Growing Mythology, or, To Turn a Frog into Something That Isn’t a Frog

Tuck islands in the lyric. Offer a watery spelling of light.
The disruption of stars in the blue-black oil

unearths a verb from its worm palace. Sing.
The green algae ribbons were just released on parole,

now the banks are becoming sentient. Whoa,
they’re really holding this place together.

Between two mirrors, a face becomes
prepositional. Under Hydra’s nose

it’s hard not to imagine animals
outside physical law.

Every inexactly green blink
brings you closer to amphibious

and you can’t stop believing
Robert Lowell died in a bog.

It was only the idea of a bog,
in the same way a question like

Need I move mountains to hear the sea?
puts us on our backs.

The cicadas are mythicizing everything
with their remarkable racket.

I so want to join, to chirp the orphic end—

In their language, the frog is the face of our moon.
Light sways, a little drunk.       An ancient body blooms.

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

Two Poems from “What the Hollow Held”

We’re proud to feature these two poems from Rebekah Wolman’s chapbook “What the Hollow Held,” which was selected by Valerie Smith as a finalist in The Headlight Review’s Chapbook Contest in the Spring of 2024.

Late Father as Lost Wax-Casting

People said "Sorry for your loss," suggesting
gone forever, suggesting never come back,
never get found, as in empty, as in without,
                                but it was something more
like transformation, the Dad-shaped space
inside my forlorn mind full first of shock
and fear for what he'd feel if he could feel,
                        alone and somewhere unfamiliar.

Then slowly what the hollow held, the chill
and numbness, began to melt; slowly
the cavity refilled. There he was again
in the place where he belonged—alloy
of his finest traits, rough spots filed. Still
himself but so quiet, so easy to be with.

The Two Cultures, with bursitis and arthritis of the knee

Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists. . .Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.
— C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution

Massaging my swollen knee to coax the built-up fluid
against the tendency of gravity and towards the beating pump,
I think about my father—his knee, smashed on a lacrosse field
in 1941 and what may have finally killed him if decades of aspirin,
even buffered, can kill a person. We're joined now, closer
than we were when he was living, by these joints not engineered
for wear or weather like expansion joints in dams and other structures
of his life's work.
                                But the high bridge over the gulf between us
remains unfinished, the span from his end reaching farther,
closer to a meeting point, than the span from mine. He read
George Eliot and Boswell's Life of Johnson, was better versed
in literature than I in how things worked. You live in a fantasy world,
he told me. His was the world of pumped storage hydropower plants.
In mine those reservoirs and turbines become a version of a heart.

The Painter

You sat with brushes in hand and the light flowing above and below,
the prayer like paper, the light illumined our sacred trees.
Somehow, we forgot our raucous and joyous past loves
when I asked you to listen for the screen door's slam
and the call to supper as I brought you the evening meal.

And then there was that folio of your recent sketches:
so many similar dark faces filled with joy.

I gazed at the rich, brown texture of a watercolor on the page,
a man’s tortured face, his beard, his tough bronzed skin.
You said it was a portrait of your brother,
who died overseas during a rain of fire in Viet Nam.

And you put down your brushes to confess
we were going to start life all over again
without waging the private wars that keep us together.

You painted your dead brother’s face
against a background of blue.

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

Map of Matter

I could talk about the past like anyone else
about surfing the winds of childhood
to get here and the things I remember
as if the limbs of earth can be owned
by reminiscence
but that’s someone else

I don’t have a story to go back to
or a scenario to play out Everything
I’m from was made up by the Shaw Brothers
and their starlets under dramatic lighting
cat-eyes tinted lips mansions cocktails

Those were not the days and I didn’t live
through them as much as I slewed
across the surface of their rotten skin
because the decayed hand of the past reaches
for everyone not one finger of truth

Don’t lie. Don’t lie. My memory speaks in sleep. But be
creative and quick about it. Soak in the salt
of the world’s illusion. Deliquesce. Be true.

