Randy Berry
Acrylic
Inspiration Piece provided to Jewel Beth Davis

Abstract Realism Or Realistic Abstraction
by Jewel Beth Davis

I love spiders. Well, that’s not really true but I have very amicable relations with them. I’ve just explained this to the members of my writing group. I’m showing my fellow writers a photo of a painting that’s meant to inspire me to write a story. We are sitting in the beautiful old Trustees Room in the Dover Public Library. The table where we sit is mammoth, heavy and solid wood, circa 1920’s. I love the solidity of it, except when I have to move it.

I’ve recently taken on a project to write a piece based on a work of art in a genre different than mine. I write and act, so I’ve been bestowed a painting for my inspiration.

“The painter, Randy, said it’s an abstract painting but it doesn’t look abstract to me,” I say. “See that black thing there in the middle? It looks like a spider. And he’s smiling. Widely.”

“Well, I think it’s an ant. A happy ant. There’s a whole line of ants coming down from the upper left hand corner of the painting,” says Roberta. She pushes her thick black hair out of her eyes so she can examine it better. “Yup, it’s an ant.”

The painting is on my new Mac Book Pro laptop. The colors are deep, intense swaths of yellow, pumpkin, and sage.

“Let me see,” says Peg. She reaches a long arm to the laptop and turns it around to face her. “Yeah, I think it’s an ant. And they’re all marching down from that crawfish onto that papaya that’s been cut in half. See?”

Crawfish?

She points to some little round black outlines shapes in the middle of the painting. “Those are the papaya seeds. And that looks like a peach there. Or maybe a melon.”

We all three lean in even closer, peering at the screen. The fourth member, John, is on summer hiatus. I wonder what he would make of this. I’ve made the painting as big as I can without distorting the work.

“Spiders and I have always gotten along,” I say. “Well, maybe gotten along is too strong an expression. We live and let live. They’re always in my bathtub or shower stall. I’m very careful never to wash them down the drain and they don’t bother me. I always talk to them. I always call them Pidey. I say, ‘Hey, Pidey. How’s it going? How you doon?’ They seem to like that.”

“Wow, I have arachnophobia,” Peg says. “I’m deathly afraid.”

I’m really enjoying the fact that my writing group is so engrossed by this discussion. Sometimes I wonder if we’d rather talk about anything rather than deal with our writing. Writing with honesty is difficult. Being critiqued is painful, often brutal.

“I used to be afraid of spiders when I was young. I don’t know what changed me. But spiders are good bugs,” I tell Peg. “They eat all the bad ones like horseflies and mosquitoes.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” Roberta confirms. “They’re gross but it’s good to have them around. They’re necessary.”

Everybody says that about spiders, that they’re gross, but beauty is a relative thing. They don’t look ugly to me.

I have no idea why I’m on such good terms with spiders. Sometimes they get trapped between my sheets and I wake up the next morning with two huge red spider bites on my belly. They’re painful. Still, I don’t get angry.

I think back to my yoga class this morning. Heidi had us with our legs spread as wide as they’d go as if they’re attached to a torture device. She put her hands on the floor between her legs, her fingertips barely touching the shiny wood. “Pretend your fingertips are spiders and creep them gently forward along the floor,” she said. “Away from your bodies.”

The word “creep” is always used when referencing spiders. Well, how else can you walk if you’re given that many long legs? As far as I can tell, they don’t creep around much unless they’re trying to get away from the shower water. They seem to like it damp.

Peg says, “A few years ago, two enormous spiders, the kind with the thick hairy legs, came to live on my front porch. One in the right corner and one on the left. I was petrified whenever I walked out onto the porch. My husband moved one of them into the garden.”

“Yah, but,” I say, “What happened to the other one?”

“We left that one there,” Peg responds. “Because I actually felt, for the first time, a bit less afraid and I had developed a strange fascination for the beast. It was hanging out in its web, waiting to catch the moths that were attracted to the porch light. I didn’t want to disturb it.”

“Ahh,” Roberta nods sagely.

“That’s good,” I say.

“In New Hampshire,” Roberta says, “People always seem to be talking about not killing bugs.”

We all have roots in NH and Massachusetts.

“In Boston,” she continues, “This conversation would be going very differently.” Peg and I nod and murmur agreement.

We all go back to looking at the painting. I will it to telepathically tell me what to write. Thus far, I’ve had no lightning strikes of illumination.

“That’s a great idea for a writing prompt,” Roberta says.

Sure, she can say that. She’s not the one with the vacant mind. “Amy, my friend from school in Vermont, thought it up. She’s pretty smart. I’ve no idea what impelled her to come up with it.”

“Would you mind showing it to us when you’re done?” Roberta says.

“Okay, but there’s a time limit on it. We’re supposed to do the whole thing in two days. No real time for feedback.”

“The colors are wonderful. So rich,” Peg says.

“Mmmn, they’re yummy colors.” But how do I describe them? Maybe they’re different shades of butternut and acorn squash. Lots of sage green and buttery yellow too. And now that I look again, there’s watermelon coral and pomegranate.

“Food colors,” says Peg.

“I wonder why that spider looks so happy,” I say.

“Probably because it’s walking all over delicious fruit,” says Peg. We savor that idea for a moment.

“Good point,” says Roberta.

“Those two on the upper left corner look like they’re watching television,” I say. “The big spider in the middle looks like he’s dancing.” Like a Hasid on the Sabbath, I think.

What is abstract to the painter appears to be completely subjective and representational to me. And to my friends in the 4-C’s Writers Group. We each have our own interpretation of the shapes but we’re convinced they are real objects and living things.

I keep coming back to the same question. What is a joyous dancing spider/ant doing right in the center of this rolling landscape of luscious colors? The answer: even spider/ants can be happy and glowing with beauty, despite the negative way they’re usually described.

We three writers bend our heads over this painting, our imaginations spinning sugary webs of words and thoughts that shoot sparks intermittently.

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Randy Berry
Acrylic and collage on paper
Painted using Jewel Beth Davis’s story (below) as inspiration

Clothes Encounter of the Fourth or Fifth Kind
by Jewel Beth Davis

I look into the three-way mirror at Macy’s and am horrified. My beautiful body that I work so hard to keep in shape has betrayed me. I say aloud to no one, “There’s a small person living in my stomach.” It’s funny but it’s not. I look like that guy in the movie “Alien” who had an entire person inhabiting his abdominal cavity.

I’ve come to Macy’s to look for a dress for my niece Anna’s Bat Mitzvah. I am flying to Atlanta in a few weeks for an over-the-top Southern version of the Jewish rite of passage that, until the 1960’s, had pretty much been reserved for Jewish boys. Now, the female version of the ritual, the Bat Mitzvah, had caught up and even surpassed the Bar Mitzvah, especially in Atlanta among my brother’s attorney colleagues. I have to have outfits for each occasion of the weekend. There’s the Friday night Shabbat service, the dinner at a lovely restaurant with the cousins afterwards, the Saturday morning Bat Mitzvah service, the Lox bruncheon that follows it at the Temple, the Saturday evening party at the beautiful lodge on the river that goes into the wee hours, and finally, the Sunday morning brunch for close friends and relatives. I have to look good. It’s important to hold at bay the attacks on my self-esteem that occur every time I visit Atlanta. I haven’t had a boyfriend in almost three years, which my brother Michael never fails to remind me of. I’m well past childbearing age and everyone I see in Atlanta has family and is starting on grandchildren. I’m an adjunct professor with no savings. I rent, don’t own. No matter how good I feel about my life, my anxieties about my personal failures are ongoing backwashes of acid reflux that accompany me on each trip to Atlanta.

I try on a black silk strapless that two years ago would have been breathtaking on me. This time, I just look as if I am pregnant. I’d wanted to become pregnant for the last twenty-five years and never had. Now, I look as though I am, without the kid bonus. What is going on with my body, I wonder? Why has it suddenly taken on this strange shape?

I try on a lovely blue satin form fitting column dress, another style that had always flattered me as I was very curvy and looked great in clothes that hugged my body. Now, I resemble a stuffed blue sausage with a protruding growth.

I’d danced ballet and jazz most of my life and maintained a slender, muscular figure, even up to the age of fifty. My best feature had always been my tuchas, rear end in Yiddish. All three of the Davis kids had booty. I still do. I still ask friends to punch it because it’s hard as a rock. My legs are long and curvaceous with a small ankle. My thighs are big but pure muscle, no fat. My arms are well defined with none of that skin that continues to wave goodbye even after you’ve stopped. My neck is long and leads to shapely breastbones, and the girls are still round and firm.

I still exercise every day. I take a yoga class four to five times a week, power walk, lift hand weights, and do crunches, bike ride, and ballroom dance at least twice a week. Now, in my mid fifties, it’s all still there. I’m still working it. All except for one thing. I have a stomach that’s shaped like I’ve been gestating for six months.

I try on six more dresses at Macy’s, each one more traumatizing than the last. I keep looking in the mirror thinking that it’s a hoax, that if I look enough times, this anomaly will disappear. I’d been counting calories for the last three months, 1500 a day. I write down everything I eat. I should be losing a pound a week. Nothing. I eat NO junk food. I eat only healthy fats. Tons of fruits and vegetables. Only lean meats. I don’t drink alcohol. Except on Passover. Four glasses. I’ve maintained a stable 152-154 pounds for a year and at 5’5”, I’ve lost an inch of height. Last year I was 142-146 lbs. What’s the deal? I should be a cool 130-135 pounds.

