From NonBinary Review Issue #40: Epiphany

22 After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, "Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." 2 He said, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you." 3 And Abraham stroked the length of his graying beard as he considered the grave commandment. 4 "No thanks," said he. 5 The Lord God tilted his great head in confusion. "What do you mean, 'No thanks'?" he asked, his voice thundering off the hillsides and trembling the well water at the refuge of Beersheba. 6 Abraham made sure to breathe steadily as he measured his words. And he spoke, saying, "I am signaling that I've heard and understood your request, and I am politely and respectfully declining to murder my child for you." 7 So Abraham went about his day, guiding his donkey back toward his home as The Lord God remained in a furious silence. 

8 The next morning, Abraham rose early, saddled the donkey, and brought Isaac with him to gather water at the well of Beersheba. 9 Abraham had taken The Lord God's commandment as a sign that he should speak with Isaac about the treaty that resulted in the well being dug and their salvation in the hard land being vouchsafed. 10 Yet before they could reach the well, God spoke to Abraham again, warning him that he would cause a great damage to come to the land if the elder refused to kill his child upon the altar. 11 And Isaac did thus say, "Oh, hold up?" 12 And Abraham said, "Now why would you do that, my God? You who has gifted me Isaac and gifted us this water and gifted us this land? I mean, what possible reason could you have for wanting my son dead and for wanting to destroy the land if that doesn't happen?" 13 "Because this is a test of your loyalty which you have already failed," said God The Creator Of All Things In The Universe And Lord And Master Of Dominion Over Them. 14 "But, like, what a weird test, Lord," said Abraham. "And loyalty to whom?" 15 "To me, your God!" The Supreme Being said. To which Abraham in his wisdom responded, "It seems to me that I've proven loyalty to my son, who cannot defend himself and needs me to guide him to understand both this world and his place in it. And since you keep pressing the issue, I've gotta say it's a pretty shitty thing to ask a father to do to his child. It makes me question your strength as a God.”

16 The Lord God Almighty On High Leader Of Heavens attempted to interject, but good Abraham cut him off, saying, "And, holy hell...threatening me when I wouldn't kill my son for you? Forgive me if this is out of line, but that makes you seem incredibly weak, Lord. Like, super thin-skinned. One would hope your ego wouldn't be so easily penetrated." 17 And God The God Of All Gods let out a mighty eruption that shook the earth and brought down large stones off the hillside such that it blocked Abraham, Isaac, and the donkey's path. 18 "Oh, here we go again," said Abraham. "Is violence and destruction the only solution you've got in the grab bag, O Lord? If you ask me, you have rage issues to work out. Find a healthy outlet for it like pickle ball or Krav Maga and let go of whatever insecurities are plaguing you." 19 The air was still and silent, except for the donkey braying. 20 "Oh, come on. I know you're still there, so just talk to me. Don't shut this out. Lean into the pain. Let your walls tumble down, O Lord."

21 And Praiseworthy God boomed, “Insolence! My mind is on a quadrillion other things more important than one barefaced worm! I am keeping the heavens and earth aloft while you mumble about feelings!” 22 Then did Isaac speak up, saying, “Let’s start there. That seems like a ton of pressure, O Lord,” and Abraham did nod, patting his child on the shoulders in encouragement and praise. 23 “Will you just kill your son already?! Stop disobeying your Master and threatening your God!” Abraham’s Master and God proclaimed. The very atoms of existence trembled.

24 “Legitimate criticism should not feel threatening to the confident mind,” Abraham shouted back into the sky. “If it will help, I’ll say something first, and we can take turns.” 25 When the valley lay still, Abraham continued, saying into the wind, “I still regret how everything went down with Lot but remind myself daily that he’s an adult, and I can’t make his decisions for him. Your turn, son.”

26 “I feel like I can’t be a kid sometimes because our family drama is so consuming,” the Isaac said, and Abraham did listen – really did listen – to his son’s worry so that he might try to alleviate it over time. 27 As they waited for the Lord to speak, a ram burst from a nearby thicket, running off across the valley and out of their sight.

28 The Lord God of All Creation sighed deeply. “I’m lonely,” He did avow. “You’re right about the immense pressures of maintaining the complexities of this imperfect universe, and there is no one who really understands me, so I have no one to lay down my burdens upon, so sometimes I lash out in extreme ways. This behavior goes back a long way, and often it consumes me. I can't even remember why I asked you to kill Isaac in the first place."

29 Then Isaac lifted his outstretched hands toward his father as if to say, "What the fuck?" And Abraham calmed him before saying to his God, "I don’t get it, but I get it, if that makes sense.” 

