Mr. Salameh Gets Drunk at the Wedding

There was a man in the ballroom of the Sheraton wearing a skirt.

Mr. Salameh watched the man approach the buffet. He still couldn’t believe he was at a wedding—his son’s wedding—where you had to stand in line and fetch your own food. So many insults, so many things wrong with this wedding.  A daughter-in-law who couldn’t pronounce her new husband’s name. A wedding that cost a year’s salary. A fight with his wife. A DJ who played American music that sounded like a video game. A celebration less than forty days after they’d buried his mother. The mass for her soul hadn’t even been said, and here was her only grandson, dancing a strange dance with his skinny wife, flapping their arms like terrified birds.

And now, this man.

A man with a red beard and bare legs, at his son’s wedding, eating pork on a stick istaghfurallah.

“Meghan’s family is proud of their culture, just like we are,” Raed had argued. “You have to respect that.”

But they had a culture too. He’d asked Raed for Arabic music, and that’s when his future daughter-in-law revealed her dark side. “My aunt is a harpist and she’s playing a special song,” she insisted, her blue eyes staring boldly at Mr. Salameh, momentarily breaking her sweet  act. Mr. Salameh wasn’t stupid. He’d been in America for thirty years. He knew the elusiveness of delicate white women, how they drew Arab boys to them like planets to a fiery star, how they turned their young men into blushing, stammering fools. He saw how Meghan, with her pink nails, her slim wrists, her tiny waist, transformed Raed, his football-playing, lawyer son, his only son—the child he’d poured all his energy and love into, the child he’d prayed—well, no matter all that now because like a witch, she changed him from a proud racehorse into a mule that lowers itself to the ground for its back to be loaded. And while she was controlling him with her glossy smiles, she’d say, “Culture isn’t everything. Ray and I are both Leos,” like it was such a big fucking deal. One-twelfth of the world are Leos, Mr. Salameh wanted to shout at her every time she said it.

All around him, people talked lightly, and laughed. My mother is dead, he wanted to shout. Stop clinking your glasses. But they continued talking about the tall, dark, handsome groom and the bride who looked like a model. The man in the skirt was back in the buffet line, piling his plate with so much chicken, steak, and pork—so much meat, these Americans, and then they wonder why they’re always so tired. Mr. Salameh thought Raed should count him as four guests, not one.

Mrs. Salameh approached, looking angelic, even though he knew she was still upset. His beautiful wife, in a sky-blue satin dress. You’ll be overdressed, he’d warned her. They’ll all be wearing jeans probably. She didn’t care. He’s my only son, she’d said. And I’m going to look like the mother of the groom, she’d declared.

“Are you going to eat?” his wife asked, slipping her hand into his as he strolled to the bar and ordered another drink. It felt nice to speak to someone in Arabic.

“Are you still angry?” he asked her.

“You need to eat,” she replied, wearing her patient smile. She indulged him a lot and he was grateful to her.

“This whole thing…everything is so rushed.”

“They had to marry before Lent,” his wife said calmly. “You know that. It was bad timing about your mother.”

“She’s only been dead three weeks,” he said, shaking his head. “And by the way….There is a man here wearing a dress.”

“Allah yerhamha,” she said. “I miss your mother too.”

“They should have waited. It’s not even been forty days.”

“If they waited, it would be Lent. No weddings during Lent.” That was the voice she used when she was annoyed with him, and it was his signal to stop. Sometimes he wanted her to drop the serene veil she always wore. For her to be as angry as he was.

“The living,” he continued, “used to pause for the dead. Out of respect.”

“Let me put you a plate. You should eat something. How many drinks have you had?”

“I’m not eating.” Something caught his attention. “Look…there he is. Do you see him?”

She ignored his question. “People are watching. You’re the father of the groom.”

“Do you see what that man is doing?”

She finally turned and looked. “I saw him. He’s very nice. His wife is the aunt. The harpist. We haven’t met her yet.”

“Why do we have to have their music but not our music?” Mr. Salameh asked.

“Everyone can tell that you’re not happy.”

“I’m not happy. You can see the bride’s tits right down the front of her damn dress. I’m scared to stand next to her in case something falls out—”

Khalas.” Her voice was firm, so he snapped his mouth shut. She put her arm through his. “I’m going to fix you a plate. And then we’re going to chat with Raed and maybe take some pictures. And then we’re going to smile and shake hands with everyone. We will mingle. You will look happy.”

“There’s nobody here whose hand I want to shake.”

“Your nephew Marcus came. We should say hello to him. I’m glad he did, even though you wouldn’t let me invite his sister.”

“Her own father doesn’t talk to her. Why would I invite her?”

Mrs. Salameh muttered Allah give me patience, dropped his arm, and headed towards the buffet line. As he watched her walk away, he noticed Meghan’s father approaching. Raed’s father-in-law. It was too late to escape, so he drained his glass as the man trudged towards him. His hair was white and stuck out at all angles on his head, and his glasses slipped down his bulbous nose. He looked like a white Husni from the Ghawar movies—a man nobody could take seriously, no matter how dressed up he got.

“I think they need us at the front for more photos, Wah-leed.”

“Ok. Ok. I go get my wife.”

“Just the fathers now, I think.” He clapped Mr. Salameh on the back and pulled him toward the head table, where Raed and Meghan stood. “Enjoying yourself?”

“Yes.”

“It’s ok that we had alcohol, right?”

“Yes, of course.” He held up his own glass. “I tell you before we are Christians, not Muslims.” As if to make a point, he beckoned to a waiter, handed over his empty glass, and took a fresh one off the tray.

“Gotta always ask, you know. This way the culture doesn’t become a problem.” He was only half-listening to Mr. Salameh anyway, waving at other guests. Before they reached the front of the room, the man stopped and waved his hand around. “Like some of your guests here, they’re wearing head scarves. That’s not gonna be something Raed surprises my Meghan with, right? In a few years?”

“We are not Muslims.” Mr. Salameh’s head started to hurt. “These are our friends.”

“Right.”

“But our guests—they are not forced to wear.” He nodded towards Mrs. Hamdi, who stood to the side with her husband. “That lady right there, she is pediatrician. She run the whole clinic at Bayview. Their daughter, she is soccer player. She play for big Maryland team.”

“She wears that thing while she plays?”

“Yes.”

“Some things are ok. Some things…I gotta ask.” Meghan’s father shrugged. “This country is changing. Not all the new people coming in are like you, you know.”

