IssueNo.5

CONVERSATIONS FROM THE VIRTUAL VALLEY

Our new series featuring author interviews, readings and panels.

Laura Cogan in conversation with David Ulin, moderated by Andrew Tonkovich.

Watch the interview

 

Poetry Anthology Forward     Poems     Participant Essay     Participant Essay     Novel Excerpt

POEMS

by Maw Shein Win

The Dome

 

That’s not what she said, that’s what I said.

The ants were everywhere.

 

In one conversation, a person speaks, the other pretends to listen.

Takes place in an elevator with a velvet pillow.

 

The ants take over city hall.

They circle the exits, fill sinks, crawl into politicians’ ear canals.

 

One by one, people stop talking & listening.

The ants inch along the cool tiles into the dome hole.

 

  

 

The Chalice

 

A honey possum darts across the floor of a downtown bar

among table legs and teachers & tourists.

In another city a developer sets a building on fire.

 

The stand-up downs a shot of honey bourbon.

Survivors crawl into the emergency wagon.

In another city the children play air guitar on trains for coins.

 

The cabaret singer has bright teeth & a honeyed voice.

Eight survivors wrapped in blankets.

Two tourists leave the bar.

 

In another city a woman sits alone in a kitchen.

She considers revolution, sipping honey

wine from a glass chalice.

 

 

Still

 

I stand perfectly still in the classroom corner

Wearing a paper dunce cap while balancing on one leg

A memory: knocking a pitcher of water off the countertop

Just to watch it shatter

 

Tonight I hear the fireworks outside

Crackling the stillness inside

A thought: the story of a girl who had tumbled into a cave

And crawled her way out & up

 

Alive & quiet

I wear a red cloak to the 4^th of July picnic

I stand still beside a pine tree

Three drops of sap land on my cheek

 

Focus my eye on a cave swallow until the fireworks end

 

 

Gazelle

 

 

sleeps near a tumbleweed

with vessels & veins thumping soft like

 

witness the neighbors in search of water

& the cabin dwellers in fear of fire

 

what makes sounds at night: nwack, nwack

 hairs on heels, stiff & pointed

 

young gazelle with bruised sides

                        licking water drops from a desert fountain

 

---

 

Maw Shein Win is a poet, editor, and educator who lives and teaches in the Bay Area. Her poetry chapbooks are Ruins of a glittering palace(SPA/Commonwealth Projects) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Invisible Gifts: Poems was published by Manic D Press in 2018. She was a 2019 Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at UC Berkeley. Win is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito, California (2016 – 2018), and her full-length poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020). She often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers. mawsheinwin.com

Poetry Anthology Forward     Poems     Participant Essay     Participant Essay     Novel Excerpt

PARTICIPANT ESSAY

Run Away Home

by Katherine Seligman

I ran away from home when I was six. It was after a birthday party in my backyard with my family, a few classmates, and a duckling named Downy. That much I remember clearly. Someone had given him to me at Easter, without knowing what a bad idea that was. He followed me around the yard, marching behind like I was his mother. I grew more attached every day, even though my parents kept saying he should be in a pond.

But on that birthday, he was the perfect guest. I was not. I wasn’t allowed to win any games or go first at anything. I remember the dry fall air bewitched by Santa Ana winds, and standing alone by the back fence, the anger bubbling up inside. When the kids went home, I was exhausted. And mad, which was not uncommon for me. My mother probably yelled at me and I probably yelled back. There was a lot of anger in the house, both directed at and blasted back out into the world by me.

I don’t remember exactly why I got sent to my room that time because it happened so often, but once I was there, the fury escalated until I reached a fitting decision: I was going to leave. I walked down the hall and out the front door. I didn’t take anything with me, and I didn’t see anyone on my way down the suburban Los Angeles street where we lived, towards where it intersected with a busy throughway that led all the way to the ocean. On the corner, there was a patch of ivy. In the mental picture I made that day, it was a wild garden, a perfect place to hide.

**********

In the children’s book my mother, Dorothy Halle Seligman, wrote about this episode, she created a character named Billy. He was a little boy whose cheerful mother reminds him to take his sweater and hands him his lunch before leaving for school. There is a turtle named Tillie, but no duck. Billy looks about six, but he walks to school, or rather enthusiastically, runs all the way.

At school he realizes he’s forgotten his lunch, so his friends offer him parts of theirs and he’s satisfied until he gets home, without his sweater. His mother does the obvious right thing and makes him go back to school to get it, but when he arrives, the door is locked. At home, he’s crabby and his mother sends him to his room, with a directive to stay until he’s not so cross.

