After the Pause: Winter 2018

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Contributors Mai Al-Nakib is associate professor of comparative literature at Kuwait University and author of The Hidden Light of Objects. Jordan Anderson grew up in Portland, Oregon; his writing has appeared or will appear in Ink In Thirds, World Literature Today, and Music & Literature. Paolo Bicchieri is an ethnically ambiguous journalist, author, and poet. His work can be found in formercactus, Headway Literary, Sprudge, and other places, too. He is optimistic about national politics and likes singing Elton John. Austin Davis is a widely published poet from Arizona whose most recent book, Second Civl War, was released in September from Moran Press. Brandon Thomas DiSabatino is author of the poetry collection, "6 weeks of white castle /n rust," whose work for the theater has appeared in Cincinnati and NYC. Rainier Harris is a high school sophomore from New York City. Milla van der Have is a Dutch native writing in English. Jenny Liu is a high school student from Westchester, New York whose work was recently recognized by the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards; her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Alexandria Quarterly, Eunoia Review, Watershed Review, The Manhattanville Review, and elsewhere. Rupert Loydell is an artist and poet who lives and works in Cornwall. William Lychack is a work in progress. Brianna McNish is a fiction writer and student studying American literature and creative writing in Connecticut. Daniel Olivieri is doing his best, or something close to it. Darrell Petska is a Middleton, Wisconsin writer and emeritus editor, University of Wisconsin-Madison. C.C. Russell is an apple fallen far from the tree.

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Kaylie Saidin is a writer living in New Orleans. Fabio Sassi is a visual artist living in Bologna, Italy. www.fabiosassi.foliohd.com Marvin Shackelford is a man come from the hills and hollows, bearing a sackful of polyhedral dice. Cathryn Shea sneaks time to watch a covey of quails scratch in the dirt when she’s not writing poetry. Emmy Song is a junior at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland.

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William Lychack

These Dreams are Fists

They are hard and closed and never would you open them, though they are yours and yours alone to open. Who else would even want them, really? Who else would care enough to jump in and tell you the truth about them, either, the truth that you won’t be this untangler, won’t be this undoer, won’t be this beautiful little dreamer, this lying little sneak? Because say it, say you can’t hocus-pocus it all perfect again, and then watch—and voilà!—the heart knows something else, doesn’t it? It knows your secrets to swallow and days to come and father to bury. It knows a thousand things you wish it never knew and saying or wishing won’t change a word of what it knows about the boy, which is you, and the mother, which is yours, and this house of yours, which too has its dark corners, its winter drafts, its cellar shelves and jars of vegetables. And the house, too, lays its wasps out to dry in the sun and the dust and the tindery heat upstairs. And even after they split open for thirst, the wasps, even after they lay curled and dead and hollow as toys, it’s hard not to be somewhat wary of the bigger ones, isn’t it? All the sci-fi armor and helmet eyes, the jet-fighter wings, the stingers, and it’s true—when you slip them into your mouth and the wings dissolve and the shell rolls silently over your tongue and teeth—you are swallowing fear itself. So collect and arrange and study them, tip them belly-up and pinch off their heads and legs, but remind us again why? Why rub them to ash and blow them out like candles? Why the Sucrets tin full of them? I mean if it’s strength you need, and if pushing them over your tongue and molars trades weak for strong, then how long is it before this so-called strength becomes a kind of fear? And how long before this fear becomes a kind of hope or longing? In fact, how long before any longing clenches you hard and tight and cruel as the fist in your hand? I only ask because I see you there with your first hope, the one where the wasps go dead and are swallowed away clean and tame in you for good. And

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then I see you spitting them back up in pieces again, too, spitting them small and dark and glossy wet into your hand. It’s this other hope of yours that I watch, this hope as true as the first, the one where they’re in the cup of your palm again, moving, all newborn and alive as ever.

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Marvin Shackleford

Bulette

The body is too solid to be water (though it’s made mostly of water, we’re taught), too soft for stone, more tightly bound than soil, but there’s a mass to it that can be only earth, a landscape, something noted on a map or gently traced from far overhead. What breaks the air like a dorsal fin from waves blackened by the collapsing sun burrows organ to bone, rearranges the shallow underpinnings shaping us with the faulty stroke of a plough’s broken shank. This field must taste of light or breath or ancient pagan tomes that begin with jaws unhinged to claim us and end, jaws unhinged to claim us.

