Cindy Rinne

Assembled Stories

SURVIVOR (2003 Old Fire, San Bernardino)
I found a piece of burnt pottery in the front
garden. It has text which I can’t quite
make out on one side. The other side has a
bubble of melted glass and burn marks. I
thought to myself, “Did we build the new home
that much further back?”

It seemed odd to find this remnant of memory
3 ½ years after the fire.

These memories have been washed away into
the mist of my dreams. This fragment is a
survivor that will take on new life, new adventures.

ALONE, Part I (Pomona College Museum of Art)
My plan to sit in the park and write poetry
brought drizzle in silent grays. I thought about
writing in the library. Then I noticed the
art museum across the street. I had seen
the shows and thought there might be a bench
indoors: warm and dry. What better place to write
poetry than to be surrounded by the shapes,
colors and sounds of Steve Roden’s installation
and paintings?

I was offered a comfortable chair and a pencil
once the gallery attendant found out what I was
up to. I thought how poetry gives one passage
into other worlds. A place of cement floors
and white walls.

I started to see the characters of Dean Pasch’s
“A Collector of Shadows” in the abstract shapes
of “Up Within” by Frederick Hammersley. The
blue, red, green, gold and purple dagger stood
assured like the lone shadow in Dean’s art.
The other three people are a grouping of geometric
Curves. There’s triangles of green, orange, peach
and golden yellow. Is that a turquoise hat?

Diagonal triangles of charcoal and gold point in
two different directions. A season of many choices
in my life. I seek the advice of friends and sometimes
meditate alone focusing on the flame.

ALONE, Part II
Sometimes you think you
have it all figured out.
You’re out with your friends
and think you’ll be close
friends forever. One incident
happens and the friends start
to blur and fade away.

Tomorrow seems all planned
out and one message changes
everything. Hammers crash,
the TV drones and an anonymous
person calls with no voice. Green
rectangles like buttons on the
old touchtone phones. Sleek,

they fit in your hand. No more
dialing a number. A yellow button,
“on” and a red button “off.” You
shield your eyes from the
glare of the future.

MONDAY MORNING (San Bernardino Neighborhood)
I took a walk under blue skies
and white mountains. It had been
a while. I had been sick and I had
been traveling. It felt good
to breathe again.

This adventure turned into one
of gathering. I’m exploring the
sense of touch. I began to gather
rough, small stones under the
bushes. Poisonous plants with
tempting pink flowers that
I used to keep my children away
from when they played by the
house. As I was gathering stones,
I found smooth, round snail shells.
The occupants were missing. Eaten
by what I wondered? The shells
were light and airy. I kept finding
more and more of them. By now my
hands were overflowing with treasures.
No pockets to hold them, I made a pocket
with an over shirt.

Looking a little pregnant, I am beyond those
years, I continued my walk. I was thinking
how amusing I must look when a young
couple approached me. I had seen him
peering over a wall into someone’s
backyard. He with tattoos and large,
circular earrings and she with black, long
hair and a magenta top asked me, “Have
you seen a Chihuahua? We found it in the
middle of the street last night and took
him home. He has escaped.” I hadn’t.

I rounded the corner from where this
inquiry had come. The lost Chihuahua
found me! Barking and barking he kept
a safe distance. A grandma and granddaughter
stepped aside from the baking Chihuahua
holding their own dog safely in their arms.
I told them about the couple looking
for the Chihuahua in case they saw them.
I tried to find the couple but couldn’t.
In the meantime, I added dried leaves
by the curb to my sensory collection.

Home again, I separated the nature
treasures into three bags. I prayed
that the couple would find the dog
who was once again in the middle
of the street. Do we often run away
from those who love us?

ROSE PETALS ON THE GROUND (San Bernardino Neighborhood)
I discovered that herbs from our garden could be used for potpourri. A book
had beautiful pictures and recipes for making my own. I decided to use flowers
and herbs to create my own color combinations. Added to these were spices of
marjoram, lemon thyme, cinnamon sticks, cloves or vanilla pod. I developed my
own scents mixing essential oils like rose, lavender or orange blossom.
Harvesting my own herbs, I tied them up in bunches to dry them from the rafters
in my garage. A workplace was set up in one corner. I soon discovered that I couldn’t
produce enough dried flowers if I wanted to sell my creations. My book had resources.
I ordered bags of rose hips, chamomile flowers, hibiscus flowers, jasmine flowers and
essential oils. I purchased large plastic jars for the potpourri mixes to marinate.
When ready, the potpourri was carefully placed in cello bags, labeled and tied with a ribbon.

A neighbor had roses in the front yard and I was welcome to the petals on the
ground. One day I gathered petals from her unusual lavender rose bush. I took
them off the plant. Later she called and was angry. She was right. I had gone
too far in my zealousness. It was the only time she got angry with me. She was
like a grandmother to my children. I even left my daughter at her house when my
son was born. I held her hand and spoke into her spirit as the hospice nurse made
her comfortable. All was forgiven.

Today I gather rose petals of salmon, magenta and burgundy from the ground.
I place them in little dishes on my dining room table. I don’t make potpourri,
but am amazed at how a few petals bring back such strong remembrances.

