1. THE VISION OF EASTER BY JIM
By Martin Bemberg

2. Fayetteville, Arkansas
October 6th, 2008
Dearest Owen Prater,
Here are directions from your Austin to my Fayetteville. Take Interstate 35
North, all the way to Dallas. You will hate it there is what I hear and exit
right for US 75. If you cannot stand a ten hour drive, there is a modest
motel called the Pilgrim Motel in Dennison, just before or after the
Oklahoma border, where the main becomes US 69. For forty-eight dollars
a night you can smoke your chronic without reproach. I checked it out. It
is somewhat of a meth den and you should be the least of anyone’s
worries. Next day, north, all the way to the Fort Smith Exit onto I-40 East.
Then in two hours you will be in Arkansas and you will know that you are
in Arkansas without welcome signage because beauty all around and of a
sudden. Welcome. Our mockingbird is your blue bonnet. A crime to pick
the blue bonnet in your state, I hear, but a sin to kill a mockingbird
anywhere, so I win. There are diamonds in the soil here too, just farther
south and hardly ever. Interstate 540 North, and exit for Fayetteville, and
you are at the home stretch. See if you can feel the hills climaxing. Stop in
Rudy. Eat catfish at the gas station there. They charge for tartar sauce oh
well. A sign for the town of Winslow, where all the true hippie hillbillies
ended up. There’s an annual ‘Winfest’ there to raise money for textbooks
and whatever else at the one school they have. I went once, the pot was
terrible, you’d hate it. West Fork, which has natives apparently and
running water, but all I know of it is old and seasoned Fayettevillians who
have left Dodge for something like a cabin and a place to swim on the
White River, and we will do the same once it is warmer. After Westfork is
Greenland, and all I can say about it is that you should probably stop there
for your third tank of gas. There’s a hill next up, the final hill, which every
returner knows. You reach the summit like you crest a wave and there it
is, the skyline of dorm and stadium and library and the old folks high rise.
And you surf, really, until you get to where you end up, which for you is
me, at the corner of MLK and Church. Now, at this summit you must call
the Hogs. You will know the summit and if you do not know how to call the
Hogs already I will show you. Exit 61 and I forget the name of the right
turn, but head for town because that’s where I will be. At the stop sign at
15th Street you will see the soup factory on your right and Baum Stadium
for Razorback baseball on your left. For your second visit because you will
miss me so much you can come in the springtime and we can catch a
game. Our pitching is weak but you can drink beer on the lawn beyond left
field. (It is a world-class facility in other respects too.) By now you are at
Martin Luther King, or, REVDRMLKJRBLVD so take a right at the light.
Left on Church Street and you will see me on the porch reading Leaves of

3. Grass for the third time. I will be waiting there until you give me so many
kisses.
Adore you candid,
Grace Anne Spice
Collector of Jars
P.s. My cottage is drafty, and Arkansawyers do not know how to drive.
Come before the snow.
THIS ANGLED HEART

4. Past the door ajar I saw her walking. She was scoping out the hallway real
good, looking for something, I thought. For me, I thought. I loved her first
for how her footsteps pattered elegant. I pretended to be thirsty because
she was at the drinking fountain. I tapped my foot because she wore heels
that made a clop clop on the tiles. I tried to look around and fascinated by
everything, because what she was looking for I thought was a poet. Really
she was parched. I'll become a poet, I thought, to quench the world when
the sea is not enough.
"You must be parched," I said. Not anymore, she said. But how
receptive, that twirl toward me. Hair light brown, the best of yaw, olive
skin, eyes mysterious. What grace, I thought. How telling, that twirl toward
me. Then before I could say, Hi I'm James - "Hi," she said. "Bye," she said.
I didn't go back to my class. Not yet nor for a while. Instead I waited
by the fountain for her, every day until we met in the garden. And when in
the garden I saw her hair light brown and her olive skin in the moonlight, I
thought let's you and me make us a baby. Lust and premonition both. In
the garden she lit my cigarette. She asked me how old was I and I did not
lie. Nineteen. She also did not lie. Twenty-five. She said very little. She
handed me some seeds to eat. They were chrome under Luna, she said
morning glory. I said good morning yourself and she laughed for me, for
the first time. And lit by Luna. And I imagined it was the first laugh she’d
ever laughed. And I imagined it was the first I’d heard. The seeds tasted
worse than shit, and I had to chew them forever. Tasted like dirt or shitty
coffee. I drank my coffee black after that, for the conditioning those rancid
seeds did me. She told me the effects would be worth it. We danced to
some 45s alone in her loft above the party. Sounded like 1945 indeed,
which I sensed the way a synesthete might, zeitgeist tangible to the
primordial five. Post-War baby and it feels so good. Everything felt so
good. I the ham managed to slip the word 'dame' once or twice into my
wooing. I was still in 1945 and Duke Ellington didn’t tell me no different.
She said stop at her pants that night so I did. The next we’d sweat two
pitchers of beer onto her sheets, sweat her pants onto the floor.
Next morning, stallioning on home. I stroll the four blocks like my
life has changed because it has. But at a strut you'd never guess how.
Home and glowing still, and on the door a note folded heartwise. Her
curves were perfect. She’d made a great point.
I would open it, with remorse in the end, for the craft I’d undone.
Hi.
Where did you come from?
You said that to me, I like that, I like you.
Okay bye, G.A.S.
We became very much in like after that. Friday night sleepover and
Saturday Farmers Market in our Friday clothes. I still have not washed

5. that pastel purple dress shirt. We watched the puppies and the babies and
we looked, for once, like a real couple. Then, once upon a time it was
Friday and the traffic had a Friday urgency to it. Folks were speeding,
switching lanes, seemed like for the hell of it. Trying to get away from
wherever they didn’t have to be anymore. A lot of them university
students skipping town like she and I were doing except most of them
were skipping town to head back home to Texas. The Texas kids got the
same in-state tuition as I did for some reason. Anyway there were too
many of them. Phillip painted the outside wall of Hog Huas Brewery about
it. I backtracked and went by there to see the stencil before we set out for
the wilderness. I had a feeling it would be gone soon, for the powers that
be sure be. An enormous Texas outline was Phillip’s message. Upside
down Texas, and in the middle of it, Go Home. Many heeded Phillip’s
advice that day. She told me, "I wouldn't mind visiting Austin someday.”
She didn’t say much about her friend down there, just that he was a friend
and he was down there.
We camped there in the balm of September with no tent, just pads
and a blanket we would share. I’d spent my whole paycheck on supplies
that would never come in handy, and I couldn’t buy us beer for another
few deluded months. Grace Anne would never forget to bring beer. I
would notice her gaining weight, and I reckoned it was the beer. When she
informed me otherwise, Phillip bummed me a cigarette. And that’s
something I’ll never forget.
Kings River Falls, out past Fallsville. “Once upon a time,” I said. She
smiled, and laughter shook her abdomen. “A King James, the King James
impersonator who wrote the apocrypha and not, you know, the word of
God.”
“Of gahwuhd,” she mocked, for which I kissed her on the nose. She
made her rabbit face and so I did it again. She took my face in both hands
and said coldly, “Son, I brought you into this world and I’ll pull you right
out of it.” I cowered in the face and shoulders.
“Was that a Freudian slip?”
“Come,” she said, standing up. I expected her to say something like,
Which part? Instead she looked behind her shoulder opposite me, holding
her gaze on something; I could tell her eyes were squinty like they got
when she was thinking...I reckon I never did know what she was thinking.
When she was done checking for, goblins probably, she did not look over
the shoulder closest me. She did not look at me but straight ahead. “Come
on,” she said stoic, brushing the sand from herself, toe to calf to thigh, to
just above her pubic hair. “I want to tell you something.” She stood staring
at the waterfall. I sat looking Grace Anne up and down.
“What you need to tell me,” I said, “is when when you’re not wearing
any pants.” She took my hand. She took her shirt off as she jogged barefoot
over the stones. I wondered how a city girl like her had callus enough to
endure something like that. And then I remembered, no girl’s a city girl in
Arkansas, even in Little Rock. We have a saying in Arkansas,

6. Hell man -- can’t skip a dang ol’ stone’n this state ‘thout hittin’ a
da’gum river. By God son I tell you what.
Beneath the waterfall, we did what lovers do beneath waterfalls.
“Is something wrong?”
“Hell no,” I said. “Do you need to rest?”
“Hell no.”
I’d seen them on the shelf she built above her bed, below a gawky
Nabokov, swarthy if that’s what swarthy means, and ripped from a
magazine, New Yorker I think. Beneath the waterfall she looked at me like
I was high and I was in an oxytocinicalisticishlike sense when I asked her
why she collected them. Grace Anne Spice told me two things and I
reckoned they were reasons. She said capacity and she said potential. She
said right now they are empty, all my jars are empty. She said right now I
am empty. She said fill me up. And that’s where Jacob happened if I have
to guess, at a waterfall if that’s what it even was. A river flows
perpendicular to the sea seeps up into the shore will fill until the tide says
that’s enough shore, rein it in. But there is no sea. There is no shore. These
are only stories we tell ourselves. The two true stories are the moon, and
the bloom.
For twenty years, my life, bullion. And it was all over when Grace
Anne Spice lit my cigarette in the garden. And lit by Luna’s splashing on
the morning glories.
Little Rock Arkansas,
November 5th, 2008
Owen.
There is no good way to say this. Unless this mess is a blessing. We have
gone our separate ways since Galway and you still have not called the
Hogs in the hills we call mountains and you still have not danced with me
at Wild Bill’s. But. What happened across the pond will bring us back to us.

