K. Krumrie
The Pool
K. Krumrie
beehive
ISSUE 1
ESSAY
POEMS
MISC
Mathias Svalina:
Julie Carr:
Boe Barnett:
Serena Chopra:
Kelly Krumrie:
Ali Crockett:
Eric Baus:
Serena Chopra:
PDF
Bio 1: Mathias Svalina is a co-editor of Octopus Books and Magazine and author of numerous chapbooks, including the brilliant and award-winning Creation Myths from New Michigan Press. His first book, Destruction Myth, is forthcoming from the CSU Poetry Center this fall.
Bio 2: Julie Carr's books are Mead: An Epithalamion, which won the University of Georgia Press's Contemporary Poetry Prize in 2004, and Equivocal, published by Alice James Books in 2007. Her poems have appeared widely in journals such as Volt, Verse, New American Writing, Parthenon West, Boston Review, Verse, Volt, Bombay Gin, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, American Letters and Commentary, Parthenon West, and Public Space. She also has poems in the anthologies Not for Mothers Only (Fence Books), and The Best American Poetry 2007.
Carr teaches poetry and literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and is the co-publisher, with Tim Roberts, of Counterpath Press.
Bio 3: Boe Barnett has been awarded no prizes, stipends, residencies, chairs, fellowships, advances, or royalties. His work appears hardly anywhere, and in fact he prefers beer to poetry. In the meantime, he's teaching writing at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Bio 4: B. Alex Miller studied architectural design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 2001 collaborated with Jeff Taylor to create the architectural firm of Taylor & Miller, which is housed in New York City. The firm's projects are diverse in design approach and in program. The firm's most recent works include installation art pieces for the Boreas Gallery in Brooklyn and a residential tower lobby in Manhattan; residential design and custom fabrication for projects in the Berkshires and New York City; Art master planning and art direction for non-profit groups and corporations including Storefront Artists Project in the Berkshires and Erno Laszlo in New York City; Master Planning for landscape and urban design for Atlantic Assets in Brooklyn, NY; Retail space and deployable retail system designs for Sanctuary Salon and Alex and Ani of New York, NY; and private day school architecture and master planning design for Sinai Academy of the Berkshires. Taylor and Miller is also a lighting design collaborater with L'Observatoire Lighting, working on projects such as the Art Gallery Ontario in Toronton, The Fondation Louis Vuitton Museum in Paris, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California.
Bio 5: Eric Baus is the author of The To Sound (Verse Press/Wave Books), Tuned Droves (Octopus Books) and several chapbooks. He publishes Minus House chapbooks and lives in Denver.
I started this one business that installed padlocks in clouds.
We sent our technicians up in airplanes with their cheeks puffed out. We sent them up wearing protective gear & carrying Sawzalls in each hand like cowboys in gasmasks. We sent our technicians to the academy of clouds & they drank from the world by means of sawdust & dew. We sent our technicians into the desert of stifled laughter, to fields of dust. We sent them to the steel-roped tops of bridges & asked them to close their eyes & imagine cracked mirrors. When we sent them home, they stayed up all night watching the blank screens of their loved ones’ sleeping faces.
Our offices are wooden barracks of raw walls. We have invested heavily in the traditions of princes. We have no interest in landscape.
Our clients approach us with their palms turned out & with a certain grit to their step. They fill out the initial forms of age, weight & death. They tell us about all the loved ones whose faces have become white tablecloths. They tell us about the knives they have buried in the sand. They tell us the secret names of all the trains that whistle by night. They sketch loosely imagined drawings of the clouds that need to be locked.
The technicians look over the drawings as the airplanes warm up & they pick the splinters from the soles of their feet & they hate the chaos & they feed themselves with their own lost structures of use.
I started this business because I grew tired of the feeling of someone calling & me not answering. I started this business because I grew tired of the sound that I heard when I answered the phone, the sound of breathing into a metal water pitcher. I started this business because everyone walks away.
There is too much behind us. There is so much behind us that the world is lost in every moment that you move through it.
I have no memories of being an adult. Like an ache, I have never stopped moving. When I am happy I feel like I never have to move.
