APIARY 5 by APIARY Magazine

WRitTen by humans

2012 Staff Executive Editors Lillian Dunn Tamara Oakman info@apiarymagazine.com Web EditorS

Dear readers, listeners, literary lovers, Welcome to APIARY 5 ! It’s one of firsts for us: our very first guest editor, poet Frank Sherlock; our very first audio zine, featuring live poetry performances; and our first full-color issue, thanks to our advertisers and supporters. While our content, circulation, and staff have all grown, we’re still not that far from the days when we printed out submissions fliers on our work copier and hoped we’d get away with it. We still have staff meetings in Lillian’s living room. The magazine is made in coffeeshops and on the laptops of the incredibly hardworking staff listed to the right, often after a long day at work. It’s made out of 5,000 e-mails and 3,000 pots of coffee. It’s made for free, because we believe that the city is full of passionate voices that deserve to be heard by their neighbors. We’re honored to be among the thousands of Philadelphia writers and artists who do just the same or more: eke out time for their art, do it for little pay, and work to transform this city into a more beautiful, compassionate, possible place. If you’re inspired by what you read in the following pages, support them. Buy a ticket to a reading or a slam. Buy a local author’s book – from a local bookstore, listed at our new literary database, phillyliterarycalendar.com. Become an APIARY member! Or just quote your favorite poem from APIARY in a love letter. Lend a copy to a friend. Send us a note telling us what you liked. And once you’re done with this issue, read more excellent and original local writing, twice a week, at apiarymagazine.com Finally, we thank our staff, who continue to surprise us with their talent, generosity, work ethic, humor, and dance moves; Frank Sherlock, who, while being one of Philly’s bestknown poets, found time to curate an astonishing take on the Philadelphia diaspora; and everyone who submitted to APIARY 5 in our largest submissions season yet. This fall we heard from high school teachers, nurses, activists, lawyers, college students, and an MMA fighter, just to name a few. (Sherlock, when not busy transforming Philadelphia’s literary scene, teaching, or grant-writing, has been known to pull a few shifts at Dirty Frank’s downtown. Go say hi if you like his picks.) Some writers said they are just trying poetry or fiction for the first time, or sitting down to it again. Many have been writing or performing steadily for years. And many teach their craft, to the people who we hope will one day end up in our pages. This city lives and works and writes. Read it in APIARY. Love,

Alexandra Stitz Lisa Yoder web@apiarymagazine.com Performance Poetry Editors Lindo Jones Warren Longmire spokenword@apiarymagazine.com Youth literary Editors Eve Gleichman Jasmine Walker youth@apiarymagazine.com poetry Editor Alina Pleskova Art and Design Editor Amy Scheidegger art@apiarymagazine.com Graphic Designer Michael Martins design@apiarymagazine.com new media editor Ras Mashramani media@apiarymagazine.com video editor Nick Forrest video@apiarymagazine.com Submissions Manager Thomson Guster submissions@apiarymagazine.com OUTREACH COORDINATOR Andrew Ly outreach@apiarymagazine.com PRODUCTION MANAGER Amelia Longo production@apiarymagazine.com DISTRIBUTION MANAGER Leslie Burnette distribution@apiarymagazine.com MEMBERSHIP Manager Elizabeth Knauss membership@apiarymagazine.com BUSINESS MANAGER

Lillian and Tamara

Lauren Otero business@apiarymagazine.com WEB CONTRIBUTORs To learn more about the artists and artwork you see in this issue, please visit apiarymagazine.com.

Steve Burns Emily Southerton

CONTENTS 4

Divine Lorraine

Nico Amador

At Walnut Mountain

David P. Kozinski

Heat

Kay Peters

Dirty Dishes

Cristina Perachio

Lost & Found

Erin McCourt

Where I’m From

Jason Zuzga

(How To Make a Decision) (10 Ways to Make Better Decisions)

Carlos Soto-Román

O Tannenbaum

Dawn Manning

After The Memorial Service

M.C. McCoy

Memo Regarding your Future

Valerie Fox

Sirens Underwater

Nicole Pasquarello

Postcard to James Schuyler at Magic Hour

Stephen Potter

Eve at Dawn

Joseph A. Cilluffo

voice fluid

Lily Applebaum

Folk Art Center

Danny P. Barbare

Body Box

Shawn Proctor

storm on A st.

Quyen H. Nghiem

Vacances

Maxime D. McKenna

Vocals

David Kertis

the devil and mary blowjob at wrigley field

Lynn Hoffman

from handmade recursive fast food restaurant menu

Eddie Hopely

Oceanic

Robyn Campbell

Hydrophobia [Storm Watch]

Rachel Marie Patterson

33 34

Color it Bluer

Patrick McNeil

Girl with Wings

Ayah Joice

as the doctors dig

Lovella Rose Calica

Kirtan Wallah

Faith Paulsen

Something Came Over Johnny

Kirsten Saracini

Parts of the Self

Amy Small-McKinney

Dead Meat

Ewuare Osayande

Edge

Leonard Gontarek

The Daughter as Mermaid

Alison Hicks

the three known tales of hatim muzumbo

Alex Smith

Five girls in matching Natchez

Brett Evans

reflection

Lisa Gratz

St. Desdemona

Lauren Yates

Shimmer Around Us

Cathleen Cohen

Magdalena Zurawsk

Carnival

Dilruba Ahmed

Snapshots for Looking at Summer of ’91

Davy Knittle

A Case of Mistaken Identity Ends in Asphyxiation.

Jeffrey Bumiller

Three Conversations

Susan Charkes

For Etheridge Knight (1931—March 10, 1991)

Jeffrey Ethan Lee

One-Stop Solution To All Human Suffering

Trisha Low

On Meeting Lamont B. Steptoe

Tracey Ferdinand

Flash Freeze

Sean Webb

Author & Artist Biographies

Italics denote a youth author

APIARY GUEST EDITOR

FRANK SHERLOCK Guest editing for this issue of APIARY has been a great honor and daunting impossibility. The incredible writing that has come through Philadelphia during the past decade-or-so of my poetry life could easily comprise one of the better anthologies the 21st century has yet to see. I’ve had the fortune to be part of a poetry community that has earned a national reputation through the work of poets that are talked about from the Bay Area to New York and beyond. What culminated from a discussion between Tom Devaney and me about a Philadelphia poetry convergence in 2003 isn’t exactly old news. Those who have helped build a PhillySound scene include Jenn and Chris McCreary, Mytili Jagannathan, Pattie McCarthy, Kevin Varrone and CAConrad among others. What makes me happiest has nothing to do with that good ol’ days get-together, but the new waves of poets/curators/publishers that have continued to see Philadelphia as a poetry destination and build new possibilities. Debrah Morkun, Suyeun Juliette Lee, Jamie Townsend, Dorothea Lasky, Stan Mir, Carolina Maugeri, JenMarie and Travis Macdonald, homeboy Ryan Eckes, Ian Davisson and so many others continue to make this city’s poetry community more vibrant than it’s ever been. That’s a lot of names for you to check out and love. It turns out that none of them are in this issue. I wanted this to be an inside/out sampler, selecting writers from around the nation and (yes!) the hemisphere who have focused on Philly as a place that informs their work. Carlos Soto Román came here via Valparaiso, Chile to translate, edit and wrestle with the promise of liberty that was born in this city while making sense of an Empire that crushed the same promise back home. Magdalena Zurawski spent the early 2000s with a queer Springsteenian take on these sometimes unforgiving streets, shaping her path to San Francisco to Durham to the award-winning novel The Bruise. Speaking of bruises, you can see a Philadelphia shine on the Mardi Gras/ Mummer drunk verse of New Orleans native Brett Evans. And there is the playful darkness and a playtime-in-the-dark quality that makes Trisha Low one of the most exciting Conceptualists writing in New York today. Here it is — hate it or love it. But you will probably love it if you know what’s good for you. LO VE, Frank

Divine Lorraine 699 North Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA Look for me in the graves of my old friends, or the silent bedrooms, the chairs emptied of their choir: I am that pale wall where the painting of Grecian ladies used to hang, the cold ceiling, the dust in the light. I am that hollow wasp, a yellow skeleton of brick, my windows like dead wings, my body a catacomb of wood that the luckless take apart, rib by rib. I am that burning pile of wood. I become fire. I am of this world but not in it. I am that juju woman. Watch me press dry flowers into my eyes. Dark birds nest in my hair. I wear a corset of ivory teeth. I let the snakes lick my ears clean so I can hear the wild predictions of my trembling chandeliers. I look to the place where nightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s edge begins to fray, test my back against the wind. I stand.

Nico Amador

At Walnut Mountain for Patti Allis I miss you as mist rises in the distance, moved left to right behind the firs. The hand hesitates to push this pen — disconnected from how I feel, northerner, perched in Georgia. It is a big mountain in a bigger world on a tiny planet in a place so vast I can’t grasp why we need magic tricks and easy answers. I miss you at six a.m. when a single thunderclap muffled by the overhanging trees has me groping for my specs as the rain smacks the metal roof, each rim shot like a bullet on a list of the things I can’t change. I draw the comforter of sedation over the rest.

I miss you, dearest, even though I’m only away a few days, miss you when half a dozen deer roam across the drive and through the trees, surviving without human names. All morning the leaves dripped and crows called and last night as I sat against the pillows a batsized Polyphemus moth flapped urgently at the screen, lit there, wings spread, showing off its lineup of extra eyes. I miss those I won’t see again — can bring to mind only with prompts or props or cat’s paw, miss the ones that we were, think we were, weren’t. David P. Kozinski

HEAT She steps outside, takes a deep breath of exhaust fueled humid air, slams the door; the house shudders. Her heels stab black asphalt as she crosses the street and pushes through a maze of tables, dodging waiters and diners. The screech of the subway reaches up, ricochets off her pounding heart. Kids in the street splash in a hydrantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fresh torrent. She steps out of her shoes, walks on water. Kay Peters

Dirty Dishes Uncle Skip and the Highway Hag are standing outside the door at quarter of seven even though we’re not open yet. It smells like bleach and grill cleaner, and I don’t know how the regulars stand it. My boss is always playing that fucking Cat Stevens album because we have to ease the customers into the day. But I’m the one working. Keeping myself buzzing, sneaking and sucking on pork roll bits from the grill, sipping stale coffee, hating the taste. School is five days a week and work is only one, but it seems the other way around. Hot, crackling, clattering dishes and plates. Everyone talks louder above it. The heat of the grill warps my focus and the buttercup yellow walls. I can never go a day without mistakes. Dropped toast butter side down. Fresh out of the dishwasher glasses shatter with iced coffee. Over medium, not over easy. Sauce on the side. Didn’t you say onion bagel? Third time I’m telling you, eighty-six on pumpernickel. You get the job by lying about your age, and you work there long after you have to. Even though the boss is always saying things that make your face go hot, you don’t quit. Beady little eyes crawl like spooked insects. Untying your apron so you have to bend over and pick it up. Sausage fingers on the back of your neck. “What’re you tense about? You’re sixteen.” His mean, porcelain Norwegian wife hates you and shit talks in a language no one understands. You meet lots of different kinds of people, which makes you feel grown up. The money is too good, and it’s easy to steal more each time you cash out your tips. Quiet. Not greedy. You learn that you can get away with stealing anything by making eye contact and small talk. Skip sits at the counter, swimming in a beater leather jacket and orders nothing. I give him a green tea, and he gives me a peace sign. Highway Hag has her own mug; she squeezes behind the counter to fill it herself, and you can smell her like wet cardboard. I have to serve her a saucer with eight creamers on it. No matter how many you bring, she still wants more. She has the face of a mole and the body of a rotten plum. You look at her for too long and she starts talking. Her teeth are rotten and wiggly. Every customer thinks they’re the most fascinating person on earth. She drives the van that takes criminals out on 95 to pick up trash. Have I told you? She has, but that doesn’t stop her.

It’s an open kitchen, right behind the counter so you can’t spit in food. You get creative. Cranky folks get decaf. Wheat instead of rye. Sorry, we’re all out of whatever it is you want to order. I repeat the special several times for a table of firefighters. The Crabby Dick. Cheddar scramble, hot peppers, lump crab on Texas toast. They make me say it over and over. I smile and act dumb, why you laughing, because they are good tippers. They should be. They never pay the bill. They just nod their heads at the cash register like they’re wishing it a good day. Same with cops. There’s one good-looking fireman and one goodlooking cop in town. The rest are doughy and bald and can’t lift their mugs to their mustaches without getting out of breath. By laws of the universe, if handsome cop comes in then handsome fireman doesn’t. And vice versa. The cop one day. He has a smooth face like he can’t grow a beard and blue eyes to match his uniform that’ll make you keep touching your hair. You put on lip gloss in the bathroom and pat down fly-aways with wet fingers. He calls you Honey and Doll even though he can’t be much older than you. Boys almost never say your actual name. Bobby McKenna called you Chicken, and Mark Short called you Kid. Jordan’s older brother dated several girls at once, so he always called you something different. Some guys can get away with that kind of thing. There’s always a reason, they’ll skip homeroom to kiss in auto shop or have a swimming pool or their parents are never home, but it’s almost always because of their hair. “Can I get a short stack with you on top?” says some fathead at the counter with his son. He’s got on a uniform from a school I don’t know. Gold and cranberry plaid. A bronze cross pinned to his lapel. I tell his dad I’ve heard it all but that is the cleverest yet. I ask him to write it down so I can remember it forever. Then I feel bad because the kid looks embarrassed. I give him extra whipped cream on his cocoa. It flops over and I make a big show of licking it off my knuckle, between my fingers. He does that thing where he’s looking but won’t make eye contact because he doesn’t want you to know he’s thinking about anything other than cocoa. The pregnant yoga moms squeeze into a booth, demanding decaf and organic everything. They all talk

over each other at once and never stop, even when they are out the door and down the block. I tell them we only serve produce from an organic farm in Lancaster that I made up. Boss prices everything at a dollar fifty extra if it’s organic. We used to squeeze the orange juice with this big industrial machine, but then the machine broke. We keep fresh oranges loaded in it so it looks like it’s in use. The Man in Black sits at the counter closest to the register and asks if there are any Morning Glory muffins left, but there never are. He slicks back his hair with both hands like in the movies and smiles at me. His teeth are little yellow corns. I bring him his coffee and say, “Black for the Man in Black.” He tells me he has a gig tonight and I try not to smile, ask what he’ll be playing. His band only covers Johnny Cash. They aren’t that good, except he sounds just like him. He is old, but you can tell when he smiles and gets crow’s feet that he was handsome once. There are always the girls who go with older guys, men. The rest of us say it’s gross, then complain that the boys at school are immature. Their hands are nervous. They fumble with buttons and are afraid of our fathers. A boy from my school with a rattail sits outside beside a woman with fake nails and boobs. I tell him to introduce me to his sister, and it’s his mother and I want to die. She takes it as a compliment, so I don’t feel bad then. I forget his name, but I think it’s Anthony. He would be cute if it weren’t for the hair. The morning rush dies down and you’re sweating through your clothes and you smell like burnt homefries, grey dishwater, salt. Your tongue is thick with coffee and brown sugar. Your boss dares you to eat a piece of mystery char stuck to the pan you’re scrubbing with steel wool that makes your blood go icy. For five dollars. You tell him to go fuck himself and steal an extra five when you cash out later. Chef sends me to storage for more scrapple and I sit with my head between my legs in the walk-in freezer. I think about swiping the bottle of whiskey hidden behind the industrial-sized tubs of ketchup and then move it underneath a container of cole slaw so I can get it after my shift. He is a sweet man, Chef. The kind you never know if they’re good looking because they always seem different. Chef is a morpher. Dirty white apron, baby hairs combed over a bumpy skull. I’m always asking

him a bunch of questions, but he pretends not to hear. He is the sort of person you can’t imagine anywhere but at work. Chef must evaporate when he’s not at the grill. The bus boys at the fancy restaurant across the street come by when they run out of ice or napkins. Your boss has you give them everything for “free,” except you know the little Russian one leaves tiny baggies of weed under the crates of maple syrup. There are twins. Mexican or Puerto Rican, you can’t be sure. A mean one and a nice one. You let the nice one follow you into the walk-in for a bag of ice. He hefts it over his shoulder with both hands to steady it, and you kiss him. He doesn’t put the ice down or move at all, freeze tag, just his tongue goes. Folding silverware in paper napkins, marrying the ketchup bottles. The place is empty. The boss yells at you for sitting while working. It looks bad and takes up a seat for customers. So you keep your ass on the stool and one leg on the ground. Finally, a four top. Kids from the college. The girls are dressed up in what they wore last night and quiet like they should have been home already. The boys show off. Balled up straw wrappers fly into water glasses, and the number of beers keeps growing with each retelling. You bend over when you drop your pen and everyone gets quiet. You are bored. Sometimes boys will leave their number on the check. Scrawled across the inside of your forearm. It’s never the ones you want though. You and your friends prank call them late at night and laugh so hard you hold your ribs, your jaw aches. Except one time. He’s a professor at the college, but a young one like he could be a student. He doesn’t wear tweed or anything. He teaches art history and tells me that I’ve got classic features, and it feels like the best thing anyone’s ever said to anybody even though I don’t know what he means. You will hold onto that feeling for a very long time. You grow up, and even as an older woman, continue asking other men what they think is meant by “classic features.” Quarter-to-One-Guy moves his feet off the floor so you can mop under him. He keeps asking for more coffee and complains about the fruit flies. The closed sign is flipped. He takes a shit in the bathroom after you’ve already scrubbed it. One time, he has two black eyes and won’t say from what, and you know it’s from karma.

