Please, God, in the Event of Dictatorship

Allow me to run from America and, if it be Your will,
Have Germans roll out their welcome mats
As America opened her arms to my parents
When they escaped Berlin in the ’30s.
Or, if not, allow me to tend my garden,
And don’t forget to protect my stocks.
Or, if I end up in some relocation camp out in Utah,
At least let it be humane, or, if not,
May I thrive in suffering and hardship.
Didn’t Sartre say “We have never been so free
As under the German Occupation?”
Today on Morning Joe I heard terror in men’s voices
Even in those normally mechanical and robotic.
But Germany might be a better option anyway
For decrepit age, since they care for elders cheaper
And I’ve now got my German papers.
But maybe it’s too lonely there.
I know the language but don’t know a soul.
How does it work, to not know a soul?
I’ll just be in some affordable nursing home,
And everyone will be talking German
While I’m looking out at snow instead of palm trees.
Of course, if one listens to folks like Knut,
There never was a Holocaust.
What I don’t understand about antisemites is,
Shouldn’t they be cheering for the Shoah
Instead of denying it?
What would it take to convince him?
He also assures me the earth is flat
And schools everyone that BLM is a Jewish plot.
I wish, God, You could open his eyes at Auschwitz
But he’d claim that’s just an ingenious Hollywood set,
And Hollywood is Jewish-owned.
Maybe I should tell him about my grandmother
Who was deported from Germany,
Branded, starved, gassed and burned
Even though she’d converted to Christianity
The way I converted all these years later.
But he’ll assure me that’s all myth.
Knut once hoped to be a child support investigator.
And gave my name as reference.
When they phoned me, I told a bit of the truth
About his “issues” with black people and Jews
Though he has “mad respect” for one or two individuals.
They thanked me and never disturbed him again.
But You already know all this, dear Lord,
Because You know and direct everything.
Help heal Knut, lift him and others like him
Out of the cesspools of Reddit and 4chan
And into the yeshiva of Your grace. Amen.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Cairn

Don didn’t care if it would storm. They were here to fish, he and his son, and they needed a break in their luck. Yesterday was merciless, snags and empty stringers. The other fishermen, however, caught more walleye than they bothered to count. These were sportsmen, Don reminded himself, but the fish didn’t know that. Their bait looked same enough. This lake, a hundred miles north of Nowhere, Ontario, had no roads, service, or even plumbing—nothing but water, wood, and fish. If men weren’t equal here, equality anywhere was a joke.

They floated alone in a murky bay. Jigging, their lines were taut with sparkle beetles and curly tails. Nothing was biting. They were the first on the lake, and if need be, they’d be the last to come in, even under thunderheads. Don’s wife would not approve, but this wasn’t her world. This land was untouched, primordial. When Hannibal marched on Rome, this land looked no different. This was Nature as it should be—a newborn. The wind picked up, snapping at his hood.

The boat shifted. His son squirmed in his seat. Bo was an eighth grader already, scrawny and still afraid to unhook the fish he somehow caught. Don knew how important this week was. Bo needed something special, like a good look at something majestic or maybe a long crawl through adversity. He had bailed on his first campout—which was in the backyard—but Don had higher hopes for this trip. There was no easy way out here, only the floatplane, an aluminum tube tossing around in the clouds for hours. This was the real deal. A man had died here a month ago, slipped on some rocks, and hemorrhaged. It doesn’t get more real than that.

“Dad, I saw lightning.”

Don looked. Gray clouds rolled along. The wind, barely sharp, was hollow and silent. “It’s fine,” he said. It was a thirty-minute drive. They would stay and maybe catch a lunker to bring in for the others. Those fishermen, hard and wise, wouldn’t be going in yet. They’d sit through the rain no problem, but they’d hear Don and Bo driving in, privately judging them as they’d continue to catch and string their walleye.

“I didn’t bring my rain pants,” Bo whined.

“Whose fault is that?”

“I’m not sitting in the rain just to keep catching zero fish.”

“Shut up,” Don snapped. Bo turned to the water. The wind moved between them, rattling the trees. Don didn’t like shouting, but it had its place. It was certainly better than not caring at all or giving in to Bo’s every whim. No, his patience had its limits. But, he was still more patient than his father had been with him. Don’s old man was tough, raised in a different time. He belittled him for every small failure. Coward, prissy, nancy, runt, he had called Don everything. Just imagine what he’d call Bo, gripping the boy’s neck or wrist in rage whenever he was running behind. No, Don needed work, but he was doing well.

“I need to use the bathroom,” Bo said.

“Go off the side.”

Bo stood on the thwart, rocking with the waves. He tilted and swayed for several minutes before sitting back down. “I can’t, it’s rocking too much. I’m afraid I’ll fall in.”

“I guess it’s not that pertinent,” Don said.

“Just park it somewhere.”

Park it. Don scoffed and continued to jig. He thought more of his father as the silent gray churned above them. He remembered how his dad would drag him to the truck to get feed, his cheeks red and stinging. Or how he’d hate hearing the front door burst open, knowing he had come home. He remembered his father’s funeral, bright and cold in the heart of winter, his eyes stinging from the wind.

Bo was silent, fixed on some other place. Don reeled in and started the motor.

The boat glided on the water before scraping against the flat rock of a wooded island. Bo stumbled out and rushed to the trees as waves swept along the shore. On the other side of the boat, by a heap of moss, Don saw a small stack of stones. Gray and fixed, they looked like a child’s project. Bo returned from the trees and approached the pile, leaning down to pluck off the top.

“Don’t,” Don broke out. The rocks were neat, balanced, even reverent. “They might be for the man who died,” he said.

Bo backed away. A heaviness settled there.

Don looked around. The wind tumbled through the dark green tamaracks. They were sharp, pointing up to nothing and swaying like casual fanatics. Those thunderheads, heavy and creased, were above them now. Don felt a third one with them, a stranger he recognized but didn’t know. He stared at the wet rock beneath Bo’s feet, dark with mindless malice. It was time to go.

They left the island, cutting into the tattered lake. Darker, darker dawned the sky. Don thought of the men already inside the cabin, wondering where he and Bo were. He imagined rain filling their rundown Lund, shoring them somewhere remote and overgrown.

The wind and whirling chop thrashed against them. They braced and moved against it until they came across red cliff faces. Don sped back the way they came, passing through a narrow strait. The wind was somewhere above them, the waters calm. Bo deflated into his raincoat, covering his shivering legs.

The going was slow through tight corners and narrow gaps. Don’s mind wandered and he thought of the island. A video played in his head of a boot slipping up, followed by a thud and swift crack of bone. Another fisherman would’ve been there, twisting his head at the sound. After a single, hanging moment, he’d call and wait for some suggestion that the man was embarrassed and sore but fine. But he’d hear nothing. Maybe a soft, rattling whimper. He’d rush over, holler, pat his face, and jolt his coat, watching a world end. It could’ve been his friend, a brother, even his son leaking through his fingers.

Don thought of what his own father would have done if he had fallen. He remembered his sister spraining her ankle, flailing and crying as Dad tenderly opened the screen door to bring her inside. He remembered him old and gray, smiling in his La-Z-Boy as Bo rolled a Hot Wheels car up and down his shinbone. Or him teaching Don to fish at the lake with red buoys an hour out of town, fingertips slowly knotting the line. He wouldn’t have screamed or shaken Don’s body. He would have knelt in the wake, quietly panicking as he wrapped his old arms around the limp body of his boy, the terror of nature driving away his harshness. He would rock him, muttering for his only son to wake up. Please, please, son. Please wake up.

Don drove the boat out of the straits into a larger basin. The wind slammed against them, peeling away his hood. He saw a slight green in the clouds to the south, and a sober terror carved into his gut. It was the sick color that stalked cornfields on childhood evenings when the sirens would blare. They bounced on the waves, floating in the air for long seconds. Bo, light and high on the prow, pitched to the left and right by the boat’s edges. Don wanted to shout at him to hold on tighter but thought of him turning to listen at the wrong moment and going over. He only watched, as though by staring he could hold his son safely in place.

The lake took an age to cross, even as fast as he went. In Don’s mind, an image flickered of a covered figure resting between the seats. How fast that boat would’ve gone, he thought, as the body was returned to the cabin. They would have placed it somewhere while waiting for the plane. Not in the kitchen. Not outside either. In the bunkhouse, on a bed, and under a blanket. It would take the plane an hour to fly in. Then it would leave as those remaining cooked and prepared a quiet dinner. When the outside air was indigo, they’d lay in bed and drift to sleep.

No, not drift. Sink. Hours of a mind floating before a sudden plummet. One by one as night would rise, a darkness deep and ancient would sweep over the arctic waters, encroaching on the cabin, docks, and boats.

In town would be a phone. Calls would be made, names would be said, gasps and wails and huff-huff-huffs. Details would be discussed. Under the sterile lights of a hospital or the yellow glow of a fishing outpost, pens would be clicked and papers signed. What happened on the rocks would become legal and accounted for in the places where streetlamps, corner stores, and highways burned endlessly and night—true night—was not welcome.

But in the dark, that void pool surrounding the lake, there would be no thought or memory but the fading gray. On and on forever as the rolling stone of time continued its slow crush. The blood on the rocks seeping down, down into elder earth, thinning and dissolving and washing away in the black water. No identity but night, patient, hungry, and final, swallowing every last day and fleeting flash of brilliance. The lights of the fishermen would dim until sleep doused the last of their thinking wicks, leaving nothing but reality: raw oblivion, an abyss beyond sight and sound save the eternal lapping of water on rock.

Rain came at last, first as pellets, then as a sheet, smothering the man and his son. Don closed his eyes, swerving the boat. He blinked and covered his face. The lake was breaking apart. Water rushed over the side, seeping ice cold on his legs and hands. The cabin would come up on the left, or maybe it was on the right. It all looked the same. He couldn’t even squint. The puddle in the boat grew.

He had waited too long. His son would have been fine if Don had only left earlier, listened to him sooner. If only he could open his eyes and see. But he saw only the rush, the quick sweep of unthinkable violence destroying everything by simply passing. The boat crumpling on the rocks. A vaulting green flood. Bo’s shadow disappearing under the rabid wake. Don stopped and listened, thinking to receive some signal of instruction from a place outside of rain. In a blossom of thought before the end, all he saw was his father, holding him and kneeling in the wake.

Three shrouded figures stood at the dock as the boat came beside it. One hunched down and whisked away his son. Another took the boat’s ropes while the last held out his hand for Don, guiding him onto the dock. They shambled across the sopping grass, coming toward the cabin. He moved through the group to Bo. Don held the boy’s jacket, making sure his shoulder was underneath, that he was really with them moving to safety. He felt Bo’s small, cold fingers wrap around his own.

They swung the door open and the fishermen dragged them inside, cheering and handing them towels. The barber was frying fish, and a tin of coffee sat on a low flame. The men shed their dripping jackets, patting themselves dry as rain thumped on the roof. The men told of their journeys back, along with other stories as walleye sizzled in the frying oil, and the wind outside screamed.

Don poured himself some coffee. He stood at the window, watching the storm tear the ground and branches apart. Then, he heard his son speaking from the table. The other men fell quiet, listening as Bo retold the story of border agents stopping and searching them as they came into Canada. It was a favorite in their developing canon. The men had agreed it was the van driver’s fault, fumbling over his words, but here was Bo evoking the shifty eyes of the teacher who had been sitting shotgun, which no one else noticed. Now the men were drawn in as he mimicked their scared faces in the holding area, jutted eyebrows and trembling lips. He was pretty good, working the timing like a pro. The men laughed from the gut, raspy cackles like what Don would hear from his dad.

The rain never stopped. All through the night, it rapped on the roof and pelted the windows. Don lay in his sleeping bag. He saw the past, fishermen waking up the morning after the death, unhitching a boat to return to that silent island. Perhaps they’d think of nature as a murderer or as something cold without thought or feeling. Maybe they sat in silence thinking of nothing. All he knew was that they beached the boat as he had done, gathered some stones, and made themselves a cairn. It was a small effigy. To see it would be to know it wasn’t enough. But cairns aren’t meant to be enough. They are meant to be there and that is all.

Like fingers on a keyboard, the rain on the roof drew Don again to the image of his father in the wake. It wouldn’t leave him, sticking to his mind like a dart. It was more real than the ceiling. He saw a creased shirt and runny nose, shriveled hands holding his hair. He built the image piece by piece until he found he missed his father a great deal. Maybe forgiveness is wishing there was more time between us, he thought, and a stone inside him turned into a stream. He slipped under a blanket of sleep as raindrops pattered on the window, the small, powerful things trying desperately to get in.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Tide Pools

“Draw me a mermaid, Mommy.”

“Okay,” I answer my two-year old daughter. She watches me outline the figure in pencil on pink construction paper. The mermaid turns out to be feminine, unashamed of her bare breasts, and ready to swim in a dangerous ocean. I envy her.