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Marvin Shackleford

Dwarf

For Trey

Because the sun rises like blood against the skin, easterly bruise crowning my day’s every moment, to the bottom of every bottle I will go, to the end of mug and tankard and bar top and city block and street where I wobble before signs suggesting I walk or not walk, their flashed advice for getting ahead, going forward, moving on. But I know better. Right is always right. And so I turn the direction of an oath, I turn the way of time and stone tablets and mines endlessly veined through earth stripped of its treasures by men stooped and dark. Daybreak is an empire in decline. I wait for whatever follows a long night spent crushing to powder cracked but delicately carved memory, the statues and columns upholding my heart.

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Marvin Shackleford

Halfling

For Jonas

If you sleep on the sea, and waves toss you across the timbers like careful steps taken in a dream, or from stone to half-sunk stone across a stream, still you won’t wake until they shake you. Then through darkly rolling waters you wait at the bow, prayer of a harpoon in hand. You’ll have your whale strung about your neck, lighting your lamp, filling your stores. Later, in the long days of a mob’s crashing against the dock with the rhythm of history and revolution, you divide the trinkets and treasures of your life into distinct and battered piles. Some swallowed, others cast to the sea. You ask what sort of man you are, ask whether heart or mind can halt the giddy tide. You open your chest with a quick slash. The ocean makes progress with your bones.

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Marvin Shackleford

Ogre

The body is a scrape of cells clawed from mud and caves. It hunts mighty creatures to extinction, fingers a likeness across the walls. The body eats to bloating, displeases the sun and distends, slack-jawed, with the heat. I trace my passage here like walking fingers across the spine’s notches. Rise and fall, breaks that should have wiped the slate. The body is retarded by sick mothers, failed crops, narrow and salted pools and the driest light between peacetimes. The strange curve of its neck brings earth out of focus but Heaven clearer. Beyond the campfires where we twist and break against the future, tiny men built less of bone than the soft tissue connecting ideas stretch feeble and proud in their own blasted darkness. The pretty words of their swords throw light that rhymes and breaks most preciously. Their songs flutter through spires of stone and glass. I speak only by snarl and roar, the body’s monstrous call to arms, but when I raise my great wooden club, hurl my misshapen bulk blindly against the skulls and hearts of that assembled host, the night does quiet a while, someone

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sleeps, our eyes meet a moment with all the language of this body on our lips.

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Marvin Shackleford

Plant, Intelligent

Shambling Mound I’ve struck the tiny fibers of shame in me until they snapped, until guilt couldn’t raise a hand against me. Can’t close fingers into a fist, signs only a knuckled whisper. I’m not brave but a viny honest. But I want you to appreciate the courage that pulled me from bed this morning, what force of pills choked me into view of the sun. I pick up roots and smother the bones of your pyramids, calendars like quarried love notes to the stars:

Today you will be forced to choose the tendrils of earthly body or heaven as it spreads its legs. Do not begin a new venture. Risk limb and life for the flowered eyes of a house ascending.

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Don’t turn from sure stonework to soil that gives with every step. There I wait with daylight. You pull me from soil to sky. When I touch myself I feel you.

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Brandon Thomas DiSabatino

been a slow century, bonaparte blues

i am tending drinks at the airport bar to the blue cheekboned mansions who lean here. it is raining fiances in the bathroom mirrors, sonnets drip like tar from the faucets. i pickpocket their wallets their chokecherry switches the belt buckles that fasten their windsock bellies, inheritor of their rain, their language. i know their addresses, canceled mortgages, how martyrs hang like diplomas from their withered hard-ons. i am living in the evidence of the substance they live in – lost in the gossip of second comings – waiting like they are. the night piles up in a mirage of parking tickets

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/n polaroids of wind blown from pine, as cockleburs give shade to a river that has burned. i know i am an obsessor of rivers – the soft burlesque of surfaces made to wade through. i am noah gunning my heel to the branch (raising a shithouse ark for the flood) to cross the same waters moses, later will part like the legs of a centerfold. we follow the soap slivers of planes their vertebrae scaled in smoke. i deny your name among its circus of gates: its latitudes departures delays. cuyahoga baton rouge grand coulee kalamazoo – alabaster (i call you) if anything else may break - please – be anything

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else /n begin again to me, new – find me like weather – sink into me (carelessly) call me your water.

