Author’s note: “I’ve always been fascinated by forces of nature whether water, wind, or fire. Much of my work is centered around some aspect of nature. A sunrise or sunset enthralls me; the thought of an earth without wild animals is unconscionable. This essay arose from a desire to present various truths about fire, and that resulted in these ten short sections. The style is hybrid, for readability.”

“This was written before the West Coast fires, and though fire will always be a serious issue, I was looking at it from a distant perspective as a varied, though important, topic.” 

The Fire Anthology 

I TAKE IT THIS IS YOUR FIRST TRIP THROUGH A FIRE. It’s what some would call peppery. 

Part 1. It’s easy enough to start one. Ray Bradbury’s narrator in Fahrenheit 451 said it was a pleasure to burn. Bradbury, it seems, was obsessed with fire: “The Candle,” “Frost and Fire,” “Pillars of Fire,” and “The Fireman” also came from his pyro- loving mind. Who would go to such lengths to confess a crush? 

Part 2. My farmer once set a fire, burning brush at the edge of a field. Any farmer disguised as an engineer can accomplish something equally spectacular, any farmer at all. But the wind picked up and the flames spread and when all was said and done, the authorities were summoned, ten acres had been accidentally scorched, and eventually everything was under control again, forgiven. See? It only takes a village. Or, in this case, an absentminded professor with far-fetched ideas, forgetting to keep an eye on smoldering embers when the wind blows. Needless to say, I carry the matches these days. 

Part 3. A successful fire invokes the trinity of burnable material (fuel), oxygen (air), and spark (heat). Add the chemical reaction necessary to tie everything together, and what you have is called a tetrahedron, a four-planed triangle. Odd imagining such a thing, if you can picture it. 

Part 4. Those beautiful trees of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan. Over a million acres incinerated on October 8, 1871, in what was, at the time, the largest wildfire in American history, the Great Peshtigo Fire. (The what?) It doesn’t sound familiar because it occurred, coincidentally, on the same day as the Great Chicago Fire. A 2000-degree blaze fed by hundred-mile-an-hour winds, the Great Peshtigo Fire wiped out several towns and thousands of people. The firestorm spread quickly and with such force that a fire whirl resulted, a flaming tornado that lifted rail cars and anything else not cemented down and sent it flying. Survivors watched people erupt into flames. “I think Peshtigo is cursed,” said author Bill Lutz. And Peshtigo local historian Robert Couvillion reminds us that the streets of that city are built on the ashes of trees and the bones of dead bodies. 

Part 5. Everyone loves a fire: to watch it and feel its fever, to attach our attention to something as destructive as death itself and survive. Everyone wonders at the flickering shapes (do we see ourselves, our past or present, levitating into the unknown?). Everyone senses a release with the rise of a fire’s fury. 

Part 6. The heat of desire is present in all living things, that yearning to connect, to give and take, conjoin. It’s libidinous to surrender to the blaze. But my farmer ages, naturally. Flames wax and wane. Memories feed his fire, as do senses: touch, sight, sound, and taste. He smells the scent of love blowing down, touches breasts he knows, and sees the shapely curves and folds. “I may be getting older, but I’m not dead yet” is his verbal epitaph to his flagging machismo. It’s a pleasure to burn, he says, and sighs. 

Part 7. To char ditches is a thing in Iowa, to toast old patches of grassland or fields. “Controlled burns” clean old growth and add nutrients back to the soil, and when the smoke ascends, we tick another section off our map of the ozone layer. 

Part 8. Annie Dillard talked about fire, but more recall the seared moth in Holy the Firm than the burnt girl. Why is that? A moth aflame. So what. A girl disfigured, true tragedy. Why do we remember the moth? Told in such detail, each sizzle and crackle, it’s hard to forget. But a young girl’s face, who can tell that, who can describe something so hard? No wonder we forget. Is this why Dillard said the little girl was baptized “into the bladelike arms of God?” “The gods in their boyish brutal games bore you like a torch.” The moth had it easier, and so do we when reading it. 

Part 9. God. It’s said He’s a consuming fire. He smolders and flares at our sad, mistaken ways, our bold stupidity. His Old Testament patriarchal wrath seethes in opposition to our religious inclinations, leaves us pathetic, ashen, and revolting against all things divine. It’s the soft warmth of the Newer News that draws us nearer her gentle cauterizations, willing to accept the healing ointment and gaze into her tender caring eyes. 

Part 10. Fire, raise us to the heights of heaven, gray ash, blown, tasted, tested, gone. A crucible, an urn. 

That look on your face. But please, don’t sleep much, because after this there’s no going home. 

