blue moon vol. 30

blue moon

Thanks to Associated Students of Whitman College Penrose Library for their financial support

Special thanks to Professor Scott Elliott Roxanna Downing Whitman Events Board Katharine Curles, Barbara Maxwell, and Leann Adams Reid Campus Center The Whitman College Wire

COVER ART

Not All Wounds Heal Maddie Bailey Found bark, thread

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Hillary Smith Lily Monsey LAYOUT EDITORS Eli Cohen Zoe Guckenheimer POETRY EDITOR Catherine Fisher POETRY STAFF Adrienne Groves Annie Want Chapin Dorsett Clouds Bueermann Grace Little Rina Cakrani PROSE EDITOR Jillian Briglia PROSE STAFF Clara Greenstein Elizabeth Campbell Ema Di Fruscia Michelle Foster Sophie James Tessa James ART EDITOR El Horsfall ART STAFF Cheng Cheng L. Grace Dunbar Keelan Booth Liv Staryk Missy Gerlach Mona Law DIGITAL MEDIA EDITOR Leo Hernandez DIGITAL MEDIA STAFF Zoe Guckenheimer Isabel Smoyer Janssie Zhu Mercer Hanau Nhi Cao PUBLIC RELATIONS EDITOR Samantha Tong PUBLIC RELATIONS STAFF Ashlyn Quintus Bella Rivera Clouds Bueermann Isabel Smoyer

blue moon Whitman College

2017

volume 30

blue moon, Whitman College’s student-staffed art and literary magazine, is published annually in April in Walla Walla, Washington. blue moon accepts unsolicited submissions of art, prose, poetry, and digital media. All submissions to blue moon are judged anonymously and selected by the editors and staff. Whitman College is not responsible for the contents of the magazine. The magazine accepts no liability for submitted artwork and writing.

The views expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the editors or staff members. The individual contributors hold copyrights to artwork, texts, and digital media in this issue. No material may be reprinted without the permission of the magazine or contributors. blue moon is a not-for-profit media organization within the Associated Students of Whitman College. All donations and gifts to blue moon are tax-deductible. Please make checks for donations and subscriptions payable to the Associated Students of Whitman College.

Copyright 2017, blue moon For more information on how to submit, subscribe, and donate, please visit www.whitman.edu/bluemoon. blue moon Whitman College 280 Boyer Avenue Walla Walla, WA 99362

Contents Black Morels Grace Little

11 poetry

Radiant/Gradient Keelan Booth

31 art

What a Wonderful World El Horsfall

13 art

Demiurgus II Taylor Penner-Ash

32 art

Sorority Ione Fullerton

14 poetry

mental congestion Christine Schoeggl

33 poetry

Head/Space Eric Rannestad

15 art

Open Samarah Uribe MĂŠndez

34 art

After Flossing, Emma Graham

16 prose

Unfeeling Owen Crabtree

35 prose

Skateboard Tywen Kelly

18 art

Water on a Spider Web Alex Lupton

51 art

Speckled Kirk Corwin

19 poetry

Portrait Rimona Law

52 art

Elegy of a Freshwater Mermaid Jillian Beatrice Briglia

20 poetry

cove trail Laurel Field

53 art

The Ants Ruined Everything Haley Forrester

22 art

Welcome to the softland, to the greydrip greenmelt land Heather Hamilton

24 poetry

May Annie Want

54 poetry

Amber Grace Dunbar

56 art

Scatter Rimona Law

25 art

Twilit Safety Lily Monsey

57 prose

Eye Can’t See Through This Smog 26 Meghan Feldman prose

Stills from a Corporeal Testimony 60 Maia Watkins art

Goat Island Paige Dempsey

62 poetry

Shadows Maddie Bailey

64 art

Love Letter to the Shame of my Family Celia Langford

65 poetry

Borderline Nick Sekits

Sipping Slipping Tipping Tripping Point Martina Pansze

81 poetry

Self-Portrait at twenty Catherine Fisher

82 poetry

all bodies are beautiful Grace Dunbar

83 art

68 art

Girls Girls Girls Nick Guo

84 prose

Walls Trevor Press

69 poetry

13 Ways to Groom a Woman Emma Graham

96 art

new words for trichotillomania, dermatillomania Gus Coats

71 poetry

deep fried Liz Campbell

98 poetry

Untitled Zoe Guckenheimer

72 art

the night breeze Gus Coats

100 art

Escapist Daydreaming, 2:36AM Hannah Filley

73 poetry

From the Road Maia Watkins

101 poetry

dislocation Liz Campbell

74 poetry

DNR / No Code Henry Carges

102 poetry

Untitled (n, s, e, w) Fiona Bennitt

77 art

Skull Bloom Mercer Hanau

103 art

The Darkness in the Deep Robby Brothers

78 prose

On the moraine, on memory Paige Dempsey

104 poetry

Missing El Horsfall

80 art

The Sky Last Year Martina Pansze

106 art

Brief Interludes from Purgatory Emma Philipps

107 prose

Runaway Hippie Antonio Tharp

125 art

Waiting for my therapist Ione Fullerton

111 art

126 poetry

Untitled Janssie Zhu

112 art

Ode to the Moon From the Mantis & Ode to the Mantis From the Moon Grace Little

On the Lips Lindsey Brodeck

113 prose

Poking Holes In The Firmament Eric Rannestad

128 art

alpine Prachi Patel

115 art

Self-portrait Natalie Quinn Godfrey

130 art

LaCray Chris Meabebasterretxea

116 poetry

Morning Cait Mazzoleni

131 poetry

Colorful Feeling 2 Isabelle Fenne

117 art

Burial of a Flag Taylor Penner-Ash

133 art

Directions the spines of a cactus can point Amanda Champion

118 poetry

Mourning Ritual Tara Emerald McCulloch

134 prose

Not All Wounds Heal Maddie Bailey

120 art

Fisherman’s Companion Travis Gallatin

137 art

Deadly Sins Catherine Fisher

121 poetry

Pinecones Helena Platt

138 poetry

Ice Bath Keelan Booth

122 art

Bears Nina Moore

140 art

Short Stories About Ex Boyfriends Jillian Beatrice Briglia

123 prose

There are swifts here too Allie Donahue

141 poetry

Packed Sally Paul

142 art

Digital Media All digital media pieces can be found on the blue moon website at:

bluemoonartmag.wordpress.com

Audio: I. Summer Rain II. Snow III. Long Live the Humpbacks

Visual:

IV. Memorial Hall in 3D! V. Cosmos

Claire McHale Henry Carges Jack Swain Eric Underwood Andy Bainton

Tywen Kelly Mercer Hanau

Audio/Video: VI. Reclined VII. Bath

A. Bath (book PDF) VIII. Edgeworth Box IX. FEMALE X. Menorah Time Lapse XI. Geothermal Projection Mapping XII. Decomposition XIII. Hyperflow

El Horsfall El Horsfall Eric Rannestad Grace Dunbar Mercer Hanau Mercer Hanau Eric Rannestad Rimona Law Tywen Kelly

Letter from the Editors Picture Whitman’s Fine Arts House in miniature: a doll-sized residence. Two soft-spoken roommates begin to curate the corners of their bedroom. They are mice. One is a yellow mouse sporting several different necklaces, and one is an orange mouse whose curly fur is woven into intricate braids.

“How much closet space do you want? I don’t need this entire side!”

“Oh no that’s fine! I didn’t want to use all this space anyway!”

Flash forward a year and a half: these two mice decide to rekindle their partnership and take on the joint role of Editors-in-Chief of a small, mousesized literary magazine. They hesitate at first, unsure about their abilities to head up a staff and to lead the magazine layout process, when neither has even remote knowledge of InDesign and the most they can manage in Photoshop is cropping the tiniest of images.

Flash forward another year: these two mice have succeeded in leading an entire staff of other talented student mice, utilizing their respective strengths (such as: speaking to an audience, and NOT speaking to an audience).

Together, they forged a power duo of gentle yet firm leadership from their furry, mouse-sized bodies. And, thanks to complete reliance on their star mouse layout editors, the magazine got off to the publisher without a hitch.

On a more human-sized note: we want you to feel welcomed into these coming pages. Don’t let the shiny surface and crisp typeface fool you. The art-making process is messy; the fear, passion, and drive involved in sharing one’s art simmers just under the surface of this book. You, the reader, play a vital role in making this art hum with life. This publication is for everyone, including you. And mice.

Oh, and the two mice are us, Hillary and Lily. Doesn’t it make sense?

We think so.

Love,

8

Hil and Lil

blue moon Editors-in-Chief

blue moon

Black Morels Grace Little

The big wood writhed.

Loam and worms and wild decay collapsing together. The smell mossy and full as dirt with fungi, and from the remains, mushrooms:

curved orange thimbles the size of thumbs,

wide white fans sprawling in practical stacks,

stems stick-thin with crooked black caps.

What withers there falls. The world wonders at it and opens the sieve that is both maw and body. It bleeds, digests. Renews, the thick swaths of black morels, puckered like brains or the insides of beehives or mountains on a dimpled globe, sprouting from burnt earth. Nothing comes from nothing. But here is the wild cycle. Here is the morchella, the little phoenix, buttery and stunning in the delicate way of things born from bitterness.

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LITTLE

If you will be anything, be it all. The rot, the scent, the flames, the growth again. If you will be anything, be the revival. If you will be anything, renew.

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What a Wonderful World

El Horsfall linoleum reduction print, letterpress

Sorority Ione Fullerton after “Seated Girl”

by Diego Rivera, 1947 Waxy and enlobed, I’ve made a new home in the ear of one of Diego’s girls (the one you showed me, lover) I nibble and I gnaw, keeping her devout to the doctrine of longing (the one I spin for you) Is there any act more sororal?

And when the fatness of her sorry lids threatens to swallow us both, I only have to whisper: “You’re alone but for me, sister” to have her twist herself from sleep’s grasp, pious, once more.

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Head/Space Er ic Ranne stad oil on canvas

After Flossing, Emma Graham

I lie awake too fearful to close my eyes. A racing heart stops me from leaving the safety zone in my bed. I know I can’t fall asleep with a racing heart. To fall asleep, I must calm down. ... !. Before getting into bed, the two latches–hugging the left side of the broken west facing window to the frame–must be pulled down into full lock position. Before getting into bed, the pink accordion shades must be dropped to block the room from the watchful eyes of strangers. Before getting into bed, the floor of the closet must be swept for the feet of intruders. Before getting into bed, the crease behind my door must be checked, and again. Before getting into bed, the door must be locked, and checked, and checked again.

Before getting into bed, the room must get a visual clearance in between every two flips of four total flips of the lightswitch next to the door–ending with a fifth flip. Before getting into bed, the top of each shelf must be checked for inconsistencies. Before closing my eyes, the room must be inspected one last time with a flashlight. (. . .). It never hurts to check again. ...

(Check again!).

Established in bed, eyes shut, and convinced I can fall asleep anyways, my gut tells me I am wrong. I forgot to turn on the fan, and I left the hall light on–again. A racing heart now drives my body from my final position in bed.

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I sit myself on the toilet to relieve myself. Posted in the pink bathroom, eyes cast to the white, thin pink-lined, plaid linoleum floor. I can’t look in the mirror at this hour, I have that feeling I can never seem to shake from my spine, when it feels like someone is approaching from behind. But no one is there, and how could they be? I know I’m still in my midnight realm. What’s here dissipates with company, but here, I am afraid the mirror will lie to me. I scramble through five empty rolls of toilet paper before my blind hand grabs onto a padded roll. I fold not scrunch. Pump soap–one, two, three, four–wash. Pump soap–one, two– I run warm water over my wrists. I grab one of the still damp towels next to the sink and quickly once over my hands. I lose focus leaving the bathroom and I catch a glimpse of my reflection turning out the light. Assured, and none the less terrified, I run back to my bedroom, my spine twisting in search of a place to hide. Only I can’t really run, and certainly not from this. Glancing behind my shoulder to guarantee I am still alone, I push my bedroom door closed behind me, straightening my spine with it.

Before getting into bed, begin again at the window.

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Skateboard

Ty wen Kelly digital photography

Speckled Kirk Corwin

Behold in your finite vision: Fluid dripping from The stump onto dirt Where spatters darken, spots where Life met ground, and was welcomed, enveloped At the end of its Arcing journey from Severed arteries of a spotted hen

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Elegy of a Freshwater Mermaid Jillian Beatrice Briglia

In April I dreamed of rain Hot rain filling the sun porch Oil slicks of rain under the piano Rain dripping from the chandelier like wax.

Now in June I find excuses To linger in the kitchen For whiffs of scum and insect spit Silt and tender cattails River bottom and sour fish scales.

In July I feed his five foot seven Cincinnati shoulders Scrub the detritus off the bowls I turn on a faucet And the house expands But Curtis only cries Less Salt!

At night I cannot sleep.

His cigarette hisses on the nightstand His back feels like flour or Dust sticking to my frogskin hands I long for a wet stone to suck on.

