Camille T. Dungy

Do you see current events differently because you were raised by a black father and are married to a black man? I am surprised they haven’t left already — things have gotten downright frosty, nearly unbearable. A mob of them is apparently mouthing off outside when I put down my newspaper and we all gather to stand beside my daughter in the bay of kitchen windows.Quiscalus quiscula: this name sounds like a spell which, after its casting, will make things crumble into a complement of unanswerable questions. Though, if you need me to tell you God’s honest truth, I know nothing but their common name the morning we watch them attack our feeder. I complain about the mess they leave. Hulls I’ll have to sweep up or ignore. My father — who I am thankful is still alive — says We could use a different kind of seed

Stripped in a flamedance, the bluff backing our houses quivered in wet-black skin. A shawl of haze tugged tight around the starkness. We could have choked on August. Smoke thick in our throats, nearly naked as the earth, we played bare feet over the heat caught in asphalt. Could we, green girls, have prepared for this? Yesterday, we played in sand-carpeted caves. The store we built sold broken bits of ice plant, empty snail shells, leaves. Our school’s walls were open sky. We reeled in wonder from the hills, oblivious to the beckoning crescendo and to our parent’s hushed communion. When our bluff swayed into the undulation, we ran into the still streets of our suburb, feet burning against a fury that we did not know was change.

One will live to see the Caterpillar rut everything they walk on—seacliff buckwheat cleared, relentless ice plant to replace it, the wild fields bisected by the scenic highway, canyons covered with cul-de-sacs, gas stations, comfortable homes, the whole habitat along this coastal stretch endangered, everything, everyone, everywhere in it danger as well— but now they're logging the one stilling hawk Smith sights, the conspiring grasses' shh shhhh ssh, the coreopsis Mattoni's boot barely spares, and, netted, a solitary blue butterfly. Smith ahead of him chasing the stream, Mattoni wonders if he plans to swim again. Just like that the spell breaks. It's years later, Mattoni lecturing on his struggling butterfly. How fragile. • If his daughter spooled out the fabric she's chosen for her wedding gown, raw taffeta, burled, a bright hued tan, perhaps Mattoni would remember how those dunes looked from a distance, the fabric, balanced between her arms, making valleys in the valley, the fan above her mimicking the breeze. He and his friend loved everything softly undulating under the coyest wind, and the rough truth as they walked through the land's scratch and scrabble and no one was there, then, besides Mattoni and his friend, walking along Dolan's Creek, in that part of California they hated to share. The ocean, a mile or so off, anything but passive so that even there, in the canyon, they sometimes heard it smack and pull well-braced rocks. The breeze, basic: salty, bitter, sour, sweet. Smith trying to identify the scent, tearing leaves of manzanita, yelling: "This is it. Here! This is it!" his hand to his nose, his eyes, having finally seen the source of his pleasure, alive. • In the lab, after the accident, he remembered it, the butterfly. How good a swimmer Smith had been, how rough the currents there at Half Moon Bay, his friend alone with reel and rod—Mattoni back at school early that year, his summer finished too soon— then all of them together in the sneaker wave, and before that the ridge, congregations of pinking blossoms, and one of them bowing, scaring up the living, the frail and flighty beast too beautiful to never be pinned, those nights Mattoni worked without his friend, he remembered too. He called the butterfly Smith's Blue.

Lynda Hull Maybe you sold it to buy junk. Though I like to think not. And I don't want to think you used the money for food or rent or anything obligatory, practical. A pair of boots, perhaps. Thigh high burgandy boots with gold laces. Something crucial as lilies. Mostly, I want to believe you held onto the book, that your fingers brailed those pages' inky veins even in your final weeks. I want to believe words can be that important in the end. Who can help the heart, which is grand and full of gestures? I had been on my way out. He was rearranging his bookshelves when, in an approximation of tenderness, he handed me, like the last of the sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving, like a thing he wanted but was willing to share, the rediscovered book— he'd bought it years ago in a used bookstore in Chicago. Levine's poems, with your signature inside. That whole year I spent loving him, something splendid as lemons, sour and bright and leading my tongue toward new language, was on the shelf. These weren't your own poems, autographed, a stranger's souvenir—we'd spent vain months leafing through New York stacks for your out-of-print collections—but you'd cared about this book, or cared enough to claim it, your name looped across the title page as if to say,Please. This is mine, This book is mine. Though you sold it. Or someone else did when you died. We make habits out of words. I grew accustomed to his, the way they spooned me into sleep so many times. Now I am sleepless and alone another night. What would you give for one more night alone? No booze. No drugs. Just that hunger and those words. He gave me The Names of the Lost. Need comes down hard on a body. What else was sold? What else—do you know?—did we lose

I will enter you as hope enters me, through blinding liquid, light of rain, and I will stay inside until you send me out; I will stay inside until you ground me. We cannot outrun the rain. So many summers I have tried. So many summers. But when the rumble calls after the spark there can be no escape. No outstripping the drench soak, the wet sheath, the water caul. This is more than you want to hear. Much more than I want to tell you. Tabernacle transporting my life from the desert, you, the faith I am born and reborn into, you, rescuer, deliverer of rain.

Because she'd heard him laugh through new moon darkness and she knew he'd fallen and she knew, before she turned, he'd be crawling, like a crawdad, rock to loam— because she tried to love the straight back and neck he'd erected to recollect the man he'd been before—because she found herself adding up his usefulness like some kind of auctioneer—she showed him the dark coils areoling both her breasts and all the ways she bent and lifted, bent and lifted, steady, strong. She let him believe he was past due for a harvest and her hands were the right ones, now, to hold onto the scythe. • She made quick work of pleasure. The boysmile bunked down in his eyes, she claimed. Her tongue found the place in his mouth where the teeth were gone—where he'd hold his corncakes until they grew soft enough to chew. History had bedded him in all of this—his own history and failures not his own. Before he'd tramped in she'd watched another man—a man she'd thought she'd hated—watched his body opened, opened, opened until blood had married brine. She'd watch that man be whipped into something good for nothing more than fertilizing clay and she'd thought buckshot would have been a brand of kindness if sprayed into him just then. But even after his hard going, she did not miss him very much. • Anyone she chose could be shucked like surplus property tomorrow, but that hadn't been enough to warn her off of picking him that night. Because she knew if she set her sight on nothing she'd get nothing in return, she'd walked with him. But because the night progressed so —because there were some clouds—no stars—no moon—he'd tripped over the branch of a dead and down tree. In all that darkness, there, without a moon, even then, she had not fallen. She thought to say so, but she did not say so. She did nothing but say she was sorry for him. She did not use her mouth to say this. Could he not listen to her hands? They spoke softly, articulating her condolences, to his torn and bleeding skin.