♦ 

Chila Woychik is the owner and managing editor of Port Yonder Press and Eastern Iowa Review. Germany-born Chila (pronounced “Sheila”) tells the Delmarva Review  she is “a complex organism trying to live a simple life.” Kismet has led to awards from Storm Cellar and Emrys, and publication in Cimarron, Passages North, and more. She, and when she wants to see her family roll their eyes, calls river debris “tidewrack.” She lives on a small homestead in eastern Iowa. Website: www.chilawoychik.com. 

Delmarva Review specializes in publishing writers’ most compelling new poetry and prose selected from thousands of submissions annually. While national (and beyond) in scope, it has a strong regional presence. The review is an independent, 501(c)(3) publication, supported by individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. It is sold in paperback and electronic editions at Amazon.com and other major online booksellers and specialty regional bookstores. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org. 

Author’s Note: “This poem—a pantoum—has two sources: my first experience of love and marriage, and the remarkable Henry James novel The Portrait of a Lady, which gave me courage and language to speak about that experience. The pantoum’s pattern of repeated lines, which always seems to be looking back seemed a perfect vehicle for this tough subject. I hope you like it.”

perhaps you’ve been there too
after Henry James

it is hard to speak of this
too much too close too far
a place where I have been
perhaps you’ve been there too

too much too close too far
curled up tight inside
perhaps you’ve been there too
a sort of delirium

curled up tight inside
unschooled in the rite of survival
a sort of delirium
needing love and place

unschooled in the rite of survival
any place would do
needing love and place
love had no place for me

any place would do
and so I took the bait
love had no place for me
I made myself quite small

and so I took the bait
I gave up all of me
I made myself quite small
made room enough for him

I gave up all of me
to match the way he knew
made room enough for him
the right the only way

to match the way he knew
he knew what women were
the right the only way
I had thrown away my life

he knew what women were
it is hard to speak of this

I had thrown away my life
a place where I have been
perhaps you’ve been there too
♦
Gwendolyn Jensen began writing poems upon retirement from the presidency of Wilson College, in 2001. Her work has appeared in Harvard Review, Salamander, Beloit Poetry Journal, Sanskrit, Whistling Shade, and Measure, as well as Delmarva Review. Her first book, Birthright (Birch Brook Press, 2011), is a letterpress edition, now in a second printing. Her other books are As if toward Beauty (2015) and Graceful Ghost (2018), both by Birch Brook Press. Her poem “perhaps,” above, from the Delmarva Review will be included her new book of poetry, to be released in the fall. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Website: GwendolynJensen.com.

Delmarva Review is a national literary journal with strong regional roots. It publishes the best of new poetry and prose from thousands of submissions annually. The Review is an independent, 501(c)(3) journal, supported by contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. It is sold in paperback and digital editions at Amazon.com and other major online booksellers and specialty regional bookstores. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: “When my beloved husband was dying at age 59, I felt compelled to write…in the middle of the night…about living in the bardo of dying. (“As the Moon Has Breath,” published by Main Street Rag.) As years go by, new memories about our life together keep emerging. “Wow” was written as I pondered how calm we both were upon hearing his grave diagnosis. That calmness, looking back, was a tribute to the depth of our connection, and our shared spiritual practice that included facing, with fear, courage, tenderness and awe, the fragileness and impermanence of life. (Steven’s father died suddenly at age 57 two weeks before our son’s birth.) I write with immense gratitude to my dearest Steven, who announced at his 50th birthday party, it was his decade to practice dying and then began dancing like a phlonic bird with widespread wings.”

WOW

NOTHING MUCH SURPRISES ME ANYMORE, except for the day my fanatically fit, nutritionally balanced husband was diagnosed with a Stage 4 brain tumor, but even then, it wouldn’t have been a surprise if I hadn’t had my head in the sand, or wherever dread-avoidant heads go in Philly, where there is no sand. I mean, looking back, there were signs of his brain faltering at age 58, which, if you think about it, is a terrible miracle, as it makes a person aware of the great miracle of the brain when it works, for years on end, with no stutters, sputters, dips, blips.

The signs included, but I’m sure were not limited to, the day we were driving to the Willow Grove Mall (such an excellent driver he was) and the front right side of our car bumper hit a mail truck’s front rubber bumper. My husband didn’t even stop to give his insurance info or to wonder, what just happened? I said something like, you’re not yourself (which was our mutually odd way to be understated in all things). And he didn’t disagree with me. But he didn’t agree, either. Some piece of his brain had already signed off. But no one saw it yet, not even me.

You have to be willing to see what you see, which happened only after his diagnosis. See, right there, pause the tape, he said. We were watching his TV appearance recorded a few months before on the causes of disease. He showed me the moment the word pestilence had escaped him. So, he had to use a different word, had to make do without pestilence—had to use a usual pedestrian vocabulary, which was probably a good thing for the audience, but he had wanted his usual scientific-dictionary tongue to be sharp.

