Postcard Memoirs

something for everyone

Tue, 03 May 2011 13:49:00 -0400

by: holly hofer

an evening in my house in a neighborhood not far from possibility. i sit on the floor, up close, watching a rerun of lawrence welk on the tv. i hold up five thin fingers counting my age, sharpening the soft-colored light from the screen, then bang! i am on it—i am on the tv! my sister says, she’s me, not you, and i say, oh, but that’s me in the background at least.

i’m in middle school, and the tv talks to me from four to six every day i don’t have soccer. i befriend oprah and then the queen of nice in two separate dreams. does it count when it’s in your mind that you’ve done something—that you’ve actually done it?

the magazines do flips at the doctor’s office. matching paintings schmooze on the wall. even if there is no sign, everyone knows, please leave the magazines for others to enjoy. some rebel’s inked up the personality quiz in mine. the psychiatrist guides me to her office. she asks what i expected a psychiatrist to look like. i shrug. she’s kind. i’m somewhere else. i receive no plastic trinkets for being good but leave with a slip of paper and two black books on darkness and light. she can’t be sure, but I will devour the books—can’t be sure, but I will return them. my mom waits in the parking lot. she smiles. i gloom, half-asleep. i hold no expectations, only seventeen and a half years and lackluster eyes.

i’m caught in a web of fictions. i can’t be sure that i will wring understanding from this pain. in the hospital, a romance plays. for a few hours i believe i am kate winslet in titanic and, god, it’s exhilarating to be in love and awful every time we sink.

Holly Hofer recently graduated from Flagler College in St. Augustine. Two of her prose poems, included in the Spring 2011 issue of the Flagler Review literary magazine, can be read at the Flagler Review online.

The Project

Mon, 02 May 2011 16:07:00 -0400

Everyone has a story.

Postcard Memoirs are personal snapshots in a handful of words, accompanied by an image. Why limit words? Because of attention-deficit; mine and yours. Because there’s nothing like the muscularity of poetry combined with the real-lives-lived aspect of memoir. Because less is more. Because each of these tiny gems speaks volumes.

The Project is a Lit-Log featuring the work of guest writers. Included are award-winning writers, as well as students. The project is not purely academic, nor does it rely upon name making small talk with the right person. It loves everybody. There are no strict guidelines. People send very short essays, preferably lyric or experimental in form, but anything goes. The site is updated about three times a year. Though they aim to be shared, all postcards featured are T-Log entries and no matter how they are used and disbursed; writers must be credited.

Son ja Livingston manages/edits this project. Sonja is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Memphis. Email sonjale na@yahoo.com for more info.

Doghouse

Sun, 01 May 2011 15:57:00 -0400

Charles Coté

When your wife says, Hell no, I don’t want another dog, ever, visit the shelter without her, take your sons. Find a dog that reminds you of the word regret, all the dog’s you’ve lost, preferably one with all-or-nothing markings. If he won’t look you in the eye then pees on the floor; you’ve found your guy. If he’s been in eight homes before; start making plans. Think redemption for the times you failed to do right by your dogs, the time you thought it would be a good idea for your pup to see the fireworks at the park. Think panic. Long, scraggly fur and a nervous disposition will seal the deal. Spend too much on paraphernalia –– top grade collar, dual distribution bowl, alloy steel kennel, the extravagance of science diet. Let the boys call him Walter and promise to walk him daily. Give the girl who was hoping for a Springer a sympathetic smile as you leave the shelter. Let Walter yank you out to the car, and if it’s raining; all the better. Bring him home late Sunday afternoon and pretend to be surprised when your wife says, I hate you with her eyes. Tell her she’ll learn to love him, like she learned to love you, she won’t have to do a thing. Be patient when he soils the carpet and runs out the door into traffic. Praise him loudly when he comes back on his own. Put him in the dog house at bedtime.

Charles Coté is the author of a chapbook (Flying for the Window, Finishing Line Press, 2008) and is working on a full-length book of persona poems called Shrink, about a man in search of himself amidst the patients he tries to help. His poems have also appeared in: Upstreet, Salamander, The Cortland Review, Redactions, Free Lunch, Identity Theory, Blueline, Modern Haiku, Connecticut River Review and HazMat Review. He is a psychotherapist in private practice and teaches poetry at Writers & Books in Rochester, NY.

My Father's War

Sat, 30 Apr 2011 15:42:00 -0400

Mitchell Sommers

There’s a picture of my father, Private First Class Harold Sommers, hanging in my stairwell. It was taken in Germany, on the day they surrendered, where my father served with the Army Corps of Engineers. It was at a point in the war where he was no longer wading ashore Utah Beach or freezing in the Ardennes Forest, but had the more mundane duty of guarding German POW’s.

The original snapshot has been blown up to poster size. He stands against a concrete wall with barbed wire on top. His helmet is slightly cocked. His expression straddles the boundary between smile and smirk. His eyes have a squint to them, and are infused with something I’d describe as sadness if I was presumptuous enough to say that. Some days I look at that picture, and I feel a tightness in my chest, a second or two of gasping for air.

Late summer, 2004: My father was still alive and my girlfriend and I drove with him to Pittsburgh for the unveiling of his sister-in-law’s headstone, something Jewish tradition generally requires a year after death. My father ran into an old friend from his neighborhood, as well as other relatives and old friends, there to pay respects in advance of the Jewish High Holidays. From there, we headed to the delicatessens of Squirrel Hill.

Nostalgia. Pastrami. Then the Pennsylvania Turnpike back to Lancaster .

As the Pittsburgh stations drifted out of range, I started flipping around the dial, trying to find whatever NPR station I could. The announcer talked about the Iraq war, at one point mentioning the torture at Abu Ghraib. “I understand that. I understand why they’d do that.” My father’s voice was softer than the words he spoke.

I didn’t know what to say. No, that’s not true. I did. My father was a classic New Deal Democrat. His postwar years were spent as a union organizer. Later, he was a local party chairman, an unsuccessful candidate for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, and a successful one for Lancaster City Treasurer. And he never, ever missed a chance to bash Bush.

