Table of Contents Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of Nickel and Dimed Review of Night Shade By Elizabeth Murray Radical Influence: Review of Spoken Word Revolution Redux By Romella D. Kitchens Creative Nonfiction Toiling in the Garden of Memory By Madonna Dries Christensen Poetry Homecoming By Nic Sebastian Maple Syrup Emergency By Paul Carlino Bathroom Visitor By Michael Lee Johnson Fiction A Job Well Done By Catherine Cheek Animal Man By R.B. Trout Watch Over By S.K. Tatiner The Frailty of Perfection By William R. Stoddart Eat Drink and Be Merry By Rebecca Barbush Cover Art "Riot of Flowers" By Dee Rimbaud About the Contributors © 2007, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Kenneth Weiss, Ed.D Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Senior Editor - Patti Kurtz Senior Editor - Neeldhara Misra Copyeditor - Kathy Skaggs Blog Contributing Editor - Maggie Koster Education Blog Contributing Editors - Jordan Wirfs-Brock, Kim Haynes Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/subs.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit VolunteerMatch.

Animal Man By R.B. Trout Sure, I killed her. But it’s been five decades. I tell myself I can’t stand this stupid wallpaper. People see what they want to see. That’s how I strolled into hospitals with a white coat and clipboard and made my way to medical lockers and loaded up on lidocaine or bupivicain, or verset. I always had a huge supply of and need for pentobarbitone sodium. It euthanizes animals, you see. People see what they want, and I know how to play a part. That’s how I walked into university biology departments dropping explosives in their places. That’s how I charmed my way past receptionists, answering services, and personal assistants. I can be what you want me to be. I’m not proud of it, especially not now, not here in this storm. Appearance is nine-tenths of perception, and perception is nine-tenths of reality. Most guards are apathetic and lazy. I give them a “workin’ hard?” or an “everybody behavin’?” and they nod and I walk right by. They smile at me. I’m one of them. Nothing ever happens, so they don’t expect anything to happen. They don’t even imagine I’ve got big blocks of thin explosives under my vest with its shiny badge. You don’t need to be invisible; you just have to look the part. That’s the only invisibility we can have. Countless speeders go about their day with no tickets because cops don’t want any more paperwork. I do my research, I assume the part, I am a ghost. I’ve been many people. I never got questioned, not even by the people who loved me, the people who had the right to question me. I can fool them all, men, women, old, young. People see what they want to see. It’s been five decades, and there’s no statute of limitations on guilt and remorse. Tonight my old man eyes don’t want to see what the roaring plains electrical storm wants to show me. It’s holding something up to the panes of the darkened window. I’m in my living room, all lights off, and I don’t want to see what the storm, with its formless hands, is pressing to the thin glass. I feel faded. Lightning climbs, blue and elastic, the walls of my living room. I pulled the chair up to the big picture window just after the storm started, and now it’s roaring, the freight train two-thousand pounds of water per minute kind of roaring. The stupid wallpaper all over the walls with the flowers? - it was my wife’s idea. She wanted it, and now after all these years, I’ve convinced myself to finally admit I like it too. She’s dead. But I didn’t kill her. Not her. It seems like everybody I ever knew is dead. I think of what their bones must look like…smell like. I want to dig them up sometimes. It’s late, and I should go to sleep, and I don’t want to see. I can’t sleep again. Outside the window, in the fat pregnant dark, the rain that makes it across the covered porch sprays on the window, small streams are running downward in lighter branching tributaries like slow motion lightning strikes in liquid, to the ground, to the earth, to be welcomed back. I feel faded. ¡Por favor, no me mate! This is what she had begged. Don’t kill me, please! What did I know? It was fifty years ago, and I was only twenty-two. ¡No me mate! Her accented English was like old music, like it was worth something. The room is darkened, but the phosphesent lightning paints the stupid flower wallpaper white and blue and gray. ¡No me mate! The furniture looks like hulking cars seen from a quarter mile away. The maroon shag carpet is black and feels soft under my old man’s feet. Lightning flashes again, and the big painting on the wall lights up and vanishes. ¡No me mate! I can close my eyes and I’m not old anymore. I can get out of this growing prison and go back to the days, the days of sun and sand. I used to be a marine biologist who bombed things for the environment and animals. Remember me? Once upon an ancient time, before the Internet and women’s rights and veneer teeth, I was a twenty year old who picked up flamenco dancers in Spanish bars. Later I was even