Last night I thought “Face it, you’re drowning.

How many times can you recall Toes puckering the cool loam

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The abalone comb A farmboy frame freckled with spatters of mud Come quick come quick Elizabeth his kiss like a bubble rising to the surface his face On the water like an upturned mirror?�

Curtis laughs and asks what I am thinking about But how can I tell him I am thinking of algae soup And my bathing suit thrown behind The bureau like a secret?

Somewhere he cannot see is A green swimming hole where Legs with freckles like mud Swing off the dock like moss tugging At the edge of a river bank.

In September I dream of salt.

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The Ants Ruined Everything Haley For re ster digital photography

Welcome to the softland, to the greydrip greenmelt land Heather Hamilton

She didn’t know, upon arrival, the windsound through those branches, the roundvoices smoothtilting into her ear.

She had never seen bricks arranged in just that pitter pattern, the height of messy mossy stonewalls.

Upon arrival, she could not have known the smoothblending of all the greens in the world, the suckbreath of the tide over flat islands of barestone sprinkled with purplerocks.

Upon departure, she knew what that mud felt like between her toes, its footwiggle and softdancing, that warmrain coming even on sunny forecast days, that trailgreen grass in the betweensheep of the fields.

She knew the taste of meatsalt and seaweed puddingsweet.

It was not that blue greenplace, the one from which she came nor the grey greenplace, the one to which she went, that made the quickturn mindsong twists in her head.

It was the widetime movement, the groundstrong arrival, giving her the deeplungs to breathe it all in.

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Scatter

Rimona Law wood

Eye Can’t See Through This Smog Meghan Feldman

Mrs. Morrison was too busy to die. She had firmly insisted upon this since she had completed her term, and she was haunted every day for it.

The sun shone into her room, drenching the bed in deep red, sooty light as the curtains automatically clacked open.

Anette rested for a moment with the heels of her palms pressed against her lidded eyes, with a headache already throbbing inside her skull. Her mind started to drift, the crashing waves of crazed dreams slowly ebbed, and a calm silence swaddled her that was suddenly, brutally shattered by a few persistent tones from the device on her nightstand. She sighed before languidly reaching for it as it lay haphazardly among a few bottles of pills and eye drops. The harsh light from the device’s screen washed across her face, skipping over the ropy mark that stretched from the corner of her left eye out to above her ear. The familiar message blinked insistently up at her.

“Perhaps you’re ready now?” Her eye twitched. It was often itchy. She quickly typed out her standard reply.

“Too busy.” Anette swung her feet onto the cold marble floor and pulled a silken robe around her body that still stung with its scarred scratches, phantom aches, and bruises that never seemed to fade. She grimaced, then slipped the device into her pocket. She padded through her gilded flat, which she supposed was intended as some sort of compensation for those thirty years.

She averted her eyes as she passed the grimy, floor-to-ceiling

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window that permitted the sunlight that had been permanently dirtied by The Construction to explore her space. A lush tomato plant greeted her, flourishing in the kitchenette; it seemed to thrive in the unending sunset. Anette gently touched the delicate leaves, and started filling a pitcher with water. The faucet dribbled slowly, painstakingly filtering the water, and Anette absentmindedly fingered the circle of wire around her finger. She remembered the blank look on the man’s face when she had gestured at him to avoid the sharp rusted wire protruding from The Construction as they trudged through the maze of tunnels and ramps, dragging behind them sleds stacked high with rubble and debris. She remembered the look of anger and bitterness that was slowly turning into blankness, and she remembered the clicking of his mechanical left eye. Her eye itched again. She rubbed it and felt her scar twinge beneath her fingers. That interaction was one of the few that had stayed with her, still lodged firmly in her brain after thirty-five years, rusted into her brain to the point where forgetting it would cause her to forget herself. With the bowl overflowing, she shut off the faucet and poured the water into her plant. Her device buzzed again in her pocket.

“You must be tired, you didn’t sleep well. Perhaps you’d like to reconsider the offer?” Anette absently keyed her response.

“Still too busy.” She paced back to her room. She pulled on the same rough clothes and worn out boots that she had worn for almost forty years. She went back the kitchen, selected the few round juicy tomatoes that hung heavy on their stems, and packed them into a knapsack. She flicked off the lights, then headed towards the elevator at the door of her lavish flat, feeling her device tap her thigh lightly from her pocket as she walked.

Besides the window, there was only one exit from the apartment. Anyone who planned on returning used the elevator. Anette supposed that most people used the window, but she couldn’t be sure; she didn’t know any of her thousands of neighbors. She knew that they were stacked up around her, but

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FEL DM A N

the elevators were single-occupancy and delivered their occupants from their apartment directly to the street. Anette decided against the window and took the rattling elevator down to the waste below.

When the elevator doors opened again, rancid air slunk inside and swirled around Anette. She only noticed it when she first left her apartment, though; she had worked in it for so long that it just seemed like part of the outside world. Already the soot was starting to settle again into the lines of her hands and around her eyes.

Today was a clear day; Anette could see ten paces ahead of her through the lurking smog, and the red sun tiptoed around The Construction’s multitude of spires that threatened to pierce it and drain it of its blood. Meandering through the streets, Anette silently noted the stares directed towards her. People were unused to seeing Retired Workers. Anette also perceived the engineered belief of superiority displayed by the Non-Workers; it was often intentionally forgotten that chance alone determined those who Worked.

Out of each face around her stared two eyes, the sight of which Anette had still not grown accustomed to. She sifted through the sea of irises and sclerae until she found what she was looking for: a singular, clicking, metallic orb that peered out from a hollow man dragging his sled. When she drew near enough, she tapped his shoulder until he stopped his trudge and turned, facing her general direction. His jaw was slack, and his right eye stared out from under its eyelid, leaden in its socket. The thing in his left socket seemed more interested in Anette, clacking and rolling and narrowing in on the scar across the side of her face. Her device buzzed in her pocket. She placed her bag of tomatoes into the man’s cart and typed out another terse reply. She turned back to the mechanical eye that rolled at her. Anette tried to shake off the memories that started creeping back through the itching line that scraped against her eye. She had once feared that the eye would

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become tainted by the process of Removal, and that the horrors it would see might creep into her brain upon Reinsertion. She had still requested it back when her term ended. She twisted the wire around her finger and pushed the thoughts away.

“Hey husband, I brought you some tomatoes, freshly grown, full of antioxidants.” She unloaded all but one into the cart, nestling them among the rubble, not really paying attention to the man’s feeble reply.

“H-huzbend…” The man’s mouth flapped pathetically.

“Close enough. When a glance shared with a stranger in the depths of hell is the most intimate experience you can get, then you might as well call it marriage.”

The man stared with his blank eye. Anette knew that at the end of his term, he wouldn’t request his eye back. He wouldn’t have to be asked to die. “Take care, get some rest. You need it.” She turned away, winding back through the crowd of Non-Workers, avoiding the trudging sleds of the Workers. She knew that the man wouldn’t process any of the encounter. He’d turn back to his sled full of rubble, bow under the weight of The Construction, and continue plodding.

Anette wove unnoticed through the throng of dusty cloaks and dirty furs and rusted metal, and felt her device buzz against her.

“I think you must be getting tired. Perhaps you should rest, now? Perhaps you should die now?”

“Later, too busy.”

The Retired Worker would not lose her patience. She continued through the narrow, winding streets that made her feel as if she were in the bottom of a well. With everyone’s eyes on the dusty ground, focused on the steps ahead of them, no one noticed as Anette clambered up the scaffolding of The Construction’s roots that sprawled for miles beneath its central peak. From where she sat, cradled between iron beams, Anette looked over an expanse of sludge. It oozed and glistened, a snail track muddying red dirt.

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From where she sat, she could make out The Surveyor at the base of The Construction’s main tower, his crisp suit stark against the muck, and his clacking body glinting through the thick air. He squirmed like an ant. The only dull patch that remained encircled his right eye, its fleshy pinkness smothered by the smog. Anette bit into the tomato that she had saved, feeling its juice dribble down her chin and drip into the river.

One time, many years ago, she had thrown a stick into the sludge. She found it weeks later, a few feet from where she had left it. In her mind, this proved that the sludge was indeed a river, rather than another unyielding swathe of disgusting earth. Anette finished her tomato as her device buzzed again in her pocket. She stood up on the beam.

“Thank you for your term. You seem tired. We think you should die now. Perhaps you’d like to die?” Anette paused, then replied. She paused again. She twisted the wire on her finger. She dove into the river below, leaving the device where she left her boots: collecting ashes and filings on the cradle of beams above the oozing river that wound slowly through a forest of iron.

Anette’s reply glowed in the sooty, red air:

“Always too busy.”

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Radiant/Gradient

Keelan Booth digital photography

Demiurgus II

Taylor Penner-Ash ceramic

mental congestion Christine Schoeggl

i wish there was such a thing as a neti-pot for the brain a fluid you could pour in one ear slosh around and dribble out the other taking all the bad thoughts with it

-31 december, 2016 (mental congestion)

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Open

Samarah Ur ibe MĂŠndez digital photograohy

Unfeeling Owen Crabtree

“Stand up,” the policeman says. Almon doesn’t respond.

Almon is cold. It is a damp space. Soaked wood and dim lights. A silent place, except for heavy drags of breath. Almon looks up. In prison, it will not be the same as here.

Almon’s wrists are cuffed. “Stand up,” says the chief. But his limbs feel sucked to the floor. “Stand up.” The policeman is impatient.

Outside Almon’s head: policemen, a disappointed wife, and a house kissed by a swelling river. Inside, a memory of a moment of feeling: the loneliness of a quarter on the sidewalk, nearly forgotten, nearly unwanted. A special moment, for Almon is not a person of feelings.

The rusted black bars bore Almon. His cell has a toilet and a bed and a cold floor. He is respected by the others. They sense his unfeeling and it gives them shivers. They do not bother him. They have heard the rumors of his crimes.

The disappointed wife visits on Thursdays. Almon meets her in the visiting room, accompanied by two guards. She wants to hold his hand, but they are not allowed to touch.

“How have you been?” she asks.

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CR ABTR EE

“I’ve been well.” He hopes she knows that she doesn’t have to be his wife anymore. She hopes that he is sleeping well.

Almon sits on his cot for hours and thinks of nothing. His mind is like a field of ice.

There is a fight between two gangs, and one inmate is badly hurt.

The guards search each cell for weapons. They find two, both in cell 301. A sharpened spoon and a pocket knife. They drag the man out of his cell and beat him in front of the other prisoners. One guard keeps the pocket knife.

An inmate runs next to Almon during exercise hour.

“Why are you in here?” he asks, not believing what the others have whispered to him.

“Quiet,” says a guard. But these rules are not firmly enforced.

“I killed some people who deserved to be killed,” says Almon. His eyes don’t flicker towards the inmate. The inmate’s name is Freddy.

He is short and fit, with scraggly black hair and a round face.

Some nights the prison is loud, some nights it is silent. Tonight is a loud night. This angers the guards. Prisoners banter and shout at one another. Hey sleeping beauty, they say. The noise does not bother Almon. He falls asleep easily.

“Which number’s your cell?” Freddy asks. Freddy has started talking to Almon a lot, but Almon doesn’t mind. Freddy has a good voice.

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“317.”

“Oh.” Almon is quiet. He watches the others taunt and roughhouse. They are like pigs. They are like little boys.

The halls of the prison are gray and barren. Their uniforms are blue.

Their meals are the same everyday: porridge for breakfast, ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch, and beans for dinner. Almon doesn’t like cheese, so he doesn’t look forward to lunch.

Freddy sits next to Almon at every meal. He tells Almon that he has only eight months left, so they won’t be able to become great friends.

Almon tells Freddy about his disappointed wife. He wonders if she is still his wife. Freddy asks why she married him. His voice is cautious and slow. Almon doesn’t know. Freddy asks if he loves her.

Almon says yes, but he sounds unsure.

Freddy sits in his cell playing games with his fingers. He has had two years to make them up. They are complicated and exciting.

Even Freddy believes he doesn’t know which hand will win. The left hand wins more often, because Freddy feels bad for it. He is righthanded. His right hand gets to do everything.

Freddy’s hands are thick and calloused and pale. They are hairy, but not as hairy as Almon’s hands. His beard is thin and measly even though he hardly shaves. His eyes are big and green.

A beard appears on Almon’s face, tangled and warm. His back hurts

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from sleeping on the cot. His feet are blistered by his crumbling shoes. One night he dreams of sitting with his wife in a desert and watching the sun bleed red over the horizon. There is nothing but sand and sky and their two hunched bodies. It is a dream of feeling. When he wakes up in his cell, it feels as though a painter has brushed the faintest black of betrayal on his heart.