30 And Abraham and Isaac did sit to talk it out with God and to snack on dates and honeycomb. When they were done supping, and the Lord had gotten everything off his chest, he apologized and vowed not to seek petty violence ever again. 31 As Abraham and Isaac made their way down the pathway toward the well to share in the lesson of the treaty of its creation, God spake one final time to them both, saying "Thank you, wise Abraham and farewell, dear Isaac." As their Lord departed, thankful Isaac took his loyal father's hand and mouthed, "Oh. My. God." and Abraham did say, "Seriously. I know, right?" and they continued in peace to gather water from the well at Beersheba.

From NonBinary Review Issue #39: Mistaken Identity

People say they love my honesty, but honestly,
I’m a liar and a thief. I would steal your mother
and help you look for her. What was she wearing?
Large breasts or small? Truly I have a prurient
bent. I sometimes incline toward pure prurience.
But at least I’m honest about it. I am up front
at the adult movie theater. I’m in the first row
where there’s nothing between me and these
fine actors, some of whom are really very fine—
I mean they’re so convincing I believe they are
in love. I believe I am in love. I mean that’s how
good they are. But me, I’m not a good person. I would
pocket your twenty if I found it on the floor of
your car. I would borrow your car without asking you.
I would steal your line and put it in my poem without
crediting you. I would sleep with your mother
if she were good looking enough and willing. Honestly,
I am not an honest person and this poem is not
an honest poem. It expresses feelings and beliefs that
I have never felt or entertained. It’s a sad day when
someone like you lets someone like me get away
with something like this. What were you thinking?

From NonBinary Review Issue #36: Heredity

“I think my brother came back as a crow,” I say to the young woman at the flea market stall. The pretty, quiet one with good skin who sits indifferently at a table full of bones and crystal balls. “He’s haunting me.”

She nods as if she has heard this one before. She probably has, this or some variation of it. After all, her booth, “Raven’s Requiem,” proclaims to be “Baltimore’s foremost purveyor of occult trinkets and treasures.” I trace the fraying edge of one of the tapestries that hang from the side of her table, wolves howling in vain at a yellowing moon.

“I’m not crazy,” I continue. “In fact, I’ve never been more lucid. Ever since his death, it’s like my senses are heightened. I notice things. I can hear things most people can’t. And see things too. It feels like I’m sitting up high, watching everyone else from above.”

“It started about the same time as the crow appeared. It’s always watching me. Every time I look up, I see it. It perches on the skylight of my bedroom. I wake up in the morning and it’s the first thing I see, looking down at me with its black, unreadable eyes. Staring at me, like it’s trying to send me a message. Or like he’s accusing me of something. And I keep thinking, if I could just get to him, you know, maybe I could figure out what he wants. We were close, once. And so I can’t shake this feeling that he’s come back. He came back for me.”

This is what happens with grief. You can’t stop talking about the dead, to practically anyone, anywhere you go. As if divulging such personal details will bring him back to life.

I try to will this woman into asking how he died. Most people do. Then I’ll say, matter of factly, that he swallowed poison. That he took a bottle from the factory where he worked, one of the many bottes of chemicals he used every day, and drove back to his apartment, stirred the crystalline powder into a tall glass of tap water, and drank it. Deliberately. I will say he killed himself. I will say all of this while looking her directly in the eye, as if without shame, although I am very much ashamed.

She does not ask.

“Sometimes he brings me things. Yesterday, I woke up to this terrible pounding sound. He was right there on my skylight, rapping at the glass with a watch in his beak. My brother used to collect antique watches. And guess what I found, later that afternoon, sitting in the grass in my front yard. The watch was badly cracked, but it was still ticking. He dropped it there. Intentionally. He wanted me to have it. That’s my brother for you.”

I shift my gaze to the neat little rows of Victorian apothecary bottles. Tinted glass. “My brother would’ve loved this stuff,” I tell the woman. And I know just what he would have said about them: “Built to stand the test of time.” He worked in plastics, but hated it. He manned the blow molder, the machine they use to make plastic bottles. He’d make thousands in one day. I can imagine him still, in his truck after work, muttering about all the waste. “Where does it all go?” he’d ask. Litter, it turns out. Straight into the Chesapeake.

I pick up an amber tincture vial. It’s so slight and beautiful. I wonder what it was used for in its day, what chemicals it has harbored. I view my distended reflection in the beveled glass. I see my brother staring back. He looks like he’s been crying.

