Author’s Note: “When my son was three, we’d walk around the neighborhood, on the way to a park, running errands, or sometimes just to have something to do. During these little adventures, he’d often pick up a twig and insist on stopping at each tree to tap the bark around the trunk. He called this ‘nectarine-ing.’ We couldn’t move on until he was done giving each the little care it needed.”

Nectarine

It’s good to not know what you’re doing,
a reminder you’re just visiting from somewhere.

When my 3-year-old says he’s nectarine-ing
the oak, don’t ask how nectarines figure in.

Let him delight in picking the perfect twig.
Follow as he rounds the trunk tapping its bark.

You’re visiting from somewhere you can’t describe,
why rush to the next place, then the next?

Stop and let the tree need this from him
like the bloom needs the bee’s casual brush.

Good to know the fruit, but not the tree.
Let nectarine pass through the dictionary of air.

♦

Jason Gebhardt’s poems have appeared in many journals, including the The Southern Review, Poet Lore, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Iron Horse Literary Review. His chapbook Good Housekeeping won the 2016 Cathy Smith Bowers Prize. He lives in Washington, DC and is the recipient of multiple Artist Fellowships awarded by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

Delmarva Review is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, independent literary journal publishing the best of new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions. Partial financial support comes from individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available worldwide from Amazon.com and other major online booksellers, and from specialty regional booksellers like Mystery Loves Company, in Oxford. For more information, please see the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

# # #

Author’s Note: “After losing my mother to cancer when I was twelve years old, the cemetery where she is buried became a complicated place for me of expectation and mystery. When I became a mother myself, I traveled back home to Tennessee with my son and watched his young eyes upon her grave. This moved me to write a poem.”

How To Walk Among The Dead

My dad took my older sister
to the cemetery on Sundays
to practice for her driver’s test.
I sat in the backseat of our Jeep Wagoneer,

waited for my turn
to drive those crooked hills
that led to where my mother was buried.
I never knew how to be at her grave.

When I was older,
I brought my girlfriends and a case of beer.
We smoked Camel Lights on damp grass,
interpreting the rustle of leaves

or the Calico cat that passed by
as signs of her presence.
I brought my son there years ago⎯
a summer thunderstorm

had knocked large tree branches
onto her gravestone like omens.
We moved them away, piece by piece,
careful not to step on other stones,

his young face, uneasy,
looked up at me for guidance,
for lessons of how to walk
among the dead.

♦

Jennie Linthorst’s two books of poems, Silver Girl (2013) and Autism Disrupted: A Mother’s Journey of Hope (2011), were published by Cardinal House. Her writing has been published in Forge, Kaleidoscope, Foliate Oak, Literary Mama, Mothers Always Write, Sanskrit, and The Art of Autism. She is certified in poetry therapy from the National Federation of Biblio/Poetry Therapy. Website: www.lifespeakspoetrytherapy.com.

Delmarva Review publishes the best of new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Editors welcome submissions in English from all writers. In addition to sales, the editors are thankful for the generous financial support received from individual tax-deductible contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Please see the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

Editor’s Note: March is almost here, and with it comes the open season of writers’ conferences everywhere, with thousands of writers searching for their muse and perhaps the inspiration to write a best-seller. Here, a professional author shares a piece of his writing journey, taken from a new memoir.

Author’s Note: “A Place to Write is drawn from a recently completed memoir, The Hungry Years.  Like the book, this excerpt is intended for the neophyte writer, artist, or adventurer, who has few financial resources at his disposal, but nonetheless, is hoping to create something that will someday, if not immediately, be regarded by himself and others as valuable.”

A Place to Write

– For Marsha 

WHEN I ARRIVED IN PORTSMOUTH, NEW HAMPSHIRE on July 8, 1978, I believed I had one last chance to ignite my flagging dream of becoming a writer. Though I was only thirty- two years old, I knew there would be no more second chances. I had reached the end. 

After several abortive attempts at writing a novel in Edinburgh and in Chicago, I sold my Massachusetts house for a meager amount, quit a teaching job, and attempted to live on my last nickels until the book was completed. Once the money ran out, I believed, my dream would either succeed or fail. If it failed, then I could dismiss all past attempts to become an artist as puerile fantasy and get on with my real life, whatever that was. 

Success or failure. That’s what I wanted. Nothing in between. A conclusion. An ending. A finality, however merciless. Though desperate to succeed, I wasn’t as afraid of failure as I had been before. At this point, anything was preferable to dragging my already diminished literary ambitions across a grievous and wearying terrain of setbacks, rejections, and Pyrrhic victories. 

Given the daunting reality of my new life in Portsmouth, one could reasonably assume I was filled with anxiety. After all, I had never even managed to finish writing a single volume of anything. And I could only boast of one publication: a letter protesting the Vietnam War that had appeared in the International Herald Tribune earlier in the decade. There was no reason to believe that just because I was pushing all my chips to  the center of the table I would succeed. Although I was uneasy with impoverishing myself—again—in order to create art, I wasn’t depressed. Quite the opposite. When I arrived in my new hometown, I was inexplicably filled with exquisite joy born of soaring hope and bloated self-confidence. Or maybe it was self- delusion and egomania. Whatever it was, everything that once seemed intensely difficult and manifestly unattainable now seemed suddenly possible. I felt strong, and my new world glowed with promise and excitement. I would succeed this time, I told myself. And most days, I believed it.

That first day in the city, I rented a small house at 39 Cass Street. After a brief tour of the premises, I quickly agreed to terms without even the smallest of quibbles. To find a house to rent— any house—was highly improbable. But to find one for only $250 a month was beyond my most fanciful expectations, and it came with an unexpected godsend: a fenced backyard for my dog and two cats to explore and to frolic. Furthermore, to add to its allure, it was a historic house: a small plaque hanging beside the front door read Ebenezer Haines’ House 1845. Although his claim to fame rested solely on his job as a street commissioner, it was nonetheless heartening to know I was lodged in the former home of a man of local import. I regarded it as a good omen. 

