to the relationship between mind and spirit that fascinates Lababidi. He finds mind at odds with spirit, explaining that he is “fed up with the

138 mind”; “I’m less enamored of the mind, its tyranny and seductions. . . . Displacing my fascination with the life of the mind,” he continues, “is a deep respect for the life of the spirit” (191). Adding a feminine, even feminist perspective to Lababidi’s overwhelmingly male—and arguably masculinist—discussion of mind and spirit might offer different, less oppositional approaches. Schucman’s work, coming from what might be called a Christian midrashic tradition, finds that mind and spirit mesh. “Hold to the Thought the Christ has placed in you,” Schucman writes; “Accept Christ’s Thought, and let it be your own” The( Gifts of God, 19). Poet and scholar Mohja Kahf, writing from an Islamic tradition, collapses divisions between mind and spirit like Schucman does. The “holiest of holies has been placed,” Kahf writes, “in the mihrab of your mind” (Hagar Poems, 95). Including more women’s voices, especially from the Sufi tradition Lababidi reveres, such as Rabi’a al-‘Adawiyya, Mahsati Ganjavi, and Jahan Khatun, might offer spiritual insights, if not to agree with, at least to engage. These women’s writing, especially Schucman’s, might model ways for Lababidi to infuse his interest in politics with mystical perspectives of nearly incomprehensible care, forgiveness, and innocence for those on any and all sides of a policital situation. Lababidi’s wish to widen participation in mystical conversations is one of the volume’s most urgent contributions. The volume shares frank and refreshing insights with budding writers and anyone called to create beauty. In a brilliant analogy in the essay “So, You Published a Book—Now What?,” Lababidi compares writing a book to parenting: “Think of publishing as parenting. Do your responsibilities end with having a baby? No, they begin” (122). He describes the new life that begins upon book publication: tours, signings, and promotion across all possible mediums (internet, print, radio, podcasts, friends, family). “Accept empty chairs” at readings and book promotions, “overlook the yawning, texting” (122). He also advises writers to “approach an author who works in the same genre”; “begin networking, and try to do so with elegance and grace” (123). For mystical writers in and out of the closet with few visible role models, Lababidi’s advice to forge community is invaluable. His corpus launches something remarkable: a vocabulary that beckons mystics, prodding them to trust their voices and come out of the closet, too. I encourage readers everywhere to study and enjoy Lababidi's past, present, and future work, for his books serve as public squares and parks in which he invites us to gather in mystic pride. Spread the word. Invite friends.

Works Cited Kahf, Mohja. Hagar Poems. Fayetteville, AR: The University of Arkansas Press, 2016.

139 Schucman, Helen. The Gifts of God. Tiburun, CA: Foundation for Inner Peace, 1982.

140 A Review of Her Sister's Tattoo by Jacqueline Sheehan

HER SISTER'S TATTOO Ellen Meeropol Red Hen Press (April 7, 2020) 296 Pages $17.49 Paperback ISBN: 978-1597098441 To order: https://smile.amazon.com/Her-Sisters-Tat- too-Ellen-Meeropol/dp/1597098442/ref=tmm_pap_ swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

I’ve been a fan of Ellen Meeropol’s novels for ten years. Each book merged personal drama with social justice. But not until Her Sister’s Tattoo has Meeropol so masterfully grasped the political strife in our country since the 1960’s. And as a true novelist can do, she allows us to experience the turmoil through the intimate lives of two characters who we come to know and understand. Rosa and Esther Levin are caught up in the passion and violence of the anti-war protests of 1968 in Detroit. When protest marchers are bloodied by the mounted police, the sisters spontaneously take an action to distract the police that would seem innocuous, even childlike. They hurl apples at the police. But a horse is spooked and a police officer is horribly injured. In that one moment, their lives change in unimaginable ways, driving a brutal wedge between the two sisters that will endure for decades. The dynamics of loyalty to family and one’s conscience become the battleground for a truly American novel. Meeropol forces us to answer our own quandaries about how far one can ethically go in a political movement to protest injustice. Feelings about the war in Viet Nam drove families and a nation apart. The two sisters are pummeled by just how painful this divide was and how insidiously the pain remained in the veins of the sisters and in our country. Late in the book, (I’m not giving anything away here) a character says, “The Levin sisters taught me it’s not your family that determines who you become. It’s not even your abilities. Your choices define you.”

