Fear of Lovebirds

The Basement Door

To Mother, her pets were “Velcro birds” sticking to her fingers and shoulders, fully bonded to her, never wanting to let go whenever she allowed them out of their cages.

Les inséparables, she whispered to me. Under the right conditions, they could bond to humans as well as they bonded to each other. Mother had a talent for socializing her masked and peach-faced lovebirds, pets so colorful and so tame they could be sold for top dollar.

“For ten to fifteen years of companionship,” she used to say to her buyers, “it’s a cheap price.”

The man who kidnapped her in her childhood, wanting ten years of companionship, kept her in his basement until she became a woman, then set her free. He was a tiny, wiry man who wore short-sleeved shirts to reveal my mother’s name, Beth, tattooed on his left bicep. 

Once she was no longer a child, he wanted nothing to do with her. By then, she had been caged so long, she didn’t remember how to be free. She only wanted to go back into the cage, but he evicted her from the basement, banishing her into the world he had stolen her from when she was a little child. 

Freed, she still wanted to sleep in a basement or a coop. She could only sleep in a room with no windows. Or, that’s what my father told me when I asked him why my mother was the way my mother was. My father understood her history. He was a retired police officer who had worked her case since she first went missing and could never forget her, even after all his years of searching ended when an elderly farmer discovered my mother attempting to crawl into her chicken coop. 

My father couldn’t believe it until he saw my mother’s face washed clean of dirt and feathers. Only nineteen, she could speak but didn’t like to talk. She was pregnant and couldn’t stand to be alone or in open spaces. She needed to be in a basement full of bird cages to feel comfortable. Because no one else would be responsible for her, my father filled his basement with cages so she could sleep.

Eventually, as her family of lovebirds grew, my mother had less time for me, even less for my father. She devoted hours to her birds, moving them in and out of cages, allowing her favorites to snuggle against her cheek and toy with her chandelier earrings. In the morning, she carried the cages to a room with windows, and the birds dove into the caged light.

When I was a teenager, I did the math and always regretted doing the math, thinking about who my biological father really was and why in her last days she rarely left the basement.

“Are you really my father?” I said to the man I had been told was my father.

“I don’t know why they call them a lovebird,” he said to me. “They’re just an affectionate parrot.”

My father—or the man I had been told was my father, the man who raised me, the retired police officer—began to sleep alone in the little guest room above the basement stairs. Soon, my mother rarely visited the rest of the house, confining herself to the makeshift aviary where she ate and slept, no longer bothering to put the birds back into their cages since the entire basement had been transformed into a cage. The birds cried shrilly whenever she left the basement, and my father didn’t seem to care for the sound.

I suspect my father was secretly afraid of the lovebirds. He could never admit to his phobia and seemed ashamed of the way Mother’s pets made him cringe. Helpless in the presence of the birds she adored, he leapt when she opened the basement door. 

Freedom

Because I couldn’t fly like Mother’s birds, I wanted to swim.

I almost drowned after watching the movies Mother’s kidnapper made of her.

When I grew older, decades after her death, I began to wonder why. I realized it was strange that after having been kidnapped as a girl and held in a basement against her will, she married a man who looked so much like her kidnapper and moved into his basement. 

It was almost as if she never knew how to be free.

Mother’s soul escaped the cage of her body when I was still a young girl. A petite woman who adored large earrings as well as lovebirds, Mother died too soon, leaving me with questions about her death as well as memories of the birds she fed by hand.

Turning Colors

In the movies, her skin changes colors in dark light.

In the movies, a girl with my eyes does what the man says.

In the movies, my mother doesn’t look like my mother. She is too young. She looks like me.

I have the man’s silly grin.

My father, discovering me watching the movies in the attic, kept saying, “What did you see? What do you think you’ve seen?”

His eyes are why I ran to the neighbor’s pool to fly away through the night-dark water as if it were sky.

Our neighbor, the doctor, found me drowning in the kidney-shaped pool in his backyard and carried my body to Mother by wading into chlorinated water. She jumped into the pool, her yellow housecoat soaked and swelling. The doctor revived me, breathing into me and tapping on my chest with his fingers, cold and wet from the pool. By the time he smacked me, Mother was shivering, attempting to swim in her ruined housecoat. I started to breathe, again, screaming as the doctor handed me to Mother and then hoisted us out of his pool. Immediately after sending us away, he dove back into the water, never even allowing Mother to thank him. 

Her exquisite dark eyes wide and unblinking, Mother told me to remember the blueness of my flesh on a long-ago afternoon. “Turning colors,” Mother used to say. “Do you know what that means?” 

“No.”

“Another girl, one much older than you—a teenager—drowned in that pool a year before you.” Mother whispered, “She died there.”

“Why,” I whispered.

“Your soul tried to escape,” Mother used to tell me. “Your body was too quick and caught it just in time. Be grateful your soul is caged like my lovebirds.”

It was a strange idea, to be both caged and grateful, an idea that I came to embrace from a very young age. 

Loving a Dead Girl

Some nights Father left without warning. In the kitchen, Mother held an egg to the lamplight—candling, searching for the shadow chick developing inside the shell. Whenever I caught her candling, a part of me longed to break free, to go to where I was forbidden. The teenage girl who drowned in the doctor’s pool was a shadow silhouette gliding through my dreams. I was in love with the idea of the dead girl. Thoughts of the girl drowning became inseparable from my hopes and fears about the future. I kept trying to escape our house, our yard, and our family to run away past the trees to the doctor’s pool. 

By now, Mother was too busy hand-feeding the baby lovebirds that had been rejected by the hen, too busy to keep track of me as she disinfected the syringes, heated the formula, tested the temperature, and then lowered the syringe to the fragile beak of the chick resting in her steady hand. Because Mother could no longer depend on Father or watch me herself, she hired a babysitter named Martha, a bold teenage girl with intense watery eyes and distracting red streaks in her blue-black hair. 

“Please don’t,” I said the first time Martha tried to hold me. This angered her, as I had hoped.

The week before Mother died, Mother said she would have to fire Martha, and I was glad because I was beginning to dream the lovebirds escaping.

Sky Gazer

Sometimes a cloud moving over the moon seemed to take up the entire sky, so Martha and I thought the cloud was the sky. She became frightened, hiding with me in ditches or beneath trees. She said we could disappear. I believed her. Her lies were shifting clouds. 

“That’s the way words are,” Martha whispered. “Say what happened again and again, so that the truth is forgotten, and the details of what really happened seem strange.” 