7. Not that it has to. This is up to you. Wait never mind because of what I will
tell you next.
Thanksgiving at my mother’s home [Little Rock; don’t use brackets;
remember?], my sister proctored the urine test because my hands were
clenched and shaking so. She withheld the result but she could not
withhold the tears, whether they were tears of joy I do not know. But I do
doubt. The cross was blue. Dear Owen. I am four months pregnant. Four
months equals November minus July, or Arkansas minus Ireland. Maybe,
Owen, this novel tenant in me, and of me, is only three months a resident.
But three or four, you are a candidate. The dark horse is a boy or man
named James. He goes by Jim sometimes and Junior. He lives here in
Fayetteville and was born here. I suppose you don’t care. Well I do not care
that you do not care because you answered my letter but did not really.
You know this. You know that the response I got was worse than none;
you know already. Who is she? Never mind.
This baby in my belly. If he vacates later not sooner I want you to be the
father. Regardless of the genes, half of which are mine and he’s in me, and
I choose and that’s that. You are old enough for it and you have a career,
albeit creative, which, you know…
Anyway you are the father and deal with it.
Or. We could act like it never happened. Amnesia but consensual. And I
wonder which pain is worse.
Okay,
Grace
P.s. Should I tell Junior.
PEDESTRIAN
I know just the place for when the storm lets up. At the tree its autumn
always. The foliage is a solar gold, and a baby step from her front door. We
will baptize one another there. Again she’ll have the name she had when
the cosmos dreamed her. I am the sea which softens sand, I weather crags.
The future of geography depicts a coast of softest glass. Grace Anne Spice
as specks of white. Thousands maybe millions of them, crystalline. You
can see yourself reflecting in a beach of glass. Mirrors pop up now and
then in groups of ten along I-40. This glass depicts a man barefoot and he’s
charming as hell, handsome too and tall. He’s ambling to the resurrection.

8. All I do is I will knock on her door. Storm hits hard and we live out our
days in bedding. We visit the tree, the only one on the block. The stand-
alone evokes the grove. Thank God for the deciduous. I’ve dreamed too
much in pine. The tree is somewhere down the street, standing there all
radiant. Sheen that’s orange and gold year-round sometimes and galaxies
among the leaves that stare back at you. You can see yourself in a canopy
like that. You can see yourself reflected in a beach of glass.
It’s coming down hard enough that it hurts now. I imagine back at
the diner in Clarksville there’s still a simple fellow wearing camouflage,
saying something like, “Boy, there’s some weather out there.” Whether I
wander on or hitch it, decide for me please, because I can feel the cold
now. Ice first and then snow on the ground. My feet are down there
somewhere. I know. It was a revelation to me too.“I wonder what scenery
all this used to be, this concrete. Abstract, I imagine. It gets swampy this
far south, you’ll see.” (I aloud am keeping me company.) “You’ll see the
swampy, once you’re off the interstate. Sometimes when you’re on it. Am I
on it today or what? Soon we’ll pass the swamp with all those trees
reaching decapitated out of the water. There must be mischief in that
murky. Tiny bayou looks like a children’s film I watched. What’s it called.
I’ll spare you the whole you know the one with the plot, where the
protagonist does some stuff, and there is conflict, and growth, and
contrasts, and twists and turns, and come on you know the one. No, I’ll
spare you that. It’s the one about dinosaur friends, animated dinosaur
friends. I think the swamp is coming up. I wonder are there friends in
there. In the swamp with trees reaching decapitated out of the water. You
know they are logs just waiting to happen. You won’t call them trees
anymore, once they are flush with the horizon, lying flat, maybe floating.
The highway is a flattened pillar if you think about it. Can you imagine? It
was a revelation to me too. What would you call a vertical highway, I
wonder. I’ll ask Borges, easy guy to find believe it or not always hanging
out in libraries. In that story ‘The Immortals,’ the architecture of their city
is darn wonky. The design implies the irrational, and a surplus of
dimensions. Ones where never dying makes sense. Heaven, I guess --
where people live forever, and dogs too if you believe the movies. I don’t
believe in movies. I do not allow myself to have opinions about the things I
cannot sit through. Not like this can I. No sir, all the places my mind is
going. Where is it not, really? What do you expect a body to do, Gutensohn.
Sit still? Well fuck you, Junior, and bah humbug every day until there are
no more. How’s this for sitting still at the cinema?
I see my dreams on
movie screens deserted,
and in dozens of them empty
cinemas my brimming head
contains. But only at night and
all of them look at me
about the same to me where

9. they are empty. And the reve
in them. It’s too tried for
me to wrap my sleeping
deep-in head around. If there
were a pill I’d take a pill if a
pill were a pill to lend my
dreams the kind of wealth
everyone blabs about, else’s
hearts seem to carry, and instead
I sit brimming vacant among the chairs,
where a stranger here myself is not the waking way
I know so well not where mirth
is what I find in quiet crowds.
With hums and whispers, swell,
swell swelling as the sea might
do his thumbs, yes that my thumbs,
they be like tap tap tapping prayers
in silence – aye! The kind of silence
only toddler, dog, and she
with great imagination can hear,
or maybe a synesthete hears
in pitch black, mind ye.
I would give to dream even slowly,
dream only scenes holy,
never again would it be so lonely
see them at all, anywhere, to
remember I had them of drive-in
speaker boxes slurring gravitas at the
nervous and the smooching teens.
Handle it,the truth is it’s a sin to
kill a mockingbird and black boy
stereotypes are the elephant in the room
and what color is the elephant I wonder.
Face it, It’s a Wonderful Life is
‘Oh Mary everybody gave me money
so I wouldn’t kill myself wow you guys
Merry Christmas’
and that’s about it, but
Bring me your campy your sappy
you’re gonna need
Dramamine is what I’d take all day
if it made me dream or remember
them I’d take them I’d take
any sort of reverie
because reverie
my name is reverie.

10. I don’t know whether to call this one “Kill a Mocking Bird O Mary
Everybody” or something else, like “You Guys Wow.” Or maybe “Gonna
Need Dramamine You Guys Wow.”
I get no farther than a mile probably before a friendly fellow picks
me up and thank God he’s fat and colored, I could use some, I am gaunt
and pale like prophets are. The man says I must be colder than shit, odd to
think about. He wonders why did I call him Sir. Because I am grateful, I
say. He wants to know all about my pilgrimage. He doesn’t say so but I
know it, and I take him out on the boat I call S.S. Fabula, the vessel where I
weave my loom-like stories. We are flotsam there, one-off cruisers, and
seasick atop the waves a-chopping, telling tale, exalting banks maternal
where the Son once burrowed deep. Wooping and a hollering and a
carrying on. He doesn’t quite get what I mean. Neither do I exactly. So we
are in the same boat in that sense. I reckon in an Ahab-Ishmael kind of
since we are all in the same boat.
“I get elated like I am lately,” I apologize, “and some invisible thing
or force out there is throwing all that ethereal language at me and it festers
until I pass it on, to someone else, and not just, say, the atmosphere which,
you know, the atmosphere listens -- don’t get me wrong -- if you woo her
right, if you woo her right she listens. The atmosphere. I am grateful that
you’re listening. Descriptions like those, like the one-off cruisers, I don’t
know where they come from they just do, they just are all of a sudden and
they come -- and are -- at such a rate that after a while -- if one ‘while’
equals forty-eight hours or so sleepless -- my noggin gets plumb tuckered
out. Buddy. My word and goodness gracious alive all the novels I’ve talked
away today, I’m getting hoarse by it. These wordings that the ether sends
me, they are novel and never slow. Forty-eight or so gone sleepless and I
cannot make sense of them anymore, I wear myself out, but they are all I
have the energy to believe I’m so tired I am.”
I say this about being tired and I am struck with spirit again. It’s
making sense and waking all of me. There are dots everywhere, counting
on me to connect them. I have work to do. I close my eyes. This must be
what dying is like. I stand before the firing squad. My life is flashing before
my eyes. It’s not sequential like they show it on television. It comes as a
wave, like up in Akash or in a Colombian epic, but it’s more than just a
wave. It’s all at once. It comes a wave but a wave that keeps on growing,
keeps on cresting. And higher and higher. Enredo a la Moratín, poor
Paquita. Playback reveals that I am coming to an end. It peaks and peaks
and peaks,
the end. Its peaks have peaks. From the womb I watch the biggest of the
big kids, snapping my collar bone on the merry-go-round. I am weaning,
teething, potty training, twelfth grade James. Twelfth I know because
Kathleen is my girlfriend. But so is Susy, and Evelyn, and all the others.
But not Grace I wonder why. My first bicycle wreck in slow motion --
Canto XXIX, is the soundtrack, in Italian, in the voice of my college World
Lit teacher, Mohammed split down the middle strung up by his own
entrails and warning me not to touch my penis before I eat pancakes,

11. watch cartoons, or move in for my first kiss. I wonder why not Grace. All
the while, learning to take a dump with Maw Maw. Maw Maw reads Where
The Wild Sidewalk Things End by Mo Silverdick. All the poems all at once.
For a fleeting moment Maw Maw was every woman to me, and now hen
she’s just the feminists.
Feminist Maw Maw, she loves Tony Hawk the video game.
Feminist Maw Maw is with me in the Impala, where currently I am dying,
and doing it up comical. It’s comical, I guess, that I meet my maker while
taking a dump. Comical in a chubby black man’s Chevrolet. That he’s
albino and digs the smell of toddler butt on vinyl. Goodness gracious alive.
Can you imagine? Meanwhile Brendan Alligheri tears Mohammed in two,
and hangs him by the guts again. All in terza rima can you imagine? He
knows terza rima so well. And the in-unison with President Obama – and
this has got be a joke.
I get it, stars, I’m the dream catcher.
I get it. I’m not dying. It’s not me it’s just the world that is ending,
and it is going to be hilarious. I open my eyes. We are not a step closer to
Little Rock. No time has passed that I can tell. We are still behind the I’m
Pro- Choice and I Vote sticker, some entitled Episcopal I’m sure, hair light
brown. I tell my chauffeur about the death waves, and Feminist Maw Maw
beefing her rib cage on the half-pipe.
“Feminist Maw Maw, she loves Tony Hawk the video game.”
“What?” “I thought you’d like to know the world is ending. Buddy.” I
thought you’d like to know. He doesn’t understand, he says. He says he
doesn’t understand, as if I understand. I don’t understand. I’m just a vessel
for these things, just doing my job Ma’am. Dad gum it and gall darn -- the
novels I’ve talked away today I’m hoarse by it!
He giggles. “How you suppose to save the world and ain’t got no
shoes on?”
“Multiply and fruitful,” I say. Here’s how I see it. The world is
ending, and we’re all gonna die, even me and that’s saying something, boy.
All our
lives will flash before our eyes, el enredo final, I know what that’s like
now, and by God I’m going to have Grace Anne Spice with me, when it
happens for keeps -- but when is that. How soon is now? “You’re polite as
heck for listening. Pal.”
Where was Grace in the playback? Her absence whispers the unfulfilled.
The answer is obvious. Grace Anne Spice will be there when I die. The
how is that I have to find her soon. After all, the world is waiting on me.
But I have work to do if I’m to make it worth the wait. It will end like
Macondo. The Son will read the past aloud, from Adam to Omega. And
then the meta, the beyond. The instant He says Omega, it’s his conception-
resurrection of a sudden, the future is undone, it swells and swelling, it
shrinks, and black-holes us into what dreams may come.
Again this makes no sense to my chauffer. But I have nailed it so
carefree. What’s there not to get. Nailed it on the head so tiny.
Such a smidge of a skull His must have been. Beginning of month four, I