Mr. Salameh thought about his mother, who was so kind and sweet and would have still looked at this man and muttered, “Kalb ibn kalb.” He glanced up at his son Raed, who stood tall besides his elf-wife and wondered, how could he do this to me?

They took the damn picture. The mothers came too. There were more pictures. He drank another glass but saw his wife’s glare and declined another one. More and more people joined the picture: Raed and Meghan’s coworkers, cousins, friends. He wondered who would see this picture in ten years, twenty years. Maybe his grandchildren? In forty years, his great-grandchildren? He wanted them to see him smiling, but not too broadly. He was going to lose his son. He’d already lost him. And if his grandchildren grew up feeling lost in the world, unattached to anything, he wanted them to know that, even before their birth, he had anticipated this, and he had been sad.

“I wish Sitti Fayrouz were here,” Raed told him somberly, as they posed for a father-son picture.

“Is that your grandmother?” his tiny wife asked.

Raed nodded sadly, and everyone made a sympathetic sound, like a rush of emotion, even though they had been dancing something called a curly shuffle a few minutes before.

He wished his son hadn’t said that.

Because now, he was sinking into his memory of those final days in the hospice when she was gasping for breath. He’d sat many long hours in that room with her, just the two of them sheltering from the rest of the world. Over the beeping of her machines, she’d mumbled to him, when she’d thought he was his dead brother, and talked to him so lovingly in her delirium. “I missed you, Michel. Where have you been?” And in his own desperation to comfort her, he’d lied. He’d pretended to be Michel, who could make everyone smile just by walking into a room and who should have been the one to live anyway.

And that’s why, now, Mr. Salameh couldn’t stop himself from replying to his son, “You should have respected her memory, then.”

“Stop, Baba.” Raed said firmly.

“You’re disrespecting her memory. And I don’t even know why I came for this.”

“Waleed.” That was his wife.

“I’m telling you all,” he shouted in Arabic, “that I don’t even know why I am here. There is nothing for me at this wedding.”

Several people tried to calm him. Then he heard, “Uncle Waleed.” That was his nephew, Marcus, who barely talked to them anymore. “Let’s take this somewhere else.”

“Why are you always bossing people around?” he asked Marcus, who gave him a dry look like he wanted to pick him up and throw him. He could too, the beast, he was taller than Raed and even wider and more muscular.

“This isn’t the time.”

“I guess we should be glad you’re even here,” Mr. Salameh shouted.

“I’ll give you one warning.”

“Or what? One warning? For what?”

Raed whispered something hurriedly to his fairy wife, who walked away with her father, clutching his arm as if she couldn’t stand on her own skinny legs.

“Are you drunk?” Raed asked him.

“Yes,” replied Mr. Salameh. “I am as drunk as Peter at the Last Supper.” He yelled towards Raed’s father-in-law. “Peter, you hear? Not Mohammad! Peter!”

Marcus rolled his eyes.

“You’re mad at us because we don’t talk to your sister? Isn’t that it?”

Marcus became very quiet.

“Nobody talks to her.” Mr. Salameh had him now. What could he say? “Why would we? She’s not welcome here. She’s shacking up with her boyfriend…” he shouted, getting close to his nephew.

The punch hit him in the stomach. Later, his wife would say Marcus had spared him his face. All he knew in the moment was that he was suddenly lying on the floor of the ballroom. When he registered the gasps and felt the pain shoot through his abdomen, he understood: Marcus had knocked him flat on his ass.

Within minutes, there was a stampede of people to the front of the hall. Some lifted him, others squawked nervously like chickens. “What happened?” “Why did the big guy hit the groom’s father?” “Should we call the police?”

“No bolice. No bolice,” he heard his wife imploring someone. “Everything eez ok.”

“We’re ok, everybody,” Raed said. “Not a fight. Just an accident. My father tripped.”

The muttering changed as people who had not really seen the punch began to absorb and repeat the new story.

And that was it. Marcus, who was heading out the door, was no longer the aggressor. The story morphed quickly: he, Mr. Salameh, was a drunk fool who’d embarrassed himself at his only son’s wedding.

“I’m leaving,” he announced, standing up. “This is not right. This hasn’t been right from the beginning.” He walked out slowly; his hand pressed to his side. It hurt to breathe.

Raed didn’t follow him out.

When he turned back to look, he saw Raed at the front, looking angry and disappointed, his arm around his wife to comfort her.

His wife and a few others did follow him. He told them, after a few minutes, that he was fine. They wandered off, including Mrs. Salameh, who said, “I’m going to check on Raed.” Alone, he trudged through the Sheraton’s carpeted hallways until he found himself in an empty lounge room. He stood under a large chandelier, assembled from thousands of glass beads, each one reflecting the light to look bigger and more important than it really was. The chandelier cascaded down into a cone shape, like a big light ready to beam him up to heaven. Maybe that wasn’t where he’d end up, he thought, looking around at the ornate room, lined with tall vases of flowers, plush carpeting, rich sofas and chairs. He slumped onto one couch and stared up at that conical chandelier, which seemed to be pointed down, cocked, and aimed right at his heart.

It was a few seconds later when he heard the music. A soft, rippling sound, like a qanoun. He shook his head, but it was still there. He looked around the lounge, he was alone, but he realized it was coming from a side room. He stood up and lurched unsteadily toward what looked like a break room for employees. Inside, a group of servers, wearing black vests and pants with white shirts, stood listening reverently to a woman sitting behind a large harp, hugging it as if it were a child.

He didn’t know the song she was playing and humming, but it soothed him. And then she looked up, stared into his eyes, and he gasped loudly.

“You,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Hello,” she said quietly, tilting her head to the side just as she used to do before. “What a coincidence.”

“My God. I thought I will never see you again.”

“I do see patients’ families sometimes. It’s always nice to reconnect.” She spoke softly, stood up and held out her hands.

He gripped them and remembered how warm they’d felt, rubbing his back, holding the prayer beads on his rosary for him when he’d collapsed into sobs. They were not smooth hands, even though her face looked young. Her hands were worn, like supple leather that has been broken. They’d held his mother’s hands during an injection, they’d lifted his mother by the arms, held a stethoscope to her lungs, to her back. They’d dipped a sponge into a shallow bucket to clean his mother’s legs and feet, and they’d run a comb through his mother’s long, uncut, white hair. And in the end, they’d pulled the sheet gently over his mother’s contorted face.

“The groom is my son.”

“Ah. The bride is my husband’s cousin. I promised her I’d play for her. It’s an old family song.”

“Your husband…he’s out there?”

“Yes. Did you meet him? He has a long beard.”

