APIARY 4

APIARY written by humans

4

APIARY Apiary publishes work by authors of all ages. However, some content may not be appropriate for children under 13. If you are interested in a kid-friendly PDF edition for use in schools or other community programs, please contact us at info@apiary magazine.com.

Our next deadline to submit work for consideration is October 1, 2012.

Visit apiarymagazine.com/submit to learn more.

Apiary Issue 4.

Spring / Summer 2012.

ISSN: 2160-9608 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in review.

All works rights return to the authors upon publication. www.apiarymagazine.com info@apiarymagazine.com

write us a poem.

2011/2012 Staff Executive Editors Lillian Dunn Tamara Oakman info@apiarymagazine.com

Hello!

We’re Tamara and Lillian, co-founders and executive editors of APIARY magazine, and we’re very happy you’re joining us for Issue 4. It’s full of stories and poems by your neighbors. We hope the writing will move you, provoke you, surprise you, and delight you with the variety and brilliance of literature in Philly.

Web Editor Alexandra Stitz web@apiarymagazine.com

But we’re also happy you’re reading this particular issue. It embodies why we love Philadelphia and its uniquely generous creative communities, since without them APIARY wouldn’t exist at all.

Performance Poetry Editor Lindo Jones spokenword@apiarymagazine.com

Last fall we decided to print our first free edition. To do so we needed to multiply our staff, so we put out the call for new editors – for people who would want to devote their time and creativity, for free, to publishing other people’s writing.

Youth Editors Eve Gleichman Jasmine Walker youth@apiarymagazine.com

In some cities our job postings would have been met with a resounding silence.

But this is Philadelphia. Our inbox was flooded. Dozens of men and women with busy lives wanted to help celebrate literature, love and the pursuit of great writing. This winter our very first staff helped us create the magazine in your hands right now.

So Issue 4 is dedicated to our inventive, kind, and intensely talented staff members, and all of the other people who’ve donated their skills and ideas to us along the way.

To Lindo, Jasmine, and Eve, who run youth workshops across Philadelphia, pumping up classrooms with poetry and storytelling. To Amy, who scouts talented artists and captures our spirit in line and color. To Michelle, who ran our submissions long-distance while working and going to school. To Elizabeth, who convinced the advertisers who funded this issue to take a chance on a new magazine. To our interns, who always had finals but always saved our bacon.

To Alexandra, who keeps the website running like candy-colored clockwork. To Alina, who makes sure all 3 billion literary events in Philly are on our calendar.

To Mike, whose design lassoed our flyaway ideas into a coherent and radiant whole. And to Ras, for a sharp editorial eye and steady foot on the gas pedal, all the way to the printer in NYC. And it’s dedicated to you. Thank you for reading. Thank you for writing.

Love,

Art and Design Editor Amy Scheidegger art@apiarymagazine.com Graphic Designer Michael Martins design@apiarymagazine.com Events Editor Alina Pleskova events@apiarymagazine.com Marketing Manager Elizabeth Knauss marketing@apiarymagazine.com Submissions Manager Michelle Crouch submissions@apiarymagazine.com Contributing Editors Ras Mashramani Lindsay Steuber Interns Tiffany Kang Alice Liu Nadia Laher Anna Strong assistants@apiarymagazine.com

apiary

To learn more about the artists and artwork you see in this issue, please visit www.apiarymagazine.com.

CONTENTS 4 To Equisetum 5 Street Smart 7 The Hummingbird Landed on Your Casket 8 Greenhouse Index 8 Victory Threads 9 The Black Madonna 10 A Ladies’ Tea in Papua New Guinea 14 Folding His Laundry 15 Lady Montesinos’s Slumber 16 Thai Spiderman 17 Abuela’s Dance 18 Center City Sinister 19 Schuylkill Drive 20 Birdsong 22 Overheard on the Bus 22 So Why Do Pain and Fear Buy Heaven?

23 American Manifesto 24 Invisible Boy Thwarts the Brain 30 The Dream Zoe Had in Which She Killed 31 Her Body Remembers 32 Number 8 33 The Day 34 A Line, A Wall 36 Adrift 37 If God Was a Woman 38 Unsent Letter from Hansel and Gretel’s Father 40 Appease, Atone 41 Angel Island 46 Lust and Lights 48 Epiphany 48 Birthday at the Plough and Stars 49 Little Things 50–51 From marybones 52 A Strange Place for Snow 53 It’s Like Touching 55 News From the Porch 56 Roads Under Repair 58 Walt Sublets the Attic Bedroom 59 Striptease 59 Tears 60 Modern American Mythology 62 South Street, Philly 63 Intake 64 Cries of War 65 How Will I Find You? 66 The Magic Apartment 67 Roadside Marker 68 The Decision 69 The Fat Jar, Circa 1968

Nathan Alling Long Jacob Winterstein Adele Somma Montgomery True Ogden Octavia McBride-Ahebee Mel Brake Laura Tamakoshi Deidra Greenleaf Allan Dutch Godshalk Ellen Murphey Denice Frohman Anne-Adele Wight Mini Racker D. Panichas Hal Sirowitz Anne Kaier Naila Schulte Gregory Kane B.e. Kahn B.e. Kahn M. Nzadi Keita Elaine Terranova Andrew Ly David Dill Hiwot Adilow Michael O’Hara Jacob J. Staub Geoffrey Ng Lamont B. Steptoe Harry Baker Lauren Hall Lauren Hall Pattie M cCarthy Warren Longmire Dianca Potts Brian Patrick Heston Sean Finucane Toner Michael Haeflinger Minter Krotzer Minter Krotzer Travis DuBose Janet Spangler Kitakiya Dennis Shawn Henderson Thomas Devaney Adele Somma Hayden Saunier Aimee Seu A.V. Christie

70 Artist & Author Biographies

Italics denote a youth author

image listing “I’m Just a Crafty Sort of Guy” Inside Front Cover “Falcons on the Floor” Page 4 “My Little Hummingbird” Page 6 “Lux” Page 9 “The Latest Fashion” Page 10 “Peonies” Page 14 “The Other Holiday Meat” Page 21 “Winter, Go Away” Page 23 “The Inventor” Page 26 “Rooster” Page 31 “Rogue Activities” Page 32 “Escape of the Paper Pets” Page 34 “Maya” Page 36 “Summer, Come to Stay” Page 38–39 “Summer Banner” Page 41 “Apples” Page 42 “The Garden” Page 44 “Vest” Page 49 “Doves” Page 52 “Baby It’s Cold Outside” Page 54 “Jesse” Page 56 “Allen Ginsberg’s Howl” Page 58 “Belmont” Page 60 “Dress” Page 63 “My Giraffe Sanctuary” Page 67 “Self Reliance” Page 68

Artwork by Deanna Staffo. www.deannastaffo.com

To Equisetum It was horsetail, the oldest plant, that kept the Earth company during the Ice Age. Together they watched long, slow, foreign films and held each other tight as the ice came down in buckets and sheets . . . Afterwards, horsetail returned, bristly as sergeants’ hairs, waiting for ponds to become ponds again, their wide tips pointing up like thermometers in the newly gaseous sky. They whispered to the frozen planet, Wake up! . . . And it did. You can still hear the Earth’s secrets rattling inside them. You can still harvest, from each plant, almost a cup of patience – for they were around before horses, before tails. Consider how long they waited for a species to be named for, for a species which could name them, and then for someone, finally, to write for them a poem.

Street Smart names like New Golden House Chinese and American Food Take-Out written in red paint stroke script on lit yellow signs off white waiting rooms ketchup’n’salt’n’peppered in graffiti great walls of bullet proof glass and that same deceiving picture menu are as numerous and unmemorable as streetlights i was overly impressed by skyscrapers in tune with the pitch of car horns drunk off tastykakes and tap water on this particular typical saturday night i walked like a trolley into New Golden House standing in the glow of a wall sized backlit photo of a man paddling his humble wooden canoe through a dense emerald green rain forest my horizon interrupted i asked do places like this even exist? all naturey and shit years later far from bus schedules and fluorescent lights i sat alone in a forest its wood could only be carved more captivating by time birds chirped louder than my ego clamoring for city space

Nathan Alling Long

4

i, a gringo on the dance floor trying to loosen up as i watched the trees sway with the wind firm yet flexible

my broad street posture was useless so i leaned forward like a pine growing from a hillside didn’t straighten until i reached the top of a mountain my skyline became a circle my eyelids opened new overflowing with sky i stood there until night fell me laid out beneath the stars every single one was present even the ones i knew from germantown avenue i felt insignificant and that felt good! i knew from that point forth that no man could make me feel that small i slept dreamless with the night the sun rose me gently i stood up into a waterfall let earth’s hourglass rush over me i drank without fear thought back to me in the chinese store street smart still dumb as styrofoam do places like this even exist?

Jacob Winterstein

5

The Hummingbird Landed On Your Casket For Mom After you died, I became a scientist and researcher of miracles. Having written nine volumes on the subject and developed new systems of classification, I am now famous for my contributions.

I often work in the field, saying things like, “This looks to me like a stage 4 miracle” while eyeballing documents detailing diseases that were not only cured but that became kind and affectionate toward their victims, flooding the body with extra vigor.

A hummingbird alone qualifies as a stage 2 miracle for sharing characteristics with both helicopters and soap bubbles.

I am respected by my colleagues and am invited to speak at universities. Some of my past lectures include: why miracles occur more frequently on Tuesdays, how singing together invites larger miracles than singing alone, and if miracles ever are or could be political.

Miracles typically will result in both laughing and crying, and if you happen to hear this unusual sound, go toward it. There is most likely a miracle nearby. Do not mistake this for loss of sanity, which is similar in pitch.

Hummingbirds give forked tongued french kisses to 1000 flowers a day.

At the first sign of a miracle, open your heart immediately, through a good stretch or your most delightful memory. Many important miracles have been missed through lack of preparation and poor celestial vision.

Be watchful for uncommonly beautiful children and disturbances in the atmosphere.

Miracles of healing have been known to smell of lemon balm; miracles of otherworldly transmissions, like frosting.

A funeral in conjunction with the presence of any benign animal but especially a bird and even more significantly a hummingbird – indicates a certain garden-variety miracle, in which the deceased communicates their OK-ness.

I once studied the miracle of my grief for many months and found that it had millions of fibers, that it glowed under a black light. I knew my grief was a miracle because my soul had increased two inches in diameter to make room for it.

My theoretical opponent argues that everything is a miracle, including discarded plastics and loveless marriages, years spent in prison, carcinogenic melanoma. Miracles are not merely beautiful things, he announced, but fierce reckonings of the heart!

A hummingbird’s heart beats 1,260 times per minute!

Adele Somma

6

7

Greenhouse Index

Victory Threads

So summer’s wrung memory corrects through this flint lens, love’s also — richard kenney

For Sojourner

1.

I was hiding in the yellow of my brother’s curtains, wading through the seaweed of their translucence, grown jealous of the day-lilies flanking the garage at dawn.

2.

My mother’s reflection barely catching in the glass of a museum-front’s display,

I heard her friends laugh at her that laugh which is square that stops at points never to wonder only to breathe in base expulsions of uncurious air she had proclaimed in a combined fit of wistfulness and swaggering insolence she had had combs in Abidjan with names – Akissi, Ahou, Abla, Ama, Adjoua – who understood the temperament of each day’s hair story who could dress your head while weaving choruses of victory threads in your brain preparing you to meet the day haughty and wholly armored.

The Black Madonna I am the black Madonna

I am the giver Of life

encased now by a photograph she took. Funny, I never thought then

I am blacker Than The Earth

And the receiver Of a man’s Shell

of looking back or looking for her, thin as breath, just across my shoulder.

I am black Like The soil

I am the black Madonna

And Dark As the Tree of Life

I am Mother Primordial

I am the black Madonna

I am the Great Mother

I am black Like The womb

And black Like Eternal Wisdom

3.

A collection of lightbulbs my father keeps in lieu of plants, wasting in the sun beside a living room window, laughing at the trees.

I am The fruit Of All men

Montgomery True Ogden

8

Octavia McBride-Ahebee

And I don’t Belong To any one man

Mel Brake

9

A Ladies’ Tea in Papua New Guinea

I

n 1983, at the end of a long rainy season and a year “in the field” in the steep mountains in the interior of Papua New Guinea, the last people to accept me into Gende society were three older women who lived on the other side of Yandera village. Separated from the Tundega side by a large wooden church with a tin roof and steeple, and squat bush material classrooms and teachers’ houses circling the upper and lower playing grounds of the Yandera community school, the women lived in smoky, thatched roof houses with their Yandima clan in-laws, husbands, and pigs. Though I was adopted on my arrival in 1982 into Tundega clan by a powerful Big Man and his family, my research demanded that I get to know every household in Yandera, the largest of the Gende villages with 492 residents and over two-hundred absentees living in towns and more developed areas. I was especially interested in interviewing these particular women, however. They were among the few Gende women old enough to remember what it was like to grow up female in a stone-age society before the arrival of the

10

first German missionaries in 1932, at a time when the school grounds were “fight” grounds and most Yandera villagers were living elsewhere after being chased off their land by fierce Gende warriors from nearby Karasokara and Emegari villages.

Early on, I was told by amused storytellers of how three young Yandera women set off the conflict when they hotly rejected the rude advances of Karasokara Lotharios by turning their backs on the men and publicly shaming them, raising their pulpuls (string skirts) and revealing their naked bottoms. The young women’s obscene taunts accompanied derisive cries that the Karasokara men would “never get closer” to the young women than looking. The young warriors had insulted the young women by suggesting that they wanted to have sex with the men even before their bride prices were set because the young men were handsome and the young men’s families were more prosperous than the Yandera women’s fathers and uncles. The young people’s skirmish occurred in the context of an exchange event in which the Yandera hosts disappointed their traditional exchange partners (and sometimes enemies) with what the Karasokara recipients considered meager and ungenerous gifts of pork and shell valuables. Doubly offended, but surrounded by hundreds of Yandima’s and Tundega’s allies from other Gende villages, the young Karasokara warriors skulked off, but not before they vowed that they and their allies would drive the Yandera people off their land forever. Though the Yandikaris were driven off their land and forced to live with allies for years until the missionaries and Australian patrol officers established a Pax and Yandera villagers returned to their land in the late 1930s, the story of the young women’s boldness was a village favorite and a continuing source of pride for the three women, who were still alive, more than fifty years later.

One of the three women had snubbed me for the better part of a year. When I first came to Papua New Guinea, I came alone. Plans to have my family accompany me for a year in the field evaporated when – only months before our expected takeoff from the States and after years of planning and preparation – my husband announced it was not a good time to take a sabbatical in his beleaguered school district. Our children – being teenagers – decided they’d rather not

leave their friends for a year and they’d stay home with Dad. And so began a year that held many traumas for me and them, but especially me – a woman who had never been away from her children for more than a few days at annual anthropology conferences – and my youngest son, who was twelve when I left and suffered the ignorance of other twelve year olds asking him why his mother had “left him”. While Gende villagers enjoyed my family’s month-long visit in the middle of my fieldwork and teased me that I needed to put away my notebook and take care of my family like a “proper wife and mother”, the only ones who seemed genuinely worried about my family being able to take care of themselves without me were my three critics.

After my family left, the three women amped up their disapproval. Climbing up the mountain to the Yandima side of Yandera to wash my clothes and collect water at a spring where other women gathered and gossiped, I was met by the three women’s sideways looks of condescension and stage-whispered critiques. As my understanding of Gende tok ples grew, I heard them sneer about the “white woman” and her “bad ways”. At the bi-weekly markets on the upper school ground, sitting straight-backed with thin muscular legs off to the side and small piles of green vegetables and yams in front of them for sale, the “ladies” – for that is what I came to call them in my head – would turn their tightly curled, grey heads away from me, their aquiline profiles and chins lifted in distaste as they muttered about the strange mores of foreign women. On Sundays, when parishioners from the surrounding villages worshipped in Yandera’s Catholic church, the “ladies” made sure there was never space for me to scoot next to them on the women’s side. Soon, I was intimidated by their severity and began sitting towards the back of the church, focusing on other relationships and matters, like the upcoming poi nomu (pig kill) in which Yandera Big Men would show off their influence and power and visitors from all the Gende villages and returning migrants would be fested for days with mounds of cooked pork, gifts of cash and pigs, and traditional dances.

From the first days of living in Yandera, I and six or seven school teachers who came from other parts of Papua New Guinea to teach in Yandera’s primary school pooled our resources and twice a month paid a local youth to walk the twenty-mile mountain trek to Bundi Station where he would gather our mail at the

tiny post office. Our mail boy would then bring it back the following day along with trade goods he purchased with his wages; items such as cartons of cigarettes, cheese pops, and gum. Several times a week a small plane could be heard down the Tai-Ayor river valley as it came over the mountains from Madang town, bringing supplies and mail to the Catholic mission and government patrol post at Bundi. It was the only mechanical sound heard and my ears became so attuned to the sound of mail being delivered to Bundi that I could hear the plane long before it crested the mountains and on clear days could see the tiny speck as it disappeared behind the distant mountain cutting off our view of the Bundi airstrip, only five or six miles away as the crow flies.

Receiving news from home twice a month became an emotional metronome. On the day they arrived I would shut myself in my thatched roof house and read and re-read the letters. Sometimes I cried over what I was missing in my children’s lives, but mostly the letters connected me to my whole self, the streams of information about village life and life in West Chester, Pennsylvania crossing, blending a stable inner dialogue.

Throughout the time in between I would write daily letters to be shared by my family and mother and sister, letters responding to their letters as well as descriptions of daily affairs in Yandera. As the day for the next delivery approached, my anxiety grew and I became distracted, my letters (which my family saved for me) becoming more needy. After a batch of letters, I was revived knowing how my children had done in school, family gossip from my mother (who wrote the most letters), and that everyone was alive and well.

After the poi nomu – which took place in October – the weather turned rainy. After Christmas, with scores of Christmas cards from friends and family in the states still hanging on my woven bamboo walls and the fake Christmas tree my mother had sent gracing the inside of the church, the rainy season descended full force. For months it rained every day, sometimes all day and night. I had only to put plastic buckets outside my door and they were full of fresh water in ten minutes. Walking anywhere was treacherous as the red earth turned oily and everywhere, except in the village squares, was vertical. Rubber boots were useless as they got stuck in the mud and I soon went barefoot with my toes grasping the muck as I worked my way along to a neighbor’s home to warm myself by their fire. With twenty inches of rain falling some

11

nights, I was kept awake with the roar of a river coming down the mountain behind Yandera and deepening the gorge that separated parts of the village only a few feet from where I lay. Landslides were common and stories of whole villages being covered added to my anxiety. Above all, however, my anxiety mounted as more than a month and a half passed without any mail, it being impossible for the mail planes to land at Bundi and no one was crazy enough to send anyone to get the mail even if it was there.