12. reckon he approached mere cartilage on the marrow meter. Surely He
came out blooding royal, all over Dr. Hands. I hope the blood and tissue
experience was profoundly unpleasant for Dr. Hands.
He’s seen what I have and it certainly made an impression on me.
This is no country for old men. No. I am mackerel-covered. I am crowded
and commending whatever is begotten, born, and dies. The monumental
and unageing, the singing masters of my soul.
The Son last seen as chubby red and iron droplets in her underwear,
I am sick at the thought.
Still I am comforted by the ease with which the soul escapes the
body. I am sailing for Byzantium. Ride out wanderlust. At exit, His
corporation was a month short of halfway formed. I doubt
she ever gleaned the wreath of chromosomes within her. She must have
feared the tangled rosary. The Son to her was just a school of sloppy beads,
nothing to pray home about, no outline recognizable, the Son, dismissed,
her doing. I know now that not to do it was the only way to do it. There
never was a good way to do it, no do it right, no do it over, not ’til now.
“Return the pride and joy,” I explain. “Replace one cub with another.
Lest I die of old age and brokenhearted, I reckon. To perish for old age at
mine, can you imagine?”
Who is this girl he wants to know. To me she is the shore and my fuel. Just
look at the initials on her origami heart. I undid it was my undoing.
My chauffeur accelerates again as if he doesn’t follow. Bullshit he does not
follow how can you not follow. There are shepherds and there are
shepherds, don’t you see, and I am the latter. So pick up the pace, black
sheep, and I say look buddy. Look. Buddy. You’ve got to know the
resurrection. Bible Belt and all. We had ourselves a child, and now the
world is waiting on me to end itself, I can’t let you down. The child is ready
to save the all, be the all, bring you all or y’all the safety and salvation in
His blood before it’s over, all of it. But I did not know this until He was
gone, the little one. He was acing every test, I bet extra credit even. Baby
Boy, he incubated undetected, for a third of a trip round the star that
warms us. Sacred cell assembly as redeemer, under construction.
Unwanted property, the slave and savior, donated. Who in this center
where we wait can count the miracles we will have missed for the gospel’s
extraction? My God. My God, enumerate. My God – my Mother Mary at the
vacuum.
“We owe him at least a resurrection, don’t you get it? Crucifixion in
the womb, can you imagine?”
My chauffeur doesn’t answer. “Aw sleet sleet motherfucker!”
Really coming down now. Clipse is on his busted stereo. The thing
about hip-hop is you rhyme proud about a busted stereo. Naseous at the
weight of battle, drugged at the sheen of wealth. ‘Momma I’m Sorry’ is the
song now.
“I’m sorry I stopped calling,” I say. Just in case she is listening.
There are wiretaps in most cars you know. And proof -- I divined it from
the stars just now, and yes the method is brand new but I have not been

13. wrong yet have I. My eyelids heavy as the machinery turning over in my
brain. My eyelids saying I want to sleep, the machinery says I cannot. I ask
him for one of his bananas and with a straight face he hands me a peach. I
think about this for far too long. Lost my appetite. I was tired a minute ago.
I was a hungry-sleepy then. Glad it’s over with, I toss the peach out the
window. He nearly tosses me for it, boy. Can you imagine? I could hit the
ground running, I say, and he laughs at this. It’s a metaphor of course,
which I document on my ‘To Decipher Later’ list. My chauffeur is still
laughing. He likes me clearly and how can he not. I laugh too – and oh how
I teach him what joy and its jumping are all about. No sooner am I patting
myself on the back than I am recalling that wise old adage: He who one-
ups a driver has boots for walking and that’s just what they’ll do if their
owner one-ups the driver. No shoes on me though, much less boots. I
didn’t mean to one-up the driver. I’m just so way-up-there, I reckon, it’s
hard not to outdo other people sometimes. He faces me like I’m the Holy
Ghost itself and nails the accelerator. I would have hit the ground running,
I tell him. “Snow or no snow, feeling or not. My feet are numb nothings by
now.”
“You still ain’t told me what the hell you doing without no shoes.”
“Soul for soles.” I am on a roll, boy. “Carries me swift does the soul. Weeds
out sharpened stones and takes me up in flight. In rhapsody lobbed gentle,
over stones that stab in secret. Fuck the jagged, says the soul and so I glide
along, hung-up, swept and airborne. That is, when I’m not treading on
those round, those smooth, those prehistoric eggs of Macondo. That’s the
town that stands for all the world. Like the colonel I am also facing the
firing squad, looking back on childhood and on youth’s pebbles in a
stream, I think they must be of dinosaurs. I stare down death. Meanwhile
life is dancing before my eyes. I am feasting on the past. When my
offspring read the world aloud, I appear before them with a crucifixion in
my face, they are the present and feasting on the past. In such collusion of
ere and hither the yon disappears – it is vanished, the Twin Born After
announcing his resurrection in this way. Can you imagine. Where is he
now I wonder.”
My chauffeur exits onto 430 and we’re in the city, west side I think,
take me to Ascension. But he’s from over east I think, other side of the
tracks. He doesn’t understand Ascension. “Right on, Ascension! Hey, let’s
you and me keep in touch,” I say. “Got a business card or something?” I’m
out of the Impala now. I miss Feminist Maw Maw.
Feminist Maw Maw. She loves Tony Hawk the video game.
“I’ll holler at you later.” But he pretends not to get it and drives off.
Christ, everyone is an actor lately. Shaking his head, and laughing. Hard to
believe it, people see the light so clear and shake their heads and chuckle
under their breaths. Shake their heads and drive off shadeward and
chuckling. No ascension for you I reckon. All right. I’m chuckling now too,
laughing at the end of the world.
“Not the police!” I knock. “I’m sorry I --” “Stop that,” the woman

14. says. “You can stop knocking now.” But where is the shore. Where is she.
We don’t know what shore
you’re talking about. Sure you do she’s inside she’s made her pilgrimage
like me. She’s awaiting the father of her gone, and too of her coming. My
Maw Maw used to live in this house, I explain, but she’s a feminist now.
And the door shuts sesame at my profile. Practically breaks my nose, this
gale force closure. I walk east up the hill, climbing Ascension and bleeding
on my smock. I am at the grungy thoroughfare, and fuck calling it Colonel
Glenn because fuck that guy whoever he was, this is Asher Avenue. It is if
the stoned, the nicotiners, and the whoring-outs and unemployeds are
here, and they are. Brendan knows them all I’m sure. Brendan is the key.
When I find him I’ll send him back to his children and that’s what sets it in
all motion. World, it won’t be long.
So I ask around. Nobody knows Brendan. Everyone is an actor lately.
Christ. I walk into the gas station about a mile before the light at
University. I ask the woman working, girl really, and she has to be white
about the whole thing, which means she lies to me. I say you do too know
him and she chases me out when I finally get livid about it, a broom in her
hand. We’re standing in the white condensed there on the car tarmac.
Softest glass but no reflection in it. I curse the white girl in my mother’s
tongue. Prince of Cubs, I say. The world will call him Thomas, he is the
Twin, and I’m not going anywhere.
In the meantime, wishing now it weren’t so cold. I have roads to
read. I’d be at home, at Grace by now if I had steered the coach that
brought me. No, I am only feet. There is no getting warm around here. I am
going to lose my feet to frost and then what. I am lyricking to warm them. I
say speak muse, recall autumn bond fires and the like. One muse whispers
me a kiss and I free the words as sentimental fluids. The tears are
streamlined, now celestial, they are jolting they are heaving past lip after
yon lip, can you imagine. Words and sentimental fluids at a crossroads; at
the crucible between the mouth and brain; gain the twain and a scene
brews; travels verse-like through the nasal cave. The words I smell are
these.
Speak, Gravity.
Create now ascension I climb the where
and what and peak at why and Gravity
do save the tale of what for later.
You make the where you are
the lasting image. You last imagined
past the ceiling sky. You are painted
with ascension ink on elevators.
I have seen your work
through telescopes – you made the fields
Elysian there at Saturn with your scythe.

15. Crafty, and congrats, you did it --
now find my wife.
The verses, they just spit on through the old factory bulb. The scent is
coastal perfume.
The sea, the shore, a love supreme. When I reach her, when I reach
for her, she’ll be not coy. We don’tmake worlds wait long for their
vanishing. I’ll waltz her bedward and it’s all right if she bleeds. After all,
this discharge is my last and only chance to feel the warmth of Him, Prince
of Cubs. At the sight of the sea -- her angled heart will tell her -- it could
stop itself if that is what she wants. In this dialogue the salmon-filled
reminds her she has stopped already one too many. Crucified with
forceps. I reach for her and she is waiting naked on her knees, the sheets
are soaked with the blood royal. I know how the story goes, I see the
future.
But alas I am still in the parking lot. I have not ascended of the
verses like I thought I would.
“Hey man will you tell her I’m for real?” A nod, and an of course I
will. I trust him to. A friend of Brendan’s is a brother of mine no matter
melanin, nor matter how fucked up my mother’s other son may be. The
white girl attends the conversation. I flee. Here I am the world’s about to
him and I fear for my life. Yes I fear for my life and where is she. Where is
Grace. Land ho! -- a jar’s fallen from the shelf. A yogic breath and my heart
is racing. And my thoughts are lapping it, oh hell. Oh hell it hits me and I’m
Jesus’ son already. Already mighty, mighty. Mighty mighty mocking bird
oh Mary everybody you guys wow. Wow you guys -- Hell. Hell or Heaven
or both. Both Heaven and the road up-to, vertical, per Borges, Jorge, sort of
-- Argentine in infrastructure, rotting dirty-dirty, chummy-chummy with
him aren’t we now. Aren’t we now. Aren’t we.
I’m out of breath from racing feet and thought and so I light a
cigarette. Winston and I part gladly though. It’s too cold to have your hands
out of pocket. It’s a bad idea to keep them swaddled when there’s
balancing to do. But I’ve made it this far without busting anything on the
ice, full speed even. I thank the ether I have not fallen. Then at thanks my
crummy fate perfected, as a baby step gets out from under me. My back is
on the ice and my eyes on Winston slowly losing his cherry. I am in pain
and lulled by the icy sizzle of less and less ardent orange. Hands like
payment out of pocket but it is too late for equilibrium. My eyes roam over
to my feet. Fa- ggot Da-ddy are they battered! Tender too and swollen
purple. Behind me, the trail of blood. If I die it will not be of exposure. I eye
the building of reflective glass and high tint closest me. Who knows what
goes on in an unmarked building with no windows. Gagged and bound
rites, maybe, or meth chefs. A dungeon either way. Parked out front are
two white, Ford church-wagons. Also no windows, kids call them rape
vans. My reflection should be on them though and the building both. I
don’t remember the last I looked in a mirror. First one in forever is the
skin of a dungeon probably. I’d crack this case if I could but I’ve got work

