Analecta 40

Analecta 40

Analecta 40 Spring 2014

Editorial Staff E ditor -I n -C hief Elizabeth Barnes W eb E ditor Ann Zhu P ublicity M anagers Katie Cerdedo Emily Stewart P oetry B oard Jennifer Yang Kelsey Amundsen Katie Cerdedo Katy Massey Kathleen Woodruff

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A rt B oard Gitanjali Bhattachar jee William Brewer Cole Bubenik Mihir Shukla Nicole Stewart Stephanie Vanicek

A ssistant E ditor Rachel Abbott D esign T eam Nicole Stewart Kelsey Amundsen Seth Beaugh Stephanie Vanicek Kathleen Woodruff F iction B oard Erik McKenny Rachel Abbott Katie Bland Cole Bubenik Emily Stewart Nonfiction & Drama Board Colleen O’Neill Anjali Bhattacharjee Mihir Shukla Mikaila Smith Seth Beaugh William Brewer

COPYRIGHT 2014 by the Senate of College Councils at The University of Texas at Austin. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

Analecta is published annually by the Analecta agency of the Senate of College Councils at The University of Texas at Austin.

Please visit our website at analectajournal.com to view our web edition, contact our staff, and learn more about joining the staff, submitting work, and ordering a copy of the journal.

Analecta 40 is printed by Ginny’s Printing, Inc. The text was set using text families Baskerville and Oriya.

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Acknowledgements Analecta 40 marks a year of evolution for our journal. Submission numbers soared. Our blog output multiplied. And the journal went amphibious—once available only in print, Analecta has ventured online.

This spring the staff is delighted to share this journal in digital form for the first time ever. To reward our preordering supporters, we have withheld some pieces exclusively for print. If you’d like to buy the full journal, you can do so through analectajournal.com.

Many people deserve our thanks for making these changes possible and for ensuring that Analecta 40 upheld our standard of literary and artistic excellence.

Of course, we are grateful to the artists and writers whose talents form the backbone of Analecta 40. However, we extend our thanks to all 92 students who submitted work this fall. We love reviewing every piece, and we hope that you’ll contribute next fall to Analecta 41.

Our journal would not have been possible without the invaluable guidance and resourcefulness of Veronica Cantu, Becky Carreon, and Cheryl Pyle. Analecta takes pride in belonging to the Senate of College Councils and deeply appreciates its continued support.

Likewise, we thank Roland Castruita for his coordination of our print job with Ginny’s Printing, Inc. As editor-in-chief, I have come to love the entire Analecta staff.

Your adaptability, ingenuity, and energy continue to astonish me, and I am honored to have worked with you this year. Design guru and organizational wizard Nicole Stewart kept the journal beautiful and on schedule. Lifesaver Rachel Abbott rose to every challenge with grace, enthusiasm, and an uncanny aptitude for journal production.

I have no doubt that Analecta will flourish under her leadership.

Finally, on behalf of the staff, I thank you—our reader—for supporting Analecta. We welcome you to explore the volume we’ve come to love, and we hope that you’ll join us next year to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the foundation of Analecta.

Elizabeth Barnes, Editor-in-Chief

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Table of Contents Title

Contributor

Cover: Noh Masks Dance Floor King of Crickets In-Finite My Hands Tales of the City All My Fears Wowing Living Alone Jagged Bones/Dead Moon Your Neck Is Warm and Your Blood 6

Runs Beneath It Like Quicksilver The Jackson Pollock 5 A Palimpsest Circus Justine Softly Hannah Blind Contour Yokai Alan’s Theremin

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Ryan Chen

6 8 10

Samuel A. Vanicek

11 12 13 15 17 28 30

Rachel Rein

32 33 36 37 38 39 40 42

Majid Breland

Joel Deeter Emily Campbell Robinson Cody Bubenik Charu Sharma Kate Coleman Austin Wyman Shannon Connor Frew

Jourden Sander Charu Sharma Meagan Waldrip Lea Konczal Adele Powers Ryan Chen Keith Padraic Chew

Aqueousconscious Beat 42 Blue Haze Doublet Mouthpoet Double-O-Seven Fallen Avenue E To a Boy Calendar Book People American Muscle Pearl Street Bedroom Author Bios

43 46 58 60 62 64 66 67 77 80 84 86 96 98

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Robert Lopez Kristopher A. Denby Sadia Quddus Madeleine F. Guy Shannon Keith Padraic Chew Lea Konczal Christopher Nordahl Rachel Rein Matthew Garner Ryan Chen Kristopher A. Denby Erin Miller

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Dance Floor Samuel A. Vanicek Digital photography

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King of Crickets Joel Deeter

Silently sipping, HEB cola and whiskey We listened to the croon of Sinatra

over the hum of AC. The whir of tractor blades in the distance

—two wide awake headlights making smaller and smaller circles

in the field before us—

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Between the whiskey

and Modelo

and sweet Mulberry wine that your mom made

two summers ago, we talked about girls

and college and girls and heartbreak Alcohol subtle grave robber

unearther of secrets

disrober of kings Your face was serious

like a Renaissance portrait

marred by the tobacco stained Larry Mahan on your head

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I will never

find

someone

else Those words echoed like pebbles tossed into

an abandoned well.

I am the King of Crickets, conductor of my own chirping orchestra.

Half a love never appealed to me.

Viola set against my chin,

I did it My Way I was my own umbrella

when the Stormy Weather hit.

The only song I can sing

is a sad one

that has been sung hundreds of times before.

Come fly to the moon with me maybe we’ll find

that the world doesn’t look as miserably flat

as I like to imagine.

Take another sip of Evan Williams,

you tell me, and listen to The Birth of the Blues drift

over the hot, Texas night.

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In-Finite

Emily Campbell Robinson (i float) in silent blue a night swirling beneath above within me, until I know no other (i wait) Sound arrives.

Charging horses, waves rocking against my checks, echoes of my night fade (i open) into Light. brassy broken rough smoothed and soft and whole My blue night shadowed by a separate dawn

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(i greet) the small world, its corners and ceilings, with a cry, inhaling a breath no longer infinite

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My Hands Rachel Rein

My grandmother once grasped my wrists and whispered more softly than the crinkling rustle of fallen leaves.

“Hermosas manos- beautiful hands.

Frail porcelain spiders not yet shaped by earth.”

She steadied them while I beat mortar to pestle, crushing sturdy kernels of maize into sweet violet powder, and scolded me as I scooped onto my tongue handfuls of warm gooey polenta.

Together we watched my tenacious fingers begin to mold clay into the forms of the coyote and elk, kaolin and mica into porous earth, Adam’s rib into curvaceous Eve. Golden-yellow ochre escaped my grasp and hung beneath oblique arches and callused thumbs.

My grandmother knelt before me and studied my sand dune palms carved by a great plum vein, moon crescent nails, the intricate whorls printed upon fingertips stained from droplets of light abandoned by the rising sun.

“Manos terrenale,my grandmother told me.

“Hands of the earth.”

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Tales of the City Cody Bubenik Oil on canvas

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All My Fears Charu Sharma

I am afraid of losing things. I can handle the keys, Elizabeth Bishop, even the hour badly spent, but the human mind, my mother? Even silence is precious to me. When I was only seven, I woke up to a gun show. I have had my ears plugged ever since. Blenders are the worst.

Once it’s poured out, nothing looks like it should.

The strawberry is a broken heart. Eve’s apple is a mind, and it is worrying itself to pieces.

I don’t break anything apart. Chewing is still my greatest struggle. The sheer monotony of it, the guilt of turning soft what once held itself together so well.

I am not comfortable with changing the state of things.

Still, I read Ovid. I wonder what metamorphosis feels like. I am green with envy even for Medusa, with her hair of snakes and forked tongues for split ends. Well, I think I would choose to be the head of a dandelion, instead.

Can you imagine being enough for anyone’s wishes?

To be the week no one throws out?

To be kept in vases, with your grey ghosts and all?

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Often, I am ashamed to be human instead.

After the gun show, my mother took me to the zoo.

She tried to frighten me with the music of lions.

With the claws of the bobcat.

The cunning of the red fox, but man is the most terrifying of animals.

We have language, sure. We can make laws, they say, but the tiger, the bear, even the snakeinvertebrate though he is: they do not need government to keep them from swallowing their brothers whole.

They remember love, even behind bars.

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The whale makes music without having to tear anything apart. She holds onto a nuclear family.

It is more than you can say of us, drowning out the quiet of a dial tone with the sound of gunshots. Filling the silence of loss with the loudness of a blender.

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Wowing Kate Coleman

She was kissed a thousand times as a child and the only evidence was the sticky juice of a plum coating her parted lips.

He wrote a letter in her dream in which he focused on her wowing and he ended the letter (which was to her best friend) with: I don’t hate you.

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I hate you, A stranger And it was really funny.

She looks at everything like she wants to paint it and paints everything like she needs to touch it.

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Some early mornings he would put his finger in her mouth as she slept to stop her from grinding her teeth.

In the throes of summer she would tiptoe into the kitchen, gingerly pluck a wine glass by its stem and fill it to the imaginary “socially acceptable� line with sugar.

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Living Alone Austin Wyman

Francis was cleaning his apartment for the fourth time that week. It was Sunday and the plants needed watering, so he dealt with that first. He ran a finger down a leaf of his prized red-edged dracaena after watering it. It shone with moisture. He picked up the ruler that lay on the sill. Fortyfour millimeters across. It’s getting there, he thought. The sun beamed straight through the window as he gave more order to his books. He’d had them alphabetical, then alphabetical by author, and now he wanted them in order read by month, alphabetical within the month.

He liked to clean when he wanted to keep his mind off something. It helped reduce anxiety and the frantic loop his mind would at times get stuck in. There was a catch-22, however. He liked to clean, to straighten and organize and alphabetize, but just as much, he didn’t like his place to be too tidy. He found it started to feel less like a home and more like a model of one, too sterile and lifeless. After a certain point, clean and sparse became bare and stifling, and he would begin to feel like he was the only thing left out of place.

To deal with this, he would carefully select certain things to be kept out of place, effectively building some disarray into his cleaning routine. A wire draped across a table. Pens and pencils sprinkled along the top of the shelf of his dresser.

Organized and deliberate clutter, to make the living space feel lived in. This would work to a point, but if he thought about it too much, then the calculatedness of it would start to bother him just as much as if he’d just put everything away.

