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“Hiding from Breast Cancer” by Stacy Lawson

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Hiding from Breast Cancer. Little Wing

“Little Wing” by Suzanne Stryk, 2005

Home Breast Exam

I handle my breasts in the shower more than an adolescent boy touches his penis. I pretend that I am just washing. I make a round sweep with soap from the outside of each breast to the center, a gentle squeeze of the nipple, up under the armpit and down the side. This is my version of a no-stress home-breast exam. I reason if I wash daily, I’ll notice any lumps, bumps, or changes. Will I?

 

Stage Fright

Before awareness, there’s a dawning, a sliver of a line between not knowing and knowing—enough space for a dim light to seep in and expose a threat not yet seen, heard, smelled, or spoken. I can’t remember when I first heard the words breast cancer. I’m guessing that it was discussed in whispers before I had breasts or even breast buds. Maybe it was when Phyllis, a close family friend, died from metastatic breast disease when I was ten. I don’t remember anyone telling me that she was sick or that she was dying or that her sickness started in her breasts with a cluster of cells that turned into a lump; this was well before mammograms became a yearly event.

Odd, when you consider that I grew up with a one-breasted bubbie. My mother’s mother lived to a well-ripened age of 91 with a lone plump breast that dangled to her waist and sat opposite a red- and white-scarred flatland, and, yet, I never connected my grandmother’s missing breast with Phyllis’s death.

I recall my grandmother leaning over a white industrial bra and dropping her long breast into the deep cup and nonchalantly tucking a beige pad into the other side. I never asked after a second breast, and no one mentioned that she had once had two. Now, breast cancer would be obvious, but 45 years ago, there were no pink ribbons, pink rubber bracelets, breast cancer walks, postage-stamps, tins of tea, and bottled water screaming out grave statistics.

Back then, breast cancer wasn’t discussed in stages that sounded algebraic—Stage 0, 1, 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B, 3C, and 4, or more typically as Stage 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4. Stages are a shorthand way of discussing severity and survival with few words: Stage 0-1: Very good odds. Stage 2: A little worse but very doable odds. Stage 3: Serious. Stage 4: A life sentence with no cure possible.

I wonder if my grandmother’s cancer was staged as doctors refer to the process now. Would she have been a Stage 1 or a Stage 2? Before the mid-60s, mammograms didn’t exist; any lump or bump was biopsied. Clusters of abnormal cells were studied under the microscope. My 84-year-old mother wonders if her mother had cancer at all.

When I was eight or nine, I had a Barbie doll, a Stacey doll, my namesake, or so I wanted to believe. She was a top-heavy straight-haired platinum blonde who couldn’t have been further from my Russian-Jewish genes. Stacey, like Barbie, was sexy if you were into plastic. She was manufactured from 1968 to 1971, which coincided with my infatuation with top-heavy dolls, and measured an impossible 39-18-33—a body that appears naturally only once in every 100 000 women. It’s hard to believe that Barbie, the ultimate shiksa, was created by a Jewish woman, Ruth Handler. (Handler had breast cancer and invented right and left prosthetic breasts. Makes sense. We wouldn’t wear our left shoe on our right foot. Yeah, Ruth!)

Alas, my physical blueprint is closer to a matryoshka, a Russian stacking doll, than to a Barbie. I wonder if dolls will ever be made with a single breast to reflect the reality that some little girls and boys will see when their mothers or grandmothers disrobe in front of them.

 

Once Upon a Time

In Egypt around 1600 bce, breast cancer, described as ulcers of the breast or tumors, was first detected. Centuries later, doctors began to understand the circulatory system and linked breast cancer to the lymphatic system, the sprawling super-highway of lymph nodes (key agents for infection control), which runs throughout the body. In the 18th century, scientists discovered that this super-highway could also spread disease like a reversible lane on a modern freeway. William Stewart Halstead performed the first radical mastectomy, termed the Halstead radical mastectomy, which involved the removal of the pectoral muscles, all breast tissue, and the underarm lymph nodes; this was supposed to reduce the risk of the cancer spreading. Halstead radical mastectomies were routinely performed until the 1970s, when Rose Kushner was diagnosed with breast cancer and refused the one-stop biopsy and mastectomy surgery that had become standard practice. The journalist challenged the invasive, disfiguring surgery, which had been used for 70 years with no scientific evidence to back up the practice.  She made breast cancer into a political issue and pushed for legislation that would offer women choices in treatment. She pushed for coverage of annual mammography by Medicare. She pushed for more dollars for breast cancer research. Her work lead to the change in protocol from the Halstead radical mastectomy to the modified radical mastectomy

Kushner figured out that not all breast cancers are equal. Could my bubbie’s breast have been spared? Was this a matter of your breast or your life, ma’am?

Science and medicine march forward at an unnervingly slow pace, and we wait, holding our breath, having few other options.

 

Patricia Calderon

Patti was my best friend from age 12 on. Sex-crazed boys at the Turkish synagogue where we hung out on Saturday afternoons teased her mercilessly for her large breasts.  She wore high-neck t-shirts and sweaters, careful never to show cleavage until she was nearly a middle-aged woman. She refused to hide behind frumpy blouses like the other girls with unseasonably large breasts. Behind her back, the boys came up with a long list of breast terminology­—twins, tits, sisters, headlights, hooters, coconuts, casabas, cantaloupes, boulders, berthas, melons, and knockers­—while they made smacking sounds with their mouths and squeezing gestures with their hands. “Vavavavooom!” They’d explode when Patti or another amply developed girl came into view.

Who knew then what her future would hold?

