In the morning the light forces its way through the dirty window panes. The invisible becomes visible as dust dances, twirling in the light. Maybe it’s the curve of your shoulder, the curl of your hair spinning, smiling. The shaft of air is warm and as I exhale it’s the heat of our bodies but as I inhale it’s cold.

Maybe I’ll grow gills and go looking for you in the dishwasher, next the bathtub. I’ll imagine you water and every breath will surround me in you. I’ll just keep swimming, giving you carbon dioxide and taking your oxygen. When you evaporate I’ll trade in my flaps for lungs and go looking for you where there is nothing, rescue you clinging to pairs of nitrogen and oxygen with inhales and exhales.

In cold cobwebbed cellars
underneath the back
of your mind, the far back
corner of your mind
there is hot ambition combusting,
bubbling over lips of
clean concrete crates,
there is a new collection
each moment of moments
unsorted, unembellished,
there are villainous words
holding blades to each other
at the throat – whispering
sharp eager threats, fighting
for belief & release.

In the strange sturdy valves
of your heart there pump
poems that will never be read,
beat rhythms you only hear
in your head,
bleed language that hasn’t been said.

In wanton fingers
sit stories you’ve been through
before, are not waiting
to be seen but making
this happen:
there is a soft pretty girl
with her brother sharing
pictures with one another
downtown,
& when they get up to go
she walks quickly ahead,
eyes down where she steps
not slowing for him
to keep pace.

In the back of your mind
there are thugs
without faces writing
words in the blank
bathroom stalls. There are
great banners that read
DREAM THROUGH THE NIGHT,
DO NOT LET SLEEP
AWAKEN YOUR NIGHT,
NEVER OPEN YOUR EYES
AND GET DRUNK ON
THE NIGHT –

there are sleeping in the back
of your mind pistons with
crippled hind legs, frost
snorting from the holes on their faces,
teeth bared & broken & white.

In the black bright patch
behind your eyes
there is you, blinking
speechless & barren,
building dreams in the night,
trailing empty banners
of sleep, catching villains
& thugs, sisters & brothers,
youth captured in full –
in the corners, in the walls,
in the pitch of the vast dim
back of your mind.

I want the end of the earth on a platter,
For all of this to matter it would take a miracle
That would cost a lifetime of yeses
And nos that none of us have,

It would take more than what belongs to us
To sort out the difference between a beam
And a truss, to raise high the studs and kings
Of a stiff hammered wall, straight enough

That we trust it will never fall over, or
Splinter and keel in the strongest of winds,
The stiff-backed spine, leather hands
Of a man the color of the Appalachians. The sounds

That he makes are whistling songs
From a whittling stick, the scrape of an end
Without means we will never forget. I’m tired
For the scourge of blue Virginia’s lost

Who clamor up roadsides relying on faith
And the balls of their feet to bring them home
With more coal in the bag than was there
When they came, I’m afraid that they fear

And trust that they don’t.
I want a line of work that scabs my dry hands,
A day so long we use lighters to find our keyholes,
Memories I never had but wish were my own –

I’m tired of sashaying, relieved
Every day instead of reliving, I’m tired of not being
Tired when I wake. Where are the ends of my earth?
The beginning of me was more than I’m worth.

of winter storefront dazzlement. Hello,
sundogs loping at the edge of sight,
goosedown on a wet and chilly night.
Hi, summer afternoon. Good morning, snow
that drifts us in so we don’t have to go
to school today. Hello there, startled flight
of doves with whistling wings. Hi, time to write.
Hi, ringing downstroke of a cello bow.

Voluptuosity? Go down.
Cascades, cataracts: fat in a bra,
globes of honey tickled into
some palm, but only Anubis,

lover and coroner, sees the yellow drupes
of cells stacked inside, parts the lips
of the Y-incision most tenderly.
The living see only the juicy

dive, meetly and sweetly, between
strong marked-up thighs. What moving
finger writ these runes? White calves
bellow at night. Painted hide,

and the brown hands of a wicked, wicked witch
on a strapping white ass. All poses are coy.

I got root access through you,
root doctor, root guru,
ghost in the UNIX shell.

Penguins taught you and you
taught me. See? How a mojo hand
trails off in rootlets, a taproot

where saxophones divide,
a girl named Truffles brushes the drums
with hairy ginseng from the holler:

you knew these blues, and you taught me well,
chords of the Buddhas unborn.

He said:
The leaves are falling off the trees,
browned to the color of the cancer
rust edging up the fenders of my car.
Usually just the leaves die, but
I think the trees are dying too.

She says:
My head is swollen. Pregnant
with ideas and failure. Full of mourning
and morning sickness. My feet so fat
I can only wrestle in my sheets
and lay with open mouth counting peaks
in stucco ceilings.

