TABLE OF CONTENTS
Issue 5

ELIZABETH R. CURRY POETRY CONTEST WINNERS

Winner,
Tarzan, My Tarzan
Mary Elizabeth Parker
Finalist Runner-Up,
Tialoc
John Nieves

Finalist Runner-Up,
The Middle School Scab Eater
Nicelle Davis

FICTION

The Old Man and the Tree
Mickey Hess

Brothers
Shawna Moyer

What Sally Sells
Joshua Reese

Leader of Men
Meg Tuite

The Silo and the Water Wheel
Mark Bowers

Doubt
Shawna Moyer

POETRY

Ode to Candy
Tobi Cogswell

When Spring Begins
B.Z. Niditch

The Beauty of Stones
Victoria Elizabeth

Virginia Napalm
Daniel Ruefman

Penguins
Evie McCarthy

On Shotguns
Alex Cigale

To Jeff
Paul Hostovsky

Summer Solstice
Mario Duarte

Centripetal Motion
Devi Lockwood

Twisted Psyche
Mike Berger

Two and Two
Elizabeth Kerlikowske

please don’t name that reservoir
Peter Schwartz

The Palm Reader is Packing It In
Richard Luftig

5:55
Katherine Goertz

Ancient Boats
Simon Perchik

Dread
Brady Rhoades

i am the smoke tumbling from your lips
Casey Novak

Reforestation
Gerard Samat

Nostrum
Diane Lockward

My Death as Coleslaw
Thomas O’Connell

September
Lyn Lifshin

Solitaire
John Grey

Love’s Desire
Darryl Jungen

Big Business
Ariel Smart

Flappers
Thomas McDade

Drawing Blood, Drawing Bread
Octavio Quintanilla

Project
Marian Kaplun Shapiro

La Chascona
In Neruda’s Home City

Reporting
Guy R. Beining

Comfort Food, With Garnish
Andrei Guruianu

Ghosts L-Z
Richard Kostelanetz

Advice to a Younger Self
Kasandra Larsen

CREATIVE NONFICTION

The Legend of the Hubcap Lady
Dorothy Blackcrow Mack

Double Portraits
Hilary Schaper

Sock Magnets
Tami Richards

Prayer Wheels
Debbie Wong

The Time That Uncle Tom Died
William Siavelis

‘Til Death Do Us Unite
Johanna Wald

ELIZABETH R. CURRY POETRY CONTEST WINNERS

Winner,
Mary Elizabeth Parker
Tarzan, My Tarzan

Slicker than any croc, Johnny Weismuller in the soup,
man/beast clamped in a death-squeeze. Why wouldn’t Jane
lose her chemise, artfully, tatter by tatter, for this: white form
underwater wagging fishy in a tussle, boy/girl, before the
censors nicked her back to rudimentary house-holding,
logic in the strangling trees and
Jane plunked safe on shore as the water churned:
fretful now, wringing her hands. Years later,
Greystoke battered his gloved fists against the cage
of a moth-eaten ape, Maman. Beneath ooze,
crocs wait their cue to rise and be knifed in the death-roll,
over and over man/woman/woman/man/man/woman/woman/man/man/woman/woman/man


Finalist, Runner-Up

John Nieves
Tlaloc

You puzzled over my face in an encyclopedia
of mythology. Was I a puma, a serpent or a frog?
I will tell you this much, my tongue is longer
than any love you will ever have. You wondered

how I could have been part of a pantheon when
I was the god of storms and rain, harvest and birth,
fire and death. What did that leave? Then you saw
that I married the moon. You read of my artifacts,

pondered the vines and the mud and the ferns that
covered them for so long. Then you reached into my
past, stole lightning and orchids for the lips of
the woman who dropped her towel near your feet. But,

as my people knew, everyone who claims part of the
jungle is eventually reclaimed. I have already picked
out the spot where your body will fall and be forgotten.
I have already plucked your name from the wind.

Finalist, Runner-Up
Nicelle Davis
The Middle School Scab Eater

Everything about her was recessive: hair retreating into tight curls, arms holding
legs close to chest. She folded into a wooden chair like the yes/no notes we agonized over; tight origami shapes we passed while Coach wrote heavy petting
on the board. We hated her. Her child’s body and thick lips. Her shins bleeding where she ripped off scabs.

Coach going over the concept of foreplay, explained how the family dog never
really loved us—was only after the pleasure of being touched. You have to butter
a lady up was his best attempt at talking about the bodily secretions most of us
were wearing like invisible gloves. She was beautiful and secretly we loved her.
Her obliviousness.

In class, she blew on her open sores same as the head cheerleader blew on
wet petal-pink nail polish. It was confusing; this separation of love from pleasure. She looked satisfied. Harvesting dry red chips, taking herself into her mouth like bread. She didn’t notice how even Coach gagged a little when he looked at her.
His argument for abstinence,

a game of averages: If two people sleep with two people who have slept with two people, then we’ve all slept with your mother and our fathers, we’re all carrying something catching within us.

