Essayist and TTR Advisory Board member Patrick Madden will read on the Tusculum College campus March 22, 2010. The event will begin at 7 p.m. in the Chalmers Conference Room. Admittance is free and open to the public.

Following the reading, Madden will announce his selections for this year’s Curtis-Owens prizes, an annual award to recognize the literary achievements of the college’s creative writing students. Madden is the fourth “outside” judge for the competition, following Playwright David Muschell, Poet Sally Keith, and Fictionist Kellie Wells.

Patrick Madden was raised in Whippany, New Jersey, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He received his B.S. in physics from Notre Dame in 1993, his M.A. in English from BYU in 1999, and his Ph.D. in English from Ohio University in 2004. He served a mission to Uruguay from 1993-1995 and later returned there as a Fulbright fellow from 2002-2003 to write his dissertation, a collection of travel essays.

His first book, Quotidiana, a collection of essays that won second place in the 2007 AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction, and has been published by the University of Nebraska Press. He has published individual essays in The Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, Portland Magazine, and many other journals; plus some of these essays have been anthologized in The Best American Spiritual Writing 2007 and The Best Creative Nonfiction vol. 2.

“Learned and lighthearted, eloquent and eccentric, cheerful and nutty and utterly fresh, Patrick Madden appears to have absorbed the salt and song of every fine essayist since Plutarch died, and he smoothly manages to cram an immense amount of math, science, biography, song, comparative religion, American history, Uruguayan history, and much else, without ever getting pedantic or dull, which is an amazing thing.”-Brian Doyle, author of Leaping

“Patrick Madden has a footloose, restless, well-stocked mind, sometimes maddening but always quite interesting; he gleefully demonstrates what Montaigne claimed: an essay is the best way to show that everything is connected to everything else.”-Phillip Lopate, editor of The Art of the Personal Essay

“Patrick Madden is an essayist of verve, passion, wit, and dependable moral compass. Quotidiana drew me in powerfully, from page to page and from pleasure to pleasure.”-Ian Frazier, author of Lamentations of the Father

“Quotidiana puts the post in postmodern. It’s not the next best thing but the best next thing, a truly creative creative nonfiction book. Patrick Madden has constructed a text ripe for the authorial reader’s arrangement of meaning. . . . Everything gleams like the center of some sun and, at the same time, collapses into the foil of the blackest of black holes. The book is a remarkable achievement of complex simplicity and elegant confusion.”-Michael Martone, author of Racing in Place

This Manual Is for You If

You never met your
minimum balance
never ate mayo
never went a day
without seeing yourself
in mirrors
hardly ever recognized
your own reflection
always wore too much
lipstick
sometimes ordered
sandwiches with no mayo
when you bit
into them left
red lines of lipstick
on your chin and
a half-kiss mark
on each bun
your reflection in the café
window saying nothing of
your features that appeared
when a black car passed
and disappeared
with a white one
always sat with your
legs crossed
your strobing
reflection here then
gone then here
again.  You pick up
your drink from the top
by the rim
the straw cradled between your
pointer and middle
pick up your sandwich
bite into your own
kiss, look outside and think
something then
nothing wondering like this
always then the waiter
calls you miss,
you unfold your legs,
breathe in then out
the door.

Tip #1: Home and Garden

Think:
Adorable.

Small,
yellow,
one cat,
one dog,
gerber daisy
girl next store,
you get it.

Tip #2: Making A Bed To Lie In

Think:
Intimidating.

Not just king:
California king, endless,
nine pillows,
nine hundred geese
plucked.  Downed
wall-to-wall, fluffed,
feathered, bleached and
white, and I mean white,
all white, white so white
you could milk it, white so
white he’d never guess
you snore.

Think a place to tuck,
to snuggle, to suck the bright
ambition from day.

Tip #3: Kissing

Make it
zested.