Our technicians are the only ones who know how to lock a cloud. Our technicians are young & wild, with large families with lots of children with lots of names. Our technicians must have pitch black eyes. Our technicians must have sharp white teeth.
To lock a cloud one must know the heart of the cloud, just as one must know how much blood is in a baby. To lock a cloud one must watch the black spot in the middle of their eyesight all day until they come to the canyon. A locked cloud is like a child who only knows his name. A locked cloud blinks & blinks & blinks & blinks.
Our technicians do not lock the clouds; they only install the locks into the clouds. Fifty thousand clouds make up a sky & with our product one can maintain their clouds.
One cannot brand a cloud. One cannot teach a cloud anything more difficult than to cry. It is so cold in the sky that one’s tears turn into glass. The protective gear protects our technicians from all the shattering tears.
M. Svalina
I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur
I started this one business that takes Americans on tours of their own neighborhoods.
We have the double-decker buses with the open roofs, the cute young tour guides with the feedbacky microphones (all of them honest-to-god struggling actors, not pre-med students pretending), laminated maps for an additional $9.99.
We put up posters every few weeks in all the usual places, the libraries, the showers, the bedrooms, though the best spot is on the fridge, stuck via commemorative magnet beside junior’s latest art project. Every time Pops grabs another brewsky he sees our slogan: “Visit where you live for the first time.” Every time the husky son sneaks another chicken leg he associates his desire with our image of all those stupefied families atop the tour bur.
Sometimes our poster hangers get overzealous & you’ll find a house with a poster in every room; we’ve found that this actually lowers the chances of this family taking the tour. If you think about it, every neighborhood is interesting in the ways humans endeavor to organize their interactions, in the history of the habitation of the land & the dynamism of the environment, in the relationship between the rooftops & the skyline, but these, of course, are not what the people want.
We tried to do it the right way at first: we researched the geography (physical & cultural). We poured through the legal records of purchases & sales. We brought in teams of artists in order to view the neighborhoods from a variety of novel perspectives. But our comment cards were so embarrassingly low that we knew we had to revamp the whole shebang.
What people want, it turns out, what makes them clap & giddily shout out, is to have the tour guide simply state who lives in each house: this is the Wilkinson’s house, which has three bedrooms & two & a half baths; this is the Schniderman’s cozy ranch style house; this is the split level that the Von Derdonks have owned since way back in 2003; etc, etc.
And you won’t be surprised to know that the people shout & applaud the loudest when their own house is announced, occasionally even standing up & taking an elaborate bow or yelling out “That’s me! That’s me!” to their neighbors who all know them already.
What might surprise you is to know that when the tour ends & the bus is idling near the library, the residents of the houses cannot find their ways home. They walk the streets like kittens whose paws are covered with scotch tape. They peer into the windows of each house, comparing the family photos to their own spectral reflections.
M. Svalina
I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur
I started this one business that builds skyscrapers in your likeness.
What could be better than a 500 foot building in the shape of you looking out over the expanse of muddy lives down on the streets of Manhattan?
What says I am somebody more than 70 stories of you among the old crust of stone & steel on the skyline.
Picture yourself towering over the Chrysler building with a look in your eye that says “Suck it, Chrysler Building.” Picture your gigantic arms folded, or perhaps casually holstered in the pockets of your slacks or designer jeans. Picture the cut of your coat writ Everestian among those elevator-plagued relics of history.
Picture the epic base of your feet, how the little people with their weeping & their children & their envelopes, how they pass by your feet, how their day’s path is defined by your feet, how some child would see the feet & slowly crane his neck up to look to your towering visage cast against the cadmium burn of the blue sky & how you would seem to be looking down on him both in inspiration & derision, how the mothers would never notice the burn in their throats, how the fathers would continue in their mindless urge toward prayer before meals & how the child would begin to cry like a dog that has broken its old tooth on a bone – I mean, what shoes would you be wearing, you know?
I mean picture, how big your dick would be. It would be useless to try & tell you this is anything but the grandest of vanity. But, I propose as counterpoint, what is the function of the human superorganism other than the extension of the few, lucky, brutal vanities?
Where would we be without our kings & our popes? What a simper it is to believe another intellect lies behind those dormant clots of eyes? What form of cannibalism is this urge toward equality?