Almon tells Freddy about the dream. Freddy will have something interesting to say about it, something Almon can pass time thinking about. Freddy has had a dream too. In it, the prison cells were surrounded by nothing but trees and dirt. The guards were nowhere to be seen. He and Almon pried open their bars and stepped into the night. They smelled the mossy bark, and dug their hands into the dirt, and ran. They ran through the woods, yelling whatever words came into their bulging minds. They ran and ran and ran but when they stopped for breath new bars appeared around them as though created by a spell.

A prisoner sits next to Almon at lunch. The prisoner is not Freddy.

“Get up,” says Almon.

“Fuck you,” says the prisoner. “I sit where I want.”

The prisoner is trying too hard to win the respect of the others.

Almon has no interest in helping him.

“What’s your name?” asks Almon. His tone is high and curious and fake.

“Jo—” the inmate starts, but Almon punches him in the nose. The inmate falls off the bench and onto the floor. He is dazed. Blood trickles out his nose.

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“I beat who I want,” says Almon.

The disappointed wife visits Almon. She has not visited in many weeks. She says she is sorry. She says Almon needs to shave and start eating more. Almon reminds her that he’s never getting out, and that she should find a new person. She says she knows. Almon wonders if she has already. He doesn’t care.

“Is the house still flooded?” he asks.

“Of course not.”

“Do you still live in the house?”

“Yes.” She comes back the next Thursday. Her hair is long and blond and frayed at the ends. Her eyes are like blue walls. Even Almon cannot see into her. She looks at his grungy body. She remembers seeing him for the first time: waiting for the bus. Him staring at his leather shoes. Her liking the way his hair curled around his ears. Him being different and her noticing. Her wanting to know his strangeness.

She looks at the prisoner Almon has brought to the visiting room.

He is short and round-faced, with kind eyes.

“This is Freddy,” Almon says.

“Nice to meet you Freddy.” They are not allowed to shake hands.

“Freddy’s leaving in six months.”

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“Congratulations.” She is surprised that Almon has made a friend.

When she leaves, the guards pull the men roughly to their cells. The prison is a loud and dirty place compared to the visiting room.

The guards are big and gristly. They walk from cell to cell with their hands on their holsters and taunt the prisoners. Hey fatty, they say to one. Hey sweetheart, to another. Sometimes they take a prisoner and disappear for a while. They don’t take Almon. They don’t even call him names. They sense his unfeeling, and it sends shivers down their spines. They torment Freddy because he is an easy target. Hey midget, they say. Hey dwarf.

Freddy can’t fall asleep. He wishes he could call his dad. His dad is old and wrinkled and kind. He hasn’t visited Freddy in a long time.

Freddy lies on his back with open eyes. The night is cold and heavy.

Almon swallows a spoonful of tasteless beans. He looks up at Freddy’s greasy head. Freddy flinches, because Almon almost never looks at him.

“What are you in for?” Almon asks.

“I thought you weren’t going to ask,” says Freddy. “I stole some stuff.

Some expensive stuff.”

“Oh.” Freddy looks at Almon with nervous eyes. “Can I ask you a strange question?” he asks.

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“Yes.” “Are you a sociopath or something?”

“Yes.” “Oh.” They finish their beans without speaking. The other prisoners snicker behind their backs. Freddy and Almon are always together, they whisper to one another. They must really like each other, they say.

Almon has trouble falling asleep because his hips ache. The night is filled with eerie noises. The night is filled with thoughts of his house and its rugs and mirrors and doors. Almon can feel the soles of his feet step through the house. He doesn’t miss it.

Almon’s wife doesn’t visit on Thursday. He files his fingers on the wall of his cell. He wants to cut his beard, but he can’t think how.

He can see himself in the reflection of the toilet water. When did his cheeks get so sunken? When did his skin get so pale?

Almon pries a piece of loose concrete out of the ceiling. He tosses it off the wall over and over, catching it before it hits the floor. The game is Freddy’s invention. Almon’s heart beats fast. He plays and plays until his hands are scratched and bleeding. When he goes to sleep he dreams of playing the game with Freddy in an enormous cell. They play and play and play. They sweat and smile. The guards outside the cell are also enormous. They are too big to hear Almon and Freddy laughing.

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At breakfast, Almon doesn’t tell Freddy about the dream. Freddy is bruised purple and silent. Almon stares at him. He never imagined Freddy would get into a fight.

“What happened?” he asks.

“One of the guards got me,” says Freddy. Freddy’s eyes are fixed on his bowl.

Almon looks at Freddy’s bruised arms. “One of the guards?” he asks.

Freddy doesn’t answer. His eyes are hung and red.

“He beat you?” Almon asks.

“Called me gay boy. Little faggot boy. Asked me when I was going to propose to you.” He pauses. “I’m not a faggot.”

Almon looks around the dining hall at the guards. “And you fought?”

“I told him I wasn’t a faggot, and he said he wasn’t so sure, and he pushed me against the wall, so I tried to push him away, and he started hitting me and touching me and stuff.”

Freddy looks like he might cry. Almon isn’t hungry anymore. It is a moment of feeling.

“Visitor,” says the guard. Almon wonders if this is the guard that got Freddy. The guard is short with black hair. He pulls Almon into the visiting room where his wife sits patiently. He sits down and says hello.

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“Almon,” she says. “I found a new person.”

“Good,” says Almon.

“So we won’t be married anymore.”

“That’s okay.” She seems hurt. “I liked being your person,” says Almon. This is a good thing to say.

“I know,” she says. She is relieved to be leaving him. She pats his shoulder and walks out of the visiting room. Almon watches each step.

Almon sees one of the guards demand a blowjob from a prisoner, and he wonders if this is the guard that got Freddy. The guard has buzzed blonde hair, and a mean face. He is muscular and tall. He is considered one of the worst guards. He has been battered by life.

Freddy’s tormenter threatens him. Look out, he says. Hey pretty boy, he says. Almon can tell that Freddy is afraid. Freddy eats his beans quicker than usual. He looks around more than usual.

Almon enjoys his beans. He has learned that if he keeps a couple in his mouth and brings them to his cell, he can play games with them.

He has an army of tasteless beans.

There is a new guard, and he asserts his authority by pretending that prisoner 244 has looked at him wrong. He punches him in front of the others. The prisoners are not phased. They have seen new guards do this before.

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The prisoners have their own slang. Wacks are clubs, browns are beans, toughs are guards. The guards don’t like the slang. They threaten the inmates, but there’s nothing they can do. The slang sticks to the prisoners like religion.

It is winter now, and there isn’t enough heating in the prison.

Almon’s uniform is thin and the legs are ripped. The concrete cot freezes his blankets. He sleeps with his legs tucked to his chest. He looks forward to exercise hour, because it is an hour of warmth.

Freddy dreams that his dad visits him. He walks into the visiting room smiling like a kid. Hi Freddy, his dad says. Hi dad, Freddy says. His dad is not so old in the dream. They talk and laugh.

Freddy’s dad says it’s okay that Freddy is here, in prison. It is okay that he stole. Freddy wants to hug him. He is not allowed to touch his dad, but the guards are. One guard grabs Freddy while the others beat his dad with their clubs. Freddy shouts and kicks, but he cannot escape the guard’s grip. His dad grunts and coughs and huffs. Freddy wakes up breathy and sweaty.

Thursdays feel long without visits. Almon has nothing to do but play with his beans. He incorporates the chunk of concrete into the games. If he plays the games slowly, they take hours. Today, the rock is an objective that the beans fight over. It is the dusty beans versus the cleaned beans.

“What are you doin honey?” A guard asks. It is the tall guard with the buzzed hair.

Almon doesn’t respond.

“No matter how you arrange those beans, they ain’t gonna turn to

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a woman.” The guard laughs. His hand is on his club. “Or do you even like women?”

Almon stares at the wall.

“That hair is gettin pretty long,” says the guard. “I bet you like bein ladylike.”

Almon turns towards the guard, and looks into his eyes. The guard’s eyes are blue and cold.

“Leave,” says Almon.

The guard senses Almon’s unfeeling. It sends shivers down his spine. He pretends to be unafraid. He starts forward and jabs his club towards Almon’s face, but Almon doesn’t move. The guard is angry.

“This is what bein brave gets you,” he says. He clubs Almon in the stomach, and stomps on Almon’s beans.

Almon dreams that his wife’s new person is Freddy. The three of them share a cell, and Almon watches as they kiss. They claim the bed, and Almon has to sleep on the floor, with no blankets. He does not care. He is numb with cold. He wakes up and finds his blankets on the floor. He pulls them to his shivering body.

The guards are unusually quiet. The prisoners whisper gossip to one another. The short one with the black hair got fired, they say. The warden died, they say. The prisoners only see the warden once a month, when he comes to check things. He is aged and bald, with a skinny frame. He seems kind enough. He never speaks to them.

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Time disappears in the prison. Days blur together into a rolling sameness. Most prisoners let go of their days. They let them bleed into each other. One unending day is better than hundreds. Almon does not let go of his days. He knows about each day and why it was different. His days are his companions.

Almon and Freddy eat their sandwiches together. Almon takes the cheese out of his sandwich and trades it for a slice of Freddy’s bread.

This is their lunch ritual.

“I know which guard got you,” says Almon.

“How?” asks Freddy. Freddy is nervous. He isn’t sure if he wants Almon to know.

“It’s the tall one with the buzzed hair.” Freddy doesn’t respond, so Almon knows he’s right. “He shouldn’t have done that to you,” he says.

Freddy dreams that Almon is one of the guards. Almon is the worst one. He teases and beats and spits. He looks at Freddy like he doesn’t know him. Freddy has no one to sit next to during meals. The others make fun of him.

Almon dreams that he is walking down a hallway that doesn’t end.

It is wide and carpeted, with yellow walls. Almon thinks he will pass a door, but there are none. He walks and walks and walks. The carpet is rough on his feet.

Almon watches the guards walk past his cell. When the tall guard

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with the buzzed hair passes, he looks at the floor. He doesn’t want to provoke the guard. The guard passes. Almon hears his taunts and threats as he walks down the hall. Not one prisoner responds.

“Security check,” says the tall guard with the buzzed hair. Freddy’s heart beats fast. The guard comes in and looks under Freddy’s blanket.

“What’s this?” asks the guard. There is nothing there. Freddy’s stomach sinks. Something bad is going to happen. “Looks like someone gets a visit with the warden.” Freddy knows that the warden is not in. The warden never comes in on weekends. The guard pulls Freddy out of his cell, and marches him away from the main hall. Freddy doesn’t say a word.

At dinner, Almon stares at Freddy. Freddy has fresh bruises on his face. Freddy is not eating his beans.

“Can I have your beans?” asks Almon.

“Yes.” Freddy is staring at the table.

“He got you again,” says Almon.

Freddy doesn’t respond. Almon eats the beans in silence. He saves a few in his cheeks.

Freddy has two months left. He is excited to leave. Almon notices a new glint in Freddy’s eyes. Freddy says he will miss Almon. He says it’s funny. The food is better now that he is leaving soon. The cot isn’t so bad. Almon says this is good. Almon asks where Freddy will

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go. He asks what Freddy will do. Freddy says he will go to his dad.

He tells Almon that his dad is old and kind. He tells Almon that he misses his dad. Do you think he’ll forgive me? he asks. For stealing?

Almon says yes. Old people are the best at forgiving, he says. When you have to learn how to die, you learn how best to live. You realize you should have lived that way all along.

Almon sits on his cot all afternoon and rubs his concrete chunk. It is rough. It is the size of a baby’s fist. After dinner, he tosses it off the wall over and over. He is careful not to let his hands bleed. His mind is like the concrete.

Almon tells Freddy that he might disappear soon, but Freddy doesn’t hear. Freddy is playing with his porridge. You are a good friend, says Almon. This time Freddy looks up. Freddy says Almon is a good friend too.

Almon is not sleeping. He sits on his cot in the dark and thinks.

He picks up his concrete and rubs it against the ceiling, trying to sharpen it. Quiet, says a guard. It wasn’t working well anyway. He puts it under his pillow and lies on his back. The night is black and dotted with footsteps.

Before breakfast, Almon watches the guards pass by his room.

When the tall guard with the buzzed hair walks by, Almon throws a handful of wet beans at him.

“I peed on those,” Almon says.

The guard is angry. He pulls out his club and strides into Almon’s

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cell. His face is red and mean. Almon backs towards his cot.

“I’m gonna beat you ‘til you can’t turn your head,” says the guard.

“I’m gonna beat you ‘til I can see your bones.” He swings his club at Almon. “Come here pretty boy.”

Almon kicks the guard in the shin. The guard is blind with anger.

He clubs Almon in the stomach and then the head. “This is what bein brave gets you,” he says.

Almon is calm. He reaches under his pillow and grabs his concrete.

The guard swings at Almon and hits his back. It hurts, but Almon doesn’t care.

“You’re out of breath,” says Almon. “You’re red.” The guard misses Almon’s face. Almon raises his arm and smashes his concrete into the guard’s nose. The guard is dazed. Blood trickles from his nostrils.

