5x5 Issue #6 by 5x5literarymag

5x5 Issue #6

5x5 is a 501 ÂŠ (3) nonprofit organization and literary magazine that publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. We publish once a year between fall and winter. 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. ÂŠ 2019 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 Cover image: "Untitled," by S.J. Dunning

5x5 Editors Editor-in-Chief S.J. Dunning Poetry Editor Jeff Pearson Fiction Editor Julia Hands Nonfiction Editor S.J. Dunning

Letter from the Editor S.J. Dunning

Table of Contents 7 Poetry

Dan Pinkerton "After the Parade"

Barbara Buckman Strasko "Folded Bird"

Savannah Rivas "Thoughts on the Final Days of Riperidone"

Seraphina Tang "autocorrect"

18 Fiction

Fadwa Al Qasem "On the Edge"

Casey Corcoran "The Entertainer"

Isabella Ronchetti "Wrinkled Sun"

Aaron Allen "Kronos"

Bridgett Wissinger "Recompense"

32 Nonfiction

Sarah Sorenson "The Most Romantic Carwash in the World" 37 Bryan Parys "Footage"

Aholaah Arzah "Someone Other Than Myself"

Catharina Coenen "Saddle"

Melissa Sibley "Queer Theory"

Mariah Hall "You Think Too Much"

Dear Readers, The cover of this issue is from an old Kodak slide I recently found while going through a collection of slides that belonged to my maternal grandparents, who have both passed. I held the slide up to the sun in my backyard and took a photograph of the photograph it frames. Time and weather have damaged the slide, but I've done my best to capture the young woman in a red dress who remains. She's standing in a pool of light on a rock surface near a shallow body of water. I chose this slide because I'm drawn to the way the woman seems unaware she's the subject of the photograph, and I'm drawn to the color and texture the damage unwittingly created. I like the way a photograph of an old photograph preserves both the original photographer and their subject, honoring the simple, yet profound, fact that they each existed. I like how, even when damaged, someone else's art can become the material we use to create our own. I aslo worry I'm the only one who sees the woman. 7

Maybe the cover won't make sense to anyone who hasn't held the slide it features in their hands. But if I've learned anything as an artist—as a writer, namely—it's that artists have to take risks. Each issue of 5x5 I put together reminds me to appreciate the courageous act of creation itself, and to, in turn, honor the way art can endure the time and weather—and that's not to mention the fear—that so often threatens to destroy it, and to destroy all the women in red dresses who deserve an opportunity to be seen, to exist within it. It's with that spirit of appreciation and honor that I introduce the works of art in this particular issue of 5x5 I'm thankful for each writer and for each writer's courage to create and to share their creations with all of us. .

Over & Out, S.J. Dunning 5x5 Editor-in-Chief and Nonfiction Editor 8

Poetry

After the Parade Dan Pinkerton After the last bunting-strung float had passed, the final horses and baton twirlers, the candidates in convertibles, the sweepers who cleaned up after the horses, there would be no more parades. It had been decreed. For weeks we staked out our spots, taking shifts in lawn chairs beneath canvas awnings, and on the appointed day the procession drifted past for hours. There was some elbowing, jockeying, altercations over candy, a few faces flaring like bacon grease. The great 10

import of it soured the sweat of those involved, the insurance agents and volunteer firemen. The sun handed us its whitest light. The parade flowed like molten ore toward some unseen cast. We could not quite grasp that a cloud had passed over the moon on the other side of the world, that a dog tied to a tree was barking at the dark as though it were a vast razor-lined jaw, that waves lapped a beach, leaving behind the perfectly-preserved corpses of sailors lost years ago at sea. After the parade we went home and sat staring for a long time at the unused swing set in the backyard. 11