This is how it is when someone you love has a sharp mind and is diagnosed with a brain tumor, and his mind was the very thing you fell in love with—that mind that fathomed miracles and understood the body is such a thing—how miraculous dendrites are shaped like branches of a tree, transmitting impulses to nerve cells.

Or, how his brain tumor was shaped like a cauliflower-tree with branches that invaded the Broca area in the frontal lobe, left side. How we both shaped—after 30 years of marriage, when the MRI came back in the ER—how we both shaped with our mouths only one word, wow. And that was that. Wow. A terrible miracle. Miracles every day. One of the last we’d share.

♦

Doris Ferleger, MFA, Ph.D. is a prize-winning poet, nonfiction author, and psychologist. She has published three volumes of poetry, Big Silences in a Year of Rain, As the Moon Has Breath, and Leavened, as well as a chapbook, When You Become Snow. She holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College and a Ph.D. in psychology. Dr. Ferleger is a mindfulness-based therapist in Wyncote Pennsylvania.

Delmarva Review publishes compelling new prose and poetry annually. As an independent, 501(c)(3) literary journal, it is supported by individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is sold in paperback and electronic editions from Amazon.com and other major online booksellers and specialty regional bookstores. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: “This poem grows out of my fascination with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, a couple of unparalleled greatness. Franklin, a paraplegic during his long presidency, was the source of their power. People and things orbited around him; he used them as necessary. And so I heard this competitive call and response between Eleanor and the car made especially for him, both of which served his purpose.”   

Franklin Roosevelt’s Hand-Controlled Car vs. Eleanor

Car:  He rode in others’ cars, hand pumping his hat, smile lifting the light. But I was the one he drove. I was his wings.
Eleanor:  Substitute wives sat on his lap, taking notes, chasing his smile. But I carried his name into the world. I was his legs. 

C:  Clutch, brake, gas: knobs built for presidential hands. No lessons needed. We soared.
E:  Amelia Earhart taught me to fly. Made for it, she said. Two women pedestaled by the clouds. 

C:  He was reborn inside me. I stayed wholly his. We shared a living space.
E:  I bore him six children in ten years. Discovered love letters in his suitcase. We never shared a bedroom again. 

C:  First presidential chariot to race along wooded hills and lose the Secret Service.
E:  First First Lady to join a union and be spied on by the FBI. 

C:  From my steering column, I dispensed lit cigarettes, comforting him.
E:  From my heart, I nagged and nudged: unpen Japanese Americans, let in Europe’s Jews, untie the lynchers’ knot. Consciences never comfort. 

C:  At the end, I waited for him. Too weak, he didn’t come.
E:  At the end, I wasn’t with him. Too strong, I couldn’t stop.

C:  We should have gone under together, two of us lowered down, me as his coffin.
E:  Riding the train with his coffin, seeing people lined up along hundreds of miles of track, I knew I’d served his purpose. 

C:  Preserved behind glass where people stare and study, I am immortal.
E:  Every American woman, as far as freedom takes her, carries me forward. 

⧫

Douglas Collura’s work has been featured in numerous literary publications earning the poet Pushcart Prize nominations and other recognition. He is the author of a spoken CD, The Dare of the Quick World, and the book, Things I Can Fit My Whole Head Into. He was a finalist for the 2007 Paterson Poetry Prize and the 2008 First Prize Winner of the Missouri Review Audio/Video Competition in Poetry. He lives in Manhattan. 

 

Delmarva Review is a national literary journal with strong regional roots. It publishes the best of new poetry and prose selected from thousands of submissions annually. The Review is an independent, 501(c)(3) journal, supported by contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. It is sold in paperback and digital editions at Amazon.com and other major online booksellers and specialty regional bookstores. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: “We live in a migratory center for several of nature’s long-distance flyers, most famously the monarch butterfly, the subject of an earlier poem of mine. In 2016, I read a newspaper article about the Godwit, a bird that travels almost non-stop to South America after hatching in Canada’s Hudson Bay and visiting our shores for food and rest. No one knows how it does this. As a retired brain surgeon, poet and forty-year Chesapeake sailor, I was naturally drawn to the Godwit as a poetic subject.”

