The Bench

Cassondra Windwalker

Evening Street Press

Winner of the 2020 Helen Kay Chapbook Contest

The force of fiction, the rhythm of poetry, Windwalker's

latest places tangible inanimacy at the intersection of
heartbreaking experience. About writing, John Prine said,
"Save your details for things that exist." With The Bench,
Windwalker drags her unique scalpel into the center of a year
that exists beyond comprehension. The result is an
uncompromising narrative, stitched together by tragedy,
injustice and oppression. —Noah C. Lekas, poet of Saturday
Night Sage

Windwalker's documentary-like precision expertly weaves a

poetry of witness centering on a seemingly simple bench that
operates as a lyrical thread to hold these artfully rendered
poetic narratives together. "What does a bench say,"
Windwalker asks readers to consider, telling us that "this
testament to frailty became a repository of strength." So, too,
does the bench become a place for the reader to rest, for
Windwalker has invited us "to sit here and listen" so we can
"take the stories" with us when we go. As we listen, as we
read, it is impossible to forget these poems, these snapshots
into lives like or unlike our own, but all too familiar in our
shared story, our shared humanity.—Molly Fuller, author of
For Girls Forged By Lightning and Always A Body
 The Bench
Cassondra Windwalker

Winner 2020 Helen Kay Chapbook Contest

Evening Street Press

Sacramento, CA
 Evening Street Press

Sacramento, CA

The Bench
Cassondra Windwalker
Copyright 2021 by Evening Street Press.
All rights revert to the author on publication.

Cover photo Nika Wolfe

ISBN: 978-1-937347-66-6
Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

Evening Street Press

2881 Wright Street
Sacramento, CA 95821
www.eveningstreetpress.com
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

the bench 1
collateral not-damage 2
we do what we can 4
small talk 6
and still 8
the view from the nursing home 10
a song baked in a pie 11
behind the mask 13
assignation 15
two walks left 17
a badge and a bird 18
repurpose yourself 20
ice drifts apart as it melts 21
a father is always a father 22
a father is always a father 23
summer wives 25
MAGA 27
no second reprieve 28
day of the dead 29
the bench 31
 the bench

RW + MC and Jake was here

in 2012 – weathered scratches attest
to some insistence on recognition,
the claiming of identity, incantation of permanence
cast on the impermanent by the ephemeral:
perhaps not as futile as it seems.
after all, this bench does stand
and we read its worn engravings.

golden leaf-filigree’d in autumn,

ice-bound in winter, wet and unwelcoming
in spring, in the strange sick summer
of 2020 a bench became a chapel,
a hallowed space made sacred
by the profane feet that stumbled here,
their hands all prayers and their hearts all broken:

what does a bench say

but I know you are tired, I know you are weak,
rest with me.
this testament to frailty became a repository of strength
in the stories lived and breathed and told
on its sagging seat and iron arms.
sit here and listen.
take the stories with you when you go.

1
 collateral not-damage

one mittened hand clutches the metal cart

even in sleep: a heap of blankets and trashbags
on a narrow park bench hides what might be
man, might be woman,
the camouflage of debris loosening the tongues
of passers-by who sigh with relief
as they pass what is definitely trash
and not person:

a person might be cold, might be hungry,

might be sick, might be lonely, might be afraid –
a person might need,
but trash only is and is easily ignored,
acknowledged only as nuisance that ought to be
carted away and kept out of sight:

dawn brings heat and hate and sticks and jingling cuffs:
the not-person unfolds himself,
tucks his bed (stolen moving blankets)
and his rain-fly (black trash bags)
into his vehicle (grocery cart with a bad wheel)
and goes to work (scavenging for food)
almost like a real person,

but when night comes on with its aching joints

and hungry eyes and shadows that strike like snakes,
when the not-person tries to go not-home
and make of his tiny huddle a safe harbor,
he cannot reach the bench.

the streets are full of signs and shouts

and jostling bodies. they are angry, he knows,
about something, but he has been too tired
to be angry for a very long time.

2
the voices and eyes of this crowd
slide over him just as greasily
as the voices and eyes of the morning commuters
but their bodies are somehow more real
than his. he cannot push through.

he stands wavering under a streetlight

two blocks from his bench (his home,)
clutching a metal cart:
a not-person not far from not-safety,
not seen by the new conquistadores.

