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P U B L I S H E D AT T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N O RT H C A R O L I N A – C H A P E L H I L L

SUMMER 2015

Call it quantum, call it sad, this new notion of everything,

C A R O L I N A

JOHN HAZARD

T H E

where eternity is the prelude to a sneeze.

Q U A R T E R LY

Bipin Aurora

Ezra Dan Feldman

Hannah Star Rogers

Edward Black

Patrick Ryan Frank

Craig Sanders

Gaylord Brewer

Stuart Gelzer

Chris Siteman

Mike Brodie

John Hazard

Kenny Williams

Jesse DeLong

L.S. Kla!

An Rong Xu

David Denny

Terrance Manning, Jr.

and more

$9.00

S U M M E R 2 0 1 5 | Vo l u m e 6 4 . 3

F E AT U R I N G

POETRY

| FICTION | ART | ESSAYS | REVIEWS

IN THIS ISSUE

Wanderers and photographers, Sleights of hand and circus thieves, plus Parachutes, highways, and honeycombs

FREE TO UNC STUDENTS VOLUME 64.3

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Founded in 1948 P U B L I S H E D AT T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N O RT H C A R O L I N A – C H A P E L H I L L

Spring 2015 V O L U M E 6 4 . 3 E D I TO R- I N - C H I E F

Lindsay Starck M A N AG I N G E D I TO R

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Sarah George Lee Norton N O N - F I C T I O N E D ITO R

Sam Bednarchik A RT E DI TO R

Chloe Accardi L AYO UT E DI TO R

Samantha Farley C OV E R DE SI G N

Philip McFee

MO RE O N L I N E AT

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SUBSCRIPTIONS The Carolina Quarterly is published three times per year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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SUBMISSIONS The Carolina Quarterly welcomes submissions of unpublished fiction, poetry, non-fiction, book reviews,

ON THE COVER AN RONG XU

STAFF Aisha Anwar Anuradha Bhowmik Krista Harder John Ligtenberg Maddie Norris

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and visual art. Manuscripts and editorial or business correspondence should be addressed to the appropriate

NON-FICTION READERS

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INDEXING The Carolina Quarterly is indexed in the Book Review Index, Poem Finder, Index to Periodical Fiction, American Humanities Index, and the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature. Member Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. ISSN 0008-6797.

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Contents

SPRING 2015 | VOLUME 64 .3

FICTION BIPIN AURORA My Wife 10 CRAIG SANDERS Circus Money and Bad Precedents 18 TERRANCE MANNING, JR. Trick-Pony Revival 35 STUART GELZER Dolls 100 EDWARD BLACK Sleight of Hand 116

POETRY PATRICK RYAN FRANK This Must Be The Place 9 DAVID DENNY Bitter/Sweet 16 KENNY WILLIAMS Front Matter 30

Philadelphus Addresses the Head of his Enemies 31 The Pedestal 32 Velรกsquez Bone 33 EZRA FELDMAN The Opposite of // 34 HANNAH ROGERS All the wrong lessons 58 L .S. KLAT T Fox 76

Penguin 77 Honeywell 78 Goodyear 79 JESSEE DELONG 1 August 2013 90

7 October 2013 92 3 September 2013 94 2 May 2014 95 1 August 2013 97 1 August 2013 99 JOHN HAZARD Prelude to a Sneeze 115 GAYLORD BREWER Longhorn Beetle 124

Little Gray Bird 126 CHRIS SITEMAN The Message 128

ART AN RONG XU Grandpa 60 MI KE BROD I E A Period of Juvenile Prosperity 80

REVIEWS DOREEN THIERAUF on Jacob M. Appel’s Einstein’s Beach House 130

Pressgang, December 2014

ANNEKE SCHWOB on Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star 132

Two Dollar Radio, February 2015

PAT R I C K RYA N F R A N K

This Must Be The Place Autumn, a rental, a radio and a map— another man excuses himself from the highway to look for the actual world: a tourist trap, a town that hasn’t had its trigger pulled, those pre!y girls about to fly away.

It eats at you, the fear that you’ve been fooled into believing what you have is real, quietly asking the movies how to feel.

You understand why your grandparents spent their decades with that television set, polished wood and full of weather: snowstorm, snowstorm, static through the night.

Watch it long enough, it must be life.

Somewhere, a man casually loves his wife; a woman si!ing on her sofa says, goddamn or hallelujah or not today; and somewhere near, the deer and foxes do what deer and foxes do, unseen, unknown.

