Mike White < Back to Breakthroughs Issue STONES Mike White 00:00 / 00:36 STONES Mike White The most torn angel came into town and we were dazzled and a little afraid His one shredded wing he held to his side like a secret and for all our asking he would not speak of God An angel fully broken so that when we finally led him up the road (gathering stones as we did) He trusted us like a serious child and asked again for nothing but water and homecoming “Stones” is an older poem from How to Make a Bird with Two Hands (The Word Works, 2012) that combines a sense of revelatory change with breakage. Previous MIKE WHITE is the author of How to Make a Bird with Two Hands (Word Works, 2012) and Addendum to a Miracle (Waywiser, 2017), winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue AN AMICABLE CORRESPONDENCE Scott Abbott amicable : good-natured, harmonious, cordial, agreeable, good-humored, kind, polite No, none of those. I mean something with more bite, more room for spirited exchange. This amicable correspondence will be between amici , prijatelji , Freunde . amicable : between friends. In 1826, officials in Weimar decided to clean out an overstuffed mausoleum that housed the remains of various notables, including those of Friedrich Schiller, who had died twenty-one years earlier. When they could not identify Schiller’s bones in the chaotic crypt, a doctor named Schwabe gathered 23 skulls to examine at home. Schwabe had known Schiller, he had his death mask, but still he was unable to identify Schiller’s skull with any certainty. He finally chose a skull that distinguished itself by its large size and fine, regular form. Großherzog Karl August recommended that the skull eventually be housed under glass next to Leibniz’s skull in the Royal Library. In the meantime, Goethe borrowed the skull and in the night of September 25th wrote a poem in honor of his friend, exploring the shifting relationships between nature and spirit, between matter and mind. Wilhelm von Humboldt saw the skull in Goethe’s possession and wrote to his wife that Goethe was having a burial vault built in the hopes that he and Schiller could eventually lie there together. In the end, the friends never shared a grave. DNA analysis in 2008 proved that the skull in question belonged to someone other than Friedrich Schiller. I decide to translate Goethe's poem. The dense rhymes of terza rima and the rhythms of iambic pentameter are integral formal contributors to the content, but my attempts to reproduce them in English are a disaster. I opt for a more straightforward form. While Contemplating Schiller’s Skull It was in the somber ossuary that I saw skulls aligned with ordered skulls; old times, I thought, gone grey. They stand fixed in rows, once mutual foes, and stout bones that clashed to kill lie athwart, rest subdued. Dismembered shoulder blades! what they bore now lost, and fine and lively limbs, the hand, the foot, scattered, disjointed. In vain you lay down tired, they left you no peace in the grave, drove you again into daylight. No one can love the desiccated shell, whatever splendid noble germ it protected. Yet for me, the adept, were inscribed sacred meanings not revealed to all, as I, amidst that unblinking multitude sensed an image wondrous beyond imagination, and in the clammy hall’s constriction I was warmed, refreshed, as if life had sprung from death. How mysteriously the form ravished me! The divinely ordered trace, preserved! A glimpse that carried me off to that sea whence figures rise transmuted. Mysterious vessel! Orphic oracle, How am I worthy to hold you in my hand? Lifting you fervently, ultimate treasure, from corruption and into the open air to freely muse, turning myself, devoutly, to the sunlight. What more can one attain in a lifetime than that God-Nature reveals herself? How she lets what is firm pass away to spirit, How firmly she preserves what the spirit engenders. (to be continued) Translating the poem from German to English and from the distance of two centuries, I enjoy an opening of sorts. As opposed to my largely monolingual habitation in the American West where I was born and raised, my friends Žarko Radaković and Alex Caldiero live at linguistic junctures. Žarko, who emigrated from the former Yugoslavia and whose native language is Serbo-Croatian, lives in Cologne with his German wife Anne. An uncompromising novelist, he is also a devoted translator of works by Peter Handke. Alex, who emigrated from Sicily to Brooklyn at the age of nine, lives in Orem, Utah with his Russian / Turkish / American wife Setenay. His poetry performances are legendary and his translations from Sicilian include the delightful “Bawdy Riddles and Tongue Twisters of the Sicilian Folk:” Trasi tisa / E nesci modda — It goes in hard / And comes out soft. !Pasta). I have been the fortunate friend of these emigrant / immigrant / translator / artists for more than four decades. 8 December 2017 I show Alex my new hearing aids. He points out that because his right ear is still his worst one, the fact that I can now hear through my bad left ear won’t change the fact that I’ll need to walk on his right side if we’re walking and talking. He has some technical questions. And then he gets to the heart of the matter: What if this destroys our friendship? What do you mean? What if our friendship is based on miscommunication? What if we’re friends only because I’ve been hearing you poorly and you haven’t been hearing me correctly? While contemplating that possibility, I tell Alex about Goethe’s poem written while contemplating his friend Schiller’s skull. My mother, Alex responds, had a burning desire to see her father’s bones. We were in Licodea, Sicily, and she insisted that we go to the cemetery where the family crypt is. My grandfather’s casket is in the ground-level room of the crypt, directly under the altar. She asked a cemetery official if she could open the casket. You can do anything you want in your family’s crypt, he said. I did my best to dissuade her from opening the casket. You know how close to an emotional edge I live; imagine my mother 100 times closer to that edge. She finally acquiesced and we didn’t open the casket. When Schiller died, Goethe was 55 and Schiller 45. Goethe was 76 when he contemplated Schiller’s skull. Žarko, Alex, and I are 73, 69, and 69 respectively. None of us is likely to write a poem with the other’s skull on our desk. Schiller’s first letter to Goethe (first of more than a thousand letters subsequently passed between them), dated the 13th of June, 1794 and sent from Jena to the neighboring town of Weimar, addresses Goethe as High Wellborn Sir, Highly-to Be-Honored Privy Councilor . The letter is a request for contributions to Schiller’s proposed literary journal Die Horen (The Horae). Schiller mentions co-publishers—idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the linguist and eventual founder of the University of Berlin Wilhelm von Humboldt. He signs the letter Your High Wellborn, most obedient servant and most sincere admirer F. Schiller . Goethe responds on the 24th of June and then again on the 25th of July. He offers a token of friendship and assures Schiller that he is very much looking forward to a frequent and lively exchange of ideas: "I shall with pleasure and with all my heart be one of the party." Several letters follow and in September Goethe invites Schiller to visit him in Weimar. Schiller responds enthusiastically on September 7th, but with a caveat: that Goethe not rely on him to meet any domestic timetables. Cramps during the night disturb him so seriously, Schiller writes, that he finds it necessary to sleep the entire morning and cannot commit to anything at any given hour. "You will, then, allow me to be a complete stranger in your house . . . to isolate myself so that I can escape the embarrassment of having to depend on others. . . . Excuse these preliminaries. . . . I ask for the simple freedom of being allowed to be ill while being your guest." And with that the friendship that proved so valuable to both men was begun. Goethe later told Schiller that he had given