 

Offerings

On the same day that my younger son, Shiah, was born, my friend Bobbie’s sister, Tina, died of breast cancer. Tina had offered up both breasts to the stainless-steel surgical altar a few years earlier to no avail.

At three-days old, Shiah was the color of a watery-yellow bruise. He was diagnosed with severe jaundice, which required another hospital stay for treatment in the neonatal intensive care unit. While he was laid out like a plant in a light box­ until his bilirubin count dropped to a normal level, he drank far less milk than I produced.

I pumped my breasts every few hours, placed the bottles of milk in the pockets of a flimsy hospital robe, and smuggled the liquid gold into the maternity ward where I skirted around the nurses on my way to visit my friend Johanna who had just given birth to her fifth child. Smiling, I pulled out my still-warm milk and offered it to her. Johanna had had a bi-lateral mastectomy, both breasts removed, four years earlier during pregnancy. Her third son was delivered early a few months later, so Johanna could undergo aggressive treatment for aggressive breast cancer.

Five days after Shiah was born, Patti’s mom called. Patti, of large-breasted fame, at age 42, was on her deathbed in Manhattan. She had been diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer in her late 30s. Her medical team had urged her to have a complete mastectomy. She had opted to have one breast removed and take her chances.

A few days later, Patti’s mom called. Patti had died. I was sitting cross-legged on the couch, nursing Shiah, talking to my in-laws and my husband. Noah was next to me, his shirt flipped-up while he nursed his doll named Baby.  I shook and sobbed uncontrollably. I wiped my nose with my sleeve and tried to pass Shiah to Steve, but Shiah was clamped to my nipple, not yet finished with his afternoon tea.

 

Who Knew that We knew?

Rachel Carson began writing Silent Spring, her epic environmental book, in the late 1950s. It traced the path of the chemical agent DDT through the food chain to humans via land, air, and water. She concluded that DDT was causing cancer and genetic damage. Her book was serialized in the New Yorker in 1962, a year after I was born, two years after Patti was born. Initially, no one was interested in Carson’s work despite the fact that she was a highly respected author. Her ideas were so out of line with the prevailing knowledge that they were dismissed as if Carson had lost her way, if not her mind.

Shortly after Silent Spring came out, Monsanto, the multinational agriculture biotech corporation, and the producer of the herbicide Roundup, published a parody of Silent Spring called Desolate Winter, which aimed to discredit Carson’s work. Monsanto asked what would happen in a world where bugs, famine, and disease ran amok because of the elimination of DDT and other pesticides. Did anyone in the Press question Monsanto’s motives? Where were all of the other scientists who knew better? Was there other conflicting research that was hidden or stifled? Did money change hands? Was the threat of cancer so little known back then that it didn’t ring any alarms? How many times has the same scenario unfolded since then? How many dissenters, like latter-day prophets, have tried to get our attention and failed? Rachel Carson died at age 57 in 1964 after a long battle with breast cancer.

From 1960 to 2003, the rate of breast cancer rose 181%. According to a 1993 study by the National Cancer Institute, “breast cancer is strongly associated with DDE (a form of DDT) in the blood.” In the early 70s, DDT was banned in the US; decades later, traces are still found in the environment, the bloodstream, and breast milk.

Because of the many changes that must occur to make healthy cells cancerous, breast cancer can take up to 30 years to develop. Why did it take science decades to conclude what Carson knew in the early 60s? Who knew that we knew so much back then?

My personal list of breast cancer tolls and loses rolls continuously like credits at the end of a movie. My mother-in-law had ductal carcinoma in situ a few years after Shiah was born. In April 2007, two friends, Anna and Little C, were diagnosed with breast cancer. Three more breasts removed. In 2008, my friend Sarah got a call after her mammogram. She had calcification sites. A biopsy followed. Thank God no breast cancer, but because she has dense breast tissue, she will likely repeat this cycle many more times. In 2011, my friend Em was diagnosed with HER2, an aggressive form of breast cancer. Soon after it was my friend Ren. Now, my dear friend Gee is recovering from a lumpectomy. My friend Maggie is waiting for the results from her surgical biopsy after having 2 mammograms, an ultrasound, an MRI, a needle biopsy and then the surgical biopsy. She waits. We wait.

Consciously and unconsciously, I recite the Hebrew phrase from my childhood, b’li ayin hora, literally translated as “without an evil eye,” an incantation that I use to protect my two small breasts and all breasts. I know far too many women whose shirts lie against flat chests, dented chests, foam, silicon, or saline. I wonder who declared this war on women.

 

No Matter what You Call It

Four years ago, Jules, one of my favorite students, came to a yoga class I was teaching for cancer patients, survivors and their caregivers. She wore a pin that said, “Not yet dead,” from Monty Python’s show Spamalot, which she had seen in Las Vegas with a group of women who were living with metastasized breast cancer.

Many of my students have or have had breast cancer.  The stages and diagnostic names sound industrial and mechanical, as if named by an engineer in a steel plant: ductal carcinomas in situ, lobular carcinomas in situ, Paget’s disease, ductal and lobular carcinomas, inflammatory breast cancer, angiosarcoma and cystosarcoma phyllodes, estrogen-negative cancers and triple-negative cancers. Breast cancer, the catchall phrase, oversimplifies the highly variable disease, the treatment options, the side-effects, the variety of outcomes and chances for survival, recovery, and recurrence.

Jules has lived with metastasized breast disease for ten years. In 1999, she was diagnosed with Stage 2, a diagnosis that she thought meant she’d be fine after treatment, but it didn’t work out that way. Three years later, she had a sore leg, which felt like a pulled muscle. An x-ray showed extensive bone metastases in both of her femurs. An MRI revealed she had metastases in her skull.