A non sequitur
zest, something he’s not expect-
ing, all tingle and pock and tongue
tuft radish to zip
him from the sky, to
etch and peck and pucker him
straight out of his cape,
not just some hickey but a
radiant bruise, a flashflush of delight,
a come here said
slurred, one breathe allowed
sounding like kumear,
or from a distance
fastflying as he does
sounding like kumquat,
best zest-maker there is,

you tart little orange, you
bright light fruit.

Tip #4: Hygiene & Other Adorations

Wear lipstick
the color lipstick always is
when a woman is blind-
folded and the white
tips of her front teeth
show through.

Wear lipstick to
shame a month’s worth of Sundays,
lipstick to match his
bikini and boots.

And for Christ’s sake, brush
those teeth, swab those ears,
soak the secret
pluvial folds.  There’ll be no plications
he can’t sniff out with that bionic
hound dog nose.

What To Say As He Details Various Escapades, Escapes, & Rescues

You peep.  You peabiddy
baby doll.  You Biblical, cosmic sweet-talking
staggering long stalk of a boy.
What good news?  What grin fit
to split and what dream ready to quake?
What odd and exiled kiss landed just here
on my worrisome V of a forehead, on my
downy caul of a cheek, on my spreadwing
collarbones, on my ear that can
pick your voice so keenly from the air,
as if those silver hoops of mine had a
mercurial pulse all their own?  How’d you
get those seed pods to burst so soon?  What salt
of seas following?  And tell me again, what exiled
airlessness? And truly, now truly, how did you
find me?  I found you?  Stars uncrossed and perfectly
asymmetrically aligning since when?  And soon?

Your breathing, Superman, your strongwarm
blessings here and here and oh,
right here.

What Not To Say, Ever

Let’s buy a grill, my boundaries
aren’t flexing as expected, I haven’t
got the nerve, you told me it was a
short trip, where have you
been, you didn’t call, you nearly jerked
me baldheaded, right up by the roots, can I
ask you not to, do you want to play
ping pong, I saw you looking at her with your
lazerblues, I know what you’re thinking, you can
go,
but if you
go,
I won’t be
here when you
get back, I have to establish
boundaries, you need to take your phone, I need to
borrow your car, you need to switch your cellular
provider, I have a sore throat, I am cold, I am
cramping, could you plug in the heating pad, please, put it
right there, and run to the store for some aspirin too.

What To Buy As A Gift

Figurines, toy
heroes, mint condition
unopened thirty year-
old box.

Or things with jagged
edges, loose teeth:
chainsaws, hedge
trimmers, dynafiles, steak
knives, things he can practice on,
throw at himself
then dodge.

A Note On The Ice Palace

Your eyes will
crystalize.  Your tiny nose
and ear hairs will
crystalize.  You will be a radio
exposed-skin warning, a ski-sloped
snow bunny, a Midwestern good-bye
waist of a girl giving up all shapeliness
for down feathers, all figure
for comfort, nothing but flat
boots and chapstick and hat head
say goodbye to your hair-
doo days.

Do not stay
long.  You know you’ve worn out
your welcome when the spit stops
mid-achoo, flashfreeze
sneeze in the air.

What To Wear Out Walking

An Ao Dai, that long
Vietnamese flyaway schoolgirl
on a bicycle
tunic.
Flows down
to your knees but with a slit
cut straight up the sides.

Looks good walking, even better
overhead.

A Note On Cryptonite Poisoning

He’ll say I have a condition.  He’ll never
explain, never complain, turn the color
of an octopus on ice.

He’ll pull back, say things like but you cannot
 feel compassion without imagining what I feel,
and that is impossible.

He’ll run as slow as a chess player in the park, say
God was filled with wrath so much that he sent his own son
down to kill him.

You must not allow his metabolic hatred
to turn inwards.

You must not talk to him before the movie credits
are over; he wants to know who did what, and why.

You must not wake him before eleven a.m.; he needs to
dream, and more importantly, he needs to dream deep
enough to forget he is
dreaming.

You must not say all his Clark Kent days were good—
they weren’t—say he had some okay ones in the bunch.

