Mother Says Research Articles

Sweet as She Can Be

Sweet as She Can Be

The Death of Alexander the Great

The Death of Alexander the Great Zak Salih (bio) When they pass Mr. Nestor’s house, Mike asks his parents to turn on WMMS. A boy again, at twenty-one, in the back-seat of his parents’ car, his own car in the front drive with its broken transmission, asking Mom and Dad to play some music. Through their cigarette smoke, he watches the morning release the Cleveland suburbs from sleep. Cars and buses flash silver on their way downtown. Trees lie wrecked on lawns after last week’s storm. A mackerel cat stalks a finch along the eaves of the corner store. Mike’s mother turns the radio on. “—of 271 American lives lost this week, a stark report that—” She quickly changes the station. “—remains had recently arrived in New York City for her funeral, barred to reporters and the public, who nevertheless lined up to pay respects to the woman they said could make even the most rock-hearted man cry.” “So sad,” his mother says. She blows smoke out into the morning and starts to whistle “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Dead soldiers. Dead film stars. No one, on this station or WMMS or any other, says a word about Alexander, as if the brief mention Mike caught on the television news last night, between a segment on his brother and other hometown war heroes and sick elephants at the Metroparks Zoo, had been a mixed signal from another state, another universe. An old woman out for a morning walk in Trumbull Park had found the body left like litter in the meadow. A body later identified as Alexander Rush. Mike said nothing when he heard the name. He sat on the sofa and sucked his cigarette dry and remembered Alexander’s advice. Never look sad. They won’t pay for a crybaby. [End Page 107] The police mentioned guns, gangs, heroin. Mike’s father, high on his oldest son’s celebrity, scoffed. A woman held shaking hands to her face, spoke of a son she felt she’d never known, and Mike tried to find Alexander in the gaps between her fingers. During the weather, the lotto numbers, Mike thought of the cautionary films from high school about what heroin did to a body. The bleary eyes, the needle marks like bug bites, the inexplicable rage and paranoia. But Alexander hadn’t been angry or suspicious. His arms had been clean of everything save the scattered moles Mike liked to count when he was too nervous to look into Alexander’s eyes. Alexander had no need for heroin in Trumbull Park. The other boys, maybe. But not Alexander. Breathing in the backdraft of his parents’ exhaust, Mike yearns for his own pack of cigarettes, which he’s forgotten at home, which he can see on the garish yellow felt of the armchair in his bedroom. Sure, he could bum one of his mother’s White Horses or his father’s Solents, but Alexander had exclusively smoked Rothmans, which means Mike exclusively smokes Rothmans. To do otherwise, especially this morning, would feel sacrilegious. Goddamn cigarettes on the goddamn chair, he thinks. His mother brought the ugly beast home last year from an estate sale. A chair for listening to your music, she had said. Mike had seen right through the gift, of course, all the way down to her desperate desire to keep him safe from the violent world to which she’d handed over George, now off flying his planes somewhere in Southeast Asia. It was broken, too, the chair. The springs had long lost their tension, the weak wood slats on its underside felt ready to snap. Still, the chair wasn’t without its use. One evening, when Alexander was a no-show at the school, Mike had come home to his room, turned up WMMS, and pulled the slats out of the chair, one by one, like rotten teeth. Here, under a stack of bath towels, he stored the shoebox that held the money he’d made, his mother’s gift an illicit bank for the illicit income he had hoped to one day present to Alexander like an offering before a king...

STUDI KASUS: PENERAPAN PIJAT OKSITOSIN UNTUK MENGATASI KETERLAMBATAN ONSET LAKTASI PADA PERIODE AWAL POSTPARTUM

Failure in the breastfeeding process is often caused by the emergence of several problems, both problems for the mother and the baby. Problems from mothers that arise during breastfeeding can start before delivery (antenatal period), in the early postpartum period, and after late labor. Problems with breastfeeding can also be caused by special circumstances, such as delayed onset of lactation on early postpartum period, the mother complaining that her baby often cries or refuses to breastfeed, which then means that the milk is not enough or not good enough to make the decision to stop breastfeeding. Anxiety caused by fear of not being able to produce milk and not having enough milk is the most common reason women fail to start breastfeeding, stop breastfeeding too soon, or start complementary feeding before it is needed. One alternative to help facilitate breast milk is to do oxytocin massage. In this case study, after full breast oxytocin massage before breastfeeding, the milk output was good, the baby showed a good sucking and swallowing response, after the oxytocin massage technique was carried out independently and assisted by the husband, the milk came out smoothly. Mother says that the baby is calm and sleeps soundly not fussy.