Gotwit

     —Old English for good creature (god wihte) 

The godwit somehow finds its way right out of the shell,
leaves Hudson Bay for thousands of miles before
he vacations in South America for the winter.
I’ve seen him in June and July—
his stilted feet and upward curving beak digging after shells
in Chesapeake mud, a small pile driver on legs.
Never in doubt he wheels through the skies over the Bay
on wings of certainty without GPS,
an entire scheme of our planetary hemisphere
laid out in his brain better than any sea captain’s chart.
From where he starts to where he’s never been
the godwit crosses latitudes and longitudes without a stop
for more than brief meals, ingests geography unconsciously
in a machine smaller than an acorn, makes a perfect trip
my wrong-footedness could never achieve.
Far from the start of my own journeys I may drift off-line
towards absolute certainty, mistaking my freedom
as opportunity, seeing life as a door not a trap. 

♦ 

Michael Salcman is a Maryland poet, physician and art historian. He is former chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum. His poems appear in Arts & Letters, The Café Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, Poet Lore, and Delmarva Review. Poetry books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine, and his popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness & healing, A Prague Spring, Before & After, winner of the 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize, and Shades & Graces: New Poems, inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020).

Delmarva Review is a national literary journal with strong regional roots. Publishing compelling new prose and poetry annually, the Review is an independent, 501(c)(3) journal, supported by individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. It is sold in paperback and electronic editions from Amazon.com and other major online booksellers and specialty regional bookstores. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Author’s Note: “This short fiction explores that tension between what we think or know we should do and what we’re capable or willing to do. Inspired by people, places, and stories from my childhood, the piece focuses on a teenager trying to remain optimistic despite the resignation or limitation of the people surrounding him. One afternoon without planning it, he rejects the status quo, and a new world begins to open to him.”

Confinement

I STAND IN THE FOYER OF MY FATHER’S HOUSE and hope the old fool didn’t hear me come through the front door because the left side of my face is still pink from O’Brian’s black-hearted swipe. If the old man finds out about it, he’ll get wet in the eyes and grumble to himself about getting revenge. Then his wife, the ogress, will convince him that the good Monsignor would never do such a thing unless he’d been properly provoked. I’ll get a hard-boiled egg for dinner and the silent treatment for a week.

The old lady has set up what looks like a little waiting room just inside the front door, a place for her royal visitors to pass the time while her highness prepares herself to receive guests. I’m the only one who’s ever sat in either of these chairs, even though I’m forbidden to do so since they’re “strictly for company.” She once accused me of repeatedly knocking the lace doilies off the armrests. I told her it was probably her cat, Tommy. She said that was impossible because for one, the doilies were pinned down, and two, Tommy isn’t allowed in the foyer because he might bolt out the front door. If it was Tommy, it would have been my carelessness that let him out in the first place, so I should accept the blame and pray for an increased sense of responsibility.

Above the little table that separates the two chairs is what looks like a photograph of Jesus, and tucked into a corner of the frame is a frond from Palm Sunday. He’s got big, blue eyes gazing up to heaven, and his hands look like they’re suspending his Sacred Heart in midair, like he’s some kind of magician. He looks to me like the kind of person who might understand the nature of human beings like myself.

NOW I CAN SAY, with God as my witness, that I never met a priest I liked. I think they’re cruel by nature, and then they learn how to perfect their cruelty when they go into the seminary. They become priests because they’re too pompous and too unlikable to ever hold a regular job, so they get one with a lifetime guarantee. No woman would want them, and I think that suits a lot of them just fine. When we all became altar boys in the fifth grade and Mike Flynn’s brother, Pete, drove us home from the church hall after picking up our cassocks and surplices, he half-joked that we should be careful of priests with “Russian hands and Roman fingers,” which at first I didn’t understand and then didn’t believe. The only thing I knew for sure was that priests thought they were better than the rest of us since God chose them specifically to do his work. Monsignor O’Brian was no exception.

He was looking for trouble from the minute he walked into religion class this afternoon. He likes to make a “surprise” visit about once a month, and he always starts with the kind smiles and the good-natured charm. Sister Mercier giggles like the schoolgirl she was sixty years ago when he gives his fake speech about just stopping by on his way to visit a “very ill parishioner who might be needing the Last Rites,” as if he were the direct line to God that we’d all desperately need one day. Then she goes and sits at an empty desk in the back row and looks at him as if it were Christ himself come to give us some advanced instruction. Today was about our inevitable stay in Purgatory while God ponders our eternal fate. As usual, his enthusiasm for instructing students began to peter out after a few minutes, and he started looking around the room.

It became obvious that the old bastard was determined to humiliate one of the girls, so we boys weren’t as worried as usual.

He started with embarrassing Doreen DePolito by asking her why her father charges so much for fishing bait at his tackle shop. Then he teased Teresa Devine about her brother, Jimmy, who came back with his tail between his legs two weeks after he left for New York City, vowing never to return. I don’t blame him for trying to get out; Dorchester is a shithole with too many Irish immigrants, their American kids, and a bunch of other people who’d rather be somewhere else but who can’t consider it. Once he finished with Teresa, the old goat scanned the room again before settling his eyes on Mary Muldoon, a good girl who never caused trouble.

