The Junction 2012 by The Junction

Charly Himmel

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Nora Curry

Before Death on Greenwood Lawn Horses dropping in for maybe Paul The One Left Frank Song Popeye Song That Side of the Oscillation The Man Grown Pup Turtle Hare A Perfect Match Of the Earth, Never Dead Because You Are Always There Keeping Distance Once Cackle Won’t Make Old Bones Been a Bit The Most Important Meal of the Day Ryan, We’re Doing Too Many Drugs Again Grandma How to Kill Yourself Slowly Waking this Morning Memoirs of a Silent Film Autumn’s Embers (excerpt) Dreamers might Sins thought, that heats the house Express Deer Come to Our Apple Tree Delusions of Adequacy Unwinding Tossing Out the Home (excerpt) Prayer for Mama Cuban Roommate Transition Between Going and Went La Ciudad De Juárez Receipt A Kind of Kindness One September The Education of Mary M. For Services Rendered My Feet About Moving For M.

2 3 4 5 7 8 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 17 18 19 20 21 23 24 25 26 27 28 30 39 42 44 45 46 47 48 50 51 52 53 54 55 60 61 62 64 65 66 67

Front Cover: Saskia Kahn Back Cover: Adeline Witherspoon Eric Vasquez

BEFORE DEATH ON GREENWOOD LAWN Kate Conte Running the rhythm hunt under wolf moon, downed eyes dimmed too weak to hold ritual or tequila ginger. Lights off, watching the kitchen waltz— black & white music of touch. looking up from Skinflints, 3JP, two shots in Killarney Tamaqua in little Ireland & halal after four— bus stops, pool halls bar bathrooms pool hall bathrooms & ten years parked till sunrise colors fogged front views You walked up steps in your socks hey beautiful, hey sleepless, hey meaning all those names— You go on baby, I’ll catch up.

Nora Curry

HORSES Brigida Pirraglia

Horses are named when they’re trained to win races. Every race I’ve ever heard has had horse names tricky enough to trip up regular folks, but not those horse race announcers. You know, the ones who could just as easily have been auctioneers. I remember a race that, in its home stretch, came down to two horses: My Wife Knows Everything and The Wife Doesn’t Know. They were neck and neck, My Wife Knows Everything and The Wife Doesn’t Know, and this guy didn’t falter, didn’t slow down, just kept on and it’s My Wife Knows Everything, The Wife Doesn’t Know, My Wife Knows Everything, The Wife Doesn’t Know, and yes! My Wife Knows Everything! What does a nameless horse know? Nothing of saddles or stirrups, surely. The nameless horses must be few now, whittled down to herds of mustangs of the American West and brumbies of Australia. The descendants of the domesticated horses smart enough or fast enough to escape. When they run, there’s no name following. They run and they always win.

Saskia Kahn

DROPPING IN FOR MAYBE TWO HOURS Joseph Didonato drive me to the northest place I know pitch black patches, little curls climbing up his neck, reaching under leather and elastic itches all up the least Sunkist the unseen inner thigh blue yankees fitted grey college sweatersleeve rolled over more black trails and tiny pocs on more wallpaper white his hands are so beautiful never worn by work at all, rich parents who donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get art forty thou for just five months just hope youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re not doing drugs just call every two three weeks button-ups in black garbage bags scraping dust from dime backs synthetic dreams in unwashed jeans black like his shirt like this stupid leather book smoky eyes, choky voice dusty rustic vocal chords husky verses screeching inflection not looking so good unfocussed eyes pinpoint pupils scanning fluttering closed completely

Katherine Demaray

PAUL Adeline Witherspoon Being one of the youngest in an uncommonly large—and uncommonly Catholic—family, I spent most of my adolescence searching for a means to identify myself as exceptional. Last year I decided that maybe photojournalism was my calling and I wallpapered the bedroom Ollie and I shared with grainy Polaroids of the flora and fauna in our suburban habitat. I had captured my older brother Peter romancing one of the summer girls, pretending to admire her locket while peeking down her blouse, my aunt at a church picnic in July mopping her brow, pancake-makeup melting in the heat. My photography career ended when my mother, probably acting on the complaints of my brothers, refused to pay for more film. This summer I decided I was meant to be a poet, like Shelley, Keats, or Byron. I didn’t do much writing besides the occasional scribbled haiku, but I was content outfitting myself in over-sized tweed jackets and whatever costumes I could find that I thought to be appropriately academic, sliding my skinny arms through the sleeves and letting the wool scratch my flat boney chest. When my mother announced that my oldest brother Paul would be visiting before the fall semester began, and that he would be bringing a friend, I was crouched in the flowerbed in the front yard, picking the scabs on my knees and inspecting them carefully next to the azaleas. At twelve years old, I hadn’t understood my mother’s tone of voice when she said “friend.” I assumed she meant the chubby roommate we’d met three years before when all five of us were loaded into the station wagon and driven six hours to visit Paul during his freshman year. My brother Paul was twenty-one years old that summer, and each time I saw him he resembled less and less the shadowy, mythical giant of my imagination. Paul was, in reality, a soft-spoken young man, and despite an initial impression of pretension, he had a wicked intelligence. Each morning, when he was still living at home, he would shave in the bathroom before school. I would peak around the doorframe, watching him tap his bare feet on the tiled floor, swaying his hips absentmindedly in time to the radio. In our adolescence we regarded Paul, most of the time, as a thing of wonder, our very own renaissance man, whose counsel and achievements were akin to the word of God. So when Papa drove to the train station and arrived home with Paul and his friend early Friday evening, the younger portion of our family—myself included— hung back, daunted slightly by the unfamiliarity resulting from months of separation. His friend’s name was Grace, and she was tall and blonde and slender. I shook her hand gently, pushing back the sleeve of my oversized jacket, and I found myself struck dumb by her overt femininity; my costume seemed to me to become more ludicrous by the second. Grace leaned close to me, close enough for me to smell her perfume, and smiled, revealing a row of flawless white teeth like wet pearls. “You have pretty eyes. If you want, you and me, we could have a girls’ night this weekend. We can give each other makeovers.” I wasn’t able to make a sound; I only acquiesced dumbly and followed my mother into the dining room. We sat down to dinner at our old rectangular dining table, covered with a cloth of blue linen to hide the scars of many years of homework, finger-painting, and craft projects. Everyone was silent at first, but I could see Paul looking apprehensively back and forth at our parents, and our mother discreetly studying Grace beneath her eyelashes. In the midst of the sounds of silverware scraping plates, my mother began a polite line of questioning. “So, Grace. Paul mentioned you’re studying nursing?” “I am, I’ll be taking the licensing exam next fall.” My mother smiled in a noncommittal sort of way. “How lovely. How did you and Paul meet? I’m afraid he hasn’t told me any of the good parts yet.” “Actually it’s a funny sort of story. You see, my roommate’s boyfriend John had a few classes with Paul and used to talk about him constantly, I guess they had a lot in common. After a night out, my roommate and I came home and ran into John and Paul in the stairwell and we just hit it off right then and there. I never would have taken the time to get to know Paul if I hadn’t seen him smile. John was right; there’s just something about him.”

PAUL Adeline Witherspoon I watched Grace take a sip from her glass, her lipstick leaving a faint pink impression on the rim. It was a flag, that little pink imprint, which said to future girls who would adorn our table: “A real woman has been here.” Paul said nothing, and my father nodded in an uncomprehending but congenial way. “Have you fucked her yet?” Luke leaned forward eagerly. Peter, Luke, and Paul had gathered in the backyard after dinner, sneaking cigarettes, while I lurked unobtrusively a few feet away. “No, I haven’t fucked her,” Paul responded, carelessly tolerant of Luke’s immaturity. It wasn’t that Paul was anti-sex; it was simply that his life at the moment was absent of it and had been for as long as I could remember. Luke elbowed Peter in the ribs, a conspiratorial sort of gesture mastered by adolescent boys, and they headed back towards the house. In the morning, Paul took Grace out on the bay in a canoe he rented. I sat on the shore digging my toes in the sand and picking bits of seaweed from the folds of my jacket. I could see that the canoe had tipped, and Grace and Paul were laughing, her blonde hair bobbing above the water, her cheeks curving in a smile as she wrestled with my brother. Paul liked to take his friends out on the bay. The last time I had seen him do so it had been dark, and Paul went swimming with a boy from his sailing class. I wondered if Grace went swimming with her girlfriends and if they had as much fun as Paul and that boy did. “Why’d she leave?” I sat next to Paul. He was laying on his back in the backyard, his hands clasped behind his head. I thought maybe that evening Grace and I would have our “girls’ night,” but Grace had made an abrupt departure about an hour ago. I couldn’t tell if her face was red from crying or sunburnt from her swim in the bay. “I told her the truth. I told her I couldn’t really picture getting married and having kids and that whole deal. I told her she wasn’t really my type, and that I just didn’t care anymore. But don’t ask me why I thought this weekend was the best time to tell her all this. And, oh God, she wanted to have sex! What was I supposed to do? Lie back and think of John?” He paused. “Hell, I could see the way mother was looking at us over the table, just back and forth between us, like maybe I could have a normal life after all. I don’t want a normal life; I don’t know what normal is. I think if the mundane is life-threatening, then a house in the suburbs must be fatal. Remember the bathroom mirror, what we used to do?” I nodded wordlessly. Our home was small, or so it felt anyway because of the size of our family, and due to conflicting schedules our mother began leaving hastily scribbled post-it notes in the one room all of us would be guaranteed to enter at some point in the day. Consequently, there was very little space in which to see one’s self in our bathroom mirror, but it gradually evolved into the hub of communication for our family. Not only did we leave messages of domestic importance (“Peter, please PLEASE walk Molly in the mornings. Your father is tired of stepping in her ‘presents’”), we left pieces of poetry, drawings, and ideas, and we would eagerly await Paul’s morning shave when he would respond with notes of his own, often in the form of encouragement and refined critique. Paul looked over at me from his place on the ground. “You can take pictures, wear costumes, whatever—doesn’t make you an artist or a poet. Doesn’t make you anything other than what you are: a kid playing dress up.” He began to get up, dusting the grass from the back of his pants. “I’m 21 years old and I’m still a kid playing dress up. It’s just not as much fun anymore. Hey, smile.” Paul had picked up my camera and snapped a picture of me. He threw the Polaroid into my lap and began to walk back towards the house. “Goodnight, kiddo.” I turned the photograph over in my hands. It was a picture of a skinny girl in an over-sized jacket, eyes wide, blinded by a sudden flash of light.

THE ONE LEFT Esther Varon My hands are bigger now. The walls that watched me still smell like the yeast you kissed me with. I wait for the creaks and hum of the stairs that sang to me, and they begin to confront me. My sister’s crumpled little feet Aren’t dangling off the bed, waving me goodnight. And it all begins to hurt The eggplant floor, the cedar doors, the peeled flower-pot wallpaper, all knew me very well, and remember me. They buried themselves in my mushy body and tried to tell me they loved me. But, my soles have failed them. They stood, still, and ran faster, and stomped, but they also left. Now, I am endeared by myself and those small hands. Those small crevices. Don’t you know I just want to be carried? Maybe you’ll carry me to where there aren’t any oaks or pines, or piggies to count. Yeah, maybe carry me there. Where I can hear my sister and watch her feet Where I can stumble into her music, Scrape my knee and stay there.

Nora Curry

FRANK SONG & POPEYE SONG Timur Mukhodinov Frank Song. The kids run round and make r-r-roar like airplanes in the sun around bacon. In the proverbial dog house Frank sits slack and chews his eggs. “Frank,” Mabel pours “Maybe you want some more coffee to wake you up? Or, can you see clear now, the past and taste the eggs and feel the milk go down your throat because you can’t taste me now ever, ever again.” The airplanes r-r-r-roar past, Frank is 1000 miles away chewing chewing it over.