Cambodian American Listening as Memory Work

Cambodian American Listening as Memory Work

Penélope Palominos: rheumatology by sight and touch

Penélope Palominos cannot remember a time when she did not want to be a doctor. “My mother says I made the decision when I was 2 years old, almost as soon as I could speak in sentences, and I never changed my mind”, said Palominos, now a rheumatologist at LifePlus Litoral Norte, a hospital in Xangri-lá, in Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil. At first, the plan was cardiology. But a bout of viral encephalitis left Palominos with moderate but permanent hearing loss, which would have impaired her ability to distinguish between types of heart murmurs. Surgery would also have been problematic—it is impossible to lipread if your colleagues are wearing masks. Rheumatology presented no such obstacles.

Care

Care

A Bowl of Cream of Wheat

A Bowl of Cream of Wheat

The (Ho)rror of It All

The (Ho)rror of It All

The incalculable costs of tuberculosis

“Zimkitha was the world to us”, her mother says. “When she died, we lost everything: our hopes, our future, and our faith. She was more precious than any gem, and we will never recover from the fact that she is gone.”

One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes

109 CHARLES YU One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes • When a child stays needy until he is fifty— oh mother-eye, oh mother-eye, crush me in— the parent is as strong as a telephone pole. —Anne Sexton, “One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes” e moves back in, a week shy of his fortieth, eighteen years to the day since he moved out. In between, they’d had three divorces (two hers, one his), two bankruptcies (one a piece), two stays in rehab (both his), and one thousand, three hundred and thirteen phone calls. She opens the door, her face expectant. He doesn’t return her look, can’t bear it. He steps into the small living room, his prom picture still angled on the mantle between a jade frog and a porcelain rose. He turns to see, on the opposite wall, a handmade sign she’s taped up: welcome home! Please take that down, he says. She asks if she can make him a plate of food. He doesn’t answer. Goes straight for the cabinet, grabs the first handle. Splashes three fingers of room-temperature gin into a mug. Okay, he says. There are going to be some rules. Yes. His mother laughs. Mine. She takes the mug from him, drains it in one easy gulp. You are not to touch this, she tells him. Not even a drop. Or what? he asks. This time it is her turn to not answer. She tells him to get some rest. He’ll need it. A blanket, folded on the couch. His old pillowcase. He looks out the window. Was that a new tree? He didn’t remember. But it looked like it had been there since before the house even. It looked ancient. ‘ h 110 He wakes in the night. His stomach, empty. He finds bread and meat and cheese, slaps it together. He eats the sandwich in four rough bites while staring through the window. A cold wet wind blows against the tree, the house. The white bread sticks in his throat, unmoving. He cups his hand under the faucet and slurps a few times, forces it down. Full now, or at least no longer hungry, he finds the whiskey, fills his mother ’s mug almost to the top. In her bedroom, he hears her stirring. She calls out to him. You okay? she asks. Go back to sleep, he says. He takes his mug to the window. She’d always been overprotective. Always hovering. Still doing it. Driving him to this. Middle-aged, alone, the sum total of his possessions in the hatchback parked on the street. The wind shifts, the clouds part, and moonlight reveals two men standing by the tree. He freezes. Were they there before? Are they looking at him? They walk toward the window. His head pounding, his stomach heavy and warm, his breath damp and sour. They are at the door. They don’t knock, but he can see them standing there. They are large, tall enough that he can see the tops of their heads through the transom. He stands still, unable to move. From behind him, footsteps. Told you not to drink, his mother says, suddenly in the doorway of her bedroom. There are men outside, he says, his voice small. Get in my room, she tells him. What are you going to do? Never mind that, she says, and she pushes him inside, closes the door. He hears sounds, voices, but everything is carried away in the wind blowing through the front door. ‘ He wakes in the morning to find his mother asleep on the couch. Her hands covered in dried earth, her arms scratched and bleeding. They’re gone, she tells him. Who were they? he asks. 111 I had two sisters. Each of them had a son. Each born with one eye. That sucks, he says. They thought so, too. So they tried to kill you when you were a baby. For my eyes? Yes. What did you do? I told them they couldn’t have them because you would need them. Because one day you would do something with your two eyes that would bring them...

