Just Ice

Published in Texas Journal on Women and the Law

A measure of justice
40 pounds weighed on the public scale
the child's eyes
look down at his heart for mother.
It's Charleston.  1815.
A cup of cool mercy
on the bare backs
dry throats
eyes.

I wonder how, when.
I enter the courthouse from the hot sun,
the mercy of marble.
The line through the
metal detector
where we leave our knives with the guards
and take with us inside
all the forms of fear.

Each new day
a witness raises her hand
metal weights are adjusted
and a line solid and true
plumbs through the floor to the courtroom below,
and the one below that
and that to
the center of the earth;  while we
sit here and scoop with spoons
the mighty mass of the law.

We listen for:  a clear deep tone
look for:  a gesture
of something true, oh
bring me something true.
Line up the cookie jars
at the dining room table
the headless doll
in the mahogany armchair
the recently discovered bottles of vodka,
spinning on the table
with all the spent shells,
your napkins slit into slivers of silk.

Tell me now
what is the exact distance
between this flesh and that?
Measure it precisely, Justice,
in fingers, please,
in car lengths,
paces,
a hundred yards of football fields,
the field of all our possibilities
dissolving like ice
on the hot Carolina auction block
just ice
a trickle of spray paint on the elevator wall.

My toes spread wide
and I push all my bones
into the solid ice
where I now stand.
We must find the words,
get it over with,
make them up
say anything,
before it all melts
the pool of rights and wrongs we fight for today.

The drone of the docket
quiet curses
summer odor of
too many bodies in
too small a space
people with so much nothing
those with too much heart
those without enough.

Every case picks, slices, carves 
what we believe and what we
do not, in the
eyes
dry throat
summer odor of bodies
all the forms of fear.

Give us what is clean and true.
Scoop  marrow from our bones
Let our feet grow plump and pink,
Let them step lightly now
not to be sacrificed

to the cotton gin

the thresher.

The Shawl of Midnight

Published by the Golden Antelope Press, The Shawl of Midnight, is a standalone sequel to My Sisters Made of Light, Jacqueline’s first novel that explored a Pakistani family’s determination to educate women and defend human rights.

The Shawl of Midnight is a coming-of-age story, a family saga, and a hero’s journey set in Pakistan, India, and Kashmir. We pick up the story eighteen years later, following young Nafeesa into the depths of family relationships, surprising changes over time and distance, and how we might discover through our own pressures and actions what we are shaped by--exactly what we are made of, and where home truly is.

Half of the author’s proceeds will go to two humanitarian service organizations, one in Jammu and Kashmir, India and in Lahore, Pakistan.

*E-book is available on Barnes&Noble

Reviews About The Shawl Of Midnight:

“Jacqueline St. Joan writes with the passion of a life-long feminist and the insight of wide experience. She brings to her story what she brought to the law, a conviction that life is full of both struggle and purpose and that grace comes to us when we have no reason to expect it.” -Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“The Shawl of Midnight is a remarkable work. I found myself as immediately taken with this book as I was with its predecessor My Sisters Made of Light. Its depiction of time and place, its evolution of character, are told with such convincing detail that it has the ring of truth. I literally read twenty pages thinking I had turned only one. The Shawl of Midnight is a compelling story that belongs in the annals of literature.” - Harry Maclean, Edgar Award-winning author, In Broad Daylight and The Past is Never Dead: the Trial of James Ford Seale and Mississippi's Struggle for Redemption

“An absorbing, inherently interesting, deftly crafted novel that will have a very special appeal and resonance with women readers, The Shawl of Midnightshowcases author Jacqueline St. Joan's genuine flair for originality, eloquence, and the kind of memorable narrative storytelling style that fully engages the reader's rapt attention from first page to last.” - Midwest Book Review

“St. Joan manages from the first page to draw the reader into this exquisite novel about sisterhood, coming of age and the ways women can cross generations, borders and cultures to weave from the tatters of oppression enduring fabrics of deliverance and justice.” – Susan Greene, the Colorado News Collaborative

“The Shawl of Midnight is a mesmerizing second novel from Jackie St. Joan that takes you into the frightful challenges and drama of gender crisis in Pakistan and India through the experiences of a family we know well from her breakthrough book, My Sisters Made of Light.” – Fawn Germer, author of Hard Won Wisdom and 8 other titles.

“A masterpiece, a finely embroidered story.” – Zahra D. Buttar, Ph.D., College of Southern Nevada, Departments of Political Science, Women’s Studies and Global Studies

“It’s clear that this is a work wrought from lived experience but more than that, St. Joan writes like she’s on a mission from God. The Shawl of Midnight is drenched with the casual details of one who knows the world of her novel intimately and who wants to touch the universal themes. A really timely and wonderful contribution to the human story. ” – Alexandra Fuller, author of Don’t Let’s Go to The Dogs Tonight

Beyond Portia: Women, Law and Literature in the United States

Co-editor (with Annette Bennington McElhiney)

This pioneering anthology presents a multicultural, interdisciplinary collage of women’s experiences with the law by mixing creative and analytical writings about family, abuse, and community in the context of feminist legal and literary theories. Beyond Portia opens with grounding essays in both literary and legal theory, and offers two collections of essays, stories, and poems that focus in turn on law and literature on families, and law and literature on abuse of women. Drawing on the idea that literature by women can offer material richer than the typical case fact pattern used in traditional legal training, the editors show that both literature and literary methods of reading can help articulate otherwise unspoken premises in legal decision-making, bringing them into the open for examination.

Dismantling White Supremacy: The Importance of History and the Role of Neighbors

White people can’t change the story of our collective past, but we can influence the ending. For us to take responsibility for dismantling white supremacy, we must

• Know white history—both collective and personal-- so we understand and are not surprised to learn of its impact on communities of color.

• Explore white privilege-- how we benefit directly or indirectly.

• Own that shameful history. It belongs to us even though we wish we did not

• Disown white supremacy completely. Try to undo the damage it has caused.

A Brief, Incomplete History of White Supremacy in Denver*

Since the arrival of white people in Denver in the 1850s, minorities have suffered, especially Native people whose lands, people, and cultures were and continue to be destroyed.  In Oct. 1864 at Buffalo Springs, a detachment led by Nichols killed Indian women and babies. (In 1987 University of Colorado changed the name of Nichols residence hall to Cheyenne-Arapahoe Hall.  In Dec. at Sand Creek 700 federasoldiers led by Chivington massacred 500-600 Arapaho and Cheyenne men, women and children.  He received widespread support from Denver’s leaders and media.

The Denver Ku Klux Klan era is signified by Mayor’s Stapleton’s tenure, 1923-31 and1935-47 because it was a reign of terror for minorities.  There were hundreds of hooded men marching in the streets, harassment and violence.  West of Denver regular KKK meetings occurred on South Table Mountain, with burning crosses visible, and south of Denver there were weekly rallies near “Kastle” Rock.  Klansmen harassed the Jewish enclave along West Colfax.  They burned crosses on front lawns of black activists, white supporters, blacks who moved to white areas, black professionals and blacks who were business partners with whites.  During this era (1925) Shorter AME Church was destroyed by fire, many believe caused by the KKK.

Racism’s Impact on Denver Neighborhoods, Neighborhood Associations & Schools

The effects of Denver’s KKK era lingered in an aftermath of cultural practices and racist attitudes, particularly related to housing and schools.  As Five Points deteriorated and African-Americans moved east, they risked crossing racial lines—first, Race Street, then Colorado Boulevard, then Park Hill, and Monaco.  Today Denver’s easternmost community retains the name of the mayor who embodied and enabled white opposition to African-Americans. Is it any wonder many feel the slight, the insult, the disregard, the old burn, when they see or hear that name--Stapleton?

• · In 1920 when a black fireman bought a home on Gaylord St., his life was threatened by the Clayton Improvement Association of white homeowners. Then a white mob threatened a black woman who moved to Gaylord Street.

• · In 1921 a black post office clerk’s rental on Gilpin St. was bombed twice.

• · In 1924 black students from Morey Jr. High were barred from swimming classes. Students from Manual Training High School tried to attend a dance for white students. In response, The Denver school board ordered that school social functions be separated. The Park Hill Improvement Association advocated for racially separated schools. In 1927 the Colorado Supreme Court ruled the board’s action unconstitutional.

• · In 1932 blacks tried to integrate Washington Park’s swimming beach, and beat them up in front of white onlookers.

• · Just as mortgage companies and real estate brokers played a role in Denver’s history of racism, so did neighborhood associations. Sometime before 1948 when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down restrictive racial covenants, neighborhood associations, including the Capitol Hill Improvement Association, urged owners restricting sales of their home to whites only.

• · In 1967 the court struck down the restrictions in the Clayton will that had prohibited non-white boys from admission to Clayton College for Boys.

• · In 1969, Keyes vs. School District #1 Denver, a lawsuit challenging de facto segregation in Denver public school, was filed. The U. S. Supreme Court, in * 1973 “compelled by a mountain of evidence,” ordered schools to desegregate, which required busing students due to Denver’s historical practices of “racial steering” in real estate sales and rentals and redlining certain neighborhoods, as well as private restrictive racial covenants.

• · In 1984, as part of their plan to kill prominent Jews, neo-Nazis machine gunned to death Denver radio talk show host Alan Berg.

• · In 1995 the court ended supervision of Denver public school desegregation and busing stopped. In 2017 Denver’s public schools may be even more segregated than they were before court-ordered desegregation.

• · In 1997-98 Skinheads killed a Denver police officer, an African refugee and they paralyzed a white woman who tried to help him.

• · In a one-year period ending 1998, eight African-American workers at Denver area companies discovered nooses planted in their work areas.

White supremacy has always been a part of U.S. history and the ideas have not gone away.  They go underground and simmer in the dark, sensing when they might survive in the light of day.  We remember and honor the lessons of Nazi Germany.  We speak up, even when it is uncomfortable.  It takes courage to live in this world.

