Blue Mesa Review Issue 35

BLUE MESA REVIEW

NO.35NO.35NO.35NO.35N O.35NO.35NO.35NO.35NO.

Contents Cover Art: “Verboten” Artist: Kyle Hemmings Letter from the Editors

p. 2

“—vibe [Fragments from a Notebook]” By: Marcos Santiago Gonsalez p. 8 “The Meaning of Life” By: Myriam Lacroix

p. 18

“Reckoning” By: Liz N. Clift

p. 28

“Hózhó” By: Leeanna T. Torres

p. 29

“Last Night a DJ Saved My Life with a Song” By: Mario J. Gonzales p. 37 “Elegy” By: Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

p. 45

“Talking Shop, an Interview with Lori Ostlund” By: David O’Connor p. 46 “The Boat I’m Building You” By: Robin Cedar

p. 53

BMR Staff

p. 55

Letter from the Editors

Jason Thayer and Aaron Reeder Editors-in-Chief 2

Contributors Marcos Santiago Gonsalez is a PHD candi-

date in English and Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and teaches writing courses at Baruch College. His short fiction can be found in Latino/a Rising: An Anthology of U.S. Latino/a Speculative Fiction, and Duende Literary. He is currently seeking representation for his first novel, and is working on a memoir about trauma, racism, and growing up with undocumented Mexican parents in rural New Jersey. He currently lives in New York City.

Myriam Lacroix writes and translates and an-

swers a lot of tweets about hamburgers from her little loft in Victoria, BC. Next fall, she’s going to leave the mild and moss-covered Pacific Northwest for snowy Upstate New York, where she’ll spend three years studying fiction with some of her favorite writers at Syracuse University. She was a finalist in the 2015 Gigantic Sequins Flash Fiction Contest, and her work is upcoming in a sweet new publication called AADOREE.

Liz N. Clift holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Iowa State University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Hobart, The National Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Colorado.

Leeanna T. Torres is a native daughter of the Great American Southwest, with deep cultural roots in New Mexico. She has spent the last fifteen years as an environmental professional working throughout the West. Her essays have been published in regional literary magazines such as Pilgrimage, and Bosque. He work is also forthcoming in The New Mexico Review.

3

Contributors Mario J. Gonzales short fiction has appeared in the

New England Review, the Sonora Review, the Rio Grande Review and other literary journals. He has participated in writers conferences in Taos (2012) and Bread Loaf (2016).

He is currently putting together a short story collection called Descansos. Born in Fresno, California, he was raised in a small farm-worker community, Parlier, located in the middle of California’s San Joaquin Valley. He has a PhD in cultural anthropology from Washington State University. Currently he lives and works in Santa Fe, NM.

Robin Cedar is an MFA candidate at Oregon State

University, where she teaches English composition and serves as poetry editor and social media manager for 45th Parallel. She has been published in The Fem, Leveler, Moonsick Magazine, Wildness, and elsewhere. She’s currently working on her first book of poetry.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is an American poet of Pal-

estinian, Syrian, and Jordanian heritage. Her first book of poems, Water & Salt, is published by Red Hen Press. She is the winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Prize for her chapbook Arab in Newsland. Her most recent poetry publications appear or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Crab Creek Review, Barrow Street, Drunken Boat, and Massachusetts Review. She is an alum of Hedgebrook and an MFA candidate at the Rainier Writing Workshop of Pacific Lutheran University. She lives in Redmond, Washington. You can learn more about her work at www. lenakhalaftuffaha.com 4

5

NO.35

6

7

—vibe —vibe

[Fragments from Notebook] [Fragments from aa Notebook]

continue with his list. He sees me as some kind of sentimental: I flirt, I tease, I laugh, I tell him his dickprint looks good in the pic he sent. I am his Florida retirement plan. I am his gay dads at the PTA meeting. I am his removal from the Bronx. I am everything he wants me to be because I let myself be. No mirror image but an image of his: his is his is his is his. But what is D— to me?

Just that: D.

Remember this before you forget: The second month after moving to New York a fortune teller tells me I was born into a great and terrible sadness. Remember how this made you feel all levels of grandeur and relevance. Now the sadness bores. There’s little telenovela glamor in it. A year later, when bringing a friend (who? can’t remember) the basement business was surrounded by yellow tape. The old Puerto Rican woman sitting on the stoop told me, “Que la mataron.”

the eyes brown diamonds, lips centered opulence, skin brown and

Sex without a condom. Again

I am dumb so freaking dumb dumb dumb. Neither of us

bother to ask if the other is fucking other guys. He thinks we are a thing. Hah! Hahaha. He does

8

By: Marcos Santiago Gonsalez

He thinks we vibe. Over lana del rey? platanos? bochinche y chismes? I’m sure D— could

not know I fuck him without a condom out of vengeance. The bizarre and unutterable hope I will catch something and bring it back to E— so he can know pain like the pain I knew when he fucked A— B— C— and who knows who else. This body becomes the vessel of my great revenge.

The fortune teller tells a prophesy of the past, a past erased, a past with no future, a past

Recanting his aesthetic philosophy that all art should be in the pursuit of pleasure, Oscar Wilde wrote in his public letter to Lord Alfred Douglas titled “De Profundis,” “I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art…there is no truth comparable to Sorrow…out of Sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or star there is pain.”

—sick of the sorrow—

The leaky body, the diseased body, the disintegrating body—they tell me I am to fear this. A history not too long ago tells them so. Stripped masculinity. Pissing on oneself without one’s consent. Spoon fed by a mother not afraid to touch lips leprous. A tia who refuses to drink from a coffee mug because she fears contagion. Four letters which robbed us of a generation of men who laughed who loved who fought who fucked who cried who lived who died who never even were

9

“Dale! Metele! Dale! Metele!” It is the swerving of the L on the tongue during sex which is

A month before I was born my uncle died. No one really knows how. No one really questioned any of it. No one knows who his boyfriends/hookups were who might have loved him when this death to be first manifested. No one knows what life he lived after he took off from that small New Jersey town. There is just my mother blurting out the fear in four letters and my grandmother who quiets anytime I whisper out the four letters of its Spanish counterpart to get her to fess up to some memory. This was the fortune teller’s prediction.

Wilde’s De Profundis was created because of betrayal. The betrayal of a lover. The betrayal of community. The betrayal of an aesthetic. The betrayal of everything you believed to be true.

Betrayal begets sorrow begets clarity begets truth begets life. Betrayal is the beginning of a better story: _______________________________________________________________________

The fear of death made so by the history of four uppercase letters brought together without spaces between them. Assotto Saint knew he was going to die from these four letters. He did not fear death, nor its pains (so I would like to believe, or so I have convinced myself). He feared vanishing beyond the veil of time. The consequences of stigma after his passing. “i do want to discuss my dying and my death,” he wrote. “dying” is made into a gerund, a noun, no conjugating work lassoing the verb into a fixed point in time. The noun because it is fixed is eternal. It is timeless and timely. Saint’s “dying” is ever present, ongoing, stubborn continuation.

10

He knew to really die was to not be remembered, to be a name on the tip of no one’s tongue.

Saint knew this, and he fought to be loud, to be a diva, to tell the leakiness of his body, to weep, to live his identities wrathfully. That famous slogan—Silence=death—he tells me “remember it.”

E— smiles when he says those words. The indent of his dimples. Brown eyes glisten. He means it.

Too much, in fact. On his lips it becomes customary. They are no longer transcendence, they no longer are a ravage. I do not bleed when they are spoken like I once did. The letters of the word l-o-v-e tell me— The pronouns sandwiching these letters hail no one. The dulled syllables deafen. No impact anymore.

There is a poem by Saint titled, “De Profundis: for eleven gay men in my building.” No clear connection to Wilde. No betrayals. The poem is abbreviated portraits of men who were and no longer are. It is a poem documenting, in brevity, in an extreme brevity, the abyss of loss, its unfathomable depths, the never sucking never fucking never bottoming never topping never kissing a beloved again—loss as having no bottom, the waters eternally

—much like love

E— says those three words to me and, on the rarest of occasions, concludes the statement with my name. This is startling to me. I am/am I uprooted? Palpitation of the body. Twitch of the

11

eyelid. Vibration of the lips forming some kind of sound. Undone at the pronunciation of my name. It feels like —vibe

Assotto Saint was not the given name of the writer. He was born Yves F. Lubin in the country of Haiti. “By using the nom de guerre of Saint,” he wrote, “I also wanted to add a sacrilegious twist to my life by grandly sanctifying the loud low-life bitch that I am.”

When E— tells me what he has been doing the ruse is up. There is an A—. There is a B—.

There is a C—. There are more letters, and the letters repeat. My letter M— is no longer the only one. I am no longer made to feel special. I can no longer convince myself that what we are is something true, pure, untainted. The dysfunction of my mother and father which I said would never be mine is now all mine. Their inheritance is this pain.

De Profundis means from the depths in Latin. Wilde and Saint, at the time of both of their compositions, are writing from the depths. Rock bottom, or near it, they write at their lowest: Saint, who will live and die from an acronym consisting of four letters, and Wilde, who will live and die because of the “love which dare not speak its name.” To write from the depths is to write from a place unspeakable. It is Saint’s rage and bitterness, his insistence and urgency in writing himself into existence before he is taken from existence. It is Wilde’s petty accusations over how he fell from grace, his antipathy towards all that once hailed him as genius. These depths, if they

12

are to be known, must be experienced for its dank darkness, the isolation, the inescapable nature of it. From the depths the writer is always looking up, sun deprived, at what they do not have, at what they cannot have. To write from the depths is to write what is for a will be that is not yet so.

He makes me remember I am a body: impulse, vibrational matter, hair tingle, velocity rub—he makes sound out of me, this is the sound: [

]

Wilde does not write “De Profundis” to exonerate his lover, Bosie, for his incarceration. He does not write out of friendliness, or to mend relations. There is a tone of pity, perhaps, and certainly an undercurrent of rage, but otherwise the letter is a testament to love. Loving to its limits, the extremities of love. The being that is being exposed to love. The letter is a letter written to love, to the love given to Bosie, and of a love that was. An obituary to love’s loss. “Its joy,” Wilde writes of love, “like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive.” Loving in the past tense is a means of its staying alive. The duress of time passing, love going, yet resuming its hold, the momentum from a past done and over with still building. The becoming past tense of love is the hardest part knowing it will someday be past tense lived as a present. The decreasing in intensity, the diminishment of the syllable impact, a weakening of its surge—love’s prophetic doom. “The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less.” The art of loving in minimal. The bare minimum. The expression of love, its grief its desire its history its desecration its damnation, to express love as continuation of a past and a present and a future. Love happens all at once. Love is all times.