“What is happening?” I was almost afraid to ask. She might lie. She might tell the truth.

“Your mother thinks I’m after your father. And maybe I am, but just for the hell of it?” She looked at me and had to know I saw the way he left the door to his room open in the night. “You’ll probably think it yourself,” she whispered. “You have to remember, no matter what happens, it was never about you.”

Glue

When the doctor’s pool had to be filled with dirt and leaves, I became a pack rat, saving stamps in a shoebox under my bed. Occasionally, I gave the stamps to Martha, as if they were money she could use to buy the things she wanted. 

In the days after Mother died, I kept finding the stamps all over the house—hidden in the closets, in dresser drawers, behind posters on the walls, inside pillows, beside the sewing machine, underneath the television, and on top of the radio. 

In her last days, Mother spent so many hours caring for her lovebirds that she was out of sorts after selling off her newly weaned brood. In the evenings and mornings, just before sleeping or after wakening, she kept candling eggs, her face illuminated by the promise of new life.

“No, Avie. No,” Mother used to say, gathering the stamps off the floor, exasperated as they stuck to her fingers. “This is a fire hazard. Throw this trash away!”

“But they’re Martha’s. I gave them to her,” I said.

“Trash,” Mother whispered, throwing stamps into the wastebasket.

I put my face to Mother’s hands. Her skin smelled sticky, minty, sweet like the glue the stamps left behind. 

The Playhouse

My family’s home was a big wooden house with an identical miniature house, a playhouse, in the backyard. After Mother’s funeral, Father wouldn’t look at me anymore, wouldn’t talk to me. Loading up the cages covered in dark blankets, he drove away in his pickup and was gone for weeks at a time, supposedly delivering lovebirds to a breeder in Florida, a woman who would take the remaining birds and their cages while offering a handsome price for Mother’s precise notes on taming, feeding, and weaning.

Alone with Martha when Father went on his journeys, I used to tell Martha stories about Mother. Martha used a knife in the playhouse to make her drawings on my arms while I spoke. My body was her canvas. Sometimes I fainted while she drew the things I described. She covered me with designs until there was no skin left untouched except for the places clothing couldn’t hide. 

Designs, I used to love that word! I still do. Designs, designs! Her designs! 

The first time I ever heard the word I was standing in the bathroom near the vanity mirror and admiring Mother’s perfume bottles. The clear or yellow-tinged liquid misted out of blue and violet glass. While examining the lattice edges of the metal tray, I ran my fingers over the flowers and vines that were flowing into each other in a linked pattern that had no beginning or end. 

“What is this?” I asked Martha.

“What?” she asked.

“This. What is it called?”

“That’s a design, Avie.”

“What’s a design?”

“A decoration or a drawing. A big picture made up of a lot of little pictures that keep repeating.”

“Like these?” I wanted to ask, opening my shirt and unwinding the gauze that Martha had wound so snugly against my skin. We never spoke of Martha’s designs or even alluded to the drawings on my body.

The perfume stung the cuts on my skin, so I sprayed it on my hair until it was practically dripping from my forehead. I was the sweetest smelling girl in town. When the wind blew, people could smell me from half a block away. They knew I was coming long before I was there. The perfume was like those little bells that cats wear on their collars, some sort of warning and location device alerting those who were near me. 

Hero

My father was afraid to be alone with me because of what I might say. I could see through lies. I understood Martha’s words in ways he sometimes didn’t.

“There’s still at least one lovebird somewhere in the house,” I used to say to see him squirm. “At night, I hear it flying, calling through the vents.”

I had hidden one lovebird in my closet, Mother’s favorite, an old masked-face named Hero. Secretly, I kept Hero hidden in the house for years and fed him lettuce and fruit stolen from the kitchen as well as some food pellets I had tucked away.

I was seventeen when Aunt Sarah, who became my legal guardian, called the police after discovering Martha’s drawings on my body, but there was nothing the police could do but look for Father and Martha, who left in the night, abandoning me. 

I cradled Hero. In caring for him, I honored Mother. Remembering her small basement world, I imagined the way it kept getting smaller. Her world could never be small enough to make her feel safe. 

The world is too large and full of too many possibilities for people like Martha and Father to stay in one place for long. There is always someone else to meet, someplace else to see. There is always there, which is so much better than here. There is a way and away—another man and another woman, another mother and another father, another motel, another house, another city, another town, another life, another story, another you, and another me. 

After Mother’s funeral, I kept a tiny photograph of Hero on a locket on the silver chain around my neck. On several occasions, I caught Father staring at the locket when he wouldn’t look at my eyes. 

The Smoker

Now at nineteen, I’m still trapped inside this scarred body. Ever since I got my license and saved up enough money to buy a car, I’ve been driving around with my lovebird Hero while showing strangers photographs of Martha and Father.

After months of searching and dead-ends, I finally locate my father at a garage near a motel less than ten miles from the house where my mother died. My father looks old now, so much older than I remembered. 

Father seems frustrated, crouching on his hands and knees beside the broken Chevy. His long white hair is soaked, and his frayed jeans are wet with oil and rain. Assuming he doesn’t recognize me, I try to pass by without notice. He gazes up at me, his hammer held in mid-air.

“Do you have any cigarettes?” he asks, his face smeared with mud.

“Yes,” I say, not surprised by the request.

After all, he is a smoker, and cigarettes are swapped among strangers for conversation or companionship or various information. Even though I don’t smoke, I’ve carried almost every brand at one time or another and given them all away, one cigarette at a time while asking strangers if they have seen anyone like Martha or Father in their town. Marlboro Menthols, Camel Lights, Kools, Pall Malls, American Spirits, Lucky Strikes, Winstons, Dunhill Golds—I remember the months of searching by what brands of cigarettes I used to carry in my purse. 

I take my pack of Lucky Strikes from my purse and shake out a single cigarette, trying to shield it from the rain.

“Do you know of any place around here where I might purchase lovebirds?” I ask.

He smiles warily, gestures toward my oversized purse. “Lovebirds?” he asks.

As I remove my silver lighter with Beth etched on the side, Father whispers, shaking his hammer close to my face, “Give me all the cigarettes you’ve got. I’ll need that lighter, too.”

“Okay,” I whisper, shivering as I once again recall how little I know about him, how limited my understanding of him has always been. 

“What do you want with lovebirds?” he asks after lighting his cigarette and tucking the lighter into his pocket.

