The submission period for the eighth issue of damselfly press has closed. Look for the issue on July 15th, 2009.

As always, thank you to all of our submitters.

Spring is the ultimate time for renewal. We’re pleased to feature writers in the seventh issue of damselfly press who illustrate their interior lives, thoughts and passions. Whether questioning their beliefs, remembering past fears, or simply saying this is who I am, these writers are candid and courageous.

This season, damselfly press would like to renew its commitment to women writers. As always, thank you to our readers and submitters. We welcome your submissions and feedback.

POSTCARD TO MY SISTER FROM RUE DE TURENNE

It’s gray again and I feel I could do anything today; gray takes the edge off, softens the world, makes me feel invisible, invincible on this bench beneath a canopy of old poplar, eating pain au chocolat, shooing sooty pigeons from my feet. A miniature street park, so Parisian: wide boulevard, painted wooden bench, statue - this one a bronze of Turenne Enfant - and the trees, the trees I know by heart: buckeye, maple, poplar,

and apple. Our apple trees in the spring - opalescent showers, cave of green we crawled into, our refuge, me with that leatherette accountant’s journal, even then a fountain pen.

You, fearless, freed those brief hours from perpetual scrutiny, graceful arabesque on the tire swing -

A young woman has just ridden by on a bicycle, long brown hair, silk scarf, pedals tucked in the arch of black stilettos.

Oh Dawn, for a moment I thought it was you.

-Southern California poet, Kim Noriega, reads locally and abroad, most recently at the Ugly Mug in Orange, California and Shakespeare & Co. in Paris. She teaches poetry at Crossroads Women’s Recovery Home and workshops for teens through public libraries. Her poem, “Heaven, 1963,” was featured in Ted Kooser’s syndicated column, “American Life in Poetry.”

Contacted Tree. Empty Road. Waited Evening.

Don’t worry.
You don’t have shoes
to take off. If you’re not fond
of the sky, there isn’t one.
In theory, we are likely trading
it for the idea of falling.
I come prepared to catch
myself in the act
of being someone else,
of holding the incapable
birds in my shirt
and surprising everyone
by showing them
what magicians are like
and how often
birds appear.

-Jennifer Denrow lives in Denver, where she is currently pursuing a PhD at DU. She is the poetry editor at fireHabit Press and has stories forthcoming in Thermos and The Iguana Review.

In the Moment Before Waking

they stop their wandering,
make a brief appearance.

Maybe you’re in the kitchen,
and you’re the you you are now,
but the house is of your childhood,

only brighter, more lights,
the paint somehow bolder
than you’d remembered. Or is it

the living room, you sitting
on a white sofa, toy horse in your lap,
stroking its goat’s hair

mane, braiding it’s tail. Sometimes
you’re in the blue
bed and they’ve gathered

at the foot of it. You begin to say
how glad you are
they’ve come home again,

how well they look –
the dead – always glowing
after a long sabbatical.

But you find there’s never enough
time for chit chat, and they wish to offer
advice, hand you a packet of papers –

and you’ll be damned
if you can remember the words
when you wake.

-Ronda Broatch is the author of “Shedding Our Skins,” (Finishing Line Press, 2008), and “Some Other Eden” (2005). Five-time Pushcart nominee, Ronda is the recipient of a 2007 Artist Trust GAP Grant. Her work has appeared on Verse Daily, and in the Atlanta Review, RHINO, Blackbird, and Rattle.

POETRY

Some poems read like a bookshelf.
The poets carefully putting each word
in its place, snug and sure and right.

And other poems feel like Polaroids,
poets waving them about in the air
to make the scene come into focus.

Still others feel like a come on,
something you can’t believe still works,
and yet here you are, in bed with it.

My poems are like the panic
you feel when you’ve lost something
and dump your bag on the table.

My poems are the things which
tumble out of the bag: the menus,
the post-its, the articles your mother

cuts out and gives you at Christmas,
the books, the receipts, the leaky pens,
the old gum, the unflattering photo,

the lint, the dust, the dirt, until…
there it is. You find it.

-Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s Internet Tendancies, Barrelhouse, Monkeybicycle, Pank, decomP and The Other Journal, among others. Her latest book, “Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam,” was published last year by Soft Skull Press.

Revelations

I stumble and catch myself before I fall. Not bad for a clumsy middle-aged walker in a foreign landscape on an icy March morning. This rocky path winds through a ranchland of brown hills, tottering fences, and emptiness—except for the nearby country club and surrounding homes.

I’m living a new life as a Congregational minister in the northern Arizona high country where I landed a few months ago at a small church made of local wood and stone. Sacred light comes into the interior through faceted glass placed high in the sanctuary walls. The abstract blues and yellows, reds and greens make patterns on us that change with the movement of clouds. No Christian icons adorn the church walls, except for a brass cross on the gray stone. The air inside feels fresh, crisp—neutral.

