Blue Mesa Review
Issue 44
Blue Mesa Review Albuquerque, NM Founded in 1989 Issue 44 Fall 2021
Blue Mesa Review is the literary magazine of the University of New Mexico MFA Program in Creative Writing. We seek to publish outstanding and innovative fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, along with compelling interviews.
Cover Art “The Pass” Kathleen Frank
BLUE MESA REVIEW Fall 2021 Issue 44
Editor Managing Editor Associate Editor
Rhea Ramakrishnan Mikaela Osler Tyler Mortensen-Hayes
Fiction Editor
Ruben Miranda
Nonfiction Editor
Cyrus Stuvland
Poetry Editor Faculty Advisor Readers
Evelyn Olmos Lisa Chavez Amy Beveridge Echo Jardini Anthony Yarbrough Haneen Abdeljawid Marcos Balido Callan Buday Marisa Cabanillas Isabelle Daikhi Jennifer Evans Patrick Gallegos Adam Phelps-Romero Sayra Ramos Adam Rutherford Bridgid Shaski Vicente Vargas Allegra Velazquez
Table of Contents Foreword
Rhea Ramakrishnan
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Fiction Farewell Address to the Last Mango in the Pacific Northwest Ari Laurel
16
Scorched Earth: The Legacy of the Globizent Affair Kelly Neal
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Poetry Poem in which a Gold Rush Bride Writes to her Husband Joanna Ng 11 How to Kill a Goat & Other Monsters
Saúl Hernández 51
Nonfiction Buckshot Suzanne Martin
23
Stars from a Burning House Rowan Lucas
55
Author Profiles 70 Artist Profiles
72
Art The Pass Kathleen Frank Within a Wish of Other Seasons Edward Lee
Cover 7
Landscape Gerburg Garmann
10
Pinedes Randall Stauffer
14
I Hope This Song Will Guide You Home Nina Tichava
22
Canyon C.R. Resetarits
50
Desert View Randall Stauffer
54
Everything In You Valeria Amirikhanyan
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Within a Wish of Other Seasons Edward Lee
Foreward Dear Reader, Reading through the Blue Mesa Review archive, I’m always surprised and intrigued by how the pieces that appear in each issue seem to be in conversation with each other. We don’t solicit submissions according to any specific theme, but sometimes my mind groups the pieces in such a way. This year, as I read through the pieces selected by our judges, Zeyn Joukhadar, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, and Kim Barnes, I detected a distinct and overarching sense of longing. In “Farewell Address to the Last Mango in the Pacific Northwest,” Ari Laurel invents a hopeful future America, in which our elected officials not only recognize their responsibility to their own citizens but as participants in an international stewardship-based economics. Inevitably, however, this means going without certain luxuries, such as mangoes. In this piece, Laurel urged me to long for that future world while, remarkably, renewing my appreciation for the things I am able to enjoy. Kelly Neal also employs an essay form in “Scorched Earth,” a satire of corporate greed complete with office shenanigans and archived blog rants. Perhaps what I longed for most while reading this piece was the kitschiness of the early-aughts internet which is, unfortunately for some, still preserved in all its former glory. It’s the most lighthearted piece in this issue, even though it does tackle late stage capitalism at its ugliest. Joanna Ng’s “Poem in Which a Gold Rush Bride Writes to Her Husband” is a mournful exploration of loss and longing in a foreign land. Ng ambitiously explores the historical facts of Chinese immigrant labor during the California Gold Rush through the lens of an argonaut’s widow, waiting for his bones to be returned. In “How to Kill a Goat and Other Monsters,” Saúl Hernández’s speaker describes the violence he has come to mistake for love while longing for beauty. The piece follows the thread of an exboyfriend’s violence creating parallels with the speaker’s grandfather. “Theres a war in his hands / the way there was a war in Abuelo’s hands,” Hernández writes. In “Stars from a Burning House,” Rowan Lucas tackles similar subject matter. Throughout the piece, Lucas attempts to use the stars as an escape from a violent and broken home. Ultimately, however, the speaker longs for a home and, perhaps, something as stable and enduring as the myths constellations are born from. Suzanne Martin’s “Buckshot” anticipates a violence or, at least, a breaking that we, as readers, are unsure will ever materialize (perhaps because we’ve been in the speaker’s shoes and know that our anxieties are often greater than the sum of their parts). Instead, we are presented with a stack of small uncertainties or anxieties on which the narrator has built their relationship with a mysterious and, at times, emotionally unavailable man. It’s clear that she longs for F but what she longs for more is, perhaps, an assurance that cannot be given. And yes, perhaps the assurance we crave can never be given to us, though it can be represented 8 | Issue 44
and delivered to us in the form of stories, poems, and essays which have always provided us with some escape, some relief, and some understanding. My hope is that Issue 44 provides you a new form of longing, different from the kind you’re currently living in.
Rhea Ramakrishnan Editor-in-Chief, Blue Mesa Review December, 2021
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Landscape
Gerburg Garmann
1st Place Poetry 2021 Summer Contest This poem asks of its readers many questions, but among them: What does it mean to be buried away from one’s home? What does it mean to remain a stranger in a strange land even after death? What does it mean to return home only in bones? How do we beg the land to witness our pain, our dying, and our death? Fueled by mournful musicality I returned to this poem over and over.
Natalie Scenters-Zapico
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Poem in Which a Gold Rush Bride Writes to Her Husband Joanna Ng
When Chinese argonauts died in California, their bodies would be buried until the flesh decomposed. The bodies would then be exhumed, the bones cleaned and shipped back to their home village to be buried with the ancestors. Husband, you haunt the wrong mountain, return to White Cloud Mountain, where sparrows nest in our roof, tell us when to throw seeds into spring. Gold Mountain, Gum Saan — Husband, don’t you hear it? The name itself a kind of closing. Saan, meaning mountain, Saan, meaning shut. What sky is there but a bleached sky? What door but a closed one. Husband, do you think they want you living or dead? Haunting gweilo in their hangtowns, their shanty camps, their double-door saloons, their mills, their mines, their graveyards, their first golden spike in the ground. Country always breaking something. First, the mountain, then your precious body.
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And for what? To see what dust they could make into gold. Bitterfruit for bitter labor. Husband, damn the gold — let us suffer together instead of apart, let the other Pearl River wives weep, wait, grateful for bones, for gold smuggled back through clavicle and sternum. So little to pass on — a bit of lustrous rock, a little luck, ossified dead seed. The cooking pot is my only companion, and I love her to death. Husband, today I made too much rice. Husband, today I butchered the chicken, and what I don’t eat will go bad without you. Husband, it pains me to see the bird gone in this way, fed to the ground until it is picked clean. Husband, the bonescraper writes to say there is so little left.
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Randall Stauffer
Pinedes
1st Place Fiction 2021 Summer Contest “Farewell Address to the Last Mango in the Pacific Northwest” uses an imagined historical document to explore a future in which the land has been given back to Indigenous peoples, and globalization and dependence on colonized economies have been replaced by local supply chains and sustainable agricultural practices. Yet “Farewell Address” explores a moment not of triumph, but of grief, centering that grief as central to the path that leads to change. As one last mango is passed around a crowd at a speech that functions as a ritual closure to the unsustainable past, the assembled audience has mixed reactions, just as there is conflict among community elders in advance of the ceremony. People openly weep; they grow anxious or angry over letting go of the mango; they are afraid. Rather than imagining a future utopia without collective grief, fear, and conflict, “Farewell Address” posits these emotions as central to liberation, and asks whether finding collective ways of mourning might be the key to making such a future possible.
