Lux Spring 2013 by Lux Literary Magazine

lux spring 2013

lux literary magazine produces a biannual publication of student poetry, fiction, and art for the Bard College community. By creating an open venue for student work, we aim to promote expression and exchange amongst student writers and artists.

lux literary magazine, Bard College, Spring Semester 2013. All works copyright Lux Literary Magazine. Produced with support from the Bard Convocation Fund. Printed by ColorPage, a division of Tri-State Litho. The reproduction of any portion of the magazineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s contents without permission is prohibited. Lux reserves first publication rights. Upon publication, remaining rights revert to the authors.

Executive Editors Ash Duhrkoop Josh Corner Fiction Editor Josh Corner Art Editor Nicole Maron Nonfiction Editor Sam Prince Poetry Editor Ash Duhrkoop Associate Editors Lauren Barnes Anne Boylan Kelsey Davis Linda Dayan (abroad) John Ohrenberger Nicola Goldberg Milo Goodman

Doireann Herold Collin Leitch Cypress Marrs Sean Newcott Becky Samuels Kassandra Thatcher Melissa Van Fleteren

from the editors you might not know it, but right now you’re holding a collection of the finest work ever produced on our campus. The assortment of stories, essays, poems, photographs, drawings, prints, and paintings in this magazine come from the visionary community of artists and writers who call Bard home. We are proud to sponsor a medium for their work, and we really think this is one of the best issues of Lux we have ever published.

Submitting and sharing one’s work can be a scary prospect. The editors would like to sincerely thank everyone who showed the courage to submit. Although we cannot publish every piece we receive, we are grateful for the opportunity to review all of the work submitted. We would like to thank the following groups and individuals for their continued support:

• The faculty of the Written and Studio Arts programs, who cultivate an environment in which creative exploration and expression is fostered and encouraged. • The artists and writers who submitted their work for review. Without you, we wouldn’t exist. • Our fellow Bard publications, including Bard Free Press, Bard Science Journal, Bard Papers, Qualia, Forum, Sui Generis, and The Moderator.

• The Root Cellar and This Bardian Life for creating unique, nonclassroom spaces in which art can be created, developed and shared. Happy reading, Lux Editorial Staff

table of contents Will Kettner On the Grading of Academic Papers ................. 7

David Sater Untitled ........................................................ 13

Troy Simon R-E-D ......................................................... 14 Orit Yeret Philosophy ........................................................ 16

Kimberley Feltkamp Double Exposure ............................. 17 Ted Jameson March 1st 2013 ........................................... 18

Tara Sheffer Untitled ....................................................... 19 Mikhail Yusofov Prospect Park #5 .................................... 21 Jacob Powsner During Desserts ........................................ 22

Will Anderson Seeing Steve ............................................. 23

Max Gavrich Flagstaff, Arizona ....................................... 31 Stuart Leach From the Desk of Lil Wayneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Doctor............... 32 Emma Horwitz Truisms .................................................. 33

Jenny Ghetti Monoprints ................................................. 36 Alex Baro Limehouse Blues ................................................ 38

Jordan Bodwell Second Hands of Midprice Watches ............ 39

Maxwell Taylor-Milner Let X = X ................................... 45

Emma Horwitz A Past Life and Scoff ................................ 46 David Sater Untitled ........................................................ 48 Damon Korf Soap Opera .................................................. 49 Maya Sommer Untitled ................................................... 50

Allison Shyer Strange Tendernesses ................................... 51

Izzy Bump Self Portrait .................................................... 59

contents , cont . Leah Stern Pog ................................................................ 58

Jenny Ghetti Excerpt from Thunder Perfect Mind .............. 59

Maeve Dillon Captured / Untitled Form #1 ...................... 66 Maya Osborne Conquerors ............................................... 68

Max Taylor-Milner Thank You ......................................... 70 Rebecca Bell-Gurwitz Lunatic Stages Dollâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Murder ........ 71

Zoe Finn Habit ................................................................ 81 Cassidy Turner Untitled .................................................. 82

Elsa Raker Cataloguing .................................................... 83

Ted Jameson North by Northwest ...................................... 88

Will Kettner Untitled ...................................................... 89 Ted Jameson Untitled ...................................................... 90

Jono Naito Space .............................................................. 91 Max Gavrich Richard Morris ........................................... 94

Leah Stern Wet Pig .......................................................... 95 Tamas Panitz Elegy ......................................................... 96

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on the grading of academic papers Will Kettner

Let it not be imagined that a given idea could ever become

so completely crystallized in itself as to detach and exist apart from that churning and bountiful ocean whence it was granted life; though the harshness of winter oft exerts itself on our more boreal waters, geluque / flumina constiterint acuto,1 yet we well know—indeed, any child could confirm—that the substance of the thing has not changed alongside its consistency. If, therefore, in my struggles to encapsulate and solidify the following argument (if it can so be deemed), I seem at times deeply submerged in relations inconsistent with my point; if, in what is otherwise a slow and determined drift, I graze another half-formed thought and wobble ceaselessly, now in this way, now in that— atque animum nunc huc celerem nunc dividit illuc in partesque rapit varias perque omnia versat2 — indeed, even if I seem to dissolve, and at once to break off in a multiplicity of directions, understand that this is the only method of presenting my thoughts I find manageable, and that, hopefully, if the above analogy is at all to be credited, none of the substance of my argument should be lost in it thus being presented.

Allow me further to excuse my register, which, in its unbear-

1 “And the rivers have been fixed in a severe frost,” Horace, Odes I.9.3-4. 2 “And now he divides his swift mind in this way, now in that; he seizes the various parts and turns through them all,” Vergil, Aeneid IV.285-6.

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8 able loftiness, wraps itself unpleasantly about the head— bis collo squamea circum terga dati superant capite … cervicibus altis3 — and has a reasonably soporific effect on the reader which unfortunately would render him or her dangerously ignorant of a situation’s particulars: sopor fessos complectitur artus. et iam Argiva phalanx instructis navibus ibat…4 Yet the use of this suffocating rhetoric can best be understood as a familiarity heuristic: since my environment has so accustomed me to the presentation of ideas in such manner; and since I am either wary of offending this perceived norm, or, as is more likely, I am simply keen on presenting a piece materia conveniente modis.5

Were it your wish that my tongue, the work of which being

here transcribed, be checked in its serpentine slithering; and that it further be deprived its venom and vitriol altogether—it would in turn be my great desire that you, or, if otherwise, some representative body, supply your own whim’s agent. For little has ever been improved but has first been complained, castigated, or declared improper. And thus, in our present society and conditions, whereof the reader’s failure to compliment the author seems paradoxically to be a fault of the former and not the latter, since now some transient kindness and the equally ephemeral smile it evokes are more highly valued than are the arduous trials evoking a finer and more durable 3 “The scaly backs wrapped twice about the neck … they conquer the head with their lofty necks” Ibid. II.218-9. 4 “Sleep embraces the tired limbs. And now the Argive troop, with its ships outfitted, goes…” Ibid. II.253-4. 5 “With the material being suitable to the methods” Ovid, Amores 1.1.2.

lux product, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas— 6 plus uno maneat perenne saeclo!—7

it happens that a despicable writer, such as myself, of such words which in their unintelligibility can only be deciphered as a cry for censure and guidance (whose children, by and by, are correction and reform), could instead pass between his life’s ultimate points, receiving as many vacuous appraisals as he produces works, though they be equally vacant of value.

Rather I should hope that, even on those sempiternal monu-

ments granted us by the arts, still a rather scrupulous inspection would reveal pockmarks: cernis … non ... putrescere saxa, non delubra deum simulacraque fessa fatisci;8 and then how much more the case in my own abject oeuvre—it can be nothing but gravel and bitumen! It therefore puzzles me when, having submitted for critique such a crude and anthracitic piece of writing (for no coal became a diamond but which first endured extreme heat and pressure), the thing returns to me unscathed, or, worse, speckled here and there with approvals, check marks, accolades. All of which I find without use, since in submitting the work I have already admitted the mistake of my satisfaction: that, though 6 “Which neither the wrath of Jupiter, nor fire, nor iron, nor voracious old-age will be able to efface” Ovid, Metamorphoses XV.871-2. 7 “May it remain eternal, for more than one age!” Catullus, I.10. 8 “Do you not discern … that stones decay; that the shrines and tired images of Gods are cracked?” Lucretius, De Rerum Natura V.304-6.

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10 certainly the thing must be composed largely of errors, yet they are not visible beyond the shroud of my pride and self-favor. But before I have been alerted to the ineptitude of my writing, am I thence to produce something exceedingly competent?

Indeed, it has accordingly been under the heavier oppression

and more merciless lambasting of others that my work has more noticeably strengthened and matured. I have scarce written more successful papers than following the mocking and copious criticism of my Professor, Daniel Mendelsohn; and my own sister stands unchallenged as my most pitiless and punctilious critic and editor, to whom I am therefore most grateful in this regard: for had I been want of her revisions and derisions I would further be want of that smallest literary talent and interest to which I might lay claim.

In secondary school, I often placed myself in contention with

an English teacher who was given to subtracting disproportionate numbers from my grade over such minor issues (as I then thought them) in my essays as were with conjunctions, articles, and, on one occasion, the unnecessary usage of an abbreviated Latinism (e.g., “e.g.”). On one day in peculiar, finding myself insensibly incensed with his marks, I resolved to demand of him, quite pretentiously, that my grade be reevaluated, to which he rejoined that if he were to grant me the grades I deserved—the merits which I merited, as it were—then I would doubtless strive for nothing more. And in truth my essays in that year were refined, as I see it, by a great margin: for each essay in turn became a stepping stone toward the next; and not a mere mirror—shoddily clothed by the guise of novel content—to

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Had this, however, constituted my first encounter with the

subject, I have no doubt but that it would have destroyed any budding curiosity forthwith, and further salted any grounds wherein some vital interest might well take root. A first student in any discipline “must be treated in the first instance with humanity, but kept under control by means of iron discipline,”9 for indeed, “anger may in time change to gladness, vexation may be succeeded by content; but a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never again come into being.”10 I am so much the less perplexed, therefore, when a stranger to myself, and subsequently to my work, will with diligence towards my unknown whims withhold the sting of his tongue or the bite of his pen—though, in all fairness, it should rightly be the hopes of any being who favors logic and reason that their errors be righted, their crooks be made straight, and their splinters be planed; for even if the ascent bodes more formidable than the fall, he “who makes it all easy finds it all hard. Therefore the sage makes everything hard, he thus finds nothing hard.”11

It may aptly be reasoned, too, that no man is an empty and

inanimate vessel, to be fueled and driven merely by the gusty aspirations of his others (those being his teachers, namely, and his critics); and that rather we are lifted into our pursuits by the connate wings of our own volition, which must at least infrequently be waxed or bolstered, were we to circumvent failure— 9 Sun Tzu, The Art of War, IX.43. 10 Ibid. XII.20-21. 11 Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 63

