Max Cavitch – Bridge

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Max Cavitch
Bridge

Max Cavitch writes: ‘Bridge is a digital photograph of an arched bridge in Philadelphia, taken with a Nikon D7000 and mid-range zoom lens. To achieve the desired ‘vibrating’ effect, I took the shot with the camera hand-held, using a narrow aperture and long exposure time (approximately 1.3 seconds). The lighting is natural: an overcast late afternoon, when the numerous small lights beneath the bridge were on, yielding the pale orange, wavy lines. The bridge straddles the Schuylkill River, whose waters are visible in the lower right quadrant. This is one of many such shots taken; this one achieved the desired effect so well that no post-shoot editing was needed.’

Max Cavitch, Bridge, digital photograph, 2024

Bob Ward – Listening In

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Bob Ward
Listening In

In all but the worst of weathers, my partner and I take a daily walk both for the exercise and to keep tuned into our natural surroundings. One place that we visit regularly is a woodland that serves as a country park. It is crossed by a myriad of tracks that lead one past ponds, a children’s playground, and pieces of outdoor sculpture, notably a lifelike buzzard. There is also an open-sided marquee for fresh air events.
       Revisiting the woods following serious gales, we found that the fabric covering for the marquee had been ripped off. It now lay in a scrambled heap to one side, and the area was cordoned for safety’s sake by a long loop of red and white tape.

A steady breeze billowed the tape into a gracious crescent. As it did so, the tape vibrated, making a low burring sound.
       We passed on, eventually taking a path along the far side of the wood that we don’t often reach. There we came across a new feature: a rustic memorial bench faced a board that carried a poem of remembrance, of which the opening words were:

       ‘I heard your voice in the wind today…’

       It was a moving elegy, but neither the author nor the person remembered were named. The effect of that omission is that the poem comes to speak for anyone mourning a loved one. Having just lost my younger brother, it certainly spoke for me.    AQ

Jim Ross – Body Talk

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Jim Ross
Body Talk

Soon after my wife Ginger and I met, we discovered we’d both secretly dreamed of learning the sign language used by deaf people. A decade earlier when I was commuting to high school in New York City, on Manhattan’s upper east side, I often crossed paths on the Lexington Avenue subway with students enrolled at a school for the deaf. I didn’t know until decades later that they attended The Lexington Avenue School at 68th and Lex, founded in 1864, starting out in someone’s living room. I watched entranced as they spoke with their hands, faces, eyes, and bodies. Two deaf students signing together looked like dancers performing a pas de deux. They didn’t merely speak with their hands. Their bodies moved across the subway platform, as if they were auditioning for West Side Story. At the same age, Ginger concluded that the use of facial expressions and body language turns signers into Marcel Marceaus. Our fascinations simmered until we met and revealed them to each other.

***

In 1976, about a decade after linguist William Stokoe argued that American Sign Language (ASL) is as a full language distinct from English or any other language and has all the expressive power of any oral language, Ginger and I enrolled at Gallaudet, the only university with all programs designed for deaf and hard-of-hearing students, also founded in 1864. Twice weekly we attended two-hour-long classes in ASL. Some classmates who were hard of hearing and came from the hearing world were taking ASL to enable communications with the Deaf (i.e., signing) community and make connections. Our personable teacher, Will, required that each student tell a joke at every class meeting. We had at our disposal ASL, then called Amaslan, plus finger spelling, and all the facial expressions and body language we dared muster.
             Coming up with jokes that lent themselves to signing had its challenges. Most spoken jokes centre around a homonym to form set-up and/or punch-lines. In one type, two same-sounding words are spelled differently and carry different meanings. That type wouldn’t work as a signed joke because there is no possibility of sound with all its ambiguities. In a second type, a word encompasses two or more meanings within a single spelling. As a young researcher starting my career, I was fascinated to see that we were operating on the fringes of the science of humour, especially in translation. Relying on ASL supplemented by finger spelling, we sought out jokes whose set-up and/or punch lines employed the second type of homonym: same spelling, different meanings. Sound differences were irrelevant since we were limited to ASL, finger spelling, facial expressions, and body language. For help, every week we called my Dad, also a researcher, whose encyclopaedic memory enabled him to rattle off jokes on any topic, on demand.
           I can still tell my favourite Dad joke from class. It uses more body language than sign. A man on a deserted island sees a woman in a wet suit walking ashore toward him. As she unzips a pocket on her right sleeve, she asks, ‘Would you like a cigarette?’ He responds, ‘You mean, you’ve got cigarettes in there?’ as he imitates her hand going ‘in there’, into her right sleeve pocket. As she unzips a pocket on the other sleeve, she asks, ‘Would you like some brandy?’ He answers, ‘You mean, you’ve got brandy in there?’ as he again imitates her hand going ‘in there’. After he swigs some brandy, she begins to unzip the wet suit’s central zipper, and asks, ‘Would you like to play around?’ In response, he reaches down deeply into his imaginary wet suit, and with gusto asks, ‘You mean, you’ve got golf clubs in there?’
           The joke’s set-up line uses the second type of homonym but with a twist. In fingerspelling, ‘play around’ and ‘play a round’ are finger spelled identically, but convey very different meanings. They happen to be pronounced identically too (or almost identically, depending on local dialect) but that’s irrelevant because sound doesn’t enter into signing. And its absence is filled by reinforcing uses of body language. To reach my audience, I imagined I was one of the deaf students from the Lexington Avenue School whom I saw years ago on the Lexington Avenue subway. While I received no offers to perform at the Improv, Ginger says the joke was a hit.
           After every class Will required that we move to the Gallaudet Rathskeller. One rationale was that we could observe members of Gallaudet’s Deaf community in candid interactions. That proximity also created the possibility that conversations might develop between us and more experienced signers; at another level, some of us might make connections, and gain entre into the Deaf culture. But, the major reason for bringing us there was that we would have no alternative to signing with each other because the juke box blasted at max decibels so deaf students could feel the vibrations. Our Rathskeller time placed us in the heart of Deaf culture and temporarily made us look like members of the Deaf community reaching for a new language. For some hard-of hearing classmates who didn’t yet consider themselves culturally Deaf, it helped bring about their initiation and fostered connectedness.
           Going to the Rathskeller led to some memorable exchanges. My most educational one occurred one night when I tried to order dinner. After I used a combination of signs and finger spelling to turn in our order, the deaf student worker behind the counter reared back his head, looked at me as if I were crazy, shook his head vigorously, shrugged his shoulders, and orally said, ‘Mister, you just ordered a pepperoni penis. We don’t serve those here.’ Evidently, my thumb position was off. For ‘pizza’, I was supposed to make a ‘p’ followed snappily by an ‘a’. I formed the ‘p’ properly. However, to form the ‘a’, I was supposed to hold my thumb erect alongside my closed fist. Instead, I wrapped it over the first two closed fingers. The difference between pizza and penis was a mere slip of a thumb. After looking duly contrite, I adjusted thumb position, and delivered my request with flair. ‘I’m on it’, he said.
           Ginger became choreographer for the Gallaudet modern dance group, Good Vibrations. She had completed her bachelors in modern dance the year before. Her strategic advantage was her ability to hear rhythmic subtleties. Some dancers could feel those subtleties. They shared the collective advantages of being imbued with Deaf culture and accustomed to using body language as both intuitive and intentional components in communication. For them, dance became another vehicle for using body language to communicate and entertain. Watching them rehearse reminded me that in high school I thought the deaf students communicating in sign language on the subway looked like dancers. Maybe I’d been onto something.