“A pagan temple!” some people call our church. “New-age fright!” others say. Gossips tell me the Baptists don’t approve, claiming it looks like a witch’s meetinghouse. I don’t care. The non-traditional building with its peaked roof suits me fine, down to the lone rosebush by the front door.

People have left my church because they distrust a woman in the pulpit. Members tell me my voice doesn’t sound right. Folks wonder if the ceremonies over which I preside are valid, and some male clergy won’t welcome me as a colleague. In a place formerly called ‘Lonesome Valley’ where scorpions lurk, gravel is the paving element of choice, and a Safeway and dime-store comprise the shopping district, I feel like a hothouse flower among cacti. Still, I like it here. Most of the members of the small church—a gentle, forgiving group—circle me with no rancor.

I trudge the Old Chisholm Trail wearing my heavy red jacket and my husband’s blue knitted cap with California Bears on the front. The cold air whips my cheeks. Some mornings I feel this desert is the proper setting for a woman in a pioneering role. I feel strong and capable in this bracing world, a lone crimson cowpuncher. We women ministers forge modern tools, clear old brush, speak new truth. We’re needed to bring fresh ideas into the church to preach liberty to the enslaved and compassion for the poor. This morning I’m just not so sure-footed.

I’ve left a lovely city, San Diego, with its beaches and boats and flowers, a place where I’d been a single mother, a high school teacher, and an actress in local theater. But something drove me into a religious profession. It wasn’t courage. I had no wanderlust. I had no spiritual calls. I’m an ordinary soul with this itch to meet God.

Arizona high country is a place where solitude is visible outside your window. To step into the landscape is to find yourself in a vastness where it’s easy to think, where thinking is required. The air, the clouds, the hawks and desert emptiness teach you to observe. This morning the skies have a pristine clarity and dance with swinging raptors. The surrounding Bradshaw Mountains are bastions of integrity. Hillsides of pine and juniper stand untouched by human development. My walk helps me clarify, discern, and I like to think I stumble toward more truth.

I’d wanted to try ministry on my own for the past five years while I’d worked as an assistant minister in San Diego. With a seminary education in my pocket, a degree in literature, a tour of raising children and high school teaching experience, I felt qualified. Today, in the March cold, I confess: I’m not a traditional believer. I can’t and won’t teach a strict orthodox Christianity using the Bible to proclaim Jesus as savior of the world, the only way to God.

I’m a fraud. A roadrunner darts in front of me with a young snake in its beak. I start. Danger. The pronghorn antelope, grazing on the open desert beyond the fairways, stop their business to stare at my pilgrim’s progress. The atmosphere changes, smells earthy, of pastures and growth. A handsome buck, proud of his magnificent antlers, turns his mighty head to regard my long-legged stride. Being observed with disinterest makes me uncomfortable. The gentleman sees into my heart. He knows how much I doubt myself. I don’t belong in Arizona among the faithful. What have I done? I’d like to sit down and watch the animals, stop the momentum, but I walk on. The antelope goes back to his grazing. The roadrunner hides somewhere with her meal.

Perhaps my questions about Christianity come from my being a woman, an alien in ministry. I question old ideas, but my church members don’t. They haven’t accepted biblical research or scrutinized the stormy contradictions in Christian theology. They like the stories. Questions are beside the point for them, and the point is comfort. My dilemma is whether to let the questions and doubts stay packed away. The effort is getting harder.
I sigh a burst of warm air into the cold March atmosphere and try to keep up a brisk pace. The church members don’t know I have doubts about conventional Christian beliefs. I should have told them the truth during our initial conversations when I applied for the job, but I didn’t. I carry a backpack of guilt on this hike. Only movement gives me energy to keep trying to make sense of my ministry.

My commitment to this vocation came out of a sense that the Christian Church was on to something, and I set myself on a path to figure out what the something was, hoping to meet God in some way. Or maybe I chose ministry to put myself in the presence of people like Dave Palmer, a born again man in the congregation. The man has soul, you could say, eyes that offer his heart. Or maybe it was the role, the robes of clerical authority.

Boulders, pampas grass and cacti are the shrubs of choice in front of the homes lining the street, but a few gardeners have planted burgeoning tulips. The tulip people come from verdant eastern places. They bring in fresh soil and grow tulips to transform our wilderness into Eden. I’m not sure what to make of their effort. Do I want the desert to look like a watered place? Even so, I identify with the tulip, a transplant from another world; I’m not a native species. Like a proud tulip, I can stand up in imposing costumes pretending I belong.

Silence. My feet touch the pavement, but they make no sound. No cars speed by, as if Arizona hasn’t come to accept the wheel yet. There’s something newly born about this setting. I’m the first to touch down.

The emerging tulips and noisy birdsong remind me that Easter is coming. My sermon for Easter Sunday will have to be elegantly Christian. I’m expected to affirm that Jesus is God and will come back to earth after dying for humankind. I should assure my listeners that He awaits them in an afterlife. My faith, however, does not include that scenario, let alone the literal resurrection of Jesus. I walk to overcome worries about being a fraudulent minister unworthy of the trust of believers. I walk so I can stop walking on Easter Sunday and stand alone in front of a faithful congregation.

