: : Home, Again // A Leder, J Rutzen, A Sutherland

Drive Thru

Down the familiar stretch of Wisconsin 43
Rain scatters, 
Kaleidescoping the glaring taillights of
Semi-trucks and four door sedans

The ache growing in the small of my back
Is like the ache for cobalt expanse of
October skies
I ruminate on cascading autumn days, 
Petite Nuage with
Sweet lavender honey and wild raspberries,
Reading Collins, 
And fussing with the stubborn typewriter
My grandfather gifted me on his father’s passing

I imagine the soundtrack of my drive
With ambient growls of synthesizer tones
And simmering notes, cool and clear: 
The howl of the misty wind through the tiny-cracked window
And the buzz of the refrigerator unit on the roof,
The oscillating thump of heavy wheels passing
Over patches of cracked asphalt. 

The sun peeks through at intervals, 
Reaching down like fingers in a murky pond, 
Trying to reach for a slipped-off ring at the bottom. 
Cathedrals, smokestacks, and bell towers strain
Upward across Milwaukee, green fronds of
Seaweed, and I am a slithering catfish, 
Sliding through the mud, inexorably onward. 

// J Rutzen

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Industrial Roofscape. Digital Photograph. A Leder. 

Home Again

// A Sutherland

The key slid into the lock as it always had, yet somehow it sounded more hollow. As I opened the front door to my family home, a cold gust hit my face. The place was empty and dark, having sat uninhabited for months. After dropping me off for college, my parents had packed up and left for another country, leaving me to spend long weekends, vacations, and breaks alone in the five-bedroom home we once all shared. For as long as possible I avoided coming back, tagging along with friends or staying in my dorm room. All of this to not confront what now lay before me.   

As I stepped into the cold home, my footsteps echoed. The house was now a cavern, emptied of all but a few possessions. Wandering down the dark hallway, the silence seemed to lay heavy upon the rooms. It enveloped them, like a large dust cover, holding the shape of what I remembered, but devoid of any character. 

When my family was here it was always filled to the brim with noise and sound. I would wake on Saturday mornings to the cacophony of siblings echoing off the walls. My brother and sisters arguing over the bathroom, racing up and down the stairs, knocking pictures off the wall and blaming each other for the damage. They were younger then, and the house felt small and cramped with bodies. Slowly, though, the place began to expand and quiet descended. My siblings left, one after the other, and with their departure a piece of the house went with them. A room would be empty, a table would be less crowded, and the noise of the house would fade little. It hit my mother the hardest. She would stand in the doorways, looking at the abandoned beds. “It’s so quiet” she would say, though I paid her sorrow no mind back then. 

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Eclipsed Elements. Digital Photograph. A Leder. 

All was silent and unfamiliar, suspicious and discomforting. I churned in the bed trying to make peace with it, but couldn’t get comfortable. I rose and paced the halls, the darkness following me like a specter, crushing me with its emptiness. I couldn’t shake it. I grabbed my keys and left. 

It was midnight then, so I drove to the only place that was still open. The gas station attendant looked genuinely surprised to see me. Entering the shop, I reveled in this unlikely oasis. The shop was brightly lit and full of color. There were rows of sodas bursting with color, puffed up packages of chips, and bags of candy that made a satisfying crinkling sound when touched. Fleeing the silence, I embraced this space and felt at ease. Strolling through aisles, I felt the attendant’s eyes following me. He seemed uneasy. Stalling, I pretended to read the backs of labels and judge their contents. I only wanted to buy time, to soak up the way fluorescent lights gleamed off the packages and listen to the constant hum of the ice cream cooler. These little luxuries I had never noticed were so dear to me now. I could tell the attendant was growing impatient. I placed my selection on his counter: wasabi almonds, snowballs, and white wine. He grimaced and handed me a thin plastic bag, holding the things I neither wanted nor needed. Suddenly a dread came over me when I realized I was supposed to leave. With no other place open I had to return.  

Arriving at the house, I took a deep breath and pushed the door in. I glide across the floor, not letting emptiness seize me, and perched myself on the arm of the couch with my gas station haul. I sat there stoic, looking out over the empty room. Downing mouthfuls of sugary wine, I threw snowball and almond wrappers to the ground like bait, daring the emptiness to meet me. As my stomach began to churn, I began to feel dizzy. Slowly slipping into intoxication, I became more resolute than ever. I sat there waiting, alert, aware—forcing myself to remember what the place was, what I wished it to be again.