THE TRAIL NEXT TO THE MAJESTIC OAK (Rancho Santa Ana Botanical Garden, Claremont)
The wind speaks of an ancient muse.
The branches twist and turn as
life is so often not a straight
path. A tribal environment of
an earth-dome. A symbol of
long life. Bird song comes from
several directions like echoes of
time. As the wind speaks again,
calling me to remember this restful
place. We know not where the wind
of the Spirit blows. Listen. Observe.
Look inside myself. Movement. Change.
Which branch should I walk upon?
Sturdy. Grounded. Everlasting.

Contributor Biographies

Cynthia Anderson is a writer and editor living in Yucca Valley, CA. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, and she has received poetry awards from the Santa Barbara Arts Council and the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. Her collaborations with photographer Bill Dahl are published in the book, Shared Visions.

Lee Balan was the first editor and art director for Beyond Baroque Magazine in Venice, CA. His poems and stories have been featured in several magazines including Phantom Seed, Sun-Runner, and Storylandia. He was the facilitator for the Tenderloin Writer’s Workshop in San Francisco. His background in mental health has been a major influence on his work. Lee has been the featured poet at several events and venues including the Palm Springs Art Museum. Recently, Lee self published his first novel Alien Journal.

Nancy Scott Campbell has been a desert hiker and resident for more than twenty years. She has been a mediator, has taught English as a second Language, is a physical therapist, and is delighted with the workshops of the Inlandia Institute.

With their girls grown and independent, Marcyn Del Clements and her husband, Richard, have more time to pursue their favorite activities: birding, butterfly and dragonfly watching, and fly-fishing. Marcy is published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Appalachia, Eureka Literary Magazine, Flyway, frogpond, Hollins Critic, Literary Review, Lyric, Sijo West, Snowy Egret, Wind, and others.

Mike Cluff is a fulltime English and Creative Writing instructor at Norco College. He has lived steadily in the Highland and Redlands area since 1998. His eighth book of poetry “Casino Evil“ was published in June 2009 by Petroglyph Books.

Rachelle Cruz is from the Bay Area but currently lives and writes in Riverside, CA. She has taught creative writing, poetry, and performance to young people in New York City, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Riverside. She hosts “The Blood-Jet Writing Hour” Radio Show on Blog Talk Radio. She is an Emerging Voices Fellow and a Kundiman Fellow, she is working towards her first collection of poems.

Sheela Sitaram Free (“Doc Free”) was born in Mumbai, India and has spent equal halves of her life in India and in the United States. Her BA in English Literature and Language, MA in English and American Literature and Language, MA in Hindi, PhD in the Contemporary American Novel-novels of John Updike-and her twenty four years of teaching all across the United States in Universities, colleges, and community colleges reveal her lifelong passion for the power of words, especially in the context of world literature and writing. Her collection of poetry entitled “Of Fractured Clocks, Bones and Windshields“ was published in February 2009 and nominated for the Association of Asian American Studies as well as the Asian American Workshop awards in 2010. She has been writing for over 20 years, but it was the Inland Empire that inspired and motivated her to publish; she has simply loved being a part of it for 9 years now. It is home to her and she draws a great deal of material from it in her poetry.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya is a clinical psychologist in Claremont, California. She has been writing since she was nine. In another life, she was a German Literature major and read poetry for credit. She has placed poems and photographs in many publications, including Off the Coast, Umbrella, Abyss & Apex, qarrtsiluni, Poemeleon, Lilliput Review, In Posse Review, and Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. She was nominated for the 2010 Pushcart Prize. Her first chapbook, Eggs Satori, received an Honorable Mention in Pudding House Publications’ 2010 competition, and will be published in 2011.

Valerie Henderson is an MFA Fiction student at CSUSB. More of her work can be found in The Sand Canyon Review.

Edward Jones is a graduate of UC Riverside’s MFA program and has been published in Faultline, Crate, Mosaic, and Inlandia: A Literary Journey.

Judy Kronenfeld is the author of four poetry collections including “Ghost Nurseries,” a Finishing Line chapbook (2005) and “Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths”, winner of the Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize (2008). Her poems, as well as the occasional short story and personal essay have appeared in many print and online journals including Calyx, Cimarron Review, The American Poetry Journal, Fox Chase Review, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, Natural Bridge, The Hiram Poetry Review, Passager, Poetry International, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Stirring, The Women’s Review of Books, and The Pedestal, as well as in a dozen and a half anthologies or text books, including Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California (Greenhouse Review Press/Alcatraz Editions, 2008), Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease (Kent State University Press, 2009), and Love over 60: An Anthology of Women’s Poems (Mayapple Press, 2010). She is a lecturer Emerita—after twenty-five years of teaching in the Creative Writing Department at UC Riverside. Her new poetry collection, “Shimmer,” has just been accepted by WordTech Editions.

