5x5 Issue #4
Outsiders
5x5 is a 501 Š (3) nonprofit organization and literary magazine that publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and photograph. We publish twice a year, and each issue is (usually) theme-based. Submissions are accepted year-round. Simultaneous submissions are welcome, though we do ask that you notify us and/or withdraw your work should it be accepted elsewhere. Visit 5x5litmag.wordpress.com for information on submission guidelines. Š 2016 in the names of the individual authors. Subsequent rights revert to the author upon publication with the provision that 5x5 receives publication credit. Issue designed by S.J. Dunning Art included in the issue, as well as the cover art, is by poet Ciara Shuttleworth.
5x5 Editors Co-Editors-in-Chief
Jory Mickelson & S.J. Dunning Poetry Editor Jory Mickelson Fiction Editor Kristen Blanton Nonfiction Editor S.J. Dunning Photography Editor Tyrah Dunning
Table of Contents Letter from the Editor Jory Mickelson Poetry Richard J. O'Brien "The Bloodless Battle"
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Jolene Brink "Northcoast - I"
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Daniel Suarez "IV"
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Katharyn Howd Machan "When My Tooth Disappeared"
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Jen Schalliol "The Basics"
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Fiction Brian Burns "Man-Tailored"
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Julia Hands "But She Still Loves Him"
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Tara Roberts "The Earthling"
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Joey Marzocchi "Floors"
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Alexander Rafat "Marco Polo"
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Julia Shipley "Parable of the Attic Apartment" "Letter from Pentecost"
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Benjamin Woodard "Exoneration"
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George Michelsen Foy "Jalalabad"
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William Morris "Before and After"
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KV Wilt "Unsent Letter to My Younger Brother #3" "At My Bed's Foot"
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Dear Readers, When we chose the theme OUTSIDEŽ from this issue, we decided to let contributors tackle this as wildly or weirdly as they wanted. In doing so, it also caused me to reflect on the many ways in which I am or can be perceived to be an outsider. As I compose this, I am on a road trip to see my former hometown. I haven’t lived there in more than 15 years. In this way, I am an outsider to the local residents. Also, while revisiting the town I grew up in, I continually confronted who I was as a child‌how my perspective had changed between the young person I was and who I have become. The local swimming pool seemed gargantuan at age 10. Now, I realize it is very small, not going deeper than 7 feet. Many of the businesses I frequented as a child are now closed, the video store, the bookshop, and the movie theater. However, wandering the aisles of the local grocery store fills me with the same feeling it did
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many years before—tracing the path through it as I did with my mother on a weekly basis. Turn right and there is the produce aisle. In this issue, the writers and artists explore all the ways in which one can be outside, an outsider, and other—and in doing so, they also examine the subject as it grows and alters through time, space, and perception. We welcome you to read and reflect on how each piece may or may not speak directly to your own experiences, thoughts, and feelings. We invite you, here, to these pages, no matter where you are presently traveling. Best, Jory Mickelson Co-Editor-in-Chief, 5x5
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Poetry
The Bloodless Battle Richard J. O'Brien Crash test dummies, a whole family of them, live on the next block. They are deep into a feud with the mannequins right next door. It's a bloodless battle; and, if you ask them, neither family can remember how it all got started.
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Northcoast-I Jolene Brink We northern. We belong to no city set across the limits of our bodies, the urban box littering the landscape below us, we do not claim it; nor can we believe city people understand their constraints or false identities, the cake eaters throwing wealth into lake cabins, secondhand capitol swimming upstream. Condos behind the silo. We hold festivals for them, oil chainsaws—rip bark already trimmed by us, repaint highway lines to keep open the corridor between us and them anyway. We hunt deeper to avoid their stare, our poverty an aesthetic freedom we select by not leaving. This land was taken when we arrived. The axe we used rotted faster than we could keep sharpened. We cling to this narrow tract of wilderness anyway.
