Author’s Note: I spend a great deal of my writing wondering about and exploring masculinity; here, I wanted to look at the idea that “men don’t cry” and really twist that around to ask questions about the value of emoting.  As a queer writer, I’m also always trying to examine what it’s like to feel islanded outside of the world of heteronormativity, and when those two things came together, this story emerged.

Criers

EVERY DAY AT RECESS, SOMEONE MADE LARRY HELVIG CRY. We kept eyedroppers in our pencil cases, extracting them right before the bell rang if it was our turn to suck tears from the corners of his eyes or draw them up off his cheeks. Larry’s tears were magic. A single drop squeezed onto a worksheet made the answers appear, written in perfect black graphite. Spiking our parents’ wineglasses ceased their fighting. A tiny smear rubbed into the palms transformed a klutz into an expert free throw shooter or pitcher. Daubing Larry’s tears on a scrape dissipated the pain like a powerful analgesic. Larry, we all knew, would one day change the world. His tears would cure cancer, eradicate AIDS, probably create world peace. But while we had him, we would use his tears to pass science and get better at playing the oboe. 

Making Larry cry wasn’t difficult. Some people, especially the girls, tickled him, the ribs on his left side were particularly tender. Others smuggled Tabasco sauce in their lunch boxes and dabbed it on his sensitive tongue. Naomi Marcus had a knack for singing sad songs, and these made Larry bawl profusely; some of us subcontracted her to serenade him, for which we promised her a portion of the take. Others, like Willy Ziegfeld, used pain, pressing into the tender spot of Larry’s shoulder or giving him rabbit punches to the sternum. 

The great tragedy was that the only person his tears couldn’t help was Larry himself. For him, they were just saline and salt. They could give the rest of us exactly what we wanted but left him only hiccupping and red eyed. Larry was small, pale—rumor was he suffered scoliosis—and we all knew he was madly in love with Peter Frost, a tenth grader with bronze calves who played soccer and swam for a club team. We once sent Peter’s younger sister home with a vial of Larry’s tears, a massive dose that she slipped into one of Peter’s protein shakes. They made him run faster but did nothing to make him notice Larry. 

But we noticed Larry. We noticed that he smelled like stargazers and sweet alyssum, which his mother grew in a tiny greenhouse in their backyard. We noticed how hollowed out he looked after weekends with his father, who had left his mom for his secretary. We noticed everything but that which we should have, and when he didn’t show up for school on the last day of eighth grade, it took awhile for us to realize something was deeply wrong. When we learned what Larry had done to his eyes, we cried. But we sobbed not for what the world had lost or for Larry’s hungering pain but for what had slipped away, all our hopes and dreams leaking out of our eyes in tiny, hollow twinkles. We tried using our own tears, but all they did was sting, soaking our mouths in our own bitter taste. 

⧫

Joe Baumann’s fiction and essays have appeared in Phantom Drift, Passages North, Emerson Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Iron Horse Literary Review, Electric Literature, Electric Spec, On Spec, Barrelhouse, Zone 3, and many others.  He is the author of Ivory Children, published in 2013 by Red Bird Chapbooks.  He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette.  He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction.  His debut short story collection, Sing With Me at the Edge of Paradise, was the inaugural winner of the Iron Horse/Texas Tech University Press First Book Award, and his second story collection, The Plagues, will be released by Cornerstone Press in 2023.  His debut novel, I Know You’re Out There Somewhere, is forthcoming from Deep Hearts YA.  Website: joebaumann.wordpress.com.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry selected annually from thousands of submissions locally and nationally. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, it is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: Pulling Salt from Water was not an easy thing to write. I have never written about sexual abuse. I think this subject braids nicely with my youth and experience of schizophrenia. It’s a story that triumphs over tragedy. It’s a story that highlights my writing life and my need to be transparent. Yes, I have trauma in my past and yes, I have schizophrenia. Those two things no longer define me. I am at peace.

Editor’s Note: “Pulling Salt from Water” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in nonfiction, as published in the Delmarva Review, Volume 14 (2021). From the opening lines, we are invited into the mind of a courageous writer who is “best understood on the page.” She gives her voice to metaphors that “long to be set free, the paragraph that belongs to me, the one I decide to share as I try to touch my reader.”

Pulling Salt from Water

HE ENTERED AT NIGHT. THE ONLY PROTECTION I HAD were the monsters living in my closet. I begged them to pull him off me. Quietly. Softly. So much so that he couldn’t hear me. My words were hot breaths against his neck. I left my body to float on the ceiling. 

This man was not my father. He was an impostor who simply smelled and looked like my father. Old Spice was his cologne of choice. This man was not the man who seated me between his bicycle handlebars and rode me around the neighborhood. He was not the man who played hide-and-seek with me and my two sisters. Not the man who taught me how to throw a football or quizzed me on math problems. He did not buy me a hamster for my twelfth birthday; my father did that. 

The monsters never came to my rescue. Instead, they tormented me on sleepless nights, telling me they were going to shave my head while I slept or eat my fingers to the second knuckle. The monsters had been in my closet for years. I knew they were there, these lecherous old men standing three feet tall with no hair and mottled gray features. They wore dinner jackets and stank of feces. They never blinked.

IN THE PAST, MY BRAIN CAUSED ME TO LOSE WORDS; I was locked in psychosis with no way to communicate. In the future, I will be hospitalized. There is a fear that I will not be able to get my proper medications. There is a fear that depressed and paranoid me will not be able to leave my house. I have a fear of losing words. 

I WAS SITTING IN A PSYCHIATRIST’S OFFICE, midday, wondering why he had fake plants. He was a bald man with a Salvador Dali mustache, the ends of which stood up beautifully. This was my first time seeing Dr. Denton. The file on his desk contained information about me. It was filled with an accumulation of hospital staff reports and my parents’ observations. Dr. Denton told me this as he randomly flipped through it. Dr. Denton was the one who would deliver the news. My diagnosis. 

He cleared his throat and in one breath said, “I have reviewed your file and believe you to have schizophrenia.” 

My whole world changed with that one sentence. I was twenty-nine years old. 

Please, poetry, make me more awake; lead me to a new truth.

Ask me to come to the poem with a child’s sensibility. 

     – Unknown 

I BELIEVE WRITING IS A SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE. I rarely know what it is I’m going to write. I like learning what I don’t know about my story. I love the magic that is poetry. I am a poet writing prose. Sometimes my prose leaves me at waist level in water. 

I AM IN A PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL. The plastic window allows sunshine to brighten the bedroom. I am warmed by it. The unit runs cold; an open door of a freezer allows the ice to melt slowly. Once the door is closed, the ice will regain itself. Maybe it is cold to keep us awake and moving. My mood slowly thaws. 

The day room is sterile with a smell of Lysol. There are couches covered in gray vinyl, a whiteboard, and several round tables with chairs around them. The TV is paused on Forrest Gump running. The room is well lit. There is no dark corner in which to hide. I don’t eat in the dayroom with the rest of the patients. The patients don’t interest me. I am a cat who never meows. 

A few of us pace the hallway. Up and down. Again. Up and down. Once tired, I will stand still as a hinge, sometimes for hours. 

When will I fall into myself? I wonder. Back into my shoes and the weight I feel with each step? Normality is suspended. 

THE FAMILY ROOM WAS DIMLY LIT. The wood-paneled wall contributed to its dreariness. It was 1976. Wood walls were all the rage. I could hear my mom in the kitchen preparing dinner. I knew she was making Italian food. I could smell the garlic. The clock in the hall chimed six. 

Father and I stood eyeing each other. I was six feet tall at twelve. He had a couple inches on me. He was barefoot. I, in black-and-white Converse sneakers, flat to the ground, no heel. 

I was afraid of this man. My fear was like a snipped tail of a kite unable to catch wind. The kite stalls out before ever having flown. I am tethered like this. To the ground. Flightless. Unmoving. At the mercy of what he will say. I’m afraid of being ridiculed. 

I needed him to hear me.