Associate Fiction Editor Ruth Nolan, a former wildland firefighter and native of San Bernardino and the Mojave Desert, teaches Creative Writing and Literature at College of the Desert in Palm Desert. She is a poet and prose writer with works forthcoming in New California Writing, 2011 (Heyday, 2011) and in Sierra Club Magazine. She is editor of No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California’s Deserts (Heyday, 2009) and a contributor to Inlandia: A Literary Journey (Heyday, 2006) She has collaborated on two film projects, “Escape to Reality: 24 hrs @ 24 fps” with the UCR-California Museum of Photography (2008), is a writer for a film in progress, Solar Gold: the Killing of Kokopelli (2011), and represents our region’s deserts in the “Nature Dreaming: Rediscovering California’s Landscapes” public radio series sponsored by Santa Clara University and the California Council for the Humanities (2011) She lives in Palm Desert.

Cindy Rinne has lived in the Inland Empire for 29 years. She is an artist and poet. Her poetry includes nature inspiration, parts of overheard conversations, observations on walks, life events, and her response to her own artwork and the works of others.

Except for a short-lived adventure to Long Beach, CA, Heather Rinne has lived in the Inland Empire her entire life. She grew up in San Bernardino and attended college at Cal Poly Pomona where she received a BFA in 2008. She loved and still loves exploring the art community in the downtown Arts Colony. A fire took her parents’ home, the home where her childhood memories lived, in the fall of 2003. Even with the unexpected chance to move, her parents decided to rebuild on the same lot. Back in the place where she grew up, she makes new memories. She currently works as a Graphic Designer and Photographer out of her home office and dances at a studio in Redlands. She enjoys Redlands because it has a lot of history and is only a short trip to the desert, the city, the mountains, and the ocean.

Ash Russell is an MFA candidate at CSUSB. She has been telling stories since she learned how to speak and writing since she learned to string the alphabet together. She relearns regularly that the magnitude of space is emotionally devastating.

Mae Wagner is firmly rooted in the Inland Empire area and sees Inlandia stories everywhere just waiting to be told. She says, “writing has always been a passion, but was largely relegated to the back burner while she focused on raising a family, earning a living, and going to school.” Over the years, as a longtime Inland Empire resident, she has written for a public relations firm, the Riverside Chamber of Commerce, The Chino Champion newspaper, and had several columns published in the Op-Ed page of the Press-Enterprise when it was locally owned, including a noted investigate journalism series focused on a landmark environmental case involving the Stringfellow Acid Pits in Glen Avon, just west of Riverside. She currently writes a column for her home town paper in Hettinger, North Dakota and is enjoying being a member of the Inlandia Creative Writing Workshops, which she has attended since its opening session in the summer of 2008.

As a child, Rayme Waters spent some time each year at her grandmother’s house in Rancho Mirage and watched the desert cities grow up around it. Rayme’s stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Dzanc Best of the Web and have been published most recently in The Meadowland Review and The Summerset Review.

Special Guest Matt Henriksen Reading for the Inlandia Palm Springs Creative Writing Workshop

Preeminence, Pulchritude: Ordinary Sun, Matt Henriksen Ordains the Inland Empire–Inlandia Institute, Poetry Reading Palm Springs, CA March 7, 2011

By Maureen Alsop

The earth is not large enough.

And among a sea of pink cafe chairs the conversions of language imperceptibly distill above the urbane traffic’s hum.

Here less staunch poets would wane against burnt lashings of muzak, that dormant elevator spindle, as if through a blurred supplication of Hell’s hallway mirrors, but Matt Henriksen’s words spiral, showering ash as an immunity against snow-capped San Jacinto peaks.

And we (listeners or windows) are held less into being in a place as we are are held toward a swarming. Gathering continuity as perfection’s gloss.

Allowance is given as if we are again seeing someone in what we know.

And time connotes a new form of conclusion. Vacancy is befuddled. O witness: inner possession, connectivity as a medium, is razed.

At last.

Beyond my inexplicable control, in trying to record Matt’s reading, and exclusive trek through the desert, this was the only poem which remained available from that evening. Matt reads the poem “Insomnia” from Ordinary Sun (Black Ocean, 2011):

Insomnia
by Matthew Henriksen

I had the busted leg of a plastic chair
to pillow a highway sign’s dream.
Once a person on his roof begins to think
about saying fuck you to the particulars,
the only blessing is a stagnant block
in the middle of a dead neighborhood
in a city that has been nowhere since
before you or I were born. And who
and what are we, after words, but
mourners signing a petition at someone’s
grave, for better dreams, better meals, better
orgasms, though most of us would rather just
sleep well more often. Jesus, why must it
be so late, so bright and so early?

Also found at: http://thisrecording.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/in-which-each-time-it-begins-calling-me-home-hickory-wind/

Matthew Henriksen is the author of Ordinary Sun (Black Ocean, 2011) and the chapbooks Another Word (DoubleCross Press, 2009) and Is Holy (horse less press, 2006). Some recent poems appear in Fence, Realpoetik, Raleigh Quarterly, Alice Blue Review, Sink Review, The Cultural Society, Handsome Journal and Two Weeks. He co-edits Typo, an online poetry journal, and publishes Cannibal Books, a book arts poetry press. From 2005 to 2008 he organized The Burning Chair Readings in Brooklyn and now hosts irregular readings throughout the country. A special feature of Frank Stanford’s unpublished poems and fiction, selected by Henriksen, will appear in Fulcrum #7. He lives and teaches in the Ozark Mountains.