But it wasn’t the only important name I’d find associated with the house. In the cellar, I found the name Rhea chiseled in big letters on the cement floor. Below the name was the date: 1972. Believing this discovery was shaped by destiny’s hand, I took the name of the former tenant and gave it to my female co- protagonist. And as my character, Rhea, slowly developed in the novel, I eerily and intermittently received mail addressed to her. 

Soon after shaking my landlord’s hand, I moved into my new place. It was located in a working-class neighborhood known as the West End, an area that attracted young artists of meager means and big dreams, like myself. 

I got to know my neighbors on either side of me. One house contained an elderly Irish couple, and in the other was an African American family who owned a Doberman. Every day their Doberman, Duke, raced my mongrel dog, Moss, along a stretch of chain-link fence that separated our backyards. They raced to the end of the yard and then returned, running, whence they came. They went back and forth like this for quite some time until exhaustion summoned retreat. Other than this daily joint exercise, my immediate neighborhood was quiet during the daytime. 

At night, it was a different story. A small bar nearby on Islington Street, called Duff’s Dump, closed past midnight and emptied its roistering patrons onto the street. Almost every night there was a row, usually involving a fight over a woman. Drunken howls intimating violence could be heard the entire block. In spite of the almost nightly heated skirmishes, no blood was ever shed, and after an initial burst of antiphonal shouts, the combatants jaggedly made their way back to their cars and drove away, though their departures were usually punctuated by the angry sound of tire squeals and the roar of accelerated engines. In the beginning, when I was awakened and left bed to look out the kitchen window with Moss (who often tossed a few barks in the direction of the fracas), it would always take a spell for me to return to sleep. But later, as I realized nothing would come of these boisterous airings of jealous grievances and machismo theatrics, I wasn’t so easily roused from sleep, and I seldom— even during the noisiest of rhubarbs—left the comfort of my bed. 

Until I had settled into Portsmouth in early July, I was unfamiliar with it. I knew it was located on the New Hampshire seacoast and that it was historic and beautiful, but there was no possible way of anticipating what I was about to experience. I was instantly struck by its jumbled anatomy. On the northern edge of the city’s limits, three magnificent bridges, each reflecting the divergent styles of the city, lay across the expanse of the Piscataqua River connecting New Hampshire and Maine. Mixed with the texture of the city’s gentrified reconstruction was the gritty feel of a rough-edged river town with its biker bars, tattoo parlors, and late-night diners. All these incongruous elements of style and substance seemed to strangely work together and were the perfect components for the tale I was telling. 

Everywhere in town, there was a sense of being internationally connected. Ocean freighters from faraway places like Turkey anchored downtown, dumping their load of salt onto the Market Street docks, while in Market Square a travel agency displayed four clocks in its large window, each conveying contrasting times in New York, Paris, London, and Tokyo. 

Amidst all this downtown glamour, I unexpectedly found distinctive traces of my childhood on the South Side of Chicago. Probably no place better exemplified this than J.J. Newbury’s. Located on Congress Street, it was a throwback to the five-and- dime stores of my youth, featuring a lunch counter, plastic flowers, and women cashiers named Noreen with pencil-drawn eyebrows. Inside, the smells alone were enough to propel me backward in time to the transports of the 1950s. There were many places like this. From ancient balconied movie theaters to Green’s Drug Store that sold vanilla frappe-malts at a marble counter soda fountain, it was as if one part of town never left the placid fields of the Eisenhower years. 

And yet this odd farrago of past and present, of sophistication and rawness, of art and commerce made the city all the more captivating. 

From the moment I entered Portsmouth, I felt its unique spirit, a mixture of mystery, suspense, and buoyancy. That spirit added a sense of importance and inspiration to the task I had come to perform. 

At first, the pages came slowly. Though eager to make progress, I did not rush the task. Besides, progress was slowed by the very circumstances of technology. Writing back then on my Smith Corona electric typewriter was both tedious and wearying. When I made a mistake, I was forced either to use Wite-Out or rewrite the entire page to mask the error. More often than not, when I revised, I retyped the entire page. Until the page was perfect, I was unable to proceed. Some days consisted of typing the same page over and over. I tried to establish two completed pages as my daily output. Somedays it was not possible. 

It was a hot and sultry July when I first sat down to write at my desk, but I was assisted by the fact that I had already, the year before in graduate school, begun the novel. I had amassed thirty- two pages. Now I was intent on rereading and revising what I had written until it was as close to perfection as possible. 

I had a plan. It was inspired by my old writing professor who sold his first novel on the basis of just forty pages. I would adopt his strategy. But to accomplish the same thing, I knew my opening chapters would have to be impressive. I began by painstakingly revising what I had already written. 

By summer’s end, I reached my goal. On the 29th day of August, I took copies of my first forty-two pages, placed them in four large manila envelopes, and sent the scripts to New York City publishers. That night I commemorated the moment by eating a hot dog at downtown diner called Gilley’s and then later walked Moss in Prescott Park. Watching him gleefully run along the coastline of the Piscataqua River, I felt a rising sense of accomplishment and freedom. I had taken the first step of my journey. Now while I awaited early word from some posh editors, I would continue to write the next chapters of the novel. 

Despite my good start, the next chapters were new territory for me, and they were composed at an even slower pace than what had previously been done. At the end of each week, I took a carbon copy of the pages I had completed to a local bank and deposited them in a small metal box. While I was unclear as to the exact direction of my novel, at the time I knew enough about the early chapters I was working to eventually, with rigorous revision, complete them. Every Friday my girlfriend (and future wife), Marsha, would arrive, and before we left for a celebratory dinner at a downtown restaurant, I would read what pages I had completed and get her reaction. Her enthusiasm for what I had created kept my motivation high, and each week this gave me a goal to achieve: I would have pages for her to read by week’s end. 

Although I was making progress, I was not sanguine. When I finally realized how the first half of my story ended, I knew I had to leap over a few chapters to get there. This necessity grew out of insecurity: I had never written anything like this before, and I was uncertain if I had the talent to execute it. My impatience, insecurity and, finally, logic gave me no choice. If I couldn’t write this all-important chapter, I reasoned, it didn’t matter if the other chapters worked as I envisioned them. There would be no novel without this chapter. Everything hinged on my ability to make it work. Therefore, in late October, with great trepidation, I began writing what was, at that time, the most consequential section of the book. 

