Cecil Morris, volume 2 number 4
Hole In The Head Review
her inside gives nothing away
at our daughter’s autopsy, the doctor opens her
like a question and the comforting burr of bees
alive among mandarin blossoms in spring sun
rises, swells—a sound sweet and angry, freighted
with her story, chapters unbound—then black wings beat
as crows assault the air, a dark and noisy lift,
a plethora, too many for her narrow chest,
for the shrinking receptacle of our one girl,
who, more or less than glass, now gives all her secrets
to antiseptic air, to purple latex gloves,
to blood tests and magnetic poles, the blur of crows
in crowded tumult rise, a different kind of hide-
and-seek, the truth comes peek-a-boo, through feathers fanned
for flight, confusion of shapes and shades, to us still
the mystery she didn’t share in the twenty years
since she left our home, the golden straw of our girl
to woman spun, enigma machine idling
in the hall of don’t ask, don’t volunteer, don’t look,
this blonde stranger casting aside our hand-me-downs
of chin and eyes and long limbs and inside what else,
beside the crows, a chattering next of songbirds
at dawn or dusk, incomprehensible but bright,
the foreign language of siskin, junco, house finch,
perpetual blush and flutter, a palpitation
of wings so nearly weightless they float above her
and tell us no more than crickets do as day fades—
that night has arrived and day departed, the end
and beginning, everything at once as always,
and we have only questions and no answers,
no finish to our daughter’s ending, no final
revelation as doctor closes our daughter.
Jean Kane, volume 2 number 3
Hole In The Head Review
Making a Stink
I huffed oil paint
like glue. With turpentine
and linseed fumes, it plunged
me into sense,
a folding out. The thrill
knuckled under no solid.
I can’t locate that precise
odor any longer. Paint doesn’t
smell the same. Perhaps, I’m told,
because of danger. New didactics
note the minerals that masters used to grind
in the raw were often lethal to breathe.
History’s poison infuses thick
promise, cigar smoke and bus exhaust,
mercurochrome’s scraped air.
Mothballs’ secret closets. What’s the trade?
As if a scruple could prevent
the disasters that barreled over me
instead.
Samantha DeFlitch, volume 2 number 2
Hole In The Head Review
In the North Country
There's me! Loud
trudging beneath
trees with their blue
language, their wind-
swept crinkling. My
spit freezes before it
hits snowpack. I am
proud to live here but
that is wrong. All I have
to offer this hard land:
a foil-capped birdfeeder
chockful of balls, soft
small suet. The mountain
rises and it is brilliant and
it is terrifying and it is not
anything at all: an uncaring
rockpile. Bold of me to give
it meaning. I'm a loud knock
at the wrong door; the world
will go on without my help.
At dusk, chickadees find log-
pile-protection, self-induce
hypothermia, and live. Yes,
this land is a blue ritual.
Then some far-off dog
cracks open the quick night
that carries her yelp away.
Farah Habib, volume 2 number 2
Hole In The Head Review
How to Eat a Mango
Slice with the skin on. Stand the mango up. Cut from the top of the fruit, down one side of the pit and then the other; try to cut as close to the pit as you can. Put the side with the pit on the square wooden cutting board that sits in front of you on the small kitchen counter where you are standing. Hold the other half in your hand and make a tic –tac – toe like grid; peel back the skin and knife out the meat. The fruit should fall in cube-like shapes into a bowl. Serve with fork and napkin. The internet is full of suggestions.
Is that it? Is that the way to make a mango taste syrupy sweet like it did back when your uncle served it after dinner, the deep rumble of his laughter leaving you hungry for more?
No results found, the internet responds. Did you mean mango mousse?
Come on, don’t you know what I’m talking about? Is it in the geometry of the mangoes where the sweetness resides?
Mangoes come in all shapes and sizes, the internet states—oval, round, almond-like.
Looking closely at the images online, you see only perfect piles of the tropical delight, no sturdy palm cupping the soft drupe, no thick grip that always knew what to do, how to be.
The secret, you finally realize, is in the hands. Yes, it’s somewhere deep in the lines of the hands of the man who cuts, slices and serves the yellow-orange sweetness to all the children and adults sitting around the long rectangular table listening, talking, learning the ways of the world in a room with stories that make their way to us, as the juice from the pulpy, soft, fibrous meat slides down our chins and fills our mouths with the sometimes citrusy, sometimes tangy taste so comforting and soothing in the way stories are when told to us by those who were there, who walked the gullies, who sat on the charpoys, who chewed on the paans, who smoked the hookahs, who remembered the mothers, who buried the fathers, who wiped the tears, but always, always knew what to do as they slept on the clean white sheets spread out in the big open spaces of the verandas where our ancestors breathed in the house full of mangoes.
Larkin Warren, volume 2 number 1
Hole In The Head Review
Walking with My Mother in the Dark
On most weekends, Sundays by five or six, the lake was empty,
boats mostly gone, save ours. A gift, to stay on the water
after others go—floating at anchor
or drifting in the yellow canoe, eating blueberries from a bucket.
Falling light calls us closer in—the white dock glowing,
the loon’s heartbreak call-and-response,
the ping of summer bugs against the screens.
Into the house for gin and tonic, out again to sit in the glimmer,
the halyards clanking after the sun goes down.
In daylight, she is sure and steady, straight-backed
as we go up and down the old road.
Her road, after all. His too, once—in winter, the big boots, a shovel,
the snowplow on his truck, his sense, defense, pretense
of guarding her, of guarding everything they had.
At night she holds my arm, leans a little as gravel shifts
beneath our feet. The dogs run ahead or beside,
into and out of the trees, crossing through the flashlight beam
Now she sits in a bright pink room peering through a city window,
certain that the Lady in the harbor is waving back at her.
"Best you hook that screen door," she murmurs.
She'd asked them for a yellow room,
but only pink was left. "Pink!" she says, and waves it away.
—Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, August 2005
Tim Benjamin, volume 2 number 1
Hole In The Head Review
Lifeline
My wife’s great aunt went into
an asylum at seventeen, pencil-thin, pious,
unconvinced the small knot of flesh
they’d cut from her stomach wall
wasn’t in fact immaculate.
She left two years later, fifteen pounds
heavier and an atheist, telling her parents
she’d drowned God in the
activities room toilet.
From there, her life was made of toast and
quince jam, coffee, afternoon card games, a sullen
cigarette on the back porch at sunset
with a brother who taught her how to
swear in French, insomnia.
The doctor who’d performed the operation
came every other week, injected her with a
neuroleptic, and stayed for dinner.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, before or
since,” he’d always say, as if
for the first time and as if to himself,
and raise a glass of Malbec in honor
of nature’s unpredictable plot, while
under the stone fountain in
the back yard, just out of earshot,
his name-making patient sewed together
featureless dolls out of strips of old pants,
dish cloths, thread and dried beans.
“One in every half a million live births,” he’d say. “They
want me to give a speech in Boston next month!”
The family was wealthy; otherwise, as my
mother-in-law reasons, who knows?
She could have been a martyr, a
dead, canceled saint, something besides
the zombified curiosity once or twice referenced
in out-of-date medical books.
There’s always a plan, she claims;
but to have a part of yourself lopped off—even
if it would eventually kill you—
there’s your crisis of faith.
And the night they found her under the
stone fountain, twenty-two,
alone in the house for the first time in
at least a year, the doctor was stumped, but
impressed: it wasn’t pills or the old pistol her
brother used to shoot pigeons in the summer,
but an incision, just to the left of the costal arch;
the scar doubling as guide for the
boning knife, her hand, to the wrist, missing,
stuffed inside the wound and wrapped
around her large intestine.