Refugee Songs

There's something deep in the dripping forest that's darker than anything else in this world. You'd best pray you never find it. 

A beach shaped like a razor clam. A vulvar shell like a lover's wild promenade. Beads of moisture and salt.

"Don't look for it. Promise me."

"One day I'll find you. I swear."

They tellin us we gotta meet up wi' a lady named Fleur De Lis. That funny. But it what they tell us. That Cajun French or summin. Know what that mean in English? Flower of the lily. 

Fingertips oxidized brass smell. Grooved smokin' abraded calluses. An undersea cable drama. 

Because you're always there. Spitting lore and ill-judged bromides: "You might win some, but you just lost one." A hill you might not want to die on.

"You might not find me."

Her bland face was sexual the way a cheap motel is sexual. Dirty. Cut-rate. Worn. But you stay the night anyway. And suddenly it's no longer about sex but about adherence.

"I'm sorry, Mikey."

About loyalty. 

"I saw you up there earlier. A girl with a voice like yours should never apologize."

Cover all the deserts in geometric panels. Spin a million offshore blades. Panels, blades, desperate boats, great cedars. Components of the flag of the refugee nation. 

Have you ever felt bad about something, wished you could take it back? Downtown, a hawk roosts on a ledge thirty stories up. Calm and pitiless. In its mind already sorting bones. 

I am sobbing. I never sob. I haven't seen a honeybee in five years. Must I compose a requiem for all that's lost? 

"Yes. Yes, you must."

"But why me?"

Haole. Cracker. It ain't about whiteness, it a human thing. You have an advantage, you take that advantage. Majority will run with it. Don't matter, though I won't. No one will notice, or if they notice they won't care. Ditch that nigga. Cowardice is the febrile line running through the arc of the human story—thin, hot red, and moist with shame.

We're blinded on the Gaza Strip. We see red. We see sand. We see night. We're just guessing. Not guessing: imagining. The daubed wheel of trillions of stars turns glacially overhead. Christmas music, choral, sweet, as warm as the brandy that ignites the fruit pudding. 

Sing along.

"How can I sing when my teeth have been obliterated, my lips torn ragged?"

"Try."

Grasp my outstretched hand, take it, feel its hot sweat. My England is like an underground brook, bubbling beneath a brittle mantle. Aching with want, ghosted by yesteryear. Its heroes and heroines, its Arthurs and Robins and Boudiccas and Guineveres. Its Sids and its Nancys. Rule Britannia my flaming asshole. I love you. I fucking adore you. A disoriented child slips from a chalk cliff, and the ripples engulf the world. 

The truth? Rags become riches almost never. 

Bowie's gone. Prince too. That sly old Canuck also. Starmen waiting in the sky? The crack in everything? How about earthmen and women prepare to put in a shift? Help turn this clusterfuck around? The Provos said it: First we take Mountbatten. We ourselves. The dead will always dance, the sisters dispense mercy. I can wait a long, long time before I hear another love song, comes the echo through that crack in everything.  

"Stop now. Don't walk away."

"I'll do what I have to."

Rags of green fluttering in the storm's death rattle. Pulsating clouds. Black remnants, dark marvels. Come here. Yes, you. I think you're beautiful. No, don't turn your head. Walk don't walk. Sing for the bones, compose hymns for the migrants. "Be joyful—though you have considered all the facts."

A girl meets a boy in middle school. They clutch each other, astonished. Share eerily similar playlists. Someone else plays a song by Journey. They think it's corny, both secretly loving it, the part about the small town girl living in a lonely world, but they also go down to the fleet river during the snowmelt and listen to Springsteen. Laughing and crying both. Waiting to hear the inky coyote wails from the other bank. Or hoping to see the visceral curl of a sturgeon outliving us all as it wrings all liquid from the world, lustier than the river that birthed it, writhing, squeezing, scheming.

It's a midnight promise, a moment of traffic and ambition, a howling voice on the flat side of pitch, everyone arriving in their Chargers and Mustangs, primed for a conflagration, drenched spectral, emergent, let down by the truth of the world, that its best moments are almost never announced, its secret dreams rarely if ever proclaimed. 