And then, suddenly, it didn’t rain for almost a week.

The skies were blue. The playing fields dried up. And on Sunday, there was a full congregation. After church, people from all around gathered outside to catch up on the news. As we stood in small circles, I saw an unfamiliar man make his way up the hill from the Tundega side to where I was. He introduced himself – a migrant home on leave and passing through Yandera on his way to another Gende village – having arrived at Bundi two days before. While normally I would want to talk with a returning migrant, I was more interested in the pile of mail he retrieved from his backpack and handed to me. There were a few letters addressed to the school teachers but the preponderance of mail and packages was for me.

My excitement made me shake as I quickly hugged a few friends and said goodbye to the young man and headed downhill to my house. A shout stopped me.

“Laura! Where are you going with the mail!” A Tundega clansmen – a cousin “brother” of my Big Man father (and therefore mine) – stepped in front of me and grabbed the mail from my arms. “The school office will be open for business tomorrow morning. You can get your mail then. Not on Sunday!” Stunned, I caught my breath and then laughed at Joseph. As Tundega’s school committee member he had the authority to dictate some bureaucratic matters, but this? It was private mail delivered from Bundi straight to me.

Joseph shoved the mail through the open window of the little school office onto a table. He then repeated, “You can get your mail tomorrow!” and walked off down to the Tundega side where the first of the day’s card games was about to take place. Gambling, an illegal activity in Papua New Guinea, was an obsession with the Gende.

The irony of Joseph’s pulling moral rank caused me to laugh again as I turned for support to those small groups of men and women still gathered near the church. Most were already heading off to their own

12

Sunday afternoon activities however, most that is except for the three “ladies” who glared at me in a satisfied way before departing to visit friends and family on the Tundega side. When they left, the only people remaining were children, several boys playing marbles and a few girls who stared at me and then giggled, running off after their mothers to help prepare the afternoon meal of boiled sweet potatoes, greens, and maybe – if they had company – tinned fish spooned over hot rice with potatoes and greens on the side. Alternately glancing at the pile of mail and at the boys concentrating on their game, I let half an hour go by before I reached in and took the mail, careful to take only mine. Back in my house, I spent the remainder of the day reading and re-reading the letters. One of the packages had a tin of home-made chocolate chip cookies that a friend had sent surface mail, not realizing it would take six weeks to cross the Pacific Ocean and be processed through endless foreign post offices. The cookies were completely crumbled but she had wrapped it in enough plastic wrap that the crumbs and chocolate chips were still fresh.

As I picked up my Coleman lantern to light it for the evening, I was startled by the sounds of Joseph pounding on my door and shouting my name. “Laura, open this door! You have committed a crime against the community! Stealing the mail is a federal offense!”

On the defensive, I unlatched the door and swung it open, shouting back, “It’s my mail!” As we hurled insults at one another, I was aware of a crowd gathering outside my house that – judging by their smiles and laughter – was enjoying the show. I was more aware, however, that I was transgressing normal anthropological behavior by fighting with one of my study group! What was I thinking? I could be thrown out of the village, possibly the entire country, for verbally attacking a school committee member who was trying to maintain order! I burst into tears. “I’m sorry. I miss my children,” I sobbed. Through my very real tears, I could see concerned looks in everyone’s faces. A few men shouted at Joseph to leave me alone, and many of the women berated him. At the head of the women’s chorus were my three “ladies” who were not only censuring Joseph but telling the crowd to go to their own homes and leave me be. Within a few minutes the crowd dispersed, Joseph slunk off, and there were only the three women standing at my door.

If Joseph were American I would say he slunk off in

disgust assuming my tears were a woman’s trick.

The three women’s faces were no longer imperious, but warmly concerned.

After several minutes of staring at them, I asked them in. They stepped in and sat down on the floor beside one another. I lit a match to the primus and put a kettle of water on for tea. I opened the tin of crumbled cookies and gave them spoons. I opened a package of crackers and spread peanut butter and jam on them and placed them on a tin plate in front of the “ladies”.

After giving each woman a mug of tea to drink, I sat down on the floor with them and lit the Coleman lantern. For the next hour, the women and I laughed about Joseph’s officiousness and they told me that men could be cold when it came to women’s feelings about their children. As they talked, it became clear that although they never “left” their children, they had grown sons and daughters and grandchildren living in town who rarely visited from one year to the next.

The woman who had been one of the bold young women who stood up to the Karasokara Lotharios, laughed the hardest at the thought of men trying to run women’s lives when it was women who did most of the gardening, raised the children, and tended the pigs that were killed at the grand poi nomu. Before they went off in the dark with my flashlight, we hugged tightly and promised to sit together at the Wednesday market.

The next few weeks were crowded with finishing my research surveys and planning my “going-finish” party. While the days took care of themselves, my nights were crowded with anxious dreams: dreams of trying to find my way home and, worse yet, not wanting to go home because I feared I had changed too much and those at home would disapprove of me. In one dream, a number of villagers walked me down the mountains to a borderland where Papua New Guinea ended and America began. I could see my family in the distance, picnicking in our backyard, laughing, and not seeing or just ignoring me. I wanted to run back to Yandera but the women told me I must go home. In another dream, I was home, at a fancy ladies’ club tea party.

The three Yandera “ladies” were in charge, seated behind a linen covered table pouring tea from silver tea pots into china cups. They were dressed in western clothing and pearl necklaces, their grey curls glistening, their manner impeccable as ever. I on the other hand was barefoot and dressed in used clothing, totally out of my element. When one of the “ladies” offered

me a cup of tea I mumbled that I was afraid I would break the cup and turned and fled.

In real life, people expressed their happiness that I was going to see my family but sad that I was leaving.

Many kept saying, “You won’t come back. Why would you come here when you have everything special at home.” No matter how many times I remonstrated with them, they would repeat, “No, you will not come back. White people never come back.” The only ones who believed me were the three “ladies.” “You will come back. You must bring your children. Your son Andrew [ who was nineteen the summer before and had a number of female admirers in the village ] is a handsome young man. We will find a good wife for him, one who will not leave him.” If my lady friends were Americans I would say they winked at me! But they were serious.

Laura Tamakoshi

13

Folding His Laundry

Lady Montesinos’s Slumber

For a son in recovery

Lady Montesinos, the world turns without you

I fold it neat, this sheet full of wrinkles in my arms. I grip its corners, snap it in the air, and watch as it settles to the floor, its white expanse blotched and crannied with blue like an iceberg adrift on the sea.

It lies so docile there, unable to move without my help, unable to resist my care, its crumpled landscape splayed like the legs of a man asleep.

I lift it up and begin to fold — corners even, creases true and tight — smoothing and shaping its awkward bulk down to a perfect square, then, like a flag honoring an ended life, I lay it on the closet shelf and close the door.

though you’re not gone yet: Present in a leather chair as coffee continents stain your gown, and thin, un-muscled legs lay forlorn, you’re here, O lady, but not by more than a tally on a government form: reclining, dormant through sun and storm; sustained on the pension of one folded American flag propped at the head of your sleepless, queenly, screened-in bed.

Widowed lady, bitter mother of many, does your skin not miss the touch of sun’s rays? can TV, flashing stale over frozen face, replace the warmth of summer days?

Snared by the syndicated, you are caged freely behind unlocked doors: Volition sealed you in behind the black blanket you tacked up to blot with intemperance the twisted light of a window’s frame, shades opened in vain:

In near darkness you sit beneath the frantic glow of cable colors, unmoved and unseen in this place of your retirement; this place where memories distort like stones turning under water, where the mind believes whatever debris bubbles up from the deep: Swirling, baseless cognitions denouncing objectives of old while loath stirs from lethargy.

You cultivate hate from false experience, clinging to stalagmites of fictive history, facts formed of successive opera plots and perennial battles on court TV. O female Polyphemos, suspicious from wood-paneled cave; a place recessed, a place of battling shadows, of restless rest: The world turns without you, O lady.

This country does not wait for the sedentary.

As the lone glow of a cigarette stick burns to a poisoned filter (one freckled ember rising, falling; a single dismal sun dusting dusted robe), You are felt in fears of sons for mothers, and heard in prayers uttered under breath, while the flies believe you statuesque, and all the rest go on without you.

Lady Montesinos, will you wake up before you sleep?

Deidra Greenleaf Allan

14

Dutch Godshalk

15

Abuela’s Dance I creep into your room, Abuela.

Like an 8-year old on Christmas morning up 3 hours too early, but it’s 1pm and you’re still sleeping.

Thai Spiderman

I decide to wake you.

Call me selfish, but there’s something left in you that I need to hold before you’re gone.

News Item: A Thai firefighter put on a Spiderman costume to rescue a superhero-loving autistic boy who had climbed onto a third-floor balcony because he was anxious on his first day of school. Somchai Yoosabai was called in after the 11-year-old boy’s teachers and mother failed to coax him off the ledge…“I told him, ‘Spiderman is here to save you,’ Somchai said. The teary-eyed boy broke into a smile and started walking to him.

Of all the firefighters they could have asked for – the semi-police, with loud boots, axes smashing down the door – those could have been the ones who showed.

It’s straightforward to chop through a door and spray the flames. The most basic love sometimes is being brave.

So the mother and the teachers pleaded: “Don’t be afraid! The first day is cupcakes!”

Their bladed voices aimed for the boy, for the doors in his skin, to gash and poke their courage in.

As your eyes open, I wait your face, trying to make sense of mine, trying to translate me into something you’ve spoken before And I know it only takes about 22 seconds, but I swear, it’s long enough for me to fall in love again.

The door cracked open and he entered on a thread.

This kind of love is rare, requiring a spider’s climb into thin air – the kind you give an ancient relative who mistakes you for your mother, who airily declares that her (dead ) husband is sitting there on the empty olive-colored ottoman, and you say Yes. He always was a quiet one.

Watch the break in her face, the confirmation of an opened door, the sign that sometimes someone else’s truth is what is called for.

It didn’t work. Their ruse didn’t comply with his truth.

But someone knew what to do.

Trading his jacket for a blue and red skin, he waved his spindly, spider legs.

16

Ellen Murphey

“Abuela, yo soy tu nieta. Recuerda?”

And there your eyes widen like football fields, as you reach for me in your back pocket, like a crumpled dollar bill you forgot you had, showing me that I have always been worth holding onto.

After we exchange short Spanish greetings, I try to keep the conversation going, but I’m not fluent, this language, your language was always bumpy road.

So I turn the radio on to fill the pot holes in my tongue and we dance.

Let Celia Cruz lay the clues that stitch you back to me the lyrics pulling themselves over the gaps in your seams like a jacket covering the puddles in your memory lapses, synapses snapping, and though your mind is a retired dancer with two left feet, your spirit is a 22 year old woman, with legs that could wrap Christmas presents for days and hips that could make God want a lap dance.

Every chorus a question I ask like: “Abuela, how did you feel when it was illegal to wave your own flag?”

Every melody, a moment to capture your history like: “Abuela, did you really walk 3 miles to school everyday?”

Every riff, a chance to end those sleepless nights once and for all: “Abuela, did you ever figure out how to stay in love?

I promise I won’t tell a soul I know.”

See when we dance, we make corpses wanna boogie.

You in bed, moving your arms conducting the skeleton of my body like a symphony my hips, rocking back and forth, with a dip and a twist, kissing the accents in your favorite song’s lips, reaching for the dimples in your memory for me to take a picture with.

I can make you feel like when she was 22, growing up in a poor Puerto Rican town too high up to place on the map.

Abuela, do you remember you yet?

And I know this just amuses you, but the truth is this was never just dancing.

You represent a part of me that people said I could never claim.

You give me the language to speak my identity fluently, for the first time this was never just dancing.

And maybe it’s because I’m the only one that can get to you, the 22 year old in you, the joy, the smile that forgets to show itself on most days.

Abuela, you make me feel useful.

You make me feel like I come from someplace, so who needs maps any way, I have you.

So go ahead Abuela, sleep – just not forever.

Because you and I have a lot more dancing left to do.

Denice Frohman

17

Center City Sinister

Schuylkill Drive On the highway by the river, sharp points of light Reflect back out of the ink basin, Sliding beneath their realities like interlocked combs’ teeth The trees waver in the pallid glow of the low moon And I drive with the glass down so the night hits me Ice air sting rushes, and the cold enlivens me To the possibilities of the water, where great whales dwell Deep below and currents thrash the relinquished to the mirror world.

Across the way, a lone car drags along the other pieces And the dark grass, like algae, and the stone hills Are a call to the city both and quiet gardens.

One-eyed man gestures with his arm in a sling pulling fistfuls of wire from the heart of a hotel he’s younger than he looks volcano building its crater

corner bartender swats flies for the deep-fat fryer I think back to the feeling of the lamps, Not points in the blackest depths, but stars shaping framework Of industry and promise against the sunset And the rapid parachute winds, arms clawing at the rising vacuum, Like swimming breathlessly, swinging for something, But this place right here is only Teleportal, jaguar-sleek, forward motion, The type to make me forget, and to breathe The force-fed oxygen which doesn’t really harm the eyes As much as the plains here thought it would.

The houses don’t twinkle, and it’s the water’s very darkness That attracts me to it.

we get nowhere fast by parsing beer signs

his fist became a scarred knee that time they sold hell on Broad Street hawked it as a Parisian festival mudslide Ferris wheel a sad mistake

Except there is the way In which the colors change. Like magic, It conjures memories, and even in the empty Motion-car the voices return and the scent of firs And Scotch cookies mix in with the sound of smiling And there’s music, too, but that’s with me The beats and the lyrics smoothing my soul alongside the wind.

While every shadow calls for it and the animus itself Longs to melt into this resolved mirage.

you understand theory of flies mating in the lap of your skirt it’s the practice that throws you

has Tiffany’s gone fishing? window rife with ice cream cones pickup trucks fold their wings earthquake position

he extends his imaginary tryst while she waits behind a sandwich everybody loves Paris at least once.

18

Anne-Adele Wight

But as the voices and promises and firelight cling, And the avenues call me back, Ridge and the Boulevard, Indian Queen, and the coffee shops and Fluorescent gas stations, all abandoned for the night.

I find my shoulders tense, and this speed too.

And with great effort I pull every muscle down.

And I let go, but now it’s only the pulsing poems From the speakers, and friction with the asphalt, Dragging that takes me home, where light is only heat Not perfect iridescent coldness. And I do miss it.

How I miss the Drive.

Mini Racker

19

Birdsong “Mommy-what-do-you-give-a-sick-bird,” Zack stated flatly, staccato.

Amy stared at her son, shocked, and then confused.

After this, and after all this time, this was what he had to say?

Zack sat rumpled on the floor, his face still red from the thirty-second restraint he had been placed in after punching himself in the face while he was being read to. He looked past, not at, his mother. His teacher, who had restrained him minutes before, sat neutrally by. She had to be neutral. As part of Zack’s behavioral program, his teachers were to positively reinforce good behavior and be neutral towards negative, no matter how upsetting it was. The program worked – Zack’s self-injury had decreased dramatically once he was surrounded by a fleet of professionals who didn’t react when he tried to break his own nose – but it required a superhuman level of detachment that no parent could maintain. This was why Zack lived at this school, and not at home where Amy so desperately wanted him to be, and why she was reduced to visiting him once a week, parenting by program.

Yet his teacher’s eyes were not detached. They had somehow widened without physically widening. She was as shocked as Amy. Zack had not spoken in four years. He was ten years old.

Before he stopped speaking, Zack didn’t say much, but he spoke. Not like everyone else – he sounded as if he were phonetically reading aloud a language he didn’t know, with correct pronunciation but no cadence, no inflection. But he did talk. Then one day he just stopped for seemingly no reason, and disappeared so thoroughly it was like he had kidnapped himself.

Dancing inside, Amy tried to stay neutral outside.

Was he truly speaking to her? Or was he just droning strange things to himself, as he had years before?

Either way, she would take it.

Waiting, his eyes flickered towards her, then to the wall.

Still struggling, Amy didn’t know what to answer. She looked at Zack’s teacher, who subtly shrugged, just as baffled. All Amy knew was that, per Zack’s program, she could not blow this moment by reacting too strongly. She had to act as though Zack had spent the past four years chatting away, not sealed off in his own steadfastly silent world. If she reacted too strongly, if there were any hoopla ( how she wanted to jump up and shout! ), he might disappear again. She had heard of this happening to other kids.

“Um . . . medicine?” Zack had always been about facts, so she stuck with the obvious.

“No. What-do-you-give-a-sick-bird.”

“Heat?”

“No. What-do-you-give-a-sick-bird.”

His voice hit her harder, and suddenly inside she was flooded with him, his voice, his insane question, and their wretched, unfair, heartbreaking life together and apart. Her head spun, her heart pounded, she felt dizzy. The walls around her seemed to yaw, stretch, collapse. He was her son, and she hadn’t the foggiest idea what he was getting at. She had never known.

During his four years of silence she’d prayed for enlightenment at the end of his long mute tunnel, for a shining new voice that would give some clue into him, but apparently this was not going to happen. It was just more of before, now older and hoarse.

“Yes,” Zack monotoned, distinctly un-jokesterish.

Zack’s teacher lost control of her eyes; they grew round. And with that Amy lost her hard-fought neutrality. Her eyes welled over, tears spilled down her cheeks, and her body flooded with joy at this, the only joke her son had ever told her.

She smiled at him brightly, tenderly, and remembered to reinforce this most positive behavior.

“Zack, that’s a very good joke.” She touched him lightly on his cheek. “And you’re a funny bird.”

“I don’t know, Zack.”

“I’m not a bird. I’m a boy.”

“Tweetment.”

“Yes.” She looked at him. He looked, as he always had, straight through her.

Now Zack was back.

“Mommy.” His voice was rough but surprisingly strong.

His tone was as toneless as it had been when he was six. “Mommy-what-do-you-give-a-sick-bird.”

Amy paused, completely confused. Then something in her head flickered and clicked.

“Zack, are you telling me a joke?”

20

Content, they finished the chapter.

D. Panichas

21

Overheard on the Bus

So why do pain and fear buy heaven?