When Jules arrived to class with her Monty Python pin, we wanted to laugh and cry in the same moment. Jules spoke our fears when she said, “I sometimes wonder when the other shoe will drop.”

 

Reaping and Sowing  

Washington State is known for apples, asparagus, airplanes, wheat, timber, coffee, computer genius, marijuana, and BREAST CANCER. According to the Center for Disease Control, women in Washington State (me) have the highest rate of breast cancer in the nation. Typically, we delay childbearing (me) or skip having children altogether. We drink more alcohol (not me). We absorb less vitamin D due to lack of sunshine, and more of us use hormone replacement therapy to beat back the effects of menopause­—all of these factors are known or thought to increase the risk of breast cancer.

Ashkenazic (Eastern European) Jewish women (me) have a higher rate of breast cancer than the general population. Five to ten percent of all women with breast cancer have a gene-line mutation gene. The genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 when normal and healthy protect breast and ovarian cells by being tumor suppressors and ensuring genomic integrity. Genes, made up of thousands of DNA letters that run down the DNA double helix, can become delinquent, dangerous, and deadly with the deletion of a single DNA letter.

Long, long ago, when Jews were called Hebrews and wandered in tribes through ancient Israel, DNA letter 185delAG was accidentally dropped; but unlike a stitch in knitting, we’ve not been able to pick it up, and it’s been a deadly error. Translation: Women with the BRCA1or BRCA2 gene have up to an 82-percent chance of developing breast cancer by the age of 70.

A few months ago, I went to the doctor for a sinus infection, and for a dreaded round of antibiotics. My doctor rifled through my chart as though looking for something she had lost.

“I don’t see your last mammogram here.”

“I had one last year with my annual.”

She turned a few more pages and said, “You haven’t had one since two thousand and eight.”

“Shit! Are you sure?” I was stunned. How could I of all people have missed even a single mammogram? I looked at my doctor thinking she had misread my chart.

“Really” I asked again.

She nodded. “Really, two thousand and eight.”

Women and some men will continue to be diagnosed with breast cancer each and every day and each and every year. I see breast cancer in part as a collective karmic return for environmental misuse, arrogance, lack of awareness, and greed, but it’s also an opportunity for change. As we pollute and defile our world or watch others do it, and pass it off as an unavoidable complication of modern life, we suffer and rack up negative karma. Karma is the cause and result of our actions. Think of it as a self-perpetuating loop that can be stopped if we take action. To believe that things have to be the way they are, to believe that we have no choice, to believe that we are stuck with what we have, is to live without hope.

 

 

Stacy Lawson is a yoga instructor and writer living in Seattle with her husband, two sons, and dog. She is the founder of Red Square Yoga, a by-donation studio focusing on therapeutic yoga. Stacy’s work has appeared in Under the Sun, Drash Northwest Mosaic, The Seattle Star, and Sunday Ink: Works by the Uptown Writers.

“Christmas Cactus” by Ann Goldsmith

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Christmas Cactus.Sanctuary
“Sanctuary” by Suzanne Stryk 2007.
(See also “Christmas Lights” by Wanda Deglane.)

A year ago, the Christmas cactus
sashayed in with its pink and
white party hat crowning the long
stems like ecstatic shrimp.

When the blossoms fell off,
each with its soft pink pod,
how bereft the stems looked,
jammed so closely they must be
strangling one another at the roots.

Removed to the patio in May
for repotting, my cactus rested
through October untouched
except by wind and sun,
mostly green, but barren,

surely dead—like some fake plant
pre-tinted with indelible dye.
When autumn days drew down,
it returned to the living room,
light as paper but still mostly green—

except for pink fins
pressing out in November,
month of my birthday,
from every suddenly laden stem.

Two days in the house—and
air schools of shrimp
took to the warm currents,
crowning the whole head
for an entire week!

Now it is December,
winter before us,
but spring still so new
I can rinse my hands in it.

 

 

Ann Goldsmith‘s second book of poems, THE SPACES BETWEEN US, appeared in April 2010. She won the Quarterly Review of Literature’s Poetry Prize for her first book, NO ONE IS THE SAME AGAIN. Goldsmith holds a doctorate from the University of Buffalo, where she taught English for ten years. She has also served on the faculties of D’Youville and St. Trocaire Colleges, and worked as Western New York Coordinator for ALPS, a statewide poetry-in-the-schools organization. She has served as poet-in-residence at the Chautauqua Institution, and taught writing at Buffalo’s Trinity Center, which granted her an Excellence in Teaching Award. Her recently completed book of poems, WAITING AT THE TURN, is looking for a publisher.

Read an interview with Ann here.

“Absentee” by William Kelley Woolfitt

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Absentee, Eclipse Salamander

“Eclipse Salamander” by Suzanne Stryk 1996 gouache on paper

I come from the careening wrong turn,
Holy Rollers, multiflora rose, and fists;
siltstone and slate embossed with ferns;
bituminous coal that pocks our land with holes
and pits, and makes an overseas company rich.
My trailer stands at the end of a derelict road
I never would have found.  Showers at night
fill my gutters with knuckles of hail,
scattershot ice a bruising reminder to me
that I am really in my body, and not in a dream,
when I go out to smell the world set alive.
Taking welts on my back, I move past wood scraps
and junk cars, to the well-house where I draw
sulfur ooze, a bucket of the true, the dark, the raw.

