The Other Man is Always French by Richard Peabody The other woman can be a blonde or a redhead but the other man is always French. He dresses better than I ever will. He can picnic and stroll with a wineglass in one upraised hand. Munch pâté, drink espresso, and tempt with ashy kisses. He hangs out at Dupont Circle because the trees remind him of Paris. Did I mention sex? Face it— he’s had centuries of practice. I’m an American. What do I know? He drives a fast car, and can brood like nobody’s business, while I sit home watching ESPN. He’s tall and chats about art— I don’t even want to discuss that accent. He’s Mr. Attitude. My fantasy is to call the State Department and have him deported. Only he’ll probably convince you to marry him for a green card. No way I’m going to win— the other man is always more aggressive, always more attentive. The other man is just too French for words. From now on I’m going out with statuesque German women so next time we run into each other they can kick his butt for me. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue This poem is my semi-recovery after a relationship ended owing to a classic French louche. At readings it gets a lot of laughs. But I was flabbergasted by how many people have confessed that they’ve been in that situation. My students assumed I’d written the poem after seeing Addicted to Love . Nope. Though after watching it, I get why they thought so. .................................................................................................................................................................................... RICHARD PEABODY lives in Arlington, Virginia. His most recent volume of poetry is Guinness on the Quay (Salmon Poetry, 2019). gargoylepaycock.wordpress.com Next - The Barking Dogs of Taos by Richard Peabody Next

Kayaking on Hebron Lake by Marjorie Maddox As when the astronaut, anonymous in his vast slate of space, stepped out from manmade vessel—beyond the printed map of fingers, skewed compass of eye, eco-skeleton of the self-guided— to glide on the dark surface of depth, beyond moment and hour, solar system and this singular body of shimmer shimmying outside each shore of season, tide and time, far beyond the mind of universe and wave. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue Some of my poems tell stories; some capture a moment. This previously unpublished poem does the latter, showcasing the intersection of worlds, particularly in connection to nature, the imagination, and writing. “Kayaking on Hebron Lake” was written during my Monson Arts Artist Residency in Monson, Maine, in 2023. .................................................................................................................................................................................... MARJORIE MADDOX has published 17 collections of poetry, a story collection, and four children’s and YA books. She is a Professor Emerita of English at the Lock Haven Campus of Commonwealth University. marjoriemaddox.com Next - Ode to Everything by Marjorie Maddox Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue GAMBLE PATRILINEAGE Robbie Gamble B eginning with James, of Scotch-Irish stock, shipped out to America from Enniskillen at sixteen, following the magnetic call of Manifest Destiny, pulling up on the stockyard banks of Cincinnati. There he learned the soapmaking trade, and soon fell in with William Procter, candlemaker. They pooled funds, and in 1837 co-founded the Procter & Gamble company. Energetic, shrewd stockpilers of materials, they grew the business well, filled coffers in Civil War contracts on the Union side, shipping bar soap and candles downstream into the maw of the conflict. And when the armies stumbled home they expanded as the nation, reconstructing, flexed its wealth westward. D avid, son of James, born into wealth amidst the bright industrial flush of household goods, cradled high on the bow of flagship Ivory Soap, while America scoured itself clean, striving toward a fresh end to the century. David served P&G as company Secretary, retiring in 1893 to sail the world with sons, overseeing Presbyterian missions charged with Oriental evangelization. Disembarking, he shuttled between showcase mansions in Cincinnati and Pasadena, the latter now a national landmark, the Gamble House. C larence, son of David, unexpected youngest of three. Prodigal, self-possessed, he posted first in his class at Princeton, 1914, then second through Harvard Medical School. His generation unburdened by the reins of soap production, instead he got a trust fund, his first million at twenty-one. Clarence caught the bug of Eugenics, pseudo-science of race and class superiority, dreaded humanity being dragged down by bad genes. He never built a medical practice, instead became a population-manipulator of one, urging for more babies amongst the educated, testing new contraceptives for the poor, funding rogue clinical trials, advocating sterilization of the feeble-minded in the rural South, always striving to constrain human sprawl in worrisome backward societies around the globe. W alter, son of Clarence, third of five redheaded siblings, the quiet, studious one. He lived for scientific questing; like his father he studied medicine, and unlike him he kept at it, specializing in pediatric cardiology, designing new pacemaking devices in the 1960s to impose strict rhythms on sick kids’ faltering hearts. He kept a hand in the family’s Great Cause of world population control, sitting on their foundation board, rattled about in his research lab with a menagerie of subject rats and cows, rounded on patients, and biked in to work in all kinds of weather, for over thirty years. R obbie, son of Walter, first of three boys, came into unexpected millions at eighteen. He grew deep discomfort for his wealth, shifted from Harvard to the Bowery in 1982, to work among homeless folks, and with his first wife Martha gifted away a fortune. He became a nurse practitioner to better care for people scraping at the margins, raised three kids, lost a marriage and a brother, discovered Anna, an orchard, a shining reverence for words. If there’s a breakthrough in the unpublished poem “Gamble Patrilineage,” it’s in the influence of my first wife, Martha, who helped me to see through the constraints of the patriarchy and the trappings of wealth, and turn away from family convention to become a more authentic agent for change in the world. My family has an almost biblical sense of self-importance, and I find it useful to co-opt that narrative with an over-the-top generational structure that shows the undue focus given to the men on the family tree. Previous ROBBIE GAMBLE is the author of A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). He is poetry editor at Solstice Literary Magazine . robbiegamble.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue SUMMONING Shari Zollinger “I've always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I've worked hard at being the hero of my own life. But every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn't know how to belong. Longing? Yes. Belonging? No.” – Jeanette Winterson What if we were born with an assumption, we tiny creatures without verbal webbing in our already formed pulsing cortexes, and what if that assumption was simply that we belong to the world and the world belongs to us—even while our gooey little bodies spill out into gravity? And how do we reconcile the betrayal we feel when we learn that belonging never was the static act of our grand assumption? That we'll have to walk round its bend repeatedly, that we'll get caught inside the crook of its elbow, that we’ll get lost. I once tried a thing called soul retrieval. A bandied term that lies thick with ambiguity. The practitioner lay by my side, hip to hip, after calling upon the four directions. She took the responsibility for driving from me for just a moment, and I was grateful. A relief to let her hold the space for this expedition, as I handed over my consent for her to act upon my body, just this once—not as renunciation but investigation. To scry inside my webbing long enough to see what I’d not seen. To lead me through a matrix of memory. After I lay on the decorative rug next to her for some time, she sat up with a story to tell. Was this what she meant by retrieval, reaching for what had been dropped into the margins and carrying it home? Her story was about a rock. The rock was in the hand of a girl. The hand of the girl was clenched around the rock. The rock and the girl were asleep deep underground. The girl was eight years old. As the rush of the story came into our space, I thought, well, there was a time when I was eight years old, when we were exiled from the sprawling Mormon farm full of cousins, playmates and caretakers. We were given orders to leave. Reasons as messy as families are, the breaking fraught with financial mistakes, personality conflicts, scapegoats. And because I was eight, and I didn’t know that eventually I’d break with this tribe deliberately, I’d taken the orders as religious gospel. As once we might belong, so too shall we not. We became, in my