The best navigational charts put the number of islands at about 200. The shorelines are sheer cliffs, jagged and white as bergs, crowded with puffins, cormorants, and gulls. Every island lies within sight of several others, and no island is separated from another by more than two hops. On a map, if you pinned down segments of string linking the islands, you would describe a network more entwined than the strands of a spider web. But understand this: if you tried to pull the string into a knot, gently, the tangled connections would amount to nothing more than a simple loop. It would be as if the archipelago were not even there.
Poetry by Sebastian Matthews
The first thing I learned about her was that she was dead. Her short story “The Hill” had just walloped me. I was still feeling a little blindsided and concussed on finishing it—my fingers tingling—and so her obituary was an unfortunate place to commence her biography. I mean the writer Berry Morgan. Before reading this story, I had been a stranger to her name. She had come to my attention through Edith Pearlman, a short-story writer who advocated her for Ecotone’s new “Reclamation” department. Edith told me that Morgan’s story “The Hill,” published in 1973 in the New Yorker, was among the best stories she’d ever read, but that for some reason no one to whom she mentioned it could remember ever having read it. The story was not even given a mention by the anthologies in the year following its publication, and although it was later included in Morgan’s collection, The Mystic Adventures of Roxie Stoner, it has never, to my knowledge, been reprinted.
Sometimes in the summer, the lightning doesn’t arrive until two a.m. The sky is like obsidian, or black marble suddenly hewn down the center. I always think of Michelangelo.
Poetry by Lisa Fink
Poetry by Patrick Phillips
Poetry by Robert Aquinas McNally
Poetry by Bruce Cohen
Poetry by Kevin Prufer
Poetry by Karina Borowicz
My mother and her sister push the old green VW Beetle from the shed down the cobblestone drive. This is their chance to escape the drudgery of Mutti’s home, the endless polishing of wood and washing of wool and cooking of dust. The sun is high and behind them, the house stands empty. Maike, newly out of the Pädagogische Hochschule, wears a pantsuit and sandals; my mother wears a dress, a gift from Maike, one of the first store-bought outfits she has ever owned (You can have this and more, if you work hard enough! Maike promised, as my mother modeled the butter-yellow shift in the mirror at Karstadt.) The women maneuver the car into the street while clouds overhead drift smoothly out toward the Baltic. Though this is midsummer, the air reels with autumn crispness. The engine refuses to start, and so the women get back out and push the VW toward the street’s decline. There is something inelegant about this labor, but my mother and her sister don’t care. They don’t care how they look or what the neighbors think, most of whom have always been deeply suspicious of Mutti’s daughters. They know that the neighbors know that Mutti doesn’t approve of this VW (she often calls it a piece of junk while chatting in the garden with Frau Mortorf). But what does that matter? Maike drives it with obvious pride. Mutti herself drives a used Karmann Ghia, a reckless piece of car that barely gets her to and from the center of the Heikendorf, where she teaches elementary school. She earned that Karmann Ghia, just as Maike earned the VW—but there is something awful, of course, about a daughter claiming the prize in much less time than it took the mother. (Will Maike and Elke ever know what a struggle my life was? Mutti asks Frau Mortorf as they shake their heads in the twilight.)
At the decline, my mother and Maike give the VW a final push, jump back in, and descend the hill. Frau Mortorf opens her curtains and shakes her head. Look at that—the one girl merely seventeen and her sister no more than twenty-two, and a teacher at that! The height ofUnverschaemtheit!
My mother and Maike wave at Frau Mortorf’s window as their car zips by, its motor finally engaged! Auf wiedersehen, Frau Mortorf!
They brake at the bottom of the hill to embrace each other and to apply lipstick in the rearview mirror. They can’t stop laughing. But after a minute or so they drive off. My mother and her sister have to make good time if they want to make the festival at Flensburg, which will be starting in a matter of hours.