“Dad, I’m tired. Like really tired all the time.”

Dad responded, “You can’t be tired. You’re only twelve.” 

Tears sprang to my eyes. I lowered my chin to my chest with the hope that he hadn’t noticed I was crying.

“Hey, hon. Do you need any help in the kitchen?” He called out to my mom. “We’re done here, yes?” he asked me and then turned to walk away before I could answer. I thought the deep green of his Polo shirt was a good color for him. It complimented his raven-colored hair. 

“Done,” I said to myself. “Done. I’m done.” 

I didn’t know what to do with my hands. It seemed I would feel better if I just knew what to do with my hands. I rolled them into the front of my shirt, creating a cotton muffler. 

The front door slammed open. My sisters had been playing Barbies in the front yard. Their hands were full of blonde dolls and small cardboard boxes. They used the boxes for all sorts of things: dressers, beds with tissue pillows, refrigerators filled with paper groceries. They fell into the family room beside the blue couch like one falls from climbing a tree onto the grass below, silently and suddenly. 

“Wow,” Samantha said, stopping abruptly. “You’re crying.” 

“I am not,” I said. “My eyes just itch.”

My sisters left me alone. They headed for their bedroom where the coveted case for everything Barbie lived.

Dinner was silent. Samantha and Suzanne twisted spaghetti onto their forks and then shoved it into their mouths. Mom wouldn’t look at me. I figured Dad had told her what I said. She was afraid of my feelings. Feelings weren’t her thing. Dad was brutally quiet. He usually was a mountain of talk. He reached for the garlic bread. Mom offered to pass the butter. He nodded yes. I pushed the broccoli around my plate. It was covered in cheese so my sisters and I would eat it.

“I’m not hungry,” I said.

“So, you’re tired and not hungry,” Dad said. “You’re really just a mess tonight.”

My sisters stopped eating as if hearing my dad clearly required them to abandon their forks scraping against their glass plates. 

“Okay. I’m a mess,” I said solemnly. “May I be excused?” 

“Of course,” Mom said before Dad could say anything. She saved me in that moment. I felt her love. 

I slowly inched my chair back. The wooden legs caught on the shag carpeting, spoiling my quick exit. Dad stared at me. I stood and turned my back to all of them, leaving my chair stranded a few feet away from the table. 

“I love you, Kristina,” Samantha said. Her words painted color back onto a blank canvas. Suzanne eyeballed Dad and then mumbled out an “I love you” in suit with her older sister. 

I paused and then started to cry again. Without turning around, I said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I really don’t.”

“You’re just twelve,” Dad said. “Only twelve.” 

I wasn’t sure what he meant by that. I didn’t know if he was acknowledging my suffering or jabbing me with words already said. I just knew it hurt. A boxer rests his arms on the shoulder of the other, but only for a moment. Then the beating begins again until they finally dance away from each other after the bell rings. The hall clock struck eight. 

I BELIEVE I WAS BLESSED WITH THE BREATH of the written word. I’m not much of a conversationalist, but I can write. My writing began in the first grade, when I used to journal about my feelings and ideas for my parents. Once, I caught my mom reading one of my letters to a friend. They laughed at it. I slinked down the hall and into my bedroom. Later, I created illustrated stories about Batman and Robin. They always caught the bad guy. 

The fact that I have schizophrenia makes my language different at times. It impacts my descriptions of things. Sometimes, the way I write only makes sense to me. I write in snapshots. My mind welcomes single images. The bee stings my shoulder knowing it will lose its life as it leaves its rear end behind. 

Sometimes, descriptions don’t necessarily fit in the right places. I have a blueberry that’s barely visible in the ocean of cranberries but is still sweet like only a blueberry can be, while the cranberries remain tart. 

Writing allows me to give voice to the metaphors that rub the inside of my cheeks and tickle my throat, causing me to cough. I can hear it in a period, hear it in a comma—the phrase that longs to be set free, the paragraph that belongs to me, the one I decide to share as I try to touch my reader. 

IN MY DREAMS, Mom would open my closet door and encourage the monsters to come out. The monsters would moan and tell her they were too tired. Mom would offer them vodka. They’d still resist her. 

I WOKE TO MY PILLOWCASE STAINED WITH DROOL. At times during the night, it felt as if I was drowning in spit. This was a side effect of my medication. Maybe this is why the hospital pillow inside the starched white industrial pillowcase was plastic. It is quiet in the hospital. Still early. Most don’t rise until they hear the call for breakfast. One thing I know for sure is that no matter how sick the mind, everyone comes to meals. 

Bonnie, the psych tech, shouts out, “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Breakfast is served.” Her voice so loud that it easily reaches the last room down the hall of eight doors on each side. She rivals a rooster. 

I CAN SPEND AN HOUR ON ONE LINE OF POETRY or one paragraph of prose. The pitcher walks four players before she begins to strike out batters. 

I’m not good at knowing what is working and what is not working in my writing. Writing peers assist me in pulling salt from the water, allowing me to quench my thirst without losing the spark that ignites each page. Water can boil without the salt. Perhaps the salt can be added seasoning later, but it’s primarily about getting rid of the thirst. 

THERE WAS A MIRROR PERCHED ABOVE MY DRESSER. I leaned toward it, my face a palm’s width away. “I don’t know what’s wrong, but it will be okay,” my twelve-year-old self said to my reflection. A line of snot dripped from my nose. I swiped at it with the back of my arm. 

“My time will come” I reassured myself. “Yes, it will. I will be a strong and beautiful girl with the energy of a horse, who will have several best friends.” Right now, I was alone with no one to talk to. 

Removing my long-sleeved black T-shirt and light-colored blue jeans frayed at the bottom, I slipped into an oversized white T-shirt with the band Queen on the front. I liked Freddie Mercury. Fortunately, my dad knew nothing about him. My dad hated gays and would light my T-shirt on fire, probably with me in it, should he learn that Freddie was queer. “What a fag,” my dad would say. 

I pulled on my black cotton pajama bottoms with little cats dotted all over them. They were the softest thing I owned. 

The salt from my tears had streaked my face. The bathroom was just across the hall from my bedroom. I took a wet washcloth and washed the traces of my pain away. “As if nothing happened,” I said. I dumped the washcloth into the laundry basket in the corner. 

I was too tired to sleep, which I knew made no sense, but that was the way it had been for days. No wonder I was crying so easily. Exhaustion could do that to a person. I stroked Felix, my cat, my black cat with a white chin who’s small enough to sleep across my throat as I lie on my back and began my count of a hundred backwards. 

“One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight,” I forced my eyes shut. Felix licked at my cheek, savoring the remnants of salt. 

MY DOCTOR, DR. PUREWAL, VISITED DAILY to have fifteen-minute conversations with me. At first, it was always frustrating because I was unable to get him to understand me. Pulling words randomly into full sentences was beyond my reach. My writing was bleak, also. While lost in my mental illness, I could write only for me. Readers weren’t allowed in. He said he could make the voices I hear go away and bring me into clear thought. With clear thought, I could write and speak once again in paragraphs. 

Dr. Purewal always had a poker face. When I finally agreed to take Clozaril, he got excited. He clearly believed the drug would break my psychosis. It was the only anti-psychotic of nine different anti-psychotics that I hadn’t tried. 

IT’S BEEN A WHILE SINCE I SHAVED MY HEAD looking for the dial that would allow me to choose realities beyond my psychosis. I still believe there is a dial on my brain that can be found beneath my dark curls. I believe that other people could dial into my realities if only they had such a mechanism attached to their brains. Of course, my belief in the dial was attributed to my schizophrenia. 

The voices I heard that no one else heard, the voices that were so real to me, telling me things I should do like tell the fat man he had a lard ass, punch the woman who is always crying in the face, knock down the little man with the mustache like a bowling ball would a pin, finally quieted. 

I struggle with maintaining life in the common reality: the reality of postal workers and grocery store clerks, the reality of friends and family being intimate with each other. Today, my struggle is less intense, unlike ten years ago, when I was in and out of hospitals every three months. 