It took me two weeks of intensive writing, but I succeeded. I finished my work on a Thursday afternoon. I was relieved and elated. That night I placed the completed chapter in my leather satchel and drove to a friend’s house for a celebratory meal. I planned to copy the text the next day and make a bank deposit. 

But for reasons I’ll never fully understand, I left my leather satchel containing the manuscript in my Fiat, and when I returned, I discovered someone had broken into my car and stolen the valise. When the full weight of what had occurred fell on me, I was devastated. I doubted I could ever replicate what I had just so painstakingly created. It was disheartening and tragic. I was beyond grief. 

Then suddenly I remembered: the discarded pages of the early drafts were still in my outside garbage can, and the trash wouldn’t be gone until the next day’s collection! 

I raced home in my car, grabbed the large refuse bin from the backyard, and then dragged it onto my living room carpet. As I stood in the center of the room retrieving crumpled and torn pages while my dog and two cats looked at me with bewilderment, I thought of that famous line from Thoreau: “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.” Miraculously, I was able to piece the chapter back together. Better than that: I made significant revisions that actually made the chapter better. Though desperation would remain one of the shoulders on which my fortunes rested I was, early on, rescued from theft and despair. 

Almost every weeknight I ate dinner downtown for free. With little money in my bank account, I had to find ways to cut corners, and I soon discovered the best happy hour menu in town to help me achieve that goal. The restaurant was near the docks, a place called Horse of a Different Color. During happy hour, in the upstairs bar, free chicken wings and short ribs were supplied for the price of a single drink. Though the paper plates were half the size of a frisbee, I stacked as much meat as possible onto that tiny circle so that my trips to the buffet table were limited. Not that anyone would stop me, but I wanted to remain as inconspicuous as possible for fear the whole operation might one day be shut down for lack of profits. After all, the restaurant’s owners were planning on selling a lot of liquor, and I was not, therefore, their ideal customer. 

I ordered a single glass of Coke to accompany dinner, and that was all I drank for the rest of the evening. By anyone standards, it was a cheap meal. But I soon discovered, with each return to my seat at the bar, I was not alone. There were others, regulars like me, who were doing the same thing. All were strangers. None conversed. Everyone ate until the food ran out. Then with bellies full of wings and ribs, we exited the premises as furtively as we had entered. 

This experience was a small but cogent reminder of the importance of place in the life of an indigent artist. Had I lived rurally, for example, this thrifty avenue would have been closed to me. 

But more than that, Portsmouth would very unexpectedly become the setting for my first novel. When I first arrived, I still had the intention of writing a story set in a small city in the Midwest. But slowly, as I discovered the visually imposing seacoast landscapes as well as the alluring city streets, my plans changed. 

Fiction writing classes seldom, if ever, emphasize the importance of place in the creative act. Of course, there was a plausible explanation for this. The place where the writer wrote the story or set the story was, more often than not, preordained by immutable circumstances. Usually, both were established by the naturalistic limits of income, heredity, and geographic access. Choice had little to do with it. 

Though limited by financial restraints, I had no limits to raw material in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Quite the contrary. The city was bursting with it. Furthermore, by casting scenes in a new location, I could summon not just my imaginative gifts, but also my reportorial skills. Everything witnessed could be viewed with new eyes, and that would lend an authenticity as well as a freshness to every dramatic scene. Things overlooked by rote familiarity would instead, with time, be discovered by curious and awakened eyes. 

By late fall, I received encouraging news. One of the four editors had written to say that although the manuscript was too small in length to make an offer, she found the writing “evocative” and wanted to see the entire manuscript upon completion. I was walking Moss in a city park known as Pierce Island when I opened her letter. I instantly fell to my knees after I read it. Until that time, all I had ever received were form rejections anonymously sent. Now someone thought my work was “evocative.” That word would have to sustain me over the next several and difficult months, and it did. 

From then on, I submerged myself in the novel. As I had in the past, I wrote in a room surrounded by books, but unlike before I didn’t pause at my desk to stare at others’ works or, even further, pull down a volume from a shelf and begin reading it. For the first time in my writing life, I was more interested in the story and characters I was creating than any other. If I sought inspiration, I simply walked the same streets and coastline as my protagonist and then hurried home to record all I imagined. 

The book took on a life of its own. I was little more than a doula in its birth, there to only administer proper treatment to keep it alive and vibrant. Every night when I turned out the lights to retire to bed, I took one long last look at the manuscript lying on top of my writing desk, and it seemed as if I were viewing a living thing sleeping, with heart and lungs gently expanding and contracting. 

With time, pages mounted. By early summer, I had reached 108 pages, and had sent the novel-in-progress to four publishers, as I had done before, but this time three were new recipients. 

By late August, I had run out of money. One Monday morning, using the telephone book as my lone reference, I began calling local colleges and universities I found listed there. Luckily for me, one small college hired me that very afternoon for a full-time teaching post so I could pay the rent. Though I rejoiced at having money again, now I would have to negotiate my writing time with a heavy teaching schedule. 

Sometime in late fall, I reached 150 pages, and celebrated by howling, with Moss, into the wind as we stood amid a stand of trees at Odiorne Point State Park. When I returned home, I discovered a lengthy letter from an editor interested in reading the completed script. Not long after that, I heard the same offer from the other three publishers. 

Despite my teaching obligations, I managed to complete all but the final chapter by late March of 1980. Though I was close to finishing my first novel, I paused for two whole months to exhale before writing the final chapter. I was exhausted from the journey I had taken, and I wanted to marshal my strength before attempting to write a complex and consequential ending. 

In June, I completed my novel and sent it out. Though I was joyous for having finally finished something, it would take a few years before my book found a publisher.

LONG BEFORE I ARRIVED IN PORTSMOUTH, I had always believed that the selection of a place to write was critical. It was important to find those remarkable places because they contained a unique magic to enrich and sustain the creative act. More than that, I learned the place where I chose to write could also become a good place to live. Though it sustained me in a dissimilar way it had my characters, the truth was neither my characters nor I were able to leave it. We believed our survival and happiness depended on remaining where we were. 