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So eventually he’d resign himself to the slight unease until the natural progression from tidy to messy brought his apartment back to a comfortable equilibrium.

He was straining to make his apartment feel less empty and more alive, hence the plants. Cats don’t make a lot of noise, so the apartment was just as quiet, but still, less alive. She had died of old age, as most domesticated cats do, and it had been a Tuesday. Francis remembered this fact despite the fourmonth cushion between now and then because he always did laundry on Tuesday, and it was after he’d come back from the machines that he found her lying on the living room hardwood floor, eyes closed, in a position unmistakably unlike any he’d seen her sleep in before. Today was Tuesday as well. After the plants, and the bookshelf, he gathered his laundry and took the hamper down to the machines.

Back at the windowsill that held the plants, he looked down two stories on the street of a city waking up. The road was heavy with people pushing their way to work, driven by all the willpower they could muster to counteract the desire to sleep in favor of the unpleasantness of early morning traffic, fighting for every foot of progress toward a place they didn’t want to be. What was it he’d heard about the life of the city, he asked himself. He remembered it being compared to an organism. Someone had come up with an equation to determine how frequently an organism’s heart should beat, given its size. Plug the size of the average city in that equation, and you get two beats per twenty-four hours. The streets are

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veins, the highways major arteries. Each day the heart of the city pumps cars in a swarm for the places of business, and then again, eight hours later, for home. Looked at abstractly enough, all structures of significant complexity start to look the same, the brain, the city, the universe. It’s a matter of patterns.

Francis followed patterns just the same. Just because he understood this phenomenon on an intellectual level didn’t mean he saw himself as above it, quite the opposite. He felt comfortable in his patterns because he understood their significance. Life would not exist without patterns. Nothing would. That’s when he witnessed the first thing that day he thought only happened in movies, on the street below. A man was walking down the sidewalk across from Francis’s apartment. He wore a grey speckled sweater and a black scarf, matched by the grey speckled hat and black glasses on his head. In one hand he held a paper cup of coffee and in the other, his phone. Francis wondered what he was reading that held his attention so steadfastly as his quick pace took him down the block. One shop down, at that moment, a women was coming out of a convenience store, who looked to be of a similar age, in a blue sweater and a white scarf with nothing on her head besides short blonde hair. In one hand she held a bag of groceries, using the word “groceries” loosely, and in the other, her phone. She pushed the door open with her phoneholding arm and Francis watched as their trajectories led to the inevitable collision. The force of the door combined with the force of the fast-walking man sent the women to the ground.

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The man’s coffee left his hand effortlessly, but his phone merely felt the increased pressure of his panicked grip.

The man closed the door and offered a hand to the fallen woman. Together they gathered her things back into the bag, saving them from the spilt coffee that was running in all directions. After that was done, they stood there beside the store door, wide smiles on them as they unwound from the fall. But maybe not so unfortunate, Francis thought, as they exchanged the very phones that got them into the mess, nearly five minutes of conversation later, oblivious to the people pushing past them through the door. They waved goodbye as they went their separate ways.

Patterns with mistakes, that was the other part. It’s not enough just to follow patterns. If those two had followed their patterns perfectly, as usual, they would have avoided each other, and their day would have looked nearly identical to the one before. But a slight alteration in an otherwise perfect execution of a familiar pattern led to a disproportionately positive result. Life wouldn’t exist without patterns, but it also wouldn’t exist without the mistakes. A single-celled organism making a mistake in replicating itself became a dual-celled organism. Patterns with slight deviations. Francis needed a slight deviation.

Francis lowered the blinds as much as he could without blocking the sunlight for the plants. The voyeuristic experience had left him feeling warm and good, or maybe it was the sunlight, but regardless, he didn’t want that energy to go to

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waste. The problem was he didn’t know where to direct it.

Nothing came to mind. Energy without direction turned into anxiety, another pattern Francis had noticed. Feeling utterly idealess, he decided to do the first thing that came to mind. He would take a walk.

His closet was getting messy. For whatever reason, it was always the first thing to lose its organization after a thorough apartment cleaning. If someone asked Francis to identify his apartment based solely on the color of the carpet of his closet floor, he would ask for a hint. He changed out of his pajama pants, put on his shoes, turned off all the lights, and left. On the street directly beneath his apartment, he looked up at his plants on the sill. He imagined himself standing there at the window, looking down on himself on the street. So that’s what it feels like, he thought. I wonder if the man and woman could feel me watching them. I wonder if there is anyone in a room across the street, looking down at me looking up at my building, wondering what I could possibly be looking at.

Francis put the wondering aside and walked, and as he did, he people watched through the windows of the shops.

There was a coffee shop with only three patrons. It was clear they hadn’t come together, as they were not seated at the same table, but a conversation had sparked between them all the same. He passed an expensive French restaurant occupied primarily by people on business lunches and couples out for brunch. Despite it being the middle of the day, the lighting was dim and it made every conversation going on inside, which

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Francis could see but not hear, seem more intimate. The last place he passed before reaching the park was a petite-sized bakery with only three circular tables for two inside. The ovens were visible behind the counter, and they gave the small room a warm glow which looked the same way fresh bread smells.

There was no one in there beside the brown-haired women at the counter.

Francis wanted to go inside the coffee shop, order something (he didn’t care what), sit at a table adjacent to the other three, and revel in the kind of conversation you can only have with lovers and strangers.

He wanted to have a date he could take to the fancy French restaurant, at night when the lighting was even more intimate, and each red leather booth would be its own little world, separate but not isolated from all the others.

He wanted to go into the bakery and ask the woman at the counter if she owned the place, or if not, how long she’d worked there for, how early she had to be there in the mornings to start baking, and if she minded. All these wants were there normally, but today they had migrated from the back to the front of his mind. But then, he was at the park, and he thought he saw a ghost.

It was a cat, sniffing at one of the seats of the swing-set, and from afar it looked just like his own. Its collar was blue, however, and its legs had more white fur. Francis scanned the small park for signs of the cat’s owner and found none. He

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approached the swing-set slowly, conscious of the possibility that at any moment the cat could sense his presence and bolt.

He or she didn’t bolt though, and once Francis had reached an arm’s distance from the swing, the cat brushed against his leg, again and again, and Francis took it as another sign. Someone was missing their cat, but unlike Francis, they wouldn’t lose theirs for good with his help. He squatted down and took a look at the tag on the collar as he petted the cat’s head. It gave a name, “Sphinx,” and a phone number.

He dialed, it rang, and Sphinx’s owner answered, “Hello?”

“Hi, I think I’ve found your cat. Um, Sphinx,” he said, as if he needed to specify her name.

“Oh, wow, I didn’t even know she’d gotten out,” she laughed. “I’ve been out all day myself. But thank you so much.”

“Of course. It’s nothing.”

“Where’d she get to?”

“The park, the one right next to Regency Apartments.”

“Oh, that’s where I live. Well at least she didn’t get far.

I must have left the balcony door open. There’s a tree right next to it.” She laughed again. “I need to take that cat on more walks. She gets restless.”

“Well, I’m holding her just fine now, so she must have gotten it out of her system,” Francis said. And he was holding her, with one arm, sitting on the swing and swinging gently as he talked.

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“That’s good. Well I just got out of lunch, across town unfortunately. I’m on my way as fast as I can, but I don’t want you to have to hold her until I get there.”

Francis agreed that would be less than ideal. And the people in the lobby of the apartment probably wouldn’t take too kindly to letting a cat roam the bottom floor.

“How about meeting me in the bakery beside your apartment? Marlenne’s, it’s called. There’s no one in there, so I think they’d let me hang out there with a cat for a few minutes.”

“Oh, that’d be great. And thank you again,” she said, and then hung up.

Francis got off the swing, and the cat tensed up in panic for a second but then settled back into his arm as he walked toward the bakery. Then it was Francis’s turn to panic briefly as he approached the bakery door, oscillating between confidence that the person inside would not find a man carrying a cat into a bakery strange at all, and changing his mind about the whole thing and just standing around the park, waiting for the cat owner to come, or perhaps just abandoning the rescue operation entirely and making a mad dash back to his apartment. But he was much too far in to do that. His hand had reached the door handle and there was nothing left to do but say “hi.”

“Hi,” he said.

“Hello,” said the girl behind the counter.

She looked as if she were about to speak but Francis got in first.

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“I found this cat outside and the owner is coming to pick it up. Is it alright if we wait in here?” By “we” he was, of course, referring to Sphinx and himself.

“Sure,” she replied kindly, and without hesitation. “I mean. People bring dogs in here smaller than her. I wouldn’t want to be discriminatory.”

Francis set the cat down and said, “People bring dogs into the bakery?”

“Well, yeah, sometimes. Setting up shop next to a park has that effect.” Francis looked around idly, as if to confirm that it was indeed a shop. He wasn’t sure where to stand so he moved closer to the counter.

“So this is your place then?”

“Yep. It’s my little slice of the American dream pie.” She laughed at her joke. “That’s my one and only bakery joke. For some reason no one else laughs at it.”

“I thought it was funny,” Francis said. “But I didn’t realize it was a joke until it was too late to laugh. It’s one of those kinds of jokes, I guess.”

They talked like this until from the back came the sound of something falling. Her face took on a puzzled expression as she moved toward the storage room. The door was ajar and inside, she found the ground littered with plastic forks and the box that had contained them. On the top shelf of the storage rack, where the plastic forks had been, was Sphinx. She meowed.

Francis entered the scene and said, “How’d you get there?”

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The cat meowed again. A bell rang in the distance, signaling that someone had come in the front. “It’s probably her.”

“I’ll stall her,” she said. But a second later Francis heard, “Oh, good timing Sheila. Just check in and keep an eye on the scones, please. There’s a cat stuck in the back.” She came back.

“It’s just my employee, Sheila.”

They tried everything. They tried calling her by name with open arms. They tried enticing her with food. They tried calmly explaining to her that they needed her to come down now, please. After that, they tried the obvious thing, getting a ladder and grabbing the cat. The cat evaded Francis’s hands, content to stay just out of reach on the top shelf. Just when they ran out of ideas, the bell rang again.

The woman who entered looked around, then approached the counter and said, “Hi, I’m looking for my cat.