He says:
I’m hungry for change.

She said:
It’s time for me to go.

You’d look swell in such a place, I swear
you would. Not far from a lake, it’d all look
just out of this world, like some pearl-strung
still frame from a faraway screen, all blithe

and fair. Small lights, I’d have them there
too, bugs that each hold a piece of moon
to build as gold fades to a June night blue.
What would you think of such a rose? Of “I may

be wrong, but I think you’re wonderful.” And as I
mean it, I’d spill my drink, honest I would. Please say
at least, you’d smile, at me, at petaled songs, the beat
of thumbs to thorns, and of love, old, gone Deco.

The stroll of it’s step,
says it’s drunk.
And the shine in it’s eye,
says it’s high.
The whisper in it’s words,
says it’s dreaming.
And the curve of it’s lips,
right at the tips,
says it’s scheming.

The way it goes on,
it’s delirious.
It’s drum is a beat,
walked on by feet,
that won’t do to be naught,
but mysterious.
The taste on it’s tongue,
says it’s displeased.
The fire of it’s wants,
says it won’t be appeased.

The steps of it‘s dance,
are contagious.
The sweep of it’s words,
advantageous.
As it walks through the high grass,
in a field never tilled.
And it rambles like a madman,
for it always will.
The madness in it’s mind,
says it’s seeing.
The high grass before,
when it was something more.
And the memory,
makes sure it keeps breathing.

ii.
What instrument
does it take for you?  to lift one and return to the Old Country,
       not war-torn Russia but to
      Hackensack to the paper prints of her     My
          Grandmother young and dark in this way:
               there is one-
          The Crepe-Paper          dress
               as though she wore a Maypole and the streamers
               wound around her waist, her curls, her fingers
          Look at this one young and wide-wild-wry-eyed
               the cups in their saucers, her eyes
               in their saucers The sockets kept
      and cleaned by the moment.
          When she lights the candle how can we not
      hang our heads
               at least a Little

iii.
Do you remember-      the fear in that kitchen candle Yellow
      Not like of wax, of corn But
      cloth stars kept
      in the spring sink.
          I could not sleep when it sat there,
          while our eyes closed and It stayed
          alone and lit.
      Now in the dream-velvet not a
          tune, but the dripping arrangement of my house
          pooling in the sink.
               a handle of wax in glass

iv.
      the bees in the light swam,
      their last buzz and collected
      in the sink         In what melts in
          ribbons with the fear of waking
          in wax.

The bump tucked
up near the nape is touched, is then spread and
the sting’s thinned
          how a bleached
          scalp breathes in milk.

A gift for Nicola’s 10^th birthday, but it wasn’t really hers.  It was a “keepsake”; it was something to “save for when she had kids.”

Nicola was not going to have kids.

Her parents were still in the living room with her grandmother as she snuck past.  Once there was a lull in the conversation, they would remember the cake and ice cream in the fridge.  The teddy bear was squished under one arm; Nicola pressed it hard against her side so the metal and glass inside wouldn’t clink.  The straps of her armguard bound her brown skin.

They kept her bow and her arrows in the garage, as if keeping them out of sight would keep them out of her mind.  Her uncle had given them to her a few weeks before along with lessons at the local club.  Her parents weren’t satisfied.  A certified instructor and even a solemn promise to never take down her bow without their knowledge barely qualified as trust.  They forgot how true a promise could be if you wanted something badly enough.

Her quiver was hung on the edge of some white plastic shelves.  The shelves sagged under the weight of neglected paint cans and dirty rags, but the sides held firm against the wall.  Five arrows shifted inside as she slid the quiver down; their tips were blunted steel and the fletching was bright yellow plastic.  Her knees weakened a little at the sound, at the thought of what she was risking.  The bear looked up at her, lumpy head pulled to the side in limp apathy.  She took a shaky breath and moved on.

Getting her bow was a different matter.  It was a green plastic recurve bow with a molded black rubber grip.  The bow was laid, unstrung, across two hooks over the back door.  The sun was setting on that side of the house so she could barely see it with the glare coming through the window.  She wheeled her bike back to the door, the wheels disturbing the grit spread across the concrete.  Bracing the bike against the wall and the pedal against the kickstand, she stood and used one of the arrows to flick the bowstring free of the hook.  Nicola grabbed ahold of it and quietly pulled the bow off its restraints.

A chair scraped inside and someone stomped further into the house.  She waited, heard the pipes rattle as the water ran.  Still no one missed her.  She tied the quiver to a belt loop on her jeans and went out the door.  The sun shone on her black hair and on the spider webs she dodged.  The unstrung bow was in her left hand; the bear smothered under her right.

