blue moon by Bo

blue moon

Thanks to Associated Students of Whitman College Colville Street Patisserie laht neppur ale house PENROSE LIBRARY for their financial support

Special thanks to Pat Bender Das haus Professor Scott Elliot Barbara Maxwell, Leann Adams, and the Reid Campus Center Simon Van Neste THE Whitman College Multimedia Development Lab The Whitman College Pioneer Whitman Events Board Amber DoBBs Woodworth

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Co-Editors-in-Chief N ic k M ic h a l E v e l i n a m i ro p o l sk y Layout Editor B O ERICKSON Poetry Editor Philip Hofius Poetry Staff Grant Bradley ELE A NOR ELLIS m a d e ly n P e t e r s o n S A B RIN A W ISE Prose Editor alex pearson Prose Staff bo e r ic k son Ma r i s a I k e rt H A NNE J ENSEN M A REN SCHIFFER Jenn y Willis Art Editor Sa r a h Ca n e pa Art Staff Clara Bartlett Maddison Coons Kiley Wolff Public Relation Sarah Debs Copy Editors Chelsea kern jenny willis

W hitm a n College

volume 25

blue moon, Whitman Collegeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s student-staffed art and literary magazine, is published annually in April in Walla Walla, Washington. blue moon accepts unsolicited submissions of art, prose, and poetry. 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 poems in this issue. No material may be reprinted without the permission of the magazine or contributors. Subscriptions to blue moon are available for $12 an issue. blue moon is a not-for-profit media organization within the Associated Students of Whitman College. All donations and gifts to blue moon are taxdeductible. Please make checks for donations and subscriptions payable to the Associated Students of Whitman College. Copyright 2012, 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, Washington 99362

Contents* Pulling up the drive

Maren Schiffer

poetry

Alexander

William Newman-Wise

art

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Chronotheology: An Introduction for the Adept or Recent Initiateâ&#x20AC;?

Tyler King

prose

Untitled

Gaea Campe

poetry

Great Lengths

Hilary Painter

art

Learning How to Speak with Death Over Tea on Melrose Street

Madelyn Peterson

poetry

Voodoo Tricks

Wesley Sparagon

art

Witch Bear

Billy Harbour

art

clumsyhands

Katie Haaheim

poetry

Window of Opportunity

Benjamin Lerchin

art

Untitled

Anna Dawson

art

The rain does crazy things

Nick Michal

prose

Left Behind in Belleville

Evelina Miropolsky

art

Anachronologists

Carrie Sloane

art

Origins

Dorian Zimmerman

poetry

Big Shadows

Elana Congress

art

Following Directions

Sarah Canepa

art

In Transit

Kendra Klag

art

Trying Swimsuits Under Florescent Light

Olivia Mitchell

poetry

Morning Coffee

Elana Congress

art

*See end of magazine for alternative tables of contents

Colony

Allison BolgiAno

art

dulcify

mAdelYn Peterson

prose

Home

reBeccA gotZ

art

Certain Lives

iAn moore

prose

Tractor Dream

sAm Alden

art

Subject Matter.

kAtherine Berfield

prose

When evening falls

eleAnor ellis

poetry

Eggs

BrYnne hAug

prose

Les Oiseaux

hAYleY mAuck

art

Sleeping

dAriA reAven

poetry

Lester the Molester

cAde Beck

art

Estuary

mAggie AYAu

poetry

after the whale

mAdelYn Peterson

prose

Another Dimension

hilArY PAinter

art

Maybe

eleAnor ellis

poetry

Untitled

AnnABelle mArcovici

art

Wynnewood

kAtie hAAheim

poetry

North Carolina

mAtt rAYmond

poetry

Flash of Life

cAde Beck

art

Men in Red Coats

Alex PeArson

prose

Margaret

WilliAm neWmAn-Wise

art

The Art of Peeling Apples

gAeA cAmPe

poetry

Big Sky Cuntry

Ellie Newell Madeline jacobson

prose

Reichstag

Sara Rasmussen

art

In the Greenhouse

michaela gianotti

art

On Public Lands

gaea campe

poetry

100

Burning House

Sam Alden

art

101

Construction Worker

lily idle

art

102

Words in Edgewise

Rose cotter

poetry

103

dear uncle

madelyn peterson

poetry

104

Meditation of Hanged Man

YonatAn Adin Evans

art

105

Mission San Miguel

Maddison coons

art

106

Ecological Ranch Dining Room, Peru

Jack Lazar

art

107

Elegy

sabrina wise

poetry

108

Mao the Teenager

john-henry heckendorn

poetry

110

With Care in Hopes

Marie von hafften

art

111

To the slight change in seasons from fall to winter

MAren schiffer

poetry

112

Cuzco Alpaca

emily cornelius

art

114

Untitled

Ruth Hwang

art

115

Salvage

olivia mitchell

poetry

116

Untitled

Kiley Wolff

art

118

Yoga

Madison munn

art

120

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s About Time

Alex Pearson

prose

121

Untitled

michAel Jorgensen

art

127

Kitty Games

mAddison coons

art

128

The Maltese Falcon

ZoË BAllering

prose

129

Instinct and Obedience to God

kileY Wolff

art

133

Translation

grAnt BrAdleY

prose

134

The Bottom Line

kevin dYer

music

DVD

Cool Crimson Cacti

rick lAmB

music

DVD

And Waltz

rick lAmB

music

DVD

The Waiting Room

Alex PeArson

fi lm

DVD

“Dog Cure” by School

ZAck ellenBogen chrissY delicAtA

fi lm

DVD

Frankly Cooking

ZAck ellenBogen

fi lm

DVD

Editor’s Note Now…where were we? Ah, yes. Since the dawn of man, women have made art. Artists starve to make their pieces, finishing in the nick of time, flirting with deadline and disaster alike. They stand on the shoulders of giants, immortalized much like death and taxes, ensuring that every dog has its day. Back to the drawing board: it’s probably time to let the cat out of the bag and admit that actions speak louder than words, so when life gives you lemons there’s no place like home. To make a long story short, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so when viewing this magazine remember that, while some things are knee-high to a grasshopper, others are larger than life. Concerning clichés, the English novelist Evelyn Waugh said, “I think to be oversensitive about clichés is like being oversensitive about table manners.” With that in mind, we hold tongue firmly in cheek as we present volume 25 of blue moon. The pieces contained within aren’t clichés, to be sure, but like clichés, they present events, things, and circumstances that weave concurrent threads of understanding and inanity, restraint and experimentation, wonder and mystique. Some have a plaintive quietude, truly showing that silence is golden. Others are all that and a bag of potato chips. But each piece invites thought, contemplation, and reconsideration, allowing old ideas to be examined anew. Our hope is that the vigor and creativity of these pieces encourages not only close reading, but also closer examination of the everyday. A clichéd hope, to be sure, but hey—we were told to aim for the moon, because even if we missed, we’d land among the stars. Sincerely, Nick Michal and Evelina Miropolsky

Cover Art

Memory Series Film Still

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W i l l i a m N e w m a n -W i se film still

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Pulling up the drive Maren Schiffer

Conversation quivers in the chill of my sedan as gravel by gravel rolls back from wheels in timidity. leather puckers lips against backs of bare thighs, our innocence collision of question and touch. trembling fingers lower themselves (bodies just behind) to know anotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s self, desired. volume 2 5

Alexander W i l l i a m N e w m a n-W i se silver gelatin print

“Chronotheology: An

Introduction for the Adept or Recent Initiate” Tyler King

The book on his desk had changed, or rather it had been swapped out for another while he was in class. Adept 10061 examined the new textbook carefully, noticing the new author’s name and “3rd Edition” (instead of “2nd”) printed in the upper-right corner of the front cover. Before class, he had been reading an article in the Appendix of the old textbook that suggested that the structure of the Order of Chronos had been altered over time; in public there were still references to an executive body that no longer existed. This confused Adept 10061, and he hoped the new textbook would be easier to understand. He read the first chapter: “The Chronologos states that the Holy One was the first to receive God’s new teaching. Legend and other denominations debate this, but if one is to start properly, one must start with some fact that is mostly believed to be true. The Holy One ascended that peak1 with the simple hope of embarking on some spiritual journey, of having time to be alone with God. Indeed, this small need was satisfied in him, but upon descending again there was something else, an energy stirring deep inside. The air seemed to hum, and everything around him grew too bright to keep his eyes 1 Many have tried to locate the actual peak, but most consider its exact whereabouts to be unknown. Still others say it is merely a metaphor.

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open. Then, as suddenly as they came, the hum became silent and the brightness dimmed. All that remained was a faint glow in the set of footprints directly behind him. Out of that glow materialized a complete double of the Holy One that echoed his present movements at some constant interval. The Holy One was wise, and immediately realized the gift he had been given: he realized he could not only see one moment 2 into the past, but actually perceive (and comprehend, more importantly) both the past and present. After several years of meditation and prayer, the Holy One learned to see several selves of the past and even several selves of the future. He left his home to spread his teachings and became known as Chronos the Holy One. The rest, of course, is all set down in The Chronologos, which gives several accounts of his enlightenment and the foundation of The Order of Chronos (TOOC). “Next I shall attempt to clarify exactly, since you are all new adepts and have little idea of what this spiritual discipline is yet, what chronotheologic meditation is, how to achieve your first split, and the scientific measurement of Chronological Selves (CS). Scholars and those of TOOC have studied these for centuries, so do not feel discouraged if all this information is overwhelming. You will have your entire training as adepts to understand the basics of these topics and more. “Chronotheologic meditation can be many things, but all of its manifestations share three main goals: 1) to perceive farther in one direction of the timeline, 2) to further subdivide an area of the timeline already reached, and 2 A “moment” in this sense is rather imprecise. The exact interval between the doubles has been calculated to thirty digits after the decimal point, but as I am not concerned with the mathematics I can only recommend an excellent and approachable essay on that topic: Dan Zimmerman’s “The Interval of the Holy One: An Extended Proof.”

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C h ronot h eology

3) to strengthen the perceptions one already receives, that is, to make them more vivid. The third goal is the simplest, but the first and second no doubt need more explanation. When one successfully splits, one will be able to observe an additional Chronological Self (CS). Recall the story of the Holy One: this CS moves in time at the same rate as the present self. Unlike the Holy One’s experience, however, this CS will not necessarily appear exactly one unit of chronosubdivision away from the present self. It may appear anywhere on the individual timeline. Of course, with focus and self-discipline, one can attempt to split in the way the Holy One did, equally expanding in both directions, (though not always by a single unit of chronosubdivision, not even the Holy One could do that) adhering to a most divine symmetry. “I have mentioned units of chronosubdivision (UCSd) without really discussing chronosubdivision (CSd) itself. Think of an entire individual’s timeline. At one end is birth and at the other death, with the present self at some point in between. Imagine actually putting a point on that timeline that corresponds to the present self. When one splits, another point appears on this timeline. CSd is the process by which one can create 3 a CS equidistant from two already-existing points on the timeline 4 . The meditative technique for CSd is slightly different than basic chronotheologic meditation, but for the sake of simplicity we will not be addressing anything but the basics in this introduction. “Next I will address basic meditative theory, 3 The word “create” here is misleading. I simply mean “gain access to new perception of.” The phrase “already-existing” is also only used for convenience. 4 Note that these can be any two points: a CS and a CS or a CS and the present self.

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followed by an introduction to the scientific measurement of CS, and finally, a response to some criticism. The Holy One used to imagine his timeline just as we did in the previous paragraph. In order to successfully split, the Holy One suggested that one should think of it as a sort of ‘crossing of the eyes, in that one image splits into two, but there is also a slight overlap’ (The Chronologos, X 32:4). By visualizing this overlap, there is a ‘knot’ made in the individual’s timeline, so that ‘even when the eyes are relaxed [to continue the analogy] the second image remains’ (The Chronologos, X 32:7). Certain props are used to aid focus in this meditation: the Holy One used a candle, but today it is more common to use binaural beats. This is a simplified description of meditative theory, but you will learn more once you really begin your training. “At one point it was said that the Holy One saw over 200 CS at any given time. This would certainly drive many people mad, but his mind was strong indeed. The Holy One knew that the ultimate goal was not to split the self, but instead to unite it throughout time. So he took another trip to the site of his first spiritual awakening and meditated for an entire month in a cave near the peak. The Holy One claims that he—with as much focus as he could muster— untied, so to speak, all the knots in his timeline. As he did this, the CS began to blur, but they did not disappear nor lose their vividness. Once he had done this for every one of the CS, he turned to the only point on the timeline left: his present self. He realized that the burden of life had twisted this into a knot, so with all of his focus he untied that knot as he had the others. His consciousness now observed his entire timeline simultaneously; he gazed upon Time itself, and was enlightened. He descended once more from that peak, eager to pass on his teachings.