eight-year-old head, the Boxcar Children looking for pine needle beds. And because we were used to caretakers in multitudes, how then would we survive, being reduced to two parents who’d possibly never considered that they’d have to bear the emotional weight of 9 children on their own? What if this story buried itself inside a rock in a small bird-claw-hand, deep under the earth, because this girl simply didn’t want to leave? Perhaps at that point, she’d searched the farm, walking dusty paths by the cow corral, next to the silage pit, underneath the red-twined hay bales for a place to bury one piece of her with a rock to keep her company. She’d allow this separation because, although leaving was inevitable, perhaps it could be mitigated by letting one piece stay—the rock piece. How long do we stay in a place with our hands wrapped around stone? Then the practitioner excavated the metaphorical rock and in shamanic ritual, blew it back into my belly, creating a crossroads of then and now, where something lost was found—something buried, reclaimed: the revolutionary act of remembering. "Summoning" debuted alongside a film by Amanda Madden, A Spell for Queer Home , in 2023 in Moab, Utah. In this lyric essay, the summoner leads a seeker to revisit childhood traumas and achieve a breakthrough. Previous SHARI ZOLLINGER is a Salt Lake City-based poet, essayist, and bookseller whose work examines memory, place, and the traces we leave in both landscape and life. She currently reads for Sugar House Review and has spent 25 years in independent bookselling as a buyer and community advocate for literary programs. Her work has appeared in Sugar House Review , Redactions: Poetry & Prose , The Shore Poetry , and Ephemeral Magazine. sharizollinger.substack.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue PAINTING THE CAVE Shawn Dallas Stradley HGTV sends weekly emails showing 38 'what’s-trending' ideas to cover bare walls. Not much different than Lascaux, jonesing to make our mark. If not make it, buy it. Textile: two needlepoint parrots in oval frames, hand-stitched by Grandma. Walk out to the fire pit. Pick up a piece of charcoal. Mark making—Kilroy was here—that speaks to authenticity. Monotype Diptych: The Geology of Language , ink on paper, cream scribbles surface through the black. Indecipherable. People grow restless. "Shelter in Place" mandates attempt, in vain, to prevent the spread of something new. We just had to get out of the cave . Something wrong with your cave? Not happy staying in. Going out, deadly. Photos: black-and-white silver gelatin on paper, taken in grad school, the abandoned flour mill, when you tried to be a photographer. There’s no place like cave. There’s no place like cave. No place … if only ruby slippers… Don’t be dramatic, all we really want is a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie. Shelter. Place. Warmth. Food. Sex. Marks. What could the tally be? It could be feng shui, it’s probably just genius loci. Spirit of Place. Who dances across shadow walls in candlelight? Oil on raw linen: Two Naked Boys Dancing , painted by a bisexual artist. To see Tous les Matins du Mond e, the tragic film, somber viola da gamba scored throughout, but not every sunrise. Enjoy what can be seen from the kitchen window while eating oatmeal with blueberries. Watercolor on paper: Rainbow Grid , graphed like an equation, gift from a previous lover, painted when he was in junior high. A pot of black beans boils on the stove. Biscuits bake in the oven. Mom’s crocheted afghan drapes across the couch. Dad’s high-school wood-shop lamp lights the table. Paper and twigs: Family Tree , leaves twitch in the slightest stir, branch how we came to be born in this desert valley of poplar trees, temples, irrigation ditches, though we descend from fishermen in the fjords. Home— the golden egg—belongs only to you, to everyone. Solitude. Respite. Protection. Tapestry: white ink on green cloth, mass-produced Dalai Lama from a New Age reminds: Be kind . Whisper to every sun that has ever burned and will burn for all brothers and sisters to flourish in caves of dancing shadow. Acrylic on black velvet: dickered for around the fountain in Cuzco town square, Machu Picchu, from the band of boys pretending to be artists. This "kitchen sink" poem relies on couplets to control content, pacing, and enjambment, painting the cave. As a poem, "Painting the Cave" takes the simple idea of home into the breakthroughs that formed a part of 'interesting times." Previous SHAWN DALLAS STRADLEY grew up in Utah and California. He holds a B.S. in Horticulture from BYU, and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Colorado. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing and Translation from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Shawn began writing poetry at age 16. His mystical fascination with the natural world weaves throughout his work, and mixes with the urban. Shawn became active in the Utah poetry scene in 1997 and published his first full-length poetry book in 2003: Beyond October (Black Rock Books). Shawn has worked with poets and artists to produce chapbooks and a collaborative catalog for the art exhibit, The 9 Muses . Two chapbooks of Shawn's poetry were published in 2025 by Moon in the Rye Press, Fragile House and a group collaboration, When Cupboards Open . His poetry has been published by City Weekly , Exit 7 , Panorama , The New Era , Nine One One , The Poeming Pigeon , and My Kitchen Table. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue THE AWFUL THING Christina Robertson My mother, Liz Carthage, was used to looking great. She’s an ex-dancer, married for forty years to a successful art dealer. She had adopted a kind of chic built upon exposure to interesting shapes and ideas. Elastic waist pants and cotton/poly sweatshirts were not part of her wardrobe as they are now. Not that she’d notice the difference, but I decided to bring her stockings and a new blouse today, and after searching her drawers, managed to track down a pair of earrings that matched. She tries to put her hands in the stockings now, thinking they’re gloves, but she holds perfectly still while I comb back her hair and pin it, and apply a dab of color to her dispirited lips. Despite her general confusion, she seems to have a deeply embedded recognition of what we are doing. That is to say, she nods and seems pleased. The woman who attends the holiday party won’t be the cosmopolitan of yore, no, not the head turner she once was, but will be, without doubt, the most attractive woman in the Day Room. I remember her dressed to go out with my father to an opening, smelling powdery and lovely, in a bottle green hourglass dress, her dark hair swept back in a sleek chignon. I think of her even before that, before she was Lizzy to my father, Peter. I like to think of her as the woman who wanted to be prima ballerina, but was to become my mother; a young dancer with aspirations and flaws, who likely didn’t look or smell so perfect after six hours in the studio, her feet bleeding through nearly shredded pointe shoes. That woman was separate from me. She was a heartbroken woman seated in an orthopedic surgeon’s office, a woman bewildered as to what to do next if she could no longer dance. She was the woman who, soon after, found the rabbit had died and came to the realization that she was in possession of the seed for another sort of creative life. Now she knows herself only in fragmented refractions. Left to her own devices, she’s a mess, adrift on a sea of holes. She’s the product of neurological devastation and, in a cruel ironic twist, my salvage. I have become the mother. As we approach the Day Room, I feel pride at what remains of her dancer’s posture. That quickly fades into the sad reality before us. Surveying the gathering, I see that Liz Carthage is just another entry in the turtle races, the only difference being that I’d painted her shell. Gentlemen, such as Harmon, are wearing crooked bow ties and have their hair plastered down as if they are in first grade, circa 1935. Ladies’ hair has been sculpted into virtual helmets in shades of peach and beige and ice blue. They are wearing their best faux pearls, their least stained shirts, their old leisure suits. All in safe heels or dismal slippers, all at a loss for what they are celebrating. My mother had been living on 4 West for nearly a year when the Reverend Harmon Triplett arrived. She didn’t (and still doesn’t) know anybody on the unit, not the staff nor the other residents, but this is because she has advanced Alzheimer’s Disease. Most of her “neighbors” on 4 West don’t know her either. Frequently they reintroduce themselves as they pass each other in their never-ending loops of the hallway. The formality is touching, as if they are forever trying to make a good impression. The day Harmon Triplett was brought to the unit, I had just finished combing my mother’s hair, which I often find limp at her shoulders. She still insists on dying it black, though she hasn’t fooled anyone in decades with that. Still, if we don’t keep coloring her hair, don’t take care of those white roots, she