Breadcrumb #328

DAVID KLASOVSKY

Shall I build you a castle by the lake?
Call my old seneschal out of retirement
to order your household?
Down from the mountains-
from the village of his fathers
he'll come, and come smiling

Each of my barons shall send
a daughter to attend thee-
Only the prettiest, most graceful, or clever
I'll tell them.

Then some fine spring morning
when the last frost has lifted,
across the dark moorland
dividing our kingdoms,
myself, I'll come riding

Your bare-pated servant!
I'll step the garden path ginger-
with a basket of garlands-
to ask you out walking

• • •

Breadcrumb #327

AD TENN

They saw each other in the dark. Their wings as wreaths for vows,
a felled tree turned down by a hurricane posed ready
to marry them — their Dance reels like the timbre of empty bottles of cider
and swallows whole as if the darkness knows the shadows of the two lovers
as one.

A flight pattern the color of pomegranates against the heart saddles
(these are below the throat) of the pair grows as she watches him
spin for her, attempt to spell her into the natural equation of what makes
their genes burn, their feathers flutter.

They’ll keep dancing over and over the widths of street
to street, hurtling bravely as we all do
into each other.

• • •

Breadcrumb #326

JOANNA BETTELHEIM

If she were to believe such modern-day classics as Dawson’s Creek, my mother might have expected, at some point in my teenage years, to catch me in bed with a boyfriend. Neither of us would have guessed I would be found with a squirrel.

    Two nights before, my mother had pried a hole into the wall of her bedroom to release a squirrel that had made its way through a hole in the roof and scuttled and scratched his way down. This interrupted her HGTV viewing and had to be stopped. I returned the next day from a sleepover. I should have been drinking illicitly at a party in an abandoned factory like the cool kids, but instead, my friends and I were marathoning Pretear, a 13-episode anime series that reimagined Snow White. She showed me the cardboard patch covering the hole beside her nightstand.

    I returned home from school Monday afternoon ready to complete my Calculus homework while snacking on store brand Goldfish crackers and watching reruns of M*A*S*H*. But the squirrel had returned. Back through the roof, he had wound through the walls and easily broke through the cardboard reinforcements. I found him clinging to the blinds of my mother’s bedroom window.

    I closed the door. In my haze, I could barely hear the jocular camaraderie of Captains Pierce and Honeycutt. Outside, I wrestled the screens off of the window. When I returned to my mother’s bedroom, the squirrel had hidden himself somewhere. Tip-toeing to the window, I pulled up the blinds, opened the window, and retreated. By the time my mother returned home from work, all trace of the squirrel was gone. We assumed he had found his way out the window.

“When I returned to my mother’s bedroom, the squirrel had hidden himself somewhere.”

    I went to bed promptly at 10:30. At some point in my childhood, the parent-mandated bedtime became my own self-enforced habit for school nights. I allowed myself no exceptions. My mother kissed me goodnight at the side of my bed as I set my glasses aside. Glasses have been my constant companion since I failed the eye test in elementary school. Without them, I can’t read the big “E” at the top of the chart. My only failing grade.

    As my head set against the pillow and my body began to relax into its sleeping repose, a vaguely brown blur shot out from underneath it and past my face.

    I grasped for my glasses. He was sitting at the end of my bed.

    My mother, rushing back, shut the door and instructed me to open my window, which had no screen. We spent the next 30 minutes attempting to coax the squirrel into the dark night of our backyard. We adopted tense Sumo-wrestling style postures, which were quickly abandoned to avoid actual contact when the squirrel scampered in the wrong direction. We finally made progress when we borrowed some food from Robin, my cat, who looked on only vaguely concerned from the living room. Following a trail of dry meat-flavored tidbits, the squirrel finally stepped out nonchalantly. I promptly slammed the window shut behind him.

    Crawling back into bed, I tried not to think about how the squirrel might have passed the time between the afternoon and the night’s climax. The next day, I found casual ways to draw the conversation towards my interesting interlude with the squirrel. My mother continues to buy me random knick-knacks with squirrels on them to this day. We all survived the infamous squirrel incident. All except my hot water bottle bunny, who lost his pink plastic nose to the invader.

• • •

Breadcrumb #325

SAHINA JEROME

His fingers astounded me

His fingers played me better than my ex,

In fact

His fingers played me to the rolling hills,

To rollercoasters,

To just eyes rolled

In the back of my head --

A grin on my mouth

A grin down south.

