Lynne Kemen

​Outlier

every morning edgar allen crow wakes me, him and his committee, loud and belligerent and brilliant, and outlier the turkey who has decided she is also a crow. then there’s you, b, who set the coffee up the night before, grinding the beans in some particular ratio, always a little different, dubai chocolate lately, a favourite, and you bring it to me. birdie, you say, or sometimes babycakes. we drink from our mugs, yours nasa, mine write drunk, edit sober, and outside the window the committee is still at it, outlier moving through them like she was born to it, like there was never any question. the crows have no idea what they’ve done.

 **

September 5, 2024

B makes the coffee. I read the Times. Every morning, same order. This morning Maxx is in her sunspot, Teddy wedged behind my back, Jake draped over the couch, Mitzi on B’s knee. Headlines first, just to make sure. Then culture. Then the obits. That’s where I find him: Sérgio Mendes, dead at 83. And I’m thirteen in Ithaca. Landlocked, gray, nothing like anywhere the radio promised. "Girl from Ipanema" is playing, and something in it is telling me about sunlight, about bathing suits, about the specific gravity of a body moving past you on a beach. I had never seen that beach. I had never felt that sun. I didn’t know yet what I wanted, or that wanting was allowed, or that a body could move like that and undo you completely. Now I’m in Delaware County and it’s September and the obituaries come faster every year. All these people who were young when I was young. The background noise of my life, going quiet. I scroll on. The coffee is cold.

 **

Jonathan Rosen

after Diana Marie Delgado

Jonathan Rosen is dead. I learned this the way you learn things now, a name typed into a search bar, a small notice, no photograph. We were five outliers in a living room in seventh grade, a playwright, a musician, a writer, and me, and Jonathan, who vamped and played Mae West and re-enacted love scenes from old movies, playing both parts, knowing every line by heart. There was a baby grand piano in that room that didn’t belong to any of us. Jonathan would resist it the way you resist something you need too much. But eventually he’d sit down and something would leave him (the performance, the armor) and he’d launch into Chopin and the room would go quiet. We’d sit on the floor and not move. He got a scholarship to Juilliard. He was one of many there, not the one, and something in him couldn’t hold that. The drugs came first, then the school was gone, then the home, then we were gone too, because he always needed money and it was too painful and we were young and didn’t know how to stay. I have thought about that ever since. We were young and didn’t know how to stay and I am still sorry for that. He was so talented. I wanted us all to make it: the playwright, the musician, the writer, and Jonathan most of all. I did not want him to become someone I wouldn’t recognize. I don’t know what he was looking for in those last years. I think he was looking for that room.

**
 
Time Travel in Treadwell

Friday. The children have read their poems to the parents, loudly, the way I taught them, voices thrown out into the summer air, shown the dioramas, the clay, the papier mâché, and carried everything home. I took them to the playground between sessions, watched them run. Now they’ve all gone. I’m left with the railway bench on Bright Hill’s porch, staring across at the rectory. No lawnmowers. No cars. Just quiet, and the buildings, and the dead-end street, and it could be a set for a film about 1900. Every building here breathed the same air then: the church, the rectory, Bright Hill itself, all of it still standing, still doing what it was built to do. 1900 sashayed in wearing button-up boots. Too tired to argue, I let her.

Something about the cusp: porches mattering, time moving at the pace of rocking chairs. A distant airplane stitches the sky, pulls me back. This bench. This century. I would trade all of it for one real conversation that lasted until stars appeared without fanfare, until time forgot to count itself.

 **

No. I. Don’t.

Every weekend I came home. By then we had the hospital bed in what they used to call the sun room: pine paneling, dark green curtains, a ramp where the one step down used to be. My father was still trying to do everything. She confused him with her own father sometimes. There had been an affair, a small town, everyone knew. My grandmother never said a word. Not once. Mom was angry that day. I said: you don’t know who I am, do you. Not a question. I already knew. No. I. Don’t. Four words, each one a door closing. I bent over to catch my breath. That’s all I remember after that.

 **

The North Forty

This morning: my black squirrel, a gray one, three wild turkeys working the torn-up grass for whatever the night left behind. No crows yet. One blue jay passing through without stopping, which is what blue jays do. The turkeys don’t look up. They never look up. They trust the north forty the way you trust a place you’ve always known, head down, feet moving, the whole body certain there’s something worth finding. The grass won’t recover until June. Maybe July. The turkeys will see to that. I look out the window. My friends are accounted for, an excellent way to start a Friday morning in May. It’s still cold, spring doesn’t feel quite real yet.
 
**
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Lynne Kemen is the author of Shoes for Lucy (SCE Press, 2023) and More Than a Handful (Woodland Arts Editions, 2020). Her work has appeared in One Art, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen's Quinterly, and elsewhere. She received a 2024 Pushcart Prize nomination and serves as Editor/Interviewer for The Blue Mountain Review. She lives and writes in an 1830s farmhouse in rural Delaware County, New York, where she shares her property with a murder of crows, one of whom she has named Edgar Allen Crow. https://lynnekemen.com/