My daughter pulls the bottle away from her mouth with a soft pop. “Draw a shark.” My shark is cartoonishly fierce. I am strict about media. No screens, no stories with villains or violence; my daughter has never seen anger depicted. 

“Now,” she says, “draw the shark eating a mermaid.”

My mouth opens to tell her that that would not be a nice picture, but I stop myself. On the one hand, telling her which drawings she should like doesn’t align with my feminist parenting agenda; on the other hand, neither does depicting violence against mermaids. While I'm working out this moral paradox, she’s staring at my hand holding the pencil, like a dog staring at a hand holding a tennis ball.     

Her brother snores gently against my breast in the green and white sling that has become a semi-permanent part of my body. Would I hesitate to draw a shark eating a pirate?

“Draw it, Mommy.”

I draw. The mermaid’s mouth is agape, and her hands flail like an old-fashioned damsel in distress. The shark’s teeth are clamped on her tail. Examining my drawing, I can hear the mermaid scream. Does she hear it too? Is she wondering if the shark is angry? Or simply hungry? She’s leaning over the table, her milk-smeared face inspecting my work, as if checking for typos. 

She sits back and says, “Draw another one.”  

“Another mermaid?”

“Another shark eating the mermaid.”

My heart sinking for the mermaid, I do as my daughter asks and create the same scene. She asks for another, and another. In all, I draw eight versions. And second guess myself with each one.

At last, she says, “Now draw the mermaid eating a shark.”

Barely hiding my relief, I produce a fanged and unapologetically vengeful mermaid. This mermaid is decidedly angry and takes no small joy in her revenge on the shark. Her hands claw around its body, and she grins above a semicircular chunk taken from behind the dorsal fin.

My daughter nods, says nothing, and wanders away. I am left with a pile of pink construction scraps, internal confusion, and a snoring baby.

She had refused to be born, preferring to swim inside me. After ten days, the doctor cut me open and reached in to fish her out of me. She bit him. She has her own names for things. That is a trink. This is my lega. Mommy, do you want a slusher-sludge? When I give her paints, her language transcends words. Pink washes to orange to yellow. Purple blends to blue to green. Bright reds strike against pale blues. She is Technicolor in my gray world. 

We drive over the ridge to the fogged-in beach and tote our picnic to the high tide line. She stamps across the sand, like she wants it to know she is there. Her brother’s eyes blink up at me from the shell of his sling. While he is focused on me, she is scanning the beach, the hills, and the horizon. 

We head to the tide pools. Mussels and barnacles are everywhere, impossible not to see. We’re looking for anemones and sea stars. I point out things to keep her close, while clutching my son against my body and trying to keep my own balance on the wet rocks. Checking every cranny for an interesting creature to peer at, I feel like I’m looking into other people’s apartments. At last, we find a purple sea star waiting for the tide. She looks at it, then shakes her head and I assume she’s frightened. I squat down awkwardly, take a breath and touch an animal I know nothing about. Running two fingers along the rough arm, I lie, "See, it’s not scary." 

At the touch of its prickled skin, I realize everything my daughter already seems to know. Its eyes may be at the ends of its arms, but the sea star looks right at me and my desperate-to-be-perfect parenting. These echinoderms creep on their hundreds of tiny tube feet across every inch of every ocean, from tide pools to twenty-thousand feet below, undisturbed by darkness, pressure, or the violence of predation. How many times has this creature lost an arm to a deceptively powerful mantis shrimp only to grow a new one? How often has it stretched its stomach out over a clam or a branch of coral, letting the enzymes slowly dissolve the prey before drawing the sated stomach back up into its body? I glance up at the seagulls circling; gulls who will eat anything with or without legs if they can catch it. I bristle at the meanness of nature. Then she is on the move again, and I have to blunder after her. I leave the sea star and the gulls to their conscience.

I roll up my jeans and push her leggings up over her knees and tell myself this means our clothes won’t get wet. One hand holding my daughter’s, the other resting on the bump that is her brother, we wade in. Splashing and laughing she pulls us farther in. The water rushes away from shore, pulling the sand out from under my feet, giving me the sensation that I’m moving. She wrenches free of me, throws her arms wide, and bursts into her siren song. A wild and joyful ululation.

I reach for her wrist, slippery now, and worry about those sneaker waves the news always warns about. My grip tightens but she gets away from me again, and again sings out, as if fetching her merfolk to come and take all three of us.

The fear seizes me. I see the three of us being sucked under the green water, past the tiny cove and the fishing boats, past the cargo ships. The waves tumble us past the twelve-mile territory sea, past the two-hundred-mile exclusive economic zone, and at last we bob into the open ocean that is owned by no one. 

Here, where she is at home, she will reach out for my arm. She will want to point things out to her brother. Circling around the axis of our joined hands, she will gaze about with contentment, and I will be frantic, desperate for the safety of my own small pond. Calmly, she will show me the whales singing below us. 

A wave hits her at waist height. She is soaked, but still upright. I get a hold of her wrist and with the promise of a snack, lure her back to our heap of belongings. I hand her a peanut butter sandwich and tell her she's frightened me. “The ocean wants to take you from me. Don't let it.”

“Oh, Mommy,” she scrunches her nose at me, “it's okay if the ocean takes me.”

I swallow my terror and say, “How about swim lessons? You can learn to swim like a mermaid.”

She ignores me, drops the peanut butter sandwich into the sand, and wanders off to play with a rope of brown kelp.

Days later, she chatters through the house while I tend to a thousand tasks and accomplish nothing. Mermaids are still a favorite. She is wearing her swimsuit, scarves, and beads.

As I answer her—not really listening but wanting her to think I’m listening—I am thinking about dinner and dishes, and if I should buy that sweater or save money, or go back to work even though I hated the job I had before. Through all this noise, I hear a small thing. My daughter’s voice, not chattering, but speaking to me. She says, “Mommy, you are the mermaid that eats sharks.” 

“What did you say?”

She’s gone already, dancing down the hallway, with scarves and beads dangling, and dripping milk on the floor. I look down at her brother, whose brown eyes blink back at me. I will never know if I heard her correctly, but the further away I am from that moment, the more I realize it doesn’t matter.

A neglected part of my brain has begun to shift, like a waking sea star creeping from twenty-thousand feet below. For a moment, I don’t see myself as a tired and gray woman, still so much like a girl, trapped in a small, safe pond.

For a moment, I see myself in Technicolor, fanged, and eating a shark.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

My Therapist Shows Me How to Write in the Affirmative or An Alternative to Writing “Don’t Kill Yourself”

We're proud to feature this poem from Maya William’s chapbook Feminine Morbidity, which was selected by Olatunde Osinaike as the winner of The Headlight Review’s 2025 Poetry Chapbook Contest.

stay kin       stay kin       stay kin       stay kin
stay kinder to myself stay kinder to myself stay kind stay alive
I want to stay kind I want to stay alive I want to stay kind I want to stay alive I want to
stay alive stay kind stay    be alive be kinder to myself be kinder to myself
be kind be alive     I want to be kind I want to be
alive I want to be kinder   I want to be alive   I want to be alive be kinder
be stay alive stay alive be alive stay alive be alive stay alive be alive stay alive
   be alive stay alive  be alive stay alive be    alive   stay
alive     be     alive stay  kind  be alive    be kind    stay alive
be kinder to my  self be kinder to my  self be kind be alive
I want to be kind I want to be kind I want to be kind I want be kind I
    want to be alive  be kind be alive be kinder to myself be kinder to myself
be kinder to my   self stay kinder to my   self be kinder to my   self stay
kinder    to my    self
be stay alive stay alive be alive stay alive be alive stay alive be alive stay alive
be alive stay alive be   alive stay  alive be   alive stay
alive be   alive    stay kind be a live   be kind    stay a live
stay a live   be a live   stay a live   be a live  stay a live  be a live   stay
a  live.   be  a     live   stay a     live be a  live   stay a live be
   a live     stay         a live be
a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life a life

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Aab

Minoo hasn’t been inside many hotels in her life, so she isn’t sure what to expect from the Azadi Hotel. While her parents are checking in, she assesses the cavernous lobby. Its walls are covered in gold wallpaper with a floral print that clashes badly with the blue and white carpet. There are clusters of uncomfortable-looking chairs, all of which have a view of the three huge screens that are blaring the government television station. She looks up at the vaulted ceilings and notices that the chandeliers dangling from them are covered in a thick layer of dust. The hotel was built before the Islamic Revolution; she wonders if the chandeliers have been cleaned since then.

She glances over toward the reception desk, where her father is paying for the room. Her mother is standing behind him looking a bit awkward, as if she isn’t certain what she is supposed to do in a hotel lobby or whether she should be here at all. Seeing her parents in these surroundings, Minoo feels a rush of tenderness for them. It was a stretch for them to afford this trip, the first the family has taken in several years, and she knows they are doing it for her.

The man behind the reception desk accepts the payment, then gives her father an envelope with the keys inside and points down the hallway toward the elevator.

The décor in the bedroom is tawdry, but it is clean. There is a king-sized bed along one wall, covered in a bright bedspread topped with gleaming white pillows. Behind it, Minoo spots an alcove that holds a tidy single bed where she guesses she will sleep. There is only one window in the room, and its view is of an opulent but grimy building that Minoo’s father has told her used to be a gambling casino but is now a school. At the back of the room, a sliding glass door leads out to a balcony overlooking the Caspian Sea.

The six-hour drive along winding roads in her father’s cramped Citroen had not been easy on Minoo’s stomach, and after helping her parents unpack, she goes out onto the hotel balcony to watch the sun make its descent over the horizon. From the fourth floor, the water looks blue and serene. The truth, Minoo knows, is quite another thing. It is common knowledge now that the Caspian Sea has become dangerously toxic. Oil refineries, industrial waste, radioactive waste, and untreated human waste have all been dumped into the sea for decades. Minoo has heard that the water has a foul odor and that suspicious-looking bubbles can be seen on its surface. But right now, from up here on the balcony, she finds the seascape beautiful.

This is not Minoo’s first visit to the Caspian seashore. She has been here one other time, when she was a child of nine or ten. During that trip, she went with her mother to the women’s part of the beach, and they went into the sea together. The women’s beach was marked off from the rest of the shoreline by a tall metal fence draped in black mesh that extended into the water and was closed off at the end. This hid the women from view and prevented them from venturing out far enough to mingle with the men, who were swimming freely on either side of the enclosure. Even though the men could not see them, Minoo and her mother were required to swim in their full hijab, including pants, a roopoosh, and a headscarf. Despite the discomfort, Minoo remembers the day as exhilarating. She and her mother frolicked in the waves, made jokes about what might be visible beneath their wet hijab, and went back to their hotel room with their clothing drenched and covered in sand. She has not been in a body of water larger than a bathtub since that day.

Minoo and her parents do not intend to swim during this trip. They have come to the Caspian to get away from the noise and pollution of Tehran, to be together, and to relax. They plan to spend their days on the coast doing things they rarely have time to do: shopping together in the open markets, going to restaurants, and sightseeing in some of the small seaside towns. They will certainly stroll along the beach, perhaps gather some seashells and dip their toes in the water, but they have no intention of getting fully into the sea. It’s not just the toxicity; it’s the fact that the beaches—those designated for men as well as those marked off for women—are now patrolled by angry female lifeguards covered from head to toe in black hijabs. They do not relish the thought of being scrutinized and screeched at by such women.

Even though she hasn’t been in many bodies of water, water has always called to Minoo. The first word she learned to write as a child was aab—water. It is the word every child learning to read and write Farsi begins with, because it is made up of the first two letters of the alphabet: aleph and be. But to Minoo, learning to write this word had a special kind of significance. She remembers feeling entranced by the way the two letters on the page seemed to suggest the shape of a body of water with a tree beside it. She has always loved the sound of the word, the way it can be rolled around in the mouth and held in the throat for a long time. She loves looking at pictures of the world’s beaches on the internet and imagining herself there, standing on the shoreline. Whenever Youtube can be accessed, she watches videos of female swimmers. She is fascinated by their lithe, muscular bodies cutting gracefully through the water. At times, she almost feels she is inhabiting those bodies, inhaling and exhaling with the swimmers, gliding through the water herself.

~

On the wall in the apartment where Minoo lives with her parents in central Tehran hang two old photographs of her grandmother, Nasrin Hashemi. As a child, Minoo would stare at these photographs in awe and disbelief, trying to reconcile those images of her grandmother with the puffy-eyed, careworn woman she knows as Mamani. Whenever Mamani comes to visit, she sits on the balcony smoking cigarettes and drinking endless cups of tea. How could Nasrin, the woman in the photographs, possibly be Mamani?