Have you—” Sheila pointed at the storage room door. The woman opened the door to find the sight of a man on a step ladder, trying to lure her cat over by waving around a feather duster.

“There she is,” she said. “Come on, Sphinx.” The cat walked past Francis along the shelf and jumped into the woman’s arms. “Thank you so much for keeping an eye on her,” she said sincerely.

Francis said nothing for several seconds. His brain was trying to work out why she looked so familiar. Then it hit him.

In a remarkably coincidental fashion, Sphinx’s owner was none

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other than the woman he’d seen early that day, the one who was knocked down and helped up by another stranger in front of a convenience store. His brain recovered from the surprise, and he replied, “Yeah, it was no problem at all, really.”

“Well, thanks again,” she said, and left.

Back at the counter, Francis asked, “What’s your name, by the way?”

“Marlenne, of all things,” she said, gesturing in the direction of the store’s sign outside.

Francis added that one into his collection of dumb mistakes to play over in his mind when trying to sleep at night.

“Well I guess after all this it’d be rude if I didn’t buy anything.”

He looked at the menu. “What should I get?”

“The scones are cooling now.”

Francis got a strawberry scone. He sat down and ate it and regretted having lived so long without having done so before. I ought to come here more often, he thought. He brushed cat hair off his jacket and finished his scone, enjoying it and thinking of very little other than its wonderful taste.

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Jagged Bones / Dead Moon Shannon

never call me darling sugar! call me your favorite blade! inside me there’s a porcelain grrl it’s raining i’m disgusting i want to fuck everything in sight 30

does my taste remind you of snow? i want to blow your fucking brains

out!

i, myself ! am quite devoured! i myself am quite ashamed sad & high & lonely

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(kiss me on the collarbone tomorrow!)

you slip inside me! this feels pure enough god is sad & dead & bleeding fare l’amore fare l’amore fare l’amore fottere! trombare! chiavare! dig your nails into my back until my eyes cease to close

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call me wounded! doe eyed baby! it’s been awhile since i’ve opened my mouth

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Your Neck Is Warm and Your Blood Runs Beneath It Like Quicksilver Analecta

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Connor Frew Enamel house paint on medium-density fibreboard

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The Jackson Pollock 5 Majid Breland Digital performance art

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A Palimpsest Jourden Sander

Drive down the access road and avert your eyes to avoid the homeless man as he stands up, shaking.

Wonder if the shaking is real or a wildly entertaining show, romanticized in the mock sadness, the complacency.

A plastic rose bought at 7/11.

He carries a worn out Abercrombie and Fitch shopping bag (with a hole punched in the model’s face) filled with empty liquor bottles and a box of crayons and a loved photo and rain damaged cigarettes and a piss stained sock, hidden behind the muscles of a shirtless model.

You cannot avoid his eyes as you approach the turn lane.

Turn up the music, listen to Lady Gaga’s Two years ago hit, Born This Way, and wonder if the mediocre song was making a comeback.

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Just put your paws up, cuz you were born this way, baby.

Turn the music louder, in an effort to drown the homeless man’s raspy voice as he sings along.

My momma told me when I was young, We’re all born superstars.

Stare at your iPhone, put your Ray Ban sunglasses on, roll up the window, sip a frothy Starbucks drink, appear enamored by HEB’s new paint job,

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And wonder a different scene.

He drinks coffee, but only on the weekends, and plays the accordion; a forgotten bird whom he defends, He doesn’t eat birthday cake on his birthday, believing the tired tradition to be cliché.

He has a secret talent for poetry and so he wakes up and writes an aubade.

On Saturdays he fancies a visit to his favorite childhood penny arcade.

He sometimes feels mistaken for a cynosure as he walks to the grocery store with such impressive composure— And then walks out, carrying another pack of cigarettes to replace the rain damaged goods.

And then walks across the access road to begin being a homeless man again.

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His overgrown, dirt filled,

cracked fingernails rap at your window to the lyrics.

There’s nothin’ wrong with lovin’ who you are Shake your head at him and shield Your face with your hair.

Or your jacket.

Or your hand. But he doesn’t leave.

He smiles, tapping to the song.

Hold your head and girl you’ll go far Turn the music off and roll the window down, but only two inches or so.

“I’m sorry, I don’t carry cash on me.”

The homeless man swings his Abercrombie bad of goodies in delight, spitting on the pavement.

“Did I ask for yur money?

I got all that I need here. luxury, art, friends, and always, another bottle of beer.”

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Circus

Charu Sharma Alexander Pope loved his charming monsters of nature.

He could run a circus with all the pieces of people he thought he loved. Life is but a series of broken parts to him. We are the flawed gears of a perfect machine,

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and most days, I am glad you don’t hold carnivals.

Ringleaders are machinists, and they frighten me.

Real men do not need stilts.

What is the point of running a carousel, or anything that travels in circles?

But sometimes, I still hope you love circus freaks.

Like one finger short, part elephant part chimpanzee, can’t stop walking tightropes even when there isn’t one there, life is a joke, and death is the punchline kind of circus freaks.

Some nights, I wish you could see how many roles I’ve been juggling all day, the energy I throw into putting on a good show.

“Never a boring moment,” you said once, laughing at my big, red nose. What happened to that?

I guess the price of a ticket to insanity isn’t worth the cheap thrill.

After all, the beast may bring the crowds, but in the end, he lives behind bars.

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Justine

Meagan Waldrip

God made a fist and cranked it back. Expecting her to flinch, the penthouse bachelor paused for a second when the girl stuck out her chin and waited patiently.

“Odd,” he thought, before he shrugged and sent her reeling.

She bathed in her reflection, cooing and sighing over her most gorgeous gift, her divinity: that oozing black eye.

God wrapped his hands around her neck and answered all her prayers. She counted his purple fingerprints backwards and forwards, meanwhile every muscle in her body hummed a swinging tune.

They’d be married soon. Just you wait and see; she’d be hanging her coat up in that penthouse.

But before he could tie the knot around her lovely, snapable wrists she hid her hands behind her back, played it coy and said, “Pick one.”

“You like your chances with the left hand, or the right?”

And she laughed because she had two, bright fistfuls of nothing and whichever way God threw his weight, she won.

The sound of her bones splintering sparkled just as pretty as any other trophy.

Cheater as ever, God pried open both her hands and found them empty.

“Odd,” he thought.

God made a fist and cranked it back.

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Softly

Lea Konczal Softly she killed him, and softly he died— From not a knife in his back but a thorn in his side; And softly the people did murmur his name, As the woman who slew him avoided all blame.

And the doctor who treated him was thrown into jail, And the nurses who helped were held without bail, And loudly the people did call for a queen To be made of her who killed softly—unseen.

And the people spoke of his death with lament As they anointed the woman; with joyful intent To worship the crown that had once been his, But now is the woman’s who still softly lives.

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And softly the country fell into the sea As the multitude pushed it, blithe and carefree— And softly the songbirds spun out their refrain, “Softly treads that which would dastardly reign.”

And there came a time when the people forgot All the man paid and for all that he fought, And memory of him became faint from their pride— Softly they killed him, and softly he died.

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Hannah Blind Contour Adele Powers Colored pencil

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Yokai

Ryan Chen Lithographic print Spring 2014

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Alan’s Theremin Keith Padraic Chew Digital photography

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Aqueousconscious Robert Lopez I I rest atop clinging shingles like heavy grit barnacles in uniform rows guarding a silent dusk. I stare across sand-paper beaches of neighboring islands glimpsing dying gleams of shells in the shadow of a yellow moon.

I dangle anxious toes above a rippling reflection, contemplating depth, foreign objects, a reason for fear— why I must go.

II Pinching my nose, a clumsy plunge embraces fluidic contradictions. Adrift in a vacuum, I bob as bait over unknowns.

A bubble of truth grazes my foot, abrasive first like shark skin rubbed in reverse.

Lacking a Kevlar wetsuit, I desperately seek a dock-ladder, gone. Eyelids & shores trace a distant, crowning event horizon of my windowsill on lonely plane.

How far am I?

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III A canto climbs out a velveteen marine-blue.

I dip below; pick-up whale songs, clicks of skittering crustaceans on skeletal sea floors, serenades of mermaids, and her— a voice without source.

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Requesting my presence, I still afloat, her chords quell any remaining urge to dog-paddle.

The sink, echoes of metamorphose, shifting figures, few features, obscure boundaries.

Building pressure caves my bravado, asphyxiated pride forces humble gills form.

She relays instructions: leave the self behind, adding, do not seek, but find.

She hands me a telescope, I awake, tasting salt of westward breeze, a dream– was she a dream?

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IV I grip the telescope tighter, exhale through my neck & awake.

V This roof again, I rise, find a guide to astronomy in search of a world shipwrecked in slumber.

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Spring 2014

Beat 42

Kristopher A. Denby

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Los Angeles, California: Fall, 1985 I don’t dance. But they do.

These places... they’re like breeding grounds for guys like me. The bad music, played at a volume that masks even the worst pickup lines. The sooty layer of cigarette smoke on the air, disguising bad cologne and bad intentions. And the sweat. The sweat of fresh, young bodies mixing with the smoke and the music like an aphrodisiac until that tingle just behind your eyes works itself into a red throb. Like a loose tooth that you can’t stop tonguing.

At first it’s just the ones that have had too much to drink.

Easy targets. You get your start working on some cute blonde in a business suit. Some secretary that’s been pounding down Bartles and James since she punched out at 5 o’ clock. She’s pliant and will never know that she met her end in an empty lot nearly two miles from where she began the night.

But pretty soon that gets old. There’s no thrill in it. No risk.

So you raise the stakes. Find one that maybe hasn’t had so much to drink. It takes a bit more coaxing. Some charisma and a little creativity. And you fail more times than not. But you know what they say? Throw a dart enough times...

And then you move the game, out of the industrial parks and the dives that ring the manufacturing plants in Anaheim and Van Nuys, to Century City and West Hollywood. Where the action is. You get ballsy. What it is, see, is the rush starts to get watered down in those backwaters. Low crime rates.

Passive cops. The targets lose their luster. You want to feel

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that pulse of adrenaline like a squirt of ignited diesel running through your veins again.

Like the first time.