3
 we do what we can

cheap metal window blinds tinkle out

their melancholy song as he peers through –
the blinds, like the glass, have been cleaned
half-way up: dust and oil and grime
coat the higher elevations like clouds on peaks.

the wheels on his chair prevent him

leaning closer, but he can still see
the bench under the trees across the street.
it has become his television:
the black box in his wall only speaks
of ventilators and crowded hospital hallways
and temporary morgues, but the bench
is a stage on which he still watches
the players strut – if his husband were here,
he’d spin stories about every one of them,
regale him with imaginary dramas
and improbable comedies till this quarantine hell
was only dinner theatre, but he is not here.

a stroke put him in the nursing home,

and now they two are trapped apart.

he watches two joggers arrive

at the bench, bending over their knees,
stretching their hamstrings. they came
from opposite directions, but he fancies
they linger, stretching again and again.
he wonders if they are talking to one another
behind their masks. he drops the blinds
when the door buzzes, wheels over
to let the home care nurse in.

4
he pretends he does not see
her red-rimmed eyes or the tracks
of tears retreating beneath her mask.
before she leaves, he gives her a drawing
he has made of a robin on the windowsill.

5
 small talk

she lowers herself slowly

on the far end of the bench –
not quite six feet apart, but her knees
won’t let her keep creaking on
down the sidewalk without a break:

she raises her eyebrows and scrunches her eyes

over her mask toward the bench’s other occupant
in an effort to convey conviviality –
the other woman’s mask is the bottom half
of a sugar skull, teeth bared,
but her eyes are warm as they waggle back
in a matching caricature of welcome:

good morning, the old woman bellows

on a gasp, and the sugar skull sings out
an equally muffled, it’s lovely isn’t it,
and for three minutes or so,
they toss inanities and mundanities
back and forth like so many juggling balls:

a month ago, they’d have never acknowledged

each other, but now
they cling to the trappings of society.
days spent behind doors, behind walls,
have made this brief intersection
an oasis. the old woman clutches her prescription
and rises, reluctant to abort this connection.
she waves good-bye as if they were old friends
now, as if this moment mattered.

the woman in the sugar skull mask goes home

to her empty apartment and does not kill herself.

6
 and still

she doesn’t have time to stop

but she stops anyway, sinking onto a bench
as if she were a hundred years old
instead of only thirty: her thighs
and the soles of her feet are suddenly
so heavy, she wonders if she will ever stand again.

this is the first of her two days off

from the hospital – it should be three,
with her long shifts, but they need all the help
they can get, and on her days off
she does home care.

the sky beats against her eyelids,

so she keeps her gaze on her hot pink scrubs.
when she’d bought them, she’d thought
a bit of cheer, a splash of color,
would be a good thing, but now she choked
on her own incongruity. every hall
she walked, every step she took, grew greyer
and greyer and greyer, false light
diminishing into fear and fatigue and fever.

past that, in the shadows, lay even darker

ways, churning and roiling with hate
and conspiracies and disinformation and lies.
her whole self, with its merry, foolish colors,
its hands that ached to heal, its feet
that ached to arrive anywhere, anywhere
at all, belonged less and less in the blur
of dark grey hours that only accelerated
from one death to the next,

but still,

7
she had no place to go.

if all good was swallowed up in grief,

what good was good?

and still.

she sighed and stood, straightening her scrubs.

she stared at the stiff little card
in her hand, at the few strokes of pen
that somehow brought to life
the perky curiosity of a redbreast robin
peering in at a windowsill.

his insistent little eye made her laugh,

and so she wedged the card
beneath a screw on the bench.

so many placards floating around these days,

she thought, so many signs.
this robin will be my protest anthem.

when she arrived at her next home care stop,

she called an ambulance.
she sang, Stayin’ Alive, Stayin’ Alive,
in her head as she panted her way
through the chest compressions,
but no song, no shine, no cheery scrubs
could alter how that story ended.

8
 the view from the nursing home

the world is a window.

they pushed his bed closer,
but he can only see sky-slices
cut up by narrow grey buildings.
now and then clouds ribbon past,
shredded like his words are shredded,
looped out and undone into strange shapes
that won’t hold their place.

he is tired of chasing his thoughts.

he imagines they drift out the window
and join the threaded clouds,
and he wonders if his husband will see them
when they float past the apartment,
or if they will only rise higher and higher.

will they disappear?

is he disappearing?
he can’t be sure.

nurses come and go with their cold hands

and their sing-song voices, and he supposes
if they touch him, if they move him,
they must see him, mustn’t they?

perhaps he is already dead,

and they are all just pretending together
that he still has a home somewhere.