I went to Kmart to buy a Halloween costume

Maybe Hamlet’s right. It’s what’s unknown, the undiscovered country, that gives us pause – even for a young man like Hamlet, who, though in a very bad fix, still had shapely legs, and a compliant girlfriend.

But he was on to something.

for my daughter, she said.

She wanted to be Princess Diana.

The saleswoman said they don’t have them in stock. She suggested a Tinker Bell costume. But Tinker isn’t as relevant. Diana took care of the poor and infirm.

She radiated love. Plus, she died tragically.

What did Tinker Bell do for humanity?

She didn’t do shit. She waved her wand, then flew away. She didn’t stay around to see whether the spell she cast transformed the person or left him the same.

Plus, she’s the same age she was when I was young. She hasn’t grown up. She only has herself to blame for not becoming a saint.

If you are frozen out in some forsaken nursing home, in bed with a fly and you can’t get up, but you have a stash of pills – well, the nurses probably count the pills and watch you take them – yet if you managed to stash the pills and the fly, who was, after all, free to leave, wouldn’t, would God mind so much, even having fixed his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter, if you ignored that rule and swallowed?

Lying there, when nightmares glare like seven deadly sins, when they frolic in the daytime, peering, leering from the metal bedside table, when they zoom in the window and swoop across your bed at noon, when your brain lets loose grotesques in your skull, gargoyle monster faces you can neither tame nor know, when jeering men kept down for years, come out to flog and beat and eat you, you want to drown your sense in odors, float like Ophelia to a soft and watery death.

AMERICAN MANIFESTO We believe in sin. We call it sadness.

Nakedness of raw nerves.

We always win. We know it as privilege.

Who sweeps the coins off the table at closing, licks the bowl, gets first dibs. Who throws the knockout punch while collapsing into death. Who doesn’t know the difference.

We believe, and our belief destroys us.

Singing is for Idols; caged birds may tune in. Shorn wings, electromagnetic bars, wholly plausible Matrix. Beyond the curtain, the puny Wizard detonates triumphant laughter.

Naila Schulte

I ended up not buying anything.

At home I made her a Princess Diana costume.

Hal Sirowitz

22

Anne Kaier

23

Invisible Boy Thwarts The Brain

T

he cameramen take turns helping Einstein with his math homework. It’s the fractions that give him problems – finding common factors, converting mixed fractions, the dreaded denominators.

Cameraman Joe uses slices of pizza to help make sense of the problems, but that only works for so long.

Dividing 5 2/3 by 4 5/6 doesn’t translate well to slices of pepperoni in greasy cardboard boxes. At least, not to a fourth grader.

They try it anyway. It’s good television.

Four pizza boxes are lined side-by-side on the hardwood floors of Einstein’s study space. Joe crouches behind the boxes with his camera at his feet, a slice in one hand, teaching improper fractions between bites.

Einstein sits Indian-style in front of the boxes, nodding and scribbling in his notebook. Cameraman Tony stands to the side, filming every moment.

“So we’ve got three full pizzas, and three slices gone from the fourth,” Joe says while finishing his second piece. “There’s eight slices in each pie. What’s the fraction?”

Einstein takes a moment, writes a few notes in his book. He looks up. “Three and five-eighths,” he says.

“There you go!” Joe goes up for the high-five; Einstein obliges. “Now, say we’ve got to multiply these pizzas by another set of pizzas. How do we do it?”

Einstein shrugs.

“We convert it to an improper fraction, where the bigger number’s on top.”

Silence.

“Think of it this way,” Joe says, trying another tactic.

“Each pie has eight slices. So the denominator’s going to be eight. The improper fraction’s going to be the total number of slices over eight. There’s twenty-nine left here, so that’s twenty-nine over eight. Right?”

Einstein stops scribbling. He looks over the pizzas arranged before him, a concentrated look on his face, willing understanding to somehow surface in the mixture of congealed cheese, grease and reddish meat.

Millions of loyal viewers know what this look means, what the boy’s sudden silence and halted note taking during study time indicates. He’s lost. “Don’t tell my dad, Joe, OK?” Joe nods. It’s a silly request, really. Einstein’s dad is going to see this latest stumbling block in his son’s

24

education along with everyone else watching at home. The trouble with fractions won’t really surprise Helmsworth Adams – his gradual acceptance of Einstein’s apparent mediocrity is one of the wrinkles that have made Atomic Family such a success during the past decade. A boy genius is no match for a weekly avalanche of disappointment and failed expectations.

Einstein Newton Nils Adams has a secret. He keeps it locked away in a trunk in his closet, the same place he keeps the drawings and comic books he scribbles when he’s supposed to be studying. Helmsworth and Einstein’s mother, the scientist Agnes BobrovskyAdams, first notice the trunk early in the eighth season and pick the lock during the season finale. They rifle through the drawings and writings, etched onto the backs of the scrap paper Helmsworth uses for his complex formulas, unsure of what sort of contraband an eight-year-old boy could be hiding. Pornography?

Drugs? Then they find it, zipped away in a duffel bag under a heap of papers: A can of gasoline that went missing from the basement months earlier, and a box of matches from the kitchen.

“Maybe he is planning a scientific experiment,” Helmsworth says.

“Experiment?” Agnes says. “Burning the house down?”

“Not all inquisitive minds manifest immediately,” Helmsworth continues. “Fire is among the basic elements. It’s only natural for a young physicist to want to toy with such phenomena to further his understanding.”

Agnes turns and walks away.

The trunk’s opening ranks among the series’ highestrated episodes, just below Einstein’s birth, his first day of school and the unforgettable IQ test. It is also Agnes’ final appearance – she leaves before the ninth season begins, taking a research position in a European laboratory. She gives Einstein a kiss and tells him she will try to return for the holidays. She never does.

In an interview, Agnes says she wishes leaving her only child behind had been more difficult. “He is my flesh and blood,” she says. “But the way we’ve been, all these years … Einstein feels more a co-worker than a son.”

Helmsworth and the producers agree to leave Einstein’s secret in the trunk. Perhaps it’s the key to the boy unlocking his potential as a great scientific mind, they say.

Plus, it’s good for ratings.

Atomic Family debuts on September 15, 2000. It features Helmsworth, a Nobel Prize-winner for his pioneering work in advancing the string theory of particle physics, and wife Agnes, herself considered among the world’s great scientists. Agnes is five months pregnant. She lies on a table in a doctor’s office, Helmsworth standing by her side. Both stare at a black-and-white ultrasound image of a fetus.

They learn it will be a boy.

“His brain is developing nicely, then?” Helmsworth asks the doctor.

“Everything looks normal,” the doctor replies.

“There will be nothing normal about this child,” Helmsworth says.

They play Tchaikovsky and Mozart through a set of headphones placed on Agnes’ swollen belly.

Helmsworth whispers mathematics to his unborn child, starting with whole numbers and graduating to multiplication, addition and subtraction. By the pregnancy’s ninth month, the physicist recites the proofs of famous equations while lying at Agnes’ side, willing every word toward his son’s ears. Physics will be Einstein’s second language, maybe his first.

It is in his genes.

The original pitch for Atomic Family is to follow Helmsworth and Agnes as they run through their everyday lives. What do two of the most intelligent people in the world discuss during dinner? Who wins the arguments? Who does the cooking? Then, just before filming begins, Agnes becomes pregnant.

Now comes the promise of history: the offspring of geniuses, the next great intellectual, his every developmental milestone documented and broadcast to viewers across the globe. The television show about a married couple tackling science’s greatest mysteries becomes an homage to a boy. Or, more precisely, a boy and his obsessive father.

Helmsworth names the boy after the fathers of modern physics: Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and Nils Bohr. Father and son, he imagines, working together on the great unsolved theoretical problems in physics: The quantum field theory bringing quantum mechanics and general relativity into a single reality, Penrose’s cosmic censorship hypothesis, Hawking’s chronology projection conjecture. The child will eventually surpass them all with his genius.

Einstein has a C. He knocks on the door of his father’s home office.

The look on Helmsworth’s face is unbearable. It’s as if he remains hopeful for a breakthrough, some sort of divine enlightenment in which his son’s mind becomes extraordinary. Einstein’s father does not notice the As in English and art or the high marks for behavior and penmanship. It is the C, in mathematics, that breaks his heart all over again. Report card day is Einstein’s quarterly ritual of shame.

“You must take your work more seriously,” Helmsworth says.

“Yes, dad,” Einstein says.

During the first few seasons, when Einstein is a baby, Helmsworth takes an active role in his education.

He reads Joyce, Tolstoy and Shakespeare to the sleeping infant. He explains quarks, quantum mechanics and spacetime while spooning pureed peas into the baby’s mouth. When Einstein speaks his first word – at six months! – he throws a party to celebrate his son’s rapid advancement.

The child seems to be every bit the genius his parents and millions of viewers expect to see. He forms sentences while most children his age only know a handful of words. He memorizes the names of animals and presidents and geometric shapes. As a two-yearold, he recites his multiplication tables. In one memorable episode, Helmsworth chews out the principal of the prestigious Halford School for not accepting his three-year-old son for early entry into first grade.

“He’d outthink your third graders!” Helmsworth screams.

“I’m sorry, sir, he’s just too young,” the principal says, eyes nervously darting between the angry parent and the cameras.

“His progress must not slow!”

But it does. Einstein has difficulty with the advanced mathematical and scientific ideas his father introduces.

The pace in which he learns something new every day diminishes. The school that does accept him as an early-entry first grader, Kendrick Academy, sends disappointing progress reports home with the young student. Einstein regularly loses chess matches to children his own age and begins to forget the tables he so easily memorized just a year earlier.

The show’s critics chime in, saying Einstein’s early genius was an illusion, a case of an average child seeming extraordinary because of incessant tutoring and drilling. The crowds that once lined the street

25

outside the family’s house hoping for just a glance at the wunderkind – one man arrived every day holding a sign reading “Please Cure My Cancer Einstein!” – grow thin. Helmsworth takes Einstein to a worldrenowned testing center to prove his son’s IQ is at the genius level, even higher than his own 191 and Agnes’ 185. They spend a day solving problems and puzzles, taking tests and answering questions. At the end, the doctor conducting the test takes Helmsworth and sits him down in an office.

“He’s a 112,” the man says.

“You’re wrong,” Helmsworth says. He watches his son sitting at a table in the corner of the room.

Einstein is playing a game in which wood objects of different shapes are assembled to form a solid cube.

He builds and tears down and builds again, but cannot put the pattern together. The camera pans on the father’s face. He lowers his gaze.

Helmsworth retreats. The daily tutoring sessions come to an end. The physicist spends nearly all his time behind the closed door of his office, where he labors over finding solutions to the great-unsolved questions in physics – questions he fantasized one day answering with the help of his son. The boy takes a back seat to his own struggling work. He waits for the inevitable cancellation of Atomic Family, for the cameras to disappear and the advertising revenues funding his research to dry up.

Then, a twist: Audiences love Einstein’s fall from grace. He is a four-year-old working-class hero.

Viewers can’t get enough of the look on Helmsworth’s face as his precious genius child disappoints again and again. The producers stage situations to maximize this effect: They enter him in spelling bees and chess tournaments, send him to math camp, arrange play dates with other gifted children. Atomic Family becomes slapstick, a weekly dance between an overbearing father and his second-rate son. Helmsworth and Agnes receive raises and occupy themselves. The show goes on.

The hero of Einstein’s self-drawn comic books is the Invisible Boy. He has the ability to disappear whenever he chooses, sneaking around undetected, like a ghost.

He stumbles upon nefarious plots concocted by villains in seedy hideouts, and uses his invisibility to trip them up and turn them in to the authorities.

He then returns home, becomes visible again, and says, “Gee, what happened?”

26

Helmsworth puts locks on his bedroom door. He grows more uncomfortable with the arson kit each day it goes unused. One day he approaches producers about confronting his son and removing the stash from the trunk. He gets nowhere. “The network loves it, Helmsworth,” they say. “People are talking about it.

The trunk is generating buzz.”

“What if he kills somebody?” Helmsworth asks.

“What’s he going to do?” they say. “The cameras are always there. He can’t blink without us catching it.”

He got it in there without the camera’s knowledge, Helmsworth thinks.

During the seventh season, Cameraman Joe asks Einstein whether the Invisible Boy is based on his own life. Einstein seems confused. “He can’t be,” he says.

“Everybody can see me.”

Einstein uses specific materials for his issues of Invisible Boy. He draws them first in regular pencil, then uses crayons – from the Crayola 64-Pack, with the sharpener – to do the coloring. For paper, he uses thick bonded sheets discarded by his father during failed equations and proofs. He gathers them from a garbage can in his father’s office once Helmsworth inevitably grows frustrated with a problem and throws it away, vowing to start again from scratch. Each issue features the colorful adventures of the boy’s hidden hero on one side, and the father’s wild scribbling on the other. Einstein refuses any other paper for his drawings – he prefers the worn quality of the used sheets.

One day Einstein shows Joe and Tony an issue of Invisible Boy in which the hero sets fire to the villains’ hideout. “He’s supposed to be a good guy, kid,” Joe says after flipping through the pages. “He can’t burn things down.”

“But they’re the bad guys,” Einstein says.

“Still,” the cameraman says. In the editing room, the producers cut to the file footage of the gas can and matches in Einstein’s trunk. Then they go to commercial.

Las Vegas set the odds of Einstein burning his parents’ house down at 100-to-one. Arson at the school is 125-to-one, and experimentation on neighborhood animals pays 150-to-one. The Nevada Gaming Commission forced casinos to remove odds for setting himself or Helmsworth ablaze, although that action can still be had through offshore bookmakers (1,000-to-one and 1,800-to-one, respectively).

Einstein takes it in stride. Helmsworth sinks further away.

In the early days, the physicist and his son have a tradition: Helmsworth brings books on physics into the child’s nursery, singing probabilities and theories and formulas into his ears like a lullaby. Joe, filming these moments, can’t follow the science, but marvels at the change in the usually stern physicist’s personality. Helmsworth looks up often from the book, smiling, nodding, seeking understanding. Einstein listens intently. He has his father’s narrow face and pale skin, and the nose – the nose of an Italian grandmother. Only the eyes are different, Helmsworth’s Joe worries about the kid. He’s known him since he brown and narrow, hidden behind thick black frames, was a baby, and spends more time with him than parEinstein’s the arctic blue of his mother. “The guy lights ents, teachers and other kids combined. He remembers up when he’s doing it,” Joe tells his wife one day. when the crazies used to line up outside the house, “I can’t tell if it’s the math or the kid.” back before the IQ test, Einstein shrinking back from As reality sets in, Helmsworth’s nightly visits to his the frenzied shrieks and pleading eyes. He’s three son grow rare. He blames his work finding methods years old. He sees the man with the cancer sign – to test the string theory of particle physics for the Please Cure My Cancer Einstein! – skin hanging from absences. The theory attempts to answer a centuryhis gaunt frame like melting clay, a tear streaking old problem that even Albert Einstein could not down his non-existent cheek. solve: How the principles of quantum mechanics and “What’s cancer?” Einstein asks later that night. general relativity could be tied together in a single, “It makes people sick, bud,” Joe says. unified formula. String theory involves viewing “How do I cure it?” an atom’s electrons and quarks as one-dimensional “I don’t think you can.” “strings” that vibrate, giving them mass, spin and “Oh.” He’s a thoughtful boy. Even at three, he’s charge. The theory also requires the belief in multiple, very aware of who he is, why people line up to see him, unobservable dimensions beyond the known height, his father’s expectations. A childhood broadcast at 8 p.m. width, length and time. These assumptions make Sunday evenings – reruns during the summer – does testing difficult, a challenge Helmsworth takes increasthis. Einstein sits silently for a moment, looking at ingly to heart as criticism of his ineffective work grows. the study sheets from a tutoring session earlier that He sleeps in his office. He sits at his desk for hours, evening. He then looks to Joe. “I wish they knew I surrounded by sheets of data sent from colliders and don’t know what cancer is.” observatories and laboratories across the world. His The man with the sign stops coming around once thinning hair forms a permanent muss. He searches it becomes clear Einstein is no genius. So do many of for answers to multiple problems but runs into walls the others – scientists and mathematicians seeking everywhere he looks. He pretends not to hear talk answers to perplexing questions, recruiters from mit that Helmsworth Adams is a “once-great physicist.” and Stanford offering scholarships, the lost and lonely One of the last times Helmsworth visits his son and confused. A different group of fans begins to take at bedtime is during the fifth season. Einstein is four their place: Hecklers, laughing at Helmsworth and – years old. The father carries a paper bag in his hand. during her rare appearances at home – Agnes, some In the bag is a comic book, “The Adventures of Young even taking jabs at the boy as he turns five, six, seven.

Albert Einstein.” It is an illustrated account of the Faces in everyday life that once awed at Einstein now original Einstein’s rise from Swiss patent clerk to take pity. Teachers cut him breaks on ambiguous test world famous physicist, and includes accounts of his answers. Grandmothers in the park walk over and theories that are easier for children to understand. tousle his hair, bragging about the intelligence of their “I saw this and thought of you,” Helmsworth says to own grandchildren. his son. “It might help.”

27

Einstein reads the book by flashlight under his covers that night. The next day, he begins to draw.

Helmsworth finds the first edition of Invisible Boy on the floor near his office door, where Einstein left it the previous evening. Its hero is badly drawn, a stick figure with a large round head and boxy clothing.

When he becomes invisible, the character is replaced by an outline of broken lines, indicating that only the reader can see him. Helmsworth scans the text for any hint of physics. He is disappointed. As he puts the book aside, he recognizes the paper, sees the familiar formulas inked on the pages opposite of the Invisible Boy’s adventures. Later that day, Einstein asks his father if he liked the book. “Where did you get those papers?” Helmsworth asks, ignoring his son’s question.

Einstein stiffens. “From the trash.”

“You can’t find any other paper? There is important work on those sheets.”

Day-by-day, year-by-year, new issues of Invisible Boy are delivered to the same spot outside Helmsworth’s office. Each appears undisturbed when inevitably returned to Einstein’s room. They are retired to the trunk in the boy’s closet, unread.

The number of comics in the trunk steadily grows.

The illustrations improve: The character’s face becomes more detailed, his clothes more form fitting, the trees and houses and cars in his world increasingly lifelike. The comic’s stories also grow sophisticated, with recurring villains and subplots surrounding the Invisible Boy’s family life. His father is a famous scientist, apparently, and an accident in his lab is what allows the boy to disappear from view. The two work together on a cure in their spare time.