Taking moments for tiny prayer: sycamore seed, thistle, moth thin papery leaf, a little torn. Shy Coltsfoot lashes grow near a curled root and cluster like stars out of the ground. As a Catholic girl I was taught to step between gravestones but what has died without a marked grave? I was also breach, so perhaps I see the world upsidedown. After you died, the light kept gray for days. The worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s head, dulled pencil lead, like you said once of your own, missing its sharpness. On the day of your funeral it rained, pencil lead turned liquid. I used to wonder if we could reconcile in dreams. Now some days I think: thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the one path still possible 12

between us, others: in wordless moods, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re the one I want to talk to how do I do it, as if the moon could balance, focused, on the tip of a pin with all those dancing angels. Some days you are in each star, clear, and I feel how light can scar. Others: all the blue in between. You tell me constantly how the heart gets bigger than the body You say find me in the future that the past held. We werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t there for nothing.

Folded Bird Barbara Buckman Strasko The quiet in late November enters our ears broken only by the sound of geese so familiar by now they sound like a kind of silence. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the sound of wings moving so near by, we hear the rough wind under them. I think of all of the remaining questions I have about myself. My son recognizes my insecurities, because he also has them. 14

He believes itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in our blood, as if we are recovering from some ancient loss, I tell him we need to sing our way out of it, lift from the earth with the wings we can only imagine, having heard so many times the sound of risingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;

Thoughts on the Final Days of Risperidone Savannah Rivas I said: My tears belied the promise of angels, those jackals bearing fangs against steel barrels of pens whispering, “There will be recompense here.” Vesta has willed it, then hastened the deluge. We yield to a doctor’s divine poison. Medicine says: Take heed; these stares have grown so criminal, fire freckled its ashes across their stars made of bone and they became mad with marrow. God wields a divine poison. They said: She is mad enough for you. And this is how God poisons— 16

first, all matted hair, grinding seeds into chalk for the prayer. Next, she swallows it bird by bird until it bleeds away, saying Quetzalcoatl help me— I have spilled this divine poison. I’m about to put this asylum to bed— may it be silent as a prism filled with a divine poison. I am filled with a divine poison.

autocorrect Seraphina Tang i. the ten p.m. you is sad-eyed and sharp-shouldered. i don't like him. i don't know him. the you that belongs to me is lazy afternoon you, is sunshine-like butter and guitar-calloused hands, does not stand like a child nightgowned in my door i am scared of you now, of the blood on my tongue, of your cold fingers winding through mine. the ten p.m. you is a retroactive ghost. ii. still, you do not meet my eyes. when our lips meet, you taste like petrichor, like brine and last nightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s vodka and regret. i do not linger on the fact that our mouths do not fit like they used to. iii. generational trauma, eight tabs open, a cup full of cold. my brain said, true love is forgetting. 18

six oh three, message read. thank you. the only thing i can't forget is that you're my best friend fading fading fading. and maybe i made up your laugh and the smile-crinkles of your eyes. the way you held me, the warmth of your lips against my knuckles, and your fingers carding through my hair. and so maybe it was in a storybook or fairytale, magic wands lighting up for every time you stopped meaning it. iv. *i live you. i breathe you. a little bit of your mouth in my lungs. your hips against my hips. a dimple in my heart. you exhale and i forget to move, to move you, inhale your scent, make you wake up and forget. astronomical metaphors are overrated so let's say you're the north pole and you're in my smile every time i go to sleep. v. i have loved the ocean but not the sands of missing you. ayam panggang and your sparking brown eyes, 19

thigh to thigh, we are not afraid. you eat slowly. i wolf. i gave you the moon, my heart, plug my ears with: i could spend forever with you and saturday hockey match dates, art gallery roaming, inside jokes, two people card games. fill my eyes with: your dance, now, now, now. i don't hear the scream of metal. you don't see me explode. *i love you