141 We all make choices every day that define us, but some of us make choices with more lethal consequences. Will our loyalties reside first with our loved ones, or should we sacrifice even our freedom to a larger belief in what is right? Meeropol pulls back the curtain on the lives of two sisters in the midst of this and by doing so, pulls back the curtain on a history of political activism that reverberates through time. For those with an eye for politics and fiction, Ellen Meeropol’s novel will not disappoint.

142 A Review of Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound by adele kenny

KISSING THE LONG FACE OF THE GREYHOUND By Yvonne Zipter Terrapin Books (2020) 81 Pages $16.00 Paperback ISBN: 978-1947896291 To order: https://www.amazon.com/Kissing-Long-Grey- hound-Yvonne-Zipter/dp/1947896296/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1 UB8RR1YHSUI3&dchild=1&keywords=kissing+the+lon g+face+of+a+greyhound&qid=1601216602&sprefix=kissi ng+the+long+f%2Caps%2C142&sr=8-1

It isn’t often that a book cover is so visually stunning that a potential reader is immediately captivated. Sometimes, however, a book’s contents don’t measure up to the cover. In this case, Yvonne Zipter’s poems do not disappoint! Her work is extraordinarily rich in metaphor and meaning and skillfully crafted in language that is both compressed and compelling. The poems in this collection come to bear on love, loss, and grief—things the poet has been forced to learn about herself, things we are all, ultimately, required to learn.

Often, Zipter illustrates the human spirit in terms that speak of the natural world, almost as if she incorporates the two so deftly that they become one. Witness the way in which she creates an ideal weighing scale between the spiritual and temporal worlds, between nature and human nature in “Hummingbird”:

The hummingbird, color of a manzanilla olive, and I, color of red clay, hail one another from a comfortable distance as it hovers in imitation of a child’s rendering of a star—a fury of lines dashing from a central node. I might be holding my breath when it shoots away and leaves me wishing on it,

143 leaves me spellbound, dumbstruck, reverent, leaves me with a wild resolve to hold it on a willowy thread of words, leaves me. (12)

Many of the poems in this collection are powered by memories and loss. Writing of her mother’s cancer and prosthetic breast fitting, Zipter says:

In those days when it was shameful for a woman to be so careless as to lose a breast, my mother wore a scar like the sign of the cross ablaze on her chest, the edges puckered like a narrow lip imparting disapproval.

… I, a shy fourteen, searched among the bustiers and brassieres for something to look at that didn’t remind me of loss … (15)

And anyone who has experienced post-surgical fear will identify with “Postsurgical Slumber”:

The moon pokes out of the sky like a troubled tooth, clouds worrying over it like tongues that cannot stay away, while I follow the long red line of my body’s betrayal through a disquieted sleep. One expects wolves on a night like this, or ghosts. (19) 144 These are poems of acceptance and resilience, generous with caesuras and flawless line breaks through which the reader is invited to spend time with each image and phrase. Also infused with passion and tenderness, many of the poems in this collection speak to relationships. In “Presentiment,” Zipter writes that she “will die in an avalanche of books.” She says that the pages “will sigh as they settle” over her and accept her "into their fold.” Interestingly, she brings the poem to closure within the context of a relationship:

… and I will read like a mirror of what I have loved. The deckled edges of poetry books will remind me of speckled moths and the late May of my life. The unforgiving corners of hardbacks will suggest my stepfather, the failed military man looking for someone to command. There will be no words for the experience. Or maybe I mean there will be only words. … Live by the word, die by the word will be my last thought. Or, no, the penultimate. For the word penultimate will make me think final pen and then, mostly, of you, my dearest, and how you loved that word and what was yet to come. (56)