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Zeyn Joukhadar
Farewell Address to the Last Mango in the Pacific Northwest Ari Laurel
A speech given by Ruby Valencia Fung, First Secretary of the Central Committee of Cascadia (formerly the Pacific Northwest Territories of the former United States of America), September, 2068 In the early 20th century, Chairman Mao Zedong was gifted a basket of mangoes from a Pakistani delegation. Rather than keep them for himself, he bestowed them upon the factory workers who were instrumental in the Cultural Revolution. While the workers stayed up through the night, admiring and caressing the fruit, the mangoes soon became subject of debate. How should they indulge in the spoils if they could not divide the basket evenly among the masses? Following the precedent set by the Chairman, they chose to preserve the mangoes in wax so that all might enjoy them. A ceremony was held at the factory to welcome the fruit. To spread the message of friendship and solidarity between China and Pakistan, teams of workers were sent to various parts of China with real and artificial mangoes on trucks where the mangoes were received with fanfare and veneration. In the early 21st century, when Asian American diaspora storytelling was at its height, cut fruit, and specifically mangoes were often the subject of poetry. Writers meditated on the mango’s golden flesh and compared its taste to nectar and honey. Mangoes became such a popular device that they came to be seen as a tired trope. Asian American writers who invoked the mango were accused of self-exotification and pandering to a colonial fantasy, which sparked a movement against depictions of “the mango and the monsoon.”1 Often the invocation of the mango was an attempt at reconciliation with a land lost to time and distance. The flavor of the mango is distinct and vibrant, triggering nostalgic sensations that connect us to the earth. But we are not simply stewards of the earth, we are the earth. The land is not something separate from us. We are the land. So when we say we have lost our connection to nature, what we have truly lost is our connection to ourselves. In rebuilding this society together, we have the opportunity to restore the connection which was once lost. Today, we have made great strides in progress toward restoring that connection. In the last three years, we have increased wild salmon populations in the salmon run to levels that will ensure their survival. We have built sixty-five new renewable energy farms up and down the coastline, with wind farms being planned in inland regions. We have successfully mended the failing infrastructure of four major urban hubs—Vancouver, Surrey, Seattle, and Portland—and have begun exporting those same infrastructure resources Eastward to rural communities. We developed local supply chains in forestry 1 The criticism of using mango and monsoon imagery in East, Southeast, and South Asian fiction and poetry extends as far back as the 1990s. See Atima Srivatastava’s 1999 British Asian novel Looking for Maya, where Amrit sneeringly refers to South Asian diasporic fiction as “mangoes and coconuts and grandmothers ... The Great Immigrant Novel.” The repeated trope was often criticized by other writers as cultural performance, where the East or South Asian writer exploits their ethnic background by playing up orientalist ideas for the consumption of white readership. However, it was not until late 2021 that the art movement, “No Mangoes, No Monsoons,” emerged when a collective of East Asian, Southeast Asian,and South Asian writers campaigned to eradicate orientalist fiction from American publishing.
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processing. In doing so, we have not only provided jobs for 1.5 million people, but we have also been able to construct homes by sourcing from those areas. Today, we are well on our way to decommodify housing and end homelessness for our unhoused populations in the Pacific Northwest territories. I am grateful for the certain promise of a quality of life yet to be seen by previous generations. For clean, safe drinking water for every community and family across the region. For the lush green of our backyards. For meaningful work ahead of us led by skilled expertise and strong hands. I am grateful that children are nourished, healthy, cared for, and educated by model caregivers and educators. I am grateful for the World Indigenous Nations, who have assumed authority and restoration of the land, for this chance to repair generations of broken promises. I am grateful that we have begun this process of healing from the trauma of capitalism, imperialism, settler colonialism, and environmental ruin, and that we are mending ties with those who have faced the most virulent effects of this former nation’s crimes against humanity.2 This mango that I have in my hands is a gift from my ancestral homeland of the Philippines as a show of faith in continued relations and internationalism. This mango, which was grown in the tropical sunshine, was plucked off one of the oldest trees in Central Luzon. From that tree, it was brought by freight to a warehouse facility where it was carefully packaged in cotton batting and molded pulp trays to keep it safe from damage. From there, it was driven again, one hundred and thirty miles to the Port of Manila. It was then stored upon a large shipping vessel, which, traveling 19,000 nautical miles for nearly a month, delivered it to the Port of Seattle. When we received it several weeks ago, it was still very firm. So we let it sit in the sun until it reached peak ripeness. As with a mango, all good things come with time, care, and cultivation. For a mango, this may be a few weeks. For a society, this may be several centuries. As our ecological recovery programs continue to restore the old-growth forests, the mountains, wetlands, and the beautiful coastline to the ecosystems that rival the days before extraction, our communities will thrive on sustainable fishing and agriculture—enough to feed generations. And yet, as we all know, the region does not sustain enough sunlight and warmth to grow mangoes and many other foods in a largely permaculture society. As subsistence farming dominates our agriculture, we must also lower the imports of such goods, even things like coffee, which once commercially defined this region. These so-called luxury goods were grown under a monocultural system which devastated the soils and left whole countries unable to plant for their own sustenance. These goods were the product of exploited labor and enslavement and tethered colonized economies to the whims of Western bourgeois imperialists. Finally, the export of these goods contributed to unparalleled levels of environmental destruction, which only intensified the cycle of loss, trauma3, and pain experienced by all. Our generation, having lived through yearly wildfires that ripped through our towns, swore that the next 2 There were ten acts punishable as crimes against humanity when perpetrated knowingly by a state actor as part of a systematic or widespread attack against a civilian population. These were: murder; extermination; deportation or forcible transfer; false imprisonment; torture; rape, sexual slavery or enforced sterilization; ethnic persecution; disappearance; and apartheid. The ICC was set up by the Rome Statute in 1998 to prosecute those responsible for the most serious international crimes. While it was conventionally accepted that the United States had committed all ten of these acts, either on its own soil or on international soil, trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity have only been completed in a small handful of cases, and the US was never convicted. 3 “Trauma” was the common term in North American analysis, which more often than not, used clinical or mental-health terminology. In publications from China, for example, these things were often called “ghosts” of backwardness, ignorance, imperialism, and colonialism.
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generation would never see the same devastation. We can only count ourselves as so lucky to still be blessed with fertile farmland and a mild climate. But as you can see, the journey that the mango took from Luzon to Cascadia is no longer sustainable on a large scale. Today, we find ourselves in a similar position to the great revolutionaries a hundred years ago. Today, we are on the precipice of fundamental change. And so I’d like the delegates seated before me4 to join me in passing the last mango in our possession from one person to the next. You are invited to participate in this ceremony because you have been entrusted with the monumental task of preserving this moment and reporting our history. Upon receiving the mango from your neighbor, take several seconds to admire it, smell it, and commit it to memory. After that, please pass it to the delegate next to you. As there are several hundred delegates in attendance today, I ask that you be patient during this ceremony. When the mango reaches the final delegate, I ask that it be returned to the lectern, so that it can be transported to the People’s Memorial Garden of Willamette Valley, where it will be planted as a display of our commitment and solidarity to our comrades in the Asia Pacific. And now, we must say farewell to a number of these small, but sensual luxuries—to this mango, which we have committed to being the last mango in the Pacific Northwest. It is a solemn farewell. But it is also a promise. It is a promise to cultivate our own crop, to make our own wares, to share the fruits of our labor to each according to their need. ENDNOTES In the weeks leading up to the farewell address, procedural details for the mango ceremony were hotly debated within the central committee. A number of committee members expressed skepticism over a ceremony that invited veneration of a luxury object. After all, the mango during the Cultural Revolution symbolized what could be gained through struggle, while in this case, it symbolized what the people of Cascadia were sacrificing for the sake of better conditions for all. A luxury good won during an industrial period of society gave the people hope that mangoes would one day be enjoyed by all, but due to globalization, there were so many daily luxuries enjoyed by the middle classes of late capitalist North American society, that they became tantamount to other banned luxuries such as mansions, private jets, or designer clothing. A mango exported to China also did not bear the same carbon footprint as a mango exported to Cascadia5. The debates originally began just after the mango was in transit from Central Luzon, and continued even after the mango arrived at the Port of Seattle. Minister of Defense, Pamela Haskell, interrogated the committee on whether “flaunting luxury fruit in front of the masses before snatching them away for good” was in fact counterrevolutionary, as they would not be able to anticipate the effect such a powerful commodity would have on the people. She was joined in her objections by Clem Tsosie, Minister of Education and Culture, who emphasized that the 4 Delegates were 500 individuals from varying regions of Cascadia. Among them were a selection of artists, musicians, scholars, filmmakers and storytellers. Occupying the upper seats were some 10,000 local workers who had won a lottery to witness the passing of the mango from afar. 5 Between 2060-2066, nations of the former United States of America experimented with the cultivation of tropical fruits in Florida. However, Florida’s agriculture faced additional challenges from climate change, including sea level rise and intensified extreme climate events, which negatively impacted land and irrigation, livestock, and pest and disease control.