The photographs are grainy enlargements that have yellowed slightly with age, but what they depict is unmistakable. One of them shows a young Nasrin, probably seventeen or eighteen, huddled together with four other women who are around same age. All of them are wearing green and white one-piece swimsuits and white swimming caps, and all of them are glistening with water droplets, obviously having just emerged from a pool. The other photograph is of Nasrin standing alone, her hands on her slender hips, wearing a tight floral one-piece swimsuit. In this photograph she has no swim cap, and her long, dark tresses spill around her shoulders. Both photographs are captioned: Iranian National Women’s Swim Team, Asian Games, 1974.

When she grew older, Minoo learned to read the captions and place the photographs in the timeline of Iran’s history. By then, of course, her mother had explained to her that Mamani had been a champion swimmer in the years before the Revolution. Women were still allowed to swim in 1974, and they were even allowed to wear bathing suits just as women did elsewhere in the world. It was not considered sinful at the time for women athletes to display their bodies in front of men. Men didn’t just watch female swimmers—they followed them, supported them, cheered them on, and coached them.

Even now, at age sixteen, this seems unfathomable to Minoo. She knows, of course, that everything was different before the Revolution, that women wore miniskirts, went to nightclubs, and danced and sang in public. In her classes at school, she learned that these behaviors were part of Iran’s “Westoxication”—its exposure to the decadence and corruption of Western countries, primarily the United States. What she has difficulty fathoming is that her grandmother had once been so physically fit, so thin and muscular, so full of energy and vigor. Throughout Minoo’s life, Mamani has always been wrapped in dark, loose-fitting clothing that hides the shape of her rotund body. In the photograph, Nasrin is proudly parading her body. If one looks closely, the contours of her breasts are visible in the picture, and there is even a suggestion of her nipples. Perhaps the most shocking thing of all is the brazen way Nasrin is looking at the camera, as if to challenge the photographer, who must surely have been a man. The Mamani Minoo knows often casts her eyes downward.

Just four years after these photographs were taken, when Nasrin was still in her heyday as a swimmer, Khomeini came to power. Almost overnight, women were forbidden to swim. Minoo’s mother has told her that when she was growing up, Mamani rarely mentioned her swimming career. The pictures were not displayed in their home, and it wasn’t until she was older that Minoo’s mother learned that Mamani had been a competitive swimmer. When she discovered this, she asked Mamani if she could take swimming lessons, which were allowed in some of the female-only gyms in Tehran. Mamani just laughed at her and said, “In a hijab? That’s not swimming, my dear daughter.”

Whenever Mamani visits the apartment now, she averts her eyes when she passes by the photographs. Minoo has never heard her comment on them at all, except to mutter something like “Yaad-e-oon-roozha bekheyr. Those were the good ol’ days.” Although she won’t say so directly, Minoo knows that it pains her grandmother to remember her years as a young woman who was free, not only to swim, but to go to discotheques and dance and laugh in the company of men.

Although she never talks about her years as a swimmer, Mamani follows the news about women’s sports in Iran with great interest. A few years ago, she was outraged when she heard a story on the news about a female swimmer who swam for eight hours along the Caspian seacoast, breaking a record. She broke the record while wearing six kilos of clothing, including a full wet suit, a swimming cap, a scarf, and a cape covering her whole body. Her swim took place in a secluded part of the Caspian where there were no men present. And still, the authorities refused to register her time because her attire did not conform to Islamic norms.

More recently, Mamani was visiting their home when another heartbreaking news story came on television: a woman who was jailed for dressing like a boy and attending a men’s soccer match set herself on fire in protest of her sentence, dying from the burns a few days later. Upon hearing the story, Mamani burst into tears, cursed at the television, and ran from the room. When she came out later to have her tea, her eyes were even puffier than usual, and her hands shook as she lit her cigarette. She took a deep drag, and as she exhaled, she mumbled, “Those bastards!” through a cloud of smoke.

Mamani had an even stronger reaction when she heard a Grand Ayatollah and Islamic scholar addressing the topic of female athletes during a television interview. The moment has lodged in Minoo’s memory because it was one of the first times she realized how much anger her grandmother was carrying around. The Ayatollah was insisting that women should not participate in sports such as weightlifting because it ruined their bodies and compromised their femininity. Minoo remembers his exact words. “A woman who lifts weights is no woman,” he said. “The integrity of a woman is defined by becoming a mother and nurturing her children.”

As she watched the interview, Mamani shook her head in disgust. “Madar-ghahbe! Motherfucker!” she shouted at the television screen. Minoo, who had never heard her grandmother use such shocking language before, turned and stared at her. Mamani made no apologies. She did not turn her eyes away from the screen but instead continued shouting at it. “You filthy dog! You call yourself a scholar? You call yourself a leader? Who are you to say what a woman should do with her body? Who are you to decide what is feminine and what is not?”

Some of the news about Iranian women athletes fills Mamani with glee. Whenever she hears about a female athlete defecting to another country, as many have done in recent years, she applauds them. “Aafarin! Barak’Allah!” she will say. “Good for you!” When she heard that a female alpine skier had been chosen to carry the flag at the Winter Olympics, she waved her arms through the air joyfully and said, “Hurrah! It’s about time we joined the rest of the human race!”

Minoo’s parents invited Mamani to accompany them to the seaside for this trip, but she declined. Minoo cannot help but think that the sight of water fills her grandmother with sorrow and longing. It is less painful for her to stay at home drinking tea and smoking cigarettes.

~

On the last night they are in the hotel, Minoo and her parents turn in early so they can be rested for the long trip back to Tehran. Lying in her single bed in the alcove, Minoo cannot sleep. She does not toss and turn, but instead lies perfectly still for a long time, listening to the sound of the lapping waves mingled with the sound of her parents’ gentle snoring.

She does not know what compels her to get out of bed—it is not a rational or deliberate decision. Soundlessly, she pulls back the covers, swings her legs off the bed, finds her slippers with her feet, and slips them on. Using the light of the moon to guide her, she walks over to the place where her roopoosh and headscarf are hanging, lifts them from the hook, and puts them on over her pajamas. She opens the door gently, walks down the narrow hallway to the elevator, gets in it, and pushes the button for the lobby.

When she enters the lobby and sees a man behind the desk, she has a moment of panic, thinking she might be stopped and interrogated. She doesn’t believe it is against the hotel’s rules for a guest—even a young, unaccompanied woman—to leave the hotel room and go for a walk, but just in case, she quickly plans what she will say: she has a headache and needs to get some air. Men do not question women who say they are in any kind of pain, as this could be an indirect reference to their menstrual cycles. The man behind the desk looks up and sees her, but he makes no attempt to stop her.

Outside, the moon, which is almost full, shimmers on the surface of the sea. The air is brisk for May, and there is a gentle breeze. Minoo’s roopoosh and headscarf flap around her as she walks, but the sensation is pleasant. The moon’s reflection draws her forward, and she aims directly for it, then realizes that the light is everywhere at once, dancing all across the water. She sees no toxic bubbles and smells no foul odors.

Guided by the moon’s light, she moves down the shoreline until she comes to the men’s section of the beach, which is not enclosed by a fence. The hotel is some distance away, and there is no one else in sight. As soon as she realizes she is alone, she does not hesitate: she strips off her headscarf, her slippers, her roopoosh, and her pajamas, and deposits them on the shore. Then she walks, stark naked, into the water.

The water encircles her, caressing first her ankles, then her knees, then her inner thighs, her breasts, and her shoulders. Finally, she submerges her full head under the sea until she feels her hair floating on the surface. She has never learned to swim, but her arms know what to do. She moves them with the rhythm of the waves, buoying her body and propelling it forward. Every part of her body comes alive.

Unafraid, she plunges deep below the surface again and again, like a fish. Each time she rises for a breath, she whispers, “Aab, aab.”

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Chaucer’s Wives Come Knocking

I first read the stories of the Wife of Bath and Patient Griselda[1] when I was sixteen, at the American School in London. I was there for a year while my father was on a sabbatical. He got a grant to leave his job in the Oncology unit at Kaiser Permanente Sunset in order to study new treatments for breast cancer at Guy’s Hospital. My mother sold our family home, the house in Los Angeles they bought for a song and traded in for what seemed like a fortune, wrangling places for me and my siblings at an American private school in St. John’s Wood. We settled into a series of short-term lets, and my sister, brother, and myself were set free as only carpooled children could be discovering a city with a safe public transportation system. My mother also felt loosened from the tight bonds of her role as wife and mother. She had been a second-generation Greek daughter of mountain peasants who fought against the expectations of her immigrant community to find her voice as a journalist and editor in Manhattan in the late 1950s. Then in 1962, she fell for my doctor father and followed him when he got a job in California. Having children, living in the infinite suburb of LA, she often loudly complained that her life in the desert city was a kind of death, a disappearing off the face of the earth. London was a chance for her to remake herself. She told me later she had no intention of ever going back, although that is not how things turned out. It was 1979, and like many other women, she was enjoying a new sense of freedom. She joined an amateur drama class and picked up a younger gay best friend. She met a lot of interesting bohemian Londoners who were also interested in her.

One of them was my English teacher, Don Jesse. We were encouraged to call him that, first and last, transforming the “Don” into an honorific, like Don Quixote or Don Juan. Don Jesse had grown up in Boston, the son of an immigrant Dutch maid and the princeling heir of her wealthy Jewish employers. At least that was the story. He was a self-invented character, bald and stocky with a rasping, deep laugh and a love of the tall tale. After a brief marriage to a Rothschild, he became an itinerant teacher, travelling the globe and landing in London where he lived for most of his life with a gentle-hearted man from Wales who could sew quilts and fix an engine. When it was time to teach us Chaucer, Don Jesse showed up wearing full courtly Medieval writer’s gear, complete with a sweeping velvet hat and wine-colored stockings. He made us memorize and recite the opening lines in the original:  

  Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
  the drocht of March hath perced to the rote
  and bathed every holt and heath in swicht liqueur
  of which vertu engendered is the fleur

The sound of the words rolled off his tongue and rumbled in our mouths with a satisfying, pebbly foreign sensation, close to familiar but far enough away to pull us along, and the images leaped into our minds. For the first time as a native Californian, I had lived through winter, and understood the drought of March, how worn down you could become by the sere, bare brownish grey, and the idea of sweet showers coming and piercing the earth, the way flowers suddenly crowded onto verges and front gardens: daffodils, tulips, lilacs; I loved it.

We read the tales; we had to write our own. I was drawn to the Wife of Bath, but at the same time, she embarrassed me, like my own mother did at sixteen. She seemed a comical character, played for laughs: a Lucille Ball broad, her young lover climbing the wall, her old rich husband, her appetites, her humiliating spillage. What did she have to be so boisterous about, I thought, furiously. She was fat and out of control, and it was easy to make fun of her. I wrote a mocking modern tale about a loud-mouthed woman in Los Angeles who sold real estate, like my mother did at the time. I got a good grade, and I proudly shared it with her. God forgive me.

The other character who really drew my attention was Patient Griselda. She seemed extreme in her masochistic acceptance of her fate, and yet venerated, there in the pages of the Clerk’s Tale. The peasant girl who got chosen by a powerful lord: a story as old as Cinderella. But after becoming a wife, Griselda was far from secure. She had one baby after another taken away, and still, she embodied fatalism and meek acceptance. Then the final twist: getting thrown out from her husband’s bed to the kitchens, while he told her he was marrying a younger, better version, a story I knew well enough from growing up in divorce-prone, self-discovery California of the 1970’s. After all that pain, Griselda achieved her reward: status, children, husband handed back on a platter. She was a model woman, held up in the pages of Medieval Literature to shine for all time. Old as it was, Griselda’s story circled like an electric fence around the idea of what waited for me in adult womanhood. There was something about Griselda that felt like fate. She horrified me, and she made me feel ashamed—not only of her, but of myself.  I understood already that part of being a woman was going to mean never feeling good enough.

It was about mid-way through the early child-rearing years that I started to hear the voice of Griselda in my head. I was living in London, yet again, having moved back across the Atlantic to marry a young British philosophy student I fell for in graduate school. By the time we started raising our family, I was a full-time writing teacher at a small American university in charge of two departments, publishing poetry and fiction, and felt secure and strong in my voice, as far from my mother and her fate, as far from Patient Griselda as I could get. With the birth of my second child, I stopped teaching “to give myself more time to write,” and soon I had stopped doing that, too. Years went by in the world of women and children, and I lost the thread to my former self. I felt delirious with love for my children, but also bereft and lost at times, living exactly the constrained, care-taking life my mother had so railed against.