*

I gave that Easter sermon in the shimmering green and yellow light of Easter morning. I affirmed the rebirth of hope, including the story of a man much like Dave who gave dignity to fishermen, held children in his arms, and fed the hungry. I could do that much, but my sense of displacement and fraud continued to weigh on my conscience as the Easter month turned into a summer of thunder, lightning and downpours. The fall shouted change. Finally, winter. Snow on cactus.

My fitness walks sustained me for another five years while the antelope watched my movements. I spun thoughts about the mysteries of religion and marveled at Arizona high country where unexpected snow fell, tulips appeared in the desert, and nobility drove a pickup truck. But I continued to doubt the comfortable beliefs of church-goers until the stones in my path became boulders. I couldn’t see over them to make my way and realized I was no more connected to the Christians around me than to the antelope. The separation between me and the others grew too wide, and I walked away from ministry aware I was leaving behind spiritual revelations from clean, untamed earth.

- Elaine Greensmith Jordan is a retired minister who lives in Arizona. Her essays have appeared in South Loop Review, New Works Review, The Georgetown Review and other journals and anthologies. An excerpt from her unpublished memoir, “Mrs. Ogg Played the Harp,” won an award from the American PEN Women and the California Writers Club.

Radiant Red Violet

It is the last week of summer, a wicked August afternoon that makes your skin drip just from standing still. Megan and I spend the morning as we do most summer mornings. We walk mindlessly through town and mark our names on the walls of buildings with fat black pens. We sneak through the back lots of shopping centers, take turns pushing one another in wobbly carts and ultimately crash into curbs. We stop into an old-fashioned ice cream shop and drink strawberry malts until we think our brains might freeze. By lunchtime, our t-shirts are wet with perspiration, and our vision blackened with spots of sunshine, so we decide to stop off at the closest place we can find to briefly find refuge from the heat.

The aisles of the beauty supply shop overflow with candy-colored beauty products packaged in plastic and in glass. Rainbows of petite polish bottles line pre-made display racks, rows of color that spread from indigo to burgundy to brown. Megan and I brush our fingertips over the labels of mane & tail shampoo, gallons of mango and cocoa body lotion and jars of lemon cuticle crème. We glide across the floor, as though possessed by the acetone smell that seeps from every crevice of the shop.

Megan pulls off her knit beret and shakes her head. Several thin, red braids fall and frame her face. She strokes one of them between her fingers and lets out a short puff of a sigh.

“I’m ready for a change,” she says and rolls up her eyes to examine the strawberry blonde strands.

We peruse the shelves slowly, icy air blowing across our damp necks, and take our time to shake and sample bottles of glittery polish, dabbing beads of sweat from our faces before we swipe the color across our toes. A twenty-something salesgirl sits at the front counter and eyes us from behind the cover of a glossy magazine. She snaps her gum loudly and twirls a piece of her over-processed hair around her fingertip.

“You girls looking for something?” she says and breathes heavily, exhausted by her efforts.

Megan squeezes a glob of ice blue serum into her palm and runs it through the hair at the nape of her neck. I pose momentarily beside a yellowed mannequin, her fake, plastic head trapped beneath a giant bubble-shaped dryer.

“Nope,” Megan says. “We’ve got everything covered over here.”

She mists coconut body spray into the air and dances beneath the fragrant cloud, as though it is rain.

I follow Megan as she breezes towards a back aisle, waving my hands in front of me to help the fresh polish dry. As I do this, I study Megan’s movements: The way her bag slaps her side each time she takes a step; The way she pouts her lips and tilts her head with wonder while she browses through acrylic nail kits; The way she rests her hand on her hip and pulls a braid across her lips. But mostly, I think about how alone I will feel without her. Next week, high school will begin and, for the first time in our lives, we will be separated. Town lines have marked our fate. She will move to the left and I will move to the right. We will sharpen our pencils each day on opposite ends of town.

I wonder what it will be like to wander through foreign hallways amongst unfamiliar faces. Will anyone notice me without her there? Will people find me interesting when she is not standing beside me? I think about how I’d like a change, too. I’d like to become someone that people notice. Someone that people recognize for more than just her offbeat fashion. I want boys to think I am pretty and ask me to school dances. I want teachers to smile as they describe the success they are certain I will find. But I want these things for her, too. I crave a sense of normalcy for us both.

Megan pauses beside a shelf lined with countertop mirrors, various sized ovals situated across it like a funhouse wall. As she moves forward, her face spreads from mirror to mirror. She narrows her eyes, observes her many reflections and combs her fingers through her hair. My stomach aches as I wonder what it will be like to wander the halls of some new building without her. I swipe my greasy palms down the fronts of my denim cutoffs, leaving behind a faint lotion stain. As I step closer to Megan, she moves away, preoccupied by a display of tortoise shell combs. Now, my reflection multiplies across the shelf. I pause, smile a half smile at myself and slide a tube of ruby red lipstick across my lips.

