noteworthy
In each issue, the editors choose a writer whom they would like to bring
to the readers' attention.In this issue, poet Rebecca Elliott is highlighted.
Rebecca Elliott's imagination takes you places you have not been: where bees inhabit fingertips, where coffee smells like tuna fish, where fifteen drops of water are the next fifteen days of your life. Arrive at each poem as a tourist and leave with its secrets as souvenirs.
When He Holds Out His Hands, Bees Stream from His Fingertips
The Meaning of Wallpaper
[She has spent all day in the back...]
What Would Happen
[For a long time I was too eager to fill up rooms...]
[Today the coffee smells faintly of tuna fish...]
3 Dinners
[After the funeral, the uncles stood in the doorway...]
[This was the summer of a...]
Of Someone
Opaqueness
[By midnight: two or three empty beer cans...]
[I know a bridge...]
Even the Walls are Painted White
When He Holds Out His Hands, Bees Stream from His Fingertips
He stands near the hives behind his father's house
with one finger pointed at each of the stars. The light
from the bathroom window presses into the grass,
the grass presses into his ankles,
and it's true that every time he tries to raise his hand
the other students duck, and when he points at the window
the bees rush to knock themselves out
rhythmically against the glass,
but at night they circle down again in long arcs
toward his ears and their wings make breathy winds
and whisper things, like maybe, and radiant,
and tomorrow afternoon the answer.
She had forgotten the meaning of wallpaper. Now when she ran her hand along the wall
she felt nothing but the suspicion that she should feel something, and so she had stopped
touching the walls altogether. She walked sideways through doorways and stood in the
middle of rooms. This became habit and life regained its clarity. She never thought about walls
anymore. She didn’t notice their absence. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to miss the
way they used to resist when she leaned against them.
[She has spent all day in the back of ...]
She has spent all day in the back of a restaurant.
Now in her mind the kitchen produces its own light, a glow that has nothing to do with pilot
lights or warm ovens or the cigarette she breathes in. Now it’s the smell of linden leaves, dogs,
children. It’s good to stand outside at night on a crowded corner of an empty city. Across the
street the old men who have spent all day in the library come out, disperse, and vanish between the buildings. She is comprised of her gloves, bare arms, cigarette, scarf, of the way the thin cord of her headphones feels against her cheeks, and the way the air at night feels on her ears and shoulders
when she stands outside a restaurant and watches the lights go off in the public library, and the men
file out.
And what if, he thought, he was sitting outside at a small table and eating fries with ketchup,
and there was on the ground between the bricks a small piece of paper, maybe a ticket to a museum,
maybe a receipt or a price tag, and then what if it started to rain on his shoulders and his French
fries, and people walked by with newspapers held over their heads and when a wind came up they
all went flying—him and the table and chairs and the fries and ketchup and the bricks with the
small pieces of trash stuck to them, and the people with their newspapers held over their
heads—they would all go flying up in an enormous wind and then he would be able to see the
city was bigger than he thought and that it was surrounded by fields and cows.
[For a long I was too eager to fill up rooms...]
For a long time I was too eager to fill up rooms. I had moved into an empty apartment and
began immediately to fill it with furniture. Once the walls were lined with sideboards,
bookshelves, etc, I started on the floor. A good foundation of carpets and area rugs, and
then tables. There were an enormous number of table designs to choose from and I chose
them all. Dining room tables, big oaken ones, coffee tables, glass-topped coffee tables, long
low wooden coffee tables, post-modern coffee tables made from roller-skates and plexiglass.
Just before it became impossible to move around in the room, I started buying chairs. I
placed the chairs on the floor surrounding the tables and then on top of the tables when there
was no more floor space. I climbed up to the tallest chair on the highest table and I sat
there for a while. That was when the birds went out the windows and the light came in. It was
too late to hang curtains. Someone came by and said, Hello. It was Francis. I held out my hand
but I wasn’t about to get down. He had to reach way up to shake it, standing on his toes and
leaning over the mahogany-based, mosaic-topped coffee table. He bruised his shins. What
difference would it have made if I had apologized. He went away after a while and it was
nighttime so I fell asleep.