has been known to attempt to do it herself—with mascara, eyebrow pencil, even pen. Blue pen. I helped her choose a top to go with her brown polyester pants and a necklace that probably belongs to someone else here, and put a smudge of lipstick on those thinning lips. The makeup thing is more for myself than for her. It is similar to putting candles on a cake, a hopeful contrivance, a fantastical effort toward making a wish come true. The Reverend Triplett was to be moved into Room 18 on the “Green Wing.” My mother is in 2 Yellow, just across from the elevators. When the doors opened, and the Tripletts stepped tentatively out, a familiar aroma came wafting up through the elevator shaft. If ever an odor can make you feel as though you are swimming with rocks in your pockets, it’s nursing home turkey loaf and creamed corn. The family still smelled of the autumn world outside. I wished I could bottle it for them. Belle, the charge nurse, employed her well-rehearsed congeniality in greeting the Tripletts. She was all warmth and breeziness as she had been with us a year ago, and dispersed assurances all around like air freshener. The Reverend was a big man, more than six feet, and had retained the sturdy bones and musculature of his younger days, though it was apparent gravity and illness were conspiring against him. He stammered in an effort to reply and seemed embarrassed that he couldn’t say what he sensed he was supposed to. He shook his head and laughed, handing the whole exchange off to his adult daughter to navigate. I’d liked the look of them, Triplett and his daughter. They were unexpectedly earthy. I don’t know why I automatically assign stereotypical attributes to ministers. Like they all use Ivory soap and sing hymns in the shower, and display exemplary moderation in their approach to everything. As if they are thoroughly benign beings, plain donuts. Reverend Triplett’s Birkenstocks and faded shirt were retro-hip, and the small paunch resting on his belt looked as though it came from drinking good beer. He had a boyish, almost mischievous, smile and prominent cheekbones, evident in his carelessly beautiful daughter as well. His heavy thatch of hair was snow-white. All in all, his appearance was that of a kindly king in humble disguise, a hero out of a storybook. I was instantly fond of him without knowing anything about him. If his presence had that effect on me, it seemed to awaken an even stronger response in my mother. She approached the group, staring up at the Reverend from her height a good foot below him and quietly took hold of my hand, an expression of what appeared to be dismay and relief on her face, as if she had been waiting for him. “This, him, it’s upping. I am going up. I have haunting in here,” she said to me and pointed at her heart. Belle reached out for my mother, drawing her petite body into the fold. As she did, the Reverend’s wife appeared out of nowhere or maybe from his shadow. She was also small, with a broad, concerned face and arthritic hands. Her wiry hair was growing out from years of dark brown dye and her hastily applied rouge deepened the creases in her cheeks. She was introduced to us as Gail. She acknowledged us graciously and grasped her husband’s arm. “This here is Ms. Carthage. But we call her Liz, don’t we?” Belle gave my mother’s shoulder a squeeze. She responded like an eager child. “Ms. Liz, this is Reverend Triplett. He’s joining our community here.” Everyone was cordial, except perhaps Mrs. Triplett whose smile began to tremble. She was, after all, about to leave her husband on a locked dementia ward, hardly the “community” she’d been dreaming of for their retirement. Of course it could have been due to the fact that my mother and Harmon Triplett were looking at each other like Maria and Tony at the dance in West Side Story. The Reverend had enveloped my mother’s hand in both of his huge bear paws. He was a man well past his prime, but the strength in his hands was definitely still pulsing. Neither spoke beyond a polite murmur, still, if this wasn’t my eighty-year old mother who tried to put socks on over shoes, I would have said there was electricity there. His daughter Laurel and I introduced ourselves to break the ridiculous tension. I wasn’t sure if she was reading things the same way I was, but the arch in her eyebrows told me she was. I created a quick diversion, ushering my mother around the corner into the Day Room where, I had insisted, she had wanted to join the others watching a Sing Along with Mitch video. I could feel Gail Triplett’s eyes on us as we left. Facing the opposite direction, my mother had already forgotten the Reverend, but Mrs. Triplett likely hadn’t forgotten my mother. That night, about nine o’clock, I received a call at home from the evening nurse, Carin. After lights out, she reported, my mother must have gotten up and wandered out into the hallway, seeking god knows what. Harmon Triplett was also awake, also anxious over his inexplicable surroundings. They were found sitting side by side on the glider at the end of the Blue Wing under the moonlit window. They were holding hands, my mother’s head on his shoulder. Seeing my mother and Harmon Triplett over the next several visits, receiving the obligatory notifications from staff that she and he had had to be separated, that they had found him missing from his room in the middle of the night and discovered asleep in the vacant second bed in my mother’s room, that she trailed along like a stray dog, distressing Mrs. Triplett during her visits, began to make sense in a primitive sort of way. Their affinity, despite the inability to communicate coherently with each other, had taken on substance. I’d begun to get it. There was something compelling in Harmon Triplett that reminded me of a fairy tale hero, but also, unaccountably, of my father. Alzheimer’s Disease is the Ash Borer of the human experience. Slowly, determinedly, its toxic plaques wind in and disrupt the flow of neurological signals, all that informs people about their own lives. They are gradually hollowed. Sapped of what they know in order to thrive, then even to survive in the world, these people become a shell. The shell is affected too; shapes and contours distorting, falling prey to repetitive pacing, lost teeth that they hadn’t realized were decaying, then lost dentures, poor eating habits, fractures from falls or walking into things. All form of mysterious bruise and lump, mirroring the scratches and dents, pre-4 West, they had been shocked to “discover” in their cars, dents they hadn’t any idea about. I am finding the experience terrifyingly similar to what I imagine it would be like to witness my mother drown. I stand on the shore and throw ropes to her, but she has no idea what to do with them. I try to swim to her, but she only moves farther away. I bring in family photo albums and we go over and over the old faces. Sometimes they set a spark off in her darkening mind and she smiles. Other times she shakes her head forlornly, or in utter consternation, pointing at a pink-faded picture of my dapper father, and asks, “What is that doing?” I opt then for the answer that might give her momentary peace of mind, He’s coming later, after the gallery closes. There was a day, after Harmon had settled in, that I came toting the albums, but she wasn’t in her room. After a quick sweep of the Day Room and the nurses’ office, I went in search of Belle. And there I found my mother. She was in a chair in Mr. Klein’s room, blocked by the Nurse’s ample hips, looking slightly annoyed. “I’m keeping her with me,” Belle said. I had come to read nuances in Belle’s tone. There was a problem. “She’s helping me make my med rounds…it seemed like a better idea than spoiling the Reverend’s visit with his wife.” She raised an eyebrow, then chuckled off the whole state of affairs while dosing Mr. Klein with Aricept. My mother looked cross. “Oh boy…again?” I said. “It’s nice to go to vote out there.” My mother tensed her jaw and gazed out into the hall. “Honey she loves that man! It’s gonna come to no good I think.” Belle shook her head. I wasn’t surprised. I’d caught her myself, two days before, in the green wing, ten paces behind the Tripletts, her hands relaxed behind her back as she strolled, not particularly focused upon Harmon or his wife, simply enjoying a parrot’s constitutional. She’d gazed up at the banal, nostalgic prints fixed to the walls, as if they were flowering trees along a parkway. If someone else passed, she nodded politely. If the Tripletts stopped, she stopped as well, evidently satisfied just to follow in his wake. I took my mother from Belle’s supervision back to her room. The plastic mattress cover made a crunching sound as we sat on her bed. She had no interest in the photo album or the chocolate I brought. Instead she was turning over my hand, examining my nails, saying, “Those cans are floosh.” I pulled a book from her bedside shelf, a book of Brancusi sculptures that had been one of her favorites back in her real life. Just then there was a gentle knock at the door. I looked up to see the medical director, Dr. Voss, edging her way