POETRY

Victoria Elizabeth
The Beauty of Stones

Wander that distant beach below cliffs:
bring a green-gray/wet-dry heart-shaped
stone back to your best friend,
having thought of her in your solitude.

After the expedient move north,
take her daughter’s wobbly hand,
dance the sand, chase foam toward
sea, reveal white lines licking blue,
emerald-black, rose, burrowed stones.
Fold her hands, fill her pockets.

Invite her to play every day;
bring a dog, shy from abuse,
to run; reunite wave with foam.
Find flat stones, curve, touch,
as lovely as color this time;
be the first to see her skip on water,
one stone prancing thrice
before scooped beneath wave,
water to enhance its beauty
while awaiting revisit to land.

On the last day of your vacation,
find pebbles and rocks amongst
stones; tell her about the brown-gold
glint of cobblestone roads, how
both eyes focused forward cannot
see it until one eye whispers beauty.

Evie McCarthy
Penguins

Wander that distant beach below cliffs:
bring a green-gray/wet-dry heart-shaped
stone back to your best friend,
having thought of her in your solitude.

After the expedient move north,
take her daughter’s wobbly hand,
dance the sand, chase foam toward
sea, reveal white lines licking blue,
emerald-black, rose, burrowed stones.
Fold her hands, fill her pockets.

Invite her to play every day;
bring a dog, shy from abuse,
to run; reunite wave with foam.
Find flat stones, curve, touch,
as lovely as color this time;
be the first to see her skip on water,
one stone prancing thrice
before scooped beneath wave,
water to enhance its beauty
while awaiting revisit to land.

On the last day of your vacation,
find pebbles and rocks amongst
stones; tell her about the brown-gold
glint of cobblestone roads, how
both eyes focused forward cannot
see it until one eye whispers beauty.


Devi Lockwood
Centripetal Motion

For the gold-digger,
life is dank dirt

and desolation.
Deliberate solitude crumbles
between white canvas gloves
(a ring).
He is nothing more than

camouflage
kneeling before a promise,
inaudibly
probing the world
for perfection.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske
Two and Two

The old people were a pair of capital Ps, their hands on their aching hips as they shuffled
through the mornings. Whole meals accomplished without a word. How could they balance

on the long bridge of that silence? Their heads rolled back against the antimacassars, and under
the blare of television, I stood over them, grazing his stubble with my eyes, his jowls, waiting

for the back half of a snore, her knitting quiet, skin crackled like freshly broken ice. How
could they see through the spattered lenses? I mocked her when she asked me to thread

the needles that would mend my clothes. How was I to know that the tar paper wrapped
around the roses for winter was not protection enough?  On one hand alone: the memory

of freckles, little continents of liver spots, raised rivers of blue ropes, dark broken blood vessels
berry-staining fingertips, a blister from the rake, white lies under the nail bed, and a Band-aid.

When they spoke to friends, they said we kept them young. Perhaps it was tobogganing or
shoveling the rink. How could loss be the source of such power?  Impossible to think of them

as young until silence chewed at our dinner table.

John Grey
Solitaire

I watched the news,
people far away.
I read the first chapter
of a book,
other people’s thoughts.
I found myself spending
more time with those I don’t know
than the ones I do.
I stretched out
on the couch,
spent an hour or more listening
to the music of strangers.
I even sat out on the
front porch,
watched traffic,
some I could have known
I suppose
but how do you introduce yourself
to a couple in a red convertible
as they flash by?
The phone rang.
A voice on the other end.
A wrong number.
But it was the closest I came that day
to a right number.


Octavio Quintanilla
Drawing Blood

It’s invisible thresholds that time
traverses, not you.

This is why first you draw a clock
floating in the air; on the table,
a bottle of wine.

Then an eyelid sketched by bitterness,
eyelash; the rest of the face,
unrecalled.

You want it to be your father’s,
his broken jaw, the thin lips
you’ve heard so much about.

Like true suffering, he’s beyond
representation, outside
of language.  Out of all
your soccer games and the first fistfight
you lost.

When you try to draw him, you return
to the house where you’re always
a child. Where you have an absent enemy
whose life you save in your thoughts
and then condemn again.

This time, you want it all
to end in fire.
And because you have no need of it,
you also want to toss
the word murder
into the serrated flames.

This time, you’ll not be alone:
A loaf of bread next to the bottle of wine.
Your mother’s soft hands resting on the table.

Michael Salcman
La Chascona: In Neruda’s City Home

The dining room seats
look like piano keys for a giant,
the patio juts its prow.
In the double portrait with Matilde
his face is disguised in her hair
while in other rooms, he’s as noisy as a bear
among the snakes and Whitman photos,
two bars, liquor pouring from a fish-mouth
faucet, small jungles divided by stairs,
a door hidden in a china closet,
and the sound of invisible water
bent to his shape.
Most of the walls are as white as porcelain
but for the library, yellow and red,
from which all the books have recently fled
the green air of Santiago.
A question like a prayer springs from my eyes:
who will make our bed
if it’s locked behind a door, like theirs?

