The Grief Bearers A thesis submitted to Kent State University in partial Fulfillmet of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts by Mary Roulete May, 2017 Copyright All rights reserved Except for previously published materials Thesis written by Mary Roulette B.A., Kent State University, 2007 M.F.A., Kent State University, 2017 Approved by ____________________________________________, Advisor Professor Imad Rahmn ____________________________________________, Interim Chair, Department of English Dr. Patricia Dunmire ____________________________________________, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences Dr. James L. Blank TABLE OF CONTENTS…………………………………………………… iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………. …. v CHAPTERS I. Prologue ……………………………………………………….. 1 II. Part One ……………………………………………………….. 4 Cri de Cœur …………………………………………………..... 5 Hebrews 13:2 …………………………………………………. 13 They Entered the House ………………………………………. 19 Crone ………………………………………………………….. 21 Little White Lie ……………………………………………….. 25 III. Part Two ……………………………......................................... 28 House Guests: First Impressions ……………………………... 29 The Well ………………………………………………………. 30 Good Morning…um…Mr. Bird ………………………………. 36 Victor .…………………………………………………………. 42 Ghosts .………………………………………………………… 44 Witnesses ………………………………………………………. 46 Usurpers ……………………………………………………….. 47 IV. Part Three ……………………………………………………… 52 Alice …………………………………………………………... 53 The Possessed and the Dispossessed ………………………….. 57 The Queen of England ………………………………………... 62 A Hundred Dead Animals ……………………………………..70 iii Collisions ………………………………………………………. 73 Writing on the Wall ……………………………………………. 80 Abdullah Al-Baradouni ………………………………………… 84 In Water ………………………………………………………… 91 V. Part Four …………………………………………………………92 A Blinding Light ………………………………………………. 93 The Truth Is …………………………………………………….. 95 Journal Entry …………………………………………………... 106 Message on the Ceiling …………………………………………107 The Priest ……………………………………………………….110 Lilacs ……………………………………………………………121 VI. Part Five ……………………………………………………….. 125 Run ……………………………………………………….......... 126 As the Crow Flies……………………………………………..... 127 VII. Epilogue ……………………………………………………….. 136 VIII. Poems ………………………………………………………….. 137 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to my sister Ellen McHugh and daughter Casey Gruden, my tireless readers and champions, who threw me a rope again and again when I was at the bottom of the well until I caught it. Thanks to my thesis director Imad Rahman and committee members Robert Miltner and Mike Geither for their enthusiasm, encouragement, and priceless feedback on my thesis. Thanks to my NEOMFA instructors and to the Imagination guest speakers and workshop moderators who cultivated an atmosphere of openness and respectful debate in which every student’s voice was validated. Thanks to Shelia Schwartz, my first fiction workshop instructor, whose kind, meticulous attention to my work gave me the courage to write the first tentative pages of this novel in progress from which a few sentences still remain. Thanks to Michael Dumanis, whose brilliant coffee shop workshop helped put my poem published in Pleiades in the hands of my father before he passed away. Thanks to my children and grandchildren for their love; and to my father and mother— and my son Michael—all glimmering over the grave horizon. v Prologue Micah 1:8 Therefore I will wail and howl, I will go stripped and naked: I will make a wailing like the dragons, and mourning as the owls. One would think the residents of Cemetery, Ohio—named in 1847 for its founder George Hobart Cemetery—pioneer, philanthropist, shameless philanderer—might have noticed the macabre coincidence inherent in a town called Cemetery, with its plethora of old grave yards sprinkling the mostly flat, quotidian landscape. But that was hardly the case, unless, of course, you were a newcomer, and newcomers, due to the town’s small size—or rather the lack of anything that would attract outsiders to settle there—were rare in Cemetery. And unlike other nearby cities and towns that had the practical foresight to circumscribe areas of land large enough and early enough on to gather and contain their future dead, Cemetery had not. No, Cemetery’s ubiquitous dead were scattered like dandelion seeds and sunk in small unkempt grave yards, with the mostly flat markers mixed in with dozens of old falling down headstones. Many of the headstones had long since lost their inscriptions to decades of driving coastal winds and rain, their white stone faces now washed blank and smooth as lake glass. And it was a sorry fact too, though the town’s residents were oblivious to it, that there were more dead now in Cemetery than alive, and, as with the world in general, it had been so for a very long time. # 1 210 Linden Avenue Cemetery, Ohio People walking by Shane and Claire Bird’s house in spring and summer of that year— when the parlor and bedroom windows were thrown open to let the fresh lake air in—might have heard loud thumps like furniture being turned over, glass breaking, and the gut-twisting