16. to do.
It looks like I’m casing the place I’m sure but I don’t care how it
looks. I’ve got work to do. Glory! how ashamed I was before the full moon.
Knowing what I know about whom it is the world waits on, what do I care
if Asher Avenue's whoring-outs think I’m meddling. Any fucked-up crazy
enough to be out in this frigid is too busy shitting a brick about it to notice
the vagabond-peregrino I am, unshod and trying to sneak a peek at who
knows what. Who knows what I am curious not enough to find out. I’ve got
work to do. Put it on my growing list of shit to decipher. The more I don’t
find out the more I wonder what this place is. The more options I consider,
the darker the options. The darker they, less gusto for the investigation I
wasn’t going to do anyway, whatever.
Who knows how long I have been up close staring into this house of
mirror without seeing my reflection. My cheeks are caked solid with the
tears. This hair in my face nonsense will not do. Funny I forget my pocket
knife until I’m lowering ears with it. Blade so dull I hear each follicle
snapping distinct. I am lucky not to slice a finger, or a forehead; the blade
dullest is most dangerous I reckon; the leverage behind it gets so reckless-
frustrated that you pay down the sharpness-deficit as it goes astray at a
tender part of you. Now the blizzard is taking a break. I open my eyes at
the wall of mirror. My oh tender me my name is reverie and behold, boy.
Ecce, blizzard prince! My name is reverie!
“Damn I look good,” I shout at sirens. “We should have a party.”

17. LET ME GO AND MAKE OUR VISIT
“How is he?” Grace asked. Owen could hear her windows rolling down
and then up. She exhaled.
“He’s fine,” Owen replied, looking over his shoulder. “When did you
start smoking?” James flipped through the Little Rock Metro Area
phonebook looking for other Gutensohns. Owen looked down at the beige
tiles, but something about them upset him. He noticed his hands in his
pockets. They were empty. The whole thing felt unfamiliar.
“Is he…you know?”
Owen Prater looked again over his shoulder to find James attempting to
dial out. He lowered his head, closing his eyes this time. He hoped never
again to eye a hospital floor from above. “If you mean dangerous…I reckon
no one’s watching their backs.”
“What’s it like in there?”
“What’s wrong with ‘How was the drive up there?’” he chided. “It
was fine, actually. The only hitch was that when I turned onto Church,
your car was not in the driveway. And I thought, hey, that’s great. Grace
left the stoop. She must be singing the body electric by rote.”
“What is wrong with you?”
“I thought you wanted to know about Junior,” he said. “He’s fine.”
“Well, has he said anything to you?”
Owen bent down to the floor to pick up his notebook, hardback, which he
had picked up at the Office Depot on the way to Bridgeway. He had taken
his time selecting the perfect shade of green (there were two to choose
from and one was lime), checking the prices on blank CDs, and test
droving a sexy, white leather office chair. He held back laughter as he
spoke to a salesman about the “resistance on this particular model.” The
salesman played along, extolling further the virtues of “one of the finest

18. I’ve seen come through here.” When the man at one point paused to think
of the perfect word to describe his personal favorite feature, Owen could
read, in how the man held his mouth, that what came out of it next would
be something…special. “The yaw - yes, yaw - on this here,” the man
advertised proudly. Owen laughed so hard at this that the pitch went
unfinished, and he fell from the chair. The fall was partly an accident,
Owen, explained, and sprinted for the parking lot. He had made away with
the first notebook to truly infatuate him since Grace shared her
commonplace book, full of French translation attempts and butterfly
sketches, with him. She share this with him at the hostel, as foreplay, in
Galway, which was half a world away now and nearly a year. “Yeah, let me
just find some gems for you. Who am I kidding? They’re all gems.”
“Funny.”
“Not meant to be.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Is that James I hear singing in the background?” Grace asked.
Owen wrote off the tenderness in her voice as the child in her belly
kicking or something quaint like that.
“Yes. Ready?”
“Ready,” she said but not.
“Forgive me if I stumble a bit,” Owen warned her. “He insisted on
writing it himself.”
Grace Anne Spice did not speak, not until Owen Prater attempted to,
when she said, “Well, Owen, send me your draft in the morning.”
“What?
“What?”
Amid the pause Owen shook his head, his eyes closed, thinking, You
have no idea, Grace Anne Spice, and I know I can only hear you breathing
because you want me to, and cut that shit out, little girl or next time I
swear to God I’ll fuck you really, really -- really well.

19. THE FALSE FRAME
I knew there was no good way to do it. It was November, the Sunday after
Thanksgiving. When I got to his house he took me up to bed, spread me
across it like a sheet, and then I told him to wait. And then I told him. From
his bed I heard him. He was in the hallway, asking his roommate for a
cigarette. “You don’t know how much this means to me,” is how he
thanked his roommate for the smoke. He was not much of a smoker then.
Not around me. He came back from the cold and asked to use my lighter.
He knew I always have one though I never smoke never. He left again. He
came back smelling awful and in shock. He did not speak. He lay on his
back and waited. He could not make sense enough of the what’s-to-come
to say a word about it. He wasn’t breathing well. So I told him, “Don’t
worry. I’m going to take care of it.” Thinking it would make it easier on
him. I suppose he expected a discussion. And that’s fair enough, looking
back. “What’s wrong?” I asked. Foolish question, looking back.
“I need to leave,” he said. “I need to go somewhere not here.”
“You mean you need to be alone,” I said.
He sighed. “I don’t know. Don’t leave me I guess.”
I called him the day after the abortion. He didn’t know what to say. He
asked if it was chemical or physical. It took me a minute to figure out what
he meant by that. Really it comes down to venom or vacuum, his chemical
or physical question. I played dumb with him. He asked how far along I
had been. Scientific, near silence, his voice crumpled, and the rest of him I
imagined pulled apart stringy, like the undoing of a cotton ball. Thomas is
a tender one. A paper bag collapsing. He was just a crinkle. Not to mention
what the telephone adds to one’s crackle. And tobacco, which was also in
his voice.
I was in Little Rock for the abortion. For Christmas with my family. He
and I had not spoken and I needed to know how he was taking the birth of

20. our savior coinciding with the loss of his child. And so I endured the bus
ride to see him. I could have driven in half the time but I wanted time to
prepare. I arrived in Fayetteville twenty minutes late. He had been waiting
since ten early. He was eager to see me and, it seemed, to redeem himself.
He was sorry for the flowers, I was sorry for the blood. “This has been a
royal fuck-up,” I said.
“Or,” he countered, “the blood royal.” His head drooped at this. He said
he was sorry, that that was stupid, and I said not it’s not and don’t be. We
had a farewell meal next morning. he didn’t know it was farewell but that’s
what it was. I alone made it so. Nor had I discussed the abortion with him,
that is, whether to. And Sunday, last of my visit, I did not tell him it was
farewell. Not until he finished his salmon. He asked me to stay for coffee.
Drinking it black was a ritual of ours, you could say. But I could not
stomach the coffee, not black. I tried keeping this a secret but no use. I
gave in, I asked for cream. He had none, he was devastated. Then, I reckon,
is when he sensed I would be leaving soon. He did not cry, not while I was
there. After that who knows because, well -- because Thomas. We said
goodbye. I was relieved. He must have been relieved too. I hoped so at
least. I returned to my mother, my sister, and to Little Rock. Thom and I
played phone tag for about a week. Ambivalent and brief. We gave up,
because it was easier that way. Then, my mother’s house and depression.
Days I couldn’t bring myself to turn on lights or fill cups. My body
temperature dropped, for a few weeks at the very least. I did not tell a soul.
I lived in the dark. I drank from the faucet and wore blankets to the toilet. I
tried to read poetry, which had been romantic when there was more
inside of me. I was empty, I thought. Someone fill these jars. I would
remember when I read him Yeats for the first time, how I thought: I’ve
seen his life change. Because it had. Infinities in his eyes as he would
recite back to me at a whisper, “Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
and be the singing masters of my soul.” Poetry seemed trite at best in my
depression, until I returned to Elliot. Preludes was always my favorite,
Thom’s too. Preludes and Prufrock both had been premonitions. Emptied,
I wondered, Do I dare? at every meal. I lost twenty pounds. The doctor told
me to expect ten -- three months pregnant, not four. I lay for hours on my
back, waiting. Considering my guilt. Sordid images. My soul. But things got
better. After a while I did not want to eat dirt anymore. Black coffee, beer --
neither made me want to vomit. When the blues lifted, coffee and beer
helped me discover the two and only reasons for my blues: lack of coffee,
and lack of beer.
One rainy night months later -- the spring solstice, he claimed -- my
blues learning shyness, the boy or man named Thomas showed up at my
door, pastel purple dress shirt turned smock and thick with paint. At the
sight of him I swelled. I shrank. He nearly stopped my heart. He said, “I’m
sorry I stopped.” I told him not to be. “Calling,” he said.
“Hi?” I said.
“Yes,” he said, fingers at his temples. “I knew you’d say that.”
“How are you?” I asked.