Saskia Kahn

Popeye Song. When we get old my teeth won’t hold good even for the bread you bring from the store ‘cause you still walk, and women live longer than men.

THAT SIDE OF THE OSCILLATION Ryan Skrabalak I wasn’t dreaming then. Second thought, I was. For a week the world dreamed so magnetically intense that no one stirred into reality, the Deep End. It wasn’t just me, I wasn’t the only ill one. Looking up from it, the world was a bath of scars, a mirror of burn. It was partly sunny. That is to say, there were sunnier days and certainly darker ones. So New York City will act out, be itself, etc. There was potential leaking to other worlds, siphons in the sky. I pictured the scaffolding and the grunts of orange-clad workers, dragging their eyes like pipes in the street. It was a Sunday and the library was closed. It was a Thursday actually and I had an odd number of cigarettes, menthol. I was on that side of the oscillation. I started to live in New York like this: count the hollow-dead busses wheeze NEXT BUS PLEASE and wait in the warm glowing ATM room of the bank, swipe pint glasses from West Village pubs, hop turnstiles at the faintest breeze, fall asleep on trains, wake up to greasy dawn of Stilwell Avenue, at least I still had my wallet. Out there the old rides dying of cancer, heartbroken trinkets, mangled stories as the ocean (a footnote, a chipped greyglass footnote) vomited condoms and peanut shells onto the sand. I loved New York like this: two matches left in a book in my breast pocket, always picking a favorite stoop on the block. Ah yes, I imagine some lost looking people on the A express, straining to the overhead gargle, wondering what postcard New York might assume as they trudged above ground with wheelie suitcases, airline tags spinning from handles in the wind. It was a postcard for me, once. Riding with my grandfather over the George Washington Bridge, we listened to The Temptations. The sun cartwheeled a mystic token behind the Midtown serrations. In each obtuse section of the passing girders, a minutely different Olympic bonfire smoldering. Funny, you sit down to etch a dream into something, onto something, as they are like tides, different but consistent in their swells, and each time the moon coughs. You are left with bubbles, bits of shells. Someone is crying into the ocean and adding to it. Even now, with the glow of the monitor washing me like a Degas, I remember magenta, twilight, teakettle. There, I have done it. I have not, though. I must think of the temperature of your hands then, like warm sand. The loose change all over the place, I guess. Riding the crisp twilight like a phalanx of stained-glass braids. Some of these. My headspace is essentially flat, yet somewhat malleable. I apply pressure and from the seeming prairie of it, some nice air puddles out from the edges. Poems are sort of written like this. One must consider all the great prairie poets, all the bison. Like this: where do all the colors go? To the moon. That’s why it is a half-dollar fistful of ash, the starboard side of a cichlid one night, and your face rocketing through the Battery Tunnel the other. I wanted to extend my arm to you. Shoo the tobacco stuck on your lips. Watch your eyes dip like a roller coaster under a boardwalk. Again. The sky flame-blue, warm sheets sprinkled with magenta petals, Thelonious Monk grafted into the pocks of your white walls. Again. I sit down at my desk with all the syrupy cut scenes, vistas, waterfalls, and start buffering, O no! pencil in hand and the white paper (perhaps still carrying that pulpy perfume of Berlin, New Hampshire or Sandusky, Ohio) bares back at me like the outer planets. Mysterious, icy, ceaselessly patient. You see I forgot the teakettle over the twilight shivering sunflower of the burner, the stove specked with grease, you upon the doorjamb with a cigarette jammed in your lips forming some alien isosceles. The dim length of the hallway, the buds on the bush out your window like old man’s ears, like microphones. The siren at 4:30am or perhaps 6:23am. A dog barked, a shingle fell, a woman finished watching a romantic comedy by herself. This is how New York loved all of them, inconspicuously, in this galaxy of -isms, in the systems of crush. You turned off the lamp and the windows cannoned forth the oily daylight. I am unsatisfied, like a palsied cellist. Is there room in the margins for the precious inches of life? The valueless half hours, the precious centimeters. I am not on trial. There is a spider surreptitiously grinding his feathered pincers in the corner of my ceiling. I swear I hear it minutely, like a baseball game in heaven, like the lines of some poem I forgot to write weeks ago.

THE MAN GROWN PUP Emily Rogers

Dara Feinberg

I think he had mange. The dog. We called him Father, with eyes large and loving The name fit. The bald spots became shiny like a fire roasted pig. But we continued. Rubbing his achingspotted-belly and soft tissues that lightly sucked the last grey hairs around his neck. Father in the night Father in the yard digging. A hole large, and loving it fit his body with no hair. Little Father, He was re-born.

TURTLE HARE Joel Cruz

Adeline Witherspoon

we stopped believing in butterflies. a 5 week eviction notice. pheromones know nothing. of permanence. we hang battered cocoons. foreign to seasons. like underdeveloped regrets. there is something dark. about letting love in. without proof of identification. we stopped. believing in butterflies. we hang like bats. trusting the voice. because the eyes spread drapes. like a play they were not ready to watch. the blind make love. in dark caves. filled with ancient wall paintings. they use their fingers to read. these tales like the sun. transcribed into braille. each lover is drawn without a face. sockets know silence. better than underwater earthquakes. watts a moaning firefly. if not the only source of light. feel the room. before looking for the switch.

A PERFECT MATCH Yevgeniy Levitskiy Dad cries over a pair of Made in Wisconsin socks. I hear him in the kitchen. My brothers and I burned them up. In our backyard, with his matches, minutes ago. We got mad when he forgot to make pancakes. It wasn’t the first time. Dad was too smoked to cook. He comes out of the kitchen. Go, I say. My brothers dive into the basement. I turn around. Dad stomps, swears and breaks a bottle of sweet tea. He almost slips. I lock the door. Dad doesn’t like that we ruined his Academy Award-winning socks. “They ain’t a way to replace them,” he says. “Hell, you boys did yourselves in.” I hear his voice down the stairs. It’s raspy and loud. Dad’s coming, I say. I nudge one of my brothers. He does the same to next brother. Brother see, brother do. “You boys,” Dad says, “are goin’ get it.” My brother sees my mouth form a smile, and he copies me. The other brother copies him, too. Dad unlocks the basement door. He jingles the keys and says, “You there, boys?” My brothers and I move. Hurry, I say. We flip and cover the couch. Brothers everywhere . Defend the castle, I say. I squint and notice Dad’s arm. It floats in the air. A single, flashy thing . “Who wants pancakes?” he says. “Raise them high so I know.” My brothers, my idiot brothers, they expose their right hands. Trick, I say. I nail downmy hand with a pillow. Dad holds wooden matches in his hand and flicks them over the couch. One match lands on my brother’s skin. It brightens a bright spot on his arm. Indian burn, I say. Another match hits my brother’s face – his eye. Pink eye, I say. My younger brother catches a match on his lips. Herpes, I say. My fat brother trips over my pillow. A match falls on his lap. Gonorrhea, I say. My brothers are goners. Dad leaves the basement.

Alexis Arias

I look at my brothers on the floor. One of them laughs. I hate pancakes, he says.

OF THE EARTH, NEVER DEAD Margie Sarsfield

Everything is terrible in exciting new ways, but don’t fret we’re still sweet calves and lips on backs, still hard braided and easy peas, I don’t mind, you can fall on your knees, or meet me in the moonlight alone. Buffalo stompings raise groundwater levels but rabies will thirst you to death, be careful for cicadas burrow thirteen years just to come up and ruin the silence of one summer, my God you are more colorful than all the blood and the straw, flamingos pink by eating shrimp, say please, say something or fall on your knees. To tell you that ferns smell to me like spaghetti let’s first show our armpits unshaven and sweet like our calves, and let’s say we’ll meet in the moonlight, how’ll that be? Come here, come here, elephants have souls and we are God’s babies so we have enough days, everything is exciting in terrible new ways.

Charly Himmel

BECAUSE YOU ARE ALWAYS THERE Celia Vargas I woke up one day and Kept thinking I would spread my Body over damp sheets, but I didn’t for fear I Should, would, could wake You. I’ve fought with you My whole life, and keep At it so—break your stride, Strip you bare, force, jam My way into your soul. I’m Going to take pleasure in your naked, but Only once I’ve controlled it. I’ve fooled you twice and You never carried any shame. I’ve Fed you hot bread and made you round People would gasp at That poetry that got so fat, You became a joke— Your poetry is so fat… Fill in the result. Then I became scared You would hear, so I snatched Away your wheat and growth. You searched for crumbs in Your dirty beard. Poetry became Thin, bones protruding The wasted skin. It Was a sickly mess I made, So I decided you would be Better off without my Inexperienced hand. Yet, you came back You stripped me down, forced Jammed yourself through The oxidized locks, Pleading I should, would, could Do whatever I pleased. So I did— And I woke up one day and Spread body Over damp sheets Waking the Poetry that slept next to me.

Elia Bonsignore

KEEPING DISTANCE Adam Gallo The house was being shown at noon. Cooper sat at the counter in the kitchen drinking coffee; half packed boxes surrounded him, encasing him in an impenetrable cardboard fortress. He had lived there for five years with his wife, four of them with his son. Before them it belonged to his grandparents. His wife hadn’t gotten up yet, awake, but unmoving. The realtor would be there in half an hour and he wasn’t dressed. He finished his coffee and slipped one of his wife’s cigarettes out from the pack on the counter, lighting it with the matches on top of them, and then went upstairs to get his wife. He was dressing when the bell rang. He slipped on his pants as he went to the door. Outside, the realtor cleaned cobwebs from the light fixtures. She was wearing the red pantsuit from her ads, hair done up high, a helmet crowning her head. “Morning, are you ready for the big day?” “Morning.” He looked away as she removed the Whitlow sign. “It makes it seem like they’re entering someone else’s house, you know?” she said. He let her inside, and watched her as she surveyed the scene. “Christ, the place is supposed to look lived in, not abandoned. Can’t you move some of these boxes?” “Sorry, it just all piled up on us I guess. Where should I put them?” “Put them in the garage, or the corner if that’s the best you can do. Is that smoke? Could you do that on the porch from now on, we want them to imagine a place they can live in, not die in. It smells like a bowling alley in here.” He shook his head. She produced a spray bottle from her bag and waved it above her head, finger rapidly pulling the semi-automatic trigger. Cooper went upstairs into his bedroom; his wife was dressed and sitting on the edge of the bed. “The realtor’s here.” This hung in the air, rising slowly to cling to the ceiling. “She needs us to move the boxes before people start to come.” They smiled at this, and made no movement to suggest compliance. Cooper went back downstairs. He gathered a few boxes and moved them to the garage, then he just pushed the rest into the corner and poured himself coffee, lit a cigarette, and walked out onto the back porch. He was out there smoking when the bell rang. After the first people left, his wife came with two cups of coffee and sat down across from him. They stayed there as the couples came and left, peeking out at them occasionally to see the view, or ask if ‘this is a good place to raise a family.’ They sat there. They made jokes. They were silent for long intervals. After each guest left, the realtor would come out and tell them if they made a good offer or not. By four, the stream of people weakened, and they were dry. Cooper went to the garage and got a bottle of vodka and two glasses stuffed with tissue paper out of one of the boxes. Walking up, he could hear the realtor saying how they needed to get involved. He sat down next to his wife and gave her a glass. “Tomorrow’s another day I guess,” he said. They sat there having their drinks and smoking. The realtor left at four-thirty. The bell rang at five as they made their way inside. Cooper opened the door on a couple in their twenties. “Hi. Is there an open house here today?” the girl asked. “It just ended,” Cooper said. “Would you like to come in anyways?” The couple came in and looked around. The girl was pregnant, and the man was hip. This was the first house they had ever looked at. “Would you like me to show you around? Sorry it’s a mess, we’ve just been so busy with the move and all.”