howls of a couple duking out the most serious of marital infractions, such as infidelity; certainly the kind of hot domestic dysfunction foreshadowing divorce. Startling and upsetting but not unthinkable, stumbling upon yet another marriage crashing and burning, witnessed with their own ears, the joggers and people riding by on bikes; moms pushing strollers in the company of women friends walking little mongrels named Max; all the drab and colorful outdoorsies streaming down the sidewalks—for these were a tough, hardy people resigned to extremes of heat and cold and the countless damp, miserable days in between—all of whom must have jumped out of their skins when the first death-metal notes blasted onto the sidewalk from the Bird’s once lovely, now quite dilapidated, old mansion on the lake. Startling and upsetting but not unthinkable. Yet what had happened to Claire and Shane Bird was the unthinkable. No marital strife had caused their house to quake and list like a ship in a storm since the nineteenth of May. Claire and Shane weren’t railing against each other; they were railing together, against the unthinkable thing, the unthinkable thing: the death of their beloved son Fen— —who hears everything now inside that house, and inside the people inside the house, what’s in their heads 24/7. Yeah, I can hear and see and feel everything now, particularly my mother’s grief, that ellipses of trauma, her heart’s trauma taking up all the room, like cymbals crashing and reverberating inside me. And inside the house: shocks of blues and reds, a violet 2 sky—no, a violent sky—penetrating the roof, windows, doors. The house, if only my mother and father could see what I see, is literally alive with their grief, but mainly her grief, my mother’s grief: Black mold runs down the walls, the white wainscoting. Fat rats gorge every day on my mother’s grief and leave their enormous piles of shit all over the floors. Florescent spiders cling to the light fixtures, shoot out of the vents, their long, serrated legs making a scratching sound like coarse sandpaper filing back and forth, back and forth. The window blinds grind and clatter, and each night, the stars wince and withdraw into their velvet sky, then blink out, every one. 3 Part One It begins in August, that absence of sound, of vigorous bird song grown fainter, then subsumed by the mad cacophony of crickets, frogs, and cicadas, until even that leaches away, is gradually silenced, with the rustling of leaves replaced too by the ache and creak of cold bare trees in winter. And for months, year after year, they must bend with it or stiffen against it, each new dead season demanding the same painful contortions of the heart… 4 Cri de Cœur Claire Bird 210 Linden Ave. Cemetery, Ohio 44045 December 8, 2016 Helen Brennan Poetry Editor Glass Parachute 420 Mauna Loa Lane El Mirage, Arizona Dear Helen, Thank you for considering my submission for Glass Parachute. I’ve enclosed two of my poems for your consideration. I presently teach English and Creative Writing at Florence Dyer Community College. I’ve had my poetry and short fiction published in Lissie’s Mirror; Ink pot; Forgery; Stillborn; Wooden Leg and others. I was awarded honorable mention in the Fanny Caldwell Arts and Letters Poetry Contest and won the Frieda Oxley Simms Outstanding Essay Award for a paper on Milton’s Paradise Lost— “ Between the Intellect and Imagination, Circling the Open Mind in Paradise Lost: ‘Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.’” I’m at work on a novel which incorporates my love of gothic themes in literature with an emphasis on the supernatural, while addressing the existential component at odds with all of that: mainly, the necessity of confronting one’s anguish as the most authentic and practical route to a more meaningful way of life. When I’m not teaching and writing, I’m moving pots around to catch the rain—in winter, we sweep the snow!— from the failing roof of our crumbling old house on the lake. Oh, yes, and my young granddaughter thinks this is great fun too! Thank you again for your consideration, and I look forward to your reply. Claire Bird Claire Bird Enclosures 5 How Afterward, the Long Branches Shuddered —for Fen I can’t write about it, not a poem, no metaphors or dreamy, baroque narratives slipping in and out of consciousness…so what the fuck was that that stopped us in our tracks at Wildwood, late afternoon, the whole park ours? All those gray fallen trees, cross-hatched, one on top of the other, and then the sound, abrupt, emphatic, like a giant’s hand had lifted the collapsed scaffolding and slammed it down hard. We both saw it: how afterward, the long branches shuddered. And the dog stood erect, her tail wagged once then stopped, stopped panting, panted twice more, then done, her soft body turned to stone. This dog who’d run after anything that moves. My son died six months ago—he died—that’s what I’m really trying to say here. And I want to tear up the ground and pull down the sky to find him. The dog, the dead trees, the giant’s hand—all of it— is just scaffolding.