Jackie St. Joan is a white woman who has lived in Denver for 46 years.  She experienced extreme racism that tore her own family apart, and speaks here to white people specifically.   Much of the history is derived from “Home-Grown Racism:  Colorado’s Historic Embrace—and Denial—of Equal Opportunity in Higher Education,” by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, University of Colorado Law Review, Vol. 7,  #3 (1999).

Get involved:  Facebook sites: ChangeTheNameStapleton, NE Denver Neighbors for Racial Justice, Indivisibility Denver, Standing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ Denver)

Ghosts in the Writing Field

When I was growing up we had two magazine subscriptions in my house:  Reader's Digest and Arizona Highways.  We were not a literary family;  yet, my mother, who was just a country girl, had been a student with perfect spelling, perfect penmanship, and perfect attendance.  She had memorized perfectly, poem after poem after sing-song poem: 
Shoot if you must this old gray head,
but spare our country's flag!
she would bellow dramatically, her right arm waving above her head.  She sang it seriously and with such passion I was sure that if she ever saw someone threaten to shoot Old Glory, she would happily re-direct a rifle to her heart and die a martyr to the red white and blue.
The gingham dog and the calico cat, 
she'd begin and a weird light would spark in her eye.  To my mother a poem was a workout:  every poetic idea had a gesture to accompany it.  I was only six myself, but I could see how she must have looked at my age, reciting it in the parlor on Sunday for company. 
Half past twelve and what do you think! 
Not one of them had slept a wink! 

Her pointer finger was wagging in the air, and she was winking and rocking. It was a little embarrassing to see her bald effort at elocution,  but I couldn't take my eyes off of her.  Her store of corny pone was always full:  
Oatspeasbeans and barley grow
Oatspeasbeans and barley grow
or 
Would you rather be a colonel with an eagle on his shoulder
or a private with a chicken on his knee?  

Then her words would singsong here and singsong there, and they still do.

Writing begins in my body and ends up in your head.  How do you ever think up all those things?  someone asked once after a poetry reading.  I don't think it all up.  Thinking comes later.  First,  I have to hear it.  Don't play what you know, Miles Davis advised young musicians, play what you hear.

But even before I hear it, I have to feel it start and stop and start again.   Robert Hass writes that "rhythm has direct access to the unconscious; because it can hypnotize us, enter our bodies and make us move, it is a power."  I hear the powerful thing and it makes me feel something. 
It makes me wiggle and want to move towards the paper and pencil. It's not an emotion that has a name: not sad, bad, mad or glad.  The urge to move is more neutral, both voluntary and involuntary. The trick is to get that far and then get out of the way.  Follow it to the first words. Then follow it right into the field.

It's a place.  The words come into the body like a lump or a bump or a bad case of the mumps, but they also come around the periphery of the field of consciousness, what Joy Harjo calls the "field of miracles."  The words are hiding near dreams. 
I often sense I am lying in that field in the morning.  I believe I know without looking how many of my cats are still on my bed. I say all three cats are on the bed, then I see that one of them is not.  She is sitting over there by the glass door licking her front paw.  You can be wrong in the field; in fact that is an important part of it -- you are encouraged to make mistakes.  In this field of the periphery it's right to be wrong.  Here you are looking up between the cracks in the world from your spying station.  Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to stay there quietly in the light where they can see you and just watch them in the shadows:   images form; sounds come forth.  Do nothing, and a  message will arrive.  You have the rest of your life.  We are all waiting to die.  Anyway, Lorca says that's where the poet's true fight is.

As a child I sometimes wished my mother could go to school too.  She seemed to like it so much.   She was especially excited when we were assigned compositions.  She would traipse up the attic stairs and emerge with one or two volumes from the dusty corpse of an encyclopedia she stored up there. The books were dated 1908.  The only thing I'd ever seen that old was a dime my grandmother showed me once.  Somehow Mother would always find something useful in the old books, and I'd wipe the Formica table clean after dinner, pull out the red plastic chairs, and we'd set to work.  This went on for the first few years of grade school.  She would practically write my compositions herself, and I would feel guilty turning them in as if they were my own.  Finally I had to put my foota stop to it.

The composition was a biography of Susan B. Anthony.  I took scissors to the encyclopedia and cut a picture of Miss Anthony in the shape of an oval so it would look like the cameo at the throat of her high-necked white shirt.   I pasted it on the cover of my composition, and using a Sheaffer's washable blue ink pen, I began my final draft.  With great concentration I copied the roughd draft proudly one by one. By the time I came to the final paragraph, I was falling in love with my own writing.  I was lost in the scene that described Miss Anthony as an old woman, delivering a speech on the stage -- something about justice and equality. She was standing alone at a podium in a shawl, looking "frail," it said.  "Frail"? The word "frail" was inserted in the earlier draft in my mother's neat hand. It was not my word.  I had no idea what "frail" meant. But the paragraph was so beautiful, and I didn't know a better word, and I didn't want to call my mother's attention to the moral dilemma I now was in, since she had put me in it. So I learned the compromises writers make, copied the word "frail," and finished the job. I was ashamed because it was a fraud. The next time she got that "Let-me help-you-with-your-homework" sparkle in her eye, I turned her down. 

"Oh, now you're so smart you don't need my help.   It's  ‘Mother-please-I'd-rather-do-it-myself!’ is it?" she replied, mimicking the television commercial that featured the impatient teen-age girl fronting-off her mother.  "Just like when you were little and wouldn't hold my hand crossing the street!"  she continued, going off somewhere in the wind without me.

I could hear something calling me from out in the field.  Something else was starting to die. It would take many years of waiting before I could tolerate this ongoing tension between what was calling me and the dying me. 

The problem is that as soon as we start to wait attentively for the sound, the image, or the beat, our minds start to spin somewhere else.  We forget to remember to keep waiting.  We lose our concentration, and the inchoate sounds of poetry become the drone of the shopping list.  Shifting images that resonate in timelessness become of the familiar pages of the Day-timer full of lists of planned activities jotted down next to the numbers we assign to time. 

This is what takes us away from art -- not the need for money, or for uninterrupted time, or for the right teacher, or for a publishing contract (These do have important effects all their own.)  Forgetfulness steals us away from the paper and pencil that betray their art.  The mind is looking for something to do, anything at all.  So you give it the shopping lists and the calendar.  You control it with no better effect than you control your mind.  Write it on your prayer flag, my friend:  Remember!

My father was a music teacher.  I could listen to the lessons from the top of the basement stairs.  His student's clarinet  played slowly and deliberately while his loud deep voice intoned the beat:
                        Baaa/BaBa Ba
                        Baaa/BaBa Ba
                        Baaaaa!

The bass line of my writing today was born in that basement.  The  treble was trained by television. 
During the years I was in high school, my father was teaching himself to play the flute.  He was a union man--a working musician. Art and beauty were good -- very good.  So were good wages and reasonable hours.  He would work at night.  During the day he would teach students, attend union meetings, have dinner with us, then nap in front of the TV until it was time to get ready for work again.  With a schedule like that he had no time to practice the flute, so he played during commercials.  He kept the instrument primed laid across the mantel.  Dinah Shore would start singing about Chevrolets, and he'd switch off the sound, pick up the silver tube, run a few scales, check his embouchure in the mirror, adjust the position of his fingers and elbows, and finish all the variations in several keys before the horses and guns appeared again on the screen.  Then he'd settle back down in his chair from where Bart Maverick and Ben Cartwright were his kind of guys.

What keeps me from writing is a certain weakness of the mind and a little dread.  Trepidation.   I recoil from the mystery with a lingering sense still stored in my body that writing is not a legitimate way to live.   In this matrix of generating material,  I have to get out of the way of my life, so that I can truly have my life.  Otherwise, I forget my intention to write in the field and instead fill my days with items from "the list," all those obligations frozen in time.  I could die, I fear, and never complete them.  In the field of the imagination all of this makes perfectly good sense--just like shamanism or infinity or the dual nature of light.  In the field, time melts, but you must be brave. 

From the time I was ten or eleven I felt that something was terribly wrong. I polished my saddle shoes nightly, and had my homework ready on time.  My mother stood on the speckled linoleum  and ironed my blouses long past the age when I could have done it myself.  Now I think she kept doing it to keep her sanity in those years when she was so unhappy and we couldn't talk or do anything about it.  The shirts were clean and bright and carries so much promise.  In those days I'd rush home from a friend's house in the cool dark morning of winter  with a growing sense of disaster at home.  But ther was no obvious disaster.  She'd be watching television and waiting.  Or ironing and waiting. 

Always waiting.

My first short story was about a lonely little girl in a park with an imaginary playmate and a mother in a mental hospital.  She was really a very angry little girl.   I entitled the story in code:  "Step on a Crack."  Since everyone knew the rest of that verse, my outcry was complete.  We could pretend the story was fiction, and since I never said my mother was crazy, I without fault.

Meanwhile my father kept playing his sax:  a one and a two and I love Paris in the Springtime, I love Paris in the Fall.  Because he was a music teacher, he knew about the importance of practice -- that as long as you put in your time, your star would climb. You'd improve;  you had to. His body, as much as his mind, was learning to play the flute.  My body does the writing and my mind takes the hits.  Phil Jackson, coach of the Chicago Bulls, says the key to any success is being in continuous motion -- repetitive drills that train the player on an experiential level to develop an intuitive feel for the connection between their own movements and the other players.  Anyone who is open and receptive can have the ball in this place of total and profound relaxation.

It's the field again. 

For example, whatever made me write about my father fitting music practice into his schedule?  You think I sat down and tried to think up a good example to persuade you to squeeze writing in between Cosby and Star-Trek? No way.  I don't have that kind of control.  I just was sitting here typing and feeling relaxed watching the cursor move across the screen, and I started hearing  my father's voice -- Ba/BaBa/Ba -- and I could see his right shoe tapping, and the next thing I'm telling you about how he was a teacher and then about how he learned to play the flute.  I had no idea I was going there anymore than I knew I was going to describe my moral dilemma with my mother over the word "frail," and pages later tell you about her frailty.   My point is that I didn't do it.  The words did it.  I just followed along.                   

My mother died this year. She slowly lost her mind.  Her brain responded to the interrupted flow of oxygen with little bursts of electrical charge that zapped first her memory, then her energy, and finally her life.   