P0717 / #1448: IMMUNOMEDIATED ENCEPHALITIS IN PEDIATRICS, CASE REPORT

Aims & Objectives: Immunomediated encephalitis, is a type of encephalitis given by antibodies against N-Methyl aspartate (NMDA). It occurs frequently in children under 18 years with predominance in females, and a good response to treatment. Methods: Male adolescent of 13 years of age referred to the psychiatric hospital for conduct disorder, aggressiveness and irritability, does not know his relatives, sensory disorder, alteration of the state of consciousness, disconnection with the environment, dyslalia, dysarthria, with personal pathological history of Sindrome from Steven Jhonson at 2 years old. Mother says that 3 days prior to admission presents abruptly behavioral disorders, does not obey orders, irritability, incongruity when speaking, clothes are placed upside down, also remains decayed, hyporexic, argues that adolescent is calling attention however the picture is exacerbated by what he decides to be valued by a doctor, denies trauma, refers to thermal quantification not quantified in the last 3 days. Results: The following results are reported in the tests performed on our patient: • Simple brain CT scan: normal • Simple and contrasted brain resonance imaging: normal • cerebral fluid: normal • • Negative drug panel • normal eye fundus • Anti NMDA in spinal fluid, serum and serum: positive Our patient later required tracheostomy and gastrostomy, as well as physical, language and occupational therapy. however, the connection with the medium was not recovered, nor the prostrationConclusions: Among the most frequent clinical characteristics, the presentation of fever with psychiatric abnormalities, abnormal movements and orofacial dyskinesias stands out; the latter occur more frequently in the pediatric patient

One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes

109 CHARLES YU One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes • When a child stays needy until he is fifty— oh mother-eye, oh mother-eye, crush me in— the parent is as strong as a telephone pole. —Anne Sexton, “One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes” e moves back in, a week shy of his fortieth, eighteen years to the day since he moved out. In between, they’d had three divorces (two hers, one his), two bankruptcies (one a piece), two stays in rehab (both his), and one thousand, three hundred and thirteen phone calls. She opens the door, her face expectant. He doesn’t return her look, can’t bear it. He steps into the small living room, his prom picture still angled on the mantle between a jade frog and a porcelain rose. He turns to see, on the opposite wall, a handmade sign she’s taped up: welcome home! Please take that down, he says. She asks if she can make him a plate of food. He doesn’t answer. Goes straight for the cabinet, grabs the first handle. Splashes three fingers of room-temperature gin into a mug. Okay, he says. There are going to be some rules. Yes. His mother laughs. Mine. She takes the mug from him, drains it in one easy gulp. You are not to touch this, she tells him. Not even a drop. Or what? he asks. This time it is her turn to not answer. She tells him to get some rest. He’ll need it. A blanket, folded on the couch. His old pillowcase. He looks out the window. Was that a new tree? He didn’t remember. But it looked like it had been there since before the house even. It looked ancient. ‘ h 110 He wakes in the night. His stomach, empty. He finds bread and meat and cheese, slaps it together. He eats the sandwich in four rough bites while staring through the window. A cold wet wind blows against the tree, the house. The white bread sticks in his throat, unmoving. He cups his hand under the faucet and slurps a few times, forces it down. Full now, or at least no longer hungry, he finds the whiskey, fills his mother ’s mug almost to the top. In her bedroom, he hears her stirring. She calls out to him. You okay? she asks. Go back to sleep, he says. He takes his mug to the window. She’d always been overprotective. Always hovering. Still doing it. Driving him to this. Middle-aged, alone, the sum total of his possessions in the hatchback parked on the street. The wind shifts, the clouds part, and moonlight reveals two men standing by the tree. He freezes. Were they there before? Are they looking at him? They walk toward the window. His head pounding, his stomach heavy and warm, his breath damp and sour. They are at the door. They don’t knock, but he can see them standing there. They are large, tall enough that he can see the tops of their heads through the transom. He stands still, unable to move. From behind him, footsteps. Told you not to drink, his mother says, suddenly in the doorway of her bedroom. There are men outside, he says, his voice small. Get in my room, she tells him. What are you going to do? Never mind that, she says, and she pushes him inside, closes the door. He hears sounds, voices, but everything is carried away in the wind blowing through the front door. ‘ He wakes in the morning to find his mother asleep on the couch. Her hands covered in dried earth, her arms scratched and bleeding. They’re gone, she tells him. Who were they? he asks. 111 I had two sisters. Each of them had a son. Each born with one eye. That sucks, he says. They thought so, too. So they tried to kill you when you were a baby. For my eyes? Yes. What did you do? I told them they couldn’t have them because you would need them. Because one day you would do something with your two eyes that would bring them...

