blue moon

blue moon

Thanks to Associated Students of Whitman College Colville Street Patisserie Penrose Library Pontarolo’s Office Supply Tallman’s Pharmacy for their financial support

Special thanks to Professor Scott Elliott Amber Dobbs Woodworth Whitman Events Board Barbara Maxwell, Leann Adams, and Katharine Curles Reid Campus Center The Writing House The Whitman College Pioneer The Whitman College Multimedia Development Lab John’s Wheatland Bakery Ami Koreh

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EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Bo Erickson Chelsea Kern LAYOUT EDITORS Jessica Palacios Tyle Schuh Kinsey White POETRY EDITOR Sabrina Wise POETRY STAFF Hannah Bauer Aaron Baumann Anna Richael Best Tyler King Jessica Palacios Madelyn Peterson Tyle Schuh PROSE EDITOR Hanne Jensen PROSE STAFF Emma Casley Kai Rasmussen Will Seymour Kinsey White ART EDITORS Anna Dawson Andrew Strong ART STAFF Olga Baranoff Kendra Klag Sandra Matsevilo Medina Hilary Painter DIGITAL MEDIA EDITOR Dana Thompson DIGITAL MEDIA STAFF Lucinda Sisk Benjamin Shoemake Linnaea Weld PUBLIC RELATIONS Sarah Debs Maren Schiffer COPY EDITORS Anna Richael Best Hanne Jensen

blue moon Whitman College

2013

volume 26

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

The views expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the editors or staff members. The individual contributors hold copyrights to artwork, texts, and digital media in this issue. No material may be reprinted without the permission of the magazine or contributors.

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 tax-deductible. Please make checks for donations and subscriptions payable to the Associated Students of Whitman College.

Copyright 2013, blue moon For more information on how to submit, subscribe, and donate, please visit www.whitman.edu/bluemoon. blue moon Whitman College 280 Boyer Avenue Walla Walla, WA 99362

Contents* For Indiana Jones Anna Richael Best

11 poetry

Fulminology Eleanor Ellis

31 poetry

Drowning Lily Idle

12 art

Inside the Berlin Holocaust Memorial Kevin Dyer

33 art

The Circus Fantastic Chelsea Kern

13 prose

Songbird Clare Spatola-Knoll

34 art

mom and dad Kendra Klag

20 art

The Bluff City Dairy Café Cathryn Klusmeier

35 prose

wax Tyle Schuh

21 poetry

“Suffering is Caused by Attach- 37 ment to Impermanent Things” poetry Allison Good

Four Flours, Eight Flights Rosemary Cotter

24 poetry

Mona Lisa Olivia Kinney

38 art

Uprooted Sandra Matsevilo Medina

25 art

Grounds for Investigation 1316 Charly Bloomquist

39 art

MAD RIVER Katie Hardy

26 prose

Notice of Refusal Rosemary Cotter

40 poetry

Shh Gone!

Marie von Hafften

28 art

Baby Maggie Hickman & Nick A.B. Roberts

41 art

She Carries It With Her Maddison Coons

30 art

westward (winter) Andrew Strong

42 art

*See end of magazine for alternative table of contents

Mouths to Feed Nick Budak

44 art

Magic Hanne Jensen

75 poetry

Helicase Sarah Debs

45 poetry

tomb Kendra Klag

77 art

Hish, Nick Cross

47 art

DjoulĂŠh and the Serpent Jordan Benjamin

78 prose

Center of Balance John Vincent Lee

48 art

Goat Meditations Tino Mori

88 poetry

Me, Rambling Jonas Myers

49 prose

Garden of Monstrous Delights Asa Mease

89 art

Suburban War Lily Idle

64 art

Twenty Blindnesses Brynne Haug

90 prose

Acorn Cups Brynne Haug

65 poetry

Sauntering through REM (75 percent) Natalie Stevens

97 art

Caroline Hilary Painter

66 art

The Data Fields Nick Budak

98 art

Dinner for Deaf Expressionists Tyle Schuh

68 prose

Departure Eleanor Ellis

100 poetry

Man of Many Lines Kai Rasmussen

74 art

On the Fence Maya Volk

101 art

Logic on the Fisher Farm Sabrina Wise

102 poetry

Dust at the Wheatfields Asa Mease

114 art

Stick Figure 010 Charly Bloomquist

104 art

Consumer Goods, etc.

Maren Schiffer

115 prose

Hanford B Reactor (Control Panel) Ben Lerchin

105 art

Frost Halley McCormick

117 art

Wonderland Kinsey White

106 prose

happiness is going home Melina Hughes

118 art

Dusk Wanderings Marlena Sloss

107 art

Touching You cade beck

120 art

I’m a Lady Madison Munn

108 art

Summit 121 Maya Booth-Balk & Ali Danko poetry

Kensington Gardens Clare Spatola-Knoll

109 art

Hanford B Reactor (Little People) Ben Lerchin

Polar Bears, Rockfish, and the 122 Ten Modes of Ancient Skepticism prose Cathryn Klusmeier

110 art

Skyscraper Annabelle Marcovici

128 art

Shine Slow Down Robby Seager

112 poetry

At First Light Sarah Debs

130 poetry

Through a Filament Robby Seager

113 poetry

The Sandbox Brennan Johnson

131 art

You could have at least asked Logan Thies

132 art

kiwi Kendra Klag

133 art

Karl Marx: the Band: the Movie 134 prose Mattie Fattie Abid ji Kendra Klag

144 art

Change in taste Maren Schiffer

145 poetry

Seattle Riah Sorn-ampai

146 art

The Functional Body Sabrina Wise

147 prose

Ode to City Limits Eleanor Ellis

153 poetry

Before the Storm Lily Idle

154 art

Some of These Days Rosemary Cotter

156 poetry

Film

DVD insert

Bad Dog Will Witwer i LuV u <3 Will Newman-Wise Wonderland Ann Chen and Whitman College Film Club Optimistic Man Will Witwer

Music My Fear One on the Door Humans Being The Highlight Better Way feat. Chairman of the Boardz VirtuAll Seeing iGlass Problem Play Great Regular Flavor Fun For All Forever One Kyle Donald Combat Boots Glo’s Waltz Josh Tacke La Vie en Rose Libertango Grandma’s Bail Ramblin’ Hobo Eric Niehaus Slow + J Allan Okello and Alejandro Fuentes Circle Dance Rick Lamb Sky Library Toby Alden

Letter from the Editors In this issue of blue moon, we hope you find yourself in a state of immersion. As you splash around in the pages, spend some time orienting yourself. We would not want to tell you here which direction is up or down (or whether you are floating or drowning).

We definitely couldn’t tell you that. But—we could hint at the possibilities inherent in oppositions. In the space between water and air, factories and fields, irreverence and sanctity, burrowing and flight, the established and the emergent, you may uncover something more than binaries. blue moon loves its own indeterminacy. In 2009, then-Editors-inChief Jenna Mukuno and Glory Bushey asked, “what is blue moon?”

This question comes back to us every year with a vengeance: sometimes jokingly, sometimes passionately, sometimes just loudly. And every year, after months of negotiation, we answer this question anew. Here’s one: blue moon is what you’re holding in your hands. This blue moon is an answer to all of those blue moons from the past. If you’ve been paying attention, the magazine should look a little different this year; in fact, it has a new face. With a change in typeface we have broken with the image that has defined blue moon for six whole years now. After all this time, we’re giving Didot the boot. This is Minion Pro. You’re welcome.

But, we have to thank you, too, along with all of the artists, writers, directors, musicians, staff members, and supporters who defined volume 26. It’s been an honor working with you. The result is beautiful, confusing, and very blue moon.

So plunge in, go overboard, float on, and tell us: why is it that the landscape is moving when the boat is still?

With Love, Bo Erickson and Chelsea Kern Cover Art

Lycidas

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Josh Tacke 35mm film

blue moon

For Indiana Jones Anna Richael Best

Even Cleopatra was afraid of snakes.

Was it suicide Or a game of wits?

The asp became a mere crossword puzzle perennial, And dear Cleo,— She’s the most envied woman in the world.

I’d say she outsmarted that snake.

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Drowning

Lily Idle silver gelatin print

The Circus Fantastic Chelsea Kern

If we’d been paying attention, maybe we would have noticed the messages they left for us in the sawdust, the ones stamped into the earth by soft, round footpads and the trailing of long noses, punctuated by steaming piles of dung. Look out, their feet and noses and buttocks might have said, we are not as we seem.

– The first time I heard about the elephants, I was walking to school with my baby brother and the other kids. There was a new flyer on the wall of the post office, announcing in bright reds and oranges and the darkest of black inks: George Washington’s !!CIRCUS FANTASTIC!!

FEATS and WONDERS beyond IMAGINING! For ONE week ONLY Come see the TRUE WILD MAN with a FAMILY of APES WORLD famous ACROBATS of ALL SIZES and RAMSES THE GREAT with his 14 ELEPHANTS of AFRICA! The spectacle NOT to be MISSED by anyone CHILD OR ADULT! And right there on the poster you could see RAMSES THE GREAT himself, shirtless and regal with kohl round his eyes, perched on

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the head of an elephant large enough to eat us all whole or at least gore us to death on tusks longer than our dads were tall. Naturally the artist had greatly exaggerated the size of this elephant, but we didn’t know that then. Mary-with-the-pigtails said that Ramses was the man of her dreams. Susan-scaredy-cat shuddered at the thought of trampling and trumpeting beasts. Luke-the-eldest feigned disinterest. My baby brother stared in silence at the elephant with dreams in his eyes. It was all we talked about for the next two weeks.

– When the train brought George Washington and his Circus Fantastic into town, our teachers gave us the day off to go watch, because, after all, how many times do you get to see George-Washington-feats-and-wonders-wild-men-apes-acrobatsand-elephants all stepping down onto the boring-as-boring train platform and trundling off into the tents erected for their comfort? Every kid from school showed up to watch the three o’clock train come in, and probably every adult too, though to be honest all I remember is wide eyes and straining necks. But George Washington was too smart for us all. Not wanting to spoil the surprise for the FEATS and WONDERS of his show (tickets $3 per seat!), Mr. Washington had asked the stationmaster to erect a screen made out of bed sheets between the platform and the train, all the way to the field where the circus would be, and so when the various components of the Circus Fantastic disembarked, all we saw were the grey humps of elephant backs bobbing down a river of linen towards the fairgrounds.

Of course, they couldn’t hide forever. The other kids and I spent every afternoon before the circus opened hanging on the fence outside the elephant tent, ignoring and being ignored by the circus people. Most of the time we couldn’t see anything, but we listened to the grunts and stomps, the faint clinking of chains, and occasionally ogled the bulges in the tent walls where elephant-sides

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The Circus Fantastic

pressed up against the canvas. And once a day a dirty child not much older than me would open up a flap in the tent to muck out the elephants’ poop. For the half an hour it took him to extract two wheelbarrows full of stinking dung, we could peer into the dimness of the tent and see them.

I remember legs like columns, holding up swaying bodies with more body than any body I had ever seen before. There were noses hanging down, and occasionally the dull glint of a long, long tusk. Susan shivered in fear while the rest of us quivered with excitement.

But they were gentle, then, cooing and gurgling in their giant throats. Occasionally sneezing. I think I loved them.

(In 1870, during the German siege of Paris, two zoo elephants, Castor and Pollux, were killed and served to members of the Parisian gentry as Consommé d’Eléphant. One such gentleman, visiting from England, recorded in his diary: Yesterday, I had a slice of Pollux for dinner. Pollux and his brother Castor are two elephants, which have been killed.

It was tough, coarse, and oily, and I do not recommend English families to eat elephant as long as they can get beef or mutton.)

– It may have been at this time that I began to dream of elephants.

–

Ramses the Great made an appearance on the third day.

The summer weather had given way to a slow drizzle, but that couldn’t stop us from clinging to the fence posts and listening to the distress of the elephants. They were restless, pushing against the tent and trumpeting whenever the wind picked up. Their ankle-

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chains clanked and creaked. Just when Susan was beginning to think that they would upset the tent stakes and run all over our town (gobbling and goring at will), Ramses emerged, shirtless despite the rain, from the small tent he shared with Leonard the TRUE WILD MAN. The Pharaoh, as Ramses was also known, was an imposing man, even without his headdress and scepter. Also a very handsome man, as Mary noted. He flashed us a white smile and strolled over to our fence.

“The rain disturbs them. It makes noise on the tent.” He smiled again. “Would you like to see something?” His voice seemed foreign to us, though I have heard rumors that Ramses the Great was born in Philadelphia. We nodded and chattered and climbed over the fence to follow as he turned toward the tent and stepped through the flap.

Inside, it smelled of dung and urine, but also of something else, like spice or maybe magic. Who knows? It was an exciting time. With Ramses among them, the elephants quieted and shuffled in place like guilty children. He moved from one to the other, stroking their trunks or massaging their ears and murmuring to them.

“This is Surus,” he called to us from the back of the tent, holding the trunk of a truly massive beast. “He is the grandfather.

Come meet him, if you like. They won’t hurt you.”

Suddenly infused with Susan’s fear, we nevertheless walked between undulating trunks to where Surus stood with Ramses. My baby brother pressed his hand into mine and even Luke-the-eldest kept his feet close to the group. I don’t know how Susan kept her head.

Surus was a giant—his head brushed the slope of the tent’s roof. As Ramses stroked his trunk, the elephant closed his eyes and hummed deep in his chest, swinging his ponderous head slowly from side to side. Legs-like-columns stood obediently in chains that seemed too flimsy to hold such a beast. His tusks, though trimmed, though not long-as-dads-are-tall, were fearsome enough.

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The Circus Fantastic

“He is older than I am,” Ramses said, “He’s been a circus elephant ever since he was just as tall as you. Go on, pet his trunk.

He likes that.” Three trembling hands (all of us minus Susan) reached out to touch that long nose.

“Elephants are just like people, but bigger. See how he likes being stroked. Just like people. Be nice and they will love you.”

Ramses was still talking, but I had stopped listening. There, at the back of tent, standing in front of Grandfather Surus, I looked up into his tiny eyes and saw my round moon-face reflected back at me. There was nothing else there. But I swear he winked.

(Years later I read about Hannibal, who in 218 BC marched an army and thirty-seven war elephants from the Iberian Peninsula into Italy. Most of the elephants died on the way, but Hannibal and his army swept down the peninsula with much screaming and great success. In J.M.W. Turner’s painting of this historic crossing, men and elephants crawl up the mountains under huge, Romantic storm clouds. It’s no wonder our elephants didn’t like the rain.)

– Why do children dream of running away to join the circus?

– Packed into our bleacher seats in a red and orange tent, buoyed by kettle corn and iced lemonade, we beheld the FEATS and WONDERS of George Washington’s Circus Fantastic for the first time. Mr. Washington himself, a tiny, bald man who did not at all resemble his namesake (though he reportedly, for authenticity’s sake, had wooden teeth), stepped into the center ring and announced to us in a voice as enthusiastic as his advertisements,

“WELCOME one and ALL to the CIRCUS FANTASTIC! Are you ready to witness the SPECTACLE of a LIFETIME?” His

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wooden smile clattered with each consonant. And yes, yes we were ready.

It was the spectacle of a lifetime. In that tent, I saw more FEATS and WONDERS than I ever saw before or have seen since.

There was the promised wild man, wilder even than his troupe of apes, who cavorted around the sawdust rings wearing hats and riding bicycles. The acrobats, world-famous or not, flew, really flew, from trapeze to tight wire, dizzying us with their speed and sparkling leotards. And there were clowns, and jugglers, and lions, fire-eaters, strongmen, and even a talking bear. George Washington bounced between the acts, calling out to his performers and to us with his booming (BOOMING!) voice and laughing, laughing, laughing.

Last of all, there were the elephants. After the last clown had stumbled out the ring followed by our laughter, George Washington stepped up to his dais at the center of the ring and once again regaled us with his poster voice: “And now, LADIES and gentlemen, I present to you…

RAMSES THE GREAT and his FOURTEEN ELEPHANTS, come to you ALL the WAY from the dark AFRICAN continent to perform for you today…”

And in rode Ramses the Great, seated on the back of Surus the Grandfather. (We went wild.) Thirteen more elephants trundled in after Surus, arranged themselves in a circle around the ring. And then they began the Dance of the Elephants. See them as I saw them, these huge beasts prancing and tiptoeing and, yes, landing with rumbling thuds, for their illusory gracefulness did not negate their mass, but flying too, truly flying. Under the magic of the red and orange tent and Ramses the Great’s love, the elephants danced, they hummed, they flew. Believe me or don’t, but I saw it.

Baby brother saw it, Mary-of-the-pigtails saw it, Luke-the-eldest pretended not to see it. Susan did not see it because she had her fingers over her eyes. Elephants flew, Ramses the Great smiled, Surus winked, and George Washington laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

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The Circus Fantastic

â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I am sure youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve heard of children running away with the circus. Come one, come all. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; After the first show, it rained for three days.

(Some Biblical scholars believe that the behemoth of Job was in fact an elephant of great proportions.

Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox. Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly. He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are wrapped together. His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars of iron. He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make his sword to approach unto him. Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts of the field play. He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and fens. The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the brook compass him about. Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not: he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth. He taketh it with his eyes: his nose pierceth through snares.

So sayeth Jehovah.)

Look out, my feet and nose and buttocks say, I am not as I seem.

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mom and dad Kendra K lag 35mm film

wax Tyle Schuh

May we be humbly beheaded and from our blood, from the hands we fed, let us bear something beautiful, again i. honey moon gold on silver we melted our rings till death

pulls us apart

or morning a brighter burning weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll bathe in the alchemy of our offspring.

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schuh

Yes. by a devilish divinity we are what we’ve destroyed: Solitude. ii. i leapt from the blush butcher’s block

from the touch

the searing sex, i recall— it smelled like trees. & something blanc in me is kept cut

a branch

a hand reaching lost in the lost.

i pulled away

in hot repulse and left the bed still warm alit in the anachronistic induction to

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wax

white light

which we gain grow/groan color

or pour out our painted limbs to get rid of it, quickâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; too hot too skin to embrace ourselves. iii. molded in this stasis my body is a lily in braille but melting.