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C h ronot h eology

“Despite the fact that the eventual goal is a unity of the self, it has still been important ever since the Holy One left behind his teachings to acquire as many CS as possible as a step towards achieving that unity. As such, it has become essential to measure how many CS an individual observes. This is made possible by the following procedure: 1. The subject is given a clicker to hit when they encounter a CS so that the number can be easily recorded. 2. The subject walks at a consistent pace in a straight line for 50 yards, then turns around and walks back, following their previous path as closely as possible. 3. Every time the subject walks through 5 a CS, they hit the clicker. For those of you that are curious, the walk from 0-50 yards ends up measuring future CS (because they’re walking back while you are walking there) and the walk back ends up measuring past CS (because they’re walking there while you are walking back). This procedure is repeated a minimum of five times in order to reduce the impact of uncertainty or mistakes. “The Order of Chronos (TOOC) 6 uses this procedure to rank its members: adept (0-5 CS), junior member (6-10 CS), member (11-50 CS), the Outer Circle (51-99 CS), 5 “walks through” is the best way I can describe it. The CS may be visible, but they cannot physically interact. If that were possible, all sorts of complex paradoxes might arise. 6 For those of you wondering more about the structure and purpose of The Order, I strongly urge you to read the relevant sections of The Chronologos. As a quick analogy, however, there are striking similarities with the Catholic Church you’ve read about in your history books.

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and the Inner Circle (100+ CS). Those of the Inner Circle are no longer tested on the quantity of CS they perceive, but instead they begin to focus on unifying all selves throughout time. The Inner Circle is also the governing body of TOOC, and though they don’t make public appearances, their spiritual guidelines are heard through the leader of the Outer Circle: the Disciple. “Some have suggested that the Inner Circle doesn’t exist, and that the Disciple makes his own guidelines, but this, of course, is nonsense. Although the procedure for ranking is based on self-reports, fabricating results would be a disgrace to TOOC and to God. The Disciple is a pious and respectable man that spends his life passing on wisdom of the highest caliber. Wild criticism of this type is blasphemous and treasonous to our fine state; it will not be tolerated in the adept program. Any adept thought to be spreading these views will be dealt with most harshly. “As a final note, as you go about your day, think on this message from the Holy One set down in The Chronologos: ‘This I say to you: Time is not your master, nor your slave. Time is your brother; he walks beside you. Join hands with him so your strides shall match, and you two shall watch the Universe together’ (The Chronologos, XVIII 13:6).”

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Untitled gaea campe

In the supermarket today I almost abandoned my grocery list to write an ode for industrial chickens. In the aisle of anemic thighs and breasts frozen under the sterile palm of plastic wrap I forgot what chickens look like.

Tonight, I listen to the rain sizzle, how it sounds like grease in an iron skillet. I think about the chickens in the yard, their muddy claws scratching for earthworms smelling of putrid earth.

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Great Lengths h i l a ry pa i n t e r 35 mm photograph

Learning How to Speak with Death Over Tea on Melrose Street madelyn Peterson

“Of what is coming in the New Year I know nothing… all that is unforeseen will appear with the certainty of the sun who every morning shakes a leg in the sky. And of what is gone I know only shilly-shally snatches and freckled plaids, flecks and dabs, dazzle and froth…” - Dylan Thomas, “The Crumbs of One Man’s Year” You and I stand on the evening-lit kitchen floor of the woman-poet on Melrose, who has offered an open door and an invitation for green tea, company, and three shelves of poetry, who is grieving the loss of a friend whose memorial (yesterday) she couldn’t attend. “Is that enough?” “—tea leaves,” she asks. We smile, more than enough, watching the dead leaves unfurl in the hot water. The floor is cold for bare feet and ripples under the shadows.Yesterday, that is, thirty years ago, she moved to New York with a job offer and erased her hometown. Now that brilliant city is grieving for her, two-thousand miles away, since she left the company of its artists, poets, metro, and grit, to keep company with her dying father (now gone) and her bookshelves. Enough to smile. Trinkets on her shelves are perpetually grieving: a tin of her neighbor’s ashes, black and white photos from ceiling to floor. volume 2 5

pet e r son

We sit at the woman-poet’s feet as she recites and we offer a hum or nod of pleasure. A week ago yesterday, a young friend of yours died in her sleep. So yesterday I folded my arms around your waist as you cooked, kept company in your bed, and held your hands as we fell asleep. All I know to offer you is patience, a cup of tea, and a warm body—enough to get through the night. The woman-poet’s cat has joined us on the floor, touches noses with me and climbs into your lap, not grieving that she is old and thin and arthritic. She is not grieving, but purring through the months she has left. Yesterday the woman-poet called her friends in New York and was floored by the life in their voices, wished herself in the company of their common nostalgia. I am young and lucky enough that I have no bittersweets to offer her, so I listen to the stories she needs to tell. Dylan Thomas proffers her solace on lonely mornings. She tells us that grieving is overcoming the fear of being happy again. Enough life is wasted on quiet weeping. She reads to us the same pages she read yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, welcomes our company, and lets us hold her passing grief in our arms on the floor.

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Voodoo Tricks W e sl e y Spa r ag on film photograph

Witch Bear Bi l ly Ha r bou r graphite

clumsyhands Katie Haaheim

I wonder how to wow you, clumsyhands mouthed again and again, it became the shape of every in- and exhalation little arcs and dashes wrote themselves onto pages, but had lost their grace and revealed the rusty hinges that held them together and allowed them to open themselves to the world silly scribbles, flirtatious scribbles clumsyhandsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; tongue trips dry, losing the shape of all the important gestures. the hair stands on end, anxious, waiting, hoping that sensation returns sad hands, clumsy hands, the world beats on without you we are all waiting for you to notice its throbbing once again

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Window of Opportunity be nja m i n L e rc h i n instragram

Untitled A n na Dawson linoleum blockprint

The rain does crazy things Nick Michal

It was already hot enough when the power went out, so that’s when I really started swearin’ up a storm. I had been watching Key Largo. That Bogey. He reminds me of how blood gets twenty grit sandpaper tough to the touch. He made you feel it, that burn, whether it was for him or the dame he was holding. Kathy was with her People magazine and went to the bathroom with a flashlight to finish. The sky was like the light those film makers put gels in front of to make it look like fire. Or lightning, depending on the gel. I spent most of the night by the window, and though the thermometer said it dropped ten degrees in ten minutes it was still hotter ‘n hell. I was foul. I waited five minutes and it was hotter ‘n hell, then held out for a longer five minutes and it was hotter ‘n hell, and then didn’t even look at my watch and, sure enough, five minutes later it was still hotter ‘n hell. My beer was sweatin’ and it felt like I was grabbing a hesitant and well-lotioned arm. My back was all sweaty and the couch told me to get up, so I did. I went to the fridge and found some apple juice that was still pretty cold and figured what the fuck and poured it in my beer. I figured what the fuck. This doesn’t happen often and it happens more than once. I nicked myself shaving. I decided to shave because my shirt was already off and I noticed the left side hairs were in a bit thicker than the right. Every morning the

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M ic h a l

same face and I didn’t notice it. Like I did anything in the morning. And it’s noticeable. I was probably drunk the last time I did it. I was getting good at that. After I wanted some food from the kitchen. I wasn’t really hungry for food but it was there, and I was here, and these things don’t happen often. In the pantry there was peanut butter and crackers, and my mom used to make sandwiches from them and lay them on a plate in a circular fashion, saltines and peanut butter and a large glass of milk not in the middle of them, but off to the side. I’d meet lips with the giant mouth on the plate, part, and then drink that delicious cold milk. The milk ripples and the glass shakes when the bathroom door shuts. I shouted. “You in or out, Kathy?” I realized she’d been in there the whole time. Reading People. She said out, now and walked into the hall so that I couldn’t get a look at her. By then I had a candle and was pretty used to the darkness but she just walked out of the doorway down the hall. As soon as I turned back to the pantry the milk and the crackers and the peanut butter were gone. Gone? Kathy in the doorway, aye eye. “Tom, hey.” I could tell what she wanted before I turned around. Then I did. “Jeeze, Kath. You look like a ghoul.” Her make-up was all over. Smeared in most places. Really off. The sweat around her eyes blotted the make-up and hid her eyes in a shroud, her whites barely visible in all the cloud. She looked wild, unfinished. There was something in the heat that made her look hot. “Where you goin’,” I asked, as if I didn’t know. She coulda been going to her grave, for all I knew. “To water,” she said, and sauntered clumsily up to me. Somebody was tipsy. Then past. I almost turned the wrong way looking. The apartment was new to us but really

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T h e r a i n doe s c r azy t h i ng s

old, the wood floors squeaking like crazy. Like it needed work. Most things do. “There She Goes” played in my head, and I guess that’s how it goes. “Don’t go,” I said to myself saying to her. The wind was blowing through the windows. I couldn’t tell if it was raining or not, it was that slow. I couldn’t tell how hot I was, I was so hot. I couldn’t tell if— She got up to me and got real close, kissin’ neck hairs close, and licked my cheek. Straight licked the sweat off. Like the foam off espresso, the crisp backdraft cutting downward. The candle had been out, from before, and looking at her, it seemed darker. She licked my other cheek. I licked hers. We left the kitchen, in search of water. We were thirsty.

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Left Behind in Belleville E v e l i n a M i rOpol sk Y digital photograph

Anachronologists Ca r r i e Sloa n e ink wash and digital

Origins Dorian Zimmerman

When I lifted him from his mangy blanket, the faded periwinkle cloth slipping from his chubby, grasping fingers and set him upon that cross between a table and a deskâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the one in his motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s officeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; he pointed with a plump digit to the window. Bird he chirped, and I applauded, pressing one hand lightly against his so that it was more of a shlufff than a clap! We have explained away the world to him, in pointer fingers and soundbytes, and so I long to tell him that nothing deserves definition with a single syllable or even just a few,

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to tell him that Bird is a Western Tanager, the mate of the one that hit the living room window, whose limp, disheveled body I gathered in a fist wrapped in itchy fabric, dumped into the green yard waste bin, his red-and-yellow feathers blending with autumnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fallen leaves raked up from the front yard last week.

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Big Shadows E l a na C ongr e ss photograph

Following Directions sa r a h c a n e pa mixed media

In Transit K e n dr a K l ag 35 mm color film

Trying Swimsuits Under Florescent Lights olivia Mitchell

Try this one, she grins, I think it will look nice on you. She holds fifteen identical plastic hangers tangled in the slopes of her arms, a mess of glossy fabric. In the aisle, between two rows of dressing rooms, florescent light banks against her freckled forehead. You were always beautiful, you know, she says, with conviction, like an old window, when a light throws dancers off the glass. Intently, she removes a black bikini from the pile, the filmy fabric sliding easily into my waiting arms. I walk into the dressing room, her eyes moving with me, full of expectations and reassurances and threats. I pull myself into the swimsuit, the lycra slick and cold against my skin, I settle my limbs in their sockets and in the mirror, reflections of moon-grey skin, small metal hooks, tenting of ribs, peculiar ankles. I leave everything doubtful dancing in the mirror, and walk back out into the aisle, always with knowledge of her gaze. She laughs. Sound scattering out from somewhere deep in her lungs, cacophonous and ethereal. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s for swimming, you know, not for funerals

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Morning Coffee E l a na C ongr e ss film photograph

Colony A l l i son Bolgi a no digital photograph

dulcify Madelyn Peterson

well how ‘bout them apples – the ones that are rotting in the orchard rows because we’ve cuffed the brown hands that used to pick them and shipped their asses south of the border, following the grain truck of subsidized corn – the friendship bracelet of yankee free trade. we’ve got a song that we sing ‘round here. it’s catchy – a no-fat, sugaredup hybrid of show-tunes and jingles and dirges. it slips down your throat easy-like then hooks your tonsils with its barbed end when you try to pull it out. if you yank too hard, it rips out your voice, and you know better than to bleed. so you follow the fishing line and keep singing the tune and don’t stop for your neighbors who dug in their heels and are laying mute and bleeding from their lips. give us your poor, your needy, your hungry, the chorus goes, and we will build an empire on their backs. – lighten up, chum, it’s only a joke.