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12 … geminas opifex libravit in alas ipse suum corpus motaque pependit in aura; instruit et natum …12 This I cannot in the least dispute: for I am at times my only critic, and in this deserted state have not, by my individual labor, been helpless to salvage at least some exiguous fruits. Thus, though I am chary of surmising in extremes, it may be said that review and critique are largely superfluous tools in the encouraging of an art: since the artist in scrutiny, whether he accepts opprobrium as a blessing or annoyance, has perhaps already resolved so to do before submitting the thing; and thence—though of course if he possess any voluntary interest in himself, it can only be strengthened by the contribution of another; and therefore this contribution should unconditionally be given—his teachers and critics would be less his absolute guides and more rightly like those Gods, qui simul stravere ventos aequore fervido deproeliantis, nec cupressi nec veteres agitantur orni.13

12 “The workman balanced on his two wings, and he himself hung his body in the agitated air; and he instructed his son …” Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII.201-3 13 “who lay flat the battling winds on the torrid sea, and simultaneously neither the ancient cypresses nor ash-trees are shaken” Horace, Odes 1.9.9-12

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untitled David Sater photography

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r-e-d

Troy Simon

It starts when I am seven. I’m a second grade student

at Johnson C. Lockett School. She starts to show the class how to read. I feel left out. I don’t know what’s going on in the classroom. The other students can pronounce words when the teacher calls on them. But when she calls on me, I get nervous and sweaty. My body trembles and my heart races. She points to a word on the board. I can say the letters and spell them out, but I cannot understand, no matter how many times she calls on me, how R-E-D forms red. It doesn’t take long for the other kids to figure out that I can’t read. “You don’t know that? You dumb!” “Boy, that’s easy. My lil’ sister know that.” “That’s a shame.” Even my own brother tells me I’m dumb. “You ain’t going to make it.” Once or twice, my mother tries to help me with reading. She sits on the bed and clicks through the channels. “Read, boy.” She flips to another channel. “Come on.” I feel hurt. I don’t know anything on the paper. I can tell she doesn’t care.

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“Go ahead, boy! I don’t feel like helping you with this anyway.” Our house on N. Dorgenois is full of anger. There is tension between my mother and my father, between my step-brother and my mother. My father yells at my mother for neglecting us and my mother yells at my father for running around with other women. They are living under the same roof for now, but it will not be long before my mother leaves. She shoves and slaps my stepbrother. She sees him as my father’s child, not hers. “I don’t like that boy. He makes me sick.” Some of this tension is because we lack money. My father serves beignets at the Café du Monde on Decateur Street; my mother doesn’t have a job. I bring this anger with me back to school. In the classroom I face more hostility. I begin to act out. I curse at the teachers, I pick fights with the students, I cut class, and walk the halls. I never learn how to read.

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philosophy Orit Yeret

I am studying Kafka. I write his name in bold letters in my notebook, And color them, sporadically, black and grey. My comments are not an easy read; They shift in a curve, they step over each other, Enter and exit different realms In a way that only makes sense to me. I dye the margins of the page with polka dots; With each one I add, I die a little. How fragile time is – he would wonder, And I shall respond – indeed. He is strict with me; making me learn, Do the time, do the work… for how long? Jesus, get to the point! Which way to go? Once you enter the ring, Be prepared to handle the punches And because I am a woman – do it with grace. Delicate creatures die every day. I shall be his student forever. right: double exposure in a mud parking lot Kimberley Feltkamp, photography

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Ted Jameson

TIVOLI, NY: I watched as a town

burned to the ground last night. They cut holes in a roof so the building it sheltered would draft better, burn quicker – the roof was old slate.

The horizon flamed and they saw it from across the river, the silhouettes of the stunted trees from where they’d amputated old dead branches so they wouldn’t blow down in the road. I never really slept that night. There was a hawk on the telephone wires the next morning, when we drove to the bakery. People stared and whispered and I would rather not have talked to them. It was still grey when she drove off, her cheek still soft against me. march 1st, 2013

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two parts of one whole lump

Tara Sheffer

Arkansas is hot. Really hot. The heat is immediate and visceral, but particular. Dogs constantly pant. It’s like standing over a propane barbeque grill and feeling a water mister blow in your face at the exact same time. That mist ain’t refreshing, let me tell you. Condensation forms on the can of your Cokewhich in the south is a name for all carbonated beveragesthe moment you take it out of the fridge. It doesn’t matter if you are in the middle of a rice field or next to the river, you’re going to be sunburned and you’re going to be sweating. Southern heat is a workout. She lived in a dead town. A rice town. Where the closest grocery was thirty miles away. A place where distance is measured in miles instead of time. Where the main form of transportation for an eleven year old girl is a bicycle. Though this town was dead, Gracie Belle was terrified of dying. Her daddy quit smoking two years ago just because Gracie Belle would hide his cigarettes, and being a forgetful sort with a short temper, he didn’t have the time or patience to look for his Kools. The first time Gracie Belle thought about death was when Sue Anne’s daughter, Tammy, told her a story about the river. They were drinking cokes, squishing their feet in the mud at the Arkansas Post, and she said when you die your soul goes into the river. That your heart opens up and water flows in. That the you that makes you you breaks into two...and that piece of you that made you special goes out. It gets ripped out of your body. That body sinks lower and lower and the fishes eat your eyeballs and the alligators chomp your toes. Gracie Belle would wonder if this was true for all things. She would think about it in the shower or when school was almost out. Does everything split in two? Does everything go into the river? Is that why you can’t see the bottom?

Gracie Belle was an exceptional bicycle rider by the age of seven. So to say she was ‘good’ at eleven could be, by some standards, considered insulting. She was so good that she was able to ride on the highway. No problem. The shoulder was big enough and her daddy didn’t have to know. It was faster than the backroads. The road that ran from the Arkansas Post to Gracie Belle’s daddy’s house was not actually black it was yellow. If the road had been black, the bicycle tires under Gracie Belle would’ve melted. Thankfully the road was yellow and not black, and Gracie Belle’s tires didn’t melt into a puddle of rubber. Gracie Belle was peddling at top speed, her hair whipping in a ponytail behind her. She could see a lump in the deserted yellow highway, just in the distance. The heat lines made everything wavy though, so she couldn’t be sure. As she got closer she could see two lumps. Two grey lumps, boiling in the middle of the yellow highway. Her brakes squeaked and she abandoned her bicycle in nearby grass. Checking left and right before she crossed, just like her daddy taught her, Gracie Belle’s red tennis shoes padded over to the two lumps. She knelt down and the two lumps were actually not two lumps at all, but two parts of one whole lump. Armadillo lumps grinned up at Gracie Belle. Run over by car or a combine, the armadillo was split in half. It had weird scales and armor like an alligator, but a cute little face that really wasn’t that cute at all. Its snout had a snarl that could be mistaken for a frown. Its entrails and guts spilled out and sizzled on the yellow highway. Its blood dried and it’s blue insides were filled with flies and bugs that buzzed. Cut down the middle, the armadillo’s eyes were wide open, dark, and brown.

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untitled (prospect park) Mikhail Yusofov photography

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during dessert Jacob Powsner

I was gone out side between yard, pacing myself, and wood pal(ate)let digesting while setting theâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;dog down sun, passing over stone wall to walnut cracks of old pasture lay berried bushes in that part west where I wanted to raise the barn.

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seeing steve Will Anderson

I once had a therapist who reduced emotion into five, simple categories. The point was that you could follow any emotion, trace it back to its root, and get a better grasp at what you were feeling. Whenever we spoke—when he would prod and I would answer, when he would stare and I would shift—those five categories hung over us like a guiding force: mad, sad, glad, lonely, and afraid. His name was Steve and his office was full of stuff: magazines and books and ashtrays and bobble heads. They filled the floor, the shelves, and the drawers; they sat amongst the messy desk and the two wicker chairs, beneath the dark, dirty windows. There weren’t any diplomas or certificates on the wall. Rather, there was only a single bumper sticker, stuck behind his desk, on a warped mahogany wall. It read: To Thine Own Self Be True. Steve worked from his home in Los Angeles, a small, shakeshingle structure in the shape of a dome. He had two dogs: a giant mutt named Rena, and a tiny dachshund named Taffy. The house had a small patio, an upstairs loft, and some mismatched furniture. The walls were dark and the light was always yellow. And like his office, the rest of the house was littered with stuff: old street signs, superhero piñatas, empty fish tanks and dusty instruments. It was also littered with teenagers. Though the number fluctuated from time to time, around eight kids lived there with Steve, all under his care, all troubled in some way. The girls slept upstairs, the boys slept in the garage, and Steve slept in his office. There were another half dozen who came in after-school and on weekends, who hung out in the living room, or watched movies upstairs, and smoked cigarettes outside. They left after it was dark, returning home around ten. Steve didn’t really look or sound like your typical therapist. He chain-smoked Marlboro Reds and wore wrinkled Hawaiian shirts. He was handsome, but he didn’t take care of himself. Steve was around 45 years old, but he looked older. His eyes were creased, his skin was leathery, and his voice was husky and rough. He wasn’t a put-together doctor. He looked like a mess. He would laugh loudly,

24 always referred to you as his “friend,” and would speak with energy and wit. There was nothing professional about him. Seeing Steve was also unlike seeing your typical psychiatrist. Steve ran “The House,” the official name for the outpatient rehabilitation facility he operated from that home in Culver City. The program catered towards adolescents, ranging in age from fourteen to twenty, with issues from substance abuse to eating disorders to depression. He founded the program in 2005 after being terminated at a more established facility. It began in the living room of his apartment, after loyal parents and kids followed his exit from the previous treatment center. It eventually expanded to that home the Los Angeles. Parents needed to know someone in the program to have their children admitted, and Steve refused to have more than fifteen kids enrolled at once. The House became known for its exclusivity, for its charismatic leader, and for its tendency to transform the lives of all who entered. The program required total immersion. Participants were expected to be at The House whenever they weren’t at work or school. There were nightly group sessions and daily meetings with Steve. The kids did almost everything together—they cooked dinner, had chores, and did homework all under one roof. I vaguely remember my first meeting with him. I arrived at the House with both my parents on a warm afternoon in June. We went inside, sat down, and he grinned at me. He asked me about the last three months: my recent expulsion from private school, the new friends I was hanging out with, and my chronic lies to my parents about where I was spending my weekends. He asked me how often I was smoking pot and what other drugs I had tried. He asked me why I hadn’t talked to my older brother in over a year, why I seemed so unhappy at home, and if I was nervous about about starting at a new high school in the fall. And I responded with very little. I gave him one-worded answers, lied about the stuff I wanted to avoid, and looked out the window while talking. I was fourteen years old. I wasn’t formally admitted into the program, whether for a lack of need or lack of urgency. But Steve liked me, and I continued to meet with him throughout that summer, maybe once a week. I went for my session, and then left. I talked to the other kids, but only briefly. But my attitude and behavior remained consistent outside of the