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Four Floors, Eight Flights Rosemary Cotter

I come from a stair-based society

(she said) and I often wonder why these heathens are unable to understand that stair-stepping is an art as holy as the walk of the wandering ascetic with rules plain, simple, strict 1. Evenly allocate lanes of up and downward traffic 2. No inter-directional or inter-flight conversation 3. Tripping upward will always be forgiven and I ask you

(here her eyes burned black) what would the Sisters say if they saw this mess?

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Uprooted

Sandra Matse v ilo Medina acrylic on canvas

MAD RIVER Katie Hardy

They say he’s a saint, but only on Sundays. And only if he’s lurking somewhere nearby. Broad shoulders, mean tongue, beard reeking man-musk and whiskey, he’s a figure of grime and souring age.

One day a week—sometimes, but not always—he strides steeplebound, ignoring the brothels. Hair parted Main St. straight, head cocked left to stare the sin out of you, he’s a strange candidate for sainthood. But he’s the best we’ve got.

Juan has one nice shirt. All the rest are more sweat-salt than thread these days, rumpled in awkward pseudo-starched angles long after he’s tossed them to the floor. The nice one is blue—blue with buttons, those opalescent orbs that look cheap up close. Hand-sewn by his mother just before she died of pneumonia.

I guess the good die young. Awful shame.

Juan (San Juan, I should say, as this is a Sunday, and he is wearing his blue shirt), never quite recovered from the shock. He was an only child, serious and sullen, hands trained to seek comfort in his mother’s skirt folds and root there until anxiety passed.

Now, on some Sundays, he shoves his hands stiffly into worn denim pockets, a self-comforting gesture that he is shamefully aware of, but that he permits himself during his do-gooding errands to town.

On those certain Sundays, Juan glides down sandy streets to the steps of a towering church. There he stands on the steps but never goes in. Instead, he turns his gaze to the gathering flock as it swarms to the heavenly pavilion he’s perched on. Most people pass in cautious arcs. His dark persona, though transformed, is fickle, fragile. Not even the white spire’s stern frown can hold his saintly demeanor from one moment to the next. The townsfolk know to give him wide berth. Even so, every now and again a man

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with a toothache, or a limp, or near-blindness will approach the uncomfortable blue of the sometimes saint.

“Have you come to be healed?” barks San Juan in a whisper.

“I have,” says the one with the ailment. And with that, the rough hands withdraw from their worried massage of pocket linings and dip into a flask of cool water hung at Juan’s hip. In a movement unspeakably tender, the fingers so often confused at connection, plant lightly on the sufferer’s forehead.

“Go and live sweetly,” hums the blue saint.

When the bell tower chimes eleven, there is no more excuse for healing. Juan trundles down the heavy stone steps and into the darker dim of a bar. It’s nearly afternoon and already he’s well into the whiskey. Black tufts of wild hair wrestle free of their careful combing and his nice blue shirt lies open at the chest. The cheap-looking opal buttons lend a luster to the afternoon drudge of the saloon. Tonight, temper prancing, fists ready to restore the balance of ailments he undid that morning, Juan will careen home to his young wife. Such a beautiful woman—pale, strong for her thin frame—but parched for the gentle baptism this man could give her with a kiss. Tonight, she will wait a little longer for water. She is used to waiting.

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Shh Gone!

Mar ie von Haf f ten digital photograph

She Carries It With Her Maddi son Coon s charcoal and pastel

Fulminology Eleanor Ellis

“No one ever saw lightning hit a public lavatory.”

Peter Abelard, quoted in Gerald of Wales’ “The Journey

Through Wales,” 1188 I. I’m thinking of open fields, sheets of rain, the irate monk, and the electrician in my living room.

He’s wearing a fluorescent orange vest.

There’s no storm yet.

II. He’s telling me that water doesn’t conduct electricity—it’s the particles in the water, sodium chloride or something. He tells me golfers are often modern victims. He tells me not to hug trees.

III. Peter wrote about the malice of the devil. His twelfth-century tantrum: he wants to be noticed by God, but not struck from on high, crosses crumpled by crackling light, lying askew on church-tops, the ruination of sizzling illumination, the fields of the unholy left untouched. volume 26

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IV. He’s showing us the phone jack in the wall, grateful for the hidden wires. I’ll tell you what, he says, the safest place to wait is in your car.

It’s not on the ground, see? It’s lifted up.

He gets down on his hands and knees, asks me for a different cord.

V. Peter wrote about clouds colliding: his polemic falls open on my lap. Outside, the wires over the house bounce like jump ropes in the wind. The trees cast their woody girth over the street, roots straining. The thunder comes.

Me, I hear and I lie low to pray.

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Inside the Berlin Holocaust Memorial Ke vin D yer digital photograph

Songbird

Clare Spatola-Knoll mixed media

The Bluff City Dairy Café Cathryn Klusmeier

On the left-hand side of Utah Highway 119, just north of a land called Navajo and south of a city called Bluff, there is a sign. The sign is white with large black letters that have chipped away, revealing naked wood after years of dusty afternoons and it says, “DAIRY PAWN RUGS INDIAN JEWELRY CABINS PARTS AND SUPPLY ICE TACOS” in all caps and no pauses, inevitably raising questions about the feasibility of advertising “Ice Tacos” in the Utah Desert. Underneath the sign there is a barred metal door and behind those bars there is an 81-year-old woman named Faye Belle with a shriveled left arm, eight ear piercings—four pearls on each of her drooping lobes—and crusty turquoise eye-shadow that matches the Navajo jewelry she sells. The jewelry is how I came to meet her in the first place.

“So I’ll wrap this one up for you, right?” she says.

“No,” I say. “I don’t think I can afford a 97-dollar pair of earrings right now.”

“Well, that’s okay,” she says, “because I take Visa and MasterCard. So how bout this one? It’s only 83 dollars.”

This is the way Faye Belle does business. She stands in a darkened shoebox of a showroom filled with a wide array of Navajo jewelry behind museumesque plates of glass. The other things, too, like fake plastic Halloween pumpkins, a broken organ, four pseudo-visible security cameras, a miniature Christmas tree with tin-foil ornaments, and a sign that says NO LARGE BAGS IN SHOWROOM, with the two “o’s” in the word “room” turned into cartoon eyes with matching downward-slanting eyebrows, as if perhaps to stare down potential thieves. And when she talks, it

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is with force, in all caps and no pauses, like the sign outside of her store.

“Honey,” she says to me as I stand on her peppered linoleum tile, surrounded by the blue rocks she has finally given up trying to sell me, “there are millions of stars and planets and I been to all the continents in the world except for that cold one and I read all of the Bible and the Book of Mormon and I gotta tell you, it’s crap, all that religious stuff. I floated down the Nile and it’s five miles across and honey, there ain’t no way that some baby floated down it. It’s all crap. All those religious nut jobs.”

And then she stopped. She paused to look at me—first up, then down—as if contemplating whether or not to reveal some sort of wisdom she’d gained after 81 years of dusty afternoons chipping away at her.

“You see those people,” she said, pointing her shriveled left hand in the direction of her barred door, “Those people who need religion really only need a post to lean on and honey, I don’t need no post. I can stand on my own two feet just fine because I believe in myself. I can do anything I want to.”

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“Suffering is Caused by Attachment to Impermanent Things” Allison Good

Another bite of lo mein.

But no attachment can cause suffering too.

A bite of sesame chicken. Mostly fat. I pull the slobbery ball out of my mouth and put it on the side of my plate next to the slip of paper.

The back of the fortune has a Chinese word of the day.

Blue: 蓝色 I agree.

In China, blue symbolizes immortality.

But dark blue is used for funerals and deaths.

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Mona Lisa Olivia Kinney ambrotype

Grounds for Investigation 1316

Charly Bloomqui st archival inkjet print

Notice of Refusal Rosemary Cotter

it was when eyes faced the other direction that the pages fell bucket spilled and small granulized points of contact fairly exploded. we found there was an itch at the back of the knee and a slightly nervous hole where those fluttering things had been like it was surprised to find itself there. still that gaze might turn back once in a whileâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; to the detriment of all in fact: that splendid shade of green has always been hard to replicate.

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Baby

Mag gie Hickman & Nick A.B. Rober ts 35mm film

westward (winter)

Andre w Strong digital photographs

Mouths to Feed Nick Budak 35mm film

Helicase Sarah Debs

Kaiping, the place I go hesitantly to uncover what I do not know.

The soft underbelly of China bulging from poverty, the ankle swollen from overwork.

My ancestors lived here for an eternity. Drank the Pearl River Delta, blackest water of exhaustion. Bent over rice rice rice hungry for a mouthful of knowledge.

I machete bushwhack thigh-high grass, kneel at the grave of my greatest grandmother.

Bow my head thrice. Tradition not my own entirely my own.

My grandfatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s childhood home, a dusty altar and rat droppings. Six-hundred-year-old tangerine, broken stairs, the hot breath of suffocated spirits.

He kicks a plant, shouts at a cracked wall. This is the place, but this is not the place.

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Debs

Gun towers (now World Heritage Sites) spike communism’s countryside.

Not having any in my “civilized” country, I live now in golden California, away from my grandfather even though I owe him so much.

I am drifting shadows of his past, my past, our past looking forward. I am questions that zip open wax seals.

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Hish,

Nick Cross inked string, photopolymer

Center of Balance John Vincent Lee digital photograph

Me, Rambling Jonas Myers

In the fall of 1992, I accompanied my family on a visit to my grandparents’ home in Austin, Texas. My grandfather, my father’s father, Red Wolley, had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. The cancer had metastasized, and was beginning to attack his brain; his doctors were giving him one or two years. He still maintained that he’d beat the thing, refusing to understand that this kind of cancer, this far advanced, in a man of his considerable age (eighty-one), did not simply reverse itself. His wife Bess, my lovely grandmother, one-time Miss Texas finalist, was not as hopeful, though she never voiced in Red’s presence her more sensible take. Except once. In one of their more heated arguments, a week before our visit, she finally burst out with what Red would not admit to himself, and certainly not to others:

“You aren’t going to survive this!” she said. “Get that into your head!” she said.

So by the time we arrived—Red’s condition worsening, Bess’s patience wearing thin, Austin’s summer heat losing its swelter—the tension was palpable. Stepping into their house, I could feel the heaviness in the air, the burden of the thing everyone knew but no one would say: that my grandfather was going to die soon. And I was unsure how Bess, seven years Red’s senior, would fare in Red’s absence—this cancer, I knew, might kill them both.

I think this was when my siblings and I, all in our twenties, started to think about having kids. None of us was married, and we felt that approaching pressure: our parents, now entering their autumn years, their own parents providing a preview of the inevitable withering to come, would probably want some grandkids soon. The cycle repeats itself; the generations march on.

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Our parents were divorced, but Christmases, Thanksgivings, graduations, and important family trips like this one still brought the five of us together. Ted and Tess; The Wolleys (she kept the name even after the divorce, too used to it after thirty years). Yes, yes, I know: Red and Bess, Ted and Tess. What next, you may be asking yourself, do we meet Ned and Jess? Actually, yes: my older brother and sister. It’s pretty strange; we all acknowledge it. The trend started off accidentally enough: Red and Bess had two boys, Theodore and Calvin; the boys grew up, went off to college; soon Theodore was no longer Theo, he was Ted; sophomore year he met freshman Tessa, or Tess, either one was fine, really; they dated, and fell in love, and married shortly after graduation. And there they were, two generations of rhyming couples. And perhaps it gives you some idea of my parents’ quirky sense of humor, their penchant for misinterpretation, for skewing things some, that they named their first two children, my older brother and sister, Ned and Jess. And then they had me. And they named me Cornelius.

(It occurs to me to mention that, no, since the time in which our story takes place, Jess did not marry an Ed, nor Ned a Ness; the trend missed its chance to multiply.)

But I’d better get back to 1992, lest I digress further and further into the unyielding labyrinth of coincidences and idiosyncrasies that is the Wolley family history. Were I to become carried away and lose sight of the events of the story—of the narrative, as it were—this would cease to be a story at all, and simply become me rambling.

The five of us drove in a cramped white rental car out west of the city and up into the hills. Though my grandfather had grown too sick and finally retired from his post at R.A. Wolley Real Estate, LLC, the company still bore his name, and his billboards still punctuated the highways: I saw him three times on the drive to his house, wearing his goofy grin, white cowboy hat, white suit with black-andsilver bolo tie, and pointing two pistols in the air. Next to his face, in bullet-hole font: “BUY A RANCH.” Below that, the slogan: Dreams Come Truer In Texas.

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You are probably starting to gather that my grandfather was quite a man. Larger than life, some might say (and not just because of his giant image on those billboards). A college dropout, a numbers whiz, a gentleman, a bully, a tennis fanatic, an optimist, a competitive fencer, a personal friend of Lyndon Johnson’s, a multi-millionaire, a blues guitarist, a lover of animals; in short, a fascinating puzzle.

But perhaps I should first let you know a bit about who I am. There’s who I was growing up: Cornelius, the quiet one, the introverted one, the boy who was never any good at sports, the boy who painted his toenails, the boy who dreamed in metaphor. By 1992? Twenty-three, just out of college. An English major, no job, no girlfriend, a lot of sarcastic t-shirts. I was living at home. So full of assumptions, so sure I was entitled to something I wasn’t getting, so goddamn lazy. I think I knew I wanted to write, but I hadn’t found my story. Wasn’t even close.

Now, I teach, and I write, and people read what I write, and I have a house and a car that I bought with money I’ve earned teaching and writing, and I’m married. But none of these achievements was in sight in 1992, not even hazy distant smokesignal smudges on my horizon; I maintained that I knew exactly where I was heading, and that it was Nowhere. Like a compass deprived of its magnetism: direction meant nothing to me.

But again, I’ve digressed, and if, as we’ve already found, the Wolley family history is an unyielding labyrinth of coincidences and idiosyncrasies, then the topic of Me, my strange and silly self, Cornelius Wolley, is an inquiry into paradox and impossibility; a subject without the satisfaction of conclusion, or even conjecture; a path leading to no results; no workable hypotheses may be crafted, let alone pursued in experimentation; all inquiries have been and will be entirely fruitless, I assure you.

To me I’m as much a mystery as the universe, life, love, etc. Even today, with all stability and success and security that I maintain the appearance of maintaining, I really have no idea who I am or what is going on. That’s important: I’ve always felt and will always feel new here, a visitor. volume 26

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OK. Disclaimer out of the way.

When we went to Austin as a family in 1992, I really only tagged along because I had nothing else to do, or so I told myself. Sure, I also wanted to see my grandparents. They were an important part of me. Buried way back in the archives of my innocence, collecting dust, were still shelved those musty-booksmell memories that I had wanted so desperately to cling to: of early visits to my grandparents’ ranch, horseback rides through the hill country, trips into town for the brisket at Cooper’s Barbeque, drives out to Enchanted Rock, or closer-by Hamilton Pool, nights around a campfire, the security of my grandfather’s lap. You know, all that gooey sentimental grandparent-grandchild stuff.

I had always figured myself to be Red’s favorite. I knew he loved Ned and Jess too, but I was his little Cornelius, CornOn-The-Cob he called me, so accidentally charming in my young enthusiasm that I must have been his favorite. We really did connect. He’d finger the chords on his old guitar and let me strum, or tell me cowboy stories, or take me fossil hunting after a rainstorm. Or we’d sit in the den and watch TV, and I’d get lost tracing the lines in his hands.

But that was all when I was very young, before I discovered sarcasm, and then girls, and then masturbation, and then college, and then Nietzsche, and then Cobain. Before Red got really old, and then sick. Before the cancer attacked his stomach, and then metastasized, and started eating away at his brain, dulling the part of Red I had always adored most: his sharp wit. Now he slipped and stumbled over words, sputtering out his denial: “we’ll, uh, we—we’ll beat this, this thing. With the themo—chemopath— chemopa—chemotherapy!”

I hadn’t seen Red and Bess in a few years, and hadn’t made the jarring journey from Seattle’s grey arboreal fog to Austin’s suburban dry brown junipered hills in a few more than that. As we wound up out of the city I noticed more development than last time, more planned communities, more superstores, more homogeneity eating away at the sun-scorched land. Where there

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had been expanse, there was now expansion; prairie, now parking lot; horse country, now Home Depot. This was 1992. I don’t want to know what it looks like now.

We pulled up to the stately ranch house, beige-orange adobe-style siding, tile roof, and got out of the car. I hadn’t spoken a word since we deplaned. I had sat contemplatively the whole ride, thinking, not listening; Ned and Jess had been off about something, chasing a memory they shared. But now I spoke up, finally, shattering the silence that was mine alone and that only I seemed to notice: “I can’t believe we’re here.” It had been at least a decade since all five of us last came to Red and Bess’s together. No one responded. I regretted speaking.

On the porch, my mother rang the doorbell, then knocked on the big wooden door with its pink chipping paint. In newer, teal paint, in cursive, right on the door: The Wolleys. Strange, by most people’s standards. On the fraying mat below: WELCOME. “Coming!” we heard from inside, and soon Bess opened the door and smiled through the worry lines which had doubled on her face since the last time I’d seen her. We all stepped in and gave our hugs and cheek-kisses.

“He’s napping right now,” she answered the unasked question, “but he’ll be up and about shortly. Tea, anyone? Coffee?

A snack?” And so we all headed for the kitchen and sat down in the various teal cushioned chairs that flanked the old rustic wooden table. “Cornelius!” my grandmother said when she’d finished marveling over Ned and Jess, “you look wonderful. When can I meet your girlfriend?”

“I don’t have a girlfriend, Grandma,” I said, not sure what made her think I did.

“Well, one of these days some nice young lady will come to her senses and reel you in. Realize what a catch you are! Just you wait.” She pinched my cheek.

