Category: renaissance (Issue No. II)

What I think about when I think about my mom:

Holly Salvatore

1. The bottoms of her feet fleshy and pink, cracked yellow heels, meeting deep dewy skin. I see my mother’s legs, long and muscular, propped on the railing of the porch. Everything is blooming. The bees are not all dead yet. Hummingbirds vibrate and shimmer through the porch shade, stopping at the feeder to drink sugar water for less than a second. They nest in the pear tree. My mother drinks a margarita. Her stomach is flat and she rolls up her shirt to collect the sunlight in the folds and creases of her skin. When she smiles, it’s her eyes.

She lets herself sweat, lets it roll down the backs of her arms, from her neck, from her chin. She lets herself drip into the garden bed and onto the stones. I imagine this rosebush then, grows accustomed to my mother’s taste.

I am picking raspberries to make a pie, but we eat them all before going inside.

My mother’s fingers, red and sticky. The hummingbirds watching. We eat in greedy handfuls and gulps like berries are breath and body for us.

2. The morning grayscale tone of her hollowed out cheeks.

My father has dressed her in a pink fleece zip up and soft flannel pants. She is wearing her slippers, lined with faux fur and a blue fleece beanie. Cushioned and insulated, nothing can touch her. The fabrics, my hands, a cup of tea, my father’s goodbye kiss — everything soft when everything hurts. My mother sniffles. She begins to leak. I don’t know what’s wrong, but I know what’s wrong. The thing that lives inside her chest banging and lunging to get out, the thing we don’t talk about. Her eroded lungs shake, and I remember she used to seem bigger. Now her edges blur and her arms fade into the couch. One collarbone peeping from her sweater as sharp as a dagger.

My mother’s palms are yellow-pink, her hands faded from tan to parchment, fingers long and slender with perfect, oval nails. Her hands are cold. My hands are cold.

Clear liquid snot and tears mix at her chin. I hold a tissue to my mother’s nose and instruct her to “blow.” Wipe her face while I fail to keep mine neutral. We do this again and again. When the knocking in her breath stops, I test her tea on the skin of my wrist, and ask if she wants some. I hold the mug to her mouth and she takes tiny sips, the muscles in her neck straining.

She is sorry, her eyes say.

I know.

Looking into blooms of soft, green lichen, lashes gone, eyebrows gone, looking into eyes that are alive in a body that is dying, I tell her that it will be OK.

The sun comes up. Maybe I’m not lying.

3. Red Lodge, Montana.

A woman is a hawk at rest, at any moment ready to take flight.

A woman in a cowboy hat and mauve puffy coat, too short, her slender talons show beneath the sleeves. Even sitting, she is long and tall, even blurred, she is happy. Evergreen and alpine flowers and soil — the scent she carries on the breeze as she circles above, riding air currents. To watch her dive fearlessly into a meadow is to know joy. To see her come up with a body in her claws is to know death.

Watch as she devours a snake.

Alive.

My mother, the hawk, sits perched on the bumper of a beat up blazer, breathing easily and steadily in the early summer sun, full-bellied, clear-eyed. Less of a woman and more of a bird.

Holly Salvatore

Boxes

Liat Miriam

This morning my cat, anxious from the move to our new apartment, would not stop crying. I placed a cardboard box on the floor, she crawled inside and quieted. I put the coffee on and wished I could sit in a box, although, gazing around my tiny studio apartment, I guess I am. After they left my mom said my dad regretted not leaving me weed.

At this time exactly a year ago my cat and I were moving into a different apartment a world away. That one had three rooms and a backyard, enormous for a city, even an extension of a city, like Bat Yam, where we lived. My cat could spend half her time outdoors. She’d taunt the ferals until they’d attack, then dart inside for mommy or daddy to come running and shoo them away.

My cat cries because she misses the yard. My cat cries because she misses the smell of her home country. I wonder if she misses the man called daddy, too? The man whose eyes would flash with anger if I referred to her as “my cat” instead of “our cat.” I always knew to stop when he’d spit a curse in Hebrew.

I open a cardboard box just bigger than his fist. I pull out a little ceramic gray kitten with a ceramic white face and paws, asleep in a little ceramic cardboard box. We saw this kitten on a shelf in a store in Breckenridge. He loved it, so we bought it, but he insisted I be the one to keep it when we parted. He tended to buy me things he thought I wanted.