‘“I will,” stormed Billy. “And when I get there I’m going to pack my things and I’m running away.”

Of course, in the book, the kid is storming the mother is mothering. She is busy cooking dinner and when he says he’s running away because no one cares, she tells him, “I care.” He is unmoved.

‘ “You won’t cry,” he says.

“Grownups cry inside,” Billy’s mother explained.’

But she doesn’t protest. This was not the world of Runaway Bunny, the 1942 classic where the mother rabbit tells her son that she will follow him anywhere if he runs away. Billy’s mother helps him prepare for the getaway, telling him what shoes to wear and giving him a warm sweater and mittens. Then she hands him his uneaten lunch and bids him goodbye.

Billy runs across his school friends soon after he leaves and they invite him to play, then tell him how they’ve run away before also. He shares his lunch with them and suddenly can’t remember why he was so mad. It’s getting dark so he heads home, where his dad is standing in the kitchen tasting something on the stove. This is how the book ends:

‘“How was it at the North Pole?” he asks.

“Cold,” Billy answers.’

I read the book, Run Away Home, when it came out in 1969, and realized for the first time that that my mother had known all along about the day I ran away. We didn’t talk

 about it then, and it remained one of the many things that remained unexplained. A fiancé during the second world war who died in a plane crash. The reason she always sent me and my sister to live with her parents in Tennessee for the entire summer. Her ovarian cancer diagnosis and the following months where she kept insisting, though bedridden, “I am beating this.” She died much too soon, when I was in my twenties, so we never got to know each other as adults.

Her book, of course, reflects the time when it was written. Parents were not helicopters. They were supposed to cry inside, while exhibiting perfect calm on the outside. They were neat, civilized, prosperous, after all those dark war years. No one was supposed to know if they suffered. If a kid ran away, of course they’d smile and help him. You wouldn’t want the neighbors to know that something had gone wrong.

Even the illustrations are muted, in brown and gray tones. The mother’s face is full of empathy, but you can’t tell if she’s worried. All the houses on the street, with their eaves and lush yards, look inviting. Kids are playing, adults are in the yard or pushing strollers. It was the late sixties, when social protests were percolating. But if the Summer of Love was happening in San Francisco, the streets in Billy’s neighborhood were blissfully peaceful.

**********

What I remember is that the ivy wasn’t as high as I’d thought so I had to keep readjusting my position to stay hidden. Were those spiders crawling in the dirt? I curled on my side, then rolled face down, telling myself that my parents must be frantic. It felt like hours passed and the anger didn’t suddenly evaporate. No one came looking for me. I started to get itchy and bored. I couldn’t stay still any longer.

On the way home, I didn’t see anyone. We lived among blocks of ranch style houses with well-tended gardens. I could bike to see friends, but mostly we went everywhere in a car. You could walk down our entire street and not see another person.

When I got inside, no one asked where I’d been. My mother told me to take a bath and filled the tub. She was going to cook dinner and I should put on clean clothes, she said. I suspected she thought I’d stayed in my room the whole time. At dinner, everything was normal, or it looked that way. My mother brought out the food and we sat down and ate it because that it was what you did.

**********

People might have thought my mother was like the one in her book, but the truth was she gave up her work as a radio journalist when she got married and never seemed at peace staying home with kids. She was frustrated and irascible. My parents were born in the south and moved to Los Angeles, like so many others, to reinvent themselves. My father worked long hours as a doctor and my mother did volunteer work, mingled with her friends, wrote two children’s books that were published and a few detective novels that were not.

I remember seeing my parents mostly in the morning and at night, which gave me a certain freedom, but also a sense of being utterly alone. In elementary school, sometimes I would go to the beach with friends or hang out in the notorious Vacant Lot one street over. But usually I filled the time playing with the stuffed animals in my room and reading.

My parents eventually got rid of Downy, who waddled after us, until my father accidentally stepped on his leg, and then he limped after us, with a popsicle stick brace attached to his damaged limb. There were no ponds anywhere near where we lived, but I didn’t question that at the time. I cried, but that was the end of it. Downy was happy so I should be happy for him. He became another detail in my childhood, but not one that was glorious or tragic.

But the day I ran away, that stayed with me. It was when I learned how alone I was, which is something we all come to know, eventually. It may have partly been what turned me into a writer. My running away was, I can now see, as much my mother’s event as it was mine. It was hers to remember or render. “Here is a story that captures an experience of childhood itself, lovingly told with humor, insight and charm,” says the jacket cover. It was, I thought, when I picked up the book recently. The mother in the story wants Billy to know the world is safe. There is no fury or darkness, not the way there is in the imaginations of many kids. The way there was in mine. Mostly, though, I thought how little we know what is in the minds of our parents, or of our children, perhaps of anyone. That is why we make up stories.