I didn’t really feel up to the task of reacquainting myself with Bess’s, shall we say, forwardness at this moment. I needed some air, some air I wouldn’t have to share, so I stepped out for a

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cigarette. Cornelius the smoker. I had begun to kick the habit of shutting out my family, and started to wean myself off cynicism.

But I had yet to address my half-a-pack-a-day. But let’s not get distracted. Narrative at all costs.

As I sat puffing and feeling a bit more relaxed, looking out over my grandparents’ land, I began to ask myself what I deemed the difficult questions: why am I here? What do I want to get out of this trip? Will this be the last time I see Red? (These were not the right questions.) His had been such a fascinating life. And I decided right there, on those porch steps at my grandparents’ house in the hills out of Austin, sucking down a cigarette, that Red would be my first novel. That I would fictionalize his life and exploit it for my writing career. What better subject matter than a real man I knew, a man who had lived a full and wild life, a man who was on billboards? I wouldn’t have to make anything up, just change the details a little, and surely I’d be called a genius. The real test would be the extensive research: was I up to it? Did I have the energy? Or would my laziness sap my resolve yet again?

I would start, I decided, by spending some time alone with Red later that day and interviewing him, seeing what gold I could mine from his memory. Getting a sense of the scope of my project. If only, I realized with a cringe, if only I had thought to do this before the cancer started to eat his brain. Back when he remembered every significant date of every significant event in his life, every address of every one of his childhood homes, every score of every Wimbledon tennis final, the price per acre of every ranch lot he had ever sold. He had really had an impressive intellect. An extraordinarily sharp wit. A magnificent memory. I wondered how much information remained, and how much was fried. How much was lost forever, tiny tidbits that had existed only in his private encyclopedia of knowledge, now sunk to the bottom of the sea of his confusion. How much had been wisped away, vaporized, made indistinguishable amidst the mist of his clouded mind. (I can never settle on just one metaphor.) What had I missed out on? As I stomped out my cigarette, I realized, not without shame, that I

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was actually feeling a little sorry for myself. What a selfish ass I am.

He’s the one with cancer, not me.

Not me. Right? Not me. But how would I know? Twentythree, only just shaking off the illusions of invincibility I’d maintained all my life. I’d lost a good friend in a car accident. A few acquaintances too; but they’d all been accidents, not illnesses, not cancer. But the point was driving itself home: people die, even young people. How would I know if I did have cancer, anyway?

I certainly wasn’t being screened for it on a regular basis. None of the suspenseful CAT scans, prostate checks, colonoscopies (I shuddered at the thought) old people subjected themselves to, all in the name of early detection. Any other indicators? Symptoms.

I didn’t recall showing any… but wait, what about those regular stomach aches? Perhaps my lactose intolerance didn’t explain them all. They’d come and gone for the last few years; sometimes I couldn’t eat for a day, the pain was that bad. Cancer. Me?

What a strange, prickling, gnawing concept. The idea, like Red’s own cancer, had spread from my stomach to my brain, where it now festered, feasting on my peace of mind. Give you everything I’ve got for a little peace of mind—the lyrics echoed in my head. It wasn’t cancer that killed him, it was a bullet; either way, Lennon never saw it coming. (Or did he? The way things are going, they’re gonna crucify me.) I realized I was angry at cancer, angry at the cells that mutinied against the body, angry that they weren’t giving Red a chance. That anyone I knew, that I myself, could be struck down. That I might not see it coming. That something—stealthy, disguised, lethal—might sneak up on me. And I swear that I don’t have a gun, Cobain said.

Shake it, Corn-On-The-Cob, his voice told me. Shake it off, forget it, don’t think things like that, focus on the positives. I was curious to see how Red, whose optimistic denial was such a defining trait, would be staying positive now, losing more and more of his prided eloquence each day. So I decided to go find him. As I stepped in through the side door I noticed, glinting off its French panes, thin grey clouds to the north, closing over a distant valley.

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I found them in the living room, my family gathered around our ailing patriarch, just up from his nap. I had never seen him in sweatpants and sweatshirt, only his elegant suits, so that the man I now looked upon, smiling benignly from his favorite leather chair, seemed a rough copy of my grandfather, a drafted version, not the man himself. The fire had dwindled in his eyes.

But I could see the love there, which had always been there, and the pride, mixed in with a new sadness I had not seen there before.

As he surveyed his family, I could not help but see that, despite his outward denial, despite his reassurances that he would be fine, that he’d survive this, his deep blue glassy weary eyes betrayed his knowledge of his own mortality. He knew. He knew, though he’d never admit to the knowing. In his core he’d recognized the arc of his life, traced its descent into completion. This was something I had never expected to see.

“There you are,” he greeted me as I stood in the doorway, “Corn-On-The-Cob.” Something slower about him, almost, surprisingly, more at ease. I walked into the room feeling heavy, and joined Bess on the couch.

Need I focus so minutely on the details? The gestures, the expressions, my emotions? Need I describe the reunion that followed? It was what you’d imagine it: some catching-up talk—at times a trying process for Red, who could not articulate all he wanted to express, so that sometimes he’d just have to give up, unable to voice a certain idea; Ned spoke of his new job at Microsoft (yes, he got in early, and yes, he is now fabulously wealthy), Jess of shaping her artistic vision at graduate school in New York, I of very little; picture albums were brought out and opened, marveled at; sure, some tears were shed; Red, still able to crack a joke from time to time, brought us all to laughter. At least the cancer—which had entered Red’s body, the house of himself, and ransacked and ravaged, absconded with whatever it could— had left him that much.

But were I to zoom in on each single detail the story would slow to such an unbearable pace as to render this whole thing

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rubbish. An unjustifiable read. I must let go, un-dam the flow of events, let them happen freely as they did in my experiencing them.

My moments at my grandparents’ house in the fall of 1992 never slowed for the benefit of my being able to examine them, organize them, narrate them. In fact, time only moved between various rapid velocities. Time is by no means consistent, but it never slows when we want it to. I wanted it to, badly, unwilling to let what might have been (and was) the last time I’d see my grandfather on This Earth flash past. But of course this was not up to me, and, of course, our time together raced by, zoomed into history, whizzed past my head, grazed my ear, left me to look back wonderingly over my shoulder, having barely detected it in its wake. Even in remembering these moments I can’t actually slow them down in any meaningful sense.

Even in reminiscing they go by too fast. Oh, the inadequacy of retrospection! Those two-and-a-half days I spent with Red in 1992 only exist now in that museum called memory, behind glass which we’re hurried along to look through, at images still fleeting and ungraspable as ever.

What I am trying to say is that time is fast, and it moves at different fastnesses, and our time here is short; and, that being the case, for the sake of my perambulating tale, I’ll jump ahead: to when all my family members were hungry and decided to drive up the highway and get Tex-Mex, and I, my appetite stifled by nicotine and throbbing headaches of thought, decided to stay behind with Red, who needed his rest.

My chance.

We sat in the den, like old times, only with the TV off, my grandfather slumped back on the couch sipping a Diet Coke and breathing loudly. When I was younger, staying at his house, I’d sometimes wake up really early, as young children are so bafflingly capable of doing, five o’clock maybe, and come down to the den to find Red, half-awake, watching an old movie in black-and-white in his navy-and-green plaid bathrobe. I’d lay my head on his belly. He knew the names of all the actors and actresses in whatever ‘40s-B-movie we were watching.

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But now it was three in the afternoon, the low sun was shining through the window over the drawn bottom shade, and I began to interview him. I had my pen and paper.

“Red, you were born in 1910. In New Orleans, right? What was your house like growing up?” He smiled, the seeds of fond reminiscence now planted in his eyes.

“Yes, New Orleans. I lived at 5224 West Water—no, it was, uh, 5212 Chestnut—5220—not the…” he wheezes a laugh, “the funniest thing. Why can’t I…? It’s this weirdness, the cancer. The last few months it’s just been...” he points to his head and whistles, high-tone low-tone.

“That’s fine, Red. Don’t worry about the address. What was it like?” But he wouldn’t give it up. Always a numbers guy, a mind for statistics, facts, but now with each attempt at his childhood address he became more frustrated, his laugh now pitiable, forced. I said, “Red, it’s OK. Don’t worry about it, it will come back to you.” I feared I might have ruined the occasion, our interview simply reminding him bitterly of the faculties over which he no longer had command. “Let’s forget your house for a while.

We don’t have to do your history: just talk. Tell me what you want to tell me.” I put down my pen and paper. “Not an interview. Let’s just talk.” I’d have to forgo notes and trust my memory for this, for the sake of getting him talking.

My tactic worked. He was more at ease. And it was only now, for perhaps the first time in the history of my interactions with Red, that he really went into things of substance regarding his own life. Again, no need to trace the unfolding moments close up; I’ll spare you the whole hour-and-a-half, just tell you this: I coaxed out of him stories of learning to play guitar as a boy in New Orleans, of moving to Jacksonville at fifteen after his mother died, of meeting Bess in a taxi in New York City in 1936, of what the Depression was like to live through, of working as a ranch hand, wondering where he was headed. He opened up about having children, starting a company, maintaining his marriage, having grandchildren. I was, as someone who, at the time, would

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rarely admit to any emotion, moved. He had been honest, real.

No numbers to recall and rattle off; only a history of triumphs and failures, trials and successes, lessons and loves; if he couldn’t remember a word or two, he nonetheless got across what he wanted to get across.

I thanked him for the information. Already I was licking my writer’s lips, salivating at prospect of my genius novel, my Pulitzer, my Nobel. I couldn’t believe my luck: what a goldmine my grandfather had turned out to be!—

Cornelius-from-the-future, grown-up-writer-Cornelius, wiser-more-experienced-Dr.-Wolley-with-a-Ph.D.-in-literature, cannot help but interject, can no longer be restrained, must now tell 1992-Cornelius, Corn-On-The-Cob-becoming-Cornelius, exactly what he was missing, tell him like it is: You’re an idiot, Corny! I can hardly believe your flagrant idiocy! How blind you are to what that interview was: you can only see it for what it might bring you.

For its aiding your attaining the shallow aims of fame and wealth.

(And I’ll tell you that it led to none of those things. The novel never materialized. Sorry, folks.) You exploiter of beautiful moments! You even had the audacity to be moved! I bet—I don’t bet, I know—you felt the stirrings of meaningful emotion in your chest, and rather than trust it, let it stir up something of value, you immediately thought, how wonderful, an emotion to put in my book—this’ll be the introduction, the hook, the humble part where I explain how my cancer-brained grandfather opened up to me, and when they’re teaching my book to Harvard undergraduates, they’ll... I know. I know this was what you were thinking. Because you are me. And no matter how much I may try to deny your existence, you blind idiot of a past self, you are still in me, and, frankly, I am ashamed.

My profusest and profoundest apologies. For your benefit, dear reader, I will allow this no longer to be a battlefield upon which my inner selves can duke it out; no more will my story be an arena for the chastisement of an idiot who years ago failed to realize what he had: a precious moment, valuable in itself. On with the tale, which has, despite my best efforts, been departed from once again. Don’t worry, there isn’t too much left to cover. volume 26

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That night, there was an earthquake. Not a normal event by any means in Austin, or the surrounding areas. Seismographs may have recorded this as a small earthquake, if they recorded it at all. But believe me, (I remember it, I was there), the earth was shaking. Shaking nastily, violently, wresting us from balance and comfort; I was tossed, battered, shaken loose. Not injured (and perhaps I am exaggerating for effect), but rattled, in every sense of the word. The shaking felt sinister; I sensed an anger in the rumble.

I had been dreaming: two friends of mine were planning to bomb a mall, but we were all really young, eight maybe. They told me their plan and I had that pit-in-your-stomach feeling, the nausea of my knowledge. I was wrestling with whether or not to tell anyone (sounds insane, I realize… the things our dreamminds come up with…) when I noticed that I was in the mall, and the time bomb was scheduled to go at any minute. I ran, yelled to everyone I saw to run with me, made it outside, crossed the street, entered some sort of supermarket, and found the basement, which, conveniently enough, had a bomb shelter. I awoke just as a low, amplified female voice was saying: “one second to detonation,” just as I was closing the bomb shelter door behind me. I was awakened by the sinister, rumbling earthquake. All I could think was that I had predicted this.

The shaking subsided. I wandered out of my room, and found my family—siblings, parents, grandparents all—gathered in the living room. They all looked jarred. Red had still not collected himself, still didn’t realize fully what was going on. He was mumbling his disbelief and delirium: “Wha… I… Oh dear, it seems… Uh… Bess? Bess?” “Right here, Red.” “Bess!?” “Right here.”

“What the… where the hell…”

I stood back, in a corner; I did not want to get involved with what I saw developing. Bess was trying to calm Red, who could not grasp onto understanding and awareness, too slippery for his grip. He was getting louder, and my father, who didn’t understand, who too had been jarred from sleep by an angry rumbling after going to bed late, was getting angry—angry at Red

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for being so delirious and loud, angry at Bess for not letting anyone help her; and my mother was getting angry at my father for getting angry, still comfortable yelling at him though they were divorced, which made him angry at her in turn, and all this anger shook and shook, and it was even worse than that sinister earthquake. This is the greatest advantage of cigarette smoking (which I’ve since given up and am in no way recommending): an excuse to leave the room.

And leave I did, fast and with purpose, found the back yard, lit up, calmed down. Who were these people? I hardly knew them. Who were those caricatures in there, yelling at each other?

They were ridiculous, cartoonish. Who was I? I stopped. Thought it again: Who was I? “Who am I?” I said out loud. Who was I—this introvert, this loner-stoner, this dreamer of strange things, this attimes-verging-on-nihilistic-solipsistic-egotistical pseudo-optimist, this exploiter, this malfunctioning compass—who was I?

But that was about where my self-examination ended, for the time being, because I was distracted by something I now saw.

Down the hill, lower down on Red and Bess’s massive property, I now noticed a large crack in the earth. A fissure. I hardly believed it: what kind of Texas earthquake was this, which had seemingly opened a wound in the ground, a new crevice, right here on my grandparents’ property?

I scrambled down the hill, a few hundred yards into the small valley where the crack had formed. I now saw that it was much bigger even than I’d thought—nothing less than a canyon.

Geologists must be informed! The Earth is coming apart at the seams! Though I could barely see in the dark, I came to the edge of the canyon, to what looked like at least a twenty-five foot drop.

I remember thinking that this would be a great spot to look for fossils, and that I’d come back in the morning to do so. But I was tired and could not see nearly well enough by the dim moonlight to explore the fissure, and so I remember walking up the hill, returning to bed. My family had apparently been calmed, as all but my sister Jess had gone back to bed. She sat reading in the living room.

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“Couldn’t sleep,” she said. “Thinking about Grandpa,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

The next morning, the fissure had—mysteriously, miraculously—closed. I went down to where I had seen it to investigate; there was a seam there in the earth, a slight scar, hardly indicative of the massive geological event I was sure I’d witnessed— you wouldn’t have noticed it unless you were looking for it. So I took the whole day to decide if I was losing my mind, or if I had dreamt the most vivid dream ever dreamed, or if the thing had really happened. But really the choice was obvious. I had to believe myself. I saw what I saw: the crack in the earth had opened up suddenly, only to close just as suddenly, as if the Earth was opening its mouth, as though it had had something to say. I saw what I saw and I trust it. You may not.

That’s about all I have to report. The rest of our visit was quiet. I was once again amazed by the fluidity with which my family moved between anger and love: the next morning, the night’s quibbling had subsided, or at least re-submerged, and everyone went back to reminiscing, crying, cherishing time.

• • •

Before, I mentioned (briefly, parenthetically) that our 1992 fall visit was the last time I ever saw Red. Well, that is true, and it isn’t. In the physical, worldly sense, it was the last time. He passed a little over a year later. But before he did, I saw him again in a dream. He came to me—not a vision of Red, not my subconscious’ conjured version: this was Red himself, unmistakably. Disbelieve me if you must, but I stand by it.

My dream: I was standing by a river at the bottom of a canyon, sorting rocks. It was nighttime, though the sky was bright.

I was arranging the rocks into piles of like colors, and singing while I worked. I looked up and saw a horse on the other side of the river. The horse crossed towards me and when it had arrived on my side it turned into my grandfather—not shockingly so, but in that seamless way things turn into other things in dreams. He was wearing a suit, dry despite the river, and he put his hand on

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my shoulder and said, “Corn-On-The-Cob, my boy, you’ll be fine.

Don’t worry about it. You’ll do fine.” Surprised to see him, I said, “Grandpa!” and then, “How will I know?” The sky had turned a bright orange-red. He said: “You’ll be fine. I’ve enjoyed my visit.” I was confused: “Your visit?” Red said: “Everything will be fine, just fine, Corny, my boy.” And then a screen door materialized between us and suddenly I was in a new-smelling rental car with my family, looking back at Red just as I had when we left their house in 1992, seeing him standing in the doorway watching waving crying.

I had this dream on a December night in 1993. Red died the next day.

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Suburban War Lily Idle silver gelatin print

Acorn Cups Brynne Haug

You have to believe in her because she’s trying.

It isn’t the pounded-out pieces of her paper sheets on the desk underneath her bony elbow, or the tilt of her chin as she stares out the window wishing for fog when she’s tired of acorn cups settling in the grass, and when she’s not sure how to piece together the phrases that hold her phases in one body and soul.

Mainly you have to believe in the rattling whistle from the hot water pot and the dust settling on the windowsill, standing vigil for the aging hands wrapped round her coffee cup.

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Caroline

Hilar y Painter 35mm film

Dinner for Deaf Expressionists Tyle Schuh

CHARACTERS MAN ½ MAN WOMAN SLAVE STAGE Three identical chairs upon the stage, triangle-like. One facing full front at UC. One facing profile at DL. One facing profile at DR. Blue lights up.