O God.

9
his name. what is his name?
the nurses always say it when they come in.
he waits in agony for their return,
for the shape of that sound
that keeps him a person,
but agony is exhausting.
he is asleep when the nurse comes next,
and when he wakes, the sky is bereft
even of her pestled clouds.

10
 a song baked in a pie

grandmother’s soft, lofty bread

is all hard knotty rolls these days –
she beats the dough when she ought
to knead it and has no patience
for the rise – even now, her gnarled fingers
clutch her granddaughter’s as if
maybe she is furious with the short legs
that trot so slow, or as if maybe
she is terrified the child might drift up,
up into the city skies and never come down again –

the little girl winces and trots faster,

looking up and down the sidewalks
for the magic masks –
‘most everyone’s are the same,
but here and there she is sure
some witch or wizard or friendly imp
lurks behind the cloth:
she spies a mad cat, a blooming garden,
a galaxy, a sugar skull, and one
with big letters spelling out words
she’s not allowed to say –
she wishes she could tell Chrissy
about them, but there is no Chrissy anymore,
no school, no camp,
no playdates at the park.

her own mask is boring.

grandmother made it from a tea towel
and it ties above her ponytail –
grandmother hates the masks,
but the girl likes to hide behind
the cloth, making faces at strangers
and whispering secrets to herself.

11
there’s the bench. halfway, then,
to the store. the trip home will be slow,
their arms weighed down with bags,
and maybe, if no-one is there,
they will stop to rest at the bench. the streets,
after all, are half-empty these days.
the girl wonders if the animals
come out to play after curfew,
if the songbirds and stray cats think themselves
conquerors of a city abandoned.

her gaze snags on a black-and-white drawing

of a little bird stuck on the bench
as grandmother tugs her along –
perhaps that is the queen, she thinks,
queen of the birds. she tries to whistle,
to pay homage to the monarch,
but her mask swallows the sound.

12
 behind the mask

he misses the bus.

the bus was faster, and there were rules
on the bus: eyes down, shift, slide,
scrunch, get on, get off.
Sidewalks were trickier,
and he was always going the wrong way
trying to dodge people.

his mask is hot, it itches,

but he keeps his hands in his pockets.
Global warming, he thinks,
the ice sheets are melting, polar bears
are starving, oil drillers use machines
to refreeze the ice so they can drill deeper,
the salmon are dying,
cops keep killing black people, brown people,
people not like me but we’re all like me,
aren’t we. his fingers tap against his thighs
in his pocket as he counts
the steps to the pharmacy.

he watches a little girl’s eyes go wide

as they pass over his face,
and he wonders for a minute if his smile is wrong,
if his face is wrong,
but then he remembers that he is wearing a mask,
a mask that says FUCK FASCISM.

it’s not good to be rude,

but maybe sometimes it’s wrong
not to be rude.

13
at night he closes the curtains and puts on
his headphones so he can’t hear
the shouts and the swilling and the milling
from the protests that have turned
a melting pot into a boiling pot.

he can’t go in those crowds, can’t feel his skin

bubbling and his blood running
and his bones jangling with all the rage
and sound and terror
but he is very afraid that the sea is rising.

he is afraid that sometimes people with badges

murder people without badges.
he is afraid that the man without a mask
is going to sneeze as he passes
and a tiny molecule of virus will get sucked in
through his mask and then he’ll get sick
and he won’t be able to breathe
and maybe there won’t be enough ventilators
and maybe he’ll die.

ten more steps, and he has his meds.

now he has to make it all the way home.
he squares his shoulders and reminds himself
that he is a rebel, he is in revolt,
he is not afraid to walk home.
his mask says FUCK FASCISM.
he is trying as hard as he can.

the pharmacist watches him go

as she wipes down the counter with sanitizer
and wonders if anyone is checking on him
or if he is all alone.