The avalanche of human history must forever self-propel, by which I mean that you must remind the people around you of your superiority. And yet to say it to their faces, well, that is out of fashion.
A skyscraper!
A skyscraper in the shape of you!
Even Reubens of the beautiful bubble-butts was a diplomat, attempting to bluff the Dutch into Catholic capitulation. No ocean of luscious beaver pelts, washing into Amsterdam in creaky wooden tankers could keep this city from the resolute control of the British, just as no amount of blood assuages the fury of the heart. But again, I say, this is vanity but also allegory.
Not only do we build the skyscraper in the form of your outward likeness, we build the interior in the exact function shape & twirl of your veins & arteries & organs. The employees in the building of your body pass through your chutes & sphincters in their daily work. There are the obvious undesirable, one might even say officious, offices of guttural organ; the places for those who never dream of a desk at the command of the eyes. We have the finest conceptual architects constructing our skyscrapers with precision computer modeling – it is crucial that the buildings are not only structurally sound but anatomically coherent.
In a sense, of course, it is blood flowing through the buildings veins, isn’t it, in the sense of a suicide pact or an ocean voyage? For what is a man but the internalization of so many other humans, the little twist of the neck unconsciously stolen from a childhood teacher who could never remember his name, the fixed voice his father used just before the door was locked.
The true equality is the raising up of one, the increase of the individual into a monster of chrome & glass. Equality is not a horizon line. It’s not the connection between one person & another or the movement of water in an aquarium. We don’t ride the roller coasters for the loops & the splashes.
M. Svalina
I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur
Years having passed, the foliage is wet. The final morning on which you, in freedom, will wake. I see your imprisonment as a fault of my own. My failure to house you, to allow you to live as an unknown being within my own body.
A girl we know has memorized the witches’ song. Her pinched serious face and unbrushed black hair hiding her eyes: Fillet-of-a-fenny-snake-in-the-cauldron-boil-and-bake-eye-of-newt-and-toe-of-frog-wool-of-bat-and-tongue-of-dog. No pause, no breath, as if forced as if never before or again as if always as if gripped.
And you, un-gripped, have been trained to know less. The training arduous, lasting for ages—your entire lifetime. First you had to give up the sounds of words. And then water.
J. Carr
Sarah
In the second week of solid rain, Sarah. You wake at dawn with a head of dream. Clover’s fell enthusiasm expands in the perpetual bath. Sarah. The lamp suspended in the garden, Sarah: Cheshire-like and falsely dear. We make boats of juice-bottles, houses of cereal boxes, cats of toilet paper, eggs of lavender and stone. Sarah. At the festival of water we watch an orchestra of children sway to the music of their strings. And in your room you succumb. Learn as you are dying how to behave like one near dead. As magpie, you are eave-bound, acquisitive, indiscriminate. Beak clipping the scraps of your old existence, the strings of your future weave, Sarah. As duck you are industrious, with a reed in your possession, across pond you slide. But here, tatter-head, you are forced into days, broken into hours, and those hours mercilessly sliced.
J. Carr
Sarah
Then the quarry where I learned to swim. How you watched me from the ledge as I suddenly, illogically, stopped moving my limbs.
Lapping up water, the cat masters its survival.
Bottle-fed once a lamb in my lap. The sucking more focused than any one noun or stone. To position myself between such need and its fulfillment seemed then the most honorable of seats. But now I find I cannot, with any steadiness, sit there.
But perhaps this never happened? Just as you were never a woman who birthed me.
And stilled the clouds.
J. Carr
Sarah
The mighty powers of
Sunday ignore this singly
mood of fear, this type-
casting of capital as being
anything other than un-
interesting, this official
trial of a high profile
former head of state.
Before the death of death
expect the indictment
of Merck to be delayed
and the right to a public
spectacle to make gains.