Opponents use the comics as an example of why Atomic Family should end, saying they are a clear cry for help from a boy who never knew a life without cameras. The network capitalizes, making copies of the books while Einstein is at school and selling the books to fans. The child is a bestselling author as he nears his ninth birthday.

All 387 issues of Invisible Boy are drawn on the blank side of Helmsworth Adams’ scratch paper. The father knows. He uses only one side in his work so Einstein can use the other. He tells the camera it is because he loves his son. One evening, when shooting stops and Joe and Helmsworth sit on the patio drinking Scotch,

28

the physicist gives another reason. “It’s poetic,” Helmsworth says.

“How so?” Joe says.

“There are two great failures in my life. That work, and that boy. The two being attracted to one another is only natural.”

Joe wonders whether the Scotch is his first drink that day. “He’s a good kid, Helmsworth. Why do you have to call him a failure?”

“There are a billion good kids,” Helmsworth says.

“I wanted great.”

The final issue of Invisible Boy appears on Helmsworth’s desk on a Tuesday. He is surprised to find it here, rather than its usual spot outside the door. Helmsworth takes the booklet and begins flipping through the pages. He notes the improvement in artwork: vibrant colors, clean lines, even a little shading. The Invisible Boy has a cartoonish look, as if he’s jumped from the pages of an Archie book.

The story concerns the hero and his father’s quest for an invisibility cure. The boy’s arch-enemy, a mad scientist bent on world domination called The Brain, has stolen a rare chemical from a top-secret government facility that the boy and his father need for their cure. The military says they can use the chemical if they help put The Brain away for good. They lure The Brain out of hiding by staging a fake assembly of world leaders. The scientist storms inside with a bomb made using the chemical, only to watch it float away in the hands of the Invisible Boy. He is trapped in a cage while chasing his precious weapon. The Brain goes to jail, and the Invisible Boy is cured, free to live a normal life.

The End. But it’s not.

Helmsworth notices a final page at the end of the book. He flips over, expecting a prologue or some other note concerning the Invisible Boy. Instead, he finds a blank page with what appears to be a small box scribbled at its center. Helmsworth squints and recognizes that the box is a picture. A tiny television, little knobs on its right edge and bunny-ear antennae extending from its top. Inside the box, a stick figure, its arms pressed against the edges, a frown on its face, a teardrop below its tiny dot eye.

Helmsworth looks to cameraman Tony, makes a face – what gives? – chuckles and puts the book back down on his desk. He doesn’t understand the kid.

He rubs his hands together, moves them to his face,

palms inward, massaging his eyes and the bridge of his nose.

His stomach turns.

He smells something on his hands.

Gasoline.

His phone rings.

“You should get out here,” Joe says through the receiver. “He’s got all the comic books out in the yard.

They’re all piled up in stacks. He’s poured the gas all over them.”

“The books?” Helmsworth asks. “You’re outside?

Not the house?”

“You think I’d let him set the house on fire? We’re in the middle of the yard. Get out here.”

The backyard is a green, manicured expanse in which normal fathers and sons would have played catch or set up a Slip’N’Slide on hot summer days.

Helmsworth is rarely out here. He walks out the back door into the bright sun and, across the field of green, sees his son. Einstein stands before a pile of papers, probably two feet high and three feet wide. The gas can is discarded behind him, near where Joe stands with his camera. Einstein stares at his father with an intensity that gives Helmsworth the chills.

“Explain yourself,” Helmsworth says as he approaches.

“I wanted the cameras to leave,” Einstein says.

“And setting a fire will do this?”

“You didn’t read the books.”

“I read this one.”

“Not enough.” Einstein’s gaze moves to the book in Helmsworth’s hand, the final issue of Invisible Boy. “You didn’t read them.”

Helmsworth sighs and begins paging through the book again, making a show of dramatically flipping the pages. Einstein continues speaking. “I wanted the cameras gone. But they never left. I thought they would …”

“What are you jabbering about?” “... if I was normal. I wanted you to see. But you never saw.”

He continues scanning the book until something catches his eye on one of the opposite pages featuring his old, failed equations. The formulas originally written in pen – a display of hubris for which colleagues always chided him – now feature writing in pencil as well. The formula is a recent one, an attempt to answer Hawking’s chronology protection conjecture using his incomplete work on the quantum gravity

theory. The challenge is to prove whether the laws of gravity as currently known would permit time travel, as the real Einstein’s law of general relativity says is possible. Helmsworth, along with hundreds of other physicists, got nowhere on the problem.

This new writing takes the problem in an entirely new direction. Helmsworth marvels at the creativity in the work, the simplicity of his previous mistakes, the … genius of it. The penciled corrections to his work appear to suggest a solid, testable theory reconciling quantum mechanics and relativity. The physicist’s hands shake. He looks up from the page. “Einstein?

Did you …”

“I thought they would leave,” the boy says.

Helmsworth runs to the pile. He gathers handfuls of papers, flipping through the old problems he long ago threw away. Each features the pencil corrections, answering questions over which he spent a lifetime agonizing. Multi-dimensional string and superstring theory. The quantum vacuum and its mass. Black hole radiation. He will study it all. The work in these pages is enough to propel modern physics into a new age of understanding.

Tears stream down Helmsworth face. He runs to his son, hugs him, grabs his face in his hands. “Why didn’t you tell me? Do you know what you’ve done here?”

“I can’t cure cancer.” Einstein does not reciprocate his father’s affection. He takes it, waits for it to be over. Helmsworth jumps up and lets out a celebratory Whoop! He returns to the pile, not sure where to begin.

He thinks of Agnes – poor Agnes, so sure Einstein would be special, so disappointed in his regularity that she left the country. He decides to call her, to give her the news: Einstein is a genius after all! He fooled us all this time!

Helmsworth grabs the phone latched to his belt and turns away to dial. In his excitement, it takes him a moment to realize what is happening when he feels a burning heat radiate behind him.

Gregory Kane

29

The Dream Zoe Had In Which She Killed the remnant of a man — found him already dead, headless.

With the source of direction gone, his words fled too.

And so she began to finish him off, began to carve hairiness, mineral oil that stuck to her like shame and sweat stink. *

Somehow, only little of him bled. She’d found him in a forest.

Greenery absorbed him. She relished his draining into the soil.

No cruelty tree would grow there, she hoped. Rather it be done.

In the dream, her bravery wavered some. *

She, ashamed to have her family know she’d taken part in shredding flesh of this animal-man. She should have

HER Body Remembers Zoe was at the seashore eating smoked ( holy?! ) mackerel.

On it were large pieces of black pepper.

She woke up the next day with no voice — only on-and-off, high-and-low pitched tones.

Then she recalled that statue of the university founder, Pepper — how just being near the bronze likeness made her itch and she didn’t know why. One day the connection — electric — popped into her head. His name, that lowly childhood ghost, meant “pepper” in Rumanian.

He — the man who had thought himself spicy but Zoe found purely toxic — had squirmed, through this chance, appetizing sea catch, into her body. Zoe sneezed. Zoe coughed.

Her body knew. Zoe spit him out.

stood on any sliver of his heart, blade of him above her head and freely shouted to the sky, Take and mend what you can.

B.e. Kahn

30

31

Number 8

The Day

You would have sprouted a field

It was the day the earth caught fire,

of perennials, you could have moved

the longest day, the day summer arrived,

objects — certainly birds and cats and fishtails —

8 o’clock sharp in the evening. The sounds,

with your gaze, you could have sung teal

the expectation we experienced, waiting.

to fuschia and plucked vermillion

It was the end of books, the end

melons, you would have lifted

of end papers and closure, yet everyone

off the ground as you laughed,

was writing a book. Covers snapped like a trap.

just faintly enough for outsiders

And the war went on as wars go on.

to think themselves dizzy or brain dry,

The number down grew. It was the day

you might have hauled words

the earth caught fire but the birds didn’t know

out of green stone and hewed

before it was too late. They called to one another

sounds that heal from a distance,

from various trees, cherry, beech, ash, still seeking

and Ellington’s need for Strayhorn’s

a connection. And insects proceeded,

heart might have peeled back, changing

drunken, erratic, their paths deflected

everything — except toads and roaches —

by enveloping heat. It was the day the earth caught fire and the troops staggered on broken roads

if you could have said

and the temperature of the sand rose until

the story. If you had found that one

it was molten glass. The uniforms mocked the desert

loud thread would snap

and the desert cracked under heaving tanks

to birth the pain out.

while somewhere a mockingbird recycled his repertoire

Make it plain. And plain. And plain.

of whistles, warbles, sequenced like a car alarm going off. We listened, rapt. It was the day the earth caught fire and the stars would not show themselves again.

M. Nzadi Keita

32

Elaine Terranova

33

A Line, A Wall “Nimol and I did this all the time when he was your age,” Grandpa said. Two wooden posts lay in the yard, side by side like still brown bodies.

“Did what?” I asked in English, although Grandpa had spoken to me in Cambodian.

We had arrived to America as refugees when I was only a baby. I felt as unnatural speaking his language, as he did mine.

“Work outside, growing things together.” Grandpa kneeled to the ground. “Before the war.” Across the two wooden posts, he set three oak laths like rungs on a ladder.

“I knew that already, Grandpa. You’ve told me about two million times,” I said, more annoyed than I had intended. The June sun sweltered even as dusk approached; I blamed it for my mood.

Grandpa kept his head down, his knees on the ground. I noticed the bald spot on his head. Wispy white hair barely shrouded the lonely island. I passed Grandpa the hammer. Tock, tock the hammer struck as nails impaled the wood. Grandpa circled the frame counterclockwise, fastening the laths until the two posts were joined. He arranged three more laths crosswise to form a square lattice. Those he nailed in too.

“Why do we need this anyway? We already grow tomatoes.”

I pointed to a vegetable patch across the yard. Green tomatoes clung by the vine to thin stakes.

“We need the trellis to grow bitter melons,” Grandpa said.

We raised the trellis upright and rested the posts in two narrow pits. Grandpa laced his arm through the lattice and propped it on his shoulder. “Nimol loved bitter melon.”

“But did we have to build it today?” I shoveled dirt to bury the ends of the posts.

I kicked the dirt down, stamped it hard until it was flush with the ground.

“What else would we have done?” Grandpa asked. He unhooked his arm and stepped back, focusing on the trellis. Suddenly the damp air felt stifling. I walked to the end of the yard, as the sun settled over the fence. I gulped the air and sighed. When I turned around, I saw the shadows of Grandpa and the trellis. They cast the image of a man trapped in a cage.

Grandpa and I had a quiet dinner that night. He sat with his head in his hand, his eyes on the plate. I chewed slowly, waiting to be surprised, but only found him drawing on the tablecloth with his fork. Eventually, Grandpa disappeared upstairs. I cleared the table.

After washing the dishes, I looked through the refrigerator. The lower shelf was filled with my food: ham and hamburgers, condiments and cheese, leftover pizza.

Grandpa’s shelf was empty, except for the remains of a silver fish fried whole and a cleaved-open durian that made both shelves stink. I saw no cake and went upstairs.

The bedroom had two twin beds separated by a nightstand. I slept on the bed to the right, the one by the window. Grandpa slept in the other. Sometimes he had nightmares.

I stood in the doorway. Grandpa sat on his bed. He held a black and white photo with the face of a teenager, just about my age. When his hands shook, the face wobbled.

Grandpa’s lips spoke silent words. I sat down and my legs settled into the space between our beds. I took his hands in mine to stop the shaking. My thumb almost hid a liver spot on the back of his hand.

34

“My poor Nimol,” Grandpa’s lips trembled. “What they did to him –” “Stop. I know this story, Grandpa. I can’t listen to it again.”

“But he was your father…” Grandpa’s eyes watered.

I let go of his hands. “I know that too.”

We sat in silence. I ran my thumbs one over the other. Grandpa ran his finger up and down the photo, stroking Nimol’s face.

“Today was my birthday,” I said.

“What?”

“I turned sixteen today.” I stared at his face. For a moment, Grandpa was expressionless, but his finger still moved. Then his face blossomed, a realization formed into words.

“We should buy the bitter melon seeds tomorrow.”

My shoulders sunk. I got into bed and turned toward the window. Burrowed under my blanket, I heard footsteps behind me on the carpet. Then the room went dark.

Sheets rustled and soon Grandpa snored.

I could not be sure how long I had been awake when I found myself watching Grandpa sleeping. With each breath, his chest bobbed like a boat on the horizon and the gulf between us only seemed to grow.

Grandpa twisted in his sheets, startling me. I got up and stood on the carpet between our beds. I looked down at him. His eyebrows were pulled in, his forehead creased.

His lips parted and he mumbled. I thought of waking him, as I had so many nights before when I would shake him, two-handed, and he would ask with bloodshot eyes and hope in his voice, “Nimol?” And I would wish then, as I always had, that he would have asked for me.

But tonight my body was taut, my arms hung at my sides. The still moon lit the room through the window. On the nightstand, a small square shimmered. I touched it and felt the slick surface of the photo. Taking it in my hands, I saw familiar black hair, black eyes and a smooth white face.

I ran my finger on the photo as if skimming over water. I pressed the photo between my palms. It formed a line, a wall. I turned the photo around and the face was gone.

I thought then of tearing the photo and burying the pieces in the yard under the trellis. But I knew by harvest, I would find Nimol’s black hair growing along the vines, his black eyes stretched across the leaves, and his smooth white face belying the bitter melon’s wrinkled skin.

Grandpa twisted again and the corners of his lips upturned. I stepped back and stared at the photo for a while. The face glowed lifelike in the silver moonlight. I had always thought this black and white face was what came between Grandpa and me, but with silver all around me, I could see it was the only thing we shared. Carefully, I laid the photo onto my bed. I gazed through the window. It looked cool and bright under the moon. I stood there, between Grandpa and the photo for a long time. And I thought of the trellis from that morning and realized, slowly, that this was what Grandpa had wanted, not me in the bed beside his.

Without disturbing the photo, I took the blanket from the bed. I wrapped it around my shoulders like a cloak. Then I reached for the door.

Andrew Ly

35

Adrift If God was a woman

ngc 5555 sighed quasar. Another star core slipped past her centers event horizon. She tasted paradox. Dark matter creaked in the space within her arms.

in my home, in between the 2nd and 4th worlds,

***

All her sisters were red shifting. Time created space between them. She cried supernovas. None would be left to hear her pain.

where women seem to be most obviously oppressed, we congregate.

***

when our husbands leave to be men without us we cry to allah/elshaday/ yesus-cristos/ and the sky and pull our veils and our hair and we pray.

Birth pained her. It leached her gases into glowing brilliance. She knew someday they would die. She would remain. Eventually she would eat all the matter they cast off in their deaths. Eventually she would be entirely alone.

we inquire…then we scream like only circumcised/abused/raped/ beaten/and living women can do, “why are you he?” “why does everyone forget sarah and mary and sheba and penelope and nefertiti?” “why were they hidden from every woman who cannot read?” “why can’t every woman read?” “why must we pretend to not know them…” “why are you he?!” where is the respect for she? we cry.

***

Something was growing larger. A shape in the void.

Another spiral? A globular elliptical? An old one made beautiful by its flawed shape? Time would create a closing of space. She would know. ***

Another spiral! One of her sisters. Large, more than 300 billion. What would they talk about? How close would they pass? She giggled red giants. ***

They would touch! To feel another. What would it feel like? Would it tickle? Would it sting? Would it be love? ***

So close. She yearned to stretch across emptiness and draw her in. But the other had said nothing. She would say something. She would. ***

Pain. Arm broken, stretched awkward into the void. Her insides were filled. The other was too big. She was losing mass. She was being consumed. She didn’t want to be consumed. She was afraid to be consumed.

from beneath the pile of broken women and damp cheekbones a young girl rises and asks, “what if god were a woman?” “if god were a woman i’m sure she’d have a clitoris.” “if god were a woman my husband would not be teaching my daughter to hate herself.” “if god were a woman they’d call her a whore. she’d be beaten –” “for what?” “for whatever you were flogged for.” for walking in the dark alone for having her ankles show for loving a man her family didn’t choose for loving a woman for saying no for saying anything for saying everything “if god was a woman she would be married to the sun; though she is greater than him he is the one that shines… she made the sky he lives in everything he has, she gives him. but the sun is the one that the world appreciates. think of all the times we’ve forgotten god.” we count them. ten times for each of our sons and the way they will forget that they first loved a woman.

***

Her insides were displaced. Viscous dust trailed her fleeing sister. She hadn’t said a word. She hadn’t said a single word. There was no filling the voids. This new emptiness would always exist, reminding her of the pain.

She wept brown dwarfs.

the second time our sons break a woman open instead of looking to her for life they’ll end up consuming it from her slowly burning away her being with the way they see fit to shine. god is a woman, she is among us, and she is crying.

***

A new life. Conceived from the matter exchange. Another reminder. A G type yellow. A system of variety. A blue egg. ***

She smiles evolution. The child brings life in its wake.

Rests, cradled it in her reformed arm. Time creates voice.

They speak to her. They call to be heard. She listens.

36

David Dill

Hiwot Adilow

37

Unsent Letter from Hansel and Gretel’s Father My Dearest Children, Those were no wolves growling crisscrossed padding over our felled pine cottage porch The grim noises echoing off the eaves, children that stole your sleep, children were a litter of famine songs pupped into your parents’ stomachs If you had listened close, hugged your ears against the raw bark of Papa’s poor ribs You could attend the words. They said “some must go”

If you come home, know this pulpy letter left to rot under a carved dining table Seems thin to me, it is hidden where you two would play as if burrowed in a faerie stump waiting to be born You will look up, if you return, and find this while playing

The plump thing of a growing woman that raised you both while I sunk my axe in daylit dry trees, would eat her young or push them out as unwanted white stones in a garden of flowers

Keep the house Do not dig up the fresh mound by the shed Or look for the missing axe

I hope you remember to empty the stones from your pockets before crossing the Rhine These, the currency of your plain abandon You will be weak in a day without even breadcrumbs Learn to leave your burdens

I will put these woods behind me reinvent my craft, reinvent my self and camouflage in a grove of swaying tradesmen, and

The witch who eats children in the woods Is not the Earth itself Is not Fear of Famine incarnate Is not your mother’s true form finishing you off in a gingerbread ambush She is a witch (who eats children) Burn her to death to be sure Push her into chimney smoke And keep your own bones close at hand

38

Her house, as empty-sweet as promises that fatten you and crash your eyes like cage doors slammed to lock’s bitedown Her house with frosted windows that have never known the withering of rainstorm has nothing you will have prayed for

carve a sappy wooden boy from a dead log with a mouth that needs no food and a nose for lies with no strings attached in some city to the South where no one knows what I have left behind my back Where the pines curl over the paths, and flood shade into evening fear Where there are not witnesses to contradict me, telling you, dearest children “Papa is just trying to scare you to sleep”

Michael O’Hara

39

Angel Island

Appease, Atone “For transgressions against another person, the Day of Atonement brings no atonement until the injured party is appeased.” (Mishnah Yoma 8) For me, you should find her a man.