“You got Freddy,” says Almon. “You got Freddy.” The guard raises his club but Almon grabs it from him. “You shouldn’t have done that,” says Almon. “He doesn’t deserve that.” The guard senses Almon’s unfeeling. It gives him shivers. He is afraid. Almon hears the other guards running towards the cell. He clubs the guard in the temple and he crumples to the floor.

“You made me feel,” says Almon. “You made me angry.” He clubs the guards head, and then his neck. He has never hit anybody this hard before. The guard is not responding. “I’m going to kill you,” says Almon. He bashes the guard’s eye. The guard is not moving.

He clubs him in the mouth and then the forehead. The other guards reach the cell and rush in. Almon smiles and drops the club. It is a moment of feeling.

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Freddy sits alone at breakfast, and at lunch, and at dinner. He misses Almon. A night crawls by. Freddy has five weeks left. At lunch, he wishes he could have Almon’s cheese. He realizes that the tall guard with the buzzed hair is missing. He smiles. This must be why Almon is gone. He laughs quietly to himself. He picks up his ham and cheese sandwich and finishes it in four bites. It is delicious.

Freddy dreams that the guards lead him gently into the visiting room. His dad and Almon are there, beckoning. Come on, the old man says. Let’s get out of here. Freddy’s round face lights up. The guards simply wave as the three men walk out of the room and into the world once again. Outside the prison is a beach and a glittering sea. As they step forward the prison shrinks behind them until it is nothing but a pebble. The sand sifts through Freddy’s toes. The wind runs through his hair. He hears the gulls calling above him.

He watches the waves crash and spread themselves on the shore.

Freddy starts running, and the others follow. They run and run and run like they are young. When they stop, no bars appear around them. They sit in the wet sand and watch the sun sink beneath the water. The sky is red. The kind and wrinkled man breathes heavily.

Almon stares at the sea. Freddy smiles.

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Water on a Spider Web

Alex Lupton digital photography

Portrait

Rimona Law line

cove trail

Laurel Field digital photography

May Annie Want

I. I will be lying in a still cool bed in some far away October, and it will be late, 3am or so, and she will be sleeping in big heavy sighs and slight twitches next to me, immaculate and mussy and so lovely.

II. There is a version of this story in which I almost think, almost wonder and then I look at the places where her hair makes maps in the pillow, whole lands that change every night, and I tuck myself into her and sleep again.

III. And there is a version where I wander back in my memory to you, and it still hurts a little, like a sprained ankle that never quite heals and is still tender to the touch, weeks and months and years later.

I leave the suspended still darkness in the living room of my mind and I wander through the earthen tunnels and I arrive at the cave, and I open the safe and all these recollections glow faintly, golden light stealing across my cheeks and warming my chest ever so slightly.

In one, we are walking hand in hand and the day is densely chilly and the world is oozing dampness and I have goosebumps and for some nonsensical reason I am wearing my favorite sundress. Your legs are comically long and we are striding down a hill, and I am

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letting gravity stretch my legs long too, I am letting my body thud a little with every step, and I am looking up at you, and you and this love are the only real things in the world, more real than food and air, more real than the truth of time, this love has replaced my blood and it alone is carrying everything my body needs to function.

When I have watched this over and over again and noticed the faded edges and disintegrating details I shut the safe and my skin cries out as the frigid air replaces the glow. And in this version I return to the autumn night, to this bed and to her with you all over my lips, and I don’t quite regret, and I don’t quite break, but I seriously consider it, and sleep is not the same when I finally return to it.

IV. And as I write this, fully aware of the present, I do not know which of those versions scares me more.

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Amber

Grace Dunbar multimedia collage

Twilit Safety Lily Monsey

You believe the lavender light around seven p.m. is true.

In your eyes it turns everything around you a bit purple, but you know someone else could see the same thing and call it blue, and they would not be wrong. You look up at a rounded half moon, warm and inviting with a soft, waxing belly. You immediately think about your bare arms and already notice goose bumps rising with the fine, blond hairs like tiny red flags, whispering for you to go inside even though you know that right now—maybe just for this minute—the air is a perfect temperature.

You turn immediately left, away from the raw and penetrating noise of Isaacs Avenue. You have lived on this street for only three weeks and already find yourself wishing you could sink beneath the pavement into quiet. The encompassing noise of passing cars leaves a semi-permanent impression, an inky stamp on your brain. You turn down the quieter street, hoping to rewrite this noise that fills your head.

About this cold light: it turns everything in warm hues brighter. You notice the voice of a high school art teacher enter your mind, telling you how powerful complementary colors are once you begin to work color into a painting. You think of this as you look up, and suddenly everything in shades of yellow and orange glows. You come to a halt in front of a stop sign, the words echoing in your head. You are standing on a raised, yellow textured strip, covering the slight incline from sidewalk to street.

Its raised knobs mimic the anatomy of an oversized lego, there to protect bodies from slipping. It looks backlit, almost fake.

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MONSEY

When you look up, the first thing your eyes latch onto are the small squares of yellow light emanating from the windows of a house down the block. You stand rooted on the yellow strip. For a moment the world is only shades of yellow and lavender.

Slight darkness creeps silently into your peripheral vision. You walk toward Isaacs. You are sure you are safe and yet, as soon as the edges of the lavender turn dark, you tell yourself you should leave, leave soon, because you are alone. Your insides contract ever so slightly as you continue to set one foot in front of the other. Your remind yourself that your body is here, on Isaacs, and not on the darkening and dusty streets of Denpasar, Bali on one particular night. But your senses are already crossing oceans. …

In similar darkness and withering heat you ride on the back of a motorbike alongside a close friend of yours—her blond head a clear sign of foreignness here. It is a stifling December night on this small island just south of the equator in Indonesia.

This yellow-haired friend has convinced you to come along on a nighttime beach trip with local friends she recently made. You said no when she asked, that’s crazy. Now, somehow, you find yourself clinging to the back of a strange man’s motorbike. No helmets. You think maybe you can protect your friend—this is important. You think of how stupid you are but you’re travelling at such blinding speed so you leave these thoughts of caution behind you in the buffeting wind. You let your head tilt back toward a black sky, your hair whipping violently around your face.

The night that follows is a blur of Bintang and beaches and searching for words; your rudimentary Indonesian only gets you so far with two young men who speak no English. It becomes awkward when there are so few words left you resort to reciting the days of the week. You laugh together in spite of the strangeness.

The night slips quickly away, inching into deeper darkness. All of a sudden the man whose motorbike you are perched on is driving through the entrance of a motel when you

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TWILIT SAFETY

are sure he said karaoke. Your friend’s yellow hair catches your eye and you realize she has had too much Bintang, a familiar dead look in her eyes—gazing, unconcerned. Vines of unease wrap their way around your lungs, your stomach clenches, and ivy-like fear creeps quickly and silently up your spine.

Doors open and shut and lock at stunning speed and you are alone and you attempt to speak for yourself in a language you have no confidence in, but your silence, the lack of words passing your lips, scares you even more than this place you did not see coming: the locked door, the full, waiting bottles of beer. …

You return to the lavender light. It is dwindling now, and you stride quickly back toward your house. It is a few degrees cooler, no longer any kind of perfect temperature. The hairs on your arms stand straight up, a reminder. You turn the corner, the sound of your shoes echoing on the strangely silent street. You see your home: the blocks of yellow light in the windows are a promise of safety.

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Stills from a Corporeal Testimony Maia Watkin s digital photography

Goat Island Paige Dempsey

November 11 2016 It is almost the same standing on cracked rock shouldering its way into the ocean after the tide has come roaring and foaming splintering against the land slumping downwards there are birds here too like before and their legs are bright orange feathers smooth white clear markings of birds made for the ocean and where the spray pops against stone and into the air landing lightly—or not on your shoulders

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you hear the same sound and the water is rushing up just as the boat’s bow once rolled down it is almost the same it is almost the same

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Shadows

Maddie Bailey tree branch, paint, light

Love Letter to the Shame of my Family Celia Langford

I watch my three children in Marlo, Australia hang up their bathing suits for the year, spandex dropping its last few drips onto the linoleum floor.

In Tokyo you, brother, hang up your phone and I am left midsentence on a long, flat tone.

The wee hours are in force for you and I guess you lack the resources to go over our wishes for you even one more time.

I was discussing the weather, in fact, but in the breaths in between, you must have heard my wishes.

“That’s enough of that,” I can hear you saying to the moon and your empty 1K apartment, the faucet leaking and the cars honking below.

I know you are by the window, unshaved, skyline-crazed, and I know that right now you are not holding small stones or insects in your hands.

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L A NGFOR D

My children are, right now.

They are out in the sunny, misty morning, undeterred after the first too-cold swim, old clothes rubbing on their wet skin.

They kneel in the muddy grass beside the swing set, socks shedding their white.

The moths get cupped like in snow globes, held captive by the sweetest affection; sticky lollypop lips kiss the place where small hands can feel fragile bodies moving.

Love dust left in the palms.

These are the last of the bugs for the season; in the snow they’ll fly, fly away to Heaven – but they are principally themselves this morning and not the sad stories pushed onto them.

I am holding you in my hands, right now, brother.

Snow globe though you may feel my grasp is this morning as your eyes trace the city, I am not put off at this moment by your fluttering struggle against me.

I am now watching my children feel out round stones.

I am thinking that this planet is another such stone and also a quick-pulsing moth.

I am thinking

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L OV E L E T T E R T O T H E S H A M E O F M Y FA M I LY

that had you not left the same womb three years before me, this moment when my children play under the banksia tree would be like a dark earth from which the rain and sun were likewise barred.

This is for you, big brother.

I want to bring you moths.

Right now, while I sit in this kitchen, I want you to have all the soul things.

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Borderline Nick Sekits mixed media

Walls Trevor Press

The hills, spattered with grass, shone like the day he had left. His window down, the familiar breath of wind beat along his temple, drying the sweat that had formed along the drive. He had reached the small gas station, claiming to be the last one for 100 miles, and automatically opened the window. The lie was all too familiar. All of the little businesses along the highway boasted their last in 100 mile status. It was the nature of things in rural Washington. People take you seriously when they are unfamiliar with the territory and the people who know better don’t have the money to keep companies afloat.

He had left, never intending to return, when he was sixteen. He had stormed out, mouth frothing with so many curse words he could hardly spit them all out. He could hardly remember why he had left. It had been sunny, his parents had been working and he had been stoned. Nothing too bad, but religion is a beast. They had found him, that was why he had left. Looking back, he supposed it wasn’t the drugs, but the oppressive freedom, too much freedom. All his childhood he had looked for walls, boundaries. He had found plenty of social boundaries, but nothing physical. He had needed a wall to hit, to run into. Something without give. He had found it in the city. The social bonds of his youth broke and were replaced by walls. He had to look for what was out there. A mile is much further when you can’t see it. So he had burrowed in, lost himself in social holes, so deep he didn’t need to think about anything further away. Nothing to worry about but the usual two blocks, and only then one at a time.

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PR E SS

And now he was returning.

The letter had pleaded. It had spoken of family and forgiveness and hope. He had listened and now he was back.

The wind whipped his hair side to side as he looked across the flattening countryside.

His father had once said to him, “They need people like us. What do people expect to eat? Soy?” It was a scathing question, loaded with sarcasm. He was supposed to say no. He was supposed to like farming. The family had worked the land since before photographs were invented. It was the way it was supposed to be.

Back then, not even fences marked the end of one farm and the beginning of another. “We were really free then. Not like today with all these laws, if you worked it, it was yours. No questions asked.”

Now the land was divided by fences, big fences that marked what belonged to whom, nothing more. They couldn’t keep anyone on one side or the other. Driving back, the private property signs stood out, posted on gates over dirt roads just off the highway. He hadn’t recognized them before. They were always just suggestions, and why pay attention to suggestions when the only real consequence was being chased back over the fence by a weary guard dog?

The sky was turning orange as he pulled off the highway at the dirt road that led up to his house. He got out, went to open the gate but found it held by a shiny padlock.

With a grunt of dismay, he walked back to his car and sat down. He fished in his pocket and pulled out his phone. He dialed the number. For a minute he sat, looking down at the screen, before he pressed send.

A familiar voice answered, he said his name, and the voice told him to wait a minute. They told him they would be right there, and then they were silent. The phone clicked and he sat.

Waiting.

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new words for trichotillomania, dermatillomania Gus Coats

have you not too

at times been these fingers,

digging up seeds [hungry] to remember

they were growing; this snake,

snipping off scales [bleeding] as if to shed

ahead of schedule; this hermit,

shrinking its shell [unwelcome] around itself

to realize its lack;

or an otherwise red bird,

sinking single feathers

into spoonfuls of ash

as if to skip to rising

without the work of dying ?

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Untitled

Zoe Guckenheimer digital photography

Escapist Daydreaming, 2:36 AM Hannah Filley

The hills here roll like wrinkles in loose bed sheets, asleep and unspectacular.

I roll over. Each night, like this one, you fall asleep first, so I read the story of our legs.