 

 

William Kelley Woolfitt lived in West Virginia for over twenty years, and now teaches creative writing and literature at Lee University, in the foothills of the Appalachians. He is the author of The Salvager’s Arts, co-winner of the 2011 Keystone Chapbook Prize. His writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Cincinnati Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, Los Angeles Review, Sycamore Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. He goes walking on the Appalachian Trail or at his grandparents’ farm in West Virginia whenever he can.

“Absentee” first appeared in Talking Leaves, in slightly different form.

Read an interview with William here.

“Skunk Stroll” by Lisa J. Cihlar

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Skunk Stroll. the collectors secret

“The Collector’s Secret” by Suzanne Stryk 2001

These are the things she buried: the skull of her pet rabbit whose name was Sometimes Fred, a dog whistle, a pair of purple knitting needles, a feather from a guinea hen, all black and white laddered. She climbs the oak and joins herself to the trunk with streamers of spider web and weary people come to watch her turn to shaggy bark. It is taking a long time, but that she expected. The people send up sandwiches using the pulley system she pilfered from a tree house where the children no longer play. The Ladies Garden Club brings old tires and fills them with dirt to plant Sweet Williams and Purple Viking potatoes. One morning she sees a man walking his white turkeys. In the evenings when all the people have gone back to their domesticities, she watches a family of skunks tumble past in the moonlight. She dreams when it is windy, but mostly about the stove and iron. Did she remember to turn them off?

 

 

Lisa J. Cihlar‘s poems appeared or are forthcoming in The South Dakota Review, Green Mountains Review, Crab Creek Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Blackbird.   She has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her chapbook, “The Insomniac’s House,” is available from Dancing Girl Press and a second chapbook, “This is How She Fails,” is available from Crisis Chronicles Press. She lives in rural southern Wisconsin.

“Keep Smiling Mary K” by Leah Kaminsky

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Keep Smiling Mary K (Still Life with Anole)
“Still Life with Anole” by Suzanne Stryk, 2011, acrylic on canvas

Now you can perspire in the comfort of your own living room, viewers, with Christian Aerobics, broadcasting all over the Middle East from here in Nicosia, Cyprus. Get ready to start your heart pumping, girls. Exercise your faith.

Thighs hurt, especially the left one. I was always weaker on that side. OK, I’ll push. It’s worth it to get rid of the flab. The baby lies on the couch, mouthing for my breast. Nipples are so sore. Push on.

Lift the knee, two, three. Come on, you can raise it higher.

Fat chance, lady. It won’t go. The whole lot just won’t push back into place. Definitely not nubile; more like voluptuous now. No, not true. Definitely obese. Stretch marks on the tummy. I’ve tried the creams and Jane Fonda’s video. He, on the couch, all of six weeks, stares at his mother who is leaning on a chair and pushing herself around the living room, a beached whale straining to get back into the water.

Four more. And four and three and two and one. All right, you deserve a break now, you’ve all worked hard. Here’s a letter from Mary K in Beirut, who watches us every day:

‘Dear Justine,

I love your show and your Health Club is the answer to my prayers. I’ve just had my fifth son and I’d like to know how I can get back to my pre-pregnancy weight.’

Thank you for your letter, Mary K and I’ll pray for you, even though I’ve never met you. You are so sweet. The answer, Mary K, is to keep pushing away from the table when you are full. Eat natural foods. Anything that is the way God made it, right from the earth to you, is good for you. Avoid batter, exercise your faith and keep smiling!

It’s the veins that really hurt, and I’m still bleeding, but there’s no time. I’ll go and get a check-up when Shlomi gets back from reserve duty. It’s hard to keep smiling, Mary K, when you feel like a lump of dough.

Come on, girls! Leg raises, one two, one two. Concentrate on Jesus, surrender to His heart. Exercise your faith, now’s the time to start. Good, good.  Now lift your shoulders, in the name of the Lord!

I can’t do it, Mary K. Can you? They hurt from all that carrying. I live on the hills of Jerusalem; the world balanced on its shoulders. Justine, the blond aerobics instructor in her tight pink leotard, broadcasting from Nicosia, can’t feel the weight of our children. They pour over the top of their baby scales, heavy with the weight of the dead. But the washing has to be done and the nappies hung out to dry in the Middle Eastern sun.

In the name of the Lord, tighten those buttocks. And don’t forget to smile!

Are you smiling, Mary K? The girls are at my mother-in-law’s and I’m home alone with the baby. I get so tired and, late at night, I cling to Shlomi’s empty pajamas. He is in Lebanon, Mary K, and won’t be home for a month. I wonder if you saw him over there?

Breathe in, two three, and out, two three, raise it higher, tighten those tummy muscles, girls.

I saw your dark eyes once, I think, Mary K, in a little Lebanese restaurant on Brunswick Street, back in Melbourne. And I saw you crying when you held your first-born son in Bankstown hospital, in Sydney. I have tasted your foule, your falafel, your hoummous, your tabouleh. I met you in Australia, where Beirut and Jerusalem lie on either side of a back fence.

Are you still smiling, girls? Give it everything you’ve got. Come on, try harder. Up two, three, down two, three.

I cried when my son was born. That week, an ancient cemetery came crashing down on a street cafe in a laneway of Jerusalem. The dead kill the living and the living live on the dead. That is the weight of Jerusalem-of-gold. Will my son follow his father’s footsteps? Will his father step wrong one day before his son takes his first step?

The first step is always the hardest, girls, but you can do it, in the name of the Lord. You can be slim again. Come on! And one and two.

I am knitting booties for my son. I polished Shlomi’s boots before he left and today there was more shooting on the border. Purl, plain, purl, plain: it soothes me while I watch the 9 o’clock news. But right now, it’s pelvic tightening, so we have to concentrate Mary K and strengthen ourselves for the next season’s fertility, family, fodder, fruit, festering wounds.