It is August. Sweat all over, hands pruned, and slimy even places you forget about like behind your ears and knees. I want to go home and shower, but the Professor offers me a ride home. We go to the college gardens. There is a circle of bamboo as tall as a house with a bench in the middle. It is dark except for small bolts of orange sunlight and it smells like hay. He acts timid, and I’m confused. So I pretend I’m someone else, a good trick a girl on the lacrosse team taught me. Straddling him, I can smell my own hair like the black bits scraped off the grill. His stubble burns my upper lip and chin. It is disappointing because he is just as shaky as the boys at school. Except I don’t even get a ride home after. He’s late for class, so I walk. Saturday nights are the worst. You’re so afraid you’ll oversleep, you don’t sleep at all. When you get to the shop, they’re overstaffed. This is one of the best feelings a person can feel. You will grow up and remember it exactly. The quickness of your heart. The unwanted surge of energy. The relief of being able to crawl back into your bed for a full day of sleeping. “Sorry, honey. My fault, head home.” And you’re already untying your apron, stiff with pancake batter, still stuffed with inflated tips from the weekend before.

Cristina Perachio

Lost & Found I dropped my Philly accent somewhere in the Outback, returned with a tan and an easy disposition. My mother noticed right away, You’re always losing things, she sighed, A kangaroo probably has it by now. My cousin Billy went to Rome an artist and came back a philosopher in a thrift store yellow jacket. He was now William, he said, and announced at Thanksgiving dinner he’d contracted an std in Saint Peter’s Square. The curable kind, he reassured us, and dug into his mashed potatoes.

Erin McCourt

Want flexibility in your master’s program? The Master of Communication and Information Studies program at Rutgers University now offers specializations: • Digital Media (available online) • Strategic Organizational Communication • Health Communication mcis.rutgers.edu MCIS APIARY Ad v1.indd 1

11/27/12 11:50:50 AM

Where I’m From “That there is such a province as New-Jersey, is certain.” —The Epistle of Penn, Lawrie, and Lucas representing West Jersey, 1676 # The summer before my parents moved into the house on Harvest Road, the family that lived there had installed an in-ground pool. In the sidewalk that surrounds the pool, in one square, the family pressed their right hands into the unset cement and then drew in their names with sticks. Dad, Mom, Dave, Chip. Over time my hand grew to fit Chip. Then Dave. Then Mom. # Once I met “Wendy” at a store opening to which we’d been invited. In fake freckles and a red PippiLongstocking-pigtailed wig, Wendy handed me a puppet of herself—a thin plastic mitten with thumbs on both sides, so I could make her arms move. # We rubbed slippery sticks of charcoal over the names: Pheeby Williamson d. 1794; Aquila Jones b. 1789 d. 1830; Hezekiah Toy d. 1810; George Fish, infant son of Isaac Fish d. 1795. We found two headstones with what we thought were knockers to wake up the dead and make them come to the door. We dared each other to knock. I lifted one knocker. We saw underneath a picture of a middle-aged woman smiling, wearing cat-eye glasses and an I- know smirk. # In 1961 the citizens of Delaware Township voted overwhelmingly “yea” to a ballot proposal that would change the name of their township to Cherry Hill, the name of their new shopping mall. The road on the way to the Cherry Hill Mall was once presided over by the Hawaiian Inn, a giant architectural pineapple. # Bryan, new kid in class, reaches down his pants and pulls out a new pubic hair. He holds it to the dimmed rec room light, says “I’m going to make a wish,” and then he blows it into the air.

# “Equally impressive are the beautiful housing developments and shopping centers within the township. In a sense, Cherry Hill is a series of neighborhoods, rather than a single community. It is bisected north and south by parallel highways.” —The Cherry Hill Story, Americana Publications Co., 1973 # In the woods behind Thomas Paine Elementary School I found a Monotropa uniflora, an Indian Pipe or Corpse Plant. Without chlorophyll the Indian Pipe lives with mold and doesn’t grow any more than six inches tall. # “Dear Friend! Through the Mercy of God, we are safely Arrived at New-Jersey…Here is Good Land enough lyes void, would serve many Thousands of Families; and we think, if they cannot Live Here, they can hardly Live in any Place in the World.” — John Crips to Henry Stacy, the 26th of 8. Mon. 1677. # Meanwhile, at the Cherry Hill Mall, I waited on the customer who worked at Kitchen Kapers, her regular nightly coffee break. Somehow I froze, scalding milk bubbled onto my hand over the edge of the cappuccino steamer. “Put it under water, cold water,” she said, as she ran around the counter past the bins of roasted beans. She held my blistering hand under the stream. # Sand collected below the stacked stones in the backyard. If I examined the sand carefully, I could find miniature snail shells, magic whorls, translucent and so tiny I could barely pick them up. I could find shells where they did not belong, like Darwin in the mountains of Peru.

Jason Zuzga

(How to make a decision) Toss a coin. Throw three potatoes under the bed during Saint John’s eve. Pull up petals from a daisy while reciting the options over & over again.

GUEST EDITOR PICK

Apply the law of more for the most. Try to be equitable imparcial unbiased rightful honest fair Consult the principles but

which ones?

(10 ways to make better decisions) 1. Do not be afraid of consequences 2. Trust your intuition 3. Consider your emotions 4. Play the Devil’s advocate 5. Be careful with comparisons 6. Do not regret the inevitable 7. Change your perspective 8. Avoid social pressure 9. Reduce your range of options 10. Ask someone else to decide

Carlos Soto-Román

O Tannenbaum

After The Memorial Service

for Grandpa Breid

Mom told me Dad promised Aunt Rita a plot.

He who hardly spares a word but for the weather, found the German left in his tongue, and sang over the static of ships filled with Midwest farm boys, over the wails of Japanese mothers burrowed into hills to warm the naked atoms of their children; he sang between barren mountains of bicycles blistered thousands high, trees felled under human snow.

Neither of us has a tissue we blotted out his funeral. * I didn’t know your mother’s favorite meal was coffee and donuts. That explains why I read the travel section first on Sundays. * This is my brother you probably don’t recognize him. I remember her in splashes of p-i-n-k rearranging Scrabble tiles. * Did she ever tell you about the time she shot the bear? No, her first husband you are too young to remember the bastard. * During the War they performed a comic ballet the soldiers took them seriously. Her sister wanted to be here the Jersey Turnpike is too much at 90. * I’m the last of the Mohicans she said Irish-eyed and danced a jig with her walker. You survived the Depression I thought you could use some flowers.

Dawn Manning

M.C. McCoy

Memo Regarding your Future Let me start off by admitting that the world can be a coarse and harrowing experience for any of us, even me. Let’s be frank and honest here. When you were on the seventeenth floor, Randy, over last weekend did you notice the splattered microwave or the unlocked window, several inches ajar, because, well, somebody else did and they have complained and they also saw various and previously mentioned (and documented by Legal) items in your desk and corner area. By the way, this is for your own good. You will get even more notification mailed to you. So, lo and behold, more than one person in there saw and became aware of this. Now I must ask you to consult your manual. Just to clarify we are not dialoguing here concerning the matter of your hair. Of course, we’re not literally speaking, but I hope that there is an element of communication in what is happening here as in there is an idea or what I like to call an “image” and it is projected on a screen in my brain and it then miraculously appears, the very same, in someone else’s – yours, I mean. We, I really am talking now about me, walk about the halls well after ten o’clock in the evening many an evening and come across people, those who are quite devoted to this their job. They are still working, assessing and reducing costs. They too have opinions including about why you were in the office over the weekend and they have written a report with an overwhelming ( in my view ) and disastrous (well, not for me ) conclusion, and something they like to call the denouement – and here it comes, Randy. Randy. Planning ahead is not a dirty word. It is what some people call the Way the Truth and the Light. Valerie Fox

Sirens Underwater When I saw my mother for the last time, she looked nothing like she had in life. She’d never worn more than a thin layer of eyeliner and never did more to her lashes than curl them with a metal object, and now she was done up like a carnival clown. Her skin had always been a palate of pastels: the color of the soft earth in our garden, the shade of the roses, the tint of the stepping stones, hues of pink and purple and blue spilling out at me like Easter morning. But death and the mortician had darkened her, turned her colors to those of late fall, when the world is most vulnerable. Afterwards, I stared at the backs of knees in a slow-moving sea of black cotton, harmonies of silverware and hushed voices flooding the fuzzy space between my ears. I had never understood why people speak in such low tones when a loved one dies; they can hear you still – loud or soft or not speaking at all – from a throne of white, perched on the roof, taking up corners in the living room, unseen. Hands of strange passersby gave my thin shoulders small sympathetic squeezes (always with one hand, the other balancing a paper plate bending under the weight of pasta splattered with red sauce, and someone’s homemade potato salad), a learned response to death and all of those things that follow it. I weaved through the crowd from our living room to the kitchen. A group of women stood near the granite island; each one of them looked sick, their features sunken and catching shadows as my mother’s had for months. One turned as I entered the room; red hair the fiery color of autumn was ignited at the edges as sunlight poured in from the window behind her. I lifted a hand for shade. Her green eyes softened and one corner of her mouth rose in a defeated half smile. “Sarah,” she said. My name spilled from her mouth as a sad melody; “Sar-” a high pitched tune, the “ah” fading into the low range of an Alto. It was the safe song of grief and gentle condolences. “Hi,” I replied. My own voice sounded smaller than usual, higher, even for seven. It’d been hours since I’d spoken to anyone. She crouched to my level, away from the rest of the gossiping women, her knees making a loud cracking sound on the way down. Once at eye level I realized her hair color was probably not her own. She smoothed the wrinkles in her dark pencil skirt. I breathed in, the sweet, thick scents of a neighbor’s string bean casserole and someone’s blueberry pie filling my nostrils. My stomach moved in waves. “Your mother was one of my best friends. I’m so sorry.” I stared. What did it matter? Years later, after several encounters with death, I’d come to realize that in the face of personal tragedy people always blurt out their relationship status with the freshly departed. “We went on a date once,” a high school classmate choked out between tears, after sophomore Andrew Sharpman hung himself in his parents’ attic. When the little blonde girl two streets over was hit by a drunk driver while she chased a ball across the concrete, a neighbor at the funeral cried out to anyone who would listen: “I bought her an ice cream once!” I gave her a slight nod as if it was my turn to do the consoling and she smiled, rising up again to dab at her face with a wrinkled tissue. She faded back into the crowd of other mothers who looked as I walked by, bits and pieces of “just a shame” and “what now” being dropped delicately in my path. In the hallway by the front door there was the small table in a half moon shape that for years had greeted visitors with a vase packed with flowers from the garden and a picture of me

as a baby, my father balancing me on the edge of his knee as my mother hung on his shoulder, mouth open, looking somewhere other than the camera. Now the table was draped in an ocean blue fabric I’d tied in a knot around my neck hundreds of times when I was a superhero running marathons through the house. It was the same fabric that covered the square pillows in the family room, the thread my mother used to sew it together now fraying into tiny swirls at every corner. The vase was still there, filled with a mixed bouquet someone had bought at the grocery store. The picture of me and my father and my mother was pushed somewhere to the back, a picture of her standing alone now dominant in the front, by a river, one toe in the freezing water, red sandals dangling from a bent index finger, in a time before I knew her and she knew me. Other tiny photos of family friends and my father and random holidays surrounded that one in faded frames. I ran my fingers along the blue fabric down to the wrinkled spot that hung below one edge of the table, where I’d tied and retied the knot. No one had bothered to iron it out, or else they hadn’t noticed it was there. “How you doin’, kiddo?” I turned to see my father’s friend Eddie standing awkwardly by the table that chronicled my mother’s life, hands in the tattered pockets of a gray suit jacket, hair matted on one side proving he had woken up just in time to make it inside with the rest of the guests. I couldn’t remember seeing him at the service. “Fine,” I mumbled, turning quickly back to the blue fabric and the wrinkle no one but me recognized. “Real sorry about your mom,” Eddie said, pulling a pack of cigarettes from one pocket, a glitter of gold and white from the box illuminated in the sunlight that sprayed through a window. I watched as he took one cigarette from the pack and shoved it between his lips, a lighter suddenly appearing and a flame being brought to life inches from his face. I felt the heat on my cheeks from where I stood. I rubbed one scuffed white sneaker against the tiled floor. He stood for a while, next to me in the foyer, neither one of us saying a word. I coughed, Eddie cleared his throat. He’d held me once, when I was four, maybe, when my parents got into a fight and I cried and cried until they stopped. He took me out into the morning and pointed at the leaves on the trees, naming out loud every color from red to orange to green. “Repeat after me,” he’d said, my arms wrapped around his neck, his right index finger pointed stiffly at a tree branch. I looked out past his arm, past his finger, into the back yard I’d roamed thousands of times before; suddenly the visions of what I’d thought I’d known had changed. The flames of autumn unfolded in front of me, with colors I’d only seen before reflected in the bonfires my father had sometimes sparked. I remembered how wide my eyes had been, how the cold had been sucked in through my mouth as I inhaled the discovery. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Eddie had said, bending his knees and slightly jumping upward to lift me higher on his hip. I don’t remember if I answered, but instead I remember the yelling as it dissipated from the house, soon replaced by a quiet murmuring on the back porch. A few stern sentences were followed by the usual, effortless laughter of my mother. I turned to Eddie and smiled; he smiled back. “Thank you,” I said, back to reality in the stale foyer. He fumbled; there was nothing elegant about him now, as there had been only years before. I wondered what had happened to him. Had he lost someone along the way? Eventually Eddie wandered into another room towards the sweet smell of hotdogs in a blanket and there I was again, the outsider in an event I thought should have been at least partly about me. I continued through the house, a stranger now in each room of my own home, people I didn’t know or barely now sitting on the couch I napped on, leaning on the

mantel that still displayed pictures of me, eating the fruits my mother had packed into the fridge in hopes I would eat them without being asked. The whispers continued, bouncing off of the paisley wallpaper, echoing like the ocean in the vase that held her flowers, ricocheting through the static in my brain. The hallway seemed to lengthen as I searched for my father in a mob of sympathetic smiles and wrinkled brows aimed casually in my direction. I checked each room, every one I passed occupied by some grieving neighbor or acquaintance touching my mother’s blue robe that hung on the back of a door, flipping through the pages of her favorite book on the nightstand, rattling off information that pretended to know where she’d gone to college or what her favorite drink had been. I soon grew heavy; my sneakers dragged across the wooden floor as if I’d just ran for miles, as if I’d been turning my head left then right in search for days. Every corner was crowded with someone who did not belong, and for a moment I stopped somewhere between the upstairs powder room and the hallway closet where I squeezed my eyes shut and held my breath, a temporary leave of absence. “Sarah?” I squeezed my eyes shut tighter. I’d need to take a breath soon. “Sarah, baby, what are you doing?” I heard the nervous laughter of my father. He’d always sounded edgy, even when he seemed otherwise relaxed. He put one hand on my head and I let go, my shoulders slumping forward as I exhaled loudly. I opened my eyes and looked up, seeing sparks of light at first but then the familiar smile that curled only to the left side of his face, the large, dark eyes that always reminded me of a giraffe’s searching my matching ones as I caught my own image in them. No response; instead I wrapped my thin arms around his waist, my cheek resting high against one hip, leaving him with nowhere to go. I stared down at the un-scuffed leather shoes he’d worn maybe once before, on my parents’ tenth anniversary, and I remembered wondering how he’d twirled her for hours without even a blemish forming in the black, squared toes. “Sarah,” he said again, lower this time, almost a whisper; the only whisper that day meant for me to hear. I hugged tighter. Memories of my mother climbed from my eyes and jumped downward onto my father’s slacks, my dress, the wooden floor she’d polished, his spotless shoes. His larger hands had to pry mine away before he could scoop me up from my underarms, like thousands of times when I was much smaller and grabbed at him because my own legs were too tired, or I was just pretending. As my feet left the floor so suddenly did my strength, the burden of the day, the responsibility I’d been handed for hours on a Tuesday when I was seven. As soon as I’d reached eye level I pressed my face in the crease between his neck and shoulder, into the warmth, into the faint smell of the cologne she’d make him wear on special occasions, and I wailed. It left me louder than I’d thought it would, in undulating pitches, in pauses filled with coughing fits or the need for more breath. Soon my father had joined me, his face buried the same way in my collarbone, his tears soaking the collar of my dress. I didn’t know it at the time but it had grown to a deafening silence in every room: the whispers gone, the silverware put down, the flipping of pages or fluffing of pillows disrupted as everyone looked to each other, to the ceiling, or the walls, trying to make out where it was coming from, the sound of two sirens underwater.

nicole pasquarello

Postcard to James Schuyler at Magic Hour Though I never knew you, I suspect this time of day — when sunlight teases out the rose, lavender, & orange dormant in facades — was your favorite. You also knew a lovely building when you saw one so maybe you would understand this craving for imploded factories. What I specifically miss are the smokestacks, Jim. They made my father’s blue collar part of the skyline.