Tangled and untouched. I watch the rise and fall of your body, striated and scarred, an earth punctuated by wounds, some open, some healed. I can see the stars out the window.

Each night, like this one, you fall asleep first, so I dream with eyes open.

These nights I imagine bolting out of bed out of pajamas out the door to drive up and down basalt quilted hills until I’m running across jagged peaks collecting stars butt naked cloaked in stardust cloaked in lostlust dancing painting my body gold shaking awake a milky way until all the stars are dancing and somewhere hundreds of coyotes howl and I howl, too.

I escape here when I’m too tired to sleep next to you. I look out the window and back to the curve of your sleeping body.

There is never enough darkness out the window or in these sheets. Eastern Washington.

The hills outside. You. I think I hear something howl and I whisper It’s almost beautiful.

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dislocation Liz Campbell

i drew a map of my naked white body i sketched a smooth line between my eyes nose and lips i shaded the strands of wild coarse hair that roamed the bridge of my backbone

the bulge of my moody breasts down

to

the

dip

bellybutton but i did not know how to draw the

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of

my

flaps and folds of soft pink skin sinking between

my legs that they told me tissue paper could touch tampons could touch

he could touch but i could not touch

the

to

i did not know how to connect dots (whisper it)

my

vagina

so I left a large blank space between my hip bones

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CA M PBELL

and upper thighs and labeled it “foreign territory� because it never belonged to me anyway

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Untitled (n, s, e, w)

Fiona Bennit t camera obscura (drainpipe, paper, velum)

The Darkness in the Deep Robby Brothers

Across the world, a steady rain of silt, clay, and dead algae settles in slow motion towards the bottom of the sea. It does not do so quickly. Occasionally something larger than algae falls from the ocean overhead, a dead fish or bird which survived the gauntlet of scavengers living in the miles of water overhead.

This is rare. The open ocean is populated only sparsely with organisms, and the probability of one dying in a position to disturb any specific patch of mud is absurd.

So the bottom of the ocean is a quiet place. And a dark place. Light has a difficult time reaching too far into the depths of the ocean. Were you to descend from the surface and follow the raining microscopic organisms to their final resting place, you would quickly run out of light and face a miles-long stretch of darkness between you and journey’s end.

If a dust storm is a deluge, the rain of mud in the ocean is a sunny afternoon. The sediments collect unbearably slowly in some parts of the ocean. When your feet touch the muddy ooze on the bottom, you’ve already displaced all of the sediment that accumulated in human history, and then some. A large scoop of your hand could remove all of the sediment since the human species evolved. But even at this monumentally slow rate of deposition, you’d have to dig a hole as deep as a 20-story building is high to find the ash layer left by the dinosaur-killing asteroid.

Find the oldest piece of ocean on Earth. Find a piece of ocean as old as our planet. There is no such place, but imagine one. Imagine a quiet piece of ocean sitting undisturbed since the

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formation of the planet four and a half billion years ago. Imagine, once more, that this impossibly old piece of ocean is where you landed. That is where your footprint has removed civilization and your hand the human species. You stand at the mouth of your 20-story hole in the ocean floor and stare at the bottom, at the year the triceratops died and you wonder, how deep is this mud? So you dig. You’ve been doing it for awhile already, although there’s no way to tell exactly how long.

The human concept of time does not apply to this place, where the second hand is ticked at the millennia. There is no concept of a year here, not even a day. The darkness never changes, it doesn’t ebb and flow with the coming and going of the seasons.

A season is simply too short a time to be remembered in the mud.

Four thousand seasons fight to add a millimeter of dust to the ocean floor, the voice of any individual lost in the din of millennia.

As you reach, finally, the bottom of your new trench, a fine veneer of mud covers your back, and you find yourself at the bottom of a hole some four kilometers deep, some one thousand three hundred stories deeper than the hole you dug to see the dinosaur killer. The Grand Canyon fits in your hole twice, with enough leftover room for The Empire State Building on top.

The new abyss is deep, and dark, but no darker and no less timeless than the ocean floor four kilometers above. The second hand waits, expectantly, as the first few grains of dust settle from the ocean above.

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Missing

El Horsfall copper etching

Sipping Slipping Tipping Tripping Point Martina Pansze

I’ve been trying to unravel the backwards half-life of spilled milk.

How the puddle only grows over time.

This morning the showerhead started spewing a warm 2% and my coffee kneads clouds into its own sky.

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Self-Portrait at twenty Catherine Fisher

steam rises like its antithesis for where there’s smoke, there’s fire. it’s cool in the shade when I wake up early, with all the wants of home, none of the feeling.

I killed the first flowers of spring through forgetting.

The water had gotten moldy so I threw it out. the trees are green again and the days longer: all murder and dignity. flowers dead in dirty water vases, or dried, if you like to celebrate the rotten.

This is the crease of land before the hill.

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all bodies are beautiful

Grace Dunbar marker, pen, watercolor

Girls Girls Girls Nick Guo

That morning began with pancakes and a woman’s breasts. At the table my uncle sat across from me; Grandpa had already eaten and was reading the paper in the living room, and Uncle’s latest girlfriend stood at the stove, cooking breakfast. She was a real FOB, still sopping wet, hair damp with the musty scent of the Atlantic. Normally Uncle’d make his patented porridge á la leftovers, but the few days since she moved in we’d had Shanghainese scallion pancakes served with soymilk. I chewed slow and deliberate, studying Uncle. His eyes were vacant and his hand fumbled over his mess of a beard. I knew he was thinking about Aunt Faye; she’d always chastised him for letting his facial hair grow too long. Sometimes Uncle would stroke that straggly lintball for hours; I half expected there to be five finger-shaped holes by the time he was finished. He didn’t touch his breakfast but I ate that shit up—it was real good. Uncle’s girlfriend finally turned from the stove to smile at me, as if to say: tasty, right? I almost smiled back, too, before I realized her robe was left wide open so that her breasts hung out unceremoniously low. Quickly I looked away and returned my focus to the grease on my empty plate. “Are you a fucking virgin, sha bi?”

“What—no.” But my lower lip quivered, and for an instant, I was afraid I’d given myself away. Uncle Gu studied me intently—surely he knew, surely he could glean the truth from the bead of sweat forming on my brow, or the way the oil on my cheeks shone a faint pink under the light. He leaned in so close our noses brushed at

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the tips, but in the end he just burped, leaving me with a blast of green booze and a pounding heart.

“Na jiu hao. Thank god.” I called it green booze because my uncle once told me that beer that’s sold in green glasses is no good—bu hao, and I could tell it was nothing good from the way it reeked of the defunct refrigerators in the convenience store down the street.

He said that shades of green were weak to the sun, weak to UVrays that penetrated them the way he did women on weekdays.

There wasn’t much that Uncle Gu concerned himself with on my account—not that I was complaining, mind you. I didn’t expect him to care too much; he fed, clothed, and housed me, and that was enough. But the one thing he seemed to always have something to say about was women. “Sha bi, it’s true what they say. That women are nothing but trouble.” He lit a cigarette, held it in his left hand, and started to grope his girlfriend’s tits with his right. “But no man can live in the absence of woman. Surely we will grow tired of our hobbies and our masculinity will fade as we age. Make sure to remember what’s important.” He snuffed out his cigarette in between his thumb and index finger, and began to suck passionately on his girlfriend’s breasts. She looked at me and smiled cordially, like there wasn’t a dirty old man slobbering all over her chest. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I wasn’t going to smile back, so I ambled away. When she thought I was out of earshot, I heard her say something to Uncle Gu. “Ni gang cai dui ta jiang le shen me hua? What’d you say to him?”

“Mei shen me. Nothing,” he replied in between mouthfuls of milky flesh.

Later in biology, I couldn’t concentrate. The image of those perfect breasts was seared into my head—I was in a daze. I’d seen naked

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women before; they said to worship their feet, moaned when big black penises touched their clitorides, and seduced their sons’ friends in tight, high-riding lingerie. There were ones who did shit with animals and whips and chains, but I left them alone. The ones that came over round our place were different, though. They were real nice; they seemed more like real people. But none could compare to the tits on this woman.

I remember when girls were first introduced into my adolescent life—both gradually and spontaneously. I’d had feelings for classmates as early as the third grade. I’d sit in class and under our little wooden desks, wrap my hands together like how you’d make a two-handed gun, and aim it at girls who I thought were pretty. I know for a fact that on that first day in the third grade, the trajectory of my stubby finger gun never so much as grazed Olga Mann. I didn’t know much about her, other than the fact that she was tall and Russian, and that her mother made the same stew for every school event that nobody dared to taste.

But back to biology: on that very same day between third period biology and fourth period economics, I fucked the brains out of Missus Mann. We did it in the boys’ bathroom, in close quarters where she could see the curvature on the spine of my nose, the vicious pimple that festered left center on my forehead, plaguing my entire high school career and the eyelashes, not batting for a second, obscuring my pupils—my erratic, rapidly dilating pupils, fixated on the chest of Olga Mann. Much like everything I knew about her, most of Missus Mann’s figure was hardly worth noting.

But she had these two full, voluptuous globes, bursting out the seams of her mother’s old cardigan; its little button threatened to pop if her bosom trembled. She leaned down, like she was going to kiss me; I ducked underneath her bushy upper lip—Mannstache, they called her, and buried my face in her cleavage, reaching my hand underneath the back of her shirt to try and free her bust. I

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could’ve just left it at that too, could’ve left her in the third stall from the left of the entrance to the Pastenton High boys’ bathroom breathing in the fumes of unflushed urinals with her brassiere half unhooked and a faint puddle growing on her plaid miniskirt. After all, I’d gotten what I came for. But I figured this might be her only chance at getting laid, so I did the deed, reluctantly. It was the least I could do after taking advantage of those breasts. I thought it was pretty cool of me, that I’d done that for her, and it brought a smile to my face as I wiped the blood off of my boxer briefs.

When I walked home from school that day I kicked a little pebble along with every step I took—usually when I did this it’d take all sorts of twists and turns. But that day my pebble was uncharacteristically obedient. It rolled along like maybe it wasn’t just any old stone I’d come across but instead perhaps it’d endured years and years of erosion and weathering for this very purpose. I stepped into the apartment feeling like a cool million bucks. Uncle Gu was still sitting at the table, exactly where I’d left him. I walked to the fridge to pour myself a glass of milk, excited to report my conquest. But when I turned to him his face was obscured by a heavy hand; his other hand poked through his beard. The way he was angled, his wrinkly elbow almost seemed to sink into the marble countertop. His woman was beside him, comforting him.

She put her hands on his shoulders and rested her head on his and asked him if he wanted a massage. Uncle just shriveled up even smaller, like a sultry little date under the pulsating fieriness of the Great Sun. The date’s majestic maroon would burn to an understated umber, its withered skin caving in and gradually crumbling into a fine powder atop a little pit. The woman wrapped her arms around his beer belly tenderly, pressing her body into his.

I snapped—I’ll admit it, the sight of those perfectly formed breasts suffocated by my uncle’s cowering spine struck a nerve.

I slammed my glass on the table—and I mean slam; a horribly

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shrill crack resounded through the room and my milk and a dozen shards of glass ricocheted through the air, clattering to the tiles below. My uncle didn’t move, ever the immovable statue—a milkdrenched one at that. Maybe because I was just so fucking furious in that moment or maybe it’s just for added effect but I remember fantasizing about wringing that sullen motherfucker’s neck like a beach towel, dipping it in water, and whipping his own bare hide with that shit. Make him pay—pay for what? I don’t know, for hiding behind that facade of masculinity and then coming out here with that weak pussyshit? For lecturing me with all these Chinese proverbs and then pulling a stunt like this? How could he consent to this woman consoling him about his late wife; this woman who, relative to Aunt Faye, was a complete stranger? It was disgustingly pathetic, and I let him know it.

I guess I never explained why I lived with my uncle; there was a surprising lack of tragedy involved, considering the circumstances.

My parents lived overseas because of their jobs but didn’t want to uproot my education, so they sent me to live with my dad’s brother who lived just a bus ride across the Hudson. For awhile my grandpa, Uncle Gu’s dad, lived with us too, but he passed away from old age. My grandpa died asking to see me. I didn’t find this out until nearly ten years after his death. Or maybe I just never wanted to think about it. Grandpa lived in Queens, New York. My parents and I used to live across the river in a small town called River Vale, New Jersey. Grandpa used to hop on the train and come visit all the time. A year before I moved in with Uncle Gu, we moved to another house—we still lived across the river, but the small town was called Woodcliff Lake. After we moved, Grandpa didn’t come over anymore. But it wasn’t for a lack of trying—he just couldn’t figure out how the tracks were aligned, or when the trains moved across them; it was poetic, even.