I can reassemble the dismembered limbs
of the past by ingesting them
then making a new body of history
and pining for it like a farmer weeping
for her country lost to flood and fire

I have total recall of the Belle Epoque the Age
of Innocence the Age of Anxiety the turn
of the century the Ways of the Swanns
by demarcating the borders reconfiguring the atoms
of my birth I’m born again
and again

In the movies in the library I watched and read read
and watched until I was entombed
with recollection molecules degrading in travel
in moves
from East to West village to city town to town

The spaces between I lit with candlelight of nostalgia
to illuminate the path of sequined shifts beaded gowns
satin shoes I wore them over my tattered t-shirt dirty feet

Once I moved on a flat space a blank topography
a village for squatters the homeless
not worth visiting or revisiting
in the dark in my telling it transforms
becomes the enchanted forest apples snakes gardenias
a place I find myself time and time
again then again In my telling (tell and retell)
I redraw the geography of slanted truth
and an ending happy
enough to last forever and ever
after that

A Basalt Princess

Pacific reaches for the valley.
In side glances see-throughs
in fuchsia dawns and hell fire dusks
with a latent thrust of impudence:
outer space beckons to the sea trench.

This once was her isle -
with quenching guava scrub,
manioc, taro fields, mango orchards,
decorous breadfruit trees -
glugging the sky
between Capricorn and Equator.

She delivers the shadows of her house to me.
Looks me up and down until
I ebb into remoteness.
Ninety years have streamlined
her down to timelessness.

Crowned with island rose and ivory.
Porpoise teeth inter-woven with buds
gleaming like mortuary relics.
Glory still nestles in the furrows
of her face smoked in tattoos,
a Brueghel blue of soot and thunder
from head to toe.

Her voice, a blast of surf,
a dark inclusion in a storm’s crystal.
I can see her as then,
draped in royal tapa,
one splendid smooth arm
fanning the dormant air.

Then my own time topples
when, suddenly clairvoyant,
she predicts that money
will devastate the world.

Luxury

Before the Florida roads were
bleached whale bones for barons
to pick their teeth
we had the luxury to flick
the fucking matches.
We stole fruit from laden
branches and stars
still tipped scales. Remember
the luxury of disconnected everyone.
Remember the luxury to walk where birds
hid in their tiny rooms singing. The luxury
to joke with clowns driving
tinkling trucks. The luxury to stand
on a beach without fish hooks
in our knees. Remember sticking
out your thumb because you could.
Remember when no one prospered.
Remember never knowing
who we might become.

Where Nobody Is

Last weekend, a friend asked to go for a walk—
somewhere without people, she said
She doesn’t want to see people:
hiking trails are packed,
so I suggest our town’s cemetery.

There are people, you know, but not really.
She agrees.
We meet at the entrance.
What a beautiful place to be put to rest—
overlooking the pacific.

We walk up and down the hills,
reading tombstones, sharing stories.
It’s all too familiar. I spent my childhood there:
my Austrian mother obsessed with death.

My friend spoke of her mother’s passing,
and her ashes are in the closet
under a fake candle, and how each day,
she whispers good night.

No wind in this cemetery; trees are still.
Something in the distance beside a gravestone
caught our eye—a balloon on a stick in ground,
gently swaying back and forth. flowers beside.

We glance at one another and walk in its direction.
We arrive to gravestone of Jose Garcia:
January 13, 1989 - April 1, 2016.
A photo of his truck in the lower corner:
gone but never forgotten. joined the twenty-seven club.

I glance at my watch.
It’s his birthday.
He called us to sing to him and we did:
we wished him a peaceful journey

I still ask if a cemetery
is really an empty place.