Nicola walked quickly across the backyard; her shoulders felt heavy, like phantom hands were pushing her on.  She was afraid that if she turned her head, she might find she had gained an audience.  Or see someone in the windows and hesitate.  She didn’t turn.  Noise scraped her ears: the grass beneath her feet, the swishy flop of a loose armguard strap.  Her uncle would be so disappointed.

The day he gave her the set, they had a talk right before he left.  They both stood by his truck in the driveway and he had crouched to her level.  He said, “Listen, Nick, we both know how much you wanted this.  Just be fair to your parents and follow their rules, ok?”  The possibility that they might not let her keep her bow clenched her heart.  She bit her lip and, when she could talk, asked why he couldn’t keep it at his house.

“That isn’t the kind of secret you keep, Nick.  Not just because it’s a weapon.  You don’t lie about your actions; you own them.”

The walk down the property line seemed to take an hour but she made it behind the garden shed without any discovery.  It looked like a barn out of a picture book with red siding and white trim that seemed to glare at her.  On the other side, there was a bale of hay and a nailed target.  She set the bear down with its mirror belly gaping open.  A few paces away, she stepped through the opening of the bow and bent the upper end over an exaggerated jut of her hip, sliding the string into the notch.

The first arrow went through one of its stitched eyes.  A bead of sweat, a piece of hair irritated one of her corneas.  Nicola was not crying.  The force had knocked the bear back, tilting the mirror so she could see herself.  She paused, straightened her posture, and aligned her waist on an even plane.  She hated this goddamn girly bear.

Nicola pulled another arrow and sent it through one of the paws.  A seam split; stuffing and purple fuzz came loose.  It tangled on the hay, caught on the yellow fletching.  A memory ghosted through the back of her mind: her mother’s hands in her hair, asking why she couldn’t grow it long enough to braid.  Two more arrows pierced her target.

Finally, she sent the last arrow through the mirror itself, just to see if it would break.  The metal broke, but the head clanged strangely against the atomizer inside.  She lowered her bow and stood undecided.  Was the glass shattered or was something inside still whole?  Suddenly she couldn’t bring herself to look inside the bear’s belly.  The longer she stood there, the more the hole gaped at her.  Nicola heard the back door open and ran to meet whoever it was, her hands ready to surrender the bow.

It is a grievous occasion,
for brown mice cannot find
their grey mice.
Blind to the terrible, terrible.

And do I dare embrace the branches of this singleton
          tree
blowing in the wind like the delicate beauty
          of my past.
She whom my heart will not let me forget yet what is
          Now gone:

Dressed in a crown of green, a gown of Splendor’s
          Richness,
She is beacon unto me as desperation cries out in complete
          Fullness.
I see not ancient limbs that call to me at this time
          And how!
But faithfulness as I draw nearer and closer to my
          Once
Abandoned home. Still so full of the fullness of life as
          always.
And with shaking hands like the wind through your hair
          Now
I remember my buried woes, a dream that failed in life,
          a…

I tempt future emotions that are sure to come and
          place
My hand upon the soft bark to see the youth that once was
          where
A lost engagement was swept away in the tempest of my
          youth
I am he, who dreamed too much what ought not come to be
          passed.

I asked my dad if he had ever been drafted. He took a deep breath, sat back in his rocking chair and crossed his arms. He looked very natural in that chair he had built as a boy one summer in Michigan; now it nods back and forth on our patio whenever he steps out for a breath of fresh air. I realized too late that his answer would take the form of a long story and so I sat down in my lawn chair and prepared myself for the enigma of a story my father tends to tell. This is the story he told me…

“Well, I was in Munich and I received a letter from Selective Services indicating that I would be drafted soon. I decided that I’d rather enlist with the Navy then be a foot solider in Vietnam, so I took the train to Bremerhaven where some kids told me how to find the naval base. I jumped on a bus, and passed through this fenced area, which I thought was odd, but nobody said anything. The recruiter was out to lunch so I went to grab a bite at the commissary; I got a burger and fries and was ready to pay.”

I tried to picture my dad as a young man and found it difficult as most children do; we see our parents as these one sided individuals, dominated by their master status as our parent. I found an old photograph of him standing next to a hanging three-point buck with one hand resting against the tree, and one hand resting on the butt of his gun. I can see a young man hardened by the premature death of his father, a country boy who felt most at home in the woods behind his house. He’s smiling and he stands about 5 9′ and weighs a buck forty. His time as a Peace Corps volunteer is evident in his malnourished cheeks. His sharp mahogany eyes complemented his hair, which was the color of mustard yellow maple leaves, which he wore short and parted on the right. His skin resembled the bark of a birch tree, a very light complexion sensitive to the sun. I couldn’t see the palm of his hand but I knew it would be calloused from the years he had spent outdoors, hunting, chopping wood and gardening. His shoulders slumped slightly, extended too far, like branches burdened by the weight of winter’s snow. Forged in Lake Huron, he became a capable adult, conscientious of his place on this planet. I could see him purchasing that burger and fries looking for a familiar meal in foreign territory.

