The End of the World – June 2022 by Bennington College

the end of the world

Bennington College

The End of the World Stories, essays, and poems by the 54th Graduating Class of The Bennington Writing Seminars

JUNE 2022

Managing Editor Kerri Goers Fiction Editors Logan Beitmen Lucy Faye Rosenthal Nonfiction Editors Kerri Goers Stephanie Sellars Poetry Editors Claressinka Anderson Krysia Wazny McClain Cover Artwork/Photography Michael Martinec Book Design Ayla Graney © Copyrights retained by all respective contributors.

“I swore when I got into this poem I would convert this sorrow into some kind of honey with the little musics I can sometimes make with these scribbled artifacts of our desolation.” ― Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

Amid both personal and global chaos, we have learned the gift of words. We have learned to create our art under duress and to find beauty in the difficult. We have leaned on our words and they have carried us to places known or imagined. Words have given us the means to reach past ourselves, to what has been, and what can be. We wish to thank the faculty and staff of the Bennington Writing Seminars who have ushered and supported us through this process, and helped us to find creative space during uncertain times.

Contents POETRY | Claressinka Anderson He Sends Me Blue Mountains, a Field Milk Years Manhunt The Wind, What it Does Middle C If I Were There

11 13 15 17 19 21 24

FICTION | Lucy Faye Rosenthal Neither Here nor There

POETRY | Nico Amador On Continuation Bottleneck Sunshine Park Brandon is a Wig Maker Upstate, Damian

37 39 40 42 43

FICTION | James Roseman The Intermediary of Abraham

NONFICTION | Patricia Martin PRIDE

FICTION | Gina Fallas-Rodriguez A Voice The Empress’ Attire

57 60

POETRY | Richard Brait Reading the Spanish Flu, 2020

FICTION | Michele Feeney Like Family

POETRY | Michael Martinec February Unspool Alexandria American Airlines DFW > DTW

81 84 85 89

NONFICTION | Stephanie Sellars Battleships and Billfish

FICTION | Logan Royce Beitmen Shooting Barin Ghosh

FICTION | Meiko Ko The Broken Nose

107

Contents POETRY | Krysia Wazny McClain The Blur Mother and Child I’m Easy A shame about the money In Which I Am Visited by the Ghost of Georgia O’Keeffe

116 118 119 121 122

FICTION | Keli Flynn Davidson Puissance

124

POETRY | Susan Dines Metaphor for Mardah

132

NONFICTION | Claudia Simone Franklin A Cartography of What is Left: A German Lyric Bavaria and Berlin 1945 Berlin, 1945 and 1947, East Kingston, 2015

134 138

NONFICTION | Kerri Goers The Pleiades Everything Past Iron

143 145

Biographies Recommendations

154 160

P OE T RY

He Sends Me Blue Mountains, a Field By Claressinka Anderson

—in the painting we are running somewhere towards a hole where all the people we need to forgive sleep, burrowed below their grim winter grasses, furry they are— we go to pet them, Sorry, we say, we’re late in our forgiving. Come out, come out, we promise our version of the witch is friendly. * I’ve never had a four-hour friend, I mean one I can bear talking on the phone with for that long—Dry January, he tells me. Sure, I say, cocktail in hand. It’s hour four in the witch’s house— probably best for me not to drink.

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It would be better if we were together right now, I say— We’re melancholy anyway, he replies, so at least we’d get to be drunk. Don’t ever let me become someone you’ll need to forgive, I think. For now, I keep my mouth shut. We both know how sweet it is to follow those perfidious crumbs.

Milk This isn’t about how the child suckled, his flushed lips parted, eyes closed in a bliss of nourishment, the smell of his cheek after— This is about the text message she received from a lover years after the final time she breastfed— on her tank top this night, directly over the nipple: the small circular stain. She only notices it later when she brushes her hair in the mirror. The body with its leaked truths startles her in the bathroom light. What else will her body semaphore when she ignores its urges, when she tries to escape

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lust’s crusted remains? She peels off her top, examines the nipple. A terrible thrill, to see the body like this— to accept its rule. She imagines herself, once more, a spraying, dripping, spilling thing. Like the child she once fed, in her there remains a residue—even the risk of such a fullness— Quelling words repeatedly used: erase, conquer, the dreaded make peace with— all seemed viable, possible—but when he would walk through a room, the flash of his neck (just watching him, mind blank): between her legs— the immediate & private betrayal. In the body a desire once known is always carried—canonized. With her own hands at night, in bed, she remembers being touched. All he’d said in the text was how’s it going? This milk she thought long gone.

Years I told you, once, about the artist who sat next to me at the theater— in the dark: the way he stared at my profile instead of the play. There is a lake, he said, inside you. I need to paint it. I laughed when I told you, called him crazy, but when the tide went out, he would observe the rocks, dry, how they listened for water. Night after night he walked my edges, knelt down and drank the silted waters. There, in the littoral zone, a tree grew, its roots emboldened

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by his claiming—each leaf drawn with the cadence of his tongue. Father of my child— I return to you here, to enter the times you didn’t touch me. All those years— When I was a tree, I waited for the wind.

Manhunt I have a friend who kills people. A friend who says I’ll see you in the summer —Inshallah. A friend who creeps into the impossible dark, doing the thing he’s good at. He becomes a mirage, a violence I move through— Years ago, I sat alone in the cinema, bewitched by the gliding horror of Zero Dark Thirty— a winged narrative, it swooped —green death after green death. Which bodies deserve to live? Mine? His? When I walked back into the blinding movie poster hallway—all blaring grins & proclamations of happiness, I recoiled from the onslaught, returned to the body I had understood in the zero hour. I didn’t know him then.

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Now it’s not quite morning, and there he is, running past my pre-dawn window. Later, he might open a door for me, our hands grazing knuckles at breakfast: I’m a good, kind man who kills folks. And there are trees & trees where he runs. And there is snow.

The Wind, What it Does –For M., in memoriam.

The sun behind everything today—in the same way it illuminated the back of your head at the table where your heart stopped, mid-bite. The wind also. Our hair flying everywhere, mine a totality across my face. The last time I hugged you, I called it insufficient. True, given it was the last time I saw your teeth flash with laughter. The sun was behind us then too, as was the wind— the leaves like dumb birds

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flying at the glass. We watched their roiling, clueless beauty. How quickly we told each other our punishable secrets. Now, a father holds his boys. Your boys. The smallest one, not yet understanding his grief, looks out at us, at his mother in the ground, and smiles.

Middle C He came with the piano, that adult-making thing, his body: anchor & hummingbird, stoic in my house, hands quick & weighted on the chords of me. When I think of his arms, swarms of white flowers river through his blueberry veins— needled notes, played high to a god only he knows. * I, too, have watched the descent of my body—the slide. I, too, know devotion as a subterranean shade of blue. * Consider how much the word of comes into your poems. Consider, also, how much light. * When he left that night, it was my capability for excess— winged & gripping—that held me close through the hours.

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Not just the moth seeks the light; termites too become ugly with desire— they disrobe, shed their wings for their nuptial flight. * Capability—consider its use in the context of love. Consider, also, the word flight. * Will we make a new colony— of notes, in sweat, in angles of light that hurry the bed? When his fingers go inside me he finds middle C. I want to disappear, he says— into you. * Consider the word disappear— its use in the place of love. Consider also, disappearance. * I’ve spent most of my life running from the ways in which my body & mind attend to their consistent failures. *

Middle C

Consider the role oblivion plays in your poems. Consider, also, how much fiction. * A body that doesn’t do as it’s supposed, takes what it can— chronic / desire / organism. * Consider the breaks—what happens, if they’re removed? * thebodythebodythebodythebody * Consider the term body— is it being used as an excuse for selfishness? & the word disappearing— can it be used as a substitute for living? I want another chance at disappearing too—this time, if only into wonder.

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If I Were There Mostly, I had to admit, I live in the subjunctive. –Rosmarie Waldrop

Possessive, today, of the I that belongs to you— my wet thighs in the guest room, your flat palm a back & forth— slow, rhythmic—pressed between them. Why say you’re leaving? Tomorrow, you will require the statue’s thighs visible from your window, walk down to the cemetery, make an exquisite fist for its legs. Two people can be meant for one another. And that’s all it means. Two statues can stare at each other’s lips through eternity. Is that what you want me to tell you? Here, the sand surrenders to my feet, the way our bodies indent themselves to the other in the dark. The man next to me reads a book—a map of America unfolded on his lap. He smiles, tells me: Good Morning— It’s 6pm, I don’t want to go home. I want to be unaccompanied, shadowless, in the warm night air.

F ICT ION

Neither Here nor There By Lucy Faye Rosenthal

I met Devin in a basement in Tivoli, between walls of pink fiberglass and a concrete floor that was sticky with spilled Genesee. We were watching a three-piece local band sweating and playing simple, spirited punk music beneath the cool glow of a work lamp. They looked like they were around my age, early twenties, and so did Devin. He was standing near me in the small crowd. I noticed his t-shirt first and his tattoo second. The shirt was vertically-striped — mint green and salmon and white — and the tattoo was just below the inner ditch of his elbow — a line of text rendered in hand-poked dots of black ink: Nobody broke your heart. I leaned into him, gesturing toward his forearm. “You broke your own, ‘cause you can’t finish what you start?” He smiled and nodded. After the band packed it up, Devin and I drank upstairs in the kitchen until it got late, and I walked him out to his car. It was an old navy-blue Volvo slathered in bumper stickers — I Stand with Planned Parenthood and No Farms No Food and Radio Catskill — and when he kissed me, he held me as if he were

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about to tumble off the face of the earth. I was working as a gallery attendant at a modern art museum that was a thirty-minute Metro North ride away from my apartment in Poughkeepsie. It was a large brick building overlooking the Hudson River that had once been a cardboard factory in the 1930s, and it exhibited the type of art that made people want to come up from New York City just to stand in front of it and take pictures of themselves. Neon sculptures made of plastic tubes filled with lime and periwinkle and pomegranate-colored gas, labyrinthine arrangements of sheet metal that stood over thirty feet tall and folded in on themselves like perverted Fibonacci spirals. I wore an all-black uniform and an ID badge and a walkie talkie, and I roamed through the building, standing at watch, for eight hours a day. The museum’s visitors were always fashionable and beautiful and clean. I liked studying their outfits. I also liked studying which pieces they took the most photos of, and which ones they walked right by without stopping. On my first day of work, I had been assigned to watch over a cherry-colored Chevrolet pickup truck parked in the center gallery. The truck itself was the piece of art, and my job was to make sure that nobody touched it, or even took pictures of it, as per the artist’s dying wishes to never have any of his work be photographed. It had something to do with the phenomenology of the in-person viewing experience. I also had to watch for visitors standing too close to the truck, because apparently human breath and body heat would melt the red paint. There were so many ways that I needed to be scrutinizing other people that I had never before thought possible. All day long, in every room of the museum, I overheard the other gallery attendants

Neither Here nor There

approach visitors with the same warnings — You’re too close. Please step back. Please don’t touch. Sometimes a polite whisper, sometimes a desperate shout, echoing throughout the airy, concrete atria across which we were all stationed at various posts. Imposing this sort of capricious order onto the bodies of strangers was the crux of the job, and I was very, very bad at it. I was soft-spoken, slow to react, and I hated telling other people what to do. The managers would call me over my walkie talkie to chastise me about some visitor’s infraction that I had failed to call out, like somebody’s sneaker edging too close to a piece and breaking the invisible three-foot distance that I had to make sure everybody constantly maintained. It made sense to me that nobody was allowed to touch the art, but I never understood why it mattered if someone stood even an inch too close. Every piece was enormous; the human bodies were easily the smallest things in the building. How was it that the big, unfeeling objects were so vulnerable, and the tiny, alive ones such a liability? What was the true danger of warm breath on car paint? On that first day, when I was walking past the truck exhibit on my way to another post, I saw an old man with his hands clasped behind his back, standing nose to nose with the driver’s side window of the red Chevy — squaring up, staring down its insides — and nobody said a word. Devin had pierced ears and painted nails, and though he spoke about his childhood with humility, almost shyness, I got the sense that he had already lived a really big life. Manhattan prep school, friends with famous people’s kids, everything. I went over to his house on the first unbearably hot day of the summer. It was a big A-frame cottage in Woodstock, with mahogany floors and high, vaulted ceilings. We walked to the

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Hannaford’s down the street to pick up pasta and tomatoes and basil for dinner, and as the AC nipped our bare ankles, I thought about how strolling through a grocery store with someone really made me feel like I was really with them. It was a nice grocery store; I had never been there before. Devin said that it had been here for a while, nine years, although he remembered the locals staged a protest before it was built. “They stood in the lot holding signs that said Can’t Afford Hannaford’s,” he said. “Wow.” I watched Devin ponder the wall of LaCroix in front of us. “You were here nine years ago? Didn’t you say you grew up in Manhattan?” His mother was a painter, he had told me, and a successful one at that, I had gleaned for myself once I Googled her name. She had raised Devin and his little brother on the Upper West Side. His father didn’t seem to be in the picture, but Devin hadn’t told me anything about that. “I did,” he said. “But we’ve been coming up to Woodstock since I was a little kid.” I inferred, then, with a wonderment at why I hadn’t realized it sooner, that the house he invited me to was his family’s vacation house. I didn’t voice this realization, because I knew that would have been embarrassing, though I couldn’t tell if I would have felt more embarrassed for myself or for him. At the checkout, Devin suddenly and clumsily divided the groceries into two halves, wordlessly implying that I was to pay for one of them. Of course, I hadn’t assumed that Devin was going to pay for everything just because he was a man and I was a woman and we were probably going to have sex within the next few hours. But I always maintained an unspoken, This is my treat, you can get the next one sort of quid-pro-quo with all of my friends, and now I worried that this mindset of mine was simply a working-

Neither Here nor There

person’s thing that Devin didn’t understand. I felt uneasy as we walked out of the store with our paper bags, into the dusty, humid sun, but there was a certain hierarchy to the concerns that lay in front of me in that moment, and I decided that the boy wanting to fuck me was at the top of it. I cooked for us back at his place, stirring onions with one hand and drinking white wine straight from the bottle with the other. Devin turned on the surround-sound speakers. I swayed tipsily to the music until he came over and took the bottle from my hand, luring me away from the stove. I followed him to the middle of the living room, and we kissed and stumbled on top of the carpet and tripped over his cat. All of the blinds were up; nobody’s eyes to hide from. Just woods and darkness and little stars for miles in every direction. Afterward, pressed together in his twin-sized bed, I stared at his pale forearm, bluish in the darkness of his bedroom. He had ended up being a little too gentle with me, but it was less like tenderness and more like terror. Every time I got on top of him, he would smile and say something that alluded towards intimacy and ownership — There she is, or that’s my girl — but I could see the fear and the distance in his eyes, even with all of the lights shut off, the look on his face that screamed, This is it from me. What more do you want? I preferred my weekday shifts at the museum. Especially the mornings, when I could stand in a gallery alone, or with the few polite retirees who happened to walk through, and watch the early golden light drip down the cold metal limbs of the sculptures, quiet and serene. The weekend shifts were chaotic — full of tourists, minor celebrities, families with strollers and screaming children — and the managers put extra pressure on

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us to sell memberships and solicit donations. Weekends also meant group tours. The tour guides were on staff too, but they only came in to give their twenty-minute Saturday tour, get paid a hundred dollars for it, and leave. I was stationed in one of the front galleries when a notoriously eccentric tour guide, a middle-aged French man in a seersucker suit, brought a group through. He stopped them in front of one of the more popular sculptures: a row of glowing white halogen light tubes stacked next to one another in a line of ascending height. “What is it?” a visitor said. I had heard these same words, with varying degrees of desperation, thousands of times already, about every piece of work in the museum. “Great question,” the guide said. “But instead of wondering what it is, what if we considered how it is what it is?” Years from now, I would learn that this tour guide had lifted this line of questioning straight from Susan Sontag. But I didn’t know that now. Now, I was enrapt. “But how do we know how it is what it is if we don’t know what it is?” another visitor said. “Well, the sculpture is called Monument,” the tour guide said. “What do we think the monument is?” Silence. The visitors stared at the guide, waiting for an answer. Admittedly, it didn’t look like anything, monumental or not. I could try to pull out some of the art history jargon I had amassed over the past few years, but I was tired from standing all day. I just wanted to stare at it and see a pretty light. “Time,” the guide said. “It’s a monument to time itself. To the time between when these lights were first assembled and when they will inevitably burn out. To every time these bulbs have had to be replaced. To the day, in the very near future,

Neither Here nor There

actually, when there will be no bulbs left to replace them. Not a lot of factories produce halogen lights anymore.” I looked for reactions on the faces of the visitors, but I couldn’t glean any. A few people had already peeled off from the pack and had started wandering the museum themselves. “Time is the cathedral we are building here,” the tour guide said, as he led the group out of the gallery and into the next one. I watched them funnel out and thought about how I could probably fall in love with someone just by watching them wordlessly walk away from a tour group, because I would never, ever have that type of audacity. Devin and I had been seeing each other for about a month when he told me that he was going to take a road trip, by himself. We were in his backyard, drinking IPAs in front of a bonfire. I was sitting on his lap, and he was sitting on a bright red Adirondack chair. He wanted to drive out west, go camping for a few weeks. He wanted to see the Grand Canyon. “What about your job?” I said. Devin waited tables at a vegan restaurant downtown. Just for the fun of it, I supposed. “I quit,” he said. “Why? I thought you loved it there.” He shrugged. “I didn’t want to have any more responsibilities.” I looked into the leaping flames, not sure what this meant. “What about us?” My eyes hurt. “I feel good about us,” he said. “But I wouldn’t want to hold you back while I’m gone, or anything. Like, live your life, you know?” He asked me if I wanted to spend the night. It was nearly two in the morning, and I had a forty-minute drive back, but I suddenly wanted to be alone, so I left. When I got home, I

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ran a bath that was much too hot and screamed like an animal when I sat down in the tub, the water burning my skin, the sound of my own voice shocking me. My reaction, maybe, was out of surprise more than out of pain. I didn’t think it would hurt so much. Devin drove out to the desert and I went back to work. I tried to talk more with the visitors when they walked by me. The long shifts went by faster when I could fill them with conversation, and I felt sick and wrong inside when visitors avoided me as if I were wallpaper. Here I was, living my life. The other gallery attendants tried to warn me about not letting visitors push me around, but I sort of liked it when they pushed me around. Not in the exact way that my coworkers were talking about, but in the way that the visitors could use me, make me into whatever they wanted me to be for the sake of their experience. I could be one of the things that they could touch. I was stationed in the center gallery at some point in the middle of the day. I didn’t know exactly what time it was; I had gotten into the habit of leaving my phone in my staff room all day so that I wasn’t waiting to feel it buzz in my pocket. It made the day go by faster. I walked around the perimeter of the big center room, inspecting the long, color-blocked painting that stretched around all four of its walls. A group of visitors sat down on the soft gray couch and stretched out, taking in the glorious expanse of the painting. My legs ached with jealousy. I wanted to feel what it must’ve felt like to collapse onto that couch. Watching other people’s tired bodies felt like being let in on a secret. I was definitely starting to know and see too much. At the end of the workday, I took my phone out of my locker and checked it. No messages from Devin, but he had posted

Neither Here nor There

a picture of the Grand Canyon on Instagram. It had already been two weeks. I wasn’t sure when he was coming back, so I called him and asked. “I don’t want to bother you,” I said, not really knowing why. “But I miss you.” Devin said he didn’t know when he would be home. I told him it was hard for me to know what to do, or how to feel about him, if he couldn’t give me an answer. Then he got upset. “I just had to quit a job that I actually really enjoyed, and that was hard for me,” he said. “I could use some sympathy from you.” I felt a sharp pain, somewhere between my stomach and lower chest. “Nobody forced you to quit.” This happened a lot when I talked to Devin, where I got so confused that it left me at a loss for words. “It’s a huge privilege that you could quit, to just go on indefinite vacation.” When I felt lost for words, I usually defaulted to harsh ones. Devin didn’t have a response. He was tired, he had spotty service, and he needed to pitch his tent before the sun set. We said goodbye. A crew of machines came and started construction on the east side of the museum. Power drills and hammering and scraping — ceaseless, and impossibly loud. I asked my favorite coworker Tyler what the construction was for, and he said they were replacing the mortar between every single brick on the entire east wall. I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. It sounded like the most ridiculous and time-consuming task in the world, but given the way things were at this place — the painstaking lengths to which we all had to go to preserve minutiae at the expense of our sanity — I wouldn’t have been surprised if he was being serious.