Stephen Potter

Eve at Dawn

voice fluid

Think of her standing there struck still by sudden understanding,

he had a voice made of a viscous fluid it was obvious that he practiced it in the mirror at home, probably he poured it in a corrosive honey ooze in a special jar that I could spread on things but it stripped off paint jobs ate through everything turned every body part into an ear a kiss ending in teeth, a leech sucker he had an endless supply he never asked for it back

the fruit fallen from numb fingers after that first bite had brought to her a body now known to be beautiful. Her heart pounds, her breathing is short and fierce, a sound almost silent as the Garden is almost silent, surrounded by the scrape and whir of a thousand summer insects rubbing their legs together. She grasps, hands shaking

Lily Applebaum

to reach for another apple, running to search for Adam, startling from their sleep the animals he had named.

Folk Art Center

The fruit in her hand extended toward him shines red with reflected fire. Her body is the earth in early March, quivering, crying in anticipation Now? Now? Now?

Shopping For Art What Is For The Heart What It Likes Or Not.

Joseph A. Cilluffo

Danny P. Barbare

Body Box When I woke up and heard the high-pitched ring, I knew a part of my middle ear was missing. She had stolen the malleous or incus – hammer or anvil. I shook my head, but the sound remained, along with the memories of my daughter, Chandra, in our bedroom. Chandra’s footsteps padding across the carpet. Her thin fingers touching my hair and skin. Her nails picking through my flesh to touch the organs underneath. That morning I asked my husband Allan about a lock for her room. “At five years old? Don’t you think she’s a little young to be able to keep us out?” he asked. Allan had one eye on the television, one of those drug intervention shows. His cell phone buzzed. He glanced at the display and tossed the cell aside. “I don’t mean for locking out,” I said, leaning against the wall. My balance had been off since last night. Allan paused the show. He looked at me, probably noticing the worry lined across my forehead and the sadness that sagged the skin under my eyes and around my stomach. He opened his mouth three times, halfformed words caught. “It was jewelry. Try forgiving her, if only for yourself.” I swallowed hard. “I love her,” I said. “She’s stealing again, Allan.” “Stealing?”

Parts of my body, I thought and picked at the cuticle around my thumb. “Things only I would know about.” “I’ll talk to her.” Allan picked up his phone and began typing. The day the jewelry had turned up missing, I had tried not to blame her. I had asked Chandra again and again whether she had taken them. I used a sweet voice, one a four-year-old would understand. I explained the difference between right and wrong, that you shouldn’t take things that aren’t yours. Finally, I begged – “You don’t understand what they mean to me. They are the only things from my family I kept.” She just smiled, wrinkled her upturned nose, and said, “No, mommy.” I had found the jewelry in her closet, hidden in a small purple box in the back. I screamed at her then. Threatened. Shook her by the arms. Allan snapped Chandra up before I could do anything more. Chandra was crying so loudly her voice disappeared for three days. I would have done far worse had I known what would come later. The first time I noticed a body part missing, we were at a butterfly conservatory. Chandra had been sick the week before with a two-week fever that broke overnight, and Allan suggested we take her out, just to relieve her isolation. Chandra knew to never touch the wings,

which would remove the chitin, tiny scales that made them shine iridescent. Allan walked her to a box where chrysalides hung with the next generation of butterflies ready to emerge. The hard mountings looked like tiny shells. “They only live for a few days once they emerge,” he told us. “The butterflies die so soon?” Chandra covered her mouth. Fat tears gathered in her eyes. “That’s not true,” I said, knowing that most butterflies live for weeks. Chandra began to cry. She pushed me away and started to run. I tried to grab her arm, but my leg buckled and I fell to the pavement. Allan helped me to a bench and went to bring her back. “I hurt mommy?” Chandra asked, stepping from behind an exotic fern. “No,” I lied, clasping my knee, pain surging down to my ankle. I felt a strange scar and hole in the joint. “You scared us.” A butterfly flew past and Allan’s eyes followed its erratic path. He sighed. Chandra’s eyes narrowed when she touched the scar. She ran her finger pads run along my purple flesh until her nails cut the knotted skin. “I hurt mommy,” she said, her gaze locked on my eyes. She licked her dry lips. It felt as if the ligament had never been attached, it had vanished so completely. Of course, Allan didn’t believe me when I said my limp was because of Chandra, that I knew from her reaction that she had pulled strands of ligaments from my knee. I haven’t eaten much more than a crust of bread or drunk anything stronger than tea in months, since she cut a rope of intestines from me, leaving a nickelsized dent in my stomach. Chandra grew despite eating little of what was offered at dinner. “She never touches her fork,” Allan said. When Chandra was at school, I sat at the kitchen table. I couldn’t walk much further than the bus stop, so I made up logic puzzles to keep my reasoning sharp. Angels on the head of a pin. One hand clapping. If I screamed and no one heard it, whether it would make a sound. The night after Chandra cut a nerve from my eye, ruining my peripheral vision, I had to talk to Allan. His eyes, even while sleeping, remained open, the vitreous gel like set gems. In the seven years we’d been married, he had never remembered anything after he fell asleep – it was like talking to his naked inner

thoughts. I needed him to have no memory of our conversation that night. “My life since Chandra feels compressed. Small house, small desk, small bed. Small body, too. I calculated that I lost ten percent of my weight in the last three months.” I sat up, my back to the headboard. “Compressed?” His voice was raspy, barely a whisper. “I can’t walk anymore. I’m scared I will lose everything,” I said. He took a deep breath, as if settling to sleep. “She will replace you, piece by piece.” My heart raced, and I pushed my hands against my chest, feeling something odd: an asymmetry under a thin scar. Chandra had plucked a rib from my chest. Was she going to rip out my lungs, fiber by fiber? I wondered. “When did you realize that?” I asked, but Allan didn’t answer. The house was still, except for the endless breathing cycles of my husband and the shallower patterns of Chandra. I limped to her room. For an hour, I sat and watched her, tucked inside the covers. A poisonous butterfly of my own creation. By the dim hallway light I searched her closet. I felt the small outline of her special box, where she had hidden my jewelry. I felt an edge, but of a much bigger box than I remembered. It had grown heavier. Taking it to the hallway, I found what I had hoped, what I had feared. Inside was a tiny organ, which I recognized as the hammer of my ear, along with a splinter of rib, intestines like knotted yarn, a shred of nerve, and a cut of tendon. Beneath, were parts I didn’t expect, parts that were not mine. Tucked at the very back, were the blackened shreds of Allan’s seminal vesicles. Our bodies, the parts that were taken, had shriveled like apples left for months in the icebox. Lost to me, the way my youth had been. We will both be replaced, I thought. I promised to myself then never to confront Chandra. Not to yell or threaten or tell her I had learned her secret. It had become our family’s secret. I looked closer, and what I saw made me slam the box and tremble, hoping not to wake the child nearby. A child who would most certainly come again in the night. There, on my intestines, were garlic dust, a drop of olive oil, and spiraled, petite teeth marks.

Shawn Proctor

storm on A st. Winter is gone and I mean me I learned not to write of it, askt instead for speech — which is power where it will be, at the hearing on the 17th, behind the wood and the face of old whites, they are pink and white, powerful, as were taught Mr. Woody, he was a large pink man who sold pretzels for 25 cents each and said never to lean your head back when you had a nosebleed because you will choke I’ve never had a nosebleed, ever. Absoposilutely. Sure. Mr. Woody had a paper cut out of Woody Woodpecker on his office door. One day I heard he had died. Pretzels tasted of blood, children dusted the sidewalks with salt, blood, itself, salty. I was salty, even. Other kids were. Other kids I knew, who died. An old man w/ a large tricycle rode us kids up and down the block in his giant basket. At the end of the block were Cambodians. Rathey and his brother who had all the Zords. At the other end, Christian, who only pretended to be my friend. My cousin and I staring at five or more black kids who stood on our front lawn. I don’t remember what happened after. I suppose they finally moved. One of the only white kids on the block askt for sugar and wrote ‘thanks’ w/ it on our front steps. My mother told me that in the morning, grandpa was sweeping all the ants away.

Quyen H. Nghiem

Download

THE BUZZ An Audio Guide to Philadelphia Spoken Word

by APIARY Magazine At coffeeshops, on stages. From universities and church pews. For more than two decades, Philadelphia has been home to some of the most talented spoken word artists in the country. They’ve performed for the White House and won international competitions. And they’re all here on APIARY’s new digital mixtape, The Buzz. Want to listen in on what the nation’s already heard? Download The Buzz by using the QR code below or visiting apiarymagazine.bandcamp.com.

FEATURING WORK BY

Hanna Van Sciver ≠ Mike O’Hara ≠ Clarence E. Wright Jacob Winterstein ≠ Alyesha Wise ≠ And many more

from organizations like

The Philadelphia Youth Poetry Movement Temple University’s Babel Poetry Collective And The Excelano Project at the University of Pennsylvania

D own l oad it for free at

apiarymagazine.bandcamp.com Photographs courtesy of The L.Park Project, Mike Taylor Collection and Danophonic.

Vacances They had delighted in the pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall, to the furthest café in town, where he would stay until and the beaches of Tahiti, but by the time they made it to he solved the entire puzzle page of the newspaper. But America, they had each just turned seventy-two and felt so. no matter what he did to keep in shape or stay sharp, he Gravity had taken its toll on them both. Lucie had gotten could feel his body and his mind growing weaker together, into the habit of dribbling whatever she ate down the front a condition he attributed to too much leisure time. of her dress, and sometimes she wore her napkin like a “Here you can work until the day you die,” Lucie said. bib. Albert, on the other hand, had developed a hunched “It’s terrible.” posture, and his earlobes seemed to be elongating down Albert was quiet. Then suddenly he grinned and said, the side of his face, the way stained glass is said to bulge “I would like to walk into this casino, and play my entire near the base after years of slow, imperceptible dripping. pension in a poker game with Donald Trump!” At the beach in Atlantic City, Lucie could tell through his “Do as you like,” was Lucie’s response. His jokes, which swim trunks that his testicles too hung lower than they had always been bad, had gotten worse. used to. He approached the sea with too much caution, “I don’t really want to,” he reassured. his back bent and his knees bowed, stepping uneasily They stopped in front of a pier to watch the people into the break and receding tide. He had never been boarding the thrill rides. There was no organization to much of a swimmer, true. But in the photo albums from the arrangement of the rides. They appeared to run over their early family vacations at the Riviera, he seemed so and into one another, as did the lines of people, creatmuch defter in the water, smiling as he carried his young ing a clutter that excited in Lucie a desire too recessed children on the waves. and foreign to her to prevent her from saying reflexively, On the boardwalk, they bought ice cream cones from “How dangerous!” Albert wondered if it were possible to a vendor. Lucie spoke enough English (and knew enough synchronize the hundreds of separate mechanisms that about the inflections of speech) to know that the children all day moved parts into place and let them go. Had they behind them in line were making fun of Albert’s travel not been so tired from the sun, they might have ridden purse, where he kept his money and sunscreen. the old wooden roller coaster, still never daring to let go of “Where are you folks from?” the vendor asked them. the safety bar in their laps, their shoulders pressed close He was a tall, thin old man, wearing a bright white outfit, together, holding each other in by the friction of their which Albert thought made him look like a surgeon. On bodies. the wall hung black and white pictures of him as a young man, serving ice cream in the very same store, at least The train brought them from the beach back to 30th fifty years ago. Street Station in Philadelphia, where they were staying three nights in a hotel in Center City. Albert scrambled Albert looked to his wife, awaiting the translation. “He wants to know where we are from,” she told him. up the marble steps from the platform to the concourse, while Lucie rode the escalator beside him. He was growThen she said aloud, “France.” “French?” the old man said. “We have a lot of French ing anxious, she could tell. Canadians here, but never many French French.” The fear that they were wasting time had struck him Albert and Lucie managed to smile as politely as they already down in Washington, DC. He had shot up from could, understanding too little, and not wanting to make his chair by the hotel pool and began to dress himself, the effort of responding. insisting that they go to one of the Smithsonian museums “It’s remarkable that that ice cream vendor is still on they had skipped over the day before and that it would be the job,” Albert said, as they walked down the boardwalk. a terrible shame not to have seen everything they could. Albert had owned a successful printing company, and However, as they walked toward the mall, his urgency had made enough money in his life to afford all those gave way to a quiet brooding. Finally, he gave a sigh of vacations, and also to retire early. He had spent his early resignation and said, “Let’s go back to the hotel. We’re days as a retiree cooking elaborate meals and relaxing on both tired.” the balcony, watching people pass on the street below. But Dealing with Albert was still easier than dealing with soon, he took up a regimen of exercise, walking each day a travel agency or a tour group, which Lucie had grown

to detest. They had always traveled in group tours, but Lucie had insisted that, for their long-overdue American vacation, they not sign up for any package and that instead they buy the Michelin guide and make their own itinerary. “It will be our own holiday,” she had said when they were first planning the trip. “You’ve never planned a trip before,” Albert replied. “Leave it to the professionals. You’re going to get us lost.” “The guide is very good, Albert. Besides, you know how tiresome it is to be in a group. This way we will have plenty of time to relax. Just the two of us. Wouldn’t you like that?” “I don’t want to relax. I want to see things.” “Ok, then. This way we will be able to visit as much as we want, whenever we want. It won’t just be les vacances.” “Very well, Lucie.” Lucie eventually presented Albert a schedule. They would start in DC and for seventeen days work their way up the east coast, with stops in six cities, and rigorous sightseeing in each. While it reassured him that their time in America would not be wasted, the long list of dates and foreign names overwhelmed Albert. He put the list down and sighed. “This is too much, no?” he said. “We are getting older after all.” The air conditioning was kept on strong at the Double Tree

Hotel where they were staying, and it was sometimes so cold that they had to eat their breakfast with caps on. But after a day at the beach, the cold blast that greeted them as they passed through the sliding doors was welcome. “Oh that does some good,” Albert was saying. “I think I’m burnt.” “I will put cream on you when we get upstairs,” Lucie said. As they passed the front desk, Albert looked at the concierges, something he did anytime he stayed at a hotel. Lucie knew that the staff was one of Albert’s favorite topics of conversation while on vacation. He always insisted that everything be correct, and whenever he said that, she heard his father, and remembered how adamant that man had been that everything at their wedding go correctly, though he was to die two months before the ceremony. Even in the more exotic places they’d stayed, Albert was wary whenever “ethnics” were left in charge. He was quick to say who was trustworthy and who was not, though he never did much about it, beyond hiding his suitcase under the bed or storing his extra cash in a coin-operated safe. Once back in the room, Lucie had Albert take off his shirt and lie facedown on the bed. Years of chafing shirts had worn most of his body hair down to a few commemorative wisps. She noticed how his birthmarks had grown larger, stiffer, and less inviting since the last time she’d seen his torso.

As she worked sunburn cream into his red shoulders, ing. Albert paused in front of a painting of the founding fathers in deliberation, and Lucie joined him, sweat formhe began to speak. ing around her coiffure. “I can’t hear you, Albert,” she said. He turned his head to the side and repeated himself: “They must have all been very hot,” Albert was saying. “Did you see that old concierge looking at me? The black.” “Especially with those ridiculous wigs.” “They all seemed nice to me,” she said. “They were all great inventors,” Lucie remarked. “They “I just don’t understand how he can be allowed to work loved machines. Like you, Albert.” here. This country. Old people everywhere. Old people Albert pointed to a figure in the painting. “Is that who sell you ice cream, old people who sell you tickets Franklin?” he asked. for the train, old people who work at the hotel.” “Benjamin Franklin, yes,” Lucie replied. “Albert,” Lucie said, just massaging his back now that “A real old bugger.” all the cream was gone. “We should eat dinner. According A group of children streamed past them noisily. to the guidebook, there’s a French restaurant not far from “Oh, we’ve lost our place!” here.” “There’s no place, Albert. But let’s move along.” “I’m not very hungry,” he said, righting himself. “I think “If there’s no place, then can’t I just stay here?” he asked. it’d be best if I got some rest.” “The guide is explaining something and I won’t understand what. I understand more looking at this painting.” “But it’s still early. Don’t you want to do something?” As she led him into the assembly hall, it occurred to “These sunburns are tiring me, Lucie. I am burned.” her that maybe he was right, and she felt a little bad for “Very well,” she said. “Get your rest.” While Albert rested, Lucie read the guidebook, plan- him. But something about that morning had upset her. ning the next day’s itinerary and tiding herself over on She was listening to the guide talk about the biggest chair snacks from the mini fridge. After a bit, she was also ready at the front of the hall, and she started not only to feel to sleep. She was feeling the sun too. She went into the upset, but also to feel that for once it was the right feelbathroom, fixed her hair, came back into the room, and ing to have. The chair had belonged to Washington, the lay down. guide explained, and for months Franklin had stared at the image of a sun carved into the back of the chair, trying Lucie awoke alone. She stayed in bed until 7:40, exactly to decide if it was rising or setting. She could feel Albert ten minutes longer than she ever would have with Albert looking at her. She should have translated for him, but there, hoping, just a little, that he might knock gently on didn’t bother. Instead, she looked at the chair and decided, the door, wait for her to announce she was decent, and unlike Franklin, that there was no real way of telling where come in with coffee and pastries. She knew that this was the sun was going. done sometimes. But she also knew that breakfast in bed was out of the question. The flakes of pastry crust would They emerged from Independence Hall and went to a get in the sheets and in their hair and Albert would never nearby cafeteria where Lucie, who had not yet had any stand for that, and neither would she, she thought. breakfast, bought a coffee. In a series of precise motions, Instead, she found Albert seated in the lobby, wearing Albert rolled his sleeves back, removed his cap, set it his cap and one of the two emergency sweaters he had perfectly on the counter, drew a handkerchief from his packed, clutching a cup of coffee with both hands close trousers, wiped his brow, and let out a puff of air. to the indent in his chest. In his lap was his book of extra- “So, the ‘Independence Hall,’” he said. “Very good.” difficult crosswords and a fountain pen. Lucie waited for Albert to finish his thought, any thought, “This is how you catch the flu in the summer,” he said, until she realized there was nothing to finish. noticing her from the corner of his eye. “It’s hot outside “Was it correct enough for you, Albert?” she asked sudand icy inside. So where to today, my guide? I’m ready.” denly. “The ‘Independence Hall.’” “Are you mocking me?” “What about the skyscrapers, ma cherie ? We said we “No, not at all, Albert. I just want to make sure that you would see them, no?” visit everything you want to visit.” “Later, Albert, later.” She sipped her coffee. Albert was still. The heat inside Independence Hall was stifling. They “We could go see the Liberty Bell now,” she said. “Or moved in a slow stream of people through the old build- we could take a break. Maybe we should rest a little, don’t

