Breadcrumb #517

GABRIELLA EVERGREEN

It was the summer we took the RV to a campground in Florida
(or maybe it was Vermont)

We sat in the back, me and my two brothers
where Andrew had once dropped a McDonald’s cheeseburger between the seats
I remember the sound of your shouts
and your fists coming down on his head
but anyway,
We were watching a VHS tape of Disney’s Robin Hood when the crash happened
We didn’t notice until the car was spinning and flipping
(at least we remember it flipping)
and landed off the side of the highway
the overhead compartments spilled out
a butter cookie tin full of crayons
rained down on us
a container of milk shattered on Nick’s head (he still has the scar)
Your miniature motorcycle fell against mom’s leg
marking it black and blue
she always hated that bike it was black and yellow and heavy
We don’t know what caused the crash (your anger?)
or what happened after (your anger)
I just remember the campground once we got there
the way the light from the lanterns and campfires of scattered tents
half-illuminated the woods
as we walked through the thick trees
shining flashlights on roots and stumps
looking for the source of the bullfrog’s croaks
but only finding a spot where some kid
had spilled a bowl of Froot Loops
which glowed in a puddle of graying milk
and the sound of a man playing guitar
singing Puff the Magic Dragon

We didn’t know that mom never wanted you to get the rental car or to finish the trip
how unhappy she must have been the whole time
We can’t really be sure
what the bruises
were ever from

• • •

Breadcrumb #516

MICHAEL TAGER

He might as well be 
a poor

None of his reruns play on any station
He knows because this time share
Always has power
And the waves outside the floor-to-ceiling windows
Never cease their chatter
So he plays the TV endlessly
Swipes left on phantom phone
Skip-skip-skipping
Swipe-swipe-swiping
Skip-skip-skipping channels
It’s endless being dead
And the mirror is only empty space
He just wants to see the apple face
that minted his fortune
one last time
on his way out
whenever that is

Please. Come and knock.
Please. Come and knock. 

• • •

Breadcrumb #515

NANCY HIGHTOWER

There’s a school with clocks 
that tell yesterday's time, 

traps girls with perfectly drawn 
eyebrows in the dusk of their iPhones.

In a bank five women kneel as if
in prayer while a gunman counts 

backwards to tomorrow’s news 
when he’ll be seen as a prophet, 

bold as Moses, who understood that forty years 
is nothing when milking the desert for honey, 

like the rock star who fucked 
kids and called it love,

like the politician who painted 
his china bone face black for a party, 

argued that it’s zero sum game 
once you’ve made it to the promised land

where every sunrise is a lie,
every sunset, a hemorrhaged memory

of caged children, their skin 
stretched thin as soap.

• • •

Breadcrumb #514

MARJORIE TESSER

Up on deck there’s a saline breeze and milky stars and endless ocean, shiny and black and moving like synchronized seals under the moon.

The cruise had been booked by my husband, though I’d barely gotten used to thinking of him as that. We’d gone from our first meeting at the conference to messaging to weekends to wedding, and from wedding to ship, friends and family seeing us off with bubbles instead of rice, which is said to harm the birds. How had I agreed to this?

The ship is our home away from home, our haven, our womb, our first-world vehicle for an arms-length tour of the third. Several days out of port, several more till the next, and then again to be herded down the gangplank to lie, flaccid and pinking, on gravelly beaches, or drift mindlessly in and out of overpriced shops to dicker over tourist trinkets. On board we are scheduled like children; steered, managed, and cajoled to participate in games, lessons, sports, and amateur theatrics. There are plenty of nap times—around the pool, on deck, where the ever-present thrum of engine lulls me to a drowsy stupor.

Everywhere, at all times, there are people. And, of course, my new husband ever at my side. The cabin is tight quarters. If I say I’ll take a walk or go work out or sit on deck and read, he jumps up and comes with. I book a massage; he says great and changes it to a couples one. I’d thought I’d known it would be different but hadn’t counted on this constant togetherness. Yet worse, he keeps trying to draw others into our ambit—at dinner, full of bonhomie, he invites all and sundry to sit with us, at the pool, he hectors me off my solitary float to join in a game of water volleyball, in the lounge, he badgers me to join in the singing, while he plays old show tunes on the piano for a jolly throng. After much too much alcohol and rich, heavy, yet somehow unsatisfying foods that leave me logy and overly full, I find myself again in our small cabin, enclosed in his embrace. He’s currently crashed out in the stateroom, satiated after yet another round of our marital intimacies. I slither from under the heavy arm, dress, slip out.

