Author’s Note: I watched my daughter teach a swim class at the local high school pool and was struck by her combination of beauty and ridiculousness. There is a goodbye that comes after high school for many parents, when we realize things will never be the same. This moment felt like a turning point, and I wanted to capture it.

Last Swim Class

In the shallow end of the swimming pool
children surround my daughter. They climb
onto her shoulders, hang from her arms,
say goodbye to their dripping goddess.
I will not think about her leaving tomorrow
for college. Douglas firs lean into the chain link fence.
Between wind-blown boughs, a glimpse
of turquoise. Summer sun illuminates
waves around her, droplets of water
sparkle in her hair. I smile, give a thumbs-up
from my white plastic chair. Her newborn
spine was a string of pearls beneath my fingers.
One minute she is a painting from centuries past,
illuminated in golden light—the next
a laughing girl in goofy pink sunglasses.
Daughter, you cannot see how brightly you shine.
We push quarters into the rusty soda machine.
Cold bottles clunk into our hands. Let’s take our time,
drink this effervescence as slowly as we can. 

♦ 

Pam Crow is a clinical social worker and award-winning poet who lives in Portland, Oregon. Her work has also been published in Ploughshares, Green Mountain Review, Carolina Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, and other journals. Her book Inside This House was published by Main Street Rag press in 2008.

The Delmarva Review, in St. Michaels, MD, gives selected writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) for their most compelling new prose and poetry to present to discerning audiences everywhere. It exists at a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) were closing their doors or reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. About half are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: “Petrarch’s Cat” sprang from my experience of trying (trying!) to learn a piano piece by Franz Liszt, based on one of the poet’s sonnets. I had to dig for an English translation, in the process learning a lot more about the poet’s life and stumbling on a description of the supposed cat mummy. An irresistible peculiarity. Add the notion of a long-term, unrequited love, and…

Petrarch’s Cat

MY FIRST SIGHT OF SOPHIA came in the Piazza San Marco in the Italian village of Arquà Petrarca. The plaza was crowded, and it was hard to keep her in sight even though she was, with her red hair, bare shoulders, and long white legs, the most conspicuous person in the village. 

I lost her in the Piazza but saw her again an hour later in the Church of Santa Maria Assunta. She had covered her head and shoulders with a dark silk shawl, and she knelt before a side altar. I was struck by the timelessness of the image; a similarly draped woman might have knelt so at any time in the last five centuries. The air itself was hushed, the candle flames perfectly still, tiny threads of smoke rising undisturbed to the ceiling. The setting offered no chance of conversation, though, so I lingered outside the church. 

She did not emerge, but stayed on my mind as I walked the winding streets to my true destination, the house where the Renaissance poet Petrarch lived out his final years. And there she was, still wearing the scarf, and browsing the displays in the house’s small museum. I kept her in sight this time, moving with her from room to room, and standing a few paces behind her as she looked at Casa Petrarca’s famous oddity, the supposed mummy of Petrarch’s pet cat. To my eye, the object on display looked nothing like a cat, and there is little evidence that Petrarch even owned one, but never mind. A legend is a legend, and tourism matters to small towns. Saint Jerome is said to have had a lion for company in his hermit’s cell, so I suppose Petrarch is entitled to his kitty. 

Here, I realized, was my opening. Unless she read Latin, the inscription beneath the gruesome display would mean nothing to her. I could open that door, charm her, win her over. I knew my Petrarch. 

The beast’s own voice speaks in the inscription, first claiming to rank even higher in Petrarch’s affections than the poet’s eternal, unattainable love, Laura de Noves: 

AAAAnd when I say I had his heart,
AAAWhile Laura play’d the second part,
AAAI must not be derided. 

Then he boasts of preserving the Great Man’s works by driving the mice away: 

AAAEven now, though I am dead,
AAAThose nibbling wretches dare not tread
AAAlOn one of Petrarch’s verses. 

It was the Petrarch house that brought me to Arquà, as a freshly matriculated graduate student casting about for a thesis subject. I was brimming with Renaissance facts and eager to strut, and I stood a while in the gallery, looking the girl over and formulating my approach. I could appear to take her for a native and use my awkward student Italian to ask her help; perhaps she could recommend a pleasant trattoria where we… 

She was in the exit door of the museum, haloed by afternoon sunlight, and as I took a panicky step toward her, she showed me the serene half-smile of a Raphael Madonna, a smile that knew exactly what I was up to, and that sized me up and dismissed me in a single thought. Then she disappeared. 

I hurried outside and saw her at the next corner, tossing a crumpled piece of paper into a trash bin. A tour group, in the care of a shouting guide, engulfed me and slowed my pursuit. By the time I reached the corner she was gone again, into a warren of medieval alleys that gave no sign of her passage. 

Immune to embarrassment, I reached into the bin and retrieved the paper she had discarded. It was her receipt for the Casa Petrarca entry fee, made out in her name, Sophia Altobelli. 

That was thirty years ago. 

THROUGH ALL THESE YEARS, Petrarch has been my field, my niche, the key to whatever career success I have had. 

Petrarch, born Francesco Petrarca. V anguard of the Renaissance. The first humanist, the first tourist, first to climb a mountain just for the view. Coiner of the term “Dark Ages.” Inventor of the sonnet. 

The man who taught the world to pine. 

I can’t say Petrarch has made my fortune, because universities don’t pay that well. I have a modest reputation, all the same. My books on the poet have been well reviewed and have sold decently, given the limits of their subject. They rest even now in the stacks of hundreds of libraries, waiting to be stumbled upon by scholars looking for something else. 

As my expertise grew over the years, I never believed the story of the cat. The author of the inscription lived some two centuries after Petrarch, and the first mention of the cat mummy dates from about the same time. A fine joke on credulous pilgrims, I thought, and my thesis advisor shared my skepticism. 

Still, people relate to the cat. It humanizes Petrarch, just as his decades of devotion to Laura gave the world a model of loving from afar. He ascertained the routes of her daily walks and contrived to be in her path; he sat near her in church; he even bought a plot of land nearby to stay close to her. 

Today, of course, such conduct is called stalking. For Petrarch, it was enough to think she might appear if he dawdled in the town square or the public gardens, and that if she appeared, she might speak to him, or give him a brief smile. In his letters and journals, he berated himself for impure thoughts and for giving himself over to obsession. Yet he also cherished his obsession; it inspired his work. 

Did they know each other or ever speak? There is no record. Apart, of course, from the hundreds of love poems that sprang from Petrarch’s pen between his first glimpse of Laura in 1327 and her death from plague in 1348. And I know that a love such as Petrarch’s can not only survive separation from the beloved but require it. Some women, perhaps most, are loved best from a distance. Lord Byron, after all, had his own verdict on Petrarch: 

AAAAThink you that, had Laura been his wife
AAAAHe would have written sonnets all his life? 

SOMEHOW, I knew the girl was American. The way she crumpled the receipt and tossed it into the trash. The way she vanished so abruptly into the village’s ancient maze of stone- paved passages. That’s how Americans walk, I thought. And that display of flesh. Add in her smile, at once modest and arrogant. An American girl, for sure. 

I had two more days in Arquà and spent most of it wandering outdoors in hopes of another chance encounter. Surely, she had invited me, I thought; surely she expected me to follow. I took dozens of pictures, convinced that the place itself held a key. My scrawled notes gave me a plausible occupation as I sat in one café or another, drinking endless bitter coffee and scanning for her. 