***

Flash forward about fifteen years, Ginger and I have brought two children into the world. Our daughter’s kindergarten teacher was Linda Jordan, who happened to be married to I. King Jordan, a dean at Gallaudet. Three years later, Linda took a job at Gallaudet around the time it awarded an honorary doctorate to my then new favourite actress, Marlee Matlin, who had just won an Oscar as best actress for Children of a Lesser God. And then the seventh President of Gallaudet, which in its 123 years had only hearing Presidents, resigned. The board announced three finalists to become Gallaudet’s eighth President: one hearing, the second deaf since birth, and the third, I. King Jordan, deaf due to a motorcycle accident at age 21. Student efforts to promote selecting a deaf President garnered support from U.S. President George Bush (the first one) and key Senators on both sides of the aisle. After the board selected another hearing President, claiming ‘a deaf person cannot function in a hearing world’, Gallaudet students, faculty, staff, and alumni launched an escalating series of Deaf President Now protests and issued four demands, including selection of a deaf President.
           The protests shut down the Gallaudet campus and extended to Capitol Hill. The hearing candidate resigned. A week later, Jordan—who came to Gallaudet as a college Freshman twelve years earlier—was announced as Gallaudet’s new President. What’s little remembered now is that a faction protested against Jordan too, claiming that because he wasn’t born deaf, he wasn’t truly one of them and couldn’t appreciate what it’s like growing up without hearing. In other words, he couldn’t embrace being Deaf with the sense of collective pride that they shared. The flip-side arguments were that Jordan’s years as a hearing person would enable him to communicate more effectively with the hearing world; and, that nobody questioned his pride in being Deaf during his years as dean at Gallaudet. Jordan served as Gallaudet’s eighth President from 1988 until 2006. When Gallaudet’s ninth President was announced, protests again broke out, partly on the grounds that Jordan’s successor wasn’t deaf enough.
           Does someone with an acquired deafness have the same right to call themselves deaf as those born that way? Within the Deaf community, being deaf isn’t regarded as a pathology or deficiency but a mark of pride, the defining characteristic of their culture. However, those who lose their hearing can either view their becoming deaf as a pathology to be overcome so they can remain functioning members of the hearing world or they can embrace sign language and the Deaf community. The science of Deafness and deafness has explored such questions but, to a large degree, they relate more to what defines the Deaf culture and how the Deaf culture stretches to embrace those with acquired deafness. The Deaf culture can be viewed as a political entity and even a movement, and like any political movement, it rightfully identifies that which it views as marks of pride, to counter what those outside the Deaf culture may view as pathology, disadvantage, deficiency, or weakness. Rejection of terms like ‘hearing impaired’ in favour of ‘hard of hearing’ is an example of the repudiation of the pathologizing of deafness. For the Deaf culture to be strong, it must be based on pride, and in large part that pride derives from developing facility in sign language.