him “a second youth and made me a poet again, which I had as good as ceased to be.” Schiller, thinking perhaps of his delicate health and uncertain future, wrote that, “I hope that we can walk together down as much of the road as may remain, and with all the more profit, since the last companions on a journey always have most to say to each other.” Years later, while Goethe was editing their correspondence for publication, he asked “what could be more amusing than to see our letters begin with the pompous announcement of the Horen . . . . And yet, if there hadn’t been that impulse and will to document the times, everything in German literature would now be very different.” If the Serb hadn’t invited the American to contribute to the literary journal Knjizevna kritika , if the Sicilian and the American hadn’t begun neighborly conversations about poetry, and if the Serb and the Sicilian hadn’t conversed one morning in the American’s house, everything in the field of Serbian-American-Sicilian literature would now be very different. This opening section of my half of the book We, On Friendship (Elik Press, 2022) , co-written by Žarko Radaković and with contributions from Alex Caldiero, led to a surprising integration of Goethe’s and Schiller’s correspondence into the correspondence between the three of us. For more about the three books Žarko and I have published in both Serbian and English, see our website . Previous SCOTT ABBOTT completed a doctorate in German Studies at Princeton University and is a professor emeritus of Integrated Studies, Philosophy, and Humanities at Utah Valley University. His most recent book is a collection of essays, Dwelling in the Promised Land as a Stranger (Common Consent Press, 2022). He has translated works by Nobel Prize Awardee Peter Handke and botanist Gregor Mendel. scottabbottauthor.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue COLD MARBLE, HOT MEMORIES Lev Raphael I was in love with museums before I even visited one. My parents had a small, battered, brown suitcase filled with art postcards from London, Paris, and all across Belgium, where they lived for five years after WWII. They never spoke much about surviving the Holocaust, and the hundreds of postcards seemed to fill that silence for me. Europe was art back then, not death and destruction, and I communed with those images as intently as someone deep in prayer. Sitting on the linoleum-covered floor in front of them, I could have been one of those guys in a science fiction movie opening a mysterious box whose unseen contents give off an unearthly and mesmerizing glow. My Washington Heights bedroom had an unobstructed view of the George Washington Bridge and watching its lights come on at dusk was one of my quiet joys, as soothing as poring over these photos of statues and paintings. But nothing prepared me for the revelations on my first visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A fan of Ancient Greek history and Greek myths in elementary school, I was immediately drawn to the galleries of Greek and Roman statues. I already sensed I was different from my classmates and I was electrified by the bold nudity on one pedestal after another, bathed in tender natural light from above, or so it seemed, and lit up even more by their own perfection. With my parents off in some other gallery, I wandered and stared and studied—and who could accuse me of anything unwholesome or dangerous? I felt safe there, sheltered, wordlessly embraced. It was a much later piece, though, that changed my life: Canova's Perseus . At the time, this statue loomed on a landing at the top of a mammoth staircase, its placement making the space around it feel like an altar. Shy then, bookish, easily bullied, and living in the shadow of an older brother who seemed to get all the attention I craved, I relished the Perseus, would have gulped it down if it were a drink. Easily three times my size, Perseus was all graceful, cool triumph as he held Medusa's grotesque head away from himself. His strength, his beauty, and yes, his perfect nude body, filled me with longing not just to be him, but to create something, anything. I returned to him on each visit, engrossed, inspired, and many years later wrote a story in which he figures as an icon of gay desire. Every statue from the ancient world that I've encountered since that day, whether in the Santa Barbara Museum or Berlin's Pergamon Museum, reminds me of the discovery of such unparalleled beauty and the nascent discoveries of self that waited for me in my teens. I've even felt Perseus's power at London's Tate Modern Museum, wandering through an exhibition of Brancusi statues which couldn't have been more unlike Canova's work, but their beauty triggered vivid memories of his. And made me cry, which alarmed the nearest guard. I muttered something about being overwhelmed and wandered off, dazed but replete. Published in the Gay & Lesbian Review . I grew up in an immigrant family where money was tight but the love of art and music was the air I breathed. My parents took me to concerts and musicals from a very early age and we visited the major museums in Manhattan so often that I grew to have favorite pieces like Van Gogh's "Starry Night" at the Museum of Modern Art and "Rembrandt Contemplating a Bust of Homer" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. These were works that mesmerized me with their beauty, especially since I had no talent whatsoever myself as a visual artist. But I did have words and the words for the sculpture described here apparently lay dormant until early in the pandemic when in my relative isolation from friends, family and even neighbors, I found myself writing essay after essay as memories filled my days. I was never truly alone. And art was where it all began. Previous LEV RAPHAEL is an editor, mentor, writing coach and the author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery. writewithoutborders.com and levraphael.substack.com Next

Lauren Camp < Back to Breakthroughs Issue SIGHT Lauren Camp 00:00 / 01:47 SIGHT Lauren Camp This isn’t how I intended to begin. A woman in a white dress. Comăneci’s routine on the uneven bars. How a friend gets her contacts to the river. The tumor larking an ankle. Why did you come, I ask everyone. Everyone has photos of sunset that summer. Moving away from the plains. A legal brief, a will. How you knew she would say, shouldn’t we? Glass doors into a hotel lobby. Fitting a key to the indifferent frame. That season I babysat for Danielle and her birthmark. A condor laving the canyon. My very first diary: pink with a lock. What are you looking for? Two men taking turns taking photos of selves as a layer, a promise. The couple on the bus in the wobbled tip of an argument, building a fault line. My father’s bald head and why didn’t I run my small hands over it. The spine of a cloud. The courtesy and plop of water as it takes each notch. How many times you write that you miss us together. So small yet I figure you’re hollering. Jupiter through a telescope. My grandmother’s cowbell in Tulsa. The camels in Luxor. Satellite images of the past. And now darkness. First published in In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024) . This poem is one of many I began during a month-long stint as Astronomer-in-Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. My focus was on the pristine natural darkness that spanned across and above this wonder of the world. I often write into a subject somewhat obsessively, interested to see what comes out when I’ve exhausted the easy response.“Sight” takes on a large collection of objects and experiences that continue to unfold and deepen for me. Every one can be summed up as ephemeral, though they left me with residual memory, and with things to turn over and question further. Previous LAUREN CAMP served as New Mexico Poet Laureate from 2022 to 2025. She is the author of nine books of poetry, including Is Is Enough (Texas Review Press, 2026). www.laurencamp.com Next