The World Is an Open Blossoming

The World Is an Open Blossoming Adeeko Ibukun (bio) Keywords Adeeko, Ibukun, Nigerian poet, human, mother, body, water The world is an open blossoming.I know it through my mother's face.Silence still shifts within human spaces.I don't know how I come to it. I knowLiving is for wandering into. I don't alwaysKnow how I come to it in everything, thoughI know I arrive in here. I look at the acresOf its turnings and the world is an openBlossoming. Silence is the tail behindEverything I can hold in there. I don'tKnow what weight it adds to the lifting bodies.I know it is death when silence is all thatIs left. I arrive in here in the unbroken clayOf my mother's smile, and the world isAn open blossoming. I arrive at the frozenFace worn to mock her death. It is allI've been trying to say and the world isAn open blossoming. I know silence is stillA still water behind a smile. I don't say"Welcome in here" to the elusive apronOf its light. I have said look at me in hereAnd mean look at the reflection of the water.I think I come in here with half of myself.I think the rest gives itself to me in everythingElse. I still consider the weight behind a faceThat is broken into a smile, a country asThe world is an open blossoming. Its bodyA shine and a contrail brisk in the water.Don't I say all of living is for wandering into?Don't I say all of wandering leaves off a jewel?I am only trying to say there is a room I am [End Page 292] Trying to reach in the acres of these turnings.It's the beauty to go through my mother's faceAnd the world is an open blossoming. I'mNot lost though the body of a still water doesNot tell me where it begins or where it ends.I don't know where to begin and I think thisNever ends? My mother says, plunge in here,But I say, can you see I am only drowningIn your still water, can you see I need noSaving and the world is an open blossoming. [End Page 293] Adeeko Ibukun adeeko ibukun is an award-winning Nigerian poet. He received second prize in the Sentinel All-Africa Poetry Competition in 2012, and his poem "A Room with a Drowning Book" won the 2015 Babishai Niwe African Poetry Prize in Uganda. Ibukun was a guest at the Lagos International Poetry Festival and Ake Arts and Book Festival in 2015. His poems are widely published or forthcoming in local and international journals, including Sentinel UK, Open: Journal of Art & Literature, Salamander Magazine, 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Expound, and Fortunate Traveler. He lives and writes in Abeokuta, Nigeria. He strongly believes every Nigerian youth has a political duty to help Nigeria find peace. Copyright © 2021 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