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Brandon Thomas DiSabatino

5 stanzas in search of a cross (at a motel 6)

I. under a motel moon staggered by vacancy signs pastel dye-jobs rise in the toy dark; the bathrobes of unfashionable bachelors dry from patio rails, bachatas echo out of portable radios. the rain falls in dull, poetic devices – voices layer like kudzu from other rooms, full of evangelists dressed as fake, vegas elvis singing amazing grace at the county fair, delivering the nightly news: II. it is the last night of the walk-on-watermemorial-rodeo /n jesus has been granted a stay of execution – his crucifixion commuted to a life sentence of concessions,

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(of self-opening glass doors at buy-in-bulk boxstores (tableaus of symbolic blondes on colored television (negotiations w/ waitresses - either real, or imagined – (postcards from the belly of jonah’s whale tacked to the headboard in his room III. in our room: cursives of neon tongue through the burnmarks of boxstore curtains leaving an acne of chessboards on your naked back. the perma-shadows of those who have slept here before us, frost over the walls like saints in stained glass. what they have left on the baseboards (no more than metaphor) than what they have touched ached to mend IV. the maintenance man

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is drunk, humming hot blue /n righteous to himself, stepping in pools of rain he has pissed-in; a can of kodiak snuff tucked in the hammer-holder of his overalls, steadying while he waters a dead, yellow lawn – (he can’t hear it is raining) V. in a mirage of dramamine on-ramps soft diesels pass over asphalt the color of smothered wick - lumbering – like strangers discussing their own dreams, the meaning unknown to them.

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Brandon Thomas DiSabatino

never can tell (9th rain song)

my grandfather was buried w/ a bottle of michelob beer by his side. i was the 1st pallbearer (in white gloves) among the members of my 4th grade class. they wanted to know what it was like – if his death left any echo in my hands. they were being groomed as millionaires owners of ocean liners, drunks /n department store managers – they wanted to know what they needed to run from. i told them: i could hear the music of the bottle against the side of the casket as it was parallel parked between two lutheran headstones how it sounded like his hand asking to be let out. my mother had to tell me that it wasn’t. now

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young men stand at urinals like cashew horses they turn to hearses, buttoning their crotches in the harnesses of restroom stalls, emerging centuries older in the clothes of their fathers that every father before them had worn – the hours pass in the shape of brutal women the terraces answer w/ nameless birds, the worms alone will shovel them down finding whatever river they feed.

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Daniel Olivieri

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Brianna McNish

Disappearing Act

“I guess I didn’t mean to make her disappear,” begins Klaus, though there is something about the way he starts his explanation which makes me think he did. In some way, all of us did. Sometimes it happened mid-performance; sometimes it happened in the bedroom. But we all said abra-cadabra! only to find our beloved or our assistant or our friend went up in smoke, poof, gone. Most were inexperienced magicians who needed consolation. The support group leader, a stout woman named Sheila framed by a curly pixie cut bob, had been quick to affirm the amateur magicians with coaxing smiles and affirmations. With Klaus, Sheila fell completely silent. We had all known about Klaus. Klaus stepped into the community center room in his iron-pressed robin-eggshell blue tuxedo, his raven hair as glossy as Windex-sprayed glass. Here was the man who had won the county fair’s Best Entertainer in 2009, 2012, 2013, and 2016. Here was the man who made his assistants turn into rabbits and toss them into different dimensions in his top hat only to drag them back never quite the same as before. He eased into a fold-out chair. His body looked like he was comprised of mostly legs and neck. He was the type of man who was insistent on wearing satin bow-ties and this made me immediately hate him. “Do you know what it’s like to have your partner torn from you and thrown into a different dimension? Usually,” he says, his entire body moving like a sigh, “I’m so good at it. I’m so good at pulling the bodies out into this reality.” “Yes, Klaus,” we all say in breathless unison. “I know you do.” “Do you know what it’s like to have your daughter turn into a mouse? She refuses to turn back into a person. I think I might have crushed her when I was making toast yesterday.” “Arabella accidentally turned her wife into a rabbit,” I say, hoping to finally divert attention away from Klaus. “Arabella, tell him about your wife.”