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program. That was the summer I started pitching in with friends to buy cocaine on the weekends, since it was easier to get than alcohol. But something else happened that summer, albeit slowly, but powerfully. I don’t know when exactly, or how exactly, but I know it happened. A shift occurred. I started to like the place. I began looking forward to our weekly conversations—I started telling him the truth, and stopped looking out the window. He was patient and interested in what I had to say. He was encouraging and helpful with his advice. And I began to get to know the other kids—I started hanging out with them, and stopped leaving right after my meetings with Steve. There was Keri, who weighed 95 pounds and had dark circles under her eyes. She wore the same fur coat everyday that concealed her fragile frame. There was Brian, who was goofy and kind and had the same birthday as me. We would sit outside and smoke cigarettes and laugh. Sometimes he would mumble to himself. There was Sam, who was plump and Asian and taught me how to throw gang signs and blow smoke rings. He also helped me with my math homework. There was Andre, who was handsome and Lithuanian, who hated his dad but loved his mom and couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble. He was under a court order to complete counseling. There was Ashley and Alysia and Tom and Lindsay and Jeremy and Chantal and Audrey, and a handful of others. And, of course, there was Steve. By September, I was going twice a week. Unlike the others, I could come and go as I pleased. I didn’t have to be there on weekends, or eat dinner there, or give up my afternoons and free time. But I often did so voluntarily. I became involved with the group-sessions at night, opening up to the others, and listening to what they had to say. I began to feel close and comfortable with that house. Its smell, its furniture, its sounds all became so familiar to me. I really don’t know what it was about Steve that made the place

26 work. He could be an asshole at times, unpredictable and confusing. He would lose his temper, retreat into his office for hours, and shout and scream and swear at us. But in a way, I worshipped him. He was genuine. He wasn’t doing this for money, or because it was a savvy endeavor. He devoted his time, his house, and his life to a group of kids who had been marginalized and dismissed by the people around them. And I think he did it because he cared about us, and had some kind of insight to how we felt—he thought he could help. There was something optimistic about that. The kitchen was a mess and his office was a mess and the living room was a mess, but he gave us a place to come to, a place to sleep, a place to talk, a place to live, a place to hang out, a place to problem solve. And if we couldn’t solve them, we could come back the next day and try again. And Steve did more than just give us a place to talk; he offered us real, concrete solutions. He had tutors who helped me with my work. He would call my school and help me get into better classes. He got other kids jobs, went to court on their behalf; all his time was spent fighting and advocating for this small group of kids. Steve would often talk about honesty and integrity. He often joked that if we chose to be heroin addicts, that was okay, but he wanted us to be the very best heroine addicts we could be; he would rather us be kind, compassionate addicts than cruel, sober people. He criticized other sober-living programs because they only focused on using; every conversation, every exercise, every instruction, he said, centered around staying clean. It reduced life to one single purpose and one single goal. But his goal was not to make us drug-free; he wanted to make us better people. He wanted us to be happy and engaged and enthusiastic about our lives. He wanted to teach us how to be better humans. And if he succeeded, the rest would fall into place. I continued going to The House for most of my freshman year in high school. There were days when I wanted to stop going, when I grew tired of the kids, or became angry with Steve. He could be arrogant and spiteful; he would argue his point, even when he knew he was wrong, until you grew too tired to argue back. He would belittle and yell at kids, knowing exactly how to make them react. During one dinner, Brian, who had been fighting with Steve, grew so angry that he grabbed a knife from the kitchen and threatened to kill Steve. And Steve kept yelling back, egging him on, insulting him. Eventu-

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ally Brian slammed the knife into a wall, and stormed out. We never saw him again. But there were also the moments of wonder and discovery, that seemed to outweighed the program’s problems. I learned how to talk to my parents. I learned how to share with others. I learned how to be honest with myself. We had times when all of us would stay up all night and just talk. We would drink coffee and chain smoke and Steve would lead the discussion while we grew so delirious and tired that we had to just go with it. I remember after one of those sessions, just after sunrise, a couple others and I decided to go get breakfast at a nearby iHop. There were barely any cars on the street; it was a still and clear morning in a city that is usually so loud and full. As we quietly ate our breakfast, rubbing our eyes and talking about the night before, I remember feeling glad—just glad. I was lucky to know these people, I remember thinking. They were smart and funny and interesting, and they cared about me. And I cared about them. We didn’t have much in common, and we all came from different places. But I think we really cared about each other. And that was enough. *** Things began to unravel as spring approached. Sometimes I would arrive at the House after school, for an appointment with Steve, only to find him asleep. He wouldn’t wake up until the next day. Once, my mom and I arrived for a meeting, only to find The House locked and dark inside. Steve didn’t answer his phone, and nobody knew where he was. My mom and I passed time at a nearby Thai restaurant, picking at noodles we didn’t want, waiting for him to call us back. Eventually, we just went home. I remember I wrote Steve a letter, in early May, about what I perceived as a corrosion of The House, how I thought he seemed disinterested lately, and that the place didn’t feel the same. I’ve always expressed myself better in writing than in speech, and I wanted him to really understand how sad I felt that the place I had grown to love that past year seemed to be slipping away. I remember he told me he read my letter, and he thought I was right, and we would sit down

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28 and talk about it soon. Maybe tomorrow. *** Every Thursday we had family meetings. Parents and kids would gather in the living room, and, as some say, hash it out. On this particular day, May 17, 2008, I had forgotten to remind my mom to come. It was maybe 6 PM, and the sun was beginning to set. And then the front door crashed down. The splitting wood produced a loud a treacherous bang. Police streamed in; they were pointing guns. In the backyard, a dozen more jumped the fence, almost in complete unison. More guns. We screamed while they shouted directions. Get Down. Get Down. Get. The. Fuck. Down. It happened in seconds. One moment I was standing. And in the next moment, I got down. The room filled with cries of terror and disbelief. Bodies stumbled and crashed together as we all just tried to follow orders. I was told to line up with others against a wall outside, with our hands on our head. It was one of the few moments in my life where I worried about being shot. The dogs barked while the officers searched. My back faced The House, where Steve was apparently being handcuffed and led away. I never saw him leave, and I haven’t seen him since. Eventually the night came to a close. We were allowed to leave, after the rooms had been torn apart and statements had been taken. I remember walking past Steve’s office. All the drawers to his desk were on the floor, and his papers thrown around. Inside the drawers was the tinfoil—small, crunched up pieces, scattered everywhere, burnt and rotting. The following days were just an effort to understand what had happened. It was so unclear at first, and so completely incomprehensible. But the information was relatively straight forward: Steve faced nine felony charges of a sexual nature, including oral copulation with a person under 18, sexual intercourse with a minor, sexual battery, contributing grave bodily harm to a child, and two counts of providing narcotics to a minor. As the police searched Steve’s office, they also found bags and bags and bags of crack cocaine, all hidden in the space where we used to talk. He had been

lux using the entire time.

The victims were two females in the program, both of whom lived at The House. I once read a written account of their accusation, and they were so disturbing and so numbing that I couldn’t finish. They had gone to the police, quietly, and the raid followed. That effort to understand carried on for weeks, for months, and for years. I remained in contact with most of the kids at The House initially, but we eventually drifted apart. Some moved back home, and a couple moved in together. Our lives branched off in different directions, and it suddenly it became hard to even find time for coffee. Even when we did see each other, it didn’t really feel the same. The charges against Steve were eventually reduced to a single felony count of possession of a controlled substance. There was no trial, no testimony, and no verdict. He was given 250- hours of community service, and was forbidden from individually counseling any male under 18 or any female under 23 for a period of 40 years. And that was that. I mourned The House privately in the wake of its closure. It wasn’t something my friends from school really knew about, and I wasn’t sure how to explain it to them. And the details of its demise generally solicited a reaction of awe and excitement rather than sympathy. For most, it was just a cool story. But as time went on, the trauma ceased. I moved through high school, with those ten months behind me, drifting farther away, as the memories blurred. But I still think about Steve. I wonder what he’s doing, or where he lives. I Google his name from time to time, but nothing comes up. And mostly I wrestle with myself. I was at first certain he was innocent. I couldn’t understand why the two girls had accused him of such heinous acts, but I thought they must have a reason. There had to be an explanation. I just didn’t know what it was. My faith in Steve’s innocence eventually waned. But I still don’t understand how it happened, or why it happened, or how he could do it. I can’t understand how someone who helped me so much, who I grew to trust and admire, could commit such evil. Because he did, I think, make me a better person—a happier person. He didn’t necessarily turn me into me a “sober and responsible” teenager. There was no day when I woke up and swore to never use a drug or have a drink

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again. But my time at The House made me less interested in the idea that life was more exciting when you’re living a substance-driventeenage-rebellion. It made me aware of how scared my parents were about me. It made me bored with my friends who only talked about getting stoned. It made me realize I had options in how I spent my time. Or maybe I just grew up, and this would have happened in spite of Steve. When I think about The House now, I can’t reduce my feeling into one of those categories that Steve laid out to me. I feel sadness—tremendous sadness. I feel mad, towards Steve and towards the kids and towards the situation. I feel glad that I got to know them all, that I had a place, if only for a year, that I felt so safe. And I feel afraid and lonely when I try to understand what happened. It’s an experience that I cannot reduce to one single moral, or one single feeling, even with vague and encompassing adjectives. But I can also acknowledge that that’s okay. I can admit that I don’t know what to feel. I can admit that I still care for a person that destroyed lives. I can recognize the good he did, while also recognizing the bad. And I can admit that I miss him. This above all.

right: flagstaff, arizona Max Gavrich, photography

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from the desk of lil wayne’s doctor Stuart Leach

The vitals are fine, though mentally, he’s cashed and the melodrama of the relapse has burned through his chicken-scratch. No more vague metaphors from his lips, but his digital presence is as strong as ever. Twitter won’t shut up, my son tells me, and he’s been trending on Yahoo for the past twelve hours. And as he reads tweets, his glazed eyes give weight to the ink across his shoulder, spelling “Haters gonna hate.” I sympathize. He’s no idiot. He’s intellectually unassuming, but he’s no idiot. The idiot is the one who laughs at death (as much of the web is, he tells me.) He then recites verse from one of my orderly’s favorite rappers: Notorious B.I.G. “I would never wish death on nobody, you know what I’m sayin’ because there ain’t no coming back from that.” It’s biblical, he says, as he itches his elbow, his industrialized teeth rubbing his thick lips raw. He recites more Biggie to me: “Notorious is glorious in the sack, Hit skins from the back, put my thumb up the ass crack.” He laughs, and the Miles Davis crackle rears its head, a product of years of chain-pot-smoking. He asks if he can smoke in the room. For the sixth time, I tell him no. He laughs again. He’s intellectually unassuming, but he’s no idiot. The idiot is the one who laughs at death.

