On October 17, 2007, a Union Pacific employee called the Tooele Police Department and reported a vacated truck in the Salt Lake desert. The truck was parked next to the train tracks, and had been there since just before noon. The police asked for the license plate number. The truck was registered to Stephen Krommenhoek. He was 23 years old and lived in Salt Lake City. They sent an officer to check it out. When the officer arrived, he found the truck windows rolled down. There were two boxes of unused ammunition and an empty water bottle on the floor of the truck.

On the other side of the train tracks, fresh shells were sprinkled on the ground. An old office chair and some Bud Light bottles were set up in the distance as targets. Past those, over a small hill and closer to the water, there was a body lying on the salty ground. The call from Union Pacific came in around five and the officer found the body around seven. An ambulance was called; family was notified. The body was lifted up and hauled away.

—-

After Steve died, that was about all of the story I was able to tell, despite trying to eulogize him several times. Whether writing an essay or drinking with my friends, I was never able to get far into the story without turning back or shutting it down. I couldn’t handle the image of Steve lying there, face down in the salt, with the distant I-80 traffic zooming past him. Every time I tried to tell the story, I just wanted to put him back in his truck, and to bring him home.

Tamara, Steve’s girlfriend, responded to his death in the opposite way. She couldn’t not talk about it. In any context, to anyone. She couldn’t go a day without bringing Steve up. It didn’t stop her if her audience didn’t know Steve, nor would she pause for those who knew him well. In my case, she didn’t mind if I just listened without saying anything, and we started to spend a lot of time together—much more than we did when Steve was alive.

In some of Tamara’s versions she recounted what Steve must have done that day. Other times she blamed herself for being in San Diego when it happened. And sometimes she presented the story as a small blip of something much bigger—something as long as eternity. When Tamara talked about Steve’s death as part of the eternal scheme of things, she started by telling me that he prayed every night. That was something I didn’t know about him.

Tamara and Steve were both Mormon. So was I, to some extent. I grew up Mormon, at least. Sometimes Tamara took comfort in her religion. Other times she said that the pressures of being a righteous priesthood holder drove Steve to the pawn shop, and the inability of the church to find a place for nuance put the .357 Magnum in his hand.

Still, Tamara was occasionally able to calm herself down when thinking about two things: 1) that she’d be able to see Steve again after she died and 2) that at some point while reclining in the passenger seat of his truck before he walked off and shot himself, Steve was comforted, and felt some kind of peace in the Salt Lake desert before he left.

That was one reason why I couldn’t tell Steve’s story as freely or as well. When I imagined him leaning the seat of his truck back as far as it would go, I saw him staring at the brown metallic ceiling, and that was all.

Baptizing the Dead | Georgetown Review

(after Edwin Reyes)

Considering the lack of oversight,
the lack of tracks, considering
the shunned moon and the bitter
grit of stars, the bed’s gravelly silence
and the idling tinted-window
bass-thump SUV, the melting ticket
and the grim cyclops conductor,
it was pleasant to waken,  my son waving,
rattling the sports section in front of me
like a panicked sailor to read me some score,
the pages drifting apart and down
to the dusty floor of our tiny station.

Dream With a Train in It | Georgetown Review

When winter came I was out of work again. For two months I did nothing but drink and smoke and fall asleep in front of the television. I knew I should look for work before the money I’d saved over the summer ran out, and most mornings I flipped through the classifieds with my coffee. But I couldn’t concentrate on them, or if I did find a promising ad I couldn’t bring myself to walk through the cold. So when my brother called, early one Monday morning, waking me, I was already a month behind on the rent.

“Time to come out of the cave, George,” Brian said when I finally answered. “Hibernation’s over. I found you a job.”

I rolled onto my stomach and lay propped on my elbows, the phone pressed between my shoulder and cheek. The blinds covering my bedroom window were bright enough to make me squint. The mattress was on the floor, along with an empty bottle of Livingston, a juice glass with a circle of crusty wine at the bottom, a pile of newspapers, my work boots. It had been a month since I’d spoken to Brian, at Christmas, when I’d had too much champagne at his house and said something nasty to his sister-in-law. He was 27, three years younger than me, and filled with shame for the way I’d lived my life.