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mango was “imbued with generations of meaning.”6 The committee frequently tabled the subject over the course of several meetings, but as the mango sat ripening in the greenhouse, the committee began to call attention to their limited time for debate. Several members in favor of the ceremony accused the objectors of deliberately stalling so that by the time the committee could come to a decision, the mango would be overripe. The objectors blamed Minister of Foreign Affairs, Indigo Diallo, for accepting such a dangerous gift without at first consulting the committee, thereby putting Cascadia in a position of obligation to recognize the gift publicly. A notable turn in the conversation came about when Katrina Noisecat, Chair of the People’s Council of Yakima County, spoke to the committee. Below is an excerpt from the final meeting, which was held August 30, 2068: I’m personally shocked at the way members of the committee are talking about this. Not the mango, but the people. Some of y’all already know this, but my family just put a dog down. We had two dogs. Bestie, our elderly mutt -- beautiful girl, Bestie -- and Bullet, named because his head looks like a bullet. Yes, Secretary, this is going to go somewhere, I promise. Bullet grew up with Bestie from a puppy. She was practically his mother. Well, Bestie hit fifteen years old about six months ago, and she got very ill. Kidney disease. Me and my wife took her to vet appointments, and Bullet would stay home with our daughter. Whenever we’d leave with Bestie, Bullet would spend all his time at the window waiting for us to pull into the driveway again, open the back door, and lift her out. Eventually, she became so ill that we made the tough decision to put her down. She’d lived a good life. She saw us through the farm riots. We didn’t want to keep her around in pain and vomiting and not eating just because we couldn’t bear to see her go. This was two weeks ago. When we brought her body back, she was skin and bones by then. Our daughter, Camilla, wanted to hide Bestie’s body from Bullet. She didn’t want to break that pup’s little heart, didn’t want him to know what we had done. But instead I brought Bestie inside, laid her on the carpet, and uncovered the blanket. We let Bullet smell her body. He howled, nudged her little jowls, and tried to wake her. We let him mourn for her, his adoptive mother. I explained to our daughter that it was important for him, or else he would be at the window living hopeful and confused. Comrades, these are our people. They fought for the revolution. They pushed for change for over a decade, and have since been rebuilding the world into something that serves us all. Saying goodbye is difficult, but the people barely had the time to mourn the old world. And to let them isn’t a danger to them. Some of these folks have had bigger losses than a fucking mango! Apologies, Secretary. All I’m saying is, people are well aware of the stakes, even more than some of you. We ourselves cannot make ourselves so essential to the movement, that the movement dies with us. I am preparing my daughter to inherit our victories and our sorrows. That’s why we can’t baby them. We have to trust them. We 6 While the exact meaning of Tsosie’s statement is unclear, their early work in Cultural Institutions of Revolutionary Storytelling suggests they are referring to the connection between the invocation of mangoes and the naval-gazing individualism of the writer, as explained in footnote 1.
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have to have faith in the masses. Many scholars argue that Noisecat’s contribution was what ultimately convinced the committee to move forward with the ceremony as planned. While some of the committee members still voiced hesitation, many were unprepared to face public criticism for their unprincipled paternalism toward the masses. During the final vote before the September address, the motion to move forward with the passing of the mango ceremony passed unanimously. Indeed, as predicted by the objectors in the committee, the ceremony was an emotionally charged event. Some of the attendees of the farewell address reported a serene calm, which gave way to excitement and agitation as the passing of the mango ceremony commenced. Some attendees reported feeling suddenly filled with sadness and longing once they held the mango in their hands. Others reported becoming increasingly manic and anxious as the mango slowly made its way closer. One respondent noted: I wasn’t feeling that strongly about the mango at first. But the energy of the room must have done something to me because as people passed the mango, it was as if the smell was getting sweeter and stronger the closer it got. It became almost too much to bear. When I was finally given the mango, I became overwhelmed by the fragrance and immediately gave it to the next person. When it started moving away from me again, I felt full of remorse. Like I should have spent more time with it. The full ceremony took approximately forty minutes. For members of the committee, they were forty tense and uncertain minutes. Some became visibly uncomfortable whenever the mango disappeared from view, and it was later reported that some had privately speculated that there had been tampering or theft. Wails and weeping could be heard from the crowd and a number of people expressed reluctance to pass on the mango, having to be prompted by their neighbor or a committee member monitoring the situation from the aisle. The committee didn’t have to wait too long, however. Eventually the mango was passed to the next person, and the next, and the next, until it was returned safely to the lectern at the front of the assembly hall, where it was once again received by Secretary Ruby Valencia Fung. Though by then it had been handled by by five hundred people, it emerged from the audience completely undamaged.
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I Hope This Song Will Guide You Home Nina Tichava
1st Place Nonfiction 2021 Summer Contest How the story we tell ourselves of who we are is a cumulating text of Martin’s multi-media essay—how one moment, one sentence, one sensitivity can layer upon the other until what lies beneath is no longer something as benign as a pea but something more sinister, hardened by experience and injury into a tensile threat. “Buckshot” is fabulous in its conception and even more fascinating in its execution, the writing spare and lovely, the images vivid and arresting… and always that sense of tension building, weight bearing down, our speaker “clinging like a tree frog,” ready to spring.
Kim Barnes
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Buckshot
Suzanne Martin Editor’s Note: The original version of “Buckshot” includes pages of increasing size. You can view that version at bmr.unm.edu.
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Canyon
C. R. Resetarits
2nd Place Poetry 2021 Summer Contest Anyone who is a survivor of violence knows that the trauma such experiences leave cannot be processed in a linear fashion. “How to Kill a Goat & Other Monsters” explores how the violence we learn and experience as children can create dangerous patterns into adulthood. Filled with visceral images and striking lines, this is a remarkable poetic voice.
Natalie Scenters-Zapico
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How to Kill a Goat & Other Monsters Saúl Hernández
I wish I could start with beauty. Under the snow, my ex-boyfriend guns me down, buzzes into my ear:
His hum takes me to Abuelo and I in Mexico dragging No hoof prints behind us
Do you know what runs faster than fear? a goat out into snow.
only strides of a body in movement.
In the first grade, a boy sees me write his name & mine on the last sheet of my spiral with a heart. During recess, the boys throw my words around, pages blow out like baby’s breath shaken from their stems. The boys call me freak for the rest of the school year. My ex-boyfriend’s chuckles remind me of those boys, he breathes heat into my mouth with the edge of the gun. I’m sorry babe. I just... You know how I get. & he’s right. There’s a war in his hands the way there was a war in Abuelo’s hands. The war being survival. Survival meaning to eat. My pomegranate jewels stain the snow crimson. My ex-boyfriend bends down, kisses my cheek, brushes his hand on my arm, draws circles with his fingers, Do you forgive me? I look at the shiny glare of my blood in the light, it takes me back to Abuelo brushing the goat’s belly laying him down against the snow. How Abuelo reached into his pocket, took out his navaja.
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Mira, lo tienes que hacer rápido. Rapido. Fast. A verb of action, that’s how I once escaped death merging into the highway an 18-wheeler didn’t see me entering. I swerved into the emergency lane. Let the monstrous truck pass me by. GET UP! My ex-boyfriend kicks me until I roll in snow sawdust. I groan the way the goat did when Abuelo punctured its throat. Te digo un secreto. You have to twist the knife inside the throat,
keep twisting it as you pull it out.
You’ll gut the vocal cords it will not be able to shriek. Before the goat finished bleeding out Abuelo closed its eyes told it, yo no soy un monstro. My ex-boyfriend says, Don’t be afraid of me. I love you. My body can only handle so much love. When I was seven, I thought I could only find monsters under my bed. Each night Amá checked under my bed. After she’d wrap me in my yellow tiger blanket, Esto te protegerá. Amá forgot to tell me not all monsters can be killed. Somewhere in the future, snow falls again, burns my lip like salt. I’ll drag a goat out of my Abuelo’s farm. I’ll tell him: ¡Vete! No te quiero matar. Because I want to end with beauty.