He’ll initiate. He’ll wear her out.

Breathless, she’ll plead for him to stop, fading with a tiny wicked smile.

She’ll pretend to be above it all, but indiscreetly, she’ll let everyone know that he’s rough and ravenous.

She’ll gloat that she is getting what I could never give her.

She is the injured party.

Everyone assured me, but she will never forgive.

Mornings, her anger ignites her.

Evenings, she suffers righteously, refueling her indignation.

She won’t give me the satisfaction, won’t collapse, won’t allow a kind thought to arise. She awaits my regret not for hurting but for loving her, for ruining her life with my lie.

The script was forever and always.

Her need is not to be appeased.

40

Unjust that the greens of leaves grew so vivid once the mask of terror was shed. I bake flourless chocolate tortes, treat skull caps as accessories, write poems and play the djembe.

Once I hoped to find true love in my next life with merit earned in the closet, but the world to come is here.

God moves unexpectedly, the rabbis taught, from the throne of judgment to the throne of compassion. For some sins, no atonement, but redemption nevertheless.

Jacob J. Staub

A newcomer named Wong enters the bunkroom. Men are packed in. Some sleep in their racks while others carve characters into the wooden walls with their fingernails. They’re writing poetry. One man has written this on the wall: A flickering lamp keeps this body company. I am like pear blossoms, which have already fallen.

Pity the bare branches during the late spring. The calligraphy is sometimes bold, sometimes thin like grass, but the most masterful strokes are carved into the Western wall, right next to the doorway where Wong entered. Wong admires the form, tracing each character with two fingers. This man took his time writing, Wong thinks, as men slowly gather around him, clearing their throats and spitting on the floor near his feet.

The floor has a thick coating of mucus, and Wong’s cloth shoes stick to it as he tries to walk away. That is when he notices the soiled sheets covering the bunk beds; clotheslines are strung across the room like a spider’s web, and Wong sees the room getting smaller and smaller. The heat is rising and the smell of filthy feet and rotten breath choke him. I’m going to die in this place, Wong whispers, as he traces the last character.

These men are grim-looking, bones showing beneath rough cloth; their skin and hair smell of the fields they left behind. Wong looks around for a bunk and finds one all the way on the top, closest to the guard station. There are no windows to look out at the ocean, only chicken wire stretched across wooden beams.

He can smell the sweet San Francisco Bay air and it reminds him of red bean soup; he can taste the fried noodles and soft, tender chicken, which his Big Uncle Wong cooks up in giant woks cured with sesame oil. Auntie Wong should be here by now. He hears her sugary soprano voice, calling his name like she used to back in Canton. He sees her bending down in the earth, uprooting giant radishes and tossing them into his hands. They are heavy and she doesn’t seem to notice him swaying about, trying to balance the radishes in his arms. And she’s telling him something important while she’s digging: “Don’t forget that your name is Wong.

Whatever you do over there in America, don’t lose sight of your name. Losing your name is like losing your soul.”

“Auntie?” Wong asks, but she has already evaporated. The sun is going down now, tucking its head underneath the ocean blanket.

“Let me out of here!” Wong demands, shaking the chicken wire fence. He hears the wire rattling against the nine-inch nails embedded in the walls. How many men must have grappled with this fence before him? How many men are here right now? Darkness expands the room, and the guards’ flashlights occasionally throw beams of light into the tight space, giving Wong the sensation that he is lost at sea and lifeboats are searching for him. “I’m right here!” Wong waves to the lights and he hears a whistle pierce the sounds of choppy water. A white-faced guard appears and slaps him across the face with the leather glove he’s just pulled off of his hand.

Wong can’t make out what the guard is saying to him. “Please, please, man! My auntie is right outside… she can identify me as her nephew!” The guard slaps him again and points to a nearby bunk.

“Alright, I’ll sleep, but you better release me tomorrow.” Auntie won’t come, he realizes. Not today at least. Tomorrow. She will come tomorrow.

Wong unrolls his bedding on the top bunk. This is the highest he has ever slept.

41

“Stop fidgeting up there, brother! I need to catch up on my beauty sleep in case my wife comes to get me tomorrow!” a man groans below him.

More men groan and jitter in their beds.

“Don’t be silly, Brother Chu. You don’t have a wife,” another man laughs from a bunk nearby.

“He doesn’t even like women,” a second man sneers. “Got his eyes on that red-haired boy. You know, the one who works the morning shift!”

More men start laughing. They holler at one another. Wong remains silent, listening to the man below him, weeping.

“Alright, men, shut up now!” a somber voice says. “Some of you need the energy for the day ahead. Some of you will go home.”

“Yes, Number One!” they snap to attention. “You got it, boss.”

In the middle of the night, in the midst of men snoring loudly, the man bunking below asks Wong a simple question: “You’re new, right?”

Wong doesn’t respond at first. All he wants to do is sleep and roll through time. He’s not so keen on making friends; he doesn’t plan on staying here very long.

“I know you’re not sleeping brother. no one sleeps on their first day here.”

“Yes,” Wong sighs. He figures talking a little bit might ease his mind. “Got off the boat three days ago – I slept standing, so no one would cut me in line. And they still wouldn’t let me in.”

“That’s a familiar story,” the man below says, turning in his bed.

“How long have you been here?” Wong says after a while, letting his words float down. He figures the man has been here for a few days – he doesn’t sound so broken.

“Three months.”

“Ayah, that’s a long time! Are you sure you’ve been here for that long?”

“I carve a notch on my bunk each day I wake. This morning I counted 92 notches. You know I have a father waiting for me out there – I bet he’s out there right now, bickering with the guards to let me go.”

“How do you know that?” Wong asks.

“I don’t. That’s part of the arrangement. He’s not my real father, but I trust him all the same.”

“How can you trust a man you’ve never met?”

“How can I trust that you won’t tell the guards everything I’m telling you now?”

“Because you know I can’t speak English.”

“No, the guards have people that can talk Cantonese if they need to interrogate someone. Just because you don’t know English doesn’t mean that they don’t know anything about you. They’re probably looking through your papers right now, looking for any holes they can dig into.”

Wong starts to worry. He’s heard stories about this place, stories about the guards deporting Chinese immigrants because they were found out for what they really were, paper sons. But Wong is not a paper son. He knows his life story by heart; he has studied it for years.

“They can dig all they want,” Wong says. “They won’t find anything.”

“The guards always find something. They’ll ask you where your sister sleeps and who she sleeps with. They’ll ask you how many times your Auntie passes the bakery

42

on her way to work. So, don’t be so naïve brother. They deport you for lying here, so be careful.”

“So why haven’t you been deported yet?”

“I’m a good liar,” the man cackles.

“And what about that old man who told us to shut up early on? How long has he been here?”

“That’s Number One, brother. He has been here a long time. He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“Oh, I didn’t know. Say – why do you call him “Number One? Doesn’t he have a name?”

“He doesn’t have one. Not since I’ve been here. But we’ve grown accustomed to calling him that on account of him establishing relationship with the guards; they even let him out for fresh air whenever he wants, he just walks up to the door and they open it for him as if he were a high-ranking official or something.”

“Do you think they will let him go?”

“Like I said, he’s been here the longest.”

“And how long is that? A year?”

“Try nine years.”

“Bah! That’s a load of horseshit! They would’ve deported him by now!”

“You know I think the same thing sometimes, but I know what I say is true.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Number One is not like the rest of us. He can speak English! He helps the guards translate what we say, and who knows what he tells them. Maybe that has something to do with why some of us stay and why some of us are let go. Rumor has it that he’s actually an American spy, born and bred here in America in one of those railroad towns, and placed here to snitch on us. He’s a good listener – pays attention to our stories – and if something doesn’t line up with our paperwork, he lets the guards know.”

“What do you mean by ‘something not lining up?’”

“Say your paperwork states that you worked in a factory for four years before coming here, but then you go tell your bunkmates that you actually worked on a farm all your life. Well Number One might overhear you, and he’ll report what you said to the guards. They’ll put you on a boat headed for China the next morning.

It’s happened before.”

“Does everyone else know this?”

“Sure, sure! Everyone knows to watch out for Number One! Just make sure to study your paperwork, so you won’t say something you don’t mean to.”

“Can’t he hear us?” Wong asks. If Number One really was an American spy, then he was listening to this conversation. Wong had to be careful with his words.

“Are you selling the new guy your same old propaganda, Brother Chu?” a voice says from a nearby bunk.

“It’s not propaganda, Brother Mui! This is truthful language!”

“Listen here new guy. Disregard what Brother Chu has told you. Number One should be treated with respect. He’s been here the longest after all. He’s been here since our people have been building railroads in this land.”

“That’s horseshit!” Brother Chu hisses. “This island barracks didn’t even exist back then!”

“As I was saying, he’s the senior elder here. I personally feel bad for the old man; the guards lost his paperwork when he was being processed – said he had to stay

43

here until they found it! I think they took his papers, tore them, and scattered the pieces along the Bay. They’re probably disintegrated by now.”

“Probably?” Brother Chu snickers.

“He’s been here so long that they should make him a citizen. He’s actually not full Chinese. Did you know that new guy?”

“No, but I haven’t seen him yet. And how can you tell anyway?”

“No, no, look at the old man in the corner.”

“Which corner? There are old men in every corner of this building.”

“Trust me. He’s lighter than us village folk. See! His skin shines in the moonlight!

He definitely has some white in him.”

“That’s just the moon! Ayah! Don’t believe him, brother!”

“Let the new guy form his own thoughts. This is a free country after all.”

“Bah! Don’t make me laugh. Freedom, what nonsense! Look around Brother Mui, we’re not free.” Brother Chu can’t stop laughing; his bed creaks.

More men start groaning and turning in their beds. “Shut up, you two chicken heads!” they say in their sleep. “Keep it up and the guards will put you back on the boat where you belong. And while you’re at it, tell our wives we say, “Hello.” And don’t forget to tell our long-lost sons that we made it here safely and have found work, a place to call home.”

“Alright, men, shut up now!” a somber voice says. “Some of us need the energy for the day ahead. Some of us will go home.”

“Yes, Number One!” they snap to attention. “You got it, boss.”

The voices die down and the room quickly falls asleep again, slipping into silence.

“I’ve heard enough for one night,” Wong tells Brother Chu and Brother Mui. “My auntie will come for me tomorrow. I need to sleep.”

“Brother Wong,” a distant voice says. Wong is out at sea again, floating in the waves of sleep. “Brother Wong, wake up.”

“Yes,” Wong says. “I’m awake, what you do want from me?”

“I want you to know the truth about me.”

“And what’s that? No one seems to be telling the truth here.”

“They are, just in their own way.”

“Who are you?” Wong asks. “Tell me your name.”

“I don’t have a name, Brother Wong. I’ve been here so long I’ve forgotten what my parents called me.”

“But you must have a name. I’ll make one up for you.” Wong suggests. He wants to get back to sleep. He hears the ocean lapping against the rocks outside. In the distance, he hears a fog horn blare. “You can be a Wong, too. Pretend that you’re my father. When my auntie comes tomorrow she can identify you as her older brother – that way we both can leave this island.”

“That won’t work, Brother Wong. The guards are too fond of me to let me go: I polish their shoes, I light their cigarettes, and I translate what you men say. They’ll never let me go, not until I die of old age will I be let free.”

“Father?” Wong says.

“I’m here,” Number One answers. His voice is coming from the doorway.

“What are you doing? I hear a scratching noise.”

“I’m writing a poem. You can read it tomorrow. I know you are fond of my handwriting. Sleep son. You could use the rest.”

“Alright, father,” Wong says sleepily. “Tomorrow, you’ll come home with me.”

44

The next day, Wong tries to speak to Number One face to face, but he is nowhere to be found. He isn’t outside beyond the walls, catching his breath. He isn’t in his bunk. Brother Mui thinks he could be at the small hospital on the hill, and this makes sense to the other men since he is both old and frail, but by afternoon he still has not returned. Even Brother Chu is confused. Number One has never before missed his lunch duty, which consists of scooping the miserable rice porridge out of a huge iron cauldron onto the men’s’ plates. Where could he be? Wong asks all of the old men in the bunkroom whether they’ve seen Number One and they all point to themselves, chuckling.

“Hey, Mr. Guard! What happened to Number One?” Brother Chu calls out to the guard post, but they look at him funny, say something in English to him, point their fingers to the ocean, and go back to smoking their cigarettes.

“Hey! Who’s going to scoop the rice for us?” Brother Chu demands.

“Make the new guy do it!” the men groan, waiting in line and banging their plates against the chicken wire fence. “C’mon brother! What’s the holdup? Time to put in your share of the work!”

“But I talked to Number One last night! He must be somewhere! Check the poetry on the walls, he might have left a note for us.”

“Stop speaking false words,” the men say. “No one has heard Number One talk, he’s a mute,” the men grumble.

“I’m not lying, I’m telling the truth. Look here, he’s written something: “I am going out for a smoke.”

The men laugh. Wong can feel his heart pounding. “Okay, brother that’s enough fun for one day, scoop the rice for us now,” the men form a ring around him, clacking their plates against the rice pot.

“But my auntie is coming here soon. She’s right outside the gate! She’s talking to the guards right now!” Wong sees her drifting towards him in a lifeboat. Her hair is flying wildly about her face; her arms are outstretched. She’s coming to rescue him from this prison island.

“We don’t see anyone, brother,” they laugh. “Now pick up the ladle and get to work!”

So, in the end, the newcomer named Wong finds himself scooping watery rice to callous men, cursing Number One under his breath for disappearing in the early morning hours without telling a soul.

Geoffrey Ng

45

Lust and Lights A poet’s night in rainswept New York All streets gleaming shimmering with surreal reflections of the actual metropolis A steady downpour slanted like the horn of Lester Young Human trees walking splendidly Among a thousand thousand strangers every other face jaw dropping with its beauty whether that beauty be masculine or feminine Overkill of such glory and the poet in you wants to imagine a story for each even go beyond that and attempt conversation attempt to hear the treble of a voice a bubbling laugh a sketch of a smile interrupt their rushing in this rushing city Did Lorca feel this when he walked and moved on this same island in the 1930’s?

Manhatten is a stage set it’s all unreal every stranger is an actor even the rain is artificial lights cameras action where’s the exit?

At least Philadelphia is a museum!

New York is lust and lights Even the wind makes you horny!

New York is glamorous as Paris One feels all the phantom clubs famous bars midnight hideaways Still jammin’ packed with the vanished who loved the hi-life The livin’ and dead pass like trains in underground tunnels Each oblivious of the others’ destination and wouldn’t care anyway if they were aware

Lamont B. Steptoe

46

47

epiphany

Little things

Boxes of doves, turkeys and chickens on the sidewalk appear to be bird condominiums. Some people demand the freshest meat around, or maybe it’s a religious thing. A voodoo outlet. For whatever reason they sit in their cages and shit on the sidewalk and mutter to each other in their bird lingo about this latest development in their lives.

Therese showed up at my door with a mouth full of flowers. She claimed she was a saint, so I let her stay.

Now she spends her days digging in the garden and rooting herself next to the trellis. It’s a slow process; the last time I saw her face, her left eye had blossomed into a peony. Her right one was still blinking.

Except for the little brown rooster. He cries out at the top of his little bird lungs, “It’s FUcking Murderrrr!”

From the Rite Aid parking lot across the street you stop.

Birthday at the Plough and Stars

Lauren Hall

“It’s FUcking Murderrrr!”

It can’t be.

It sure sounds like that chicken is trying to tell me something. It becomes clearer with each repetition.

This bird will not bear mute witness to the imminent mass murder of he and his fellows. He’s sounding the alarm. You seem to be the only one to hear his cries for what they are. A miracle.

You refuse the voodoo priest’s offer to dress the bird and tell him you are old school and would like to do the bird yourself and he smiles knowingly. Soon you are walking down the street with a live rooster in your arms, but the motherfucker has stopped speaking English.

Your cats aren’t that happy about your new roommate.

A feathered ninja who attacks you, all beaks and claws and fury whenever you try to boil yourself a hot dog or eat a pepperoni, he dons his ninja garb and you start bleeding.

“It’s FUcking Murderrrr!”

Jimmy’s back from Congo again.

Eventually, he’ll look for a real job, but tonight he’s giving French lessons on the back of napkins. “Your French is too academic,” he tells me, crumpling conjugated verbs into my palm. “Sleep with this under your pillow and you’ll see.”

Martin won’t talk about his research anymore, now that the Feds have tapped his phone. I can’t tell yet if he’s trying to blow us all to bits or save the human race.

His favorite Austrian idiom is the one about wearing wooden pajamas. “Because coffins are made of wood,” he laughs.

Joe used to live in the back of a station wagon, but now he has a condo. He still sleeps in the car sometimes, when he needs to feel small. It smells like weed and the engine’s shot, but at least there’s nothing left to trip over. When it’s time to sing the birthday song, he reaches below the table and unscrews his metal leg.

“It makes a nice trumpet,” he says, and bleats out the melody.

You get it now and have been a vegetarian ever since.