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Home R e becc a G otz digital photograph

Certain Lives Ian Moore

I. Swollen, black and blue, pulsing with an urgent, invasive gaze, viewing every move that I made; the murk of night, hovering above and about the dirty clouds, still my eyes, always glued to the guttersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; stink and concrete, outline empty rails that chase one another; always parallel, always together, please find their way home; the other, my half, my husband, the man I thought I was married to; Wander, he says, Thinking, he says, and so, I become another accent to the subway, searing through gloom like the burnt tongue of an assassin, rails clash to spit the spark of stars, to dive deep through hardened lungs, then exhale out into the open world; deprivation, the throb that finally exhausts the mind, a reminder to rest, and tonight, like most nights, seated near a young man, impish and pale, eyes linked to the haze of electrons escaping his cradled hands; a momentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s glint through such tiny squares of the urban submarine, blue reflection, illumination, worn as a mask to the man in the dark, resting in the chair; a glow permeates below and behind him, standing as a faint slit in the night II. and it seems, I, the centipedal heart of the subway; running tunnel lengths for hours, eclipsing stop after stop, sample after sample of theatrical coitus, plot driven and colored, it is always muted, soundless, the aphonic cries of viewed sex;

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the same clip played over and over; on the bus, other times, in a pile of leaves at the park, as transient eyes glow on my shoulder, as rusty palms rustle against the hidden skin; no, yes, maybe some would know; in the hover of an eyebrow, in the pulse of a nod, in the whip of a grimace; still riding on long after they all had escaped, no one hearing the wane and cry of my stage; my member, never a prick, forever silent and restful as she took it, as I watched, as we all knew III. this is a blue chair, an island centering the room; halfasleep; how long, 15 days, where is she, restless as an awkward itch, a blue glass bowl rests in my lap, thin valleys, gliding down the sides, perfect mudslides bruised by the day; who can say how long itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been; oh, time; oh, body; aching, as empty as the bowl, as empty as the room; lamp, table, chair, boxes; blue and brown; always in my bones, always in my bones, vibration, subway thunder eclipsing the television hum; up the rails, it climbs, crying out with the selective moan of a memory in the dark; light, off; television, off; I can saddle this horse for once; that is an ugly young man, face shadowed by the night train, eyes aglow, luminescence that seems IV. always and again, to hate this hallway; the tan walls, the seething cracks, the spilling out of blood from veins from muscles; light, dim, a faint heartbeat limping along to the pulse of primitive circuitry; always the same carcass of a building; room 217, someone new lives there, I heard he didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have much; a chair quivering at the seams, a television worn bare at the corners to shine like tethers of gold, a blackened table, a lamp, and boxes; I wonder why, what force, to breathe in the fresh fumes of roach shit and

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insecticides; the light, off, where is it at night, even tonight, it just is never on V. time; hours, days, weeks, now months; recollection was never my strong suit, to recall how long the eyes had been watching her, following her, calling her, tracing every curve and mention to outline the signature of presence; from a diner in midtown, red and white weathered checkers speak to the wind like decapitated teeth; everyday the same call, the payphone outside; ham on rye, no mayo, no I will never pick it up; eye contact, please, eye contact, I scream inside, please look up and out, I see; she walked home today; following, not directly behind but from a distance, block after block, corner after corner, waiting for impulse to push body and mind and soul into the intersection, to be struck down, to finally die crippling in the street; but it never comes, and now, outside her door, the net collecting my heart, tightens the muscles of my chest, to fan out like a plume, of feathers, or of quills; why canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t my lungs ever let go?

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Tractor Dream Sa m A l de n pigment liner

Subject Matter. Katherine Berfield

“Why can’t you write about anything happy?” She sobbed, red dress tangled about her legs. “Kittens sell just as well as serial killers.” But baby, I wanted to whisper. Then it wouldn’t be an autobiography.

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When evening falls Eleanor Ellis

When evening falls so hard, I will comfort you. – Paul Simon The hard days are the ones when evening falls like a child on the concrete, the sudden gravel in his palms, howling. As if the sky could be scraped, you say— but have you ever seen the rhododendrons blooming raw pink in spring under a grey sky, have you walked and held the hills with your hands and each slope you scale you touch with your bare feet? I cannot bear to see the soft toes of evening stubbed— And I hold him in my hands, this small and shaking brother of the night, clasp the quiet fingers of disbelief, and turn away from that dark, tall and proud and studded with the certainty of reflection. We close the door when she leaves the sidewalk strewn with stars. I carry the evening inside

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and cradle him in my arms, take the weary struggle with the afternoon from his shoulders and hang it on the constellations with our coats. We shall leave our woolen worries with Orion, another quiet layer of the night, and let the water run where it needs to. Even in the dark, we can chart the horizon.

volume 25

Eggs brynne haug

“Did you ever notice how no one ever talks about how nice it feels to pee after you’ve been on a really long, really cold walk, and you’re all cold, and the pee is warm? I think it’s the most outrageous taboo in our culture.” The fact that Janna was telling Peter this as she energetically rolled out dough for cinnamon rolls was, he judged, a sign of the fact that it might after all be an okay day. Because he said nothing, she grinned at him sheepishly and turned the dough over. “Maybe it’s different for a guy.” Peter wasn’t willing to say one way or another. He just shrugged and smiled back. “Maybe.” Janna wielded her rolling pin with enthusiasm, and white dust rose in clouds from the table. Urination was not liable to win her any points from her customers, but then, most of them were used to Janna. Janna dusted her hands off on her apron and brushed past him. Peter drew a deep breath, inhaling flour in her wake, accompanied by the spicy scent that lingered about her face and her hands. The air always tasted of her, cinnamon and strawberry jam catching in the corners of Peter’s mouth whenever she passed. The baking room was open to the front of the shop, visible from the counter where Janna now stood, talking to a customer. Peter stood silent in the no-man’s land, the space between the cash register and the work table, where a fine layer of flour settled over everything.

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the doorbell of the shop tinkled; the customer left with a steamy paper bag tucked under his arm. Janna turned around and leaned against the countertop. though she’d dusted her hands, they remained white and powdery, leaving a fi lm on the fi ne hairs of her arms. “What do you think, Peter?” Peter, about to check the bread sponges rising along the opposite wall, stopped and turned back. “What do i think about what?” little vs formed in the corners of Janna’s eyes when she smiled, not-quite-crow’s-feet the only sign that she was nearing forty. “urination and the cold. tell me you have an opinion. it’s your job to make people urinate.” they both looked at the espresso machines on the counter. they’d branched out to coffee and teas because people bought more pastries when there were hot beverages to go with them. Peter manned coffee because Janna liked to have dough up to her elbows, and anyway she’d never got the hang of timing the espresso right. it had to be done manually to get the best pull, and Janna was too impatient. Peter still hadn’t answered the question, but there was not much he could say to a reduction of his profession to urine-making. “You should ask the next people to come in about it, i’m sure they’d have an opinion, given the temperature outside,” he said. she glanced out the window. When they drove to the shop four hours ago they’d had to pause on the doorstep to shake the ice from their hair and boots, but though the mercury in the old thermometer by the window hadn’t risen a millimeter, nothing fell from the sky. only feathery mounds softened the corners of the plate glass window at the front of the shop. the words across the upper side of it— to be read frontways from outside as

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but backways from inside as

YRE K AB NEH GNIDOORB —had bits of ice caught around their edges, and the hen that perched atop the initial B had grown trailing whiskers. “honey, why are we talking about pee?” Peter crossed the space between them and slipped his hands into her back pockets. she snuck out from under his arms and danced through the no-man’s land to their workspace. “i need to pee!” she shouted back at him. the bathroom door slammed. he turned back to the counter, an involuntary smile eating away the space between his mouth and his ears. it was still on his face when a family came into the shop, which was perhaps what made the wife smile particularly wide in return when she ordered hot chocolate for her children and a latte for herself. the two children pressed their noses to the glass under the counter while he got their drinks. the sister pronounced that the cheesecake looked tasty, but her brother vehemently denied it. it gave Peter an odd twinge in the pit of his stomach when the girl poked her brother’s cheek and giggled. the parents took their drinks and herded their kids out the door just as Janna came back in. her hands were clean. “hey,” Peter said. “hey,” said Janna. “i’m going to make some lemon curd.” Peter went after her into the workspace. it wasn’t as if they’d had more than half a dozen customers this morning, and on days like this he and Janna were free to mind their own time together among the sugar. they had three employees, college student jacks-of-all-trades, but kelly and Jake could never make it saturdays, and catherine was sick. Peter liked it better this way, really.

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Something silky slipped into Janna’s voice when it was just them, something fifteen years of marriage hadn’t erased. The bakery sucked their lives and souls away for all that they were living their dream; up at four o’ clock in the morning every day but Sunday, late nights going through financials praying they’d broken even. “Are you still thinking of pee?” Peter asked her. “Lemon curd, pee, ha ha.” Janna wrinkled her nose. “Don’t be juvenile. It’s selling like mad. After that angel food cake order yesterday I also have twenty-four egg yolks in the fridge. Need to be used up.” “I know, I saw them.” While Janna hunted around for a pot of the right size, Peter got the yolks out of the refrigerator and carried them across to the counter space beside the stove. “What about the cinnamon rolls, Janna?” “Oh, shit.” Janna turned around, halfway through adding lemon juice and sugar to the enormous pot she’d unearthed. “I’ll finish them if you give this a stir.” Peter took the spoon from her and twirled it in the vat of sugar and lemon. “Is something bothering you, Jan?” “What the hell,” said Janna. On any other day she would have laughed. She raised a cloud of flour. “Where’s the goddamned butter?” “Melting,” said Peter, ready to back down. Janna shook her head. “Sorry.” “Hey,” said Peter. He took the spoon out of the sugary lemon and began beating the egg yolks in their bowl. Janna turned her attention away from the cinnamon rolls and came around the work table to hug Peter from behind. Peter stopped mixing the eggs. “You missed one,” said Janna, peering over his shoulder. “I hate breaking the yolk.” Peter turned around and put his arms around Janna. “It’s like the Wal-Mart smiley face, it’s not like I’m attached to it but I’ve got to admit it’s

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impressive it comes back day after day to a hard job.” He was playing for a laugh but Janna only offered the slightest eye crinkle. “I feel like the chicken worked so hard to produce it, we ought to pay it some respect, you know?” “It’s already separated from the white,” said Janna. “Also, biologically, the yolk and the white are both just food for a baby chick. If the egg isn’t fertilized, it’s just empty work for the chicken. Makes no damn sense why people put them in the meat category.” She turned her head to press her cheek against Peter’s chest. “No one wants to visit brooding hens on a snowy day like this.” “You do know it’s okay,” said Peter, thinking of the kids and their hot chocolate. “Sometimes things don’t turn out the way we think, but really it’s okay.” Janna shifted, tilting her head up to look at him. “What are you talking about?” Peter shrugged. “Eggs?” Her eyelids shifted. She squeezed his waist briefly and stepped away, pacing back to the cinnamon rolls. She brushed her hand across the floury dough, flat and ready to receive the melted butter and cinnamon. She seemed to change her mind, then, and her shoes scuffed the floor back across to Peter. He took her hands. “ It really does feel nice to pee after a cold day,” she said. “It’s warm? You said so once already. What’s up with the pee today?” “You know what isn’t so nice?” she went on as if she hadn’t heard him. “When you pee on a stick and it tells you. . . .” She spun, headed back to the cinnamon rolls. Peter caught her arm. “Wait. What?” Janna shook herself free from him. She took the butter out of the boiler and spread it in vast quantities across the flattened dough. Her yellow-oiled fingers picked

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up flour, trailing pebbles of it across the buttery surface. “Eggs, Peter. Eggs.” “Janna . . . ?” She slammed the butter dish onto the countertop. “What, Peter?” Cinnamon flew in clouds across the counter and the floor. “Stir the goddamned lemon curd. Please.” Peter retreated across the workroom. His fingers moved without direction from his brain. The sugar was bubbling, but he couldn’t hear it; his own heartbeat was too loud. He stirred in two pounds of butter, craning his neck over his shoulder to watch his wife, who scattered sugar in short, brusque gestures. He tried to still the shaking of his hands and ask the necessary questions in a level voice. “How far on?” Her sharp shoulder hid the curve of her neck, so that he couldn’t see her face when she answered. “Seven weeks.” Peter’s heart sank. Far enough for hope, not so far it meant anything. “So. . . .” “I know, I know, I know, I know, I know!” She sprayed a last burst of sugar across the dough and started to roll up the top of the paper container she’d been scooping from. It slipped from her hands and fell to the floor, spilling sugar in a cascade across the tiles. Janna slumped down in it. She righted the bag. Then she scooped a handful of sugar and let it run through her fingers back down to the tiles. The bell jingled at the front door. It was Reggie Blighton—a regular. Half-blind and deaf, he came by for a coffee and a muffin every other morning. Peter waved, looking from Janna to him and back again. She shrugged. “It’s okay,” she said. “This can’t wait a month, but it can wait a minute.” Peter bent over and brushed a stray hair back from her cheek. She looked down at the sugar and picked up another handful. And then he made his way around the

