Tom Daley – Aphorisms for Graduates at a June Commencement

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Aphorisms for Graduates at a June Commencement
by Tom Daley

You will be remembered
as sustainable skirl, as focus
blending quietly into fearful

beige. Your requirements outdone
by oaks that stood the rain
and willed it

where carpenters seeded
their own superfluity.
Accomplishment is a hinge linking

consequential to fretful.
These are the small infrastructures
of abandonment, of tears

confirmed, of whistles
shivering in bioluminescence,
of sighs hurled like mortarboards

over bated poise
and teetering platitudes.
These are the shrewd butterflies

that alight on the podium,
a tardy marvel conferring
distinctions on a case-by-case

basis—like you, tempted
to bound and reach far back—
and burgeon.

AQ20 – Education

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Bryan R. Monte – AQ19 Summer 2017 Art Reviews

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AQ19 Summer 2017 Art Reviews
by Bryan R. Monte

Edward Krasinski Retrospective, Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, 24 June to 15 October 2017.
Rineke Dijkstra Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, 20 May to 8 August 2017.

The Thin Blue Line

As an art critic, I am sometimes seen as the thin blue line between what is art and what may be variously described as kitsch, empty, repeated stylistic or signature gestures or just plain hype. For me, important art is something sublime, revolutionary and/or transgressive, which stirs theists’ souls or atheists’ psyches and which must be encouraged and protected. As a critic with preview and privileged access to some new, Amsterdam art exhibitions and sometimes their artists, I consider it my duty to guide both my Dutch and foreign resident readers to where they can best spend their time. Sometimes, as is the case with this review of the Edward Krasinski Retrospective at the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, my review is mixed as I found some elements of this exhibition praiseworthy, whilst others unfortunately left me cold.

Krasinski was part of an experimental, minimalist art movement in Poland from the 1960s to the 2000s. His tiny studio and apartment was a gathering place for the Polish avant-garde. His “trademark” was his use of 12 mm., blue electrical tape that ran through most of his work (and sometimes that of others) continued on the walls of his studio at exactly 130 cm. This divided the standard wall of approximately 260 cm. into two planes: above and below. Sometimes, as in his Intervention series paintings from the 1970s to the 1990s, the blue line is incorporated into the planes and dimensionality of the geometric shapes themselves, going into the sides and corners of the three dimensional objects and then out the back of the artwork and then back onto the wall. These pure geometric shapes with many planes certainly reminds me of Piet Mondriaan’s later work, after he had abandoned Impressionism and Cubism for his own Constructivism and also that of Kazimir Malevich, both of whose work is well-represented in the Stedelijk’s permanent collection. In addition to this perspective-challenging gimmick, the Krasinski exhibition also contains earlier work from the 1960s before the omnipresent thin, blue line. These mixed media sculptures and mobiles, incorporating scrap metal, wood and other found objects, are evocative not only due to their combinations and surfaces, but also due to the shadows they create on a wall when a light is shone on them as they move. These works are indeed are economical, whimsical and multi-faceted. In addition, the last gallery of the exhibition contains an archive of selected documents, especially photographs, correspondence and sketches that add a historical dimension to the exhibition. For example, there is a letter from Nelson Rockefeller’s art collection curator, requesting information about acquiring Krasinski’s Number 7, 1967 on exhibition then at the Guggenheim Museum.

However, since this is a travelling retrospective, which is making its second stop after the Tate Liverpool, the exhibition contains a lot more installations, artwork and even a reconstruction of part of the artist’s tiny Warsaw studio which unfortunately left me feeling a bit cold. The gallery called Labyrinth with its hanging mirrors with blue tape through them reflecting the faces of the exhibition’s viewers and also the backs of other mirrors felt like something I’d seen before in student art shows wanting to exploit the voyeurism related to art appreciation. Another gallery which featured Krasinski’s blue cord sculptures for the Tokyo Biennial also didn’t seem to me to be such a radical extension of, nor as effective as, his blue-taped wall trademark since they don’t seem to be geometrically transgressive. Lastly his reconstructed studio, whilst cluttered with archival papers and photos, didn’t really seem to shed much light for me on his modus operandi. I realise that being an artist in Cold War Poland required sacrifices both related to being unable to make challenging political statements and having access to proper materials, but I don’t see how this reconstructed studio brings this to light. I do, however, understand how this repressive impoverished environment created absurdist artwork such as Tadeusz Kantor’s black and white photo entitled Panoramic Sea Happening of Krasinski at the beach standing on a step ladder with an audience in beach chairs, conducting the waves and how other parts of the exhibition I have mentioned above, do bring this, if only tangentially, to light.

Youth

If however, you are able to make it to the Stedelijk before 8 August, and perhaps need a break from the Krasinski exhibition, you will be lucky to view some of Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra’s work including a few series of photographic portraits of young people and some video works. Dijkstra has made her name as an artist by being able to capture seemingly spontaneous moments in young people’s lives whether it be in a park or at the beach or the transformation of a new recruit to battle-hardened soldier. Her photos and videos capture the permanent, youthful, artistic springtime mentioned in John Keats “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Dijkstra’s children and young adults, are depicted in moments of society and solitude that fade or change almost as soon as the photos are taken. For example her Park Series includes one photo of two young men and two young women sitting on a lawn between trees with water in the background in Amsterdam’s Vondelpark on a rare sunny day. One youth sits up looking slightly cross while the other is reclining and on the point of laughing. This photo reminds me of Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe only the young women are fully clothed, maintaining the transitory adolescent air of innocence. Dijkstra is famous for some of her other classical references such as her photo of a female in a yellow swimsuit, Kolobrzg, Poland, July 26, 1992, her hair and pose similar to that of Botecelli’s Birth of Venus. In another series, Olivier, Quartier Viénot, Marseilles, mentioned above, Dijkstra captures the transformation of a fresh, young recruit to hardened, battle-ready soldier (including one photo with face camouflage and fatigues and another in dress uniform) over three years.