Fiction

On the Edge Fadwa Al Qasem He called her Alex; does that count? She came here to relax. To stare into space and receive inspiration. To write. But whenever she was alone, she felt empty. No words came to her. No stories. No images. And worst of all, her mind would only bring up things about him. Things he said. Things he did. The way he said things. The way he did things. Her breathing would quicken, in anger, in ecstasy. She stood staring at the water as if her gaze would make it warm enough for her to throw her naked body in and let the salts do to it what they would. But nothing happened. The turquoise water remained cold, stunning clear and beautiful. And she remained still. Alone. Yearning. Not naked as she had imagined herself in her mindâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eye. The sweater she stood in was knitted for her by an ancient 22

aunt. It saddened her that she could not remember her aunt's eyes, or her fingers as they wrapped around the beige yarn. She herself was fourteen when her aunt gave her the sweater with great pride. It was the one item of clothing that has stood by her through cancer, the loss of loved ones, emotional turmoil, and his disappearance one night. The sweater knows that it still clings to the same soul although the body has changed much. A conversation between a man and a woman floated over the waves and lapped at her feet. The woman was laughing as the man spoke. So delicious was the woman's laughter she wished it were her own. She, too, was once loved by a man whose presence made the whole ocean glimmer in gold. And he used to call her Alex, instead of Alice. Yes, it counts, she decided.

The Entertainer Casey Corcoran The entertainer played the second track from his most recent album to a crowd of approximately 1,500 people on an outdoor stage in southern California. The album on which this track was sequenced number two was his first release for a major record label (the term "major" signifying the substantial monetary investment of a corporate umbrella organization operating one of the three remaining "Big Three" music groups whose music publishing company had released the entertainer's most recent album). The entertainer's job was to perform fourteen consecutive songs for this crowd of people; a task he would be paid $75,000 for completing. While singing this particular songâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the theme of the song was Loveâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the entertainer thought about his relationship to the individual people who made up the crowd of ~1,500 spectators. He tried to reconcile the metaphysical distance between the manner in which some of these spectatorsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the members of 24

the audience who had previously invested time into consuming the art he had released—perceived him, and the person he knew himself to actually be. It had seemed to him, while privately writing the lyrics to the collection of songs he was performing on this day, that the mundane details he wrote into his lyrics—daily rituals, chores, name brands—created an authentic and pleasing sense of familiarity listeners could recognize as proof of the fact that he was just an average person, like them. This constructed sense of normalcy that had long been a main tenet of folk music, though, seemed non-existent in this particular moment. It was as if the things he was singing were at odds with how he was being portrayed in this specific situation—a single, important person singing on a stage in front of a large group of faceless, normal people. The people in the audience had paid about $85 each to attend this performance. The entertainer grew up in a small town in Idaho and started writing songs as a means of escaping the blue-collar lifestyle the everyday people in town seemed resigned to and destined for, so it was interesting that at this point, on this stage, the 25

thing he desired most was for them to recognize the banality of his existenceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to see him and this concert for the fake spectacle they both were. While finishing the final verse of the song he was performing, the entertainer contemplated (frantically, he thought) how to convey these thoughts to the audience. After finishing the song about Love, just before beginning the song about living in New York City as a 26 year old, the entertainer recognized that he wasn't currently thinking about Love, or New York City, or of how his life was when he was 26, but he knew he couldn't let the audienceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;this collection of individuals, all with unique and possibly meaningful relationships to the songs he was performingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;know that he wasn't thinking about the sentiments he was currently conveying through song. The entertainer continued playing his songs.

Wrinkled Sun Isabella Ronchetti When I awake my pillows are sodden and water is seeping up through the mattress, licking my polka-dotted sheet and yellow cotton socks. I look at the cracks in the ceiling, so near I could probably reach up and touch them with a raisin-finger if I tried. The wrinkled sun frowns through the skylight, a little closer than it used to be. Propping myself up on both elbows, I find an empty spool of thread tangled in my sheet and many more floating around me amongst picture-book pages and my wilted herb garden. The desk and the mirror and the lamp and the chair swim around my bed, too, as it glides to the middle of the small room then stops, and justâ&#x20AC;Śis. Afloat, with me still on top, it barely moves in a golden pool, light shining up from my submerged window below, ajar, though the level of the water remains the same. The tinfoil crown I made in kindergarten surfaces next to a buoyant bedside table. When was the last time I saw that crown? My feet are cold. A checkered fish brushes up against my bare leg, which now is immersed; he must have come in 27