Long Island
November 2006
This was in the late 1950s. I was a student at the Pedagogic College where they trained teachers. To be honest, I was pretty mediocre. My teachers often let me slide when I mentioned that Maike Schmidt was my sister. She was the shining star, the teachers expected me to do well because of her. And I did do well in Germanistik. But basically I slid.
Maike had received her degree and was already teaching in a school. She was not married. My sister was not like other women. Germany in the 1950s, you have to understand.
I wanted to quit school. I wanted a job. I wanted to move out so badly. My parents had just gotten a divorce and Mutti used me as a sounding board. She complained all the time about Papa and his women—I couldn’t take it.
Photo: Andrew Parnell
Summer’s Company (Multiple Universes)
A poem by Pattiann Rogers
Poetry by Kevin Prufer
Sway Me Smooth: Sound Track for an MRI of the Brain
I Like to Move It
“Don’t move,” the technician named Molly says. Then she squeezes my ankle and leaves the room. Move? I’m supine, with a thick white semicircular cage locked across my entire face. Rubber chocks immobilize my neck and head on a table so narrow I think one deep breath could topple me. Even if I weren’t dizzy. But I’ve been dizzy nonstop for thirteen weeks and six days. When I lie, sit, stand, move. When I look up or down, left or right. When wind stirs the maple leaves outside my bedroom window or birds fly by or images flash on the television screen. I can’t drive, need a cane to walk, have fallen in grocery stores and on sidewalks. Persistent dizziness and vertigo are why I’m here, in a remodeled former cake factory, about to be drawn into the bore of a giant magnet. The magnet will force hydrogen atoms in my brain to line up neatly, then bombard them with radio waves so a computer can identify what’s causing the problem in my brain or inner ear. Movement is something I’m no longer good at, and no longer do without careful planning. So, okay, Molly, I won’t move.
Suddenly her voice is in my head. “Earphones work?”
I force myself not to nod, and risk a shallow-breathed whisper: “Unless I’m having aural hallucinations.”
“Good. Now what kind of music do you like?”
Like most people, my head is often filled with music. Broadway, 1950s rock, the pop crooners, dance music. A random word can trigger a whole string of melody and lyrics, which explains why the song running through my brain now, triggered a moment ago by Molly’s telling me not move, is Reel 2 Real’s 1994 hit “I Like to Move It.” It’s been a sticky song—an earworm—for me since my wife, Beverly, and I watched Julianne Hough and Apolo Anton Ono samba to it on Dancing with the Stars. I like to move it, move it. I like to move it, move it.
“Music?”
“Yeah, we can play music through your earphones. Helps distract you. Some of the scans can be a little noisy.”
A little noisy. I’ve had two brain MRIs before, twenty years ago, and remember feeling as though I were stuck inside a jackhammer.
Without thinking, and overriding the crazed tune in my head, I tell Molly, “The old standards.” That seems to confound her. There’s a click in my earphones, then silence, then another click.
“Name a singer you like.”
I doubt she’d know who Vaughan Monroe was. Or Matt Munro, either. “How about Michael Bublé?”
“That’ll work.”
She reminds me about the squeeze ball she handed me to use if I need help, and re-reminds me not to move. Then the table is moving backward and I know enough to close my eyes so I won’t have to see the tiny space where I’ll be spending the next forty-five minutes. Molly’s view of me now: the pale blue paper shorts I’ve been issued, from which protrude my legs and feet, held absolutely still.
Photo: Jon Olav
A poem by Douglas Kearney
. . . and there was that one winter afternoon, after I left the hotel on Montmartre, because sometimes after I would see the other boy, the French boy Alex from the university and the bleak graffiti-splattered classroom building on Rue Censier, then everything would seem more strange than ever, sometimes I wouldn’t go right back to the apartment on Rue Broca, I mean I couldn’t go back there right then and just talk and try to act naturally around Billy, and it was the same for me that afternoon after I was together with the French boy up on Montmartre, and I suppose a better way of putting it would be that I really couldn’t face Billy, I couldn’t face him just yet after having spent the afternoon with Alex in another one of those one-star hotels where we did go in the afternoon . . .