Staring into the darkness, I thought of many things in this strange, altered state. I thought of how my mother and I cried as she walked me to my freshman dorm, my throat choking on all I wanted to say to her. I thought of the conversation around the dinner table, when it became known that I wasn’t the only one to be leaving in the fall. Straining, I tried to recall the placement of all our things—chairs, sofas, tables—what pictures were hung near them, what dents they had, how many meals were eaten around them. I wanted to conjure the smell of my mother’s cooking and the sound of her low humming as she stirred a boiling pot. Staring into the emptiness, I tried to revive what was lost and to reclaim what had been. I thought if I were resolved enough, my eyes would pierce through the darkness and my memories would fill the house once more. Pushing to resurrect it all, I saw the dark begin to change. 

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Night Lights. Digital Photograph. A Leder. 

The early light of dawn began to creep through the house. It moved across the floor and onto the wall. As the sun started to fill the house, an ease came over me. With the space now illuminated, I could see the house for what it was. The foreignness gave way to a sad familiarity. The house was as it had always been, just lonely now. Without its occupants it was left a cold empty husk. Not a menace, but a mourner lamenting the loss of its family. Succumbing to the wine and fatigue, I sank to the floor. Lying amongst the discarded wrappers, I felt the old wood floor with my hands. It was cool and smooth, well worn by the steps of others. 

As I traced over the wood grain, I felt new sympathy for the house. We were both missing the same people and longed for the same time. The oppressive emptiness was nothing but longing, the same longing I held within myself. In the dust, I traced a heart with my finger and slowly wrote the names of each family member. Moving back up to the bed I looked at my small shrine to what had been. I realized then how much we had lost, how our family may never be together as it once was. My heart sank, but there was nothing to be done. Staring at my work, my eyes grew heavy and closed. The morning light to stretch across my bed. Feeling its warmth, I lay my head down on the pillow and rested.

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: : Gone to Come Back // A Leder + R Des Jardins

GONE TO COME BACK

// R Des Jardins

Last month we crossed the divide.
As of now, I’ve lived longer in the States than home.

I’m still a Caribbean kid.

Still defined by a childhood salt-caked and rusted, spent at the beach, on boats, tripping over the round, worn cobblestones of Christiansted in my sweaty school uniform. Stretching through the thorns for yellow limes. Picking papaya, mango, guava, guinep. Eating tart tamarinds and sour passionfruit by the dozens until our teeth hurt to the touch. Shimmying up a coconut tree before breasts made it impossible and twisted heavy jelly nuts until they dropped into the sand with a muted thud. 

By the time I got my license, I knew to always have a machete and bikini in the car.

I was prepared to pick fruit, cut bush or suddenly swim.

Those days, I drove through the smell of weed and rum and ocean, surfing the breeze with my arm out the window. There was the sound of waves, the flute of quelbe and bass of reggae. Tremendous steel pan troupes shook my chest. Bawdy calypso songs and someone spinning me around to merengue, salsa.

Everyone’s parents were so brown and drunk and beautiful, and the kids were off on their own—ever covered in sand, sticky with fruit. You could spot their quick limbs over there, sharp angles splashed through the sea, bodysurfing until the reef made them bleed, following stingrays for mesmerizing hours, hiding up in a fort in a rubber tree where they would roll the soft sap into balls that hardened to bullets, covering dried coconuts in mud so the red ants would come and create firebombs. Cousins chased me with live lobsters they caught or bleeding fish still on the spear. Uncles were everywhere, their leather sandals slapped, mustaches scratched, they grabbed me to dance the second they saw me and everyone else on island just blurted out “Bish-OP!” when they drove past.

“L’il Bishop!” They yelled when I was alone, because they couldn’t remember my name or whose child I was, but they knew I was part the big Bishop clan. I swelled with pride at my mom’s fun family. I wished I had her name instead. I gave it out when I introduced myself to wrinkled Crucians who stooped down to hear me.

“Ruby? Who you be?”

“...I’m a Bishop.” Which meant, I am someone. I may be blonde, but I belong here.