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IV Daniel Suarez . . . can I tell you how a record is made: there is a master—an aluminum disc coated in acetate lacquer, an analogue signal is cut into it by a heated diamond stylus; this is a soft facsimile of the final record there’s more but I won’t go into it . . . picture me: six years old playing outside, back turned to the alley, body swung around: my brother, his fist to my chest he didn’t stop beating me until I was 13 and I am the soft facsimile and the final record hasn’t been made
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When My Tooth Disappeared Katharyn Howd Mchan I became a smaller woman. I had to boil my new green shirt and cut inches off my jeans. No one had explained to me a book would no longer fit my hands but topple off like a broken brick. The sun became a huge hot mouth mocking my need to speak. I didn’t know where my tooth had gone: such a permanent loss! Or was I supposed to ask a Dentist to help me get it back again, his fingers like a surly god’s angry that I was shrinking?
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The Basics Jen Schalliol So, let's have it out: you died, and I came home. Back to the big city with halved-me, quartered-me. Shredded me. It cornered me, pointed its snout at my empty space, the city did, always hungry. I was no longer a part thereof, but now: apart. Split, like
so.
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That's just the start. Now I am learning how to go alone. Resigned. To erring. I can do this. Fake meter. And mark time. I keep count and the alphabet. Only those. I’d like you back, and grammar, but it goes.
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Fiction
Man-Tailored Brian Burns He used to tell me I looked like Patti Smith but it never meant anything to me. It wasn’t until a few years later, when I was in that record store in Battery Park, that I reached for a copy of Horses and saw Patti’s face on the cover. She was handsome—her eyes far apart and her shirt man-tailored with her hands held against her chest, sublimely. I bought the record and got choked up when I listened to “Birdland” and wished I hadn’t thrown out his number—not that I would have known what to say or if he would have listened or if he would have picked up the phone at all. I started playing the bass like he always said I should, I guess I would have told him that. Joan of Bob Barker, that’s what we call the band, and we play at the kind of places where they never comp our drinks. The guys we share stages with used to look at me like they would their sisters but they’re starting not to look at me at all. Some drunk college kid came on to me last week after our set. I turned him down and, humiliated, he told me I looked like his Aunt Irene. Hoping that it meant something, I asked him if she looked like Patti Smith.
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But She Still Loves Him Julia Hands He leaves her on the bed and closes the bathroom door as the sink starts. Lying on the bed, she crosses her legs, her thighs pinch. She breathes out and picks up her robe from the side of the bed. The sink stops, the shower’s next. Before he went in, he’d asked her to join. She said next time. After she tightens the rope around her waist, she traces circles in the carpet with her toe. It’s been a month since he asked her to stop taking birth control. She continues to breathe, remembering how to take air in and out. On the other side of the door, he hums. While camping last year, two other couples had brought their children. They huddled on one side of the campground, creating a No Man’s Land of forgotten Barbie dolls with muddied dresses and Power Rangers with dirt-crammed joints. From the other side, she watched her husband play hide-and-go-seek. One of the kids broke through the border, their hands reaching out to her with a doll. His eyes were on her as she stood up and walked
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back to the tent. She fingers the robe, which he’ll have to untie and pull her out of if they start again. She’ll have to use the bathroom first. Around campfire, their legs interlocked, he had asked if she wanted a son or a daughter. She watched the smoke escaping the fire. Please, he said, he loved her. She followed the smoke’s flight from the embers through the chains of trees. The shower stops. Her foot freezes and she tightens the rope again. When he comes out, there are still suds at the corner of his chin. He says he has to dry off more and she should come help. She shakes her head with a smile. He goes back inside. She stands and crosses to the dresser and takes the pack from the stashed box of tampons she had stuffed in the back and swallows the pill dry.
