The scrambler phone howled on my father’s desk during Vietnam. Mostly late at night.
Somewhere, the enemy.
A regular sequence for dads on my street. First the phones, grey with no dial, a red light blazing with its siren howl.
Somewhere, the enemy.
Then the ruffle of staff cars pulling up to collect the men on our silent, guarded street. Lights on, lights off.
Keeping us safe.
The deep rumble of inboard motors at the dock. Three blocks away, the boat drove the men across the Potomac, a machine gun mounted mid-deck. The Tet offensive.
Keeping us safe.
They did their best. It wasn’t enough. My father shook his head that politicians would try what the French under DeGaulle couldn’t manage in twenty years.
Somewhere, the enemy.
One father on our street had two sons: one went as a pilot. The other, conscientious objector, chose oceanography. He loved them equally. We played chess. One father died. Also one son.
Somewhere, the enemy.
I played guitar and sang folk songs at hospitals, ward to ward, for air-evacuated wounded, the most severe. Hard to look at, but some of them smiled at a teenage girl.
Nixon ended the draft to be more popular. Politicians do things like that.
Keeping us safe.
All the dads on my street were against the war. They threatened to resign en masse unless we got our prisoners back. Lights on, lights off.
Somewhere, the enemy.
Nixon ended the draft to be more popular. Politicians do things like that. All the dads on my street were generals. They did their best. It wasn’t enough
New Poetry by Rochelle Jewell Shapiro: “Each Night My Mother Dies Again”
FALLS ON NIGHT / image by Amalie Flynn
EACH NIGHT MY MOTHER DIES AGAIN
Each night the phone rings— Your mother has passed. Each night I expect to be relieved, but night falls on night.
Each night she is the mother who makes waffles,
batter bubbling from the sides of the iron, the mother
who squeezes fresh orange juice, and serves soft-boiled eggs
in enchanted egg cups. Each night I squint into her face
as she carries me over the ocean waves, her arms my raft.
Each night she refills Dr. Zucker’s prescriptions
for diet pills and valium. Each night she waters her rosebushes
with Dewar’s. Each night I see her hands shake,
her brows twitch. Each night she adds ground glass
to the chopped liver, rubbing alcohol to the chopped herring.
Each night she puts a chicken straight on the lit burner
without a pot. Each 2:00 a.m., Mrs. Finch from 6G phones— Sorry to say your mother is naked in the hallway again. Each night my mother is strapped into her railed bed
at Pilgrim State, curled into a fetal position,
her hands fisted like claws.
Each night she calls to me
from her plain pine coffin, calls me
by the name she gave me, the name
she hasn’t forgotten.
New Poetry by Emily Hyland: “Rehab Day 1,” “Rehab Day 4,” “Rehab Day 9,” “Rehab Day 11,” and “Rehab Day 19”
THAT PARTICULAR REGION / image by Amalie Flynn
REHAB DAY 1
He hadn’t told me, hadn’t stopped drinking
drank beer in the hallway near recycling
where people bring garbage and broken-down boxes
he guzzled, and I was here on the other side of the door
thinking him sober,
reversing redness and the inflammation
from an otherwise young and healthy liver
and I was sober—
how would it help for me to sip a glass of wine
while he drank water with our chicken piccata?
My first thought after drop-off was rebellion
to pull the cork from a long glass throat
and pour full garnet into stemware
I wanted that right again. In my home
the right again
to not finish a bottle and know
it will still be there in the morning
Then I felt a kind of shame
I checked him into a rehab facility
and all I could think of was wine
to unleash my desire for want
drove hours home like a Christmas-morning kid
thrashing through ribbons and crinkled paper
so soon as it was in sight
enrapt and hungry for vice.