Someone who looks like you drives into town.

Nothing special: some stores and a bar or two, kids in the park beside the Eagles’ Hall, old women enjoying the last of this weather, warm as the wind picks up and the red leaves start to fall.

PAT R I C K R YA N F R A N K

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CRAIG SANDERS

Circus Money and Bad Precedents Extravagantly garbed Russian-American children, ages six to sixteen, dance, juggle, fly through the air, and balance their nimble figures on unicycles in the poster adorning the CoGo’s front window.

Mark tosses Eric an anticipatory glance.

They’ve stolen from the circus before, but it has always been comparatively pe!y things like monkeys. A monkey does not want to be kidnapped, but it does not have the capability to alert the authorities as to its whereabouts. Eventually, it adapts to its new habitat and becomes a semi-productive member of the household. Eric dismisses Mark’s glance—stares at the ground and shakes his head, his eyes obscured by his Calgary Flames cap, as they cross the street to a residential complex.

Eric follows Mark up the winding staircase to the seventh-floor apartment marked “SKARL” with the hammer-and-sickle doorknob.

They open the door to Mark’s four monkeys dusting the cupboards, vacuuming the carpet, and se!ing the table with two full-sized microwaveable TV dinners.

“You’ve taught them to use the microwave?” Eric says, flabbergasted.

“They learn fast. Next month we’re hoping to master the stove.” Mark motions to his favorite of the servant monkeys, named George Walker, tongue-in-cheek, a#er the 43rd President. They stole George Walker about a year ago from the Q.E.W. Traveling Circus in Ontario. Mark hands him a smashed and slightly blackened banana from his pocket.

“I thought you were just happy to see me,” Eric mumbles.

Mark ignores his juvenile crack. “Wine?” he asks.

“No thanks, I don’t care to drink.”

“Suit yourself,” says Mark, as he pops the cork and pours himself a glass of red wine. He has yet to train the monkeys to pop corks. At Mark’s hand motion, George Walker sets down his flawed-but-still-delicious banana and brings Eric a glass of water. They eat without speaking.

Midway through the meal, Mark sets down his plasticware and breaks the silence. “Just listen to me,” he says, and tosses back that same anticipatory glance from CoGo’s.

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“No.” “What? Why not?”

“I’m not about to get into the business of kidnapping.”

“It’s not a business, and it’s not kidnapping.”

“What is it, then?”

“Building an army.”

At this, the cheap, fake potatoes fly from Eric’s fork into the face of Larry Harmon (named a#er the actor who portrayed Bozo the Clown), a monkey stolen the same day as George Walker, albeit a less skilled monkey.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“No, I’m not. Down, Larry.”

“What in the world could we possibly need an army for?”

“Seriously? The proletarian uprising.”

Thinking strictly stereotypically, Mark’s logic makes sense. They’re Russian. The proletarian uprising is in their blood. And they’re kids.

Still plenty of time to come up with a reasonable plan by which actually to overthrow the government before they’re ready to be soldiers.

“Because they’re...Russian?”

“Yes. I already have a box set aside to store them in during the gestation period.”

“Gestation period? What are you even saying, man?” He li#s his fork, takes one last bite of salisbury steak, then stands up and approaches the door.

“So, I’ll see you Saturday?” Mark asks.

Eric shakes his head and walks out the door, leaving the hammer and sickle behind him.

———— Friday night. Mark has yet to hear back from Eric about acquiring (certainly not kidnapping, he thinks) the Russian-American kids. He sits at a fire with George Walker, Larry Harmon, and the other monkeys, Pa!y and Wallerstein, in a patch of grass mere yards from the local playground. It’s probably illegal to build a fire here, but then again, CRAIG SANDERS

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whatever’s in that self-rolled cigare!e he’s using said fire to light is probably illegal, too. And it’s definitely illegal to use monkeys to steal people’s wallets for you.

It’s really a clever thing he has going here, though. Whenever someone who looks like they have money walks by, Mark u!ers a syllable, and the monkeys take turns running over, jumping on the person’s back, and stealing his or her wallet. Think about it. If a monkey’s jumping on your back, the first thing you’re going to think to do is not to check for your wallet. In all likelihood, you’re going to be flailing around like an idiot trying to get that monkey off your back. In the following moments, you’ll most likely wonder why or how a monkey ended up on your back. Even when you do realize your wallet is gone, good luck convincing the police you were robbed by a circus monkey.