Traversing No-Man's Land

Traversing No-Man’s Land JENNY STRAUSS CLAY We all know that the hero of the Odyssey is an ambiguous figure, trickster, a teller of great yarns, a devious manipulator, a master of disguises, polymorphic, multifarious, slippery. The Odyssey is named after its protagonist, yet that name, both in its presence and absence deepens our perplexity as to his identity. Here I am mainly concerned with the pseudonym Odysseus adopts in the cave of the man-eating monster: No Man. But even the name assigned to him at birth reeks of ambiguity and has been much discussed. I think first and foremost of Dimock’s article and Peradotto’s book.1 Here I only draw attention to a few relevant observations. In the very first scene of the poem, the poet draws attention to the hero’s name by punning on it—and for the Greeks paranomasia, especially in the case of gods and heroes, reveals their nature: nomen omen (e.g., Apollo, Cassandra’s destroyer, Aesch. Ag.1072–87; Aphrodite, the Foam-born, Hes. Th. 188–98; Hekate, the goddess by whose will prayers are received or rejected, Hes. Th. 411–52). In the divine assembly that opens the Odyssey, Athena bemoans Odysseus’s lot and berates Zeus: “Why now do you odysseus him so much? (τί νύ οἱ τόσον ὠδύσαο; 1.62). This accusation is especially ironic in light of Zeus’s opening complaint, accusing men of blaming the gods for their troubles; Zeus’s own daughter accuses her father of doing just that! The implied derivation of our hero’s name from odyssasthai, recurs at several important junctures of the poem (5.340, 5.423, 19.275; the verb means “to be wroth with” and is used exclusively—with one exception—of divine arion 29.2 fall 2021 2 traversing no-man’s land anger, which thus makes it the verbal equivalent of the noun menis, the subject of the Iliad. But the form of the verb is itself ambiguous; it can be understood as both active (“to incur wrath”) and passive (“to suffer wrath”). The unique occurrence of the active sense is exploited in Book 19 in the episode involving Odysseus’s naming shortly after his birth, a scene that is in turn embedded in the famous foot-washing incident and forms its core. There, the nurse Eurycleia not so subtly hints at an appropriate name for the baby, the first-born and only son of Antikleia and Laertes: Polyaretus, “Much-Prayed-For.” (Perhaps the old nurse does not realize the name’s possible ambiguity from αρή, both “prayer” and “curse”). Thereupon, his crusty old grandfather Autolycus names the child Odysseus, because, as he says, “I have come here, having odysseused, or having been odysseused (“having been hated” or “having aroused the hatred”)—or better, “cursing” and “being cursed”—by many men and women over the fertile earth” (19.407).2 The syntax here is intentionally ambiguous: the trickster Autolycus has both provoked and incurred wrath. And his grandson will live up to his grandfather’s reputation.3 The whole sequence is unified by its focus on the issue of identity: who and what is Odysseus? There are indications that the name of Odysseus is itself illomened or somehow taboo, since characters in the epic seem to make a special effort to avoid using it. Eumaeus is quite explicit (14.145–46): τὸν μὲν ἐγών, ὦ ξεῖνε, καὶ οὐ παρεόντ᾽ ὀνομάζειν αἰδέομαι. Stranger, even though he is not present, I am ashamed to name him. The irony of course is that Odysseus is present. Telemachus also seems to shy away from naming his father throughout his dialogue with Athena/Mentes in Book 1. His avoidance is most striking when he notoriously expresses doubts as to the identity of his father (Od. 1. 216–20): Jenny Strauss Clay 3 μήτηρ μέν τέ μέ φησι τοῦ ἔμμεναι, αὐτὰρ ἐγώ γε οὐκ οἶδ᾽· οὐ γάρ πώ τις ἑὸν γόνον αὐτὸς ἀνέγνω. ὡς δὴ ἐγώ γ᾽ ὄφελον μάκαρός νύ τευ ἔμμεναι υἱὸς ἀνέρος, ὃν κτεάτεσσιν ἑοῖσ᾽ ἔπι γῆρας ἔτετμε. νῦν δ᾽ ὃς ἀποτμότατος γένετο θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων, τοῦ μ᾽ ἔκ φασι γενέσθαι, ἐπεὶ σύ με τοῦτ᾽ ἐρεείνεις. My mother says I am sprung from that man, but I for my part Don’t know. For no one4 ever himself knows his begetter. Thus, indeed I should have been the son of some prosperous Man, upon whom old age came amid his possessions. But now, he is the most ill-fated of all mortal men: That’s the one from whom they say I was begotten, since you ask. But there are...

The Reasons of Conflicts in the Relationships between Parents and Children

The purpose of this article is finding out the problem of maladaptive family relationships between parents and senior schoolchildren which are usually characterized by the severity of conflicts which have being arisen, by blocking of their constructive resolution, the exacerbation of intra-family alienation. Methods of the research. The following theoretical methods of the research were used to solve the tasks formulated in the article: a categorical method, structural and functional methods, the methods of the analysis, systematization, modeling, generalization. Method of interviewing was used as empirical one.The results of the research. In order to find out the causes of conflicts between senior pupils and their parents we organized a pilot research based on the questionnaire «Reasons of conflicts between senior schoolchildren and their parents» developed by us. The questionnaire was proposed for 355 senior pupils from Kyiv, Rivne and Mykolaiv. From the point of view of youth, conflicts with parents are not the main problem in this age. Based on a survey of a representative group of 16-year-old pupils, about a third part of them (about 27% of schoolgirls and 29% of male schoolchildren) found disputes, considerable differences of opinion with parents, rejection of criticism as the reason for conflicts. At the same time, only a few pupils completely reject the views of parents, who are called as «old ones» (8% of schoolgirls and 13% of male senior pupils). For 33% of schoolgirls and 27% of male schoolchildren, criticism and controversy do not apply to all spheres of their life, but mainly to clothing, hairstyles and evenings at home. Senior pupils who use psychoactive substances have significantly more conflict situations than healthy ones. Disputes with parents are the most important negative factor that hinders the development of senior pupils (35% of male respondents and 28% of female). At the same time, 26% of schoolgirls and 31% of male pupils suggested that learning problems led to drug use, delinquency, symptoms of stress and low self-esteem. Conclusions. It is during the period of maladaptation, for example, when the mother and the child are deprived of one of the possibilities of resolving conflict situations, which in a certain period of time were real, such as: facilitating the relationships through the intervention of the third person – an aunt, a grandmother and some others. As a rule, in this case, throughout the subsequent life of the existence of good and loving the third person helps to compensate for the joyless moments that take place in the relationships with the «other one»; this attitude greatly neutralizes the child’s aggression and significantly eliminates the emergence of fear. In a family where a child takes psychoactive substances, the conflict with a mother or a father (or both of them) becomes extraordinary. In addition, the child’s communication with the father is perceived by the mother as a situation of relief. But if the mother is divorced, then everything becomes much more complicated, and if the child, after arguing with her, suddenly tries to call the father, the mother may get very angry and shout at the child: «Well, go to live with your dad!» Emotionally agitated mothers usually do not understand what they are doing with this phrase, resorting to this kind of method as a struggle is; moreover, the child will feel defeated, and he / she feels a satisfaction – his / her goal has been achieved. At the same time, the child begins to realize that the mother tells him / her to «get out», and the father is already almost have lost her, and then the mother says that she does not need the child at all. Thus, the child «is cornered», and he / she is in despair experiencing the hopelessness of this situation, feels anger towards the mother. Therefore, it is no coincidence that such children begin to look for another, important for them social microgroup, which leads to dependence on the use of psychoactive substances.