The Gasconade

— for M

---

We make Southern Missouri by dusk,
arrive at your river, park, & walk
along your shy, thin corpse.
I come to you by firefly tonight
to do what children do with mothers
and rivers: to take from you
without asking & have you pass
again from my life. You will not
remember that you are dead.
That your body & blood went bad
on alcohol & grief. But this is before
all that. Before recompense &
Lethe, & your final command
that we not do as you had
and carry it with us like a glacial pressure
and wound. This is what the dead know.
Do not tarry on the two miscarried &
the one child taken by fall. I will not so much
as whisper it in the eddy of your ear.
For I come to you now before that agony.
Even before I was born, when we met
in that neither space, when your heart
stopped for minutes during the final push.
As if you or I or something could not decide.
This time, it is before I existed, unless
we always are & were & will be again.
The river seems to imply. You may not
know me. But you will know my voice
because you live within it. It is before
your courtship with the boy, my father,
who would take you off the farm to Chicago
and Palo Alto, the unenvied edges
of the world. Before even the trip to Tulsa
or your wedding in the little Chetopa church
or your honeymoon at the Bob Cummings
Motor Lodge in Joplin. Before your sister
introduced you to the river that would change
your course. The transaction of rivers is
transactional. One becomes another.
They are less noun & more verb. Such that
the plate-on-plate New Madrid quake
caused the Mississippi to run backwards
for three days straight & reversed time.
I come to you now by broken light.
By the heather atop a field of wheat.
By the immortal moan of cicada.
By shadow of the co-op grain elevator.
By the last cow into the barn for milking.
By the kittens drowned in a burlap sack.
The little skip in your heart when you ran
too fast along the irrigation ditch.
That was you, or me, the voice inside you.
The Irish in the wind & the expanse
of the large that pares us down to seed
and lifts us into confluence. Though
I am doubtful you found peace,
frantic as you were in the letting
and the loss & cautious not to offend.
I want to tell you what your river says to me.
It boasts of nothing or grand nothingness.
Fanann muid. We wait.
Leanann muid ar aghaidh. We abide.

Real Change

My cousin told me he found
Jesus, which was the easy part
since he couldn’t find his way
out of Brooklyn. Then this morning
it was so quiet you could hear
a cat walking. By noon the wind
kicked in making the trees swing
like Count Basie and the traffic
sounded like his horn section.
There is a mystery in all of this
I could never understand even if
I took it all apart, examined it
and put it back together, replacing
Brooklyn with Queens, put tap
shoes on cats paws and took Basie’s
horns away and replaced them with
strings. Sometimes it’s best just to let
them burn like my friend’s cigarettes
he kept smoking as he sat in his dark
kitchen after losing another job.
When he inhaled, the tip
of his Marlboro turned orange
like the moon in the window behind him.
The next month the surgeon removed
most of midnight from his lung.
The next year will mean a lot more
than the last 45 ever did. I wished
he had read the article I did that
said real change starts as soon as
you find yourself. I wasted no time.
That same night I took a red eye, then
an Amtrak to find where I am now.
It took awhile but it was worth the trip.

Pea Notes

Hey, fancy this: Clyde Barrow had a thing
for sweet peas (creamed) and Buck’s wife
Blanche did shampoos and perms and cuts 
at The Cinderella Beauty Shoppe in Denton. 
In Blanche’s My Life with Bonnie & Clyde, 
written in prison, the juice is in the sides. 

This morning, I saw Upstairs LeeAnn off 
to Germany. (There’s a Downstairs one, too.)
Upstairs LeeAnn, the way she looks (auburn)
and cooks (cakes) and trails a heavenly scent:
Yum. No, scent is too strong. When she’s near, 
you know and feel warm. In Blanche Barrow’s 

autobio, there’s a lot of crooning over husband 
Buck (honestly, gets to be a bit much). But the
editor’s notes (hot chocolate) and flourishes (with
marshmallows) swoon me. End of the day, it’s
the tiny treats I keep. Seeing Loretta Lynn live 

in Honolulu and, back in high school, friend
Mike and I chirping, “I’m raising black-eyed peas 
and blue-eyed babies . . . prayin’ for weather” 
down in the rec room on Rainbow View Drive. 
(Mike’s dead before I catch the sweet irony 

of his growing up on a rainbow.) Mike, 
his parental units, and dog Ginger. Tupperware 
soaking in the sink for hours. Dad working at the P.O., 
packing Mike’s peanut butter and jellies. If bibles 
have a smell, there’s that mixed in as well. 