you think? You were up so early this morning.” “I let you sleep in, didn’t I?” “I would hope so. I’m on vacation, Albert!” “Well this is not the way that I like to vacation.” “We really ought to take a break, Albert,” she retorted. “You’re getting older, after all,” she said and excused herself to go to the bathroom. When she came back, Albert’s seat was vacant. Instead of going straight back to the hotel, Lucie went sightseeing. She saw the Liberty Bell; she saw Franklin’s grave covered in pennies, and left a penny of her own; she toured Betsy Ross’s house and bought an American flag; she ate a pretzel in the park next to the Christ Church. Everything was so patriotic here: she noticed the oversized flag draped over a coffin that pallbearers were loading into a hearse; she noticed a vagrant woman because she carried her things in red, white, and blue souvenir bags; she noticed a van transporting handicapped people because it belonged to Liberty Transport, and had stars painted on the side. That Albert had disappeared did not worry her. She was relieved, in fact. Over the last fifty years, Albert had been mad at her more times than she could count, always in a way that made her feel stupid. But he had never once stormed off. So many times he had scolded her and went on sitting at the table, telling her what she was doing wrong, while she had no choice but to go on cooking his dinner. And she would wish that he would just walk off. She often wished too that she might get the chance to be irritated at him for once. And yet, she wondered, when life without Albert finally came, would it be like this? Would it happen so suddenly? Would she be mad at him beforehand? Would she be relieved afterwards, and would she continue on so easily on her own? Just then, she realized that Albert might outlive her. He could never do it, she thought. But he had left her at the cafeteria, hadn’t he? He chose to go out there, now, in a country where he didn’t speak language. And at the thought of this, she got up from her bench, and made her way back to the hotel. When Lucie walked into the lobby and found Albert sitting there, she felt a little foolish. Of course he would be here, she thought, in his cap, filling out a crossword. She knew he would be. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, looking up. “I want us to go out to dinner,” she said, standing over

him. “To that French restaurant nearby. I already bought the wine.” “You already bought the wine,” he repeated. “The guide says we have to bring our own.” She showed him the wine she had picked out on her walk back to the hotel. He examined the label and, to his credit, reserved his judgment. Albert was quiet on the walk over to the restaurant, bothering only to mutter about how baffled he was that they had to bring their own wine. Neither of them brought up what happened that day. There was nothing to say. At the restaurant, they were seated immediately, which pleased them both, and service was speedy, a quality that Albert always valued. It looked much like any bistro they might go to at home. The food was not too bad either, and Lucie was pleased that at least they might have a nice dinner together. “I thought it would be sillier in here,” she said. “Didn’t you hope so?” “I’m glad that it’s good,” Albert said. He hunched over his steak, and cut into it with the steady rhythm of a carpenter sawing a block of wood. “I guess I expected we would have something to laugh about at dinner. Like waiters with bad French accents. Or dishes on the menu with funny names. Coq à la Marie. Something a little ridiculous.” Albert finished the steak, wiping the plate neatly with a piece of bread and laying the knife and fork over it like a cross. He waited for the waiter to clear the plate, but the restaurant was full now, and service was slowing down. “Did you enjoy yourself today?” she asked him. “Despite everything?” “Yes, yes. How come the waiter isn’t clearing my plate?” “He’s busy, Albert.” “Well I don’t want to sit here too much longer. We did enough sitting today.” “You did enough sitting, Albert,” Lucie said. Albert looked around for their waiter. He rolled his eyes at Lucie. Then he pointed to the red stains of duck drippings that had appeared on her blouse. “Oh my,” Lucie said. “You should be more careful.” “Stop chastising me, Albert.” When the waiter finally brought them the check, he pointed to the half-empty wine bottle and asked them a question. These days, they could only bring themselves to drink a little. “I think he is asking if we want to bring the wine home,” Lucie said.

“He wants us to bring it home?” red, and the man lurched back, gripping his head where Albert had struck him with the wine bottle. He let out a “Well yes. We bought it; we get to keep it.” Now that it was dark outside, the skyscrapers were lit low, confused moan, which disturbed Lucie much more up, each a different color. Albert, who was carrying the than if he had just shouted. They had gone at least five bottle of wine under his arm, looked up. blocks before Albert realized that he was still holding half “The financial district is very close by,” he remarked. the bottle, and dropped it promptly. “We could use a good digestive walk.” In the bathroom back at the hotel, they checked each other As a former businessman, Albert appreciated what the for injuries. In the light, Lucie could see that Albert’s tall buildings represented. The buildings in Washington, clothing was, for the first time in his life, covered in red though impressive, had none of the vertical grandeur of stains. Always squeamish, Albert was glad that whatever other American cities. Albert and Lucie had come of age blood there had been could not be detected from the wine. in a time when America was struck through their lives “I’ve never been robbed before,” he said. “I must be with Mickey Mouse, Zorro, Ford Mustangs, and, most marked as a grandpa. Attack the grandpa.” importantly, the Liberation. Skyscrapers were the archi- Lucie was silent. tecture of those fantasies. Needless to say, Asia’s modern “Shouldn’t we call the police?” skylines did not enchant Albert in the same way. “I suppose,” she said at last. When they walked onto Market Street, they found it “I leave that up to you,” Albert replied. “You’re the one quiet, its storefronts shuttered. The glow of the buildings who speaks English.” was like falling dust, covering everything below in the Now that they were safe, and sure that they were unkind of pale light radiated by old stars. In it, they could harmed, Lucie’s adrenaline cooled into fear. For the first see they were the only ones in the district. time in her life, she had seen Albert injure someone. What made it more frightening was that he had done it without “Here it is,” announced Albert. any anger or forethought. It was as if he had carried inside “All for us,” remarked Lucie. “There’s nobody here.” Albert was walking with his neck craned back, straining him a wound-up spring needing only the right amount to see the tops of the skyscraper looming overhead. Lucie, of pressure to trigger. But the man sitting deflated on the however, looked at the street. Down here, the buildings bed before her seemed utterly incapable of what he had looked only like walls. It was like being at the bottom of done. Yes, he had done it all the same. But what else was a crevasse. They walked down the street, away from City he to do? Hall. Cars passed, but Lucie could not tell through their “Let’s not call the police after all,” she said, and at once their good fortune seemed to strike them both. “That was dark windows if anyone was driving them. “Can we turn onto another street?” she asked. “It’s very courageous of you,” she added. much too lonely here.” “It was, wasn’t it?” Albert said, smiling and reddening But Albert hesitated. The cross-streets receded away into a little. “What exactly did that man say to me?” darkness where small homes and churches were just “I’m not sure,” she said. “It’s not important.” visible at distance. He looked at her. She saw him calming down now. The anxious knot in his chest was loosening. For the first time “There must be something up ahead,” he said. “I don’t think so, Albert. I think everyone is at home.” in months, he seemed to welcome the fatigue encroaching on his body. He lay down. “Ok. The light is giving me a headache anyway.” They turned at a corner, rounding the base of a brown “I’m tired,” he said. “Me too,” she said, lying down next to him. She smelled building. of perfume, wine, and duck fat. “It looks like there is another avenue ahead.” Suddenly, a man walked toward them from the other “I love you,” he said. side of the street, and said something inaudible. When “I love you too.” Albert and Lucie made no response, he gestured towards There was something else to be said, but she did not his coat. But it was much too dark to see why. A moment say it. She just pressed her bony shoulder into his. The later, he put his hand on Albert’s shoulder. howling siren of an American police car passed in the “What is he saying?” Albert asked her. “Is he in distress?” street, and as it receded to a further part of the city, they “I think he wants to rob you, Albert. It’s a mugging ! ” fell asleep. There was a loud crack accompanied by a burst of Maxime D. McKenna

vocals

the devil and mary blowjob at wrigley field

The city is made out of voices I live there in a half-furnished room but I’m not anonymous. I’m part of the babble but what I utter might be called song. This was on the shore of a Great Lake. A short drive away the waves were rolling in and out, and there was no salt. Reasons are running wild on the vine, and they don’t come home in the evening. I enter my door each night with the wrong key. At home, I’ve been sleeping upright in a chair. The bed’s been standing empty for too long for me to endure it. Gold is dissolved throughout the ocean, and comes down over the vocal city when it rains in the sunlight. Silver, though, is only a dollar in my pocket.

they scored the club seats at wrigley field. mary’s sporting heels and the devil’s wearing horns under his smoldering Cubs cap. the devil says: “i wish to hell they’d trade for some pitching, sweetheart. i’d sell my soul for a good righthander or even a closer with a nasty attitude.” and mary blowjob, she scratches the back of his scaly neck, real hard and angry like it was true true love and she says “darling baby, you don’t want to bring some hellbait fireballer in here: it would ruin everything. listen to this crowd — hear the woo-woo, smell the sulfur coming off a six-run shellacking, listen to them sing ‘take me out to the hell game’. they’re here to pray, to pray to losing. man, this is church, st. loser’s parish.” the devil, he squirms, grinding his ass into the slats of seat 105. “i’ll be damned” he says “forgive me mary, my error.” mary gives him a kiss, that big wet one she’s noted for. “yeah baby, these humans they mostly lose, every day they lose and god’s in their image, ya know.” when the weak pop fly shallow center ends the game bottom of the ninth, the devil smiles at mary blowjob. “amen” he says.

david kertis

lynn hoffman

from handmade recursive fast food restaurant menu [1]It is a dazzling because harmoniously crucial figurationâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;flatly demanding recognition for each diminutive facet in a moment of dumb luminescence and stupidly reflective approachability in which consistencies of initialized mass identify in a coherent pliability stillness like truth and modulatory states of appearance as appearance itself to the threshold of manipulationâ&#x20AC;&#x160;â&#x20AC;&#x201D; according itself shadowtwin of animal craft.

yea the thing I am working on right now is a

Something must be taken, and that thing here is in

um uh a book a book project where uh I am

you as its circumstantial registration and own

take a fast food restaurant menu and try to

integrative face, for you retroactively

think about how to recreate every item on it

autochthonous, a featureless light blocking double

without doing any research into um food

that is also your whiskery touch and its failure to

production and uh um preparation and cooking

instantly maim. those kind of things so just kind of making up the recipe sotospk for um the entire menu item to item its recursive its called recursive um its called handmade recursive fast food menu uh fast food restaurant [from handmade recursive fast food resturant menu ] and um its recursive in that each like obtaining each item would require would be would need to happen multiple times so um you know if your making I dont know a hamburger you would have to make the item you have to you have to get you have to kill you I put on a soft cotton blouse

have to get a cow multiple you know once and then a second time et

light blue, and lift the collar gently,

cetera um and its also recur its also recursive to the extent that um in

and touch the round plastic buttons.

that I want each item to recur within the next one so that if your

Perhaps no issue is more vexed

making the second hamburger for instance you have the first

than the small linen jacket that slides

hamburger made inside of it such that by the end you would have a

over my arms; yesterday I cut my hair

kind of maximal restaurant item which is you know reasonably

into a bob. The ends fall to the bottom

imaginable as something that would be advertised um a maximal item

of my ears. I tuck my hair

including all other items inside of it a kind of so but right now I am just

behind my ears,

stuck on the you know its supposed to be very straightforward sort of

one at a time and smile.

but I have you have to kill a cow first thing and I feel like so just jumping right in you know angus burger some bullshit you have to fucking kill a cow so thats just what I am stuck on at the moment so just [1] stuck right there and eventually move forward (bare hands/ what kinfs iof tool ok?(utensilsd, pans etc when cookingetc ) Eddie Hopely

Oceanic Walking along the beach, I notice there are baby jellyfish like clear gems. They must be that, though I’ve never seen any this small. In my pirate life they are what I would have collected while everyone else was resisting the urge to drink seawater. My older brother tells me that a discoloration in the waves means fish. A school of them, all moving off together somewhere because that’s all there is to do anyway: aggregate. Eat or be eaten, he says, right? And I say, right, because he is. I admit that. It is sad, the tendency some of us have to let nature wring our hearts.

Once, he caught a young shark in the piece of ocean we stand in front of. He carried it home in his arms like a toothy grey baby that he could be proud of. Burning at both ends, caught between hot sand and hot sun, we stood sweating and he let me pet the unreal skin of it, told me how you move your hand the wrong direction to do it right, otherwise it felt like wet plastic. I don’t know what he did with the shark, its dead body if it died, and he can’t remember it ever happening. I am walking along the beach and the waves are humming, then hissing. They turn pink. Then a man comes out of the waves, lacking any Aphrodisian grace, shark-tumbling over himself and foamy shells. Robyn Campbell

HYDROPHOBIA the fear of water; an archaic term for rabies You jerk away from the metal bowl, you run from the spitting creek: When you swallow it feels like you’re swallowing sewing needles, but you can’t sleep for thirst. Last night you bled across the highway and hid in the tall grass while the fever rushed your skull and boiled your brains until they were hard like the hard-boiled eggs your master used to feed you on Saturdays. Now every old loving feeling has snuck away from you and you are wild again, deaf to your family; you troll the woods mouthing up squirrels and crows, moaning against the wind, your eyes as wide as the plates you used to lick clean, as red as the cardinals you used to let dart through the yard undisturbed. You rampage through that yard now skipping bullets, lapping up mud and rodent guts, and you’re not angry because you’re sick, you’re angry because you were made this way, all foam and blood, all hunger and thirst, rolled-up newspapers, bacon grease. Even while they were good to you, they were not good to each other. Whatever that was, your old life, is receding: Now the hand outstretched to you seems evil, and it’s not because you’re sick — every gentle impulse turned to fear — it’s because your fever has let you see what’s true. Rachel Marie Patterson

[Storm Watch] This weather comes too soon —

The old man’s troubled by the worms and the dog won’t take his pill.

GUEST EDITOR PICK

Don’t hesitate to take a broom to it. Insects get everywhere.

Magdalena Zurawsk

Color it Bluer My brother counted the whole way to the Pokes, out loud. He said he couldn’t just do it in his head yet and I didn’t believe him, but my mom always encouraged things like counting, so we sat in the car while he got up there past a thousand to the beat of a Creedence Clearwater cassette. One thousand, two hundred, and fourteen, Tommy said. It was a long ride. I listened to it and the wipers, and I watched them push rhythms of rain off to the side, all of it out of sync with the music and at odds with itself, and I guess I got restless. Forty-five, I said. My sister smiled, and we traded numbers back and forth. Tommy said, Mom, and she told us to cut it out. She said it to the water on the windshield and I could tell she was outside of us, back at the house we already left. One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Claire said, is my favorite movie. Tommy laughed a little and gripped his booster seat, shut his eyes. We’re going to 87 Emerald Lakes Lane, Tommy, I said. And I said, That’s the address, 87 Emerald. He lost count and started over. From the beginning and we let him. My mom didn’t notice, I hope, or she would have stopped him. She would have taught him to round down, to start from the last number he could remember but the rain came in curtains and she only slowed and squinted out the windshield while we let Tommy start over from zero. One, he said.