“What’s it to you?”

Glaring, he catches my hand and rubs something that feels like glass and mud against me, between our skins, an object placed on the hearts of our palms. I stuff whatever it is into my purse and stumble to the other side of the motel.

Motel Balconies

Martha looks down at the garage from one of the motel balconies, but she doesn’t see me watching her. She waves to my father, and he nods to her. When she turns away from the streetlight, her face disappears into shadow. The shadow makes her appealing to me. Her features fade into darkness. Without a face, she could be anyone. I have a sudden urge to go to her. Because I cannot see her eyes, it never occurs to me that she might not want to see me.

On the balcony stairs, I fall at Martha’s high heels. Instead of reaching down to help me, she holds her hands straight out in front of her, palms towards the streetlight. Splaying her fingers, she turns her hands slowly.

Her fingernails are extremely long, chipped and curling under, painted with a thick glossy topcoat with pale green glitter trapped inside. Underneath her nails, near the tips of her fingers, bright white lines are drawn with an ivory makeup pencil. It’s the oddest French manicure I have ever seen. In the white space, diamonds, ovals, and stars have been scraped as if etched with a scalpel or an X-Acto knife. 

The tip of each fingernail is pierced a little off center. Some of the holes are larger with rougher edges than others, as if the holes had been made with an ice pick. The holes have begun to crack, down the center to her cuticles.  

Through each hole, a tiny, silver jeweled charm is strung. The jewels are very small, amber and ice blue. The charms are shaped like sea creatures—octopus, whale, dolphin, seahorse, starfish, mermaid, shark, eel, turtle, and clown fish. They jangle like cattle bells in the distance. The jewels glint in the window light. Hair-thin, green curling ribbons are stranded through each of the holes, along with the charm catches, tangling her fingers.

“Can I touch your hands?” I ask.

“Don’t,” she says as I try to stand. 

I smile up at her while stumbling through the open door that leads to her room where the walls are chipped and painted a dull golden ivory clashing with bright blue-green paintings of the sea.

“Get out,” Martha says in monotone.

Ignoring her, I empty my purse onto her bed to see what Father gave me. The thing itself doesn’t explain anything. It’s just a small piece of soft blue clay full of red-glass shards.

“Where did you get that?” Martha asks, as if she has seen something like it before. “Who gave it to you?”

“My father,” I whisper, holding the blue clay to the lamp so the red glass turns to embers in the yellow light.

I lean closer to her face, almost too close, and I realize how beautiful and confusing her face is. Like an old-fashioned jigsaw puzzle of a woman’s face that has been taken apart too many times, her features are worn down so that the edges don’t quite fit together the right way, leaving gaps on the seams. 

“Who is he?” I ask because I am certain that she knows my father better than I do.

“Just an old man. He could be any old man.”

“Why did he give me this?”

“Did it look like this when he gave it to you?”

“Why?”

Touching my chin with a fingernail, she tries to turn my face back toward hers. There’s a dark ridge under her nose that is too deep and shadows on her face that don’t make sense—shadows that aren’t supposed to be there, cast by protrusions under her skin. Her cheekbones are too high, moon-shaped, one slightly lower than the other. Her lips are swollen, sensual yet unnatural, so that they move in delayed response, as if she were trying to shape the words just after she speaks them. Hair-thin scars like starbursts are hidden just under her earlobes. When she blinks, her eyes make a slight popping sound, but the lids don’t close all the way.

“You have to remember,” she whispers.  “Try.”

“It looks a little twisted.” I lie to her while studying the clay. “Look. You can almost make out its eyes. Here.”

“It’s an insect or a bird?” She says, “Can I have it? You don’t want it anyway. It cut your hand, and it’s broken. Right?”

“Sure.” I’m not sure. I don’t know why she would want it. “Only I don’t feel right giving it away.”

“It’s ugly, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess so. But just because it’s ugly doesn’t mean I don’t want it.”

I whisper Mother’s name into her ear: Beth.

“Go away,” Martha says, holding the clay to the light as if it’s a piece of jewelry. Then, as I back away from her, she says, “Wait! Don’t you see? This is supposed to be a lovebird.” 

No matter how long I stare, it’s just soft blue clay hiding jagged shards.

“A mingling of grasshopper and swan, a thing of insect and bird, shore and meadow, beautiful yet common . . . sky-bound yet earth-bound, malleable yet sharp,” she says. “I want to know if you’re who I think you are.”

“What happened to you?” I ask.

“Avie?”

She tugs at my shirt to examine the old scars, then removes her clothes, showing me her story scars for the first time. Studying her body, skin so rough and patchy and shiny pink and mauve and gray in its uneven tone, I realize we are the same.

She puts her fingers into my shirt, tracing my story scars with her fingernails, delicately following the designs. 

“Why?” I ask.

Her voice is low, soft, trailing away. I was you, I think she says. A long, long time ago. Her fingernails work fast over my chest and back and arms, making me shiver. 

“Why?” I ask, again.

Helping me remove the rest of my clothes, she whispers, “It tells a story.”

Carved

The story carved into me touches what she wasn’t supposed to touch: reasons Mother left this world with lost birds, a drowned girl, and Father holding Martha in the night. After the funeral, Martha borrowed the knife from my father, and she and I began hiding in the playhouse, holding secret meetings while he worked at the garage. 

Martha created openings—doors and windows, cups and bowls—for my blood to flow through, blood used to paint the trees and the giant flowers and stars Mother showed me in dreams. The rainbow perch Father caught in the lake, the chicken hawk and the sparrow hawk, the ducks and the dogs, the ants and the crickets and the tree frogs were carved into my body along with the lost birds. 

Martha wrapped me in tissues and paper and rags and white cloth, so tight, again and again, so the blood wouldn’t show. She began cleaning everything with bleach—my clothes and the floors of the little house and the big house. 

Every night before I went to sleep, she sat on my bed and whispered to me, so sweetly, that I wouldn’t tell anyone what she did, that I would quit reminding her of the way Mother cried in the movies clutching feathers in her trembling hands the same way that Father would later gather petals of the damp roses that were strewn across her grave.

“Why?” I asked her.

“You.”

Images scabbed over, darkened then lightened, building up mysterious textures over the years as my skin grew with me, stretching over my bones.

The textures grew and grew into one large drawing from my collarbone to my chest and arms, my back and my hips, my feet and legs—even the spaces behind my knees, in between my toes, under my arms. Then there was nothing left to scar, no skin left untouched besides my neck, my buttocks, my face and hands, which the knife would never touch. Martha told me as much. She promised me that.

