UAB Digital Commons (Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham)

Data collected from Mote corals in 2021-2022 outplant experiment that were used in publication

Gantt, Shelby

Kemp, Dustin

Supplemental MotePOR Outplant 2021-2022

Rosenberg, Gigi

PoemMemoirStory (literary 
magazine) 
Volume 12 Article 34 
2013 
Say His Name 
Gigi Rosenberg 
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/pms 
 Part of the Creative Writing Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons 
Recommended Citation 
Rosenberg, Gigi (2013) "Say His Name," PoemMemoirStory (literary magazine): Vol. 12, Article 34. 
Available at: https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/pms/vol12/iss2013/34 
This content has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of the UAB Digital Commons, and is 
provided as a free open access item. All inquiries regarding this item or the UAB Digital Commons should be 
directed to the UAB Libraries Office of Scholarly Communication. 
103PMS. .
Gigi Rosenberg
Say His Name
When I meet somebody and they ask that innocent question, “Do you 
have children?” I never know what to say. How can I not mention Ben? 
But then if I do, I’m trapped in a long story of what happened and maybe 
that’s not where either of us wants the conversation to go. 
But to not mention Ben, to say, “I have a daughter Jill who’s twenty-
one and in college,” feels like more than a lie; it feels like I’m ignoring the 
biggest thing that ever happened to me… losing Ben. So, I take it case by 
case. Sometimes I say, “Yes, I have a boy and a girl” and change the sub-
ject; other times, depending, I say, “I have a daughter who’s twenty-one 
and a son who died when he was eighteen.”
There’s always the follow-up question hanging in the air, even if they 
don’t ask me: How did he die?
I say: “His heart stopped. We don’t know why.” I don’t have a great 
answer. “His heart went into arrhythmia and they couldn’t stop it.” Then 
there’s that silence. That hole where maybe we both feel the big empti-
ness, how fragile the whole thing is. Then, the hole closes up, although it 
never fully closed for me after Ben died. 
That’s why I want to say his name, to honor him and the person who 
asked the question. I don’t want his name in that big hole. 
I knew growing up that I would have a son named Ben, Benjamin. I 
knew in elementary school. I remember sitting at my kitchen table, my 
mother spreading peanut butter on toast for a peanut butter and bacon 
sandwich. I was in third grade and I said to her:
“When I grow up I’m going to have a son named Ben.”
“What if you have a girl?”
“No, no. I’m going to have a son named Ben.” I loved the name 
because it was so big and short at the same time. It’s such an honest 
name: Ben. That’s exactly what Ben was. No pretense.
When he was a little boy he loved to sing, do anything musical. When 
he talked, he was shy, but when he sang, he sang loud. At his first swim-
ming lesson when the teacher had the kids sing the “Motor Boat Song” I 
could hear him belting it out clear across the pool.
104 PMS. .
Rosenbe rg
Sometimes, a friend will say: “I don’t want to remind you of sad 
things but I heard this new band and I thought of Ben. I knew he would 
have loved their music.” You’re not reminding me, I tell her. You’re help-
ing me feel normal. 
At Christmas at our house, Ben loved lights. From the time he could 
point at them, he wanted the house lit up. As he grew older, he decorated 
the whole outside of the house with little white lights—each year add-
ing more. That last Christmas before he died, he was up on the roof for 
hours. I looked up at him from the driveway, my arms folded against 
myself. He had no hat, no gloves, that head of curly brown hair blow-
ing every which way and he was smiling. I yelled: “It looks great. But it’s 
enough! Get down. Put on a hat.”
“When I’m done, Mom. Don’t worry. I’ve been rock climbing. I’ve 
done things a thousand times more dangerous than this.” 
Like that was supposed to make me feel better. 
That last Christmas, the house was ablaze, every window outlined. It 
was shockingly beautiful.
That first fall after he died, we went away for Thanksgiving. I couldn’t 
stand the thought of being home without him. I’ll never forget driving 
home that Sunday night. My husband Bruce, Jill and I had fallen into a 
silence perhaps bracing ourselves for the return home. We turned the 
corner onto our street and as we drove down our hill, I saw in the dis-
tance this glow like a house on fire. We edged closer and I realized it was 
our house so bright, then brighter and then, there it was: every window 
circled. 
My best friend Marnie had come over with her husband Rick and 
strung the lights. Some people might think “how cruel.” But no, it was 
the biggest gift—to have the whole house lit up again. To be remem-
bered. To have him be remembered.
Sometimes I think people don’t talk about Ben because they don’t 
want to hurt me. They don’t want to make me cry. I learned something 
about tears: they come, buckets of them, and then they stop. I carry tis-
sues, I don’t wear mascara, I take the tears with me. They’re what I can 
keep. The missing him is what keeps me close to him. 
Say his name. Ben. Sing his name. Ben. Light up the house with the 
letters B-E-N. That’s what I want. Ben, my Ben, Benjamin. 