“Yes. I see him. He is wearing a skirt?”

She laughed softly. “I always remember our conversations so fondly.” She was indulging him, he could tell, the way his wife did. “It’s called a kilt. I’m sure you’ve seen one before. Our family plaid is the design he’s wearing.”

It’s still a skirt, he thought, but this time, he kept it in his own mind. There suddenly didn’t seem to be any pleasure, any benefit to shocking someone, to packing his thoughts into a bullet and firing it into his listener. He felt, so strongly right then, that he would rather hurt himself, than insult this woman.

“Thank you for what you did. For my mother.”

“It was a difficult few weeks. And I’m glad I had a chance to know her. She was lovely.”

He squeezed her hand again, his throat thick, but his mind clear.

“Will you come and listen to me play?”

“Everyone in there.” He shrugged. “Nobody happy with me.”

“Oh, I can’t believe that.”

“It’s true.”

“I’d love for you to hear the song, though.” She patted his shoulder. “Won’t you come and listen?”

He did, sitting just inside the door at a vacant table. He watched and listened as she fluttered her hands over the strings, pulling out a lovely, echoing sound, along with her pretty voice. He’d walked in on her once singing to his mother, he remembered—the Ave Maria. He watched as people in Meghan’s family stood and listened reverently to her. Mrs. Salameh’s head was craned, looking around the room for him. I’m back here, he wanted to tell her. I’m ok. I’m listening.


Susan Muaddi Darraj won the American Book Award and the AWP Grace Paley Prize for her short story collection, A Curious Land: Stories from Home. Her writing has been recognized with a Ford Fellowship from USA Artists and an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council. In January 2020, Capstone Books launched her debut children’s chapter book series, Farah Rocks, for which she won the Arab American Book Award. Susan grew up in South Philadelphia and now lives in Baltimore, where she teaches fiction writing at The Johns Hopkins University.

Like Speaking in Morse Code

Do you need instructions? (Y/N)

>n

You wake up to yelling from downstairs, just like yesterday. You find your glasses on the nightstand and feel the world come back into focus. Your room has gotten progressively filthier since you arrived here. There was a point, only a few months ago, when you could still navigate the mess to find what you needed—deodorant, misplaced socks, the expensive calculator required for Trig. But now, five months in, anything that falls to the ground is as good as gone.

Beside you in bed is your laptop, still on from the night before. This might be the only object that will never be lost to the heap. You don’t know what you’d do without it.

> open laptop

The computer powers out of Sleep Mode. You lean in and study the screen, trying to remember where you left off.

Before you can read any further, you’re interrupted by more screaming from downstairs. “Are you awake?!”

> ignore

You turn back to the laptop and begin reading.

The game opens in a top-secret underground prison somewhere in the middle of Kansas. There’s a long description of how oppressive the room feels. The player doesn’t know why he’s been imprisoned—something about a shadowy organization of elites intent on world domination. You remember this being better.

You hear footsteps in the hallway, each one louder than the last. When they stop, Pop swings open the door. “You’re late!” He’s still yelling, even though you’re now in the same room. “What the hell are you waiting for?”

> say “i guess i overslept”

“I guess I overslept,” you say.

“Well, now you’re awake.” His voice is softer now, and more difficult to disregard. “Put on some clothes and grab some food.” As he walks back downstairs, you close the laptop, find your bookbag amidst the wreckage on the floor, and get dressed.

> go to the kitchen

Pop’s at the stove, cracking eggs over his cast-iron pan. “So what’s with this sleep pattern,” he says. It’s technically a question, but he delivers it as a statement. You’re not sure how to provide an answer. You’re not even sure he’s looking for one.

> say “i was writing”

“I was writing,” you say.

He cracks another egg. “You seem to think you can get through high school without sleep.”

Up until five months ago, you’d only spent time with Pop on holidays. It wasn’t that you’d disliked him; you hadn’t had any say in the matter. According to your mother, the family was toxic. Anathema. “My dad’s so judgmental,” she always said.

She wasn’t wrong about that. Since you began staying with Pop, he’s made it clear that you need to “shape up,” to “get to working,” to “get serious.” You nod every time he mentions these things, though you’re not sure if he really expects you to change. You’re sixteen. Part of you thinks he knows that you’re not actually listening.

“You need to focus on your schoolwork,” he says now, placing some runny eggs and dry toast in front of you. “And to be able to focus on your schoolwork, you need sleep.”

> eat quickly and head to the bus

You scarf down the plate in silence as Pop drones on about manhood and responsibility and “the defining moments in our lives.” With your mouth still full, you head for the door before he can start his daily lecture about steering clear of your Mom’s mistakes.

The yellow bus pulls up to the corner just as you arrive. As you board, you scan for open seats. Only two remain. There’s one in the back row, where the kids with vape pens sit and blow grape-scented rings, and then there’s the cramped space behind the driver.

> sit behind the driver and take out laptop

You take the seat behind the driver and open your laptop. Almost everyone on the bus is staring at a screen, but they’re watching their favorite YouTubers beg for subscriptions or listening to whiny songs about pharmaceuticals and heartbreak. But you, you’re different. You’re working.

You once tried to explain it all to a classmate, a shy kid with greasy hair you thought might be sympathetic, maybe even interested. It didn’t work.

“It’s a game?” he asked.

You nodded.

“But it’s only words?”

You knew elaborating would be pointless.

> open new doc

You open a new Doc and rack your brain for phrases you’ve heard over the last few days. You type “THE BORDERLINE” at the top of the page and stare at the way it sits against the white background. Your cursor blinks, like it’s taunting you to press Delete.

You ignore that impulse and instead try to imagine where the story might open. You try to imagine the options that would be offered to the player. You try to imagine the narratives that would arise from their choices, and the ones after those, and the ones after those. You start to get a bit dizzy, but you keep typing, hoping some of it will make more sense than whatever it was that you’d written the night before.

The bus pulls to a stop. You’ve arrived at school.

> hide

Sorry, I didn’t understand that request.

> hide under seat

Sorry, I didn’t understand that request.

> head to first period

Ms. Andrews is already starting the lesson when you arrive. “I want to give you some time to work on your memoir projects today,” she says as you settle into your desk. It’s an assignment the class started last week. You, however, haven’t written a word. Any minute that Ms. Andrews had allowed for in-class writing, you’d instead spent working on “THE FAMILY,” an adventure game about Giuseppe Crambino’s attempt to take his rightful place at the head of the Crambino Crime Syndicate. You’d been twenty rooms in when you realized you didn’t know anything about the mob. Demoralized, you’d pressed Ctrl+A and deleted the whole thing. The fifteen thousand words you’d written had suddenly vanished and were replaced by an unvarnished white space.