To make ma!ers worse, Mark’s monkeys will never leave a trace of evidence. As soon as they get the wallets back to the fire, they toss them and all their contents. Legal tender up in flames. The funds on burnt-up credit cards can usually be recovered, but that’s okay. The action is primarily symbolic anyway. The loss of family photos is an unfortunate but necessary consequence.

A#er four wallets, sufficient for one night, Mark checks for that missed call from Eric. Nothing.

Mark stops on the way home at the box office, kept open late the night before the circus, to put down the cash (so he does take a li!le bit from the wallets, enough to survive and go to the occasional circus) for two tickets to the Russian American Kids Circus. He signs his name on the line, xMark Skarl, and exchanges $25 for two watermarked slips of paper, and the transaction is complete. If nothing else, he’ll get to watch some impressive acrobatics for twice the market value.

———— Eric sits at the Sixth Street Pub, sipping beer, adding the occasional shot of Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey to round things off.

Sports memorabilia and cloverleaves line the walls; Eric thinks how Mark would complain about the place’s disgusting aura of capitalism.

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The regulars stare him down, some blankly, others with inexplicable anger. Two empty bo!les and an empty shot glass sit in front of him. Eric already spills his hard-earned malt beverages all over himself, hands exorbitant tips to the bartender just for being cute, and squints at the baseball game on the TV. “Fielder’s choice? Ain’t even a damn...ain’t even a damn hit?”

An old man puts his arm around Eric. “I been telling the boys he’s worthless,” he says. “Wha’s yer name, kid?”

Eric tells him and continues his commentary: “Catch the ball, damn it,” he yells as the shortstop fields a ground ball.

“Funny kid,” the old man slaps him on the back. “You hear they paying this guy 15 mil? And what’s he ba!ing, buck fi#y? Ain’t right, is it?”

Eric squints to get a be!er look at a patch of white hair on the old man’s head. “No,” he says, “no, it ain’t right. Ain’t right at all.”

“And you got, you got this other guy pu!ing up numbers, something like, what, three homers a week, making chump change?”

“Chimp change?”

“Damn near league minimum.”

“Ah,” Eric says, adjusting his cap, “league minimum. Ain’t right.”

“You’re damn right it ain’t right. $500,000 a year for numbers like that?”

“Ain’t right,” Eric says. He remembers something he heard Mark say and adds, “Equal pay for equal work.”

“Damn,” the old man says, “we’d have half our players begging on the streets.” He thinks for a moment before continuing, “But I like your style, kid. It’d improve the game, you know?”

“Game’s a damn circus,” Eric says and gives the old man a cryptic, half-eyed smile.

———— Mark still hasn’t heard from Eric about the circus, now less than twelve hours away. He sits in his relaxing chair, contemplating bed, stroking George Walker’s furry cranium. Deciding to give it one last go, Mark taps the send bu!on on his cell phone twice to redial Eric’s number.

CRAIG SANDERS

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EZRA FELDMAN

The Opposite of // The opposite of an escalator is a parachute.

—Escalators possess teeth but do not chew; belts but not buckles // trousers, garments of any kind. A parachute has strings.

—The course of an escalator fixes motion in space. Space unfixes the motion of a parachute.

—A parachute is silent.

a chute: is like an escalator up or down.

An opposite opposes not necessarily.

parachute: Rabbi says a parachute will not open between the third floor and the first.

escalator: Rabbi says: the escalator is a category of stair.

-chute: A chute is like an escalator.

parachute: Rabbi says: a parachute is also a category of stair. course: The down motion of an up escalator is necessary for nonangelic creatures.

Cogs are interchangeable.

garments of any kind: are a danger on an escalator. In a parachute some garments are required. The harness of a parachute is not a handrail. course: An up escalator goes down even if it goes down hiddenly.

Cogs are proportionate to the escalator’s elevation.

opposite: Rabbi says: the opposite of an escalator is a stair. silent: One can never discuss silence convincingly.

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TERRANCE MANNING, JR.

Trick-Pony Revival Travis Bailey had been dead for twenty years the night he walked into Bear’s Pub on Warbler & 5th in McKeesport. The skin around his eyes had darkened, and his hair had grayed a bit, but even from across the bar Lonnie recognized him—the way he rolled his sleeves and cracked his neck, ordered Cuervo and wiped his lips. He leaned back on his stool, looked around the place. She hadn’t seen him since she’d heard he died in ’92, when a mutual friend had said that he’d been killed in Ohio, still working for a towing company. He was crouched between the truck and car hanging the hitch when a tractor-trailer clipped his tow and crushed him between bumpers.