Variations and Changes in Language Acqisition in Children

Children acquire language spontaneously without being explicitly taught how. Their mastery of sounds passes through stages determined by a progression from unmarked to more marked sounds, unmarked ones also being those most commonly found in languages and least likely to erode over time, as discovered by founding linguist Roman Jakobson. Their mastery of other aspects of grammar proceeds along with their ability to master rules, rather than simply memorize.
 It was once thought that children learned to speak simply by imitating adults: They hear adults saying words, and then they pick up words. However, modern linguists have found that it is something apparently innate to the species, and thus it proceeds according to basic aspects of linguistic structure.
 Most children start producing words from a time between the age eight and twelve months. Many children have ten words in their vocabulary at the age of fifteen months. They gradually pick up speed from that point onwards. An eighteen month old child may learn only one or two new words a day; whereas a four year old will acquire a dozen. Children do not just master a basket of words and expressions. There’s something more constrained and systematic going on. Words are just empty shells. There is no point in learning a new word if they don’t learn its meaning. Children are remarkably good at this too. They are able to learn a word’s meaning at the first time they hear it used. For instance; a child sees a cow running in a field and hear his/her mother say “cow” the child typically will figure out the right way that the word refers to the animal; not to its colour, or to its legs or to the fact that its running.

This Is the Way We Talk

This Is the Way We Talk Miriam Karmel (bio) Today I will coach her and she will pass the test and the doctor will send her home, as if the only thing standing between her and the sliding glass doors is a mere confusion over dates. (Later, I will tell the doctor that I am lost without a calendar. I will suggest they put calendars in all the rooms.) ________ I have a plan. After she recalls the date, and names the president, we'll hop in the car and head down the open road. Maybe we'll go to Madagascar. I read about it in a magazine in the lounge down the hall. The mellifluous m, the sibilant s call to me. And all those syllables! I've heard that dogs should have two-syllable names: Fido. Rover. Charlie. But a place should roll off the tongue. Mad-a-gas-car. You cannot rush it. It sounds warm, sultry. Easy. Breezy. We must go. Knowing her, she'd just as soon go shopping. We'll go to Safeway, fill our cart with all her favorite things. Olives and blue cheese. Gingersnaps. Diet tonic water. Cut flowers. Ritz crackers. Yes, Ritz. Once, she made an apple pie from the apple-less recipe on the box. She said it was pretty good, though it didn't taste like apple pie per se. (She uses little verbal flourishes like that. I'll miss that. I should tell her.) "The trick was the cinnamon," she'd said. So we'll toss a couple of boxes into the cart. Then maybe we'll go to Costco and get hot dogs for lunch. For dessert, we'll sprinkle cinnamon on Ritz and pretend we're eating apple pie. We might even take in a movie, but she'll only go in the afternoon. She loves exiting a dark theater into the glare of daylight where people are bustling about, full of purpose. She says it's like getting off an airplane and finding yourself in another world. The doctor had better chop chop, or we'll never get out of here. ________ Yesterday she said, "I dreamed I was running up and down the hall looking for someone to translate a letter in Japanese. [End Page 133] "Odd," she said. "I've never been to Japan." "Would you like to go?" I asked. "Oh, Vera," she sighed. ________ The nurse comes in and says, "How are we doing today?" "I'm doing okay. How are you?" mother replies, but she isn't mean. She even compliments the nurse on her uniform, says it's cheery. "All those dogs. What are they? Bassett hounds? Beagles?" She tells the nurse that when she was young, girls weren't allowed to wear pants to school. "On cold days, we wore them under our skirts. We had to take them off first thing when we got inside the classroom." "You're a real card, Francine," the nurse laughs and checks mother's pulse. "I can tell you don't believe me, but it's true," mother says, as if she hardly believes it herself. She's only sixty-nine, but she must feel as if she'd been alive before the invention of pots and pans. Or fire. ________ While the nurse bathes her, I go down the hall to the lounge and read a magazine filled with ideas on how to simplify your life, though everything in it seems enormously complicated. I spend too much time reading about how to reuse the plastic tubs that fake butter comes in, only the article says, "repurpose." Reuse. Repurpose. Either way, you're supposed to decorate all the plastic tubs that clutter your cabinets, then use them to hold all the odds and ends that clutter the rest of your life, like stray buttons, dead batteries, keys that don't fit any locks. I flip to a recipe for a casserole using tuna and noodles, which actually is simple, though it's nothing new. Lately, I'm finding that most things presented as fresh and new are, in fact, old. Perhaps when everyone who was around for the first round of...