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sugar spill to the front counter, because as strong as he knew he had it in him to be, he wasn’t strong enough to do anything else. “Good morning, Mr. Ruskin,” said Reggie Blighton. “How’s the wife?” Peter glanced over his shoulder. Janna had got up and gotten the broom from the corner. She moved slowly, shoulders slumped. “Fair,” he said. Reggie likely couldn’t hear him anyway. “The usual?” “What kind of muffins you got today?” Reggie asked. Peter reeled them off as he made Reggie’s coffee, his voice raised unnaturally loud. “Blueberry, blackberry, black current, lemon, orange cranberry, chocolate chip, bran raisin, raspberry twirl, banana walnut, almond crème, chai spice, chocolate coma, you name it, all the usual,” he said. “Plus Janna’s got a new wicked apple-pie muffin you ought to give a whirl.” “I’ll take that, um, raspberry twirl,” Reggie said, pointing at the case. He always did. This was because, as far as Peter could tell, he only asked the question out of courtesy; he couldn’t hear Peter’s list. Peter slid the coffee across the counter and rang Reggie up. The shop wasn’t a sit-down restaurant, but Janna had four little round tables and a half-dozen chairs along the plate glass window for regulars like Reggie. Peter didn’t stay to chat with him. Janna had finished sweeping up and was rolling cinnamon rolls, her head bent and her shoulders hunched. “Go stir the lemon curd,” she said at once, “It’s going to burn.” It hadn’t yet. Peter gave the bottom a good scrape all the same. “Janna, maybe this time it will be different.” He spoke to the bubble of lemon sugar in the pot, not directly at

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his wife. “Like hell.” She wielded her knife with precision, slicing cinnamon roll rounds and placing them on an oiled sheet. “When was the last time?” She knew as well as Peter did, but he said it anyway because she wanted him to. “Seven years ago. You were thirty-one.” “I’m thirty-eight fucking years old. I’ve been pregnant so many fucking times. What the fuck am I supposed to do.” She said it in a monotone, face tilted down at the floor. When Janna stopped waving her arms and spoke quietly it scared Peter. But the lemon curd was bubbly. Janna would murder him if he didn’t add the eggs. He ladled lemon sugar into the eggs and beat them furiously to temper them. His heart raced. Janna sniffed behind him, a sure sign she was trying not to cry. Goddammit. She needed him. He poured a thin stream of yellow yolk into the sugar, whisking constantly. Just like the recipe said. Those recipe cards they bought ten years ago when they moved here. She’d had two miscarriages then, but not enough that they didn’t hope. Of course it would happen. They named the bakery as a joke. They made their own recipes now and the cards stayed tucked away in the corners of a cupboard somewhere. They cooked together, just like they’d always wanted. The eggs whirled into the sugar and lemon. The liquid sucked at the sides of the vat. “Janna—” “Don’t. Say. A. Word.” She was still chopping cinnamon rolls. “Ouch. Oh, fuck.” “Janna!” Peter dropped the spoon. She turned around to face him, the middle finger of her left hand in her mouth. “It’s okay, it’s just a little cut,” she said. Peter took the opportunity to put his arms around her. She hugged him back with unexpected force. “The

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worst part is, what if it—” “I know,” said Peter, “what if it lives. I know.” Janna turned her face so that her forehead rested against his cheek, her eyelashes tickling his jawbone. “It’s stupid,” she said. It’s a stupid stupid thing to think, I’m a stupid stupid woman.” She paused to swallow. “We should have been more careful.” “No shoulds, no coulds. And you’re not stupid.” She sniffed. “Stir the lemon curd. I need to go wash my hands.” Peter turned around and twirled the spoon through the lemon curd. Eggs. He saw what Janna meant, now, about the problem with believing the baby was in the egg. He got ahead of himself. He could see the chick pecking its way out of a shell that never had a chance of letting something out at all. It left him dangling. Of course he’d wanted kids. She had, too. But for all they thought they could tell each other anything, he didn’t quite dare to ask her if she still did. After all the doctors and all the late-night conversations, going round and round, do I get a vasectomy so we don’t have to do this again, do we adopt, they still didn’t know why. When they decided to stop trying to get pregnant it wasn’t just not trying, it was trying not to. It was too hard. The lemon curd was finished. Janna assembled the shining jars on the countertop and returned to her cinnamon rolls while Peter poured the lemon curd into each jar. Stamped and labeled: Brooding H en Bakery. The curd would cool in the jars and then they’d screw on the lids. Everyone wanted them at Christmastime, gifts for grandmothers and aunts no one ever saw. The cinnamon rolls sat to rise in their trays and Janna traded them for bowls of bread sponge, puffed and risen. She punched them down with unnecessary force, split them, kneaded them, shaped them into loaves. Peter took one and divided it into three. The dough was warm and

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malleable in his hands, and he twisted the three strands together, forming a round coil. Holiday bread for holiday makers. “Shitty Christmas,” Janna mumbled. “Hey.” Peter paused at his efforts and leaned around her to kiss her forehead. She looked up at him and her face softened. “I’m sorry, Peter, I’m sorry.” “I’m sorry I made you have to pee on a stick again,” said Peter. “I guess I really am the pee-man.” Air escaped from Janna’s lips in what was likely meant to be a laugh. “I know.” She took the vat out of his hands. “Look. All the jars are full, and there’s some left over.” She took two spoons from the drawer and sat down on the kitchen floor. She passed him one. “I’m pregnant, and I’m going to eat some lemon curd,” she said. Peter scraped the sides of the vat, reaching down into the bottom edges where the curd had cooked a little too much, grown grainy and solid. “It could be different. It’s been seven years. Who knows, Janna.” She leaned her head against his shoulder, sucking on the spoon. As old as she’d looked on the floor with the sugar, she now seemed young. Young enough to be in college, maybe, except for those smiling Vs at the corners of her eyes. “My ovaries are on their way out, Peter. Eggs get all shrivelly when you get old.” “Thirty-eight’s not old.” “Old enough.” She sucked a massive glob of lemon curd off her spoon. “There have been plenty of times in the last seven years when we weren’t as careful as we should’ve been, and nothing happened. It’s a shitty piece of luck it’s now, when I’ve more or less sorted out being okay without kids.” “We could adopt.” They’d been over this before.

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They didn’t have the money, didn’t have the time for the paperwork or the home visits, and in the aftermath of another miscarriage it was too much for either of them to handle. As if having your own kids didn’t cost money. As if having your own kids didn’t take time. But it felt different. She didn’t say any of it now but she was thinking of it when she looked down at her belly. “What if my eggs aren’t so shrivelly? What if it turns out this one takes?” Peter reached across her to take a spoonful of curd from the bottom of the vat, but didn’t bring it to his mouth. “Then we’ll have a baby. And all the hard work of the poor hen won’t be for nothing.” The joke fell hollow. Why the hell was he such an asshole? She didn’t deserve this. Janna took his spoon from him. She brought it round to his mouth and put it in, fed him just like she would a baby. “If it comes to it, it comes to it. I just don’t want to have to lose another one.” “I know. I don’t either.” They ate the lemon curd in silence. Peter thought about the twenty-four eggs he had beaten to bits to produce the yellow cream dancing on his spoon. He thought about the girl poking her little brother while they waited for hot chocolate. He thought about peeing. And as he thought and his fingers crept across the still-sugary floor to intertwine with his wife’s, snow began to fall from the sky outside the plate glass window.

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Les Oiseaux Hay l e y Mauc k 120 black and white film

Sleeping daria reaven

I. (This morning I awoke to the sound of a child being beaten: the echoing sound of skin against skin rang and rang thud thud thud through everything) II. You sleep alone and without sheets. The morning is sacred, (sacred because you can’t see, your room is foreign and not in the “adventurous” way, but in the way of loneliness, like a river-vein in an upsidedown map) But you’ve been sleeping too much, having dreams of covering Mumbai in ice of flinging shit at monkeys and desecrating temples III. Women try not to bleed through their saris into the light of day. Wash it out with the blue scrubber cake,

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balance on bent knees, try to remove that smell. IV. And of course there are always the birds. Peacocks, doves, crows, sparrows, swifts, starlings the vociferous sound of wild dogs with warts and hundreds of nomadic flying things but still you sleep, knowing you are good and safe and warm and in the morning the beating will also be good and warm

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Lester the Molester c a de bec k silver gelatin print

Estuary maGgie ayau

Even if there were no hope in heaven And angels were merely dust particles Suspended in a murky beam of light And all we knew of God was that he lived Alone in an old willow tree, in that Bay where the rains always came and settled And told stories of the great, endless sky, Even if all of this, I would hold you, Unwrap the secrets tucked in your corners Piece by pieceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;elbow, armpit, shoulder bladeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; I would drape you in silk and sonnets and Perfect circles and sing to you all night; We would melt into each other like the Mouth of a river slowly opening Wider, wider, to meet the great ocean With that soft intake of breath and then we would Just lie there, unfurling our tired wings, Gathering our dreams in pools, and basking In the radiance of a universe Composed of the flecks of gold which fell off Our eyes when we finally learned to see.

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after the whale madelyn peterson

“THE INUPIAT Eskimo village of Kaktovik, Alaska, is on Barter Island, just offshore from the mainland. Once a trading center for whalers and hunters who plied the frigid waters along the Arctic coast, today Kaktovik is a village of prim, oil-heated houses, wide, gravel streets, a large, fully-staffed school, a police station and a power plant. All of it has been made possible by tax revenues generated from the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, about 100 miles to the west, during the past three decades of oil production on the North Slope. – Scott S. W. Wallace, from “ANWR: THE GREAT DIVIDE,” Smithsonian Oct. 2005 Every autumn, Aga dreamt in Blue. Blue and Gray, slowarcing shapes and long-moaning water songs. The whale hunt always began near September, when the tundra-scrub turned golden-red like the rust on the motors of the fishing boats. At dawn Aga and her mother would help push the hunting party in the umiaqs, silent sealskin boats, into the ice water. The men moved like whispers over the sea, birdlike in their white parkas. Mama would let Aga skip school for the whole day to wait for them to come back. Aga and

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her mother skipped pebbles and listened for the slushy plunks, combed through each other’s baleen-black hair, and pressed their ears to the cold gravel beach to listen for the whale-songs coming closer. With the left side of her face pressed to the pebbles, Aga would squeeze her squid-ink eyes shut and hum, grunting and squealing in songs that aren’t meant to come from human children’s mouths. By dusk, nearly all of Kaktovik would flock to the shoreline, full of hungry waiting. The umiaqs drifted back to the village, propelled by a yawn from the heavy sun, trailing the whale by the harpoon-strings. The beach ruffled into a flurry of harvest-songs and bustle and cheers, the children would dance like bobbing shorebirds, and Aga would run into the bloody tide to be the first to meet the whale. Her father would toss her up in the air and sit her on his shoulders, and from her perch she leaned gently into the whale. Her palms pressed on either side of its great ear-bone, and she kissed its rough, briny cheek. When the sun had set and the village was still elbow-deep in whale fat, Aga would run into the kitchen and fill grandmother’s old bowls with the soft blubber-oil. She lit a wick in the middle of each bowl and lined the beach with the whale-lamps while the adults slowly carved the beached bowhead into wheelbarrows full of chopped muktuk blubber and meat. When their bones ached after hours of night-frost and hard labor, the moon would set and the lamps would burn out. The village, glistening in blood-dark oil and sweat, would trickle back indoors and fall asleep. Aga, though, would not sleep. She would hold herself awake, watch the stars fade over the water from the silty windowsill. Listen to the ice slosh against the hulls. Watch the dawn play shapes inside the whale’s ribs. Hum. This year, Labor Day came and went, the umiaqs drift out and drift back in, but the whales have

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disappeared and the lamp-bowls are empty. Last night Aga dreamt in Black, slick-stain Black that screeched through the Blue and Gray. She woke abruptly: the biting smell of mossy fishnets and fraying rope, burning kerosene, stale rubber boots, metal on skin, grief. Sharp and violent. It pushed her off her pillow and tossed the covers off her little legs. She ate her cheerios without milk this morning. Yesterday it had curdled the moment it touched her lips. Her mother was still in bed. She’d been sleeping later and later lately, ever since the sea let itself in last winter, after the last hunt. After the barges and rigs landed on the horizon line, after the word Conoco started showing up in the mail, on village paychecks, between her father’s tight lips. When his boat had come back empty for the fifth morning in a row, Father clomped into the house, one-two, and flocks of krill spilled and scuttled from his boot-soles. The bread box, the washing machine, the butter—every room swam. Pink-shelled colonies now crowded the plumbing and kept Aga company in the bathtub. Tiny crustaceans kissed the backs of her knees and the tips of her toes while she washed her hair. When she dunked her head underwater, they whispered “swim, sister, daughter, swim…” Aga stood barefoot in the doorframe after breakfast, watching the morning work on the shoreline. She liked to see her father smile with the other men in the village as they haul in their nets. She stepped into her mother’s boots and stumbled down to the shore. She lay with her belly on the gravel and pressed her ear to the ground, but the ocean sounds were radio-static metallic, whirring and screeching, drowning out her ebbing whalesongs. Too quiet, too far. Aga is not in school today. A pair of muck-boots

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A fter the w h a le

and a nightgown are tangled in a nest of kelp by the umiaqs. Her mother is standing in the tide, singing and singing, waiting for the reply.