She never re-appeared, and soon I thought of her simply as a future memory, an image sure to recur from time to time. I would smile briefly on my deathbed, and my loved ones would look at each other. Not so much a Road Not Taken—I had not really had the choice, after all—as one of those slightly worn trails that wander off from our main life path. A book of Petrarch’s love poems, coupled with an Italian dictionary, helped me pass my long flight home. 

FOR NEARLY TEN YEARS, the girl obediently played her assigned role in my life. Whenever an unknown woman smiled at me in a bar or on the subway, I returned the smile and thought of Sophia: her hair, her shoulders, her prayerful posture in the ancient church. She also appeared to me in dreams and flashed into my wandering mind in idle moments and odd places, often in much less pious poses. 

Meanwhile I wrote my thesis, got my master’s, got my doctorate, got my first job, and a better second job. I also acquired a wife, a slender pediatrician with no interest at all in Renaissance poetry. 

As to my Sophia, her beauty grew in my memory as Arquà Petrarca shrank into the past. She was safe in that mental realm where she would never age, never change at all. 

Then one day, there she was again, taking a seat on a dais in a Baltimore hotel ballroom at the annual conference of the National Society for Renaissance Literature. I had sat near the back, hoping to slip out early, and at first, doubted my eyes. But the program told me the next panel included a presenter named Sophia Altobelli. 

Her last name had not changed. Nor her hair. The shoulders and legs I recalled so well were demurely covered by jacket and pants. 

I remember almost nothing of her talk. She focused on Dante and only mentioned Petrarch near the end, when she accused him of thrusting himself at Laura but magnanimously forgave him because “he was a cat person, after all.” 

“I know,” she added, “because I’ve seen the remains of the cat at the poet’s house in Padua.” With that, she looked out over the audience and smiled, a smirk really, conveying to me, if no one else, that she shared my own opinion of that bogus artifact. Had she seen me in the audience or somehow sensed my presence? 

Afterward, I went straight to the evening reception on a terrace overlooking Baltimore Harbor, where I staked out a position near the bar and waited. In vain. 

I saw her the next morning, crossing the lobby and dragging a wheeled carry-on case. She glanced in my direction and seemed to pause; perhaps I imagined it. Did she recognize me, somehow, despite the years that had passed? My last sight of Sophia was as she passed through the revolving doors to a waiting taxi. She had not come to socialize, I thought; good for her. She’s busy and a serious scholar. 

Thanks to the printed program, I now knew where to find her—the University of North Carolina—and had a sampling of what turned out to be an impressive library of papers and other publications. Our shared professional interests also gave me an excuse to get in touch. I did not do so, but I still have that program somewhere. 

The immediate effect of this second encounter was to jump- start my own rather becalmed career. I read all of her papers looking for something I could comment on or a tidbit I could develop into an article of my own. And it worked, for a while: I had three significant publications in the next two years, boosting my chances of tenure. I thought, she’s inspired me, hasn’t she? 

Newly motivated, I began to work up a session proposal for the society’s next national meeting, conveniently nearby. They turned me down, but accepted a proposal from my colleague Mel Isaacson, whose work had never impressed me. When the advance program came in the mail, I quickly discovered my Sophia was also on the agenda once again. 

So: A serious scholar, admirable for more than just her looks, and her work was more interesting than mine. 

PETRARCH usually prefaced his poems, and some of his other works, with a pun: “His laurels grew along with his love of Laura.” His poems are also full of references to gentle breezes and light airs, portraying the subtle effect of his beloved on her surroundings. The Italian word he used most was l’aura, the air, which has led some scholars to argue that he fixated on her mainly for the wordplay. Or perhaps made Laura up. 

He found resonance in the fact that Laura died twenty years to the day from the day he first saw her. He claims that first milestone occurred on Good Friday of the year 1327, and the date of that holy day is easy to establish. Laura died on April 6, 1348. That date might or might not be accurate, depending on the reliability of local clerks more than six centuries ago. 

The notion fits well with Petrarch’s own narrative of his life, as a man who wholly devoted himself over twenty years to the praise of a distant beloved. He defined himself, which most people living today would be hard-pressed to do. 

If the dates turned out to be unreliable, would it matter? 

“HAVE YOU EVER MET THIS ALTOBELLI WOMAN?” I asked Mel in the university food court. I was leafing through the advance program, which listed his accepted session. He shook his head. 

“You should go to this,” I said, tilting the booklet toward him. He leaned forward for a look and shrugged. “Not really my field,” he said, and returned to his acai bowl. 

“I saw her once,” I went on. “In fact, we go back a long way.” 

“Really,” Mel said flatly. 

“She does good work. And she’s definitely worth looking at.” 

Mel glanced around the almost-empty cafeteria. “Don’t you know better than to say something like that out loud?” he asked. 

He shook his head slowly while I forced a laugh. The next month he was off to the conference. When he returned, he dropped the thick on-site program on the coffee table in the department lounge. He had marked several pages with Post-it Notes; Sophia’s presentation was not among them. 

“I did check out her session,” he told me over coffee. “Didn’t stay long. It was kind of superficial, actually.” 

“Superficial?” I repeated, and even as I said it, I heard my voice rise in pitch and volume. 

“Whoa,” Mel said, chuckling. “Dial it back a bit, hey?” 

I smiled. “I’m surprised,” I said. “I’ve read a few of her papers and thought they were quite good.” 

“Well, as I said before, not really my field,” Mel said.

“I have a couple of ideas on which she might be a good collaborator,” I went on. 

“So get in touch. All the presenters’ emails are in there,” he said, gesturing at the program. 

I decided to write to Sophia and propose that we work together on something for the following year’s conference, something that might even result in a book. I threw myself into the task and generated a 2,000-word document, which I then slaved to cut to a reasonable email. I finished by proposing that we meet at the conference to discuss it in person. The event was close enough that I could go on my own dime. The message sat in my “Drafts” folder for two days, then I clicked “Send.” 

She replied almost immediately to say she had been forced to cancel her conference trip, so we couldn’t meet, and as to collaboration, she unfortunately found herself fully engaged for the foreseeable future. 

My encyclopedic proposal lingered in my files for a year, then began evolving into my first book. Sophia had inspired me once again. 

She also beat me to publication with a thin but well- reviewed study of Boccaccio. I decided to bring my copy to a conference someday and ask her to sign the title page. I also noted in the author bio that she “lives in the Chapel Hill area with her husband and two young sons.” 

I spent some time online—knowing I was behaving badly— and found her address, then used Google Streetview to get a look at her house. On-screen I saw an abode of brick and siding, with window boxes full of blossoms flanking the door. An SUV was parked in the driveway, its license number blurred out. On the stone entry threshold sat a black cat, benignly surveying its front yard. 

The whole scene had an appealing domesticity. I imagined the life going on behind the brick, under the self-satisfied gaze of the black cat. A settled life of scholarship, modest success, yard work, grocery shopping, contentment. 

And two young sons. Well, I thought, Laura gave her husband eleven children while Petrarch pined away for her. 

While I pined, my university moved steadily closer to shutting down its comparative literature program. Enrollment was scandalously low, alumni financial support had fallen off, and the institution did not have the comfort of a large endowment. The field I loved had become a frill, an indulgence, no match for all that indispensable science and tech. It was only prudent, I thought, to fish in a few other ponds. 

Over supper one evening near the end of the spring semester, I said to my wife, “They have a strong program at UNC.” 

“North Carolina?” she replied. “Are you serious?” 

