Apple picking upstate under hot autumn blue; the apples thundered off the branches: Plop plop plop into our sacks, little boy in the branches pitching them like baseballs. We went upstate to Red Hook with Sweeney’s mama and sister, and his sister’s best friend who grumpily totes a five-year-old and a doting young husband. Sweeney and I bought a half-gallon carton of 24-hour-old cow’s milk from a farm down the road and drank it from the handle while we gathered raspberries. I bent in the bushes and talked to his mother about messiahs, emulating Spirit, Catholicism: It could have been anything, she said. She wanted her kids to be grounded in something. She just happened to fall in love with an Irish Roman Catholic. But that ended, too.

Over “hot, buttered soul brunch” at the FiveSpot, Sweeney and I thought about creating our own meal prayer or grace tradition, and I criticized the Catholic practice of addressing God as “father” because it perpetuates the belief in the man-in-the-sky, and he said, You’re right, but I think most religions have used an anthropomorphic address in prayer: you have to make it something you can talk with, otherwise, why say anything?

School is very well. Getting hot shit readings & critical theory in Samantha Hunt’s class. Talking about all the important things: devastation, broken hearts, how to love, homeland, The Devil, haunted houses with misplaced doors etc… Read Breece D’J Pancake recently, and recommend Kelly Link, and also Samantha Hunt’s book, The Seas. She’s a good teacher because she’s firm, under your skin, but doesn’t impress herself on her students.

US Lit is fine for discussion; reading a lot of early doctrines and captivity stories–a trend in the late 17th century pilgrim communities, of women being returned to their families after native warfare, and their Puritan minister husbands writing the account from the perspective of their wives and the “fantastic, awesome mercy of God”; not unlike the sensation of Go Ask Alice (1971.) Also, Romanticism to Existentialism with kind, patient Michael Eng, Linked Short Stories, World Civ with mouthy Professor Santore: “We’re gonna cova’ everything from mass murda’ to masta’bation!”

I drank two pitchers with the Sweeney and Dave, on Dave’s last night in Brooklyn before he went back to Scotland. We laid in the park, walked around the neighborhood, wondered how people stay together for twenty-five years, talked about the Three Generation Rule: First gen creates, second continues, third destroys–and then it repeats.

Last night we met Robi and Matthew at deep-set bluegrass bar by the highway in Red Hook, Brooklyn (not at all where the apples grow) called Sunny’s. It was made of corridors, and had a court yard, and ever growing jam band of old, Southern flat-foot dancing country-grass. This young girl joined at one point, and sang like she’d been singing for sixty years, the most beautiful croon you’ve ever heard.

Being aware of my bones recently: my collar bone, elbows, little extra lump at the base of my middle finger. Been cooking fine meals with the girls. Amassing free food from the Karrott, and natural pharmacies whose freezers keep breaking. Spinach cakes. Tofutti Cuties. Lily and I sat under a tree and read each other Keats, and I found the poem Robert and I might use for the liturgy of our play. Our play: The Windmill.

Friends, Countrymen, Carriers of our poetry;

We have a reading. We have a book. We have news. We have a name. We have a knight who plays the violin, three cats and a garden in claw foot bath tubs.

The Corresponding Society has a reading on October 7 at 5:00 pm in the oldest library of Brooklyn. Pratt Institute. Six readers. Treats & our book for sale. Hot air balloon rides. Singing roses. Glass floors. Wrought iron shelves designed by Tiffany. Meet us at: 200 Willoughby Ave, Brooklyn, near the Clinton/Washington G stop, and also the Clinton/Washington C stop.

Our first book, Correspondence No. 1, was released earlier this summer. Submissions for No. 2 are due October 15th, and can be sent to thecorrespondingsociety@gmail.com. Please attach your work as Word files and indicate “submission” in the subject. After reaching sufficient funds, The Corresponding Society will begin printing book length works in addition to the journal. Robert Snyderman’s novel/poem/journal, The Poverty Book, is lined up for 2009 release.

Visit our brand NEW website, www.thecorrespondingsociety.com, for updates, events, contact information and a Roladex of contributors. Copies of Correspondence No.1 are also available via PayPal at our Store.