a minor celebrity who appeared on cable network talk shows, news shows, and in the New York Times. Young, smart, pissed and influential the magazines called me. People were concerned I was building an army. No talk shows calling now. These days I know words like Melanoma. Carcinoma. Inoperable brain tumor. I know the cerebellum like the back of my hand. Did you know the Cerebellum is the second largest area of the brain and consists of two hemispheres connected by the vermis? I didn’t either, for most of my life, when I was lucky like you. You see, the vermis connects the brain stem and together with the thalamus and cerebrum, it controls skilled muscular coordination, including gait and articulation. Isn’t that nice? Look at those words. Gait and articulation. Very logical, clinical, and precise. It means fucking walking and talking, that’s what it means. And those are some of the Cerebellum’s big jobs. You see, now I know all kinds of things. I know I’m not twenty anymore, I know what no me mate means in Spanish, and I know that if you have to get a brain tumor, you really don’t want to get a malignant astrocytoma. I’ve traded in youth for falling age and one of the perks that came in the bargain is the knowledge that high-grade astrocytomas have a tendency to spread into surrounding tissues (invasiveness is the clinical term) which makes them difficult to completely remove them during surgery. Of course, if yours has lodged deeply enough into the cerebellum, right near the thalamus, like mine has, you know words like inoperable, and you don’t even have to bother with the pesky surgery. Lucky guy, I am. I see doctors who specialize in Neurological Oncology and their receptionists, as young as flowers in spring winds, give me glassy smiles and look away. I remember that C-4 feels like play dough that’s been left out in the sun. I remember my doctor. “You really need to be seen weekly at this point. Or at least biweekly.” His blond hair is lush and askew. “This progression is rapid, and you need to be seen by me.” “The outcome is fixed?” I asked. “In the majority of these cases, when the tumor reaches…” I cocked my head and raised an eyebrow. “…yes, it’s fixed.” He said. “There is no hope?” I asked. The clock ticked in the silence between our words and told all the story I needed. “There is always hope,” he said. I sat there on my frail bones and veiny skin with my ass on the rice paper and he stood there, just in from a run, veins standing out in the hairy forearms, whites of the eyes the perfect blue-white of perfect health. “Now that, doctor, that’s a breakthrough.” I dressed and left. I haven’t seen him in months. He’s probably thirty-one. When I was thirty-one, I was visiting the finest schools in the world. Columbia University, Harvard, Yale Medical. We got them all, one way or the other. Like I said, you might have read about me in the papers, back when papers weren’t bullshit. San Diego State University lost a few hundred thousand dollars in medical research equipment. Cambridge, Oxford, I always liked the English countryside. Prague, Spain. Spain. More lightning comes in followed by a huge thunderclap. The house, my two-bedroom house in the middle of the Great American Plains, shakes like someone picks it up by the foundation and drops it. ¡Por Favor! Necisito vivir. Tengo ninos, she had pleaded with me. It was the first time we had gone to Spain. I couldn’t help her. There was no way, no time. Time. What a joke. But up here in the present, with the lightning and tumors, the rain and the waiting, the clock on the wall is drowned out by the steady roaring on the tin roof. Can’t hear it, but I know it’s there. It’s always there. Outside, the rain falls on the sodden dirt and replenishes the cycle of the Earth. I know it’s there, too. Young men look to the sky and old men can’t stop staring at the ground. I take a sip of the chocolate milk, and it is tepid. Anything else makes me crap fire these days. Warm, thick milk runs down my old geezer’s esophagus, and I think about the Spanish woman. She is what the storm is holding up to the thin, vibrating glass of my front windows. Doesn’t this storm know I used to be practically famous? I used to inspire people? I see her at night during storms like this one. She flits around my room and won’t leave me alone. You could have done something, she says in her old music accent, speaking English in death. There was time to try something. And then the sobbing. Often, neurological tumors deep in the cerebellum can cause hallucinations. They told me this, but it doesn’t help. I don’t feel better about it. NYU medical school used to have a very active vivisection lab. Vivisection is when animals are butchered in experiments to get big fat government grants for academics to put on their resumes. They tell you it’s for medical research, but surely you don’t buy that. I didn’t. That’s why I went to Northwestern with our team. We went there with coils of wire and big putty blocks of C-4. And that’s not all. There was UC Berkley, UC Irvine, and UC Santa Cruz. A veritable tour