Across the bar, Travis kept reaching his hands up and pulling his hair back, bobbing his head a li!le to the music in the background. Lonnie finished her drink, pushed the glass away, and sat down next to him.

“My God,” she said. “You look like a boy I used to know.”

“That right,” he said, smiling, and when he smiled she was sure it was Travis, the same teeth kicked back in his mouth but straight and—blurred in the cigare!e smoke between them—still handsome.

“People say I have a familiar face—like they’ve seen me in the movies.

Or somewhere on the street smoking with a thumb in my pocket.”

“The eyes,” she said, meaning Travis Bailey’s eyes: river-green and greener with his hair all gray and black along the sides. “You really got the eyes.”

“That right?”

“That’s right.” She ordered another drink. Travis looked around the bar and back to his cigare!es. “Lonnie,” she said, reaching her hand out. “I’m Lonnie Kale.”

Lonnie and Travis had been good friends before he died. They le# Pi!sburgh together and moved out to Cincinnati where they worked for a towing company, each driving their own truck. When she came home to Pi!sburgh for her grandmother’s funeral she imagined she’d see him in a month, maybe two. When she heard, all she had le# of him was an old Jesus and Mary Chain casse!e. She drove around those TERRANCE MANNING, JR.

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early months in the truck listening to it, imagining Travis playing the tape those nights towing before he died.

Lonnie wasn’t much for walking up to guys or introducing herself.

Normally, a#er work—driving now for Connolly’s in Highland—she’d slip in the bar for a drink before she picked Bobby up from her mother’s. Though the kid was seven, she figured if she could save money she could cut her hours and spend time with him. At some point, he’d forget the time he spent in front of a tiny television at her mother’s house watching cartoons. She imagined that, eventually, the television and toys would blend and disappear. Soon she’d build memories for him to keep: like laughing under a hose mid-summer, swinging out on a swing-set at the city park, holding her hand as they crossed the yard, the smell of barbecue and tractor-cut grass.

Travis jumped up from the bar like he was the one who’d seen the ghost. Off the stool, he laughed and hugged Lonnie around the shoulders, shouting, You look so different. Things have changed, and, Goddamned Lonnie fucking Kale, so many times, she felt embarrassed in the bar. Still, she hugged back, shouting, I knew it was you, and nearly mentioned that he hadn’t changed in the face, that though he wouldn’t recognize her since she’d gained the weight a#er Bobby was born or since the kid’s father broke her nose, Travis looked and acted the same, still skinny-faced and handsome, still laughing long and wailing like a loon.

“I faked my death,” he said casually, like he’d said, I quit my job, or I dropped out of school, or, Lonnie, you understand, we were young then, and crazy. And sure, they were, but to get the call that he’d died had crushed her. For some time she’d hurt for him. Drove her truck feeling as if a#er every tow she’d driven farther from a time that had slipped past on the highway, splashed across the dashboard and hood like the reflection of Pi!sburgh, the way it looked those first weeks a#er his death: night-time rivers black, wrapped around the city’s point just outside the Fort Pi! tunnels.

“Where’d you go?”

“Stayed in Ohio,” he said. “Then many places, man. I’ve been so many places. I’m a traveling man.”

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“Did you drive?” she asked, thinking all that time he was right where she’d le# him. She’d go!en the news from a guy they’d towed with in Ohio, a phone call to tell her—along with some others—that Travis was dead, buried the week before. She wrote down the name of a cemetery she’d never find then never heard from the guy again.

She assumed the only knowledge of the place sat quiet and dying with Travis’s father—the “madman” people called him—who lived in the nursing home where Travis le# him, only grunting, staring into people’s eyes until they looked away. Lonnie and some friends held a memorial in the park.

“Sure, I drove,” Travis said. “I was a driving man for a time. Then I headed down to Mississippi and became a fishing man. I’m still a fishing man. I’ve been all kinds of men—a card-dealing man, a knife-selling man, even a thumb-my-way-out-to-Vegas man. You know me, Lonnie.

I drag.”

“Sure,” she said. “We’re always draggin’,” not knowing what that meant, feeling like Travis should’ve dragged his ass to a pay phone in Ohio and called. Though it was just like him to leave like that, to try and crystallize the way his idols had.