through that unlatched window. I can hear the sputtering and the gurgling of my drowning red telephone as you call me. And bubbles rise as it rings and rings; I dive down to answer. I see the floating rug above me, more fishes dancing past. And algae have grown along the walls and in the cracks of the wooden floor. The window is open all the way now, water-jasmines and drowning roses peaking in. By the time I reach the receiver the phone is floating up, up, dead. When I surface it's dark and the ceiling is mere inches away. I don't see the sun anymore; it has probably been swallowed, too.

Kronos Aaron Allen This doctor asks me if I plan on having children. I am twenty-eight, in his office in New York City. I have just ruined my ankle in a pothole and this doctor has it in his hands. He asks if I am willing to leave my children fatherless because, he says, you are obese. And at the rate you’re going… He says the first thing but he doesn’t have the heart to say the second. How do I explain it to him? It isn’t like I don’t see my size or feel it every second. It isn’t like I don’t realize every time I binge that all these mouthfuls are murdering my futures. Chew down another mouthful, chew down a year I could have earned—a sunrise. Chew down a touch, chew down a lover. Every day I see so much beauty in the world, and every day I have to reconcile myself to leaving it. 29

But how can I explain it to this doctor, who has pictures in his scuba gear, tight wetsuit with his arm around his daughter? Do I tell him that after I broke this ankle in a pothole on Jay street I limped to the subway in so much pain, having to put weight on the joint every step, tears coming out involuntary with the pain—do I tell him that even then I almost, almost, stopped for a pizza and that my hands were shaking, not from adrenaline—I know that tremor—but from the pure want of a full stomach? I don’t know what to tell him. So, I sit in his office and I tell him about my children. I say, I hope to have children. I’ve always wanted a girl. I think I will name her Isabella, so we can shorten and call her Bell Allen. She will be dark, doctor, unlike me. Dark eyes, dark hair. Maybe I will live long enough to teach her how to read. Maybe her mother will be healthy. Maybe she will one day forgive me. I hope she forgives me. She is angry, doctor. She is one of those dark haired brilliant angry girls. She keeps to herself and her books. But when she opens, say if she opens to a boy, her anger is a physical wave and the boy has no 30

chance in the sudden flush. She is one of those angry girls who says fuck it and commits casual dangerâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;as if risk were a window, she could see me through. I hope, doctor, that her mother will be wise enough to take her to Spain. To take her to Madrid, to see the Goya museum as I did once, so she can stand in front of his terrible painting, Kronos eating his children. Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll never forgive me unless she looks into his eyes, doctor. Looks, to understand hunger. Looks into his eyes. Look. We are sorry, daughter. I say all of this. The doctor has no answer.

Recompense Bridgett Wissinger Someone is maintaining Guerdon Road. Summer 1993, the house still stood on Guerdon Road. Driving past on Route 3, you could see the hopeless situation. The Cache River was rising along with the Ohio and Mississippi, and the house on Guerdon Road was surrounded by hope-filled sandbag walls. Eventually, you couldn't drive down Route 3. You were trapped on one side or another and waited for the water to recede. Only then could you see what was left. The house stood, but the sandbags didn't keep the water out. Years pass and you drive down to visit family members who won't leave, who are bound to the land and water. You pass Guerdon Road on the way. On the left, before Klondike, before you get to the Cache, the street sign announces: Guerdon. Family name? None you've ever heard. 32

