Jeff Newberry
Vocabulary
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i.
My mother swooned at my reading the backs of cereal boxes at breakfast: riboflavin, acetate, pyridoxine hydrochloride, niacinamide, calcium bicarbonate. The words meant nothing to me: a collection of syllables and sounds as my mother prepared us for a day at school. Still, she often expressed wonder when I read the ingredients aloud, praising my pronunciation and encouraging me to read louder. She bragged to distant relatives we visited from time to time. I would read on command, enunciating each word, while the whole vocabulary of the world spun around me, a diction of jargon I didn't know. |
ii.
In the eighth grade, Mr. Brown showed us how to diagram sentences. He drew charts on the chalkboard and spoke of predicate nominatives and predicate adjectives. He gave us worksheets with blue ink that we all smelled to feel our heads lighten. I struggled to make the sentence fit into the diagram's charted rules. I imagined scenarios: "cleave" could be a noun or verb, depending on the context, the sentence I said again and again in my head. Words obeyed some arcane structure I didn't grasp. I didn't know a predicate from a subject. I couldn't name an order I didn't understand. |
iii.
I don't have the words, some people say when confronted with your tragedy. I'm not sure what to say, they continue. I don't know how to say this, doctors tell families huddled in cloistered waiting rooms. I'm not sure how to begin, speakers, flummoxed by some award, say behind podiums. Ezra Pound thought words could be wed to emotions, a one-to-one relationship. Milton's daughter wrote in Latin, a language she didn't understand, as her blind father dictated Paradise Lost. Some greeting cards have no words in them. Others provide poems we didn't write to express feelings we can't begin to name. |
Frames
What Doors Do
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Doors keep out and admit. They allow passage and keep things out. They lock, keeping one safe inside, but they also lock, keeping one trapped inside. Open doors welcome. Closed doors deny. Some hide keys under foot mats or concealed in rocks that never look quite like real rocks. These hidden charms allow certain visitors to enter, even when the door is locked. Like "Open Sesame," these secreted keys belong to only the few who know their secret. My father was a door locker. Each night, he went to the front door and back door, turned the lock and bolted the deadbolt. Before doing so, he hooked the screen door shut. We owned nothing that would entice a thief. No caches of money or jewelry. No stock or bond certificates. A robber would find my mother's costume jewelry. My father's pistol, hidden in his nightstand, cocked and ready. A robber would find canned and boxed food, processed carbohydrates that swelled our bodies and encased us in layers of fat, doors that shut us inside the shell of our corpulent selves. Mornings, my father unlocked the doors to let the light in, he said. He liked to look out at the neighborhood, to see what was going on. Still, the doorframe surrounded him. Gave him context. Like some painting on the side of a house, a man who might want to get out, a man who might be observing, a man in stasis, caught between coming and going, trapped in place.
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