The title of my graduate school admission essay should have been I chose grad school over love, so grant me admission. He held me at the airport and promised he loved me.

I go to Amazon and for the hundredth time this week I consider buying magnetic poetry. Perhaps with the words so readily available I will be the type of writer who writes, instead of the bitter kind who reads the poetry books at Urban Outfitters and thinks “I could do better” without actually trying. I haven’t bought measuring spoons yet, so to brew the coffee I estimate pinches of grounds.

During the last meal we shared a man died in a pool of blood beside us. Perhaps an aneurysm, he fell flat on the pavement. We’d never seen so much blood before. That night we drank arak and toasted every glass to him.

Now I’m flirting with other men. He asks me what I’m doing, I say I’m writing a creative nonfiction essay, but I have no idea how to say creative nonfiction in Ivrit.

Liat Miriam

Magnolia Leaves

Jane M. Fleming

I have a superpower. I throw acrylic paint onto plywood board with my fingers and push. And push until my hands become part of the painting. The cadmium yellow is my skin, running underneath like spiny veins. I can convince myself that I am simply a brushstroke, pink and red and brown and green. And I can control my curves and grooves and make myself seen and unseen—

But I didn’t learn about this superpower until after nineteen.

The scabs on my feet caused from running barefoot through woods and roads would wake up and bleed, forcing me to wrap them in gauze and walk gingerly on my sandaled soles. The streets of Williamsburg, Virginia were colored golden by the leaves on oak trees and stinking late-summer magnolias. They reminded me of Easter Sunday with my grandparents and the magnolia tree reaching over the sidewalk outside of the old Episcopal church. Sometimes I can still feel the thin, waxy petal of those magnolia flowers against the skin of my thumb and forefinger. The magnolias are the only thing I miss, with their flowers that are larger than my hands and the leaves that crunch under your feet in October, and my faith-filled lungs in the swampy heat.

I thought they smelled like a corpse, those magnolias— like the byproduct of my rotten flesh on the bottoms of my toes. They didn’t bring joy like they did when I was six, feeling their leaves crunch under patent Mary Janes, just a flash of running past twisted tree branches under clouds pregnant with rain. When my feet healed, I threw off my shoes and would wander between those trees at four in the morning and shiver each time I caught a low slung male voice echoing from behind those deep green leaves.

Maybe if I had been Raphael, I would have painted the glossy photograph of us smiling, lying on top of one another, taken with a disposable camera that I purchased and developed at the last place in town that still did that. I thought it was kind of retro— the sort of thing we did as kids— rolls of birthday party and vacation photographs stored in cardboard envelopes with the pharmacy’s insignia all over them.

He loved the picture because of what you cannot see. Our smiles are wide, cheeks stacked on top of one another, his head covered by a red baseball cap, my neck dripping in hemp necklaces that I made myself. What you cannot see is that we are lying on a woven blanket in a thicket of trees next to a lake. You cannot see that we had just been making love and thought ourselves so clever. The things you cannot see—

He loved that photo because behind us there was the danger of getting caught. I was all his. His magnolia petal that smells like rot.

I held the photo in my hand, crying, when he called to tell me he’d taken all of his Xanax. He said would be in the hospital for a few days. I was confused— we had been arguing. I called his best friend who told me that he tried to kill himself. It was because I was making him upset, because I’d killed his baby, because I tore apart his family.

Call again. Tears rolling down my face. He said he was fine— it was a false alarm. He’d gone to urgent care, but they sent him home. He lied. “The doctor told me that you would choke on Xanax before it would kill you,” he said. I wasn’t sure that that was true.

When I relaxed, I assured him that I wasn’t changing my mind. We could not continue like this. He said he had no reason to live. I had killed his baby and he had no reason to live. I hung up the phone and I called a friend. I called his bluff.

My thumb and forefinger slid against the sheen of the glossy 4X6 photograph, increasing the pressure, remembering that what he could not see in that photo is that my feet were bleeding. He liked me better without shoes. I tore it to pieces. I wrapped my feet in titanium white gauze.

I didn’t know then that I was a paint thrower or I would have emptied my pthallo green to wash out the sheen of his liar’s smile. But I am now and can

Jane M. Fleming