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“How often do they do that?” I asked. “Only once every like, fifty years,” Tyler said. His eyes were wide. After the closing announcement rang over my walkie talkie that day, I walked through the eastern gallery on my way back to the staff room. I wanted to see the Mary Corse pieces again before I went home. I had seen the same exhibit of hers a couple of years ago at the Whitney, long before it arrived at our museum. It was a collection of paintings that were varnished with a layer of microbeads. From a distance, they all looked like plain white canvases, but when you got up close, you could see that the museum lights were casting the shadow of your own body onto the beads, creating an iridescent halo of light that moved with you. There was also a dark corner room, with a white lightbox plugged into the wall, so small and cloaked in shadow that it made you feel like you had it all to yourself. I felt different standing in front of the glowing white prism alone and in my work uniform. I stared at it, letting the light burn my eyes because there was nobody there to stop me from doing so. On one of my first days of work, Tyler had shown me this little room and asked if I noticed the charred, noxious smell. I had. The year before there had been an electrical problem with the prism and the room had caught fire. They had to evacuate the museum. Even though the smell was still there, we weren’t supposed to tell any visitors that something like that had ever happened. When I stood in the little room now, I was boxed in with the sculpture so tightly that I could feel it radiating heat onto my skin. It was clear to me how easily it could catch fire again, if any one small thing were to go wrong, and I knew, then, that Devin in the tent in the desert did not feel the same way about me that Devin in the A-frame house in the woods did. They felt

Neither Here nor There

to me like two different people — they talked differently, treated me differently, had different levels of patience for me and my inane questions, my infantile wants. The one solace that I held onto, as this realization sunk heavily onto my upper chest, was that I, no matter where I was in space, remained the same. This room would be my cathedral, I decided. In front of the white light, I could see the truth, and the things that the light was showing me were things that stung. On my walk from the museum to the train station, Devin called. He asked me if I was happy. “I am,” I said. But it sounded desperate. “I mean, I think I am. Aren’t you?” “I don’t know,” he said. “I feel a lot of animosity coming from you. It doesn’t feel good.” His voice felt far away. The train pulled in, dredging up a cold wind. “I have to get this train,” I said, wanting to back out of this conversation and never return to it. He told me to call him back when I got home. I boarded the train, sat down, and curled my arms around my knees, trying to make myself as small as possible. It was a disgusting type of summer day, the air heavy and wet. I kept picturing myself calling Devin back and hearing him say that he was on his way home after all, that we could give things a real shot once he got back to New York. But I didn’t believe that, not really. The train heaved alongside the river; the distant buildings shielded by fog. I had never seen the Hudson look that ugly before. By the time I arrived home, the sun was back out. The honeythick golden hour sun was melting over the brick buildings, but I knew it was too late. I sat on the back steps of my apartment, not wanting to go inside and have to say hello to my roommates.

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I was in a strange position, one wherein I had the chance to delay the inevitable, where I could choose the exact moment when I wanted this to happen. I thought about what it would be like when I finally dialed Devin’s number and heard his voice. From my end he would be able to hear car horns and unruly shouts from the street. On his end, I would only hear birds chirping. Crystal-clear, as if they were perched on his shoulder or flitting around in his lap. I pictured him sitting in his backyard, in the red Adirondack chair, his grass more lush than mine, his house emptier and quieter and cleaner, with the speakers and the smell of firewood. He would take painfully long pauses between his words, and the pauses would just give me even more time to focus on those birds. He would tell me I couldn’t be angry at him for things he couldn’t control, and that my anger made him very, very uncomfortable. Then, I would start to get, ironically, very angry, not so much at the things he would say, but at that slow gentleness with which he would say them. As if his being soft and vague could render this whole disappointment entirely imperceptible; could render me, by contrast, a maniac. And so, I would stay quiet. I could give Devin that much — he was always so good at shutting me up. The loudest thing of all, by far, would be the birds.

P OE T RY

On Continuation By Nico Amador “…vagueness makes the future conceivable.” –Etel Adnan

Egrets nuisance the hour, shaping themselves into question marks. They hover outside in the branches. You curl under the damp sheets like an egret, unresolved but familiar, the morning emptying dream after dream into your sleep. I prefer it this way, with the fog on the water, the residual of what’s yet to be delineated in the sober view. Last night we stood in the kitchen as the storm electrified the pitch dark every few seconds: the strip of beach, our two cars, bordering pines illuminated in stuttered exposures as if in error, as if the present couldn’t hold us in any kind of peace. I wanted then what I always want,

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my body pressed into some approximation of yours, released with the assurance that I’d be claimed again, returned to. There’s no saying this. Not here. With you, I’ve learned what I can have by not asking. I’ve stopped and the warm possibility of you stays in the balance, the moon above the earth’s material blue shelf.

Bottleneck Yours was an intelligent throat. A place. An unfaithful transcription: the snow covering an empty church yard. Next to the house where we made ourselves breakfast. Where we made ourselves a coalition. A fuck in the guest room. A moment of nakedness where we disclosed or at least alluded to previous wounds. The early light severing. The us that we weren’t. Part of my argument is that the estrangement of any two things gives them a likeness. It’s not a new idea. My friends all resemble each other, same as the green shadows that fall under ledges, the rabbit mirroring the hawk overhead. Where am I going with this? If you were here I know you’d explain it better than I could. That the statue and the cemetery are both alone with their memories. That we wanted them gone. We wanted them banished.

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Sunshine Park Week before last, I looked at the boyfriend I had and said, don’t plan the rest of your life around this. The boyfriend I wanted said the same to me. I traded out my apartment for a smaller one, for fewer possessions, less talk. It was absolution in the non-religious sense. Without attachment, I claim nothing, owe nothing. I’d dreamt the snowy streets we’d made between each other and now I turn and let illusion vanish in their dusky margins like an unleashed dog. I let it go so I could know myself in its absence. The truckers, the slow busses and I take the same stretch past the Holiday Inn, the Big Y and around a screwy curve at the town center. A shabby corner promises nothing but a view above the river’s high-walled flood chute, a place to stand and watch the ice swim, more and more passing by the glittering minute. And look, if I refused to see clearly, if I went too long believing one thing was another, it wasn’t ignorance but habit, a way I once applied myself

Sunshine Park

so that the most limiting facts might also be extraordinary. It’s how I lived, what my circumstances required and if that’s true, what’s truer now — the difference of these middle years — is what I can admit, what I accept and name plainly: the unlovely growth, the current winter, a run of days bright as they are cold.

NICO A M A DOR

Brandon is a Wig-Maker Sunny in Los Angeles. Boulevard said to different effect than street. The mood languorous as a poolside brunette, lime trees reaching over the fence to drop their fragrant leaves at her feet. The afternoon is full of pictures, the intersections full of noise. Delivery men on motorized bicycles and someone’s daughter dressing the mannequin in the shop beneath the studio, accessorizing, the smog too adding glamor, a pink enhancement at dusk. I’ve learned to think of beauty as something claimed, confidence as borrowed, half-worn, half-spoken — energy, I guess. A plastic bird of paradise, a new mid-century sofa. Not pretending but not-not pretending. A posture toward that question: What words to use? His hand on my leg, my body spelling out its preferences. Chandelier, I tell him, pomelo, aqueduct, anything that turns you on.

Upstate, Damian Warns about the copperheads outside the house. Says watch your step. Early apples rot, soft side down, drawing hornets. When he leans in, his taste is spoiled milk and bread, roughly, summer but adolescent. Birches flash. Is that an invitation? He reaches overhead to test his weight against one, unspools his rope, a long, inarticulable thought. You stand there, held in the foreground like the jay feathers and bleached rabbit skulls you once lifted from the creek bed, their draw distinct from the animated whole. If each part of us is an object, is that an invitation? Sun smears your face with its sticky light. His mouth finds yours again, his hands tie knots around your wrists. A branch drops low, a game suggested. Hard to tell which player claims power, who concedes it. Your deliberate breast, the curve of your ribs demand one thing, his rooting fingers another. Where he touches, he must touch you. Whatever he touches, you give it up.

F ICT ION

The Intermediary of Abraham By James Roseman

Although both brothers are in the house, neither is in the living room, which is where one traditionally sits when sitting shiva. Donald is in his room doing push-ups. Phillip is in the bathroom, alternating between scrubbing the porcelain cover of the toilet tank and snorting lines of cocaine off it. There’s a rip of fire up his nostril and then clumps of baking soda bitterness at the back of his throat. He was twelve the first time he heard of cocaine. A fat cop named Officer Rene had come to homeroom to tell them all about drugs. “This one is no good,” he’d said, “makes you all alert and twitchy.” Rene had said it and winked at the substitute teacher before clicking the slide projector forward. Alert and twitchy. Bullshit. A cup of coffee makes Phillip alert and twitchy. This is more like digging his fingernails knuckle-deep into the nape of his neck and yanking out fistfuls of long knotty fibers between the gaps in his vertebrae and jamming the frayed nerve endings directly into the terminals of a fucking car battery. The world

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goes sharp and clear and for a few beautiful minutes everything ticks like a clock. Phillip sprays every surface of the toilet until it goes sudsy with chemicals and then scrubs with the rough side of a sponge. His reflection stares at him in the mirror, slack-jawed and menacing. He hates that reflection, how it looks nothing like him, and he remembers that you’re not supposed to have uncovered mirrors when sitting shiva so he punches it as hard as he can. There’s a certain beauty in the duality of a broken thing, something whole that is irrevocably changed. And there is beautiful certainty in the knowledge — not opinion, but fact — that the thing is worse for it, that it can never go back to being unbroken again. Phillip likes this idea. He likes it so much he carries on punching even when the mirror’s reflection is free from its frame and lies in splinters on the floor and in the flesh between his knuckles. He moves on to the family photographs hanging on the wall and his fist goes through the frame of one of Mom’s portraits that Donald forgot to set out in the living room with the flowers. The whole thing rips off the wall and hangs off his forearm like a wristwatch. The basin is still smudgy so Phillip jerks a fresh antibacterial wipe from its sachet and feels a bit funny like he can’t feel his toes when the door kicks in and there’s Donald, fists clenched, teeth grating, screaming at Phillip for getting blood everywhere. The words go to mush and the world turns sharply to the left and the tile floor rushes up to meet his head and he hears his brother yell and then feels himself being lifted. He thinks that feels nice, the lifting, the being carried away. If only his brother would stop shouting. They strap him down and there’s a man in white who puts

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a needle in Phillip’s arm and there’s a sensation of drowning in cold water. Phillip looks through the bubbles and sees his mother standing beside him, and there’s G-d, and he thinks that there ought to be a hyphen there because that’s what they taught him in Hebrew School so long ago, that you weren’t supposed to spell it out. “Should I call you Hashem? Adonai?” “You can call me Dr. Rosenthal,” G-d replies. The hyphen is very important to remember. G-d, just like that. And G-d tells Donald to take Phillip to the mountain Moriah and sacrifice him there and Donald agrees and tells the doctor that they will leave straight from the hospital and get Phillip checked into a place called Tranquility. There’s an aunt up in Vermont nearby that can look after him. Phillip opens his mouth to argue but only bubbles come out and the current of the freezing water is too strong to keep his eyes open so it becomes easier to submit than resist and the blackness takes him. # “Will they have a Kelly’s Roast Beef up there, you think?” Donald chews at his thumbnail, his jaw snakes dancing. “Donald. Did you hear me?” “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know.” Phillip adjusts his right hand, the one that’s all wrapped up in gauze, so that it rests on the back of his neck. Having it pinned back there helps him resist the urge to stretch his fingers. He’s been told by Dr. Rosenthal that if he stretches his fingers then he’ll rip his stitches. That’s what junkies do apparently, they rip their stitches. “I won’t stay if they don’t have a Kelly’s. That’s overboard. You can’t really expect me to stay up in bumfuck nowhere if there’s not even a Kelly’s.”

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Donald switches lanes to the off-ramp and the engine of the beat-up sedan coughs as he downshifts. The headlights light up an exit sign, green and reflective and stark against the darkness. Three more hours to Burlington. It’ll be all freeways from here. Donald takes his right hand off the steering wheel and stretches. He twists the hand until the wrist pops. He repeats the motion with his left arm. Phillip puts his head against the cold window and cups his hands around his eyes but it’s too dark to see anything. There’s a noise like a quarter bouncing off a tin can. “It’s raining,” he says to the window. They’re on the freeway for two more exits before the next rest stop. They pull up next to the gas pump and Phillip reaches for his door handle. “Stay in the car,” Donald says. “I just wanna stretch.” “I don’t care. Stay in the car.” “Well I don’t want to stay in the car.” “Well I don’t care.” Phillip stays in the car. He watches Donald pump gas and his stomach gurgles. The rest stop is part of a larger complex so Donald parks the car and they go in together. It’s one of those food courts Phillip has only ever seen in the middle of the night when half the lights are off and all of its restaurants are closed with metal grates and padlocks. The Mickey D’s is still lit-up even though there’s nobody at the counter. Donald raps his knuckles on the counter until a pimple-faced zombie yawns out of a side door. The kid is so stoned that he can barely focus his bleary eyes on them which makes Phillip’s gauzed-up hand itch something fierce. They write their order

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down on a napkin and the kid still comes back with the wrong amount of food. Donald orders three chicken burgers but gets four and Phillip orders a chocolate milkshake that never comes and a small order of fries. They sit in silence and eat. Donald vivisects his burgers, leaving a discarded pile of buns and ketchup and chicken breading on the paper wrapper. Phillip picks at his fries and looks around the rest area. There are a few other chain restaurants and in the corner is what looks like a family-run Chinese joint. It’s so out of place that Phillip rubs his eyes, like he might be looking at the wrong side of a Burger King or something, but sure enough, there it is. “Do you remember that time we went with Mom to Gourmet Garden when we were kids and they gave me the learning chopsticks with the little bit of paper rolled up in the bottom and the rubber band around the backside of them?” Donald shakes his head no and stuffs another bit of dissected chicken patty into his mouth. “I convinced her that I’d made the learning chopsticks myself. She made the manager come out from the back to show them off and she even offered to sell them the patent for them.” “That sounds like Mom.” “But it was theirs. Like, the manager knew the restaurant had provided them. He just didn’t say anything.” There’s a clanging of pots from somewhere inside the kitchen and then a tinkling of glass. “I’m sorry,” Phillip says into his fries. Donald looks up from his food, a piece of white meat stuck to his bottom lip. “This,” Phillip says, and motions around him. “But you don’t need to send me away to rehab, come on. I took too much,

The Intermediary of A braham

sure. Everybody takes too much sometimes. I got a little out of control. I don’t belong up there with those people. I’m not like them.” Donald stares at Phillip and sips from his plastic cup of water and swallows and then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He breathes in and breathes out. His fists are clenched. “I don’t know what to do except for this.” # The rain gets pretty bad and neither of them needs to vocalize why driving at night in the rain reminds them of Mom, so Phillip knows sort of subconsciously that they’re going to turn into the motel just before the blinker comes on. There’s a man in a poncho with a cardboard sign and a dog in the parking lot. His cheek is smeared with something black. His teeth are yellow. “Change? Please, change?” Phillip flinches as he sidesteps around him. “No, sorry.” Donald talks to a sleepy looking woman at the front desk and gets them set up in a room so tight the door hits the bed when it opens. “You’re not going anywhere, right?” Donald pulls off one sock and folds it and then the other. “Not gonna sneak off or anything?” Phillip shakes his head no. Donald slaps his wallet onto the nightstand next to the car keys and pulls off his jeans and folds them, sliding them underneath his other clothes so that they stand in a neat stack. He picks up the wallet and keys and finds a safe in the wardrobe and throws them in. There are four beeps as he enters a code and he closes the metal door. It doesn’t beep a fifth time. “You didn’t hit the button to lock the — ”

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“Look,” he interrupts, “it’s nothing personal.” “It’s all right,” Phillip says. He opens his mouth to say something else and closes it instead. Donald gets into bed and flips the light switch. He watches Phillip until his eyes flutter shut and his meaty head sinks into the pillow and then he starts snoring. Phillip lies on his bed and he’s so cold he’s shivering but there’s no way he’s getting under the shrink-wrapped duvet in some grimy motel so he just lies there on top of it shaking and staring at the ceiling. He can just make out these dark brown blotches like malignant skin tumors, like the whole structure is rotting from the inside out. The wallpaper is peeling. He scratches at his scalp and it only itches more. The skin flakes off and gathers under his fingernails. Phillip pretends that he heard five beeps from the safe, not four, and that then the safe whirred as the lock engaged. But he hadn’t and it didn’t. He pretends that the car keys are locked up and that Donald isn’t a heavy sleeper and that there isn’t enough cash in that wallet to leave Donald bus fare back to Boston if his car were to go missing and then Phillip tries to unimagine what even that bus fare could score on the street and how many hours it’s been. There’s a standard-issue hotel alarm clock with glowing red block text on the night stand: 22:09. He slowly stands in the narrow space between the beds. He takes a cautious step towards the wardrobe. There’s a thrash from the bed and he freezes. Donald’s thick arms shoot out at awkward angles and his breath goes ragged. Phillip thinks it’s sort of funny how his strait-laced brother turns into a wind-up toy when the lights go off but then he hears a throaty sniffle and when he looks over at Donald, the red light from the alarm clock catches off tears coming down his face. Phillip sits on Donald’s

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bed and puts a hand on his brother’s shoulder. He doesn’t know why he does this. “Shhh,” he whispers, “it’s okay.” “I-I-I-” “It’s okay Donald, just shut up and go back to sleep.” “Where am I?” Donald mumbles. Phillip sits on his brother’s bed facing the hotel room door in the darkness and he tries not to think about getting high and he tries not to think about the car keys and he tries not to think about what a fucking disappointment his mother would think he is and he tries not to look around because when he looks around at this ramshackle hotel room he thinks it should just be torn down or forgotten but that it’s kind of like him in that way, and that if he were a hotel he too would be beyond “fixer” and well into “raze and rebuild” territory. Phillip stretches the fingers of his right hand and feels the dull rip of his stitches and a thick warmth spread underneath the gauze. He sits on Donald’s bed and looks at the clock. It says four minutes have passed since he checked it last. It feels like four hours. A car drives past their window and lights up Donald’s face through a gap in the blinds. He clutches a pillow to his chest. His hulking frame looks almost small when he’s asleep. He looks so peaceful alone. A dog barks in the parking lot. Phillip hears something like the bleat of a trumpet.