Fifty yards later, it joins back to Route 3. It's really just a driveway, after all, for the little black and white house that faced away from Route 3, facing out towards the Cache. The house stood, empty after the flood, and you watched nature reclaim its own. The family gone, the roof decayed. The windows are gone one Christmas, you notice through the ice storm. Once the windows disappearedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;were they stolen? For what possible purpose? Is there a resale market in window glass?â&#x20AC;&#x201D;the vines crept in and did their swift strangulation. Cottonwoods grew with trash trees and wild weeds all around. Ten years it took for the house to be swallowed up by wild grapes and sweetgums. The street signs stand sturdy, sentinels at each end of the emptiness. You drive past. Your father-in-law dies, then your cousin's mother. A greatuncle. Twenty years slip by in your marriage, in the years 33

you've been traveling Route 3 back and forth between your life and the world you left behind, lapping up against the shore of the past, tying up loose ends and shaking hands. Goodbye, goodbye. Hello, goodbye. Driving down Route 3, wondering if it's your last Labor Day picnic at your mother's brother's farm, you pass the street sign for Guerdon Road. A flock of water birds rise into the air as you drive past, catching your eye. You glance over, remembering the years slipping away, the house disappearing. The road is gone now, but someone has mowed the weeds that stole the concrete's place. Someone is maintaining Guerdon Road. Your children are asleep in the back. Your husband plays on his phone. Did you really see it? The second street sign passes. You tap your brakes, looking down the empty space, your first impression confirmed. Someone is maintaining Guerdon Road. 34

Whose house was it? Nobody ever said. You never asked. Does the property still belong to anyone? What purpose is there in mowing a road that goes nowhere, that loops on itself and returns the traveler to the same route? You drive on towards home, towards your past, down past Guerdon Road.

Nonfiction

The Most Romantic Carwash in the World Sarah Sorenson (for Becky) Let’s (you + me) go get ourselves stoned and take a trip to the most beautiful drive-in carwash in the world: Bob and Kay’s Gas Station! Lit-up hot with dazzling arches and baubles of colors. A wonder tube of water spurting with fat bubbles popping. You beside me with your perfect nose and clever teeth. It’s the place to hit on a Saturday night, blackout dark at 6:00 p.m. in November. So, my sweet, let’s (you + me) sit in the humid air and hold hands, my stuttering tongue full of longing. Long swathes of cloth slap the windshield, then slither away in waves. I am (fully + ridiculously) in love, the way nobody loves nobody, except in a Buddy Holly tune. You are such a beauty; our tangled ways must look like Klimt. Hey! The lights go down fast in Michigan, home of the fine (Ford! Ford! Ford!) Flint automobiles and Detroit lines! We too, on a metal conveyor belt, assembling (together + forever) ourselves. Let’s slip through this stunning light show, 37

a worm hole, walls painted with the 1960’s glory of a sunny day in an aqua Thunderbird. The pace feels slow, but it is all over so quick. Let’s (you + me) remember to be grateful. We are sliding fast toward an end that I’ll never understand. Hold tight! Please, this is my hand, and it waits, open.

Footage Bryan Parys You need to work out your faith with fear and trembling, a friend said 12 years before shooting himself at a gun range. I don’t remember where the gun range is, but I’ve heard a rumor his mother asked to see the surveillance tape. Faith, I should note, has been described as: evidence of things unseen. He was quoting some splice of Kirkegaard and the Bible in response to an essay I’d just written on friendship that belonged somewhere between the trash and a spiritual greeting card aisle. The ones decorated with lambs and tucked with their lavender envelopes behind labels like Special Birthday and Just 99 Cents. I imagine the pharmacy clerks are trying to hide the religious ones. It’s what I learned to do with things left unseen. I didn’t speak right away, but made a noise that began as a removed hmmm, the same tone I used when I learned that little is known about the adolescences of the largest 39

mammals on earth. The years I’d spent in back rows of folding church chairs salted that hmmm, deepened my throat into an ocean at night, so many things unseen. Two years before he talked about trembling, I sat in a revival meeting that stopped in New England on its tour trying to save a generation that Pepsi once called GenerationNEXT. The only light in the arena was on the chubby leader, sweating as he worked pubescent hormones into a spiritual frenzy. I was there, recovering from my first kiss, had used the inside of my mouth to reach into someone else’s inside. It was in the arena that I learned to hate the things that made me feel alive. Evidence of things shifting. How many chubby leaders have sweat on children in the name of God and while we’re asking questions about triggers, how long before impact can a shot be fired, how much time can exist in smoke and is it the same amount as a mother’s sweaty finger pushing a play button—and if that’s too much to calculate: where, then, are the young blue whales? 40