of California. The University of Georgia, Brown, Vermont, UMASS, Boston Fucking College. They all had their big ideas and stray cats and surrendered dogs. My last pet died two years ago, and I miss him like hell. I got him as a gift when he was a two-year-old mutt liberated from a fine New England private university’s lab. When he died, he was almost sixteen. More thunder, the rain increases, and great forks of lightning shoot deep into the earth, under the heavy silent brown world of worms, anaerobic bacteria, and graves. Ozone floats across the land and into my dark living room. Old Argos, sixteen years. Oh no, I quit firebombing labs a long time ago, after my several stints prison for ecoterrorism (remember my bearded face on Larry King Live?), but a young revolutionary gave Argos to me after they freed him from his fate. I’m well known in that certain circle. Like you’ve probably heard of me. My attention wavers back to the storm and the cascading whirlwinds and aquadervishes being enacted just out my window, on my roof, and my tumored mind. They say I won’t notice serious motor impairment for another six months if I’m lucky. But imagine living with a little time bomb monster in your head. Imagine those horrible tentacles branching out from the tumor like some resilient moving octopus. Imagine them snaking in and out and through your one-of-a-kind, precious, irreplaceable brain meat. You would be very aware of clocks, like the darkened one on my wall I can’t hear but can hear. It took me precisely one month to come to terms with my inoperable friend. The truth is we all have our own little time bombs, ticking away. You have one too. Might not be a tumor, but the clock you can’t hear is ticking. That’s what makes us live. That’s what makes us laugh. The doctor says there’s always hope. Heavy rain is immediate; we all turn to face the wind. The rain in Spain was like this. No me mate. You see, our teams didn’t only do the United States and England. We bombed our way through Europe’s finest animal labs as well. The first and only time I was in Spain was on a mission. We had to go to a grand old school, the first school in Europe, and take care of some unchecked hatred. The rain is pouring off my porch in great white sheets reflecting light with no source. I hate to hear that school’s name. It’s where I picked up my Latina ghost that runs around my room at night. Its name even sounds the sibilant anthroporphism of rain. Salamanca. Here in the darkness, approaching my mid-seventies and death at precisely the same rate of speed, it’s easy to close the eyes and picture 1967. I see the mirrors of my youth. Mirrors on the wall and smaller mirrors on record jackets. If you could have seen my eyes back then, you would have seen someone who was pissed. Someone who had taken enough. Someone who was going to change the world. Fast forward twenty years and you would see someone who wanted the world to change him. My youth was spent in deep woods beside streams, outcroppings of rock, and the call of birds. Things scurried through underbrush, I learned all about explosives in the Marine Corps, got out and learned about animal rights groups that actually did something besides talk, parade celebrities around, and raise money. Action. Animals were dying when I was young, and I did my part to even the score. Animals are dying now. The rain sounds like snakes on my roof, or maybe marbles, and a lightning volley brighter and longer than any before slides around my carpet, walls, and luminesces across the ceiling. The wind finds a loose shingle and starts pounding out uneven rhythms somewhere above my head and to the left. The clacking in the dark takes me there. Clack. The complicated rhythm of the loose shingle and the never-ending rain picks me up and I’m there. I don’t want to be there. I’ve been trying to stay away for fifty years. The thin windows. My wife is gone. She used to help me. God we were young once. The last one, my old dog Argos is two years dead. I’m alone in the dark and that arrhythmic beating like a black heart takes me to the smoky air, the blue night, the Mediterranean. I shut my rheumy eyes and try to concentrate on the thunderstorm rolling across the plains outside my house like the ages. It doesn’t work. That sound takes me there. The bar was crowded, typical of a Salamanca flamenco bar on a Saturday night. The troupe was stomping through blazing guitar and dance numbers and suddenly the music stopped. After applause and moments of motionlessness, three, perfect, horrible notes on the Spanish guitar rang from the guitarist’s fingers and slid down the walls signaling the beginning of the petenera. The dancer was lithe, dark, and covered in sweat. I felt anticipation, immediacy. I knew this was important. Her gypsy clothes were clinging to her body. Three more notes, the last one lower this time. The singularity of time and space and eons of human dreams and those three notes. The bar was clogged with smoke and Spaniards and no one moved. We were too transfixed, too terrified by her duende to move, to