I-70 Review

Writing and Art from the Middle and Beyond

John Gallaher

John Gallaher teaches at Northwest Missouri State University and co-edits the Laurel Review. A previous winner of the Levis Award and The Boston Review Prize, his poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and others. The author of five previous collections of poetry, Gallaher has also co-written books with G.C. Waldrep and Kristina Marie Darling, and co-edited collections with Mary Biddinger and Laura Boss.

     Ghostwalk, Missouri

Our neighbor to the left had a stroke a couple years ago. It didn't look

like he was going to make it, and then he made it. I'm watching him

from my window as he makes his slow way across his yard

with some tree branches that fell in last night's storm. Three steps.

Wait. Three steps. It's a hard slog. Watching, I want to pitch in.

And we do, at such times, wanting to help. But on the other hand,

it's good to be as physical as possible in recovery. Maybe this is part

of his rehab. Maybe this is doctor's orders: DO YARDWORK.

And here comes his wife across the yard anyway, to give a hand

with a large branch. She's able to quickly overtake him, and she folds

into the process smoothly, no words between them that I can make out.

It's another part of what makes us human, weighing the theory of mind,

watching each other struggle or perform, anticipating each other's

thoughts, as the abject hovers uncannily in the background, threatening

to break through the fragile borders of the self. “What's it like to be

a bat?” we ask. The bats don't respond. How one life unfolds

at the periphery of catastrophes happening to others. I'm

reading, while my neighbor struggles, that the squirrel population

in New England is in the midst of an unprecedented boom. A recent

abundance of acorns is the reason for this surge in squirrel populations,

most particularly in New Hampshire. They're everywhere, being

squirrely, squirreling acorns away. We call it “Squirrelnado” because

it's all around us, circling, and dangerous, and kind of funny. Language

springs from the land, and through our imagination we become

human. They're back in the house now. We name the things we see,

or they name themselves into our experience, whichever, and then

we use those names for things we don't understand, what we can't

express. Wind becomes spirit becomes ghost. Mountain becomes

     god. The land springs up before us. It shakes us and pushes us over.

                    First published at Academy of American Poets, as

                    "My Life in  Brutalist Architecture"

Artist Statement

I'm just trying to get through the day, with a non-stop inner monologue playing. I think what I've been doing all along is trying to transcribe that voice, to get as close to that voice as possible. It's not really possible. Is that “stream of consciousness”? I guess one could call it that, but I like to think of it as a kind of companion instead. So my poetry is like that, if it's like anything: a back and forth with this inner monologue.

In My Life in Brutalist Architecture, things have changed-up a bit. Now there is a specific content that continues from poem to poem. Back in 2018 I took a DNA test to finally figure out the story of my adoption. Each story has many version, and My Life in Brutalist Architecture is a version of this story:

I was born, January 6, 1965 as Eric Martin Enquist. My mother and father, Patricia May Gorman (Enquist) and Lynn Martin Enquist, were young, and divorced a year later. He died in a car accident in the summer of 1968, which coincided with my adoption and name change to John Jerome Gallaher, Jr. The first twist in this story is that my adoptive mother, Kathleen Patricia Sullivan (Gallaher), when I was born, was my second cousin. Her father, Timothy Tade Sullivan, and my birth grandmother, Hazel Belle Sullivan (Enquist), were siblings. The second twist is that my brother, Richard, who I was raised with, also adopted, was, at birth, my cousin. His birth mother and my birth father were siblings. It should have been an easy story to sort out, but it took 50 years.

     1968 as Superhero Origin Story, Et Alia

     Look, up in the sky! Look what the culture is thinking of itself!

     Two orphans up against it, ladies and gentlemen. And aren't we all orphans

     in some way? Don't we want to be? The alien falls to earth

     in a ball of fire. The wealthy child watches again and again

     as his parents are murdered. We'll stop there, as the rest

     is all newspapers and money, the ability to fly

     and the metaphor of falling. Night arrives. Exterior. I'm three years old

     and I'm not allowed to fly alone, so the family makes arrangements

                                        with a man

to sit next to me, because it's important to have someone

to sit next to. Your Alfred. Your Ma and Pa Kent. Aunt May.

The pilot gives me some pin-on golden wings,

because in 1968, cockpits are open, inviting places,

as if you can just sit down and say “Let's go,” and it's off

to Kansas, clicking one's heels, imagining home,

though I had no say in the matter.

*

The adopted child dreams of Superman, but the dream

is Batman just as much, or Spiderman. I don't

remember his backstory. Something traumatic, I suppose.

Because you have to be working to avenge the past,

to redeem yourself, or to prove yourself

worthy. A lot of people are lost this way, though I could

just as easily have said “found.” I forget

the exact economy of superheroes, having given them up

for cowboys, who just want

                      some obscure horizon

to squint at.

               First published in BOAAT, as "My Memories of 1968" as

               "Scathing Reviews of Batman vs Superman"

        Hello from the Dumpster on Centennial and College Park

     Last night I was sitting in the back row of the reunion of the dead

     who hang on the family tree as empty spaces, a generation or two ago—

     someone must remember—but they never got into

     the pictures or stories, and I find two Patricia Gormans,

     same age, sixty miles apart in 1961, Portland and Salem.

     One is my birth mother. I'm homing in. We mark

     by long strings of absence, the hands holding us we do not feel . . .

     Sometimes, though, you find them, intentional

                                           or accident,

     a reclamation project—

                                 here it is, like it was easy.