“Can I touch your arms?” Martha asks.

I stare at our reflection in the dresser mirror. She runs her fingernails all over me. A blind woman could read me like Braille. Behind the television, she holds me close to her chest the way she did when I was a little girl, cigarette smoke drifting through our hair. 

“It must have been really painful for you.”

“Remember?”

“Why?”

“What was my mother’s name?”

She motions for me to come closer and lights a cigarette. Her hands are shaking.

Beth

“This is your daughter,” Martha whispers when Father finds us in the motel room. He begins to laugh as if we’re joking, holding the hammer in one hand and the knife in the other. I reach for my shirt on the floor. He spits into his hands then uses the spit to clean off dirt crusted on his knife. Reaching under his sleeves, I caress his arms, the scars that have erased the tattoos of Mother’s name. Beth, I whisper. Beth.

“Hold it right there,” he says. “Lay flat on your stomach.  Don’t move.”

He drops the knife to the carpet and puts the hammer down on top of the television. I fall on the bed and close my eyes. He rubs something dry and rough and cold against my arms and shoulders, all over my body. When I open my eyes, I see it’s just a big stick of charcoal.

“You missed a spot,” Martha says to him as she halfway sits up on the bed, watching him with her elbows resting on the pillow and her face in her hands. “Make sure you get it all.”

After he covers the back of me with charcoal, he says, “Now, roll over. Slowly.” 

I turn over, no longer afraid of him. His eyes are kind, the irises greenish-brown, flecked with blue and gold. They are the eyes of the man in the movies with Mother when she was a girl but also the eyes of the doctor who saved me long ago—or rather, the eyes I imagined the doctor had, as I never remember seeing his face. 

Father holds me higher above the bed, and I feel my soul flutter in the cage of my body, a prisoner dancing at the chance to be set free.

Martha smiles. Fluttering before skipping beats, my heart stops and then starts. Stops and starts. Avie, I think she whispers, I drown, waiting for you to swim with me.

His Large Arms

Perhaps Father doesn’t know what she’s saying. I’m hyperventilating. He lifts me higher and higher, cradling me in his large arms. Then he smiles at me, gesturing back toward the bed with his chin. 

When I turn away from him, Martha is no longer smiling but looking down at the space where I have lain. Father holds me tight. Gazing into Martha’s mercurial eyes, I wonder if we really are inseparables. 

Father releases me.

The distinct shapes between my raised scars, Martha’s drawings, reveal a silhouette of lovebirds on the charcoal-blackened sheets.

---

Author’s Note: “Fear of Lovebirds” was published online in a digital journal that seemed to disappear without warning over a decade ago. Its name has been scrubbed from the internet and my mind. It is truly a ghost zombie story ripe for resurrection. 

The Voyage of Parenthood: A Review of LITTLE ASTRONAUT by J. Hope Stein

Little Astronaut by poet J. Hope Stein captures the wonder, joy, and isolation of new motherhood. The title compares the psychological experience of parenting an infant to traveling with a small crew aboard a spaceship, and several pieces convey and build on this metaphor, including "Lullaby for Voyager," "A Toast to the Dark Side of Earth," and, of course, the short titular poem.

The poems in Little Astronaut reflect a variety of emotions, from the humor of a child's public announcement in a natural history museum that "monkey-people have boobs!" to the sweet reflection that a mother holding her infant daughter can look like just one being in the bathroom mirror.

Stein doesn't shy away from the earthy: we see how pregnancy affects her sex life, the cabbage leaves she uses as a remedy for excessive milk production while weaning her daughter, the songs they sing to poop while toilet training, and the occasional cuss word. The "gross" is occasionally intertwined with the hilarious: "Daddy, don't drop your penis in the toilet!" and the tender, in a poem where Stein races to remove cat poop from the baby's mouth, and at the close of the piece, scars on different parts of Stein's body "speak" to each other as she sleeps holding her daughter, who will not sleep in her crib. This reflects the experience of parenting in its physicality and sweetness.

Yet, her work reflects sophisticated knowledge of and fascination about many aspects of the world: space exploration, fetal development, evolutionary history. And, a deep tenderness towards her little family, including her husband (who does the dishes!) and especially her tiny daughter, Oona.

Motifs of fanciful childhood imagination are scattered through these pages. A rock becomes a symbol of power. Stein wakes to tea parties, fairies, confetti, and glitter. She also engages in her own adult fantasies of being cast in a movie by a famous director (as well as fears, as she recollects the "universal cinematic language " of miscarriage). Yet, sometimes, in the same pieces, ordinary rocks, seashells, and dirt get mentioned right alongside the fairy dreams. Our actual world can be just as amazing as fantasy, especially when seen through the eyes of a child.

Poems here are of varying lengths: some extend over multiple pages, and others consist of two lines. This reflects Stein's versatility as a writer and also the way thoughts and emotions occur to us while we have an intense experience. Sometimes, there's a lot to say, but other times, one sentence is more than enough.

The quick vs lengthy bursts of thought also recall and evoke Stein's space travel metaphor. Time is measured differently in space due to the varying orbits of planets. Days and years as we understand them can be minute or nearly eternal elsewhere in space with Earth's migration as a reference. So, as we "spacewalk" through Oona's early childhood, there are naturally a balance of short interjections of feelings and observations and longer periods of reflection. And sometimes, during the toddler years, "every number on the clock is replaced by the word now/and the hands of now always pointed at two nows."

As explorers might spend extensive time solely with each other for company, the little family develops their own language of love. From the earliest newborn days, Oona's little mouth resembles a parenthesis, a device to hold and contain the sounds and words she will eventually say.

Some words in the pieces are modified to reflect the toddler's way of speaking. The three create their own music when Oona's tiny hands slap her father's belly like a drum. In one rich piece, at three years old, she writes "Oonadad" in bright pink on the driveway with her own self styled punctuation, exclaiming that the word means that Oona and Dad love each other very much.

This collection follows the Steins through Oona's learning to crawl (An Infant Reaches) through the baby's first steps and eventually to her walking and dancing. Stein references dancing in several poems, from the relief she finds from her doctor's announcement that the baby is healthy and "dancing" in her womb to a piece where her husband plays guitar and sings lullabies to Oona and the three dance together. Dancing is something people do for fun when we're happy, which this family is, but also a metaphor for navigating a complex situation, losing and regaining balance, which is part of the physical and psychological journey of parenthood.