And so you find yourself leaning against a bar in a jumped up dance club next to a guy that looks like a vagrant that wandered in off the street, and surrounded by hop-heads and speed freaks, while you try to figure out how to make your play on a pair of twins in matching red dresses. +++ I found this place on Pico last Friday after work. Beat 42. I cruised it a couple of times and watched a handful of hip cats with their black leather jackets and tight, neon blouses duck in out of the rain. I parked a block down and walked up to get a better look. It looked promising, but the rain had slowed things down. No cover in all that emptiness for a guy like me.

I hit the john to take a leak and scope the back of the joint. One exit door, no alarm. It’s good to have options. I figured the place was as good as any for the next score, so I ditched and headed back home without buying a drink. You have to get the lay of the land, but you never want anyone to be able to pick you out of a line up or recall your face for a police artist’s sketch.

You can never be too careful. +++ So I wait a week. It’s hard, but I wait. I spend the time—when I’m not working—checking the newspapers and watching the local TV stations. It’s easy to get lost in a city this

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big, but three murders in one year don’t escape the public’s attention. That was my biggest mistake early on, dumping in areas that were too populous or on plots of land that had been slated for construction. I try to learn from my mistakes. The last four are still listed as “missing”. If I have it my way, that’s the way they’ll stay. +++ On a sunny Thursday afternoon, I let the car idle by a bus stop near the corner of La Brea and Coliseum. A shapely woman exits the city bus at 5:05 pm, just as she has the past three Thursdays in a row. I wait until she’s near the corner of the block before I put the car in gear and edge slowly down the street behind her. I reach down, feel the familiar shape of the stun gun beneath the newspaper on the passenger seat. This is just practice, but it’s good to have all of the tools at your disposal. It heightens the realism of the exercise.

The woman—she looks like a Tina to me—carries herself with an internal rhythm, as if she’s walking to her own personal soundtrack. She wears a red, women’s sport jacket with square shoulder pads over a black short skirt and snakeskin high-heeled shoes; the dark skin of her bare thighs and calves ripples in the fading bronze light as the muscles beneath flex and relax. She’s strong. Probably too strong. But I like a challenge.

I tail her for another couple blocks until she’s almost to the apartment building where she stays, but a yellow Datsun suddenly exits the parking lot ahead of me and I have to slam on the brakes, tires smoking and squealing as I come to a stop.

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When I look up, “Tina” is staring right at me. I wait for the Datsun to move out of the way, and I quickly turn down a side street. I head west towards the Pacific for about a mile, making several turns as I go, finally pulling in next to a dumpster in the empty parking lot of a state park. I stretch the gloves over my hands, grab the screwdriver from the tool kit under the seat, and set to removing the plates. I find the extra set of plates beneath the spare tire in the trunk, swap them out, and wrap the compromised ones in plastic. I finish the job by tying them tightly up in a garbage bag and tossing them into the dumpster.

You can never be too careful. +++ The street lights along Crenshaw have begun to wink on as I continue my circuitous route back home. A black and white turns out of the parking lot of a small strip center and falls in line a few cars behind me. But I’m cool. I keep my registration current and my inspection sticker doesn’t expire for another couple of months, and I regularly check all of my lamps for burnt-out bulbs or broken lenses. I try not to worry.

I know I’m covered. But the car behind me is turning and now the patrol car is right behind me. All of the things that I could have missed—the infinite number of mistakes that could lead to failure—begin to chip away at my resolve. What if I’ve missed a hair in the trunk or back seat? A spatter of blood?

Fingernail? A thread from an article of clothing that could link me to one of the bodies they’ve already found? And how would I explain the stun gun, if I were stopped?

I imagine the worst: Handcuffs, long interrogations in

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dingy rooms with pitted linoleum floors and polished twoway mirrors. Dirty, overflowing ashtrays and Styrofoam cups with burnt coffee grounds swirling in the bottom. Juries. San Quintin. The gas chamber.

I hear the howl of the siren before the lights appear in my rearview, and my bowels threaten to let go. My foot is off the accelerator and my right turn signal is blinking, but the cop car is accelerating and it screams past me, its red and blue lights circling the darkening sky like Technicolor vultures in search of an easy meal.

Breaths come in sharp, ragged bursts. The feeling in my legs starts to come back, but the horrifying picture my brain had painted for me only moments before is more reluctant to fade, and I think—not for the first time—about abandoning my dangerous hobby while I’m still ahead. +++ Things have to be kept in order.

Having things in order makes dealing with the unexpected that much easier when the time comes. I spent that Thursday night in the garage going over every inch of the car with a magnifying glass and a vacuum cleaner. I keep a strong solution of Clorox on a shelf with Armor-All, cans of motor oil, and brake fluid. After several wipe-downs of the car’s vinyl interior, I repeat the whole process. Twice. Magnifying glass, vacuum, Clorox solution. After stripping down in the garage, I wrapped the hand towels, the vacuum bag, and my clothes in a paper bag and burned them in a barrel in my backyard.

You can never be too careful.

I don’t know how long I stood there naked, staring up at the sky. I thought of the vast expanses of space that separate us

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from the stars, other celestial bodies in our own solar system.

I imagined the human mind as the earthly representation of that vastness. That diversity. Each possibility, regardless of its potential alienness, accepted by science as a natural outgrowth of the infinite number of potential variables within and without. And the human mind, the last true earthly frontier of man. A universe of possibilities contained within a couple thousand cubic centimeters of bone. So often misunderstood, misjudged, condemned.

Eventually, the fire died down and the chill air drove me indoors. I scrubbed my skin beneath the steaming water until it was red and raw, and toweled off, shivering in the dank space.

As I dressed for bed, I noticed a very thin film of dust on the glass case that holds my service medals. I ran a finger through it in disgust, and went straight for the cleaning products beneath the kitchen sink. Two hours later, after dusting all of the surfaces in the house, polishing the medals in the glass case, and cleaning the three rifles in the gun cabinet, I crawled into bed and set the alarm for 6 am. The digital numbers on the alarm clock bathed the room in a terrible red glow, and I fell asleep thinking about Mars sometime in the predawn hours of the morning. +++ I dreamt of the ‘Nam. I hadn’t in nearly ten years. But it wasn’t just Vietnam. It was Vietnam and the house that I grew up in, and the elementary school that I attended as a child.

It was my grandma’s house in Cincinnati, with its nicotinestained walls and the peeling cornice boards in the eaves and along the vaulting gables at the front and rear. And it was the dark, musty hallway where I had gone, many times as a child,

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to peer through the keyhole into my mother’s room where strangers (Except they weren’t strangers in my dream. They were the men from my platoon, and my third grade history teacher that would hand out licks to boys that he caught fighting in the schoolyard. And the men were my grandfather and my father and my brothers...) would appear and disappear, there grunts and cries, so indistinguishable from anguish at that age, echoing inside and funneling out beneath the crack in the door and through the keyhole to my ears and beyond—to my impressionable mind.

The door opened in my dream, a long wave of fetid, humid jungle air wafted out in a long napalm sigh, and out of that door came my mom, hand in hand with the six year old version of myself. And throughout the hall, the faces of all of the strangers that had come through that room, and all of the men that had (and would) come through my life, laughed at us from picture frames that seemed impossibly straight and level.

And in the dream, I ran. I ran past the roaring faces of the men in the hallway, past the yellowed bodies of the old men, women, and children that we had piled in a ditch outside My Lai, and past the dusty lot where the broken bones of my first victim lay. I ran and ran through the dream until the digital alarm clock on my nightstand sounded in the stillness of the early morning dark. +++ Fridays are usually my day off. I’d rather work, but being an overachiever makes you stand out. The union doesn’t care for dissonance. And aircraft manufacturing plants are like small towns. People love to gossip. Step out of the bounds of what is considered ordinary and people will notice you. Start

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talking about you. Ask questions. Try to guess what makes you tick. I prefer to blend into the background. Stay out of people’s way. You can never be too careful.

I make use of the time off to weed the yard and get in an hour or two of physical exercise. The ache that comes after a day of heavy lifting is a pure experience that has no other earthly analogue. I take a salad for my lunch and spend the rest of the afternoon checking the car over: the tires, the battery, hoses, fluids, brakes, light bulbs and lenses. I give them all a triple check to remove as much potential for mistakes as possible, and then grab a fresh pair of license plates from the lockbox behind the water heater.

By the time 5 ‘o clock rolls around, I’ve finished all of the prep work, and I’m ready to dress for the evening. I keep a special trunk with a variety of clothing styles in it for different occasions. I usually try to wear clothes that aren’t trendy in order to avoid being noticed. Beat 42 is trendy, though. It’s in a trendy part of town, and it’s got a trendy set of patrons.

Dressing out of style is almost a guarantee that I’ll be noticed.

But I have wardrobe for this. I select a black sport coat, wrinkled white dress shirt, thin black tie, and loose-fitting gray slacks.

Black high-top Nikes with white soles and a white Swoosh. No socks.

The jacket is a little snug, but it doesn’t impair movement, so I go with it. I run a warm iron over the shirt a few times, taking care not to remove any of the wrinkles on the tail, and continue getting dressed. Finish with a flourish of department store cologne (not too much) and a quick rinse with mouthwash, and I’m ready to hit the joint.

There’s a Catholic Church down the street and a block

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over from Beat 42, and I park the car in the church’s parking lot. This has two benefits: no one from the club will be able to associate me with the car, and no one ever pays attention to what is happening in a Catholic Church parking lot. It’s not the kind of place where you’d expect anything to happen. The walk is short. The night air is cool. And it lets me work off some of the jitters that have built up on the way over.

The buzz cut at the door barely looks up from his comic book as I pass by on my way in. It’s still early, and it’s the Friday after Halloween. I’m definitely not the most interesting thing he’ll see tonight. The place is trimmed in polished steel and chromed gridiron; the floor, a gleaming checkerboard black and white. The pulsing music and laser lights reflecting off a thousand different surfaces are disorienting. This is good, I decide. A few colorful people hunch over their drinks at the bar and in the shadowy perimeter where uncomfortable looking booths ring the writhing dance floor.

I don’t dance. So, I post up in a corner near the bar.

Order a Coke and check out the crowd. There’s a few good looking chicks surrounded by a sea of guys on the dance floor.

That won’t do. A fellow in a trench coat slides into the seat next to me. He smells like a vagrant, but looks dangerous. I inch back a bit.