When Grandpa died, Dad came home and went straight to the

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sun room, this small room in the house with green marbled tiles and a clear glass ceiling. He sat in this wrinkled beige recliner that sagged so low your butt would touch the ground when you leaned back. He took his glasses off and pressed his hand to his brow and a bunch of creases formed in the general forehead region. It was the first time I saw my dad cry. You could hear the sound of vegetables being stir-fried from the kitchen, an obnoxious crackling of oils. I wanted to shout at the vegetables to please shut the fuck up, but our nanny who cooked for us was paid by the hour.

I remember not long after my grandpa died, I had a dream about his will. He left me this tiny puppy. It’s funny because at the time I loved that dream puppy so much. It was a miniature schnauzer.

In my dream, my uncle came into my room to check on me and I quickly stuffed it in a drawer—I didn’t want anyone to find out about that dream dog. Grandpa had left it to me, after all. After this, the dream goes a little fuzzy. I opened the drawer a few weeks later looking for something, and my dream dog was dead. Its eyes were still wide open, like maybe if I just let it sit it’d start barking or something. I woke up after that.

Don’t read into it too much, because if you do and make it some metaphor then maybe you’ll get involved too. Hell, I have no clue what it means except for I just forgot that darned dog. I didn’t forget Grandpa—I knew he was in the hospital.

In a way, my grandpa dying was the biggest thing to happen to me. The death of a man I pretend to know is more than the sum of everything I haven’t done. For a long time after he died I would use my 11:11 wishes on him coming back to us—before my hormones started raging and my dick started thinking for my brain. I felt bad that potential girlfriends meant more to me than Grandpa, but I found ways to rationalize my decisions. Grandpa only spoke Shanghainese, a dying dialect. He didn’t speak English, or even

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Mandarin all that well. What if he came back and I wasn’t able to convey anything I wanted to say to him?

But maybe more than that, there’s something to making realistic wishes. It’s paradoxical, in a sense, because wishes are presented as these fantastical, otherwise inconceivable things that only some cosmic interference could hope to actualize. To me, though, wishes should be attainable above all. There’s nothing worse than that crushing defeat of failing to achieve something you knew was impossible all along. It might seem counterintuitive because, well, why would you feel bad about not doing something that nobody could? But the thing is, by wishing it, you subconsciously convince yourself that maybe if you just focus real hard it could really happen. And it doesn’t. For me at least, using my wishes on girls instead of on the cold, unfeeling corpse of my gramps was a relief.

So now we’re post-Grandpa. My wishes weren’t for naught; I was no Casanova but there was no shortage of females in my life. My first real relationship came just after The Unmentionable, Olga, in sophomore year of high school. Two days after Olga, Sadie and I shared our first kiss. I couldn’t tell you what it was like except that it was soggy and lumbering, an act of overlapping limbs and discombobulated emotion. Like two marionettes, one with a crotch in the shape of a V, and the other with an unassuming bulge, in the hands of an amateur puppeteer who, despite his best efforts, was unable to get the marionettes to move to the right places at the right times. It didn’t matter though, we were lonely and desperate, and what’s more, we were unapologetic about said loneliness and desperation. We filled each others holes until we didn’t fit anymore—either the holes got too small or we were too big to stuff in. (Figuratively, of course.)

Years after that I had this thing with this chick Dolly DeJesus, properly pronounced day-hay-soos (best when hollered down an

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empty stairwell, or barked through the warden’s bushy ‘stache at the county prison.) We met through my best friend and dormmate Dewey, who used to schedule our dealings for the weekends so that our ganja footprint would be near invisible. His mantra was to get the plastic baggie, smoke that shit up like a flank of salmon on an industrial barbecue grill, and immediately dispose of the waste. Eat it if you have to, just don’t get caught. Dewey was nothing if not careful.

I wasn’t picky about things like that, but I learned to embrace a similar weekend philosophy for different reasons. I developed a tendency to ask Dolly out on dates after our exchanges, a sacred ritual that could never not be uncomfortable but still managed to put my mind at ease (chemical or natural?). She’d ask me where we’d be going, and I’d tell her I hadn’t a clue, and that I’d let her know when we got there, wherever there was. She seemed like the sort of broad who’d be into that sort of shit. She’d tell me she wasn’t scared, but I’d hold her close anyways. Dolly was burlesque, a caricature of every troubled film heroine you could recall. She dealt dope not because she needed the money but just because; she spoke crudely but with a beautiful tongue, and often lashed out at the world. I started smoking for her; I thought it was romantic. Dolly made me try because maybe in some ways (most ways) I always felt inferior, but boy, every time I made her smile, it was like falling in love all over again. She may’ve dealt in cancer sticks but her teeth were pearly white. We broke up when she got arrested for possession of narcotics for the fourth time and called her bodybuilder of an ex-boyfriend, Sergio, to come get her instead of me. I remember I drove down to the station where they were holding her, fist clenched on the gearshift the entire time so that the whites of my knuckles began to bleed through the fleshy pink; it wasn’t until I got there that I learned how hard it was to look intimidating slamming the door to a lime green 2004 Prius. Sergio roughed me up a bit, but after Dolly pleaded with him he let me go,

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my body intact but my pride scarred. Having to climb back into that shitty car without Dolly or even a black eye to cuss about was humiliating. I wished he’d have had the courtesy to at least swing at me a couple of times, give me something to get angry about.

Instead I rode back with the butt warmer on and the air-con angled just right so that the breeze hit but didn’t dry out the tears forming in my eyes.

So why go on about these girls who are no longer a part of my life?

Because at any given time they were my life. Girls will make your stomach churn. They will grab you by the heart—the real, physical entity, not the oversaturated red clip-art with a strip of white gloss running down its side--and tug like they’re scraping for the last trickle of water at the bottom of a bottomless well. Sooner or later your insides will come tumbling out the mouth, a tangled mess of bloody, raggedy knots, and you will be spitting rubies and you will be sorry you ever loved. I think Uncle Gu would tell you the same; you take advantage of them, they take advantage of you—it’s a vicious give and take.

I once had aspirations of becoming a novelist. I got pretty close to finishing my first book, even; it was this story about the end of the world. This guy is in bed with a girl for the first time in his virgin life; she’s wasted of course, but shit, it still counts. Just as they’re getting naked the first signs of their impending doom come and this chick just hightails it. Straight down the fire escape like, fuck, she can risk a 20-foot fall so long as she doesn’t have to do the nasty with this guy. He doesn’t give up though, goes around looking for prostitution rings and all sorts of whorehouses but what do you know, whores don’t do that shit because it’s fun, it’s to sustain their livelihood, dipshit, and so of fucking course they’d be out doing other shit when the world’s about to end. I would’ve finished it too, had it all planned out. He’d find himself a hunny in the end (no pun intended,) in one of those brothels just as he’s

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about to give up and so yeah, maybe he can finally relieve himself of a serious case of blue balls, but turns out the universe has other plans. She’s a lonely broad with nowhere to call home and no one to call family, and is just looking for someone to talk to as everything comes to a close. They eventually form a meaningful friendship but dude never does wind up getting his dick wet, dying a virgin as the cosmoses converge and collide and collapse—but a happy virgin with a friend, at least.

Most of the time, I start new stories not because I’m struck with inspiration, but because the ones I’ve already started get messy and cluttered and revising them is like being engulfed in a whirlpool of my own filth. Shirtless in my boxer briefs, I drape a heavy quilt over my knobbly knees and hammer away at the keys. I like writing without clothes because it feels good, but I hate that my back is so small. I’m scared that someone will look at my body and see creases on my belly where other guys have abs, flatness on my chest where other guys have defined valleys, but most of all I fear the moment when I’m hunched over, confiding my thoughts in my MacBook and someone comes in and sees my bare back.

My tiny, bare, back. I’m lost because I thought I knew who I was and who I wanted to be, but now I’m not so sure anymore. When my high school friends call I tell them I’ve gone straight edge but really I just don’t like getting high enough to justify the disgusting aftertaste of marijuana. It’s all about give and take, priorities.

Instance One: I don’t want people to judge my masculinity based off of my bare body, but being shirtless feels good so I do it anyways.

Instance Two: I want to write this story, but why stress it when I can sit just the same, butt naked on my bed and jerk off to voluptuous women?

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Flashback to the summer before freshman year of college. I’m lying face up on the rafters of Dewey’s house, back scraping up against asphalt shingles, having a rather one-sided staring match with the stars and the moon. The cherry pit in my stomach turns over, a slow, deliberate churn that interferes with my breathing. It’s an unsettling churning, like how still swamp water just sits there, but it’s sitting there with this gooey wad of membrane-looking jello that makes uneven ripples that get bigger and bigger until they fill the place.

“So how does it feel to’ve graduated?”

“What are you talking about? We did it together, didn’t we?”

“Yeah, it’s just—I wonder if the same things going through my head are going through yours. Or anyone’s, for that matter. I don’t know that I’m ready. Or that I’ll ever be—that’s the kicker. Like yeah, I got a year to just dick around and all but I mean I don’t see myself having changed all that much a year from now.”

“Tell me about it. I’m fucking jealous, though. You, hiking around with all the freedom in the world, me, cooped up with a stack of books in the library. Tell you the truth, I’m not ready either.

Sometimes I think I might be the one taking the easy way out, just because I want to stick to the conventional path.”

“I know. Doesn’t mean running away is the right answer, either.”

“Mmf.” I do a quarter roll onto my back, but slow down before putting all my weight on my spine. “Say something interesting.”

Dewey has to think a little before he says, “Grown-ups are weird

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because sometimes they say how are you and you have to say you’re good even if you’re not.”

“Fuck man, you’re right. That’s fucked up. Hey listen—I really liked the girl who sold us that weed yesterday. She was cute.”

“Right? Bitch was banging, dude. Oh hey look man, it’s cool, you got dibs.”

I stretch back, meaning to rest my head on my wrists (the roof is an unforgiving surface,) scratching my hand on a dislodged shingle in the process. I arch my arm back and shut an eye to gauge the distance, squinting into a far off hunk of rock. “Dewey, you think if I throw as hard I can I could reach the moon?”

“I don’t see why not.”

I fling the shingle and it goes hurtling through the air on a perfect crash-course towards the moon. Once it enters the lunar silhouette it appears to spin infinitely, and for a minute, I’m convinced it’s really got a shot: BOY SHATTERS MOON UNIDENTIFIED ROOFTOP FRAGMENT ENTERS SPACE FROM EARTH TO MOON IN 60 SECONDS The shingle disappears into the darkness not long after, and the only proof that it ever existed is the hollow echo of it skidding down the neighbors’ driveway.

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13 Ways to Groom a Woman Emma Graham pen

deep fried Liz Campbell

her withered hand reaches into a tired Ziploc bag, methodical fingers stretched around salty clumps of flour and pale lime green seed pods a pesky vegetable, really she muses for the thousandth time recalling that steamy fourth of july of ‘49 when she set the stubborn stove ablaze with her daydreams of his hand slipping beneath the hem of her patriotic pinstriped skirt mother took one look at the blackened affair and burst out into tears at the shame of birthing a daughter who burned instead of simmered louisiana short okra and two pounds of lard

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into glistening golden chunks, perfectly battered, like so, served up hot and ready for his greasy fingers that curled up around the edges of the Gazette but no longer curled up inside her

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the night breeze Gus Coats

I shook the hands of many flowers some were dewy eyed and the night blooming jasmine winked at me!

I curled up in a birds nest over and over I bounced off a very sturdy window I twirled a vine and then it unwound and wow, the night blooming jasmine is very good at winking I lifted a bug far away from here I slapped a bird and I rubbed the shoulders of the bridge I rocked a cradle and then a boat and later a different boat that had a cradle in it I rubbed my back against a house by the woods I was tickled with music and I laughed it across the water I was split by so many breaths I was a kind of garlic-pressed I was a kind of god but there was still so much of me left

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From the Road Maia Watkin s film photography

DNR / No Code Henry Carges

When dead Hyacinths line your limbs And shaking, you hobble across The wide-dark spaces that have crept in your soul, Hoping to find the source of loss— And when you discover that for the last time your mouth Is dry, raked with cracked and jagged breath That flows, falls past your teeth and heaves itself out, Tasting Zephyrus’ farewell, these winds of death— And when your body falls and cracks the floor Open wide, making sure the earth has room For another grave to give rest to this host Of trembling bodies; flowers past bloom— When you know these things have happened Then rest. Don’t try to open your eyes. Please Sink gently, quickly toward the dying light, And I’ll stay.

Hoping new winds might still set flowers trembling.

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Skull Bloom Mercer Hanau digital scan

On the moraine, on memory Paige Dempsey

i After the heartsized rock found rest in the side of the hill, sometimes flowers grew beside it, a fragile color next to a buried, sturdy color.

And sometimes hands steady or serious or nervous, small guessing and questioning hands would lift it and wonder. ii Before the little things leaped away from my feet in the short grass like butterflies and bugs unnamed, the lichen sat still.

Lichen which grows slowly Which patterns widely, repeating.

And in the distance something roared— the wind or the engines on the road.

Perhaps I had forgotten the difference.

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iii Here there is moss, a dark black kind of green.