“Alright,” Ms. Andrews says, “let’s get to work!”

> open the borderline

You take out your laptop, power it back from Sleep Mode, and reopen the Doc containing “THE BORDERLINE.” You decide to avoid reading whatever you’d written on the bus. You want to focus on addition, not subtraction, so you begin typing whatever comes to mind. Character sketches, possible rooms, narrative webs—all of it could be valuable, so long as you can find the right place. At this point, the only goal is to try and keep your fingers moving as fast as your train of thought.

When you look up from your frantic typing, you realize Ms. Andrews is behind you. “Are you working on your memoir?” You know this is what she’d call a rhetorical question.

>lie

“Yes,” you say. You know it is not convincing.

She squats beside you, hovering just above the ground so she’s eye-level. “You know, your grandfather told me that this is an interest of yours. Honestly? I think it sounds pretty cool.” She’s smiling, but you can tell it’s forced. The whole thing feels like an act. You imagine Ms. Andrews and Pops in this classroom, sitting across from one another in comically small student desks, hatching this elaborate, pathetic plan to try and solve the problem that is your life.

>don’t respond

You don’t respond.

“You know, I used to play some of these games when I was a kid,” Ms. Andrews says. “Floppy disks. Do you know what those are?”

>say “yes”

“Yes,” you say.

“And what I remember about all of those games is that they’re so focused on storytelling. I mean, if you’re spending all your free time writing these games, then you must do a lot of writing.” She smiles. This is meant to be comforting. “It just makes me think that if you dedicate some of that effort towards the writing assignments for this class, then your grades will improve. I bet your games will get better, too.”

>don’t respond

You don’t respond.

“You know,” she says, lowering her voice so the other students won’t hear. “I really think an assignment like this one, where you’re asked to dive into your past, to sift through your memories, might be especially helpful for you.” She pauses. “I know you’ve been through a lot.”

What you want to say is that your writing has nothing to do with the past. It doesn’t follow a straight line backwards. It doesn’t follow any straight lines. No, your writing is concerned with the present. Your stories suggest that everything could suddenly change at any given moment, that nothing is ever truly fixed, that everything depends on your next move.

>say “can i use the bathroom”

“Can I use the bathroom?” you say. Ms. Andrews nods and moves on to the next student. You almost feel bad. She’s convinced that she’s finally broken through. She really believes you’re headed to the bathroom to have a good cry and throw some cold water on your face, that you’ll return to the room a new man, ready to exorcise all of your pain through the 750 word assignment.

>leave classroom with backpack

When Ms. Andrews begins working with another student, you grab your backpack and walk out the door. The restroom is to the east, a few hundred feet away. Ten feet to the west is an emergency exit you’ve seen teachers use for clandestine smoke breaks.

>take exit door to the west and walk off campus

You step outside the door, amazed by how much fresher the air feels. There were rumors that the school building was still rife with asbestos and now you’re certain they’re true.

You’re not too familiar with the neighborhood around school. You’ve never ventured off-campus for lunch like some of the older kids and you’ve never paid attention to street signs and landmarks on your bus ride in. That time’s always been dedicated to working on the next game.

>use gps on phone to find route home

You pull out your phone and type in Pops’ address. The app starts buffering, the circle icon spinning over and over again, asking you to just wait a little bit longer. As you’re staring, you feel someone approaching. You tell yourself not to panic, but you also begin thinking of plausible excuses for why you’re not in class.

“Do you remember me?” You look up to find an older woman. She’s smiling wide, exposing her unnaturally white teeth. “I was a friend of your mom’s.” She says this like it’s a good thing. You figure they must have fallen out of touch before everything happened.

“Okay,” you say. It comes out of your mouth without thinking. You hope it somehow sounds polite.

“How’s she been?” the woman says.

You don’t know how to answer the question. She’s wearing a navy pantsuit, the kind Mom wore years ago back when she was working the front desk at the law firm on the other side of the city. Maybe Mom knew this woman back then. Maybe this woman still works there. Maybe everyone at the law firm wears pantsuits, and smiles when they ask questions, and reaches the bare minimum of what qualifies as a “functioning adult.” As far as you can tell, the woman seems to have her life together. You wonder if she has kids at home. You wonder what they think of her. You wonder if they appreciate the fact that their mom is simply present, if they realize what a blessing it is to have a reliably boring parent capable of patience and self-control.

The woman’s smile turns to a concerned stare. “Are you all right?” she says.

> run

Where do you want to run?

> home

You turn away from the woman, in what you hope is the direction of Pops’ house. You start with a fast walk, but in just a few steps it turns into a jog. The woman is calling after you, wondering if she said something wrong, but you don’t respond. Soon enough, you’re sprinting, and the laptop in your bag bangs against your spine with every step.

After a few blocks, you stop to catch your breath. You’re hunched over, hands on your knees, panting as you stare at the sidewalk. When your pulse has finally returned to its normal pace, you take in the surroundings: you’re in front of the post office, across from the 4 Points Deli. Pops’ place is just a few minutes from here. You know he’ll be furious when he sees you at home, but you’re too tired to spend the day wandering around town. You’ll suck up your pride and nod along with his lecture, hoping that such obvious appeasement will stop him from throwing you in the car and delivering you back to Andrews’s English class.

When you enter the house, Pops is fast asleep on the living room couch. You realize you’ve never actually considered what he does all day while you’re at school. Observing him there, eyes shut tight and legs propped up on the armrest, you wonder why. His skin seems to be losing its pigment, exposing purple and blue veins that remind you of the human anatomy chapter in your Biology textbook. It’s easy to forget that he’s old enough to require a mid-morning nap, that taking you in is not something he’d planned for when he’d retired almost two decades earlier.

>go to bedroom

You quietly climb the stairs and return to your room. You lie down on the bed and open your laptop. “THE BORDERLINE” is still on the screen and you read the first few lines again, trying to put yourself back in the state-of-mind you’d found before Ms. Andrews had interrupted. But no matter how many times you re-read the opening, you can’t find the words to continue. You’re still thinking about Pops lying on the couch, about the smiling woman from the street, about the awkward way Ms. Andrews whispered, “I know you’ve been through a lot.”

You’re still thinking about Mom. You’re always thinking about Mom.