“What do you mean,” I said.

“I just understand.”

I thought to press. To ask exactly what a Jewish soldier who had guarded German POW’s meant by associating himself, however tenuously, with hooded prisoners, naked bodies, and vicious dogs being discussed in the news.

Laura was asleep in the back seat. It was just father and son. All I had to do was ask. You’re 82. I’m 46. Tell me. Just tell me what you did. Instead, I flipped the dial again. I found a Cards-Pirates game. And kept driving.

So I gasp when I see that picture of my father. But sometimes I find comfort, too. My dad. No Greatest Generation fake fawning. Just my dad.

Other times, I just walk on past.

Mitchell Sommers is an attorney in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, concentrating on bankruptcy, foreclosure and debtor/creditor rights. He is a graduate of Franklin and Marshall College and Penn State Dickinson School of Law. He received his M.F.A. from the University of New Orleans and is on the editorial board and board of directors of Philadelphia Stories, and co-edits the online literary journal Tatanacho. His fiction has been published in PHASE, Philadelphia Stories, and The Big Toe Review, and recently won Honorable Mention for a short story from Central PA Magazine. Mitchell has written op-eds for many newspapers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, is a columnist for iPinion, and his short play Holiday Treat(ment) Part Two was performed for the Creative Works of Lancaster’s 2010 Christmas Special.

He is currently working on a novel about Colonial Pennsylvania and a play about the origins of the housing bubble and recession. He can be reached at sommersesq@aol.com

Pall Mall

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 21:15:00 -0500

Sora Kim-Russell 김소라”

You sit on a hard wooden chair outside beneath the kitchen window and light a cigarette. The air around you fills with smoke, turns as warm as the air in your lungs. You put your feet up, inhale, lean back, breathe out.

You smoked back when you were pregnant, through all your pregnancies. Your doctor told you to. They didn’t know better back then. It started with your first. The difficult one. The one who gave you no rest, always kicking and punching you from the inside, never settling down. Back then, you would balance a glass of water on your stomach and watch it roll and slosh, as if she wasn’t so much a fetus as an earthquake, a welling up of magma, an angry sea intent on capsizing your ship. So you smoked, to calm your stomach, to quiet your daughter.

You kept smoking after your first child, all through the second, and again through the third. You smoked when your husband was away on TDY, and when he came back. Your first cigarette was in Yokota, where your first daughter was born, and you continued along each hop across the Pacific: in Georgia, in Japan, in Idaho, in Korea, in Florida, in Okinawa.

You used to hide your smoking in Korea. You hid in your mother’s kitchen, in the outhouse, behind concrete walls. Back then a woman could get slapped for smoking in public. Like spitting in the face of your elders, to enjoy something so much in their presence. Even while eating, a woman kept one foot braced on the floor, ready to rise.

You smoked in California. You smoked on military bases and off. You smoked when you held your daughter on your lap. Hot ash whispered over her skin. You smoked so much the ceiling above the kitchen table turned a rich yellow.

You smoked indoors until the day you saw your youngest daughter’s fingers twitch at the sight of your cigarette, the way she brought ballpoint pens to her lips, to draw the air through the hairline cracks in the plastic. You knew that she knew what a cigarette tasted like without ever having smoked one. You saw the desire and knew it. Knew the crushing need. The stubborn refusal that came to define both of you.

Right now, on your hard chair, you sit with one leg folded beneath you. The other has dropped to the ground. In a moment you will rise and go back inside. You will eat alone. But for now, the cigarette is in your hand, and you are drawing the flame close to your lips. The weight of the cigarette lifts between your fingers. Your lungs contract, your heart slows, and for a moment, you are breathless. In a moment, you will let go, and the air will turn white before your eyes, but for now, you hold on.

Even the air stops for you.

Sora Kim-Russell teaches literary translation in Seoul, South Korea. Her writing and translations have appeared in Azalea, Pebble Lake Review, The Diagram, and other publications. Her hobbies include working too much, eating too much, and mumbling under her breath in public too much. If you’re lucky enough to be standing next to her on the subway, you might even get to hear the whole story.

Python

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 05:00:00 -0500

Kayla Myers

Thick. Cotton. Clutching my body, my neck and throat, like a python. The turtlenecks only come out in winter at my century-old Victorian house, and I fight, oh, do I fight; I whine, beg; sometimes even cry. But there is no relief from their weight, their grabbing of my neck as I attempt to sleep. Every night, I lose the fight and my mother forces the heavy snake over my head and around my throat.

My cat was six when she died; the only one who could sense when I was feeling anything but normal. She was always by my side, rubbing her black and white fluff of fur against my arm, purring loudly as a hushed motor in an attempt to comfort me. She purred me through break-ups with boys, fights with my parents, and when I was sick.

Now, as I sit in the white room of the vet’s office, I want to comfort her, but I cannot. She may sense my fear for what I have to do to her, but she purrs as she lays in my arms, tears streaming down my cheeks, silently, as always.

I think of the old turtleneck I was forced to wear each winter and now I feel like a python as I clutch her to my chest, one arm around her white belly, the other just under her throat.

In the dark, cold bedroom of my Victorian house, I lie still under the white covers that cannot protect me. My fingernails make purple indentations in my palms as my fists clench tight. The turtleneck wraps and curls around me, from belly to throat, under my footy pajamas.

It is bedtime.

Kayla is a Senior majoring in English at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland. She aspires to teach literature and creative writing to high school students and to travel across the world. Kayla hopes to use her love for literature, writing and education to one day open a school in El Salvador. Kayla resides in Baltimore, Maryland and this is her first publication.