Two [Man and Woman] enter slow and synchronously. Woman from left, Man from right. Strict faces, black-and-white, formal wear. Each holding a white bowl of tomato soup ceremoniously, as a ring bearer would a ring. They arrive at their seats, positioning the bowl at their chairs’ feet. They sit statuesque, elegantly and puppet-like, each peering, necks long and jutting, offstage in opposite directions. From upstage enters ½ Man concealed as an old woman. The disguise is genuinely convincing, but obscure. Shoulders hunched, he trembles as he walks, as old women often do. Hair hidden, nose and eyes shadowed by a modish hat—lips rouged. He wears white gloves, a hulky trench coat, scarf, lace frock, nylon stockings, and a flat shoe.

He holds a white bowl of tomato soup. He feebly stands up on his chair, facing the audience, and takes out a spoon. He taps the edge of the bowl daintily three times, as if to call attention.

Woman snaps her head in a mechanical manner towards the audience. ½ Man mouths and gesticulates, as if addressing the crowd, as Woman speaks: WOMAN: We dine tonight, marking the demise of two languages:

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the rhetorical and the sign. I am here before you, gladly lost for words, when I ask, what saved us from our deaths—us the deaf— when the blind, but headstrong, bellwethers led us into the dim of an era riddled with uncertainty? Postmodernism, I say, is a cliff. A climax, yes: a personal celebration of everything we don’t know; but then again, a cliff.

Man snaps his head in a mechanical manner towards the audience to speak. ½ Man still mouths and gesticulates . . .

MAN: Why did we halt, when others did not—did we sense the preceding gasps before angelic forms were sent tumbling? It was not that we couldn’t hear—it was more that we didn’t listen—feeling something, instead. An inclination. We pushed them: the perfect, the definite, the objective, and we stood back and watched . . . Why? WOMAN: How did they fall? That is language: defining the inbetween. Hyperbole, ambiguity—these extremes are an old dynasty, enslaved and at our service to ask a different question: The Why. A more powerful declaration. It never matters what we say, or how we say it. Why we say what we say is simply is.

Slave enters quickly from UR, crossing to CS. He is in butler garb. He bows quickly, nervously, and then crosses UR to exit.

MAN: So, show me your hands—let them speak.

Open your mouths—let them feel. Let us spill our delightful discourse over this lovely tomato soup.

MAN & WOMAN: And let us see if we are forever to be lost in translation.

Man and Woman simultaneously and mechanically revert their heads to regular, looking-off-stage positions. Lights down. During blackout, ½ Man steps off chair and sits full front.

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White lights up.

Slave enters hastily from UR and stands CS. He’s neurotically timid.

He looks at both Woman and Man as if unsure about whom to go to. The Woman breaks pose and glances at Slave with a smug disposition. She snaps her fingers. Slave starts to walk readily to Woman, but stops abruptly at the sound of Man snapping; Man turns his head and looks at Slave authoritatively. Slave back-tracks and starts to walk towards Man. Woman gives Slave a more definite snap. Slave turns. Man snaps back, even more forcefully, and Slave cringes. Woman and Slave make eye contact and Woman snaps, demandingly pointing her finger to her side. She hmpfs. Slave starts to go there, but Man snaps his fingers and coughs forcefully. He beckons Slave to come over. What proceeds is a building snap-fight between Man and Woman, with Slave caught in the middle. It is to be carried out until the episode crescendos and Slave finally rushes to Man’s side. Man motions demandingly towards the soup, at which Slave picks it up and hands it to man.

At snap-fight ½ Man stands Man looks at him as if this were not up on chair and takes scisenough. Slave pulls out spoon and hands sors out of his trench-coat. it to Man. Man takes it and throws it He begins to cut away at his on the floor. Slave goes to reach for it, clothes—outward gaze— but Man grabs Slave by the back of the working from trench coat to shirt and Slave crumbles to a four-legged frock till all is on the ground. position. Man sets his bowl on Slave’s This action should continue in back, as if he were a table. Slave hands background until the end of Man the spoon and Man takes a sip of the play, where he stands com- the soup, making a deathly stare with pletely exposed, bare-chested Woman from across. As he stares and & down to under garments. sips his soup he speaks to Slave, without breaking eye contact.

MAN: Tell my wife she looks beautiful today.

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Man picks up his bowl and Slave crawls out and stands up at attention. He takes the bowl and sets it back on the ground. Man turns away. Woman turns away. Slave walks hastily to Woman and Slave waves slightly to get her attention. She doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t turn, but stares, vexed, in the opposite direction. Slave snaps his finger. Woman turns ferociously upon him with an intensely insulted expression. Slave bows down before her on one knee. He kisses the back of his hand gently and proceeds to trace the contours of Womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face, brushing her hair, tracing her jaw structure and neck. He pulls back, like one does from an embrace. He stands. Woman smiles at Slave semisweetly and kisses her hand. She beckons Slave closer and slaps him.

WOMAN: Go! Give my husband the boot.

Slave exits SL and we hear a momentary offstage crash as if fumbling for items. Slave returns with two sturdy hiking boots, holding them by the strings. He puts them behind his back. He rushes part way to Man, who looks at him directly. Slave creeps in until he is standing directly over the bowl of tomato soup on the floor. Slave looks down at the soup and then back up at Man. He pulls out one of the shoe by the shoe string and suspends it over the soup, alluding to letting go. The tension holds until Slave unexpectedly slings the hidden shoe from behind his back and knocks Man forcefully on the side of the face. Man looks dumbfounded, but grows greatly enraged.

MAN: Tell her I will not see her again.

Slave sets shoes asides, regarding Man hesitantly as he darts CS. Woman looks over. Slave conjures some strength and sticks his hand down his pants and pulls. He writhes and shrieks wildly, gasping, until he uproots a handful of hair, which he holds in the air, dignified. He walks calmly to Woman and blatantly drops the hairs in her soup. Lights slowly grow to red as Woman fumes and Slave exits quickly SL. Woman, at last, breaks all manners of her tranquil

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decorum, screams and flings her chair to the side. Man, once posed un-expressively elegant in his corner, bolts up and lunges crazily.

They stride to tear each other, but are stopped by—white spotlight— scissors thrown between them. Spotlight on ½ Man. He screams, fully revealed, flinging remaining clothing items onto floor in a disturbed furry. All is still and we should hear an intense panting. ½ Man descends from the chair. He holds out a shaking hand to assure their brief armistice as he picks up the bowl of soup. He walks to them, looking to Man and Woman with a sad expression. He stands between them. He places the bowl of soup at his feet and dips two fingers in it. He rises again, never breaking eye contact, and slowly draws a red question mark on his bare chest. ½ MAN: Why? Spotlight on corner. All turn to Slave gently entering like a scared child from the UR corner. He crosses inward towards CS. He speaks to them: SLAVE: Why? Man and Woman drift slowly to their respective corners, looking haunted and distraught. They ask themselves incessantly, under their breaths, “why?” They turn to each other with a pained look of agony: MAN & WOMAN: Why? All are moved and begin to gently cry. Slave embraces ½ Man as ½ Man collects his soup and draws a question mark on his forehead.

Man and Woman rush to each other, at CS. They embrace each other clumsily and wilt to their knees, grasping each other’s faces, each hollering in a transcending choral “Why, Why, Why’” until the word becomes phonetically unfamiliar and they lie entangled on the floor, breathing lightly. Long pause. Man and Woman compose themselves

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and turn to the audience, staring intently. Plainly they ask: MAN & WOMAN: You may be wondering the question, “why?”

MAN: And it is a wonderful place to begin.

WOMAN: And it is also a wonderful place to end.

Blackout.

NOTES “The confounding third play of the night literally left the audience with a single question: “Why?” Hilarious, awkward and possibly genius, it involved a butler being used as a table, an old woman (played by a man) cutting apart her dress, and said woman painting a question mark on her chest in tomato soup. Interpret it at your peril.” –The Whitman Pioneer

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Man of Many Lines Kai Ra smu ssen charcoal

Magic Hanne Jensen

I. When I was younger, my mother told me the cobblestones on this old street were made of dragon scales.

Do you still think the world has magic?

No, not really. Not anymore.

That’s a shame.

It’s alright, I can wait.

II. hair to mouth to knees to eyes

I have too many secrets. wind to grin to wrists to ground

Yesterday is too far away. rings to beetles to glance to regret I might forget the way you look when you remember— but I doubt I’ll forget this.

III. After you went home, I went home (unsurprising I know).

While eating licorice on the floor at the most inappropriate time, everything I wanted to ask you

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(wanted to tell you, needed to scream to you) just floated by.

I know itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s your birthday today, so smile

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tomb

Kendra K lag 35mm film

Djouléh and the Serpent Jordan Benjamin The call came in around midnight. A jumble of rapid-fire French crackled from the speaker of my African cell phone, the emergency line I keep at my side 24/7. “Morsure du serpent!

Pediatrie! D’urgence!” Snakebite, midnight, pediatrics ward—I’ve only been at this here for a little over a month, but already I can tell that this call bears all the hallmarks of a bad one. I grab my stethoscope, a small mountain of patient report forms, and check over my snakebite kit for everything I might need to stabilize and treat a critical snakebite patient: a full rainbow of appropriately-sized IV catheters (from the filamentous yellow 25G pediatric cannulas to the green large-bore 18G for pouring fluids into adult shock patients), clean glass blood test tubes to test for viper-induced coagulopathies at the patient’s bedside, emergency airways for neurotoxic snakebite-induced respiratory arrest, 5 and 10 mL syringes with a range of needle sizes to go along, the pulse oximeter I picked up before heading here, vials of 1:1000 epinephrine for anaphylaxis, 6x ampoules of polyvalent antivenom, dexa- and betamethasone for allergic reactions to transfusions or serum, diphenhydramine, 50 mL phenergan vials, sterile H 2O ampoules, three pairs of latex gloves (since the cheap ones here tend to tear right through as you pull them over your hand), and a bag valve mask—good to go. I throw in a snake hook and a pair of forceps for good measure, as I once arrived in pediatrics for a similar call only to find that my patient was of the cold-blooded, legless variety. Pack over shoulder, headlamp fired up, boots on, and I am out the door—six minutes have now elapsed since the call came in.

I hustle through a patch of forest across from my room and up into the maze of open-air paths and corridors that join

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the various wards of the French-colonial style hospital, stepping over sleeping bodies wrapped in sheets and clusters of Peul men in straw hats and iridescent purple pants. On the day I arrived, I was told that the spread-out bungalow-style design popular in African hospitals had originally been chosen because it made it easier to isolate and quarantine an entire ward of the hospital in the event of an outbreak of one of any number of highly lethal infectious agents that could walk through our front gate here. Marburg, pox, Lassa, Ebola-Zaire… I read The Hot Zone about Ebola virus shortly after arrival and had the unsettling realization that any patient arriving here with a hemorrhagic fever would be directed straight to me because the late-stage bleeding symptoms would mimic a saw-scaled viper envenomation to a T. Some avenues of thought, I have decided, are better left unaddressed.

Four more minutes pass as I race through the Bureau de Medicine, past the Bloc Operatoire and maternity wards, weaving through throngs of wax-cloth-enveloped mothers with sick children and indifferent fathers who have packed the rising promenade leading to my destination beyond maximum capacity without fail every single day of malaria season thus far; a tideless, vibrant sea that finally carries me into the small intake room of the Bureau de Pediatrie, towards another young casualty of the conflict between people and snakes in rural Africa.

I find my patient on the back left corner of the long counter that serves as a communal examination table for as many little ones as we can fit on it at a given time. He is a young boy, six or seven years old and small for his age, and his breathing is ragged. I drop my bag, roll out my kit, snap on some gloves, and get to work. The boy is Peul, a member of Benin’s “semi-nomadic pastoralist” ethnic group, as my favorite African history professor Jackie Woodfork would remind me. I will call him Djouléh here because it is a common Peul name (and I want to protect his privacy). Djouléh’s left leg is grossly swollen; extravasation has inflated everything below the knee like a water balloon, lending

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a waxy appearance to the tautly-stretched skin. Bright red blood flows freely from a series of mud-caked incisions along the top of his foot, a common traditional medicine “treatment” for envenomations here, and runny yellow plasma and blood leak incessantly from two punctures on his first toe. I check for pulse and capillary refill below the knee and am rewarded with warm skin, cap refill under three seconds and a weak pulse, telling me that tissue of his leg and foot is still alive for the moment despite the extensive edema. His breathing is rapid and shallow, radial pulse rapid and thready, and he responds weakly when I call his name. I pull down his lower eyelid and find pale white tissue: he is anemic.

When I open his mouth, I find fresh blood actively seeping from his gums and weeping from the capillary-rich mucosa behind the rear molars, angry red rivulets that join together as they flow for lower ground before collecting in dark pools between his teeth and lips, or in the depression underneath his tongue. While conducting this primary survey, I ask the nurse questions in French and he translates them into Fon to ask the child’s parents, and then back again to French which I translate back to English in my head; a frustrating game of medical telephone that turns obtaining a consistent answer to even the simplest of questions into a trying and time-consuming endeavor. I ask how long ago the bite occurred, how many times he was bitten, if he has been vomiting blood, and so on. Yes, he has been vomiting blood; he was bitten once 12 hours before while walking around in his house, and from the description of the snake and Djouléh’s symptoms this is clearly another bite from Echis ocellatus, the saw-scaled viper. Like that of most vipers, Echis venom has components that attack tissue and produce massive swelling and tissue damage; unlike that of most vipers, the venom also hijacks natural coagulation cascades and produces millions of transient clots until the clotting factors are entirely consumed. The official term for this is “disseminated intravascular coagulation,”

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or DIC syndrome; the result is a victim with blood that cannot clot and massive internal and external bleeding that will continue unchecked until death or definitive treatment. Echis bites usually kill in one of three ways: by increasing pressure on the brain due to cerebromeningeal hemorrhage in the confined space of the skull, massive blood loss, and/or multiple organ failure due to lack of ability either to deliver oxygenated blood or to remove waste products from critical organ systems.

Djouléh is critically ill only 12 hours after the bite—he is suffering from a severe envenomation. I have learned that, in Africa, it is rarely a good sign when a patient arrives within 24 hours of being bitten. There seems to be an unspoken threshold of tolerability with snakebite symptoms out here, whereby a person will wait around at home or continue to go to work for the first several days of the envenomation before suddenly reaching a point when they can no longer manage with traditional medicine alone and finally come in to the hospital. In Bembereke the magic number seems to be somewhere between 48 and 72 hours. If a patient arrives sooner, it is generally because they have simply reached that threshold earlier and, accordingly, are suffering from a more severe envenomation.

The nurse begins to search for a vein while I finish up the clinical exam and plan out a course of treatment. As I finish up my primary assessment and take a last sweep of vitals for clinical markers before getting the serum ready, Djouléh suddenly crashes.

I think back to my training as a young Wilderness EMT three years before and recall a warning given by one of the instructors: children are great actors when it comes to medical situations, dramatically breaking down when mildly injured, but appearing completely stable when gravely ill, until the very last moments when their bodies finally give out and they crash. Oftentimes, by this point, it is too late, and I am acutely aware of the ominous implications of those words as a young boy reaches the beginning of the end before my eyes. The skin of his arm suddenly feels cold

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as ice, the radial pulse I had checked only moments before now absent as the blood in his extremities retreats towards the core of his body, an ancient biological triage program of sorts to keep vital organs alive until the last moments. Djouléh’s eyes have rolled back into his head, and he no longer responds when I call his name. He has just dropped into decompensatory shock; his body is no longer able to compensate for the assault of the venom, and he is heading quickly towards the third and final “irreversible” phase of shock.

It has been less than five minutes now from the moment I walked in the door of pediatrics, and 15 total since the call came in—emergency medicine moves fast, but right now the venom is moving faster. Only a vigorous sternal rub or sharp pinch to the back of his arm elicits a response from the young boy, he is now AVPU-P on the consciousness scale meaning that he is only responsive to painful stimulus—not a good sign. I become acutely aware, suddenly, of the stares from Djouléh’s family. Their faces show no emotion and they stand back and gaze objectively on the drama unfolding before us while chewing strips of bark. It bothers me immensely at the time, because when I am very scared that a child is going to die in my hands right now, how can they stand there stoically watching what may be their son’s final moments without showing even a hint of concern? I wonder if they have any idea how serious this situation is—their little boy is currently circling the drain and I don’t even have a working oxygen mask to put on him. I look at the nurse and he glances up, a little yellow IV catheter in hand, trying unsuccessfully to get a patent line in Djouléh’s wrist. Since it’s nighttime, there is no backup to call; technically, a single doctor works the guard (night shift) for the entire hospital, but this generally entails either running an emergency surgery in the Bloc Operatoire when the case simply cannot be delayed until the next guy’s shift, or, more realistically, sleeping at home. I have yet to encounter the guard doc when I have wanted or needed him. Whatever decisions are made in the

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next few minutes will determine whether Djouléh lives or dies, and all eyes are currently pointed at me to make them.

I can feel a weak brachial pulse and warmer tissue just above the elbow; since the peripheral veins can collapse as shock progresses, I ask the nurse to try cannulating the larger antecubital vein while I begin to prepare two vials of antivenom. My working plan is to get serum onboard as quickly as possible, treat for shock, get bloodwork for the lab so we can start a transfusion if it is needed, and deal with any other medical problems as they come up. I draw up 10 mL saline, inject it into the first ampoule containing powdery-white, crystalline, freeze-dried antivenom proteins. Reconstitute and mix until clear, draw up the first ampoule and inject it into the second, reconstitute and mix until clear, check for solids and foam—all clear and good to go. I am talking to Djouléh the whole time but really it is for my own benefit, because in my head I am sure this is the slowest preparation in all of human history and he is not responsive to verbal stimulus at this point anyway. Finally, serum is prepped and ready, drawn up into the syringe again and air bubbles cleared, 10 mL of slightly off-clear solution packed with purified F(ab)2 antivenom fragments ready to go to work and hopefully pull Djouléh back from the abyss. It seems it will take a miracle to bring him back from the rapid downward spiral he has entered, but I am posted in a missionary hospital—if ever there was a time for the big man upstairs to intervene, I reckon that this would be the one.