Do not pretend to know all the superheroes, but stack
the comics by his bedside.  Feed him

pumpkin pie, then ice down sweet,
carbonated beverages.  He will have headaches, and
very, very bad headaches.  In this case,
do nothing.  Do not touch.  Go quietly
to bed.  The pain is
vascular, hallucinatory, bad enough to slap him
flat.  Tell him you love him
twice.  If he is half-awake, he might hear you
say it
once.

If Your Mother Says

You can do
better.  You don’t know where
he’s been, what he’s
carrying, when he’ll ever
come home.

Hang up the phone, try to forget
her, let it occur to you Merlin,
sorcerer swordstone hero
of your man, is also a merlin,
a bird, a small dark
falcon, also known
as a pigeon hawk.

When It’s Over

You will bloat.  You read a fortune
cookie fortune, a thief of the worst kind,
but it’s too late. You will slide down the
hill, gray, those lonely breasts
down with you.  You will be too
weakhearted to buy
a thing; you will be left with
catscatscats. Who to spoon you your Thanksgiving
pie?  Who to notice the flesh sinking in bone?
Dry crepe of wrinkles, vague recollection
of moon, how he held you
there, how gravity didn’t matter
back when.

Nickole Brown: Bio

Other Featured Artists

Nickole Brown’s books include her debut, Sister, a novel-in-poems published by Red Hen Press, and the anthology, Air Fare, that she co-edited with Judith Taylor. She graduated from The Vermont College of Fine Arts and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She worked at the independent, literary press, Sarabande Books, for ten years.  Currently, she is the Co-editor for the Marie Alexander Series in Prose Poetry at White Pine Press and works as the National Publicity Consultant for Arktoi Books.  She lives in Louisville, KY, where she is Lecturer at the University of Louisville and Bellarmine University and teaches at the low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Murray State.