Despite the fact that I had composed a dark novel, that darkness never sullied my everyday life in Portsmouth. Instead, I was constantly revitalized. Not only did the environment provide halcyon days in which to work, it constantly stirred my imagination. No place before had ever come close to accomplishing that. Though Portsmouth would never become my own Yoknapatawpha County, many stories have emerged from it over the decades of my residency. Stories that could not have been told anywhere else. 

After much time searching around the world, I had, at long last, found a place to write, and to live. 

♦

John Robinson is a novelist, playwright, essayist, memoirist, and short story writer, who lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In addition to Delmarva Review and his recently completed memoir “The Hungry Years” (in which this essay appears), his work has been published in numerous other literary journals including Ploughshares, Sewanee Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Green Mountains Review, Cimarron Review, Tampa Review, and Bitter Oleander. His writing has been translated into thirty-two languages. 

Delmarva Review is a nonprofit, independent literary journal publishing the best of new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions. Partial financial support comes from individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available worldwide from Amazon.com and from specialty booksellers like Mystery Loves Company, in Oxford. For submissions, please see the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

#  #  #

 

Author’s Note: “Last March, writing a daily sonnet offered the structure to channel mounting anxiety fed by the news. The goal of five iambic feet per line soon took over any desire to rhyme. During quarantine, many reported having vivid, unsettling dreams. These poems recall dreams of my late father’s visits and the depth of introspection they inspired.”

Days 8 & 9 Visits During Quarantine

I wake to my father two nights. Opened
my eyes, expecting the dog, old and
nearsighted—there staring into my face.
Instead, my father is reading a book
in the chair that I moved to my mother’s
two months ago. Instead of the dog, my
father reads quietly in the dark. We
keep three cases of books we cannot part
with because he rereads each—his essence
permanent between dog-eared pages.
I check the clock—blink. He reads with his face
close to the page—his glasses sliding down
his nose, lenses glinting—catching the thin light—
his pajamas—white stripes on blue cotton.

I speak to my father this night. Opening
my eyes, expecting the dog mooning
over my open-mouthed snore. I say, Dad,
I’ve missed you. He does not put down the book.
He says, Good job with that last one. His voice
returns to me, deep and warm. I puzzle,
Which last one? The book, the job, a public
speech given one week before everything
closed. Poetry submitted, a short story
sent, or patience practiced? What did I do
last night? Shattered another glass? He stares—
pulling back thoughts. I meant to write it down.
His fingers ruffle the pages, Don’t worry
too much. The dog scratches at the shadows.

♦

Joan Drescher Cooper is a writer and teacher from Berlin, Maryland. She published a poetry collection Birds Like Me (Finishing Line Press) in 2019. Her poetry, book reviews, and fiction have appeared in Delmarva Review, River Babble, Doorknobs & Body Paint, Sand Dune Anthology and The Bay to Ocean Anthology. Joan published the Lilac Hill fiction trilogy with Salt Water Media. Website: joandcooper.com.

Delmarva Review publishes the best of new poetry and prose selected from thousands of submissions annually. The literary journal receives partial financial support from a Talbot County Arts Council grant with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Readers can purchase copies from Amazon.com and other major online booksellers, and from regional specialty booksellers like Mystery Loves Company, in Oxford. All writers are welcome to submit their best work until March 31, to be considered for the 14th edition. See the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

 

 

 

Author’s Note: “As I drive through the Delaware wetlands, I think of Harriet Tubman and how her song can still be heard.”

Harriet’s Song
—Delaware

Can you feel the pull of it,
the moon’s force in your veins, the tides
that once ran through these fields of corn,
tassel fibers floating, silky and brown?

Drained long ago, this land was swamps and wetlands,
with catkin grass extending to the ocean, when mud
was everywhere, when towering sweetgum
provided shade for runaways to hide in.

Let us go back and hide with them, for we are bound
to those bound people—into a past that flows through
and flows around us. Let us go back—and listen,
come nightfall, for Harriet’s song . . .

♦

David Salner’s first novel, A Place to Hide, is being published this year. His most recent poetry collection is The Stillness of Certain Valleys (Broadstone Books, 2019). He worked all over the U.S. as an iron ore miner, steelworker, machinist, bus driver, garment laborer, teacher, and librarian. His stories and poems have appeared in many journals including Threepenny Review, Delmarva Review, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal. Website: www.DSalner.wix.com/salner

Delmarva Review publishes the best of new poetry and prose selected from thousands of submissions annually. As an independent nonprofit, the literary journal receives partial financial support from a Talbot County Arts Council grant with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Readers can purchase print and digital copies from Amazon.com and other major online booksellers, and from regional specialty bookstores. Writers are welcome to submit their best work, until March 31, to be considered for the 14th edition. See the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: I wrote this poem after attending a week-long silent meditation retreat at a place called Mt. Eden, at a time when I felt the way Eve might have felt after being kicked out of Eden!—alone with wildly flowering negative tape loops running through my head. I posed the question in the poem to the teacher. His answer inspired a comforting sense of connection to our common human condition, and a desire to build the “muscle of tenderness.”

Everybody Who Sits in the Zendo Is Breathing

     In life, we can’t always control the first arrow. However, the
second arrow is our reaction to the first.

     The second arrow is optional.

                                                               – Buddhist Sallatha Sutta

You watch through the triple-bay window,
twenty geese shift into wide then narrow formations,
over and over. You know you are not a bird.

And for the first time you are comfortable
knowing you are nothing special,
that the mind widens and narrows

over and over, even in the most practiced,
and the secret of the most practiced is
they believe this is not a problem.

Everybody who sits in the zendo is breathing.
Some with difficulty. Some with ease.
You can’t tell who is what, whose house

caught fire last week, whose jealousy eats
away at her. You sit with your own
obsessions, fixations, useless stories.

Your breath shortening, throat tightening,
loosening. In the Q&A, you ask what the Buddha advised
about painful tape loops that keep replaying.