That’s the way to do it, well done, girls! For the love of the Lord, do it for all mankind. Strengthen those pelvic muscles. Up and down, and up and down.

Forget it, Mary K. Let’s have a cup of tea and some honey sweet baklawa from the bakery next door. Let’s face it; we’ll never be the girls we were before we gave birth. And Jesus, Moses and Mohammed all know that neither of us will ever, ever lose the weight.

 

 

Leah Kaminsky, physician and writer, is Poetry & Fiction Editor at the Medical Journal of Australia and Online Editor at Hunger Mountain. She conceived and edited Writer, M.D., an anthology of contemporary doctor-writers (Vintage Knopf US 2012) and her award-winning poetry collection, Stitching Things Together was published in 2010. Her work is published or forthcoming in Huffington Post, Monocle, Griffith Review, Hippocrates Poetry Prize anthology, Poems in the Waiting Room, The Ampersand Review, and PANK, amongst others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. (www.leahkaminsky.com)

Read an interview with Leah here.

“Sushi at Midnight” by Jacob Fons

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Sushi at Midnight.WorldEnough
“World Enough,” by Suzanne Stryk, 2006. Acrylic on handmade book, map, leaf.

“It’s time to go.”

“Yeah, I know Father, I heard the bell.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“Wasn’t really what I thought it was gonna taste like.  I’ve never really liked seafood. It was OK, I guess.”

“You chose Luke 6:37, any reason for that particular verse?”

“My Mother would read that one to us on Christmas Day. We got that instead of presents. I guess it was supposed to make us feel guilty for being pissed that we didn’t get shit on Christmas. It’s just kinda stuck with me since then.”

“She did her best.”

“Yeah, she did something alright. Only three of us six left. She definitely did something.”

“Well, we all choose our own paths in life Jeremiah.”

“You didn’t have my life Father. You couldn’t imagine the things I’ve seen.”

“Good Evening Father.”

“Hello Warden.”

“This way please Jeremiah.”

“Did my wife and kids show up?”

“Sorry, we did try to contact them, but no, they’re not here.”

“That’s alright. I don’t want my kids to see me like this anyways. This shouldn’t be the last image that they have of their dad.”

“It’s midnight, Jeremiah, time to start.”

“Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be–“

“Hey Father?”

“Yes Jeremiah?”

“Don’t worry about it. You don’t need to read anymore. I never really believed it anyways. Father?”

“Yes?”

“You really think there’s something else out there?”

“I do my son.”

“Well how about for someone like me? Never mind, I guess I already know the answer.”

“Do you have any last words Jeremiah Wesson Hill?”

“None that matter anymore.”

“Begin initial injection.”

“Bless you my son…”

“Funny thing Father, at a time like this, the only thing I can think about is that I finally had sushi.”

“That’s good, my son. That’s real good.”

 

 

Jacob Fons is a short story author and novelist. He has work appearing or forthcoming in over a dozen publications including Enhance, Epiphany, and 1000 Words. He is currently writing a book of short stories entitled, Stories from 32nd Street that will be published in late 2014. Jacob has been writing stories his entire life but just recently began submitting his work for publication. There’s one thing that he promises; his writing will always be honest, and heartfelt. It may not always be pretty, but it will be real, and full of emotion.

Read an interview with Jacob here.

“Sex for Groceries” by Kirie Pedersen

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Kirie Pederson.FactsofLife

“Facts of Life” by Suzanne Stryk

“…During a summer storm of three or four days of chilling rain, flocks leave the nesting grounds and may fly hundreds of miles until they encounter favorable weather. After the storm, they return in small groups to the nests. In their absence, the young survive without food, becoming torpid: cold, motionless, and barely breathing. Lower metabolism prevents starvation, thus allowing the young to be raised through alternating periods of plenty and shortage.”  ~National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds Western Region

 

“When your mother dies,” Matthew said, “Your molecular structure breaks down and is rearranged. When it’s over, you literally become a different person.”

Matthew is my love. I don’t know what else to call him. He endured the deaths of my father and mother, a year apart, and in between, Zoe’s murder. It was as though a hole opened up in the universe and sucked them all away.

Rather, I should say, Matthew endured my family. And me. My father refused to acknowledge him, and made snide comments about Jews. My mother adored him, but of course, my mother loved everyone. In grief, I became insane.

“Now you will truly be an orphan,” my therapist said, “a real orphan because your parents are dead and dying. And you will cast off your family.”

Cast off my family?

“Your family is the embodiment of evil.” Pam tilted her head, examining me as if  for self-inflicted burns, cigarettes crushed out on my belly. “I see you standing on the porch of a burning cabin. You can go back in and rescue everyone. Or you can save yourself. You’ll be lucky to escape with your car keys.” Pam wore a silly purple beret and jaunty scarf. She didn’t care what other people thought about her. “Have you read the Old Testament? You must cleave unto your lover.” That shut me up. Pam quoting the  Old Testament. Sucked as I was into the tarpit of my family, it seemed logical I should jettison Matthew. If I increased my losses to the highest possible level, I wouldn’t have to feel anything at all. It was like pressing on a bruise on my wrist to ease the throbbing in my skull.

After decades without drinking or smoking, I wanted to drink and smoke. I’ve never done heroin, but that sounded fine too.

If not heroin, throw myself off a cliff.

“Want anything to take the edge off?” Pam asked.  Sweet words. But I knew from long experience that I wouldn’t simply ease the edge.