“Well, my days here are numbered,” I replied. “And why not UNC? I hear Chapel Hill is charming.” 

“And what in the world would I do there?” 

“The same as here,” I said. “They need pediatricians everywhere. Renaissance scholars, not so much.” 

“It’s not that simple,” she said. “What about my patients? What about my parents?” 

“What about them?” I countered. “You can be a doctor anywhere. There’s not so many opportunities in my field.” 

“Then maybe you should think about a new field,” she said, and began to clear the table even though neither of us had finished eating. 

I sulked the evening away in my (our) home office. I had fully imagined a new life in Chapel Hill, building my reputation while rooting for the Tar Heels and seeing Sophia almost every day. 

I updated my curriculum vitae and began making lists of people I could approach for letters of recommendation. Each time I raised the topic of a move with Nicole, she shut down the conversation. 

Mel did not return to the university that fall. He let his colleagues know by email that he’d taken a new job in California. I passed this news on to Nicole, who said only, “I wish him well.” 

I tried to remember the name of the department chair at UNC. Idly I clicked on the UNC website. On the comparative literature program page, I found a box captioned “In Memoriam,” within which I saw the long-remembered face: Older, but still serene and beautiful. Sophia, I learned, had died of brain cancer the previous month. 

I sometimes invite my students to imagine the day Petrarch learned of Laura’s death, of the unrecoverable loss of something that was never his at all. 

He imagined it himself, or at least imagined avoiding that day: 

AAACreator kind!
AAAGrant that ere hers my death shall first be met.
AAASo the great public loss I may not see,
AAAThe world without its sun. 

My male students sometimes identify with Petrarch’s longing, but mostly they think he was a fool. Most of the women I’ve taught have had persistent unwanted suitors and don’t find them appealing. I doubt I have ever known a woman student who had received an original love poem from a guy. Nor can I plausibly imagine any of my male students sitting down and composing such a thing. 

As far as I can tell, they’re stumped by the very notion of a faithful love from afar. 

That was the role Petrarch defined for himself: The chaste and endlessly devoted lover of the perfect woman. That role is not available today. I know, because I tried. 

Petrarch’s legacy has shrunk. The nibbling wretches have been hard at work, right under the cat’s nose. Scholars long ago discarded the term “Dark Ages.” Other poets have been credited with the actual creation of what is known as the Petrarchan Sonnet. His ascent of Mont Ventoux has been endlessly re- interpreted. 

And the mummy? Though the subject of smiles and shrugs among the knowing, it continues to draw modest crowds in the little museum in Arquà, and its epitaph continues to charm. The ugly little thing simply fits the romantic story Petrarch concocted for his own life. And I continue to love it. 

♦ 

John J. McKeon is a Maryland writer with an Irish/German heritage. He grew up in New York City and has always been interested in the immigrant American experience. His career has included work as a newspaper reporter and magazine writer. He is the author of several novels and a short story collection, and his work recently appeared in the Delmarva Review,  Volume 11 (2018) and Volume 16 (2023). Website: www.johnjmckeon.com 

The Delmarva Review, in St. Michaels, MD, offers selected writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) for their most compelling new prose and poetry to present to discerning audiences everywhere. It exists at a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) are closing their doors or reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions (at no charge) to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. About half are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

Author’s Note: “Revision” appears in my poetry collection, The Ledger of Mistakes (Terrapin Books, 2023), about caring for my mother during her decline and death. Having worked as a hospice chaplain, I am well aware that the death of a family member often brings up what is left unresolved. In fact, sometimes the urge to rewrite history is almost irresistible.

Revision

Because after widowhood
and a second marriage,
you had five names,
(trochees linked by single stresses) 

which you tried on
like skirts, blouses, jackets,
mixing and matching
according to your mood,
for different occasions,
a pile left on the closet floor—

three of the five for your license,
a different three for taxes,
yet another three for your will— 

who but I to untangle the mess
when were you gone?

Because in the end
you left it to me to decide
who you were—what name
to display I meant to say—
on the two-person headstone,
bought so long ago,
half of which
had been blank for fifty years,

I made the last edit,
struck out the final trochee,
gave you back to Daddy,
God help you. 

♦ 

Kathy Nelson has worked as an engineer, a teacher, and a chaplain. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and is the recipient of the 2019 James Dickey Prize for Poetry (from Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art ) as well as a Pushcart nominee. In addition to her chapbooks, Cattails (Main Street Rag, 2013) and Whose Names Have Slipped Away (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and her forthcoming full-length The Ledger of Mistakes (see above), her work has appeared in LEON Literary Journal, New Ohio Review, Tar River Poetry, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, among others. Website: https://kathynelsonpoet.com/ 

The Delmarva Review, in St. Michaels, MD, gives selected writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) for their most compelling new prose and poetry to present to discerning audiences everywhere. It exists at a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) were closing their doors or reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. About half are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: “On Making Marmalade” is an excerpt from my lyrical essay collection, The Blue Years. I wrote it as a love letter, or meditation, on taking our time to do things right. I had never made marmalade before, and something about the process was so beautiful to me. How do we show our love? How do we spend our precious time? How can one translate into the other? There is something incredibly honest and simple about this piece, and in the entirety of the collection, it is something a little different. A moment of sweetness.

On Making Marmalade

IF YOU WANT TO SHOW SOMEONE how much you love them, make them marmalade.

This year has only just begun, and I can already tell you one of the lessons it carries with it: anything worth doing well takes time, and anything you do is worth doing well with patience and grace and a steady hand.

If you’re going to make marmalade, it’s going to take you an entire day. You’re going to go to the farmers’ market early when they open so you can have your pick of the very ripe oranges from the bargain bucket.

Oranges, to me, feel so very California, a staple of my understanding of this place. They grow so frequently that sometimes you will see a tree weighed down by unpicked fruit, so swollen it falls to the ground and rots. So much excess and so beautiful at once. Next to my sister’s house, there is an orange tree. I can see it out the kitchen window when I wash her dishes, and it reminds me of the few weeks I lived with her when I was very sad.

When you get home from the market, you will make tea and wash the oranges in a large metal pot that you fill with water and vinegar. Let the oranges sit for a little while, then scrub them clean because you use the entire orange. Something about this act will feel holy—the scrubbing, most likely.

The oranges will glow, and you will wonder which came first, the name of the color or the fruit. You have a vague memory of wondering this before and asking a friend over drinks in a dark bar. And they knew the answer, but now it escapes you—the answer, not the memory of the drinks.

Not everyone likes marmalade. It’s a specific taste, a balance of the bitter and the sweet. Because you use the rind, you have to peel the oranges, save the rind, and then slice it into impossibly thin ribbons. About halfway through this process, you’ll wish you had decided to do something else with your day. This can be made much simpler if you have a mandolin, in which case use that.

You’ll spend the rest of the day cooking, watching, forgetting, floating around the house while you half do other things, but always still making marmalade. You cook the oranges and sliced rinds with a few cups of water. Cook them long enough so everything starts to wilt. This will take hours upon hours. The steam will be laced with citrus and tangle in your curls and make the house smell sweet and sticky. You fold laundry, and water plants, and let the dog out, and make more tea.

Once the oranges are cooked, you add sugar. More sugar than you’d think—pounds of sugar. You stir carefully as it spits and tries to burn you. This time you have to be more attentive; you have to wait and stir and let it boil but never burn. If it burns, it’s all ruined.  And then you stir some more. Eventually it thickens and cooks down, and you cross some kind of invisible threshold where everything you had starts to look like everything you want: the transference of effort into something entirely new. By this time it’s late afternoon, and the sun in the house is different, and you have to put on a sweater, and the tea you made and then forgot about has gone cold.