Listen to me, Body! What do you think you’re doing? You’re a freaking digestive Benedict Arnold! You’re the Saco and Vanzetti of the Stomach. You are not behaving in a logical or just manner. What more do you want me to do? Why don’t you just leave? No one wants you here, Stomach. You’re not invited. Take a hike!

I remember I purchased Spanx foundation garments for my MFA graduation in January. I’ll have to root those out before I pack for Atlanta. Foundation garments. What a load of hooey that is. They’re girdles. What does a foundation have to do with it? They’re “Suck-Ins.” They’re “Breath Disallowancers.” Why can’t people just be direct? Don’t sell me. Don’t handle me. Just say it in plain language. You’re fat. You have a huge stomach. You need a girdle.

“Is everything all right in there? Do you need anything?” the sales woman calls through the door.

Shoot! I must have been voicing some comments out loud. I’m getting more and more eccentric every day. Yesterday, I lost my balance, tripped over my own feet and fell hands first onto a bunch of pebbles and the center of my palms bled. One of my students asked me if the marks were stigmata.

“Fine. Just fine,” I respond in my sanest voice, smiling into the door. “Still have things to try on. Be out in a minute.”

“Take your time,” the saleswoman replies.

“Yah, right,” I say sotto voce.

“Excuse me?”

Jeez, she’s still there at the door. I decide to pretend not to have heard her and maybe she’ll leave.

I re-try two of the dresses. Both are empire waists, both are floaty. One is white with a black silky tie encircling the bodice and falling straight down the front. The other is built similarly but is black with gold and silver flocked velvet. They are absolutely beautiful dresses that look terrible on me. And although they look terrible on me, they look better than anything else I’ve tried on. Maybe the long silky tie down the front will hide my bulge or distract from it. And get this. Macy’s is having an 80% off sale and they’re only $20 each. So I buy them both. If, in some parallel universe, I lose even five pounds, they’ll both look great.

This shouldn’t be happening to me. It should be happening to all those people who eat loads of lard-covered fries, greasy burgers, chips and Dunkin Donuts mochaccinos with donut sticks. I eat only olive oil and avocados, for cry-eye! I’m so good. So healthy. Why must my body be so treasonous just because I’m over fifty? And what’s all this about a stress hormone Cortisol? Who came up with that? I don’t feel bad enough about myself already but now I have to feel guilty about having too much stress, which is causing all the bulging around my middle. That’s insane. I exercise all the time and meditate. How can I have too much stress? And now I have to worry about all this subcutaneous abdominal fat causing heart attacks and cancer.

People tell me things. About themselves. My gynecologist told me that she didn’t lose her stomach until she came off the anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication. She’d had a really bad marriage and even worse divorce so she had to take psychotropic medication. But now she’s better so she stopped taking it and her stomach flattened out. Well, goodie for her. I can’t come off. I’ve had a serious chemical imbalance my entire life and the last ten years have been the first time I’ve ever felt capable of handling the stresses of everyday life. I feel balanced for the first time and I’m not plunging myself back into a deep depression to lose my stomach.

Liposuction is an option. Too bad I’m an adjunct professor and don’t make enough to afford it.

The other night I was sitting at my friends’ Marsha and Ben’s table in a condo overlooking Portsmouth Bay. Marsha’s mom, Evelyn, was at the table. She’s known at the synagogue for asking who you are every time she sees you. She has Alzheimer’s or some other memory loss syndrome; she’s ninety-seven after all. She has plenty up there to forget. We’d slowed down eating and I was talking about this story I was working on. About my stomach. I was rubbing my belly and pulling and pushing at it as I sometimes do when I’m disgusted and fed up.

I said to Marsha and Ben, “ So why am I writing about my stomach? Why do I envision an alien living in there?” I talk it out sometimes when I’m writing and it often helps clarify my thoughts. “I mean, why does it bother me so much?” I didn’t really expect an answer. I spooned more chicken chow mein onto my plate and picked up my chopsticks.

Evelyn’s mom said something so softly; I couldn’t hear her at first.

“What? What did you just say?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s not important.”

But I knew it was, so I hoched at her until she spilled it.

“I said that it’s important because Marsha and I had babies in our stomachs but you never used it for what it was meant.” And she sat there in her chair, a small grey haired woman, her face a blank slate. I just stared at her. She’d no idea how momentous her comment was.

There it was. So simple.

I am so bothered by the way my stomach looks because I’ve never had a child.

The end. Finis. Exeunt. What more is there to say?

“But I’m probably not right,” Evelyn says.

“No!” I say. “You’re right! You are no dope, that’s for sure.” I’d been screwing around in the forest while Evelyn, though she can’t remember who I am from visit to visit, identified the tree.

I feel betrayed, by my body, by my age, by science, by this society, and especially by the marketing mavens of this country. They’re the ones, men mostly, who created Cortisol, liposuction, Spanx, size zero clothing and the diet industry. I bet Jenny Craig is really a man. It is a fact that men run most of the franchises. We know too much. That’s the real problem. About science, exercise, medication, health issues, weight loss, plastic surgery, and psychology. About everything. All this information isn’t doing us any good. And it’s making me even crazier than I was before. So we’re living much longer but with fatter stomachs, heart attacks, strokes, wrinkles, fake boobs, cancer, and best of all, Alzheimer’s and HIV.

All right, the truth is, I feel betrayed by my own choices and lack of them. By the child I never had or was blessed with. Aside from that, what I still want to know is, who is the alien being living in my stomach and how do I give birth to him?

Michele Hoben
Nevermore
Acrylic and collage on illustration board, 40″ x 30″
Inspiration Piece provided to Lisa Ventrella

Sense
by Lisa Ventrella

I never imagined I’d be known as “the help,” which is how my mother phrased my employment with Mr. Conrad, but it was a job that found me—since Mr. Conrad knew us—and came with the right hours and pretty decent. Before I started with Mr. Conrad, what I really wanted was to make some big money fast, like how folks win the lottery and then start a new life. When I was younger, my mother always accused me of being fixated money. Probably on account that we didn’t have none. She reminded me of how I loved to make money mowing lawns or selling cookies and lemonade on hot summer days. And then I’d remind her that I wasn’t ten years old anymore.

Since I’d recently turned eighteen and wasn’t going to college, it was time to get a real job, partly so I could help with the rent and to save for what I wanted more than anything in the world: the canary-yellow Mustang convertible that our neighbor Tom Fong was selling. It wasn’t nothing great, old and rusted out by the back wheels, but to me, it was the perfect ride. It was a Mustang! It was Freedom!

Mr. Conrad had been our neighbor for years, an eccentric recluse for the most part who was going blind and needed help with the daily chores of living. He was a painter, a painter who was going blind. He had paintings all over the house – abstract art they called it. Very few had been hung up. Most were propped against the walls, leaning like tired old drunks after a long night of boozing. On an easel, with a light sprinkling of dust, rested a half-done painting with reds, blues and yellows running together and lots of white space where he either hadn’t gotten to it or was too blind to see that he had more work to do. Maybe he’d just forgotten about it and couldn’t see enough to know it was still there, although he says he still paints, relying on bright colors and the memory of line. His lips are caked with dried skin and the blue has mostly evaporated from his eyes. The left eye is like a cloud with grey phlegm covering it. He has a creepy look about him, but he’s sweet like a puppy.

He’d hired me to help out during the day with housework and cooking. He had Mrs. Truitt doing his shopping and whatever else it was that he needed to have done. He wasn’t the chatty type, which suited me just fine. Most times when I got to his apartment, he’d say he was tired and going to lie down. The apartment smelled of body odor, dirty feet and stale ashtrays. It smelled of paint too. Should a nearly blind man be smoking around cans of paint? He says it’s okay as long as it’s not in bed. I empty the ashtrays and the trash and then unclog the sink.

A week goes by and I start to get curious about a few things. Mainly if he had anything that was worth anything hidden away. Like something valuable he’d forgotten about. I didn’t plan on stealing nothing, but was just curious and bored. So, I took to looking into drawers, closets, even under the sink in the bathroom. I was good and quiet too. He didn’t have much, truth be told, but I kept looking anyways thinking I might find some gold jewelry, maybe an old wedding band he’d forgotten about, tucked up in some old sock or something. It wasn’t a great sin just to look. From the next room, I could hear his breathing thick and heavy. And that’s how I spent that particular summer.

Most mornings before my eyes creak open, I remember the putter of a distant lawn mower or the birdsong of the collection of non-exotic birds at my mother’s bird feeders, but never the smell of fresh-cut grass or brewing coffee. Since I’d known Mr. Conrad, I pay attention to and sometimes get overwhelmed with the barrage to my senses. It’s a moment when you realize that what was small before is now the big thing.

This morning the sun rose over the garden wall and a rare blue sky leaped from east to west. I leave and lock my apartment behind me. I step out onto the stoop. In the sky, the birds are leading each other to the next shady tree. The warm lazy air smells of soft tar from the streets and there are sirens in the distance, or is it a freight train like those childhood sounds you’d hear at night … melancholy and sweet-sounding with the power to make your eyes fill with tears.

It’s now months later and Mr. Conrad is living at the home. I have a better job working in the real estate office, a car (not the Mustang but a Saturn with a sunroof), an apartment of my own and have started seeing this guy Bud, a livery driver. Every Saturday night, we like to stroll the boardwalk with its circus of people and dogs and vendors hawking their wares.