21. “Successful,” he said. “I’ve come to your den this night to replace
one cub with another.” He told me his roommate the lion had taken his
phone and keys. Well how did you get here, I wanted to know, and without
a car? And why aren’t you wearing any shoes? He punned all over soul as
in spirit, sole as in shoe-bottom. For a good ten minutes. I led him inside,
to wash his travelled feet.
“So. Are you okay with everything?”
“I’ve never been better,” he said. “The full moon coming and
running water. All we are is running water are you?” Everything about
him slowed at the sound of the tub. “Are you okay?” he said. “With
everything?”
“I wanted to give up,” I said.
“We gave up too much already,” he said, and asked that I douse his
feet in perfume. I dried them with my hair.
On our way to bed he followed close behind. He grabbed my hips,
hands trembling. He let me go ahead, then he came up close and slow
behind again. He whispered some Latin into my ear and told me it meant
‘Truth is currency.’ His feet guided mine from below. The way my
grandfather did when he taught me to dance. Thom’s and mine was a half-
speed waltz sheetward. Laughter marked the downbeat. Once horizontal
though we defied metrics. He was a different man. He was quicker, bigger,
lighter on his anointed feet -- touched with fire. We caught our breaths and
said nothing. Maybe we held hands. He watched as sleep took me, sleep
having been foreign to him for some time. He told me he’d been practicing
hypnosis and said, “What did the sea say to the rock when the rock told the
sea he just wanted to give up and erode?” I wasn’t falling asleep anymore. I
was fixed on an image of erosion as bloody avalanche. “The sea said, ‘Are
you shore?”
I woke and thought I’d never sleep again. I shouted, “I love you!”
Full moon having come and gone, everything made sense. He and I
made more sense than we knew there was sense in this world. We had not
slept since the start of the rain, which turned to sleet and then to snow. We
spent our elation days indoors, painting, writing, reading each other’s
minds like twins, and forgetting to eat. We forgot that people eat. His
poetry was gorgeous. Speak gravity, he said. He knew all his own poems
by heart, conjured them from what he called the Akash. We listened to
more records than I knew I had, every one of them on repeat. Beethoven’s
7th nearly melted; we listened to it for three days straight. I asked him why
the 7th and he said, “Alex and his droogs of Burgess may’ve preferred the
Ninth, my dear, but that one’s trite in many ways and places. Many ways
and places. While on the other knuckle the Bundestag chose the 7th to
commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall and I say unto thee, my love, my
earth’s seashell: which do you say is most important? Future-thugging or
the death of Marx? Ah vastedad de pinos.” Somewhere between Nina
Simone’s lament and Mahmoud Ahmed’s Amharic holler we ran out of
paints and canvasses. “And at the same time!” he cried. And softly he

22. followed, “It’s a miracle.” Thom crying slight and silent. I did not know
why it was a miracle and did not have to ask; he loved explaining, and
loved to bird walk even more. “Mirth in dearth maybe. Or who knows!
Mirth in dearth or maybe we head yon to re-up and who knows! Who
knows the friendlies we may find out there. Aw sleet sleet motherfucker!”
he hollered.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get some vitamin D.”
So, feet bare, wearing only our pajamas -- he in mine -- we walked
through the blizzard to the corner of my street and stopped at our favorite
tree. None of its leaves had fallen, its still-autumnal palette a solar blaze
among the midnight street lamps. “We should have brought sunscreen,” I
said. Thom said he didn’t mind getting burned. “A ceremony then,” I said.
“I’m a sucker for ceremony.”
“I baptize with fire!” he said. “Or water, to cleanse.” I nodded water
and he filled his hands with snow. He sprinkled some over my head with
the kind of care you lend some caustic element. He said, “Coged de vuestra
alegre primavera el dulce fruto, antes que el tiempo airado cubra de nieve
la hermosa cumbre. You are now Shore.”
Then I did him and called him Sea. I asked him what the Spanish
meant. He told me it meant carpe that diem, girl, before you go all grey and
can’t get any. “So,” I said. “Get some young.” I paused, which he didn’t
notice. “But literally?”
Sea took a deep breath. His posture and inflection parodies of
Castilian arrogance. It was a performance. “Snatch the fruits so sweet from
this joyful spring lest frigid airs do blanket with snow your gorgeous
peak.” He began to giggle. “But seriously girl, you’ve got to let me tap that
while it’s firm.” He wanted cigarettes, grabbed my arm and we set out for
the gas station. Not the closest gas station, in fact we were headed for one
on the other side of the tracks, but this was an adventure. “My brother is a
gun runner,” he said. “And he’s in with the crooked cops.” I asked him how
he knew that. “Because for the last month he’s been out of town more than
in. Haven’t seen him in months, Sarge. Got two kids. One is eighteen
months. Need a father. Probably haven’t seen him in months. Bet he’s in
Pakistan right now buying dirty bombs. You seen this? You heard about
this? Journalists I swear have sifted through the depth of the black
markets there and purchased nuclear weapons. Just to prove that it could
happen. He comes here to Little Rock too. Every couple of months. Do you
want to get married in a month?”
I said yes why not now.
When we got to the gas station everyone inside and out admired our
pajama smocks. I know just what they were thinking. They were thinking,
How great their art must be. They were thinking, The Sea and The Shore, a
love supreme. They were thinking: art’s epitome entire. I knew they were
asking us to change the world. They knew we could. They were counting
on us. In turn we could count on them to keep us safe.
Sea beelined for the first black man he saw and I went after the shelf
with the real estate pamphlets. I looked at advertisements for houses we

23. could buy after the wedding. I heard Sea ask the man, “Do you know my
brother?” and the fellow said no, and Sea said, “Are you shore?” He winked
from across the store. “Shore you do. Sarge. From Fayetteville.” I did not
know black men could blush.
“Sure. I know him. He’s your brother?”
“Well, half. Different Dads. But yeah, my brother.” Sea winked again
and my giggles turned the pages.
“Now I see the resemblance. Man! You only half brothers. Look just
like him. What’s your name killer?”
“That’s Shore and I’m Sea. She’s my bride-to-be.”
“Sea. All right. Congratulations, y’all.”
Before the man could leave Sea had to ask him for a stranger-favor.
“If you know where he is, if you see him, tell him I’m looking for him. That
his kids need him.”
“Sure thing, killer.”
Sea did the same to the next two black men he saw. Same thing. That
sealed it. His brother really is a gun runner, I thought, knew. Sea went to
the counter. He asked the clerk, a white girl, the same questions while she
plucked his menthols from the shelf. Said she did not know his brother.
Sea persisted. “Well maybe this will refresh your memory.” He slid the
cigarettes back over the counter.
“What the hell are you doing?” the clerk asked. I don’t know, lady,
makes sense to me.
“It’s called a bribe, ma’am.” He was whispering. Sea insisted that the
clerk knew and she did. I knew. But she wouldn’t budge. It reeked of
conspiracy. Who knows how deep in the mud, how high up the ladder the
investigation would take us. But for now the bitch would not budge. She
would tell Sea to get the fuck out though. He grabbed my arm and we
rushed out of there, but not before I gathered as many pamphlets as I
could.
“Look what I found,” I said. But Sea wasn’t listening. He was livid,
and afraid.
He walked up to the first fellow again, the guy was outside puffing
on one, and Sea quivered, “Hey, man. Will you tell her I’m for real?” The
man nodded. Counter maid burst through the exit waving a broom and
shouting all over again, to get the fuck out, leave him alone, get the fuck
out, and what are you talking to him for. As if she didn’t know. Sea berated
her in Spanish, he grabbed my arm with one hand, and with the other he
gave her the finger. He let go of my arm to show her the other finger. I had
no doubt she knew Sea’s brother Sarge. What other reason would she have
to get so angry? Sea said the counter maid was going to send some very,
very bad people after us. Big black guys and they would rape me, he was
sure. Why won’t you protect me, I wanted to know, and he said, “Because
they’ll crucify me first.”
So we sprinted off. Never mind the ice. I knew exactly where to go.
We got to St. Thomas Aquinas, and through labored breathing I told him St.
Thomas Aquinas is where I’d come after the abortion. I kissed him on the

24. mouth. I said we’d better hurry. I said those people are after us, and if they
know Sarge then they have guns. Maybe even a dirty bomb if they’d been
with Sarge to Pakistan. They could be crazy. You never know what crazies
are capable of.
“You know,” he said. “Your kissing me on the mouth might could
make our brethren jealous. They might think I love you more than I love
them.”
“Don’t you?”
“I do.”
We entered the church through the back, safer that way. There was
an acolyte goofing off with water and crossing himself with it. It all
seemed so silly. We approached and Sea told the boy we needed to see a
priest. Water Boy didn’t look at us until he’d finished with the splashy
ritual and even then he didn’t say a word. “We need to see a priest,” I
repeated. “It’s a big, black emergency.” Water Boy told us to wait. I said Sea
let’s you and me hold hands. We did. On the wall was a rendering of
Magdalene, going to town on Jesus’ feet.
“They were lovers,” Sea told me. “They got the hell out of the Holy
Land and headed for gay France. They took the Sang Real with them, the
holy blood. Not the San Greal holy grail, but the holy blood. The blood
royal. And you don’t take the blood royal to France in a jar.” He looked to
me for closure.
I nodded. I shook my head. “No,” I said. “It flows in the veins of a
child.”
A man and a woman came to see us. They seemed to really enjoy the
foot bath piece too. They asked us what was wrong and why were we
wearing pajamas in a snowstorm. Sea told them we needed to see a priest.
But they kept on. They asked all sorts of questions like had we done any
drugs, had we done something wrong, had we done any drugs. We scoffed
for our sobriety and I sobered and I told the man we were in danger. That
we needed a safe place. That’s it. The woman left and the man led us out
into the sanctuary where midnight mass was in full swing. This man’s
name was Mason. “Shore,” said Sea. “What did the sinful customer say to
the mob of bakers?”
“Let me think,” I said. “Which of you shall cast the first scone?”
“Perfect!” he shouted.
He smiled and he nodded, his head in holy seizure. Darkness
circling his eyes and the galaxies within them. Gaunt and full. “Yours is the
most beautiful face I’ve seen,” I said. He stopped at the nave and fixed his
gaze on the rendering of a gored and tortured Christ bearing the cross.
“Shore. I think I’m going to get crucified.”
“Well if they want to crucify you maybe you should go ahead and get
crucified.” The both of us, so tickled at the thought, and dirty looks from
the pews. But I knew their irritation was a test. Folks had been expecting
us all night. I saw through them. Sea did too. We agreed they were there to
make sure nothing bad happened to us. We were too important for the