Then I spot the blondes. Twins. Red dresses off the shoulder. One elbow-length, black glove on the left hand, and some kind of big, lacy thing in the hair. Madonna look-a-likes.

Sexy times two.

One is dancing with a dork in a Freddie Krueger costume, and the other is at the bar chatting up a pencil-thin black fellow in a gray suit. Nothing I can’t handle. But it’ll take

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some strategy to pull it off. Adds to the thrill, I decide.

I can feel a pleasant swell in my slacks, and I resist the urge to reach down and adjust myself. Too many lookers.

Might give myself away as some kind of pervert. All it would take is some nosey bitch calling the fuzz and it’d be “Bye bye, twins” for me. Can’t have that. Anticipation is too high now.

The way the kid in the Krueger mask is dancing, I can’t tell if he’s high or just a spaz. Either way, he shouldn’t be too difficult to deal with. And the black guy’s eyes are bigger than his appetite. One of the two red dresses is saying something in his ear, but he’s too busy checking out all the other fur in the crowd. Enough time and he’ll probably float away on his own.

His eyes keep coming back to the blonde in a blue tiger-striped tank top. Or maybe it’s the guy in the white suit he’s checking.

You never know these days.

I consider waiting for Freddie Krueger to go the restroom, following him in, and inserting my penknife into his ear canal. But an early discovery of his useless body in a pool of sticky blood and piss would end the game quick, so I push the thought away and try to focus on getting the red dresses out of the bar. If I have to, I’ll wait all night until they leave.

The club has gotten busier. The bartender asks me if I want another drink, and it’s the first time I really notice her.

Brunette. White tank top. No bra. It’s good to have options, I think. The muscle head at the door has put away his comic book, and is checking I.D.’s and collecting the cover charge.

The twin at the bar is still prattling on to the slick-looking black guy, and he’s still not paying attention, but he seems to have grown into that bar stool. I realize that I might have to deal with that situation before the night is over. It’ll make things harder,

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but it’ll also make them more interesting. Freddy Krueger has wandered off, but the dancing twin is still out there, having traded Krueger for a trio of new wave girls. The music has gone from bad to worse, and the smelly vagrant-looking guy seems agitated. He’s muttering into his drink and hasn’t looked up in minutes.

I’m trying to think of alternative ways to make contact with the twins, if they never part with the company they’re currently keeping, and the vagrant-guy is slamming down his drink, shards of glass shrapnel flying out in a flat arc away from the surface of the bar. And then he’s whirling up out of his seat with what looks like a very large shotgun. The twin and the pencil-thin black guy are in the line of fire, but my barometer is telling me that this party has ended. I’m about to turn and head for the back exit I’d spotted the week before when the vagrant-cum-cowboy discharges the weapon into the nearest neon sign. People are screaming and scattering in all directions, and the madman is chambering another round and spinning to point his street sweeper in my direction. I duck and throw up my hands reflexively and somehow manage to trap the barrel in the V-shape where my crossed arms meet. I drive up through my thighs, pushing my arms above my head, and not thinking about anything accept not getting shot. But the stock has been cut off, and the vagrant is shorter than me. The shotgun comes away from his hands easily and nearly clatters to the floor before I manage to gain control of it. I realize what’s happened a split second before he does, and before he can react, I bring the pistol-grip of the gun down onto the

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bridge of his nose. There’s an audible crack, and blood sprays out in a fan of dark red. The bartender with the perky tits is standing stock-still and staring at me, eyes wide with disbelief.

The vagrant has crumpled to the cold, checkerboard floor, a tumbledown chess piece. And the club has, with the exception of those who have fallen and been trampled upon by the stampeding crowd, emptied out completely. I turn and flee out the back door, taking the shotgun with me. +++ It’s Thursday, January 16th. There’s a chill in the air and the sun has nearly fallen below the horizon. I let the car idle by a bus stop near the corner of La Brea and Coliseum.

A shapely woman exits the city bus at 5:05 pm, just as she does every Thursday. I wait until she’s almost reached the end of the block before I put the car in gear and join the traffic flow. I tail her for another three blocks until she reaches the apartment building where she stays. I pull into a parking spot between a dark colored van and a dumpster, and watch her let herself into her apartment.

And I think, It’s good to have options.

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Sadia Quddus Digital photography Analecta

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Spring 2014

Doublet

Madeleine F. Guy Bonsai trees are grown in straight jackets.

You must warp them like a lover’s back contorted into position.

I thought of you glancing by in the rippled water in the street.

No longer lit by the chorus of drips just must overhanging from the steeple visible from my porch where we sit and smoke.

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My hands grew longer when I met him.

Hips wider, eyes hungrier.

My brain devoured words again with a relish I had relinquished to some time back then - not now, not while my hands were short.

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A horticulturalist is as good as his tools.

Strong ties are necessary to produce the correct shape.

Sound ground by the right mouth to produce syllables, to heft our weight against God’s.

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Spring 2014

Mouthpoet Shannon

he seals letters with his tongue & tells me i can’t read them while rain flows like blood on closed eyelids; damply, i swell i dream blindly too often; 64

he tells me how to see & relieved i oblige:

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he means no harm but i am biting back vomit

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Double-O-Seven Keith Padraic Chew Digital photography

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Fallen

Lea Konczal Charcoal & coffee on Bristol board

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Avenue E

Christopher Nordahl

Richard fidgeted behind the wheel of his car, waiting for the train to pass and watching his breath fog up against the windshield. It was snowing in Lac-Megantic. He lit a cigarette for warmth and ran a hand over his freshly shaven head as he exhaled, feeling the bumps where hair would grow if he ever gave it a chance. Richard watched the freight cars and allowed his consciousness to drift off in the monotonous rush of cargo and exhaust. It was an odd place for a train, or maybe more so it was an odd place for a house, built just 100 meters from the tracks with Avenue E leading directly up the drive way. He hadn’t seen that road in four years.

He stood before the doorway of the house, examining its peeling paint. He thought about turning back for a brief moment, but what point was there? It wasn’t as if he had any other place to go. He lifted the heavy knocker and brought it down against the door.

There was a moment of silence before the three locks that kept the house safe from the outside world slowly began to turn. The door jerked halfway open as a woman’s perpetually glassy gaze rose to meet Richard’s.

“Hi Mom.”

The woman let out a strangled whimper as she surveyed the figure standing before her. A white t-shirt full of holes firmly tucked into jet-black jeans and a thick leather belt, topped off with combat boots and a deflated parka.

“Can I come in?” Richard asked. She paused, perhaps deciding whether or not the man standing before her was in fact her son.

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“Yes, of course, dear. Get out of the cold, please,” she finally conceded as she hurried him inside.

The house was exactly the same as when Richard had left it. The eerie photos of his dead relatives, the snaking rabbit ears of the outdated television, the ships in bottles that his father had spent hours meticulously assembling in the basement, all lined up as neatly as they had been since his birth.

“Sit down, please. Make yourself comfortable,” his mother said. Richard sat cautiously against the couch, folded his arms, and crossed his legs so the tip of his boot nervously tapped the bottom of the wooden coffee table.

“I’m so glad you’re home…” Richard’s mother murmured. “How long are you planning to stay?” She did her best to proffer warmth as Richard turned the question over in his head. He chose not answer while his mother nervously swallowed.

“Where’s everyone else?” Richard finally asked. He noticed the silence of the house ran even deeper than he had remembered.

“Oh, they went out for a bit. They didn’t want to spook you all at once, you know.”

“Jesus mom, I’m not a horse,” Richard retorted. He could feel the familiar anger flickering up in his stomach. He told himself it was just a stupid comment, a silly annoyance. It wasn’t worth exploding over. He closed his eyes and began to tap the coffee table slightly faster with his boot.

“I’m going to go drop my stuff off,” Richard said finally, breaking the silence. “I assume my room is still in the same place?”

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“Yes, of course,” his mother said. “I haven’t touched it.”

Richard’s mother hadn’t been exaggerating. The handmade punk posters displaying the images of Crass, Crossed Out, and Saccharine Trust were humbly peeling, but otherwise the room remained an impeccable shrine to all of Richard’s teenage fascinations, with a layer of dust obscuring everything and the pungent stench of a 15-year-old boy miraculously preserved. Richard curled his lip up at the room as he set down his backpack and surveyed the scene. One by one, he began to tear down each of the posters and stuff them in the trashcan.

He was aware of the garage door opening as he worked, signaling the return of his father and sister. He heard his father’s gruff voice contrast against his mother’s airy drone, with his sister remaining silent as always.

“Is Richard here?” he heard through the din. He sighed as he descended down the spiral stairs.

Richard’s father chuckled when he got a first glimpse of his son. “You look like you’re ready to get shot into space!” the man guffawed.

Richard forced an accommodating grimace. “Hi Dad. Hi Evelyn.” Richard’s sister remained quiet but smiled at the mention of her name. Richard’s father embraced him and clapped him on the shoulder.

“Ha! You’re strong!” he proclaimed, dancing around the elephant in the room like a prize fighter, acting as if his son was perhaps simply returning from university for the winter holidays or stopping in for a family gathering.

“Why don’t you take off your coat? Make yourself

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comfortable…” Richard’s mother trailed off again. She began to pull the parka down from Richard’s shoulders as panic jackknifed through his body. He did his best to quickly recoil and pull the parka back, but it was already too late. They had seen the prison tattoos that adorned his arms and the scars from where the cherry red swastikas had been snuffed out. +++

Richard looked down into the grounds of his coffee cup and avoided making eye contact with his father sitting across from him in the booth. J&J’s Diner was the closest form of life near the house and thus had always served as the family’s setting for birthdays, special occasions, and private conversations.

“I just don’t understand it,” his father finally said.

Richard studied every minute detail of the coffee cup before replying, “I just got involved with some bad people.”

The man sighed as he shifted his weight in the booth and focused his attention towards the restaurant’s kitchen window. Richard looked up and furrowed his thick eyebrows.

He couldn’t help but think of that night in Montreal when he was standing in the phone booth trying to scrounge up enough change to call the house. His sister had answered the phone and Richard had asked if Dad was there.

“He can’t come to the phone right now,” Evelyn had replied like an answering machine, but Richard knew otherwise.

It was Sunday and while his mother may have been caught up in a Bible study, Richard knew his father spent every Sunday evening in that basement, tinkering with his ships in bottles.

