The Color of a Prickly Pear's Heart, by Pat Longoria

Do you know that color? The color in between, after the milk and sugar and butter have been mixed and have begun to boil, but before the mixture reaches the hard-candy stage, when a spoonful of it forms a perfect caramel ball when dropped in a glass of water. That color that is just the hint of sweetness of a soft caramel dissolving in your mouth, a brief note of butter melting on the tongue. It has a whisper of pink in it, a faint blush. That is the color of my mother's flushed skin as she leans over the stove and stirs and stirs with the wooden spoon in the speckled kettle.

She has sent me out to the monte, just past the pasture and the cemetery, to pick prickly pears for the cactus candy she is making. I carry a few dozen of the tunas home in a tin pail. They are a deep, purplish-brownish red like nothing else I have ever seen. They are not as deep as the blood that spills from the neck of the goat that my grandfather has slaughtered for our Easter dinner, the blood that pours in a living stream into the white of the enameled basin. There is something lifeless about that red of the pear-shaped tunas; they turn like knobs as I cut them from the cactus. Nestled together in the metal pail, they look like they more properly belong in the box of rusted hinges and old doorknobs and bent nails that my father keeps in the old shed. Yes, that is it: they are a rusted knob of a fruit, hard, born in dryness and suffering, the fruit of the poor.

The tunas make a hard sound, like knocking, when I dump them out onto the wooden table in the kitchen. Mama lifts each one with metal tongs and holds it over the open flame of the stove to burn off the wispy spines. When the tunas cool, she finally sits down for the first time that day in the steamy kitchen, with a sigh of aching joints and wilted skirts. The paring knives with the wooden handles are old and blunt, but my mother's hands are sure and deft as she peels the tunas. The dry skin of the fruit peels off in short strips to reveal a surprising interior: a scarlet pulp that drips with moisture. Where does it come from, I wonder, this hidden well, this tender heart? Here in the scrublands the rains are infrequent but violent: the llovisnas that pound the metal roof and wash out the caliche roads and drown the chickens that are too silly to take shelter in the hen house. The prickly pear cactus blooms after these rains and gives birth to that bruised fruit, the fruits that my mother sweetens and boils and then bakes into candied red squares for the family feasts. 

Life Lines, by Maryam Steele

The inside of my brain is lined with maps.

Or is that my heart?

Definitely my bathroom.

When you come in the house, you can see

the tiny room across from the door is papered with maps.

Crete keeps falling down, and who could blame it?

It’s old and the paper feels more like fabric: quiet and thick,

yet it tears at the slightest glance of tape.

It’s an island shaped like a funky dragon

dotted with Hertz Rentals, and I love it.

The others maps are closer to home:

Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maine, Yellowstone.

Ontario.

If I made a map of dreams,

all my moonlit roads would lead there.

If I could chart my childhood,

all streams would flow from one Canadian lake.

It has been so many years since I’ve seen it,

more than half my life.

If I went back, what would happen?

Like trying to take a Polaroid of Narnia —

would it implode?

Like soil samples from Neverland —

it could slide out from under me

and vanish.

Would Canada take back its memories,

and the dreams it bestowed?

What about the blue-gold dream

when I was a dolphin girl

swimming in the sun-sparkled quiet shallows?

Maybe.

I’m willing to take that risk someday

to bring my children to the place

they have heard so many simple stories about:

the baby sparrow, the caterpillar tree, the mean dog.

The sand hill, higher than a house.

My uncle catching frogs for bait and

me setting them free when he wasn’t looking,

his anger.

How I got this scar on my leg, the territorial barn swallows,

the water — always it is the water

in the background of every memory.

I can forget the sky, the grass, the leafy trees —

it was always summer there —

but never the water stretched out like an open palm.

Did you know I am part mermaid?

It’s true.

Not the part that can swim well, because I can’t.

The part that loves and loves and loves the water,

never wanting to leave.