25. world not to protect us. And they knew we would not make the same
mistake twice.
At the back of the sanctuary now, Mason handed us a hymnal to
share. He wanted to make sure we knew the lyrics before he let us in the
studio. We passed the test. I learned to sight-sing on the spot, and I
thanked the akash. Mason took us through a maze of hallways to a secret
room and told us, “Meet Father Andy.” Father Andy told us to have a seat.
We did. Seemed like he could have dressed up a bit more for us. He asked
us what was wrong, as if he didn’t know already. I told him, again, that we
were in trouble. We needed a safe place. And Father Andy asked then what
we had done wrong. Nothing, we told him. Look: it’s us, Father Andy -- the
Sea and the Shore. And puzzled Father Andy then asked us what kind of
relationship we had. He thought we had come to ask for forgiveness, I
guess, for carnal...endeavors. I thought I’d never stop laughing. Sea and I
laughed chords together. Father Andy, baffled at harmonics. He asked
again, “What is your relationship like?”
“Well,” said Sea. I admired his patience. “It is very much like I am
Jesus Christ and she is Mary Magdalene.”
Father Andy saw a ghost the rest of us didn’t. “Where in the world
did you get an idea like that?”
“From outside this world, my man. From the Gospel of Judas. From
akashic revelation.” Father Andy, still, pale, speechless. Sea took my arm
and told the pallid, “I think this conversation is over.” We sprinted out of
the place, laughing the halls into echoes. The stoop where I first asked
forgiveness, that’s where we smiled. We shivered the crackling streets into
dance partners, and the flickering lamps into our wobbly sentinels.
Infrastructure had our backs. “Shore,” he said. “It looks as though the
intrigue-free sentries swim sly in what we threw.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” I said.
We made our way downtown and towards the river. We waltzed
inverted as we had, bedward, a few nights earlier. We admired every angel
in the architecture. We reveled with them for what seemed like weeks that
cannot last long enough. Not far from the church we ran into a black lab,
fellow roamer. His tags called him Duncan.
At last the storm let up.
“I’ve got an idea,” said Sea.
Well, I wanted to name the critter Lemon, but Sea insisted on
Basketball. This was the only thing that hadn’t made sense to me since the
full moon. We took Basketball down to the water’s edge. Behind the Civil
War Memorial Pavilion we removed his collar and his leash. Sea kissed
and tossed the bondage far as he could into the current. Someone in
Mississippi would find it and surely thank us telepathically. Sea cursed the
name Duncan as the black lab’s slave name. Sea baptized him there on the
banks of the Arkansas River. “Dios te bendiga,” he said. “Lord who art
most definitely in heaven and in other places, give us this day our daily
doggie baptism. Lead us not into temptation but to the complete fulfillment
of our temptations and let it be revealed here today the full truth and

26. nothing but of the critically acclaimed and apocryphal children’s film, All
Dogs Go to Heaven, which Thou hath commissioned. Which Thou hath
sent to this world of ours as Thine own redeeming son-daughter film. As is
written on akash’s walls and filing cabinets and elsewise and cetera,
Chapter Zillion, Aisle Googol, Dewey Decimal, hell yes. Let this child be
reborn! Amen.”
“Amen,” I said.
He looked to me and said, “Sister. Are you a Baptist or a Methodist?”
“Episcopal,” I said.
“And do y’all sprunk or dinkle?”
“Dinkle. Clearly,” I said.
“Well then get to clinkling, my Dearly!”
So I dunked that lucky dog beneath the frigid and his name made
sudden sense.
“You’re brilliant,” I said.
“You’re the sanest person I know.”
“I feel safe with you.”
“Shore,” he said through sobs. “We have a son.”

27. AND WHO KILLS AT THE FINISH LINE?
The original hipster was called so for posture. He lay drugged somewhere
last century and wore sunglasses. “An art form uniquely American,” he’d
say of jazz. He’d smoke opium and it was his hip that bore the weight of his
eyelids. I ponder her hip because it bears her. Postured here like this, she
is the origin of hip.
It’s day two and day worst of her bout with ulcers of the mouth and
throat. Hardly able to speak, she is a series of hummed sympathies. She
winds like highways among the hills, which we call mountains. She’s a
gorgeous slouch - languid, pitiful, and damned pretty but try telling her
that. On Saturday, she asks whether The Enlightenment first caught fire in
Denmark. I have the map in mind already, but the five-century timeline
eludes me. I count backwards from Voltaire. Galileo to Erasmus, Luther,
then Gutenberg.
“Germany,” I reply. “The printing press set the whole thing ablaze.”
Used to, I didn’t know to be flattered when she assumed I knew
everything.
“James, Everyone in this film is so beautiful,” she says to me. She’s
right – the Danes are beautiful. I haven’t watched any of the film yet, but
the language is a thrill. I hear, probably from someone who heard as well,
that they’re the happiest people on earth. If it’s true, I’d wager that the
beauty of their mother tongue has something to do with it. If you’re like
me, you’ve always wanted to hear English as an alien thing. Danish
satisfied my curiosity. If you’re like me, - which I would not recommend -
you ponder that we naked apes want to see ourselves as other naked apes
do and hope to witness our own funeral. I used to wonder, how does the
world behold my talents, my looks, my character. And then I married, and
found that these traits are tolerable for at least a lifetime.
After some errands, I report back to her with this brief essay, which
I penned for her on the backs of receipts I collected while emptying the
car. I hoped it might quell her baby fever. For now, at least, we have no
children and are each other’s.
What I Have Done Today
I have done some things today. The first thing that I did today was that I
woke up. Next, I went to the drug store and to the grocery store. At the
drug store I got medicine for my wife and at the grocery store I got food for
my wife. I got split pea soup and I got ramen noodles. I got them for my
wife because she is sick. I am sad that she is sick. But it is okay because
Olive The Pug - cannonball bug, little black cub, bear you can hug - took
care of her while I wrote an obituary for a magazine. After I got medicine
and food for my wife, I cleaned the kitchen. It took a long time. Then I set

28. aside all the clothes that we are going to sell. We are going to sell clothes so
that we can buy more clothes. I need new clothes because I am getting
bigger in my tummy. All in all I have had a really good day. I hope I get to
have more days like this because I am happy. I like to be happy.
I left out the part about swooshing her oral analgesic in my mouth. (I
wanted to find out what smoking a cigarette outside a dentist’s office feels
like. I was thoroughly underwhelmed.)
Around 3:00 my brother in-law sends me this:
LOVE AND PREPOSITIONS
By O. Vaughn Schmaydter
In. One can be in love with someone. If this way of being in is sufficient, I'd
suggest being inside them. That is, if you are a man. But have no fear,
queers! One lover mustn't be a man in order for you to be inside them.
Some may disagree, but these people often have a rod shoved painfully far
up their asses, which causes them to lose touch with reality (see: "with,"
"up"). Once you are inside your lover, it can be quite difficult not to have a
special place in your heart for them. If this is not the case, I'd suggest you
reconsider your values, but this may just be me having a monogamy rod
shoved painfully far up my ass.
With can be special but it doesn't have to be. You can physically be
with someone even if you do not necessarily love them. (See: "monogamy
rod.") But being with someone can also denote commitment, connection
and intimacy (see: "monogamy rod"). A woman can be with child, and
hopefully that is the product of love. Sometimes it is not, which I find
unfortunate, but just because I see it that way does not mean it has to be
(again, see...oh never mind, you get the picture). One activity which can be
especially effective in building intimacy is getting drunk with someone,
but beware, this can also be especially bad and lead not to building
intimacy but eroding it. However, when it is special, inebriation with a
lover can swiftly lead to euphoria and almost always to sex, which is
something you have and share with someone, unless you prefer to go solo
(or maybe you use both hands, who knows.) But be careful with "with."
With is not always positive. Watch out when your lover is angry with you.
This may lead to his beating you with his bare hands. (The female version
of this is known as "passive aggression" or "withholding sex.") He or she
might end up wanting to have nothing to do with you. This is especially
unfortunate when she is with child and that child is yours (though less
responsible men might refer to this as "being off the hook").
At is the most expressive and creative love preposition. This is why
it is my favorite. Few things are more exciting than presenting oneself at a
potential lover's doorstep, unannounced, and shouting, as if from a
mountaintop, "Here I am! Come and take me, my sweet Rick!" This can

29. also lead to disaster, especially if your lover has a lover at his or her home
at the time. Unfortunately, sometimes our lovers are at the end of their
rope with us (see: "with"). When it comes to love, we often find ourselves
saying things like, "Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time." This is
most common after a heterosexual male has experienced a close
encounter of the 69th kind, that is, with a transexual (about whose
orientation he "claims" to have not known about - see: "about") in the back
of a taxi cab. Often such a heterosexual male will "claim" that someone
must have drugged him, but do not believe this for a minute. The only
acceptable explanation is "It seemed like a good idea at the time." Indeed.
One can be mad at their lover, sad at their lover. Often these two emotions
are the result of one being drunk at his or her
lover. When using at, drunk is never a good idea. Try "with" instead (see:
"with"). When talking about drunkenness, about works in about the same
way.
About connotes emotional connection in the same way "with"
connotes a physical one, and is therefore exclusively negative. A good rule
is to without "about." And remember, it is not a good idea to be drunk about
your lover, the exception being when you're just going to have one more.
James, I miss you. I’m lonely, you fuckface. Get here or I’m coming
after you. Okay, I’m coming after you. It won’t be until February, but you’ll
manage, right? Tell my sister I say hello.
Fuckface,
Owen
Around 3:15 Marie asks me whether I have heard from the redhead. I tell
her I am taking a break from poetry because there’s no money in it – I’m
going to write a novel. The novel was her idea, which I remind her loudly
and then apologize for grumping at her.
“And what do you mean by no money, James?” she asks.
“Well, if I’m not in Austin I can’t get free lunch any time I want now
can I?”
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Because of the swelling of
certain parts of her mouth and throat, she sounds absolutely ridiculous.
“Sounds like the swelling’s going down, Beebs,” I tell her.
“Really? Oh, thank God.” God she sounds hilarious. Around 3:30
the Times sends me a breaking news alert e-mail. Two bombs have gone
off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. I balk at first but end up
watching the explosion on a Russian news site. When I was a child, I
venture to say that the notion of someone videoing such an event, and by
coincidence, would be called a damned silly notion. How things have
changed; if someone told me today, “information super highway,” or
“Wash your hands after you touch your penis,” I’m not so sure I’d know
what to say to them.