You close the file for “THE BORDERLINE” and re-open what you’d started last night: “LIKE SPEAKING IN MORSE CODE.” You highlight all of the story’s text, every description of that oppressive underground bunker and the player’s confusion at his situation, and press Delete. All that remains is the title, centered at the top of the Doc, waiting for direction.

“You wake up to yelling from downstairs,” you type, “just like yesterday.”


Kevin M. Kearney’s writing has appeared in Necessary Fiction, X-R-A-Y, Hobart, and elsewhere. He’s a fiction editor at Rejection Letters and a staff writer for PopMatters. He lives and teaches in Philadelphia. More of his work can be found at kevinmkearney.com.

Fluttering Heart

You said we needed a cage. We found one at a thrift store. It was a round cage with a big domed top that reminded me of a mosque or a Russian church. There were three perches inside and plenty of floor space. I’m sure it wasn’t brass, but the bars were that color and set far enough apart to not obscure the view looking in. Nobody wanted it to feel like a prison. We brought it home. It sat on your lap on the ride. It was a nice day and the sun came through the windows and reflected on the bars of the cage. You absolutely tapped your fingers on the bars. When you noticed you were doing it you stopped, looked over to me, and smiled.

We put the cage in the library because it was out of the way but not too out of the way, and it looked good in front of the yellow walls in that room. We had already moved the old end table from your mother’s bedroom set into that room, just for the cage. When we put the cage on it we stepped back to look at it and held hands. It was like putting up a Christmas tree or painting a new child’s room.

After dinner that night we had sex in the bedroom with the window open. I had been on top, and afterwards you rolled me over and playfully pinned me with your hands on my chest. I though it’d be like that, but that’s no way to catch a heart. We both sat up in bed facing each other. You rested your fingers against my chest and then, gently, reached in. My heart hesitated at first. You knew better than to reach for it, just kept your hand still and waited patiently instead. It didn’t take long for my heart to step into your hand and perch on your fingers. You brought it out of my ribcage and I closed my chest as it beat calmly between us. It was easy.

It liked its new surroundings right away, hearts being naturally inclined to small enclosed spaces. You fell into the habit of talking to it, and we gave it time out of its cage every day to perch on our hands and fly around the room. Every time I needed a book from the library, I would admire it the heart, I have to admit, preening or sitting in the bottom of its cage in the sun. It didn’t sing in the morning, but there was a soft, steady heartbeat below life at our place at any time of the day.

Hearts can live for years. When our friends would come over you would show them the library, your face full of pride and happiness any time they showed an interest in my heart. They would stand looking at it sleeping in its cage, laugh with surprise if it happened to turn in a circle. You were patient, letting them look at it as long as they wanted. More than once, a visitor would begin to cry, softly, while looking at the heart, or exhale deep breaths slowly through their lips like blowing out candles on a birthday cake. We would kiss, just once, in the doorway.

I loved going to the museum with you. We would spend the whole day. I loved the people as much as the art: the students sketching in their notepads on the floor, families whispering or talking too loudly, the people standing in front of a single painting to look as deeply into it as one can. There was always at least someone in front of van Gogh’s sunflowers doing that, a lot of times lots of people. But only one room over would be Renoir, women bathing together in water and light. You bought me a postcard once of that one. Do you remember hooking your thumb into the waistband of my jeans while we looked at that painting? I could feel my heart back home doing what hearts do in moments like that.

After we started fighting more often, and then after we stopped, I saved that postcard, packing it with the rest of my things. We divided the books in the library, which didn’t take long. They were mostly mine. My heart watched us from its usual perch. It was time, we agreed. I took off my shirt. Then, maybe after a moment of hesitation for both of us, I undid my belt and stepped out of my pants and underwear. You opened the cage. My heart, again, as always, perched on your fingers. You moved your hand to my chest and rested it there for a moment: your hand, my chest, my heart beating between us. Then you reached in, gentle as before. My heart returned to my body. It seemed to recognize the place.

The other day I was walking in the park by the church when I saw some robins bathing in a puddle. It is still spring. I watched them tilt their heads to listen for worms under the mud. They ran a few steps if they heard nothing to try again in a different spot. If they did hear the thump thump thump of a worm as it pulsed through the body of the planet they plunged their beaks into the mud and, as often as not, pulled him out to beat his dirty body against the ground and eat him. It was a nice day, wet and warm and living.

I don’t know what happened to the cage. I’m assuming that you sold it, or put it outside by the sidewalk with a sign that said “Free.”


Neil Craig Kennedy is a librarian. His book A Jigsaw Puzzle is available from Finishing Line Press. He lives outside Philadelphia.

REVIEW: Animal Nocturne

Liz Chang, Animal Nocturne. Moonstone Press, 2017

Liz Chang’s chapbook Animal Nocturne (2017) explores the complexities of race, love, and motherhood through a style of poetry unique to the contemporary moment. In addition to her work on the editorial board here at Philadelphia Stories, Chang is an Associate Professor of English at Delaware County Community College, and she has published two books of poetry in addition to her chapbook. Her poems have also appeared in the Verse Daily Origins, Stoneboat Literary Journal, and the Schuylkill Valley Journal, among others. She was also the 2012 Montgomery County Poet Laureate.

Animal Nocturne’s fauna imagery stands out from the first poem, entitled “A Herd of Elephants is Sometimes Called a Memory,” which begins with a metaphor that suggests that truly knowing is, “a dappled elephant hide, / ancient pachyderm’s skin (1),” huge and comprehensive, with the ability to speak and understand, “so low / that only we can hear it.” In the last poem of the collection, “A Ceremonial Poem to Honor Improbable Events,” Chang describes the persistence of horseshoe crabs. She writes:

The horseshoe crab lays enough

eggs to spare some 40,000 per starved avian

 

I was driving, thinking of love, the architecture of the universe

and this crab who has stubbornly bulldozed her way through

 

all six extinctions on this tired earth (22).

 

This comparison of love to the strength of a species to survive against all odds could easily slip into cliche, but Chang’s careful implication of the connection keeps the metaphor firmly out of that territory. The first section implies that in order to be able to survive those six extinctions, one must be able to give, to provide some eggs as food for birds.

Chang’s chapbook also deals with race, and passing that race onto one’s children.

In the poem, “What to Look for at the Dry Cleaners,” Change describes a moment where she recited a racist song that she had heard from school in front of her father. She then describes a scene where she called herself a racist name because a boy at school didn’t like her. She writes:

Daughter, I am telling you the names
I called myself so that you will hear them

and know that when politicians set off

calculated attacks

using our heritage as code…

…You will notice

The gentle and kind workers (3).

