Razorblade Oatmeal

A fine dead sound.

[razorbladeoatmeal]

Joanna Newsom’s Five Stages Of Grief

DENIAL of the olive pits extenuating bitterness as buried bears beguile us nimble nymphs into the netherworld.

ANGER at your octopus your tentacle resentment under waves of hardened sugar crystalline the diamonds of your oceans faded fully into furor.

BARGAINING, the crow and jay were chirping wistful feathers on an autumn day, transforming into rabbits, winged and weary from their wanting.

DEPRESSION is the thing, my dear, the nectar of the coldest year where walruses in stovetop hats greet our those with this and thats and sadness melts beneath the snow where jasmine dies and kudzu grows.

ACCEPTANCE as my only tongue no longer forked no longer rung from bells as beetles baited briskly to the buoy beneath our boredom.

[razorbladeoatmeal]

Safe Word

Aside from an unparalleled fear of us contracting AIDS, my mother was absolutely certain throughout the 1980s that one of her three children would be abducted at any time – be it from our car, our beds at night, or from the safety of our desks at school.  

We had a safe word: “soft.” I’m sure we’d been instructed of this word several times, but my earliest memory of the safe word being incorporated into daily activity was at the beginning of my 3rd grade year. My brother and sister and myself attended a largish private/Christian school in Birmingham, Alabama, and had been dutifully instructed by our mother to scream “bloody murder” while running like hell away from our prospective captors should the occasion present itself. It was a thirty-minute ride to our school and we carpooled with a family called the Uptigrafs. To this day I have never met another Uptigraf and have trouble believing this to be their actual name. Alas. Steven Uptigraf was my age and we sat in the back of his mother’s van talking the usual 3rd grade shit, both realizing that our respective mothers had instructed us in similar fashion, albeit with Steven’s mother sidestepping the sensationalistic horror my mother had opted for.

           “We have a safe word. I can’t talk about it.”

           “We do too. I can’t talk about ours, either.”

I would try to count the reflectors on the interstate during the drive almost always reaching 100 before feeling like I would vomit at any moment.

           “Our safe word is ‘soft.’”

           “Ours is ‘terrarium.’”

           “What?”

           “Terrarium. You know, it’s a thing you can put plants and stu-“

           “Yeah, I know…what a terrarium is. That’s your safe word, though?”

           “Yep.”

What the hell? Terrarium? That’s some heavy safe word shit. I didn’t think this at the time as the word “shit” had not been fully introduced into my limited vocabulary (it was well on its way, though). I was beginning to question the sincerity of my mother’s considerations for our being abducted.

           “Why ‘soft’?”

           “I don’t know. Why ‘terrarium’?”

           “My mom has like five of them. She thought we’d remember that                     easily.”

           “But what if someone you guys know tries to kidnap you?”

           “What do you mean?”

           “I mean, what if someone you know tries to kidnap you?                                  Wouldn’t they know your mom has all those terrariums?”

           “I dunno. Why ‘soft’?”

           “I told you. I. Don’t. Know.”

The sad truth was, I had suddenly realized, that my mother was terrible at safe words. And if her carelessness was any indicator, I would be abducted well before I saw the fourth grade.

           “Maybe you could use ‘terrarium’ instead.”

I was tempted to defend my mother’s choice of safe words, but I started to daydream about the possibilities of an abduction. I stared out the window cooking up some scenarios trading the daydreams of paranoia for the nausea of counting highway reflectors. I imagined some unctuous gentleman pulling up in his car at the car pickup line.

           “Jonathan?”

           “Yes, sir?”

           “Ah, I thought so. I’m your Uncle Vince.”

           Vince seemed a sinister enough name for a child abductor.

           “I don’t have an Uncle Vince.”

           “Gah. Your dad. He’s such a prankster. You do, though. I’m your                    dad’s long lost brother.”

           “My dad has five brothers, and I’ve met all of them. None of them is               named ‘Vince.’”

Try again, pervert.

           “Well, he didn’t know about me until today, so there you go. Why                   don’t you get in?”

            “What’s the safe word, Uncle Vince?”

I imagined myself sitting on the concrete curb there, backpack weighing me down, pondering why my father had never told me about his long lost brother, or how he’d never known about him.

            “Safe word?”

Ah, the jig is up, creep.

            “Yeah, what’s our safe word?”

             “Look. Just come here and sit on this soft leather seat, and we’ll go                see your dad.”

I would immediately get in the car. He said “soft.” Awesome. Is that acceptable? I didn’t know. I kind of panicked in my brain as we neared the school. I imagined hypothetical “Uncle Vince” finally revealing his true self and me screaming the literal words “bloody murder” while everyone else in what I imagined would be a warehouse district destination, would wonder what the hell a kid was doing there that time of night.  Steven nudged me, and I realized we were at the school.

             “’Soft’ huh?”

              “Nah.  Terrarium sounds good.”

              “Awesome, man.”

We both headed inside the school all the while I looked behind us at a row of cars full of potential Uncle Vinces – none of which I hoped had an affinity for botany or, at the very least, knew the Uptigrafs.  

[razorbladeoatmeal]

Guests

The light bulb was a dying star. The filament gasped brighter for a moment before dimming into an orange yellow slit. A cat’s eye in pitch, the thing leered at me from its corner of the room, and then it was gone. 

Forced shut, my eyes squinted at the terror of nothing and the imagination of everything in tandem. “That back room is bad luck,” my grandmother had said so flippantly that my mind had immediately dismissed the notion as a relic of superstition. The room had been my mother’s as a child, eventually relegated to a makeshift guest room and closet once she’d left for college. Over years of holiday visits and summer stays, the quiet seed of my grandmother’s words sprouted their tendrils and vines into a strangling dread. They say children will believe anything, but that’s a lie. Children are at least for some time gifted the benefit of no reference point to their fears. Things are just as they are until they aren’t. As a child, I saw the room as a room – yellowed white paint and the musty odor of memories so old only the house itself could remember. “It’s a thing about houses,” my grandmother would say, sipping the well water coffee and staring out the kitchen window, “They got better memories of folks than folks has a’theirselves.”

Years later and with my grandmother joining the generations of voices in the clapboard walls, the room was no more a stranger to me than my own arms and hands. The familiarity was not a source of comfort. On the contrary, the bond between my own memory and those that bled beneath the rusted windowsills and into the heart of the room was a terrifying acquaintanceship. “It’s only a room,” my father had said smirking. And it was precisely that. Nothing more and nothing less. But the room itself, the four walls and cherry wood bureau, the drape-covered closet, the twin beds and the exacting click and whirr of the cuckoo clock on the wall – these things formed a malevolent chorus echoing without regard for the safe confines of any reality I could hope to inhabit. “What do you remember?” The words came without hesitation against the black of the room. Barely above a whisper, I asked again and felt like a lunatic doing so. Houses don’t answer questions. They only ask them.

I’d made the drive by myself. My reasoning divided into equal parts nostalgia and guilt. I loved the house but feared it just as much. Adulthood provided the digressions I needed to avoid trips back “home”, and the spacing between my visits widened over the years, eventually only compromising to attend a handful of funerals. The last of these was my grandmother, taken by a stroke and briefly held in the purgatory of advanced medicine’s desperation for immortality. I’d left then, surmising that my own memory of the place would trail behind me, providing only the skeletal frame of a story I could remember without the inconvenient ugliness of its flesh and blood.

I thought about just that on the six-hour trip I’d finally mustered the courage to make. I wondered if perhaps my fears had been born out of childlike wonder; one that gradually decomposed into the bleached remnants of what I’d chosen to forget. As a child I laughed at the ceiling fan, following the slow blades with my eyes and fingers, imagining creatures from the patterns on the thin wood veneer. I had loved the room and, in its own comfort, I believe the room had loved me, curling itself around my innocence and abating any sense of fear with unhinged imagination.

The relationship ended with an abrupt thud when I was sixteen. Standing in the doorway, I felt a shadow move behind me. The thing turned and faced me. All haggard and a black gum line to match his rapidly vanishing teeth, my uncle had stood for a moment, staring past my head and then back at me. “Mamaw says you like t’sleep in ‘ere.” The chuckle was unsettling but no more so than his breath which reeked of cheap booze and Red Man. I’d never liked him. Partly because of his constant drunkenness but primarily because the man sleeked around dark corners and secrets, hoping to turn tables on old gambling debts and the still flesh-ridden corpses that hunched themselves in the back of his mind.

“She tell you ‘bout Uncle Hardy?” I’d never heard the name or maybe I had but the thing had left me. I shook my head, eliciting another chuckle, only one this time the laugh was a thread of ice in the July warmth of the hallway. “Aw hell, I don’t guess she would’ve.” I cocked an eye with all the blunt force an adolescent can wield. He paused, likely stripped of any doubt that I wanted – that I needed – to hear the story which, I’d supposed, was utter horseshit. “You can’t tell her I told you, hear?” I nodded and leaned against the frame.

“Your Uncle Hardy, he was a good man. Hell, he might a’been the best ‘at’s been ‘round here in a long damn while. I wasn’t nothin’ but a new walker when I met him, and he’d done gone on by the time I could’a remembered. Anyhow, Hardy was y’Mamaw’s Uncle. Handsome and educated, that man could’a had any woman he saw fit to court. He did tradin’ down in Newalins in the 20s, though. I don’t recollect just what th’hell that was all about, but you’n be sure Hardy was as good as any that ever did it. He’d made money hand over fist, Hardy had. Then ‘at crash happened. ‘Ey still teach y’all kids about ‘at don’t they?”

I nodded while we continued, “Hardy lost damn near everything in the space of ‘bout a week or so. Money, cars, investments, you name it. He’d been tough as nails, though. Came back up here to live with Mama Taylor – ‘at’s y’Mamaw’s mama. I know you know’d it but hush and listen. He came up here with only a suitcase and ‘at woman a’his, Sharon Lenfant. Coon ass but lord help if she weren’t the most beautiful creature to ever grace the floors of this house. They knew Hardy’d survive regardless of his losses, and they’d known it ‘cause a’that woman. See, he could have any of ‘em but all he wanted was that Lenfant girl. She’d grown up down ‘ere near Metairie; her daddy was an oil rigger off Grand Isle.”

“Y’see,” he continued only now with wet eyes and a just barely quivering chin, “Where she growed up, there’s those cattail weeds everywhere. I ain’t never thought much of ‘em ‘cept for weeds, but she loved ‘em. She’d make them wreaths and other sundry out of ‘em. Not for sale but just for her own likin’, I suppose. It was a thing Hardy had loved. He loved it s’much he even took to callin’ her ‘My Cattail’, and I s’pect she loved ‘im all the more for it. I tell you right now, I ain’t never heard nor seen the likes of the kind of love them two had, and I don’t reckon I nor anyone else who saw ever will. Anyhow, Hardy’d taken a job over in Hodge workin’ at the paper mill. Didn’t suit ‘im, but I figure he was plannin’ bigger things. Worked long hours, that man did. Right down to his bones.”