The most engaging piece of this exhibit, however, is the video triptych, I Can See A Woman Crying, (2009) in which a group of Liverpudlian children in their red, white and grey school uniforms first describe hesitantly and cautiously their ideas about what is happening in Pablo Picasso’s Weeping Women. Their discussion picks up pace and volume as they become more engaged and feel freer to express themselves reaching a natural crescendo towards the end of the video’s 12 minutes. The spontaneity of the children’s responses is also aided by the slightly asynchronous depiction of what is said before the young speaker is shown and the speakers are shuffled from one to another of the three video screens. This a fresh and engaging video piece, worth the journey alone to the museum. I hope you have the opportunity to view it. AQ

Bryan R. Monte – Animals Close to Home

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Animals Close to Home
by Bryan R. Monte

Although he is best known as a writer and an editor, Bryan R. Monte has a photography collection which covers nearly 50 years. It includes not only photos of San Franciscan artists and writers such as Jerome Caja as a young boy scout and Steve Abbott as a middle-aged man, but also landscapes of the many places he has lived. Two of these landscapes include animals close to home. The first is of a wild deer in the Cleveland, Ohio Metroparks, less than two miles from Monte’s former family home. The second is of a parking lot in Holmes County, Ohio with a line of horse-drawn Amish buggies, within a short drive of his father’s birthplace.

Bryan R. Monte, Deer, Cleveland, Ohio Metroparks, photo, 2016

Bryan R. Monte, Amish Parking Lot, Holmes County, Ohio, photo, 2015

Robert Rorke – Ten Dollar Bill

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Ten Dollar Bill
by Robert Rorke

We came down to breakfast Sunday morning and found Himself slumped on the kitchen floor, back against the white enamelled oven door. His head was hanging down, dark hair hiding his right eye. Mom leaned against the sink, sipping a cup of coffee in her pink flannel nightgown, and looked down at him, as if trying to figure out how she was going to lift him—or if she was just going to leave him there.

He was conked-out. If you screamed in his ear, he wouldn’t have heard you. We’d found him passed out before, usually at the kitchen table, but never on the floor. Did he fall off the kitchen chair? He was like one of those guys you saw on the Bowery. How do you come home like that, so drunk you just collapse? I didn’t want to see any more and almost went back to my room until Mom hustled him upstairs.

I waited with my sisters in the dining room for the okay to walk in. Mom put the coffee cup down and waved us over. I went first.

Mom lit a cigarette on the gas burner and took a long drag on it. “She’s all yours,” she said, pointing.

As shocked as we were to see Himself in such bad shape, the bigger surprise was the dog. She was reclining next to his bent left leg, a tricolor collie blinking at us in the most bewildered way, as if she were waiting for us to tell her what she was doing here, in our kitchen. She was very striking, even beautiful. Her coat was mainly black. Her forelegs were brown, paws and chest white. Her snout was longer and narrower than most collies, with a thin stripe of white in the brown. It gave her a slightly aristocratic air. She was going to need it in this house.

Like me, my sisters were half-asleep. Ringlets of damp hair stuck to their necks and temples.

Maureen, the eldest, immediately knelt to pet the dog. “Look at you,” she said into the collie’s confused, melancholy face. She looked up at Mom. “Where’d she come from?”

“Your father brought her home from a bar. Where else? Who wants coffee?”

The aroma of a freshly cooked pot filled the kitchen. I raised my hand. “I do.”

Maureen glanced at Dad. “He’s really smelly, Mom.”

I didn’t plan to get that close. A thread of drool hung from his lip, pack of Pall Malls crushed in his shirt pocket. I checked the clock over the far wall of yellow cabinets. Eight a.m.

Maureen gently unbent Dad’s leg to free the collie. Now his legs were spread out in front of him, blocking the way to the sink. Standing on his other side, Mom poured coffee into cups she took from the drain board and passed them over his head to Dee Dee, who put them on the table. Then she passed out Tupperware cereal bowls.

“Let’s get her some water,” Maureen said. Mom filled a cereal bowl and passed it to Maureen. The collie lapped up half of it and then reclined on the floor next to Himself, crossing her front paws. Master and pet, in repose.

“Ooh, she’s such a lady,” I said. “Definitely not the saloon sort. What did he say when he brought her in?”

“What was there to say?” Mom said, flustered. “He opened the door at five o’clock and said, ‘I’ve got something here for the kids.’ I looked into the front porch and there she was.”

Having the collie there made it possible to overlook my father, as if he were a sofa too cumbersome to move.

“Well, she’s pretty and that’s nice,” said Patty, the second sister. “What’s her name?”

“I don’t know if she has one,” Mom said, wiping her glasses on a hand towel. “I think that’s up to you kids.”

We all looked at her.

“Well, we could name her after the bar where he found her,” I said.

Maureen shot me a baleful look. “Like what? Dew Drop?”

“We are not naming her Dew Drop,” said Patty. “Don’t be such an ass.”

“No, I think we’ll name her Queenie,” Maureen said.

She was always so pushy. “Hey, who says you get to decide?” I asked.

Mom took a ratty leather harness off the closet doorknob and handed it to Maureen. “Before you start arguing, why don’t you get dressed and take her out for a walk? Your father swore she was housetrained.”

We threw our clothes on without taking showers first and walked the dog together, the five of us. Me, Maureen, Patty and our two youngest sisters, Dee Dee and Mary Ellen. I helped Maureen put the harness on the dog and felt the hairless skin under her coat. Himself was grumbling on the kitchen floor.

“Go on now, while I get him up to bed,” Mom said.

The block was empty except for other dog walkers. It was a cloudy day with a raw, wet breeze. The Black Beauty, Himself’s vintage Pontiac, struck a lopsided pose in the driveway, its fancy back end, with a two-tone Continental kit, nudging the orange berries on our neighbour’s firethorn bush, its grille breathing on the alyssum plants around the border of our garden. Maureen held the leash and guided the collie into the street. The dog trotted along and Maureen, long brown hair lifting off her back, kept her eyes peeled toward Snyder Avenue for oncoming cars. It was uncanny, how she knew which way the collie was going to move. She pulled the leash to her, stopping the dog when a car approached or even if another animal appeared in her path. You would have thought she had been doing this for years. When I tried, I held the leash too loosely, and the dog almost walked into a passing Dodge.

We took the collie across Snyder Avenue where a dirt path ran along Holy Cross Cemetery. Gina Martinucci was already there, walking her dog, a camel-colored mutt named Muffin. She lived across the street. Not one pimple on her face. I’d known her as long as we’d lived here, almost ten years; she’d never looked so pretty. She was wearing a bright green raincoat, her wavy brown hair cascading to her shoulders. Not one pimple on her face. Next to her, I felt grubby in my blue corduroy pants and sweatshirt. And I wished I’d combed my mop of hair.

Gina was obviously ready for church. She sang and played lead acoustic guitar at the St. Maria Goretti folk mass (I hadn’t been to church since starting high school; maybe I needed to go back). There were almost as many girls in the Martinucci house as there were in mine, and one son, also the eldest child. The big difference was that her whole family was involved in the church: her mother sang in the choir, her father was in the Holy Name Society. Rumor had it that the Martinuccis said the rosary together—something we would not do in a million years.