The day before she died I visited her.  She was all dressed up and her fine white hair was fixed.  She slumped down in her wing back chair. One side of her mouth drooped and she couldn't talk. She could make sounds, but her eyes were red and strained, flicking around her mind, searching for the word that would unlock the door to the world of words again.

I wasn't sure she understood the words I spoke, so I sat on the floor at her feet by the chair, and I wrote her a few:   

Your name is Peggy. 

You are my mother. 

I love you. 

You will feel better soon.

I handed her the little notebook as if to ask her the check my spelling.  She turned it this way and that.  I started to take it back to read it aloud to her, but she snapped it away from me with all her strength.  She kept turning the words this way and that, over and over, until finally, exhausted, she surrendered back into the chair. She looked so frail I believed she would be dead soon.

Later that night my sister and I helped her into her bed.  She was agitated, pulling her nightgown off, her underpants too.  She wanted to be naked.  So she curled up on her side, pale and soft between the white sheets.  She was the shape of a scoop, a slice of the moon, the line of an egg. We pulled up the sheet to cover her in the dim room and she pulled it right down, hard, squeezing the palm of her protective hand down in there between her legs.

Ten years before this, waiting outside of the hospital room where my father would die,  my mother and I sat in silence.  We were tired from the on-going strain of it all.  She turned to me and said:  “He told me to meet him at the pass.  I could hardly hear him at all, so I leaned over to put my ear right over his lips.

“Meet me at the pass,” he said,  “Come alone.”

In the field of reverie I am wise and wordless.  The urge toward words is small and moves quietly, simultaneously with all else that cannot be named.  The urge widens my world.  In the field of ghosts I dream of my grown children as if they were six and eight years old. I contact another galaxy where my father's foot is under the kitchen table, tapping the back beat; and my mother is out there with him, winking and wagging her finger in his direction.  She picks up the iron and pushes words back and forth across the board.  She is preparing it for me.  She is ironing a clean white shirt.

Four CU Alums Pull Teeth to Help Children in Cambodia

Last fall I flew to Cambodia to embark on 10 days of tourism with my Denver friend Laurie Mathews (EPOBio’75). Laurie is executive director of Colorado-based Global Dental Relief, which was operating a week-long dental clinic in Cambodia. I was eager for her to finish up so we could travel, but I agreed to attend the last day of the clinic as her unofficial photographer. Then on the bus to the clinic, I discovered other CU alums also on board: Marc Carpenter, a dental graduate from CU Anschutz, and Barbara Keller, a doctoral graduate from Anschutz. Hours later, when we re-boarded the bus to return from the Village to Siem Reap, I knew I would write about the experiences of that day. The inspiring, remarkable people doing their ordinary work had made this tiny corner of the world just a little better.

At 7:30 a.m. already the air is warm, but there is a slight breeze and a cloud-filled sky with promising patches of blue. We take a 20-minute drive from the glamorous Shinta Mani Resort in Siem Reap to Kompheim Village Community School that has been transformed into a hygienic dental clinic. We drive from the city into a world of fresh yellow-green rice fields, long-legged egrets and white cows. Several women with orange plastic buckets poke a muddy, drained pond with their sticks, searching for fish. Across the road behind a brick-walled compound with a wooden house on stilts, a father squats, spooning noodles from a bowl into his mouth. A little boy stands next to him, watching every bite.

Soon the other volunteers arrive — skilled, big-hearted, open-minded people — Ukrainian, African-American, Vietnamese-American, Canadian, a woman from Mumbai, a red-head teenager from Holland, Cambodian locals, a Dutch couple clearly in love, a retired nurse from Vail and a few other Americans.

The school is a cheerful sight. Banana trees shelter a red hibiscus that matches the new red plastic chairs lining the wall outside the clinic door where children wait their turns. They are wearing white button-down shirts and dark blue skirts or shorts. Each has a one-page dental record clipped around the neck like a bib. Inside, a room with eight windows and 12 electric fans has been converted to seven workstations. The walls are decorated with white paper plates drawn by children who have made them into clocks. The clinic is designed to be a child’s place.

Bic Aki, a retired dentist from Oklahoma, presses the palms of her hands together in the traditional Cambodian greeting, as she smiles when each volunteer enters, literally singing out, “Welcome Home.” Then she escorts each child to a reclining chair. It is time for the clinic to begin, and I start taking photographs.

Then Laurie tells me that today several volunteers are sick and unable to work, so she has assigned me a job keeping records. It will be my job to keep careful track of those dental records around the children’s necks.

At the station nearest the door is a 10-year old patient facing down a very long needle. I hear a lay volunteer, one who is neither a dentist nor a hygienist, count down from 10 in Khmer, the local language, while the dentist injects anesthetic into the girl’s mouth. 

 “Counting down is all we know how to do in Khmer,” Laurie explains. “In Vietnam, we sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ Anything to let the child know that the pain will end when the song ends.” The girl opens her mouth again, and now she’s getting another injection in her check. Then the volunteers lead her to a chair next to a little boy, where she waits with a few others for the anesthesia to take effect.

The day grows warmer, and child after child is examined and treated — a filling here, an extraction there. Old rock tunes sing out from the ‘60s in the clinic’s background: When darkness comes and pain is all around, like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down.

Across from my table by the door is a row of four small chairs that Laurie calls “the extraction bench.” It is where the children sit to recover after their teeth are pulled. I want to take the little boy with the big tears and rock him in my arms, but instead I give him a lion sticker and that seems to please him.

At the doorway children from one of about six schools participating are peeking in. A local community organizer traveled to the schools in advance to encourage them to send children to the dental clinic.

One little boy is especially scared and crying loudly. It is difficult to tell how much of his distress is physical pain and how much is fear. The noise increases tension in the room, but the professionals keep to their tasks. We worry that the boy’s screams will frighten the waiting children.

“This is when you need a clown,” I say to Laurie. She closes the door and turns up the music to protect the waiting children.

At lunch, we sit in a circle on the floor, passing plates of pasta and vegetables, mango, banana and dragon fruit. On the playground, teenage boys play volleyball with Marc Carpenter. The Dutch teenager tells me she is taking six months to travel and volunteer with other non-governmental organizations to help in the world.

Soon mid-afternoon fatigue sets in. We are getting tired and the physical operation seems fatigued too. The electricity fails and the lights and fans go off.

I am dripping sweat onto the dental records, a bird cries out, and suddenly the generator charges up and the drills, fans and lights are rolling again. In the corner children are laughing, poking each other, waiting for their turn for drilling and filling. A fresh batch of older children arrives. Their dental problems have gone untreated much longer and are more serious.

“Here, have an elephant sticker,” I say.

By four o’clock the last patients are being served. I am still at my desk, transferring data and counting up patients: by age, by sex, by school, by which tooth extracted, by which tooth filled, by how many sides, by how many children had PT — perfect teeth.

The last child to lie down in Marc’s dental chair holds her own hands as if in prayer. She is so small that they have to check her age — how could she be 8? Though he understands not a word of Khmer, Marc leans in to listen to her.

“Let’s hope she has perfect teeth,” says Marc.

Soon a cheer goes up around the room when the exam is over and the dentist happily pronounces PT. I add her statistic to my collection of data.

The next morning, while the staff is packing up the clinic and moving equipment and records into storage, I asked Barbara and Marc what brought them to volunteer with Cambodia and Global Dental Relief.

Barbara is a lay volunteer. Last year she retired as a high-level executive health care consultant at Novia Strategies and moved to Vail. With her CU doctorate, Barbara has been an administrator as well as a floor nurse at several Denver hospitals. This is her first experience with Global Dental Relief.

Marc is a recently retired Westminster dentist who lives in Denver. He’s never really traveled outside of the U.S. before and now he plans to do more. When I ask him about his decision to volunteer, Marc’s light eyes brighten in response.

“I like travel with a purpose,” he says. He can’t recall exactly how he heard about GDR, but he decided at age 62 to leave his comfort zone and sign up. He has no regrets and will likely do it again.

The inspiring voices of compassion that I heard in Cambodia belonged to Global Dental Relief’s volunteers and staff, like these CU alums. By the time one day in the clinic is over, the change to being a mere tourist seems a let-down, a distraction from real life in the real world.   

Consider joining Global Dental Relief as a volunteer. To view trip schedules and itineraries, visit www.globaldentalrelief.org , call (303) 858-8857 or email info@globaldentalrelief.org for more information.

Jacqueline St. Joan(MEngl’97) writes fiction, nonfiction and poetry. My Sisters Made of Light, her first novel, was a finalist for the 2011 Colorado Book Award in Literary Fiction. She is coeditor of Beyond Portia: Women, Law, and Literature in the United States. She has worked as a lawyer, judge and law professor. She lives in Denver where she serves as Ziggies Poet of the Year.

It’s Loving Day

SPECIAL TO THE DENVER POST
https://www.denverpost.com/2008/06/11/its-loving-day/

June 11, 2008 at 1:00 p.m.

To paraphrase Dinah Washington, what a difference a week makes. 

In 1967, Pete Bryson and I were students at Georgetown University. He was studying at the medical school while driving a taxi, and I was in my last year at the School of Foreign Service while working part-time for the Catholic Church. 

We were quite a contrast. Pete was the son of an interracial couple. He had been raised in a progressive political community in the Bronx. I was the youngest daughter of a Catholic Italian musician and an Irish farm girl, raised in the D.C. area, where I lived at home until I was 21. 

Pete and I met on a Student Peace Union picket line while protesting the war in Vietnam. He said he fell for my green eyes and I fell for his folk singing. Six months later we wanted to marry, despite my parents’ profound objections.

Pete would be leaving soon for California for a summer job in the federal anti-poverty program, and we wanted to go together. But where to get married? Washington, D.C., had a waiting period due to blood testing, and I can’t remember now why we didn’t consider Maryland. In Virginia, social custom and law prohibited interracial marriage. The slave laws had written that 1/32 part black blood meant you were the master’s property, and Jim Crow titrated blood along similar lines. The law was frustrating us each way we turned. 