Kasandra Larsen
Advice to a Younger Self

You think that becoming an adult will mean
freedom, choice, independence, a louder, equal voice,
ice cream for dinner. You’re wrong. Or you will be
if you don’t stay on your guard. That last one, sure,
you can have that if you don’t mind getting fat,

being judged on looks alone. Grown-ups will be
crueler than the kids at school. Ignore them. Make
your own rules. Don’t compromise. If it doesn’t
feel right, walk away. Whether it’s a guy, a job,
a place to stay, a promise or a threat—don’t take it,

don’t believe it, if your gut says it doesn’t fit. Listen
to the voice inside. When times are hard, don’t hide.
Don’t be ashamed to cry. Don’t lie about your feelings.
You’ll never be popular anyway, so don’t censor
yourself. Don’t say I can’t. Don’t listen to others

when they say that. Don’t worry that you’re too picky,
that you set the bar too high, that your deepest dreams
will never come true. They can, if you can get over you,
your fear, your desire to be liked, your taste
for praise. None of those things matter anyway, not

when you’re dead, and time goes by so fast
it will make your head spin. The only way to win, at last,
is to spend as much time as you can doing only
what you love. No matter what, be true to you. Laugh
when people say you’ll regret this. You won’t. I never do.

 

FICTION

Mickey Hess
The Old Man and the Tree

1.

Andrew had written a story about seeing an old man drive into a tree. It was messy, even by English 101 standards, but it was the best thing I read all semester. The old-timer yelling at the neighborhood kids as they played football across his yard, then as they grew up and drove too fast around the curve in front of his house. It ended with Andrew and his friends, now college aged, standing in front of their sports cars watching the old man drive slowly into a maple tree.

It was brilliant.

That year, my thirtieth year, I found myself spending far too much time with people ten years younger than me. I introduced all my friends as “my former students.” I met their parents. They met my wife.

That fall I was invited to read words I had written, out loud, in a woodshop outside Evansville, Indiana. The stage would be two workbenches pulled together and covered with a blanket. They promised to pass around a Mason jar for gas money. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Andrew looked at his feet when I talked to him on campus, when I asked him to come with me and read his story about the old man and the tree. But he agreed. He was excited. Told me he’d been in plays in high school, which was sort of the same thing.

We ignored weather reports and drove across the state of Indiana, Andrew’s mom calling periodically to provide ice storm updates and remind him to take his insulin, and my wife in the passenger seat playing old bands that she felt Andrew should hear to better understand the new bands he liked. The Pixies. The Smiths. Andrew told us about humorous things he had done at parties.

Inspired by him, I read the good people of Evansville some stories I wrote when I was eighteen, about stealing things and setting things on fire. Andrew read a story about urinating into a potted plant at a party. The audience cheered and awarded us with a Mason jar full of gas money, but we didn’t get far.

An ice storm trapped us for three nights at the home of a sculptor who worked days at the literary woodshop. The sculptor made Tater Tots and coffee, stuck as he was with us, his unexpected houseguests—two vegetarians and one diabetic. The diabetic and vegetarians watched old skater films while the sculptor chiseled away in the basement, his sulking girlfriend rarely emerging from the bedroom.

Evansville, Indiana was encased in ice. Driving was impossible and even walking was treacherous. Still, after a day and a half, the sulking girlfriend insisted on digging her car out and getting away from the house and Andrew’s running commentary on the photograph of her hot younger sister.

Through the kitchen window, Andrew and I watched the sculptor’s girlfriend prepare for her escape. She chiseled away at her car like the sculptor in the basement turning wood and metal into little creatures and helicopters. She chiseled like she knew there was a car under there.

When the tires spun free, we latched onto her: “Take us to find food.”

We came back with frozen pizza crusts, fake pepperoni, and fifteen sugar free chocolate and chocolate mint Dr. Soy bars, which Andrew insisted were awesome.

We played board games. I took a nap with my wife while Andrew tried to convince the sculptor’s girlfriend to drive out and bring back her younger sister. I talked to the sculptor while Andrew watched soap operas with my wife.

Andrew and I sat up talking all night. We talked about what a good excuse diabetes is for missing class or turning in papers late. It’s mysterious. People don’t understand it.

We talked about Hemingway, Céline, Knut Hamsun, and other people we believed each other should read. We talked about rap music and played a video game in which we stole cars and smashed them into trees and buildings and banks.

“I never even work on the missions or anything. I just run around beating up cops.” Andrew showed me a cheat code to get the tank, and we killed policemen, luring them out of their squad cars and blowing them up with bazookas. We got blown up too, of course, but that’s what we’d put on our tombstones:

Here lies Andrew

“At least I took a lot of cops with me.”

I liked Andrew. I liked how he walked kind of like Charlie Chaplin and would pull up his pants and tighten his belt mid-stride. How he hunched over and clutched his ribs when he laughed. I liked how he spent a lot of time on his hair, his deep voice, and how he muttered like a bitter old man.

