Reader, I

Abstract

Reader, I Corey Van Landingham (bio) had grown skeptical of line. Of stern procession down a page's blue rule. Malmaison's perfumed rows the Empress marched down—Rosa Centifolia, Rosa Lucida—while her husband's flotilla lapped toward Trafalgar. Of the jealous descent. I had cast off such impossible realms—near Diamond Head, on an unseasonably cool August morning, Gloria, great-aunt, finally let go the material world forty minutes after father was lifted from his last bed. Then I shared the blood of three still-breathings. Lone quatrain, us. Who mostly didn't speak, or write. All to say—when I attended the teeming wedding feasts, the high school graduations of yet another Cleveland cousin, the austere Catholic masses full of him, I softened, a bit, my stance. Signed my name inside his family Bible, though I didn't believe. Seventeen casseroles sent post-surgery, reliable piles of Christmas cards. In the frozen cemetery, enough small talk to cancel out a whole sad self. When I glanced, after, the sprawling hand-drawn tree from which he came, I thought of shallow [End Page 217] roots. And the women of Greece mourning, each year, mortal Adonis. Reader, some say they were a simple people, who believed in mere symbols, gods of corn. They planted—in the quick, festive flush of summer heat—fennel and barley in terracotta shards. "Gardens of Adonis" they called these small, short-flourishing graves, and when on the eighth day the false flowers withered, the women flung them to the sea. Imagine—their dead that present. Listening. So when I make the small cut, insert the orange-flowering Arizona into our disease-resistant, winter-sturdy Wife of Bath, I say a little prayer. Beautiful, brief Adonis—forgive me my hubris, this dreamy cultivar, this mingled seed. We wrap grafting tape around the rose's wound. Wife now, I see it. The fresh lesion of two. Tender twinning. We know not what will come after—peach petals, scent of myrrh? A tusked beast rushing from the forest to gut us, four months in hell? But we know what came before. Which ship held which man before he lay down in which new country with which wife. The log they sawed, the plates they stacked. The children they buried and the children that buried them in deep family plots. It astonishes me still how many shared the same name. How his people will gather in the same church gymnasium, in Bucyrus, after the funeral, the baptism, after the wedding for the same creamed chicken. That they stand in the longest lines for that. Reader, I found belief outside belief when for the first time the cicadas weren't screaming, all evening outside our bedroom, me me me me. [End Page 218] Corey Van Landingham Corey Van Landingham is the author of Antidote, Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens, and Reader, I, which is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2024. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois. Copyright © 2023 The University of the South