But then, the next week, on June 12, a date now known as Loving Day, the law was liberation. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving vs. Virginia, struck down anti-miscegenation laws, starting with the one in Virginia. 

Aware of the historical moment we occupied, Pete called ahead to let the court clerks know when we were coming. The person he spoke with was flustered and said that they were not ready. That we should wait. They had not yet received the court’s order back from the attorney general. So Pete replied that if that were the case, we’d be bringing a reporter from The Washington Post with us. 

So four days later, on Friday, June 16, 1967, Pete and I probably became the first legal interracial couple in Virginia (and perhaps U.S.) history. At the Arlington County Courthouse, they asked about our bloodlines, and in the box marked “race,” Pete wrote “B” for black. I wrote “H” for human. I felt the past — dissolving like notes from the cup of my father’s saxophone — come out from hiding, like the Jewish children of the pogroms, as my new mother-in-law had been, and hanging like clotheslines outside a Mississippi kitchen, where my new father-in- law’s mother had cooked for white folks. 

The justice of the peace, who was also a Baptist minister, seemed to be excited to perform the ceremony. He told us he had written an ecumenical service for a couple the following week and he’d like to practice his new ceremony on us. 

It was a short ceremony in chambers with four of our friends, where the judge said something about Adam and Eve and a babbling brook and we suppressed giggles, rolled our eyes, and tried to get out of there as fast as we could. 

The next day, we loaded up a blue Ford Falcon and left for San Francisco. After all, it was the Summer of Love. 

• • • 

Postscript: Pete and I separated five years later. We had a son and daughter together and managed to raise Chris and Dana jointly. Today we are old friends, still family. 

Our children are magnificent. As their mother, it took me a long time to face the facts of legal history — that under Virginia’s racial laws, our children were “quadroons,” a term used to define a person with one-quarter “black blood,” a badge of inferiority that signifies that in that place, but in another time, these precious children would have been slaves. And so their children. And their children’s children. And their grandchildren’s children. In that time, all my relations would have been enslaved, yet I would have been free. 

So “quadroon” was a word I never wanted my children to hear because it divided me from them — the ones who, when they were brand new and someone laid them across my belly, carried the blood of all their ancestors, pulsing in our strong cord.

Jacqueline St. Joan of Denver was recently elected as an at-large delegate for Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention.

Aisha's Daughters

Finalist, F(r)iction Spring Short Story Contest, 2016

September in the Hindu Kush.  Sides of raw mutton hung like curtains in the vendors’ stalls.  Bare apple trees and gnarled mulberry bushes wound around in their brambled ways.  Fertile ground was sacred in this harsh land, where every tree was spoken for, watered, pruned, and harvested with care.  Scarecrows stood at attention on the piles of stones that separated small farm plots. Crows and jays ruled the days, and owls ruled the nights.

            Chanda Khan, Lia Chee, and I were an unlikely trio to emerge from the Peshawar bus.  I was a teacher trainer with an NGO; Lia, an American journalist, and Chanda, a young woman missing her left nostril.  We traveled without escort--no brother, no father, no son, no husband.

            My sister, Fiza, had found Chanda at the women’s shelter.  When she learned that I had accepted an assignment to Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, she asked if I would take Chanda with me—to get her out of Lahore, where her father or brother might find her and finish the assault they had begun with her face. Against her father’s order, Chanda had gone into the Shahi Mohalla, Lahore’s red light district, to visit a childhood friend--a young dancer who had been teaching Chanda all the classic moves. I remember the urgency in Fiza’s voice, the way her eyes widened as she begged me, “She’s only seventeen, Baji. Please.”

            I was shocked by what had happened to this girl, but I did not like to get involved with these things.  There is misery everywhere.  What can one person do?  But Chanda Khan taught me that love, dancing and storytelling can cause the most cautious person to take risks.

            On the bus to Chitral I met Lia Chee. The last available seat was next to her.  Dressed in khaki trousers and wearing a red bandana tied around her neck, she looked like a Girl Scout. A bulge under her camp shirt suggested she had a fat moneybelt.  Lia talked non-stop all the way to Chitral, while she pressed a navy blue daypack between her knees.           

            “I am Chinese,” Lia had told me when we first introduced ourselves.  “From Singapore,” she said.  But during the ride, I found out that actually she was a Chinese-American from South Carolina.  “Who wants to be American in Taliban country?” she asked.

            In the back of the bus Chanda told Lia the story of the Shahi Mohalla. As I translated for her, she touched her fingertips to the bandage taped to the side of her face. Lia offered to let Chanda stay with her in Chitral at the Hilton, and in exchange, Chanda agreed to let Lia magazine’s publish her story. Over time I found out that Lia and I had more in common than I would have expected.

             We stepped off the bus and into the frosty air of Chitral, a remote town of twenty thousand souls.  Our breath clung to the bus’s windows like whispers of conversations left behind.  We were deep in Pathan country, where local culture defines life across western Pakistan and throughout Afghanistan.  There was an unfamiliar tang in my mouth that I later learned to recognize as gunpowder in the air.  Any excuse—a wedding, a birthday—and gunfire rang through the mountains.  The area had been notorious for arms dealing, supplying guns and missiles to cousins fighting the Russians in Afghanistan.  Everyone wanted automatic rifles stamped “Made in the U.S.A.”  Pistols and Kalashnikovs lay across the counters of the open bazaar, with boxes of shells stacked on the shelves behind the men in their woolen vests and flat hats.  A young boy with an AK-47 stood like a guard next to an open stall.   Guns were as common as bread.

            The men of Chitral lay their blankets on the cold ground for prayers.  The foreheads of the elderly were bruised from a lifetime of praising Allah. Some bought carrots, flour, and milk to carry in plastic shoppers to their mud-brick homes, where they handed the bags to their women.  The men wrapped themselves in woolen shawls and looked up to read the clouds.  At the bus depot Chanda and Lia loaded their parcels and backpacks into the trunk of a taxi, and we agreed to meet at the hotel in three days. 

            Two teachers from the local school met me at the station with their old Toyota and their driver.  They were eager to show me their school—one room with three walls where they offered classes to boys in the morning and to girls in the afternoon. They did not permit boys to attend unless their sisters could as well. When the girls turned ten, and began to observe purdah, the separation of females from public life, they became like puppies waiting, tied up in a courtyard.

The family’s modest wealth and the women’s determination had supported the school for the past three years. I would live in a teacher’s suite—one room and an outhouse-- in their family compound. I intended to stay for a year--if I could endure the strict rural life.

            The next morning I walked with Sabira to meet the other teachers and walk them to the compound. Through the open door of a makeshift madrassah I could see rows of young boys, sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth in their shawls, reciting the Q’ran.

            “They used to be our students, Sabira said.  “But the mullahs object to anything except education in the Q’ran.  Sabira opened her arms to the sky as she mimicked the mullahs.  “‘Geography, history, literature—these tempt young people away from God.’”

            At noon we washed and prayed before sitting outside my room in the sun-baked courtyard. We shared a pot of tea, a bowl of lentils, and bread.  “Everything here starts with the Q’ran,” said Sabira, pulling the bread apart with her fingers and dipping it into the warm lentils.

            It’s almost the Taliban here, I thought.  I was a secular Muslim and at this time--in the mid-1990s—I had never participated in a regular round of ablutions and prayer.  But, as part of the daily routine in Chitral, I became accustomed to it.  Over time, I believe it changed me. 

            “The Prophet  (Peace be unto him) lived a simple life, and was gentle to women,” Sabira continued.  She sighed.  “Oh, that he would return to remind these men how to treat women!”

            Tahira was the youngest of the three sisters, bright-eyed and chubby.  She told me about a girl whose father had forbidden her to return to the school. Tahira’s voice split as she spoke.             “She threw herself off the roof of her house and broke her neck,” Tahira recalled, her eyes fixed on a distant point.  “--and the next week another girl did exactly the same thing—died throwing herself off the roof of her house.”           

            “Easy enough for grown men to criticize a young girl—such an easy target,” said Asma, the oldest sister. Her voice was on fire and I recognized the burn.            The conversations of women when they are alone are the same everywhere.  In all the places I have taught-- cities, seashores and deserts, and now in the northern mountains—it’s all the same.  Women’s dissatisfaction is the cough that won’t go away. 

            I saw an old man hobbling through the courtyard gate.  He wore a long white coat and lungi and the Pathan hat.  He had the orange henna beard of a Hajji.  He neither looked at us nor walked near us, as he padded across the courtyard and disappeared into a mud-brick room.  A scraggly red dog slipped in the door behind him.

            “Our grandfather, Aga Ji,” Sabira said, nodding in his direction.  “He does not speak to women outside of the family, so he won’t come over here as long as you are with us.  Nothing personal to you, but he will stay away.  It’s just his way.”

            “But how will that work if we take meals together?” I asked.

            “We eat before or after the men, so it is no problem.  We will hardly notice him come or go. He takes care of it himself.  He waters and prunes a few poplars for one of the landlords, then spends the day at the mosque and the teahouse. He lives in his own world--he and his dog.”

            On Monday it was sunny.  I pulled on my boots and walked along the muddy road to meet Lia and Chanda. I looked up to face Tirich Mir, the baby toe of the northern mountains, the 25,000-foot wall of sheer rock and ice that stood at the gate of the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram, and the Himalayas.  It was awesome to behold, impossible to climb, an enchanted place, as if the mountains were the only beings who knew the way things are and the way they always have been:  the Hindu Kush, ancient Hindu Killer, was The Historian who recorded everything and forgot nothing; the Karakoram Range, black rock, was The Geologist of a petrified future; and, The Philosophers were the Himalayas, the field of snow, where the One Mind abides.   I admit I trembled in their shadow. 

            I knew that Tirich Mir was no protector. Soon it would be October when the mountain would offer no hospitality and the winter winds would blow whiteness around, covering the known world. Twice a week a plane flew to Chitral from Peshawar, the inaccessible city only a thought away from the lost horizon. I heard a falcon shriek and suddenly it swooped down, still high above me in its endless search for rodents and water.