And somewhere the secret sadnesses 
absorbed in green shag carpet, parents who dote 
on their only child (the idea of him) though 
they never really see him. Whole. 

When Mike’s grown, out of the closet,  
his mom once impulsively asked, 
“Are you ever tempted to cut it right off?” 
(A lot to unpack, huh . . . ) 

After that, he stayed away for a while. 
But all our lives, Mike and me, we’re full 
of guffaws and squelched guffaws 
that happen when you should absolutely NOT
guffaw. Sitting shiva for his partner Paul, to
name one. Good God, the rabbi’s high strung 

“May the Hebrews gather . . .” before heading 
full-tilt nasal into the Kaddish. Horrified, we
bit our cheeks, eyes spilled water, mouths 
contorted with explosive snorts. Oh well, it’s
the flamingoes that open the dance, 

right? Did I mention: Mr. Clyde also liked French 
fries? (peas, no peas—who knows). BTW, Mike 
would love both my LeeAnns. (There’s always 
room for more.) Tonight I munch perfect
strawberries Upstairs gifted me before a white Uber 
whisked her and her three black suitcases away.

Ode to Grief Bacon

Weeks after the pills folded
my grief like an omelet,
I opened a cookbook to taste  

the hollandaise sauce, buttery
and beaming from a spoon
and asked Alexa to turn

the volume up so Sam Cooke
could croon against the cast-irons,
and for the first time

in months, I whisked
three eggs while shuffling
in my socks. I hummed “A Change

Is Gonna Come,” while considering
the elegance of toast,
how the char makes even

the stalest wheat dissolve
on our tongues
in a quick burst of caramel.

Then I opened the package
of thick-cut bacon
as if it were a letter written

in sodium and fatback,
its cursive sizzling in strips
and sopping in grease

that bubbled against my knuckles
which, friends, was a pain
I too toasted into joy—and harried

by heat, I remembered the Germans
have a word for eating
out of despair: kummerspeck,

meaning “grief bacon,” so I sliced
the entire package and watched
the porky sadness shrink

until Sam’s voice grew heavy
with salt, the strips splitting
and spitting and saying only

kummerspeck, kummerspeck,
which is another way
of saying I glided

with a wooden spoon,
dripping yolk across
the canvas of the floor.

Coming Full Circle

Imagine the magic a circle holds, its infinite points—dotted or passing through. Imagine my Tagalog and accent erased, so that I could pass.

I uncovered my mother’s dictionaries in the towel cabinet, her scribbles: proof of definition and memorization. Perfecting English helped her pass.

For the sixth-grade spelling bee, I studied intensely, circling only unfamiliar words, burning them into my brain. My mother, orbiting me. And I passed.

Imagine the power of a trophy or a medal, to a child, the rounded
glory beaming from the walls. My wild and free daughter, wanting to pass.

Is she yours? people say to me. Is that your mom? children ask her, studying her coils and caramel skin. From my womb, you grew. Through my body, you passed.

My anxiety rises like a rocket flare, brief but real, being in a fully
Filipino space. Even in a white space. Oh, but you’ll be fine. You pass.

Pass me courage, make us all balls of limitless love and identity. Here is the open field. Pull back, do a double roulette, and pass.

Have we come full circle? Are we still fishing out words and phrases from the stream, afraid to awake the sleeping eye and ashamed of the past?

There is a description for identity confusion, this lostness: Ang Pilipinong nawawala sa sarili. To not always belong or pass.

---

This poem—a loose ghazal—echoes concepts and Tagalog phrases from Leny Mendoza Strobel’s book Coming Full Circle: The Process of Decolonization Among Post-1965 Filipino Americans (2nd edition). The “sleeping eye” references page 6 where Strobel discusses the Filipino American community’s “identity crisis,” traditional Filipino values versus modern American values,” and the “invisible minority and the sleeping giant.” The loss of language guilt and shame is further contextualized on page 130 (“Why didn’t you maintain the language? Why didn’t you teach me?”).