Lauren Camp < Back to Breakthroughs Issue POEM APPROACHING FOUR PAST TENSES Lauren Camp 00:00 / 01:53 POEM APPROACHING FOUR PAST TENSES Lauren Camp Later agrees to be the change of subject. On Thursday a fever adored him and then it didn’t, and now it does again. His soft bit of electric hair. His erasing. Two days more and fluid is swimming his lungs. How still we are. Invisible in the soon or very soon. The day nurse gets up, props him up, and up and up in bed, and hums and nests a white towel across him. Obedient oxygen accedes through a tube as a current and I want him to sing to me. A riff from Sinatra, a prayer. His breathing lands in even froth, the whoosh and pecking. I understand it. Or how long I have been making a life in his shadow. First day of spring and brooches of green. I speak close and loose, all calm exits versed beyond our past knots which still halve my mind. I make up the difference of his loyal not talking. I daughter. I squirm. I shape words into harmonics and within each scale a proverb. I watch his hands gesture. His mouth doesn’t know questions. Here I am watching some edge of being apart to being farther apart. A hot pink sun comes in urgent to land. It’s interesting to me to look through my drafts of this poem that deal with the end of a life, the actual final days or moments. I changed the title four times, looking to recalibrate my thinking. The poem went through a number of other revisions, too, though “past tense” was there from the start. At one point, I got more interested in exploring that term, and discovered there are four past tenses. This gave me a new way to consider a subject so close to my heart. Previous LAUREN CAMP served as New Mexico Poet Laureate from 2022 to 2025. She is the author of nine books of poetry, including Is Is Enough (Texas Review Press, 2026). www.laurencamp.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue THE LITTLE HOUSE WE DANCE IN David G. Pace Cheryl’s daughter slips me a personal check for a thousand dollars. This before she leaves for home without her son, our grandson, per usual. I toss it on the bureau in one of the two small bedrooms on the main floor and eventually go to bed in the little house we dance in. In the morning, I get ready for work, thirteen-year-old Derek—for that is what I will call him here—gets ready for school, and Cheryl moves into the small kitchen to make breakfast. That’s where the dance begins. The kitchen is about ten-by-eight feet, if you don’t count the counter space, and she makes herself coffee at the sink which is angled into the corner. Soon Derek is standing in the middle, cold feet the size of boats on the tile, his Simpsons cotton pajama bottoms getting too short. His voice is lower than it should be, hoarse this early in the day. Cheryl turns from the sink, takes her mug to the opposite side of the kitchen, to the microwave above the stove. Derek steps back, yawning, hair a mess. There is the whir of the microwave, then she’s back to the sink as if she’s made a giant oval pass in a single move. There is his voice again, saying something at an improbable pitch for a boy his age. And then I step onto the floor. This house seemed large when we first bought it four years ago. But then everything seemed large after our one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. Now it has settled in to be the cottage that the real estate agency called it—nine hundred square feet on the main floor, nine hundred in the nearly finished basement. We didn’t have enough furniture to fill it and went shopping for extra beds, a sofa for the TV room downstairs, chairs and lamps to fill spaces that looked blankly at us for weeks. Now we all live in the kitchen, it seems. Like the designated emergency gathering spot for airline crews outside a hotel, it is the space we migrate to when we aren’t sure where else we should be. I was furloughed from the airline two years ago, and while looking for full-time work, I’ve been an adjunct at two local colleges. Cheryl is making lunches for me and Derek and is to the immediate left of the sink at the bread board above the utensil drawer, which is where I’m trying to get for a spoon. She’s halfway through cutting a tomato, and she swings the lower half of her body for me to the left. Derek moves back by the far wall next to the door that leads to the basement. He has an itch on his back, and both arms are wrapped around him, trying to get at it through one of my T-shirts that, because of his lank, has shoulder seams dropped halfway down his arms. I merge the spoon into my shredded wheat and move to the opposite side of the kitchen—to the door leading to the dining room—but I stand there to eat. We all stare at each other for a moment, and then the dance starts up again. I considered it a small victory when I began to think it was no longer an imposition to have Derek in our home full time, that I was getting something from the experience completely unexpected and filled with a kind of haphazard grace. But the conversations in my head with his mother, my daughter—really my step-daughter—continue anyway: furious, sarcastic, mean. Always I return, a bit sheepish, to the only fact I need to hang onto, a fact I share with those who ask. Derek’s mother is unavailable to him. That is all. Unavailable. And now I have this check of hers. So, Derek lives with us in this cottage in a Salt Lake City neighborhood far away from the life we had in New York, and as he grows the house continues to shrink. As he moves through its tiny rooms built in 1950 in what was originally a Dutch enclave of the city, it trembles under his weight but somehow holds as he jumps the last four stairs to the basement with a mighty thud that rattles the new windows we finally had cut into the foundation—for more light in this little house with gray wood shingles for siding. And even downstairs where it is carpeted and slightly more spacious and where we congregate in front of the television for yet another viewing of Derek’s favorites (Die Hard and Ocean’s Eleven ), we navigate around each other in a series of complicated steps. Step back, twist to the right, step up, fold to the left. We move around great-great grandfather Daley’s leather-strapped trunk serving as a coffee table for Cheryl who is sashaying through with a basket of laundry. We perform a two-step on the way to the corner office around a pile of videos being organized in the middle of the floor by Derek. “Bow to your partner, one, two, three . . ..” And then there are the cats. How soon we have filled this little house that once seemed so spacious compared to the jigsaw puzzle of a New York apartment with boxes of Christmas wrap carefully stored with Cheryl’s picture-framing equipment under the bed. The owner of this little house before us, a young man, actually had a punching bag hanging from the door jamb leading into the office downstairs. Room to throw a punch, for God’s sake. Now, Cheryl and I share the office and Derek occupies the bedroom with Jimi Hendrix in skintight pants posted on the door. The cats are like a credit card ad—“everywhere you want to be.” Not unlike my daughter, I suppose, whose absence is what’s everywhere. In fact, from time to time she still makes a phone call or sends an email to inform us of something all people should know about pre-teens, a summer program that would be good for Derek (and that we will have to pay for), how important it is that a child understand the “natural consequences of his behavior,” a new book out on attention deficit disorder. Through the receiver I can hear the television in the background, the raucous laughter of her boyfriend, the categorically fecund breath of the university where she is a hot shot undergraduate “single mother” at 34. She graduates soon. This is what she can do as a mother. Make a phone call. There is a conversational arc I travel in my head with my daughter. It is the same every time, and it comes across as sanctimonious and angry, a litany of her crimes and of my woes. It ends with “tough love” demands that start with, “And you will . . ..” I am the good father even though I’m hard and pressing, which is my job, damn it, to make sure my love for her is earned, not