How to Seduce Superman

Other Featured Artists

My friend Mike is rich and dying. He lives alone in the hills north of the city. He bought the house right before he found out he was terminally ill, but he’s decided to stay. Every weekend I go out to check on him and bring him reports of the people he left behind. Susan got a promotion at the bank but she had to remove her tongue stud. Bradley got arrested in a sting at a bathhouse but his lawyer wound up getting him off. Janice took a bunch of pills, but she barfed them up and was at the club later that evening. I haven’t told him about his ex, Katie, moving in with me.
            I stop at a flea market on my way up to Mike’s and buy a rusted tandem bike. I always stop at the flea market to buy something to cheer Mike up. We can ride the bike together up and down the rolling hills. I can do the pedaling. It takes me a long time to strap the bike to the top of my car. I cut my hand and wonder when my last tetanus shot was.
            When I get to Mike’s I discover he’s already purchased his own distraction.
            “Meet Whitey,” says Mike.
            At Mike’s side is a big dog. He’s like a pit bull but twice the size, white as a snowman, with a loose pink mouth.
            “Whitey?” I say. “That’s the best you could come up with?”
            Mike says, “I don’t have enough time left to get creative.”
            The dog’s got a big, flat head and muscles the size of yams in his jaws. He doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in me, but he’s not exactly disinterested either. I concentrate on projecting a calm vibe so that the dog will like me, but these days I’m anxious around Mike.
            “The breeder told me these dogs are trained to take down wild boar in South America,” Mike says. “Even jaguars, sometimes.”
            Whitey’s docked ears twitch in their sockets.
            “What they do,” Mike continues, “is grab the boar by the throat and drag it down to the ground and pin it there, a thousand pounds of pressure in that bite, and wait for the hunters to come kill it.”
            Mike’s got a violent streak. When he says this stuff about killing boar, I think about kissing Katie that first time, when Mike was still healthy, or at least didn’t know about the sickness inside of him. Mike was in the living room of his big apartment, entertaining our friends, and Katie and I were in the kitchen, dropping olives into martinis from precarious heights. Then we kissed. Our lips were dry. It was like rubbing scabs together.
            The big glass door to Mike’s house slides open and Jorgé walks out carrying two bows and a quiver of arrows. Jorgé is Mike’s at-home caregiver. When he’s not taking care of Mike, Jorgé lifts weights, so his arms are big and impressive. They stretch out the sleeves of his tee-shirts. He wants to tattoo a dragon on his biceps, and he keeps asking me to draw it.
            “Mike tells me you’re a very good artist,” he says. I don’t want to make Jorgé feel stupid, so I never tell him that my paintings are just big color fields with parts of old computers stuck to them.
            Jorgé says, “A little archery, maybe?”
            But Mike doesn’t feel up to it.
            “We’ll watch,” he says. The dog and Mike are a couple now, a “we.”
            Jorgé and I shoot at a styrofoam deer I got at the flea market. Over the course of the summer, we’ve become good shots. Our arrows punch the deer with satisfying thwaks.
            “Pow,” says Jorgé, “Right in the boiler room.”
            The deer is so full of holes that the arrows droop after they hit. When we miss the deer the arrows fly into the woods beyond Mike’s yard. A few weeks ago, when we went to collect our arrows, Mike and I found a red fox lying under a tree with eyes turned to black goo and mushrooms growing around him. But there was no arrow in him. It wasn’t our fault.
            Mike is sitting on a modern lounge chair that Jorgé dragged out of the living room. Whitey rests on a hot flagstone with an unfurled tongue the size of a flank steak.  I wonder whether Mike’s getting a dog at this point in his life is really very responsible, but Mike’s got enough money that it’s easy to feel confident in his decisions.
            As if he’s been listening to the goings-on inside my head, Mike says, “These guys don’t come cheap. I paid over three thousand for Whitey and I can’t even breed him.”
            Jorgé lets an arrow fly and it hits the deer’s neck, which is not Styrofoam but plastic.
            “Crap,” says Jorgé.
            “That’s a lot of money, Mike,” I say.
            “Well,” says Mike, “What else do I have to spend it on?”      
            “Jesus,” I say. “I can think of certain less fortunate friends…”
            It’s a joke, of course, but Mike gets out of the chair. It is a many-staged process of leg bending, straightening, grimacing and balancing. He goes inside. Behind the glass doors and the reflections of the leaves and the sky it appears as if he’s moving underwater. When he comes back out he hands me a check for four thousand dollars, made out to me and Katie. The dog raises his head off the flagstone and watches me looking at the check.
            I begin to pinch it in my fingers.
            Mike says, “If you rip that check so help me god.”
            Whitey stands and I see that the dog is old and rises painfully.
            “I’m sorry,” I say.
            “Don’t say it to me,” Mike says. “Say it to my dog.”

David Schuman: Bio

Other Featured Artists

David Schuman’s fiction has appeared in Conjunctions,  Black Warrior Review, Carolina Quarterly and many other publications. A story which originally appeared in the Missouri Review was reprinted in the 2007 Pushcart Prize Anthology. He lives in St. Louis.

Dogo Argentino

Other Featured Artists

1.

          I once fell in love with someone.
     After a while, she wasn’t there.
                    I wonder what I could have done differently,
               what sequence of moments
                              could have led to her

               standing here before me
     instead of vanishing. What one thing
          to put in front of another
                              in time? What passion,
                     what restraint, what silence, what word, what self, what

          effacement? Every time we tried,
                    I took a misstep somewhere. Yes, she hurt me,
               but if I had led her
     this way instead of, with just the right
                              poise—would she have turned?

               If you take the right steps,
          a voice tells me, the whole dance will
                              open up to you.
                    This keeps me coming back to her in my mind.
     If I could right the wrong steps, open

                         up a new sequence . . .
                    But each new one is already scored and cross-
     hatched with all the old mistakes, making
          it even more difficult to
               navigate. Sometimes I

                              think love shouldn’t be
               this difficult: two people are
               involved, there should be room
     for error, interplay between them,
                    one person should not have to do all the work

     of leading. Sometimes I think love is
          all a matter of timing: it’s
                    no use meeting the right person at the wrong
               time, maybe I met her
                              at a time when no

     right steps even existed. But these
                    sound like excuses. If a woman loves you,
               and you love her, and you
          fall apart, let’s face it, you failed
                              her. The man should take

               responsibility.
          It’s childish to blame her, to
                    absolve yourself by saying she made it too
                              hard, requiring
     you to be perfect; you were going

          for immortality, of course
                    you had to be perfect! The poet does not
     blame his poem if it doesn’t turn
                         out right. It may be
               we are all tragically

                    in time, that no single sequence can save us,
          but I persist in the belief,
               perhaps to my demise,
     that all can be won through mastery
                              of performance: time

          can be conquered by consciousness.