Themes of food and nourishment also run through this collection as symbols of love and connection as well as sustenance. Stein relates her own hesitation at weaning Oona from the breast "a little less and a little less, and then no more/but tonight, a little more." She becomes wistful at the close interaction her daughter has with a cup that covers her face as she sips.

In a later poem, she reveals her poignant reason for her reluctance to wean: psychologically, she does not want to give up her ability to nourish her daughter from her own body without depending on the unpredictable outside world. Even grounded on Earth, life can be unpredictable: she’s vulnerable to her own memory and planning lapses as well as to economic and political threats.

Of course, human growth, as well as space exploration, requires separation from the known and the familiar. Oona must eventually step out of the "mothership" for a spacewalk of her own. A section, "tethering," references the parents' process of letting Oona grow while still nurturing her under their care.

The final poem, "The foot" highlights the motif of watching a child grow. Stein reflects that Oona used to be a "ceramicist/molding the elasticity of her skin." Now, at three, her daughter is more than half the length of her body as the two curl up together in bed. Yet, her foot still massages her mother’s stomach as they sleep, although now from the outside.

Like the recordings and images on Voyager 1 and 2, which make appearances in several pieces, children are "probes" we send to the greater world out beyond our own existence. In this way, the baby becomes a "little astronaut" traveling through time.

J. Hope Stein's Little Astronaut is a complex yet relatable ode to parenthood. It highlights the joy and wonder of bringing small children into the world, an experience both personal and cosmic.

Illusions of Solid Ground: A Review of YEAR OF THE MURDER HORNET by Tina Cane

While the pandemic was such a repetitious and monotonous period of time, Tina Cane brilliantly provides a unique lens with which to view those haunting years.Year of the Murder Hornet offers a microscopic deep dive into many facets of quarantine life. It allows for wordplay within experimental poems, without becoming oversentimental nor apocalyptic. The wry, humorous, choppy lines in many of the works provide a sense of ease, yet a solemn place for reflection, as well. There is a heightened sensation of unpredictability, which portrays the disjointed, disconnected, mental state of the speaker and many people, for that matter. Societal issues loom large. The threats of racism, gentrification, conspiracy theories, the divisiveness of cable news, and the titular threat of murder hornets are tackled within the comfort (and discomfort) of home. Orderly stream of conscious confessional poems evolve and morph, revealing the blurred lines of the personal and the political. From the first page to the last, it is sharply proven that “memory is a poet / not an historian.”

There is such musicality in each poem’s freewheeling enjambment, which produces kinetic verses, as one is forced to travel back and search for meaning. The complex vocabulary of the pandemic intermingles with layers of experience, “...America / least American Dream-iest of lands” “where like most / I hoard the future and try not to be afraid,” when there was so much to fear. Mentions of “snags in food chains, quarantine baking fails, celebrities sheltering-in, and time no longer having meaning,” all come together in a reckoning from the relative safety of this side of the pandemic-present, “the illusion of solid ground.”

“But what if the thinking / never ends?” Yet feelings of despair and uncategorical delight can occupy the same realms as “this delicate dispatch / to the images I store / of evergreen California / or Ashbery’s / chorus of trees / a stash of small prayers / and promises.” After all, “truth is in / the feeling not the facts.” Repetition recreates the monotony of daily life, only to be punctuated by natural internal rhymes both dynamic and purposeful. These mimic the sparks of unexpected joy that dotted the landscape of distanced schedules. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Paths: A Narrative in Captions” captures the labyrinthian mental and physical passages the speaker takes as they “Walk to Stay Sane” or are “Trying Hard in Trying Times.” This winding piece is in part a collection of daily diary entries, while also a meditative cataloguing of routines, seeking to quell overwhelming fear and anxiety. This captions-style narrative connects two distinct parts of this book, a poetic path unto itself leading the way, while warning, “every day is endless / shortcuts are conditional.”

Every poem reveals a journey narrated by conversations shared between poet and reader, speaker and characters, before posing questions back again. Images succinct as “a cornish hen / houses in a bell jar” commingle with lushly abstract ones like “everything’s gone to hell / since David Bowie died.” Yet a turn of the page doesn’t solve the mystery of the whole, nor the command,  “stay tuned to souls / that brood and to poets / who like finches in cages / sense the changes / before they come.” This work begs to be reread, to revisit surreal settings, and to relive the collective emotions, contained within the real and fantasized places held dear in times of trouble.