There are so many other things you are supposed to be doing today. So many things that need the same kind of tending to, the same care and attention, the same patience. But perhaps an act in one is an act in all. Perhaps some of it carries over like the sweet smell of the marmalade, perhaps not. Perhaps it’s nothing at all.

You set the marmalade out on the counter to cool and thicken, and once it has you spoon it into jars that you’ve saved from store-bought sauerkraut and honey. You take some to your sister and some to your mother and store some in the fridge. And when he comes home, you feed him a spoonful. He kisses you with the bitter and the sweet on his lips, and he tells you it’s delicious. Everything feels good and simple, and you remember that this too took time.

If you want to show someone how much you love them, make them marmalade.

♦

Erin Rose Belair received an MFA in fiction in 2013 from Boise State University. Her story “Rare Items From The Universe” won Glimmer Trains’ Emerging Writers Award. Her other work appears in Narrative, Southern Indiana Review, Greensboro Review, and more. She was a Vermont Center Fellow in 2018 and is currently writing her first novel. Website: erinrosebelair.com 

The Delmarva Review, in St. Michaels, Maryland, was founded to offer writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) for their most compelling new prose and poetry to present to discerning audiences everywhere. It has been a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. About half are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

 

Author’s Note: This poem was inspired by the time I spent as a writer in residence at the Woodlawn Plantation in Alexandria, Virginia (sponsored by the The Inner Loop literary group in D.C.). While I was at Woodlawn, I learned that the enslaved quarters and much of the evidence of their work no longer existed. It made me think about how easily we accept the narratives we want and how these narratives are presented to us. 

Staging a Plantation Home

Start with curbside appeal: make it appear
majestic. Repaint doors and window frames,
shine up the wrought iron shutters, oil
creaking hinges. Lay down a path
of rounded pebbles, each carrying a story
from the river. Leave the smokehouse,
let its ghosts stir pots of broth, hang
rabbits from metal hooks in the rafters,
stoke the fire. Tear down the slave quarters—
their neglected, stressed timber crumbling
beneath their own weight. Tear down
any building that interrupts symmetry.
Place bowls of plastic fruit on the tables—
apples, pears with red blush, lone
pineapples. Hang birdcages with fake
doves in the music room. Is this the evidence
we need—to believe that someone had time
to think about fruit, a bird’s mourning song—
that these gestures could restore
what has been forsaken—the sweat
of those who built this house, torn
skin, callouses and blisters, faces
whose names have been forgotten
or never known?
Retain only the aseptic lore—
of opulence, Southern hospitality,
gilded staircases. Forget the lives, the bodies,
aaaaaathe truths erased
aaaaaaaaaain this landscape. 

⧫

Susan Bucci Mockler teaches writing at Howard University, in Washington, D.C. Her poetry has been published in numerous literary journals included the Delmarva Review, Poet Lore, Gargoyle, the Maryland Literary Review, The Northern Virginia Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, peachvelvet, Maximum Tilt, Pilgrimage Press, Crab Orchard Review, The Cortland Review, Paterson Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, Voices in Italian Americana, and several anthologies. Her full-length poetry collection, Covenant (With), was published by Kelsay Books in 2022. 

The Delmarva Review is a national literary journal with strong local roots in the Delmarva region. The editors read thousands of submissions annually and select the most compelling new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for publication. The review is available in paperback and digital editions from the major online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: Hydrangeas captures and expands a moment I experienced early in the pandemic.  The  catastrophic aspects of the virus, our social, political climate, the confinement, were all overwhelming. Looking out the window at the hydrangeas set me off on a journey offering  perspective on human and botanical vulnerabilities and virtues — universal, bobbling, green.

Hydrangeas

THE HYDRANGEAS, cream, lime-tinged, bob outside the window. I’m lying on the living room couch, under the weather on an overcast day. The room is dim, the hydrangeas glow. 

The flowers form a bouquet with a gawky tree and the butter-yellow house across the street. A few weeks ago, you’d have seen a massive oak there, too, but the neighbors said it was dead or dying and then it was gone. 

What kind of hydrangeas? According to Google, they’re panicles. According to my dictionary, panicles are loose, diversely branching flower clusters. They are a type of racemose inflorescences, racemose referring to boat-shaped nectar cups and inflorescence to the arrangement and distribution of the flowers on an axis. 

Whatever their name or pedigree, they’re no beauties. Cone-headed, swaying awkwardly on their long stems, they look goofy.  If I were a botanist, I’d call them racemose mullet heads.

Jerking toward and away from each other, these hydrangeas, framed by the curtains, remind me of Punch and Judy puppets but without the high-pitched bickering. And they’re slower—more like marionettes.

Marionettes can mimic us imperfectly and then, in a single gesture, capture us. I don’t know if I’m remembering or imagining a maiden with bright yellow braids and a black-and-white pinafore, blushing, and dipping her chin, gravity too slowly closing her carved eyelids. And a bearded, doddering, old man raising his trembling hands and tipping his head heavenward. I know I sighed, awed, string-pulled this way.  

They have odd rhythms, marionettes, and hydrangeas. Babies, often, too. I imagine one lying on its back in a crib, fists squeezing, feet kicking, totally besotted by the purest prospect—the world.  

I glide my finger down the dictionary page—panic, panic grass, panicked, panicle. Looking it up on YouTube, leads me to a video of millet, the most commonly cited panicle. I watch a field of it, green arms raised, hailing the wind, and pleading with it, with Pan. Of course, these words must be related, they must be spawn of the all-encompassing, part-goat, part-man, pipe-playing shepherd-god Pan whose name itself is a propulsive breath of a word.   

Sounds heard by night on mountains and in valleys were attributed to Pan, and
hence he was reputed to be the cause of any sudden and groundless fear. 

But while pandemic derives from Pan, panicle does not. It derives from the Latin panicula, literally meaning “thread wound on a bobbin.” 

I like these cross-pollinated images with their distant drama and Gothic, verdant dread. I like them much better than the myriad scenes of ever-closer catastrophe that come to mind again and again these days. 

I have redefined panicle, but I realize I’ve overlooked hydrangea, a mashup of the Greek hydra, water, and the Latin angeion, vessel. Hydrangeas were originally (and still often are) called Hortensia.

Philibert Commerson, the eighteenth-century French botanist, named them after Nicole Hortense Lepaute, his secret lover, so the speculation goes.

Lepaute was a clockmaker, astronomer, and mathematician. She helped predict the return of Halley’s Comet. She adopted her nephew and trained him in science. She nursed her dying husband in his last year, even as she went blind.

The scope and the frailty of such a life, of life, in just these few facts, quickens. I stare at the wind-blown forms through the glass, breathing. 

⧫

Elly Meeks’ essays, articles and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and JSTOR Daily, among others. She works in nonprofits in the areas of community arts, culture and mental health and lives in Northern New Jersey. Website: https://www.efsmeeks.com 

The Delmarva Review, in St. Michaels, Maryland, was founded to offer writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) for their most compelling new prose and poetry to present to discerning audiences everywhere. It has been a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. About half are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

 

Author’s Note: We used to live across the street from our neighborhood park. It was a private community park, and contained a pool, pool house, tennis courts, paths through the woods, and a pond. There was a path that went around the pond, and it had a small fishing bridge and a little island. The park, and the pond,  was the center of our community, enjoyed in all seasons and at all times of day.  It is one of the things I miss most about living there.