Someone Other Than Myself Aholaah Arzah I am guessing that he practiced the make-up in a dim room with artificially augmented light. It is just too harsh a slathering for the first bright day of summer and shit those shoes. He is sliding awkwardly into each next step wearing blocky heeled pumps, a kind of old-fashioned that will never achieve retro status, at least a size too large. Grandma what big feet you had! I have a keen radar for vulnerability. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s one of my few super-powers and I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t always use it wisely. But I am trying not to obviously notice the fashion infractions, the social-sexual glitches in the get-up. Someone still tender is unfolding a self, making a tentative foray into being. Our eyes intersect and I carefully hold the neutral semi-smile I wear in honor of just being in such a fine summer day, let my eyes, small benign clouds, drift away. She has seen that I have seen and that I exhibited no shock or alarm. Let her interpret that however she chooses.

Saddle Catharina Coenen A general-purpose English saddle weighs about 18 pounds—one for each year of my life. Not too heavy for me to lift onto the horse, even though her shoulder aligns with my head. But too heavy now. I’ve ridden for two hours, alone, through fields and woods, same as most days. I have rubbed down damp fur, put blankets on, scraped hooves, wiped down the bridle. Last chore: take saddle to farmhouse basement across the stable yard, for storage where it’s safe and warm. And dark. Sweat-soured mustiness clings to foundation walls. There is a light bulb somewhere, outside the room where the saddles go, and, when I turn behind the rack, just ready to lift the saddle up, there is a man between me and the door. The horse’s owner has assured my parents that the farm, though isolated, is plenty safe for a girl to take care of a horse here on her own. Outside, a willow weeps by a green pond; there 42

are ducks, geese, a peacock, bright sumac trees in the pasture. Four or five people live in the ancient house. But only one of them, Willie, is always around, sweeping, pushing wheelbarrows, mucking out stalls. Willie has trouble speaking and moves erratically, with a kind of crooked limp. I don’t know how old he is, because I tend to lump men below eighty into a single group: potential threat. How have I learned that classification? TV thrillers? The news? Or murder mysteries? I take a step to the right. Maybe six feet away, Willie—I think it’s Willie, from his squat silhouette against the light—mirrors my stride. My mother doesn’t like the idea of me out on the horse, alone. But she has not said no. Two hours of sun and wind and clip-a-clop of hooves make the difference between having a daughter who smiles and goes to school and one who alternately reads and cries. We haven’t named what ails me, but customers in my mother’s store have lost a child to suicide. 43

My mother doesn’t know about the saddle and where it has to go. She doesn’t know that hoof-beat sun-wind is cinched to this: the leaden, subterranean dark. The peacock screams, piercing, like murder at midnight. I flinch, step left. Willie follows suit, six feet away. He tilts his head. We don’t deserve this. Not him. Not I. This saddle-weight, this murk, this fug, this clumsy rumba in the dark. Guilt writhes deep inside my chest. But I am scared and fear trumps shame. I toss the saddle on the rack, step left, sprint right, squeeze by and through the door. His face swings ‘round to follow me, the bulb glares on his loopy grin. “You scared?” he calls. I scurry up the stairs. A camera inside my brain has snapped a picture of his face, recorded the sound-waves of his voice. Ten thousand replays won’t resolve: Did I see glee—or just surprise?