“My God, is that your dog?” she said. “She’s beautiful. When did you get her?”

“This morning,” I said. My sweatshirt was not warm enough for the crisp air.

Gina gave me a strange look. “This morning? You’re kidding. Wow.”

“It was a surprise.”

She bent down to pet the collie. “How old is she?”

I shrugged. “We don’t really know.” I sounded like a first-class doofus.

“What?” Gina said, glancing up. “Well, she’s not a puppy. Where’d you get her?”

This encounter was getting more awkward every minute. I glanced at the flower arrangements on the graves through the cemetery’s wrought-iron fence. Piles of raked red, yellow, and brown leaves colored the dying grass.

“Our father brought her home,” Patty said finally.

Gina stroked the collie’s black fur. “Really? I mean, was she a stray?”

“The dog belonged to a friend of my father’s who couldn’t take care of her anymore,” said Maureen, standing next to me.

Gina was beginning to get it, her knit brow registering the weirdness of this meeting. “Oh, that’s too bad. So I guess you didn’t get to name her. It’s more fun when they don’t have a name.”

“You’re right,” Maureen said. “We were told her name was Queenie.”

I wanted to step on her feet. It was such a frigging stupid name.

“Queenie,” Gina said, trying it out. “Well, that’s different. I guess there enough Princesses around.”

“And they’re all German shepherds,” I said.

Muffin and Queenie were sniffing each other out, the collie ever so standoffish. Maureen didn’t even grip the leash. Gina ran her fingers through the collie’s thick coat again. “She must be shedding everywhere. I’m constantly picking up hair.”

“Yeah, it’s a real drag,” Maureen said, rolling her eyes. She started to lead the dog away. “Come on, Queenie.”

When my sisters were out of earshot, Gina told me, “Her coat’s a little dull. You should give her a raw egg once in a while. Makes it shiny.”

I caught up with my sisters after Gina left. “Why did you tell her we got the dog from daddy’s friend, of all things?”

“Why do you have to broadcast our family’s business all over the place?” Maureen said, letting the dog drag her ahead as she sniffed the ground.

“What did I say? We have a dog. We don’t know how old she is, and we don’t know where she came from—except some bar. Which I didn’t tell her.”

Maureen remained stone-faced. “You didn’t have to tell Gina Martinucci anything. She thinks who she is.” Finally, the dog squatted and peed.

Even though they met under the most unlikely circumstances, Queenie seemed to like Himself most of all. Whenever he sat in his chair, a rust-colored recliner, the dog ran over to him and leapt into his lap, offering her neck for a good rubbing. He always obliged and the dog moaned appreciatively.

“Daddy, why doesn’t she ever bark?” Dee Dee asked. That was Queenie’s thing: to almost bark, moaning when she became excited but never really opening her mouth to let the full sound out. “It’s like she wants to but doesn’t know how.”

“I don’t really know,” he said with a yawn. “I think she may have been beaten when she did bark.”

“Poor Queenie,” Dee Dee said.

There was no question that the arrival of the collie was a blessing in our lives. We could all take care of her. Dad set up a schedule for the care of the dog. Queenie was walked five times a day; I had the late shift. Soon we wanted the dog outside with us all the time. If there was no one else for Dee Dee and Mary Ellen to play with on the block when they came home from school, they could run her up and down the sidewalk between our house and Snyder Avenue or try in vain to teach her tricks, like how to catch a ball. And Queenie was always good company, whether you wanted to hang out on the stoop or walk two miles around the perimeter of Holy Cross.

There were only a few things she hated: baths, firecrackers, and bars. I discovered that one night when Dad called home, asking for money to stay out and drink. That had been going on a while, the staying out, maybe an entire year. Nights in neighborhood bars like the Dew Drop and the Brooklyn Inn or even Harkins, a bucket of blood in Park Slope, got longer and longer and sometimes ended the next day. It had us all on edge because we never knew what mood he would bring home. The morning he brought the collie counted as a good mood, but some of the others were ugly. Last week he summoned us to the kitchen table at the crack of dawn after being out all night about talking on the telephone too much—even though we never got a bill since he worked for Ma Bell. No matter what we did, there was always something wrong with it and we learned to walk on eggshells around him. Or avoid him altogether.

Mom was using her lowest possible voice as she talked to him on the phone, sitting on the telephone bench on the staircase landing; I knew she didn’t want to give him five cents. Then she hung up, called me over and asked me to give her the pocket book on the dining room table. She took a ten-dollar bill from her change purse and handed it to me.

“Take this to your father,” she said evenly.

“When?”

“Now.

I finished my French and geometry homework and was ready to watch “The Avengers.” Diana Rigg in a leather cat suit doing karate on the bad guys, then changing into something sleek at the end of the episode for a martini with Mr. Steed. Never missed an episode.

Mom knew from my expression I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t say anything. I went where I was told, though she didn’t have to tell me where. I knew: the Dew Drop. “He says to take the dog with you.”

Queenie, napping in front of the television, didn’t look like she wanted to go anywhere. “Why do I have to bring her?”

Mom bit off her words. “It will take ten minutes. Do me a favour and take the dog.”

Maybe I’d make it back in time for the second half-hour. Emma Peel would be kicking the villain-of-the-week in the teeth by then and the show would really get good. Maureen could tell me what I’d missed.

I walked up Church Avenue, heading towards Nostrand. Our neighbourhood was more black than white now. The streetscape I knew was changed forever. Roti shops had replaced grocery stores. Guy’s hair salon, with its sun-bleached pictures of women with blonde beehives and champagne bouffants taped to the windows, was now called De Hair Wizzards and advertised weaves, wigs and Afros. Himself wanted me to bring the dog for protection in case I ran into any trouble, but I didn’t think I’d have any problems. Now that it was colder, the corner boys who usually hung out in front of the bodega on New York Avenue drinking Colt 45s were gone. The few guys I did pass sidestepped me as if they were afraid of the collie. Little did they know she barely barked; it was hard to imagine her biting anyone.

The Dew Drop was on the corner of Church and Fairview Place, six blocks from home. Queenie trotted along at my side under a dark blue sky, her coat shiny in the moonlight (I’d taken Gina’s advice and mixed a raw egg into her Alpo). I wore a red-and-black plaid jacket that used to belong to my Uncle George; the sleeves were a little long, but had a great scratchy feel I always associated with old-time wool. He moved to Germany last summer. As a parting gift, he gave Himself a copy of The Big Book, a present from one recovering alcoholic to another on his way down. The book had vanished, hidden somewhere in our house, I was sure, probably unread. I needed no further proof than the morning he brought home the dog, unconscious on the kitchen floor.

