Apeiron ReviewFall 2014 Issue 7
Issue 7, Fall 2014
As I was sitting in a conference surrounded by other writers and writing instructors I was pumped, as I always am, to talk about and discuss writing. Nothing new. There was a well-known speaker hired and flown in to speak to us, and speak he did. It was interesting and enlightening. Nothing new. This speaker was introduced by the dean of the institutionâs humanities department. The dean was not a writer. He was, in fact, at one point a math professor. He spoke of his admiration for writers and their adept ability at an activity in which he had never had
much success, but an activity, nonetheless, he does more than any other on a daily basis. We professors and professionals exchanged knowing glances. Nothing new. He told us that communication and the ability to do so skillfully was of the utmost importance to human existence and experience. This was not hyperbolic to this particular crowd. You may even call the crowd a choir, and he was certainly preaching. Nothing new. I was captivated by this nothing new going on around me. The information shared was new in the specific sense, but this was no avant-guard, system shattering meeting of artists.
And yet when posed with the editorial for the seventh issue of Apeiron I placed the heavy weight of newness upon my head and immediately had a stiff neck. Apeiron is moving in new directions, and as the humans behind the journal we have certainly been in the midst of newness in our lives. But our love and passion for the words on the page are steadfast and ancient. I realized that what weâre doing isnât new, and thatâs important. It is important to continue to share this prophecy, as Ginsberg called it. The prophecy of feeling or knowing something and having that articulated in a hint in your words
that will resonate with and throughout time. Producing and publishing this prophecy is at the core of who we are, this core of empathy, this core of what it means to be human and look to another and know, that yes, they too feel as you do. I can think of nothing less new than this, and nothing as fundamentally important. We want your prophecy and we want to give it to others who may not even know they need it. We know we need it, and thatâs why weâre here.
While the prophecy may not be new there are elements of newness here at the magazine. We have a staff! A wonderful staff with wonderful reading eyes that are working hard to help Lisa and me keep up with ever growing submissions. And I would like to single out one of those new staff members (youâll meet the others later) for special recognition and thanks. Xavier Vega is not only a great writer (you can read his fiction âReturn to Dustâ in this issue) but he has also been an invaluable asset volunteering his time, reading skills, and editing expertise to help us comb through the beautiful mess that is the pre-published version of Apeiron. This, like many arts, is a labor of love, and although our love is great the hours in the day are not. And so we are ever thankful to Xavier and the others who are helping make your art a published reality. Apeiron is dedicated to its authors and the words on the page, and that is certainly nothing new.
Editorial
Poetry
6 Dogs Michael Bernicchi
7 Cradle 6 Judith Skillman
9 Wedding Song Robert N. Watson
10 To a Friend a Day Younger Robert N. Watson
19 Twice Bradley K. Meyer
24 Diminishing Returns Will Cordeiro
29 Simmer Kenneth Gurney
31 Garden Party Lauren Potts
32 Dinner with the Hemingways Cindy St. Onge
33 Neighbor Bob Hicks
35 Jazz Haiku (after Basho) Mark Jones
35 Bix and Tram Mark Jones
35 The Bad Plus Plays the Logan Center, 25 October 2013 Mark Jones
38 Seduction at Sixteen Kelly Andrews
The Review Staff
EditorsMeredith Davis Lisa Andrews
Design EditorLisa Andrews
Production EditorsMeredith DavisLisa Andrews
Art AdvisorChris Butler
Unsolicited submissions are always welcome. Actually, we do not solicit submissions, so please send your work our way.
Manuscripts are now only accepted via Submittable. For submission guidelines, schedules, news, and archived issues, please visit our website at apeironreview.com
ŠApeiron Review. All rights revert to author upon publication
39 The Money Girls Peter McEllhenney
40 Calculating Rain Matthew Connolly
42 You Have to Eat Myron Michael
48 Burning Snakes Heather M. Browne
55 Underemployed While Being a Black American Denzel Scott
57 River Canal in Fukuoka Sarah Page
58 Condemning Colors in Pitch Pines Park Sarah Page
59 Fetched Rose Maria Woodson
66 Cellophane Malaise Kat Lerner
68 Tenderly Finnuala Butler
69 Untitled Finnuala Butler
76 Decency Derick Varn
77 Ultraviolence Vanessa Willoughby
85 Now that he has died Ann Howells
Contents
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About Our Cover
This issueâs cover was created using photography from unsplash.com. Why? Because we wanted to use a beautiful photo, but we didnât want to mar the photogra-phy presented within these pages with logos and text. We thought weâd try something a bit different. We await your feedback.
86 At a supermarket in South Florida Jesse Millner
91 Quartet Sarah Bence
93 Before We Fall Silent C.C. Russell
99 Duende Denzel Scott
100 Disease Elisabeth Hewer
112 Ugly Breasts R.K. Riley
113 Apology to Wrigley, et al. Jean Kingsley
114 Agnes invokes the Nightmother her syllables made of mercury Michael Cooper
116 Meditation on Reincarnation, Roaches and Kim Kardashianâs Butt Jesse Millner
119 I have been way too careful with my poems Jesse Millner
120 Full-blown Sugar Jill Khoury
121 Lifeless, Inverted Lukas Hall
122 Midnight Picnic Steffi Lang
123 Fog Study Tim Buck
124 Things I Donât Post on Tumblr or Ars Poetica Hannah Baggott
125 Boiled Peanuts, Out of Season Allie Marini Batts
Fiction12 The Challenger Stephanie French-Mischo
20 From One Synapse to Another Maggie Montague
25 The Game of Diamonds Irving A. Greenfield
34 Small-Engine Repair Ray McManus
36 Last Chance Fancy Pants Robert Hiatt
43 Fusion Sherry Cook Woosley
49 Metzger Haus P.K. Lauren
60 Dear Alfredo Rose Maria Woodson
67 Living for Leaving M.G. Wessels
70 Evangeline of TĂŠnĂŠrĂŠ Matthew Donald Jacob Kelly
73 Of Gods and Curtains Star Spider
78 Return to Dust Xavier Vega
87 A Pocket for Taeko Gregory App
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94 Tokyo Francis Davis
101 Perpetual Remnants of the Deceased Gina DeCagna
106 Clear Cut Brad Garber
108 Blind Mice Melody Sage
Nonfiction8 Words from Grandpa Ray Scanlon
18 Knuckles Jessica McDermott
61 There Are All Sorts of Holes Michelle Donahue
Photography17 Cresting the Hill Shawn Campbell
30 Reflection in My Eyes M.I. Schellhaas
41 Fern Kristi Beisecker
56 Figures, Cathedral, Nicaragua, 88 Harry Wilson
72 Life Ring Dave Petraglia
84 My Perceptive Simulacrum Savannah Hocter
92 Looking Ahead Shawn Campbell
107 Naked Summer Katherine Minott
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Michael Bernicchi
DogsMy mother says the dogs arenât smiling but sweating and they canât love only obey only once they smelled cancer and were nicer to the cat and I wonder if my mother knew love
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Cradle 6
Judith Skillman
after Erika Carterâs artwork
You must not cry for night,a garden of blues and greens, the fragrant stars, the little melodiesfalling silent. You must not weepfor the selvage of dusk, its framesettling against the window.
This other kind of cottonâsmade to soothe, to sweep and wrapagainst your back. Your childâshiding within the forbidden grove,ever restless with her dreamsof horses, her fear of wind.
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There are words as good as forgotten through disuse and resurrected by chance, words acquired in my fishing days when I had scarcely attained double-digit years, before I even knew the definition of vocabulary: Wulff, hellgrammite, Neversink. There are words that, like the unexpected advent of a hummingbird, trigger a smile, which I will pit against cellar door and Shenandoah any day: Kattegat and Skagerrak (always the pair, and they always remind me of Shagrat and Gorbag), zouave, myrmidon, erysipelas. The oldest words delight me most, words with a provenance, burnished by long service, words my grandfather taught me: peacock herl, ginkgo, caltrop, wapiti, stilettoâas in my crudely-glued plastic model Douglas X-3 Stiletto that sat on my grandparentsâ television. Unlike its prototype, the model did not end its days in a museum.
Ray Scanlon
Words from Grandpa
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Robert N. Watson
Wedding SongThey brought in session men to tape my wedding songâThe whole legendary Muscle Shoals rhythm section.I sat back against a poorly lacquered panel in the church foyerMy mouth taped shut, though my tongue testedThe bitter adhesive, and after a while I found myselfHumming along. I had tried banging my head against the wall,But that seemed just to make them laugh in there, The brideâs side twinkling an eye across the aisle. I tried thinking the music on the rack of the rehearsal piano,But it was Rachmaninoff, and the first page was mostly signatures.In person, I was pronounced âhusbandâ and ânow the worse For wear,â at which the younger wives whispered behind their handsTo each other, giggling, about the dust on my tuxedo tails,The clownish lips produced when they ripped off the tape,Mercifully all at once. And everyone said the videoCame out beautiful, and we still play it sometimes.
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What was the difference if it rained the day that youWere born, or on the day before, when I was born?We were too young, our mothers were too tired, to seeThe sunlight angling through the blinds, if any did. It could have rained on Clotho and the continentFrom Sacramento to New York, the land a washcloth Held up to a shower, pale and dry one moment
And the next all dark and dripping with its purpose Once again, and it would not have mattered much, To us. On my birthday ten years later, rain Had hung a beaded curtain on your back-porch doorâAs good as prison-bars, your parents must have thoughtâBut breath and pulse pursued you hurtling to the swamp,A maze as strange and vivid as your fever-dreams.
Your legs were small and cuffed by arcs of mud from whenYou stepped between the clumps of grass. You climbed the treeThat overhung the stream: the darkened bark was sweet Against your hands, and underneath the waters puckeredMilkily, and surged as if another urgeWere deeper underneath; your body tugged you down;You landed willingly on hands and knees, and stopped.
You felt the spongy ground, and you could smell the lifeThat it was breathing, and your hair itself was runningLines of rain, and in the momentary blurYou traded with the field the look of curiousSurprise of people who have never kissed before,And linger in the secret and the moisture of Each otherâs eyes, half-worldly, wondering what theyâve done.
Then you stood up and looked back at the houseâa sliveredThing between the lines of hair and reeds and rain.When you arrived the raindrops and the reeds had wipedThe giant fingerprints of mud from off your knees,And you were welcomed in with tokens of reproach,But you were still the smiling of your parentsâ Sunday:Fresh as water and your infant second breath.
To a Friend a Day Younger
Robert N. Watson
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The next day I was just another child, a creature Tempest-tossed, but stabbing bravely at the world With weapons new to him, to free a buried spring; You had become the present, crisply dressed in pink; And only when the party waned, and when the door Swung open for a last departure, could you hearThe storm that hailed you like a thousand ticking clocks.
It seems somehow unnatural to celebrate A single birthday here tonight; a decade goes,But not the ghost; I feel my time becoming yoursIn midnight tolls. The hour is oceanic, troubled;Dreaming dead, and suited for the mist in coatsOf wistfulness, I travel out to meet the phantomOf my age that sees a difference in the rain.
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The ChallengerStephanie French-Mischo
Itâs cold and dark the morning of January 28, 1986. Icicles dangle from the A-frame of the old swing set in the Fiorlito backyard. Brooke, the eldest daughter, tears herself from the otherwise flat, Central Illinois view of her bedroom and wrests her damp hair into a ponytail. An embroidery floss bracelet slides toward her elbow. Only one of these woven loops of friendship remains, and it clashes with the black watch plaid of her uniform jumper. In another year, she will advance to wearing a white, robin-collar blouse with a solid navy, box-pleat skirtâthe much more sophisticated high school uniform. But, if her parents get their way, her little sister will be sporting the same.
âWeâre out of mousse,â Brooke says as she enters the blaze of light and yolky paint that is the family kitchen.
âIâll add it to the list.â Mom folds crisp rolls in the tops of brown paper lunch sacks. âAnd a Good Morning to you, too.â
Brooke scuffs over the tile. She knows that her parents are exchanging that look as she takes a seat at the oval table of blonde wood and matching boomerang-back chairs. Atomic age, her father brags, collectible. Multi-colored planetary models of the same era sprinkle the curtains. Heâs particular about how things look even if all she can see of him at the moment is his receding hairline above the newspaper.
âTheyâre launching the Challenger today,â Cecilia says to her, as though she cares. A dishtowel protects Ceecâs uniform jumper from spills. Brooke points to an imagined something on the pointed edge of the towel. Cecilia
knows better than to glance down; Brooke flicks her sisterâs nose anyway before placing a napkin on her lap, like an adult. Things would be easier if their parents allowed them to come to the table in their pajamas, but they refuse to listenâto this among many other reasonable requests. Brooke reaches for a banana, the sole alternative to the wannabe astronautsâ steak-and-eggs breakfast.
âTheyâre really going to go today,â Cecilia tells her, still stuck on the stupid space shuttle.
âWeâll see.âThe corner of Dadâs paper flops perilously
close to the grease shining on his plate. His head doesnât move, so Brooke is left to wonder if thatâs an accident or a response to her skepticism.
âItâs cold even in Florida.â Mom frowns at the banana peel spanning Brookeâs uneaten meal like some sort of tentacle-bearing sea monster. âMake sure to wear your sweaters.â
âItâs about that time,â Dad says. âCoats, backpacks, shoes.â
A shoveled walk lets the girls pass to the drive without slipping. Exhaust plumes from the Saabâs tailpipe. Brooke cups a gloved hand under the door pull. As the oldest, she should get the front seat, but Dad has determinedâout of fairness to Ceciliaâthat both of his daughters should sit in the back. The carâs cabin is warm at least, the windows already fogging over as though they are in the clouds. They buckle up before Dad pulls through the crescent and into the street.
âI hope Mission Control doesnât scrub the
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launch again,â Cecilia says.âColumbia was delayed a couple times,
remember?â Dadâs voice lifts. He works as a Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the local campus and asks for freeze-dried ice cream packs alongside his birthday cake. âDo you recall why?â
Cecilia ticks off a list in her girlie voice. âFirst it was an aft orbital compartment, then out-of-tolerance solid rocket booster hydraulics, and then problem valves and pre-valves, plus the weather. They returned late, which pushed the Challenger back.â
âOr maybe Tang and freeze-dried food laid everybody up in the vacu-toilet,â Brooke teases.
Cecilia says, âI like Tang.â Brooke begins to laugh.
Dadâs resulting eyelock in the rearview makes it clear he understands that âtang is vernacular for something else. Itâs surprising; her parents seem so clueless otherwise. She glares back, a point made that her sister, book-smart as Cecilia may be, is not prepared for high school. When he breaks away, she says more to Dad than to Cecilia, âYou forgot to mention the Columbia astronauts blowing one of their missions because they forgot batteries.â
This earns another look from Dad, a longer one since theyâd reached the stop sign at the end of their road. Itâs like sheâs insulted him personally. He returns to gauging traffic, and she winds the slack of her lone bracelet around her opposite index finger then releases. Threads near the closing knot have already snapped out of this habit. They dangle from her under her coat cuff like frayed wires. She could make more of the bracelets, of course, but trades are what symbolize the right associations. Status is the whole point of wearing them. Dad taps his palm on the wheel and mutters, âGo, go, go!â to spur the morning traffic to adapt to his speed.
Brooke rubs a circle on the window to see the white colonial where they used to stop and pick up Angie. No longer. Word had spread about Cecilia being advanced, and, among other slights, Angie had started to ride in with her mom. A campaign of whining, door
slamming, and threats hadnât granted Brooke the same privilege.
âIâm sure theyâll push for the launch today,â Dad eventually says. âItâs getting embarrassing.â
He turns on NPR for an update, and Cecilia starts digging in her backpack. As Dad accelerates to make the green arrow onto Westchester, Cecilia knocks into Brooke. âWatch out,â Brooke warns, punctuating with a good shove to put her sister back into place.
Cecilia keeps fishing in her bag until she recovers a mass of green and white embroidery floss.
The outside world begins to swirl and a rush of blood crashes into Brookeâs ears. âWere you in my stuff?â
Cecilia avoids answering Brooke, revealing a strip of bracelet several inches long and about a half-inch thick. Alternate-color chevrons form the design. She pats it flat and untangles the mess. âItâs like the one you wanted in YMâonly in school colors.â
âYeah.â Brooke caresses the work. Itâs nice, but she canât exactly wear a bracelet Cecilia has made without being an Ăźber-loser. However, if she can weave bracelets as good as this, she might incite some trades. âHowâs it go?â
Cecilia fastens the safety pin to the hem of her coat for tension and then explains the sequence of knots as she completes a row. âI can write it down if you want.â
âI got it.â Brooke unclasps the pin from Ceciliaâs coat and stuffs the entire project into her pocket before Dad catches on to something that might disrupt her schoolwork.
Brookeâs rubber-soled Keds lose their spring as soon as sheâs out of the heated car. Still, she will not suffer the indignity of yanked-up knee socks in addition to being dropped off at school with Cecilia. She approaches the two-story box of blonde brick, the sills outlined in Parisian green.
Her homeroom clusters near the west-facing doors of the junior high wing. Students are not allowed inside until seven-fifty but are given demerits if not in class by eight. A group of pant-clad boys serve as a windbreak as Brooke
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hovers at the outer ring of the eighth grade cool clique, her socks fashionably scrunched, her fist tight around Ceciliaâs bracelet tucked in her pocket.
The fifth graders are in much the same configuration farther down the school yard. Cecilia, though, is out in her own orbit again, scraping a bit of frost or mold or who-knows-what into one of her baby food âspecimen jarsâ before tucking it into her pack. This sort of thing will not go over well at the high school. And it isnât just this or even just this day that has Brooke concerned. Most of the summer Cecilia had geeked around the neighborhood with a Kleenex box, two emptied TP rolls, and Atari joysticks taped to her back like her very own Manned Maneuvering Unit. Brooke had pitched the damned thing so Cecilia would have to play tag or something normal, but, instead, her sister had sat and dripped melted Popsicle over piles of National Geographic while on the front stoop.
The school bell rings at ten âtil. The students form rows so theyâll be let inside. Cecilia, already advanced one grade by this time, is a full head shorter than anyone in her class. Brooke crosses the metal threshold into the Junior High wing, traversing a salt-crusted and soggy mat to terrazzo tiles. If theyâd been born boys, their father might have worried more about the difference in age and size at high school. Had her mother not told him or had she forgotten the politics of breasts and flat chests, of pervy boys and mean girls? Brooke hangs her bag, her coat.
Perhaps things were different in the golden days. They believed in Martians and thought the moon was made of green cheese. Their generation heldâholdsâsome pretty strange ideas. For example, Teachers in Space sounds like a bad sci-fi series. She goes by Mrs. Orlen, the upper-level science instructor, in the hall and concludes that moon landing nostalgia explains the glittery deely-boppers wriggling above the womanâs head.
First period Catechism passes by doodling in a notebook. Then, since it is Tuesday, Brooke
faces the humiliation of PhysEd instead of the beauty of Music, like on Monday-Wednesday, or her favorite, Art, on Friday. In Art, she mightâve found time to work on the bracelet. But volleyball eats up all of PE, and, at the end of fifty sweaty minutes, masculine-anorexic Mrs. Monyhan claps her hands together and says, âLine up, class. Alphabetically. Your homeroom teacher has asked you to proceedâsilentlyâto the Multipurpose Room to view the launch.â
So, it is still on. The only good news in this announcement is the opportunity to stand next to Angie. Brooke rolls up her sweater and does a few knots on the chevron bracelet stashed inside. She makes a mistake on the sequence, but Angie takes the bait and whispers, âWe could swap when youâre through.â The bracelets Angie creates are of a lesser quality than Ceciliaâs, but are much higher status. Brooke agrees.
Mrs. Orlen beckons the class forward and into the Multipurpose Room, an area about half the size of the basketball court and with sliding blackboards up front. The pep club uses the attached kitchen to make popcorn for home games, and the stale, slightly rancid odor of the seasoning has sunk into the deep blue industrial carpet. Sixth and seventh graders sit in blocks of about forty, an aisle left between homerooms. Another void separates the students from a twenty-four inch TV atop a rickety A/V cart. A Betamax as well as a VHS wait beneath, red recording lights shining. Mrs. Orlen directs, âEighth graders behind grade seven, please. Quietly.â
âWhy are we so far back?â a classmate asks as they fold to sit on the floor.
Mrs. Orlen responds, âGrade five will be joining us.â
Heads whip towards Brooke. Everyone knows why the little kids are invited up, and she is guilty by relation. Even Angie, so warm when interested in the bracelet, shifts dark. Coughs of nerd break from the boys in Brookeâs section as Cecilia and her class parade inside. The teachers hear nothing, as usual. They donât intervene even when Brookeâs blonde
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boy crush, the one with the constellation of freckles over his nose and cheeks, aims one of those coughs her way. She ties a few knots tighter than the rest. The strain makes them appear smaller.
Cecilia helps herself to front and center. She stares up at the static Cape Canaveral shot, squirmy at all that potential just sitting there. News people talk of ice on the tower and the possibility of delay. Brooke expects that NASA will scrap it at the last minute, hoarding publicity. Then again, they can only cry wolf for so long. Shuttle launches arenât exactly the event they used to be. This isnât even airing on a real networkâa satellite donated by Angieâs dad brings in CNN.
Brooke continues to weave whenever Mrs. Orlen isnât looking. Angie warns her once, keeping her from getting caught. The protection is more for the bracelet than for Brooke, but she takes what she can get. Angie having a bracelet means the other girls wanting ones, too. Brooke can almost feel the silky glide of all those links along her forearm. But Mrs. Orlen senses trouble and camps out nearby. She slips into the fuzzy, avocado-colored cardigan usually stowed on the back of her chair. Brooke pushes the bracelet back into her sleeve before spacing out at looped footage of the crew boarding.
Seven astronauts, yet everyoneâs attention centers on McAuliffe. The others have trained for years, flying jets, gaining experience from living the life, and then she comes and hogs the whole spotlight. Classic. Brooke hopes the crew has put her through an initiation at least. There is the freshman field tripâScience Day at the amusement park. She could put Ceec on the stand-up coaster. A tear and vomit-streaked Cecilia might give evidence that little sis canât hack the pressures. Yes! Their parents will have to pack Cecilia off to the genius school then, or plunk her back with the booger-pickers of fifth-gradeâŚor ground big sister for not looking out, regardless of the fact that it should be their job. This last one, sadly, is the most plausible based on experience. Brooke begins her ritual of twisting and untwisting her
bracelet. Her fingertip purples and swells as the countdown finally starts.
Ten thirty in the morning, Central Time. The teachers are jazzed, some of them deluded enough to think they could be the next astronaut. Her classmatesâ shifting and whispering and passing covert notes or flicking paper triangles for field goals ends. Everyoneâs watching now, waiting. Brookeâs rear end is numb.
The CNN guy talks over the official clock at Kennedy, and Cecilia lip synchs with him. âT-minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.â
The Challenger ascends on clouds of white. It adjusts its attitude. The throttling down of the engines is logged. Cecilia is hunched and scribbling in one of her notebooks, likely recording the data to graph with Dad later on. They graph all kinds of things for fun. Brooke looks around for signs of dismissal and finds none. She gets in another few knots on the bracelet. Not a whole lot of string remains. Cecilia has underestimated what she needs, and Brooke worries about a snug fit on Angieâs rather thick wrist. Itâs so quiet that Brooke thinks sheâs been busted, but, when she glances up, everyoneâs still looking at the TV.
The shuttle isnât on screen. Instead, a strange, Y-shaped cloud blots the sky. Horns reach out from a cotton ball body and a devilish tail.
An announcer says it is the Solid Rocket Boosters, but Brooke has seen enough launches to know that the SRBs donât produce a trail like that, not normally. Something is wrong. She grabs and winds her bracelet as the shots of icicles on the scaffold and the icicles on her old swing set begin to merge in her brain.
Cecilia and the others in the room lean forward. Itâs as though they expect that at any moment the Challenger will rise above the obfuscating white and continue into the great blue yonder. Orlen hugs her ugly, green sweater to herself like a binkie, her deely-boppers a quiver. Mission Control seems frozen. A TV voice, soundless for several seconds, says they are âlooking carefully at the situation.â Her parents and teachers have âlooked carefullyâ at
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Cecilia and her placement. Cecilia. Still in the prime spot, trying to
absorb the static shot of sky and steam looming in front of them. Sheâs catching on, rocking back and forth upon her hands, her odd way of self-soothing that often precedes a monster fit. To go off like that will humiliate them both. She needs help, but Mom isnât here, and the teachers stand as transfixed and as useless in this tragedy as in the face of coughed insults.
Brooke unfolds her stiff legs without kicking the students in front of her. The carpet fibers have cratered her skin between sock and hem. She rubs her wrist against the marks, hoping to clear the imprints on each tract, but they stubbornly stay. Another thread of bracelet pops from the friction. She tries to tie it to the remaining shreds, tugging hard while keeping it from unravelling further. Meanwhile, nothing appears on the TV, not even parachutes.
The teachers start to see what has happened. Brooke notices the glances between them, the head jerks. Theyâll conference before they do anythingâand even then itâll probably be the wrong decision.
Brooke can save all of them from itâshe sees this but hopes to be recalled by the use of her full name followed by a sentencing of detention as she stands. She pauses, the hide-and-seek pressure of holding both breath and urine holding her a moment. However, she is, as is often the case, invisible. No last-second reprieve comes, even as she floats towards the disaster up front. âObviously, a major malfunction,â the man on TV says.
Ceciliaâs face is pulled tight, like when sheâs losing a board game. Her rocking nears frenetic, but her eyes havenât left the screen. She is incapable of turning off.
Brookeâs fingertips barely register the ridged knob protruding from the TV. She gives a twist and a push, not sure which action shuts this particular set down. The volume of dead air increases for a moment before the television pop-fades to black.
Eyes move to her. This unaccustomed attention throbs through her limbs. It takes
all of her will to endure it, to keep her head up, and to return the stares of the bewildered students and their teachers. Mrs. Orlen finally says, âBrooke, please rejoin your classmates.â
Thereâs a giggle as Brooke reddens, rushes back. But the laughs are at the adultsâ expense. Her rebellion garners pats on her damp and hunched back, a thumbs-up and wink from the blond, freckled boy. Angie reaches for the bracelet that fell from Brookeâs sleeve when sheâd stood. They are instructed to return to their homerooms, Angie tying what is salvageable of the bracelet around Brookeâs wrist.
A look back shows the vice principal bent over Cecilia, who remains in her curl of motion. To touch her in that state is a dangerous thing. The teachers know this and will clear the other children then call their mother. Cecilia will be taken home. A damp cloth will be put over her forehead and the covers pulled to her chin.
Over dinner, in hushed tones so not to disturb the exhausted and resting genius but no less urgent for their volume, their parents will discuss what happened. Dad will focus on the technical issues, hypothesizing causes if they are not yet known. Mom will worry about those left behindâthe families, the technologists involved. Brooke will point out the red flags ignored. She will use NASA and Ceciliaâs breakdowns to blow her whistle all the louder. Perhaps, in the respectful silence that follows, they will hear her.
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Shawn Campbell
Cresting the Hill
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Jessica McDermott
Knuckles
A friend once told me the only part of the human body that doesnât turn to ash after cremation are knuckle bonesâlike little Jacks, small concaving squares with the durability to withstand temperatures reaching above 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
My dadâs knuckles are fat. From growing up on a farm and playing basketball for the last fifty years, my dadâs knuckles have been jammed in nearly every finger. I will often notice him squeezing the knuckle on his ring finger, sub-consciously measuring the worst of the bunch, trying to make sense of the pain it shoots up his hand.
My dad has had three wives now, but I donât think a wedding ring ever went easy over his enlarged knuckle. I imagine once he got the ring over the joint, he left it there without ever taking it off; only removing the metal-hoop after my mother died and the other two rings after each kicked him out, both times in mid-winter.
Maybe my dad strokes his finger not only to ease the pain, but to touch the soft space just after the middle knuckle where a wedding ring typically sits. Like a phantom limb still stings and aches, maybe he feels metal where there is skin, maybe he is remembering what is left when something ends. Perhaps there is comfort in momentarily covering what is now bare as bone.
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Bradley Meyer
TwiceThat first summer spent drinking with salvia for saliva & mushroom visions, vicious in our heads flew by swiftly.
That autumn, winter & spring passed in succession slowly. They were only in the way of another Summer spent drinking with salvia for saliva & mushroom visions, vicious again-
-No, no, no, you were standing over there before & Tyler was sitting there. -Tylerâs dead. -I know, I know, but...
We were unable to recreate it. & the third summer, we didnât even bother.
I donât cross my fingers for Alzheimerâs, Frontal lobe trauma & forgetting.
Instead, my sails unfurl, devoid of destination to avoid any further attempts at a second 2007. I burn my calendars & hurl the ashes over-board.
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Maggie Montague
From One Synapse To Another
I.
The scent of milk and golden honey fills the bathroom, or at least that is what the label tells me. The allusion seems out of place on a three-dollar soap dispenser. Moses and the Israelites trudged through the wilderness with grains of dirt crushed into their skin. And me, with clean hands doused in the scent of milk and honey. The images cannot be reconciled in my mind, and I am flooded with the urge to walk until my shoes wear thin, to seek something, anything, to put meaning back into the scent.