I shifted my weight and sighed, briefly interrupting him. “I’m gettin’ to it. Patience is a virtue, boy. What I’m gettin’ at is ‘at there ain’t been a whole lot of lovers like Hardy and his Cattail. It was a sight to be seen until it wasn’t no more. One afternoon Hardy was startin’ his shift at the paper mill, and not a single notion that Sharon had slipped and fallen in the Ouachita. She’d been pickin them weeds and just reached too far is what Old Man Tinsley’d said. Fell twenty feet right off ‘at embankment and broke her neck on the cypress roots. Th’only fortune they’d had was there’d been a godawful drought that year, otherwise she’d of floated on down to lord knows where.”

“Hardy’d come home and looked around for a good while before the notion that somethin’ might be wrong came to ‘im. He run up yunder to Temple’s place and ‘fore you know it they’s about twenty men, lanterns and all, callin’ for Cattail and not findin’ nothin’. Wasn’t ‘til the Caskey boys were settin’ trot lines later ‘at week that they found her. Said she looked just as beautiful as she’d ever been. Hell, they’d said she’d been untouched by any kind of animal like ‘em woods knew better. When they told Hardy he didn’t cry or nothin’. They said he’d just folded ‘is hands, tilted ‘is head down for a second, and then just stood up and walked on outta the kitchen like they ain’t even said nothin’ at all. He went on like ‘at for another week. I s’pose everybody got used to ‘im bein’ like that, so they didn’t pay no attention when he walked out the back door of the church ‘at Sunday. Hell, they probably thought he’s sick or som’in like ‘at. Y’Uncle Jeffy’s one ‘at found ‘im. Found ‘im right here in this room hangin’ from ‘at fan and still in his suit. He’d stuck one a’them cattails in his pocket but no note or nothin’ like ‘at. Just Hardy in a suit hangin’ ‘tween them two beds right yunder. Mama Taylor bawled like you ain’t seen a woman bawl before. Least ‘at’s what they told us when we was growed a little more. Said she dropped right here in the doorway and hollered out a shriek ‘at peeled the paint off ‘em walls. She’d loved Hardy, see. Some spected just as much as he’d loved Cattail ‘erself. But ain’t nobody really thought more of it than ‘at. They all thought the less of ‘er for not burnin’ ‘is bed, though. I know ‘at much.”

“Wait…what?”

I’d kept up along with him intently enough that every other sound tapered off save for the drawl from the scarred mouth telling me the story of an uncle I’d never known.

“What is it?”

“You said ‘burning his bed.’ What is that? I’ve never heard that.”

“Oh, well back in the old folks days, ‘ey’d burn the bed of whoever might’a died in it. Hell, ‘ey did ‘at all the way up ‘til I’s in grade school.”

“Why, though? Why burn the bed?”

“Mama always said ‘cause a’the disease. Like diphtheria and whatnot. Had a real bad what you call epidemic of ‘at ‘round the time y’mama was a baby.”

“So they’d just burn the bed and that’s it.”

“Yeah, boy. ‘At’s what I’m tellin’ you, ain’t it? ‘Cept with Hardy, Mama Taylor got all the gossip mongerers a’goin ‘cause she never did burn Hardy’s. They took her to task over it, and she’d just tell ‘em that she wadn’t ever burnin’ ‘at bed ‘cause Hardy never died in it. He died with ‘at rope strung up over ‘at fan.”

“So the bed – one of those beds – it’s the same on Hardy would sleep in.”

His grin chilled every drop of blood already racing through my body at that point.

“Yessir. Now, you gonna ask me which one, but I don’t know. And ain’t nobody else knows either. So Mama Taylor kept ‘em both. Figured you’d at least need to hear the story ‘fore you get all haughty ‘bout bein’ the only one brave enough to sleep in ‘ere.”

“So they don’t know which one he slept in?”

“You smart as a whip but deaf as a post, boy. Like I said, ain’t nobody still alive knows ‘at, and if I’m shootin’ straight with you here, I’ll tell you ‘at this point it wouldn’t matter t’me. Both of ‘em’s as good as spooked. This whole house is if’n y’ask me. But you settle y’own differences, I reckon. Don’t let me keep you from it.”

Still grinning all teeth, he turned on his heel, chuckling as he walked through the double doors at the end of the hallway. For a moment, my uncle had become a seer. A prophet of sorts to relay the message of doom from a memory that wasn’t even his, he’d seen fit to tell me the story for my own renderings – those of which I might one day share with a nephew, a daughter, or a son.

It was the last time I slept in the room until this trip nearly twenty years later. My uncle had died a few years before my grandmother, and nearly every storyteller we’d surrounded with open ears and minds had been a sequenced number of ceremonial sendoffs, filling plots and lying under markers for the next generational narrative.

I’d switched from the bed on the left to the right and then back so many times until exhaustion forced my hand to stay put and simply be. Simply wait. The light had burned out and the tarnished silver mirror of the dresser reflected the moon against the wall above my head and to the left. It was a gradual thing and though a source of light, was not a welcomed sign of reprieve from the dark strangle of the room. I used to laugh at the fan, I thought. Now I couldn’t even see it. I heard the hum of the blades, the uneasy buzz against the paneling of the ceiling still cracked where it’d given way just enough to remark for any visitor that the thing had borne more than the limitations of its purpose.

Exhausted as I was, the room and I fell in silent but sleepless synergy. Those voices that once echoed through dust yellow walls only whispered and gazed on a dying memory in me. The past is the past is the past is the past, I thought. He’s dead and the house is a house, I thought. But the thing was in my spine. It crept with serpentine stealth until settling on the surface of my eyes so that the shapes might become the stories, the shadows transform into the sinister. I stayed awake and motionless, waiting for the sun to break and the cardinals to perch on the fig tree just outside. I waited motionless. Dreading but what I could not even now possibly illuminate.

The next morning I found the diesel can sitting rust covered next to the axle turned fire ant bed. The driveway caked my steps before turning from graveled dirt into the grass at my knees. The leaves bent against the hot, prostrate against the ground and whipping my legs as I crossed the small path to the fence line. I used what little fuel was left in the can, covering as ample a space as I could. The fuel’s too old, I thought, lighting a cigarette before tossing the nearly spent match onto the mattress. A momentary vaporous hiss, and then the whole of it was engulfed, burning an eerie calm and conjuring a dank smoke into the clear morning air. I finished my smoke near to the filter and tossed it into the flames that licked nearly as high as the fence line now. But if this isn’t the right one, I thought, before smarting myself for the lunacy of the thing. The breeze against the pasture caught my eye and drew them to the patch of cattails leaning against the hot pull. The mattress smoldered with the orange of its neighboring light from the previous night, dying down into the ashes and dust of the earth around it. I watched as it faded before setting a faster pace back inside to fetch the other one, all the while hoping I’d saved enough fuel for it, too.

[razorbladeoatmeal]

Moccasin

The road looked white, but I knew better. Chalk powder kicked into the air from the wheels, making a thick haze that went midway up the pines before settling back onto itself. Dust on dust on dust. 

We’d left the newly tarred blacktop highway a quarter of a mile earlier, roaring onto the nameless road with my father behind the wheel. But it wasn’t white. We all knew the dust lied with no more villainy than it did in a drought. We knew it wouldn’t be too long before the warm gulf wind saddled up to the arctic chill before unloading four months of torrential rain. We’d seen it. I’d seen it. I’d watched the strangled bones of the road bleed mud into the shoulder and off the banks. I’d watched the rivers rise to headlights and the bayous hemorrhage slime and the moss to the porch steps. The road looked white but not for long. It can’t rain all the time, my mother would say then, otherwise you’d never miss it. No sooner had the words left her mouth when she followed them with a shriek, pointing and grabbing my father’s arm so much so that the wheel nudged the car to the right. She’d seen the thing first. I still wish I had. Once he was finished figuring just what in the hell was wrong with my mother, he grinned at us three in the backseat. He carried the smile back to my mother, half mischief and half curious and the whole of the boy she loved who’d turned into a man in spite of himself. I saw it myself then. Just past my father’s head and over the dash, ten or fifteen yards from the radiator, it slithered with all manner of elegance and rage. 

Cottonmouth, my father said and we repeated in round like we’d thought of it first. Black as the bottom of hell, the snake moved against the white of the road like a cut across the face of god. Nearly halfway across, my mother would protest my father letting the thing live. He would meet her scowl and the rest of our agape fascination with a smile saying only, even the devil gets hot. I watched as the thing slid, full-bodied and fierce into the brown burnt weeds, disappearing into the shade and beyond our sight. I heard the rain bludgeoning the air conditioner unit in the window later that night. Hot and wet drifted into the other open window smelling of iron and wood. The sheets in almost rhythmic motion, laid against the side of the house like a descant to the shrill cry of toads, cicadas, and whatever else celebrated in the swamp that night. I listened to all of it trying to go to sleep until all I could hear was my own pulse. In and out. In and out. Thudding like a stalled rudder, enveloped in the skin I suddenly felt a stranger to. Half dreaming I saw the tail of the cottonmouth from earlier that day ooze into the slat boards of the ceiling. I smiled at the notion and thought before settling my eyes, even the devil gets tired.

[razorbladeoatmeal]

A History of Violence: The New Old American Narrative

It never fails. Our sense of balance, of goodness, of hope, of stability are all shattered in a single moment of horror. 

In the wake of these events, our instincts, now hardwired to the medium of social media, are to employ the habits of those generations that came before us, stretching all the way back into the very beginnings of civilization. The forum for everyone that is social media is both an invaluable tool for discussion and dialogue and a platform for all manner of opportunistic parroting and emotional arrogance. We become compelled by little more than reaction, because taking away the prefix of that very word demands far more than we’re willing to admit or, better yet, manifest in our daily lives. 

What happened in Charleston and countless other cities is not some new American narrative. It is the American narrative. It is the story written by our history and retold by us, its descendants, not because of obligation or indifference but because of fear. The same fear that causes us to concern ourselves more with what others will think rather than find within ourselves the wherewithal to admit how that narrative has shaped every facet of our culture. That said, the past is not a representation of what we must resign ourselves to in the present with unabashed cowardice. Fear is the name of the game and has been for so long that we’ve renamed it rhetoric, utilizing our assumed intelligence to combat terror with terminology. That same fear, paired with the vanity of our presumptions of right and wrong and illusions of morality is again simply a retelling of an old story.

I have lived in Alabama my entire life. I don’t ever plan on leaving, and even if I do, my home will always be here. I love my Southern culture. I love my family and the wonderful people I’ve known throughout my thirty-three years here. I do not love the associations that we have rightfully earned as a culture, though, nor do I love the apologists who voice their discontent that those associations exist for a reason that is not altogether negative and damning. Not twenty miles from where I live stands the 16th Street Baptist Church. I use the word “stands” because they still hold services. They have wonderful ministries both within the community and abroad. They live. They thrive. The congregation meets every Sunday. Yes, the history is dark and terrible but the present has thankfully refused to be silenced in the wake of even the most seemingly irreparable damage.