Glory & be well!
Adrian & The Corresponding Society

Photos by Amber Stewart

In Maggie and Eric’s bullet-shaped Airstream one night, Sweeney passed my hand and whispered, “Come look at this.” We sat on the stoop and looked into the night. Beyond our bodies in the doorway stretched wheat fields, swaying in the blackness. The conversation of company flickered behind us. Our barefeet fell flat on the two-step, and Sweeney said: This is what life is like. If ever I’ve seen something to compare it to. All we have is the light we generate from camp fires, kitchens, lamps, and headlights. All we can do is hover around the light and talk. Beyond that, it’s just darkness. And you are constantly having to step into that darkness.

Lyndel wakes up next to my desk and says, What a treat! every morning, and then Lily and I make a pot of salty oatmeal and try to get the rest of our work done. The apartment is well, and casts tree shadows above my bed at night. I work at The Karrot and read Time Magazine, and become endeared to political candidates. Since when was it necessary to show pictures from their high school proms, or first-grade in a lily field? Sarah Palin tried to remove As I Lay Dying from her library system in Alaska, but she also gave a speech in Texas last spring right after her water broke, and held the baby in until she got back home: these things don’t speak to foreign policy, healthcare or Iraq Iraq Iraq (that’s what they keep saying), but they’re sort of sweet and strange, and distracting. There was a feature on NPR drawing parallels between McCain and Obama’s respective “daddy issues” (McCain’s pa ordered the town his son was held P.O.W in to be bombed during his captivity.) Maybe it has always been like this. Politics as a sitcom. Half of the country is voting for “the right guy” and isn’t even sure why. My dad said if I stopped reading Time Magazine at work I’d realize Sarah Palin is a wench. 

Kate Swenson visited from Portland and I took her around town, made quick breakfst at Gates with flies buzzing around. Robi let her sleep in his room piled bookstack-high, and she held herself like some kind of unwavering Saint at the Salon. “Poets sure read their work funny,” she said. “From an outsider’s point of view, you can’t imagine.” We walked Uptown with her old heartthrob, who had a tattoo from the illustrated Moby Dick on his bicep, and he said, “Have you gotten to the part where he’s describing the whiteness of the whale?”

I said, no, that they had just left shore.

“Oh, you just wait,” he said. 

Chanelle has been calling me Rainage lately, some backwards pronunciation of my name, and it rained during my birthday party. Everyone into the storm! And as were kicking up drawn water and soaking through our party dresses, Chanelle gripped my wrist drunkenly, saying, “Rain age! Rain age! Don’t you see! Rain age!” Some friends had taken me to the park under the Brooklyn Bridge for brie and crackers and olives. Rats galloped about us like a dog park. Then we went to Gates, and Sweeney and Dave had made a sloping cake, and more people came; Robi wrote me a poem, and so did Dave, transfixed and red-faced, and I got letters, a book, JuJu Fruits, and everyone gave me individual blessings as the heat gathered in the very small room. I’m writing a story about a house that changes shape, and reading lots of Western history, and reading about Kant’s attempt to define metaphysics so that we can all finally just talk about God directly. No matter how it comes out, my work will always attempt to enrich and explode and make sense/mess of the love between people (familial, phelial, marital, ephemeral.)

And all anyone seems to be talking about lately is getting married or having babies, and Maggie Brande (high holy heaven!) is actually getting married, on a cliff in Mendocino I once sat on with Kate Swenson, to Sir tell-it-like-it-is Eric James Horton during the season where the days stretch longest next year. Cheers to the oldest arrangement (from amoebas to lightening storms) on Earth: two.

by Ray Ray Mitrano

In elementary school, we played “college,” in the vein of say, “house” or “orphans.” The way of the world is to mimic until you assume the actual mimicked position, and then flail until death do us part. There is joy in the flailing no doubt, but I was a much more austere and less complicated twenty-year-old at nine-and-a-half, in my imaginary apartment. I was an exceedingly sober parent-of-stuffed-animal-fox [Foxy] in preschool than I will [probably] ever be for a kicking baby. But I remember sitting in Kelsey’s bunk bed in fifth grade deciding that the best age to be fell somewhere between eleven and thirteen. Somehow, I no longer think this is true.