On Being a Tomboy

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 13:42:00 -0400

Goldie Goldbloom

How to walk across the top of slippery waterfalls without falling in. How to get leeches off your legs. How to make bird sounds. Ways of pretending you have brushed your teeth when you haven’t for three weeks. Moment when you discover that teeth brushing is incredibly vital. How to practice kissing. How to bribe your brother not to tell that he saw you practicing kissing. Lemonade stand management. How not to set the field at the end of the road ablaze. What to do if it accidentally happens. Barbecued-everything. The fine art of tie ironing. Best manly scents for when your dad offers to buy your first bottle of “perfume.” Snappy comebacks to classic bullying gambits, nerdiness including nerdy glasses 101, uses for the funky junk you find in the dump/thrift shop/rubbish bins behind the grocery/alley. Coolest ways to whistle. Fence sitting/riding. Tire swings, rope ladders, compasses and rafts. Boulder-rolling, rolling downhill inside a tire, seeing who can go longest inside your Mum’s dryer before punching out the door and falling out in a woozy heap. How to hang spoons on your nose at a diner and make the waiter laugh. Murder in the Dark without wetting your pants. Scary campfire stories. How to comfort the girls who get spooked by scary campfire stories. Secret signal methodology. Time-telling from the height of the sun. Homemade medicine, especially anti frog-wart medicine made from stinging nettles, and cures when you are on the run (a pebble in the mouth when you are thirsty but don’t have any water). How to avoid being head-butted by goats. How to avoid being head-butted by your Mum when you come home after dark, covered in stinging nettles, leeches, barbecue sauce and ash, saying that you’re still learning how to tell time by the sun, but in the meantime, your brand new girly-watch went over the waterfall when you almost fell in, but didn’t.

Goldie’s novel “Toads’ Museum of Freaks and Wonders” won the 2008 AWP Award. Her collection of short fiction is forthcoming in 2011. Her work has appeared in many countries and languages. She writes stultifying thirty page letters to her friends who plan on selling them on ebay *if she becomes famous. [*Editor’s note: “When” she becomes famous..]

Triad

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 01:49:00 -0400

Liz Robbins

I’m six, in rust-colored cords and a green jean-jacket. On one hand, a wash-off tattoo of Mickey Mouse. I’m holding my security blanket and a plastic gun. It’s 1977. I’ve just come in from playing in the woods behind our house, tiny strawberries from the undergrowth still tart on my tongue. The woods go back for miles, so far back, I can’t hear voices.

My mother mows the yard in short-shorts and pigtails. She makes playdough from scratch. Makes brownies from scratch. Drives me to John Lahey’s house to play, sips coffee with his mother, with whom she has little in common. Mom makes up stories about a dinosaur who gets lost in the woods, even has a special voice for him. The dinosaur regrets losing his temper and scaring people, and is lonely until he meets a brave girl in the woods who says, I’ll be your friend. Each day, each week, Mom makes sloppy joe’s, grilled cheese. Does the dishes, the laundry, the beds, the raking, the dusting, the sweeping, the mopping, makes birthday cakes from scratch. All while wearing sleeveless dresses that show off her chest.

My father works and pays the bills. Reads newpapers, news magazines, books of every historical stripe. He watches the nightly news, my jumble of questions followed by, Just a minute. Wears gray flannel pants, ties with a college stripe. Most of the time, he’s gone. When he speaks, how to compete? My mother and I agree silently. Dad’s a tease. Reads fairy tales I already know, changes them as we go, testing. Hansel and Gretel, leaving a trail of daisy stems to mark their way. He laughs when I howl in protest. Later I’ll recall the tease, the protest, edit out the warmth behind it.

When it’s dark outside, I play a recording of Jack and the Beanstalk to help me sleep. Dad comes in to lie on my bed, listening, sometimes doing the giant’s fee-fi-fo-fum. He falls asleep before I do, then wakes up, stumbles down the hall to their room. I want him to stay.

Thirty years later, I walk around with an imaginary gun, shooting slugs of praise or sarcasm. I secure myself within a circle of books. Twice a year, I bake cookies, always from a mix. My nephews ask to play board games: In a minute. I pay a woman to clean my house. I wear pants, cover my arms in sleeves, where underneath, I dream a carnival freak’s burst of tattoos: Ten quotes from my favorite tales. A trio of wild strawberries. Across my back, a forest, for the trees.

Liz Robbins’ poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Greensboro Review, Harpur Palate, Margie, New Ohio Review, Puerto del Sol, and Rattle, among others. Poems from her first book, Hope, As the World Is a Scorpion Fish (Backwaters P), have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily; other poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. She’s the recipient of an Intellectual Life grant and a Schultz Foundation grant, as well as the First Coast Poetry Award, judged by Robert Bly. She’s an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Flagler College in St. Augustine, FL.

Thimble, from Grady

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 13:02:00 -0400

Samuel Autman

A few days after my birth in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, my parents drove 27 miles south and east to Grady, the town where Mama grew up in the Mississippi Delta. I weighed 8 pounds and 6 ounces and was 21 inches long, tall for a newborn back in 1966. Mama pulled the sheet back and presented me to her mother, Madea: Most women have a pretty baby, but girl you sho have brought home an ugly ass child. Madea said, He looks like a little Thimble, doesn’t he?

With those few utterances, I was transformed from Samuel Anthony Autman Jr., into “Thimble,” a moniker that resonated as I grew to 6-feet-4 inches and 235 pounds.

After seeing a picture of the girlfriend Uncle Eddie had met while serving in Korea during the war, Mama found her name, Chung, irresistible. Two years later, my sister, Chung Syrethia, was born. A few months later, Aunt Freddie Mae, my mother’s oldest sister surprised everybody and named her daughter Chung Denise. Two Chungs in a black family, neither of whom has a drop of Asian blood.

For generations, the women in our family have been sampling , creating, and borrowing names from wherever they choose. Unless they’re naming a son Jr., the men tend to stay out of the naming business. They’re three Freddie Maes and two sets of Whitneys, Brittanys and Bernices in the family tree. My maternal great-grandmothers were Everlina Lately and Lilah Gray, known respectively as Mama Lately and Mama Lilah. I had to look on Great Aunt Toad’s obituary before discovering her name was Ernestine. I never knew my Great Aunt Booker’s real name. But she got her revenge by naming her daughters Tiny and Niecey.