KEEPING DISTANCE Adam Gallo “Oh, it’s no problem, really. I would love to see it,” the man said. “Well, it’s pretty small, but ask me if you have any questions.” The four of them walked through the house. It was ten minutes before they were upstairs. It was a silent ten minutes. They asked few questions, and Cooper and his wife gave basic answers. They walked upstairs and showed them their bedroom and bathroom, after which Cooper and his wife felt that the tour was over. “Is there another bedroom?” the girl asked. “Oh, yeah, it is on the first floor. I guess I forgot about it.” They went back downstairs and opened the door next to the garage. The room was nice, clean, without any boxes cluttering it. “This was our son’s room,” his wife said from the doorway. “Did he go leave for college?” the man asked. “No,” Cooper said. “No, he didn’t.” They walked into the living room, and the couple looked around a little more. Cooper and his wife sat at the counter and made another drink. “We like the house,” the girl said. “Do you want it?” Cooper asked. The couple looked at each other and agreed. “Yes, we do.” They agreed to make an offer to the realtor and left. The next day the Whitlows accepted their offer, which fell well below the others.

Alexis Arias

ONCE Ocean Vuong

Brooklyn's too cold tonight even for the most desperate. You want to believe the steam jeweled on every lit windowâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a sign of two voices, speaking low and not the heat of someone waiting for reasons. The blonde boy is walking towards you like a knife, an echo sharpened with what it touched. If only you could test the pavement with your knees, ask him to spare you your name made new in his mouth. If only you are not already wounded. But too late: his jaw emerges from the shroud of smoke and you're reaching beneath your shirt, making sure there's still one more warm place to enterâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;

Saskia Kahn

CACKLE Kerry Gertner I shove the cackle in my back pocket. It’s sorta big, but squishy enough to mold to my starch-stiff jean pocket. If you look from far away you’d see one butt cheek a cup size bigger. I feel the edges peeking out. I push it in deeper. I don’t want to carry the cackle with me. I have to, though. I get all OCD if I don’t have it on me. It’s a habit to grab my own ass to check. That’s the most action I usually get. I know I’m not a kid. I shouldn’t even own a cackle now. Guys my age threw their cackles in the trash years ago. Or their moms keep their cackles stuffed in some box of childhood mementos that they don’t look at until their parents die and they have the job of cleaning out their houseful of knickknacks and Stride Rite shoe boxes. I try to make my cackle look cool. As cool as a cackle gets. I have a few band pins stuck on the middle. It’s a safety precaution. It’s a concert souvenir if anyone asks. They ran out of the good stuff. My cackle isn’t one of those sticky ones that feel like toddlers’ jam hands. My cackle isn’t one of those damp ones either, wet like touching pee or something. My cackle looks young for its age. It’s close to mint condition aside from its drained color. I have to clean it a lot, otherwise it gets that split pea soup smell. I don’t really care. I don’t look at it much. I just pinch it a lot. Or poke it a lot, depending. I pat my ass four times.

Kerry Gertner

WON’T MAKE OLD BONES Patricia Tavares De Oliveira It’s the sabotage of spring, cracks where curves were and the pale murmur of carnal winds. There was once Vaseline skin, cells languid; panache before the bark and ossified teeth. There was the spectral peach, now the scab in milk, humid armpits and the gold-leaf blush, dipped in cinnamon. She is Machiavellian in her bodice gown, bending stares like spoons; it’s the art deco In her decoction of chamomile tea, stains on her still life, seeping sex sins in virginal dreams; lava licks dead meat, goop pops wherever she goes

Becky McFalls

BEEN A BIT Nora Curry Oh yes, that’s the one! My favorite idea yet—Let’s burn this world or raze it flat & build a new one made of thumbtacks— We’ll try not to step on the points & I’ll try not to laugh if you do. Let’s pour coffee on subway strangers & be sad for it. Let’s put out cigarettes on our mothers’ windowsills then think better of it. Let us always live by the overground station & watch the train leave before we get there. Let’s only wear socks on days we really need them. Let’s paint our mailboxes green so nobody forgets them. Let’s use the word love because everyone else is tired of it & we haven’t decided yet. Oh! and did you see? They cleaned up the pharmacy on the corner! There’s no dust in the window! It would no longer break your heart.

Kate Conte

THE MOST IMPORTANT MEAL OF THE DAY Edward Kearns Breakfast’s dry. Eggs, toast, bacon’s chewing sandcakes. Hashbrowns too. Everything crumbles. Falls apart in pieces. Filling my face with grease is my favorite thing to do, next to sleeping in the afternoon. But not today. I try my coffee, milk, orange juice, water. Nothing helps. This is the first sign, my first symptom of what’s to come. Just a taste, and I can’t even do that. “Why are you making that face?” “Wha ace?” “Like you ate a fart.” I spit out my mouthful, only there’s no spit. More like it falls. “Thorry. Ith thuth tho dwy.” “What?” “Dwy.” Half an hour later, she's freaking out in the ER. My lips stick to my teeth, and when I talk, they stick to my gums, so I’m trying to be quiet. She’s far from it. “Can't someone see him now!?” “I hine.” “He can’t even talk!” “Miss,” the receptionist’s a nurse, I know it. “Take a seat.” She’s fucking with us, making us wait. Mom listens, and as she does, I watch her chew her cheek like me. Only I gnaw mine to salivate, thirsty enough to rip her blouse open and suck her dry as I am. After ten minutes, my lips are cracked bleeding and Mom’s screaming, “He’s bleeding! For Chrissake, he’s bleeding!” True, but it’s helping. Suckling blood, I sit back and breathe. The air is stagnant, plastic as my seat, or the G.I. Joes in combat poses over my bed back home, waiting to attack. It soothes, sedates me, and I sleep.

Julieta Salgado

THE MOST IMPORTANT MEAL OF THE DAY Edward Kearns Waking up, I’m on a metal table smaller than me, under lights brighter than I’ve ever seen, naked. Coughing up sand, skin flaking off in clumps, people hover over me in masks strapped tight, mumbling things I can’t understand, faces bent together. They’re cartoons, staring at me with eyes the size of grapefruits, dripping powdered sugar. I can't see through the fog, but I taste it. They're putting something in me. Water. Filling me up with a garden hose. I hear it splash down my gullet, but my tongue won't move. Neither will my eyes, dried wide open 'til I fall out again." Andy, can you hear me?" It's Mom. "Andy?" She's floating on her back, splashing my face with a tail. I try to say, "I can't swim," but she pulls me in. "Come, drink." And I do. I drink and drink and drink until I'm the sea, the fish and the beach. "Andy? Please," she turns away. "He's not breathing." "Yes he is. Look," the voice is distant, echoing and garbled. "But he has to eat." So she feeds me, nurses me into a sandcastle of a man in a hospital gown, palm tree feet paper-slippered, orange blossoms sprouting from my hands, built by a boy who looks just like me. I watch him work, patting me into the ground, packing me tight. I watch Mom stroke my hashbrown hair, listen to her sing stories about breakfasts I've never tasted, and in the end, I'm back on the table, shivering cold, weeping seawater. The next day we head home. Arms and legs potted, she rolls me to the car, plants me in the passenger seat. At the house, she sets me by the window, waters me daily, turns me toward the sun when I'm in the shade too long. It's sweet, like the dates growing from my feet. She picks 'em for milkshakes. First for her, then for me. Now I'm eating, growing. Towering over the kitchen, I break the window and crack the ceiling, 'til she makes the most important meal of the day. Buries it beside me, deep – two fried eggs, bacon, potatoes and toast. When my oranges ripen, she reaches with the picker for the highest ones, 'cause up there they're sweeter. Only I wouldn't know. I've gone too far, grown too fast to taste the fruit of my creation.

Judy Zhong

RYAN, WEâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;RE DOING TOO MANY DRUGS AGAIN William Machi In the morning of my headache, Dawn Is relapsing, stuck To skin like leatherâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Wrapped in the flesh Of friendship, one body To another, Scraps of paper folded In secret, by the window, ashes and oil, The diorama of the day. My head is round With cocaine when I try and think of You, taking sips Of water running Down the wall when It rains, pulling drags Long of your smoke every time She takes her shoes off, We bark "Mother Fucker!" When something is funny, and Everything is funny. We sit In night, shuffling static Away from the tips of Our favorite songs, Flick lit cigarettes At the television When our lotto numbers Go unheard, We've never won, but One day, We'll be rich! Tossing wads of Powdered cash At taxis, we'll yell "Step on it, Mother Fucker! I don't care where we go."

Adeline Witherspoon

GRANDMA Sara Najam Her fingers seized the steel cane’s throat, gripped the limp handkerchief back hunched, head bent in prayer, head bent in plea, plea for his vindication, plea the ants do right crawl on his body like their wedding night plea, her prayers help help him smell the roses a dirt layer too close … It’s all ointment and oatmeal from here, cold shower stools fat socks on swollen feet lice lost in graying hair “Can you scratch my itch?” or wrinkles of course scars of frozen time It’s all shots of insulin from here, blood losing hope veins pulsing in search “Can I have a spoon of sugar?” or diabetes in a bowl you know, that sweet disease … Back hunched head bent in prayer, again head bent in plea, again plea this time her kohl remains unlike her man husband lover. … “No, you can’t have sugar.”

Nora Curry

HOW TO KILL YOURSELF SLOWLY Charly Himmel You gotta smoke a lot of cigarettes. When you start to notice burn holes on the driver’s seat and your favorite jean jacket you’ll know you’re doing it right. Make sure to smoke in bed but take care not to set the house on fire. Some people think you should stop eating. Don’t. Eat as often as you can. Eat when you’re bored, eat when you’re hung over, eat at corporate restaurants. Eat as much as you can. Order an entire pizza and force yourself to eat it even though you’re not hungry. Eat your feelings. Never drink a drop of water. Cheap beer is good. Bum vodka is better. Don’t steal your roommate’s sandwich out of the fridge or play your records too loud because you don’t wanna piss anyone off that might come to your funeral, not that you give a shit if they do. You got to call your parents a lot. You have to let them know everything’s ok and that you’re eating and making money and fucking chicks with bank accounts and shaved legs. Make them think you’re real happy and you’re not a queer. Don’t do anything stupid like ride a bike or climb a fence because you don’t wanna have an accident. You have to be really careful about accidents, especially if you’re drunk. Don’t call anyone except your parents. Hang mirrors all over your apartment, above the sink and up against the doorjamb, believe me it works, but don’t look in one unless you want to fuck up. Don’t take her home. Don’t ever go home with her no matter how bad you want to. It’s all in the planning. Make a small hole in yourself someplace nobody can see. Don’t dig too deep or use any rusty blades, in fact, buy an economy pack of surgical scalpels just to be on the safe side. When you pick up your dog’s shit, pick up all the other mummified turds in the 3 foot radius. Knot the bag and squeeze it in your hand if there’s snow on the ground. Don’t ever write down anything relevant to how you feel or what you want. Don’t tell anyone about that shit, either. Sleep with the TV on. Count the steps to the subway station. Skip the yellow stairs and don’t look up very often. Imagine the painlessness of instant death when you’re out in public. Don’t shower unless you start to itch. Pick your scabs until they become scars. Pick your nose and eat it. Bite your nails and jerk off like a lab monkey until you’re too raw to come. Talk to strangers on the street not because you want to but because they started it. Swallow a very tiny piece of broken glass like a pill. Huff Carbona ‘til you’re a goddamn cosmonaut. Put a rubber band around your dick and balls. Don’t ever complain. Dab a little marine grease on your big toe, somewhere far away from your vital organs. Remember, this is only temporary.

