FIRST BOOKS ISSUE Brandel France de Bravo   BREATH "...scientists have found fetal cells surviving in the maternal bloodstream decades afer the women have given birth to their children." —Natalie Angier, Woman, An Intimate Geography The satyr in Aesop's fable, seeing the human cool his soup and warm his hands with the same breath, mistrusts him. The child too, blows hot and cold, paining the mother who once shared her breath with him, allowing his sighs to pass invisibily through her lips. She does not regret this conspiracy, the plot that overturned her life. The son will travel far from home to try to get there. In a room full of people inhaling and exhaling, he will sit with crossed legs watching his belly roll ashore and back. He will look at his navel, forget-me-knot, and remember thinking as a little boy if he untied it all the air would escape from him until he was just an empty balloon. He marries a woman from another country with a temperate climate. One day, making guacamole, the man slices open an avocado, wide as hips around the pit, which he digs free to discard. "Not yet," says his wife, tossing the pit into the mixing bowl. "It's what keeps the avocado green." The man's mother thinks of him often. Sometimes he is distant in her mind, like a slogan shouted decades ago when independence was what mattered most. Other times he is near as the pastry on her plate, a colonial left-over that fills her with its foreign-sounding name, each bite a creamy syllable of the language she once lived. Her country may be free but her son's cells still occupy her, patrolling her pulsing alleys. A powerful junta will rule over her until her last breath: memory of mother and son as one. Sheila Rotner Containment 1 metal wire and bones (2007) 24 x 24 inches see more work by Sheila Rotner   EUREKA Dr. Duncan MacDougal didn't shriek Eureka, running naked from a bathhouse, or later reveal his discovery to a king, but published the results of his scientific experiment (based on a sample of six) with pride in American Medicine. The New York Times headline read, "Soul Has Weight, Physican Thinks"—21 grams to be precise, weight of a hummingbird or a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. Only one of the six whom the doctor watched die on a scale-bed of his own design had a sudden, irreversible drop in weight at the moment of death, which we now know is not so easy to be precise about, but none of the dog-controls lost even a gram when put to sleep, confirming the doctor's belief that animals have no soul. Purity—not weight—was King Hiero's concern. His newly crafted crown had the right heft, as many ounces as the gold given to make it, but what if lesser metals had been used in its place? The King charged Archimedes, lover of levers, father of bouyancy, with teasing truth from rumor and devising a means to test the holy wreath that would not damage or defile it. "A good, hot soak," thought the mathematician, inventor, "will help me come up with a solution," and immersing one leg and then the other, he watched as the water rose, overflowed from the tub, and experienced the euphoric moment more precise than death, that gave us the sound of secular ephiphany. If Hiero's crown must weigh the same as the lump of gold from which it came, the smith who substitutes lighter silver, melts down spoons, will forge an object of measurably greater volume. The more water displaced, the more gold replaced. Archimedes proved the goldsmith's duplicity but no one has found a way to test the soul's mettle. Some days we feel its heaviness, but even if the soul had weight, —weighing the same on the day we die as at birth— what about its expanding girth, the alloy of years? We age silver-gray, lose value, but compensate by growing softer and turning up the volume. It's not enough just to be, in all its density. We ask for more and, of course, make it filigreed. As for the pure soul... It never spills out of its airplane seat, never encroaches upon the next passenger, forcing him to remove his arm from the rest or displace one thigh, crossing it over the other. KIBOSH The movie producer who could not be reasoned with awoke to find in his bed, not a starlet, but another sort of trophy: the severed head —black with a white diamond—of his new racehorse. After that he dropped his obstinacy like two lumps in his coffee, drained the cup and called to say Corleone's godson could have the lead, after all. Only the night before he had boasted to the Don's emissary of his contacts with the FBI, his close personal relationship with J. Edgar, but Hoover was a milquetoast compared to Draco, the man to cozy up to if you were a miscreant in ancient Greece, for whom stealing