Queer Theory Melissa Sibley Whenever I hear the word “queer,” I always think of this—the tail-end of November, my mother twirling around the house in a crazed fit of cleaning and decorating, the crystal reindeer pulling a sleigh full of red lollipops; it is always my job to arrange them on the dining room table, at an angle—I must be delicate with the chains on their harnesses, because they fall off easily. There’s the Charlie Brown clock I bought my mother as a Christmas present years ago—it goes in the kitchen up above the ancient offwhite telephone that’s been alive longer than I have. The Barbie ice-skating rink, one of my mother’s prized possessions, goes in the living room on the knick-knacks shelf, the bottom shelf, because it is too big to sit on the top shelves. Everything has its proper place, including me. I assemble the toy with care, all the little pairs of men and women embracing and skating, the magnets on their feet that twirl them in endless circles. The women cannot break themselves away from the men even if they wanted to; the 45

designer made them permanently attached. While we decorate, Clay Aiken sings his heart out in the background, Christmas song after Christmas song, on a loop, on my mother’s old blue stereo full of gospel CDs and recorded sermons. It is not Christmas until I hear Clay telling me not to save it all for Christmas day. Find a way, he sings every year from that blue stereo, to give a little love every day. Every year my mother listens to his Christmas CD, and every year my mother says, “It’s too bad he turned out to be a queer,” and for so long I didn’t even know what that meant. “What a shame,” my mother says. “What a shame.” I know what that means now. I know why the Barbie skaters only come glued together in pairs of boys and girls, never girls and girls, or boys and boys. Every year the skaters spin their circles on the mirrored glass rink, and every year my mother plays Clay Aiken on her blue stereo, on and on and on.

You Think Too Much Mariah Hall Date number three, oppressive July heat, you’re biking up Main Street, squinting against the sun, temples beaded with sweat. We go to this park behind Saint John the Baptist Church. At the top of a hill, you spread a blanket on the ground, sit cross-legged, pour wine into paper cups. From here we can see all of Manayunk—sloping cobblestone streets with trolley cars, the tangled web of telephone wires, the river yellow-green like the inside of an avocado. There’s a stick-and-poke tattoo of a triangle above your inner ankle, faded ink. You talk about dropping out of art school a few years ago to become a bartender, ditching your dreams of becoming a filmmaker, say that maybe you’ll go back for engineering, something vocational, something practical. There’s this swing set and we sit dangling our legs over asphalt, the ashen color of cooled magma. I swing high enough I get that fluttery-stomach feeling, dig my heels into the ground, skid to a stop. We have a deadline, an expiration date, but I’m trying not to count days. I feel like I’m dragging 47

time on a leash, resistant to movement, to change. You say you’re dizzy with oxytocin. Your cheeks are flushed pink, the color of bubble-bath, there’s this jagged slash of a scar on your upper lip. You kiss the center of my palm, stubble grazing my wrist. Eyes misty, half-drunk, sleeves rolled up exposing lily-white shoulders, dusted with freckles, you look like a greaser boy from The Outsiders. I’m thinking about how it’s easier to love someone from far away and hate them up close, how it would be better to not know you at all, to be infatuated with the idea of someone, that blank silhouette that remains without flaws, a false projection. I like the steady weight of your hand and how it doesn’t ask anything of me, doesn’t take anything from me, simply exists, a comforting presence. Later we go for Thai noodles, and you chain our bicycles together against a lamppost. I’m trying to remain in control, keeping track of the power balance, a rocking seesaw, I don’t want to let you pay for dinner because you bought the wine, really it has nothing to do with being a feminist, I’m not trying to make you feel emasculated I promise. You laugh, not condescendingly, not in a way that makes me feel less. You think too much, is what men say when they want you to 48

stop talking.