Ethan Barnett

WAKING THIS MORNING Theresa Dietrich

Waking this morning to the memory of your body in the mattress that had absorbed many tears and bits of rice and spilled wine and air and screams and screams without air, silent as magnets – I look past the thin bars on your window where the naked trees are sober and the neighbors’ party has apparently ended. I imagine them strewn about like bags of sand, protecting one another from floods or wars, forming a little shield with the warm weight of their bodies. I like to make my body a diagonal and tuck my hands in the warm fold of my thighs and lie still and listen to the little trickle of the water heater and a few far off car horns, eager in the purple morning. The sneeze of the neighbors, the small sounds of pinball in the pipes. I find little ways to hope: the hung towel, the new bar of soap sitting exactly centered in the ceramic tray, the smooth eggs in the fridge Unblemished – as far as I can tell, the fact that I did not die in the night. Elia Bonsignore

MEMOIRS OF A SILENT FILM Kerri Byam Home born, foreign raised, home bound once more The street is wild with omission, want. and tyranny.

Why? Translations from ancient radio Are dirty, static, Whiff-whaff, the wind blows. Seduced by breeze, By sounds of faint assurance Or warnings, The dew drops begin to fall, To call, My running feet into action. Tumbling over grass and steeple stepping stones, I mount hitchhikers and Miles and miles of road. My dress is soaked Soaked to fill buckets and pails Of blood, Of flesh, I pull a piece and come a part; The rotting meat singes off my fingers. The scream is a hollow ring but blinding still; A fluorescent light bulb Echoing, Bouncing shadows off The swayed hips of trunks. Sturdy, strong, sereneâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; All of the things I wish to be. Falling to my knees, I kiss the dainty dews on the grass. I take their holy drops to wash This feeling of fear, of pretense Of the murder to my soulâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Just one drop. If only, If only I can be renewed again.

Eric Vasquez

Lies and defamation, Dispositions of old, Lost, To behold once more.

The concrete road sweetly summons A drawn face, Cracked and worn and boned. Vestiges of a mourning neck Braces itself, packing UP, peeking UP At the sky A rainbow is glowing softly still. Spilling my empty cup Past its brim, Spewing with colors Past shades of black and white, It reaches through The dark, wet tunnel To grab my rotting flesh And mend it again. Through need and threading The platelets are restored. My sobs are whispers, Calling from a wanton seashell, Awakening members Of the body, To swim ashore To run Home To remember All That was left, That was carried, Memoirs of a silenced film.

AUTUMN’S EMBERS (excerpt) Kate Conte Cold comes early as August passes. Clouds are white no longer but grey with storm tempers. Mom keeps vigil on channel three, watching the endless loop of the coming hurricane. She calls us into the living room for the governor to address us. RJ and Jerry take the couch arms. I sit on the coffee table as Mom stands at the kitchen wall looking in, waiting for Aunt Terry, her sister, to call. Dad’s snores drum-roll the governor’s appearance. The governor wears a dark grey suit with a bright red tie. His hair matches his lapels, sloped to the left by a careful hand, and his face is smoother than apple skin. I bet his shoes are shined too. Too sharp. Too clean for Dodge Mill. Had probably never stepped foot in it. He looks right at me, then down at his prompt cards. He says the coast is in danger, but we were worse off. When the rain comes down, it will flood the rivers and the rivers will flood our streets. Weatherman says the storm will touch down by midnight. It wants to kill us in our beds. Aunt Terry calls as soon as the doomsayer finishes. Mom turns into the kitchen, telephone between ear and shoulder, dancing with the cord. RJ and Jerry run to the front window, fingering the blinds. Almost black purple clouds pull the wind upwards to the sky. We watch as the metal trash lids roll down the street and our neighbors board up their windows with ply-wood. I see Kirsten making her way home, hugging herself, face tucked between her shoulders, walking fast. “It smells like the ocean outside.” Kirsten hangs up her sweater and pulls her fingers through her long black hair. RJ and Jerry rush her jean pockets. She backs them up with a look, like Dad does. But as soon as their faces fall, she holds out two jawbreakers. They grab them and run, hurrying inside before Mom can see. Kirsten kicks off her sneakers. “How’s he been?” She tosses her head in Dad’s direction with the same care as she tosses back her hair. “Asleep, drunk. Asleep.” “What he’s good at.” She catches Mom’s eye from the kitchen. A quick, hard look. Kirsten puts something in my hand before heading down the small hall to our room. “They were out of peanut butter cups.” I stare at my second favorite candy, two twists of sesame honey. Kirsten is already in our room. Mom pivots to the living room, then back inside. She gives the ten minute goodbye, bows out of the chord and stares into space. I become that space. “Get your sister. I need all hands.” Dad dreamily backhands drool off his face. Mom’s face bends somewhere between fed up and frantic. “Howard.” He sighs with a full chest. “You get up right now or I’m lighting this chair on fire, with you in it.” His voice cracks and clears. “I’m getting the match book.” “I’m here. I’m up. What’s the matter?” Mom turns on the television, volume all the way. “Her name’s Iris. She’s a category three and would love to blow out all our windows and flood us out of house and home.” His hairy fingers drag down his scratchy face. “What’d Terry say?” “Pig & Pickle is cleared out, but Fred Barnes is still on the Shawnee.” “Damn fool is gon’ drown on ‘er banks.” “Howard.” Dad’s large hand threads through what’s left of his ash brown hair. “I’ll board ‘er up. Don’t worry.”

AUTUMN’S EMBERS (excerpt) Kate Conte Down the hall splits off into a three-room cross. Ahead is my parents’ room. I never go in there. To the left is the boys’ cave. Blankets are always draped from the ceiling and bunk; pillows never on the beds. When mom works late and dad’s asleep, the three of us watch the midnight movie on the old black and white we pulled out of the garage two summers ago. My room overlooks the backyard. Kirsten sits in the window, cigarette between her fingers, sea shell ash tray between her legs. Her eyes are somewhere in the storm. “Mom says she needs us to help Dad.” “Isn’t that why she had sons?” “C’mon.” “I’m not going out there.” “Mom’s gonna be pissed.” “She’ll get over it.” She thumb flicks the cig butt. I grab the knob tightly. “Put that thing out. It smells like shit.” Dad’s strapping on his work boots, bent over on the couch. I feel Mom’s eyes follow me to the coat rack and watch me climb into my grey sweatshirt. “Where’s your sister?” My head clears the collar. I tie my hair back in a tail. “She’s sleeping.” To watch Dad work is rare. He does most of his penance in the garage. He rarely lets his chest bleed in public, let alone where I can study him. But we are outside. He’s on the ladder, striking the wood to the pane. I am at the bottom, his only witness to the struggle. Kirsten was right; the air smells salty. The winds tug upwards, strong like a coastal lull. It fights Dad at every shake. “Hold the ladder Dannie!” I brace against it, face pressed to the spoke between its steel legs. Dad’s voice shoots up. A stronger gust rocks us; I hit the side of the ladder. Something whips by. My shin starts to burn. The wind dies. Dad comes down, hands on my face. “You ok?” He smells like beer, but not too bad. A yard away rests a strip of aluminum siding, freshly torn from the McClaren house. One corner is red. “Let’s get you inside.” Dad picks me up like I’m ten again and brings me to the kitchen. I remember twirling his hair around my fingers when he held me. (There’s a picture of it hanging in his garage next to his tool rack.) He puts me up on the counter, arm around my shoulders as Mom rolls up my jean pant. From under the sink she pulls out her tray of alcohol, band aids and hydrogen peroxide. “You’re lucky. It’s not that deep.” The peroxide stings. The alcohol’s worse. “It’s ugly.” RJ and Jerry stare at my wound like it’s a queen moth. Dad backs them up with a look, then waits over Mom’s shoulder. His eyes’ bags are too heavy to widen anymore, but his mouth is slightly opened as he watches Mom put me back together. His whole face is rigid, focused in hard lines as his eyes move from me to Mom. I follow his looks. We trace Mom’s neckline, her Mother’s Day pink heart necklace, her thick brown, shiny hair. Then he stops being focused. He’s far now, or maybe too close inside, unable to see us anymore. He retreats, grabbing a beer from the fridge door, his back to us. His gunmetal grey sweatshirt has more tears and hanging strings than Mom could sew or snip. His shoulders are rounded as he hugs his can with both hands, but he isn’t relaxed. Even when he’s asleep, his brow is crinkled with three distinct hills between his eyes. Only I see this. Mom only sees my wound.

DREAMERS MIGHT Max Temnogorod Somewhere in this world dreamers might assemble and press together the ends of their buzzing circuitries, might inhale the space between lips, might see into one anotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyes like infinite mirrors back and forth. My brain is smaller than television I have weighed clouds on my finger I have shaken hands with sundials My circadian eyes droop but I shake to sound your open windows I am not a floating chess piece I am not the silent canvas dust I keep behind the bookshelf, I shake to leave an impress, if not on the great wide world then on your heart and if not with my own voice then with the nameless gems I collect into my brain and drop onto rooftops in my sleep.

Alexis Arias

Charly Himmel

Ryan Skrabalak

Nora Curry

Ryan Skrabalak

Nora Curry

Radelys Carmona

Saskia Kahn

Adeline Witherspoon

Charly Himmel

Becky McFalls

Rebecca Najjar

Kate Conte

SINS Patricia Tavares De Oliveira My mom pukes her guts out. Can’t expel the migraine. Veins in skull dilate. She swears it’s the mélange of cod fish, cabbage and carrots, the ardent heat and the brat that squawked at lunch, the life she leads. It’s none of these things. It’s the infernal turmoil that moved into your belly years ago. It’s an independent life, aquatic, mammalian, who knows, mama? And now you wonder where the pain originates from, why drugs don’t rust the knives that attack the head. I want you to feel good; I want you to smile with your splendid ceramic teeth, ad infinitum. You wish to know how I live, what my face signals when I wake in the morning, if I carry my limbs with strain or ease, whether my bones show, whether they crack, crack and crack again to the point of alarm. In the summer, my body sizzles in the sun. In the summer, I return to Portugal, where I was born, where my family is from. Here I harbor the panache of a young widow, accoutered in dark garments of lament, yet chic, breathy, in sync with the wholeness of the winds, sanctity of the sun. I am cleansed; I shine against the skeletal trees on the horizon. The decimated forests, the hungering earth, the dwarf houses and the toothless peasants that encumber them work to my advantage. They make me look good. I am a rose, mama. When I stroll down the dirt road, it’s a caesura in your eye, peasant! I wasn’t raised here. I am a Parisian. The Eiffel Tower was mine, mine. I roused every day to its raucous, rusty timbre; the cacophony of workers humping her rigid parts, turning junk into art. I gobbled snails and frogs by the dozen, canapés, amuse-bouches, and béchamel sauce in my bourgeois mansion. It was the best of times. In truth, there was a house but no insulation. There was a home without warmth. Shelter, no love. There I lived with three siblings, two parents, one bed. I scampered; in the willowy conduits of my broken mind as a preemptive measure, Seattle and New York shortly afterwards. I stunk like sweat. Muck sunk into every parcel of the skin. I dressed like a fugitive and wore a camouflage backpack with a fatty duck on it. Strong but sweet…and poor! Kids are Machiavellian; their war malign but impassioned. They don’t spill the blood nor do they deprive you of dessert. They murder your spirit. They will have your skin. To be ostracized from a war waged to ostracize is death before birth; excommunicated from marble tournaments, girls’ bands, clothes swapping at recess, and the dirty secrets of nine-year-olds in quest of demystifications. In my Bronx home, it’s cigarette butts on the floor and roaches the size of midgets. Backwards glamor; upscale ghetto. The pre-war allure is in the walls, in their decrepitude. They’ve seen the crack epidemic. The comfort is Spartan but the warmness inimitable: a xylophonic rumble of spoons beating pots; the paralysis of faux pearls on pasty necks, the heat and its placid cry. I heart Bronx. In my home reigns chaos. At night they roam; the sound of teeth against skin. The squealing when the trap snaps and crushes the bones, severs the neck, splits the body in two. Tail sweeping the linoleum floor; the carcass shrinks. I crave mornings free of hasty clean-ups before breakfast. I like my coffee clean. My roommate Barry says my naivety is disconcerting. I didn’t grow up around here; my knowledge of the city is limited. He saw me once glancing at the sky and now thinks I’m lost, permanently. We used to be the best of friends; now we merely reminisce and laugh at our old tricks, convinced it’s all it takes for the amicable bond to resist. No new memories and a clownish retelling of adventures past that leave people flabbergasted and tense. We reenact and perform for an increasingly thin audience.