“Where’s your ID?” said the cashier. I pulled out my passport and showed it to her and then she called the guards with assault rifles over. Apparently that was the wrong ID!” He let out a chuckle, the kind of laugh acquired when the years have displaced the emotional intensity of the moment.

“It turns out this was a ‘secret’ N.A.T.O. base, so they interrogated me for an hour and I figured out they weren’t going to believe that I wasn’t a spy.”

I had to pause for a moment to take this new information in. The fact that someone thought at one point in time, that my father could have been a spy was more than I could believe. After all, this is the same man who tried to raise chickens at our house in Nepal without my mother’s consenting knowledge. That lasted a whole 26 hours. He might have gotten away with it if he hadn’t gotten a rooster that Ca-Cawed at 5:46 in the morning. It also didn’t help that he kept them right next to the house in the car sized crate that my mother walked by every evening in her garden stroll. Raised in rural Michigan, my father’s a farmer at heart and just didn’t have the deception in him to be a spy. Even now, in Virginia he still kept a small garden of tomatoes, mint leaves and grapes and hunts, whenever deer are in season. He said he was going to tell my mother eventually, using the eggs they’d lay as leverage to keep them and he still believes that would have worked.

“So I said. ‘Listen…maybe I am a spy; but let us assume for one minute that I am who I say I am; an ex-Peace Corps volunteer, looking for the naval recruiter. Assuming this is the truth, it would be awfully embarrassing if word ever got out about how easily I walked into your base.”

Here I was expecting him to be detained until the U.S. Embassy stepped in and instead he found his own way out. My father has a Ph D, so I know he’s an intelligent man, but there are also some days when he spends half an hour minutes combing the house for the hat on his head or the keys in his hand. These days he’ll remind me to do a chore I completed weeks ago. I see medication come through the mail that promises to improve your memory or your money back. I know that he’s getting older and it’s getting harder to remember the small details, e-mail passwords, my girlfriend’s name, and his children’s birthdays. Every year his glasses get thicker and his organization system becomes more complex.

I remember lying in my bed trying to postpone my bed time by asking question after question and my dad would answer every one of them, even the tough ones like is there a heaven? Can Raja, our lab, come with us? Why do dogs have to die? It saddens me to witness my father’s mind failing him, to see that hazy look as his eyes search for recognition. I wish he would stop aging.

“The guards decided they couldn’t detain me any longer and escorted me to the recruiter’s office and I took the two tests, a physical and an officer test. I passed the officer test, but I failed the physical because I’m 50% red-green color blind.” His uneven mustache reminds me of my uncle, the way it tilts to the left.

His brother has the same affliction. This explains how both he and his brother owned and wore the most ridiculous combination of neon aqua-green swim trunks, an old stained white t-shirt, a flimsy hat, knee high socks and water shoes at the same family reunion. I thought it was a joke when they stepped out from changing and were dressed identically for water tubing down Michigan’s cold summer rivers. When I asked if they had choreographed their outfits, they stopped walking, looked each other over from head to foot and started chuckling while making comments like, “I didn’t realize how handsome we looked” and “Boy, I guess a keen fashion sense is genetic, waddayouknow!”

My dad has a boyish grin at times, something age hasn’t been able to take from him.

My father continues his story. “They told me that I couldn’t join the Navy and would have to join the Army. I asked if there was anything I could do to overturn the decision and they said I could try to bring up my case with the higher ups at the Detroit Naval base.”

“So what’d you do next?” I asked.

“Well, I boarded a plane back to the States, landed in New York and just happened to know a friend who needed someone to drive his car back to Michigan. My draft letter said I had to report to the Army recruiter so I went to the Army base and told them that I was trying to join the Navy. The secretary showed me my draft recruitment letter and told me she’d hold on to it if I could join the Navy, so I drove to the naval recruiter in Detroit and I took the two tests again.”

My father is a nice guy and people like dealing with him. He’s quick to give pats on the back or head rubs to friends. I wonder if secretaries understand the power they hold over regular people like my father. They are the gate keepers. I remember playing soccer with my dad and I was trying to make the argument that the only thing that mattered was how good a player you were and my dad insisted that you had to be a nice person; I guess he knew first hand how important it was to be a nice guy because you never know which hands will control your fate.