Love is being compromised, the bounds of yourself in jeopardy, vulnerable to the pain Love brings, “You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had”—then is that what love is? To

13

live and have lived and will live a lifetime, as violators as enemies as a discord itself, the onset of this love lifetime shadowed by a betrayal to be, a beginning—an end, the anticipation of betrayal’s realization? Wilde, my comrade, we are victims to, as well as perpetrators of, love.

Caught up in every tense of it.

When D— and I fuck I call him Papi. I even put on my best non-white boy voice I can muster.

He bites his lower lip, intensifies, eyes blaze narrow, thrusts, brow ripples concentration. This triggers him because he hates his father, his Papi. He thinks his father is a Dominican stereotype.

Left his mom when he was a baby, check. Gossips unendingly, check. A beer belly sponsored by El Presidente, check. It is because of him you inherited your six foot six height, I want to plead to him, forgiveness lindo. Maybe the rage at his father and me calling him Papi is why he fucks so well. Trigger after trigger triggering triggers. Forgiveness can wait.

us vibing, the matter at hand, believing it, want to believe in what he believes in: our vibing—our mutual agreement of sensational pulses, the harmony of body to body, skin equivalence, the being that is being in tandem, our accord—not that though: it is He and I, the pronouns singular, the “and” a border stalling our unity—ours, if we are to have our plural, possesses no friction, ours is the absence of the tense pulse, no quiver of the skins, nowhere near the precipice of our unbecoming, the slow unraveling of all that we are on no foreseeable horizon—ours, if it is anything, is a negation, the canceling out immediately, the gradual waning of lust, the immanence of our ending, our transcendence into nothing—He and I and Us and Ours no more nor never was

14

Saint’s “De Profundis” is in the honor of eleven gay men. No more, no less. He tells us of their “strolls through chelsea.” He gives us the ordinary details of craving “french fries kiwis gin” after a night out dancing. He reminds us of the what will be: i tried to see anything but his casket gorged by the ground the tears were for myself one day i shall be in this darkness love’s suffering, the suffering of loving, losing love, love dawning, the withering of love, the darkness that is to love in all the present tense verb of it—this has been the condition through time for kinds of loving that are not Loving as a burial grounds of names that you will join…—D— and E— and A— and O—…

Dare not spoken, spoken only in daring

The Ghost, it is A-I-D-S-

The

curious predicament of the man who loves other men. He is a disease. He carries disease. He gives disease and in giving it he gives regeneration. Death as a life as a means of living as a memory. He regenerates in those who come after him. This is his loving, this darkness all shall be in.

15

D— and E— are the entire island of DR to me. Flesh I make expeditions on weekly. They are my conquest and my land and my steed. They are history I ride, I suck, I bite, I fuck in the making. They are

Vengeance is the ultimate act of __________________________. [forgiveness] [pettiness] [revolution] [selfishness] [love]

16

Self Portrait As Leaves Artist: Christopher Ursini

17

The Meaning of Life

*

Jonah, because they’d never met anyone with that name. They had no idea what Jonahs were like, and they liked the element of surprise. They were not going to be the type of parents who call their baby Mozart or Beyoncé. In fact, they immediately agreed that they would not wish any type of success upon Jonah. Life was too short to have that kind of pressure.

They called Leah’s mom first to tell her the news. They told her a desperate woman with no eyes inside her eye holes begged them to take her baby and raise it as their own. They said that because they knew Leah’s mom wouldn’t understand, she’d pester them about not making any efforts to find the parents.

“Babies are expensive,” she pestered them anyway, “how’re you gonna pay for diapers or dentists or, worse, orthodontists? And with Sarah working at that juice bar?”

Leah’s mom thought that because Sarah wore men’s shirts she should be the breadwinner. She understood nothing about lesbianism, and she understood nothing about them.

“If you don’t try to be more supportive, we’re gonna tell Jonah he only has one grandmother,” Leah said. She hung up.

Sarah’s parents were much cooler. They offered to host a late baby shower, and Leah and Sarah invited all their friends. Leah wore her gold mini dress, and Sarah put on a gold tie to match. They dressed Jonah up in a little white and gold dress they’d taken off a baby Jesus doll at the Salvation Army.

Leah and Sarah’s friends decided that Jonah was a very cute baby, which meant he’d be an ugly adult. Sarah and Leah didn’t mind. Ugly adults were usually better – like blind people whose hearing developed to be sharp as a detective dog’s, ugly people were forced to learn very

18

By: Myriam Lacroix

They’d planned on getting beer from Toby’s, but instead they got a baby, and they were not unhappy about it. Leah and Sarah hadn’t talked about kids yet, but finding one seemed to be a sign that it was time. Besides, being lesbians, this spared them the trouble of adopting or getting one of their friends to have sex with them.

They found the baby in the alley behind their apartment building, close to a gutted couch and confetti and some blood. There’d been a fight outside Toby’s – on stand-up comedy night, of all nights. That was Toby’s. Leah and Sarah noticed the baby’s feet kicking at the inside of its flannel cocoon, and they loved it right away. It was the perfect baby: droopy-cheeked and sullen, with fists barely larger than grapes.

They brought the baby back to their apartment and washed it in the sink. They rubbed it until it was clean and warm and happy. They dried it with a dishtowel and took turns smelling its head; it smelled like green apples from the dish soap.

They wrapped the baby in a sweater and gave him a tour of their apartment. The Christmas tree turned Easter tree. The sudoku corner. The coral bathtub, with its seashell-shaped headrest. The front closet, filled with an incredible collection of Men’s Health magazines left behind by the previous tenant. The baby loved the apartment. It gurgled and touched and put everything in its mouth. When Leah and Sarah asked the baby if he wanted to stay and be their baby, he grabbed their hair in two little fistfuls and yanked down twice – twice for yes.

They made their new baby a bed next to their bed by bundling blankets inside a Rubbermaid bin, but they couldn’t get themselves to put him down. They pressed him between their skins and fell asleep, warm as hams.

good jokes or develop an amazing sense of fashion.

They all sat by the pool in lawn chairs with Sarah’s parents occasionally refilling the chip bowls, and nobody swam. Leah and Sarah’s friends were not the swimming type. They wore thick makeup and boots that took a long time to lace.

“You have to let me do a photo shoot with Jonah,” their friend Liv said. “Anne Geddes meets Marina Abramovic’s Balkan Baroque – an homage to Jonah’s dark provenance.”

Liv was the best thing to have come out of Ms. Grant’s geography class, and Leah told her so.

“To the most rad aunts and uncles in the world!” Leah cheered. “And to our cute-ass baby!”

They all raised their glasses and took big gulps of their drinks. Leah was drinking lemonade in case her breasts started making milk from being around a baby, but Sarah got sloshed. She kept climbing onto the diving board and threatening to jump if Leah didn’t promise to stay with her until they were so old their asses hung down like sandbags and their pussies smelled like kelp.

They ordered pizza and let their friend Matt give Jonah a little Mohawk with tiny leopard print on the sides of his head. They played electropunk remixes of lullabies.

Later, Sarah’s dad drove them home, and Sarah puked a thin string of puke on the family van’s carpet. When they got home, Sarah and Jonah fell right asleep, but Leah stayed up counting Jonah’s toes over and over again. She kissed his feet until they were purple with lipstick.

She wondered if Sarah had realized yet, that he was real. *

Leah couldn’t stop smelling Jonah’s neck. At the store, on the bus, while changing his diapers. His baby smell was intoxicating, like the smell of permanent markers or very fresh flowers. Sarah found a knitting kit in the dumpster and started making Jonah lots of little socks and hats and tunics, all from the same purple wool. Leah learned to cook. After her shifts at the café, she’d come home and soak bread in milk and sugar to make soft pudding that Jonah could eat. She stewed apples with cinnamon, for vitamins and because it made their apartment smell like a candle store. She thawed frozen peas and puréed them with the heel of her hand.

Things were like that, when Jonah was a baby. Soft, warm, easy. They spent all their free time playing: dress-up and tickle fights and spin the baby’s bottle. They all loved those coloring books that came with a single clear pen, the pen’s wetness turning black and white pictures into bright paintings. Those books were especially good for Jonah, who was pretty bad at coloring inside the lines.

Then, one day, when he was two, Jonah got an ear infection. Leah and Sarah had avoided

going to the doctor until then, but this time there was no way around it. Jonah’s upper lip and chin were permanently caked with snot from crying all the time. His little child body was flushed and holding him felt like holding a hot water bottle. They took him to the walk-in clinic by their house and claimed to have lost Jonah’s health care card.

“No problem,” the receptionist said, “I’ll look him up in the system.”

“Fuck the system,” Sarah thought to say, “we hate the system. The system is oppressive and one day the world will return to its natural state of anarchy.”

The woman blinked her big brown eyes.

“Just have a seat, please.”

19

The doctor was a short old guy with really long eyebrows. He was grumpy with them, told them that even anarchist parents had to make sure their child could have access to health care.

He sent them out with a hand-written prescription for antibiotics.

In the lobby, they thanked the nice receptionist and promised her that they were going to try to accept organized society. When they turned around, Jonah was throwing magazines on the ground and a lady in a pinstriped jacket was looking at him funny. She had lots of makeup around her eyes and on her forehead, and deep creases were forming in it from how much she was frowning. Sarah picked up Jonah and apologized to the lady. As they left the clinic and turned the corner into the alley where they’d found Jonah, they heard the lady yell: “Hey, where’d you get that baby?”

“We got the baby in the normal way of giving birth to him!” is what they should have answered, but instead they started running. That was a bad call. The lady’s inner predator kicked in and she charged them like a provoked pit bull. She had calves like bricks, so thick the nylon around them was stretched almost invisible. She caught up to them almost instantly, grabbing Sarah by the sweater so tightly her knuckles turned white. She was breathing hard and her face was red like a demon’s. From a distance, she had looked like the kind of lady Leah and Sarah would never talk to: a business executive or a paralegal, someone who lived in a nifty condo with chrome appliances. From up close, though, they could see that the skin under her makeup was leathery, that her too-tight bun was held together by a purple elastic threaded with silver tinsel, that her skirt suit wasn’t so much navy as the tired color of a varicose vein. She was a fraud, which meant that she was one of them, which meant that she was no more entitled to having a baby than they were.