I picked up the glass and dug at the dried wine with my fingernail. “Your gutters clogged again?”

“Nothing like that,” Brian said. “Real work this time. A steady job. Steady pay. Not this half-ass seasonal shit you’ve been trying to get by on. George, it’s not working.”

I wanted to ask Brian what he thought he knew about real work. But he was right. I’d spent the summer and the first warm weeks of fall laying stone paths from front doors to driveways, from back doors to garages, across lawns I’d been hired to cut the summer before, and the summer before that. I’d always seemed to work for the same people, who all lived in the same house, a house with a deck, French doors, bay windows, a swimming pool. When I first came back to North Moreland I’d worked six months for a moving company, and these were the people I’d moved. Brian’s kind of people, and I was tired of them. Tired of hauling slabs of stone from the bed of someone else’s pickup, tired of looking for work every time the weather turned.

I scraped all the wine off the bottom of the glass and now my fingernail was darkened with red flecks of what looked like paint or wax. I touched the dried wine to my tongue. Tasteless. I spit it onto my pillow.

“You okay?” Brian asked.

I told him I was listening.

“Good. I met a guy in a bar on Saturday. Nice guy, friendly. He said something about needing good workers at this factory where he’s the foreman. I told him about you, and he wants you to stop in this morning. There’s bonus and some overtime. He said you can clear six hundred a week pretty easy if you’re diligent.”

“If I’m diligent,” I said.

The last time Brian had found me a job was the winter I’d been laid off by the moving company. I’d driven on icy roads to his three-story Victorian, where he said he’d pay me a month’s rent to dig snow and ice out of his gutters. In his driveway he pointed a garden trowel at the icicles hanging from his eaves. A ladder leaned against his ivy-covered wall. I’d told him to go fuck himself.

So I wasn’t sure I could trust my brother, even though his great motivation in life, ever since I’d returned to North Moreland, was to save me from the disaster he seemed sure I was heading for. But the rent was overdue, the fridge almost empty. I asked where the factory was.

“Right on Moreland Road,” he said. “Not too far to walk for a tough guy like you.” But he wouldn’t give me the name of the company or the address. He insisted on driving me there himself.

The twins screamed, and Rhonda called Brian’s name. “Ralph, the foreman, he’s expecting me to bring you over,” Brian said. “ I’ll be there in a half hour.”

After he hung up I dropped the phone on the floor and lay my head on the pillow, listening to the dial tone with my eyes shut. I felt a twinge in my back, an echo of old pain, and my head was muzzy from my late night with Livingston. So today was the day my laziness would end, if Brian could help it. Let it end, I thought. When the phone started beeping I replaced the receiver and went to the shower.

Lifer | Georgetown Review

she’d come with me
but her eyes were on the singer
of a cover band
in a small night
club in Texas &

the longer he sang the more
she stared & the more he
returned the favor

it was
horrible I wanted to leave
but had I left she
might not have
noticed & the point

apparently

was to be noticed

no it was better to wait it out
not even the sappiest
lovers could
gaze at each other
this long without laughing I thought

then I tried to enjoy
the music but the music wasn’t

much

finally after she’d
slunk back in her chair scissoring
her smoke between second &
(same stanza)                        third fingers with her vodka
on rocks chilling her chest

she glanced
away from him

missing her chance
to catch me

Rock Star | Georgetown Review

Here my mother is the teenaged girl in the passenger seat beside my father. She pulls down her sun visor and rests her palms on her belly. Because she is prone to water retention, her fingers are swollen and her rings cut into her. But this is her second pregnancy. She is used to the discomfort. Fixing her gaze on her hands, she breathes deeply and intently until she is sure she can feel the baby breathing to her rhythm. She has calmed herself this way for three years, ever since she was sixteen and pregnant for the first time, sixteen and terrified, though back then there hadn’t been much time to dwell on fear. One day the doctor told her she was pregnant, and the next day, or so it seemed, she was a wife and a mother. Everything she did then, and everything she is doing now, including being in this car on her way to the Sweet Life Quality Foods headquarters in Connecticut, she is doing for her husband and her children. Her children must have a father, their father, and she believes it’s her job to make sure he sticks around. God knows she’s doing her best to keep him happy and in one piece. God knows it isn’t easy.