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My hope to finally draw attention from Klaus failed. Arabella starts crying again. She laments how she leaves celery and baby carrots at her bedside all so her wife would come back to her, but it doesn’t work. “My husband is in the second dimension,” I say in a vain hope to drag attention away from the decorated magician. “He’s trapped there.” Klaus doesn’t even feign interest. All air eases from my chest like a balloon. Again, in my head, I repeat those words I had practiced hours before: My name is Rita and my husband is in the second dimension. My name is Rita and my husband is in the second dimension. If anyone asks, and thankfully no one does, I would lie and say I didn’t know how to use Mister Bartholomew’s Master Magic Kit, which I had bought from MagiCon for forty-percent-off. I would lie and say I didn’t know how to use the slender, white-tipped wand the kit came with, and I trapped him there by accident. In this version of the story, there are no accidents. In this version of the story, everything is carefully mapped out, each lie smooth and milky as a pearl. In this version of the story, everyone would listen to the grief pour from my chest and nod their heads in solidarity. But no one asks. No one listens. My thighs press together so tightly I fear they might congeal together. During our first Magician’s Anonymous meeting, Klaus spends a short while talking about himself, about his missing wives, about his only daughter, his precious Daphne, transformed into a mouse and crushed all because he decided to make buttered toast that morning. His explanations are punctuated by Arabella’s distant sobbing. Sheila continues to reaffirm our grief with “I” statements, such as, “I know exactly how you feel,” or “I know it’s hard, sugar, but let it all come out into this reality.” And with Klaus leading us with his rambling grief, we begin to unfurl slowly, carefully, our narratives overlapping each other, our voices spilling out into the stale heat of the community center lounge formerly used for students to make arts and crafts after school. Some talk about how they have severed limbs with incantations, electrocuted loved ones, trapped assistants and partners in a past, decimated time in a single breath. I hear Klaus talk about his mousy daughter above everyone else. I talk about how I threw my husband into a void because I had to. Because he hurt me. Because I didn’t like the way he touched me anymore.

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But again no one hears me. No one cares that my name is Rita and I expelled my husband into the second dimension with a magic kit I bought on eBay. When everyone finally falls quiet, Sheila clasps her soft hands together and smiles her warm smile. She tells us how wonderful it is to expunge our bodies of so many ghosts.

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C.C. Russell

I Find Myself

Retouching the last touches of you that are

left

on my skin, embellishing the aging inks of our story.

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C.C. Russell

A Familiar Song

Takes me back to your driveway, that half-moon of asphalt that I found myself idling in.

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C.C. Russell

Tonight, For

Neither muse nor vengeance though both press like shadow upon the edges of the page.

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Cathryn Shea

The Fabrication of Dobros

I dreamed Gibson moved its Dobro factory to China, worried what would happen to bluegrass music. Those Slav Dopyeras invented the Dobro in Los Angeles;

vaqueiros packed them to Kona, rich sound made loud and affordable. The echoey twang and scratch of steel lazed in my dream, the sonance a riddle. I was caught up in America disintegrating, factories vacant, shops abandoned. Only malls full of gewgaws to buy. Tools, jeans, toys, every stick made in faraway continents. Dobro fret necks and bodies made there, every last thing made where I don’t know anymore. This instrument I love to hear someone play. In a welter of acrylic and polyester dyed brightly I woke up sweaty, certain the ports of Oakland and LA had collapsed under laden containers stacked high like terrifying towers.

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Fabio Sassi

Art on Tar

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Fabio Sassi

Elastic Mood

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Darrell Petska

Time-Lapse

That crying infant! Causing the new mother to lactate. The new father to yawn. The grandparents to coo and cluck. The cat and the dog to flee toward the basement and the mice—well, god bless 'em. So tiny a being reverberating through closets and hallways, rattling windows, dislodging chimney ash. Passersby pause, cars draw to the curb as planes fly low— Wonder prevails. Sun and moon dangle on strings, the Milky Way chills in a bottle, and Time, the old gaffer, catches a wink in a cross-stitch boat on the wall.