into the room. Behind her, Harmon was maneuvering to gain entry and Joyce, an aide, was trying to entice him away. It had to be something important to bring Dr. Voss up here outside her monthly round of the unit. Of course, I had a hunch. The doctor is a smallish woman in big heels, besieged by freckles she tries to hide with makeup. She was clutching a stack of files against herself like a shield and smiled politely at Harmon before closing the door on him. Joining us for some together time on the plastic bed, she tilted her head sympathetically. I felt my back molars ache. “Can we talk?” “Of course,” I nodded. “It’s come to my attention that your mom has been a little more…agitated…lately,” Dr. Voss began, setting her files on her lap. “The fact is, the Triplett family is a little concerned .” Her credentials swayed on her lanyard as she gave my mother’s shoulder a folksy rub. “I think hearing that the Reverend had pulled his pants down in her room last night might have done it.” Until then I had been distracted by the way she held her foot, flexed, when she crossed her legs, the heel of her shoe spiking out menacingly. Suddenly we were staring at each other in an accord of alarm and suppressed laughter. “What?” How could I not have heard about this one? “The staff report says that when Joyce came in to do her eleven o’clock well-being check, your mother was asleep and the Reverend was in the room taking off his pajamas. This wasn’t the first time they’ve been caught.” “Wait a minute, ‘caught ’?” It took effort to tamp down irritation. “I doubt very much that either are capable of anything premeditated.” I tried to take any sharp edges out of my voice. A moment of silence followed. I looked at my mother. There was no reasoning with her about this. She wasn’t following the conversation. She looked at me, politely smiling as if I were a slightly boring guest. “What do we do now?” I said. “I need your permission. I’d like to tweak her meds,” Voss said. Tweak always meant add. “Really? She’s not hurting anyone. She’s definitely not any more confused. In fact, on some level, she seems pretty clear. It’s… almost like an improvement.” I shot back, forcing a little levity. She smiled weakly. “I have an obligation here. Gail Triplett has asked me to intervene.” “I guess I can imagine that. My mom is giving her a run for her money.” More silence, though I’m convinced Dr. Voss wanted to laugh. I kept my eyes on her. “What about Harmon? Will he be prescribed a little saltpeter with his meals?” I knew I’d officially stepped out of line with that one, but the doctor let it go. “I would really like to avoid loading her up with more drugs,” I said. “She’s already taking enough medication to sideline a football player.” This elicited a cautious, but respectful nod. The nursing home had rules and standards, but I had Power of Attorney and the checkbook. My mother was trying to eat a wadded-up Kleenex. When I took it from her, I realized there was a cookie wrapped inside. She looked sublimely happy when I gave it to her. “I like quickies!” she said taking a bite. It was decided that, when at all possible, a staff member would sit outside both my mother’s and Harmon’s rooms at night, and my mother would spend the Triplett visits in the nurses’ office with Belle or Carin or whomever was available. This, we agreed, would carry us through the holiday, and with luck, would disrupt the pattern enough to end the “affair." And, for a while it worked. This afternoon’s New Year’s Eve party is in the Day Room. Occasions here are typically observed with shiny cardboard decorations, themed cookies, and Blue Cow ice cream cups. However, today the Day Room is particularly festive. They are serving non-alcoholic champagne, fruit punch out of a crystalline bowl, and pizza. Awkwardly draped “Happy New Year!” crepe paper banners, silver plastic ware, streamers, and white balloons force a kind of undeniable, if manufactured, cheer upon us. Many have donned glittery party hats and hold onto noise makers. The gala began at four, making us fashionably late. Adherence to a schedule is kind of ironic since the staff and visitors are the only ones with any concept of time. The staff are good humored, loose and giddy, the music an amicable compromise of golden oldies—the likes of Glenn Miller and The Andrews Sisters—and the best of Earth Wind & Fire. Carin and Beatrice from Housekeeping are dancing with each other and any of the spit-shined residents they can coax up out of a chair. Visiting family members coax as well, or sit dutifully beside their vacant mother, father, sister, brother, or spouse, trying to share the mock excitement, or perhaps just trying not to cry. I can’t bear to look at the sallow faces of those residents who are totally lost, are petrified wood with beating hearts. Instead I paste on a smile and step aside, allowing my mother to make her entrance with the dramatic flair of her youth. It’s been two weeks since the pants incident, and a full week since any “improprieties” have been filed by the staff. As far as I know, equilibrium—as defined by no one dropping their pants—has been restored on 4 West. All we have to contend with is…everything else. My mother glances at me, then toddles into the sea of dithering revelers, a twig wearing red lipstick. In his aged, graying body with its slight jowls and sags, Harmon’s eyes shine like polished onyx when he sees my mother. He is sitting in the circle of chairs with his wife who holds onto his hand. Laurel is standing nearby, talking with the nurse’s assistant Joyce, and nibbling at a square of waxen-looking pizza. Quivering and quaking, he suddenly makes an effort to rise. They are playing Moonlight Serenade . Observing her father’s sudden effort to stand, Laurel reaches for him, helping him up into a dance. She hasn’t noticed my mother’s arrival, and Harmon seems to have promptly forgotten it. He looks down at his daughter with a warm, slightly vacant expression. Gail watches them together, her face frozen in better times, her knobby hands folded pleasantly in the lap of her burgundy tweed skirt. Having declined a party hat, the stretch of silver roots at her part gleams beneath the florescent ceiling lights. It underscores a vulnerability, her irreversible journey. At the same time, I can’t help noticing a strangely threatening flicker in her gaze as it eventually comes to rest on her rival. My mother is, of course, oblivious. A change in rhythm introduces the Chattanooga Choo Choo and Davis, the activities coordinator, charms my mother onto the “dance floor.” She grins as she is led in and her confused mind is reunited with this familiar tune. She picks up the beat and, leaning to and fro, jazzing it up, she shows him the correct steps as they come back to her. It is a known phenomenon that people with dementia seem to recall and respond to music—especially of their youth—with mysterious clarity not available to them otherwise. I watch Gail watching her. The envy is unmistakable. As the music downshifts to Nat King Cole’s I Love You for Sentimental Reasons , her husband begins making his way from Laurel to my mother. Gail gets up from her chair. Nervous, I start toward my mother. It’s painfully obvious she’s on the path to certain conflict. But Davis grabs me, whirls me, then snaps me back in, apparently determined to show off what my mother and a few of the other ambulatory ladies have taught him. Meanwhile, I watch Harmon take my mother in his big shaky arms, her little head barely coming to the center of his chest. He doesn’t look clean, but she burrows her cheek into him. They couldn’t have been more besotted had they been seventeen. Joyce looks at Laurel, Laurel looks at me. Before I can free myself, Davis dips me and I almost end up on the floor. Clutching at him, feeling annoyed and more than a little ridiculous, I get a tilted view of Gail attempting to pry the id-driven lovers apart. “No! Go…there!” my mother protests. “This is my husband.” Gail Triplett tries to say with patience. “My husband,” she repeats, pressing her hands to her heart. “No,” my mother says, shaking her head slowly, as if Gail is the deluded one. “This is the one for me.” More coherence than I’ve heard from her in months. Harmon smiles at her with idiotic devotion. The tape leaps into a groove by Earth Wind and Fire and he bobs clumsily in time. Say that you remember dancing in September… “Harmon…sit down,” Gail instructs. Harmon blinks, trying to figure out what is happening. Then, cooperative as a spaniel, he complies, taking my mother with him. “Let go of her hand honey,” Gail says, patience diminishing. “I want my wife,” he answers, clearly concerned that this woman with the silver streak is trying to pull a fast one. “I’m your wife, Harmon…I am .” He doesn’t look convinced. Love was changing the mind of pretenders…chasing the clouds away My mother is on fire now. She is in Gail’s face. “This, you…it’s a bad cookie!” Everyone freezes. I shake Davis off. Remember how we knew love… “You don’t even know what you are saying. Get away—shoo !” Gail flicks her hand. “You’re sick !” Laurel swoops in, her smile desperate, trying