In the mirrored visor, she studies the dark circles beneath her eyes. She hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks. Not since my father lost his job at the Sweet Life food warehouse for the third time – and “the last,” his boss had told her when she called to ask if he’d reconsider. “I’m sorry, Vicki, but he’s blown it for good this time.”

She could kill him sometimes, she thinks, shifting her gaze from her reflection to his profile. It’s as if he were the teenager in the relationship, and she the twenty-eight-year-old. In this moment he is singing along to the radio and tapping on the steering wheel as if he hasn’t a care in the world, as if the events of the past weeks hadn’t happened, as if that ambulance had not stopped in front their apartment on Main Street and rushed him to the emergency room. Feeling slightly uneasy, she considers what she’ll say and do once they reach their Connecticut destination. Her uneasiness is less about nerves and more about agitation over my father’s most recent escapade.  Typically, she would have tried to talk to him over the radio as he drove, regardless of whatever drama the previous weekend had brought, but something had changed. Something had started to shift within her at the ER when the doctor dropped his bomb on her. What my mother wanted to ask my father, she knew she couldn’t. She couldn’t risk upsetting him. Her question would always remain unanswered. He would never tell her why he did what he did. Most likely, she suspected, he didn’t know the answer.

Sweet Life | Georgetown Review

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
—W. B. Yeats

Because as grandma wolf
I snarled from a Halloween photo

every time she opened the fridge,
the first time my only sister’s first

child’s first child ever saw me
she screamed, ran away in terror,

called me the wolf man, as if she knew,
through her blood, my favorite movie:

old gypsy woman, pentagram in my hand,
childless, aloof, and alone,

my cocky cynicism
transformed by a pregnant moon.

And I do have a beard
and that widow’s peak, and a tendency

to change moods abruptly, but, hey,
who hasn’t?

Now, she thrills to the way I howl
and growl as I chase her through the house,

shrills in mock fear.  Mock because,
though she hasn’t yet seen The Daughter

of Dracula or The Bride
of Frankenstein, she somehow knows

about the silver bullet,
the one she was born with.

Wolf Man | Georgetown Review

Everyone knows what not to do
in a dream,
and in a dream everyone has the heart
to tell you who you are.
He was sorry for how he’d sat
a massacre in the guise of a man
at a party for a boy he didn’t know,
oldest there
by forty years, most thinking
he’d come in with the caterer.
There’s a man who sees
the real hue of things, someone said.
In fact he had in him
several chemicals
which allowed him to see not hues
but residues, and behind him,
where the majestic tail of his life should have been,
was just a boy
asking whether he would agree
to play horse in a game of Knights.
He would.
So he bore on his bad back
a boy who fought half as a madman
to rescue a princess
who did not exist,
and spared three adversaries
who did not deserve it
when their spears broke
on the small of his back.
After, he sat with the boy on a bench
and spoke to him not knowing
which chemicals were left in him,
the new ones
or the ones he’d been born with.
He put a hand on the boy’s head
and said,

I am your horse. Would the boy accept?
Yes, he would.
No,
the man said to the boy,
you don’t see—
and putting his face so close
their two faces were almost one
he said, I am your horse. I am
your horse. I am your horse.

A Man and Boy or Two Boys or a Horseman | Georgetown Review

Something terrible has happened in the house next door.  Mrs. Allen has lost her son.  Meaning he has been taken from her.  The first I know of it, late-afternoon sirens fill the air, and from my bedroom I see police cars lining the street, jammed edgewise.  Many other neighbors have come to look.  I see Julie Terblanche, the school teacher, and her husband Jan, and where Thomson Street becomes Heather Street, Mrs. Broome and her two boys are hanging about the wrought iron gate, Mrs. Broome hissing at them to stay close.  Of Mrs. Allen nothing is seen.  Presumably she is inside, being questioned.  Presumably I will soon be questioned too.