14
 assignation

two lovers, two masks,

and a few planks of wood
as an intersection, as a signpost,
as a subterfuge: they used to pass
in the hallways at work, fingers brushing
at the coffeepot, all stolen whispers
and snatched breaths and secret jokes
told over coworkers’ shoulders,
but it’s been three weeks,

three weeks with no paychecks,

with the anxious eyes and angry voices
and awkward silences of home,
all the needs and wants and wonders
they’d been shoving in corners
and in the back of dresser drawers
spilling out and piling up with the laundry
and the dishes and the bills –

they came here empty, in their running shorts,

but they leave emptier still,
the hunger clawing at their ribs
no longer quieting with reunion.

only a handful of other people are out,

all urgent and fearful and anguished
as they press to their task and then scurry
back to safety: he watches a policewoman
across the street, mopping her face,
and thinks unwillingly of his wife asleep in the rocking chair
with the baby on her shoulder.

15
she takes a drink of water from the bottle
her husband insisted she bring
and her stomach rolls.

she tries to say something fun,

something sexy, but she flushes,
suddenly embarrassed and angry,
and he says he’d better get back.

she watches him jog away,

looking so out-of-place amidst the purposeful
few who had ventured out,
she supposed, to actually do something –

even that man, walking his dog,

served something other than himself.
she touched her toes,
just for something to do,
and thought fiercely how ugly her knees were.

she hated her knees.

she wished she hadn’t shaved her legs
for him, because now she hated her legs too.
she jogged home, aching for a shower,
fearful she would never wash this day off.

16
 two walks left

four times a day he walks the dog.

sunshine steams up from the faded grass,
the trees pretend to offer a cooler respite
beneath their spreading branches,
but he forgives the lie,
still grateful for respite of a different sort.

someone has stuck a drawing of a bird

on the park bench, and his smile to see it
stretches his face in a shape he has nearly forgotten.

he watches Millie’s tail wag,

her ears flick this way and that,
and wishes he could be as happy
in these brief moments and not still only walk
in dread of their return.

his wife has gotten worse in quarantine.

her kisses are vodka, her blows are rum,
and that awful low growl of contempt
is all whiskey. he wishes he could walk
the dog five times a day,
but she would guess at his escape
and make him pay.

he wishes he could walk and walk

and walk and never go home,
but who would hide her pills and hold her hair
and tuck her in?
who would need him if he left?

he still gets two more walks today, after all.

maybe this afternoon will be better,
maybe this afternoon will be vodka.

17
 a badge and a bird

sweat ran between her breasts

under her vest, and she adjusted her heavy belt.
her feet ached, and she wanted to just sit
on the bench, to feed pigeons
or play hopscotch down the sidewalk
or spring into an impromptu dance
with friendly neighborhood teenagers
or do whatever it was that all the back-the-blue
Facebook videos showed as “community policing,”

but she settled for resting her palms

on the back of the bench and trying
to convince her brain to convince her feet
it took the weight off.

she was so damn tired.

tenth day in a row of twelve-hour shifts,

each briefed with grim warnings
of the latest threats and ambushes and protests gone awry.
her mom begged her to quit –
everybody hates you, she cried.
they just want you dead.

and she wanted to quit – the sergeant

was a misogynist and the corporal was dirty,
but how could she?

who would have stopped that man

from beating his wife’s head in with a hammer
or talked that teenager out of killing himself
or pulled that baby out of her carseat
as the car slipped into the river
or promised those elderly shopkeepers

18
that they didn’t have to be afraid
of the gangs anymore if she quit?

who’d keep her partner alive

or just keep him from giving up
and eating his own gun if she walked away?

she’d seen the news.

she’d seem the teargas and the assaults
and she was done making up stories
to explain it all away, but she couldn’t just quit,
just walk out on everyone who still needed help
because some of the helpers were the whole hurt.

maybe the entire barrel was rotten,

maybe she was rotten too,
but as long as even that rotten barrel
might stand in the line of fire and save somebody,
anybody, she couldn’t drop her badge.

her partner emerged from the corner store

with two coffees, like they weren’t hot enough
already, but there was a weird strength
in the cheap Styrofoam ritual.

she straightened up, her fingers dislodging

a scrap of paper wedged under a screw
on the bench. a little bird stared up at her
from the ink drawing, and she fancied
he struck a martial air.

she wondered if it was some secret message

from the protesters who gathered mostly at night,
some coded missive. can’t get a more peaceful protest
than that, she thought, and wedged it back into place.
maybe this little bird has the answers we need.