Meanwhile, you’re paid
in rags and plastic bottles
of petrol (which we’re
told is a leading indicator
of the decline of our
once divine and destined
country), a sad minister
blows through twelve
Easter numbers on his
organ pipe, and courtrooms
are lined with broken
contracts and undue
victory. In an effort
to declassify the links
between foil and sage,
what has become clear,
as vague as such policy
may be, is the nest is the
place the gesture settles,
the desert is an intractable
disease, as is the existence
of a bunker beneath D.C.,
where foreign obligation
obliges the creation
of an infinite variety
of rejections of peace.
B. Barnett
Undue Victory
I began in a failed society. A wisp, like cloud folly
and spoken-to-soon mammals, a letter
written, “in respect of this little pitiful Earth
of ours” – Can you imagine what we will do
without it?
There will be flying, or perhaps being without an atmosphere,floatingand great fashions of space suits.I chased our histories, our amazement
with everything bigger than us, Jupiter,
big and dumb, and our fascination
with bartering abstractions
for symbols, big and dumb—
Of what we know! Of what
we know! We can
of what we now know!
is not working.
Slowly the atmosphere peeled away like flakes of burnt
skin. Branches turned up and their roots, like cat claws,
(and the cats as well) pressed deeper into the earth. One
by one we were lifted, some still under their roofs. Whole
families, linked by rope or weeds or hands, went searching
in the horizon-less space, for endless millennia
for their children and mothers, slipped away without them.
Funerals became ancient, for corpses could float
better than anyone, and reached the thirty-year
frost of Saturn quicker than anyone. I once saw
Caesar, skeletoned and sucked from his tomb, floating in the ruins
that ended him.
I’ll be ended here
in magnificence. In great
tombstone and wonderful, reeking
dirt.
Somewhere there’s a ladybug,
somewhere there’s a leaf,
somewhere there’s a monster truck,
crushing.
S. Chopra
Spring Without Gravity
If you love them too much, they will die— Not only will they die, but you will have killed them. I made my bed everyday and still they wore through time. I kept the rug straight and still they wore through time. I chanted at 12:48 and still they wore through time. I kept things in their place, and still they wore through time. I did everything four times or eight times or twelve times or forty-eight times and I got an award for always being late. And the weight of each gesture, each moment, and my presence, like a membrane, wears, is wearing over-time.
S. Chopra
(Com)Pulse, With Pulse
One way of thinking about excavation in terms of a writing process would be to take a text that it is already written and try folding the language into itself. I generally arrange my text into four columns that can be read across its gaps for new connections. There are many other ways. The idea is to create new tributaries of meaning and to unearth implicit alternate landscapes. The point is to open a space for hidden siblings of the text to speak.
How might obstruction, failure, blockage, redundancy, reversal, and negation be used to create environments of growth and proliferation? How and why might pre-articulate utterances, and partial, warped bits of speech be looped and fused together? How might one build a way of speaking and seeing out of the ways speaking and seeing are damaged? I think of muscles tearing apart and re-forming. I think of composting and the necessity of turning the material over. How might micro-level textual violence be reconstituted as a sutured assemblage? If things are working properly, the page becomes a magnetic field, and certain clusters of language will call out to one another and synthesize. The old idea of “cut-ups” can be reconfigured into an idea of cuttings (shoots) in the botanical sense, as simultaneously marked sites of rupture and potential.
This is one example of a cutting made from my friend Ryan Eckes’s narrative:
it felt so good to lie down at night back flat on bed, without pillow, muscles loosening their grip along my spine, noise dissolving, until finally no sound but the soft hushes from the boulevard, and below that a tiny ring in the ear from the mowers, tiny ring that would before sleep curl into a tiny dime in the gut, indivisible, and on into sleep, pit from the best moment of my life—allison, allison, in pennypack park
“It felt so good to dissolve into the loosening boulevard. My spine a noise, a ring in the ear. “
The sibling texts, the cuttings, inevitably inherit many of the complications and contours of the original. However, they often foreground a small number of qualities of the original text in an amplified form. Here, my cutting tended to zoom in more closely on the blending of sounds, bodies, and the physical landscape, something that was present but perhaps not as explicit in the original.