            The Chitral Hilton was surrounded by a brick wall with glass shards embedded along the top.  Fiery red bushes framed a shallow pool where hundreds of floating candles were lit at twilight. Sparrows flew cheerily through the open lobby.   Small groups of businessmen as well as trekkers and guides clustered around the enormous lobby.   Embroidered wall hangings depicted local battles—against the Mongols, against the British, even a new one depicting a snowy mortar attack against Russians.  Elephant blood ran beet red against the untouchable snow of the Khyber Pass. I saw Lia and Chanda sitting on the terrace.  Chanda was wearing a lavender shalwar kameez, the loose pants and overshirts traditionally worn by both men and women in Pakistan. Her gold necklaces gleamed in the sunlight. A string of seed pearls was attached to her hair on one side of her head under a gold-trimmed dupatta.  The other end of the string of pearls was attached to a small bandage where the side of her nose used to be. The bandage was covered with gold glitter.  I was speechless at her transformation from a wounded bird of a girl into this elegant woman. In the glow of her face and the flash of her bangles, Chanda Khan was the acclaimed Pathan beauty revealed.

            I shook my head in disbelief.

            “She has finally found out who she is, and she will be nothing else.  ” said Lia, clearly enjoying my reaction.   “I’m pretty brassy, but I wish I had her pluck.  I mean, look at that girl.”

            Chanda nudged Lia with her elbow.

            “She can’t wait for me to tell you,” Lia announced, laughing. “Chanda got a job!”

            “Dancer!” Chanda said in English.  “No nose!”  She pointed to her bandage.  Chanda and Lia’s laughter infected me, too, and we giggled like schoolgirls.

            “Stop!” Lia pleaded, trying to catch her breath, “I’ll wet my shalwar.”  And we laughed some more.  When we saw the waiter bringing ice cream, we regained our composure.  “It’s too wonderful!  And I get to tell the world her story.” 

            “Tell me first!” I begged.  And while Chanda enjoyed the attention she was attracting from the hotel guests, Lia told me about the previous three days.

            “First, we did a little shopping,” Lia said.  “My magazine, Nature and Nurture, did some extra “nurturing,” shall we say, and bought Chanda several fabulous dance costumes.  Classical.  Tasteful. Perfect for her audition.”

            “Audition?” I asked.

            “Yes.  We took a taxi into the backwaters of Chitral, where the artists hang out—the woodworkers, weavers, potters.  There we found--in Chitral of all places, “Aisha’s Daughters.”   

Named for the Prophet’s youngest wife, a warrior and political leader, Aisha’s Daughters was a traveling theater company, they told me, that was in need of a classical dancer. Mostly young women, and a few men, they performed skits, dances, comedy routines—even puppet shows—all about the relations between men and women—about dowries, street harassment, marriages to the Q’ran, honor killings.  Some women were married, and their husbands worked with them.  The other men pretended to be brothers of the single women, so that no one bothered them.  They planned to stay in Chitral until the snow fell. 

            “Then Chanda will be safe.  She will move with them to Sargodha and on down the valley,” said Lia.  “She danced for them like an angel. Her movements were silkier than the clothes she is wearing.  No ankle bracelets, no razzle-dazzle, no seduction, no rupees in the belt.  Just dancing-- lonely, glorious, solemn, proud.  Really, it broke my heart to watch her.”

            “But what about her--you know,” I said, whispering, tapping my nose.

            “They ate it up!” said Lia.  “They presented the story of her attack, and her sliced nose, as the truth unveiled:  ‘This is what happens behind the veil, behind the metal gates,’ they said.  They encouraged Chanda to dance with her nose just as it is.”  Chanda laughed when Lia stopped talking.  She pulled on my arm.

            “Baji,” she said, adding in English.  “Now Chanda not too nosey!”

            That evening Asma told Aga Ji that he must accompany us to Chanda’s performance.  Aga Ji never looked at me.  He sat in front with the driver who stopped the Toyota at a nondescript metal gate across from the ice factory.  Inside, a tent-like canvas covered the courtyard where twinkling white lights had been strung.  In one corner a few musicians assembled—a tamboura, tabla, and tambourines.  The audience of twenty or thirty men sat cross-legged on blankets, leaving an open circle in the middle for the performers.  Bags of walnuts and dried apples were being passed around.

            “Assalam aleikum,” said the emcee, with a wide smile across his face.  He wore a striped woolen shawl and bright cap.  The crowded mumbled its response, and peace also to you.

 “We have a very special performance tonight,” he continued, “the debut of one of Pakistan’s finest interpretive dancers—Chanda Khan.”

            The lights dimmed.  The emcee disappeared into darkness.  Then slowly the stage lights came up, focused on Chanda’s still body and her outstretched arms.  The sparkles on her nose patch caught the light.  Only her pale eyes lined with thick kohl moved.  They circled the courtyard, stopping briefly to match the gaze of each of us in the audience.  It was not a seductive move, although it drew us in.  Her glances seemed to be the oath of a witness, with a surprising and powerful effect.  It was over in less than a minute, and then the steady rhythm of drum and the tambourine began. Chanda’s movements were lyrical, steady like the strings of the tamboura, as she practiced the most basic moves of a beginner.  She took small steps to each side of her central spot, always returning modestly to that point.  Her glossy, stained lips opened soundlessly as the emcee returned to tell the crowd her tale as she danced.  Chanda hugged another dancer and the friends pantomimed waving goodbye, as Chanda covered her head and face with a gossamer veil and moved into the imaginary street alone.  When a male dancer entered the circle, he pulled Chanda into the shadow.  The crowd gasped.  Then an older dancer appeared at the edge of the circle and Chanda recognized him. 

            “Bapi, Bapi,” she cried out joyously.  “Father, Father, rescue me!”  The audience was relieved as the father approached. 

            “Whore!”  the emcee shouted out in the voice of Chanda’s father.  Instantaneously, the young man bound her arms behind her back.  The father’s blade glinted in the light and sliced the night in front of Chanda’s face.  She fell to the ground as the men ran away and the music stopped.  The sparkly patch wa gone.  A pool of beet red stage blood dripped into her cupped hand.  A man in the audience stood, outraged.

            “Where were the four witnesses?” he shouted, cutting the air with his fist.

            “Yes, the Q’ran demands that there be four pious witnesses to fornication!” said another.

             “There were none,” Chanda said in her own voice.

            The audience was silent as again Chanda looked into each one’s eyes and they knew in their hearts the truth of her courage and the truth of her dance.  I looked behind me to read Aga Ji’s face.  His eyes were wet with tears as he cried silently, shamelessly.

            In winter the pace of Chitral slowed like the pulse of a bear, as all life submitted to the twin fates of climate and altitude. My life became a constant effort to stay warm.  The river froze over quickly, and man-sized blocks of ice littered the riverbanks. I wore home-spun leggings, mittens, and shawls. Snowdrifts blocked the roads. All the woolen layers made me feel lethargic and heavy. I collected snowmelt to place by the kerosene stove for cooking, drinking, and washing. We ate oil and grains, dried fruit, peas and beans, and I began to put on weight. 

            Religious practices gradually became part of my daily routine. 

            “Maybe it’s the altitude getting to my brain, or the long, cold winter,” I told Sabira, “but there is something quite cave-like about isolation in this slow-moving life centered on the core of Islam that means so much.” It was new to me, a quiet, naturally contemplative life. I decided to fast during Ramadan.   I realized that for the first time I was fulfilling four of the Five Pillars—faith in God, daily prayers, fasting during Ramadan, and service to the poor. The only one left was the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca I was obliged to do once, if I was able.  But I was not eager either to join a throng of two million and their patriarchs.

            Aisha’s Daughters decided to stay in Chitral for the winter, and their performances continued in the artists’ quarter. Chanda’s wound healed and her bandage became smaller and smaller until all that remained was a scar and her sparkly patch.  But all winter long the mullahs murmured about Chanda’s dancing.  The city’s prayer beads clicked and clicked their disapproval. 

            “In Islamabad women artists are resigning from the theater and taking the veil.  Why not here?” they asked. “The Kalash men and women dance publicly together, and they are kafir, infidels.  What will be next?”

            My youngest brother, Amir, arrived in Chitral on the day that the first impassable snowstorm began. He looked oddly modern in his denim pants and blue sweater.  Amir had collected donations of used computers while in the U.K., and shipped them to us.  He offered to install them at the school. I could hardly wait to see him. It was a double blessing!

            “You know I wouldn’t be here if Abbu had not insisted,” Amir told me impatiently after we climbed into the back seat of the car.  “Computers need a dry, temperate climate for their survival—and, by the way, so do I.”

            “You always were a bit spoiled,” I teased.  

            The only sound in the hushed city was our tires crunching the snow.  On the streets the loudspeakers that hawked blankets and prayers had shut down.  The air was cleared of the stench of diesel.  Wood smoke hovered, then dissolved into the river.  Day and night, the valley wore every shade of white.  All of the city’s sharpness had softened and rounded, except one.

            “There it is, Amir--” I said, as the Toyota crawled along the main street. I hooked my arm into his and hugged while I pointed.  “—Shahi Mosque, its minaret is a needle that pierces this cottony world.  On clear days its blinding light is magnetic.”

            “You are going to the mosque?” he asked.

            “I pray at home now,” I said.  “But just wait.  You’ll see what happens to you here.”

            In spring, the teachers’ father, Syed, returned home from Peshawar where he had been teaching at the university. Nothing gave Sabira, Tahira, and Asma more pleasure than seeing their father happy.

            One day Syed and Amir hauled cedar logs into the compound to build a wall for the school, while Aga Ji directed the work.  The women watched, picking their teeth.

            “Put the wall over there,” Aga Ji insisted, pointing to the opposite side of the courtyard.

            “But, Aga Ji, the school is over here.  We are building a wall for the school,” Syed reminded his confused father.

            “Of course, the school is over there,” he replied, hesitating.   “I knew that.  Well, put it over next to the school’s other three walls, you idiots,” he shouted.  “Why in the world would you put it over here by my room?”  Amir laughed out loud.