“I’d take one, then the whole damn bottle, and then crave more,” I said. “But if you give me an IV I can lead around on a leash, with just the right dose trickling in? I’ll take that.”

Instead, I walked for miles in the Olympic National Park. I walked so far and so fast my collie and golden retriever couldn’t keep up.  I walked until I reached an altered state. Adrenalin or endorphins or exhaustion kicked in, or the sun streaked through the trees to illuminate a single fire-singed stump, turning it blue and black, and at the same moment, a Pileated woodpecker made its “high clear series of piping calls” overhead.

My toenails bruised and turned blood dark, like those of a marathon runner.

Dad died first.  Matthew and I left Manhattan and returned to the Pacific Northwest. It was a long dark spring, or so I remember: rain without ceasing. We were shipwrecked in our cabin, death and darkness folded around us. Sometimes, I wanted to be even more alone, in a tiny space, like a baby’s crib. I wanted to move into our guest cottage, called Eagle Cottage because bald eagles perch overhead. I wanted a cell-like bed separate from all others, to be attached to that bed by a slender chain, floating away from time.

Yet I could not sleep unless Matthew wrapped himself around me, holding me tightly, forming a womb, and even that was not enough. I never lost awareness of my mother, a few miles away. After sixty years of marriage, she slept alone in her own cell-like basement room in the hospice. I wanted to fashion a pouch, like those in which newborns are swaddled, clutched to the chests of their fathers or mothers. I would carry my shrunken little mother twenty-four hours a day, singing to her in her own dying days.

Every dawn, I awakened to a heavy fist of dread striking my heart. I dreaded visiting Mother, and then felt guilty for my dread. I dreaded her actual death. I was sad about my sisters, and how estranged we had become. I fantasized the lovely sisters again united, singing perfect four-part harmony. This happened, briefly, at my father’s memorial down on the shore. After the guests left, the siblings sat on the grey stone sea wall Dad had built by hand. It was dusk. We sang every song we remembered, someone starting one up and the rest picking it up, on and on, until the moon rose red over the horizon.

And then the next morning, the calls and texts and emails began, the awful things this person said, or that.

Sometimes I woke with renewed energy to take action, to quit feeling sorry for myself. I wanted to accept death as a natural, even healthy part of life. I wanted to accept death as beautiful, a way of prayer, a simple cessation of heartbeat and breath. I did not have to die because Dad died, because Mom was dying. Yet the child, alone, without parents, does die. If she can’t find sustenance or shelter, she dies.

When Matthew and I were in Manhattan, I taught a class on addiction, weight and body image. It was nice to be around teenagers. The women, girls, really, were beautiful and brilliant. It was difficult to understand how they could hate their bodies, want to hurt themselves, cut into their flesh, as most did, but Manhattan is filled with ambition, and even the very young are driven to accomplish by thirty what others, in other parts of the country, the Northwest for example, might be content to achieve in a lifetime.

Two days before Matthew and I were to return to Portland, one of the young woman called. She begged me to attend a “ladies tea,” as she called it, in my honor. I had already begun to push the students from my mind, my way of protecting myself from loss. “I can’t,” I said. “I have too much to do. I like clean departures.”

Zoe insisted. Sweet Zoe was spectacularly beautiful, a gifted singer and piano player, on scholarship to Manhattan School of Music. She had a glow about her, the same glow my mother had, but she also had a craziness I couldn’t quite put my finger on, perhaps only my own madness when I was nineteen.

“We want to celebrate your Kirieness,” Zoe said.

And so the dozen women from the class gathered in Zoe’s studio apartment. Everyone dressed up, and perched along two facing couches, and on chairs, chatting about this and that. I was staring out the window at a brick wall, thinking about Matthew and my dead father and my dying mother, and then, as if from nowhere, as if from far away, I heard Zoe say “I trade sex for groceries.”

She needed groceries to feed her child, her scholarship didn’t cover food. Or child care.

I didn’t know Zoe had a child.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “I lost custody. See, when I was eleven, this guy talked me into going to his apartment, and then he raped me. When he was done, he threw, like a hundred dollars on me. On my body.”

“How awful.” My heart went out to her, this beautiful smart young girl, her life shredded. When I was the age Zoe was now, in art school and working as a model, the same thing happened, and the guy threw a few dollars on a chair. This is all I’m worth? I remember thinking that.

Zoe said the man became her pimp. And she was on a yacht one day, and the client left for a moment. She felt something beneath the bed, poked with her high heel, and she saw the body of a woman shoved underneath. Still in her heels, Zoe ran for her life across the dock.

I wondered if this was how I sounded, too, at her age, when I tried to tell my sisters or my friends what had happened. Zoe cried a little, but the tears fell straight down onto her beautiful dress, as if beyond her bidding.

Then Zoe laughed. “I escaped,” she said. “I’m alive. I’m starting over.” She would regain custody of her little girl. She would finish school, support her family. Relieved, we all laughed too, a glitter of sound across the darkening room. Zoe poured chamomile tea into fragile cups, passed around trays of lemon cupcakes.

“Violence changes the brain chemistry,” I told the young women. “Experiencing it, I mean.” I cannot help talking like a professor. It’s better than feeling. “Talking about these experiences with each other lessens the pain,” I said.

“I’m going to be a therapist,” Zoe said. “Like you. I’ll do music therapy with young girls who’ve been damaged. And help them live.”

A week after our gathering, when I was already back west, the story was all over the news. Zoe met a man who was once a client. She met him in a hotel room where they’d often met before. She thought he was in love with her.  He was a law student, and maybe he would help her with college, with her daughter. It seemed he wanted to tie her to the bed, or tried to. Zoe ran, actually made it to the door, and then he shot her in the back.