“Down here,” Megan whispers from the end of the aisle.

Amid paddle brushes and economy-sized cans of aerosol hair spray is row upon row of synthetic hair – coarse, one-inch strips, organized according to color, from silver to platinum to auburn to brown. Megan and I rub the samples between the pads of our fingertips, squat down and press them against our foreheads. We imagine how much more interesting life would be for us as blondes.

Megan crouches and begins to fumble through tubs stacked on the bottom shelves. Unlike the other coloring kits, these tubs do not have colorfully displayed pieces of rough hair, but rather, are concealed in generic, white containers, like some dirty secret the storeowners are ashamed to admit. She unscrews the cap and reveals a thick paste the color of a Caribbean sea. Her eyes widen and she laughs a malicious belly laugh, the sort reserved for occasions like this, when she knows she is about to be up to no good. I lean down beside her and stick my finger into the dye.

“This,” Megan says, “is just the kind of change I’m looking for.”

We swipe the dye across our palms and envision our faces beside wild hair colored in magenta, fuchsia, or lime. One by one, we uncap new jugs, bright hues of electric purple and blue and green that surround us like a piece of pop art. Megan’s eyes glitter with anticipation.

“>“Help me pick out one you like,” she says.

“My mother will murder me if I dye my hair with any of these,” I say.

Megan skims her finger across the backside of one of the tubs.

“No she won’t,” she says. “Not if I do it with you.”

I swirl my pinky through a jar of mutant green and think about the fact that she is right. Each time we pull stunts like this together – purposefully tearing our clothes, or coloring our eyelids ebony, or sneaking off to dingy places to have metal jewelry stabbed through our skin – they seem, to our families, like silly teenage things rather than, what we will later learn, is the deeper, more complex rebellion of my friend.

“I think it’s about time we were devirginized, anyway,” Megan says.

She remains quiet as she waves the open jar beneath my chin.

“So,” she says. “You in?”

I nod. Sure, I think. I’m in.

Megan spins one of her braids like a tiny lasso.

“It’s about time to say goodbye to strawberry blonde,” she says.

We drop two plastic tubs of hot pink dye onto the counter and wait while the saleswoman finishes reading about orgasms and pant hems. She lays the open magazine down with a sigh, examines our purchases and places them into a plastic bag.

“You girls know you need brushes for these, right?” she says and pops her wad of bubblegum with a loud snap.

Megan and I shrug and toss our crumpled singles and coins onto the counter.

“They’re in the back,” the woman says and sighs again. She leans across the counter and points towards the far end of the shop. “They look just like mini paint brushes.”

She looks down at the cover of her magazine, anxious to return to her reading.

“Look. Just go grab one and I’ll pretend I didn’t see anything,” she says and shuts her register drawer. She picks up the magazine and flips to a new page, returning to the glossy world she dreams of.

Megan’s parents are at work for the afternoon so we set up shop in their laundry room, converting the sink into a rinsing station, the dryer lid into a miniature beauty display. I lean my head into the sink and allow Megan to splash my hair, warm water trickling down my jaw line and across my cheeks. My heart races as I think about my mother, and the furious reaction I am certain she will have. But more so, I think about the camaraderie this moment brings to Megan and me. That each time I receive a judgmental stare from a new classmate, I will know that someone, somewhere, is experiencing the same thing.

“My mom’s going to murder me,” I say again.

But Megan pretends not to hear me over the rushing sound of water. Instead, she looks at me with a smirk and massages her fingers into my scalp. When my whole head is damp, she tugs the hair at the nape of my neck and lifts my dripping head from the sink.

Megan scoots herself onto the washing machine and sips warm beer from a can. I stand beside her, waiting like a child on Christmas morning, anxious for her to unscrew the tub and reveal our selection. She uncaps it slowly, full of suspense, and exposes the goopy, pinkish shade. Radiant-Red Violet.

I sit on a folding chair in the center of the room, the floor and my shoulders lined with bath towels. Megan begins to paint small sections of my hair neon pink, while the room fills with a stinging ammonia scent. Once my hair is saturated with chemical color, we switch places. Now, Megan sits in the middle of the room and taps her foot in anticipation.

“You know,” I say. “It’s something like only one in a hundred people who have natural red hair like yours.”

“So what’s your point?” she says and lights a cigarette.

“Are you sure you want to say goodbye to it for good?” I say.

“It’ll grow back,” she says.

“Yeah, but, it will never be exactly the same,” I say. “It’s like when you lose your virginity. You can go a while without having sex, but you’ll never be a virgin again.”

Trust me. I’m ready,” she says. “I want to be a new version of myself. I don’t want to look like me anymore.”

She tosses her lit cigarette into the damp sink.

“I don’t care what the statistics say,” she says. “I’m ready to become someone new.”

I dip the brush into the dye and smear a thick line of pink down her center part.

“Goodbye strawberry blonde,” I whisper to her head and spread the color across her crown.