The Pond at Evening

Still light after sundown,
not yet dusk or dark.
The great blue heron appears
among the reeds, spare,
silent, elegant,
the barred owl calls
“Who cooks for you?
who cooks for you?”
some days his call
is answered.

Colors begin to fade,
the edges of the pond
begin to blur,
the heron,
watered silk,
recedes
into the reeds,
only the small white egret
is still visible
against the light
that is leaving.

⧫

Madeleine Cohen Oakley is a retired librarian who loves words, language, and grammar, and is a firm believer in the serial comma. She especially loves working with children to write poetry. Oakley has participated in writing programs at The Writer’s Center, in Bethesda, Maryland. She lives in upstate New York.

The Delmarva Review, in St. Michaels, Maryland, was founded to offer writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) for their most compelling new prose and poetry to present to discerning audiences everywhere. This is a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

Author’s Note: I’ve always loved Kudzu for its relentless growth. My drives from ETSU (Eastern Tennessee State University) to my parents’ home in Kentucky wound through kudzu-draped roads in Virginia, feeling like another world. This story explores themes of displacement, connection, and the silent struggles we face. Inspired by my mother’s teachings on Kudzu’s dual nature—destructive yet resilient—I hope it resonates deeply, rooting itself in your hearts like Kudzu, unyielding and ever-present.

Someone Planted Kudzu in New York City

NO ONE KNOWS WHEN IT WAS PLANTED, or who did it, or why. In fact, no one even noticed at first. It was a gradual realization, like when you slowly understand that growing up wasn’t anything like you thought it would be, or when you allow days to become weeks and then months without speaking to your parents back home, or when you lie down to sleep next to someone every night and without even meaning to, you find yourself falling out of love with them. That’s how the kudzu managed to grow in the middle of the city—by being quiet and steady and invisible. 

It slithered inch by inch in the background, taking Balto and then the Bethesda Fountain. When it began to walk with me down The Mall and climb into the stone laps of the authors I prayed to, I noticed. I would stand and stare at it, its broad green leaves fluttering in the wind and the tiny, curled fingers reaching out toward the wide-open spaces, just hoping for something to cling to. 

Later that day, when I got home, I called my mother in that automatic way I used to, when talking to her was as natural as breathing. It wasn’t until after I heard the ringing that I started to worry about how long it had been since we’d talked. But when she answered the phone, her voice was sunshine like always and it’s hello Kelly and I miss you Kelly and I love you Kelly and I’m just so happy to hear your voice Kelly. She spoke as if any minute now I was going to no longer be myself, but a telemarketer trying to sell her sham car insurance. 

I told her about my internship at Soho Press and my writing group that meets on Wednesdays and about Noah’s promotion and how we could afford to move out of the Bronx and into Brooklyn now, into a top-floor studio. She seemed pleased with our progress and said she was happy with all the wonderful news. She told me about the squirrel that steals her tomatoes out of her garden and that Dad had gotten her a little wiener dog that she didn’t want but now loves and about how she’s gotten herself a season pass to the Barter Theatre.

I hung up without telling her about my job at Macy’s in the fragrance department that sends me home with headaches every day because I’m allergic to the perfume. I did not tell her about the constant stream of impersonal rejections, each letter like a papercut to the heart. I did not tell her that it’d been four weeks since Noah last touched me. I wondered what she didn’t tell me.

The kudzu took root and made itself at home. The tourists began to take notice when the kudzu besieged the Belvedere and commandeered the Carousel. When the tourists got angry, the city noticed and decided to do something about the “problem.” The last thing they wanted was for the tourists to take their money to some other city, like Pittsburgh, Buffalo, or—heaven forbid—Toronto! So they decided to spray it. The city signed a hurried contract with an herbicide company and launched chemical warfare on the kudzu the moment the sun went down, and only bums and gangbangers were left in the park. 

The next day, the kudzu was gone. 

I tried to go about my routine as usual. I was supposed to stay at home and write; my self-imposed deadline was a week away, but my eyes kept glancing to the window across the cluttered, cupboard-sized living room, and my fingers kept striking the wrong keys, typing longwinded descriptions of greenery instead of forwarding plot or developing characters. Once I’d wasted half the day, I closed the laptop, grabbed my bag, and left for Central Park. I had to know if the kudzu was still there.

I walked down every path and trail. I hunted in the Great Lawn, I scouted out Strawberry Fields—I even interrogated the giraffes and lions at the zoo before going mad searching Alice. I gave up and sat at Shakespeare’s feet. I willed myself to forget the vines and remember the verse. There was a poem on the edges of my consciousness that I couldn’t quite remember, but it felt so right in this moment. Something about soft rains. I was about to ask Bill, but a mother and her two young daughters were standing nearby, and I didn’t want to seem like one of the crazies. 

That night I slept on the couch because Noah said the kudzu was a dangerous, invasive species of plant and that he was glad the city took care of it. He didn’t know it upset me, and I didn’t tell him I thought it was beautiful and reminded me of home. But, mostly, I didn’t want him to accidentally touch me in the middle of the night. When he touches me—if he touches me—I wanted it to be deliberate. So, I put blankets on the couch, and on his way to bed he stopped and stared at me, toothbrush hanging askew out of the side of his mouth. I kept my eyes averted, making myself busy with fluffing my pillow just right.

“What are you doing?” he asked, a white dribble of toothpaste foam gathering at the edges. 

“I thought I’d sleep on the couch tonight.” 

There was silence for a beat, then the sound of him brushing for a moment, and then he asked, “Why?” 

I didn’t respond except to throw the covers back and sit down. A few seconds later he walked out of the room, and I could hear him spit into the sink and gargle mouthwash. He came back, wiping his mouth on the back of his forearm. He stood there watching me. 

“Are you mad?” he asked.

I shook my head no. 

“Did I forget something important?” He was beginning to sound anxious. 

I shook my head no.

“Did I not notice something? Did you get a haircut or lose weight?” 

I shook my head no, again and sighed, now beginning to feel annoyed at how clueless he was. 

After another minute, he admitted, “I have no idea what is going on right now.” 

I looked up at him, taking in the sight of his shirtless body, tousled hair, confused expression. “I guess it’s just not what I imagined.” I stretched myself out on the couch and started to cover up.

“What?” 

“The way everything has changed.” I flipped over and faced the back of the couch, turning away from him. I waited, wondering if he would come to me, comfort me, tell me that the way he feels for me has never and will never change. Instead, I heard his footsteps retreating to the bedroom, and soon I fell asleep under the artificial glow of a muted Amanda Evans and a cacophony of rain on the roof. 

The next morning, I woke to the smell of fresh air mingling with bacon. Noah had opened the window and was making breakfast, which was unusual for him. I sat up and breathed, trying to inhale and internalize the aromas that made the small apartment smell like a real home. I wrapped the covers tighter around me, and Noah told me to unmute the television because there was something I’d want to see. 

I grabbed the remote and listened as Amanda Evans relayed the breaking news. The camera cut to an overhead shot of Central Park showing all eight hundred acres smothered in kudzu. The camera zoomed out farther to show the park juxtaposed with the buildings around it. The vines were spread out like a sea of green in the middle of the sparkling silver city. 

Noah stepped over with two plates of breakfast and handed me one as he sat down on the couch next to me. 