I wanted to be well. I did not know how to always get my mind to cooperate. My mind was a wheelbarrow filled with glass bowls the color of cherries, the bowls filled with letters of the alphabet. Some bowls contained words like shoe, door, walk, and free. Others contained just random letters I desperately wanted to make sense of. The bird walks to the edge of the mountain and jumps, expecting to fly, but instead finds that she has a broken wing and tumbles to earth. Words like fall safe could have prevented her from crashing in a mix of feathers and blood. Before the Clozaril, I could not make sense of the things I thought about. 

When stepping out of my mind, I could not be understood, like an infant wanting to say hello. When I fell into my mind, I made sense. I am a woman who just happens to have schizophrenia but am not controlled by it. I wanted this. I wanted freedom like a helium balloon released from the clutches of a toddler’s fist. 

My mind is never emptied of bothersome thoughts, but it is so much better. Many days the voices are just static, and I can clearly say good morning to my coworkers and thank the man who bags my groceries. 

MY HOME IS A SAFE PLACE FOR ME TODAY. There are no monsters in the closet. Mirrors are my friends; I can look and see more than just vacant eyes and an empty stare. I have pretty hair. 

My kitchen is small but mighty. I can crack eggs to scramble. One of the burners on my four-burner stove doesn’t work properly. When it’s turned on, smoke comes from the dial. 

I have two black cats that I got at the Humane Society for ten dollars. They have never been without me. Grams is named after my grandmother and Annie after my mother. I am good at cleaning the bathroom. Grams watches me as I clean, her sleek black coat avoids my cleaner, the smell of Comet is toxic to her. She lifts her nose. 

I kneel, making certain to clean around the valve at the bottom of the toilet. Grams leaps onto the seat, her feet clean against the white surface of the plastic. She eyes the blue of the toilet bowl cleaner. Her meow lets me know my work is right on. 

My home is as much Grams’ and Annie’s as it is mine. Together, we move forward. The calendar ticks off days and nights of solace. I am happy. The world invites me to take a seat at the table of quiet abundance, where I am served coffee with two sugars and cream.

I DON’T MISS MY FATHER. He died of a heart attack ten years ago. I still haven’t reconciled the imposter and him, but the two do sometimes fit into the same beige shirt and black khakis when my father morphs into the rapist in my dreams. 

I continue to miss my mother. She never smelled of alcohol and cigarettes, although she indulged in both. Alcohol killed her at the age of 58. She was walking around on Thursday and then in a coma by Friday. 

I knew she drank too much, but I had no idea it was going to kill her at such a young age. I didn’t know she was dying. Her liver just quit. When young, I spent months hoping she would save me from him. How could I tell her he forced himself on me? I was too afraid and ashamed to tell her my innocence had gone the way of a feral cat, wild without bonds. 

I have regret. I wasn’t a good daughter. I could have done more for her. At the time of her death, I was really sick. I could not swim my way out of depression. 

I’ll always remember the call at midnight. Bob, my mother’s roommate, called and told me that my mother was acting strange. He didn’t know what to do. I gave him the number to the psychiatric helpline. They would send a team of therapists out to see her. 

The next call I got, at two that morning, was from a psychiatric nurse in the urgent care center. She explained to me that my mother had been brought in to be evaluated. Though rare for them to allow clients to be given the phone, they put her on. She was desperate to speak to me. 

“I trusted all the wrong people,” she said over and over, her voice a piston of words. I could sense the steam through the phone. 

The psychiatric nurse took the phone from her and told me they were transferring her to a medical hospital because she didn’t look good. Her liver collapsed on the way there.
I would never hear her voice again. She woke once from the grave of her bed in the ICU when I visited her. I told her I knew she loved me. She blinked with yellow eyes, and then they closed, leaving me alone. I had never felt a loss so deep. I struggled, trying to break the surface of an ocean whose waves were relentless. 

My heart fractures when I think of her. There is so much I want to say. 

I climbed trees at night as a kid, hoping to pull down a star to give to you.

I no longer hate you for not knowing I was being raped. 

I want to take her hand in mine and whisper in her ear, “Sweet, you have nothing to prove to me. I love you just the way you are.” 

I WEAR MY SCHIZOPHRENIA BLINDLY. When my symptoms are not present, a person would never know I have mental illness. Why do I have the good fortune of having schizophrenia? Right…the good fortune. But I do make the most of it, turning it on its head by writing about it. It can make for an interesting paragraph. 

I HAVE NOT BEEN IN A HOSPITAL FOR ELEVEN YEARS. I have worked my same job with no absences for that same amount of time. I am at home in my body, able to watch comedy on TV and laugh, able to fix myself a spinach omelet, able to drive to the grocery store and shop. 

I forgave my father because I had to. The hate and loathing were eating me up, leaving a big hole in my psyche where God should have been. 

God is with me today. I am led to my creative self by inviting God in. God is the birds I hear in the morning, the dance of the bush in the breeze. The love I have for my friends is orchestrated by God. I am always in good company. 

I WALK AWAY FROM PSYCHOSIS, leaving it on the pantry shelf behind my medications. I continue to write myself into being, thinking I am best understood on the page. The days are gentle, like green oil paint on the bristles of a brush. My schizophrenia is in my hands. I shake it loose, leaving plenty of time to walk into the parking lot, filled with hope, painting a black Mercedes that I can drive, taking me wherever I want to go. 

⧫

Kristina Morgan’s book-length memoir Mind Without a Home; A Memoir of Schizophrenia was published by Hazelden Press (2013). She received an MFA in creative writing and poetry in 2007 from Arizona State University. In addition to Delmarva Review, her writing has been published in Quartet and  other literary journals. Her work has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, for a short story and for a personal essay in Delmarva Review.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry selected annually from thousands of submissions locally and nationally. Designed to encourage and present outstanding new writing, it is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Author’s Note: “Garden” began with the woeful state of my yard which I knew needed tending. The thought occurred to me that while my yard was in a poor state to my mind, it was becoming a paradise to the various residents who inhabited it. I tried to capture a heighted description of an idealized garden that had been left untended. I wanted to contemplate that both value judgments and drama are a matter of perspective. 

Garden

RAIN FELL ON CLOVER as ivy pushed apart fence slats and roses choked the gate. Grass obscured the path and oranges rotted on the ground. The rain stopped. A snake slid beside the fence, weaving through the ivy, as a rabbit sat in the clover with ears raised. Robins perched, scanning for worms driven from the earth, and sparrows chirped in song. Aphids sucked sap from hollyhocks, and beetles devoured rose petals. A snail labored through the grass knowing the robins would have him if spotted. The snake slithered under the fence and disappeared. The rabbit’s ears lowered, and it began munching the patch of clover. The sun sank and a cricket choir erupted as earwigs emerged to feast on dahlias and chrysanthemums. A lightning bug blinked, others joined, the air glittered. Everyone who walked past the garden thought it was abandoned. 

♦ 

Michael Gazda lives and writes in Austin, Texas where he is a software engineer while studying creative writing through the Harvard Extension School. He was raised in Pennsylvania and lived in North Carolina, Boston, and Ireland. His work has appeared in the Epoch Press Literary Journal. 

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry selected annually from thousands of submissions locally and nationally. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, it is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

 

Author’s Note: I turned eighty recently, in a world that seems increasingly crazy and disjointed. For me now, making some sense of that world is less a matter of big ideas than of small actions. Like carpenters who nail together a home for the senile, or the homeless man for whom bus routes map the city, I write poems that try to make connections among disparate scraps of experience.

Editor’s Note: “Community Gardens” is one of three poems first published in the Delmarva Review included in John Palen’s new chapbook, “Riding with The Diaspora”. With graceful language, these well-crafted poems offer powerful, relatable moments experienced from the dispersion of people into America’s heartlands. They offer readers the feelings left behind as we view our expanding diversity.