NOVEL EXCERPT

Strangers Here

by Vicki Forman

My years of flight began on an empty service road, outside of Tarrytown, New York. I was nineteen and pregnant, in love with a group of radicals, one of whom, Peter Hass, had fathered the baby I carried. I could say Peter and his group seduced me but that would be a lie. I joined them because I wanted to belong, because they spoke in big long sentences about ideas that were important: fairness, equality, justice. Because we believed we could change the world and didn’t care about what might happen to us or anyone else along the way. “The way we break things is the way we fix them,” Peter said to me the day we first met. Right away I knew I would be there with him when it happened, the breaking and the fixing.

And so, on the morning of the hold-up, I watched as Peter and Gordon and the others moved the canvas bags from the U-Haul, parked on the service road. The men seemed tense. Gordon worked quietly, distracted, his usual energy deflated. Harry Bee was silent, the look on his face impossible to read. I tried to see if Peter noticed, but he and Steadman were busy taking the bags from Harry Bee and loading them into the trunks of the waiting cars.

“What happened?” I asked. “Something’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Gordon said. “We’re cool. It’s all good.”

I didn’t believe him. Gordon was preoccupied, distant. We all moved this way, mechanically, distracted, the way you might move in a dream, paying close attention to each gesture like you might not finish the step otherwise: Harry Bee grabbing the heavy bags from the U-Haul, Peter taking them from him to stack them in the waiting cars. My car, a bright red Chevy Nova, was empty except for groceries to feed us during our time at the safe house. If the cops stopped me, I was just a teenager, headed out of the city to visit friends. I was the decoy, the good girl.

That was the plan, complicated, methodical. Then there was the mood – anxious, worried. And finally there was that tension between Gordon and Harry Bee. Peter finished loading the Corvette, then tossed his backpack into the front seat. He didn’t look at me and I could tell it was because he was worried all over again about my being there at all.

“We’ve been through this,” I said. “It’s going to be fine. I’m ready.”

“If anything goes wrong—”

“Save myself,” I said.

As if to confirm my confidence, the sun broke through the clouds and shone on the U-Haul’s back window. Gordon squinted, shielding his eyes against the sudden sunlight. He went to hug Peter. “See you brother,” he said, and when he leaned in I saw it, the smallest trace of blood, a tiny splatter at the edge of his glasses. And there, on the side of his palm, the hand that shielded his face, another.

“You’re bleeding,” I said.

“Where?”

“Your cheek.” Because there it was, another small spray of blood. “It’s on your glasses. Your hand.”

Gordon removed his round wire-framed glasses, saw the blood, then brushed his hand across his cheek. “It’s nothing,” he said.

Far off, I heard sirens. “Let’s move,” Peter said. “Why are we standing around like this? Come on.” He went to the U-Haul and slammed shut the back of the van. I saw the blood then, a splatter across the back window, trailing down the white metal door. This was why Harry Bee and Gordon were so silent. This was the reason for the tension between them. Gordon followed my gaze. Don’t, his look said. Not now.

I should have said something, told Peter and Steadman, called Gordon out. I should have said, “Where did that blood come from?” but the sirens were real, coming closer. We all heard them. There was no time to question, no time to insist on an answer.

“Let’s go,” Peter said. “Now.”

I got into the Nova and started it up, slowly making my way down the service road towards the Thruway. Peter and the others formed a caravan behind me. I came to a stoplight turning yellow and hesitated, wondering if I should brake or move on. On instinct, I went through the intersection and pulled to the side to wait for the others. Peter was stopped at the light. I waited and watched as Gordon pulled a sudden U-turn, barely avoiding the oncoming traffic, escaping the intersection, driving off in the opposite direction.

The light stayed red and Peter and Steadman were still there, still waiting, even as the Datsun sped off. A moment later, the intersection filled with police, arriving all at once, coming to a stop in front of Peter and Steadman.

I forced my gaze away from the scene. I thought of Gordon pulling the U-turn, how he and Harry Bee had sped off.

Mechanically, I put the car in gear, turned on the blinker, pulled into traffic, driving away. Until that moment, I might have been an accessory, a hanger on. But that was it, the day I joined the Movement for real.

 

The safe house was in the Berkshires, between Williamstown and Bennington. The place belonged to a friend of Gordon’s, an old Movement member willing to protect us. I drove as if I knew where I was going, sure the police would catch up to me, and then, after the first dozen miles, stunned they hadn’t. Somehow, miraculously, I had escaped. I suppose I looked like what I was: a college co-ed, out for a ride. I drove as I were that girl, as if nothing had happened back on the service road. Peter and Steadman weren’t been caught. Gordon and Harry Bee hadn’t driven off. As if I wasn’t nineteen and pregnant and on the run.