As I turn to take Djouléh’s arm and start giving serum, the room suddenly plunges into blackness. A storm has knocked out power, but I am still wearing the headlamp I had thrown on for the walk over, so I hit it and we work on by a single light. The nurse is taping up a now-patent line in the antecubital space, as he secures it to the arm I am already hooking up to the medication port and beginning a slow, direct push of life-saving serum into Djouléh’s body. Every minute is a lifetime; I hope he will live long

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enough for me to finish the injection and that we aren’t too late. I have never treated anyone this critically ill with serum before, and I honestly don’t know whether it will be the miracle cure he needs or little more than a symbolic gesture. It would be a cold comfort to say, “We tried” in this situation and find any solace in the result of a family forced to return home with a dead child, an expensive bill for treatment, and a vote of no confidence in the modern medical establishment. I’ve seen it happen, not with snakebite but with malaria patients, and it can really tear your heart out.

I slowly depress the plunger on the syringe at a rate of 2 mL per minute, timing the progress of the push against the march of the second hand on my wristwatch until the end of the fifth minute and the last mililiter of serum have come and gone. No time to waste; we don’t have much else on hand to treat Djouléh, but I’m a Wilderness EMT, and I’ll be damned if I let a lack of basic medical supplies keep this kid from having a fighting chance at pulling through. Beg, borrow, build, steal; improvise, adapt, overcome. There are no pillows to elevate his legs or blankets to keep him warm for basic treatment of shock, but in a storeroom I find a large stuffed Nemo (the fish) toy and gently slide it under his legs to help bring his blood pressure up. I ask his family to give me their heavy winter coats, and they are reluctant. “Who, me?”—they point to their own jackets with a look of incredulity on their faces.

Yes, you—I’m getting irritated now, I don’t have time to waste arguing with three young men about why they should give up their jackets to save the life of their younger brother or son, so when one of them takes his off to hold it in his hands I loosely interpret the gesture as what I am waiting for, snatch the jacket and a wool cap, and do my best to cocoon the little guy in a capsule of warmth.

Then I collect delicate capillary tubes of blood and run them to the lab by hand. Three minutes and one very low hematocrit result later, I am running back to pediatrics with a bag of blood to transfuse and help treat Djouléh’s critically depressed red cell volume. Three hours later, Djouléh hears me talking to him (and

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myself) for the hundreth time and cracks his first smile; I take my first deep breath of the night and realize that he is going to pull through.

When I visit Djouléh each day over the next week, I notice that he finds it extremely funny when I ask him to take deep breaths for my stethoscope while I take lung sounds. Although we can’t speak the same language, his family and I get pretty good at communicating, and every day he waits with anticipation for the stethoscope test. Sometimes I hold my breath with him until my face turns red, then when neither of us can keep going we gasp dramatically together and soon the whole roomful of women and sick children is roaring with laughter. “Bon travail,” I say; “toh,” he replies in Peul, and smiles. The feeling of seeing Djouléh on the mend after such a touch-and-go arrival is indescribable, as is the feeling of having played an integral part in the saving of a child’s life. Medicine is a strange field, full of the most unimaginably rich highs and devastating lows that I have experienced thus far in my life. As an emergency medicine guy, my background is to get on scene, stabilize, and get patients up the chain of care as fast as possible. Here, much of the chain of care for snakebite patients is me, so the experience of directing care each day and seeing every step of the clinical improvement is new and more fulfilling than I had anticipated.

Nearly 10 days after his arrival, Djouléh is finally ready to go home. I start to tell his mother to make sure he keeps his bandaged (but fully functional) foot in a shoe until the last wound has closed, when I realize he doesn’t have any shoes. I ask my friend Amy, a Canadian nurse, if she can stall him for a few minutes while she does the tetanus vaccine, so that I can run down to the front of the hospital where a woman sells a pile of used clothes and shoes. I sift through the pile until I see them—a pair of baby Doc Martens. Perfect, but I grab him a pair of Chuck Taylor’s as well for good measure, then run across the street to find a flashlight. I head back up and call Djouléh into the room, and

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with the help of a nurse who speaks Peul I tell him to be a little more careful next time he is romping around barefoot in snake country.

“These should help though,” I say as I hand him the baby docs; “and these too,” I add, handing him the bag of Converse.

I know it’s not really kosher to get your patients presents on a general basis, but I don’t particularly care either…sue me. He beams with pride and asks again and again if it is really all for him. Finally, I hand him a new flashlight for walking around at night when so many people come into contact with snakes. I told Djouléh that I don’t want to see him back again for any more snakebites, and it’s true, but I’m honestly going to miss the little guy (even if he did knock a few years off my lifespan with such a dramatic episode).

It can be strange at times to find myself working on the front lines of conflict between people and snakes, because I love them both. Love of snakes has brought me around the world, taken me to Whitman and my mentor Kate Jackson, led me to pursue snakebite medicine professionally, and now landed me on another adventure back in Africa for the third time; so I can’t and won’t blame snakes for doing what they do best as snake habitat gets destroyed and people bring themselves into close proximity with dangerous animals. As a person, however, and particularly now as one who has been treating the devastating effects of snakebite firsthand, I can’t say I blame Djouléh’s family or other people here for killing snakes they come across in light of how real the threat of snakebite is. I wasn’t sure how I would handle such a conflict of interest until I came here, but the answer is actually very simple.

The people here have coined a name for me now, one that does not yet exist officially in any language. They call me “serpentologue.”

For the time being, I’m going to keep on fixing up as many casualties from both sides as I can, regardless of the frequency one sheds their skin, or the content of their diet. And one day, when I finally hang up my snake hooks and stethoscope as an old and

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successful snakebite doctor/herpetologist, I’m going to mint the term serpentologue in the OED as exactly whatever it is I have been doing the past seventy-five years or so and die a happy man.

Problem solved.

But as for the present, this particular story has a happy ending. Djouléh went home alive and well, with full recovery of the bitten limb and zero disability. I haven’t seen him back here again for any snakebites, and already another month has passed since he left for the journey home and I began writing an account of this story. I still think about him when I take lung sounds, mostly because I still can’t figure out what was so funny about being asked to take a deep breath, but also because I do genuinely miss the little guy. Perhaps I’ll see him again someday, perhaps not—either way, I can’t help but smile when I think about Djouléh’s triumphant return home, both feet not only intact but planted firmly on the ground, in a new pair of baby Doc Martens. In a place where stories are woven into living history, I’d be surprised if the story of Djouléh, the serpent, and the serpentologue isn’t retold as the pièce du jour for some time to come (with lots of dramatic breath-holding, of course). At the very least, he is a shoe-in for the most stylish return from hospital award.

Until next time, Serpentologue out.

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Goat Meditations Tino Mori

Tree Goat, would I were skyward as thou art, thrust in grand majesty upon a branch, not in earthen thralldom, yoked to a cart, bowing to the tyranny of the ranch.

Perched boldly like a falcon cloaked in fur, looking down with dark eyes of clemency, upon a world, earthbound and secular, cloven hoof raised in calm severity.

Tree Goat, in your crepuscular glory, I seek to decipher your shrouded soul, grasp the revelation of your story, and find harmony in this noble goal.

And as this humble plea swells from my throat... did I just read a poem about a goat?

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Garden of Monstrous Delights

Asa Mea se graphite

Twenty Blindnesses Brynne Haug

1. The palm Tina is blind. Her glasses are opaque, black, hiding sightlessness because it is grotesque to the people on the other side of the picket fence around her garden. The back of her hand is unmapped territory, hidden and unknowable. She slides her fingers down the veins to her wrist, sensing the pulse underneath the invisible hairs and invisible skin. She keeps her fingernails short. Part of her thinks that maybe someday she’ll know the back of her own hand, but she can never feel her own skin like someone else’s. There are too many nerves, and it is too exquisite to be sightlessly both toucher and touched.

2. To walk More than anything, she longs to open the front door and step out onto the sidewalk. She has heard of blind people with canes who walk the streets, helped by strangers. She cannot imagine this.

But still she stands at the end of the path in front of the house, just before the picket gate, and listens to the cars pass. Her sisters used to hold her hands to walk together and she remembers the spongy-flatness of asphalt under her feet, and most of all the harsh smell rising off it on a hot, muggy day. But her sisters have fled the nest now, and it is only her and her father. The hours he is gone, he works. The hours he is home, she must care for him. No matter what Rebecca says.

3. The face She always takes her glasses off to hug Rebecca. It isn’t because it matters whether she smears them, but only because she wants to get close, to smell the smell of familiarity. It is strange to know the topography of someone else’s face so clearly that it is tattooed

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against her skin. Though her sisters don’t understand, it is simple and straightforward. It is only that she cannot help leaning toward the windows that open to the world beyond her home. Maybe her sisters only do not want her to touch a sister outside of their sphere.

4. To work Her father is a banker. She doesn’t know how much money he makes. They can afford a cleaning lady once a week, but she only sprays strange lemon and vinegar smells across Tina’s microcosm and Tina cleans after she leaves. They can afford a grocery service, too. It’s lucky. She can’t imagine her father shopping, and she cannot leave the house. He tells her this every day: I’m sorry you can’t leave the house. In a flat monotone, a ritual she has to believe that he believes in as strongly as she does. But she is not sorry that he leaves the house every day to work, leaves her alone to clean and listen to the radio.

5. The town Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Snowy in the winter, humid in the summer. She tastes the rainforest and the icebox by turns.

6. To sing Her secret is music. Her father does not like to hear it. So when he is gone from the house, when all that’s left to keep her company are the breakfast dishes and the empty rooms upstairs, she opens the bottom cupboard in the kitchen. In it lives an old boombox. She found it here once, and, with Rebecca alongside her, put in tapes, turned on the radio. Cranked it up and danced around the kitchen table until her sisters drove them off. When she craves connection with the world she switches on the radio and sits at the table, swinging her legs. They don’t quite touch the floor. But more often, she prefers to slide in cassettes, stored in a battered cardboard box three inches to the right of the boombox. They are all the same shape and size, but she knows some by the rattle when she picks them up, others by the texture of their edges. She puts them in and feels the buttons, the small triangle for play not to be mistaken for the more dangerous record. And when the tape is in and the dial is turned as high as it will go, she steps away from the cupboard and

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runs hot water for the dishes. Through the steam and clatter she sings at the top of her lungs.

7. The years She is twenty-five years old, but she feels younger.

8. To be seen When she was younger, fifteen or sixteen, she wandered out the garden gate. She didn’t mean to. Meg and Beth both still lived with them then, pruned the rosebushes that now grow tall and wild.

They could never bear to see her wander across the grass, so they confined her to the porch whenever they could. But sometimes the glass of lemonade in her hand was too sour for her to bear any longer. And then she felt her way across the lawn, bare toes tickled by clover patch and prickly mowed grass. The cement walkway down to the fence found her almost by accident. She scraped her feet on its edge but she kept going, one hand feeling the thick air ahead of her, till she came to the fencepost. One step at a time down the three stairs to the sidewalk. Her sisters never saw. She paused a moment, head tilted back over her shoulder as if she sensed her mistake. It was too late. She let go of the fencepost and took seven steps down the sidewalk. Only seven, then she was lost. She did not see the moving van at the curb, though she inhaled the tarry fumes of its exhaust and heard the rumble of unfamiliar voices.

New neighbors. Then, standing in front of her, was Rebecca. It was like that forevermore: there was Rebecca. Even the gaggle of Meg and Beth and their clamorous voices, running after her to draw her back into the house, could not take this victory away. She had left the house. She had not seen, but she had at last been seen. Even now Rebecca sees her.

9. The rooms She is the youngest. Meg and Beth are both married now. Both mothers. They left as soon as they could. But she is confined to the crooked walls of the house in which she spent her childhood, every piece of furniture nailed to the floor. At night when she can’t sleep she paces the floorboards, stands in the doorways of her sisters’ empty rooms and imagines they are still there. But the rooms are silent.

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10. To love She sometimes feels she is the only person in the world who is able to love simply and entirely. Her sisters are confounded by her. She accepts that this isn’t their fault; her father never told his daughters that he loved them at all. She is quite convinced that this is because he does not love.

11. The teeth She lives with her father. Her mother is gone. She’s not sure where.

She tastes the absence, sometimes, picks it out particularly between her first bottom molar and the tooth that turns slightly crooked next to it, the extra tooth she can’t put a name to. When that happens she puts her fingers up to touch the gap. Tooth enamel feels like slick porcelain on her skin. But no matter how many times she fishes in the gap with her too-short fingernail, she is never sure where to find her mother.

12. To teach She wants to teach her father to love. She knows it is likely he has forgotten how to learn. Her impression of bankers by and large comes from the radio, since her father’s absence during the days and his desire for servitude other times leaves little room for explanation. Her impression of bankers is poor. Her impression of bankers mainly has to do with Wall Street and the recession.

Nevertheless, she sets out to show her father that she loves him in an attempt to explain to him how to love her back.

13. The spices She says cheerfully to the few people with whom she speaks how lucky she is that her dad lets her stay on with him, but she takes care of him more than he does her. He never learned to cook, and so she opens the kitchen cupboards and inhales the spices.

Her nose seldom fails and her hand never wavers: she reaches for the cilantro when she wants cilantro, cinnamon when she needs cinnamon. Rebecca says that she ought to get out from under him, step out on her own, stop letting him take advantage of her.

But every time she thinks to, she remembers the cinnamon in the cupboard and wonders what she would do if it moved.

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14. To burn She brings her father homemade muffins with his coffee at breakfast. He eats them in silence, not noticing the burn she has sustained on the soft inside of her right wrist, a result of a dangerous interaction with the oven. She tries to be careful, but sometimes her blindness stands in her way. At first the burn stings angrily and is too tender and swollen for her to touch. Her only relief is a bowl of cool water. The burn scabs with time and then begins to flake. It itches. She picks at it habitually, and even after it has scarred over, when she runs her fingers along it she can still feel the rough patch. She finds other ways to show her father that she loves him, tries to engage him in conversation and cook his favorite meals. Meanwhile she fingers the scarred burn.

15. The hand She sometimes sits in silence on the front porch with Rebecca. She holds Rebecca’s hand because although she can hear her breathe alongside her, she is never quite sure—never certain—that the hand that belongs to the breath is the hand she thinks it ought to be. Never sure that the familiar smell is the scent she wants to believe it is. She has never quite got the hang of telling people apart by their breath. But she knows hands, and so she holds them whenever she can, whomever she can. Lifelines and deathlines and lovelines, the kind of loveliness that makes the most sense to her.

She reads them as easily as sighted people read books. It is only her own that remains closed.

16. To lose For years, ever since she moved out from her parents’ house next door, Rebecca has visited every Wednesday lunchtime. She rights the wrongs Tina cannot figure out and calls her by her name.

For years she has spoken laughingly of a man named Patrick.

This Wednesday, today, Tina smells something different. She smells a voice and a palm from beyond her microcosm, coming up to the garden gate alongside Rebecca. She stands paralyzed on the porch, too frightened to speak, though Rebecca greets her from the pathway. She remembers the day Beth came home

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with Jim, Meg’s unspeakable tension across the dinner table. Meg eloped with Frank twelve days later, half out of jealousy. She had always wanted to do everything Beth did. Tina never understood.

But today she stands on the porch and reaches through the hot, muggy Pennsylvania summer to grip Rebecca’s familiar palm, just to make sure it’s her. She does not know if the knotted strings squeezing her heart are jealousy or merely concern, but she cannot resent Rebecca. She takes off her dark glasses to press their cheeks together. The topography of Rebecca’s face has hardly changed over the years: her pores are a little rough, her cheekbone hidden under a thick layer of flesh. Rebecca introduces Patrick and he shakes Tina’s hand. His palm is strong and dry. They don’t stay long. There are plans to be made, invitations to be sent, but Rebecca wants Tina to be her maid of honor. And she does not know if this is forgetting or remembering, loss or gain.

17. The books She never learned Braille. She has spent all of her life that she can remember in this house; her parents never bothered to send her to school at all.

18. To plead There is no reasoning with her father. She stands across the kitchen table from him. Coffee slurps and toast crunches. He says nothing.

But she knows the answer. He let Beth go and Meg left without saying a word. He has only his youngest daughter and she knows that she is the one thing he does not believe he can afford to lose.

The trouble is that he takes everything from her and gives so little in return.

19. The names Her parents named her Kristina and her sisters knew her as Kitty when she was small but now she is Tina. Her father rarely calls her by any name at all; Meg and Beth don’t visit, wrapped up in their husbands and children, refusing to speak to their father. Sometimes she wonders if the name is a secret between her and Rebecca, a myth invented and perpetuated for their personal amusement.

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20. To run When she was younger, fifteen or sixteen, she wandered out the garden gate. She wanted to walk then. Maybe she didn’t do it on purpose, but her feet led her down the road to Rebecca. It is like today. Rebecca has stood with her on the edge of this precipice for years; she has at last decided to jump. Her father is at work.

He will come home to an empty house. All she takes with her are her clothes and her tapes. The boombox stays with the house.

Her father does not listen to music, but she has always somehow suspected anyhow that the music belonged to her mother long ago.

The tape player belongs here. She will find a new one wherever she ends up, whether with Rebecca or on her own someday. She puts her things in Rebecca’s van. She has not ridden in a car since Beth and Meg escaped, got out, ran away; they used to drive her places once in a while. Her father should have known. He should have known that just as his older girls found men to marry, his crippled youngest would one day too find a hole in the fence. This is not about Rebecca’s wedding. Sitting in the front seat of the car while Rebecca checks the house, breath tight and dry from the air conditioning, she runs her fingers over the rough burn on her right wrist. Muffins. She turns her hand up and traces the lines on her palm, traces her life and her head and her love. She’s never been sure about palmistry. Before today, though she has read hands skillfully, her own have been too familiar for meaning to come out of them. Today she tickles the lines, runs the pad of her forefinger down her wrist to her pulse, just below the burn. Around on the other side of her hand the soft, prickly hairs brush the back of her knees where her hand rests in her lap. Funny how she can feel both sides of her skin. Funny how even though she is sitting still and silent in a cold car, waiting for Rebecca, she has never felt more like running.