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truisms

Emma Horwitz They had a baby with a heavy constellation of birthmarks patterned along its back—Not a single on the front, How strange! She remarked, That our baby would have so many dots but not on its tummy. He said, Yes, it’s giving me the heebies—my own baby’s giving me willies, he doesn’t really look like his papa, I mean maybe he could, but his nose is small, his hands, his face is small, he’s so much smaller than I am, he looks nothing like me, I’m so big. So big and defined. He’s just soft. The man and the woman attempted to fix their baby: they took a permanent marker and colored lines connecting birth mark to mark to mark. The man drew, he held the pen—his wife was tired from giving birth to the freaky thing that looked more like another random baby than its own parents. The wife-mother said: Now our baby looks reptilian, like, scale-y. You buffoon, re-fix my baby! The hubby-daddy said, silently, Okay, and filled in the geometries of birthmark-to-mark-to-mark decoration with permanent marker. If the baby had been a girl, the mother would have wept even harder than she was now—all of those bumps looking like an omen of a witch on her precious child’s back. Forbid it, she though to herself, that my baby be burned at a stake for her oddities, cause otherwise she’s got pretty symmetrical features. Father filled in a trapezoid, then a triangle. Make sure to stay within the lines, he told himself, an adage he had previously abhorred. He was a creative type (liked doodling the hair of his wife in the corners of the newspapers): but this was not a project to be creative with. This was his baby. The back of the baby was, after hours of fumes, completely black with permanent marker. Both the man and the baby passed out from the smells of toxicity. They awoke to find themselves in their respec-

34 tive beds, tucked in by Mommy. Or, rather one by their mommy, the other by their wife. Though the father felt like a baby, with his head rattling, and yearned for his own mother to come give him a goodnight kiss, though it was three in the afternoon, and his own mother had never exactly been affectionate during bed-time. Knowing the marker wasn’t exactly permanent as in “forever”, the wife took her baby to a subterranean tattoo parlor, where she bought off a man named S. Frank for a hundred and seventy five dollars to tattoo the back of her baby. She said: Make it seriously filled in, we don’t want any blemishes, make sure to get each crook of his back, especially where his arms meet and bend at his torso. And, with a flip of her hair and a busty pose, she asked Hot Frank if he would be so kind to also get in around the armpits. When the baby grew up to be a child, the tattoo stretched. And as the baby got taller, lankier, fatter and all around more humanshaped, the tattoo smeared into a greyer and greyer landscape, until this kid looked like a soggy newspaper. Like its back had been wiped with a rag that had been kept for years near an oxidized drain, waiting to wash something, waiting to have a dish to clean, but always being “that rag that’s too dirty to be called a rag, who’d want to wipe something with that dirty of a rag?” The baby went to schools when it became an adult and got a job that paid him well with three and a half weeks of vacation annually, and a coffee mug with the company’s logo on it, which he was free to replace at any time, if something like the handle broke or the lip chipped. The baby worked for six months on a spreadsheet concerning the effective cost of concession carts. The analysis he did on the ageto-consumption of sweets by teens-grandmas was award winning. He had told everyone, with his dark suit on, covering his back and buttoned up his front to make sure nothing of him gleamed to anyone in the conference hall of Lambertlake’s coveted Arts and Theater center (he’d wanted to be an actor), that the secret was in the hardness of mints—that without teeth, mints are torture. Buying

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mints was a drastic waste of financial resources that should have been redirected to red chewies, or chocolate stickies. The gummy bear/worm/cherry industry sent him a medal of honor for his support of the work they did. Dr. Groy of the consistency production unit of a candy conglomerate called his congratulations in—Thank you for understanding how the flippancy with which we are usually shackled is merely a label. The baby was awarded a lifetime supply of gummy sharks. The mint companies never called, not even to complain: it wasn’t worth it, there were always people to be kissing. He went to a beach and took his shirt off. He gripped the sides of his hips and put his feet in the sand and sun bathed. He drank vegetable juice. He watched the television. He made noodles. He put his gummy sharks in the bathtub and let the hot water disintegrate them into a pool of blue sugar. He tried to adopt a baby of his own but the adoption agency asked what a single guy wanted with a baby. He went to a beach and saw children. He saw seagulls and a woman with a kid feeding bread to birds, some of them pigeons, some of them seagulls, all with bird parents lurking with wings in the background. During a vacation the baby returned home to its parents and asked them why his back looked all grey, was it a birth defect? The mother cried: How could you think your birth was a defect! That’s not what I meant! The baby said, and the father took the baby in his arms (even though the baby was four full inches taller than him by now, and many extra pounds heavier than he had ever been) and rocked him to sleep saying: it’s okay, it’s okay, we wanted to make you as seamless as possible. next: two untitled prints Jenny Ghetti, trace monoprints

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limehouse blues Alex Baro

the movements of some suffice to make full even the deserts of a day. I ask only a nice dry cave with a clock radio and a happy woman-born with rosy weight enough to distract from its impossible noise. the soul is at sea in a clown car. even with the radio on, any room must have room enough for two seas to knock against each other hard and shaking still not loud enough to see.

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second hands of midprice watches Jordan Bodwell

enter west

west sally west sally

west sally west sally west sally

and sally

(The audience of course didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know why the two characters had just walked on stage) (The color of rain) (It was nine-thirty at night, after all) (Belt loops, the second hand of midprice watches, buttons from the left sleeve of flannel shirts and knobs locked doors) (Was their disconnected speech enough?) (Her pockets by contrast held nothing) (They werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t together) (They had to spend time together.) His name (west) Her name (Sally)

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40 west sally west sally west sally west sally west west sally west sally west sally

(But really, who were they?) (In the pockets of old jackets, the green dust of ground up tennis courts) (It was true- they really did both need haircuts) (Loose tobacco and pubic hair) (But what was it, what was it between them?) (Baseball stitching to sew up calf wounds) (Clearly they had some relation) (mailbox flags, ripped off while in the down position) (Could they hear each other?) (They both thought for a second, on that one.) (Beat.) (There was both no mail at all that day, and entirely too much mail.) (They were of course aware of each other) (His tongue, to be perfectly honest, tasted like envelope seals) (Maybe if they ambled more towards the other side) (Dry but sweet.)

lux west sally

west sally west sally west sally west sally west

sally west

(He wasn’t sure whether she wanted to know why they found themselves exactly there) (At the touch of the tip of their tongues the air somehow absorbed the moisture, and they found themselves not touching tongues but tasting tongues. Tasting tongue.) (What tense were they even talking in?) (The lake drowned.) (Who, in actuality, were the people watching them? What did their souls look like?) (Stone squirrels smashed on black asphalt) (How long-,even,- could this questioning sustain itself ?!) (You’re mine, said she.) (For indeed, it was high time to leave.) (They were connected as two ends of a ticket are) (It would be appropriate to say, in a French accent, “I cannot work under these conditions! Get your coat dear, we are leaving!” But of course he didn’t say that.) (Bread for breakfast was, to say, unfufilling) (What if he left and she didn’t follow him! He would look like a fool!)

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42 sally west sally west sally west sally

west sally west sally west sally

(the cracks between bricks) (the crack of dawn was not far off, after all) (all bald men would grow hair) (Worried?) (she had filled him, one by one, with plastic creamer containers of puddle oil) (Lets get the fuck out of here! Was his thought) (She went down on him, unbuttoning with her mouth. After heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d finished, she dropped one by one on his forearm the 127 teeth from his pants zipper.) (Was it getting too sappy, now?) (The coat hanger never had any hooks.) (Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d drifted now to the edge of the stage near the door, about to go out) (Daylight savings time was stored in mason jars bobbing within the sea.) (What was the holdup? Who was responsible for this traffic jam?) (In desperation she had drawn a square root sign as large as him, next to him. He was naturally a prime number.)

lux west sally

west sally west

west sally west sally west

end( ).

(This was, after all, the quiet car, wasn’t it?) (An infinite succession of toll booths, having to decelerate the second she’d just started to accelerate. The toll was two match sticks, one lit and one not. Right into an outstretched hand.) (Had they made their exit yet? Who, indeed, was controlling the entrances and exits?) (So long as they were hitting each other with pillow cases filled with water, everything was happy.) (They could hear each other.) The two look at each other. Staring deep into each other’s eyes for more than a couple moments, a mutual decision is made. They “exeunt, severally” as they speak their final lines. Having seen each other, had they bolted? The meeting was akin to stabbing the bristles end of two brooms together. (They walked away now, anyways, the audience wondering about the character of their characters, (Stamps do not stick.) and the performers, for their part, wondering about the character of the audience as well.) (Exit.)

screencaps from â&#x20AC;&#x153;let x = x: konceptual karaokeâ&#x20AC;?

Max Taylor-Milner / installation, mediated performance / performed live 4.10.13

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a past life and scoff Emma Horwtiz

A former fictional queen ran into her high school boyfriend at the Stop & Shop. She was wearing, now in her non-queeny way, a sweater with knitted ribbing and looked not like a queen, at all, though she held that head up high-high, knowing in her former glory she had been to prom, had gotten a crown, had danced with Tomas, who had played her fantasy king in the life production she produced called: Look At Me Now, Right Now, I’m in Twel-f Grade. Tomas, she said, stopping him by the electrically sliding door to the grocery store, Did you not but love it when were both were dost royals? Tamas stared at her, gave her the up down once over, saw her boobs, which were her boobs, ones he had remembered and said Huh, I guess it’s you, isn’t it, do you still live where we grew up? The former fictive queen of her own embellished high school universe said to her former fantasy king boyfriend, also of her own high school universe: Tamas, I forgot that thou werest considered to name changing a while latter, ago in the olden days, and did change your first vowel from O to A in efforts to be high on the alphabetical food chain, re: the food chain of the finest corporation where I did yonder hear from a word-poison at the gas station, where you work as sir floor manager. Yes, Patricia, I do work as floor manager, it’s nice to see you, you look like you’ve grown, up I mean, in the good non-obesity way. Also, said Tamas, Hey, what do you think, my wife’s in town but I could get her to go to the movies by herself and you and I could make that—pasta you were always so good at making. Even in her current life universe, Patricia Queen of Current Life, could smell a rat sack of a human and this Tamas guy was swinging

46 his tail back by his nape as if he had, behind otherwise gooey lips, rows of yellowing chicklet teeth. And thus she scrolled with her tongue the following, causing Tamas to tuck his formerly feathering, now oily, hair behind his drooping ears and trot back to his Toyota, from where he did enter. Dearest Tamas, you rat squeezer, you poor puppy pusher, to think I wouldst take your wife’s virgin eyes and have them set upon a scene of our naked bodies touching in synchronization with the fairest lyre playing in the background of our copulations, most romantic tunes all the land—did you remember Nancy Porticallo, from the block called Edmond Way, a woman with a stringed instrument so lush and round she did ever have all the gentlemen callers? Did you also know that Miss Nancy Porticallo, current holder of record deal with Hurley Sons Music, is also the current holder of my Best Friend title, one I do not needith give out to anyone else, as this fine woman with hair as black as cindered ash, does also consider herself to be my Best Friend. Reciprocated romance! I would, in your hypothetical love scene you are constructing in gravel-toned words before my very eye-set, play some of Porticallo’s tunes, but no, not me, I would never dare dream to upset that marriage agreement you and your wife (Anna?) have set upon many moons ago (six years, has it been?). To think you would ever see my white and nippled bosom is beyond my fine thoughts. So be jealous, fellow, who was once a boy I did talk to while in my bed sheets, you on one end of my cellular phone, me on your end. You are my King no longer, nor will ever be. Tamas, with that name, said Okay Patty, when you want to find me I’ll be at my workplace, so ask Al with the purple name tag to give you a day pass and maybe we can have lunch in the break room (winking) if you promise to come make the noodles you were always so good at boiling. Patricia, again appalled, yelled at Tamas as he sped off in his white rimmed Toyota four-wheel drive: Don’t you understand, Leper of the Night, Man who broketh my heart and left me for College, that the noodles I did make for you were out of a packet, the cheese but