I see my brother bring the glass to his lips. I watch him drink the misty white liquid inside. It is tasteless and empty. I watch him set the glass down gently and lay in his bed. He pulls the sheets up to his neck. It’s getting cold. The watch at his bedside keeps ticking. I look on as hours pass, as life leaves him and he dissolves into nothing.

I sift through a mass of coins housed in a faded cigar box beside the vials, pick out a few of the newer-looking ones. “Do you think I could lure him down somehow, maybe if I set out something shiny in my front lawn? Would that would work? I need to get to him. The noise he makes up there is awful. His talons on the glass at all hours. It wakes me up, and all I see are his insistent little eyes in the dark, watching me. Not telling me why.”

The woman takes the coins from me, gently placing them into a small brown paper bag. She folds down the edge, avoiding my gaze as she hands it over.

“Do you think it would work? If I could get him to come down, maybe it would be easier…If I could just get a little closer…”

***

I see my brother in a body bag. He is not quite human now. Still, this will forever be the point in time that I am closest to the old him, the living version of him. The medical examiner had wheeled the body out on a gurney, hoisted it into the back of a white, unmarked SUV. A final slam of the doors, and then all I could see was my own reflection in the tinted windows as they drove him away. As the next of kin, the police gave me the key to his apartment. It was the first time I had set foot in it, even though we lived in the same town. When I stepped inside, I saw the sign written in his methodical hand: “Caution: Body Upstairs. Do Not Resuscitate.” He had written this on a whiteboard and propped it on a chair at the base of the stairs. When I went up to the loft, I beheld the full extent of his plans. The typed-up note by the bedside table. A spilling box of anti-emetics, so he would not expel the poison he had ingested. The still-ticking watch. A tidy stack of unpaid utility bills. He did not leave hastily, he had planned his departure. For how many years? How many times did he look me in the eye and laugh and smile, full well knowing what he was going to do? How long had I been deceived? These were the thoughts that plagued me that afternoon, as I crawled into his bed. The sheets were rumpled but cold now. Laying my face on his pillow, I noticed a tinge of blood comingled with a smattering of downy black feathers. They were so fine, so foreign that the police must have missed them. That’s when I first suspected my brother was not who he seemed. He’d become something else.

***

I pick up a stick of incense from one of the tables, dozens of glassy eyes watching me.  A placard advertises, “Tarot Readings: $5.00.” The young woman catches me looking. “Do you want to know your future?” I shake my head. I’m not crazy. I know what the future has in store for me. Not much.

“Or your past?” Something about the way she says “past” stops me cold, the hard slap of the t as it catches in her teeth. “I can see you have unanswered questions.”

 As she takes my money, the light hits her face, and I am struck by her youthful complexion, the smooth features of her skin. When I see young people now, I am always judging them against my brother, who was still young when he died. And who will now be forever young, immortalized at thirty-five, having decisively ended his own timeline. Meanwhile, I’m left here to go on, grow older, watch the world crumble around me.

The woman pushes some bones aside and lays down three cards on the table. All swords. Now it’s her turn to look to me for an answer, to explain this sudden onslaught of violence. I refuse to.

The last time I saw my brother, in his embodied, human form, he had been dead for four days. In a small side room, off the main hall of the funeral parlor, they had laid him out. The mortician greeted me. She said, “I don’t know what they told you about the manner of his death. I did the best I could with the makeup.” I hated the way she said that, as if I’d be oblivious to the manner of my own brother’s death. I am a smart woman; I am not blind to the pain of others. We were close, once. I gritted my teeth and said nothing.

 They had set him out on a raised table, with a blanket tucked tightly up to his waist, hands folded neatly across his chest. I noticed his fingernails were blotched black and blue. His eyes were glued closed, but he did not look at peace. The skin had a stretched-out appearance, like a thin veil had been draped over his bones. When I touched his arm, it was cold and rigid. He had been stuffed with something. It did not feel human. On his forearms, tiny black slivers poked out through his skin. I touched them. Inky little feathers. The white powder of the mortuary makeup came off on my fingers.

***

Of course, thinking back, I see now: he’d been turning into what he would become for many years before he died. His demeanor changed first. He would blame it on work, the constant ringing in his ears from the factory machines, or the new medications the doctors prescribed. I had no reason to doubt him back then. Still, when he withdrew, I did not bother to follow. Even though I knew that life was breaking his heart, I thought it was a temporary despair. I presumed he would learn to bear it as I had. So I brushed it off when he would say, as he often did towards the end, “If we only had lived in a different time!” He viewed our present world as a bomb waiting to detonate. The poles heating up. Mutating fish in factory-polluted rivers. Microplastics invading our very bodies. As a boy, he would pretend to build time machines. He wanted to live a hundred years ago. The past was safer because you knew what would happen next.