           You just need the right number. Hello.

           It's late afternoon on the west coast, and Pat Gorman is talking to me.

           Which story is this one? Am I fixed

           now? Is this what I needed? The way we say “great literature,”

     and hesitate. Oh, memory, oh, dear

     and delightful memory of sketches, of a bitterness

                                                     more beautiful,

     as the meaning of living is that someone will miss you when you're gone.

      Later, I'm driving, a mouse in a translucent butterscotch livetrap next to me,

      because mice stopped going into the translucent green one.

      Therefore, it's different traps, but the same question.

      How far away must one drive a mouse so that it won't return?

      Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt

      in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. So I go east,

      two miles. That should be enough. Goodnight,

      little creature. Good luck.

First Mesenger

I find a picture of my birth mother online.

She's in her first year of high school. Centennial Union Yearbook, 1961.

You can already understand the nature of the hole. You look to the sky one night

and there are so many stars, surely there must be life out there.

So you try telescopes, you try math, the habitable zone, presence of oxygen.

The dogs look up as the adopted child is hovering over sky charts

and birth announcements. "What," they say, "isn't this world enough for you?"

There are 133 stars within 50 light years from Earth visible with the naked eye.

It's probable there are Earth-like planets around some of them. We separate

the real and the unreal into two identical, unlabeled boxes.

We place them on a shelf in the garage.

                                            The story is searching for the story.

The problem with the story is empty sky. The problem with the story

is real. Who is your "real"? What is your "real"?

Once, I said, "Anything, for one picture." Now it's "Anything

for two." Stepping off

the back porch, looking up, I'm in outer space, forever

in every direction. Everything is superficial.

A mix of planetarium and dumpster-diving.

Like imagining 'Oumuamua would return.

That someone would be there. That we'd talk.

That we'd sit on the couch going through a shoebox of photos

spanning 6.5 light years to Hodge 301, the Pearl

Cluster, Jewel Box, southern Pleiades, Andromeda.

I want to say. I want the clouds to say.

The mailboxes, in chorus, to say.

     Lugubrious Salutations

I'm driving past the empty soccer field, saying, “football pitch.”

The mouse that's riding beside me in the translucent green live trap

rolls its eyes. I get that. I'm rolling my eyes, too. Yesterday

I was cruising the aisles of Hy-Vee for charcoal toothpaste,

and I don't know why. It came over me in a wave,

like when I first understood how to tell time. Now it's easy

as “hello” and “goodbye,” and antique candy is calling to me

from boutique shops in tourist towns in Colorado.

I'm listening so hard, people, that the sky turns a pale pink,

like when I was six in speech therapy, repeating sentences

into a mirror, a little Narcissus of propriety, getting all fixed up,

placing weather balloons across the Mayfair set.

I have a voice now, indistinguishable from TV news,

though I don't know much about weather balloons

outside of press releases after UFO sightings, but I can guess,

as the speech therapist had to guess at my speech and/or language

disorder, as I'm also guessing what the Mayfair set is, as the mouse

is guessing. And then we're to the dumpster, and I realize it's empty

but for several inches of water. That would be a rough end

for the mouse, so I put it into a nearby trash can instead, full

of McDonald's bags, and I feel OK about how this is going.

I hope the mouse does, too. I really mean that. It's a nice day. 76

degrees. A lot of McDonald's bags to explore. These are life and death

decisions, like last week in Colorado, when I hopped onto a rock

so Boyd could take my picture, and I put my left hand to the cliff face,

and off falls this chunk that strikes me in the leg, just below

the knee, because I can't jump or anything, not knowing if jumping

would be worse, so I have to take it, and then

                               I feel the blood,

and Boyd says, “OK, got it.” And here I am.

I'm shaking this translucent green live trap

like it's a stubborn can of parmesan cheese,

the mouse holding on. Cloudless, the sun already warm.

   Garden of Mirrors

I look up from lunch and see a guy dozing back in his chair

and I imagine my dead father that way, perpetual sleeping passenger,

his head full of roads. “And who cares,” he says in his dream,

“that since you'll never wake, that you're not inscribing memories?”

My odometer hit 123456 today and I had a minor celebration

and took a picture. Birds, scientists are saying, see the earth's magnetic field

as a kind of blue. I like that. I wonder if my father would've liked that,

as families have recurring themes, generation to generation.

Measure the shoulders. Measure a taste for parsley. Hand tremors.

As in the Enquists vs the Gormans. The mother and father

are young, newly divorced. The Enquists want the baby, the child,

as he's three now, spring 1968, to be adopted out

through their side of the family to the Gallahers, and the Gormans

want to keep it in Portland, maybe cut a deal

over where it is and when. The Enquists sign the papers, though,

and the child is off on a Continental jet with a golden tail

to Kansas. (The painting that we're working on keeps folding,

fretting along the edges of the frame.) A few weeks later,

the Gormans are still not taking it well. For them, it was

a kidnapping. And one Gorman, the mother, goes off somewhere,

and the father, the Enquist, goes looking for her

with some friends. A friend of the father's, driving, falls asleep,

and down the hillside,

into the trees. You fall asleep over this life, and you wake

in a doll playground in a doll town surrounded by a doll

forest. You're planning some sort of festival.

The Enquists and the Gormans understand each other,

as a desert understands rain. As now, 50 years later,

they've all gone but for the mother and the child,

and he finds her in late fall, and she asks him

if his eyes are still a beautiful steel blue.

First published in LIPS, as “Golden”