“This time I did very well on the officer test; the secretary told me that I had the highest score that base had ever seen; a serious accomplishment because it was one of the larger recruiting facilities back in the day. Part of why I did so well was because I had already taken the test but I was also a pretty good test taker in those days. However, I failed the physical test again for the same reason. I still didn’t want to be a grunt in Vietnam so I asked the proctor of my test what I could do about it and he advised me to bring my case up with the officers in charge of enlistment. After about four months of my case getting passed up the branches of the navy recruiting agency, I finally received a rejection letter saying that they wouldn’t take me in the Navy. Accepting the inevitable, I went to the Army recruiter to enlist and the secretary said ‘Tim Gabriel Johnston? Oh. Well we don’t need you to enlist anymore.’” He laughed at the quirk of fate, here he was running all around the globe to enlist in the navy so he wouldn’t serve as a grunt…and the army no longer wanted him!

Why wouldn’t they want him anymore? Here was my father, Mr. Magoo with a PhD, with no more options but to enlist and they were telling him they didn’t want him anymore?

“Well, you see, I had turned 26 and since I didn’t want to be in the armed forces in the first place, I decided not to enlist.”

He had aged past the required level for recruitment. I looked at my father and smiled. He told me that if the secretary hadn’t told him he wasn’t being drafted anymore, she could have got him to sign on anyways. I should have known this would happen; he has this, what will be, will be, element to his character that gave him the ability to roll with the punches. Time and time again, he gets into these complicated situations but he always finds a simple solution and sometimes, solutions fall into his lap. I realized that his aging was part of the reason that I was here; if he hadn’t surpassed the age restriction he probably would have served, might have died and definitely never met my mother at graduate school in Indiana.

I looked my father over as he concluded his story and saw the effect of time on his body. His once lean frame had grown the “papa paunch” and through over exposure to the sun, he had accumulated hundreds of freckles, the way trees accumulate rings. He hunched as he sat at his desk, but I could tell he was still strong, that hidden strength of deep roots. His legs were thick like the oak trees of his youth, hardy from years of toil. His hair has receded, so now he has a permanent laurel of white cresting the tops of his ears, circling around the back of his head. The cataracts in his eyes refract too much light through his thick glasses and so he wears shades whenever he’s in the sun. His hands had become thick from calluses built on calluses; I remember at Christmas, he could carry pine trees with his bare hands and not feel the sting of the needles.

I hope that when I am an old man, my memories gain that cloudy lens that softens pixels so you can’t see the lover’s marks that scar the trees. The lens of memory brings out the best and shades the real; maybe it’s a biological censor built into memory so that when we look back at our lives we don’t see the dirt and broken branches, we see the way leaves glisten and the sun shines. At 60, my father doesn’t have much to look forward to; one day he’ll be uprooted by fierce winds, raging rivers or the crack of lighting and as he falls to the Earth from which he sprang, at least he can take solace in the roots his seed has sown and watching his children grow.

He hadn’t reassured me about what I would do if I was drafted, but I realized that there wasn’t anything he could do to reassure me. I can’t change my fate the same way I can’t change him aging. The most I can hope for is to alter my fate slightly, the way trees lean toward the sun. All I can do is grow tall, bend with the wind and endure the storms and it was that simple.

I had reached the culmination of my childhood. Four years later, I would be accepted to the Peace Corps program to teach English in Lithuania. I think about the day when my children will ask me how I ended up there, while they try to postpone their bedtime and I will tell them what my father told me on that patio when I was 18. “We start as seeds, cast out by the wind. We take root under the shade of our father and eventually we grow tall, drinking in the rain, reaching for the sun and then… we start the cycle all over again.”

I go to the drawer where we keep the keys. My wife and I are older than most of the other couples on the block. We’ve lived on this street since we first married and have watched families come and go. It’s a stable neighborhood; homes here are sought after by young couples starting out. We’ve felt no need to move. We’re looked up to here, I believe, and are considered dependable and generous. Our neighbors greet us on the street and in the winter we can usually count on having our walks shoveled for us. Because we rarely travel, we are often asked to watch houses, feed pets, and water plants while the homeowners vacation. We have, therefore, quite a collection of keys. I sift though them now, reading labels, considering choices. Finally, I choose the Whittaker’s key, and slide the drawer closed. I trade my slippers for tennis shoes, slip on my jacket, ease open the front door and step out into the night. The neighborhood is quiet, as one would expect at this hour. I can hear the trucks shifting gears on the highway a mile or so away. In the distance, a dog barks once, twice, and then is still. The air is crisp and fresh, and the sky is clear.

I cross the street and cut across the Morgan’s front lawn – there’s no frost yet, so my footsteps won’t show – and walk around the side of the Whittaker’s house to the kitchen door. I always avoid their front door. It has a tendency to creak despite my best efforts with the WD-40.