As I approached the bar, something strange happened. Queenie pulled at the leash. I looked down at her and said, “What’s wrong?” I took another step and she dragged her hind legs on the sidewalk, claws on her forelegs scraping the concrete. I stopped. She gave me a frightened look. She knew more about this place than I did. I didn’t know what to do, so I bent down and pet her.

I glanced at the bar. The window was decorated with green shamrocks, decorations someone forgot to take down; it was already October. Or maybe every day was St. Patrick’s Day at the Dew Drop.

We went back to the corner and crossed the street. I walked the collie down to the corner of Martense Street and crossed back over. “Come on. It won’t take long,” I said, as if she could understand me. When we were near the bar’s side exit, she allowed me to tie the leash to a No Parking sign and I stayed with her a minute.

I was hoping I could make this quick, give the old man his ten bucks and scram. I entered the bar through the side door, hands at my side, not knowing what to expect. First surprise: It was a mixed crowd. I couldn’t even imagine Himself drinking with black guys, especially the ones here with Afros, when he was always making jokes about blacks, but I guess in the smoky confines of the Dew Drop, racial tensions were set aside as long as everyone could watch the Mets game. They’d won the World Series last year and were still the city’s favorite team, giving hope to underdogs everywhere.

I was the only minor in the joint, sure I stuck out like a sore thumb. Standing on tiptoe, I saw Dad sitting on a red stool. Probably itching for this ten-dollar bill, thinking about it every time he saw the foam slide down the inside of the empty pint glass next to him. He was talking to some middle-aged white guy with a sharply receding hairline and a cigar sticking out of his mouth. The TV set was poised above the far right end of the bar. They were complaining about first baseman Ed Kranepool. I knew that name from listening to my parents watch the game at home. Dad always called him lard ass.

I stood behind him, took the bill out of my pocket and placed it on the bar in front of him. I leaned in. “Mom said this was for you.”

He turned and shot me a look. “Hey, who’s this?” the man sitting next to him asked, and I reached out to shake the hand of someone I didn’t really want to meet.

“You haven’t met my son, the scholar?” Dad said, poking the shoulder of a guy next to him. “Nicky, can I buy you a drink?”

Mom didn’t say I was going to have to stay. “Uh, maybe a quick one. I’ll take a ginger ale. I have the dog outside.”

One of the Mets scored a home run, and he shouted to everyone, in the booming voice we heard him use to cheer on the Giants, his other favourite team, “Seven to four, top of the eighth. We are home free.”

When he was wound up like this, Dad was hard to resist. He called the bartender over. “Charlie, give me another beer. And a soda for my son.”

Charlie was an older white man with liver-colored lips and thinning brown hair slicked back with some old-time tonic with a medicinal odour like Vitalis; when he spoke, his nicotined teeth flashed garishly from the right corner of his mouth. I bet Dad had known him for years, from one place to another as he stopped in for a quick one after work. Charlie slapped another foamy beer on the bar.

So this was Himself’s inner sanctum. A private world of men playing the away game from their families. Some customers were older than Dad, guys with thick-lensed eyeglasses, pudding skin, and chin lines lost to jowls, but many looked like they were about the same age, early- to mid-thirties, still slim and well built. All eyes were on the television screen and the all-important game. I sipped my soda, trying to seem natural though the smoky air was bothering my eyes; it was hard not to rub them.

Compared to some of the joints I would later retrieve Himself from, this place wasn’t terrible. The décor was standard: a jukebox, a pool table, dartboard, neon signs advertising Rheingold and Pabst Blue Ribbon. Two photos over the walnut case that housed the bottles of liquor and liqueurs caught my eye; they seemed so out of place. One was John F. Kennedy, in a fake gold frame, the kind we used for our school pictures, lined up on the fireplace in the living room. The other was Martin Luther King Jr. The owner wasn’t stupid; he wanted to keep his changing clientele happy.

Dad was telling the guy sitting at the next stool—his name was Molloy, Joe Molloy—what a fantastic student I was. “This kid got one hundred in Latin, I kid you not,” he said. I remembered more the lecture he’d given me about my mediocre algebra grades on the same report card.

“I’m lucky I can speak English,” Molloy said. He got up to take a leak and I took his seat.

The ginger ale tasted kind of flat. I drank it anyway and gestured to the dog when I finished. The side exit was open now, and Dad glanced at Queenie resting on the sidewalk.

“She’s some watchdog,” he said with a wink. “Best game of poker I ever won.”

“What?”

“I was playing cards here with Tommy Sullivan and Phil Cooney and Joe was flat broke. So he put his dog up as ante. You see, he’s the owner and she was kind of like the bar dog.”

The bar dog. I wished he had the sense that she did about coming here. “And you won the game and the dog.” I couldn’t even smile.

Dad gave a hearty laugh. “That’s the way it goes sometimes.”

I wondered how long Queenie had lived here. We didn’t even know how old she was. I rubbed my eyes and looked at the guys sitting on the stools. How many of them would go home after the Mets had won? Most, probably. So why couldn’t Himself do that?

Standing up, I glanced at the singles on the bar, the change from our drinks. I was feeling nervy. “So I guess you’ll be home when the game’s over?”

He did a double take, as if I’d cuffed him on the ear. “What did you say, Mr. Flynn?”

For the moment, I forgot about Emma Peel. “I want to take another driving lesson tomorrow. We haven’t gone out in a while.”

He’d given me my first driving lesson in The Black Beauty, inside Holy Cross Cemetery. I crept along the winding rows in the ancient Pontiac—it was new in 1958—driving ten, twenty miles an hour amid the rows of granite and green. By some fluke, I learned to parallel-park there, on the first try. Since then, we’d branched out, taking the black-and-white tank to the Brooklyn Terminal Market, which had no yellow lines, just huge spaces between the vendors. “I don’t want to get rusty.”

“Yeah, well. We’ll see what we can do about that.”

As saves go, I was proud of myself, although my knees were shaking. An appointment with a car he could make. Spending the night with his family, he was on the fence.

Queenie looked fairly miserable out on the sidewalk, panting in the dark, but I wanted to see if I could get Himself to come home. It was the top of ninth, the score unchanged. I ordered another ginger ale, chipping away at what was left of that ten-dollar bill. Tom Seaver, the cute Met my two eldest sisters had a crush on, was pitching so that was a good sign. He could knock out the other team and when he did, the guys in the bar cheered as if they were out at Shea Stadium. Then they started to leave, settling up, shaking hands with the bartender, and going on their way.

I stood and nudged my old man. “Come say hi to the dog.”