“Pretty amazing, huh?” He nodded toward the television. 

“I thought you didn’t like the kudzu?” 

He looked at me. “Are you kidding? It’s beautiful. I mean, I know it’s got to be controlled, but this is the coolest fucking thing that’s happened since we moved here, Kel.” 

“You really think so?” 

Noah nodded. “I was thinking about taking the day off work so we could go down and check it out. You want to?” 

“Sure.” 

At the park, caution tape separated the city from the battlefield as dozens of contracted landscapers fought the good fight against the invader. They weren’t even concerned about waiting until after dark anymore to spray the glyphosate onto the plant, but it didn’t look like they needed to waste their time or energy. The herbicide seemed to have no effect whatsoever on the kudzu. Some of the soldiers began hacking and chopping at the vines with sickles; when that didn’t work, they fired up weed eaters and charged into the creepers. 

Noah and I stood watching the massacre for hours until the men worked their way out of sight, leaving in their wake bits of vine and leaves littered across the ground. The segments of vine looked like severed green fingers. I felt Noah’s hand on the small of my back, and I let him guide me away. He guided me all the way to Il Cortile, our favorite restaurant in Little Italy. We used to go so often that the maître d’ knew our names and always gave us the most intimate table on the patio underneath the twinkling lights and grapevines. But we could afford it then. That was when I was teaching at JHS 80, before that kid took a gun to school and Noah convinced me to quit. I had protested; the kid only took it to show off to his friends, never attempted to fire it. My reasons fell on deaf ears, and for weeks afterward he’d hold my face in his hands every morning before work and stare at me for minutes that felt like years, and then he’d kiss me like he was never going to see me again before walking out the door without a word. Then when I’d come home after, he’d beg me on his knees to never go back. He was terrified, and I loved him. And so now I work in Macy’s fragrance department, and I wonder if the reason he doesn’t kiss me anymore is because I smell like sandalwood with a hint of geranium.

To my surprise, the maître d’ remembered our names. At our normal table, under sparkling lights and lifting his glass of wine, Noah reached his hand across the table and interlocked his fingers with mine. I smiled and clinked my glass to his. I drank to the kudzu; I wondered what Noah drank to. He talked about work, and as we ate, the conversation shifted to musings about how things were back in Abingdon and then to our upcoming move and how we needed to start organizing silverware into boxes and how proper labeling was key to a successful move. We sat there talking until they closed, and it felt nice to be talking to him. But as we walked back to the subway, silence descended. I swallowed over and over on the subway ride home, trying to get the stale taste like cardboard out of my mouth.  

The next day the kudzu was gone. They’d shredded it, chopped it, cut it up into itty-bitty pieces, and cleared it out of sight so that the park belonged to the people again and nature was tamed. Amanda Evans’s picture on the television was replaced with video they’d shot the day before of landscapers’ work. I cut off the television, interrupting her mid-sentence. I didn’t bother to try and write at home; I had to go back to Macy’s the next day, and I didn’t want to waste any time, so I packed up my laptop and headed for the park to write.  

I knew the kudzu wouldn’t be there, but I sat on the edge of the Burnett Fountain alone in my own secret garden and trailed my palm across the glassy surface of the water. I sat staring at the deep green pool before pulling my hand away and wiping it off on my pants. I opened my laptop and began typing. I stayed all day without stirring, until the streetlamps flickered to life, and I knew I had to go home.

Noah had dinner ready for me, and we ate on the couch watching Amanda Evans to see if she said anything about the kudzu, but the only thing the brunette reporter mentioned was that landscapers had been successful in eradicating the nuisance. After dinner, Noah asked about my day and about my writing and if I was sad about the kudzu. I told him it was a wonderful day, and I wrote a lot and that it would grow back. He kissed me on the cheek and then the mouth, and then he grabbed my blankets from the couch and took them around the bookshelf that separated the living room from our makeshift bedroom. 

I let him lead me by the hand and didn’t turn from him as he pulled my body to his, and I didn’t push him away as his hand slid up under my shirt and he fell asleep cupping my breast. I scowled at the ceiling, frustrated with myself for being so stupid and angry at Noah for not loving me like he used to. With a sigh, I turned my back to him and yanked the covers around me so that they pulled off of him. He just made a sleepy noise and turned with me, looping his arm around my abdomen and throwing his leg over mine. I tensed, but was too tired to push him off, so I exhaled and tried doing that mental exercise of consciously relaxing each body part, starting with the toes and working upward, but I was barely past my knees when I started thinking about Noah again. Then thinking about Noah became thinking about teaching, which became thinking about writing, and I wanted to write a song about the kudzu that a famous musician would sing so the whole world would know about it, but I have no rhythm. 

We slept and it rained and the next morning the kudzu had reclaimed what was taken from it and had invaded the city. Amanda Evans said the expanse of the vine’s conquest reached out as far as 2nd Ave. and down to 23rd Street on the East Side. The shops on 5th and in the Garment District closed for the day as the herbage coated their display windows with broad leaves and locked its curling arms across their entrances. The streets were not drivable because the vines had climbed their way to the tops of the poles and wrapped themselves around the streetlights. People couldn’t leave their homes because entire apartment buildings were wrapped up in its unyielding embrace. 

With Macy’s closed, I could go see it in person. I needed to witness the verdure violate the cityscape. I hurried down the sidewalk to the Metro station and hopped on Line 6. The route formed itself in my mind and without any effort. As I settled into an empty seat on an almost empty train car, I realized that learning the Metro happened the same as the kudzu—gradually and unnoticed. I remembered the struggle when we had first moved to the Bronx, first dropped our bags on the apartment floor of the Pelham Grand. There was constant confusion every day in figuring out where we were going and how to get there. Now, those things that had confused us were effortless, and what used to seem so simple was what we struggled with the most. 

As the subway approached Manhattan, the car filled up with people; it filled with bodies that had lives and jobs and purposes and families and thoughts that I would never be able to know or experience. They had eyes I would never be able to see from, shoes I’d never be able to walk in. I tried to remember when riding the Metro stopped being an event and just became a routine, when I stopped being a curious outsider and became a whatever I am. I tried to remember that exact moment during the entire fifty-steven minute train ride to 68th Street. But remembering that was as tenuous as trying to remember the day you learned to read or when you went outside to play with your friends for the last time of your childhood. 

When I emerged from the subway station, I entered into a new world. It was no longer New York City—it was the New York Forest. I looked around at green-sheathed buildings and vine-covered sidewalks. I stepped over plant life and stood near a lamppost encircled by foliage. This was not the New York of my dreams or the New York of the new life I made here. This was the New York of three thousand years from now. This was the New York abandoned by humanity and reclaimed by the earth. It occurred to me that this was the New York of the future. 

When I came home there was a letter from Epiphany in my inbox and it was not a rejection. I tried to order pizza and then Chinese, but Bedford Cafe was the only place that agreed to deliver during the kudzu crisis even though we weren’t anywhere near the “outbreak zone” as police were calling it. On  television, Amanda Evans was interviewing a man named Dr. Frye, an extension educator associated with the New York State Integrated Pest Management Program at Cornell University. He has spent most of his career studying kudzu. He says the only way to eradicate the plant was to dig up its root system. 