At twenty, I sometimes wonder how my body manages to resist gravity, how my head balances on my throat, how I manage to speak English everyday. I don’t take these things for granted any more. And with this feeling of being shoved into some breeze on a rickety, vaudevillian stage, comes this wild power: you can dance and do the show, or you can also just not. And so of course the choice to dance is exhausting (in those starchy show suits); the choice to be alive and critical and open is going to thump you with rapture and terror and weight and soft, slow nights on an old futon with dirty sheets; and you will know the sheets are dirty, and the short breath, sweet. You will know them both at once. People ask me how my summer was, and I say “expansive. It had many chapters, aches and adventures,” and they say that they heard some things about it, and that it sounded beautiful and big. And it was, but also, well, the sheets were dirty or something, but the bed was nice.

What did you do this summer? My legs moved me down sidewalks! I could never think of life as uneventful now that I’m aware of the miracle of my body in once piece.

When we used to play “college,” we learned languages and had matching boyfriends and malevolent janitors to ward off. We did not factor in the miracle of our legs.

Tropical Storm Hanna is supposed to blast through Brooklyn this evening, just in time for cake and gin. Send a little rain dance our way: for everyone’s protection, but then also for the storm of my dreams. Blackouts, candles, rattling, hiding under blankets and listening to trashcans get pitched around the street. At midnite, Jenny, Robert, and Sophie made a giant pile of leaves and then jumped in, and covered me, singing Happy Birthday. Jenny gave me a huge elm leaf with a hole poked in it and told me to look through: “My present is perspective,” she said. “Look how simple everything gets. Look at the sky.” In the morning, Lily gave me a silver dollar to help with decision making. The mint on the back is an eagle perched in the moon with Earth in the background.

We wandered around two old Pratt studios last night, when all was empty. They go on forever and ever, and were constructed into a single winding building a few years ago. Robert was wearing tiny track shorts, and said cryptically, “It’s like the Winchester House.” And so I learned that the Winchester house was built by the widow of William Winchester, of the Winchester Rifle. Advised by a mystic who said she would forever be haunted by the victims of her late-husband’s guns unless she never ceased the construction of her house, so she lived. It was to make homes for the spirits, or others think, it was to hide from them. Sarah Winchester slept in a different room every night. And in this house are doors that lead no where, staircases to hidden levels, one-hundred-sixty bedchambers, unreachable turrets, two ballrooms, and disappearing corridors.

I suppose, if not careful, life could become somewhat like the Winchester. People seem to have dreams their entire lives about houses like this: finding rooms in their houses they never knew were there, a secret attic or tunnel.

Last week, a bird pooped on my forehead, and I split a rib and had a hard time moving for a few days. These were appropriate things to happen at the end of a season, I think. A slap and boot-kick into transition. Spread out in the backseat, we took Robi to South Jersey anyway, in pain et. al. His brother was hosting a blessing ceremony on the beach for his new baby, and Robi needed to be there. On the drive down, we ate cloves of garlic to ward off the mosquitoes. We arrived in the middle of the night and Sweeney, Chanelle, Robi and I slept on a pile of blankets in the backyard of his sister-in-law’s parent’s house on the coast, and woke up to bless Aradia, baby, by the ocean:

it was a moon-magic-woo-woo ceremony with a priestess who spoke directly to Diana and Apollo. The baby’s mother called herself “woo-woo” the way my father calls himself such. Family and friends gathered in a circle around an alter early in the morning. My pain was mostly gone. The priestess said to mom and dad: Aradia has been with you since the day you met! Chanelle and I cried, and then everyone, barefoot, led by the great-grand-parents, paraded to the water and dipped Aradia in [to her quivering dismay.] And then we all jumped in and swam.

Sweeney and I watched everyone during the reception outside. Playing banjo, eating, talking across the gaps of broken bonds. As everyone else’s, Robi has a complicated family, but was united by the shock of mohawk-headed baby. After all the mistakes and myths and meanies and bad genes and good genes, everyone was, well, OK. Ta-da! We elbowed each other. Everyone was fine under the holy sun. For now.