If it made me feel cool to hang out with Andrew, it was in that way that feels like you’ve been drawn into somebody else’s world, somebody infinitely more exciting than you. He had so much more promise than people my age.

2.

            “You think my insides are drying up.”

“No.”

“Then what’s the hurry?”

“It’s just, I don’t know, I mean we just turned thirty. What do you see when you look into the future?”

“This, I guess.”

“Just this? You don’t think about watching our future kid grow up and graduate and go off to college?”

“No. I don’t.”

“So this is it? Just this?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

            Upstairs in the sculptor’s spare bedroom, my wife and I continued what had become our ongoing discussion about the future.

            “But someday you want kids?”

            “Someday. Maybe.”

Downstairs we hear something expensive-sounding fall and shatter, then Andrew muttering, “Fuck.”

            “What if our kid’s like Andrew?” I ask my wife.

            “It probably will be.”

3.

            Andrew told me that the key to underage drinking is to say “I left my ID in my server apron.” By his logic, kids under twenty-one can’t work as servers, so this excuse proves he’s of age. “It always works.” I never saw it work.

            Instead, what I usually saw was the bartender telling him, “Well, go get your server apron,” and Andrew running and the rest of us wondering why he never came back.

As a show of solidarity, as a protest against unfair ageism, I declared that I would not drink in any establishment that refused my friend Andrew. That year the two of us took stances. We took on forces bigger than us. We drank root beer in restaurants and started our own reading series in Andrew’s mom’s basement.

Andrew’s mom was an expert baker cursed with a diabetic son. Every Thursday night, our reading series served petits fours, torte, and three kinds of cheesecake. She made candy like I thought you could only buy in a Whitman’s Sampler. I was as close to Andrew’s mom’s age as I was to Andrew’s, but as young as she was, she seemed like she’d been born a mom.

“Andrew got into NYU, you know.”

“Mom, Jesus.”

“He just wasn’t ready to leave home yet.”

“Mom, holy fuck, I can leave home, okay?”

Andrew invited his indie-rock friends and fraternity brothers. He read stories about parties and doing seven Smiths songs in a row on karaoke until someone unplugged the machine. He read the introductory chapter from a political philosophy textbook. But he made it so damn entertaining.

It was mind-blowing.

It was the best reading series in someone’s basement in all of New Albany, Indiana.

But then the Icelandic rock star showed up.

The Icelandic rock star was fifty years old, if anything. People in Iceland agree that his band was, by far, the best Icelandic rock band of the century. In Iceland, the old rock stars become poets. But not the boring kind you hated reading in college. I took him to an English Department party, and the professors didn’t even know how to talk to him. He stole a bunch of unmarked pills from the bathroom cabinet and threw up in the backyard.

When he showed up at Andrew’s house and Andrew introduced him to his mom, he said, “Hi, Andrew’s mom,” and then, “Son, does your mom have any vodka?”

In the basement, Iceland’s finest guitarist read poems about his youth, about stealing quarters from wishing wells. Andrew read a story about contracting something called herpangina, which his mom thought was a venereal disease.

By 2 a.m., the rock star was snoring with his boots on an antique ottoman, and Andrew’s mom was saying she didn’t care how famous he was in Iceland, she wanted him out of her house.

            This was the end of our reading series.

4.

That year three students had died on campus, which was making a lot of us nervous. There was an aneurysm and an allergic reaction. Someone OD’d in the parking lot.

            The English Department asked me to speak to Andrew. He had used diabetes as an excuse for missing his Chaucer exam, but it seemed like more than just an excuse this time. He was pale and skinny and weak looking, but when Dr. Pederson insisted on driving him to the hospital, he knew he could still outrun her.

            “We’re really concerned about him.”

“Will you talk to him?”

By the end of our first official student-teacher conference, Andrew had made diabetes sound hip and exciting. I learned of his dedication to outdoing his fraternity brothers, how they all chanted his last name as he followed each shot of alcohol with an insulin shot. “I have to keep close track of it—if my blood sugar bottoms out, I just get kind of angry and confused. I freak out.”

“You should write about it,” I said. “Incorporate your illness into your stories. That way it’s not just all about parties. There’s something deeper to it.”

            A week later, he rode his bike twenty miles on an empty stomach and ended up locking himself in the garage thinking people were out to get him. His mom had to call the cops to break down the door, and Andrew got in five or six solid punches before he could be restrained.

5.

            I read in a magazine at my wife’s doctor’s office that when most people picture their unborn kids, they don’t picture a newborn; they picture a three-month-old, smiling and cooing and holding her head up on her own.

            Is it weird to picture her college aged?

6.

At the ice-skating rink, at Andrew’s twentieth birthday party, he and I circled for hours, dodging small, fearless kids who could fall and rebound like their bones hadn’t just smacked the ice. We talked about writing. Andrew was working on a new story. “I’m writing this new story about my dad and how he kind of used up my mom and moved on.” Andrew’s dad, the pilot, had left his mom and moved on to a new family, had a new baby and left behind his two teenage sons. In the story, Andrew’s dad tries to bond with him by taking a road trip to the childhood home of his grandparents.