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47 a powder before I did use my lithe fingers to stir each granule into a creamy consistency of luscious eatability. Tamas didn’t speed entirely away with his truck but stopped at the corner of the parking lot he and Patricia had met in, and leaned out his window, his arm angled, looking behind his shoulder with his lower chin fat an unmoving like a whale’s supposed “blubbery composition”, which, in actuality, is tough not tender. Patricia went home and thought hard of her former production, the fantasy turned only fantasy, as all that the reality of her high school days did was to play out as a precursor for a worse life where she had seven children, all by forgetfulness of birth control. She called her Best Friend Portocallo and said: Love of mine play on your harp sweetnesses to awake the undertones of my fantasy soul, to which Nancy obliged, and the two stayed on the phone line until both were red in the face, knowing Patricia’s children would one day grow up, and change their names to get high-paying professions.

untitled David Sater charcoal drawing

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soap opera Damon Korf

He sat upon a shallow curb, swathed in thick, soapy darkness â&#x20AC;&#x201D; receding with the suds, towards the tug of a drain somewhere in the deep. A pair of blazing Camels flanked him, flickering through the stillness. Washes of red, yellow, orange â&#x20AC;&#x201D; brightest blue, dead center. Silence punctuated only by exhalations of tar from lungs. New Mexico, one croaked finally, of all the states we die in, the last will be New Mexico. The other said nothing, but there was an unspoken understanding that they had lived by the logic of an hourglass. The Camels took one final breath before they died, twin arcs of flame tracing the night before hitting the damp street in extinguishment. The sound of cartridges clicking into place as footsteps pad towards the bank. Too quiet to think. The night black as pitch rolling awkwardly upon the dawn.

untitled Maya Sommer photography

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strange tendernesses: an unraveling lyric Allison Shyer

(1) I Spent the past year and a half trying to write about love, which is to say I spent the past year and a half trying to experience love, which is to say spent the past year and a half wondering how I got blind. I don’t know if I have experienced love but I do know I have written it. Do we write to prove that things happen to us or are there better reasons, are there better reasons? I am sifting in a year of love poems, a year I am firmly planted within, but not so firmly as to be unable to see the other side of it. I see how thick and silly it is, I ask no one to try and convince me otherwise. I hate calling whatever it is love, it has different names, they shift off of and onto objects, people, places. It is not love, it is a kind of attention, attention with prongs that root their way up in the soles of a writers feet and makes them stay or go. I have chosen to locate this attention in the body. I have not chosen, I realized-- just as I realized with the first spring rain that I did not have adequate galoshes. I realized that I needed to write about bodies, when I came to them unprepared. (2) Body (n) Old English: trunk or chest of man or animal from root word botah. Word has died out in German and replaced with lieb meaning “life,” extension to person in the mid-thirteenth century, meaning “main part” of anything. ________________________________________________ Winter is known for taking exactly what it needs. In the Midwest a stigma against practical coats exists. Among friends in thinned furs scaling the wingtips of autumn, I spotted your cocked head:

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52 When you see me, You push the corners in-Just playing. The two of us huddle in my thick mother coat. I cannot scold you for the cold for being too old to wear that too old. Hands twined with underarm in the greased public of a street light. Make my body decrease but it won’t it won’t. My body under street-light, under coldbody how hurdling of you to be in that with it. (2.5) Our words touch like a joint in an arm, leaving air in between what it means and what it doesn’t mean so we can move around each other we won’t conjoin at thought. (3) Body (n) contrasted with soul since at least mid 13th century. Transferred to matter more generally in middle English eg: heavenly body, body-politic, body of water. ________________________________________________ If the loved object is body-has parts smelled as a rain water, As smelled as salt— if the object is a body. If not, shake off salt.

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53 (4) Atoms of steel contain conduits that stiffen as the object is bent and loosen with heat. The granules released return to the spaces they used to inhabit. To know that steel is a malleable body made up of still more bodies is to know that there is nothing that is not touching or un-touching. She told me that she used to think that there were little people dressed in white that lived inside the television set and changed the pictures, that lived in the lamp and made it turn on. Tiny bodies of touch and un-touch creating responses, dances, maybe licking a finger, then parting. (5) Having concussed dreams about pennies falling out of my hair. Then I shake loose a tooth-- I see the tooth is not mine. How much does it take for something to become strange to me? How much must I warm it before it becomes mine again? The pretense of collusion is that we are made of objects that are indispensable. The pretense of collusion is that we were once finite. Maybe I am dreaming about Walt Whitmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s autopsy again:

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54 Here lies Walt, at his most malleable, which is to say his most alive. Here is Walt at his most “in love” if love is a way of bringing things into his own body. Here lies Walt Whitman prince among lovers Who has finally inverted into a series of small abscesses about the lungs and two-and a-half quarts of water. Here lies Walt, being a bottom for the world. (6) The psychologists used to say that lesbianism came from an early inability to differentiate self from other, baby from mother, leading to a desire for sameness- later debunked. Is it bad that I still like that theory? Holding within it undifferentiated clumps of limbs, eyes, skin, mother, lovers and babies. Making us all into indiscriminately sexed things, maybe unsexed— a strange super power or color blindness—shamed into the shape of a diagnosable thing—this love, that cannot be abstracted and therefore cannot be understood. Walt Whitman’s indiscriminate and consuming love that weaves in and out of bodies, crosses over rivers, plants itself under the earth with the seeds. It is a need not for sameness, or the desire to pair like with like—no it is lust more complex for the tips of the greenest things that have not yet emerged from the ground. (7) “Where as we find a thick, if translucent, barrier between self and other, he was often without even the thinnest differentiating membrane.” Said Stephan Mitchell in his forward to Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Mitchell goes on to explain Rilke’s need for solitude as a “means of self preservation” in light of this fact. However, I have trouble believing this de-

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55 fense is necessary. To be a poet is to be tender at the feet of everything. Rilke knew this most of all. Am I advocating that to create is to shirk our response to pain in the face of strange tendernesses? To lean into bitter wind and let it nip at the tips and cores of us? I am no Rilke, I am justifying the shapes my pains take in words where I left your body behind, uncurled its form from mine. Un-touched the corners of your lips, your toes, the thick schrim of your pubic hair to become myself again. I am trying to pin down your body to get a grip on how I lost it, if it was mine, if it will be mine again. I am sorry, I don’t know who you are, your body has become something else for me. (8) “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, and to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.” The pain of collusion or maybe things that cannot stay the shape of a self. We talk illness into Shapes that have gone awry, Haywire orders cells undressing. There are orders of bodies that when twisted break, that wither under peel, that bust too soon like a lantern coil. things that can break create space get busy folding air. (9) I once saw a man dressed in only cellophane. He had his cellophane shirt tucked into his cellophane pants. He lay on the sidewalk like a shrink-wrapped odalisque. All the people passing looked away, and so did I, making space for shame.

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56 Our first instinct is to apologize for the shapes we take and the places we put them. Should I tell you I fell asleep thinking about your nipples on the train again? Things without their replacements are sometimes frightening. Dreaming about your nipples on the train is like looking at a door without the hinges or knobs, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s un-sanded, with so much gall-- when you look at it you think about other doors that are maybe more representative of what they are. The only thing I learned in biology class is that if you amplify something enough, you see that it is not true to itself in form. It is a slippery thing, being true to yourself. What form are you being true to exactly? So I already know that your nipples arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t yours at all. They are mine. They have traces of something you gave me in them. They are a collaborative rendition of nipples, constructed on the train from thin air.

index

_________________________________________________________ (2) (3) paraphrase of Body definition, OED (5) Excerpt from Walt Whitman Autopsy Report, New York Times, March 28 1892 (6) Study Citiation, Gladys Bently and The Cadillac of Hormones (7) Letters to A Young Poet Introduction: Stephan Mitchell, Random House 1984 (8) Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Leaves of Grass

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self-portrait Izzy Bump acrylic painting

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pog

Leah Stern

They most frequently appear to those who are ready but not in need Perhaps in a dream or else in a seating area with a shag couch to prove their weight Lazy eyes but thoughtful ones and wise ones too the eyes of a diva Soft ears Entirely immovable Pig dog

lux excerpts from thunder perfect mind Jenny Ghetti 1.

Sofie builds her life out of teeth. Her mother’s bottom left wisdom tooth is preserved in a closed cup around her throat. Her own are stored away. Her father’s have been lost to an unmarked grave, scattered somewhere. When she has children of her own, she keeps them in small boxes on her mantel, each labeled. She never touched her husband’s teeth except with her tongue, and they disappear before she can collect them, walking away still attached to his jaw. She forgets that she has dreamed about them, dark where they sat in the pool of his mouth but pearly below the flesh of his gums. Her grandfather sits her down when she is young. “Take care of those little teeth. Someday they’ll fall on out and you’ll miss ‘em something terrible.” She listens with eyes affixed to the gold cross pinned to his collar. He pats her shoulder, cards his fingers across the top of her head. “Jesus’ll watch after ‘em for you, but only if you take care of ‘em, too.” His hand comes to rest on his own jaw before he rises to move to the next room where her grandmother is beginning to cook. Sofie mimics the gesture, feeling the softhard curve between where her ear stops and her teeth begin. Clicks her jaw open, closed. She walks through the door and out into the backyard, clattering

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60 the tiny sound of baby teeth against slowly growing adult teeth as she steps. 2. She grows up in her grandparents’ house, running girl fingers over brick and wood, drawing saint halos in crayon on crude but hard-worked illustrations. Sofie stops believing in God when she is a teenager, but still goes to church with Joshua to make him happy. Sometimes the songs they sing in the candlelit hall build through her and her eyes water with something. But she doesn’t feel faith. In college, she interns at a holistic health center, where her name tag reads, “Sopia,” an error that leads to innumerable jokes about her personal hygiene. “Hey, Soapie, give us a hand back here, would you?” Sofie works her way through the practice, and takes certification classes on the side until she graduates with an irrelevant degree, a license to be a homeopathic health practitioner, and a permanent job at the center. She takes to the rush-in rush-out of patients and herbal supplements, making a ritual of examining bodies. 3. She marries a boy she met at school. He is named after an archangel, which she finds charming in a nostalgic kind of way. They had shared an apartment during the year to save money, but as a wedding gift, Pistis and Joshua loan them the cash to buy a little house. “I haven’t had a grandchild yet, you know. Not really,” Pistis had said, squeezing Sofie’s hand. Sofie smiles, but does not think too

lux deeply of it.

