Any time I read work by Michelle Reale, something happens in the world, something changes and becomes new or different or altered. I am pretty much always left in awe. The Stone Highway Review contributor writes powerful yet subtle pieces that retain both mystery and insight into human nature, all while keeping the reader close and intimate. Her chapbook Like Lungfish Getting Through the Dry Season ($8.00 on Lulu, Thunderclap Press 2011) upholds the expectations I had from reading her work in numerous literary journals. This chapbook is its own strange world, at times surreal yet gritty and entirely now and embedded in poetically seductive language. This is a book about broken families, about struggling childhoods and about how one becomes a woman, or a person, after the influence of imperfect and often hurtful people.
Each piece often reads as if someone just ripped the cigarette you were smoking right from your fingers. The second piece sets us up for a new world, a journey into the strange and different, about a woman who is fleeing possible abuse. The abuse is never named, but only alluded to: “Upon arrival she’d begun to think the shiny white bandages she’d wrapped herself in… might have been a mistake.” When asked where she is going, the character’s arms turn into wings: “fluttering…in gentle arcs.” Reale shows a knack for comparison, when she describes planes in the sky as “steely coffins.” This piece hums with a threatening yet hopeful tone, and sets us up for a collection of pieces that work much in the same way. We may be in an airport or at a hospital or in a car, but often we are in more place than once, and we get there in subtle and soft ways.
A key element to this chap is the honesty of Reale’s work throughout each piece. The language is crisp, dreamy, and seductive, while remaining unapologetic. Reale isn’t afraid to “go there.” In “A First Time for Everything,” a mother dances the day away in response to a fight with a father. The daughter watches the mother’s dancing, anticipating the father’s return and the fights that could ensue. A story like this could become dramatic or over the top, but Reale keeps us grounded in the language and the sexy scene:
“She begins her dance, her long thin arms wrapped around an imaginary partner. Her beautiful feet, arched as if she were wearing heels that make her look like every man’s dream. I am hung over from a binge with my friends the night before, something that doesn’t register with my mom. When I take a drag from her cigarette, my little sister, still in her nightgown with the sagging ruffle giggles. I hold my fingers up to my lips, shhhhhh, while the smoke unfurls from the corners of my mouth. ‘ Magic,’ she whispers, loving the secret between the two of us.”
The chapbook is filled with secrets. Secrets the reader gets to know about, secrets we may feel left out of, but we don’t feel cheated. We always know enough. “Nostrum” is an example of a story we feel there is much more to, but because our main character is younger and knows less, so do we. This depressing tale of a broken family made me write “Woa” in the margins. First, a child is taken from her father because of a fight between the parents. Then, the father picks up a girl and we get the hint that he sleeps with her, then leaves her behind. The father tells the daughter, “No one can save you, remember that,” giving the piece an anti-evangelical feel, while the father remains “pounding out a furious beat on the steering wheel.”
Another strange piece involves a mother who volunteers to watch a neighbor’s child. The child happens to suffer from some kind of developmental disability. The speaker of this piece does not trust her mother – a common theme in the entire chapbook, and one that is shown for good reason here. This is another piece I wrote “Woa” in the margins many times. The things this mother says are surprising and can really make you gasp:
I will tell you this, though, my mother says, dropping her voice as if Belinda might understand. She will still get her mothly. She touches her head first and then her crotch: Up here has nothing to do with down there. Honestly, can you just imagine?
The mother is even a bit torturous to this helpless child:
My mother blows a stream at Belinda. She laughs when the girl sputters. Belinda’s mouth looks like the downward grimace of the tragedy mask of theater.
And the mother continues to say, “She’ll live a long life ‘cause she won’t have any stress.”
This particular story struck me sensitive to children, but also to those who are silenced in any way. Reale uses her seductive and subtle language to take our breath away, to show us the true darkness that can reside in all kinds of people – mothers and fathers are not the perfect people we should idolize after all. And they are more complicated than simply evil, here. They are troubled people, yes, and yet somehow still retain our sympathy.
Reale’s chapbook is modest in that each piece is quite short and looks as though there is little to it. Yet, each piece contains an urgency and life-like quality that pulls you through them quickly. I read this book straight through each time without stopping. While you may want to take a break and breathe, you most likely won’t be able to because Reale makes us sympathize and care for often grotesque or even borderline gothic characters who simply need to be loved. For example, the intensity of “Hunger” –
I held my arms under my stomach, cradling my girth and nursing hunger pains. I rocked myself back and forth on the curb like I was my own baby.
And again in “Like Lungfish Getting through the Dry Season” –
She spread her fingers in front of her face. Her gestures were like currency…
She skipped out the back door like a sprite.
She would read their futures in his fur.