The kitchen door opens quietly and I am in. While the first moments of stepping into a strange house still brings me a chill of excitement, I find that the greatest satisfaction comes later, when the rhythms of the sleeping house become my own.

Meanwhile, standing here in the Whittaker’s kitchen, the refrigerator is humming, and the room is lit by the icy blue lights on the microwave and stove. I can smell the faintest whiff of the Whittaker’s dinner – something Italian. I see the milk has been left out so I open the refrigerator and put it on the shelf. As long as I am there, I help myself to some grapes and a slice of cheese.

I move deeper into the house. In the dining room, the plants on the sideboard under the window are dry. I water each one carefully. Then I pick up one pot and dribble just a few drops of water onto the wood, replacing the pot carefully. The water will creep along the foot of the pot and tomorrow, when Jill moves the plants to catch the morning sun, she will find a circular white water stain on the mahogany. I stand for a minute, enjoying the thought – the image – of her lips pursing with displeasure.

I climb the stairs slowly, skipping the third step, which pops loudly when any weight is put on it. I drift down the hall. Jared, the six year old, has kicked his covers off and is curled tightly against the chill in his room. I pull the covers up over him and wait. In a few minutes I am pleased to see him relax and unfurl, warmed again. I see one of his electronic toys sitting on his dresser. I slip out the batteries and put them in my jacket pocket.

Next door to Jared, the baby, Melissa, is sleeping soundly in her crib. She’s still so small, but lying there with her fists flung out to either side she looks like a little pugilist, ready to fight her way through the night to the next morning. I wonder what it’s like to hold a child that small. My wife and I will sit houses and pets but we do not sit children. We never had any of our own. I wouldn’t know how to behave with a child. I would be afraid of causing a child harm. Their smallness, their fragility, screams danger to me.

I take the baby’s doll out of the crib and place it on the windowsill, within sight but, I calculate, frustratingly just out of her reach. I watch her for a moment longer, my hand lingering just over her head, feeling her warmth. But I dare not touch her.

I move down the hall towards the master bedroom. The door is ajar and through it I watch them sleep. Mark is snoring and Jill is an almost silent mound beside him. I wonder what might be hidden in the drawers of their room. I could always come over when they are away, but there’s no challenge in that, no thrill. I watch them sleep for a few more minutes, then back away. I’ll leave the drawers for another night.

Back down the stairs to the kitchen. I open the fridge again and take out a beer, leaving the now-empty grape stem in its place. The opener is in its usual place in the drawer by the sink. I move into the living room, and sit, sipping the beer, fidgeting with the bottle cap, feeling the differences of the house surround me, until I sink into them, until the house feels as comfortable as my own and I relax. Jill redid the room last year and this is one of the more attractive living rooms on the street. The older furniture was more comfortable, though, more welcoming somehow. Housekeeping is important to me. I won’t go into the Fairchild’s house any more. Jeannie is not a good housekeeper and the clutter and dust bother me. She wouldn’t bat an eye at a water stain on her furniture.

The furnace kicks in and, after a moment warm air blows across my face. I finish the beer and decide it’s time to head home. But as I grab the arms of the chair to pull myself up, I hear the baby cry out.

Almost immediately, Jill gets up to check on her and I hear her call out to Mark that the baby is feverish. I sit back down, caught in the living room, in the dark, and listen to the baby fuss and cry. I listen to the rattling in the medicine cabinet, the dispensation of the Tylenol, the discussion of whether or not they needed to cool her off with a washcloth. I can’t decide what to do, whether it is safe to leave. This is the first time anyone has wakened during one of my visits and I am finding it strangely hard to breathe.

Once more I begin to rise and then, suddenly, the hall light is on, making me blink, making my eyes tear slightly. Mark is stumbling downstairs, past the living room’s darkened entrance, toward the kitchen. I hear him open a cabinet and run water and I heard the clink of a glass being placed on a countertop. I sit back, mostly in the dark, with a slice of the hall light cutting across my lower legs and sneakers. I am wondering what I can say if Mark finds me, if I could successfully plead the confusion of the elderly. I am more excited then I have ever been since I first began visiting my neighbors’ houses. My heart is beating loudly in my ears and my breath has quickened. Mark passes through the hall again and up the stairs, snapping the hall light off once more. The darkness descends like a comforting blanket, wrapping me in safety. Within the hour, the baby’s fever is down and they have all three settled back to sleep.

My breathing is back under my control; my heart beats steadily. It’s definitely time to leave. I toss the bottle cap on the floor under Mark’s recliner, but quietly rinse the bottle out and add it to the recycling bin. As I begin to open the kitchen door, I notice the coffeemaker, set to make the morning brew. I pull its plug from the wall.