Lee Balan

Ars Umbilicalis Poetica
(The Art of the Connection to the Poem)

A folded napkin could be blamed
When an accidental tug on the napkin’s edge
Caused a wine glass to tip and spill
This small misdeed
Led to snark remarks about stumblebums
Incriminations
And revelations about indiscrete behavior
Someone yelled “fire”
Which fed a full scale panic

Cosmologists tell us
Space is folded like the napkin
Within each fold there is more space
Each fold could be a new dimension
An alternate universe
Where there is another version of Earth
Of you Of me
Acting upon different decisions
Leading in new directions

Here I am
In the emergency room
With an IV in my arm
Feeling nauseous
There I am
Writing a prologue to a poem about accidents
I could be dead somewhere else
Yet still be alive

Folded napkin Folded space
A small misdeed could lead to catastrophe

Review: Adamantine by Shin Yu Pai

Adamantine by Shin Yu Pai
(Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, 2010)
Paper, 96 pp.: $14.00 ISBN 978-1-935210-18-4.

Adamantine is Shin Yu Pai’s eighth collection of poems. Early in this collection, in her poem “Blind Spot”, we find the speaker at a crosswalk. After the signal has changed to green, the speaker looks back “at the man poised at the street // crossing, long after / the light has gone green” only to then see “the round sticker affixed // to his chest / I am deaf and blind”. The speaker, who cannot even ask his permission, takes the man’s arm and guides him across the street: “… I / place myself between // his body & the hostile line / of humming cars queuing; // when we reach the other side / he’s ready for me to let go. // there is just this practice”.

Here, the reader – this reader – is forced to pause. What is meant by the heavily emphasized “this practice”? What practice is this? Later in the collection, we encounter another poem, titled simply, “Practice”:

my own practice:
carving holes in
poetry books w/
exacto blade & straight
edge, intervention as
design concept

a hole too uneven
a hole too big
a hole too ragged
a hole too small

every event a mirror
of mind & heart,

In carving holes into books of poetry, Pai “practices” an excavation of emptiness, and in so doing, we join her in the exploration of what that might mean. In spite of the inherent violence in the act of cutting, it is with compassion and a keen observation of human nature that we are led through these poems, and it is because we trust her that we follow, regardless of where they might lead.

Every poem in Adamantine is rooted in compassion, compassion that springs from Buddhist thought but does not dwell on it, instead panning between east and west. Even the title itself. Adamantine, as defined by Merriam Webster: Unbreakable, from the root word adamant, meaning “refusing to be persuaded or to change one’s mind”, which comes from the Greek, adamas — “untameable.” Adamantine. The hardest non-synthetic substance known to man, commonly known as diamond. And, incidentally, a word intrinsically linked to the particular form of Buddhism that Pai practices, Vajrayana. Often translated as the adamantine, or diamond, vehicle, the word vajra, from which Vajrayana is derived, references “a legendary weapon and divine attribute that was made from an adamantine, or indestructible, substance and which could therefore pierce and penetrate any obstacle or obfuscation.” It is one of the core symbols of Vajrayana, and is a metaphor for wisdom, specifically a “wisdom realizing emptiness”.

These poems, while far from empty, are indeed wise, and it is this wisdom, this weapon, that Pai turns toward her subjects, finding beauty in all things. What defines Pai’s Adamantine is a fierce looking-out, both literally and figuratively. There is a clarity here that is rare among poets. Pai observes, and documents her observations with an unsentimental, and at times unsettling, eye that allows those observations to speak for themselves:

At 82, Luciano Mares remembers
the night his house burned to the ground
and wonders:

Does a mouse have Buddha nature?

I had some leaves
burning outside,
so I threw it in
the fire, mouse
trap – the heat
loosened the glue

incensed,
the creature ran
back towards the house
where flames lit
the curtains &
spread up from there
destroying everything

Buddha nature. The potential for reaching enlightenment. Does a mouse have that potential? Pai, wisely, does not offer an answer.

Pai, a native of the Inland Empire, has lived in Texas, Massachusetts, Colorado, Illinois, Washington State, and Arkansas — and probably elsewhere as well. In a recent interview she states that she doesn’t consider herself a regional writer, but there is a definite sense of ‘place’ within much of her work, from exotic Asian locales to the unremarkable terrain of Riverside, California, where we learn that the local saying is “homicide, suicide, Riverside” (“The Diamond Path”). But where Adamantine is truly located is within the heart — a recurrent image throughout.

In these fifty poems that comprise Adamantine, what we find, contrary to what the title might imply, is not a study in permanence but an excavation of impermanence, of an existence that is simultaneously full and empty, meaningful and meaningless, intersecting where heart and stone meet; their steadfast refusal to burn.

Reviewed by Cati Porter

Don Lenik

Inlandia Creative Writers Workshops Feature – Idyllwild Nominated by workshop leader Jean Waggoner

DIALOGUE With My Hair

ME: Hey, hair? Yeah, you, on top of my head, why don’t you keep on growing the way

you did when we were younger? Listen, I want to sing that old radio jingle again:

Brylcream, you look so debonair.

Brylcream, the gals’ll all pursue ya;

They love to run their fingers through your hair!