19
 repurpose yourself

don’t save mateless socks, gran said,

they lose their purpose once they’re alone,
and that melancholia spreads
till the whole dryer’s covered in unmatched socks,
but always save a good cardboard box.

she was glad she listened to gran

because today her daughter and all her friends
filled the living room wall to wall,
fiercely repurposing all her salvaged cardboard
into signs of protest and outrage and righteous fury –

Black Lives Matter and Say Their Names

and George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain –
and their voices sang and cracked and shouted
through the apartment halls till even some of the neighbors
joined them: the little old white guy with the bow tie
and the hippie whose apartment always smelled like licorice
and the lonely cat lady with the sugar skull mask:

what could make a mother prouder?

these children and these old people and these strangers
with their marker-stained fingers and their rage
and their HOPE

that irrepressible fucking HOPE that insisted

and demanded that there was a better way

would MAKE a better way, she was sure of it.

when they stood in the sidewalks and filled the little park
and marched in the streets with the signs they’d made
in her living room, she laughed with joy
even as her belly swelled and distended with tears.

my baby is a freedom-fighter, she thought.

20
 ice drifts apart as it melts

he was grateful, he told himself,

as he sorted jigsaw pieces by color,
that his wife was an essential worker,
grateful she could help people (like him)
get the medicines they needed to stay well,
stay whole, stay sane,
but still he wistfully clicked like
on all his friends’ posts about Tiger King marathons
and Netflix and chill, and all the new strange quirks
they were discovering in being cooped up together.

she was serious and strained and severe,

fraught with holding herself and all the secrets
tied up in the bottles she filled,
so he tried to meet her where she was,
tried to know all the hard things she couldn’t forget.

he watched the news all day: glaciers were melting,

bee colonies collapsing, journalists dying in embassies,
oathkeepers lying, police knocking down old men,
presidents posturing, people dying
dying
dying
everyone was dying.

he tried to meet her where she was,

so he took her lunch every day
and met her at the park bench, hastily unloading
in those few hoarded minutes all the grim truths
he’d learned that morning.

he wanted her to know she wasn’t alone,

where she was,
but every day her coordinates shifted,
every day she was farther away.

21
 a father is always a father

a father sits behind the wheel of a car

in his driveway, stares at lumpy wrinkled knuckles
that can’t possibly be his, can’t possibly
have carried a gun and carried a jackhammer
and carried a baby, stares at a faded gold ring
that keeps a promise to the dead.
a father steels himself against the day

today he will drive the little grid of streets

his son calls home and look for a familiar heap
of blankets, look for an old man
(how is it he has lived long enough to call his son
an old man) with fearful untrusting eyes
and a wobbly cart of trash that makes his every repose
his only home – he would leave him be,
leave him to his conspiracies and his voices and his mania

but these damn protesters are everywhere,

with their hate and their violence and their open mouths:
where will his son sleep when even the streets
are claimed? he doesn’t understand
what they want and he doesn’t care –
they should go to work, he thinks, get a job
and build something instead of tearing everything down.

he only wants, when he prays tonight –

he calls it prayer and hopes it counts,
but he talks to his wife instead of God –
he only wants to tell her
their baby is safe, for one more day.

22
 a father is always a father

all I want, he thinks with eyes

like mines that swallow men whole,
all I want is for my baby to be safe,
for one more day.

he stands islanded in the fury of the crowd,

and though he shouts the chorus:
Black! Lives!
MATTER
he feels his heart pounding out of rhythm
with the swelling blood of strangers that lurches
and jerks alongside his own varicose veins:

all his colors are writ plain on his skin.

my baby is black, my baby is hard-of-hearing,
my baby is a boy, a young man,
and I am so tired so goddamn tired
of these terrors. I don’t want
to teach him how not to get killed,
but I do it.
I don’t want to teach him how to look less than,
to look smaller, to look weaker,
to look more goddamn polite,
but I do. I have done,
all his life,
because I want my baby safe one more day.

today a father is not polite,

today a father is not less than,
not weaker than, not grateful and quiet.

today a father is in the streets,

because there is no safety at home,
not even asleep in his bed.

23
today a father stands,
because there is no recourse in kneeling.

today a father shouts,

because no-one reads the words,
buys the arts, watches the films.

today a father will tear down

every scaffolding his hands can reach
because sons like his are hung
from platforms that look like that.

all he wants is for his baby to be safe,

for one more day.

