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Blood Will Tell

Craig Paulenich

BlazeVOX [books] Buffalo, New York

Blood Will Tell by Craig Paulenich Copyright 2009 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Book design by Geoffrey Gatza First Edition ISBN: 9781935402336 Library of Congress Control Number 2009925614 BlazeVOX [books] 303 Bedford Ave Buffalo, NY 14216

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Love of Iron and Fire I need words that pressure the eardrum, rumble in bone and belly, syllables chipped and ground, shouted through cupped hands, words that stumble in the sand, words without earplugs, words stinking of wine sweat the day after payday, cut words, live wires, nouns for fifty kinds of fire, ten kinds of dust, nouns common, proper, collective, concrete, black nouns blown out the nose so that handkerchiefs read like tea leaves, tarot cards, Rorschachs. May my tenses be perfect, my participles past. I need verbs that smell in the clothing, that set up housekeeping in the pores so that others will sniff and say, You work at the Malleable, words like fingers in the sand, adjectives that burn, wooden shoes atop a ladle of steel, words that puddle, slosh, sputter, ping, that cling to the flannel shirt, mundane and fundamental as time cards, lunch buckets, hard hats, words familiar as workboot creases, words for the love of iron and fire.

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N o Last W ords The dead are such teases, walking off to Mexico, disappearing into nameless sanatoriums, improbably crushed by random cars on icy iron bridges, passing out into acid pits, stumbling into ladles of steel, slumped in the shower, or asleep in some unimaginable posture. They arise suddenly in casual conversation, always one step ahead, just around the corner, leave boxes of tinted postcards, nicknames, love letters, mute about their diseases, the houses that burned, the speed at which the car left the curve. They lift their skirts, drop their pants, walk beneath lightning to gather up chickens.

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They W ill Be Like Stones Words spill like milk. Everything will be forgotten, remembered; moments will be cut and pasted, posted on the refrigerator where someone believes them, and tells it again. Yes, they will say, that's how it will be, was, or is. And some things take root, become true, like a tomato becomes red, or light, darkness. They will be facts, have private lives.

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Blood W ill Tell Blood will tell you there is lightning in the window, that hair is a calendar, fingernails cookbooks. Blood shows you how to roll them bones, tells you watch what you wish for. Blood remembers your face before you were born, hums "Jacob's Ladder," spells "heterozygote" and "polydactyly." Blood is behind you and before you. Blood mumbles riddles, dirty limericks, bad jokes, laws of probability; lectures on line breeding and prepotency, throwbacks, back-cross, repulsion. Blood knows all the skeletons, opens all the graves, whispers, "There's no one like you." Blood says, "Catch me if you can." Blood says, "I told you so all along." Blood says, "Rumpelstiltskin," sees in all directions, knows where you live. Blood tells who and when, gives names and dates. Blood knows which foot fits the slipper.

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M agi

America is Gods Crucible.


Two thousand years before there was a Christ, some men smelted iron, tempered it with blood. The blower looked into the burning bush and read the heart of steel. My father is an archangel, sears the air with sparks, stares into the furnace, eyes flares of molten steel, smells it cooking, in his blood, feels it slosh and mutter. He is intimate with fire, a magicians casualness. It sears him and he does not flinch or squint. Iron turns malleable, steel becomes steel, flesh and bone incinerate at the same Fahrenheit slash. My father understands this, recognizes all the patterns, knows every piece work rate. Straw Boss, he oversees Gods brute alchemy: fire, iron, flesh, blood and word.

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H iawatha and H ardhat The National Malleable is improbably robins egg blue, shaped like a longhouse on the bank of the Shenango: clans along the sides, fire down the pouring floor, smoke slits in the roof. Theres a chunk of plate steel cut to the shape of a broom suspended above chutes of blast furnace flames, heaps of cooling slag on the floor like strawberries under dark leaves. Hulking electric furnaces tear the ozoned air, cowering crackle and snakespit, the om beneath the eruptions a hum so bass it plucks the diaphragm like a string. A dozen times a day men misplace their bodies, mistake them for greentops or shrieking cranes. The iron thunk of flask on flask echoes in the chambers of the heart, flesh nothing more than salty pudding in a universe of iron and fire. Belts stretch like snakes in the rafters, naked bulbs and tunnels beneath the floor. Opiate flame, smell of burnt bentonite, arrange the cores counterclockwise and the iron minutes melt to overtime. The men eat sand, each breath sparkles with silica.