HAIR: Aw, shut up, you fool; I’m dying, most of my companions are dead, brushed off.

Leave us be.

ME: Whatta ya mean, “Leave us be”? You’re supposed to go on doin’ your thing, keep

puttin’ out, the way the rest of my body is (well, almost…I wish).

HAIR: Look, we, the few, the brave, we’ve got some distant wild cousins on your neck,

on your chest. That’s the best we can do. They’re weak, but they’re willing. So you’re

shiny above. Be happy! STOP COMPLAINING.

ME: Yeah, but try to understand. It costs ten bucks a haircut – they call it – but all I

ever get is a trim. I’m being cheated. Also, people are blinded by the glare from my

forehead.

HAIR: Forehead, shmorehead, you sorehead. Be thankful the rest of you is still

around; most of us aren’t. Ah, vanity, thy name is man. Wehhll…get a rug, you know,

a toupee. Or get a transplant. Go ahead. Hurt yourself. Spend the money. Cover your

ugly skull. Plastered on, whatever, we won’t mind the new neighbors. Comb us silly,

see if we care. Big deal, a little fuzz on the pate, HUHH.

* * *

Like Walt Whitman, Don Lenik worked as a journeyman pressman in the printing business. He tells an amusing story of when his first son came home from school after share-and-tell about what their dads did for work. The son complained that the kids had heard “presser” instead of “pressman” and thought Don worked pressing clothes. Don and his wife Sheila (now deceased) moved to Idyllwild when he retired from his career in Los Angeles in 1994. That’s when Don began to share his life’s trove of story notes in various writing groups. He joined the first Idyllwild Inlandia Workshop in the summer of 2010. Don is the group’s most stalwart member and has kept many of the younger members [we’re all younger] amused with his zingers of homespun wit. His workshop leader especially likes his natural-sounding dialog.

About his writing, Don says, “I like a grabber for a title.” Sometimes he starts with a catchy title and builds a story he’s been thinking about around it. Putting something on paper is “a way of getting it out of my system,” he says. What he gets out may be meditation, diatribe, short sketch or completed story. Sometimes he writes in the voice of another – of someone with a body-piercing obsession or of the hair on his head. He says that what he writes first “doesn’t always make sense” and bemoans, “I have to revise drastically.” Workshop writing, notes Don, “doesn’t come automatically,” as it seems for those “who write two pages while I have trouble with a half page.” Still, he says, he doesn’t bleed on the page, though he may sweat or cry, especially when he’s writing by himself and sad memories come back. “It’s a lonely business,” he insists.

Besides sharing his writing in workshops, Don keeps loneliness at bay by volunteering and participating in a number of other community groups, most notably the Garden Club, the Idyllwild Chorale and the Associates of Idyllwild Arts Foundation. He is a familiar face about town in Idyllwild. During the recent long drought, for example, Don could often be seen driving around with buckets and barrels doing “compassionate watering” of the flora in public spaces, like the ornamental cypresses at the Idyllwild Public Library. More recently, he served as a booster for the hill’s [Mt. San Jacinto’s] Lemon Lily Festival.

Louise Mathias

Twentynine Palms

For the days when beauty was elsewhere.
Someone beats off

in the trailer, it’s the stellar white dream:
cocaine and long stemmed brides.

Always, you must focus on the sky. Bougainvillea
mutely moving like a stain, a young girl

peeing in the pool.

Is that what you wanted? Subtle? The lukewarm
politics of someone else’s marriage?

Nicelle Davis

Written in the Margins of, How to Turn Siren Scream to Song

It is cool. And I am tired.
Too tired to
start a fire, so I boil water.

If you were actually my
son, I would
not tell you such things—

but you are in the care of
another, so I tell
you everything. I met you

when I fist saw your father.
Odd. Yes. But how
else to explain—I broke his

ribs with the ease of cracking
open an egg. Best
night of sex I ever had. And

then you were in me. Now
it all seems
so practical, but at the time

I had mistaken vulnerability
for love. Sometime
your Dad would say he loved

me. I mistook his words for
a house, garden,
and the sound of your feet

down a hallway, frightened
by a storm,
your little self made quiet by

the heat under our family
quilt. I live all
of this, in my head. How

to tell you, No one can know
the extent of another’s loss. I
stir my tea and hear your feet.

Louise Mathias

Four Drives in the Heart of the Desert

Went out to the edge of my life. Tumbled soft,
by wind and by sun, by ocean, by elsewhere, Anza

Borrego—
Less of a schism

between man and sky; less democracy really.

Remembered the terrible theatre

of the rental car, that summer, my father
turning slowly into lava. This is the country

they say, where no one can live. Shed it

like shale. Where stars will refuse

to fasten themselves to the sky,
will stream down in contrails

& stammer.

Samantha Lamph

Bougainvillea

After he had done the thing, he threw the shovel down, spit out his cigarette, and walked away from the mound of dirt. He had already moved past it. The guilt was momentary, gone as quickly as her last muffled breath. Her wriggle and whine already somewhere distant in his consciousness. What could she have meant to the world at six or seven years old? Not even a pair of front teeth or a menstrual cycle to show for herself. The living would forget her soon enough, and then, it’d be a wonder that she had ever walked and breathed among them at all.