“The 1988 exploratory oil well drilled by Conoco, the only well ever drilled in the [Arctic National Wildlife] Refuge, …was drilled just off-shore of the mainland and only a few miles from Kaktovik. Due largely to the noise from the well, no bowhead whale was taken that year by the village, the only year in memory when that was the case.” – Arctic Voices, 2003, Arctic Cultures at Risk

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Another Dimension H i l a ry Pa i n t e r 35 mm photograph

Maybe Eleanor Ellis

Breathe in. I’ve always been fond of the missing gap, the one that you speak but don’t hear. Maybe. May be. And then again it may not. The subjunctive climbs into your lungs like springtime pollen, doubt painted in sticky yellow across the field. It’s in this month that I am most certain of what I am not. The words collect in your sinuses. I sneeze in the doorway. Pollen drips down my throat, when it is not a time for words, and I want to argue with the wheat and the high grass on the side of the highway. You tell me that the reason you cannot breathe is because you have life in your lungs. Because a sticky anther—not a game animal but the rearing head of a poppy— was brushed by the foot of a bumblebee, because colony collapse was not complete, because this fellow cross-gartered with half a seed could not bear his burden, and some of it was taken on the wind waiting for an ovary—not medical but botanical. Why are the words for our bodies medical anatomical physiological?

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I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t swallow the sounds of my species. The great gust of language robs me of my words. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s May, and I can breathe. You do breathe. Even though this is called the indicative tense, it calms. I do. I breathe. I act on verbs and every spring my lungs open to the onslaught of pollen, which is looking for a different organ of a different organism: the round green ball of the upside-down baby rattle sticky stigma like the gooey fingers of an infant, that catch the yellow stuff and know it is life, know it is life in a way my lungs cannot. They know it is life, and slide it down the style to the ovary. Slide it down the style, with style, to the end of the rattle that we do not grasp we with our fumbling finger words medical anatomical physiological but the plant grasps it. The plant grasps the yellow ball, ball meets egg, fuses. Throw out the words that stick like walnut skins between your teeth gamete zygote wintertime raincoat May it be.

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Untitled A n nabe l l e Ma rc ov ic i digital double exposure

Wynnewood KATIE HAAHEIM

I live daily with your weight on my brain stem heavy heart, sad heart the pressure surrounding my legs the sensation perhaps that I have too much blood the wet and meat of lips assuages but does not unravel the knots of guilt that I have knit for myself, I wear it around my neck, sky aches sky too big water pushes itself endlessly through landscapes creating its own architecture, creating spaces that were not there before and I wonder how to do that, how to craft it— heavy heart, sad heart take heed—the heft will ease

into the wide and accepting expanse of the air

– October 6 th

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North Carolina Matt Raymond

...he overheard that there was a farm where men stood erect, backs unfolding like stalks of corn flush against the perishing sun, and they fed from the dirt, wearing acres in the gaps of their smiles.

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Flash of Life Cade Beck silver gelatin print

Men in Red Coats Alex Pearson

Miles felt a hand come down on his right shoulder and as he turned and looked up his gaze met Quint’s grin, which broke into a, “Sup bud.” The usual. Ear to ear. Miles started to rise from his chair but Quint’s hand was firm on his shoulder. “Naw, you just stay sitting. Be back in a sec,” Quint walked over to the coffee house bar each step clanging on the wooden boards. Miles stared at the back of Quint’s shirt. Painted flowers. Hawaiian shirt. Silly design. Man’s got a great job but he can’t dress. Wonder if I should wait. Hold, coffee is still warm. Got to drink slowly. Yep, that’s it. Sips, not gulps. Make. It. Last. Sip sip sip, down into my belly. Wake me up. Can’t never remember how to do these things. The door behind Miles opened again. The cool morning air breezed by his face as a man in a red windbreaker walked in. Odd to wear a coat like that in the summer. Suppose it’s cooler in the morning, but he’ll be soaked by midday. Maybe he needs it. What is he? Somali, Ethiopian? East African. Lots of them round here now. Sit outside. All day, sit sit sit, chat chat chat. All the time here. What to talk about all the time doing nothing but sitting. Must have jobs, immigrants are those hard workers. No factories round here. As the man reached the counter Quint turned and walked back toward Miles. From under his arm Quint pulled the small leather board case and placed it down

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onto the table. Ah there it is. The weekly duel. Quint sat down lazily gazing about the coffee house and suddenly his neck snapped and he stared straight at Miles. Here we go. “Well, dude, how you been doing?” Deep, deep into my eyes. Deep focus. “Good, good.” Give me about two hours… “Little slow this morning I see.” Little slow yourself. Morning people, plague upon this earth. “Well you know me, not really the morning person.” Morning person. Mourning person. Bury them all. “No you never have been, man, Kim always says to me, Early Bird. You got to get that worm. So yeah, you got to get on that early stuff, I’ve been up at six every day this week and my week, my week has been pure excellence.” Goooooooood, good good good good, good. For you. Shit, Kim. Wait. “That is good to hear, what’s, what was going on?” Tell me of excellence. “Well you know, work has been just fantastic, I’m on that new ad campaign, it comes out next week.” What was that…bananas or was it scented baby cream or… banana scented body cream. Crème de la Mer. Crème de la l’urine. Tell him. Wait. “You been on that for a long time.” “Yep, almost three months, it’s a big ass one.” Wait. Say something. “Huh. You want to start?” “Man, you know me, lets go.” Quint unlatched the case and swung the sides open, laying it flat on the table, revealing the backgammon board within. Head to head. Point to point. Wonder if he will throw the board on the ground. More likely at me. Spinning it will crush my skull. “You want whites or blacks.” White, black, day, night, yin, yang. “Doesn’t matter.”

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Quint began collecting the white checkers. The man in the red jacket moved toward the door with a small steaming cup held firmly in his hand. They must need the jackets. This weather’s got to be cold to them. Shivering on seventy degree nights. Balmy mornings even. Miles collected the black checkers and started placing them on the points going left from right. 5-3-5-2. Five-three-five-two. Five plus three plus five plus two. Only two of us. Telling him here will be best. Wait. “Wanna roll for it.” “Sure, sure.” Quint and Miles each took one die in their palms. They rolled, each on the right side of the board. Miles tracked his die. Three. Poor show of a number. Six. “Looks like I lucked out,” said Quint. He scooped up both dice into the dice cup. Shaking the cup with his right hand and using his left palm as a lid and let the cubes fall upon the board. Dance wonderful. Spin. Like that ballerina on TV. Only sharper and faster. Quite the dance of dice. “Ha-ha,” Quint called out, “4-4, wonderful roll, wonderful. If only Kim were here to see this! We played last night, she beat me and said I couldn’t roll for shit. See me now.” Yeah I see you now. Kim, shit. Tells me tell him and plays games with him acting all nonchalant and letting me stab the back. Quint moved his checkers. Advancing fast. The usual strategy. Gonna wait. Have to wait. Here we go. Miles collected the dice. He felt them bouncing about within the dice cup as it shook in his palms. Don’t spill. He let them fall onto the board. Doubledoubledouble. The door opened and another man in a red windbreaker came in, walking towards the bar. Black slacks this time. Must be hot in those clothes. Bet he got all those jackets for his friends. No screwing them over. In this

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heat hot drinks and jackets. Weird. “Is there some kind of club meeting?” “What?” Miles asked while moving his checkers. Club Who? “All the, you know,” Quint jerked his thumb toward the man in the red jacket, “all the African dudes in the red jackets.” African dudes. Noisy jackets. Nosey people. Quint reached down and collected the dice. “It’s, um, they’re Ethiopian I think,” Miles said while turning his head to look out the window behind him. Several men in red jackets sat outside the coffee house in the early morning sun sipping steaming drinks. “Don’t know where they got the jackets.” Goodwill maybe. Or they all work at the same fast food place. Nice sunglasses. “Well yeah what’s the deal. Are they starting some kind of secret society?” Quint let the dice fall. Not so secret but they sure are society. “Donno.” The dice tumbled. Roll, roll, roll in the hay. Ouch. “Again!” Quint exclaimed, “This is my game, wow, 5-5. Huh, let me see…You’re gonna have to amp it up if you’re gonna keep up with this.” Wow, cool your jets. Too early for this kind of thing. How do you tell him. Got to tell him. “Clearly,” Miles mumbled while picking up the dice. He rolled. Every week to catch up. Listen to you squeal. “You come here much, you know during the week?” Quint asked. Slice of that grin on his face. Getting at something. Knows? Hold on. “Not usually,” Miles returned, “Why?” “Well, its nothing much, really.” Miles advanced a checker. Wait. Let him finish. “What.” “Its just Kim came here Wednesday, told me she

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was meeting her friend Emily here,” Quint grabbed the dice and placed them in the cup. He knows. He knows. He must know. Quint swirled the dice around inside of the cup. Like a drink. Fine wine. Waiting for the kill. “But Emily happened to call me at the office that day, she was sick, never came here. Later Kim said they met.” Mustknowmustknowmustknow. Don’t fade, don’t blink. “Dude, that sounds like more than nothing.” “I know, its just, well, it sounds silly but, I trust Kim. I trust her a lot, but I still can’t make sense of it.” Quint extended his arm holding the cup and the dice out for a moment. Going to smack me with that cup. Clobbering me over the head with the chair, my brains oozing out all over this floor. Then he will leave. Triumphant. Wait. Hold. “I mean, it was probably something innocent, did you confront her about it?” “No, I just didn’t want to seem all bat-shit crazy, you know, and I guess I’m kind of worried.” What is his play. Waiting for me to confess. Confess to it probably. That’s what you want. “Don’t be man. That last time, at the Slew, you guys seemed happier than ever together.” “Yeah well, I feel like stranger things have happened between couples that ‘have it all together.’ Nobody wants to find out they’re being lied to.” Pants on fire. Strung up and hanging from a telephone wire. Wait. “Dude, I just wouldn’t worry about it. I’m sure there’s some-” “You know, my birthday is coming up, it’s in like two weeks, I bet that’s all it was, she was planning something right, probably with you.” What the. “Hey, I don’t know anything about it.” “Sorry, you don’t need to spoil the surprise.

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Look, if you really don’t know anything, you don’t need to worry, I suppose sometimes I can be a little dramatic.” Guess that’s an understatement. Shit tellhim don’t wait shitshitshit. “I mean, no worries man, you got to worry about these things otherwise they kinda just, sneak up on you.” You are the sneak. “Yeah.” Quint let the dice fly out of the cup and onto the board. Everything moves along. “So,” Quint said, “can we talk about something a little less crazy? You gone diving lately?” Need to. Wait. Diving. Going into garbage and bringing back the crap. “Well, actually yeah, last night.” In the slime: fingers, knock against steel. Echoing loud in stinky city sludge. “With who?” Miles rolled the dice. Stuck, can’t advance any. Shit. With who? With whom. With Kim. Only with her. But not diving. Diving alone. “Nobody, just, by myself, you thinking about getting back into that?” “No, no, just always interesting hearing what you find on those dives. Where’d you go?” Quint rolled and advance a checker. Wants to know where I go. Follow me. “I went to Chocolati. They had some baker’s chocolate and a few pastry’s that were still good.” Tasty tasty in my stomach. “Cool very cool…You ever think, maybe its kind of not responsible to do that?” Miles picked up the dice slowly and rolled. Not responsible, not appropriate. Who are you telling me this. Trying and trying not to break you not to say how she called me up and met me out without you and then told me to hold her and come over and feel her so she could be happy and feel safe again and I did feel and I did come and now I’m needing to say needing to tell need you need truth but I don’t want to.