I went outside. Queenie jumped on me when I untied the leash, thinking we were finally getting out of there. When she settled down, I pet her under the collar, rubbing the white hair under her neck, which she loved. Then Himself joined us on the sidewalk and she got excited all over again. She was ready to go. I wondered if he was too.

“Want to walk us home?”

He stopped petting Queenie and looked up at me. “Why? You afraid of the dark?”

“Game’s over, Dad. Your team won.”

He stood, looking down at the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets, as if giving serious thought to my proposal. “You go on home, Nicky,” he said. “I’ve got to talk Molloy about something.”

When he raised his head, his eyes were full of regret; he knew what I was up to and he was still going to let me down. I wondered how much of that ten-dollar bill was left—enough for one more drink? Maybe he had to talk Molloy into giving him a free one. A buy back, they called it. Except that my mother was doing the buying here. He was doing the spending.

He left me on the sidewalk with the dog. I was a fool to think I’d convince him to come home. Voices came from the TV set inside the bar, sportscasters falling all over themselves about tonight’s game. I stood there like a jerk, looking at the mannequins in the window of Bob and Betty, the children’s clothing store across the street. A stock boy from the Big Apple dragged tied-up cardboard boxes to the curb for garbage pickup tomorrow morning.

I had him, then I lost him, like an image that slips out of focus in the lens of a camera. All the elements were there to give me a clear picture of what I could expect the next time I was sent to get him. And the time after that. The corner bar, the sound of my own footsteps as I walked up the street, the kid taking out the trash, as I would do when I had my own after-school job, scooping thirty-one flavours. A lingering sense of futility, and the lonely certainty that these missions would end only when I grew up and moved away.

I took the dog and headed back down Church Avenue. She pulled at the leash with the same force she showed when clawing the sidewalk. Home, that’s what she wanted. Me too. Neither of us belonged here.

Grove Koger – Death of a Tortoise

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Death of a Tortoise
by Grove Koger

The morning of June 24, 2012, was a somber one at the Charles Darwin Research Station. Located on the island of Santa Cruz in Ecuador’s Galapagos Archipelago, the station had long been the home of what was believed to be the last surviving Pinta Island tortoise. But that morning his caretaker, Fausto Llerena, found him dead in his corral, the apparent victim of nothing more dramatic than old age.

The tortoise had been discovered on Pinta Island in November 1971 and transported to Santa Cruz for his own good, as his subspecies—known to herpetologists as Chelonoidis nigra abingdoni—had been considered extinct since 1906. Dubbed Lonesome George, he had become an icon of efforts to preserve the earth’s endangered species.

Pinta was once home to untold numbers of George’s brethren, but they were hunted down throughout the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by pirates and whalers. Darwin commented on their decimation throughout the islands during his visit aboard the Beagle in 1835, while noting the suggestive differences among the populations as well. Then fishermen dealt another blow to the surviving tortoises by releasing goats on Pinta in 1959, planning to slaughter and eat them as needed during their long fishing expeditions. Within a decade the goat population had grown to an estimated 40,000 individuals, destroying most of the island’s plant life in the process. It was at the height of this devastation that a scientist discovered the lone tortoise, and in 1972 rangers for the Galapagos National Park transported the animal to the research station.

Over the years scientists introduced female tortoises from a closely related Isabela Island subspecies into George’s pen, hoping to produce a population that, although hybrid, would nevertheless preserve George’s DNA. When it was determined that George was actually more closely related to a subspecies on Española, two females from that island were substituted. But while the females laid several clutches of eggs, none hatched.

After George’s death, his body was transported to the American Museum of Natural History for preservation by noted taxidermist George Dante and a short period of display. “This is absolutely the most important project you could ever do in your life,” Dante says of the assignment. Determined to capture the tortoise’s personality as well as preserve his body, he questioned those who had taken care of the animal. “Everyone you talked to had a different story about George,” he recalls. “They knew every wrinkle on this animal.”

Preserved in a suitably regal and lifelike stance, George’s body was scheduled for permanent exhibit at the Santa Cruz research station where he had lived so long. However, Ecuadorian officials insisted that he be displayed in the country’s capital, Quito, where environmental conditions could be controlled more carefully, and a bronze replica shipped to Santa Cruz.

#

Questions of extinction aside—and they are certainly profound ones—there’s something about tortoises that appeals deeply to us. “Poor, lumbering creatures” we say, admiring their stubborn patience yet thankful not to be in their place. Of course George is far from being the first individual tortoise to have caught the attention of mankind. Think of Aesop’s fable in which the hare, certain of winning the race, settles down for a nap, while the tortoise—stubbornly and patiently—pushes on to the finish line.

Eighteenth-century English naturalist Gilbert White wrote affectionately of a Greek, or spur-thighed tortoise (Testudo graeca) named Timothy who had been bought from a sailor in 1740 and was eventually given free range of White’s garden at Selborne in Hampshire. (The designation “Greek” refers to the species of tortoise rather than its original home, which in Timothy’s case was never known.) Upon Timothy’s disappearance from the garden in late spring of 1784, White lamented that he “should be sorry to lose so old a domestic, who has behaved himself in so blameless a manner in the family for near fifty years.” Fortunately the old boy was found ten days later in a nearby field. Timothy died at about the age of 64 in 1794, surviving his famous owner by one year, and was only then identified as being an old girl.

Yet another spur-thighed tortoise named Timothy was a well-known resident of the rose garden of Powderham Castle in Devonshire until 2004. Taken off a Portuguese ship in 1854 during the Crimean War, he lived as a mascot aboard various vessels of the Royal Navy until given a home with the Courtenay family. Apparently perturbed by the vibrations of bombs dropping on nearby Exeter during a much later conflict—World War II—Timothy dug himself a shelter under a set of terrace steps. He was 160 or so at the time of his death. His last owner, Lady Gabrielle Courtenay, who was then 91 herself, remarked that “you could call him, and he would come and say hello and have a strawberry.” In 1926 a scientist had determined that, like White’s beloved reptile, this Timothy was actually a female, but the name stuck.

To this day a genuinely Greek tortoise, but one of undetermined gender, lives in the ancient Agora in Athens, where it has become something of a tourist attraction. My wife and I encountered it one afternoon a few years ago as it trudged through the dry grass for a drink at a shallow basin provided by the Agora’s staff, then retreated to a sheltered corner amidst a tumble of ancient masonry. Its life appears carefree, but in the midst of the economic calamity that has befallen Greece, it’s hard not to view its stubbornness and patience—those qualities again!—in a symbolic light. The animal has appeared in several YouTube videos, and may well be of greater interest to many tourists than the ruins it lives amidst.