***

In 2009, I joined the planning committee for the 40th anniversary reunion of my graduating class from Georgetown University. My job was to find the lost. Among them was James Woodward, who stayed on to earn his doctorate there in the sociolinguistics of ASL. Woodward is the one who, in 1972, while still a doctoral student, suggested using deaf (with a lower case d) to refer to the audiological condition of deafness, and Deaf (with an upper case D) to refer to Deaf culture and the Deaf community. This convention has been accepted within the Deaf culture and in scholarly literature in English and, to a lesser degree, in other languages.
           In searching for Woodward, I was able to determine that he spent years at Gallaudet, staring immediately after our graduation, and worked closely with Stokoe in securing ASL’s acceptance as a full language distinct from any other. I figured out that Woodward was splitting his time between China and Vietnam but had no means of contacting him. Out of desperation, I called the office at Gallaudet where he used to work, because I knew he was continuing to study the emergence of and adaptations in sign languages in various cultures around the world. All I hoped for was an email address. Instead, when I asked how to reach him, I was told, ‘He happens to be here today. Hold on, I’ll transfer you.’ My heart leapt. Woodward and I talked for over an hour. My agenda dissolved as I became intrigued.
           Woodward spent lots of time talking about the emergence of sign language on Martha’s Vineyard and its impact on ASL. Historically, a significant portion of the population of Martha’s Vineyard passed along hereditary deafness to their children. Because of its disproportionately large deaf population, Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language (MVSL) emerged in the early 1700s as an evolutionary derivative of Old Kent Sign Language in England, with influences from French Sign Language. Because virtually everyone on Martha’s Vineyard gained some facility in MVSL, deafness presented no barrier to public life and deaf people were fully integrated into the general population. Hearing children were taught MVSL in their early years. Hearing residents often used MVSL in communicating with each other. The last person born into MVSL died in 1952, but efforts continue to document MVSL. It lives on because hundreds of signs from MVSL were incorporated intact into ASL. Recently, some schools on the island began incorporating ASL into their curricula.
           In a larger sense, Woodward’s point was that historically, wherever sizeable numbers of deaf people are present, they create a form of sign language or derive one from other sign languages that have entered their culture. Starting with the influence of French Sign Language on ASL, he has applied comparative linguistic techniques to study sign language varieties in such places as Costa Rica, Hong Kong, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Shanghai, Thailand, and Vietnam. In addition to studying comparative relationships of sign language, he has endeavoured to document endangered sign languages, such as Hawai’i Sign Language. Twenty years ago, Gallaudet honoured him as an international leader in promoting the well-being of Deaf people around the world. The last I knew, Woodward was still shuttling between The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Dong Nai University in Vietnam.

***

Nearly half a century has passed since Ginger and I first took ASL at Gallaudet. We hardly appreciated then that we were present during a formative period in gaining acceptance globally for ASL as a full language distinct from all others. We drank beers and ate pizza in the Gallaudet Rathskeller surrounded by members of the Deaf community as Deaf Pride was emerging. The Lexington Avenue School, whose students I watched with awe as they signed on the platforms of the Lexington Avenue subway, cashed in on its pricey Manhattan real estate and moved to more affordable Queens. Ginger and I held onto sign language for use in noisy bars and restaurants. That we passed onto our kids too.
           Recently, our two youngest grandchildren, both hearing, began to learn such ASL signs as ‘more’, ‘food’, and ‘thank you’ in preschool as early as three months old, long before they could speak a single word. They’ve held onto their use of sign and the number of signs in their repertoires has grown exponentially. They’ve in turn passed their rudimentary facility in ASL on to family members. Of late, they’ve been giving us a refresher course. ‘Put your body into it’, urges Ginger, the former dance teacher who forty-five years ago served as choreographer for the Gallaudet dance group, Good Vibrations. ‘Think of yourselves as dancing with your hands, your arms, your whole bodies. This is body talk.’        AQ