Madea is the biggest culprit and sometimes a victim of this name-twisting. She’s one of the two Bernices in the family. Her husband Roy, a 93-year-old man, calls her “Old Girl,” or “Yo Mama.” At 90, many of her friends have died. The remaining ones call her Shug or Ms. Shug as in sugar. She named two of her sons, Arvan and LeVaughn. Arvan became Van and married a woman by the name of Nearlean. Madea decided that LeVaughn would be known as “Tanna” or “Tan.” Madea named my mother Elizabeth, which quickly became Lizabeth and Lizbeth. Mama’s youngest sister is Verla.

But things didn’t get really fun until Mama’s sister Freddie Mae, (the Chung-copier), had the last of her twelve children. Freddie Mae’s oldest son’s birth certificate lists him Travis Gleen. Groggy from the birthing medication, the nurse heard “ee” instead of “en” for Glenn. That’s ok. We called him Brother or Bro. She named her second oldest son Emerald Kane, after seeing the word emerald in the book of Revelation. That became EK or Emma. EK and his wife named one of his sons Roymaiel Herbertus in honor of our grandfather, Roy Herbert. And Aunt Freddie Mae’s youngest boys are Antwain and Ca’Stanlius which Madea reduced to “Old Two-dog” and “Swain” respectively.

There’s a cousin Ronnieus MeShay, who is named after her father Ronnie. By the way, we call our grandfather ‘Grandchild’. Uncle Roy Jr., my grandfather’s namesake son became Uncle Boo. Cousin Tossicia (toss see ah) is the second Bernice. Her beautifully named sister Sacha, Madea called Sashit. Cousin Charles became Charlie-boy. Cousin Karen became Fassie. I never knew our late great-Aunt Sister Girl’s real name.

But it wasn’t just our family. Other people from Grady: Boy Blue, Red Duke, Ada Mae, Iddy (as in titty) Boy, Bo Peep, Moses McDonald, Bay Bruh, Cousin Pig, Cousin Squirrel and Whistle Dick.

Come to think about it, Thimble doesn’t sound so bad.

Samuel Anthony Autman Jr., an assistant professor of English at DePauw University, is working on Sanctified: A Memoir. Read more about him at http://www.samuelautman.com. Grady Family Photo, used with permission of author.

Surely

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 13:23:00 -0400

MJ Iuppa

After the poetry reading, the crowd milled about: cheeks were kissed; fingertips touched fingertips– the close whispered good-byes– lovely, so lovely. And, in an eye blink three hundred people, like a net of starlings, disappeared into thin air.

I headed towards my lone car in the side lot of the art gallery; relieved that I’d soon be out of these new dress shoes and in my slippers. What a perfect event, I thought as I stepped off the broken sidewalk to the lot.

“You.”

The voice poked me in the back. I turned to look over my shoulder to see a young woman in denim coveralls and a pink jacket come from behind the trunk of a large pin oak. Her eyes were wide, her hands fidgeted with her jacket’s zipper.

“You got to help me. I’m trying to get to the St. Joseph Motherhouse. I got a job there; pays eight dollars and fifty cents, good money, but I don’t have a car. It’s broke down, and no gas; I’m tired, tired, and I need the money real bad. To get to the Motherhouse. I’m suppose to take care of them old women there. You got to help me. I need a ride– home.”

Her hand clamped onto my car door. I stood there for a moment.

Alone.

With her.

“Okay, I said, “get in.”

“This your car? Sure is clean.” She slid into the seat with ease, and sat ready.

“Yeah,” I answered, trying not to have second thoughts as I got in on my side,“my mom named her Pretty Woman.”She snorted inward, chin to chest. I slipped my purse under my legs and started my car

“I’m Shirley.”

“So where do you live, Shirley?”

“North Goodman. Not far from here. Turn left up there.”

I rolled out of the parking lot toward the neighborhood that is just behind the Public Market where narrow side streets are packed with rundown houses. It was hard to see in the snare of darkness. Shirley, on the other hand, grew brighter.

“What do you do? You got a man and kids?”

“Yeah, I do… . where are we going?”

“Not far. Down a piece. You got twenty dollars? That would set me right. Get me some gas and something to eat. You got twenty?”

”I have some money. Not twenty, maybe twelve dollars. But I need two dollars for my son’s school lunch. Ten, Okay?”

Shirley looked hard at me, like she was making a decision.

“Over there.” She pointed left. “ Three houses in.”

I turned and pulled to a stop when she said here. It was pitch black. No streetlights. No porch lights. Just the shadows loomed over us. I reached inside my purse and pulled out my wallet. Shirley watched as I opened it and counted out the bills.

“One, two, three. Twelve’s all you got.” She picked the ten and wadded it in her fist as she began to open the car door. She stopped and leaned back in. Her eyes, calm and steady.

“Lock your doors, you hear. This ain’t a great neighborhood. Lock’em now.”

Shirley swung her legs out to the curb and shut the door behind her, tapping the metal good-bye.

I stayed a few seconds more, keeping my eyes on her, watching her steps quicken as she vanished into the margin of the night.

M.J. Iuppa lives near the shores of Lake Ontario where she writes poetry and prose and is Writer-In-Residence at St. John Fisher College. Her MFA is from Pacific Lutheran University, and she has many publications and books, the latest is Within Reach; check out more of her work here.

So You Want to be an Au Pair

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 13:11:00 -0400

Jennifer Litt

You’re a college senior, an Anglophile majoring in English literature, with no interest in teaching. You have no job in the offing, a yearning for adventure, and most importantly, e no boyfriend. Securing a position as an au pair might be the perfect enterprise for you.

An au pair is a young foreigner, employed to take care of children, do housework, and other odd jobs in exchange for room and board. Whatever you do, don’t mistake an au pair for a nanny, who has received special training to care for children. Lose the Mary Poppins image, but do entertain the idea of moving to an English-speaking country. Remember you want time for fun, which means no changing nappies or investing in Rosetta Stone language acquisition software.