granted as with her mother’s. After all, the world works that way. You have to earn the love of the world. This is how the conversation actually goes this time between us. We are in the park the previous summer which is between our cottage and the house that Derek does not want to live at. We are at a picnic table. I have asked for the meeting. She is smoking a cigarette. “I know you think all of this is okay with me,” she says. “That I don’t care.” “I’m not thinking anymore,” I say. “I’m looking for you to actually act. Not just talk about what you’re going to do as if just talking about it lets you off the hook.” She pulls out a piece of paper with a list. “I’ve brought notes.” “What are you going to do?” I say, jabbing at the paper. “Itemize our crimes?” “I never asked you to take Derek in.” “I’m not talking about me and your mother. I’m asking you to be a mother to your son. “You step in without my asking and then expect my gratitude . . . “Gratitude?” “ . . . when you’re really just making me look bad. “To whom? Who is it this week?” She searches over her notes, as if for the answer. Turns her head to take a drag. Blows. “Robert? Is that his name?” “I didn’t ask you to take Derek in!” “That’s right. Derek moved himself in. Took him a year. But he’s not a dumb kid.” “He wouldn’t do anything I needed him to do. He’s . . . incorrigible.” “What story do you need us to tell Robert when he asks about your son? That he’s ‘incorrigible’. . . “I’m not dating “Robert”! “ . . . when he finds someone he doesn’t know passed out in bed below his bunk? You can’t even pick him up on time at school.” “I’m a single mother!” “You were ninety minutes late. He was alone. And it wasn’t the first time. You showed up with a guy he doesn’t even know and then argued with your son that McDonald’s for dinner wasn’t what someone named ‘Mike’ wanted. Do you know that at night before bed your mother has to walk your son through the house checking the locks? He sleeps with a baseball bat.” She stands up. “I didn’t ask you to take Derek!” Maybe it doesn’t really matter how the conversation goes. Only how it ends. My pounding the table and raising my voice so that someone walking by looks at us. Something about “single mother, my ass. Try ‘no mother’.” Her saying something that sounds as if she pulled it off of Dr. Phil like, “This relationship costs me too much” as she tries to juggle her bike, her cigarette, and the two pages of now crumpled notes. And she is leaving. If there were a door, and she had an extra hand, she would be slamming it in my face. But it is I who wants revenge even though it is disguised as foresight. “You need to take care of your son for yourself,” I announce to her back. “You need to be his mother for your own sake as much as his!” But she is gone. I will apologize two days later, but the damage will have been done. My gunning for revenge has only triggered her spite. Turns out that saying what I’ve been thinking for a long time isn’t the right thing to do. Clearly, I’m not good at this. That was last year, in the spring, when dinner could be taken on the back deck. Now we are back inside, in the eight-by-twelve dining room off the kitchen. There is a seam between the dining room and the living room where, incomprehensibly, there appears to have once been a wall. Impossible to imagine one more wall sectioning off another part of the house that is already . . . so . . . small. We sit at this table for everything right now—dinner, breakfast, homework, model car making. My laptop sits here after two of the four shelves collapsed under the weight of books in the office Cheryl and I now share since moving Derek into my original office downstairs. This is my daughter’s fault as well, somehow. The collapsed bookshelves with everything now on the floor. When my books are on the floor, I can’t seem to get anything done. Another convenient excuse—along with the TV just outside the door next to Derek’s GameCube with spidery cords spread eagle—not to get my prep time in, or not to work on my novel before I head out to teach a class. I consider not cashing my daughter’s check. If I do cash it, don’t I legally accept the terms of the transaction, and in turn, the arrangement? But we need the money. Derek is expensive. We’ve seen an attorney, but her advice is not to anger either of Derek’s parents (whoops ). To let sleeping adult children, well, lie, no pun intended. So not only is there no child support, but we don’t qualify for state assistance either. Whenever I attempt to tell the story of how we moved back here to be closer to our grandson after his parents’ divorce and how we are now raising him, none of it sounds convincing, especially to myself. Somehow my brilliant but conversationally elusive daughter has perfected the narrative that makes us look as if we are just mid-life co-dependents. Why aren’t we putting our foot down? people ask. Why aren’t we claiming our grandparent lives? Why don’t we go to court? Why is our house suddenly so small? Why do we put up with it? It was eighteen months into my furlough, the summer after my conversation in the park with Derek’s mother, and our little family of three manages to go on vacation, my first in over two years. We drive across the high desert, down through the appropriately named and plunging Virgin River Canyon to Las Vegas and into the San Bernardino Mountains and then to LA where we land on Hollywood Boulevard. Universal Studios theme park will claim our lives for the next two days. We are out of the house but into a single motel room in Little Thailand. One bathroom, one television, one short fuse. Derek has the impossible task of exulting in movie-land while still maintaining “cool.” It’s not unlike my dilemma. How do I love this boy but not feel taken advantage of? To love him, to care for him—doesn’t that mean I’m absolving my daughter of any responsibility? Am I not telling her by my actions, by being here with her son while she’s out gallivanting, that it’s okay what she’s doing? We’ve been on the Jurassic Park ride. We’ve visited the Backdraft exhibit . . . thrilled at the spills at Waterworld, eaten ribs the size of mine at a Flintstones’ eatery. And I hate this place. It represents everything that is wrong with America. Gluttony, living vicariously through movies, the materialism approaching hedonism of a culture that must, I’m convinced, fire the imaginations of an Islamist suicide bomber flying into the World Trade Towers across the river from our Brooklyn neighborhood and sending the airline industry into a nose dive. Derek, on the other hand, is ecstatic. High on sugar, going ballistic over the Back to the Future ride—twice. He’s pushing and pulling me. Demanding this and that. In a frenzy that he’ll miss something. In short, he is a twelve-year old en extremis , every angle of his body jutting out above over-sized feet. He’s entered that place where he likes to slug me in the arm as if determined to figure out where he bodily ends, and I begin. And then the Blues Brothers are in front of us. A half hour review of their songs built around the bare bones references to a long-lost narrative from the 70s. It’s live, and, finally, there’s something for me to enjoy, the music, the singing. And I can tell Derek is jumping out of his skin, craning to go over here, busy himself with something over there, head out for the Terminator 2 Pavilion to don 3-D glasses to see the Governor of California in leather. The Blues Brothers show appears to be winding down. It’s hot—LA is insufferably hot in July. And Derek starts pulling on me. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” Now he’s pushing me, this kid almost my height with elbows the hardness of squash rackets. It goes badly from here. I grip him by the back of the neck with one hand and take his upper arm with the other. I start walking him somewhere, away from where he was pulling me. I get my mouth very close to his ear, behind him. He can’t see me; he can only hear and feel me. He attempts to wriggle free, but I have eighty pounds on him. He attempts to say something back, but my grip gets tighter to shut him down. When he’s completely overpowered, I can actually let go and he does exactly what I say because he can’t control his shaking. Cheryl has moved away, furious with me. Only temporarily resigned to the situation, she knows that Derek is spent, but more critically, so am I. She knows, at any rate, that I will only try to defend myself to her and will be angry with her for taking Derek’s side. As if there’s a war going on between me and a twelve-year-old. Or something like that. Now that I have made Derek cry, and Cheryl has walked away, helpless, I become the soft-spoken psychologist that I have learned to hate. And like the soft-spoken psychologist the conversation is designed to make sure that the patient (Derek) knows that my intentions are good, but that he’s just pushed me (the lay shrink) too far. That my bad behavior is not my fault, but his. The optics are: Look good (the parent at Universal Studios quietly decompressing with a visibly distraught pre-teen), get what you want (revenge for having descended as a former flight attendant from five miles high to this parental road where I am both the asphalt and the rubber), and finally, don’t be at fault (he made me do it). None of this is my fault for one very important reason, I think, but it is my trump card: Derek’s mother is not my daughter. She’s Cheryl’s. Derek is not my blood grandson. I am not really a part of any of this. That it is I who can’t stop myself from seeing red, and then acting on it, escapes me in the moment. It will take a long time before Derek starts to trust me again, if he ever does, completely. His “Poppa” is explosive, like the man who fathered him before exiting his life. What’s more, his Poppa does denial like his mother, but his Poppa has less of an excuse than either of his birth parents: I have a young person in my charge, supposedly under my protection. They do not. At least not any longer. At least not for now. During the trip home I mentally disappear into the Mojave Desert. For Derek, he ventures further into Hollywood on the portable DVD player he has in the back seat that Cheryl scrimped together for weeks to buy him just for this trip. He has some good moments after my blow-up in front of the Blues Brothers pavilion. A competition between us of swimming underwater in the hotel pool. A calming moment at an aromatherapy salon, the two of us plugged into the bubbling, bright liquids of jasmine, lavender and citrus. A retro lunch at Hard Rock Café where Cheryl makes us apologize to each other for “the incident” while she is shooting me her mother bear look. She’s right. I have failed the boy, and it makes me want to run away from him, just as others in his life have done. To run back to the choices I thought I was making even after I got laid off from the airline. To be childless. To somehow be a writer. To not ever have to visit Universal Studios. Back in the little house we dance in, we have been gearing up for another school year. There are school fees, clothes and shoes to buy. We need a new bed for Derek. He’s outgrown the daybed we folded out for him before he migrated over full-time. We are getting ready to take a mortgage out on the house we bought for cash with the money we got from selling our co-op in New York. And there is the second appointment coming up with the orthodontist who will require another two thousand dollars up front, out-of-pocket, none of which either of his parents has offered. Until now. My daughter’s check is here, waiting to be acknowledged, redeemed, and it’s the very embodiment of her myriad avoidances, the latest of which has turned me into an abuser of my grandson. Derek trusts me less, of course, digs his heels in more when I do anything other than agree with him or let him have his spurious, now nearly-thirteen-year-old way. I am one who overpowers and shames, one who digs in his heels as well. Someone who wants to win and who propels every conversation, every interaction into a competition of sorts. A sick contest between an adult and a child. But my daughter is right. I didn’t have to take on Derek. And now that I have, badly, I have become the very thing I’ve come to despise in her. Today, it’s the first day of school and we are dancing again. Derek is eating eggs, bacon, and toast that I’ve made for all of us before the start of a new year, to get us all off on a good foot. I am standing at the stove, the frying pan hissing and spitting, and Cheryl comes up behind me with her coffee. I shift to the right even before her hand rests gently on my back to signal her arrival. She opens the microwave to warm her mug and pats me twice so that I know she’s retreating backwards in a tango step to our internal rhythm. I move back into my space for two beats. Then Derek arrives to get juice out of the fridge, the door of which opens into my hip which I bump back just enough to send it closed as he turns to the counter with the jug, looking for a glass, which Cheryl gets for him since she’s now standing at the counter wiping up crumbs. From cruising altitude, it must look like a hive—bees frantically filling in cells, intimate, humid. Or it looks like the choreographed chaos of a street scene in a musical. These are steps comforting but terrifying as well. This is the little house we dance in and will dance in forever it seems. Constrained, constricted as we are but at times calmed by kinetic familiarity. “We need a bigger house,” I say to no one in particular and flip an egg. “I think we should look for something with a bigger kitchen at least. Maybe something on the other side of Liberty Park.” Derek stops short, a half-filled glass of juice in his hand. He is a different boy than he was this past summer at Universal Studios when he followed the patron saints of the American dysfunctional family, The Simpsons, as they waddled away from signing autographs with their four-fingered yellow hands. He had padded after them like a puppy as they disappeared behind a fence following the photo op, and he stood, as if in jail, hands on the vertical bars, his pale forehead pressed into the cool steel, his cheeks still stained with dried tears from our ugly encounter. Now, standing with his juice held half aloft, he is something of a cross between The Beaver (a TV boy sanitized from irony) and a mountain-bred surfer dude (coolness bordering on nihilism). “No way!” he growls as only a man-boy can growl. “We are not moving from this house. I love this house. This is our house. You’re going to give it to me when you die.” And then he grins. And those four-thousand-dollar braces go a-glint in the kitchen light, and I have a stab of gratitude for the slip of paper signed by my daughter and sitting on my bureau less than a simple, modified foxtrot away. # # # This nonfiction piece is an unpublished excerpt from my book-length narrative nonfiction Cold Desert: An Interstate 80 Picaresque , which placed second in the Utah Original Writing Competition. It tracks a breakthrough between me and the step-grandson my wife and I raised as our son in the early aughts. How does a non-blood grandfather acting as a father care for a boy when he doesn't feel like he (the author) had a choice to do so? That "Derek" demonstrated to me that "the little house" the three of us danced in was now HIS house, was the dam that broke into a wash of tender paternal feeling and bonding. Previous DAVID G. PACE is a narrative nonfiction writer located in Salt Lake City where he writes about the liberal arts and sciences for the University of Utah. His collection of short fiction, American Trinity: and Other Stories from the Mormon Corridor (BCC Press, 2024), won the AML Best Short Fiction Collection Award and 15 Bytes Award for fiction . Pace's debut novel, Dream House on Golan Drive (Signature Books, 2015), won first place in the Utah Original Writing Competition. davidgpace.com Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue FRANK'S BUICK David G. Pace I’m not sure when my late father-in-law’s town car became our car. It wasn’t when we wrested it from Mom, who we decided couldn’t safely operate it anymore. It