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The Earthling Tara Roberts When the aliens arrived they had every intention of giving their technology away, but the Americans offered so much money they took it and settled in. They bought houses and cornfields and sugar-beet farms, thriving as they did on the simple carbohydrates abundant on earth. They selected genders and names. They learned to drive. Amber chose the name Amber because he liked the hum and pop of it on his lips, different from the true name he'd always found so bland. The others informed him the Americans would find the name a mismatch with his gender, and he said he didn't care. The eldest of them laughed and declared his rebellion good— Amber, as the youngest of them, would be sent to an American university to learn about the people among whom they'd settled. The American young, the eldest said, seemed to like nonconformity. Or at least the idea of it. Amber had been selected for the mission to Earth because of his quick grasp of languages, but still he found himself nearly silent those first few weeks as the other students clamored for his
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attention. He was content to listen, to observe. He liked how the Americans could not suppress, the way the aliens could, the movements of their eyes that indicated dishonesty or joy or surprise. He liked how they waved their hands when they spoke. He wished he had fingers. The crowds faded as Amber's novelty wore off, as the others had assured him it would. Even his roommate, a boy named Kevin, turned back to studying and lifting weights and watching movies and going to parties. Amber had stopped being invited to parties. The aliens were unimpaired by alcohol and unimpressed by American dance music, and Amber disliked the dim lights that hid the other students' expressions, the noise that muffled their inflections. Julia from his world history class said she hated parties too. She said she was beat deaf—her brain couldn't process rhythm—and Amber could see she was telling the truth. Julia was one of the few people he'd met who preferred to ask questions rather than answer them, and when she did answer, she usually lied. He asked her once why she did this and she laughed and covered her face with her hands and said it was better than the alternative. Then she asked him to tell her again about the vast
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orchards on his planet. In the aliens' culture, love was something you felt for your colleagues, whoever they were, a shared bond of affection and respect among a group, not an individual thing. And so it was with surprise that Amber realized that he did not, in fact, feel love toward the other students at the American college. He only felt it toward her. So one day, he said it. He had to. "Could you ever love me?" And she said no. He couldn't tell if she was lying.
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Floors Joey Marzocchi I’m cutting up your clothes. I went up to the attic and the stairs ached. I brought a flashlight because the bulb was out, but I found old sweaters, dress shirts, pleated pants, suit jackets, coats, all wrapped in plastic. I tore through the thin embryotic cover and filled two whole bins. Two whole bins. Then I made collages with them. There are so many colors: orange from a cardigan’s stripes, purple from the lining of a blazer, light blue from an old pair of jeans, worn out white from a dress shirt collar, loose strands like hair, blonde, brunette. I can’t find the letters in the garage. The weather is still so damp. There’s the smell of gasoline. A soaked cardboard box rips apart in my hands when I lift at its handles. It’s filled with books. I hear the sounds of pots on the stovetop inside. You screech and I rush back inside to find you leaning over the sink, hand under a loud faucet, your shoulder bones stretching the skin on your back, cursing under your breath. You burnt the tip of your finger, the one with the bruised nail that turned purple while you slept. People don’t know my father made chairs. There were pieces
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of wood to be scavengedEverywhere—drift wood the sun had parched, abandoned electrical poles stripped naked of their transformers and wires, barns he saw from the road that were freckled with rotted holes. He carried torn away pieces into the basement. I remember how red his face was, his small arms. Weeks later he’d take me and my brothers down the stairs that bent with our collective weight to show us each new chair. I remember how white his teeth were, how he would nod when we had questions.
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Marco Polo Alexander Rafat I lean on the side of a building in the ghetto. The building was once beautiful. It possessed the remnants of its charm, like an elderly woman. I stare at the sidewalk, at the creases that we used to hop over when we were kids. The cracks. They weren’t really cracks though. Our neighborhood was much too affluent for that. A girl walks out of the building. A shitty pop song from a decade before litters the street when she walks out the door. She leans next to me and reminds me what my name is—and how suburban white girls speak, with prepositions. “Alex?” I’m okay. The words won't come out though. I’m temporarily mute. The way you are after getting punched in the stomach, how that friend in high school that you lost contact with would keep asking you if you were okay and your wind would just be gone and you’d just sit there silent, trying to breath, trying not to cry. Imagine if that feeling lasted forever and all you could do
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was count the cracks and try your hardest to say “polo” whenever someone decided to yell “marco” at you.