a cabbage was cause for capital punishment: an eye for an eye, a head for a head. Sentencing a vegetable thief to death is not as extreme as it seems once you know cabbage —peasant food that stinks when boiled like the sweat of workers in a Minsk tractor factory—has noble origins, having sprouted from the tears of a king. And the teetotaling ruler of Thrace, Lycurgus, had reason to weep after challenging Dionysus. We have, in one corner, the king of prohibition, (boxers emblazoned with "Let's put the kibosh on fun!") ......................................and in the other, DJ Rave throwing down ......................................the tippling sound of Club Bachanal. Lycurgus suffered a couple of blows—drought and the death of his son—before going down for the count. But the match continues: to this day people swear cabbage is a cure for hangovers, not to mention cancer, obesity, and the effects of radiation. Its leaves are a salve for the swollen breasts of nursing mothers everywhere, and kimchi, they say, will keep Korea safe from bird flu. It's no wonder a French wife calls her husband "my little cabbage," reminding all who are married how we once lost our head in love. PARIAH The lion and the unicorn were fighting for the crown: The lion beat the unicorn all round the town. Some gave them white bread and some gave them brown, Some gave them plum cake and drummed them out of town. The sound of two sticks beaten together is clear as black ink, even if the hands that hold them are graphite-gray and half-erased. A leper comes, a leper walks among you. He will part the crowd into opposite pages, fusing message and messenger. In India, the drummer, percussive heart of the festival, while not an outcast, is lower caste, just as in rock and roll the one behind the battery is a lesser star—think "Ringo." If you're talking about a revolution, rat-a-tat-tat and fife, or the birth of a messiah, pa rum pum pum pum, he's the maudlin soundtrack. The guitarist, strumming his crown slung low across his pelvis, is king while the drummer is the court jester whose solo we must endure. The audience waits for the snare to beat it out of town, gallop into the woods from which it came, a fleeing unicorn, its horn rising and falling like a drumstick. WEDLOCK 1. Wedlock There are deal-breakers and deal-makers. What sealed it for me was you came fully assembled and equipped with two tuxedos—one white, one black—and the Encyclopedia Britannica —macropaedia and micropaedia. You didn't give my family a cow, two goats, and a check like my friend who married in Africa, nor did I come with 17 gold pieces or even a hope chest. Exchanging rings, we made a bet in front of many, which we pay up, collect on every day in private. We are lifelong gamblers. 2. Deadlock Hanging an inch apart, our toothbrushes are not talking to each other, the bristles bristling with tension. Your razor and my razor are sleeping on opposite sides of the sink, growing dull. 3. Bedrock Bedrock isn't just a town that Fred and Wilma, Barney and Betty and all the other prehistoric couples in leopard skin togas call home; it's what marriage is supposed to be (honey, you're my rock), but I say less steadiness and more animation, less caution and more cartoon because I want to be laughing when death do us part. I'm tired of working so hard: you have to run as fast as you can if you want a stone car to move. 4. Padlock At the wedding a priest placed a long string of plastic pearls over our bowed heads—one loop hung around your shoulders and another around mine— like neurons yoking our memory. You will remember faces; I will remember names. You will remember addresses, and I, how to get there. In Spanish, handcuffs are called dos esposas: two wives. Yet married men are happier, live longer, studies show than males without mates. It's hard to admit but there are times we like having our hands tied, sharing our bed with a bad cop. The woman says: I'll have to ask my husband. The man thinks: It's not so bad in here. As long as I can smile and wave to the people on the other side of the bars, as long as the bread is dry and the water so very wet. Brandel France de Bravo is author of Provenance, winner of the 2008 Washington Writers' Publishing House Poetry Prize, and co-author of Trees Make the Best Mobiles: Simple Ways to Raise Your Child in a Complex World (St. Martin's Press, 2001). A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA program for writers, she lives in Washington, DC. The poems here are reprinted from Provenance, with the author's permission. For more information on the book, see: http://www.washingtonwriters.org/authors/francedebravo.shtml   Published in Volume 10:2, Spring 2009.