Why not head to merry old England?

Interested?

Search the Internet for Help Wanted ads in the greater London area. Soon enough you’ll make the right contact and be offered the position, then it’s time to get your passport, and away you go!

When you arrive at Heathrow, your employer will be waiting for you. Expect to be nervous, which will exacerbate your jet lag and leave you dragging for weeks. You’ll be over the moon when you find out the rest of the family is on summer vacation in Ireland. Your new residence will be a late Victorian with parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme in the back garden. Your bedroom will be undergoing Laura Ashley renovation. Two former ballet dancers who have succumbed to Cadbury bars and sausages will be living in the separate flat on the third floor.

You said you wanted adventure.

August gives way to September. It’s time for the children to return to school, and time for you to adapt to a new routine. Get up at 6:00 a.m., throw in some laundry, put out breakfast for the children; four children whose schedules you must commit to memory. While the children are at school, you’ll have to pick up, maybe dust a little. The domestic life will leave something to be desired, so focus on one area to master. Perhaps it will be cooking, though the only dish you know how to prepare is something your family calls “super chicken,” chicken breasts baked with cream of mushroom soup and wine served over rice.

Becoming the family cook entails visits to the supermarket, in addition to the individual local shops. The problem is you have to drive there, and in England you have to drive on the left side of the road.

You could introduce the children to spaghetti and chili, which they will enjoy as long as the fire extinguisher (pitcher of water) is nearby. Speaking of the children: make sure you’re home before them to let them into the house, give them afternoon tea and then take them to dance and scouts. nota bene:. Learn to make proper English tea

Don’t forget that being American makes you vulnerable to ridicule. If you say OJ for orange juice, one of the children might say, “Okay, let’s have a little OJ.” He will say this with a Texas accent even if you’re from New England, or a benign Mid-Atlantic state.

After dinner the father might challenge his nine-year-old son. “I’ll give you a halfpenny if you can name the capital of Iceland.” To which the boy will undoubtedly respond “Pity it’s not Rangoon, but that’s the capital of Burma.”

When you’re riding with the family on a day trip to Hampshire, be prepared to play the license plate game. Whenever a car passes, use the letters on the license plate to come up with a word in which the letters appear in their original order. If you come up with the word vichyssoise from say VHY, one daughter will stare at you in disbelief. British children, like their parents, believe they are superior to the break-away colonists. Pretty soon you’ll believe it, too.

During the course of the year, you’ll go to plays and concerts and art exhibits. Your employers might even arrange for you to take graduate classes while the children are in school. You’ll absorb the culture almost by osmosis and begin to enjoy eating Marmite.

You’ll discover that films with the words au pair in them are often X-rated. You’ll start speaking with a British accent.

You’ll learn to make bubble and squeak and to bake gooseberry tarts.

You’ll fall in love with British children.

You’ll even celebrate Boxing Day

Jen Litt writes poems, memoir, and fiction to find balance between levity and gravitas in her life and has received invaluable guidance from her teachers, Thom Ward, Sonja Livingston, and Sarah Freligh. She works as an adjunct professor in the English departments of Saint John Fisher and Monroe Community Colleges and is the sole proprietor of Jennifer Litt Writing Services. Jen lives in Rochester with her cat Phantom.

The Baby-Ladies

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 19:57:34 -0400

Aurora Lewis

How I come to meet the Baby Ladies ain’t so unusual.

Daddy used to take us down to the Amusement Park in Long Beach where we’d ride the merry-go-round, bumper cars, eat cotton candy, and walk the strip, looking at the sights. Mama always warned him not to take us to the sideshows, saying it was too much for little kids, but Daddy was stubborn, and did what he wanted most times.

I was looking up at Laffing Sal, one of those mechanical women who rocked back and forth, laughing at what seemed to be the funniest thing in the world when Daddy pulled on my hand and said, “Let’s see what’s in here.” Donny was 3, I was 6 or 7. We walked over to a tiny trailer, silver, blimp-shaped with flowered curtains in the windows. A bald-headed man stood at the door, wearing suspenders and smoking a cigar. He waved us in, whispering, “You’re about to see something, little lady.” His beady eyes were rimmed with folds of sweaty skin. He laughed, snorting like a pig, as we entered the trailer.

“Good evening,” the voice was raspy and I looked in its direction.

A baby! Except this baby had an old-lady face, and looked like a messed-up I Love Lucy, red lips, and curly flaming hair. She sat on a counter and wore a yellow dress that looked like it was meant for Easter Sunday. Her fat feet were done up in black Mary Janes and swinging while she smoked a cigarette. In her other hand, the Baby-Lady held a glass of brown liquid that smelled like the stuff Granddaddy drank after Sunday supper.

The Baby-Lady reached out, shaking Daddy’s hand.

“You sure are handsome,” she said, giving a low laugh and looking him over. Then she looked our way and said, “Well, what have we here?”

I took a step back. Donny cried and held on to Daddy’s legs.

But Daddy laughed, picked me up, and held me out to the Baby-Lady, who set her drink down, and stretched a puffy hand my way. Her polished nails matched her red lips. I pushed my hands behind me, but Daddy said to shake, which I did, but snatched that hand back so fast you would have thought I’d touched boiling water.

The Baby-Lady laughed real loud. So did Daddy. He returned me to the floor and pulled Donny up to the Baby-Lady’s hand. Donny struggled, twisting and turning until Daddy finally put him back on the floor. We clung to his legs while he talked to the baby, asking about her size, her life, even the clothes she wore. They were still chatting when the bald man appeared with another baby in his arms. This one wore the same clothes and had the same red hair, but looked even younger. She didn’t smile like the first Baby-Lady, just looked at the floor.

“I’d like you to meet my daughter.” The Baby-Lady said.

My father looked at both babies, then said, “You been married?”

“Oh, yes! More than once,” she laughed, “Zeke here is my third husband.” She looked over to the bald-head, who winked at Daddy while laughing his little pig laugh.

“Pleased to meet you, I’m Frank.” Daddy said, laughing a little too.