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Nonfiction
Epistle from The Attic Apartment Julia Shipley A few times, he came over to her attic apartment and after they made love, he’d slip back into his skivvies, hunch at the attic’s gable window, and peer out like a fugitive. Was it more pleasurable than what they’d just had? His bliss, it seemed, was supervising the world while remaining himself unseen. She’d ask, no beg, come back to bed. He would only want to linger if she had left the bed first, imaginatively, in her mind, wandering into the next possibilities, though remaining still, at least physically, beside him. Only her mental dalliances could trigger his affection. Sensing her shift, he would pursue her, as if she were one of his herd, straying. The strength of his desire corresponded in inverse proportion to the degree of her departure, such that she wondered if they had ever met, he and she, with their full beings, whether they were ever Together when they were together, or did they only begin to meet long after they parted and were in, at least geographically speaking, different towns in different counties. Yes, she thought, once they were truly not together, then, finally, they were.
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She also hunched by the window, when he wasn’t there, which was most of the time, watching her grey and white cat prowl the back yard, where, until recently, two calves had reclined through the summer, under the alder, chewing their cuds, and twitching at the touch of flies. She’d watch, undetected, as the cat sniffed the scuffed-up sod, sensing the calves still, even though many rains had rinsed their place. Were she to call his name, he’d look up and run to her. Run! as if responding to emergency, bounding up the bank, skirting a bunch of chickens. He would surge up the stairs, push through the cat door, and launch himself into her lap. Even when they were no longer together physically, she and the man, part of her wanted to them to end even further, and she so prayed that their other, surreptitious togetherness would also end. However, another part of her would not relinquish, would cling to the memory of when their bodies mingled, and so it went on like this: wanting and not wanting to want in equal proportion, with her will flexing against her wish for a Love that was concurrent with love. Even when the day came for her to leave this place and move far away, decimating any remnant possibility of ongoing physical connection, as she packed the last box into her
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car and handed the keys back to her landlord, she had yet to leave their make-believe union behind. Goodbye to the garret apartment would not exempt her from the suspicion that God’s great eye was peering in, and had been taking her body and his body like dollies and making them play. For when she was a little girl, she’d known that kind of power—she’d spent hours in the attic playing with her dollhouse, bending the limbs of the costumed bears, the inhabitants, and reenacting the only five scripts she could think of: crisis-resolution; misunderstanding-placation; turning a searchlight on the flummoxed children; giggling in bed; and of course, hearing a noise, then going to the topmost window to have a look, imagining the source of everything originated solely from outside.
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Epistle from Pentecost Julia Shipley She’s a difficult cow. I’ve made calls all around. Wanna buy her?—this calf I raised into a 800 pound willful animal who kicks my bucket, swats me with her tail? Every day, for a month and a half, I have pulled a stool up beside her and tried not to become furious. Halfway through, she puts one hoof in the half-filled pail. If this happened to you fifty times what would you do? I met Cain the day before Easter, at a dance. I grinned through the sunrise service thinking of his hand at my back, my hand on his. He was here the day before she calved, and many days and nights afterward: making a nest box for the hens, finding a place to hang a rake, helping me fence a pasture. And then one day he said, I think we feel differently. By then it was Pentecost. Oh well, I might have thought as I try to keep nothing but the milk from ending up in the pail, but when I accepted his words as I sat there pulling on her almost solid udder, some of my emotion fell in, too. Miraculously, she let me take the full bucket up from the barn. As I neared the house, a man walking past on the road asked,
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Is Craftsbury Common down here? His legs looked sunburnt, but other than that, he looked like a neighbor out for a walk in shorts, with a t-shirt that read Cabot, a hat embossed with Shakespeare Festival. Black, unspectacular sneakers. He had begun his walk in Rouse’s Point, New York, he told me, and was headed for Montpelier on foot, about 200 miles. I wondered, where was he going to sleep? I’ve got a tent. What about food? Well. I usually eat two meals a day. And so I’ll stop somewhere and buy a sandwich and carry it with me. He looked at my pail, Is that milk? I poured him a glass of it, which said he’d never had minutes out of the cow. Still warm. That night, I got into bed and the rain threw itself down on the roof. I thought of him out there, perhaps at the edge of a pasture, within his tent, possibly with his pen and journal, writing by flashlight, composing an account of his day. I considered my own rain in the milk I gave, and how he glugged it down, appreciatively. What would happen to my little grief, now that it had entered him? I remembered his grin, how satisfied he’d looked, as he handed back the empty glass back. And
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then, how easily we’d turned and went our different ways.