II.
I first encountered the Wandering Jew, an aptly named member of the spiderworts family, outside a Subway in Texas. The spider-like purple-leaved plant hung in front of the window, limp in the summer heat. Tradescantia pallida gets its nickname from the rapid rate of the vine growth. The vines are easily uprooted and broken off. The Wandering Jew can be given new life by simply laying the broken off stem on soil, and it will begin to grow again.
The name alludes to a myth said to be invented and first recorded in the thirteenth century by an Armenian archbishop. There are many different versions and names given to the Wandering Jew, but the gist of the story is as Jesus was dragged from the hall of Pontius Pilate a man goaded him saying, âGo faster, Jesus, go faster,â encouraging Jesus toward his death. Jesus responded to the man, âI am
going, and now you shall wait until I return.â It is said that the man was cursed in this moment with immortality until the second coming of Jesus. The myth also has origins in Genesisâs story of Cain cursed to wander the world for murdering his brother Abel.
I acknowledge its shaky origins and the fact that it is a myth, thus inherently false, but I also wonder where the Wandering Jew would be today. Would he be in the midst of planting new roots? Or maybe, he would be just about to detach from the home he has come to know, because the wandering heart does not allow him to stand still for long. How many footsteps has he taken, and how many pieces of himself has he left in his wake?
III.
My grandfather Leo was a wandering soul. When my mother was only nine, he left my grandmother Esther, ten years after immigrating to Los Angeles from Jerusalem. But his wandering started before that, when he was a boy in Germany, in Poland, in Egypt, when he became a man in Prague, a husband and father in Israel. When I was little, I remember cramming into the van to visit him in Los Angeles. He would beckon us into his stuffy apartment with remnants of his over-easy egg caught in his mustache. I would call him Saba and he would smile. I would sit on the rug at his feet, and he would settle into his chair, squinting into the distance to find his memories. He told tales of the ghost he had
21
seen in a hotel room in Italy. The specter sat on his bed silent, as he grasped the wall to steady his shaking legs. It was a woman he once knew, but could not remember her name.
He told me of the time he gave his only money to two young boys in Prague. He slept in the street that night. He wasnât a religious man, but thoughts of God kept his teeth from chattering. He would stop the story, look past me, past my mother, father, brothers, and into the place beyond the walls, where his memories escaped him.
IV.
The Wandering Jew has been a recurring theme throughout the centuries in art and literature; take for instance, French artist Marc Chagallâs painting On the Road, the Wandering Jew, or British poet Percy Shelleyâs poem âThe Wandering Jew.â Both portray immortality as a form of punishment. To wander and to seek used to be synonymous in my mind. Both words hinted at a chance for adventure and sojourns into another world, but now they could not seem farther apart. The Israelites sought the promised land. There was an end to the journey, a home destined on the other side of the travels, while the Wandering Jew cannot settle, he must constantly uproot. In wandering, he gains access to the world, but as one in exile, never again can he find home.
I wish I had snapped a stem from the plant hanging outside the Subway window. I could have planted a piece of the Wandering Jew in each of the places I went. My path through the world could be traced by the vines seeking a way out of their pots. And the branches would leap from their confines and begin again. Instead, I left a piece of myself. My ears remain forever in San Francisco, where they listen to the pluck of my brother Jacobâs banjo while leaning against foam-covered walls. My feet continue to walk the streets of London, catching on the cobblestones of century-old streets. My mouth exchanges stories with my parents between bites of spaghetti in San Diego. My jaw clenches to keep my teeth
still in Big Bear, where my brother Jonathan and sister-in-law Lauren teach me how to snowboard. As for my nose, I wonder where I left it; perhaps, it sniffs the sulfuric stench of Yellowstone, or maybe, it seeks out the company of fisherman in Tarcoles.
V.
My grandfather died at the age of 93 after battling dementia for several years. The last two years of his life were spent in nursing homes in my hometown, Fallbrook. My mother visited him every week writing down his stories on a yellow notebook pad. She filled page after page, and the lines of fact and fiction were never clear. He claimed he sat next to George Lucas on a plane, and my grandfather spoke of his idea about a story crafted in a galaxy far, far away. He also spoke of the time he tried to smuggle John Lennon into the country, and my mother remembers walking down to the pay phone at night because John Lennon called collect and my grandmother wouldnât pay.
I remember visiting my grandfather, and he was so certain that he had thousands of dollars hidden away somewhere. A retribution check from after World War II. It was next to the motorcycle in a garage he did not have. He died, and somewhere in the aftermath, the yellow note pad was lost.
VI.
My definition of home narrows a bit more each day. My brothersâ rooms have been emptied of guitars and computer gadgets and decorated with World Market canvases. The rickety treadmill has been updated to a newer model, complete with a non-slip guarantee. My parents want to re-paint the kitchen. Change is good, we say to each other. My address switches to 1012 North Ten Mile Road as the tree grows taller outside 1114 Bellewood Way. The participants in annual family road trips reduce from five to four to three to two.
Change is good. Maps of places I have been and places I plan to go line the walls of my
22
room. Picture frames are crammed into the corner of my desk, and in their static state, I trust them to tell me of my past. I keep memories of kickboxing in oven mitts with my mother to avoid cleaning the dishes or watching the Miami Dolphins win their one game in the 2007 season with my dad, I keep them just below the surface. And I look to the pictures to tell me of the red in Jacobâs beard and the blue in my fatherâs eyes.
VII.
According to Israeli neuroscientist Daniela Schiller, âMemory is what you are now. Not in the picture, not in the recordings. Your memory is who you are now.â Schiller studies the reconstruction of memory and how controlling memory can be beneficial to patients undergoing rehabilitation or trauma recovery. She compares the repeated access of memory to revising a story every time you tell it. Every time a memory is accessed, a morsel of it is changed. A piece of reality is traded for fiction.
Neuroscientists such as Schiller or Karim Nader seek to show that memory is malleable and not consolidated as previous scientists had thought. Traditional thought said that memory once constructed would remain relatively unchanged. Nader suggests that the act of calling upon memory is an act of reconsolidation, or re-construction. This reconsolidation could be the brainâs way of restructuring the past from the perspective of the future. We take into account everything that has happened since the memory and infuse that knowledge into the memory itself. Nader explains that this process is what could keep us from re-living past trauma.
VIII.
My dog died yesterday. My father called and said that she didnât suffer. They stuck a needle in her because sixteen years was too much for her body to handle. Lacy witnessed three-fourths of my life. All I could think was, if
I recall her, I would lose her a bit more. My defense weakened when I tried to fall asleep, and I recalled Lacyâs lion eyes and reddish brown face framed in gray, but the light in her eyes shifted from golden to green as I tried to grasp it.
My definition of home narrows a little more. I know I canât go back. I canât go back to the roof of the doghouse where Lacy and I stood to keep away from Petey, my brotherâs white boxer, who shook his head and flung drool in every direction. Itâs fading, the story where she ran away to another county and was adopted from a pound, which we discovered a week later. I walked down the aisles of the pound, pit-bull in every cage, I saw her face in each of them. Except, she was a mutt, pit-bull and lab, maybe something else too. But she peed on their carpet and they returned her to the pound. She came home to us.
The walls of my house trembled from the 4th of July fireworks. Or maybe, it was the bombs being tested at Camp Pendleton. Both shook the walls, and I held her tight to stop the tremors coursing through her.
IX.
From 135 C.E. when the Romans exiled the Jews from Israel to 1948 when the state of Israel was re-established, the tribes of Israel spread across the world with no homeland to return to. After 1,813 years away, homes change, people change as well. Knowledge is gained and lost, while stories are revised from one generation to the next.
What specters exist in the lands of Egypt? What pieces of heritage were discarded in the ghettos of Poland or the concentration camps of Germany? What remains of them on the streets of New York, or in the films of Hollywood? And what of them still dwells in the temples of Israel?
People say my generation dwells in an amnesiac culture. What have we already lost?
X.
Jacob and I decided that we want to try and
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celebrate Hanukkah this year. The problem is that we donât know what that entails. We know there are eight days, we know a menorah is involved. My mother, the only full-blooded Jew in our household, knows bits and pieces, but my grandmother left all that behind in Jerusalem. My mother didnât celebrate any holidays growing up in the Jewish projects of West Hollywood, where Christmas morning was the prime time to ride your bikes in the street. She became a Christian in college and married a Gentile, receiving a letter of warning from her aunt. Donât marry that German boy. We need to keep the Jewish heritage going. We are the only ones that can. She married my father anyways, who, though not German, was also not Jewish.
âWhy Hanukkah?â My mother asked, and I puzzled over this. Why did I take a course on Biblical Hebrew, why do I organize my bookshelves right to left, why do I investigate the Holocaust like remembering will erase it, why do I seek to go to Israel and see what this promised land business is all about? âI donât know, Mom. It just feels like we lost something along the way.â
I am not converting to Judaism, though there was a second of consideration when I realized that if I converted, the Jewish state would pay for me to go to Israel. I am Christian, and I remain so. But there is something to maintaining the Jewish heritage, and I canât bear to forget, even what I do not yet know.
24
My familyâs written tender blah-blah notes for years. They offer me their trustfunds. But Iâve been too busy cashing out their checks to ever check back in.I found this word, idiolalia, but never looked
it up. I took all I can. Took it in and got moresmashed than the guitars. Whatâs not questionable? I crowd-surf, crowd-source hallucinationsâI help cover hits. I double dip blue chips in low-cal artichoke spread, and call it a vegetable despite the sugared processing while sound checks iron out the static, feedback. The lights gel. We tool with covers before redressing.
âOld card. Weâre called âNervosaâ now. No, I just work merch. Yâknow, I bang my head while the markets and the spliffs get rolled. Most days I need a lift, like if the gigâs in some exurban hole. I listen to the air reports. News says your modelâs been recalled. I tell the kids that punk is dead. I tell the old-timers you never can know whatis being said on them old records, golden junk.
I hatch up Ponzi schemes for blue book quotes, take stock of gonzo marginal value theorems as the squirrels scratch up their patchy treasures buried in the pay-dirt everywhere; blonde rows of slow rotisseries in discount tanning bedsâitâs all screwed up my heart, like some halfway transformed Transformer, not quite starship, not quite Decepticon, ok⌠So far, so what?
Yo, shit-tards, I tell âem, I need your bottle-opener, aâight? Iâve paid my dues. This piece ofwork ainât a twist-off, jeez. Hey, fuck it bros, Iâll whip something out my old bag of tricks you gotta see: here, hold still, I can make it pop like nobodyâs business, getting purchase against the gristle of my good eye socket.
Diminishing Returns
Will Cordeiro
25
Fathers tend to teach their children whether or not they want to. Some do it because the son or the daughter will someday take over the family business, or perhaps the child accompanies the father to âthe job,â whatever it might be. That particular educational practice reaches back to the time when man was a hunter, and it was imperative the son learn the skills of his father.
In time the âapprentice systemâ created a surrogate âfather.â There are still skills that require years of apprenticeship. But more often than not, high schools, junior colleges and regular colleges take the place of patriarchal teaching.
When I was youngerâsay, in my twentiesâI would argue that my father never taught me anything. It was a stupid statement, and could have only been made by someone in the foolishness of youth. Because I believed it, I looked for, though not consciously, a surrogate father. And every time I bonded with a man older than myself, I was disappointed. I was mistakenly looking for a father I never had, or rather one of my own creation rather than the man who was my father.
There are numerous situations in which a surrogate father plays an important role in the life of the seeker. But my search led only to disappointment and disillusionment. The experiencesâthere were three of themâwere teachers of another sort. From them, I learned not to trust individuals who praise easily, and just as easily discard you as if you were a piece of trash.
The fault was as much mine as it was theirsâ;
I should not have allowed myself to be seduced by their verbal blandishments. But in my defense, which is really no defense but rather a statement of fact. I was hungry for their praise, starved for it.
The distance between my father and me was more than forty years, light years in terms by which we viewed and understood the world. Born in 1885 in a small town outside of Vienna, he came to the United States when he was six months old. Thereâs strong possibility that he was illegitimate, not an uncommon situation when immigrant parents have been separated for years. From what little I was told my father hated his father, who, according to the family mythos, was a cruel man and beat my father mercilessly. Oddly, given the hatred between the two, I was named after my paternal grandfather.
I donât ever remember my father being young, though I had a photo of him when he was in his forties I would guess. But my sister, Roselyn, appropriated it. I have another of him at the piano but he looks like the old man he was. He appears to be deep into whatever heâs doing. I donât believe he could read music, but he might have been playing by ear. He seldom laughed, and when he did it was usually the result of having witnessed some slap-stick event. A stocky man, he was shorter than my mother. He was handsome, and grew dignified as he aged. He had a shock of beautiful white hair.
My father seldom spoke. Though he was Democrat, his newspaper was the Daily News. I am not sure he was capable of writing much
Irving A. Greenfield
The Game of Diamonds
26
more than his name. He never wrote a letter to me while I was in the army. But he did append a very brief sentence or two at the end of my motherâs letters.
He lived in a world of âdasants.ââmust not do. He seldom raised his voice, but pushed to anger he could and did out roar the best of them. He struck me only once. I interrupted him while he was speaking to his friend, Benuzia.
My father would rather avoid an argument than engage in one. I have no idea what he thought about. He never shared his thoughts. But he did teach me things. He used his own hands on method. Though on one occasion, it could have been a disaster; I could have drowned.
This took place in Coney Island; he called it Cooney Island. It was his summer joy. His hangout was Giant Racers Bathhouse on 8th street, where the Aquarium is now located. Off the beach, going straight out into the water, the Atlantic Ocean, there was a man-made breakwater of huge rocks and approximately at its mid-point was another man-made structure of creosoted pilings that ran perpendicular to the rocks for some distance, together they formed a small artificial cove with the ocean on one side and a protected area between the pilings and the beach on the other.
Though people fished off the rocks, or went crabbing, or just sat on them, they were a big âdasantâ for me. They were dangerous. It was easy to slip on the seaweed that grew on them and in places the rocks were razor sharp. Moving from one to another often required a leap of some distance either up or down, and amiss could easily mean a broken arm, leg, or worse, a broken back.
So, when my father beckoned to join him on the rocks, I was surprised. But
I made my way to him and we moved slowly out on the breakwater. My father, as usual, gave no explanation for being on the rocks or why he wanted me with him.
I was familiar enough with the tides to be aware that it was low tide, and much of the breakwater and the pilings that formed the
artificial cover were considerably above the surface of the water. The day happened to have been a blistering hot Sunday in August and there were thousands of people in the water and tens of thousands more on the beach. The small cove held its share of the multitudes trying to escape from the heat.
When we reached pilings, my father did something even stranger than going on to the rocks; he led me on to the pilings. Despite the low tide, seaward side was white water as the waves crashed against the pilings. It looked dangerous, and I knew it was.
Suddenly, without any warning, my father picked me up and threw me into the placid water of the cove.
I was under water; I was terrified. I didnât know how to swim.
âSwim,â he shouted when I surfaced spitting water from my mouth and trying to clear my eyes. âUse your arms and legs.â
I swam, while he moved down the rocks toward the beach shouting instructions to me. He never learned to swim.
I swallowed a lot of water before I found my footing and, exhausted, made my way back to the beach where I promptly vomited. But I did learn how to swim.
I donât think it ever occurred to him that I might have drowned. It surely occurred to me several times that day, and for some time afterwards.
Though it was a âhands onâ way of teaching, I wouldnât advise anyone to use it. There are more benign ways to teach a person to swim, or learn an athletic skill. But my father must have thought it was important for me to learn how to swim, otherwise his action would have been inexcusably cruel.
* * *There were things my father wouldnât teach
me: card games, though he was an excellent poker and rummy player, shooting craps, pool, and discussing anything having to do about sex. He was most certainly a prude.
What then did he teach and how did he do it?My father was inveterate walker, and when
I was a boy I walked with him. By doing that, I learned about the city, about the harbor and
27
in the days before World War II, about the transatlantic liners berthed along the North River, another name for the Hudson River, and the Brooklyn waterfront. He taught me recognize the colors of their funnels, and thereby know the name of ship and the company who owned it. He taught me how to be psychologically comfortable no matter where I am. Together we roamed the city. But never did he say, learn this or that. My learning took place almost by osmosis. That said, I have to add there was exceptionâthat exception had to do with diamonds. He was a diamond dealer, a jeweler by trade. Exactly how he became one, I have no idea. But what I do have is an apocryphal snippet. After the Triangle Fire, he was hired to sweep out the premises at Eighty-two Bowery, which was and still is part of the downtown Diamond Exchange, on a daily basis. Eventually, he was hired by a man named Joe Rose, who I understand died in prison. After working Mr. Rose, he worked for George Harris & Sons. My father learned about diamonds from Mr. Rose and Mr. Harris. He worked for Mr. Harris for at least twenty-five years, and was let go in nineteen-thirty-seven, at the height of the depression. He was fifty-two years old, and I was eight.
He never again worked for anyone; he was a âfreelancer.â He didnât have a show case. He operated out of a black leather change purse which he kept in the right hand pocket of his trouser. All of his customers came to him by way of recommendation. His usual place was in eighty-six Bowery, at the counter of one his friends where he often spent hours playing poker or gin-rummy. Years after he died, my mother told me the from time to time he was also a fence, which might explain his rapid departures for parts unknown and the visits from detectives, often late at night.
To teach me how to judge the purity and therefore the value of a diamond, he invented his own game of pick and chose. Heâd put a piece of black velvet down on the kitchen table; then heâd empty his purse, or remove stones wrapped in tissue paper, and place them on the black velvet. Sometimes the diamonds
were in settings, but often they were not. Then, heâd hand me his loupe and tell me to pick out the best diamond from the lot.
Of course I made mistakes. I went for the biggest stone first. But the under his patient tutelage I became discriminating and found the gem stone even if it was less than karat.
He worked gently and without coercing me until I developed the kind of expertise that pleased him. He did this without wanting me to follow him into the business; it was his way of giving me something that no one else could give me. It was his special gift to me. It has stood me in good stead many, many times.
* * *Now flash forward. Iâm eight-three years old.
My watch has died after I put a new battery in it. The battery could have been defective or something else might have gone awry inside the watch. The minute hand still makes its rounds, but no matter what time I set it to, it loses an hour. Is it time for a new watch, maybe. But I happen to be down town where there are many jewelry stores. I do some window shopping. I even go into a couple stores to look at what they have in their display cases. Iâ m not impressed. Most are too elaborate; they do too many things and have more dials and controls on them than I want to deal with. I am impressed by the prices, which are much more than I am willing to pay. But I finally find one, a simple watch, for a hundred dollars.I tell the shopkeeper that Iâll be back with my wife. I know he doesnât believe me; thereâs no reason why he should. My wife is having her hair done and when sheâs finished I go back to the Jewelry store with her in tow. She likes the watch and its price. But I know I can move the price down by at least twenty percent. I offer to pay in cash, but only if the price comes down to a more acceptable level. Magically the price drops twenty percent. I buy the watch, but three links in the wrist band have to be removed in order for the band to fit on my wrist.
Itâs while the links are being removed that I begin to examine the diamond rings in a nearby case. There are well over a hundred rings in
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the case. With prices that range from a few thousand dollars to well into the five figure range. The settings are varied as are the cuts of the diamonds. I see nothing that impresses me. Yes, the diamonds sparkle. But thereâs sparkle and thereâs fire. Then I see one, a very small diamond, probably seventy or eight points. It catches my attention. It has fire.
I point to it and ask how much it costs.The Jeweler tells me, adding itâs a âgem
stone.âI smile and nod my agreement. âSeventy,
eighty points,â I say.âSeventy five,â he answers.I suddenly have a lump in my throat. I turn to my wife; I can feel the tears welling
up in my eyes. I manage to whisper, âMy father taught me very well.â
She doesnât hear me.I swallow hard and hold on to the memory
of my father and his game of diamonds.
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You arrive fresh baked,cooked, steaming the smellsof the city.
Your words spray soap,launder my wooly dog thoughtsthat snooze flee-bitten in my brain.
Between us: fault linesand pointed fingers,maddening afterthoughts.
Martyrs. Loaves of dark bread.A brand name penny-pinch detergent.Our lusts co-mingling with the unwashed.
You say I wear a five oâclock rainstorm,a slow kiss drizzle that submitsto your gravity.
I say you are an apprentice to silencenot yet able to train your tongueto curl quietly like a lap dog.
Kenneth Gurney
Simmer
30
M.I. Schellhaas
Reflection in My Eyes
31
Dance with me, Kansassays an old man who still looks too long at women. Drink in my hand decides and my forehead fits tight against his flask, silver fleeingchest pocket flannel. Hard liquor hazes him away I sway
now with late autumn, hostile earth opposing its decay. Tires crunchinggravelâhis wife in the drivewaybut aging fingers leech twentyone green Novembers from the young
veins at my wrist. Iâm not done he says, wordswhiskey thick on his tongue.
Garden Party
Lauren Potts
32
He canât sleepso why should you.Lights are on at the morgue; theyâllunzip him for you.
The man on the slab stops at the neck.His hand is cool between yours, and youâre shaking when you findthe divot in his finger, proofof that last exertion.
Brown, curly hair fringeshis opened skull, the interiorexposed like the rubble of Coventry Cathedral.
Itâs catching, they sayâthe melancholy,the lassitude, a germ in the tears perhaps.
Youâre afraid, but you might risk it, knowing once you close your eyesyou could fall long into that hypoxic darkness too.
It took a while.After a few false starts,putting it off and putting it offuntil the time was rightâwhen the money and the gun met, then he finally lost the argument on the drive over.
The view from the St. Johnsâ bridgeis a postcard bearing bad news.When youâre ready, go standon that exact spot, look throughhis eyes, and try to change his mind.
Cindy St. Onge
Dinner with the Hemingways
33
Propped open in the clampof my thumb and pointer finger,it flummoxes,this New and Selected Poems.
The poet who captures squirming icons and mysterium treenddumis my neighbor in the Craftsman a few blocks away.
He is the guy Iâve seen for years on weekday afternoons taking slow lap dog walksin a stuttered, loopy gaitalong the dawdling streets,
His face skyward then snapped down,a hockey stick grinnearly always hitched up,his talent unmedaled and hid.
A puff cloud of a dogpulls taut the retractable leash,inhaling and cataloguing the width of a side yard,
While the dogâs owner,engulfed in the vermillion bloom of a snapped tulip,somehow findshis motherâs face,
A desert hermitage,streams of black bile and ejaculate,then fingers probing the woundin Christâs side,
And, of course,a sky looming,full of haunt,churning some vague and awful truth.
Bob Hicks
Neighbor
34
Jeff stands, feet spread and back straight, and I listen to him tell the customer that Iâm new here. The customer nods to the mower on the sidewalk. I get it. A good mechanic is drawn to an engine. A good mechanic is part chassis and crank, oil and water. But a small engine mechanic hovers and grunts, finds a way, uses pliers on rusted bolts. You borrow tools and work under the outside lean-to, not near Rush and his Camaro Jacket, not at the shop table near the fan and radio.
We havenât seen our boss in days. Jeff takes a twenty from the cash box, tells me to get him a biscuit and to bring back the change. I imagine what his trailer looks like, how it could be possible for him to have sex with his wife when sheâs awake. I think about quitting and taking the money. Sunlight reflects off the showcase chrome. His hand is out. He never says thank you.
The power stroke: just before the piston and crankshaft reach top dead center, a spark. Take what fuels us, the air we breathe and smash them together: the boss on vacation, Jeff manning the counter, Rush pouring gasoline.
Everything that has been taken in and thrown back is tossed aside just as quickly, unlike the two stroke principle and all of its scavenging. Iâm better for it: the blow-down, the displacement, the wrench in my hand, Jeff facing the opposite direction.
Ray McManus
Small-Engine Repair
35
Jazz Haiku (after Basho)
A series of haikus by Mark Jones
even in autumnâ
bill evans scattering leavesâ
I ache for autumn
commissioned cover:
the trio plays Stravinskyâ
man, where is thy swing?
bix in davenport
horn pressed tight against his pillow
singinâ the blues
tram slides in
on sweet c-melody
singinâ the blues
Bix and Tram
The Bad Plus Plays the Logan Center, 25 October 2013
36
Hold me.You should know that Iâm not an early
adopter, with the possible exception of Grand Gestures. So listen up Mr. and Mrs. Green Jeans. I just read that a supernova is now visibleâdiscovered by some kids in Englandâand it happened twelve million years ago. But here and now, on the east side of the island where I live, no one seemed to notice.
But I noticed many things that day. There was a distinct difference in my surroundings. Light, shades, and perspective were all enhanced. My toaster radiated optimism, and I saw it from several points of view. The cats improvised a harmonic meow chorus, and I sipped my coffee with an awareness and self-consciousness that informed or distorted (depending on your point of view) my new state of insight. I was in love with no object of affection, no subject of attraction.
[This is where something important belongs]The phone rang and I let the machine answer
while I went to the kitchen. I ate a banana and thought about bicycles. I stared out the window for a while and considered the day.
While I was pondering these things a couple of kids spotted me watching them from my window. One of them gave me the finger. I continued to watch and they moved on. I became immersed in memories of my little league childhood, stealing bases with ease.
* * *Thrill me.I decided to wait until the mail came before
I went out into the world. The mail is delivered at an arbitrary time in my neighborhood,
and I like that. I remember when there were no zip codes and mail was delivered twice a day. Milkmen wore white suits and Captain Kangaroo was administering something that I never quite understood. I never knew when those Ping-Pong balls would fall, nor did I know why.
The message that was left on the answering machine offered some advice about something that I didnât understand. I didnât recognize the voice, but I could hear music in the background that sounded familiar. Something about the sky splitting, planets shifting, and the stopping of existence.
And stop it did. Or at least it seemed to stop. I wanted it to stop, but after a slight pause, existence continued.
After a cigarette and some more coffee, I put the newspaper in the collage morgue, put a bagel in the toaster, and took care of business. A cream cheese satisfaction distracted me for a while, and I made more coffee.
The phone rang again, and I answered it this time. I didnât want more cryptic advice, and I was ready to make that clear to whoever was on the other end of the call; however, it turned out to be my good friend and droog, Seymour.
âIâm getting bored,â he said.âYou never get bored,â I said.âThatâs right.ââSo?ââSo what?ââSo whatâs what?ââI said getting bored. Getting, get it?ââWhatâs to get?ââI want you to get something and bring it to
my house.â
Robert Hiatt
Last Chance Fancy Pants
37
âWhat and why?â I said, knowing I would not want to âget and bringâ anything.
* * *âIâm thinking of time and space.ââOf course you are.ââOf course,â he said.âTime and space are hard to get,â I said.âMaybe we should get back to where we
once belonged,â he said.âSome would say that when youâve got it
coming, you should get it while you can.ââSome,â he said, âSome might say that.âI hung up and got more coffee. The Mr.
Coffee machine was sitting in the cusp of the morning sun and the glass pot was invisible until I touched it. The black coffee in the black cup was austere, but generous in spirit. I sat, smoked, dreamed and drank. I was aware of no purpose, only process. At that moment I got up, and I noticed that all three cats were positioned perfectly, deliberate as if posed by Apollo or Michelangelo. I stood in admiration and watched them as I walked across the room. Each step, each movement within each step, showed them in infinite perspectives, all in fascinating accord with uncommon lighting and shadows.
* * *Love me.Seymour never did tell me what he wanted
me to get and bring, so I bought flowers and went to his house.
By the time I got there, I was exhausted. Seymour was asleep on his couch, the room was filled with flowers1, and a note was propped-up on the coffee table:
âI live on an island that has no beaches, The tides imitate the water it reaches,In time thereâs no telling,The next thing theyâre selling, Is Truth for the sailors in speeches.âI put the flowers on the coffee table near him
and let myself out. When I got to the west side of the island, I turned into the preservation area and there was no one else there.
1 ?
* * *Tell me that youâll never let me go.I got out of the car and looked at the
water. The blues were in my head, and I heard polyrhythm accents and counterpoint harmonies that I could neither describe or deliver.
I was dancing at a bride-less wedding. There were laughing gulls and ring-bill gulls, and carp-less aquarium dwellers, along with blue-green pads and ponders. I wanted to see how fast I could go while I was standing still. Well, it was just as they say: the closer you get to the speed of light, the more time slows down. And thatâs how it went for me, gradually slowing and speeding at the same time, until there was no time, and there was no speed, and I saw everything happening all at once, at the same time, as it were.
38
Beer-drawl backdrop and neon signs light up the wood-paneled walls. Heâs mimicking my movements,one long makeshift stare. Twenty years my senior, easy, and Iâm grimacingthrough the watered-down gin,my first taste of something so bold. Hold here, he says, zipper burn on soft skin. Ice cubes slideacross the marble counter, pool sticks pound against peeling paint. Every mouth is moving, mapping the night.
My back against the dumpster, he dips down to eye levelgrabs my gussied-up facetake off that skirt. And fuck if I want it, panty hose pulled, the cold metal on the backsof my thighs. Stench of all thatâs rotting hovering behind our heads. In the heat of his hurriedness, no one notices my pale shaking legs, his near-limp dick.