Hope in Any Other

© Steve Hebert"Isn't that what matters?"

The rest of what she had to say was drowned out by the falls. 

We gathered our equipment and began the hike back down to the trailhead.

But yes, I thought. It is what matters. 

And also, that was the last time we or anyone else saw her.

Spem in alium. Did you hear? The hidden choir, singing "Be mindful of our lowliness" in a dead language?

*** 

Christmas Day. We found our way back into town and heard George Michael died. No one cried about it until later; one of those slow-burn things. Somewhere along the timescale we lost our freedom and our faith, and we never fully pieced those two together until now.

Here in the bar, we drank to all the people we lost in this terrible, abominable 2016. Someone suggested karaoke, and to our eternal shame most of us cheered encouragement, when we really ought to have left that dire year to its abject misery. To dissolve in its own toxic juices. Not even sang about it.

To me was allotted "Rebel Rebel," and however hard I tried, profusely cognizant some boy might be a girl, some mother was in a whirl, I could never do it justice, whoever tore their goddamn dress, even if I were telling this story from a fictional land. A story board. Some tawdry vision.

The thing is, we still had the mud and water from those canyon trails sluicing from our hiking boots. Our dreams were still unfolding. I recall watching Michael Stipe on some talk show, withdrawn into his guru beard, his pain at the outcome of the world so plain and so wretched I could feel my actual heart shrink within the cavern of my chest and quietly crumple. This isn't what we envisaged in 1991. Or 1999. At what point did the dream end?

If I could say anything, I would say this: stop being afraid. Stop being fearful. And quit blame. Reject potato peelings. Spurn astroturf. Reduce dead fledglings to tiny rubber dinosaurs. Fucking stop it, you weak-kneed, spineless fucks. Taste the dirt. Either we're right, or we die. Don't pretend. Take a stand. 

***

Anger and graciousness. You don't deserve us, and vice versa. Cardboard signs at four-way intersections kitty-cornered by Target and Kmart, Costco and Walmart. Vast static confluences of concrete-and-asphalt rivers occupied by grubby penitents holding Sharpied cardboard pleas, each one more desperate—Need work. Please help. Will work for food. Will work for weed. Will work for sex. Homeless, anything helps. I used to be your neighbor. Please help me I have nothing. God bless—people staying, people moving on, not so permanent markers. Impregnable suburban tanks gliding by. Such rootlessness in a land of generic signs, identical to the next town and the next, long as they're on an interstate. Less so off the beaten path. 

But then the shocking moments of beauty, the dream blue of the sky with fantasy clouds scudding above a smoky mauve-into-cerulean range of distant peaks. A hawk spit-crying and spinning slo-mo in the afternoon thermals. A coyote loping quick-step anxious in scrubland. Mile-long trains blaring like lonesome creatures seeking their lost herd. Made antlike by tawny distance. Rare punctuation in the endless sentence of a narrative yet to be fully told. 

***

"What's that movie? You know the one."

"Uhm, no."

"With that actor, you know? She was in that other show, yeah? One with the trailer in the desert."

"I sure don't have a single idea what you're talking about."

"Aw, fuck, you ain't one bit helpful."

It don't have to be some big drama. We can just get away. Leave while the pulse of a hip-hop beat makes of the walls a drumskin. While the smell of fried food coats the air and clogs our sinuses right after we free the blockhead dogs to piss in the overgrown weeds out back.

I don't know anymore what's good or not. Or I think I know. I just ain't sure. My fingers look like they belong to someone twice my age. Daren't even look at my face no more.

My mama come from Lisbon and my daddy mighta been Moroccan or Malian or something, Mama's story always changed, but I'm an American girl, bathed in American light. That was a joke. The only light I mostly ever knowed was held under a spoon so the drugs would cook. Somewheres between the two half-jokes lies my real tale.

We are what's known as itinerant, living in the places in between the other places, Red Bull our fuel and Mark One vodka our lube, refusing to dream, middle-fingering all a y'all. Dancehall and trap, sometimes even cowpoke. Metro Boomin. Vybz Kartel. Lady Antebellum. The world is made of gauze and crepe, draped over syncopated yelps of nothin' much, dissolved by the sound of a thousand funnel storms harsh-disciplining flat annihilated land.