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Exoneration Benjamin Woodard Cold, cold, cold, and in the path of the headlights appear twin car seats, nestled between yellow slashes, vacant of children, their mere presence suggesting a bundle of questions, because it isn’t every day that expensive, spotless safety devices are found alone in a forlorn parking lot in this haven for insurance workers and drunk soccer parents, this birthplace of Noah Webster, far from the congregation of cars still occupying spaces at the discount supermarket, and the fact is that six months ago a grandfather was robbed here at gunpoint, so bad thoughts are not ridiculous to have when passing through this parcel of over-privileged suburbia, regardless of their ability to distress, for, yes, this is, overall, a rather decent neighborhood, and, yes, it is doubtful any thief would line these contraptions so neatly on the asphalt before jacking a car, and, yes, without flowers or balloons from the plaza’s party store, this certainly cannot be a makeshift memorial, but that does not mean a mother or a father isn’t right now driving far away from all responsibilities, nor does 34
it make the sight any less disquieting, and it doesn’t bring any sense of relief to realize that, as the headlights shift with the turn of a wheel, there are no moral justifications for two car seats to rest silently, alone, in the cold, cold, cold, watching the sky from the shadows, waiting for snow.
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Jalalabad George Michelsen Foy I’ll always wonder why I didn’t go on to Jalalabad. Disguised as a Mujahideen, I had been spirited over the Afghan border with a convoy of horses carrying mortar rounds. "You are Mujahideen," the guerrillas lied, posing me with an assault rifle while one of them snapped pictures. We all knew what I was: Western, soft, a writer, researching an article for a journal they might never read. On our way to meet the convoy, we had been stopped at a border checkpoint. The soldiers stared at me as I sat, disguised in beard, turban, and Pakistani pajamas, behind a clutch of Pashtun in the pickup’s bed. I looked like an Afghan the way a hippopotamus in a tutu looked like Baryshnikov. The soldiers fell apart, laughing. Inside Afghanistan, in a mountain camp at nightfall, the Pashtun put me in a tent alone and gave me a plate of curry. Outside, the guerrillas ate around a campfire beside a bomb crater, dipping bread in stew, chatting quietly. The commander came to my tent. He spoke no English. I had no 36
Pashtun or Dari. All we had in common was a few words in Arabic. "Thariq," I said, the way. "Through djebel," the mountains? "Jalalabad?" the commander suggested, scratching a map in the dirt. We’d been walking for days. I’d had no one to talk with, and it was getting to me. "La," I said, Peshawar. I wanted to go back to Pakistan. The next day, the horses had gone on to Jalalabad, and so had the men, except for two mujahideen who squatted outside the tent, waiting to guide me back. One had a face like a goat, the other chuckled a lot. We walked much of that day, and in the afternoon reached a fort in a valley. I wanted to keep going, but Goat and Chuckles made aiming gestures with their rifles and repeated, "Dushman, dushman." I knew this meant enemy. I heard women’s voices in the fort. Except for distant figures working in the fields, dressed in long robes of cerulean and russet, I had not seen a woman since leaving Pakistan. Not being able to see women seemed an expression of everything that was wrong with war, with what I was doing here. We left the valley at dusk. The mountains were blue in shadow, silver where moonlight touched. I thought: I have 37
never been so lonely. I became certain we were walking the wrong way. It was said the Russians would pay 50,000 dollars for a Western journalist, dead or alive. I grew convinced I was being delivered to them. I picked up two rocks. If my companions stopped suddenly and un-shouldered their guns, I would smash each of them in the head with a rock. It wasn’t a good plan, but it was all I had. Two nights later, Goat and Chuckles dropped me at a mujahideen depot in Landi Kotal, a town near the Pakistani border. I slept on the floor with a dozen other men. Sometime before dawn, the building shook itself like a wet dog. Chunks of concrete fell from the ceiling. For half a minute, as the earthquake happened, nothing was settled or trustworthy. Then, it all went back to being the same. The men around me laughed and spoke soft phrases in Pashtun. One of them said “Jalalabad,” among other words I couldn’t understand. Then, they went back to sleep, and everything was still again.