I can swim like magic in my sleep,

and always no matter where I am

that lake in Ontario shimmers

and holds my heart beating beneath its gentle tides.

I have an overflowing binder of maps from

magazines, atlases, the trash, school,

from friends, from this town and other countries.

I don’t even know all the maps I’ve got in there,

this collection surprises even me.

But I do know the one map I no longer have: Jamaica.

I remember finding it at a library sale, adopting it,

and sitting in my room staring at the shape of Jamaica

with blue blue blue all around it.

I have never been to an island, and because of that

there is something magic about them.

My eyes snagged on Runaway Bay,

mesmerized by the name, the letters.

I gave that precious map as a gift, an apology really,

for something I should never have been apologizing for,

and have missed it far longer than I missed the man I gave it to.

I knew I would never go to Jamaica, but it was his dream.

I wonder where that map is now, if it and the ex ever made it there.

I live inside my ultimate map, a cartographical woman.

These constellations of freckles, these stretch marks,

lines on my knuckles and eyelids and lips,

these 2 long scars, perpendicular and unrelated.

My son asks if the biggest scar will ever go away.

No, I say, it’s here forever.

I don’t mind since it reminds me that I nearly died

but didn’t.

My hands, I watch them aging

back and forth through time:

today they look like my grandmother’s hands at 75,

tomorrow they will look like my own at 15.

I wonder at my eyes, at what they tell,

what they keep secret.

I have never been good at hiding my feelings,

a talent I would love to have.

If only I could pin my heart inside my coat

instead of on my sleeve,

it would be an improvement even if

you still heard it thumping like a drum

when I try to stay calm.

Here in this body are my childhood, my children,

my grief and my mistakes,

my blissful moments.

This form is my map, my country.

The roads and coasts it has named,

and its empty, unmarked places

are equally beautiful:

the known and unknown,

the past and future,

glowing at the edges and flowing as water.

Encounter, by Sue Norvell

Sun-warmed stone

lures you out, garter snake.

Harmless beauty, sleekly black

and greenish gold, gleaming in your new spring skin.

Settled and serene

— perhaps sleeping? You're draped

across the sidewalk's step

like an abandoned jump rope

dropped by an absent grandchild.

Which of us is more startled?

You, who saw the threat of death descending?

Or I, who skipped a step, lurching

to avoid your sudden-vacant space? 

You vanished between slate and grasses —

I landed safely on the walkway.

We go our separate ways.

I write of it with pulse still pounding.

Summer, by Yvette Rubio

Lawnmowers buzz green

Teapot steeps on red front porch

Cat naps in light patches

Cat naps in light patches

Big black ant on orange wall

White compost pot full

White compost pot full

Dappled sunbeams spill on floor

Shady backyard hums

Shady backyard hums

Bright red bee balm stretches up

Purple clematis

Purple clematis

Opens wide against the sky

Earthworms dive down down

Earthworms dive down down

One red tomato flashes

Through green leaf branches

Through green leaf branches

Past tangled morning glories

Sparrows contra dance

I Admire Poets, by Sue Perlgut

I admire poets and their craft. Grace Paley, Marge Piercy, Irena Klepfitz, Adrienne Rich, Katharyn Howd Machan. Not that I can quote one line. Nothing comes to mind. Not one word. 

In all the novels and murder mysteries that I read, someone, anyone, is always quoting poetry or Shakespeare. They are usually British. I wonder, are the Brits taught differently than us?

I imagine the following scenario in a first grade class or whatever they call it:

Teacher: "Class, today we are going to read Shakespeare." (No Dick and Jane for them). "Memorize stanzas seven and ten from As You Like It. Someday you'll quote those lines in a novel you write."

It's not that I don't read poetry, it's that I don't remember what I read. 

I can blame it on my age, but truthfully once I'm finished reading, it's gone. Out of my mind as if I need room for the next thought. 