At the Community Garden

The crew at the senility wing next door
is busy making connections,
nailing studs to plates, ceiling joists
to rafters. Today’s news was Trump, Covid,
a homeless man in a wheelchair
riding buses back and forth across LA.
I squat in my rain-soaked garden,
pulling bindweed out of the onions.

I used to think gardening would help
save the world. Such a peaceable thing,
you and I and the next person
and the next, like kids donating dimes
or cleaning their plates. Now I think
it has only helped me reach old age.

The rough, wet tongues of crabgrass
lick my muddy hands. When I stand up
the air darkens, daylight drains.
I spook the sparrows. As old
as I in sparrow years, they explode
out of the roofers’ scrap pile
with hard, quick wingbeats
and vanish into the leaves.

⧫

John Palen, a life-long Midwesterner, has worked as a store clerk, draftsman, newspaper reporter, editor, and journalism teacher. Over the last 50 years his poems have appeared in numerous literary publications and anthologies. He earned a PhD in American Studies from Michigan State University and was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities journalism fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. His chapbook “Riding with the Diaspora” won the recent Sheila-Na-Gig chapbook competition. His work was nominated three times for a Pushcart. He lives on the Illinois Grand Prairie.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction selected annually from thousands of submissions regionally and nationally. Designed to feature the most outstanding new work from aspiring writers, it is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

 

Author’s Note: My experience in the ballet world, and the close friendships and sisterhood cultivated among us dancers, provided inspiration for this story: “Coffee From Arabia” follows a young up-and-coming ballerina as she navigates growing up, identity, and desire both on and off the stage. In writing, it has been enchanting to peek behind the curtain at this life again!

Coffee from Arabia

I OFTEN MARVELED AT THE SLOPE OF ANYA’S BACK, milky skin against the bright fabric of her leotard. We’d started in light pink, then lilac, then powder blue. I’d stand behind her in adagio and concentrate on the tautness and slow uncoiling of her muscles as she moved, trying not to lose my own balance, my focus. It seemed strange and wonderful to me that I was intimately familiar with the curve of her spine, rather than my own.

We wear black, now, but Anya remains my anchor. As I study my body in the mirror, making sure my neck is long and my shoulders are square and my elbows are soft and the entirety of my core is pulled in and up, up, up, I often catch her gaze, both of us smiling. Or, I catch the steady concentration in her face, her determination to reach farther, lift higher, hit each intricate angle stronger, even when she’s not aware anyone is watching. Her grace, her beauty, her preciseness, everything I want, laid out in the mirror before me. A reflection, solid and fleeting. The casting for this year’s The Nutcracker will be posted tonight; my favorite season has finally begun. Unlike our other productions, we tour with this show. The show where everything began. The curtain rises. 

——

Anya and I met at eight years old. She was tiny, with big doe eyes that seemed to take up most of her face. We had both been cast in The Nutcracker, as the girls who attend Clara’s Christmas party in the opening act and Mother Ginger’s little clowns at the end of the second. Ours was the youngest age they started the casting, the year that students metamorphosed—like the winged, butterfly-like sylphs in La Sylphide—from casual dancers to serious, upcoming ballerinas. I like to think of my time with Anya as one of our many performances—after the overture, an opening act, intermission, a second act. A start, a middle, a continuous end. 

I had been fitted with what I considered at the time a glorious, old-fashioned party dress for the party scene. Violet and heavy velvet, with an obscene, swallowing amount of lace and ribbons and layers. I spun off while the costume mistress pinned my name to it, but when I next turned around, there was Anya in my dress. She was too small for any of the others, I remember the costume mistress explaining patiently. She gestured to the rack of cheerful colored garments that remained, the ghosts of Clara’s friends. I had ended up in a burnt, tired kind of gold, with a sometimes-there greenish sheen in certain light. 

This became a sort of truth of this new world I was being invited into, the world of ballet. An envy that was not quite green, a chameleon kind of color. Layered with other, nameable and unnamable, things. That day, what I felt was mostly a marbled purple. But Anya was made my partner for the Polichinelles dance during that first rehearsal—due to our similar height—and she squeezed my hand excitedly when the huge skirt we’d be jumping out of was described to us and when we met the man who’d sit on the ladder, dolled up and beautiful on opening night. She was as mystified and awestruck as I was by the magic we were allowed to see, to touch, on this side of the curtain, yet serious and solemn as she went over our little steps, over and over. Shy among the older dancers, as I was, but I knew that they saw she stood out, as I did. 

“We’re not even on stage very long, you know,” I’d say, as she practiced her curtsey to Drosselmeier yet again, intent on her reflection in the mirror. You cannot escape the floor-to-ceiling mirrors in a ballet studio; they always see what you are. “But we’re on stage, anyway,” she’d say, feet pointed perfectly, back straight, head bowing at just the right angle. And she was right. We sat next to each other nervously on the tour bus, heading for that first show right after Thanksgiving, hair done up in curlers the night before by our dutiful mothers, and by the end of the ride we’d become the closest of friends in that easy, unquestioning way young kids do. And after we’d done the warmup and marked the half-hearted run-through in wooly socks and sweaters, then disappeared backstage to help each other take out the curlers, pin in hairbows, carefully lay out our small costumes, and painstakingly apply stage makeup in the way our mothers had shown us—beauty queens at only eight years old—the transformation was complete. As I watched Anya twirl in delight while Clara received her nutcracker, smile reaching to her eyes, her transformation resonated the most. I hardly recognized her, and I recognized her more closely than I ever had. She deserved my perfect, violet dress. 

——

Our ballet studio was well-known, difficult to get into and prosper in, a hidden gem in the busy interior of sparse Maine. Our teacher, Ms. Iris, was as fiery and passionate as her graying red hair, a principal dancer for the American Ballet Theatre at only seventeen years old. You came to her to become a dancer, and she could make you one, if you had it, that abstract concept spoken about in hushed tones. Our parents knew this, of course, and they sent us there explicitly for this purpose. 

My mother, who played principal clarinet in the Bangor Symphony Orchestra, was ever the artist. She did not believe in wasting talent, and she did not believe in giving up if said talent dawdled in the shadows, taking its time to make an appearance. She also did not believe that any daughter of hers could not be graceful. Half her motivation for choosing ballet was my clumsiness as a toddler, my tendency to ram into things, too grabby, too eager, too impatient. She was as familiar with Tchaikovsky as I was, his Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake and, of course, The Nutcracker steadily running through my veins as I grew older. I grew up going to symphonies, imagining my mother making music, making magic, in the secret underbelly under the stage. She took me to concerts, to plays, to museums where she’d hurriedly shuffle me past the paintings of naked men and women. Never too young for art, but too young for art, I suppose. Or reality.

Nakedness, nudity, was a norm in my new world, though, the world I was beginning to keep as a secret to those outside, those who wouldn’t understand. The dressing room had the pace of an accelerated heartbeat, dances passing on the stage too fast to call for modesty. In our early Nutcracker years, speed was not a problem for us youngest dancers, appearing only in the beginning of the show and at very nearly the end. But the toy soldier who had successfully helped vanquish the Rat King had four minutes to become a Snowflake, and she did not care who watched her do it. None of us were really watching, after all; we were existing as ballerinas, together, and even at a young age this camaraderie swelled warmly inside me. I was slowly taught that the female body, our bodies, did not need to be hidden, did not need to be judged. It was a shock at first—I remember my first time in the dressing room, eyes widening at the suddenly-there, largest breasts I had ever seen as the Chocolate from Spain dancer laced up her heels before bouncing into her long, fitted, ravishing red dress. But, as with the initial iciness of the Maine sea during a summer day at the beach, your body adjusts, grows warm, becomes used to it. I was fascinated that each body was new, unique. There were no two that were the same, yet they all fit together. And I would fit, too. There was beauty here, different from the beauty of our movements on the stage, but present still. 

The dressing room—here were women in a way we were not allowed to see them, to know they existed. Reality.