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Desert View
Randall Stauffer
2nd Place Fiction 2021 Summer Contest “Scorched Earth” presents itself as an essay examining cultural criticism, scholarship, and marginalia surrounding a series of increasingly ridiculous events that center on the firing of a fictional head of Quality Assurance at the Globizent Corporation. Satirizing the absurdity of latestage capitalism via corporate quarrels, subterfuge, and online as well as intra-office gossip, “Scorched Earth” is part soap opera, part dick-pic whodunit, part darkly funny commentary on the strange afterlife of the content we consume, share, and discard.
Zeyn Joukhadar
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Scorched Earth: The Legacy of the Globizent Affair Kelly Neal
On 12 June 2012, Krysta Holcomb’s supervisor Shelly McDougall, head of Quality Assurance at the Globizent Corporation, was fired under mysterious circumstances. Plenty of employees at the corporation had reason to want to be rid of McDougall, including and especially Holcomb, who is said to have conducted an affair with David Jensen, McDougall’s successor. Countless articles, essays, editorials, monographs, novels, documentaries, art installations, and song cycles have explored this case, many with the intended project of identifying those responsible for the firing of McDougall, while exonerating those who are believed to have been wrongly implicated. The reputation of the woman to whom Holcomb once referred as “the worlds [sic] most shittiest boss” has undergone many changes, and there are as many different versions of the Globizent story as there are reasons to write about it1. This paper examines the Globizent Affair and the schismatic studies that have resulted from its ongoing academic scrutiny. By all surviving accounts, McDougall-Holcomb relations were cordial until either late 2011 or early 2012. McDougall even attended a “jewelry party”2 hosted by Holcomb, at which time she bought what she would later assert was, “the most hideous necklace I’ve ever seen, or worn, or been weighed down by, in all my goddamn miserable life I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOD [three crying emojis].”3 This relative peace was not destined to last, for McDougall made the fatal mistake of confronting Holcomb about the latter’s failure to deliver the department’s mail to the correct recipients. Reports deviate here, but the majority state that Holcomb blamed the mailroom clerk, a man colloquially known as “Ronny D,” and for whom there appears to be no official employment record. McDougall countered that Ronny D brought the correct mail, and that Holcomb merely needed to distribute it “with at least minimal attention, like just about any halfwit could do.” Holcomb then dug through the latest batch and retrieved McDougall’s copy of Knit Simple magazine, which she promptly ripped apart and shredded.4 Years later, an anonymous eyewitness wrote in a moving account that, “The intensity and pathos of this moment cannot be overstated. It’s simply…the oddest, most hypnotic…most unimaginably cruel thing one can imagine. Krysta shredded every page of that magazine one after the other, and maintained unblinking eye contact with Shelly the entire time. I will never forget it.”5 At 2:27 the next morning, every member of the Quality Assurance Department received an email from McDougall’s account that contained no subject. The 53 words in the body of the email changed the workplace forever. The document is transcribed here in its entirety, though spelling and grammar are standardized for readability: This is scorched earth, motherfuckers. No more Ms. Nice Boss. I’m tired of the shit-ass attitudes in here from you shit-ass people. You think it’s easy keeping this department 1 See also, But Her Emails: A Contrarian History of Women’s Workplace Writing in the Long Twenty-first Century. 2 One of many multi-level marketing schemes, mostly targeted at women, in which cash-strapped participants were encouraed to manipulate friends and co-workers into buying goods priced high above typical market value. 3 The Lost Drunk Texts of Shelly McDougall 4 Human Resources Records Pertaining to the Globizent Memos 5 The Day Globizent Stood Still”
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afloat, keeping this whole goddamned company afloat, but you’ll find out soon enough. You’ll have to knit your own fingerless gloves. I’m out, bitches. Shelly McDougall Quality Assurance Manager, Globizent Corporation Floor 2, Suite 10, Ext. 4492 “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” ~Proverb The email was sent from McDougall’s work address, but its legitimacy was questioned immediately. In an email sent the following day in defense of his colleague, Brian English wrote, “Shit-ass people? Who says that?” Conversely, around the same time, Jeannine Barkin wrote, “I am not prepared to vouch for this email’s authenticity, as I did not see the individual writing it. But given the circumstantial details, I am 99.999999999999% confident this message was written and sent by Shelly McDougall.”6 Of course, we know that McDougall was held responsible and immediately terminated, mostly due to a lack of interest on the part of HR to involve IT in the email scandal. War had been declared in Quality Assurance, and it was only a matter of time before the entire Globizent Corporation became involved. It would take an entirely separate essay, or short book even, to provide a comprehensive literature review of the theses, dissertations, articles, books, and other strictly academic texts—to say nothing of other genres—that deal solely with the contents of this email.7 In fact, the “Scorched Earth” email is now often used as close reading practice for undergraduates at universities all over the world, including and especially those that teach English as a foreign language.8 The checkered history surrounding the McDougall ousting is perhaps more interesting than the woman around whom the mythos has arisen. For example, early accounts of McDougall’s conduct and subsequent termination are, unsurprisingly, primarily informed by the departmental politics of those writing them. History has flattened this conflict into a criminally reductive “Coke vs. Pepsi” narrative, as the battle lines were originally drawn around the competing soda brands. The members of what is now known as the “Coke faction” viewed McDougall as a brave martyr for their causes; conversely, the Pepsi advocates feared a repeat performance of McDougall’s zealous Cokeist predecessor, Blanche Higginbotham, and tried their best to defame both QA departmental heads. At that time, the Globizent home office was located in Atlanta, Georgia, just 3.5 miles from the Coca-Cola headquarters. Half the QA department had been traumatized by the paucity of Pepsi products in the Coke-dominated city, and requested that all nine varieties of Mountain Dew be made available to the department. Higginbotham refused to grant this request. The department tried again after Higginbotham’s tenure ended, and McDougall only inflamed the situation by suggesting the employees take turns purchasing 2-liters to share, or, according to one email exchange, “just drink water.”9 In order to control how other employees viewed the incident, members of both campus started anonymous blogs. On one blog, a writer who self-identifies as an “Aspiring Arsonist” writes, “I hope 6 Ruth Adebayo, Timeline of All Electronic Correspondence in Globizent’s Quality Assurance Department, 2008-2013 7 Scores of sources explore this particular mystery, but preeminent among them are (in alphabetical order): Sam Baranski, “Yes, She Went There (But Which ‘She?’”); Paolo Gennaio et al., Shelly’s Emails: Texts and Contexts; Melinda York, “Shitass Attitudes from Shit-ass People: Women’s Invisible Crafting Labor in Corporate America” 8 Harriet Martinez’s I’m Out, Bitches: 101 “Scorched Earth” Reading and Writing Exercises for Beginners is considered the preeminent pedagogical text in this vein. 9 Dafydd Merywen, Corporations in Crisis
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Shelly drowns in a giant vat of Coke.”10 This post represents the propaganda of the Pepsi faction, who would later support Holcomb’s efforts in protest of McDougall’s failure to meet their needs. However, opponents would have their say as well. In a post titled “WTF is Wrong with You Guys,” an anonymous Coke drinker defends McDougall on the grounds that she is “actually, a really nice lady,” and someone who “was willing to look the other way when I input my paid time off as a ‘sick’ day when I was, in reality, quite healthy.”11 It hardly seems remarkable that members of the department would have opinions about their boss, but what is striking is the sheer volume of blog posts and subsequent comment threads in which co-workers on both sides eventually issued death threats to one another, without knowing or apparently caring about the identity of those on the receiving end of such threats. Even though the writings disseminated by McDougall and Holcomb’s contemporaries tell us a great deal about the role of propaganda in office discourse, they are hardly reliable accounts of what happened.12 Given the early partisans’ inability to see past their own prejudices, department-wide communications in the form of a series of intra-office memoranda from McDougall to the rest of the QA department would ideally speak for themselves. Unfortunately, McDougall was among the last corporate managers to continue to distribute memos in print form, and no known electronic copies remain extant. Thanks to the company’s aggressive Recycling Initiative (ca. January 2009-August 2014), all copies of these crucial memos are lost to us.13 Only one of McDougall’s original sentences survives the physical destruction of these documents, and indeed it was quoted in no fewer than three of the anonymous blogs: “Hourly employee’s [sic] must remember to clock in after they return from lunch—NO EXCEPTIONS!!!!!!” One of the blog entries14 that quotes this sentence focuses exclusively on the errant apostrophe. Another15 mocks the rhetorical style, particularly McDougall’s capitalization and excessive use of punctuation. While the aforementioned examples are not particularly helpful in illuminating the import of this single sentence, an untitled entry on a third blog, Confessions of a Pissed off Paper Pusher, includes a more detailed analysis of the source of this particular outrage: When a certain group of us from QA drives across the Parkway for lunch at the Bistro, certain salaried employees take for-e-ver to finish their rice bowls (haha sorry G, you know we all love you!), which means the lunch “hour” turns into 90 minutes, and then half of us have to “forget” to clock in when we get back. Why should I choose between eating in the break room and getting my pay docked for taking a long lunch? Commenters on this post added, “If the bitch has a problem, she can just say it to my face,” and, “ugh she cornered me by the bathroom about this bs and i was like yo let me pee.” It is unclear whether employees were more incensed over the suggestion that they manage their time, or the means of communication. One of the early sources on the Globizent Affair does mention a blog post titled, “why Im so mad abt this RN,” but the blog that contained this post appears to have been deleted shortly after publication. 