Tambourines and elephants, the cassette sang. My eardrums let out, and the roads shouldered us up into the mountains. I watched for deer in the wet woods. When I was a kid, my grandpa told me his house was on the tallest mountain in the world, and that’s why they called it the Pokes. Because it pokes God right in his rear-end, he said, and I liked to hear him tell it. I don’t think I ever believed it, not truly, but I liked to pretend that I did for a long time. Maybe because it was something to hold onto, and maybe it was like that with Tommy now, that he still set our family apart because we had a house at the top of the world. Maybe he pretended the Pokes wasn’t only short for the Poconos or he called it coincidence, or else figured the long version derived from the short one and not the other way around. One hundred and forty-five, Tommy said. When we pulled up, I got out and took a breath of the wet, cool air. In it with the rain was the moss and the bark and the musk of the woods, a smell I never remembered until I got back. That remembered itself that way. My mom stood just inside the hallway and dropped her bag, and I looked over her shoulder. In the middle of the living room was a yellow wine bottle, sitting on a chair with a funnel fitted into its mouth to catch the water that fell from the ceiling. There was a dark circle on the ceiling, pooling and falling in quick, clear drops and my mom didn’t say anything. The bottle was yellow, a relic of my grandfather’s. He used to make wine every autumn and always bottled it yellow. This one full of rain, and each new droplet hit and spread itself out to spill over the tin rim of the funnel. There, the puddle on the floor. My mom started to cry and said, It’s nothing. It’s too much, she says when my grandpa pours me a glass. First wine of the season, It’s not enough, I think. My mom takes a long sip from my glass and walks away, and he fills me back up. The chill of the wind off the lake in the night and the heat of the red in my stomach, I smile with the secret. I stood on the coffee table and said, The floor’s hot lava. Back at home, the day before we left for the Pokes. Claire had the jump-rope-whip and cut off my leg early on so that I had to hop around on my other foot, cushion to cushion. Tommy had the wiffle-ball-bat-sword and they made a truce and cornered me on the arm of the couch. I tried to jump over Tommy when my elbow went through the wall. Mom just had them painted, Claire said. Shut up, I said. We put a Jurassic Park poster over the hole but my mom tore it down as soon as she came home and her shout through the house. James, Claire, Thomas, get in here. And then, What the hell is this? Hole in the wall, Tommy said and touched his glasses. Mom did not curse. I know it’s a hole in the wall. Who did it? We played Gladiator again, Tommy said. Shut up, I said, and my mom told me she just had these walls painted. I know that, I said. Dad can fix it when he gets back, Tommy said. He knows how to do it. I know how to do it, my mom said. She said that isn’t the point. The point is you don’t just sweep dirt under a rug, you clean it up, not cover it with a poster, and do you think I’m stupid that I wouldn’t notice? She started getting back to the part about dirt under rugs, I guess it struck a chord. I went to my room. I didn’t have my own TV or anything so I picked out and put back a book. I found a charcoal set I’d gotten a few years back from some far-away aunt who guessed

I liked drawing. I had never opened it before. The paper was coarse and yellowed and, I decided, like papyrus. I drew hawk-men and rivers, waters and wings made heavy with black. Exodus, I titled it. I listened to my mom on the phone through the wall between my room and theirs. She was trying not to cry. I could tell by her voice, the way it wound up and croaked out. I have to get out of here, she was saying. I made more hawk-men. The hole in the wall in the living room was still there the next morning. A beige crater, cracked and caved in like the negative of an eggshell, but bigger. Like an ostrich’s eggshell, Claire said. We’re going to the Poconos, my mom said. She stopped calling it the Pokes when my grandpa died, I didn’t know why. I didn’t like it. Storm’s coming, she said. The sun on my back and the wind in my hair puts the boat to a tilt. My grandpa laughs and I do too until he gives me the rope that gives and takes from the sail and the rudder. I don’t know how, I don’t say. You do and you learn, he tells me and after we capsize I come up crying but he’s laughing and in doing it says, It’s not that serious. It’s only a boat. He rights it then and hoists me up, puts the rope in my hand, and the rudder. My sister whispered, Why is she crying, and I shook my head. My mom only replaced the bottle with another, yellow again, and I listened to the rattle of rain on the windows. Claire fixed Tommy a slice of crumb cake and they talked time travel. I’d go see the dinosaurs, she said, and see what happened to them. Why they all died out. Who set up that bottle? Tommy said. Maybe she was crying because of the hole in the wall back home and now one in the ceiling and her dead father’s bottle full of rain. Turned out it was Alex who had set up the bottle. My grandpa’s old friend with a key to the house, he still came around to check up on the place. This time he found us, in the living room watching the flooding going on back home on the news. Streets turned rivers and cars up to their chins in it. Without precedent, the anchors agreed. Alex whistled, inspected the leak in the ceiling and told my mom he would patch it up once the rain cleared out. If it ever does, he said. The ping of the rain on the funnel came like a clock-tick. Maybe he used the yellow bottle to catch it because he used to make wine with my grandpa every year. September will be four years already, he said to my mom. Can you believe it? She made him coffee and sent him home. Families on rooftops waved to helicopters on TV. It’s a good thing we’re up here, Tommy said. Tick-tick from the funnel. Because the floods can’t reach us up here. That’s right, my mom said. Top of the world, baby boy. Then Tommy said, What about dad? Ten, nine, eight, blastoff, he says and shoots me up out of the water. When I surface and clear it from my eyes I hit him in the chest and I scream, You jumped the gun. I show my dad the right way to count down from ten. How nasa does it. I climb onto his shoulders and holding his hair I tell him I wish I had wings. All pupas grow wings, he says. The next morning my mom hung up the phone and told us our father was back from Portland. The airports were all shut down, so he had to rent a car in Pittsburgh. He’s driving up this afternoon, she said. Today? Tommy said. He smiled at Claire and me and she smiled back. This afternoon, she said. I watched the backyard through a window. The shed there, a dull, peeling blue. A Civil War blue, a color for the North, my dad said once. The rain shot up from its aluminum roofing, Look how the paint’s peeling, I said.

I asked my sister did she remember when we painted it? She shook her head and my mom said that she was still young. I don’t remember, Tommy said. You were still dead, I said. Mom, he said. You weren’t born yet, T. And she said, James, I told you I don’t like that. I said I was taking a nap, but I walked down to the water alone. The rain’s soft clap on the woods and the lake. The infinite circles spreading across put a bend to its surface, like stained glass but alive. The time we painted the shed I had asked him, What’s your favorite color? Lavender, he said. My dad. What’s that? I said. You mean like purple? I was young, five or six. Sort of like purple. I laughed at him and put a brush into the blue paint, slow. That’s a girl’s color, I said. I took off my clothes and walked into the water, warm with the rain. My dad had said there were no such things as just boy’s or just girl’s colors. Colors are for everyone, he said. I believed him. I told him mine was green, and he said that he knew it. The air was cold so I kicked farther out and tread water, the line of it striping my neck. I looked back at the dock and the shed and the house in the woods. We put blue handprints onto our chests. Like Apaches, he said, and he told me how they painted their faces purple with berries and wore their hair long the way he did and they were warriors. Real men, I believed him. The faint shapeless flash of lightning, thunder unfolding down from the mountains. He let me go years thinking boys could like purple, I swam farther out. My dad and my grandpa line six yellow bottles in a circle on the dock, fit six mortars into their mouths and lean them out toward the storm. Panther-dark and prowling down from the mountains across the lake. I shiver, shirtless and the wall of it comes running across the water and hitting first in fat dark spots on the dock. A fuse is lit. Lightning on the water, the scream of the rocket and we dance around those bottles and the rain comes lashing in waves, the three of us firing back into the storm and howling like wolves like we’re the ones to be reckoned with. My dad walked up to the house through the rain. He wet the three of us with hugs under the awning, shook out his hair and tied it back. My mom leaned out the screen door and only told him to take off his shoes before coming in. And I’m going to take a nap, she said. So try and keep it down. Want to go swimming? he asked us. It’s raining, I said. I had already dried off. He laughed at me. Since when do you melt? Can we really go swimming? Tommy said. You mean that you’ve been here three whole days, with a lake out back and you haven’t swam in it once? It’s raining, I said, and I looked him over like he was something I’d never seen before, because that’s what he was. He saw me do it. He could tell that I knew that my dad was already gone. My dad throws Claire off and I push him in from behind. I beat my chest and I scream, King of the dock, watch the water. The clouds and the sky and the mountains and me are there riding along the laketop and when he tries to climb up onto the dock I put a heel to his forehead, lock eyes and I kick him back roaring.

Back home, the night before I put the hole in the wall, my mom told us our dad would be back in a week. He had never gone to Portland before, and she said it was for an interview, or something. Claire asked if we were going to have to move all the way out there if he got a new job. I wouldn’t worry about that, my mom said. The cutting board clapped and the blades of her shoulders swung into a rhythm as she sliced a carrot, set down the knife to circle back. When your father comes back he needs to talk to you. We both do, she said. My sister looked at me then and I left the kitchen to sit with Tommy in front of The Lion King. You gotta put your behind in your past, said Pumba. My dad already had a job. What was in Portland? Hakuna matata, sang Tommy. And then in their room, in the bedside table, I found the leaflet tucked inside of my mom’s Bible, the leather one with the gold trim. Also tucked was a wedding picture. A flower pressed flat. The leaflet promised resolution for couples going through transition and it bookmarked Exodus 23:1. Transition to what. My eyes didn’t work right, I couldn’t make out the words so I studied the photos that burned through the laminate. The wife smiling some kind of confidence to her husband. No. To her wife. Her husband-turned-wife. Who smiled too but up at me, shyly and terrible in the way that it said, Dad. Father-turning-mother, the leaflet said. I pressed my fingers to my eyes. Laid back on their bed and breathed through my mouth. Spinning above me like the solar system mobile we built for my room that still hung over Tommy’s bed were all of the times I had looked away from it. The butterfly net that he bought me and said was for catching more than just butterflies, but what else would I catch? Bees? Claire’s seventh birthday party, the girls in the kitchen baking cookies with dad. The little league games he stood on the sideline with cherry water ice and singing my name while I was at bat that red shock on his mouth like lipstick. Stop singing my name. Purple Venus and pink Jupiter and fuchsia fucking Pluto spun above me and I wanted to walk into my brother’s room and tear it all down but Tommy still loved it. I guess I did too was the thing. We walk on the lake, and the pines at shore bent low with the weight of the snow, bowing to the mountains like they are made of more than earth and time. Three sets of tracks lead back to the dock, my dad’s and Claire’s and mine. He brings a broom, moves a stripe of snow from the ice and we run and penguin across on our stomachs. The burn of the cold in my lungs, on Claire’s cheeks. Shhh, my dad says and points. A stag at the treeline beneath the mountains is watching. The strong slope of shoulders dusted white, the antlers branching up. Isn’t he beautiful, my dad says. Handsome, Claire says. She pokes him and says, He’s a dad deer, dad. Dear, she adds and laughs, but he only watches the thing alone in the world under all that white. Oh daddy dear? she says. He’s going to shed those antlers soon, he says and after a moment the deer turns off into the mountains. Daughter deer, he says and we penguin-race until dark, and sing. Dear dad he’s a dad deer oh daddy dear dat deer right dere is a daddy deer right daddy dear. I’m singing in the rain, he sang. I’m swimming in the rain, Tommy sang then. I watched them from the back porch with a yellow bottle in my hand. My mom had asked me to empty it when I had asked her why she wasn’t going swimming with her husband when she asked me why I wasn’t going swimming with my dad. I poured out some of the rain from the bottle and Tommy called out to me from the water.

Come on in, Jim. My dad swam in a shirt. That was new. Come on inny, Jimmy, Claire called. They watched me, but my dad didn’t. Instead, he threw Tommy in an arc through the rain and he bear-hugged Claire. Held on for as long as he could. If I had wings like my dad I could have flown down and pulled them out, carried my brother and sister up into the mountains, the top of the world. We could’ve watched the storm roll off into waves for miles and miles below. Tommy had never really met our grandpa, and he was young enough to forget he ever even had a dad. It could work. Swim with us, Jim with us, Claire sang. I carried the bottle down to the lake, and the three of them watched when I stood at the end of the dock and told my dad that we would erase him. We already had a mom and if he wanted to go and start over in Portland then take all of it with you and don’t come back. We get to start over, too. What I said was, When you go, take your solar system with you. The mobile over Tommy’s bed, we don’t want it. Jimmy, he said treading water. Go where, Tommy said. Portland, Claire said. But he already went to Portland, Tommy said. He said he came back, and my dad said he loved that solar system. He said he would bring it wherever he went to hang over his head and look up at the planets we built. Get out of the lake, I said. I was begging him. Or maybe it only thundered, but he got out of the lake, and Tommy followed him back to the house. Claire said my name, and I tossed the bottle into the lake and told her to go with dad. It bobbed out away from the dock like a candle on a river. When are you leaving, Claire said when she caught up to them, on the back porch under the awning in towels. My dad lit a cigarette and told them the time where we painted the shed. How mom had a fit when I spilled paint across the yard cupped in my hands, chasing my dad to cover him blue. How I howled like an Indian Brave. From the dock I heard Tommy howl like that, like he was the one to be reckoned with. The bottle rode out through the wall of the rain like my grandpa was calling it home. When are you leaving, Claire said. He said he was done with the lies, and he put out his cigarette like that’s where they came from. He waved the smoke away and blew the rest out. His voice shook through the rest of all that he said, the rest that I could not hear from my place on the dock through the rain and the trees. I’m finally finding myself, I could not hear him say. Or the questions they asked or the answers he gave, I didn’t want them. I didn’t see my sister hang on from the neck of her dad who wept like my mom, who had come out from the house to cry with her kids, but Tommy did not cry. He took off his glasses and pressed his fingers to his eyes, started over from zero. One, he said. Even from my place on the dock I could hear it. My mom held him tight on her lap but he kept on going. My dad said his name but he kept on going. Eleven, he said. I could hear it even from my place underwater. Patrick McNeil

Girl with Wings 2 little girls walking down the street 1 little girl is walking 1 little girl is flying

Ayah Joice

as the doctors dig

Kirtan Wallah

as the doctors dig into your body I click on my computer what can I do?

The day a mousetrap an instant awake my cheeks sunburnt I am shellbark

their hands are snakes writhing among your fragile insides your life, in those hands in their white, sterile hands

remembering how we leaned in asked each other What is real? Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t ask me how I made it through the night without you Underneath myself the cold metal chair

if you were at home in the heat of Cupang if it were long ago what would the healers do to you what would the elders recommend what ceremonies what songs what food would we eat what dances would we dance what prayers, what chants would we call to blessing

Sri Siva Prasad sits cross-legged whistles through O-shaped lips The harmonium drones the tabla patters He whistles devotees give it back in words

but it is this day you are in a hospital in Chicago I am in Philadelphia holding your wrinkly hand wondering what songs? what dances? what chants? Lovella Rose Calica

For me the words fill in this way taproot, synapse, ash. No stars in my crown. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve heard when the nurse cleans the wound it helps if the patient sings In my windowbox a praying mantis davens on a petunia Where he comes from a waggle of the head means yes

Faith Paulsen

Something Came Over Johnny We were all a little drunk when Johnny convinced us to have a cannonball contest. Sam and Keith said yes right away, but it took awhile to turn the others around. Lisa swore it was an elaborate way to make her top fall off. I was working on my third beer and could be swayed to almost do anything. I was still a lightweight then. Johnny’s folks had left for New Haven and wouldn’t be back until noon the next day. They’d left him a twenty for food, but Lisa had her sister’s old ID. Johnny’s shit brother was the first Sciorillo to go Ivy. It was all their Dad talked about. I thought that Keith would’ve had us, all three hundred pounds of him, but the poor guy had a lame jump. I would have been in the running if we had scored sanely – according to our weight to splash ratio – but my friends are cheap and can’t stand to get beat by a girl. The whole thing got pretty boring after ten minutes. I took my towel back from Keith, who was still pissed about his jump. “Dude, it’s fucked, you know? You can’t see your own splash.” “I guess,” I said. “I’m serious, it’s crap. Everyone’s supposed to just judge it for you?” “You gotta look at the waves when you come up,” Lisa said. “That’s not the splash.” Keith shook his head. “We should be tape recording these or something.” “It doesn’t matter.” I laughed, fumbling with my beer. Keith put his towel over the fence and looked back at the pool. “How else are we supposed to know?” “This one’s for you, Patterson.” Johnny pointed at me and sent a big one our way. Johnny and I had made out at Sam’s thing the week before, but we hadn’t talked about it yet. “I got you guys, didn’t I?” “No,” I lied. “I did too. Look at this place.” We could all hear the water smacking the side of the pool. “I’ll do it again,” he said. His next one got my ankles. Johnny came up, and Keith shook his head. “You guys suck,” Johnny said. After five more minutes, it was just Sam and Johnny, splash after splash, but another twenty-something and it was Johnny solo. “How high was that one?” he said. “Pretty high, dude,” we said. He jumped again. “How about that one?” We stopped answering him, but he kept jumping and asking, cannonball after cannonball. After awhile, Sam mentioned a pizza run and most of the guys piled into his car. I was promised a slice, so I walked to the side of the pool to stick my feet in. The sun had gone down and the water felt cooler than I remembered. Johnny hoisted himself out of the pool and stood across from me, panting. “Come on, Johnny.” “One more,” he said. He took a step back and hurled himself into the water again, one hand pinching his nose, the other wrapped around his knees. Once in the water, Johnny stretched out his limbs, turning around to face the sky. He let out a few air bubbles and looked up at me, the waves wetting my knees and my towel as I sat. Looked up at me and waved.

Kirsten Saracini

Parts of the Self I was raised in a family of nothing creators, inside, outside, belonging, disowned. In Revaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s jeweled box, there were photos with black crayon smeared across banned faces. I will never know resemblances, if they wrote poems in Odessa or preferred green apples. Samantha drew the same black across our parents, our brother, his wife, daughter, my daughter, me. With a swipe, our mouths, suspicious blackbirds. Someone is always furious, rummages for love from rationed cans on nearly empty shelves. Greta cut out my mother, her daughter, from the will, my mother sliced my sister Sam. There is always war, what is left is a stencil. At the end, my mother sang, shine little glow worm. I am aging, unravel as stretched paper, I cannot trust anyone.