breathe. The dancer glanced up on the last of three more, slower notes, and the world stopped. I was three tables back, and when she glanced up our stares fused. She pulled one arm skyward, slowly, like Michelangelo’s ceiling, like Gauguin’s insanity. Without dropping her gaze, she stomped her right foot.Clack. She blinked those huge war-like almond eyes. Again, Clack. Five notes in rapid succession from the seated guitarist. Clack, Clack. Faster. The complex rhythm with the counterpoint of the simple note processions and the stomps was mathematical and beyond me, beyond the stars, beyond everything. Three notes. Clack. Four notes, faster. Clack-Clackity, Clack-Clackity. Math being controlled and contained and unleashed on plywood Spanish floor. Same sequence again. Again. Faster. My colleagues and I were on business in Salamanca, Spain. The next night we were conducting a mission on the oldest university in Europe who harbored one of the most active animal experimentation programs in Europe. That was the next night, but that night, at that moment, the world was stopped and I was listening to the Clack, Clackity-Clackity-Clack of the dancer’s mathematical duende and the particular tragedy of a lone flamenco guitar. Throughout the dance, our eyes would meet across the room, across the tops of the red-glass-sheathed table candles, across the thick smoke, and I would burn. As I watched the sinewy Spanish dancer, paradigms rearranged and I didn’t imagine she would haunt my mind during thunderstorms. No me mate, she had said, the very next night. A long time ago, just after I turned twenty, I had one of those days. You know the ones, sixty degrees, breeze. Wind chimes. I rode my bike, way out in the trails near where I was living and sat on a stump. Behind me were deep woods heavy with coniferous cedars, hues of canoe birches and the human heart. Before me was a gently sloping hill with tall pines, maples, and low young saucer magnolias standing sentinel around an opening. The grey hills were in the distance getting greyer with distance. The sun illuminated the small triangle patterns that make up the skin of my left hand. Look close enough and you’ll see yours. Leaves dangled in the steam engine wind and dropped sunlight off the undersides. It was one of those days. An unknown metallic banging in the distance reminding me progress wasn’t too far away and something had to be done about it. This was one of those days. You know, days before brain tumors lodged deep in the cerebellum, days before the induction of “inoperable” to the daily vocabulary. My uncle had a brain tumor that changed his life forever, but at twenty I didn’t think about my elliptical head ever playing host to one of those time bomb monsters. On this day, death and old man’s aches were far away. Then, I looked at the sky. I sat on the stump and had no foreknowledge of my Latina ghost, my fantasma español. I was in college studying ecology and marine biology. My world was forest preserves, Eastern Spinner Dolphins, and Beluga Whales, not diseased brain meat under siege. I had mountain biked up there in the spearmint mountain air to match my bike, sat on the stump, and took in the world. I could feel then. Now, I feel faded. I took in the trees and the left slanting spider webs of shadows across the brown, acorn-strewn ground. I could feel the dimes of white sunlight on the dark green leaves of low bushes. Heard the whippoorwill off to my right, other bird calls and answers, the silent sunlight, the soft give of the sand-colored pine needle carpet the color of ancient Pylos. I could feel the swirling patterns of wind through boughs, branches, bending appendages of the great live oaks. I was just about to graduate from harmless PETA to a more “active” group, and I had never witnessed the isolated beauty of the dance of Andalusia. Nothing existed; all was now. That was then. Now the rain is intensifying. Montana thunderstorms should have their own family and genus. The falling water mocks me and reminds me of the pain I’ve caused. “You had them all fooled,” it says. “High and mighty liar,” it howls from the sky, across Great Plains, over ponds with complete silence and dreaming coy fish only sixteen inches below the surface, across my property, up my stairs and through my eaves. I try to shut my eyes, but the thunder forces them open, pries them open with a cacophony of the end of time, or at least the end of mine. My retinas with their mild cataracts are stunned when a bolt hits my property a hundred feet from the house. “You can’t run from me,” the storm says. The anger of Zeus. The wrath of Achilles. Ball lightning skitters across the yard and I know if I keep thinking about it, those damn balls will hone in on my thoughts and explode through my window. But it ends before the thought does. I’ll always be afraid of ball lightning. The shingle still clacks up there in the tempest and my black heart beats irregularly. “I’m coming for you,” the darkness whispered through the blinds. I hear it. Flamenco heels on plywood. The ticking of the clock. The rotting