“Miss Muldoon,” he snapped before switching to a tone that suggested it took effort for him to remain patient, “stand up and tell us why you think your skirt looks better three inches shorter than any of the other girls’.”

Sister Mercier looked in Mary’s direction with a snarl.

Mary Muldoon’s pudgy face froze solid except for the two corners of her mouth, which she couldn’t help from curling downward.
“I didn’t tell you to pout, Miss Muldoon, I told you to stand up.”

Poor fat Mary did as she was told.

“Now, Miss Muldoon, tell me; do you think it’s your dimpled knees that all the world wants to see when you enter the schoolyard?” Now he was smiling like he was a regular guy, good natured and curious. We all knew better.

The whole class looked at her knocked knees, bulging out above her knee socks, and noticed that they did, as the old devil mentioned, have dimples. She stood there looking down at the floor in shame.

“Miss Muldoon, would you be deaf and dumb as well as being an exhibitionist?”

“N-n-n-no,” she replied, now red-faced with embarrassment. The rest of us were miserable due to the fact that we liked Mary, and we knew she stuttered when she got nervous. We also knew that her uniform was shorter because her chest had recently grown to three times the size of any of the other girls’, and the whole dress “rose to the occasion,” so to speak. I was afraid O’Brian might feel obliged to mention this. We also knew that it could easily be any one of us he was ridiculing.

I started to get that feeling I sometimes get, where I can either start laughing or crying, so I looked down at my desk, hoping he would soon finish with Mary and return to his discussion about how the unbaptized babies in Limbo have it much easier than the repenting sinners in Purgatory.

“Miss Muldoon, would you even remember the original question I posed to you?”

At that point no one could remember what the first question was. There was a stretch of silence that was surely as painful as a week in Purgatory.

“Do you or do you not remember the very simple question I asked you?”

“N-n-n-n-no.” Tears started when the humiliation was more than she could bear.

As bad as I felt for Mary, something inside me let go. I started laughing. After the first little chuckle got away from me, a gushing flood of uncontrollable laughter followed. The harder I worked to stop it, the harder the laughter pushed to get out. Now I had as many tears in my eyes as Mary had in hers.

“What’s this? You’ll stand up right now, Mr. McDonough, and you’ll tell me what has you so amused.”

I felt so sad about everything, so sorry for Mary, and so full of hate for the old bastard, but I couldn’t stop the laughing.

“You’ll stop it at once! You’ll stop it right now, or you’ll be the sorriest young man that ever there was!” He was furious as he came toward me.

With her scowl, Sister Mercier stood up and started marching toward me as well, her anger looking like a close second to the good Monsignor’s.

“That’s enough!” she barked as she walked toward me. “E-nough! E-nough!”

The tears made everything a little blurry, but I could see him turning a purplish red. The broken capillaries all over his face seemed to grow with every breath he snorted. We stood facing each other, and I was still laughing when he gently placed his beefy left hand on my right cheek. I was beginning to get control, to feel a privileged sort of comfort with his hand there, to think that maybe he wasn’t the devil I thought he was. That was when his right hand came down and smashed the other side of my face. He’d only held my right cheek to steady his target. I was so stunned that I pushed him away, but it was I who fell backward, tripping over a desk and a chair before landing on the floor. He came toward me, his eyes puffy with unholy rage.

“Keep your meat-hooks off me, O’Brian!” I screamed at him like no one had since he took up the collar. “You’re a mean old bully, picking on Mary Muldoon when you know she can’t fight back. None of us can.”

“Why, you arrogant little—”

He came toward me, but I was too fast for him. I scurried toward the other side of the classroom as he climbed over the fallen desk. I was infected with a bit of evil myself when I thought of how nice it would be if he took a stroke and died right then.

“You’ve got a hell of a nerve warning us about the pain of Purgatory when it’s perfectly obvious that you’ll spend eternity slurping your whiskey with Adolf Hitler on one side and Pontius Pilate on the other!” With that I bolted out the door of the classroom and then the door of the school and I sprinted home.

AFTER A HALF AN HOUR IN THE FOYER, I hear the phone ring, and the old witch picks up. Everything I hear is muffled, but I understand anyway. I hear her voice get high pitched and excited, almost musical, as if it’s Pope Paul checking to see if she approves of how he’s running things in Rome. She doesn’t say anything for a few minutes, and then her voice drops down to the polite tone she always uses with strangers and acquaintances. She hangs up the receiver; I count to three before I hear her wail. It’s a cross between screaming in anger and crying in desperation, and it makes me sick when I hear it because I know I’ll be the one who’ll pay the price for her pains. The old man, who’s home for lunch, makes a weak attempt to calm her down, but she drowns him out before he can make a full sentence. She cuts one of her howls short and stomps through the living room and up the stairs (they don’t know I’m in the foyer). My father follows her like her faithful mutt. I hear them above me in my bedroom, then a few thuds. She’s giving my things the knocking she’d like to give me. Every so often, I hear a phrase or two that tells me what she’s thinking.