Amy Small-McKinney

Dead Meat if we are what we eat then we are a super-sized enterprise of burgers and fries the globe’s golden arch enemy restaurant chains that got the land on lock branding the earth enticing us to jump out the fire into their frying pan if we are what we eat then we are a high fructose corn syrup sipping sorbate sucking guar gum chewing monoglyceride munching assembly line of bleached flour being paid under the kitchen table by the hour the world’s latest wonder since sliced bread with traveled provided by Trans Fat “we waste no expense to rush you to your death.” if we are what we eat then we are designer beans high fashion caffeinated manufacturing fascists dictating the price of trade making deals with the imf to keep our stocks from slipping star bucks who once played in the nba now get paid to ceokay our agenda to the masses who sip hot Columbians for breakfast if we are what we eat then we are diabetes on a stick cancer in a cone a stroke to go microwaveable bowls of irritable bowel syndrome

if we are what we eat then we are a drug-infested body politic over-priced pill-popping dope addicts fiending for little plastic-coated rocks provided by corporate dealers and doctor pushers smuggling everything from Ritalin to Viagra across Canadian borders pushing prescriptions take 2 three times per day so we can stay high from the day we are born to the day we die if we are what we eat then we are less than 5% of the world’s population who devour the rest making them refugees who we force-feed with blind-folded taste-tests the entrails of our waste telling them it’s a complimentary multinational breakfast that comes with their stay at the all-you-can-eat buffet where we are the diners and they are the main entree if we are what we eat then we are foul fowl crazed cattle spilling spoiled milk spiked with steroids into cartons being chugged in our schools by hormone-raging kids with diseased mouths and feet if we are what we eat then we are dead meat dead meat dead meat

Ewuare Osayande

Edge 1 Where we are not. There, and there alone, are real shadows and real trees. Fernando Pessoa

4 How is Eugene? Did he tell his teacher she was born from the devil’s anus like I told him to?

2 So a parent called Eugene’s teacher and said Eugene told a lil girl he was going to piss on her head and babies come from penises. ok so my issue after trying not to laugh lol is that he says pee not piss and weewee not penis. but instead I pretended I was in shock and stated that someone must have taught him this on the bus because his father is a saint and his grandmother is deaf and only speaks ukrainian.

5 Eugene got in trouble at school for calling his crayons naked because they were paperless, really?!?

6 Yeah and they’re really sexy when the paper is ripped a little bit …

7 Mask of tassels that question the elements & the dark. Mask of mache that drifts in the falling dark.

3 8 Firstly, no girl I know ever got pregnant that way … Secondofly, I can imagine him saying don’t make me go all-goldenshower on you … Thirdly, I’d like to be Eugene’s wing man … You want me to talk to his teacher?

Mask of the one in the mirror who has broken your heart. Mask, lit & blue from a martini. Mask of the surface of America, afire.

9 Mask floating on scraped surface of water.

Mask of your face sinking an inch.

There is a connection being investigated between shadow and light, but it is underground

11 Mask of the face of November orange trees & patches of black at the edge of the woods & into the woods.

12 Mask of the radiant search for the third person.

18 and is lost where the roots break off. Any correspondence between mask and identity is fancy. Masks appear to be what is available at the time. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all shadow and we wore many masks, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m just saying.

Shadow of the stripes of light, saturated curtains. Shadow of the repeating leaves.

14 Shadow of the garden, padlocked, where he sat. Shadow of the statues, handsome & metaphysical. Shadow of summer ending as the book opened. Light for the taking. The snow, velour.

15 But the chief beauty of an image is its reality. Such digressions. Longinus

16 Shadow that is raw, obscure, north. A towel has dropped in the yard, shadow. Leonard Gontarek

THE DAUGHTER AS MERMAID I didn’t want to walk, but to float in bed and dream. Hot air blew my body. Eyes closed, an ocean. I swam with currents. They carried me. * Hans Christian told a tale, steps that cut like knives. Love that didn’t pan out. She walked but couldn’t keep up, while he dallied with the twolegged girls. He couldn’t see her. Altered, no way to return. * I understand sighing as points break skin. Rush of blood an out-breath. She might have preferred it. Each step calling, here, here, walking into that voice. * On manatees, keloids’ fibrous thatching marks encounters with propellers. Silkies they say can be persuaded by human voice to unzip seal coats. Even so, they are distracted, return eventually to the sea.

On my two legs, I get up go down to the kitchen. My father’s cooking fills the house. I swim up to the counter. Mixer, rice maker, canisters of sugar and flour. I will make a mermaid cookie for my little brother to eat. * I think I will never marry. To whom could I tell the swell of this house, that lifts and plunges? My father sighs in the night. My mother’s voice hides in the cushion of the sofa. * She grew a tail and swam out the window. I would like to join her but will not. Stay here in this boat, my sea-legs.

Alison Hicks

the three known tales of hatim muzumbo 1. Men are in the village. Tall men, healthy, but not like the last men who planted wooden stakes or tied orange ribbons to bushes in the nearby fields – not white men. Their skin was like ours a bit, their rubber suits pipe lightning down their arms and legs and their chests shine brighter than moons. They are here to see Hatim. “There.” Nairobi points to the hut that shakes in the barely there breeze, that sheds sticks and coarse grass from its roof. “This is where he is.” Nairobi, as ever, willing to sate the curiosity of outsiders, guides them down the narrow pathway connecting our houses. The men stomp past those of us aroused from slumber, past sick men lying without mercy on the dusty earth floor, past women who have huddled several small children as close to their breasts as they can, scolding any who dare to venture into the path to touch the glowing garments of these men. Nairobi stops ten feet from the door of the small hut where Hatim is sleeping; even he, the crier, pauses. The men look back at him for a second, then at each other, until the one in front nods, signaling all three to continue moving. We saw their vessel erupt out of the sky, just appear in the stillness of the night. Nasir and I, we sat by the river and listened to wild cats hissing and jostling on the other side, to things swimming underneath the water and imagined a strange world calling to us. We imagined that the world under the river’s surface was vast and filled with creeping and crawling things, with scaly demons whose bites were worse than a piranha’s, that they were spawn from the souls of the dead bodies we sometimes saw float down from

the some nearby city. Until the ship announced itself with a roar, we had not thought of anything more terrifying, more loud. It fell into the atmosphere and hovered over the ground. The air got thick and felt wet. My skin felt like it was being stung by mosquitos and ticks as the machine hummed and whirred. We ran back as fast as we could, yelled at the elders, and when they would not believe us, we hit under our mats and clutched sticks and waited. They flash lights into the hut, checking machines and pushing buttons on their arms. When the third one pulls out his gun, a collective moan rips through the village. These men who look like us, they have come to murder us all! The elders tell of such things, when evil men come and burn down homes and kill all of the men, leaving the survivors to long walks through the jungle for a hundred days, some dying along the way. The man with the gun lifts a finger to his lips as the other two went in. Was this happening? And why our village? We were of no consequence to the rebels, my father had told, because we had nothing they wanted, no resources we could be forced to mine or leave our land for. I believed him, until strange men started showing up and so many of us started disappearing. The men rush from the hut, barking. One of them is carrying Hatim, who is limp and barely dressed and foaming at the mouth. Their boots move so quickly that dust billows into clouds. I cannot make out what they are saying, but they are frantic. Their voices are mechanical and wiry and muffled by the strange devices emanating out of their ears, eyes, mouths. They run until they are far off into the distant fields, by the river, until we can no longer follow the trace of the glow of their suits, until all the light that’s left is from the stars in the sky. We strain to see where they have disappeared over the horizon. Nothing. Then, a bright white explosion peels outward from the direction of the river, accompanied by a thundering that knocks the weaker of us to the ground, including the hut that housed Hatim until he was taken by the strange men. The gravity around us increases and presses into us as something shoots out over our heads. The ship! When it passes seconds later, we find pieces of the hut’s thatched roof scattered for yards. Hatim had grown sicker and sicker and spent his days in that hut; some of us envied him that he did not have to tend to the goats or hunt wild boar or carry crumbling clay pots of dirty water in the radiant sun. Only Djinji, the man who can make sweet liquids from plants that can pass through a body and kick out that body’s demons, was allowed to enter. “I am sorry,” he told Hatim’s mother after a month of trying to care for him. “There’s nothing I can do. The ancestors are all that’s with him now.” Hatim’s mother sank to her knees, cradled her son in her arms, sobbing violently. As Nasir and his brother tore her away, she had run off into the forest never to be seen again. I am remembering this when Nasir puts his hand on my shoulder. I am reminded that I am in the village, that tomorrow I will take the goats far up north to pasture and that I will carry my longest stick in case a tiger shows himself, starved and bold and insistent on a feast. 2. I miss his wiry fingers on my cold flesh. I miss calling out to him from the bathroom with soap in my eyes. I miss sitting on the couch reading bad romance novels while he made appliances dance to his will, the kitchen echoing a determined clang and rattle, wondrous alien scents whisking out to greet my nose. I miss even the tiny ridges of his forehead that canyoned up every time he got nervous or angry. And he was often angry. Or bruised, broken up in some way. He’d be on the fire escape landing, tapping on my window with bloody knuckles, gasping. “What the fuck, Hatim?” I’d scream. He’d put a long finger to his lips and motion to open up the window. I’d let him in, and, in a quiet rasp again: “What the fuck, Hatim?” A ubiquitous “they” were always after him. Goons in glowing red costumes or thugs carrying scepters crafted from bones of rare sea life and imbued with black magic, anti-spies in grey suits with machine gun boots, or weaponized wood nymphs with telekinetic mollusks for their brains. I never saw any of

them, only heard glimpses of stories, only saw strange lacerations and wounds cut into his body in ways I didn’t know the human body could be cut. I only saw the artifacts and memorabilia, usually some small exploding thing I’d have to pry out of his elbow with a hot pair of scissors. “No! No we can’t go to the hospital. They will find me there.” My apartment is cold, too small, and poorly ventilated, but sometimes, even on the most wintry nights, I keep the window open in my room and just pile on the blankets my aunts have given me over the past few Christmases and huddle in front of an old space heater. I leave the window open so that the dust from the heater can circulate and rise out, and also I leave it open for him. Tonight, I hope he returns. The cold gets unbearable, so I go into the living room and watch Jay Leno squeak out tired anecdotes at some beauty obsessed starlet and try, to no avail, to stay awake. I think that through the haze of a dream, I can see his length emerging in front of me. He is all arms and legs, springy and powerful. “Kevin.” His voice is reverberating in heavenly tones and it sounds like bells falling on concrete. “Kevin.” I’m dreaming that I can hear him, that he’s surrounded by low floating clouds and cosmic rainbows, until I feel something hot grip my arm. With a start, I’m up. He is standing before me. “Kevin, I have come to you.” “My arm.” His grip is inescapable, the more I try to pry myself away, the more taut his grasp becomes. “It’s fucking burning, Hatim.” “I am sorry.” Slowly, he lets me go. Hatim looks at his hands wide-eyed, turning them over in shock. There’s a strange glow to them, a crisp orange light that I’ve never seen before. I feel guilty for having cursed and reach out to stretch and wrest myself out of sleep. “That‘s new,” I say, pointing to his pulsing hands. “I should not have come!” he exclaims, backing away. When he starts toward the window, I‘m suddenly panicked. I may lose him again to coyness. I reach out for him; his skin is taut, woodlike. I notice finally that he’s not wearing a shirt, just the leather pants he begged me to buy for him at that goth store in Fishtown – no shoes, nothing. His hair is spikey, and his eyes flash in a swirling aura-like array of color. I’m afraid, but I’m tethered to him, lost in his mystery. “I should not have come. I am sorry.” He is outlined by a slow, growing light hovering just beyond the invisible barrier of the window. His eyes slowly dim; now he is more normal than I have ever seen him, standing there, looking at his hands, whispering to himself, “I should not have come.” As the light increases, a large ship appears in the alleyway, just hovering there at my apartment window. There’s a deep hum that I can feel in my stomach that seems to roil through the building’s walls. It’s barely audible, I simply feel it. Then, nothing. Hatim puts a flared fingertip to his lips that, in the darkness of my apartment, looks like a pixie flitting in space. My ears pop, as glass shatters, raining down into the room. Shards fall onto our bodies, tearing through our flesh, mostly just bouncing off of his. I fall to my knees in agony. Dark clad mercenaries on wires rip through every window, smash down my apartment door, kick over my furniture, all while screaming in eerie robotic timbre. Without warning, I’m wrapped in one of my aunts’ blankets and pushed to the floor. Through a sliver, I can see boots stomp by or bodies fall to the floor; I can hear things breaking and blowing up, all in a cacophony like a rave in a casino beset with fireworks. There’s a two second silence, and suddenly the ground beneath me disappears. I can’t see anything, as the blanket has grown tighter around my body. Is someone carrying me? Hatim? I try to call out to him, but I grow faint. There’s nothing there, just the vastness of the current around me that increases exponentially as I drop. It feels like I’ve been drugged. I shut my eyes and Hatim’s blurry visage ricochets in my head again, until it all dissolves into blackness. When I awake, it’s broad daylight and I’m on a beach. A seagull has been poking at my dried-out lips. It stands before me with a piece of my skin in its mouth. I am barely able to move, so I let him have his lunch in peace in the high, beaming warmth of the sun. The beach stretches far, but not wide. A steep craggy hill is only a few yards behind me. I crawl towards it and sit against the rocks, waiting for the relentless sun to smash into the abyss of the sea.

3. I am Hatim Muzambo. I am the pilot of this ship. I am the ever light being of Earth, I am the Star Sparkle of the universe, the lamp of God, traversing the ghost-strewn path of the cosmos. I am the lightning avatar, the creeping hot death of heat, the burning bright light of the cold of Pluto surrounded in the gate Nebula. I came to you as Horus. I came to you as Ahkenaton. I came to you as Vishnu. I came to you in parabolic visions and far-flung tales of the mystics. I came to you with my arms open and eyes blind, with my heart rendered into fragments as big and wide as the heavens itself. I gave you the sweet nectar of the rain, the cooling breeze, the Amazon. I, Hatim Muzambo, whose great grey ship sits aloft clouds, hovers amongst the innermost regions of your dreamscape, baring down on nightmares and shifting those dark, ominous clouds into the gutters of all reality, whose legions are armed and amassing, poised and sharp-willed and righteous and baring the artillery of love, whose love is laser and light, I! With a horde, a fleet of gods whose vesselsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; afterburners dot the sky, whose souls streak auras and whose eyes, alit and flashing, race across galaxy after galaxy, whose very light is simply a star. I am the pilot of this ship, the master of this, the sword and the pen; I am why men fight wars, why love tears apart kings, and why princes die valiantly or vainly in wanton massacre. I am why there are dug-out pits filled with dead bodies after the revolution. I am why there are landfills and choking pelicans stricken with mutating disease or choking on their own bile or strangled by plastic six-pack lids. I am why there are roses growing on West Philadelphia sidewalks, why these rosesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; thorns push through dried cement and still flower, are trampled on and fed exhaust and hate; yet, I am why this, the rose, still rises and flowers. I am the ghostking, I am the nebula, I am the abandoned parking lot littered with mattresses and glass and caskets. I am that great, seeking, raging, god king, berdache. When they came for you in black masks, with their batons held high, when they knocked on your door at midnight and called out for your sons, for your daughters, for your souls, I and I alone, I, whose lonesome army descended upon them and did so smite them, who blew up buildings for you. Who poisoned their water, who sent locusts, who burned the bush. I, who built the mountains, who found your lover cold and naked and who fed and clothed them, who sent the butterflies. I, who would paint Rothkoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s on the side of a train, when you are sleeping, I am the pilot of this great ship. I am rising, I am a star. Buddha, Texaco, America, cosmic, nova, nuclear, unicorn, Microsoft, pixel, gravity, I am rising, I am a star. Alex Smith

Five girls in matching Natchez tee shirts romp over the Indian mound latent city accidentally kick open an ant pile

GUEST EDITOR PICK

Natchez Indians even before ‘All-burn!’ balloons all about Up Here in the Sky And so we start the day as a planet candle early on the relationship with the French was good if not wonderful It’s your birthday you took their picture they’re off again Brett Evans

reflection

St. Desdemona

merely Cassiopeia swims there below the roots of sleeping trees and troupes of lake-fish in yellow shadows. easily she trades her sky for the mirrored blindness of that flat silver circle into which she sinks silently, warm and awake and newly wet, dreaming her starry secrets.

At the clinic, only the virgins get tested. The nurses swab their warmth, the air heavy with holy buckets.

the bottom’s blackness unfastens as others collect at the bar, around the piano

At the stables, there are no horses. Our girls can’t smash their sweet peas. The wedding sheets must bleed. This town wasn’t always cold water. The sky was filled with miracles, almanacs printed daily.

— points of light in a dark room — while above, her unworn dress unfolds itself on cue, revolving lace and aquamarine and ceruleans and higher still, her king sleeps innocently on, the unwritten letter beside him. the Camembert surprises her, the champagnes, the games, the glittering exchanges, our poissons and oysters and bread and delicate gold thread, Chopin’s frail hands, our tossed bouquets, our soufflés, our one chance surprises her—all this and then a space.

Until one day she locked eyes with a man she had only nagged in dreams. Gave herself to him after seven pills. As her bump grew, the itchy-wombed women picked their teeth clean with her garbage, snipped off bits of her hair, mistook her husband’s manhood for a chair. She wore placebo white to the wedding. Miracles bottomed out from the sky, the sycamore melted by locusts, almanacs crossing their pages in shock.

she smiles at the shy waiter, licks the salt from her fingers and floats on, leaving the plankton in their clamshells unopened like herself, assembled, lying still like herself in the curve of a scalloped silver tray.

Lisa Gratz

Lauren Yates

Shimmer Around Us

CARNIVAL

A brother arrives for afternoon prayers,

We’d only begun to detect the air was full of tricks if a woman could, in a man’s hands, disappear.

surprised that the entrance to the mosque won’t budge, but the school is on lockdown.

The boys who manned the carousel punched each other’s arms when we dropped hot coins into their greased palms.