The doorbell rang, and I accepted the cheeseburgers and handed the skinny teenager a twenty-dollar bill. I left the television on the news and watched as the footage showed them trying to follow Dr. Frye’s advice. They grabbed the plants by the vine with both hands and were trying to follow them back to the base. I thought about how sad that was, how abrupt and ungentle. To just yank something out of its home, roots and all, seemed somehow inhumane. It seemed downright cruel. The kudzu was just trying to live, like all of us. Just trying to find its place, make its home. Taking away its roots would be to take away its life. I thought about how I hadn’t been home in five years. I turned the television off and went to bed without waiting for Noah to get home. 

The next day, the kudzu was gone. 

Noah told me that they’d worked all night, digging up every trace of the root system that they could find. Then, they removed every last scrap of leaf, root, and vine to a remote area for incineration. On the news, Amanda Evans interviewed city officials, who assured citizens this was the last they would have to worry about the kudzu. I pulled on my all-black funeral clothes and headed to Macy’s.

The odors of the fragrance department wafted into the air, cypress and vetiver mixing with oakmoss and magnolia. The scents stuck in the air and became trapped in my sinuses. I couldn’t breathe, and a thumping pain began in my temples and spread behind my eyes. There was a distinct lack of customers, perhaps due to the insanity of the last few days, and so instead of spraying more perfume into the air or organizing and reorganizing crystalline bottles, I pulled out a notebook and began to write. 

I lost myself in the story, became mesmerized with the transfer of words from brain to hand to page, became hypnotized by the light scratching sound of pen against paper, became entranced at the sight of ink pouring out into swirling twirling winding letters linking to form words to form sentences to form paragraphs to form pages, and everything connects and is interconnected and—I quit. 

It seemed I ignored a customer who needed some Bleu de Chanel. I gathered my belongings without a word of apology or excuse, and I just walked out as the manager shouted after me. Outside, I took a deep breath, felt the fresh air of the day inflate my lungs like balloons. On the ride home, I pulled out my notebook and kept writing. When I got home, Noah was still at work. I called my mother again, and she asked me if I was happy. 

After we hung up, I opened the window and climbed out onto the fire escape because I wanted the wind to blow my hair into my face. It was as if I’d awakened from a long sleep and the sunshine was blinding, but I couldn’t keep my eyes closed any longer. I looked around as if I thought I could see the kudzu growing from here, but my apartment didn’t have a view. I could only see the brick wall of the building next to mine rising up toward the sky and the alley below, littered with take-out wrappers, glass bottles, and cigarette butts.

♦

Sam Campbell is a writer, teacher, and editor with an M.A. in English (ETSU) and an MFA in Creative Writing (University of Arkansas). She co-founded Black Moon and serves as its fiction editor. Her work has been featured in October Hill and Another Chicago Magazine. She won the 2021 Jesse Stuart Prize for Young Adult Fiction and is currently a student at Columbia’s Publishing Institute. Learn more at samiamwrites.com

The Delmarva Review, published from St. Michaels, Maryland, was founded to offer all writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) presenting their most compelling new prose and poetry to discerning audiences everywhere. This is a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The review is available from online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

#  #  #

 

Author’s Note: Many Junes ago, my friend and I found ourselves in Times Square, just as the full moon was rising between skyscrapers. It looked incongruous beside the flashing billboards and scrolling marquees, and I too felt out of place, having grown up in the Midwest on a farm, far from urban centers. I also was experiencing the strangeness of being pregnant—the moon of my body, the new life stirring there—so, in this alien landscape, when I saw a woman draped with lizards, I felt a kind of kinship.

I Land as on Mars

in the flash and flare of Times Square
my years of growing up on a farm
gather up and hide,
but I understand the lizard lady immediately
her adornment of creatures
their calm draping her, large green fronds
cool to the touch on this June dusk

the strawberry moon rising
improbable between hard-edged buildings
as the being in my round belly
my hands move to soothe the kicking
light, tender, that draws me inward
as we stand among the noise
filled with expectation
I read the glowing orange banner
—news! it scrolls across the sky. 

⧫

Mary Buchinger teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences and serves on the board of the New England Poetry Club. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including Navigating the Reach (Salmon Poetry, 2023), Virology (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022), and Einfühlung/in feeling (Main Street Rag, 2018). Website: www.marybuchinger.com

The Delmarva Review is a literary journal published in St. Michaels, Maryland. The review was founded to offer all writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) presenting their most compelling new prose and poetry to discerning audiences everywhere. This is a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The review is available from online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: In 1929, my Grandfather, at 16, came to the United States from Lithuania. He could already speak and read English, in preparation. He corresponded by mail with his friends and family. He received a letter during WWII that all his buddies, all the men of his village, were lined up against a wall and shot.  His buddies, their fathers and sons were gone.  This story is inspired by that event.

Grandfather’s Story

THE IVANS KILL OUR COW, even after I name her Ivan.

I ask my grandfather how to spell Ivan, in Russian. He shows me with his cane in the dirt. I throw my coat on it, so the wind won’t take it and run for the paint.

I run fast, my long stick in both hands, sometimes a cane, sometimes a sword. My grandfather watches me run against wind and dust, past roofless walls, around the one shell-crater that lands in the village, and past doorways where the sick inside make my legs a little shaky.

Boom-pop-pop-prack—in the distance.

I run up the hill home, for Ivan, for glory, to be able to read.

My grandfather is the most important man in the village. He reads Russian and Lithuanian. People stop him while digging his root cellar, and Grandfather stretches the small of his back and takes their pieces of paper. I walk around a lot, stretching the small of my back. My mother asks me what is wrong, and my sister laughs.

I am not allowed to come near my grandfather when he reads to people. No one is. My best friend Mykolas and I flop on our bellies from a distance like soldiers to see what we can see. Grandfather looks upon the paper, and his lips move. People hold their hands together respectfully, bowed heads, nodding. Some cup their hand to their ear, afraid a word might get away. People gratefully take back their letters, folding them like priests, putting them back inside themselves. They talk with Grandfather a long time until Mykolas wants to do something else.

The last is Mr. Binkus’ daughter, Janina. I look up from the root cellar we are digging and see women coming with shawls on their heads from the village, very serious, like a funeral. The women are close around her, supporting her, as she walks from the gray-brown walls of the village to my grandfather in the green grass. When Grandfather sees them, he looks the other way, and I can tell, for a moment, he wants to run.

By the color and size of the paper, her husband is dead. But he can’t be dead until my grandfather says so. Grandfather has to be there for people to die.

Supper is late this day. Grandfather sits in a dark kitchen, not wasting a candle. He smiles at me.

“Grandfather, teach me to read.,”

“Do you remember Gediminas Grebelis?”

He is the blacksmith.

“When Gediminas was no larger than you, he waited for me at the foot of the hill by the creek, and I put him on my shoulder and ran up the hill with him, toolbox and all. He always shouted for me to run faster, faster. Who is left who would remember?”

“Grandfather, teach me to read.”

His eyes glitter. He pinches my cheek, “Antonus, not today. There is nothing, really, for you to read anymore. For now, you play. Go on.”

I want to read the newspapers. Someone comes to Grandfather with a newspaper, everyone gathers around, and my grandfather talks about fighting in Vilnius and Poland, North Africa, other villages and towns, the shortages of food, the marriages of royalty, and the deaths of famous people. My grandfather is so respected, that people tell him things before he reads them in the newspaper. It makes me tingle to know something before the newspaper is read. The paper looks very small in my grandfather’s hands, those days.

I run back with the white paint. I run past the Janulises. Their house is three walls. Most of the roof is left.