At Twilight the Signs Shine With a Remote Light, and: The Future, and: Tomorrow

At Twilight the Signs Shine With a Remote Light, and: The Future, and: Tomorrow D. Nurkse (bio) At Twilight the Signs Shine With a Remote Light You might fall in love with one of the moments, and follow her through the leafy streets of Jugtown, pausing sometimes to give a coin to a panhandler, or pat a mangy dog, to give yourself plausibility.She is just a moment, your mother says, scraping a cauterized yolk from the skillet with the edge of the spatula. She won't last, your father says, looking up from the dictionary, where he's memorizing synonyms. There are a million like her, says your little sister, standing on tiptoe before the full-length mirror. Your uncle just clears his throat.Yet you dream of her, you write letters you don't sign, you wait for the Ditmas bus she rides, you eat every night at the little falafel joint. Unless you recall her charm bracelet, you can't imagine the night sky.You might glimpse her in a rearview mirror, or hear her guffaw in the static at the far end of the FM band.Summer is almost over. The hydrants open as if of their own accord. The children are fascinated by that current, all glance, nudge, and dazzling cold. The older kids sit on stoops tossing cards with pictures of the great sluggers from deeper in childhood: Harmon Killebrew, Moose Skowron.All the moments of August fascinate you, their wildness, their silence, how they glint and vanish. But she is the one you can't live without. Even in autumn you sense her sometimes, shepherding a child across the street, running after a dog's snaking leash, combing her hair in a taxi window, even in winter and the night that follows winter. [End Page 407] The Future I spend more and more time in the underworld. It's not that I don't like this world, Kensington, Brooklyn, long rainy streets, domesticated maples carved with hearts and names, the little factories that make bits of things—second hands for stopwatches, latches for the cases of flutes.I love to lie beside my wife, watching clouds mass in the mirror, waiting for a thread of cold morning rain, listening to her calm adamant breath and perhaps a scrap of Meek Mill from a passing SUV.It's just that the underworld is magnificent. The streets there glitter. The house I am summoned to has no number. A cat waits behind the door; his eyes are dazzling, purely reflective. The bookshelves are imposing, but all the books are blank, no titles on the spines. My father is there, waiting, and there I am as a toddler, a child, a boy, sixty years ago, then fifty. There is my little sister, worried sick over her shiny kneecaps. We all talk together, we are shy, we share so little, but I remember an incipient interest—Miles Davis—and the teenager warms a tad. Where do you come from, he asks.A candle burns in a candlestick. If I blow on it the flame remains vertical. If I comb in the oval mirror, the old man on the other side combs in the opposite direction, grinning slyly.You have been vanishing all your life, my wife explains when I return. You keep disappearing to make way for the next self. Who knew that you were vanishing into the future?I can't help it, our room feels cramped now. The rose in the vase. The calendar with all the days crossed out. [End Page 408] Tomorrow Can you make it to tomorrow? Can you hold out?There you will find what lies beyond the pines, what the porch lamp hides, who waits at the top of the chipped stone steps.Your father and mother will be circling in the green skiff, far out in the reach. He sculling with one oar, she scanning the glare, eyes shielded. She points, she mouths a name, you break the wave, gasping. Such a delicate operation. She has to lean forward to embrace you, he must slouch back at the same moment, equalizing the thrust, then right himself in increments, while...

