July 2011 | back-issues, poetry
The lace was frayed at the edges
worn and old – yellow like the
books you were so very fond of
You had rubbed at the needlework,
running your fingers across the
embroidered lilies; your hands—
clammy and cold, had pinched
those petals; plucking them as if
they had been Real
I had mended your garden,
each time you came to me;
red faced, puffy cheeked,
tearful over the mess that
You had made, yet telling
Me to fix it – please
My eyes can no longer hold
the needle, thin and silver,
which you had watched –
enamored, as it swam
between the eyelets
I am too old, too liver spotted,
too wrinkled and grey –
and you, you’ve grown too
big, for the false flowers I had
sewn so long ago; You, the garden,
are Gone
– Alice Linn
July 2011 | back-issues, fiction
by Kerry Lanigan
Amy’s voice is on the line before Ellen even hears a full ring.
“Thank God you called. I’m at my wit’s end today, Ellen – he is On. My. Last. Nerve.”
Ellen sighs into her receiver; in her ear the air reverberates with a harsh blast. “What time did he wake you up?” She pinches the bridge of her nose between her eyes, pulls her hand slowly across her temple.
“Six-freaking-AM! He wanted waffles. Wouldn’t stop yelling until I made some waffles and then he knocked over the bowl of batter and it went everywhere. He spread it around the table with his hands; it was a fabulous freaking mess.”
“Did you try playing that puzzle that I sent you a few weeks ago? Sometimes if you can get him to do something constructive with his hands—”
“I tried the puzzle! He kept getting up from the table and getting into the cupboards instead. He’s going through everything, pulling out papers and silverware and…” Amy’s voice is thick and wobbling as it trails off, fat clouds of tears gathering, ready to open and pour. “Jason can’t stand it. He can’t sleep either and then he yells at me and…I don’t know if our marriage can handle this.”
“I’m sorry. I know it’s hard.” Ellen bites the inside of her cheek, a raw, smooth, sweet-tasting spot that she’s been making worse all month, an aching worry stone for these daily phone conversations with her sister. “Maybe it’s time to consider some other living arrangements for him.” There. It’s out.
Amy is silent in her ear, only breathing. Then a sniffle, a shaky breath. Ellen listens hard, her body clenched, waves of energy pulsing toward the phone in her hand. Finally: “Maybe.”
“Poor dad.”
“Yeah. Poor dad.”
July 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Transcendental Love
Apparently, our love
has been reading Emerson
and believes it is self-reliant.
We, who have been part and particle
of each other, daily, nightly,
minutely merging (your hair covering
my skin, my tongue speaking your thoughts,
your oversoul in my underwear,
my hammer on your anvil and your foot
in my stirrup), now sit rooms apart
and prefer not to
Will you assume
what I assume
as I celebrate myself and sing myself?
Do your atoms, belonging equally to me
as mine to you, resonate with the same frequency?
Or does your heart vibrate to that iron string—
trusting yourself, exploring the sacredness
of your own mind, your own body?
If we must each triumph in our own
principles, can we not yet hope
that Whim will lead us each
through each
other, that the
currents of the Universal
being will circulate your Not Me
through the not me
of my own body,
once more?
The Empty Set
I am still only conjecturing that
spending the night with you last night is what
did not happen, out of the set of all potential
events that did not happen between us all
night. But the graph seemed to me to lead to
your bed (which, as you recall, was just two
feet away, with the blankets thrown back).
Yet our evening was a demonstration of Zeno’s
Paradox—we could not cross the distance
to the bed because we forever had first
to cross half the distance.
When I think about that missed intersection,
I think about plotting the slopes of our lives, the route
we each took to meet in that room, and how
any previous meeting would have already
been too late for us to reach that bed;
how we would have needed to have exactly
our same experiences leading to this
precise moment together, but without
ever having passed through those other points
on the graph, that intersected with those other husbands
and wives and children. Those trajectories
are defined by the impossible—they are mapped
in imaginary space only, when we subtract
our families from our lives and take the square
root of our resulting negative selves.
Other people, I think, can compute this, but
it was a math too radical for me.
– Suzanne Lane
Suzanne began as a fiction writer many years ago, but for short forms, she has been increasingly drawn to poetry. In addition to writing poetry, she is also writing a mixed-genre memoir, All over the Map, about my experiences growing up as a military dependent, and an academic book about the rhetoric of antebellum slave narratives. Suzanne has taught literature, creative writing, and composition at Harvard, Cal State, San Bernardino, and BU. She currently teaches rhetoric and writing at MIT.