NON F ICT ION

PRIDE By Patricia Martin

The day came when I was ready to step forward and claim my identity as the parent of a transgender youth. It was the day of the Chicago Pride Parade, June 2016. I woke early and made a sign to carry. The sign was a riff on the I heart NY logo. I wrote with giant magic markers: I (heart) my trans child. I colored the heart in with rainbow colors. A little corny, I thought. But it was my last sheet of poster board; it would have to do. Texting one of the members of my trans-parent support group, I let her know I was heading to the meet up spot. I stuffed a backpack full of sunscreen and water bottles and burbled my way to the car. By the time I arrived, people were lined up waiting to march. It was still morning, but the heat was already bearing down. Everywhere I looked was an explosion of color. Floats were festooned with rainbow archways made of balloons. Flashy dancers, drill teams, men wearing stilettos and lace corsets — it was like being backstage at a Tim Burton send up of Vegas. I’d promised my friend, Kit, that I’d find her. Swimming past men in hoop-skirted ball gowns and feather headdresses,

PR IDE

past the Women in the Trades marching band and a gay politicians’ float, I made my way to the Lambda Legal Defense Fund megafloat. There, Kit stood at the prow, arms akimbo. I waved. She saw me and gave a loud whoop, popping two thumbs up. In any direction it was a flotilla of reverie. Suddenly, police whistles blared, and cops whizzed by on bikes signaling us to get rolling. I found my group and stuck close to the middle of the street, not sure what to expect on the periphery. As we snaked through the streets of Boystown, I held up my sign a little higher. People shouted to me. A bevy of queens up in a highrise balcony got my attention and blew kisses at me. I scanned the onlookers. Teenage kids with acne and braces, old dandies with rainbow ties, all waved and cheered us on. Young mothers held up their toddlers who clutched little rainbow flags in their tiny fists. The cacophony was deafening, and I couldn’t make out what people were shouting. But they were smiling. All of them. An anthropologist I once worked with taught me the axiom that in no country, province, or village anywhere in the world are the upturned corners of the mouth a sign of menace. We turned down Broadway, the parade slowing to a crawl as bumptious floats stuttered around the corner. I was edged to the curb, where a boy saw my sign. He looked to be 12 or 13. Hollering above the din, he shouted hoarsely, “You, lady, hey you.” Pointing at me he pushed his way through the crowd. I moved toward him so he wouldn’t have to keep yelling. “You, yeah, you!” I stepped closer. “You’re a good mother,” he said. I lifted my sunglasses to meet his eyes, long enough to see the kid was crying a little. I thanked him and gave him a wobbly smile. “Where are you from?” I asked. “Southern Indiana, ma’am,” he said.

PATR ICI A M A RTIN

“Are you heading home after the parade? Or do you plan to stay?” “I’m not sure,” he answered timidly. “Listen, you go home or at least someplace safe. You promise me,” I said gravely. A grin curled up the corner of his face and the marchers swept me along until he was out of sight. It’s hard to imagine that parents kick their gay teens out of the family home in this day and age. But every year, scores of gay and transgender young people arrive in Chicago seeking safe haven. Living on the streets they soon become prey, a fate I couldn’t imagine for this sweet-faced boy. Marching along the next few blocks I was grateful for my sunglasses. They made a gutter to catch whatever ran down my face — sweat or tears, or both; I could no longer distinguish. The heat was staggering. The blocks stretched on, and I was down to my last bottle of water, which was warm. Sometime later, I can’t say when, we came upon a crowd of spectators holding signs with hateful messages. The protestors shouted with contorted faces and shook their fists, condemning us for our sins. There were no upturned corners on any mouths. Looking tense, the police lined the curb standing shoulder to shoulder to form a safety barrier. I lifted my sign. The crowd thundered. My chest pounded. Everything was reeling. Then I hoisted it as high as my arms could reach. More jeers. The next thing I recall is throwing my head back to let loose a howl that shook my body. I didn’t look at any of the other trans-parents in my group, this was just me now. From my belly I gathered up another bellowing howl. I was a wolf, now. Again, louder. Pumping my sign in the air, I roared at the protestors. Each howl a soaring primal release of all my petty agonies, my

PR IDE

tormented fears about who I was or wasn’t as a mother, all my misplaced anxiety over my child’s decision to change genders. The mob had given me permission to unleash an angry shadow of myself. But I wasn’t thinking that at the time. I was doing exactly what felt natural to me: standing in the middle of a street in Chicago in broad daylight, howling like an animal. Later that day, my son Henry and I planned to meet at a pub near the parade’s end point. Nine months into his gender transition, I was curious to see how he was doing. Having taken a summer job at a grocery store to help with college costs, he had to miss the parade for the first time in years. My phone juddered. “On train.” “K” “WRU?” “Street in front of pub” Cool (emoji) Waiting in front of the old brownstone tavern for Henry to arrive, I rested my sign on the iron fence and sat down on the stoop. When I sat, the full weight of the day, the crowd, the heat, the affirmation, the zaniness, the conflict; it was all wrung from me at once. Looking down at my legs, I saw they were sunburnt and streaked with dirt. “Mom!” Henry called from across the street. There he stood, waving excitedly and holding a bouquet of flowers. He looked so different; his shoulders seemed broader. As he jogged across the street, I noticed his gait was more masculine. Smiling, he handed me the bouquet. “Here, these are for you,” he said. “Thanks, Mom. Thanks for marching.” We hugged and went inside where we were grateful it was cool and dark. We got a table near the window and watched the wilted marchers and

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spectators stroll by as if in slow motion. Over cold beers and fried bar snacks, we talked about the parade. I kept the wolf mom business to myself. At one point, Henry threw back his head and laughed the way he did as a little kid when I’d toss him in the air. I felt a catch in my throat. A line had formed at the doorway near the bar, so I paid the bill to free up the table. Henry had to go meet friends at a party, he told me. As for me, I needed a shower. We stepped out into the warm June evening. The sounds of house parties rose and flowed onto the lit streets. Henry helped me fold up my sign and wedged it into a trash can. Then we hugged and parted. I stood for a while watching him walk away, into his life. Days later, I got an email from Kit. She had taken a picture of me from her perch on the Lambda float before the parade started. I was holding my sign. My smile was a faint slit. I looked small and timid. I was posing for her, I suppose, but for the life of me I couldn’t recall the moment or what I was thinking.

F ICT ION

A Voice By Gina Fallas-Rodriguez

She wondered if she could ever love anybody. Her love was fickle. The only thing her lovers had in common was that she loved their voices. Their voices were the smoke and grit that flowed out of volcanoes with fiery, all-consuming lava. She didn’t want a smoothed-voice singer who sounded as if the doctor had just slapped their bare bottom on the way out of their mother’s uterus. She wanted voices that had felt pain, that sounded broken, that made her believe that so many pieces of a self could be put back together and made to sound beautiful. No matter how ugly she found them to be in appearance, the grit, the pebbles of her lovers’ voices pattered against her hard-hat-wearing-heart and eventually created a chip that allowed the husky smoke of their tones to twist their way around her desire. She would first hear their song on the radio or in the backdrop to a scene in a show. It bore its way into her mind, the ticking of her rapid thoughts finding a reason to slow down and pay attention to something other than the never-ending strings

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of anxiety. She had to know more about these singers. Did they sound the same live? If they didn’t, she immediately crushed the slithering snake of auto-tuned voices beneath the heels of her calf-length-boots. Her heart cooled the lava of their notes, so they turned to stone and had no chance of warmly flowing through her veins. She would not deal with a lousy-voice-lover. If they sounded the same live, their springtime love was just beginning. She listened to their studio voice, she yearned for their acoustic words, she basked in the exposed nakedness of their live songs. Song after song, she knew every inch of their words as her lovers’ breaths filled their. abdomens and pushed the tone through the chest, let the tones dance in their vocal box as it eventually left their curved lips. They released the song to her. She would be content with those songs, their voices swirling around her, making her feel like someone else could see the pieces of her. As she fell in love with their voices, she dreamed of them coming into her bed. Her lovers’ bodies would consume her passion, everything she had. They would sweat, breathing into each other, moving their limbs in unison, in a dance wherein they were built to please each other. They would smell of musk, and campfire, a little bit of Earth, and a touch of vanilla. As her heart raced and she was certain she could no longer take it, they orgasmed together. As she was in the midst of her intoxication, her lover would let their smoke-filled voice slip from their lips, and surround her senses, pressing in on her mind like a drug. Their breath would wind over her thighs, trace the length of her torso, and caress the curves of her breast. They would sing her a song that aroused her again, that made for hours of vocal-

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filled-bliss. She would wake up, a few beads of sweat starting to form by the hairline of her brown strands. Her mouth would be wide open, caught in a song, as if she was singing out to her imaginary lovers. Her voice was that of a siren, trying to bring them to the shores of her bed. Waiting for them to jump and rock the frame, the way the waves in the Strait of Messina threw themselves against Ulysses ship. She challenged these singers with voices of Earth to defy the call of her own. Her haze-filled cool tones that ebbed and flowed, traveled on the night breezes beyond her door, trying to find someone that could match her own harmonies and quell the restless nature of her love. Then when the dusk was dispersed by the light of dawn, her own voice subsided. She felt a pain in her heart. Would her love ever be steady, solid? Would she ever find the voice that satisfied her beyond one night? Once she dreamed of her imaginary lover, they rarely made it back into her bed. Instead, it was on to the next voice, that would turn frog to royalty. The next voice she might call to in the middle of night.

F ICT ION

The Empress’ Attire By Gina Fallas-Rodriguez

What type of Empress did she want to be? The question plagued her. Enora had been in power for a little under a year but had yet to decide on how she wanted to present herself to the world. The previous Emperor was ruthless. He wore his gowns of black and gold, mostly so people would see the platform shoes he wore to guarantee he was always the tallest person in the room. She killed him because he was ruthless. He had the hubris of all men in power, the idea that a woman would want to sleep with him for the mere honor of it. She killed him as he was lost in his pleasure by slitting his throat. Once he was done writhing, she assumed his scepter, put her clothes on, and presented herself to the world. As she stood from his balcony, looking at the guards below, she said, “Now is the time of change. You can return home or work for me. You are no longer forced to labor for an unforgiving Lord. Decide by morning.” She was called a witch; people assumed she had unnatural powers because, while many before her had tried to kill him

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and failed, it took her twenty minutes, if you counted the five minutes it took them to get undressed. Her first year as Empress was reclusive. There was no need to go out with a house of servants at her disposal. People visited her, the once-poor city girl who now sat in her iron throne plated in platinum. The people walked across the wooden floors, polished nightly, the windows lighting the path to her throne. They bent her ear, and she was often moved with compassion but realized she could only do so much. She found it difficult to institute changes to the farther-flung corners of her country. She knew she needed to present herself to the people in a parade, as the previous Emperors had done. To show the world that she was more than some recluse that was losing touch with her people. While every Emperor and Empress took their throne by blood, she didn’t want to present herself that way. She wanted to stay away from blood reds, she wanted no obvious weapons clinging to her side. She wanted to appear as innocuous as the day she had taken the throne for herself. She and her advisors argued. She wanted to walk in the streets, naked. It would be an act of strength and power. She wanted to show how she came from nothing, how she would dirty her own hands if she had to, how she preferred to converse and work together rather than rely on weapons and wars to get her way. They didn’t want her naked. It didn’t matter that the previous Emperor got drunk and slept on the balcony exposing himself to the world. A young woman, of a certain age, should present herself respectfully. At least that was what they told her. A month before the celebration in her honor, she finally decided on an outfit. She would wear a cape and have a new headdress made. She would present herself as a nighttime Empress, controlling the ebbs and flows of the sea. She would

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bare her body, covered in paint, to the people, to remind them of the power of women; a woman’s body was the start of life, the start of consciousness. While her advisors were not happy about it, she would at least not have her unadorned bare skin, exposed to the world. Her cape was painted in colors of cerulean, sapphire, and navy, with white to mimic the ebbs and flows of waves as the wind blew her cape. Her legs were painted in the browns of rocks and dirt. As the paint moved up her leg it turned into hunter and forest greens. The shades of a dark blue across her abdomen turned to lilac as the paint worked its way up her body. The lilac gave way to amethyst, becoming a dark purple that, when it reached her dyed hair, transformed to true black. Spots of yellow and white decorated her purple-painted body to look like the night sky, reflecting the most well-known constellations of her nation’s sky. She had beads of gold and silver sewn into her hair. The new scepter she held had a pomegranate-shaped medal at the top, and she imagined walking through the town, eating that fruit, and letting the juice roll over her body. Instead, she kept her hands free in case she needed to defend herself. The young women assigned as ladies-in-waiting washed her body. They pulled and prodded her hair as they sewed in the beads. They grabbed the first bowls of body paint and started on their work. Eight hours later the Empress stood before her mirror, not completely content, because she was not naked as she had wished. But she had become her version of Mother Earth of nighttime Empress. The cape was light enough that just a small breeze would make it flutter in the wind. She knew all eyes would be on her. She stood at the carved mahogany doors. Her advisors were behind her.

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The trumpets blasted. The doors opened. She stepped into the world and heard the gasps and claps. The sun was warm as it hit her body. Then she felt one lonely drop of rain, now two. The words her grandmother said to her flowed to her through time. “We must never become complacent. We either fight or bend the world to our will, but never be complacent.” Enora’s lips curved up as the first drops of rain rolled over the curves and plains of the paint on her body.

P OE T RY

Reading the Spanish Flu, 2020 By Richard Brait

(I) Someone who works for me stays at home, washes his hands two dozen times a day. My wife sits in front of the TV, watches and worries. I hide in my den and read about the Spanish Flu: Arthur Lapointe, his family gone. The tragic train from Quebec City to Vancouver. Grosse Ile, the quarantine island in St. Lawrence’s mouth. Okak, Labrador — winter — all the men dead, no one knew. My great great aunt Margaret home from India, tending tirelessly to the distressed and dying. Or should I join the herd and let it run — pick the best restaurants, the coppered bars, sing about the ruin of Troy while Rome burns?

(II) Arthur Lapointe, Soldier of Quebec, 1918

R eading the Spanish Flu, 2020

1. Bramshott Camp, England: I’m an officer now — it’s a time to yelp, throw dirt like confetti, but my youngest sister visits me in my fevered dreams tonight, leads me to a row of graves, names my brothers and sisters in turn. “I too am dead but God in his mercy has allowed me to spend this day with you.” 2. Bexhill-on-Sea, England: Gagnon insisted on being my nurse — bathed my temples when the influenza raged, dragged me through a mile of boggy trench. His chest torn open, his lung gaping a hole, when all he’d wanted was a small wound to get him out. But here now and alive, reading me a letter from his family that tells of the Lapointes — the youngest sister and two brothers taken. And then the other soldier from our village who looks at me with such pity — “To have lost six to the flu,” he says. Death, it seems, just beginning her harvest when Gagnon’s letter was penned. 3. Mont-Joli, Quebec Leaving the train, I watch the station door creak open, not knowing who might greet me. Father, Mother, Alphonse all that I see. The rest ghosts. In my room at night, thinking I have seen less than half my family — but no, I have seen them all! I remember France, my prayer of thanks to God in the little church at Lignereuil. But all you can really pray for is the dead — they’re the thing that God delivers best.

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(III) The Plague Train – September/October, 1918 The Calgary Herald, October 2, 1918 — but for the first line it could be yesterday’s newspaper: “Epidemic Influenza (Spanish): … highly communicable … may develop into a severe pneumonia … Keep away from public meetings … where crowds are assembled … mouth and nose covered … in a room by himself … well ventilated … put on a mask before entering.” Quebec City, September, a diseased barracks — the healthy soldiers load onto a train. In the looming forests of Northern Ontario the sickness starts. By Winnipeg several taken off, bedded in small town hospitals — deadly acts of mercy all along the route. Waived through Regina, met at Calgary — 3 am, the health officer, the military. Fifteen soldiers are dispatched to isolation. The train fumigated, but the flu’s consuming fever has caught fire. By Vancouver, a quarantine train — tinned food passed through the windows on long poles, no one on, no one off. “Just drag to bed and have your chill, And pray the lord to see you through, For you’ve got the Flu, boy. You’ve got the Flu.” Those soldiers, those that lived, likely didn’t give it a second thought — that they’d killed more at home than ever in France.

R eading the Spanish Flu, 2020

(IV) Grosse Ile, 1919: The Irish They are ballast — ballast for the timber ships coming back empty from Ireland. Do they know it’s an even bet they’re placing — a better life in Canada one side of the coin, the largest Irish graveyard in the world, the other? Do they know how desperate on the ships? Crowding together and up to the ankles in bilge — the vessels lining up for miles at the harbour? The great rocky sanctuary engaged too late — the grim mathematical progression already begun. Blue flags on every ship show fever on board. Dragging the dead out of the holds with hooks, the sailors stack them like cordwood on the shore. The ground so bare on that quarantine island that soil has to be brought in from Montmagny to create a thin layer for burial. But the priests and clergymen are always there — the same mumbo jumbo, new world or old, the only consolation that they are dying too.

(V) Okak, 1919: The women, the graves “They all expected to die and when they didn’t they did their best to live.”

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The men all dead and the dogs wild, no way to get word to the outside world, and so they get on. All move into the five biggest houses — the women care for the surviving children, sew one hundred rough bags for the perished. Five barrels of fuel, twenty cords of wood. A week is needed — hot ash softening the ground, layer by layer. The blackened bodies are laid down, calico-wrapped, in rows of ten, thirty yards long. Fifteen dog teams arrive in late March to take the survivors. More offers of marriage than women. More offers of adoption than children.

(VI) Okak, 1919: The dogs The sled dogs, their masters all dead, fend for themselves like the rest of us, wander in packs, nothing to be done — the flu among us and all undone. We can hear them tearing into the corpses as we struggle, sinking through the spring snow to the small house on the harbour slope — the door bitten through, the window smashed in. Within range we set the lantern down, begin firing through the openings. Arms, legs, heads separated — strewn about — wounded dogs crawling through the mess, whimpering.

R eading the Spanish Flu, 2020

We take apart a table and bench, buttress and nail the door shut, board the window against we know not what. Morning, we begin the hunt, kill forty more, the others fleeing into the barrens — like their masters, not to be seen again.

(VII) Margaret Norris Patterson to her nephew Sam — Toronto, Women’s College Hospital, 1961 “After War Comes Plague” — it’s a Chinese proverb, Sam. Maclean’s said the Germans craftily named it the Spanish Flu, before it could acquire its true name of German Plague. I don’t know Sam, always looking to blame the other. When the task was upon us though, there was none of that — just unending effort. I gave lectures several times a day in a room at Queen’s Park — a pin for those who completed, then dispatched to the battle — our Sisters of Service. Three hundred nurses in all, and the lectures telegraphed across Canada, reprinted as pamphlets, and given to the troops — not those so soon from Europe, but a new army, Sam. Their front lines not the trenches but the hospital wards and the back bedrooms. And their weapons nothing more than your heart or mine.

F ICT ION

Like Family By Michele Feeney This is the first section of a novel completed during my time at Bennington.