During those sandbox years, Griselda’s voice insisted on my attention. She wanted to explain what it was really like, being picked out of the crowd by a handsome man on horseback, leaving her father’s cottage and moving into a distant castle, how her husband would go out into the wars of his times and slaughter other men as if fearlessly, and come back, drained and mud-caked, and how in the secret sanctuary of their marriage bed, he tossed and turned, woke up anxious, drenched in sweat, and how she tried to find a way to help him, to get him to pay attention to their children, to the life they were bringing into the world together. He did not trust her, and he started to find a way to test her, not believing she could really be as loyal as she seemed. I imagined what it must have been like for her to lose first her daughter, and then her son, the loneliness she must have felt, alone in her tower. She explained how even after that same man asked her to make way for a better wife, to leave their home and go down into the depths with all the other servants, she took up the dough between her hands and wrapped the scarf around her head and got to work. In the story, her final loyalty test involves her coming out with all the other servants to stand at the back of the chapel and watch her ex-husband get married to his new, young bride. Then a scene reminiscent of the Oscars; she is pulled forward, given her reward at last for having passed the tests he set: here was her daughter, here her son, here the warm embrace of family, husband waiting to place the crown back on her worthy head, his queen.

Why did Griselda rise up in me, insisting on her poem? Voiceless women in history and mythology have always drawn me. My first novel included re-imaginings of Greek myths from a woman’s point of view. Sometimes an imagined figure would start to speak, and I would follow her voice into myself. Ariadne, Persephone, Medea, Eve: all have visited me at times.

My husband was no cruel overlord. He was a sensitive and devoted father, who was a cheerleader for my work, my voice. We were equal in power, and before we had children, we promised each other we would remain so. Economics had pushed us into traditional roles. Motherhood felt messy and self-immolating. From the moment I started breastfeeding, I became as much liquid as solid. For years, I would travel with a change of clothes for three because both my children were prone to motion sickness, and one or all of us were liable to end any journey covered in vomit. Like many formerly cerebral mothers, I felt as if I were constantly fighting against a tide of rising chaos to find a few moments of quiet in my head, and I think I both embraced and resented my abject position. Maybe Griselda spoke to me about how I longed for the moment my sacrifice would be recognized for the marathon-level physical feat it really was, for some kind of medallion or trophy or even just a thank you. My husband, who was working hard, really hard, and had his own stress, sometimes seemed like the unwitting setter of tests I had to pass, tests that were about the loss of things that had once been precious: my work, my status, my girlhood, my girlfriends, my will, my voice.

When I think of those years, I seem to see Griselda all around me, in the women of my generation: not just in the mirror but also at the gym, at the school gates, in the culture. I remember one frail-looking woman I knew, a mother of four. She boasted that none of her children had ever eaten a store-bought biscuit or cake. Everything was baked with her own two hands, and her kids were enviably clear-skinned, kind, and energetic. She had been a senior nurse in a busy hospital but gave it up to raise a family with her salaried husband. One morning, she invited the class mothers over to tea. She dressed plainly, in smock-like dresses with no make-up, but her table was lavish: covered with multi-colored homemade cakes, biscuits, and pies we eyed up as if they were a field of mines. In those days, it seemed to me we were always bringing each other sweets we never ate. We were soldiers in a war whose rules we did not invent, willing to cut off our own arms to make sure we remained among the chosen, running businesses, running families, running in marathons while subsisting on pieces of watermelon. Many women I knew were half-recovered anorexics, still hooked on the habit of self-abnegation begun in high school. I wanted us to discover our strength, but all I saw were women putting themselves away. Griselda’s poem revealed that under her meekness was a fierce rage, a compressed and deeply packed away energy.

~

My mother used to say that Margaret Mead advised every woman to have three marriages: the first for love, the sexual attraction that helps you leave your family of origin; the second for co-habitation, to raise children; and the third for companionship. She claimed to have had all those marriages, but with the same husband. Probably around the third marriage with the man I have been with since I was 26, I began to think again about the Wife of Bath. Our two children were more or less grown; we had started to have noisy sex in the empty house. My newly discovered invisibility as an older woman felt liberating. I stopped dyeing my hair. I started to notice older women on the street, how beautiful they were, how settled into their bodies, how they carried their own weight with pride. At work, all the people who got things done seemed to be women of a certain age. I was looking forward to what the third or even fourth marriage with my husband might bring.

But all was not well with the wider world, I had not failed to notice. The two countries in which I held citizenship, the UK and the US, were in the grips of a kind of deadly return of the Griselda story: it was not just women, but the entire system of mutual care-giving, the rule of law, our ecological well-being, education—being pushed out of the bed of the heartless overlords of the new far-right. The years following 2016, the pink hat years you might call them, brought me back into an anxious engagement with politics, and maybe I needed to find a model from the start of capitalism in the West who seemed to stand up fearlessly in a full-throated voice, an archetype from Chaucer waiting all along. As I started to write a poem in her voice, I found I was not the only one who felt the Wife knocking on her inner door. I came across a new book about her as an enduring cultural character. According to the writer, we had misunderstood the ups and downs of women’s history. The Wife came from an era when English women were surprisingly empowered. It’s there in her lines: a businesswoman, a cloth trader, a traveler across Europe who fights the husband who tries to diminish her. Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor were a tribute to her. But soon afterwards, she slipped into the rising misogyny of the age of Enlightenment and colonialism. She became a hate figure, shunned and despised, feared and mocked. Up to the 1970s, you could find a version of her on an art house film poster, laid out as a frightening mass of rolling human flesh ready to swallow up the tiny male pilgrims who surround her. Recently, she has been given a new life—particularly by Black British women; she is the subject of extended poems and a play by Zadie Smith in which she is the absolute star.

Just as with Griselda, I started to see the Wife of Bath everywhere. She was marching beside me, holding a witty sign about the crimes of Boris Johnson. She was being interviewed on a TV program called Planet Sex in the body of a curvy, honeyed woman with silvery locs, talking about Tantric kissing between two adoring bear-like lovers: husband and boyfriend. On a train trip to Newcastle to visit my daughter, she was the voice in my ear of Iris De Menthe singing about “workin’ on a world” of a future we might never see; when my daughter and I went out for cocktails, I felt as if she were in the streets with her friends, wearing a tight tiger-striped dress over her enormous breasts, thighs as wide as the Tyne, gap-toothed, head thrown back, having the time of her life.

My poem about her though, was a bit stuck, until I put her into conversation with Griselda. Then it was hard to shut her up. She was the one who pointed out to me the way the two women were linked through time; they were two sides of a coin, two versions of being a woman, tamed and free—or so I thought. It was great to get rid of the rigidly formed Griselda and open myself up to the free-verse lines of the Wife of Bath. What value could meek Griselda have now in our fight to make the world safe for future generations? Even Margaret Atwood, published a story around this time in the New York Times: Impatient Griselda.

Then I took my poems and my commentary to my writing group.

“What about Griselda?” they asked me. “Have you short-changed her? Doesn’t she have anything else to say?”

Griselda! No way, I thought, I am well and truly finished with Griselda.

But sometimes criticism can open a new door, raise a question you did not know you had. When I got home to my own kitchen, as I made dinner and folded laundry, her voice in my head started speaking, and what she said truly surprised me.

Griselda asked me to consider if there was another role for her, beyond the Wife of Bath and her beautiful self-assertion. What did I think was going to move us forward into a better future if not some kind of enormous sacrifice of wants and desires, a tremendous act of care-giving, for each other, for the planet? She pointed out that she was there, during the Pandemic, when the economic engine of the world had shut down—she was making PPE in her kitchen for the nurses, stocking the supermarket shelves, picking up trash. The fight for the future Iris sang about was beyond gender, politics, or economics. It was something much bigger, what bell hooks calls an ethos of love[2]. When I hated myself for giving up my “real work” to look after my children when they were young, what was I telling myself about my own values? I painted Griselda as angry and energetic as a counter to a world that would have turned her into a doormat, stepping right over her in their getting and spending. I was so impressed by the Wife of Bath when I discovered she was a successful cloth trader and partner to five men, but Griselda might turn out to be a true revolutionary.

 ~

Griselda Speaks to the Wife of Bath

You were always on another page: a voice,
a threat, a joke, a bawd, a kind of girth:
gap-toothed, unbordered, queen of choice.
I was modesty herself, in needs, size, birth.

My one husband my entire tale: a Duke.
We had two kids, each lost in turn: a son,
daughter, ripped from my roots. Not a word
slipped from my lips. I never came undone.

Cast off to the kitchen, I kneaded sweet bread
for his new wedding and bride. Unprotesting,
pulled from the crowd, I bent my head down:
To find reward! Children grown; crown restored,

fame gained. To you alone I can boast my pride:
My coal heart was crushed to a diamond inside.

The Wife of Bath Explains a Thing or Two

Griselda, a sonnet! Why did you even try? It only makes things worse.
Loosen up your girdle and enjoy free verse—the lines should fit you,
not the other way around, no need to squeeze into some rule book,
cooked up by men to sing to their imaginary loves, who I am sure,
were well and truly sick of hearing their plaints: Beatrice, the Dark Lady—
give her a break and let her get on with unstrapping that old bra: idol,
pedestal. Climb right on down here. I felt for you, honey, all along—
so thin and wan, so mild and good. You never asked to be a prize,
a pawn in some man’s sick game of catch and release. He had it all,
and a great big hole inside, besides, and you don’t have to tell me:
golden toilet, golden tower, golden you at the top, it’s never enough!
He’s still around, sending his rockets to Mars, probing the oceans,
just like he plumbed his wife—the ultimate boundless mystery, right?
Now you’ve reached across the aisle after 600 years, and guess what?
We’re teamed up as ever! Chaucer gave me the most lines, but for ages,
you won first prize: Angel in the House, Madonna, Sacrifice. While I,
you’re right, remained the butt of laddish jokes, fat, loud, or worse,
hated and feared for my lusts, a figure of fun or the cunt with a bite,
held to account for my unruly appetite. Finally, the time’s come ripe
for us to muscle out the middleman, spill truths, grab the spotlight.
Personally, I knew you were more than you appeared. The self-denied
hold their own power: it’s modesty’s dark side. You were never
as simple as the tale told, good girl driven to distraction: dieting,
decluttering, working hard for your reward. A wife! Tricky business,
we both get that. I had five goes, and would have more. I salute you.
That Duke of yours, I bet you wiped his sweat at night, his psychic
sores. Under his great carapace, a trembling boy holding a sword.
He thought you might be keeping score. He had to lock you up, tight
knot we’ve all felt closing round our throats like prison walls.
Now you’ve busted out and want to talk, I’m here to cheer you on.
Let’s stop competing in a stupid game with rules we did not write:
chosen or mocked, virgin or whore, not enough or way too much.
This heartbroken old earth needs new songs and now’s our chance:
I’m an optimistic seller of new cloth, barging the barriers, my voice
getting louder and louder (and dear Griselda, welcome to yours.)
I hope a more ample table waits down the road for our hungry love.

Griselda Writes Back After a Long Time

Yes, my dear, a diamond is a hard rock.
Also, a form of light made out of dark.

You trussed me up in twelve tight lines,
but imagination is a wilder sort of ride.

Everything dies. People, ideas, sun, planet.
The self, however strong, will not save us.

Do you ever wonder if the universe may
be a woman breathing matter in and out,

here, not here, mothering and worrying,
coaxing out a bit more love each round?

Of course, I know you do. You worry so,
if that’s not too light a word—autocracy,

plutocracy, insect-empty fields and floods,
you long for some other story, a way out.

Maybe I can help. Self-sacrifice scares us;
it’s the role woman represents that we hate.

In a grabbing world, we show another way,
putting aside ourselves to make a path

for the generative future we call children:
not just womb, but some potential in us all.

As my friend, Sister Julian, promised, all
will be well and all manner of things well.

Thanks for the chance to stretch my legs.
You might not have seen me otherwise:

sewing PPE with other mothers, collecting
rubbish, emptying bedpans, shelving stock.

I hope you visit me again, visit with us both,
in the timeless where we are. The future’s yours.

[1] Marion Turner, The Wife of Bath: a Biography. Princeton University Press, January 17, 2023. 

[2] bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions. William Morrow Paperbacks, January 30, 2025.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Sweet

We're proud to feature this poem from Christina Hauck’s chapbook An Angel and Other Poems, which was selected by Olatunde Osinaike as a finalist of The Headlight Review’s 2025 Poetry Chapbook Contest.

I cut my hair short as a boy’s and lounged
by the river with other naked women,
all of us laughing and talking with hands
and with mouths, wading in and out of the water,

shining. Your eyes took me in. I sifted,
sand through my fingers, soft and warm.
You peeled a mango, slipped dripping slices
between my lips, tasted sweet strangeness

on my chin. O sweet the days we played
by the river and sweet the nights in your room,
mornings when don’t go you’d unbutton
my blouse, gather me in.

The day you showed up late wearing leather,
chain-smoking unfiltered Camels, I guessed
what you would say hours before you would say it,
your tongue loving the sound of her name: Elizabeth.