2.

               And yet the cost of such
                    consciousness—a disinterest so powerful
                              as to appear cruel.
     Chow leans back with a puckish smile

          against his wall, stranding Bai Ling
                    in the middle of his room as she coaxes
     her fledgling declaration out of
               its nest. I don’t care if
                              you love me or not.

               I’ll love you anyway.
                    He snaps smoke in through his nose, coolly whistles
          it out. Since we got together,
     I haven’t brought other men back. I
                              hoped you’d feel the same.

               Will you promise me that?
                              —No. The grin again,
          slowly fading as he looks up
     and meets her expression: he knows that
                    vulnerability. How did he get here,

                              aloof from all that?
     He feels a sudden falling, a drop
                    to the past person inside of him, but he’s
               worked too long to secure
          this hard housing in the present

               to suffer a collapse
                              now. How many nights
     has he spent turning in on himself
          in the same knife-peel of anguish
                    he sees working at her face, eyes loosening,

               mind bereft, a blown field
                    completely at the mercy of the hours?
          A single god presides over
                              that field, indifferent.
     He knows how brutal that god can seem,

          how criminal it feels to have
                              a single visage
     colonize your consciousness, but with
                    the slightest slip into sympathy, he knows
               he soon could find himself

                              in her place. So he
     holds his position, telling himself
               he never meant to hurt
                    her—she’s just an unfortunate casual-
          ty of this discipline—but he

               can’t help but feel a slight
          satisfaction at maintaining
                    the upper hand, which shows him his disinterest
                              is not yet complete,
     that he’s still taking some subtle form

               of vengeance on the past.
     And when she screams and storms out, the way
                              her glare glazes him
                    inhuman makes him think perhaps disinterest
          should be left to the gods, because

                    its human form always takes on an aspect
          of cruelty, as now he pulls
                              her back by the arm
     and grins: If you’re ever in the mood,
               feel free to come over.

3.

          I once fell in love with someone.
     I couldn’t stop wondering whether
                    she loved me or not. I found an android which
               looked just like her. I thought
                              the android might give

               me the answer. At first
          it seemed everything had worked out
                    for the best: M-2046 was just as
                              beautiful as N,
     if not more so, because she had all

                    the same physical features with none of the
          imperfections. I thought I loved
               those imperfections, but
     one can get used to pristine android
                              skin pretty quick. Plus

     M had no emotional baggage.
                    She was so dependable! If I called her,
               she was there, no drama.
          People used to say I was in
                              love with drama, but

          I always thought this was stupid:
                              I loved N in spite
     of her drama, not because of it.
                    The drama was what drove me crazy; did I
               love being crazy? No.

               Still, I couldn’t get past
          a certain barrier with M.
                              She was wonderful
                    in all the ways N wasn’t: sitting with me
     through the long afternoons on the train

               reading, having coffee;
                    taking walks with me through the corridors to
          watch the windowed whir of the world
                              go by; stopping to
     hug me in all the cold passages;

                              nestling up to me
          in the cinema cabin—just
               the feel of her doing
     things with me filled me with such well-be-
                    ing that I saw how much of a hole my love

          had become. Yet some part of her
                    was unreachable in a way N never
     was. She wouldn’t give in to passion:
               if I tried to kiss her,
                              she’d accept my mouth

     briefly the way a secretary
                    might accept a memo. Totaling up all
               our kisses, our fragments
          of flame, as I liked to call them,
                              I’d say they equaled

               one semi-okay kiss.
                    Nothing like the nova of a kiss with N.
          There was no tongue, no saliva;
                              I became obsessed
     with android saliva—what did it

               taste like? Her tongue—was it
                    rough or smooth? What was her hidden malfunction?
          Why wouldn’t she give herself to
     me? I lay next to her in her cool
                              grey satellite dish

                    of a bed thinking, This is even weirder
          than my last relationship. And
                              soon I found myself
     making all my old mistakes. When I
               pressed her, asking her how