He says, First notice that your tapes, like everyone
else’s, are the loopiest. Everyone in the zendo laughs.
Then, let them be, as you would a toddler in tantrum,

and if all this fails, there is nothing left to do
but grit your teeth, make two fists,
take the thought by the throat

as if you were a sumo wrestler, and drag it
into a pit of hot coals. Each time it reappears.
Develop that muscle, he tells you.

This is a very advanced kind of tenderness.

♦

Doris Ferleger is an award-winning poet and creative nonfiction writer. She is the author of three volumes of poetry, Big Silences in a Year of Rain, As the Moon Has Breath, and Leavened, as well as a chapbook, When You Become Snow. She holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College and a Ph.D.in psychology. Dr. Ferleger is a mindfulness-based therapist in Wyncote PA.

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. Editors welcome submissions in English from all writers. The submission guidelines are posted on the website: DelmarvaReview.org.

In addition to sales, the editors are thankful for the generous financial support received from individual tax-deductible contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council.

Author’s Note: Originally, I wrote this poem for Iranians who were killed during the peaceful protest on November 15, 2019 and those people who died in the Ukrainian airplane shot down in Tehran, on January 8, 2020 and for the hope for world peace. But, even in the United States, a nation known for domestic peace and freedom, the words in this poem seem universally applicable today.

Bring Me Some Hope

Bring me some hope
and a few bright stars.
I will hang those stars
in the sky of war,
and every night until dawn
I will dream of peace.
If you come to visit me
bring me some hope
and a bit of kindness.
I will sow your kindness
in the garden of the world,
and when this winter ends
I will watch it bloom.
If you come to visit me
bring me some hope:
hope for brighter days,
hope for world peace.

♦

Sepideh Zamani, a Maryland writer from Iran, graduated from law school in 1999 and moved to the United States two years later. Her poems, essays, short stories, and novels focus on immigration, gender inequality, and the lives of ethnic and religious minorities under cultural and religious cleansing and forced assimilation.

Delmarva Review publishes new poetry and prose selected from thousands of submissions annually. The new 13th annual edition includes work by 64 authors. As an independent nonprofit, the literary journal receives partial financial support from a Talbot County Arts Council grant with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Readers can purchase copies from www.Amazon.com and other major online booksellers, and from regional specialty booksellers like Mystery Loves Company, in Oxford. All writers are welcome to submit their best work until March 31, to be considered for the 14th edition. See the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

Author’s Note: I wrote “Learn to Sail” in a poetry workshop. The assignment was to write about an instance where you misunderstood what was said. Just then a woman poked her head in the door, saying, “I’m dropping off brochures on ‘Learning to Sail.’ I honestly thought she said “Learning to Fail,” and the class burst out laughing. I instantly had my topic for the assignment.

Learn to Sail

When our poetry teacher said
learn to sail,
I heard learn to fail, a course
I would have aced. I failed math
in junior high so badly
I was given a rolled-up, blank
paper at my eighth-grade graduation.

When learning to meditate, I blurted
“I masturbated this morning!”
It wasn’t even true.

I’ve said pummel when I meant plummet,
forsaken instead of forgiven, misgiven
for mistaken, spring instead of fall.
And once I said hate when I meant love.

♦

Donna Reis writes from New York’s Hudson Valley. Her debut poetry collection, No Passing Zone (Deerbrook Editions, 2012) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is co-editor and a contributor to the anthology, Blues for Bill: A Tribute to William Matthews (Akron Poetry Series, 2005), and the author of a nonfiction book, Seeking Ghosts in the Warwick Valley (Schiffer Publishing, Ltd, 2003). She received a MA in creative writing at The City College of New York and an MS in early childhood education from Hunter College. Website: www.donnareis.com.

Delmarva Review publishes new poetry and prose selected from thousands of submissions annually. The 13th annual edition includes work by 64 authors. As an independent nonprofit, the literary journal receives partial financial support from a Talbot County Arts Council grant with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Readers can purchase copies from Amazon.com and other major online booksellers, and from regional specialty booksellers like Mystery Loves Company, in Oxford. All writers are welcome to submit their best work until March 31, to be considered for the 14th edition. See the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.

 

Author’s note: In 1950’s Southern California, Mom didn’t have much money to spend on my birthday, so boys were invited to wear tattered clothes, smudge their faces, and join a nighttime gathering of “hobos” roasting hot dogs over a crackling campfire in our backyard. No wonder I later thumbed around America and hopped freights to New Orleans. My wanderlust eventually led me to haul my backpack around the world….as you’ll discover.

In A Common Sea

“I feel we are all islands—in a common sea.”
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Tom Sawyer Island, Disneyland – 1960
WE ADOLESCENT BOYS march down Disneyland’s Main Street dressed as Christmas trees, ringing out carols on handbells in the Parade of Toys, fearful the wind will topple us, and delinquent kids will snatch at our bulbs and garlands. Our earnings go into the treasury of our church choir, so our reward comes on those afternoons when we shed our costumes and roam the park. Dismissed from the backlot, my friends dash to the Autopia cars and the Matterhorn bobsleds while I hurry to Frontierland rafts that bear me across the Rivers of America to Tom Sawyer Island.

I clamber across the pontoon and suspension bridges spanning Smuggler’s Cove, wave to riverboat passengers from atop Castle Rock, squeeze into Injun Joe’s Cave, study teepees and a burning settler’s cabin from Fort Wilderness. I’m happy surrounded by fake rocks and plastic deer, but I’ve been reading my Grandma Day’s water-stained National Geographic, and I hunger to hike real islands with jungles and volcanoes, Maori warriors and hula dancers, emus and wild horses.

Hawaii – 1967
IN MY CHILDHOOD, I grow wistful learning about Grandma Molen’s disappointment. She was born in 1895 and grew up in Santa Barbara, with its old Spanish mission and view of the northernmost Channel Islands. By seventeen, Grandma was a paid companion for an elderly widow who invited her along on a steamship voyage to the Territory of Hawaii. Her mother wouldn’t let her go. Instead, she went to work at a beauty salon. She was bobbing hair when she could’ve been riding a mule to the Molokai leper colony founded by Father Damien or watching Duke Kahanamoku surf giant waves on a longboard.