Kelly Andrews
Seduction at Sixteen
39
Beauty is marketing to theMoney girls and they spendWith lavish precision becauseBig dreams need big budgets.Seal-sleek hair, shinning pumps, Pearl earrings, suit and skirt,All elegance and no sex theyInterrogate their prey withSmooth questions; and whenYour answers satisfy they slideTheir treasured secrets from Leather cases softer and moreDurable than flesh, click-clasp,Showing what you long to see:MBAs and GPAs, KPIs and ROIs.Will they be content after they Eat the world and donât grow fat?Will work and reward fill the void Or just gild it over? I canât say, butThe money girls will spend their youth In acquisitive pursuit, and if those yearsGo to hard waste, they canât have them back.
Peter McEllhenney
The Money Girls
40
Reality is like our family dinners, Ungrateful, always on the verge of madnessâExceedingly ordinary. I have retreated many times to a wine glass,Nearly laughing at the thick silencesAnd the half-charred chicken more aliveThan our teeth and jaws; not more human Than our bewildered eyesThat connect accidentallyâmutual pin-pricksWaking knitting hands to time.
Later from our porch I watch the mayflies rise and twirl, unawareThat they are little embers burning out.I am not sure who is more unawareOf digesting the chickenâs limbs that fought and flailedAs blood leapt hurriedly from its neck:
My mother with the house-phone to her ear,Sweeping the bones into the trash.She has asked me to walk the dog;My father who is asleep and burping out the chicken;Or my sister sitting next to me, calculating rain.
With the American flag going like it is and this April sky(That she says could be a November sky)Sheâs sure that the dog and I can reach the end of the yardAnd back before the rain. There really is no point To this contest, but sheâll come with me, she says.Sheâs that certain I can make it.
Matthew Connolly
Calculating Rain
41
Kristi Beisecker
Fern
42
Myron Michael
Hunger comes with its mouth open.When the cupboards are bare.But the mind mass producesand cooks up modified food starch(flour, water, salt, and peanut buttermakes a kind of cookie). If writing or eyeballing divine lawâone thorn of a rose to another and so forthâI forget to eat.
(Once I was too young to know how the moon tugs at the ocean. It would splash through my window,and I would swim through the streetsand stroke the plum face of a womanhanging with every muscle from her atrophic body, with my eyes.)
You Have to Eat
43
Sheâd practiced the night before, by herself in the college dorm room reserved for this writersâ conference. Aimee found the identical twin beds and empty drawers comforting rather than sterile because of the dormâs very closeness. A womb of oneâs own, Virginia Woolf with a lisp. At home, the diaper bag was a daily test as it sat on the table with its maw spread open to ask if Aimee was a proper mother. That is, the opened bag asked from between its zipper lips, will you be able to anticipate all the wants and needs of your children? No need for sippy cups and goldfish crackers here, but Aimee hadnât known what snacks to bring instead. Sheâd forgotten what she used to like.
She searches, holding the bread, fingers kneading kneading as she passes over the whole, the fully formed. The woman and creature meet with guttural cries of recognition.
Susan, the poetry workshop leader, sits in the front row wearing a bright red top. She plays with a golden hoop earring while her head tilts to the side. Aimee recognizes the posture, knows that her words are being evaluated, sifted, tasted. Aimeeâs hands flutter with nerves, but she continues, falling back into the moment.
Souls struggling until the entwined spirits rise toward the horizon on diaphanous wings veined like palms read by gypsies.
Aimee slows the sentence to draw out the last image. âThank you.â She smoothes her teal sundress, and walks back to her seat. The dress had been bought last year, but sheâd never worn it. There had never been an occasion when little hands wouldnât pull at the silk, spill creamed green beans, blow milky spit bubbles across the top of the
âGood luck,â whispers Toni, an older poet with a strong command of prose and short, gray hair. âToo bad your family canât hear you read.â
Aimee gives a delicate shrug as if to say âwhat can you do,â but, of course, her poetry is only possible because sheâs away. She walks to the stage and tilts the microphone down as far as it will go because even in wedge sandals she can barely reach. Tonight Aimee is Cinderella at the ball and she must seize these three minutes with both hands before she returns home and becomes Mommy again. She looks for her friends and finds themâthe poetsâclustered together like birds. Except Ronnie. Heâs half-Korean, half-black, and all gay. This afternoon he sits by himself, the timekeeper, ready to signal the one-minute mark. He gives Aimee a wink. The lecture hall is small, seats filled by the other conference writers. Sound will carry without her yelling.
She sweeps her long curls away from her face with both hands. âIâm reading the poem Iâve been workshopping called âOne-legged Ducks.â Itâs about the transmigration of human souls andâŚoh, Iâll just read it.â Gentle laughs buoy her and Aimeeâs senses are heightened so that she can hear every cough in the room, feel every twitch in the bodies before her. This is it, Aimee marvels. This is the precipice. She takes a breath and leaps over the edge.
The pond is filled with two-legged ducks, Two- winged, one-billed. But, thereâs a woman, frumpy and thick like potato ladke, who looks for the stumpy one- legged bird.
Sherry Cook Woosley
Fusion
44
shoulder that would dry to a crusty white. Toni reaches over and squeezes her hand.
Performance giddiness over, Aimee touches her purse. The purse is merely the container for her phone, the connection to her other life. Aimee folds her hands in her lap.
Of course sheâd called to check in with Bill and ask how the girls were. Two girls, aged 18 months and 3 years, whom Aimee loved. Bill, the husband, devilishly handsome and unpredictable. But, she could admit in the lovely silence of the dorm room, her family had stolen her words. Bound it with twenty-four minute episodes of a bilingual child who was always looking for a map. Pummeled it with expectations of playdates and laundry, grocery shopping and constant meal-making. And Bill, former poet himself, acted resentful if she tried to get away from the house. Coming home from a job, something in a cubicle over at Locust Point, wrapping his artistâs fingers around the neck of a beer, reminding her that she didnât have to work, but he did.
I want to work, she had felt like screaming. But saying, âI want to make art from wordsâ was like saying, âI want to be a firefighterâ or âI want to be an astronaut,â when you are a child. And Aimee could not embrace whimsy, not when she was the one pushing the stroller.
The last person reads and then the writers meander out of the lecture hall and across the grounds to the outside reception in an open grassy yard between college buildings. The weather cooperates, sunshine mediated by vaguely-shaped clouds and teasing breeze. In the nearest buildingâs shade, a long table displays refreshments. Folding chairs have been placed haphazardly, but Ronnie, the timekeeper, waves from a table in the sunshine where heâs âsaved seatsâ for their group like they are still in school.
âJust bring the bottle over,â Ronnie calls to Aimee.
âI second that,â says Toni.After looking to each side, Aimee grabs a
bottle of red and a bottle of white. Knowing her friends are watching, she makes a show
of placing the bottles in her large purse and walking with exaggerated innocence.
âNow youâve done it,â she says to the group. âYouâve made me either a thief or a pig.â
âCheers to that,â they raise their glasses to be filled. Other members of the poetry workshop wander over and settle in chairs.
âJust pass the bottle around.â Ronnie says.âSpeak for yourself, young man. Iâm not
drinking after you.â Toni adjusts her bulk in the seat. âAimee, that part about the woman like a potato ladke. I liked it.â
A buzzing in her purse. Vibrations that signal she is being called away. She uses her elbow to push the purse away so she canât feel it. âI added it last night.â She shakes her curls back, irritated. Her hair falls long past her shoulders because there is no point in cutting it â being shortened just gives the curls more bounce. She wants to be a serious poet, a notion at odds with her childlike appearance. âI wasnât sure whether it worked.â
âWell, I think so.â Toni shakes a ringed hand. âYouâve got good instincts.â
The unexpectedness of the compliment brings tears to Aimeeâs eyes. It means so much. The purse shakes, an irritated dance. Only one person would call again and again. She understands he is on the other end, increasingly angry, maybe all three of them clustered around the telephone in the kitchen, listening to four rings before her voicemail picked up. Automatically, she checks her watch.
When Victoria was an infant, every evening around seven was hell. Sheâd start the crying, the fussing, the balling up her hands into tiny angry fists, her face turning red with the force of her cries. Aimee had tried to rock the infant into contentment, but she felt so scared of the babyâs enormous anger, so flustered by Billâs scrutiny. Sheâd swaddled Victoria, made comforting sounds, and swayed back and forth in the rocking motion that is supposed to soothe infants.
âYou look like some fey creature stealing a human baby.â Bill said. Heâd been high, sprawled on the couch, his eyes glazed over. A smile twisted his lips. âSee how I did that? I
45
evoked a specific image wrapped in a larger story. Thatâs how you write a poem.â
Aimeeâs face flushes as she comes back to the present. This trip is hers; Billâs advice about poetry an unsolicited intrusion that creates a sour taste. The poetry workshop, however, has been four days of cerebral delight. Poetry by immersion. They read each otherâs work in the morning, eat lunch outside, attend lectures in the afternoon, work on their own material, and come together at night for faculty readings. Breakfast and lunch are provided â no grocery or preparation â as if Aimee is a child instead of a mother. The experience has been heavenly and Aimeeâs creative voice flooded in the second day as if a levy had broken. Her hunger for words cannot be satiated.
âRonnie, I would have liked to have heard you read.â
He shook his head, mouth pursed. âNope. Too soon. I donât show early drafts.â
A toddlerâs shrill scream pierces the air. The table, as one, turns to look at the red-haired fiction writer from Toronto with a child sitting on her hip. Her parents lived nearby, sheâd said on the first day, thus her reason for choosing this conference, and her husband and son had come with her to visit. Aimeeâs breasts tingle in physical response to the child so close in age to her own Amelia, although she hadnât nursed either of her girls for very long. Sheâd tried, but the experiment ended in bleeding nipples for her and frustration for the hungry child.
Ronnie shakes his head. âWhyâd she bring a kid here? Total downer. This is like our closing ceremonies.â
Aimee smiles, but the toddlerâs cry has affected her and Aimee is suddenly aware of the empty space where her family belongs.
âDonât, Ronnie,â she says. âRed is educating the next generation of writers. She shouldnât be hassled for bringing her child.â Her statement, offered in mild reproof, rings true. An ideal world of art and motherhood blending. She wants to be that woman whose writing is supported by family. A woman whose daughters will admire her as a writer, not remember a mom passion-starved like an
anorexic model.âWriting is lonely work, the words pulled
out and then chipped away to reveal brutal honesty.â Ronnie leans forward, dark eyes shining with emotion. âSheâs over there as if this was a vacation. I guess they have their own trust fund.â
âIâm jealous of her too,â Aimee said. Heat rises in his face. âIâd like to see how
she coped with growing up gay in a Korean family.â
âI donât know.â Aimee swallows. âI just think weâre all âtrying to scrape by with a little grace and dignity.ââ
âAnnie Lamott,â he says, identifying the quoteâs author. âI love her.â
âMe too.â Her heart hurts, breaking open with new awareness. Sheâd been feeling like Cinderella, escaping a life of diapers and bottles, but other writers had their own struggles. His dark hands swallow hers, cradling her small white ones. âPain calls to pain.â
The phone, and all it signifies, presses on Aimee. She excuses herself and walks across the lawn for privacy. Three missed calls. HOME, her phone identifies. The first ring doesnât finish before his voice is in her ear.
âWhen are you coming home?ââWe finished the reading and havenât even
made it to the reception yet.â She swallows after the lie. âThereâs a party tonight that I was thinking aboutââ
âMommy? Mommy? Are you going to read to us tonight?â
A picture of her sweet girls, teeth brushed, nightgowns on, snuggled under blankets with their lovies, the smell when she buries her nose into their hair right at the crown, fills her mind. She looks at her watch again. At least a three hour drive. Sheâd have to leave now, ten minutes ago even, to be there.
âShe wanted to talk to you.â Bill has taken back the phone. âWe miss you.â
Guilt makes her stomach cramp. She sees Susan, the workshop leader, approaching the group. Invisible hands pull her in two directions.
46
âYes,â she says. âYes, Iâm coming. Iâm leaving this very second.â
She walks over to the poets, only to say goodbye, but Susan speaks.
âIâm so proud of you all; good work this past week.â Susan hands marked papers to the poets, but holds Aimeeâs against her chest. âAimee, I noticed you took out the line about the âstrange, hissing quack melding with the womanâs cry of greeting.â Iâm glad. I found it distracting.â
âThank you for this week.â Aimee says. âI needed a chance to be away, to talk with adults.â She tries not to trip over her words, to hide the admiration she feels for Susan, this poet in a red blouse who, before this weekend, was only a name in literary journals.
Susan nods toward the refreshment table. âWalk with me, Aimee.â
âIâve got to go soon,â Aimee says, slipping the paper into her purse. As she does, she sees a flash of familiar black hair far away in the parking lot. But, Bill wasnât here. Sheâd just talked to him on the phone. Aimee shakes her head and follows Susan.
More treats have been added to the table: roasted red peppers dripping with olive oil, a shrimp ring, grilled cheese sandwiches cut in quarters, and chocolate-covered strawberries. Susan spears a slice of goat cheese with a toothpick and adds crackers to her plate.
âYour poems grapple with emotions, Aimee, and the gut-level hunger for freedom rips through.â
Aimee swallows. âNot on purpose.â âMy son is thirteen now.â Susanâs nose is
hooked like a bird of prey. âI remember what it was like.â
A laugh sounds nearby. Aimee looks for Bill, but too many people are moving, as if they are on a spinning carousel and she sees only blurred images.
âI havenât done much writing since I had my daughters.â Aimee avoids Susanâs face, fearing condescension. âShort-lived career.â
Aimee discovered writing in high school. Her teacher had insisted that everyone could write poetry. Mrs. Blumsky had nodded
encouragement with such verve that her permed hair jiggled like an echo. Webs, charts, and brainstorming exercises before they were allowed to put pen to paper. For Aimee, excitement built as she moved phrases, selected images, found details that, together, became more than a sum of their parts. Each poem became a puzzle; the struggle for words, to communicate, and then the final draft an emotional pay-off. In college she met other students who wrote poetry, who knew what it was to become a magnifying glass and to sweat over each syllable.
âDid you know that becoming a mother physically changes your brain? Itâs hard to get that creative focus back.â Susan selects a sardine with a toothpick. âPicasso had a Blue Period and a Rose Period. My poems are pre-child and post-child.â
Aimee feels something inside of her, a possibility trying to birth itself in her chest. Not to return to the way she was before, but to become something new. To the left she sees a three-year-old with blond curls duck behind a group of fiction writers. Aimee leans away for a better view, wanting her daughter.
âWe normally have a party in a hotel room to finish off the conference. Are you staying?â
âUm.â Aimee steps back. She doesnât see anyone with black hair or a little girl. âIâm not sure.â
It seems impossible, but an hour has passed since sheâd said she was leaving.
A champagne cork pops. Bubbles rise in the air from a sweet mist. Aimee sees the faces of Victoria and Amelia in the bubbles, round baby faces smiling in iridescent splendor. The bubbles float up and away. Aimee reaches out her hand to catch one and it collapses with a soft pip, leaving a wet circle on her palm like the imprint of a childâs moist mouth.
Susan tilts her head. âIâd like to see you submit âOne-Legged Ducksâ to literary journals. I jotted down the ones I thought might be a good fit on that copy.â She gestures at the pages sticking out of Aimeeâs purse.
Aimee wants to ask if she sees the bubbles. Instead, she says, âThank you,â and walks back
47
toward the poetry table. From here she can see the periphery of the party and there, just like she knew she would, she sees Bill standing there holding Victoriaâs hand while Amelia clings to his leg. She can invite him in, to her poetry conference. Her new friends can meet her children, maybe say how cute they are, and Bill will take over the discussion of poetry mechanics. And then Victoria, 3-year-old Victoria, will need to go potty and Aimee will leave the talk of enjambment and structure. She will dig in her oversized purse and pull out not another wine bottle, but a sippy cup with juice.
Bill and the girls shimmer as light hits their undulating bubble edges and makes a rainbow on the grass.
Pop.âAimee?â Toni is looking at her as if this is
not the first time sheâs called her name. âAre you coming to the party tonight?â
She wonât make it home for bedtime anyway. Her purse vibrates again. She could tell him she changed her mind, sheâd be late. She could say that she has left, but is stuck in traffic. They would know. He must already. Otherwise, he wouldnât be calling to check. Aimee glances around the reception, notes the full-bodied sun sinking, her teal-colored cloth sparkling in the fading light, make believe artist dress. Aimee feels the possibility inside of her, stretching wings underneath her skin. She embraces this power inside her, of being a strong enough gravitational force to bring the two worlds of motherhood and poetry close enough for overlap. Fusion.
âNo,â she says. âI need to get home.â Her purse strap is thick on her thin shoulder, the weight of Susanâs critique digging into her skin. There is urgency now, a need to get home, to touch her children. To, maybe, touch her husband. She walks away, toward her parked car.
âHey,â calls Ronnie. âKeep in touch, right?âShe waves a hand in response. On the way home, before she hits I-95,
Aimee pulls over to the side of the road. She reaches for a napkin and pen and begins scribbling.
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Her mind crackedthe night snakes burned.Releasing grey smoke to color the sky,darken the clouds.
Her sight tilted,like stepping off a curve.Stumbling,she slipped,not able to catchher fall.Thoughts and voices rising up.
On the ground we lit snakes.Freeing them from charcoal cage, growing long streams of ashy scales.Sulfur scented serpents slithering.I wanted to touch one,to hold him close.And as I stroked softly, his long grey body cracked,disintegratinginto dust.He tilted too and fell.
Heather M. Browne
Burning Snakes
49
P.K. Lauren
That was the summer I sold clean slates. Jobs trickled in through word of mouth and referrals, leads passed down from my few real-estate agent friends and their even fewer in-escrow homes.
Move-out cleans were where the real money was. Something about people moving away, about new inhabitants moving in, required a special kind of clean. An erasure. In this way I think maybe homes and lovers are not so different. Personal. Territories of sorts. Both pretend undiscovered, virgin states, however illogical the illusion may be.
Proximity landed me the Metzger referral. My roommate at the time, Stephen, moonlighted as a property manager for various vacation rental properties in northern Arizona. I walked in the front door one evening at dinner time and he tossed the job in my lap.
âJust signed a new contract. Interested in doing the clean?â He pulled a few staccato drags on his joint, holding them in as he stirred a wildly creative pozole concoction on the stove. The smell of cilantro and lime mingled with the sweet skunk as he exhaled.
âHell yeah.â * * *The day I went out for the bid I drove 25 miles
from Flagstaff across blustery I-40 to the remote community of Parks. There was no town to speak of, just a gas station, fire house, school and half a dozen residential roads filled with sprawling ranch homes and even larger lots.
The Metzger residence was located some five more miles past the freeway off-ramp, down a dirt and gravel dead-end. The red slatted façade was ringed with outbuildings and chain link. The gate was open, but as I rolled through I could see the No Trespassing and Private Property signs layered upon the fencing like metal fish scales, several of each as if the point wasnât adequately
expressed with one. J.T. Metzger sat on the front porch, jilting slowly back and forward in a rocker, watching me as I killed the engine and approached. A rolled cigarette became visible between his teeth.
Metzgerâs handshake was paper over thin wooden planks. His eyes were hard and splintery too, nearly indistinguishable from pupils. His facial skin sagged at the chin and neck but stretched taut over a bald forehead imprinted by constant 10-gallon cover. The handshake went on a little too long. So did his eye-contact. I broke it and looked down. I could see his fingers as they lowered were grey towards the tips, drier and darker there from decades of nicotine.
âStephen says youâre good.âI looked up and assumed my sales pitch smile,
âWell, I do my best.â âYou should know I already have another bid.âHardball always did get my head hot.
Discomfort momentarily forgotten, I leaned my hand on my hip and pulled a pad and pen from my back pocket. Another bid my ass. If he was in any way happy with it he wouldnât have called me here. I smiled wider.
âNo problem at all. Why donât you tell me what you need done and weâll see if we canât get you an estimate youâre pleased with.â
J.T. mirrored my lifted eyebrow and opened the front door, motioning for me to enter. The smell of stale tobacco burn filled my lungs and I fought back a cough. It wasnât the time to offend. It must have been about mid-July and I was flat broke. No way was I losing this job, even if it would be a difficult one. Some evidence was harder to lift than others. Odors were the worst.
He led me through the house which was a linoleum-wrapped, animal-corpse adorned monstrosity. The blinds need cleaned, all the triple-
Metzger Haus
50
pane windows too, probably need a pumice for the toilet bowls, everything dusted, vacuumed, mopped, walls washed, stove needs a deep-cleanâlots of fat build-up there... In each room he rattled a laundry list of tasks, explaining that he intended to use the place as a vacation rental once it was cleaned. J.T. Metzger was hitting the road. Said he was done with Arizona.
My sheet had notes on both sides. I began to get a little sticky, perspiration adding to the heavy dark inside the house, inside my chest. I hadnât tallied it all up but I could tell just from the first few items that this was going to be a number that even I would balk to utter.
âCan you shampoo carpets, too?âI swallowed hard. âSure, that will cost quite
a bit extra though.â The last time I cleaned carpets I charged $75 per room. J.T. had two heavily stained, large, oddly cut carpeted rooms. He dismissed my disclaimer with a flippant hand.
âSo whatâs your price?â His smile was a dare. He stood looking at me as I ran the numbers on my paper and then in my head.
Mouth flat as a floorboard, eyes steady, I took a slow breath. âFour hundred twenty five.â Any lower and I may as well have murdered myself with a pumice stone. Or maybe the residual tar in the air wouldâve done it. I took the gamble. This time it wasnât me to break eye contact.
J.T. scanned me up and down. He started to smile again. âShake on it?â
The sun was fully detached and rising from the jagged Flagstaff horizon by the time I got to the Metzger residence on the day of the clean. I pulled around back, coming to a stop in front of what looked like an industrial tumbling composter. My ride sandwiched nicely between Metzgerâs F350 and one of the three sheds that spotted the lot. His truck was hot and running as I sidled up to it. Just as well. I preferred to work with clients absent. There was something off-putting about being watched.
Vacuum in one hand, Rug Doctor in the other, I shuffled my way to the back door and
knocked with a free foot. J.T. swung open the door and pushed out the screen to let me through. I dragged in the cleaning implements in after me as he walked back to the kitchen. He began calling out to me in the mudroom as soon as he heard the screen shut.
âIâm leaving some food here if you want it. Otherwise toss it.â
I came through the wood paneled hall into the dining room and kitchen. I scanned the counters and saw one was full: half-empty orange juice, cardboard milk carton with the mouth unfolded and gaping, a few boxes of cereal, Ziploc full of grated cheese, various condiments. I didnât want any of those things. Neither did I want to bother hauling them in the back of my Jeep to a dumpster.
âOh. Thank you, thatâs thoughtful.â It wasnât worth making a point of contention.
âHereâs some change too. Can you get stamps and mail my last utility checks?â
This was worth speaking up. Apparently J.T. was under the impression he had purchased a personal assistant. I didnât quote him for this shit. But as I opened my mouth to protest, I stopped and looked at him. His eyes were fixed on me but his fingers were furiously at work, rolling cigarette upon cigarette on the dining room table. His hands were a blur. The wood was covered with torn bits of rolling leaf, scattered tobacco and filters. A half-eaten bowl of bran flakes accompanied a coffee mug in front of his cigarette tailings. Most of the milk had sogged into the cereal, but I could see what little remained unabsorbed as it sloshed in the mire with the motion of the table. Still J.T. rolled and rolled, waiting for my answer. He didnât watch what he was doing. He only watched me.
âNo problem.â I smiled as genuinely as possible. Somehow I just couldnât bring myself to be assertive with him. Something in his unblinking eyes, his dark doll pupils staring me down in the poorly lit room. If I was accommodating, he would finish licking those papers, rolling those leaves, suck down his coffee and cereal, and hit the road. His car was running and ready. In that one moment,
51
I would do anything to facilitate that turn of events.
âThat box there, thatâs the good silver. I want you to set the table up nice like itâs for dinner before you leave.â There was no inflection to indicate that this was a request. I shifted my weight. My legs felt stiff, my back rigid. My palms sweat inside my pockets.
âOkay. Thatâll look really lovely. I even know how to do fancy napkin folds.â
J.T. nodded once and began gathering up the mound of smokes he had rolled onto the table. He put them all into a Ziploc and stood up from the table. âWell. Best be off then.â
âDrive safe, wherever youâre going first.â I began walking with him to the back door. âMontana. Then, who knows?â He smiled for the first time that morning, a wide grin that seemed to more evenly distribute his facial skin. Just as he was stepping through the threshold he turned again to me, the tight expression still fixed on his face. He leaned on one side of the door jamb and shook the bag of cigs at me. âYouâre pretty.â
Adrenaline made my mouth bitter. I put on my best flattered, shy face. âWell, thank you! Thatâs awfully sweet to say!â I wasnât able to stop the raising tone. The last word was almost a squeak. I glued my expression steady and counted the seconds it took Metzger to turn and walk to his car. One⌠two⌠three⌠four⌠five⌠six...
Seven. He stepped into the extended cab and closed the door, already chewing on a cigarette as he kicked the truck in reverse. One eyebrow cocked as he began to roll down the drive and shouted out the window. âHave fun.â
I stayed on the back stoop and waved until he pulled out of sight. I wanted to be sure.
* * *Once back inside I locked the doors
and cranked Mars Volta into my earbuds. I decided to start with the kitchen. I began to relax. Kitchens give an immediate sense of accomplishment once cleanedâitâs the same way in my own home. I almost enjoy cleaning kitchens because there is something
so comforting about pristine countertops, a glistening stove, no sign of a single soiled dish. An empty canvas waiting for something delicious.
First to go was the proffered food. J.T. left a coffer of cleaning supplies for prospective renters. I took the liberty to open up one of the boxes of 50-gallon Hefty bags and fill it with the unwanted counter buffet. The half-eaten raisin bran sludge still sat on the table. Into the bag with that too. Fucking slob. I was feeling a little better already, more confident. Wailing guitar riffs and syncopated drum rhythms filled the inside of my head. I bounced a little with it. I cursed Metzger out loud to the empty house, even timed it along with the music. âFucking Honkey. Honkey Ass Slob. Dickwad!â Several dishes littered the remaining countertops. Into the dishwasher with those. Once I had the surfaces clear, I began my crop dusting ritual. 409 in a thick layer over all the counters, front of fridge and appliances. Soft Scrub for the sinks. Degreaser for the oven and stove.
Cleaning professionally is all about efficiency. Set chemicals to pillage the crust while you do something else. I did just that, launching an attack on the inside of the fridge in the meantime. From the first shelf I was forced to hold my breath. There was a smell there, perhaps sourced by the globs of jam and chocolate and onion skins as well as other undistinguishable substances. It was a sweet, cloying odor. I didnât even mind inhaling the antibacterial spray fumes as I covered the soiled white plastic over and over and over.
I began to get nervous after 45 minutes of scouring the fridge. Perhaps the chemicals I sprayed on the rest of the kitchen had eaten through not only the filth, but the Formica too. I checked the counters, half expecting them to squish under my probing finger. No give, no discoloration. I went back to the refrigerator. At least by this point the top part was clean. At least the smell was less present in the air; though it still clung in my nasal cavity I closed my mouth and exhaled sharply several times.
I opened the freezer and whatever odor
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molecules I had dislodged were immediately replaced by something far more foul. I got down onto my knees to have a look at it; there was something in there. I plucked at it with a paper-towel shielded pointer and thumb. It wasâŚwas it? I sat down on my heels with a thump.
It was human hair.For a moment I could only stare at it, my
eyes getting wider, then squinting, then getting wider still. My heart played kick-drum on my ribs. Long, black, curly hairs. Lots of them. Clumps. I stretched one to full length. It was at least a 12 inches long. There was no doubt it was human. It surely was not from Metzgerâs bald head.
I sat on the gritty, moist, laminate floor in front of the fridge for an entire song. My headphones fell silent between tracks and I took a deep breath, wrapping my hand three times in paper towels. With an inhale trapped in my throat, I quickly swept my hand-swab around the interior of the freezer. Into the Hefty with that too.
* * *Two hours later, fat disintegrated from the
oven, images of hair fading, I made my way into the master bedroom. Every wall was covered with lacquered wood paneling. It was the only real wood in the house as far as I could tell. As such, I would need to oil and dust it all thoroughly. Carpet to ceilings. Cobwebs rounded out the corners and lit up grey where the windows allowed the sun to peek through.
My scanning vision stopped for a moment. Rising up into the ceiling like an empty elevator shaft was a gigantic skylight. Each one of its sides was wide and tall, much larger than a standard door. I squinted. One of the panels had a row of padlocks down its right side. Three of them. There were no spider webs anywhere in the skylight.
I pondered the logistics of such an inaccessible storage space for a few moments. And why lock it? I shook my head as if the motion could remove the thoughts. I focused back to the task at hand. First things first.