to de-escalate things. With extra-drippy deference she asks my mother to show her some of those dance steps. My mother, adrenaline pulsing, musters the presence of mind to be disgusted. She ignores Laurel and turns away. Tere is a collective exhale from the staff. Then, abruptly, she swings around and slaps Mrs. Triplett across the face. “Shuume!” she says in a voice quivering with rage. No one insults Liz’s intelligence and escapes unscathed. Ba duda, ba duda… Without realizing it, Laurel and I have grabbed onto each other. There is a throbbing heat in my face, a rapid sinking in my heart. Shaken, Gail falls into her chair. Laurel rushes to her. Joyce goes for an ice pack. Belle lures my mother away with the offer of ice cream and an extra dose of Ativan written all over her face. The unit social worker appears as if summoned from a magic lamp and officiates damage control. Daughter of the damned, I stand by wordlessly, like another balloon. Not able to track all this, poor, addled Harmon appears only mildly stunned. He pets his wife’s head as she begins to weep. “Good,” he says. The party is over for my mother. She’s served a tranquilizer with a cup of Hawaiian Punch in her room. I’m frightened, baffled, outraged, mortified, and, in the distant ozone layer of my mind, proud, the emotional cacophony that is the Alzheimer’s theme song. I know I owe the Triplett family an apology, but can’t really hang my hat on why. Blame seems pointless. Like blaming two goldfish for swimming in the same direction in their bowl. I sit at my mother’s bedside in my party hat, watching her fall asleep, knowing when she wakes it will be a new year. It will always be the same year for her. Before she closes her eyes she says, “You are a swede baby.” My tears rise. Later, and with the profound sadness that can only exist on a holiday, I punch in the pass code for the elevator down to the lobby. I’m retreating, deserting, going home. As usual, shame lurks just behind relief. My grief tonight is a dark heat though, the dying embers of a forest fire. Strains of an old Lawrence Welk Hour tape running on the TV in the Day Room don’t help. Just as I am settling into a deep loneliness, Laurel startles me, poking her head around the corner. She has a positive urgency and flashes an impish grin. Her eyes are like her father’s. “I’ve been waiting for you!” she says, approaching. Mournfully I surrender. “You probably want a piece of me…” I answer, mostly in jest. She laughs. I’ve gotten good at diversions. “I truly apologize! It’s crazy…I don’t know why this is happening.” I am lying only a little. “Please tell me your mother is doing…better.” I wince, embarrassed at the inadequacy of my words. “She’s alright. Really.” Laurel reassures me. “Yours?” “Wow. Kind of you to ask. She’s asleep…Ativan.” Her eyes brim. As if she, herself, has shot my mother with elephant tranquilizer. “It had to be.” I concede, though I can’t deny my emotions around this are still raw. “You know,” Laurel begins, “I’ve been thinking and, well, I guess I’m not feeling like it’s an awful thing... that your mother is drawn to my dad, and he…” She paused, “ to her.” We are both silent as we mull this over, blind acceptance being our only shot at adapting. “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I mean, does it? So my mom thinks he’s Gregory Peck, that isn’t so terrible.” Our limp smiles surrender to the miserable humor of it all. “Exactly,” she says. “I don’t care…I’m glad, in fact.” I can’t help but think of poor Mrs. Triplett. “But what about…” I say. “My mom?” Laurel says. “I’ll get her to understand. Or I won’t.” There is a ding and the elevator door slides open. A catatonic resident, crusty with spilled food, is wheeled out by a clearly depleted family member. We make way, and at that moment we both know the awful thing here isn’t love. The call I get later from the evening shift is to alert me to the fact that Harmon and my mother have been “caught” together trying to figure out the elevator pass code. They were trying numbers and naming saints. Then, the staff reports, they kissed and wandered away into the blue wing in search of, well, something. Maybe the moon. "The Awful Thing" was published in Bellevue Literary Review . In this story, two dementia patients on a locked ward in a nursing home fall in love. The families involved, including a living spouse, must find a way to accept an incomprehensible, seemingly unacceptable new reality. Acceptance comes in the form of an assessment of what is and is not the truly awful thing here. Previous CHRISTINA ROBERTSON is a half-Greek agnostic tree lover, a former therapist and ex-floral designer, a writer, and a bit of a divining rod for the absurdity beneath so many of life’s darker moments. Living just outside Chicago, her professional background in psychiatric settings ignited a fascination for nature's terrible and fragile beauty as it exists within people, which informs her writing. As a member of the long-running Off Campus Writers Workshop and Fred Shafer’s short story workshop, Christina's Pushcart-nominated short fiction has appeared in Pleiades , Bellevue Literary Review , and Tahoma Literary Review , among others. crobertsonlit.wordpress.com Next

Decoration Day by M. L. Liebler A couple of days after The news reached the States, His mother’s heart broke Never to mend itself. With his last breaths, He took his family and friends Hostage into the darkness Of the world’s sin. There’s no turning back The clocks. They cannot be Adjusted to read the present Time, when the future has died, alone Somewhere, in another place. And the newspapers will write About it and the TV will Talk about it, but no one Will ever tell this story he way it happened. The way it was supposed To have happened in a town, In a life somewhere, unknown. And this business of murder Bruises each rising sun Above every American town. Towns that were never More than small dots On small maps, routing death To innocent lives that Will be forever lost In the rapid-fire Of the jungle night. Because everyone can’t Believe it, That doesn’t mean it didn’t Happen! Because everyone didn’t See it, It doesn’t make it Untrue! Because everyone Hurts, Doesn’t make it Stop! Because after twenty years They’ll have forgotten your names Doesn’t mean you never Existed! Because you did live, Doesn’t mean You’ll remain A memory! Because it is, It is! And you can’t reappear For the benefit of the few Who doubted all along. Injustice is the law here Dear boy. Here where You grew up where You dreamed, not where You died. Not where They took you, Laid you out, Neatly uniformed, Placed you in the funeral Home of the Far East. The whole thing planned, Planned to the smallest detail, Except for your mother’s broken heart. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Published in Written in Rain: New & Selected Poems 1985-2000 (Tebot Bach Press, Los Angeles 2000). Back Back to Current Issue .................................................................................................................................................................................... M.L. LIEBLER is a Detroit poet, university professor, literary arts activist and arts organizer. His 15 books and chapbooks include Wide Awake in Someone Else's Dream (Wayne State University Press, 2008) which was awarded The Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence and The American Indie Book Award for 2009. A Wayne State University Distinguished Scholar, he directs The WSU Humanities Commons and The Detroit Writers' Guild. mlliebler.com Next - Decoration Day by M.L. Liebler Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue AT THE END OF OCTOBER Dennise Gackstetter All day I worked to ready the garden for winter, kneeling on the earth to trim spent seed heads and crispy curled leaves, bowing low to cut brittle stems and browned stalks close to the ground. From far overhead I hear sandhill cranes call to each other in flight, their harmonic clicks and whirrs and bugles traveling through the clear expanse of sky. I leaned back and turned my eyes upward, but I did not see them. I stood and searched across the brilliant blue and still, I did not see them. Standing amidst untidy piles of plant debris saturated in sunlight, I continued to listen long after their voices faded away. This poem expresses the deep reverence I have for the world in all the ways it reveals itself, and in all the ways I can meet it. It stands as a breakthrough for me because I successfully engaged the power of narrative in a prose poem. My poet friend, Star Coulbrooke, called this a strong example of “incantatory prose.”Through sound, rhythm, and repetition, I conjure deep sensuous qualities that invite the reader to share in the visceral magic of the moment. Previous DENNISE GACKSTETTER is an artist, educator, and writer. Recently retired from Utah State University, Dennise was a Principal Lecturer in Art Education and the Art Education Coordinator. She was a part of the Writing Team for the new Utah Core Fine Art Standards. She lives happily in Logan, Utah. dennisegclayworks.com Next

