Autumn 2021

Eighty
by Anne Haven McDonnell
This meadow was once a necklace
of beaver ponds my mother has lived
long enough to remember. She walks
with poles, I carry her pack.
We pitch tents near a cutbank
of whiskey-dark creek.
As night loosens and oozes up
the valley, the peaks go cindery,
remote. We take our plastic cups
of whiskey to the open grass where
dark condenses in the long
stilts of a moose, her dewlap dangling
as she plows the meadow like a prow
of a ship, like a cello solo
tipping into banjo twang. Browsing
willows, our smell must hit her
sideways and she swings her giant
head, stills herself like a lake
behind a dam, churning
her discernment. What are we
here— mother and daughter, mild
and dissolved, our favorite rooms
to watch from, thick with forgiveness.
Two calves wobble out, chasing
the roof of her belly. Something human
gusts out of us, and the mast of her
lifts and fills and sails across
the grass—which has knitted itself
from water, which is creeping back
to forest, which is now an opening
where mothers and daughters meet.

An Excerpt from “Matador”
by Patricia Patterson

On the drive home from work, Christine calls and tells me I’m going to be a father. She says, at first, it seemed like paranoia. Her hands were swelling, getting fleshier every day. Then came the morning sickness, so she went to see a doctor. “As you should,” I say, my language strangely formal. She says, in the ultrasound, the baby looks a little like a black hole, or the eye of a hurricane.

This is when I start to feel queasy. It’s not that I don’t want to be a father. I have nothing against babies. But nine months doesn’t seem time enough to quit smoking, get a better job, start acting more like a father. “Ernesto,” says Christine, “you there?” I think about baby heads and how tender they are. “Hello?” she says. Like I could hold a baby wrong or drop it or squeeze too hard and put a dent in their skull. “Can I call you back?” I say. “Can we talk later?” She mumbles some garbled response, and I hang up.