Zipter writes attentively and gracefully. She brings time and place together with an aesthetic steeped in the profound emotion of being human and knowing how it feels to be truly alive. While reading, I found myself thinking of Sylvia Plath and Mary Oliver and how Zipter is, in her own way (and in my opinion), uniquely better than both:

Going where the dogs’ noses take us—through the little woods to the old racetrack, this particular— this very particular—morning in June, the asphalt oval giving way 145 to wildness, green pushing up through every crevice and into this time before the world rises. Beyond, I let the grass run its fingers over the naked back of my foot. The dogs and I are drenched now with dew and birdsong. … (61)

These are the poems of a poet whose full and fully realized life is buttressed by love’s redemptive power—love for her spouse, for her beloved greyhounds, for the natural world, and for life as it is. From “Redemption”:

Before us, lily pads crowd the west end of the lake like footprints, a blueprint for some complex dance of nature. We pause among their confusion, giving physics a rest, letting our thoughts stretch and roam across the landscape, your voice always behind me.

… We push through, unsure of our destination yet somehow managing to row there together. (65, 66)

As one might expect from the title, dogs (and a cat) figure poignantly in this collection. In one poem, Zipter awes the reader with her image of a deceased dog whose ears “lay like spent milkweed pods.” In “Guarding Our Grief,” Zipter writes of putting their tabby cat to sleep (and any reader who has ever had to have a pet put down is unlikely to read this poem dry-eyed):

146 It is too bright in here; the light glares, refuses to let us deny a thing.

…The air flutters from her lungs, her tongue slides out like a penitent’s waiting for Communion. The vet leans to listen with stethoscope. Her heart, he says, is stopped. The rest is simply reflex. Left to our goodbyes, we stroke familiar mottled fur. Still supple, she might only be sleeping. … (50)

The title poem, triumphant in its moment of perception, touches the heart and soul of anyone who has ever shared his or her life with a dearly-loved pet:

My dog’s head is the exact shape and size of a Brooks leather bicycle saddle, and I love to seat a kiss on the snout of her, bending over that jetty of face, our heads cheekbone to cheekbone—

… The thrill of knowing we are only the span of a sense memory from past perfidy, a whisker’s breadth from pointed tooth and unfurling flesh. (53)

Dylan Thomas noted, “You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick ...You’re back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps ... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.” The poems inKissing the Long Face of the Greyhound

147 touch the heart with such force, with so much that creeps, crawls, flashes, and thunders in, that the reader is often left breathless but, still, wanting more.

This is a beautifully produced volume filled with poems that match Terrapin’s signature elegance. Yvonne Zipter will elevate your senses, gladden and break your heart, and take you to that place deep within yourself where reconciliation, hope, and healing begin.

148 Contributors

PAMELA A. BABUSCI Pamela A. Babusci is an internationally award-winning haiku/tanka & haiga artist. Some of her awards include: Museum of Haiku Literature Award, First Place Mount Fuji Tanka Contest, First Place HPNC Tanka Contest, and First Place Mainichi Haiku Award. Pamela is the founder and editor of moonbathing: a journal of women tanka, the first all-women’s international tanka journal.

BENJAMIN BAGOCIUS Benjamin Bagocius teaches writing and literature at Bard High School Early College in Cleveland, Ohio. His essays and poems appear in a range of venues, including On Being, Soul-Lit, After the Pause, Lit, Modernism/modernity, and others. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Indiana University, an M.F.A. in creative writing from The New School, and a B.A. in English from Kenyon College. He facilitates Soul Salon, an online spiritual writing-and-conversation gathering. Feel free to email Ben at [email protected].

AMANDA BERRY Amanda Berry is a poet and middle school teacher. Her poems have appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Edison Literary Review, English Journal, and other publications. Her chapbook, Second Sight, was published by Finishing Line Press. Amanda holds a Ph. D. in the history of doctrine from Princeton Theological Seminary.