10 Burn It All Down (A WordPress Site) 11 Why Is Everyone Mad? (Blogger) 12 See also, Dale Wasserman’s fascinating, if not woefully inadequate, chapter in the essay collection, The Post-Truth Era at Work: Case Studies. 13 As described in S.E. Beukaler’s Cheating the System: Academia’s Most Forged Documents, supposed “copies” of these memos have occasionally surfaced, typically by underemployed academics eager to publish on this case. 14 “My Boss is a Stupid Bitch,” from the blog They Don’t Pay Me Enough for This Bullshit 15 “Get A Life, Cokewhore,” from the blog Quality My Ass
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In the study of this issue, much attention has been given to the pursuit of one question: Was Shelly McDougall a good Quality Assurance Manager? It is certainly true that McDougall was not prepared for management. Although she was the daughter of an executive assistant and CPA, she received a B.A. in Art Education and spent her early career teaching the craft of silhouette-making to fifth graders in Decatur, Georgia. This is important to note, for McDougall’s lack of experience in adult-centered workplaces—and, consequently, her later failures as a manager—can be attributed to the expectation that she would instill the concept of time into pre-adolescents. Nevertheless, McDougall’s position was cut due to budgetary reasons, and she was forced to use the skills she had inherited from her parents. A number of writers have claimed that McDougall lost her job for other reasons. Theories include (but are not limited to): McDougall pocketed the money otherwise intended for the students’ art supplies; McDougall used corporeal punishment on students who failed to grasp spatial relationships; McDougall attended an end-of-year art fair high on peyote. No evidence exists anywhere to support such claims, but some theorists insist that McDougall’s partisans colluded in a massive cover-up. The likeliest explanation remains the simplest: no art teacher who began work in the United States on or after 2008 remained employed as such for more than five years before “budget cuts” intervened. After McDougall had been working at Dynient for some time as a data entry clerk, a position opened rather suddenly at Globizent when QA matriarch Blanche Higginbotham unexpectedly retired at 57. Had she been given a chance to learn corporate statesmanship and diplomacy, McDougall might have acquired the skills necessary to rule her department competently and maintain control of her employees. In his sympathetic biography Shelly McDougall, the Best Department Head Globizent Never Had16, Stephen Gray challenges the traditional view that McDougall was an incompetent manager, arguing instead that she deftly handled “the astonishingly dim-witted lackeys over which she had the misfortune of presiding,” and “made the best of what was clearly a hellscape beyond what any of us today can even begin to imagine.”17 In any case, McDougall was doomed to be measured against Globizent’s other department leaders at that time, whether or not she was prepared for it. While McDougall did not quite demonstrate the diplomatic prowess of Facilities Manager Alex Chapman, or the celebrated intellect of Inside Sales VP Blair Eckhouse, or even the street-wise savvy of Miranda Adams from the Legal Department, McDougall nevertheless remained afloat longer than anyone expected. Initially, she was a popular leader who was known for her benevolence. She allowed her employees to keep plants at their desks and dissuaded belligerent anti-plantists from reporting to HR on the issue.18 She relaxed Casual Friday to “Casual Friday-and-a-half,” whereby employees were free to wear jeans as early as Thursday afternoons after lunch. McDougall also implemented a filing system that was eventually adopted by every employee at Globizent, and maintained peaceful relations among several departments within the division.19 It was not until 2010, around the time Krysta Holcomb became Quality Assurance Office Administrative Assistant, that, according to Mikhail Nielsen’s provocative six-volume work A Genealogy of Holcomb-Style Office Warfare, “McDougall’s troubles began,” and “she started to lose control of her department.”20 Such characterizations are not uncommon, and have also appeared in other works.21 16 The latest volume uses the revised title Shelly McDougall, A Life. As Gray notes in the Preface to the Second Edition, “I have been made aware that ‘Best Department Head’ was not a wise choice of words” (ii). 17 Ibid, xxi, 332 18 Ibid, 41. 19 Ibid, 57, 551. 20 Vol. 4, 667-668. 21 See also, Brianna Rankin, The Globizent Inheritance: A Teleological Perspective.
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Unsurprisingly, Holcomb’s sympathizers have always resented such interpretations of the situation, and tend to argue such views are too simplistic. Dom Bradford, the last Globizent survivor, put it most pithily when he commented, “Correlation is not causation.”22 Depictions of Holcomb have been as polarized as those of McDougall, with the former emerging as both a cold-blooded opportunist and a romantic figure. Due to the alleged sexual nature of Holcomb’s relationship with David Jensen, McDougall’s successor, wild and fanciful accounts have captured the imaginations of even the most serious academics. In one particularly famous case, preeminent corporatist Zachariah Beckstrom retired from his coveted Ivy League position to work full-time on Unbidden Synergy, the now immensely popular erotica series based on the Globizent Affair. Imitators quickly followed, but Beckstrom’s narrative remains the urtext of Globizent-related erotica, largely due to a particularly vivid scene during which Holcomb and Jensen construct a privacy screen out of empty toner cartridges in the supply room and engage in frottage atop cases of unused goldenrod yellow paper. Physicist Andrea Szanter argued this was not physically possible, and challenged Beckstrom to a debate on the matter. The live televised event ended when, after having verbally sparred with Szanter for two hours, Beckstrom said, “It’s a fucking book,” and exited the stage.23 Returning to real life, the main Holcomb-related controversy remains the question of whether Holcomb had a romantic and/or sexual relationship with Jensen, and if so, whether that relationship had any bearing on Jensen’s 2012 Quality Assurance Department coup d’état. According to court documents, Krysta Lynn Holcomb filed for divorce from her first husband, Jacob “Jack” Minchin, on 22 October 2011. However, Holcomb did not sign the lease on her new apartment until 8 April 2012, and did not formally restore her original surname until 19 September 2012.24 In a transcript of instant messages exchanged between Holcomb and Rachel Borman, the Globizent front desk receptionist, Holcomb stated, “You know I can’t stay away” (17 Nov. 2011 15:34:28) and, “He’s Colton’s father” (2 Jan. 2012 8:43:56). Marco Boselli’s work on the office instant messaging systems includes a chapter on Holcomb and Borman’s conversations, which were fairly lengthy, immensely private, and rarely involved any pertinent business matters. In his examination of thousands of digital workplace exchanges between Holcomb and Borman from 2010-2012, Boselli concludes that Borman’s primary objective was to convince Holcomb to leave her husband, thus indicating a one-sided romantic attraction on Borman’s part.25 Boselli’s “unrequited love” thesis has since been widely discredited as an early 21st century scholar’s impulse to, as phrased by Danica Rogers, “project the homosexual onto the homosocial.”26 Although it is impossible to determine the exact date or time Holcomb extricated herself from her relationship with Minchin, an internal document recovered from Globizent’s Human Resources Department indicates that Holcomb was disciplined for showing Borman an image of an erect penis on her cellular phone in the second floor breakroom in March of 2012. Digital images of disembodied parts that were normally covered began to gain traction as a courtship ritual around this time. While “dick pics” were fairly common by the time of Holcomb’s divorce from Minchin, they were frowned upon in public life—especially the workplace.27 Holcomb and Borman were insufficiently discreet and caught 22 “An Interview As Extraordinarily Rare As It Is Extraordinarily Brief,” Globalization Today, vol. 33, issue 9 23 Toner and Titillation: Points and Counterpoints 24 Government Documents Pertaining to Krysta Holcomb, Vols. 7-8 25 Backchannels of Interpersonal Intraoffice Communications 26 Retro-fitting Gayness: How the Scholars of the Second Sexual Revolution Tried to Make Everyone Queer, and Thereby Made No One Queer 27 László Iváncsik’s groundbreaking Wiener’s Wiener, which is considered the foundational text on Dick Pic Studies, includes a chapter on the Globizent incident.