 

This section details the ways in which microaggressions, and the childish forms of racism, become public policy and intentional, institutional oppression. The speaker in this poem is trying to avoid a layer of generational trauma of internalized racism appearing in their daughter, a feat that would seem too impossible if discussed in those big picture terms. So, Chang describes it as finding a love for the individuals of their heritage, who, of course, make up the whole of a culture.

This collection touches on motherhood in a more intimate light as well. In her poem, “The Truth of It,” she writes presumably of her daughter:

this world is laden with sorrow

 

and I cannot humanly shield her softest parts,

but here is beauty

and the pain it remakes.

 

The season of her grey eyes

was shorter than I’d hoped. (19)

 

The euphonious language of this section edges close to that of a lullaby, and the enjambment pulls the lines together almost as if the speaker is singing. The content is a tenet of parenthood, without once slipping into cliched or tired language.

Chang’s poetry is both uniquely refreshing and grounded in the traditions of 21st century craft, and Animal Nocturne is an honest and beautiful reflection of her experiences with aspects of her life that are deeply personal and wonderfully intimate.

 

REVIEW: All These Things Were Real: Poems of Delirium Tremens

Michelle Reale,  All These Things Were Real: Poems of Delirium Tremens [West Philly Press, 2017]

All These Things Were Real: Poems of Delirium Tremens by Michelle Reale is an intricate window into the life of a mother struggling through and with her son’s alcoholism, spending an unclear amount of time in hospitals, treatment centers, and pain. She begins the collection with the dictionary definition of Delirium Tremens, “a psychotic condition typical of withdrawal in chronic alcoholics” (6), effectively setting the tone for the coming meditation on emotional and familial affliction.

Reale is an associate professor at Arcadia University in Glenside, PA who has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. Other collections by her include Season of Subtraction (Bordighera Press, 2019), Birds of Sicily (Aldrich Press, 2016), and Natural Habitat (Burning River, 2013), among others. She also conducts ethnographic work on African Immigrants in Sicily.

All These Things Were Real shines in its description of alcoholism from the outside. In a poem called “Crossing Borders”, Reale writes:

 

I could wallpaper a house

with receipts for Nikolai Vodka, for Rumpleminz

schnapps, one you can’t detect, the other could be

nothing more than assiduous oral hygiene. I want

to place his fragile existence in an ornate curio
in the corner of my favorite room in the house

 

Safe and unreachable. (15).

 

Reale uses the image of creating wallpaper out of the receipts for the alcohol that is actively killing her son as a way to represent the need to act, to do something tangible with her pain. Wallpaper is used to cover, alter the situation in a person’s home, which is exactly what the speaker is trying, in a way that feels impossible, to do with her familial life. She later writes, in a poem entitled “Accusations” of the level of resentment her son has for her desire to heal and help him:

 

My son froths a verbal manifesto

Against my excessive mothering,

Like turning over tables in the temple.

We don’t look at each other and

We don’t look at him (16).

 

Implied in this section is her unspoken horror at the condition of her son, and the impossibility of helping someone who doesn’t yet understand that they need help.

Reale’s description of hospital rooms and staff is another aspect of this collection that cannot go unmentioned. In a poem entitled “ICU,” the speaker describes a scene where her son wants to give his medication to the art on the wall. Reale writes:

 

The nurse plays along in the loud, over-patient voice I’ve come to dread, because it means he’s not getting better. Meet my future wife, he says, as she has the gall to blush. More fake laughter. I am in the chair in the corner, overly warm in my winter coat, pulled around me like a fortress. I wear ICU delirium like a hairnet (18).

 

The scene has an eerie sense of normalcy to it: her readers can feel the uneasiness of the speaker, and they can see the grandeur of the dying man in the hospital bed as he denies his illness. The constant, ignored presence of the speaker throughout the entire collection forces the reader to understand her perceived powerlessness, her lack of tangible ways to fix the alcoholism of her son. She can only be and watch, hidden in a coat that feels as protective as it does suffocating. In a poem entitled, “By Now”. Reale writes:

 

My lady-like grief has betrayed me.

I dab my heavily made-up eyes,

garish, in their seemingly callous denial of why I am here.

Today was a good day,

The nurse with the cigarette and coffee breath bellows,

I am silent, questioning

Her method of measurement, though admittedly

I am no nursing school graduate (25).

 

Here is another scene of grief shown through smiling, bright-faced nurses that the speaker can no longer trust. There’s a mention of other, more acceptable addictions in the coffee and the cigarettes, hinting again at the perceived untrustworthiness of the nurse, and the lack of clear outward emotion from the speaker show the repetitiveness of this scene as clearly as the diction Reale uses does.

All These Things Were Real: Poems of Delirium Tremens, is a collection of poetry for anyone with experience dealing with and loving those with addiction. By showing her care for and understanding of the ailing, Reale offers a sense of community to those that share her experience. Reale’s visceral imagery, perceived powerlessness, and quiet, desperate love, are just personal enough to be effective, and just resigned enough to be honest.

 

REVIEW: Tart Honey

Deborah Burnham, Tart Honey [Resource Publications, 2018]

Deborah Burnham’s collection of poetry, Tart Honey, carefully examines the intricacies of love and marriage that span decades, one of which was spent almost entirely long-distance. Burnham is the Associate Undergraduate Chair of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches classes in literature, craft, gender studies, creative writing, and a number of other subjects. Her other works include the award-winning collection titled Anna and the Steel Mill, and several chapbooks. She is currently working on a young adult fiction novel.

Tart Honey intimately combines a deep and complex understanding of love with the complicated resentment and sadness that hard years away often facilitate.

The collection is separated into four parts: I. The Rich Salt of Your Skin, II. We’d Wake Early and Eat Apples, III Shadows Waver Between Your Shape and Mine, and IV. A shirt, a shroud. The first section mainly deals with physical intimacy and loneliness. The second section is filled with food imagery, placing an emphasis on self-soothing, comfort, and missing the whole of a person. The third section deals with strife and a feeling of resentment for the situation of long distance, and finally the last section handles a feeling of dread and fear of a grief that hasn’t yet come.