SALLIE BINGHAM Sallie Bingham is a life-long professional writer with thirteen titles currently published, including short stories, novels, poems, memoirs and a play. Her 2020 books include The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, April 2020) and Treason: A Salllie Bingham Reader (Sarbande Books, August 2020).

LAURA BOSS Laura Boss is a first prize winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Gordon Barber Poetry Contest and the recipient of three NJSCA Fellowships. Founder and Editor of Lips, her recent books include Arms: New and Selected Poems, Flashlight (both

149 Guernica Editions) and The Best Lover (NYQ, 2017). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The New York Times.

RAECHEL BRATNICK Raechel Bratnick’s memoir The Likelihood of Dawn: An Intimate Journey Within and Beyond Grief, was a finalist this year in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. She is a Kabbalistic healer, psychotherapist, dreamer and author of Awakening the Dreamer. For seven years she lived and traveled in Mexico and Europe. During the pandemic, she relocated to Massachusetts. She loves writing, poetry, drawing and the reflections of human beings.www.raechelbratnick.com

ELLEN PRENTISS CAMPBELL "Ruby" previously appeared in the Ellen Prentiss Campbell's Known By Heart: Collected Stories (Apprentice House Press, Loyola University, May 2020). Her debut novel, The Bowl with Gold Seams received the Indy Excellence Award for Historical Fiction; Contents Under Pressure: Collected Stories was nominated for The National Book Award. A reviewer for journals including The Fiction Writers Review, Campbell's second novel, Frieda's Song, will be published in 2021. She lives in Washington, DC. (www.ellencampbell.net)

AMY CHAMPEAU Amy Champeau is a Jungian psychoanalyst and psychotherapist in private practice in Tucson, Arizona. She received her MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles where she served as assistant editor of the creative nonfiction, flash prose and amuse bouche teams for Lunch Ticket. Her work has previously been published in Pilgrimage magazine. The essay which appears in this issue ofTiferet Journal was longlisted for the 2020 Prism Magazine Creative Nonfiction Prize. Contact: amychampeau@gmail. com. Website: www.somaandpsychetucson.com.

RAY CICETTI Ray Cicetti’s poems have been published in a variety of journals including Tiferet, Exit 13, Stillwater Review and the online journal The Metaworker. He also contributed the chapter “A Journey Toward Awakening: Self-Relations and Mindfulness,” in the sourcebook Walking in Two Worlds, edited by Gilligan and Simon. A featured poet in various reading series, Ray is also a teacher in the Zen Buddhist tradition and senior teacher at the Empty Bowl Zen Community. He currently lives in Mountain Lakes with his wife Carolyn.

150 PHILIP F. CLARK Philip F. Clark is the author of The Carnival of Affection (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). He teaches poetry and creative writing at City College, New York, where he received his M.F.A in 2016. He most recently is the Poetry Editor of A&U Magazine, and an Associate Editor at The Night Heron Barks. His poems and reviews have been published in Vox Populi, Lambda Literary, The Good Men Project, HIV Here and Now, as well as other publications.

JOAN DAIDONE Joan Daidone is a writer and creative activist living between New York City and the Harlem Valley. She writes short fiction, one-act plays, prose poems and essays as a way to connect to the divine and be a voice for the often silenced feminine spirit. She’s worked in educational publishing, media, and communications for 25+ years. Joan teaches ESL writing to immigrant teens and young adults through various community programs, including PEN America Writing in the Schools program. Currently, she’s working on a book of prose poetry celebrating the art of her late husband, Brian Saltern. Contact: [email protected]. Upcoming website and blog: www.joandaidone.com

JESSICA DE KONINCK Jessica de Koninck is the author of one full-length collection, Cutting Room (Terrapin Books) and one chapbook, Repairs (Finishing Line Press). Her work has been featured on the Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily. Jessica leads poetry workshops and is a long-time resident of Montclair, New Jersey, where she is very active in the community.