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Sauntering Through REM (75 Percent) Natalie Ste ven s suminagashi, embroidery

The Data Fields

Nick Budak 35mm film, digital manipulation

Departure Eleanor Ellis

The engine has a thicker accent than any of us, and I can’t help but listen: First, the whirring, the thudding of tiny wheels on concrete.

Our ears pop, straining to hear the sounds that leaving makes: the crumpling of newspaper pages, the thump of small bags sliding under seats, the click of metal clasps around our waists.

You’re already sleeping, resting on the stiffly numbered seat. Me, I can never sleep properly without valleys and mountains close to my body.

I’m awake, but when we take off, I don’t look ahead.

In this country of complimentary peanuts they speak the language of the sea: We’ve left the port, boarded, and here in the cabin I am holding the seat in my hands, eyes closed so I can hear the tide coming in.

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On the Fence

Maya Volk digital photograph

Logic on the Fisher Farm Sabrina Wise

Robin has clean hands and there’s a baby inside her. No one knows but me.

My first day, she says you kids don’t usually last and sends me to drain the compost basin.

She lives as I’ll learn to, fingers aching for unwanted grasses, grasping, shifty on unweeded ground.

She speaks Boston and broken Spanish, plans to bike Alicante someday.

The Fishers ask her to plant kiwi in May so she does. It inhales on a cold night and never breathes again.

Hot afternoons, she cuts lavender near the plot where I’m weeding. We talk stories, the ones a mother should know.

The Grimm’s goose girl knew forest-speak, that fallen princess. Her horse named itself Falada, terrified guards chased her from her kingdom, the creek cried as she ran— If your mother only knew, her heart would surely break in two.

And the sky burned blue ‘til it opened, and the goose girl’s footsteps set the hill

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in motion, and she saved the right man at the right time and far away a prince noticed, loved her, threw her betrayers in spiked barrels, rolled them to the sea.

The week she loses the baby, I work overtime. Ignored, the apple tree’s gone heavy, branches pinned to the ground. I cart flats of fruit and clear the overgrown clover patch, attack it, she says, if you don’t see the bees they won’t sting you.

Five days later she’s slashing blackberry brambles.

She is quiet, the goose girl.

Fugitive crowned without trying, blessed with strange power and a creek to weep for her, a creek simple and sad because things are not as they should be.

If your mother only knew, her heart would surely break in two.

She leans toward the brambles, listening.

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Stick Figure 010 Charly Bloomqui st archival inkjet print

Hanford B Reactor (Control Panel) Ben Lerchin digital photograph

Wonderland Kinsey White

Alice is flitting through a World War I battery without a care in the world. Tripping and falling, she grazes her left knee against a needle full of heroin. I’m disjointed. Tears instantaneously stream down her angelic face. Alice rushes to the spigot in hopes of clearing the gravel from her gushing wound. The water hits her raw flesh with a sharp flip of my stomach, and the sting that is echoing throughout her petite frame is rocking my core.

I’m currently asking Alice where she is going, how much it will cost, and why I’m still in this dimension. I’m merely ten years old and already planning a drug-addled future that ends tragically like hers. It was confounding as to why her name was anonymous, but they deemed her Alice in the meantime. But then I remember it’s a Jefferson Airplane reference, before the Starship days, and I’m an obese hip wannabe who cannot yet recite the nomenclature with ease.

If I could ask Alice a single question in this moment, I’d first inform her that I understand what these four gorgeous people are doing. But then I’d like her to explain to me why they ruin my life with every misstep into the unknown. It’s riddled with uncertainty and I don’t want to fall into the void. So, like Alice, I’m drowning myself in a concoction of Virginia Slims and distilled vodka. Alice and I are one and the same—our age differs by a mere five years. She’s fifteen.

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Dusk Wandering Marlena Sloss digital photograph

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m a Lady

Madi son Munn chalk pastel

Kensington Gardens

Clare Spatola-Knoll non-adhesive handbound book

Hanford B Reactor (Little People) Ben Lerchin digital photograph

Shine Slow Down Robby Seager

glisten. so often do pools of dew I seek our reflection, we up in time. Just to receive our thoughts in the head of someone who might look a squirrel scurry up a nearby tree and drop on the whispers caught in the claws of nectar on their still faces. None are alone, Others lie downâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;stars drip Others climb to a feasible escape.

Trees fell to build steps out of the bog. our burst skin with moss, with fur. in drudge. We gather substance, patching we emerge from salty bodies soaked

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Through a Filament Robby Seager

we emerge from salty bodies soaked in drudge. We gather substance, patching our burst skin with moss, with fur.

Trees fell to build steps out of the bog.

Others climb to a feasible escape.

Others lie down—stars drip nectar on their still faces. None are alone, the whispers caught in the claws of a squirrel scurry up a nearby tree and drop on the head of someone who might look up in time. Just to receive our thoughts in pools of dew I seek our reflection, we so often do glisten.

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Dust at the Wheat Fields Asa Mea se 35mm film

Consumer Goods, etc.

Maren Schiffer

1.

I fill my notebooks with names I don’t look up, things “I don’t have time to see.” It’s the thought that counts, right?

2.

I have three empty picture frames: A hanging 3x3 A metal 4x4 An ordinary 4x6 I know, roughly, the pictures that belong to them.

But Rite-Aid’s quite a drive, and my printer’s out of ink.

3.

Apparently, no one eats Oreos anymore. Our kitchen is full of empty talk and empty grins and empty wallets. Shelves are packed with lentils, cumin, raw nuts. All I want is processed wheat to cradle myself with. How soft the powder of factory crackers must be. Who knew it’d become the nitty-gritty, the product left forgotten by consumerist trends?

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4.

I had a dream I was shopping in a barata. I chose pastries, powderfrosted, one by one. When it was time to pick up my mother’s cake, the lady smiled, “Would you like it wrapped?”

“Okay,” I said.

I watched her unroll Christmas paper in May. It was thin and sad, tomato soup red, but it sparkled under fluorescent lights. She rolled out layer after layer, hypnotized by its steady progression, folding it carefully around the box.

“Wait!” I yelled. “You’ve made a mistake! The cake you’re wrapping is already half-eaten.” The other stood next to it, untouched, undemanding. She stared blankly at me, not yet awake from her trance. Slowly, ceremoniously, she undressed her work of art.

5.

In a bookstore, women on the covers of international and national magazines stare angrily at me. The illustration of Hillary Clinton is clearly airbrushed. They say, “Don’t look at us like that. It’s not our fault. We’re all embedded in the now, you know? You’ll see.” Some are vixens, others does, others victims with blindfolds and red X’s painted on their lips. Imagine the conveyor belt they come from.

6.

My mother says another world exists in this one. I never knew her to be so cynical, our combined imagination so dark. In distant depths of Vons, Starbucks brews caffeine to tunes of Frank Sinatra.

The coffee cries for attention. “Drink me black, you big shot buffoons!”

“Yeah!” I want to echo. But the sign displays sugar-free vanillacaramel. I clutch a carton of half and half. The magazines, the cake, the frames, the notebooks smirk tentatively.

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Frost

Halley McCor mick digital photograph

happiness is going home

Melina Hughe s digital photograph

Touching You

cade beck mixed media on digital print

Summit Maya Booth-Balk & Ali Danko

Tape wind to an easel

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Polar Bears, Rockfish, and the Ten Modes of Ancient Skepticism Cathryn Klusmeier

The skeptic, because he loves humanity, wishes to cure dogmatists of their opinions and rashness, with reasoning, so far as possible (Outlines, 1.280).

Part 1: The Second Mode of Skepticism—or, I Drink Tea.

I am drinking some red rooibos tea from a green and yellow mug with a broken handle and writing in the margins of the chapter called “Skepticism” in my Hellenistic Philosophy book with a black Pilot Precise v5. My thick, mustard yellow book is open to page 328 and there are blue smudge marks on the corner of the page because I’ve been eating frozen blueberries for the past hour and a half while reading about the ancient skeptics and their philosophy circa the third century BCE.

I like frozen blueberries. I believe in frozen blueberries, but the ancient skeptics on page 328 do not. They do not believe in anything, they say. We are skeptics, they say. “You cannot know anything for sure, so it is best to believe in nothing at all” (327).

There are ten modes of skepticism. They call them “modes,” but they are really reasons. The ancient skeptics give ten reasons why they believe it is better to believe in nothing at all than to hold things to be true that you cannot prove. They have constructed ten modes to convince you that there is nothing you can really know for sure, and this is mode number two:

“Since there is so much variation in the bodies of men, it is likely that men also differ from each other with respect to their souls.” For example, “Some people digest beef more easily

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than rockfish, or are more readily afflicted with diarrhea from drinking Lesbian wine,” they say (330). This is the second mode of skepticism. There are ten modes of skepticism that are meant to convince you that there is nothing in this world that we can know for sure and in number two they cite digestion problems because of rockfish and Lesbian wine as proof that all men are different and, because of that variation, there is nothing in the world that can be known for sure.

I wish I knew what a rockfish was. I have this picture in my mind of a fish that I can skip across the surface of a muddy lake in late July. I’m thinking smooth; I’m thinking flat; I’m thinking a dark grey color with slippery, oblong, scales and glassy eyes protruding from its small, round head. I’m thinking that a rockfish probably doesn’t taste very good and I probably couldn’t catch it with a net and some Wonder Bread because it won’t stop sinking to the bottom of the lake to join all of the other rocks that aren’t fish. But even if I could catch it and I managed to cook it up on my grill, to fry it like I fry trout and bass and catfish, could I digest it?

Or would it get so far as my small intestines and then retreat out the other end? I’m a vegetarian, so I don’t usually eat rockfish, but the fact is, if I caught one, I would eat it. I would eat it with Lesbian wine and a side of beef and the left over Wonderbread I used to snare the slippery fish. But see, the fact is if I do get diarrhea from drinking Lesbian wine and eating rockfish, I’m not going to stop believing in everything like the skeptics think I should. Instead, I’m going to start believing that I should give up that bottle of Lesbian wine and stick to whisky and novels and frozen blueberries because this stuff isn’t sitting right in my gut.

Part 2: The Zoo

Once, when I was six, my parents drove five hours to take me to the St. Louis Zoo. The drive to St. Louis from Arkansas is a stretch of long, stuffy highways of cigarette-lined asphalt and overgrown ditches and Harley Davidson dealerships. St. Louis is a lot of things, but it’s mostly baseball fans and Italian mobs

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making fettuccine and beer factories of red and brown brick and dilapidated concrete. The zoo in St. Louis is a lot like St. Louis itself, but with fewer mobsters and more gorillas. The zoo is mostly red brick buildings with crumbling concrete cages and rumbling air conditioners that never seem to be fixed, which is a problem for the indoor reptile exhibits in late July when the temperatures in St. Louis topple over 110° Fahrenheit with a humidity of 87%.

My mom doesn’t like snakes, so we stayed away from the indoor reptile cages and hovered around the sea lions in the cracked concrete pool, jumping in and out of murky water over and over again in return for limp, grey fish. The cheetah exhibit was closed down because earlier that week a 55-pound female cheetah, Zuri, managed to scale the ten-foot wall separating the visitors and the cats. Twenty-seven minutes later she was tranquilized and put back in the cage, but the exhibit was forced to close for the week, so we went to see the polar bears.

There are two polar bears in the St. Louis Zoo. They are the only two polar bears in a 400-mile radius and this means they should be popular. They should be popular like the sea lions eating limp fish and jumping out of muddy pools are popular, but the polar bears are not. No one waits in line for the polar bear exhibit.

My parents and I are the only ones here, and this polar bear is brown. This polar bear is a female and her fur is brown and she is lying in a muddy puddle of murky water collected in the small concrete pool in the corner of her concrete box. She is brown and I am red with the sunburn that my mom tried to prevent with SPF 55 but there comes a point when SPF 55 is not enough on crumbling concrete in the St. Louis Zoo in late July. We are sweating and we are sunburned and my skin is red but it will turn brown eventually, like the polar bear whose name is Penny. Penny is lying down and turning brown and she looks like I feel, which is sick, not with diarrhea, but with something else. It’s the kind of sick that doesn’t come from rockfish or Lesbian wine, but from somewhere in my gut, and for some reason I can’t seem to stomach it.

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Part 3: Almonds and Olive Oil

I am eating almonds now. I went to see the doctor yesterday for an annual checkup and he told me that I need to put more fats in my diet and I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “That’s exactly what I mean. You will never be able to have children if you do not have sufficient amounts of fats in your diet.” I said, “I’m twenty. I don’t want children.” And he said, “You say that now, but in a few years, you might change your mind. It might happen sooner than you think. And with your small frame, believe me, it’s going to be hard enough to bear children. You have to think about this stuff.”

“Oh,” I said. And then, “I believe you.”

“Yes,” he said. “You need to eat fats. Good ones like avocados and almonds and cashews and peanut butter and fish oil and olive oil. Can you do that for me?”

Part 4: The First Mode of Skepticism

I would tell you about the other modes of skepticism that make up the ancient skeptic philosophy. I would tell you about the other nine modes that make up the rest of the reasons why the ancient skeptics say that you should not believe in anything because you cannot know anything for sure.

“Your beliefs are the source of your discomfort,” they say (307). “By removing your beliefs, you will become free from disturbance.” This means that there will be no more religious wars, because no one will believe in anything or feel the need to fight for it. No more gay rights. No more votes for women. Racism becomes a thing of the past. Nobody will step on each other’s toes because there will be no more toes to step on. I would tell you all of this about the rest of the modes and then I would try and explain why this philosophy makes sense. I would tell you all about the first mode that says that olive oil is beneficial to men, but if you sprinkle it on wasps and bees it destroys them. Or how salt water is unpleasant and poisonous for men to drink, but very pleasant and potable for fish (326). Fish like rockfish. Fish like fish oil that I’m supposed to be drinking by the barrel. But the problem is, I don’t

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really believe the doctor at my annual checkup because he never has to bear children and he doesn’t construct an elaborate home for an infant every month in his uterus. He doesn’t construct that home for the baby in his uterus only to have it destroyed by a raging hurricane wrecking havoc in his gut that makes him double over in pain for four days every month. He doesn’t have to wait until the storm is over and the house has been forcefully removed along with flesh and blood and tears only to build it up to be torn down again next month.

I could go on. I could tell you all about the other modes of skepticism and the implications and how we should all take a second look at ancient skepticism because look, just look at all of the problems that it solves. But I’m not going to. I’m not going to because I would be lying and you would know it. You would know because you know that I know that I can’t forget about Penny the brown polar bear, who died six months after I visited her because she had been carrying two dead fetuses in her uterus that the zookeepers didn’t know about. She died in that muddy pond. Six weeks later, Churchill, the other polar bear in the St. Louis Zoo that I didn’t see that day, ate a fatal helping of cloth and plastic that he somehow found in his bin, causing him to die on the surgery table four hours later. The St. Louis Zoo has given up keeping live polar bears in St. Louis. In 2005 they installed three life-sized, robotic polar bears that are white, not brown like Penny and not troublesome like Churchill because they don’t have dead fetuses in their uteruses and they don’t eat cloth and plastic and they don’t need to eat more fats or more rockfish because they will never have children. They don’t drink Lesbian wine and, if they were alive, they could probably digest meat pretty well, but they are robotic and this is cost-effective because they don’t need to be fed anything, let alone rockfish. The children will flock to the exhibit, not knowing that they have been swindled, not knowing that they need to believe that polar bears can be anything other than white, robotic, and well-behaved. They will not know and they will not be troubled by things like empathy and compassion and rage.

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They will not know discomfort. They will be free from disturbance through robotic polar bears in the St. Louis Zoo. There will be no more religious wars. There will be no more votes for women.

There is nothing to believe in here, nothing to be disturbed about, nothing to worry the children. No traces of Penny and her unborn fetuses in her gut that the zookeepers forgot, or plastic and cloth in the bins that they also forgot. There is no muddy water, no brown bears, no racism, no more flesh and blood and tears or hurricanes wrecking havoc in your uterus. All is quiet on the western front.

Inwood, Brad, and Lloyd P. Gerson. Hellenistic Philosophy:

Introductory Readings. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub., 1998.

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Skyscraper

Annabelle Marcovici silver gelatin print

At First Light Sarah Debs

Closer, he buzzes Sundrops melt fingertips Drink golden down sugarsweet Wheat between teeth Toes knee deep sink Taste honey, drift silk Flutter stomach too brisk Tumbleweed stain Shhh, shock pang Ear pressed silent Bite rock back Eyes flick halves. Oh, Lilac, Swallow dirt scratch Drown blackest blue at last.

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The Sandbox Brennan John son digital photograph

You could have at least asked Logan T hie s plaster

kiwi

Kendra K lag 35mm film

Karl Marx: the Band: the Movie Mattie Fattie

Young, weak-chested Karl Marx puffed on a stale Prussian cigar with a vacant expression on his narrow face. In the smoke, the sweaty Trier Tavern dissipated and Karl was momentarily transported to a belching textile factory.

He shook his head and tried to think about Cuba. The vast swaths of tobacco lain across the tropical plains. The warm trade winds from the northeast. The hoarse-voiced men with impeccablygroomed mustaches and sweet-smelling fingertips who rolled what must be the finest, richest cigars in the world and licked them closed with an easy swipe of the tongue. Jenny von Westphalen giving him a blowjob while he looked into the Caribbean Sea and inhaled spiced rum. He puffed again. Back to the textile factoryâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; the Prussian tobacco tasted like despair. Like the child in Derby who barbecued his left arm in a blast furnace.

Karlâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s newfound love for Jenny, a Prussian baroness with a penchant for dumping aristocrats, was second only to his love for alcoholic drinks. The band met around an oaken table at the tavern.

Above them on the wall hung a particularly uninspired painting of Frederick III, the uninspired king who brought Prussia into Federal Germany, who watched with an uninspired smile over the crowd of godless liberal bastards that populated the Trier Tavern. Karl kept glancing anxiously towards the front door, hoping that Jenny might suddenly decide to waltz on in with the goal of watching Immanuel Labor perform. But Jenny, even at her ripe young age, usually avoided establishments like this where a young man like Karl could, if he so desired, sing with the band, drink himself under the table, drink himself back above the table, and then get involved in a

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brawl, citing “the alienation of labor” as his reason.