“Where’d you get that baby?” the lady asked again.

“You can’t have him,” Sarah said. Another faux pas. She may as well have said finders keepers.

Leah got a feeling like a cold glass of water down the back. This was the feeling she got when she sensed a manager trailing her through the aisles of a department store and her skirt was full of perfume bottles and lacy underwear. She yanked the woman’s bun back and the woman collapsed like a folding patio chair. She gave her a swift kick between the shoulder blades and grabbed Sarah by the hand. They ran down the alley, dodging tire rims and broken glass and rotting cabbage. When they looked back, the woman was trying to sit up on her knees, a palm on the back of her neck. Her eyes didn’t know where to be in their sockets.

Sarah pulled Leah into the yard of an apartment building that wasn’t theirs. They snuck around to their own building, half a block down. Leah was pretty turned on by how clever Sarah was, throwing the woman off their tracks like that. When they got back to their apartment, they calmed their sweet baby and didn’t waste one second after he was asleep to start fucking like astronauts who just came back from a mission and actually survived and took off their space suits and were suddenly irresistibly bare and fleshy, floating around their tiny tin-can room. They loved everything about this situation. They loved having a baby, yes, but they also loved being felons.

They liked lying and devising plans. They liked that they had a nemesis, and they loved being each other’s partners in crime.

When Jonah woke up from his nap, they did the thing where they put all the pillows, cushions and blankets they owned on the living room floor and lay down on them. They poured chocolate chips into their palms and ate them with their pinkies up, as if they were tiny appetizers. They made shadow puppets with brown, sticky hands. They looked at some picture books and did whatever they wanted. When Sarah had to leave for her evening shift, she kissed

20

their baby on his face for five minutes, then she kissed Leah deep and put her hands in Leah’s underwear, stroking her bum. Leah and Sarah really did respond well to adversity. *

“She’s out there,” Sarah said when she came back that night. It was midnight and raining.

Leah took off Sarah’s wet coat and hung it on the back of a chair.

“Who?” Leah asked. She didn’t want to believe it.

“She’s just sitting out in her car. I had to come in through the back. She looks demented.”

Sarah’s lips were purple from the cold. Her nostrils pulsed open and closed like little jellyfish: she was worried. Leah took Sarah by the hand and pulled her onto the couch, wrapping her arms and legs around her from behind, like a backpack.

“She’ll go away,” she said in Sarah’s ear. “Let’s go to sleep. When we wake up, she’ll be gone.” * She wasn’t gone. She was leaning back in the passenger’s seat of her car with her feet up on the dashboard. She was there as they ate their Corn Pops, did their morning aerobics tape, had their morning bath.

She was still there when Leah came back from work around dinner time. She was there when they went to bed. The following morning, they cracked the blinds and there she was, wiping something off her windshield with a napkin.

She’d spend the whole day on their street, sitting in her old grey Camry for hours on end.

Sometimes she’d step out and circle some buildings, or she’d get on her knees in the middle of the street and say please, please with her hands clasped over her heart. She’d drive off late at night and be there again the next morning.

At first it was fun to sneak around like spies whenever they left the house, but, after a few days, the woman’s presence started getting to them. Leah and Sarah didn’t exactly feel bad for the woman – she had, after all, abandoned Jonah in an alley – but her whimpers, her increasingly purple eyelids, the way her knees quivered sadly when she walked: it all filled them with a sort of unspecific dread. They started leaving the apartment less often. They kept the blinds closed.

They stopped taking Jonah to the park, and if he cried too loud they all huddled into the bathroom, stuffing towels under the door so the sound wouldn’t seep out into the street. *

It was Wednesday night, almost two weeks after their trip to the clinic. Sarah and Leah had planned a parent meeting. Until then, parent meetings had meant coming up with fun new games to play or sharing intel about where to score free baby stuff. Not this time.

They’d thought the woman would have given up by then, but they were starting to worry she never would. The day before, she’d gone into the alley, written down GIVE ME BACK MY BOY in blue chalk and stood over it, screaming like a burning witch.

“Maybe we should move,” Leah said through a mouthful of digestive cookies.

“And leave our apartment? The best apartment in the world? No way. Anyway, we’ll never

be able to get Jonah’s drawings off the floor and we can’t afford to pay the damages.”

21

“So what do we do? I’m not giving up our baby,” Leah said.

“Murder?” Sarah said.

“I don’t know, lovebum. I don’t think I’m mentally ready to take a human life. Besides, if we got caught, we’d go to jail and Jonah would grow up in the system. I’m not sure what exactly the deal is with the system, but I’m pretty sure cute babies don’t belong there.”

They sat in silence, dipping cookies in chocolate milk. Sarah drew a small arrow on the able, and another arrow, and another. She did this when she was deep in thought.

“If you know yourself but not the enemy,” Sarah started, “for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.”

“Sun Tzu. Are you saying we should learn more about her? Follow her?”

“Maybe. I mean, we have the advantage. She can’t see us, but we can see her.”

And they could see her right then through a slit in the blinds, sitting in her car and mouthing the words to some unknowable song, deep half-moons carved out under her eyes by the yellow street lamp. They could feel her presence like a mop bucket weakly but relentlessly slopping all over their shoes. * Sarah asked her parents to babysit and borrowed a coworker’s car for the night. Leah and her hid under an old wool blanket on the backseat, parked three cars behind the old Camry.

They played a game where they made each other cum and had to stay very still and quiet. By midnight, they were so exhausted they almost didn’t notice when the Camry’s tail lights turned on. Sarah climbed into the driver’s seat with her hood down to her nose and Leah joined her, sinking low in the passenger seat. They followed the Camry slowly, from a distance, through the dark potholed streets of their neighborhood. The woman pulled into the driveway of an old brick bungalow only a dozen blocks from their apartment. Sarah pulled over and had to parallel park, but the woman didn’t seem to notice. She walked around the side of the house and down a small staircase, into the basement. Leah and Sarah walked across the wet grass and crouched on either side of a small slit of basement window. * Brenda poured the milk first, filled the top third of the glass with Kahlúa. She stuck her finger deep into the glass and swirled until it was homogenous brown – adult Nesquik. The first gulp pulled her back into herself, into her clothes, into her basement apartment with its old humming refrigerator, bluish ceiling lights, the beautiful Christmas tablecloth she’d inherited from her grandmother and used year-round because it was so sturdy, the reds and greens and oranges so rich.

“Who’s winning?” she managed to say.

“It’s a tie,” Ken said, looking at the television. “Did you find your kid yet?”

“Don’t you go calling him my kid, Ken. He’s your kid, too. Don’t you go denying that.”

“Fine, fine, sorry I asked,” Ken answered. “What’s for dinner?”

“There’s chicken in the fridge. Why don’t you get off your ass and warm it yourself,” Brenda said, opening the fridge and peeling saran wrap from a dish of chicken covered in cream of mushroom. She scooped two chicken breasts and two dollops of mashed potatoes onto plates,

22

microwaved them one at a time.

“Your job called. They’re wondering when you plan on going back. ‘Soon,’ I told ‘em.

Didn’t seem to believe me. Go figure.”

“I’ll go back when I have my boy. If they don’t like it, they can shake a can of Coke and squeeze it up their tight asses.”

Truth was, Brenda didn’t want to go back to work. She couldn’t stamp another passport application, force another customer service smile, put on another stiff skirt that dug into her waist and left deep red grooves in her sides. Since finding out that Lucas was alive and safe, she’d started to feel herself slowly come back to life. Out of all the scenarios she’d imagined – Lucas being eaten by alley dogs, being kidnapped by psychopaths who chained him up in their backyard and made him drink his own urine – the thought that two teenaged dykes found and claimed him had never crossed her mind. What a joke. Knowing that the only thing standing between her and her Lucas was a couple of anarchist idiots filled her with hope. It was only a matter of time until they gave themselves away, and she’d be right there when they did.

Besides, sitting in that car all day allowed her to connect with herself, to think her thoughts and figure out how she really felt about things. The answer was that she felt like life had decided to make the space above her head its toilet seat. She looked like shit, felt like shit, probably smelled like shit and, irony of all ironies, hadn’t herself taken a proper shit in at least two weeks, making her acutely aware of all the shit piling up in her gut every time she took a bite of buttered bagel, had a bowl of minestrone, got up in the night to eat an Ah Caramel in fucking peace. There must have been at least six chicken breasts sitting in her gut at that very moment, and there were about to be seven. Brenda took a steaming bite of mushroom chicken.

Realizing that she felt like shit was a bit better than feeling like shit and not realizing it. It meant that if she started to punch her steering wheel, she knew why she was punching it. If she started to slap herself in the head, looking up to the sky and asking god to please let everyone in the world eat their own fucking faces off, she knew that she was doing it because she was in a difficult place, emotionally. And who wouldn’t be, in her situation? The same scene had been replaying in her head for almost two years. Bringing baby Lucas to karaoke night wrapped in a flannel blanket because babysitters were expensive and she couldn’t stay in that damned basement one second longer. Why should Ken get to have all the fun? Brenda needed a fucking drink once in a while too. Ken mouthing off at Toby’s, as usual, shouting “Get off the stage, faggot!” to some kid who, it turns out, actually was a faggot, the kind with a tear tattoo and boxing gym arms. The kid had taken Ken out to the alley and punched him until his face didn’t look like his face. The kid kept hitting and hitting – Brenda had never seen so much blood. Then he’d started dragging Ken down the sidewalk by his shoe, saying homophobic fuckers like him didn’t deserve to live. That had scared her, really scared her. She didn’t much like Ken herself, but the idea of living without him made the ground wobble under her feet and the sky press down on her head. She’d hid the baby in a corner of the alley and had gone after Ken. “Help!” she’d screamed like a twit. As if people weren’t already seeing what was happening, as if they hadn’t already made the decision to stay out of it. She’d tried to pull on Ken’s leg, get the kid to let go of it, but the kid had kicked her off like a dog. She’d fallen to the ground and hit her head on a fire hydrant. The rest was fuzzy.

She’d come to on a stretcher in some hospital hallway, doctors and nurses running around her like clean chickens. She’d walked right out of the hospital, hailed a cab she couldn’t pay for and gotten off at Toby’s to find the alley empty, with nothing but blood and confetti where her baby should have been. That night, Ken had come home from the hospital and the two of them

23

had beat the shit out of each other. They’d looked pathetic, swinging at each other and missing half the time, dizzy from concussions and pain medication. Still, it was the first and only time they’d hit each other, and they’d made it count.