English

Say His Name

Jerrell, Carrie

PoemMemoirStory (literary 
magazine) 
Volume 13 Article 19 
2014 
Ubi Sunt for the Family Road Trip 
Carrie Jerrell 
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/pms 
 Part of the Creative Writing Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons 
Recommended Citation 
Jerrell, Carrie (2014) "Ubi Sunt for the Family Road Trip," PoemMemoirStory (literary magazine): Vol. 13, 
Article 19. 
Available at: https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/pms/vol13/iss2014/19 
This content has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of the UAB Digital Commons, and is 
provided as a free open access item. All inquiries regarding this item or the UAB Digital Commons should be 
directed to the UAB Libraries Office of Scholarly Communication. 
27PMS. .
Carrie Jerrell
Ubi Sunt for the Family Road Trip
Summer meant a cooler packed with pudding pops,
ham and cheese on Wonder white, sweet tea brewed
in bottles on the dash, Teen Beat, flip-flops,
I Spy, and Def Leppard on cassette. Pursued 
by wanderlust, Dad taught us to map the route,
heads bowed as one over the Rand McNally
in pilgrimage to tourist shrines from Butte
to Birmingham, Disney to Death Valley.
Now, it’s eighteen blocks to work and the landscape
never changes. I long for yesteryear’s 
long hauls: my little brother’s off-key singing,
my sister’s knock-knock jokes, the hopeful shape
of Polaroids and roadside souvenirs,
back when I looked forward to what the future was bringing.


Ubi Sunt for the Family Road Trip

Staff, PoemMemoirStory

PMS 14 (Complete Issue)

Rindo, Jenna

PoemMemoirStory (literary 
magazine) 
Volume 14 Article 7 
2015 
Step Over Cracks 
Jenna Rindo 
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/pms 
 Part of the Creative Writing Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons 
Recommended Citation 
Rindo, Jenna (2015) "Step Over Cracks," PoemMemoirStory (literary magazine): Vol. 14, Article 7. 
Available at: https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/pms/vol14/iss2015/7 
This content has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of the UAB Digital Commons, and is 
provided as a free open access item. All inquiries regarding this item or the UAB Digital Commons should be 
directed to the UAB Libraries Office of Scholarly Communication. 
41PMS. .
Jenna Rindo
Step Over Cracks 
so I don’t  break her
back or her mother’s before
her who stands four-feet-eight.  
She has permanent ridges
furrowed into her shoulders
from the weight of triple D
against gravity. Even so she
two-steps a polka. Smells the
stink of bad karma. Scours the 
rust-stained sink with blue Ajax.
Vases peppery roses 
to light duplex gloom. Births 
five babies upstairs
in the middle bedroom with or 
without a midwife. I watch amazed
as she strikes a wooden match 
to flare the gas flames blue,
studs a ham with cloves in star patterns,
then bastes it with Mountain Dew.
Roasts a cheap cut of meat ‘til it falls
from the bone. Works third shift at
the Xerox plant. Walks the dogs, rocks the 
cradle, entertains all variety of strangers.
Chants in Latin, cusses in German,
throws back a cold beer. Brings down
the sudden onset of fever. Alters
the atmosphere. Shovels the walk,
throws seed to the birds, marks the inside
cover of paperback romances with a code
before returning. Hopes for a 
42 PMS. .
heaven brighter, lighter than her private
Ohio, frozen litter in layers, memories 
muddled, infused in jam and sauerkraut
jars, lined up on shelves, basement stairs
too steep for her to descend. 


Step Over Cracks

Hovey, Kate

PoemMemoirStory (literary 
magazine) 
Volume 14 Article 8 
2015 
Out of Air 
Kate Hovey 
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/pms 
 Part of the Creative Writing Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons 
Recommended Citation 
Hovey, Kate (2015) "Out of Air," PoemMemoirStory (literary magazine): Vol. 14, Article 8. 
Available at: https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/pms/vol14/iss2015/8 
This content has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of the UAB Digital Commons, and is 
provided as a free open access item. All inquiries regarding this item or the UAB Digital Commons should be 
directed to the UAB Libraries Office of Scholarly Communication. 
43PMS. .
Kate Hovey
Out of Air
A woman who doesn’t wear perfume has no future.
—Coco Chanel
White Shoulders, ghosts in a bottle: jasmine, gardenia, 
tuberose, lily, traces lingering like silvered trails 
across lurid, moonlit summer lawns. One whiff and 
I am wilting at my grandmother’s swamped vanity 
as she spritzes me on my wedding day, her mottled hands 
trembling, something old, borrowed. Something new: 
Charlie, pure platform-shod 70s, fizzy aldehide 
floral top notes with enough cut grass and crushed leaves 
to turn short divorcees into long-stemmed world beaters, 
hair cropped like the Halston-clad model in the ads. Or 
something curious (blue): Tabu and teddy bears, hermetic
joke gift of professors twice our age, but we steeped ourselves 
in spiced ylang ylang, neroli with woodsy mid notes, 
ambered musk and who didn’t want to smell like Ava Gardner? 
Men loved buying perfume—you gave me L’Air du Temps, 
remember? Because, you’d said, this little Dutch chick on the plane...
forgetting basic chemistry. I’d detected it months before, 
science of shirt sniffing—whole years lost to Klein’s Obsession. 
And now? Lady Vengeance by Juliette Has a Gun. 
Great patchouli-rose marriage, edgy bitter-orange base.
44 PMS. .
But I no longer wear it, ancient habit overruled 
by the newly scent-intolerant holding their heads, gasping 
for breath. One in ten, research shows, the numbers 
rising. Roomfuls of women choking on their own fumes. 


Out of Air

Model 195 - travertine - sedimentary rock
SketchFab link: https://skfb.ly/puzPzhttps://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/rocks-all/1068/thumbnail.jp

Brande, Scott

Model 145 - basalt - igneous rock
SketchFab link: https://skfb.ly/puwOFhttps://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/rocks-all/1027/thumbnail.jp

Model 193 - shale - sedimentary rock
SketchFab link: https://skfb.ly/puyJBhttps://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/rocks-all/1066/thumbnail.jp

Model 216 - schist - metamorphic rock
SketchFab link: https://skfb.ly/puzTDhttps://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/rocks-all/1085/thumbnail.jp

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