“It was brilliant,” Travis said. “A real work of fucking art, man.”

And there were questions she should’ve asked, like what the hell was the ma!er with him, or how disappearing for twenty years was art, how running away from a father that was sick was brilliant. She wondered if the Travis she’d known, the guy that, despite all that energy, would’ve considered coming home when his old man died. She wanted to ask, Where’s the art in that? But asking might break whatever it was they were building at the bar, drinking, laughing about the old days—when they were kids, when they drove together, when they tried to start the motorcycle club in high school, or the Trick-Pony Playhouse in McKeesport, where on a big stage with outside seating anyone could play a part if they wanted.

They talked for hours and drank themselves drunk. Travis told stories: time he’d spent in Tennessee, or in Louisiana, where he sold bacon for a guy that chased him out of town with a shotgun when he found Travis sleeping with his daughter.

TERRANCE MANNING, JR.

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HANNAH ROGERS

All the wrong lessons You said it happened in Philadelphia, but as I do not know that place, I always picture you in an apartment in Anniston with a woman I do not know.

And she says you have to get rid of these mice and you shrug, though I know your roommate was a man and that you agreed together to dispatch the vermin.

But in my mind, she says, you have to, and you begrudgingly sever its spine from its head with the end of a shovel, even though I know it was less execution and more fight, and a broom handle, because why would you have a shovel,

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when you didn’t have a garden, and why was it the mouse’s pregnancy, and not her life that worried you a#erwards.

HANNAH ROGERS

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Introduction to the Artwork Dear Grandpa, I’m pre!y sure you’ve noticed that I have been photographing you.

I also assume you are wondering why. Well, it is because I am trying to get to know you be!er. When I found out you were diagnosed with cancer, I was very upset. I really did not know how to react. So I did what I do, I took pictures. I started photographing you. When I did, I began to realize, I didn’t know much about you, that’s why I started asking you questions.

You took care of me during my childhood in my most impressionable years. I still remember our old apartment on Mulberry Street. When everyone went to work, you’d take care of me, and weekends meant the park. I still think of you every time I walk anywhere closer to the park.

I believe you took me to one of my first haircuts at (Borgail). I really enjoyed going to get my hair cut, there was once, I kept complaining about my hair sticking up, so you took me to Borgail, and I got a really short haircut. Now that I’m older, I realize I really enjoy haircuts, because it brings back my memories of you.

Much of all that is happening now, doesn’t make much sense to me, I just know that photographs are my way of expressing myself. I hope to become a successful photographer one day, so you, my mother and father will be proud of me.

I hope you will continue to let me photograph you. With the photos, I want to have in pictures, what my grandfather was like. So one days when my children ask what you were like, I can show them them pictures I took of you.

I want to let you know I appreciate everything you have done for me.

You have and always will be a big part of who I am. Thank you, Grandpa.

An Rong Xu

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AN RONG XU

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AN RONG XU

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AN RONG XU

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L . S . K L AT T

Fox The traces of my fellow foxes, light-footed, quick-wi!ed, are fugitive; you can find them, if you can find them, among Hawthorne’s notebooks, though also in Aesop, foxes in their simpler states shrewd, telling tales out of school but, paradoxically, on the mark. The foxes in fables always move crooked; so says the fabulist. Which explains why movies were at first silent: the flick is foxfire, vixen.

Who can tame the talkie? It seems a century ago (when a fox caught my tongue & dragged it to its den) that I was laid out on a La-Z-Boy. I got not a lick for my lazy bones.

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Penguin Fog subsumes the iceberg, an intermi!ent peak the only signal, & whosoever wishes to write also leaves a beauty mark on the white space of the horizon. The mark will be a cartouche; within the cartouche, a penguin. May it impart to the vapor a loopy eye of watchfulness, as if to confirm that, in the middle of nowhere, here is a living thing.

Let us ask of that eye, as of the absent iceberg, a belief in archipelago; let us begin again in the barren incunabula.

L . S . K L AT T

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JESSE DELONG

1 August 2013 Only here—Wyoming—a brain fever—the choke of growth once, a landscape of space & root decay. Fray, air bubbles in the blood.

No one knows it yet.

Right yourself, young reader of the grass & mind—the last two rest stations were closed, so you squa!ed beside scrub brush & opened, opened. Maps of Sea!le & Arkansas to purge. Sun spots on prairie grass: a virus of clouds cast/ a blemish. This blemish.