And it mounds across a rock like a piece of coral I learned in grade school, brain like, rope like, as if there was all the knowledge of the world wrapped up at the bottom of the ocean floor or just here, draped across rocks witnessed by the sun.

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The Sky Last Year Mar tina Pan sze digital collage

Brief Interludes from Purgatory Emma Philipps

NUMBERS

The Marcus Whitman Hotel has three entrances into the lobby. Inside, there are 16 armchairs. The 16 armchairs are partitioned into three sections, each section with an identical glass coffee table at the center and a chandelier hanging above. There are four potted plants, two identical oriental rugs, four mirrors, a tasting room, a coffee shop, and an extra lobby equipped with four high-backed arm chairs, a fireplace and a slightly out-of-place Japanese folding chair.

ARCHES

A woman strides through the lobby, heels clicking on the floor. Travis–the man working at the front desk–calls to her.

His voice carries through the room the way men’s voices often do, whether or not they know the imposing bravado of their utterings.

“Hello Sheila! Remind me, are you a bride or a model today?”

She musters a polite laugh, the way most women do when they’re trying to feign friendliness. Travis inadvertently tells me his life story while he talks to Sheila, his questions and replies audible while hers are not. He’s on day two of his diet. He has not had any soda or sweets today. This morning he walked for 40 minutes on the treadmill. It is very hard.

COLUMNS

I can’t tell if they’re Ionic, Victorian, or Neo-Classical.

According to the scope of my undergraduate degree I’m supposed

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to know these things. I briefly consider my failure as an art historian.

CEILING

I stare at the ceiling, irritated by my inability to use complicated jargon to describe the details of this room. I make a list of adjectives: baroque, Roman, gaudy, frilly, neoclassical, rococo, Parisian, Victorian, drab, brown, visually delectable, frivolous, loud, cool, fascinating, colonial, neo-colonial, nice.

I write a sentence in my notes: the ceiling is delicately carved with floral reliefs, not unlike the columns, which also have leafy decorations at their heads and feet that touch the floor and ceiling. I half expect to smell bullshit rising off the page.

SOUND

This morning I forgot to take my ADHD medication, and whether you think ADHD is a real or not, my brain is tethered and pulled in three directions of sound. From behind a shut door off of the foyer, a muffled loop of clapping feet pounds as a woman croons “no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.” It reminds me of a KT Tunstall song that dominated the radio when I was in middle school, a song that frequently lodges itself in the part of the mind with hell’s jukebox, repeating itself over and over again.

From behind me I hear the faint sound of piano. The amiable chords bring me back to the country club brunches my family would attend on the rare Sundays we succumbed to Catholic guilt. I’m flooded with the memory of moving through the buffet line, opening silver trays of oily fried chicken next to fried okra, small pieces of salmon in cream sauce covered in dill and lemon slices, soggy squash and zucchini steaming in hot water, and cold prime rib shinning under a heat lamp.

Then of course there’s the sound of Travis, whose conversations are banal and delicious like a bag of stale Cheetos. I can’t resist the urge to listen every time his voice reaches my ears.

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B R I E F I N T E R L U D E S F RO M P U RG AT O RY

Now Travis is talking to a man, saying he recognizes him, but from where? Where did the man say he worked again? Oh right!

You make drones! How cool! says Travis.

A LANDMARK HOTEL

Down main street, past the wineries, the art galleries, the bicycle shop, the quirky restaurants, the clothing retailers, and the coffee shops, there’s a monument to the hotel’s namesake Marcus Whitman. With a hearty look on his face and his chest puffed forward, he holds a bible and looks out into the distance, a coonskin cap atop his bronze head. Engraved on the pedestal it says “MY PLANS REQUIRE TIME AND DISTANCE.”

In 1836 Marcus Whitman and his wife Narcissa established a Presbyterian Mission in Waiilatpu, eight miles away from the Marcus Whitman Hotel and ten miles from Whitman College (which is also named after Marcus Whitman, not after Walt Whitman as I’d initially thought). In 1847, the Whitmans and nine other white settlers were hacked to death by five Cayuse warriors. It would be immortalized as the Whitman Massacre.

WITH A LEGENDARY PAST

When the Whitmans came to Walla Walla, they brought Christianity and the measles. The natives’ warriors were dying, their children were dying, their shamans were dying, their elders were dying–and with their elders, their oral histories.

Consequently, The Cayuse believed the new settlers were cursed.

The Whitman Massacre would ignite the Cayuse War, a war the indigenous peoples of the plains eventually lost. The Cayuse warriors were swiftly executed, and in one fell swoop, the Walla Walla, the Umatilla and the Cayuse tribes were relocated to a four-million-acre reservation in eastern Oregon in 1855. Later, the treaty was revised and the reservation was reduced to 95,000 acres. In a second treaty, it was reduced to 29,000 square miles.

Land was seized, hundreds-of-years-old traditions were ruptured

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and destroyed, and the natives were hidden away, erased from Walla Walla. Waiilatpu (which meant place of the people of the rye grass) is now called the Whitman Mission National Historic Site.

AT THE HEART OF WALLA WALLA

Two mirrors on the wall announce MARCUS WHITMAN with dignified lettering on either side of the archway.

Four women pass beneath the arch, past the mirrors, roller bags grinding on the floor. One of them points at a mahogany cabinet full of porcelain tea sets with gold trim and says to her friend in a bad British rasp, “want a spot o’tea?” “LOL,” her friend replies.

She takes a breathy sigh and says, “Oh my god this place is sooo nice.”

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Waiting for my therapist Ione Fuller ton digital photography

Untitled

Jan ssie Zhu digital photography

On the Lips Lindsey Brodeck

The kitchen hums and tiny ants on the faded yellow countertop dance, saved once again from the single digit temperatures. I stir in plopped frozen blueberries that bleed and blend into the pancake batter. The two colors coexist in lazy swirls.

I stare out the dirt-smudged window into a parallel world ice cold and clean. I am happy…

One of his former housemates plays familiar music in the other room. Maybe it’s an honest mistake. The insidious melody slithers across the grimy cracked floorboards and snakes over my chipped toenails, traveling up and tightening until I’m suffocating more than I ever did from the cigarette smoke.

The first gob of batter poured becomes a fat, ugly disc. Burnt on the outside and light blue ooze in the middle. There are no eggs in it, but you can get e. coli from raw flour nowadays.

I think they are asking me if I’m okay so I look up from the smoking pan and say “Oh it’s just the song.” Hot tears threaten to spring. I close my eyes but what lies inside cannot be so easily escaped.

Sticky steps take me across the crowded, pounding dance floor. This is not my scene and I see my boyfriend who dumped me four hours ago making out sloppily with some slender female frame in a tight black dress. Josh takes one look at my expression and understands. His warm brown eyes never let me go until we are next to each other. We push through the doors and run hand in hand.

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B RO D E C K

The town is lifeless except for the two of us. It is ten pounds lighter out here. He asks if I’m okay and I don’t have to lie because I am. We keep running and I yell and laugh and twist my silver choker so the heart rests squarely in the little indentation between my clavicles. There’s a statue next to the Starbucks of a dog.

The whole universe explodes on his fur. On his nose balances a brick, what looks like a moldy block of cheese, and a silver apple emanating a low glow in the night that matches my illuminated necklace.

I stop and climb on and stretch my arms long and wide. The flash of his camera makes his smile a blinding white.

Some people are made of different stuff than the rest of us.

Josh was one of those people.

We walk slowly back to campus. His hand exudes only the lightest pressure on the small of my back. He notices a bench and sits down. I smooth the back of my blue lace fit and flare and join him, kicking off my strappy heels.

The cold slatted metal leaves red lines on my bare legs and he smokes a cigarette I wish was his last. I tell myself it is so much better than the other things he does but still, I am scared.

“Have you ever listened to Frankie Cosmos?” Josh always had better taste in music than me.

He hits play on his phone. Her voice is clearer than the moonlit pond and I shiver from the haunting simplicity seeping into me. Josh just thinks I’m chilly. He takes off his blazer and places it delicately on my shoulder, like I’m a house of cards about to blow away.

I was only nineteen then so he walks me back to my all-girl dorm and our flushed faces glow in the lamplight.

The smell of blackened pancake jolts me back into the present.

I scrape off the burnt. I fill up the pan to soak. The point of my silver heart digs hard into the skin as I press the cold metal deeper and deeper.

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alpine

Prachi Patel collage

LaCray Chris Meabebasterretxea

There are two things we cannot live without: Water and air.

Everything else is extra, everything else is what we can love And these things let us love.

LaCroix lets us love.

LaCroix is the union of the sky and the sea And when the bubbles pop over your tongue, Those are the stars reflecting off midnight water.

It sparkles like hope.

It is clearer than the motivations behind campaign donations, It has more flavor than flav, more natural than all, it is better than the first time and it is better than the time you actually figured out what you were doing.

This water, which is the greatest thing to come out of La Crosse Wisconsin ever since it gave the world Walter Ristow, who everyone knows was the greatest map librarian the Library of Congress has ever seen, is delicious.

It is the sea because it is the giver of life.

It is the sky because damn if it isn’t close to heaven.

Also fuck Perrier, fuck San Pelligrino, and fuck sparkling Aquafina I mean what even is that.

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Colorful Feeling 2 Isabelle Fenne digital art

Directions the spine of a cactus can point Amanda Champion

up down east west ground sky horizon telephone pole mountain peak future lovers sand a watch lying on an off-white sheet north pole child breakfast at the kitchen table juniper up down east west empire state building your mother on the phone with your father pacific up down east west when he fell from the tree and broke his ankle Andromeda mercury mercury

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gilbert street his path from home to 5th grade she sitting at empty table wondering when they will come home up down east west

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Not All Wounds Heal Maddie Bailey found bark, thread

Deadly Sins Catherine Fisher

A glance at lips to list and lilt.

The ache when a day’s gone by without a single curl.

The end of your curl like each hair lilts off from the others by twist and turn, strand by strand. In some sad marvel every curl ends.

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Ice Bath

Keelan Booth digital photography

Short Stories About Ex Boyfriends Jillian Beatrice Briglia

I. You smoke too much weed but your laugh fills a room. We watch people argue at the grocery store and we chase each other to the airport and sit in movie theaters to kiss and drink from wine glasses. We copy them. Your stomach is soft and one time we bake an apple pie when your parents aren’t home. In photographs of us I always look sad but for the life of me can’t remember why.

III. Under the full moon you lick the mango juice off my fingers.

One sweet slick finger disappears behind your lips like a stick greedily sucked into mud. One finger, two fingers, three fingers, one sweet slick hand inside your mouth. To your credit you don’t look away. You watch your own popsicle melt into a mango pool and drip like honey between the slits of the deck. You watch the goosebumps spread across my shoulders. You watch the parallelograms of light across my floor. You watch my hair tremble like snakes on the pillow. You watch me until I look away. It takes me until the end of the summer to recognize you only watch me during the night.

II. We are only listening to the second symphony when you turn your head to point out your friend, the third cellist from the left, and we are close enough that I can trace the six creases travelling from the corners of your eyes towards your hairline. Writing this several years later I realize they looked like the tributaries of raindrops shivering down the windows of a car—careless and familiar. You turn your head away and we watch the orchestra

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BR IGLI A

again but I am not watching the orchestra again, I am wondering what the creases around your eyes remind me of.

Out in the cold and quiet we split a PopTart.

You mention you are late for a phone call with your girlfriend.

“I’ll see you later,” you say.

“Later,” I echo.

VII. I find myself making more and more lists these days. Lists like Ten Possible Scenes From My Future or How To Forget the Things You Don’t Want to Forget. Lists with items like rotting pears in the trees, twilight badminton, crushed Cheerios, snow down the neck, lie to someone you love every day, leave your journal in a library, drink more sparkling water.

V. I suddenly remember what to do with my hands. I remove the hot slice of toast from my plate and put it in the toaster. It turns white and spongy and I put it underneath the end slice in the bag.

I unremember five years ago. You return to Chicago. Your parents see each other for the first time and erase their names from the divorce papers. Their skin smoothens like clay at a potter’s wheel and they discover the urge to dance. Your facial hair pulls back into your jaw from clumps in the sink. Raindrops climb towards the sky on silver threads as we drive backwards from the apartment. I unlearn the temperature of your body when you sleep. You move back home. I break two bones. Then one. Then none. The water droplets fall back into the deep end as we fly feet first towards the diving board. We scrape the sunscreen off of each other’s backs. We have never kissed. Your friends yank you away from my side in church. They draw you into the eye of their hurricane, unwhisper the words in your ear. We are eighteen. I look away from where you are playing the piano. I leave the room.

I unhear the notes falling from the sky.

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Runaway Hippie

Antonio T har p digital photography

Ode to the Moon from the Mantis & Ode to the Mantis from the Moon Grace Little

Ode to the Moon, from the Mantis Lovely lovely lovely nightbrain, wide eye of the darkness. Pulse upon pulse, you grow with dusk, you draw your wake across the sky, water skimmer. I rest and lust after fullness.