“I’m hysterical,” I told Matthew. “I’m so sorry. I should know better.”

Matthew disagreed about what I was, what I should be sorry for. “Hysteria is deep healing,” he said. “The more deeply you cry, turn yourself inside out, the deeper the healing.”  He said grief is like being hit by napalm, immolated and melted. Or boiled to a grinning skeleton of bone.

“I would rather light myself on fire than continue to cry like this.” I put my hand over my belly as if protecting an embryo. “If my molecular structure changes now, what will I be when it’s over?”

“It’s never over,” Matthew said. His parents had died decades before. I’d always felt sorry for him, but now I envied him.

“Was it like this for you?” I asked. “Did you feel like this?” Every day, I asked him that.

As our mother embarked on what the hospice nurse called “active dying,” we four sisters gathered a final time. We sat around our mother’s narrow cot and sang every song we knew, the songs she taught us. We folded our coats into pillows, and slept on the floor, breathing ragged as she did. When she stopped breathing, she looked like herself again. Her folded-up body straightened out. She was beautiful, like concentrated sweetness.

I howled like a baby, a pierced animal.

“I’m not sure I’m coming back this time,” I told Matthew.

“I know,” Matthew said. He reached over and touched my knee. “I’m not sure either. Let’s just go ahead for now.”

When I was attacked, I left my body. I saw the event, but I was outside it, looking down from near the ceiling. I never returned to that body. That girl was dead. I developed the head, the brain, and even some of the credentials to help others. I did help others. I didn’t save Zoe, but I’m sure I helped a few people.

That day, when Matthew touched my knee so lightly, I re-entered my body. Just as the assault took place at a specific time and place, on a specific day, to a specific body no longer mine, so I returned to my new body, this rejiggered constellation of molecules, almost with a thud. It was as if a screen or shroud lifted all at once. Below the cabin, the high tide lapped on the grey stones of the shoreline, and in the Douglas fir and madrona clung small clusters of golden crowned kinglets, bushtits, creepers, and nuthatches with their tumbling chatter, their tinkling descending warble. I shook my head and looked around at the waxing gibbous moon, the turquoise water. The moss was freshly green in the cold spring rain. I wanted to pet it. I wanted to lie down in it and roll around. I wanted to pray to it. I wanted to learn its name.

 

 

Kirie Pedersen has work forthcoming or published in Quiddity, Wisconsin Review, Eclipse, RiverSedge, Utne Reader, Folly Magazine, Eclipse, Women NetWork, Alcoholism the National Journal, Northwest People, Caper Literary Journal, Laurel Review, Teachers and Writers, Regeneration (Rodale Press), Glossolalia, Avatar Review, Chaffee Review, Black Boot, Eleven Eleven, Folly Magazine, and elsewhere. She holds an M.A in fiction writing and literature and blogs at www.kiriepedersen.com

“A Sudden Tilt of the Head” by Michael Sarnowski

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M. Sarnowski. LivesoftheBirds
“Lives of the Birds,” (detail) by Suzanne Stryk, 2010

Believe me when I say
I tried not to apply deeper meaning
to ordinary happenings
like the blood that dripped from your nose
onto the splayed open pages
of the book on my nightstand
but we think divine
of the commonplace
to entertain and explain
to explore the connections
at the synapse
that abstract the direct
blur the narrative
into a form that takes new meaning
like the title page spotted
with dried brown blood
as if the American
who fucked his way through Paris
in the pages that followed
had something important to say.

 

 

 

Michael Sarnowski earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Vanderbilt University, where he was a recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. His poetry has appeared in Potomac Review, The Adirondack Review, Underground Voices, and Foundling Review, among others. He currently lives in Rochester, New York, where he is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Read an interview with Michael here.

Tuesday a.m.

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LivesoftheBirds.Lori May
“Lives of the Birds” #4, by Suzanne Stryk, 2009

Looking to buy some happiness
maybe a dose of self-respect
she combs her fingers through the racks,
sale or otherwise,
knowing the possibility is there.

If only she could find it.

The one thing to guarantee bliss,
carry her weight
for the rest of the day.

Cold marble floors
industrial with purpose
polished three hours earlier
know the point of her pursuit.

Brushed cottons
loose linens
raw silks
hold comfort.

Here,
in this buffet of hope
she seeks out a smile,
a reflection in the chrome
she will at once recognize.

Intercoms and lost children
mists of new scents
the intoxicating knowledge
that anything is possible.

Smartly altered mirrors convince
and disguise last night’s restless sleep.

Here,
there is a chance of renewal.
Plastic overpowers and creates an armor
offering just a taste of worth.

 

 

Lori A. May is the author of four books including The Low-Residency MFA Handbook: A Guide for Prospective Creative Writing Students (Continuum, 2011). Her poetry and literary nonfiction has appeared in publications such as Phoebe, Caper Literary Journal, Steel Toe Review, and qarrtsiluni. She lives online at www.loriamay.com.

Read an interview with Lori here.

“The Physics of Memory and Death” by Curtis Smith

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Physics (Who Am I)
“Who Am I?” by Marilyn Sears Bourbon

Sara wakes after midnight. The moon is bright, the room lit in indigo and bone. The lacy curtains billow. On the breeze, the scent of salt, the waves’ ceaseless crash. Sara’s shoulders are sore to the touch. She smells of lotion. She lights a cigarette and, with lips pressed to the window screen, blows a smoky plume. Her parents had fought earlier—too much bourbon and too many cigarettes. Now another sound, a rhythm like the surf. Soft moans. Sara rises from her bed and lays a hand on the thin wall.