Karin Anderson < Back to Breakthroughs Issue BLOOD DRAW Karin Anderson 00:00 / 25:59 BLOOD DRAW Karin Anderson My first whole image of my mother: my just-older sister Marti and I sit on our knees on the window seat at the front of our “nursery school” on the high end of C Street. Our teacher, a thick-shouldered woman with a European accent, has set us there to watch for our “mama,” and here she comes, walking slender and composed up the hill: knee-length white dress, white hose, white shoes. A stiff white cap with a black stripe pinned to her dark brown hair. We wave madly. We fog the plate glass. Our mother sees us at the window and smiles, happy to spot her little girls. Then, as now, she is amazed that she is an object of love. The teacher holds us back until our mama reaches the stoop, then releases us to run into her arms. My memory fades there, but I know we trekked on up the flatiron slope, a maternal hand for each of us, home to the basement apartment above the blue-green desert city. Our dad went to work too, but what he did there was unimaginable. He came home to kiss our mother. He threw us high and caught us. He’d put one of us in the rattletrap kid-seat strapped to his ten-speed to ride the steep pitches of the Avenues. Dad was either not here or he filled the atmosphere. But I knew that when our mother was gone, she was a nurse. She made sick people in white beds in clean rooms in long hallways get better. One day after work she told us about delivering a baby, following through with placenta, cord, and clean-up all by herself in the delivery room, because it just came before the doctor managed to arrive and wash his hands. She said she was fine, knew exactly what to do, but when the shift was over she had a shaky little breakdown in the parking lot. Before she was married, she’d worked with the Red Cross, traveling in the Bloodmobile from rural town to town. In that circle she was notorious for her aim—she could find a vein and enter it when no one else could. Also she once rebuffed a man who hung around after giving blood: he was waiting to tell her she had the most beautiful breasts he’d ever seen under a uniform. I don’t think he said “breasts.” Once, as she walked toward the hospital doors, she thought an enormous bird was flying overhead, but she looked up to see a grown man falling through the air. He’d jumped from a high hospital floor—my mother’s arrival was coincidental. But I believed this was the sort of thing my mother did in general: run toward people who dropped from the sky. It was kind of true. She had a way of being at the perimeter of disaster, as if she attracted it. She may believe so too, somewhere in the vault she won’t—can’t—open. It started young. Her mother died, dead winter night in their Idaho farmhouse, heart failure at thirty-three. Mom doesn’t remember her but recalls her father sitting at her bedside, pre-dawn, bearing the news. Mom was four. Her sister was eight. “Daddy” said he was going downstairs to call Mr. Kiser, the undertaker, and then she understood he wasn’t teasing. When she was sixteen she fell in love with the high school Apollo. His name was Keith, which sounded to me like teeth. She’d taken some abuse from local mean girls, so she was amazed that he loved her back. He proposed, gave her a ring. Her father and stepmother weren’t as thrilled as she’d anticipated. He came from a good family. An upright boy. Girls her age got married all the time. But her parents told her to go to college for a year. She was about to turn seventeen and had skipped a grade, way back, so graduation was near. She was a good student, a good daughter. She obeyed her parents and returned the ring. Next October she rode the bus home from college classes, thirty miles. She was eager to dress up for a date with her guy. She stepped off the northbound bus with her younger sister, crossed the train tracks on foot a hundred yards from their new home below town. Mom saw Keith’s car coming south, stopped to wait. Somehow no one saw the train, right there. It was just getting dark, light swirling snow. Aunt Karleen says the train’s lights should have reflected on the steel rails, but it came from the Underworld: no lights, no horn. The boy turned at the tracks. The train slammed into his car. Mom ran to him, half-ejected from the shattered window. His neck was broken and she wrapped her coat around him as he died. Our mom told us this story when we ran our hands over a pieced lap blanket draped over the back of our sofa: squares of burnt-orange felted wool. Pieces of the coat that comforted the dying boy in the smashed car. Her stepmother had cleaned and crocheted them together as a keepsake. When she was heavily pregnant with Marti (the first of us), Mom was walking across State Street in Salt Lake City, two steps behind an older man dressed in a suit and nice shoes. A car ran the light, hit the old guy, missed Mom’s extended stomach by a few inches. Mom watched in slow motion as he flew up, face to the sky. His glasses dropped at her feet and shattered. And then the man came down, she said, with “a sickening thud.” I could go on with this; my childhood was street-lit by other people’s disasters. My parents settled, three more siblings beyond Marti and me, in a small Utah town fifteen miles of no-shoulder roads from a hospital. Doesn’t seem that far until a kid spurts blood from the head after falling off a horse, or a jagged tibia sticks out of a sloshing irrigation boot, or a baby comes too quick in the house across the street. Or a middle-aged father of six is gasping through a deep-night cardiac arrest. People in our town knew the first thing, before calling an ambulance or piling a bloody mess into the car for a drive to the hospital, was to call Nadeene Anderson. … For all the blood, the only time I saw my mother saturated in it was the Sunday she backed the station wagon into, and almost over, my two-year-old sister Teri. It was the first time I saw my mother descend into paralysis, like other people did, in the face of horror. Where we lived, everyone went to church together. Neighborhoods belonged to the same congregation, attended meetings at the same time. Walking home from church with the girls my age—fifteen—was a way to free-wheel an extra hour of a waning weekend. Halfway home on long, narrow Grove Drive, my friend-enemy Melinda said, “Is that your Mom and Dad?” just before I saw our brown Ford station wagon coming back from driving the rest of my family home. I saw my dad honking the horn, scattering cars and people as he sped past. Incapable of discerning between a gag and a crisis, I waved as my parents blazed by. I laughed it off, maybe nervous, until our neighbors, following more slowly, stopped to address me. Sister Seeley said, “It looked like something happened to your little sister. Do you want to go to the hospital with us?” I got in, stunned, and was more shocked when I saw the station wagon in the Emergency drive-up. My father stood in the corridor, pale. He said, “Come sit with your mother.” I dissolved when I saw her, cowering in a dark sitting room, her gauzy dress soaked in blood at the cream-colored bodice, spreading down to muddle the floral skirting. In a weird way now this is just a run-of-the-mill five-kid family story of losing track of a toddler at the wrong moment: everyone thought someone else had seen her in. Teri wandered around to the back of the car. Mom backed out for yet another church meeting, and the bumper knocked the baby to the ground, a bad thump to the head—still gives Teri a look of gazing in different directions. The chassis went over clean but then the turn of the front tire scraped her face along the concrete until my father came out, shouting as he ran. Mom hit the brake, Dad picked up the bleeding child, held her as bait to make Mom move to the passenger side. She held tiny Teri, barely conscious, as Dad rushed them to the hospital. A story like this acquires many renditions, and we’ve all spun it in the decades after our little sister recovered. But I don’t think Mom did. Recover, I mean. I think it was the first irreversible crack in the stone. Dad cuffed it off on the other side with, “It’s hard to kill a kid,” but Mom never found a way to speak of it. We’ve come to understand that there’s a lot she will never speak, never release. Her mouth tightens into a lipless line, compressed at the corners. Primal, livid smoke behind the eyes. Fierce and strange as her people are, I’ve never seen this in anyone else—no one related to her, no one raised with her, no one who emerged from her. It's not just awful stuff like almost killing her toddler daughter. She presents the same livid blankness when her fine hair grows too long and “clings to her neck.” When she used to reach to brush my ragged teenage hair out of my eyes, restraining herself, I think, from slapping my cheek. When we folded towels the wrong way. She cloaks when we smirk at her idyllic portrayals of our father, the fairytale man who rescued her from the bleakness of what she also, in dissociated stories, portrays as her happy, glorious Idaho origins. … She returned to hospital nursing the year I went to college—partly