SINS Patricia Tavares De Oliveira He has AIDS and I can’t help him. My twin sister says to scrub my skin often and hard, with severity, with irrational violence because her fear is irrational. I know it’s not ignorance. It’s love, hard and irrational. Barry has a boyfriend, a true polyglot he affirms, a contortionist as well, a jobless can-do-it-all. They cook formidable meals together and I content myself with the tepid left-overs that fail to satiate the little appetite I have. It’s the herbs and the unwelcome vermin. A flora and fauna of sorts; Noah’s ark in miniature without the holiness. I have sought the company of the erratic youth, the misled, the misfit, and the misunderstood. I have hungered for the bare minimum, the survival kit that renders the rest so insipid: human heat, cigarettes, and honey for glacial darks. I yearned for the luxury of interdependence, the phoneless friend that can be reached at all hours of the day and night. I felt physical love in ways beyond fervor and hysteria. I have lived, lied and lured, mama but I regret nothing! You left me juiceless, daddy. A desiccated magma, odd and impracticable. Joy is for the weak, the poor-minded, those who can’t value the benefits of a life spent in the gutters, toiling till the body gives out. A brain? Yes, to count bills. In Portugal, I make plans. I decide I will be happy because I will expect nothing. My mother will be unhealthy, my father will not like me, my sister will not listen, and my brothers will try but fail. Contentment in the status quo as well as the occasional little revolutions to offset the bitter aftertaste. I write, outpour the horrors of my black soul on the virgin page. I appear, I cut, skewer daddy, heal mama, reunite a smaller family to a bottle of Martini red, and sing a hymn, a canticle, compose a splenetic poem. In my reveries, the world sweats bliss and temperance. It’s a glorious epoch of dreams easily made true, where art emerges from immaculate souls, angelic, seeking inspiration in the incongruous forms of mundane objects, the voluptuousness of nebulae, the sensuality of corporeal secretions; where the specter of folly isn’t dark, because untainted by the frustration of impossible things, the inexplicable sorrow that blisters chests, the ephemeral alcoholic peace and its violent aftermath. Mama, don’t stain the sink, the new floor, beds and sheets. Don’t you dare be fragile! When you’re crawling on that floor, you’d better be scrubbing it. New York was for the name, the glint, the wax dolls. Seattle was for the cheap Pall Malls and the organic skies; mountains in the bus and pine trees in your plate. I was flailing then. Dad is spring-cleaning the house for the third time this week. It’s contaminated with our lethargy. For me it’s the ancient furniture, the flowery sofas, and the fake paintings that tell no story worth duplicating. The symmetrical bad taste and the off-focus photographs that speak more than I would desire; I want to lay there amidst the anarchic patterns and die or scald and recreate, reform the dying unity, invest in modern material, and go again for another tour, the last one. With each arrival of a family member, an addition, a hole drilled, venom deposited. An extravagant abandon attesting to his late emasculation; mama holds the dough and in the summer holidays he does and shows it. Bills of fifty fly. We don’t work well together. Brother versus sister versus brother. Rises and falls in discordance. The truth isn’t easy to admit to others or to oneself. I was young when I deserted the familial cocoon; I was galvanized with visions of larger nests; as a novice they’d take me in and teach me I thought. Reveal their open wounds, run their fingers across my hands and laugh as they would see laughter filling my days. Companions of fortune becoming more and the soothing of eyes watching backs; the acrimony of the years, its respite. Mama, I don’t know how to live. I have journeyed like a romantic, incognito, forgetting to build, to disperse pebbles as I traversed, to explain why here, now and whereto. All one must recall is my canonic features, rotund legs and voluminous breasts but no one recalls the amplitude of my mission: to distribute the love I have never given, to seek revenge from those who didn’t give by giving too much, too often to those who don’t ask for anything. And in my heart I failed to feel the spark of the species synchronizing to its function, the ultimate end of any life.

SINS Patricia Tavares De Oliveira Givers who seldom receive recount stories seldom heard. Stories of amorous sabotage, sick love, scars. Daddy says mama’s a whore. Daddy says he’ll slash her throat with a saw. And when his dormant blood commences to bubble, and when his serpent skin shrivels, china chips and skulls crack. And me I will taste the rubber, the banging hit of the house sandals. I will wet myself. I will whimper, because hits add up and I feel low. I redoubt the relapse, the return of indomitable rage, the red eyes inflicting black eyes, the tremor-causing fear. Even a thousand miles away, he is there, applying pressure on old wounds. He does it by hand. He smudges his melancholy, skulks behind adverbs and semi-colons, drags his heavy fountain pen across the paper, so that even a thousand miles away, he will give me his fever and cough in my mouth. Mama, I fled the war although a treaty was in the works, and in my exile, I forgave and forgot, but I haven’t found the peace to live unlike you, in bliss and temperance. ~~ Daddy, I do not repent to have crossed these oceans; they were to be crossed I believed because you said I was to stare through your stare and not see past the ideal, one you never missed for you knew not but projected. You saw in the contour of others, anecdotes, compact, crafted with utmost care, stagnating formulations of uneventful lives, the demarcation of aims I ought to set in stone, live by, not die from, like you, deprive as you had of trivial joys. Films, music, the sun, and I think love, as well, in your one bedroom cul-de-sac, two meals a day that’s nice, no diapers for the twins, we can use ragged cloths, might bite at first, but they’ll get used to it, it’s for them, not me, they’ll survive, perhaps live better with the ragged cloths, with the money we won’t dilapidate, is for them, not us, an opulent house in the West, remote from the vertical mountains, level terrain, with antique furniture and stuff from the four corners of the world, might not fit at first, but we’ll get used to it, it’s for them, not you, and another house, less luxurious, less large, see we’re not money-oriented, but worldly, we can rent out, we can retire early if we buy only one Christmas gift for everyone, you can share, might be difficult at first among the four of you, but you’ll get used to it. I do not repent to have crossed these oceans; they were to be crossed.

Julieta Salgado

THOUGHT THAT HEATS THE HOUSE George del Valle

Nora Curry

Not one of these faces is not drinking the moment with pent up-thinking, with eyes in Pound or Proust to prove he knows a life, to test its reflexivity, to dress it in scantily clad ‘choice’ And from this word who can say being is an island of sensate bone in a reckless cellulose sea / with Cerberus barking all night / the wonder who to dust off the pot, decipher the allegory, of why we built the house we were going to change with a hot word or two? How I tend to see the sky in great knotted globs forsaken with myth & How pithy earth’s chaotic colors can seem in the light of that fact

THOUGHT, THAT HEATS THE HOUSE George del Valle in the top shelf of our topsoil in the minutia of memory of past doceats regarding transit to this higher place, cheek against sky we trace the limit of the given order which to adhere a given order in Homerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s forests will surprise in you with newnesses and archaisms simple in sort as things in their own syrup can fill you with desire to be built anew leaf, you in the custom of history, light does around you this spring said, autumn fed a, what what said, said fed a said what to have fed what is only new in a head is that scent of pine so freshly wounded, that scent of you so lately bloomed like the rivers by our homestead, rippling when they hear the self negated: things oblige nothing but this clear water of individuation, this stone still uncertainty of presence before the blue-flamed event of me O how I tend to roll when the work of when the thought of is slipped from my fingers into something more sheltered from my Promethean gaze

EXPRESS Ryan Skrabalak And so after we got lost in old quarters and after supping on pork neck and fuchsia cabbage and after milling about ramparts and hushed courtyards and whispering fountains and after befriending park benches in blue powder morning and after belching old yugo trucks in assonant traffic jam and after trying to promenade naturally and after spicy walnut liquor from dusty bottle 11AM to be good hosts etc. and after leaving clouds soaking wet and glowing and anointed adriatic salve of sunset, After bears in the cage behind the roadhouse and grinning taxi driver in rear view mirror with black-pink mountains and gloria gaynor we are rumbling drunk from belgrade tim has blown chunks in front of police and the passport-red eyes border guard and relief O great plains wind-myth in cabins perfumed with mink oil and cigarettes and avoiding gypsies with their jangly shuffle the train blessing towns in silver, And we are now weary and desiring peace and continental breakfasts and are now friends with boisterous youths next door and are now battening doors with joeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s belt and are now unraveling cheese burek in coldness and are now waking from cyrillic horrors and are now developing coughs and looking back in baroque merriment with alacrity and sixeight time signature of budapest express pannonia piggybacked past whistle stops

Joseph Wade

DEER COME TO OUR APPLE TREE Margie Sarsfield

see the apple tree? bloomed unripeable green and sour, tough tumtying seeded fruit no good for sauce or cider or even crunch - but shaking thin trunk yielded thud thud of dumb apple weight, ground-meeting hearts-beating deer-feeding joy, no good unripeable apples thud thud! on the ground around still wet lake water feetpatchy brown where sun reached (noiseless ‘cept for thud thud.) late night creep round the campfire come deer to crunch up tough green seed fruit from where two hands (whose hands?) thud thudded them to the ground.

Allegra Earle

We’re too young to just look at something, have to grab it both handed and confirm; our hands tell us, “yes, this is a real thing, and this real thing is astounding.” We jump on the big beds, land on our stomachs. We make a crappy pet out of a stray cat and don’t mind getting scratched. We leap atop rocks and do magic with sticks, fish leaves in the creek, sit on the damn dam with sandwiches. We’re in and out of the lake all day, change out of your swimsuit or you’ll get crotch rot. We look for deer endlessly, and when we see them we are still for as long as we can be. If you’re lucky you see mrs. deer and baby both by the abandoned trailer. If you’re really lucky you see mrs. deer and two babies out the car window on the way to get milk and pancake mix, milk and pancake mix for making pancakes which might be blueberry with good middle-mushing blueberries from snake island (no snakes after st. patrick) where we row with boats and buckets for blueberries, for our pancakes, which mom is good morning flipping on our match-lit gas stove (‘cept when dad makes babycakes with tiny mounds of batter and maybe one blueberry in the middle) and blueberries left over get made into muffins or maybe tomorrow morning’s pancakes if we don’t drink all the milk (did we?) Mom admires the way the light falls on the no-good-apple tree leaves, a canopy so thin coming from a trunk you can clutch with both hands and shake. The sun on the ground is quilty and warm on our lake-water-wet feet and we shake that trunk and quiver those branches and down they thud thud one or two at a time, roll a bit and sit quietly in the dirt. Then we run off somewhere else to see what else hands can find to make noise. And sometime after dad douses the campfire and sometime before we run shivering with morning cold to the kitchen for pancakes, deer come to where we thud thudded the apples and crunch them up. They must be just outside our window, we are that close to the tree, and if we were awake and looking we could watch the good work we’d done in feeding the deer, but it seems we’re always sleeping when the eating happens and the apples are gone by the time we get up.