I flew away for college in Boston. There, it looked like I stepped into a photo negative—all at once the people I passed were pale and the sky around them dark. Even blondes were suddenly a dime a dozen. At parties, I spent my memories like so much spare change, exploiting my newly exotic hippie childhood for cocktail conversation. I told tales of those infancy naps in baskets under bars while my parents crooned country and calypso from stools in the corner— a little something for every kind of drunk. When we got too long-legged to fit beneath the bar, there were sleeping bags rolled out in the back of the truck, so my brother and I could crawl into a bed while they worked songs late into the night. We would wake up to stars racing past, and played a silent game of trying to tell from the sways of road and the trees curved over us exactly when we were almost home.

When the parties were over, I'd shiver through the city. My dozens of seventies sweaters, thrifted on island, layered like I’d seen in magazines, were not winter’s match. I lost the sunshine, studied away my accent. My hair turned dark, and when I returned home for the holidays folks didn’t recognize me on the street. My hands became permanently numb from the endless ice—glasses slipped through my fingers and smashed. All around me was sharp broken glass—sharp, not smoothed by the sea like the treasures I’d collected. I felt my body floating away. The winds whipped between buildings and whispered ill wishes. It tried to knock me adrift, but I still had an anchor. I had nowhere else is home. I had people who stayed where they were planted. I had my born-and-raised mom and all her sunburnt brothers. I had my dad who ran the crab races and walked barefoot through the streets. There was a place and people I could always return to, relax into.

I’d been exiled before.

Right after I turned nine, after Hugo ripped through our house.

After a night in my bottom bunk with bookcase and card table held close to ward off glass flying through where the windows had been. In the morning there were sailboats piled up in the streets, pieces of our porch in a friend’s pool far away and an astonishing blue sky where the roof had been. “All those records,” my mom moaned as we surveyed the swirl of vinyl, drywall and broken furniture before us.

Hugo took the leaves from the trees and the music from where my house once stood.

So instead, we sang. For two weeks we harmonized as we mucked through what was left, from sun-up until the mosquitoes came out. Then, with no house or a school left, they sent my brother and I off to live with some family in Vermont. There we saw snow and skied for the first time and in social studies we learned about immigrants and they pointed to me as their real-life refugee. And I was never warm. At night on the mattress on the floor, I silently listed everyone I missed and cried myself to sleep.

Now I sleep in the States by choice—in this cold city I picked. I survive hurricane season in my own way. I get a salted rim the way my father did, claiming tequila made his guitar ring smarter—lick it and think of the sea and family. I ride a bike to soar through the streets the way we did in the time of star baths in the back of a pickup truck. I sharpen the machete by my bed, stay stronger than storms, ready myself for seasons. As home enters the third month without power, I turn off the lights and remember that I lived through the eye and came out the other side.
 

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FOLIO : : Expatriate // E Schalk

: : Expatriate
 

Wa 和  - on maintaining group harmony, peace:
equal proportions of intense desires to please and fears of displeasing,
which prompts careful consideration, curating  
every step taken  
every word spoken
        into a field of ambiguity

A process of self-erosion
underneath awareness

slow, 

subtle, 

layer upon layer  
       disappearing

erasure, 

missing,

until you are left with stripped, infertile ground
as you fade in color and substance,
your image shifting out of focus
as you become pliant,
excessively susceptible to the environment which shapes

you,        yourself
 
blurring, 

fading at the edges, 

what was once transparent has been shrouded
like the evolution of memory:
a person you have not seen for a long time
and when you can imagine nothing more than the outline
of their featureless face

but in momentary heartbeat flashes of clarity — 
   the mental click as a transient, past vision resurfaces - 
      and is buried as suddenly as it rose.    

But it is you there. 

Still.

Expatriate Video Still. Digital Photo. E Schalk.

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: : Enclosure

April 2011

From susceptible childhood,
he had always
lived behind the web of
the perimeter’s eternal fence

At twenty-six, I,
however
came to live inside the base
surrounded by

razor wire  
the endless traveling spirals in their speeding
trajectory,    
end over end,  
vacuum coils ensnaring potential energy,    
galvanized
in materiality  
but not in action,  
a reflective, openwork matrix  
which allows vision,    
but denies being,    
outward. 

Within the base,
I felt as
an insect ensnared in a web,  
claustrophobic —  
captive — 

 while he perceived
 — only —  
the compound’s protection.
 
A fundamental chasm of vision:  
the security of holding in
and  
the insecurity of keeping out. 