to keep her license from lapsing but probably also because I was expensive. Marti was halfway through her two-year nursing degree. I was a flighty maybe-art / maybe-French lit major. Dad was doing fairly well as a small-town real estate guy but the enterprise was always up and down—another story but it called on my mother’s talents for consistency. She worked part time on the medical floor of the local hospital for less than a year before being recruited as Director of Nursing at a new long-term care center. It pushed the final decades of her career into geriatric care, and Nadeene slayed as usual. Wherever she took charge, state accreditors ranked her work as the best in the state, again and again. Like her house, my mother kept her institution spotless, efficient, calm. Her staff, like her children, knew what she expected and found it inarguable. She loved the residents in the pragmatic ways my mother loves—never sloppy, a little strict, undramatic. Everyone showered, or got a thorough bath in bed, every day. Everyone ate, at least a little bit. Everyone got dressed, all the beds got made. Everyone who could possibly get up, got up, at least for an hour, because it was good for them . I don’t think she particularly liked being in charge of things. She didn’t crave control over other people—not even her children. She was generally reluctant to call us out, resented confrontation more than the inciting crime. … Her career kept arcing as my father’s disintegrated. In their late fifties, our charismatic, gregarious Dad dipped into a years-long depression no one was allowed to notice. It must have been garish for him and my mother. He read Time and Sports Illustrated on the sofa in the open loft of their late-life foothill “dream house” while the TV blared ESPN. Sometimes he’d buck up but mostly he was in the loft, TV so loud no one could speak over it. Mom worked so long into her sixties I thought she’d never retire. She must have been exhausted, and fearful, and I know she was simmering over her children’s religious defections. The vulnerability made her more impenetrable. She came home after work to make dinner for her husband, clean it up. She went out to the yard with Dad to plant flowers, or pull weeds, or help with a little construction. After a pipe broke and their basement flooded, they worked together to clean it up, repaint, get it ready for Teri and her husband to move into the apartment they made of it. A lovely endeavor until Mom lost her footing on a stepladder, went down hard on the concrete floor, broke both arms at the elbow. Teri moved in, wiped Mom’s butt in the bathroom until the casts came off. … Our mother just turned ninety. We threw a big party for her at the condominium clubhouse. Dad died twenty years ago; they had a sweet final season after she retired—sold their house, bought the rather murky tunnel of a condo and paid for it, no mortgage. Took road trips to national parks, slept together in a pup tent on an inflated mattress. Spent a year teaching medical and business English in China. Went to Europe with Mom’s sisters and their husbands. I picked them up from the airport when they returned from Europe. Dad came down the escalator pale. Disoriented. Mom, in a state of denial that rendered her unrecognizable, insisted it was just travel fatigue. She had to know better, but the next day she drove him to Idaho for her class reunion, of all things. He slept in the back seat both ways. Marti, who became the fierce RN she was taught to be, insisted against Mom’s addled protests that they meet her at the emergency room. I’m not sure she’s ever forgiven Marti for that; maybe in some thread of magical thinking she believes that if the whole thing had remained unsaid it would have not become real. The ER, where Marti had once worked for eleven years, transferred Dad to the veteran’s hospital in Salt Lake City for testing. How it takes a full week to discover a melon-sized bleeding tumor in an unnaturally distended stomach, I don’t know, except protocol is test by test, elimination by elimination. And, maybe because Nadeene, who acquired her clearest contours when disaster hovered like a leering corpse, who managed mortal and immortal crises step by step, was suddenly amoebic. This isn’t the story of my father’s death. It’s a wincing glance at my mother’s living death twenty years beyond—another boundary fight as she clings to the diminishing phrases, anecdotes, and insistences that cloak her in being-ness. … She remembers her grandchildren’s and great-grandchildren’s names. She recounts a rote repertoire of memories that make church people coo at her spunk and charm. She knows her accounts and bills to the penny. She calls to remind my sister and me of upcoming medical appointments, and she’s dressed and ready to go when we arrive to take her there. Lucid. But there are eerie lapses. Ten years ago Marti and her kids took Mom, eighty, to a Fourth of July fireworks show. An older man a few family blankets over had a heart attack in the melee. Medics arrived to administer CPR and prepare the man for transport. Mom stood up like a sleepwalker and homed in, hovering unsteady over the medics, staring but saying nothing. Marti ran to her, took her arm, eased her away before anyone had to shoo her off. Mom followed, expressionless. She sat down contritely but as soon as Marti turned her attention, Mom paddled right on over again. Stood silent and entranced at the edge of the action, as if trying to recall something. A medic told her to stand back, but Mom held position, transfixed, until Marti reached her again. … Since then Mom has shattered both shoulders, one by tumbling backwards down her basement stairs because she insisted on carrying up a snowman jar. Again by falling hard on the asphalt as she walked the short distance to retrieve her daily junk mail. The falls were so brutal, the surgeries and recoveries so debilitating, I don’t know who but Nadeene could have bounced back. The bones in her hips (one artificial) and in her spine are rubble. The battle over her car keys nearly put me down for good. I told her I was terrified that she’d crash into a car in another lane, or worse, hit a neighborhood child. She said, “Well, sometimes terrible things just happen. We can’t control everything, you know.” Until just a few weeks ago she’s insisted on lurching along with her walker when we show up to do her shopping, or go to the drugstore, or to the many doctors (why she sees an ophthalmologist—two of them, in fact, when she’s almost completely blind, her irises silver as her hair, I do not know. She won’t let us take her to the dentist to tighten her lower teeth). But this month the pain has kept even her from clambering into the neighbors’ car for a ride to church, from coming along to “do her own shopping.” After the second shoulder break, our brother Tom said, “Look, we’re all bigger than her. We outnumber her five to one.” We assembled at her house—Tony and Teri took long drives—to lay down the law. She needed full-time access to medical care. We were there for her, always would be, but we couldn’t attend every minute, night and day, trying to prevent the next fall, the next terrible accident, the next internet scam, the next social media fiasco. Straight from the black hole: No. She doesn’t want to spend our inheritance. She “doesn’t want to be a burden.” She just won’t drink very much water so she won’t need help getting to the bathroom on painful hips. She has a nice supply of vanilla protein drinks, so she won’t need to wield a knife, or a can opener, or raise her stiffened arms too high to retrieve a plate that she won’t leave on the counter, or turn on the stove. She gives herself a “sponge bath” every morning although it’s clear there are places she can’t reach, or forgets to. She’s disintegrating in place, in her formerly spotless house she can’t see to clean. Watching it is my personal definition of Hell. … Marti ordered a hospital bed for her, bendable in ways Mom perfectly understands and knows how to operate, complete with a bubbling vinyl pad to distribute pressure across the skin. Handsome young men came in and set it up quick as a wink near the bedroom window. Marti had a wheelchair brought in, and a commode that fits high over the low-slung toilet. The commode: sure. The bed: Mom won’t even look at it, won’t even deign to say no . It just isn’t there. She sits in her green armchair, gazing over the invisible bed toward the window. She still prays out loud at bedtime: Please, dear Heavenly Father, help me to endure all that thou requirest of me so I may return to… … My mother is a high-def constellation of hyper-specific recollections. Behind the bright stars: dense velvet black—not because she’s ninety but because she became herself, at four years old, by learning what to configure and what to shroud. No memory beams forward from the event horizon, that winter night in 1939. Whatever Nadeene was or might have become before her mother vanished is erased. Here in her place is the child who shielded herself behind a tapestry of perfect compliance—good girl who did her chores, smart girl who skipped