Peter, a man who could have been even shorter than his temper, was a philosophy student at the University of Bonn.

He pulled out his cornet and blew a moist C in the instrument’s highest octave. High C was his favorite note, and in some of the band’s more politically subversive airs, he might play it at exact intervals of four measures. He emptied his spit valve onto the floor. Peter loved, in particular, the ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers. Though he and Karl were both, at times, incorrigible assholes, their sincere love for Voltaire and Kant united them—in fact, it was Peter’s idea to come up with “Immanuel Labor” for the band’s name (Karl suggested “The Bloody Kants” but everyone else in the band thought that was wildly inappropriate). Karl failed, drank, and failed and drank his way out of the University of Bonn, but not before he threatened to shoot some sense into anyone who questioned Peter’s break with Catholicism.

Over the span of the band’s nearly one-year life, hanging onto a cymbal player proved to be a formidable challenge. Hans waddled into the tavern followed closely by his mother, who carried two enormous brass cymbals. A stool was pushed up to the table and two thick King James Bibles were placed on the stool so that Hans could discuss the set list with the rest of the band while being able to see above the table. Hans snapped his tiny, sausage-like fingers and the barmaid brought a pitcher of ale, a pitcher of stout, and a glass of warm milk to the table and planted a gentle, wet kiss on his forehead. Seeing Hans’s mother, Karl flicked his cigar under the table and extinguished it with a decisive stomp.

Hans offered a pudgy little hand towards Felix and shook his mallet. Felix was the xylophonist of Immanuel Labor—he was tall, blue-eyed and well-built, a favorite with the ladies of the tavern because of his proclivity to wink with both of his eyes. Sadly, he lost his left hand trying to defend Trier against a charging Ottoman Turk, but a clever surgeon simply shoved a mallet into his handless arm. This procedure saved his burgeoning xylophone career but made routine activities like clapping and left-handed handshakes rather difficult and cumbersome. volume 26

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The door was thrown open. A tiny, snow-white and cultured Pomeranian with a golden brooch waddled into the tavern and began scratching at the torn trousers of a stonemason named Ludwig. It dropped a slobbery lamb chop on the splintery floor and yipped and yapped furiously about the benefits of French occupation and the pitfalls of being absorbed into Prussia.

Ostensibly, the French dog soufflés were more savory and the extra chicken parts were dispersed among the Pomeranians roughly three times as frequently before the Prussians took over. “The Germanic sludge they feed me these days doesn’t hold a candle to the frômage du chevre and boeuf bourguignon I used to get each night. You people need to go to Par-ee and eat some damn coq au vin. This lamb chop tastes like Lord Byron’s boxing shorts.”

Before Karl could express his astonishment at the Pomeranian’s savoir-faire, Ludwig from the bar pumped a cartridge full of eleven-millimeter bullets from his Francotte Revolver into the Pomeranian’s walnut-sized brain, right between his tufted pink ears.

“Why the fuck did you do that?” Karl’s quavering voice cracked tremulously, as expected, on the word “fuck.”

“I hate the French. You know why the French smell bad?

So the blind people can hate them too! The Pomeranians I love though. They taste like chicken,” Ludwig noted, rightfully, picking up the Pomeranian and taking a vindictive bite out of its flank. Karl hacked weakly; his body jolted and a sincere expression of anguish flashed across his face.

Karl collected himself, returning his focus momentarily to the table, hoping to teach his band a lesson about commodity fetishism. Hans was sobbing moistly, comforted by his mother. The pitchers of stout and ale and the cold pewter cups lay untouched, unjustifiably neglected throughout the curious episode of the cultured Pomeranian. Karl gathered the four empty cups, the jug of ale, the jug of stout, and Hans’s warm milk from the band’s table and pulled them in front of him. Methodically, he picked up the pitcher of ale and poured half of it, dividing it evenly between the

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four empty, pewter cups. He then set the pitcher of ale down and grabbed the pitcher of stout, pouring half its contents into the halfemptied pitcher of ale. With the intense precision of a surgeon, Karl pinched eight grains of Brandenburg salt from the table, releasing four into each pitcher of ale. One-by-one, he dumped the cups of ale into the pitcher of stout. He gazed quizzically at his experiment in collective ownership as though, in the impassioned delirium of relentless egalitarianism, he had missed something crucial. He had, in fact. He picked up Hans’s glass of warm milk and topped off the pitchers with the remainder of its contents. Hans was still sobbing moistly. Karl smiled knowingly upon the two abundant pitchers, filled to the brim with his own slightly opaque, slightly warm, slightly amber-colored solution. Immanuel Labor wouldn’t play for thirty more minutes but already he had done something admirable for the people. He was a vanguard in a tavern of slaves. Nobody noticed. * * * *

Peter, Felix and Heinrich Dorn, the band’s gentlecountenanced oboe player—classically trained in opera and ballet, but not oboe—didn’t notice Karl’s redistribution because they were helplessly fixated on the heavy, iron-studded door to the tavern, which slammed resoundingly as Ludwig vanished outside like an unreliable apparition, his revolver at his side. The people of Trier erupted in frantic whispering. Another blindly charging Ottoman Turk? Another cultured Pomeranian? Had Ludwig decided to blow his cartridge into another raving madman shouting the death of God into all the lighted windows he could find? Karl looked up for a brief second and gingerly passed a cup of his stout/ale/warm milk concoction to Hans, who accepted it and drank it meekly. A toothy grin superseded the frown on Hans’s soft, round face.

Outside, Ludwig conversed peaceably with a smiling Ottoman Turk, who pulled out a soft, squishy ball of black opium and offered it to him. “Wow, this is the good shit! Where’d you get this?” Ludwig asked with earnest appreciation, accepting the ball with a hearty affirmation.

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“What, you don’t know? We have Silk Road!” The Ottoman Turk replied in jubilant, broken English, laughing in between hacking, unproductive coughs—he was, like so many charging Ottoman Turks, a sick man, and he was weary of halfheartedly charging for a sultan who didn’t care about him at all.

“Also, we try have secular government now! Christian, Muslim, nothing—no matter. Here, take this,” the cheery Turk exclaimed, pressing a gold-inlaid rosary into Ludwig’s open hand and closed it into a fist with a delicate touch.

“My God, thank you.”

“Don’t thank your God!” the Turk replied jubilantly.

“Thank your friends, the poets. Keep us in business! Now I charge again.”

“Be safe!” Ludwig shouted after him. The gently, halfheartedly charging Ottoman Turk jogged at an easy pace through the cobblestone streets of Trier, holding his short sword snugly against his left flank, so as not to cause any undue damage. * * * *

Inside, the members of Immanuel Labor began to realize that their stout, ale, and warm milk had been expeditiously transformed into stout/ale/warm milk, except for Hans, who had been sipping away blissfully without the supervision of his mother.

Felix contorted his face and spat the stout/ale/warm milk on the floor. “God fucking dammit, Karl! You always do this to us. You, the President of the Trier Tavern Drinking Society, always fucking over your people.”

Karl was infuriated at his band’s inability to comprehend his experiment in social science (or social chemistry) and unwisely lobbed empty threats across the table at the muscular Felix, who looked poised to stick his brass, mallet-y left “hand” in Karl’s ass.

Without much effort Heinrich was holding the seething, violently thrashing, incorrigible asshole Peter back from unleashing a stream of seething, thrashing incorrigible asshole rage. Hans was almost one cup of stout/ale/warm milk deep and was enjoying the spectacle before him quite a bit. Felix sat down, having had enough,

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and shook his head at Peter, who was now doing his best imitation of a giant (but not too giant), profanity-muttering leech, squirming weakly.

The band settled down and Karl calmly reminded Felix and Peter that they weren’t angry with him—they were, instead, channeling their deep-rooted disdain of the bourgeoisie dictatorship commanding a superabundance of material wealth.

Thankfully, another pitcher of ale was brought to the table. Felix flashed a relieved smile. “God in heaven above, thank you for this pure, unadulterated warm German ale” he joked.

“God does not exist!” Karl snapped at him.

“Neither does the ale,” Felix answered matter-of-factly. He had already chugged the pitcher of ale. He belched triumphantly.

“You thieving cap—”

Before Karl could finish waxing philosophical on the decrepit tatters of human nature, Ludwig tossed open the door.

His eyes were bright red and an unsettling trail of black drool leaked out of the corner of his mouth. He chewed furiously, like his jaw was the only thing he could be sure of, like the secrets to the problems that plagued him were trapped deep within the dense ball of black opium.

Ludwig began to hallucinate vividly. His dead wife leapt into his arms. The revolver fell to the floor. “God took me, but he can save you!” implored Maria. He gently draped the gold-inlaid rosary around her neck and kissed her forehead. He kissed her and kissed her and kissed her. A wet, tar-black sludge pooled between the splintery birch planks of the tavern floor. The kisses wouldn’t stop coming. The room was silent, even Karl. Ludwig remembered the rosary. It was on the floor, relishing its bath of second-hand opium juice. Then the Cultured Pomeranians scampered into the tavern. They converged upon the slimy rosary. They wore berets and yipped about Montesquieu and their favorite dog boulangeries.

He looked down at his right hand. His index finger was pointed, but the rest of his digits were curled tightly. They were locked in place. There were more Cultured Pomeranians. Ludwig’s glance

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shot to his right hand again. It had become his Francotte Revolver.

He mimed shooting at the floor indiscriminately. “Fuck you, Frenchies! Shove your bouche de noel up your hairy gypsy asses!” he yelled. The bullets were silent, but they were incredibly effective.

Warm, deep-red blood flowed in abundance, spilling out of the cracks in the floor. Without reloading, Ludwig pumped cartridges and cartridges of eleven-millimeter bullets into the yipping and yapping and scratching and postulating horde of Cultured Pomeranians until they had all been mowed down. Exhausted from the hard work of defending Prussia from Cultured Pomeranians, Ludwig fainted in a lake of his own opium-blackened drool. There was no blood. There were no red-stained corpses of Cultured Pomeranians. Nobody felt like making another joke about the French.

The six members of the Poets’ Club made their way into the Trier Tavern, hunching through the door frame. Each member had a policeman surgically attached to his back and tightly hugging his torso, reflecting the Prussian monarchy’s desire to enhance the surveillance of political radicals. Twelve men lurched over to an empty table with six chairs. With uniform alacrity, the policemen began stuffing shortbread cookies into their mouths.

Chunks of unreasonable demands spattered on their table. They wanted ale. They wanted stout. They wanted steak-frites. They wanted more shortbread. Promptly, the barmaid arrived at the table, covering it with a festal mess of glitzy meats, cool beer and sugared everythings. The policemen were instantly lost in ravenous chewing. “Poets eat free when accompanied by an officer of the law surgically attached to them!” the barmaid chimed in. * * * *

Karl, meanwhile, had walked to the quite-possibly-dead Ludwig and knelt at his side, eyeing the rosary pensively. The rest of Immanuel Labor began to set up on the creaky tavern stage, warming up their instruments. Hans had to be carried onto stage by his mother, who mistook his drunkenness for performance anxiety. Peter blew another moist, bubbly C. His cheeks puffed up

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permanently. Heinrich, clutching his oboe between both hands, executed a graceful grand-plié and rose spryly into a soubresaut.

With help, Felix pulled the xylophone upstage and began playing his favorite xylophone etudes in g minor. Karl shouted, with a quavering frustration buttressed by unmistakable, inspiring conviction, something about religion and opiates being eminently related. The tavern erupted joyfully! They had expected this was true this entire evening. The brutal slaughtering of the Cultured Pomeranian, the periodical intrusions of charging Ottoman Turks, the child barbecuing his arm in the blast furnace at the textile factory, the stranglehold of monarchic oppression, the constant fisticuffs between the poor laborer and the wealthy consumer, Ludwig and his opium-eating, rosary-clutching hallucinations— they had seen enough. Weak-chested Karl-Marx, at the ripe age of eighteen, would lead them all to the promised land. Stout/ale/ warm milk for everyone! The reign of the vanguard had begun, the pursuit of sweetness and light, the incendiary beacon of ideas setting fire to the shadowy valley of death.

The Poets’ Club clapped and whistled. In flawless unison, the surgically-attached policemen pulled their clubs from their waists and gave their respective poets a healthy, cautionary whack on their heads. “Let’s play some goddamn music!” Karl bellowed unsteadily. The crowd cheered more. Cautionary whacks were administered as needed. The Young Hegelians, led by a clearly sloshed Bruno Bauer, entered the tavern. “Is it okay if I bring whiskey to the Workers’ Party?” the teetering Bruno inquired loudly, to nobody in particular.

Immanuel Labor began their set, as was customary, with one of Frederick II’s flute pieces. Heinrich took the flute concerto with his oboe, leaping beautifully across the fraying carpet, sometimes stopping to play the oboe. The music was creaky and urgent. Hans’s mother lifted the cymbals to his hands and helped her drunken four-year old child clash them together in neat quarter-note bursts, while Karl sang the voices of stifled revolution with a shrill baritone. Hans’s mother was a proud woman. Peter hit

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C in the cornet’s highest octave with a metronomic accuracy. The crowd had come to expect this, but they delighted anyway in the audacity of Peter’s style. Hans dropped a cymbal and tugged firmly at Felix’s left mallet. Bullets of pain tore through his left side. He lifted his wrist gingerly and slowly began playing again, returning to his famous two-eyed winking. All tavern-goers with a vagina, and some tavern-goers with penises, were immediately reduced to blushing, shrieking, pulsating lumps of firing hormones. It was perfect. Karl waved the song’s coda and looked upon his motley band with an illuminating smile. His four-year old cymbal player, his dear friend and Napoleon Complex-ridden cornet player, his heartthrob amputee xylophonist and Heinrich Dorn, the ballet dancer who, while on stage, occasionally took time from his busy ballet dancing schedule to play heart-rending oboe solos—they were the beautiful children of class revolution.

Immanuel Labor launched into one of Ludwig Böhner’s airs about potato farming. Riotous applause shook the splintery tavern. The tavern-goers held their applause in anticipation of the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. Surprisingly, the rumbling continued. The tavern thundered. Cups of ale jumped on tables and fell over. A cymbal crash and a bright, perfectlytuned high C from Heinrich and Peter hearkened the beginning of “Hallelujah.” Karl hurled his chest forward and roared in tepid song:

For the Workers’ Partyyyyyy, portent reigneth.

The policemen administered more cautionary whacks.

The Trier tavern was quaking. The roll of thunder became closer and closer. “Who are we playing for?” Felix yelled. It was the right question to ask, but it fell on deaf ears.

Mexican President General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and his troops burst through the haphazardly-erected tavern walls. Light streamed into the Trier Tavern and revealed the stark backdrop of Burbank, California in the valley below, with its massive, rectangular studios sprawling like spread hands across the valley floor. General Santa Anna shot his pistol into the tavern

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ceiling and a chandelier fell on a member of the Poets’ Club, who was, along with his policeman, knocked off his chair. A band of dirty, flannel-donning Texan soldiers ran right through the still-playing band. The cymbals crashed onto the stage and the back wall of the tavern was knocked down methodically. The tavern unfolded like an opened box. Jenny von Westphalen fought her way through the ensuing Battle of the Alamo, meeting Karl at the front of the stage on cue. “I love you so much, Karl,” she said, unzipping Karl’s pants and taking him in her mouth. “¡Viva Mexico libre!” shouted Santa Anna. Texan General William Travis threw fake blood all over the band. Karl, sensing that his life was in sincere danger, pulled his erect penis out of Jenny’s mouth. James Bowie kicked Jenny in the stomach and Karl started to scale the walls of the fake Alamo with a real-life erection, accompanied by twelve other Texan soldiers fleeing from the asshole General Santa Anna, who was still determined to take San Antonio de Béxar from the enemy.

A sweaty Paul Thomas Anderson in a tuxedo arrived at the chaotic scene, wheezing, wanting for breath. “CUT!” he finally yelled. “FUCKING CUT, GOD DAMMIT!” he yelled again, unable to control Hollywood’s latest controversial project of historiography.

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Kendra K lag 35mm film

Change in taste Maren Schiffer

When you found me I was the meat in a lobster’s claw, waiting to feel the crack of my confines, the tenderness in me willing to burst and be swept up into your lips.

My excess butter dripped into and through your cradled fingers.

Now I’m fish and chips in a plastic basket.

Next door a taffy place secretes stickiness, the air is sticky.

My grease clings to your cheeks, palms, the tip of your nose, and a year’s supply of tissue napkins will not get rid of me—not my film, not my taste, not my salty invasion.

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Riah Sor n- ampai digital photograph

The Functional Body Sabrina Wise

• To avoid risk of injury or electric shock, unplug your Dyson200 when it is not in use. Do not unplug by pulling on the cord. Grasp the plug firmly on either side and pull directly out of the electrical outlet.

• Keep hair and loose clothing away from all moving parts.

• Do not use the vacuum outdoors or on wet surfaces.

• Use the vacuum only as described in this manual.

In his grave at the entrance to Westminster Abbey, Chaucer howled.

Lydia Callahan heard him, just as she heard him three years before when she tried to submit her critical thesis proposal and he bellowed, “Wait!” She ended up writing about mechanisms of sorcery in The Canterbury Tales. She earned honors.

On the day of the second howl, Lydia Callahan, professional writer, slung her faux-leather purse over her shoulder and walked the 1.2 miles to Ace Hardware. The sliding glass doors hissed open to admit her. She ducked inside. Twenty minutes later, she emerged with a dark blue vacuum cleaner, a Dyson100. She’d half expected Dyson to send her a demo of the 200, but when no box arrived after three weeks, she wasn’t much surprised. They had given her a job, after all. Anything more than that would be an unsettling generosity.

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Back in the apartment, Lydia negotiated her way to a crouch and let the box tilt out of her arms onto the floor. She pulled her pen and notebook from the purse and scribbled down “unsettling generosity,” which really did have a lovely ring to it.