I walk home slowly, relaxed and at peace. Before going into my own house, I sit on the porch and watch my neighborhood for a few minutes. The Whittaker’s, the Grant’s, the Barbarossa’s. A light goes on in the Morgan’s bathroom. Perhaps someone is ill…usually no one wakes in that house until 5:30. But within a few minutes the light is out again and the house is dark. The sky has clouded over, and there is an indefinable feel to the air that lets you know that autumn has definitely taken grip. The chill is beginning to work its way into my bones. It’s time to call it a night.

Back inside, I hang my jacket neatly; slip out of my tennis shoes and into my slippers. I stand for a moment, savoring my night at the Whittaker’s, and then I head upstairs. As I enter the bedroom, my wife stirs.

“Where were you?” she asks me.

I pause. “Visiting the Whittaker’s.” I say, finally.

There’s silence from her side of the bed. She’s motionless, her back unreadable.

Then she turns toward me. “I was thinking,” she says, “that I might visit the Hirschs’ tomorrow night.”<–>

Ander Monson is the author of  the novel”Other Electricities” and the poetry collection “Vacationland.”  Monson also edits the online literary journal, Diagram and teaches at the University of Arizona.

Ripple: You’ve said previously that creating a story through multiple mediums (as you’ve done with schematics in OE) makes the book a thoroughly designed experience rather than a simple text.  Do you feel that this creates a more tangible world to readers?  Does this help them immerse themselves more completely in the story you’ve created?  Are there other senses you’d incorporate into your work?

Monson: I don’t know how it works from the reader experience, but I do think that if we’re interested in writing books, we should be writing thinking about the books, not just writing prose that can be dropped into books or ebooks or whatever else. It’s hard for me not to think about the artifact of the book as I work on a book, even if the pieces were originally published as solo things. By putting them together my obligation to the material changes.

I’m not sure what you mean by the “other senses,” but I’ve been working on further elements of interactivity in my texts (thus the web presences of the books–my new book has sections that proceed out of the text and end online, tangling up the idea of reading). The idea is that the reader doesn’t have to go online if she doesn’t want to, but there’s moments in the essays that are denoted with glyphs or are otherwise rendered different via type that indicate I’m not done with this question/idea/image. This also allows me to keep thinking about things after the book’s been published, since the online stuff is revisable, and also totally under my control (no editors involved). This is one thing that more experimental things do for reading: you have to read experimental texts more actively; when done well I think experimental texts have some quality of games, like you have to play them as much as read them.

Ripple: Even your website itself is intricately designed with photos, interactive card indexes and the like.  Is the controlled chaos of otherelectricities.com faithfully representative of the inner workings of Ander Monson?  Is the labyrinthine quality of the site a single stroke of inspiration or hours upon hours of careful consideration?

Monson: The different forks on the website were conceived at different times (each book has its own thing going, and there’s some interactive web essays on there like the “Box” one), so I think of the website as a way to organize a bunch of different collections of things while retaining some bigger sense of Ander Monson as author, so when you’re on there, you’re in my head, or a simulated version of my head, which is also what essays are meant to do. The labyrinthine quality, as you nicely put it, is emblematic both of my interests in prose/poetry (digression is big for me) and a function of the ways I’ve been composing and working on the website, clipping off some things, adding others, and so on.

Ripple: Imagine the “Welcome” sign greetings first-time visitors to the, Houghton, Michigan depicted in OE.  Underneath the “welcome,” there is the population.  Beneath that, is a simple, single-sentence summation of this small Upper Peninsula hamlet.  What does it say?

Monson: It says “You are Now Entering Memory” and underneath it, “Home of the 1982 High School Cross Country State Champions.” I actually spent a lot of time trying to figure out where the “State” should go in that sentence. I think that’s the best place for it.

Ripple: Weather seems to play a large role in your works.  Is that purposefully done or just organic?

Monson: I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition. If you grow up in a place where weather is a constant consideration it is everywhere, in every character, in every interaction. But plenty of people from where I grew up don’t write about it all the time either, so it works both ways. It’s one of those big ideas that I am going to continue pushing on.

Ripple: Amputation shows up really often.  Does that symbolize anything for you?

Monson: Amputation doesn’t symbolize anything, no. That’s not to say it doesn’t mean anything.

Ripple: How would your dream obit begin?

Monson: Ander Monson…

Ripple: If you could bottle yourself as a scent, what would Eau de Monson smell like?

Monson: Ice rink shavings just post-zamboni in the second intermission. Collected, electrified, and smoking hot.