                              she felt, she stiffened
     like a table lamp. It didn’t help
               that the same parts used to
                    make her head and neck were actually used
          to make table lamps. I began

          to long for all the things in N
                    I used to hate, the wild emotional
               fluctuations, the sad
     apologetic emails always
                              a little too late,

     her “unintentional” cruelties;
          because I saw, through the contrast
                    with M, how these could be proofs of her love for
               me, which was comforting
                              and damning at once.

4.

     I slowly began to doubt myself.

                              Maybe it was me,
                    maybe I was nuts. What was likelier, that
          all the pain she brought was love or
               not love?
                              Love is not love,

          I said to myself, collapsing
     the sonnet.
                    I read to pass the time

                    but really time read me, flattening open
                              the page of my face,

               picking my meaning a-
               part.

                         When had I boarded
                    this train, why was I always staring at this
          wall?
                    Talking to myself. Counting.

                              I read of Unsang
     Institute on Mt. Jiri, where old
                              Okbogo enrolled
          to study the geomungo.

                    I swallowed my heart, an unsung institute.

               O Okbogo geo-
     mungo, I mumbled, geobogo,

          mungnasium, geranium,
     giraffe, waiting is like a giraffe,
                              long in the middle.

                    “The giraffe is deer-bodied, cow-tailed, wolf-browed,
               horse-hoofed, and grows one horn-

               shaped clump of flesh without
                    bones.”
                              I liked this sentence, all its mad hyphen-
          ations.
                    My love was cow-browed, wolf-
                              hoofed, horse-horned, and chewed
     my heart like one deer-shaped clump of flesh

                              with small bones.
                                                            Chomp, chomp.

               I read, “We could just be
                    a simple, direct and straightforward person.
          Form a simple relationship
     with our world, our coffee, spouse, and friend.

          We do this by abandoning
                    our expectations about how we think things
               should be.” I had no world,
                              no spouse, no friend, so
     I looked in prayer to my coffee.

               Oh ma ni es press oh.

                    What did I expect my coffee to be? It
                              gaped back pleasantly.

     I remembered sitting with her once,
          reading the back of my coffee

                    cup because I couldn’t bear to read her face
          and feeling all too much kinship

                              with the description
               of this bean: “Dark, nearly
     black in color, Espresso Roast flirts

          on the border of ruin.” I
     swallowed my heart, an Espresso Roast
               coffee bean. A giraffe
                    was my esophagus, and the swallowing
                              was slow.

5.

                                             It begins
                    as a dance of detachment, the man leaning
          in to whisper along her neck,
     the woman freezing, wanting and not
               wanting his lips to con-

          tinue against her flesh, the man
     pulling away now with a little
                              smirk, saying, I’ll leave
               now, withdrawing where most
                    men would have pressed their brief advantage and been

          rebuffed. And so the posing, the
                    distancing, the woman laughing a little
               too loudly on the phone,
                              the man parading
     a sequence of women back to his

                    room, both spying through eyeholes, windowslits, pricked
                              for a certain set
     of heels on the floor, until chance (which
               the man had secretly
          been courting) brings them together

     in the hotel hall on Christmas Eve
                    where, sensing his opportunity, the man
               suggests they have dinner
                              to keep each other
          company. And then there are names,

     pasts. But Chow keeps this information
               at bay, trying to steer
                    the interaction methodically toward sex;
          with one as guarded, as practiced
                              as Bai Ling, he knows

          their coming together must seem
     spontaneous, inevitable,
               or she won’t go for it.
                    Under the lightest pressure (Another drink
                              someplace else?), she backs

               off, smelling his intent;
                              so, deftly, he backs
                    off, saying he just wants to be “drinking pals.”
     Years later, he’ll use this phrase to clench
          their relationship (Of course you

                    missed me, we’re drinking pals) as she tries to pry
               it for meaning, flicking
                              a finger against
     her glass; and she’ll wonder how she once
          took comfort in this, how once she

                              wanted so little
                    of him—why did she ever start to want more?
     What filled this frame with her whole future?
               I wish it could have gone
          on a little longer, she’ll say,

                              softly, trying to
                    get back to this place of poise, this last platform
     of sanity before everything
          started sliding away from her,
               as if sped from a train . . .