Gavin Kayner – Gratitude

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Gavin Kayner
Gratitude

Gertrude Hinklemeyer lived in a two-story bungalow on a crowded block in a crowded city—surrounded by humanity but utterly alone.
       No one knew her name.
       No one, in fact, cared to know it.
       She had a husband, a son, a cat. Once-upon-a-time. But the husband played dead and was carted away only to be resuscitated by a female impersonator whose best work involved Judy Garland and a cigar. Sonny boy had facial reconstructive surgery and changed his last name to Smith in repudiation of his heritage. Repudiation of her. The cat gave up after only three lives.
       And yet, Gertrude persevered.
       That’s what life does, despite the odds.
       Most of the time.
       Angular, gaunt, hooked-nosed, and pointy-chined, the dear woman resembled a stork or some maligned creature from a grim fairy tale.
       Children egged her house on Easter and smashed pumpkins on her doorstep on Halloween. The 4th of July, Labor Day, and so forth had their own particular desecrations.
        For that and the fact of her singular life, the holidays dismayed Gertrude.
       When she went out for her morning constitutional, folks crossed the street to avoid sharing the same sidewalk.
       While shopping, hourly help ridiculed her visage with snorting commentary amongst each other.
       As these and other large and little cruelties accumulated, they formed a callus on her soul which protected her against debilitating despair.
       Up to a point.
       Income from a trust fund protected Gertrude from abject poverty, also up to a point. The fund kept her in tins of tuna fish and baked beans.
       And an occasional pair of pre-owned shoes.
       And not much more.
       At night, she kept all the lights on in the house. Even the ones in the closets. Especially the ones in the closets. That’s where the persistent memories hung out. The regrets and rejections. Without the lights, they’d swarm the rooms like rabid bats squeaking for their bloody feast. Sucking her dry.
       Desiccated-she’d collapse into dust.
       Dust the final anonymity.
       Gertrude perused the Romance Novels in her local 2nd hand shop—Starting Over. There she could buy a basketful of titillation for less than ten dollars.
       At home, in her highbacked, claw-footed chair, she feasted on such pulp ravenous for unbridled passion, musky sex—a human touch.
       But never took her own pleasure. That constituted a sin. According to her childhood prurient priest.
       She lingered over the novels’ smouldering covers. Those hunky men with taut stomachs, broad hairless chests, square chins, requisite piercing blue or green eyes. Seeking redemption.
       From implausible gods in a godless universe.
       Her husband had been a dough-boy, not a stud-muffin. Nevertheless, Gertrude missed the idea of him. His palatable presence. The rattling of newspapers. The ‘Did you read this, Gertie? A man robbed a bank with a bar of soap. I guess he won’t be caught red-handed.’ The tittering laughter as he admired his witticism.
       Such as it seemed to him.
       She missed the boy who went from eating Play-Doh to modelling it into voluptuous figures which he used to create pornographic content for certain malleable websites.
       She missed the cat who disdained petting and hissed and raked her hand with its fierce claws whenever Gertrude reached out to seek comfort in its silky black coat.
       The house reverberated in silence now. Not even the floorboards creaked lest they disturb the weighty quiet surrounding Gertrude like a thick cloak into which she burrowed having no other choice.
       When she did attempt to seek refuge in the radio or television, either only served to accentuate her isolation.
       One dark, but not so stormy night, a good deal of time after the cat had expired from ennui, Gertrude, absent the presence of any sort of animate being, finished reading Secret Rendezvous and luxuriating in the exquisite consummation of the heroine’s climatic ending, had an epiphany. She said into the hum of solitude, ‘Other people read these books. But no one lives these lives. I’m not alone in my longing. Surely.’
       At this point in the story, you’d think this revelation would serve as an incantation, perhaps inviting a romantic hero, a stock character from a well-used, fifty-cent potboiler clad in suggestive jeans and unbuttoned shirt from the ethereal to make an appearance as the material.
       To lighten the tale and give us hope.
       But no.
       This is fiction, not fantasy.
       Instead, Gertrude took the revelation as a final condemnation of her and humanity’s futility and rose from her chair, donned her forest-green parka, stepped out into the cracking cold, and walked right out of her life.
       She passed houses grave and dark as tombs. Passed lit windows framing solitary figures clinging to porcelain cups as if it kept them afloat. Passed the homeless huddled on their cardboard beds in dank door wells. Passed the man at the burnt-out street lamp, the red flare of his cigarette—a warning or a plea.
       Passed broken junkies hunting their temporary fixes. Midnight riders sombre as morticians. Strangers as ghost haunting the grim witching hours.
       Passed the alarming carnival of police lights splashed across the grimy facades of soulless high-rises.
       Passed the pitiable plight of the human condition.
       When she arrived at the river, starlight dancing on the murmuring current, she stopped and considered her options. The immensity of time and space. The insignificance of being.
       The unbridgeable chasm between existence and meaning.
       Her own bleak life.
       An indifferent night mocked her poor philosophizing.
       And the river offered no solace being too shallow and near at hand.
       A battered truck rumbled across the bridge where she stood.
       One hundred feet beyond Gertrude, the pick-up’s brake lights flashed on and it stopped. The engine went to idling. An elongated minute ticked over before the driver-side door yawned opened, illuminating the interior. A shadowy figure eased from the vehicle. It turned and faced Gertrude.
       Two incidental lives were about to intersect.
       The moment vibrated with possibilities.
       Gertrude awaited whatever might happen next with gratitude.    AQ

Caroline Cronjäger – What the Cat Dragged Out

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Caroline Cronjäger
What the Cat Dragged Out