“Girl, tell the kids your name,” The Baby-Lady snapped at the smaller one.

“I’m Thelma,” the other said, still not smiling, looking like she might cry.

“She’s kind of shy,” the Mama-Baby said, as she shot Thelma a dirty look.

Daddy finished up talking to Zeke and the Baby-Family and finally freed us from the trailer, walking us over to the ice cream parlor, trying to explain what we’d just seen. I gulped my sundae, and knew I didn’t want to see a whiskey-drinking baby ever again, though I wondered which would have been worse, the Baby-Ladies or Jo-Jo the Dog-Face Boy.

Aurora M. Lewis lives and writes in Southern California. Her chapbook of poems is Forget-Me-Knots.

Routine

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 12:22:00 -0400

Sarah Freligh

The hour after my cat died, I swam laps because it was Monday and because I’d read somewhere that routine is an antidote to grief and my routine for nearly ten years had been to swim on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, sometimes Sunday, though lately, I hadn’t felt much like swimming, what with my cat meowing around the house, shriveling down to nothing but fur and bones, but somehow I kept on swimming if only to drown out the image of him crouched on a pile of dirty underpants at the back of my closet or the way he hunched behind the toilet and turned away from me, away from the forkful of fresh tuna I offered him, the same way my mother had curled away from me on the sofa, a husk of herself, yellow and used up, a peanut shell tossed on a bar floor, and because under water the only sound was the absence of sound and not of my cat as he sighed into death or my mother who died silent the second my dad turned to talk to the hospice nurse. My sisters dressed my mom in the green sweatsuit we gave her the previous Christmas and sent her off to be cremated, the same as my cat, both of them reduced to a tiny pile of gray-white ash. My mother came back in a silver urn, my cat in a metal box with his name typed and taped to the bottom so I didn’t forget him, and it’s true, I still swim, but only on Tuesdays and Thursdays now.

Sarah Freligh lives in Rochester, New York and teaches Creative Writing at St. John Fisher College. She’s an NEA Fellow, and has published many pieces in all genres, her book of poems is Sort of Gone.

Woods Cove, 1959

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 14:10:00 -0400

Lin Nelson Benedek

Eight flights of stairs from the sea cliffs to the sand. Past clumps of African daisies, rugged wildflowers, my brother and I climb barefoot onto sharp rocks leading to the tidepools, sea anemones, hermit crabs. The waves are cold, fierce, lift us up, wash over us, tumble us around, then deposit us at the shoreline with scraped elbows and knees, salt water in our nostrils, on our tongue. The tide gently rocks our weight first onto one thigh, then the other. Our fingers collide with sand crabs and shards of seashell, the sun burns down on wet hair and backs as we make a mermaid with seaweed hair and sandy breasts. We bury ourselves up to our necks in wet grit.

Back home the sand rolls off our legs in muddy streams, the shower rinses salt from little cuts on our skin. Before dinner my father drinks a Rob Roy, very dry, straight up with a twist, my mother a Jack Daniels Presbyterian, and on the bamboo sofa, my sister and grandmother play two-player Canasta. My brothers turn the pages of a heavy volume of New Yorker cartoons from the twenties, thirties, and forties. Rasping from the phonograph in the corner— Mrs. Carpenter’s old seventy-eights: She started a heat wave by making her seat wave. She really can can-can. A sign on the wall reads: No Stuffed Shirts Allowed. Mrs. Carpenter, my grandmother’s friend, lets us come here every summer. This is her bungalow, and I know her only by the things in it; the pitcher shaped like a cow, a casserole in the form of a duck, a platter with a rooster painted on it.

I sit at the desk at the end of the room, dip the antique nub of a translucent green fountain pen into India ink and write my name again and again on filmy onion paper in as many styles as I can. I press the pulpy ink blotter onto the wet letters I’ve made. The old phonograph needle catches on a groove: Someone to watch…Someone to watch…Someone to watch…

In the middle of the night, I wake to the sound of my parents fighting. I get out of bed. My bare feet pick up traces of sand in the hallway. The wood floor creaks. I hear my father’s voice: “Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.” I stop at their door, pause, then return to the room I share with my sister, open and close the door which fits into the frame like a stage door on a theater set. Everything shakes slightly. The walls are thin, flimsy. “Things take a beating here,” my grandmother always says. The limp fog and the salt air seep into the wood, making everything swollen; and the sun burns it off, leaving things dry, rough, musty, worn. Expansion and contraction.

I climb into bed with my sister. In the half-light, the pink-skirted dressing table, the painted wooden mirror, the tufted bedspread look unfamiliar. I want to think that when Mrs. Carpenter lived here with her husband there was dancing, laughter, no angry words. I feel the warmth of my sister’s body, the flannel of her nightgown. She smells like glycerine and rosewater. Trying not to kick my feet, trying to stay on my side of the bed, I remember the daddy-long-legs in the garage, walking precariously on stilts. I picture the morning glories beside the trash cans in the back. They open up at daybreak, begin to fade at midday, close up their shocking blue petals after dark. I take a chance that things will be all right by morning, and close my eyes for the night.

Lin Nelson Benedek is currently working on a book of short memoir pieces and a volume of poetry. She lives with her husband and son in Los Angeles, where she maintains a practice as a marriage and family therapist.

Popsicle, with Feathers

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Lish McBride

The bird is dead and the soil is hard, but I dig because I have to.

The finch is frozen, sandwich-bagged, and thrown into the box that sits next to me. This is my lesson, one out of two, as to why I shouldn’t own birds. The parakeet, escapist, sprung from his cage when I was at Dad’s, flew at the ceiling, breaking his neck. The cat might have been involved. Or not. There’s no proof. Just a dead parakeet on my bed, neck broken, yellow and blue feathers everywhere.

Welcome home.

Even before the parakeet’s break, the finch drowns in his water dish.

Both birds, brains the size of shriveled peas, choose suicide over me. It’s enough to make a girl cry. My mom finds the finch and thinking I’ll want to handle it grown-up-style and say good-bye, she bags its small body, and put its in the freezer. My brother finds the frozen thing while looking for a snack.