Harry Baker

48

Lauren Hall

49

from marybones

[ TUDOR 1]

MARY

& child [ TANNER ]

have you a daughter mary tudor

Mary was nursing in the world’s oldest known image of her (c. 250). was nursing a standing & distracted & barefoot baby (c. 1335). was nursing in bed, sidelying (14th c.). was sketched out in ocher under some tracery, nursing the baby to the aggravation of the toddler (c. 1350). was nursing standing (c. 1400). was nursing a heavy toddler, standing (c. 1360). was not interested in the offered canteen or the breast-shaped fruit because the donkey had her full attention (c. 1383). was nursing while he drew her in silverpoint, with kneeling ox (c. 1435). was the role of Mary’s breasts in pleading on behalf of humankind (ibid ). was immensely popular in the artist’s own time ( ibid ). was in a very narrow room with two eggs on the windowsill (1436). was an altar with her flat lap (ibid ). was possibly taking the suckling motif quite personally, quite seriously (ibid ). was so domestic, so maternal, that perhaps she was his own wife, who gave birth in 1434 & 1435 (ibid ). was unusual in that the baby is in a realistic nursing position & latched on (c. 1620). was like a fountain with excellent aim (1650). was up nursing while he slept (1628). was nursing while he played with the baby’s foot (1595). was playing with the baby’s toes to keep him awake (c. 1630s). was sitting nursing with dog & basket of apples in a forest landscape & in room 42 of the Hermitage, which won’t stop spinning (1607).

well, someone must have taught him

where’s your hot sister

Emmett picks up half

a robin’s egg

shell what tiny

veiled Mary could go to sea in that

happy days

a circle shows a city

mountain-gown the mountain

that eats men within her

body are roads trees animals

native people going about their

dailiness daily news

crack all round me & let me out

stood the mother

his own wife & son & the act of reading like an act glowing he is very

pretty & the words spill out of her hand & out of his hand onto the floor

& in the moment just before

the announcement is made

her hand likewise

glows & it is otherwise

very blue & dark & that

is the shine of waiting

& he paints her this way

the year his mother died

why / for the romance / do I qualify

I think she

knows he’s coming

in Tanner she doesn’t say anything she sits on a box on a rug on a rug

misericordia

Fionnuala eats a leaf as others did before her brothers before as autumn asks Fionnuala nurses to sleep builds a tower one block two blocks heard the birds pass overhead

in the circle that is a city in

the center of the mountain body

*La Vergen del Cerro (Virgin of the Mountain of Potosí ), c. 1720

50

not so much an infant as the suggestion of a baby’s body under a heap of blankets

the halo a tenuous

sphere of old stars

the halo a hover

or the blankets themselves are holy

what matters is the swaddle

the swaddling & not

the body

a hover over nothing everything is quiet now

the worry in that quiet

after the force of birth

*Henry Ossawa Tanner, Christ Learning to Read, 1910; Mary, 1914; Mary, 1910; Mary (La Sainte-Marie), 1898; The Holy Family, c. 1909-1910

Mary [ was a horizontal collaborator ] Mary was a horizontal collaborator. was when the bough breaks. was safe as houses. was our lady of private devotion. was nervously waiting for word. was the daughter and only surviving child. was crushing his head with her immaculate foot. was being with child cried, travailing in birth. was pained to be delivered. was I do not know, says the great bell of Bow. was his three Marys like bits of puzzle. was in partu et post partum. was the most popular name for a girl from 1880 through 1947. was unseated by Linda in 1948. was the most popular name for a girl from 1953 through 1961. was unseated by Lisa in 1962. was the one-hundred-ninth most popular name for a girl in 2010. was stolen from an oratory in 1969. was ruined by pigs & mice & eventually burned. was dressed in red & restored in public. was bargaining for the safety of her babies’ bodies. was looking at last like someone who had been through labor. was happy, but labored, at last. was clutching her infant & seeing no angels & at last. was the glow of expectation. was what to expect when. was that glow that is waiting.

Pattie Mc Carthy

51

IT’S LIKE TOUCHING

A Strange Place for Snow When joy reminds you of it and sun does and sundays and breakfast suggests it. When you make the best eggs in a month, buttered sun burnt bottom and firm, that’s something you learned back then. How to make love an ingredient.

What it means to ache lost. To identify a tweak in your intestines as the absence of a look. When passion became a concrete noun, a tone of voice. The particular conditioning of a stranger’s hair is breathable and you bleed a little when it passes.

When life is so free it is vacuum and you could fractal beer choices and class schedules for months but, drunk reminds me. When sober suggests it or its absence and drinking one more is. Was it.

Five words for brevity, nine if you’re nervous, complex, or trying to get specific like when scientists use the Latin name for a houseplant or kitten or the common cold so you ditch layman’s terms for proper nouns that stretch out like the length of a stranger in your bed, getting so close you feel them without touching, the way you get close to a person on the subway you never talked to but with the same tension of lust / thrill / promise of a shared hangover with a nameless face you meet at a bar and have mutual friends with but don’t have their number so it feels new, this sort of elongation can feel inviting or obtrusive, it could make you smile or feel guilty like the way waking up at 2pm in the middle of the week makes you worry that your life is a mess and that you should take things more seriously, like you should start eating breakfast and budget your money, stay in on Fridays and read self-help books, start flossing twice a day or settle down with this stranger that excites you and spend a few months trying to get to know them, like what their favorite ice cream is, what they’re allergic to, what makes them cry and in return they’ll listen to your tired stories about how you missed the bus but found five dollars or the one about how you taught the cat to sit and beg, they’ll memorize your face and the two of you will be inseparable, you’ll do everything together, like shower, check your Facebooks side by side in the kitchen, you’ll try to solve the weekly crossword in CP, your friends will see you as a unit, you’ll share clothes and the flu, you’ll grow dependent like a subordinate clause or Ke’nex, Lincoln Logs, or the makeup of a chain linked fence, you’ll see, it won’t be so bad, needing this former stranger, making them your everything, they’ll fill up your days with wanting, pain, regret, or joy, no wait, joy is way too intense, let’s just say you’ll be happy, unless if you’re not the only one they think about “like that,” but by then it’s too late and you’ve already gone to Ikea together like in that movie everyone likes or they’ve used your toothbrush or you’ve cleaned their happy hour induced vomit off your shared bathroom floor and put them to bed, tucking them in like you’re their mother, you’ll watch them sleep until you get bored and crawl in next to them, maybe then you’ll be ready to touch likethiswithoutseparation, maybe you’ll hold each other like (( or )) and hear their heartbeat, match your breathing to theirs, your so-called narratives could share the same spatial context with the same false utopian promise of truth and resolution, right and wrong and while they’re breathing sleeping and you’re sleeping breathing warm you will be as close to complete as anyone can without the frustration of a fixed and permanent end looming over that moment, you will sleep and then

And the dark is. When the dark comes and pity is a bed briefly, but you get bored. When longing seems quaint, so I pick a colorful hat and march on. When the arguments are moot and you’ve quieted. Live selfishly. When you outgrew anime and meditate but even the movement reminds me. Reminds me I’ve moved. Reminds me that movement means ground and that ground is required to fly. That otherwise everything is just space.

Warren Longmire

52

Dianca Potts

53

NEWS FROM THE PORCH I

III

Jean came over conniptioning about Hoot again. Gone

No, I don’t put that TV on anymore. You try to ignore the blood

and knocked up some girl on Palmer. Third girl in two years?

then feel stupid about worrying over who will win American Idol.

I can’t help but laugh because I guarantee that boy didn’t

That doesn’t make me superior, just exhausted, like the Romans

so much as get to second base before coming back from his first

must have felt when they let the Christians take away their

tour, sun scorched and wavy-haired. You remember him

gladiators. I try to stay busy in the garden. Trimming the roses

from before? Couldn’t speak a word around the girls, spending

and keeping the bees happy. I pull the weeds, even though

all his time in his room playing video games. Jean was always

I know they’ll be there again in a few days. Sometimes, I’ll put on

hollering about that, too. Wouldn’t shut up about how lazy he was,

news radio just to have something to listen to when I sit with a cold

and how he might be a homo. “So what if he is,” I’d say. “Least

one in the sun. There’s the hum of air conditioners and kids

he ain’t cutting school or pushing drugs.” She didn’t like that.

calling to each other in the streets beyond the alley. I think

When he graduated from Holy Redeemer and told her he was

of Jerry. (Could it already be six years since they put him

joining the marines, she lit up brighter than Mr. McFadden’s

away?) I haven’t visited him in the state pen once. He was

house at Christmas. “You’ll learn to be a real man,” she told him.

a mischievous kid, but sweet. Always sweeping stoops for old

Jean always was a fool. Now he’s running around being as a real

ladies. And that’s how I want to remember him. On the radio, they

a man as he can be. Showing off that long scar across his chest,

interviewed this man from Africa. Half the continent is at war.

telling them girls how they were the dream that kept him going

They’ve taken to killing the mothers and carrying off the boys,

through all those desert nights. “Well, at least you know

some no older than ten. They starve them awhile then give

he’s not a homo.” She about spit when I told her that.

them AK 47s. “This,” he said. “Is best way to make them soldier.”

II

IV

Frannie told me it was Angela Spataro. She and Hoot scaled

Hoot may be something of a sperm bank, but at least he’s not

the Palmer Cemetery fence one night and screwed behind the stone

coming back from Iraq without an arm like Ray, Alice’s youngest.

angel of Abimael Smith who, at seventeen, froze at Valley Forge.

Remember what a kidder he was? Now he just sits on his

He was one of the first they buried there, going off with his father

stoop staring out at the houses and the people like he’d just

to meet the British at Brandywine. When the colonials retreated,

been dropped off from Mars. Alice’s newest boyfriend fought

he never saw his father again. The boy died early in winter,

with him in the street the other day, had him in a headlock,

and they couldn’t bury him until May. Can you imagine his mother

the whole time Ray laughing and singing The Battle Hymn

dozing on her porch, the bees whirring above the lilacs, finches

of the Marines. You know how it goes: “From the halls of

chattering in the elms, woken by the soldiers riding up in their pointy

Montezuma/to the shores of Tripoli.” Remember how him and Jerry

hats and black boots? Probably looked like over-sized children

would stuff themselves to sickness with Termini Brother’s Cannoli?

with their naked faces and squeaky voices. Apparently Abimael

I took some over to Alice after the fight, hoping they might help

has become a kind of rite of passage. Sweet talk a girl to his angel,

bring Ray back a little. “I’m afraid he’s going to kill himself

see how far you can take it. Father Martin gave a homily about it,

or somebody else,” she said to me. There’s a willow in Palmer,

saying how disappointed Abimael must be looking down from heaven.

it’s leaves hanging down its trunk like a mess of wild hair. Hopefully,

“Yeah,” I whispered to Frannie. “Disappointed about what he missed.”

Hoot had enough good sense to take the girl there afterwards.

I’ll tell you, all we expect from these kids, everything we always expected, it’s a wonder they want to feel anything at all.

Brian Patrick Heston

54

55

ROADS UNDER REPAIR Robin leads me to the night’s festivity over buckled sidewalk, through winter chill and into chimney scent.

If she slips away, all that will remain is her cherry Chapstick on my lips, the white cane in my right hand, and those lottery balls – of diabetes and kidney transplant pills – tumbling in my stomach.

Writer-editor Robin’s direction is concise, essential.

“Branch.” She ducks. My hand tags along, then the rest of me follows. “We’re clear,” she says.

My left palm on her Anne Taylored shoulder, strands of her hair on my knuckles, she navigates me through the Philadelphia suburb of toppled trashcans and jutting hedges. She’s not seeing the Poltergeist sky or the Dali-esque trees playing behind my blanked screens. Instead, she directs me across a street and cautions “snausages” when we are back on the sidewalk. Dog shit, foreclosed eyes, never an easy traverse.

Soon, we are at the house where the writers’ salon will take place. Inside are wordsmiths with misfunctioning limbs, with shorted-out eyes, others with damaged processors. I’m all grouse and grumble and, “I don’t want to join the defective doll party.”

Robin says her, “You are my hero, Seansy.”

And I say my, “I’m stuck in the burning house.

You are the one who ran in.”

Tonight’s disability salon should be one of shared stories: loss, longing, jigging away in our leg braces.

But I’m more in the mood to have quads throw Molotovs, blind guys slug tinted Limo windows, spokesmen with Tourette’s voice our lives of relentless oxymoron.

“Ready, Sport?” Robin says as we head for the door. *** Inside, there’s the handshake dance with a blind essayist, a team-greet from an autistic poet and his bedraggled but devoted stepmother. Robin and I duck into a bedroom, ditch our coats and play endocrinologist. She shows me hers – the talking blood glucose meter in her purse. I show her mine – the insulin vial and syringe in my pocket. There’s a swabbing of fingers, a pricking of blood, and then a jab of needle to my abdomen. We emerge, just another Saturday night couple at a party.

56

We catch up with memoirist Rachel and dig right into archeology, paleontology, autobiography – all the cracked pots and T-rex fibulas from which we reconstruct our lives.

A “Hi, I’m Ona,” emerges from the party’s white noise and I’m soon holding a poet’s hand in mine.

I try to remember her disability. Are her fingers bent?

What would that mean? But her hand lies so delicately, so femme fatale, that I have a growly Sinatra kind of feeling. I want to say “Well, aren’t you the little heartbreaker?” Is this wrong?

I say, “Nice to finally meet you,” and she says “I’ve heard so much about you,” or maybe it’s the other way around.

Beside me, the bespectacled harem-of-my-heart hands back my Diet Pepsi, as if to say, “Well, go get em, tiger.” ***

We gather in the living room and take turns reading, clockwise. Headphones on, a blind essayist cursors through his boyhood remembrance swinging for this thing called “Moon.” Ona recollects her girlhood classmates mocking, mimicking limp. The autistic poet points at a keyboard, and his stepmother interprets poems about her long-deceased husband. The man lives on between them.

Our stories pad through the room, shelter cats scratching at doors to roam the hood.

Next up, Robin reads my summer-of-the-lovelorn essay. It’s the early nineties, I’m the sighted boardwalk clown and my legumey object of desire is a confection store Mrs. Peanut. I honk my horn, madam peanut taps her cane. The writers’ salon chuckles at the courtship of the Abled.

Robin returns the evening to its upright position, reads her account of one of my emergencies. The blood streaming from one of my useless eyes. My resisting a call to the paramedics. The ER doc removing the offending shard. Through her words, I care for this character Sean in ways I refuse to when I’m loose, off the page. And I’m surprised how frail her Sean is in her words, even as the evening’s strawberries disquiet my stomach.

By the time we reach Dave’s place, the weather settles and Robin sees the poet safely up to his door, leaving me in the passenger seat, my fears at the wheel. I am alone, worldless if it weren’t for the water torture drip-drip. I am a child in a carseat waiting for Mom. I’m seated on a gurney in an underfunded morgue. I’m in a cut scene from the movie Alien.

Maybe Robin and Dave are at his threshold, whispering words of arousal to each other: arugula, jalapeno, Pacific shucked oysters.

Where is she?

The car door opens. Robin climbs in, breathless, says, “We were at the wrong house.”

“The dog didn’t know?”

I feel the warm breath of her stare. She gives a “How do we get back home from here?” Her sincerity is the gift wrap. So what if I pocket all her ribbons?

“Make three rights, go up two blocks, then a left.”

My inadequacies diminish to fleas as we guide each other home along roads that will always be bedrizzled, poorly illuminated, and under repair.

*** Afterward, we drive poet Dave and his leashed eyes Rudder home. Robin is pre-gps, the dog is harumphing on the floor, and it’s starting to spritz rain.

“Let’s take Route 1,” I say. “I know the area. I’ve driven the area.”

Dave pines, “You’ve driven?” He boots his Braille palm device and connects it to a modified navigator.

I hear muffled mutterings from tiny speakers, then, “My gps says take Route 30.”

We take Route 30.

Dave announces landmarks. “There’s an ihop on the left,” he says. “”Burger King on the right.”

The rain worsens.

“Coming up on a Dunkin Donuts,” Dave says.

Soon, we are on the highway under heavy rain and then a stretch that is under repair. Robin says, “I hope Rudder can take over.” Her tone is wheel-grip tight.

She brakes more than she accelerates.

Sean Finucane Toner

57

Striptease When I was eight my sister and I planned a striptease show for my cousin Harris, who was also my age. We pulled out my father’s Playboy magazines and laid them on the floor, centerfold open, creating a path to the guest bedroom. At the end of the path of pictures was a chair for him to sit in, an antique Chinese chair that looked like a throne. We played Pete Fountain records on our portable record player and waited for him to arrive. He walked through the doorway, avoiding the pictures with his feet as if he was watching out for cracks in a sidewalk. He reluctantly sat in the Chinese chair.

We began our performance: with each blast of the saxophone, an article of clothing came off: shoes, then socks and skirts. Harris’s laughter got stronger as each piece fell but we continued, ignoring him. We twisted our hips and pouted our lips, made circles with our arms. We looked at our reflections in the mirror above the bureau, allowing our bodies to give way to the music. We twirled and pointed our toes in the air. And then it was time to take off our shirts. As we slowly lifted them up Harris started laughing again. We didn’t want him to laugh – taking off our shirts was an important part of the show. I told him that if he didn’t stop laughing we wouldn’t take any more clothes off. But he kept laughing, even harder. He fell out of the chair and rolled onto the floor he was laughing so hard. So we didn’t take anything else off.

I think we were more disappointed than he was.

Walt Sublets the Attic Bedroom For the first few days, the Mrs. thought he had a carnival in his beard.

He kicked the can of flea shampoo one night stumbling to the toilet in the dark.

Whatever he did made for an awkward explanation to the neighbors.

I thought somebody was being murdered, he complained as I secretly wished he would just move already.

The tenant liked to sit in the hammock in his underwear or less and name the birds who dug seeds from the garden.

When she said it was time, I didn’t argue for the sake of contradiction, which I often seemed to do when she made suggestions.

Tears

I muttered something underneath my breath and she shot back, Contradiction?

What does that have to do with anything?

I told her that I, too, contain multitudes.

Just get him the hell out of here!

He must have heard us, because when I went out the hammock was still swinging and the back gate still wide open.

He’d see the silhouettes of kids through the slats in the privacy fence and call them into the yard, though thankfully none came in.

Michael Haeflinger

58

It has been a long day in Tennessee and Hal is tired after dinner. I go into the guest room where we are staying, Hal is lying on the king size bed, asleep, still in his clothes, on top of the bed covers. His book about Davy Crockett is lying on his chest (we are in Davy Crockett country and he likes to read books about where we are visiting). I go up to him and kiss him on his forehead, telling him that he should take off his clothes and get into bed. I pick up the Davy Crockett book and lay it on the night table. I help him take off his shirt and pants and get underneath the covers. I love you, he says, his eyes barely open. I give him another kiss, on his mouth this time, gentle so as not to wake him up even more. I love you too, good night, I whisper. But then his eyes open wider and he kisses me back. When I look up, afterwards, I see how handsome he looks at this moment, almost ageless. Sometimes this happens when I look at him – I feel like I can see him at any age: as a boy, a young man, an adult before Parkinson’s.