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Kaylie Saidin

Disney

Rachel Disney has a sleek pointed nose, one that you’ve never seen on anyone before and must be a dominant inherited trait that runs in the family. She is tall and dark-haired and, in a strange and frightening way, beautiful. She brought the mini fridge, and you feel bad for not getting any other dorm room supplies. She puts her name into your phone contacts as Rachel Rose, with her middle name where her last should be. You smile and act nonchalant, but she can’t fool you. The university housing email said that her last name was Disney. It only took you a few minutes of cursory google searches to find out that your roommate-to-be was the granddaughter of Walt Disney. Every time you think of her, you think of her last name following its predecessor around like a ghost. She is never just Rachel. Rachel Disney is from Los Angeles. You want to ask her why she would move to Louisiana, but you think you already know. She is the first person from California you’ve ever met that didn’t talk about the West Coast incessantly. In fact, Rachel barely talks about herself. You want her to like you. You have a dream that, while she sleeps, you stand over her bed and peer into her eardrums. There is dried blood around the rim, and you look deep inside until you can see her brain and watch her thoughts. You wake up and try to forget about it. You aren’t crazy. Just nervous to share a room with an heiress. Rachel Disney doesn’t drink. You go out to socialize at parties and bars together, but she doesn’t touch a solo cup and shakes her head when people offer. Eventually, she opens up a little and tells you that she had problems in high school with substance abuse, and that it runs in her family. You imagine Walt Disney as a druggie. Alice in Wonderland did always seem weird to you. People at school know you for being Rachel Disney’s roommate. For a while, this makes you feel desired. You’re an insider in a world that people want to know more about. When they ask, you blow cigarette smoke out of

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your mouth, laugh, and say, she’s really cool. You leave it at that – the more mysterious, the better. But come October, you are sick of being asked about her. You have a dream that you and Rachel are the last humans left on Earth after the apocalypse. Surrounded by mutants, she cowers next to you. In this dream you are taller than she is. You wake up sweating and turn down the thermostat. One night you are out with Rachel and a boy from school sits next to her. He is blonde and stupid and you can tell that she likes him. They laugh and flirt and you sit there, watching them like a child staring through the glass window of a store. You want her to look at you, maybe not the way she looks at him, but you can’t be sure. Then, the boy makes the usual can you get us tickets to Disneyland? joke. You know that he is trying to be cute, but you wince. Her grin wanes, and for a moment, she wears a face you’ve never seen before. She looks exhausted. Then, her smile waxes and returns, lacking some dimples. She laughs it off. Rachel drinks that night, and you don’t stop her. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you think that you should, but you don’t. She’s your age – she can look out for herself. Yet you wonder how she could’ve learned to look out for herself when everyone wants to know her with a ravenous hunger. You feel guilty. You did this to her, too. But you swallow your thoughts and pound back Heineken with her and hold her while you dance to early 2000s music. When you get home, the two of you brush your teeth in the sink by the door and climb into the twin beds that lay on opposite sides of the narrow room. You flick off the fluorescent lights. In the darkness, you can hear her crying. You pretend to be asleep already, but your eyes are open, staring at the wall. You want to get up and crawl into her flower-printed sheets, to hold her, but you don’t. For all the talk about her, the mythos that you’ve thought up that must have been her life, you realize you don’t know her at all. At last, you speak. Are you okay? She doesn’t reply. There is nothing but the darkness and the glow of the lamppost coming in through the frayed blinds, and you lay there on your back, staring at the stucco of the ceiling.

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You imagine that she says, some people are born with something larger than them. It follows them for their entire life, an inescapable fog. It shapes who they become. It’s not my fault what I was born into. But she doesn’t say this. You don’t know Rachel Disney, and in the silence, you think that maybe now you never can. When you finally fall asleep, you have a dream that the university e-mail read Rachel Rose in bolded, black font. In the dream, you meet her again for the first time, and you still notice your nose, but this time you’re the one who brought the mini-fridge. As your morning consciousness leaks back in, you start to frantically wish you could un-know what you know, that you could see a girl instead of a product of history, but then the light leaks in through the windowsill and tells you that you are too late.

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Emmy Song

Minimize

you are — a sore in my mouth, born savage amid the delicate vowels i spin for mother; the last rotations of summer, all cracked lips and missteps into sidewalk puddles. my head tilted & searching for a requiem to the sky; the yellowing calluses carved in my fingertips, tender flesh hardened by sawing strings. i trace your name like i'm learning to write for the first time; like driving on the freeway with nowhere to go, broken brakes and needing to get away; this poem, a handful of loose threads with ends i cannot stitch together — my dying youth.