After an hour I made it to Poughkeepsie, and still no one was behind me. I knew I should keep going but I was hungry and so I took the exit, turned onto an empty lane and drove another mile past several farmhouses until I was alone on the road. I stopped the car and opened the trunk to find the bag of gourmet groceries I’d splurged on that morning at Dean and DeLuca. Stupid girl, I thought, remembering how I’d picked each item as an indulgence. There was champagne and cheese and crackers, a basket of raspberries and a chocolate cake. I ripped open a round of gouda to break off a piece. I ate without thinking, barely tasting past the basic flavors: the salt of the cheese and the sweet of the raspberries and the tart of the champagne which I opened it to drink straight from the bottle. I shouldn’t have been drinking the champagne at all but there were a lot of things I shouldn’t have been doing. I stuck my hand into the chocolate cake, to eat a fistful in one bite.

I looked down at the disarray and up at the cold dark sky and couldn’t imagine what came next. There was forty dollars in my wallet, an address in the Berkshires I’d memorized, and a baby growing inside me. I thought about the baby and I thought about Peter, back there on the service road. I began to cry, more angry than afraid, but stopped myself. Where would the tears get me? I was no longer a decoy, but a target now. Even Peter had said my job was to save myself. It was up to me to keep moving, to put all the distance possible between myself and Peter.

I grabbed my pack from the backseat, changed into my black engineer boots and walked away from the red sedan and the trunk full of groceries like it belonged to me. A few minutes later a car passed, then pulled to a stop and I saw with relief that a young girl was driving, someone close to my age. “Hey,” the girl said, through the open passenger window. “Where you headed?”

“North,” I told her. “The Berkshires.”

Sarah was on her way to visit her boyfriend at SUNY Albany. In another life, she and I might have gossiped about all the things we had in common, but I kept my answers short and blunt and when she realized I wasn’t the gregarious traveling companion she hoped for, she gave up too, turning the radio to an all-news station. We drove north up the valley, away from the river, and at every toll booth I sunk a little into my parka, averting my gaze from the collector. After Sarah dropped me off outside Albany, another car stopped. Josh and Eli were long-haired and dressed in flannel and thankfully harmless, even when they lit up a joint between them and Josh drove stoned with Creedence playing on the tape deck. I let myself relax in the back seat, allowing some relief to set in: I had escaped. The red sedan was far behind me. I was closer to the safe house with every mile.

The Berkshires came into view, and soon we were in their midst, peaked grey hills with the road narrowing between them in deep valleys. Night found me arriving into Bennington. I knew from memory the address on Middle Pownal Road; at a Friendly’s on Main Street the teenager behind the cash register gave me directions so simple I couldn’t get lost, even in the dark. Half an hour out of town I knocked on the door of a one-story farmhouse whose dim lights barely lit up the dark stubble of lawn in front. A young girl, maybe six years old, answered the knock. From behind the screen door I could see a woman in the kitchen, her back at the sink.

“Mom,” the girl called, and then the woman turned and I saw it was Rosa, a friend of Harry Bee’s, whom I once met at party on Osage Avenue. Rosa had a long braid down her back that swayed behind her when she turned.

“It’s you,” Rosa said. She pulled me into the house, closing the door behind me. “Where’s everyone else?” she asked.

I didn’t answer, and Rosa seemed to understand what it meant that I was alone. “Okay,” she said. She went back to the kitchen and returned with a cup of tea and a bowl of pasta. The girl emerged from a room down the hall. “Mom?” she said.

“I’ll be back,” Rosa said.

I ate the food Rose gave me, then sat out on the sofa and drank the tea, covering myself with a quilt. The windows of the front room looked out upon the road, which was still and quiet and dark. I heard the sound of Rosa putting the girl to bed. After a while, she came back to sit in the armchair across from me, her expression a mixture of anger and worry.

“What happened?” she asked. “Where’s Harry Bee? Where are the others?”

“The police came,” I said. “They trapped Peter and Frank. Gordon and Harry Bee escaped.” We both looked around at the empty living room, understanding what we both now knew to be true. Harry Bee and Gordon weren’t coming. It really was just me. The girl without cash in her trunk, the decoy.

“This was a ridiculous idea to begin with,” Rosa said. “Completely and utterly absurd. What was wrong with you all? What got into you?”