There’s a loud thunk as he drops it on the counter. “What the hell?” he says, but he’s eating a popsicle by the time he says it, more morbid interest than grief. And I understand. He has to take the opportunity. Popsicles are infrequent visitors to my house, they never last long.

The finch, apparently, doesn’t last long either, and I can’t drum up any more sadness for the dark-feathered frozen body than I could for any small dead thing found. Just surprise.

I put the bird in a box that is way too big, because boxes are how you bury things, whether you have a proper-sized one for the job or not. The dirt isn’t cooperating, and I’m too lazy to find the shovel, so I dig with a stick, a rock, my hands.

But the soil is hard and the box too big.

When I finish the job; though I’m something like six, I know it’s half-assed, the dirt barely covers the lid. Raccoons will get it, or a dog; possibly even my cat, out for a little frozen snack. I compensate with flowers, a few fistfuls of dandelions and foxglove, the only things growing close-by. Maybe I’ll say a few words, a fumbling eulogy by someone who’s only heard them on TV or read about them in books. I might even stand over the dirt pile, giving the bird a moment of silence.

Most likely I will shoot back to the house.

There are popsicles in there, and they won’t last.

Lish McBride lives in Seattle, where she undoubtedly has ice and frozen veggie things, but no birds, in her freezer. Hold Me Closer, Necromancer is the first in Lish’s series of forthcoming books.

Le Midi

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 13:53:00 -0400

Claude Lanselle

I woke up somewhere in the Rhone Valley. The sky was blue, there were sunny hills in the distance, the fields nearby were green with the hue of crops; lettuce, beans, melons and wonder of wonders, tomato-bearing trees! In December! I had discovered persimmons. I was nine years old. The year was 1934.

The train stopped in Montelimar. The vendors on the quay peddled bars of nougat and calissons, a marvel of diamond-shaped candy made of almond paste created in the 15^th Century for the wedding of a local princess. How could I not fall for this land of beauty, of bounty, this, forever; my Midi. How could I not transfer my allegiance, bare myself, cleanse myself of everything Northern and plunge body and soul into this ocean of color. I rolled the name Montelimar on my tongue and, in time, learned to pronounce it with a Southern accent, sounding the “n” and dragging the last syllable, all the way to Marseille where the train stopped at the St Charles station, almost as large as the ones in Paris, and then went east along the coast, following the Mediterranean’s deep blue, its creeks, its red rocky points in the Esterel, stopping at Toulon were I saw sailors in uniform, on to Cannes were my mother commented with approval on the attire of a gentleman in grey pants, blue blazer with brass buttons, scarf in his shirt neck opening and, oh yes, the first pair of two-tone shoes I ever saw, black and white. Finally, we arrived in Nice, sunny and warm, where I was to live for the next fifteen years.

We left Valenciennes in Northern France, near the Belgian border the morning before and took a train to the North Station in Paris, cold and grey on an early December day. We walked, had lunch in a restaurant somewhere, walked some more, seeing the sights. I remember the wide, cracked sidewalks and pairs of policemen wearing short capes, officers nicknamed hirondelles, swallows, by the Parisians. We boarded the night train going South at the Lyon Station, had started dinner in the wagon restaurant while the train was gaining speed in the suburbs. Only the promise of vanilla ice cream with meringues kept me awake till dessert.

Back in our compartment, I fell soundly asleep.

Almost twenty years later I left France to live in southern California, and there I found red bougainvillea, the same one that grew all the way to the top of our four story apartment house in Nice; the same cypresses, the same lemon and orange trees, the same blue sky, the same sun, the same curved roof tiles. There, I would spend the rest of the life I woke up to, as a boy, one December morning, in the midst of Cezanne country.

You can go home again. Peut-etre. Almost.

Claude Lanselle writes about his life in France before and during WW II, and lives in southern California where the sky is always blue and something is always in bloom.

Lustoleum

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 22:36:00 -0400

Natalie Parker-Lawrence

you’re not sure about it until it happens twenty more times, the visceral tension from across the room, the kind of smoldering look you think you see. but you looked away the first fifty times, understanding the word smolder for the first time because you are sure that people in between you, even the ones milling around and talking about nothing in clotted conversations about utility bills and recalcitrant children and negligible tax refunds, notice a scarlet wet rise of temperature in the vodkaed room and feel the fingers of heat grabbing across their boredom to you and back to him, despite his being a Republican, his sansabelt pants, his being fifteen years older, his being a geometry teacher, his love of country music, his not being the high school boyfriend. but his eyes, those bluer than black-ice eyes, make you drip and take chance after chance, inventing new ways to move after waffles in their bed, before and after school, after presents of porcelain statues and neck scarves meant for another generation of women, after ice cream, after he fixes your car by just filling up the water tank, after greasy chinese food, after his list of honey-do chores, after night school in parks and in parking lots in neighborhoods that you don’t travel to in daylight hours. his eyes make you forget every yawning sermon, every religion class, every catholic school, every prayer you said for every blurred ambulance, every asian soul in purgatory, every holy card, every sticky scapular, every manufactured sin in confession, every memorized penance.

you scream to and for the stars in his gold chevy pickup, the metal ribs on the floor of its flatbed sticking in your back, bruising tail-bone muscles, teaching you to move your pain toward the screaming that scares the lightening bugs up toward the bigger light like street lamps and down to the smaller and closer flicker of backup tail lights.

above the pain, he screams up at myriad stars while thousands, maybe millions, of mosquitoes dive in and out and eat you alive, you wondering but not caring about malaria, but remembering the first time on the cold formica of the kitchen counter even though the maid from next door, the one with three fingers who could still hold and peel a potato, watches through the barely-curtained window, moving to the cold linoleum floor and then over to the rough gold, brown and tan couch that America issued to everyone in the suburbs that year.

Natalie Parker-Lawrence lives in Memphis, where she teaches beautiful children, writes plays and nonfiction, and is completing her MFA from the University of New Orleans—and yes, she is as spicy as she seems.