Wayne stood and stared out at the night surrounding him. Only the stars still awake to blink back. It would be morning soon enough. For now, though, Wayne needed the silence, the sleep of everyone else around. He had watched them all swarming around the neighborhood, throughout their small town of Pilsky, looking for her. For the past three days, his neighbors had walked the streets in groups, taping the fliers on neon copy paper to any available surface. Her face stared out from each one. Light poles and car windows became mosaics of lime green, bright orange, bubblegum pink. Terribly inappropriate, Wayne knew. News vans and police cars took up all available parking on the street, as if nobody else could be expecting company. That pretty young anchor woman from Channel 4 had even broadcast a plea right from the asphalt of Lindora Avenue. Wayne watched her stern, serious gaze and her silent, moving lips from the bathroom window. They stayed all day and he could not finish the work he had started while under the watch of the sun.

Wayne had waited until now, at three o’ clock on a Monday morning to cart her, or the sum of her parts, out to the backyard. To be as inconspicuous as he could be, he had dumped her into the old wheelbarrow. He threw a tarp over it as he rolled her out to the farthest corner of the yard, breathing loudly through his mouth, trying to avoid choking on the rancid stench emanating from the load he pushed. These extra efforts had proved to be unnecessary. Nobody had strolled by on a late night walk as he had feared. Even if they had, it really wouldn’t be so strange to see Wayne working in his garden at such an early hour. It’s all any of the neighbors ever saw him doing, at any other hour of any other day. Ninety-three minutes was all the time it took to lay her under the warm dirt of Arizona in the summertime, to discard the little girl forever.

Wayne was not like her. He still moved about the earth as he pleased. When he had made it back to the sliding doors, he kicked off his boots and walked through his small house. Inside, the heat was almost intolerable. Even when the swamp cooler was working, it never seemed to cool Wayne, or his walls, down. As he made his way to his shower, he peeled himself out of his dirty clothes. The stench of dry sweat hung heavy around Wayne’s flannel shirt, the threadbare jeans. Once in the shower, Wayne’s tightened muscles began to relax. He let his head hang under the showerhead for a while, rinsing out as much of the dirt, sweat, blood and dandruff as could be expected without the aid of shampoo, which Wayne hadn‘t bothered to buy in weeks.

As the hot water ran over him, Wayne thought about what he would say if the cops came later in the day, what story he should rehearse. He could play dumb and pretend that he didn’t know about the missing girl from his own neighborhood. That he hadn’t been outside, read a newspaper, or turned on a television since Thursday night, when she was still safe and tucked into her frilly, lace comforter. That he’d been sick, barricaded in the bathroom for the better part of the week. They wouldn’t buy it, he knew. Maybe he should act disinterested. Like this shit happens every day. My kid brother was kidnapped in the sixties, he’d lie, but nobody made a big old carnival about those things back then.

But Rosie was a little girl, Pilsky’s little princess. Being too insensitive regarding her case would not be smart. Wayne should pretend that he was one of those assholes who had taken it upon himself to find her, by walking through every empty field in the city and scouring it for clues. But, he knew that there was even greater risk in seeming too eager, too willing to help. He’d just have to play it by ear.

After his shower, Wayne whistled his favorite song, a classic Neil Young tune about a cinnamon girl, as he strolled into the kitchen, ready to continue with the rituals that comprised his daily routine. He fried two eggs, started a pot of coffee, and opened up the newspaper from the day before. She grinned at him from the front of the local section. Even Wayne, who had never had children of his own, and had himself been out of school for some forty years, could tell that it was her class picture. Her auburn hair was intricately curled and pinned. Obviously the result of her mother’s loving labor. Wayne imagined the young mother towering over the living version of little Rosie Carpenter, curling iron in one hand, can of hairspray in the other. A routine of their own, he imagined.

The headline was desperate, in bold letters. Futile. By the time they had printed it, she was already gone, just sitting in a pile in Wayne’s bedroom. Her violet sundress balled up in the corner next to her. Her plastic jewelry and barrettes tossed haphazardly on the carpet. He shook his head as he considered all the ink that had been wasted on her behalf. He read the article. It was really the least he could do, Wayne felt. They didn‘t say anything Wayne hadn’t anticipated. Pleas from family, friends and estranged relatives who, in all likelihood, already knew in their hearts, without much doubt, that Rosie was already decaying in some dumpster, in some neighboring town. Still, they spoke their piece and hoped aloud for her safe return. Wayne expected nothing less−and nothing more− from them.

Wayne hadn’t been a stranger to the Carpenter family. Every Halloween, Rosie would stand expectantly at his front door, as a bouncy, yellow bumblebee or a smiling little princess, a plastic bag, already full of candy, wide open in her arms. Wayne would smile and throw handfuls of candy into the bag as he watched her mother, tall and slender, still in her work outfit. Her black slacks and smart blazer contrasted sharply with her bright blue running shoes. She stood further back on the lawn, talking to other mothers of trick-or-treaters. Rosie would yell her thank you and run back to her chaperone. Wayne wouldn’t retreat back into his house until Rosie and her mother were out of sight.