My mother wrote poetry. She was even published in the local newspaper when she was a teenager. They ran a poetry contest and she kept winning. Finally they made a rule about the number of times you could enter. So, she submitted the poems under her two first cousin’s names and they became the winners. 

I have two small notebooks, journals really, of some of her poems. I tried reading them years ago but seeing her handwriting made the missing of her so current and present I closed the book. They sit on my bookshelf, cracked red spines facing out. I never look at them. 

East Meets West in Leningrad, by Natalie Detert

To the chiseled face with steely blue eyes under a fur-lined hat:

You approached a group of Americans one stark night in February of 1988 while the wind stroked our cheeks and tossed snow lightly onto our eyelashes. We were nervous and awkward outsiders exploring the embankment in front of the Hermitage certain the Secret Police was watching us after our tour guide’s stern warnings to not wander off. This was the Soviet Union after all, but we were young, just 21.

In contrast, you lacked any self-doubt and carried yourself with the confidence of experience. On a mission, you looked down into my eyes, reached out your arm with letter in hand, and penetrated my breath as it hung in the cold. I heard your broken English, asking me to take this letter and mail it to someone in America. Who? I can’t remember. A family member? An old friend? A lover? Yes, the desperation in your eyes said lover.

As my hand reached out to grab your correspondence, your eyes began to soften, and I knew I could do it. I could be your hero, your savior, your escape from oppression, and your connection to freedom and a touch of compassion in a world so cold and cruel and dull. Until overcome with worry, Susan rushed in to stop me and pushed me aside with warnings of gulags and prison camps, detainment and torture.

I turned back as you stood there defiantly and silently mouthed, “I’m sorry.” As we walked away, our boots crunched on the snow that had collected on the wide, brick sidewalk. No one said anything. We felt small and defeated, knowing that collections of art displayed in the palaces had watched as the visions of our better selves dissipated with the arrival of fear as quickly as our breath in the frigid air.

Still, the Volga River continued to flow. And, all these years later, I have always wondered, who I would be, what I would be, and where I would be, if I had taken that letter and posted it to a stranger, for a stranger, to be part of a love triangle across continents. The cold war did end not so many years later. I hope your love survived. Just know my courage has grown over the years.

An Aerial View — Greenport, 1988, by Laura LaRosa

Now I can say it was a little madness in the spring, what possessed me.

I ran straight into his life, his arms. Seduced by an accent with London Blue eyes.

We made love on the bloodstained sheets where his first child was born only weeks before.

Just a little spring madness…

My son awoke to find his mother gone, evicted from the family home by jealousy and passion and broken things. It had to have been madness. A decade, two spouses, two young children, two blocks between us. Between those two blocks we evicted a friend from part of her home and made love so noisily our friend had to tell her son, my son’s friend, that the neighbor’s cats were fighting.

Spring madness…

We moved into a camper. I worked as a chambermaid. At night we feasted on leftovers from the silver service French restaurant where he waited tables.

My friends were astonished. My parents, not so much. They always knew I was mad.

Around us the town grumbled and chose sides. I felt watched like Hester, and like her I refused to care. More and more the sidewalks seemed to pull away as I walked by the little walkways up to those homes where once I had coffee. Curtains moved. Conversations stopped.

I didn’t care. I couldn’t think.

Of all the days and nights I drank Kokinelli, Bacardi, J&B, Old Grandad, Old Overholt, cognac, chianti, Brandy Alexanders, Slippery Nipples, sniffed, smoked , injected, inhaled, pushed drugs under my skin and into crevices — nothing compared to this intoxication.

His wife and my husband began a campaign. Together they visited the places where we once worked, currently worked; visited old friends, told anyone who would listen about our madness. Our awfulness.

I had nightmares: running up and down the Greenport streets; up and down, back and forth in those tree-lined, church-lined, tavern-lined, judgment-lined streets. In the dreams I was always rising above the town. From above it was always beautiful, smelling of lilacs and seawater, looking softly golden in the setting sun. So easy, so sweet.