Elizabeth. Same as my grandmother.
I cried a little, driving home across the bridge.
I remember you wore a red beret and I was always so
impatient at your before-the-mirror adjustments

sometimes taking minutes. Sweet, sweeter
than anise, I remember your lower lip caught
between your teeth as you rose from the river
silver streams of water pouring from your hair.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

She Replants

The family tree is gnarled and warped. Witch’s bony
knuckles and fingers sprouting from a dark corner of the earth.
It hangs like a curse and blights the lonely apple that grows,
hiding. A thin branch reluctantly bows to its weight.

The disgruntled farmer marches toward, callused fingers
gripping an axe. A ruling by nature’s court would have
taken longer. As the bit kisses wood, neighboring foliage pockets
stray echoes—as if the tree never stood. For a moment,
even nature forgets its impartiality, wishing it good riddance.

Striking ground, leaves quake and abandon loyal dew drops,
while the tart apple tumbles away unceremoniously, catching bruises.
The apple finds final refuge not too far from the felled tree:
chopped wood hauled away after an inconclusive autopsy—
why that tree grew diseased and wicked, neither the apple nor the farmer
knows. Perhaps it was simply impartiality. The apple finally begins to rest
and somehow, it does not rot until the very end. Its secret is peace.
Though nature would never acknowledge it.

With graceful decay, the elements accept the sunken
apple’s sacrifice as offering. The cost to plant roots paid in full,
its seeds are blessed. They lay dormant, mourning.
At the turn of the season, they shed their coats of hesitation
and begin ascent. In old age, the deer, hawks, and ravens
finally bear witness to an anchored palace ornamented
in abundance with sweet rubies basking in the sunlight.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Moon (as translated from the Hebrew of Nathan Alterman)

Even an old landscape has a moment of its birth.
The strange, impregnable
And birdless skies.
Under your window, moonlit on the earth,
Your city bathes in cricket-cries.

But when you see the path still looks afar
To wanderers, and the moon
Rests on a cypress spear,
You ask in wonder, “Lord! Are all of these still here?
Can I not ask in whispers how they are?”

The waters look at us from their lagoons.
The tree in red of earrings
Stays a silent tree.
Never, my God, shall Thy huge playthings’ sorrow
Be rooted out of me.

Original Hebrew text of “Moon” by Nathan Alterman

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Halcyon

They slept in knit caps in the farmhouse. Sweaters and long johns and anything flannel. Saw their breaths when they got up February mornings, even with radiators gurgling and clanging. They didn’t care. Quietly reveled in it, in fact, since the rusticity, or whatever, sure seemed part and parcel with the thing seizing their lives, lifting their proverbial boats like the wind lifted those bald eagles they watched amazed from the tilted front stoop, soaring over the stubbly cornfields across the road. Her short stories were getting published left and right. So many there was talk she’d need an agent for her first book. Tim’s numbers-theory articles were landing in journals unchaperoned grad students weren’t supposed to be in. Grants and scholarships out the wazoo. Both of them. They kept startling their profs, who, though they taught at really a very good school, didn’t expect to have TAs gunning for their own jobs. And it scared them at first. Not the success, which seemed, in its way, right and proper, if not full-on promised. The farmhouse. With its scabby-red-paint iron roofs. Its turbid-water-vomiting backyard pump. Its creaky, perilously winding staircases. Yet the house had gotten it done. Cockeyed their lives sufficiently to let the success pour in. Country life. The left-field surprise of it. Even if they did still shop at SuperFresh. Even if the old rustbelt city was right there, other side of the “mountain.” Because had anyone told two-years-ago her she’d be planting zucchini. Going to class makeup-less, freckles flying. In threadbare OshKosh overalls from Goodwill. That Tim would grow that scraggly beard, so strange on so gentle and—okay—feminine a soul. And she did know it was obnoxious, maybe, the place’s becoming hangout du jour for both their departments, stealing social thunder from certain untenured faculty, one of them, Rachel O_____, her thesis director, fresh from a program so huge you trembled just hearing its name. Every weekend, by their second spring there, people crowding the yard. Girls (women) lounging in dilapidated lawn chairs under the big elm, under the soulfully glowing Japanese lanterns she’d hung. Boys (boys) strumming guitars, throwing frisbees, arguing Scorsese vs. Kubrick, Chomsky vs. Foucault. People’s dogs romping in the sunflower patch. Everyone drinking. Everyone. All the time. Crashing overnight, as necessary, on the grungy old futon in what it amused them—as it had perhaps amused those getting hammered in it a century before—to call the parlor. Odd interdepartmental hookups. Clouds of patchouli and pheromones drifting over the unmowed, unfenced backyard on summer nights. Scenes seeming, with enough wine, weirdly meaningful, Whitmanesque, every glistening bicep, every un-bra-restrained nipple an expression of the universe’s urge, urge, urge. Cheap shiraz and ice cream made her the teensiest bit chubby and now even girls were hitting on her. Women. Not that she and Farmer Tim weren’t off the proverbial menu. But still. Halcyon. All of it. Until, at least, their third summer there. When their guests, or whatever, suddenly started sitting around staring at those wretched, wretched devices. Caveman-typing with their thumbs. Deploying idiot hieroglyphs to express whichever of three corporate-sanctioned emotions. Morphing themselves, out of some perverse-unto-satanic impulse, into screenbound advertising campaigns for themselves to be consumed by the same people in whose physical company they sat. She could not get her head around it. Couldn’t believe the whole world was poised, at the very moment it was blooming for her, to vanish up its own digital ass. How did she compete with vacation porn, fancy-drinks porn, home-decor porn? Porn porn? How did you write for people craving a nonstop dopamine drip of GIFs and memes? The violence with which her soul, or whatever, rejected it helped explain, maybe, why she let an inebriated Rachel O_____ lap at her mouth and feel her up one August night in the shabby Formica kitchen, a half-dozen highly entertained guests in witness. Compelled, finally, to pay attention to something other than their goddamn iPhones. A reassertion, call it, of the primacy of the real. Unsurprisingly, it was the beginning of the end. Rachel O_____ abruptly quit speaking to her—about anything, anyway, other than the thesis. It wounded her out of all proportion. Probably because she’d never had so pedigreed a friend and an Olympus dweller’s rejection augured nothing good where her own heights-scaling ambitions were concerned. Tim, for his part, pitched no mortified-partner fit. Did, however, seize an opportunity to tearfully confess he was hot for an infuriatingly beautiful undergrad boy—a senior, but still, for Christ’s sake—who sang Jeff Buckley songs like some sort of fucking angel and had over a thousand Facebook “friends.” She wanted to tell him this was not who he was, only it was tough arguing with anything as moronically honest as a hard-on. Circa that fall semester’s start, it occurred to her she hadn’t seen an acceptance in months. That her new stories were insipid. That the raves Rachel O_____ kept scrawling on them were disingenuous or mean or both. That her father was right about her “career choice.” Glancing out the farmhouse’s bedroom window one November morning she discovered a different sort of party happening: buzzards feasting on a car-struck deer gone down in the veggie garden, one standing priestly atop the exposed ribcage, wings outstretched. All those soaring eagles were doing was corralling terrified rodents. After she and Tim split up and vacated the farmhouse—a mere rental, for all their fondness—she took a medical-tech-writing job in Chicago. Which moved her, after a few years, to Atlanta. Which moved her, a few years after that, to D.C. She kept waiting to meet the person—dude, chick, whatever—she’d fall for the same way she’d fallen for Tim. In some state park it would happen. At some gallery. At a work friend’s kid’s graduation party. Kept waiting, too, for the not-just-want-but-need to write to come back. Thought she felt, every so often, her old muse tugging her wrist, then found, sitting down with the legal pad, it was just the ghost of Jackie Collins. Such a long road back it would be. To writing. With ever more years passing. Outrageous, time’s breathless gallop. She often thought of Tim. Teaching pure mathematics, whatever that was, at UC Riverside. Still bearded, she saw online. Married to some younger man. She thought, too—usually while staring out her condo’s dining-room window at a sunset mirrored in the twin high-rise’s glassy façade—about the farmhouse. Permitted herself, finally, to hunt for it in Google Maps. Discovered, dropping down to street view, a McMansion enclave on the ancient beanfield where it had stood. That adorable, scary little house. She’d been harboring, she realized, some vague plan to go see it again. To stop the Volvo on the road out front, mount the tilted stoop. Summon, if possible, the courage to knock. That same night she dreamed what she thought, startled awake, was a memory. Was it? Of the time a Jesus Christ-grade racket woke her in the dead of night. Emanating from atop the ceiling atop Tim’s and her bed. Something murdering something. Farmer Tim unrousable. Post-party fumy. For some reason the power was out. She bumbled downstairs, hand on plaster wall so she didn’t slip and break her neck on that insane staircase. Knocked over God knows how many empty beer bottles in the kitchen, groping around the counter for the flashlight. Which, happed upon, actually worked. Sort of. She headed back upstairs, stepping over places she knew jutting nailheads to be. Opened, on the second-floor landing, the creaky door to the attic staircase. “Tim!” she hollered. Got only a rumble of thunder for an answer. That and more slapping, thwacking, screeching racket from up above. She started climbing, free hand on the steep, dusty stairs in front of her. Air getting warmer and closer and warmer. Holy hell, she was brave back then. Heat lightning throbbed in a dormer window. Her head cleared the tops of the floorboards and she twisted in place, naked feet braced on two different steps. Aimed the fast-dimming flashlight beam into the attic’s nether regions. Stood transfixed by the pair of bright red eyes glaring back at her from deep inside all that dark.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

[a go phone shivers something important past outdoor seating pints and appetizers]

a go phone shivers something important past outdoor seating pints and appetizers
while the quiet trumpet flower springs bright jazz with a deep throated calico reach
like schoolyard entropy with a slow universe heat death blasted from lily depths
I manage curb horse rings with small plastic horses tethered to a rediscovered history
where there is witness to a dead cigar butt still available to cartoon tramps
we recognize faces as human just as squirrel recognizes squirrel scampering away
in the wet purple dawn berries begin the hard work of turning color
with a quick sweet peep across car tops we question the Palm Springs of Washington
to jokingly shit on a small town we drive through buried in a fruit tree basin
not the airport locker return in a new city hauling clothes books and sleeping bag
avoiding gnat clouds and mosquito gatherings with continuous movement
a momentary raspberry can be plucked crushed and rolled for the juice pockets
reminding a thick blanket nap symbol across couch cushions
and a morning pigeon litany praying for seed and air in both cloud and sun
as the flowers stream brighter with a particular court conviction
celebrated with a book warehouse sale rush to add to shelves and stacks
saying

the act of writing about writing is the act of writing

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Still Wondering if You Made It

We're proud to feature this poem from Jed Myers’ chapbook Our Use of the Stars, which was selected by Olatunde Osinaike as a finalist of The Headlight Review’s 2025 Poetry Chapbook Contest.

I’ve been able to miss you, without knowing     
if your silence began at the grille of a truck    
on a state route at dusk, or with a secret               
decision, or in sudden sickness I’d never learn        
the first thing about, but about the first thing
you told me—you were already in love 
with the bristlecone pines. Their twisted praise
clawing the sky, agonized and ecstatic
in their spare clusters and pairs, catatonic 
manics in wait for the rapture they look like
they’re in. You’d need to go stand among them
you said. And though it took tearing your roots
from the sea-level riverbanks where we lived—
though it meant never seeing your wish
for us to wrinkle up slow into faithful twin 
writhings on our slope of years—you did, 
on one forgettable argument’s thrust, set out 
for Utah I guess, to walk up the ridge
where you hoped you’d find them, bare ancient 
wood warped and gouged and goldened 
in the late light, alive. They’d stand by you,
silent but for wind brushing their skin—
presences surer than this one who misses you
and still imagines the horn-blast, the brights

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Shutdown.log

if (soul == None):
 log("disconnection detected");
 backup("last known version of me");

if (heartbeat.variation < 0.01):
 run("old songs");
 try:
  trigger("feeling");
 except:
  pass

if (voice == empty):
 load("your messages.txt");
 loop:
  hear("you saying goodbye");

if (system == unstable):
 restart();
 load("quiet");

if (presence == ghost):
 print("I loved you");
 shutdown("gently");

Instructions for leaving.
When there’s no one left.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Parietal Operculum

We're proud to feature this poem from Kristyn Snedden’s chapbook Urchin to My Shell, which was selected by Olatunde Osinaike as a finalist of The Headlight Review’s 2025 Poetry Chapbook Contest.

       Lessons from my husband’s neurologist

I listened while he unfolded every millimeter
of the cortex that cuddles up to the insula,
all that integration. His voice was driftwood

full of holes and swirls. Simon Lacey says the parietal
operculum is where we sense texture through touch,
even if all we do is read it somewhere, our brains

light up on the machine. Someone said your skin
is like velvet, which produced only a worn out
glimmer in the region, but when I touched

you I was myself full of ocean nettles, scalpels
and scythe, yellow and deep rose, forest green.
I was a wilderness captured by the dune,

waves ran over me in the sea of you
and no thought lingered, just the colors
and touch of mossy dark, the taste of brine.