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Jenny Liu

inflections upon inflections

it was the same sort of sharp thing— inadequacy they call it. sometimes it wears different faces. it was the confessional tone that knotted my capillaries. the blow off the steam. the low self-esteem. sometimes it wears different faces—i tell you words you don’t hear; hands muffling eyes. it was the floral undertone under my words. the sinusoidal graph of i’m sorry; the way my face looks at me when the ending crescendos into a question mark.

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Jordan Anderson

Remain

In the slipstream where thought and eternity collide, are torn apart. You are there, in darkening relief of half-known memory, held like a butterfly in shallow amber.

In the shadowed place where all thought ceases you may be free of the eyes that haunted, starved, drove you like an animal to a land without refuge. I saw your picture on the missing person’s website: your eyes had changed -- wide, staring, lightless.

Your family pooled a detective’s fees, but you had eluded all people, all existence. Two years before he found you -- an accident, a slanted robbery, a murder -- he had no answer.

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Rainier Harris

The Window That Separates Us

the raindrops marries my tongue chart each hill of me down Queens Boulevard trout billows in my throat until i choke on my desires i wonder what could be better than knowing who you are chained to the lake dreams of me nearby & i dream to be borne of it, a landscape to paint there is something special when the cigarette skyline bends the sun to its will and i can witness it from my bedroom window.

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Mai Al-Nakib

Mourning Monique

After Sophie Calle’s Rachel, Monique, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2010

I film as doctors and nurses verify she is dead. I invite her friends to the funeral. We bury her copy of À la recherche du temps perdu; her little black book with the names of all the men she slept with, had been hoping to sleep with, would never have slept with, but who had shown some small interest in sleeping with her; her silk Christian Lacroix scarf; a pack of Marlboros; the plastic tulips that sat for years on her counter; her parrot-embroidered purse where she kept her B-complex capsules; her plaster mold of my father’s penis; my birth certificate. The next day, I cremate my mother’s body. I buy a giraffe’s head and neck and hang it in my studio because its eyes remind me of hers. I call it Monique—one of my mother’s many names. My friends begin to think I am unraveling because the giraffe is from Kenya and much larger than they had imagined. I assure them hanging a giraffe on a wall constitutes acceptable mourning. I put my mother’s portrait, her diamond ring, her Chanel necklace of gray pearls and garnet beads into a valise, and we take a cruise to the Arctic Circle. She grins at me from the porthole of my cabin. Sometimes I take her out on deck. Passengers are let off the ship onto a glacier. I tuck Monique, her ring and necklace into a snowy nook. I lower my lips to the icy ground, knowing they will stick, wanting never to say goodbye.

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Rupert Loydell

Imaginary Landscape 30

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Rupert Loydell

Imaginary Landscape 38

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Rupert Loydell

Imaginary Landscape 42

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Rupert Loydell

Imaginary Landscape 46

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Rupert Loydell

Imaginary Landscape 54

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Milla van der Have

These things are (not) alike

not yet father

not yet ghost

rivulets

sunken depths of memory

a body and what comes the way I find myself kin of bodies boots and worn feet

the trenches, the toils of the east

moustache, curled over your face family

a wrinkle

the meaning of skin

if we have left, we will never be onwards, to which war a picture of a picture within a faded wall the cracks of time a uniform

the place where you fall, where the shells now lie a single bond

the unfolding of generations sense of the west petals upon petals tunnel-view

a photograph

miles and the pull of the sun earth as it claws at you your veins, open

mud and deep layers of smell

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a kiss, October and all that belated goodbye, her skirts as they rustle in the autumn wind its sweet belongings a child, a war, a war, a child something you retrieve minute, the all-foreseen

something you leave behind

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Austin Davis

Why We Need to Vote

I’m a straight white man right now I really don’t like straight white men don’t get me

wrong there are straight white men who fight for equality spread compassion give the homeless

a dollar there are straight white men who hug the ones they love smile more

than they spit live with an open mind about white privilege

and try to understand the history behind their footsteps but there are also the straight

white men who lie to women and say the condom doesn’t fit that pulling out

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works babe but when she misses her period he misses her calls there are the straight white

men who say the world is racist to whites the ones who stand behind Trump at his rallies and come

home every night to yell curses at the women who agreed to love them in sickness

and in health but hate isn’t a sickness it’s a disease the straight white man who places the red

hat on his son’s head and leaves a dangerous stain on his child’s mind is the straight white

man with racism sexism and misogyny tattooed behind his eyes

the blood that his son will one day mark

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his children with as well

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Austin Davis

October

Em brace me in the space between the wind ow pane and the shad ow from the fan spinning a round your face your fear is the rain drop that top ples the bucket under the hole in o ur sky we thought some paint could patch