With Bud, I’m comfortable and don’t feel the need to be kept alive in continuous conversation. I stare off to the horizon where the sky meets the sea, watching the gulls dive toward the water as they eye their prey, screaming their battle cry, and remember Mr. Conrad, hoping he was well. I can hear his deep, cigarette-laden voice in my head saying, “Be sure to listen to the whispers and watch for the little things.”

Then I notice that Bud has descended the stairs to the beach, looking up at the gulls as they airdance amidst the late summer gusts of airstream, our eyes seeing the same thing simultaneously: swatches of white gulls, beaks open, floating and falling against a faded blue sky.

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Michele Hoben
Liquid Sky
Acrylic and graphite on paper, 22″ x 30″
Painted using Lisa Ventrella’s story (below) as inspiration

Liquid Sky
By Lisa Ventrella

It used to be that I would do anything to get more Oxycontin, otherwise known as OC or Oxy by my friends. Eventually, my parents figured something was up. The bastards had cleaned out the medicine cabinet and hidden their cash.

I remember some of those days like it was yesterday when in fact, it has been a long two years ago. I’d rummage through my purse, thinking one might be living amongst the loose change, tampons and notes from Lizzy, slipped to me between classes.

Nothing.

One day, I even get down on all fours and scoured the bathroom floor, my nose close to the dingy, yellow tile hoping that maybe there would be one behind the toilet base or one stuck in the gap between tiles.

Shit. Still nothing. That itchy feeling was starting. I slothed my way to my bedroom, picked up my Hello Kitty phone and called Lizzy.
“Hey!” she said.

“I’m dyin’ over here. I need something bad. I think I’m going to be sick if I don’t get something right now.”

“I’m out too.”

“Shit! What about Michelle or Justin?”

“Can’t you take some from your mom?”

“The bitch has hidden it. I’ve looked everywhere,” I said. I picked at a crusty scab on my ankle that was ready to fall off into the jungle of my lavender carpet.

“Okay, let me call Michelle and see if she has any. I’ll call you right back.”

My hand was shaking as I hung up the phone. My armpits were sweaty. The withdrawal had started. I’d gone through it once before for one wicked afternoon and didn’t plan a repeat of that Hell.

I’d never thought withdrawing from something that was prescription, like Oxy, could be that bad. Oxy was safe. A doctor prescribed it.

I’d never tried E or GHB, like so many kids were into. I was careful about staying away from the potheads, cokeheads and alkies. None of my friends clued me in to the fact that OC could take you from the “I don’t give a shit” mellow mood to straight-jacket crazy when you were out of it. Or at least, that’s where I feared I was heading if I didn’t get some fast. I could see how people could lose it on this stuff.

My Hello Kitty phone starting meowing like a feline in heat, low and loud.

“Hey it’s me,” said Lizzy through the phone.

“Did you find any?”

“Michelle has some Perkies and OC’s from when her dad hurt his back last month. She doesn’t think he’ll miss them.”

I exhaled and wiped away the tiny beads of sweat that were coming in shorter intervals now.

“Thank God. Get over here now.”

“Okay, I’m going to Michelle’s. Should I bring her along?”

“I guess. I don’t care. Just hurry up.”

As I said goodbye, a wave of nausea took me to my knees. I’m gonna puke, I thought, my face brushing against the carpet that I’d picked out when I was in 4th grade. I stumbled to the bathroom with the taste of bile in the back of my throat, my stomach about to explode. My mom would be home from work soon. I’d be in so much trouble if she found me like this. Even if my dad still lived in town, and popped in for a visit, he probably wouldn’t notice. He was more interested in his new family complete with a one and two-year old.

I kneeled at the toilet and gagged. Nothing came up and the sickness passed just as suddenly as it came on. Weird. I sat back on my heels, wiped the tears away, being very careful not to mess up my makeup. It was then it caught my eye. One lone Oxy near the base of the sink. How’d I miss that one? My heart flipped. I cupped the tiny pill in my hand, so as not to lose it again. Using a can of shaving cream, I crushed it into a fine powder and snorted the exquisite tart granules, half for each nostril. Ah, the burning rush. The initial sting transcended into a warmth that spread to my head and then through my body like I was blanketed in a warm lava. Time evaporated and I was one with my Oxy.

Just then, I heard pounding at my front door. It must be Lizzy and Michelle.

“Jesus, what took you so long to answer the door?”

“Sorry, I was in the bathroom.” I floated behind her, following her to my bedroom.

I don’t think she realized I was high. If she did, she didn’t say anything. It wouldn’t last long. I needed more.

“Where’s Michelle?” I asked.

“She had homework, so her mom wouldn’t let her come.”

We both sat on my bed, the pink comforter shiny and cool. I was suddenly tempted to just lie back and close my eyes for a minute, but Lizzy was anxious to get the party started. She dug through her croqueted purse, the one I called her hippie bag.

“Here’s a couple Perkies and some Oxy,” said Lizzy, smirking as if she’d just gotten away with something.

“Hey, why don’t we try grinding them up together?” I said, hopping up from my bed like I’d been thumped by a second wind.

Lizzy’s lopsided grin and raised eyebrow told me she had something else in mind. “I have syringes.”

“No way! Where’d you get those?” I asked. I’d heard that some kids used needles for this shit.

“Justin’s mom is a nurse, remember?”

“She brings home syringes and needles?” I asked, even though I knew it was a dumb question.

“No, stupid. She forgot they were in her work jacket and he found them.”

“Oh,” I said. I’d never considered injecting anything into my body. Gross. I was careful. At first, we just took the pills. Then, we craved a bigger and better high so we grinded them up and snorted them. It was incredible. We were getting a little bored with just snorting, but injecting it? No way.

“I don’t think I can stick myself with a needle,” I said.

“I’ll do it for you,” said Lizzy.

“How do you know how to do it?” I asked but wished I hadn’t because my curiosity was all the encouragement she needed to shoot me up. I noticed my hands trembling a little. I knew I’d need more soon. Jesus, what had I gotten myself into?

“I’ve done it before,” said Lizzy as she opened the syringe and attached the needle. It looked like she knew what she was doing.

“To yourself?”

“Yep. Michelle’s tried it, too. It’s no big deal.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I can. Let’s just snort it. My mom’s gonna be home soon anyway.”

“Oh come on. She’ll never know. I’ll just give you a little. You’ve got to try it. The trip is amazing. Like nothing else. Liquid sky. Heaven.”

It sounded tempting, but fear bubbled up, stopping me. Maybe being afraid was a sign I needed to get away from this stuff. I didn’t want to end up dead.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“How about I do some and you can decide after you see how it works on me?” asked Lizzy.

I thought about my mom, so happy and busy with her job at the flower shop, spending more and more time there. She’d become so disconnected from me, almost uninterested unless I was causing problems. She’d kill me if she found out about this. She and Dad would send me to a home or something. “I don’t think I can,” I said.

“Sure you can. It’s really awesome. I promise I won’t inject that much. It’ll be safe.”

Just that word: inject made me feel sick. I watched Lizzy mix up the powder with warm water that melted it into a clear liquid that looked like water. She pulled it up into the syringe. She looked like a professional and didn’t seem scared as she penetrated a big blue vein in her forearm with the glistening silver needle. I couldn’t believe she could do that to herself.

Lizzy reclined back on my bed next to my teddy bears. A silly grin consumed her face reminding me of the Cheshire cat from Alice in Wonderland. She grooved to some hip hop shit she’d turned on the radio. I glanced to my American Girl doll collection on my little-girl, white bookcase; their frowns of disapproval seemed to mock me. My eye traveled down to my bookshelf. Back in eighth grade, my mom had said I needed some “classics” to prepare for high school and stocked it with books like The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. I thought of running out of my room and away from this. But that would not be cool.

“Well?” smirked Lizzy as she sat up, mixing the next batch of liquid sky. I scratched my forearms. Maybe I could try it just this once and then never again. This would be it for real. I can’t believe how desperate I’d become. What was I, a 15-year old junkie? No way.

I offered up my pale flesh to her, eyeing the pretty charm bracelet my parents had given me for my thirteenth birthday. I couldn’t watch, but I felt the prick of the needle, but only for a second, because this avalanche of warmth quickly followed. I couldn’t move while the liquid heaven blanketed me in a feeling I’d never experienced. I felt like I was floating on puffy clouds that smelled like Johnson’s baby oil. I looked in the mirror and felt beautiful and confident. I was in a peaceful place and knew that everything was going to be okay–and really always had been. I’d go wherever this warmth wanted me to go. I floated back onto my bed and laughed. The fading afternoon light sparkled, glimmering silver, blue … purple and pink. I focused on the shine and shimmer of it, until I couldn’t. That’s all I remember.

The high was spectacular as Lizzy promised, but when my mom found us, both stoned unconscious on my bed, she flipped and called 911. Talk about a buzz kill. We survived, obviously. My parents sent me to rehab in Montana. Lizzy went somewhere in Minnesota. I wasn’t allowed to contact her, not that I wanted to. We were two bad girls put away in remote places with nothing to do but think and talk about our habits. Most kids blamed their parents, but I didn’t. I knew what I was doing and could have stopped. It was like I sold my soul to the devil. He could take away my pain but he owned me. I had one goal during that time in my life: to get to my next fix.