Not for me. The past is a dangerous assembly line of regret, one after another. Here a betrayal, there a stab in the back. Each a colossal failure to see what was coming. Now,  all I see are dozens of alternate timelines: If I had answered that call. If I had arrived earlier. If I had said something before it was too late, said that I understood. If I had begged him to stay.

But instead I am stuck here, in this god-forsaken timeline, where my brother is dead, and I am alone, and the world is still the same ticking time bomb. Where I am forever haunted by his eyes, inscrutable in the dark.

***

The woman puts the cards away. A heavy gust of wind pulls at the wall of tapestries. Whatever she had foretold, I’d missed it.

“What’s the secret?” I ask her. “To keeping them so alive-looking?”

I point to the animals arranged on the edges of the tables. The real reason for my visit to this booth. A taxidermied squirrel with a cowboy hat, a checkered bandana, and a holster. A red fox perched delicately on a stump. A great horned owl, midflight, wings outstretched.

She looks at me from the dark wells of her eyes, a reproaching tilt of the head. Baiting me. What are you up to? But I will say nothing more. I will not reveal what I have planned. I understand now what my brother was trying to tell me. I must be careful. Life is a fragile, flying thing.

When I see that crow again, I will trap him. And once I have him, I will hold on to him, hold him still enough to cut a thin long line down the length of his breast. Then I will peel back the skin and scrape out the organs, the eyes, the leftover meat. Inject the talons with a chemical solution: 50% glycerin and 50% formaldehyde. Once he has dried out, I will stuff his insides with cotton balls and wire, sew him back up. With a mortician’s care, I’ll fold his wings neatly in repose. I will kill him to keep him with me. He will not get away again.

From NonBinary Review Issue #35: Old Friends

I’m sorry, Peter, but I really wanted to write this letter to you, last night, around two in the morning, over my third martini, after not thinking of you for three-fourths of a century. More accurately, I felt like writing about someone totally repugnant, creepy, and grotesquely impelling; then you popped into my head.

I’ve always known that being Peter Petro would be a continuously painful experience. Even at eight years old—you always will be eight to me—you are nothing but grief. The fanaticism in your little gray eyes is intensified as it pierces your thick lenses—how can you wear glasses like that when you’re only eight? For God’s sake, Peter.

And then there are your bangs, plastered limply against your damp, pulsating forehead like seaweed on a rock. In our whole third-grade class there is no one more awfully awful than you. From another planet, I’d say if I knew about other planets—but honestly I don’t. I’m eight and a girl, so I haven’t gotten into the outer-space thing; that obsession is typical of you. What I’m actually into is the awfulness of Peter Petro. Apparently you have made a strong impression on me.

Peter, the incident of the swing, for instance. When I was swinging at recess? Happily? And you stood there and wanted the swing? Wanted it to the point of insanity, screaming for it and stamping your Buster Browns until Mrs. McFall had to come over, lame as she was, and make me give you my turn. After that, you swung and swung. Never mind that there was a whole line waiting, your clear intent was to keep the swing until the very end, till the bitter clanging of the recess bell.

But you can’t ever live down the worst part, because it is etched unchanging on my memory even into old age: There in the gravel under your swing appears a sudden drip of water, and now everyone can see it seeping wider, puddling. Look how fast the news of this event rushes through the schoolyard; hear the hoots from the boys, the scandalized gasps among the girls. Only when Mrs. McFall has hurried the last tittering straggler back into class do you relinquish the wet swing, a swing that no one wants now—oh God forgive you, Peter Petro, for that sorrow in your young life.

It was our mothers who decided we ought to be playmates. Of course, I don’t have many friends either, so I guess it seems inevitable. But compared to you, I live on Earth, a planet I do know and care about. Nevertheless, here we are, thrown together. Here we lie on the floor, head to head, drawing furiously with our Crayolas. At least you are furious; your fury has brought out in myself a certain imperious detachment.

I am working in color on my picture, which—Christmas being three weeks away—shows the Virgin Mary cradling little Jesus within her (periwinkle blue) shawl. The flying (white) things are angels, and here are their (goldenrod) harps. I’ve even done the Three Wise Men with their (burnt sienna) camels—the camels were hard to do, not my best work—and at the upper edge a (yellow) star with a single long ray lighting the Wise Men’s path.