wasn’t when we changed the title to my name. For even after that, I saw it as Frank’s Buick, a.k.a. the Batmobile, so named because of its dual automatic “ComforTemp” controls in the front seats (leather), its “Twilight Sentinel” feature that turns the headlights on and off depending on how light it is outside, the heated windshield, the cruise control with automatic reset, the illuminated entry system around door locks, the electric radio antennae that telescopes into hiding every time you turn off the radio. The sexy stereo system. Actually, the stereo is one I had installed, complete with a CD player. The old one, which came with the car in 1991, freakishly shut down with a pop while I was listening to the radio and approaching the Verrazano Bridge from the New Jersey side in 2001. It was at night, just days after the terrorist attacks on New York City and, of course, the first thing I thought was that there was another downed transformer on top of a burning skyscraper. Embedded as I was within those many pounds of Detroit excess, I still felt vulnerable. When I replaced the stereo, I actually wondered what Frank Daley would think, what style he would prefer. I winced after it was installed when I realized it didn’t mesh too well with the dashboard, designed at a time when CD players were probably a thousand dollars each and Americans were still getting tangled in their cassette tapes. I didn’t think of the Batmobile as ours even after we made arrangements for Mom to live in a rest home in Western Massachusetts and took the car home to Brooklyn, where we hobbled it with a newly bought “club” on its steering wheel. The maroon monster with the runners on top of the trunk sat parked on Prospect Park Southwest as a persistent reminder of the suburban car culture I had fled. My wife, Cheryl, and I talked about never using it except to visit Mom. That it was a gas guzzler and the size of a small pachyderm and therefore couldn’t be trusted on the narrow, pocked streets of New York. Its very presence suggested that we weren’t really New Yorkers who take the subway everywhere. I wondered what my late father-in-law would think if he knew that his ten-year-old car, which cost more than his pre-fab in a Florida golf village, was sitting on the streets of New York and dodging yellow cabs on the monthly trip up to his boyhood home of Florence, Mass. to see his widow. It was shortly after the Buick’s Brooklyn era started that I found Frank’s auto log. It was in the glove compartment, and in it he had put the history of the car’s maintenance: the lube in 1992 shortly after he bought it at a Ft. Pierce, Florida dealership; the wheel balance later that year; the replacement of this with that. It was detailed, fastidious, and very Frank— the type of man who labeled his Christmas storage boxes with reminders of which ornaments he’d hung each year. I found this log scoffable, coming as I did from a family whose patriarch was lucky to remember to put gas in the car, but months before the stereo got replaced, I found myself adding to the log as the car needed service: Re-set RF wheel speed signal code (2/11/00) Horn button replaced (9/21/00) Inspection (10/03/00) I would return the small pencil—expertly sharpened with the pocket knife I had inherited from him—to the wire rings of the notebook and wedge it back into the glove box as if the car would fail to turn over unless its history were kept intact. Frank Daley’s story was one largely written by the time I met him in 1992. The Buick was barely a year old, and I remember standing with him behind the trunk that automatically closed and locked itself, a cooler of drinks on the runners, watching Fourth of July fireworks over a saltwater river. He had a natural fascination for celebrations, which brokered easy conversation with me, someone I’m sure he thought was just his daughter’s summer boyfriend. She was twice divorced, and I was nearly twelve years her junior. I kept my distance from this short, stocky man. At the pool earlier that day, Frank, white and hairless, was nearly luminescent next to the blue tile, his body a network of scars that crackled from the notch in his throat through his sternum and to his left leg, where they had stripped away a vein. I knew that Frank had developed a seizure disorder late in life and had suffered more than one heart attack, the first when he was just fifty-three-years old, which forced him into early retirement from his work as wonder-boy salesman for Rustcraft Greeting Cards. In Brooklyn, I got a lot of respect driving around in the Batmobile, even though for the first month I had to reassure myself vocally that I had the right to drive this car that wasn’t mine and that my mother-in-law sorely missed. The Buick was sleek, its nose tapered from its grill to the center of gravity over a muscled chassis. Its maroon color was all sheen except for a couple of nicks that Frank had judiciously touched up with a tube of car paint he kept boxed in the trunk along with every imaginable car care and travel item, including a chamois, hub cab cleaning foam, flares, and an impressive first-aid kit. The car’s trunk was big enough to hide not one, but two bodies. Only twice did I wheel my luggage past the Batmobile to the subway for the two-hour commute to JFK International where I was based as a flight attendant. After that, the siren call of convenience lured me to its side, all sheen. As I shot down Caton Avenue and Linden Boulevard, I actually had people flagging me down, thinking that with a town car, I was operating a car service. Other vehicles moved the hell out of the way when they saw me angling into a lane or chasing a yellow light through a busy intersection with Flatbush Avenue. That is, until one day about a year after I started taking the car to work. I was on North Conduit, the final feeder of my trip before hitting the straight shot to the airport, and I was late. The chaos of late afternoon bore down on three lanes becoming one, and the world narrowed to this stream of fenders, a mass migration of diverse species nosing into one another’s paths. A man in a Celica was performing the infamous New York Ace: entering the flow of traffic by assuming that if you ignore eye contact with the driver you’re cutting off, he will have to brake for you. I’m not sure if my aggression stemmed from my anxiety over being late, or if I resented that this four-wheeled gazelle would so easily ignore me, a far superior animal bearing down on it—and with the right-of-way no less. The game ended with the gazelle’s left hoof implanted just behind the right shoulder blade of my leopard, the Buick. There was much honking and yelling while the rest of the herd instantly re-directed itself around the new obstacle. “What happened to the Batmobile?” asked Cheryl, who often claimed that when she wanted to lose weight she sat in the passenger seat of Frank’s Buick while I drove. “Bummer, huh? Somebody hit me in the parking lot at work. Didn’t even leave a note. Gotta love New Yorkers.” Frank would have been disappointed, but not because I lied. One of his many maxims to my wife was, she reported, “Lie to others if you must; just don’t lie to yourself.” He would have been disappointed that first, I was driving his Buick on the streets of an uncivilized city (after meeting his wife in New York City on leave during World War II, he never bothered to visit the city again), and second, that I had been so stupid as to crash a car. That was something his wife did, or a man of lesser character, a man who would never be driving a Park Avenue Buick in the first place. Repairs to right quarter panel (6/04/02) $250.00 deductible. Frank and Mabel had lived well, even after Frank was disabled in the late seventies. One could fairly say that in their salad, G.I. Bill days, Frank made “more money than God.” That they could summer on an island every year even while maintaining their home in Rhode Island was a testament to just how much money there was. That after selling both homes they moved into a Florida don’t-call-it-a-trailer trailer was a testament to the price of his