Contributor Bios Aholaah Arzah received her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard. Her poems, essays, short fictions, and visuals have appeared in a variety of publications, including Short, Fast and Deadly, Crab Creek Review, elimae, Paper Tape, The Bellingham Review, Literary Orphans, Crack the Spine, Moon City Review, ARC, and Duende. Her essay "Ring Cycle" received Longshot Magazine's feature award. She lives in Port Townsend, Washington. Catharina Coenen is a German immigrant to Northwestern Pennsylvania, where she teaches college biology. Her creative work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Appalachian Heritage, Christian Science Monitor, Anastamos, Bird's Thumb, and elsewhere. Casey Corcoran is currently a PhD student in the English program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received his MA in English Studies from Western Washington University in 2016.

Bryan Parys' memoir, Wake, Sleeper (Cascade Books) was released in 2015, and his poetry and nonfiction has been published in Ruminate Magazine, Exit 7 (forthcoming 2019), and Virga, for which he was a 2018 Best of the Net nominee. He's a writer/editor at Berklee College of Music and teaches creative writing on Boston's North Shore. Dan Pinkerton lives in Urbandale, Iowa. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Pank, Fjords Review, Natural Bridge, Permafrost, Spry, Barrow Street, apt, 32 Poems, and Canteen. Fadwa Al Qasem is a refugee by inheritance, a woman with a restless soul and a gypsyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s spirit, and a self-expressionist obsessed with play, adventure, exploration and mark making. Fadwa holds a BA in English Literature (UK) and is currently studying Art Therapy. She is a mixed media artist, poet, and bilingual author with three published books in Arabic and three in English. She currently lives between Spain and Dubai, where she teaches visual journaling and works on her first novel. Her website is www.fadwa.com.

Savannah Rivas is happy to exist the intersection of art and science. As a graduate student and cognitive scientist, she is drawn to the question of what makes a human mind the remarkable system it is. Her work as a poet addresses similar mysteries. Isabella Ronchetti is an artist and writer originally from San Francisco, California. She spent a few years studying in Florence Italy, and currently is living in Virginia. She enjoys spending her free time reading psychology books, running, and people-watching. Her writing and artwork have won awards and appeared in magazines such as FishFood Magazine, Glass Kite Anthology, The Sigh Press, and Canvas Literary Journal. Mariah Hall is an English major at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA and works for WXPN as a music journalist. Mariahâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work has been featured in Fishfood Mag and Medusa's Laugh Press. Melissa Sibley has had several nonfiction essays published in the University of North Carolina at Ashevilleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s annual

literary magazine, Headwaters, and was selected in 2015 for the university’s Comfort Scholarship Award, given to the Literature Department’s most promising student in creative writing. her nonfiction piece “Don’t Drink the Liquor in Lizard Lick” was selected as the winner for the Wilma Dykeman Award in nonfiction in 2014, and has since gone on to be presented in undergraduate research conferences and published in the online journal for COPLAC, the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges. Her work has also been published in The Scarlet Leaf Review, as well as the literary magazine Sink Hollow. She is a recent graduate in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina Asheville, and is currently courting local MFA programs and publication. Sarah Sorenson has most recently been published in Identity Theory and Five on Fifth. She has her M.A. in English Language and Literature from Central MIchigan University and is currently writing her first novel. Find her at www.typefingertapdancer.wordpress.com or buy her a coffee in Kalamazoo, MI.

Barbara Buckman Strasko was the first Poet Laureate of Lancaster County. She is the 2009 River of Words Teacher of the Year and is the Poet in the Schools in the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Rhino, Nimrod, Brilliant Corners, Ninth Letter and Poet Lore. Her book of poems Graffiti in Braille was published in 2012. Bridgett Wissinger lives and writes in St. Louis, Missouri, where she also teaches middle school mathematics. Learn more at hickory.hardscrabble@gmail.com. Seraphina Tang is a nineteen-year-old student from Singapore whose poems have previously been published in the Singapore Creative Arts Programmeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Eye on the World 2016 anthology. She was a participant in the Creative Arts Programme in 2015 and in its mentorship programme from 2015-2016. When she is not busy writing essays or poetry, Seraphina is pretending to be Ed Sheeran in the comforts of her own bedroom.