               And of course he’ll hear her,
     but ignore her cheerfully, almost—
                    this is what she can’t understand—kindly, as
          if it were tenderness to show
                              her she meant nothing.

Jason Koo: Bio
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Jason Koo was born in New York City and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the University of Houston and the University of Missouri-Columbia, he has published his poetry and prose in numerous journals, including The Yale Review, North American Review and The Missouri Review. He currently lives in New York, where he teaches at NYU and Lehman College and serves as Poetry Editor of Low Rent.  “2046 Love Songs of Wong Kar Wai” can be found in Koo’s brand new collection, Man on Extremely Small Island, (C&R Press), winner of the 2008 De Novo Prize.

 
“2046 Love Songs of Wong Kar Wai”
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On the twelfth day of the first year of the Obama administration, as the nation’s economy continued to crumble, we opened our beehive and found the colony dead.

Through most of the winter, we left the bees alone so as not to release the heat they generated huddled between their walls of honey. But when the temperature rose into the 50s, the bees could bear the air enough to take brief cleansing flights, and we dared to open the hive for a few minutes. We had plenty of unseasonable warmth this year—sunny days when the bees flew to gather maple sap, risen during the freezing night, draining through holes the sapsucker drilled through the bark. No bees were flying the afternoon we opened the hive, but we assumed they’d finished their business in the warmest part of the day. A few dead bees lay scattered below the hive, evidence of the cleaning efforts of the workers.

Even though the hive still had honey-weight when we hefted it, Jason decided to bring the bees a sugar syrup bailout. If the nectar flow is slow in early spring, strong colonies can die of starvation. Jason pried up the lid and eased it back just enough to expose the winter feeder, a deep tray tucked into the box in place of a tenth frame of honeycomb. I anticipated the small eruption of bees that comes with hive-breaking and winced, in spite of my veil and gauntlets. No one emerged. We guessed it was too chilly for the bees after all, so I ladled the syrup quickly, sloppily, so that we could put the lid back on. My cup made a poor ladle, and syrup sludged between the frames and down the exterior of the hive. No matter, I thought. The bees would soon clean it up.

But then we opened the hive for a quick peek. Across the top of the frames, we found a scattering of dead bees. They’d been using a crack under the cover as a second entrance; perhaps they’d brought up their dead to dump on their next flights. But nobody flew up between the frames to see about the influx of light and cold. Jason prodded the top of a bee cluster clinging near the top of a pair of frames, but instead of stirring into angry action, the bees dropped lifeless into the hive body. We beat on the sides of the box. No response. We pried off the top box, looking for survivors in the bottom half of the hive, only to find thicker clusters of unmoving bees and at the bottom, heaps of the dead. We’d lost the colony.

In winter, the bees cluster tightly to form a corporately warm-blooded sphere around their queen. The skin of the sphere is two tightly-packed bees thick; the bees trade places before cold overcomes their ability to move. Inside the sphere, attendants gather around the queen, burning honey for heat by shivering. Maintaining a summery warmth of 64 to 90 degrees at its center, the cluster creeps from frame to frame as the bees empty the cells of honey. Sometimes, it’s too cold for the cluster to move, or confused, it breaks into less efficient factions. Sometimes a virus will take out the bees—just a touch of dysentery could throw off the balance. Sometimes, the cold is enough.