My hands fell into tight grips during the night. I woke up and opened them and there was
a small acorn inside each one. It’s like take a zipper and open it and there are wild nuts and
berries just waiting to be picked up.
[Today the coffee smells faintly of tuna fish...]
Today the coffee smells faintly of tuna fish and I like it better than ever.
Today two black pugs on red and blue leashes pass under the shade trees across the street.
Today a woman finds herself with hollow ankles.
The stomach gnaws always at itself. A sonnet is no longer a relevant method of communication.
The only thing that is not remarkable is trees growing out of the sidewalk.
There are a few things I keep coming back to -- the feeling of wood grain on the tabletop -- texture
indicating time. How ankles can contain cold air (even on the hottest days) (when the rest of the
world is boiling). How ankles can contain a pocket of cold air, as other bones contain pockets of
warm air. And then: a shadow in the corner, dead flies on the windowsill.
My fingertips are the only part of me that exist.
Today, afternoon sunlight on the trees from above.
Dinnertime #1:
The next time you see her, she has her hand immersed
in a brown paper bag of dried insect wings that reminds you
of school lunches waiting on the kitchen table
in the morning. “Look,” she says, “ants also
have wings sometimes.” But the wing she holds out
to you has no ant attached or any other kind of insect
and you have to lean in close to her tiny fingers
to see it at all. When you look up there are brown
translucent things sticking out of her teeth.
Dinnertime #2:
Someone has tied a dog up in the alley behind the bar
behind your house. A black one, with white paws,
and skinny. This is when you're alone in the house
making yourself dinner, and the dog keeps barking
at the bums who are going by with their brown
Safeway shopping carts, and their wood pallets,
and their garbage bags. What are they building down there
at the far end of the alley? Garlic, mushrooms, tomatoes,
ravioli. The dog is cowering against the building.
Dinnertime #3:
The sky is still pink and it's earlier than usual,
but the ground is dark and dinner is ready
so your mother is in the back yard with the flashlight
in one hand, pointed down. Her other hand
is in her sweatshirt pocket and the graham cracker crumbs
are getting under her fingernails. This is before
she moves to call you. Admire these: the two thin tracks
are the lines your knees made in the dirt
as you crawled under the house.
[After the funeral, the uncles stood in the doorway...]
After the funeral, the uncles stood in the doorway with firecrackers in their hands
The sound of an ancient oak tree falling under the weight of a snowstorm: a groan, a slow
groan, its roots lifting a room away from the rest of the house – so slowly that when the uncles
later went up the hill to look at the damage they found all the objects in the room exactly as
they had been, only tilted 30 degrees to the right. Grandma stood at the kitchen sink and
watched the tree up the hill as it tipped over. Two weeks later her husband was dead.
If I were to define memory, it would be a house or a house you left and could almost return to. It
would not be a flock of birds or a bowl of water hissing on the stove. It would be the
staircase leading to these things.
A human form that becomes a piece of furniture. A human form easily becomes a piece of
furniture. An old woman is lifted, stiff, and placed in another part of the room. Firewood piles
by the stove. In the kitchen, another wood stove, which she bought when she first lived
here. This one for cooking. She explains its complicated system of dampers, compartments,
and vents: lift each iron burner and see the flames beneath them. When I was eight I lived in
this cabin for a year with my family. When the power went out we would light kerosene lamps
and cook pancakes on the woodstove in the kitchen. When it rained the creek would swell and
overrun the swingset. My sister and I raised chickens and brought stray kittens in, but at
the end of the year we moved to Seattle and the dog ate almost everything. The grandparents
stayed, moving back and forth from one house to the other, up and down the hill.
A human form that becomes a piece of furniture. When I have known you and have loved
you long enough, you will become a piece of furniture in my house. I will sit with you for
hours. I will forget you are there. You will be the most comfortable, most beloved furniture
I have ever owned.
If there is no one to witness you in the morning, your hands deep in dishwater, your mind
somewhere out the window with the decaying tile of your neighbor’s roof, do you still
entirely exist?
Or if you are in a cafeteria and each time you look up from your book to think about
what you have just read, the people at the tables around you have changed…
In a home movie, Grandpa is leading my brother, my sister, and me around in a circle
over the rocks in the dry creek bed. Jacob is the oldest so he gets the drum, Grandpa has
a rattle. Charlotte and I trail along, enthralled and distracted. Grandpa tells us the words
of the rain chant and we repeat: “rain rain rain rain rain.”
