A classic exit affair, she called it— and the diploma on the wall backed up her assertion. With our passion hot as high school sophomores, well, the odds weren’t in our favor.
But even when they’re stolen, the seeds of love will flourish when they fall on fertile soil, and passions well tended bring forth the bounty of devotion. Eighteen years proves all of this is true.
Alan Abrams was once a motorcycle mechanic, a carpenter, a builder and bootleg architect; now a scribbler of stories and poems.
Did you think of shipyards, things that sail the seas When you heard vessels- I am thinking of the glorious Uruli, peepa,kodam… Grand, majestic creations in brass. At least until that modern day interloper called stainless steel crept in. These storehouses of grain, water, pickled mango, lime Great big family lunches and dinners, served on banana leaves On cool earthen floors, when the kuyil’s plaintive, insistent cries Surged in volume and pitch along with the summer heat!
Were the Uruli a chess piece, it would be the castle Solid, staid, capable of no dramatic flair. Peepa– of immense capacity, sang lustily of a family’s gustatory dedication Now, a form of address for a person of generous girth. The kodam– immortalized by womenfolk of yore, gopis of Mathura Figures of grace, making the arduous task of filling water from a well or tank Look oh so- languorous!
Now, that one has steel, melamine, plastic, and paper containers Some disposable too. What is the fate of brass vessels- That need elbow grease, lemon peels or tamarind pulp to shine Will they gather dust in attics and basements? Or meet fiery ends in furnaces? To be reborn into shapes appealing to modern tastes? But listen carefully as I do, and you will hear the whispers of the past Linking a Rekha in Manhattan to a Radha in Mathura
Notes Urulis, Peepas, Kodams- Tamil words for various storing vessels Kuyil- Tamil for cuckoo Gopis- Devotees of the Hindu deity Krishna
Uma Shankar lives in New Jersey. She likes to write poetry in English and Hindi and also translates. Her poems have featured on Wingless Dreamer and Red Noise Collective.
I’m trying to leave my phone in the drawer, to get enough sleep, and drink more water. All while the world tumbles towards becoming rubble—it feels inevitable. But I’ve started buying peaches and writing poetry. I’ve deleted dating apps for more time with me. I’m digging deep, I’m in therapy— I’m searching for ways to feel less empty. I’m finally starting to appreciate the journey, but it’s like relighting a candle just as a hurricane sweeps in from the East. I’m scared the world will end before I know what it’s like to be happy.
Grace Hasson is the self-published author of Into the Orange Grove, a singer-songwriter, and a fiction writer. She defines herself as a true lover of writing, no matter the form.
Image: Lokal_Profil, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Broen and I catch Mother Weather napping, push off into her belly, glide on glass into the York River. Glittering current requires the paddle just as rutter. We find a duckblind
and climb in. Plywood benches hidden by vertical branches. Floor of fishbones. Osprey spy from above 60-foot trawlers the Nancy D, the Alice B and Blue Alaska.
We land next to Ludwig the lost rowboat. No one here but birds, Green Point beach juts into the bay. To each his own boat. To each her own belief in curious turtles and fish flashing in shallows.
To all saltwater eyes and seeing beneath the surface the treasure of small effort.
Conch Trail
During the three-mile paddle to Cedar Island, Doug tells Moe and me about the world’s smallest carnival: two blocks of downtown Wachapreague: a ferris tire and a twisting spider, cotton candy and clam fritters, beer and bluegrass, golf carts and open only seven to nine p.m. for a couple days before July Fourth. Moe fills his mug with an IPA. I chug sunblock and bug spray. We row through the largest marsh I’ve ever seen: square miles of tall grass, darting turtles, jumping fish and diving birds all in the flow of salty, muddy current. We ride the tide and fight the wind until we reach the beach, pull boats up, breathe and admire the audacity of undeveloped solitude. No roads reach here, no motels or markets or carnivals. There’s an old Coast Guard cabin, can still see the power poles snapped by a hurricane and never reconnected. We rest for a second and walk north through shorebreak and shelves of shells. Doug shares his strategy: don’t carry conchs in backpacks but stick their points in the sand and collect them on the way back. Too many to consider, plus eight-inch clams, spiral whelks, bones and stones, breakers bring more with every wave. We weave among shell meadows and blue pools, buoys and crab pots. I pull a thick bone from the surf. I picture prehistoric Earth. We turn back after a mile and a half, clearly see the trail of conchs pointing skyward all the way back to the kayaks. Our packs overflow with beach debris. We break for lunch. Moe cleans his mug with sea water and refills. Doug plans to crown his picket fence with shells. Tide turned, wind mostly with us, we float back to the launch with sunburn and barking shoulders, all forms of pain repressed by awe and appreciation and two drops of perspective: the fortune of friendships and the value of vast emptiness left alone. When I peer across endless sea and sand, I know I am a lucky nothing. With three boats affixed to Moe’s Lexus, we pass the carnival capsule on the way back to Doug’s, momentarily part of the parade: one fire truck in bunting, Miss Oyster atop waving madly.
DL Pravda tries to keep it together either by jamming distorted reverb juice in his ears or by driving to the country and disappearing into the woodsfarm dimension. Recent work appears in Bookends Review, The Meadow, Poetry Quarterly, Rockvale Review and South 85. The winner of the 2019 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize for his book, Normal They Napalm the Cottonfields, Pravda teaches at Norfolk State University.
I light the forest, see what burned looks like, more visceral than AI pictures. Flaking branches, like fish on a grill. Black smoke, crawling along acre after acre of flame. These are real, and I wish I could touch them.
But the authorities are after me like I’m treasure on a map. They can detect a burnt match from a mile away. They want the TV to announce my guilt, listed with the damage I caused, my new last name.
I flee into the wilderness, fly into the hole of a tree. Around me, animals wake at night, and each hoot of an owl freezes me, so I can’t get out. A coyote howls nearby, a spider dangles above me.
Far from me, last embers of fire run out. Everything is gone, like an eraser of ash swept over the woods. I can’t see that. My heart is bursting out of its chest. I can’t breathe, like a weight has been placed on my lungs. I know what is happening. I will be the last thing burned.
Civilization
The closet is my neighborhood. The fat blue coat is my mail delivery person, the light green jacket the owner of a bodega.
Boxes upon boxes are neighbors, each empty as the day they were born. Why they don’t have bodies like mine is a mystery.
I realize life has only so much space to inhabit this world. I represent the average of the average, who leaves and carries a mediocre civilization with me.
Where the real TV is speaks with its streaming voice. I watch show after show, comedy stand-up after stand-up special.
I lie on my side on the sofa, a sardine that can’t move in its jar. Please, someone put me on a pizza.
Everyone else pretends to be busy, to do things to pacify death. But even in the closet, things break, the weight of outerwear bends the pole so everything drops to the floor.
There is mourning, but there is also praise. More will be added to my neighborhood, additional boxes to peer into, a new friend.
I’m just a boy who wants to get the mail for his Dad, shop at the bodega for mangoes and grapes. TV told me I should eat fruit. I will taste the sweetest allowed.
Donald Illich has published poetry recently in The MacGuffin, Slant, and Okay Donkey. He is the author of Chance Bodies (The Word Works, 2018) and Rescue Is Elsewhere. He lives and works in Maryland.