“High and mighty!”

“Raised by wolves!”

“A mind of his own!”

And then, finally: “The damn Beatles!” That one almost makes me laugh.

They fly back down the stairs, and she swings open the door from the parlor. I stand up from my seat in the royal waiting area to face her straight on. She’s got bobby pins in her hair, and she’s wearing house slippers and one of the dusters she puts on when she knows she’ll see no one but my father or me. She stops five feet in front of me and crosses her arms.
“Well, there he is, the foul-mouthed criminal who hits priests.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I say. I figure it can’t get any worse, so why not say what I’m thinking?

“What did you say? What did you say!” She unfolds her arms and holds her right hand to the side of her head for a minute, as if she’s worried her skull might explode.
“Nothing,” I tell her when I think that maybe things could get worse.

She comes closer to me and says in her most angelic tone, “I’d like to know what you just said to me.”

I’d been fooled once today into thinking I could trust someone I couldn’t, and I’ll not be fooled again.

“I said, ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake.’ Did you think I said something else?”

“Upstairs right now, mister.” She seems to remind herself of her own superiority over the rest of the human race, which encourages her to calm down. “You’re cursed with the same contrary and unlikable nature as your poor mother. God rest her soul.”

“Now, Mae.” My father finally manages those two pitiful words before she leaves the room to return to her throne in the kitchen. She’ll soon be on the phone to each of her three sisters, telling them about her cross to bear that’s in the form of a seventeen-year-old boy.

The old man follows me upstairs and sits next to me on the bed.

“’Tis a miserable welt you still got on the side of your face.”

“For fuck’s sake, Dad. I’ve only got one more year here at home before I move out. You’d think you could ask me a question every now and again. I’m not even asking you to stick up for me, just consider my side of a story for once.”

My father takes a hankie out of his hip pocket and wipes the corners of his mouth. He takes a deep breath, shoves the hankie back in his pocket, and pauses before exhaling. For a brief moment I’m sure he’s going to make up for all of the spineless and pointless things he’s ever said to me. I know what’s about to come out of his mouth might be the most important thing I ever hear him say.

“Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.”

“What?” I have to ask because I’d heard this bit of nonsense fifteen times in the past week alone.

“Nothing.”

“That’s what I thought you said.”

After no more than a minute, he stands up, says, “Well then,” to himself, and heads downstairs.

AT ABOUT MIDNIGHT, Mae’s cat, Tommy, jumps on my bed and starts kneading the side of my leg. I get out of bed and pick him up, letting him ride high on my shoulder like a great explorer looking for uncharted land outside my bedroom window. I start thinking of Tommy’s life sentence in this house where he’s never permitted on anything higher than a footstool, and I get to feeling sorry for him. He stays at his helm, purring as I walk barefoot down the stairs, through the parlor, and then into the foyer, where I wink at the photograph of Jesus on my way to the front door. Once outside, I’ll give Tommy what he’s been craving his whole life. When we get to the door, his purring stops, and he sniffs wildly at the night air. I gently close the door behind us and stand on the cold cement in front of the house. Tommy begins to push away from me as if I’m hurting him. He fidgets more, so I hold him tight to me, and that’s when he claws right through my tee shirt and carves three bloody lines in my chest. He punctures six tiny holes in my right shoulder before he makes what I think will be the getaway he’s been planning for years. But I’m wrong. Tommy runs to the front door with his back hunched, hair standing on end, and his tail puffed out like a squirrel’s. He sits there shaking until I open the door. He dashes in and disappears somewhere in the parlor.

The next morning, as I leave for school to face the wrath that surely awaits me, Tommy tries to bolt out the front door. I grab him by the scruff and toss him back inside without the tiniest consideration for his dashed hopes.

♦

John R. Murray is associate professor in the undergraduate writing program at the University of Southern California. He also teaches a class to help students create short documentaries raising awareness about social justice concerns. His most recent work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The MacGuffin, and Mount Hope Magazine, in addition to his story in the Delmarva Review. He received a Master of Professional Writing and Doctorate in Education from University of Southern California.
Now in its 14th year, Delmarva Review publishes the best of new prose and poetry selected annually from thousands of submissions across the United States and beyond. As an independent, nonprofit literary journal, it receives partial financial support from individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available worldwide in paperback and electronic editions from Amazon.com and other major online booksellers and specialty regional bookstores. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: “The occasion for this poem was attending a friend’s 50th birthday party and seeing his younger brother for the first time in 30-plus years. That small shockwave of recognition and surprise at his aging sent me heading down this poetic rabbit hole, where I found myself wanting to hold the moment briefly, then accelerate time at warp speed — as a reminder (mostly to myself) of this precious continuum that links us all.”