Teachers watch behind slit blinds, finally releasing the door

We took a whirl. We preened like park birds, creatures who feed from strangers’ fingertips. We took a crack at the vanishing

so children can spill into the street— flowers emptied from a vase. Jumping sidewalk cracks, they are daisies seeding junked lots, waving above fences.

Is this safe? Has enough time passed?

act with the lunches we packed—cucumbers, yoghurt. We could stage our own departures. Weren’t our bodies meant to be flat? Those women onstage, the wisps they became—

Sirens circle like wolves, choking Ramadan’s peace. Five blocks away some boys blasted a cop. Words ignite the street. No one knows who was detained and who roams the alley with an injured heart.

they infused our hair with a form of belief. Carolina jasmine choked the breeze while magicians produced rabbits from hats, doves where there’d been none.

They used birdshot, but few birds perch down here. I gather my class with swooping arms. We need to write poems about everything: fractured air, bruise-dark sky, a few shards of light that shimmer around us. Cathleen Cohen

Dilruba Ahmed

Snapshots for Looking at Summer of ’91 My dad bought a copy of the “Three Little Pigs” a week before Frank Rizzo’s funeral There, cardinals and throngs of old Rizzocrats, cops in the ‘60s haloed “Frank Forever” at City Hall We sat in the grass that week with the book the brick house pig reading in the paper about Rizzo, the pig like another good man In everyone’s Philadelphia, the pig’s, even, missing Rizzo like another good neighbor down the block.

Davy Knittle

A Case of Mistaken Identity Ends in Asphyxiation. One already blemished morning on my way to work an empty man confronted me, and pointing at me said, “You! Weren’t you famous on TV last night?” Before I could answer him gravity pried my mouth open and out poured a tiny black rat brandishing a tiny black gun.

She stumbled after hitting the ground, swearing loudly in perfect Korean.

Gathering courage, I motioned toward the man, poised to answer his question.

It was clear that her day was starting off poorly, in much the same way that mine was.

It was at this point that I realized he had vanished, a magician’s legerdemain.

We were aligned in our frustration. Like fingers curled into the palm, forming a clenched fist.

I reached for my throat and I began to choke on the vapors he had left in his wake,

Seeing her, I was perplexed, with admiration perhaps, as if watching rainfall in reverse.

While the rat fired off one round into the cool early morning air.

Jeffrey Bumiller

THREE CONVERSATIONS 1

I got a little queasy you say when you spun me around

I got married on a Friday my neighbor says leaning on the fence

the trouble with kids is it’s all electronic now the produce manager says severing the head of broccoli but to reach people you’ve got to be face to face

but I liked seeing your garden you say and you’ve gotten a tan — yesterday it got up to 120 here I like your haircut I say what does it feel like bristly you say I stroke the screen yes I say so it does

Thursday I was in Korea — didn’t see my wife again for four years how did you keep in touch I say letters he says when I got there a guy called out to me I’d known him in school he’d been over a couple of months he offered me a cigarette oh, no, I said I don’t smoke oh, he said you will.

yes I say you do it’s all about the people he says I don’t do this for just anybody tucking the stem into his apron handing me the top cradled in my palm I carry it home

I took it. Been smoking ever since. a week later he was blown apart by a grenade that just shows you – what’s that saying? seize the day? I say life’s a bitch he says, flicking ash into my garden and then you die Susan Charkes

For Etheridge Knight (1931— March 10, 1991) Break — heart, in your madness — rejoice in nothing that is — tomorrow’s the day Etheridge goes down deeper than sleep — he’s gone out today like thin air — his life-force breath and spirit freed from the poor tortured body in disease will never sing again — what garbage this world is — heaped up plastic circuit lies and foam-rubber elastics stinking like deaths that can not be without what you sing — Mississippi blues and mosquito rivers run and carry you miles like the speaking drum mantra of flesh — bone — skin — tones — …your echo calls me, then as now to say to them what you told me — but the no-good Nile and ravaged Hudson run like bodies of glass bearing industrial mass — without your breathing voice anymore the trees crack like old factory panes and the leaves bleed through black acid holes made by chemical rain falls — the inhuman moon loves no one anymore… Old friend — for the spirit of the wood, for the beauty that made you immortal for the end — the speaking and the hearing drums pound us all away into the tongue of purest sound — poet of soul-blues/jazz and song I know too well how I miss you now, first sayer of the sooth-said psalm that gave my voice liberty to swing when you said: “Just say a poem…” and I heard your echoing power in each thing of this life-world…

And now all night in tiny pieces I remember how much hope and strength you lent me, your voice deep and gentle as explosions under sea as oral wisdom humbles hyperliteracy, I heard your South with awe,

your America a horrorshow of laws — you knew all along how heady poets jam images like waters pushing over a dam (and it ain’t got that swing to mean any damned meaning thing) — how poems for the page are aimed into linear ages that never arrive — their futures never mature into now — Speaker of truths — what else can you be?… Sainthood’s too high and prisons make a faith of abuse — You believed in your self enough to open the deep and sweet cells of the heart even in ruins no one could bear — your voice like a thunderhead made so many leaves tremble to answer your gale with words — So many times you started over from scratches deep enough to kill ten men — I hear your grasp of hungry pain, its pulsing rhyme of clash like ragtime tiger pianos — there every note strikes — hammering bone — The world becomes criminally insane without you beating its cinder-block walls — without your refraining voice ringing out what must be — telling/tolling to become all you survived — transformed creating glories from agonies — but terrible beauties free-born, music of the mired-shit of foreign wars, so crises/politics/presidents become no lies, no liars, but resonance — a triumph no next wind can unhinge, your greatness pouring melody to and from what never changes and changes every thing… Faithful to the abuses of these killing times, you lynch the stone-deaf denial in us all, you string up love’s pain with laughter piercing your own heart — the first act of love…

You make milk-toast critics cringe as if human experience had reached in — as if your experience were also human — like Gwendolyn Brooks asked about universality: ‘Isn’t black experience part of the universe?’ But the harmony of this universe is part ripped out now, and only remembering you, without you — yet your soul can sing: “so my soul can sing…” I didn’t know till this moment there was anyone who’d make me cry by just dying — I’d forgotten how to remember love till this moment of breaking — I thought I was hollow as a chime but at this touch my space is screaming out of the blues into the brackish white-water and the black sea of you —

Etheridge, Take heart in your madness — Rejoice — even when there’s nothing to fill the spaces women leave behind in the air when they’re gone — Rejoice even when you say “What’s the use of talking to myself when I’ve heard it all before?” Rejoice — because the heart is mad for liquid joy — and asking what love is makes loving into retrospecting — In the air you left for me the space is my own palm now pressed like a seashell telling its roar — Rejoice — fires burn only the cold. One wave follows its brother, and till I see you as another, Rejoice… Jeffrey Ethan Lee

ONE-STOP SOLUTION TO ALL HUMAN SUFFERING

GUEST EDITOR PICK

It’s like every morning I wake up and think discover yourself I mean darling. I’m the girlfriend that wouldn’t ever cheat on you, Daddy. Oh, Freud? Um. I think he’s probably one of those people for whom everybody has a different definition? Right? And I’ve heard a lot of people’s definitions, but. But they’re probably different from what it means to me, but I’m still like yeah that works too so whatever. I mean for me it’s sort of – apart from being totally hot – I it’s being aware of the way that people have had some of the same experiences throughout history and you know like in a contemporary setting too. There are a lot of people who say Freud is about like not having a choice? And I think that makes a lot of sense on a lot of different levels, but at the same time I don’t think it makes any sense at all. So I mean I’m going to say, you know, here’s the really important thing. I believe in Freud so I’m gonna make this choice to prefer myself. I think that to make a choice from a Freudian perspective is to say how does this affect me, but also how am I affecting other people? I mean we had no idea he would like crusade on about our collective identity or unconscious or whatever? Sorry. Because I mean you can do things that make yourself feel good or are convenient that can make life harder for other people in like society in stuff and I think to not consider that is not like the correct Freudian way of thinking. Sometimes it sucks to think about other people, but on an aspirational level, like you know to become famous and shit, Freud says you still need to, even if it doesn’t sort of – lead to the optimisation of your individual fucking happiness. Right? I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about Freud because I view women and men as equals just in different ways, and that’s his definition, right so... I mean, I do think it is represented in me. I don’t ever think of myself as inferior to a man. In fact, most of the time I find myself smarter or more well-rounded. But I don’t know, I mean, men and women have to be equal right, like especially when guy next to me thinks this outfit makes me look really hot. Like, this is my fucking life, so. I mean I know a lot of people who are really Freudian, like lesbians or whatever and spend a lot of their life fighting for it. I guess I just have other things to do. Like you know, facials, nails, a little cooking and, cursing, unicorns, dogs, exhibitionism, scrapbooking cutout images of evil trees, building fairy princess castles, hello kitty band aids and oh yeah, bikinis. I mean I spend most of my time curating an online selection of buttons on a background of ornamental doilies, lavender doodles, and professional drawings done totally tastefully in Microsoft Paint of me like totally naked. I’d also like totally, invite you to click, but like here’s the thing: almost none of the links attached to me work. I mean I guess I could actually make a sign that says like ‘you can’t find where the button is’ but it would be really easy for me – like – too easy probably, to make a little button that says ‘click here’ on the part that’s like, supposed to do what it’s supposed to do? I’m like perfectly aware that this message is, like unprovoked. But don’t particularly care because I guess I like Freud to begin with. Like I mean, I still find it dumb that single straight girls on okcupid list Valerie Solanas as like their primary interest. I mean whatever bitches, who wants to cut off cocks when you can just dress so you become one. You know, explode some daddies! Their worlds, I mean. I mean, seriously, as if any if any non-masochistic human being would want an openly misandrist girlfriend. I mean yeah, I have like a super crush on Freud but that’s only because I dig narcissistic men and totally feel superior to them and yeah I guess they totally feel like I’m superior to them too… I mean I guess it’s always adorable when they fuck the shit out of me. But own okcupid interests say like, indie music, 5 a.m. ‘me’ time, loneliness, ghosts, forests, cassettes, pop music, Disney and twitter. I cry mascara. I mean I’m like devastating, devastating? Decorating myself with the loaded issues. Things that just automatically make me, well, better. Than you. Freud? I mean my friends told me this one time that there’s a lot purposely, senselessly wrong about him. But that like doesn’t interest me? Like why should it? Boys always lie. I mean, it’s only reality. And anyway I dreamt this dream of myself the way you wanted me to – discover yourself. Don’t you want me? Isn’t it perfect? Trisha Low

On Meeting Lamont B. Steptoe eager to hear a whirlwind traveling man read, and baptize my spirit in the word, i arrive early, take an elevator up to the sky floor then sit waiting for a congregation. Steptoe hands me a flyer for an art gallery show, asks me where I’m from. “Trinidad, Tobago, New Jersey” it’s crazy down there in Trinidad. drugs, kidnappings, rotting youth over ripe with potential spoiling in sun. asks me, how big is Tobago? as deep as calypso? as wide as your grandmother’s feet?

Tracey Ferdinand

Flash Freeze The two of us sitting in my warm car idling, your empty idling car warming alongside. You in a party dress, risen from the garden. Me in a work shirt, a rust-belt city in decline. The question is how to not make it work. We have answered it well and windows in nearby houses offer us only the dark. A flash freeze is descending on the east. Hundreds of years of trouble ran us down. You in terrible bloom, me in architectural ruin. The downhearted city is filling now with snow. It would be beautiful in someone elseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mind.

Sean Webb

Artist & Author Biographies Nico Amador is a community organizer, facilitator and writer living in West Philadelphia. He currently works as the Director of Training for Change, a national organization devoted to teaching skills for effective social change and nonviolent action. Nico is a student in the creative writing program at the Community College of Philadelphia. He has published poetry in MiPOesias and Joto: An Anthology of Queer Chicano/a Poetry. Lily Applebaum studied English, creative writing and environmental studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She works as the assistant to the faculty director and coordinator of the Brodsky Gallery at the Kelly Writers House, where she first started writing poems to fit in. Danny P. Barbare has been writing poetry for 31 years. He says he likes to go on long walks and think up his poems, or get ideas. His poetry has recently appeared in Calico Tiger, Gold Dust, picayune, Wordland 2, as well as other publications. He attends a local writer’s group at College and libraries. He has three books available through Amazon.com: Nature Poems, Family, and Being a Janitor. Jeffrey Bumiller is a poet/musician who was born in Yonkers, NY just outside of the Bronx and grew up in Fishkill, NY along the Hudson River. He has been a resident of Philadelphia since 2006 and began attending Community College of Philadelphia in the fall of 2010. Jeffrey is the president of the Creative Writing Club of The Community College of Philadelphia and has had his poetry published in the school’s newspaper, The Vanguard. In the spring of 2012 he received the first prize in the Judith Stark Creative Writing Contest. Robyn Campbell lives, works, writes, sleeps, sells, yells, eats, and breathes from her home base in Philadelphia. She received her BA in Fiction Writing from the University of Pittsburgh, and her work has found a home in online journals such as Prairie Wolf Press Review, SLEET magazine, and Caper Literary Journal among others. She currently reads for WEAVE magazine. Susan Charkes is a freelance writer and communications consultant, and also works in the land conservation field. Her poetry has been published in Schuylkill Valley Journal, U.S. 1, U.S. 1 Worksheets, and Poetry Ink and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the author of AMC’s Best Day Hikes Near Philadelphia (AMC Books, 2010) and the forthcoming Outdoors With Kids – Philadelphia (AMC Books – 2013). More at susancharkes.com. Joe Cilluffo is a practicing attorney who spends his free time writing, weeding his vegetable garden and playing with his three children. Joe attends the monthly Mad Poets Critique Circle. He recently was selected as a Finalist in Tiferet Journal’s 2012 Poetry Contest, and Joe’s poems have also appeared in Philadelphia Poets, The New Purlieu Review and Adanna Literary Journal. Joe was a featured reader at the Moveable Beats Reading Series in Center City. Cathleen Cohen, PhD, is the Education Director of ArtWell, a Philadelphiabased arts education nonprofit which has brought poetry and arts workshops to thousands of students from different cultures and backgrounds. A graduate of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she exhibits paintings at local galleries as well as Soho20 Chelsea in NYC. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, such as Babel Fruit, Cumberland Poetry Review, Moment, 6ix, Layers of Possibility, The Breath Of Parted Lips (CavanKerry Press, 2005), and Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal.

Brett Evans is the author of Ready-to-Eat Individual (with Frank Sherlock), Slosh Models, and the forthcoming I Love This American Way of Life. He is a member of the carnival microkrewe tit-R x in his hometown of New Orleans, LA. Tracey Ferdinand holds a master’s degree in Africana Women’s Studies from Clark Atlanta University and a bachelor’s degree in English from Ursinus College. Her main areas of interest and research are Africana women’s literature, womanism, and narrative medicine. Her writing routinely explores how multiplicative intersecting structures of oppression affect our health. A member of the National Women’s Studies Association, she is also an active participant of the association’s Women of Color Leadership Project. She is committed to effecting social change through personal health transformations by promoting physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing. Her writing encourages women of color to cultivate vibrant lives by reframing discussions of wellness around self-care. Valerie Fox’s books of poetry include The Rorschach Factory (Straw Gate Books) and The Glass Book (Texture Press). She has recently published work in Blip, Ping Pong, Hanging Loose, and Hamilton Stone Review. Originally from central Pennsylvania, she has travelled and lived throughout the world, and has taught writing and literature at numerous universities including Sophia University (in Tokyo) and currently at Drexel University (in Philadelphia). Poems For the Writing: Prompts for Poets (co-written with Lynn Levin) is due out from Texture Press in 2013. Leonard Gontarek is the author of four books of poems: St. Genevieve Watching Over Paris, Van Morrison Can’t Find His Feet, Zen For Beginners and Déjà Vu Diner. He Looked Beyond My Faults And Saw My Needs is forthcoming from Hanging Loose Press. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Field, Poet Lore, Verse, Handsome, Fence, Blackbird, The Awl, Poetry Northwest, and in the anthologies, The Best American Poetry, The Working Poet and Joyful Noise: American Spiritual Poetry. He conducts poetry workshops at the Moonstone Art Center, the Kelly Writers House and Musehouse. He has received five Pushcart Prize nominations and twice received poetry fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council On The Arts. He was the 2011 Philadelphia Literary Death Match Champion. He coordinates The Philadelphia Poetry Festival, Peace/Works: Poetry Readings for Peace, and the Green Line Café reading and interview series. leafscape.org/LeonardGontarek Lisa Renee Gratz makes poetry, creative nonfiction, young adult and children’s fiction. She teaches writing at Arcadia University and other colleges around Philadelphia. She lives in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania with her Siberian Husky and is an unkempt room except when she’s not. Alison Hicks’s books include Kiss, a collection of poems, Falling Dreams, a chapbook, Love: A Story of Images, a novella, and Prompted, an anthology. She received the 2011 Philadelphia City Paper Poetry Prize, and has twice received fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her work has appeared in Eclipse, Fifth Wednesday, Gargoyle, The Hollins Critic, Pearl, Permafrost, Quiddity, and Whiskey Island, among other journals. She leads community-based writing workshops under the name Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio (philawordshop.com). Lynn Hoffman has been a merchant seaman, teacher, chef and cab driver. He’s published five books, including Philadelphia Personal, the novel that makes 50 shades look grey. Skyhorse Books just published a second, expanded edition of The Short Course in Beer. A few years ago, he started writing poetry. In 2011 his poem, The Would-be Lepidopterist was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Most of the time he just loafs and fishes.