It went on like that for a while, with Richard deflecting questions and his father not being bold enough to cut to the

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heart of the matter until they had nothing else to do but climb back in the truck and return home.

“Do you want to know why I was in there?” Richard finally asked.

“No. It was two years, that’s all I need to know.” +++

Richard spent the rest of that day and most of the next meticulously cleaning his loft until it was devoid of any scent of personality. All that he left behind were the baby books that had resided in his room since his birth and the standup piano that he couldn’t hope to move on his own. He was thumbing through Goodnight Moon when his sister poked her head through the hole in the loft’s floor that led back down to the outside world.

“Hey,” she said softly. It was one of the few times in Richard’s life that he had heard her initiate a conversation.

“Hey,” he replied, “What’s up?” She hoisted herself up through the hole in the floor and went to sit next to Richard on the bed. There was stillness all around them. Richard could almost hear the snow tapping against the glass of his picture window.

“I know what those scars on your arms mean,” she cooed.

“Yeah everyone does,” Richard answered. She looked down at the carpet for a moment but turned back around quickly.

“Did you hurt people?”

He had always been told to be gentle with his sister.

His parents were sure that her crippling shyness meant she

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couldn’t adequately handle life’s realities, or at least what they considered life’s realities to be. For a long time they had felt the same way about Richard.

“Yeah I did,” he answered as he turned his attention back towards Goodnight Moon.

“Was it because of Gregory?” she asked as Richard felt a lump the size of a small boulder forming in his throat.

“What… Well it was because of a lot of things,” Richard replied, finally looking at his sister and catching his reflection in her TV tube eyes. He watched his stark figure through those eyes and wished that he could tune them to another channel.

Evelyn finally broke the hypnotic spell as she got up and headed back towards the hole in the floor.

“Just let me know when you want to tell me,” she murmured before taking her first step through the hole.

“Hey,” Richard stopped her, “how do you know about him?”

Evelyn’s mouth settled into a grimace. “I know a lot more than all of you give me credit for. It’s not like I thought you just magically vanished one day.” Her grimace twisted into a frown before she descended the steps.

Richard looked up at the beams of the ceiling and felt his heartbeat return to its resting pace. Of course it was because of Gregory. For the first time in over a year Richard reached for his wallet and pulled out the photo buried deep within. It was folded into four tattered squares and was on the verge of coming apart completely. Richard felt sweat forming on his

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brow as he gazed upon the other boy’s stoic half-smile and the point of his shirt collar that had refused to stay pressed on picture day. +++

Richard and Gregory had grown up together. His house was the only one nearby so the two had no choice but to bond. Richard looked up to Gregory, and while he was only two years older, Gregory already bore the mark of the man Richard wished he could be. He wanted the smart, sharp eyes that defined Gregory’s face instead of the wide, wet ones his mother had cursed him with and longed for the other man’s solid musculature instead of the stringy arms that sprouted from his torso like weeds.

At age 15, Richard’s mother found the two together in the loft’s twin bed with their arms wrapped around each other and their clothes folded neatly on the piano bench.

“The heat went out,” Richard desperately tried to explain as tears began to form in his eyes and Gregory got up to collect his things, “We had no other choice!” But the next day his parents had pulled him from school and submerged him in a conversion therapy camp. Every day for the next year, he was given pills to puke up the demons residing inside of him until he lied to the camp director, saying he had seen the error of his ways. The evening of his return, Richard packed up the small backpack that would serve as his only constant companion during the next four years and ran down the road in the middle of the night.

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+++

Douglas and the other men from the Heritage Front found Richard a few months later, scrounging in a dumpster for food. He hadn’t asked questions when they cleaned him up and gave him a place to stay, and it was only polite to accept their invitation to hear Douglas speak a few days later.

Douglas towered over the young men in attendance from the height of his modest pulpit, and Richard was intoxicated by the other man’s vigor as he expounded on brotherhood, heritage, and duty to one’s society. Richard looked around and felt he shared a quiet understanding with the other people nodding along to Douglas’s every word. For the first time, he recognized the many effronteries served to him by men. Men. That’s what his real problem was. Men like the ones he met in the streets who would offer a place to sleep for the night, provided he would perform a service for them in return. Men like Gregory, who never bothered to visit, let alone write, despite the many letters Richard had snuck through the mail in the conversion camp. Men like his father, who played the mighty patriarch in the house but acted as the shallow outcast in the basement when no one was watching. But here, Richard saw he could hate men. Here he could hurt men.

Two years later he was standing over a stranger in a back alley in Montreal; the other man’s blood emblazoned across his t-shirt and spackled in his eyebrows, with gooey bits of teeth and tongue stuck in the crevices of his boot like chewing gum.

The police found Richard crouched down in a phone booth with his head in his hands and tears streaming down his face.

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It was in the next two years that he was taught what true hate was really like.

A day after he was released, Richard was biting into a wooden spoon as an acquaintance removed the swastikas from his arm. He left Montreal and made his way back to LacMegantic, staying in a motel for as many days as he could afford before resigning to pick up the courtesy phone and call the house.

Richard sighed and looked out through the loft’s picture window, the photo of Gregory now crumpling against the sweat lining his fingers. He had heard from a woman in town that Gregory had graduated from McGill and might come home around Christmas time, but he decided then that he didn’t really want to know. +++

Richard came down for dinner that night wearing a brown moth-eaten sweater that his mother had saved for him.

He spent most of his time fiddling with the green beans and offering guarded responses to his mother’s questions.

“Meet me upstairs,” he mumbled in his sister’s ear as the two were cleaning the dishes.

Evelyn later found Richard in the loft sitting at the piano. “Mom didn’t make you learn piano, right?” he asked as he turned to face his sister.

“No she didn’t,” Evelyn responded flatly as her eyes came into focus.

“Well come here I want to teach you,” Richard motioned.

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“So you start with a middle C. You put your ring, middle, and index finger here, here, and here.” He said as he adjusted his sister’s fingers and pushed down on the keys. The familiar hum reverberated against the beams of the loft, but it wasn’t long before the sound dissipated in the compressed space. She looked enraptured by the note, but Richard couldn’t ignore the static buzzing from behind her eyes.

“Richard?” she turned and asked, “Why now? When mom said you were coming home I thought she was trying to make a joke.”

Richard looked through the picture window out towards Avenue E. The train must have been running late as he could only hear the muffled throb of the engine in the distance.

“I guess I just got tired of hating them.”

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To a Boy Rachel Rein

I think your fingers are beautiful, the way waxy tobacco leaves stain the tips sunset yellow as if you could paint the sky with a few gentle, pastel strokes.

You think you’re filthy, all glassy eyes and parched lips that grin, “Dead by 25 or dead already?

It doesn’t really matter.”

You never actually say that out loud but I see it in the way you crouch down, rocking back and forth like a fetus wearing stiff cotton sweatpants.

And I know it in how you curl up so tightly, trying to crush your chest with your kneecaps alone, and I feel it when you shudder and pull down your sleeves to hide hardened veins that creep up your arms like stiff and useless worms.

When the warmth of a shot seeps into your stomach, I think you find salvation sizzling in gummy brown tar that melts like caramel, taste heaven

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in acid, vinegar, and black shoe nail polish.

When you’ve licked the last few remnants out of little plastic baggies and bent spoons, I think you relish the agony radiating throughout your spine and feeling its way blindly in your bones.

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Because you want to believe that you deserve to be soaked in sweat with flecks of foam at the corners of your quivering lips and nostrils.

Screaming, unable to pull yourself forward across the bathroom floor with your broken fingernails when there’s no where to go anyway, except maybe to the edge of the Hudson River to bury yourself under acrid sludge and old tennis shoes.

And I want to, but I can’t tell you that the odor of dry earth decorated with rain is called petrichor or drink fizzy drinks that pop like roiling oceans with you, to show the world that we’re fearless.

Or put on fuzzy, polka-dotted socks and make you dance to Beyonce with flailing, skinny legs and fingers that slowly wave

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as they reach up to brush the ceiling.

Because one day I’ll find you sprawled over moldy bathroom tiles cracked and broken with violet lips and bloated lungs, and I refuse to let myself fall in love with anything that I can’t put my palms up to and find a heartbeat.

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Calendar

Matthew Garner

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It was January and the snow was falling and still stacked in graveyards under trees when we met at the bus stop for the first time. The bus was running late and it was colder than usual and you asked if I had the time and I told you that the bus was definitely late. It was with people who had seen too many early mornings and we sat next to one another on plastic thrones in the back like a king and queen because they were the only two seats available. Your coat was the same shade of blue as your eyes. + You told me one week that you were applying for grad school and that you weren’t sure about us. I said I didn’t care, but of course you knew I did. We still celebrated anyways, even though you don’t normally celebrate just applying. But I wanted to impress you. So I took you to a fancy restaurant that was out of my price range and treated you to flowers and everything I could think of I might have seen in a movie because I didn’t want to screw this up. We went back to your place and I walked you to the doorstep and kissed you on the threshold and told you good night. It was one of the few times I told the truth. + At three AM you rang my phone and asked if I could pick you up from some party you were at. I could tell you were drunk on box wine and stories told by men who were trying to pick you up. When you got in the car you smelled of rotten perfume, like an apple infested with worms that were hidden

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beneath the skin. You talked and talked about some guy you met who was also going to grad school for art history, like you. We had to stop so you could throw up on the side of the road in the middle of the night as solitary cars drove by, their headlights cutting paths in the tangle of darkness. You called the morning after thanking me and asked if I wanted to get lunch. I still think about that from time to time. + Graduation was coming quicker than we imagined and we talked about what we wanted to do after we were done with school. I said I would try to find a job in advertising, writing copy or doing public relations work with any company that would hire me. You told me one day you were hoping to teach.

We celebrated your acceptance letter by drowning two cartons of the cheapest wine we could find. You were so happy. I think it was the happiest you’ve ever been, and I had nothing to do with it. + When summer was still young and crawling on its knees you found a part time job before leaving in the fall. You said the guy you worked with was great. I would probably really like him, but I’m glad I never had to meet him. You worked night shifts and morning shifts and day shifts and I stole glimpses of you in the awkward spaces in between. I eventually found a job for the summer, something to keep me busy, and we saw less and less of each other. You said the guy you worked with was just so funny and that you were going to miss him at school. +

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It was still hot outside and I was still living at home and everything was seemingly okay, hidden behind that post graduate haze that we both were under. The job I had was retail and dull and you looking for somewhere to work in the fall. We both were so excited about the future, even though we knew that it was so uncertain. It didn’t matter to us. + Fourth of July was boring. I was working and so were you and I came home to sleeping parents and an empty house.