With Grandma in mind, I’m elated when—after graduating from a state college in ’67—I learn I’m going to be sent as a volunteer to Hawaii by VISTA, the national service organization. I’ll live simply, hanging out with native youth, finding ways to build their cultural pride. But before I begin my assignment, my dream is devastated by mononucleosis. Instead of going there, I read James Michener’s novel, Hawaii.

Decades later, unlike Grandma, I finally reach Hawaii. I drive the winding Hana Highway and stare into the crater of the Haleakalā volcano, but by now I’m no more than another paunchy tourist wearing a necklace of puka shells.

Catalina Island – 1968
ON A CLEAR DAY IN THE EARLY ’60’s at Newport Beach, my body-surfing buddies and I glimpse Santa Catalina before we yelp, sprint, and leap into the waves. From the Four Preps’ song “26 Miles,” we’re convinced across the sea lies the “island of romance, romance, romance, romance.” We’ve also heard that William Golding set Lord of the Flies on the mountainous island whose wilderness is inhabited by wild boar and buffalo. It’s an island where, during the Great Depression, Mom and her teenaged classmates danced the foxtrot and two-step to the music of Pinky Tomlin and the comedic cornet player, Ish Kabibble, in the Avalon Ballroom.

Without an income because I didn’t go to Hawaii or sell my first two novels, I ride a ferry to Catalina to spend the summer directing a YMCA camp. I deliver homilies and crack jokes at campfires, counsel boys in the uplifting ways of the Rags Society, and learn to water-ski and snorkel in a realm of garibaldi, sea bass and moray eels. The next-to-last camp is held for girls, followed by a coed gathering of high school and college kids.

A vivacious eighteen-year-old former cheerleader, Nanci—a cabin leader one week and a camper the next—slowly transforms Catalina into an island of romance.

Because Nanci’s the Muse with whom I’ve always wanted to share an island, I write, “I am glad now I did not lie / I love you to the easy girls / I took to the Edgewood Drive-in / or to the well-built chicks at those dances / who gave me their kisses in dark corners, / for when I said I love you, / I didn’t think of the dark corners / and the Edgewood Drive-in…”

Alas, like my tan, our relationship fades away.

Japanese Islands of Honshu, Kyushu and Shodo – 1974
TOYOKO’S A REBEL IN MANY WAYS. She’s nineteen, and in a country where men and women travel in groups, she’s by herself. She seeks a tan instead of keeping her skin as white as she can, like her sister. In her halting English, she introduces herself at a youth hostel and we spend the next day at the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima, where I imagine Toyoko staggering through the ruins, burned, irradiated, and dazed.
She wants an adventurous week of vacation before school starts, so we reunite in Shimonoseki, and begin thumbing in a country in which I only see one other hitchhiker, a gaijin like myself. On a rainy afternoon at a hilltop shrine, I teach her to dance and give puckered kisses, things she’s never done with her boyfriend.

Toyoko wants to try beer so I buy a single can from a vending machine. Though she only takes a few gulps, I have to walk her in circles and lightly tap her face, so she won’t stumble into our youth hostel. Another day, we skinny-dip in a secluded cove.

Our journey ends at her house, where I spend a few days with her family, who had been reluctant to invite a foreigner into their lives for the first time.

When we’re bidding each other sayonara, Toyoko says, “Thank you, teacher.”

I wonder how soon she’ll be giving a kissing lesson to her boyfriend.

Bali – 1980
ON A FLIGHT TO HONG KONG on my way to India, intoxicated by wine and the thought of four weeks away from my newspaper reporting job in Orange County, I write on the first page of my journal, “I am aloft. Freed of the tie, the dress shirt, the slacks…the typewriter, the condo, the stereo with a rack of records…the responsibility of the work week…free, I am light…I soar above the clouds in a sky that will take me to India.”
Smiling at my literary excesses, I look up from my words into the eyes of a pretty sandy-haired woman reclining in a neighboring seat. Linda from Palos Verdes. Twenty-one, thirteen years younger than myself. The stewardess brings us white wine.

Linda tells me she saved money working as a waitress so she can return to Bali, where she’ll live for many leisurely months. A hut costs fifty cents a day, including tea and bananas for breakfast. We kiss. Volleyball on the beach. Balinese dancing at night. Magic mushrooms served in a soup. A coral reef for snorkeling amid stingrays and scorpion fish. We kiss some more. I love volleyball. I love to body-surf. I could love this woman.

But I’m going to India, and I have a nice job and live in a rented condo with a swimming pool. She asks if I’ll go with her to paradise and share a hut. She kisses me while I ponder my answer. What would happen to my Super Beetle and my belongings and my journalism career? I can’t. I simply can’t. I tell her no. We kiss again…without passion or promise.

Taquile Island and Los Uros Island, Peru – 1984
ON THE TRAIN BACK TO CUZCO from Machu Picchu, though I’m poised to spring after any thief who grabs a bag, I flirt with a curvy dark-haired Chilean named Ana. The next day, I convince her to follow me to Lake Titicaca and take a boat to Taquile Island, which is known for its pre-Inca ruins and the traditional lifestyle of its Quechuan-speaking inhabitants.

On the way, we pass Uru Indian women—wearing bowler hats, blouses, and skirts—poling boats made of totora reed, tar, and rope. Once we arrive at the foot of the island, Ana and I climb a steep mountain path to reach the pueblo, where we’re assigned a host garbed in a knit cap and clothing that’s been described as Spanish peasant. He leads us across terraces and around low piled-rock walls to a home roofed in thatch. For a dollar and a half in soles, we’re given a bedroom and use of a small bathroom that contains a clay pot with a narrow neck that requires an expert aim I don’t possess. Every time I enter or exit a door, I bang my head.

After we take a short nap, Ana claims she’s visited the island twice and can lead us to the pueblo even though the sky’s darkening.

We’re lost by nightfall, and I nicely tip a local who guides us back to our room, where we’re served a starchy yet tasty dinner. Once we’re snug under a pile of blankets, I make Ana smile—as I always do—by crooning “Summertime” and “House of the Rising Sun.”