The morning after Cecilia’s last day of school in June 1918, after Papa and Hugh left for the fields and they’d cleared breakfast, Mamusia took the picture of Josef, Cecilia’s oldest brother, off the mantel and put it on the kitchen table. Then she climbed onto the stool and removed the flour sack from behind the heavy pots on the highest pantry shelf and placed the sack on the table next to the picture. Cecilia knew the flour sack did not hold flour. Instead, the sack, weighted with a few rocks from the stream that ran behind the house and bulked up with dried-out corn husks, was where Mamusia kept private things — hair ribbons for Cecilia to wear at school, a savings passbook Mamusia took to the bank from time to time, a packet of sunflower seeds like those they’d planted early last spring. The sunflower plants had grown tall among the stalks of sweet corn in the garden. “Foolishness,” Papa had said, when he noticed the bright blossoms nodding among the corn stalks. “A waste of

Like Family

good money.” Mamusia poured herself a cup of steaming coffee, and sat down in the chair that had its back to the door, the one where Papa usually sat. She tucked the sack into her lap, then patted the seat of Cecilia’s chair. Cecilia sat down next to her. “Do you remember Josef ?” Mamusia asked, tapping the picture with her finger. “Only a little,” Cecilia said. She’d been four when Josef went off to war. In her head, Josef was no more than a shadow in the vague shape of her older brother Hugh. The framed photograph of the stiff young man in uniform — an image she’d seen every day — felt more solid than her memories. Mamusia held the picture at arm’s length, her head tipped to one side, her expression sad. “He looks exactly like Hugh,” Cecilia said, and smiled. Hugh, two years younger than Joseph, had stayed home to help on the farm. “Same big ears.” Mamusia shook her head — she didn’t like when Papa teased Hugh about his ears. “Is Josef coming home?” Cecilia asked. “Yes,” Mamusia said. She removed a thick rectangle of brightly colored paper from the sack. The rectangle was the shape of a red brick from their fireplace, but not as thick. As Mamusia unfolded the brightly-colored rectangle, it grew bigger and bigger, until it was a map, like the one hanging from a pole on the wall in Miss Crowley’s classroom. The unfolded map covered most of the top of the kitchen table. Mamusia smoothed the map flat with the same stroke she used to smooth Cecilia’s hair, which Mamusia always said reminded her of the palest and finest corn silk.

MICHELE FEENEY

“This is the United States,” Mamusia said. Then, she pointed to a state in the middle of the map, and in the middle of their kitchen table. “And this,” she said, “is Kansas. Josef is in Kansas. He is healing.” She marked the spot called Kansas with a heavy black pencil, and said the letters — “K-A-N-S-A-S.” Cecilia found the mitten shape in the upper part of the map. “It’s Michigan,” she said, tracing the mitten with her finger, then putting her small hand into the shape, fingers together, thumb sticking out. “This is where we are,” she said, wiggling her thumb. “In the thumb.” Mamusia nodded. “Clever girl,” she said. “The blue is lakes. Miss Crowley taught us that the word ‘homes’ would help us remember the names, but I’ve forgotten.” “Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior,” Mamusia said, pointing to each one. Then she folded the map away, put it in the flour sack for safekeeping, and put the sack back in its hiding place. The summer passed, slow and fast. Weeding was slow; sunrise was fast. Storms were terrifying but fast; the raspberries on the bush outside the kitchen door stayed green and hard for weeks. Cecilia could barely remember being in school, when the chicks had hatched. But then the chicks began to behave like chickens over a single night. When Josef was free to come home, in mid-August, Mamusia took the map out again. Over a few mornings, Mamusia made a long snaking pencil mark, which she traced over — Kansas to Chicago, then Chicago to Emmett. The train track ran along the north end of their property, and its whistle woke Cecilia in the morning, and, again, late at night. It was the same rushing train that would bring Josef home.

Like Family

The day of Josef ’s homecoming didn’t come until late August, on Cecilia’s eighth birthday. The Pokorski family — Cecilia, Hugh, and her parents — hitched up the horses to the wagon and were there to meet Josef ’s train at the station near the grain elevator, even though it was the middle of a perfect haying day. On the way, Papa said they’d catch up tomorrow with Josef ’s help, or maybe that afternoon. When Cecilia saw Josef, her scant memories evaporated. The limping man who lurched off the train, who barely spoke, even to her parents, let alone her, was a stranger. He didn’t look as though he could climb onto the kitchen stool, let alone toss bales into the hayloft. When Mollie Crowley saw Josef Pokorski and the Pokorski family in the front pew at Sunday Mass, Labor Day weekend, she was surprised. Like many farming families, the Pokorskis rarely came to Mass during haying season at all, and would never have sat right up front in one of the pews with a gold plate to show which family had donated the money for that pew, regardless of the season. Mollie assumed Father Farrell had invited the Pokorskis to take a special seat to celebrate Josef ’s return. She was sure of it when she saw Father Farrell beckon Josef to an empty chair on the altar beside the head usher — it was a place of honor. Josef had been one of the boys in the back of the one-room schoolhouse during Mollie’s first year teaching. She’d faced him down like she’d learned to face off with the bull that often escaped the Gaffneys’ west field. Once, when she was a little girl, that bull chased her with his nose flaring, wet breath spraying the back of her legs. It had been her father who’d taken her back to that field and shown her how to stand her ground,

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moving slowly but with assurance, and always leaving a route for escape. He’d said that if she couldn’t run faster than a bull, or a bully, she’d need to look him in the eye. “Calm, confident and quiet,” had been her father’s mantra. Mollie had found the same approach held true with rambunctious boys, like Josef had been. She only had to arrange a conference with Josef ’s father once — now she couldn’t even remember what transgression had upset her. At the conference, the father’s gritty glare and Josef ’s pallor and quick apology let her know what Josef was afraid of — his father. From then on, corralling Josef only took a look. Then, at the end of sixth grade, Josef was gone, working on the family farm. His brother Hugh followed within a few months. The congregation, silent as Josef made slow progress forward, leaning on Hugh, gave a collective burst of applause when he settled into the empty seat. Josef dipped his chin and looked at the floor; the applause came to an awkward halt. Josef stayed seated for the Creed and the Gospel, like one of the oldest ladies or the mothers with tiny infants. During the homily, Father Farrell said Josef ’s was the first of many homecomings to come, a “true blessing.” At Holy Communion, Father Farrell came to Josef, who tipped up his head and opened his mouth like a hungry robin to receive the host. This Josef was not the tall, quick boy Mollie remembered kicking a ball across the dirt playground, darting away from other boys. This Josef was a bunch of bones with a gray face, disguised in a neatly-pressed uniform. The uniform looked to be wearing Josef, rather than the other way around. After Mass, outside the church, Josef tolerated the hugs and tears of many mothers, celebrating his homecoming as though their own sons had returned, even though the Pokorskis were

Like Family

Polish with customs and language strange to nearly everyone. Mollie did not hug Josef, finding the others’ sentiment somehow cheap and extravagant at the same time, but did press his hands between hers. He didn’t seem to remember her, and she wasn’t sure she was distinguishing her memories of Josef from those of his younger brother, Hugh — the Pokorski boys ran together in her memory. They’d both left school so long ago. She was surprised to find tears in her eyes as she walked away from the crowd toward her car. The boy hadn’t had much of a childhood, and now it was finished. Dr. Hart, who treated Josef, said it was the “Spain Flu” — he was fairly certain. “I’ve read about it, like everyone,” he told Mamusia, when Josef began coughing as though he would turn himself inside out, “but I hadn’t yet seen a real case.” At first, Cecilia didn’t know what Spain was — a place? a food? a person? Then, she overheard Dr. Hart commenting to his nurse, “The war wasn’t enough? They brought this home, too?” So, Spain was a place. Cecilia didn’t remember Spain on their map, but there were so many words and places. And the “Spain Flu” had something to do with Josef ’s war. It was something he’d brought home with him, something unwelcome. Josef passed during a night when it seemed the house was full of noise and movement, a night when Cecilia swam up from deep sleep again and again, but never fully woke up. In the morning, Josef ’s picture was back on the kitchen table, and Mamusia was weeping into her coffee. Father was already in the field, like always, and Hugh was “still asleep,” Mamusia said. That was strange — Hugh was always up with Father. “Hugh was needed for the burial,” Mamusia added. “The doctor said, do it quick. He was up most of the night.”

MICHELE FEENEY

“Burial?” Cecilia asked, looking at the face in the picture, then peeking over Mamusia’s shoulder into the boys’ room, where the sheet on Josef ’s empty bed was pulled tight. It was as if the real Josef had never been there. The day after Josef passed, Mamusia fell ill. The doctor told Cecilia to make a bed for herself in the pantry and stay there. It was a tiny room off the kitchen; she remembered when Mamusia had tried to bottle feed a newborn after lambing season, then abandoned, to no avail — the lamb had died, and her father had made fun of Mamusia’s soft heart. Cecilia soon understood Mamusia was very sick — she never even came to check on her in the pantry. She wanted to come out of the pantry, for comfort, but wanted to stay in, for safety. She spent the nights curled in on herself like a single kitten. In the nights, Cecilia heard the sounds of coughing, not like when she had a cold but more like an angry storm. She heard vomiting that was so much harsher than when she’d had the stomach bug last winter. She heard her brother Hugh screaming with pain in his head. As the days passed, the sounds grew louder. First Josef, then Mamusia, and finally Hugh and Papa. Everyone was sick, and no one seemed to be getting better. Each time Dr. Hart knocked, she quickly opened the pantry door. He’d always backed far away, and always wore gloves and a mask, which left only his stern dark eyes visible. Cecilia heard in his tone the disbelief that she was still healthy. She always found a basket of food, in exchange for which she shamefully exchanged the chamber pot she’d filled in the previous twentyfour hours, by the pantry door. It was the doctor who gave her the news of Mamusia’s death. That day, the doctor cried with her but didn’t come any closer. Then, a day later, from

Like Family

behind his mask, the doctor told her that her “other brother” had passed, and she knew that meant Hugh. Hugh had been her only real brother, the only other young person in the house. He’d been up early every day with their father, in the barn or the fields, but still took time to push her on the swing he’d hung in the barn, and to read to her in the evenings. The baskets kept coming even after they took the last body, her father’s. She didn’t know where they’d taken the bodies or whether there were prayers of any kind, like she and Mamusia had said over the lamb that passed, now buried next to the back garden. Whoever was delivering the food rang the farm bell in the yard — the same bell Mamusia had used to announce dinner. She always ran to the front door, but all she ever saw of the people making the deliveries was raised dust as their farm wagons travelled back down the lane. Sometimes, the basket held a “kindness” — that’s what Mamusia called small gifts. Once, an extra sweet, another time fresh mint for her water, and once paper and charcoal pencils, which Cecilia used up in a day. Every few days, Dr. Hart returned to the house empty of everyone but her, and knocked, then waited at the bottom of the porch steps. Each time she answered, he looked surprised she was still healthy. One day, standing at the bottom of the porch steps, he said, “We’re still waiting for word from your people in Chicago.” “I don’t know any people in Chicago,” Cecilia said, remembering that Josef had stayed an extra day there when they were tracing his path, but not knowing who he’d seen. “The priest wrote to the Polish parishes. We’ll see if anyone turns up.” “So am I to stay here?” she asked. “Until someone answers? Alone?”

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“I am sorry — ” he stammered, and shuffled his feet. “My wife….well, she has babies of her own, and is terrified of the flu.” “But I’m not sick,” Cecilia said. “Please.” “She doesn’t know I’m here,” the doctor said, as if he hadn’t heard her. “No fever? You’re not hot?” he asked, holding out his hand as if to touch her forehead, though he was several feet away. She didn’t want the doctor to come closer — it was Mamusia she longed for. Or perhaps whoever was taking time to pack the sweet baskets. She put her hand to her own forehead — cool — and shook her head. Then the doctor left. She washed each afternoon on the porch, using the hand pump to lift water up from the cistern. Like the doctor, she disbelieved her continuing good health, but it remained. She was eight years old. She could take care of herself, even when the thunderstorms she so feared made the tin roof rattle overhead. She counted the beats of the thunder, as Mamusia had taught her to do, and the storms always passed, usually quicker than she would have thought possible. By the time Mollie overheard the two ladies talking outside the post office, the Mass where the community had celebrated Josef ’s return was four weeks past. It was late September and she had worked and worked to compress what she’d planned for September and October into a single month — her goal was to catch up by November 1st. She had posted a handmade sign about school re-opening on every storefront door in the village. Placing a sign at the post office, then picking up their mail, was her last stop. Once she got in the car, she could take her mask off — it was trapping

Like Family

perspiration in a thin wet line across the top of her nose and her breath smelled rank. The Michigan governor left the decision of whether to open schools to each community, their community left the decision to the town council, and the town council delegated the decision to Mollie. Could she keep the children apart? Would she alert them at the first sign of trouble? What precautions would she take to cleanse and sterilize the classroom? Did she have a plan to keep the children safe? Hadn’t she always had a plan to keep the children safe? At age thirty-two, with over fifteen years of teaching experience, didn’t they trust her? Didn’t they think she’d do her homework? Didn’t they think she could maintain order in the schoolhouse? It seemed the task of proving herself might never end. The signs she’d posted directed that children wear masks on school grounds, stay home if they had any fever, and be prepared to wash carefully and often. School would start Monday, October 10. Thank God the Pokorski family mostly kept to itself, and all the hugging on Josef after Mass hadn’t seemed to transmit the disease to anyone — if it had, they’d surely know by now. With no cases since their deaths, the children would be safe, as long as the families followed her instructions. There was no more time to waste; she was already a month behind. The two chatting ladies were right behind Mollie as she positioned the last sign on the post office door. Neither lady was wearing a mask, which made Mollie wonder what she would do when families resisted her request. She’d have to have masks ready in the classroom for children to wear — no point in fighting with parents. One more extra thing to do before the start of school — perhaps her mother could make masks. There were plenty of fabric scraps in the sewing room — good, thick

MICHELE FEENEY

cotton would be best. Mollie began to step out of the way so the ladies could pass, leaving them a wide path into the building. “Never mind, dear,” one said. “We can wait while you finish that. No hurry.” Mollie nodded. She knew her mask would muffle her voice if she spoke. The ladies continued their conversation a few feet behind Mollie’s back. One mentioned that Cecilia Pokorski had been left behind in the Pokorski family house for almost thirty days. She was only eight years old, the other said. Then, “Poor little soul, it’s not right.” “I’m to drop a basket of food this afternoon — I’ll put in some treats,” the other said, “and some fresh milk.” “Poor little soul,” was the last thing Mollie heard the two women say, as she brushed through the door to the mailroom. Again, it seemed they were speaking in unison. She used her key to open the little gold letterbox she shared with her mother and took out three envelopes — a letter from her sister-in-law to both of them, a letter from the Michigan state government that was probably her teaching certification for the 1918-1919 school year — she’d been watching for that — and a flyer about a new tractor model for her father, John, now two years gone from heart trouble.

P OE T RY

February By Michael Martinec

It’s snowing in Texas. I didn’t see snow until I was twelve. That too was a confused snowfall in June. Were things wrong even then, or was it, as I assumed, magic? Claressinka is calling from California. I tell her I’ve been thinking about temporality in her poems. The clips, breaks, about doom, the future, a bad fuck and never, never “making love.”

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Couples only fuck, gently or ferociously, quietly or with volume. I tell her everyone that speaks through her, whispers angrily, painfully – Say to her, because I must, I’m in love. She tells me, Darling, I’m in love. Though not with each other, but also, yes, of course, with each other. It’s not snow so much as ice that beats at the glass backdoors, but nothing sticks to the earth where the warm dirt soaks, gathers the cold, thaws it, melts and consumes the ice that covers love, or wraps it in metaphor or aphorism, meditation –

February

Poets know the earth and sky fuck, and fuck often, too often one might think. Wrapped in each other, blind to the havoc their love creates. Who is Sada Abe in this realm of pure sensuality, of water absorbed in the dry earth? Of water drowning us? Will the ground ever be soaked again? I suppose earth, sky, moon, sun, all our creations, these are Sada – delicate humans, Ishida. I recall Claressinka’s line, the world will always become lovers. She reminds me, I never said those words. But thank you for thinking of me.

MICH A EL M A RTINEC

Unspool Last week I lost hold of my tenses – wrote sentences like this: Now, I will have forgot she is dead & we’d not spoken as I’d always imagined, she’s ahead of me. I forgot how to write a poem & live linear. I mean live within the line itself – no that’s not what I mean – I want to say: my sentences broke, moving back & forth through time but still in the same moment, like film reels played over each other unspooling different scenes from different times, each scene semi-dissolved, projected all at once, compressed, pressured – a life flattened.

Alexandria a car-bomb went off last night blasted the entrance to an entrenched Coptic church we won’t tell my sister young as she is but we won’t tell my mother either – neither of them read the news or listen to it my sister too sullen my mother too distracted by newness abroad we don’t say why the army is in the streets today why the corniche is emptier but livelier than yesterday • at one end there is an imposing old citadel built in the 15th century I can’t focus on the history because I need to shit dangerously close to disaster I find a man retailing squares of toilet paper one square for five pounds and I only have ten pounds I sprint and find my dad he gives me all his money this only gets me five squares I pinch and ration myself in the WC •

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my brother walks me to the end of the corniche next to the citadel to the fish market where he haggles in a loud voice with a man in a skinny stall for a large red fish its open eyes staring at everyone still living my brother knows of a restaurant that will grill and stuff it for us and only charge for the cooking the fish now tiger-striped steaming swollen with citrus dropped between us and I eat watching all around us • the bombing was the worst attack in a decade they say somewhere else in the city Copts and Muslims are demonstrating pelting police with rocks Yehia a friend of my brother says it was Mubarak but also Islamists but also both but also all the dead have become martyrs for God • my mother keeps bringing up Lawrence Durrell looking at me like I’m the one who should care “you know his Alexandria Quartet” she states I nod yes pretending I know – • I’m conscious of my self on these streets on Fouad St. I can feel my torso twist to look around at the streets nameplated in enamel on the walls of buildings the Arabic and the French both in white

A lex andria

these names aren’t real anymore they’ve been replaced by the latest names on green street signs in English nobody uses the green names or seems to know them • my brother is teaching me things he takes a beat drinks his tea smokes his cigarette and cats run underfoot and between chair legs “the greatness of a city is proportionate to how many feral cats it has the more the better just saying” ok • they’re saying it was a suicide bomber now at least now I won’t flinch at parked cars • I see Pompey’s Column buttressed by two small sphinxes but it’s not even his it belongs to Diocletian it’s made from pink granite with Corinthian spitfires at the top poor thing with nothing to hold up • we go to the library swooping in grand brick curves as it faces the road with glyphs stamped into gray blocks but we enter on the side of the Mediterranean and a huge slide of glass covers the library inside like the steps and seats of a wooden amphitheater people with their heads down or in the stacks

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I’d seen this movie Agora with Rachel Weisz she’s the Greek Hypatia teaching boys in the Ancient library I think of when the Christians sack the place burn the scrolls and knowledge with them • they’re saying the bomber was foreign influenced one source is saying it was Hamas • there’s a small window in my room that looks out on the Mediterranean in a gloaming when dust and dirt reflect the setting sun a thousand particle terrors become gold at the balcony next to me I see young men smoking Western tobaccos lingering like gunshot residue on hands overlapped over the railing • Yehia takes my brother sister and me to a café in Sidi Bishr the ocean is unseen to the north but heard in small distant crashes “Two Saints over there a couple blocks down” Yehia points away from the sea I can’t see much other than a clog of people “that’s where the bomb went off” my sister looks at us “wait what happened”

American Airlines DFW > DTW In the seat in front of me, a woman slides up the shade. Distortion at the curve of the windowpane stretches static figures below, egrets each a circle Styrofoam bead on the water, some banded together in a huddle & others off alone – pearls unstrung from the oyster’s throat. I want to stay –

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curl in the warp of the windowpane. Red wasps (from where?) flick at the window tap tap tap, the sun rises, it pours through languid – I hear humming, high, lonely pitch, filtered sunbeams in the curves like fingers reaching through a steel grate. It is tempting to touch the edges of this woman’s window, reach over uninvited, run my fingers quick as a whisper over the textures at the lip of the windowpane.