Mother Janulis is very ill, in a big bed, with her mouth open. When the east wind blows her white hair too much, Adolph Janulis puts on the rope harness tied to the foot of the bed—the bed Mother Janulis slept in since her wedding night—and drags his mother to the other side of the wall. I often help. She begs every day to not leave her home. It is strange to watch her travel that way, like a puppet, stiff and lifeless and yet moving. When the west wind blows, we do the same.

I have a plan to make Grandfather proud of me. On one side of Ivan’s bell, I write the name, Ivan so the Ivans won’t kill our cow when they pull back. When the Ivans or Fritzes pull back, there is a lot of damage, beaten men, crying women, and much livestock killed. After the Ivans leave, I will ask Grandfather to spell Fritz with his cane in the dirt, in German. He will know. I will put Fritz on the other side of the bell. This will save our cow and show Grandfather how smart I am and make him to teach me to read.

But, the Ivans, they kill our cow, even after I named her Ivan. They stick a bayonet in her side, and my mother screams. The cow jumps, trots, limps, and moans, and finally, legs buckle, and down and over Ivan falls, her huge side rising up and down, blowing great gusts of air and blood out her nose. One of the Ivans cuts the bell from her neck and reads it. He yells something in Russian and throws the bell as far as he can into the horizon. All the Ivans laugh. When they leave, my mother runs out and falls to her knees next to Ivan. People gather around and try to comfort my mother. They stand around, looking at each other, shaking heads, and looking at each other. Some men take off their caps. Some people bring paper, and roasting pans.

There is a silence, and my grandfather’s limp is heard. In his hand, is the longest knife we have in our house. The tip is broken off. The people make room for him to come through. My grandfather looks at the wound on Ivan. The people around him bend nearer and look again. Grandfather scratches his beard. Everyone can hear the scratching, the wind through the grass, and the buzz of black flies moving back and forth over Ivan’s black blood. Then Grandfather grits his teeth, puts the knife to Ivan’s throat, and I turn away. Ivan is dead.

Grandfather gives the knife to Mr. Vitas, the butcher. My mother stands first in line, holding her apron out.

My grandfather is furious with me when I come back with the paint for the bell. He is holding my coat in his arms. It looks like me, sleeping in a tree, one sleeve swinging back and forth.

“Crazy! Madness! Why have you done this?”

“Done what, Grandfather?”

“Put the coat on! Put it on! Do you think they grow like mushrooms? Stand up straight!”

I stand up as straight as I can.

“And throw that stick away! Are you a soldier? Do you want—,” Grandfather runs his hand through his thinning, hair.

Pop-pop and prack-prack.

“You hear? They might be coming again.”

“Yes, Grandfather.”

“Any louder, go home to Mama. I mean it.”

Mykolas comes walking toward us, hands in pockets, playing a little football with stones in the road, kicking up dust that disappears quickly in the wind.

“And tell Mykolas he must go home to his Mama, too.”

Grandfather limps off, stabbing at the earth with his cane, his arms moving faster than his legs. I watch after him, hoping he will slow down and forget. I want to see an end to his anger.

“Is that it? Is that Ivan?”

I nod, and Mykolas looks at it from one side and then the other and then nods like men do when they fix machines.

“Which way does it go?” “

In my excitement, I forget where Grandfather is standing when he writes it. The I and the N are no help, and the V looks much like the A. It looks pretty much the same either way because we were ignorant peasants. But we know that those little things are important to the educated. The small line in the letter A and the middle of the N mean something.

Which way does it go? I think of Ivan, her importance to the family. I pray fast and make a guess, “This way.” I dip the tip of my stick in the paint.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I lie. “This is the way.”

I want to go fishing with Mykolas. Everyone is proud of Mykolas because he catches a fish after all the old men had said the river was fished out. The fish is as big as he is. He walks into the village with his arms around it, muddy tail dragging in the dirt.

Mykolas! Look at Mykolas!

Stone faced, Mykolas walks through all the smiling people to his mother and gives her the fish. Then, he hikes up his pants and wipes his nose. All the women are cooing like doves in his mother’s kitchen, and the men outside knock Mykolas stumbling with slaps on the back and shake his hand and arm until his hat falls off.

Mykolas tells me he knows of a place where there is a fish. He stretches his arms out as far as he can and looks even farther. He is going there tomorrow and says we can go there together.

But I can’t go with Mykolas.

“Antonus, wake up. We have to leave.” Grandfather slaps my cheeks. But I don’t want to wake up. He bundles me up in my clothes and overcoat and takes me out into the cool night and crickets.

“Hurry,” I hear my mother say.

Grandfather is running. He runs with a limp to the root cellar and throws me in, jumping in after me. I get up naked, out of the cool dirt, fully awake. “Grandfather, what’s happening?”

“Quiet, Antonus! Go to sleep.”

I fall asleep, and I am in bed with Mother Janulis. The jerking of Adolph’s tugs on the bed throws her head backward and forward. She looks one moment like she is in a great howl of laughter and, the next, pain. The wall we are going around is long, disappearing on the horizon. Mykolas is fishing off the foot of the bed. He disappears in the clouds of dust carried by winds, after shelling.

I wake with sun in my eyes coming through gaps in the thatch covering, making lines of light on the ground. Fritzes are shouting. Machine guns, pop-pop-popping. Women are screaming, Grandfather grabs his head, falls against the wall, and slides down to the dirt floor, “Jezau! Jezau, Maria!”

I put on my pants and shirt. Grandfather is crying. Curled up, hugging his knees with his elbows. He looks no older than me.

“What happened, Grandfather?” Only sobs from Grandfather.

He sits a long time, staring into the past. I can tell. The sounds of the truck engines leave the village. I dig a river with a stick. Curled up leaves are boats, and the rocks I line up are houses. I draw little roads and make a big hill with a big rock on it. That is my house. But I want to go fishing with Mykolas. I slash my stick through the town, crushing two boats and send my house rolling. I slash the other way, some other house.

“Antonus! Come here.” He has a piece of paper like Mr. Binkus’ daughter, Janina Grebelis. It is falling apart at the folds. Someone died for it. I look at it. It is full of words and letters. He points to some of them. “Right here, this was your father’s name. It was my name. It is your name.”

I look at my name.

“Take it.”

“Thank you, Grandfather.” I sit down in the middle of my village with my name and a stick and try to write it in the dirt.

“All the men of the village are gone, Antonus.”

“Where did they go, Grandfather?”

“The soldiers didn’t want to worry about us anymore. We would have been hunted down like rabbits, and what about you? You see, it was too much to ask this time.”

I looked at my name on the paper, then in the dirt.

I am thinking of the day when I can read and cannot remember what all he says. Hours later, my name is everywhere in the dirt of my little village.

“Go home, Antonus. Go on home to Mama. I’m staying here.”

I drop my stick and put the paper under my coat, inside myself.

“I love you, Antonus, my little boy. Forgive me.”

I give my grandfather a kiss. “Thank You, Grandfather,” and leave him behind in the root cellar, to find Mykolas . . . 

♦

Richard Sensenbrenner is a writer in Illinois who says he never wanted to be one and considers it a form of mental illness. He works by day in intellectual property law and fights his madness by night. He’s recently published in Ancient Paths, Corner Club Press, Down in the Dirt, EveryDay Fiction and Defenestration. He forgives them all. 

The Delmarva Review is a literary journal, published in St. Michaels, Maryland. It was founded to offer all writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) to feature their most compelling new prose and poetry to discerning audiences everywhere. This is a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions to select the best of new fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. The review is available from most online booksellers and from regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org