Unleavened, and: W, and: Yardwork

Unleavened, and: W, and: Yardwork Matthew Gavin Frank (bio) Unleavened The matzo brei sticks to the skilletbecause my mother has spilledthe sugar. The spatula is nowinadequate, and so are her hands.Two cubes of butter can't save usanymore, and the trout on the sideof the sugar bowl seem aghast,out of water, only pretendingto be as stoic as the ships thatfish for them. They, too, mustbe watching the news. We eat itin front of the television,my younger sister freshlyunemployed, my mother lyingabout how she likes the burntpieces best. She movesthe lumps of wet dough aroundher plate with her fork. I thinkshe thinks she's writing her name.She does this—with silverware,house keys, her finger signingagain and again my father's deathcertificate dreamily in the air.Months ago, after seeing picturesof his enlarged heart, she vowedto stop preparing pancakes, sworeoff yeast. Now, when my mothersleeps, she sees me and my sister [End Page 33] building a long fence in the snowto keep in the horses (we neverhad horses) because they can'tsuppress their jumping. Ourfaces are red, our hands are red,we are rendered to our listsof cold ingredients. The spruce rockover us, and the only crow leftis beyond solitude, blindedby the breaths of the horseswhich surge to meet it. Webuild the fence, she says,and my sister cries as she worksher hammer, and as my motherspeaks. We eat through it,and the matzo is dense becauseit has to be, and on the television,agents dislocate children from theirparents at the border. So manypipe dreams forsaking their natures.There is little left inside usthat will compel us to rise. My sisterrefills her prescription. The horses,my mother says, are so beautifulthis year. W The gush of the snailis the gathering of the shell,some tight spiral beliesthe soft thing dyinginside of it. Again,the weather is oozy [End Page 34] and indistinct, hissingat us like some angryduped audience. The booingof the thunderstormon top of us, the missionarydroplets, and dropletsof light. Again, we arepinned down in Illinois,pillaging such prettychandeliers from the brokenwindows of the boutiques.You are so reckless withthe electricity makingflytraps of your hair. Eventhe wind here is toothy,beaded with sugary poisonand a monogrammedsaltshaker. In its gustingis some failed attemptto announce its own name,arrested surprised-mouthedgumming a fat letter that's stolenits identity from another.In your plastic backyardswimming pool, no oneis ready to open their eyesto identify me underwater: this copse of rust,this aperture of infinitedehydration. To myasshole, the shadowsof the paramedics arrivewith their vacuumsto suction, then sutureone shocking bolt to another.This, they call a braid,a waterspout. They drink [End Page 35] themselves alive from the crushedcarapace and, so hypnotized,confuse the calcified cindersfor a galaxy. Yardwork I'm afraid of the plants,their baby-hairs sharpand babyish, they don'tlisten to reason, or, myreason. I didn't meanto break anyone's spirit,or finger, or ribs. I'm afraidof my mother's tolerantbreasts, flip and brassyand undershirted flat.I want to be, finally,a fast runner. Someonewho can catch a ballwithout being afraidof the way that evenmountains will becomeplains. I'm afraid of myfather's beard andthe redness of his facebeneath it, the rash thatonce reminded meof a moose. I shouldmow the plants downbecause I can do that,I have a machine for that,but those old kisses, thatold breath, eaten oatmeal, [End Page 36] drunk dessert wine, if onlysome scalpel can cutthat off, leaving onlysome pretense of frailty.Please forgive me forthe turtle who has beenrecently unanchored inmy chest, so slowlygumming all the softround stuff in there,my...

Canadian Theatre Made for Black Women

For close to two decades Trey Anthony has carved out a successful career as a published and produced playwright in Canada in a national theatre landscape where few playwrights enjoy sustained success. This is, in part, because Anthony is also an entrepreneur who identified Black women in Canada as a financially viable and lucrative target market and she has consistently self-produced content that is geared specifically to them. This article begins with the production history, critical response, and box office response to Anthony’s play How Black Mothers Say I Love You. It continues with an analysis of the play’s content and characters as representative of staging Black female life and it concludes with a contemplation of what Anthony’s successful cultivation of a Black female audience in Canada suggests about Canadian theatre.