Eat A Peach: An Excerpt from Jen Michalski's THE COMPANY OF STRANGERS

Lynn always waits near the far end of the farmer’s market in West Hollywood, in the food court. That way, she can see the women before the women see her. If Lynn gets a bad vibe, or just a case of bad nerves, she can slip out to the parking lot and drive away. Her sister Lucy thinks it’s strange that Lynn treats these outings more like drug deals than the blind dates they actually are, but given Lynn’s bad luck, it’s the only way she can get herself (halfway) out there.
“She doesn’t sound like a catch,” Lucy said on the phone last night of Rachel, the woman who Lynn is meeting today. Lucy is married and lives in the Atlanta suburbs with her husband and children in a five-bedroom house, the kind you see on cable shows, clean but soulless, with quartz countertops and en suite master bathrooms.
Lucy is usually right about most things, and as Rachel enters the food court and navigates the maze of tables, both hands gripping the strap of her purse, eyes squinting, body closed, like a tourist in a Tunisian marketplace, Lynn presses her sandaled feet on the ground, ready to bail into the throng of Saturday shoppers. Rachel’s online profile was full of red flags—widower, young daughter, not necessarily ready to date but feeling like she should wade back in a little. But then again, Lynn’s own life on paper—massage therapist, maxed credit cards, barely affordable studio apartment in Echo Park—is nothing to crow about, either.
Lynn watches as Rachel scans the faces of those in her immediate area, her lips slightly parted, and something about her expression, the soft glassiness of her green eyes, the haphazard way her hair curls over her ears and a little in her face, makes Lynn stay a minute longer. She knows this is a mistake—but this private moment of Rachel’s vulnerability tugs at her. She lets Rachel find her, watches her face lock into a smile, one hand unattaching itself from her purse to give Lynn a quick, enthusiastic wave.
“I was just coming to meet you,” Lynn lies, standing up. She leans over and hugs Rachel with just her fingertips. “You look exactly like your picture.”
“You too.” Rachel holds onto Lynn’s forearms. She keeps her close for a second. “Your hair’s even redder in person.”
“It’s the sun,” Lynn says. The picture she used for her profile was taken indoors, her face shadowy, lit by candle. Her friend Michael said it made her look mysterious and artsy.
Then, she doesn’t know what to say. It’s been a long time since she’s let it get this far. There was Yuki, who she slipped out on, fearing she was too trendy and possibly shallow, and Kim, who had too many tattoos. And Sandra, who she simply stopped talking to on the dating site because she’d discovered a sixth degree of separation between Sandra and her ex.
“Something came up, by the way,” Lynn lies. Even when she lets it get this far, she always builds herself an out. “A last-minute appointment—so I only have about forty minutes. I hope that’s okay.” 
“Well, we’ll just have to make do,” Rachel says a little too brightly, and Lynn can’t tell whether she’s disappointed, whether she knows Lynn is lying. “So, do you have time to grab lunch, or just walk around?”
Rachel wears real perfume and not essential oils. Her makeup is so bare Lynn can see a light smattering of freckles, the faint lines of crow’s feet around her eyes. She’s definitely in her late thirties, as listed on her profile, five years older than Lynn. Her TOMS look like she’s walked a thousand miles in them, and Lynn gives her bonus points for thinking ratty canvas slip-ons were fine to wear on a first date.
“We can do both, I think,” Lynn reassures her. Maybe she should have given herself an hour. She has aborted so many trips to the Farmer’s Market she’s never actually shopped here. That, and Ralphs is more her price point. She puts on her straw hat and sunglasses and walks beside Rachel toward the Littlejohn English Toffee stand. The girl behind the counter offers them hard, flat, sample squares of toffee. As Lynn bites into hers, she watches Rachel wrap her sample in a napkin and slip it in her purse.
“For my daughter, Maggie,” she explains. “I always feel guilty, going out without her.”
“How old is she again?” Lynn asks. She hears Lucy, slightly nasal, on the phone. You’ve never wanted children, Lynn. You’re going to take care of someone else’s?
“She’s seven,” Rachel answers. Her skin is pale, like Lynn’s. She hides it under a faded denim button-up, her neck swaddled in a scarf. “She was five when Deborah passed away, and she still worries when I—I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be talking about this.”
“Why?” Lynn’s throat is still thick with sugary toffee. “It’s your life.”
“So, you’re a massage therapist?” Rachel glances at a text on her phone before dropping it into her purse. She smiles at Lynn. “You’re a healer.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Lynn laughs. “More like a body mechanic.”
She did a semester at community college in North Carolina, then massage therapy school in Studio City. She was surprised that she liked massage, touching stranger’s bodies, kneading their pressure points, freeing them from pain, their own self-imposed stresses. She was worried she’d have to offer words of comfort, of understanding, but most people don’t want her to talk at all, only listen. Most of the problems—cheating spouses, budget overruns at the studio, the actor who is a liability—she wouldn’t know how to solve, anyway. Her friend Michael, who she moved here with, says the only problems people have in LA are the ones they make for themselves.
“You’re the healer,” Lynn says after a moment. “Working in oncology.”
“I always thought I’d be a concert pianist,” Rachel answers. “But life took some detours. I would have never met my partner if I’d been a concert pianist.”
“Was she an oncologist, too?” Lucy is almost screaming into Lynn’s ear now. Run, don’t walk, away.
Rachel looks straight ahead. “She was my friend.”
“I’m sorry.” Lynn touches Rachel’s wrist lightly. She doesn’t have to date Rachel, she thinks, but she can be sympathetic. She understands loss. She understands things being ripped away from you.
“I knew she was terminal.” Rachel says the word ‘terminal’ like ‘left-handed.’ “And I thought at the time there was no way I would get involved. I mean, what did I think…but I wouldn’t have had Maggie if I hadn’t.”
Rachel stops in front of a produce stand.
“Want a peach?” She holds one in each hand. “First of the season.”

---

Editor’s Note: “Eat a Peach” was originally published in Chicago Quarterly Review.

Grief and Gravity: A Review of ANCHOR by Rebecca Aronson

“A body” writes Rebecca Aronson in her new collection, Anchor, “is a just a set of nerves in fur and spangles.” Yet these nerves at the core of our simple being can turn our lives into a labyrinth of emotion. A brief, breathtaking journey through the viewpoint of an adult child who must navigate her own parents’ decline and passing, Anchor deftly sidesteps the maudlin or macabre and invites us into a new reckoning with mortality.

Death waits just beyond the next page in this collection. The imminence of mortality, almost more than mortality itself, troubles the speaker. In a series of letter poems addressed “Dear gravity,” she cajoles the broader forces in the world—specifically, those that knock her father off his literal and metaphorical balance—for understanding of why they must do what they do. Such knowledge can’t empower us but is learning for knowing; as the speaker laments, “how vexing to be made an instrument/that measures only what can’t be mastered.” The lack of control and its associated pain cut deep in these poems, even as the narrative tension keeps us reading.

Aronson captures the absurd heartbreak of dementia with particular accuracy. One day, the devastation is palpable, and, as in “Source,” the speaker laments of her mother, “she has forgotten everything/she ever wondered.” Yet as many loved ones of dementia patients know, there are also moments of levity, as in “My Mother at the Gate”: “Sometimes/kindness descends like a fever. We walk the halls/laughing at nonsense and are briefly cheerful.” We cling to what we can, and we shake off or sit with what we wish to forget.

At once expansive and microcosmic, Anchor scrutinizes all levels of deterioration and forces at work in our world. Environmental degradation stands on its own and as a metaphor for the smaller crumblings that feel astronomical to individuals but are insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Contemplating the smoking, burning land around her in “Fire Country,” Aronson writes “the air is thick/with other people’s fires. And my own burning/is so small as to go unnoticed.” Amid all the damage that our “toddler species” does to ourselves and our planet, the individual struggles seem trivial.

Yet Aronson’s poems continually validate the significance of griefs, “those awkward pointed stars/there is no easy way to hold,” no matter how small they seem in the cosmic scheme of things. We’re reminded that even seemingly evanescent things have its importance and impact, even “the petal of your life which is brief, which is delicate and weightier than you know,” as is the chrysanthemum that gives the poem its name.