“So how do you and your dad get along now that you’re older?” Andrew asked, and when I told him we never got the chance to find out, he got quiet. That’s what I liked about hanging out with Andrew. Where older people would claim to know how I feel, Andrew would say, “That must be awful. That’s unimaginable.”

7.

It was the second time someone had asked me to talk to Andrew. I could get through to him, people thought. We had some kind of connection.

This time it was his mom on the phone. “Is Andrew staying at your house?”

“No. Isn’t he staying at your house?”

            She sighed. “I haven’t talked to Andrew in a week. He doesn’t come home; he won’t return my calls. I’m worried about him. I know he isn’t taking care of himself.

If you see him, will you talk to him for me? He’s going to lose the deposit on his dorm room in Manhattan.”

I did not know about Manhattan. Manhattan was happening behind my back.

Andrew had enrolled that semester in two universities: Indiana Southeast in New Albany, and NYU in Manhattan. I knew about Indiana, and his mom knew about Manhattan. Neither one of us knew why he would enroll in two schools in two different states and not show up for classes at either of them.

“I’m sorry I bothered you,” his mom said, audibly crying. “I thought he talked to you about stuff like this. I thought he kind of confided in you.”

I thought so too, I thought. But I didn’t tell her that.

8.

Andrew didn’t show up to that one, or the next two.

The semester went on without him. I taught new classes, full of new students, and the future became no clearer.

When Andrew resurfaced during NYU’s fall break, having cost his mom double tuition and missed the first two weeks of two sets of classes, he was sitting on the floor outside my office, writing furiously in a red notebook. He had grown a scraggly beard, but a beard, still.

We stared at each other, him looking like he didn’t expect to see me at the door to my office any more than I expected to see him there.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

He kept writing.

“What are you working on?”

He shrugged. “In my class at NYU, we’re supposed to rewrite one of our stories from the perspective of a different character.”

“Which one are you doing?”

“‘The Old Man and the Tree.’”

“So you’re writing it as the old man?”

“No, I’m revising it from the car’s perspective.”

He closed his notebook and capped his pen. “I’m sorry my mom called your house,” he said. “She’s crazy.”

            I may have said some things about responsibility. I may have asked him how hard is it to pick up a phone, or skip one night of drinking.

But whatever I said, the words didn’t sound right to me. And I could see that things were not going to be the same between us.

Time moved on. The Icelandic rock star went back to Iceland. My wife and I continued debating whether or not to have children. Andrew’s mom went back to worrying about Andrew, and Andrew went back to New York.

I replaced him shortly with a personified car, a Corvette, and while it isn’t the same as hanging out with Andrew, it’s not bad. The Corvette and I can confide in each other. The Corvette never ages or moves away. The Corvette goes to bars and gets drunk.

Meg Tuite
Leader of Men

He was a tall, good-looking man, though his features bore the slight tremor of the frenzied, similar to that strained purposefulness of a dog that has come to the end of its chain, but does not agree. He was waving a butcher knife out in front of himself while he spoke, and with each thrust, the knife, a bit of a yes-man itself, nodded up and down in obvious collusion with the man who held it, giving an added force to the man’s words that alone they didn’t carry. The woman watched the man and the knife equally, but said nothing, though her face, exquisite in its own right, said everything. They stood in front of a wounded tomato that the woman had been brutally mutilating before the man had been able to assess the seriousness of the situation and rush in to salvage it from its complete demise. There the tomato sat in front of them, bleeding to death from its right side, a savage testimony to the woman’s complete and utter incompetence.

 “Wrong,” the man said, “Wrong, wrong, wrong!” He snatched up the knife quickly, calling a halt to this obscene bloodbath. Was it necessary for him to be everywhere at once? Was there nothing that the woman wouldn’t destroy if left to her own devices? She understood nothing––absolutely useless. The man held the knife forcefully, and with authority, letting it know immediately that he was in charge now, and it was to do exactly as he said.

“Look,” he said, “Look at the knife. See how I hold it?” It was true. In his hand the knife was pointed and dangerous. It was a weapon, an extension of himself. The woman’s reddened, shriveled hand had reduced the knife to nothing more than a feeble, clumsy thing that fumbled ridiculously with vegetables, pawing them into a slow and painful death. The blade stuttered and hung its head foolishly, until it became as dull and lifeless as her tongue.

The man looked over at the woman once more. His eyes rolled together in disgusted formation from one side of his head to the other, a trembling final summation of his entire contempt, and without another moment’s hesitation, he gripped the knife like nothing less than a leader of men, and using swift, competent, ruthless strokes, sliced the remaining portion of the tomato that the woman had not been able to deface, whereupon the tomato eighths, also prepared to show her a lesson she would not soon forget, dropped neatly away from each other and lined themselves up efficiently, cleanly, and precisely––like well trained little soldiers in uniform red. The man gave the woman one more derisive look and swaggered out of the kitchen. The woman stared at the tomato, and then after the man.

            “This is your head,” she said. She slammed the remains of the tomato against the wall and watched them slide artfully, gracefully down to the floor.