Chemicals for the flooring. I made a thorough pass over the room with a Resolve bottle, marveling at the shapes and varying shades of tarnishes. Dark brown, greens, charcoals ranging from dime to fist-sized in diameter smattered the carpeting. I used half the spray treatment in one go.
Another hour down, attached bathroom spotless and finally onto the excessive dusting. Start at one corner and work in diagonal lines. I came to the bed and remembered I needed to wash the bedding. Quickly stripping the sheets, I walked back to the laundry room that was little more than an oversized pantry off the kitchen. I tossed the bedclothes into the washer and set the temp as high as it would go. A glance around the closest shelves and not a single detergent bottle to be found. I started digging deeper. On the side of the dryer, stacked against the wall, were two rows of 10-gallon plastic tubs. In the shadows I could make out just a few labels. Ammonia. Sodium Hydroxide. Lye. The last two made me stand up straight. Maybe the hot water would be enough to clean the sheets. They had looked pretty unblemished to begin with.
Back in the bedroom I went straight to the bedside tables, sliding each one from the wall to allow the vacuum to pass behind. I put my back into it and gave the bed a similar treatment. A thick runner of hair lined the baseboards. I remembered the panting Labrador in the back seat of Metzgerâs king cab. This fur matched.
With a healthy stream of lemon oil, I soaked my rag and got wiping. The tops and sides, all the grooves and features of the battered nightstands shone up like Pepsi-soaked pennies. I opened the drawer to give the inside a pass-through. It wasnât empty. At first all I saw was a tri-fold pamphlet. I lifted it out of the drawer before I saw what the heading read. Erectile Dysfunction: What You Should Know. My lips pinched, my nose scrunched, a little grunt that closely resembled âickâ escaped me.
I went to toss the brochure towards my trash bag against the wall and stopped. There was more. Something bright pink in the drawer pulled at my periphery. My hand tightened on
53
the pamphlet. I stood blinking at the florescent cornucopia, the paper in my hand strangled and forgotten in my grip.
Monstrously long, girthy, silicone dongs. Next to the pink was a purple too. They nestled atop a coil of rawhide straps. Suddenly my eyes went to the headboard. Matching leather earth tones coiled around the leftmost corner. I must have overlooked them, or perhaps I only subconsciously catalogued them before. The leather almost blended in with the wood.
âNo fucking way. No.â I unwrapped the headboard binds and dropped them into the nightstand along with the reading material.
Stephen referred me this job. Stephen was J.T.âs new property manager. Stephen could clean the sex drawer. Dildos and choke-straps were Stephenâs jurisdiction.
âFuck no.â I said it once more to the empty room, kicking the drawer closed.
* * *By the time I reached the last section of the
house, the afternoon had taken a nose-dive into full-dark. I turned all the lights on in the house and pulled the blinds shut, even in the rooms I was through with. I had saved the guest room for last, thinking the simplicity of it would afford some solace. After a dust, wiping the walls down, cleaning the window panes, vacuuming and shampooing the carpet I could finally go home. I wanted nothing so much as that. When I got home I could pop a Black Butte, sit on the back porch and let my lungs clear. I had developed a sturdy cough somewhere during the day, no doubt brought on by the combination of several chemicals. Every time I blew my nose I inspected the fallout. It was darker each time; almost black the last tissue I checked.
Dragging my dusting implements, rags, spray bottles, paper towels and vacuum down the tiny hallway between living room and guest room, I paused for a quick wipe of the bookshelf hidden there. The shelves seemed equally blanketed in grey and books. The complete works of Horatio Alger and Louis LâAmour, along with various books on warfare, became
visible as my rag lifted the thick dusty film. Of course. Metzger was just one big limp-dicked cowboy clichĂŠ with a military background. That padlocked room up in his skylightâit was the perfect place to stash his victims. And thatâs what was up with all that hair in the freezer. He kept the last oneâs head in there until he got sick of it. Then he threw it in that huge barrel composter in the back yard. Thatâs where the sodium hydroxide and lye came in.
It all made sense. I was completely high on aerosol cleaning products.
* * *I sighed. Just an hour or two more. Then
cold porter in a hot shower would wipe the slate clean. Few things are more satisfying than cold beer while bathing. Steam and condensation are happy twins. I fixed the pending reward firmly in my mind and mustered my final wind.
Once inside the tiny room, the last vestige of filth, my tired hands lost their grip on the cleaning supplies. Lemon oil and paper towels falling with a solid thud. For the sake of continuity I opened my right hand and let the other bottles tumble on purpose. I thought briefly about picking up something and throwing it intentionally. It seemed like it might be soothing. But then it struck me; the sound of impact on one side was different. I flexed my foot and thumped my heel on the carpet to verify. Sure enough, in the area directly to my right, the floor was hollow. No doubt about it.
The low thrumming section of the floor abutted a closet with sliding mirror doors. Windex could wait. I slid the doors open and thunked the floor inside with a heel for good measure. It was hollow too. I leaned my top half inside and began knocking my way around the wall panels. Duck⌠Duck⌠Goose.
I pushed on the closet wall furthest left and it flexed. I could see the edge bend up under the pressure. A gap appeared between solid wall and what now seemed to be nothing more than painted plywood. One good pry with a screwdriver and I could pop that left wall right off. I could. I stood there for minutes on end, leaning on the corner of the closet and staring
54
at the trick wall. I could open it. My IPod battery had died hours prior. There was only a ringing in my ears to fill the empty room.
I could have opened that hollow room. But there are so many good reasons to have hollow walls and floors inside a house. I was sure there were. And my imagination is far too active. Always has been. There were good reasons, sound ones that didnât involve secret burial plots. Rationales that would make decades of bones under the floorboards seem ridiculous. Still, I took a quick walk into the kitchen. I staged a flashlight search party. It was all for show. I only looked in one cupboard before giving up. After all, it was probably nothing. That was logical.
My mouth filled up with a familiar bitter taste when I got back into the room. Despite my solid logic I was running on nothing but fumes and hormones and fear. I cleaned that guest room in 30 minutes flat. Including the time it took to shampoo the carpet.
Just as I was turning to leave the space, my index finger poised to flick the lights off, I looked up. I donât know why I looked up, but I did. There on the ceiling, above the dingy day bed, were footprints. Grey, sporadic, human footprints. On the ceiling. I could see all the little toes. I started laughing. I couldnât help it. It was the sort of laugh that is more hysteria than humor. I shook with it. I didnât even try to figure it out. I couldnât. I wonât.
* * *Off with the lights. Out with the vacuum.
Out with the Rug Doctor. Lock the back door behind. Out with me, down the dead-end, close the gate, peel out the gravel, merge onto the interstate. My Jeepâs speedometer stopped at 80 MPH but my foot on the gas pedal kept going. The weather stripping around the windows had long since crumbled, allowing gusts of wind to trespass between metal and glass. Again and again the air pushed through the tiny gaps. Again and again, and every burst sounded just like a scream.
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Working as a cashierwhile being blackteaches you a few things,but none so important as this:people assume youâve done nothingwith your life because of the job you have.My saving grace is my wit.But before I can speak, Imust be spoken to.I must be acknowledged as an equal. Without my Heidegger,Milton, Ellison, Aristotle,Flaubert, Faulkner, and Morrison,I would have no shield,being merely a black body thoughtto have no brain, and thus a lesser soul.
No customer with any real money in their pocket,of any color or creed, gives the benefit of the doubt that someone like me might be cultured,might have a sensitivity to mattersof a higher aesthetic,might be someone a little bit more complicated,without those books either being in my hands,or constantly near the register.
And so a lesson I learned quite early as a childaids me well in presenting my humanityto the masses that I must accommodate: To be an intellectual, I must carry the articles of an intellectual,and then and only then can I astound, as nappy hairand dark black skin,almond eyes, and full lips,rightfully become the opulent embodimentof a fervent autodidacticismand unconquerable will.
Denzel Scott
Underemployed While Being a Black American
56
Figures, Cathedral, Nicaragua, 88
Harry Wilson
57
Unruffled ducks sun themselves Serene on the pier at high tideWhile submerged white bags float byâLethal as swarming jellyfish Death traps emptied of whateverHuman treasure, now just molted dreamsBobbing in the currentâs ebb and flowAs daffodils on the bank nod throughBroken tines of an umbrellaWhile a white heron nests in rubbishCaught in an isle of golden reedsAnd seagulls sort the rest.
When
Did we learn how to throw away things? Just little things at first: Bones,Pottery shards, shiny beads and worlds,Acres of clean air, you and yours foreverDrowning together in rivers Of undrinkable detritusâWatching wings over the canal, I canât tell If the salt stinging my eyes belongsTo sea-laced waters or originates with me.Perhaps that is why we are always losing With so much having, I forget all thisSalt was never mine, but Ours to cry.
River Canal in Fukuoka
Sarah Page
58
Sarah Page
Condemning Colors in Pitch Pines Park
Pink ribbons twist around the limbs of those still waiting to dieWhile sweet-scented pine needles gleam green as innocence,Thin spires scattered few and far between deciduous silhouettes.
A sign lends slaughter an air of authority, makes each clearing a victory: Pitch Pines Park shall be reclaimed from decades of hardwood invaders Who now blithely flaunt the spectrumâs blaze on the edge of a breeze.
Perhaps the tree sparks are not so bright, but grey-laden skies frameEach October leaf like the settings for a hundred thousand jewelsAs if citrine, amber and garnet were the facets of a fading wing.
Not a single water drop has stripped the branches, yet as I tread deeperInto groves of many-hued foliage, I count the signs of scouring:Oaks and maples have all been hewn down with deliberate strokes.
Someone must splinter; the hardwoods shade out the evergreens,Their broad leaves smothering young cones on the forest floorBut I wonder if there can be no co-existence? Itâs all too human.
The forest wonât sound the same again next autumn:Crunch of blanketing gold, scarlet flutter and sighâexhaled.No eyes will ever breathe the sap and syllable of these sentences.
I canât accept this revel of colors will never burnish another fallThat already, I am walking among the chroma of ghosts Who have lost their time to be here, like tears before rain.
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we are stars driving through night sipping breath like orange crush something sweet & cold is rushing into us, short lines short lived glorious dust
Rose Maria Woodson
Fetched
60
Finally I have found work. Inside an oyster. I put a spin on things, little pings that piss the mess out of you, like being one car behind the car that takes the last parking spot, paper cuts, cheap ass garbage bags that break when you overstuff them, leaving you in a carpet of cartons and egg shells. And worse. I wrap silk around shit like that, over and over again until it becomes. Pearls. All the rage now. Then, again. Rage is all the rage now. The mollusk across the way keeps rain in her heart. Sheâs all piss and purrs these days. But then, she sleeps with a storm. Keeps spinning apologies around his sorry ass, waiting for some shiny alchemy to gloss over his dross. Sheâs swimming in a dry river bed, dreaming strawberries, eating dust. Canât get home like that. I listen over coffee, serve up blueberry muffins and emotional helium. What can you do, AlfredoâŚwhat can you do? There are nights I ride the hoot of an owl even though there are no owls here. I hear âwhoâ swooshing through the current and I jump on, take hold of wings not my own and hold dear. Now I know what you knew all along, Alfredo: I had to lift one brick of a foot after the other, one after the other. Pave my own road out of Dodge. Leave the only fireflies Iâve ever known. Thatâs oxygen- mask- over- your- snout scary. Scarier still when the road fizzles in still waters. The pinwheels in my heart stopped that night. Any knights in white armor were rust stilled. Thatâs when I learned to knot my own darkness. Arch my life like hyperbole. And swing. Back and forth. Back and forth. I was a flee on a trapeze, looking for a wayâŚand just when I was about to unclench my rope-burned self, I saw them, a pod of photons lighting the brink. I hitched a ride on the mĂĽngata. The rest is history. Dear Alfredo, thank you for noting the darkness. Thank you for being. My trellis. At last I am my own magic bean.
Love
Rose Maria WoodsonDear Alfredo
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\ la¡cu¡na \Words were always hard for me. Though
my mother said at three months old I spoke a solid, sharp, âgood,â I didnât speak again for months. In fact, I didnât say another word properly for years.
I saw this nice, old man named Dr. Borghie for my speech impediment. We mostly played games, while I tried to pronounce words like noon and nook, and then later, harder words like rock and shell. I was good at the games, but the words just wouldnât quite shape in my mouth.
It didnât bother me much. When people couldnât understand me, I made up my own language. I imagined it was a bit like Hebrew. Iâm not sure why I was obsessed with Hebrew; I wasnât Jewish nor were any of my friends. But Hebrew seemed magical, and once an idea stuck inside me it never left.
Iâd sing songs in my own language and cry when my mother couldnât sing along. I thought I had found a secret language. I had words that went unspoken in English. Mine was a language of intuition, of emotion, of whooping laughs, and gesticulations.
I couldnât say most words at first. I loved bees, and when I pretended to be one I went around saying âb, b, b, b,â because I couldnât go âzzzzzâ. My name: Michelle, was Ma-hell, a name which gave many parents pause. âMa-hell?â theyâd repeat, their eyebrows climbing into their hairline. A lot of words were âbahâ because I could make that sound. Table? Bah. Chocolate? Bah. My blankets I carried around everywhere with me? Also bah, although that
name stuck even after I could say blanket.I couldnât say beach, although I loved it and
always wanted to go on the weekends. My favorite beach was Laguna. But that
word was hard for me. I liked Laguna because there were rocks and tide pools with all sorts of magical creatures like spiny sea urchins and swollen sea stars.
But I couldnât say Laguna. The âlâ the âgâ even the ânâ were too hard. It was the word I labored over the most, as I tried to convince my parents that we needed to go to Laguna again this weekend.
Fitting, that Lagunaâs name is one small letter away from another of my favorite words. Change the hard âgâ to a smooth âcâ and you get lacuna: a lexical gap. A missing word in a language.
When I grew frustrated with trying to pronounce a word, sometimes Iâd just say, bah, bah, bah. Bah? My tongue couldnât tap my teeth properly or curl and bend enough to say beach or ocean.
And as I struggled to say the words right, I kept a list of missing words, of lacunas I found particularly intriguing.
\ tree-eat¡ing \I first learned of this lacuna when I read an
article about Vashon Island, in my beloved Pacific ocean, in Washington, over 1,000 miles north from my home. There was a tree here. In the woods close to the Vashon highway, someone left a childrenâs bicycle chained to this tree. As the tree grew, its hard lignin wrapped around the rusting metal. And as the tree lost
Michelle Donahue
There Are All Sorts of Holes
62
and gained layers, it began to eat the bike. The tree lifted it upwards and the bike flew higher. Now, if you walked through the woods of Vashon you could find this tree and look up at the rusted bike.
The news said, in 1954, a boy named Don Puz, left his bike to the devouring-tree. His house had burned and someone, nameless now, donated this too small bike to the family as a consolation present.
There is no consolation when your home burns. Don left the bike chained to the tree. Children understand the art of losing things.
There is no word for tree eating. A tree that refused to be confined and devoured anything around it.
The opposite word exists: dendrophagy, eating trees.
In El Oriente, the Ecuadorian rainforest, I witnessed dendrophagy. I walked through the dark cast by thick, buttressed trees and then came to a clearing. I was a young thing, barely nineteen, and was studying abroad.
âLook,â my guide said, as he took a knife to a tree and peeled back the bark. Brown ants swarmed beneath that skin of bark.
âLemon ants,â the guide said. He scooped one off and ate it. âTangy,â he said.
This was symbiosis. The tree, Duroia hirsute, gave the ants a home. The lemon ants produced formic acid to protect their tree from interspecific competition, or competition against other species. The ants crawled into other trees, ate the leaves and spat out this acid. Two hydrogen, two oxygen, a carbon, an alcohol, a ketone. So simple, yet it ate through the trees and killed them. All trees except the Duroia hirsuta. The natives called these clearings the Devilâs Garden because they believed malignant spirits dwelled there. But it was just an insect, an acid that ate trees.
Eating trees. I wondered about the tree in Washington that eats. Tree eating. Perhaps it was too rare for a name.
I was eaten by a tree once. My father and I hiked to the Bouli tree in
Sequoia National Park. My mother and sister were tired, but I felt antsy; I never could stand still for long.
When Dad and I pulled up to the trail, we were the only car in the parking lot. The trail was up-hill the whole way. I was a young twenty-something and my lungs were used to the smog of the Inland Empire, so I could conquer the altitude and keep walking. My father needed breaks; when we stopped I felt that wonderful loneliness of nature. So many people flocked to Yosemite that few found their way to Sequoia and fewer still to the Bouli tree trail. General Sherman, the largest tree in the world, pulled people toward him, so that Bouli was wonderfully, tragically, left undiscovered.
We walked in the hour before sunset. Not dark, but soft light. We followed the sign that pointed toward Bouli and came to a plaque. The Bouli tree. The only great redwood left in this area when the trees were cleared not long enough ago. Left because Bouli was too large to be cut down. Or too beautiful. Maybe even the loggers could see this.
âWhere is he?â I asked my Dad.Even the new trees were large and thick
now, but through a sliver of space I saw him, seemingly taller and more beautiful than Sherman ever could be. There. Bouli was right in front of me. We walked the path and got right up to him. Touched his red flesh. You canât do this to Sherman; there are fences. I crawled right into Bouli. A fire had burnt a piece of him open leaving a gaping fire scar. It was charred black inside. I touched the inside of him and felt him wrapped around me.
Trees eating. It felt like night inside of him.
\ lâa¡ppel du vi¡de \I was the first to jump from the cliffs of
BartolemĂŠ Island in the Galapagos. I was somewhere very close to the equator, high up on the center of the earth. The guys in our group started making snide remarks about girls, because Julia was too afraid to jump off. The guys were talking a lot because they were scared, too. We were a small group of biology students studying on the GalĂĄpagos and there werenât many guys. So they stuck together, mostly.
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I had always been drawn to high places. I liked heights or else I liked that twinge of my stomach I felt when I was high. And I liked falling. I really liked falling. That swift rush of air and the precious seconds of weightlessness.
In French, lâappel du vide describes the instinctive desire to jump from high places. When I was on a sixteen-hour train from Budapest to Bucharest, I whittled away time in the dining car with a French and Belgian guy. Etienne, the French guy, told me about lâappel du vide on that trip as he sloshed through his fifth Ursus beer of the night.
âI hate heights,â he said. âI donât get it.âI did. Iâd never had the word to describe it
before. I walked to the edge of the cliff and looked
down. Sharp, black volcanic rocks pierced the water to my right. Tomorrow I was twenty. Today was the last day that I could blame stupid acts on my stupid teenage mind. I turned back and looked at the boys, then jumped from the edge. Jumped to the left. The air around me rushed, my stomach shifted and for a moment it felt like flying. I landed in deep water, far from the rocks. As a native Californian I could navigate the Pacific Ocean and its dangers.
I wished the thirty-foot fall had lasted longer, but that water felt good. That equatorial sea turned cold from the arctic Humboldt.
Julia finally did jump. She hit the rocks. Her back was bright pink flesh, blood flowing into the sea. There were sharks in these waters.
I was in search of sharks. After I jumped, I joined the others who were snorkeling around the island. I sprinted to catch them, knowing that this was my best chance to see the hammerhead. Iâd seen the GalĂĄpagos sharks, I even saw a tiger shark, but I wanted to see a hammerhead. They were shy, so I knew I needed to be in front of the pack.
I swam fast, with strong muscles thanks to years of water polo. Water made sense to me and I could move through it quickly. I pushed my muscles until they burned.
And just as I got in front of the pack, just as I was thinking ok you can slow down, I saw him, coming from the depths of the ocean, a white
hammerhead. He looked like a GalĂĄpagos shark until he swung his head around and I saw that long, flatness. His eyes on the side of his strange head opened as if in shock. His mouth opened too. For a moment we just looked at one another, both a little afraid. Then he snapped his head around and dove down deep. I pulled in as much air as my lungs would hold and dove after him. I swam as fast and as deep as I could in chase of the shark.
I swam into that empty darkness.Lâappel du vide literally translates to call of the
void. When I retold this story, no one understood
why I followed the shark and I couldnât explain that inexplicable allure of deep, dark water.
I swam after him until long after my lungs burned.
\ place¡less \I was in the darkness of underground,
waiting for the metro in Barcelona. Night had begun shifting to morning, but I couldnât tell this from the sky.
Iâd met Jonathan ten hours ago in the hostel common room. Iâd just showered and my hair was strange and puffy. I wore clothes that had been worn too many times before, because my mind was too interested in other thingsâGaudiâs sculptures, towering sandcastlesâto worry about laundry.
We stayed out all night in Barcelona. Mostly we just rode the metro. We couldnât settle on one place.
We started with a large group of people from our hostel. We soon lost everyone. This wasnât something I would do normally, but I was two days from turning 21 and I felt invincible. I felt the lure of adventure. I had never been in love. I couldnât be safe or rational because those words didnât exist here. Traveling meant jumping head first into everything.
Anachronistic means out of time, but thereâs no word for out of place. Yet I was so often out of place and this lack of place changed me.
Both Jonathan and I were out of place. He was British and I think that, more than anything, attracted me to him. I had these false ideas about love and romance.
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Later, he would be the first person I had sex with. Iâd meet him in Wimbledon and in the room of a house he rented, I would lean down and kiss him.
Later, he would lie to me. Later we would try to make a long distance relationship work. Weâd meet in the U.S., in Denmark, in Prague. Later he would cheat on me and I would discover this slowly, gradually.
But then we both felt the fearlessness of being homeless. So we jumped far and fast together.
\ yaâa¡bur¡nee \In Prague people burned sugar and let it
drip, caramelized, into absinthe. Jonathan and I drank in Karlovy Lazne, four stories high in Eastern Europeâs largest club. The floors lit up with neon lights as we drank absinthe, cloudy with ice water. It burned our throats.
In Arabic yaâaburnee literally means âyou bury meâ. But it really means I love you. It means I canât live without you, so I hope I die before you and you bury me. Sweet, but also a little selfish.
As Jonathan smiled at me and whispered his magic British speech into my ear, I felt for a word I didnât have. I felt us cracking. He had already cheated on me then. Except, it was more complicated than that. Isnât it always. I had promised I would never take anyone back who lied to me. But I was young, and naĂŻve and I loved him. Or I thought I did.
There are so many levels within love, and yet only one word for it. Weâd walked the levels: up, then down.
That day, we went to Kutna Hora, to the bone church. Long ago, Frantisek Rint, artist and wood carver, took bones from people who died of the bubonic plague. He fashioned their bones into art. Human bones lined the walls of the church. In the center of the main room hung a chandelier with at least one of every bone in the human body. Human skulls became pillars. Strung humerus bones formed garlands. In the front was the Schwarzenberg Family Coat of Arms done, of course, all in bone. Jonathan asked around about who the
Schwarzenberg family was, but no one seemed to know. There was a lot of mystery in the Czech Republic.
I stood near a wall of bones. Long femurs sliced open to reveal the marrow, the hollowness, the star-shaped osteocytes: bone cells. One of the few cells in our body that does not undergo mitosis. Blood and bone; they canât split themselves in two. Osteocytes, housed inside of lacuna connected together, branching and becoming bone.
I feared that I too could not split myself in two. I wanted to inhabit both worlds: his and mine, home and abroad. No matter where I was, I missed somewhere, someone. There was no getting around that.
In Karlovy Lazne with its windows looking out at the Charles Bridge, we drank too much absinthe. So when we started yelling, we had to yell louder. The absinthe came burning from our throats and we couldnât put that fire out. We were on the third floor and music blared and I couldnât even really hear what he was saying. Not until the music stopped and we were smacked with that silent moment of tension (a lacuna) and all I heard was myself saying goodbye.
I didnât know what else to say. Words were always hard for me.
I was lost in the skeletal night of Prague with every cell in my body hurting. Earlier that day I had slammed into Jonathan on Eastern Europeâs longest bobsled track. Every move hurt my bruises and my back. And that wasnât the worst of it.
Yaâaburnee: I love you. You bury me. Even at the time I knew it was melodramatic.
But the emptiness that had burrowed inside me, a feeling past even grief, felt like the ground being poured around me, my body being immersed in earth.
\ tos¡ka \The waves licked my toes that were half-
buried in the sand of Laguna Beach. I was home again after being too long gone (but never long enough). I lived now in Iowa, landlocked, locked so strictly in corn and a
65
culture that felt more foreign to me than any other Iâd known.
I liked the ocean because of the thrill of its beauty coupled with the aching nostalgia I felt whenever I was there. A good sort of sadness, whole and clear, as if the ocean was all of my memories given physical form. The soft hushed in and out of waves. A promise always to return. A promise to leave.
There was no word for this that I knew. In my language or others.
The sun started falling toward the ocean, lighting up the sky like it only could in the polluted air of Southern California. California: the land where you appreciate everything, right down to the pollutants. I thought beautiful sunsets were worth the lung cancer. After all, bad air gave me big lungs, which helped make me a good swimmer. I could see the light side of things here, like I never could in Iowa.
In that middle space where water became land, I thought of that almost spiritual feeling you get from perfect sadness. From breathing but not belonging.
Toska means sadness in Russian. But it means so much more than that. Toska is bone-aching spiritual anguish, sudden and from no known cause, just a wave of it sweeping through you.
Sometimes I felt sad for no reason. I felt out of place, out of my place, like I was groundless. And this wasnât a bad feeling, always. Sometimes it was just a feeling I wanted to crawl inside of and explore.
I loved California, but I was bored here. Too much excitement, yet nothing to explore. I always yearned for a nameless elsewhere with a faceless someone. Sometimes these places had names Barcelona, Ecuador, Prague and sometimes the people had faces. Mostly I just wanted to move, keep moving like a shark.
I watched the waves move in and out as I dug my fingers into that damp sand.
Toska can also be a dull ache, an ungrounded longing, an itchy restlessness, yearning. Toska also describes apathy and boredom. And thereâs little beauty in this sort of monotony.
And here the ocean was, bone-ached, beautiful, and me, a dull ache, bored.
The tide rose. The sun set into the darkening sea.
66
The brittle people perch in dim cafe cornershazy yellow diners, nightclubs frothingour cut paper selves pile onto shelvesscatter and lose track of our home addressesTumblers empty and fill, amber liquid clearcrystal, glass, waxed paperâitâs all passed aroundand forgetting is a little easierthe unopened letter in her desk drawertucked under the dry stamp pads and stale peanutsthe ticket to Moldova, or was it MaldivesMontreal? Est-ce que se serait moins effrayant?shake, ear to the cereal box, two-thirds emptybut before you close the cupboard, just apeek at the jars of bitter cinnamon that mixes with honey so sweetempty spaces filling withvials of vanilla, jasmine, fire yellow knots of saffronnudging towards a breeze that leads outa window overlooking branches bentwith swollen cherriesdouble breasted plums, raspberries something likevelvet thimblesâand you wonderif I pour my hopes into a sugar crumb crustlet the edges burble and gaspat the trickle of strawberry ice creama shivering pink line down its side, what ifitâs exactly what I wanted after all?hits that sweet tooth pop and zingand the living room grays, the telephone,the vanity, the soap dish, the bubblesas your lips hum in technicolor, what ifthe letter begins, âWe are pleased to inform youâŚâor âI havenât forgotten anything,âand she bought two almond biscotti at a sunny cafe in Ville-Marie?what beastly frights lurk behind these gauzy curtainscan only be imagined, only therecould their bite gnash sharperthan the meringue licks sweet
Cellophane Malaise
Kat Lerner
67
The one time he forgets to lock the front door is the first time he comes home to find their house completely torn apart. The first and last time heâll see his wife dead on the kitchen floor. The coffee is still hot in its glass carafe, and the beer is still cold in the fridge, while the television quietly plays local news.
Overwhelming joy brings this man to tears, a new profound happiness that he can already feel. He didnât have to do it himself. It wonât cost him anything. On the floor, a sock remainsânot his, underneath a picture of him and his wife, the glass of the frame shattered.
He calls the police, moves to the fridge, and grabs a drink. He waits on the front porch. The TV hums in the background.
M.G. Wessels
Living for Leaving
68
Remember motherâs hand cupping the nectarine as she cut with a small knife into the sweet-silent flesh.
How I reached for the first pieces of newborn sunshine and swallowed the spilt light greedily, hoping to grow my heart so tender a fruit.
Finnuala Butler
Tenderly
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Finnuala Butler
UntitledWe, steam-paralysed strangers embraced in the column of dawn between two locked doors.
Spoke in light and dark only, never learned each otherâs names.
As such there is nothing of that solace left on my tongue, but still I say, âmorning is breakingâ when I fall in love.
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Evangeline of TĂŠnĂŠrĂŠMatthew Donald Jacob Kelly
âYouâre two blinks away from a whole lot of nothing,â Miss DePasqual sneered before plopping Evangeline Mudd at the metal cafeteria table leaning against the dumpsters in the back of Saint Simeonâs Elementary School. Evangeline knew full well what it meant to be relegated to the janitorsâ table â a Mecca of Lucky One cigarette butts and Styrofoam coffee cups left behind by the schoolâs custodial octogenarians, who convened around it daily to trade jokes about erectile dysfunction and âthe old lady upstairs.â There, for the morning, Evangeline would disappear, hidden from those assembled for the Sixth Grade History Fest Parade, this year to be officiated by Deputy Mayor Stu Trudeau himself.