It is almost noon and I long to be outside. The sky is a hazy blue with just a few wispy clouds to the West. A blanket of bogs and marshes covers the smooth hills, their reds and golds radiant in the morning sun. To the innocent eye it seems perfectly harmless, but as the wind picks up and stirs the grasses, I am forced to lock the door, double-check all windows, and move around cautiously, trying not to draw attention to myself. The sound of its gusts sends shivers down my spine, and like prey sensing the predator’s approach, my sensitivity to sound and movement is heightened.
       There is no mistaking this for a natural phenomenon, simply a movement of air masses. This wind is not only shaking the foundation of the trailer, but unhinges the very laws of physics. It bends straight lines into circles, tugs the tiny salt crystals back into the shaker and has you burn your tongue on the very cup of tea that was lukewarm just a moment earlier. No, these blasts cannot be mistaken for something harmless, not if every hair on your neck stands up at each gust and crack.
       On mornings like these, my mind is heavy with dark and grey thoughts. The malicious skies press down on my conscience, squashing what feebly solace is left to me. Though locked out by boards and bolts, its presence imposes itself on my mind, drains my energy, and dampens the few positive thoughts, residues of times past.
       As I watch the scene outside, a pair of eyes appears hovering above the horizon. Eyes of an animal, much more than of a human. A primaeval fire burns within their brown depths, speaking of a determination that can only be born out of hardship, survival. As I blink, the floating eyes blink back. It seems impossible to reunite the creature reflected in the smudged window pane with the woman I was before. I feel like the kernel of a fruit that only emerged after every layer of comfort, hope, and solace has been peeled away. As each layer withered and died, the flame emerged from within. It is all that is left. Burning out of hollow eyes, bringing to life the taut, dry skin, the dirty brows, the chapped lips. Today, all that remains of me is a survivor.
       A movement at my feet retrieves my mind from its depths, pulling it back into my physical body. Margaret rubs her nose against my leg and points her tail to the ceiling in a gesture of greeting. “Good morning, my love,” I say with the cheerful inflection that is reserved only for her and pick her up. The cat sniffs my cheek and then rubs her soft black head against my neck. After feeding, she saunters off in the direction of the bedroom. In her absence, my thoughts regain their dull tinge, and the faint rattling of brittle roof boards in the blows fuels my unease.
       The morning hours are spent picking up one book after another, putting each down after reading just a handful of lines. Restlessness is plaguing my mind, and the occasional creaking of different parts of this ramshackle home grating against each other gives me goosebumps. With each passing moment, the gales seem to grow stronger, more threatening. Discarding my current book, I get up to make a round of the locks and latches that keep the windows closed, and bolts and screws that attach their frames to the wall boards. They fortify the physical barrier that separates the inside of the trailer from the fierce, unforgiving wrath raging outside.
       From my vantage point in here, it is impossible to tell that the grasses covering the mountain flanks are moving, but the walls are shuddering in the strong gusts. Rushing and gushing around my small abode, the wind is ripping violently at every crease, edge and tear it can find, ravenous for exploitable vulnerabilities in the foreign matter, the human-made materials. Though all windows are shut and latched, the wind pries its long, razor-thin talons into the narrowest gaps, hungrily feeling around for a living thing, tirelessly seeking vengeance.
       On my round, I encounter Margaret who is nestled up in her usual nook behind the bedroom door. As I bend to scratch her head, a warm purr emanates from her body. At least I have a companion in this desolation. Mildly reassured, I return to the couch and open my book on the page I left off. Luckily, the wind did not move my bookmark—it has played this trick before. I curl up and pull a blanket around me. Hopefully, this will all have blown over by tomorrow. Huddled like this on the sofa, I eventually fall into a sleep haunted by eerie dreams, distorted flickers from the past.
       A stuffy Hackney flat. Thick, hot air. Hands lifting Margaret into a pet carrier.
       Motorway signs flying by. Capital letters. The NORTH. Endless motorways.
       Brown eyes in the rear-view mirror. A spec of silver blinking in the left earlobe.
       When I awake from my slumber, I absentmindedly reach up to twist my earlobe between my fingers, but find it naked. Trying to shake off the strange residues of my dreams, I drag myself to the kitchen. While the kettle is boiling, I rub sleep from my eyes and peer outside. The sun has moved past its zenith and the wind has risen to a raging storm. I shudder as an unusual cold creeps into my bones. Returning to the couch with a steaming mug of ginger tea, I pick up the booklet that has slipped from my lap. As I mindlessly leaf through the tattered copy of Leaves of Grass, my unease at the wind’s noise is mounting. I hear it stalking around the trailer, encircling me, drawing closer to its prey. It is trying to pry open the twisted latches of the bedroom window, pulling, pushing, wrestling itself into the tiniest cracks, causing the structure to bend and creak. It taunts me, it threatens, it seeks to inspire fear, panic; prompts me to do something stupid in despair.
       Creak.
       But I have known it for years. Though an enemy, it is as intimate as my beloved Margaret. It cannot outsmart me. I force my thoughts to return to ‘Song of Myself’: ‘Unscrew the locks from the doors! / Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!’
       Creak.
       My thoughts wander to the jams on the windows. How they were manufactured from cheap metals in some godforsaken steel plant on another continent.
       Creak.
       How they have been shipped to this island to be screwed onto the frames at crooked angles by some stoned carpenter’s apprentice.
       Creak.
       How they have been sitting in this desolation for decades.
       Creak.
       Time eating away at the substance.
       Creak.
       Erosion.
       Creak.
       Rot.
       Creak.
       I start up and fly through the door to the bedroom, slamming it open with the full momentum of my body. It doesn’t bang against the wall. In the middle of the room, I freeze and stare. My chest is heaving up and down in uncontrollable spasms, my heart pounding violently against its bony cage.