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G aining D om inion I My grandfather's name was Josef, though somewhere between Ellis Island and Oakwood Cemetery he became "Joseph." My father was "Francek Josef. It says so on a taped Xerox of a birth certificate folded for pocket passage, a map of the heart, a neverland. Six foot by age thirteen, the rough-handed men in the Malleable furnaces called the boy, and he was, forever, "Shorty." When his father spoke his name, what did he say? As a child, I thought he was named for the emperor, Franz Josef, whose nephew, Francis Ferdinand, was murdered at the corner of Francis Joseph Street; whose abrupt ascension left a world at war. But that was wrong. II My parents wouldn't name me, wouldn't speak it aloud. Out of touch, weightless pink astronaut,
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rat, burning bush, I would have fit in the palm of my father's hand. I was nothing but a scream. My sister Patty's name was already there, in the grass, embossed on a silver rectangle the size of a jewelry box lid; Patricia Ann, named for Annie, our father's sister, crushed against the wrought iron of the Wasser Road Bridge. III Beneath an oak at St. Mary's, my father buried Christine. He only ever called her "my first wife." What name is called the thirteenth year? Terry lives somewhere, cleans houses, pushes a grocery cart loaded with ten trips to the Barbian Unit, three husbands, two sons, a fistful of names and regrets, an ocean of lies.

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All the H oles Are Filled W ith Stories I There are only three pictures of Grandmother Terezija. She would be the first of three wives. I cannot tell you why. She looks uneasy, caught off guard, somehow unprepared, her body tilted toward her husband. Or she stands alone, a cutout moved from room to room; as though this were a crack in the world, as though at any time she might topple. She wears flowered dresses. Perhaps this is how my father remembered her, dead when he was twelve. II What were you thinking? I cannot imagine, any more than I was imaginable. Could you project yourself, your picture, in my hands? Did you know you were dying?

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III You were my father's mother. What could he tell me, a twelve year old, forever. Did he often recall himself then? I cannot remember myself at twelve, can only picture me in photographs, faded ektograph on one knee beneath a tree, long dead. You stand in the yard, monochromatic, a fragment of the narrow house behind you. Someone had a camera.

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A Prim er

"Don't talk of the birds who are in the Heavens."


I Terezija Dove of wind-fingered sandstone, barely visible, gone before she could be known, only imagined. II Terry She is a plastic flamingo gorged on sulfurous krill, desperately pink, catawampus in a shopping cart, catatonic on the front lawn, or wandering the greens among the water hazards. The graceful curve of her neck is choked with voices, bus tickets, diagnoses, illegible script. Deceit clings like oil to her feathers, her tail brings grief across the threshold. III Christina The one called only, "my first wife."

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IV Elizabeth A small brown bird, the kind you barely see and couldn't name, chased with a broom about a TB sanatorium. V G reat-G randm a U dovich Crow with a white eye on a ladderback chair in the woods. VI Annie Caught in flight, slapped against an icy iron bridge, taxidermists sewed her up and sent her home to die, the bird in hand. VII Patricia Bird of my dreams, I picked the grass from around your grave, silver rectangle embossed with a plump baby. It was all I could do, the receipt for your burial a solitary pinfeather in the bottom of our father's cigar box.

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VIII G randm a Biggart Brood-hen measured in stone, flightless bulk in flowered shift, she rolled her nylons down, wore hats on Sunday, had eleven aimless chicks wandering the prairie. In the Farrell Terrace projects, each night before sleep, afloat in a cloud of horehound and Vicks Vapo-Rub, she whispered "if I die before I wake," terrifying birdsong in the darkened room. When the County Home caged her, we visited every Sunday for ten years. Only death could stop us.

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