A conch shell rests atop the dresser. Sara lifts the shell from its wooden stand. The shell’s shape reminds her of her brother’s old football. She runs a finger along the bony ridges, wipes dust from the opening’s shellac-glistening tongue. Using two hands, she raises the shell to her ear.

Of course Sara does not hear the ocean. The low-frequency hiss is born from the fact that the shell acts as a closed-pipe resonator. Its wave-mimicking song is white noise, the blank slate upon which all recognizable sounds are etched. In a bit of Mobius logic, its gentle purr is also the washed-out resultant of all sounds, a tone which gravitates more than any other toward purity and which also contains almost every audible frequency.

 

Hot the next day, the air thick with haze and a fishy odor. Sara lies in the umbrella’s shade but soon grows restless. She is annoyed by the stink. Annoyed by the radio station the boys beside them play. She tries to focus on the sounds of waves and gulls, on the call of children’s voices. From behind her sunglasses, she considers her parents. There are all coping with memories, with silences and empty spaces. She goes for a walk. The seagulls hover, the shoreline thick with their calls and the too-close beating of their wings. There are no swimmers in the water, the surf overtaken by wave-nudged jellyfish, dozens, maybe hundreds of them. In the wet sand, a boy pokes one with a stick. The texture and thoughtless cruelty of the scene make Sara ill.

She lies back on her towel. Sand bristles the nook of her upper thigh. She pulls the elastic aside and brushes out the granules. Turning, she catches the boys with the horrible music looking her way. The boys smirk. One leans over and whispers into a friend’s ear. Sara rises and shakes out her towel, ensuring the boys are hit in the fallout. She repositions the towel on the other side of her parents and lets the sun beat upon her face.

Friction is the rub of this world. Friction wears on a body from without and within. The smoothest surfaces are rough at the microscopic level, imperfect despite their machined polish. Mu is the measure of the coefficient of friction. The higher the mu, the greater the frictional force. Mu is equal to the force applied divided by the force perpendicular. Both forces are measured in Newtons, which, upon calculation, cancel, leaving mu as that rare phenomenon of physics, a number unclaimed by a unit’s measure.

Last year, Sara’s science teacher introduced her class to mu in a lab involving sliding blocks. Calculating the frictional coefficient was simple enough, but despite her teacher’s words and diagrams, Sara struggled with the notion of mu. She found its lack of a proper unit vexing, the unshackled numbers threatening to flutter off like a summer butterfly, but today, on the sun-baked beach, she feels a previously unappreciated force all around her—in her mother’s crinkling page turns, in the boys’ music and banter, in the breeze that stinks of rot and death. Here, perhaps, lies the crux of her consciousness, the most telling confirmation she exists registered in the rub between herself and the world.

 

That night, they go to the boardwalk funhouse. There is always a hitch at times like these, the memory of her brother, dead these eight months. A car accident, a night of bad decisions. Gone. The funhouse would be his kind of thing. Spooky, silly, stupid. Sara is not the type to scream—yet she does, her hands clutching her father’s arm when a knife-wielding woman bursts through a curtain.

They enter a room of mirrors. A dozen reflections surround her, fragmented views, distortions fat and thin. Sara grows disoriented. She reaches for her father, but she is fooled, her hand grasping air. “Daddy?” she calls.

In physics, /images are divided into the real and the virtual. A real image’s rays converge at a focal point, which in turn can be observed on a screen or sheet of paper. A virtual image does not exist in these terms; rather, it is a trick of the eye and the properties of light, the plaything of magicians and the subterfuge-filled origin of the phrase “done with mirrors.”

Upon exiting the funhouse, Sara thinks again of her brother. Recently she’s been distressed by his fading image, another abandonment, leaving her nothing more than memories and photographs, /images both real and not.

 

Sara sits atop the sloping shoreline. The late-day sun strikes her back, her shadow stabbing far into the foaming surf. Nearby, a little boy dips a bucket into the lapping waves and empties the water over his sister’s feet. A bigger wave rolls in. The boy tumbles but the girl pulls him from the water. The children yell and laugh. Seagulls hover on the breeze. The lifeguards are gone, and most of the day’s crowd has left. The light is warm and yellow and rich.

A complex wave is formed by two frequencies separated by more than 7Hz. The world is awash in dissonance, two waves that mesh in an unpleasing manner. But if the resultant sound is pleasant, consonance is achieved and a chord is formed. Cultural and experiential influences surely affect the judgment of consonance and dissonance. The symphonies of John Cage and other avant-garde composers raise the question of whether our values of consonance can be altered by experience. Traditional music of the Far East, with its pentatonic scales and lack of quantitative rhythms, often registers as odd, even unpleasant, to the Western ear. Thus, unlike most of the hard-set rules of physics, the values of consonance and dissonance appear to be flexible and open to interpretation.

Sara listens to the children. What a deceptively simple magic, their voices able take the surf’s crumble, the caw of gulls, and elevate them into chords. Sara closes her eyes. She hears her brother’s voice and hers, arguing, laughing, teasing. In this echo, her brother lives. She will keep this chord in her heart.

 

 

Curtis Smith’s stories and essays have appeared in over seventy literary journals and have been cited by The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, and The Best American Spiritual Writing. Press 53 published two recent story collections Bad Monkey and The Species Crown. Casperian Books published the novels Sound + Noise and Truth or Something Like It. Sunnyoutside Press recently released his latest book, Witness, an essay collection.

Read our feature of Curt (including the author’s own words about his work) here.