DELUSIONS OF ADEQUACY Andrew Lerman “What’s the plural of moose? Is it mooses or moosi?” “I think it’s just moose.” “That doesn’t sound right...” “Why do you even want to know?” “It’s for my novel. It centers around a moose that feels isolated from its herd. It follows him as he strays away from the other moosi. He meets a talking cockroach named Jesus that guides him throughout his journey. At the very end when he realizes his place in the universe, he gets shot down by a hunter.” “...Wow, that’s...some deep shit you got there. You know that moose don’t travel in herds, right?” “What the hell do you mean, ‘they don’t travel in herds.’ Of course moosi travel in herds, they’re animals aren’t they?” “Stop saying moosi. That’s not right. And your logic is terrible. Why even write about moose?” “I got the idea after reading The Metamorphosis in my fiction class. That story really changes you, man.” “Yeah...sure.” “I pitched the idea to my professor. He totally loved it.” “He loved it?” “Well, he said go for it. He’s kind of a man of few words. You want to read it?” “Actually, I kind of have to—” “Oh, come on. I know you’ll love it. I know how much you love Murakami. Well, I’m pretty sure this is as good as any of his stuff.” “Okay, did you just compare your moose book to any of Haruki Murakami’s novels?” “So you’ll read it?” “Well, I guess I have no choice now, now do I?” “Great! Here’s the rough draft. Try to soak it all in while you read it.” “‘...A desire that could never be fulfilled. Though the young moose was close in proximity with his herd, he had never felt further from them, isolated even. Never would the other moosi ever comprehend that they were sequestered from the rest of the world in this dense and cruel forest. However, the young moose knew, he always knew. The crimson blood that pulsed through his moose veins burned with a yearning to break free of his routine lifestyle and find his purpose in his world. Though he was naïve in naivety, his moose wisdom exceeded his years. Tomorrow, he would depart with Jesus on his journey…’” “The goose bumps will wear off in about twenty minutes.” “What…did I just read?” “Do you like it or do you love it?” “Do I like it?! Do I like…it? I…this is definitely…something.” “You…hate it, don’t you?” “Oh, no. No no no! This is perhaps the greatest piece of fiction that I have ever…been forced to read.” “Really?! Do you have any suggestions?” “You need to add the word crimson…at least five more times in that paragraph.” “Are you sure?” “Oh, am I! And that naïve in naivety? Genius.” “I thought so, too. I knew having you read it was a good idea. I’m going to go see my fiction professor right now.” “Oh, and one more thing.” “Yeah?” “The goose bumps? I still have them.” “Dude…twenty minutes. Minimum!” “Alright, see you later!” “Later, dude.” “…fucking moron.”

UNWINDING Joseph Wade

Every man's mortal enemy maddening time the heart booms the heart booms father's feet chime down hard wood hall better rebel well

Katherine Demaray

TOSSING OUT THE HOME (excerpt) Oliver Lamb I woke up on the floor. Our floor: a wet carpet, stretched over uneven concrete. I was in the dark. There was a sharp and terrible pulse curving down the lower half of my body: My calf, twisting into a knotted muscle; my ankle, spastic and asleep. I reached out, clenched and pained fingers plowing into the layer of crust along the floor, in search of a leveraging hold—a thick flaky ball with a mushy center—my hand reached into a deli sandwich. I crushed the sandwich to push up, squirming along a jagged, stabbing pole, a cymbal stand. The stand toppled. The cymbal clamored into my forehead. With one hand, I fisted my leg to stop the cramp. The other pulled my numb ankle beneath my lurching torso. I crawled for the door. A light streamed in a line from the crack under that door, the only door in the room. I was after the doorknob. One twist, and the fluorescent light of the hallway burst into the rehearsal room. Footsteps? I flipped the switch for the overhead lights and slammed the door shut. The management was prone to roam the halls shortly after sunrise. Their rules prohibited smoking in the rehearsal rooms. Now, with the ceiling bulbs lurid and alight, I could see the months of roach butts mashed into the carpet. We weren’t supposed to drink either. The management was afraid of stains in the carpet. And right there, where I had been sleeping, was a dark pool of beer.

Joseph Wade

Rock & Roll society is bound up in dope. I suspected pardon for the smoky air and all these bottles. But there was no accounting for the long-grain rice spilled across the floor. The disorder in this room had to be protected. I grabbed the knitted sweater hanging off Helen’s amp and stomped it into the beer puddle. I checked my wristwatch, my newly purchased tour-manager wristwatch: 10:07am.

Two days left. One day to abandon the rest of the furniture. I shared an apartment with Tobias Mörtt and Mr. Eugene Davies in Crown Heights. Mr. Davies was the only one with gainful employment; Tobias and I just kept up the home and kept him company. We had decided to terminate the lease early, in less than eight hours. The plan had been worked out yesterday: stuff anything worth saving into the van, then into a storage space. Everything else, onto the sidewalk. There wasn’t even time to carry the dressers, bed frames, nightstands, kitchenware, and those nice domestic things, thoughts of our happy home, down the three flights of stairs to the street. Everything would have to be thrown. New York City sanitation regulations forbid dumping bulk items and unbundled debris. The landlord would assume the fines. We had given up on kind relations when he threatened to extort all of our assets in court, even if he had to chase us “down the homeless alleys of Brooklyn!” He would have to hurry. By Sunday, June 19th, my band and I would be 250 miles South West of the Big Apple, in Forgotten America, Maryland. I was back on all fours clawing the butts and grains of rice, slapping the beer bottles and Bodega-food hunks into a pile. I grabbed a plastic bag. I was hanging over the heap of trash, bag stretched between both hands, ankle and heel a push broom, hands and bag a dustpan. Our last show in New York was on Saturday. We were headlining Wickfest at the Trash Bar, a midnight show time. By 6:00pm tomorrow, the contents of this rehearsal room had to be dumped on the sidewalk or packed into the van. When you try to leave this tomb of a city, be prepared to terminate: leases, possessions, friendships… The next 48 hours would be an impetuous process of severing all sentimental ties. Nearly everything must be made worthless. Nearly everything must be thrown away. I picked up Helen’s soggy sweater and tossed it into the plastic garbage bag.

TOSSING OUT THE HOME (excerpt) Oliver Lamb Fortunately, we wouldn’t need much. Most of the travel expenses were covered. My university had granted the endorsement, paving the way with cash. The purpose was as old as the nation, the design came with the onslaught of the automobile: drive west. Escape to open country. A man can only avoid the mire with freedom and motion. A man can only begin moving with fuel. Fuel costs money. Sign the paperwork, get the money, and take the trip. I realized this sound logic while lying naked in an empty bathtub. It was just before dawn in late February. I refused to start the hot water, to clean myself. I drew a tree along the bottom of the tub with shampoo instead. I thought of the music such a shampoo-tree might contrive when the rush of a plane roared through the bathroom window. A revelation: I would spend the hot days of summer searching for the true music of America. For the modern day CounterCulture. For the fantastic, unrealized possibilities of life in this country. A salute to true grit in its most squalid form. A state of the national character that could only be found as a lived in reality: I would have to drive my band across the country—it would be the only way. Musicians are nomads. Naturally, my band mates, Tobias, Rimsky, and Helen, liked the idea. But they were terrified by the specifics. At the time, I had no license. And the passage of my driver’s test since then was more fortuitous than merited. The road appeared life threatening. It seemed I would be the only one grappling with the wheel: none of the others could legally drive. We were determined to travel all the way to California and back. Which meant finding half our shows on the way there. The last venue to respond to our calls was Headhunters, in Texas. But planning appeared unnecessary. Our job was simple: be the story.

Charly Himmel

PRAYER FOR MAMA Nora Curry Mama, it is Friday night & the candlelight is reflecting on the pew. You will be here in thirty-six hours after you wake up late & the dog begs to be fed. That boy I don’t talk about anymore walked down the aisle at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture. There are reasons the dog is more obedient. I came at night when the pastor would not be here & secretly miss the one who used to crack jokes & garden. You must remember walking through the park with smoke in the sky. The first night I thought about Australia. Mama, I think of you at 9:30 every Sunday morning when I’m pouring coffee for men in tailored suits. The Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture is the one where they buried Luci’s dad after he hung himself in the basement. There are reasons I don’t stay. There’s that Irish song in the red hymnal that I still sometimes hum at the end of summer when I think I’m on the block by myself. The September I used the shower drain to catch my tears and it started backlogging. Mama, I’m so sorry that you sit alone on Sundays. It’s not that my father hasn’t gone since 1984 your wedding. Or that it was cold in March when they started dropping bombs in Iraq. Sometimes we waited at the stairs to the choir loft, but mostly I miss the snow upstate. The way you stopped noticing it until you forgot & wore ballet shoes in a blizzard. There are reasons I wait. Mostly it’s the way the mattress curves after twenty-two years holding a body. Mama, I want you to know that sometimes I climb into bed red-eyed & do the sign of the cross while lying supine. Yes, sometimes I find my hands clasped in a gesture I forget that they remember. I should have told you that I left to be missed. Forty-five minutes later the wafer would be resting on this tongue. To not be done. I couldn’t take this faith on US Airways Flight 4195. I moved upstate because he told me I looked beautiful in yellow. None of this is airborne. I wish I had told you that four years ago in the arboretum. I moved back to Brooklyn because there were no shades on the windows. The same way the geese go. I’ll probably leave again when my clothes stop smelling like cedar. But Mama, I’m older now & more of a poet. Sunday morning you’ll think of the red lighter between my teeth. You’ll pray for your mother who still signs her cards “Mrs. Peter J. Reehil” nine years later & then you’ll wait. I drink rooibos tea instead of Christ’s blood & think about Wednesdays. Knowing anyway that when the answer comes it won’t be altars or skyscrapers or big white houses —something more like boys & grass

Allegra Earle

CUBAN ROOMMATE William Machi Relying on less Than a Bobby Short's worth Of inspiration, How can I? Put a cigarette out On a piece of Broken chocolate? His bed frame remains, the one I let him borrow, I Don't think He ever brought a woman Home, he Let me watch Movies, use Pillows, tell Jokes, I Crack at the thought of

His His His His

Music, that could be His parents' car, parked and honking, "Come! Outside, we've so much To show you!" He saw us, Friends and lovers, Marbled In American education, our sexual identities Detonated on sips Of vodka and 3 a.m. exits. We played our games and Paid our rent, when We could we Smiled, when We smiled we laughed, then We lit candles I'd Stolen from home, Watching shadows carve outlines, like A heart beat Monitor on the ceiling. Toenails and Pubic hair, I'm Not sure whose but I'd fashion masks with Spit and Nipple rings if I thought it'd make me More exotic.

Adeline Witherspoon

Hey! Let's talk soon I Want to tell you about all The nothing I've Been up to.

TRANSITION Angelica Berry

Alexis Arias

“I’m going to jump,” she exclaimed, and before I could lock my feet in the sand my entire body was jolted into the warm gritty specs. And I lay with a weight on my back. She vibrated with laughter, gave my shoulders a firm squeeze, and hopped up while I looked up with a squinted eye. Hands on hips as always and I waited. “What happened?” “I was unstable,” I said as I rose. Smiles. “Okay, again.” In an instant she was hanging from me like a cape. I propped her thighs up with my arms and resumed our walk. I deliberately stomped holes with each step as I carried her like a worn backpack toward the boardwalk. “Faster!” I started walking along the water with the same stomping speed. I didn’t want to rush away. Her spiral golden-brown strands moshed with the wind. I inhaled a white-flower cotton-candy breeze. “Can ya let me go?” I unlooped my arms and she let her feet dangle for a moment before returning her toes to the sand. “Wasn’t it just sunny?” “And loud?” The sky looked like melting crayons, and seagulls cranked their wings between the color gradient and sea, away from us. We waited.

BETWEEN GOING AND WENT Arielle John Became bathwater and the baby. sat in my dirty just to keep something truthful around. washed my face clean enough to become any other face that could fit, switched places with my shadow, counted every rib I stole to recreate myself. I am brown paper wrapped and returned to sender, I happened when the drought came happened when the rain stopped happened when the place was not big enough and bottle necked ambition. I have origins in the bone-white of teeth and how they are not spine and smile enough to get you very far. I am far from familiar things. baffled at how sun and snow could be Flatbush at the same time. The walks home that never take me there turning keys in the maybe of night the silence waiting up for me phantoms turned lullaby. Very far is a place you go looking for yourself, I would have left something behind if I knew I was coming. Running is the language of feet passing codes to the ground. Then my blood cannot speak for itself. It will not tell the business of its coming and going. and does not stop There will be a trail of things to follow, there will be salt after the sea has dried up, prints after the path is made, shells of prayers left on my bed from the fourth hour of the morning, I will be a little more than what the air looks like, empty everything that is not mine Learn the secrets of mirrors and how to find things I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t lose but forgot.