GRACE DE ROND Grace de Rond writes about effective living atgracederond.com and for sites including Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global. Grace’s focus is on how to use our inner worlds to shape our outer worlds. She’s lived on an Israeli kibbutz, walked on fire with Tony Robbins, attended events with the Dalai Lama and Pope John Paul II, and cooked for Barbara Marx Hubbard and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. She lives outside Amsterdam with her coauthor/husband. Their new book is calledThoughts Worth Thinking on Life, Career, Lovers and Children.

KRIS FAATZ Kris Faatz’s short fiction has appeared in journals includingKenyon Review Online, The Baltimore Review, and 100 Word Story. Her first novel, To Love A Stranger

151 (2017, Blue Moon Publishers), was a finalist for the 2016 Schaffner Press Music in Literature Award. Kris teaches creative writing and is a performing pianist.

KIM HANSEN Kim Hansen wasn’t sure whether to dance or work for the forestry department, so she received her MFA in dance and spends time outdoors every day. Writing, especially poems and letters, is another way she explores the relationship of humans moving in our environments. Kim is a massage therapist and Feldenkrais Practitioner and lives in Boulder, Colorado with her astronomer husband and their translator son.

PENNY HARTER Penny Harter’s work has appeared in Persimmon Tree, Rattle, Tiferet, and many other journals as well as anthologies. Her poem "In the Dark" was featured in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. Her most recent collection is A Prayer the Body Makes (2020). A featured reader at the 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival, she has won three fellowships from the NJSCA, two fellowships from VCCA, and awards from the Dodge Foundation and the PSA.

NADIA IBRASHI Nadia Ibrashi’s work appears with Narrative, Quiddity,The Southeast Review, Atticus Review, Nimrod, The MacGuffin, Rosebud, Mobius, and others. Her prose and poetry have been nominated for four Pushcarts prizes. She served as assistant editor at Narrative magazine, and has practiced medicine in Egypt and in the States.

SUSAN JACKSON Susan Jackson is a New Jersey poet transplanted to Teton County, Wyoming. Her book Through a Gate of Trees was published by CavanKerry Press and chapbook All the Light in Between brought out by Finishing Line Press. She writes, “I am grateful to Tiferet for fostering this strong community of writers and seekers.”

NANCY K. JENTSCH Nancy K. Jentsch’s poetry has recently appeared in Eclectica, EcoTheo Review, Panoply and in numerous anthologies. In 2020, she received an Arts Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her chapbook, Authorized Visitors, was published in 2017 and her writer’s page on Facebook is https://www.facebook.com/ NancyJentschPoet/

152 JEN KARETNICK Jen Karetnick is the author of five full-length poetry collections, includingHunger Until It's Pain (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming spring 2023); The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, August 2020); and The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016), finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Book Prize. She is also the author of five poetry chapbooks, includingThe Crossing Over (March 2019), winner of the 2018 Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition. Her poems have been awarded the Hart Crane Memorial Prize, the Romeo Lemay Poetry Prize, the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, and two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes, among others. Her work appears recently or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, The Comstock Review, december, Michigan Quarterly Review, Terrain, Under a Warm Green Linden, and elsewhere. Co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, Jen is currently a Deering Estate Artist-in-Residence. Find her on Twitter @Kavetchnik and Instagram @JenKaretnick, or see jkaretnick.com.

ROGAN KELLY Rogan Kelly is the author of Demolition in the Tropics (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019) and the editor of The Night Heron Barks.

ADELE KENNY Adele Kenny, Tiferet’s poetry editor since 2006, is the author of 25 books, a former creative writing professor, and founding director of the Carriage House Poetry Series. Among other awards, she has received poetry fellowships from the NJ State Arts Council, a Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and Kean University’s Distinguished Alumni Award. One of her books was a Paterson Poetry Prize finalist, and she has twice been a featured Dodge Festival poet.

YAHIA LABABIDI Yahia Lababidi, Egyptian-American, is the author of nine critically acclaimed books of poetry and prose. His forthcoming collection of spiritual poems and aphorisms, Learning to Pray: a Book of Longing, is due in 2021 (Kelsay Books). Nominated for a Pushcart Prize three times, Lababidi has participated in international poetry festivals throughout the USA, Europe, and the Middle East. You can learn more about his work, here.