July 2013

South Korea’s plum rain season,
blankets of pregnant droplets
glistened as brightly as the fruit’s violet-black skin,
camouflaging Incheon’s ragged coastline
as crystal ribbons descended the bus windows
the highway pulling away from a previous life. 

Gunmetal haze blended
the Yellow Sea’s horizon
into the slate sky
an impenetrable monochrome, leaving
no distinction between
earth and space. 

But for a brief moment
the atmospheric citadel broke
revealing the stilted hut of a North outpost,
that sheltered a mounted Type 73
and its invisible gunner. 

And as before,  
razor wire rushed past,  
framing our view outward.

DMZ (Demilitarized Zone, border of North and South Korea.) Digital Photo. E Schalk.

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 : : (Identity) Membrane

Explaining you are American when you’re assumed to be European

Being told, “this is how we do things in America”
 

Having strangers stare into your eyes, asking if they are blue or green

Facing negative stereotypes and discrimination for being a small person

Learning to toast your glass underneath because of your foreigner status

Changing your speech to be more direct, your personality more assertive

Changing your speech to be more circumventing, your personality more passive

Being chastised for apologizing too much

Constantly being asked, “When are you leaving Japan?”

Naturally laughing louder and more easily in public

Trying not to notice when the neighbors run inside whenever you leave the house

Trying to get into the front right car door and realizing this is the passenger side

Facing the wrong direction while using a traditional toilet and ending up with wet shoes

Being told you color palette is too minimal

Being told your artwork is too large and brash

Being yelled at to speak up and find your voice

Being told you are your sensei’s most brilliant Japanese language student

Being completely overlooked in a crowd

Driving home through protestors shouting, “Yankee Go Home!” 

And wanting to go home,
but having no idea where
(or if) 

it exists. 

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 : : (be)coming to know                                                                                      

I had fashioned for myself a menagerie of paper birds — fragile, perhaps, but not in transparent frailty — these creatures of my sleeping visions, recurring, bearing messages from a writer to a recipient who were no longer in existence.

Unfurled and unfolding, the faceted creases gave way to voids exclaiming through silence, to splintered thoughts caught within the most vulnerable parts of memory, to those words that were never uttered through breath but continue to resound as long as as breath continues.

These remaining creases became creators of form: the skeleton of a being’s structure and the cartography of passageways outward. Their anguish in indelibility was relieved through acceptance; it was not in coming to understand but rather seeing what needed to be left behind…

… and only then…

my flight no longer became contingent
on the will of the wind.
 

Landing. Digital Photo. E Schalk.

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: : Belonging // J Mannebach, J Todd, M Serafimova, J Betton

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: : Tinto de Verano: 

First night living in Camarma de Esteruelas, Spain
 

A cheap buzz off one-dollar wine is still fine, and pairs well with the rich
glow of Spanish street lights, illuminating the stray dogs
whose bark, like the rooster’s call,
will summon, at 6 o’clock sharp,
those with the misfortune of leaving their windows open
to awaken to the pre-dawn stirrings of morning and café con leche. 

But in the hazy shade of this summer night, all Andalusian voices
melt into warm sweetness like dark chocolate under a heavy tongue. 
Soft, bodiless voices which whirr beneath a balcony
prance and play on the backs of rolling R’s
to taunt and tease their melody like a matador—
then slip away— across the bridge beside the plaza
to continue their discourse on upcoming fiestas
and yesterday’s futbol. 

And in the navy sky, the dull outline of a church can be traced
beneath the stork’s nest on its belfry—
where bells are replaced with dogs’ howls
and the sanctuary with a skatepark. 

// J Todd

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: : Belonging
 

The Balkans are mine.
The languages are ours, mine and my lovers’ –
Serbian with its green-forest, singsong cool,
Greek with its pre-eternal spark, its air electrifying nothing, signifying all -
that which the eye holds, creativity predestined.
Turkish, evercalling a visitor to life to keep the peace, and to honor the minutes’ death.
And my language, my own – my power, my glory, as real to me as the lands that I own
where grasses carry the day, and creatures correlate to stars -
that thing that makes me who I am beyond that which I am.   
The wars, peninsular contempt – we love each others’ words,
and our earth possesses logos.

// M Serafimova

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: : Dent'n
 

From the first time we recalled all the words to “Colors of the Wind”
I knew that I was being born again. 

And I testified to it every time the house of Hickory inhaled us into the kitchen
and we collapsed on the table, laughing and panting, 
coughing out decades of bad news. 
and we never thought to ask why we didn’t own a T.V.