A grin.

I saw the brightest of colors

I heard the sharpest of sounds

I felt light;

Spellbound.

Felt my heart and every pound.

God was like, "Yo, what the fuck?"
Priorities forgotten:

Bills huh? Loans who? Rent what?

With his hands, he blessed me

Though my body was his to worship

Like a memorized prayer

He knew me better than what he could understand.

• • •

Breadcrumb #324

CHRISTINE QUATTRO

When my parents started mailing me pieces of my childhood, they came back broken. Picture frames with shattered glass, surrounded by leaking snow globes that still played White Christmas, small shards of sparkling glass cutting deeply into the fibers of 1980s Kodak matte prints. A small child, underwater. Eyes open, paddling. Red polka dot swim suit on both the child submerged and the child in the reflection on the underside of the waves. A swim school instructor had the idea to photograph children mid stroke in 8 feet of water. I swam the length of the pool over and over for him to get the best shot. Each time I breached, I went back under with my cheeks puffed and lips pursed to preserve my air supply. 

    There are things that make it. My first dogs, Jack and Russell. Two small ceramic dogs from a set of what surely was an elderly woman's hobbyist collection. 1994 stamped into their bellies. We could not have the graceful German Shepard of my father’s childhood and we certainly couldn't have the "Dog— any breed ok" that appeared as number one on every Dear Santa letter I penned. So, these were my dogs.  Despite the fact they had to be carried and couldn’t go outside and were constantly on the verge of breaking and being put in the garbage. There is the not-to-scale-Jack Russell, named Jack, with white fur over a light grey mask over his muzzle and eyes. There is to-scale-Golden Retriever, named Russell because he looks like his name might actually be Russell. Three of Jack’s legs have been broken and expertly repaired by my mother or grandfather or whoever was around to super glue. Jack comes back to me wrapped in an old black sock of my father’s.  It has a golden toe and is in the box next to a white gym sock of my father’s that holds Russell. These two socks somehow survived the horrors of my mother’s laundry room and made it to this box to keep these first ceramic canines intact long enough to live in a home with my two real dogs. It's horrible to say Jack and Russell aren't real. It’s horrible to admit that they're just ceramic because all that time on the blue carpet of my bedroom, I pretended they were. By this I mean that I pretended they were enough. 

“It’s horrible to say Jack and Russell aren’t real.”

    So in between the broken picture frame and the leaky Christmas snow globe and the small travel cases from hotels and airplanes that my mom sends because I might have forgotten how to pack my bags for a trip across country I did every year for the first 15 years of my life, and again for the next 15 after that, is a small envelope with twenty Ambien. The Ambien are intact, tucked in between Jack and Russell and the socks my dad left behind or socks that left my dad behind or the socks my father left behind when he left and it was just me, using them to scrub the end of a golf club or a sneaker or polish a spoon.

    I could call and say things broke but inevitably they must know because they packed the box. I don't call though I think of calling because the new pretenses of my father almost killing himself and begrudgingly coming back to life is that we get along and only talk about present problems not past ones. This is a box full of my past that cannot even compare to this now present future I spend all my hours obsessing over. This is a box of sadness and loneliness and small ceramic friends with imaginary personalities. This is a box that shows me that even I knew then what I wanted all along, and that I didn't stop until I got to it.  One day I will have a dog. Maybe even two. One day I’ll leave. Maybe never come back.  Jack's grey mask over his white fur looks like my real dog Gunner’s. Jack is lean and fast and so is she. Russell is big and brooding but gentle, and so is my real dog Cash. Russell has blonde hair and a steady face, and so does Cash. There is no girl figurine in the box except the image of one in a red polka dot swimsuit under water. She opens her eyes wide though the chlorine must burn. She's probably used to it in the way that all swimmers are. She held her eyes open, the instructor told my mother, when all the other kids had theirs closed. I dust the girl off, try to pick the shimmering scales of glass off the surface, run my hand over the cuts in the photo fabric that weren't there before the frame broke on its ill-advised postal voyage. She might have been better off had she stayed on the wall of that room with the blue carpet where I last left her. But maybe, the person who packed her in the box knew that much like the real girl, this one couldn't stay either.

• • •