Often, after generating some rough shoots, I do several different generations using another part of the text and then I splice those together. The clippings meet with other clippings. I hallucinate on top of the language. I erase parts of sentences until two Is’s become Isis, which eventually becomes Iris. I push things around a lot. I think of this kind of writing consciousness as always splitting and fusing, doubling back as well as moving toward something. This movement emits excesses, it creates noise that can be recorded and re-circulated. The writing can be made to split and spill, fuse, feed on itself, and become food for, and the family of, other writing. By constantly composting a piece of writing, all of its parts can eventually come into contact with one another. The text can talk to its own body at the same time it speaks outside itself.
E. Baus
EXCAVATION/ COMPOSTING/
CUTTINGS
This image is taken from a book on silent film. In the middle of the page the seam becomes part of the image instead of obscuring it. In the film this still comes from, the woman might be seen as gesturing toward the tree or simply walking forward with her hands outstretched. However, its reproduction in book form changes the relationship between the visual elements. The thread can be read.
What might a stitch have to do with these people? Instead of sticking to the world of the film by mentally erasing the interruption, I like to project another, parallel film, a sister film where a woman finds a thread pulled through the air in front of her. She wants to touch it. Part of the thread is apparent but part of it disappears into a space that can only be imagined.
This new film would contain residues of the old film. The man with the gun leading the prisoner in the middle doesn’t disappear. Instead of filling in the part of the tree that falls off the page and touches the ground, I like to think about the tree as hovering in the air and having a flat top and flat right side. This image mixes the organic and the artificial: the natural outgrowth of tree limbs and the rectilinear qualities of the page. By treating the most literal visual elements as part of the narrative, an opening is created for a new, oscillating loop.
Looking at this picture makes me pay attention both to what I'm looking at in pictorial space and to what I'm seeing as physical material. I want to point to the stitch at the same time I keep the people in focus. I want to shift between the stitch, the people, the tree, and the squeak of the glossed page when my thumb and forefinger touch it.
E. Baus
THIS IS ABOUT A FILM ABOUT A STITCH IN THE SKY
Youth and beauty had nothing, anymore, to do with him. And yet like Narcissus he fell into the moon of her face and sunk there in the yellow glow of her rolling, unrolling eyes, beneath the ridiculous sky of black curling locks. A quiet village like the one she was waiting for, and her hips were broad as the land she would upon and perch her home like a belly button, falling beneath the land, like a grave.
He would not say if he had known her—the city being as common as it was, and as dead—he had only seen her disappear and appear like the spring, but not as steady. No, she appeared like a stray cat, from beneath the clumping snow or untamed leaves. For what she came and left, he did not know. I could see it in his eyes that it didn’t bother him to know either. He liked her transparent, elusive, her limbs soft as paisley and quiet as cotton. She fell like smoke against his knee. Conway ashed his cigar over her toes, and she, not as easily dismissed, hissed her embered eyes. “I’m busy tonight.” She ran her red palm over the red silk lining of his coat, lifting a cigarette from the straight-lipped breast pocket. She smoked it silently, whitely, and ashed it into his ashen hair. He closed his eyes and shot at a thousand things. He shot at nothing and smelled her slightly used. S. Chopra
Context 47
In a classical burden, one of the Greeks or Americans, one of blood and humiliation, there are always heroes. The heroes run under the burden and lift it onto their bearing backs. The burden kicks and beats its fists like a badly behaved child and, though everyone must watch and feel the lethargic ways of blood spatter and guts, only the strongest heroes will endure the humiliation.