I always woke up sweating. He always said, “One day, we will look back on this and laugh.” Then near to tears we would laugh so hard.

It had to have been some kind of spring madness. Who in their right mind would do this willingly? 

(inspired by the painting “Modern Art 4,” by Lynne Taetzsch and by Emily Dickinson's poem that begins “A little madness in the spring”)

Numbers Journal — Revisited

The first Numbers Journal was published here on Sunday, June 3. It gave rise to this latest version, with additional entries and many new contributors. A collective list of phrases encourages the reader to ask "What lies behind/beneath/beyond these words?" Aren't you curious? I am! But there is also something intriguing about not knowing the whole story. We are presented with possibilities and invited to fill in the details ourselves. 

I hope you will enjoy reading this word-collage, and perhaps it will inspire you to keep your own Numbers Journal, even if only for a few minutes, or an hour. But who knows? You might discover that once you begin it is hard to stop!

8 dark pink peonies in my blue vase

45 long minutes in the dentist's chair

2 Indigo Buntings on a fence in Arnot Forest

30 people ahead of me in line at Purity Ice Cream while I'm dying for a hot fudge sundae

1 lonely bug

4 vacant walls; 3 panes of glass; 1 mound of bedcovers tossed back

3 loads of dirty laundry

300 micrograms of navy wool

34 silent shuffling steps

2 conversations I can't have

7 escape routes I can take

4 tethers holding me back

1 stone in my heart

440 Facebook friends online; 40 upon whom I can count

1 dull ache in my head

2 swollen limbs

6 nanograms of ear wax

1 elephant in the room

2 angular sides of my face

1 little creep

3/4 empty tank; 1/2 way home

479 breaths in and out 

6 perching starlings aiming for the red sports car

2 pairs of glasses slid down her nose; one dark, one clear

1,247 seeds to be eaten by an unknown number of chickadees before the feeder is packed away

19 days until her five-and-a-half birthday

3 more days until the day after the day after the day after tomorrow when we'll go berry picking

1 ray of sunlight as the bride walked down the path

3 tiers on the wedding cake

90 minutes until he calls

7 minutes walk to school

5 of my favorite "bottle-to-pen" (B2P) pens

1 brother, 4 dogs, 2 cats, 2 turtles

3 cups of coffee, each with 2 Splendas

3 photographic art books depicting older adults

3 courses that I created and taught 

5 Nalgene bottles, all beat-up

3 completed journals, full of irrational worry

6 windows in my tiny apartment 

1 apology

2 giggles

1 parrot throws 4 ping pong balls off the top of her cage

8 separate rainstorms in 1 day, each occurring just as I thought things were clearing up

1 cake recipe made 6 cupcakes and 6 small cakes just large enough for 2 people

100 clothespins that always want to escape from the bag every time I pick it up

1 decade of the rosary on small pink crystals blessed for my father who deserves no such benediction

2 long conversations with my son about fathers who do not love their offspring

35 Bing cherries eaten from a dark blue bowl on a dark blue day

6 thumb-sized yellow potatoes boiled in singing salt water dressed with olive oil and vinegar

60 revolutions around the sun; so far so good

1 stinky fish; 2 smelly dogs

3 strange birds, seen then gone

64 for the last day

75 minutes later than I planned to get up; I roll over and make it 90

3 bluejays screaming in the ornamental cherry tree

1 big boy cat slinks up the stairs, avoiding eye contact

89 days since I last looked into your eyes — I still miss you 

7 . . . 8 . . . 9 deer grazing at the top of the hill near the Pleasant Grove Cemetery

6 a.m. — fog on the lake

1 red squirrel chased up a tree by a gang of four gray squirrels

47 shards of sea glass — green, brown, blue, and white — on the bathroom shelf

2 purple-starred globes of allium on long stalks

6 orange poppies and 3 fuchsia peonies opening at the same time

3 tethered shopping carts, escaped from the cart corral at Wegmans, rolling in front of my car