Much in the same way that so many felt the need to immediately disassociate themselves and those they knew from the needless violence in Ferguson, Baltimore, or so many of the other central points of focus over the last few months, we as Americans choose to continue our most valiant efforts to place our fears and historical resignation at the apex of our collective priority and concern. In the words of King Macbeth, one of literature’s most infamous examples of delusion gone horribly awry, our story is one “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” We have become masters of discourse while relegating the courage of action to an entirely sedentary state that while so full of potential, refuses to move an inch because, after all, not moving is all we’ve ever known or done.

The story of Charleston and of our ancestral divisions has been repeatedly and relentlessly laid at our feet, offering a question we’d rather ignore, deflect, or worse yet, answer with the party line of “it’s complicated”. There’s very little that’s complicated about hate. There’s very little complexity to the manifestation of that hatred into violence. History has shown the unforgiving simplicity that is our inherited arithmetic of ignorance, hatred, and the summation that is violence. We have to learn that recognition and obligation are two completely different animals. We have no obligation to our past with the lone exception of learning from and never allowing ourselves to repeat its devastating failures. We have to recognize that no matter what our ancestry may be, it does not own us, nor does it dictate who we must be or who we will be. We have to recognize that rage and anger without resolve and focused, meaningful action is simply a lot of sound and fury, and we are fools to think otherwise. 

For all that we're good for when it comes to these senseless and habitual tragedies, Americans have become brilliantly efficient at inefficiency. We wait until it's too late or until someone else says what we don't have the guts to. Maybe the saying is too much, though. Maybe it's okay to not have an answer. Hell, maybe it's downright arrogant to assume that you do or that reason or logic are applicable concerning an action that negates both. We're very good at talking and very good at having answers, but for me much of that is a clever avoidance tactic. It keeps us from looking at the glaring problem of our past, our present, and what could be a terrible future. It doesn't mean we should stay quiet or not rail against injustice. It only means that maybe we should stop trying to wrap our head around what's incomprehensible and instead use our head to find and fight for a solution with all the same determination that drives these hateful people to act on their delusions. Our enemy is ignorance, and you can't fight ignorance by yelling at it or echoing what sounds like the right thing to say. It takes courage and hard work, and it takes guts because if history has proven nothing else, it's that independent thought paired with action is a dangerous and powerful thing. Own your thoughts. Own your actions. Otherwise it's the same droning noise we've been relying on to no avail except being shocked at what's tragically not shocking or surprising at all.

[razorbladeoatmeal]

Disorderly Doors

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder as an adult. The word itself – “disorder” – is an interesting albeit completely apt noun in the case of mental illness. Here are a few reasons why:

Refusing to do just about anything except use the restroom because anything else is impossible due to the immediate onset of paralysis. This often includes going days without brushing your teeth, taking a shower, checking your emails, making your bed, or even bothering to look out the window. And don’t even consider the door. That shit is just a architectural mistake because obviously the builders were unaware that you would never, ever want to go outside for any reason whatsoever, because the universe is collapsing inside the space of your brain and doors are abstract things that can’t exist in a black hole.

Declining every call and ignoring every text because everything is nothing and you don’t feel like pretending to be “well” for anyone at the moment. This will cause friends to either a) become concerned for your well being because when you do respond it’s usually with a “Ok”, “Sure”, or the dreaded “K”.

Paralysis.

Paralysis.

Paralysis.

Listening to a full minute of a song before finding another one to fit your mood because it changes that frequently. This makes long trips the equivalent of a shuffle medley that will in fact cause any unlucky bastard who happens to be riding with you to also join you in your insanity.

Looking at yourself in the mirror just briefly enough to realize how gaunt you look because you forgot to eat yesterday and today but at least your meds are working. This will inevitably cause concern from parental figures who say things like: “You need a cheeseburger,” or more fittingly: “I can see your ribs, boy. That’s gross.”

I love that the technical acronym for Bipolar Disorder is BAD (Bipolar Affective Disorder). It’s entirely appropriate because those close to you will say things like: “We went to the movies and Jonathan acted like he felt bad,” or “Jonathan, I think it’s a bad idea to call the police just to tell them you think they’re tapping your phones.” Now, the above list is more along the lines of what’s called a “period of depression” and while it’s the equivalent of trying to climb up a shit chute in a pair of Crocs, the other side of BAD is just as “disorderly.” These episodes are called “manic episodes,” or if it’s sweeps week at the batshit bananas club, they’re sometimes called “hypomanic episodes.” If it sounds like a superhero, you can go with that. Just understand that in this comic narrative arc, the superhero believes that they are invincible and unstoppable despite the fact they’re more like Robin and really can’t do shit except look like a lunatic. Interestingly enough, sometimes tights can and often will be involved in said episodes. A few examples:

You write texts so long that iMessage has to split them in two because Steve Jobs didn’t consider the fact that perhaps you do in fact want to fill that blue bubble up with an invective that would make history’s most delusional tyrants proud. This can often lead to the willingness to pull over onto the side of the interstate and spend nearly two hours discussing your feelings to someone you rarely text or, even worse, someone you love.

Everyone else is an idiot, and you’re a genius until you start questioning that and then spend another hour asking those same idiots to evaluate their life, your life, and the lives of those around them. This can often lead to yelling fits about existential nihilism while trying to order a Baconator at Wendy’s and noticing the employee who’s been trying to take your order has begun filling random cups with ice and avoiding eye contact because his shift just started and goddammit of course you’re the first customer he has to deal with.

You apologize or antagonize profusely and oftentimes in the same sentence. For example: “I’m sorry for yelling about the bookshelf no longer being alphabetized, but you fucking know how much I hate having to look for shit, and yet here we are with me trying to get my shit together because you can’t get your shit together, so I’m sorry.”

You drive around for no reason and stop at random stores to purchase things you normally wouldn’t give a shit about. For example:

A random family portrait from the 1980s you saw at a thrift store and the Olan Mills tag made you think about the happier times of your life.

]A suitcase the size of a couch because one day you will need all that space to pack the collection of random family portraits you’ve amassed over the years.

Fifteen bags of Sour Patch Kids and the Die Hard DVD collection (which leads you to lie to the cashier about how you have several children, all of whom love candy and Bruce Willis)

Three suits (with vests) in case you end up going back to law school (which incidentally you dropped out of because going to class felt like being asked to give birth to a Walrus while sitting in a wheelbarrow that’s barreling down the side of Mt. Everest. No thank you.)

Fourteen feet of fabric because you will learn to sew but are unsure as to what exactly it is that you will sew.

A pair of binoculars so you can ensure the door remains closed when you eventually revert back to depressed mode, because you sure as shit aren’t getting out of bed.

States of mania can also be fun for your friends because you will literally help them do anything. Need help moving? Let me move all the boxes and bark orders about where we should put the baby’s crib even though you don’t have a baby and it’s not my house.

Any poor schmuck that calls you will undoubtedly be subjected to an hour long conversation about absolutely nothing and everything all at once. For example, “Dad, my tires need to be rotated and balanced because all I do is drive to work and back and forth, and I’m so tired but maybe we can dinner with all of us together this weekend. Is Mom ok? God, my head hurts, but at least it’s not raining anymore. Do you have that old photo of the kids at the park from three summers ago? Is it hotter this summer to you, or is my A/C just not working? I have to get my tires rotated and balanced, or do I? What do you think? Don’t ignore me. Why are you ignoring me? Why don’t you say something? Thanks, Dad. Thanks for all your help.”

As opposed to the paralysis of being depressed, being manic is like mainlining meth and coke at the same time, and then feeling confused at why no one else can be totally fine on just thirty minutes of sleep. This can cause you to wake up partners in the middle of the night to ask why they love you or if they think you have man boobs.

Of course there’s medication for all of these things and thank medical research and patient doctors for that. It’s a weird existence being medicated, though, and it’s an even stranger prospect to walk into the pharmacy and slap the pill organizer onto the counter and quickly blurt out that your “Papaw” takes a lot of meds and just cannot “keep that shit on lock.” You expect the medication to be a wonder drug, and while it helps immensely it doesn’t create a new you. It allows for functionality. It gives you restraint when your instinct is to till up the entire yard because you think nothing could be more beautiful than replacing your grass with a field of sunflowers or more ideally a pen for the chickens you’ve always wanted but no one would let you have because people are dicks.

In addition to my other diagnoses as an adult, I was also awarded the ADHD certificate to the surprise of absolutely no one who’d known me for more than five minutes. All of my undergrad notebooks are sequenced as follows:

 Pages 1-2: Judicious and pertinent notes

 Pages 3-yellow cardboard at the back: indecipherable lyrics, poems,  shapes, penises, caricatures of my teacher who looks like an Ent, and  declarations of why I will take school more seriously.

When I was first prescribed my ADHD medication it was Adderall. I’d heard a lot about Adderall as a teenager, albeit in hushed tones in the hallway, but at the time I was only interested in the few opportunities I could smoke weed. I hate Adderall. I loathe Adderall. There is nothing remotely fun about having cotton mouth or having pizza (or any other food for that matter) taste like a leather belt that’s been dipped in turpentine. I had “friends” who when they found out I’d been prescribed the drug, suddenly became increasingly concerned about my well being and more accurately whether or not I had any “extrees”.

Going on medication is something that eventually becomes fairly public knowledge when your friends seeing you pop enough pills to down a Clydesdale every morning or night or both. Some are genuinely concerned but remain quiet because they don’t want to invade your privacy. Others share their own stories, and you feel an incomparable relief that someone else knows exactly or at least partially gets what you’re going through. Then there are the vultures who want to know what the side effects are and what might happen to them if they took them. The only positive with that is getting to imagine them scrubbing baseboards for six hours while listening to Whitesnake so loudly that the neighbors call the police, because it’s 2AM and that’s just uncalled for.

Funny things happen, and when they do you tend to grab onto them with the desperation of a kid who has to leave a petting zoo and has had her/his plans to liberate the animals thwarted by heartless parents. You hold onto the brief moments between, and you do it long enough to realize that nothing is as crippling as anticipation. You know it’s coming eventually, and the waiting is always worse than the thing itself. You wonder if anything matters at all, or if you’re a mistake. You think about being born in a charity hospital and going twenty-two days without a name until you were adopted by two of the most amazing people in your life who, for better or worse, raised you in a Christian cult that taught you that mental illness is a lie and psychology is for the spiritually weak. You think about being sexually abused at nine by an adult you were taught to trust. You laugh at the wrong things and cry at the right things.

There are those moments of clarity and no matter how small they seem, they work like workable cracks in the dam that’s holding the real you back – the one just waiting to bust the hell right through and feel normal. But maybe disorder is normal. Maybe disorder is just the right thing for you because it’s what so many others feel is the greatest wrong they’ve been dealt by an already cruel world. I am unashamedly crazy. My own father didn’t believe me for a long time, and even thought my illness was some attempt at getting more attention. Then one day recently he accidentally took some of my medication. Granted, a lot of what transpired in the next 24 hours was some of the funniest shit I have witnessed in a long time (i.e., my dad calling to talk about how he’d completely rearranged the garage and wanted to knock out one of the walls to build a fort for the kids).