Participation in the parade was simple enough â students were instructed to come to school dressed as their favorite historical figures. Two years back, Jesus costumes had been banned on account of costly legal proceedings brought by Harriman McQueen, the local bondsman and notary public who independently and unofficially converted to Orthodox Judaism on account of not having anything better to do. But even with Jesus excluded, the event was a grand old time all the same. On the morning of the event, a sea of Escalades parked before the school and unleashed wave after wave of prepubescent Lincolns, Washingtons, Edisons and Cleopatras. However, Evangeline Mudd was not among them. As her own grandmother had said before abandoning the family to take up with a Pentecostalist minister who smelled of whiskey and Vaseline, âIf Evangeline thought straight half the time, sheâd be two-thirds the way to
hell and dragging us all down with herâ The sobriquet was modified over the years through laziness and inexactitude, but the crux of the message remained the same â Evangeline was a strange little girl. True to form, her choice of costumes for the parade made heads turn: she had made the half-mile trek to school on foot dressed in a brown Lycra jumpsuit, gold glitter streaked across the front, holding aloft two humongous tree branches.
âAnd who exactly are you?â DePasqual sneered, eyeing the jagged branches arching over her desk.
âIâm the Tree of TĂŠnĂŠrĂŠ,â came the reply. âWhat in the world is the Tree of TĂŠnĂŠrĂŠ?â
DePasqual barked, rolling her office chair back to clear the spiked acacia leaves.
Annoyed by the question, Evangeline moaned. âThe Tree of TĂŠnĂŠrĂŠ was the loneliest tree in all of history. It stood alone in the Sahara, hundreds of miles from any tree. It was a monument to hope and strength and solitude.â
DePasqual blinked uncontrollably, which happened in only two circumstances, the first being acute panic-induced hyperventilation and the second a physiologic response evoked behind closed doors by Deputy Mayor Trudeau, whose years of roof bolting had honed manual dexterity faculties storied among the townâs backdoor gasbags. Squeezing her eyes shut, DePasqual moaned. âIâll pair you with a Lincoln and you can be the tree he cut down.â
Evangeline shook the branches angrily. âIâm the Tree of TĂŠnĂŠrĂŠ. For years, I was the only tree in a vast stretch of desert but nobody cut
71
me for wood, no camel ate my leaves. I was the symbol of all of life in the desert!â
DePasqual leaned forward and spoke into the branches, her voice a gravelly grunt. âItâs either Abeâs tree or the janitorsâ table.â And that was that.
Evangeline had been given strict instructions to remain at the table until 11:00, at which point the parade would have passed and the deputy mayor with it. She was then to march herself to the school therapistâs office to let her figure out how it was that âany girl in her right mind would come to school dressed as an African tree when Betsy Ross was a viable alternative.â
When 11:00 came, Evangeline wandered into St. Simeonâs administrative offices looking for the therapist, who as it turns out was engaged in a roof bolting consultation with Deputy Mayor Trudeau. So, she rambled instead into the office of Mr. Rugglebart, the incalculably obese man who met with all eighth grade students attempting to find internship in the townâs local oil refineries and toiletry manufacturing plants.
Evangeline wasted no time in getting to the heart of the matter. âYou help kids figure out what they want to do with their lives, right?â
Rugglebart nodded, unsure whether he was awake, asleep, dead, or the target of some strange administrative performance review.
She continued. âGood. I want to be the Tree of TĂŠnĂŠrĂŠ.â Rugglebart nodded again. Evangeline sighed and shook her branches. âThe Tree of TĂŠnĂŠrĂŠ was the most important tree in all of history. It was all alone in the Sahara, a beacon of hope and strength. And now itâs gone. I want to be the Tree of TĂŠnĂŠrĂŠ.â
Rugglebart nodded once more, concluding that the spandexed sixth grader was not in fact a figment of his imagination. Leaning forward and resting his hands in the droopy pockets of his burgundy cardigan, he sighed. âIt looks to me like you already are the Tree of TĂŠnĂŠrĂŠ. I help kids find what they want â youâve found it yourself. Go be the Tree of TĂŠnĂŠrĂŠ.â He paused, unsure whether what he said was right, wrong or legal. Evangeline processed
the words, nodded a deliberate nod, and left Rugglebart to drift back into a confused but happy sleep.
The little girl then marched out of the office, down the administrative hallway and straight through the front entrance of the school. Before her stood the vast Chihuahan Desert, stretching for miles as far as the eye could see. The Tree of TĂŠnĂŠrĂŠ was indeed gone, downed by a drunk driver ten years before Evangeline was born. But with each step into the Chihuahan wild, Evangeline became its heir, her skin tightening, her branches lifting, until finally she too was a singular dot in the vast, dry solitude. A piece of history. Two blinks from a whole lot of nothing.
72
Dave Petraglia
Life Ring
73
My God lives behind that curtain. But it doesnât act like a curtain should, it doesnât fold and ruffle, no, it hangs so still and solid and thick I would think it was a part of the wall if it wasnât striped,
white and greenand white and green. And when my God comes home, smelling
of pennies and promises, He will push it aside because He is stronger than me, He is so much stronger than me that He would push the curtain aside even if it belonged to His Idols, He would push it aside because He is the kind of God who needs to know what is behind curtains that are still.
I am not strong, in fact, my hands are not hands, they are paws and I crawl along the floor. I am His dog, struggling, struggling to remember who I am
beyond what He has taught me. Stupid, He says, Bitch, He calls me, and I
remember only those words because those words are my name, because I respond so well to his commands, sit, beg, crawl Stupid Bitch. Sit, beg, crawl. I come crawling back on my tired paws to greet Him because He is all I know and making Him happy affords peace in this small world in which I am to allowed reside.
I salivate when He rings the bell for supper. A supper I have cooked. My paws are singed from the stove and cracked from the soapy dish water. I used to play with the bubbles, I used
to watch them sail through the air because they were so light they made me believe in magic. I believed in magic so much that I went out to look for it and, lucky me, I found my God. He is all I need of magic now so the bubbles stay in the sink.
They are tools, only tools for the ritual of washing the dishes
of my God. Stupid Bitch, He says, mouth full of food, I
will take you away, we will live by the seaside, all alone by the seaside and there we will be free.
My God knows the future, He tells me to prepare, He tells me who I am and that everything has been written. He says we will be together forever and He is happy that I have given myself to Him.
He smells of pennies and promises and I smell of nothing. Every day I scrub myself hard with unscented soap,
scrub myself hard to remove the stain of my own personality,
to release myself into the soap and the steam and the water so that He may fill me up.
You are evil Stupid Bitch, He told me once, when I made the supper wrong, you are evil but if you follow my instructions you can be good. So I wash myself clean of myself and try to fill up with Him instead,
hang on to His every word, try to perfect my slow crawl across the
apartment floor, the happy wag of my tail when He finally
Star Spider
Of Gods and Curtains
74
comes home to be with me, to hide all the tears that fall whenever He is
gone or hidden, hidden behind the curtain. A hidden God. I wonder if there is any other kind of God,
any who show themselves, who put themselves on display so we can see them at their weakest,
when they laugh, when they cry, when they shit. Or maybe those things are beyond the Gods,
maybe those things are only for dogs, only for me. He doesnât try to fuck me, He wonât even hit me. He doesnât want to touch me, His hands are too holy and fucking is for dogs, another thing that is only for me. I hoard those things because so many things belong to Him, like light and song and goodness and right, those pure things are His and I get the others. I keep them in a row on the floor by my bed, those things that are mine:
evil, and fucking,and shitting. I get tears too, and sorrow. Secret sorrow. I should be happy, He says, I should love
myself in spite of myself, I should be happy to know the future, to be a part of something bigger, with Him. My sorrow is like a black river, hidden behind the curtains of my eyes and it flows and flows and erodes my insides.
You should be happy, He says, when He hears me in the deep night, sobbing, sobbing, tears of black onto my pillow. We are going to the sea, far away from this evil place where we can be alone together and I can teach you to be good.
Yes, yes, I cry, I want to be happy, this is the place I want to be, with You everything is perfect. Itâs me, I say, itâs my fault, the black river has always flowed through me, I just never noticed it before today.
The supper bell rings and I crawl. When was the last time I saw the sky? He doesnât want me to leave because there
is evil out there, evil out there and evil in here,
deep in here. I cry into His noodles, His beans, His soup. His soup is too salty, Stupid Bitch, His soup
is so salty I must be trying to poison Him. Do I want Him to have a heart attack, to die and leave me forever? I canât answer the question, but the answer must be no. The answer must be no but I wonder:
if my God was to die would I be allowed to see the sky? No no Stupid Bitch, donât think that, I say to
myself. Sit, beg, crawl. He doesnât need to be there to say the words anymore, to remind me I am His.
I salivate when the bell rings. I build a mask to catch my tears, a mask that
makes me blind and I burn my paws on His soup. He is pleased that the salt is gone, but mad that my eyes wonât stop leaking, there must be a flood, a broken pipe.
I canât bring a Broken Dog with me to the sea, He says.
Broken Dog is not my name, Stupid Bitch is my name.
He drives me to the vet, but I canât see the sky because I wear the mask all the time now, to soak up my tears.
Broken Dog, He calls me now, not my name, not my name. He doesnât want
a Broken Dog. My God lives behind that curtain, white and green, white and green. My God has been out for hours when I reach
for it, reach for the curtain, with a hand that is not my own. A hand in the shape of the vetâs hand, with smooth fingers and rings of gold. Maybe the vet is a God too, a God of Broken Dogs.
Go behind the curtain, the vet says, here, use my hands. She lends me her hands and they are strong enough to pull the curtain back, to
75
reveal the room beyond, my Godâs room, the place where He resides.
The walls are covered in ink, in words, I have stopped crying, removed my mask so I can read. There are stories of my life, my history, my psyche, there are plans for the future drawn like
maps, scrawled like spiders across the white, white walls. My God is not a God, he is an Elephant,
with memories as long as the world. It is all written by his hand, nothing divine, just an Elephant making plans for the future. He is not a God, he is an Elephant and I am not a dog, I am a mouse. I am small and fast, but if I stay I will be trampled.
I back up and out as my Elephant returns, my eyes are dry and he watches the curtain fall, back into place. But it is not a curtain, I see that now, it is a carpet.
His eyes are wide with wrath, but small, so small. Everything is small now as my God
diminishes. Not an Elephant or a God, just a man. Your Idols are crumbling, I scream, you have
put them so high on their pedestals you canât see the cracks.
Then I run and he reminds me that I am too broken to run, but I have borrowed the vetâs legs as well as her hands and I am faster than him.
Down down down the stairs and out into the sky. He shouts from the balcony, I donât want a
Broken Dog. But it is too late.He is a broken god,for what is a god with no one to pray for
him?
76
Derick Varn
DecencyThe swerve of headlights ahead: something nicked and broken.The truck moves past in a blackened blur. Stopping my car I see the fawn still breathing, sinew unknotted and legs unwoven,browns eyes looking at me. There is no decency in suffering, the nonsense grew out of careless swerving that even my pity does not undo. In unbelief, I took a revolver from the glove-box and caressed its blank head. Then pulled the trigger.Deer blood to remind me of another unkindness of heedless speed and motion.
My grandmother prattles about the Garden of Eden how we all fell but the sinister bit of truth no enchanted apple can explain steel upon flesh. It drags the ear to hear faithful talk about the wicked tree. Like a record skipping,the lambs bleat but we know what shepherds do to a herd at the end. A less kindculling comes from what we choose to believe.
In the end: no waves, no wind, no sound,but swerving atoms collapsing and colliding. Makingand unmaking life: itâs hard to be decenttramping down the mud and nurslings under heel and yet kindness is careful violence and a clean end and kinder stillthe care to to avoid the blind side swerve.
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we met when Eros was lookingfor a rope to hang himself.i was simplerâyoung and panting, carryingburdens heavier than heavenâs gates.you ripped me from the rootsand readied the nerves for the swaddlingslumber of Plathâs great electric-shockwhite-heat-love-making engraved in the memory of the scholars who specialize in shame.
mountains rumbled when you touched me,but i dulled the avalanche to a dog whistle.to pack a bag is to be reborn again into promiseof blinded flight.i donât want a handler, a tamer, a manwho fancies himself a breaker of wildjungle cats with shifting eyes.
you came strapped with the fear of deep sea depthsand Wonder Women who hold divine power in the ink-dipped locks of their hair.you are the witch-hunter who shot me down.
maybe i could have saved both of usif trust had never comfortably crystallizedand i had bothered to turn around.
Vanessa Willoughby
Ultraviolence
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Xavier Vega
The public library is always full of Mexicans taking advantage of free federal outreach programs. They come for help filing taxes or to take citizenship classes. Some of them come for the computer lab, and some bring their children to borrow books or DVDs because they have no money for cable. I tutor English, and in my study room today is a middle aged couple and their baby. They both have muddy colored skin and they are very oily. The baby looks like a baby.
They are shiny people, like little jewels twinkling in the sun. My father told me that Mexican bakers would rub their dough against their skin to collect grease before kneading. It wasnât a disservice; they just simply didnât know they were disgusting. The Mexicans who came over learned some of the American rules of cleanliness, but some didnât care enough to change. A roach here or there adds crunch. My father told me that you canât trust other Mexicans.
The four of us sit in a soundproof study room with windows, but it is a cheap library in a cheap city, so the room is not truly soundproof. The baby cries and other patrons stare into the room as if we were animals in a zoo. It is frustrating to continue our lesson, but the mother calms her child and we continue.
âDid you understand the homework?â I said, hoping to recap our last lesson.
The woman did quite well, but the husband struggles.
âYes, sir,â he said.âAre you sure?ââYes, sir.âI believe they are in their thirties, but they
look like they are in their forties. The man wears a hat and a flannel shirt with jeans. The woman wears a thin dress. The husband fakes his way through our lesson and he reminds me of children I previously tutored. You have to confront them on their issues without demeaning them. The husbandâs shame fills the room and he taps his fingers on our table. His fingers are calloused and his nails are caked with dirt. He reminds me of my father back when we lived in old tin trailers on dirt roads.
The baby works to my advantage. I give him a man-to-man talk to convince him to stay. I speak to him in Spanish.
âYou plan to stay here for a long time, yes?â âYes, sir. We want to stay.â
âSo the child will grow up in America, yes?ââYes, sir. I want him to go to school and get
smart to get a good job.ââYou wonât have to worry about him. He
will speak English. He will watch English TV with English cartoons. He will speak English at school, he will speak English with his friends, he will read English books, and he will learn with English teachers. It will all come very naturally to him. He may even prefer
Return to Dust
79
English to Spanish.âI pause for a moment and smile down at
their sleeping child.âI could barely speak Spanish myself for
many years,â I said, âI could understand it a little, but a few things never made sense. I wasnât very good at speaking it. My parents wanted me to know English first so I could do well in school, and it worked. But what will happen if you and your son canât speak the same language?â
We went over the homework again and I showed him what he did wrong. Later, I explained that Americans pronounce their vowels differently; their mouths donât open as much, which is why they were so quiet. âNoâ in Spanish puts a large emphasis on the O. The mouth expands more and the lips stretch out further. To Americans this is loud. They donât like it when people get loud because they are quiet and tame. They do not like to strain themselves.
I donât tell him to ask his wife for help, otherwise he would never come back. She doesnât offer him any help either, and the husband continues to struggle. Our hour ends.
I leave the library and walk to a bar for a drink before I go home. I graduated Summa Cum Laude from a highly accredited University, but Iâm Mexican so I look around the bar for men to fight. When I was young I would take a sharp pencil and drag it across my arm in an attempt to tattoo myself. It was not a depressed form of self-harm, but rather a stupid attempt to mark myself as a member of a gang because thatâs what all the other Mexicans were doing.
Thin trails of lead marked Sur 13 on my arm because I hated white people. I knew some kids who dug paperclips across their skin to draw tiny amounts of blood, hoping to cover their cuts with permanent marker to make a tattoo. Some of them got arrested for misdemeanors over the years, some dropped out and got menial jobs.
Those parents I tutored have so much hope, but thereâs no guarantee their kids wonât be stupid. The problem with being Mexican is
that you canât get away with stupidity the same way that white people can.
I am dressed professionally, and I am confident that if I do land in a fight and if police were to become involved, they would take my word over that of a stupid gangster. Part of this disgusts me, but part of me relishes it.
I remember being stupid. We all hated white people because our parents worked so hard for so little. Picking strawberries is a job that requires you to bend over for hours at a time, and the pay is not hourly, but per unit. My farm paid us two-dollars per flat, and so it was about speed, but the money never added up to enough. We all saw the big American Pie in The Sky, but we got the tiniest slice, and so we tricked ourselves into thinking that white people were weak and pathetic, and that Mexicans did hard labor because only we were tough enough. We didnât need breaks or overtime. We didnât need food.
You have to do something to not hate yourself, and success through adversity is the sweetest kind of success. All the good superheroes have tragic origins. Hercules had his Twelve Labors, and grown men cry on national television when they win the Super Bowl. All the shit and pain and despair vanish with victory as a boxer finally snatches that golden belt and declares himself Champion of the World.
A Warrior.When I was young and overweight I used
to run laps around the large strawberry fields. By the time I started, the berry pickers had been working for several hours, and I finished running several hours before they went home. No matter how hard I ran, I knew I would never be as powerful as them. They were warriors.
The bar is dim and quiet, and in the back are several pool tables. Sitting at the bar, I sip a rum and coke. Iâm an odd sight, wearing a dress shirt and slacks inside a Mexican pool hall, but the older crowd appreciates my work in the community, so I have a little respect. Itâs the young bucks that donât like me, and I like
80
that they donât like me because it means we can fight.
A young cholo sits next me. He wears long socks and long, baggy shorts that reach his ankles. There are many other stools by the bar, and he could have picked any of them. He knows it and I know it. Mexicans always want someone to fight.
âIâm saving that seat,â I said.He gives me the dirty eye, and instead of
giving him one back, I give him a look that tells him he is beneath me. In reality I am jealous of him and his power, but I want him to think that I think I am better than him. Itâs the best way to antagonize him.
He shakes his head and moves to the other end of the bar, and so I take another drink.
The choloâs t-shirt has a cartoon of a bald and shirtless Mexican gangster in sunglasses with a bandana around his forehead. The cartoon wears baggy khakis, but the cartoon isnât a bad guy. The cartoon is on a cross with a sad woman close to him. In the background is Jesus weeping, and on the top of the shirt is the caption To Love is to Suffer.
I remember that shirt because a young boy in middle school wore that same shirt as he lay on the restroom floor in a fetal position, protecting himself from his fellow gang members as they jumped him in. They stomped his ribs and kicked him in the face, but after a while one gangster called off the beating. The boy got up and hugged his attackers, and they left the bathroom and went somewhere to get high.
Itâs a strange initiation, but I suppose some fraternities have done worse.
It doesnât surprise me though. First we had the Aztecs. They were all about human sacrifice and tearing out hearts. They would serenade volunteers with flaming arrows to the chest on top of large temples. They had Flower Wars where the entire purpose was for opposing armies to gain sacrifices for their gods. And then the conquistadors came in with a vengeful God that demanded penance and sacrifice.
A man has to suffer to be a man. He has
to endure pain. Carlos Fuentes said thatâs what Mexico is all about; you have to kill a man to believe in him. You need to slit your wrists and let the blood nourish your crops. Huitzilopochtli wonât allow it any other way.
A few men in their late teens come in. Theyâre wearing blue Dickies and blue hats and blue Nike Cortez shoes. I laugh at the irony and decide to antagonize them.
âNice shoes,â I said, âNike Cortez?ââYeah,â said one of the gangsters, âYou got a
problem?ââDid you know that Hernan Cortez was the
Spanish conquistador who came to Mexico and killed all the Aztecs? Stole their gold, raped their women, gave them smallpox. And youâre wearing his shoes. Itâs cute.â
âThe fuck you care?ââJust wondering why you were wearing a
white manâs shoes.ââWhat?ââCortez was from Spain. Spanish people
are white. Those conquistador shoes are white. The Aztecs, the warriors? They were something else. They were magic.â
âWatch your back, faggot.âI chuckle, hoping for them to make the
first move, but like nervous lovers nothing happens. Iâm worried that the Mexican people are all dying. Mexican Americans will take over this country in about twenty years, if the numbers are true, and I am not a Mexican. I am a Mexican American. I live in the space between two worlds. I want to be professional and dignified, but I also want to get drunk and scream to Tejano music.
Mexico truly is a rugged country. The cartels still decapitate villagers and stick theirs heads onto pikes. You donât see that shit in Seattle.
Iâm trying to get into a bar fight because I donât know what Iâm doing with my life. My tutoring job is funded by a federal grant, and I might not be employed a year from now, but even if that were certain, I would rather be doing something else.
I didnât want to go to graduate school because there is too much petty academia. Academia doesnât reach out to the people. Itâs
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an ivory tower of supposed intellectualism. Itâs incestuous and hollow, full of people looking for careers instead of knowledge. Academics tend to look down on the ants who slave away for minimum wage with nine-to-five jobs. The working class. The Warriors.
Academia does nothing to help people who struggle, it just documents suffering like someone who calls themselves an artist but just sits around doing coke all day while having sex with under aged models. Rich bastards with inheritance. Inheritance bugs me. Itâs like watching a horde of cannibals eating the corpse of one great man, taking the rewards for his hard work without struggling themselves. They donât value things the way we do.
And then I remember how Iâm making myself feel superior this way, and I know I need a reality check. In my mind I know this is not the face of all white people. I perfectly understand this, but I cannot believe it.
At least thatâs what I think. Or maybe I was too scared and didnât think I could last in the white manâs world.
A few more blue gangsters walk into the bar and they greet their compatriots who insulted me. They point me out and I raise my drink to them with a shit-eating grin. They glare at me and I wink.
I was about to get some action when a few red gangsters walked over from the pool tables towards the blue gangsters. None of them want to fight me. They want to fight each other. They want to fight someone in the same boat. Itâs prisoner envy; why should one inmate get privileges and not the others? Beating someone below or above you wonât change the system, but beating someone whoâs supposed to be on the same level? That makes you better as an individual. That makes you special.
There was a stare down and some pushing, but the bartender threatened to call the police, and so everyone left. I wanted to find them on the streets but realized that I would be making an ass out of myself. I finished my drink and paid, and the bartender smiled at me. He never cusses me out the way he does
with his friends. I walked towards to my apartment and saw some chonga ladies in the street. They wear gaudy gold bracelets, low-rise jeans, thick lipstick and eyebrows that have been shaved off and drawn back on. They dance to reggaeton in the street, and I can feel them staring at me as I pass. We both look like Frankenstein monsters.
Sometimes I donât feel man enough to be with my own kind, but then I feel restricted when I have to be around white people. Iâve read bell hooks, Foucault, and all the other big thinkers. Iâm well versed in the social sciences that shape the human psyche. Intellectually, I can understand my problems, but my heart wants something else. I want to be the Golden Aztec who wears cheetah skin with a bald eagleâs head as a helmet.
As I kept walking, the music began to pour out the pool hall, and I pondered upon the similarities between a dance club and the jungle. Nothing important has ever been said in a club. Loud music, dancing, a search for lackluster sex, and the occasional fight. Itâs all very primal, full of awkward mating rituals, and even the cleanest bars have a dim and seedy vibe like raw meat or Mardi Gras in a bottle.
Thatâs not a shot at Mexicans. Everybody turns savage when the beats are good.
I get a phone call from Sherry. Her sister is fine. She has a broken toe but will be given a splint and should be able to function. Sherry apologizes for missing our appointment, but says that she can meet me later tonight if I can make it.
When I arrive home I turn on some jazz and read an issue of National Geographic. Today we are in Thailand, discussing Muay Thai, the fighting style that inspired Kickboxing.
Some would say that it is a crude and blunt martial art, but some say the technique is graceful. Itâs not about learning the myriad ways to hurt a man, but mastering a limited number of ways to hurt a man. Muay Thai, and all exercise in general, is rewarding because of the sweet relief from pain. Any weightlifter will tell you how good your muscles feel after
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you toss an enormous load onto the ground after the struggle. For the uninitiated, think of a nice couch or bed after a long day at the office. Think of taking off a heavy backpack after school.
In Thailand, all the young men fight. Fourteen year old boys will compete in title fights and retire in their late teens unless they have the potential to become a star warrior. Their skills require hundreds of hours of training and repetition. Muay Thai kicks make use of the shin and not the foot, and students practice their low roundhouse kicks with each other, connecting against each otherâs shin to strengthen the bone.
This country makes me so soft.Apart from a few minor gang fights in my
younger days, I canât say Iâve been in any serious conquests. The only other violence Iâve faced in my life was from my parents, and it was never abuse or neglect.
Very few people acknowledge that violence is a necessity in the real world. It has its uses. Disciplining children is a cerebral task. You never hit a child in an emotional outburst; you only do it deliberately as a lesson, like any good teacher. Most kids canât understand the consequences of their actions. They donât understand the social contract or that their actions can lead to trouble, or theyâre not smart enough to care.
What they can understand is a smack on the arm or to the back of the head. You phase it out once theyâre smart enough to understand yelling and shame. Humans are not as fragile as white people believe. Discipline teaches you respect when done right. Youâre forced to acknowledge the power of others. You learn not to fuck up someone elseâs shit because you can end up punched in the face or with a broken back. Itâs an awareness that most people donât have. An awareness that can save your life. An awareness that can become a crippling fear.
I once read an old story where an aristocrat couple cheated on each other with members of the lower class. The wife tricks the peasant woman into a trap, getting her killed in the
process, which causes the couple to stop the cheating and live happily ever after.
It was written by Maqruis De Sade, I believe, and that story pissed me off because the peasant woman was disposable. For some reason I really wanted justice for that lady. Itâs human nature to want justice. On the internet I click on links titled Justice Porn. Itâs all about bad people getting caught and punished; turning the tables on a mugger or bullies. It feels good to condemn things; we love to hate things. Weâll team up on someone if they say something against the LGBT community or black people. We hate Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber for some reason, and thatâs perfectly fine with most people over twenty one. Hatred aimed at acceptable targets is highly fashionable. Hatred will never die, and this is exactly how propaganda works.
One of Hitlerâs men made a series of cowboy movies featuring villainous Jews that would try to destroy small towns. Victorious showdowns at high noon got all the Jr. Naziâs excited. Think about that for a minute, then think about Twilight. One day there will be a book burning, and suddenly the lines will become blurry again.
Itâs stubbornness that allows Mexicans to thrive, but it also keeps them miserable. Hard work can get some people up and into the world, but an overdose will keep you cynical. It takes away your faith and leaves you bitter and depressed.
There are no pleasures that come without hard work. Hard work is important. Hard work is what gets you success. You have to go through trauma early on in order to be prepared. What you reap is what you sow. No pain, no gain.
I drive into the city hoping to meet with Sherry. I park outside a closed bank, walk past a butcher shop, go down an alley and open an unmarked door. Down the steps is another door, and past that is a receptionist who tells me to wait. Ten minutes later, I am tied up in an elaborate torture table. I am shirtless and flat on my back with my arms and legs spread apart. My wrists and ankles are tied to ropes
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and the ropes are propped up and strung through pulleys. Sherry cranks a steel gear that slowly pulls my limbs apart.
Then she digs her nails across my chest, sits on stomach, bites me randomly and slaps me around a bit. Towards the end she sits on my face for several minutes. I struggle and shake and suffer and scream as she squeezes her thighs to choke the air out of me. My screams are not screams of pain, but a battle cry. The cries of a berserker.
Our time is up and I help her clean the room. âHowâs your sister?âââSheâs fine. Overreacting if you ask me.
How about you? Itâs been awhile. Howâve you been?â
âWell, Iâm feeling much better now.â
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Savannah Hocter
My Perceptive Simulacrum
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Ann Howells
Now that he has died she moves to the mainland,a neat white house above the river,packs life in boxes: dishes, linens, photos of children alive and dead.Age rests on her shoulders,but does not burden.She unpacks records and cassettes,from the forties on,recalls a piĂąata she bought for Jasonâs ninth birthday:paper machè burro, bright with red, yellow and turquoise blue. She hung it high;children, blind and vicious with the broom,left a shattered husk, dangling paper streamers and cardboard innards.For weeks foil-wrapped candiessparkled in the shrubbery.
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Whitman gazes at me through the eyesof an old woman who wantsthat last helping of pineapplethe nice Publix lady is handing out.Even though I know the yellow fleshis good for my inflamed prostrateI move on to other mattersof fruit and vegetables. Kalefor example, full of iron and vitamins,a deep cosmic green that makes me dreamof acres and acres of tobacco in a Virginia sun.Itâs odd that the prettiest leaves were poison.
Thereâs the old woman again, standing in frontof the narrow display of free range chicken,each package with a website that will takeme to the farm where the chicken was raisedby a nice family, and if I imagine deeplyenough, I can travel to that farm,inhale the deep calm of those green pastureswhere it feels like a man can settle down,raise his own family with his own chickensMaybe even have a cow or two for fresh milk.