Like, walking in from outside, the temperature changing. A life can embody that shi# of heat.

The root of our evil is nostalgia, the dust-brims of memory: a spur le# to rust on the roadside, a hawk’s feather tied to the stop sign.

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An american flag, ta!ered at its end, spasms in wind.

She is back there. You are here.

Soon to be farther somewhere else.

Outlaws also escaped here, beyond the borders of this young nation. They hid from how the gun’s steel scorched eyes’ undersides. A rash on inner thighs.

And you: swelled tongue, the water spilled on the floormat. That is the real idea of desire. A dog upchucked on the speed ruts: no where for the smell to go.

JESSE DELONG

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27 October 2013 A straight shot for a long time for a good while who knew Louisiana had such straight roads. New Awlins: a swamp plot where a house squats the cyprus trees leaf less a closeup of split-ends A factory, far off, pumps smoke a grey smog the air grey humidity in the early morning// There are no roads no to the house now how did the truck get there\\ A light, later, in New Orleans—at once warm and cool for this an Autumnesk day in a state where Autumnnow doesn’t exist A bum rides by on his bike pedals clacking breaks squeeling no teeth talking to himself What a smile on his face What Smile? // The le!ering (EFAC EUNIVA) embossed on the window

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where her face, the one I have been waiting for, sipping coffee, reading, this chance here, we haven’t seen each other in so long and le# on such bad terms, her mother staring out the blinds, a rip in my shirt, the grass, the lawn torn up worn out by tires this time once again we are near, appears.

JESSE DELONG

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EDWARD BLACK

Sleight of Hand It was a#er the early morning Mass. Last night, the abbot, Father Benedict, looked forward to an idle Sunday. He poured himself a tea.

He raised the cup, and taking a sip at the kitchen window, he made out movement. It was barely dawn. Someone was scampering up the path between the crawfish ponds and onto the monastery grounds.

He squinted. A woman drew near, waving her arms and calling out.

The abbot put down his cup. He opened the screen door for her.

Fran Boudreaux, from the adjoining farm, hastened inside.

“What is it?”

He pulled out a kitchen chair. The old maid sat.

“I’m still a chicken,” she said.

“What?”

Her breathing slowed. “Last night…the benefit downtown…”

“The novice monks’ annual fundraiser,” Father filled in.

Fran nodded. “The magic show.”

“Go on,” Father said.

“You called me up from the audience to be hypnotized.”

Father chuckled. “Had you believing you were a chicken, flu!ering about the stage clucking and flapping your arms. It got some good laughs.”

“But Father. You turned me into a chicken. But you didn’t turn me all the way back. I’m still part chicken.”

Puzzled, the abbot took a contemplative sip of tea. “When did you first notice this, uh, condition?”

“Last night, at home, a#er the show. I knew something was up. I was drawing myself a bath when all of a sudden, I began clucking; and flapping my arms, I hopped up and perched on the TV set.”

“And then it soon stopped?” said Father.

“Not till 2 a.m. when I gave a final squawk and I put on my pajamas and went to bed.”

“Done and over with,” Father said.

“So I thought. Then this morning I got out the chickenfeed to toss to the chickens. I found I was taking a nibble first myself.”

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“Why I never,” exclaimed Father.

“I rushed right here when out in the yard it started again, the clucking, my arms flapping.”

Outside, George the groundskeeper lowered the handles and set down his wheelbarrow with its hoe, pitchfork, and rake. He entered, taking off his straw hat. “Good morning, Father. Uh, Miss Boudreaux.”

“Now let me get this straight,” said Father. “You’re claiming I didn’t revert you back, completely. That you’re still chicken?”

“Exactly.”

“George, you were there,” said Father. “What do you make of all this?”

“Well, I was backstage with my broom watching. Her eyes was closed, her head tilt to one side. You announced to applause that you—the Great Bendini—would tap her on the head with your wand three times and bring her back to her natural self again, fully restored.”

“Well?”

“Well, come to think of it. You tapped her once, tapped her twice, but you forgot to tap her the third time.”

“I did?”

“That explains it,” Fran cried. “I’ve yet to fully return. I’ve stayed 1/3 chicken.”

“The solution’s easy enough,” she said. “Cast me under your spell.

Then tap me three times and bring me back, entirely restored, 100%.”

Father didn’t answer.

“You still have the wand, don’t you?” Fran said.