When you hollow, simple sliver, the grass subsumes me. I make love cower beneath your roundness and let the glimmer surround the greenness of my limbs. I long for a life like yours with its stark lack: lovers, longing, sight. Holy fist, holy orb, vast argument of reduction against rising like a fat fresh loaf, stay your migrant pace tonight—let me rest a little longer, unattended, hungry.

Ode to the Mantis, from the Moon O mockery of seismic scale and homage to viridity, O wild and infinitesimal sight, my onliest goddess! We are the same lonely, aren’t we wearing the same luminescence, holding the same no one and

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nothing and feeling that like a cold magic? I wane, I wail at this betweenness. But you can bathe in me, in your waiting, and I will watch your stillness, in miniature, your five eyes.

Your arms! I long for them— not to be held, but for my own, for tools to hold back love in all its forms.

But my light is unstoppable.

I grow and with each night, you’re mine.

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Poking Holes In The Firmament Er ic Ranne stad acrylic on wood, french paper, bolted plexi glass

Self-portrait

Natalie Quinn Godf rey collage

Morning Cait Mazzoleni

Night’s white moon leftovers are still up As Dawn’s pink fingers stretch out cold.

Last night’s news still biting and fresh.

Rays cut through navy blue with light.

Her eyes are sinking, melting down, Diagnosed to lose the fight to gravity.

Lazy clouds float, suspended by gravity.

Blushing as quickly as a new sun rises up.

She remembers, fears, and swallows it down.

A meadowlark’s cry pierces the silent cold.

On last night’s frost falls the loving light Melting away a silver sparkling fresh.

Can even a failing body start fresh?

She stands, stretches, and beats gravity.

But her skin is pale green in the light.

Her stomach knocks at the door and up The stairs a heart taps irregular and cold.

Gold on the hills. A vulture diving down.

The walls and ceiling choke her out and down The back steps. She runs as the brisk fresh Air rubs on her cheeks. A shiver. She stops cold.

Her face to the sun, chin pushes on gravity.

Dew in her clothes makes her skin pucker up.

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Convinced again that she loves the sun’s light.

Life is real. So is the end with tunnel and light.

A shell of a human slowly shutting down.

A hairless body is cold even when warmed up.

Her insides are rotten, but nature is still fresh.

She believes, hop, skip, she can harness gravity.

Disease picked her. She picks flowers, stems cold.

The edge of life is warm blood, hands cold.

The edge of the sky is a happy blue light.

She would fall into it if not for gravity.

She looks at her feet which sink down, down, Down in brown soil, thawed and fresh.

And she looks at her spirit rising up, up, up.

She forgets gravity and starts to walk down To the old cold pond that clings to a light Blanket of fog. She will touch everything fresh.

Who knows the next time she will wake up.

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Burial of a Flag

Taylor Penner-Ash cement and American flag

Mourning Ritual Tara Emerald McCulloch

Lights up on two lovers, ELEANOR and VIOLET, in the kitchen. They are both dressed in black, which contrasts with the ochre hues of the kitchen. ELEANOR cooks scrambled eggs on the stove. VIOLET sits on the linoleum floor and exhales a visible breath of steam.

I can see my breath.

VIOLET

ELEANOR You really should put on a sweater.

VIOLET Well I really shouldn’t be able to see my breath inside.

ELEANOR Well, we need to save money.

My throat hurts.

VIOLET

ELEANOR Then drink some of that damn herbal tea you’re always raving about. It’ll help with the cold too.

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VIOLET I think my hands are turning purple. Are my hands turning purple?

ELEANOR examines VIOLET’S purple hands.

ELEANOR Rub them together like this, see?

VIOLET rubs her hands together. ELEANOR takes off her own sweater and drapes it over VIOLET’S shoulders.

VIOLET shrugs off the sweater.

You don’t have to do that.

Do what?

VIOLET ELEANOR

VIOLET Take care of me like that. I’m not a child.

ELEANOR laughs.

ELEANOR You make it really difficult to love you— impossible, even. You know that, right?

VIOLET rises, fills the tea kettle with water, and sets the tea kettle on the stove. A silence weighs over them as ELEANOR cooks her eggs, and VIOLET waits for the water to boil.

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MCCU LLOCH

VIOLET I’m going into town tomorrow to buy some more eggs. And ketchup. Scrambled eggs taste like shit without ketchup.

ELEANOR picks up her sweater from the floor and gently holds it out to VIOLET—an offering. VIOLET accepts and dons the sweater.

Thanks.

Yeah, of course.

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ELEANOR

The tea kettle begins to whistle as the water boils. Neither VIOLET nor ELEANOR move the kettle. The whistle intensifies in volume and tone as lights fade over VIOLET and ELEANOR in the kitchen.

Fisherman’s Companion

Trav i s Gallatin digital photography

Pinecones Helena Platt

In second grade, I was told The story of pinecones.

Waxy, gnarly, pregnant lumps Ripe with children that cannot be freed Without fire to lick them open, And eat everything else around.

I learned what grows when the rest is gone.

I fear the flames But I remember pinecones.

On November 7, 2015, the world did not end.

I didn’t think it would But afterwards, I was a bit surprised.

Red spilled through the so many states And smoke stung my watering eyes.

I realized how many would rather watch others burn Than build homes with the kindling.

When ash catches in your lungs with every short, sharp breath Remember pinecones.

On November 7, 2015, my mother told me: “I apologize, poor child of mine For this strange world I put you into.

I used to apologize to you when you were a baby.”

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I wanted to tell her not to be sorry But combustion was building in my chest, Resin was dripping from my eyes.

When the world didn’t end, I laid in bed I remembered pinecones.

One day, I will take my daughter To the tired town I grew up in.

I will lead her through the woods To where saplings tremble around our knees, Where young green bends soft beneath our feet And char-blackened trees stretch to the gray sky, Like the remnants of some great pyre.

I will remember pinecones.

I will not be sorry.

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Bears

Nina Moore ink and watercolor

There are swifts here too Allie Donahue

Yesterday, I drove through this city to watch the orange evening dissolve to white.

Nobody walks on the sidewalks here.

Just ahead, a stoplight blinks red and I bite a fleck of skin off my lip, check the rearview mirror, feel the fatness of my tongue.

And then I look up: exploding from the chimney like silk black stains of memory on the whitened sky— There are swifts here too.

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Packed

Sally Paul pencil

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Contributors Alex Lupton

Celia Langford

Allie Donahue

Chris Meabebasterretxea

Amanda Champion

Claire McHale

Annie Want

El Horsfall

Antonio Tharp

Emma Graham

Cait Mazzoleni

Emma Philipps

Catherine Fisher

Eric Rannestad

2020 Undeclared cat cuddling at midnight

2016 Rhetoric Studies Plush

2019 Undeclared warm sand

2017 Politics A well-cooked potato

2019 Art, Sociology A burrito

2019 Environmental Studies-Geology No socks

2018 English, Race and Ethnic Studies smooth, soft

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2019 Asian and Middle Eastern Studies beach glass

2018 History Both of us, breathing

2020 Undeclared Soft blankets

2018 Art Female vocalists

2017 English A bowl of soup

2017 Art History and Visual Culture Studies Weiner dog kisses

2018 Art, Economics cuppa moon bean stew

Fiona Bennitt

Helena Platt

Grace Dunbar

Henry Carges

Grace Little

Ione Fullerton

Gus Coats

Isabelle Fenne

Haley Forrester

Jack Swain Eric Underwood Andy Bainton

2017 Geology Sourdough pancakes after rain

2019 Art, Sociology Bed

2017 English Flannel sheets, grilled cheese

2017 Politics Limber heart

2017 Art, Theatre Hot tea, firm cuddles

Hannah Filley

2019 English JalapeĂąo potato chips

Heather Hamilton

2018 Environmental Humanities Water

2019 Rhetoric Studies Fur, strings, fingernails

2017 English Snuggly slugs

2017 Politics Holding hands

2019 Biology Cuddly Animals

2016, 2017 Art, Philosophy; Astrophysics; Religion Creative companions

Janssie Zhu

2019 Sociology Soft wool, hand-made paper

Jillian Beatrice Briglia 2019 Film & Media Studies Books

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Keelan Booth

Maia Watkins

Kirk Corwin

Martina Pansze

Laurel Field

Meghan Feldman

Lily Monsey

Mercer Hanau

Lindsey Brodeck

Natalie Quinn Godfrey

Liz Campbell

Nick Guo

Maddie Bailey

Nick Sekits

2017 Art, Film & Media Studies Soft blanket smooth skin

2019 Undeclared Warmth in cold

2017 Biology Melted cheese

2017 Anthropology Cradling a baby

2018 Enironmental Studies-Biology Fresh tournagrip and sweat

2018 Spanish Summer toes in chacos

2017 Art Snuggle puddle

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2017 Art, Spanish PWR BTTM while embroidering

2018 Film & Media Studies Highway 550

2018 Physics, Astronomy Warm and fluffy

2018 Art Fingers in dry lentils

2018 Rhetoric Studies Sunday morning sweatpants

2020 Undeclared Chocolate milk and eggs

2020 Art, Biology Calloused fingers

Nina Moore

Samarah Uribe MĂŠndez

Owen Crabtree

Tara Emerald McCulloch

Paige Dempsey

Taylor Penner-Ash

Prachi Patel

Travis Gallatin

Rimona Law

Trevor Press

Robby Brothers

Tywen Kelly

Sally Paul

Zoe Guckenheimer

2020 Undeclared Sunny breeze

2019 Psychology Summer night breeze

2018 Environmental Humanities Dog ears

2019 Art, Biology Blanket warm friend lap

2017 Environmental Studies-Art Date pit in pocket

2017 Geology Hugging a dog

2017 Biology Flannel and beach rocks

2020 Undeclared Bare feet under blankets

2017 General Studies, Film& Media Studies Velvet

2017 Art Squish

2018 Environmental Studies-Geology Open windows

2017 Economics, Psychology Underside of a pillow

2018 Film & Media Studies Salt

2018 Art Mom’s quilts

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Which Layout Staff Member Are You?

Created by: El Horsfall

Frequently Asked Questions Q: How can I get involved?

A: If you want to be involved in the magazine and its creation, send in your application at the start of the school year. Anyone can be on staff; experience is not necessary. Apply to be a genre staff member or genre editor, and/or to work on public relations, copy editing, or layout. If you want your work in next year’s issue, send in your poetry, prose, art, and/or digital media to bluemoon@ whitman.edu for consideration when the submissions deadline rolls around (soon after winter break). You can also friend “Blue Moon” on Facebook and get all the updates!

Q: How do selections work?

A: The editors-in-chief are the only staff members with access to original submissions; they remove the artists’ names and distribute the pieces to the respective genre groups, who review them anonymously over the course of one month. Final decisions are made during a staff retreat, and notifications go out to the artists soon after. The staff is not told the names of artists whose work is not selected.

Q: How is blue moon made?

A: After selections decisions are finalized, our editorial and layout staff stays on campus for the first week of spring break. We work together to determine the magazine’s flow, and we copyedit each selected work before formatting it for the magazine. Then, we read over a proof and send the magazine off to print. One month later, the magazine appears in print for the campus and community to enjoy.

Q: Is this actually the 30th edition of blue moon?

A: Well, it’s a little complicated: the history of the magazine dates back to 1924, almost 100 years ago. Funded by a 35-cent price tag and advertisements from various Walla Walla businesses, Volume 1–which can still be accessed in the Whitman archives–inaugurated the name “Blue Moon,” though without the characteristic lowercase lettering. In 1974, the name of the magazine changed to “Faire.” This version of the magazine no longer contained advertisements and ASWC funding made it free for all students. The magazine morphed again in 1988 into “The Blue Moon,” and this marked the first of 30 issues leading up to this year’s publication. Editions in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s contained no art, save for the cover. Beginning in 1995, the magazine adopted the square shape and artistic format that continue to this day.

Q: Wait, why don’t we have a DVD this year?

A: We hope this doesn’t disappoint those who were fond of the DVDs, but after eight years of including our digital media in this format (Volume 22 marked the first inclusion of digital media in a disc in the back of the magazine), we made the decision to remove the disc and instead publish our digital media selections solely online. We feel that as computer disc drives become increasingly less common, it makes the most sense to send people directly to our website, bluemoonartmag. wordpress.com. This site has been revamped, so check it out!

Colophon blue moon volume 30 was printed in Portland, OR by Bridgetown Printing Company. The magazine is set in Minion Pro, an Adobe Originals digital typeface designed by Robert Slimbach in 1990.

Slimbach’s typeface takes its name from the old, near-arbitrary English system of designating printer’s type sizes, in which minionsized type falls between emerald and brevier, bigger than brilliant or small pearl, but smaller than bourgeois or English. Minion is based on Renaissance-era typefaces, boasting sleek design while remaining highly personable. The magazine was designed using Adobe® InDesign® CC and Adobe® Photoshop® CC software.