And then I wondered, because it seemed funny, what would someone think of a 15-year-old girl getting healthy in a crazy place, because there really were a lot of head-cases there, biding her time with group therapy sessions and twelve-step programs? Would you think that she was getting the right treatment and exorcising her demons? Would you think it could have been worse; she could have died? Would you think she’d one day have a normal adult life with a family and children? Would you think that something like this couldn’t happen to someone like you or someone you love?

Drew Hood
Digital Photograph
Inspiration piece provided to Nick Rieger

Truth and Emptiness
by Nick Rieger

There I am

facing you, and in the mirror
is my alter image

of one who knows that tomorrow brings no solace
since she left, for territories unknown
The landscape of her skin, though,

knew my touch.
Now, it knows nothing but the emptiness in its path
of what she left behind for me to grasp
onto the aching truth of it all.

My soul now only knows remorse.

———————————————————————-

Drew Hood
Digital Photograph
Made using Nick Rieger’s poem (below) as inspiration

Gemini Cast
by Nick Rieger

Emptiness
Winter’s tale of night slithers inside you
For the world has turned to
Faded black and white photo’s
Spread across your morbid mind
Surrounded by subterranean mutations that
Inhabit the deep, dusky places you keep.
A frail changeling you’ve become
Cold as could be, mewling an elegy
In a web of despair, caught there without end
Surrounded by forged walls of loneliness
You move only by great effort dragging
Hundred pound weights of inertia.
Now waiting for that final plunge downward
Into timeless, hopeless, desperation

Ecstasy
A summer of radiant sun on golden bodies beholds you
Butterflies fly away from the outstretched
hands of ecstatic, laughing children running all through
Fields of green that go on forever.
You dance to your own elated, fluttering heart while
Intoxicating energy courses inside you
Your euphoric mind and mischievous body.
Lost in obsessions, imperative obligations
Competing thoughts fume inside your head.
Anxious with motion you become a juggler keeping a
Hundred balls a float while running along a narrow cliff’s ledge.
Too fast, faster, now gone off like a thousand
Fireworks racing skyward that fill up the
Night sky with embryonic outbursts of exhilaration and joy.

Ruth Kelmer
The Maternity Question
Acrylic on canvas, 22″ x 28″
Inspiration Piece provided to Amy Souza

without mothers
by Amy Souza

the stormy skies of a faceless woman
break out of your fractured reality
exposed, framed: who are you and who should you be?

cracked prism of melting drama
drips the collective hands of Mother Nature
a shame to leave a good womb empty, no?

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Ruth Kelmer
Deserted Boardwalk
Acrylic on paper, 11″ x 15″
Painted using Amy Souza’s poem (below) as inspiration

Padanaram in Winter
by Amy Souza

The dog tromps these unplowed streets, turns back every so often to make sure you’re there. Ducks float atop close-in waves, the water swishing onto the beach as in summer, enticing, belying its icy clutches.

Except for a few parked cars and a line of recent footprints, the village appears abandoned, the storefronts dark, some covered with crisscrossed boards to keep out intruders, ghosts, the night, the living.

In one window, half hidden by frost, hangs this painting: faded sailboats against a delicate ocher sky.

Next door, the boatyard’s lot is lined with docks pulled aground for the season; their foam bottoms stand as high as a young girl, like the hidden depths of an iceberg, mottled with dried seaweed and old mussels. The gray planks above, painted with sand for boat-shoe traction, hide now beneath drifts of snow, a memory.

Down the shore a fish jumps or someone out of view has thrown a rock. The dog barks, runs toward the water, toward the ducks, who stand in place, slapping their wings against the cold air to balance their feathered bottoms. This dog is in their territory. They will not move.

Paula Lantz
Lost Touch
Mixed media (acrylic and collage) on canvas, 30″ x 42″
Inspiration Piece provided to Sarah Priestman

Paula’s Painting
by Sarah Priestman

There’s this fabric that’s underneath the color, and maybe that’s what we’re really looking at. But I wouldn’t want to extrapolate and make it about everything. It becomes so much clearer, sometimes, when you just don’t think about something. When you allow your mind to just see what is: a red coat. A blue coat. A yellow hand, bracelets, a blue robe and under it, plaid.

A face covered in bandages. Is that what it is? Two men, colors, shapes just under the surface.

I am in a situation with shapes just under the surface. People get angry. They pull out their anger like it’s a football and toss it around, wanting to play. Let’s pass, let’s run, let’s tackle. I brought some pigskin. Let’s play ball. But I want to walk, or sit, or sing, or read. I don’t want your ball. I’m not playing your anger game. There’s a big yard out front. You go toss this thing in the air. My arms are at my side, refusing to catch.

The face covered in bandages. Is he looking to Mr. Plaid? Looking for some kind of connection to make it all ok? It’s a salve we’re taught to search for – connection – as if it can actually provide relief. As if connecting with someone, or some impulse – like the impulse to create – or some feeling – like the divine – as if that connection is what will allow us to rise up out of the darkness and feel – feel what – connected? So then what do we feel if we are not connected: apart? A part. A part of what? A part of all that is connected, I would guess.

Mr. Bandage may know this. That being a part is, in actuality, being connected. It’s all folly, he says, because there is no connection and no separation. There is no part, no being of a part. These are all ideas, and he’s not about ideas. He’s about grabbing that sword.

Ah ha. Yellow hand, reaching for the sword. Mr. Bandage wants that sword. He eyes Mr. Plaid only to see if he is watching. Not for connection. It is not that elusive feeling he wants. He’s got a plan for that sword. He does not have to desire connection. He has a plan.

So out front you go, throwing the ball. What do you do when no one catches the ball? What do you do when you get angry and no one yells back? Anger is about that same thing, the desire for connection thing. The idea that we have to do something in order to have it. Anger gone solo is not good news. If you don’t want to feel connection, get mad.

Though it may not be a sword. It may be a red sash, which is part of the bandaged man’s coat. He wants it back. It’s his. He is the one in red, and that is red. He wants it back. He steps toward the man with the plaid head, trying to grab it.

I love the way this painting conveys movement. Mr. Bandage is actually stepping forward, his arm swung behind him, extending his hand. The painting is still, but the people are moving. How does the artist make movement from paint? How does she take a brush, move it across a canvas and allow an image to bleed out?

And Mr. Plaid, I can see, has stepped back. I see he is more grounded. More sure of himself. He is waiting. He is not giving up the red scarf. He looks down, watching the yellow hand. I can see his eyes move, though I cannot see his eyes. The brush gives me no eyes, yet I see him staring.

The painting eludes to action. The people are still, but I see them move. Is this what happens out front, when you toss that ball up towards the branches? Does the anger shift anyway, even though I won’t respond? I am still, but you see me move.

——————————————————-

Paula Lantz
Journey to China
Mixed media (acrylic and collage) on canvas, 20″ x 28″
Painted using Sarah Priestman’s story (below) as inspiration

After China
by Sarah Priestman

Life is no longer about loss. I sit in my apartment sometimes, the carpet strewn with rattles and board-books and Pooh-bears, and I think, this is my life now. The way I thought when my brother died, this is my life now, my life is without him. But this time, my thoughts aren’t permeated with emptiness, this time they are of a life overflowing.

I adopted a ten-month old girl from China. And now, with my daughter asleep in the next room and my priorities organized around maintaining the frequency of our time together, I realize that I must rise to the wonder of gain, just as, back then, I buckled to the shock of loss.

When I fist arrived home with Evie, I spent hours wandering around my apartment the way one does in an airport when waiting for a connecting flight, biding time on strange ground. She was sleeping peacefully, the kitchen was clean, my desk tidy, and the little pink onesie she had worn that day had been washed and was drying on the towel rack. My mind implored me to take a hot bath, but my body walked from one room to the other, as if there were another connection to make in order to complete the journey.

It was winter then. One day, the weather was balmy and the sky was clear as we prepared to go to the medical lab for Evie’s post-adoption tests, but when we emerged from the subway it was pouring, and cold. I covered Evie with my jacket and pushed the stroller through a pelting rain. It didn’t occur to me to step out of the storm (of course I was soaked) to reschedule and come back another day. I was still moving forward, as if I were a hiker who has lost the trail and sees a flash of color in the distance that looks as though it might be a backpack, and so tromps through the underbrush with one thought in mind: “There’s something there, there’s something over there, I think I see it again, I must make my way towards it.”

I was putting one foot in front of the other as I had been since I decided to adopt. Step by step, the idea, the decision, the applications and the paperwork, not to mention the additional jobs I juggled to make the money required to get to where I wanted so badly to be.

My brother, Jerry, died of cancer six years ago. He was diagnosed in March and died the following February, the morning after his forty-second birthday. There was nothing we could do – his wife and my family – to prevent his death, but there was plenty that we did do (trips, gatherings, making every visit a special one) to improve the last year of his life. This, too, was a matter of placing one foot in front of the other, toiling up the seemingly impossible incline that is seeing a brother suffer, walking freely when he was in remission, and living his life as if the path were clear, then stepping slowly as he lay dying, the ground shifting under my feet.

After he died I wandered aimlessly just as I did when I first returned from China, but not because I was in a logistical trance. Then, it was because I needed to be moving away from a pain that was constantly bearing down on me wherever I went, and to which I finally succumbed, sometimes not moving at all. Then I had not only to face the emptiness that is loss, but also to live in a state of grief.

Mine was the challenge of almost everyone who mourns – how to make sense of life after being paralyzed by loss. It can take years, but eventually the aching emptiness might fade to bearable sorrow, and then to a deep sadness that is always an ember ready to flare, but no longer sears the heart with every breath. That is what happened in my life. I miss Jerry, but I have learned to live with my pain.