#

Today Pinta is goat-free, thanks to a project in which the island’s feral invaders were hunted down, but no more of its once-plentiful tortoises have been found. So is this the end of the line for Chelonoidis nigra abingdoni? Maybe not. After Lonesome George’s death, it was discovered that seventeen tortoises from the remote Volcano Wolf area of Isabela Island (the home, you’ll remember, of the first of George’s would-be mates) actually carry some of the genes of the Pinta Island tortoise, and that one of them is an eighty percent match. Given that five of the seventeen are juveniles, there’s a distinct possibility that purebred examples may yet live in the same area.

Others tortoises from Volcano Wolf carry the genes of the Floreana Island tortoise, also considered extinct. Authorities suspect that the crews of whaling vessels may have captured the Pinta and Floreana tortoises for food but later threw them overboard when they weren’t needed. Over the subsequent decades the animals would have mated with their distant Isabela relatives—or maybe, just maybe, among themselves.

Now efforts are underway to establish a captive-breeding program for the two subspecies, with plans of eventually reintroducing them to their original homes to help restore the islands’ ecosystems. “The word ‘extinction’ signifies the point of no return,” explains Yale University professor Dr. Adalgisa Caccone, a member of the research team working on Isabela. “Yet new technology can sometimes provide hope in challenging the irrevocable nature of this concept.”

And maybe, just maybe, George’s cousins will win their crucial race after all.

Vidya Vasudevan – The Urban Milieu

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The Urban Milieu
by Vidya Vasudevan

“Street dog turns savior. Dog which saved child from being run over by car dies despite best treatment,”

ran the headline in the local tabloid.

Just returning from a visit to the local zoo, which offered animals the assurance of meeting their basic needs, medical attention plus security, my thoughts flew to the situation of animals in a different setting, a perilous urban setting with its rapidly paced life and relentless struggle for survival amidst rampant exploitation.

The school was located amidst a not-so-dense forest, one of the last remaining patches of green, within the city limits. The children waited in a long line for the morning assembly to commence. Just above their head, a troop of monkeys atop the banyan tree swung from branch to branch, chattering by the dozen. Were they discussing the day’s news read by one of the pupils?

Another monkey sat on the window ledge abutting the classroom. Was he listening? The children giggled. Chemistry was boring but the monkey seemed interested. Simultaneously, he was learning mechanics, trying to figure out how to unscrew the cap of a bottle he had found.

The little girl in pigtails on the corridor munching a cookie at break time looked back. A soft eyed, spotted fawn followed her with a mournful look. He tugged at her skirt. Turing around to pat his lil’ head, she shared her snack, amused by his persistence.

At the shopping centre located in the forested area, the clock struck 2 pm and the troop arrived on the dot. There stood the fruit and vegetable truck waiting to be unloaded. They waited eagerly, their hungry eyes and long legs, ready for action. The minute the driver left the truck, the simians climbed in ready to grab a tasty bite, only to be chased away by men with sticks. A sly one scrambled off clutching a huge bottle gourd. Shoppers returning with purchases looked around warily anticipating trouble. Some had their bags snatched away and watched helplessly as the culprit drank mango juice from a carton, while another ran up the tree with a roll of cream cookies.

A huge, tame looking stag, showing off his aesthetically designed antlers, wandered in and out of the shopping centre. His target was the big sack containing vegetable and fruit waste placed in a corner waiting to be carted off by the garbage truck.

Moving out onto the road, I spotted a stray dog wagging his tail at the customers at a roadside eatery. He jumped up eager to grab the tidbits offered. Witnessing this was a scrawny tabby on the wall. Her gaze fell on the notice board displayed outside. Was there fish on the menu? A Golden Retriever walking beside his master, held by a leash, looked down upon the street dog as if to say, ‘you are beneath me’.

Ahead on the road loomed a traffic jam. What was the cause? There, standing tall and proud, in the middle of the road, was a gaily decorated horse ready to carry the bridegroom as part of the wedding festivities. He was an old hand, adept at negotiating the long line of traffic. A group of kids, craning their necks through the bus window for a glimpse of the galloping hero, squealed in delight. The disgruntled cop, his hands up in despair, glared at the four legged creature for enjoying the attention. A far cry indeed from those gentle ponies offering soothing rides to kids on the beach.

Another sweaty creature, caught in this melee was the bullock, almost tempted to run away with his cart. He looked around but there was not an inch of space to move.

Finally, with the traffic clearing, we moved ahead only to be stopped by a herd of buffaloes indulging in a catwalk of sorts, down the road, with the desperate owner trying to shoo them away to the side. A trio of bleating goats lifted their legs to brace themselves against the wall, trying to reach the ‘greens’ hanging from a basket on the vendor’s shelf.

Alighting from the vehicle, we had to work our way through a few stray cows relaxing on the pavement swishing their tails, chewing the cud. Siesta time was nearing.

Other occasional sightings include the lone elephant carrying the mahout (handler), stopping whenever a crowd gathered, and lifting his trunk to offer blessings in return for coconuts and bananas. The sight of the washerwoman’s donkey bedeviled by the huge bundles on his back and trucks carrying cattle tightly packed together like sardines meant for the abattoir also form an inevitable part of the city scene.

Good tidings to you! This would be the loud call of a gaudily dressed fortune teller, shaking his Damru (a two headed drum) at our doorstep offering to foretell the family’s future for a fee. He would be accompanied by his decorated bull, emitting a jangling sound every time it shook its head, thanks to small bells tied to its horns. From the smallest to the eldest, every member of the family, would crowd around him, never mind, whether or not his predictions came true. His tame bull was the focus of attraction.

It seems to me that all these creatures have adjusted well to the madcap urban life. And so they carry on, along with Homo sapiens, in today’s urban jungles, some cosseted, others less fortunate, striving to make the best of their current habitat, be it chaotic or luxurious.

Maryah Converse – Friends with Goats

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Friends with Goats
by Maryah Converse

It was 2004, not long after the United States began occupying Iraq. In the neighboring Arab kingdom of Jordan, sid Muna was the headmistress of the girls’ school in the northern village where I would soon be teaching English. About mid-way through my Peace Corps training, she came down to our training center in Madaba, Jordan, to meet me. She was tall and statuesque, in a long, loose olive green duster coat called a jelbaab. We had a list of questions Peace Corps staff had given us to ask each other.

“Tell me about your family.” Sid Muna had a husband and five children, a small family for Jordan. My parents had four children? Allah kareem—Generous God, that was a large family for an American!