NON F ICT ION

Battleships and Billfish By Stephanie Sellars

Pop-Pop took me to the Intrepid. The World War II aircraft carrier turned museum permanently in port in the Hudson River at West 46th Street in Manhattan. I always thought of the Intrepid as a battleship, probably because my brother and I used to play the board game “Battleship” with Pop-Pop and the tiny ships were long and gray just like the Intrepid. According to my mother, I was about eight years old, staying at her parents’ house in Brooklyn when Pop-Pop drove me to the Intrepid. The car was enormous to me, like a ship. I remember the color as gray, but it was a late 60s copper Chevrolet. I sank into the ash and mauve or tan seat and inhaled the cigarette and cigar smell that permeated everything. The smoke failed to mask his particular smell of public toilet and oily skin. I was glad to be in the passenger seat with the windows open. The ride seemed like hours, even though it was only about forty minutes. He had a cigar butt hanging from his mouth. He was wearing gray polyester slacks, a Cuban style shirt and beat-up loafers. I don’t think he wore a seat belt but he made me wear mine. We didn’t talk much. He kept changing the radio from one fuzzy station

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to another. When the car pulled over on the West Side Highway, my body buzzed with anticipation and fear. We were about to embark on an adventure, but I had never been alone with him for more than a few minutes. He was gruff and didn’t hesitate to speak his mind about how I should be in the world. You better watch it, he would say. Or, serves you right. He held my hand as we walked through the museum. Many of the photos and plaques prompted stories of his time as a Seabee. When we was working on the airstrip in Bora Bora, the Japs attempted to invade… Pop-Pop used the word “Japs” a lot. At the time I didn’t understand this to be derogatory. In middle school and high school two of my closest friends were Japanese immigrant girls. When I performed in my high school’s musical production of South Pacific, I wondered if Pop-Pop ever had a fling with a Tahitian girl. I imagined him smoking and drinking and playing cards with images of pin-ups. I felt proud that my Pop-Pop was a Seabee even though I didn’t understand much about World War II. In my girlish mind, the Seabees were a magical bunch of sailors who built things for an idealized America. My other grandfather was a cornerstone of that America: mansions, boats, a mantle of duck decoys, and a Norman Rockwell book open on a stand. Fishing trips with Grandpa Sellars were a matter of course during Cape Cod summers. It was a boys club. Grandma never went, nor my mother, nor aunt, nor any female cousins. My father, brother, uncle and older male cousins woke up at six in the morning and they were gone all day long. They returned with a swagger and tales of fighting with a fish. It’s not that I couldn’t go. I didn’t really want to get up so early and spend all day in the middle of the

Battleships and Billfish

ocean watching my male relatives do battle with nature. I loved seafood but didn’t want to participate in its killing, especially if it was for sport. Grandpa fished for billfish: marlin and sometimes swordfish or tuna. There was a small marlin mounted on the garage. It was shiny and curved like a perfect frown, as if it died mid-jump. There was a little café in a shack at Crosby’s Boat Yard called the Crow’s Nest where we got rope bracelets every year. They were in a basket next to the register. Every July or August my brother and I got thick white shiny rope bracelets that were gray and dingy by summer’s end. I loved when it got dingy — that meant my skin had turned from pale to golden, and Cape Cod was a part of me. The salt water made the rope shrink so it had to be cut off with scissors sometime in September, after we returned to New Jersey and were back in school. The ghost band on my wrist was a reminder of both belonging to the sea and the sadness of summer gone. I went on a fishing trip once. Grandpa often took his biggest boat The Dolphin sixty to seventy miles off Cape to The Dump, a ten by ten mile square area south of Martha’s Vineyard, teeming with yellowfin, bluefin, albacore, mahi-mahi, marlin, and some sharks. More likely I joined one of the shorter trips, ten to fifteen miles away where the primary catches were bluefish and striped bass, also called stripers. Grandpa consumed garbage when he went fishing. The freezer on the boat was always well stocked with Snickers bars. He drank Mountain Dew. The healthiest snack was Nabs peanut butter crackers. It was a running joke in the family — Grandpa and his Snickers bars and Mountain Dew! It seemed funny at the time, but now I wonder what compelled such a wealthy, sophisticated man to consume candy and soda on these fishing trips. He could’ve had champagne and

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caviar. Was he rebelling against class expectations, or indulging like a kid on vacation? I’m inclined to think it was the latter, as Grandpa fished alone or with family and friends. He was more boastful about his toys than fine food and drink. Perhaps this is a trait common to those who acquire wealth as opposed to those born into it, like his grandchildren. Grandpa helped me hold the fishing pole with a reel the size of a bowling ball. I remember the sharp jolt when a fish bit, Grandpa standing behind me with his giant hand over mine as he talked me through the process of reeling it in. And then a hump of shimmering gray and silver thrashing in the water. I watched with disgust and fascination as he stepped on the fish to slow its movements and gently pulled a hook out of its mouth. He was sensitive to preventing further damage to the fish’s jaw, like trying to put a band-aid on a drowning man. Although Captain Dick helmed his boats for years, sometimes Grandpa took to the wheel. And he let me steer sometimes. I loved steering the boat wheel. It felt more powerful than a car – the shiny oak wood with spokes like the ones on wagon wheels of pioneer days, the way it spun 360 degrees. It was one of the few times in the company of my Dad’s family when I felt important and in control. When I wasn’t steering, I enjoyed sitting at the back of the boat, looking down and watching the ocean split into two foamy hills. I was fascinated by the momentum of the water, how these shapes maintained consistency even while changing. In 2000, I moved to Hell’s Kitchen, a few blocks away from the Intrepid at Pier 86. I didn’t know it was so close to my apartment until a few years later. Since the renovation of the pier in the early 2000’s as part of Hudson River Park, I started to take walks there. On Sunday nights during the summers, a

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wooden dance floor was laid down and I and other dancers reveled to the syncopated rhythms of a swing band. The Intrepid helped me pretend it was 1943. My husband and I “buried” several pet goldfish in the Hudson with the battleship at our backs. I stood in the same spot alone, tormenting myself with doubts over the same husband. During these moments, the Intrepid seemed to say, “Here you are again. I will restore you.” I became an occasional runner on a route that starts and ends with the pier. I either go north or south twenty blocks before crossing the highway to return home. During NYC’s 2020 pandemic lockdown, I would often walk to the pier and back as a respite from quarantine. I still go there and hear gulls that remind me the ocean is not far away. The Intrepid casts a beautiful, harsh pointed shadow in the sun. At night, she glows in a halo of light. From my childhood to Covid-19, she has remained solid and steadfast. I feel like she watches over me in her own way, just like my Pop-Pop did.

F ICT ION

Shooting Barin Ghosh An excerpt from a novel-in-progress

By Logan Royce Beitmen

Imagine fire. Imagine it in black and white. Big white flames and heavy plumes of black smoke. Through gaps in the smoke, you begin to catch what looks like the top of a forehead, the bottom of an ear. The wind changes direction, clearing away some of the smoke that has been obstructing your view. You can see clearly now that it’s the face of Barin Ghosh. Lit from below with flickering shadows, it has an eerie, menacing quality. You see the flames dancing in the lenses of his wireframe glasses. His brows are slightly furrowed. His hair is greasy and rumpled. Paper-thin flakes of carbon float up from the black smoke. They hit his cheek and dissolve into ash. When he wipes them away, it leaves distinctive black and white streaks on his medium-dark skin. The streaks appear stylized, as if drawn on with lipstick. Almost like war paint. Behind his head, in the deep space of the background, you see his white marble villa, overgrown with trees and vines. It’s lit

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by gaslamps, inside and out. His gang of revolutionaries, young men in white robes and white dhotis, are rushing in all directions across the lawn, carrying stacks of books and buckets of metal hardware or pushing wheelbarrows full of newspapers. Two of them are dragging a bulging white mass, a collection of objects they’ve wrapped in a bedsheet. Everyone is in silhouette. We see their forms moving against the white façade of the villa. Barin’s back is turned away from them. He’s not looking at them. He’s stoking the fire. A second-story window opens, and someone starts throwing rifles out of it. They land in the shrubs below. A thin teenager with a wheelbarrow full of newspapers, rolls up next to Barin. He’s out of breath. “Burn or bury?” “Burn,” says Barin. We watch from overhead as the newspapers fall, ten or twelve at a time, onto the bonfire. Barin jabs at them with a metal poker. Close-up on one of the papers. The masthead reads “l’anarchie.” It’s a slab-serif typeface, similar to the kind they used for wanted signs in the Wild West except the letters are rounded at the top and swoop up at the ends like cute little dollops of gelato. The fire burns the paper from the inside out — a slowly expanding blob of blackness, like blood from a bullet wound seeping through a white shirt — until the paper turns completely black. In the blackness, we hear a voice. “They’re here! They’re here!” and suddenly everyone is shouting in Bengali. Four police wagons pull into the yard. The lanterns on the front of the wagons swing violently, casting wild shadows through the clouds of dust that follow them in. Their horses whinny. Ten officers jump out. They handcuff everyone. No one resists. The officers cram everyone into the back of two

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wagons — everyone, that is, except for Barin and Hem, whom the Chief Inspector orders to open the door for him. He calls out the names of three of his officers. “You’re with me. The rest of you, split up and search the grounds.” The men outside use handheld tungsten-filament searchlights. They sweep the beams of light left and right in front of them as they walk. Within short order, they discover most of the rifles and handguns and some of the bomb-making materials, as well as some seditious literature, which is halfburnt but still able to be identified and catalogued. Meanwhile, inside, most of the bookshelves are empty, but the Chief Inspector sees several books on the floor in the study. One of them is Aurobindo’s old Greek-English dictionary. He holds it up. “We taught you bastards Greek? I suppose this is the thanks we get for trying to educate the natives.” Barin and Hem say nothing. Another officer is ripping drawers out of the oak desk in the corner. “What’s this?” he says. One of the drawers is not the right depth. It has a false bottom. He cracks through it with his nightstick and uncovers a trove of letters. Barin stiffens his lips. “These anarchists thought they could pull one over.” “Good work, Anderson.” They collect the letters in a burlap sack. The Chief Inspector leads everyone back outside, when they hear a call from the other side of the duck pond. “Come quick!” An officer has spotted the two large tanks of picric acid that Hem and Ullas hastily stashed in the reeds over there. The police photographer runs over with his camera. A loud pop, a bright flash, and the pungent smell of molten glass. He replaces his flashbulb and crouches down. Another pop-flash and that same flashbulb smell. The Chief Inspector saunters over more slowly,

Shooting Barin Ghosh

behind Barin and Hem. His men have weapons pressed against their backs to keep them from running. All of them are walking in a tense cluster along the edge of the pond, where a chorus of frogs is croaking. A light breeze causes the moonlight reflected in the pond to scintillate slightly. The ducks are sleeping. The Chief Inspector reaches the tanks. His men are aiming their beams at the tanks, and they’ve already pulled back some of the reeds to make it easier to see. “Canary yellow,” he says. “Remember that color, gentlemen. That’s picric acid. Enough there to blow up half of Calcutta.” “A goldmine for you, Inspector,” says Barin. “This oughta win you a nice big promotion.” “And you a good hanging.” The officers march Barin and Hem back to the front gate, cram them in the back of one of the wagons, then gather up the last scraps of evidence, congratulate themselves, and drive away. Alipore Jail, exterior. The façade resembles a child’s drawing of a castle — completely flat but with a crenelated top. It’s a reinforced concrete building, and it’s been painted bright red. Or possibly black. Interior. The officers bring the suspects in and hand them over to the guards, who line them up, one at a time, and take their mugshots. “Face forward.” Click. “Turn to your right.” Click. They are made to undress and put on striped prison uniforms. Fade to black. You are inside a black void. In the middle of the void, a white isosceles trapezoid fades into view. A glowing white trapezoid, twice as wide at its base than at its top. It is a table, but we are seeing it in forced perspective. So, when Barin, in his striped prison uniform, is brought in from the right side and made to sit

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down, and the British man in the magistrate’s wig joins him on the left, we get a clear, three-quarters view of them both, even though we understand that in reality they are seated across from each other on a regular rectangular table, looking directly into each other’s eyes. Magistrate: Do you wish to make a statement before me? Barin: Yes. M: Do you understand that your statement is being made before a Magistrate and will be admissible in evidence against you? B: Yes. M: Is your statement being made voluntarily, or has any pressure been put upon you? B: Nobody can make me do anything. M: Please proceed, then. B: I’ve said it already in my written statement. M: [Sighs.] Have you any objection to making that statement to me here? B: What, from the very beginning? M: Yes. B: Very well. In my statement I’ll be a little vague about time, because it’s difficult to remember dates. [Barin reads.] I quit college after one year and went to Baroda, where my brother Aurobindo was working for the Maharajah. M: At what age did you come to India? B: I was one year old. [Clears his throat and continues reading.] In Baroda, Aurobindo taught me revolutionary history, and I became a political missionary. I moved through the districts of Bengal and started gymnasiums, where young men could learn physical exercises and study politics. M: The Body-Building Society.

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B: Yes. [Continues reading.] By that time, the Swadeshi and Boycott agitation had begun. With my friends Abhinash and Bhupendra, I started Jugantar. M: Your newspaper, which was the subject of two sedition cases. B. We had the guts to publish the plain truth about what you Britishers are doing. We put your brutality on the record. M: Please proceed with your statement. B. [Reads.] I managed the paper for one and a half years and then gave it over to the present managers so I could focus on recruiting. I collected, all together, fourteen or fifteen young men from about the beginning of 1907 until now. We were always thinking of a far off revolution and wished to be ready for it, so we began collecting weapons in small quantities. All together, I collected eleven rifles, four revolvers, and one pistol. Among other young men who came to be admitted to our circle was Ullaskar Dutt. I don’t remember exactly when, but Ullas said he wanted to be useful as he had learnt the preparation of explosives. He had a small laboratory in his house without his father’s knowledge, and he experimented there. M: You saw it? B: He told me about it. [Continues reading.] With Ullas’s help, we began preparing explosives in small quantities at the Garden House. M: The house at 32 Murari Pukur Road, where you were arrested. B: Yes. [Continues reading.] In the meantime, another friend of ours, Hem Chandra Das, after I think selling part of his property in Midnapore District, went to Paris to learn explosives. When Hem came back, he joined Ullas in preparing explosives and bombs at our house. This was only five or six

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months ago, after the press prosecutions became numerous, which is when we began to think seriously of using explosives. M: As revenge? Is that why you targeted Chief Magistrate Kingsford? B: Yes. But not only that. Wherever we went to ask for money for our cause, we were encouraged to use explosives. M: Encouraged by your donors? B: Yes. We took that to be the voice of the nation, the will of the people. So, we began preparations. M: Who were your donors? B: I do not wish to say. M: You believe political murder will bring Independence. B: No. M: Then why did you do it? B: It’s what the people wanted. I yell “Cut!” Yesinia stops rolling and does three hard finger snaps against the leg of her corduroy jumpsuit. “Why, Lenny? It was going perfect.” “Barin’s hair,” I say. “Again with the hair, man.” “It’s still wrong. Barin, Magistrate, you two stay put. Gloria, let’s see those wigs again.” The actor playing Barin turns to Magistrate 2 and mumbles something, which I can’t hear due to the building’s acoustics. We call it a soundstage, but really it’s a 30,000-square-foot warehouse. The floor, walls, and ceiling are all made of solid concrete. It was a produce warehouse before Mr. Chuck bought it, like where grocery stores would store their onions or whatever. Its ridiculously echoey. That doesn’t really matter, because I’m

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planning to re-record all the audio later and dub it in, Italian style. Like Fellini always did. Or Pontecorvo, when he made The Battle of Algiers. Gloria turns to get the wigs. Yesinia has me look through the viewfinder of her camera. “Tell me you still think it’s wrong from this angle.” “It’s wrong.” “It’s not wrong.” “It’s wrong, Yesinia. I’ll show you.” I go over to my desk — a sheet of plywood on metal sawhorse legs — and open my laptop. “Man, not this again.” “I know we’ve seen these a million times, but we don’t have it yet.” I pull up the two mugshots of Barin Ghosh from his 1908 arrest. One head-on, one in profile. “Look at him, then look at our Barin.” “I mean… they’re not identical. But this is an art film. I thought we weren’t gonna stress about historical details. I thought we were on the same page about this.” She shakes out her curls and redoes her scrunchy. “It’s just about the spirit, the feeling.” Gloria is pushing the wig rack through the black void. Its clattery hardware and creaky wheels send soundwaves bouncing in all directions like a ghost dragging metal chains through an echo chamber. I know this place will drive me crazy by the time we finish shooting. Also, we painted the whole thing black months ago, during pre-production, so it still has a strong paint smell. But if it didn’t smell like paint, I guess it would smell like what it really is, a grocery store dumpster. The wig rack. I look at the four Barin wigs. I have to admit, they all look pretty similar to the one he’s already wearing. I

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point to the second one. “What about this?” “You said it looked too emo,” says Gloria. Her own hair today is a purple fashion mullet. “Oh, yeah. Maybe we should trim it.” The actor playing Barin asks if we’re on break yet. He needs a cigarette. Magistrate 2 says he could use one, too. “Alright, everyone take fifteen.” Yesinia turns to Gloria. “You think Barin’s wig is good, right?” “Of course. It’s my wig. But it’s up to Lenny if it’s right for the film.” “She thinks I’m obsessing over nothing, but a shitty wig can ruin a picture. Yesinia, did you ever see Oliver Stone’s Alexander?” “You’re talking about with Colin Farrell, right? That bleach blond thing?” “It didn’t even fit his head.” “Man, that was a shitty wig.” “Right! It doesn’t matter how great the writing is, or how great the acting is, or how great the cinematography is…” “Yeah, but Gloria doesn’t make shitty wigs,” says Yesinia. “Tell him, Gloria.” “I’m not getting involved. You two work it out. Just tell me what to do.” “I don’t know. Lenny wants us to look at these pictures again, so let’s just do it, I guess.” “You want me to talk about the pictures?” “Yeah. He’s not gonna let us do nothing else.” “Sure, I don’t mind. Well, Barin’s hair is basically a short shag. It’s slightly asymmetrical. The texture is thick and almost straight, but it’s got a little wave to it. Slightly rumpled, slightly greasy. A bedhead kind of look.”

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“Right!” I say. “He slept on the floor. So, what do you call that? A floorhead look?” “Sure,” says Gloria. “Lenny,” says Yesinia, “if our film’s great, no one’s even gonna notice the wig.” “That’s a big problem,” I say, “because I want them to notice it. I need that wig to communicate to the audience everything there is to know about Barin. He cut his own hair because he believed in self-sufficiency. That’s the whole idea of Swadesh. Cutting your own hair, making your own clothes, etcetera. Everything’s D.I.Y. And Barin’s gang are a band of brothers, a band of equals. Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. They took those ideals seriously. And you can see that in his hair. We just need to figure out how to translate that so everyone else can see it — so audiences can get all that content and meaning and the feeling that his hair represents in one instantaneous gestalt.” “Lenny, you know what you sound like? You sound like Nick Cage in Wild at Heart.” She holds her fists against the top of her jumpsuit like she’s holding the lapels of an imaginary jacket, and she puts on her dumb-guy voice. “Did I ever tell you this snakeskin jacket represents a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom?” “Yeah, that’s it! And it’s not a joke. For Barin, his hair represents freedom. It’s the same thing as his revolution. It’s the perfect symbol! It’s impulsive. It’s messy. But it’s also authentic, you know? And it’s not even punk, because this was like a hundred years before that. Or seventy years, whatever. But when you think about who he was, and how he lived, and then you look at that hair, I mean it’s punk! Barin basically invented punk.” “I can make it more punk,” says Gloria. “Yeah, maybe exaggerate it.”