There’s a theme of usefulness that runs through this collection, especially as one ages, from the poem entitled “On the gift of a photograph”:

 

Thanks for telling me

About Andre Kertesz, and how in 1915

He snapped two Polish Soldiers on their field

And how he kept his dignity clean and useful (11),

 

To the poem called, “Useful” which starts:

 

The snarky Roman cities the ancient practice of tossing

Old me from bridges when they’d reached sixty,

“The age of uselessness” (50)

 

And continues with, “I’m thinking of ‘useful’ because you, my love, turn sixty / in the spring (50).” Usefulness as one grows older is a consistent point of distress in these poems, specifically due to lower energy, and the fear of decay. Another aspect of this theme is clearly the idea that one struggles to feel useful to their partner while away from them for extended periods of time. Burnham thanks her husband for telling stories and talking to her on the phone, as that is one small way she can assure him that he and his love are useful to her.

A shining moment in this collection exists in the slow and intimate development of grief.

In the poem“Will,” Burnham writes:

 

The man I’ve loved for forty years will die

In less than forty years, and, like most men,

He has not willed his precious objects (53).

 

Then she describes the action she imagines taking after her husband dies, specific to the table he owns:

 

When he no longer sits there

I will soak and bend it to a boat

And take my grief to sea, and inch of wood

Between my skin and the abrading

Salty sun (53).

 

In the very next poem, she states:

 

Because women in my mother’s family

Live more years as widows than as wives,

They could write a manual for the first years

Of grief, which come without directions (54).

 

Burnham is deconstructing her feelings of strife having to be without her husband by imagining the world as it will be when he doesn’t come home, and will never come home again. She speaks of the impossibility of truly understanding her life without him, and how instead she turns to mystical fantasies, drawing on history and myth. Also in the final section is the poem called, “One way to end” where she describes the tales of elderly individuals wandering deep into the woods, seemingly confused. She writes:

 

I might leave the house to look for you, walking

A straight line, turning only to avoid

A sapling, a fallen log, but as the woods

Thicken, I’ll leave bits of clothing- a sleeve,

A shoe, caught on encircling limbs.

I’ll walk so near the great rough trunks that

Cell by cell, my grateful drying flesh

Will wear to nothing (62).

 

In this poem, it’s unclear if the speaker’s husband has died or if he is just away, blending the feeling of grief she has with the current act of missing her husband as he works across the country. The similarities between the two emotions are shown to be dizzying, even while one is imagined and looming and one is very present.

Deborah Burnham’s collection takes her reader through her decade of being separated by space and her decades of being filled with love slowly, and with a steady hand. Her diction is clear and written with a level of authority I found to be fascinating. Tart Honey is truly a collection for those who need a companion in their grief, their loneliness, and, perhaps most honestly, their love.

 

REVIEW: Fire Up The Poems

Fire Up The Poems [Bucks County Poet Laureate Program, 2021]

With the return of in-person learning in American classrooms, teachers will confront a challenge they haven’t faced since the COVID-19 pandemic began: galvanizing students in a live classroom. But thanks to the generosity of Bucks County Community College, there is hope. Conceptualized by Mary Jo Lobello Jerome, the 2019 Bucks County poet laureate, Fire Up The Poems is a teacher’s handbook for engaging students in poetry. Each prompt is written by a different Bucks County poet laureate. The book offers no shortage of support: after the book’s publication, all BC teachers received free copies from the college and the college’s poet laureate program hopes to create a PDF and an audio version to reach a wider audience.

Fire Up The Poems has concise introductions, poems, and instructions in each of its prompts (often three pages maximum). Anyone can read it and learn techniques to improve their poetry, but the handbook’s true gifts are for teachers. The instructive sections, titled “Start Writing,” prepare readers, teachers, and students to answer prompts with methods like asking questions or pointing to certain media to research.

In her prompt, “Letting Your Spirit Out!”, 2005 Poet Laureate Patricia Goodrich explains how to teach her prompt to a class: “Before class, cut up hundreds of words. This could be a student or teacher pre-activity…In class, pass around a basket filled with words. These are the words that will help you find your own poems,” (26). Goodrich concludes by explaining the ways students could share, like reading aloud or remaining anonymous while a teacher reads their work.

Prompts in Fire Up The Poems can be categorized into different styles and activities. There are prompts about literary techniques (Anaphora, Assonance, Consonance), memory, (The Risks and Rewards of Resonant Particulars, Glimpsed in Passing, The Road You Have Taken, etc.), research (Tattoo Talk, There’s a World Out There, Discover a Poem in The Dictionary, etc.) and more. Research may seem difficult to teach students learning poetry—they may be easily distracted, but in her poem, “The Poem with the Teensy Tattoo,” (11) 2002 Poet Laureate Luray Gross shows research can be fun and achieve fun results:

The poem with the teensy tattoo

you’ll never get to see talks big

but keeps her private matters

private.

She let her pigtails jounce

as she skipped rope

in a corner of the playground.

Bent over her library book,

she felt them fall over her shoulders.

 

Gross explains this poem came to her after a tattoo conversation with a friend. In her “Start Writing,” section, she suggests that students supplement their writing with research on tattoos. She points to an article from the Smithsonian magazine that says humans have marked themselves in tattoos for thousands of years. She further suggests analyzing specific tattoos and seeing what emotions they conjure in students. By using interesting facts and evoking the emotions of students, research becomes a fun tool. And like all tools, research can be used in multiple ways for multiple purposes.

As a handbook to pick out concise poetry prompts, Fire Up The Poems functions very successfully. The book is also enjoyable when read cover-to-cover, though the pace is slower when read this way. Having been written by different poets, the writing style of each prompt is unique.

With concise instructions and rules that can be adapted to fit any classroom scenario, Fire Up The Poems offers varied and exciting resources to teachers in need of engaging poetry exercises.

 

REVIEW: What Is in the Blood

Ellen Stone, What Is in the Blood. Mayapple Press, 2020

If it is true that a humble upbringing can inspire lasting impressions in the soul of a poet, Ellen Stone’s What Is in the Blood bears this out. This two-part collection of poems compassionately portrays the sensitive issue of bipolar disorder, an illness little understood in the 1960s and 1970s.

The reader is immediately introduced to the mother’s mind and connections to the family, their environment, and nature. In the first two lines of the first poem, “My Mother’s mind,” Stone informs the reader “She doesn’t remember how she lost it/We were young and needed her” (5). The trappings of daily life and nature appear several lines later, respectively: “Greasy stove/cluttered counter” and “lit shards of kindling…watching wood turn into space.”

There are moments of imagination throughout the book, of the whirlwind of better days without melodrama. “My parents’ hands” (8) sets an early tone of the dynamic of Stone’s mother and father. Her father is distant, unaffectionate, seemingly in denial of his wife’s illness. Her mother appears in nearly every poem, if not directly, then nuanced. A woman whose central role in keeping the family intact erodes before our eyes. A grandfather appears bent on attempting rote order, a futile endeavor toward cohesion.