            “Do whatever he says, Amir,” I shouted.  “He’s the head man.”  It was always wonderful there when everybody was at home.

            Amir told me about the day that Aga Ji made him an honorary Pathan.  Amir was recovering from the hour he had spent pulling a wagon full of bricks and mud. The clouds were playing a game with their humans, drifting in front of the vanishing, then reappearing, face of the sun. He was chilled from the sunless sky and was putting on his heavy wool coat when he saw Aga Ji approach him.  The old man moved with purpose, muttering and flapping his arms like a chicken.  His red dog ran far ahead, returning to Aga Ji’s side again and again.

            “I must talk to you, young man,” Aga Ji said with authority.  Amir rose from the pile of wires that circled his knees.   “Syed is away for the day, and I am too old.  You are the oldest, so you must take this responsibility for the men of the family. We are Pathan.  If anyone asks for our protection, we must give it--even at the cost of our lives.  And it is our first duty to protect women--even those who are not of our blood.” Amir’s eyes popped open as Aga Ji continued.

“In the coffeehouse they say that the mullahs are discussing Chanda Khan again.  Although they have no witnesses, they say she is a fornicator and they have issued a fatwa, a religious ruling.  The mullahs say to kill her on sight.”

            Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!            God is great!  Prayer is better than sleep!  I heard the muzzein’s morning call as if it were in a dream. As if Abraham were crying at what had to be done.  Each tear broke open like a heavy star exploding in the winter night.

            I pushed open the shuttered window to let in starlight and fresh air, feeling grateful that Allah’s name awakened me again, so I could spend another day loving this difficult world. I wrapped in a heavy shawl, and, for ablutions, I circled my fingertips lightly over the sheet of ice in my washing bowl.  Then, when I bent to unroll my prayer mat, I caught a glimpse of movement in the stillness outside.  One of the animals must have gotten loose! It moved again.

            I lifted the wire latch to my room and walked straight across the courtyard in front of the main house and school.  Directly opposite my room, a mud brick shed housed goats and a few chickens. I saw a child hidden under the feeding trough, huddled in a blanket. Beneath a wool cap, thatched hair fell over his closed eyes.  He gripped a line of rope attached to an old donkey.

            “Assalam aleikum,” I said to them.

            “Waleikum salaam.” A small voice from the darkness. The child did not move.

            “What are you doing here?” I asked in Khowar.  There were more than fourteen languages spoken in the Chitral Valley, and I knew only four.  “Do you attend classes here?” I asked next in Pashto.  Silence.  “Tell me your name, boy,” I demanded in Urdu. I reached under the trough with both arms and pulled the child out. His lips were dry and cracked, and his eyes looked vacant from exhaustion.  “Something to eat?” I asked, motioning toward my mouth with cupped fingers.  “Naan?”  He nodded twice very quickly. “Follow me.  Leave the donkey here,” I instructed, pointing first to the animal and then to the ground.

            “No!” he said in Khowar.  He was clutching the end of the rope with his bare hand. I forced the rope out of his hand and looped it over a broken post.

            “No one will take her from here,” I told him.  The boy unwrapped himself and the covered the donkey with his blanket. When he turned around, even in the dark, I could see the little grin he flashed.  He bolted across the dirt courtyard toward the tiny light from my window.

I heated water on a single-burner stove and prepared two cups for tea. I unwrapped a long loaf of Kandahari naan that I stored in a clean cloth.  I offered some to him, along with a handful of dried apples.  He sniffed the scent of yeast from the cloth and sat cross-legged on the floor next to the wall.  He ate quickly, leaving one small piece of naan and a slice of apple on his knee.

            Where are you from?” I asked him.  “Why are you here?” He said nothing. “How can I help you?”  I knew what I was looking at; I had seen it before.  He was deciding whether to trust me.  He studied my eyes.

             “Allah has sent me. I am running away,” he said.  He spoke so softly I was unsure if I had heard correctly.

            “Running away?”

            “From a landlord in the valley.  I have walked all night to get this far,” he said.  “Don’t send me back there.  I beg of you.”  He turned his head away again, hesitating. “You have a kind face, Madam. Please help us.  My donkey is hungry.”  He took the bit of food he left uneaten and cupped it in his hand.  “Do you have more food for her, too?”

            I gave the child the entire loaf of naan and a small piece of cheese, and he divided it in two.  He folded half of the bread around the cheese and tucked it into his pants pocket.  He mixed the rest of the food with the dried apples in his open hand.  

            “Shukriah, thank you, Madam,” he said, rising, inching toward the door.

            “You come back here after you feed her,” I told him.  I poured water from a plastic jug into small pan.  “Here,” I said, handing it to him.  “Take this, too.”  While the boy fed his donkey, I mumbled my morning prayer as fast as I could.“I can see you want me to be wide awake this morning,” I said to God.  “To solve this little mystery you have put on my doorstep.”

            By the time the door creaked open and the child returned, the day was dawning.  In a beam of light I noticed dark red stains on the boy’s pants and shoes.   He was bleeding!  Red footprints spotted the little rug on the dirt floor.  The boy saw and jumped away.

            “Please forgive me,” he said, bending to wipe the rug with his bare hand.  I turned up the wick on the kerosene lamp and opened the window to get a better look.

            “What happened to you?” I asked.  I led him to the bed and felt his shoulder relax under my hand.  I placed a dhurrie over the bed and laid him down.  His trousers were soaked in blood.  It was a wonder he could walk at all.  I started to pull off the wet clothes.

            “No!  Don’t!” he protested, pushing me away.  He sat against the wall.

            “You asked for my help, young man.  Now let me help you.” I knew not to argue with him.  I waited, and the boy began to sob. “Here, drink this tea,” I said, lowering my voice.  I handed him the chipped cup he left on the floor.  “For now, I am your doctor, so you follow my orders.  You are safe. No one else knows you are here.”

            I pulled down the trousers.  There were no cuts anywhere on his legs or feet, but his underwear was soaked.  He squirmed in a half-hearted effort to get away from me. Carefully I took out my knife and slit open both seams on the underpants. Again the boy pulled away, closing his legs against my efforts.  I tugged on the front piece to pull the fabric out from underneath, and began to wipe the dried blood from his groin. 

            “God help us!” I whispered,  “You’re a girl.  Oh, look how you’ve been torn to pieces!  Who did this to you?  Who?”

            “The landlord,” the girl said, with tears spilling onto her shirt. “But this is nothing.  Will you help my donkey? Go look at what he did to her!”

            O Allah, this child needed you?  Look what you have brought me today! I covered her with goatskin and waited until she was asleep before entering the shed to look more closely at the animal.  It was covered with sores and scars.  Along each ear, V-shaped gouges were sliced out in a rickrack pattern, as a woodworker might do.  Its tail and hooves, too, were cut and wounds oozed with blood and pus.  Whiplashes crossed its haunches.  Its vagina was pulpy and red. The old girl was barely breathing.

            I stood in the courtyard watching the last star fade. There was not much time. What was to be done before they came looking for me, calling me to breakfast? Aga Ji opened the gate for a student who arrived early to prepare the classroom.  

            “I am quite sick today,” I told her.  “Please tell the others that I wish to be alone, and I would be very grateful if you would give some water to the donkey in the shed.  I found it wandering around outside the gate and let it in.” 

            The child must have heard me lie to cover up for her and to get her donkey some help.  She seemed quite cheerful when I returned.  “May I have some more tea?” she asked.  I applied more ointment to her sores with my fingertips and told her that we would have to find a doctor so she could be checked internally. The girl pulled her knees to her chest at the mention of an examination. 

            “Not now, of course,” I reassured her. “But soon.  It’s all right. It’s what women do if they are hurt or having a baby, or. . . “ I had to know, so I suddenly asked her, “Are you pregnant?”

            “I don’t know,” she answered.  “I’ve never had my monthly time.”  I continued to touch her gently.  I could feel her relax again.

            “You really had me fooled,” I said. “Now don’t fool me again.  Tell me what has happened to you.  Tell me everything.  Who are you?”

            Pushing her thick, black hair out of her eyes, she sat up on my bed, and leaned into the corner of the cold concrete walls.  She squirmed as she spoke.  She told me her name was Tasnim Ali Khan.

            “Eleven years old,” she said.  “My family, we are herders—goats, sheep, cows—in the Gur Valley, where we have lived for hundreds of years.  My father owed money to the landlord, and when he could not pay, the landlord asked for me as payment.”  She looked at me as if ashamed.  “But my mother refused,” she stated with a nod.  “But after my mother died, my father gave me to the landlord anyway.” 

            I sat down next to her.  Tasnim told me that her father tied her onto the bank of his donkey and delivered her “like a bag of wool,” she said.  Then she told me that this landlord not had a woman in twenty years.  What his body couldn’t do to her, he did with sticks and bottles and anything else he could find. When he was through with her he would send her to the barn to sleep.  He thought it was punishment because it was cold in the barn.  He wanted the bed for himself.  But to her, it was the best part of the day because she could be with her mother’s donkey she named Sheikha. So she made a plan, and when the moon was new, she cut off her hair and put on boys’ clothes, led Sheika out of the barn, and they ran through the woods all night, as fast as they could.  In the morning they saw our gate was open and crawled into the shed to sleep.  I was in awe of the sheer bravery of this child, dumbfounded in the face of it.             “Sleep now,” I said. “We will find a way out of this together.  You, me, and Sheikha.  I promise.”

            Later that same day , Amir knocked on my door to tell me about the fatwa against Chanda. I saw the opportunity and knew exactly what needed to be done.

            “I will go to town now to talk to Chanda,” I said. “She can leave on the morning flight to Peshawar.   If she travels as your wife and wears a full burqa, it should raise no questions.”

            “She can stay with my friends in Islamabad,” Amir said.

            “One thing is very important, Amir--tell no one else.  No one must know how Chanda escaped. Not your friends in Lahore. No one. I will impress on Chanda also how dangerous it would be for all of us if our part in this were known.  It would make it more difficult in the future to help others.  You must understand this, Amir.  Do not even tell Father or Fiza.” 

            “Even Fiza?” he asked.

            “Even Fiza,” I repeated. He nodded like an obedient child.