24
 summer wives

she is afraid of the autumn.

if she had time,

she would watch her husband
exit the shower, with his wet spiky hair
and his furry little belly that feels like home
to her, she would watch him
slip into his running clothes,
she would breathe in his aftershave
and think of hot afternoons locked
in each other’s arms,
but the children are fighting
and the dryer is done,
so she kisses his cheek and waves goodbye
as he leaves for his run.

he doesn’t know
how afraid she is,
and he shouldn’t, she tells herself stoutly.
she is teaching the girls how to wear
their masks, how to sanitize,
sanitize, sanitize,
in case there is school in the fall,
but what if there isn’t?

those last few weeks in the spring

were awful, and she knew it.
she’d never considered homeschooling
when she’d decided on mothering:
she hadn’t the patience,
and now, when every nerve was strung tight
with terror: how will we pay rent?
how will we buy food? how will we
pay the electricity, the car, the insurance?

25
and always
patter, patter, pattering in the background
what if we get sick?
what if we can’t breathe?
what if we die?
there was no patience left at all,
and she knew it

knew she couldn’t hold up, her home

couldn’t hold up, her kids couldn’t hold up
to the bare and remorseless gaze
of the webcam. a snap here and there
on Facebook, on Instagram,
she could pretend to be one of the good moms,
one of the moms who made granola
and dreamed in lesson plans
and celebrated made-up holidays on Pinterest.

she is afraid of autumn.

her gaze lingers on her husband’s calves
as he heads out the door.
I’m afraid, she wants to tell him.
Stay home. Hold me. Will you help me?

but she doesn’t say a thing.

26
 MAGA

nothing makes sense anymore.

he stares morosely
at his Confederate flag,
festooned proudly above a Trump 2020
bumper sticker and an Oregon license tag.

wrong is right and up is down,

he thinks. my folks never owned slaves,
and everybody knows the Irish had it
as bad or worse than the blacks or the Chinks.

if they’d just obey the law

and do what they’re told, nobody would get shot,
he mutters but thinks of The Troubles
and his mind gets muddy.
they’ve had every chance, he tells himself,
no affirmative action for the Irish, after all,
so how come it’s them filling the prisons
and the jails?
his back twinges and he pops another pill.

we’re all self-made men, he proclaims,

and they just make shit.
he laughs and posts a stream of memes
online. the cream rises to the top.
history doesn’t lie.
there’s a reason they’re sicker, they’re poorer,
they’re badder than us.

I’m no racist, he tells the stranger beside him

on the bench. I have lots of black friends.

27
 no second reprieve

she feels sick to her stomach.

why did she come back out here?
that old lady was nice,
and even though none of her words
really meant anything in particular,
the girl in the sugar skull mask had somehow felt
love
pure, simple, unqualified love
in those few pointless phrases of small talk,
and on Tuesday,
that had been reason enough to live.

but this is Wednesday,

and the maskless, out-of-work bozo
on the bench today doesn’t seem to notice
that her skin is just a little darker
than his as he scoots closer,
slurping from a paper-sacked bottle
and unloading all his casual racism
onto her shoulders

but there is nothing casual about it.

hate that cost him nothing
empties her pockets,
empties her heart,
empties her lungs of air

and she gasps, choking, but he doesn’t notice

as he rolls his shoulders
and ambles away.

28
 day of the dead

Get back!
Back!
Back!
Riot shields press against the crowd,
their scratched surfaces refracting light
from the streetlamps and the flame-crowned hills.
Get back!

she pushes horizontal

instead of vertical and clambers
atop the sagging wooden seat of a sidewalk bench.
she has lost her sign
but her whole body is a fury
screaming to be read

and she will not be still

she will not be silent
the dead are silent and she is fighting for the living

she feels the wood bending, pushing back

beneath her thin soles,
she feels the ash-fringed night breeze
clinging to her frizzy hair
she feels the pounding heart of the earth,
of the people, lifting her up

she feels the acrid sting

and then the closing down, the choking burn,
of the pepper spray
as it fills her nose, her mouth, her eyes

29
she claws her mask away
and tries to find some clean air,
some free air
to breathe
but the manacles tighten on her throat,
on her lungs, on her soul.

less-lethal doesn’t mean non-lethal,

the police spokesman explains, less than apologetically.
if she’d only complied,
if they’d only dispersed,
if only they’d been peaceful,
like us, the peacekeepers, this wouldn’t have happened.

the family hasn’t been notified yet,

so the media don’t show her face.
the camera zooms in
on a sugar skull mask, limp, around a brown neck.

outside the frame, a policewoman kneels

at her side, gently opens her clenched fist.
the crumpled drawing of a redbreast robin
falls on the blacktop. the woman rocks back
on her booted heels, tears streaming,
and unpins her badge.