The poetic forms range from couplets to numerous single stanza/several stanza arrangements. Some exist as prose paragraphs. Odes to the inanimate: the lawn sprinkler (47) and the blow-up pool (48), provide a bit of humor and nostalgia to the text. The sprinkler is described as a “Receptacle of arms, circulating/whirl-a-gigs, spreading over vacant thoughts.” The pool (48) “My American dream for under $9.99 I want to unwrap you even now, so rainbow, so bathtub in the yard.” There are epistolaries to the pool mentioned above, the garden shed, one directed toward Despair. Stone’s mastery of imagery and cadence pulls the reader close to her. At moments my reading presence seemed intrusive; for instance, there is something intensely personal in “Driving to Galesburg” (44), as I read “frayed mane, tail glowing behind [her mother] like a flag, or some kind of signal.” Stone held my attention in the crosshairs of her word choice. There are line twists that can leave the reader in a quandary of whether they missed something, as in “The psychiatrist talks to the family (1968)” (9):

Our mom would not be coming home with us,

We were young in a world of holes and doubt.

The shift harkens back to the intended effect that life as the family knew it was about to change irrevocably.

The before and after time frames weave among the pages, with nature as an anchoring force. Nature is used here not as an adversary but as a grounding point. Not as indifferent but different as circumstances proceed; by doing so, it guides the reader in theme recognition. Those themes include loneliness, separation within the household with the parents’ divorce, and her mother’s relocation to Boston, and the methodical gravitation toward the inevitable while still seeking hints of normalcy from the once mundane routine of life.  Themes further extend to the formation of Stone’s feminism; insightful, not overdone. Stone expresses disillusionment that Jesus had worked so many miracles but did not rescue her mother. Every moment toward what cannot be stopped is captured by Ellen Stone with her butterfly net, landing on each page, pain-pinned for posterity.

 

REVIEW: The Betweens

Arrieu-King, Cynthia. The Betweens. Noemi Press, 2021.

Cynthia Arrieu-King’s The Betweens is a startingly necessary book. The title refers to a needle in quilting that “you have to use… [that is] so thin and short that it can penetrate all of the layers… called a between.” (19). In fact, the entire collection of flash essays—or prose-poems, since Arrieu-King is also a poet—is dedicated to “those who find themselves in between.”

 

Arrieu-King’s speaker situates herself amid layers in many areas of her life: as a half-French, half-Chinese daughter in a family of brothers, as a teacher, as an artist. Arrieu-King’s fierce commitment to looking puts in this reviewer’s mind the classic image of the cow’s eye, cut open with a scalpel, from the early surrealist film Un Chien Andalou: she splits open her world defiantly, spilling the gory contents on the table. At the same time, the entire collection begins with an epigraph from Clutch Fleishmann, about moving away from metaphor because “one thing is never another thing, it’s a lie to say it is anything but itself.” It’s this tension of the unreal (living inside of a society that tells us over and over that those of us who defy categorization should not, in fact, exist) and her undeniable reality power this book. Although her poetic voice may be intimate—almost as if she is speaking into a small, soft space that echoes—the sweep of these essays is immense (as Gaston Bachelard might say).

 

In the second piece in the collection, she describes a dream when she was young with an intruder breaking into her house and trying to keep them out with her dollhouse. Later, “I dream about hiding in pianos, cupboards, floating up to the ceiling. I did not live through any wars… but these nightmares—in which I practice being invisible—feel inherited” (001). The impressive part of Arrieu-King’s work is that she manages not to be self-pitying. She realizes the privilege that was afforded to her in growing up “white-adjacent” and even how she “actually forget[s] I am Asian-looking” (025) when she is in elementary school. She writes about a grant application that is rejected because she is “hiding her privilege… [admitting,] I see what they mean.” (009).

 

Arrieu-King writes deftly of the “feeling of not wanting to be seen[, quoting her student who admits:] You get that displayed feeling from all the microagressions” (041). While not every micro-essay is about race, it is an elemental force in the world that she describes. So many of the works reverberate with a sense of expectation that others seem to have for her and how this speaker often fears she disappoints in an entire catalogue of ways. She recounts conversations with colleagues and friends when she feels ill-equipped to be the person they wish her to be. She does not spare herself. At times, however, these realizations are darkly funny, like when she admits she incorrectly assumed her Chinese father was quoting Confucius when she was growing up as he spouted quirky sayings. Years later she realizes that these are, in fact, quotes from Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac (023).

 

Frankly, this was a hard collection to read because I also identify as a multiracial Asian woman without a clear place. It may be difficult for any reader whose family has experienced displacement and trauma brought on by conflict and racism. But the beauty of The Betweens is that Arrieu-King models both the isolation and the freedom this affords us as we start over, resolve to thrive. She writes in the penultimate piece, when describing old friendship, that it is “…[a]s if the universe is telling me it’s right to keep choosing people that feel like home” (069). Each of these works is a quilt-square in an intricate tapestry of honesty and forged identity. Arrieu-King has artfully staked a claim on the needle-point of so many important conversations happening right now.

 

 

ONLINE BONUS: The Hunger of Tides

DaVinci was convinced that the tide was the breath of a beast

he could not see.

You agree.

It swamped your sandy house in the super storm,

washed your grandfather up on the wrack line,

pulled under the heavy mood of the mother

you barely knew as she tried to stay afloat.

Stay afloat.

You wish you were born part tide

and rise above these anxious seas. I will take what you love,

it sings, pressing you

to love

so little, so little, pressing you to rise and fall, rise and fall.

What the tide wants from you, you do not want to give.

 

Galileo felt in its movement the movement of the Earth, moving him

to write

that the Earth is not the center of the Earth, moving him

to live

under house arrest until he died.

When you dove into the Mediterranean, it rocked you against a crag

that rose out of that wild sea

as if it too, needed to breathe. Breathe. It opened your wounds

to brine—

sinew, muscle, nerve, memory, shame—

and bone.

The tide continued to roil Galileo’s imagination.

Imprisoned in his home, he looked at the stars for confirmation

until he went blind.


Peter E. Murphy was born in Wales and grew up in New York where he managed a night club, operated heavy equipment and drove a taxi. Author of eleven books and chapbooks of poetry and prose, his work has appeared in The Common, Diode, Guernica, Hippocampus, The New Welsh Review, Philadelphia Stories, Rattle, and elsewhere. He is the founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University in Atlantic City.