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“Do what?” Stuck again. Not advance. Shit shit. “Dumpster dive. I mean, you have a job, money, you don’t need the food or the junk.” Another man wearing a red windbreaker came in. Red again. Bash your head again. Want me to tell. Don’t have to wait. “Quint, I don’t really want to—” —Listen to all your bullshit sometimes. Yapyapyippityyap went the little dog. “It was fun when we were just a couple of stupid college idiots but now it’s kind of a lifestyle for you.” Lifestyle crap. Fine got to just tell. “Quint it really doesn’t matter.” Got to, will tell. Crush you with this. Beat you. “I mean, I guess not. It’s just that…Kim and I have been trying to set you up,” Quint rolled the dice. Kim. What would she want. To tell you. To not tell you. I can end your lifestyle. “I know it’s silly but really who wants to date a trash boy.” Destroy you. “Is that really what you think of me?” The door opened behind Miles. Another red jacket brigade. “No, no of course not, but you see Kim’s right, it’s hard for a nice girl to get around that at first.” She said that. Nice girl like that, moaning round like that. Ha, nice girl plenty. Miles rolled the dice. Fine, you brought this on yourself. “I don’t mean to be pushy, just trying to help you out here bud.” “Well, now that I know how you feel about it, I’ll probably keep it on the D-L,”said Miles as he pushed the dice towards Quint. Quint picked them up and tossed the dice without the cup and moved his final checker onto his side. Six black checkers remained on the board. Crush your world. “That’s not what I want—well hey, how’s it going?” Seeing Quint addressing someone outside of his line of

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vision, Miles turned his neck around towards the door. “Hi Quint, long time. Miles, Miles how have you been?” Mara. Little Mara, been so long. “Great just great. How about you Mara.” Mara turned and smiled at Miles. “You know just wonderful, got this little thing on the way,” Mara gave her enlarged stomach a rub. “Wow, congratulations,” Quint said. Baby, growing inside. “Well I won’t keep you from your game, but it was good seeing you two.” “Bye, Mara.” She turned and left for the coffee bar. “Wow,” Quint said ducking his head low to the board and keeping his eyes pinned on the bursting woman’s back, “Mara. Has to have been over ten years since last time I saw her. She looks ready to pop.” “Yeah, I mean, high school…” Long lost baby. “When did you two date?” Quint bore off two of his checkers. Dated? On and off. She wanted to keep it. Had to leave though. “I was a senior, she was a sophomore.” “Didn’t end well, did it?” Bad, like being torn. Emptied out. No more coffee. No more sips. “No, no it did not.” “Well, at least she’s moved on, I mean of course after all that time. Look Miles, I didn’t mean to be a dick about that diving stuff. You know I’m just looking out for you.” Always are. Always were. “Me too, Quint, I’m looking out for you.” Three games later Miles left the coffee house alone. Walking past empty patio chairs he headed towards the bus stop. Honk honk, noise all out. How do they talk out here. Miles glanced across the street and saw a man in

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large torn pants urinating on a building. Not afraid of the cars or the people passing by. Just there for all to see. Drip drip drip, spilling off into the street like a faucet. Leaky cocks. Want to spill my head out on the street like that. Just like that. Drop all that waste. He kept walking. Reaching the stop he stood next to the sign. A trashcan was adjacent to the stopâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bench. Well may as well. Miles walked over to the can and peered inside. Old milkshake. Leaky can. Hey there. Looking back up at him was a wrinkled mess of red. Bright and shiny. Swish. Miles reached into the can and pulled out a red windbreaker. Well here it is. Here is how I will escape. At the deserted stop Miles held the windbreaker by its neck and brushed it off. No smudge or grease or stain. Be one. In hot midmorning sun Miles put on the red jacket. Work your magic. He lifted up his arms. Make me one of them. Miles looked up into the sun and closed his eyes. Far far far away in a desert I am one of them.

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Margaret William Newman-Wise silver gelatin print

The Art of Peeling Apples Gaea campe

For my grandmother (January 29, 1914 - August 30, 2000) You taught me the art of peeling apples, how to hold the knife close and press the blade into the green skin, carving the sharp metal slowly so the peel would fall like feathers from a bird, naturally, willingly. Only you could arc the knife around the fruit so the skin would slip seamlessly, unspooling like a ream of fabric, and leaving the apple in your palm, undressed. The white light of their flesh never ceased to disarm me, like a secret eavesdropped, the way I knew you imagined dying to be like stepping out of tight shoes, soft tissue lifting from its mold.

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Big Sky Cuntry Chastitty Westwind

Virginia Lamb stood above the raging creek, swelled with spring run-off waters and pondered her next course of action. Sinner’s Gulch lay on the other side, and she knew she had to make it there by sundown to hock her grandfather’s pocket watch and get the money to Slade Montgomery or he could foreclose on her family’s mortgaged ranch. The Lazy Q sprawled 150 acres across Montana’s Sunshine Valley and if she failed to pay Slade, her family could lose all they had been working for—heck, she had been working for—over the past seven years. A bead of sweat dripped down the back of Virginia’s neck as the unseasonably warm April sun beat down on her copper hair. She had been riding her mare, Penny (also copper), for the better part of the day, and she just wanted to reach Sinner’s Gulch but was unsure if she would be able to make it across the torrential waters of the usually tranquil Beaver Creek. “Well, Penny, it looks like we’re going to have to get wet.” Penny regarded her mistress scornfully, but Virginia knew that Penny would follow her anywhere. After last winter when Penny stayed by her side when they were snowed into the trapper’s cabin for a whole week, the two had been inseparable. Virginia sighed deeply, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to make it across the creek in her heavy petticoats and corset. She began slowly removing her cornflower blue

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dress. The previously warm April air felt chilly as it nipped her sun-kissed shoulders but she pressed on, sliding out of her petticoats and unlacing her corset. Finally she stood naked save her boots, spurs, and Stetson. Using a stray bit of rope, Virginia lashed her clothing to Penny’s saddle and braced herself for the crossing. No amount of mental preparation could prepare her for the bone-numbing waters. She gritted her teeth and struggled to hold back a cry of surprise. Her boots sank into the muddy riverbed, and soon the water caressed her slender waist. “Come on, Penny,” Virginia called. Penny remained on the bank, whinnying nervously. Virginia tugged at her horse’s lead rope, urging her to enter the water, but Penny refused. “Goddamn stubborn animal,” she chided in jest, smiling at her willful steed. Suddenly Penny’s ears pricked up and she whinnied in terror. Virginia wheeled around, almost losing her balance in the undulating waters, and then nearly fell down again when she saw the reason for Penny’s fear. A sow grizzly, the fiercest member of the animal kingdom, stood above her on the riverbank and roared. Virginia’s heart caught in her throat, and she dropped Penny’s lead rope. Penny balked and surged into the rain-choked stream, preferring the danger of the crossing to facing the 400 pounds of teeth and claws. Virginia cursed, well aware that her shotgun was in the scabbard on Penny’s saddle. Penny fought her way through the water and had reached the other side before Virginia could reach the lead rope. The horse struggled up the opposite bank and began pacing up and down the sagebrush, torn between selfpreservation and her desire to save Virginia. Virginia turned away from her horse and back towards the grizzly, who was now lumbering slowly towards

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the water’s edge. Virginia backed farther into the creek and felt the water swell around her heaving breast. There was a rustling in the bushes at the sow’s feet, and two bear cubs emerged. “That would explain why she’s so aggressive,” thought Virginia, but maternal sentiment was soon replaced with mortal dread. At once two shots rang out. The grizzly turned her attention from the woman in the water, sniffing the air for the source of the noise. A silhouetted horse and rider galloped towards the perilous scene, bearing down upon the bears. The grizzly seemed to pause for a long, horrible moment, before turning and loping away, her cubs at her heels. Virginia, suddenly conscious of her bare breasts, ducked down into the raging creek, biting her plump lips as the cold engulfed her shapely frame. The shock caught her off guard and she lost her footing, finding herself being carried downstream. “Son of a gun!” she yelled, realizing that she was in danger of being pulled down the stream towards the waterfall half a mile downriver. Penny whinnied in fear, yet again. Just then Virginia felt a coarse length of rope encircling her dainty waist and jerking tight around her body. “Hold on, now!” the rider called down to her. “I’ll have you out in no time!” “Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” she thought. “Just my luck.” But she found the taut rope in the water and held on. The cowboy, for now she could see that he was indeed a man, had looped the lasso over his saddle horn and begun to drag her toward him. Virginia’s feet met the firm bank at the edge of the creek, and she was able to haul her body out of the water now. She straightened up with as much dignity as she could muster, feeling a moment of satisfaction when she realized

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she had managed to at least hold on to her hat. The cowboy regarded her as she slipped his calf rope over her supple hips. She was more beautiful than he had supposed when he first heard the horse’s whinnies and the grizzly’s roar. She was all fiery red hair and muscular limbs, the kind that only come from working a homestead. And yet despite her strong figure, she possessed a feminine delicacy reminiscent of the ladies back East. Something about the way water droplets dusted her freckled shoulders as she shook the water from her mane arrested him. She looked up and made eye contact with him and he felt a jolt of passion as he met her unabashed emerald gaze. “I’m not in the habit of needing to be saved,” Virginia said, “But I’ll thank you anyways. May I know the name of my rescuer?” She seemed conscious of her nudity, but was stubbornly pretending that boots and a hat constituted appropriate attire for a young Montanan lady. “The name’s Cody Steele. I heard your horse and saw the grizzly and thought someone needed a hand. I had no idea it would be-” “What, a woman?” Virginia challenged. “Well, you don’t see a lot of ladies riding alone through grizzly country. Don’t you know they’re awful ornery this time of year?” Virginia glared. “I didn’t have a choice. I have to get to Sinner’s Gulch before nightfall.” She regarded him haughtily, this young cowboy who thought he knew what was best for her. Although she was grateful to be fished out of the creek, she didn’t want to deal with an impertinent young cowpoke, especially not one as handsome as this. She looked at him frankly now, his six feet two inches of muscle, the curl of brown chest hair peeking out of the top of his pearl snap. He dismounted from his bay stallion and pushed his

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well-worn hat back from his brow. Virginia nearly gasped when she saw his sapphire eyes, the exact color of the precious gems coming out of the Yogo Sapphire Mine that was Sinner’s Gulch’s lifeblood. “What’s a pretty young thing like you going to a place like Sinner’s Gulch for?” he asked, taking a step towards her. “None of your business,” Virginia shot back, hands on her hips. “But if you must know, I’ve got to sell my grandfather’s watch before sundown to save the family ranch. And now on top of that, I’ve got to catch my horse so I can get my clothes and my .22 back.” “You can handle a gun?” Cody said incredulously. “There’s a lot more that I can handle,” Virginia retorted. “And I aim to. Now if you don’t mind, I’ll be on my way.” She turned, not looking forward to plunging back into the river to go after Penny. “Wait,” Cody said. “You must be freezing. Least I can do is give you my sheepskin while you’re going after your horse and clothes.” He removed his jacket and took another step towards her, his eyes never leaving hers. Virginia was suddenly aware that his body was only a few inches from her own, and she could feel strange heat creeping into her body in spite of the fact that she was still cold from the creek. Cody reached an arm behind Virginia’s head and gently set the jacket on her tanned shoulders. A mischievous look crept into his piercing blue eyes and Virginia felt herself being pulled towards him. Cody pushed a lock of her hair from her face, not losing his touch on her shoulder. “Th-thank you for the jacket. I feel much warmer,” she managed to stammer, entranced by the strong line of his chiseled jaw and his easy smile, as her heart leapt beneath her breast. “And the rescue. If you hadn’t come along, I

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don’t know what would have happened. I just wish there was something I could do for you.” “Well,” Cody said, suddenly serious. “Maybe there is.” He traced her lips with his thumb, and in that moment Virginia forgot her initial dislike for the young buck, and all she wanted to do was press her soft body against him. Unable to wait any longer, she stood on tiptoe and kissed him. Cody stiffened for a moment, but then he passionately returned the kiss. Without further delay, he pulled the jacket from her shoulders and let it fall to the ground. Virginia began unsnapping his shirt, starting at the top and working towards his hard abdomen. The shirt fell away from Cody, revealing a landscape of abdominal and pectoral muscles, forested with soft, downy hair. His hands left her body and hair and unbelted his denim work pants, his longhorn belt buckle jangling as his pants dropped to the ground. He stepped out of them, retaining his boots in mirror of her own. She laughed as he caught her body and gently pulled her to the soft grass dotted with the first wildflowers of spring. Virginia felt the push of his manhood against her thigh, and he kissed her hair and nibbled her earlobe. She reached for him, drawing his hot, pulsing spear towards her body, spreading for his delicious touch. Cody tenderly caressed her nipples, still hard from the icy waters. As he entered her, she experienced a moment of passing pain as he pierced her maidenhead, which was quickly overcome by her desire to know the length of him. He pressed into her, deeply, oh so deeply, and she moaned in spite of herself. They locked eyes for a heartbeat before he mined the depths of her (much like one would mine for sapphires), and she felt herself instinctively meeting his thrusts. Waves of pleasure like the lapping of the creek

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enveloped her. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Virginia,â&#x20AC;? he whispered into her delicate ear (somehow intuiting her name), and they felt themselves becoming oneâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;one body, one heart. They were soaring like the prairie falcon over the Montana valley, their passion bigger than the Big Sky. As they approached their climax, higher than Granite Peak, Virginia knew that her life would never be the same again now that she knew what it was to love, and to be loved in return.

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Reichstag sa r a r a sm usse n digital photograph

In the Greenhouse M ic h a e l a Gi a not t i polaroid emulsion transfer

On Public Lands gaea Campe

Outside of Tularosa, New Mexico All night giant machines excavate the earth, prodding probing, without caffeine or encouragement, without the things it takes to coax the human body to labor on. They do not stop even when the sun rises, a saffron bulb smoldering on the horizon. To them, it matters littleâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; that furnace of light growing bigger, earth reeling silently in orbit.

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Burning House Sa m A l de n brush ink and photoshop colors

Construction Worker l i ly i dl e polaroid

Words in Edgewise Rose Cotter

That god-granted gift of gab that you Fling About can only mean one thing. And if your mother had not taught you to Spurn Theocracy well weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d all know the truth. As it is the Patron Saint of One-Way Streets has never been quite so tall.