bones of Argos buried out near his beloved Douglas Fir. We prop our sanity up on crutches of self-belief. Does it matter if that belief is a lie? Take the crutch of self-belief away and watch some old poor fool fall on his face. Watch him break, bleed, and sink into the floor. When something makes you peel off those ready made masks, the Prufrock good-time masks, you’re left with what you really are. Maybe a liar, or a drug addict, or a date rapist. Or a murderer. The storm is out of control. I saw my face for the first time in years today, my real face minus the pretty mask. This storm is showing me with its blue energy and ululant thunder. Now it’s pressing something else against the window. Maybe a silhouette? And that damn shingle. Clackity-Clackity Clack. Three somber nylon stringed notes packed with innocence, growth, lies, death, and rebirth. Three notes. Clack. My layers are pulled back, my disguises abandoned on the shag carpet in the dark. My real face, not the caring husband face, or the media darling hero for the animals face, or my nice, happy and adjusted face, is here in the dark. Exposed. Open. Being felt by inky blackness and sporadic blue light. Finally, after all these years, here I am. I thought finding yourself was supposed to be a good thing. I’m finally honest, and no one’s left to see. Parents? Dead. Wife? Dead. Brother? Dead. Best friend? Worse than dead and rotting in a nursing home. Ever faithful pooch…dead. They say rebuilding is possible after revelation and coming clean. But here I am, in the wine-dark storm with mask after mask crumpled on the ground, real face with slightly protruding horns revealed, black heart laid bare, and no one is here to see. No one here to rebuild for. I think of their bones after all these years. How they must be so still. I totter to the windows after getting up and feeling my knees grind glass in the joints, intending to open both of the big tall windows. Before I do, I notice the ghost image of a person the night is pressing against the window. It’s me. With its formless hands, the night is holding my reflection, horns and all, up to the windows. The windows are big and nice, and I throw them up in their frames. My dead wife liked a lot of light in the main room. I’m almost knocked back by the wind and spray that immediately roars in my living room with its stupid wallpaper. The wind rockets around the room and I feel spray on my face and chest. I don’t feel much anymore. I thought finding yourself was supposed to be a good thing. The wind is howling. I sit back on the couch and see the dark curtains abandoning themselves to the wind, to the torment, not even thinking about what they might want to do. Good, bad, Hell or high water, they don’t care. Those damn curtains! Amazed, I look at the curtains and laugh. It sounds like someone having their throat sawed open with a dull knife. 00:45 No me mate. Shock. Confusion. Is it the same girl from last night, I wondered. I was in black and running a final check on Salamanca’s vivisection lab. I wired it myself and knew it would take at least two minutes to get back and stop the automated countdown. This wasn’t simple plastics, this was fully funded state of the art, highly organized destruction. We had a team of thirty on this particular job, were past the point of return, and I knew it. Me, I used to walk through the labs until thirty seconds were left and then run the hell out of them. It was my way of courting death, my way of feeling alive with so many animals dying day after day after day. I saw her tied to the far wall in complex, heavy chains. Her lab badge read “Dr. Elena Morealis, Directora.” A vivisector, and a very infamous one at that. She was on our top ten most cruel list so of course I knew the director’s name, but I had never seen her. I also didn’t know that Dr. Morealis earned spare money by pursuing her passion with a flamenco troupe about once a month. I read that later, after all this was over, in the papers. But it clicked in my then tumorless brain that I had watched her dance last night, even fell in love with her a little bit. This pondering brought the readout on my watch down to 00:30. “You’re the dancer.” This wasn’t a question. She looked confused and then said, “Yes, flamenco is my pastime. Please. You have to stop this. That other man said he was doing this for the animals. I know of you and your people. We can reach a compromise.” I didn’t say anything. Cedar or Ted or Al would have said something about no compromise and complete freedom for all animals, turned and walked out. “I’ll stop researching. I’ll stop them.” The whites of her eyes were lined with red, her collarbones desperate and thin. Her voice tighter. “Listen, I have children.” Her voice sounded like it was shredding in her throat. She screamed, shaking in her chair, veins at the point of rupture. “I have children you monster. How can you take life to save life?” Her voice broke off into a shrill scream. Still, I stood there. 