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the attention of Maureen O’Shaughnessy, executive assistant to the company’s Chief Financial Officer. O’Shaughnessy filed the complaint the same day she inadvertently viewed the image. The existence of the image suggests Holcomb had moved on from her relationship with Minchin by then. Was the image of Jensen’s penis, as so many have asserted? No one knows, and we likely never will. Frustratingly for historians, the HR report says very little on the particulars of the image, nor does it detail Holcomb’s motives in capturing and sharing the image. It is possible that Holcomb had been sent the image by someone else with whom she had sexual relations, in which the image is of no consequence other than to demonstrate that Holcomb did not conform to standard workplace etiquette of the era. In 37 and Counting, a juicy tell-all on Holcomb’s love life, self-described junior high “bestie” Rebecca LaPierre claimed to reveal the penis’s owner. However, so many minor chronological details were botched in this text that historians have dismissed the veracity of the entire account. Were it conclusively determined that the penis was in fact Jensen’s, however, the new information could have far-reaching implications for the case. First and foremost, such a discovery would confirm some of the central premises of the most outlandish conspiracy theories about Jensen’s takeover.28 Scholars engaged in serious study of the matter must remain objective, however, and must furthermore avoid engaging in what amounts to little more than salacious gossip. Again, we know nothing of the size, shape, or dimensions of the penis captured in the image on Holcomb’s phone. We do not know if Holcomb and Borman found the image aesthetically pleasing in any way.29 We do not even know who captured the image. What we do know is that the subsequent, gleefully alliterative utterances about Holcomb’s “phallic photo” have enabled the McDougallists to paint Holcomb as, put most harshly by Blake St. John, “The filthy, insatiable, thirsty Pepsi-guzzler every office has and no office needs.”30 Conventional wisdom holds that the rifts in public opinion and fragmentary source materials have obscured the “real” truths of this case, but conversely there is perhaps an informational overload. Various revelatory projects have been attempted, but none have succeeded as of the publication of this essay. Was the Globizent affair truly the “grave, catastrophic national disgrace” of legend?31 We might never know, but what is evident is that the Globizent drama has given us the foremost love story in the annals of corporate American history.
28 See also, “‘It Was Probably Aliens’ (And 19 Other Theories About David Jensen’s Accession to QA Department Head)” 29 Work Friends, a television series based off Holcomb and Borman’s circumstantial friendship, includes a scene in which the women spend four minutes of screen time declaring their arousal at the sight of this image. After the now-infamous episode aired, the all-male writing staff was promptly terminated. 30 The rhetorical implications of the syntax in this sentence have been explored in some depth in Amitava Pemmaraju’s alltoo-brief essay, “When the Object Becomes the Subject: Offices with Agency.” 31 Gregory Defenestraum, “Post-Holcomb, A Decency Deficit Remains in the Workplace”
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Everything in You
Valeria Amirkhanyan
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2nd Place Nonfiction 2021 Summer Contest From the first sentence on, Lucas infuses “Stars from a Burning House” with a sense of the liminal, the mercurial, the transmutable--what can be seen and not seen, known and not known, put together and torn apart, trusted one moment and feared the next. The tension of what exists between worlds informs every image and object. A child’s telescope becomes a harmonic metaphor for the lens of story and how it shapes trauma, myth, and memory. Wildly broken children become shapeshifters, changelings, their way guided by ancient constellations---one way, Lucas suggests, we might finally find our magical way home.
Kim Barnes
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Stars from a Burning House Rowan Lucas
Maybe I was seven years old. Maybe my age doesn’t matter. It was cold. I was barefoot and wearing Snoopy pajamas in the driveway of my parents’ house. The telescope had been given to me by my parents for Christmas, or maybe it had been my birthday. After hours of learning how to set it up, hours of pleading with each of my parents for help only to come up empty, I pressed my eye tight against that cold piece of metal and saw the moon. It was full, slightly yellow. I could see the shadows on the surface, one big spot with cracks radiating out from the center. I took my eye off the scope, looked at the moon with only my eyes, then went back for a closer look. I remember the difference—how much I couldn’t see with just my eyes, how much I had been missing. My world narrowed then. I remember a vastness coming next. A feeling that propelled me through that tube, upward and outward into a space much more than anything. Over and over, I took my eye from the scope and put it back. Over and over, I narrowed and expanded the world. The intensity of my hunger rooted my small feet in place. But my stepfather came out on the driveway where I had set up and said, If you don’t come inside I’m taking it away. So, I went inside, telescope in hand. Take it apart, he said. I said that it took forever to put together. Take it apart, he said again, angrier, and I saw his jaw do what it did when bad things brewed. I can’t, I said. He snatched the telescope from me and took it apart in a way where it would never fit back together. Later, when I looked one more time at the moon through my window, I felt the ghost of that unspeakable feeling I had felt in the driveway. Oh, I had thought, a way out. The telescope came with a circular star-map, a guide for what stars could be seen depending on the time of year. It had all of their names—Cygnus, Draco, Lyra, Orion, Pegasus—stamped in their center in glowin-the-dark ink. It was here that I learned the stories of thousands that had come before me, a connection passed down through the years. Even now, I can find Orion the Hunter by his belt of three close-knit stars, guided only by muscle memory. Lyra, the lyre Apollo gifted Orpheus, I know by its triangular shape. I can use Polaris—the North Star, the tip of the handle of the Little Dipper, always the brightest in the night—to trace a line to the Big Dipper. These Dipper constellations have different, older names: Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. Or older still: Callisto and her son Arcus. Callisto was a handmaiden of Artemis—the virgin goddess of the hunt, the moon, and of wild places—or perhaps, depending on interpretation, the goddess’s lover. In her story she is raped by God King Zeus disguised as Artemis. To punish or save Callisto, depending on the version, the goddess Artemis turned her into a bear. And now Callisto and her son walk the sky together, always, pointing us north. Gods would often place those they deemed worthy of remembrance in the sky as stars. Sometimes the remembrance was a punishment meant to embarrass, like with Queen Cassiopeia who, when boasting
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that she was more beautiful than sea-god Poseidon’s nymph daughters, was placed in a throne in the sky that rapidly spun around the north pole. Cassiopeia had to cling desperately to the throne to not fall. She still spins, even now. Sometimes though it was done as a reward, born from admiration and even love. Orion the Hunter was born of the latter. Orion’s origin stories vary, but in one he was the giant son of Poseidon, and so favored by his father, he was granted the ability to walk on water. Eventually, he became a hunting companion of Artemis. Two versions of Orion’s death say the goddess fell in love with the hunter and this love enraged her twin brother Apollo. Apollo, conniving, then made a bet with Artemis. He pointed to a distant and partially obscured object in the sea and boastfully proclaimed that Artemis would be unable to hit it with her arrow. The goddess of the hunt laughed. She drew her bow, took aim, and hit her target. But the target was Orion’s head; Apollo had seen him swimming. Another version says that Orion boasted to Artemis that he could conquer and kill any beast alive. His boasting enraged Gaia, the goddess of the earth, and she birthed a giant scorpion that struck Orion and killed him. In both versions, Artemis in her grief at his loss, placed Orion in the sky. The wonderful, glorious thing about Orion is that his constellation is one that nearly every single culture across the world has a name for. His shape differs depending on who is doing the naming, but still, they all see him. They all know him in his grave of stars—the remnants of a love that’s lasted eons. I grew up in a neighborhood of broken things—broken places, broken people. We were all splintered and cracking, spoiling. One boy lived with his two younger brothers and his divorced mother who made her children visit their father because “he was their father,” even though he liked to knock them around—even though she knew. The girl that lived next door to this boy had a religious zealot for a father—the kind that bans Harry Potter because it’s about magic and “devil-worship.” Her mother might as well have been a ghost; I never saw her speak, never saw her defend her daughter. One boy lived with his alcoholic father and spent most of his time at the neighborhood basketball court. He never talked about his house. We never asked. My neighbor was a girl whose biological father was in prison, her mother in the military and remarried to a military man. When the military mother was shipped off to Afghanistan, the military man liked to kick her daughter around. And if her daughter called her to say what he was doing where she couldn’t see, her military mother told her she was lying. I met this girl in high school, on one of the days the military man was knocking her around. She knocked on my door and said she had forgotten her house key. She didn’t tell me until a year or two later that that had been a lie—her stepfather had locked her out of the house after they had argued. But she had grinned when she saw me and told me her name. The second thing she said was I’m a lesbian, just so you know. Then she asked me if I wanted a cigarette and we disappeared into the woods to smoke and listen to nothing. She asked me what kind of music I liked. Years later, when that broken neighborhood was becoming a memory, we went back to its playground, and she kissed me as I sat on a swing. Told you you weren’t straight, she said, her hands on my blushing face, kissing me again. I kissed her back, then. It was night. There were stars above us. We broken children orbited around each other for years before drifting apart, pulled to each other for reasons we knew without needing to say. Blue Mesa Review | 65