Faster

What if you were the boy
who gave me his gym shorts all those years ago

that time my best friend wanted to go skinny dipping
with a bunch of strange guys from a band

and i said are you crazy?
and we jumped in the black 

Atlantic fully dressed
and later, watching us drip

head to toe across his (your?) pale 
linoleum, offered to throw

our clothes in the dryer while we listened 
to (his?) your unplugged version of Kryptonite

that still plucks goosebumps when 
it comes up in my running playlist

// what if your grin 
is a secret handshake remembering 

the hungry tone of those
apartment walls & the comforting

smell of the dryer 
underneath the pulse

of the drums // what if 
the cling of my ocean-soaked dress

sometimes 
wakes you up at night— 

what if you grew up, too, with a fist 
full of regrets only answerable

in the next mile, the next doubtful
song you fall in love with?

Another Evening Lowdown

Dangling between
         Mom and Dad,
a ripe fig ready to drop,
         we walked
from ride to ride
         at Clementon Park:

Tea Cups, the Tile-a-whirl—
         roller coaster snaking
toward blue blank space.
         From fear to joy
and back. What else
         to know but this?

Ars Poetica

Black pepper lathered
into brisket, lines like bark—
charred, hickory ripe.

From the Collected Poems of Kermit the Frog

Once there were stars,
strings to dangle them,
an unseen hand disappearing
into the moon’s waxing
ass. It’s all hanged,
you see. My tongue
no longer flicks to the quick
of your hearts. You,
who once flocked weekly
to my swamp, come
no more. I rage
to no one,
not even dear Piggy,
who karate chopped me
so often
with her love.
Oh, these piggy thoughts.
I never laid
my stuffing bare to her. So many
canceled seasons ago,
we lay watching birds
out a window—not
the Sam and Betsy sort,
but ones with
bona fides.
I’m talking plover, cardinal,
and wren—sky-glazed
and singing, but Big Apple
bustle gobbled
them up. I almost
told her I wanted
to spring
into water, plunge to find
bottom, maybe a tadpole
or two. Now this pond resembles
what the mind wants
heaven to be—not a simple
infinity but a closet
that stores all we’ve missed until
it’s needed. Piggy,
wherever you are, does
a hot spotlight still warm
your loneliness? Are you also
haunted by capers lost?  
And have you heard about
poor Nanny, left to a single
paragraph
on the back page of a paper
no one reads anymore? All I can
remember of her now is a song
whispered from a doorway
just before I sink
into dreams.

To be a man

don’t sob at the sight of your grandfather’s ashes stored in a mausoleum for war veterans and husks of grandfathers that once loved but have since formed their hands into oysters. He powdered the pearls. South of the Greyhound station, you once ate biscuits, drank orange juice against the violet dayglow of the morning. You try

to recall what stories he said back then, but no amount of trying unbuilds the mausoleum that houses how you see him now—ashes long since cooled, knuckles long since calloused. Look at the oranging picture they set beside his wrinkled lilies, the one where he held the husks of three doves lined in a row, bellies slipping out of slits. In the South, a man is nothing more than the pain he could inflict. You can form

anything into a marriage of shame and silence. Pick a wife with a curved form and lips of sweet meringue, whose dreams are just as soft and shallow. If you try to leave your birthright, remember your stepfather whose crew in southern Vietnam traded Polaroids of heads and ragged entrails as currency—ashy cheeks, eyes somehow always looking up. They were just carrion, husks. Look at your stepfather now—a man who holds more pride in Agent Orange

than in birthing two daughters—and how he once spat clustered bombs of orange napalm on weeping village wives. He goes to sleep so easy, like forming a fist. You must be like him, like your grandfather, like the carob husks of Morocco whose purpose is to wrinkle and burn and become powder. Try once more to leave your birthright, to never become deciduous. Even the ash that holds the Nine Worlds in its womb, even the palo verde of Southern

California that dances like fireworks or arteries, even you, one day, south of heaven, will become a mausoleum. Think of your mother, her orange blossom tea and her lacy summer dresses and how she made the world her ash—tray after her lips deflated and her skin leathered and she couldn’t terraform her womb to support two daughters. Your stepfather did his best. He tried to be good. You must empathize since you too feel that gravity (the need to husk

something from its shell, like the wives and daughters who strip husks of rice with warm hands and leathered feet, who live in huts in southern Bangladesh with hopes of never seeing a single plane in the sky). Try to remember how easy it can be to leave, to smoke a carton of orange Pall Malls in a rusting cerulean pickup like your birth father did, forming fingers into snakes or oysters or carob pods still hooked to the tree. You can ash

that cigarette anytime. Try as you might to escape your birthright, husks of doves and daughters are expected so that your own ashes can rest, south of heaven, where oranges will blossom, where a mausoleum will form.