00:21 I got on the walkie and shouted, “Got a live one here. Kill the explosives,” even though I knew there was no time. Stay with her, a voice said in my head. Stay with the directora. The voice crackled back full of treble and the end. “No can do. That’s Dr. Morealis, the Josef Mengele of vivisectors. She’s gotta go. Get the hell out,” the British voice said. I protested. I was ignored. 00:15 “Do something,” she said. She looked at me from dark brown eyes wide with the knowledge of her end. I thought about all that long, talented, sinewy flesh, that curvy girl shape and five hundred pounds of various explosives. I thought of her children playing in the sun or in day care. “Do something!” The universe spiraled down, the walls started breathing, my vision reduced to a long tunnel fixed on her quivering form, the quivering small form of a Mother. “Do something or you will always remember this.” I was silent. “Murderer!” She spat at me, Latina spirit unbroken in the face of doom. Snot was running from her left nostril and her eyes were bloodshot. “No… me… mate!” She screamed. It sounded like she was dying. A scream like that can end the world. A good portion of the white of her left eye suddenly went bright red and she kept screaming. I did something. 00:08 I turned and ran. I was caught in the blast radius. I almost died because my coworkers refused to take me to a hospital until everyone got changed and we got to France. I was there for a week and it seemed to constantly rain. Like now. We never got caught for the Salamanca bombing, though everyone knew it was our organization. It made European headlines for weeks. She was so beautiful, young, and intelligent, various papers would say. The public wasn’t used to the thought of a young woman, not even a young woman who tortured animals to death, being reduced to flying shreds of blood, tissue and bone. It shook the continent. The public was outraged. I was never attached to that certain attack. After Salamanca, I stopped caring about getting caught. I got bolder and more reckless and did a total of thirteen years in jail over four different stints. The day I got released after three years in prison I went to an upscale furrier in Manhattan and trashed his coats, his store, and his face. I broke both of his arms and went back to jail for another two years. I was on 20-20. You probably saw me. People called me, this mask-less failure in the dark storm, they called me a hero, an animal liberator, a kind-hearted idealist. Or they called me a naïve utopist, whatever that means. People sent me cards and notes for decades. Some saw me as their partner, a co-conspirator and a like-minded mentor. They saw what they wanted to see. They sent me bombing plans, blue prints, and information on animal abuse. I was their symbol. That’s the problem with being somebody’s symbol; you can never live up to their idea, their perfect vision. You will always fall off that pedestal. Symbols get forgotten due to a lack of substance. Young men with beards tried to recruit me for projects. People wanted to meet me, marry me, or kill me. Death threats came too, by the truckload. They think they know me. Some see me as a leader, a beginning, an illuminated version of themselves. I went to jail, I freed animals, I brought the torture of animals into the public’s frontal lobe. Fate brought an inoperable monster into my cerebellum. Some call me a beacon, a light, a savior even. I am a killer of Mothers. They invent me and want me to address them in the familiar. I am their invention, and they need their invention to work. They know these ripped and torn masks of yesteryear lying on my floor with the lightning, wind, and rain. The one with the hero beard. The one with the white, straight teeth. They can’t see my limited time, my dead dog under his big Fir, this stupid wallpaper. They can’t see the Mother’s small delicate collarbones under a thin veil of skin. Do they know there’s no one left to rebuild for? I want to dig up all their bones, all those people I loved. I want all their bones so I can make a casket out of them. I want to lie inside them, let them cradle me, and laugh my slit-throat laugh. No, the people who admire me, they don’t admire me. They can’t feel the wind rushing through these windows or share my fear of ball lightning. They know what they saw on 60 minutes, 20-20, Oprah Winfrey. They can’t see the parts of my body rotting with old age. History remembers Che in the beret with the determined look on his face. It doesn’t remember him being tortured in the jungle, feet hacked off. They can’t know I lie face down on my wife’s grave and scream how sorry I am until my throat bleeds and I’m escorted out of the graveyard by police. They know what they saw in the papers, the beard, the tan lean body, the piercing blue eyes ready to change the world, ready to force the world to change. They don’t feel this plains thunder storm or see these curtains silhouetted by the lightning and abandoning themselves to the will of the wind for better or worse, for salvation or damnation. Either one is fine. They can’t see these eyes the color of dead fish. They can’t see these horns.