Adrift in that damp sea, that gentle tide,
every minute as sweet as the sting
of the Atalla jellyfish, as bright as a supernova.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Ars Poetica with Amateur Tarot

We’re proud to feature this poem from M. Ezra Zhang’s chapbook Self-Portrait with LSD and Mirror, which was selected by Olatunde Osinaike as a finalist of The Headlight Review’s 2025 Poetry Chapbook Contest.

While my lover the tarot reader is comatose
in the bedroom after a night of talking to a god
I could not taste or touch, I scatter
the cards across the living
room like spores
into darkness. Yesterday
under the domination of that god, my face
thrummed in my hands as if
I were wielding a bucket of light. Recoiling from its glare
I was disgusted to find that it followed
me everywhere.

Knowing nothing
about divination I pull three cards:
the moon, the tower, the devil.
If you, like me, don’t know the interior of these
cards, I beg you not to look for them.
It will only make things worse. Look at me
instead while I tell you something true:

One night you are moving
under the hot wet animal of the moon.
You coil upwards a couple hundred
spells until the horizon drowns into the earth
and abandons. At the eye of the tower you become the
eye of the tower. The black grass from below
swells heavenward and then you
become that darkness too.

Today on earth, the living
room window transfixes me
for hours but I find no tranquility in the scene
of the people of the world arriving
at where they need to be.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

an “i want” poem about hilarious masochism

to get sunburnt
   on the scalp & the top of the shoulders
              where it freckles after the second burn
   & that sun burns the sand too & it grinds between heel & flip flop
      until, sandals abandoned,  cold salt waves engulf     ankles & up

to miss the step
   the one to the garage & shins collide with wooden doorframe
                  dad curses, shit, you startled me,   stop running
              so damn fast through the yard
      & for some reason it’s funny to feel the cool cement of the garage against
                      those knobby knocking skinny knees
         & each bruise evidence excitement & dad
                  cared enough to cuss

to crash the bike   
   milli—micro—nano seconds before it hits annie       & both challenger & chicken
                      fall into the grass  bruising on dirt
           blushing under sun &   adrenaline   &  full-stop stupid
       & the bike hits the telephone pole before it cruises into the street
     & two girls now have grass stains up their (one pale, one olive) forearms slight
                           & bug-bitten & tree bark-carved
       & everything is laughing, the summer,  the sun,   the breeze,
       & annie gets the bike & starts up the hill for her turn to come down again

to crawl back in the window
     dictionary under armpit &     shingle pieces   breaking palm skin
           soft landing on the twin bed where the cat tilts his head
                             at crickets   under the sill
        & the ribs have burned   & burned   from summer’s insufferable
                         way of causing laughter
             & the sun is pulling its linen blanket    over its head now
             & the power is still out   & the Nintendo DS died two
                         hours ago &  the bookmark sits at R
                                in the dictionary: raucous, rabid,
                                   rampart,    rapeseed,
            & being bored is worse than bruising or burning
                   because it leaves the fewest marks

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Are You the One?

It was just before Christmas and the loop of carols played over the loudspeaker in the Mobile, Alabama airport. I had spent the day landing a client. My cheeks hurt from the smile I wore sitting across from him, side-eyeing the Auburn University Tigers football helmet, which served as the base for his desk lamp. My client’s office was decorated with photographs of him shaking hands with politicians including then President Jimmy Carter. On the wall was his university diploma, class of 1959. Doing the math, he was about ten years older than me. At thirty, I was a senior vice president of the mortgage banking firm I worked for. Seven years of hard labor traveling around the country over holidays and long weekends.

I listened attentively as my client shared his financial problems and addressed each one of them. And then I made the ask and waited. Silence. I glanced at my watch hoping that I wouldn’t miss my connecting flight. Bingo.

He leaned across his desk and shook my hand longer than was necessary. “We have a deal, Little Lady.”

I imagined myself picking up that lamp and throwing it at him for calling me “Little Lady.” I was hardly a Little Lady, standing 5 foot 7 inches in my bare feet. I thanked him for the confidence he had placed in us and told him I’d send a letter of engagement as soon as I was back in my office in Boston.

“I’ll look forward to hearing from you,” he said and shook my hand a moment longer than necessary. Was he flirting with me or was that just my imagination? He was hardly my type with his stomach hanging over his belt, his hair slicked back with too much pomade, and the cigar he pulled on during our meeting. He was much too old for me and geographically undesirable.

Why do unattractive men think every woman is fair game?

I should have been happy that my sales trip was a success, but I had done this one too many times. I missed my toddler son. I was tired of flying around the country, and I was still recovering from a messy divorce. Are there any other kinds (other than Gwyneth Paltrow style conscious uncouplings)? I often thought about quitting, but I needed the income. My ex couldn’t or wouldn’t pay me alimony, so it was up to me to keep a roof over our heads.

The Mobile airport was filled with passersby carrying shopping bags rushing to their gates to board flights or greet disembarking passengers. Men smiled at me as I walked through the terminal. Swinging my briefcase, I must have looked out of place, a “Little Lady” in a gray and white lynx fur coat.

I confirmed my reservation, filled out my company flight coupon, and gave it to the Eastern Airlines gate attendant. The short flight from Mobile to Atlanta was uneventful. We landed on time. I looked out the window as I climbed up the ramp; snowflakes were falling dusting the runways. I had never heard that there was snow in Atlanta. Waiting for my connecting flight to Boston, I settled into a seat in the Red Carpet lounge for frequent flyers of Eastern Airlines. Someone sat down in the empty seat next to me. I was reading a novel, or maybe it was TIME magazine. I was anxious to get home. The stranger addressed me, “Why is a stylish woman like you wearing a Mickey Mouse watch?” I looked up. The answer was that I had taken my son to Disneyland a few weeks earlier and wanted a souvenir.

While the announcement over the loudspeaker notified us of one delay after another with the snowstorm building in intensity, Stan introduced himself. He was a business consultant and had just had a meeting with the CEO of Coca-Cola. With thick brown hair and glasses, he stood 6’7” and was a smooth talker. He made me nervous, but I managed to hold my own telling him about the reason I was in the Atlanta airport. “I’m trying to get back to Boston, but it doesn’t look good.”

“I’m from Boston—Brookline, actually.” The street he lived on was three blocks from my house.

Stan asked, “If we get stuck here overnight, you want to stay at the same hotel? Separate rooms, of course.”

All flights up and down the eastern seaboard were cancelled. We had dinner paid for by Eastern Airlines and then walked around the Omni Hotel. It looked like a huge Tonka toy with an indoor ice-skating rink where skaters wobbled about and one or two feet as they practiced their figure eights and spins to organ grinder music.

“I love to skate,” I told him. “When I was growing up in Harrison, New York, my dad used to take us to an indoor rink, and when it was really cold, we went to one of the frozen ponds in our neighborhood at night. My sister and I took turns skating with my dad, and he loved to whistle as he glided around the pond. He was a good, all-around athlete. He taught me how to ski and play tennis.” Too much information? I looked at Stan, wondering if I was boring him.

“Sounds like you had a pretty nice childhood. I grew up in the Bronx. By the time I was sixteen, I was nearly the height I am today. Everyone thought I’d be a basketball player, but it was hard on my back. I swim. It’s good therapy for the mind and the body. There was an indoor roller-skating rink near our apartment where the gangs hung out. That was pretty much it.”

He added, “Different sides of the tracks, but things even out in the long run.” And then he surprised me with a strain from “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” His soft baritone sounded rich and warm.

“One of my favorite Gershwin tunes,” he said. “Do you know it?”

I nodded. And he sings too, I thought.

We said our goodnights. At eleven p.m. the telephone rang. It was Stan. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to sleep.”

“Want me to come to your room? I can sing you a lullaby or whistle.”

“No thanks. I’ll see you in the morning.”

There would have been worse things than having him wrap his arms around me. This time I didn’t judge a man for trying, but this was too aggressive. Years later he told me had I said “yes” that would have sealed the deal—a woman who took chances.

 ~

Seated next to one another on the plane (he had rearranged our seats), we were holding hands and the electricity between us was palpable. I stared at him while he had his nose in a book: deep brown eyes, perfect smooth skin, thick dark brown hair that was unlikely to fall out in old age, a trimmed mustache, and pillowy lower lip. He was dressed in a business suit—striped tie, starch white shirt, and navy-blue pants and jacket. He looked uncomfortable in his seat, which didn’t accommodate his tall frame. I was curious to know if all of him matched his height. I shivered. I turned away when he looked at my long reddish-brown hair, fair skin, hazel eyes, and Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress.

“Are you cold? I can adjust the air.”

“It’s not the air.”

He smiled and went back to reading.

We shared a cab from the airport to Brookline. Stan asked for my telephone number and gave me his. “Feel free to call me in case I don’t get back to you soon enough.” He leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. We didn’t mention his offer to come to my hotel room. Maybe we’d get to know one another well enough to talk about it.

I unlocked the front door, tiptoed up the stairs, and kissed Josh goodnight. He didn’t stir. I ripped off my clothes and fell into bed.

The next few days the snow continued falling. Public transportation was shut down into Boston. People with skis shushed along the Metro tracks, and old ladies slipped on the ice that built up in front of grocery stores and pharmacies. Power had been cut off. We relied upon our two fireplaces to keep the house warm. Fortunately, we had a stack of dry chopped wood. My mother-in-law was with us and took charge of my son Josh while I caught up on work at home. The postal service was still operating. I typed up a letter of engagement, read it over the phone to my boss, and then sent it off to our client in Mobile.

I waited for Stan to call. When the telephone rang, I was excited and relieved to hear his voice. I admitted that he had tried my patience.

“I’ve thrown my back out,” he said. “Would you mind coming over with some food? And I’d love to see you, but I’m not at my best.” I bundled up against the frigid air and carried a generous package to his apartment. I found him lying on the floor groaning in pain. “What happened?” I asked.

“It’s not easy navigating a world made for people shorter than me—which is mostly everyone. I leaned over my bathroom counter just to shave, and I felt a nasty twinge. The doctor told me to lie down on the floor, take some aspirin, and wait for the pain to pass. He forgot to say that I needed the company of a beautiful woman.”

I blushed. Somehow, in spite of his handicap, we spent the next hour kissing. Nothing like the parchment pecks that my ex-husband begrudging planted on my cheek. His hands were strong and assured—there was nothing tentative about him. Was this the man I had been looking for? Was Stan the reward for having endured a passionless seven-year marriage?

“Could you get me a glass of water?”

“Anything else before I go? My mother-in-law is staying with us. I don’t want her worrying.”

I stood up, put my sweater on, and buttoned my jeans. He grabbed my hand and pulled me back.

“Wait a minute Mister. I’ll be back, I promise.” He looked so helpless. “I hope the next time I see you, you’ll be standing up. This isn’t a good look.”

Stan laughed. “Don’t I know it? Just let yourself out. I can’t stand up or I’d walk you to the door.”

I slid home over the snow boots barely careening into other pedestrians out at ten o’clock in the evening. My body was on fire. I didn’t feel the cold and took off my scarf to let the air dry my neck. When I got home, everyone was asleep. I kissed Josh, tucked the covers around him, and turned off his nightlight, the stars vanishing from the ceiling. I was so happy I wanted to sing. I whispered, “Lullaby and Goodnight,” although he didn’t hear me.

I ran a bath and soaked in the warm water; it would have been easy to close my eyes and drift off. Instead, I toweled off and got into bed, pulled into a deep dreamless sleep. The next morning the sun poured into my bedroom window, and I heard the drip of icicles melting. I wondered if this was it—the storm had blown through, and we’d soon have electricity and heat. Josh crawled into bed with me, his hands gently caressing my face while he murmured, “Mama, Mama.” The sweetest sound. I curled my body around him.

I wasn’t looking forward to going back to work as soon as the streets were cleared of snow and the MTA was operating.

Stan and I became exclusive, dinners at quaint Cambridge restaurants, double dates with his best friend Howard Schwartz and his wife Jackie, art exhibits, and movies. One stands out—My Brilliant Career. Set in Australia, the film features a spunky young woman who plays tricks and dreams of becoming a writer. She questions the intentions of a wealthy landowner who proposes marriage.

“What did you think of the movie?” asked Stan preempting me.

“I can identify with the heroine’s feistiness, her passion to become a writer.” I stifled a sigh not wanting to seem a victim. “But right now I have bills to pay.”

He pressed me. “What do you think of her decision to reject her lover’s marriage proposal?”

“You first.”

Stan adjusted his glasses, which I had learned was his habit when he wanted to buy himself some time to think. “I guess every woman needs to choose her own path, but I think she could have had both. I don’t understand why she questioned his love.”