The following day, they’d wept next to each other in bed, disinfecting wounds and icing bruises. The day after, Ken had gone back to work, proudly parading his black eyes and casts, and had seemed to forget about Lucas completely. Brenda hadn’t stopped crying – not for days, weeks, months.

“They’ll put you in jail for neglect or some shit,” Ken had said when Brenda tried calling the police. “They’re not gonna do anything to find him. Why should they care? You’re not pretty enough to be in the paper.”

Eventually, grief had turned to numbness and time had gone by like a really strong wind, sweeping her up and carrying her like an empty bag of chips.

Brenda finished her plate of chicken and brought it to her mouth, licking it clean of sauce, getting every last smear of mashed potato.

“Can you not eat like a pig in a god damned barn?” Ken said.

She was done, anyway. She went to their room and took off her jeans. As she was taking off her bra, she noticed shuffling outside the window. She looked up to see the two dykes with their hands over their eyes, cringing as if they’d bitten into a lemon. God, her tits weren’t that bad! They were holding up pretty well for forty-two. She threw on her oversized Labatt t-shirt and bolted out of the apartment, lunging across the grass and landing on the girls, whose young bodies crunched under her like a pile of kittens. The girls screamed and swore and tried to roll away, but she’d grabbed them both by the hair and had their faces mashed into the muddy ground.

“Give me back my fucking baby boy!” she roared. “Where are you hiding him? That’s MY boy!”

“We’re not telling you anything!” the more feminine one screeched.

“That’s what you think,” Brenda said. She yanked them up by the hair and dragged them into her apartment. “Get the duct tape, Ken. Those are the little bitches that stole our fucking baby.”

Brenda sat the girls down on some kitchen chairs and Ken came to tape them up. By the time he was done, they couldn’t even lift their pinky fingers. In times like these, Brenda was happy to have Ken around.

“What do we do?” Ken asked.

“I don’t know,” Brenda admitted, out of breath.

“Should I take out my knife? Bleed it out of them?”

“That’s not a bad idea. Girls, what do you think? Is it worth losing an ear to keep playing house with my boy?”

The girls didn’t move.

“Well, Ken, looks like these two little rug munchers aren’t too attached to their ears. Guess it makes sense their ears shouldn’t be attached to them.”

Ken got his pocket knife out of his leather jacket and slowly walked towards the girls. He licked his teeth to seem threatening, but he just looked like an old fool sucking on his dentures.

Brenda tried to hide her embarrassment.

“Last chance, girls. Are you gonna give me back my boy?” Brenda asked.

The girls shook their heads and squeezed their eyes shut. One of them started humming.

Ken got closer to the boyish one and grabbed her ear, brought the knife to the back of it and

24

started pushing down. Blood began dripping on her shoulder.

“Jesus, Ken! Don’t actually cut off their ears, you sick fuck!” Brenda pushed him off the girl who was sobbing now, snot dripping over her mouth tape.

Brenda couldn’t believe she’d married such a dipshit. He’d looked thrilled at the thought of hurting these two dumb-looking girls, fucking monster.

“Whatever,” Ken said, and went back to the couch to watch the hockey game. “Come on!

Just shoot, you prairie sissy!”

Brenda got a first aid kit from the bathroom. She cleaned the back of the girl’s ear with gauze and alcohol, put a band-aid on the wound. The two girls were sobbing, their whole bodies trembling.

“Alright, alright, calm down. Let’s not be overdramatic,” Brenda said, her own eyes filling with tears.

One tear escaped, then another, and suddenly she was curled up at the girls’ feet, wailing like a baby. One of the girls reached out her foot and started stroking Brenda’s back with her toes. It felt nice, soothing. Brenda hadn’t been touched like that for a long time, not since her mother had passed away. She put her head on the feminine girl’s lap and wept even harder. The girls made a muffled “aww” sound through the duct tape on their mouths.

“I just miss my boy so much,” Brenda blubbered.

The girls made the “aww” sound again, tilting their heads.

“Will you give him back to me?” Brenda asked, wiping her nose with her hand. She reached up to peel the duct tape off their mouths.

“No,” one girl said.

“No way,” the other agreed.

“But maybe you could come over for a visit sometime, if you promise to be nice. What do you think, Sarah?” the feminine one said.

“I’m not sure we can trust her,” Sarah said. “Ma’am, you left a baby in an alley. A dangerous alley with blood and stinky garbage and sharp objects. Do you know how irresponsible that is? Leah and I aren’t sure you’re the kind of person we want around our child.”

“It wasn’t my fault!” Brenda protested. “My fucking husband got into a bar fight, I thought they were going to kill him!”

“Okay, but why would you raise a child with the kind of person who gets into bar fights?”

Leah said. “Honestly, this guy looks like a Grade A asshole. Is he seriously watching hockey right now?”

“That’s pretty inappropriate, considering the circumstances,” Sarah agreed.

“Suck on that puck, you hick faggot!” Ken yelled.

Brenda looked up at the girls, whose young faces suddenly seemed so wise, like two lesbian angels who had come to tell her the good news, or at least to call her out on her shit.

“You’re right,” she said, “my husband’s a dink. Did you know he gave our son beer one time? In his bottle? So he would to go sleep already?”

“Oh my god,” Leah said.

“Oh my fucking god,” Sarah said.

“I know,” Brenda said.

“Why are you even still with him?” Leah asked.

“Yeah, why?” Sarah asked.

“Honestly, I don’t know. I never thought I’d be this kind of woman, you know? I never thought I’d have to wipe chip crumbs off the couch three times a day or drop my puke-covered

25

husband into the bath when he comes back from the bar. But before I knew how I got here, this was my life, and it was the only thing I had. It felt like leaving my life would be admitting there was nothing good about it, that I would be better off having nothing than having the few things I had. It sounds dumb, I know.”

“No way, that totally makes sense,” Leah said.

“Yeah, that’s a rough spot to be in. Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Sarah said.

“You two are so nice,” Brenda said. “You seem like a really sweet couple. I still wish you hadn’t stolen my Lucas, though.”

“You seem really nice too,” Sarah said. “But his name is Jonah.”

“Jonah,” Brenda said. “That’s a pretty name.”

“You know,” Leah said, “I’m getting a good feeling about all of this. I think we can make it work.”

“Yeah?” Brenda said.

“Yeah,” the two girls said, looking down at her with their soft, nurturing faces.

Brenda got some scissors from the kitchen and cut their tape off carefully. They sandwiched her into a warm hug, and Brenda felt her heart unfurl.

“Wanna come see our apartment?” Leah asked.

“Sure,” Brenda answered. “I’d like that. Let me just pack my things first. I don’t think I’ll be coming back here.”

“No problem,” Sarah said, “take your time. And make sure you grab that tablecloth.

That’s a real nice tablecloth.” *

Brenda happened to be really good a sudoku. She agreed that the apartment had a really good vibe. She also loved how much of her son was in the apartment. She could scan the floors and see the evolution of her son’s artistic talent, which, if she was honest, was nothing to write home about – people, alligators, houses, there was no telling what anything was.

The girls set up the couch for Brenda and told her she could stay as long as she wanted – in fact, they wouldn’t mind some help with the rent. Sarah went to pick up Jonah from her parents’ house while Leah and Brenda hung out in the living room. They made rum and cokes and talked about the meaning of life. It was hard to say what the meaning of life was. Maybe nature, or friendship. Definitely not money, but maybe science or technological advancement.

When Jonah came home, they all played a game of Candy Land. Jonah liked the colors, but he didn’t really get the game, so Brenda was put in charge of taking his little hand and helping him move the pieces on the board. Later, they all had Jonah’s favorite dessert, which was frozen yogurt with chocolate syrup and jam on it.

They helped Brenda unpack her things and decided they should all have a sleepover in the living room. Jonah fell asleep against Brenda’s chest, and the three moms stayed up late talking in hushed voices. Leah and Brenda asked Sarah what she thought the meaning of life was, and Sarah said she thought there was no meaning to life – she identified as a nihilist.

“For me, I think it’s love,” Brenda said.

“I’m with Brenda,” Leah decided. “Love.”

“Interesting theory,” Sarah conceded. “I guess if there was a meaning to life, maybe it’d be love.”

26

Road Movie Artist: Gregg Chadwick

27

Reckoning The man who raped me lit from the underwater lights, tugging my roommate onto his lap, fondling her breasts. Woodsmoke from somewhere. The sound of birds. I started to feel lightheaded. Warning signs would lecture not to mix alcohol with a hot tub, not to stay in too long, not to swim unattended.

But there were no signs.

I stumbled from tub to pool, curled my toes around the ledge.

Early April. Highs never above 50.

I threw myself into the pool.

Water that’s cold enough will stop a heart, and maybe that’s what I wanted then.

Instead maybe it skipped a beat or two, before quickening, racing, and I dragged myself out, limbs heavy.

Stumbled home on feet acting more drunk than they were before puking.

I wanted then to turn my body inside out, to see the way the blood moved through my veins, the way my heart contracted and swelled and contracted again.

28

By: Liz N. Clift

A margarita mixed with an hour in a hot tub.

Hózhó 1.

By: Leeanna T. Torres

We lean against building walls while the dancers pray with their movements. Elisha and I stand alongside the rest of the onlookers, buckled against adobe, eager for shade against the sun.

Today is Sandia Pueblo’s feast day – a day honoring San Antonio – and to be here is to witness the merging of two cultures, Spanish and Native. I am both and neither; I am a mutt of the great Southwest, an onlooker, my back against adobe. San Antonio (Saint Anthony) is the Pueblo’s patron saint, and Elisha grew up in the City of San Antonio TX, but this comparison is overlooked as she eats cherry-flavored shaved ice and the dancers dance and pray in the sun. She bought the shaved ice from one of the many vendors as we walked our way into the Pueblo’s main village area. Today is the feast day, one of both celebration and prayer, vendors and ceremony. Today there is room for both. And it is Saturday and storm clouds are moving in from the west. Dancers dance and pray in the sun. Elisha eats shaved ice, her lips bright and red, even her teeth tinged the slight color of cherry. I have brought Elisha here to witness, to see, to watch.

My friend Luke lays buried just to the north of where this dance is occurring; I imagine his body six-feet underground and wrapped in a blanket, lifeless and barefoot, his soul dancing with the dancers who are praying and moving in the sun. He was killed by a drunk driver a few years ago, and I think of him often, his widow and two young daughters dancing during feast days such as this, dancing in bare feet and praying for him who lies buried just to the north of the village dance-grounds.