The 200 will be Dyson’s hottest vacuum cleaner, her new employer had whispered to her over the phone. It operates the same way as any other Dyson vacuum cleaner. You’ll figure it out.

Lydia wrestled the 100 model out of the box and cut away the cardboard covering. The living room floor was clean, but she vacuumed it anyway, noting the precisions of her movements. Then she wrote, starting with the CAUTION! section. Urgent—just the way to captivate a reader. Lydia read it aloud. She heard the Dyson hum and Chaucer howl. It was only a first draft. *** • Sudden death: it’s so last year! The new Dyson200 is designed for easy unplugging when not in use. To prolong your own life and the life of your vacuum, grasp the plug on either side and pull it directly out of the electrical outlet.

• Tie back that loose hair and swap the baggy clothes for some tighter-fitting fashion, and you’re well on your way to being the next Vacuum Safety Master.

• We care about you. For this reason, we beg you not to use your vacuum outside or on wet surfaces. There’s a place and a time for everything—unless you’re the Dyson200.

• Just go with it! Don’t question the wisdom of this manual. Use the vacuum only as described here.

If there was anyone Lydia disdained, it was the writers of chatty life advice columns. She checked the clock on her computer: 11:43 a.m. Six hours and seventeen minutes until she had to paste the copy in an email and send it to layout. It was grad

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school all over again, except that instead of craft ing prose at a desk in Manhattan student housing, she hunched on the floor of her grandmother’s Berkeley apartment, writing subtly sexualized accounts of domestic technology.

The Dyson jolted beside her. She unplugged it by tugging on the cord; it fell still for an instant, then the upright handle crashed flat against the floor. No advice columnist could communicate what Lydia saw pulsing beneath the navy blue, plastic shell. She needed to meet the Dyson, build a rapport, dissect the unlikely synapses of its brain. No matter what, an undergrad English professor had told her, write what you know.

She planted her legs one on either side of the vacuum (“the functional body,” according to the included illustration) and pried off the hood. Unclipping the fi lter bag was easy. Next she tugged out a black rectangle with indentations on one side, and what looked like a coil without any spring. When Abigail Callahan burst through the door at two p.m., she tripped over a gray suction hose and seized the coat rack to steady herself.

“Good to see you working,” she said fi nally. “Employed, I mean.” *** • We care about you. Yes, we can tell you exactly how to operate your Dyson200, but to do so would strip you of your innate capacity for reason and creativity. So let us ask you, in turn: • What is the good and reasonable action to take when your Dyson is not in use? Is there, in fact, any reason to keep it plugged into the outlet?

• How might we understand the relationship between a Dyson200 and loose hair/clothing as analogous to that of material hunger and earthly delights? How might we conceive of vacuuming as metanarrative?

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• Th is is a vacuum. It runs by electricity. Would any rational animal consider using it on wet surfaces? No. Our reason tells us not. Does yours?

• Have you yet discovered the delights of conformity? Of freedom slipped over you like a garment and just as carelessly snatched away?

If not, take this as your chance. Use the vacuum only as described in this manual.

When she was ten, Lydia used to take AC Transit to and from school. Every day, as he walked her to the station, her father told her how much he hated it. But his daughter walking alone through Oakland was out of the question, and he needed to be at the store by eight, so bus it had to be. She wore a silver whistle around her neck. The only time she almost blew it, a man with a gray ponytail and studded motorcycle jacket stumbled onto the bus and collapsed into the seat beside her. He stretched out a shaking hand and gripped her shoulder. She started to fumble for the whistle down the front of her jacket, her fi ngers stiff and imprecise.

His sweatshirt, too small for him, pulled back to reveal a tattooed wrist.

“I tell you who you will be,” he said. She shook her head, fi ngers grasping for the whistle. “You already know it. You will not follow rules. You are one of the ones who will be lucky. Lucky, lucky.” He stared at the corrugated floor of the bus but kept his hand on her shoulder, and there it rested until they stopped half a block from Marshall Elementary. As soon as the doors opened, the man lifted his hand and stepped into the aisle so she could leave her seat. Somehow she made it off the bus.

She didn’t know why she still believed him.

“It’s really all a game of chance,” her father said amid telephone static the day of her first rejection. It was from Harper’s, and the letter started with “Thank you.” That meant no, thank you for your fi ne work, but—. They all said thank you. The New Yorker,

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Ploughshares, Slate, The Threepenny Review, the independent press two blocks down. Thank you for believing the dusty man on AC Transit. Thank you for moving into your grandmother’s apartment, rent-free. Thank you, thank you, for trying to make yourself useful.

Eventually, Abigail Callahan waved Lydia into the kitchen they shared, offered her a spoon and a jar of peanut butter, and told her writers are the ones who write the manuals for alarm clocks.

One month later, in between two rejection envelopes was a letter from Dyson Vacuums. Th is one started with “we,” as in, “we are pleased to inform you.” Abigail said she was prouder than she’d ever been and knew it all along. Lydia didn’t even tell her father. *** • L.C. and her Dyson200: A Case Study Whenever L.C. feels guilty, she vacuums the living room floor. She lives in her accountant grandmother’s third-story apartment. Her father refuses to let her live at home, says it trains her for dependence, which neither of them can afford, and means he has to buy more than double the amount of canned soup and toilet paper than he would get for himself. L.C. works four days a week as a receptionist at the local historical society frequented mostly by fourth-grade classes on field trips. By night she sits cross-legged in the corner of the living room and writes: articles, opinion mostly, some fiction.

She fi nished graduate school in Manhattan with an unpublished collection of short stories. She reads Chaucer, in the original Middle English, for fun. By now she has stopped reading her mail past the first lines; “thank you” or “we” tell her all she needs to know. When the guilt settles onto her arms and hair and the wool-loop carpet on which she sits, she vacuums. The hum of her Dyson200—for it is indeed a hum and not a roar, thanks to excellent design innovations on the part of the company—evens out the lurching roars of traffic on the street below the window. With every lurch, another unit of time disappears into the pavement, but when L.C. focuses on the parallel bands of vacuumed carpet, she doesn’t notice.

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She makes sure to unplug her Dyson200 when it is not in use, grasping the plug firmly on either side and pulling it directly out of the electrical outlet. She pulls herself into her own outline, tucks her blouse into her pants and coils her hair into a high bun. She begins to vacuum and can’t stop, she pushes the pulsing creature all the way to the doorframe, but catches herself just in time: she knows she cannot use the vacuum outdoors, especially on wet surfaces.

Once she switches the machine to “off ” and unplugs it correctly, she lingers in the dying whine of the vacuum motor and then the split second of silence before the street-traffic noises resume. She sits cross-legged in her corner, and sometimes the floor is so spotless she wants to scream, or paint her feet violet and yellow and jump up and down on the ivory rug. For the love of all that is carpet, linoleum, or hardwood, if you want a clean floor, use the vacuum only as described in this manual.

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Ode to City Limits Eleanor Ellis

After I drive outside the city limits, I find that my lights have stopped turning green and red. I’m not concerned with directing traffic: I let the chaff chide the blue car without the license plate, the one that takes off for the mountains. You said you wouldn’t go gently into that good night.

You’re not yet I’ve seen the night come in between the Palouse and the Blues and this is my ocean: this is my ocean this is the landscape you asked for. You said you had to live in a place where you could drive to these limits, walk at the borders of your city, populate the cliffs with your footsteps. It’s a love of tracing with your feet. You didn’t mean you like letting loose. It’s about stretching your strings, holding in two hands and back again into holding, like gestures that trace the borders of an idea at the breakfast table, or here, now—I mean this for you: I’m writing to tell you where home is. volume 26

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Before the Storm Lily Idle silver gelatin print

Some of These Days Rosemary Cotter

These solutionless problems Sift softly downwards And if you contemplate the way they sing Whyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; You will be nowhere near the end Or the beginning Or the bristles Or the stubs Or that prickly sensation on your hot forehead Or those razorback clams Gurgling in the dark.

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Thematic Contents Certain Lives

Instinct and Obedience to God 41 74 49 38 131

Baby Man of Many Lines Me, Rambling Mona Lisa The Sandbox

Djouléh and the Serpent Four Floors, Eight Flights Fulminology Sauntering Th rough REM (75 percent)

Morning Coffee Acorn Cups Grounds for Investigation 1316 “Suffering is Caused by Attachment to Impermanent Th ings”

Animal House 65 39 37

mom and dad Polar Bears, Rockfi sh, and the Ten Modes of Ancient Skepticism

I’m s Lady Mouths to Feed Shh Gone!

Voodoo Tricks 102 20 122

The Circus Fantastic Hanford B Reactor (Control Panel) kiwi Magic

34

Songbird

wax

Shine Slow Down

48 88 112

Th rough a Filament

113

Goat Meditations

Inside the Berlin Holocaust Memorial

33

Karl Marx: the Band: the Movie

134 106

Wonderland

In Transit Departure Ode to City Limits On the Fence westward (winter) Seattle

13 105 133 75 21

Reichstag

Yoga Center of Balance

145 108 44 28

Change in taste

Eggs Logic on the Fisher Farm

78 24 31 97

System Failure 100 153 101 42 146

Frost Hanford B Reactor (Little People) Suburban War

117 110 64

Elegy

Trying Swimsuits Under Florescent Lights

Touching You

66 30 120

You could have at least asked

132

Caroline She Carries It With Her

Dinner for Deaf Expressionists

68

For Indiana Jones

11 47

Hish,

Big Shadows Skyscraper Twenty Blindnesses tomb

Origins 128 90 77

Dust at the Wheat Fields happiness is going home MAD RIVER Summit

107 114 118 26 121

Th ree Marketeers Consumer Goods, etc.

The Bluff City Dairy CafĂŠ The Functional Body

115 35 147

The Water in Your Head At First Light Before the Storm Drowning Lycidas Some of These Days

The Data Fields Helicase

144 98 45

In the Greenhouse

Big Sky Cuntry Dusk Wanderings

Abid ji

130 154 12 Cover 156

Notice of Refusal

89 109 40

Stick Figure 010

104

Uprooted

25

Garden of Monstrous Delights Kensington Gardens

On the final day of layout week last year, the blue moon staff discovered a copy of The Blue Moon from 1932. After further digging in the Whitman College Archives, it became clear that today’s blue moon is only the latest iteration in a long line of literary magazines at Whitman. Students here have been producing literary magazines with startling continuity for almost 100 years. The first literary magazine, appropriately named The Codex, started up in 1916. The Blue Moon sprang from the heads of Whitman students way back in 1923; the cover of the first issue is pictured above. The poem on the right represents an anonymous staffer’s satire of T.S. Eliot’s “new” poetry from that same issue. Despite its apparent modernism and good humor, The Blue Moon did not survive the Great Depression, and was in turn replaced by magazines called Yeast, The Clock Tower, Masque, and Faire over the years. In the eighties, The Blue Moon made its comeback; in the nineties, we lost the “The;” and in the 2000s, we stopped believing in capital letters. Somehow, the years have translated The Blue Moon pictured above into the blue moon you are now holding, and we are kind of proud of both. —Bo Erickson

Contributors Aaron Stern

Anna Richael Best

Alejandro Fuentes

Annabelle Marcovici

Ali Danko

Asa Mease

Allan Okello

Ben Lerchin

Allison Good

Bo Erickson

Andrew Strong

Brennan Johnson

Ann Chen

Brynne Haug

fi rst-year Music Composition Music is my preoccupation

senior Psychology Freestyling and music-making

sophomore Environmental Studies-Economics Marimbas

senior Politics Buster Keatonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s silent movies

sophomore BBMB Matt Bomerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyes

senior Environmental Studies - Studio Art Google Earth

junior Film & Media Studies Pixar animation shorts

senior English Daffodils

sophomore Politics The darkroom

fi rst-year Undecided Stock photos

senior Studio Art Bitcoin Revolution

senior English Strike-anywhere matches!

fi rst-year Undecided Getting lost

2012 alumna Exhibition and Collections Manager, Maxey Museum Linen and wool

volume 26

161

cade beck

Ethan Maier

Cathryn Klusmeier

Halley McCormick

Charly Bloomquist

Hanne Jensen

sophomore History Theater drama

junior Environmental Humanities and Philosophy Driving cross-country

Senior Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art Chopping wood/carrying water

Chelsea Kern

senior English Italian pop opera

Clare Spatola-Knoll

senior Art History & Visual Culture Studies Whitman Events Board

Daniel Zajic

junior Biology Music by Joey Bada$$

Eleanor Ellis

senior Race and Ethnic Studies Sycamore trees

Eric Niehaus

senior Environmental Humanities Banjolins

162

blue moon

senior Biology Sourdough pancakes

sophomore Mathematics Les MisĂŠrables

junior English Werewolves

Hilary Painter

sophomore Art History & Visual Culture Studies Kendrick Lemur

Humans Being Boris Sagal Eli Smith Jessica Shatkin Jonas Myers Maya Abramson Robby Seager

John Vincent Lee fi rst-year Undecided Sweet potato fries

Jonas Myers

senior English (Math minor) Bachâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s preludes and fugues

Jordan Benjamin

Kinsey White

Josh Melander

Kyle Donald

Josh Tacke

Lily Idle

Kai Rasmussen

Logan Alexander Thies

Katie Hardy

Maddison Coons

Kendra Klag

Madison Munn

Kevin Dyer

Maggie Hickman

senior Biology/Serpentologue Not having malaria anymore

junior BBMB Fountain pens

sophomore English American Diners & Federico Fellini

fi rst-year Undecided Game of Thrones

senior Philosophy Sunshine

senior BBMB Collecting old cameras

senior English Nostalgic videogames

sophomore English Clipper European lighters

fi rst-year Undecided Piano composition

senior Studio Art Alt-J

senior Studio Art â&#x20AC;&#x153;Real lifeâ&#x20AC;?

sophomore Studio Art Shrinky Dinks

sophomore Sociology Stock photos

sophomore Music and Economics Stock photos

volume 26

163

Maren Schiffer

Natalie Stevens

Marie von Hafften

Nick Budak

Marlena Sloss

Nick Cross

Mattie “Fattie” Raymond

Nick A.B. Roberts

Maya Booth-Balk

Olivia Kinney

Maya Volk

Riah Sorn-ampai

Melina Hughes

Rick Lamb

junior English *Nsync Christmas Google image

senior Anthropology Walking

fi rst-year Biology Crepes, macro lenses

senior English Country grammar

sophomore Environmental Studies-Sociology Taro bubble tea

fi rst-year Undecided Oranges

junior Economics Funny cat names

164

blue moon

junior Studio Art Psychogeographical expeditions

junior Politics Chiptune

senior Philosophy Envy and idleness

sophomore Film and Media Studies Family

fi rst-year Gender Studies and Anthropology Britney Spears’s greatest hits

fi rst-year Undecided Macro lenses

senior Philosophy Fat bats

Robby Seager

Tyle Schuh

Rosemary Cotter

Will Newman-Wise

Sabrina Wise

Will Witwer

senior Economics Open Source Technology/Education

senior BBMB Candles

junior English NPR Tiny Desk Concerts

fi rst-year English and Theatre Patchouli

senior Studio Art Pretty Little Liars

senior English James Brown

Sandra Matsevilo Medina junior Philosophy My hedgehog

Sarah Debs

sophomore Biology Sharks & brains & pizza

Toby Alden junior English Porn

Tino Mori fi rst-year English Scones

volume 26

165

Digita l Media to be found on DVD insert

Film

Bad Dog

Will Witwer i LuV u <3

Will Newman-Wise Wonderland

Ann Chen and Whitman College Film Club Optimistic Man

Will Witwer

(9:03) (10:05) (3:53) (6:07)

Music My Fear One on the Door

Humans Being (Bo Sagal, Eli Emith, Jessica Shatkin, Jonas Myers, Mark Glasionov,

Maya Abramsom, Robby Seager) The Highlight

Better Way feat. Chairman of the Boardz (Daniel Zajic & Brenton Weyi) VirtuAll Seeing iGlass Problem Play

Great Regular Flavor (Aaron Stern) Fun For All Forever One

Kyle Donald Combat Boots Glo’s Waltz

Josh Tacke La Vie en Rose Libertango

Grandma’s Bail (Josh Melander & Ethan Maier) Ramblin’ Hobo

Eric Niehaus Slow + J

Allan Okello & Alejandro Fuentes Circle Dance

Rick Lamb Sky Library

Toby Alden

(4:24) (5:06)

(3:22) (3:50) (6:12) (2:55) (3:30) (2:35) (2:17) (2:08) (3:14) (1:44) (4:41) (1:10) (16:54)

blue mo on s t a f f 2 013

Back row: Will Seymour, Hanne Jensen, Bo Erickson, Chelsea Kern, Kendra Klag, Hannah Bauer, Anna Richael Best, Kai Rasmussen, Andrew Strong Middle row: Hilary Painter, Kinsey White, Benjamin Shoemake, Linnaea Weld, Lucinda Sisk, Tyler King, Sabrina Wise, Madelyn Peterson, Tyle Schuh Front row: Olga Baranoff, Emma Casley, Anna Dawson, Jessica Palacios, Dana Thompson, Sarah Debs Picture frames: Maren Schiffer, Sandra Matsevilo Medina, Aaron Baumann Photo credit: Skye Vander Laan

Colophon blue moon volume 25 was printed in ­­­­­­Salem, OR by Lynx Group, Inc. The magazine is set in Minion Pro, an Adobe Originals digital typeface designed by Robert Slimbach in 1990. Slimbach’s typeface takes its name from the old, near-arbitrary English system of designating printer’s type sizes, in which minion-sized type falls between emerald and brevier, bigger than brilliant or small pearl, but smaller than bourgeois or English. Minion is based on Renaissance-era typefaces, boasting sleek design while remaining highly personable. As said best by our unofficial typeface consultant Paul Hamilton-Pennell, Minion “bespeaks a keen empirical countenance without losing its vague air of waning romantic sentimentality.” 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.