And then the call to get onto a plane and be halfway around the world in seven days. At first I had been told to prepare to travel in a month or two, but then things changed. I had a week in which to hand projects to colleagues, acquire and assemble the final documents needed for international travel, position a nursery’s worth of medical, clothing and diaper supplies into one suitcase and put myself and Gale, my lifelong friend and traveling companion, to China. One foot in front of the other, moving with a speed and focus that not only transported me out of the country, but propelled me into a logistical trance. I was under its power still, I now see, those nights when I wandered around as if there were still another plane to catch before I got my daughter.

And now I must learn to celebrate pleasure. Pain forces us to stop and experience its anguish, but with pleasure we must decide to feel it, choose to notice its presence in our good lives. Now I must understand what it is like to live with having every day, what for so many years I have longed for: my child, my daughter, the deep yearning to be a mother, fulfilled. Must look beyond the myriad of tasks that parenting involves, even beyond the joy that Evie brings, to the realization that I have gotten where all those steps, each placed with such unabashed concentration in front of the other, were leading.

They led me to China, where I met Evie the day we arrived. I was told by the translator to expect her around 1pm. Around that time there was a knock on the door to my hotel room, and when I pulled the door open, there were five Chinese adults crowded shoulder to shoulder, two on each side of the one who was holding a baby (“Room service,” I later told friends, “You ordered a baby.”). My daughter was sleeping, and bundled in pink sweat pants with a matching quilted jacket. She was handed to me, and the five officials followed me into the room. They asked me if I had any questions. Sure, I said, what does she eat, what does she like, is she healthy? She slept against me, exhausted after a seven-hour ride from the orphanage. She weighed sixteen pounds.

The officials answered my questions quickly and then hurried out, as they needed to deliver more babies to more waiting parents. Gale and I stared at Evie, napping on the bed. Now what? I lay down and placed her on my stomach, where she slept for another half an hour. I expected her to cry when she awoke, as I was a stranger, but she did not. She lifted her eyelids and met my gaze, quietly and steadily. She looked into my eyes, lay her head back down against me, and our journey began.

M.M. Panas
Third Generation
Acrylic/charcoal on canvas, 40″ x 30″
Inspiration Piece provided to JoAnn Moore

Indelible Marks
by JoAnn Moore

Bombs fall
and, like paint running down a canvas,
attempt to erase what was
or was not:

greenless earth
raw corpses
fruitful town centers
blood soaked histories
a country’s pulse.

Yet even as the wind blows
fire and ignites

rivulets of blood and fear,
the headstones succumb to dust,
and the disgusting maggots
go about their cleaning—

the dead live on
in blue sky bursts momentarily
a little less distant
with each revelation.

——————————————————-

M.M. Panas
Without the Sun
Acrylic/charcoal on canvas, 36″ x 24″
Painted using JoAnn Moore’s poem (below) as inspiration

A Week at Mid-Age
by JoAnn Moore

Monday

A raven lands on
the overhang just above
the open window
where a cardinal—startled—
flashes red, sings louder, stays.

Tuesday

Without the sun, plants
wither, warmth ceases, shadows
cloud nature, shrunk to
mourning. Overcome, the one
miracle— hope—becomes dark.

Wednesday

Is the full-trunked elm
at odds with the ivy’s fresh
tendrils wending spring?
Or does it love the sky more
when it gets to share the view?

Thursday

The fog doesn’t sit
on silent cat haunches so
much as it pads in,
then sets curled in a peaceful
lull —lap-bound— happy to rest.

Friday

Constantly-lapping
tides keep the edge in flux, with
each wave erasing
what the previous has brought.
But the sand will remember.

Saturday

Truth: As one ages,
the hunger grows to go back,
do it again, at
least the uncertain hours—
reliving as harmony.

Sunday

The bumblebee veers—
drunk-like, laden with pollen—
seeking the nectar’s
sweet without care for the path,
or the burden to get there.

Deb Reeves
Summer Nights
Acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 30″
Inspiration Piece provided to Claire Guyton

Calling Chubby Checker
by Claire Guyton

I pay for room service. The nurse brings a tray with my medication, dosing being conveniently scheduled at mealtimes. Now I stay rooted to the mattress all day, the blankets my kingdom. I won’t see Abe Turner dribbling his cream of wheat down that bony chin, or Nannette Dee unload those yellow horse teeth into another glass of cranberry juice. We told her not to get her teeth on the cheap.

Nurse complains I’ll go to seed, she pokes a calf and calls it a wattle. I’ll wither off the bone if I don’t get some exercise, she says. I exercise at night, I tell her, and she rolls her eyes and says right, when you go out dancing with your friends, and I laugh at that, laugh hard, and get to coughing.

I read a while. Someone has murdered a bilious CEO with a predilection for cowboy hats, and although there’s motive aplenty, everybody has an alibi. I doze. Do a little knitting.

Did I mention Nanette? She bought these godawful choppers on discount. The teeth look like cubes of cheddar, and they refuse to stay in her mouth. We’re keeping count of how many times they tumble into her glass, her bowl, her lap.

The Three Biddies try to lure me to Wednesday activities. But Gishie can’t tempt me to make another mottled clay Christmas platter to pass along to a marrying grandchild, Ellen can keep her papier maché to herself, and Bernice should know I can’t see well enough to do embroidery. I was polite. They mean well, our Three Biddies, the self-appointed tour directors of our decline.

Wait. I’ve read that one before. The bilious CEO with a predilection for cowboy hats ended up in the gigantic bowl of icing at the factory because… he found his sister perfecting a new formula for their snack cakes, one she would use to take over the company! She couldn’t let him undercut her, nor cheat the public of a richer, surprisingly moist SnowDrift cupcake… no. He ended up in the gigantic bowl of icing because he saw the night watchman and his own wife in a compromising… no. It’ll come.

Once I could remember which pills I take before my Wednesday dinner of minestrone and apple sauce, which with, and which after. But I’ve lost track, so I rely on nurse, who presses the pills into my hand with more pressure than necessary.

Okay, it’s the sister, I’m sure of it, because she’s mad with creation. That’s what makes her reckless and cruel, why she lets the icing harden on the staring eyes of her murdered brother. Unless…. Sometimes I think I remember something real, when it turns out I’m remembering the mental image of what I fabricated. I’ll just read it again.

I’m cold.

That Nanette Dee, always going for a deal. She tried to get a bargain on dentures and you know what she ended up with? Chiclets for teeth. Totally useless. I can’t tell you how many times they’ve jumped out of her mouth. She just laughs and pops ‘em back in.

Hello, I’ve been sleeping, what time is it? Oh. It’s coming.

11:00 is lights out. I always tense up right before, the way I always felt strung on wire when somebody was supposed to call and the phone should ring any second. There. Even if the lights in your room are already off, the darkness thickens, and the sound of cotton replaces the day’s hum.

That next hour is like Christmas Eve when I was a child. At 12:00 I sit up and throw off my covers, swing my feet to the carpet. The mattress pushes me up, up, and I’m gliding to the door, through it, into the hallway. I pull the flashlight from my pocket, turn it on, and hold it in my mouth while I sweep my arms up and down, rotate my flexing hands. I swivel my hips and shift my weight from side to side, shuffling my feet. I am the ocean, eternal waves of life-giving water, the tide brushing the moon.

A few rooms down, a door opens, and out comes Abe in his plaid robe. He’s sinking into his knees and propelling himself into a smooth, smooth one-man electric slide. His flashlight is clipped to the robe’s sash, and it swings the light around him like a pulsing strobe. Another door and there’s Gishie in her gauzy pajama pants and cropped shirt, showing off her well-earned stretch marks, shaking her streaky belly over gyrating hips, her arms with the flapping, spotted flesh high above her head, each hand holding a flashlight. Doors behind and ahead of me open and close, the hallway fills with silent, spotlighted, gettin’ down.

We writhe and slither and scoop with our pelvises, we do the shag and the Charleston and the Watusi. One tiny woman—a corn husk in daylight—throws her sagging ninety pounds into the swim. I shimmy shimmy in my slippers, the ocean waves having pushed a sleek, finned creature to shore, who flaps her arms and skims the wet sand.

In the morning Bernice in her chestnut wig and Mary Kay lips will harangue the exhausted to get up, join the monopoly tournament. For now she lets her few white wisps of hair smoke up from her bald head and loses a slipper to the funky chicken. Ellen might have a spell and try to papier maché her television again, but tonight she makes up her own version of the hustle, slower and pre-war, soft as whipped cream.

Most of us will not smile tomorrow. Some won’t make eye contact with another soul. But tomorrow is another place. For now we move and groove, we shake, rattle, and roll. For now we just keep dancing. Even Nanette, holding on to her glorious, gleaming new teeth while throwing everything else she’s got into a floor-rattling, window-shattering twist that’s working its way right now into Chubby Checker’s fondest dream.

