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It was dark down there. I had to stand on my tippy toes and hold tight to the rickety wood railing as I reached way out to pull the chain. The single bulb covered by the shiny green hat threw little light on the concrete basement below. The steps were so big, and the third and fourth ones made creaking sounds, so I had to climb down very slowly, making very little noise.

My older brothers lived in the room opposite the bottom of the stairs. It had a big wooden door with a latch on the inside, so I couldn’t go in unless they let me.

My parents gave me the only other bedroom upstairs; it had been my brothers’ room. So they said it was my fault they’d been moved to the cold basement below.

I got to the bottom of the stairs. The room to the right was where the TV was. My older brother bought it with money from his paper route, but our father still wouldn’t allow it upstairs. I had to sneak down to watch it when everyone was gone. Before I could do that, I had to check out the rest of basement, to make sure nothing bad was waiting for me.

I walked around the big ping pong table in the middle of the floor. Peeking underneath, seeing nothing, I moved up to the wringer washing machine and the two gray stone sinks. Beside them was a curtain which hid the furnace room, which was really dark. I had to hold the curtain open to one side until I could make out where the light string was over my father’s work bench—then I’d let go of the curtain and run for it, hoping my hand remembered where it hung. Once the room was lit, I could breathe again. I just needed to be sure there wasn’t anything hiding behind the furnace or in the corner behind the big steamer trunks. Then I pulled the light string again and ran for the curtain.

Now all I had to do was to check my brothers’ room. I’d seen that the door was slightly ajar when I came down the stairs, so I figured my brothers were out playing baseball in the corner lot. They never let me play with them there.

But I had to make sure they were gone. Drawing up my courage, I walked into their room. No one was there; just the two dark wooden beds, the two old wooden desks, and the gray stone floor. I made myself check their toilet and their shower too, which were behind more curtains, with more darkness. Nothing.

Finally, I could go watch the TV. I pulled aside the last curtain, and walked over to it. As I leaned down to turn on the set, I felt the hands on my shoulders, pulling me back from behind.

“Come on,” he said. It was the middle brother this time.

“Wait! Turn on the TV. Spin and Marty,” I begged him. “Please.”

“All right,” he mumbled. He turned it on and dragged me over onto the couch, and climbed on top of me.

The room was dark except for the black-and-white screen. Leaving my body, I turned my head and watched the two boys, Spin and Marty, as they happily rode together on their beautiful horses out into the green fields.

The Holy & Broken Bliss

Poems by Alicia Ostriker

How can we find meaning in the face of aging, illness, and the inevitability of death? How can we respond to the double plague of a fierce pandemic and a divided society? The keenly observant and urgent poems of The Holy & Broken Bliss are grounded in daily existence, human tenderness, the rituals of a long marriage, and the poet's ongoing spiritual quest. In the middle of a world that seems to be breaking down into suffering and anger, the spare and direct lines of these poems, surrounded by silence, offer a kind of healing. The poems ask us to consider what living looks like inside of ongoing misery (misery we often are responsible for making and accept-ing). They call us to ask ourselves how we locate joy and even laughter when despair is ever-present. The Holy & Broken Bliss contemplates free will, autonomy, self-control, the commodification of ourselves, and our desires for vengeance, satia- tion, rage, and acknowledgment of our collective sicknesses, along with the sacred possibilities of love, communication with nature, the power of art, and the "need to praise." "Ostriker confronts the intricate dance between spiritual despair and revelatory beauty in her ethereal 17th collection. ... [The Holy & Broken Bliss] resonates long after the final page, reminding readers that even in a fractured, plague-stricken world, there is still a living, breathing force within all things." —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review Available from Alice James Books, Amazon or Bookshop

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