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“You’re wanting that wig to do too much, man. No wig’s gonna be good enough for you, if that’s what you want.” “We have to try, Yesinia. I’m telling you. If we get the Audience Award at Cannes, it’ll be for that wig.” “Man, we won’t even get to submit for Cannes if you keep wasting time.” “I got this,” says Gloria. “I’ll just exaggerate it.” “Yeah,” I say. “But subtle. It can’t look like we’re trying.”

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F ICT ION

The Broken Nose By Meiko Ko

I am not sure how it began. It could be something I ate or drank. Nothing is recorded in my diary, and if I look through my receipts, they lead me here. There’s nothing unusual about the pub, any old ordinary place at the corner of a modest hotel, three stars and along a broad street, cars still full at this hour flashing red and green lights. Tonight’s bartender is new, I’m pretty sure I’ve not met her or I’d be hard pressed to forget her height, a man’s, her edgy hairstyle like a bird nest’s fern, dyed platinum. I’m quite sure she winked, when she slid the orange soda cocktail across the counter, that it mustn’t be an illusion that causes me the sensation of floating. I am flattered, surprised of my appeal, still intact, that I thought must have vanished with the man in 2021, the year Dominica came and left, taking along with her all the poultry in the fridge, with a cold note in the freezer compartment that read, “This is what you owe me.” Yes, I’d forbidden her to eat pork. I dislike the stench it left in her mouth, but not my own. Now I must sound like a monster. It is idiosyncratic and unfair of me, I know, but I still make sure my dates are vegetarians or

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otherwise have disavowed pork. At the bar counter, I consider putting forth the question, exclusively mine for so long, if the bartender loves pork chops, which she’ll only construe as an invitation for a date, a humorous pick-up line, since I only reveal this quirk slowly — if we pass the fifth dinner date, for instance, is the sign of maturity, friendliness soon crossing over the border into intimacy. Subtly, nonchalantly, I’ll reveal through small quips my detest for pig eaters (“The poor animal,” “Do you know why eating pork is prohibited in some countries?”), the aftermath which radiated trails of fatty scent, and there I’ll be, trying to kiss and not vomit at the same time, juggling both like a clown with two batons. Strangely, my own pork-eating isn’t a problem. I could eat plenty — ham, sausage, bacon, trotters, pork pâté, braised pork, pork curries, Japanese tonkatsu — with no problems at all, no retching or the desire to, they go down with the usual satisfied burps after meal, lips smacking. I would think that something had gone wrong with my olfactory tract that detects it so keenly, like a radar, in another’s mouth, with full-blown withdrawal, but forgives readily my own chewing of the baby back ribs at restaurants, the bones I savored, gnawed and sucked tenderly clean. Add to that my snacking — pork rinds my all-time favorites, that mesmerizing crunching in front of the tv. That problematic nose tract is a puzzle, if I have no difficulty with the smell of anything else — beef, chicken, fish, none of the various perfume notes like lavender, sandalwood, or the Gucci Bloom Dominica liked to wear bothered me, or right now, the bubbly fragrance from the orange soda I’m drinking. It is pork, only pork, that gives me the exaggerated response of revulsion and repulsion, that push, my hands cruel, arms in horror extended against Dominica one day when I came home and she was

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chewing a piece of pork jerky her friend sent in from Malaysia, eyes wide and enraptured, coming towards me saying try it, try it, praising it as an exquisite, spellbinding blend of spices and sweetness, a rare taste, the best of cured meat cuisines. “What’s wrong, what’s wrong,” she asked, when she saw the horror on my pale face and my feet involuntarily backing away from her as though she were a monster. “Are you sick, Jimbo?” I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t pretend anymore that I didn’t mind, I raised my arm and said, “Don’t talk, please.” She did not heed, of course, we were on the upswing of our love story then, all sweet and doting, honey bunnies, and disregarding what I said she stepped right up to me with that pork piece in hand, thumb and forefinger clasping a corner. I backed up more, soon feeling the hard door behind me. “Don’t come any closer,” I said, and that was when I gave her the first push. That was what happened when people didn’t listen, when they think you didn’t mean what you say but I meant it in every sense of the word. She stepped back then, alarmed, brows furrowed. “No need to do that,” she said, pouting, and she set down the piece of squarish meat on a plate and wiped her oily fingers with tissue paper. My eyes must have protruded like ping pong balls and she bade me to lie down on my convertible couch. All along, since our third date, since I really liked her, I’d been dropping hints about my plight like Gretel’s clever breadcrumbs, but she didn’t get it. Happily nibbled at pork buns whenever we went for dim sum on Sunday mornings, despite my admonitions to “Drink more tea, they’re good for your skin and health. The doctor said to avoid oily foods.” Or to distract her, “ Here, have an egg tart.” I should have come right out and said it, explained my predicament, that I would vomit if she kissed me, and it was nothing to do with her, I might be experiencing an allergy,

110 MEIKO KO

a malfunction of nose, I’d go see a doctor and so on; instead of keeping it a secret — or my subtle hints, setting the mouthwash in a conspicuous place each time we returned to my place after restaurants, hoping the bright blue liquid would attract her attention, induce her to wash out all the lingering pork malodor before our afternoon’s snuggles, which it did. She came out of the bathroom breath minty, and that solved my problem for the time being, kept our relationship warm and cozy. Instead, Dominica made me grow a conscience. Since she loved eating pork, since I was aware of the double-standards, if were to confess to her, the only consequence would be her abstinence, her watching while I gaily ate my spam or snack rinds, and drooled. It wasn’t fair, no. It’d be tyrannical, the return of the hoarder, the despot and his appetite, the secret feedings and self-conscious kissing, no longer spontaneous. These considerations made me tolerate the oily aftermath of her pork ingested mouth, a mess the mouthwash managed to suppress except for the moments when they peeked out, like the glorious animals they were, in the middle of a kiss, and my tongue would freeze for a second, sensing the invasion like a soldier guardian of my nose. Once, she burped after eating meatball spaghetti. It was a tiny one, a small bubble that jumped over into my mouth like a migrating flea, and a dizzying cloud began to spread in my brain. I felt a somersaulting in my stomach, I had to break off from her instantly. Thankfully, she did not perceive it. I’d gone to the pharmacy to ask for something stronger. Something that could desensitize or end once and for all my allergy to pork odors, only to meet the cold shoulder of the pharmacist, her sullen, uncommunicative countenance, until I blurted out, “Please, I really like my girlfriend.” That, to my surprise, touched the pharmacist, nametagged Angie, a girl

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whose boredom exceeded her smile, some bronze substance highlighting the angles of her cheeks. She shuffled to the back and disappeared for a while. She returned and came out from behind the counter, and wordlessly, hands in her pharmacy coat, expected me to follow her, sauntering to the aisle of Oral Hygiene and pointed to a bottle of gleaming amber liquid. Then she said, “Good luck,” while I watched her white back view fade. She must have gotten the wrong idea, I wanted to say it wasn’t me, it was my nose, it was Dominica, but of course, I only stared dumbly. Women’s rights were stronger than ever, a brewing colony; my rare condition might sound like an excuse. I did not hesitate to stock my bathroom cabinets with her recommendation. Two bottles, one liter each — that was how long we lasted. That day, after I broke down, after she set down on the pretty plate she gave me as a birthday present that fiery piece of dried pork that was the root of our separation, the beginning of our irreconcilable gustatory views, she took an ice pack from the freezer. I had no idea I looked red. That I needed ice, which she set tenderly on my forehead, hovering above me motherly and anxious, a frown creasing her forehead with an inch-long comma, her first wrinkle, she’d said. She loomed close, face five inches near my own, murmuring what happened, sweet Jimbo, was I ill, was it the heat, the weather, last night’s dinner, was it something she did, or didn’t do, at which point I opened my eyes and screamed. In her mouth, opening and closing, I saw the wine-colored shreds of chewed up pork, pieces stuck to the right side of her tongue, a few slivers caught between her last two molars. More horrible was the smell. The terrible, pungent smell, nothing to do with Dominica, that’d haunted me night and day,

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chased me to the edge of my dreams, gave me no rest. Often I’d stood before the mirror puzzled, asking it what was wrong, that engine of sneezing, breathing, smelling. Why pork, why not sardines or duck confit or some such food, but the pork that was so readily available and in our diet? And why not chicken, beef, cucumbers or spinach for that matter? Why now, just as things were going so well with Dominica? To all appearances, I must admit, it was a fine, even splendid, nose, a harbor for all my breaths and sorrow for thirty-one years, the tears I had to snort back whenever work at the office got chaotic, unfair, unrestful. The boss Terry who killed time off our overworked hands, chiseling to his delight a traumatic sculpture in the likeness of himself, that, considering my stress, I could not help but wonder if he was the origin of my predicament, my terrible situation with this malfunctioning nose. Perhaps it all began that Tuesday when he came to my cubicle, my cubbyhole, and without warning slammed down the file I’d presented to him that morning, knocking the orange soda off my desk and soaking my shirt and trousers, and he said loudly, imperiously, “Did you actually graduate from college? Clean this up before you leave.” I felt childlike. I felt toyed. As though that weren’t enough, the snickering came. My humiliation was a theater. My nerve connecting the scent of pork in the office — it should be my colleague Annie’s Subway lunch — through the railways of my olfactory tract must have ruptured, derailed. When I left the office, it was ten p.m. Perhaps it was all cheap psychology, connections I made anyhow just to explore the reasons that might be found in Dominica’s breath. How could I tell? Life, all rolled into one, without beginning or end, like a ball of loose thread. As I said, I’d had no quarrels with the overall look of my nose.

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It sat agreeably at the center of my face, like a short king on his armchair, relaxed and in control as always, haughty and knowing everything would be provided for, the nostrils cleaned out of boogers, and the hairs, whenever they ventured out of their caves, did not survive long in the outside world without the prompt snipping from my pair of silver trimming scissors with the curved blades and rounded tips. In profile, the dorsum, while not as straight as I wished, was after all a valuable inheritance from my mother Helen, the poor but beautiful woman from up north, a legend she invented for me, I suspected, a tragedy she repeated at bedtimes ending her story with “That’s why I have my nose.” Indeed, it was a slender, handsome nose, good for all seasons, cold or hot air. The taint from my father George was apparent at my wings, which flared up easily whenever they misapprehended facts, such as Patricia Knatchbull was born under the zodiac sign of Virgo, corrected by a director during a conference dinner, which I doubt I’d ever forget. Power and money explained themselves quite clearly. Or they needed none, they were gleaming in the knife I cleaned with a napkin and slotted into my tuxedo pocket and took home that night. Patricia Knatchbull had nothing to do with it. Patricia Knatchbull was born on Valentine’s Day. Dominica was sweet enough, laying me down on the couch to examine me like a nurse, though she was really a secretary at a law firm, but I could not help but give her a second push, a rough shove this time, pushing away her hovering maternity and that ice pack on to the ground. More alarmed, for I’d never showed her anything but gentility, opening the doors for her and pulling out the restaurant seats, which charmed her so to astonished thank-yous, the repeated mentions of, “I’ve never been treated like a lady,” she stumbled after me as I headed to the kitchen

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and opened the cutlery drawer. The knife the director caused me to pickpocket just so happened to be there and fit my hand like a glove. “Don’t come near me,” I yelled. “What’s wrong, Jimbo?” “Don’t talk!” “Okay, okay. Easy does it. Hand me the knife,” she said. She was more powerful than she looked. Or, she could be in times of urgency, even though not corpulent, not an ounce of fat even after all that ingested pork, with an elegant nape and tiny hands that made me fancy a one karat ring on her fourth finger. She wrestled the knife off and pinned me to the ground. After all, it was a knife with a blunt tip, nothing to worry about, a homicide would need the meat or bread knife. Distraught, her mouth still a threat, I escape to the bathroom while the conference knife was in her hand. I sat in the bathtub for a while. Minutes later, she knocked. “You’re scaring me, Jimbo. Tell me what’s wrong, please.” I considered yelling at her to wash her mouth. After more time, when rationality, the doorman of my life, settled me down, I came out of the bathroom and said, “My nose has gone wrong.” I told her everything. When (most likely one hot June day) and what, I had no clue why, “No honey bunny, it’s not you. It’s me.” I said. She left my apartment early. When she called me that night, from the safe distance of the cellphone, all plastic and no pork flavors, I reiterated my illness to her. “I see,” she said. She brought me to the doctor that week. After that, however, our magic broke. It wasn’t the same anymore even though she cleaned her mouth carefully each time before we kissed. This went on for a bottle of Listerine, the half-hearted, self-conscious

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kisses, the look from her each time she watched me devour my dim sum pork buns and pork sausages. Once, we were invited to a garden barbeque where I had no second thoughts or consideration for her when I wolfed down a pulled pork burger, while she’d had to decline to the hosts, meekly and hungrily, “No thanks. I don’t eat pork.” I supposed it was too much for her, having to refrain from her favorites, unfree, unherself. I must have overdone it when I said too bad, it was such a good meal and belched right next to her face. She pushed me away. Yes, it was a double-standard. I can and you can’t, love sundered by pork meat, an inequity that she had to bear. “This can’t go on forever, can it?” she said one day in my car. “How long can a love like this last?” I pretended not to hear her. What did she want me to say, no kisses for her then? A week later, when I opened the freezer compartment of my fridge, I found that note. It was written in red lipstick. I put it back where it was. I never saw Dominica again. At the bar now, yes I’m still here, by the counter all along, sipping my orange cocktail soda, reminiscing and pondering if I should finally get over Dominica, my love, and move on. The bartender is closing shop. Occasionally she glances at me, no doubt wondering when I’d get off my stool and head home. Her wink, while not an illusion, isn’t an invitation. And certainly, like the many drunkards she’d encountered, like a lonely hunter hungry for company, like the double standard I really am, I blurt out, “Do you love pork chops?” She says, “Yes.”

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The Blur By Krysia Wazny McClain

The first dog I ever met was a puppet. A white and tan bulldog with my grandfather’s hand inside. I reached in and felt its soft interior, softer than its fur. What did I have but wanting? Looking back, I see a girl hug a figurine of a yellow lab before bed, believing it will turn to a bounding puppy by morning.

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I thought this memory had God in it, but it’s pure fairy tale, hours of watching Pinocchio, entranced by a wish that would come true, pushed over an invisible edge— time?—into life. In my teens, sex sat on that cliffside, a close drop I thought would never come. By 31, my body is found at the bottom, drawn by the gravity of second sexual awakening. Tonight, I’ll kiss a woman who resembles a girl from high school, brown hair in a long ponytail. My tongue will linger in her air, the place where she would be, next to me in my mind’s darkened theater. Our seat backs are velvet and red. The balcony is a precipice.

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Mother and Child After Pablo Picasso’s Mother and Child, c. 1901, painted over a portrait of his friend Max Jacob

The artist gave her shame a home. Paint yourself out of pain, he said, and sketched a child where maybe there was one. The fabric over the woman’s head administers second absolution: virginity, born again. Ten Hail Marys for a penitent girl. She sits on the ground, cuddling the babe, whose cheek is gold as El Greco’s clergymen, or heaven. He is sin and salvation. But I reject the painting. I scratch at its surface to speak to the poet, Jacob, entreat him to turn the same material over and over between his bony fingers like a coin or an unredeemed poker chip.

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I’m Easy The tripe in my pho has the pliancy and texture of those plastic grips that keep you from slipping in the shower. I munch a bouquet of cartilage, savoring my own hardness, a slim white girl unafraid to eat, even this—even tendon, pickled herring, greasy chicken neck. I have acquired tastes because I crave connection. I like the beansprouts, jalapeños, and mint, but I have acquired the tripe and with it the attention, maybe even admiration, of the people around the table on that chill evening in Chicago. They didn’t see how I fussed the whole way about my hair losing its curl in the rain, or stamped my foot over and over, attempting to scream my lost glove from its hiding place. And Kevin, who saw it all, remembers the tendon. There’s a scene from my freshman year I often return to, watching as if from across the street— the whole twinkling width of Comm Ave.

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Through the fence around the T tracks, I see my boyfriend shove his hands into his pockets and peer at me incredulously: I just want you to be excited about something. I smile in confusion and deploy tepid relish for the Thai place up the block. Soon we split, but last night, my partner of eleven years looked up from the worksheet I’d supplied to help us talk about what arouses him and me, and as I met his eyes, I felt my perspective slip. He just wants me to be excited, I hear from across the bridge. I nod. I know, like a magnet, my tastes have been oriented to his pole. I have acquired this man’s name, his love, his ever presence. And he has acquired me for a handful of garnish, still unable to say where I want to eat.

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A shame about the money Our bank account swells with a crowd of zeros. They wave flags of heavy white sackcloth across my screen, mouths aching to close or mold to tight whoops of joy, babies’ puckered cries. My parents sprinkled the naughts on our marriage bed like holy water, handing us the paper check as we huddled together in a sanitized hotel room—a ritual expression of loving devotion. Conceal it, they said, as you would any confession.

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In Which I Am Visited by the Ghost of Georgia O’Keeffe I could not feel, much less know, but I kept spotting Georgia. The elderly painter in black and white pushing color like a horse pill into my palm, piercing me with her stare in New York, Boston, Chicago. What would it take to love “Spring” again? To love even “Red Canna,” its violet petals folding snuggly into red. The red petals overflow the canvas’s edges. Finally, I touch myself to the thrum of a woman’s body. Her answer is coming. That morning, Georgia’s ghost shimmies out from the crack beside my bed, tossing her hat onto my husband’s nightstand. She fumbles at her waistline, until a flower flips from a starched pocket.

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Even beyond the grave, Georgia says she doesn’t paint vulvas. Skulls are hollowed heads, with or without horns. Flowers stand for flowers. She offers, and I accept the bloom—a magenta glory. Before I tell my husband, I make spinach and soy sausage. Already victorious, I fold myself onto his lap. He doesn’t want me any less. I want everything more.

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Puissance By Keli Flynn Davidson

“The only reason God put horses and children in our lives was to break our hearts.” Katie’s Irish grandmother had said this often, although sometimes she had bemoaned horses and dogs, or dogs and children. But she had understood this simple truth: Horses break your heart. Katie already knew this, like she knew that horses also break bones and bank accounts and sometimes families. Her father was a watery-eyed failure of a horse trainer, and he stayed with the horses after her mother left and took Katie and her sister with her, and it broke him, or the horses did. Katie wasn’t sure, or maybe it didn’t matter anymore. But despite this, horses still mattered to her, because it was horses that first taught her that love doesn’t know logic, and no amount of knowing could ever stop love anyway. What the Irish mean when they shrug and talk of fate is just that: No knowledge could ever stave off a broken heart, just like no knowledge could ever keep a drunk from his drink. It’s not the knowing that deals the hand of fate, but it’s the knowing that breaks your heart, because the wanting will trump the knowing, every single time.

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Katie was twelve when she first understood her father’s love of horses, and it seeped into and became her very bones. “Shush Katie, they’re not done yet.” “Oh Papa, he has no more, you know that, right? Don’t let him fall.” Katie pleaded and tugged at her father’s weathered coat, not taking her eyes off the spent little horse and the young rider astride him. She didn’t comprehend, on that cold night, years ago, when they were among thousands of spectators at the Washington International Horse Show who were all equally swept up in the hopeless scene, that her father had no hand in the fates playing before them. “Katie, this trial is called Puissance. It’s from an old word that means strength, and the strength to do this test must come from the heart, not the hoof,” Frank Sullivan said, and he pounded his leathered fist to his chest when he got to the word heart. “The biggest heart will always win, Katie, and we’ve no way of knowing if that means the biggest horse.” He knelt down to speak to her when he told her this. “He’s so little, he can’t jump as high as those big horses, it’s not fair! He has no more, look at him.” She needn’t have asked him to look, as all eyes in the vast stadium were upon the small, compact horse, who stood splaylegged, head down, and blowing hard. His chestnut, coppery coat was so dripped in sweat that he now appeared to be the dark shadow of a horse. For jumping, he was put together all wrong. He was indeed too small, cow-hocked, and his head was a bit mulish, with a lopsided white star in the center, which radiated like a headlight as he approached the jumps. He would have been far less conspicuous at a rodeo, but here, at the final evening of one of the world’s most esteemed horse shows, he was the most unexpected of finalists in the Puissance.