 

CREATIVE NONFICTION

Hilary Schaper
Double Portraits

Squinting into the hazy light, I walked out of the David Hockney portrait exhibition. The sun pitched tentative shadows on the museum plaza. Castaway in the artist’s world, I’d studied the line of his pen drawings, his brushstrokes, and his flat expanses of blues and greens, the backdrop to his figures of his family, friends, and lovers.

Later, at lunch, I watched my father as he, my mother, my husband, and I ate at a coffee shop. His milky brown eyes peered out of small openings; his gray hair stood up in wild waves. As he lifted the overstuffed steak sandwich to his mouth, his hands shook. A piece of onion fell from the roll, smearing the napkin at his collar. “I know, Gayle, I know, give me a minute,” he’d said to my mother when we’d sat down, and she’d reminded him to place the napkin over his chest.

“Mom,” I said when we were alone, “Go easier on him. He’s almost eighty-five, and his tremor’s worse.”

“I know, Hilary,” she said, “but if he doesn’t cover himself, no one will eat with him.”

I said no more.

I knew that she was right. But I couldn’t help remembering him as I saw him as a child: tall, large, his eyes sharp, and his voice commanding. Now, when he’s tired, he slurs his words, a reminder of throat cancer surgery. “I was always afraid of your father,” a friend told me recently.

Even before watching Bruno Wolheim’s documentary, David Hockney: Double Portrait, I’d read Hockney’s subtext in Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, a painting of a married couple at odds. A full-length shuttered window divides the canvas in half. Ossie, the husband, poses on the right before the open side of the window, his wife, on the left, before the closed side. Through the window, a stone balustrade of a second story balcony and trees in full leaf. Long haired and dressed in shades of green, Ossie sits with parted legs, at an angle to the painter, his cat on his lap. Celia, wearing a dark purple robe, stands. Her loose blond, pre-Raphaelite curls frame her soft face. Her eyes lock with ours.

From beneath his brows, Ossie’s gaze hints at mystery, flirtation perhaps, or even a kind of dare. Celia’s more frontal, direct gaze suggests resignation, even annoyance. Though her head’s slight tilt down may indicate demureness, her stance—akimbo—seems to betray irritation or determination.

Does Hockney’s portrait capture the essence of Celia and Ossie’s relationship at a specific moment, or did he sense its nature and pose them to embody his vision of them?

The space between Celia and Ossie interests me. The space between. The space. Between. People. In another work, Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott, Hockney seated Henry, the famed curator, in the center of a long pink divan, his head barely extending above its arched middle. Henry’s girth and the pull of his vest across his belly create a strong horizontal element, emphasizing his permanence. In contrast, his partner, Christopher, a slight man, stands like a ghost at one side.

Maybe the physical distance between the lovers signifies the existence of an intimate connection and, at the same time, an emotional gulf. Maybe it symbolizes the intrinsic challenge of individuals forming a couple.

I think of my parents. How would Hockney portray them?

They sit in their den. Each stakes claim to a side of the room. My mother sits on the far end of a leather sofa, and rests her feet on the coffee table before her. She wears a tan sweater and brown woolen pants. Her head inclines as she scans the newspaper on her lap. At the other end of the room, my father sits, his back to a large paned window opening to a lawn of bare maple trees, his legs cross at the knees. Dressed in trousers and his favorite holey, mustard-colored sweater, which my mother will later discard, his hands fall onto the open book, face down on his lap, and poised to slide to the floor. He dozes, his head bobbing slightly with each breath. Dusk fills the room.

“Ralph,” my mother says. Looking up, she sees his closed eyes and hears his breathing. As she rises and walks behind him to close the curtains, he stirs, opening his eyes and closing them again. She returns to the sofa, reaches for the paper, lifts a pen, and resumes her crossword puzzle.

What lies between them? A rectangular room with a high arched and beamed ceiling, an oriental rug, and furniture—a sofa against the back wall, a coffee table in front of it, windows on three sides of the room, two chairs at either end, and a television cabinet across from the sofa.

What lies between them? Over fifty-five years of marriage, four children, six grandchildren, a daughter’s estrangement from and return to them, a son’s cruelty, their parents’ deaths, their children’s marriages and divorces, love, anger, illness, joy, sorrow, regret, deep caring, good fortune, unfulfilled hopes. Likely no different than others’ lives.

I imagine how Hockney would paint them. Perhaps it would not vary much from his portrait of his own parents inMy Parents, 1977. There they sit on either side of the canvas separated by an artist’s carrel in the center of the room against the wall. His mother faces forward, erect in her folding wooden chair, her hands folded on her lap. She looks straight ahead, her expression unblinking, her lips clamped together. Her eyes meet ours. His father sits, turning into the room at a forty-five degree angle. Seemingly oblivious to the portrait session, Mr. Hockney bows his head and reads the book on his lap. Mrs. Hockney’s engagement lies with her son, his with a private endeavor.