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dear uncle, madelyn peterson

I am particularly fond of the ring in your left ear, the way you wish to say, I am more than the middle-aged, heterosexual, cisgendered, white, male, father of a city-suburb family with a 9-5 and the common hunger of the employed. I remember what you nearly said the last time we met, between our lists of dead poets and our musings on love, I am more than the self I sacrificed for the sake of self-sacrifice. I read the rest in the wrinkled skin around your wedding ring and the imprint you left in the lawn.

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I could have toppled temples.

I could have held my muse.

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Meditation of Hanged Man Yonata n A Di n E va ns 35 mm silver gelatin print

Mission San Miguel Ma ddi son C oons silver gelatin print

Ecological Ranch Dining Room, Peru Jac k Laza r photograph

Elegy Sabrina Wise

Your voice echoed through the tiled building you called home, there next to the bakery where California corners Nineteenth and the Airporter wheezes to a stop to let passengers slip off, into the rain. Wrinkled speech, rising and falling, rolled r and breath around tâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; that was how people spoke once they aged, or so I believed because of you, until I learned years later this city was only your refuge, that at home youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d been trapped in an elevator, boarded windows to bullets, mourned a child, that youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d fled across the ocean and landed here, where you rattled like a pebble and worked yourself into the place, year upon year upon year, determined to win it over. Long before I met you, you came to the apartment with the parking garage and the white-black tile checkering the kitchen. What could I have understood as I curled on your floor and half-listened to your stories about Hana the elephant, my mind roaming the city that thrummed outside your window? I listened to the rain. It was certain, untiring,

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like your voice when it crested â&#x20AC;&#x153;The End.â&#x20AC;? Six years ago, the last time I heard of you, your sister told me you started art school: 98, hunched over, loping down San Francisco avenues toward a studio or a streetcar as your adopted city glimpsed you and fell in love.

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Mao the Teenager John-Henry Heckendorn

At the bottom of the trash bin by his bed 2 condoms: one with a puddled collection of semen dripping onto the tissues (not Kleenex) the other ripped and dry an auspicious first attempt. failure after all is a critical part of progress

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With Care in Hopes Ma r i e von h a f f t e n digital photograph

To the slight change in seasons from fall to winter Maren Schiffer

You’re subtle in your moderately altered clothing: darker, greener, aloof in the mornings. You think you go unnoticed like the rest, with gradual gain in dew a blur in your spectrum from brittle straw to oaks creaking with the weight of excess water. But I hear you in the hum of a kettle piercing like it wasn’t before. A drop in degrees makes the difference, invokes silence in morning’s waking transition everything stirred by the climactic tune of water warming. The restlessness of the night before: flickers of sparsely spaced street lamps, whimpering chirps of a raccoon as he digs through dog food, the turn of a page from across the hall, now apparent in the drowsy silence of habitual beginnings. My day has been started by someone else— the preparation of a pot of tea a gentle reminder of devotion’s breadth,

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only audible in your dominating chill. You make the flick of a kettle much less mechanical than the creak of any dampened door.

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Cuzco Alpaca E m i ly c or n e l i us digital photograph

Untitled Ru t h Hwa ng ink on paper

Salvage Olivia Mitchell

When it starts, you are slow, halcyon lingering before an intake of breath. The garden behind our house is starting to wilt, and you collect the remaining grasses in glass jars, lining them along the windowsills, you dry-press flowers in an outdated encyclopedia, carefully recording their scientific names in the margins. The next week, the grasses turn yellow and lose their seeds, they trail everywhere in the house, clinging in blonde thickets to the soles of our feet and the rug in the doorway. You start writing again, installing your typewriter at the attic window as a shrine (or reliquary). The air is grey and clean and the space heater thrumming warmth against your bare feet is easy and forgetful; you stress the word forgetful as you describe it to me. You line the walls with family quilts passed to us from your great aunt and hum jazz standards that contradict the rhythm of your typing. In the rooms below you, I am salvage and storytelling, the margins and the garden, counting parts of you that will outlive me: the shape of you, your bones, which like caricatures of your misadventures, will endure seasons and decay, sink into the soil and remainâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;mimetic headstonesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; waiting to be excavated in some distant future. When you are read, as an illuminated text, the science of

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your reconstructed skeleton will be an archive, the specific spread of your hips, which welcomed her twice, and then a third time, the way you became round and rosy and joyful, wanting to be your motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s daughter, New Yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s morning when you slammed your hand in the car door, the palpable shudder of your lungs that winter, written long hand across the inside of your ribs.

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Untitled K i l e y wol f f screws and plastic mesh

Yoga Ma di son M u n n acrylic painting

It’s About Time Alex Pearson

“Purple Haze, all in my eyes Don’t know if it’s day or night You got me blowin, blowin my mind Is it tomorrow, or just the end of time?” – Jimi “Lorraine, you are my density...” – Crispin Glover “But there was time!” – Burgess Meredith —I stopped believing that time exists. But once upon a time I did think, just as most everyone else does, that one event moves fluidly into the next, an endless flow of cause and effect, one generation proceeding into the next, merging and giving way, then fading into memory. The fading is like a slow death where the edges and boundaries are blurred. You don’t always know when that first moment is but you certainly know after when something is already dead. All things die given enough geologic time—we even let stars die. But do all things age? The process of growing old, over time. Is it deterioration or is it accumulation? Does a star get wise and whimsical or does its memory rot as it sinks into senility until even its own molecules can no longer stand each other. Stars I cannot speak for, but I did have two great-grandparents. Well, actually I had eight, but two of them I knew. My great-grandfather, who nearly reached a hundred, had a body that was worked on by time. Dangly ears, sagging, and a jaw slacked out and

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stretched, as though by too much talking. He says the most amazing invention during his lifetime—a life that covers the invention of jet-planes, cars, computers and iPods—was the television. Flickers of light on a screen, he says, that as he sits in his living room can show him, he says, things happening at that very instant on the other side of the planet. Signals relayed and transmitted project a square cut out of another place’s reality. As he aged, his memories left him, but he keeps a good humor about himself, asking, more for you than for him, ‘Now who are you again?’ and ‘Where are you livin’ again?’ He meets the end with grace and humility and humor. I miss him. He aged quite well. Ageing may be defined by a collection of firsts. First words, first steps, first days, first crush, first kiss, first love, first job, first paycheck, first failure, first, first first—my first memory is from when I was about three years old. I am small at the time and living with my parents in a small apartment in a neighborhood at the north end of Seattle. The apartment is on the ground floor. It has an orange carpet, with an intense glow like the sunset after a particularly smoggy day. My mother is in the tiny kitchen standing over a pot of boiling water, cooking something in the realm of spaghetti. My father is reading in a scratchy chair in the next room. I carefully walk my way across orange and then linoleum and head outside to the backyard. That is a generous word. It is a little, enclosed area, maybe ten feet by ten feet, covered almost entirely in concrete. My tiny shoes scrape plastic against the hard ground. Walking is still relatively new. There is a small area at the very back of the cement square that is raised. My father has planted two bleeding hearts and their stems reach out over the exposed soil carrying their precious loads—their own seeming aortas—dripping, dripping, yet frozen in mid-drop. I am only about the height of the

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I t ’ s abou t t i m e

cement wall that holds back the dirt so, reaching up with tiny fingers and a leg, I scale the wall as light glances off into my eyes, sparkling off smooth rocks inlayed into the rough cement. On top, my hand touches the pink blooms that hang from the flower’s drooping stem. Pudgy fingers follow the shoot, along its curve and downward, back to the dark earth. They grasp at the bits of soil with a lack of dexterity and grace. There is a squish between my middle finger and thumb. A bug has been killed. My beginning smeared with its end. I look closer at the soil and see a host of bugs. They are tiny and greasy and coil up into balls when I touch them. I think they are called potato bugs, but actually they are known as pill bugs. They are brittle in my fingers and they remind me of a basketball. I eat several. I will ardently believe that when their digested ends leave my end that I can look down and still recognize them. There it is. My first memory. One kind of beginning, but really my beginning was earlier, I suppose. When I was born. When I was younger I whole-heartedly believed that I could remember being born. This is no exaggeration, I actually believed I could remember the experience and would brag about it to people in slacks who held drinking glasses. It would take years of selfreflection but I finally convinced myself that I had created this memory out of a firm desire to be listened to. Selfdeception is not beyond the mind’s ability. But I think that I’ve misled you. My beginning could be traced back further from my birth, though things get political from there— needless to say, beginnings are controversial; narratives are controversial, though we don’t always think of them in that way. The very moment of your ‘birth’ is very earnestly being debated amongst a very earnest set of people, mostly because we cannot remember anything, which is probably why I chose to start with my first memory, because it is

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subjective, because it is from me and no one can argue about it—unless, of course, I would have started with a memory that took place too early, like my birth then there might be a case… This is probably a good time to mention another of my firsts: my first film. I guess I really don’t know what the first movie I saw was, but the first one I remember seeing was Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future, on Christmas day, 1995. What makes this film particularly endearing is its presentation of time travel: it is the only film to create a perfect, airtight time loop. It successfully creates an endless loop of plot that wills Marty McFly to travel back in time and subsequently change his present by changing the past. All other films invite logical problems or conundrums regarding the changing of the future so drastically that the time-traveler could not have time traveled back in the first place. The best example is Back to the Future Part II, in the alternate “bizzaro” present, where Doc Brown has been committed to an insane asylum. If the Doc is in an insane asylum, how could he have built the time machine and sent back the “bizzaro” Marty? Another noteworthy problem is in John Cameron’s The Terminator, a film that most people regard as having an airtight loop. The gist: machines in the future are at war with humans, so they send back a killing machine to murder the mother of the human’s general, so that he won’t have ever been born. The problem: in concurrence with the “Grandfather Paradox,” if the general is alive in the future to begin with doesn’t that mean that the killing machine already failed at killing him, so why even bother sending anyone back? As I sit in my great-grandfather’s living room watching a film shot ten years prior, consider the watching of any film: what you see is the recording of many ‘times,’ cut and pasted together to create the illusion of one

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continuum. Many sections from the year 1985 were set out and elaborately staged to create Back to the Future. Ten years later I am watching that film; that collection of organized moments. And sixteen years later I am remembering that moment and piecing together moments of the memory. A dulled Christmas tree, the opening credits running over clocks, a singing fish on a mantle, burning tire tracks. One scene in a film can be the compilation of hundreds of different moments spaced out over months, and ultimately the result of possibly years of work. Several directors are famous for demanding endless takes and time to get what they want on the screen. Stanley Kubrick was known to shoot over a hundred takes for just one shot in a film; David Fincher is known to routinely make it into the fifties. William Friedkin spent six weeks shooting the ‘driving-backwards-on-the-freeway’ chase scene in To Live and Die in LA. Perspective: Bryan Singer filmed all of The Usual Suspects in five weeks. Hidden between those cuts is a lot of time. Segments and moments discarded and left out. In 1927 an Irish aeronautical engineer named J. W. Dunne publishes a book titled An Experiment with Time detailing his own experimentation into dreaming and precognition. Dunne believes that all moments of time exist at once and that the human mind merely organizes experience into a chronological narrative to make sense of the chaos. In more cliché terms, if time were a book all pages exist simultaneously but as ‘readers’ our minds are limited to only focusing on the book one page and one word at a time, creating the illusion of chronology. Dunne believes that dreams are the result of the mind chaotically interacting with other moments and that if dreams are remembered they can, in some proportion, detail future events and explain such experiences as déjà vu. This seems

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to oddly describe film and the organizational process that goes into its creation. All parts exist but they are assembled to make narrative. And I see this narrative flash before my eyes as I remember the first time I stay up on the roof of a friend’s cabin all night watching the stars slowly creep across a black slate of empty sky. I am thinking: some of these stars no longer exist. Some have long since burnt out and disappeared, but here is their light, a moment of their existence is frozen, hurtling across the abyss, and one speck of it has traveled those eons to be swallowed up in my eye and recorded and burned into my memory as a kind of gem to testify to its existence. And as I lay my head on rough shingles, I see that star’s entire life, frozen, like on cosmic celluloid from every angle, swooping and stretching off into eternity. If that is how our lives are strung together, hurtling through a void all in one crazed moment, why wouldn’t we want to organize such chaos? I think, on that roof, that planets do not emit light, but only reflect it back, absorbing bits. I think of one thing our planet does emit: radio waves. These signals of music and film, projected for entertainment and communication, will stretch forever out into the universe, existing as a frozen record of our living culture. And as I let my mind drift off into a dreamscape I know that I am dying and that I am being born and that I am living all in that one moment. And the stars fade as my vision fogs. And that is how—

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Untitled M ic h a e l Jorge nse n photogram fibers, silver gelatin