When the egg timer buzzes, we both rush to the sink, and furiously rub our fingers through our hair, a puddle of red-tinted water swirling near the drain. Megan presses a towel against her head. Her curls fall delicately and frame her face. Even through the dampness, I can see that her natural hair color has been transformed to a rich shade of sultry pink, a candy-colored version of Hollywood red. Instantly, she embraces her new character and seductively shakes her hair the way women do in movies, just before they make love.

“You look like a star,” I say and slip my fingers through her wet strands.

Outside, Megan and I sit like starlets. We dangle our feet over the edge of the pool, half-moon shaped ice jangling in our cocktail tumblers, our eyes covered behind black, oval sunglasses. I swirl my feet through the water, sip my drink, and turn toward Megan. When I do, I catch glimpse of my reflection in her lenses.

I know the moment I walk through my door, my mother will scream and my father will look at me with an expression of disappointment. I know that in just a few days, I will move through the halls of some strange, new building, void of familiar faces, and receive many unwelcome stares. But right now, during this singular moment, as I shift my eyes between my reflection and Megan’s head to observe the similarity in our appearances, I pretend that we are one. Our strengths and our weaknesses combined to create one perfect person. And with this thought, nothing else seems to matter.

I reach out my arm and touch one of Megan’s curls.
“We’ve never looked the same before,” I say and withdraw my hand.

Megan lights two cigarettes and places one between my lips. She fingers a strand of my hair. For what feels like hours, we blow thin streams of smoke toward each other’s faces. And here, beneath the humid August sunlight, we study the striking new resemblance that we share.

- Angela M. Graziano holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey, where she teaches writing. To date, her writing has appeared in Apple Valley Review, Ariel, Dislocate, Lost Magazine, Portal Del Sol and Miranda Literary Magazine, among others. “Radiant Red Violet” is excerpted from her recently completed first memoir.

The submission period for the seventh issue of damselfly press has closed. Look for the issue on April 15th, 2009.

As always, thank you to all of our submitters.

A warm welcome to our readers! This year damselfly press is proud to publish a new round of diverse women’s writing. We hope this issue will inspire you as it does us. It examines not only women’s issues, but societal themes as well.

So a happy 2009 from damselfly press. We look forward to meeting readers and submitters alike at the AWP in Chicago. We don’t have a booth this year, but will be around the conference. See you there!

Our seventh issue will be available April 15th. If you’d like to submit, please visit our guidelines section and send us your submission by March 15th.

BELONGING

this is how the mind works: it sees colors
sometimes not registering the thought.
the indigenous poet was constantly
asked where she was from, her aztec cheekbones
suggesting an unknown. you see the other
cannot walk around just being, the other
has to check a box or the one
won’t know itself, the one’s primacy will be
challenged. this is true even on the days
when i wander blissfully oblivious, thinking
only that i relish difference. overall,
washington, d.c. was a very brown place.
arriving from the pacific northwest, i noticed
brownness and was glad to be, briefly, awash
in it. lots of faces on the metro, on the street,
servers in cafés, hotel workers
had african roots, but the class divide
manifested only in my subconscious.
behind the hotel desk stood african-americans in dark suits;
near the counter, during the day, waited red-suited
porters whose accents suggested africa or the carribean,
but i never thought, here in this city, black people
serve me. until i got back late
after walking city streets, lost, in painful shoes,
my mind mush from twelve interviews
and asked the suit-clad black man standing by the counter
what time was check out. his flustered huh?, his troubled eyes
jarred my foggy-minded equation of dark skin and suits
with service. i flashed back to a friend’s
birthday party, a short apache woman
describing how white people in garages
ask her to park their cars, her personhood supplanted
by stature and color, and absorbed
with horror my belonging.

-Ann Tweedy’s poems have been published in journals and anthologies, including Gertrude, Rattle, Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly, and Knock. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her chapbook, Beleaguered Oases, is forthcoming from TcCreativePress. During the day she teaches and practices law.

Grief in the Morning

rises, like dough warmed in the oven

all night and filling the air
with the aroma of small live things.
Huge as a swollen water skin,

it needs attention: to be punched
down to a manageable size,
crammed back into the oven

before it again rises. I’m getting
a late start, resolve to leave
sorrow in the shower with the weeping

tile, but grief follows me out
of the house. This is my dowry,
my jeweled pack animal,

its broad and decorated feet
plodding behind me. We sway
and pick along a path.

I swish scarves. The ground
quivers with little bells.
At night I’ll lie down again

with grief, this knobby bedfellow—
all elbows and crowding the middle,
and so heavy, all night the bed

is a ditch I roll into.

-Teresa Scollon lives in the Great Lakes region. She taught as writer-in-residence and faculty at Interlochen Arts Academy in 2007 and 2008. Her work has appeared in The Dunes Review, Atlanta Review and Nimrod (forthcoming). She’s a frequent contributor and producer for Traverse City’s community radio program “Radio Anyway.”

TEMPERANCE

My spine tonight held the husk
of childhood, a bundle of chipped-off corn—
all those seeds I was born to sow.