Yes, Who Were Those People?

A friend turns fifty. Throws a party.
His gray-haired younger brother
greets me at the door.

Last time I saw you, he says,
it was spring, nineteen-seventy-two.
Instantly, I remember the skin-and-bones teenage him—

the ready laugh, the scraggly hair,
the tortured jeans—spinning on bare heels
in this very hallway and stud-strutting toward…

What adults don’t tell children:
aging can’t quite sift the child out,
even as it stuns with its efficiency,

its complicity with the steady murmur
of an expanding universe.
As I write this, that party is long past, 

longer still by the time you read these lines,
perhaps in the dim bedside light spilling
onto the ever-so-slow-to-ungather pages

as you prepare, again, for the day of night
to morph into the night of day,
when you’ll sleep again and wake again 

and again walk out into the latest translation
of the sun’s burning wish, where only the shadow
of a moment can be held, but strangely, 

like the throaty whisper of a parting lover.
A wink, a kiss, a wedding vow, the birth of children
who are already remembering years ago.

Some smug scholar looks back:
Who were those people? he thinks,
before joining us in the starlight. 

⧫

Michael Brosnan’s recent book of poetry, “The Sovereignty of the Accidental,” was published in 2018 by Harbor Mountain Press. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Moth, Borderlands, Rattle, Confrontation, Barrow Street, New Letters, and others. He’s the author of “Against the Current,” a book on inner-city education, and serves as the senior editor of the website: TeachingWhileWhite.org. He lives in Exeter, New Hampshire. Website: www.michaelabrosnan.com.

Delmarva Review publishes the best of  new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. As an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit literary journal, it receives partial financial support from individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available worldwide in paperback and electronic editions from Amazon.com and other major online booksellers and specialty regional bookstores. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: “The Beautiful Impossible”—speculative and oddly detailed—imagines the speaker before he was born, a figure who inhabits Nebraska and falls in love with a woman who ultimately turns away from him. At its core, the poem plays with questions we all ask at times: What would’ve happened had I done this instead of that? Would I be happier were I another?

The Beautiful Impossible 

I fell in love with Margaret from Omaha
on January 10, 1974, nineteen days
before I was born. We spent Saturday
summer nights at the Plymouth Drive-In
off Mercer Avenue and watched Warren Beatty
cry and Jack Nicholson connive.
We made love on her twentieth birthday
inside her father’s garage; the oil cans
rattled Esso Esso red and white
and she orgasmed twice. A stitch
of moonlight pranced through the window,
and her mother shed the afghan
and suddenly rose, the cancer she’d carried
in her stomach for decades no more lethal
than nickels or dice from a Yahtzee! box.
How happy we all were, how replete
with wonder and mashed potatoes later,
strawberry pie that tasted like Heaven
had fallen. Oh Margaret, how sensitive
you were and so undecided—we should’ve wed
in the Lutheran church and had a hundred
Susans and Johns, a thousand breakfasts
of Western omelets and a million cups
of coffee at Dee’s near the Missouri.
Your father loved me and I loved him,
his plaid pajamas, his hand-cut bacon
straight from some farm near Gretna.
One day you’ll know the meaning of forsaken. 

⧫

Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (Nasiona Press, 2019). In addition to Delmarva Review, his poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review, among other journals and magazines. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University (2007) and teaches American culture and literature at Dokuz Eylül University in Turkey.

Delmarva Review publishes new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, it receives partial financial support from individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available worldwide in paperback and electronic editions from Amazon.com and other major online booksellers and specialty regional bookstores. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.  

 

Author’s Note: “New to Delaware, I took my 18-month-old on day trips to the sleepy beaches along Delaware Bay, where we first encountered horseshoe crabs. My life then was dominated by firsts: first steps, first words, etc. In contrast, the fishermen, bay, and crabs had collectively enjoyed a long existence and connection to each other. Watching her interact with the crabs, I felt that she—just barely of this world—and I—witness of her becoming—were just as tied to a mythology and mysterious life force as these ancient creatures.”

Warrior’s Helmet Crab

Part I 

THE BEACH IS EMPTY OF HUMANS, save Penny and me and the fisherman who walks the bay tossing crabs into the boat he tugs. On land they overlap, an overturned jar of gray tortoiseshell buttons, here to salute the high-tide full moon with a good spawn. 