Later that same day I drove over to my parents’ house to pick up my kids, and my dad met me at the door. My dad rarely cries and yet there he stood all red-eyed and blubbery. It was unsettling, and I thought that maybe something was wrong with my kids or my mom. Instead he just hugged me with his gigantic arms and kept repeating “I’m sorry.” It took me a while to understand just what the hell had happened, but in the days following the awkward but much needed hug, it clicked that my dad had finally gotten it. In the weeks since he’s asked about my disease, about my meds, and even researched the symptoms. He wants to talk about it, and for all the disorder I engage with daily, it’s one of the few things that makes sense.

One day my kids will become fully aware of just how crazy their dad is, both from the humorous and achingly helpless perspectives. I dread that a lot, but I also hold on to a familiar hope that I can meet them at the door should they feel the earth shifting beneath them. I don’t wish for functionality or normalcy for my kids. I wish for an honest life that even at its most disorderly, finds them in love with a life worth living and a world worth the effort of always keeping that door open no matter how long it takes.

[razorbladeoatmeal]

High Cotton

The woman was half crouched next to the tree; her arms turning invisible whenever they passed in front of its trunk. Standing half naked in the water and leaning into the murk, the cypress had a beauty both terrible and ancient with its bark peeling off bone dry just at the water line, disappearing into the pool right where the woman’s pale leg up stood submerged to the shin.

No more than thirty paces to her West, the man leaned forward, resting his hands on knees that shook under his trousers still wet from the mud and sweat of his half trot sprint to where he stood.

 She could see him but not he her, and for only a few moments her heart relished the space, imagining an impassable gulf that expanded even beyond the warmth and glow of the horizon’s most distant line. Betraying her cover, she leaned to her left, exposing one half of her face and the steady saline beads at her temples. Brown hair turned black as she pinched a curl, setting it behind one of her smallish ears.

 “Jess…”

 Still heaving, he stood up from his knees, moving his hands to his hips and his gaze unshaken. Saying her name once again yielded only the half-faced stare she gave him from the side of the tree.

 “Jess, I am a good man. I don’t need to tell you that.”

“Then why say it?”

Her voice ripped across the chasm, stitching the distance to what suddenly felt like mere inches to both of them.

 “I only mean I’m a good – well, that I don’t deserve this…this way you’re treatin’ me.”

“Never said you did, did I?”

“Well, no. No, you didn’t. But what am I supposed to say, Jess?”

“I can’t speak for you, so I don’t know why you’d ask.”

“Can I at least come closer so we can talk, though?”

“No.”

 Looking for imagined supporters of his exasperation, he glanced around before yelling at the bruised sky above them.

 “Can you at least tell me what I did, Jess? Don’t I deserve that at least?”

 She leaned a bit more, showing the gorgeous severity of her jaws and nose, and lips that lay in the middle now drawn with a line of immovable patience.

 “I don’t know what you deserve, Ben, and I don’t know why you’d ask like I knew.”

“Well – goddammit – what in the hell does that even mean, Jess?”

 His voice echoed over the incline just that side of the creek, and it briefly pleased him to hear.

 “You keep askin’ me what things mean for you and how you fit into everything, and I don’t know how to answer for you because I don’t even know how to answer for myself.”

“If you’ll let me help instead of runni- ”

“It’s not a matter of me needin’ yours or anyone’s else’s help, thank you.”

“But you can’t just- ”

“I can do whatever I damn well please, Ben. Maybe you deserve to be told that since you can’t seem to place your own common sense in knowing that about me.”

“I didn’t say you couldn’t.”

“But you did it, Ben. You may not have said the thing, but you did it all the same.”

 The katydids raged in the twilight, all singing their sweet despair into a fine dead sound that perched itself between the two aching bodies.

 “I don’t know what I did, Jess.”

“You did everything right, but it’s not right that I want.”

“Well hell, you want wrong?”

“That’s not what I meant. I just mean that there’s more to it than what I want, and that’s all you ever gave me, and it’s not bad – please don’t say anything. It’s not bad at all, Ben, but it’s not what I need.”

“I can give you what you need, though…just tell me.”

“I can’t, though, and I wouldn’t tell you even if I could because the thing – it ain’t got anything to do with you, hear? It’s my mind that needs. I can’t speak for yours, so stop tryin’ to lead mine where you want it to go.”

“But I just want to go wherever it or you goes. Goddamn, girl, I can’t – I don’t get any of this.”

“But I don’t want that, Ben. I need to go where there ain’t a shadow behind me but my own. That’s all I need, and even if it isn’t – well, that’s somethin’ I gotta find on my own.”

“Don’t you wanna have someone, Jess? My god, you can’t surely just want loneliness or need it anyhow.”

 She stood half hidden again and looked at the fields that rolled in a green blur just over his shoulder before shifting her eyes to meet his.

 “I don’t suspect I should ever let my wantin’ or needin’ get too far away from each other, Ben, and I think that’s been my thing all along. And no…I ain’t afraid of being alone because maybe it’s the best thing I need. Maybe not the only thing forever but the best thing for now as far as I can see.”

 His voice choked as he stepped back.

 “And just how long you expect it to be, Jess? How long do I wait? I love you. I’ll wait.”

 Slowly she bent her gaze to the left again and stared at the green going in and out of focus over his shoulder, washing just under the retreating burn and running past the dark at its heels into a light that only the woman could see.

[razorbladeoatmeal]

Bastogne, 1945

my grandfather, long dead…

smells nothing but, as living, the same

he did not, when one-half boy

and one-half man

had once trippedupthe R H I N E

water-heeled on batteries

rusted up to the gills of

the several dead

“no, i could not smell”

he belched to my open mouth

“god will follow these stripes, boys,”

he vomited to the ghost men

trenched within trenches

“our feet were numb from the waiting”

and he wept ½ more from the twist

in his guts

and fractions less from olfactory

senseless from the smell of the flesh

buzzing its way to his brain

and his heels

“no, i could not smell from that day on”

and he whiffed at the air

standing between us, mockingly

remembering the water

[razorbladeoatmeal]

How to Smoke at a Children’s Hospital

“Pass us by, and forgive us our happiness” - Dostoyevsky

Finding the smoking section at a hospital is not unlike asking for directions to the local “titty bar” in a one-red light Bible Belt village. The lips purse, the one eyebrow raises, followed by a sigh and point in the direction of your respective vice. Asking where you might find your kindred cigarette spirits at a Children’s Hospital, though? Well, that invokes something else altogether in the shame realm. Akin to the dreaded “I’m not upset, just disappointed” brand of parental shame, there’s no avenue of argument at your disposal once you’ve crossed that line and shown yourself to be, at least momentarily, a terrible human being.

To avoid what I knew would be a trip down guilt alley with all its open sewers and gopher rats, I devised a game plan of finding the “smoke pavilion” or “shame tent” as it were by looking for what I was sure would be fellow nicotinites. This strategy involved an even more shameless method of judgmental presumption on my part as I immediately began scoping out other parents whose unabashed love for faded sweatpants and transparently thin beach dive t-shirts was matched only by their adoration for the cheapest of cigarettes. Luckily the search was brief as Alabama’s reputation, for better or worse, is often a tragically funny nugget of deep-fried irony.

Over the course of the next two weeks while my four-year-old daughter fought for her life and endured a whole host of tests, bloodwork, a collapsed lung, and a surgery, I took the merciful few minutes in between my own crippling worry and dread to smoke. At least that was the plan at first. The thing is, my own relationship to death is a bit odd. My parents adopted my two siblings and I when they were in their thirties, and while that’s certainly not old fart territory, it provided a somewhat early glimpse for at mortality’s indifference for all three of us kids.

My dad was the tenth of ten kids, raised in the poverty of Louisiana’s post-post-Reconstruction. My mom was raised not too far from there, the older sister to my aunt, and just barely removed from the kind of destitution my dad experienced throughout his childhood. I say all of this because the span of siblings, aunts, uncles, etc., rendered a portrait of death and dying that never blurred into the mystery it was for my childhood friends. One of the earliest memories I have is when I went to my paternal grandmother’s funeral. It was 1987, and just shy of turning five, I was fascinated and not fearful of the ceremony.

I remember the call that came a few days before. It was bedtime, and I was half asleep on the top bunk, my older brother already snoring away on the bottom. The phone rang, I heard my dad’s graveled voice through the vents we would all shout through to each other all the time like some hillbilly intercom system. Something sunk in me even though I couldn’t make out or even really understand what was being said upstairs. A few minutes later I heard the unmistakable slow thudding of my dad making his way down the steps just before our bedroom door opened with a raw kind of hesitation.

My older brother has always been more resilient and harder-edged than I could ever hope to be. In the realm of personality, we are the utter antithesis of each other. He’s quietly serious and hot-tempered as opposed to my obnoxious irreverence and endless supply of horrific jokes. My dad told him the news first, sitting on the edge of the bed and softly nudging him awake. It was the first of what’s been a handful of times that I’ve seen my brother cry. He shook the bed, sobbing almost uncontrollably while holding onto the dropped shoulders and arms that held him.

I rolled over in a kind of deliberate confusion. I hadn’t been afraid of the news itself. What frightened me then was the vulnerability of the two strongest people I knew. If I’d been introduced to cigarettes at the time, it’s with absolute surety that I would have laid waste to as many cartons as my fat fingers could find. Even then I began what was a relatively short journey to the realization that the end itself could never be as unsettling as the disarming effects it brought to those of us who are left behind to either confront or retreat from the universe’s most arbitrarily cruel brand of theft.

In the twenty-nine years since my grandmother’s death, it’s almost seemed that my own life experience has been underscored by the experience of watching friends, family, and loved ones in their final moments. Even in those moments of ache, my curiosity in the grief of those around me has been a strange sort of comfort. It’s almost as if in the few moments we’re afforded the necessary but no less devastating opportunity to face the indifference of mortality, we find refuge in the commonality of our fear and respect for the unknown and even envy for those we love who’ve crossed the impenetrable barrier and into the inevitable common darkness we all share.

Grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, students, and a biological sibling – the process of death for those closest to me over the last thirty-three years have all been enclosed in their own sort of mournful specificity like an unfortunate but inescapable companion. Almost always paired with the topic of religion, death and dying move in an elliptical orbit around an introspection and self-awareness that for all our guarded intellect, renders us almost childlike in our wonder and dread at the absence of life itself and even the mere suggestion of the impassable void left in its wake.

Thanks to the grief porn marketing scheme of the film industry and even literary circles, the epiphany-by-way-of-someone’s-death trope has become the new catch-all cliché, trading unforgiving reality for the illusion of self-serving intellect achievement through misfortune. Though I can’t speak for others, my most recent experience with the thing itself was unlike any other in that it involved my own child. Something happens in those mercifully rare moments where the limits of our own strength are chewed up in unsuspected wreckage. Pride becomes a farce and hopelessness looms right at the same door teasing a new kind of unspoken possibility.