After Elisha and I witness the feast-day dance, we drive up the road to the Pueblo’s casino. Ringa-dings and flashing lights from the slot machines plow a great commotion into our ears as we

29

enter through large glass doors, cigarette smoke and air-conditioner-cold greeting us. It is here Elisha teaches me how to play the roulette table, and we bet it all on red. Red is the color of earth and desire in the southwest. She bets it all on red, and wins. And it is more than luck that follows her and me on this day, it is destiny, and I struggle to stay sober even with a baby in my belly.

My friend Luke was killed by a drunk driver. And I struggle to stay sober, betting it all on red at Luke’s casino, colors flashing, his daughter’s dancing, Elisha eating shaved ice and smiling as the teller at the window hands her the winnings in twenty-dollar bills.

2.

Hózhó is said to be the most important word in the Navajo language and is loosely translated as peace, balance, beauty and harmony. To be “in hózhó” is to be at one with and a part of the world around you.

I first heard the word as a child. Hózhó. But more recently I saw the word written in red, a beautiful graffiti near the railroad tracks near Montaño Street. Red letters spray painted on fading brick, the letters outlined in black, and shattered windows of the abandoned warehouse just to the left of the capital letter “H.” To be “in Hozho” is to be at one with and a part of the world around you. Ho¢zho¢, Beautyway. What is it’s significance? What does it mean in this moment in time? I see two men driving bulldozers. The afternoon wind is picking up. I am afraid that I will drink again. After the baby is born. I am quiet about this. I am silent. Beautyway.

30

3.

I was born in this Great American Southwest. I am of this place. And tonight the sound of rain wakes me, and I lie in the dark, not rising to meet or greet the rain, but instead I lie in the dark, only listening.

In the morning the air is fresh and cool and clean and the storm is gone. On the six AM train a man is drunk still, and he tries talking with a stranger who really doesn’t want to talk, but rather leans into the window of the commuter train, straining to ignore the eager drunk man. The drunk man’s voice is loud and proud as he describes chugging vodka and Sprite the night before, and suddenly I relate to the drunkard in more ways than one. It is morning and he is still drunk.

As the drunkard gets off at the Downtown station I look to the east where the sun is beginning to rise, residue of rain everywhere, the air cool and clean. A cool May morning, and a man crudo from Monday vodka - the day is already speaking to my soul in more ways than I can account for, and the sun is rising.

4.

Where does beauty originate? Where are its sources, the emergence place?

5.

July and my mother lays on the bed of her bedroom, her hair nearly gone as the chemo works to kill the cancer, and I pray the rosary with her, soft and repeated words, a meditation offered to

31

the Mother of Jesus, Mary, her image captured in porcelain on the bedroom wall, hanging just above the mirror outlined in wood. I’ve lit a candle and placed it on the windowsill near the nightstand. It is Sunday morning. Summer heat pushes in through the open window screen, but my mother is covered in blankets, “I’m cold,” she states. I get her another blanket. Father has gone to mass, and I am here with my Mama, praying on the beads she held on to when her own mother died, long weeks turning into months on a nursing-home-bed. My mother is not dying – I tell myself this. Not yet. The rosary beads I hold are red, and my fingers move slowly from bead to bead… “Hail Mary, full of grace….” My mother repeats the rest of the prayer as I finish the words “…of thy womb….” My mother’s rosary beads are a soft shade of white pearl; the string holding her beads together is not strong nor tight enough to hold her fear.

This year for Mother’s Day, before the cancer sickness took hold, I gave my mother a silver bracelet, a petite but brilliant turquoise oval centered in the middle. I purchased the bracelet on a Thursday, spring was in the air. The moment I tried the bracelet on my wrist I felt the weight of the silver, heavy and immediate, and I knew it was hers, knew I had to purchase it for her. It was Navajo-made, the salesman said, and I paid for it in cash, right on the spot. I knew the bracelet was hers, the silver and the turquoise together in a lovely song that would grace her thin wrist. I walked out of the store and into the sunlight, proud of the piece of jewelry I had bought for her, found for her. And yet what I really wanted to give her instead was a piece of myself. I wanted to give her all of my foolish and sentimental self. I wanted to give her an eternity of sobriety, to begin to erase the mountains of destruction and hurt that I caused during all those days and months and years. What I wanted to give her was my weakness and heartache, knowing she, and she alone, could make it better with her love. But instead I gave my mother a bracelet, a silver

32

and the turquoise bracelet. “It’s lovely,” she said when she tried it on, and I smiled, and she smiled. It was all either of us could say.

6.

We are eating Wonton Tacos at Applebee’s courtesy of a gift card. Miguel asks me if I remember much about my last drunk almost one year ago. I shake my head “yes” but don’t offer any spoken details. Instead there is a silence between us, long and lingering, and then I ask him what he remembers. It was the morning I called him, and over the phone, I admitted with my own voice and words that I was an alcoholic. “Obviously, I wasn’t surprised, and I don’t know if it was that you were physically tired or what,” he says reaching for his large glass of water the waitress has just refilled, “but you just sounded really tired.” His words are revealing, and suddenly I realize I’d never thought about how he felt that day. I was relieved, he said. You sounded tired, he said.

7.

Even now I struggle to stay sober, and beauty precipitates from adversity, the sharp, harsh outline of life. Show me unbeautiful, the poet says to the sunrise, and I realize that in and amongst every cliché there is a truth, a blameless splinter of red-rising truth. Hózhó is that undeniable beauty, a state of being, a state of becoming, a repeated cliché my heart cannot name.

33

8.

On our way to a place called Tseyi, I wonder about the movements we make from ordinary to sacred, from casual to powerful, from oblivious to a state of deep and intended gratitude. Ron’s pack of cigarettes sit inside the cup holder of the car’s center console, L&M Blue Pack 100’s. He coughs as we drive west, and I wonder how long he’s been a smoker – years, decades, a lifetime? I do not ask. I see rain in the distance, falling miles and miles away; the Great American West allows for this sort of view, the kind that stretches on for miles, and miles, almost lifetimes. I think of the Rain Spirits. I think of Rain Spirits dressed in timid and canvas, remaining unrecognizable to those who do not know them. The blue and the greyness of sky, the weightlessness of clouds that bring us water, the way Ron grips the wheel of the car with both hands, smell of cigarettes never leaving him, driving north, closer to Arizona than we were an hour ago. This is the vessel of today’s sobriety. I grow sleepy and know that it has been years since I have hiked up a mesa.

In Gallup we stop at a gas station. I run inside to use the restroom. Ron remains outside, his large Santa-Clause-belly leaning into the trunk as he settles himself into a stance. He lights up and pulls on the cigarette with a breath that seems urgent rather than enjoyable. We are deep in the heart of Navajo country now. Big sky country. Navajo country. The landscape where legends of the West were made. There is a beckoning; I sense it traveling through the distance of this great expanse, relentless yet un-wanting. And I understand for a moment that we belong to this world, death and joy alike, and if I remain in the moment then I will have lived well, regardless of what my accomplishments are or are not. And while Ron’s breath pulls hard on his cigarettes, my own hand tugs on the wrapper of a chocolate bar, and in the parking lot of a rail-road-town we

34

embrace our small addictions as casually as the sky embraces breeze. Ron is smoking L&M Blue Pack 100, the white stick of tobacco lingering between his ďŹ ngers, an unconventional prayer, so delicate, so momentary, and his breath pulls in, in, in. To take it all in, to remain, and then to exhale. The sound of the busy interstate beside us, the vast expanse of a western sky reminding me of today, only today.

35

Bandelier II Artist: Klaus Hu

36

Last Night a DJ Saved My Life with a Song

By: Mario J. Gonzales

On the radio a man calling himself DJ Ron Hitz has a big, beautiful voice. Me and Plata listen to him every Friday. She tells me, “Oldies, baby. He’s gonna play some Chi-Lites, Big Joe Turner, Betty Everett.”

“Those people have all been dead a hundred years.” I say back. I don’t know why. Cause I know that it hurts Plata to feel old. She wants so bad to be young and beautiful. Always showing me pictures of her when there were only two colors: black and white. Back then her boobs weren’t dragging the floor. And she had all her teeth, gold ones too, and didn’t have to chew slowly the meat we can’t afford. Right now, though, her hurt runs tiny. Small enough for her to peel off her knee brace and shake her ass a few times to the music.

Her dancing makes baby birds fall out of trees and silver coins replace the new moon.

Plata is dancing now and nothing is gonna stop her but a dagger set through the center of her lace-paper heart.

When I hear DJ Hitz I think about expanding nebulas and comets. In my mind, there are circus banners filling the sky and the two-lane highway cutting through the town don’t have cars zooming 100 MPH passed. Instead, it has Arab caravans dragging along lines of camels across cinnamon sands. I call the DJ and beg him to play a song. Any song, just as I long as I hear my name on the radio. Over the phone his voice makes me tear up. Just a bit.

All that dancing gives Plata a coughing fit. Meaning her emphysema is kicking in. And despite the pain of breathing each new breath she wants a drag. Plata knows I hate her smoking so she heads outside without complaining. Sitting out there by herself there’s a good chance a vision’s gonna speak to her. She’s a stranger to most things except to stuff newly born. Hearing, for example, a baby first’s heartbeat before anybody else or tasting tomorrow’s rain today. Those visions eat her up sometimes though. For what she can’t see. What no one can.

After smoging up the porch, Plata stumbles back in. The door slams behind her and the framed Jesus picture with Roman soldiers shooting dice near the cross goes crooked. Plata hikes up her baggy shorts while asking. “Did you call the DJ? Did you tell him to dedicate a song to my girl Michelle?”

“No, I forgot,” I lie. Saying this cause it happens every year for the past twenty. Plata getting older and her marking the calendar on the day Michelle died, July 27th. That’s today and I should know this. I do know this but want to forget that day. I was there, too. In the car that wrecked all our lives.

“Listen, Plata. Hear the music playing. You don’t need to call the DJ. He knows what song to spin.”

The song’s old but perfect. Something me or Plata never heard before. That girl singing, her one-person voice sounding like a choir ascending. ‘My, my, my, my, my’ she sings as if she sees the whole of the suffering world like it’s a bunch of crisscrossing strings and wires that her song is gonna straighten out.