       The window is closed. Latches securely in place. Jams sitting perfectly aligned on their frame. Only a delicate draft squeezes through narrow gaps in the brittle insulation and lightly tugs at the blinds. They swing back and forth lazily.
       My head is spinning, and I stumble backwards, blindly groping for a corner of reality to hold onto. Instead, I step onto something soft, eliciting a weak whimper. As I turn, I see a small mount of bristling fur, visible quivering. Margaret. The force of my entrance must have pinned her body between wall and door, and now she is lying there in a trembling heap. As I bend down to inspect the cat, I realise that her head is angled in an unusual way. She seems unable to get to her paws, and instead gives off a quiet but steady whine. What have I done?
       An hour later, Margaret rests on a pillow beside me on the couch. As I gently arrange her tail around her, in the way she usually does herself when curling up for sleep, she hisses at me in anger, but her body is too weak to fight the intrusion. Her spine is not the straight line it used to be, and she seems to have lost control over most of her movement. Still shell-shocked, I regard the battered creature. I reach out to gently stroke her fur the way I always do, for my own comfort just as much as for hers, but this time I am met with a claw, instead of her purr. My breath hitches in my chest. Of course I knew that she would leave me at some point, but in my fantasy, that point always lay in some faraway future. And I never imagined myself to be the cause. We have been companions for many years, both finding solace in each other’s company. Moreover, she reminds me of a time before.
       Before dams collapsed, seemingly without any physical explanation, before the grid broke down, before cyclones appeared out of nowhere, laying waste to whole countries at a time. Before Westminster was reduced to rubble, I had been an aspiring journalist, eager to right the wrongs of the world through my unfaltering belief in democracy and the power of the written word. The fires and floods and epidemics and conflicts flaring up around the globe must surely be a momentary disturbance in the grand scheme of things, and we would, ultimately, converge back to an equilibrium, to peace. But in our single-mindedness, our pursuit of expansion, economic growth and development, we laid the cornerstone of our annihilation. We liked to think ourselves smart in the way we exploited natural resources and farmed every last bit of land and ocean to exhaustion, but just like a kid pushed around in the school yard, there was only so much that the water, air and soil could take. Once they were fed up, they started fighting back.
       As natural disasters mounted, my friends fled London one by one, dispersing into whatever part of the world each deemed safest. Meanwhile, I was holding on to the hope that things would eventually turn around, and shaved Margaret’s black fur to a stubble to keep her from overheating.
       When London summers grew so scorching that bikes left in the midday sun were reduced to aluminium puddles, I finally caved, packed up my Prius and drove up to Scotland, Margaret by my side. The plain between Edinburgh and Glasgow had already been largely reconquered by the turbulent seas, leaving no safe land routes to travel by. Hence, a ferry carried us over the Forth, the very same boat that would capsize only months later in a flash flood, its wreckage and the bodies of its unlucky passengers washed out to the North Sea, never to be seen again.
       High above the malicious waters and entrenched in the rocky Cairngorms, I started mapping out our survival plans. Hunting proved to be impractical. Instead, I bought up as many preserves as would fit the boot on periodical trips to the nearest settlements. When the locals stopped selling because they, too, were starving, I turned to cultivating my own crops. My final drive to Aviemore also marked the last time I spoke to another human being. Radio transmission broke down a few years later, and since then, no human voice apart from my own has reached my ear. For a while, the quiet brought relief. Relief from the horrors occurring around the globe. The last broadcast before the signal died had reported a swarm of locusts, each the size of a motorcycle, obliterating most of France. For weeks after, the winged beasts haunted my dreams, and during waking hours their buzz filled my ears and I expected them to come and devour me at any moment. But the locusts never came. I grew accustomed to the silence, and worked away on my improvised farmland one monotonous day after the other. For a while, it seemed like Margaret and I had found something. Not quite happiness, but rather a distorted reflection of it in a dirty pond.
       But then, the winds picked up. In the early days, they came as whistling breezes, carrying with them an overwhelming sense that something was awfully off. Though no stronger than a sea breeze on a summer’s day, they prompted me to instinctively drop my rake and hurry inside, slamming the door shut and waiting till the gusts had subsided. Since then, we have been constantly on guard.
       I shake myself out of the depressing memories and return to the no less dire present, as my eyes return to Margaret. Her tremble has subsided, replaced by a soft whimpering that is almost drowned out by the gale raging outside. Her hair has shed its velvety shine. Panic is rising in my chest, and I start to clench my fists around the pillows and cushion, restlessly kneading and punching the upholstery. Between the worn-out fabric, something pricks my palm. I hesitate, then retrieve the minute object. A silvery ear stud, blinking in the sun.
       As I stare at it, I feel a knot tightening in my chest. It rises slowly and expands, painfully compressing my windpipe. For a moment, I think that I am throwing up, but instead, what breaks out of me is a gut-wrenching weep.
       It hits me in gusts, each sending a violent jolt through my body. I sob uncontrollably, and eventually, I scream. I scream and scream, and the storm screams back at me. I scream at the world that dared to fall apart in my hands, at the cruelty of the winds that imprison me on this godforsaken mountain. Most of all, I scream at myself. I scream at myself for ruining the last shred of happiness I had left. I scream at myself for being so rash, so naive, so stupid. The distinction between my shaking body and the shuddering walls breaks down and the storm’s howling becomes my own. All sense of up and down, of motion and time, is lost in the tempest.
 