When I came home after a long day of work not too long ago, I found my dog had chewed up my copy of this chapbook. Somehow he ate the cover page and part of the first page. The cover pages fell off, leaving the rest of the piece intact. This spoke to the strength of the work for me. It strengthens our understanding of these familial relationships through its seductive and smoky language. Through its honesty. The seduction can be a bit creepy in places, but like one of Reale’s narrator’s claims, “there is a first time for everything.”
Each piece often reads as if someone just ripped the cigarette you were smoking right from your fingers. The second piece sets us up for a new world, a journey into the strange and different, about a woman who is fleeing possible abuse. The abuse is never named, but only alluded to: “Upon arrival she’d begun to think the shiny white bandages she’d wrapped herself in… might have been a mistake.” When asked where she is going, the character’s arms turn into wings: “fluttering…in gentle arcs.” Reale shows a knack for comparison, when she describes planes in the sky as “steely coffins.” This piece hums with a threatening yet hopeful tone, and sets us up for a collection of pieces that work much in the same way. We may be in an airport or at a hospital or in a car, but often we are in more place than once, and we get there in subtle and soft ways.
A key element to this chap is the honesty of Reale’s work throughout each piece. The language is crisp, dreamy, and seductive, while remaining unapologetic. Reale isn’t afraid to “go there.” In “A First Time for Everything,” a mother dances the day away in response to a fight with a father. The daughter watches the mother’s dancing, anticipating the father’s return and the fights that could ensue. A story like this could become dramatic or over the top, but Reale keeps us grounded in the language and the sexy scene:
“She begins her dance, her long thin arms wrapped around an imaginary partner. Her beautiful feet, arched as if she were wearing heels that make her look like every man’s dream. I am hung over from a binge with my friends the night before, something that doesn’t register with my mom. When I take a drag from her cigarette, my little sister, still in her nightgown with the sagging ruffle giggles. I hold my fingers up to my lips, shhhhhh, while the smoke unfurls from the corners of my mouth. ‘ Magic,’ she whispers, loving the secret between the two of us.”
The chapbook is filled with secrets. Secrets the reader gets to know about, secrets we may feel left out of, but we don’t feel cheated. We always know enough. “Nostrum” is an example of a story we feel there is much more to, but because our main character is younger and knows less, so do we. This depressing tale of a broken family made me write “Woa” in the margins. First, a child is taken from her father because of a fight between the parents. Then, the father picks up a girl and we get the hint that he sleeps with her, then leaves her behind. The father tells the daughter, “No one can save you, remember that,” giving the piece an anti-evangelical feel, while the father remains “pounding out a furious beat on the steering wheel.”
Another strange piece involves a mother who volunteers to watch a neighbor’s child. The child happens to suffer from some kind of developmental disability. The speaker of this piece does not trust her mother – a common theme in the entire chapbook, and one that is shown for good reason here. This is another piece I wrote “Woa” in the margins many times. The things this mother says are surprising and can really make you gasp:
I will tell you this, though, my mother says, dropping her voice as if Belinda might understand. She will still get her mothly. She touches her head first and then her crotch: Up here has nothing to do with down there. Honestly, can you just imagine?
The mother is even a bit torturous to this helpless child:
My mother blows a stream at Belinda. She laughs when the girl sputters. Belinda’s mouth looks like the downward grimace of the tragedy mask of theater.
And the mother continues to say, “She’ll live a long life ‘cause she won’t have any stress.”
This particular story struck me sensitive to children, but also to those who are silenced in any way. Reale uses her seductive and subtle language to take our breath away, to show us the true darkness that can reside in all kinds of people – mothers and fathers are not the perfect people we should idolize after all. And they are more complicated than simply evil, here. They are troubled people, yes, and yet somehow still retain our sympathy.
Reale’s chapbook is modest in that each piece is quite short and looks as though there is little to it. Yet, each piece contains an urgency and life-like quality that pulls you through them quickly. I read this book straight through each time without stopping. While you may want to take a break and breathe, you most likely won’t be able to because Reale makes us sympathize and care for often grotesque or even borderline gothic characters who simply need to be loved. For example, the intensity of “Hunger” –
I held my arms under my stomach, cradling my girth and nursing hunger pains. I rocked myself back and forth on the curb like I was my own baby.
And again in “Like Lungfish Getting through the Dry Season” –
She spread her fingers in front of her face. Her gestures were like currency…
She skipped out the back door like a sprite.
She would read their futures in his fur.
When I came home after a long day of work not too long ago, I found my dog had chewed up my copy of this chapbook. Somehow he ate the cover page and part of the first page. The cover pages fell off, leaving the rest of the piece intact. This spoke to the strength of the work for me. It strengthens our understanding of these familial relationships through its seductive and smoky language. Through its honesty. The seduction can be a bit creepy in places, but like one of Reale’s narrator’s claims, “there is a first time for everything.”
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