            “What about Lia?  She knows about the fatwa.”

            “Especially do not tell Lia.  I love her dearly and she loves Chanda, too, and has been so good to her.  But Lia is a journalist, and an American.  Hers is a different world than ours. No, she will figure it out on her own after Chanda has disappeared.  But there is something you can tell Fiza when you reach Lahore.”

            “What’s that?”

            “She will have to get medical help for your son.”

            “My what?”

            “You and your wife have an eleven-year old son who will be traveling with you when you go to Lahore tomorrow.  Don’t ask me anymore about it.  Remember what I said?” she asked him, waiting to see if he had been listening. 

            “Tell no one,” he answered, soundlessly mouthing the words for dramatic effect.

            “My clever boy.”  I laughed and held him tightly.

            That night Amir brought Chanda to my room where no one would see her.  Tasnim insisted on staying in the shed with Sheikha.  The old donkey lay on its side in the dirt, straining to lift her neck barely an inch off the floor when she heard Tasnim cooing to her. 

            “Nan . . . nan . . . nan . . .” Tasnim cried in Khowar for her mother.  She curled up like a cat, and nestled into the warm belly of the donkey.  She laid her head tenderly on Sheikah’s flank.  When I pulled blankets over them, the donkey snorted and the girl sighed.  Soon they were asleep.  I lay down in the straw next to them, winding one blanket around me and folding another one into a makeshift pillow.  Underneath the pillow I slipped a revolver.

            I was restless all night long, waking at the sighing of the wind or the stirring of the goats, until finally I heard the muzzein’s call.  I rubbed the tip of my shawl back and forth against the frozen crust of the donkey’s water until the corner was wet.  Then I wiped my hands, spread the blanket, faced Mecca, and knelt to pray.  Soon the roosters passed the muzzein’s prayers along into the morning. My heart’s dogs shook off the night.  I carried yoghurt, bread and hot milk tea from the house into the shed.  Tasnim was awake, nuzzling Sheikha’s lifeless face.

            “She won’t wake up,” she cried.  She pushed her hands against the animal’s side.

            “She is sleeping with Allah now,” I said, but Tasnim squinted, wriggling her nose her eyes as she spoke.

            “No! She is not!  Not with Allah.  She is sleeping with my mother.”

            When Amir arrived by taxi, I put Tasnim in the backseat next to Chanda who was wearing a blue shuttlecock burqa.  Tasnim wore washed trousers with a fresh kurta on top.  With the felt hat over her short-cropped hair, and a long woven coat, she looked like an eleven-year old boy. I introduced Tasnim as Hamid. They had no need to know their make-believe son was really a girl.  No reason to involve them knowingly in the rescue of Tasnim. Amir had contacted Fiza who would be waiting for them once they reached Lahore.  She would know what to do from there, and she would know not to ask too many questions 

            “You will be safe,” I said.  “Inshallah.  God willing.”

            When we met later for tea, Lia demanded to know where Chanda and Amir were.

            “Who?”  I asked her.

            “Don’t be coy with me—where are they?  I was up with the birds this morning and she was already gone.  I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye.”  I wondered if Lia was dense or only pretending to be dense.  Amir said that Lia knew about the fatwa.  Couldn’t she figure out what happened?

            “Maybe they eloped,” I said.  “Let’s change the subject.”

            “Change the subject!  There is a fatwa against Chanda.  Maybe some zealots kidnapped her,” she added.  The hotel waiter brought us tea and sweetmeats, and we stopped talking until he finished serving.  The silence gave Lia a chance to reflect.  “Now I get it,” she said.  “Amir took Chanda away for her protection.  Otherwise, you’d have your feathers all ruffled. That’s it, isn’t it?  Probably took the morning flight to Peshawar.”

            “My lips are sealed.”

            “You mean you will not confirm nor deny.  I hate that about you,” Lia exploded.  “You always leave me out when something exciting is going on.  You think I can’t be trusted because I’m American, right?  Because I’m not a Muslim. ”  Lia’s frustration was spilling open.  She sat there fuming.  “Now I won’t know how her story ends,” Lia whined.

            “Well, you know two endings that weren’t possible—her being a theater dancer in Chitral, and her being murdered in a fatwa. Isn’t that truth enough?” I asked.

            “OK, I guess,” Lia said, calming down.  “I guess I can work with that.”  She lowered her voice.  “But next time you go on a rescue, can I please come with you?  Just once?”

            “I can’t promise you that.”

            “When do I get to be part of the solution?  I have been writing stories about people like Chanda for years,” Lia continued.  “I want to do something real, to help even one person.”

            “We’ll think of something,” I said, emphasizing the “we.”  That is when I realized that Lia was becoming part of the family, too.  “Don’t leave Pakistan,” I urged her.  “Come with me to Lahore.  I want you to meet my sister and her friends.  If you are serious about working on these issues, they are the people for you to know.”  A big smile spread across her face.

             “I can’t wait to get out of here,” she said.    “Let’s go today.”

            I left Lia at the hotel and walked back to the school in the afternoon brilliance.  I bound my wool shawl securely against the wind, donned my sunglasses, tugged on my work boots, and trekked along the tractor paths.  I passed the bazaar and turned down the road to the school.  The sky was a high blue, crisp and cerulean, a mile above sea level and four miles below the summit of Tirich Mir.  I inhaled the cold air, feeling happiness expanding inside me. By now Amir, Chanda and Tasnim would be leaving Peshawar on the flight to Lahore, and by the end of the day Fiza would take Tasnim to the hospital.  Chanda would dance again.  Amir was home.  The teacher training I had come for was almost done. 

            I passed the entrance to Chitral Gol, the wildlife sanctuary where snow leopards hunt horned goats. A tree sparrow and a whistling thrush sang on the holly oaks on the cliff. In a field of snow-covered rhubarb, a pair of partridges called back and forth in staccato, as if I were a wild cat they were warning other birds.  Crows swarmed as one body, cawing their criticisms wildly.  Who is she?  What is she doing?  Why is she alone?  Where is her husband?

            When I reached out to push open the gate to the enclave, I heard Aga Ji arguing with someone. He sounded very distraught.  I pulled back to watch through the crack between the doors.  A rotund figure in a striped wool shawl was shaking his walking stick at Aga Ji. Two boys I had never seen before appeared to be searching for something.  They entered the rooms around the courtyard despite Aga Ji’s ordering them to keep away.  Suddenly, the man yelled to the boys.  One raced into the driver’s seat of the Jeep, and the other one tripped as he opened the gate.  I hid behind a clump of scrub oak as the Jeep slid through and turned toward town.  I could hear the master’s shouting as they drove away.

            “Baji, Baji,” Aga Ji cried out when he saw me slip in through the gate.  A sheet of tears spread down his scraggly cheeks.  I was shocked to hear his voice.  He had never spoken to me in the six months I had lived there.  I ran to him while he knelt on the ground next to the lean-to, holding a cloth to the head of his shivering, little red dog.

            “Who was that?” I asked.  Aga Ji just shook his head.           

            “Hanum Ali Khan,” he said.  “He’s looking for his wife.  Somehow he thinks we have stolen her! He is going to the police to register kidnapping charges against us.”  His voice cracked.  “Look what he has done.”  Aga Ji opened the cloth to reveal his dog’s ears.  Each one was gouged with a V-shaped mark.  I ran to the shed. The dead donkey’s throat was sliced open, and her hide soaked in a puddle of blood.

            I had to find a way to leave the school compound without being seen.  I telephoned Lia.

            “Want to come on a rescue?” I asked.

            “So soon?  Of course I do, but who?  When?”

            “Me,” I answered. “Now do exactly as I say. And tell no one.”

            “Well, damn, girl.  You’re letting me into the club.”

            Soon Lia arrived at the school by taxi.  She instructed the driver to collect a special package from Tahira—a large tamboura case wrapped in thick blankets.

            “My friend is a musician and I promised to bring this to him,” Lia said to the driver.  Syed lifted one end and the driver tied the other to the roof of his car.  “Drive very slowly,” Lia instructed.  “Don’t damage the merchandise.”

            Inside the case, I closed my eyes and breathed deeply and evenly through a metal tube Aga Ji had bored into the side of the tamboura case.  For the next three days—until the Saturday flight left for Peshawar, I remained in hiding at the Hilton.  Lia did not let waiters or housekeepers into her room.  She ordered room service, or large portions for meals in the dining room and brought the leftovers to me.  We passed the days playing cards, watching TV, checking the Internet, and watching the activity on the street.

            By Saturday, I wore a boyish European style haircut and heavy make up.  I borrowed a pants suit from Lia, dark glasses, and a stylish floppy hat purchased in the gift shop.  I no longer looked like the Pakistani schoolteacher in work boots and a shalwar kameez. I passed by the police station easily on our way to the airport.

            Deep in one pocket, I carried my handgun and in the other, the Q’ran. 

The Drama of the Long Distance Runners

Published in Thinking Women:  Introduction to Women’s Studies, Kendall-Hunt, 1995.
--Dedicated to workers in the battered women's movement

I watch you in the court
House coffee shop.  Sitting next to
The angry young woman.  The one with
A newborn tied to her chest.  Fear
And despair criss-cross her back.  You

Listen to her insults.  She storms away.  You
Chase after her touch her
Cold shoulder, her tears on the brink.  You
Hand her a card your
Home number on it.  Her
Link to hope on
Some other day
Some other day.  Some

Other day she calls you
Her lawyer and sets a date and later
You rant about her she
Didn’t show up she
Didn’t even call.  At night you

Sip your bourbon and seven you
Empty your pockets you
Search for change you
Search for change you
Have to know:

Is she safe?  Is she still
Alive?  On your way home you

Check the back seat, look over your
Shoulder form your card to our
Door.  At midnight you
Search for keys you
Rattle the kitchen lock one more time before you
Climb the stairs weary
To bed.

I watch you
Her therapist prepare your
Testimony your
Expert psychological testimony  you
Review the research you
Draft the report with your
Clinical observations you
Substantiate your opinions
Bear witness to corroborate her
Reality with your colder, calmer
Objectivity.  You try to balance her
Accounts, reconcile your perceptions with
Those of your science and those of the law.