How big was sid Muna’s village? A couple thousand, she thought. That would make my new community twice the size of the closest town to my rural Pennsylvania childhood home.

What did people in sid Muna’s village do for a living? Mostly farmers and shepherds and some military families. That was also not so different from my Amish and dairy farming neighbors growing up, where a few years in the military was a common way to pay for college.

I don’t know how it was for the other trainees, but as we went from one question to the next, sid Muna’s answers seemed perfectly calibrated to put me at ease. I knew her people, hand grown up with sprawling extended farm families. Back home, they raised cows and farmed corn. In my new community, they raised goats and grew olives, but I felt reassured that I would find commonalities there, touchpoints for mutual understanding.

***

Two weeks later, I visited for the first time the village where I would spend the next two years teaching, improving my Arabic, and integrating into the community. I spent two nights at sid Muna’s home, next door to the little house where I would soon live.

I was sitting in sid Muna’s dimly lit living room after dinner that first night, tiny glasses of hot, sweet black tea with sprigs of fresh mint set out before us on her worn Persian rug. A cold rain lashed the windows. Her second daughter Samira brought out plates of apples, oranges and little cucumbers. Her husband, eldest son Alaa, and eldest daughter Safaa were chatting with me in a mélange of English and Arabic, while the youngest son Hashem did homework in the corner.

I had only just realized that I hadn’t met all of sid Muna’s children when a dark mop of hair on a wind-burned face popped around the corner, tall, with thin cheeks and bright dark eyes, asking his mother for something.

“Maryah!” exclaimed Alaa, a big grin on his broad face and an elder brother’s glint in his eye. “Look!” he said, pointing at the head peering around the corner. “The enemy! The enemy! It’s your enemy Osama, ya Maryah!”

Poor Osama flushed red and his head snapped back out of sight. For months, although I would sometimes see him at dinner, he would avoid eye contact, eat faster than anyone I have ever seen, and head immediately back outside. We never spoke.

***

“Every time we pass a herd of goats, you turn your head to look!” said sid Muna.

Since I had moved to her village, the headmistress would occasionally take me with her to the Jerash Directorate of Education, just to remind them that she had a Peace Corps Volunteer teaching in her school, the only one in the governorate. At least, I assumed that was her reason.

On this particular day, returning from the Directorate, we were driving through our little village around the time of ‘aSr, the mid-afternoon call to prayer. This is also when the shepherds returned with their herds, lines of goats and waddling fat-tailed sheep trotting single-file down the road, but not following their shepherd. The shepherd sauntered casually at the back, clucking and tsking at his flock, who responding by going left or right, stopping or moving faster.

Like sid Muna, everyone was amused by my fascination with goats, but it was what finally allowed me to have a relationship with her second son, Osama.
 
The first time I saw someone herd goats like that was on my first visit to the home of Umm Tareq. She was a close friend of sid Muna, who introduced us not only because Umm Tareq was an English teacher like me—a professional resource—but because she was also the best candidate in the village to continue my Arabic language lessons. I had a little money from Peace Corps to pay her to be my tutor, but she was even more important to me as a cultural interpreter … and a dear friend.

***

The first time I visited Umm Tareq in her own home, four houses down from mine, she made me thick, sweet Turkish coffee, and we talked about how we would schedule our Arabic lessons. “I’m not going to teach you that Standard Arabic they speak on TV,” she warned me. “And I won’t teach you what sid Muna and your neighbours up the hill think you should learn, either. I’m going to teach you the real Arabic, like the Bedouin speak. With ‘ch’ instead of ‘k’ and all the rest.”

“Good!” I would sound like a hick on my periodic trips into the city, but I would sound like all the other shepherds and farmers and car mechanics in our little village.

I knew first-hand the value of a local speech pattern. I knew how my mother’s misplaced New England ‘r’s stood out in Pennsylvania Dutch country where I grew up. I knew, from giving up my studies of High German in Bern to immerse myself in Swiss dialect, that sounding like my neighbors could help me integrate into the community faster than anything else. That’s what I wanted in Arabic—to be able to simulate belonging right down to the shape of the last vowel on my tongue.

Once that was settled, she called for her daughter to make us a pot of strong, sweet black tea. Umm Tareq started telling me about her father’s British friends, who were frequently in their home as she was growing up. She had learned English from them, then gotten her university degree in English, and I believe she could easily have gotten a scholarship to go to England or America for graduate work. I think her family would have supported that.

Then Umm Tareq fell in love with an older Bedouin man with a coveted stable government job. Against her father’s advice, she chose to pursue a childhood dream. Just as I had longed as a child to be Sacagawea or Laura Wilder, so she had longed to be Bedouin. It was a dream she never claimed to regret, though it led her into poverty, and aged her well beyond her years.

We talked for a couple hours that first day, until Umm Tareq yelled for one of her daughters to clear the tea and little glasses away. To me, she said, “I want you to meet my husband. He’s out with the goats, but should be coming back soon. Let’s walk out to meet him.”

Umm Tareq and I walked the rest of the way down the big hill at the end of town, and up the next big rise, where the first goats of a herd had just begun to appear in a single-file line from beyond the crest. Last of all came Abu Tareq, a short, leanly muscular man in a long white robe, the pale ochre dust irrevocably ground in. He wore a faded red- and white-checked kufiyah wrapped fully around his head, neck and the lower half of his face, protection against both sun and dust. He pulled the tail of it down beneath his chin to greet us.

Introducing us, Umm Tareg said, “My husband Abu Tareg was the postmaster here for many years. Now he’s retired.”

Abu Tareg spoke rapidly in Arabic, looking earnestly back and forth between his wife and me. I thought I heard a name I recognised. She laughed, a long, uninhibited outdoor sound that revealed a deep sunburst of joyful lines radiating from the corners of her eyes, creasing her temples and half her cheeks, lighting up her round face. It was impossible not to smile back, even though I didn’t know the joke yet.

Turning to me, Umm Tareg said, “He wants you to know that he is like President Jimmy Carter. At the end of his term, the president was coming out of a fancy hotel, and a reporter asked him, ‘Mr. President, what will you do next?’ And Mr. Carter said, ‘I was a peanut farmer before, I’ll be a peanut farmer again.’ That’s Abu Tareg. He was a shepherd before, and he is a shepherd again. Never retired, always a busy, working man.”

Abu Tareg nodded emphatically at me, rapping blunt fingertips against his chest. “Jimmy Carter.”

I grinned and nodded enthusiastically, understanding that he was deliberately building a bridge between America and Jordan with his considered anecdote. It was the work that I had come to do, too.