We hug the detritus-drenched shoreline of Bowers Beach as it stirs from hibernation, a town sleepy even in summer—no funnel cake, soft ice cream, arcade. It’s Penny’s first beach since learning to walk and the crabs’ mecca for millennia. Today they’ve arrived from sun glitter grown brighter untouched by man’s leisure for months. 

The fisherman greets us, shares his family business: the shore he’s walked since fourteen, harvesting males for blood. 

They even use it for cancer, he says. It cured my dad, fellow blue-blood tradesman. 

Shakespearean clown, his Delmarvese speaks of brackish waters, calm and flat as the Great Plains, as he slogs through crabs dense as settlers thronging for limited land. 

Penny’s newborn-blue-turned-sea-green eyes watch warily the crabs bobbing in water, appendages doubly animated by surf. The fisherman turns one over to expose the hook that divides sexes, that grasps the female’s shell to hitch a ride to shore where she will lay eggs and he his seed—fierce appendage for such a slow act. The fisherman could do this blind: feel for their “boxing gloves” underwater. 

Part II 

In the factory, white jackets, donned gloves and masks saunter by crabs propped up like puppets, affixed to lab benches in neat rows, shells reflecting fluorescence barring barnacles’ rough blooms. 

Each crab bent at hinge, blue blood drips from needle to bottle, a blue that traps toxins in inescapable clots, an antifreeze- mixed-with-milk that tests tools, injections—anything that penetrates human skin—for purity. 

Returned to Delaware Bay a day later, the crabs are weak but not bloodless. 

Part III 

Penny toddles along the sand, a gift for uncalloused soles. So focused on the world inside each grain, she doesn’t see the horseshoe until we’re on him. Still clumsy with her own limbs, she watches me turn him over, flipped on his back by a wave. 

Spitting images of fossil kin who swam and spawned when water covered all, their peaked shells tell of Mt. Everest and seafloors that spread to bare the ocean’s bloody heart. They’ve seen five ice ages, Pangaea form and pull apart, the asteroid, a time before bloodletting. 

Little need for evolution when you’re so good at surviving. 

Penny’s tiny fingers read the barnacles, skim the sand- polished curves, ridges shiny as obsidian in midday sun. 

It feels like yesterday when her life was folded into mine, punctuated only by waves, tides, and moons. 

*The Japanese call horseshoe crabs “warrior’s helmet crab” from an ancient tale of courageous samurais, who sacrificed their lives in battle and were reborn fully armored crabs to protect the waters surrounding their homeland. 

♦

Caroline N. Simpson is a poet, essayist, and playwright and has thrice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry and nonfiction.  She was awarded the 2020 Established Artist Fellowship in Poetry by the Delaware Division of Arts. Her chapbook, Choose Your Own Adventures and Other Poems, was published by Finishing Line Press (2018). She teaches high school English at The Tatnall School, in Wilmington. Website: carolinensimpson.com.  

Delmarva Review publishes the best of new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, it receives partial financial support from individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available worldwide in paperback and electronic editions from Amazon.com and other major online booksellers and specialty regional bookstores. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

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Author’s Note: “When a significant relationship ends painfully, we often find ourselves rehashing the turning points, the decisions, the regrets. With the repetition of “when, then, that,” I hope to create an unsettling and even ominous litany that will evoke the human tendency to torture ourselves with unwelcome memories and afterthoughts.”

When/Then/That

That time I saw you on Bramble Causeway, and then we married
That time I realized how much you drank every day
That time I told you your new blue blazer looked cheap
Then that time the dog and I almost stepped on a copperhead
That time you yelled that awful word at me
That day I moved out
                                    when we held onto each other on the stairs
That time a garter snake slipped past the dog and me
That time you had a gun
Then that unbearable time
           when the dog and I still smelled your cigarette smoke everywhere
That time I pretended I had a gun
         then walked into the woods
               without the dog
⧫

“When/Then/That” was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Katherine Gekker was recently named Assistant Poetry Editor of the Delmarva Review. She is the author of “In Search of Warm Breathing Things” (Glass Lyre Press, 2019). Her poems have been published in Delmarva Review, Little Patuxent Review, Broadkill Review, Poetry South, and Apple Valley Review. Her work has also been nominated for Best of the Net. Her poems, collectively called “…to Cast a Shadow Again,” have been set to music by composer Eric Ewazen. Composer Carson Cooman has set a seasonal cycle of her poems, “Chasing the Moon Down,” to music. Website: KatherineGekker.com. 

Delmarva Review publishes the best of new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, it receives partial financial support from individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available worldwide in paperback and electronic editions from Amazon.com and other major online booksellers and specialty regional bookstores. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.  

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