As time passes, she and Michael fall into a complacency. He slips through the walls and becomes a part of her peripheral. On a whim she sews scraps of her mother’s old shawl into the pockets of her coat, so that the fabric lines them and pools around her fingers. The needle moves in and out as Michael passes back and forth across the room. Her eyes focus on the thread weaving itself through the coat. 4. Sofie opens the window to watch Michael slot together boards for a fence. She waves to him from the kitchen window and gestures toward the coffee warming between her palms, ducking back inside and tapping her ring against the ceramic of the mug while she moves to meet him. “Morning,” he says around the doorframe, grazing her forearm with his fingers as he passes her into the kitchen. “Hello.” She taps and the sound shadows her, floating between them. She looks meaningfully at the coffeepot, and Michael’s hands find his own mug. Sofie watches the curve of his back flare into the shape of a piano lid, shoulder blades opening and closing as he pours. She moves closer and presses her fingers to each knobby tooth down his spine. The house is theirs, a yawning shape against its neighbors, architecture squared at odd angles and disheveled shingles. She began as a cottage in the early dawn of the twentieth century, sidling into a village of other cottages, separated by wide fields and old-growth

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62 forest. Her first tenant tilled a modest garden along her side, but it was swallowed up in one or another of the winters. He had pushed fingers deep into the rocky soil, nestling seeds where his hands had removed stones, repeating the motion yearly until the shaking in his joints became too much. Buried among the trees beyond her eaves, he left the house empty and alone. Subsequent tenants stayed briefly before moving west, tripping forward into the futureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s empty arms. In 1973, the cottage was scheduled for demolition in favor of rows of modern concrete. A small fleet of bulldozers arrived, carrying the promise of asbestos-free, long-lasting foundations and frames, paid for by a buy-em-up, sell-em-back condominium firm. Work halted several weeks into the project as the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s funding was brought under scrutiny and eventually disappeared, drained away to some mysterious business. Men with hardhats who had lined the streets crisscrossing the neighborhood left without notice, their flashing signs and orange barrels vanishing as quickly as they had come. The cottage itself remained intact, but had acquired a semi-complete wall surrounding three of its sides in the process. She languished, vines barnacled up her edges, and birds nesting in her rotting window boxes. It is years before a young couple buys her up and smooths her back into herself, building rooms between the concrete and the old faĂ§ade, erecting a front wall with bay windows and a small porch to contain her. Sofie fits herself into the corners of the porch. 5. Five years into her twenties, Sofie finds that she is pregnant.

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Her husband laughs and kisses her belly, her neck. She never meant to be a young mother, but the electricity running under her skin radiates happiness, blood tapping thunder. She works until she goes into labor, meeting with patients who compliment her on her rosy cheeks and ask about her growing baby. The attention isn’t unwelcome, but it is by turns overwhelming. Visitors to the center, her coworkers, people she sees in restaurants—they reach out and press their fingers against her rounded stomach, as if somehow her pregnancy has rendered her public property. Sofie feels unsettled, stays home. The walls of the house slant forward in the southwest and southeast corners. In the summer, the eaves creak in the humidity, and in the winter they creak in the cold. St. Anthony hangs on the keyhook, and Joshua had splashed holy water in the doorway the day they moved in. Sofie gives birth to Adam in a hospital, but when she and Michael bring him home, they make spaces for him—a small room, a soft highchair in the kitchen, corners where they know when he is older, he will bring blankets and make nests to play in and hide when it is too cold or rainy or hot for him to stay outside for long. There are days when Sofie wakes up, curled around Michael, head tucked into his neck so that his lips press sounds into her as he sleeps. “It isn’t me,” he whispers, “I can’t be,” and she hears the words as though they are a fire alarm two houses down. Sofie wakes up to the sound of receding boots on the front steps. She pulls her limbs together and slouches toward the window,

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64 from where she can see the shape of her husband walking straight down the road, coat across his shoulders and fingers hidden away in pockets. She calls to him, shouts, “Hey!” and feels stupid. Before he disappears, she says his name as loud as she can without screaming, feeling the syllables burrowed in her lungs and pulling to get out. Her jaw clenches together and she stares outside for a moment before she feels stupid again and quickly turns her head away. Adam knocks something over in his room down the hall with his little hands. She can hear him clumsily trying to right it. Sofie leaves the window, moving back in toward her son, crossing the length of a room she has been crossing daily for nearly three years. She hits her shoulder lightly against a shelf as she passes it. Something jars in her head as the left side of her body is temporarily set back, but it rights as she does. Ten steps later Adam is in her arms. 6. Sofie feels like there’s a kind of light speaking through her. Michael is gone, but her hands glow when she looks down at them, resting on the tabletop. She swallows something like terror, but she isn’t afraid. She can see Adam where he has fallen asleep in a laundry basket, nestled into warm clothes. The locket around her neck knocks into her sternum when she takes the tooth out of it. Sofie rolls it in her fingers, staring absently at the curled up bones and skin and life of her son. She knows the processes inside of him exactly, which veins lead where, the beat of his heart, how to cure his headaches or bruises or upset stomach. The tooth reenters its

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chamber. Sofie stands to put on a pot of coffee and washes the dishes quietly, so as not to wake Adam. Just before noon, she steps onto the front lawn. There is a hammer in her left hand and a bucket of nails before her feet. Sofie takes a post, drives it into the earth. Drives another, and the next. 7. She only remembers dreaming about him once, though she is sure heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s slipped through her many times. In the dream, Sofie is lit up by a lightning strike at the window. Michael is beside her, laying on their bed. She reaches her hand toward him, hoping to touch his face and wake him, but her fingers go right through his skin.

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left:

captured Maeve Dillon laser cut woodblock, collage, nails

above:

untitled form #1 Maeve Dillon plaster, gesso, medium, silk, nails

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conquerors Maya Osborne

Loneliness pulled my mother

to bits,

left her breathing

through the lungs of a lunatic-

a pair of borrowed hands in her breasts. My father’s regret is a fire that burns in the middle of whatever made him stay steady. With practiced hands he guts his words. Says to me, “Rome fell.” The timbre

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of his breath tuned to a surrender-rhythm. Yet he still standsout in the barrel of the old shotgun house as seasoned

and yet purposeless

as our now empty armor.

thank you Max Taylor-Milner ink on paper

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lunatic stages doll’s murder Rebecca Bell-Gurwitz

Once I saw a dead body. The thing about this body was that it wasn’t really dead. Our college campus is concrete. There’s only one courtyard and the grass tufts out of the cracks in sad attempts at freedom. Sometimes I walk along the yard in square steps, around and around, but forcing myself to stop at each of the four corners. And do you know what I do when I get to those corners? I find those tufts of grass and I pull them out. “This is uncalled for,” says the Director into his microphone. The Director is my name for the president of our college. Students gather, gazing. On good days the students are beautiful, with their graveled coughs and their elbows dark in the crease, lightening in tone when they hold their arm up to speak. Once, during a Religion seminar, a boy stood up and said God was a cow, but he voiced his arguments in the middle of the lesson so that the boy’s words alternated with the professor’s. God is a Cow. Jesus was a fisherman from Nazareth. God is a cow. Jesus taught his disciples. GOD IS A COW. Most of the time, the students are ugly as sin. Especially the girls that I sleep with. Faces cold like my dead frog, the one I buried in my mother’s flowerpot years ago. I wonder; has she found it yet? The Director draws a line of chalk around the body. Nothing smells. Plastic flesh, so clean, although the fake blood leaves a bit of a mess. An oversight, perhaps. But no metallic scent. When I buried the frog under my mother’s potted rosebuds, it smelled for days. It smelled forever until one day, nothing. I was drinking milk straight out of the bowl, and choked because the absence of the smell became overpowering. Chalk like silk fresh from the worm. There’s something about concrete that absorbs all beauty and spits it out again, this time, reborn. The girl next to me is giggling. I ask her what’s wrong. She gives me a strange look and shrugs, “I don’t get why the president is

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72 going through all this trouble.” Her face is ugly. Coldest I’ve seen yet. I want to scream at her. But I don’t. I just cough and move closer to the front of the crowd where the Director’s gray head drips and melts onto the ground. Dali would have loved the plasticene qualities of this campus. It’s hot out. Peering down I can see how the fake blood coagulates on the concrete, absorbing better than the real stuff. White licks of paint slough off the victim’s face, which makes me hungry again. I have a thing for birthday cakes. There is nothing better than sliding your tongue against each flake of sugar, grainy and too sweet to be real. Fruit comes from a tree the same way a baby is born, smelling of blood and covered in pasty substance clinging to its hairy arms and legs. My least favorite thing is a fresh peach, because against my tongue it feels like a girl’s cheek, fuzzy and newborn. Once I found the dead body of a doll. She had the face of most other dolls, impassive and smiling as if she died in a moment of bliss. The pictures of murdered girls in the newspapers look nothing like this. As time passes, the doll’s face stays the same and I want to get down on the ground, right there in front of everyone, and lie with her. I watch for so long I think about her breathing, even though she was never alive. Limbs contorted in the worst positions, except nobody grimaces like they should. No bones, they are thinking. She has no bones. If I scalpeled into her right now, there would be no glorious organs with their rhythmic muck, no cessation of blood’s vibration in her fake veins. I wonder if they ever make dolls with veins running through the hollow plastic of an arm or leg. Innervating not with blood, but something more vital— emptiness, like the air we breathe out and suck back in. People are getting freaked out. Days go by and the Director recruits a detective team from a willing pool of students. I volunteer myself to be a part of the investigation. What a shame this dead girl never got to be alive.

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Once I found the body of a doll, warm on the concrete. She was supposed to be cold, except the sun came up and touched her. “Signs of psychopathy,” the Director says, melting. His hands are dirty and they look so large when he feels the victim’s neck for a pulse. Dying dolls are becoming a fad in campuses throughout the nation. A week after the first sighting, a baby doll is fished out of the swimming pool. The policeman’s first attributes it to the carelessness of girls. When dolls no longer satisfy a woman’s needs, she loses her instinct for motherhood. Little girls fling their dolls into piles of mud, letting the rain wash away painted lips, soaking clear through clothing once gingerly pulled over a plastic arm or leg. “She’s not real,” my sister said after our mother found a doll’s head separated from its neck in the backyard. My sweet little sister said this hadn’t been purposeful. But then again, she only shrugged at its decapitation. A small girl no longer satisfied by her supposed motherhood. This is what the officials thought when they held the little doll soaked in chlorine and bleeding red. But then they find several more dolls floating about the campus pool, the water dyed red with grocery store food coloring. The students respond gleefully, because The Director postpones midterms in order to track down the perpetrator. The Director holds another meeting, ashamed. Why this concrete campus above all others? It’s midnight. After I eat three sandwiches for dinner, I walk towards the chalk outline drawn in the middle of the Quad. The body has been removed, and the ground scrubbed clean. I find something curious just then: a note that says “GOD IS A COW”. Once, there was a manikin’s body splayed out in front of my sister’s dorm. When I visit her there, she is crying. When I ask her what’s wrong she says that her boyfriend has broken up with her. Afterwards, she looks cold like the frog I buried in mom’s flowerpot. I tell her about the frog I buried. I say, did you know? She nods and says, did you kill it?