Ripple: You’ve said that music helps you create.  Is what you write affected by the type of music?  Do Disney soundtracks produce love sonnets while death metal delivers elegies?  What are your feelings on country?  Gangsta rap?

Monson: Did I say music helps me create? I don’t think I usually get much inspiration from music. I do intentionally listen to certain sorts of music as I’m writing on a project, though, because certain artists/songs keep me in a particular emotional or intellectual space that I like (the Low with OE for instance). That’s part of the deal with working on longer projects, that you have to get back into the headspace of the piece even when you may be decades away from where you were, where those characters still are. Music can be a shortcut to that space.

Ripple: When writing poetry (or fiction, or anything really) do you set out to try to write experimentally and play with form, or does it come more organically?

Monson: It varies.

Ripple: Quite a bit of the humor on your website is self-deprecating.

Monson: Though this is not a question, I do agree that there’s something interesting about this.

Ripple: You’ve said that you created Diagram in order to have a space for more experimental works.  What is it that draws you to the fringes of “traditional” literature?

Monson: Did I say that? I dislike the term experimental. After all, the history of literature is the history of experimental literature. But when most people say experimental they mean it as a subtle put-down (you don’t, and I don’t, but most people do; experimental usually equates to obscure and difficult and annoying; means don’t expect to enjoy this intellectual pap). The idea of experiment simply means that you are trying something and you don’t know what’ll happen, right? Isn’t that how most people write? You don’t know where the piece is going to go, but you work at it until you do. And then the difference between a good experiment and a bad one is whether or not we like/enjoy/appreciate what results from the experiment. A good experiment proves something to be possible, or to be true, or to be cool. Maybe we mean that experimental literature shows its experimental beginnings, where as unexperimental (or “normal”) literature just disguises its beginnings in experiment better? After all, “realistic” writing is an experiment. It is an effect. It is a literary trend. But it reads to us–because most of what we’re offered is “realistic” writing that aspires to prose transparency, to a seeming lack of style, as if that’s not a stylistic effect–it reads to us as the default, because it’s the dominant style. If we were in a different era or a different country/culture we might read things differently.

So almost no writer I know wants to do what others have done before. If that’s what you want to do, why write at all? Why not just read those who’ve done it brilliantly before? Which is a way of saying that I didn’t see a lot of places publishing what I was interested in reading, the kinds of writers who were trying new things, and so I decided to just make one myself. We just put up our 50th issue on Wednesday.

Ripple: Do you think it’s harder to edit an online journal or print journal?  Do you think that having an experimental journal online makes it more accessible to readers?

Monson: The obligation of the online journal is a more frequent production schedule (because it’s online, readers expect new content continually, so annual journals online don’t make a lot of sense). And that is a lot of work (we do 6 issues a year, which takes a lot of work and a constant attention to reading submissions, doing production, identifying and scanning and reproducing diagrams and so on).

Doing a print journal is a different ball game. Production is more difficult in print journals. Print journals require a more solid funding base. Then you have to sell them. You have to distribute them to bookstores and handle subscriptions or whatever other model you have in place to get your work to readers. It just happens that my editorial interests and skill set work better with online (though we do print anthologies because we like books and book artifacts too). I think doing a print journal is kind of ridiculous at this point, given the economics and the logistics. Of course a lot of online journals are ridiculous and not-thought-out either. A lot of online journals are startups and won’t last. Like print journals. Most journals die out or fade out or go broke or people have kids or get tired out for other reasons, or die. It’s a noble effort, a way of resisting time. And of fomenting a kind of literary community.

Ripple: The schematics section of Diagram is intriguing, to say the least.  What did that section evolve from?  Does it have any relation to the idea of the schematics in Other Electricities?

Monson: I don’t know. The two things (the schematics in OE and the journal DIAGRAM) come out of my thinking around the same time, so obviously there are connections. But OE is using those schematics to mean in a different way than DIAGRAM does. They both come out of me finding images that are old and beautiful, and wanting to find a way to honor that. The schematics, after all, are the raison d’etre for the journal. They provide its design ideas, its modus operandi, and a significant portion of its content.

Ripple: If you could be any dinosaur, what would it be and why?

Monson: You know it’s the Tyrannosaurus, possibly carrying a crystal gavel, as purchased from Amazon.com. Looks bad ass but has those feeble arms. It’s like they’re not arms at all, but amputations of arms. They strain the definition of limbs. But then you get all those sweet-ass teeth. And in those tiny arms you’re carrying an instrument of great power that represent justice and can refract light in all kinds of awesome directions. And that’s going to be a major evolutionary advantage.

(*) Oh wow, the staff is all ladies? Rock on, girls/grrls/ladies/women/womyn/peeps.

Ander