It’s Hal I see, the Hal beyond time, beyond age, and beyond disease. I feel lifted seeing those brown eyes, as if it is really just the two of us and no one, nothing else. But then, right after, I feel sad, sad about having this disease in our life. We had a hard day with his mobility, traveling is hard with Parkinson’s, and I feel tears coming. I lay my head against his, trying to hold them in, but they fall anyway, out of the cracks in the lids.

I want to cry loudly and scream that this is just not fair but I stay still, squeezing my eyes so the tears are slower to come. I know that they have landed on his face but he doesn’t say anything. He rubs my back gently and kisses my face, both of us trying to ignore the fact that I am crying.

Minter Krotzer

59

Modern American Mythology I. It was an oral tradition. When they told the story over the years, they invariably began with the same phrase: everyone else was busy for New Year’s. From there, its content changed depending on the audience: chaste and playful for their parents; raunchy but still euphemistic for the friends who had gone out for the holiday without them; scrubbed clean for their eventual children. The climax of the story was constant as well, though the evening’s actual climax was quite different: he managed to open a wine bottle with only a screwdriver and a pair of pliers, the myth’s heroic feat. In all this, some central mysteries were retained: for her, a small feeling of violation since, though she’d contributed to the arms race of flirting and acquiesced to everything that followed, she’d drunk more wine than she’d wanted since he’d expended so much effort on opening the bottle; for him, there was persistent shame that, though she’d happily received his advances, she seemed reluctant to reciprocate. These twin misgivings permeated them, seeping over time into their collective unconscious and bubbling to the surface in flashes: he covered himself quickly when getting out of the shower, pulling on clothes before he was fully dry; she was forever suspicious of his silences, could almost see the gray churning of his brain.

Another invariable element of the myth was the absence in his apartment of almost all furniture, this being the reason he hadn’t gone out. It was his first apartment without roommates, and the security deposit had harpooned his bank account; the furniture to fill the place had maxed out a credit card and wouldn’t arrive until almost February. He had a card table with a single, borrowed folding chair, a mattress on the bedroom floor and a weathered old recliner in front of a television that showed a warm New Year’s Eve in Times Square through the distorted, snowy airwaves.

Nonetheless, she was warmed always by the January sunlight raking through the blinds on the first day of the new year. She sat in the recliner in her underwear, watching him as he knelt on the floor laughing and saying that it was all crazy. She slid onto the carpet, covered in slatted light, and they moved against one another, drowning in profane joy.

II. His childhood was well-documented, even if most of its facts came later, after his life’s work had achieved international renown. He was one of us; even if from another world, he’d grown up here in a small town or one of the city’s close-knit neighborhoods before the centrifuge suddenly stopped and flung the white people out to the suburbs. His decision to fight injustice was both deeply personal and highly ideological; for him, there was no difference. He had been touched by the horrors of evil, and he had done what we couldn’t: decided to fight. He lived in the city, beating back the frightening tide that we’d fled. He fought the war, when he could, jetting back and forth to Europe or Japan to strike blows behind enemy lines, but mostly he stayed home, reassuring us that someone was taking care of things while our men were gone.

He changed and he did not. Aging stopped for him at a certain indefinable point, maybe thirty-five at the very most, probably a little younger. His sidekicks – he went through several of them – grew up at inconstant rates, then froze in time as well, forever his junior. He had romances, of course, but his work always stopped him committing. He was married to us, to our safety.

To our ideal. His work was done quickly at first, the mysteries straightforward and solvable with enough time to laugh at the end. Soon it became all laughter, and he was subjected to pratfalls and endless incidents of being replaced by hapless copies of he and his friends. He didn’t think much about race until he did, and then he thought about nothing else for a while, beating tolerance into his remorseless, racist enemies.

As our century ended he took a turn toward grimness that disturbed many who knew him well. His enemies tracked with him. He never killed them and they, in return, provided the kind of nefariousness he wanted at the time: shrink rays and exploding marbles during the pratfalls era, psychological torment and barehanded violence as he became grave.

He died a few times. It was good, overall, for his career.

III. The oracle spoke: Are you tired of working nine to five just to get by? Do your bills just seem to pile up without any end in sight? Do you earn meager pay under a boss who leads a life of luxury? Off your hard work? What would you do if you had the freedom to do your work, your way?

Well get ready to find out, because you can Banish Your Boss! I’m Jack Clarington and I’m here to show you how. With my patented home business system, you can be a financially independent business owner in just thirty days. Don’t believe me? Ask Tom here.

I worked for a big corporation, day in and day out, stuck in traffic there and back with people just like me.

I used to joke with my wife that it was never daytime at our house, since I’d leave before the sun was up and come home after dark. Thanks to Banish Your Boss!, I now have my own home-based business that generates all the income my family needs. I get to see my kids grow up, I take them on vacation – heck, I just bought a boat!

If, like Tom, you’re ready to secure your financial independence, the money is out there waiting. Will you be the one to Banish Your Boss! and claim it? Call now.

The oracle continued: Is your hair dry? Brittle?

Do you constantly

Travis DuBose

60

61

Intake I’m getting a little older and I want to change some things.

First, I have to give up Slim Jims, pepperoni and fried chicken wings.

Because I love my body and I want to treat it right I’m giving up clogged arteries so my pores radiate light.

South Street, Philly

Don’t want to give my temple, what my mind thinks it needs; Drinking water and exercise should become daily routine.

I haven’t seen anything like it

Now there’s a man up there,

since St. Patrick’s Day when,

shirt tossed over the railing,

until the cops came,

maybe wearing nothing at all.

the girls hung their bare boobs

The way he’s sitting I can’t tell.

over that balcony railing

If I stare, I can see that he’s deep into

to torment the boys parading below,

tabloid heaven, his paper’s headline

three sheets to the wind,

almost readable from the street, looks like

in honor of the blessed saint.

(Breathing sounds) Three flights of stairs. Already out of breath.

That soda, chips and pizza for lunch, should have been labeled: death.

No more playdates with Mr. Vending Machine, Only natural sugar and a little less caffeine.

Pulling less all nighters. I have to get rest.

I have a long day tomorrow and I want to progress.

Patterns are the repeated actions we make.

Habits we form, determine the future we create.

The path that I chose and who I aim to be Becomes future rituals for my family tree.

“Crack Mom Gives Birth To Two-headed Baby”,

The remnants remain when I move on, Is a holistic pathway to keep my bloodline strong.

and, below, grainy photos to prove it But that was then and this is now.

The wrong fuel for the vessel makes the soul sad.

How can I be spiritual, If I treat my body bad?

Hey you, don’t pretend you don’t see me.

Toss down your shirt.

Most likely it’s sweat-soaked, gamey with essence of male.

Quick, I’ll slip it over my head to put a spring in my step.

I’ve decided to remove fear and while I’m at it, doubt…

Focusing on the specifics and what life is really about.

Discovering what is human and what exactly that means.

We have no control over life or death, but everything in between.

Unblinded from the struggle. unbound from pain.

Knowledge knows no limits; we have everything to gain.

I’ll make one strong leap, sidewalk to balcony, then fondle away your worries about two-headed kids.

Don’t believe what they say about Power and Fame.

We become hopeless pawns, playing an endless game.

As for South Street, let them look, jealous.

Make your own decisions based on what feels right.

It makes little sense. That’s why it’s called faith and not sight.

You and me, we’ll be in our own world.

We all have the power to obtain true wealth, But we can only gain access trough the development of self.

Janet Spangler

62

Kitakiya Dennis

63

Cries of War I am a natural disaster.

The natural disaster that spills blood through Hatred and jealousy.

Leaving fingerprints of destruction upon earth’s soul, My hands killed peace a long time ago.

I am the mother of death and bride of slaughter.

I cause men to drop and corpses to rise,

HOW WILL I FIND YOU?

i said ok — i’ll look for you.

the work we are in.

it is great and it is real.

each red hat i saw i saw you.

but is it enough?

those hats stopped me.

yes it is.

and more red hats.

but no, it isn’t.

you texted i’m late.

enough, enough.

you texted i’m here now.

yes, enough.

it was wet, but not raining.

and then enough, enough

i am here, i’m here you said.

coming down the street.

Engorging my shame. i am wearing a red hat she said.

The world feels my pain and cries my sorrow.

I am the tyrant’s angry fist.

Nations crumple under my struggle.

I drained the life from cities and left them with Carnage.

The desolate land is my frigid heart.

Time blessed me with a curse — The curse of infinite time.

The weight of eternity pushes down on me and I can feel still i couldn’t see you.

My sanity slipping. a man told me to get a job, you said.

I’d rather die in the hell I bring than to continue and what did you say?

This lurid immortality. jobs come and go but i have something else to do— I’ve come to find out that death cannot come to All of us.

Shawn Henderson

64

thomas devaney

65

The Magic Apartment When I was twenty, I lived in a basement apartment that was really dirty but also had real magic inside of it. When I was moving in boxes of dresses and silverware and snow globes, I found the last tenant levitating in the empty bedroom. The ceiling fan pushed her hair around her shoulders; I worried it might scrape her scalp clear off.

Are you taking those curtain rods? I asked. She fell flat on her back and began to laugh so joyfully that I didn’t really care about the curtain rods after all.

The apartment had a lot of bugs, but it was also crawling with angels. One day I took off my shoe expecting a pebble, but found an angel sleeping instead. I shook her out and she floated to the carpet like a feather. They liked to sleep with me too, like cats, curled into my stomach. When I couldn’t sleep, I would find my hand pushing through their dense, watery light. I once tried to french kiss that light when I was drunk, but it wasn’t into it.

Everything in that apartment wanted to be moving, dancing. I could hear the couch grunting, trying to lift itself from the floor, but it could only move a few inches here and there. My coffee table loved to somersault down the hallway. My television never moved a muscle, but it never stopped speaking about energy.

There was a lot of magic, and some of it was deep magic, and some of it was not.

Some magic is sometimes called by the word, ‘miracle’ and that is what happened to many people who visited. Nobody saw images of the Virgin Mary, except one person who came specifically to find her. She was asleep in the bathtub, and when her eyes fluttered open at the sound of the door, she closed them again, murmured “five minutes. just five minutes.” They whispered the rosary on the bath mat and watched her breathe in ecstasy.

Most of the time, people just realized things. My friend Alan realized that he could fall madly in love with the saddest parts of life, and he only stayed over one Tuesday. Georgia stayed for one week and slept at night in the arms of her grandmother’s ghost, who taught her one lesson concerning forgiveness each of those nights. This guy Theo who fixed my stove told me that he knew himself for the first time, and that he was beautiful.

Roadside Marker Highway speed, the eye takes in a short film:

man-made slash through bedrock,

guardrail, curve, tree, wreath, toy —

where crown vetch covers the ditch with small pink coronets

as if it mattered, where someone’s strapped

Coming home from work one day, I walked in on the birth of a new universe, which is an act of creation, both sexual and not sexual, but totally holy either way. It happened in the center of my living room, and I smoked parliaments and watched it unfold from the corner, layer upon layer upon layer. It sounds like a big deal, but the thing is is that it really wasn’t. It was basic magic. It was always happening, anyway.

then recognition strikes its match — another smash-up

between late-night and bend-in-the-road behind you

a stuffed bear to the scarred tree with two neckties

knotted together. Notes tucked

into the sash flutter blankly, washed clean

When I tried to move, the door wouldn’t open to let me out. This wasn’t scary, like how you see it in the movies. The apartment just didn’t want anything to change, and I understood. I promised everything would be alright, that life is designed so that when a door closes, a window is opened.

as each thought ticks by.

And yet you turn around.

Go back.

Step over fresh galvanized rail

of signature. Everything’s written in delible ink.

You touch the bear’s rough plush.

Feel how tight the knotted ties.

The bedroom window flew open. I crawled out.

Adele Somma

66

Hayden Saunier

67

The Decision Drawn and quartered. You divided me. You were all four horses, manes black as power your foaming mouths and tense bodies were beautiful to me even then. (even now but never mind) You were all four hands on all four whips. You were north and east and west and south as they dragged me away.

I had to decide where to die. In what twitching muscle unstitching wretchedly from the rest.

Which part of myself should I be in? The shoulders where I regret you, there I can still know your cruelty. Right as rain. Sure as pain. Or my lower lip that would bite itself off for ever resting on you (oh, but it had been so tired.) My ribs and waist have already forgotten you.

Do not ask the skin there your name. My ankles claim they never cared at all. My arms and fingers apologize for what they have held.

But the soles of my feet. I could not sway them they would not obey my need to lose you. My lungs expelled you some time ago and my thighs have eaten their own hearts.

The bottoms of my feet had lasted though, keeping our secrets.

Quiet pink countries of arches and bones how did you love our executioner?

And so after you dismembered me I walked all the way home barefoot and bled you out.

Aimee Seu

68

The Fat Jar, circa 1968 I’m remembering just now the jar of fat, pale, congealing, kept under the kitchen sink – the useless, the hard to get rid of, the dangerous to the workings of the house. There was too an odd metal screen to place around the fry pan.

One still sees an apron from time to time.

At first you could easily pour the fat but if it sat on the stove, in the room for an hour you had to scrape it in with the other layers of sediment, charred flakes from other earlier meals. It did not go rancid but stayed: there, still, cognizant in the dark like all the rest of us. It got topped off, was pitched and taken.

The next jar in its place and the next.

All the children in their beds.

A.V. Christie

69

Artist & Author Biographies

Hiwot Adilow is the 16-year-old Philadelphia-born daughter of Ethiopian

Thomas Devaney is the author of two poetry collections, A Series of

immigrants. She is involved in the Scribe Video Center’s Documentary

Small Boxes (Fish Drum) and The American Pragmatist Fell in Love

Like Beyonce, Cher and other massive cultural icons, Harry Baker goes

Michael O’Hara was imprisoned for weeks in library detention in

History Program for Youth and is the founder and a coach of her school’s

(Banshee Press), and a nonfiction book, Letters to Ernesto Neto (Germ

by one name now, and that name is Bakeowski. Bakeowski is the bastard

the 4th grade after a schoolyard fight where he grabbed Jose’s head

slam poetry team, and has preformed countless times with the Philly

Folios). Recent poems have been published in The Brooklyn Rail,

hybrid of great weed and Charles Bukowski and is not associated at all

and rammed it into a brick wall. While locked down he developed an

Youth Poetry Movement since first becoming involved with them in

Zoland Poetry, and The Awl. His essays on poetry have been published

with the Big Lebowski so stop calling him “dude” already. Bakeowski

interest in literature in general, the Arthurian Legends in particular,

2010. She uses her work to help her navigate through her identities and

in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Double Change, Jacket, and The Poetry

can be found performing on most Wednesday nights at the Shamrock

and managed to not get traded to any other kids for a pack of candy

her environment. She hopes her work will help her better understand

Project Newsletter. He teaches at Haverford College and is the editor of ONandOnScreen (poems + videos).

Pub (2nd and Reed) open mike singing a 25-year-old poem and some

cigarettes. Since then, Michael’s gone through some pretty good

the communities she belongs to and her relationships to them while

blues and on Sundays at the newly reopened Ortlieb’s doing brunches

fights and books and did some writing of his own. He’s written the

also helping others do the same. Hiwot will be one of six youth poets

in his best Bill Murray ski lodge singer imitation. imbakeowski.blogspot.

now-out-of-print chapbook “The Fine Art of Selling Out” and been

representing Philadelphia at Brave New Voices in July of 2012.

David Dill is a recorder of dreams and love, often writing about how

com details 5 years of unemployment and theworldsmostimportantblog.

published by the United Nations in their anthology “Dialogue Among

blogspot.com is where he is currently scribbles.

Civilizations through Poetry.” He’s performed in Chicago, New York

Deidra Greenleaf Allan has been published in American Poetry

not writing about dreams, he enjoys creating absurd situations for

City, Philadelphia, Seattle, Minneapolis, Detroit, Princeton, Providence,

Review, Haibun Today.com, Gratefulness.org, Poetry Miscellany, Puerto

characters, or very real situations that we hope to never face. He has

Trenton, Lancaster, York, Newark and Wilmington.

del Sol, West Branch, and Wind Magazine, among other printed and

recently launched a new experiment in interactive online fiction called

Brian Patrick Heston grew up in Philadelphia. He holds an MFA in fiction from George Mason University and an MFA in poetry from Rutgers

they dance until the two are indistinguishable from one another. When

online journals. She received her undergraduate degree from Temple

the Jovial Brittanians. He is one of the co-founders and editors of

University. His poems have won a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize.

Philly based 20-something and recent Arcadia Master’s recipient,

University and an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine

Obsession Literary Magazine. His work has previously been published

They have also been finalists for the River Styx International Poetry

Dianca London, aspires to capture the post-post modern condition

Arts. In 2001 she was selected as Montgomery County Poet Laureate

in Marathon literary magazine.

Competition, the Sow’s Ear Chapbook Contest, and the Slapering Hol

through fiction fashioned for the attention span of her peers. Inspired

in a competition judged by Robert Hass. Also that year, she received a

Chapbook Contest. His fiction and poetry has appeared in such publica-

by Miranda July, Morrissey, and the Dum Dum Girls, her words have

Leeway Emerging Artist Award and was nominated by Vermont College

Travis DuBose’s fiction has appeared previously in Petrichor Machine.

tions as West Branch, The Bitter Oleander, Harpur Palate, Painted Bride

previously been featured in Hyphen, New Wave Vomit, the Big Takeover,

for the Modern Poetry Association’s Ruth Lily Fellowship. In 2002, she

He teaches English and lives in Philadelphia with his wife.

Quarterly, 5AM, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Poet Lore, Rosebud, and

and her Tumblr.

is upcoming in Coal City Review, Comstock Review, Coal Hill Review, and Sugar House Review. Presently he teaches writing and literature at

Hal Sirowitz is the author of five books of poetry, Mother Said, My

Rowan University and the Community College of Philadelphia.