And if I imagine even deeper I can travel intothe past of that family, see a grandpatilling a field of 19th century radishes while grandmasits in the kitchen reading an Old Farmerâs Almanac,which says the coming winter will be the worstin fifty years, how it would be best to harvest and canall the blackberries and cucumbers so that Januarymight still be filled with sweetness and crisppickles on the white bread sandwiches that speakof a time when plain was fine. Thatâs quite a website,
so Iâd better be sure not to linger too long in its familiarforeign lands, and be sure not to covet the farmerâsdaughter whose hair is flaxen and whose breastsrise and fall beneath her lilac blouse, which promiseseven more flowers and a feast of white skin and nipplesso dark, I canât help but gasp when I touch them,which is a mistake I canât come back from, and nowI live on the farm in the website and clean the chickencoop each morning before gathering eggs for my newwife to scramble into breakfast. I canât waitto eat them along with the hot buttered biscuitsburied in fresh blackberry preserves.
Jesse Millner
At a supermarket in South Florida
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A man and his eight-year-old son sat in the attic of their home. A single bare light hanging in the center of the room illuminated the space, but every box, suitcase and unread book cast the room in shadows while planks of wood and rafters melted into the darkest corners of construction. A draft in the ceiling let the October afternoon seep in, and wandering sheets of dust floated through the mothball scent of history to settle on the pink insulation separating the yesterday of storage from the today of downstairs. The man had climbed the retractable ladder in search of a cast iron skillet so that his wife, the childâs mother, could cook her famous soufflĂŠs upon her return from work and he brought his son to assist in the search. However, the man lost himself in a box of college days and the child explored his fatherâs chest of military souvenirs, unsure of what a cast iron skillet even looked like.
âHey,â the son said, holding up a green canvas backpack with one hand while brushing a tuft of hair out of his face with the other. âWas this in a war?â The bag had sun-bleached yellow spots like bad skin and the pockets and pouches remained sealed by thick straps with tin end caps looped into metal bits. The boy undid various clasps and looked through each compartment. âThereâs nothing in here.â
The father lifted his head from a photo album and turned toward the child. His taught
neck accentuated the sharpness of his jaw. âThere,â he pointed. âIn the front. Itâs the bottom pouch.â The child struggled with the pocket as his father continued. âThat was my bag from the navy. My brother got it for me before I shipped off to Japan. No war, just fun.â
âOh, cool.â The child freed the straps and opened the pouch. He pulled out first a little plastic toy with a string attached. âWhatâs this?â he asked, and dangled the item between his thumb and forefinger.
Even in dim light and with the pendulum-like swing of the trinket, it was easy for the man to identify the faded colors and shape of the object. âHello Kitty,â he laughed.
âWhoâs Kitty?â âNo, thatâs Kitty,â he said, pointing at the
charm. âSheâs a character that all the girls loved over there.â
âWhy do you have it?â His voice was accusatory.
âMy girlfriend at the time liked her, so I did too.â
âMom?ââNo,â he chuckled. âNot your mother.â He told his son about his small gray ship,
how they used to go to many ocean side cities in Japan and how at each place there was a different kind of Hello Kitty charm made. âIn Kagoshima,â he said, âthey had a yam
Gregory App
A Pocket for Taeko
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Hello Kitty, and in other towns they had other Kitties. Whatever that town was famous for, they had a Kitty made after it.â He went on to tell how his girlfriend liked to collect these things so he bought them for her whenever he could. After a while, though, she didnât want any more because her phone became too heavy and cumbersome from all the Kitties, so he put that particular charm on his.
âKawaii the girls would giggle when the saw me and Kitty on the train. They thought I was cute.â
âWhat was her name?â the child asked, as he reached farther into the bag.
âTaeko.â He explained how they would sail toward
Australia, and Singapore, and Hong Kong stopping in little towns, big towns and nowhere towns all along the way. There would always be something to do and something to buy. âAnd I would always get her something and place it in that pocket to give to her when I came back home.â
âEven this?â the son asked, holding up a credit card size piece of paper laminated and decorated white and red with the name Taeko Zawa written in English. There were other Japanese characters printed on it and a stylized image of a kite in the corner.
âOf course,â the man said and smiled. âThatâs a lifetime membership to the Japan Kite Association that I got for her birthday one year.â He said he bought it before he and the shipâs crew went on a long deployment and he wanted to give it to Taeko upon his return.
âYou flew kites?â âNo, not really, but we liked to laugh about
it.â And he told his son that while on the boat all
he did was think about Taeko, and off the boat all he wanted to do besides smile at her was to walk around and explore the world with her by his side. So, whenever they were away from one another he spent this time asking his friends about their secret date spots and searching for fun things for the two of them to do. And he did come up with a great many ideas: they once went to the Tobacco and Salt Museum where
they saw the history of Japanese cigarette packages on display. He chose a box adorned with two imperial Japanese flags as his favorite; she a pack of Nile smokes with the pyramids of Giza on them because she liked the idea of living in the desert and she thought âthe Pharaohs had good hair on their face.â They also went to the Ueno zoo where he saw for the first and only time an anteater. They went so many places that he couldnât remember them too well anymore. But the one place he would always remember is the Kite Museum.
âIt was fun?â the child asked.âNo, it was kind of creepy,â he said staring
up at the roof in retrospect. âAnd boring.âHe went on to explain that not all of the
places they went were supposed to be fun or terribly exciting, but he only wanted to spend time with her â to experience life with her â and who else would take a girl to the Bank Note and Postage Stamp Museum, anyway?
âBut the kite place was great,â he continued. âIt was spooky the way they crammed âem all in there and how they were decorated like bugs or dragons or monsters. It mustâve been a thousand in a room half the size of this,â he gestured with his hands around the attic. âAnd the lighting was even worse, but none of that mattered because it was the first time anyone told me they loved me.â
At the sound of his last sentence the man straightened himself and stared into the insulation. He hadnât thought of Taeko as a person in many years now for she had become more of an object in time than a living memory, but he surprised himself by wondering what she may be doing and how he would very much like to say hello.
âEw, Dad,â the child interrupted his fatherâs reverie by wrinkling his face and dropping the card to the floor. âThatâs gross.â
The father sighed, then moved toward his son to pick up the card. âI guess it is.â He shrugged.
âIf you loved her so much,â the child said, âwhy didnât you give her all those kites?â
The man shook his head and hit the card against his free hand. The cheap plastic bent
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as it moved back and forth over his thumb. âWell,â he paused to scratch his nose. âI did give her one kite, but she let it fly away. She lost it.â He shifted his weight and the floor creaked under the new stress.
The child groaned, disappointed in Taeko, but continued rummaging. âWas it a nice one?â
âVery,â the father said, and rubbed his jaw as he studied the card further. The plastic lamination peeled in the corners and flecks of dirt and dust found themselves trapped between the edges. âMaybe the nicest kite you could ever have.â
âLots of money?â âNo. It wasnât worth very much.â He inhaled sharply through his nose and bent the membership into a âUâ shape. âBut it was one of a kind.â
âOh,â the child said, not understanding. âShe lost your favorite kite, but you still have all this stuff for her?â His face contorted and his voice rose at the end of the question.
The father laughed once, then stopped fumbling with the Kite Association card and turned his head toward the attic fan mounted at the top of the house. It spun slowly as a breeze passed through the assembly of metal blades, and slivers of a bright blue sky could be seen between the whirl. As his son called to him, the man said, still staring upward, âI kept a pocket for Taeko because I wanted to forgive her. I loved her, you know?â
He furrowed his brow and thought to continue. He thought to tell his son about how it felt to be away for months at a time and what a simple, distorted long-distance âI miss youâ would do to cheer him up. He thought to tell him how scared he would get and how much it meant to hold her hand and watch her smile. He thought to tell his son how Taeko used to occupy his mind and how she let him escape the dread and nothingness when the seas were heavy and the nights grew long. And he thought to explain how his absence made her equally as scared and lonely and how sometimes people who are frightened or alone have decisions to make and their choices are not always what the other person wants.
Sometimes, he thought to say, thatâs just a part of everything.
But he kept his mouth shut and his eyes off the card and before him his child sat expecting to hear more. The man could think of nothing to say, so instead of stories of the sea and romance the two passed the time by blinking at one another as dust fell like snow in between shadow and light. The fan spun twice.
âOh,â the child said, breaking the silence. He rolled his eyes with great embellishment and began searching in a different box. âI guess weâll never find that kite up here, huh?â
âNo. We wonât,â the man replied. He slipped the card into his back pocket and moved toward his son. âBut itâs OK.â He placed his hand on the childâs shoulder. âIâve got a new kite now. Your mother helped me choose it.â
The young man bent down to rummage through the container and left his fatherâs hand hanging in the air behind him.
âI donât like kites I decided,â he said into the depths of the box. After reaching as far down as his arms would stretch, he returned to face his father, spinning the wheels of a red metal car in his palm. âBut mom gives good gifts, so she probably got you a good one.â
The man smiled, full of teeth, and nodded. âShe did. I know it.â
After staring at the child for a moment he shook himself and returned the card to the pouch in the bag. He tightened the straps and placed the bag in its chest, but before he could close the lid the sound of the front door opening caught the duoâs attention.
âMomâs home!â the boy lit up and hurried toward the ladder.
From below, a woman called out, âIâm starving. Where are my men at?â
âHold up,â the father said before the child climbed downstairs. âCan you take this to her?â He moved toward the ladder, reached into a box and grabbed the skillet they had come in search of. Its weight was almost too much for him to handle with one hand, but after adjusting his grip he was in control of the kitchenware. âBe careful, now. Itâs heavy.â
âOK, Dad,â the boy said, eager to greet his
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mother. He grabbed the skilletâs round body with two hands and shouted, âMom! Weâre up here.â He scooted himself down the wooden rungs, his bottom resting on every step during the descent.
The childâs stomping rattled decorations as he crashed down the hallway, and the man who now sat alone under the dim light with his shadows, his bag, his charms, and a lifetime membership to the Japan Kite Association could hear the joy in his wifeâs voice and the excitement in the boyâs. He brushed the dust off a nearby container, returned to his souvenir box, placed the bag inside and closed the lid with both his hands. Before rising completely he froze with his torso hovering over the chest, his head bent and his arms supporting him like an exhausted athlete. He breathed deeply and stared down at the lid where dust settled and disappeared into the darkness of the grain, but he was looking beyond dust and wood now. He was looking at cigarettes and anteaters and trying to remember the color and the shape of his favorite kite. He was looking at the ocean and the stars and trying to feel insignificant again. He was looking at Taekoâs hands and remembering their softness, her face and its warmth, her smile and its brightness â the lives they would have had together if kites were not so easy to lose.
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Sarah Bence
QuartetI.We lived on hillsdreamt of pillows and quiltsother than our ownsang our songs oflove and farm animals
II.I could be so happywhen the geese scattershuddering limbs and gillsof bass we reel insolemn and early
III.Iâve learned how to builda fire in every sizeput it out with lake waterwatch white ashes witherthe hottest softest part
IV. You can come round againbut our piano is still untunedand youâll find my redboots on the back porcha hornetâs nest in our attic
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Looking Ahead
Shawn Campbell
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One more poem, thenof legsand the moist spacesbetween them.
One more of the livesspent near water,the summers of wavesand the caps of lightwe woreâforaged halos.
One more of your hair,its sticky golden strandsstuck to your face.
One more useless poem, then,of the time spenton memory,all of the heatwe squandered.
C.C. Russell
Before We Fall Silent
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TokyoFrancis Davis
Julia and I lived in South Philly, in what the locals called a trinity, an 18th century brick house with three rooms pancaked above a basement kitchen where bars lined the windows and the ceiling was low enough to scratch the top of a tall manâs head. A spiral staircase thumb-screwed from the basement to the top floor. Iâd taken one look at the place, my bags still in Juliaâs car, and knew Iâd go crazy if I stayed longer than a couple of months.
âThis is cool,â I said. âThisâll work.â Julia had just picked me up from the airport
terminal after my thirteen-hour flight from Tokyo, where Iâd gone to live with my banker brother to teach English for a year and re-invent myself only to come back, lamely, after six short weeks. Before Iâd fled Japan, Iâd caught a fever, moped around, visited ghostly Kyoto and tribal Korea, where Iâd bought a hand-carved wooden jokerâs mask, sensing that I was leaving behind exactly what Iâd hankered after for yearsâa fresh start, an adventure, a new me. Life in Japan surely would have blossomed if Iâd simply stuck it out. But I didnât. I couldnât. Iâd already punched my ticket home, already told my brother I was leaving, so Iâd gone to a park and buried a note under a cherry tree, promising myself that someday Iâd be back to dig it up.
Iâve never gone back, and probably never will, but I like to imagine this other me, maybe still there, settled down with a Japanese wife and raising biracial beauties, digging sumo wrestling, baseball, and the simplicity of tea.
Iâd run into Julia at an AIDS dance benefit a couple of months before Iâd left for Japan
and shortly after my bad break with Rita, lovely Rita, whom Iâd lived with for a cozy five years until April 1, the day (and night) she didnât come home from work, my whole life since then like some kind of hidden-camera April Foolâs joke, and a milligram of me still expecting even now, years later, for Rita to pop into the room and scream âGotcha!â
But this story is about Julia. Sheâd wooed me home with a series of long, breathless phone calls, phone calls which, because of the thirteen-hour time difference, always took place either late at night or insanely early in the morning, and always, always started with the same set of questions: âWhat are you doing? Are you up? What time is it there?â as if we couldnât believe time could bend like that. These calls had infuriated my brother, whoâd presented me the bill, red-faced, while we stood in the Narita airport waiting for my departure flight back to Philly. Iâd paid him with the last of my yen, glad to be rid of that money, and not surprised at his attitudeâthis the guy who had once showed up at my dorm in Philadelphia, red-faced, clutching two twenties, which he shoved into my hands, saying, âYou canât call Dad every time you need something, Stewart. You have to learn how to take care of yourself.â The very same guy who, years later, would bully me into turning away from my father as he lay dying in the hospital after falling down the basement steps of my sisterâs house. My father needed surgery to stop the bleeding in his brain and save his life, a surgery weâd refused because at the time he was also dying (just more slowly) from pancreatic
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cancer. Iâd cowardly ceded the decision to my older brother, letting my father slip into that dark current as my brother whispered into my ear, âYou have to take your emotion out of a decision like this, Stewart. Right? You understand this, yes?â
Julia, though, saved me from all thisâmy brother, my indecision, myself. She was a sculptress who worked with clay, an artist, the real kind who created objects of beauty, not like me, a sad-sack writer who called himself an artist but scribbled only nonsense, lies, no one would ever read. She had a studio in Old City, and actual people paid actual money for the stuff Julia madeâlife-sized limbs and torsos, quirky salt-n-pepper shakers molded into the shapes of animals that sold for fifty bucks a pop at craft stores along trendy South Street. I loved her because of her art and because the evidence of this art was everywhereâthe front of her jeans, the tips of her finger, her neck.
And soon enough the evidence was in our house, our tiny gingerbread house, where on the first floor a huge, clunky piece of clay shaped into the form of a female torso sat like some demented God, some sliced apart Buddha. We used it as a side table and called it good. The second floor was not much bigger than a closet, but Julia insisted I make it my study, and I threw myself into this idea with the abandonment of a banshee, working atop a wooden door Iâd scavenged from a junkyard in North Philly, hacking away day after day at some new version of myself that, even then, I suspected might take me away from Julia.
Ironically, the first time Iâd met Julia I was
with Rita at a party in West Philly. Rita was taking one of Juliaâs pottery classes, maybe because she was sensing my frustration with her orderliness, her perfection, and at this party, in the middle of January, in a bombed-out section of West Philly, there was drinking everywhere, pierced people smoking, a thrash band thrashing, and a back porch where all the badass creative types hung, talking the talk, shivering and smoking under a moonless gray city sky.
Iâd ditched Rita, and her exquisite blonde looks, two minutes inside the front door, and headed to the back yard, hoping to find Julia, but really what I sought was myself, that version of me that I wanted to become, the artist, the creative man, anything but the man I was at that moment, saddled in a relationship with a girl who didnât create (or drink), but programmed computers and acted rationally, day after day after day after day. I was twenty-four, two years out of college, unemployed, the first Bush was still in the White House, and I had no clue how to give birth to this idea of myself that Iâd been carrying around like a secret, like a boy carrying a frog in his pocket, but on the porch that night I spotted Julia and felt the first scratchings of this new me clawing to get out. Julia had short spiky blonde hairâpretty, but in a butchy sort of way, and she had what looked to be an acorn pinned like a medal to the front of her jean jacket. I saddled up next to her in the moonlight chill and asked for a cigarette. She didnât smoke, but bummed me one from some other guy, and a light too, and we laughed at this, bonding over our role reversals.
When she asked what I did, I said I was a writer. And when she asked what I wrote about, I said, âMy generation, you know, how we live in the shadow of the sixties. Itâs kind of sad how weâre not defined and all.â
It felt like the truth, and, more importantly, Julia didnât smirk, or laugh, but nodded like I made perfect sense, and when I asked her what she did, she said she was an artist, and right then I wanted her. I remember specifically wanted to exchange Rita, my Michelle-Pfieffer look-alike girlfriend from Roxborough, with Julia, this butch-looking artist in jeans and a denim jacket that matched mine. Rita came outside then, wide-eyed, a little shocked at the scene, and said she wanted to go home, so we went home to fight about it, beginning our mad march away from one another. So nine months later, Rita gone, Iâd spotted Julia at the dance benefit in the city, and it seemed like serendipityâit seemed only natural to saunter up and speak to her, kick-starting a relationship
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even though I was already planning to skedaddle to Japan in two short months. What I didnât know at the time, or what I didnât want to believe (and maybe still donât) is that there is no one directing all of this nonsense, no man behind the curtain directing the way; itâs just us and our choices, our silly little choices.
Julia and I tried to make a life in that house, and for a short time we did. At my junkyard desk, I scribbled my lies, slowly untwisting them, making them a little more true each day. Iâd read somewhere that if a person could simply sit still for an hour or two each day and write that by the end of a yearâs time the routine would have either burned itself inside that person or that same individual would realize the writing life was not the one he wanted. Julia had no such questions. She worked at her studio in Old City, molding her funky womenâs torsos, her amputated limbs, her lumpy moon rocks, her salt-n-pepper shakers, her single eyeballs looking right down into the center of me, firing them in a kiln as big as our bedroom, and when I visited her at this studio we often took a six pack of Rolling Rock to the tarpapered roof that overlooked Old City.
On the roof we bullshitted about love and art, the shiny city below ours, our future itself roaming along the cobblestone streets, slipping past the ghosts of Franklin and Jefferson, skirting the shadows of the street lamps, our talk, our words, drizzling down on them like rain.
âWhere do you want to be in five years?ââPublished. A book. I want a book.â âYou canât be in a book. Where do you want
to live, Stewart?ââI donât know. Here. There. Iâm not sure
it matters. I guess I live mostly in my head, anyway. Itâs sort of the same everywhere.â
âIs that what it was like in Japan, like here?ââNot at all. There was a whole different way
of looking at things over there, a completely different paradigm.â
âBut how does that make sense if itâs the same everywhere.â
âWell, amend that. What Iâm saying is itâs a
mindsetâEast versus West, but within those broader categories things are pretty much the same.â
âBut donât you get to define those categories, choose your paradigms.â
âNice word.ââI know. A little birdie whispered it to me.â âYeah, well, maybe. I donât know. Iâm
confused. I think we need more beer.â âI canât. I have to fire a piece in the kiln
before we take off.â âWhat body part is this?ââHa. Itâs a hand with a little bit of the wrist
attached, like someone reaching up through the sand.â
âWhat sand?ââBeach sand.ââWhatâs wrong with dirt.ââToo ghoulish.ââI want it to be playful. I want people to
laugh.ââDirt isnât funny?ââYou want dirt? It can be dirt. Come down.
Iâll show you.â
But I wasnât ready for this life, this talk, this love. None of it. The sad way Rita lingered like smoke in my imagination, and around the one-year anniversary of her departure, Julia entertained some artist friends from New York City, whom I think were either moving to Seattle or had recently returned from Seattleâthis before Seattle became a clichĂŠ of the alternative lifestyle. Cobain and his boys were still laboring happily in obscurity and the rest of us could only sense that some type of sea change was in the air. Being part of it, we were oblivious to all that young life bubbling up from beneath the surface, life that would eventually burst forth only to be gobbled up, repackaged and sold as a gimmick, topped with the bow of grunge, flannel, and Starbucksâa cell phone in every pocket.
âThey have these coffee bars there,â Juliaâs friend said of Seattle. âThey drink so much coffee, itâs kind of crazy, but I guess itâs because of the rain. And the music scene is really rad. The bands have this really thrashing sound, but
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itâs not really like metal.ââWhatâs it like?â I asked. We were in our
basement kitchen, drinking wine out of some sake cups Iâd brought back from Tokyo, and Juliaâs friend, like most of Juliaâs friends, was dressed in black second-hand clothing, and she was, I thought, just a little pretentious. Julia, I think, knew her from Ohio, where they both had gone to art school together.
âIâm not sure,â she said. âItâs hard to describe.â
I laughed and shook my head and Julia shot me a look of scorn.
What I remember most about that evening was how it ended with Julia spitting in my face and how, before that, her friend had cooked us an utterly delicious dinner of potato gnocchi, feta cheese, and spinach. âThis is really good cold after you come home from the bars,â sheâd said, and it proved true a few hours later. This was a dish Iâd steal and make my own, cooking it countless timesâa first meal for all my future girlfriends, and the last thing I ever cooked my father, just a couple of days before he fell on those basement steps -- but when I scoffed at Juliaâs friend she didnât rise to the bait. She just stared me down and asked, âWhat do you do, Stewart?â
Now, I have to stop here and tell you this was exactly the kind of life I yearned for when I felt stuck with Ritaâthe company of artists, wine, good food, but all I could do that night was scorn itâand maybe it had something to do with Juliaâs friendâs pretension, or what I perceived as pretension, or perhaps it was the undercurrent of a sexual vibe that seemed to exist between them, or maybe the fact that Julia hung her multi-colored bras over the shower rod in our teeny, tiny bathroom to dry or maybe it was just that basement kitchen, which smelled of mildew and was always cold, but I think it was something deeper than all these things â this habit I had of turning away from exactly what I wanted, this inability to understand my own bruised heart.
âOh nothing, really,â I said, answering Juliaâs friendâs question.
Julia paused with her sake cup halfway to her
lips, looking as if I had just slapped her. We were toast. Though we didnât know it yet, we were done. We could have gone anywhere, done anythingâSeattle, NY, Europe, but I was paralyzed and I want to know why. Could it be as simple as the tiny black hairs that sprouted on Juliaâs nipples and occasionally got stuck between my teeth when I sucked her small breasts, so unlike Ritaâs , which were ample, smooth and dreamy white? Can a life pivot on something this shallowâa hair between the teeth? Or is it deeper? The past and future just illusion. My brotherâs red face, my turning away from Rita, my father falling down those steps, and me, ridiculous little me, turning away from the old man and letting him die that way, ankles and wrists strapped to the bedrails, his hands covered with enormous white mittens to keep him from pulling out his IVs.
In March, a couple of weeks before her friends visited, on one of the first real warm days, weâd set up a couple of lawn chairs atop Juliaâs roof so we could sip our beers and gaze out at the Walt Whitman Bridge that connected Philly to Camden, the old poetâs last home. The bridge was decked out in white lights, and on the Philly side of the river, just a few blocks from Juliaâs studio, among the redbrick row homes and church steeples reaching toward the sky, stood Independence Hall, a solemn place with marble Romanesque columns lining its entrance and an engraved plaque out front. The Declaration of Independence was signed here, a document that declared the independence of the American colonies from British ruleâŚIt didnât seem real, and in a way, nothing did back then, except our own lives. Itâs what youth lacks, I guess, perspective, and though too many people have spent too much time searching for ways to remain young, what should be offered is what the young need the most, a vision that would allow them to see themselves as they really areâbrushstrokes, breaths, quivers, how they sit so near the beginning.
That night, Julia went to the edge of the studioâs roof and called back to me still lounging in my chair, maybe trying to
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remember those first few lines of Whitmanâs epic poemâI celebrate myself and what I assume you shall assume. Julia said she wanted to show me something. I was comfortable where I was, daydreaming about Whitman, my old life with Ritaâthe time she and I had stumbled out of a South Street bar near midnight and run past the house where Edgar Allen Poe had penned âThe Raven.â Nevermore. Nevermind. Oak trees dripped rain. The silent windows of the house were like a rebuke. How spooked she was, how drunk I was, and how we had stopped running only because we were laughing too hard. Part of me was still running alongside Rita, still laughing and in love, no fault lines dividing my heart like a puzzle, but I rose that night and made my way over to Julia and slung my arm across her shoulder. She wore the same denim jacket she was wearing the night I met her, and I knew we might be together forever or we could be done in a month.
Julia shrugged me off, gave me her beer, and said, âWatch this,â before she took a little running start and leapt off the roof. It was only about two feet to the next building, no big thing, but I still dropped her beer in shock, the glass shattering about the same moment Julia landed on the opposite building.
âWhat the fuck?â I said, my heart near my balls. âAre you insane?â
She leaned back and barked out a laugh, howling at the moon.
âYour turn,â she said. âNo way,â I said, thinking at the same time it
was only about twenty-four inches, you could almost make it with one giant step. I suspected I was years away from my own death.
âDonât be a afraid,â she said as gentle as if my mother were still breathing.
I shrugged, nodded, backed up, put down my beer, and took my own breath.
âWait,â Julia said. âWatch out for that glass.â But Iâd already started running, already
crunched over the glass, already felt the pinch of pain in the bottom of my foot, already knew that everything was about to change.
The day after her friend left, after weâd argued as her friend slept one off upstairs, Iâd call the Frog and asked if they needed any help, beginning that part of my life, the part that would lead to my departure to Montana, but in that dank basement kitchen of our trinity only the moment loomed, Juliaâs wine glass halfway to her lips, and she looked over at me with a pleading look.
âOh, Stewart,â she said finally, slugging back her wine, trying to save us, âjust tell the truth. For once in your life, tell the truth.â
I am, I would like to tell Julia now, wherever she isâafter all these years, Iâd like to say, Iâm finally telling the truth.
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Denzel Scott
DuendeNobody loves the angel or the muse, like they love my nigga, the duende.
The duendebe that genius childwho is like me,to everyoneâs surprise,with a crown,not of laurel or gold,but of woolly kinksand sharpest curls.
My nigga the duendedraws Promethean flame out from the bloodand ancient earthand shares it with the kids whoâve met the fire beforein dreamand baptism.
The duende bethat dark miraclewho loves meand leaves meand comes back againwith the sound of drumsand dusty black feet.
My nigga duende loves to dancethrough the desert of my mindwhere itâs always nightand I follow it into the darkness,wherever it may go.
When we dance in the desert,we dance with the luciferous moonand the wise neon serpentsand the spinning flowers.
Then the duende goesaway from meand I wait for itto come againand play with meand love me like it did before.
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Make me a martyr and Iâll teach you my city. Dusty angels with patchy wings singing glory hallelujahs from the sagging rotting dockspace and sunken-eyed Valkyries padding warningly between lawcourts. Thereâs a whole universe inside a lady somewhere wearing a fur coat and red lipstick. When she coughs she hacks up stars. The bricks feel like scales when you touch them in the dark. This nightmare inside your head feels as real as pain so imagine it if you couldnât wake up. If the wolves from the streets were pacing between your ribs. If the blood on their mouths was all yours.
Elisabeth Hewer
Disease
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Perpetual Remnants of the Deceased
Gina DeCagna
I. Mediation
This impressionistic poem
concerns the disparity
between past and present, memory and direct experience.1
These copied words from a poetics textbook were scribbled on a yellow sticky note on my desk, which was adorned with many sticky notes, with many penciled phrasings and notes.
When taken out of their original context, Iâve discovered how such words could take on new, unexpected meaningsâespecially when scrambled or left isolated for some time. I value all my sticky notes for catching the transitory bits of particular feelings. Though I may crumble and toss them from time to time, or delete the virtual ones littered across the desktop of my laptop, I believe the ideas held in the scribbles are worth more than anyoneâs life.
Ideas may not be tangible, but they are invincible.
II. Generation
coping with death
My fatherâs family history in America began in a tall, tall house. My fatherâs mother, Sarah, was the eldest of four children born to two immigrants from the rustic village of Tioria outside Naples, Italy. It was 1920 when her parents, Pasquale and Alfonsina, arrived via Ellis Island. They married in St. Lucyâs Church of Newark, New Jersey. Sarah was born two years later, in 1922.
I remember St. Lucyâs for its uninhibited gaudiness, resembling the most flamboyant Romanesque-turned Baroque church. In this same church, bejeweled in ostentatious marbles and swirls of gold, I remember Sarah laid in a casket surrounded by her favorite roses. I remember kissing her forehead to say goodbye one last time, and my immediate shock to feel the cold, stiff clamminess of her powdered flesh. She died in 2007 when I was thirteen years old. It was my first funeral.