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Before and After William Morris “I dreamt we saw Nirvana live,” I say. “Well,” my girlfriend says. “I think we’re a little late.” In the dream, we miss half the set. In reality she’s right. When my mom calls and tells me my grandma probably won’t make it through the week, the truck ahead of me brakes sharply. I have to shift lanes. Traffic lights change. Commercials play until I turn the knob, hushing the radio, voices from a carwash carrying through the open window. She was fine. Now she’s not. Back home, I hum along to Soundgarden the same as Nirvana because radio waves immortalize living and dead indiscriminately. I replace the battery in my car, have a nightmare about spiders, go out for ice cream, have several beers and wake from a dreamless sleep to find my mom back home, done with her ceaseless vigil at the hospital, an almost empty wine bottle on the kitchen table. My grandma was alive when I went to bed. Now, she’s dead. I hear about her final 39
hours, the operations, whether she moved this toe or that, but I refuse to process the details or can’t or don’t want to. The timeline stays vague. She is dead and alive. My eight year-old brother cries with me at the funeral, and it passes in a mess of mourners crossing and re-crossing the city in black town-cars. “It’s hard to believe,” I say in a voice that sounds staged because it is, even though I mean the words, am grieving. The body’s staged in a contrast of powder-white flesh rouged at the cheeks, lips the yellowishred part of a mango (her signature color), eyebrows wrong—too sharp and drawn. She had had real eyebrows. I can’t look at her a second time. The image fades until it’s like I never saw. “How’d you sleep?” my girlfriend asks. I shake my head no again. “Bad dreams?” Not bad exactly, because in them she’s still alive, giving me palpable advice about real-world problems: what to do when my engine overheats, how to handle the weight of having to move away from home. I’d like to tell my girlfriend 40
this, but how can I explain a dream that hangs in that limbo of pathos we reserve for the dead? How can I articulate that I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell but still think she’s somewhere better now? And all before the first cup of coffee. So I say yes, and we kiss, and when we rise for the day and our stiff bodies come back one cracking toe at a time, I think this is the better place I’d like to go when I die. I want to tell her I could die happily right here, right now, but what I really mean is that I’d like to lay back down in the glow of drawn shades against another gray morning.
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Unsent Letter To My Youngest Brother #3 KV Wilt Dear Todd, For instance, piggy-backing you in the blizzard, across the Mitchell parade field, to the haunted barn—and on my shoulders out to the skeleton wreck in Moonlight Bay. Or burying you in the sands of Jones Beach. Or saddling you on Wolf ’s black back in the Azores. Or taking you up and down the rope ladder in my backpack, to our penthouse at the dump. Or into the coal bins—or the abandoned gas station where we fed the foxes. In Kindley, getting you over or under the barbed wire perimeter fence onto the railroad trestle. Or lowering you into Powder Keg Cave. Or turning that blownup Chris Craft into a fort on Corsair’s Cove. Then sneaking you out the window to shoot Flying Imps and Roman Candles on Guy Fawkes’ Night. Just throwing and batting the whiffle ball in our backyard in McGuire, till we couldn’t see. Pretending we were hobos. Building forbidden fires, to char hotdogs and marshmallows. By the drainage-ditch river with 42
piranha tadpoles. In that swatch of birch we called Sherwood Forest.
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At My Bed's Foot KV Wilt The ninety-year-old cedar chest that kept Grandma Anne’s trousseau. Coffin-like. On cracked casters. With four latitudinal storage-tape scars. At its apex: Medicine Buddha. Indigo. With the allhealing gold Myrobalan flowering from his right palm. At his crossed feet: an anvil stone from the Malpais. The jade-handled jack knife that trimmed Dad’s diabetic nails. Beautiful Painted Arrow’s breath-of-life eagle feather. Grandma Mabel’s bronze thimble. The slate Mani stone chiseled by Tulku. The jet, turquoise-eyed badger who patrols the underworld. The dragonfly painted by the Zuni backward-forward boy. An aquamarine robin’s egg. A barred owl talon from the shoulder of I-75. A pearl-polished scallop shell from Sanibel. A garnet sugar maple leaf from Rue Baudelaire. Borrowed from the blue-black tide.