Therapist Said (Crown/Random House), Father Said, Before, During &

Nathan Alling Long has work in over thirty literary journals, including

was a finalist for a Pew Fellowship in poetry. Her poem “Apostrophe to the Living” was recently selected by Musehouse for its 2012 Poem

Denice Frohman is a poet, lyricist, and educator, whose multicultural

of Hope poster illustrated by Philadelphia artist Anthe.

upbringing inspires her to explore the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and the “in-betweeness” that exists in us all. She ranked in

After (Soft Skull Press) and the forthcoming Stray Cat Blues (Backwaters

Mel Brake is Founder and Executive Director of MPW Foundation, a

the Top 15 at the 2012 Women of the World Poetry Slam, and was a

Press). Garrison Keillor has read his work on NPR’s the Writer’s Almanac

non-profit organization focusing on using the arts to reach children in

member of the 2010 Philly Adult Slam Team. Her work is featured in Philadelphia’s citywide “UnLitter Us” Campaign, and she has headlined

Tin House, Glimmer Train, Story Quarterly, The Sun, and Indiana Review.

and he has included Hal’s poems in his anthologies, Good Poems and

the tri-state area. His first chapbook, Obama Poetry Project, is avail-

His work has also appeared on NPR and in a half dozen anthologies,

Good Poems for Hard Times. Hal has performed and appeared on

able at Amazon.com.

including the recently published Stripped. He lives in the Germantown,

MTV’s Spoken Word Unplugged, PBS’s Poetry Heaven, NPR’s All Things

teaches creative writing at Richard Stockton College, and can be found

Considered, PBS’s The United States of Poetry and Fresh Air with Terry

A.V. Christie’s two volumes of poetry are Nine Skies (1997) which won

with teens to transform themselves and their communities by promot-

at http://wp.stockton.edu/longn.

Gross. Awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a

the National Poetry Series and The Housing (2005) which won the

ing the power of their creative voices.

New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, Hal is the former Poet

McGovern Prize. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry, Ploughshares,

Laureate of Queens, New York.

Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, Poetry Northwest and Commonweal

Dutch Godshalk is a poet and playwright living outside of Philadelphia.

among other magazines. She has received fellowships from the National

He holds a BA in English Literature from Arcadia University, and currently

Warren Longmire is both Philly raised and currently residing, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of the

shows from Michigan, to New York, to Toronto, Canada. Currently the Program Director at The Philly Youth Poetry Movement, Denice works

Excellano Project Spoken Word Collective. He is a two time member of

Janet Spangler grew up in Washington, DC, but has also lived in

Endowment for the Arts, from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and

makes his living writing website content for local law firms. In recent

Philadelphia’s National Slam Poetry team and three time member of

California, Connecticut, New York, Arizona, New Mexico, Turkey

from the Pennsylvania and Maryland State Arts Councils and has over

years, Dutch has done volunteer work for the Philadelphia Writer’s Conference. This is his first time being published.

UPenn’s collegial poetry team. When pried from his second life as an

and Mexico. Along the way, she was a reporter/photographer for the

the last several years been a Writer-in-Residence at Villanova University,

obsessive code monkey, he can be found making abrupt pauses and

Albuquerque News, taught English as a Second Language in Turkey, and

Bryn Mawr College, LaSalle University and Penn State Abington. Currently

wild hand gestures in poetry venues throughout the tri-state region. His

co-authored a fund-raising textbook. She finally made it to Philadelphia

she teaches private poetry workshops.

Michael Haeflinger is a poet and collage artist from Dayton, OH.

work has been featured in Pax Americana, Certain Circuits, The New

and began writing poetry. She has been a featured reader at Robin’s

Purlieu Review and Walleyed Press as well as in his own chapbooks

(now Moonstone Arts Center), the Tyme Gallery, Harvest Books and

Kitakiya Dennis started coloring outside the lines in first grade and she

His work has appeared in several journals in the United States and abroad. Recent work will appear in Four Quarters Magazine (India).

Ripped Winters and the upcoming A Strange Place for Snow. His latest

the Green Line. Her work has appeared in APIARY online, Prompted,

hasn’t been the same since. Her visual art and poetry is a reflection of

He teaches at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ.

work, attempts are art, inspirations and other tidbits can be found on

Poetry Ink, an Outrider Press anthology and elsewhere.

the inner child believing magic of inspiration and empowerment. She’s inspired by the reconnection of African and Indian Ancient traditional

Lauren Hall’s work has appeared in NANO Fiction, The Conium Review,

healing used as modern-day art therapy. Kitakiya was born in West

Fiction Writers Review, and Metropolis. She was a finalist for the 2011

Raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Ellen murphey has lived in the

Philadelphia and studied multimedia at the University of the Arts. Her

NANO Prize. A graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, she

Philadelphia area for most of her adult life. She teaches English at

work has been internationally featured and she has dedicated herself

is currently at work on a collection of prose poetry. Please visit her at

Arcadia University and ESL at Bryn Mawr College. Previous poems have

to a life of creativity. She is a full time Artist, Spiritual Counselor, and

laurenhallwriting.com.

been published in Chiron Review and Blood and Thunder. She lives in

Poet, and works under the name of Intuitive Expressions.

his website dountiltrue.tumblr.com.

Mt. Airy with her partner and daughter.

70

71

Shawn Henderson says, “Since I was little, instead of wanting to

Minter Krotzer’s prose and poetry has been published in Many

Hayden Saunier’s first collection of poetry, Tips for Domestic Travel

draw, I have always wanted to write. Writing in school was my most

Mountains Moving, the Saint Ann’s Review, the Arkansas Review, Upstreet,

was published in 2009 by Black Lawrence Press. She most recently

and author of scholarly works on her research in Papua New Guinea.

favorite time, especially when we got to share. In the past, however, I

Night Train, Before and After: Stories from New York (WW Norton 2002),

won both the Rattle and the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prizes which makes

Her professional interests include gambling, development, inequality,

only used to write short stories. It wasn’t until high school that I got

Louisiana in Words (Pelican Press), God Stories (Random House 2008),

for a “kickass year” to quote Patricia Smith. Her work has appeared

gender violence, the politics of culture and sexuality, and the internet

interested in poetry. My English 1 teacher, Ms. Miner, challenged me

WW Norton’s Hint Fiction anthology and The Hollins Critic. She has

widely and is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Smartish Pace and

as a teaching tool and a platform for cultural heritage projects and e-

to write a poem. After that first one, more than 200 followed. I special-

received writing fellowships at the New School, where she received an

Southern Poetry Review. She lives in Bucks County. (haydensaunier.com)

museums. “A Ladies Tea in Papua New Guinea” is drawn from events

ize in Haikus and Tankas but I also write free-verse. My goal in writing

MFA in Creative Nonfiction, Bennington College, the Virginia Center

Dr. Laura Zimmer-Tamakoshi (Bryn Mawr Ph.D.) is an anthropologist

occurring during her first year in the field with the Gende people in PNG

poetry is to open people’s eyes and give them a different perspective

for the Creative Arts, the Squaw Valley Writers Conference, the Moulin

Naila Schulte (a.k.a. Claudia Schulte, Ed.D.) gravitates toward the

in 1982-1983. Dr. Zimmer-Tamakoshi is writing a collection of stories

on how things can appear.”

à Nef in Auvillar, France and the Ragdale Foundation. Minter is cur-

hazy borderlands where body and psyche flow into Spirit and vice-versa.

and personal essays that includes “A Ladies Tea.”

rently at work on a nonfiction book about her husband’s Early-Onset

She also loves sharing the wealth, and slipped in all the poetry writing

B.E. Kahn, Pushcart Prize nominee, is a grant recipient of both the

Parkinson’s Disease. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, poet

she could while teaching English and ESOL in the Philadelphia schools.

Elaine Terranova is the author of five books of poems, most recently,

Pennsylvania Council of the Arts and the Pew Fellowships in the Arts.

Hal Sirowitz, and teaches private creative writing workshops.

Now retired, Naila continues to edit and give poetry workshops (check

Dames Rocket (Penstroke Press). Her first book, The Cult of the Right

out languagepossibilities.com). She performs at open mics, and was

Hand, won the 1990 Walt Whitman Award. Her poems have appeared

Her poems have appeared in Harrisburg Review, Philadelphia Poets, Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, The Mad Poets Review, Schuylkill

Andrew Ly is a creative writing student at Community College of

the featured reader at the Tyme Gallery in March 2012. A performing

in magazines including The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review,

Valley Journal, and the online Tupelo Press Poetry Project among other

Philadelphia. He placed first in the Judith Stark Writing contest and is

singer/songwriter as well, she was a People’s Choice winner at the

Prairie Schooner, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Pleiades. She has

publications. A former speech therapist, she lives in Wynnewood,

student editor of the literary magazine. When not writing, he is per-

Folk Factory in 2009. Her poems have appeared in Mad Poets Review

received a Pushcart Prize, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a National

and Fuze Anthology.

Pennsylvania and has taught poetry to intergenerational interfaith groups.

fecting his recipe for black bean soup and racing middle-aged women

She is a member of the 34th Street Poets Collective. B.E. Kahn is the

on his bicycle up the enormous hill of Midvale Avenue. He lives in

author of two chapbooks: Spring Apples Silver Birch, 2008, Greenleaf

Germantown with his girlfriend, Phedra, and their doxiepoo, Jemma.

Press and Landscapes of Light, 2010, Poets Wear Prada Press. For

Endowment in the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants. She teaches writing at the Community

Aimee Seu is an 18 year old who has accepted that it is about to be very

College of Philadelphia and in the Rutgers, Camden, MFA Program in

difficult for her to feel completely fulfilled and not be broke.

Creative Writing.

more info, visit her site, bekahn.com.

octavia McBride-Ahebee’s work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Damazine; A Literary Journal of the Muslim

Adele Somma has been creating her own worlds through words since

Sean Finucane Toner’s creative non-fiction has found homes in Brevity,

Anne Kaier’s poetry has appeared in Philadelphia Poets, The Schuylkill

World, Fingernails Across The Chalkboard: Poetry And Prose on HIV/

she was 6 years old. She studied creative writing at Emerson College

The MacGuffin, Opium, Perigee, Writers on the Job, Philadelphia Stories

Valley Journal, Sinister Wisdom, and other venues. Her chapbook, InFire,

AIDS From the Black Diaspora, Under Our Skin: Literature of Breast

and recently completed a graduate counseling degree at Villanova

and “The Book of Worst Meals,” as well as at a Literary Death Match at

was published recently. She reviews poetry for The Wild River Review.

Cancer, Sea Breeze – A Journal of Contemporary Liberian Writing, The

University. Adele lives and works in Philadelphia and has spent this past

the World Café. He has served as a vice president of the Philadelphia

A short piece of memoir is forthcoming in Tiny Lights. She teaches at

Journal of the National Medical Association, Art in Medicine Section,

year working with women recovering from eating disorders. Her dream

Writers Conference and earned an MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson

Rosemont College, Arcadia and Penn State. More at AnneKaier.com.

International Quarterly; Faces of the Americas and the Beloit Poetry

is to use writing and creativity as sources for healing, meaning and the

University. Sean has been sightless since 1995. seantoner.com

Journal. Assuming Voices, a poetry collection, was published in 2003

joyous construction of new universes. Her one act play, 29 Births, is

Gregory Kane teaches English and writing in Southwest Philadelphia.

by Lit Pot Press. Her newest collection of poetry, Where My Birthmark

being produced in Seattle this summer by LiveGirls Theater. Adele’s

His short fiction has previously been featured in Philadelphia Stories.

Dances, was published in 2011 by Finishing Line Press.

He lives in Ardmore with his wife.

Anne-Adele Wight is fortunate to live in Philadelphia, a city bursting

pieces published in this issue of Apiary are love letters to her mother,

with poetry. Her new book, Sidestep Catapult, was published recently

Karen, who grew wings and flew out of this birdcage some years ago.

by BlazeVOX Books. Her work has appeared in Fairies in America, The

Pattie McCarthy is the author of bk of (h)rs, Verso, Table Alphabetical

Dariens, Philadelphia Poets, American Writing, Shrike, Tabula Rasa, and

M. Nzadi Keita has read in universities, prisons, kindergartens, and on

of Hard Words, and Marybones (forthcoming), all from Apogee Press.

Jacob Staub is Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Spirituality at the

other publications. She has read at many local venues and recently at

public television. Her poems appear in anthologies including Let Loose

She is also the author of the recent chapbook, L&O, from Little Red

Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, PA. He can be con-

Rust Belt Books in Buffalo. Anne-Adele is Vice President of the series

On the World: A Celebration of Amiri Baraka at 75, The Ringing Ear:

Leaves Press e-editions. A 2011 Pew Fellow in the Arts, she teaches at

tacted at jacobstaub.net.

Poets and Prophets and works as a freelance developmental editor. She

Black Poets Lean South, Beyond the Frontier: African-American Poetry

Temple University.

lives with her husband and two cats, loves them all dearly, and tries in Lamont B. Steptoe is an African American with Cherokee ancestry,

for the Twenty-First Century and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology

her own way to keep the natural world alive.

of Contemporary Persona Poetry. Journal publications include nocturnes

Montgomery True Ogden is a young poet and high school teacher

born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A graduate of Temple

literary review and MELUS Journal. Grants from the Pennsylvania Council

who studied English at Amherst College. When his students get wild,

University, he is the author of twelve collections of poetry and the edi-

In high school Jacob Winterstein liked to freestyle and wanted to be

on the Arts and the Leeway Foundation have funded her work. Keita is

he tames them with rhymes and brainteasers. His work has been fea-

tor of two collections by South African poet Dennis Brutus. He is the

a rapper. At Temple University Jacob studied poetry as performance

a Cave Canem alumna and teaches at Ursinus College.

tured in Circus and Explosion-Proof. He currently lives in Northwest

recipient of an American Book Award, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, two

under the tutelage of Dr. Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon. Dr. Williams-

Philadelphia.

fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and an inductee

Witherspoon whipped Jacob’s scrawny self into shape and helped him

of the International Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent by the

fuse his political beliefs, humor, observations, love of rhyme and at-

After many years of family, friends, and fellow scribes imploring her to

Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University. His work appears

tention seeking skills into performance poetry. Along with poetry slam

write for real, D. Panichas is finally listening. This is her first publica-

in the Longman/Penguin anthology of African American Literature

champion Ms. Wise, Jacob organizes and hosts the monthly event The

edited by Keith Gilyard and the Oxford University Press Anthology of

Pigeon Presents: The Philadelphia Poetry Slam. Come check them out.

tion, and it’s dedicated to them.

African American Literature edited by Arnold Rampersad. His most Mini Racker is in tenth grade at Abington Friends School. She began

recent books are A Long Movie of Shadows, Crowns and Halos and

writing poetry in eighth grade, and enjoys including both her observa-

Oracular Rumblings and Stiltwalking.

tions and her feelings in her work. She enjoys exploring words through poetry, playwriting, and acting. She loves Shakespeare and Agatha Christie. In 2012, she was the first place winner of the Montgomery

72

County Poetry WITS contest.

73

Dr. Richard Wertime, Professor of English, discusses Italian history with graduate students during a fiction-writing residency in Umbria, Italy.

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.

M.A. in Writing Studies

M.F.A. in Creative Writing

• Low-residency program with online communities • Personal attention and small workshops • One residency spent abroad • Preparation for careers in writing and college-level teaching • Fiction and poetry cohorts

M.A. in English

• Flexible courses of study for individual needs and professional goals • Preparation for careers in college teaching and professional and creative writing • Literary and critical studies

Study abroad opportunities in Italy and Scotland

Does your marketing need a boost?

Have a great idea but don’t know how to bring it to life?

In search for a designer that understands a deadline?

Banners, business cards, e-mail marketing, book covers, etc., I have done it all.

Lydia Haas Graphic Designer

˚

Apply Now!

www.arcadia.edu/apiary

• Professional internships in media and corporate sectors

M.A. in Humanities

• Scholarly competence combined with intellectual challenges • Literature concentration • Fine Arts, Theater and Music concentration • History, Philosophy and Religion concentration

Join us for an Open House on June 19th, 5:00-7:00p.m.

To learn more and register, visit www.sju.edu/writingstudies.

Metropolitan Philadelphia 1- 877-ARCADIA • admiss@arcadia.edu

lydhaas@yahoo.com 215-828-6262 www.lydiahaas.com

˚

˚

Graduate Studies

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 help pay for printing costs.

But you’re our reader. 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.

For as little as $20 a year, you get home delivery, free admission to all APIARY events, and know that your gift goes directly to our printing and programming.

Since our first issue in September 2010, we’ve been able to accomplish the following:

What matters most?

Breaking down barriers?

Building bridges?

Understanding yourself and others?

Print four issues, featuring over 150 local authors ages 8 and up

r

Increase our print run from an initial 250 copies to 7,000 copies

r

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

r

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

r

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

r



Yes! I want to give APIARY some of my money. In return, I will reap benefits beyond measure: copies of the magazine sent to my house; free admission to APIARY events; and a warm fuzzy feeling.

 $20 The Honey Bee

 $100 Mellisseus (Greek god of beekeeping)

 $50 The Beekeeper  $200  $75 The Royal Jelly

Oshun (Yoruban goddess of love, wealth, & honey)

Name_________________________________________________________________________________________ Address________________________________________________________________________________________ City_______________________________________________ State____________ Zip_______________________ E-mail_____________________________________________ Phone #_____________________________________

 Check

 Cash

Mail to: APIARY Magazine, 1713 S. 13th St., Philadelphia, PA 19148

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

The University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Liberal Arts program helps you hone your craft and deepen your understanding of what drives you to write.

Write what you know.

When you become an MLA student, your program will include seminars to deepen your knowledge about subjects central to your writing as well as creative writing workshops with instructors and colleagues whose constructive criticism will help you apply that knowledge to your work.

You’ll find yourself in a thriving academic community of students and dedicated faculty with wide-ranging interests and eclectic backgrounds. But you’ll all share one characteristic—your curiosity.

The Penn MLA is a writing program like no other.

Practice your passion at Penn.

upenn.edu/mla or search

penn mla

Expand your Creative Future with a Master’s Degree from Villanova Villanova University offers graduate degree and certificate programs that can expand your career options in the creative world.

• Affordable, competitive tuition rates • Small classes with supportive faculty

• Part-time or full-time study • Graduate assistantships

MA in English Explore literary texts from medieval times to the present in their historical, theoretical and critical contexts. Become familiar with the major intellectual currents shaping the discipline of literary study today. Advance your love of literature in all of its forms. gradenglish.villanova.edu MA in Liberal Studies Create a master’s degree based on your unique interests with courses in English, history, art, theology, political science and more. In addition to the MA, Villanova offers graduate certificates in Great Books, Ancient Worlds, American Studies and Peace and Justice. gradls.villanova.edu MA in Theatre Learn by theory and practice as you work on Villanova Theatre productions. Embark on a career as an actor, director, stage manager, playwright, dramaturge, administrator, teacher or critic. Or combine the MA with a graduate certificate in Nonprofit Management. theatre.villanova.edu

Apply Now! 610.519.7090 gradartsci.villanova.edu