You seek refuge in the menial because everything important is out of your hands and lying on a hospital bed hooked to machinery you don't understand. You lie to yourself and fight the growing pulse of your own worry, stopping only in the few moments where you battle the selfishness you’re sure has defined your identity as a parent. You lie to yourself constantly. You lie over and over and over again and devise scenarios that toe the line between probability and possibility, blurring them into a sick unison you embrace not because you want to, but because for the moment it is the only reality you can face in your weakness.

For fourteen days I heard so many stories from so many other parents and felt remorse for the presupposition that our commonality was limited to economic status or education. For fourteen days I rode the elevator down, walked out the door, and made my way to the hidden corner by the Emergency Room where the other parents told their distractions through hurried inhalation and the miniscule reprieve it would bring. After a day or so you learn names by rote. You learn other children’s names, their illnesses, their ages, their birthdays, their grades at school, their favorite movies, their hopes of getting out in time to play junior league soccer.

You hear a twenty-two-year-old mother over the course of half a pack of cigarettes divulge enough details and technical terms for leukemia and the various courses of treatment to rival the expertise of any specialist in the field. You discover the fragility of numbers. You embrace the minutiae of what had previously only been minor details, overlooked because who would think to notice a cough that sounded like any other or a runny nose that looked like your average cold. Everything is quantified into the constraints of simple arithmetic because it’s a guarantee. The absolutes of math are the only thing pulling you up from the undertow of uncertainty, and even they provide just enough slack to only tease a rescue from it.

For all my supposed stoicism and detachment from death, I learned to speak in variables of anxiety, letting the tension overcome whatever small reserve of strength I’d had before the experience. I wasn’t looking for a resolution. I wasn’t even looking for answers, really. Within an arm’s length of my own child’s death, I wanted to escape. From the machinery, from the ambiguity, from the childlike helplessness, I wanted to pick my daughter up and Bruce Willis my way through the glass and into the parking deck before we blazed a trail back home.

But I couldn’t. None of us gathered under the aluminum pavilion and around its gigantic flowerpot-turned-ashtray could do a damn thing except make feeble attempts to absolve ourselves of the self-imposed shame that we couldn’t do more. Regardless of the varying illnesses our children fought, we managed to find strength in the unlikely shelter of our collective vulnerability, not giving much thought to what I’m sure would appear like irreparable social fractures outside the white walls and isopropyl chill that waited for us back inside.

There were more frequent visitors than some and a few that seemingly never left the smoking section, but none of us really cared all that much. You’d sit down and regardless of whether you knew them or not, the conversation would typically begin with nervous observations of the weather before digressing into stories from back home and the aberrant stupidity of extended family members, ex-husbands, ex-wives, and all manner of kin between. We rarely discussed the reasons we were all there, and even then the discussion would be relegated to a brief recount of technical terminology followed immediately by a disquieting silence broken only by the poison and exhaustion of our exhalations.

I made it a point to go down to the pavilion one last time on the day we were finally able to bring our little girl home. Her mother and stepdad were in the room packing a few things to take back to their house, so I made a quick run to what had been virtually the only source of comfort for me not because things made sense there but because we they never did, and in our ten to fifteen minute breaks each day all of us had been at peace with that.

No one else was there when I turned the corner facing the concrete slab, two aluminum benches, and small overhang. I burned one up and waited. Another and waited. Lit my third in a row and waited to no avail. I thought about my brother and how I’d turned to face the wall while he wept. I watched the vehicles rush into the ER drop off lane, leaving their still running cars to hurry inside for reasons I didn’t and don’t want to imagine, and not because I was afraid but because my own reality had strangled anything imaginable from my consciousness in just two weeks. Before heading back inside I turned to see if anyone had shown up to what was still an empty pavilion.

For two elevator rides up to what had been our temporary home, I wondered where my smoking companions had gone, how their kids were, and if I’d be able to remember their names or their kids names in six months, a year, or longer. I wondered if it would even matter, or if things would change for the worse or better for them in the meantime. I worried that my daughter would have the whole experience as her earliest memory and if she too would find herself numb and indifferent to mortality, whether her own or that of someone she might love one day. I thought about the anguish I’d shared with strangers, the quiet lies we told ourselves on lonely walks to our separate anxieties, the nervous laughter we stuttered while pretending to find positivity, and the heartbreaking fractions of hope we were able to find in the ashes.  

For H.

[razorbladeoatmeal]

New Gehenna

black glass and my

Uncle (W. L.) says

“row on both sides…

the balance is shaky”

his few white hairs

make a fine sombrero

curling commas by his ears

for the joke of his dome

steady steady I pass wooden

breakers as oars fielding

splinters like knives in my

uncalloused skin mittens

ancient blood won’t marry

the water we carry

and further shine smells

of the oil mask the bayou

wearing his worry like

less than electric my uncle

initials his Jesus for the

wind between trees

cypresses – those water teeth

gnaw at our senses

so clever disguising their

knees with the marshes

white oaks as its border the

firmament passes

through gates unsplendored

through pathways unspoiled

“Mark one,” I hear from his

toothless head beading

eyes in their smoke

scanning heartless deluge

mark what? I might ask through

the shriek and the veil

of the dead in cicadas

rising up from their graves

“shine a light – just yonder”

and the yellow burns bright

in the singular eyes

of the dead in the night

an ocular choir in the shine

of their scales colored

slick from the pitch

with stars in their gaze

steady unsteady hearts grasp

choking fumes as our

blood turns the bottom

to breeze in the twilight

pallbearing the sunlight as

catching our breath

my uncle says “Row, son

“row away from that death”

his is a boxcar race in his head

telling juvenile fears

to care for their wounded

to tend to the weary

mine is a dread all lumped

unsteady as a beat in

the cold of a sweat

just born on my back

and we shore just a moment

with our backs to the glaze

that is bruised and troubled

riled and tempered

“It’s only a matter…”

unfinished as fish in the tombs

we glare at the roar

we mourn at the turn

we watch the horizon devour

the spill we had rowed

licking the wounds

just clean at our feet

where dry we had carried

the nick into time

plumbing four holes

in the mud where we stood

my uncle rubs fierce

on his temples sighing

breaths as the fumes

make waves in our faces

for a year or an hour

we stood on the banks

as Noah’s forgotten

bled fierce gasoline

both muted from awe

or the fear that the hell

would consume us

or render us both

as men as boys as favored

as heaven if god with his

tongue half-severed

could cleverly whisper

and we burned at the

surface along with the knees

of our brothers those

moss-covered kin

mourning the oil like a

limb as its ghost we scattered

the night as it twisted

the marrow to flame

[razorbladeoatmeal]

At the Mouth of the Tombigbee River

They buried my mother in Technicolor

when the winds burnt the ash from our fingers

                                    and no one remembered

  s h e was buried upright in the cavalry sanctuary

near the goldfish torniquets

and the Labrador cannons

  But you said…you said it wellwhenyousaid

That a grave is a waste to the taste of the earth

  I might have believed you

Had I not been the ground

  And sworn myself to the oath of  

a scab that the past had relapsed

  But worry won’t paint our wishes

Or razor our smiles to

 those back alley kisses

  and what names we were given are

buried in backyard question marks

under apostrophed windows

  And you will ask what they will call us

When the flames are our friends?

  The breeze will bury these bones

And though faceless, I will laugh

  And envelop the air of a kiss I had borne

From the mouth of a name that was mine

[razorbladeoatmeal]

Grizzly Man's Bane

  Graduate school is a strange place. Not to be completely glib or dismissive of its obvious merits, but the idea of paying thousands of dollars to be as disagreeable as possible while maintaining an austere distance from anything resembling an opinion is the very definition of ridiculous. At some point I had engaged in what I can only imagine was an inconceivably one-sided bout of inner dialogue with the reasonable part of my subconscious likely nursing a hangover which gave an unfair advantage to my pimple-faced arrogance no doubt still reeling from its place as the perpetual last-one-picked for [every athletic event encountered here]. The result of this victory was me entering graduate school for the second time because, let’s be honest, six figures worth of student loan debt is obviously more glamorous and much more in tune with the “go big or go home” pseudo-principles of American masculinity. “Graduate poetry course” rang out with all the gusto of a wet fart, making it the clear choice for my “I need something to take up the hours needed for me to get financial aid” class.

  I was completely out of my element in the class but had managed to be just cheeky enough to avoid being brow-beaten by my writing peers, all of whom had previously been under the tutelage of our professor – an old man’s old man who no doubt summoned all manner of Zen from what I could only imagine was a gently-worn first pressing of Blonde on Blonde with a generous helping of a hand-rolled cigarette and mail-order coffee. It was clear from the very first class that the lyrical journeyman and I would not be trading recipes or engaging in hearty laughter over the latest New Yorker yarn anytime soon, but I think we’d both nonverbally established this and as such were satisfied to nod at the ends of each other’s sentences and simply move on. For the purpose of full disclosure here, the man was brilliant but in the way that the tour guide at the planetarium is brilliant: at the end of the day I still want to part ways, go home, and watch television. He was an unabashed jaded academic, and I was an arrogant redneck who also liked to read. Having us together in the same room was comparable to watching Lou Reed and Foghorn Leghorn having a serious discussion on the merits of top hats.

  Toward the middle of the semester (or climax if you will for contextual hilarity), our silent agreement to loathe each other’s presence was briefly marred thanks to the Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man. My familiarity with the documentary was limited to having seen it only once a few years earlier. The viewing experience left me baffled, amazed, and moved – reactions that seem to come part and parcel with any of Herzog’s features. Since watching the film, I had foolishly moved on to the more plebian trappings of American domesticity by having children and enslaving myself to employment of the United States government. Despite watching what had looked like Prince Valiant scream, weep, curse, and essentially dry-hump the wealth of flora and fauna of the greater Northwest wilderness over the course of the documentary’s two or so hours, I had not fully grasped the depth of the film’s real beauty or the fragility of human nature it presented by way of its main player’s eventual and completely understandable death.

  Thankfully, my own journey to a graduate poetry course some five years later would prove to be the very connectivity I would need to understand the film’s true value. Somewhere between daydreaming about just how terrible Bukowski’s breath must have been and legitimate worry that I’d not set the television to record Return to Oz, I heard the words “It’s a beautiful tragedy and something that will always haunt me, honestly.” Here’s the thing about that. That sentence, as a general rule, should either follow some genuinely heavy shit or introduce the same. I was understandably alerted to that conversation and out of my own mental digressions partly due to the fact that I wanted to know just what would induce such a statement and mainly because like most of Western civilization, I am a voyeuristic sadist. As Mel Brooks once aptly said: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.” If I could have had a motivational poster in my nonexistent office at the time, it would have been one featuring a panicked look of futility on some random skydiver’s face with him holding a limp string and looking up at a wilted parachute just moments before hitting the ground.