She spo!ed the Great Bendini costume on hangers over in the cloakroom. She searched through the velvet pants and waistcoat, the ruffled shirt, the black satin cape, and the black wig on the shelf with the pompadour hairdo.

“It’s not there,” a trembling Fran said to them upon return.

Father turned to George. “You didn’t happen to come across it when sweeping up a#er the show, did you?”

“You lost it?” Fran shrieked. She tossed up her arms.

“Now, no need to panic,” Father consoled. “It’s around here somewhere.”

“It’ll show up sooner or later,” said George.

“We’ve a whole year to find it for next year’s show,” said Father.

EDWARD BLACK

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GAYLORD BREWER

Longhorn Beetle Already that morning, I had moved my slipper as not to injure a firebug, pyrrhocoris apterus, come to visit in sporty red jetpacks of abdomen.

But it was the beetle that unnerved me, brought me onto elbows and knees, backside to the village chapel, ridge of pine, snow-streaked alps in uncontainable distance. The longhorn’s black antennae were, as you would imagine, exquisite, twice the length of its body, sleek and seeking mustachios from a Dali dream.

I couldn’t help prodding with a fingertip.

Each time the head lowered in four quick gestures, the thorax throbbed, and if I bent my ear to within a vulnerable inch, four tiny squeaks of reproach from an alien world. This is no ars poetica, friend, no naturalist guide, no tale of romance or transformation. But it was Sunday, a#er all, and I was on my knees, bowed in close a!ention. On the closed wings, a dusting of gold, images too miniscule to read in a text untranslatable. I don’t know why it stayed, allowed me to pursue my game.

Finger push, four nods, four tiny sustained squeaks— punctuated, terrifying. Monster in miniature.

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But as it studied this colossal pixilated shape through compound eyes, snapped teeny mandibles with a wishful clack against giant nail, and the beautiful head lowered once, twice, three times, four, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, you would have required no poet or coleopterist, no semiologist or lover, to understand exactly the suggestion being offered.

G AY L O R D B R E W E R

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CHRIS SITEMAN

The Message There’s a dove dead in a puddle. I want to make it over again, an image of a dove, red-ringed eyes blinking— Staring dove-like, neck craning, head bobbing sidewise as a doubting call— So I carve felled wood chopped for fire, & sand wet years & dry years, but there’s still no wings— Well, I cut dead dove wings off with scissors— Staple them to wood, but it still won’t fly— Next I cut the tail free, tack it firmly to the tapered back— Even without saltgrained feathers, it still refuses the air— And I realize that

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no dove worth salting would ever take wing without its radar— So I cut the dove’s head off, & Elmer’s Glue it to the front, eyes & all (wait the dry), then throw the whole thing into the sky— And perhaps it’s just wind, or maybe there’s enough of a dove to wood ratio that it stays alo#— At last— I see it sail away under clouds giving way to a burst of sunshine.

CHRIS SITEMAN

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REVIEW

Jacob M. Appel Einstein’s Beach House: Stories.

Indianapolis: Pressgang, December 2014. 188pp.

Jacob M. Appel is a notoriously prolific writer, Renaissance man, and workaholic who collects degrees from elite universities at a rate at which other people discard their old cell phones. His understated website lists his nine postgraduate degrees, among them two history MAs (Brown and Columbia), two MFAs (CUNY and NYU), a Harvard JD, and an MD from Columbia. Throughout his latest collection, Einstein’s Beach House (2014), Appel’s characters tend to wear some of the author’s own and very diverse professional hats: there’s the ex-a!orney in the superb “La Tristresse des Hérissons,” the superior court judge in “Limerence,” a real and a fake doctor in “The Rod of Asclepius,” a stern public health officer in “Paracosmos,” and a failed linguist in the collection’s titular story. But searching for Appel in these eight stories is probably as pointless as trying to pin down Appel’s favorite area of specialty, even though the author’s credentials and his considerable knowledge of, well, everything pop up all over. This sprawling collection has it all, from epidemiology jokes (“Paracosmos”), to questions about convicted sex offenders’ right to privacy (“Hue and Cry”), to the dynamics of couples’ everyday fights (“Einstein’s Beach House”).