Let me state the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.  I spent this Friday like I spend everyday, the morning in bed reading, with my cat Tim curled at my feet.  Mid-morning I walked to the supermarket on Lansdowne Road to buy milk and coffee and get my daily exercise.  For lunch I made myself a toasted cheese sandwich and drank a Diet Coke, and after lunch I took a nap, not sleeping, just drifting, until the late-afternoon sirens upset my routine.  Look, you can see the lunch dishes are still in the sink.  I didn’t have time to clean them.

At this point in my interrogation I would probably offer the policeman a sandwich, which he would refuse, thinking it is a bribe, or more likely accept, knowing how rife corruption is in our South African police force.

But my interrogation, like so many of my imaginings, does not come to pass.  When the clock strikes five-thirty I am still alone, unvisited.  I remove the dress I had put on, printed with strawberries, and hang it in my closet, and wipe the makeup from my face.

Removing my makeup is like archaeology now, only in reverse; the more I uncover, the less sense my face makes.   My hair is wispy over a peeling white and red scalp.  I had plump lips once too, but now they are thin and flat.  Not long ago, I kissed the mirror, just to see what it would look like.

After I am finished in the bathroom, I mount the spiral staircase to my bedroom upstairs, where I have a clear, unobstructed view over the Allens’ wall, right into the intimacy of their living room.  Thankfully I live in the largest remaining Victorian house in the neighborhood, towering over the newer mortar and brick homes.  From here I see all the lights are on in Mrs. Allen’s house.  Mrs. Allen is on the couch, a towel covering her forehead.  The poor woman is elongated and stiff as a corpse.  Beside her, a group of women fusses, bringing her steaming drinks.  Occasionally Mrs. Allen raises a hand and a friend grips and squeezes, and once they help her to the bathroom and back, encircling her waist for support.  I suspect she is drugged.

For more of this story, please pick up a copy of the Georgetown Review.

Peace Comes to Those Who Wait | Georgetown Review

My sister’s name is Heimfreyja, but everyone calls her Freyja.  “That woman,” she sometimes says, referring to our mother, “how could she stick me with a name like that?”
Mother once said that she named her after a saint, but she couldn’t remember which one.  I like to think that she named her after the goddess Freyja, who rode into battle and claimed half the men killed.

Unlike me, my sister has green staring eyes, and an accent, a Marlene Dietrich voice,  Unlike me, she is courageous.

When we lived in Germany, waiting for identity papers, kids chased her home from catechism, chanting, “Heim, Heimfreyja, Heim.”  When she fell, they kicked her and spit at her.  But she never let them see her cry.

At home, Mother looked at the bruises on her legs, the scabs on her knees and called her clumsy, messy-looking, and then, Mother gave her a slap on the back of her head.  Freyja was always brave though.

Except that time in the bathroom when her underwear was coiled around her ankles, blood spots dripping down her legs, shaking her head back and forth.  Mother gave her a wet towel.  “Get cleaned up,” she said, telling her not to worry.  “It happens to every girl.  The change,” she called it.  “Understand?”

At school, the teachers called her mischievous, careless, a hick, “Eine Bauer Deutscherin,” smacking the palms of her hands with a ruler.

See more in the Georgetown Review!

Metamorphose | Georgetown Review

— the northern mid-winter orbit — closest to the sun —

is most remote from squalls strewing their random coils
over the purer surfaces of perfect fields

— on ground — stone to the frost line — snows press their weightlessness

over a windfall beyond sweetness — ripening

under the insulation of a patience with the lure of pomace crushed
to the irresistible ephemera of a decaying scent

cast on the silence of a wisp hissing the windy stillness

— surrounded by the oblivion of the afternoon of evening

an anonymity of apple buds embedded in the tips of twigs
under the soft frigidity of snow — in their own whiter fetal winter down

biding their hibernation on the blinding clarity of the exposure

— is nipped at by an innocence of hunger

— as selflessness — in the satiety — samples itself

perfect fields | Georgetown Review