IN MEDIAS RES OF FISH
Swim into the traps. In the river, take time from the pots. Heaving in the nets, discolored and deformed with the hand flapping, gray skinned and pink fleshed, disembodied fingers twitch like fish into the hollowed-out nest. Hold the hand. Regard the blood. Call this the fish story, even though it is not really about fish. Certain fish live to spawn, and others are programed to die after migration, swimming thousands of miles upstream. Children on the cove dive into the water, swimming through zombie salmon. Caressing the dying, the hand has a habit of touching women in the waves. Fingers soften in water. In the cannery, a machine replaces one hundred hands working to feed the children. The company promises fewer will travel from the North Pacific once the machine is named after the factory workers whose hands it is invented to replace.
BACKSTORY OF THE FARMER’S MARKET
I’ve been showered with strawberries, zucchinis, and plums the way some girls have been showered with jewels, money, and problematic lingerie as explicit as roses. No shame, agog with tomatoes, okra, and cucumbers, I’ve sold mint, dill, and asparagus. I’ve sold oodles of squash. But I’ve never sold my body. Long ago, I used to be a singer and will sing again someday, when the time is right. Meanwhile, I keep this stand at the Farmer’s Market near the lake where out-of-towners go to visit and spend a little cash. I’ve sold antique lace brought to me on consignment by a man who bears a striking resemblance to a thief wanted for stealing lonely women from another town. I’ve sold knitted shawls like the wings of giant birds.
TWIST OF THE PLAYGROUND
Wine moms ask if no one plays in a playground, is it still a playground? The rocket slide rusts in the sun, the seat of the metal glider as hot as hell. And as thrilling, some of these rides are torturous machines. Remember soaring? I do. Tell Deb. Pink wines, my rosé bestie. Like all blush wines, she is somewhere in between extremes in her thinking, wanting a bit of it all, yet smooth and romantic like red wine grapes manipulated by using white wine practices. “Imagine the grape skins are like a tea bag—the more contact they have with the juice, the more color and flavor they impart.” Rosés like her just get a quick drunk at the playground where our children dutifully babysit us and are so happy to see us play.
CLIMAX OF THE ABANDONED BUILDING
If only I could find a way to forget what I saw in that chimney in the bedroom the night we went to explore the abandoned building because you said the most beautiful crumbling ceilings are stories of the people who left secrets in the disintegrating couches. Reasons they had for leaving long ago: if broken windows are broken promises, there are views I have seen that have changed my eyes, stuck with me, and filled me with unknowing, giving me something to really think about like the reason my friend’s father tied her with belts. So, thinking of her, I got outside myself by exploring rooms strangers abandoned. Will terrified people see inside my house one day and know the way I live, the shadow of the one who loved her? I don’t want them to. Yet when I walk through my neighborhood, I look inside the windows of my neighbors’ houses and see my friend untying herself on the last day she was alive. She broke free, escaping. Sometimes I sense that I have disturbed my neighbors by watching her dancing in their houses when they don’t see her. I am sorry. I truly am. I’m lonely, though I’m too afraid to speak to my neighbors if I see them on their lawns waving.
TURN OF THE TOY STORE
Indelicate matters involving private detectives evolved so my lover refused to marry me. No, Sister, in the walls of the house I was in, the wooden floor in the shack gave reasons to vanish, to disappear with his toys. Our abductor, a large, white male, approximately 6’4” in height, more than 240 pounds in weight, with dark bushy hair, wears large eyeglasses. He, who at 46 years old took us away from our families and our lives, from our very childhoods where we went missing, allowed the cadence of a soothing voice to control every room. He was one of those men who don’t just read the room. He could recite the room. He could write the room. Over the years, when we were but playthings, we answered to a string of aliases dangling from his lips like glass beads hanging from the rearview mirrors of secret surveillance in unmarked cars.
THE SLOW REVEAL OF THE MEDUSA CINDERELLA
You are the hills to the mountain, the Medusa Cinderella I remember when I was growing up. I used to walk to high school in New Jersey past a neighborhood where you had been a brutal murder. A young girl in a house along the way was taken from her bedroom window and decapitated. What became of her body parts lying on the lawn and the street outside her house? Being an instructor, I’ve been asked to write something about it to make sense, this Medusa Cinderella posed from the pieces of you. I write to the women who were the little girls who grew up with you. I write for the little girls who are confused enough to be terrified by what you have become rather than what made you that way, the ones who refer to you as it, no longer as her. But I also write for her Teacher of Notebooks, her writing like sand on autumn leaves, being erased from our town. I remember thinking about her every day on my way to high school. In these very notebooks where I write a vertigo ballet of unintelligible letters, sketching the one who harmed you, a sailor soldier turning on a hairpin, wearing jewels like chains. Sit this one out, you say. Go inside her house where the walls are doors. An animal can transform into a person and a person into a plant like this velvet rose I draw in spidery obscuring ink bleeding over the wrong phone number.
RESOLUTION OF CATTLE GUARDS
When the calf returned without its mother, you needed to remove your breasts from my hands. Because my family quarreled with squirrels, school was unnecessary. Since your father was a felon, you felt the need to burn bridges with the accelerant of love. Did you call your father the thief, or did you prefer to call him the robber? The jury always had it out for him, the verdict pre-decided because of the overwhelming evidence against him. Since our parents could no longer work, we found our food in rivers, woods, and strangers’ gardens. We ate figs and fish with garden vegetables in summer. When we fished along the bridges, the drivers of honking cars screamed at us to get off the road. In the twilit valley, the river turned white before fading to darkness as we walked the cattle guard to venture past the ranch gates. Carrying our fish through the doors, we took our Ambien in the ambient light of dream houses filled with people who did not exist and never expected to see us there.
Image credit: Block printing on plain weave cotton ground, 1200s–1300s, Egypt. The Cleveland Museum of Art.
