by Megan Grumbling

     O me, while I stride ahead, material, visible,
          imperious as ever! . . .
     O to disengage myself from these corpses of me,
          which I turn and look at, where I cast them!
                                                    — Walt Whitman

My ghostlings snag unseen over the blue
braid coils, red Asian wool, cream cotton loops

I tread in thoughtless onward.  They detach
by filaments and settle, graze and catch

at ankles, steal fleet instants of my step
clear out of time: In string – tripped Muybridge split

seconds, they mark my movements between ice
and gin, drip rack and cupboard, candlelight

and sheets, are offerings of whispered least
resistance to this gliding, facile grace

of forth.  I go horizon – wild, headstrong,
my grown sun – burnished histories so long

so full.  But seen alone, each strand is scarce
matter enough for hue, honey and ash,

chestnut and silver though I’ve known them, gnarl
and plait, as if myself, and yet let fall

untended.  Only as they break my stride
do I discover what I’ve shed, find time

to kneel, whisk hand through seeming empty space,
sheer circles, and collect myself, a skein.

by Renée Olander

Those two creamy strands, their vague yellow tint increasing the value of the oyster’s irritation, cost an outrageous thousand bucks in the early eighties when my ex and I were living on Campbell’s soup and he had to break our deal about not blowing more than fifty dollars on each other for Christmas.  I was pissed off Christmas morning after he told me what they’d cost.  I’d opened one strand, then the other, the first stuffed in my stocking, the second under the tree.  He just wanted to give his wife a pearl necklace, a joke he made at parties when I was too stupid to understand why his buddies chuckled.  Two strands? was my question, and he explained that the saleslady said the two matched perfectly, a very rare thing.  Don’t worry about it, he said, but I knew that whatever I didn’t know about his money was worse than I thought.  Can you believe he wanted me to count the pearls toward my part of our marital estate?  He said, You have those pearls — I’ll take this and that.  I was like, YOU take the pearls — hock ’em, or wear ’em — they’ll look great on you.  I never wanted a damn pearl necklace in the first place.  Then he backed down.  I used to think I’d sell them but they’ve grown on me.  Sometimes I wear just one, sometimes I latch them together and tie them in a knot — the very thing he told me would weaken the strands — and I bite on them, I like to feel the just – under – the – surface roughness against my teeth, a sign they’re real.  After wearing them all day I take them off and hold them in my hands awhile — I like how pearls hold a body’s residual heat.

by Renée Olander

Whose bones ache in long – healed broken places?
Whose bones remember, come damp or cold weather,
The hardball hit into the cheekbone?
The shoulder – blade split
On pool – side cement —
The drowning terror, the close call, and
A green sweaty sling to chafe the neck?

Whose head sculpted a sparkling bulb
Into the windshield — pushed it out with just a bruise
To the skull?  That time the MG Midget
Rammed the Mercedes — who flew
Headfirst into shatterproof glass, walked away dizzy?

Whose bones ache in long – healed broken places?
Whose bones remember knitting
Their cracked and tender parts, green twigs, hairlines,
And small bones crushed as hearts?

Whose simmering knowledge is it?
And what source feeds the craft,
The drawing together of edges, even jagged, even
Improperly set, and even when
Chewing pain returns each winter rain

What’s broke will calcify, will weave and knob.
Isn’t that some comfort?  Seasoned cells
Pass down information, legends
Of regeneration, like loyal aches
Long – healed broken places can sustain.

by Renée Olander

I.
On the Bay this morning,
not far from beach bathers
who mostly gave it wide berth,
a dead turtle washed up,
like a whole sordid decade,
a gelled and whitened blob,
sand – crusted, half eaten,
and faintly stinking.
A few gawkers pressed near
as if it were a circus, before
six men in blue marine
science uniforms
hauled it off for study.

II.
Another woman’s body on the beach
waterlogged —
someone stumbled on her —
a whole body, not a headless torso
like one a dump truck driver
spotted last week, spilling from a trash heap,
no sign of her legs or hands.
After the news I dreamt my hands
were cut off, and the train I rode
barreled through industrial
bowels of seaboard cities.
Sunset near the edge of town,
a streak comes down through clouds
and lights a mound of landfill.