Conti-Mare undid herself as she was, unloading the heat of Stample Town, the last town, and burning down her dirt collecting fingernails of wax. She would not alter her skirt. Not for the mechanic, not for the philosopher, not for the doctor. The mechanic said he could take her apart, and the philosopher did too. The doctor said he could fix her. The opposite of all this is her, Conti-Mare of leaving town. S. Chopra
Context 56
Kinds of weather are clouds and cloudless. Inside the weather, and even under it, are two humans. They touch— are always on the brink of sweeping away like light-feathered seed. Their arms collapse like the dampest of clouds caught running like water and still-framed so one can assume the momentum of rivers and rain. Their arms collapse and they sigh. This, one will assume, is the momentum of their moment in the brush, under the damp sun. The clouds crowd and move suddenly, more slowly. And before they reach their fingers, earthworms each to the other, the cloudless noon is hushed over clouds. At the bottoming-out of the moment, Que twists her hair between two fingers on her right hand. Her shoulders hover anxiously above the wet meadow floor, her left hand waits around a strand of grass between them, which reaches, tickles even, Zed’s belly. Flowers kneel, broken for these two bodies and the time. A purple face, a yellow face, will make Que sneeze. Zed will reach for her or he will not hear her. What he hears as the moment approaches is an elk cackle, is the fire-swallowing gasp of an owl. Zed knows of all kinds of weather, and animals too. He was raised in the wild with a father and no electricity. The father had plenty of fresh vegetables, forest berries, and marijuana that he bought from his late ex-wife’s last husband. Too, they had a well. Zed could explain how that works but he has never told me and I have never looked it up. I once looked up the reason for Que’s depression but have never confirmed, or even narrowed, the possible answers with her. It began two years ago in New Mexico. I was there, but for the life of me, I can never find my way back to where we were. Where we were was under the largest piece of sky I had ever seen. The earth, at the blade of the horizon, seemed to curl under itself like the paper-thin bark of desert trees. My eyes and the lens of my camera could not pan out enough to capture this space, the land peeling away from the sky. This was due, in most part to the fact that one needed the land in order to understand the immensity of the sky. And if I captured only a sliver of land, a ray of red at the bottom of the frame, the sky was impossible to read. If there was too much land, the sky looked average, I could have been in any desert anywhere. What I did was ask Que to pose for me. She wore a long skirt that flipped and floated like her hair, that fray of knot, in the dry breeze. I had been at it all day by the time I went to Que and so when we went back out together, the sun was already fuzzing up like pink charcoal, the horizon. At night the sky seemed to extend more than anyone could believe; it stretched, pulled at the finest muscles, like a ballerina in arabesque, towards its infinite zenith— infinite in its constant reach, zenith in that it fell, eventually into morning. And this morning hid from us the still alive immensity and boundlessness, so as to not overwhelm us in our humble skin. But I did not have a flash bright enough for such a night and so I settled for the day, wanting, greedily, foolishly, the essence of the infinite zenith. I stopped and Que kept walking. She went out and out, smaller, smaller. And I snapped at her descent. The clay at her feet sparkled and lit up like fire from under the sun-bleached weeds and Yucca. I’m kneeling, and the sky, like wide arms, like an open mouth, like a huge heart, and Que is dark, except for her creamy, orange skirt. She was singing and then whispering. She leaned over some yellow flowers and I lost track of her inside the lens. All of a sudden, she leapt up into the sun, her skirt and hair like tossed water, suspend. And again and again, like a cricket, I saw her and then I could not. Then I caught her rhythm like a cat on a bug, and snapped the camera at the moment she came, tossed from the land. In the picture, she is inside the sun, an aura of hot orange at her head and blood red between her split legs. Her arms and skirt splay and fade into that which fades into the dusty, yellow sky. And the land that rolls up to her, rolls under her too, as if she is taking a dive off the edge of the Earth. In the immensity of that dusk, she is like a cricket off the edge of the Earth. When Zed sees the picture weeks later, we are outside Que’s apartment, waiting for her to return. We haven’t seen her in days. Zed looks at the pictures, only reaches for this one, like how one day he might reach for her hand, and says that this is the picture to use for her missing persons poster. I point out that you can’t see her face or features, she could be anyone out there, and how could we call her home from that moment anyway. Zed insists, says that the picture shows more than her face, which pretends to be empty. We go though the rest of the roll and the picture, now slightly crumpled under Zed’s thumbs, still shakes in his hands. This is the one, he says, Only this will bring her back. We aren’t trying to bring her back, I say, We are trying to find her. His eyes, his lips, his hands, all trying for something. He smells salty like sweat and tears, and his skin is stained with both. For the posters, I use the picture and also one of her face in the New Mexico kitchen, her hands on her head, fingers through her hair. When we see her next, she is standing with her arms stretched across the width of her apartment’s doorframe, her foot holding the spring-hinge door open, behind her. The apartment smells like cats and the dark. Her head is shaved and she has snot running out of her nose. We couldn’t come in because she had company, and, Could we call next time we wanted to stop by? Zed slammed her in the face. Eyes down, no blackout, she smirked at his small fists. He had been drinking whiskey. Before New Mexico I had seen Zed drink only a handful of times and when he drank he was happy, his cheeks flushed pink and he smiled innocently, sweating like a little boy in gym class. In New Mexico he drank whiskey for the first time because it was all the drink Kell had and being so far out, none of us were picky—from the hard sulfur water and bed bugs to the drink, we got used to it. We got roughed up out there listening to Kell’s wild stories and to the limp, empty desert, echoing against itself into an ear-wide nothing-universe.