37

We sit and listen. The DJ plays that song over and over. After the fifth-time Plata tells me to turn off the radio. “I don’t want to hear it no more,” she keeps saying, her voice sounding like a lost little dream.

I push the off button a couple of times before the music stops. Already I miss the DJ. I want to say so, but I’m tired of arguing about this and that. All the small things that grow big when the shouting starts. Plata walks right by, moving slowly to Michelle’s altar propped in the living room’s corner. It’s nice. It’s got an orange cloth that when the morning light hits right, sparkles like flakes of pure gold. The altar sits on a small table, a present from our neighbor Lottie and Baby Roses her tiny pug, who every now and again meows like a lady cat.

We set up the altar yesterday. Staring with Michelle’s graduation picture, so faded that it’s also moving toward black and white. I put a bunch of seashells cause Michelle liked the sea. Even though the closest we ever got was the dinky river at the edge of town. I also put down a snow globe lifted from store in Reno, a cat’s eye marble that Michelle told me was once a money’s paw and a letter she typed to the makers of Beanie Babies begging them to bring back Garcia the Bear. And since I couldn’t help it, a deck of cards from some dead-end casino.

Plata added the candles, a box of Jolly Ranchers and half a pint of drugstore vodka. All the stuff she likes. She also crushed some garlic cloves and had me tie fresh pine needles into small circles. We put five down. Today, I ask Plata if this is some-kind-of-Mexican witch thing.

She smiles, reaches for some balance by grabbing at the air and missing, then says, “Some people bury eggs thinking it will bring them luck. But if you stand on the spot where the egg is buried you’ll lose money or your love will turn to sand. Sometimes children’s left eye will go milky white if they walk too close to a buried egg, especially after disobeying their parents. Anyway, bad things are gonna happen. Garlic tricks the pain, making it less bitter.”

I’m noticing that without the music, the noise of Plata, the sandpaper grit in her steps and the slow spit swallow coming from her throat brings some heat. With the fever burning from the outside in. I switch the ceiling fan to high and get caught up in the confusing shadows they make.

I imagine the blades chopping up the summer air into hot little angry fists and hands that can’t help but poke and punch.

“But how do you know where the eggs are?” I ask, hoping to avoid ever encountering one.

Plata’s chews at her bottom lip like she’s wading through some big thoughts, then says, “Well, that’s it, you don’t. Your Uncle Lalo once whispered to me in secret about black butterflies hunting for buried eggs, wanting to find one and dig it out. And if they get it, they soon crack them open, sucking up the sweetness inside.”

“Then what?” I ask while washing some dishes in the sink. Way back when, Plata helpedout but not since she cut deep into two fingers with the broke end of a wine bottle. I can’t remember the details but still recall wiping up blood pooled on the floor while Michelle took her to the clinic.

“They turn into big-boned priests,” she says and then re-arranges the altar’s candles, two by two, in front of Michelle’s picture frame. I watch the rusty dish water eat through the soap bubbles. Their tiny pops and rainbow shine make me grin for some reason.

After cleaning the dishes, I go to the altar. A cricket trapped somewhere in the house is chirping and Plata is talking about a man she knew who ate a 38-oz. steak in 43 minutes flat and died 72 hours later. “All bad numbers,” she claims. I’m listening but really only pretending to.

Instead, I’m admiring the red and yellow plastic flowers I bought with loose change at Abel’s Discount Flower Mart. I move a pair of car keys sitting on the altar and an almost invisible feather

38

from an angel’s wing hovers like a flame over a string of little copper bells. I don’t know who put the bells on the altar. Maybe the angel with the missing feather who I swear now is keeping time in the body of the chirping cricket.

Plata moans from the soul-center of her chest, saying, “My head needs a pill. It’s my birthday and I feel like nothing can be born today.”

The song is over, the radio off. Years of hurt spider forward. Climbing high for me. A thick fog rises from Plata filled with made-up memories like her saying that it’s her birthday when it isn’t. In truth, it was mine. Or it was on the last day of last month when I took her to eat blueberry pancakes and she complained about the Quick Pic machine being busted and said my hair was thinning cause I had “jumpy blood.” Scared I get into a mood, I looked around the Suzy Q diner and spotted Michael Vigil, a twice-decorated Iraq vet spilling oatmeal into his toothless mouth. “Hey Plata, there’s Mike V. Didn’t Michelle go to school with him?” I asked.

“He must have been a senior when I was a freshman.”

Without looking up from her breakfast, Plata grunted out, “He’s a crazy one. Ever since he came back from Iraq. Wanted to get with your sister since she was so pretty. But she wouldn’t have him. Michele was always too good for that kind of mess. No fault from him, though. Blame that Agent Orange smoke from Saddam burning up Kuwait.”

“It’s not smoke. It’s a chemical.” I said, irritated that she didn’t know the difference.

“Chemical, smoke, whatever it was, made him crazy. You want to know something. Want to know why he’s got no teeth without being old. He took them out himself. That’s right. That’s what he did. After he got discharged he said all kinds of stupid things. Said he saw his ghost father one night at the VA hospital. Said he told him to become Buddhist and pull his teeth. Said Buddhists don’t need to eat hardly anything. You gotta eat even with no teeth. Your stomach still pains even with no teeth, Buddhist or no Buddhist. Mine got lost the natural way: hard candy and grape soda.”

After Plata spoke, the blueberries in my pancakes didn’t look so real anymore, so I said, “Let’s head to the dollar movies. I’ll buy you a Dilly Bar and we can sit in a part of the theater that ain’t so cold.” She fell asleep there after eating her ice cream. I don’t remember the movie much except for the man on the screen saying to his girlfriend right before he dumped her, “Let’s rebuild the stars and begin a new life.”

Just the same, nobody really knows how old Plata is. When she was born and how long she will go on. I know I haven’t called her mom in a long time. She’s just Plata Samienego to me.

Came from Mexico, a place called Bolanos. After crossing over she met my father. “He was a thief, took my virginity and left me with nothing but bills,” she once told me although I didn’t care to listen. Later she hooked up with Michelle’s father: a handsome man with the cleanest ears and teeth. Plata likes to mention how he carried around Q-tips and cinnamon-flavored tooth picks in his shirt pocket. “He smoked Kools but that’s not why I loved him,” she’s said many times. “I loved him cause he gave me my green-eyed girl.”

While the music was playing it sounded so beautiful that I forgot for a bit the metal staked across my body, erasing the ease of my bones. Sometimes when the ache hits strong like it does in rain or cold, I’ll try picturing what I call the North Star. That blue light on the hill atop the radio tower. Shining far throughout the city and beyond darkness. Turning back alleys and freight-

39

yards, really any of the most lonely scary pieces of dirt, into places where music can find itself clean and clear.

“I’ll get your medicine,” I finally say and go search for her pill bag. Plata thinks pills should be kept in the frig. “Fresh as cream,” she’s told me more than once. Opening the frig I find that the milk’s turned and the inside light’s just about broke. Coming back to Plata, I see her rocking a little, like she’s keeping in tune with the hum of a restless land. I also notice right off that her grey hair has sunk to a dirty yellow. Watching her face right now feels like looking into a weak sun, a dying faraway star.

“Did I ever tell you about ice in July?”

Plata is talking and messing with the TV, going channel to channel. But ever since they switched to digital, the pictures always freeze and the only thing without static showing is called 8 % Octagon where some men and one woman wrestle alligators in a funny looking shark tank.

I’ve thought about playing a record. I could never spin like DJ Hitz but Plata’s got a stack of old LP’s: Jean Knight, Fontella Bass, P.P. Arnold, stuff I’d never heard of.

“Next July there’s going to be ice everywhere,” Plata starts. “On the roads and rivers and green grass too. You know how I like to make icy pitchers of whiskey lemon Kool-Aid in July.

Going to be too cold for that. The cicadas in the trees will get silent and the bees roaming the almond orchards will buzz back to their hives. Even the little coyote pups howling at their first moon will have frost on the rim of their howls. It never happened before but it will. Ice and cold in God’s little kingdom here with us in July. You’ll never see another one like it. Never, but that’s how it’s going to be.”

“I know, Plata. I see it too,” I lie again. Just then I thought about putting my hand on the bony ring of her shoulder or helping to adjust the slipping end of her knee brace. I thought I should cool her dry lips with a damp washcloth then straighten all the crooked pictures on the walls. But I don’t. Instead, I crack at the tension collecting in my knuckles. Then I let my eyes go soft and I lean into Plata, who by now has moved into the glow of a floor lamp and is picking at an imaginary sore on her arm, wanting to make it real. I lean into her body, feel wet on her and say, “Let’s get you to the bathroom and clean you up.”

After getting her changed I’m staring into the bathroom’s red linoleum floor and I began wishing we could both be reborn into small forest animals from a fairytale land or maybe even a kid’s puzzle with all its bright color pieces locked inside a never-opened box.

All the talk about the cold has made Plata shiver even though it’s gotten too hot to speak.

The shiver forces a cough and then a bunch more. Plata’s lungs sound loose like they’re about to give way. There’s no doubt about it, we’ll have to see Dr. Peshar next week. Get some more pills.

But before we do we’ll wait in the lobby and the music playing there will be the dead kind, the kind that makes life feel stony, like you got nothing inside but a mix of old rocks cut with moss and the thorny hooks of hungry insects roaming around underneath.

It all makes me wonder, are there any more songs worth singing? Today, the music coming from the DJ fit good. It can make my heart whole for a time. It can make my dimples show and even make Plata shake and move like she used to. But tomorrow and the day after, what

40

happens then? I mean, I don’t know much but when I’m looking at life real close, my life alone and that with Plata, all I’m seeing is a bunch of unhappy spaces.

Leading me to the beginning. The very beginning when there was us three: me, Plata and Michelle. We lived in a yellow house on Martin Street that Michelle called a submarine. There was a cactus garden and a school nearby. There was a small river on the other side of town that when you closed your eyes became the sea. There were Christmas lights in July and each weekend Plata throwing an all-night party. There was me and Michelle playing Crazy Eights, watching the grown-ups drink and dance. Listening to their music blasting and them getting fall-down drunk. We saw and we learned, I guess.

And somewhere between the beginning and now, I must have stood too near a buried egg.

One that Plata sunk into the ground years before. Wishing that her bad luck would turn good.

That she could stay young and pretty a little while longer. That she could have a man by her side who wouldn’t run when the bills came due. Maybe even wishing she wasn’t stuck with two kids, always hungry, and gray with fear on the nights their mom didn’t make it home.