4 wilted stalks of rainbow chard, 3 curly kale leaves, and 6

squeezed lemons in the compost bucket

8 steaks cut from the wedge of Ithaca Soy firm tofu

40 corn tortillas my mother packed in her suitcase and brought to us from Texas

8 trashy novels read, even before summer begins

30 pages into two books by local authors that I "should" read

6 dog license renewals — a quiet day in the town clerk's office

8 sprigs of fresh oregano, picked to be dried

3 attempts to send one email message

1 card that says "EXHALE"

4 shelves in the book case; 16 books on the second shelf

5 bills received today

50,000 blades of grass that I did not mow 

17 times 4 will yield my age — that makes me 186 in dog-years

3 bottles of cocktail sauce, 6 cans of pineapple, 8 cans of diced tomatoes — does that make me a hoarder or just well prepared for any emergency involving shrimp?

6 stoneware birds on the deck, 4 tails up, 2 tails down

5 clickers in the basket prove that, around here, only the dog and I are not remotely controlled

95 years old, my house was built in 1917, back when nobody believed in closets

1 great blue heron at dusk, flying down the inlet

8 new-used books on the shelf, clamoring to be read

1 tall little girl giving that mosquito a piece of her mind

6 soft elbows

2 blue eyes forgiving me for being a hot-headed mama

1 brown-eyed boy dancing on the smooth bamboo floor

1 mountain of dirty dishes I cannot even see the top of

1 brother (my only one) 2,930 miles away

6 different kinds of berries growing in the yard

114 zinnias: 2 inches tall, green, and so hopeful

49 lavender blooms from a plant nearly dead last summer

1 mallard duck sitting at the edge of the pool each dawn

1 summer quilt of seersucker plaids that I'm nearly finished stitching

2 operations performed on a wheeled toy skunk, but still it won't drive around

8.439 memories of Crowe Lake, Ontario

5 requests for money in the mail — that’s all there is

17 magazines on the coffee table

8 stalks of Swiss chard in the bunch

4 old friends laughing at the kitchen table

10 prayer flags blowing in the breeze

3 broccoli plants chewed to the ground; damn rabbits!!

15 messages in the Inbox

43 points for “cleave” in Words with Friends

6 impatience plants waiting to be put in the ground — patience!

4 quarts of fresh strawberries picked this afternoon

18 almonds in the little white dish; wine time

1 glass of red wine, almost empty

6 classic cars, beautifully restored, parked in the barn

8 interesting rocks lined up on the porch railing

2 clematis twining in the trellis

1 dear little grandbaby smiling at me

75 years; why does my head think 25?

16 friends — another "Girls' Night Out" — followed by 35 minutes of dish washing

13 carpeted stairs

14 trips to the mailbox; will it never arrive?

5 different colors on my favorite pair of shoes

7 days since someone cruelly and violently attacked the orchid given to me by my first love, but 4 little buds give me hope that she'll live to blossom again

4 lips and 2 tongues make a sweet kiss

29 ounces of Gertrude Hawk smidgens eaten in 12 days

7 plays of "Little Romance," by Ingrid Michaelson, in 3 hours

1 dozen lovers in 2 years

3 baskets filled with crocheted squares waiting to be turned into blankets

1 hour set aside for reading a book I've been waiting to get to for the last 8 months

100 first class stamps and 100 postcard stamps but really, who knows what FOREVER means to the Post Office, anyway?

Contributors:

Peggy Adams    

Mara Alper    

Stacie Leone Bornstein

Barbara Cartwright

Dolores Dewbury

Pamela Goddard

Donna Holt

Linda Keeler

Noemi Kraut

Laura LaRosa

Barbara Kane Lewis

Pat Longoria

Deanalís Resto

Maude Rith

Maryam Steele

Charlotte Sweeney

Sylvia Taylor

Lisa Todzia

Anne Wexler

Zee Zahava