NANCY LUBARSKY Nancy Lubarsky is a recently retired school superintendent. She’s been published in various journals including Exit 13, Lips, Tiferet, Poetic, Stillwater Review and Paterson

153 Literary Review. She’s the author of two books: Tattoos (Finishing Line) and The Only Proof (Kelsay Press). She received honorable mention from the Alan Ginsburg Poetry Contest (2014, 2016) and from the Anna Davidson Poetry Contest (2018).

JOHN MCDERMOTT John McDermott has taught ESL in China, Japan, and the USA. A former editor of US1 Worksheets, he has had poems published in Japan and the USA and has performed his work at the G.R. Dodge Poetry Festival. The Long Way Home, book and CD, were published by Everyday Path Press.

ELLEN MEEROPOL Ellen Meeropol is the author of the novels Her Sister’s Tattoo, Kinship of Clover, On Hurricane Island, and House Arrest. Essay publications include Ms. Magazine, Lit Hub, Lilith, Mom Egg Review, The Boston Globe, and Guernica. Her work has been honored by the Women’s National Book Association, the Massachusetts Center for the Book, PBS NewsHour, and the American Book Fest. A founding member of Straw Dog Writers Guild, Ellen coordinates their Social Justice Writing project.

JED MYERS Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press), and four chapbooks. Recent recognitions include the Prime Number Magazine Award, The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Prize, and The Tishman Review’s Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize. Poems have appeared recently in Rattle, Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Southern Poetry Review, Ruminate, and elsewhere. Myers is Poetry Editor for Bracken.

ESTHER MIZRACHI Esther Mizrachi is a native New Yorker who lives and writes in Austin, Texas. “The House on 66th Street” is adapted from her memoir-in-progress about leaving Brooklyn’s SY community. Esther’s personal essays have appeared in Lilith Magazine and Ducts.org. She is the author of hundreds of books, stories, and articles for the K-12 classroom market.

MICHELLE ORTEGA Michelle Ortega is a speech-language pathologist in New Jersey. Her writing has been published online and in print, at Tweetspeak Poetry, Casual (an e-book), Tiferet Journal, Exit 13, Shrew LitMag, Contemporary Haibun Online, Snapdragon: A Journal of Healing, The Platform Review, Frost Meadow Review and abroad in Horizon: The 154 Haiku Anthology. Her microchapbook, Tissue Memory, is forthcoming with Porkbelly Press (2021) as is her chapbook, Don’t Ask Why, with Seven Kitchens Press (August 2020).

JAWANZA PHOENIX Jawanza Phoenix is the author of two poetry collections: The Intersection of Beauty and Crime and I Need an Assignment. His work has appeared in Exit 13 Magazine, Lips, Paterson Literary Review and African Voices. He lives in northern New Jersey where he practices law.

FRANCES RICHEY Frances Richey is the author of three poetry collections: The Warrior (Viking Penguin 2008), The Burning Point (White Pine Press 2004), and the chapbook, Voices of the Guard, (Clackamas Community College 2010). She teaches an on-going poetry writing class at Himan Brown Senior Program at the 92nd Street Y in NYC, and is Poetry Editor for upstreet literary magazine. She lives in NYC.

JUDE RITTENHOUSE Jude Rittenhouse has received a Writer's Grant from the Vermont Studio Center and poetry awards from Glimmer Train Press, Inc., and Poets and Patrons of Chicago, plus finalist designations for the Tiferet Poetry Prize and the Pablo Neruda Prize. Her poems have been published in literary magazines and anthologies, including Nimrod International Journal; Tiferet Journal; DoveTales; Newport Review; and Lay Bare the Canvas: New England Poets on Art (The Poetry Loft, 2014), among others. She was also a founding co-editor of the feminist literary magazine Moon Journal (1995- 2009), which is archived in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College. For over twenty-five years, Jude has taught writing and inner-growth classes and has been a speaker at conferences, retreats, schools, hospitals, hospices, and domestic violence shelters. With a master’s degree in counseling, along with extensive additional training, she is in private practice in Rhode Island.