  Because of this social deficiency, I wanted to at least hear about whatever it was that had engaged my world-wise instructor in such a way as to spawn the moment of self-reflection. Turns out it was Grizzly Man. I had to catch myself from making the same wincing motion with my face that you make when you finally discover what’s been making the entire apartment smell like death. The marriage of disgust and disappointment will always procreate in the form of what can only be described as our most immovably betrayed countenance. Call it the genuine WTF look if you will. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy the film’s beauty or that I didn’t appreciate the message of nature’s unforgiving kind of theology. I just felt slighted in the same way one might feel after stealing the neighbor’s UPS delivery with HP written on the side only to discover upon opening it that you’ve stolen a fax machine. Fantastic. Now I can finally deliver those faxes that have been piling up all over the house over the last two decades. No one has been excited about getting a fax machine since 1998. No one.

  Some part of me felt obligated to voice my confusion if only for the purpose of maybe understanding what it was I was missing. There had to be something. I raised my hand like a complete goon and asked:

  “What’s the most haunting aspect of the documentary for you, though?”

  After a pointed look of impatient disgust at what I’m sure sounded to everyone else like a bloodhound hacking up a xylophone, he replied:

  “It’s the whole damn thing. It’s a tragedy. He was basically betrayed by the only thing that provided him with some sense of solidarity.”

  Hold up.

  “Betrayed?”

  “Yes. Have you even seen it?”

  I know what “even” means in the interrogative context.

  “I have. I liked it a lot.”

  “Liked?”

  “Liked.”

  “I just don’t understand how anyone could watch that and not walk away changed in some way.”

  “I mean, it’s a really good film.”

  “It’s a masterpiece. Really good doesn’t even do it justice.”

  So before “trolling” was inscribed upon the rhetoric tablets of our social media culture, I was being trolled by Old Man River in a poetry class about my inability to understand the depth of a hungry bear eating a bugfuck lunatic who’d been attempting to cram a steady-cam up its ass for the last three months.

  “I just don’t understand how there’s betrayal, though.”

  “Then you didn’t watch the documentary as it should have been watched.”

  There was a very brief moment of time where I genuinely wondered if I had indeed simply overlooked some kind of viewing methodology that was inherent to watching Grizzly Man. What had I missed out on? I’m so self-conscious. To a fault. Insecurity is the name of the game, and if there’s something I’m passionate about: film or music, then I’m especially so if the possibility of error is introduced. But then I realized the sheer stupidity of that mindset and was immediately comfortable and secure with the fact that I’d watched the film like any other – by turning the goddamn thing on and keeping my eyes open.

  “Is there a special way to view it that I didn’t know about?”

  “Of course. Sarcasm. That’s what I mean.”

  “Wait. That’s the message?”

  “That’s the point.”

  “Of the documentary?”

  “No.”

  “What the…”

  “It’s why you don’t get it.”

  “The film.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t get Grizzly Man because I’m a smartass?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Should I watch it again?”

  At this point I had already decided to never, ever watch the film and to deride anyone I overheard singing its praises simply out of spite.

  “I don’t know that it would do much good.”

  I’d suddenly turned into the eighties film corporate meeting stock scene with the elongated table and the sneering eyes of everyone staring at my inability to work the overhead. Like any sentient human being caught in the throes of panic and duress, I laughed instinctively.

  “And there we have it. Grizzly Man’s bane.”

  This simply made things worse. And by “things” I mean my uncontrollable laughter and continuing isolation from everyone else in the class as “that guy who probably cheated to get into the class.” Eventually I stopped laughing with the help of a temporary exit from the classroom to get a smoke. The semester came to an unceremonious end with my validity as any kind of a writer under just as much scrutiny as ever and my status as the embodiment of everything the Grizzly Man had stood against, intact.

  A few years later I noticed the film was on Netflix and felt the near uncontrollable urge to watch it, despite swearing myself to the oath of self-respect and/or loathing of never watching it again. Two hours or so later and the credits rolled just as Herzog’s incomparably comforting voice closed the final thoughts of what the film had suggested and not so much said. Herzog’s narration is especially poignant in the documentary with moments bordering on unintentional hilarity thanks to the Grizzly Man’s bantering with a fox being rendered touchingly beautiful thanks to the thickly-accented voice-over work. While watching the film for the second time, I couldn’t help but think about graduate school again and the oddity of that class in particular.

  For all the debt and self-doubt I earned in college, I left largely as ignorant as I was in the beginning. You kind of wander in and out of these strange environments, desperate to speak the language not of academia but of solidarity and familiarity because no amount of knowledge or intellect can compare to the connectivity of relationships. Toward the end of Grizzly Man, Herzog makes a pointed statement without saying a word, letting the camera pan from the centuries-untouched landscape to the exact location where Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, had been killed by the grizzly bears of Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Even in the relatively short time since their death, the trees and brush have made quick work of any evidence they were ever there save for a few of the picked-clean bones of their assailant.

  Occasionally I think about that and then I immediately think about that camera pan from the water to the brush to the skyline and then Herzog’s voice. I wonder about the infiniteness that is the pursuit of solidarity and meaning – some alignment with what we’ve either been told matters or what we’ve discovered to be as such ourselves. It’s the kind of thing that gives pause to whatever meaning or, better yet, humor we might find in the categorical strangeness of an existence that so desperately tries to understand any and everything but ourselves and how desperately we need each other. Whatever tragedy might have existed for Treadwell was lost somewhat to the nature of his death – a senseless miscalculation of how truly far removed we are from all that is ancient and primal in the world.

  I still laugh at the idea that I was Timothy Treadwell’s bane, simply for the fact that I’d never met the man and more so for the fact that it immediately makes me think of myself as this Lex Luthor arch-nemesis to the Grizzly Man, stealthily plotting the demise of my counterpart while holed away in some towering laboratory lit only by the appropriately timed forked lightning outside. More often, I also wonder if there really was some message I’ve missed due to my inability to fit in or understand, albeit willingly so. For all the tragic beauty I might have tried to employ as a safeguard against the perils of being ostracized, I am still a raving lunatic blindly screaming every ounce of my confidence into what will inevitably end up being the endless void of my own futile echo, all while clenched in the jaws of a beast I could never hope to understand.

[razorbladeoatmeal]

The Crows of Cyrene

“Ig’n only carry’m s’far.  My leg’s give out.”

“And there ain’t nobody sayin’ you’ll have to, Carl.  Lord, now.  Enough is enough.”

“I knows it.  I’m just sayin’.  My leg’s give out.”

“How long ‘til you go to the doctor again?”

“Shit, I’s just there.  He ain’t got the common sense God gave a billy goat.”

“Who?”

“Dr. Morgan in Ruston.  You know he’s kin to that Morgan bunch in Chatham.  ‘is daddy’s Percy Morgan used to run ‘em chicken house lottos up ‘ere ‘round Wyatt.  Whole family’s rotten to the bone, ‘nya axe me.”

“Well, ain’t nobody asked you, Carl.  You gettin’ all up in a dither for no good reason and cussin’ in ya mama’s house to boot.  Here we are ‘bout to bury your baby brother, and you got nothin’ better’n to do ‘en fuss.”

“This coffee’s as good as mama’s was, I declare.”

“I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout that since ya mama wadn’t too much keen on my bein’ around ‘til she didn’t know no better.”

“All th’same.  Just ‘sgood.”

“Lord, I can’t believe it.”

“I know’d it.”

“She just prayed for ya’ll, Carl.  You and Leonard both none the wiser ya’ mama’d warsh her hands jus t’fold ‘em by’er bed right ch’yunder in ‘at bedroom ever’ night to bargain with th’Lord for mercy on both ya’ll.  Now we buryin’ ‘im today and not with a moment spared t’grieve since we bur’d Buck.”

“Now ‘ere ain’t sense in cryin’, Louise.  ‘is coffee’s as good’r better’n mama’s ever was.”

“It ain’t true but thank ya’ anyhow.”

“It’s a shame.”

“I know’d it.”

“Ig’n only carry’m s’far, though.  My leg’s give out.”

  He extended two of his fingers, more bone than skin and scarred as much across their crookedness, tapping the underside of his hat’s bill just above the iron straw that perhaps had become the lone holdout on an otherwise well-worn mortality.  Though they had not seen a bush-hog or pivoted their grasp across any synthesis of grease or labor in at least fifteen years, his hands and fingers lay burdened on the Formica table, the smallest digits hanging just above the surface having been chewed and bludgeoned in the semblance of days that had since become as dense as the haze that cradled the whole of Jackson Parish that October morning.  The blue shirt faded just so against the clapboard faux oak with his head wandering in and out of the woman’s focus among the Conoco calendar on the yellowed wall behind him.  Too tired and just as forgetful with his memory now more a creek given to the wills of the sun’s tyranny than the river it had once been, deep as the hopes his youth had ingested and broad as the shores his feet had long imagined lie just beyond the edges of his young and steady grip, Carl Temple hung his hopes in the oil slick that pooled in the bottom of his cup. 

The woman, Louise Temple, sighed in rhythm with her fists turning prayerful clutched at the bottom of her sagging breasts tucked behind the royal blue blouse she’d bought just two days earlier in town.  She had loved the Temple brothers dearly.  So much so that she’d seen fit to marry the youngest of the three Temple boys, Buck, nearly fifty years earlier.  A heart attack had taken him in the last fall, leaving Louise to tend to the family she’d long seen as unworthy of the man she’d fallen in love with at sixteen in the summer of 1940.  Though pitched in those darker journeys his baby brother had managed to escape, Carl’s voice was born of the same gravel and Marlboro that had curiously if not by some measure of fate become a trademark of the three Temple boys.  Louise found her breaths like missteps with every near growled utterance that came just below the eerily same dusk blue eyes she’d fallen asleep next to for so long.  Only these were not warm, nor did they provide the simplicity and goodness of Buck’s comfort.  These were a cold blue likely left at the doorpost where the end lies just beyond – deprived of all but just enough breath to let the little light in that was left.  Set in the tanned leather visage of a long forgotten, oft-remembered demigod, his eyes were familiar and as such all the more terrible in their steel burn just above his hawk Temple nose. 

“Shirley says she ain’t seen hide n’r hair of Sonya, Carl.” 

“That’s fittin’.  Shirley ain’t never had much in the way of showin’ up ‘erself.  Seems s’much her daughter’d have ‘at in’r blood as well.”

“She’s been to that rehab whatchu call it Brother Charley put ‘er up to.  They’s ‘sociated with the Southern Baptists, he says.” 

“Yeah, ‘at Brother Chuck says I gotta forgive ‘s th’Lord forgave me, an –“

“Now look here!  Youg’n run afoul’yer own upbringing, but they ain’ta distance too far for th’Lord’s reach, Carl Temple.  ‘Ere’s a lot to be said ‘bout just settin’ still.  Be still and know.  Be still and know that I am God.”

  Her heels lifted slightly off the linoleum at the word “God.”  He squared his shoulders, pursing his lips now too long held from the wet end of a filter. 

“I ain’t got no quarrel with ‘im.” 

“Aw bosh, Carlton Temple.  Ain’t a person in this state you don’t have some grievance against or with.”