——————————————————-

Deb Reeves
Bitter Coffee
Acrylic and vinyl paint on paper, 9″ x 19″
Painted using Claire Guyton’s prose poem (below) as inspiration

No Whip
by Claire Guyton

She strides into her favorite coffee shop, waving and laughing at her friends behind the counter—they love her!—love her voice, which, like everything about her, is confident when she sings, I’ll have a super-duper sparkiatto sprawly with a stardust-popping streak-or-ama of sprinkling sparkler, no whip! and oh oh how they do appreciate a pro, and so does he, from his place in the corner browsing the holiday-specific mugs for his wife, who loves holidays and anything stamped with the seal of this, everyone’s favorite coffee shop, where he steps to the counter, calling, Give me a gagariffic gimmick, gawker hawker, glimmering with glorious gorge; and no whip, please, same as the lady—wait! no whip!—they see immediately their bond and share a table, where he plays with the over-sized pink mug stamped with a heart, thin and bloodless, while she plays with the buttons of her blouse, pulling on her straw and then licking her lips and leaning into him, her voice soft, I’ve got a double-shot extra hot briefcase with a bun and spiky heels, and a Botox allowance of half-caf daycare and a 2nd mortgage she says shyly (it’s an act) with a Guatemalan housekeeper and organic spinach; there’s a little Green Card problem, but her foam is well frothed, and he replies, Me, I’m a haircut every 6 weeks of extra vanilla syrup for my snow blower lawn mower, four bedrooms with fraternal twins and full healthcare including dental—he flashes his bright whites—and a cinnamon sprinkling garage door opener low-interest platinum card caramello frappacino to go, and by this time their fingers are gliding across the tabletop, their tongues gliding across the foam, and yes! she touches his hand; he touches her buttons; and they meet for a while, betraying five kids, a wife, a husband, three dogs, a tank of fish and a flawless manicure before he gets bored and she gets nervous and the cherry falls off the top, but! they still have everybody’s favorite coffee shop and oh! how they love them! when they arrive at exactly the same time, and he gazes at those eyes that might, today, burn off the mist of boredom, and she measures the biceps that could, during her lunch hour, lift off the weight of her anxiety, which seems all the more possible when he says, Why not try something new, and so she says, What the hell, and then, Give me that gob-smacking smiter with simmering cider and mix in a streak of double-demi-delight and a half! to which he replies, I want your uber-grabber gimme-grammy, with a triple-shot shaker of shasta-blasta double-frasta! and they remember their adventures, smiling and tugging at their clothes, then decide to share a table, just a small one, where they pull on their fat straws, sucking.

Pauline Siple
Setting Sail
Acrylic on canvas
Inspiration Piece provided to Dale Leffler

Setting sail
by Dale Leffler

“The ship of self-consciousness, when utterly wrecked,
becomes like a sun in a bright blue sky.” Rumi

The harbor waves slap their syncopated beat against the bow
I recline into the cuddling of this vessels’ rocking motion

In breathe to the left, out breath to the right
In breathe to the left, out breath to the right
In breathe to the left, out breath to the right

My eyelids gaze into the sky, blue, bluer, bluest of white
Not long they too succumb to their resting place

Lightness refracted at sharp angles, prisms of color bounce from peak to peak
if I follow any one line it become another, then another and another still

somehow I wind up inside, here too; right angled colors shape my world
tri-masted sails strain against the wind and I tack my in-direct course

calmness butts up against frustration, energy stand next to fatigue
passion argues with apathy while desire wrestles with economy

all this to reach some center, some “no place” of surrender
Where, what is, is. Where, what I fear, is not, yet and
Where what will be is up to me.

——————————————————-

Pauline Siple
Acrylic on paper
Painted using Dale Leffler’s poem (below) as inspiration

What do I bring to this picture
by Dale Leffler

My nemesis,
the blank page stares at me with not-so-quiet disdain.
It dares me to make my mark, my pain stain in plane sight
I start to type, stop… back away in fright
not seeing the results before I begin

I sense a rhythm, a beat, an urge to compete
it creeps somewhere from behind
I acknowledge its subtleness by continuing
to write, to type, to pour clean water onto this page

My words float with the flow of the outgoing tide
reduced friction allows my uncensored words to slide
from the center of my body bypassing my brain
easing is my doubt, my fear, once again.

Then the once opened door creeks as it swings
in the lazy summer breeze
to its resting place against the jam
and daylight streams across the floor from the space by the door sill.
There, I begin to tease the shadow of a man.

What do I bring to this empty canvas?
What color reveals my soul?
What brushstroke will tell the truth
of my unwritten story?

It is an angry red that runs deep and wide
from inside my cranial cave
or criminal cabernet may just indict me
incite me to riot and rage?

Or could it the blackened blue of the midsummer’s midnight
that depicts the many mysteries of Maya?
Arrested slumber abates the autumn orange yellow gold of dreams
that swaddles me into daily sunlight.

Order and chaos cross lines like fallen green forests posts
random acts of nature, random thoughts of love
follow the roadsides’ white lines to the distant horizon.
Life as a journey, as a moving picture show
Do I paint my life with my material acquisitions?

What of work and words and wonder of rhymes?
Of family and grandkids, friend so supportive
five little ones and the counting the days ‘till reunions and hugs,
with deep appreciation, what hue would brings that to the end times?

It that all there is to be said
take a step back, relax,
look once more
Revise my eyes,
empty the “should” can and breath.
If not, dig deep, if yes, let it go and know
I have finished and closed this door.

Marsha Staiger
Lemon Lime Line (Linden Series #6)
Acrylic on canvas
Inspiration Piece provided to Mary L. Tabor

Hypersensitive
by Mary L. Tabor

Stock market has crashed. No noise. Economy in dire straits. That is today.

Last year Robert Rauschenberg died on May 12 at the age of eighty-two. I walk over to see his work at the Portrait Gallery near my apartment.

I saved the obit., got caught in the web of memory. My own straits.

My father’s white shirt, the ribbed, sleeveless undershirt beneath that as a small child I carried with me: “her schmata,” my mother called it. My father’s photo taken by my daughter when she was studying photography in high school, developing her own pictures in Bethesda Chevy Chase High School’s darkroom, hangs on the first wall to my left as I enter my bedroom in the loft where I live and write in downtown DC. He is holding his pipe, one finger tamping down the tobacco, the can of Amphora nearby. The photo is black and white and my memory of him, faded to tone. He, a decade gone this June 6, eighty-four and crippled from Parkinson’s disease and a broken hip when he died. He comes to me like his home movies, overexposed, so much light that I can barely see him. Rauschenberg-white: my father’s white dress shirt. “I always thought of the white paintings as being not passive but very—well, hypersensitive,” Rauschenberg said. The schmata shirt beneath the dress shirt.

My 82-year-old father called me in the middle of the night before he died and in the anguish of aging, asked: “What am I here for?”—a despairing cry that expressed the humility of existence and underscored the imperative of continuing to ask the question even as the darkness moves across us. It is the autobiographical tautological question that starts and ends where it begins.

I once wrote in the third person inside a fictional story, a piece of my father. Here it is in first person:

My father took my hand, and said, “There’s an inevitability about the present.”

I understood the way I’d understood when my mother, four years after her stroke, decided not to eat when the new year came, when she took my hand and said “Yitgadal v’yitkadash”—the first two words of the mourner’s Kaddish. It was five years later when my father took my hand on that hot day in June.

We’d been sitting in the house with the old round Toastmaster fan blowing at our feet, humming the way old memories did inside my head. We’d been talking about the kind of housing called “assisted living.” “Assisted living,” he said. “Funny term. Either you’re living or you’re not, right?”

I didn’t answer.

“I’m on my way down,” my father said. “I know that. This is just a stopover.”

“Stopover from what to what?”

“Don’t get philosophical on me, kid.”

My father’s eyes were brown like mine. I saw them full of light from the sun that angled through the window. I saw the green and yellow—the colors of my mother’s hazel eyes—there inside the brown. I remembered my dream after my mother died. In a haze of yellow light, my mother in a flowered housedress. I couldn’t tell the color of her hair—pure white when she died. But it must be dark—around her face in finger-placed waves, how it was when I could still fit beneath her arm, lean against her curve of breast. Then an empty chair. An elegant, suited man on the sidewalk. My mother, on the stoop of their row house. Her arm raised high in dance position. No one stands inside her hold. She leans to unheard sound. She turns round. A fox-trot circle. My father threads eight-millimeter film through the projector, on the wheel. A home movie. Overexposed. My mother. Like the whiteness of a leafing tree against night sky.

“Why are you crying?” my father said. “This won’t be the last time you see me.”

“It’s what I do. I cry, easily, often.”

“So do I,” he said. “It’s inherited.”

Hypersensitive.

I have looked for him in every man I’ve dated during the last three years—the years of separation. I sensed him one Saturday night in the expert on eastern European economics with big ears like my father’s, the man I knew might kiss me when he offered his tamarind soda a second time as we ate a late dinner, if you call what we settled on dinner, at Oyamel after seeing a new Claude Lalouch film, yes, that Claude of A Man and a Woman, a movie this sixty-six year-old, tall lanky man had seen at the Circle Theater, a DC relic, razed now—I saw it with my father, had Netflixed it two weeks before meeting this man.

Was the camera hand-held? as Lelouch circles round the lovers as they meet after they have parted, after she has said she cannot make love because of the memory of her dead husband. He, rebuffed, leaves her. She takes the train. He rethinks on the drive back in the Mustang. Francis Lai’s soundtrack strikes me now as sentimental, but, like a memory, Lai’s rhythm and the humming singers resound, will not be resisted. No rational thought. No editing. No chance to cut the sweet and to the core where I like to be.

When I danced with my husband, I once upon a time hummed. D. has perfect pitch, a curse and a blessing. For me, a curse. For him too I now think: To have heard those off-notes from my throat, the vibration of my vocal chords gone wrong, not tuned. Off pitch. No humming allowed. Not on that chest where I lay my head when we danced. This man says he is working on the question, “Who am I?” while I wait.