I thought about the first time Sweeney took me out to dinner, and afterwards, in the bleeding cold of winter sidewalks, he couldn’t decide to eat the after-meal chocolate or smoke a cigarette. He held them in his two large hands, quiet. If I could watch him back then, talking to me, I’d have a heart palpitation. I didn’t feel the weight then. I really hadn’t a clue. The weight in his two large hands. Lord! The chocolate or the cigarette! He led me outside in the sun this morning with my eyes shut to a chrome bicycle with a maroon vinyl, wide-assed seat locked to a street sign. He said, happy birthday, and the thing glinted in my eye. We are yet to have a naming ceremony.

On September 5th I turn twenty. My father asked me what I “wanted to do” about that, and I said: apple picking upstate, a surprise, a bird, someone to take me row boating in Central Park. I really want people to give me a run for my money, knock the wind out of me, jostle me. Give me something that reminds me of something really stupid or noble or strange I did. Good boots. A new backpack from the army navy store.

The plants are growing. Playing cards flutter from city park chess tables to my walk routes home. Seven of clubs. Nine of hearts. Queen of spades. Classes start soon. Autumn arrived about ten days into August and even if another heat-week struck, it wouldn’t change the state of things. You see, the light has changed, and that’s the true indicator of the equinox.

After dinner [spinach, chicken, brown rice, potato curry dumplings, Dominican beer, and a pot of garlic & lime tea] Chanelle and I strolled to the bodega for toilet paper. It was late. Upon entering, we faced a circle of men at the counter, fighting. We retreated and waited outside. The yelling quickened, grew louder, and we could see the shapes of their bodies through products in the windows, moving towards each other in battle. All at once, the sound died and truces were exchanged. We made our way back in. The men were dispersing and shaking hands. We set the toilet paper on the counter, and one of the owners leaned toward us and said, “That guy tried to steal something. We had to deal with it. It happens; you know how this neighborhood is–” and if he meant that I know how people in this neighborhood spar and then get over things, like the way it storms here, then yes, I know. But if he was trying to soothe me, a white girl he doesn’t know, and “you know” was more of a “you know the stigma of this place,” then, no, I don’t know. I really don’t know.

Sweeney and I have been waking up early and eating breakfast specials at our local diners. There are puddle near the sinks in our apartment, and we kiss and slip and do our work. We’re finding that it can feel alienating sometimes, to live around each other so wholly, and experience the parts of our lives that don’t overlap. We’re reading Moby Dick together. No one ever tells you when talking about that book, that the first part is all about men hooking their legs around each other in bed and getting married.

Robi arrived home from his soujourn across the country last Wednesday at dawn. He’d been gone for two months, and knocked loudly on the door. We smelled him and hugged and he looked around at us, me, Sweeney, Chris, Chanel, and said, “Wow; this is house is in high spirits.” He looked around and saw how we’d been living. He said, “Adrian, I wish you would stay.” The sun, just barely risen, filled the cellar apartment. Chris suggested breakfast, since we were up.

Later that night we drove to Allentown, Pennsylvania, and sailed around for a couple of days, spending a night in Philadelphia where Robi’s parents live.

Don’t forget about the newly-pressed Correspondence No. 1 ($8), available from this place, and also from this one: thecorrespondingsociety.blogspot.com.

And just a reminder; we are accepting submissions until October 1st. Send work to thecorrespondingsociety@gmail.com as .rtf or .doc files, and be sure to indicate “Submission” in the subject.

I remember Cindy Maize explaining, in a measured tone, why she would gladly die for her children. I was seven, and spent most weekday afternoons in the back of her baby blue Ford Taurus, running errands and playing Miss-Susy-Had-a-Tugboat with my friend, falling asleep in the sun. I remember her parking in their driveway, and getting out of the car and the three of us being halfway into a conversation about parents taking bullets for their children. And Cindy, walking ahead of us, jingling her keys, said, “I just would. It’s something you don’t think about, really.” I pictured all grown-ups as battle shields. “Would my mom?” I asked. “Of course,” she said.