After the rain lets up in the morning, we slog to the pueblo and listen to a Taquileño strum a harp before climbing down the mountain. On the way to Puno, our boat stops at the biggest of the floating islands. Our feet bounce as we explore the church, houses, and soccer field, all built on reeds that constantly need replenishment.

The next morning, before I board a bus for La Paz, Ana and I kiss goodbye, and I press into her hand twenty dollars, a relatively enormous amount, especially when you change money—like we all do—on the black market. She rides away in a cart in front of a large tricycle pedaled by a Peruvian. She doesn’t look back. Her eyes are firmly set on El Norte.

Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego – 1984
TO REACH USHUAIA, the southernmost city in South America from Southern California, I’ve been riding buses—many of them arthritic and crowded—for six months. I watch a revolutionary being led off to be executed in the mountains of Peru. I console a backpacker after her bag was snatched as she sat on the rim of a fountain, absorbed in her journal. Inside a Bolivian prison cell, I chat with gringos eating my pastries while smoking cocaine. I gain empathy for those who don’t have a person to hug.

By enduring sickness and loneliness and bumpy rides, I’ve earned the landscape of Tierra del Fuego: a lake with black water, rugged mountains draped in snow, and a channel named after the Beagle, the ship that in 1832 brought Charles Darwin here on his way to the Galapagos Islands.

By now I understand these words of Rainer Maria Rilke: “The only journey is the one within.”

Orkney Island – 1987
MISSING THE FREE-SPIRITED DAYS of my youth, I fly to Europe at age forty-one without an itinerary. After three weeks of travel in the Netherlands and the British Isles, I reach Scotland and meander to the mainland’s northern coast. A short ferry ride puts me ashore on Orkney.

Every misty morning in Stromness, I hope to meet a single woman in my B&B, but inevitably I end up conversing with pensioners who praise the great deal seniors get from Brit Rail. After staying up late Saturday drinking too much hard cider and listening to traditional tunes wafting from fiddles and an accordion, I plod into the dining room for breakfast.

I eat sausage and fried eggs across from Arthur, an English retiree traveling the world. He was mugged in a Colorado YMCA and, while sitting on a toilet in a Canadian bus terminal, watched a hand reach under the door of his stall and snatch his camera. The likely culprit? The shoe shine guy who could’ve slipped the camera beneath his box.

Arthur tells me he cared for his wife until she died. Then a girlfriend fell deathly ill and he tended to her. Now he’s determined to find a woman who won’t force him to be a caregiver again. I tell him in life, we repeat lessons we don’t learn the first or second time, so don’t be surprised if his next girlfriend sickens, too.

I’m told I can buy a three-room stone cottage for less than $8,000…but it wouldn’t come with a Muse. I leave this island possessing memories of its twelfth-century cathedral of red and yellow sandstone, and its Ring of Brodgar, a Neolithic stone circle. More importantly, I carry a book by a native son, George Mackay Brown, who wrote: “Monday I found a boot – / rust and salt leather. / I gave it back to the sea, to dance in…” The shore, he concluded, “was cold with mermaids and angels.”

Mallorca – 1996
WHEN I TAKE THREE WEEKS OFF from my hospital public relations job and fly to Barcelona alone, I already have a girlfriend, so I’m not looking for a muse. My doctor doesn’t want me to board a plane because I have an ear infection requiring antibiotics, and, at any moment in the air, my eardrum could rupture.
I have no itinerary. I just know I won’t celebrate my fiftieth birthday wearing a silly hat and opening gag gifts. Maybe I’ll clap my hands and click my shoes while a raven-haired flamenco dancer swirls her red dress and slaps the air with her fan.

My semi-deafness, my inability to speak Catalan, my lack of fashionable clothes, and my forced abstinence from sangria and beguda de pobre (oranges, anise and sugar), though, turn me into a hermit. I only communicate to purchase air-cured ham and bread and to pay for my room, fares and museum tickets. Given a choice between wandering out into a drizzle and reading Robert Hughes’ book about Barcelona, I read the book. Whatever happened to the guy who climbed Croagh Patrick—Ireland’s holy mountain—in a cold mist?

Finally, I force myself to take the ferry to Ibiza, an island known for its throbbing discos and topless sunbathing…in the summer. But this is winter, and hotels are empty and inexpensive, and everyone bundles up. Days later, when a ferry leaves me in Palma, Mallorca, my throat is sore, and my nose is runny. On the bus to Port de Sóller, I decide it’s a divine directive when a road sign points into the mountains to Santuari de Lluc.

The sanctuary was erected in the thirteenth century at a place where a shepherd discovered a statue of the Virgin Mary. The monastery was erected later, and I sleep in one of its austere cells. Though I was raised a Methodist and not a Catholic, I celebrate my birthday listening to boy choristers in blue cassocks and following pilgrims to outdoor Stations of the Cross. I contemplate the triumphs and failures of my life near bell- jangling sheep nibbling on grass. Instead of blowing out candles, I light five of them—thick and red—for the dead, the ailing, and a baby in a friend’s womb.

Islands in the Mississippi River – 2002
I’M FIFTY-SIX, old enough to be Huck Finn’s grandpappy, and I’ve never paddled a canoe that wasn’t circling Tom Sawyer Island. Paige, a young poet friend I met in California, has been trained by Outward Bound, so she’s the brains behind my brawn on our two-month voyage from St. Paul to New Orleans. I paddle in the bow. She’s in the stern with the map book.

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain wrote, “Huck spends three peaceful, lonely days on the island, living on plentiful berries and fish and able to smoke whenever he wishes. He spends his nights counting ferryboats and stars on the tranquil river.”

We don’t spend peaceful days on islands plucking berries and hooking catfish. I’d never smoke because I need my lung power to stroke hour after hour like a beast of burden. We don’t have time to count boats—riverboats, barges, motorboats— because we’re too busy keeping their wakes from capsizing us.