We would go to the house of whoever’s parents were coming home late that day and play video games or watch trash MTV or make instant ramen and smoke and laugh. Or we would act like idiots in the playground: jumping off swings to see who could land the farthest, tackling each other in touch football, breaking see-saws on accident by balancing on the middle of them and jumping up and down. Once, a neighbor spied us smoking on one boy’s porch and he called the police. We ran into the woods. And after, we started going on adventures there. We found new unexplored corners so we could sit in silence unbothered or sit in silence and smoke. We were made of wild things then, hungry and crazed and burning. I remember our silence never really felt quiet. There was a small noise bubbling up in each of us, a noise only we could hear. We noticed it in each other, I think. Perhaps we were trying to make that small voice louder by our orbiting, that small voice crying out for anything, Look! I’m here. I’m here. I’m here. I think a truth too often forgotten is that children never asked to be born. Magic and myths originated as ways for humans to understand an unknowable world, a world they didn’t have words for, to give it shape and meaning. For instance, stories of Helios that describe him riding a chariot drawn by golden horses across the sky were ways of explaining why the sun seemed to move during the daytime. Bad weather and water lashing at ships at sea was blamed on Poseidon’s temper, and on those sailors on the ship who may have incurred his wrath. Some myths of the moon goddess Selene were ways to explain the lunar eclipse. It was said that when the lunar eclipse happened, evil witches had succeeded in drawing Selene out of the sky to take her blood for their spells. Every time I looked up at the night sky above my small world, I thought of these stories. Every time men that did not love my mother took away her magic—every time they all drew me downwards to try and steal mine—I thought of these terrible, beautiful things to explain all things. I never saw my mother look at stars; she never asked me about them either. She had to have seen me looking. Maybe she would have looked, or did, once or twice—before different men taught her the wrong way to love, rotting her from the inside out. A rot that then spread to my foundations. Maybe that’s nothing more than a pretty story made up by a broken woman’s once-broken child. When we ventured out into the woods, I always imagined what it would be like to be spirited away, by the will-o-wisps, wild things or other fairies—fairies that likely didn’t exist in suburbia, but I was stubborn with dreams. I imagined them leading me into their world and replacing me with a changeling. I imagined if I went deep enough into the forest, was respectful enough, clever enough—breaking nothing, gently brushing branches from my path—I would be noticed by something wondrous. I imagined it would set me free, would give me something more. Three of us broken children had been walking along one of the paths cleared into the forest, before my neighbor said, oh, look! and ran off through the trees. I watched as she disappeared into fog. I watched as one of the broken boys ran after her, shit, stop running. Stop! I imagined for a moment that my neighbor had been picked instead of me. I took my time catching up with them, following the sound of their voices as they complained at how slow I was. I was taking care to not trample on anything growing. The fog was thicker in the small clearing where they sat on a fallen tree slowly being eaten by lichen and rot. I couldn’t see farther than three feet in front of me. Look, they both said, and my neighbor pat a spot beside her on the trunk. 66 | Issue 44
There was nothing but brown and white and gray. The birds weren’t singing. There was no wind, no rustling leaves. Only a stillness and the rise and fall of our breaths. We looked at the mist that ate the trees. We looked at each other. When we left, we ended up in a spot much farther away from where we thought we had started. We spent some time arguing over if it counted as getting lost. A few times after that, my neighbor and I went looking for the spot in the trees, but we could never find it. It had vanished. Magic, she said. The deeper I dug, the more I learned the names, the shapes. A system for understanding. Our sun, for example, is just “The Sun,” or “Sol.” A lot of other suns, like a lot of other moons, get names—like Arcturus, or Sirius—or like Betelgeuse, the sun that makes up Orion’s left shoulder. Suns are really just big stars, big balls of molten gas and other elements, that lie in the center of planetary systems. They are the objects all the other objects orbit; their gravity is large enough to overpower all the others. Earth’s Sun is large enough that 1,000 Jupiters would fit inside it. This is 1,300,000 Earths. Betelgeuse is the second brightest star in the sky, and the second brightest in the constellation of Artemis’s beloved hunter Orion. It is one of the largest stars visible to the naked eye, so large in fact, that were it to replace The Sun, it would eat us and Mercury and Mars and Venus. Scientists think it might even eat Jupiter too, for a total of roughly sixty percent of our solar system. It is large enough to devour our entire world and four of the others that we know. It is also six-hundred and forty light years away, which means that its light could have gone out this second and we probably won’t notice until six-hundred and forty years from now, because it takes the light Betelgeuse emits six-hundred and forty years to reach us. When science taught me this, it taught me that to look into the night sky is to look into the past. We are offered a glimpse into something unnamable, something older and more constant than we could ever hope to be. When we use telescopes to look at distant planets and stars and suns, we are looking back in time into a history large enough to hold us all—a blanket of reminders and infinite stories. Orion the hunter, Artemis’s boastful beloved, is heavier than the rest. Older. He is visible across the world, across time, and has as many names as stories. Likely even more, still, than the ones that were written down. The oldest known illustration of Orion’s constellation was found on a mammoth ivory carving in a cave somewhere in Germany. It is estimated to be 32,000 to 38,000 years old. Babylonian sky catalogues contain illustrations of him and call him “The True Shepherd of Anu.” In Ancient Egypt, he was known to be Sah, the father of all other gods. In Hungarian folktales, Orion is called “magic archer,” or “reaper.” In Indian myth, Orion is instead Nataraja (“the cosmic dancer”), an avatar of Shiva. In Scandinavia, his belt was “Freya’s distaff.” Even the Bible references Orion, though the name it gives the constellation, “Kesil,” translates as “fool.” Though, there is debate that that is a mistranslation, that his actual name is “kesel,” which means hope. Perhaps there is not really a difference. Perhaps both are fitting for the man who fell in love with a goddess such as Artemis. Perhaps his shape is the shape of love. Perhaps that is what it comes down to: when I see Orion, I am reminded of a love so deep the only way to really show it is to have it burn. We lay on a cold black pavement—my childhood best friend and I—dead center between two basketball hoops in my neighborhood playground. It was the time of night where a hush blankets the air, helped along by a faint late autumn chill. She had spirited me outside—away from my parents’ anger she heard Blue Mesa Review | 67