Following his flock, Abu Tareg hurried back ahead of his wife and me. We had the perfect vantage point to see how the goats seemed already to know where to go, half peeling off into Abu Tareg’s pens, the others continuing on to the pens where his young nephews were waiting to feed their father’s flock. In two years in the village, I would never lose my fascination with the flocks peeling off in seamless formation and filing home in the waning afternoon light.

***

Goats were something Abu Tareq had promised his wife years before in their marriage contract. One day, he said, he would buy her goats and they would raise them together. Over the two years I lived in their village, I was able to watch Umm and Abu Tareq negotiate goat husbandry together. He had experience from his childhood, but she had never owned animals.

At first, there were no baby goats, but after the first kids were born and sold, I would follow Umm Tareq down to the pen after the goats had come home. Milking the nannies was a two-person job. Abu Tareq held them by their ears, and Umm Tareq squatted behind, milking between the hind legs into a big bucket that, in the beginning, sometimes she couldn’t protect from being kicked over.

As I grew ever closer to their family, I would come to recognise that, while Abu Tareq framed his continuing work as an endeavour of the heart, noble and post-presidential, it was also a necessity. Goats didn’t just bring milk, but a greater variety of dairy products than we have words for in English. Alongside the occasional slaughtered goat, this was often the only protein he and Umm Tareq could provide for their six children. Other times, small excesses in production could bring in a paltry income from the neighbours, too.

***

I didn’t visit sid Muna as often as Umm Tareq, though the headmistress was my closest neighbor and we often traveled to or from school together. I would occasionally join her family for tea or dinner, especially when she was hosting extended family or other guests she thought I should meet. Sometimes, too, sid Muna would summon me to her house to help her roll grape leaves, stuff cabbage, help with the olive harvest, or paint the wrought iron fencing around her porch together.

From time to time in honour of some special occasion, Osama and his father would slaughter one of their goats. I would usually be sitting on the porch, drinking tea and visiting with out-of-town family members or other guests, while the animal’s throat was cut and it was strung up by its hind legs from the back side of the little shed where the goats sheltered at night. Osama and his father would slice open the centre of the torso, remove the organs, carefully peel off the skin in a single piece, quarter and carve the carcass, all just beyond my line of sight.

Osama always made a point of parading past me with the severed head cradled in his hands before him, its eyes rolled up and tongue lolling, neck still bloody around the edges.

I always winced and looked away.

He would find some flimsy excuse to walk past me with the head again, and again, until his mother scolded him to “stop fooling around and get back to work.”

These were the only interactions Osama and I had. Thanks to his elder brother’s laughing introduction that first night, Osama mostly avoided me.

***

One cool, crisp April day after school, passing sid Muna’s goat pen, I saw fuzzy new kids staggering around on their knobby little legs. I jogged home, dropped my bags, and came right back with my camera. I squatted patiently at the wire fence, waiting for the resting newborn goat babies to stagger onto their hooves for another try.

When he came home from school, that’s where Osama found me: hunkered down beside the goat pen with my camera. He grinned from ear to ear, looking me straight in the eye with obvious pleasure and pride. Everyone loved my camera, the only one in the village, and Osama loved goats. It was the perfect combination. He vaulted nimbly over the wire fence into the pen, crowded with bare, gnarled olive branches.

He picked up the kids, cradling first one, then both in his big palms. Their little heads and pointed shoulders leaned against Osama’s ribs, their spindly little legs dangling down from either side of his long fingers and bony wrists. He posed this way and that with them. Putting one back on its belly, he set the other on its little hooves and urged it with little pats on its rear to take wobbly, mincing little steps towards me. I snapped away with my camera.

As we went along, Osama chattered on and on about the life of goats. I didn’t understand most of it, but I grinned and nodded. This was more than he had said in all the time I had known him. I learned that, though his parents wanted him to go to engineering school, he wanted more than anything to be a shepherd when he grew up—with any luck, a farmer as successful as his Uncle Mohammad, whose opinion was valued across three governorates.

After we had taken photos for a while, the shepherds began to return with their long lines of sheep and goats along the hilltop road at my back. When his own family’s goats peeled off towards their shed, Osama didn’t open the little holding pen, with its fencing of piled up, denuded olive branches pruned during the last harvest.

“Come on, ya Maryah! We’ll take more pictures.” Osama leapt nimbly out of the pen. With a shepherd’s clicks and sharp syllables, he led the family’s goats away, and with a sweep of his arm, he led me, too.

I followed Osama and his goats towards my little neighboring house, over the disintegrating dip in the low wall around my landlord’s orchard, and into my own backyard. In the deepening emerald grass of April, under drooping trees dripping with long, lacy strands of short-lived little white flowers, Osama stalked, chased and grabbed this goat and that for a portrait.

They were unenthusiastic models, more interested in the grass than the camera. Osama wrapped his lanky arm around their necks in a wrestling hold, or straddled their skinny ribcages with his long legs and held up their heads with two hands around their long ears.

As the other kids came home from school, they wanted to have their own pictures taken. That was fine with Osama, who had lost his interest in my camera and was just wrestling playfully with his beloved goats.

After that, I found myself receiving Osama’s gracious, grinning help whenever I had to lug a new propane tank for my cookstove from the delivery truck down to my house, and even occasionally the bashful request for help with his English homework.

His older brother’s teasing was finally forgotten. “Osama the enemy” was gone, and Osama my little brother took his place. AQ

Irena Ioannou – Hop In Maya

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Hop In Maya
by Irena Ioannou

She was urged into the back
of the pickup truck, as soon as
Ricky was picked up by the school bus.
She couldn’t accept that he knew,
although his eyes seemed wider lately.
Maya had also seen how his father’s face
lit up when the phone rang
and darkened again afterwards.
She had noticed there were no more
bones or leftovers around,
how the mother let her loose
every morning, whispering, “You’re lucky, Maya.”
Lately, the mother had begun the habit
of opening and closing all the doors,
the fridge’s, the cupboards’, sighing.
The night before, Ricky offered Maya
a dry lump of sorts he had hidden
in his pocket; his mother’s eyes glistened.
When father stopped driving,
at the wrong side of the city, Maya
jumped off the back of the truck on her own.

J. R. Solonche – The Lambs

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The Lambs
by J. R. Solonche

Already marked
for death by circles
of day-glo green
sprayed on their fresh
woolen haunches,
they gallop in the muddy
yard of the barn, in pairs,
or singly, next to the fence
or the water trough.
Like strange, miniature horses,
they buck and jump straight up
as though saddle-strapped,
and their shadows,
which are the ghosts
of strange, giant horses,
are already across the road,
making for the open meadow.