Sarah and her three younger brothers first lived at the top of a six-story flat. Sarahâs younger brother, Nick, heaved loads of coal up and down the stairs to feed the basementâs furnace every day. At his motherâs request, he also purchased lamb and pigâs feet at the morning market on 7th Avenue. He sandwiched the meats between large blocks of ice and heaved them up and down the stairs.
1 The New Anthology of American Poetry, Vol. 2: Modernisms, 1900-1950. p.233. Editorâs Note.
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Up until his twenties, he ran small errands for the gentlemen that clustered over cards and poker at the local gentlemenâs social club. He earned a shiny copper penny or two, and sometimes, if he were lucky, a nickel. He eventually got a job as a janitor at the local public high school, and he saved everything he earned for the family that birthed him in America. In 1953, he bought his parents and sister a three-story house on Summer Avenue in Newark.
âThis is my house,â Nick recalls his mother saying in broken English as she held her wrinkled fist against her heart. That house was a symbol of pride that they had made their dream, their purpose, alive in America.
My father was born five years later in that house, in 1957, and he lived there until college. My Grandma lived in it for fifty years of her lifeâuntil she died in 2007. Nick, today an arthritic but strong octogenarian, still lives in it.
For the first ten years of my life, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, âgoing to Grandmaâsâ meant she was babysitting my brother and me while our parents enjoyed a weekend excursion. It had three flights of steeply stacked stairsâsome going into the basement, some going to the second floor, and some going to the third floor. We climbed them, swinging from railing to railing like they were monkey bars. Sometimes, we pretended to be spies with our walkie-talkies. Grandma waited for her hug at the top of the second floor stairs each time we visited. She would hold our little bodies against her peach-skin form as she rubbed our backs.
I havenât been to that house in seven yearsâsince Grandma diedâand yet, itâs one of the most vivid pieces of memory from my childhood. I canât bring myself to visit the historical landmark of my family, where my fatherâs linage in America was born, where Iâm reminded of what it means to work hard. Though sheâs gone, the idea of Grandma still lives in that house. The dream is still alive. I think of hearing her hummingâthe way she always did in a silent room.
III. Remembrance
tombs of ideas
The first time I went to a wake by myself, without my parents, was six years after Grandmaâs death. It was a wake for Paul Casale, a fifty-two year old contemporary realist painter from Brooklyn who changed the way I approached my art. I took workshops with him throughout high school within my hometown of Cranford, New Jersey.
In demonstrations, he would strike a horsehair brush against a canvas like a snake that knows exactly where itâs going. He stood statuesque: his legs shoulder-width apart, his arm outstretched to easel. His light blue eyes shifted back and forth from subject to canvas.
And then, he would turn the spotlight to me.âIs that dark of the cast shadow as dark as
the hair?â Paul would stop and point out every flaw in value, proportion, line structure, or composition. He was the first instructor I ever had who did not immediately praise me for my work.
âNow, when you think of Sargentâs work, you see how he simplifies the form,â Paul would gesture to show the breakdown of light from shadow, of foreground from background. He watched my eyes for recognition, as he held his prized John Singer Sargent book rich with examples. I nodded.
He frequently criticized me for trying to get too detailed too soon. âSimplify the form to the basic shapes,â he would say. âEverything starts out as an abstraction.â
He told me these things from the time I was fourteen years old until I was eighteen.
At nineteen, I stood in a line sweeping around the block, standing not for a painting before an easel, but for Paulâs wake. I was home from my first year of college, and I had recently received second place in the local plein air painting competition. The only artist who had beaten me for the first place prize was a sixty-five year old veteran. I was satisfied, but disappointed when I didnât see Paul there.
The last time I saw him was at a Pathmarkâa chance encounter during
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Christmas break after my first semester. He immediately asked me about my art. I lied. I told him it was going great in college, that I drew every day. He didnât know that I was spending months engrossed in readings for classes not related to art, that I was taking only one art class that was a fraction of my curriculum. I was in the Ivy League, but that didnât matter to artistsâit just confused them about what I was planning to do with my art. I didnât know, and I felt ashamed when I didnât tell him I was at prestigious art schoolâPratt Institute or Cooper Union in New Yorkâpainting along masters like he did. I didnât want to let him know that maybe, I wasnât pursuing art like him. I didnât know if the struggle of an artist was one I wanted to live.
bohemian rhapsody
Paul was the first person in my teenage life I knew independently of my parents, that I built a relationship with because of our passions for art as teacher and disciple. I learned how to pencil a graphite portrait of a model under him. I learned how to layout a Venetian palette under him. I learned to mix flesh tones and what types of brushes to use âround, flat, or bright. I purchased my first French academy portable easel with his guidance. They were my favorite tools, my most valued investments. The best investment of all, however, was the very first workshop I signed up for with Paul at fourteen years old.
As we stood in the Pathmark entranceway, metal carts in hand, I could not look him in the eye.
âIâm teaching a bunch of high school goons over in Elizabeth,â he chuckled, as the electronic doors swung open and closed. I was surprised, but immediately saddened to think that a master like him was teaching kids who probably didnât even care about art. He shrugged, âYeah, itâs another job.â
I would never find out how he diedâa question one of my middle-aged classmates kept asking me when we stood on the line of his wake. I didnât know. The cause of death was unknown at the time. The autopsy report
had not yet been released. And while all his family members, painter friends, students, and admirers pointed to the sky and demanded an answer from God above, Heda poked me in the chest and said, âIâm rooting for you, now.â
While I was waiting at the wake, my eyes grazed his original paintings flanking the passageway to the casket. I expressed condolences to his wife and two children. I hugged his daughter, a girl two years younger than me, and gave the standard, âIâm sorry.â Then, I softly added, âYour dad was the best teacher I ever had.â
Her stained blue eyes met mine.âHe really believed in you, Gina,â she
croaked. âYou have to live up to it and be an artist like him.â
I didnât know what to say.
if we must live
I recently found a couple of black and white charcoal sketches Paul did for me in my notebook. He was showing me how to capture the modelâs form. Every time I look at the sketches, I can think of his arm sweeping in a single stoke to get the arch of the neck. I think of the gentle shading of tone and value that came from maneuvers of his wrist. I think of how Paul first told me to stand back from the easel an armâs length away, to stand so all I had to do was shift my eyes, not my head nor my body.
Paul lives in that drawing. When I see it, I hear his voice giving me the advice he said before I went off to college, Draw every day.
Itâs the same as the humming of my Grandma, a memory living inside my mind sparked by associations with tall houses.
I think of how busy I am with my academic work, the numerous readings and writings and other sorts of work that donât include drawing on a daily basis.
Draw every day.The sketches contain the life and memory of
Paul, something, like my Grandma, that I try to lock away because the sadness is too great. My guilt seeps in, the expectations that I become like him reappear, and I cannot escape it.
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Draw every day.The sketches are the residual traces of a life
I valued.
V. Guilt
art, writing, music
The first time I went to my academic advisorâs office my freshman year of college, I climbed up four flights of stairs to get there. Located inside a West Philadelphia house spotting the southwestern corner of 38th and Walnut Streets, its placard read: Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. With each step up those creaky, dark-stained wooden steps, I felt like I was pursuing a path further and further into a world of academia and less art. It also reminded me of a reoccurring nightmare Iâve had since I was five.
Itâs a nightmare that lays dormant for several successive years. Then, it reemergesâmy subconscious telling me that the worry or grief is always there. In the dream, Iâm inside a very tall houseâsometimes itâs four-stories and sometimes itâs sixâand Iâve run up to the very top only to discover Iâm contained by the roof. I cannot escape. I donât know what Iâm running from, but it strikes fear into my lungs. Eventually, the house starts swaying, back and forth, back and forth, as I peer out the window and see the greatest tornado from the state of Kansas headed my way.
And then I wake myself up. The house containing my advisorâs office
was like the house of my dreams. As I sat before my advisor, amidst auroras of dĂŠjĂ vu, I asked question upon question but wasnât really looking for answers. Iâm going to take mathematics next semester, and psychology, and art history, and visual studies, because those are more intellectual than just another painting class. I thought I had it reasoned out: I was taking smart classes for smart people who didnât do art. We all knew that artists were never the brightest of the bunchâgetting lost in ideas that allowed them to get stoned in the middle of the afternoon and never make a dime that could buy them a house. People who do smart things often have
successful lives with lots of money. Thatâs all I really wanted, right?
I was insulting myself.
VI. Living
perpetual remnants of the deceased
I spent my first Independence Day weekend the summer after my freshman year of college away from my family in New Jersey. Sandwiched between two college friends in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, we spent the entire day lounging in the sand of the beach, tanning in the golden sun. We spoke our minds on the deepest of topicsâcooing mildly as we drank red wine and talked about the meanings of life and death, what our purposes were, where we went when we died, and if there was a God. When we finally got bored, we left the beach, and started meandering down a wooded street. We had no destination, but we were looking for answers about how to make sense of anything.
We ended up in a short, pink house. It was a colonial cottage converted into a bookstore with stacks piled floor to ceiling. One of the special ties of our friendship was our common interest in literature and writing. We bonded while reading short stories together over dinner. We bonded over the fact that we had the same isolating childhood obsessions for making our own books. We had each other.
âOh my God, Gina, look how cool this is,â one friend held a heavy book. It was a 19th century publication of poems with a gold-embossed cover like the Holy Bible. She flipped through the pages like a mother smiling upon an infant in her arms.
Likewise, I discovered an 18th century collection of Leonardo Da Vinciâs writings published in the seventeenth century. I continued to jump to the next book that protruded from the stacks. I followed a path of books into the basement, feeling content with each creak of the wooden steps.
Redefinition
I found a sampling of rare bound-books,
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folios, and hand-written manuscripts. My favorite was a small indigo volume. Its cover was embossed with metallic swirls and patterned letters. On its first page, the owner, Lillian Parter Wallace, 1715, scribed her name. I found notes of the same types of scribbles as the ones on my sticky notes.
Seeing I comprehend theeI did not know the 17th century owner. We
were separated by two centuries. We were separated by two lifetimes. It saddened me that I would never know her, but it excited me that I held her ideas in my hands. Her thoughts were being transferred to mine, and that made her invincible, right?
I continued to thumb through.These books were capsules of lives that
once lived. Those individuals were gone, but the outpourings of their souls remained. Their ideas engulfed me. While I went down into that pink cottage houseâs expecting to find caskets, I discovered immortality. Pieces of art, writings, musicâI realized they were all perpetual remnants of the deceased, that associations could be transferred from one form to the next.
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When the corn plant reached the ceiling I had to cut off its head and start a new one and there was no sound in its decapitation just a quiet acquiescence in fate like the time the squirrel clutched the tree for interminable moments after being shot in its tiny brain my best friend whacking barn kittens on fence posts the long snake pounded flat with a hammer by some kid on the front porch until the tail stopped moving the last twitch of the hanged foot the fist gripping in pain the bubbles escaping from the open mouth and I hope tendrils of hope erupt from the cutting which sits in a bucket on the porch and the squirrelâs children lived and the mothers of kittens have more and the snake felt little pain for even a partial death might result in, like, partial life which is moreâŚbut, then, what is âmoreâ about, anywayâŚand the damned plant was taking up way too much light in the room sort of like the âTragedy of the Commonsâ thing and the steam rising from my morning coffee could no longer be seen in the streams of sunlight after 30 years of growth reaching toward a limited sky and one time filling the air with hopeful blossoms that leaked sticky crap all over the carpet but smelled like vanilla but I certainly did not do this out of disrespect or animosity having enjoyed the company of deep green in an otherwise gray world for so long how I wished I could knock out the ceiling of the apartment and allow the dreams of flight to take root out into the last gasp of atmosphere to breathe the bullet out of the squirrelâs head to turn the fence posts to goose down and the hammer to soft strokes of a womanâs hand.
Brad GarberClear Cut
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Katherine Minott
Naked Summer
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Otto believes the children are mice. He hears them sifting through sugar in the cellar and sets traps. Traps he cannot bring himself to check. Solveig had done that task, to spare him. Then he hears the children whisper, thistle-light and incoherent, disquieting. It has been a long time since he has encountered other voicesâyears even.
âWho is there?â Footsteps in the dark answer him. Displaced household objects orbit Otto. His
tobacco pipe set six millimeters to the right. Brittle petals scattered in his underwear drawer. The lid left open on the idle dust-furred piano. Fresh bed sheets rumpled and undone.
Coming in from pickaxing root vegetables from the ice, he trips over a shoe on the threshold. Flakes of mud crust off the sole. He holds it up. It does not span the length of his hand. He sets another trap, taking a special package from a locked trunk, setting it in his lap, and pretending to sleep. They come breathless on tiptoe. Otto remembers the pure want he once felt, peering in through the gilded glass of the candy store. From the faraway vantage of age, his young self seems more like the child he never made. He forces his eyelids smooth. His moustache tingles and begins to itch. When they reach into the jar of licorice, he seizes hold of their wrists.
âPlease, I only want to speak with you.âSnorting, they fight to break free. A thick
crystal ashtray cracks on his skull. Sometime later, he rolls over and pats the ground. His thinning hair is wet, and there is a wet circle on the crocheted rug. The shards of glass and blood cling to his palms. Still trembling, he
does his best to clean up. Otto talks out loud, as he rinses off in the
porcelain sink.âBefore the war, everyone was someone else.
I was a professor of literature. My lectures were linked to ten thousand students around the world, in places that may no longer existâPapa New Guinea, Iceland, France. I lived in a snow globe of words, fragile and blinding. I never saw the end coming, the fall from the high shelf.â
From behind his back, the boy interrupts him, curt and abrupt.
âWhat happened to your eyes, then?â âI apologize. I imagine the scars must
look very frightening. I had the misfortune to glance up from the book I was reading into the profane light of a nuclear blast. The glare was so severe, so bright, steam collected in my eyeballs, and they burst from the pressure. My wife found me and dragged me down eleven flights of stairs. She exchanged her jewelry for rides out of the city, leaving a sparkling trail of diamonds and rubies behind like bread crumbs. Solveig was a determined woman. She had inherited this farm. In the summer, we used to come here on holiday.â
âWhere is she now?â Otto pinches the bridge of his nose.
âShe is buried in the orchard.â They had been careful those first months.
Solveig, always the worldly one, had prepared for the war. They took potassium iodide and wore masks outside. They boarded shut the windows and duct taped plastic to the seams. They cut and hauled brush to obscure the driveway. Their location was sheltered, remote,
Melody Sage
Blind Mice
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the more poignant for its certain brevity. He is patient. He is calm. He waits for them to approach.
He listens to static on the hand crank radio: white noise for a white world. This winter is ouroboros, a snake closing in to swallow its own tail, with its own circular logic. The other seasons are shadowed, brief and incomplete, since the bombs dropped. The boy leans over his shoulder. His breath is hot and biscuit-scented in his ear.
âCan I try?â he asks.âYes please, I could use a break.â âHave you ever picked up signal?ââNo news, not for a long time. They used to
say no news was good news.â They listen to the mechanical whir.
âMy father had a radio like this. He used to be an engineerâbefore he got sick.â
âWhat was his name?ââPeter, same as me.âPeter turns the crank harder and harder, until
Otto places his hand on his to stop him.âWe can try again tomorrow.âPeter can read a little, and Otto begins to
teach him and Isa more. Most of the writing paper was used as tinder, so he shapes the letters with charcoal on the walls and hearth, feeling out the powdery lines. They sound out the words from his favorite books for himâ1984, Les Miserables, The Brothers Karamazov; troubled friends he believed long gone.
Soon Peter is insatiably devouring the entire contents of the library. Otto periodically crashes into precarious towers of his discarded books. Isa is more lingering and particular in her selections. She recites the first sentences quietly to herself and hesitates to see if she can fall in love. Otto wonders if his own son would have been so skeptical and quick witted, if his own daughter would have been so pensive and kind. He likes to think so. Their displays of affection are quick and glancing, self-consciously nonchalantâa feather left as a token on his desk, a swift pat on his shoulder when he least expects it, staying at the table a little longer to listen to his stories. The children take care not to reveal much of their
a tight nest in the mountains built for two. No one knew they were there. They were careful, but not careful enough. He wondered if they had heard her playing Deux Arabesque by Debussy on the piano for him.
âHow did you find this place?â he asks.âWe followed the smoke.âHe nods. Of course, they should have only
set fires at night.âYou know I have plenty of food. You are
welcome to stay here, if you like.ââWeââ the girl starts to speak.âShut up,â the boy says. Otto turns around. His chest bumps into a
metal cylinder, the barrel of his shotgun. âI could shoot you,â the boy says.âYes, you could.âOtto waits. The boy gives a disgusted sigh and runs
outside. The next day, Otto wakes to find a shaved
and decapitated doll head laid like an offering on his pillow. He runs his finger across the bubbled rubber contours of its face.
âSheâs mine, but you can borrow her,â the girl says.
âThank you. I promise to take good care of her.â
âMy brother says we can stay here.ââGood, I am glad to make your acquaintance.
You can call me Otto. May I ask, what is your name?â
âIsa.ââNice to meet you Isa,â he extends his hand,
but she does not shake it. He heaves himself out of bed to make breakfast, cold glutinous porridge with the last of the apple jelly and cinnamon. He sets out three bowls, and the children eat like stray dogs, fast enough to choke. Otto starts to speak before he realizes he is alone at the table.
It is more than a month before he learns the boyâs name. Since the children came, he keeps track of the days, notching them with a knife into his cane. He feels like he did when he used to glimpse a fox or a snow hare in the forest, close enough to see their breath smoke, the flash of their dark clear eyes, a blessing all
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itinerant life before him, as if to protect him. He has gleaned that they were originally from the city. That their nursery walls were painted custard yellow. That they used to have a pet cat named Coquette. That their parents died about three years ago, possibly from drinking contaminated water, possibly from tetanus or radiation poisoning, prolonged wasting deaths, collapsing, skeletons intertwined now in the wilderness.
Isa helps him cut blank pages from the books into a bouquet of paper flowers, fragile razor-edged star shapes twisted with wire. She buries her face in them, rustling.
âThey smell so good.ââI also love the smell of old paper. It
reminds me of dust and falling leaves and Earl Grey Tea. You have a refined sensibility my dear.â He tweaks her nose to make her laugh. They walk together outside past the barn. Otto tries not to remember having to shoot the horses pointblank, tries to think of them instead glistening viscerally alive, manes thrashing in the sunlight. Ash is falling with the snow. He carries Isa with difficulty and counts the paces in his mind. The quiet is preternatural, no cars, no birdsong, no chainsaws. Even now he still expects them. Only the crunch of their boots breaks the spell.
He hits his toe on the cairn of stones. Stones he and Solveig had brought back from their travels, her concert tours around the world, brought here to the place where they were supposed to garden side by side and grow old together. Grow older, always older than they were. To an extent they had succeeded. Clapping in the front row, he must have presented her with a thousand bouquets of roses, white, pink, yellow, violet, salmon, lilac, silver, and deepest crimson. He brushes the snow off the stones and lays down the paper flowers. The best he could do.
He attempts to clear the tightness in his throat. He had planned to say a few words, but now cannot. Peter sniffs, and Otto pats his shoulder. As one, they turn and go.
Springtime comes as a surprise. The children spend the afternoons chasing each other
barefoot on the icy nascent grass, immune to the cold. Resilient the narcissus bulbs still bloom. They cover every surface with overflowing jars used as vases. Otto touches a crenellated trumpet, delicate and flesh-like, to his lips and smiles. He imagines the blossoms as a blizzard of golden eyed brides.
They are kneading sourdough when they hear the engines.
âGo into the wardrobe in the attic, as we rehearsed,â Otto says.
âYou have to come too. We canât leave you.ââNo, if they find no one here, they will look
until they do. Go now.âHe hears them pound up the stairs. He sits
at the kitchen table, knuckles still gummed with flour, the yeasty odor rising off him like a sigh. He lays his hands palm up, so they will immediately see that he has no weapon. They have stocked a dummy storeroom with food they can afford to lose. There are four other caches concealed around the property and a false compartment in the wall. They are safe, as safe as they can be. This is what he tells himself.
The interlopers hatchet through the door, not bothering to knock. Unwashed and raw, he can already smell them, the smell of a pylon of bones in a scavenger den. Otto controls his expression, sets it to careful neutral. There are both men and women. He hears their raised voices calling to one another, bantering. The hardwood floors creak under their heavy feet. A series of gunshots fire. Otto tries to rise and is knocked on his back. He feels a round O of steel emboss his forehead.
âThe food, where is it?ââThere in the pantry. Please itâs all I have.âA cudgel to the face answers him. When he
regains consciousness, his blood is crackled and dried. A hard wind blows on him through the banging door. He stumbles upright. He has to find the children to tell them itâs safe to come out now. He trips over a labyrinth of splintered and upturned furniture on his way to the staircase.
âChildren itâs safe to come out now,â he calls. His hand grips the wooden bannister. He takes a few steps.
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âChildren?âHe trips again, this time on something soft,
yielding as bread He reaches out to feel. He palpates the thin arms, the narrow rib cage, the well-known and cherished nose, and the dainty skull with its terrible small wet hole. Peter is splayed next to her, as if trying to shield her. Otto sucks in his breath. No tears fall from his ravaged eyes.
Later he finds the shotgun missing from its hiding place, and he realizes what must have happened. Peter took the gun. He would not leave Otto. And Isa would not leave Peter.
Otto lays two more cairns in the orchard, coughing up blood on his shirt. He falls on the frozen grass and looks up into his private starless night. He had once assumed that death meant nothingness. Now he sees every moment, every cup of coffee he forgot he drank, every snowflake, every kiss, every single configuration of molecules that briefly comprised his body, still exists. He has experienced his life as continuity, but everything that ever happened is happening nowâonly somewhere else in time. Solveig, Isa, and Peter, still exist. Their lives are intact, pure, and invincible. All the pain is there. And the beauty. The love. Nothing in this world can be undone.
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R. K. Riley
Ugly Breastsugly words made uglier yet by thepulsing ache of desire undisguised by aboyish smile that never climaxed to his eyes orsnuggled deep under his tonguelaced his words like lust againsta tiny crevice in my neck that knewhis name from way back but had letit lay forgotten in the shadows of new breaststhat left him fumbling like keys against change in a pocket bulgingbeside his reluctance that heldonly a moment before his open mouthfound tender skinthe hitch caught blind inside hismoan the last beautiful thing I ever heard
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The clouds whispera fine spray of drizzleânot bad
you thinkâbut still rain. Might be welcome on a hot day,
but in late November shrinks the skin with cold. Itâs not a matter of if
we get breast cancer, but when. After a lumpectomy, she asked to see
the offending tissueâit looked like an old piece of chewed gum:
gray, slick, bitten.
Jean Kingsley
Apology to Wrigley, et al.
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Michael Cooper
Agnes invokes the Nightmother her syllables made of mercury
O Alejandro what Sheppardwhat selves what hooved-horned what? What a time licking our neighborâsshingles with our toothy tongues we scrape the shellfish from the Sacrum Delirium! We changeas we fall thru no-time each hingeof us a multiplicity of delight. Our time selling the worldrecords for the slowest and the weakestsalesman sweating on the copper throne. Her hair reigns downserpentine wetware her lashes ruleall who scuttle claw handed and binary. Our timeto ignite the incandescent dark matters beneath our mantlesand cloak gaslamps with the dagger of slick fingered evenings. The eclipse of sunglasses and the closed umbrella mumblesome deep meaning. Our time long shore man pinned to the dockby a forklift split bodied dentures spat out on the ground like newbornmice[ I am bringing up my children to be you a bent wingtip leapt up from the well lipgloss crystallized on the crush thrust knee of December wet hand canât un- clutch your iron apron without giving up skin our tithe is 27 of our adult teeth our sandpaper grin erodes the under carriage of your private jet a lock of his hair all whatâs left of we small
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boy the day after payday I will let you smell this burning marrowAngel.]he still gurglesand one leg kicks to the tenor of the jigsaw. We are not warmround stones. I am the sweat under[ The windows spilled out on the kitchen floor open for the trains that dangled ripe cognizant of falling through their own mouths in search of winesmoke her necklace I sipped salt browed somnambulant coffee grinders cry out their feathered shards I bled hands with the circumference of all ladled men madhatted by her perfume spatter patterned anointment of bedside alarms sniffing out the blood trail of the honeysuckle coughing rose huffing unreason wedless undertaker of my smileless days she woven explosion of flocked apparitions in the grove.]your arms deer did you fly all night to make me? We are stones. I am the water in your lungs with what arms have you rowed my black sea flickering
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Jesse Millner
Meditation on Reincarnation, Roaches and Kim Kardashianâs ButtI wonder about reincarnation: What happenswhen thereâs no planet to reincarnate on?If everything is poisoned and dead, and theonly living creatures are cockroaches, dothe dead come back as bugs? Whenever
I read New Age accounts of reincarnation,previous lives involved queens and kings,an actress or two, an adventurer, a writermaybe, but never a bus driver or dish washer.I guess Iâm losing patience with the worshippers
of celebrity. My favorite person is the ownerof the local Mexican restaurant who workedhis way up from bus boy to proprietor. Best ofall, he doesnât smother the enchiladas in cheeseand big bits of fresh avocado float serenely in the guacamole.
Maybe it wouldnât be bad if Kim Kardashianand Kanye came back as cockroaches. Maybetheyâd find each other somehow in that nextinsect life and make passionate insect love.Iâm sure theyâd breed baby roaches
that were also so self-involved, theyâd believefrom the moment they were hatched somehow their own tiny lives were more importantthan every other roachâs.
I donât believe in reincarnation. But I donât disbelieve it either.Personally, Iâd like to come back as a bird, maybe that cardinalI saw yesterday flashing through the areca palms, so bright redagainst the monochromatic green wall. And his tiny heart beatso fast, his bones were so lightâhow must it feel to launchoneself skyward with so little effort, to skim over the surfaceof this suburban world that is a mix of strip malls and cypresssloughs, of blight and beauty, of concrete and soft swamptrails we follow in our squishy tennis shoes, where the resurrection
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fern has no need of its own reality TV show, nor do the bony knees of the pond cypress, and the siren that evadesthe biologistâs trap is happy to just swim in the tea-colored currents fringed by Alligator flag, beyondwhich lies the dome itself, deep-watered cathedralwhere sometimes god whispers down in the slurryof rain and lightning. Kanye and Kim
had a baby girl they named, North West. I know thisbecause it was the Yahoo headline. My students tell me that Kim began her acting careerwith a porn video. Just Google it, they say. I donât.I havenât. I wonât ever. But that doesnât stop mefrom asking the question, Why, Lord, why?And it is true that last summer while trollingthe Weekly World News for writing promptsin my creative writing class, we did discoverKim Kardashianâs butt explodes, which I clickedon, which immediately froze the computer, whichsuccumbed to a ravenous Kardashian butt virus,which greatly amused the class, which embarrassedme when I later had to call computer services.
I think I will name my next dog, Southwest.I think I will spare the palmetto bugsthat scrabble across our kitchen floorssome mornings, looking for crumbsin the dogâs bowl, and who knows, maybein their own ways, searching for roachmeanings in our strange world. When I first
stopped drinking, I looked for new meaningat a treatment center in Chicago. Some nightswe caught roaches and made them race each otherin shoeboxes where weâd carefully constructedlanes defined by matches. Weâd bet nickelson the speeding insects and it relieved for a littlethe darkness which was consuming usas we scrabbled away from addiction, lookingfor a new incarnation that didnât includebooze. What a dark turn this poem
has taken, and it reminds me of a reality TV showcalled Intervention, which I tuned on once yearsago when my wife was away, having left the dog and mealone, so we watched a family intervene into the lifeof a husband and father who was drinking himselfto death, and praise the lord, halfway through the show
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he stopped drinking because he finally saw the realityof his desperate situation, and his wife and daughterscried tears of happiness, but I knew something waswrong because there was still twenty minutes left,plenty of time for another reversal, which camewhen the newly sober man found out his liverwas pickled, so the show ended with a pictureof the man, and the date of his death. The dogand I hated the ending. We wanted the man to live
long and prosper like space travelers whoâd beenblessed by Vulcans. In reality there was no happiness,no long walks on the beach with the grateful family,no slow-motion montage of birthday parties and christenings,no final frame of the reformed drunk holding his wifeâs handas they walked into the kitchen on an average morningand drank coffee and listened to the birds singing in the backyard,as they talked about the mundane things that make up realreality: Maxwell House with a little cream and sugar, the brokenice maker in the freezer, the way the man once noticed there were a fewmore wrinkles around his wifeâs eyes and how that made him happy.
The resurrection fern comes back as itself.Reality stars come back as reruns in the summer.I keep going back to the Mexican restaurant and order the tamales verdes. Jalepenos, corn, beanâI tell my wife Iâm only missing squash and then I would havethe trinity, las tres hermanas, Maya have eaten for centuriesand who keep coming back in the Yucatanamid the limestone cenotes and the citiesof their dead, where every springa rattlesnake climbs down a many-steppedtemple to fertilize the Mexican ground.