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Puissance, the Grand Prix of jumping, wherein the jumps are raised and then brutally raised again, until, perhaps, one horse and rider defy the odds and clear the last, highest obstacle cleanly. The event exploits the very best of horses who gamely tackle what is not natural to them, but rather what is asked of them. It also displays some of the worst of men, the voyeurism of watching what might very well maim those giving their all. The little horse had been outclassed all evening by the other, much larger, more eloquent jumpers who had qualified for the Puissance finale. The leggy warmbloods and thoroughbreds graced the audience with their exquisite presence. Their pristine riders in shiny black boots were perched in a seat so firm as to be one with their mount. These pairs possessed a beauty that espoused class, the sort of class that makes people who have never touched, ridden, or smelled a horse — much less been one with one — buy paintings of them. Yet, despite these horses’ captivating, rhythmic presence, the audience had grown bored with them, and were spellbound instead by the unlikely little horse with an unfortunate head and a cowgirl rider. “Little,” as the crowd began to call him, seemed unaware of their attention, as was his rider. Throughout the day, as Katie and her father walked through the barns, they overheard the crowd querying one another: “Are you going to stay and watch that little horse go again?” “I heard that old fool Sullivan hauled him all the way up here from Georgia.” “That horse must be allergic to wood from the way he gets his legs up over those fences.” “There are wagers at the bar that he will clear six-and-a-half, run by there before you leave if you can’t stay for the show.” But no one left, and the stadium was overfull as Frank pulled Katie

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up onto the bleacher rails so as not to miss what would surely be the last round. “Papa, do you…” “Shush Katie, they’re coming now.” They had been glued to the previous rounds. The statuesque jumpers were given the respectful silence of the audience, followed by its polite applause. The audience clapped, even for those who broke the musical rhythm of hoof beats, punctuated by silence as the horse leapt into the air with the sudden clanging of a fence down, or the collective gasp by the audience of a rider down. Some animals flat out refused to jump and veered off at the last moment as the audience emitted a collective “Oooh” in response. “Damn.” That’s what Frank said when they watched Little come on, because from their vantage point, you could not see the horse at all, except for the tips of his ears, as his body was blocked by the insurmountable wall. His ears bobbed in and out of view as he galloped toward them and the jump. When the horse’s ears disappeared as he crouched to spring for the jump, the rider yelled out “GIT!” Then the horse would git, and git right over that wall, quite out of the character, rhythm, and protocol of the Washington International. Watching them, the audience became one person, all breaths inhaled and exhaled together, and their voyeurism transformed into a collective power to will the doubtful pair up and over. The crowd shared rapturous joy when they made it, again and again. The portrait horses, one by one, were eliminated to the sounds of polite applause. Expensively-dressed women cheered each other’s glasses, spilling their champagne, as they shared this implausible scene. Men well-invested in horse flesh remained perplexed, but

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everyone felt like they were in the middle of something rare, but very fine. “Damn.” Frank said, shaking his head. He turned to Katie, whose eyes filled with tears. There was only the Little left to jump the impossible wall that had just felled the only other horse left, a presumed American Team qualifier. But the little horse was spent, everyone could see it. His chest heaved and his head gave occasional birdlike jerks to clear the sweat that ran down his face and into his eyes. Each round he had given his absolute all, and now, one more wall was erected — a stadium record, the gleeful announcer informed the crowd. Frank had taught Katie what he loved about horses. He told her how horses so often do things for their rider that defy their very nature, and that most people miss the horse’s sacrifice. “Katie, think of all the ways that horses are used out there — jumping, in lots of forms, cutting, dressage, really everything that we see these horses doing, with perhaps the exception of racing, which you know I think is their least interesting use. These all betray horses’ nature because, without first being taught to by us, they wouldn’t do it. Forget scenes like that one in National Velvet, when the untrained horse sailed over a fourfoot stone wall.” He shook his head. “No. It’d never happen like that. We’ve taken the horse and molded him to our will. We taught horses to jump, Katie, we asked them, again and again, to ignore their instincts and trust us to do what we demand of them. The horse has but one defense, and that’s flight. When we get on a horse, we take this away, and he must fight his own nature in order to oblige us.” Frank held the bridle while the rider mounted. She swung her leg wide, without grace. “We’ll be on the other side,” he said. The girl leaned down, stroked the horse’s neck, and started

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to say something, but Frank stopped her “Trust him, he’ll know what to do” he said and pulled his flat cap low and raised his jacket collar against the cold. He put one hand deep into his pocket and took Katie’s hand with the other. They walked back up into the stands to watch the ride. As they waited, a man Katie did not recognize broke from the crowd and grabbed Frank’s shoulder. “For God’s sake, Sullivan, pull that poor animal before you kill the both of them.” Frank removed the man’s hand from his shoulder and turned back to face the arena, but Katie felt her father’s hands tremble when he braced her up on the rail. Just outside the arena, the rider petted and reassured the horse, and she leaned into his ear from her saddle to say something to him. His ear turned back to listen, as if they were conspiring. It was like a quaint scene from a child’s pony show, but here, having downed the best, the pair’s harmonious relationship was mesmerizing. There was white smoke from the horse’s breath, so cold was the night, as the rider gathered her reins. Then, as one, they leapt forward. Frank’s grip tightened on Katie, and together they watched the horse’s ears coming up and down, just tipping over the top of the record-breaking wall. It was like that cowgirl was just willing that horse over the jumps, and the audience was still, and it was as if the entire world was still, waiting. “GIT!” The silent, transcendent flight of that pair suspended all noise in the vast stadium for what seemed a very long time, and no one exhaled. Then, the audience lost their magic ties — the magic of their collective will that had held the little horse aloft. As the pair fell back to earth, the only sound was the soft thud of his hoofs hitting the dirt on the other side of the wall, having

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cleared it cleanly. The audience broke apart into wild screaming. The shared experience of this flying, reckless hope would never be repeated. That crazy rider had been oblivious to the highdollar world she and her diminutive horse just flown over, the world that Katie’s father had never quite mastered before that night, and never would again. Katie later learned that the rider was just what she appeared to be, a kid, not too much older than herself, who had been jumping her un-papered horse in a backyard. But Frank had believed that they could make it, perhaps because he needed them to, and that faith had infected the girl, who then believed that the little horse could make it, so much so that she trusted him to do it. The horse, in turn trusted her, and their giant leap of faith had won the whole damn thing. The stadium would be still there cheering, no doubt, and the girl with the Little would be still there looking bewildered, most likely, but Frank saw how the horse stammered to regain his balance amidst the cheers. He knew girls too and turned to Katie. “Meet me in the wash racks. The girl’s in shock, and the horse is hurting.” Frank had to cut the girl down from the horse with his pocketknife. She had woven her hands into the braided mane and blood seeped from her fingers when they were freed. She staggered and fell back onto the hard ground. She could fly, but she couldn’t walk. Frank sat her atop a hay bale next to Katie, then washed the horse in a liniment bath and dried him before he wrapped the legs, feeling them up and down for heat. He threw woolen horse blankets over Katie and the rider, both shivering, and not just from the cold. Katie never saw the girl again, or the horse. She drifted to sleep on a hay bale, wrapped in the heavy blankets, while listening to the other trainers, riders and owners talk to her father. A fire in a barrel outside gave off

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smoke that intermingled with the smell of horses, hay, leather, and whiskey, to flavor the air that was peppered with the small, late-night talk of horsemen. Katie remembered this as the last time she was with her father. Her mother married an accountant and they moved out west, taking Katie and her sister far from their father and his horses. The accountant gave away their dog, and adored the son he had with her mother. Later, Maggie would bring up other times that the girls had seen their father after they moved out west. Katie would always fail to bring those memories into focus, but instead would recapture this bit of him, and recall the smells and soft talking as the heavy horse blanket closed in on her. “He was at Grams’ funeral and wake,” Maggie would offer. “Was he?” That weathered man in a suit, uncomfortable and so out of place and time, giving a formal handshake to her stepfather. No, in Katie’s mind, she had drifted to sleep, deep in the aura of witnessing something so grand as to have been part of it, and when she woke, her father was gone. He went with his love, but not before sharing that love with her. This little piece of her father, and of life, became a dog-eared paperback in Katie’s mind, a page to fall back into whenever she found herself failing in strength or in love. As the years stretched out, many things that Katie loved joined the lost ranks of her father and dog, but this bit of time could never be lost or given away. Another person might hold and cherish their parent’s sterling watch, but Katie held close her stories of her father and his horses, and turned them over and over, like a river does stone, until the edges smoothed out and found a comfortable place to rest in her heart.

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Metaphor for Mardah By Susan Dines

…every tree turned into a chandelier –James Crews

You are metaphor — the glaze that glistens each brown branch quicksilver. I stop and listen for the breath of wind to recite your tinseled lines like a summer sonnet in the dead of winter, a sound worthy of you and of the poetry you chased and captured in your throat and wrote and rewrote into frost-

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coated trees. Your soft vowels still hover blue all around you like the oil-tipped brush that once touched Van Gogh’s Blossoming, your sky every bit indigo as his meticulous canvas, but now you bloom eternal, like lyric or oncedelicate petals revised ice crystals lit from within — a sure sign to look up, to explore what astounds and sublimes us — to pursue all the metaphors for beauty — for you — in each fleeting season —

For Mardah Chami

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Bavaria and Berlin 1945 By Claudia Simone Franklin

From: A Cartography of What Is Left: A German Lyric

Because the Russians were coming on foot and the Americans were bombing relentlessly from above, my father was put on a train to the Black Forest. His school was relocating and, for a fee, would take along as many kids as possible. The Black Forest was safe. The Black Forrest was safer. It was February of 1945. My grandmother was a widow; my father was her only child — she wanted her son out of Berlin. Although the distance was less than four hundred miles, the trip took four days. The tracks and bridges had been shattered, blown up. On the train, Father held onto a teddy bear and cried all the way to Bad Krozingen outside Freiburg. He had just turned eleven, skinny, small for his age. His father had died some months earlier. The Russians were coming. Why couldn’t he stay in Berlin with his mother? Of the seven hundred kids at the school in Berlin, less than one hundred went to the Black Forest. My father was the

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youngest. In Bad Krozingen, at the school housed in a hostel, food was scarce. Dinner consisted of two boiled potatoes. During the first weeks, Father sat in a corner and wept. When it got dark, he could see bombs falling somewhere in the distance. By April, they ran out of food, even potatoes. The kids were asked to beg from neighboring farmers. Sometimes, they were given one egg. Classes were suspended. Hunting for food became a full-time occupation. With the help of other boys, my father grabbed a hen from a chicken coop. He smashed its head with a rock. They cooked it outdoors over a fire, ripped it apart, ate it mostly raw. On May 7th, the war ended. On May 11th, my father heard that a group of boys, all older, were planning to run away, walk home. On May 12th, Father and a boy called Volkmar climbed out of the bathroom window in the middle of the night. The older boys wimped out. This is what Volkmar and my father had with them: one deck of cards, one stuffed bear, three slices of bread. In the dark before leaving, my father put on the wrong shoes. They were too small. They walked from Bad Krozingen to Freiburg to Tübingen to Esslingen to Nuremberg to Bayreuth to Zwickau, passing in between Halle and Leipzig to Potsdam and onto Berlin. Four hundred miles. Maybe more. My father’s feet hurt, then bled through his socks. A few times, farmers let them sleep in their barns. Sometimes, they were given food. Mostly not. Once, an old woman offered them a bed and a tub. Even in a war, people are kind. They scavenged through the garbage left behind by soldiers. When you are eleven and hungry, leftover K-rations are delicious.

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They slept outdoors. It was cold. They gave up, got up, walked on. They walked through forests. They walked along highways, along the plodding convoys of American soldiers, trying not to get too close. They walked among the displaced, the millions walking home, or towards what was left of home. They walked alongside women and their children, and women walking alone, children walking alone, and the elderly, old women, old men, alone. They found an abandoned baby carriage, put their belongings in it, and pushed it in front of them. Around Zwickau, they got a hot meal from the Red Cross. Putting one sore foot in front of the other, my father no longer cried. Outside Leipzig, they got a ride in a cattle truck. Women. Children. Everyone reeked. The children cried. The women cried. My father did not. They crossed a ditch of dead SS soldiers. Executed. Twenty, thirty, more. Bloody and bloated. The cadavers stank. They were detained by the Americans and later, outside Potsdam, by the Russians. Lacking documents, Father and Volkmar begged older women to claim them as their own flesh and blood. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes not. The Russians put the boys in a camp. Many were sent to Siberia. My father and Volkmar were let go. The Russians kept the deck of cards. Russians — my father hated them for the rest of his life. A few miles outside Berlin, Volkmar went his separate way. They didn’t see each other again until the 1980s. Once in Berlin, Father didn’t know which way to go. Ruins and rubble as far as he could see. The Russians had flushed hiding German soldiers out of the subway tunnels with water. Their bodies lay about the entrances, decomposing in the summer heat. The stench was

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overwhelming. It took a few days, but Father found his street. Togostraße. He had been so afraid, but the building was still standing. People on Togostraße began hooting and yelling. “Maria! Maria! Dein Junge ist hier! Er lebt!” Your boy is back. He lives. She fell running down the stairs. So she said. She was walleyed and during the war years so thin. She ran, her hair loose, her feet bare. There he was. Skinny but taller and alive. He had nothing with him but the bear, its nose pushed in, one eye and one arm missing.

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Berlin, 1945 and 1947, East Kingston, 2015 From: A Cartography of What Is Left: A German Lyric

My father had, over the course of many decades, a dozen depressions that I know of. Even if you survive, wars take a toll. They began in 1947, in Berlin. Father left his room as little as possible. He was thirteen. If he made it to school, he was late. He lay on his bed and slept or read all day. Karl May’s books, Winnetou and Old Surehand. He complained of one ache or the other. Ear. Stomach. Throat. He pulled the curtains shut. Made the room dark. As a kid, in Peru, I could hear him wandering around the house in the middle of the night, the cigarette stench drifting up into my bedroom, my hair. Later, he would take to bed for the weekend, or weeks on end. Or he would park himself on the baby blue settee in the TV room, in front of Judge Judy, and pull at his cuticles, pick at scabs on his hands. I don’t know when the scabs started showing up. His early sixties, maybe? But I know why they never healed. The last couple of years of his life, he sat in an assisted

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living facility in Rhode Island, picked at his scabs and wept. Dementia. Depression. He was not allowed to watch the news or read the front section of The New York Times. When a Brazilian soccer team fell out of the sky in Colombia, he wailed. Implacable. He had to be restrained, sedated. After that he was restricted to Living and Health. When I visited months later, the nurses had a need to tell me about it. He’d frightened them so. “He kept slapping his head — hard. Oh, it was terrifying! He was bruised for days.” Correction. It was not he who had frightened them, but all that was inside him. Two years before he entered the facility, I visited, as I often did, and not often enough. At that time, my stepmother could still take care of Father at home. I found him in the living room, the New York Times expertly folded in one hand. He couldn’t tell me what was in the paper, but he read it diligently cover to cover. I touched his hand and said: “Wie geht’s?” How is it going? Trying to make up with the intimacy of the language we share for my absence and indifference. He had walked out on my mother late in life for the chance at happiness with an uncomplicated American woman with little baggage and a love for penguins. They were on towels, on mugs. My siblings and I were left to manage my mother. But Mother is another story. That day with my father in Rhode Island, I felt such pity. Such aching affection. When not depressed, he’d been an intellectual thunderstorm. I held his hand, the skin on the dorsum thin and translucent. One large Band-Aid across his

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knuckles. He made himself bleed relentlessly. “Wie geht’s Dir?” I added softly, insisting, making up for his silence. How are you? He looked up, and although he sometimes did not know who I was, he had me in focus. “Claudia, er war ein Offizier? Ja?” He was an officer, yes? “Der Russe?” The Russian? In Berlin, in the fall of 1945, a Russian officer came to “visit,” for lack of a better word, my grandmother. Repeatedly. Her husband was dead. Her apartment had survived the bombings. Only a panel in the front door was broken, kicked in by the Russians. Every time the officer “visited,” he took Grandmother into the living room. Maybe he pulled her, pushed her. I do not know. After that, the living room door stayed shut, and Father was told to remain in his room. Soldiers waited in the vestibule. They smoked and whispered in Russian. How many? Two. Three. Depending on the day. Sometimes, one soldier sat down on Father’s bed. The soldier fingered toys and books, tracing illustrations. He stank. His hands were dirty. Nails black. I heard this story first in my twenties. Bits from him. Bits from her. Back then, I could stomach it all. I was a relentless little journalist, intent on getting all the details. Grandmother was uncooperative, insisting the officer was a gentleman, vehemently denying any wrongdoing, any suffering. When I pushed, she said firmly: “Genug.” Enough. So what was I to do with Father’s question? Was the Russian in the living room an officer? Meaning: Was he a gentleman?

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Meaning: Did he rape her? Yes or no? Sixty-nine years later, my demented father wants — no, needs — to know. I reassured him, repeating his words, the ones he held on to. “That Russian was an officer”, I said. He was an officer, not Russian riffraff. I held Father’s hand, caressing the parts that were not scabrous with my thumb, repeating: “Er war ein in Offizier. Ja, ein Offizier.” In 2003, a war memoir was published in Germany, later translated into English. That is how I came to understand what probably happened in that living room. A Woman in Berlin. My grandmother was also a woman in Berlin. In the months after the war ended, one million Berliner women and girls were raped by the Russians, some of them repeatedly. Sometimes, there was an exchange. A cigarette. Mostly not. When I had finished the book, I called my father. He told me he had read about it in The New York Times. I offered to mail him my copy. Agitated, he said: “Don’t.” And he did not want to talk about Grandmother either. And because I can be so thoughtless, I went on to say that the memoir mentioned that many of the victims were children, some very young. “Das stimmt,” he said. It’s true. “The girls in my building. I heard the screaming.” “How long did it go on?” “I don’t know,” he said, his voice flat and tired. “Forever.” In his last months, they had to inject him with something every day. To calm him down. He upset the other patients, the

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nurses said. Some stories are too hard to bear. The doctors said Father died from complications secondary to pneumonia and cardiac arrest. But he cried and cried — for how long? Three years? More?

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The Pleiades For Andrea

By Kerri Goers

We climb the wooden stairs to the edge, lift one leg over and then the other, and lower ourselves into the hot tub. It’s eight o’clock at night. The sky is darker at your ranch, fifteen miles outside of Trinidad. A half-moon hangs low — two on the face of a clock. The stars are more visible here at 6,555 feet, than the 665 feet of Iowa, denser and spread across the sky in long swaths like sugar spilled across a floor. I know little of constellations or planets. Where is the belt of Orion? Those sisters: The Pleiades? Can we see Jupiter in this Colorado night sky? Venus? As children, you and I looked only for the North star, the Big and Little Dipper. The jets in the tub cut out. It is quiet; only the lapping of the water against the side of the tub is audible, slowing to stillness. “We usually go inside after we see a shooting star,” you say.