——

We grew, as flowers are prone to do. Scenes passed quickly, lost in a haze of memory and a blending together of childhood years. A thousand moments that felt incredibly important or funny or joyful or sad jumbled together and forgotten. We went from curly ponytails to real ballerina buns, from soft ballet shoes to tentative pointe. To more pain—in our toes and backs and hips as we stretched, as we danced. I remember being fitted for my first pair of pointe shoes, the store owner bringing me pair after pair, until finally she slid Gaynor Mindens on my feet and asked me to relevé. I clutched at the barre and imagined that I looked beautiful. The store owner studied me for a long time. “Not many girls start with these or can ever wear them.” She clucked her tongue. “It’s a unique shoe. But if your claves bulge and they look right, feel right, then that’s your shoe. Nothing you can do about it. They’re yours, and that’s you.”

Anya and I remained partners, still almost identical in height. We were given party dresses that used to fall to the floor, too long; we graduated into battle, as toy soldiers; we peeked onstage as we always had at the dancers who were Chocolate, Tea, Coffee, Trepak, Flowers—roles we knew we’d soon be getting. We began to care more about what clothes we wore outside the studio, what we looked like, what we gossiped about. We slowly began to have a place in productions outside of The Nutcracker. Change whistled in my ears, but The Nutcracker remained my favorite. Anya remained my favorite, too.

There were other girls, of course—we’d started together and were learning to fill the mold of one of Iris’s ballerinas together. Neves, the last of us to grow out her bangs and whose mother never let her forget that making it meant everything was a competition. Elena, the one with the strikingly beautiful face who always seemed to be a half-count behind. Andi, who had the prettiest painted fingernails and whose dedication was already wavering due to her newfound love of running. Mallory,  possessor of the longest legs who tried to make us laugh at the worst moments. The two other Marys, one of them also blonde, distinguished by our last initials. Mary L., Mary C., Mary O. Millie, the most innocent, who I once handed a tampon to under the bathroom stall during the break between matinee and evening shows and explained how to insert it, while Anya murmured encouragement. A family, we liked to think, but the envy-thing pulsed louder than before, even as we tried to ignore it, for parts in each ballet of the season and for parts of each other. Mallory’s legs in the perfect arabesque; Neves’s early conquering of the double pirouette; Elena’s stability while the rest of us wobbled on pointe. Andi could eat anything she wanted and stay petite; Mary C. could bend far, far back; and Mary L. was strong in her shoulders and had a deep plié. My eyes often glanced at my feet, as if to make sure they were doing what they should, but I had natural turnout that the others had to work for. Anya; Anya stood alone. As our bodies changed more, hers changed correctly for our craft. My thighs allowed me to jump high in a grand jeté, but the power came from their thickness. Anya was slim and narrow and powerful still. All eyes were drawn to her on the stage. 

We became the older dancers in the dressing room almost without my realizing it. I remember glancing down between the others’ legs while they took off their tights to see if there was a darkness there that matched my own. We all fretted over if our boobs would grow too much; I was relatively flat, but some of the others weren’t so lucky. I’d find myself comparing leg and stomach circumference in my head, calculating if I was safe, knowing that the others must be doing the same. 

Around the end of middle school, Anya and I were put in the Tea from China dance as partners, though she was faster and more precise in the footwork than I was. A costume mistress tugged at the black capri pants and tutted. “You have birthing hips,” she fretted, pulling at the material. In all my times in the costume room, this is the moment that does not blend together with my other fittings into one long, erratically patterned bolt of fabric. I felt heat crawl up my face as I studied the swirling gold pattern of my green tunic, somehow duller than before. “Oh, don’t worry; they’ll come in handy someday,” she added hurriedly, as if for atonement. Examining and discussing every inch of our bodies was not new, nor were the stretch marks crisscrossing over my widening hips and backside—I hoped Anya hadn’t heard her, anyway.

The first year our ankles were strong enough to audition on pointe, Anya and I were cast as Snowflakes. I remember her squealing and clutching me in a hug, her usual poise of Anya the Prima Ballerina lost in a moment of excitement. We were in, we knew—real ballerinas danced on pointe, after all. A triumph.

——

Anya and I were Drosselmeier’s dolls, brought in to enchant Clara and her party guests. Matching purple tutus and pointe shoes, jeweled masks, giant Washington-esque wigs. I remember sitting next to Anya on our downtime in rehearsals, her hip against mine, heads bent as we painstakingly colored our shoes with purple Sharpie. Anya hummed along with the Arabian dance, sewing purple, shimmery ribbons to her shoes. I watched her nimble fingers. I knew the feeling of them against my skin from our regular Thursday massage classes and at intermissions of performances, carefully smoothing out the knots in my back, my calves, my feet, before I did the same for her. I looked at my own shoes, a perfect match. We mirrored each other in the choreography, her hand holding mine strongly, steadfastly, as we went through the mechanical doll-like movements. When I came out of a piqué turn blind, the winking stage lights edging into the corners of my eyes, reaching for her hand while I lifted my leg up in a battement, I never doubted that she would be right where I expected she’d be. Our bodies were in tune—I felt her next move even as I began my own, recognized her tells. I could read the tilt of her head, the twitch in her fingers counting the music, the deepened plié before she sprang upwards, the quick inhale to set up a spin.

I did not share this synchronicity with my male partners, as we became old enough to dance with another in our classes. I had always been dancing with a partner, I wanted to protest, remembering the fairy waltz from Sleeping Beauty and the quiet shadowing of wilis in Giselle. We did not need the pas de trois that Iris kept hinting she was preparing us for; we had been our own pas de deux. But Anya was beautiful and lithe next to her partners, fitting her body against theirs, trusting them fully to lift her up to their shoulders or plunge her inches from the floor in a fish dive. She was stiff yet supple while they turned her, held her, breathed as one with her. I wobbled and doubted and could not find a big enough trust that he—whichever one he happened to be—wouldn’t drop me or forget me or let me slide past his fingers. I watched Iris purse her lips and gesture for me to try again. I watched Anya lean into her partners, skin on skin, grip their hands tight; they grasped her legs and arms and waist and then the two of them would laugh off to the side during the water break, talking through each move. Iris smiled, nodded her approval. I watched Anya pull ahead, wishing she’d stay back here with me and our previous dances.

I had always sensed her body, her elegance, her passion, but her gift had lingered underneath, like in the depths of the ocean. Now it pulsed near the surface, teetering between the moment it had been and the moment it would break free from the water, tilting its face to the sun. 

——

But there was still the Waltz of the Snowflakes, which became my favorite dance. The whisper of our pointe shoes against the stage, the swirling of pure white, the increasing speed and fervor of Tchaikovsky’s music and desperation—I began to feel I lived for it. The urgency, the agitation that rose and rose amid the snow. Before we danced, Anya and I would warm our feet up together, massage soreness and tightness out of each other’s limbs. Anya would pin my crown into my hair before we went on, ruffle my dress; I buttoned her bodice up her back, rows of tiny hooks tracing up her spine, her skin warm under my hands. We sprayed our pointe shoe ribbons with hairspray to keep them in place and rubbed rosin onto the tips and heels of our shoes—for stability, Anya always said. We flitted on and off the stage. In the wings, her hands on the back of my neck as she stood behind me waiting for our next entrance, moving to smooth my hair and brush out the fake plasticky snowflakes. At another exit, my diving to the floor to tuck in her misplaced pointe shoe ribbon; she hadn’t noticed. A few seconds to massage out someone’s ankle, fix someone’s arm puffs, catch our breath. A few seconds of reality before we were boureeing back onto the stage, tiny precise movements of our feet, all smiles, all magic. We had a story to tell. There was nothing quite like the feeling of twirling and twirling as the final notes resounded, mingled with the voices of the choir, the fake snowflakes falling onto our hair and faces and shoulders as we smiled at the ever-present audience.