“God ain’t –“

“God ain’t concerned with what concerns you ‘r me ‘r none of us, Carl.  You’d think your age woulda rooted ‘at notion in your head f’goodness’ sake.  You see ya’ brother up ‘ere cold as a’grave and you just ‘s empty.  He’s n’such the same as you are now.  Huffin’ ‘n puffin’ on about a great deal ‘at really don’t mean a great deal a’tall.  ‘N it’s ya’ll’s lives you took, Carl.  It’s ya’ll lives you took and takin’ us’n who love yeh right down with ya’ both.  Lord help.  Might as well grab me a shovel while ya’ down ‘ere helpin’ ya’self to ya’ lonesome.”

“Louise, I –“

“Youg’n talk your share o’ bitterness with the sundry imperfections o’ mankind, but I ain’t gon’ abide you goin’ on about God, Carl.  I will not abide it, hear?”

  He watched the digital green go 10:00 on the microwave and nodded as slightly as possible without giving into whatever might be misconstrued as retreat.  His face half ceramic and hollowed in the last of its contents, Carl spoke and felt the air and sound echo their movement across the valleys where his cheeks had once been.

“I figure I got s’much to say t’God as God’s ever seen fit t’say t’me.  And you, Louise Temple…” He straightened his back, tilting his head so the light from the fan moving between the shadows of the blades fell in bursts of light and dark falling at once over the creases at the corners of his eyes.  “Youg’n c’mere and see just how much he’s ever said t’me, Louise.  I got as much gospel in the bottom’a this cup.” 

He slammed the ceramic down, reverberating the sound against the hum of the fan, the boil-over on the stove, and the gasp to quiet sob that whispered from the cracks of Louise’s plump fingers cross weaved just below her swollen eyes. 

The pops from his knees like small reports signaled his standing up and sidestepping to the door half open with the screen teasing the wind’s hopeful warmth.  Removing his hat betrayed the ash cowlick dancing just so in the breeze of the fan.  The light and dark did their dance as well falling hushed and hurried on the burden of the two.  Glimpsing him just from the shadow’s edges, Louise swallowed the last of her sobs, turning on her heel to face the stove and lid the casserole that was quickly approaching “burnt” in the oven.  His hand gripped around the tin push handle of the door, Carl side eyed to follow his scowl, setting his eyes on the freshly done hair that had once been as dark and beautiful as cypress roots.  

“I am sorry.”  He said at the tail end of a throat clearing.

“You don’t owe me nothin’, Carl.  Least’ve all an apology.”

“I know’d it.  All th’same, though.”

“There is good n’you, Carl.  ‘Ere’s good’n all of us, but ain’t none of it little more’n filthy rags.  We all of us born with th’same size ‘n shape’a spade, and ain’t a measure’a dirt more any of us’ll take more’n ‘nother.  It ain’t about goodness.  Lord help me, I’m blessed it ain’t.”

“I know’d ‘at too.” 

“There’s good n’you.  Buck’d tell ya’.  I know’d he told ya’ before he went on.”

  He sighed and pulled the cap back down, almost tempted to shove his shaking hands in the pockets in the hopes of strangled keys.

“Yeah.  I gotta get on.  Need t’press my Sunday pants ‘n shirt.  Ain’t much time now.”

“I’m sorry Brother Charley asked ya’ to carry ‘im, Carl.  Ain’t right, I know.  Ain’t but a spot from th’church to the yard, though.”

“I know’d it.  It don’t matter much.  I gotta press ‘em dress ups.”

“Thank ya’, Carl.”

“Naw.  Ain’t needin’ thanks.”

“I’ma say it anyhow, though, and you’ll go on ‘n 'cept it graciously.”

  He smiled just slightly in the passing shadow light dance that spiraled from the hum on the ceiling.

“I will.  I see ya’ ‘round about quarter ‘til then.”

“At’ll be good.”

“Yep.  Ig’n only carry’m s’far, though, Louise.  My leg’s give out.”

“I know’d, Carl.  I know.”

“Even at a spot, I’m worn plum out.”

“And you ain’t gon’ have to carry’m the spread if’n you can’t.  Just a bit to when it’s enough.”

“Just a few more steps, I s’pose.”

“Just a few.”

  His voice had elevated just slightly as he opened the door to the Oldsmobile more dull than warm in its red now.  She couldn’t hear what he said from the noise of the log trucks running routes on the road.  She signaled as such with her porcelain white hand like tubed dough curled against her ear for him to repeat.  He waited for the last truck to pass beyond their eyesight before repeating.

“The last’ll carry ‘is own self, Louise.  The last’ll carry ‘is own.”

[razorbladeoatmeal]

The Creosote Priest

“I remember you.  I was dreamin’.”

Brown curls tarred a slick black at their wet ends from the sweat beading up on the girl’s amber face.  A smile at the end of her oddly placed sentence betrayed the last of valiant baby teeth readying a sure surrender for when the blacktop would cool in a month or so. 

“Are you brave?”

The wad of Big League Chew nearly vanished in my throat as I tried to think of a response. 

“What were you dreaming about?  And yeah, I’m brave.  Yeah.  Are you?”

“The bravest.  Daddy told me.”

  She said “Daddy” like “Deddy,” but devoid of any Southern accent I had ever heard.  The sun had fixed itself in the center of the blue bowl hovering over Winn Parish.  1992 was a thin volume of memories all coiled around the cul-de-sacs and makeshift baseball diamonds serving as the second wombs of our childhood.   Parched and yellow at its ends, the cemetery grass held to her waist like a skirt waving in the rare but merciful breeze nearly as cooked as the ground itself.  She was beautiful and gave no thought to the caked dirt on her fingers or the fresh scrape on her hand that had run a few streams of blood amok before drying near her knuckles.

“You’re bleedin’.”

“It’s OK.  I dug a hole for Edward.  Daddy said it’ll heal.”

“Who’s Edward?”

“My terrapin.  Well, not my terrapin but God’s.  I borrowed him.  Daddy said God just needed him back so I can’t cry so I won’t.  I did a little but I…nobody saw except God and I think He probably didn’t notice because of Edward.  I buried him over yonder.”

  She indicated the location of “yonder” with her dried mud index finger, pointing to the far corner of the cemetery as of yet unplotted by any of those who’d gone before, save for Edward of course.  Just at the fence line at the cemetery’s end, a tall tree, leafless and shadow black, stood erect like a terrible guard of the dead calm that whispered through every block of granite that surrounded us.  I shuddered.  She laughed. 

“What’s wrong?  Are you cold?”

“No.  It’s summer time.  How could I be cold?”  I was smart enough, I had supposed.

“But you shivered!”  She laughed again.

“You laugh too much.”  I shouldered myself to some illusion of courage.

“Daddy said you ca –“

“Is there anything your daddy hasn’t said?” 

“Sure.  Lots of stuff, but he’s old so I guess he can’t just say it all at once.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well, if it made sense then that’d make you an old man, dummy.”

She laughed hard covering her mouth halfway through and turning to face back where what I assumed was her “deddy” coming through the aluminum gated entrance.  I was too busy averting my attention back to the black tree that seemed to have planted itself just so among the neighboring pines that it escaped any semblance of the light and heat that paints the whole of Louisiana a bright yellow during the summers. 

“That’s the Creosote Priest.”  Her grin now a full-blown smile was too much not to elicit my own reluctant half grin. 

“The what what?”

“Da – It’s called the Creosote Priest.  That tree over there with prayin’ arms.”

  I shrugged for lack of knowledge about the first word – too tired to pretend I knew what it was and too hot to care all that much.  But that tree, that tree, that tree.  It caught the eye of every gust and grass that bowed or bent in its direction. 

“Why’s it called that?  I don’t know…I mean, I don’t remember what crissote is.”

“Kree-uh-sote.  Like that.”

“Creosote?”

“Yep!”

She covered her mouth again, and I realized she was wonderful and not in some trumped up way to unremember when the time would come to leave, but in the way that might be capable of holding the whole world white knuckled from the shock of her goodness.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know!  But he’s been there as long my daddy can remember and that’s a long while.  Daddy says he looks out for Papaw and all the rest of the people who sleep in the cemetery.”

“They’re not sleeping.” I laughed cooly enough to briefly pause her grin.

“I know that.  But I like to pretend they’re sleeping so I don’t get scared.  Pretending ain’t lyin.  It’s just like puttin’ on a movie in your brain and movies are OK as long as they don’t cuss or say God’s name in vain…or show grown up things.”

“Well, I’m older so I can watch that stuff already.”  Lies.

“You ought not to.  Bad’s bad no matter how many birthdays you have.  My dad-“

“Your daddy said it.  I know, I know.  I’ma walk over to it.”

“I’m comin’ too.”  She said this as she skip paced five feet in front of me.

  The girl’s waist and legs, free from the unkempt grass now, resembled two rubber bands pigmented by some foreign splendor I did not know of at the time.  More fearless than I had been by a mile, she quickened into a sprint suddenly jetting her arms into the air that immediately brought to mind the old women of Siloam Baptist Church raising their gnarled white hands fixed to arms more vein than appendage in prayerful supplication to their fathers’ doctrine.   Half sung in the tombs of the Hebrew and the Gentile, the hymns would stir a fervor in the Sunday morning congregation to rival the battle cries over Jericho’s ruin, with the women speaking a terrible truth in a melody while husbands, fathers, and brothers looked and nodded, muttering their “Amens” in a quiet reverence that wavered its direction from their wives and heirs to the God of the Israelites and his only begotten Son. 

  Unbound by any calendar or the noose of its days, the girl’s praise was to oblivion with her arms eclipsing the limbs of the dead oak as she neared it.  I stopped some twenty feet behind, staring at her frame against the tree, imagining her as the thing itself now giving the light to the void where its frames had laid their roots for generations over.  She held them up with her back to me and her head half tilted upwards seeming to root herself just so between the wooden beast any myself.  Had I held to my spot still half covered in grass I would have sworn a vision to transformation as the girl stood as stone as the granite and marble that surrounded us.  I opened my mouth to utter some terribly imagined lie as to why I couldn’t come any closer, but she unsurprisingly interrupted my escape plan. 

“Are you brave?” 

She yelled her question with all manner of earnestness, never breaking her worshipful stance or the gaze at what I could not see.

“I am.” 

I muttered a “dammit” at the end to at least admit to myself I was the one with all the courage and had no need of having that questioned. 

“Then c’mawn!” 

Her giggle betrayed what I knew for sure was her realization that despite my being an apparent two or three years older I had deprived myself of the kind of moxie that she seemed to completely embody.

“He’s lookin’ out for us!  You ain’t gotta be afraid!”

“I know that!  Gah.  I’m comin’.”

The enormity of that tree is hard to fathom even now some twenty odd years later, so seeing it for the first time was not unlike bearing witness to legend made reality.  The bark was pitched not unnaturally and smelled as such with the odor holding equal power with the heat it had somehow managed to escape for years. 

“I bet you won’t touch it.”  She suddenly sounded grownup. 

“It looks gross.  That’s the only reason why.”

She paired an incredulous “Mhm” with a cocked eyebrow leading me to notice the cattail brown of her eyes.  It was odd I hadn’t noticed until then.  They were almost infinitely wide and even more so as she quickly lowered one of her arms to grab one of mine and run the few feet of barrier left between the tree and us.  My shock was far more powerful than my resistance to the assault as my hand, with her much smaller one it, landed palm down on the bark of the tree. 