LISA ROMEO Lisa Romeo is the author of the memoir Starting With Goodbye (University of Nevada Press). Her work has been listed in Best American Essays 2018 and 2016, and has appeared in the New York Times, Longreads, Brevity, and other places. Lisa teaches in an MFA program and is a freelance editor. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two sons. Learn more at her website, http://LisaRomeo.net

155 BOB ROSENBLOOM Bob Rosenbloom is the author of Reunion (Finishing Line Press). He is founding co-host of the Somerset Poetry Group Reading Series. Widely published in literary journals and anthologies, he has an MA in creative writing (City College of New York) and is a certified civil trial attorney. Before law school, Bob often appeared in comedy showcases as a stand-up comic and once sold six jokes to Joan Rivers.

PERVIN SAKET Pervin Saket is the author of the novel Urmila and of a collection of poetry A Tinge of Turmeric. Her novel has been adapted for the stage, featuring classical Indian dance forms. Her poems have been featured in The Indian Quarterly, The Joao-Roque Literary Journal, Paris Lit Up, The Madras Courier, Borderless Journal, The Punch Magazine, Cold Noon, Breaking the Bow and others. Pervin is co-founder of the annual Dum Pukht Writers’ Workshop, Pondicherry, India.

JACQUELINE SHEEHAN Jacqueline Sheehan, Ph.D. is a bestselling novelist. Her novels include: The Comet’s Tale, based on the life of Sojourner Truth, Lost & Found, Now & Then, Picture This, The Center of the World, and The Tiger in the House. She was awarded fellowships at Hawthornden Castle, Jentel Arts, and Turkey Land Cove. She teaches writing workshops in Massachusetts and at international retreats. www.jacquelinesheehan. com

ROBERT VIVIAN Robert Vivian is a professor of English and creative writing at Alma College in Michigan and teaches as a core faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of four novels as well as two essay collections, Cold Snap as Yearning and The Least Cricket of Evening, all available from the University of Nebraska Press, as well as the collection of dervish essays, Immortal Soft-Spoken. His latest book, All I Feel Is Rivers, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2020.

BETH WALKER Beth Walker has poetry in recent issues of Persephone’s Daughters and Rockvale Review and has poems upcoming in Buddhist Poetry Review. She was a finalist in 2019’s Hemingway Shorts flash fiction competition, sponsored by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, as well as a finalist in Minerva Rising’s 2020 Dare to Tell nonfiction chapbook competition. Her scholarship on the #MeToo movement will appear in an upcoming edited collection by Bloomsbury. 156 STEVEN WINGATE Steven Wingate is the author of the novels Of Fathers and Fire (2019) and The Leave-Takers (forthcoming 2021), both part of the Flyover Fiction Series from the University of Nebraska Press. His short story collection Wifeshopping (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), won the Bakeless Prize in Fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is associate editor at Fiction Writers Review and associate professor at South Dakota State University.

BETSY WOODMAN New Hampshire native Betsy Woodman is a novelist, essayist, public speaker, amateur musician, and history buff. HerJana Bibi trilogy of novels drew on her childhood in India and earned the affection of readers across the globe. She was a writer and editor for the award-winning documentary series, Experiencing War, produced for the Library of Congress and aired on Public Radio International. Editing history textbooks sparked her interest in World War I and she is currently working on a novel set in New Hampshire and France during the Great War. Please visit www.betsywoodman.com

MICHAEL T. YOUNG Michael T. Young’s third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His work has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including Cimarron Review, Gargoyle Magazine, One, Rattle, and Valparaiso Poetry Review.

YVONNE ZIPTER Yvonne Zipter is the author of the full-length collection The Patience of Metal (Hutchinson House), which was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and the chapbook Like Some Bookie God (Pudding House Publications). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is also the author of two nonfiction books:Diamonds Are a Dyke’s Best Friend (Firebrand Books) and Ransacking the Closet (Spinsters Ink). She lives in Illinois.

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