Even as its focus involves death, the cyclic nature of life crops up periodically in the collection as Aronson reminds us that those we are losing once stood in our shoes. Parenthood comes into a new focus when seen from the middle position of both being and raising a child: the “endless falling and fear of failing” that we don’t understand until we enter.

The range of responses to grief, including the struggle against the inevitable, give the collection depth and authenticity. There’s angst, resistance to the prospect of loss, anxiety, magical thinking, and eventually, a tentative consideration of the future without. “Maybe there will be hauntings,” the speaker muses in “Manifestation,” or “breaths/in the still air at significant moments, tea leaves/I will ask for advice.” We don’t get a neat resolution, a fully processed grief—instead, we stand with the speaker and look forward to a future that will come, even when we can hardly think about what it could be.

Little goes unexamined in Anchor, though “Ode” hints at a strain of deliberate identity shift, duplicity even, that piques readers’ curiosity in its difference from the other themes woven through the collection. A few other poems touch on the speaker’s own complex identity—namely “The Dress I Loved” and “Is That All There Is?”—but we’re left wanting just a bit on this front.

Like many of the best poetry collections, Anchor does not give its readers an easy ride, but the resulting catharsis, coupled with the lyricism of Rebecca Aronson’s verse, make this book a deeply moving and worthwhile read.

Have Grief, Will Travel: A Review of 2 A.M. WITH KEATS by Eileen Cleary

2 a.m. with Keats records Eileen Cleary’s earthbound efforts to communicate with her beloved/mentor, deceased poet Lucie Brock-Broido. This thin body of lyric poems unveils themes of grief, loss, and loneliness. Cleary’s prominent use of silence, achieved in part by superimposing inky language against a blanched-out landscape, gives voice to, if you will, an already established sense of unworldliness through the performance of listening. In this way, Cleary creates a two-fold dimensionality in her poems. This landscape does not stop at itself; in fact, the silence it creates necessarily transcends the limitations of convention and thought. It becomes the space that holds the erased: Cleary’s beloved. In this liminal space, the poet yearns, hurts, and presses for the retrieval of her beloved. At the mouth of this portal to the afterlife, (which we learn is unboundaried, is everywhere) the author dialogues, listens, and waits. Cleary is both witness and interlocutor, a player in her own play. We, too, are invited to participate in this performance. As a result, we directly experience Cleary’s emotions with an immediacy as if they are our own. These interstitial spaces are arguably most exciting when Cleary utilizes call and response, a form that recedes and expands our unconscious, where we can neither be singular or indifferent. When John Keats pirates the space that Cleary opens, the expectation of both speaker and reader are subverted. The spirit of Keats acts as veil: he is an obstruction to Cleary’s purpose (to reach Brock-Broido). Although the poetry of Keats bridges the two on earth, the character of Keats’ ghost, contaminates Cleary’s objective. To be sure, the process of connecting with the dead is easily fraught with distractions and detours. John Keats, oddly comforting to Cleary, serves as both Cleary’s and Brock-Broido’s stand-in or wingman. He is  revelator of otherwise personal information about their relationship because Cleary cannot speak it, and Brock-Broido is erased:

(        )

I’m not your first
platonic lover.
You’re not mine.

(         )

During winter, mine read
to me—her Harvard
sweats awkwardly tied,
and she wanted to last
like the Eucharist—
and be preserved in vellum. 

Although the next stanza intentionally shifts, “Let’s think of something else,” Cleary knows that the process continues, and that she must rip through the veil.

“2 a.m. with Keats” is the table piece of the eponymous collection. There is an otherworldly feel to its 53 brief stanzas, each marked by open and closed parenthesis—no numerals—creating a hollowness that amplifies Keats’ visitation:

Your apparition sings
in the corner of my room—
then listens, your ear warm
and veined, trained toward me.

(      )

Cleary suggests that there is no need for numbers, or flesh for that matter. The speaker is surprised by the ghost of Keats. After all, it is not this poet but the poet-mentor for whom Cleary yearns:

(      )

How is that you made
your way to me? Are you
interplanetary? Have you
cut through elderberry?

(      )

Keats is the wrong one and Cleary asks the wrong questions: She is silenced by the trauma of loss. Keats has a message from Brock-Broido. Why does Cleary interrupt him?

(      )

Lucie said she—
I thought you might be her.
Which makes this the first night of peace.
The cattle at the fence, breach—
chew the same grasses
while I absorb what consumes you.

(      )

Here, the language shifts to rhyme which disturbs the poem’s tone. Is this caused by the deteriorating energy of the spirit? Cleary’s inaccurate translation of the ghost? Or is it simply form and content marrying? Here, dialogue ownership blurs. There is beauty and truth in the collapse of internal structure: Singular becomes both, or delightfully many. Throughout 2 a.m. with Keats, Cleary erases the boundaries of both voice and body while giving shape to the overlapping realities that are at play. The author’s dialogue echoes similar metaphysical questions in Hamlet as exemplified in this ghost scene:

Enter Ghost

Marcellus
Peace, break thee off! Look where it come again.
Barnardo
In the same figure like the King that’s dead.
Marcellus
Thou art a scholar. Speak to it, Horatio.
Barnardo
Looks he not like the King?  Mark it, Horatio.
Horatio
Most like. It harrows me with fear and wonder.
Barnardo
It would be spoke to.
Marcellus
Speak to it, Horatio.

Hamlet I.1. 47-53.

Like the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father, and as the dead who visit earth, Cleary has tremendous energy which is required of her to discern between that which she hears as herself and that which she hears as spirit. Sadly, like so many of us, Cleary does not yet trust the dead or herself, “I can’t convince myself that it’s you.”

By engaging Keats, who is Brock-Broido’s gatekeeper of sorts, Cleary will see her Beloved. The beauty of Cleary’s art is that she trusts the process of writing, of poetry, and of getting through to the one she loves. 2 a.m. with Keats subverts the conventional paradigm of death-after-death by addressing the imaginary wall that separates us from the “undiscovered country.” Cleary teaches the reader that the undiscovered country exists, and we can access it to gain comfort from those we loved who live there now.  

In “Confrontation with the Unconscious” Carl Jung writes about his experiments with the anima:

“The psychic material which is the stuff of psychosis is found in the insane…But it is also the matrix of a mythopoeic imagination which has vanished from our rational age.”

Cleary, like Jung, bypasses psychosis through the force of her “mythopoeic imagination.” Imagination does not cause Cleary to see falsely, it is a vehicle to communicate with her beloved. William Blake teaches us to “look through it, not at it,” and Cleary does. Her imagination is fierce as her desire.