T. S. Eliot tells us,

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Meanwhile on a Saturday night, the economics expert offers me the tamarind soda on first pour (I refused) and then offers again after he’s drunk half. My father and I shared chocolate soda and coddies at the drugstore soda fountain on Dolfield Avenue, three blocks from Grantley Road where I grew up in Baltimore. We’d walk there together, wait for my mother who was getting her hair done at the salon next door.

Lanky man’s tamarind soda doesn’t measure up to his memory when he was in the Peace Corp in Columbia where the beans were refried more times than his strong stomach could bear and where he went into town for a tin of cookies and the soda, ate the whole tin, sloshed back the soda. I taste the second-hand and secondary soda, the hint of spice and tart rind that recalls my mother’s glazed orange peel that my father and I would have at home after the coddies and mustard on saltines.

This man had held my hand on the first date, not again on this Saturday night, not once in the movie or while we walked. That first date, one glass of wine and nothing much to eat at the Tabard Inn (nothing much to eat this night either. Is he cheap? my daughter asked.) Did I care?

Later I did care. My daughter began referring to him as “Cheapskate” after I took him to dinner at Tosca and it seemed only fair that I should pay. I ordered a bottle of wine. He did not object. He ordered the salad, an appetizer, the pasta, the dessert. The thin man did eat when he was not paying the check.

Thank goodness I am not dating him now in the current economic crisis. Would he dare even to go out?

But on the night at Oyamel, after the movie: His quiet, his calm like the sense of the sea receding with the tide; his angles like my father’s, a Giacometti sculpture in shadow at the edge of sand in fading light. That first date we descended the escalator at Dupont Circle, knowing that we would go down together to separate at the platform. He said, “Ah, so I get to hold your hand for a bit more?” as we descended the long arc down. The slight lift in his voice as if it were a question though we were palm on palm all the way down as he recalled a scene from the movie Risky Business: the departing train through the narrowing perspective of track on track, a camera’s eye in his words, the sound of sex in his voice: Rebecca Mornay and Tom Cruise making love on the train, politely unspoken between us.

He had not touched me since that first palm-on-palm moment. The afternoon he’d called with his “research,” as he called it from the website Rotten Tomatoes, reviews of movies playing at the E Street Theater, the first on his list, “Roman De Gare, Claude Lalouch,” he said. “That Claude,” I said and named that movie we’d both seen in 1967. “Ah, yes,” he said. I didn’t know Lalouch was still around. I cast my net back to the year I turned twenty-one. “Let alone alive,” I said. And so we chose the third-date movie.

After Oyamel, two tapas (hearts of palm salad and two scallops, the soda and a licorice tea), he walks me to my loft where I fob the glass front doors open. “Would you like to walk me up?” “I could do that.” We ride in the elevator, apart, then a short walk to my door. I turn the key. The bolt slides open with the click of certainty. I turn my back to the door. He is 6’2”. I am 5’5”. He bends, a curve of slender grace as he slides his hand behind my head and he kisses me. I kiss him and then again. He holds me against his chest, his arm around my back. “You are a sweet man,” I say into the knit of his cashmere sweater, my childhood cheek against my father’s heart, the white shirt, the soft-ribbed undershirt beneath.

———————————————————————————–

Marsha Staiger
607
Acrylic mixed media on multiple canvases, 14″ x 54″ x 2″
Painted using Mary L. Tabor’s story (below) as inspiration

Losing
by Mary L. Tabor
(Published as follows: “Losing,” Jewish Currents, Vol. 53, No. 11 (587) (December 1999), pp. 12-14. The Woman Who Never Cooked, Mid-List Press, April 2006.)

My father bought his first car in 1938. Six hundred seven dollars cash on the barrel head got him a shiny black Ford and two lessons. He drove home, pulled up along the curb and watched my grandfather Aaron Roseman, who’d been sitting on the marble stoop, cigar in hand, hobble down the path and step up on the running board.

Aaron Roseman never drove a car. He was barely 5-feet tall and had a club foot. That and his life as a tailor, the trade he brought with him from Russia, the land he left because he was a Jew, made him hard-edged, tight with money and with words. He lit cigars in the fireplace with charred wood matches saved in a jar on the mantle. He had a telephone, proof of how far he’d come, and a safe in the wall, fire-proof evidence of what he’d come from.
*
My father used to sit on the hill in Patterson Park after school across from Aaron Roseman’s narrow brick house on Baltimore Street and watch my mother’s hips sway back and forth as she scrubbed the white marble steps. He knew the way she moved before he knew the feel of her. He knew the path she took from Eastern High to home. He could tell her by her walk before her shape formed in his vision. And he began to walk beside her on the cobblestones that angled through old trees heavy with the heated light of summer, like his heart.

Aaron said, “Freda, he’s poor, no profession, a schlepper.”

“Gerson works hard, Papa.”

“With feet,” said Aaron and turned away.

Gerson sold shoes, earned five dollars a week and gave one dollar to his mother. One whole week he ate donuts for lunch so he could buy two tickets to City High School’s play. Freda held the tickets in her palm, turned them over with perfect, slender fingers so unlike his broad thick hand, and said she couldn’t go. He went alone. In his hand inside his pocket he kept the extra ticket that she’d held.

And he took another path across the park.

Two years passed.

He was standing outside Felzer’s shoe store on North Gay Street, taking a break. He crushed his cigarette under his foot, looked from the rubbed ash to Emory Zigler’s size 11 polished black oxford. Emory, a pool hall buddy from his high school, hanging-on-the-corner days, punched him in the arm, “Hey, Gersh, Al Lesser’s got an opening. You know his store next to the Red Wing Movie Theater on Monument Street? He’s puttin’ shoes right out on the floor on a rack, just one shoe for each style. The girls can touch the shoes,” said Emory, “but none of them can get their toes inside.” Emory laughed. “He puts out the four and a halves.” Freda’s size, thought Gerson, remembering her tiny hands and feet, the way her head, if she should ever lean against him, would fit beneath his shoulder. “Lesser’s sellin’ them at $2.49 a pair. Go over there. Move up from this $1.95 schlock you’re pushin’. The shoes are sellin’ themselves.” Emory turned to go, “And I guess you’ve heard about Freda Roseman?”

She’d been in the rumble seat of her brother-in-law’s car when it crashed. He went to see her in the hospital. He put his hand on her forehead, white and clear like the ivory silk of his tallit. And when he held her hand, he felt the shards of glass beneath her skin and thought about the hurt inside him while they’d been apart.

So once again they walked across the park. But now he took her small, bare hand and warmed it with his own.

The day of the wedding Aaron opened the door for Gerson who wore the black suit my mother had bought him. The white summer suit she’d also bought was in the shopping bag he carried along with everything else he owned. Aaron stepped aside to let him in but did not speak.

Three years later, when my grandmother was blind and Aaron’s heart was ailing, he opened his door again for Gerson, suitcases in hand this time and Freda at his side. Aaron said, “I owe you, Gerson, for this mitzvah.” Gerson bowed his head and wondered how they’d find the way to live together.

It was a silent partnership until the day my father bought the Ford. He needed the car for his new job selling insurance door-to-door. He figured the two lessons that came with the car were enough. He stalled at every traffic light but made it home and pulled up to the curb, breathing hard from the work of learning what the lessons had left out.

Aaron leaned on the rolled down window and said to Gerson, “Can you drive the thing?” Gerson thought about the gearshift H, wondered if he could get it into first again and said, “Get in, let’s see.” He drove the old man from Baltimore Street to my Aunt Besse’s house on Ulman Avenue, where my mother kneaded shabbat challahs in Besse’s big wide kitchen. Then all hell broke lose. My mother and my aunt shouted at them both.

“How could you drive the old man?”

“Gerson, you could’ve killed Papa and yourself.”

“Meshugah, meshugah.”

“What were you thinking?”

Aaron said, “Let’s take another turn around the block.” In the rear view mirror, my father saw them in their aprons, a semaphore of arms white with baking flour, waving above their heads to stop the rolling wheels.

Aaron told Gerson to clean out the old carriage shed in the alley behind the house on Baltimore Street. “Put the Ford inside,” he said. On Sundays Gerson carried Freda’s bucket full of soapy water, set it on the ground, then backed the Ford out in the alley. Aaron supervised. “Careful now. A little to the left. Slower, slower. Ger-shon, Ger-shon. You’ll scratch the fender. Cut the wheel tighter, harder. Ach, at last you’ve got it,” he’d yell. But Gerson never got the hang of backing up. So Aaron was essential for the ritual of the washing.

One day, my father says, Aaron, who never carried a dish from the table to the sink, who never made himself a cup of tea, came outside with rag in-hand. Their hands bumped inside the soapy bucket. When they were done that day, they stood together in the alley and looked at their reflections in the sheen. My father, tall and thin. Aaron, small and bent with age. Aaron took a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “Here’s the combination to my safe,” he said. “You be the one to open it when I am gone.”
*

My father drove that car, and many others all paid for in full in cash, until he was eighty-three years old. He drove to collect premiums house by house, to sell policies for new couples, for new babies, for insurance against disaster. He drove my mother in early labor with my sister to Dr. Gutmacher’s office. He put her in the car but in his haste and anxiety smashed her finger in the door. Dr. Gutmacher tended to the finger, timed the contractions and said, “Gerson, I’ll drive her to the hospital. You follow.” That was the only time he didn’t drive one of us when things mattered. Whenever I saw a big dog outside, my father saved me with a ride to grade school. He drove me back to College Park after weekends at home my whole freshman year at the university when I was just sixteen, lonely and scared to live away. He drove my sister home from the hospital when she lost her leg to diabetes. He drove my mother to the store for groceries and waited in the car while she picked out sweet-smelling melons. After her stroke, he dragged her wheelchair in and out of his big gray Chevy. And he drove to the cemetery every year between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to visit my mother’s grave and then later my sister’s grave as well.