first grade in a one-room country school, resourceful girl who walked ten miles home along the darkening Yellowstone Highway in winter after a piano lesson, because she missed her ride and didn’t dare call her parents to come get her. That child became our mother. That child is gaining on our mother. Not the one who must have acquired form before the morning her father called Mr. Kiser. The child who is our mother is secretive and wily. She plays us against one another. She lies low, keeps a mild face. We’ve each been taken down by it at one point or another, or another, but there are five of us, and we love her, and up to now we’ve been able to spell each other off. Bring our separate kinds of best to her. A bedsore was not the breakthrough any of us wished for. Mom knows what a bedsore is, and she understands the cause. But she eats, sleeps, sits rapt for the next Masked Singer episode in that heinous green armchair, week after week, night and day, waiting for Dad to come shining through the window right there above the nice bendy hospital bed. After seeing that nasty mess, Marti, the sibling who deserves the most validation from the mother she emulates, called me to say she needed a change of guard. I drove down a few hours later. Mom greeted me from her chair, blank and benign. Didn’t say a word about the broken, festering flesh she was sitting on. Didn’t yield a wince, a grimace, a tear. … But it’s ruptured something besides the skin. She’s fallen into a simpler, more contrite childlike state. Last week we convened in her room, a couple of us sitting on the comfy hospital bed, to hear her wishes for resettling into assisted living. For leaving her home. She said, “Whatever you decide will be fine,” and then she gazed over our heads and breathed, light. … I’m convinced she’ll live forever, in incremental forms only she can inhabit. That tight cable of self-protection, the defiant thread of vitality she spins like a spider is all I’ve ever known as Mother. We’ll come together soon to help her move, and she’ll continue to drive us crazy and break our hearts. But nurses will surround her. We’ll make the little apartment look like her own house, with her own dishes and sofas, kitchen table and all the framed photographs of our father, of our father and her, our parents and us, enshrined. Her own TV, pre-set on America’s Got Talent. We’ll bring the monstrous green chair, because it’s hers. … Oh, wait. Never mind. She’s feeling much better! She’s not going anywhere. No. No. … This morning I drove the forty miles from my house to hers on ever-nasty I-15. She needed me to drive a check to the bank, bring back the cash. She wanted me to stop by WalMart, which I hate and she knows it, to buy a box of cheap apple fritters. We go to her, errand or none. We check on her. We sit out the excruciatingly dull but dangerous hours, because we love her. Mom was on the bathroom floor, leaning against the tub. She’d fallen backwards trying to pull on a clean pair of pants. Didn’t hit anything but carpeted floor but she couldn’t get back up. She guessed she’d been down five minutes. She’d already pushed her little emergency button, so I sat with her against the tub until the fire truck roared up. Seven calendar-worthy EMTs jogged in. She looked up at them, burly angels, nearly swooned as they picked her up—so gentle, so powerful, so handsome (she knows handsome, even blind)—and helped her balance at her push-along walker. They followed her back to that damned green chair, settled her in, and disappeared. I texted my siblings. Everyone called. The neighbors flocked in to make sure everything was okay. Grandchildren texted, told us to read their messages to her. Mom says she wants to die; she wants to be among the people she believes will greet her in heaven if only she endures what she’s been called to endure. But I think she’s also terrified—this woman who has forever skimmed the boundary of death, one corpse after another after another. She’s not the one who dies; she’s the angel of death. And times like this—everyone gathered, everyone swooping in, all the reassurance that she matters even though she’s a burden : she’s radiant as a four-year-old child, astonished that we love her. She wants to stay forever. Usually I measure a little cooling time for certain experiences before I try to write about them. I’ve written about my mother before—more detailed or episodic renditions of some elements of “Blood Draw.” But writing about her now, in the deep stream of this painful, dire yet deceptively serene season of her very old age, feels unruly and surreal. Previous KARIN ANDERSON is the author of the novels Before Us Like a Land of Dreams , What Falls Away , and Things I Didn’t Do , published by Torrey House Press. She hails from the Great Basin. Next

Andrea Hollander < Back to Breakthroughs Issue LIVING ROOM Andrea Hollander 00:00 / 02:12 LIVING ROOM Andrea Hollander In the cave of memory my father crawls now, his small carbide light fixed to his forehead, his kneepads so worn from the journey they’re barely useful, but he adjusts them again and again. Sometimes he arches up, stands, reaches, measures himself against the wayward height of the ceiling, which in this part of the cave is at best uneven. He often hits his head. Other times he suddenly stoops, winces, calls out a name, sometimes the pet name he had for my long-dead mother or the name he called his own. That’s when my stepmother tries to call him back. Honeyman , she says, one hand on his cheek, the other his shoulder, settling him into the one chair he sometimes stays in. There are days she discovers him curled beneath the baby grand, and she’s learned to lie down with him. I am here , she says, her body caved against this man who every day deserts her. Bats , he says, or maybe, field glasses . Perhaps he’s back in France, 1944, she doesn’t know. But soon he’s up again on his knees, shushing her, checking his headlamp, adjusting his kneepads, and she rises to her own knees, she doesn’t know what else to do, the two of them explorers, one whose thinning pin of light leads them, making their slow way through this room named for the living. Previously published in RUNES , and winner of the RUNES Poetry Prize, selected by Jane Hirshfield, "Living Room" is included in my third full-length collection, Woman in the Painting (Autumn House, 2006 ) and in Landscape with Female Figure: New and Selected Poems, 1982 - 2012 (Autumn House, 2013. ) Witnessing my father's years-long death from Alzheimer's was overwhelmingly heartbreaking, but observing his wife's unwavering care for him during those sad, difficult twelve years gave me unexpected peace; her compassion and deep love were motivations for this poem. Though I'd written about his disease in other poems, not until I found the perfect analogy of spelunking (a breakthrough), was I able to create this poem that honors both my father and my stepmother. Previous ANDREA HOLLANDER is the author of six full-length poetry collections and has received numerous awards, including two Pushcart Prizes for poetry and literary non-fiction, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. www.andreahollander.net Next

Insomnia by Cynthia Hardy The pillow has heard it all: the litany of undone things. The horses stamp the barn at night; each thump of hoof against board accuses. Not nearly enough hay, they tell me, and where’s all the green stuff? Snow fills their paddock to their knees. And what about my words to you? Should I have said íf instead of when; what then? The darkness spreads full and warm. Blankets tangle. The cat pats my cheek with her untrimmed paw. Should I change the litter box now? Call a long-lost friend? The horses set out across the land, looking for the barn they deserve, red paint and all. A stream flows year round, its banks curve, green plush, to the clear water. There are other horses, none with shaggy coats or dirt-packed hooves. The cat wants to be in the dream. She perches her wiry self on the black mare’s back and weaves, tail spiraling for balance as they gallop off. You rise, say, I’m going with them. Fine, I say. My eyes blink; blink propagates blink. I sweep the blankets across my shoulders like some Versace robe, a gown of sleep. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue From We Tempt Our Luck , finalist in the Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press Chapbook Contest, 2009. This poem reflects some themes I often go back to—the horses, a cat or a dog, the impact of winter on the psyche, insomnia, and dreams. It was also a response to a set of prompts I set myself from bits of found language—in this case, the word “Versace.” The “you” in these two poems may or may not be a real person. .................................................................................................................................................................................... CINDY HARDY writes from Chena Ridge, Fairbanks, Alaska. She has published poetry and fiction, with a new poetry collection, Rude Weather forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Next - Mākara Beach by Michael McLane Next