Lizards on the rocks. And the brush around the edges might at any moment burst
into flames.
This was the summer of a hundred celebrations. Fireworks went off constantly and it was
difficult to sleep for that reason as well as for a hundred other reasons. Five of them: (1) the bed
was and remained a mess, (2) everyone was shouting around me, (3) there were things to do,
things to do, (4) the summer was hot and sticky and air conditioning was too expensive to
think of, (5) the beach at night, the beach at night. Imagine the feel of someone's hand in your
hair when you have gone a solid year without that kind of thing.
A car drove by, like always, moving the air around it so I felt something like a little breeze
against my sides
The next day we went to a movie and sat there in the dark while the pictures flashed by on the
screen in front of us.
The next day I stood in the middle of the street. Children came out of all the houses and
surrounded me. I didn't know what to do.
The next day I started over again. I placed my eyes where they went. I folded the blankets.
The next day, fifteen drops of water lined up on the countertop. I leaned down over them. Each
one reflected a different scene. These were the next fifteen days of my life.
Around the eyelids of someone, especially the tips of the eyelids of somebody, and the
fingernails. These are the extremities of people. His hair feels nothing, but his eyes turn off, and
on, and off again like headlights. His teeth are too pointed. His arms too long on the table. The
eyes or the eyebrows or the area around or next to the eyes, the space next to the head. The
area bordering the shoulders and the light.
Opaqueness
(a distance of twenty yards)
Sit, hold hands, see a bird that flies north
and another that flies south. Fill your pockets with rocks.
Fill your pockets with candy.
I am not the same person tonight as I will be
tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning,
the sun, air through the windows:
cockroaches and bedbugs – out!
But it is still cold and we stand in the dirty tub together shivering
while the cat bats at water drops on the shower curtain
and then falls in. This is what we meant when we said
life would be beautiful, when we said life would be beautiful.
[By midnight: two or three empty beer cans...]
By midnight: two or three empty beer cans on a radiator,
the light of a renaissance painting, a window covered in wire mesh,
and nothing else. No glass in the window, and in the glass
no mass of bodies, their heads held back
in the moment just before being flung forward again,
no cloud of smoke suspended above them.
If there is a sound through the buzzing it is not a pit bull
wandering head down and knee-deep in smashed cans,
pools of beer and the light that comes out of them and wraps itself
around its ankles.
I know a bridge. I know a long bridge and the end of it.
I know the clouds coming out of the mountains in the morning after the rain. It is blue.
In a dream my eyes are sealed over. In the dream I have been in a trance, calculating the number
of my past lives, but now that I have finished and hold the number in my mind I am stuck, unable
to speak or to move. The tighter I hold to the number, the more I struggle, the deeper I sink.
I know a long tunnel and the end of it.
I know a few shapes. The cube, which is rationality. The sphere, which is my mother's eyes. The dodecahedron, which is the way I feel most of the time.
I know that a pier is made out of these shapes and it leads to nothing. I know a bridge is also made
of these shapes, but it leads to another shore.
I know the smell of wet sidewalks.
The children on my street run up to me when they see me leaving on my bicycle. They shout
hello, but when I respond they stare at me blankly, as if they had thought I was someone else.
Even the Walls are Painted White
(for Amanda and Bobby)
In three weeks you will wake up into an ideal world, coffee always ready and a dog running
around back there somewhere. The newspaper set up next to a glass of orange juice that
has not been sitting out since the night before. Fresh-baked bread will be a regular occurrence
in your house. Flowers will bloom continuously from the back of the toilet.
With all the doors and windows open, you can let everything come to stay inside you – or pass
through you – or you can open your eyes and permit a transfer of air. An animal crawls out of
a box, and it's a dog. I mean a window opens & it's because someone has opened it.
As you sit at the table sipping your juice, you will look up over the top of the newspaper at
the person digging around in the silverware drawer, and you will feel the coldness of a
spoon against fingertips not your own.
Rebecca Elliott lives in Chicago, IL, and is from Seattle, WA.