He never ran a red light. He got one speeding ticket when he and my mother were driving through a small town in Vermont on vacation. A policeman drove out from behind a billboard. “Didn’t see that 15-mile speed limit sign, now did ya?” he said.

But last year my father missed a turn he always makes on his way to the Pikesville Senior Center. He made an illegal U-turn to get back to where he knew the way. The young policeman—and think how young this one looked to him that day—asked him to step outside the car and then laid down a wide strip of tape.

“Do you think I’m drunk?” my father asked.

“No sir, I don’t. But I wonder why your hand shook so when you handed me your license.”

“Getting stopped by the police can shake the nerves,” my father said.

“Yes, sir, it can. Now, if you’ll just step out.”

My father’s back is curved, his legs are stiff, his arms have thinned. He uses his hands to lift his legs above the floorboard of the car when he gets out.

He walked the policeman’s line with a shuffle in his gait. The years dragged on his foot.

While the policeman wrote the ticket that took away his license, my father stood in summer heavy sun and watched his shadow shimmer on the tar. He thought of his tallit and how he used to sit in synagogue and watch the fringes swing in sunlight, and the threads of memory flickered in his head.

He thought of the day so long ago when Aaron stepped up on the running board and then of the day they put the old man in the ground—the day he opened up the safe. Aaron, crippled all his life, who left, instead of cash, a pile of IOUs signed by relatives and friends who’d seen bad times, old pieces of paper from worn out lives saved like burnt matchsticks in a jar. Aaron, who made sure my father was the one to stand before the open safe, to hold the papers in his hands. Aaron, who knew that he would throw them all away.

Katie Weaver
Shadows
Acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 30″
Inspiration Piece provided to Marsha Koretzky

Shadows
by Marsha Koretzky

The late afternoon shadows are what I remember best, violet against white stucco and deep greens and golds in the garden. On that last day, before the train whistle blew, I asked Marianna’s daughter to take my picture. Outside, where I smelled salt and felt the sun on my face and let long seagrass tickle my shins.

“Do you want some from inside the house, too?” Sonia, the daughter, asked.

“No, no, baby,” I said. “I only want to remember here. Nothing from inside.”

Marianna’s ghost hovered, looking for her way into her bedroom. I hoped she’d stay where she was, peeking through the southern windows. I didn’t want her in the pictures.

I tried not to look at Marianna and combed my fingers through my hair. There were no flowers like this at home. Sonia snapped a shot before I was ready. It was okay, she said, we’d take another.

I stood next to the big bush near the side door for the next one. But Marianna was staring at me, and I couldn’t concentrate on “Cheese” for the camera.

She looked better as a ghost than she had for months.

“Marianna,” I said, “You’ve filled out.”

“What?” said Sonia. She didn’t believe in ghosts. Didn’t believe in Our Savior either. Didn’t believe in much of anything, I don’t think. Still, she was a nice girl. She loved her mother. She sold her condo and commuted an hour and back for her job in the city just so she could help me with Marianna’s care.

People think that ghosts are all white or fluorescent green and translucent, but they’re not. They are all their own colors, like what they were in life, but paler, like shadows of what they were. In life, Marianna’s hair was white, of course, and her eyes a piercing blue, even in those last days when she was too tired to fight me anymore or to eat or even take a sip of the Ensure. It looked like her ghost had been to the beauty parlor because although white, her hair was done up in a bouffant, like my mother wore back when I was little. Instead of the housedress she’d worn for the six months I was caring for her, Marianna’s ghost wore a gown of soft lavender that deepened almost to black in the shadow of the house. It was a ball gown, I think, and she wore sparkly beads around her neck and wrists. She was beautiful. But she wasn’t supposed to be here.

I came to Marianna and Sonia after the insurance ran out, and they couldn’t pay for the agency girls. I was lucky to find them. My last patient had died three months before, and I’d had nothing but housecleaning since.

I told Marianna to stay put, that I didn’t want her in the picture. I had to think it because I didn’t want to hear Sonia’s ‘what?’ again. I prayed to Jesus to let the dead rest, to show her the way home so she’d stop looking at me with that lost sadness.

I’d done everything I could to send Marianna on her way. I touched her forehead after Sonia had run sobbing from the room. I made the sign of the cross even though they hadn’t wanted a priest to come in for the Last Rites. After they took her body away, I moved the furniture around so she wouldn’t be able to find her bed and crawl back under the covers. She’d been in that bed enough. Eight months all told. It was time for her to move on.

Marianna lifted a small fist and banged on the bedroom window. I thought I heard a whimper. Sonia’s eyes traveled over side of the house, almost as though she was watching her mother. I wanted her to stop looking at what she did not believe was there.

I leaned over and gathered flowers into my arms.

“I’m ready,” I said and put on my coquette smile.
The shutter clicked. The shadows moved over the house. A train whistle blew.

“Good-bye, Henrietta,” Sonia said. Then in a whisper, “’Bye, Mom.” And she sat down in flowers. I let her cry then.

——————————————————-

Katie Weaver
The Dream Group
Acrylic and paper on canvas, 12″ x 12″
Painted using Marsha Koretzky’s story (below) as inspiration

Dream Group
by Marsha Koretzky

We have Dream Group on Thursday nights. Maggie, a bulky Jungian, is our facilitator. She has gray hair pulled back in a tight bun and wears muumuus and clunky turquoise jewelry.

There are four of us in the group, all women of a certain age, all sure that our dreams will explain the meaning of life. We are on the cusp of Fulfillment, almost ready to Follow Our Bliss, as soon as our oldest gets a job, or we get up the cold nerve to dump the insensitive husband, or we find the job that combines passion with pure joy.

I am an obedient member of the group. I eat cheddar cheese and drink milk right before bed to increase my serotonin. I leave my dream notebook and special pen on the night table. As my eyes get heavy, I recite affirmations and incantations to myself, begging my unconscious to show me the way.

I wake up Thursday morning from a drugged sleep and reach for my notebook, handmade with a picture of the Goddess on the cover.

I am in a deep forest, I write. It is dark and verdant; I can smell the decay and rot of rich black dirt. I hear leaves rustle behind me. As I turn, I see a Being in the form of a man. He is tiny and, at first, I think he is some kind of magical being sent to show me my Path. I am excited as I wait for him, feeling the touch of Nature, her dappled sunlight on my arm, her soft breeze caressing my face. The Being crashes through the underbrush and I see that he is not a pixie or an elf, but a dwarf. Frightening, ugly. He wears Lederhosen like one of Snow White’s Seven Dwarves and leers at me. Suddenly, I see his nose. It’s running and I hand him a tissue.

I’m wondering what Maggie will say about this as I enter her living room. The dream has disturbed me; I woke up in that confused state that always means the dream is Important.

I sit on a couch that smells of old cat pee and eat some Dream Cookies which are really Lu’s chocolate covered biscuits. I check to make sure I have my fifteen dollars and wait to be Enlightened.

Linda comes in first. She tells me for the fiftieth time that she’s ready to move on, to sell her business and move to Fiji. Lois is next. She’s excited because last week her dream told her to quit her lawyer job and start writing romance novels. This week, she is sure, she will tell Maggie her dream and learn how to finance her new life. Suzanne rushes in; she’s had another fight with her thirty year old son who doesn’t seem to understand that separation is part of growing up.

Maggie makes her entrance five minutes late, as usual. Her muumuu billows around her, and her bracelets jangle.

“How are we?” she asks, and we all tell her how much closer we are to following our dreams. She nods her head as she listens, a sage for the dissatisfied.

“I’d like to introduce you to my son,” she says when we’re finished. “He’s going to sit in tonight.” She looks proud as she continues, “He’s doing his thesis on dream work.”

“John,” she bellows, sounding just like I do when the kids are late for breakfast.

John walks into the room. He doesn’t shuffle or slump. He is beautiful, and he knows it. His hair is graying, but it is full and thick and long. His body is taunt and sculpted like one of the buff, gay boys in Chelsea. He sits, and then looks each of us in the eye as he says hello. His smile is sexy and self confident.

Maggie invites me to go first. And I start to read.

“I am in a deep forest,” I say. “It is dark and verdant; I can smell the decay and rot of rich black dirt. I hear leaves rustle behind me. As I turn, I see a Being in the form of a man. He is tiny and, at first, I think he is some kind of magical being sent to show me my Path. I am excited as I wait for him, feeling the touch of Nature, her dappled sunlight on my arm, her soft breeze caressing my face. The Being crashes through the underbrush and I see that he is not a pixie or an elf, but a dwarf. Frightening, ugly. He wears Lederhosen like one of Snow White’s Seven Dwarves and leers at me. Suddenly, I see his,” I pause, “his penis. It’s…it’s huge and hard and I can almost feel it inside of me.”

I don’t look at John, but I can feel his eyes on me. I smile to myself and think about Following My Bliss.