Sometimes you stare at the wall and you
Cry.  You sit there cradling her fate
So carefully in your learned, aging hands.

I swallow
The Sunday news with my coffee.
Yet another women killed by her
Husbandwhoshothimselftoo.  But
This one,

This one might have been mine,
This one,

Had I not been book up
And had to say no,

This one,

Had she had the money on Thursday
Instead of on Monday,

This one.  I enter the funeral
Home to see her dead body
Dressed like a bride in a box

This familiar stranger I
Talked to over the phone
Once.

This one

Whose Monday appointment Ia
Can now scratch from my book.  You
Sign the book at the funeral for this one
And open this book to write a poem for

This one.

Glenn Miller Was Missing

Published in War, Literature and the Arts, 1997 and in Thomas J. Cooley Journal of Clinical and Practical Law, 2001.   It won a Clincal Legal Education Association poetry award.

Glenn Miller was missing.  Somewhere over the English Channel,
his plane went down in December 1944.  You'd been drafted,
even with a wife and two daughters to support and
day work in a defense plant and night work in the clubs,
your teeth clamped onto the reed of  a saxophone,  chin tucked in,
neck thrown back under the black and silver clarinet.
Even in your tuxedo, you were slated for war.   
If Glenn Miller could die, you could die.
I don't know what it looked like,  you two too scared to be
separated.  They say your bags were packed for months.
You had to be ready to go.  Even the birth of a third child
couldn't stop it now.

By Springtime in Berlin Hitler was dead, or so it was reported. 
The war camps were being emptied of some, and filled with others. 
The boys were coming home, but no one was sure
whether to celebrate or not.  No one knew if you might still have to go
or not.  The war with Japan continued. Scientists were speeding their experiments. 
Khaki uniforms crisscrossing the globe.  Drop the bomb.
Alternative plans on the political front. Pressure from the Allies. 
Hurry before they do it first!  Americans were sick of war.  
In August, there were Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I was born
forty days later.  In the hospital my mother counted all
my  fingers,  all my toes.  A baby whose father never had to go. 

It's as though it was set like a bomb fifty years ago,
and now it goes off  when the phone rings and it's my mother
calling  to hear my voice and she asks me if I know
that she is leaving by air transport.  She says,
I'm leaving for the war, and her 85 year old voice begins to tremble.
Will you take care of my children? she begs me,  warning,
it's a big job.   She is making these last requests of me,
This woman forever in fear of what the neighbors would say
this woman whose  sins I am sick to death of listing
and won't.  I think

how brave she is, this warrior, packed for the end, ready to give her all
for her country.  So I lie to her, and I tell her
of course I will take care of the children, they are such good girls.  I wish her luck 
and thank her for the sacrifice she is making  for us all. 
I pray you'll be home by Christmas, I say over the phone,
 and I mean it.  Her voice sounds so sad. I hope so, she whispers.
I imagine her head is down, phone at her ear, talking into her breasts,
loose now in a loose gown.  And then it is quiet.
I am lost in this when she starts to laugh.
I've been sitting here with the other girls, she tells me. 
Jane had a date last night.  I just don't know why Daddy
hasn't come to pick me up.  She begins
talking about you,

You over there on her dresser in the white tuxedo
with the black bow tie, your wavy hair so light,
your  green eyes young in smoky shades of sepia,
and folded in the other photo next to you
As you two were in the mahogany bed,
is this delicate young dark-eyed woman,
a farm girl pretending sophistication, a studio portrait,
something taken in the thirties, hinged there forever
looking out, not at us, not at each other, you have become
not even you, but Youth, so sweet
So strange to hear my mother now asking for you,
when the last time I saw you, your neck muscles
were finally surrendering to the pillow.
Anita wrapped your dentures in Kleenex.
I tried to tie my silk scarf around your head
to keep your slack mouth shut, but the weight was too much
or the scarf was too narrow, or my will to force the act was too weak,
and we dragged home to tell our mother. 
We lied to her that your death had been painless. 
Now we conspire again to protect her
and I wonder if that's what you did
when she says she saw you just the other day and
you acted like you didn't even know her.  I would never
cheat on Jimmy, she says to me now, I love him so much,
but now I don't know if he loves me.  Why doesn't he
come and get me?  I love him so very much, she repeats, more and more desperate. 
So I tell her you are nearby and she is safe right where
you want her to be, and she agrees that it's all for the best.
She calls me by her sister's name, lifts her voice, pauses and asks me,
and how are the children? 

One thing I can't explain is how I feel when people say
it must be so hard to see your mother's mind fail,
when I feel like finally, finally,
all of her places and years come pouring out to me.
And I think it is me she tells these things to
only because I am here, and because
when Glenn Miller was missing and
she was afraid of war and so were you, 
you comforted her all night long.
So that now, nine months and fifty years later
when I walk through the door
with my trench coat folded over my arm,
she looks long into my green eyes,
and she thinks I am you.

Red on Her Fingers

Published in Tumblewords:  Writers Reading the West, University of Nevada Press, 1995

". . . it came from everywhere.  Which is to say it was
always there, and that it came from nowhere."
-- "Mood Indigo," Blues If You Want, William Matthews

Every morning it was waiting on the other side of her
eyelids;  lingering near the coffee pot until fed; 
it didn't eat much, though it ate often;  at first

it was only a sound in her body, racehorses crossing
her chest;  her breath and her heartbeat panting at the gates;
her bowels rumbling with the winner;  it became

other people's opinions, something gray that soiled
the town, selecting victims by the size of their hearts;  it
was a challenge in black and white;  knight to queen's fifth,

the envy of a baritone for a soprano who sings the bass line; 
but she caught the rare whiff of hatred in the piano
bench, a small mirror hanging in a tin frame;  she found it

red on her fingers from forcing open the hard nut of
compassion;  and it was worn like calluses for a gui-
tarist, green bruises inside the gymnast's tired thighs;

but truly it was also confession, an old shame trickling
down her leg;  she felt bellows pumping, the open wings
of  a heron flapping;  and thick freckled arms stoking

the fire in the living room of its childhood, where at Christmas
the black engine and four cars circled and circled back into
grievances, admissions, and closed fists pounding;

rosaries began to murmur about it, and quickly
everyone would take sides.          Once
in the back of a drawer she found an old

photograph of it:  1949;  she stands
barefoot, alone on a sidewalk, little shoulders
strapped in a sundress;  her hair long

and light;  one hand on her hip; 
that hip cocked;  the other hand shades
her eyes;  she's squinting at it, daring it to shoot.

Autumn in Five Parts

Selected Poem from What Remains (Turkey Buzzard Press, 2016) published in Colorado Women News July 1993 and Montelibre, 1993.

In early autumn, sunny gusts signal a shift,

            the kind of mystery neighborhood crows warn about.

In the garden, the last zucchini lies down with the cucumber,

            under an enormous frond. 

In its corner, the pumpkin drinks and fattens, drinks and fattens,

            While hailstones pock its holes of memory.

Seeds of armyworms under curled leaves of baby kale

            carry more futures than remains. 

2.

Across the street, my neighbor cranks a long piece of metal

            under the hood of his pickup. 

For years, he’s never spoken or waved or made eye contact,

            except last January first, when he was shoveling snow.

At the moment he stood to catch his breath, I shouted

            Happy New Year and he lifted his hand, kept shoveling.   

This time, sunlight catches a long filament flying

            from the eave of his house.  Now is time for serious work.

3.

Drops of water light on silvery cobwebs stretched across mushrooms

             to blades of grass to mushrooms to blades of grass. 

A slow bee probes the yellow mum in the terracotta planter

            just the size and shape of a rabbit. The wind rises. 

My mind rakes the ground under the tall ash while the leaves

            continue to fall one by one, as we do.

 A single crow slides in and out of view. 

4.

How like spiders we are, we aging ladies refusing to go gently,

            grabbing at the forearms of our bossy daughters,

We smile at the neighbors and stomp our feet at doctors,

We are planning our escapes—one will take a bus

            to Dallas and see what happens.                        

One will find the now grown child lost so many years ago,

            and one of us thinks she will stay put. 

5.

Last week, the tangle of planet, sun, and the evenness of days

            Aligned as they should.  Now they begin to unravel. 

Yesterday when I opened the garage to grab the rake,

            a six-sided spider web filled the doorway .

When I stepped in, the web snapped.  I felt the force of it

            against my forehead. 

I heard the sound of the trap.

---

A POEM FROM THE BOOK:

What Remains

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In 2016 Jacqueline’s first book of poems, What Remains, was published by Turkey Buzzard Press.

"I believe in the power of poetry lies in its play of time and memory with music and meaning. . . Who are we? we ask, and scraps of experience rain down."

(Photo credit: Peter Bryson, Nooknose.com)

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Quincentenary Poem: Civic Center Park, 1992

Selected Poems from What Remains (Turkey Buzzard Press, 2016) published in Colorado Women News July 1993 and Montelibre, 1993.

One by one they circle the park,
Eagles facing east from
Courthouse columns
Capitol dome
Museum fortress
The glass rectangular offices of industry.

These are the closed edges of architecture,
This law, this art,
This swallowed literature,
The politics that burn
This island of seeds laid out like tiles On which we march. 

It's another turn of another century,
stage-blood covers the globe,
Stains the pool of buildings
And the books of bones

That do not burn

---

A POEM FROM THE BOOK WHAT REMAINS.

Poetry Is An Act of Love

Selected Poem from What Remains (Turkey Buzzard Press, 2016).

To love a country is to know its poets.

Is there the soul of a human being in there?

Pure uncertainty yearns in a minor key.

Going out to get a poem is like hunting.

Is there the soul of a human being in there?

Miles said: Don’t play what you know, play what you hear.

Going out to get a poem is like hunting.

It is what the mind takes hold of.

Don’t play what you know, play what you hear.

It is what the mind takes hold of.

To love a country is to know its poets.

As if poetry were an act of love.

---

A POEM FROM THE BOOK WHAT REMAINS.