REHAB DAY 4
He’s been in rehab four days now, four days without hands on my body
how indulgent that every day I’ve had hands plying my nerves into delight
delight like the tickle and lick of sharing a bed with the same person
and when I finally call my dad, my dad who I’d been avoiding telling
I tell him how lonely it was to arrive back home after leaving him there
with nurses in their face shields, yellow gowns, and their masks
and the globe eyes of his counselor, who stood just back on the sidewalk
and my dad says with unintended harshness that he takes back
as soon as the truth hits the mouth of his phone: You don’t have to tell me that
at least he’s coming back and I imagine him there alone, barefoot
in shorts with a solid color shirt, some sort of mauve, doodling spirals
and checker-box patterns at the kitchen table on a yellow legal pad
in felt-tipped pen while he talks to me, and I remember how in the month
between funeral and stay-at-home, he was well-booked—every day
somebody stopped by with a crumb cake. Baked goods multiplied
on his countertop: cookies mutated into blondies into muffins into baskets
filled mostly with crinkle paper with pears and crackers atop and underneath
the suffocation of plastic tied with ribbons. We worked in shifts
so he would not be alone, alone where he watched her for months and months
and months and months, he danced with her bald in her walker. Oh, how
she resisted that walker until she fell over! How there was a friend each day
on the calendar for lunch, how we took turns staying the night
frying two eggs with toast in the morning—he always ate breakfast—
the plate hearkening back to the diner in Waldwick. How he does not have a return.
My call—a child seeking solace from a parent who only understands
in the way the child will only know as real in some future
hard to materialize in the livingness of abundance and relative youth
how he too was young once with a wife who had long hair she permed
curly and he would tug on her locks under their blankets. When I say future
I see Jim again, clear-eyed with warm hands playing my rib cage,
The National on in the car as we drive up 95 to some version of our life
twenty-four days from right now.
REHAB DAY 9
of course the doctor finds a cyst
on my left breast uphill from sternum
rolling around like a glass marble
of course this is the first day he calls
of course I cannot tell him this news
washed from normal humdrum stress
he swims in progress
and my secret would not serve him
any more than it serves my own
malicious asshole cells
dense like perennials since puberty
of that particular region
of course I cannot even examine
the terrain of my own human lumps
with one arm raised like a branch
fingers ambling around suspicion
every time I’ve been terrified
I’ll find what mom found
and it all feels like oatmeal anyhow
and he’s helpless from there anyhow
to distract from my cycle of peering
into imagined crystal balls and storylines
seeing only the worst, seeing coffins—
if he does not know he cannot worry
and I cannot put that upon him now
make him worry for me
while he does so well in there
REHAB DAY 11
It’s time to take the IUD out.
This is what I think about today, my body
doesn’t want this preventer centered anymore.
I remember the day it went in:
man-doctor’s hand inserting copper
I winced. He said I know, I know
generic bedside assuaging
irked my nerves I sharpened back No, no, you actually don’t.
And mom came along for support
all frail in her bird limbs, climbed broken
into a chair next to me at the outpatient place
and pain got to the point I needed her hand
to squeeze like citrus pulp out of my grip
as something external opened me up—
I want to be opened from the inside instead
dragged ragged in the riptide of giving birth—
I realized I’d break her frame of softening digits
and knuckles of chemo bones if I juiced
so I unfelt her skin and took hold of my gown
wrung into wrinkles and sweated holes
it’s only a sheen of thin paper anyway…
When he comes back, he will come back
to some levels of absence—and so in turn
open space comes back in, to come in
like syrup into my hungry self.
REHAB DAY 19
His absence heightens hers
so this is how I communicate with mom
I feel each breast one by one smushed
between a plastic pane and its baseboard
goosebumps prickle against machine sounds
in a room alone with the rumbling
inherited path toward lobular cancer
where will my tissue light up a mammogram
like a late-summer campfire sparkler?
Today the ultrasound is a shock
The technician skates a roller over my mound
and I see with clarity a round black orb
She talks to me lump to lump
on the same table she undid her robe years ago
except her skin puckered like a citrus punch
breast vines weighted
by clusters of rotting berries, overripe
mine are bright on the doctor’s screen
netted fibers the rind of a cantaloupe’s dry skin
I see roadways toward lactation
and roadways toward demise
and this marble eye from god
like an omen is benign
has come out as a reminder
of how to spend my days.
* Variation on second line borrowed from Barthes’s Mourning Diary *Last line borrowed from Anne Dillard quote, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives”