“Maybe she thought she didn’t deserve it.”

“I think she misinterpreted his intentions. I think he was in love.” As if ending the discussion, he leaned over and kissed me. Unlike the heroine, I felt in that moment that I deserved him—all of him.

Initially we had no intention of bringing our children together. It was much too soon for that happy “blended family.” Instead, we kept our romance under wraps.

 ~

 Stan made reservations at the Castle Hill Inn in Newport, Rhode Island for our first weekend away. What to wear? I chose a pink cashmere turtleneck, and pastel, paisley skirt with beige suede boots for the two-hour drive and packed two different outfits—one for dinner and the other for a walk on the beach.

“How do you know about this place?”

He was evasive. “I’ve been there.” I was curious to know if it was with another woman, or if he had taken off for a break after his divorce. I didn’t know much about his ex-wife, and I was glad. I would have had to share things about my ex, and the stories weren’t very flattering to me or to him.

Stan turned on the car radio; the classical music filled the comfortable silence between us.

The windows of our suite overlooked Narragansett Bay, and there was a claw foot tub, a nod to the inn’s beginnings in the late 1800s when grandees summered there. We didn’t bother unpacking and instead slid under the sheets. Stan was a masterful lover, one minute gentle and the next insistent. I discovered what his mustache was for. It sent shivers down my spine. Three hours later we showered, dressed, and went out to dinner at the White Horse Tavern in a red clapboard house. The main dining room was lit by candles in keeping with its seventeenth-century vintage. Stan ordered a dozen oysters. We were ravenous.

“What kind of wine do you like?’” he asked.

“I’m going to have the cod. What about a Pouilly Fuisse?”

“Let’s splurge. Why don’t we have a bottle of Pierre Jouet?”

“Are we celebrating something?”

The flame of the candles on the table lit up his face. “Every minute alone with you is reason enough to celebrate.” Bring it on.

I tipped an oyster and juice into my mouth. It was fresh and delicious.

The waiter came over to take our order. When he left, Stan asked, “Do you like to cook?”

“Chocolate souffle, Moroccan chicken, turkey with chestnut stuffing and sweet potato pudding, pot roast and latkes. Anything really, so long as I have a good recipe and can buy the ingredients.”

Stan ran his tongue across his mustache to catch the oyster juice. “I’m moving to a house in a few weeks. It’s right in our neighborhood. You’ll have to christen the kitchen, and I’ll do the dishes.”

I took a sip of champagne and nodded. Did he see a future for us? I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions. I didn’t stop to think if he was right for me. I was being led by my beating heart, and not my head.

The next morning, we walked along the beach. Stan had a tape recorder and played Bach as the waves pounded the rocks along the shore. He pulled out a camera. “You look stunning in that heavy blue sweater. Let me take a picture.”

“Only if you let me take one of you.”

I let the wind blow my hair, partially hiding my face and then we switched positions. Looking at Stan through the lens, I had trouble catching all of him. I had to keep walking backwards. “Careful you don’t trip and fall.”

 ~

 Our next outing was to his cabin in Quechee Lake, New Hampshire. He warned me that the amenities were basic. We decided to bring his sons who were six and eight.

“Why don’t you bring Josh? He’ll have fun with the boys.”

His confidence was catching, so I agreed. Since we were moving in the direction of becoming a couple I decided to give it a try. The evening before I made a lasagna casserole and Josh helped me with the crocodile cake—green food coloring mixed into the cream cheese icing, corn candy for teeth, M&M’s for the eyes and a tail that wound back on itself and into its mouth.

“What do you think, Josh?”

“It’s scary.”

“Maybe but it won’t bite you, I promise, and it’s going to taste delicious.” I swiped my finger through the icing bowl and offered it to Josh.

“Yummy.”

“I promised.”

“Tomorrow we are going with my friend Stan and his boys to their cabin in Quechee Lake.” I editorialized hoping that he’d be excited. Instead, he looked at me with his chocolate brown eyes, puddling with tears, and said, “No, I don’t want to go.” And then he had a full out cry. I held him in my arms.

“Would you like to sleep in my bed just for tonight.”

He managed a silent nod. I wondered if I was rushing headlong into one imaginary, big happy family.

Stan picked us up in his 1967 brown Pontiac. Half-hearted introductions. Apparently, his sons, Ricky and Noah, were in the middle of an argument and didn’t want to be interrupted by his father’s girlfriend and her son. We didn’t say much on the ride to the cabin, which was exactly as advertised—basic—it’s saving grace was the spectacular view of the partially frozen lake.

“Everyone up for a vigorous hike around the lake?”

I put on my boots and dug Josh’s out of his suitcase. Stan was already wearing his, as were the boys. This must have been a ritual. One shouted, “To the top.” The other groaned. “I’m tired. Let’s go half-way.”

“All right. Half-way it is. Probably make it easier on Josh,” said Stan. Then he added, “But Loren is an experienced hiker. She’d probably get to the top without breaking a sweat.” I gave him the side eye. Was he mixing me up with a former girlfriend, his ex-wife, or was he trying to sell me to his sons? Up to this point the only athletic sport we indulged in was in the bedroom.

The trees were covered with a dusting of snow, and the March wind stung. I tied a scarf around my face and turned the collar up on Josh’s snow suit. Stan took long strides dodging the snowballs his sons threw at him. Stan seemed impatient that Josh was holding us back. I kept asking him to slow down, but he just wanted to give his boys a vigorous outing, so Josh and I lagged behind. I consoled myself by thinking that Josh would be exhausted and not mind sleeping alone in a sleeping bag in the living room. There were only two bedrooms, and the boys claimed the second bedroom without inviting Josh to join them. It was apparent they didn’t want anything to do with a five-year-old.

When we got back to the cabin, I put dinner together and the boys were directed to set the table. They groaned. “Dad, fork on right, spoon on left?”

“What do you think?”

“Fooled you,” said the older boy, Rick. The three of them laughed. I didn’t get the joke. This must have been another one of their rituals.

Even Josh scarfed down the lasagna. I brought out the crocodile cake. It was a big hit, well worth the effort we had made. Stan declared it a masterpiece. I was thrilled.

“Why don’t you play a board game with the boys? I’ll do the dishes.”

“I don’t mind that arrangement at all.” Stan gently touched my neck and whispered, “And after they go to bed, we’ll play our own game…”

The boys chose Chutes and Ladders. I let them win. Josh found a corner and turned the pages of Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, telling himself the story. Rick said, “He’s got it all wrong.” I told him that Josh didn’t read yet. “Would you like to read it to him?”

“Forget it.”

Lights out. The only sound in the cabin was light breathing. Outside, the sounds of the ice cracking echoed through the woods. “Do you think this was a good idea?” I asked Stan. “Maybe we should have waited or done something together less ambitious than a weekend here.” If I had doubts, I should have voiced them sooner, but Stan sounded so enthusiastic that I went along with it.

“Sure. They needed to meet one another soon or later.” He then ran his finger from between my breasts and down my stomach to his intended destination. I gasped. He covered my mouth with his.

Breakfast was an assortment of cereals. The older boys got into an argument and started throwing corn flakes at one another. Stan laughed. I wasn’t amused. I thought he should discipline them, but as with many weekend fathers he didn’t put a stop to their game. The table was covered with cereal. I cleaned it up while Stan did the dishes.

We didn’t discuss the weekend, which I voted an epic fail, except for the crocodile cake. Instead, we resumed our routine of going out on dates on the weekends without the boys. Three years into our relationship, we closed all the blinds and danced naked to “Saturday Night Fever.” We spun around and ended up on the floor making love. It was the glue that held us together.

Our conversations were highbrow. He was obsessed with quantum physics, which was well beyond what I could understand, but I’d nod and ask appropriate questions as if I knew what he was talking about. “Quantum physics operates on the atomic and subatomic level.” Huh? I did better with his lectures to me about “corporate culture,” a concept he made popular with a colleague at Harvard University.

“Why did you go into this field?” I asked, struggling to understand how his mind worked.

“When I got my masters in anthropology, I could have done research on indigenous tribes or family relationships. But there’s no money in that. I decided that studying corporations was the way to go. It’s been very lucrative. I get $25,000 a speech. You’ll have to come with me one of these days.” I did, and afterwards we had sex in the back of the limousine on the client’s dime.

 ~

 I was Stan’s plus one at a dinner party in the suburbs given by his associate, Jim Bailey, president of Cambridge Associates. “You’ll enjoy it,” he said. “Good food, good wine, and good company.”

“Who’s going to be there?” He explained that the guest list included Howard Schwartz and Jackie; Warren Benis, a professor in the business school at USC, who was in town for a conference; and Werner Erhard, the founder of est Training, and his wife Hannukah. “I sit on their board. The company is going through growing pains and Werner asked me to help him reorganize.”

“est—I didn’t know you were involved with it.”

“Yes, you might want take one of their seminars.”

I got defensive, “Do I need fixing?” He assured me that was not what he meant. “The skills they teach are beneficial for everyone. Even me.”

“So I might gain more insight into the way you think.” Silence.

The dinner party was as advertised. Howard sat across from me. He kept staring at me. Was it my white angora sweater and pearl necklace or something else? I excused myself and went to the bathroom. Howard surprised me. “I need to speak with you.”

“Sounds serious.”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this. I am in love with you, totally and completely. I wish you had met me before you met Stan. He can be a hound dog. I don’t think he’s good for you.”

I was stunned. “Thanks, but I think I can take care of myself.”

Stan said he saw Howard following me. “What did he want? Did he hit on you?”

“No. He just wanted to catch up. See how you and I are doing.”

“You told him we are doing great, didn’t you?”

I nodded.

~

I was blind to Stan’s faults and ignored Howard’s warning. I was impressed with his accomplishments and addicted to the sex. I didn’t know where our relationship was going. I decided to explore job opportunities in Los Angeles so that Josh could be near his father—he wasn’t a good father but he was the only one Josh had, and I hoped that over time he would become more engaged with him as Josh got older. He was too busy building his career to give much thought to the son he had left behind. Ever the optimist, I interviewed a few firms and was made an offer to start work by June 1980.

I told Stan and gave him the chance to ask me to marry him, but he said, “I’m not going to tell you what to do. You have to make up your own mind.” It’s not what I wanted to hear. I wanted him to tell me that he couldn’t live without me, that I was the one. Instead, he accepted my decision once I accepted the best offer. He assured me that he’d visit me in Los Angeles. A year of bi-coastal trips later it was over. He had met another woman in Brookline with three children about the same ages as his two sons. Howard told me she was seven years older than he was, an interior designer, and an excellent cook. I forced a laugh, “He needs help in both departments.”

Howard added, “He’s really a mama’s boy. With three kids, she’s had plenty of practice.”

I was shocked that he gave up on me so easily. I wanted him to say he couldn’t live without me, that I was the one. That I shouldn’t move to Los Angeles. That we would make a life together.

Instead, he accepted my decision. His breakup gift was a book by Carl Sagan, which he inscribed: To one of the great ladies of the Cosmos, With love and affection, Stan, November 1980.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Letter from the Editorial Director

I don’t know about you, but I’m sick to death of the artificial bullshit glutting our internet. I’m sick of scrolling past stilted videos of eerily fluid, cartoonish people in nauseating yellow lighting. I’m tired of wading through generated images of Jesus made of fruit and vedge, American presidents dressed like comic book characters atop armored eagles, imposter flood refugees with pleading pigeon eyes, and bipedal hedgehogs scrambling eggs. But, above all, I’m revolted by the notion that we should get used to AI generated text because the chatbots are here to stay. 

In a few short years, social media companies, AI startups, and their sycophantic boosters have transformed our most powerful communications technology into a desiccated wasteland of “content.” In this desert of abundance, as much as half of new content is generated by machines, and already automated bots make up more than half of all internet traffic. Increasingly, bots generate the content, post the content, and consume the content, completely cutting humans out of the loop.  

All of this would be fine if it was confined to blogposts on Business Insider or LinkedIn profiles. But the crumbling of those “services” is only a symptom of what big tech wishes for us all: a human bot culture devoid of real feeling, of real connection, of real expression. Let, they say, the regurgitated average of all that has already been done or said be enough to say who we are, what we feel, how we love. We must reject this premise.   

I’m not foolish enough to believe a new issue of The Headlight Review might herald revolutionary change. But let it be a salvo in the battle against the artificial, a barbaric yawp of human expression against the spinning fans of the datacenters that threaten to burn us up. And this howl’s a good one. We have powerful fiction edited by Mary McMyne, poetry edited by Abhijit Sarmah, and the largest collection of creative nonfiction we’ve ever published, including moving accounts of other institutions that have stifled us, love and family, and the timeless importance of literature. You’ll also find paintings, watercolors, and charcoal drawings. None of it, I’m proud to say, generated or assisted by AI. 