Eddie Hopely is a poet and researcher from Pennsylvania currently living in Sydney. He organized Blanket, a Philadelphia poetics/talk series, and is the author of some chapbooks. eddiehopely.tumblr.com Ayah Joice is 7 years old. She enjoys reading, painting, digging for worms, gardening and foraging. She also has a love for animals, especially horses. Davy Knittle spent the past year abroad as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, studying how narratives of place shape urban life in Canada, Ecuador and Australia. His work has been published in swink magazine, 580 Split, Radius, Philadelphia Stories and The Fiddleback, among others. He’s a proud Northwest Philadelphian by upbringing and lives in Brooklyn, New York. David P. Kozinski was the featured poet in the Spring 2012 edition of Schuylkill Valley Journal. He won the 2009 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize, which included publication of his chapbook, Loopholes. More than 100 of his poems have appeared in print and online in publications such as Confrontation, glimmertrain.com, The Fox Chase Review, The Chiron Review and Margie. He was one of ten poets selected by Robert Bly for a workshop sponsored by The American Poetry Review. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, he has read his work at numerous venues in Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey. He lives in Wilmington, Delaware with his wife, journalist, actress and director, Patti Allis Mengers. Jeffrey Ethan Lee is the author of identity papers (Ghost Road Press, 2006), a Colorado Book Award finalist. His first book, invisible sister (2004), was a finalist for the first Many Mountains Moving Press book prize. Last year his chapbook collection, Towards Euphoria, won an Editor’s prize from Seven Kitchens Press. Another chapbook, The Sylf, won the Sow’s Ear Press prize. He became the editor, director and publisher of Many Mountains Moving, Inc., without meaning to. It happened because six months after invisible sister was published in 2004 by MMM, Inc., the beloved founder, Naomi Horii, resigned for health reasons, and then the whole staff resigned, so the 2004 book, the journal and the press were all going to die. Lee gathered a few friends to keep the press and journal going. All the books have done very well since 2004. He is presently teaching at Temple University and Muhlenberg College. He has also recently taught at Drexel University and Community College of Philadelphia. He was an artist in residence at Ursinus College in spring 2012. He shares the name “Jeff Lee” with at least seven convicted felons in Philly, hence the longer handle, “Jeffrey Ethan Lee.” Trisha Low is committed to wearing a shock collar because she has so many feelings. Remote controls are available at gauss-pdf.com, Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, TROLL THREAD and others. She lives and works in New York City. Dawn Manning is a writer, photographer and rogue anthropologist living in the Greater Philadelphia area. Her poetry has received the Edith Garlow Poetry Prize, and was recently awarded second place in the 81st Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. Her poems have been or will be published shortly through bottle rockets, The Fairy Tale Review, Mudfish, Silk Road, and other venues. Her chapbook, Postcards from the Dead Letter Office, is forthcoming from DAT Press. She has earned a BA in anthropology through West Chester University and an MFA in poetry through the University of New Orleans. In her spare time, Dawn herds cats for a local animal rescue, Animal Friends of Lansdowne, and serves as a member of the board. You can also find her through Poetdelphia, a community of writers who host quarterly readings and salon-style discussions in Philly. She can also be reached through dawnmanning.com. When the stars align, she travels.

M.C. McCoy grew up in the Philadelphia area and on the Ocean City, NJ boardwalk. As an undergraduate English major, her interests focused on the role of language in the construction of social identity, and she was strongly influenced by postmodern literary/cultural theorists and by the poets of the Black Arts Movement. Initially intending to pursue a law degree after graduating, her professional interests shifted to social work after she accepted a case management position working with homebound older adults. For the past 12 years, she has worked for non-profit organizations in various capacities. M.C. earned a BA in English from Temple University and holds a dual Masters degree in Social Services and Law / Social Policy from the Bryn Mawr College Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research. She considers Tucson, AZ a second home, and currently resides in Wilmington, DE. This is her first creative publication. Max McKenna’s fiction has appeared in Cartographer: A Literary Review, Apiary Online, and First Stop Fiction, and he has contributed essays to The Millions, Full Stop, the Journal of Modern Literature, and Filament, among others. He works at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia. Patrick McNeil is 26 years old. His story, “Color it Bluer,” is very much a product of those 26 years, and also of the Backyard Writers Workshop, which is held at the Kelly Writer’s House, which is grounded at UPenn and sort of a hike from Fishtown, where down he lays his several hats. Patrick writes only unprofessionally. He works at one of the city’s many homeless shelters. If you ever find yourself there, shout him out – he don’t bite. He still plays Super Nintendo and dodgeball, and catch with the neighbors. He rides a red bike. Thanks go to his dad for all of those hats. Quyen H. Nghiem’s work can be found at fwd-operating-base.blogspot. com & qynthnghm.tumblr.com. His poems have also been published in Otis Nebula and sharpied on Anderson food court tables at Temple. Ewuare Osayande (osayande.org) is a poet, political activist and author of several books including Blood Luxury and Whose America?. Currently he is editing a forthcoming anthology of poems entitled Stand Our Ground: Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander. Nicole Marie Pasquarello holds a Bachelors Degree in Writing Arts from Rowan University. Bartender by day, crazed writer by night, Contest Coordinator for Philadelphia Stories Magazine somewhere in between. This is her first time being published and she is honored to be featured in APIARY. Nicole currently lives in New Jersey with her fiancé and is working on a debut novel. Rachel Marie Patterson is a Philadelphia native and the editor of Four Way Review, the electronic literary journal from Four Way Books. She graduated from the M.F.A. program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and is currently a Ph.D. student in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri, where she was the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize. Her work has appeared in Fugue, Redivider, Nashville Review, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, If I Am Burning, was released by Main Street Rag in 2011. She lives in Northern Liberties. Faith Paulsen’s poem “Star Dust” was an honorable mention in the Philadelphia Inquirer Poetry Contest in April 2012. Her work has appeared in journals and collections including philly.com, Wild River Review, Literary Mama, three “Cup of Comfort” collections, “What Canst Thou Say?”, and three “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books. She lives in Norristown, Pennsylvania.

Cristina Perachio lives, writes and eats in Philadelphia. She is a Contributing Food Writer with Philadelphia Weekly and is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in Fiction at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Program. She has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer, MAGNET and BUST magazines. She writes reality fiction but don’t worry, she’s never written about you. Cristina believes in cooking with olive oil, the powers of red lipstick, dance therapy, radio rap, Bukowski and reading Susan Minot’s Lust for inspiration when she wants to quit writing and join the circus.

Amy Small-McKinney has published two chapbooks of poetry, Body of Surrender and Clear Moon, Frost, both with Finishing Line Press. She was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, such as The Cortland Review, The Pedestal Magazine, upstreet, Blue Fifth Review, SAND, Berlin’s English Literary Journal, Switchback (U of SF), and LIPS Magazine, but is most happy to be part of a robust local community of poets and artists. She was the 2011 Montgomery County Poet Laureate, selected by poet, Christopher Bursk. Her first full-length book of poems, Life is Perfect, is forthcoming from BookArts Press.

Kay Peters’ poems have appeared in Philadelphia Poets, Mad Poets Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, U.S. 1 Worksheets and Word Gathering. She is a registered nurse, a former oncology clinical nurse specialist, who now practices as a parish nurse. She came to writing poetry on the far side of middle age and has lived long enough to become a great-grandmother.

Alex Smith, curator for queer sci-fi reading Laser Life, is a queer black activist, poet, dj, actor, musician, afro punk/afro-futurist chronicler of the naughty universe. Smith’s work speaks to the post-fringe dystopia slowly creeping upon us. Too cantankerous and flamboyant for the Saul Williams wanna-be/def poetry set, too tribal for academia, Smith paints viral inscriptions for an audience of armed pixie insurrectionists. Alex’s stories, with their lines hashed like SAT-word injected SEPTA bus graffiti, will kidnap you, convert you, shoot you in the leg and then set you free.

A graduate of Temple University’s MA program in Creative Writing: Poetry, Stephen Potter works as a marketing manager for Turner Construction Company’s Philadelphia office. His poems have appeared over the years in ixnay, Aufgabe, Mirage #4 Period(ical), American Poetry Review, EOAGH, Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard, and most recently in the July 2012 issue of Assaracus (published by Sibling Rivalry Press). Born and raised in the Mayfair section of the city, he currently lives in Germantown and frequently finds the inspiration for his poems while traveling to and from Center City on the Chestnut Hill West line. Shawn Proctor’s writing has been nominated for Best New American Voices and published in several literary journals and anthologies, including Storyglossia, Anthology Philly, The Washington Pastime, Think Journal, Schuylkill Valley Journal and Our Haunted World: Ghost Stories from Around the Globe. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rosemont College, and earns geek cred by blogging on Nerd Caliber, Geekadelphia, and CultureMob. Lovella Rose is looking for her Lola. Losing laughter, smiles, and her Lola’s hands has inspired her to re-create memories made of clicks and frames, split seconds and imagination. Lovella is on an adventure to transform her life and the spinning galaxy. Exchanging computer screens for more face-to-face interactions, building deeper connections with loved ones to inspire healthier, creative rituals, beliefs and bodies. Catch her if you can, writing on walls, clicking at courage and dreaming of distant lands. Gathering community in the sun, kitchens and art spaces around the planet, she is excited to be exploring more art forms. Lovella has received two Art and Change Leeway grants and was also honored with the Leeway Transformation Award in 2009. She published her first chapbook of poetry Makibaka: Beautifully Brave in 2006 and released her second book Huwag Matakot: Do Not Be Afraid in 2010. She is the founder and director of Warrior Writers, a creative community for veterans articulating their experiences. During her time with WW, she edited three anthologies of veteran writing and visual artwork. Lovella is a co-founder of the Philipino-American artist collective, Tatlo Mestiz@s. Kirsten Saracini is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. She grew up in the outskirts of Philadelphia and now lives in Brooklyn, NY. She writes fiction. Frank Sherlock is a recipient of the Equinox Chapbook Award, selected for publication by Fact-Simile Press in 2012. He is the author of Over Here, The City Real & Imagined (with CAConrad), and a collaboration with Brett Evans entitled Ready-to-Eat Individual. New poems recently appeared in Aufgabe, Bright Pink Mosquito and Rethinking Marxism.

Carlos Soto-Román was born in Valparaíso, Chile. He is the author of Philadelphia’s Notebooks (Otoliths, 2011). He curates the cooperative anthology of contemporary u.s. poetry Elective Affinities. He lives in Philadelphia, PA. Sean Webb received an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and has been recipient of numerous honors and awards for his work including Fellowships from The Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Utah Arts Council. In 2005 Mr. Webb served as Poet Laureate of Montgomery County. His work has appeared in dozens of publications including The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, The Seattle Review, and an anthology titled Poems of Frances and Clare. He is the featured poet in the current edition of the Schuylkill Valley Journal and he has a poem featured in the exhibit Making Magic: Beauty in Word and Image, currently on display at the Michener Museum. Lauren Yates is from Oceanside, CA. She is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied Creative Writing. While at Penn, Lauren directed The Excelano Project poetry collective, and coached Penn’s slam team to third place at the Wade-Lewis Poetry Slam Invitational. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in FRiGG, Melusine, The Bakery, and The Legendary. Lauren wears hipster-friendly glasses that are actually prescription and enjoys pontificating on the merits of tentacle erotica. She wishes she had been born in the 80s. Magdalena Zurawski’s novel The Bruise was published in 2008 by FC2/ University of Alabama Press. A manuscript of poetry called Companion Animal is forthcoming from Litmus Press. She lives in Durham, but once lived in Philly. Jason Zuzga has published poetry in a number of venues and is the Nonfiction / Other Editor of FENCE. Currently, he is completing a Ph.D. dissertation in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania and has an MFA from the University of Arizona. He has had writing residencies at the Fine Arts Work center in Provincetown and at the James Merrill House in Stonington, CT. His PennSound page of audio recordings can be found at writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Zuzga.php.

For more information on the photographers in this issue, please visit apiarymagazine.com.

Image listing Andrea Poulsen

www.andreapoulsen.com

Paper Moon It may not be a full moon, but it’s close enough for jazz. Page 6 Art School Coworker Thank you for being a fellow member of the clean-up crew who appreciates the beauty of light falling upon a trash can. Page 9 Dancing Twins “It is better to open your eyes and say you don’t understand… than to close your eyes and say you don’t believe…” –Funkadelic Bylaw No. 19 Page 20 DaddyTookHimHome

Perhaps Flipper’s suicide was a deeply political act. Page 32

aids Thrift Tree Ah, the sweet pungent odors of Springtime… Page 34 Stardust Dancers

We are all, quite literally, stardust. Page 40

Painted Bride Reflections The best part is The Universe can mean anything. Page 48 Stevie Look-alike And I mean it from the bottom of my heart! Page 51 Self in Cosmos What if the series of coincidences that led to human evolution is so rare that nothing remotely like it has happened anywhere else in our visible universe? What if Earth IS that one special dot among billions? Would that fact change the meaning of your life? Page 52 Three Evergreens I love that you keep souvenirs to remind us how awesome Christmas was last year. Page 55 Brian

Being friends with you is the best decision I ever made. Page 56

Chair

Somebody’s been doing some serious meditation on the state of the world. Page 59

David Savoie

www.dcsimages.com

Jeffrey Stockbridge

jeffreystockbridge.com

Exploration 13

Page 4

Maria’s Block

Page 42

Exploration 27

Page 14

Susan

Page 47

Philadelphia 27

Page 18

Alex

Page 61

Exploration 23

Page 25

Exploration 17

Page 63

Home of Etruscan Press and SenArt Films field office

WRITE WHERE YOU LIVE

Low residency M.A. and M.F.A. in Creative Writing

LIVE THE WRITER’S LIFE Work with a community of professional writers to learn the craft and business of writing.

SUMMER 2013 RESIDENCY June 21-29 APPLICATION DEADLINE May 15

Lt. J.G. Alysha Haran, USS Antietam Creative Writing student

www.wilkes.edu/creativewriting

wilkes.edu/creativewriting • (800) WILKES-U Ext. 4534

AH-Hah! WE SEe YOU’VE FOuND a FReE COPY oF APIARY ! Why is this beautiful magazine yours for free ninety-nine? Our staff is all-volunteer. We do this for fun, and for free. And our awesome advertisers and members help pay for printing costs. If you like what we do, we’d love you to join us as a member. We have big plans – more copies, more workshops, an all-youth edition for schools – and we need your help. While we offer several membership tiers (ranging from $20 to $200), which you can read more about on apiarymagazine.com/support, your gift will go a long way in helping Apiary print, plan writing events, and proceed with its mission to connect Philadelphia writers and artists.

Since our first issue in September 2010, we’ve been able to accomplish the following: Print five issues, featuring over 150 local authors ages 8 and up

Increase our print run from an initial 250 copies to 10,000 copies

Conduct writing and editing workshops for over 100 young and beginning writers

Host literary events totaling over 1,000 audience members to enjoy local writing and music

Build and maintain the most comprehensive Philadelphia literary calendar on the web

To become a member by credit card or Paypal online, please visit apiarymagazine.com/support.

e in z a g a M Y R A I P A o t k r o W r u o Y it m Sub

om d prose collected fr an ry et po ry ra po ntem ld. arly magazine of co and around the wor y, tr APIARY is a twice-ye un co e th ss ro iladelphia, ac writers here in Ph ch on e keep a close wat w t, en m le pp su ted web e also our regularly upda ons. APIARY Onlin iti ed t in pr r ou n At APIARY Online, betwee that ure that appears in sual performances vi o/ di au r he ot d the exciting literat es an r spoken word piec provides a home fo white. in plain black-andcan’t be captured rts of styles, and so l al in s, nd ou gr and back you’ve just begun writers of all ages er th om fr he k W or n. w io h is at ic bl We pu k for publ e at APIARY consider your wor to ed ht lig uing it for years, w de rs be pu en be would ve ha age you to submit. n for writing or ur io ss co pa en e ur w yo d er an ov k, to disc r your wor elcoming home fo w a g in ak m in ve belie line at k, please visit us on or w ur yo it bm su ion on how to For more informat ns.

.com apiarymagazine to We’ll look forward

/submissio

hearing from you!

All writing is creative… Inform and inspire. Write across both creative and professional disciplines, experience intimate workshops & seminars, and get professional experience— all while honing your writing skills. Join our highly customizable and flexible writing program at Saint Joseph’s University.

Apply Today! Spring semester classes begin January 14, 2013.

M.A. in Writing Studies To learn more, visit www.sju.edu/apiary

Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences

Master of Liberal Arts

We don’t tell you what courses to take.

You tell us what You want to learn. Indulge your imagination in Penn’s part-time Master of Liberal Arts program.

eBound We'll design your eBook at an affordable price E-reader friendly in no time!

upenn.edu/mla

email eBoundBooks@gmail.com for rates

Build Your Future, Pursue Your Passion at Villanova University

What do successful teachers, writers, publishers, lawyers, non-profit leaders, actors and scientists have in common? Many of them got their start with a graduate degree in the Arts from Villanova University. Graduate Degrees and Certificates in the Arts: • Classical Studies

• Hispanic Studies

• Political Science

• Communication

• History

• Theatre

• Education

• Liberal Studies

• Theology

• English

• Mathematics

Villanova has competitive tuition rates and educators qualify for a significant tuition reduction. For more information or to apply, visit gradartsci.villanova.edu.