disability. The new Batmobile was the final imprint of the life they once had. When Cheryl and I married, we would visit the folks in sodden Florida, where we seemed to hydroplane in the Buick to go marvel at the manatees, to visit the water locks, to lunch at the crab houses before cruising back to the gated village’s swimming pool in which, at the time, I was technically too young to swim (under thirty-five). “If he’s a writer, why is he still working for the airline?” Frank once asked Cheryl who, by sheer dint of character, would always defend me. For me, the question, even second hand, lodged in my cranium like a foul ball pounded into the metal fence behind home plate. And by sheer dint of character, I defended myself to myself: “Why did he hang onto a town car when he lived in a golf village with a five-mile-per-hour speed limit and refused even to pick us up at the airport?” Frank and I had little, if anything in common. I was almost young enough to be his grandson. I was from the West and Mormon, while he was a Yankee, originally from Massachusetts and Episcopalian. I was a romantic with ambitions to write while Frank was all business—in more ways than one. But a writer is a good listener and a former salesman is a talker. True, at times I had to struggle to decipher his “dole-house” from “doll house,” his “khakis” from “car keys,” but I could listen to my father-in-law, and we could watch TV and I could help him paint the garage door at the island house. It was early January 1997, two weeks after Cheryl had returned from a marathon session of changing her parents’ pre-fab into a hospital-away-from-hospital, that the phone rang. It was Mabel. She told us Frank had died in the night. Congestive heart failure. There was no money, only a few investments, insurance, a double-wide fast losing its value in a golf village. The $35,000 Batmobile. We moved Mabel to the rest home near Northampton, Massachusetts, where Cheryl could visit her. Meanwhile, we invested what was left of the money to keep Mom off Medicaid. Except for a fender bender in Florence, Mass. and my secret one in Queens, the Batmobile remained unscathed. After nearly ten years, it was approaching only 60,000 miles, less than half of what most cars had at that age. Still, even after a full year of driving it, I had to remind myself whenever I drove that I had a right to Frank’s Buick. Perhaps I felt that I deserved Frank’s Buick only when I started getting mail from credit card companies addressed to “Frank Pace,” a creepy confusion in the system resulting from the transfer of funds from Frank’s name to mine. If I had to take his name, then certainly I was welcome to take his car, even if it was one that I would have never selected myself. I couldn’t sell it. For one thing, we needed a car to get to Mom, and this one was paid for. Finally—surprise, surprise—it got over thirty freeway miles to the gallon. The Batmobile sat street-side, braving vandals and snowplows in equal measure until Mom died and we decided to return to the West. It was a year after 9/11; the market had been good to us, including the real estate market for our Brooklyn co-op, and the Batmobile was growing on me. I liked the big engine, the big trunk, and the way it plowed through the snow. I liked how Adam from the writers’ group was clearly impressed with its digital temperature control that beeped like a microwave whenever you adjusted it. I guess I liked it because, for me, it was contact with luxury, even as I rolled my eyes at it as “the clunker we inherited from my mother-in-law.” The trip to Utah was not kind to Frank’s Buick. The moving company lifted it right into the semi behind all of our other stuff, then placed a “protective” false ceiling over it so that boxes wouldn’t fall on the car’s roof. Instead, the Batmobile bounced over 1,800 miles, its top rubbing against the unpadded wood ceiling and grinding it raw. Frank would have been appalled. The moving company dodged any and all compensation, so the roof still sports the bands of paintless metal suffered from the car’s prairie crossing. Despite the Buick’s mounting bruises, my relationship to Frank, now deceased for five years, was improving. Though he made over twenty Atlantic crossings during WWII as a cook on the USS Wakefield —we have a picture of him in the galley with Jack Dempsey—Frank was otherwise not a traveler and would have found it inconceivable that his wonder machine, bought in the twilight of his life, would have survived not only the Big Dirty Apple, but also the 4,500 plus-foot elevation of Salt Lake City. Just the ski rack on top of his beloved Park Avenue would have enraged him. So in my mind, I explained all of this to my postal namesake. How the Buick was now Frank’s vicarious time machine, taking his spirit to places he had read about but for whatever reason, found impossible to visit. How he and I were having an extended conversation with each other as father and son, a conversation that motored beyond time zones and dimensions, beyond my life and his death. I realize now that I’d been conversing with him all along, ever since I took over the Batmobile: those harried rides to work through the heart of Brooklyn; that time in Manhattan when he and I sped up the West Side highway and ogled the runners and rollerbladers along the Hudson River, the hard-bodied men cavorting with bikini-topped women—or more shocking, with other hard-bodied men. I imagined that he sat in the back seat on our way up to Niagara Falls and Mormon Country, when I tried alternately to detail and defend my background to him. I could hear him chiding me on my reckless driving, more than once, through Times Square, as if there were any other way to move through that crossroads of the world without at least appearing reckless. He even wept with me right out of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel when we were detoured away from Ground Zero, but saw Buddhists on the wooden, West Side Highway platform conducting a purifying smoke ritual for the three thousand dead. And then we were in Utah, and I could hear him berating me for thirty minutes for having pushed the car so hard up from Las Vegas and into the high desert that the right front tire gave out and tore a hole in the front panel to the tune of a thousand dollars. But he was also the one prompting me to give twenty bucks to the two penniless sixteen-year-olds halfway home from Las Vegas in a broken-down Monte Carlo they forgot to put oil in. “By the time their Mom makes it down from Brigham City to pick them up,” I remember him whispering to me, “they will have learned their lesson. Meanwhile, they have to eat.” And in the Wasatch Mountains, he forgave me for installing the ski rack when we rounded a corner to Sundance and he saw, for the first time, the mighty scalloped backside of Mt. Timpanogos, cyanic and terrible in the frigid February air. At Arches National Park, I left him at the aptly named, free-standing Delicate Arch, where he insisted on taking pictures of all the hikers and finding out where they were from, and marveling with them: “There isn’t anything like this in the East!” “I’ll catch up with you later,” he said. In the end, we parted company for good out in the desert two hours west of Salt Lake, where the world’s fastest cars shoot across the salt flats at, literally, rocket speeds. It was hard to know what would have appealed to Frank more, the awesome vastness of the desert, or the fact that man had scored it with his fast, rocket-propelled cars. The flats, white and carrying the form of tiny waves in their crystals, extend for miles to the dusty range of mountains below ribbons of high clouds trailing east. The wind is all around in a place like this, solitary tumbleweeds bumping across the hardened surface of an inland sea that in its horizontality must have reminded Frank of the sea off Peaks Island where he summered, or the sea beyond the bulwarks of the Wakefield as it plowed through the Atlantic before it was eventually torpedoed and sunk. In a place like this, even a New Englander—perhaps especially a New Englander—can