Late Night at the Office: A Sentence

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:00:00 -0400

Ariel Lawrence

It’s ten o’clock and we’re all waiting, sitting on our desks, eating the intern’s jelly beans straight from the giant Costco jar with our bare hands, because she’s not here to tell us to use the spoon she put in there, being that we cut her a break and let her go at 8:45 because, well, she’s new and she can’t really fix bugs anyway, so now we’re playing the game to bide our time, gleeful that we got some of the localization done early and isn’t it great that we can watch the in-game cinematics in Russian or Dutch or Portuguese, and we’re smacking each other on the back and punching each other in the arm at how far along in the process we are and it only being 7 days from Alpha, and all I can hear from upstairs is the quick clack-clack-clack of the arcade controllers as the Combat Designers challenge the Animators to a head to head match of the latest Street Fighter installment, and then there’s the Level Designer who’s quaking it up over the LAN and yelling at one of the Level Scripters over the half cubicle wall (because they’re not wearing headsets) that he’s bogarting the damn ammo for the laser rifle and that he can’t fucking believe that the little vegan bicyclist from Tech Art just busted a cap in his ass from across the arena with a sniper shot, which is followed by a distant, deep belly laugh from the aforementioned Tech Artist on the mezzanine in Studio B, and it’s the first time in three games that the head producer genuinely smiles, almost relaxed this close to an Alpha delivery and he doesn’t notice, or care to notice, that the Environment Artists have found the last couple of six packs of Stella in the back of the refrigerator from our last “Studio Walkabout” and are now boozing and cruising through the office, looking at the their gleaming, shining art finally placed back in the game and hooked up by the level designers and no one is caring about the out of memory crashes that will come next week when we find out that rock has a 1024 texture instead of a 128, because all we really care about is that the assets we just bum-rushed into the database before a dinner of double meat pizza when our Russian Bear of a Lead Programmer locked us out, will still build on his machine, and until then we’re just supposed to hang out, which was fine three hours ago when everyone was pumped on a self-induced high of Diet Coke and skittles, but it’s okay because one of the producer’s is just back from a quick run to Ralphs and there’s ice cream to fuel the little more time to wait for the Lead Programmer’s machine to build every level in the game, because it takes 45 minutes just to build the hero’s WAD, and then it happens; the Design Director’s deep vibrato from the programmer’s lair under the stairs saying that, finally, we’re all clear, that everything seems to build, and before the Senior Producer can finish saying “thank you for staying, you can all go home now”, we slip out the doors, back and front, hands clutching melting ice cream cones and keys to cars already covered in night dew from the ocean and we’re off, into the night, to our husbands and wives and kids, before anyone can call us back to our digital salt mine.

Ariel Lawrence is a gifted poet and prose writer, who needs to forward a one line bio, but in the meantime, I’ll say lives in California with a husband and some dogs?? And she runs, I know she runs.

Snarl

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

F. R. Rosario

Snarling. Totally underrated. Just call me your snarling. When you’re snarling, the whole world snarls with you…and yes, I guess my hair might be the color of earth waiting under leaves all winter, and okay, so my lashes are like bits of crow sitting on snow or wisps of hair stolen from the heads of eskimo babies, like my auntie always says, and sothehellwhat if I’m an iroquoiswhitewesternnewyorkstylepuertorriquena and what if my eyes are the color of coca-cola, and so so so, who who cares if that’s what I drink for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and oh oh oh, don’t tell me no, because I already know it will catch up with me and rot my teeth and cripple my skin, but right now, I don’t care about anything but the fizz and promise and absolute snarl of being thirteen.

Frankie Rivera-Rosario has a big heart, a creative bent, and a mile-high attitude. She attends John Marshall Jr./Sr. High in Rochester, New York.

29 Fisher Street: A Google Earth Essay

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:38:00 -0500

Linda J. Thomas

I’m flying to the center of my childhood. To a view that shows my old house within a silver-edged globe, a garden gazing ball reflecting the present and the past:

The Side Yard: Where my sister and I sat the day we moved in, staring across at the two girls next door. One had dark, thick hair and fair skin; the other had red curly hair and freckles. They were sitting in their side yard, staring at us. I imagine we pulled grass from the lawn. No one spoke. And then someone did. I don’t remember who; I was only five. But that’s how I first met Mr. Coyne’s two daughters, and Mary, the youngest, became my best friend. Today, four girls could not sit in the side yards and stare at each other. Now there’s a tall and solid wooden fence along the border of the property. The house next door has one too. Mary owns and lives in that house, her parents both passed on. Does she remember the day we met, or the day I told her I would no longer be her friend? Her infractions against the laws of friendship had piled up higher than I could bear at thirteen, so I built an imaginary fence between her house and mine.

The Back Yard: The Weeping Willow tree is gone. I knew not to walk too near that tree in my bare feet. The lawn was damp and squishy. Mr. Coyne once reported us to the Public Health Department because of that soggy section. The Weeping Willow’s roots had snaked through the leach field, disturbing the “bowels” of the earth. An official with a white shirt and tie walked around the tree, my Dad stood by with arms folded across his chest, while I watched from my bedroom window. The leach field passed inspection, and the tree stayed, but Mary’s Dad didn’t allow her to play softball in our back yard on warm summer nights after that. That tree is gone, but I remember its beauty in the summer, its perseverance in the winter. It still resides in a poem I wrote back then; a poem in which the tree cried and her tears created puddles beneath silky branches.

The Front Yard: Now I’m at the front of our Cape Cod. My Dad climbed up and down a ladder to apply a fresh coat of stain each year. I can almost see him standing back from the house, admiring the results, when I asked: “Dad, why can’t you paint the house a different color? I’m tired of brown.” His shoulders drooped. Today the house is no longer stained brown. It’s been painted white, purified.

Linda Thomas is a freelance writer and editor who lives in the beautiful Monadnock region of New Hampshire—if you want to know just how beautiful; google earth it.