And later but not yet latest, as Anya was passed over for Clara—the role we all suspected she’d get—to be buoyed up early to the more advanced parts of Coffee from Arabia and a Waltz of the Flowers Flower, we still had Snow. I progressed as expected, to the less significant Cotton Candy and ever-present Tea from China. As I waited in the wings to scuttle onstage with my paper umbrella, I’d watch the grace that was Anya. Anya, in her Arabian golden bra and harem pants, coffee hair and skin glowing, effervescent under dimmed stage lights. She seemed almost too exquisite to exist as she moved through the stage from one elegant lift to another, the lines of her body and her movements immaculate. Her body hummed with an energy I could feel. Her partner held her easily, pressed his body against hers. More pain, like the persistent cramping of my feet on pointe, but a different kind of ache, a new slinking feeling, as I watched her. 

And still, the Snow. The curtain falling to signal intermission, performance after performance, snow pooled at our feet. We’d relax from pointe and exhale together, and Anya would chatter excitedly as she held my waist or my hand on our way to the dressing room to prepare for Act II. 

——

Intermission, a pause. A bridge to change, something different, something new. And it’s always a gamble whether the audience, the dancers, like the first Act or the second Act better. In The Nutcracker, the break comes right after the Snow. I have so long been a Snowflake, but I only learned a short time ago that snowflakes—a universal emblem of uniqueness—are born the same. Their differences are from their falls, their separate, distinct descents. 

——

There are certain rules in ballet, rules all ballerinas must follow. A body shape, for one. Certain arms go with certain positions of the feet; the order of the barre that takes up at least half an hour of every class is unwavering; each step and movement has a corresponding locked position of every part of the body. There is a constant striving for length, the illusion of height, a pulling up. There must be beauty, there must be grace. You must tell the right story. There must always be improvement. You cannot do a turn without spotting. You cannot forget that you are here for the audience. You cannot show them the pain of a split toenail, the looseness of a headpiece, the falling of a costume element or a perfectly tucked-in pointe shoe ribbon, the mistakes or missed steps in the choreography. You cannot show them what you are really feeling. 

“No, no!” Iris shouts as I am lax about one of the rules, as I forget something essential, as I grimace at the blistering of my toes. “You must work harder. Again!” She taps her foot and points at the corner of the room where I have done chaines, tight turns, down. I bite my lip, I set my body and start again, dizzy. Auditions for universities, companies, intensives will be starting soon. I’ve been told I need to be ready. Anya has been ready all this time.

——

We were sixteen when Anya was made the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, now seventeen when she’s made Katrina in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in the fall. I was to be the double-casted witch in the company’s smaller production for children of Hansel and Gretel. It’s strange, looking at casting calls, going from chatting with one of the other girls in the dressing room about the mundanities of high school, to quick hate and cursing some aspect of her dancing when you see her name next to a role you feel you deserve or want better, then going back to complimenting her sneakers or picking up her fallen water bottle during class. The swish of green in your stomach, its inevitable settling of itself. The pushing down of your want. We help each other, we dance with each other—and yet. And yet, when Mary L. twisted her ankle during dress rehearsal and I became the sole witch in Hansel and Gretel, what was I supposed to think? I didn’t want her to be injured, but I also had to congratulate myself on my gain, didn’t I?

Anya and I had both profited from injury before—in the middle of The Nutcracker last season, between Anya’s performances in the golden bra costume, the Dew Drop Fairy had hurt her shoulder and Anya, the understudy, took the stage. I remember her weeping in the wings during intermission, telling me that she couldn’t do it, there would be too many people watching and she wasn’t ready. I held her face in my hands, stroked the purple flowers woven into her hair, and felt her tears on my fingers. Of course you’re ready, I said, and I was right. In all our time, I had never felt that nebulous jealousy towards Anya. Of her, I was proud. 

After, I hurriedly wiped my fingers off on my Flower skirt, feeling somehow ashamed of having a piece of her without her knowing.

——

And now, the same certainty in Anya fills me up as after another long class I scan this year’s casting sheet for The Nutcracker. She’s to be the Snow Queen and Dew Drop Fairy in addition to Coffee from Arabia again. There’s a pulse in my stomach as I think of watching her dance the Arabian dance from the wings—the seduction and the dimmed lights, only her and her partner, intimate in their dancing. I wish I was her partner there instead, our golden bodies weaving around each other. I quickly shake these thoughts away. My parts remain the same. Soldier, Snowflake, Tea, Flower.

This year is not the same, though. As I go through our usual rehearsals and we begin to hit the road on the bus to a new venue each weekend, I feel the magic of The Nutcracker ebbing away. Perhaps this is where the slinking thing came from, which has stayed with me since last season. It adds jolts of confusion and something lukewarm that lingers in me at odd moments with Anya, a kind of ache when she laughs or smiles at me as we partner up again for grand allegro or wipe sweat from ourselves during a difficult class. 

She twirls through the snow in the snow globe of my thoughts in her impressive white and sparkling tutu. She flickers in the shadows of a desert, eyes flashing under her Arabian headpiece, her stomach flat and skin bare under the golden bra. I want her to touch me, to share with me her balletic gift, herself. 

——

We sit in the back of the bus after opening night, away from the front seats we had clustered in in our younger days. All of us—Neves, Elena, the Marys, Mallory, Anya—squeeze into two of the bus seats, laughing and piling on top of each other. Anya sits on top of me, and I feel the bones of her hips poking into my stiff thighs. I don’t, I cannot, move. Her skin is warm, and it feels smooth and solid and different from all the times before.

“Truth or Dare?” One of the Marys is whispering gleefully, stage makeup still smeared across parts of her face where she hasn’t fully removed it. The others stop their gossiping about peeks and silly raids in the boys’ dressing room; I’d never found any of that amusing. It’s dark outside the bus, dark enough that we can barely see each other’s faces, only lit eerily for quick moments by strange, streaking colors as we pass by storefronts and lit up signs. 

“Truth,” says Anya, and the Mary giggles. 

“How far have you gone with your boyfriend?” she whispers, and these are the kinds of questions we ask now, the kinds of things we’re supposed to think about. When Anya first described the homecoming dance she’d gone to earlier this year, I had to force a thin smile. She’d interpreted my look in her own way, reassuring me that I’d know the right boy when he came along. I’m still waiting. 

Anya’s smile is shy and sneaky at once. I feel her breath as she murmurs, “Second base. And you know I hate sports.” The others cackle as if this is the funniest thing they’ve heard all day.

“Too bad Millie quit, we’d have to explain it to her,” Neves grins. We had not all made it this far—there is a straggling parade of girls somewhere with newly shorn hair and retired toe shoes who do not look back. Mallory says in a hushed tone, “He touched your boobs?” When Anya nods, she shrieks. 

It’s not that special, I want to say, to shout, as they bombard her with questions. We’d all brushed against each other’s chests at some point, while buttoning up costumes and lacing each other into tight bodices. We’d certainly seen each other. Not worth shrieking about, I think, as I know I’m lying, as I feel a squirming inside me. There’s the chameleon’s green in my eyes, I think, electric green, directed towards someone faceless, someone who isn’t one of us. I push it away. 

The game continues. It feels as though hours have passed when I know it’s not so. The other Mary whispers, “Truth or Dare?” 

“Dare,” I say, as I’ve had enough of chatter. 

“Kiss someone!” Mary squeals, and there’s a dissolving into high-pitched laughter again. I can feel a headache starting behind my eyes and I sigh, happy for the darkness that shadows my face. 

“Who?” I stutter. The boys are in the middle of the bus, and none of us seem willing to move from our entwined positions. “One of us!” Mallory half-yells, then covers her mouth with her hand while Elena throws a legwarmer at her. I realize that they all think this is a daring, impossible act. Then, Anya shifts in my lap.

“Oh, I’ll do it,” she says, and grabs for my face. I can barely make out the leftover lipstick smudging around her mouth before she’s kissing me. Her lips are soft; she pulls away. The others shriek in delight. Anya grins, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth. “See?” she says, “Not a big deal.” Passing lights slice her face into sections of red and blue and green. The ache is a purring in the small of my back. I look out the window, ignore the saltiness of desire on my tongue. Anya, the Prima Ballerina. 