Many times, Wayne had watched Rosie and the other neighborhood children playing tag, kickball, or hide and seek from his lawn chair on the patio. He was contemptuous of their energy, of how carefree they were. Nothing they did or said could possibly matter in any significant way, to anyone. Wayne did not understand how they could manage to inspire the unconditional love of the adults waiting for them back inside their houses when he had failed to do this even once within the span of his sixty-three years.

After Wayne had finished the article, closed the paper, and eaten his greasy breakfast, he stretched himself out on his couch for a nap. Before drifting off to sleep, he thought about what he would do once he woke up, with his brand new day. A trip to Home Depot would be necessary, of course, for some gardening equipment. Definitely a stop at the Vista Verde Nursery, Wayne’s favorite, for something living to hide what he had made dead. Azaleas could work, but Wayne was tired of them. He longed for sunflowers, but he knew they would call too much attention to themselves. Bougainvillea would be best to swallow her up. Fast-growing. Expansive. Hot pink like her tiny barrettes.

…

Hours later, Wayne returned home with a truck full of the magenta-flowering plants. Driving down his street, he felt like he was presenting an immaculate float at the Rose Parade. When he had parked on his cracked-cement driveway, he jumped out of the white pickup and began the unloading. As he threw down a large bag of planting soil, Wayne caught a glimpse of his neighbor,

Brian Freeman, approaching from the street. He had his daughter Lizzie in tow. Around the same age as Rosie, Wayne could see.

Her hair was pulled up into pigtails that swung to and fro on either side of her head as she skipped toward him. Wayne turned toward the father-daughter pair and crossed his arms in front of his chest.

“Hello, Wayne.” Brian nodded.

Wayne stared at the stack of brightly colored paper in Brian’s clenched fist. More of those god damned fliers.

“These flowers are beautiful,” Brian smiled, “I’ve seen them before, but I don’t know what they’re called. What are they?”
Wayne turned back to the truck and pulled down another bag of soil.

“Bougainvillea.” Wayne answered.

Brain shifted his weight and cleared his throat.

“I suppose you’ve already heard about Rosie.”

“Rosie? Am I supposed to know who that is?” Wayne asked, pulling up the corner of his gray t-shirt to wipe the sweat from his forehead.

The wrinkle lines on Brian’s forehead deepened as he frowned at Wayne.

“She’s a little girl that lives in this neighborhood. In that house.” Brian pointed at the house directly in front of Wayne’s, on the other side of the street. “You’ve probably seen her around.”

Wayne nodded. “I’ve seen a lot of kids running around this neighborhood. Making a racket. Tearin’ up my garden sometimes, too.” Wayne shot a look of disgust down at this new little girl.

“Yeah… well, you see, Wayne, she’s been kidnapped. Nobody’s seen her in two days. I was just letting you know. Just in case you saw or heard anything notable that night.”

Wayne nodded and turned back to the truck bed without another word.

Brian led himself and his daughter back onto the street. They had been out now for over two hours. Sweat covered his entire body like a sticky layer of Saran Wrap. His blue t-shirt was soaked through. It clung to random patches of his chest and back. Brian hadn’t thought to put on sunscreen or to take a bottle of water with them on their three hour suburban trek. They were paying for it. All the exposed areas of Brian’s skin were red and hot to the touch. He could already feel the damaged cells peeling away from him. Luckily, Brian had worn a hat and was able to give it to Lizzie to wear when the intensity of the sun became evident. Her nose and cheeks were rosier than usual, but Brian didn’t think it was a bad enough burn to end in a peel. Once Lizzie had started complaining about the heat, Brian began to regret taking her along. He knew his wife would not be happy at the sight of her sunburned daughter. Feeling guilty, Brian promised to walk Lizzie to the community pool, just a few streets away from their own.

As they walked through their familiar neighborhood, Brian looked at each house they passed. They all had the same basic design. Two stories, two car garage, a symmetrical lawn. Some of the neighbors kept better yards than others. Jerry Coller, whose wife had left him a few months before, had done a pretty terrible job of keeping up with the landscaping. The grass was yellow and overgrown. The hose had been strewn across the driveway all week. Most of the patios were empty, because all of the neighbors were gathered in small groups at random places in the street. Huddling together like opposing football teams planning their next play. As he passed them, the entire group would fall silent and turn toward him. Smiling or nodding in approval when taking note of the fliers Brian had obviously been distributing. They were doing their part. He sure as hell better be doing his. Brian noticed their sad smiles as they shifted their focus from him to his daughter. They had been so used to seeing the two girls together; Lizzie couldn’t help but remind her neighbors of the girl who was so much like her, but with so much worse luck.

Brian knew there really was no hope for Rosie. He had known from the moment her heard she was missing that she hadn’t a chance. Margaret Carpenter had come over herself to let them know. She had remained composed as she told Brian about waking up, feeling that something was wrong, going up to her daughter’s bedroom and finding it empty. Lizzie and Rosie had been playmates, she wanted Brian to take extra care in protecting his own daughter until they had this thing all cleared up. Brian had placed his hand on her shoulder, looked knowingly into her swollen eyes and offered his sympathies. Margaret didn’t want anything to do with those, though. She shrugged his arm away from her, smiled awkwardly and said she’d appreciate any help he could offer in getting Rosie home as soon as possible. She had a science project to finish, a dance recital next Saturday. Brian nodded and stared dumbfounded as she walked away from his front door. Brian knew it was hopeless. She must have known it, too.