You said you were working that night, that you were called in for an extra shift for someone who phoned in sick. I swear I saw your car on the way home, if only for a minute. We lit fireworks the night after and woke up neighbors who had work in the morning. Everything was as close to perfect as I would allow it. + I found an apartment and a job at a small advertising firm here in town, and you went to start grad school down south. You tried to call me every day and even on the days that you missed you would call back the next day and apologize and I would tell you that it was okay and that we were both really busy. You said school was going well and that you liked it here but you were never sure if you could get used to the heat.

Sometimes you would ask about me and my job and sometimes you wouldn’t. But mostly you just talked and talked and I was okay with that just because I was hearing your voice. + After Labor Day is when you called me for the last time.

It was a Thursday morning and I was about to head into to work when my phone rang. You said you couldn’t do the distance thing anymore and that you were sorry. I said that it

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was okay and that I figured that this was coming even though it hit me like that extra step on a staircase when you’re not paying attention and you lose all of your balance for a moment. The only difference was that I lost my balance for so much longer. I wanted to scream at you, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I don’t know why. + For Halloween I wore a mask of my face and went to an office party and got drunk and took home someone from the billing department. I couldn’t remember her name, just her job. The morning after I half expected to find you lying next to me, but I knew you weren’t. Her name might have been Rachel. She kind of looked like you. + My mother asked if were were still dating at family dinner the next month. I told her that we were not. She said that was too bad and that you were a nice girl. You were a nice girl, I think. I’m not sure how to remember you anymore. You didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t think it was possible for you too. I don’t think it was anyone’s fault. I’ve never been good at dealing with this kind of stuff. I don’t even know what this stuff is. + I saw you for the first time in a while on New Year’s Eve. You said you were back in town for winter break and I said that you looked good and asked you how grad school was going and you said everything was great. You looked incredible. We talked for a bit before you left for the night and you hugged me goodbye and I held on for a moment too long. I spent midnight alone in my room. The next morning I went and waited for the bus because I was called into work. It was running late.

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Book People Ryan Chen Digital illustration

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American Muscle K ristopher A. D enby

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Is the camera on?

Yeah, we’re rolling.

Okay, Tommy, let’s go.

Right. Buenos dias, señor. Cómo se llama?

Bueno. Me llamo José Luis Martinez. Pero…my friends just call me Pepe.

We go back and forth like that for a few hours on the restaurant’s patio. The kid asking me questions. Me doing my best to answer them. The kid is a bolillo, but his Spanish is very good. He tells me he was raised in the valley. His parents had a ranch. He had to speak it. I speak English very well, but I let him continue in Spanish. He and his friends, the one with the camera and the one fidgeting and smoking cigarettes in the back, are all college kids. All bolillos. They tell me they are making a film for school. They want to make movies for Hollywood. They have to tell the stories of the poor to get the attention of the rich.

The bolillo with the good Spanish, the one they call Tommy, asks me to tell him about my life. Where I was born.

Why I came here.

So I tell him. +++

I was born on October 30, 1951 in a small town in the foothills of the Sierra Madre, about fifty miles southwest of Monterrey. My family owned a candy factory there. We called it a factory. It wasn’t much bigger than a grocery store. We all worked there in the summers when we were children, my brother and sisters and I. My mother died soon after giving

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birth to me, so I never knew her. My brother, Jorge, would sit and tell us stories about her. He said she was a kind woman, but there had always been a kind of sadness about her that he could not understand.

My father was a hard worker. He wanted the factory to live on after him. He wanted my brother to run it when he became too old to do it himself. But he saw how the light had changed in Jorge’s eyes when he took us to Monterrey to see our first American movie. Rebel Without a Cause made a big impression on my big brother, and anything that impressed Jorge impressed me. I can’t remember how many times we saw that movie, but it was our favorite thing to do when our father gave us the choice. And when Jorge turned 18, he left for the United States. My father knew I would follow him as soon as I was old enough. And I did.

There really isn’t much for a young man in my hometown.

Most of the boys grow up and move to Monterrey or cross the border to America. They look for work. They look for women.

Sometimes they find what they’re looking for. Sometimes they find trouble. My father was determined not to let his sons find trouble. He made my brother learn English, and he saved money to help him get settled. Jorge could have the money as long as he agreed to provide shelter for me and make sure I did things right when I arrived. And he did.

I arrived in Houston in the summer of 1968. My brother already had an apartment and a woman living with him. He spoke good English and had a job in the oilfield. He wouldn’t let me work until I began taking the night classes to learn English.

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Every week night for six months Jorge or his girlfriend would drop me off at this place in a strip mall near their apartment. I would sit with a bunch of immigrants—mostly Mexicans and Vietnamese—and we would practice speaking English. There was a laundromat next door, and many of the other students would walk next door during breaks to change their clothes from the washers to the dryers. The rest of us would sit on the benches out front and smoke cigarettes, and talk about where we had come from.

I hated it at first. I wanted to get out and earn money.

Buy a fast car like the Mustang Steve McQueen had in Bullitt.

I wanted to meet girls. Have fun. I was 19. I wanted to do what other 19-year-old American boys were doing. I wanted to live.

Fast. Free.

But Jorge would not budge. He told me that if I did not listen to him, he would put me on a bus back to Mexico. I did not want to go back to Mexico. So I stayed with Jorge and took the night classes. I learned to speak English, and he got me a job. But I didn’t like the oilfield. It was dirty work, and the white boys didn’t like us. I had only been on the job for a month when one of them left a valve open. The man that got burned was from Guatemala. His face was badly blistered and he lost three fingers on his right hand. They said he was deported when he got out of the hospital. The white boys laughed when they heard that. I was scared all of the time after that. Lots of accidents happen on those rigs. How would anyone know for sure if some of them weren’t accidents? Who would care?

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I did odd jobs for a while and then went to work for a man who called himself “Skipper.” He owned a roofing company, so I learned to do that. The work was hard, but the pay was good, and Skipper was not a bad man to work for. One of the guys on the crew, we called him Pequeño, had a girlfriend named Melinda. On weekends, he and Melinda would go dancing at this Tejano club in Pasadena called El Escorpión.

Sometimes they would invite me, but I wouldn’t go. I didn’t like Tejano clubs. When Immigration wasn’t raiding them and making trouble, the regulars would make plenty of their own.

My father’s ancestors were Spanish, and I could pass for white, so I would go downtown to the discos. The white girls that I met there liked my accent. I had a lot of fun in those places.

But then Melinda introduced me to her Puerto Rican friend, Marisol. Marisol and I became a couple. I bought a cowboy hat and corduroy pants and a belt with a big brass buckle.

Every Friday and Saturday night we would go dancing at El Escorpión with Melinda and Pequeño.

Marisol had a brother, Eddie. He had a scar over his left eye. He was over six feet tall and people who knew Eddie knew to stay on his good side. One night Eddie was taking a piss out behind El Escorpión when a group of rancheros jumped him.

Eddie had put one of them in the hospital a few months before that, and they had been waiting for the right time to take their revenge. They stabbed him in the belly and left him in the alley beside an overflowing dumpster. He bled to death in a puddle of his own piss.

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Marisol’s family lived in Chicago. They had the body sent back up there, and Marisol was going to go back for the funeral. She said she would not be coming back to Texas. I was still living with Jorge, saving money for my car. I told Jorge that I was going to Chicago with Marisol. He didn’t like the idea.

He still had some of the money that our father had given him when he first came to the states and he told me that he would use it to help me buy my car, if I would only stay in Texas. But I thought I was in love. Marisol said we wouldn’t need a car in the city anyway. Jorge kissed me on the forehead and told me to be careful. We left the next day. +++

Marisol gave birth to our son, Stephen, in the winter of 1976, the year of the Bicentennial. People were feeling very patriotic. I got a letter from Jorge the week after the Fourth of July. Someone had vandalized his car during the city’s fireworks show. His tires had been slashed and they had spray painted “GO BACK TO MEXICO” and “WETBACK” on his front and back windshields. He said he would not go back to Mexico.

Marisol’s father had a bricklaying company, so I became a bricklayer. The winters were bitter, and Marisol turned out to be almost as crazy as her brother. It seemed like we were always fighting. In 1977, Marisol was pregnant again with our baby girl, Marissa. The union was on strike, and money was tight. The winter was a very hard one, and the wallpapered walls of our small apartment seemed like they were closing in on us. The arguments got worse. I admit I was not always the

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easiest person to live with. The gray winters depressed me, and I would sometimes sit for hours in the yellow recliner in our living room, beer bottles piling up around me, while my little Stephen played on the floor and watched reruns of Tom and Jerry. Marisol got a job at a bakery, and her paychecks kept us afloat. She would come home in the evenings and scream at me because Stephen had dried snot under his nose, or caca in his diaper. Or because there were dishes in the sink. But I was cold and resentful. I had never really wanted to move to Chicago. I blamed Marisol for talking me into it. I wasn’t ready to be a father. I wanted to live like an American. Fast and free.

Things went on like that for several years. We stayed together because we didn’t know what else to do. We were both Catholic. We had the kids, and I was still working for her father.

He said the business would pass on to me since Eddie had died, but that wasn’t what I wanted. Marisol and I finally split up in the spring of 1988, three months after her father passed away.

I took a bus back to Houston to stay with my brother while I tried to figure out what to do with my life. Marisol kept the kids. I cried every night for a month, but I finally got myself together long enough to make some decisions. I left for Austin two months after returning to Texas.

I found a roofing job again. Things had changed a lot since I had left for Chicago. There were a lot of Mexican crews in the construction business. Mexicans poured the foundations.

Mexicans framed the walls. Mexicans put the sheetrock up.

Mexicans painted. Mexicans did the rock work and the stucco.

Mexicans did the landscaping. White boys stood around with

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clipboards and rolls of plans tucked under their arms and watched the Mexicans work or sat in their air-conditioned trailers and pickup trucks, pretending to write important things in notebooks that probably hid magazines like Penthouse and Hustler.