After what feels like an eternity, the storm subsides. Like the waters of a tsunami wave flowing back into the sea, uncovering the devastation they wreaked, my body goes limp and collapses on the couch. My face and shirt stained with tears, snot, and saliva, I spend my last iota of energy to crawl up to Margaret. Careful not to touch her, I gently lower myself down beside her, and gingerly bed my head as close to the motionless body as I dare. Closing my aching eyes, I draw in a long, shuddering breath and take in her warm, musky scent that has provided me with so much comfort over the years.
       I think about the claw that reached out to scratch me, and the vengeful hissing. She loathes me, just like the storm outside does. My breathing eventually calms, and my heart slows as I contemplate. Things begin to shift, rearrange themselves, fall into place.
       Hate and fear elicit the same reaction in an animal. The fight-or-flight reflex. Does my Margaret truly despise me, or is she acting out of fear, pain? The wind’s talons slashing at the sides of the trailer no longer seem those of a predator, but rather of a hurt animal, frightened and fighting for its life.
       I open my eyes and blink, momentarily blinded by the orange light of the sun creeping towards the horizon. The hate and fear that was surging through my veins only moments earlier drains from my body like water from a broken barrel. What is left in its wake is tender, vulnerable. It is compassion. Gathering Margaret up in my arms, I pad to the door, pull back the latches one by one, and step through the opening.
       The wet grass instantly seeps through my socks and strong gusts threaten to throw me off balance. The dying cat pressed to my chest, I stagger forward, past the ragged beds of potatoes, past the remains of my once silver Prius, past the bits and bobs that I have scattered across the land during the decade I have existed here. The ground becomes muddier and I slow down, one excruciatingly slow step after another submerging me further and further in the undergrowth. When the brambles grow too thick to allow further passage, I gently let myself fall backward. Bedded thus upon the grasses, half submerged in the mucky bog, the sky fills up my field of vision. Flickers of hilltops, the tip of my nose, and loose strands of hair adorn the periphery.
       The wind is still raging overhead, and water from below is soaking my clothes, but I experience neither cold nor fear. Instead, my lungs draw in a deep breath, as if for the first time in their life, and I feel more alive than I have in decades.
       Margaret begins to purr, and the vibration sends a soothing warmth through my chest. As I close my eyes, my head starts spinning. The wind is deceiving my senses into the sensation of movement. Out here, with just the ferns and rocks and winds as company, I feel like I might come apart bit by bit. Like the wind blowing through me might carry off a few atoms at a time, and my body will eventually dissolve, like a spoon of honey dipped into freshly brewed tea. I am made out of the same matter as the world around, and out here, away from the cities and buses, the books and radios, and all things man-made, nature will simply reclaim its particles. There is no boundary between me and her. Matter flows freely, and bit by bit I dissolve, I come apart.
       I come to rest.    AQ