Kitty Games Ma ddi son C oons silver gelatin print

The Maltese Falcon ZoË Ballering

I. Unlike my albino grandmother, my mother was allowed to play outside. She wandered in the woods behind her house like a wild boy: bowl-cut, shirtless, and flat-chested. The female cousins of the Larsen clan played a simple game with a series of descending sticks—a ritual shedding of blood that marked the passage of the poor and emptyhanded. First, the new initiate held the longest branch to the beak of a snapping turtle. Shorter, shorter, shorter— this was the only rule. The weak ones wept when they reached the twig; my mother’s eyes were as dry as August. She was the leader, the first to lose a piece of her body to the game. Now that they are old and reasonable and curl their hair and smoke their cigarettes, there’s a secret, ninefingered wave among the women who survived. It’s a mark of pride to have mangled hands in Stoughton, Wisconsin. It means you were once a wild boy. II. Mo m m y m o ; m m y ifyourecieve t h i s iIi w;ant to c;ome h o m e M o mmy mommymy blood h; as go; ne

III. Before she had a heart attack, my albino grandmother went crazy. She rewrote Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese

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Falcon, except with different characters and an entirely new plot. Later, after she recovered, the doctors hypothesized that a slow-growing clot had blocked the blood flow to her brain. My mother kept the manuscript and if I act irrationally she sits me down and makes me read it through. My grandmother’s lunatic rambles are worse than my mother’s spankings; her punctuation puts me on edge, her syntax scares me. She sprouts semicolons in the center of her words, surrounds Is with uncapitalized sentinels, strings words together, strings them apart, and commits many ordinary spelling mistakes like recieve instead of receive. When I look up, my mother is waiting—she points at my head with one stubby digit. “Watch out,” she says. “We are full of bad blood.” IV. After the first taste, animals always yearn for more. She lost the tip of her right index finger and the next morning a sea of turtles covered her front lawn, snapping. She hopped onto their backs and skipped to the school bus. In the year of the first missing finger, Ms. Aaker taught a lesson on Lewis and Clark. It was Wisconsin—green pastureland spread low—and the teachers and the textbooks all told myths: “There were so many salmon in the Columbia that you could walk across their backs . . .” This was her destiny. By nine she was already practicing that important western hobby, back-walking to the school bus on the dull brown carapaces of a mass of blood-hungry turtles. V. Six months ago, I saw the prettiest blue thread. I took the seam ripper and I tried to pick it free. I wanted to send it to my grandmother so that she could embellish the ribbon on my birthday hat, but the strangest thing happened when I started to dig. The thread dissolved into a sticky red mess.

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My mother started screaming. Men came and took me to a clean white room that reminded me of my grandmother; a man-doctor stitched me through with an ugly color. So my mother has sent me to a Special Facility, but the black thread has been pulled out and the blue is back beneath the ragged red and I know I can’t get better until one thing stops changing into another. This must be what my mother meant. As soon as the blue thread stays blue when I pull it free—then I will be ready to go home. VI. Five minutes spent skipping rope in the dirt lot behind the schoolhouse and she was blistered red—so burnt that the bed sheets stuck to the back of her arms when she rose. Her mother—my great-grandmother—laved her with vinegar to cut the sting, then spanked her so she stung again. Eventually, to conserve vinegar, her parents ordered her to stay inside. During the long, damp summers of her adolescence, she went hat-mad to keep from going stircrazy, hammering brims and braiding rye in the workshopbedroom of the shaded basement. She peacocked through First Lutheran in a series of cloches, bergeres, birdcages, cartwheels, and Juliet caps. But frivolous hats did very little to protect her face when she snuck outside each August afternoon to meet her beau. She was sixteen. It was 1932, an unusually sunny and rainless year. She burned again; the vinegar poured forth; Larsen food lost its tartness; her mother raged; my grandmother blushed in church—blood rising to her face—as eyes caressed the feathers of her fascinator. VII. It was another reason for heading West in little leaps and bounds, from Stoughton to Lincoln to Provo to Portland. She never forgave her mother for the August romance that

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resulted in her birth. He was the car mechanic’s ne’er-dowell son, a man she was ashamed to call her father. Yet for all she shucked off as she moved West, she kept her mother’s love of hats. When she returns—once every ten years, out of obligation to the family—it’s a strange reunion. I’ve lagged behind with the suitcases to watch them walking down the street. Each has a raised head, each has a hat of spectacular proportions. They must be trying to outdo each other, but they never manage: magically— through some unconscious conduit of blood—my mother asks the milliner for the same hat that her mother makes. My mother’s hair has turned white with age like her own mother’s hair, which was white from birth. Sunscreen was perfected in ’44, so my grandmother stays pale in the sun; my mother, who lives beneath the Portland rain, can’t turn any other color. They hug stiffly, but for one moment, with their arms interlaced so that their skin fades together, they are two-women-in-one. Then I remember that for all the bad blood between them, they have the same blood, too. VIII. Maybe I will write about how I have never done anything new, how I have only repeated the errors of my foremothers with the added error of an imperfect copy. I can’t escape from this line of digit daredevils, these blanched mad-hatters, these two-women-in-one. My blood went bad because of them. But now I’ve returned from the Special Facility and I have the language back that belongs to me— my special facility—and my revolution will be a revival, as every revolution always is. Maybe I will try to explain the warp and weft of blood, the way it has woven us—how it cleaves us together, how it cleaves us apart. Maybe I will write The Maltese Falcon with a new plot and entirely new characters—yes, yes—maybe I am writing that right now.

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Instinct and Obedience to God K i l e y Wol f f pen and ink

Translation Grant Bradley

An old woman and her son and her daughter walk up a hill of sand. A hot crackled road lies beyond. The son and daughter pull their mother with them, on their way to the top. A heavenly aura descends upon the old woman. Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sinking, now, in the yellow sickly sand. Her earthly children protest loudly beside her. A choir releases its collected breath into an exaltation of larks soaring and diving, leaping and frolicking at the chance encounter with such a saint. Here (the seraphim in their flowing pearl robes with their trumpets of gold have decided), here is the soul we have been searching for. She has simmered her last matzo ball soupâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;has baked her last loafâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;has pressed her final springerle. On this darkest of days (the sand has swallowed her knees now her thighs are feeling the tingling promised warm embrace of the grains beneath her) she raises her eyes toward the heavens and is greeted with a vision of godliness. The tendrils of the earth, wrapped around her Sunday dress washing away the violent floral pattern in a comforting coating of dirt, cringes at this beam of light jutting from the plain gray sky above. Power lines buzz and traffic roars by and children (grown now with their own responsibilities and their own pride in their moral fortitude) scrape away at the sand pulling their mother down. They do not see the light. Glowing winged forms swoop down all around her,

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and now music is added to the joyousness of their voice. A harp is produced from the inner folds of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s vestments, another brings out a washboard, another a tambourine. Maracas appear in perfect hands. She thinks to clap, but instead her hands reach up to her pulsing neck and rip out her favorite pearl necklace, each bead mildly plopping down into the hillside. She heaves she struggles she tries to understand whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s happening to her and now she looks down upon her body, twitching embarrassingly in the dry desert air in the dry desert sand. Feathers cloud her field of vision and she is raised up and up until she is no more than a speck in her mindâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eye, until she vanishes completely. Her children, abandoned on the side of a road in a no-name town on an unclean dune, moan and cry and shear their hair, left with nothing but the shadow she left behind.

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Thematic Contents Pieces About Animals That Aren’t About Animals

Public Spaces, Private Thoughts untitled

certain lives

reichstag

mission san miguel

106

cool crimson cacti

dvd

the Waiting room

dvd

Witch Bear

Big shadows

following directions

eggs

les oiseaux

after the whale

cuzco Alpaca

114

kitty games

128

great lengths

the maltese falcon

129

voodoo tricks

instinct and obedience to god

133

in transit

“dog cure” by school

dvd

estuary

Wynnewood

salvage

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Portraits

(dis)place

morning coffee

12 41

Deep Focus

lester the molester

untitled

margaret

colony

construction Worker

103

Another dimension

dear uncle

104

untitled

ecological ranch dining room, Peru

107

Alexander

Genre Variety Show chronotheology

untitled

115

Anachronologists

untitled

118

Big sky cuntry

untitled

127

frankly cooking

dvd

No Po-Mo

Homeward Bound Trilogy

clumsyhands

With care in hopes

111

dulcify

home

maybe

Burning house

101

translation

134

the Bottom line

dvd

Timepieces Quadrilogy chronotheology

Window of opportunity

to the slight change in seasons

112

itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s About time

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Birthing Trilogy origins

eggs

tractor dream

30-Second Trilogy flash of life

subject matter.

north carolina

Ris-kay Trilogy Pulling up the drive

in the greenhouse

mao the teenager

110

Contortions Trilogy meditation of hanged man

105

on Public lands

100

Yoga

120

Eating Your Words Trilogy And Waltz

dvd

Words in edgewise

103

the rain does crazy things

Wardrobe Trilogy men in red coats

trying swimsuits under florescent light

left Behind in Belleville

Through the Night Trilogy tractor dream

When evening falls

sleeping

Goodbye Trilogy learning how to speak with death

the Art of Peeling Apples

elegy

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Contributors sAmuel Alden studio Art, senior cryptoapology

elAnA congress Philosophy, senior teafternoon

mAggie AYAu english, sophomore hangry

mAddison coons undeclared, freshman ginormous

ZoĂ&#x2039; BAllering english, senior squirtle

emilY cornelius spanish, senior tangelo

cAde Beck undeclared, freshman pandastic

rose cotter BBmB, Junior tofurkey

kAtherine Berfield undeclared, freshman frenemy

AnnA dAWson english/studio Art, Junior gooplet

Allison BolgiAno Politics-environ. studies, sophomore labradork

christinA delicAtA rhetoric and film studies, senior breastaurant

grAnt BrAdleY english, senior whippersnapper

kevin dYer english, Junior soundscape

gAeA cAmPe humanities-environ. studies, senior zonkey

ZAchArY ellenBogen rhetoric and film studies/Philosophy, senior brunch

sArAh cAnePA studio Art, senior tomacco

eleAnor ellis spanish, Junior frumius

yonatan adin evans Studio Art, Junior beefalo

madeline jacobson English, Senior frenemy

michaela gianotti English, Senior funemployed

michael jorgensen Studio Art/Math-Physics, Sophomore pixel

REBECCA GOTZ Art History and Visual Culture Studies, Junior fantabulous

TYLER KING English, Junior jackalope

katie haaheim Junior malbecstasy

richard lamb Philosophy, Junior geep

billy harbour Premed/Biology, Junior marzipanda bear

BENJAMIN LERCHIN Studio Art, Junior notworking

BRYNNE HAUG History slanguage

ANNABELLE MARCOVICI Politics, Freshman bootylicious

John-Henry Heckendon Politics, Senior frachos

hayley mauck Studio Art/Politics-Environ. Studies, Senior bootylicious

RUTH HWANG English, Freshman squiggles

nick michal English, Senior possimpible

lily idle Studio Art, Junior squirtle

EVELINA MIROPOLSKY Psychology, Senior manssiere volume 2 5

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oliviA mitchell Art history and visual culture studies, senior skort

mAttheW rAYmond english, Junior turducken

iAn moore sexcapade

dAriA reAven Politics, senior prevenge

mAdison munn sociology, freshman pixel

mAren schiffer english, sophomore squirtle

ellie neWell english, senior jackalope

cArrie sloAne music, senior guesstimate

WilliAm neWmAn-Wise studio Art, Junior dother

WesleY sPArAgon freshman squirtle

hilArY PAinter Art history and visual culture studies meowfits

sABrinA Wise english, sophomore bedaffle

Alex PeArson english, senior blaxploitation

kileY Wolff studio Art, senior jazzercise

mAdelYn Peterson Politics-environ. studies, Junior bodacious

doriAn ZimmermAn humanities-environ. studies, senior spork

sArA rAsmussen Politics, senior drapple

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St a f f Back Row: Alex Pearson, Jenny Willis, Eleanor Ellis, Evelina Miropolsky, Chelsea Kern, Sarah Debs, Madelyn Peterson, Sabrina Wise Front Row: Hanne Jensen, Bo Erickson, Maren Schiffer, Maddison Coons, Marisa Ikert, Nick Michal, Kiley Wolff, Philip Hofius, Sarah Canepa Not pictured: Clara Bartlett, Grant Bradley

Colophon blue moon volume 25, printed in salem, or by lynx group, inc., is set to a linotype didot roman typeface designed by firmin didot (c. 1765-1836) in Paris, france. didot, heir to a long family tradition of printing and bookmaking, designed the typeface to break with other contemporary, hand-penned lettering styles by employing clean vertical strokes, thin hairlines, and strict horizontal serifs. to this day, firmin’s typeface, said to epitomize the philosophy of the Age of enlightenment, remains one of france’s greatest contributions to the world of type design. blue moon is printed with soy ink on mixed-source paper certified by the forest stewardship council. the magazine was designed using Adobe® indesign® cs5 and Adobe® Photoshop® cs5 software.

This nameplate comes from the third issue of volume seven of blue moon, published back in 1932. We reprint it to highlight the continuing creativity at Whitman through the years.