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You aren’t in the tub with us. You’re wrapped in a large, green Selk bag, which resembles a sleeping bag with legs. You affectionately refer to it as Gumby. The port they placed below your right clavicle is covered with a large plastic dressing from which tubing extends out and down your chest – like stubborn long arm tendrils of Russian sage stretching out from the root – to the medication pump you are wearing in a fanny pack at your waist. Your chemo infusion isn’t done until tomorrow. You sit next to us, in Gumby, sipping hot tea. We watch the stars. The heated water soothes my legs and back. I’m aware that your body, full of vitriol, aches everywhere. You want this simple comfort for us, so we try to be soothed. The birds are silent. The only noise is a distant sort of humming. “There!” your husband says, and you draw a quick breath. He points at the sky: a shooting-star. I missed it. We stand, step out of the tub, towel dry, and wrap ourselves in thick terrycloth robes while you wait for us, sipping your tea. We pull the cumbersome lid over the steaming water and snap it in place. By the light of our headlamps, we make our way back to the house, along the gravel path. Before we go in, I look up at the sky. I look again for a shooting star because of course, my sister, there is something, for which, I desperately wish.

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NON F ICT ION

Everything Past Iron By Kerri Goers

It was a corner room with walls at odd angles, making the bed and adjacent chair a tight fit. The walls were painted a generic tan with peach undertones, the bland institutional color of hospitals, prisons, and schools, sold in bulk and one shade off from cement. The bathroom had a commode in the shower, metal handrails along the wall and next to the toilet, and three pull cords for emergencies, which struck me as excessive and then alarming. I sat in an oversized plastic upholstered recliner. My husband, Eric, lay on the bed, exhausted from a night in the emergency room and eighteen hours without food. His head was turned toward me, and I watched the violent percussive way his chest rose and fell, out of sync with the pulsating carotid of his neck. Loud beating rotors of a Life Flight drew my attention to the small window of our room. I watched the helicopter’s shadow flutter over the building. The beating rotors grew faint. Eric slept – oblivious to it all. He was in atrial fibrillation: a fast irregular beating of the atrium that is out of sync with the ventricles of the lower heart. It’s an inadequate heartbeat that doesn’t allow

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for proper filling or emptying of the heart. So, there we were, in the cardiac unit of the hospital, my forty-nine-year-old husband and me.

Eric is an Ironman. He competed in the 2015 Ironman Wisconsin at the age of forty-four. He completed the 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, and 26.2 mile run in eleven hours, twenty-seven minutes and one second. It was a good time; the winner completed the 140.6-mile course in eight hours, fifty-nine minutes, and fifty-nine seconds. I ran the Chicago marathon in 2009 and that alone took me well over five hours; I wasn’t paying attention to the time. I was trying to get to the end; cross that line and stop the forward motion of hours. Out of 2,990 entrants, Eric placed 278th overall. He told everyone the Wisconsin Ironman was a “one and done”. He had no desire to do it again. He met his goal: a finish in under twelve hours. There was no reason to wonder if he could do it faster or race smarter next time; he had already done his best.

Iron is an interesting element. It is the most common element on Earth and can be fired into hard metal at 1500 degrees Celsius. When I think of iron, I think of its metal form, something strong and unbreakable. Iron is silver, shiny, and appears to be almost reflective like the shards of a shattered mirror. In some instances, it’s smooth; in others, like mountain granite — jagged and rectangular. The abbreviation for iron is Fe. Its atomic number is 26 and it’s located in Group 8 and Period 4, on the Periodic Table, where it’s surrounded by violet manganese, technetium, ruthenium, precious rhodium,

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and cobalt for which the color is named. Iron is essential to the functioning of most lifeforms. In humans, it’s necessary to the formation of hemoglobin, a component of red blood cells vital to the transport of oxygen to tissues and organs. It’s also elemental to energy production. We carry four grams of iron in our body. Too much is toxic.

We had been in the hospital before, in the emergency room, where they performed cardioversion: a synchronized shock to the heart that resets its rhythm. That was less than one month ago. We thought he would have another cardioversion and go home like our previous visit. They explained that, although Eric thought he knew when the atrial fibrillation started, he couldn’t be completely sure. The best course of action was to admit him. He wasn’t on blood thinners; a CT scan would show if clots had formed. The significance of this was that clots could be dislodged with cardioversion, causing a stroke in my relatively young husband. We hoped the atrial fibrillation was an isolated occurrence; obviously that was not the case. We asked about risk factors and triggers. They replied: heart disease, high blood pressure, sleep apnea, obesity, family history, alcohol, and as it turns out, endurance athletics. Eric’s father’s atrial fibrillation started in his late forties. Eric has been an endurance athlete for the last thirty-five years.

When my friend Jenny heard that Eric was going to be competing in the Ironman, she volunteered to help us navigate the day. She lived in Madison and was a seasoned Ironman spectator.

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“Who is coming? Did you make t-shirts?” she asked. I’d never attended an Ironman and the only planning we’d done was to secure a hotel room in downtown Madison, four blocks from the starting line. Signs? T-shirts? Support crew? Clearly, I was out of my element and failing the job of supportive spouse. Eric’s previous races hadn’t been family affairs. He went, competed, came home, and filled us in on the highlights. Still, I should have understood this was different. This was the race of all races, and I hadn’t given any thought to my part in the day. Thank God for Jenny. On race-day Eric and I woke sometime before 5:00 a.m. The Capital building was lit with spotlights and the night was starting to lighten into dawn. He packed his bag and the two of us walked down to the parking ramp next to Monona Lake where the athletes were gathering, marking their numbers in permanent marker on their arms and legs, and putting their wet suits on. There was no wind, a good sign. At 7:00 a.m. I stood watching thousands of swimmers move across the lake, their pink and green swim caps blurred by the spray of water rising into the air, an eerie mist created by their many arms plunging over and over into the lake. Eric emerged an hour and twelve minutes later, ran up the cement parking ramp to the transition area, and moments later passed by on his bike.

Not long ago I listened to a Radiolab podcast about elements while in my car.1 The host, Jad Abumrad, was 1

Radio Lab/WNYC Studios “Elements,” March 25, 2021. (http://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/elements)

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interviewing Derrick Muller, the creator of the science and engineering YouTube channel Veritasium. They were talking about stars, the formation of planets, of energy, and of iron. They explained that particles that slam together lose mass and that lost mass is emitted as energy. Evidently, this is what the sun is doing: combining protons and creating the energy which we experience as sunlight. Light is former mass. Apparently, this is what stars do. Derrick said, “Stars live by this process of sticking nuclei together, going from smaller nuclei, making bigger nuclei. The heavier the star, the more the smashing and bashing they can do in their core, and the bigger and bigger nuclei they can form.” But I guess there are limits. Jad and Derrick said six-billion years ago, a giant star, bigger than our sun, was busy making energy. It was smashing and bashing, making carbon, making oxygen, getting bigger and bigger. But then Derrick says, “there comes a point where sticking nuclei together no longer gives you energy…Once you’ve formed iron, if you’re a star, that’s the end of life as you know it.” Jad and Derrick said iron was incredibly stable, “the most stable nuclei in the universe” and that “you can’t force any more energy out of them.” I remember turning onto the drive that leads to the hospital when Derrick said, “Which means you have a core which is no longer going to give you energy.”

I met Jenny and the kids in time to watch Eric pass by on the first loop of his bike leg. He cleared Old Sauk Pass Road, took the downhill on Timber Lane and was beginning his ascent. We were in brilliant positioning. The uphill climb slowed him down and gave him the opportunity to see us and gave us an opportunity to find him among the mass of near identical

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racing kits and aerodynamic helmets. Our children were six, eight and fifteen. The younger two were easily lost in a crowd. Prior to the race, I took a photo – a close up – of each child and printed them onto 24 by 36 inch poster board. My Dad made wooden frames to mount on the back, for stability, with wide wooden handles at the bottom of each. I made large speech bubbles and plastered them to each sign. The youngest’s sign said, “Go, Dad Go!” Our middle daughter’s sign read “Wow, fun, wow” (a favorite saying of my husband’s college cross country coach). Finally, our high school son, who ran in both cross-country and track, had written, “I can go faster than that!” I called them our bobble head signs because they bobbed up and down when we waved them. The signs were a surprise to my husband. He found us easily, as he was nearing his fiftieth mile. His stomach was upset so I ran next to him, passing over Imodium that he tossed back with a squirt of Gatorade. Then he was gone, and we left to have lunch at Chipotle for a couple of hours before catching him at the end of his second lap. We were able to intersect his path four times on his 26.2mile run, bobbing our heads and cheering him on. Then we moved to the finish line and watched him cross. The transition from running to walking was jerky, his feet hit the pavement in staccato, then he started to shake and vomit. After Eric cleared the medic check, I took him to our hotel, peeled his racing kit off, and ushered him into a hot shower. It was a long time before the tremors ceased and he could eat anything. One and done. The feat of the Ironman makes a strong impression when you have spent a twelve-hour day watching it unfold. Twelve hours. I can drive to the state of Colorado in that length

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of time. He spent the whole of it in motion, in exertion, expending energy.

The CT scan showed no evidence of clots; Eric could have the cardioversion and go home later that evening. He would need blood pressure medication, an antiarrhythmic, and a blood thinner. We were told he would need to come back to the cardiology clinic the next day. Then somehow, we found ourselves standing on one side of the hospital bed facing off with the electrophysiology cardiologist on the other. He said a nine-mile run was not moderate exercise. It was strenuous exercise. I understood why he said this. It would be strenuous exercise for me. It looked like it would be strenuous exercise for him. I thought of the bike mileage Eric did the previous morning and bit off a laugh. Eric on the other hand was not laughing. The cardiologist told him to give up all competition. Eric didn’t respond. He was pale and his lips were compressed into a flat line. “But he exercises on a regular basis. A nine-mile run is not really long or strenuous for him,” I said. The physician turned his head to look at me, tipped his chin up, peered at me through his eyeglasses and down the length of his nose. It was condescension. “I’m telling you what needs to be done. You will do what you will do. I can’t make you do anything.” He thought we were combative. But the ultimatum was thrown at us without any conversation about what that meant for my husband — how it would affect his quality of life, his friendships, and his general happiness. I stopped talking. There would be no conversation, no discussion.

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Jad said, “But what happens to the star? Does is just become a big hunk?” I sat in my car listening to the two men banter back and forth. They explained that the star would collapse, gravity would take over and the “dead iron core” would start to pull “everything back in…aluminum, oxygen, carbon, magnesium, silicon-.” These things would rub together and get incredibly hot. Then Derrick said, “All of a sudden you get the super nova…Here’s the beauty of the super nova, in the ridiculously excesses of energy that are there in the super nova, right? In that ridiculously huge explosion, the biggest in the universe, there is so much energy there that actually what happens is that you form these nuclei which would not form under any other condition…Including like gold, including the gold in your wedding ring. They need that ridiculous excess of energy to form.” There were big boom side effects. Then Jad and Derrick said what was left after the supernova was a field of debris which clumped together and began to form the early planets: the planetesimals, then Earth, and then us. “So you’re saying this is the birth of everything past iron?” Jad said. “Yeah,” Derrick said, “exactly, exactly.”

During the Ironman, I walked past the long line of cars parked on Valley View Road and noted the bumper stickers: white ovals with 140.6 or 26.2, or 13.1 in bold black font. There were no units of measurement, no “mile” behind the numbers, but other athletes know these numbers correspond to the Ironman, the marathon, the half-marathon and so on. It appeared that every car on the street had been branded with a sticker. There was one sticker that stood out: “0.0”. I crouched

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down next to the bumper for a selfie, laughing at its defiance in the face of such athletic hubris. As I stood in that hospital room, the image of that sticker came back to me – black and white and stark – as clear as if I was holding it in my hands. I thought it would be a slow burn, a gradual fade. How does one go from 140.6 miles to 0.0 so quickly? Eric’s a supernova and I wonder, What is everything past iron?

154 BIOGR A PHIES

Biographies NICO AMADOR | POETRY Nico Amador’s poetry has been featured or is forthcoming in Poetry Unbound, Bettering American Poetry, Poem-a-Day, PANK, Pleiades, The Cortland Review, Hypertext Review, The Visible Poetry Project and elsewhere. His chapbook, Flower Wars, was selected as the winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize and was published by Newfound Press in 2017. He is a grant recipient from the Vermont Arts Council, an alumnus of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Writers Retreat, and a reader at the New England Review. CLARESSINKA ANDERSON | POETRY Claressinka Anderson’s poetry and essays have appeared in Autre Magazine, Chiron Review, bedfellows, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (Carla), and elsewhere, as well as in the anthology Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books, 2020). Through her ongoing collaborations with artists, her work engages the interstitial spaces of contemporary art and literature. During her time at Bennington, she wrote her first libretto. Born and raised in London, she lives in Los Angeles and dreams about rain.

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LOGAN ROYCE BEITMEN | FICTION Logan Royce Beitmen studied art and experimental poetry at Bard College and fiction at Bennington College. As a professional art writer, Beitmen has interviewed and written about the work of numerous contemporary artists, including Donald Baechler, Petra Collins, Irvin Pascal, Raymond Pettibon, Julian Schnabel, Rachel Rossin, and Wendy White. He is currently working on his first novel, a book about filmmaking and revolution. RICHARD BRAIT | POETRY Richard Brait is a corporate lawyer living in Toronto. Richard’s poetry has been published, or is forthcoming, in TickleAce, The Queen’s Quarterly, EVENT Magazine, The New Quarterly, Exile Quarterly and The Dalhousie Review. He was shortlisted for the Fish Anthology’s Lockdown Prize in 2020 and is the 2021 winner of the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Competition for Emerging Writers. Richard’s recent blog post for The New Quarterly describes his reading and writing experience at Bennington: https://tnq.ca/richard-braits-writing-space. KELI FLYNN DAVIDSON | FICTION Kelly Flynn Davidson is a 2022 graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars and also has a BA in English from The University of Texas at Austin. She is working on a novel about some untoward and amiss characters, and the horses who redeemed them. She will miss the smell of the fields that lead to the Bennington barn lectures.

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SUSAN DINES | POETRY Susan lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, two turtles, and Australian Shepherd. Her daughters have recently relocated to Seattle and Truckee, California, the motivation behind her next adventure, which involves a conversion van, the husband, the turtles, the dog, and an extensive road trip. Dines’ work has appeared in Poems from the Lockdown by Willowdown Books, Kestrel: A Journal of Literature and Art, Eclipse Lit, and SLAB. Her poetry has placed in the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards Writing Competition and shortlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize. MICHELE FEENEY | FICTION/NONFICTION Michele Feeney lives in Phoenix and Michigan, and has been married to her husband Matt since 1984. They have five children and two grandchildren. Michele has practiced law since 1983, mostly in the area of Alternative Dispute Resolution and in academic positions at the Sandra Day O’Connor School of Law. After a couple of decades of taking writing classes and attending conferences, Michele was happy to accept an offer of admission from Bennington to begin her MFA in January 2020. CLAUDIA SIMONE FRANKLIN | NONFICTION/POETRY Claudia Simone Franklin was born in Peru to German parents. She is a late bloomer. English is her third language; to master it has taken a lifetime. Although she speaks it with an accent, she teaches English. These days, she lives in Miami. She is finishing a collection of lyric texts that struggle to articulate the indelible effect of war not only on her family but on the act of narration.

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KERRI GOERS | NONFICTION Kerri Goers is a Neonatal Nurse Practitioner at the University of Iowa and mother of three, who thought 2020 would be the perfect year to embark on an exploration of nonfiction with the Bennington Writing Seminars. Thanks largely to her fellow students and the writing faculty at Bennington, she has not come to regret this decision. Her work has previously been published in The Examined Life Journal. It’s been an honor to travel this road with all of you. MEIKO KO | FICTION Meiko Ko’s works have been published by the Blue Lyra Review, the Hayden’s Ferry Review, the AAWW, The Margins, The Literary Review, the Columbia Journal, Epiphany, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Litro Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, Five:2: One Magazine, Breadcrumbs Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, Scoundrel Time (Pushcart Prize nomination), failbetter, Juked and elsewhere; some of her reviews can be found at Tupelo Quarterly, Entropy. She was a finalist for the 2020 Puerto del Sol Contest for prose and has been long listed for the Home is Elsewhere Anthology 2017 Berlin Writing Prize. PATRICIA MARTIN | NONFICTION Patricia Martin is a non-fiction writer, podcaster and researcher who studies the people and ideas that change the culture. While at Bennington, she completed her fourth book. She works in Chicago and lives in the woods of Michiana with her husband and countless deer.

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MICHAEL MARTINEC | POETRY Michael Martinec is a poet trying not to drown under ever increasing debt. He lives in Austin, Texas. KRYSIA WAZNY MCCLAIN | POETRY Krysia Wazny McClain spends most of her time writing poems, organizing for racial justice, and editing academic texts. She also likes to dance and photograph piles of dishes in drying racks. Born and raised in Southwest Florida, she lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two cats. Her work has appeared in Porridge Magazine and the Massachusetts Poetry Festival’s Ekphrastic Gallery and is forthcoming in Disobedient Futures, an anthology from the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. GINA FALLAS-RODRIGUEZ | FICTION Gina Fallas-Rodriguez was born and currently lives in Boston, MA with her two visually impaired dogs. She has worked as a wine manager, a high school teacher, and a tarot card reader. When not writing, working on music, or reading tarot cards she can be found wandering around aimlessly while trying to tame her inner-rapscallion and hiding from responsibility. LUCY FAYE ROSENTHAL | FICTION Lucy’s work has appeared in Hobart, Bridge Eight Press, and the Vassar Student Review, among others. She reads tarot, cuts her own hair, and is really good at making U-turns.

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JAMES ROSEMAN | FICTION James Roseman was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming, raised outside of Boston, Massachusetts, and currently resides in Dublin, Ireland. He is most interested in short fiction with strong Jewish themes and is working towards his first collection of stories. STEPHANIE SELLARS | NONFICTION Stephanie Sellars is a New York-based writer, filmmaker, and performer. She holds an MFA in film from Columbia University and a BA from Gettysburg College. Her writing has been published in Entropy, Moviemaker, and the former alt-weekly New York Press. Her films have won awards and screened at many festivals and her debut feature film Lust Life Love was released in 2021 on VOD platforms. Other accomplishments include residencies at Yaddo and Vermont Studio Center and the 2020 release of her jazz vocal album Girl Who Loves, available wherever music is sold online. By the time this journal goes to print, she will have an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars! www.stephaniesellars.com

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The End of the World – June 2022

Articles inside

Recommendations

Biographies

Everything Past Iron

NONFICTION | Kerri Goers The Pleiades

NONFICTION | Claudia Simone Franklin A Cartography of What is Left: A German Lyric Bavaria and Berlin 1945

FICTION | Keli Flynn Davidson Puissance

Berlin, 1945 and 1947, East Kingston, 2015

of Georgia O’Keeffe

A shame about the money

I’m Easy

Mother and Child

POETRY | Krysia Wazny McClain The Blur

FICTION | Meiko Ko The Broken Nose

FICTION | Logan Royce Beitmen Shooting Barin Ghosh

Alexandria

Battleships and Billfish

American Airlines DFW > DTW

Unspool

FICTION | Michele Feeney Like Family

POETRY | Richard Brait Reading the Spanish Flu, 2020

NONFICTION | Patricia Martin PRIDE

FICTION | Gina Fallas-Rodriguez A Voice

The Empress’ Attire

FICTION | James Roseman The Intermediary of Abraham

Upstate, Damian

Brandon is a Wig Maker

Sunshine Park

Milk

POETRY | Claressinka Anderson He Sends Me Blue Mountains, a Field

Manhunt

FICTION | Lucy Faye Rosenthal Neither Here nor There

POETRY | Nico Amador On Continuation

Bottleneck

If I Were There