Maybe the angle of his chair—facing into the room but away from the painter—signifies an emotional inaccessibility. Then again, he is turned toward his wife. Maybe her direct gaze indicates that her primary intimacy lies with her son. Perhaps this portrait represents a map of the Hockneys’ lives together. Perhaps it reflects only a moment in time.

In the documentary, one of Hockney’s subjects noted that when he posed, the painter looked right into him, as a spy would. Another spoke of the artist’s ability to capture an aspect of the person when she is off-balance and to create a “psychological theater and kind of performance.” Still others remarked on his ability to expose the feelings between people, to capture the ambiguity in a relationship, and his relationship to his sitters.

If the portraits are objective portrayals, they are still somehow tinged with the artist’s own subjectivity. Hockney, though not on the canvas, is present in the portrait. In the film, he confessed as much. When asked how much of a portrait was about a couple and how much about himself, he replied, “Most is probably me, isn’t it?”

His response cast doubt on his ability to observe and record objectively, and his inability to wipe himself from his canvas. But art is necessarily subjective. The photographer, Richard Avedon, is reported to have written to Jacques-Henri Lartigue after viewing his photographs, “Seeing them was for me like reading Proust for the first time. You brought me into your world, and isn’t that, after all, the purpose of art?”

What then of my parents?

Viewing the Hockney portraits caused me to “look at” my parents differently—to examine the physical space they occupy with respect to one another as well as the distance between them in an effort to examine their relationship. Unlike a painter, though, I am not confined to portraying a static, two-dimensional world. Writing allows me to describe movement and something more closely approximating three-dimensionality.
I mull over how I can “paint” them on the page. For certain, I’ve observed them in many moments in time. For certain, I’ve brought myself to the sitting as an observer, but also as their daughter. I want to create as objective a portrait as possible but know that it will be tinged with my feelings.
To me, their poses reveal their separateness but also their connectedness; they sit in the same room though they do not engage with one another. My father feels free enough to doze in my mother’s presence. My mother does not interrupt his nap to ask him to draw the curtains. They take comfort in one another’s presence, at least in the moment. Or, maybe, I misread them.

Consider my father’s napping as a conscious or unconscious disengagement from my mother—or, from me. Consider my mother choosing not to wake him because she prefers to spend the time alone—or, with me. Perhaps, these interpretations, too, miss the mark. Perhaps, they sit in the den in a position of stalemate, or of accommodation. I can’t know. I will never know.

I can’t know either how they sit in my absence, though I believe that their “poses” are habitual, with slight variations: that, in late afternoon, before my mother prepares dinner, they sit in the den. Together apart. Alone together.

William Siavelis
The Time That Uncle Tom Died

Squinting into the hazy light, I walked out of the David Hockney portrait exhibition. The sun pitched tentative shadows on the museum plaza. Castaway in the artist’s world, I’d studied the line of his pen drawings, his brushstrokes, and his flat expanses of blues and greens, the backdrop to his figures of his family, friends, and lovers.

Later, at lunch, I watched my father as he, my mother, my husband, and I ate at a coffee shop. His milky brown eyes peered out of small openings; his gray hair stood up in wild waves. As he lifted the overstuffed steak sandwich to his mouth, his hands shook. A piece of onion fell from the roll, smearing the napkin at his collar. “I know, Gayle, I know, give me a minute,” he’d said to my mother when we’d sat down, and she’d reminded him to place the napkin over his chest.

“Mom,” I said when we were alone, “Go easier on him. He’s almost eighty-five, and his tremor’s worse.”

“I know, Hilary,” she said, “but if he doesn’t cover himself, no one will eat with him.”

I said no more.

I knew that she was right. But I couldn’t help remembering him as I saw him as a child: tall, large, his eyes sharp, and his voice commanding. Now, when he’s tired, he slurs his words, a reminder of throat cancer surgery. “I was always afraid of your father,” a friend told me recently.

Even before watching Bruno Wolheim’s documentary, David Hockney: Double Portrait, I’d read Hockney’s subtext in Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy, a painting of a married couple at odds. A full-length shuttered window divides the canvas in half. Ossie, the husband, poses on the right before the open side of the window, his wife, on the left, before the closed side. Through the window, a stone balustrade of a second story balcony and trees in full leaf. Long haired and dressed in shades of green, Ossie sits with parted legs, at an angle to the painter, his cat on his lap. Celia, wearing a dark purple robe, stands. Her loose blond, pre-Raphaelite curls frame her soft face. Her eyes lock with ours.

From beneath his brows, Ossie’s gaze hints at mystery, flirtation perhaps, or even a kind of dare.

Celia’s more frontal, direct gaze suggests resignation, even annoyance. Though her head’s slight tilt
down may indicate demureness, her stance—akimbo—seems to betray irritation or determination.

Does Hockney’s portrait capture the essence of Celia and Ossie’s relationship at a specific moment, or did he sense its nature and pose them to embody his vision of them?