Edward Michael Supranowicz – A Haunting of Cold Eyes

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Edward Michael Supranowicz
A Haunting of Cold Eyes

Edward Michael Supranowicz writes: ‘I do not believe in formal artist statements. Art should speak for itself, and the artist should maintain a respectful distance and silence. I work intuitively and compulsively, probably believing that there are archetypes that are shared among us all, but amenable to being expressed in one’s own individual style.

I have been doing digital paintings and drawings for the last 10 or so years. It is a good fit to my personality and nature, being able to go forward, then back, then back and forward, and not having to worry about wasted canvas. And digital work allows for sharing work with more than one person rather than just one person “owning” a painting.’

Edward Micheal Supranowicz, A Haunting of Cold Eyes, digital art, 2024

AQ40 – Vibration(s)

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Nora Nadjarian – No one knows what fingerprints are for

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B. Anne Adriaens – Inheritance

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Bryan R. Monte – AQ39 Spring 2024 Book Reviews

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Bryan R. Monte
AQ39 Spring 2024 Book Reviews

Coincidentally, I received two new books from the same press by two poets who have already published several critically-acclaimed books (and several poems in Amsterdam Quarterly.) These poets and books are Jane Blanchard’s Metes and Bounds and Matthew Brennan’s The End of the Road. The publisher of both collections is Kelsay Books in American Fork, Utah, who I was previously acquainted with due to their presence at literary and/or history conferences in the US, and who also published Jennifer L. Freed’s When Light Shifts: A Memoir in Poems, reviewed in AQ33. Blanchard’s and Brennan’s books, as the latter’s book title suggests, are about a summing up: ruminations on the past and the physical and mental challenges faced in later life. And coincidentally, both books use formal verse, Blanchard’s exclusively and Brennan’s occasionally, forms of poetry with which I am familiar, but with which, I must confess, I do not always feel at home. (I never create a poem with a formal line pattern and/or rhyme scheme unless the poem generates it itself).
      Blanchard’s poetry collection, Metes and Bounds, contains 65 poems. However, even though it is not divided into sections, it has overarching topics and themes such as domestic relations, mythology, religion, family history, and health problems that carry throughout this book. In addition, its poems are written in a wide-range of poetic formats: couplets, triolets, quatrains, sonnets, and villanelles, among others. Its author is a part of a mature couple and contains later-life observations. In their home—as in the collection’s first poem‘Matrimony’—their ‘books arranged on separate shelves /Are emblematic of [their] selves—’. ‘Scape’ contains a late winter/early spring gardening scene, but even this idyllic setting starts to turn as the poet notices the bulbs waning potency, ‘Two or three / Inch-thin green leaves was what most could produce’. The third poem, ‘More than Myth’ at first seems to be a modern retelling of Hercules battle with the Hydra, comparing his superhuman actions to the more human ‘lame game’ of crushing a crab underfoot. That is, until the terminal line, which mentions the constellation ‘Cancer’ foreshadowing the speaker’s partner’s battle with the big ‘C’.
      Other subjects covered in this collection are abusive or predatory relations such as a domestic abuser in ‘Southern Gothic’, a gold digger with an aging husband, who hurries to put his other foot in the grave in ‘Mantis’, and an alcoholic, compulsive gambler wife in ‘Emerald Princess’. Metes and Bounds also has many religious poems such as ‘Exegesis’, ‘Flower of the Field’, and ‘Anticipation’, poems with nods to famous poets and artists such as Robert Frost in ‘Rote’, Emily Dickinson in ‘#1776’, John William Waterhouse in ‘Rites and Wrongs’, and William Wordsworth in ‘World without End’. Included are several political poems—one entitled ‘Email’ with an epigraph ‘from Hillary to Huma’ and another, ‘My Fellow Americans’, mentioning ‘Un-Presidential rants and raves’. Lastly, there are many medical poems, including those about treatments at the Mayo Clinic.
      Despite the previous, serious list, this book contains many poems which caused me to unexpectedly laugh aloud. Part of the pleasure I derived from these poems is due to their tight, metrical structure which builds up the tension as they progress, which is sprung like a mousetrap at the very end, mostly due to Blanchard’s fresh and unexpected terminal rhymes. This occurs in poems such as ‘Email’ whose last lines are ‘Your man, like mine, must now refrain / until the end of my campaign.’ or ‘Mantis’, ‘(my) eyes peering over reading glasses at / a specimen not nearly rare enough.’ However, some have a serious satisfying finality such as in ‘Era Over’ ‘A century and a half of fun / Has reached the end of its long run.’ or in ‘Under Oath’, ‘If truth be told in part or whole, / the facts themselves are not enough.’ Furthermore, this book expanded my rather limited knowledge of ornithology through ‘Molothrus ater’ about the brown-headed cowbird, one of North America’s most abundant species, which are brood parasites like the European cuckoo. Blanchard’s Metes and Bounds takes on a tall order to describe the challenges and risks of latter life, and fills it marvellously with wit and humour.
      Matthew Brennan’s The End of the Road, is filled with many autumn and winter scenes. However, the timeline of his book’s settings is somewhat broader including poems about youth, education, historical figures, marriage, divorce, a second relationship, and retirement.
      The book is divided into four sections with no titles, but just numbers. Section 1 has scenes from youth related to family history, memories of one’s father and grandfather, parties, a first kiss, ice skating, and student days in London. Section 2 is a historical section of major and minor historical figures that go back further than the poet’s own life, from the poet’s own town in Missouri and Europe. These include historical sketches of a bordello owner in ‘Madame Edith Brown, Proprietor’, two portraits of washed-up baseball players in ‘Mordecai Three Finger Brown’ who complain ‘the co-eds and their crew-cut beaus don’t know / who I once was and would not care a lick’ and an older, alcoholic, motivational speaker in ‘Mickey Mantle’s Nightmare’ ‘slamming them / like strikes throughout a Sunday doubleheader’ whose ‘legs won’t move / like marble monuments’. Even farther back in time is ‘Haydn Unbound’, a dramatic monologue whose subject describes Esterhazy Palace as ‘a beautiful backwater’, his escape from bad ‘marriage / to one who cannot love will leave a husband / halfway to his grave.’ and how ‘At fifty-eight’ he hopes to be welcomed in London as Handel was.
      Section 3 has poems about Brennan’s later youth, early college years, and first marriage and divorce. Most are set in autumnal and winter scenes: a relationship ending with a removal in ‘314 East 25th St., on January 1st’ and another auspicious, unexpected, sudden overnight snowfall in ‘Two Snowfalls, Twenty Years Apart’ demarcating two sudden changes in his life ‘plotting new tracks in space no longer known.’ It is in this section in ‘Lambeth Bridge, Sunrise, 1991’, that the poet, four years divorced, finally ‘let(s) go of my ring, dropping it / into the glittering River Thames’ at the point where he originally proposed. As a native Midwesterner, I recognize the landscape and the deep overnight snowfalls that hold back or completely still traffic and other human activity and allow time for deep reflection. It’s also reflected in ‘the skyline of Chicago’ in ‘Sitting on a Sand Dune’ in which the poet celebrates a new love, who lives in ‘The Inner-City Apartment House’ with ‘a late-model Caddy with tires flat upon the pavement….(who) live(s) on the fourth floor and keeps the curtains closed. / Landscapes by Lorrain, Corot, and Winslow Homer / Make your walls a glimmering green, ’.
      In Section 4, the poet seems to be rejuvenated in the autumn of his life. He visits or returns to the Haydnsaal ‘At the Esterhazy Palace, Twilight’ or attends ‘A Dinner Party’ while in ‘Savoring’ enjoying autumnal pleasures, … ‘the wine, its garnet brimming / full-blooded, like leaves still holding on.’ This section includes two, very fine poems previously published by AQ: ‘The Hang Glider’ and ‘Old Trees in the Woods’ the first perhaps reflecting the poet’s regained lust for life and the second, with its accompanying epithet, ‘doomed to rezoning’ emphasizing the difficult ecology of hanging onto it. In The End of the Road’s terminal, title poem, the poet opines: ‘Now that I’m here, it went so fast’. I’ve recently heard similar resigned complaints from my newly-senior cohorts. Where did it all go, indeed!       AQ