Who takes bullets for whom? I was thinking about this today. Chanelle and I started a garden in our patio, and things are growing by the hour: squash, spinach, lettuce, peppers, morning glories, strawflowers and onions, spilling out of three clawfoot bathtub planters. These are like babies, but it is not the same.

There’s an Olympic-sized pool, abandoned and sea-green paint peeling, in McCarren Park that people have been using for concerts and outdoor picnic movies all summer long. We saw a new production of Hamlet called Twelve Ophelias, which took place somewhere in Appalachia instead, and used the darkness of the night and four spotlights for all the world’s mood. What with that buttery summer wind and the jug band battling-banjo accompaniment. Ophelia called Hamlet, The Rude Boy. “That rude boy done me wrong.”  They mixed Southern drawl with Elizabethan sentence structure.

We’ve had many guests, in and out, big family dinners, long work days; we let the cats outside as they please, these days; Robert and I worked on our play for twelve hours; Sweeney has almost finished teaching himself both Latin and French. We went out on the Hudson, cloaked in thick, green hills. Went to the house where his mother was a raised; an old inn under a red freight bridge. We jumped from the back of his uncle’s boat. If I stayed perfectly still, and looked away for only a second, the current had taken me fifty feet from the plank, almighty: at dawn this morning, after a cautionary tarot spread that gave me an inverted Ten of Staves, Chanelle and I debated whether or not it’s OK to “float away from the boat” sometimes, and of course it is. The lesson lies in learning that you can, and taking heed accordingly.

You can choose, I suppose, to swim back to the boat, but there are a thousand other forces at work. With one choice, a thousand other seeds germinate on the back of your neck, and they grow with or without your watering can.

During Poem Shop, we’ve had people teach us mamba, yoga, how to make Spätzle.  We watched a hawk land on an elm in Central Park, and eat a rodent. We stopped a crevice-faced middle-aged musician and pointed to the bird: Edie Bobe. He ended up giving us salsa lessons. Talked about a radio play he did with Debbie Harry once. And we wrote poems for adopted daughters and helpful mothers and trips to Egypt: the trick, is to just go.

My stepfather’s mother recently passed; the trick, is to just go. And seal your departure with five children, reconciled. They were all together for the first time in thirty years; maybe sat on overstuffed chairs covered in dog hair, drank coffee, and remembered how many bullets they took for each other, almighty: who did Ophelia take bullets for?   

We went to an opening party at the MoMa for Erich Kirchner; a German art nouveau.  Lots of high-kicks and prostitutes and people hiding their faces in the background. Sweeney and I went to Block Island to hunt for ghosts and myths, and all we found were quiet roads and secret beaches on rented bicycles. I felt defensive and squashed the first day.  We hugged in the Great Salt Pond and stayed in an old house. Got a beer at the Beachhead Grill, and as per request, Sweeney swatted my forehead as Defenso the Clown began to rise in my throat. Then, Defenso was gone. We dodged jellyfish in the tide and thought, well, let’s go home. Boarded the ferry and steamed through a storm: we stood facing West in the rain on the bow, alone.

I talked to my Aunt, a former island citizen, upon our return. She said, “Next time tell me when you’re going. I would’ve told you to get a cocktail at the Beachhead.” I smiled, told her we had. Told her the island’s first name was Adrian’s Island, and she said, “I know.”

Then she said, “So Sweeney’s your manfriend?”

Oh. Sweeney keeps the magic alive.

We climbed Bear Mountain with Dave and Chanelle a couple of weeks ago, barefoot and up rock faces. Everyone but me stepped in a yellow jacket nest on the way down, and said “ouch” only three times before moving on, riddled in welts. Chanelle even smiled: “I think this is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said.

 Spätzle:

“All you need is flour, egg, salt, and a little bit of water,” he said in a thick German accent. “Then you take a very sharp knife and very quickly, slice thin strips into a pot of boiling water. It’s very difficult. They have machines for it now, but in the olde says, you would fail ten, twenty times before you made good Spätzle, and once you could, you could be a grandmother; you could buy a house, own a dog; the whole big mess.”