The space between Celia and Ossie interests me. The space between. The space. Between. People. In another work, Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott, Hockney seated Henry, the famed curator, in the center of a long pink divan, his head barely extending above its arched middle. Henry’s girth and the pull of his vest across his belly create a strong horizontal element, emphasizing his permanence. In contrast, his partner, Christopher, a slight man, stands like a ghost at one side.

Maybe the physical distance between the lovers signifies the existence of an intimate connection and, at the same time, an emotional gulf. Maybe it symbolizes the intrinsic challenge of individuals forming a couple.

I think of my parents. How would Hockney portray them?

They sit in their den. Each stakes claim to a side of the room. My mother sits on the far end of a leather sofa, and rests her feet on the coffee table before her. She wears a tan sweater and brown woolen pants. Her head inclines as she scans the newspaper on her lap. At the other end of the room, my father sits, his back to a large paned window opening to a lawn of bare maple trees, his legs cross at the knees. Dressed in trousers and his favorite holey, mustard-colored sweater, which my mother will later discard, his hands fall onto the open book, face down on his lap, and poised to slide to the floor. He dozes, his head bobbing slightly with each breath. Dusk fills the room.

“Ralph,” my mother says. Looking up, she sees his closed eyes and hears his breathing. As she rises and walks behind him to close the curtains, he stirs, opening his eyes and closing them again. She returns to the sofa, reaches for the paper, lifts a pen, and resumes her crossword puzzle.

What lies between them? A rectangular room with a high arched and beamed ceiling, an oriental rug, and furniture—a sofa against the back wall, a coffee table in front of it, windows on three sides of the room, two chairs at either end, and a television cabinet across from the sofa.

What lies between them? Over fifty-five years of marriage, four children, six grandchildren, a daughter’s estrangement from and return to them, a son’s cruelty, their parents’ deaths, their children’s marriages and divorces, love, anger, illness, joy, sorrow, regret, deep caring, good fortune, unfulfilled hopes. Likely no different than others’ lives.

I imagine how Hockney would paint them. Perhaps it would not vary much from his portrait of his own parents inMy Parents, 1977. There they sit on either side of the canvas separated by an artist’s carrel in the center of the room against the wall. His mother faces forward, erect in her folding wooden chair, her hands folded on her lap. She looks straight ahead, her expression unblinking, her lips clamped together. Her eyes meet ours. His father sits, turning into the room at a forty-five degree angle. Seemingly oblivious to the portrait session, Mr. Hockney bows his head and reads the book on his lap. Mrs. Hockney’s engagement lies with her son, his with a private endeavor.

Maybe the angle of his chair—facing into the room but away from the painter—signifies an emotional inaccessibility. Then again, he is turned toward his wife. Maybe her direct gaze indicates that her primary intimacy lies with her son. Perhaps this portrait represents a map of the Hockneys’ lives together. Perhaps it reflects only a moment in time.

In the documentary, one of Hockney’s subjects noted that when he posed, the painter looked right into him, as a spy would. Another spoke of the artist’s ability to capture an aspect of the person when she is off-balance and to create a “psychological theater and kind of performance.” Still others remarked on his ability to expose the feelings between people, to capture the ambiguity in a relationship, and his relationship to his sitters.

If the portraits are objective portrayals, they are still somehow tinged with the artist’s own subjectivity. Hockney, though not on the canvas, is present in the portrait. In the film, he confessed as much. When asked how much of a portrait was about a couple and how much about himself, he replied, “Most is probably me, isn’t it?”

His response cast doubt on his ability to observe and record objectively, and his inability to wipe himself from his canvas. But art is necessarily subjective. The photographer, Richard Avedon, is reported to have written to Jacques-Henri Lartigue after viewing his photographs, “Seeing them was for me like reading Proust for the first time. You brought me into your world, and isn’t that, after all, the purpose of art?”

What then of my parents?

Viewing the Hockney portraits caused me to “look at” my parents differently—to examine the physical space they occupy with respect to one another as well as the distance between them in an effort to examine their relationship. Unlike a painter, though, I am not confined to portraying a static, two-dimensional world. Writing allows me to describe movement and something more closely approximating three-dimensionality.
I mull over how I can “paint” them on the page. For certain, I’ve observed them in many moments in time. For certain, I’ve brought myself to the sitting as an observer, but also as their daughter. I want to create as objective a portrait as possible but know that it will be tinged with my feelings.
To me, their poses reveal their separateness but also their connectedness; they sit in the same room though they do not engage with one another. My father feels free enough to doze in my mother’s presence. My mother does not interrupt his nap to ask him to draw the curtains. They take comfort in one another’s presence, at least in the moment. Or, maybe, I misread them.

Consider my father’s napping as a conscious or unconscious disengagement from my mother—or, from me. Consider my mother choosing not to wake him because she prefers to spend the time alone—or, with me. Perhaps, these interpretations, too, miss the mark. Perhaps, they sit in the den in a position of stalemate, or of accommodation. I can’t know. I will never know.

I can’t know either how they sit in my absence, though I believe that their “poses” are habitual, with slight variations: that, in late afternoon, before my mother prepares dinner, they sit in the den. Together apart. Alone together.