Nora Curry

LA CIUDAD DE JUÁREZ Judy Zhong Lost girls cry as cicadas yell throughout the night sky. That mist White and chilling Hanging over cotton fields and the sun still rises Shining — Luminescent soft against heaven. The shell of earth under the bellies of lost girls. Breast opened down into their hearts eaten by wolves and doves flew across the morning dew over their virgin skin. La cuidad de Juárez Where the ghosts of lost girls weep Here, sweet Paloma — sleep Dress around her Neck Blood and Dirt on her thigh. With barren eyes She looks up at cotton — swaying with the wind whistling quietly.

Carole Ver Eecke

RECEIPT Edward Kearns I sit. All day, five a week, ten hours each. I sit. Not that sitting's trouble, it's nothing. That's the problem. Answer the phone, hang up, write letters, emails, proposals, shake hands, drinks, and my baby to sleep, then try to myself, just to end up dreaming about sitting, answering the phone, writing letters, emails, proposals, shaking hands, drinks, and my baby to sleep. I work in a box, a cubicle inside a rectangle on a block. I live in the same, a box on a grid, with a smaller box out front for letters I send and a code to make sure they get there. Some people live in boxes stacked on boxes like building blocks, built by kids who liked playing with the packaging instead of the toys. I drive to work in a box bought from different kids, ones who like to argue. Inside, I sing out loud and pick my nose like I'm alone. I know I never am, but I forget. Evolution takes time. It's not like I'm lonely. I have a family. My wife's gorgeous. So's our baby. My parents drive me crazy. So do hers. House, car, job, wife, kid, parents alive on both sides, we're living the 1930something American dream. One week into the next, over and over, for what? "Saturday and Sunday," Marv snickers, mouth full of pastrami. He works in a box next to mine. Funny, I tell him, and keep my thoughts to myself. My wife says that's the problem. I don't talk. This is talking, I tell her, and she shakes her head. "I love you, man," Marv laughs a wad of sandwich on his sleeve, picks it off and eats it. "Seriously, you gotta mellow out. I brought you something." He reaches in his coat and hands me a box. Inside's a dead watch. Thanks Marv. "It's not supposed to work. That's the point. See," he takes and flips it in his pastramied hands, "nowhere for a battery. Just set it to something you're looking forward to, for good luck." I put it on. "Thought you could use a little more," he winks, stuffing his face with a bite bigger than his mouth, mayonnaise and mustard in the corners of his lips. After lunch I get back to punching buttons, nodding, smiling. Set my watch for quitting time and leave an hour early. Great gift, Marv's right. Driving home I watch the streets, lanes outlined to keep things moving, empty stores and chains on every corner. Everyone's so fat these days. But I'm on top of it. Keep my eating to a minimum. Gotta save room for drinking enough to have a sense of humor. Never during the day though, that's the rule. Maybe I'll start setting my watch for sundown instead. "Aren't you going to work?" She's putting her earrings in, naked at the mirror. "Not today," rolling over, I look away. Five minutes later, she's put the baby in the crib beside our bed. "Be sure she eats. Mal says she's been sleeping through." She bends down, "Just like her daddy," and kisses me. "Hope you feel better." "Thanks hon," I tell her. "I'll be here when you get home." "I can't wait." Blowing a kiss, she closes the door. Our daughter starts wiggling right away. Justasia. Her name was her mom's idea. Told her I like Justice. She laughed, "What's that?" Got me thinking. Here's this baby, ripped from her home, cut from the warmth of the womb to frigid air, and she'll never be as close to the truth as right then. Where's the justice in that? So she's Justice twisted. I can't go back to sleep. Instead I get working. Justasia kicks my feet while I stare at the computer screen, watches me sell myself to everyone else, kicking and cooing until the room stinks and she's crying. I'm bad with babies. That's where it starts. My problems grow from there. Can't ever tell what people need 'til they throw a fit or shit themselves. Even then, I figure it's as simple as a changed diaper, bottle of formula, or a little rocking to a song about counting â&#x20AC;&#x201C; "One, two, buy me new shoes! Three, four, more, more, more!" At that point I'm tired of trying, close the door and let her wail.

RECEIPT Edward Kearns But I excel in business. My job, I do well. Kills me to say it, but I work better at the office. Here at home I get distracted by what's supposed to mean something to me. At least that's what I'm told. Meaning to me's a mystery, and a mean one at that. “Don't you care about anything?" she asks me at the end of the day when I don't. I tell her I do, about her and Justasia, that's it. Fuck work. I don't wanna talk about it, and set my watch for morning. She says she understands, but we both know better. How can she understand what I don't say? That's the thing. I talk. Blah-blah-blah, I'm damn good at it. I just don't say a thing, and keep nodding at our waiter. "Fois gras?" "Soufflé?" "Perhaps a digestif?" Everything's an ad. We're all the same, some better than others, and then there's the rest of us. Everyone's time comes. Not a number in some lottery, more like a receipt. Life's a laundry list of what's bought and borrowed. In the end, you get stuck with a bill you've already paid. "Holy shit." "I can get it," she reaches for the check. "No, just thought I was keeping track, that's all." "Please..." Bending across the table, she catches me staring down her dress. I smile, and she smiles back. After haggling with the waiter over the second bottle of wine, he knocks it off, and we try to in the car. Same problem. I'm too fast, and she never comes. No matter how many licks, she's got no center. I've been working from home since last week. Keep Justasia beneath the desk and rock her with my feet. She's my gas pedal, starts crying when I stop. Faster I go, the harder I work and sounder she sleeps. Doesn't have to eat 'til I do. When I get up to piss, I change her. We're a hell of a team. Boss says I'm at my peak, so I set my watch back, keep it right by the bed. Now I'm the first one up and last to sleep. Early birds catch worms. Night owls raid nests, and I crave the taste of both. First thing I do when I wake up is change Justasia, give her her bottle and pour a cup of coffee. Then we get to it. She's best if I ignore her. So am I. She gurgles music in her sleep, my little baby Beethoven, rocking beneath the desk. Every note I follow, buy, sell, build, and in the end I've made a million. A million in a week. Five percent for her, five for me, ninety for a man I've never met. Works out swimmingly, except at this rate I'll have to keep her in her cradle half her life to earn away our debt. Mortgage, credit cards, three cars and student loans, mountains we'll climb on the back of Justasia. Her bones are soft, we just have to teach her not to break 'em. "Never!" My wife's drunk. "If I could've paid for it, I would've." "You could," she slams her glass. "You could've gotten a scholarship. You could do anything. You're just lazy," slapping my knee, she laughs. "Let’s go." So we do. Been keeping the babysitter busy every night since my hot streak. My front seat's stained, but we try every time. "I wanna 'nother baby," she pants, chewing on my ear. "That's not helping."

RECEIPT Edward Kearns

Joseph Wade

But Justasia is, there's no denying it. It's been a month since I've seen the office. Marv started coming over for lunch every Thursday. First, he brought pastrami. Now I make sandwiches for both of us, Justasia on my back. Licking his fingers, he asks if he can hold her. "Sure," I bend over and untie her, cradling her body as I hand her over. "She's tiny." I pull recycled pastrami from organic butcher paper for round two. "She hasn't grown in months. Doc says it's fine, happens sometimes. Eightieth percentile, though, size wise." The sauerkraut makes my eyes burn, homemade now that I have the time. Speaking of, how's the watch?" I tell him it's great, been keeping it on the nightstand, set for sunup. "No man, that's not the point." Justasia starts crying. "You gotta wear it." Since then I have been. Figured what the hell, couldn't hurt, set it to opening bell, and it started working – the watch, not the luck. Started ticking, now Justasia's growing. Six pounds in a week, she's crawling around the house, rug burns on her knees. Climbs out of her crib and gums my pantlegs. Gurgling beneath the desk, she made money. Fat on my lap, she's digging holes. Everything I touch collapses. People hang up before they even answer. Profits invest in debt, debt profits, and my boss calls, says he needs me back in the office. So that’s where I am. Back in my box. Too tight to move, watching my watch and draining the flask beneath my desk, I break my rule daily. By lunch, I’m drunk. “Long night?” Marv mumbles through a mouthful of rye. “Long life.” He laughs wet food from his lips, then turns pale. “What the hell’s that?” He’s pointing at my watch. "My arm?" “No, the watch – it’s working?” “Yep. Started when I put it back on.” “It’s not supposed to work,” he starts wrapping his sandwich. “I know,” I tap its face. “But here it is. Ticking.” Downing his drink, he stands. “I gotta go,” and doesn’t even shake my hand as he fires for the door.

RECEIPT Edward Kearns “You’re never here,” my wife reminds me. “Even now.” She’s making dinner, timer on the oven, stove smoking. I pour a beer. “I’m sorry.” “Tell that to Justasia. Mal says all she does all day is crawl under your desk gurgling, ‘Da-ddy, Da-ddy, Daddy.'" “How sweet.” Sitting on the ground beside her, she giggles me a two-tooth smile. “How’s she been?” “Slow.” It’s true. She’s growing, but her reflexes are terrible. I shake her rattle and she stares. I roll balls past her or bounce 'em off her head and she doesn't move. That and she’s stopped crying. Not a tear, no matter what. She grabs my wrist to gnaw the watchband. “I’ll make her another appointment.” It’s her third this month. They can’t figure it out. First she was a late bloomer, now she may never. It’s been a week since I’ve seen Marv. Heard he’s been sick, working from home, only he doesn’t answer my calls or call me back. Without him around, I’ve been skipping lunch. Lost five pounds in three days. Rather, I gave ‘em to Justasia. She’s huge. Stumbling around the house, calling everything “Da-ddy.” The doctor says she has some kind of “syndrome.” “What's that mean?” “Frankly, she’s growing too fast. She's got an enlarged heart, and her cognitive development is slipping.” “And all you can say is she's got some kind of ‘syndrome?’” “She's also a loving, fifteen-month-old baby girl –” with Justasia Syndrome. Telling my wife isn’t easy. I do it over dinner, spoon in our little anomaly's mouth. Start with, “The doctor said we should feed her less,” which isn’t true. We spend the rest of the night talking about her diet, how we're gonna tell Mal to cut back on the sweets, Jello and chocolate pudding, try to get her more exercise. For the first time in years, we're on the same page. Our daughter needs us, beached belly-first on the floor. We kiss, rip into each other and fuck right there on the sofa. In front of our broken baby, we try to make another. Only this time I can't. Rock-hard for an hour, we try 'til we're sore, and catch Justasia watching. Since then, I can't sleep. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock, all night, night after night without a battery. Bed's become my second office, sex another investment. "Here, like this," ass in the air, my wife's got her nose in a magazine. Instead of staring at porn though, it's a diagram of a uterus. And Justasia... she follows me everywhere. I can't escape. Everytime I get a hard-on, I see my baby girl's fat face staring back, "Da-ddy." "You should take a vacation," my wife tells me after my nightly deposit, fingering my wrist at the watch. "No work, just time for us, you and Justasia." Next morning my boss calls a three-hour meeting to discuss the second quarter, and I barely make it through the first half before telling him I need some time off. "Tell me about it," sweating, he adjusts his hair. "You're killing us." "I was thinking two, maybe three weeks?" "Take three." After one, I'm rested enough to take care of Justasia, but she's too big for her crib and I'm done sitting, so I carry her around the house. Without her gurgling Beethoven, I can't make a cent. Instead, we pace the place

RECEIPT Edward Kearns 'til everything's "Da-ddy," I put her in my chair, and she starts smacking the keyboard like a piano, poking the screen. That's when it happens. We erradicate debt. No phone calls, no transfers. She points, I click, and there it goes. Poof. Gone. Back in Black. We wipe our own first, clear the mortgage, wedding rings, student loans, honeymoon and cars. Mom and Dad are next, surgeries, new house and bad investments. After them, the in-laws' art collection. Then our friends, starting with Marv. We buy-out everyone I've known since grade school whose name I can remember. Only like I said, we don't use money. It's Justice.