30
 the bench

it’s a prayer,
thinks the priest, more holy than mine,
purified by fire,
as he stumbles forward
through smoldering ash and embers
of what used to be a town
before the wildfires reclaimed it

twisted metal arms

lorn of their burden, lorn of their purpose,
stretch empty-handed
toward a grey heaven
from a grey earth

some compulsion he can’t name

carries him closer,
and without thinking he clasps
the iron fingers in his own,
shrieking like a mad penitent
when they brand him with their image

shaking, he looks at the angry red wounds

on his palm: I must be
more injured, he thinks.
I must be more angry.
I must be more sad.

I must burn when my brother burns,

or I am no brother at all.

31
Winner of the 2020 Helen Kay Chapbook Contest

The force of fiction, the rhythm of poetry, Windwalker's

latest places tangible inanimacy at the intersection of
heartbreaking experience. About writing, John Prine said,
"Save your details for things that exist." With The Bench,
Windwalker drags her unique scalpel into the center of a year
that exists beyond comprehension. The result is an
uncompromising narrative, stitched together by tragedy,
injustice and oppression. —Noah C. Lekas, poet of Saturday
Night Sage

Windwalker's documentary-like precision expertly weaves a

poetry of witness centering on a seemingly simple bench that
operates as a lyrical thread to hold these artfully rendered
poetic narratives together. "What does a bench say,"
Windwalker asks readers to consider, telling us that "this
testament to frailty became a repository of strength." So, too,
does the bench become a place for the reader to rest, for
Windwalker has invited us "to sit here and listen" so we can
Cassondra Windwalker was born a derelict child of the
"take the stories" with us when we go. As we listen, as we
plains who couldn't wait to make it to the mountains. She
read, it is impossible to forget these poems, these snapshots
earned a BA of Letters from the University of Oklahoma and
into lives like or unlike our own, but all too familiar in our
worked as a journalist, a bookseller, and a deputy sheriff
shared story, our shared humanity.—Molly Fuller, author of
before devoting herself to writing full-time. She has lived in
For Girls Forged By Lightning and Always A Body
Oklahoma, Indiana, and Colorado, and presently awaits her
next adventure from the southern coast of Alaska. Her
previous titles include the novels Bury The Lead, Preacher
Sam, and Idle Hands, and the full-length poetry
collections The Almost-Children and tide tables and tea with
god. She welcomes engagement with readers and fellow
artists on Twitter @WindwalkerWrite and on Instagram
@CassondraWindwalker.
 Winner of the 2020 Helen Kay Chapbook Contest

Cassondra Windwalker records with courageous compassion how

myriad lives make it through, and don't, these days of plague(s).
This collection is a chronicle with quiet, insistent moral force and
lasting lyrical grace. She makes us see what's here, now: the awful
harrowings and what improbably, beautifully, remains. —Edward
Bassett, University of Alabama at Birmingham and poetry editor
at Janus Literary

Often grim in their perceptions but always gripping and

captivating in their language, these impressive poems explore
afflictions, threats, and preoccupations associated with characters
conceived as occupants of benches. The experiences that haunt
them and are expressed so hauntingly range from ones all too
familiar to contemporary readers, such as Covid-19 and riots, to
broader and more long-ranging ones like homelessness, poverty,
racism and aging. Windwalker's many poetic gifts when evoking
those characters include diction that uses familiar words in
unfamiliar ways ("her gaze snags"), an ear for the epigrammatic
("protests that have turned / a melting pot into a boiling pot"), and
types of repetition that by ringing the changes on recurrent words
make us see them anew.—Heather Dubrow, poet of Lost and
Found Departments, John D. Boyd, SJ Chair in Poetic
Imagination, Fordham University Director, Poets Out Loud
reading series, 2009-2020 Vice-president, INSL (International
Network for the Study of Lyric)

ISBN 9781937347666
51200 >

Evening Street Press

Sacramento, CA
9 781937 347666