Outside there’s a night breeze that’s cool but hints of heat, like the breaths you sneak when you’re close to a person you crave, but can’t show it; little sips. I wander until I find the one uninhabited area of the ship, just deck, stars, and a lifeboat hulking under its tarp. A corner of the tarp is loose. “Not a bad place to hide,” I think, and then hear approaching steps. My husband? Not that awful woman from the lounge? I quickly climb, rubber soles gaining purchase on its side. I lift the loosened tarp and lower myself into the lifeboat. Like Alice going down the rabbit hole, or the children in books who, by fluke, luck, or happenstance, enter a mysterious portal to a magic world of novelty, adventure, and danger, without a look back I jump into the lifeboat. The same way Jack climbed the miraculous beanstalk, quickly, without much thought, mainly because it has appeared.

“ On board we are scheduled like children; steered, managed, and cajoled to participate in games, lessons, sports, and amateur theatrics.”

Inside is dark, with just the lifted corner of the tarp admitting a pale haze, the clouded solution of night and deck lights, moon and stars. I sink to the floor of the boat, lean back and slowly let out breath. There’s a spark the second before I hear a striking match and then an orange glow of cigarette end, the sharp tang of smoke.

“Sorry,” I mutter, and make for the opening in the tarp.

“Don’t leave,” a voice. Another match flickers; he holds it before his face—a young man. The flame burns down, nearly to his pale fingertips. I lean and blow it out, conscious of my breath on his skin.

I don’t like cigarette smoke, but his is somehow nostalgic of high school, shared illicit smokes in the bathroom, in the dark corners of the playground. He was pale as a rabbit with hair black as crow. Hiding or holing up, here in the dark alone.

I am polite. “I’ll go if you hoped to be alone.”

“I wasn’t.” He drags; exhales. “Hoping.”

Something of the unworldly about him. Pale and slender, but strong underneath, sinewy. Luminous. Hair black as the night ocean. Faint violet sleepless half-circles under deep-set eyes. His voice a light tenor, hypnotic.

“Then why...”

“This is the safest place. From the bores, the authorities. From pirates, Ninjas, aliens, love. Disaster.”

“Have you been...imbibing?” I ask delicately.

He barks a quick laugh. “Did you know where the Coast Guard has its Lifeboat Training School? It’s called Cape Disappointment.” I think I understand.

Glints of moonlight spark the centers of his eyes with little flames. The lifeboat is a satellite, suspended, its own world.

There’s a dankness in the air and I shiver. I remember the warm, bright lounge, my husband’s cozy bed. “Maybe I should go.” Footsteps outside, close.

A moment—freeze frame, a still second.

The ocean is a chameleon—pearl grey in the morning, bottle green when frosted with foam in the afternoon, shiny black at night. The ocean is a dissembler. It seems as if solely water but underneath teems with creatures bizarre, alien, dangerous, like the seemingly kind neighbor who turns out to have a secret life. There are some who find the ocean peaceful, but others accuse it of being deceptive, passive aggressive. The ocean connects home with the places we go. It is answerable to only the moon.

Once activated, the mechanism begins to lift the tarp and to lower the lifeboat, which after a few moments dips, then buoys in the inky sea, bobbing gently in the wake of the big ship gliding steadily on, lights moving on its tiers of increasingly distant decks.

• • •

Breadcrumb #513

CHLOE CRAWFORD LA VADA

I never think of you these days, down in the Beneath
where the sun cannot remind me – where the only light
that shines dazzles mistily from a disco-ball moon. 

Here, I wear the shadows like silk. I skinny-dip in the
River Lethe, the dead bumping against me like buoys,
forgetting you more and more with each lick of the waves. 

My midnight metropolis glows like a deep-sea fish,
nestled in the lowest dark of the Great Downstairs, where
everyone sees my true face, where I am proudly known as Queen. 

But, spring ruptures through winter’s rime and ruins
the oblivion of a peaceful, perpetual neon-night; it knows
that life must move on in its slaughter of cycles and seasons. 

In your world Above, beauty melts from my face like frost;
my real self withers, a bone-flower blooming in reverse,
unsewn from hearing the whispers of a name dead as dust. 

There, all I have buried returns to haunt me; even your mirrors
show a stranger with only the vaguest trace of me. I dream
of the day when the daffodils die and autumn claws ever closer.

 I wait for the leaves to wilt like lies, wait for the earth
to quiver and crack apart. I wait for the black, toothless mouth
of the ground to split wide and swallow me whole.

 Every roadmap of scars brings me back to a city, a cemetery,
where we lay in our graves - where everyone died long ago
in the eyes of our parents, our families, our friends.

• • •