through the phone, away to where they couldn’t see. She often did things like this for me; often heard the storm in my voice before I even knew it was forming. She had this way of interrupting everything. She still does, perhaps, even though everything she was is now ashes scattered in a lake. Look, we whispered to each other. She took my hand in hers. Dozens, hundreds, countless stars suspended, surrounding us. The sky was alive in the still night, bright white—the wisps of clouds reflecting the stars. I think maybe we saw the Milky Way, not clouds. Either way, we didn’t speak, afraid to break the hush. Afraid to break our shared moment of magic. We recognized something that had no use for words, no need. She leaned into me. We lay there, gaping up. The Earth was a fishbowl, we were the fish. We stilled against our current and listened. Then, unprompted, she started to sing. I don’t remember which song, but I remember the feel of her voice as I looked up. I remember how clear it sounded, how my arms goose-pimpled with the sound and a slight chill breeze. I remember, for a moment, there was nothing else. No broken and burning neighbors or broken and burning houses. There was nothing; there was everything. There was just us, our hands, her nameless song, and the stars. Most of the things we see in the night sky are not stars. They are planets, metal satellites, moons, suns, and nebulae. But there are stars too. It’s just all the other stuff can emit or reflect light all the same. They are all bright and countless. Every planet and its sun are contained in a solar system that is contained with other solar systems together in a galaxy. Earth is merely one of these; the Milky Way is one of countless, infinite others. The universe is expanding constantly, consistently, but not only at the edges. It expands everywhere all at once: this means that the space between planets, between galaxies and suns, is expanding. We understand the universe to be roughly spherical, but we don’t know for certain if that’s true. There is no true concept for outside the universe because we are contained within it. The universe isn’t necessarily expanding at the edges because it has no edges, and we truly have no idea what the whole of it looks like. But we do know carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and a few other trace elements make up all life as we know it. Those same life-making elements are found in the stars we see in the night sky. Before we measured these things, the stars fed us fragments of dust and let us grow fat off their magic. Years later—after the neighborhood, after my kisses with my old neighbor, after my friend’s sudden death, after realizing that no gods were coming for me—I went back to see the night sky of the town that I had grown up in. I took two new friends with me, friends who came from a different world than I had: one that was whole. I told them I wanted to show them something special, some part of me that isn’t meant for words. I drove them down an old country road, the type that is a loose contract of dirt and scattered bits of rock arranged in a together-enough pattern that prevents mud. My neighbor and I had found it years before. The two friends were silent and grew more so the darker and longer the old dirt road revealed itself to be. One joked I was taking them out in the woods to murder them. I drove anyway; turned left into grass and weeds. After the trees were finally behind us, I stopped. Turned the key off. I got out and they followed me into a field. Look. Our necks bent backwards. My eyes, responding to a magnetic pull, landed on my hunter Orion. I
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traced his belt with my finger. One of my new friends whistled. Look at that, he said. We eased back, together, back into the stillness. Back into the silence, back onto the still-warm hood of my car. Sometimes, when they are lost, sailors use an old navigation trick which turns their knowledge of constellations into a guide. “Astronavigation” it’s called. According to the official definition, the method “enables a navigator to transition through a space without having to rely on estimated calculations, or dead reckoning, to know their position.” There are, officially, fifty-eight stars across several constellations that are used. The most common is Polaris, the North Star, found in Ursa Minor, or the Little Dipper. It is favored because it is the brightest star in the sky, and also because it never dips below the horizon, no matter the time of year. The others used include stars from Cygnus, the swan; from Aquila, the eagle; Boötes, the herdsman; Sirius, the great dog; Hydra, the great serpent; and from Orion, the hunter. In this way, sailors don’t need a map. They don’t need to know how to read—don’t even need to know how to speak. All they need is to know the shapes of the myths hanging above them. All they need is to see. And then in the stillness, the stars will guide them home.
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Authors Ari Laurel Ari Laurel is an Asian American fiction writer and organizer who lives and writes about radicalism, pop culture, orientalism, and the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Passages North, the Conium Review, Yellow Chair, The Toast, Duende, Kartika Review, Kweli Journal, and Hyphen.
Kelly Neal Kelly Neal is a Ph.D. candidate at Binghamton University, where she studies English. She holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from Georgia State University in Atlanta, and a dual B.A. in Music and English from the Ohio State University. She has previously edited for the literary journals Harpur Palate, New South, and Five Points.
Saúl Hernández Saúl Hernández is a queer writer from San Antonio, TX, and was raised by undocumented parents. Saúl has an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Texas at El Paso. He’s the winner of the 2021 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize chosen by Victoria Chang. He’s a finalist for Palette Poetry 2020 Spotlight Award and the 2019 Submerging Writer Fellowship, Fear No Lit; semi-finalists for the 2018 Francine Ringold Award for New Writers. His work is forthcoming/featured in Poet Lore, Cherry Tree, Atlanta Review, Quarterly West, and more. He’s part of the Macondo Writers Workshop. He’s the Managing Editor for Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review.
Authors Joanna Ng Joanna Ng is a poet from Fresno, California. She received her BA and MA in English from the University of California, Davis. She is currently an MFA student at the University of Mississippi. She writes poems about the junction of language, labor and place, and the ghosts that live in those spaces. She writes poems to speak to the dead.
Suzanne Martin Suzanne Martin is a writer from Ohio.
Rowan Lucas Rowan (they/she) is a marketing editor and adjunct professor of English living in Richmond, VA. They hold an M.A. in English from Virginia Commonwealth University. Their previous work has been published in Amendment, Ghost Parachute, The Boiler, and Pidgeonholes. Rowan’s nonfiction piece “The Water of the Womb,” published in The Boiler, was nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize.
Artists Kathleen Frank Santa Fe artist Kathleen Frank paints the landscape of the Southwest and West in vibrant hues, capturing light, pattern and a glint of logic in complex terrains. Exhibitions include, among others, High Desert Museum (Curator’s Choice Award), Museum of Western Art, Roux & Cyr, Jane Hamilton Fine Art and La Posada de Santa Fe. Publications include LandEscape Art Review, MVIBE, Art Reveal, Magazine 43 and Southwest Art. Art in Embassies/U.S. State Department selected her work for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Edward Lee Edward Lee is an artist and writer from Ireland. His paintings and photography have been exhibited widely, while his poetry, short stories, non-fiction have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and America, including The Stinging Fly, Skylight 47, Acumen and Smiths Knoll. He is currently working on two photography collections: ‘Lying Down With The Dead’ and ‘There Is A Beauty In Broken Things’. He also makes musical noise under the names Ayahuasca Collective, Orson Carroll, Lego Figures Fighting, and Pale Blond Boy. His blog/website can be found at edwardmlee.wordpress.com
Nina Tichava Nina Tichava was raised in both rural northern New Mexico and the Bay Area in California. She was influenced by her father, a construction worker and mathematician, and by her mother, who was an artist and designer. The reflections of these dualities—country to city, pragmatist to artist, nature to technology—are essential to and evident in her paintings.
C. R. Resetarits C.R. Resetarits is a writer and collagist. Her collage art has appeared on the covers and in the pages of dozens of magazine and book covers.
Valeria Amirkhanyan Valeria was born in a closed Siberian town where nuclear waste is still stored. Lifeless desert polygons, where there is not a single tree created the dull look of her hometown. She received two educations in painting and landscape architecture, which are closely intertwined in her artworks. She is a full-time artist and runs an art school where grow over 50 types of plants. With her artworks, Valeria tries to comprehend how it happened that we went so far from our natural essence and created something as destructive and terrible as radioactive energy and weapons.
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Artists Gerburg Garmann Gerburg Garmann, a native of Germany, is a professor of German and French at the University of Indianapolis. Her scholarly publications appear in English, French, German in international journals. Her artwork and poems have appeared in various magazines and anthologies around the world. “Painting is yet another foreign language for me and allows for aesthetic expression in form of color, shape, thought, and passion. It is a language, which can be shared by many, verbally and non-verbally.” Her mission is to inspire joyful resilience.
Randall Stauffer A designer turned educator, Randall Stauffer is a professor of interior design at Woodbury University. He strives to create space inhabited by people eager to engage the world differently. His drawings, designs and pedagogy explore how space creates meaning in the environment, and how the environment informs informs ways of inhabiting. The material environments transform into educational structures and then into words found in visual abstractions.
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