“You are brave.  Ha!  But not as much as me.” 

She danced her hips and half sung the last sentence no doubt giving consideration to sticking her tongue out to add insult to injury.

“Whatever.  This is stupid.”

I looked the dead oak up and down doing my best Columbo, giving a skeptical eye to the superstitions of a girl whose laughter only revealed the teeth of her youth and the superfluity of her patriarchal anecdotes. 

“It ain’t stupid.  You’re probably stupid for saying it’s stupid.” 

I veered dangerously close to a “Nuh uh” before the modicum of good judgment I had gave way to an appropriately overcooked sigh.

“Isn’t it cool?”

“It’s only a tree.”

“But it doesn’t feel like any other kind of tree…”

“I guess.  I don’t even know who you are.  Why are you here?  What’s your name anyway?”

“I’m not supposed to tell strangers that.”

“But talking to them and showing them trees and just being weird is OK?”

“You have a big head.”

“You have an ugly nose!”  I was sure this would nail her shut.

“I have my daddy’s nose and he’s the handsomest man in the world.  My mama told me she learned to speak American just so she could tell him how good lookin’ he was.”

“American?”

“Duh.  We live in America.”

“It’s English.  We speak English and live in America.”  I rolled my eyes with all the conviction I could muster. 

“Daddy!”

  The girl blazed a trail all legs almost hovering in the humid vapor that drenched an otherwise dry summer.  The older man in blue coveralls and “CAT” trucker hat sitting just on the crown of his head opened his arms yelling “Lela Mae!” with a laugh similar to the one I’d bemoaned over the last half hour or so.  I made my way to where she’d ran, fractioning my steps so as not to give away my desire to get away from where we’d stood and seem weak.  It took all of about twenty steps for me to recognize her father, a man I’d known as far back as my earliest memory as Jim Harper, my grandmother’s nephew and my second cousin.  Considerably older than me, I’d always felt inclined to call him Uncle Jim in the two or three times I’d met him.  It had been years since I’d seen Uncle Jim, and the once rust red hair had slowly seceded to the peppered straw peering out from the cap’s edges and tucked behind the ears that had been the most memorable characteristic of the man as they were abnormally large with their slightly dropped tops matched only by the distended lobes that I had often imagined as being big enough to reach near his lower jaw. 

 “How’s my girl, huh?  How’s my Lela Mae?” 

He sung the girl’s name resulting in her face burrowing deep into a neck as wrinkled and worn as blacksmith leather just beneath a smile that beamed the same familiarity as the laugh that followed it.

“Boy, Jon.  You a lot bigger’n what you were last time I seen you.”

“Yessir.”

“And manners!  Lord, boy.  You need to talk to summa these fellas ‘round here.   Ain’t a one of ‘em got any sense ‘a respect.”

“Yessir.”  I didn’t know what else to say. I was too nusy staring at those ears.

“I take it you and my Lela Mae done met and been playin’ in the cemetery?”

  Lela Mae had abandoned the conversational ship and played with the top of the softpack of Kools that stuck up just above the hem of her dad’s breast pocket. 

“Yessir.  We were down yonder by the Cre…Crissoak Priest.”

“Aw yeah?  Man, that thing’s been there s’long as I can figure.  Your Papaw’s older’n I am, and he don’t remember’t ever bein’ a saplin’.  Ol’ Cresote Priest.  You know Brother Hammonds don’t like us callin’ it a ‘priest,’ cuz we ain’t Catholic.” 

He followed the poorly whispered revelation with a belly laugh to rival a foghorn and a slap on my back that nearly knocked the wind out of me. 

“Yeah, I ‘spec he just ain’t been here long enough to ‘preciate the good Priest.  You tell Jon about the Priest, baby doll?”

Lela raised her head just slightly showing tired eyes.

“I did, Daddy.  But he said it was stupid.” 

She smirked at his shoulder.  I quietly fumed.

“Aw naw.  ‘At’s a shame.  The Creosote Priest protects and prays for all the brothers ‘n sisters in the Lord who’ve been laid to rest here at Siloam.  That’s why he ain’t got no leaves, see?  No leaves and covered in tar.  Mama said lightning struck him…well, hell, I think it was twicst during a revival meetin’ they had here one night.  Foot, she was probly ‘bout nine or ten.  You know, your age give ‘r take.  But that’s why he looks s’rough.  Takes on all that sorrow and all that pain comin’ up outta the ground and just gives it up through his branches to the sky.  Ol’ Jimmie Dunegan, you know him?”

I nodded somehow as I was completely immersed in the story and the way Uncle Jim was telling it.

“Well, Jimmie think’s he’s half Indian, but we all know he’s full bred horseshit.” 

  He quickly checked himself and seemed relieved that Lela was fast asleep looking like a dressed up sack of feed in his arms.  I swallowed a grin and squared my pride to my shoulders that a grownup felt I was worthy enough to say “shit” in front of. 

“Jimmie thinks the Indians or the Cherokees ‘at used to hoop and holler around here a hundred years ago put a curse on ‘at tree and ‘at’s a reason we didn’t build the fence no further than we did or they did, rather.  Hell, I probably got more Cherokee in my pinky toe than ‘at man’s got in his entire body.  Dunegan’s ‘bout as useful as tits on a bull, boy.  Don’t be tellin’ your Mamaw I said ‘at, though.  She’s fond of ‘im, but not your Papaw.  Your Papaw knows ‘at whole Dunegan clan.”

  Lela woke up and turned her head to Uncle Jim, her hair nearly soaked through from the sweat and cat nap. 

“I told Jon about mama saying you was the handsomest man in the world, daddy.”

“Oh lord.  Ha!  Ya mama’s a little sweet on your daddy, baby doll.  ‘At’s all ‘at is.  Speakin’ a which.  Your mama’s probly wonderin’ why we ain’t home yet.  You better hug your cousin g’bye and load ‘er up, baby doll. “

  Lela slid out of her dad’s arms and wrapped her own around mine, her head right at my chest. 

“I love you, cousin.”

“Love you too, Lela.”

“Maybe we can play again when ya’ll come back into town to see your Mamaw and Papaw.”

“Cool.  That’d be cool.”

“Yeah, we ain’t been moved back into town but about five months.  I might get deployed again but hopefully not ‘cause this’n here is a Daddy’s girl!”

  He followed the declaration by picking up Lela and spinning around with her laughter only matched by his own.  They did a kind of makeshift dance in the dust and gravel at our feet not paying much mind to anything else until they came near the red Ford pickup I vaguely remembered from my initial encounter with Uncle Jim years earlier.  Lela climbed in the passenger side and had already started waving goodbye.  Uncle Jim paused in his sitting looking at me just over the top of the rust edged doorframe of the truck.

“Jon, you keep bein’ a good boy, you hear?   ‘Cause bad or good we all gon’ end up right in ‘ere with the Priest watchin’ over us.  All of us.  ‘Ere’s a lotta bad men and bad things under that ground and all ‘at does is burden ‘im.  It’s a burden doin’ wrong and too much’ll rot the roots right out from underneath the Priest.  You gon’ be a good man, though.  I know it.  You too much like your daddy not to be.  ‘At’s a good man.  You just do like him, hear?”

“Yessir.”

  I doubt he heard my quiet confirmation as the truck roared its pistons awake and left the dust to settle in the tracks of its exit.  Turning on my heel, I instinctively looked at the shadowy corner where the Creosote Priest, or “Priest” as Uncle Jim had affectionately called it, stood leering a gloom strangely hopeful at the fence line.  It took a fairly easy line of questioning directed at my father for me to learn that Jim had met Lela’s mother in the Philippines during a deployment some time in the late 1970s and, leaving his first wife and at the time young son, set himself determined to marry the young woman he’d barely known but incomparably loved.  The whole of the family had made it a point to put the cross to Jim who’s shame had been no match for the sway his heart held over him, but all the same he’d felt compelled to move to California with Tina, his young wife, where she learned to speak English.  Lela Mae, named after Jim’s mother, was born to the couple only a few years later, just two years my junior. 

Ten years later another July afternoon found me on the phone with my mother whose broken sobs finally strengthened into the translation that Lela had been killed in Florida.  Lela had not talked to her mother or father in months, having met a man considerably older than her and naturally choosing the immediacy of her youth over the cautionary tales of the rapidly aging and distanced life she no doubt saw in her parents.  I assume that because I never spoke to Lela again after that afternoon in the Siloam Baptist Church Cemetery.  The plans we’d made as kids eroded into the fabric of actuality, eventually evaporating completely into the anonymity that inevitably floods all manner of relationships crippled by the cruelty of distance and time.  I pulled the truck over after reassuring my mother that all would be well, coaxing a lie for her own sanity as much for my own.  I was sure I’d vomit.  I was so sure I bent over waiting for my mouth to water up but nothing came.  Dropping to my knees, I sobbed into my hands, covering my mouth and wondering why and then feeling immediate shame for even raising the question in my consciousness. 

They buried Lela in that cemetery.  She’s next to her grandmother who passed just two years ago and by Uncle Jim who, just a year prior to his own mother’s death, went missing for a day or two until they found him leaned up against the chicken house on the far end of the family acreage, a .308 in his mouth and the tin siding above him a dull rust from the shot.  I didn’t go to any of the funerals.  I always felt bad about that, but it seemed to me that within those practices lies a kind of pale redundancy, reduced from the adages we might tell each other to catch the next breath and hope for more after that.  A few months after they buried my Aunt Shorty, Jim’s mother, I set out on a last minute whim to Gansville.  It’d been years, and I felt my condolences for family were long overdue.  The gravel and dirt now lay beneath a sterile mass of blacktop, and the aluminum gate to the cemetery had likely worn and had been replaced by one almost identical. 

Time had seen fit for the cemetery to have a real estate firesale of sorts with the open grass I’d stood in with Lela now largely covered in headstones and markers with names I no longer recognized.  Aware of the trip, my mother had made it a point to let me know where they were buried, and I paced my steps as such stopping just at the foot of where Jim lay next to his “baby doll.”  Whatever tears may have welled up were given a singular pause as my eyes caught the dimmed trunk just at the marbled horizon above the engraved rose and bible verse next to “Lela Mae Harper.”  The Creosote Priest swayed slightly in the shadow of its corner just at the other end of the small cemetery, its arms seeming to reach even higher towards the threshold of light.  My feet moved in spite of a stalled brain, stuttering a step across the freshly mowed grass that reeked more of gasoline than anything.  Already covered in the bayou haze and sweat, I neared the edge and felt the pull of a wind just teasing at relief, and as if by some culled up instinct of my better self, I lifted both arms, tilting my head just so to the tips of those praying hands of the Creosote Priest, wondering all the while how deeply his roots had buried themselves into the heart of the soil and how long it might be until his branches swooned to carry the burden of both the good and the evil into the unforgiving light that burned at the edge of his shadow. 

For L.