“It could have worked,” I said. “Something went wrong.” I let myself think about that spray of blood on the back door of the U-Haul, the specks of blood on Gordon’s glasses, his cheek. “Something happened.”

“Don’t tell me anything else,” Rosa said. “Go to bed. We’ll figure out a plan in the morning.”

Obediently, I lay on the couch, covered myself with the quilt and tried to erase the images of the hold-up, Peter and Steadman cornered, Harry Bee and Gordon driving off. The plan had failed and I had escaped. I felt the baby move the way it did when I was lying down and while it kicked and rolled I fell asleep, exhausted, to dream of the beach at Sea Ranch, my feet in the soft cold sand.

 

When I awoke the next morning, Rosa and her daughter were already in the kitchen, eating breakfast. I sat down at the table across from the girl, relieved to see that Rosa’s reluctance did not extend to her food. The eggs and pancakes were warm, the Irish breakfast tea strong. I wanted to find a way to make her want me there. “I wish we were all here,” I said. “I wish it hadn’t fallen apart.” I almost wanted to say, I wish they had caught me instead of Peter. “I’m sorry.”

“Apologies are a waste of time,” said Rosa, clearing the dishes from the girl’s breakfast, and setting a plate in front of me. The girl, whose name was Ellie, stared at me from across the table. “You don’t like syrup?” Ellie asked.

“Not really.”

“What do you like?” Ellie asked.

I shrugged. “Music, books. School.”

Ellie grimaced. “Not me.”

“Syrup for you then, school for me.”

After I ate, Ellie pulled me down the hall and into her room and got me to spend the morning playing My Pretty Pony with her toy figures, combing their pink manes and trotting the toys around the room on adventures to collect magic stones. Playing with the girl, I became conscious of my belly pressing against my too-tight waistband. I tried not to think of the summer ahead, when the baby was due. All those plans, gone now. I listened to the street sounds, holding onto what I knew was a fantasy: Gordon and Harry Bee would show up, pull into Rosa’s driveway, their car doors flying open, an arrival that would rescue me from My Pretty Pony and everything else. No one came and at lunchtime Rosa announced, “I found you a place to stay.”

“I thought I was staying here,” I said. “I thought that was the plan.”

“Not anymore,” said Rosa. “Not after everything that’s happened.”

In the kitchen an open box on the table contained plates and cups, basic staples like cereal and peanut butter. A loaf of bread. There were maternity clothes too, a big bright green jumper and jeans with stretchy flaps at the front.

“You knew?” I said. “About the baby?”

“It’s hardly a secret. Your belly says it all.”

I was six months pregnant. Rosa was right, I wasn’t fooling anyone. Without apology, she carried the supplies from the kitchen to the driveway, putting them in the backseat of her car, an old Subaru with Massachusetts plates. She directed me to the backseat. “Get down,” she said, closing the door on me.

We pulled out of the driveway and headed through town, Rosa explaining the plan as she drove. “We’re going to Brattleboro. There’s an inn there. My cousin Johnny hired you to work in the kitchen.”

“I don’t know how to cook,” I said. My words sounded childish, and plaintive. I resented the way Rosa had taken over and directed things now that it was just me, and no one else had come. I didn’t want her cast-off maternity clothes or her old dishes. “This was never the plan.”

“Clearly the plan changed,” she said. “When people ask, you’re an old friend from Rochester. Our parents knew each other. They played golf together.”

“What if I don’t want to learn how to cook?”

“You have a better idea?” she said. “Some other option I don’t know about?”

I didn’t. “What happens when the baby comes?” I asked.

“We’ll figure it out,” she said. “For now, follow the plan. Find a way to make it work.”

Rose’s advice came off like a threat, as if I were some kind of problematic teenager, which I suppose I was. In the coming months and years, I found this common, how the help I got offered often came with judgment. Eventually, I learned to accept the trade, criticism in exchange for a place to stay, a job, a box of kitchen supplies. This was my punishment for being part of the hold-up, for saving myself and driving away. Rosa’s threat made clear what I’d known all day, while I played with Ellie and waited for Gordon or Harry Bee to show up: I was a fugitive now. My safety would come at the mercy of others. I lay down on the back seat of the Subaru and Rosa drove through the mountains to Brattleboro and I stayed quiet the whole way, just like Rosa told me I should.

---

Vicki Forman is an alumna of the Writers Conference. She is the author of This Lovely Life, A Memoir of Premature Motherhood (Houghton Mifflin/Mariner Books), winner of the PEN Center Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize and selected as a 100 Best Book by the San Francisco Chronicle. In her life outside of writing, she works as a Registered Nurse at a Level One trauma center in Los Angeles.

 

A Letter from the Editor

Editor, OGQ