Katherine Demaray

"Is that what you call this?" My boss wheezes in my earpiece. "I'm sorry?" "You damn well better be! We're broke! Belly-up!" "I'm at home, remember? On vacation." "I don't give a shit where you are! Your name's all over this!" "Sign me off then." "What?" "I'm done." Silence. "I quit." That's it. It's over. Hang up and that's that. Boss keeps calling, so I unplug the phone. Throw my cell in the toilet and play with Justasia, crawling the house 'til there's holes in my knees. Cleaning the kitchen after dinner, I tell my wife what happened, about our debt and quitting. She smiles, scrapes her plate in the trash and hands it to me. "You wash, I'll dry." I put the stopper in and turn up the water. Hot. Steam clouds the windows. Justasia's dancing beside us, waiting for the Tupperware, and I feel my wife behind me, stomach firm. "Careful," sliding my watch off in the sink, she stands back and inspects it. "Guess what time it is." I dry my hands. Justasia pitches a plastic bowl against the wall, squealing. "Bed time?" â&#x20AC;&#x153;Nope," she bites my lip and starts winding. "It's not working."

A KIND OF KINDNESS

Elia Bonsignore

Ocean Vuong

The night he chooses her instead, you find yourself on the sagging porch, watching a lone moth bash herself against the lamp. That relentless ticking as fury is thrown again and again into lightâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;until dusty wings unravel and a drop of darkness falls into darkness. And because you've always been reckless with tenderness, you gather the small panic in your hands, part your lips and try to stitch a cracked song into wings. But what good is music if not to trouble the air? What goodâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;if not the cold rooms of hurt, the bed made emptier with moonlight, where you'll crush yourself, skillfully, into no one's arms.

ONE SEPTEMBER Christina Squitieri I got it to replace something with nothing and met someone instead who met someone instead his own something to replace his own something with something more and I was part of it. Adam, burying his son Was the first to learn first of death we’re told Abel had the first burial we’re told But what about the elephants who have Graveyards for their dead? God threw them out of Eden Because without them man would have no ivory To make pianokeys or names to mock ear-y children & Spears would be useless now wouldn’t they And where would all those ancient painters go? And I drew, and drew, a picture of you— Plants were thrown from the garden, too, And birds and words like oracular or Apollonian or a sable silvered All were tossed from Eden and floated down from Eden So what is left in Eden anyway? If Cain went East And you Are made of reneged ragged shadow-rivered promises & gaps between echoes & lips the shape of a crooked violin & Eyes oracular, if memory serves, And nothing nowhere nobody would change Than why did Aeschylus tie up Prometheus to untie him two plays later? Still I remember A Venti mint tea and a plate of chewed pomegranate seeds That you said were rat teeth—small, not quite white or right An ant’s sable silvered graveyard (too Expelled from Eden; their hills too much like burial mounds too too much like) only The blind bury the blind, they say, but I missed the mark And I went West instead. Where men like moles search blindly for breasts Dug inward until shovels crattered— The Dead have clotted our fields And seeds don’t take because everywhere you dig is bone; bow-lipped bow-legged bone (you killed mice with bald child hands torn from gluetraps at 9 said it made you a man; teeth pomegranate seeds too similar clattering Monopoly dice teeth when you smashed small skulls against walls which is why your hands still shook when we played Chutes and Ladders that time of the October snow; seeds pitting on your floor, if your wide blue remember, your mother remember it feels like this you said your mother told you so said it would make you a man) There are no more dice clatters or Sunday crosswords And I was told to stop eating pomegranates because they looked too much like a womb. Shelly re-tied the knots, Aeschylus burned the manuscripts. I wore my hair long, pulled back with the leaf pin. Outside of Eden, Cain stopped. Looked both ways. Went West, beyond the sunset. A month since I saw you last. That’s what’s changed.

THE EDUCATION OF MARY M. Becky McFalls HISTORY A man’s liver burps and flips over. Barnacles rattle his ribs. Soon he will be dead. Heels stretch anamorphic ellipses. An orphanage sprouts another head. Cash falls on this garden thick as manure. A country is irrigated with blood. (But the roots, once severed, still bleed underground. The nation, embarrassed, tries to hide its bruises: The return policy states that citizenship can in some cases be granted, though the country has no use for merchandise opened overseas.) ENGLISH The airplane curls its toes into the tarmac. Kim I Sung steps down and her name snaps loose like a string of beads. She tries to collect the pieces, to stick them back on, but they will not stay on in the hive’s heat. The plane retreats grinding her name to sand. Before she can gather the remains she is whisked from the landing, hands still cupped into little urns. GEOGRAPHY

Adeline Witherspoon

Your New Name Is Mary arrives with eyes blinking like vacancy signs. All around her a forest of birch trees hack strange vowels, but her mouth is a cocoon that cannot butterfly, for her tongue still dreams of cabbages. The compass shatters in the air-conditioning — Everyday is Columbus Day! Mary falls sick beside ammonia rivers. Who designed this map anyway?

THE EDUCATION OF MARY M. Becky McFalls HOME ECONOMICS A bread crumb trail is served for breakfast. The sky crumbles on her plate for lunch. A cow and its moon fold thick and white in a glass. Wolves, wearing the legs of dead sheep, drag their hooves from room to room. Always remember: 1) A good orphan is forever grateful to her saviors. 2) Don’t bark after twilight; don’t piss on the floor. 3) Where you come from is bad; where you are is good, but you will never be good. 4) Be grateful! Be grateful! Be grateful! 5) Don’t forget all that we’ve done for you. GEOLOGY It is too late when Mary wakes up afraid her skin is already hard as rocks. ANATOMY

CHINK GOOK CHINAMAN FLAT-FACE DOG-EATER SLUT YOU’LL NEVER BE ABLE TO DRIVE WHY AREN’T YOU BETTER AT MATH? ME SO HORNY YOU ALL LOOK ALIKE DON’T CUT YOUR HAIR I WON’T KNOW IF YOU’RE A BOY OR A GIRL WHORE I GUESS YOU’RE OKAY FOR AN ORIENTAL WHORE I FOUGHT IN VIETNAM KOREA JAPAN FOR PEOPLE LIKE YOU SLUT WHERE’S YOUR VIOLIN? WHY DON’T YOU SPEAK CHINESE JAPANESE MY KNEES LOOK AT THESE WHY DO YOU HAVE AN IRISH NAME YOU DON’T LOOK IRISH YOU LOOK LIKE A CHINAMAN WHORE THAT CAN’T SPEAK ENGLISH The photographer, annoyed, looks up from the camera and asks Mary to stop squinting. MATH One person divided by two countries two cultures two identities all imaginary all symbolic all prescribed: you’re too white to be Asian you’re too Asian to be white, you must choose one or the other, it’s your money or your life— how can one be two and two be one, or one and one make three? PHYSICS The cloud, due to gravity, collapses and contracts into a sphere. As the sphere begins to spin, it forms a core. This core soon becomes a star. If the star, in the beginning stages, has enough with which to build, it will become a glowing center around which others will orbit, and life can begin.

FOR SERVICES RENDERED Megan Hanson Hit me, he says. No, it will make you feel better. The crush of a bystander's fist into an enemy's abandoned weapon makes spectators turn into gladiators, sometimes. I believe it'll happen in you. Everything will be all right because I don't believe in fear.   Kiss me, he says. Yes, now is fine, whenever. A mouth can make things. I like watching parodies and auburn forest fires when people let their roots of love burst into heart-shaped flames. Lips have the look of melted hearts. (Cut me out one if you can.) I know your lips can make things.   Fuck me, he says. Yes, burrow into whatever protection I can give you. I've got this body if you've lost yours. No, really, that's everything I have and it's never been mine. Take me, take this. Before the body loses its willingness to mold, dropping all of its use into the pockets of whoever passes it. You're still making new things, and this body's just old change.   Leave me, he says. No, yes, go. I've been dried up and strung out for too long now. I don't know how to carry a body in the bowl of my hips anymore. I've got a hollow backbone and not much to bet on it now. Sure, leave me, before what this body was catches up with its rendered services, and I'm gone.   And anyway: I never wanted you to be waiting for the clap of air that takes back the space where this blunt instrument hung itself while waiting for the days we could make things together. Once, I even thought that we —.   Meet me, he said. I've never seen you before. But I believe that kindness is supposed to make heavy treads on top of the backbones that have lost the bodies they were meant to carry. So other bodies will follow. Other bodies will do. Everything will be all right. I don’t believe in fear. I am a tool that can unmake itself.

Kate Conte

MY FEET Julieta Salgado "...but I love your feet  only because they walked upon the Earth,  upon the wind and upon the water until they found me." Neruda

Saskia Kahn

I have walked through mud and mule shit At the blinding top of a mountain, Where only volcanic rock and clouds can live. I have run for my life through blazing city streets. I love the feel of cold tiled floors beneath my hot feet. I have slipped, I have missed a step on the stairs. I have stood in front of historic monuments and felt myself forgotten. I have stood before you, bare-breasted and sleepy, And have remembered somber rain forests and cobble stoned streets. Piss-rusted train tracks and seductive roof tops Blood puddles and spilt sugar Bushwick Brockport Macondo Rice fields, black sand, some stage, some indistinct land… And At night When you sleep Your feet like to wrap around mine, And I had so often wondered what it felt like to simply arrive.

ABOUT MOVING Celia Vargas One: The coffee can was misplaced—again. Third time is the charm, except this wasn’t charming. Keith’s grubby hands were feeling the toast, and Kelly was staring, watching the crumbs nesting on his red beard. “The coffee can is misplaced—again.” She felt her tongue say the words and her eyes wrinkle in spite. Despite the fact his eyes said confusion, but just the spite in her face was enough to make Keith drop his toast, cough, and stand up. “Well, that’s fine, but I suggest you find another way to make rent this month, you stuck up bitch.” Two: He had to tell her sometime soon, most probably before Will came to pick up the boxes. Keith was paying him ten bucks, so it was free, sort of. Damn cheap skate friend, charging him just to move empty boxes. Point is he had to tell her now. He wouldn’t miss it, he wanted it, the toast felt too wet. That was weird, toast shouldn’t be wet, and as he touched the wet bread he could feel her eyes burning silent curses at him. He stuffed the piece in his mouth, chewing the soggy toast. Wet bread and soggy toast all day long. “The coffee can is misplaced—again.” That’s what she said, straight through gritted teeth, and that’s all. The six months of building towers and columns for a person who doesn’t even care, who doesn’t even listen. This is where Keith felt enough and he looked at Kelly, and her sour face came undone, and he knew his eyes must have betrayed him. His toast plodded down, he needed to cough, and he stood solely for dramatics. “Well, I suggest you come up with another way to make rent this month, you stuck up bitch.”

Nora Curry

FOR M. Charly Himmel

Carole Ver Eecke

About twenty four, getting older how ineligible scratches and scrawls fracture the missing compound. If I die tomorrow, please excuse me for my suggestive fragile incompetent innuendo. I woke up on the bus with a dick in my face. I’m not blaming anyone only have trouble getting out of bed, go wild for rotgut whiskey. Such conviction, still unbearable. So you decided to have the operation, the same invasive procedure. “You want to talk about deep seeds but can’t even stand the bathroom at night – scalds my tongue all day long!” “Hangs around cold and half drunk!” One. That is your nature and the other bad behavior, killing time. A leather book bound on both sides. Transmutation deafening as the falling ribcage symphony ubiquitous and creepy and I’ll tattoo myself an M on my skin. I’ll tell mom it’s for her. Tell dad it’s his gift. To everyone else it could stand for Myself, only I know it will be for ‘hi M.’

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On behalf of Professor Natov and the English Majors â&#x20AC;&#x2122; â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Counseling Office, thank you for your contributions and support. We could not have done this without you! As always, we are floored by the talent here at Brooklyn College. By the way, what do you think of the font? Love us.