The game continues. 

——

I don’t trust myself to look any of them in the eye anymore, but I especially cannot look at Anya. I turn away from her in the dressing room, feeling unworthy and ashamed. When we talk, I mutter, keeping my focus on the floor, on her feet. I shouldn’t be looking at her body; I see it in a way the others do not, curves and valleys to admire and explore. I can feel her looking for me, wanting to stand next to me at the barre, stretch and massage each other out, share snacks—is she wondering what has happened? I wonder, myself. But she is too caught up each show with her demanding parts, her costume changes, to linger on me and my awkwardness for long. I do not allow myself to linger on her. Save for in the wings, while I watch her swirling solos through the snow, my own shoes sticky with rosin. She is beautiful, with magnificent piqué turns and pas de chats and waltzes with her Prince. I had been her partner, once, but I don’t deserve it anymore. As we flow through performances and looming auditions, I feel I am not a part of this world anymore, that it isn’t what I thought it was. My muscles, so well-trained, feel heavy, sluggish, disobedient. My body is slow, ugly, wrong. I’m telling a story I no longer believe in.

I had before been able to differentiate my times on and off the stage, between the magical façade and the reality underneath, between the audience and the alone. I cannot seem to keep them straight anymore. I feel as if I am always being watched, judged, expected to smile and perform some charade. Leap higher, spin faster, dance stronger and with more sureness. Perhaps it is only Anya who is watching, or no one at all. Perhaps all are watching. I feel now I am always performing. 

There is the conductor’s head poking out of the orchestra pit as I wait for an entrance in Snow, and his white hair and whiskers could make him Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky, our Tchaikovsky, whose final symphony Pathétique perhaps still rang in his ears as he toasted his lover with a glass of tepid cholera. Were his tears from laughter or pain? Can I, will I, join him?

Iris tells me in class I am not concentrating, I am not reaching my potential. We are mastering fouettés on pointe. I fall from relevé again and again, kicking myself off balance, afraid that I’ll fall, so choosing to fall early and on my own terms. Anya’s are ideal form, of course, arms opening and closing as they should, pointed foot whipping in and out in succession. “Again,” Iris says, while my core crumples and I teeter off balance. Everyone knows you must be able to do thirty-two fouettés if you want even a chance to reach that dream of Odette/Odile in Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece, Swan Lake. I can picture Anya as the white and black swan, fluttering her arms, flying, as the other swans standing stiffly in the background. She pirouettes around the shimmering lake. I can see that I am not there. 

I despise my body; it won’t do what I want it to do, what it’s supposed to do. 

At the end of class, I lock myself in the bathroom to cry. I bump into Anya as I emerge, knowing my eyes are still red. 

“My contact lens flipped over,” I say in a shaky voice, “I had to fish it out.” 

“Ouch,” she says, studying me. She reaches out, slow, to tuck a stray piece of hair from my bun behind my ear. It’s the first time I’ve lied to her, out loud. Did she remember the taste of my mouth, our kiss? Had she kissed me back, really? Has she even thought about our kiss at all? Was it possible to long for impossible things?

When I remember my dreams, they’re of Anya, spinning, spinning, spinning.

——

I lace Anya into her tutu’s bodice as the number of remaining shows dwindles. I focus on the crisscrossing ribbons, make them smooth and even. I’m quiet. I do not easily chatter or laugh with her as we used to, though she gives me a small smile when our eyes meet in the vanity mirror. I chew on my lip, try to concentrate. The top of the bodice is wrinkled and crooked, and I slide my hand up her back to adjust it, pull the sides of the bodice in place. My hand slips under the bodice, from her back to her boob—it is warm and round and small and firm, and I’m not thinking save for how good and right it feels, and I’m not moving my hand. I can feel her heartbeat, I am so close to her heart; I feel my own heartbeat speed up. I ache, between my legs, in my chest. Anya draws in a breath sharply, and my eyes dart back to the mirror. Our eyes meet, again, and the look I see on her face—

I stumble to the wings, empty still before the ten-minute call to curtain, and cry. 

——

Anya doesn’t mention it. Neither do I. I owe her words I can’t taste, can’t find.

I could always read her, sense her next move. Here, I don’t know what she’s thinking, feeling. She acts as though nothing has changed, nothing has happened. Her usual poise. Uncertainty splinters through my core. Is this also a performance? Is she waiting until The Nutcracker is over to confront what happened, confront me, hate me, leave me? I feel like I’m spinning all the time, jerky, uncentered, flailing off balance.

I will not touch her. Only on stage, if we brush past each other during the dance—when we are playing parts, when we are not ourselves. Off stage, in the dressing room, at the studio, in the wings, I make myself a phantom, flit away from her when I can. I won’t wonder if she notices, how she reacts.

The first Snow after, I dashed and weaved through the other girls retreating offstage while the Snow Prince was still lowering Anya down from their final shoulder lift. Before I could disappear behind the side curtain, leave the melting winter wonderland behind, the glint of her tutu caught my eye. Inadvertent, distracted, I turned to see her start to massage out her own ankle, bent awkwardly at the waist, hand clenched into a fist. Muted light now and her face in heavy stage makeup looked garish, enchanting. She wobbled while she finished the massage and straightened up, graceful. I pushed my thoughts, my want, down, away. She unpinned her tiara herself, letting it dangle, sparkling, from her hand. She started to brush snow off her neck, out of her hair. I turned, left the stage behind.

He comes to one of our final shows. Anya’s boyfriend. He is wearing a crooked tie and holds her firmly around the waist, and her head is back, laughing. He admires her tutu, her crown, and she glows as though she is a real queen. He’s given her roses. She holds them against her chest delicately, as though they are the most precious things in the world. I pause in my usual rushing to find her and the others after a performance, to mingle with the audience together—a semblance of our lost normal—to congratulate her and the rest on another job well done before finding my chance to slip away. I pull back and linger against the hallway wall. I feel suddenly self-conscious in my Waltz of the Flowers costume, the petals that adorn my headpiece and skirt as fragile and fleeting as the petals of her roses. I had never thought to bring her roses. I turn around and head back to the dressing room early. I’m not sure if she’s seen me, if she was looking.

——

The final show of the season comes quickly. I pick up my plastic, useless sword and put on my red toy soldier sticker cheeks one last time, go into battle. Emerge unscathed, mostly. I concentrate on lacing up my pointe shoes, adjusting my crown, while the music of Anya’s flawless pas de deux wafts from the stage. We haven’t spoken much since the incident in the dressing room, despite Anya’s trying. I stand in the wings, studying the floor. Iris told us earlier this week to enjoy the few days of holidays we had, as we’d have to go back to working hard and preparing for the new year’s audition season. 

“Your futures are nearly here,” she told us, beaming, “You are so close to getting where you want to be! You cannot waste opportunity!” I no longer am sure of what I want; or if I can find it here. I think of myself at eight years old, in greenish-gold, wide-eyed in the wings watching the giant Christmas tree, the Sugar Plum Fairy I thought I’d someday be. I didn’t think I would, I could, fall out of love with ballet—or in love with something else. Yet, here I am, waiting for my entrance, my exit, the curtain. For all there was before, it unraveled very quickly, and I cannot grasp a strong enough thread to hold on to.

The Snow falls, and there is a numbness, a cold, as though the snow were real and not manufactured, plastic flakes that will only be swept away. Anya beams at the crowd, and they love her—who wouldn’t, the perfect Anya, at their fingertips but always out of reach. The brass section reaches its climax as she whirls around the stage, then leaps, airborne. The rest of the Snowflakes enter for the final time, arms up and towards the sky, the snow, feet light and quickly boureeing. I find myself standing alone backstage. Will she notice my absence, the hole in my usual spot? Not knowing is easier. I turn away.

I am not on stage to see the final curtain, the thud of sudden velvet. 