The cricket angel is done chirping. I’m still singing the girl’s song in my head. But I know it can’t last forever. Since its Friday night, police sirens ring out. Somebody’s opened-up the fire hydrant on the corner and water is gushing down the street. The neighborhood kids are splashing outside. Their Spanish voices hang loud, rocking again and again through the air. Tomorrow they’ll be mud everywhere but the honey smell of kids running night games in the street will keep on.

Plata’s going from room to room. She’s tired. I can hear her worn muscles clicking. Her blood moving thick as used motor oil. Her hard liver weighing her down. She’s looking for her teeth but don’t want to say so. Lately, she’s gotten in the bad habit of spitting out her dentures.

Hating the ‘glue’ taste they give is why. But then Plata forgets where they fell. Once I had my head resting on a pillow, felt a lump, reached under and found the evil looking choppers staring back at me.

Seeing her wondering around toothless makes me think on Mike V. slurping up his breakfast. How’d he turn that way? I ask myself without buying into Plata’s explanation. I mean, you’d think that after all he eyed in Iraq, what he needed most afterward was the peace of being normal. ‘Get married and have some babies,’ people must have said when he came back home.

But then again, something else must have been talking too. Something low and hidden, speaking sly, saying, ‘No, you can’t have that. Not after what you seen. What you done. You gotta live your days like this and this way only.’ It probably sounded like a storm to Mike V, one troubled with anger and spiked by fear.

It’s like the feeling I get and can’t shake off. Like someone’s gone and mixed-up my days, braking them apart, chopping them up, taking them out of their natural order. They follow somehow like numbers on a dial but don’t make much sense.

Toward the end of the night Plata gets her final vision. Telling her that before there were words there were fish.

“They swam in the oceans. The whole world was an ocean back then. Music appeared and it made land. The land made us. But I made you and your sister Michelle from the sweet mud,” she says.

41

I hear her but I got visions of my own to catch and let go. That belonging to starving birds landing on the highway. They looking for road kill to lap up. That of cars crashing. That of liquor and beer. That of witches laughing. Police cars rolling. That of a hot sweat July day with Michelle playing cards. That of strands of jagged metal cutting like biting dogs. That of kings and queens, one-eyed jacks and bloody jokers scattered and screaming on the car floorboard.

That of doctors and operations, braces, incisions and scars.

“It’s late, Mama, rest now, sleep. Tomorrow we’ll go somewhere, the petting zoo maybe.

We can feed the baby goats, eat animal crackers by the box and watch the swans in the green fountain pool. I’ve heard it’s all free when you don’t got no money.” I lie for the third time. Or it sounds like a lie, working its way through me still and spare, without much room left for truth.

Before closing her eyes, Plata counts down the years since last seeing Michelle. Then she touches my arm, feeling for the points that were once soft mud.

“Brown like the richest farm land,” she says. “Sad like the music we use to hear.” She then asks me to turn on the radio. I do but the DJ is long done, taking his songs with him. I watch her fall asleep then wake startled and confused several times before dreams grab ahold and she’s gone.

Alone in the kitchen with only a single bulb to fend off the night, I’m thinking how strange it is to hear Plata talk like that. It like she’s speaking to me from beyond the grave. As though I’d been the one that died that day and Michelle had lived instead. But you know, that’s how I think every song worth singing usually ends. Sad, like the music Plata hears night after night.

42

43

Travel With Me

Artist: Sanya Verma

Elegy Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

To lose a homeland you must give away your stories. No sentences can be saved.

Verbs will break, abstract nouns will collapse and precious centuries will wither away.

The world you spoke of and the world that spoke of you will be caked in mud, strafed with smoke.

You burn the documents that will not pass checkpoints, the line of refugees thickens, the siege aimed at your ribcage sharpens its knives. You no longer want. No possessions, no hunger nor want. Only a border passage, the frayed hem of the horizon.

To lose a homeland you must give away your self. Your words must break open, become empty containers the shapes of which will forever remind you of what you used to hold inside. Beyond the greening fields there is an old road to walk and it is never paved, never the place you used to travel in the lemon blossom dreams you used to have when you owned a pillow or a lantern or the solace of a language.

45

Talking Shop, an Interview with Lori Ostlund By: David O’Connor Lori Ostlund’s debut short story collection, The Bigness of The World, won The Flannery O’Connor award in 2008. Bringing a wry Midwestern eye to Spain, Belize, New Mexico, Morocco, Indonesia and Malaysia, these stories not only explore lesbianism, racism, tourism, global versus local-living, but gaze deeply into the human condition. Scribner reissued the collection in early 2016.

Ostlund’s debut novel, After the Parade, was been released in paperback by Scribner this year. After the Parade was shortlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction, and also a Barnes and Nobles Discover Great New Writers pick. Her stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories and the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, ZYZZYVA, The Southern Review, and the Kenyon Review. She is a teacher and lives in San Francisco with Anne Raeff and their two cats.

DM O’Connor: I’ve heard writers say that talking about a book is a second career. How do you feel about interviews and promotion?

Lori Ostlund: Some say that the difference in being a writer and being author is like the difference between a tourist and traveler. So, I don’t mind talking about my book, but I don’t love craft essays. I like when people tell me their stories.

O’Connor: Do you ever write craft essays?

Ostlund: When I taught composition, I was always looking for way to quantify. When I teach writing, not so much. I feel like I have figured out my way of looking at things.

O’Connor: As for readings, do you get nervous? Do you give yourself a pep talk?

Ostlund: I prepare, yes. But I switch into this whole other mode. I like doing it, but I like knowing that I get to go home after and do nothing. I can’t do it for an extended period. I don’t know how people can.

O’Connor: Is there like a reading hangover after?

Ostlund: A little, the next day, I find I’m much worse responding to emails and people. I might do a Netflix session. But I do like public readings, especially when talking about how the story came to be. Focusing on story is the key. On Saturday, I did a fundraiser where we spoke for twenty minutes about how we became writers and how our books came to be. What was interesting to me, was trying to think through all these little important moments in my life. When something switched over, maybe because I grew up in this place that was so small 46

and isolated the first thing I knew I had to do when I left was to just figure out how I was going to interpret that world. To write, I have to position myself between my old world, the one I write about, and the world I live in now, which is who I am writing for, in a sense, to interpret one world for the other. For me, it’s about perspective. People assume I didn’t always want to be a writer because my first book came out at 44. I did. I just felt ill-equipped. I felt an MFA wasn’t what I needed. I needed to go completely out into the world. After my Masters, in my mid-twenties, I moved to Spain and read what I felt like. Then I started travelling. Morocco, Turkey, completely outside of my reality. The plan was not to go back to academia, it would be just another small town, and I’ve done small towns.

O’Connor: And you survived by teaching ESL? Ostlund: I was teaching for the Princeton Review, a test prep centre. Mainly GMAT, GREs, verbal section. I became the lead verbal teacher. I had done the test, but I had no idea what the score was. I was good at math. I’ve always been good at standardized tests. My brain is good at following directions. They hired me.

O’Connor: From Spain to the publishing world, it’s a large step, you were really out of the writer’s community.

Ostlund: I wasn’t doing any writing there. Anne (Raeff) and I got together in Spain and she was writing away on an old typewriter, hundreds of pages. I had a library card to The British Council Library there, and basically I read everything I could.

At Morehead, as an undergrad, I did some creative writing workshops and wrote a lot. Then, I was invited to join this group in the community, they were older and I was shy. Kinda the young one. There was an atheist pastor, who wrote his sermons in a dive bar that I frequented, and a woman who was in a rock band. We’re still friends. One night she was coming home from a gig and the trailer full gear caught on fire, so she became a writer. Here I was at 21, with these people who had lived full and interesting lives. fffI had something to learn from these people. I think that was the moment I became a writer.

O’Connor: And did you continue doing workshops?

Ostlund: We tried snail-mail for a while but it fell apart. Since then, Anne has been my best, first and only reader.

O’Connor: Did you ever dabble in poetry?

Ostlund: I started out writing poetry, but I think the last poem I wrote was in the late 80s. I still read a lot of poetry. Poems are like the perfect balance between cerebral and emotional.

O’Connor: But your stories are very image based. Do you start with and image? Do you write around an image?

Ostlund: Sometimes. With fiction, there is always something that takes you into the story. You pursue it, and the story either stops being about that thing—maybe the thing just launched the story and disappears, or you realize that one thing is so integral to the story that you can never take that thing out. I like when it’s an image or a memory, like Clarence in After The Parade and his tusks. Like falling off the float at a parade.

O’Connor: Like totem poles in the centre of the story?

Ostlund: Kinda, like what Robert Boswell would call spandrels. If I don’t find those, then that’s a problem.

What I like about Boswell’s essay is he acknowledges that you can’t plan for them.

47

O’Connor: So, you don’t start with the spandrels?

Ostlund: I might, but it’s still a lucky thing. If I’m working on my story and I don’t have my spandrel, then all is kinda lost. Especially at the end, because that is when your top story has to fall back.

O’Connor: Do you write any nonfiction? Memoir?

Ostlund: My fiction has everything to do with my life. I don’t have it in me to write nonfiction. I feel far too vulnerable. I need that fictional mask. The minute I try to write nonfiction, something happens. There are certain questions people ask, and I’m not confessional, I catch myself hedging. I need the fictional happening. When the book was coming out, the publicist asked me for a bunch of personal essays to shop around. I was so bad at it.

O’Connor: But you did it?

Ostlund: I did. They sounded distant. That is my natural tendency.

O’Connor: You travelled so much, have you tried travel essays?

Ostlund: No, but I would like to.

O’Connor: Do you ever do things for stories, so you can write about them?

Ostlund: No one had ever asked me that before, then two weeks ago a student asked me and I thought it was such an interesting question. I do things to have an experience, but while you are doing them, you realize that you are doing them because this will be in a story one day. I have a fondness for dive bars. And San Francisco is a haven for dive bars. Old men really like me and tell me a lot of stuff and we usually end up having great conversations. When I was in college, still trying to figure out how to go out and be in the world, I started this really stupid habit. I’d just bought my first car and at night, I would go out and pick up hitch-hikers. Anyone I saw, mostly drunk-frat guys that were happy to have a ride. I picked up one woman, whose clothing was ripped, something had obviously happened. She leaned against the door and cried and I realized how young I was and had no idea what to do. Another time, I picked up this old man—well, he’s probably my age now—he just wanted a ride to the liquor store, but in Minnesota they were closed. He seemed so sad, so I drove him to Fargo, in North Dakota. He got his cheap whiskey and I drove him home. Nothing bad ever happened.