But during the dance I drizzled them
along the floor. Some seeds were dew drops,
other seeds turned to dust.

Tell me, Sister, about the flaking,
why germination falters this way.

You’ve been in the dance before.
I’ve seen pictures of your whole head
busting into flower, your hands—

fluttering petals.

- Stephanie N. Johnson is a writer and teacher whose work has appeared in AGNI, Borderlands, BPJ, Poetry Daily, dislocate, and elsewhere. Stephanie holds a BA in English from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and an MFA in poetry from the University of Minnesota. She currently lives in northern Minnesota with her husband and daughters.

Enough

My uncle’s funeral mass is at my childhood church, a large raspberry colored building that towers over my Catholic elementary school. As I sit in the rigid, oak pew listening to the Gospel of Thessalonians memories flood from the pulpit, seeping into my skin through the incensed air. The playground where I broke my hymen while playing with my first lover, the jungle gym, is behind me; the four-square game where boys looked under my uniform skirt to see my bright white underwear with hot pink X’s and O’s scribbled on them is to my left; and the strip of pavement where my friends and I sat in a circle under a rusting basketball net, trading Bonne Bell makeup, spraying Electric Youth perfume and Aqua Net Hairspray is cattycorner to the freshly painted four square area.

The church smells the same—a mixture of carpet cleaner, incense, sulfur, perfume, and spit up. The forbidding, lifeless, damp atmosphere also endures the test of time. This is where my friends and I would pretend pray to escape frigid winter recesses, which occurred for four months out of the year in rural Pennsylvania. I remember sitting in the pews whispering to my friends and trying to suppress the giggles that were mysteriously more contagious inside these walls than outside of them. One afternoon Mrs. Rodriguez, a stalwart churchgoer, caught us pretend praying and yelled at us for doing it wrong. You are supposed to look at the tabernacle, not the crucifix! she said, her voice bouncing off the surrounding Stations of the Cross enveloping our eleven year old selves. You could never do anything right in this church, in this playground. Regardless of how much Dr. Pepper lip-gloss I painted on my lips I was never pretty enough; no matter how good I tried to be I was born wrapped in the blanket of original sin. I was a young girl; an object to be protected and controlled like the poufy, curled bangs sticking to my tender forehead.

Years pass since the Aqua Net cherry popping elementary school days. My uncle’s body lies in a comfortable looking, cushioned casket, draped in religious cloth, perpendicular to the raised altar. I have not attended mass in a long time and, while I forget to genuflect before entering the pew, I remember all of the hymns. Someone catches my eye in the middle of one of my favorite songs On Eagle’s Wings—a flaxen young girl standing next to the priest. I knew that young women are allowed to be alter servers now, and have been for quite some time, but this is my first time seeing one in action. While I am no longer Catholic, I feel momentarily connected to the church through this little girl. After all, I was once that age, coming here to pray the wrong way.

She stands nervously next to the priest in her baggy, red and white vestment. I wonder how many young girls felt excluded, or not good enough, before she felt included. Seeing her stand shoulder to shoulder with the young boy on the altar should excite a feminist like me. It means progress, right? I close my eyes and try hard to birth some pleasure for my younger sisters and pride for my older ones for our many facets of progress, but I come up empty. It feels superficial, contrived, like Sarah Palin’s Vice Presidential nomination.

I am at a funeral for a man who died too young and too quickly. The spectrum of pain felt in the walls of this church is palpable. The priest comforts our quivering hearts by telling us my uncle is in heaven and none of us should feel sad because we will see him there shortly. He advises us to live for a time when we are with Michael and the Archangels in heaven. Prayer after prayer deflects, defers, and minimizes grief, stuffing the suffocating lump in our throats deeper and deeper within. All of this supposed consolation feels nonsensical. The girl standing on the altar symbolizing progress morphs into a living, breathing contradiction. She learns to control, to protect, and to exist outside of herself before she learns long division, and without the symbolic curled, stiff, lifeless bangs.

I take a few deep breaths while everyone else receives Communion, exhales fighting off the emotional suppression cast off the pulpit. As the mass comes to a close, I process behind my uncle’s casket to the song How Great Thou Art. I remember all the words but I can’t sing because the lump in my throat has traveled to my mouth triggering a hearty sob. I reach for my mom’s hand because she is also crying. I have not held my mother’s hand since I was a little girl, playing jump rope and four square in the nearby playground. Her hand is cold, boney and comforting. My uncle’s death gives me this moment with my mom, which is painfully beautiful. I observe my always stoic Aunt tearfully falling into people’s arms like an imploded building falls to the ground. That, too, is painfully beautiful. In this moment I feel impermanence of life and the myriad ways we fight against fear—we hairspray our beliefs to statues, infuse our future full of hope, and spray perfume to mask to avoid the present. However, hidden below the foreboding layer of fear is a beautiful, broken heart.