let go and leave this world, can imagine that unlike the sea, this is the real end of the world, of the hard-baked rock that we call home. From the edge of Interstate 80, I honked the car horn for several long minutes. I motioned him back to me. But he wouldn’t return. I saw Frank Daley standing out there in his flak jacket and cowboy hat he’d taken to wearing since his removal to the West. Finally, he motioned for me to leave. To take his Buick and return to civilization where it belonged. Where it belonged, and where he no longer lived. So I did. The engine turned over, and the Twilight Sentinel flipped on the headlights automatically like it does. A bit of a clunking noise was coming from the back near the gas tank. The muffler maybe? I’d have to get that checked. And get to the paint shop before the roof started to rust. That’s what I was thinking as I babied my Buick up to seventy-five miles per hour, hit the Dynaride cruise control, and settled in. # # # "Frank's Buick" was first published in Alligator Juniper . This essay follows the author's continuing and somewhat strained relationship with his now dead father-in-law through the inheritance of the older man's prized Buick. When does your deceased father-in-law's car become your own after its title is handed over to you? Answer: years later, on the salt flats of Utah near where you've relocated, two thousand miles-plus from where the car's original owner is buried. Previous DAVID G. PACE is a narrative nonfiction writer located in Salt Lake City where he writes about the liberal arts and sciences for the University of Utah. His collection of short fiction, American Trinity: and Other Stories from the Mormon Corridor (BCC Press, 2024), won the AML Best Short Fiction Collection Award and 15 Bytes Award for fiction . Pace's debut novel, Dream House on Golan Drive (Signature Books, 2015), won first place in the Utah Original Writing Competition. davidgpace.com 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

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue POURQUOI MOI E. D. Lloyd-Kimbrel après Ron Padgett pace Gertrude Stein Why me? Why me? Why me? Why me? Why me? Why me? Why me? Why me? Why me? Why me? Why me? Why me? Why not me? Why not me. “Pourquoi Moi” is a slightly satiric verse with referential whimsy (in a nod to Ron Padgett’s poem “Nothing in That Drawer” and to the inimitable Ms. Stein), that is also resolute. Previous E.D. LLOYD-KIMBREL (whose car masquerades as a branch library) has published biographical, critical, and scholarly essays, creative nonfiction, and poetry, including a chapbook, Matrimonies (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue RUTHLESS E. D. Lloyd-Kimbrel after Mary I will teach you, she said, to be ruthless. Greatness can be achieved no other way, she said. You will learn to sharpen and cut, to do the hard prune. You will be acolyte to gardeners to butchers to desert saints, she said. Words sentiments dreams relations must be reduced to hard bone so pale in the moonlight that it glows with naked sanctity, she said. You are good, she said. But weakness lurks softness lingers compromise leans in and your grip loosens. You are in debt. You owe to yourself the sinew the essence the abandonment of all except the elemental, she said. Keep nothing that gentles that sings regret. Keep only that which is harsh in its purity. You must be great, she said, because anything else is not enough. Nothing is enough, I said. I will stay as I am, I said. And so I was ruthless after all. Published in Tangled Locks Journal . I prefer not to deconstruct my poems too much—what prompted them for me may not be how readers experience them. To paraphrase something Robert Frost somewhere said—once the poem is out in the world, it is no longer simply yours. In "Ruthless," the speaker experiences a breakthrough, with a somewhat Socratic approach, in recognition of self-worth. Previous E.D. LLOYD-KIMBREL (whose car masquerades as a branch library) has published biographical, critical, and scholarly essays, creative nonfiction, and poetry, including a chapbook, Matrimonies (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue PURSED LIPS Robert Cooperman My diminished stamina? I take in too much breath to expel, but you show me how to blow out, pursing my lips, not holding my breath and exhaling in a giant explosion— like a whale through its blowhole— ineffective and exhausting. Along with a pulmonologist’s inhaler, my pursed lips let me exercise, though I’ll never run a marathon, not that I ever did, but at least I don’t feel like I’ve gasped through twenty-six miles when I climb a flight of stairs. But what I can’t get out of my head: those pursed lips: remembering seeing To Have and Have Not as a kid, Bogie telling Bacall to walk around him, taunting he comes with no strings attached, and she comes back with, “If you want me, Steve, all you have to do is whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?” her mocking purr. “Just put your lips together and blow ,” and now all I want to do is purse my lips and kiss and kiss and kiss you forever. I’ve been suffering from shortness of breath for quite some time, but recently got good advice from my wife Beth about one way to deal with that problem, and also from a pulmonologist. For our 50th anniversary, I thought a poetic tribute to Beth was very much in order. Previous ROBERT COOPERMAN, "a Brooklyn boy, right down to a B.A. at Brooklyn College," moved to Denver in 1974 to study in the joint Literature-Creative Writing Program, and received a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and 19th Century British Literature. He has taught English at the University of Georgia and Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He lives in Denver with his wife, Beth. His volume In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains (Western Reflections Pub. Co., 1999) won the Colorado Book Award in 2000. coloradopoetscenter.org/poets/cooperman_robert Next

< Back to Breakthroughs Issue LETTERS FROM HOME: Surprise Lake Camp, Cold Spring, New York, 1957 Robert Cooperman Knowing I was lost-puppy homesick, my mother wrote every day, breezy letters to let me know that she, Dad, and my kid brother missed me (about which I was dubious) and were hoping I was enjoying myself, (I wasn’t) and eating healthy, delicious camp food, which, if she were fed that slop she’d have rescued me immediately from that Sing-Sing. I read her letters once, reassurance there was still a world beyond the metaphorical barbed wire of the camp, and didn’t look at them again. The one I did treasure was from my dad, his chicken-scratch not my mom’s pen-beautiful cursive: a man who wrote only when figuring out his piecework-pay for the week. He told me how the Dodgers— recently absconding for L.A. like sneak thieves—were doing; both of us wishing them rat-chattering torment in the NL cellar, forever, and confided he’d made a big score on a bet, and had a surprise for me when I was freed from that pit of deepest hell: my reward for sticking it out and not whining, too much. "Letters from Home" is part of a forthcoming collection entitled A Tale of Two Summers . Some kids love going to summer camp. I wasn’t one of them. So I cherished the letters I got from my mother, and even more, the one I got from my father since he never wrote anything except to figure out his weekly pay and to work the daily crossword puzzles. And of course I cried my little wussy eyes out with each letter. Previous ROBERT COOPERMAN, "a Brooklyn boy, right down to a B.A. at Brooklyn College," moved to Denver in 1974 to study in the joint Literature-Creative Writing Program, and received a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and 19th Century British Literature. He has taught English at the University of Georgia and Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He lives in Denver with his wife, Beth. His volume In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains (Western Reflections Pub. Co., 1999) won the Colorado Book Award in 2000. coloradopoetscenter.org/poets/cooperman_robert Next