⧫

 

Abby Provenzano is an MFA candidate in creative writing-fiction at Emerson College. She is the fiction editor of Redivider, a writer/contributor at Interlocutor Magazine, an editorial intern at Art + Deco Agency, and an affiliated faculty member/instructor in the Writing Studies Program at Emerson College. Her work has been published in Stork Magazine, The Black Fork Review, Blind Corner Literary Magazine, The Foundationalist, The Michigan Daily, Blueprint Literary Magazine, and Runestone Journal, among others. 

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new prose and poetry selected annually from thousands of submissions. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, it is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

#  #  #

 

Author’s Note: My family lived on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, when I was born, and remained there for two years before beginning a series of moves that would take us to Maryland, California, Michigan, and New York. Between Michigan and New York before our mother left us with our father. My memories before that rupture became hard to hang on to, and impossible to corroborate.

Already Broken
(Washington, 1950)
Flash Nonfiction

DOWN ON THE SIDEWALK, SOMEBODY IS SCREAMING.

A warm breeze comes from tall, curved windows, and the round second-story room is filled with sunlight. My big sister was just here with me, but now she’s not. I want to look out the window, but now more grownups are shouting, and I pull back.

This is my first memory. I was two and Patti was four, and we lived with our parents in our grandmother’s brick row house in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C.—a corner house with a round tower and circular rooms on each of three floors.

Patti and I, up before the grownups, had been playing tag. I was the one chasing and Patti was the one running, and she was going too fast and ran into the window screen. The screen fell out, and so did she. She landed on the sidewalk two stories down, just missing a spiked iron fence. Our father ran downstairs to see what happened, then back upstairs to get his car keys, and by the time he got back to the street somebody else had taken Patti to the hospital. She broke an arm and a leg.

As we say in our family, that’s the story I got.

In fact, my own memory consists only of the image of that sunny room, my sister there and then not there, shouting, confusion, fear, and shame. My next recollection—another visual memory, with no story attached—must be from some weeks later; we’d moved from our grandmother’s house to an apartment in Annapolis, Maryland. I remember Patti dressed in white wrappings, having to be helped up and down, not being much fun. I learned the term “body cast” years later.

We told about Patti and the window whenever kids compared stories about scars and accidents and close calls. Our tale always had the parts about playing tag and a window screen, and our father running up and down stairs. Sometimes she missed the fence by feet, sometimes by inches, but this version was the one we could tell without our father getting angry or our mother starting to cry.

The summer Patti went out the window, our parents were five years into a marriage that would last another decade. After they split up and our mother left, Patti ran away from home. She was seventeen, I was fourteen, and we grew up with infrequent contact, little relationship, and few opportunities to review old stories.

I’m not sure, now, exactly when it was we had the telephone conversation, only that we were both adults by then and that she had something different to say about how she went out that window.

We hadn’t been playing tag, Patti said, but we had been naughty—dressing up, putting on brand-new dresses we’d been told not to touch because they were for someone’s wedding. Listening to my sister, I had an unbidden image of brushed nylon, smocking, pastels—maybe pink and mint green?—and could almost remember the irresistible pull of something beautiful and forbidden.

Our father was the one who found us, she said, and he became enraged. She mentioned a therapist and hospital records and the fact that it had been her right arm but her left leg that were broken, and how she had recovered or reconstructed her own memory of what happened that day. Did he push her? Throw her? She was sure of one thing.

“My arm was already broken when I went out the window.”

⧫

Irene Hoge Smith is a graduate of the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis writing program. She has been published in Prick of the Spindle, Amsterdam Quarterly, Vineleaves Literary Journal, Wisconsin Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Stonecoast Review. Smith is completing a memoir about her mother, the late Los Angeles poet francEyE, who, after fleeing a bad marriage and four daughters, lived with Charles Bukowski in the early 1960s. Website: Irenehogesmith.com.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new nonfiction, fiction, and poetry selected annually from thousands of submissions. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, it is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

 

 

Author’s Note: “First Light” is based on a true story from my own history and my mother’s history. There are moments in our lives when we have glimpses into our parents’ formative experiences and what they might have struggled through as children. The speaker in the poem spends her own night thinking about her mother “as that little girl,” and there is a sense she can relate to her mother’s childhood loss, her worry. The poem opens with dawn and closes with a new sense of dawn, one that strengthens the connection between mother and daughter and touches on a faith that things can “be made right again.”

First Light

My mother says her favorite time is dawn.
But she surprised me when she added
she doesn’t like sunset, and then she told me
there was this time when she was nine or ten,
and her parents promised to be back
before dark, but they weren’t,
and the late summer sun went down,
and my mother put her baby brothers
to bed with stories and spent the night
thinking they might never come back.

I spent my own night thinking of my mother
as that little girl, who had already
lost her sister to spina bifida,
who might have felt that loss
was always one night away.
But when her parents were back
at first light, though she never knew
the whole story, she knew that dawn
was when everything
could be made right again.

⧫

Diane Thiel is the author of eleven books of poetry and nonfiction, including Echolocations and Resistance Fantasies. Her new book of poetry, Questions from Outer Space, was published in the spring from Red Hen Press. Thiel’s work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies. Her honors include NEA, Fulbright, and PEN Awards. She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Brown University. Thiel is a Regents’ Professor at the University of New Mexico and Associate Chair of the Department of English. With her husband and four children, Thiel has traveled and lived in Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia, working on literary and environmental projects. Website: www.dianethiel.net.

Delmarva Review publishes the best of new poetry and prose selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, it is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: “An Experience of Grief” is an effort to put down into words the wordless horror that is grief. The concept and the structure of the poem are inspired by a grounding technique that is popular as a coping mechanism for various mental health issues. This technique aims to ground one in space and time by using the senses to observe and reconnect to the physical world. By interrogating the feeling of grief in this manner and attaching physical sensations to it, it is my hope that the inexpressible has become slightly more expressible.

An Experience of Grief

Mourning feels like living
in the land of the polar night,
cold and eternally dark,
frozen and quiet. 

It sounds like broken promises
clattering to the kitchen floor. 

It smells like your mother’s
Sunday baking—
a distant memory.

It looks like a bruise,
jaundiced yellow and ringed
by bloody purple. 

It tastes like bitter herbs,
cloying and sharp,
achy and strong. 

You can dip down into
its hopeless waters,
but you wonder as you do so:
Will I ever come back? 

⧫

Abigail Johnson is a recent graduate of Salisbury University. She is interested in many different forms of creative expression, including music, dance, theatre, and creative writing. In addition to poetry, her personal non-fiction has been published in The Delmarva Review. When not writing or onstage, she enjoys taking walks in nature and practicing yoga.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new poetry and prose selected annually from thousands of submissions. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, it is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Author’s Note: I’ve long loved Walt Whitman’s work for many reasons, and this piece—“Walt Whitman at the Playground”—echoes one of them: his enthusiastic joy at everyday moments, a joy that often strikes me as augmented by an ever-present thought for mortality. I wrote the poem at the playground in question, watching my daughters at play and the people around me, grateful that we were all alive together at this one moment.

Walt Whitman at the Playground 

To see my be-legginged daughter leap o’er the mulch,
brown hair burnished bronze!
To hear her laugh! To be a laugh!

O! To watch the penduluming swingers,
faces now toward heaven, and now toward earth!
To what arc, O my soul, could I better aspire! 

O yogapanted mothers! O cargoshorted fathers!
O floralwrapped caregivers on benches—
What song could I sing thee, O love incarnate? 

Answer: a hymn of fellowship, a litany of praise,
a reminder that the leaves have already begun their descent,
and you will not be back. 

⧫

Adam Tamashasky teaches writing at American University, in Washington, D.C. In addition to the Delmarva Review, his work has appeared in The Cold Mountain Review, the Innisfree Poetry Journal, and recently in the international anthology Singing in the Dark: A Global Anthology of Poetry Under Lockdown, published by Penguin. His website is: adamtamashasky.com 

Delmarva Review publishes the best of new poetry and prose selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, it is an independent, nonprofit literary publication. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions, sales, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: DelmarvaReview.org.