If I were a more accomplished poet, Iâd leave Kim and Kanyeout of this poem and simply be grateful for the realityof my sobriety, how Iâve been reincarnated as a manwho loves Mexican food, his wife, and the wayin early Florida spring, yellow blossoms havealready sprung from the frangipani, whichwere leafless all winter, whose grey brancheslooked so barren, that when I looked at themon a wet day this past December,I could have sworn they were dead from weeping.
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so careful they seem like those perfectlystraight superhighways the Chinese have builtin the Congo, in order to more quickly exhaustthat African landscape of its precious metals and gems,so they might arrive by next-day-air in Shenzhenwhere careful workers will assemble rawbeauty into commerce so that next monthin California a womanâs new iPhone willring with Handelâs âWater Musicâ as shegazes wistfully west into the sea.
I have been way too careful with my poems,afraid of what you will think if Iâm honestenough to talk about the time in fifth gradeI was so afraid, my hands shook, and whenI tried to tell Kit Carsonâs story,the syllables tripped off my tonguelike stuttering pack mules confrontedwith a New Mexican canyon wheredown in the damp darkness near a rushingcreek, ghost Navajo still grew peaches.
I need to write poems the way I donâtwrite dreams, the way narrative movesdown a familiar road that leads to a landscapeIâve never seen before where California, China,Kit Carson, New Mexico and ghost can befive stops on a rail line where Iâm ridingin the dining car eating a hot dog.
I need to write poems that followthe logic of ripe peaches listeningto the rippling of moving water.Fruit with ears, canyons filled withghosts, the moonlight filling my bedroomwindowâare no different from the yellowpatterns that disturb the perfect blacksinging of a pilgrim on the Silk Road who hears the long whispers of windmoving sand and longs for his mother.
Jesse Millner
I have been way too careful with my poems
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Your lips surround the mouthpiece of the clarinet. Burnout attenuates the sound. Spin the cityâ black, hip, flame tipped, deeper than ache. The rhythm section has dug trenches. Abdicate. Let go the stage. (stop I said cover the mic) No smile will outshine your opposition. Framed in one note: a warning. Their mouths hang open smile bodies glisten. Break down the stage. Oh yes. Full-blown sugar. Near the bridge, you sing the darksmile soft woman: hand belly rock. Brave bombardment on one wing. Unfurl in private electricity like a quivering waterskin. When a woman undresses you, forget to breathe.
Jill Khoury
Full-blown Sugar
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Lukas Hall
Lifeless, InvertedRibbons of white cedar swirled, clambered over lily
pads as childrenâs shadows
vanished under the deafening water. The canoe, on
its tattered stomach, felt a sting of fishâs scales scraping againstits molded wood, its splinters flaking off. Teeth submerged into oak skin, catching the roots, snapping them, vortexing out chewed up wood dust.
The canoe grew silent, watching us, the indifferent children on the reeled back shore, stare at the black stripped fish all around it, while it tried to regressivly flip on its back, but the canoe was old, so it ended the day, nestling the surface ofthe river, lifeless, inverted.
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Steffi Lang
Midnight PicnicWe slip out, away from the fluorescent, sagging streetsthrough foxglove thickets and wisteria limbs. The quiet night doesnât watch usâ it is too busy guiding the fox cubs home and following the girl as she stutters in the alley. We do not hold hands or words.
Cars thrum far away on cold highway, their lights scrape the dark. You become moon wisp-organza, draped in midnight a kaleidoscope mirage beyond neon city cadence; everything blurred blue and dark the lights are behind us now.
We move through the browning clover of the fields- past the dark, taut oak and the stilled crickets. The thick scent of ragged grass and milkweed clings to your hairâ fall chills your breath into phantom gauze. We eat fruit, nectarines, persimmons and tangy apples-thick juice coats our chins in sugar dribble, staining sweaters. We are careless with words-throwing pulpy red cores in the dark to rot in sticky sap.
Blue blanket puddled on ground, we nestle like foxlingsâ I think you are more beautiful with grass in your hairyour apple smeared mouth ripening before the coming of winter.
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Tim Buck
Fog StudyConditions are best on the Mulberry Riverin September, in the northwest of Arkansas.One doesnât have to actually go there to seewhat the morning fog does when it happens.One canâin fact shouldâjust try to imagine.
A small, rushing river, rapid-filled and clear.Wild wood thick, now going to autumn color.Tumbled chaos of tilted boulders, slick rocks.A good place to drift to in a morningâs reverie.
An insubstantial river barely flowing above the liquid one.
Cold dragonâs-smoke hangs above sounding water.It haunts through the forest trees, going into leaves.Those leaves are turning into a feeling like waiting,in soft hues of reds, oranges, and darker eggplant.
One could imagine he is in Bohemia,wandering a ways off from his villagejust after dawn and before an early sunbegins to burn off dense mysterious fog.One always thinks of a somewhere elsewhen banks of mist occlude real objects.
Itâs the dimming of visionthat makes brume special.When clarity is challengedand gray vapor is hovering,equivocal mood can breathe.
Itâs the way last yearâs leavesand branch rubble scatteredappear as a collage of silence,as pieces of a lost old puzzlethat will never be completed...
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Hannah Baggott
you September 19
Iâve made myself sick with you.
I reblog you October 21
Iâve made myself sick with you.
Sick, yesâa resonant sourceâ your name shows up everywhere. Youâre always sticky like jam: raspberry preserves with seeds that stick in my teeth. I find tuna in my scarf and think of you and your packets of crackers, suddenly, in the back of my car, smoking. I see your nipples through your shirt; I bite my lip hard. I think I have made you up: sloppy memories of touching boys because they were there and they were angry. you November 1
I canât stop tasting your name.
I reblog you November 19
I canât stop tasting your name.
And it smudges my lipstick. Others ask me, Who are you talking to? I know I know I know, and they donât. I look at weeks as if theyâre minutes and they are; no one else knows your name when you post pictures of pierced nipples, but I do.
you December 13
Pictures of bodies.Pictures of places.
1 note December 13
I press like
I tell you I love everything you see, but I know youâll never go anywhere. I watch you from across the country, flipping through imaginary pictures, and I write you down.
Things I Donât Post On Tumblr or Ars Poetics
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Allie Marini Batts
for my mother-in-law, who taught me how to eat them
The vehicle that can carry a man towards nirvanais a dusty blue Ford F-100, parked next to a 24 x 36 piece of plywood
HOT BOILâD P-NUTS $5
on a January afternoon thatâs warm enough to drive out to the coastâ
the perfect saint is himself a weather-burnt strip of stick, leather-tough and tan like, limbs of pine scrubs after a controlled burn. Each arm a ropy collection of muscle, knotted from hauling a cast net back up into the trawler, full of mullet, sheepshead, or brim from the deep of the bending Apalachicola.
At the bottom of the bridge, a propane flame and stockpot, 20 quarts full of out of season peanuts simmering in water as salty as the ocean on the other side.
Shoo-ee! though, ainât today purty? Yâall take the big bag, I ainât got âem good enough today,
but these hereâre the last of âem. Ainât gonâ be back up till April,so yâall enjoy âem, yâhear?
voice all sandpaper and Natty Light tallboys, netting peanuts as easily as shrimp, fish, or oysters in their season.
Bouncing from finger to tip until theyâre cool enough to crack, spitting damp threads of their waffled husks against the Gulf breeze, windows rolled all the way down.
Joy is shaped like the shell of a peanut, and tastes soft and briny as the ocean
Boiled Peanuts, Out of Season
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Kelly Andrewsâs work has appeared or is forthcoming in Uppagus, Thirteen Myna Birds, Weave Magazine, Pear Noir, and Philadelphia Stories. Her chapbook âMule Skinnerâ is forthcoming with Dancing Girl Press, 2014. Recently she started an online lit journal Pretty Owl Poetry with two of her favorite writerly friends. She has a hand in creating the sometimes quarterly zine âBE Quarterlyâ, and like most people she knows, has an affinity for cats.
This is Gregory Appâs first time being published.
Nashville native Hannah Baggott, 23, is a poet of the body pursuing an MFA in poetry at Oregon State University while teaching writing courses. She has received awards for flash fiction and critical writing in gender studies. Her work can be found in Tupelo Quarterly, Small Po[r]tions, and others.
Allie Marini Batts holds degrees from both Antioch University of Los Angeles and New College of Florida, meaning she can explain deconstructionism, but cannot perform simple math. Her work has been a finalist for the Sundress Best of the Net and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is managing editor for the NonBinary Review and Zoetic Press, and has previously served on the masthead for Lunch Ticket, Spry Literary Journal, The Weekenders Magazine, Mojave River Review & Press, and The Bookshelf Bombshells. Allie is the author of the poetry chapbooks, âYou Might Curse Before You Blessâ (ELJ Publications, 2013) âUnmade & Other Poems,â (Beautysleep Press, 2013) and âThis Is How We Endâ (forthcoming 2014, Bitterzoet.) Find her on the web: https://www.facebook.com/AllieMariniBatts or @kiddeternity
Sarah Bence has been previously published in multiple volumes of Brown University Pressâ The Round and The Dunes Review. She also works as the outreach intern for the Kenyon Review.
Michael Bernicchi began writing poetry after his deployment to Iraq with the Army in 2005. Shortly after his return, he received his B.A. in English Literature from the University of South Florida. His poetry has been featured in Reflections, an Edison College publication. Bernicchi currently teaching high school English in Port Charlotte, Florida and using my summer off to live in Brooklyn and write about the various aspects of the borough and human interaction in general.
Heather M. Browne is a faith-based psychotherapist and recently emerged poet, published in the Orange Room, Boston Literary Review, Page & Spine, Eunoia Review, Poetry Quarterly, The Poetry Bus, Red Fez, The Muse, An International Journal of Poetry, Deep Water Literary Journal, Electric Windmill, Maelstrom, mad swirl, and Dual Coast. Her first chapbook, We Look for Magic and Feed the Hungry has just been published by MCI. She just won the Nantucket Poetry Competition and will be featured on their website. She has been married 20 years to her love, has two amazing teens, and can be found frolicking in the waves. Follow her: www.thehealedheart.net
After retiring from hardware and lumber type jobs, Tim Buck abides as a recluse in a small house on a gravel road somewhere in Arkansas. He writes poems and essays about poetry and other items of interest. One of his essays appeared in the anthology Vocabula Bound (Marion Street Press); a poem, âOld Jaffaâ appeared in the online journal Calliope Nerve. Other poems have appeared in the online and print versions of Edgar Allan Poet Journal and in VerseWrights. He is the author of a novel, SĂŠance in Bi Minor. Tim is a co-editor of the emerging poetry journal, Spectral Lyre (spectrallyre.wordpress.com). He also maintains a personal blog at My Dripping Brain (mydrippingbrain.blogspot.com).
Finn Butler lives in London and studies music at Goldsmiths University.
Contributors
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Shawn Campbell has been published in Chinese Combine, Silo, Construction, Flour Mill Tour, Prairie Grain Magazine, Winter Walk, and Owen Wister Review.
Michael Cooper is an inland empire poet, PoetrIE member, MFA student, Veteran, and father of two great sons: Markus & Jonathan. You can find his work in Tin Cannon, The Pacific Review, The Chaffey Review, The Camel Saloon, Creepy Gnome, Milspeaks: Memo, Split Lip, and other fine (but wild) publications. Michael would like to make you aware that the splash zone includes the first 11 rows.
Matthew Connollyâs poetry draws upon experiences from growing up in New Yorkâs Hudson Valley, where pastoral beauty meets rural and urban decay. Previous work has appeared in Bostonâs Burn Magazine and Literary Matters, a publication of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers. He currently reside in Columbus, Ohio, where he is pursuing a PhD in English at Ohio State.
Will Cordeiro received his MFA from Cornell University, where he is currently completing a Ph.D. in English. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in burnt district, Copper Nickel, Cortland Review, Crab Orchard Review, CutBank Online, Drunken Boat, Fourteen Hills, Phoebe, Sentence, and elsewhere. He is grateful for residencies from ART 342, Blue Mountain Center, Ora Lerman Trust, and Petrified Forest National Park. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Francis Davis has had fiction appear in Weber Studies, Natural Bridge, The Gihon River Review, and Ducts, among other publications. Originally from Philadelphia, Francis has lived much of the last 20 years in Montana, where he earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Montana. Currently, he teaches as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Montana Western.
Gina DeCagna currently attends the University of Pennsylvania, where she is
majoring in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and Fine Arts. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Symbiosis (www.upennsymbiosis.com) a visual-literary art magazine at Penn, an editorial assistant at Jacket2.org, and a frequent dweller at the Kelly Writers House.
Michelle Donahue is a current MFA candidate in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State where she is the managing editor of Flyway. Her work has appeared in Whiskey Island, Redactions, Front Porch Review, and others.
Stephanie French-Mischoâs short fiction appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of the Still Point Arts Quarterly as well as the July 2012 issue (#6) of Midwestern Gothic. In 2010, she was a finalist for the Santa Fe Literary Awards and invited to read at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolisâ International Womenâs Day. Glimmer Train Stories awarded an Honorable Mention to a story of Stephâs in their May 2009 Short Story Award for New Writers. She is a member of The Indiana Writerâs Center and lives in Indianapolis.
Brad Garber lives, writes, and runs around naked in the Great Northwest. He fills his home with art, music, photography, plants, rocks, bones, books, good cookinâ and love. He has published poetry in Alchemy, Red Booth Review, Front Range Review, theNewerYork, Rayâs Road Review, The Round Up, Meat for Tea, Gambling the Aisle, Off the Coast, Shadowgraph, Livid Squid Literary Journal, Brickplight, Shuf Poetry, Rockhurst Review, Penduline Press, Literature Today, BASED, Eunoia Review, and other quality publications. Nominee: 2013 Pushcart Prize for poem, âWhere We May Be Found.â
Irving A. Greenfield has been published in Amarillo Bay, Runaway Parade, Writing Tomorrow, eFictionMag and the Stone Hobo; and in Prime Mincer, The Note and Cooweescoowee (2X); and in THE STONE CANOE, electronic edition. Greenfield and his wife live in Manhattan. He has been a sailor, soldier, and college professor,
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playwright and novelist. He also has had 10 OFF OFF Broadway and Regional Theatre productions and won several awards for them.
Kenneth P. Gurney lives in Albuquerque, NM, with his beloved Dianne. To view a fuller biography, publishing credits and available books visit http://www.kpgurney.me
Lukas Hall is a poet, currently in the BFA Creative Writing program at Hamline University in Saint Paul, MN. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Aviary Review, East Jasmine Review, Rib Cage Literary Magazine and Souvenir Lit. He also won the Patsy Lea Core Memorial Award in Creative Writing, for his poetry.
Elisabeth Hewer is 20 years old and lives in South West England. She is currently studying journalism, media and cultural studies at university in Wales and hopes to be able to earn her keep writing one day.
Robert P. Hiatt lives on an island in the Gulf of Mexico with his bewitching wife Betsie, his young daughter Marza, and a passel of annoying critters, all of whom he loves deeply and expects nothing in return. His work has appeared in The Alarmist, Mangrove Review, Youth Imagination, and Belletrist Coterie, among others.
Bob Hicks draws his writing from the areas he has lived inâa small industrial Illinois city surrounded by cornfields, a desert village in Botswana, and the North Cascades range of the Pacific Northwest. He has written essays, a novel, and poems. Hicks has been published in Cirque, Jeopardy, Stories of the SkagitâAnthology II, and Loyalties Anthology. He is a a two-time Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest Award winner and received second place in the Bellingham Fiction 101 contest.
Savannah Hocter has been practicing photography at an amateur level for two years, and has been exploring various genres and mediums to figure out what suits her. She has
a page dedicated to her photography and other works, which has gained a slight following that sheâs trying to grow. Her inspirations include Salvador Dali and Henrique Frazao, and impressionism has helped to shape her style.
Ann Howellsâs poetry appears in Calyx, Crannog (Ire), Free State Review, Little Patuxent Review, Magma (UK), Sentence and Spillway, as well as other small press and university journals. She serves on the board of Dallas Poets Community, a 501-c-3 non-profit, and has edited its journal, Illyaâs Honey, since 1999, recently taking it from print to digital. Her chapbook, Black Crow in Flight, was published by Main Street Rag Publishing (2007). A second chapbook, the Rosebud Diaries, was published in limited edition by Willet Press (2012).
Mark Jones is an English professor at Trinity Christian College, where he teaches a range of subjects including Shakespeare and linguistics. As a writing teacher and amateur jazz pianist, he is fascinated by improvisation in music and in other forms of composition. His creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chrysanthemum, Haiku Journal, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Red Booth Review, and Tenth Muse.
Matthew Donald Jacob Kellyâs prior writing has largely been in the domain of playwriting. Of note, his play âHomegrown Beginningsâ was nominated for the Christopher Brian Wolk Award and the Woodward/Newman Drama Award. Most recently, his short play âRussian Teaâ was produced by the Metropolitan Playhouse in New York City.
Jill Khoury earned her Masters of Fine Arts from The Ohio State University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including Haydenâs Ferry, RHINO, Off the Coast, and Stone Highway Review. She has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and a Best of the Net award. Her chapbook Borrowed Bodies was released from Pudding House Press. You can find her at jillkhoury.com.
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Jean A. Kingsley was born in Omaha, Nebraska, has lived in Arizona, Alaska, and Virginia and now resides in Rochester, New York. She earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from SUNY College at Brockport, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University. She is the recipient of the 1995 Academy of American Poets Prize, a finalist for âDiscoveryâ/The Nation and The Constance Saltonstall Foundation of the Arts Fellowship. Her poems and essays have appeared in Tar River Poetry, River Oak Review, American Literary Review, Excursus Literary Arts Journal, Quarterly West, Eclipse, and Poetry Lore, among others. She has recently won a poetry book award for Traceries from ABZ Press, selected by C. D. Wright.
Steffi Lang is an emerging poet. She has worked as a journalist for her universityâs publication and has also had poetry published in LAMP Magazine and The Literary Hatchet.
P.K. Laurenâs work has been chosen to appear in several literary venues, including Clapboard House, Prick of the Spindle, Casserole, Dark Matter, Empty Sink Publishing, and others.
Kat Lerner hails from the ever-breezy Pacific Northwest, where she writes fiction and poetry and teaches creative writing. Her work has appeared in publications including Word Catalyst Magazine, Bartleby Snopes, Wilderness House Literary Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, Labyrinth, and Inkspeak.
Jessica McDermott is currently an MFA student at the University of Idaho studying creative nonfiction, but she also enjoy writing poetry. She has found flash a great way to blend the two.
Peter McEllhenney has a BA in English from Oberlin College and does a lot of writing for my marketing company.
Ray McManus is the author of four books of poetry: Punch. (Hub City Press, forthcoming)
Red Dirt Jesus (Marick Press, 2011), Left Behind (Steeping Stones Press, 2008), and Driving through the country before you are born (USC Press, 2007). His poetry has appeared most recently in Blue Collar Review, Barely South, The Pinch, Haydenâs Ferry, and moonShine Review. Ray is an Associate Professor of English in the Division of Arts and Letters at University of South Carolina Sumter where he teaches creative writing, Irish literature, and Southern literature.
Bradley K. Meyer writes from Dayton, Ohio. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Literary Bohemian, Parody, Hobo Pancakes, Right Hand Pointing & others. He is the author of a chapbook, Hotel Room (Vostok East Press, 2013). His favorite animal is: opossums.
Myron Michael is a publisher and writing teacher. His poetry appears in Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds (City Lights, 2009), Nanomajority, Fourteen Hills, Harvard Review Online, Toad Suck Review, The Blink, Words+Images, Beeswax, Reverie, The Revolving Door, Spillway, Tea Party Magazine, Cave Canem XII, Eleven Eleven, and Another&Another, respectively. In collaboration with Microclimate Collective, he has presented work or exhibited work at the openings of Eidolon, Perfect Place/No Place, and X LIBRIS. He co-created âVertical Horizonâ as a participant in Broadside Attractions/Vanquished Terrains. His chapbook Scatter Plot won the 2010 Willow Books Integral Music Chapbook Prize, and he is co-author of Hang Man (Move Or Die, 2010).
Jesse Millnerâs work has appeared most recently in The New Poet, Real South, Squalourly, and Best American Poetry 2013. He has been the honorary poet for Blue Bell Creameries and lives in Fort Myers, Florida with his wife, Lyn, and dog, Henry Brown.
Katherine Minott, M.A. is an artist whose photographic work reflects the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabiâ the celebration of things imperfect, impermanent, and
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incomplete. Her work has appeared in Camas: The Nature of the West, New Mexico Magazine, Visual Language Magazine, and the Santa Fe Reporterâs Annual Manual.
Maggie Montague is currently an undergraduate student at Whitworth University in Spokane, WA, studying writing and art history. She usually considers herself a fiction writer, but has more recently dabbled in creative nonfiction and poetry. Her piece âFrom One Synapse to Anotherâ is a braided essay exploring the nature of memory and change. This is her first official publication in a literary journal.
Cindy St. Ongeâs poetry has appeared in Cactus Heart Press, The Poetâs Billow, New Millennium Writings, and The New Guard. Her poems were shortlisted for the Atlantis Award (2013), the Knightville poetry prize (2012), and New Millennium Writings award (2012).
Sarah Page graduated from Southern Connecticut State University with an M.S. and certification in Secondary English in 2013. She is a 2013 recipient of Dialogueâs New Voices award for poetry. Her poems have been published in journals including Connecticut River Review, Fresh Ink, Inscape, Noctua Review, and included in the anthology Fire in the Pasture.
Dave Petraglia has appeared in Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Better Homes & Gardens; more recently, or scheduled in Agave Magazine, Cactus Heart Press, Dark Matter Journal, eFiction India, Loco Magazine, Gravel Literary Review, Storyacious, The Olivetree Review, Petrichor Review, Thought Catalog, theNewerYork, and Vine Leaves Literary Journal. Heâs a writer and photographer and lives near Jacksonville, Florida. His blog is at www.drowningbook.com
Lauren Potts is a graduate of the University of South Florida with a degree in public relations and a concentration in creative writing. Her work has appeared in A Celebration
of Young Poets and various official publications of the University of South Florida.
R.K.Riley quietly writes herself real from a small Midwest suburb. Her debut poetry collection, âbecause...writings from a tainted life,â was released last year.
C.C. Russellâs poetry has previously appeared in The New York Quarterly, Hazmat Review, Grasslimb, and Rattle among others. He currently lives in Wyoming with his wife, daughter, and two cats. In the past, he has lived in Ohio and New York. He holds a BA in English from the University of Wyoming and was the editor of their Owen Wister Review for part of his time there. Russell has held jobs in vocations ranging from hotel maintenance to retail management.
Melody Sage is a professional artist. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in The Best of Vine Leaves Literary Journal 2013, Menacing Hedge, The Dirty Napkin, and widely elsewhere. She currently resides in Duluth, MN. To view more of her work visit: melodysage.com
Ray Scanlon. Massachusetts boy. Has grandchildren. Extraordinarily lucky. Recovering assembly language programmer. Not averse to litotes. No MFA. No novel. No extrovert. Recently in Cleaver Magazine and Vine Leaves Literary Journal, soon to appear in Camroc Press Review. On Twitter: @oldmanscanlon. On the web: http://read.oldmanscanlon.com/.
M.I. Schellhaas is a Southwestern PA poet, abstract artist, calligrapher, photographer, and mother of two. At the age of twenty-one, she earned her Associate degree in Psychology. Perplexed with what she would truly enjoy to study, she discontinued college to devote time to a myriad of independent artistic endeavours. Her poetry has been published in various volumes by Eber & Wein Publishing. Most recently, Schellhaasâ phonoeashetic poem âReflectionâ was recorded on Eber & Weinâs Expressions CD. With a manuscript of poems
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in process, Schellhaasâ passion for photography abounds capturing, forever, the beauty of the experience before her.
Denzel Scott earned his BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago. Heâs currently working on an MFA in writing at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in his hometown of Savannah, GA. He is a great lover of the macabre, of the opulent, and the dramatic.
Judith Skillman is the author of fourteen collections of poetry. Her latest book is Broken LinesâThe Art & Craft of Poetry, Lummox Press. Poems have appeared in FIELD, Midwest Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, First WaterâThe Best of Pireneâs Fountain, and other journals and anthologies. Skillman is the recipient of grants from the Academy of American Poets, the Washington State Arts Commission, the Centrum Foundation, King County Arts Commission, and the Jack Straw Foundation. She has taught at University of Phoenix, City University, Richard Hugo House, and elsewhere. Visit judithskillman.com
Star Spider is a magic realism writer from Toronto, Canada where she lives and works with her awesome husband Ben Badger. Star is currently in the process of seeking representation for her novels while she continues to write, play and frolic on the beach. Her work can be found in Black Treacle, ExFic and Grim Corps and she was a 2013 winner of the Fringe Contest at Eden Mills Writerâs Festival as well as recently winning an honourable mention in the Friends of Merril Short Story Contest 2014. starspider.ca
C. Derick Varn is a poet, teacher, and theorist. He currently edits for Former People. He has a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at Georgia College and State University where he served as assistant editor for Arts and Letters: A Journal of Contemporary Arts. He has served
as managing editor for the now defunct Milkwood Review. He won the Frankeye Davis Mayes/Academy of American Poets Prize in 2003 and his poetry has appeared at Unlikely Stories 2.0, Full of Crows, Writing Disorder, JMWW, Clutching at Straws, Xenith, Pirieneâs Fountain, and elsewhere. Originally from the deep South of the United States. He lives in Northern Mexico as a lecturer and teacher on Ethics, Composition, and Intercultural communication. He taught both University and high school in South Korea and the States as well. He lives with his partner, and a bunch of books, and writes at night.
Xavier Vega grew up on a strawberry farm in Plant City, Florida. He moved to Tampa to attend the University of South Florida, where he was published in Thread Literary Inquiry while earning his B.A. in English. Heâs been published in The Bangalore Review and The Yellow Medicine Review. After his publication with Apeiron he became a slush reader for the magazine. Xavier writes novels and is searching for a literary agent. He also writes for the music blog NoisePorn, and he has his own blog that no one reads.
Robert N. Watson has recently had several poems published in The New Yorker, and others have apeared in The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Ariel, The Warwick Review, The Boston Literary Review, and a half-dozen other journals. He is a professor of English at UCLA, teaching mostly Shakespeare and 17th century poetry, and has authored books on Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, the fear of death, and the roots of modern environmentalist consciousness in Renaissance literature and painting.
M.G. Wessels lives, where he studies, among other professional obligations, in New Paltz, NY.
Vanessa Willoughby is a graduate of The New School. She has written for The Huffington Post, xoJane, The Nervous Breakdown, The Toast, and Paper Magazine.
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Harry Wilson is a retired Professor of Art at Bakersfield College. His photographs have been exhibited and published widely. He has exhibited at the de Young Museum in San Francisco and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art among others. Wilson has been published in Cerise Press, Folio, Rolling Stone, The Sun, and Zyzzyva among many others. Heâs been on the brink of a brilliant career for 50 years!
Poems by Rose Maria Woodson have appeared in Foliate Oak, Magnolia: A Journal of Womenâs Socially Engaged Literature, Volume II, Quantum Poetry Magazine, OVS Magazine, Jet Fuel Review , Stirring, The Mojave River Review and Scapegoat Review.
Sherri Cook Woosley has a M.A. in literature from University of Maryland. Her fiction has been published in Abyss & Apex, Bewildering Stories, Indies Unlimited, and Third Wednesday.
FEATURING
KELLY ANDREWS / GREGORY APP / HANNAH BAGGOTT / ALLIE MARINI BATTS / KRISTI BEISECKER
SARAH BENCE / MICHAEL BERNICCHI / HEATHER M. BROWNE / TIM BUCK / FINN BUTLER
SHAWN CAMPBELL / MICHAEL COOPER / MATTHEW CONNOLLY / WILL CORDEIRO
FRANCIS DAVIS / GINA DECAGNA / MICHELLE DONAHUE / STEPHANIE FRENCH-MISCHO
BRAD GARBER / IRVING A. GREENFIELD / KENNETH P. GURNEY / LUKAS HALL
ELISABETH HEWER / ROBERT P. HIATT / BOB HICKS / SAVANNAH HOCTER
ANN HOWELLS / MARK JONES / MATTHEW DONALD JACOB KELLY / JILL KHOURY
JEAN A. KINGSLEY / STEFFI LANG / P.K. LAUREN / KAT LERNER / JESSICA MCDERMOTT
PETER MCELLHENNEY / RAY MCMANUS / BRADLEY K. MEYER / MYRON MICHAEL
JESSE MILLNER / KATHERINE MINOTT / MAGGIE MONTAGUE / CINDY ST. ONGE / SARAH PAGE DAVE
PETRAGLIA / LAUREN POTTS / R.K.RILEY / C.C. RUSSELL / MELODY SAGE / RAY SCANLON M.I.
SCHELLHAAS / DENZEL SCOTT / JUDITH SKILLMAN / STAR SPIDER / C. DERICK VARN
XAVIER VEGA / ROBERT N. WATSON / M.G. WESSELS / VENESSA WILLOUGHBY / HARRY WILSON
ROSE MARIA WOODSON / SHERRI COOK WOOSLEY
Apeiron Review