Photo: Haahr via Flickr
The prisoners released before me had flown home from The Hague in airplanes sent for them by their states. I was the first one who wasn’t a national hero. The guard just handed me a train ticket to Sarajevo and some pocket money for travel expenses. I greeted him with “Tot ziens” and he answered with “Tot nooit, hopelijk!” —an unsubtle indication he didn’t want to see me again.
In the train I couldn’t take my eyes off the window: moving, everything was moving. Houses, cities, gliding by, going away, a constant flow of change after eleven years of immobility.
Waiting for another train in Düsseldorf, I felt like a ghost returning to the world for the first time. I moved out of the way of a person talking to himself, a sure sign of madness at the time of my imprisonment, whereas now everybody had headphones and their mouths were empty of cigarettes.
After Munich the landscape got more and more orderly. Austrians took symmetry and tidiness for beauty, their windows vomiting carnations from houses built to last forever. The train entered the tunnel and came out in Slovenia. I expected to see the big steel factory, once the pride of Yugoslavia, but only one chimney still stood, covered with ads for supermarkets and foreign brands.
Nobody entered my compartment—Slovenia was now part of the EU and there were no more border policemen or customs officers in Europe. But at the Croatian border I was asked for my papers. A pair of Slovenian officers browsed my documents: “Den Haag—The International War Crimes Tribunal for crimes committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia.” They looked momentarily bewildered, until the policeman, still a kid, sucked air into his spreading chest, soaking his words in venom. I looked into his eyes and the air left him. His partner, the customs officer, elbowed him out the door. The Croat officers didn’t know how to react and quickly went away; they had their own war with the Muslims and some of their heroes had been my prison buddies.
When the train stopped in Zagreb, I bought myself some newspapers. The Croats had buried one of their fascist commandants from the Second World War. In his camp they had killed at least seventy thousand people. Though he fled to Argentina after the war, escaping hanging, he had been in prison, unrepentant, for the past decade, after having finally been extradited. At the funeral the priest said the prisoner had slept peacefully throughout his life, since he knew that God had forgiven him everything.
The train entered Bosnia on the Serbian side of the country and when I offered my papers to the officers, they stood at attention, saluting me like windup toys, while they retreated backward. The staff of the small border station started walking up and down the platform, pretending to be running errands, stealing glances through my window.
I dug into the corner and shame covered me like an icy blanket.
The Sarajevo train station looked forlorn, as though no one had used it since the war began, sixteen years ago. Cigarette smoke drifted from the cafés in front of it. I waited on the abandoned platform until my bus arrived and I almost ran for it, my head lowered.
I had not called anybody in my village to let them know I was coming. The last time I had seen my former wife was in court, on the witness stand. She was talking about how she had begged me to dissolve the factory but I had beaten her into silence. I stopped listening to her. The knowledge that this must be the same lie my daughters were hearing from her dripped from my heart through my body like acid, leaving just burnt hollowness inside. For her testimony she got a change of identity and money for them to start over. I received the divorce papers in prison, signed them, and put a letter on top asking her not to ever mention me to my girls. She didn’t answer.
Photo: Gremlin
Five hundred miles from the mainland, obscured by the curve of the earth, the islands of a nameless archipelago dot a patch of blue tarpaulin sea. Barren, old, crumbling, the islands are the only defined points on a watery plain that is as vacant and forlorn as sky. Cargo ships chugging across the sea leave wakes of foam, and the wakes crisscross like pick-up sticks, but purposeless currents dissolve these lines. Jet trails across the sky repeat this behavior, the perfect lines, the breaking apart. Clouds of fish drift below, clouds of rain above. Sheens of oil. A stray, melting iceberg from the south. A fishing net torn loose. Nothing holds fast. Not even the islands of the archipelago. They are old and chalky, and they are crumbling into the sea; most have eroded to fewer than a hundred yards wide; the lowest ones are submerged during storms. Someday, the islands of the archipelago will wash away.
A poem by