Ghazal for the Cast Iron

Because I haven’t taken the bristle pad’s sudsy scraping grace
to scour this pan as I do all others, erasing the grease

of bacon and garlic, because in coarse salt and shortening
and three wadded up paper towels I trust, I grace

this pan with butter, the slick black metal muting
turmeric’s threadbare screams. So little of what we make we grace

with time’s peppered gristle. Even rot’s scrubbed clean by rain and soil.
But this held my grandmother’s hashbrown casserole, saving grace

of red potatoes. This my grandfather’s good eye, goose-white
and gleaming as he sizzled the hams of West Virginia, graced

his knotted stomach with the dinner he’d scarf beneath
the nightshift’s ochre light, a piece of himself saying grace

with each raised fork. When my mother died on a street smooth
as a skillet, my father cooked himself through grief. Tonight, no grace

of rain on bloody asphalt, but short rib seared until meat falls
from bone, the once-translucent onion darkening in a wine-swilled grace,

and I hold this grease-hiss of family with a singed oven mitt,
oil bursts saying: Josh, even from burning comes a little grace.

The Fish

At first,

the bags of water
walked:

through red deserts,
through green forests,
through gray cities.

And then,

the bags of water
talked:

about race,
about gender,
about equity.

And then,

the bags of water
balked:

over history,
over liberty,
over private property.

And then,

the bags of water
stalked:

demanding homogeneity,
demanding retribution,
demanding silence.

And then, 

the bags
of water became unstopped:

drowning libraries,
drowning classrooms,
drowning cattle, chickens, and pigs.

And when
the bags of water
were empty,

they danced in a circle,
and prayed for a river.

The dark sky answered
and afterwards,
it just

rained
and reined
and reigned:

soaking our yards,
soaking our bread,
soaking our shirts,
soaking our shoes,
soaking our soil,

until all that was left were the fish.

Self Portrait as a Blushing Petal, Nestled into the Melt

I felt the seams of sky loosen and balloon over us the day I pedaled to your house, / my white skirt billowing behind me. Before, the ache did not disturb. Before, I clung to my / wake, vermilion and veined. I don’t know why the sun raked at my back, intensely begged me / to make my way to you. Does a crocus question / its readiness to bloom? Del Playa stretched open—this is where we kissed, the saltiness sealing familiarity on our lips. How many blackflies / have swarmed us since the night, digging us a ditch, / picking up next fight? Rousing our panic / like scattering field mice? But we floated / above this traffic, our bodies satin / in suspension, the tendrils / of our fingers irreversibly / and invisibly tangled, / and I can’t / and won’t / explain / this enigma, / a sweet fragrance / of red hibiscus / glazing over us / This stem, aerial, and erect. / These stipules, present, and free. / Our fusion protects a younger leaf— / look how she collects the dew, drinks in light / every time laughter shakes our joints. She may never know / how we suffered and recovered from two hard frosts. The blight crystallized, / thought never hardening us. I prefer this side of the story, how we came out warm. / and a bit weathered on the other end. I want to cup the syrupy smell in my hands again.

for her, an offering / of what love can cocoon. / Maybe now it’s plumeria / perfuming this place, / interlaced with the urge to love you / harder, love you even when / the biggest freeze of all towers over us, / livid and lethal. And yet-this stem, deep-rooted. / This blushing petal, nestled into the melt- / shivering in the delicate spring wind. / when you cradle me, heat flares. / When the stars spin / in wild directions, / you say, Burn, burn, / and explode into everything / you touch.