Brian prayed every night that they would find her. The past two mornings he had woken up two hours earlier than usual so he could post fliers before work. He had attended the community meeting and sent a care package to Margaret. Brian didn’t do these things because he thought they could find or save Rosie. He did them because he felt obligated to. Just like everyone else with a heartbeat and a human soul felt obligated to help. Brian helped because he had a daughter of his own, and he knew that if it had been her who had been kidnapped, he would be doing the same to find her. Because there was really nothing else that could be done.

Brian wanted to be optimistic, but how could he really maintain much hope for the safe return of a missing little girl? No matter how much Brian longed to see Rosie wander back down Lindora Avenue smiling and unharmed, swinging her jump rope at her side, it was just not something he could envision happening in the world he had come to know.

When Lizzie looked up at Brian and asked him where her friend Rosie had gone, and if she would be okay, he hesitated to answer. How would he tell his daughter that her friend was gone, that she would never see her again? He looked away from her face and squinted into the sun, as if it could give him the right answer.

“Nobody knows where Rosie is. We all hope she’s okay.”

“Well, are the police gonna find her?” Lizzie whined.

“I don’t know, Lizzie. They might.”

“Will what happened to Rosie happen to me?” She asked as though being kidnapped were a normal childhood experience. Like losing a tooth. Spraining an ankle. Falling off of your bike.

“No.” Brian answered quickly, inadvertently tightening his grip on her hand. “Never.”

Once they had arrived at the pool, Lizzie ran straight into the water, forgetting in her excitement to take off her sandals. Brian sat on the grass and watched the children of his town play and splash in the sunlight. Small kids, big kids, chubby kids, skinny kids of all different colors and shapes. All smiling. Happy. Unaware that every day, one of them, somewhere in the world, was snatched away from their families. Tortured, beaten, raped, killed. They had all heard about Rosie, sure. But right now, playing in the shallow end of the sparkling, blue pool, they didn’t think about her.

Brian was glad.

He watched as his own daughter, the person he loved more than any other in the entire universe, climbed out of the water and walked, dripping, to the diving board. Her baby-toothed smile white and wide. She looked through all the parents, sitting on the same grassy hill as Brian. When she caught sight of him, she waved big and proud. She ran forward, and sprang herself from the board high into the air. Her body appeared just as a silhouette in the moment it imposed itself in front of the sun. Her arms up above her head, each finger extended into a tiny exclamation point that insisted that she was alive.

Back on Lindora Avenue, Margaret Carpenter washed the dishes that had been piling up since Rosie had vanished. She smiled mutely as she scrubbed away at the dried macaroni and cheese which had been Rosie’s last meal at home. It had adhered itself to the plastic plate and no matter how much dish soap Margaret poured on top of the plate and regardless of how fast or hard she scrubbed, she could not get it to lift. Calmly, she walked over to the trash can, and dropped the plate in with all the sappy condolence cards.

Margaret wasn’t ungrateful for the concern and support of her neighbors and friends, but she did not find such displays necessary. She did not appreciate their fatalistic attitudes, their eagerness to dismiss Rosie from the earth. Especially since Margaret knew perfectly well that her daughter was just fine. She would be returning safely any moment, any hour, any day now.

It was just a matter of time. Margaret knew.

She, of course, hadn’t been so cheerful that first morning. When she walked upstairs, into her daughters’ bedroom and found it without her. The bed empty. The lamp from the nightstand broken on the floor. Within a few hours, though, after she had swallowed a cup of chamomile or two, Margaret began to think more positively.

Of course her daughter was fine. Rosie was the most energetic child Margaret had ever known. So patient, too. Margaret could already envision their reunion. As the kidnapper returned Rosie to her, they would comment on her good manners and lively disposition. Thank her for raising such a beautiful and well-behaved child.

“It was a pleasure spending this short time with her,” the kidnapper would smile. “Let me know when she has another dance recital.”

“Thank you! Oh yes, isn’t she wonderful?” Margaret would beam, “Thank you for bringing her back to me. Thank you for bringing her home.”

Margaret walked over to the front room and stared out from the window. Across the street, she could see her neighbor Wayne, over his fence, working in his backyard. On his hands and knees, he labored in the soil. Rooting the most beautiful plants. She recognized them. When she was a little girl, Margaret’s mother had spent many hours tending the bougainvillea that stretched over the fence in their own backyard. Margaret couldn’t help but smile at remembering hot summer days in southern California spent helping her mother with the yard work. After they had finished for the day, they would lay together underneath the newly trimmed plants and stare up at the clear sky, through the magenta flowers.

Rosie would love the bougainvillea, Margaret knew. Margaret began to cry as she thought about how wonderful life would be once Rosie returned home. When they could stand in front of this window together. When Margaret could watch as both the bougainvillea and her little girl grew and bloomed together, thriving vibrantly on Earth.