My boss was a white man named Bob Woznowski. He had close-cropped gray hair and wore round, wire-rimmed spectacles. His face was hard, but he had a gentle voice and inquisitive blue eyes that seemed always to be seeing the world for the first time. His daughter was going off to college at the end of the summer, and Bob was trying to come up with some extra cash to cover her tuition and living expenses. He had a big bass boat and a car for sale. The car was a red 1972 Chevelle.

It had black racing stripes. It wasn’t McQueen’s Mustang, but it was a piece of American muscle, and I couldn’t pass it up. I got a loan from his bank and drove the car home on a Friday.

It was all I ever wanted.

Stephen came to live with me when he was 15. He had begun to see the things in his mother that had made it impossible for us to stay together. Marissa was still under Marisol’s spell, though, and it wasn’t until she had graduated high school that she decided to come and give Austin a try.

Stephen joined the Marines right after high school and was sent to Germany. And then, later, to the Middle East. Marissa loved books, and she wanted to go to college. She applied to UT and got in after a semester at the community college. On weekends we would take the Chevelle, put the top down, and ride through the hills and along the ridgelines on the outskirts

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of Austin. Marissa would let her hair out in the wind, and she would talk about boys and classes and the professors she didn’t like. Her major changed as often as her hairstyle that first year at UT, but she was happy, and that was all I cared about.

In 1997, a year and half after Marissa had moved to Austin, Marisol tied an extension cord around her neck and hung herself in the basement of her parent’s house. Stephen flew back from Germany, and we all met in Chicago for the funeral. Marissa stayed with her grandmother for what was supposed to only be a few months after the funeral to try and help her get adjusted. But the old woman was already in her nineties and could not take care of herself. Marissa and Stephen were the only living relatives she had left. Marissa never came back to Austin, and she never went back to school.

She got pregnant and married a Bolivian man named Hugo.

He sells insurance, and they live in her grandmother’s old house. Their children are beautiful creatures, but they hardly know me. They are always too busy or have too little money to come visit. I save my money and go to see them at least once a year for Christmas, but it’s not enough for a grandfather to see his grandbabies only once a year.

Stephen is now a first sergeant. He married a black woman named Carolina on May 7, 2011. I’ve only met her once. She is also in the Marines. They have a house in Norfolk, Virginia, but are both deployed right now. I don’t know if they even want kids.

I work security now for a Self-Stor out on 290. It’s easy work. It doesn’t pay much, but my trailer and my car are paid off. And I don’t need a lot of money.

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And that’s about it. That’s my life. +++

Pero, qué le pasó a Jorge? Y tu padre? Qué pasó con…

It’s okay, son. Just ask me in English.

The kid blushes and looks embarrassed. I tell him not to be embarrassed. He speaks very well, I tell him. But I am more used to speaking English now than anything else, and it’s just easier, I say.

What happened to the candy factory?

I look down for a moment; wipe the sweat from my brow.

It’s hot here on the patio. I take a sip of my Dos Equis; glance up at the collection of green bottles on my side of the table. I feel tears welling up behind my eyelids. I stand up and walk to the fence behind me before one lone bead escapes and slides slowly down my cheek. I adjust my hat and use the gesture to hide the fact that I am wiping away the evidence of the tear.

I wait a moment to make sure no more will fall, and return to the table.

Sir, it’s okay. If you don’t want to talk about it, you don’t have to. It’s just… these are the kinds of stories that we want to tell. These are the kinds of stories that need to be told.

I look into the kid’s eyes. He seems to believe what he is saying. I want to tell him to hang on to that hopefulness. But I know that it will not help. Hope is just a word that is used to describe something that will probably never happen. But he’s so young. He’s got his whole life ahead of him.

No. I will tell you, I say. We’ve come this far.

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+++

When we finish, I pay for my beers and get up to leave.

The boys try to pay, but I won’t let them. Tommy rises to shake my hand. I smile as he wraps my hand in his. I want to believe that there is something in his eyes that wasn’t there before, but I think that I am just being a foolish old man. Everyone wants to have a legacy. I shake the hands of the other boys and head back out of the restaurant.

The Chevelle is where I left it. It sags a bit on its old leaf springs, and the paint is pitted and rusted from hail damage that I never had fixed. But it cranks over on the first try, and the engine roars to life. I pump the gas a few times, and ease out of the spot. I see the boys coming out of the restaurant in my rearview as I pull out of the parking lot. Tommy squints at me in the sun and throws a hand up in the air to wave bye. I hit the gas and watch the black exhaust billow out from behind the big car. I watch the three boys dwindle in the distance, and I try to remember what it was like to live like that. Fast. Free.

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Pearl Street Bedroom Erin Miller Marker & gauche on paper

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Author Bios Majid Breland is a sophomore currently studying Plan II Honors and business. Outside of school he can be found producing electronic music, throwing his money around the stock market, and loitering in fine arts museums. The Jackson Pollock 5 Cody Bubenik is a senior studio art major at UT. His work focuses primarily on issues of isolation advertising, visual consumption, and the rapid expansion of visual culture. He is heavily influenced by the world of comic and illustrative art, with a special appreciation for underground comic artists. Tales of the City Ryan Chen is a fifth-year undergraduate student majoring in visual art studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Being a TaiwaneseAmerican, Ryan has faced a cultural dissonance between the East and the West. He utilizes his art to communicate the loss of identity in the midst of these two worlds. Book People, N oh M asks, Y okai

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Keith Padraic Chew is a freshman majoring in international relations and global studies and Asian cultures and languages in Chinese at UT. Keith does travel photo journalism, and has also worked with National Geographic. Alan’s Theremin, Double-O-Seven Kate Coleman is a freshman Plan II and English major. In an attempt to keep it simple, all you need to know is that she writes.

“Wowing ” Joel Deeter is sophomore radio-television-film student. He enjoys writing just as much as he enjoys eating bacon and watching The Muppet Show. His goal in life is to build a house-sized hot air balloon and float around the world. This is his first published poem. “King of Crickets”

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Kristopher A. Denby is a senior at The University of Texas at Austin majoring in English and minoring in government. He is a part time writer, artist, and furniture maker. On the rare occasions when he has any downtime at all, he loves going to the movies and being a tourist in his own city. “A merican M uscle,” “B eat 42” Connor Frew is currently a freshman studio art major, soon to add art history as a double-major. Y our N eck I s W arm and Y our Blood Runs Beneath It Like Quicksilver Matthew Garner is a senior majoring in English from Katy, Texas.

He hopes that after his time at The University of Texas he will get a job in copywriting or advertising. In the future he plans to apply and hopefully attend a MFA program for Creative Writing. He also likes dogs. “Calendar” Madeleine F. Guy was a senior English student. She takes her skiff out on dark waters, beating away the tentacles of old gods reaching from the deep. She also hand-makes bloodstone circles, wool hats, and portals to the unblinking void above. Now she hopes to become a true flesh-eating librarian. “Doublet” Lea Konczal is a sophomore pursuing a major in finance and a minor in psychology. In her spare time she enjoys filmmaking, fossil hunting, and exploring offbeat Austin locales. She is proud to consider herself a writer, artist, photographer, avid traveler, and expert at making stir-fried cabbage. F allen, “S oftly ” Robert Lopez is a seasoned senior according to cumulative hours, currently completing prerequisite studies to apply to physical therapy school. He is an avid cyclist who enjoys the outdoors and throwing a tennis ball to his tripod dog, Mr. Bojangles. He does his best work between caffeine and sleep. “A queousconscious”

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Erin Miller is a junior at The University of Texas pursuing a BFA in visual art studies. Looking into the interior of spaces around her, Erin often reimagines living spaces through abstract color and shapes. Her work emphasizes the intimacy and comfort that comes with spending time in these spaces. Pearl Street B edroom Christopher Nordahl is a senior majoring in creative advertising, a storywriter, a reader, an obsessive music nerd, and a musician.

He hopes to work at an advertising agency after graduation as a copywriter and to continue to write stories for the rest of his life.

“A venue E” Adele Powers is a senior Plan II and English major at The University of Texas. She is currently working on a graphic novel.

Hannah Blind Contour

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Sadia Qaddus, fourth year, is technically a student of architecture and Plan II, but prefers to consider herself a student of the universe.

Inspired by the beauty and darkness in the world, she is constantly exploring and seeking to creatively express all she thinks and feels.

Blue Haze Rachel Rein is a freshman at UT Austin who is studying Plan II Honors and psychology. She enjoys writing poetry, singing, and competing for the UT Individual Events team in various public address and limited preparation events. She is extremely partial to Early Gray tea and Russian literature. “M y H ands ,” “T o a B oy ” Emily Campbell Robinson is a junior studying both rhetoric & writing and philosophy at The University of Texas at Austin. She is fascinated by the infinite possibilities of language and enjoys writing immensely. Her greatest loves include fountain pens, cups of tea, and sunshine. “In-Finite”

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Jourden Sander is a senior majoring in English with a minor in rhetoric and writing. While studying at UT, Jourden writes for Svelto Magazine and edits for Spoon University Texas. In her spare time she enjoys creative writing, hot tea, playing tennis, and walking her corgi.

“A Palimpsest” Shannon is a junior undergrad and an English major. She is pursuing an MFA in creative writing and hopes to travel the world after that. This is her second time being published. “Jagged B ones/ Dead M oon ,” “M outhpoet ” Charu Sharma is a senior computer science and English major at The University of Texas. She previously contributed to Analecta 39 in 2013, and can frequently be found reading and writing poetry, doodling during class, or still getting lost on campus! “Circus,” “A ll M y F ears ” Samuel A. Vanicek a 2016 RTF student, studies filmmaking with interest in directing, cinematography, and editing. Currently, he illustrates Your Favorite Child, a biweekly comic appearing in The Daily Texan, and hosts Ask For Wild Bob on KVRX 91.7, focusing on different popular and avant-garde world music genres each week.

D ance F loor Meagan Waldrip is a junior in the English department at UT, studying Victorian literature with a focus on 1860s sensation novels.

Her current interests include flash fiction, voyeuristic photography, and the psychology of childhood imagination. “Justine” is her first published fiction. “Justine” Austin Wyman is an English major and a junior set to graduate from UT in December. He has had an interest in fiction writing since fifth grade and has several short stories under his belt. This is the first one to appear in a publication. “Living A lone”

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Spring 2014