***

"I ain't interested in where you come from, I'm interested in where y'are now."

"That's good."

"I mean no disrespect, but your story's like a million other stories. I only wanna know if you can help me now, this moment. Don't mean I ain't interested in you."

"Right. I understand. You know how people chase twisters?"

"Yeah, I seen that on YouTube."

"Well, I can get behind anything, you know?"

"I know it."

"Did we hurt someone back there? Back in Sioux Falls?"

"Best not talk about that."

"A'ight. You know it."

We did, though. Things got accidental. I hope someone didn't die. Afraid they mighta. 

***

We'll return to those falls one day. Some requiem playing in our earbuds. Under a grey dystopian sky. We'll carry our hope by the shoulder straps and look for signs of her, not find them, our faces wet in the relentless spray. We'll listen for her echo in the tumult, and we'll hear nothing. Gone as if she hadn't lived. The script of her life part written. A dull place in all our hearts that sometimes still aches on certain calendar dates. Earlier I said, "That was the last time we or anyone else saw her." But how can I be so sure of that? Melodrama's never a complete truth. What did she meet that day that quietly and effectively and manifestly obliterated her? I could keep on dissembling, but fact is, truth is, we won't ever know, and given the times we've turned our stricken faces toward the abyss, why on God's dark and gleaming earth should we?

Double Helix

© The Tree of LifeEveryone acts like nothing just happened but everything just happened.

I remember walking with you on the beach at sunrise, hands coupled, the clear cold air jagged in our throats, the ocean feigning benevolence. Sandpipers strutting the wet sand, stabbing their own reflections.

"Do you think it's weird how no one hardly ever talks about someone till they die unexpectedly?"

"Like?"

"I don't know. Bowie. Robin Williams."

"People talked about them a lot."

"Yeah, but not like they did when they died."

"It's because they were shocked. No one saw it coming."

"I guess. Seems strange to me still."

"Whatever."

Up ahead lay at least twenty bodies. Human bodies. We tried not to glance at them as we passed, but we saw enough to see they'd been mutilated. I wanted to make a joke about the mystery of whales beaching themselves, but I didn't. I'm glad I didn't. I hadn't known then how long we had left, and I'm glad I didn't befoul the already turbid waters of our last few hours together. Avoidance humour has its time and its place, but its time was not then and its place not there.

Who am I speaking these words to? To your memory, of course. To the strands that spiraled the precise patterns of your makeup, to the double helix that was you.

To the coiled tracks of shorebirds and the fading tracers of space junk.

I probably should have been more attentive to your theories. It's true I talked about you plenty before you were taken, but the voice in my head will no longer shut up about you, yammering about each detail like the Echo to my Narcissus, demanding I remember the time you inadvertently tucked the train of your wedding dress in your panties at the reception after returning from the bathroom (how no one even told you until the obligatory video had been captured), urging me to replay the panicked moment you thought we'd been unearthed by Bigfoot while camping in the Rockies (turned out to be a gopher), lamenting the shocked silence of the world in the sterile wake of your passing.

Have you ever imagined a field so huge it might as well be boundless? I think of you in such a place, your thin dress adhered to your curves, tall grasses eddying like liquid around you, your arms extended as if in a heaven designed by Terrence Malick. When such things could occur, before the slaughter, we would set up the TV on the porch and watch The Tree of Life and get hammered on those cocktails you called Fighting Irish, the ones only you knew how to make, while the wide cerulean day cooled into a tremulous cobalt evening, both of us poleaxed with melancholy over Brad Pitt's inkling toward his deficiencies, then stirred and charmed to grateful tears by Jessica Chastain's supple grace.

But now people act as if nothing happened, yet I know damn well plenty happened and that none of it is good and most of it is like finding your way through a dreadful dripping tunnel where dull bells toll and quick dark things skim your lowered head only to run into a sign that reads in strident black letters: This Is The Very End.