I no longer pretend pray, or run away from the cold, or have bangs to spray with Aqua Net. I allow the memories; the pain, the sadness, fear, and joy flow in and out of me constantly, without controlling, questioning, or masking them. I hold the delicate, sharp slices of my shattered heart in my hand and throw them in the air like confetti without piecing them back together or making them look pretty. I watch one piece return to the playground, another to the jungle gym, and others just fly away or fall straight down to the ground. Standing beyond the raspberry walls sitting in the muck of loss, I see beauty just below the surface and I feel grateful for the cuts in my hands and the pieces of my shattered heart exposed, flying away. I feel like I am finally doing something right in doing nothing. I am finally good enough not because I am good, but because I am enough.

- Alisa Guthrie was born and raised in rural Pennsylvania where Catholic nuns taught her more about patriarchy than about the Bible. She graduated from Moravian College with a major in Sociology and Women’s Studies. She currently lives in Florida where she is working on her first book.

Celestial Phenomena

Each year on the eleventh of August the earth splashes through a belt of fractured stones that whirls through our galaxy. I have read that on that one night of the year you can see a shower of meteorites colliding with our atmosphere and burning into dust as they tumble toward earth. You can stand in an ordinary backyard as heavenly pebbles rain down around you, winking into darkness before they touch the ground.

One year I noted the date and persuaded my sighted husband Dick to come outside with me on the porch. I wanted him to tell me what he saw, so I could taste the excitement of this phenomenon through his borrowed perception. After a few minutes of waiting he said he couldn’t see anything special. The city lights were too bright, he explained. It was strange to think that light generated by flimsy mortal beings could overpower the light of the heavens. Perhaps it would be like listening for the chirp of a sparrow above the blaring music at a bar. It seemed I might never experience the meteor shower, even by proxy.

My yearning to experience celestial phenomena traces back to one of my earliest memories. When I was four years old our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Wilson, helped me balance on the top rail of the fence between our yards. “Now,” she said grandly, as I perched at that great height, “if you reached up you could touch the moon!”

I stretched on tiptoe and searched eagerly above my head, but all I found was empty air. Grownups often lifted me up to show me things that were beyond my normal reach–the living-room ceiling, the star at the top of the Christmas tree, an icicle hanging from the rain gutter–but this time there was nothing. Mrs. Wilson said she was only teasing; the moon was very far away. I began to understand that certain things could be seen with the eyes but were forever beyond the reach of my hands.

The sun was far away too, but it was directly accessible. It poured its heat through the front windows in the morning and the kitchen windows by late afternoon. At midday it blazed directly overhead. It shone a thin, welcome warmth on the chill days of January, and burned my nose even on a cloudy day in July.

Experience taught me a lot about the sun, but the stars, the moon, and the planets remained abstractions. At school I pored over diagrams made with raised lines on paper and learned the shapes of Orion’s belt and Cassiopeia’s chair. I read about nebulae and supernovas. In a strange way their remoteness made sense to me. Astronomy was no more unfathomable than that ubiquitous phenomenon known as color that mysteriously tinged every aspect of life. Color, like the universe, was a vast impalpable dimension. Whether I perceived it or not color was real, so why not stars and galaxies?

As a wife and mother, spending summers in the mountains of central Mexico, the wonders of the sky drew a little bit nearer. In San Miguel de Allende human-made lights are few and scattered at night. Sometimes Dick would call our daughter Janna to the flat roof of our rented house and show her the full moon or the Big Dipper. I hurried after them and listened hungrily as they tried to translate their vision into words. The moon I imagined as a warm round stone, big enough to fit snugly into my cupped hands. The stars were hovering dots of heat, so many that their complex patterns were hard to decipher.

In the summer of 1991, when Janna was seven, Mexico looked forward to a total eclipse of the sun. The news crackled with excitement and warnings. Don’t look directly at the eclipse, the public was told again and again. The light can burn up your retinas. Suddenly the threat of blindness loomed over the entire nation. I wondered if people studied me as I passed in the street with my long white cane. Did they think I had ignored advice and gazed at some eye-searing eclipse in el norte? Maybe they told themselves to stay indoors and skip the whole event, lest they should end up like me.

For a small fee Pan Bimbo, Mexico’s biggest commercial bread company, promised safety. At any grocery store you could buy a shoebox-like contraption with a peephole at one end and a mirror at the other. You were supposed to peer into the box and see the eclipse as a reflection. It would be a long step away from the real thing, but safety came first.

We bought a couple of Bimbo boxes and kept them on hand on the kitchen counter. I hoped that Dick and Janna would enjoy the eclipse, but I didn’t understand all the hype. What could be the difference between an eclipse and the sun disappearing behind a cloud?

On the morning of the eclipse Janna’s summer day-camp sent the children home early. She sat in our sunny patio, organizing races with the garden snails, while I worked at my desk. It was a little past noon when Dick gave a shout. “It’s starting!” he cried. “Oh my God! It’s incredible!”