On Inauguration weekend, the temperature dove below zero, 30 degrees lower than average for mid-January, close to the record low. We thought the colony pulled through the cold patch. A week later, the volatile mercury reading 63 degrees, I went down to the hive and found a handful of bees flying. Only one worker was on mortuary duty. She dragged a dead bee to the edge of the porch and then off, plummeting with the body. It wasn’t enough to accompany the corpse to the ground; as soon as she righted herself, she tugged it through tangles of dry grass to a resting place several dozen bee-lengths away. I couldn’t detect any difference in the new place or the body’s position, but the worker seemed satisfied and launched herself up to the entrance to collect another body.

Must not be many dead bees, I thought, if they only need one worker to carry them out. But of course the opposite was true. So many bees had died that only a few remained to clean out the masses of bodies.

That would be my job. The day after we found the silent hive, I pried the boxes apart. I carried the pieces, still sticky from sugar syrup, outside of the bear fence to brush the bodies from the frames. The corpses fell around me in furry heaps, perfectly intact, as though their transparent wings would stir to life at any moment. I didn’t bother with a veil or gloves.

Halfway through the top hive I found bees I couldn’t remove. They’d burrowed deep into the comb seeking the final drops of honey at the bottom of the cells. Unwilling or too cold to emerge and move to a new frame of honey, they starved. I found a few scouts clinging to full frames of honey, frozen mid-search. They brushed off easily, but the starving bees had tucked themselves so tightly into the comb that I couldn’t get purchase on their pointed abdomens, even with finger and thumb.

The last time I saw bees tucked so firmly into a comb, Jason held a nursery frame for me to check for new brood while a cloud of bees swirled angrily around our veils. At the edge of the frame, a new bee pushed itself through the remains of the wax cap on its brood cell, antennae twitching, legs wriggling in an ecstasy of sensation and motion. When it finished hatching, it would turn and clean out its cell, then join its broodmates to tend the next generation. From the nursery, it would graduate to the honey-guzzling, wax-making chain gang. When it outgrew the ability to secrete wax, it might move on to housekeeping duties—breeze-making, patrolling for intruders, carrying out the dead. Later, it would fly miles at a time, scouting and foraging for the colony until it grew too weak to return to the hive.

Winter bees live the longest, if they survive the cold; there’s no foraging. Their sole job is to warm the queen. She’s the reason for their existence, the cohering force in the hive, yet she’s helpless without the workers. In early spring, they induce her to lay, carry her from cell to cell, feed her and clean her. She’s self-sufficient only once: during her mating flight. I can’t find the queen of this dead hive; she’s probably in the tumbled mass of bodies collected on the bottom board.

I wonder if the bees realized when the end came. When we opened the hive on the first of February, one bee still stirred among the dead scattered atop the frames—an antenna, then a leg, in drunken motion. She was too weak to fly. Still, she tugged at the corpses around her, hoping—it seemed—to drag one last sister from the hive, to bury herself with it in the proper spot under the dry grass. Was death, to her, like any other bee’s death, weary but working until the last, like the bees who try to hike back to the hive when their wings give out half a mile from home? Was her focus biologically narrowed to the job at hand?

Or did she know, in some tiny part of her bee brain, that she was the only one left, that her civilization had collapsed beyond return? Did she panic as the scent of her queen faded? For us, it was no surprise: even experienced beekeepers lose a few colonies in winter. For her, it would have been the end of the world.

All through the fall, while the bees harvested the last of the heath asters, hoarding for winter, I knocked on doors, called strangers, cheered for a face behind the tinted windows of a motorcade, stocking up on change and yeswecan. I thought a strong leader would be enough—hoped, anyhow. Now there’s nothing left to do but wait massed together, sharing warmth, to see how cold this winter gets.

Kirsten Beachy: Bio

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Kirsten Beachy lives and writes in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and teaches writing at Eastern Mennonite University.  Her stories and essays have appeared in Shenandoah, Relief, and Dreamseeker.  She is a TTR Contributing Editor.

The Last Worker

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Your Every Movement: Burst

Your Every Movement: Rise

Your Every Movement: Swell

Danielle Wyckoff: Artist Statement

Danielle Wyckoff: Bio

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