30. I wonder whether we’ll look back on this and laugh. Of course, I
can’t recite any jokes about September 11th, 2001 or April 20th, 2000. No
one jokes about April 19th, 1995 – bombed a fucking daycare, the coward.
And hardly anyone can remember December 7th, 1941 anymore. But here
goes. ‘I finished the Boston Marathon and all I lost was this lousy leg.’ I
don’t pretend to know what the doers deserve, but I personally would like
to see a bounty hunter, or a clerk at the DMV, make the asshole run like
hell. I hereby sentence you to death by wind sprints. The Older Jim would
have gone with ‘death by squats.’ I decide to give him a call.
“Looked like a pretty wimpy explosion to me,” Senior answers.
“No, I mean who do you think did it?” “Oh, some right-wing
kooks,” he says.
“Me too. Tax day.”
“Taxachusetts, as they say.”
“Marxachusetts, as they don’t, far as I know,” I say. I thank him for
the money he’s sent us, and he tells me he is proud of me. He especially
liked my homophobic, country & western anthem, “Straights Rights.” I
borrowed the tune from “Sisters Of Mercy.”
Well the gays and the homos and queers ain’t afraid to be gross
And the fact that they’re married and proud
Ain’t the only thing their shovin’ down my throat
And now that they’re married
My wife and I we’ve got it so tough
How’re we supposed to make babies
When they’re doin’ their icky butt stuff?
Well, lovin’s just for procreatin’
Ain’t no such thing as lovin’ for fun
And while my wife she’s got one in the oven
These queers do something different with their buns
Well my mind’s an open one
But I won’t close my mouth when they come
No butts about it, we’ve hit rock bottom
It’s a bummer, if you’ll pardon the puns
Well where I come from browntown means
Colored folks are livin’ next door
And where I come from takin’ a poundin’
Means you’ve got more touchdowns to score
But I left for the city, and what do you think that I found?
Huntin’ bears here means somethin’ different
Than it did in the woods outside my hometown
Well my boy sucks at manly stuff
Sometimes he can’t get ‘er done
And my boy sucks at a lotta man things

31. But another man’s thing ain’t gonna be one
And this chip off the block,
My pride and joy, pretty boy son
While he’s one the grass, he can’t catch a pass,
But he sure thinks the locker room’s fun
While he’s on the grass, he can’t catch a pass
But at least he thinks the locker room’s fun.
“All right,” I say.
“Okay, son. Bye. Love you. Okay. Bye.”
I’d called him in 2008 when we elected a black president, I have to
inform her, and called him when Cairo, of all places, seemed the most
hopeful on earth, and I can’t believe I’ve never shared my first memory
with her. Max and my father both know that it was the fall of the Soviet
Union. Papa told me I’d always remember it. Really, he told me not to
forget it. Think what could have happened had he not told me that. My first
memory might be of Terry Pendleton’s sixth inning triple - the first time I
saw a man hit for three bags, the hitter and I were in the same stadium.
Maybe I’d remember snowflakes melting on black construction paper, or
lima beans on a red plastic plate, scratched white by forks older than I. Her
first memory is the birth of her brother. She remembers nothing of her
childhood thereafter, save the Masonic rite she witnessed through a
stained glass window. “There were men in dark robes,” she says, “and a
child.”
Hammered, enamored, I demand a child, but I cannot come. Alas, and
where’s the beer? It’s in Springdale, because it’s Sunday. For all the jokes
about slaughtering chickens and Mexicans – excuse me, despite what
people south of the lake say about Mexicans and slaughtering chickens - at
least they are savvy enough to accept money seven days a week. To
reciprocate for this kindness, Sundays I drink and drive on their roads.
Today it’s two tall boys, gone for good by the time I’m home and coaxing
her into a picnic.
“Get your sundress, Beebs. We’re getting loaded in the park.” We ‘ran into’
one of her children not long after we arrive. In truth, she springs and
sprints like Blitzen, the reindeer, in heat. When the little blonde creature -
somewhat humanoid in its third year - and its mother appear some twenty
yards away, I’ve been a naughty boy, chiefing on a very conspicuous spliff
and necking cup after cheap plastic cup of bargain-bin pinot noir. “I’ll see
you on Thursday, Nicholas!” she coos. The mother and child amble on. To
my surprise, she informs me that the ‘running into’ was in fact a close call.
I am becoming a liability and so we show the scene our backs. Stumbling, I
offer to drive us home.
I plumbum on out of the passenger’s side and into the house, where a
vicious game of keep-away ensues. Papa’s turkey chili, of course, is the
kept-away, and I, poor I, the hammered, hungry sap. Her arms may be half

32. the length of mine, and her crown may be a full foot closer to the ground,
but today it seems the God-given just won’t take. No motor skills, no
recourse is I guess how it goes. We find ourselves sol-sodden on the back
porch; whereto I likely have been worm holed by a universe that knows a
hungry boy when it sees one. I reckon if we jostle, she and I, we do it like a
couple of sissies, as my lunch and manhood are hostages both.
We reaching, tussling fools are nearing the stairs. I am about to
discover what I already know – that this is not at all a clever place for the
reclamation of snacks by force. Stairs – these at least - are made of wood,
which is hard and hurts to fall on. These stairs descend into a yard-shaped,
patch of weed and bramble. But who are we not to descend, together, into
our yard-shaped patch of weed and bramble? At the bottom of the stairs,
I’m already blaming her for pain not yet palpable. Youngest sibling
syndrome coming now to the fore, she laughs something so hearty that I
can feel the thick of that poor turkey chili. Its bowl, microwavable, is about
three shards now, scattered, but in no comforting pattern. There is nothing
linear about this trail of dead.
“Damn it, woman! The invincible bowl has been vinced! That piece
of plastic was a testament to the fortitude of Chinese industry and now it’s
just more shit for bare feet to avoid.” My heavens, the nude sting of a
bramble- bed is naught compared to the painful notion that my drunk-by-
mid- afternoon snack is nothing more than fodder for the lawn urchins.
She lies there laughing with me in the milk thistle and the spiky gumball
things, whatever they are. We’re looking for our lungs and our reasoning
atop the childproof gate, which our combined weight, hunger, and cruelty
have collapsed onto the ground. The baby slammer, toddler trap, etc., had
been a part of our porch longer even than it’s been ours. And yet, we only
first question this structure when the (wholly worthless) collection of right
angles has been so brutalized by my horrible balance and ardor for
lunch. She stands and helps husband to his feet. He sobers far too rapidly.
With each fresh eyeing of the havoc comes a new wave of giggles. From
the tree house, we take vista of all three downtown steeples. I see her
gazing down now at the yard, where playthings are decaying and visible of
a sudden. I cannot for the life of me tell you why we’d never noticed them
before. And The Lord said let there be swing sets? Nor could I tell you,
really, whether these ruins are anachronism, or ruins that foreshadow.
“What was it, slide of yellow plastic, that finally made you crack?”
she asked.
“Once-orange basketball, rotting unto vintage pink: how are you
really?”
“My dear, dangling fellow,” she wonders finally at the rope, “did you
happen to catch the Hogs game last night?”
Atop this backyard fort, we are far enough from ground to be afraid,
and yet the pain and the markings say that we are fallen still. But at first
clang of twilight, no gashes in arms, nor pending bruises, nor snacks
aborted in vain are audible
“Good thing you’re not packing heat.”

33. I give her belly one pat for each hour past noon, as another and
another of the bells says to us that light is leaving. My twenty-dollar
nautical watch beeps in weird harmony.
“When the time is right,” she says.
Her hand, bloodied, covers a smile.
LUNA, IT WAS NOT YOUR FAULT
He hurries home for the speed alone. It is orange and waiting for him. It is
waiting like the more-orange prescription bottle in his sock drawer and
the one of Malbec lying open in the shower. Neither bottle carries any
warning, and good thing too, or else he might just keep his head this time.
But the green glass is empty save some shower dregs, and the pill bottle
empty too but for the half pill he did not chew this time. Wish it were the
sugary kind. Keep my shit together on that kind, he’s thinking.
This was last hump day* night. It was the sort of night he thought
he'd never forget. At the very least it was not to be forgotten but would be

34. slowly. It had to it a secret comfort hidden somewhere among the
mundane, or what ought to be mundane. But nothing about it felt routine
to James.
Before this James hardly left the house. His favorite local band had
been the same since he gave up performing -- Egyptr -- and they would go
on in an hour. He began as a teetotaler. But as the night strolled along, he
passed the hat, having found the drunken merrier in donating than the
stingy sober.
Put one on my tab, she said, and he put two then three. He accepted
first straight whiskey from the well, sipped at it at shorter intervals,
confidence a tenant in him as the shot glass emptied. He talked away two
or three novels before he asked that she donate. Put it on my tab, she said,
and he had feigned no expectation of it. The answer to will you donate to
my buzz did not matter, not tonight. Nothing could rain on the evening's
lanky gait. The coming storm was to be ice, and all the better, he thought.
So long as the wine is red, so long as red-faced Prater sticks around and
he's the one I'm stuck with. So long, caution - this wind's blowing
something awful. And what a habit, to be blown and carried away at each
reunion with him. Tonight was about Owen Prater, and the brief chance to
be reminded that he was still young.
The pale ale brewed just south of there tasted like last decade.
Nostalgia as a false remembering. He had not been more carefree as he
cruised into drinking age. He had not worried less. In fact he worried more
about worrying, and for far longer than his most recent bout of depression.
The battles lasted longer back then, but were harder to recall than even the
cloudiest of clinical opiate fogs, the upper-downer I-feel-greats, the roller
coaster is a plateau bits, and hey-yo-I-feel-goods of that golden summer of
2009. It was to be one of, which he and red-faced Owen Prater portrayed
later as they gabbed back and forth. The two stood shivering breaths
visible and cigarette smoke out of their iced faces. It was to be a hot potato,
ping-pong dialogue for the ages. It happened in the moonlight of an after-
tavern early morning. The spectacle of spoken ricochet would be known
thereafter as The Gab On Frozen Tundra Lawn At MLK & Church Streets.
“I would realize,” Owen said, “that the Arkansas Ozarks get cold as
balls, bro, cold as them and I see the news nearing every gesture, tree, and
lamplight even. And what would James do?” And it began.
"I would realize when the decade came a closing that every season
would be gilded in some shade or other," James served.
"Some with the hue," returned Owen, "that Midas saw in all he
touched, some with the sheen of paralysis, which only a regent could
provoke."