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74 I cough and shake my head. Have you ever done a science project? When we step outside into the crowd of students, she slips in and out of bodies like she doesn’t exist. Do you exist, I ask her. What are you, stupid? She says back. Manikins are meant for clothing, the Director says. That is their function. They are not for staging murders. Someone yells, YOU ARE A COW. The Director threatens to expel. My sister smiles. She’s already forgotten her boyfriend. She drags me closer to the front of the crowd and when we link arms, it feels like I don’t exist either. We peer at the body and I kneel down to touch the victim’s shoulder. What are you doing? The Director asks. I’m helping with the investigation, I say. The Director finds me lying on the ground by the chalk silhouette he drew earlier that day. It is two minutes to Midnight. I’ve found so many clues, I say. I think you’re taking this too seriously, he says. He gives me his arm. I stand up. The sandwiches are heavy in my stomach. I hand over the note. The Director slips his reading glasses on, taking a long time, stringing together words and tearing them apart. I dream that my sister is cradling the doll’s body. She is crying because her boyfriend broke up with her. She’d like to play the part of mother since she can’t be a wife. My sister and I blow out the birthday candles and tell the doll that it is alive. The doll comes to life and tells me to find the clue hidden in one of the cracks of the cement near the quad. Then my sister turns into a cow. I find her chewing cud, but instead of cud, she chews plastic arms and legs. The Director melts into the grass and my sister grazes.

lux When I wake up, the clock reads 4:35 AM.

The Director hands me a newspaper. I read a story about a doll being buried in a graveyard. According to the story, nothing happened. You’ve got something on your lip, the Director says after I finish the story. Oh really, I say. I think it’s cream cheese, he hands me a napkin from his desk. No it’s icing, I say, wiping my mouth. The Director looks at me strangely and I explain to him that it was my sister’s birthday last night, so I had leftover cake for breakfast. He nods. The air conditioner blasts processed air, which feels better than the wind I’m used to. My chest doesn’t hurt as much as usual. The Director winks at me, his eyes glassy, but not with tears. This is the first time I’ve seen the Director solid. The air conditioner prevents him from melting. I string together sentences and tear them apart. When I was younger, I used to cut clippings out of the newspaper. I thought that I could change the stories, cut and paste, bring life back to the girl who died in the car accident so suddenly, so young. Cut and paste the word ‘deceased’, place it adjunct to the name of the man who took a shotgun and systematically killed all three of his children. Words made of ink, not blood. Words made of blood, not ink. My mother, the Reporter, hated the way I changed newspaper stories like that. She said I was creating fiction from truth. The first night she found me, I was sitting alone on the floor of our attic playroom, cocooned in a circle of my old toys. I snuck up to the attic so I could play, but instead became fascinated by the yellow newspapers stacked up in boxes by the window. Lit up by the moon, but only in slats where dust floated freely, the newspapers had a godly quality to them, the front-pages given completely to the light. My sister had a box of paints, along with a small bottle of India ink used to outline silhouettes back when she was into that sort of

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76 thing. I picked up one of the newspapers, pointedly surprised that it did not crumble to dust in my grasp. I read an article about Hindu men being forced to eat pigs and cows. Then another one about a little girl being beaten to death because she tried to run away. By then I had had enough, and I took my sisterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s India ink, turning it upside down over the box of periodicals. Black seeped everywhere, down through the cardboard and into the rugged beige carpet. I must have cried out because the Reporter came upstairs, concerned. When she saw what I had done, she began to yell. It turned out many of the ruined stories were hers. Words she had painstakingly strung together to describe the horrors of the lives of strangers. When the Reporter yelled at me she said, this is the truth and this is how we know the truth. I was too young to disagree, which is something disgusting about childhood. When one family sat Shiva, the Reporter came to the house with a recorder and stuck it in their sad faces. But she had gotten the story, and now her daughterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s India Ink was all over everything. Words made of ink, not blood. She came so close to hitting me. Her hand was inches away from my face and I could see it shake with potential, a future red bloom in the skin of my cheek. Later on, I snuck back upstairs with the more recent newspapers, not yellow, but grayish white, and made sure the articles were not my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s. Then I cut them up into pieces, like arms and legs and hearts and spleens. Then I took the pile of words and wrote my own story. Except this story would be something that had never happened before, because the combinations were novel. I found comfort in knowing that my horrible constructions had never actually happened. When I finally graduated high school, I found all the old clippings and realized how my mother had lied about the truth. Something had to be done. But spilling India ink over a newspaper was amateur. So maybe I would give the Reporter an article to write, except the story would be completely stupid and she would not think it worth her time. She would have to cover it regardless. She would waste her time mourning for someone who was never alive.

Everything is deteriorating. I am a not-serial killer. The present is everything, but the future is more, the Director

lux says. Give yourself up. Give yourself up now.

What is a dream anymore? I’ve read in a newspaper article that scientists think DMT, the dream chemical, is released in large quantities when we die. Except later, I read that the reporters had gotten it wrong, that they had completely misread the results section of a scientific article. In college they tell you how to read scientific articles. Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion. Sometimes the scientists skew data. But everybody skews data, so its gotta balance out. When my sister died in a car accident, the newspaper reported an incorrect time of death. They said the collision occurred at 1:00 post meridiem on a Friday. Really it was 2:05 post meridiem, but I think the EMTs said her time of death was ten minutes later. That’s ten minutes of not knowing. That’s an hour and five minutes the public missed. The newspaper said my sister died when she really was alive, driving away from the White Castle Drive-Thru, sucking up a chocolate shake with her boyfriend at the wheel. I know about the chocolate shake because her face was sticky with it when they extracted her with the Jaws of Life. The chocolate shake will fade from the story altogether. If I die too, no one will know of it. My sister died a month before the doll appeared on campus. Was that purely coincidence? The Reporter doesn’t believe two separate events can be driven by chaos. She believes everything happens for a reason. The Director calls the Reporter on Monday. He asks her to drive up to the school, because I’ve found so many clues. “And maybe it’s the reporter in your son, but I’m a little bit concerned about how immersed he is in the investigation. Especially, since—Well, I heard about your daughter. I’m so sorry.” The Director calls my mother because the night before, he found me kneeling down, inspecting the cracks in the pavement near the crime scene. My sister lied to me, there was no clue after all.

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78 My mother shakes me awake, “How long have you been dreaming?” This is reality, I’m fairly sure it is reality. It used to be that when people talked their voices sounded as if they had been filtered through the ocean, as if I was the only one submerged and everyone was yelling at me from above, trying so hard to break surface tension, but failing all the same. I ask my mother if she’s written a story about the dolls. She smiles and touches my cheek, “I love you.” I ask her if she had a favorite doll when she was young. “There was this one,” She starts, sitting on the edge of my bed, her legs snow white in their stockings. “I named her Rosalina— kind of a silly, but beautiful name. The kind only a child could truly believe in.” She strokes my cheek again and this time all of the peach hairs stand up. “I loved that doll, thought I couldn’t love anything more. She had dark hair and painted lips. When I was seven I cut off all her hair with a pair of scissors. I loved her just the same, even with her horrible haircut.” I ask my mother what happened to this doll. Her face gets tired, but still she smiles for me. “I have no idea what happened to her. I took her everywhere, but one day, I just forgot to bring her home.” “And did you care?” Her eyes crease and I focus in on the black liner smudged right below her lower lashes, “I tried to.” I ask my mother again if she’s written an article about the dolls. Instead of answering me, she tells me to get out of bed and show her the crime scene so she can investigate. I fall asleep again. In my dream my sister asks me what it feels like to be alive. I look at her and say, you already know. In the quad, a generator is running. I can hear the electricity flow in and out, the sound far too repetitive, regenerating before it disappears

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again into the morning air. The Reporter has her glasses on. I kneel down with my ear to the cement in an attempt to block out the drone. Now there is just the hollow cupping sound of nothingness, like when I used to hold shells up to my ear, except there are no lulling waves here. An ant crawls out of the cracks in the cement, bearing up the mountain of a pebble. There are so many insects and sometimes we forget they exist. The Reporter looks concerned. It’s hot outside so she wears only a plum tank top and a pair of khaki shorts. Her shoulders are freckled from the sun, which makes her seem more like a woman and less like a reporter. “The Director thinks you should take some time off school,” Her eyes water, there is a lot of pollen in the air this time of year. When I hear my mother call the college president ‘Director’, I know this is all a dream. My mother shakes me awake. “You keep falling asleep. You should get checked for mono or something.” I ask her if she’s already told me the story of her doll Rosalind. “Rosalina,” She corrects. It’s raining outside, the streets are sprayed with slickness, the slight sound of water washing away makes us seem more tired than we really are. I think of the silhouette washing off into the drainpipes. Even though it’s raining, it’s still hot out. Now everything is humid, melting, and slipping away. I think of the Director’s face dripping through the square slats of a street drain. My mother sits on the edge of the bed looking concerned, “Why did you do this?” For a moment, I can’t remember what it was I did. Then I remember. “Did you write the article?” “I didn’t,” She picks up a pillow on my bed and squeezes it. “Why not?” “Because the article would be about you.” The forecast says it will be cold outside, so I wrap myself in a blanket from my dorm room. The title of this concrete college is

stitched into the blanket. There is warmth in naming, after all. Before I go out, I make sure that I send my article to the editor of the school newspaper. It’s well written and believable. It’s about a girl who’s dead now. Then I drag the doll out behind me. Her body wilts the second I can no longer hold her up with both arms. She’s a swan with a broken neck. A dead swan is piteously beautiful. Maybe that should have been the title of my article. I wonder what the title of my mother’s article will be. Perhaps something along the lines of, lunatic stages doll’s murder. Then after she writes it, maybe I’ll tell her I am the lunatic and she’ll have an objective understanding of me, detached from the bias of motherhood. The doll is so heavy in my arms, but I don’t want to keep dragging her behind me. Her skin is roughed up by pebbles. She helps me remember what scrapes felt like as a child falling from a bicycle or rollerblading without kneepads. She helps me to remember. The night gets warmer and the blanket no longer feels like a comforting name, but a burden. I keep having dreams that seem so real, but in this moment, I can tell that I am awake. When I get to the quad, I hear an electric buzzing. It makes the night seem sadder and duller than I would have hoped. The weather is turning to summer. I splay the arms out. The doll’s elbow makes a backwards ‘L’ against the concrete. My chest hurts because when you mourn for someone you cry a lot. Sometimes crying feels like a heart attack, which is stupid because there is no defibrillator. The fake blood seeps from the middle of the doll’s chest. Pouring the blood reminds me of when I was little and I would spill my sister’s India ink all over everything. Now I can hear my sister yelling that I wasted her ink. It takes awhile before everything is finished, mostly because I take some time to step back and watch the fake blood tadpole down the plastic. I kneel down and scribble a note, tucking it by the crease of the doll’s elbow. The night is so hot; everyone must be melting in bed. I should go back to sleep now, but this time, without a blanket.

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habit

Zoe Finn

the skin under my fingernails cringe at your memories and my in-betweens; don’t talk. we don’t need we can’t see we are just me and my finger nails on my scalp.

untitled Cassidy Turner, photography

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cataloguing Elsa Raker

I remember the bits that stick between my teeth. They are the parts not dislodged by the every day, which erases the past as it passes, twisting it into a game of the present. The stickiness is something different. I wonder in fact, if it is on the piece between my teeth or my teeth themselves. I wonder if my whole body is sticky. I once catalogued my memories because I was afraid of forgetting. My eyes got tired and soon I fell asleep on the kitchen floor. In the morning the catalog was disheveled and its order destroyed. This defeated the purpose of the catalog, which is only useful when complete. So I returned to the stickiness and its infiltration into my days. The parts that appear now are only connected as a suture revises the bodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s holes. Holes, but whole in themselves. dust Now at home, Kwa Ngulelo, Tanzania, which is home for a time but is never mine. It is white tiled with pretty white security bars on the doors and windows and flowers cast into them by a blacksmith whose mother told him to do it to match the window-boxes. It has plastic bins for bathing, an electric shower with open wires protruding from the ceiling, shy roaches in the night, and is so spotless I feel like I am dirtying the floor by stepping on it. It is the same house the German family lived in when they came years before. They left, just as we will.

