Even if our father did—after slipping at home and hitting his head— wander out of the hospital and fall fifteen feet off an embankment, whatever spirit he did it in, it was not frivolous. Not him who had always wanted to dip into the wild. It was an inexpressible wish granted. Rain dripped from the beak of an eagle to her nest. You slept on two chairs pushed together. I told him it was time. Drive carefully, sister, but fast. Guide us out of Kentucky, away from cremation. There isn’t a mortician alive who can force us to that table again—the forlorn meeting room where Stewart “I-don’t-know-about-you but-I’m-a-Christian-Man” Throgmorton told us he’d get a hold of your husband as if a woman can’t decide for herself whether to buy the necklace of ash. Maybe he was only hoping his own daughter will collapse stupid with grief when he dies. The complete and total opposite of what our father who art on fire desired. Our dad knew what he wanted and what we wanted did not always need to converge. He believed in his own ignorance, it rankled him, and still he seethed at the false convictions of smaller men. Better to be clueless. If, when I stand outside at night, I say thank you, I am equally as estranged by stars or clouds or the surprise of surviving as I was by the fires of Ethiopian music and the slideshow of children— bellies distended, beset by flies— when I was tucked between you and mom in the golden pews at Bethlehem Lutheran and he was at home stealing what sleep he could before hunting again men so desperate for something to cling to they smashed windows and crawled through. He’d seen enough. Forgiveness, he told me once— we were driving along the Ohio River in the gray, purgatorial light of early spring on a kind of pilgrimage— forgiveness is not justice. Some things are best left unforgiven. Hominid, sister of a common ancestor, weren’t we just now crossing the living room in our ring-shaped walkers like the riverine peoples of old Babylon in their coracles—stirring no wake, frontless, backless, beautifully afloat? If we get lost along the way, it’s only an hour. Guide us over these gargoyle hills. Get us out of here, well north of this place that ate him, these people with their eighty-five dollar Ark Encounter and its five-hundred-foot-long shadow.
Tell that to the tourist feeding Cheetos to black bears at the campground. Tell it to our housebound dead. They never meant to venture but off they went, bending no branches. Tell it to the singer singing Que He Sacado Con Quererte: Natalia, gardener of dark, your voice pulls me to cliffs. When I hear you, I haven’t left home in years. My love has decided this summer she wants us to face a grizzly bear on its own ground; she wants us to fight it if we must. Are you sure you want this I ask. She does. To brave the corridors and creeks where it breeds. We must make exceptions in love and art. Exceptions only. Okay, I will deliver her to the bear.
Does anyone else here—entering your own dark apartment after jogging three blocks, walking four, jogging two, walking five—leave the lights out and keep the earbuds in so the hallway feels like some kind of gauntlet? Do you not imagine a stabber hiding behind the curtain, and get just a little excited, for a second, thinking there’s a human snooping around? Maybe you did once and that was the moment you decided it was time to get married. Smart. Some people fly right past those warning signs— nothing in their head but Sarah McLachlan’s voice saying hold on to yourself and this is going to hurt like hell. Some people have a playlist on Spotify they titled “90’s Movie,” and it feels like the soft rock soundtrack to a horror film, like Jeff Buckley climbing onto your boat or Billy Corgan coming to tuck you in. To be fair, that Pumpkins sound is stronger than nostalgia. It’s not Billy’s fault if you refused to get married and now that last, long decade of your youth terrifies you. Leviathan of possibility. God goes ‘mong the world blackberrying, Stubb says, implying we ripen and get plucked. Does anyone else here sometimes catch sight of a burglar padding to the kitchen in pajamas for cinnamon rolls at midnight and think That bastard better not eat the last one? You aren’t the only one living with burglars. It’s a rush, letting them in like this.
Jacob Boyd is from Lansing, Michigan. He works in a bakery in Milwaukee. Poems of his have appeared in American Journal of Poetry, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Stilt House, was selected by Heather McHugh for the Emrys Press Award.
The colorful images below, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, were painted by an unidentified artist sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. These portraits on silk each represent a particular character from one of nine plays. Like most operas of this style, the characters hail from diverse sources — literature, military history, and myth — but play stock parts. There are four basic roles in traditional Peking opera: sheng, dan, jing, and chou, each of which have numerous subtypes. Sheng and dan are male and female leads (historically both played by men), jing is a villain, and chou, the clown. As Mei Chun details, complex personas were to be avoided. “The flatness is deliberate. Flatness in characterization contributes to the effect of moral contrast while rounder characterization could lead to ambiguity and disorder.” The characters’ painted makeup, known as lianpu, tracks back to masks worn by dancers during the Tang dynasty, and is mainly used for jing and chouroles. The colors and expressions convey moral qualities that were easily legible to audiences of the opera. From Public Domain Review https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/peking-opera