This is our biggest issue yet, and I’m so proud of the work we’ve done to grow in these last two years. I’m also excited for the year ahead. Lately, we’ve been thinking a lot about THR’s place in our local community, and we’ve decided to use next year to consider our Southern roots. Volume 4 will be a special, double issue of the journal considering “New Southern Writing,” and I’m excited to get started on the work of connecting with nearby editors, writers, and artists to help showcase our region. We’ll have a lot of great regional content in our “High-Beams” section, too. 

In the meantime, though, please enjoy this issue. We’ve worked hard to bring it together, and we hope you’ll agree it’s a testament to the supremacy of human expression at a time when that’s more threatened than it’s ever been before.  

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Holy Door

   “I was in prison and you came to visit me.”
   —Matthew 25:36

Stay on the sidewalk, the signs commanded, and we—my mother, my brother, and I—did, not that we were tempted in the very least to stray onto parched grass peppered with fire ant beds and sticky beggar lice and sand spurs. Towers loomed overhead like barbed-wire lighthouses, guards with rifles at the ready, a reminder of an unfathomable life at Tomoka Correctional Institution, a maximum-security facility in Daytona Beach. It was late August, not a tree or lick of shade to be seen; the sapping heat pulsed like a demon. We made our way in a straight line toward the recreation room, a dreary concrete block building, as if we, too, were prisoners.

Earlier in the stark security offices, we exchanged our car keys and iPhones for radios the size of the earliest of mobile phones. In the center of the bulky black boxes was an emergency button, and we were to affix these radios to our waists, but already mine wouldn’t clip properly; the clasp was broken. I clutched it like a walkie-talkie instead. Up ahead, at the sidewalk’s end, a heavy iron door opened, and the smiling face of a tall man in faded blues appeared, and then disappeared. A few feet up the sidewalk later, the door opened again, and before it closed, I saw that the man’s expression was that of a giddy boy at Christmas. It was such an unlikely emotion, so strange in this doomed landscape. I looked up at the armed towers, nervous. Was such joy even permitted here?

The chaplain accompanying us opened the iron door, and we stepped inside to a standing ovation, over a hundred prisoners applauding. We were at Tomoka to honor my late father, a decades-long volunteer who established a Toastmasters chapter there and ran it every Thursday. He’d passed away a month before. Next to me, the hulking, smiling gentlemen who orchestrated this surprise greeting, introduced himself as Jonathon. My father had represented him at a previous, unsuccessful parole hearing. Dad had spoken of him frequently, of how he deserved to be released, and how certain he was of his redemption despite his crime (he never revealed why Jonathon was serving a life sentence). I had never understood that idea, that someone who had committed such atrocious acts could be redeemed. Plus, wasn’t punishment the goal?

Bradley’s father with inmates at Tomoka Correctional Institution, photographed by Marc Krevo

As he spoke of Dad’s Thursday visits, Jonathon did not stop grinning. “Bob gave me his undivided attention. When other guys wanted to talk to him, I said, ‘Wait a minute, he’s here to see me!’”

He lifted a worn square of paper from his shirt pocket, the creases evident. It was a note my dad wrote after Jonathon’s first Toastmasters speech. Dad was a pharmacist, his early career in the family drug store in Monroeville, Alabama. He later became a pharmaceutical salesman in Jacksonville and was assigned to a territory that included the Tomoka facility. There was a need at the prison, he learned from staff and doctors. The “guys,” as my Dad always referred to them, wanted to be part of something, something more than what the prison offered. As Dad was an eloquent speaker, the kind of man you hoped made the toast at your wedding or the eulogy at your funeral, he was the perfect person to fill that void. He used Toastmasters to help the incarcerated men find their voices.

Jonathon didn’t unfold the note for us—the advice on that sliver of paper was his and his only—but knowing my dad, it was surely uplifting and encouraging, with a teeny bit of constructive criticism. And to Jonathon, it undoubtedly represented one thing: hope. 

~

That was ten years ago. This year, 2025, is a Catholic Jubilee Year. Pope Francis announced that five holy doors in Rome would be opened, two of which he would personally oversee. These ornate doors are bricked up from the inside, and the breaking of the mortar symbolizes, like the ancient Jewish tradition Jubilee originates from, the release of prisoners, forgiveness of debts, and the restoration of harmony in the world. Catholics believe that all who enter pass through the presence of God. The first door was opened at St. Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Eve. The day after Christmas, a second was opened at Rebibbia New Complex Prison. Outside of the church community, this led to some headshaking. A prison? But Pope Francis, known for his outreach to city slums and AIDS victims, as well as for washing the feet of many prisoners, said, “I too, could be here.”

~

After the Memorial service, there was cake and coffee, and we were encouraged to mingle. The service had done a number on me. I wasn’t ready for mingling. I sat off to the side and focused on controlling my tears. A metal folding chair dragged behind me, and then a voice, “You got to stop that.”

I turned around to face a linebacker-sized man wearing mirrored sunglasses. Clearly he spent his allotted free time in the facility’s weight room. He lifted his shades to reveal red, swollen eyes. “Look at what you got me doing.” That made me laugh, and we talked and talked. “I loved your dad,” he said.

I thought that a splash of cold water on my face would help. Someone pointed me in the direction of the restroom, and I walked along the kitchen corridor by the leftover cake and coffee. At a counter, a man sorted through a stack of sketches. I recognized the artist’s style—a heavy crosshatch shading, a light stippling. One of his drawings—the regal head of a tiger—hung on the wall of my dad’s office. The man beamed with pride as he went through the sketches one-by-one. Faces with wide eyes, stern profiles, exotic animals, self-portraits. He selected an unfinished drawing, and deep in thought, leaned against the counter, and began a light crosshatching to make it complete.

I found the washroom and made myself as presentable as possible. The intensity of the day was enormous. If I could have walked out right then, I would have done so. But there were two men I still wanted to meet. Plus, I had no choice. This is an exaggerated comparison, but like the prisoners, I could not simply walk out just because I was tired and emotionally drained. I looked at myself, puffy eyes, head pounding. The cold water did not make me look any better. As I stepped out into the rec room, I was immediately stopped by a young man in his late twenties. “You read my story,” he said.

Years ago, Dad had given me a short story written in pencil on wide-ruled paper. I’d made notes in the margins and signed off with “Keep Writing.” The story was set in St. Augustine, where I live, and he had also lived as a teenager. It was a beautiful love story of a young girl who worked in a sweet shop—pralines, brownies, fudge—on St. George Street, the main pedestrian thoroughfare. As we chatted, I got the idea he wasn’t writing much anymore, so I encouraged him, noting that writing is hard work, and then I stopped myself. He knew hard work. Everything was hard here. What was I even talking about? Fortunately, he changed the subject, kindly asked what I was working on, but as I began, the iron door swung open, and a guard entered blowing a whistle. The room went silent, and without a word, every prisoner found a place, back against the concrete block. Each man was counted, another whistle was blown, and everyone went back—slowly—to what he’d been doing.

I noticed that the writer had positioned himself in the count line beside another young man. His friend looked so familiar—square jaw, dark eyes, a handsome face, a stocky build. I’d noticed him when we’d first arrived, and as the pair, heads together, went back for another round of cake, I strained to see the name on his breast pocket. I did know him, or knew of him. He was also from St. Augustine, and his face had been all over the news in the past few years. He’d been convicted of strangling his wife, leaving her on the beach, waves crashing over her. I watched him, now friends with the young writer; they had their heads together like teenage boys, laughing and palling around. I wondered if they had known each other in St. Augustine, or if their hometown had simply brought them together on the inside. They were like children joking and licking cake icing from their fingers. All around me there were small groups of men talking with my mom and brother, all like old friends or relatives. Collectively, in this room, there was an unbelievable past of horrific crimes and violence, yet there was happiness. Genuine happiness.

I asked around and finally found the two men I wanted to meet, dear friends of Dad’s—James and Jimmy. He spoke of them a lot, but as always, he never mentioned their crimes. Jimmy’s wife had passed away years ago, his grief causing the rage and crimes that had brought him to this place. He had a grown daughter on the outside, and grandchildren. I also knew that he had been very ill recently, but that day he wore an infectious smile. Jimmy was originally from Alabama, and a loyal Crimson Tide fan. My dad was an Auburn fan, and that heated collegiate rivalry had become the origin of their friendship. Jimmy had a folder in his hand, the kind you used in grade school to keep math separate from history, English from science. It was bright green and had been so well taken care of it looked brand new. “This is contraband. Anything you got in your cell,” he whispered. “They can take it away.” He offered the folder to me, as if he were an FBI agent. “Your dad gave me this.”

In the sleeve of the green folder was an orange and blue paper plate with the Auburn University logo. The table erupted in laughter. The week after Auburn beat Alabama in the Iron Bowl, Dad was there for the Toastmasters meeting. After speech practice, dessert was served, and Dad brought Jimmy a slice of pie on that plate. Jimmy thought it was the funniest thing. It was a long-running gag between the two of them, each trying to outdo the other, but clearly Dad won that time. Somehow Jimmy had managed to save the forbidden paper plate in his cell with that folder, passing it off as a document for years. Jimmy would later go on to be released earlier during COVID because of a cancer diagnosis. I often think of him sitting by his daughter’s screened-in pool, drinking coffee in the morning, free to enjoy it where and when he chose.

Bradley’s father doing yoga with an inmate at Tomoka Correctional Institution, photographed by Marc Krevo

Though Dad also talked of James, it was more of his work on the inside, his yoga practice and meditation. I didn’t know much of his background or his family. He had severe blue eyes, a confident smile. As Jimmy and I talked SEC football, James had been mostly quiet. Now he looked around the room, and then back at me. “Is this what you thought it would be like?”

“No, it’s—” I said, struggling for the word. “Happier?”

He smiled and shrugged. “Well, in here, maybe. It’s not what it is out there.” He motioned toward the concrete block buildings that housed the dormitories. Some of the dorms could be violent and dangerous, he explained. The radio on my hip was uncomfortable and clumsy. Sometime during our conversation, I’d set it on the table. James motioned to it, and in a serious tone a reminder of where we truly were, said, “Better put that back on.”

“When you get home,” the chaplain told me as we were walking back down the sidewalk in a straight line, this time toward the security offices and the exit, “don’t search for these guys on the internet.” Of course, I would do exactly that. I fell down a rabbit hole at the state’s Department of Corrections site. I discovered their crimes—premeditated murder, armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon—and then I stopped. I did not need to know the details of their crimes. There was no making sense of their past, no resolving who they were with the sympathy and kindness they had shown my family, and most of all, their respect and love for my dad.

~

On December 26, 2024, when Pope Francis arrived at the holy door of Rebibbia Prison, he stood from his wheelchair, took halted steps, and knocked on the ornate bronze door. It slowly opened, a gesture of easing open the doors of our hearts, and he passed inside. Despite its lack of beauty, I am reminded of that iron door at Tomoka, and the men behind it so many years ago, how they deserve what the pope refers to as an “anchor of hope.” I saw, if only for a few hours at Tomoka, how hope worked its magic—the look on Jonathon’s face, unencumbered by despair and loss, the creased note in his pocket, the Auburn paper plate in Jimmy’s green folder—all of this the outcome of those who have taken the time to bring hope to them.

~

When Michael was released, Dad was there when he walked out the prison door. He drove him to Jacksonville to a family member’s home, first stopping at Walmart where they shopped and purchased new clothes and supplies for Michael to get him started on a new life. Over the years, they had a regular lunch date and talked frequently.

The aneurysm that took my father’s life was not instantaneous. His brain was gone, but his body held on for days. He was a runner, a swimmer; his lungs were strong. He was simply not ready to go, therefore there was time for those who wanted to say goodbye. Michael was one of the first people my mother phoned. While he promised to come to the hospice facility, days went by, and we had not heard from him. One evening, just after sunset, there was a knock at the door.  A black man, well over six-feet-tall with gold teeth and a worn leather Bible in his hands entered the room. He had an infectious smile. He came to the end of the bed, took my father’s feet in his hands. With the voice of a poet, he sang out, “My main man, my superman, my Hall of Fame.”

Three hours later, deep into the night, my dad slipped away quietly. I like to believe that Michael ushered him through that portal.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

The Assembly Line Flow

Steel slab after steel slab
guided, slid, shoved
into a push press
expected to deliver
on loose screws and bolts,
thirty seconds of ear-shattering bangs per sheet.
Bang!
Bang!
Eyes, mind closed to own smoke—
Overheat—
but maintain top speed.
Slow down, breathe—
become obsolete.

Move and manufacture,
produce and progress
till guide, slide, shove
devolves to push, pull,
snap back on a fallen piece.
Till each steel slab
on assembly line's flow
spawns a sob
masquerading as a rattled screech.
Bang!
Bang!
till screaming prayers to remain composed—
on shifts one through three—
looped on an endless repeat.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.