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Contributors
Jolene Brink is an MFA student at the University of Montana, where she serves as poetry editor for Cutbank. Her work has appeared in Postroad, WomenArts Quarterly Journal, Belleville Park Pages, and elsewhere. Her forthcoming chapbook, Peregrine, won the 2015 Merriam-Frontier Award. Brian Burns lives in Boston where he’ll graduate from Emmanuel College with an English degree. His letter to posterity was included inside Boston’s Old State House time capsule, he’s a Scholastic, Inc. Art and Writing Awards Gold Key recipient, and he's a social news reporter with Boston.com. Burns aspires to a career in publishing and an evasion of mini-van ownership. George Michelsen Foy has published twelve novels, the latest, entitled Mettle (2010), under "GF Michelsen" at
University Press of New England, and also Bantam Doubleday, Viking Penguin, and Bastei Lubbe (Germany). His long-form non-fiction has appeared in Harper’s and Rolling Stone. His short fiction has been published with Monkey Bicycle, Apeiron, Notre Dame Review, and American Literary Review. His non-fiction book on silence (Zero Decibels, Scribner) came out in 2011. His new novel, Searching for Kamanzi, will be published by Editions Globophile, Paris, France (April, 2016). Finding North: How Navigation Makes Us Human, on how we find our way around space, emotions, and memory, will be published with Flatiron/Macmillan in May, 2016. Foy, who was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction, lives in New England and New York, teaches writing at NYU, and once held down the job of chief cream-pastries transporter in a London factory. Julia Hands is a MFA candidate at Western Washington University. She currently focuses on subjects surrounding motherhood and reclamation of the female body. Her interests span across genres, from fiction to poetry to playwriting, and she is interested in the intersection between
all three. This will be her first publication. Katharyn Howd Machan is the author of 32 published collections, and her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and textbooks, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature and Sound and Sense. She is a full professor in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College in central New York State. In 2012, she edited Adrienne Rich: A Tribute Anthology (Split Oak Press). Joey Marzocchi, a fiction writer from Syracuse, NY, has previously been published in Syracuse University’s annual anthology Stone Canoe. Having received his undergraduate degree in Creative Writing and Literature from Le Moyne College, he now attends Syracuse University’s College of Law. William Morris is an MFA candidate at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His work has been published or is forthcoming online at Crab Fat Literary Magazine, Fiction Southeast, and Oblong Magazine. He devotes his time to coffee, cats, and creative writing.
Richard J. O'Brien lives in Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and teaches first-year writing at Temple University and Stockton University. His poems have appeared in The Hollins Critic, Falling Star Magazine, Stoneboat, and others. Alex Rafat writes short fiction and poetry. He's currently studying English at Montclair State University and working in Asbury Park. Tara Roberts is a lifelong Idahoan who lives in Moscow, Idaho, with her patient husband, two unruly children and odd poodle. She works as a science writer for the University of Idaho. Jen Schalliol, a Chicago native and Pushcart nominee, received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her chapbook, Means of Access, was printed through The Kenyon Review, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Salt Magazine, Landscapes, decomP, Gapers Block, RHINO, and elsewhere.
Julia Shipley is the author of a debut poetry collection, The Academy of Hay, winner of the 2014 Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize, and of a hard to explain prose project, Adam's Mark, which was and named a 2014 Best Book About New England by the Boston Globe. Her work has also appeared in Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, North American Review, Gettysburg Review, Orion Magazine, Poetry, The Rumpus, and The Toast and Verse Daily. She lives in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom. Daniel Suarez is a first generation Cuban American born and raised in Chicago. His poems can be found in the Columbia Poetry Review, RHINO, Metonym, and other print and online journals. KV Wilt publishes stories, plays, nonfiction, and poems. His most recent book is VAST SELF, a collection of poems published by Millichap Books. He also teaches writing at Saint Leo University. Benjamin Woodard is a Senior Editor at NumĂŠro Cinq
Magazine and helps publish Atlas and Alice. His recent writing has been featured in Storychord, The Georgia Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. Find him online at benjaminjwoodard.com and @woodardwriter.