Jung continues:

“Though such imagination is present everywhere, it is both tabooed and dreaded, so that it even appears to be a risky experiment or a questionable adventure to entrust oneself to the uncertain path that leads into the depths of the unconscious” (my italics).

Jung’s statement clarifies the significance of Cleary’s work which reminds us that the imagination is omnipresent and cannot be compromised.

Two a.m. with Keats is an interactive five-dimensional roadmap that may save our lives. Cleary’s fierce grief-journey is medicine not just for those who grieve;  it is for those who are oppressed by the byproducts of hyper-capitalism, namely fear, isolation and dispossession. Indeed, we are all on an uncertain path, and Cleary, through example, reminds us to trust ourselves and life.

Traveling to Find the Way Back Home: A Review of THE FORGOTTEN WORLD by Nick Courtright

Nick Courtright’s collection The Forgotten World serves as both a travel guide, with the countries he visits indicated in each section, and a collage of connected memories. While the poet seems to invite the reader along, the persona in the poems is a solitary figure, even when a lover or fellow travelers inhabit the poems. What ties the poems together is a sense of alienation. The collection opens with a call to prayer the speaker cannot answer in “Facing Mecca,” juxtaposing images of Walmart and test scores—first world concerns—with dirhams, cobras, and niqabs.

In the first section, titled “Forgotten,” (like the other two divisions of the book), the speaker acknowledges feeling out of place, noting in “I Cannot Enter the Mosque”:

When irreligious
you can only go some places,

like bars, or houses, or heaven.
But I can’t go here . . .

Whether in Morocco, Ecuador, Paris or London, the speaker finds himself in mosques, chapels and cathedrals, never places of comfort for him. Likewise, the focus on the culture and the history of each place visited seems to highlight guilt as “a spoiled American / who is a voyeur on the. heritage of those / who have heritage. . . .”

Courtright chronicles the time “Before Falling Out of Love,” telling his lover:

I couldn’t really make sense
of my happiness . . .

. . . You were there
and I couldn’t make sense of it.

Through the poem, though, he moves from his incredulity at “fucking in Africa” amid warthogs and zebras to his ironic observation, “Eventually I’ll be back / in my bed in America after having / set my family on fire…” Courtright follows with “Falling Out of Love,” bearing images of a house afire, a setting in stark contrast to Africa:

The flame moves in on the house this weekend,
the clever box and its faux wood flooring
and whitewash cabinets, too many white
cabinets, the flame moving in and through,

the flame brandishing its sad ancient dance
of romance and boyish extravagance . . .

The former lover—the you, half of we—has barely a presence.

Courtright also invokes the presence of artists and writers in the places he travels. In “Frida Kahlo Atop the Pyramid of the Sun,” he finds himself thinking of the artist, finding himself “a spy in her bedroom” as he sees “the dresses she wore, / the mirrors in which she became real.”

In “American Idiot,” the speaker, feeling out of place in South America, recalls Orwell’s autobiographical short story “Shooting an Elephant” in which he finally understands Orwell’s observation “that a colonist is always in a battle / not to be laughed at.” He notes that “the role of every white man in this world / is to shut up and take it / because so much of this bed you for yourself have made.”

The second section, set across Europe and Asia, opens with “Airplane to Bangkok,” on an overseas flight, the characters in the in-flight movie as real as the flight attendant, “Thirty years older and thirty for popularity” or the “aggressively elderly woman . . . / [who] did not smile at me when I smiled at her / Her fingers . . . twisted like the branches of desert trees . . .”

Some of the poems examine the seeming absurdity of sights he witnesses, the poverty and stacks of skulls in “Inside Everyone is a Skull,” as well as the repeated image of “A monkey [pulling] over the rope railing protecting a priceless / work of stone-carved temple art.”

Others are set in the artificial world of opulent airports, images of wealth and privilege that weigh on this lone traveler. In “Inside Everyone is a Wallet,” he finds himself in ‘The United Lounge for the wealthy and privileged.” He observes:

It’s difficult to decline such opportunity

As if that opulence weren’t enough to make anyone feel
awful 

There’s an elevator with golden sheen going up to a room
reserved for the Global First Class.

Ill at ease, the speaker continues to find himself in places of worship, considering transubstantiation and confession, the sacred and profane. He finds himself weeping, “God, please help me” in “the prayer-only section” of Notre Dame in “Happy New Year” or in Westminster Abbey, confessing to the reader, “I took the holy sacrament without belief” in “Insanity.”

Throughout this leg of the virtual tour through The Forgotten World, the poems conjure disparate images of literary figures. In Prague, he evokes images of “Good Kind Wenceslas”:

. . . boots in the snow,
like two bird in the snow,
striding with purpose
toward his aim, on the day-
of the feast of Stephen.”

The imaged conjured causes the speaker to “tear up / in an all-you-can-eat all-you-can / drink buffet in Budapest,” until he considers the king’s page, along on the wintry journey “with no agency.”

He imagines “Dracula’s Last Day,” as an anachronism, as he “gets up and responds to some emails, / texts a girl or two he’s been after,” ending the poem with a woman “stake in hand” knocking at his door.

In the final section of the collection, Courtright returns to the United States. The poems still echo with travel images but focus more on the domestic—fathers, mothers, and sons. Both as  son and as father of sons, the speaker bears the guilt of not loving his mother enough, not knowing how to offer his father consolation.

In “My Mother Shaving Her Legs,” he observes, “In time all children are disappointments . . . because they don’t love back the way they should.” Then he turns the tables, addressing his son in with images from his own travels in “Oblique Letter to Young Son as He Confronts Adolescent Loneliness for the First Time”:

When the water is all around you
you know you are the land, son.
. . . .
But
let’s not be bleak; you, son,

are the land, the firmament
filled with surprise. . .

Though the collection moves from travels abroad back to home, in the final section, Courtright draws on the motif of travel to unify this body of work. In “Apples,” he writes, “To travel the world is one thing / and to travel the mind / is the same thing” before declaring, “The time to wander prodigal / may be over but I’ll wonder / where wandering led.”

As Courtright concludes the third section of The Forgotten World, back in America, his readers are faced with timely cultural references as the poet unpacks the experiences, images, and conflicted feelings from his journey, until at last, in “We Can’t Leave the House,” the speaker finds himself with his children in the bubble that is home, “wait[ing] out the virus” with time to come to terms with who he is, who we are.