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Paolo Bicchieri

May 2016

I made her a Mississippi mud cake. My dad said it was a family tradition. I made avocado butter cream frosting that was ugly and looked like liquid Shrek spread thin on a cake made of funeral earth. It was her birthday and we had just started dating. She was a long range crush of mine for the better part of a year, too cool and powerful to approach. I was glad when she said she wanted to watch cartoons with me. I kissed her with Al Green playing over my left shoulder on a nice record player. “You should have asked to kiss me,” she said when I was done. I felt horrible. I felt like I always ask and I always get made fun of, like the nerdy sixth grader that I know I harbor inside. She said it was fine, but to not do it again. She told me she didn’t like Ernest Hemingway as we walked down the long hill from our university to the building we both haunted. I took her on her first real date, pulling my mom’s car around front. I wore a button shirt, even though I hadn’t shaved in about one year, and she wore a floral dress. I took a picture that neither of us ever looked at. Her white bra was perfect. Her smile was giving. She was considerate. She told me she had only been with men who took from her and never gave. When her body shuddered she cried, which made her body shudder. It was like sleeping next to a new idea that night, a sappy moon pasting along our bodies. After restless nights in my room, my futon betraying her peaceful sleep, she took it upon herself to smudge my room with an eagle feather, given to her by a trusted professor. I decided I wouldn’t be a party to any smudging in the future, something that shockingly came up less than a year later.

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She explained to me what my ethnic makeup meant, socially. She let me know I was Exotic White, or Second Generation, or White Passing, or White, and how she had never dated any man who was any of those. I nodded and ate breakfast, slow. We lay in her bed after “Italian Night” with my roommates. I had a bottle of wine shoved in my brain and watched the dozens of stuffed animals she had in her room circle me like a mobile. She asked me about the scandal surrounding our would-be student body president. “I think we have to hear both of their sides of the story,” I belched. “If she says her girlfriend was emotionally abusive she should explain the situation.” My new girlfriend was quiet. I think she was wondering why she was my new girlfriend. I was half-asleep. The next day I didn’t hear from her, and the day after that I found my things, piled like dead carp, outside my apartment door. I scratched my head and went upstairs, fog bound. I was in Spain when I saw she had unfriended me on Facebook. I didn’t know that was meaningful until that moment. It was vaguely insulting, and confusing. I didn’t hear from her for a while, and I complained about her strangeness for a time. Months later she told me she was sorry. I told her I respected her and her decisions, that she was smart and talented and beautiful. “Can I get a ride home?” We were at a coffee shop by the ocean, far from her new apartment, and I said yes. I drove a 1982 Westfalia across town, and we talked about cartoons. She paused outside the van, and I knew I was supposed to pause and ask her what was on her mind.

aaa


“It was always you,” she said. I crunched. “I’m seeing someone,” I said. She winced. “I know,” she said. She left. I don’t know why the Mississippi mud cake seems like the most important part. I was rum drunk when I made it, sloshing around the kitchen like a dumb ogre. I don’t know why that seems important.

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About After the Pause is an online literary journal based in Indianapolis, IN, featuring poetry, flash fiction, and artwork, published quarterly. We also publish a yearly print anthology whose proceeds benefit charity. We look to feature the best creative arts from new, emerging, and veteran creators. We also run a small, nonprofit press called a‌p press, which publishes titles of experimental poetry and fiction. Find us here: afterthepause.com or on Twitter @afterthepause The managing/founding editor of After the Pause and the overseer of its entire doings is Michael Prihoda.

Purpose We believe art is a product of life experiences, from the joyful to the heartbreaking to the absolutely mundane. Life throws pauses at us. Art follows the pause. We want to share the best art we can find and bring hope through those artworks.

Cover Art Designed by Michael Prihoda.

Departure Until next time.

Copyright 2018 All rights of the material within belong to the authors.

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