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84 teeth Here the dogs come out at night, roving through the streets in packs, licking the white tiles on the butcher’s floor and chewing the sweet melted plastic in the green fires along the road until it coats their teeth. They gnash and yawn but it stays. The bitch’s teats sweep and swim along the rutted town market making tracks like a little boy’s play car. Women everywhere sweep after the dust, which tries to restore everything to a place in far away memory by enveloping the houses each night. The dogs come out at night and with their wails they replace the Pentecostal preacher’s loud-speaker sermon. I can hear them from the window, which is not mine. Only my eyes are my own window, through which I think I see. I think I have remembered it right. throat My parents build a wall separating themselves from the market, making their own aloneness. I think my mother is lying when she says it is to block out the dust which swirls in every time a motorcycle picks its way up the rutted red road. Before my family knew only of their own space and drew lines in the sandbox which blocked them off from the space which was shared and outside their kingdom of aloneness. A feeling of loneliness, and twice the rocks fly over the wall and I feel like a colonist. I will never know why they built the wall, but the stickiness is coming undone and the memory going down my throat. Perhaps it wasn’t to uphold what they knew was clean, private, and right, but was really because of the dust, which

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swirled in at night turning the white tile floors rancid. For what was in that dust? The centuries were there and the eternality disturbed us all. feet My mother’s words stick. Not only hers but the words of a thousand advisors, Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, my grandfather’s advice from his entomology sabbatical in Zaire in 1967. Order only that which can be peeled, washed with boiled water, or eaten from a wrapper. That is what they tell you and it sticks to me. Wipe out the drops of water from the glass and “No ice, thank you.” This I remember clearly. I order a Coca-Cola. I had been told I was always to be safe in the Coca-Cola empire, but the sugar made my teeth soft and my head pang. The cola is on my breath and for a moment out of the open restaurant window I see the passersby sticking to the humid air around them. It makes me aware of my own little body, filled with memories. I wonder if they can see through my translucent skin, my blue veins, my marble eyes, as I see them now. My feet stick to my sandals. My arms to the table. One man glances in. breath His childhood love of God is trapped in the shaking man’s teeth and it wafts in as he passes. The memory of it smells like jacaranda blossoms and motor oil. He carries the weight of the congregation in a bundle on his back, having been cared for by the church his whole life. He walks past the cheap gin derelicts, their breath all oozing with too much talk of Jesus and how they knew he was and exactly

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86 how he was and did and died and the pieces in their teeth stank and the fumes drifted through the window to me. atlas / axis We went on a camping trip to Lake Natron. We dipped off the highway and began to drive on a track into a vast mirage and the dust from the road billowed into the car through the vents and freeze dried my hair. My snot turned black with dirt and my spit rocky. It doesn’t have to be something consumed to stick. A memory can alight, but passing through, sometimes it lodges in the spine without needing to pass through a bodily orifice. The centermost superior cervical vertebrae (the atlas) rides atop the axis vertebrae forming a joint which holds the head to the spine, and it scrapes like a great container ship on the dock in a deep sea port, like teeth grinding. The spirits of my malaria fever live there and the composition of the memory is acids and chemicals. It’s the kind of fever in which I dream I’m running a marathon and laughing as I jog into the suburban finish line surrounded by onlookers, panting and smiling. The tent feels funny peeling from the backs of my thighs as I don’t sleep. The purple night outside the tent is flashing billions of tiny cameras. It’s all funny because I’m going to die out here and I can’t believe how fast it’s happening and how far I am from the main road, eight hours on a dirt track of volcanic ash and salt. Moving my body back for burial will never be possible, so it’s the end of my time to determine where I will lodge myself,

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whose memory I will be, whose teeth I will stick in like tough meat. lake I’ve been consumed by the corrosive waters of Lake Natron, beside which I was supposed to be camping for fun. The trip has prompted the final combustion of my fluids. Only the flamingos can eat there now and they suck on little blue and green algae. The lake is a salt sea tear separated from the rest of the ocean by a few hundred miles, a memory of a place forgotten by the tectonic plates and left to exist alone and unexplained, a blip of the past in hiding which can’t even give water to the people who live in the nearby town of Ngare Sero. The earth’s memory is sticky as mine is and its memories are in dust and forgotten lakes. The earth’s holes are also whole. The flamingos thrive. But to cool the fever with the waters of this fickle lake would have been the final spark to my burning fever. A year later, the fever comes back from time to time, raising its head from the back of my neck, and it drools a sticky acidic chill down my spine. It reaches around my skull and screws its fingers into my temples in jest. I never know if it is the fever itself or it’s memory to which I feel so lovingly attached.

north by northwest Ted Jameson photography

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Will Kettner The tides—when from that starkest skein of night, and like an unknown lover, whisper stars; when with a sureness shine their curtained teeth… Obligingly(imbibing by a slight conversion, then, that uniform unmarked, that dormant mask of waves)the tides recede, displaying pearls… & spray a froth, lightly which splays its nascent limbs unmatched, a God. & febrile sands first bristle Aphrodite— knowing sands, inebriated, touch, who strain upon her lustrous flesh to be— perhaps in permanence— but fail to hold her. (Only like a bygone sound her boundless body, only a remembered cry

untitled Ted Jameson photography

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space

Jono Naito

When I told my teacher I did not understand space, I meant it. She didn’t get what I was saying so I just repeated myself. That is when she thought maybe I was a smart-ass. I am a smart-ass, but not when it comes to space. Space has my respect. I should have taken earth science, but I did not because I thought maybe something about space would make sense to me. Maybe the vastness would be more like the ‘eternity’ of the ocean, something we sail around and around in and soon enough it becomes clear what it really is, what it means, what centers it. The currents are mapped, the islands drawn in, the little gaps of starlight are observed by madmen shipwrecked on alien coasts. I was wrong. I still did not understand space. It was just too big. There was too much. Rocks would have been easier. There are only so many rocks. I saw some today, actually. I can’t just see some space; it’s all or nothing. My mother told me that the soul was bigger than space. I think she was being kind of dumb about it. I don’t care how special you feel in this place, your soul is not anything like space, in dimension or value or character. The soul is an engine, or the laughter after a mediocre joke, or the plot of a movie. Space is an organism made up of every heaven ever imagined, beating like a trillion hearts. And I can barely imagine one afterlife, so how could I ever imagine space? My brother said space was just the big thing. My brother is very thick. Space wasn’t a thing, it was a landscape without rivers or mountains, or plains, or dirt or rocks or sand, or water or little bunnies screwing in a hole in the ground. It was a landscape that had zero definition. It wasn’t a thing, it was a concept that you happen to be able to move inside.

92 Landscapes are a bit abstract like space. Just a matter of perspective on a bunch of big things. Space can’t even be in the same sentence, though. Space is a matter of perspective on perspectives. I had a teacher who told me space was always expanding. I didn’t get it. I felt that the universe contracted every second. People seem closer, rooms get more crowded, memories get denser. The universe must be shrinking because life, as it goes on, keeps feeling smaller. Don’t give me any nonsense, I bet it’s because of space. Space is a master prankster. I know there are people who major in space, who master space, who eat it for breakfast and get space-fat and need to go to a space gym. Astronauts interest me because I don’t think space makes any more sense to them than most. Just because they walked ten feet further into a vast desert doesn’t mean they know why it’s there, or how big it is, or what it is like to go far enough that the nearest water source is just a dream. They can pick up a handful of sand and say “Space here is like this!” and tell you there was more of a breeze or they saw around a bunch of trees and I would say so what. I see space fine from right here and it looks just the same. I just don’t have sand in my boots. You are not fooling anyone. But the love you have to have for space is amazing. I can get behind that. I love space. Like love, I don’t get it. They go hand in hand. I think it takes guts to take the ten steps into the desert. I just don’t know why, and that is probably why I’ll never be an astronaut. When the Challenger went down I know I cried – space usually makes me cry but this was a special occasion – and I felt terrible that these people were abducted forever by such a brave passion. There is just too much space and everyone got so curious and they then had to die because of it how dangerous it is to try and reach out. We already have to die because we run out of space, or our little genetic bits suffer and collapse in space or the space in our lungs get filled with water or space comes together and we crash. Space kills us all. Space is our graveyard; side by side with supernovas and comet trails we lay forever. Although that suggests

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93 we can actually lay down in space. By the way, we can’t. Space is everywhere. We are space. Stars are in space as much as we, as are the nebulae and galaxies and clouds of formaldehyde and little alien bacteria that are really no different than most bacteria we can imagine, they are just foreign (Space has made us default to racism.) Space is a soup that we have digested and mixed ourselves into at the same time. You are part cosmic beauty, but also part dinosaur fart. Space is funny, space made laws so that someday silly things would happen, like sentience would be born in its endless womb and thereby go crazy about never being born and never being able to understand the cradle of life that nursed it so. I also once saw the space shuttle Endeavor, and my mind just broke. I wasn’t even thinking about space. I was thinking about how I wanted a cheese sandwich, then suddenly I was bawling in the background of tourist photos of the shuttle and my friend asked “What’s wrong Michelle?” and I could only respond “It had been to space so many times, and I don’t understand space.” I couldn’t even really thank it for what it did. I couldn’t properly thank anyone for their discoveries, their losses, their sacrifices for space and finding us a place in this universe because I could not fathom the depth of their conquest when there is nothing to really conquer, rather there are just levels of insignificance we have in the real grand design. We don’t have an address in space, the city planning office left us off the map, mainly because the map is like remembering a dream when you get up in the morning and having to locate a specific moment. Space, like a dream, is confusing and lost outside what we can reach with our minds. Not to say space even has a comprehendable size to someone. Giving space a size is like dividing by zero. The space police will come and get you and say “That’s a bad thing you have done. You hurt space’s feelings.” When I lay in grass at night and stare into space, it stares back at me. I wonder if it thinks there is something else like it, somewhere in me, so it isn’t alone in the universe. I seriously doubt it. Sorry space.

richard morris Max Gavrich phtography

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wet pig

Leah Stern He said that sometimes it’s yellow and I winced the vitality of a rabbit but just the ears fidgeting when nibbling on you the color of milk the color of water or air clear and odorless you can only see the ceiling dance a lump at the end of your fingertips and you can’t sense a pulse it has to be like a pimple popping but not when you force it your hand is no longer the director it’s the pea under the mattress and only you can feel it beneath your back in bed with your pet pig you can’t cast it in bronze but it will return if you do it when and where in Cleveland on the bed with the wall of netting enforced by nylon you must stay in there right and tight until mommy lets you out you do it well then you can’t walk but the pig will if you place her down gently

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Tamas Panitz 1. (elegy) Things in the lost woods you catch the sleeve of you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know yet if you turn on the light. Remember someone and they, words take you in patiently for 7 hours a day make jam for however long you remember yourself.