Maybe Paige counts stars, but I don’t because not long after nightfall, I’m curled into a fetal position inside my one-man tent. We pass many islands, and sometimes Paige calls out their names. Arsenal Island. Grand Tower. Nine-Mile. And we sleep on a few less prominent ones…on their clear edges or sandbars. We certainly wouldn’t claw through thick foliage and risk angering a nest of cottonmouths. We rest on one island that’s clearly been the scene of both family gatherings and drunk fests. By the time we paddle past our last island, I’m muscled and confident, and I’ve lost thirty pounds. Early on, though, Mark Twain pretty much described me: “I felt like a skinful of dry bones and all of them trying to ache at once.”

Caribbean Islands – 2008
MOM’S EIGHTY-NINE AND I’M SIXTY-TWO when we board a ship in Florida for the weeklong Sylvia Browne and Friends Spiritual Connections Cruise in the Caribbean. Mom inherited money from an aunt, and she’s spending part of it on separate “Mommy and Me” trips for her four children.

My younger sisters have Dad’s introversion, and I’m a glad- handing extrovert like Mom, who’s got a “Whatever” T-shirt identical to mine. On the Crown Princess and in port, we attract crowds that grow with every burst of laughter.

Mom joins a conga line on deck, plays the slots, coos at every baby in sight, and bobs her head to steel drums and Jimmy Buffett. I joke that we’re a team: while Mom’s hugging someone, I’m picking their pocket. I tell everyone about my idea for the perfect souvenir gift for oldsters: a granny thong, an adult diaper dyed a shocking pink and greatly reduced in size.

To hundreds of us, psychics deliver lectures and conduct readings. When it’s my turn, I tell Sylvia—a frequent TV guest and author of Conversations with the Other Side—that I’m not gainfully employed and expend all my time and energy writing stories, poems, and essays for literary journals that pay nothing.

I ask if I should worry about money. She answers, “Absolutely not.”

Even as my savings are being depleted over the years, I’m not concerned until I discover that Sylvia once predicted a missing eleven-year-old boy was dead after being kidnapped by a dreadlocked Hispanic man. Five years after being kidnapped by a short-haired white man, the boy was found alive.

Paul Theroux, who’s written books about his journeys to Sri Lanka and Singapore, Easter Island and the British Isles, has said, “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.”

As Mom and I reclaim our luggage in Florida, I recognize I’m no longer a traveler, but a tourist. While I can probably list the islands where we stopped—the Bahamas, St. Maarten, the Virgin Islands, Grand Turk—I have no idea where we’ve been.

Assateague Island, Maryland and Virginia – 2014
MAYBE THESE FERAL PONIES ARE DESCENDANTS of domesticated horses loosened from the hold of a Spanish galleon during a wreck centuries ago. Or maybe their ancestors belonged to colonial settlers who cast them out on their own to forage.

On a day when wind ruffles cord grass and wavelets, I want to be buoyed by the sight of these wild ponies cavorting in the sea and galloping across the dunes, stirring sandpipers and osprey into flight. I want to see a vigilant egret—hungry for biting insects—standing atop a pony, and two stallions trying to master the other beside a salt marsh.

But what catches my attention is a lone brown pony—with a protruding ribcage and hair baring scars and sores—shuffling and resting in the parking lot. The pony doesn’t approach my car window to silently plead for my apple and ham sandwich, a breach of the posted rules. It seems too weak to look for rosehips, persimmons, and bayberry twigs.

The pony’s back hasn’t been bent by riders, and its spirit was never broken by a bit and reins, but it looks forlorn after living on an island on which only the fittest can survive bitter storms and scorching heat. Though my own wanderings came at considerable cost, I still believe that given a choice when it was a foal, this pony would have chosen freedom over a corral, a saddle, and a bale of hay.

Cuba – 2018
FROM THE MIST-SLICK RAILING OF A CRUISE SHIP slowly nearing land one morning, my young traveler self and my old tourist self-gaze across the sea at Havana.

My young self wonders what he’ll find once he struts on to the port. Will he meet effusive señoritas and invite them to ride to Moro Castle and the Gran Teatro in the back seat of a ’55 red Chevy convertible while smoking cigars and sharing a bottle of Havana Club rum? Will he pound conga drums in a jam session with Aguaje Ramos on trombone, Eliades Ochoa on guitar, Chucho Valdés at the piano, and Omara Portundo singing and swaying? Will he salsa for hours at a club and then sit beside the sea at the Malecón and, inspired by Jose Marti (“Sane love is not love”), scribble odes in bad Spanish to Eva’s smoldering gray eyes, the hypnotic shifting of Pilar’s ribcage, the grace of Bernita’s bare shoulders? At dusk, will he curl up in the ruins of a colonial building and sleep for a few hours before awakening to the drifting aroma of Café Cubano?

My seventy-two-year-old tourist self shakes these images out of his head. He needs to be careful of his blood sugar and lung capacity, so he won’t be sipping rum and Coke, or inhaling a Montecristo No. 2, savoring the taste of leather, wood, cinnamon, and nutmeg. He won’t be strutting but tottering when he walks through immigration. He’ll board a luxury bus with his partner, Debbie, so he can forget señoritas and a romantic ride in a classic American car reminiscent of his teenaged years. He’ll watch Cubans play music while tapping his arthritic fingers against his thighs, and Cubans dance while he tries to wiggle life back into his slumbering toes.

And this old self—grown mellow—knows that after the sky darkens, he’ll be spooning on his cabin’s soft bed while the vagabonds of the world are doing what he once did: sharing kisses on Catalina Island, getting tipsy on grog with Fiji’s taxi drivers, imitating Zorba the Greek on a taverna’s dance floor, meandering through islands guided by chance, not by a printed itinerary.

♦

Orman Day has lived a life ruled by wanderlust and a love of writing. As a young man with little money, he hitchhiked and hopped freights. Eventually, he hauled his pack to dozens of countries. His prose and poetry have been published by Creative Nonfiction, Potomac Review, William and Mary, Passager Journal, Portland Review, and others. He lives in Laurel, Maryland.

Delmarva Review is an independent literary journal selecting the best of new poetry and prose from thousands of submissions nationwide. The thirteenth annual edition, released in November, features sixty-four authors, many from the region. The nonprofit journal receives partial financial support from a Talbot County Arts Council grant with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Readers can buy copies from specialty booksellers like Mystery Loves Company, in Oxford, or from Amazon.com and other online booksellers. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.