35. "And some purest like ancient currency," James said in
decrescendo.
And Owen: "Gold earned by odes and ballads, spent to stoke the
muses."
"Seen returned," said James, "And two-fold when the next papyrus
hit the presses. Parchment maybe."
"Or lyre."
"Just so long as it came from a beast so fortunate as to die to feed the
discerning gut as much as to fill the brutish belly."
"One is nourished just so much as the next," said Owen, "and the
viscera so much as the grumbling pouch."
And James: "And what a fortunate beast, to be sacrificed for both."
"And then the pyre," said Owen. "Of an iron house."
Owen Prater gazed upward at the full moon. James gazed downward at his
ruddy, rugged companion and sketched the star-struck profile with his
eyes.
"When is the eclipse, Owen?"
"I surely don't know, James, but reckon I might rather find out by
spending all my nights and early mornings out here waiting for it."
And that’s just what he did until the day he died.
Luna, it was not your fault. Owen Prater died by the light of you. He
had done it in the yard each frigid night since the second ice storm - he
had stared back at you. The night he died, he rode his bicycle below you,
hands freed. Head bent back to see you he was riding. He collided head-on
with the drunk oncoming. The fall flattened his skull on the asphalt.
Owen Prater died by the light of you. James would mourn this death
by manuscript.

36. THE SON AT FIVE
My name is Jacob and I am five years old today. I like brown paper and
green crayons. I like raisins but I don’t like saltine crackers. Sometimes at
my school they have spinach for lunch and I hate spinach. One time a girl
that is not really my friend put spinach on her fork and then put her fork
in my face and I threw up. It was embarrassing and really gross. I don’t
like girls, but my new mommy says that the girl did that because she likes
me. I don’t like girls, but my new daddy Uncle James says that my
mommy was a girl and that Aunt Marie is a girl too. One day I will make a
baby just like me and I’ll call him Owen just like my Daddy or Grace just
like my Mommy.
I am five years old and I go to a preschool with a lot of other friends.

37. We do fun art projects and my teacher says I’m good at art. I am going to
be an artist when I grow up just like Aunt Marie and make millions of
dollars just like daddy did before he went to heaven. Mommy and Daddy
never took me to church but my Aunt Marie and Uncle James take me to
church on Sunday morning. I found out that Jesus had a brother and his
name was James and that Jesus had a mommy named Mary. But who was
Jesus’ daddy? I asked my new Mommy and Daddy who was my Daddy
and Uncle James said my Daddy was a wonderful guy called Owen Prater
and that Grace Anne Spice was my Mommy but that Uncle James and
Aunt Marie love me just like I am their own because I am their son now.
One day at school, Eden gave me a note that said “Will you marry
me?” and I said I don’t like girls, that’s gross. She cried. I told her I was
sorry and gave her a gentle touch. That’s what we’re supposed to do when
our friends are sad. Eden felt better and then we went outside to play.
Outside on the playground, my teacher chased me and we played the
monster game. The monster game is when our teacher goes “Rarrrr! I’m a
monster!” and chases us. It’s my favorite game. I was the last kid to get
turned into a monster too. I’m faster than the other boys and girls and
Uncle James said that my Daddy Owen Prater was fast too. I’m the fastest
kid in school. One day, I’m going to run around the whole earth. That’s
what my teacher said.
It’s my birthday today and Uncle James and Aunt Marie gave me the
world for my birthday because I’m going to learn about all the countries. I
don’t remember that much about my Mommy and I don’t remember
anything about Owen Prater, my Daddy, but I do remember what my
Mommy told me one time. I told her that I wanted to learn about God and
she told me that God made the world, so if I want to know God I should
know the world and so Uncle James and Aunt Marie who are my new
Daddy and new Mommy gave me the world for my birthday. My favorite
country is Mongolia and the capital of Mongolia is Ulan Bator. But I live in
the United States of America, which used to be a part of England just like a
bunch of other countries like India and I asked if Cuba was a part of
England and Uncle James told me that Cuba was a part of Spain. I like the
world a lot. It’s the best birthday present I ever got. I like to draw the
world on my brown paper. I like to draw on the brown paper with a green
crayon because green is my favorite color, but when I looked at the world
that Mommy and Daddy, my new Mommy and Daddy, gave me, I found
out that the world is mostly water and so now sometimes I draw the world
with a blue crayon because water is blue. But when I think of the world I
think of green because when I think of God I think of green because grass
is green and God made grass and he also made the world and so that is
why I draw the world with a green crayon sometimes.
I don’t remember much from before I lived with my new parents,
but when I was with my first Mommy I remember she took me to the
school I used to go to and my teacher brought a feathered boa to school.
The feathers were scary. I was two or three years old. I don’t remember. I
thought they were alive. She showed me that they were soft and friendly. I

38. gathered them and put them in her hand and then she blew them up in the
air and they came floating down to my feet. Now I like feathers. We’re
going to make art with feathers. I was thinking I could use a blue and
green feather to make the world. I of course will use brown paper because
that is the only paper I like to use. Sometimes I will use white paper but
only when my teacher doesn’t have any more brown paper. When I use
white paper I still use green and blue crayons, but I like to make men on
my white paper. I like to draw guys. I make their heads squiggly and their
bodies really tall so they can play basketball like my Uncle James. My
Uncle James said that Owen Prater was also good at basketball. Better than
my Uncle James even, because he was over six feet two inches which is
how tall my Uncle James is.
The guys I like to draw on my white paper always have brown skin
like me. My teacher asked me who is that. It was a picture of me dancing
and playing basketball. I told her it was me and she said that the man in
the picture had dark skin and I said so do I. One thing I remember about
my other Mommy, Grace Anne, is that she called me her little brown
berry. That’s what when I draw myself dancing or playing basketball I
draw a brown guy. Because my Mommy called a brown berry.
Aunt Marie told me I could choose whether or not to call her and
Uncle James my Mommy and Daddy. Sometimes I call them Mommy and
Daddy and sometimes I call them Aunt Marie and Uncle James. For my
fourth birthday which was last year my Mommy got me a dog. I called her
Olive because she is round and black just like the food that my Aunt Marie
likes to eat. That Thanksgiving Aunt Marie ate a whole bowl of olives and I
ate a whole piece of cherry pie. I decided I love cherry pie and it is my
favorite food. Aunt Marie makes me cherry pie when I feel sad and she
tells me everything is going to be okay. She says I can handle anything
because I am strong just like Owen Prater and Uncle James. I love Aunt
Marie and Uncle James. They always explain things to me so I can know
about the world. When I ask about my Mommy and Daddy Aunt Marie and
Uncle James explain that families are big and have lots of people in them,
that Owen Prater was part of my family and they are too. I think families
are like countries because countries have lots of people in them. But
Mongolia doesn’t have lots of people in it and it is still a country, so I guess
sometimes families don’t have a lot of people in them. They say that more
than one people could be your Mommy and Daddy and when people love
you they are part of your family. My teacher loves me and so my teacher is
part of my family. Someday I would like to have a brother or a sister. If it is
a brother I want to name him Owen Prater like my other Daddy and if it is
a sister I want to name her Marie Antoinette like the beautiful queen from
the movie about France.
One day I would like to be king of France but I live in the United
States of America. My friend Jack told me that kings have cake every day
at dinner and have a big pile of gold that they count each night before they
go to bed. One day I would like to have a pile of gold just like a king. And I
want to eat chocolate cake every day. Uncle James collects silver because

39. he says it is better than gold but he told me not to tell anybody because it’s
our secret. One day we will be rich as the king of France and I will own a
pirate ship and silver will be better than gold. My Mommy says,
Make new friends but keep the old One is silver but the other’s gold
She explained that it’s good to keep old friends and also important to make
new ones and that’s what her song means. My Mommy said that she
wasn’t very good at keeping her old friends so she hopes that I can learn
that I can keep my old friends from preschool because she wishes she had
kept them. Songs help me learn things like keeping friends and also how
to tell my friends that I love them. My Uncle James he wrote a song for
littler kids and it’s called “We Don’t Hit Our Friends” and it goes like this:
We don’t hit our friends
Cuz we are nice to our friends
We’re gentle and we care
And when we play we share
We love our teachers so much
Cuz they’re wise and kind and they love us
These are the things we do and don’t do
In order to be kind, kind friends
It’s okay to be afraid of things
Even Batman was afraid of bats
But that’s what made him so strong
Once he lost his fear of bats
Spiderman, Spiderman
Can do anything a spider can
We don’t hit our friends
And neither does Spiderman
These are the things we do and don’t do
In order to be kind, kind friends
We love our teachers so much
Cuz they’re wise and kind and they love us
We love our parents so much
Cuz they’re wise and kind and they love us
We use the gentle touch
With our friends cuz they’re kind and they love us
These are the things we do and don’t do
In order to be kind, kind friends
I like lots of songs but I like Uncle James’ songs the best because he writes
them for me and for Aunt Marie. And he says that I’m just like him because

40. I have a good musical memory and so does he. And I asked Uncle James if
my Daddy Owen Prater was good at music too and Uncle James told me
that Owen Prater was better with words, that he wrote the words to songs
but not the music and that he wrote poetry and even put words from other
languages like Spanish into English so that Americans like me could
understand them.
Some days I get to pick a special prize from our teacher’s treasure
chest. That’s because I am my teacher’s special helper. I help her clean and
my Mommy says that I do a very good job. At school some of the other
children don’t follow the rules. My teacher says this makes her sad. So I
try not to make my teacher sad and I let my friends know that it’s better to
be kind and not make my teacher sad. Sometimes I wonder if I made my
first Mommy sad and that’s why she went away. Her name was Grace
Anne Spice and my name is Jacob Henry Spice. My new Mommy says that
everyone in my family loves me and that if my other Mommy and Owen
Prater could be here with me they would. When I asked if they were in
heaven, Uncle James said he didn’t know but that we could go to church to
find out.
Aunt Marie told me that one day she hopes I will have a baby
brother or sister and that I will be the best big brother there is on the earth.
I love Aunt Marie. She makes me cookies and gives me snacks after school
and when other kids are mean to me she lets me know that it’s just
because they are hurting inside and that makes them want to hurt
someone else. This makes me feel sad for them. I wish that everyone in
the world could feel happy like I do with my new parents. That way there
would never be any bullies hitting or pushing other kids and making them
sad. And there would be no wars and everyone could draw and sing and
be happy all the time. When I grow up I am going to help people be happy.

41. THE VISION OF EASTER BY JIM
The Easter sun has been up an hour now and James all night. His home
has company. He sits down to write.
And lit by Luna's splashing on the morning glories.
Upstairs Marie has been awake on the sofa, pondering her brother
and trying not to. At the creaking, James gleans Grace Anne Spice’s robed
and pregnant figure descending, staircase now Duchamp's for the
bewilderment. With a kiss Grace hands James a fresh pen.
I knew there was no good way to do it.
Still and somehow, the child slept.