by Elaine Equi

Someone has remade this country into a combination golf course and theme park. I got on what I took to be an elevator, only instead of going up and down, it moved horizontally like one of those sidewalks in airports, traveling slowly through a landscape of surprising sights. There was a large ship with sails and rigging from another century that led to a replica of the White House done up to look like the Taj Mahal. There were manicured emerald lawns and holograms of what appeared to be exotic flowers. It was hard to tell if you were inside or outdoors. “I get it,” I said to the woman standing next to me. “It’s like being at The Met only you don’t have to walk and there isn’t any art.” When you finally did exit, you were greeted by a row of vendors with carts selling upscale junk food – giant hotdogs and burgers served with stone ground mustard and a sprinkling of finely chopped onion. They looked pretty good, and though I rarely eat meat, I was tempted to try one.

by Betsy Sholl

“Tomtits” he called them, the fledglings
he watched each day in the prison yard.

back when the Nazis had little on him
besides preaching a Gospel of brotherhood
and a few suspect runs to London.

“Tomtits,” a catch-all name for those small
songbirds that build nests in abandoned places—

woodpecker holes, old tree stumps,
or a prison wall where a brick’s fallen out,
nests woven out of twigs and hair—this one

filled with ten eggs, then ten squalling chicks,
two parents flying in with insects and seeds.

“A salve to the soulless life of prison,”
he wrote, even as he also wondered
if calling nature a salve was too easy.

This was before the assassination plot
failed, and connections were revealed,

before he found the nest one morning
torn from its hole. “Some cruel fellow”
he wrote, “went and destroyed the lot,

left the tomtits lying on the ground, dead.”
Later, with the scaffold almost certain,

his own life already torn and wrenched,
somehow, he saw past that old prison wall,
past the broken place, into an opening.

by Betsy Sholl

In college we had a long walk uphill to our classrooms. Rain in the fall, rain in the spring brought out hundreds of earthworms, as if they were spawned by rain, as if they were rain made visible and scrawling messages we left discarded on the ground. I shrugged. But inside I shivered, as naked under my clothes as they were out there on the path, trying to keep from drowning. I don’t know why this spring, in the season’s endless rains, I’ve begun noticing them again. All along my quiet road they coil and stretch, frontend inching ahead, pulling the rest behind. So many squiggles and curves, they could be hieroglyphs that crawled off a pyramid wall bearing secrets from the dead. On cold mornings some turn blue and lie on the road like a strand of wet yarn—blue caused by a chemical released in their dying, blue that brings back the color as my niece’s fingers when she was four and her parents rushed her to Boston on a stormy night, and discovered the terrible blue of disease in her lungs. Blue lips, blue fingertips and nails, at twenty she had a transplant which gave her 16 more years, to attend social work school and marry, to love and be loved. Before the disease wore her out, she treated even the most rude or pretentious of us with a patience reserved for the slow or fretful who can’t see beyond their own shadows. Thinking of her, I look more closely at these soil movers, essential workers, creatures living in their skin, blue in their dying, as if what their bodies write on the wet road is a message not to be disparaged.

by Betsy Sholl

In your bluesy slide and bent notes
I can almost smell the sweat in your headband

and hear the corn husk of your voice-enough
slurred words to suggest you speak most often

to people inside your head or between the covers
of a book. I would not leave my daughter

alone with you, even if you crawled up my stairs
on your knees reciting To be, or not….

Still, there’s something of Hamlet in you-
Horatio shaken, not stirred with Muddy Waters

and Robert Johnson and swallowed straight up.
You laugh as though every joke could mean

more than it does, and your rumpled clothes
make you look like someone who spent the night

in a Memphis archive playing every never-
released demo made by musicians so raw,

their instruments are their own battered lives.
Their pain isn’t yours. Still, your tuning,

your slide, the dirty tenor of your voice—
seems you must know what it’s like to fall.

No daughter of mine. But sometimes I think
I could get in your car and ride to lights out,

nothing left to lose, that low-down place
where starting is what comes after the end.

Shakespeare likes to leave someone on stage
to tell the story when the drama is done.

That could be you, aged out of hard living,
but always more pure than you looked,

more faithful to those backcountry blues.
And if the rest is silence, please tell me

that stiff fingers and a wrecked voice don’t matter
to the blues, they just want to be played.