S. Chopra
Context 82
A. Crockett
Orbital Lunch
A. Crockett
untitled
When June arrived at the pool, they were pulling a boy out of it. The lifeguard was in the water with him, some boy with brown hair and goggles she didn’t recognize, and a crowd was beginning to form near the edge. She went to one of the chaises and set down her towel, then she walked toward the crowd, where someone was helping pull the boy out of the water.
The lifeguard hopped up on the cement with ease and kneeled over the boy. His skin was white and he lay there limply. June thought of a dead fish, slick and wet. The lifeguard pressed his ear to the boy’s chest and started performing CPR. June stood on her tiptoes to see over the people. The lifeguard kept blowing breath into him and pumping his chest. The people watching were gasping, making sounds of dismay and everyone had come out of the pool though it was early afternoon. It wasn’t hot, but the sun glared on the cement and the water. She felt her bare feet on the ground.
A pool of water had formed under the boy, from him and the lifeguard. The water from the empty pool lapped up on the side next to them.
Finally, after a while, the boy began to cough, and he threw up foggy water. Everyone stepped back and someone went down to hug him. The lifeguard stood and a man shook his hand. The boy sat next to the vomit, coughing, and being hugged.
June walked over to the snack bar and bought a soda. The can was dripping from being in a cooler of ice. As soon as it hit the air it began to sweat. She lay down on her chaise and set the soda can beneath it in the shade. Bees came to it quickly.
The pool of water from the boy remained on the cement for a while. He and his family had left already, but folks still stood around talking, and the puddle stood on the side in the sun, refusing to dry.
After a while, June became anxious to get in the water. She removed her t-shirt and shorts to reveal her swimsuit. It was from last year and had faded a bit, the back of her bottoms nubby from being worn. She entered in the shallow end.
The water was cold at first, and then she eased into it. Most of its occupants had left after the boy. She waded out to the deeper end of the pool. She could still touch, but lightly, and had to keep her arms out for balance. None of her friends were there because it was early in the season. June dunked her head under the water. She came up quickly, pushing her hair back and wiping the water out of her eyes. She went under again and tried opening her eyes under water. She didn’t like to do it because it stung, but it was better than wearing goggles. She swam back and forth along the deep end, taking her time, being leisurely in the water.
Soon, it started to get late. She could feel a chill in the air and people were leaving to go home for dinner. The lifeguard made an announcement that the pool would be closing shortly.
June went under water again. She sunk down as far as she could, her butt grazing the bottom. She opened her eyes and looked around. What had the boy been doing when they pulled him out? She thought about doing a somersault, tipping over on her side. She stretched out flat and tried to lower herself, parallel to the bottom. Her head began to feel light. Had he tried to stay under? She could see someone sinking quickly under, just having jumped off the diving board. Her cheeks stretched out from holding her breath. She saw the boy’s pale limp body, and she emerged.