You work in dimension. Perspective. Your first drawing, which was of the Lincoln Tunnel, took a long time, but since then you’ve been going faster and faster—eleven pieces of paper so far. First you draw a square at the center of the page, and from the corners of the square you draw straight lines radiating outward toward the four outer corners of the page. You add a few details, furiously I might add, and shove the picture to face me. “Look,” say you. “Do you know what this is?”

“Yes,” say I. “It’s a tunnel. You already asked me that about every single picture.”

“Yes, but which tunnel?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know! Lincoln.”

“No,” you triumph once again. “It’s the Holland.”

And next time I will guess Holland because it looks exactly—to me—like the last one, and you will say it is the Lincoln, staring at me as if I should know; as if any moron should know; as if discerning between pictures of the Holland Tunnel and the Lincoln is a valid test of my worth as a human being.

Now, actually, Peter, in retrospect I think it was a very good test, and I failed it. But I did not come here to apologize. I will mention, in passing, one other scene from your miserable life: Your mother has come to pick you up. You don’t want to leave. You have had the best time ever, at my apartment, though who could tell? You are distraught. I see your mother’s hands trying to get a grip on your balled fists. I see your Buster Browns hooked tight around a chair leg. I see you stretched out between her straining arms and your L-shaped ankles across our hardwood floor like a powerless yet writhing human catastrophe—oh, may God forgive you for that, Peter Petro, and myself for bearing witness to it. I see your eyes without their glasses. I see you and your mother frantic on hands and knees, searching. And oh, woe, the now-found glasses are broken; shock and surprise, how can this be?

Peter, you are too awful to exist. How can your shoes be that brown, your trousers that short, your socks that mismatched, the striped shirt that wrinkled? ‘He’s a genius,’ grownups say in your defense. Maybe; but your intelligence is like ragged fire, blazing up, smoldering, unfed. I cannot go where you are—I will not.

What, am I writing a letter of first love? No, it’s a love that has been creeping up over a long life, my long life of not seeing people’s hearts, of only noticing from the corner of my eye that they are imprisoned by being themselves. I don’t know whether we choose what vessel will carry our share of the universal soul for a lifetime. If we do choose, apparently I chose to be me, while you (incomprehensibly) chose to be Peter Petro. I’m sure you’ll understand, Peter, my scorn at first sight of you, my dread when first faced with the specter that I might—to others—resemble you, my outright horror in realizing that I might even be you. That you and I might be one.

I saw you in your shame. I looked away, with a shame of my own, but still I saw you. Now you are condemned to live forever in my personal history as your most shameful self. Even if later you managed to survive high school, and New York University, get contact lenses and a hairdo, learn to use a napkin, become a computer millionaire, and father three healthy children, here in my memory you must forever sit on your dripping swing, hands raw from the icy chains, going down with the ship. Here you ever seek your glasses, broken by your own furious disempowerment. I can kneel down and thank God He didn’t have me marry you, the way our mothers dreamed. Yet as I write, I see that I am actually forgiving you, that in fact my reason for writing is to forgive you. Forgive you for what? For being just one speck in the human condition?

Yes, I know, exactly like me. So therefore, in forgiving you, will I myself finally feel forgiven?

From NonBinary Review Issue #32: Epic Fail

For the love of everything good 
do not watch the slaughter film 
like an old-master painting it reaches in and twists 
I fell into walls within walls 
hammers and pliers at my face 
a hundred pounds of eyeballs fell with me 
rolled into One  
one great Eye that judged 
my eighteen brothers fell with me 
through the castle chute their intestines dropped 
then slithered back to life, found each other 
latched onto my legs and chewed 
because I watched the slaughter film  
no more happy little world 
I dozed on the Judas Wheel 
and understood why God won’t visit the Earth 
I lasted thirty-six years in the emperor’s vault 
if I could wash my brain with a scouring pad and bleach 
if I could delete my eye history 
centurions said “We have a present for thee 
a cutout of Mary Poppins to abide with thee” 
centurions said “We bring thee Newcastle honey” 
they covered me with honey funneled it into me 
after thirty-six years I fried in sunshine 
they called out to the flying-things of the empire 
to partake of my sweetness      
a swarm rode to the castle turret  
my body became a thriving grey chain mail 
of ravenous flies and locusts 
for Mother Teresa’s sake do not watch  
I came unprepared to the slaughter film 
because I was just eleven years old it will break you please 
when the swarm was sated and most of my flesh devoured 
the emperor set me free 
they put me on a galleon to the extreme ice coast 
where I preach against the slaughter film 
to this day disciples reach out to the hands of my ears 
to this day they hold samples of my bones