O’Connor: Let’s talk about ESL teaching, it pops up frequently in your narratives. Is this a conscious decision?

How do you use it?

Ostlund: I’m someone who has always loved and respected subtly, silence and restraint. But as you know, ESL teaching doesn’t allow for any of that.

O’Connor: Your sentences are so well constructed, do you think about grammar when you write?

Ostlund: I do. I love grammar. I grew up in a very traditional small town, with a traditional approach to education. We diagrammed sentences and I loved it. Still do. But as I began moving, I started to feel over my head. I was around people who all went to Ivy League schools or their parents had all gone to college and they grew up travelling. Language became increasing important to me, as something to perfect. I lost my accent, it just disappeared. I wasn’t trying to pass as something. I just didn’t want to be messed with. People can be real credentialists. They follow check-lists.

48

O’Connor: And now you teach a lot of fiction workshops?

Ostlund: I’m always teaching something I have no credentials in. I have no ESL degree, nor an MFA. The bond in teaching is vulnerability. Proceed with gentleness. I’m a bottom-line sort of person. I like to know what’s working. I like to be told. I don’t need the sandwich thing, just give me the meat in the middle. I don’t need the nodding. My characters who teach ESL knock on the table as I did. I don’t knock on the table in fiction workshops.

O’Connor: I’m sure you get asked this a lot: short stories to long form. How? Ostlund: I get bored quickly. So, I like changing things completely. I thought I was a short story writer, period.

Novels are messy and much more forgiving. The novel is more of an imperfect form. I like short stories and operating under the illusion that I’m working on something that can be perfected. The novel will always have a sag, you can digress.

O’Connor: Can you see the sags and digressions?

Ostlund: Afterwards sometimes. But the editor helps. I see them much easier in a short story.

O’Connor: Do you see your novel a lot differently now then when you published it?

Ostlund: I think so. My editor helped, I need someone to step in, someone who had the books best intentions at heart, she helped me see. We cut close to 100 pages. It was all about pacing. Why digress here, when we are trying to get there? It became a different novel.

O’Connor: When you read, do you read the same section?

Ostlund: I used to, but now I mix it up. I used to read only the funny bits. Some parts just work better for performance. Dialogue driven helps. When I read out loud, it’s the way I expect it to be heard. It’s Minnesotan and very dry.

O’Connor: Is there is a through-line in your writing?

Ostlund: The thread is being shaped by a place and inside it or being shaped by the fact that we are completely outside the place. That’s why I travel. I’m not the type of person that would arrive in Bali, and say I know Bali. I like the feeling of being an outsider. I mean that’s the theme, looking at the ocean and seeing that bigness. There are so many people that see the ocean and want to retreat, but when I look at the ocean, I love the fact that the world is big. I feel comforted by that. I understand the overwhelming.

O’Connor: How did you order your short story collection?

Ostlund: I ordered it for The Flannery and the logic, especially online, which is read in order. It’s basic wisdom: best first. The screening judges might not read them all.

O’Connor: How did you know which one was best?

Ostlund: I started with “The Bigness of The World” because if you walk into a bookstore, you know how it is, you start reading the first paragraph, and I thought that’s the one that would appeal to the most people. It had a voice and forward motion. Also, I had all the lesbians stories stock-piled at the beginning, and after winning I was advised to spread them out. We wanted to make it even, balanced.

49

O’Connor: Had you published 20 years ago, you’d be put on this special bookshelf, hidden at the back of the shop, special interest or something.

Ostlund: This writing would not have gone. I mean I’ve been reading collections with all straight characters for years and it’s odd to me when people don’t blink when a book has only straight characters. I live in a varied world, gay and straight, both gay and straight people have always helped me and are close to me. I don’t want to use the word ghetto-ize, but there used to be that tendency for gay people to keep to themselves and I understand why, it’s easier.

O’Connor: Safer, yes.

Ostlund: Especially when you’ve been rejected by family or friends. Estranged. But when I sit down to write, I often write gay characters, but not for necessarily a gay audience.

O’Connor: Do people try and label or ghetto-ize your writing?

Ostlund: Sure, some people do. Or try to.

O’Connor: Did the publisher?

Ostlund: No, not at all. I think in the past you had to make a decision, you were either gay and wrote gay characters and were put on the shelf you were talking about or you wrote straight, like Edward Albee, one of my favourite authors, and gained acceptance into the mainstream literary community.

O’Connor: I guess minds have opened?

Ostlund: I’m endlessly surprised by the people that contact me and are touched by the book. It’s often not gay people. I mean gay people read it, but the people who reach out are kind of middle-American, small-towny, happy to see themselves portrayed. The world has changed so quickly. In the past—and I think people of color have dealt with this too—if you were writing a gay character, it had to do directly with identity, with a direct understanding, those coming-out stories filled the market. Early on I read a review on Goodreads and the man liked the book but said Aaron, the protagonist, shouldn’t be gay because he wasn’t coming out.

O’Connor: For me, that is so two dimensional versus three, it’s a non-issue. In the past, you needed the 2D platform to educate, people needed that, but now— Ostlund: You know for me, things happened to Aaron because of his childhood, the book is not about coming-out, it’s just so strange that this Goodreads guy thought Aaron should be straight because it wasn’t a book about coming-out. I left it at that because I didn’t want to summon the trolls. That said, I get a lot of feedback from teachers and middle America. Writing about Minnesota is not so hip. The first cover they came up with looked like an inspirational religious calendar, with little roads, the way a New Yorker sees the fly-over states, with corn and the nice sunsets.

O’Connor: So, you fought the cover choice?

Ostlund: We were very diplomatic, but my agent and editor helped with that one.

O’Connor: What are you working on now?

50

Ostlund: A novel called The Proprietresses about when Anne and I ran a furniture store in Albuquerque. Normally, I can’t write about a place when I’m it, but this time, I got 200 pages off quickly. I have another short-story collection almost ready to go. One of them is moving towards a novella, which I have no objection against.

O’Connor: Would you go the contest route again?

Ostlund: I don’t know. Scribner has first shot. But who knows? I might approach them with both together and see how that goes.

O’Connor: Any film-rights sold? After the Parade would make a great film.

Ostlund: Not yet. It’s very narrative, I’d love to see it made. I have visions of Linda Hunt, she was great In the Year of Living Dangerously, set in Indonesia, playing a journalist. The paperback comes out in July, and it comes out in Germany in August, so we’ll see. The German rights sold super fast. But there is so much competition for attention. A book’s shelf life is six weeks, and we’re onto the next thing, so I’m trying to create a little splash.

Excerpt from After the Parade The following excerpt is from the opening chapter of After the Parade: Aaron had gotten a late start—some mix-up at the U-Haul office that nobody seemed qualified to fix—so it was early afternoon when he finally began loading the truck, nearly eight when he finished. He wanted to drive away right then but could not imagine setting out so late. It was enough that the truck sat in the driveway packed, declaring his intention. Instead, he took a walk around the neighborhood, as was his nightly habit, had been his nightly habit since he and Walter moved here nine years earlier. He always followed the same route, designed with the neighborhood cats in mind. He knew where they all lived, had made up names for each of them— Falstaff and Serial Mom, Puffin and Owen Meany—and when he called to them using these names, they stood up from wherever they were hiding and ran down to the sidewalk to greet him.

He passed the house of the old woman who, on many nights, though not this one, watched for him from her kitchen window and then hurried out with a jar that she could not open. She called him by his first name and he called her Mrs. Trujillo, since she was surely twice his age, and as he twisted the lid off a jar of honey or instant coffee, they engaged in pleasantries, establishing that they were both fine, that they had enjoyed peaceful, ordinary days, saying the sorts of things that Aaron had grown up in his mother’s café hearing people say to one another. As a boy, he had dreaded such talk, for he had been shy and no good at it, but as he grew older, he had come to appreciate these small nods at civility.

Of course, Mrs. Trujillo was not always fine. Sometimes, her back was acting up or her hands were numb. She would hold them out toward him, as though the numbness were something that could be seen, and when he put the jar back into them, he said, “Be careful now, Mrs. Trujillo. Think what a mess you’d have with broken glass and honey.” Maybe he made a joke that wasn’t really funny, something about all those ants with bleeding tongues, and she would laugh the way that people who are very lonely laugh, paying you the only way they know how. She always seemed sheepish about mentioning her ailments, sheepish again when he inquired the next time whether she was feeling better, yet for years they had engaged in this ritual, and as he passed her house that last night, he felt relief at her absence. Still, when he let his mind stray to the future, to the next night and the one after, the thought of Mrs. Trujillo looking out the window with a stubborn jar of spaghetti sauce in her hands made his heart ache.

Lori Ostlund will judge fiction for Blue Mesa Review’s annual summer contest this year, alongside her partner, writer, Anne Raeff. A modified version of Chapter 2 of Lori’s novel, After the Parade, was published in The Common under the title, “Leaving Walter.”

51

Deception Artist: Deborah Singer

52

The Boat I’m Building You

By: Robin Cedar

Questions I haven’t asked pearl in my mouth – what happens when you must sail towards that horizon, what happens when I have to let you go?

I will wade out to guide you because that is what a daughter is meant to do, but every horizon looks flat from this distance.

The closer we get to that line the more the revolving blue roils.

As I guide your boat, the water will rise until there is nothing of me above the water.

In this way, I will be more intimate with death than ever before.

It will feel like belonging, bobbing like that – as if I’ve convinced you to let me come with you.

But you have asked this task of me and I can’t deny you.

I would build my own boat but for now my place is on the land.

Tell me I am loyal, that I should become your flotsam.

Your burial at sea will mean there is nothing like the sea left inside of me.

Building this boat is practice for being empty.

53

Barn Artist: David Rubenstein

54

Blue Mesa Review Staff Jason Thayer, Aaron Reeder

Editors-in-Chief

Crystal Zanders

Poetry Editor

Steve Howe

Nonfiction Editor

David O’Connor

Fiction Editor

José Orduña

Faculty Adviser

Blue Mesa Review could not operate without our reading staff. Thank you to Tatiana Duvanova, Hayley Peterson, Ruben Rodriguez, Heather Lapahie, and Faerl Torres. Also, shout out to the Blue Mesa Review undergraduate staff for all their hard work.

55