Now,
when my neighbors ask if I grew up in Chicago
I stumble over how to eulogize you, Dent’n.
I’ve rolled my eyes over how they vocalize your vowels
“Den-ton”—like a Yankee, and snap that “t” like a used match.
And none of my neighbors would celebrate with me
if I swept my mind, lit a lamp to find the missing name of the
one who called our house a hideout for queers. 
But I have. 

And I have hungered for your mustard greens. 
And I have wondered how you sing so early before work. 
And I have pondered all the quirks of your handstands, how
your left ankle folds over like a dog’s ear. 

I wouldn’t have guessed how diminished I’d become once I dismembered myself
from you, and I’ve tried to re-member myself, 
to stitch back the severed members of my heart,
puncturing all the swollen parts of me I swore I didn’t need. 
And I can see where the thread leads. 

It’s where the angel-eyed gardeners of the urban farms let down their frizzy hair
into the acquisitive hands of their newborn daughters, cradled in their sweaty arms, 
as they tiptoe around the lettuce sprouts. 

Where I first witnessed Our Lady of the Gutters raise her slender legs straight to
Jesus as she bends her belly over the wall of a dumpster. 

Where she and I hung our three-string guitar on the bough of the willow tree
that hangs over the bank of Cooper Creek as we cried for Texas House Bill 40. 

Where unshaven mothers feast in the booths of pay-as-you-can restaurants
so they may pontificate infant pedagogy
and run their fingers along the other’s dreadlocks. 

Where we followed the luminous bike trailers that rattle down the back alleys of
Walmarts and drug stores. 

Where I was led up to cars parked in the vacant boulevard up Crow Street to witness
the brief transfiguration of a Pell Grant college kid into a cross-legged
Franciscan Frère of enormous perspicuity, slapping his cheeks at the tingle of mosquito legs
as he lays out in the passenger seat. 

Where tattooed permaculturist gurus guided us
to contemplate the cosmic origins of a peapod. 

Where a Gandhian beekeeper and I smiled at the pleasant tempo of leaking rain
and lighted our squat with the beeswax candles we confiscated from the Easter vigil. 

Where straight-edge street preachers shake their icy shoulders and rub their thighs
in the chill of the February night, because our van had been coated in freezing rain. 

Where congregations of the unemployed spread across the public tables of the city
parks to question the Immaculate Conception and cut hair. 

Where we scraped free Craigslist pianos across the floorboards
of the councilman’s abandoned house, and into the hermitage with the pallet-wood
dance floor, and under the awning beside our ambulance where we lived for two
winters and multiple break-ups. 

Where woodland anarchists danced in the dilapidated aisles of the fine arts theater
to the electrified vibrations, jubilations, and exhortations of a Christian imitation
of Arcade Fire, gilded by a three-octave glockenspiel. 

I have returned alone to each of these places. 
I have relearned each of the songs we heard and improvised around the
wood-burning stove. 
I have turned the compost where we throw away all the ends of evenings
spent sniping cigarettes and talking each other out of suicide. 

And I wonder how I thought that places can be clipped off our persons like
fingernails, or pass through us like food. 
but they’ve all stayed, 
sitting in my body like a rotting tooth. 

And I wonder how long until the angel-eyed gardeners and I
can remember each other again, and when they can show me their twin girls
and I’ll re-teach them the words to our songs. 
And I ponder the quirks of your handstands again. 
And I hum a few bars of “Colors of the Wind,”
and I go on. 

// J Betton

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: : When it's Time // B Tracy + R Hudgens

: : When It's Time 

This house will tell me when it’s time.
I return uncertain of many things
but certain of that. After everyone
departed I remained. It was still my home;
where I've slept after the best days
of my life. Every time my key turns
memories wait inside the door.
My dreams are grafted to these beams.

After the birthday party tonight I drove
them back in my new car to their
new homes dropping them off
one by one: wife, son, daughter, then
turning the final corner parked where
I park, walking up the walk I walk,
past the window where no one
waits anymore to watch for me.

Some day it will be time to leave.
I pray it will come like a whispered
assurance, a breeze blowing cross
my new morning, waking my soul
on the other side of darkness, telling me
this is the day. The last petal on the blossom
of my cut flower will break off and gently fall.
I will see it and know it’s true.

// R Hudgens

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