I stepped out into the patio. Only the faintest trace of the sun’s warmth was left, and within moments even that was gone. The air grew chill and strangely quiet, as if some compelling life force had been siphoned away. The swallows that usually filled the sky at twilight swooped and twittered overhead, their daily timepiece unsprung. The crickets under the bougainvillea gave a few tentative scrapes, then broke into their full evening recital. And from every street in the town came a cacophony of barking dogs.

“Wow!” Janna kept exclaiming. “Wow! It’s so cool! I didn’t know it was going to be like this!”

Bimbo boxes forgotten, we clambered up the twisting stairway to the roof, as close to the sky as our human bodies could carry us. Dick said the sun looked like a doughnut–no, it was thinner than that, much much thinner, it was a ring, and in the middle hung a dark spot, the moon, but not a moon he’d ever seen before, it was an emptiness, a not-being. And around the moon that ring, the outline of what the sun ought to be. I thought of the ring the way I thought of the auras some people claim to see over the heads of their friends–a drifting substance light as a fine silk scarf. In the center the moon was a cold vacancy, shapeless and deep.

In less than an hour a bit of sun-warmth slid down to us, and the air seemed to lighten in welcome. The swallows went back to wherever they spent their daytime hours, and the crickets fell silent. The dogs gave a few last yips and were still. We climbed down from the roof into our sunny patio, the early afternoon world fully restored.

Later we trekked up the hill to a friend’s house for a post-eclipse celebration. To my own delight, I found I could take an active part in the recap, describing all the evidence of strangeness that I had perceived. I fully agreed with the others that the eclipse had been a spectacular experience. Most had taken photographs. Janna sat on a bench and made a series of sketches to capture what she had seen. No one, as far as I could tell, had viewed the eclipse through a peephole, and everyone’s retinas seemed intact.

The eclipse was a sensory medley–the sudden chill, the sound of the animals, and for most the sight of the moon and its mystic aura. Yet the event possessed a magic that surpassed description. “Awesome!” people called it. “Utterly amazing!” “Like nothing I ever could have imagined!” And to think I had asked how it would be any different from a passing cloud!

In the days that followed I thought a lot about the crickets. How did they know that the sun had disappeared? The dogs might have looked up and seen the change. I could imagine the swallows noticing strange goings-on above them; after all, the sky was their element. But the crickets hid deep in the tangled shade of the bougainvillea, or crouched in the hollow places under stones. Even on a sunny day they lived in cool darkness. What difference did they perceive?

Maybe the sudden drop in temperature woke them from their silence. But suppose it was something more. The ancient Greeks wrote about the music of the spheres, a faraway harmony sung by the stars and planets as they coursed through space. Might some celestial hum reach the earth at registers beyond human hearing, but within the range of dogs and birds and even insects?

Or perhaps the eclipse caused a shift in the earth’s magnetic field. Maybe the animals were stirred by some deep, visceral tug. Did we feel it too, dimly, far below consciousness? Did that nameless pull add to our sense of wonder?

The summer was over, and we were heading back to Chicago. I realized suddenly that I hadn’t paid attention to the calendar. The eleventh of August had slipped away. In this unlighted country I could have called Dick and Janna up to the roof and shared the delights of the meteor shower at last. I had forgotten all about it, and now it was too late. What surprises might the shower bring — tiny sizzles in the air? Little dots of heat upon my skin? A pitted pebble tumbling to the roof at my feet? Next summer, I promised myself, I’ll remember. Next chance I get, I’m going to find out.

We were packing to leave San Miguel when Janna asked me suddenly, “What would happen if everybody in the world was blind?”

“You mean,” I said, “if everybody went blind all of a sudden, like from staring at an eclipse for too long?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Nobody’d know how to do anything. It’d be totally scary.” She was thoughtful for a moment before she added, “If everybody was born blind, though, that’d be okay. They wouldn’t know any different, so they wouldn’t worry about it.”

As we carried clothes down from the line on the roof we imagined aloud a world in which sight was unknown. Vehicles would run on tracks, like trains and trolleys. Airplanes pilots would navigate using exquisitely precise radio communication. Doctors would read X-rays on a screen with minute tactile points activated to show the form and position of an injury.

“I guess people wouldn’t figure out much about astronomy,” I said. “They wouldn’t know about the moon and the stars.”

“Sure they would!” Janna exclaimed. “They’d want to know what’s over their heads and they’d come up with ways to find out.”

Perhaps one morning, in that hypothetical world, a woman finds a large, rough stone lying on her roof beside the clothesline. The sun has barely risen but the stone is hot to her touch. Where did it come from? And perhaps, on another day, the temperature suddenly plummets, the swallows chatter and the dogs begin to howl. The greatest minds in the land would ponder what had happened. They would ask questions, and somehow, over time, answers would be found.

- In 1978 Deborah Kent published her first young-adult novel, Belonging, which launched her on a thirty-year career as a writer of books for young readers. Now she is exploring other forms of writing, particularly the personal essay. Her most recent book is The Tragedy of the Japanese American Internment, published by Enslow in 2008.