Anna skips down the stairs, her hand light on the railing. The steps creak and sway, crack with hard landings. She goes down quickly. And outside, around their house, the ground is flat and dry and goes on forever. The sun makes waves across the horizon and Anna tries to run toward it. Running and skipping, dust puffing up around her feet. She doesn’t get very far, always looking back to keep the house in sight. Her mother looks out the window. Anna turns back. When the house sways, the shadows of the planks and the house move too. She jumps over and on the shadows. The wind sweeps under the house. Then she hears a buzzing, a hum. She freezes, and moves her eyes to see if she can see what’s making the noise. There are the planks and the stairs and the floorboards and the yard. Her mother could be doing something upstairs. But she hears it again, so she turns, slowly, and sees right behind her a beehive. It is big, and gray, and oval shaped. Bees swarm. It’s huge, loud, getting louder. Anna looks at it, recalling how she had just run freely, right under the hive waving her arms in the air. She steps a little closer. A little closer still, and to the right, slowly circling the hive. She can see where they go in, bees coming in and out so fast she can hardly count them. A group flies out fast, hooking around the side of the hive, and some more join and some leave, and they fly out from under the house. The hive is enormous. It grows as she sees how many there can be. The hive is a brown gray, an earthy color. It blends into the colors under the house: the brown dust, the gray wood. It rocks side to side with the sway of the house. The bees’ buzz changes with their distance from her: they swarm around the hive, move across the beams, and as they near her, their sound increases. And then they spread out, wide, in their own directions. The hum fades, slows down, comes from individual bees instead of the mass. The hive is flaky on the outside. Some bees cling to it.Anna hears her mother’s footsteps above her. The hive is under the hatch. When the house sways the hatch shakes and moves the hive. When the hive moves the bees fly around like mad, zipping in and out of the little doorway.She gets closer, and the doorway is right in front of her. It’s dark, and small, but if she looks hard she can see inside, see the bees going in and out and all of the crisscross insides of the hive. Then she hears her mother’s footsteps, hears the door open and the stairs creak and crack as she descends. She leans over the railing and looks down and sees Anna in front of the hive. She flies back up the stairs and back down, and Anna’s still looking in the hive, then her mother’s behind her, with a small, flat trowel. She pushes Anna gently back and steps up to the hive. It is attached to the hatch with what looks like a string—the top turns into a point and the point stretches up and spreads out under the hatch, holding it. With one hand, she grabs hold of the string section, and with the trowel, she begins scraping where it fastens to the hatch. The scraping is loud. Bees swarm around her but she never flinches or closes her eyes. She scrapes at it; bits fly off like dust. The bees buzz in Anna’s ears. She thinks they’re going to be engulfed. Then she’s gone all the way through and hands Anna the trowel. Anna holds it with her fingertips. Her mother cradles the bottom and walks to the stairs. Anna follows. They go up the stairs slowly, followed by so many bees. Inside, Anna’s mother places the hive on its side on the wooden kitchen table and takes the trowel from Anna. The bees come in and fill the house, coming out of the hive all at once, coming out in a big dark line then spreading. Her mother begins opening and closing drawers. The sound is coming from the innumerable bees her mother has brought into the house. They fly in and out of it like the house is a new hive, with several doorways, covering surfaces, nesting in the cupboards and drawers like one giant honeycomb. Anna stands in the doorway with the door wide open. The bees circle the house and other ones come in through the walls and up through the cracks in the hatch. They crawl in through knotholes in the wood. Her mother walks back and forth from the table to the drawers and sets some things down next to the hive. Anna carefully walks to the table and pulls one of the chairs out. She drags it to the doorway, walking backwards. She climbs on it and, standing, looks at the table. Her mother has placed the trowel, a small bowl, and a few knives in a line next to it. Her mother moves back and forth from the table to the drawers. The buzz is loud in the house and the wind comes in pushing bees in and out of the cracks. Her mother stands in front of the table. She picks up a big serrated knife and holds it above the hive. The bees buzz so close to Anna’s ears she feels her self begin to vibrate. She is unsteady on the chair, the wind and sun penetrating her back into the house. Her mother touches the knife down to the hive, right in the middle, and begins sawing through. She saws slowly, all the way to the bottom. They’re all around her and she doesn’t take notice. Once it’s cut, she takes a half and holds it in place, sawing a new line a few inches from the edge. She cuts the hive into circular strips. The bees are covering her hands and forearms. Anna rubs her eyes and ears. Anna’s mother cuts the hive into circles then cuts the circles into strips and squares. Anna thinks she can see the queen. Then her mother puts a chunk of the hive in the bowl and brings it to Anna with a fork. | ||||
Bio 6: Serena chopra is a 2009 graduate of the University of Colorado's MFA program. She has recently published work in Monkey Puzzle and Fact-Simile, and has upcoming work in The Denver Quarterly and Pax Americana.