The impression that lingers a#er perusing this too-short book is that Appel’s prose manages to be hilarious and devastating, cynical and candid, highly polished and fast-paced, all at the same time. Appel writes clearly, unpretentiously, yet allows his first-person narrators a bitingly sarcastic remark here and there, usually to highlight the absurdity of everyday social interactions. Sometimes it seems as if Appel’s first-person narrators know too much about their own or other people’s inner states; it might have sufficed to hint at, rather than to articulate, heavy-handed psychological diagnoses. These are moments when the author’s own training as a psychiatrist refuses to stay hidden.

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Nevetheless, Appel’s sharp insight into what binds—or fails to bind—people together across generations connects the thematically varied stories in Einstein’s Beach House. His stories are populated with siblings—sister pairs abound—and their dying or dead or at least deeply flawed parents; there are spouses filing for divorce, couples trying to stick it out, children realizing the magnitude of their parents’ moral or legal transgressions. Children, in this collection, tend to inherit their parents’ pathologies, such as schizophrenia (“Sharing the Hostage”), depression (“La Tristesse des Hérissons”), the impulse to control other people’s fates (“The Rod of Asclepius”), or, if they’re lucky, the pursuit of safe and boring suburban cul-de-sac existences (“Limerence”). Many of Appel’s characters are haunted by their childhoods, from his late-twenty-somethings to protagonists in their fi#ies.

Aided by the author’s unflinching psychological realism, they painfully realize that past selves or the influence of one’s parents can never be shaken off entirely; that something in us remains stubbornly, sickly stable over time, and that it will manifest as a symptom when communication—or marriage, or life—breaks down. Appel’s stories are very much interested in what gets transmi!ed in families, and that is not only disease or property, but our ways of dealing with our loved ones.

Trying to make the best decision under situational pressure, most of Appel’s protagonists usually find themselves running out of time or with only one chance to do the ethical thing, some of them failing miserably. Thus, a hug, a tearful breakdown, a brief, ambivalent reunion half a life later, or a one-sided conversation with a tortoise serve as funny-yet-profound turning points in these impeccably plo!ed stories, and Appel convincingly turns seemingly prosaic, everyday situations into individual catastrophes worthy of continued rumination. What we learn from Einstein’s Beach House, at the very least, is that all relationships are precarious and uneasy arrangements that might implode if we keep scratching at old scars.

- Doreen Thierauf

REVIEW

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REVIEW

Sarah Gerard Binary Star Columbus: Two Dollar Radio, February 2015. 172pp.

Binary Star, the debut novel by New School MFA Sarah Gerard, may be the finest fictional treatment of anorexia nervosa currently in print. Certainly, it is stunningly original. A!empting to cra# a literary genealogy of eating disorders brings you up, inevitably, against two genres, recurring ad infinitum: the memoir, and the YA novel.

While there are superlative offerings in both categories – Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls spring immediately to mind – the general trend is towards a muted, self-help aesthetic. Their protagonists have Issues-with-a-capital-I and they are unflinching when describing anorexia’s many horrors. Progress may be slow and stilting but their teenage protagonists, generally, move towards recovery. (Their friends and enablers, on the other hand, may not be so lucky; their fate is just as o#en to become the sacrificial object lesson). The issue book resists in particular idiopathy and incoherence: its waifish protagonists are destroying themselves, but they have their reasons.

The nameless voice at the center of Binary Star is clearly, defiantly damaged. Her reasons, however, elude us: she has a loving-if-distant relationship with her mother; she is passionate about her astronomy studies. And yet she starves. The relationship at the novel’s center is between the narrator and her alcoholic, long-distance boyfriend, John.

Throughout the book’s narrative core – divided into sections beautifully titled “The First Dredge-Up,” “The Second Dredge-Up” etc – we follow the pair on an ill conceived cross-country road trip. They fight, fuck, and fail to keep their promises to each other: his, not to drink; hers, to eat something. They reinforce each other’s damage, but are not at base its cause. Their collective failure to care for themselves is fed by intellectual activist rage, directed outwards: against factory farms, conspicuous consumption, capitalism. John and the narrator fling themselves against these millennial bogeymen and make ba!ering

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rams of their own bodies. In his review of Binary Star, Justin Taylor said of the pair that they “rightly revolt against the insane standards of a sick society.” They make their bodies the site of protest: the personal is political.

Gerard’s world is postmodern and disenchanted. Pharmaceutical on-brands abound. The duo’s road trip is sca!ered with the material detritus of the gas station convenience store. The narrator, an astronomer-in-training, looks to the stars not out of wonder but because she finds the metaphors of their material existence comforting. Gerard’s is a secular world. Yet, reading Binary Star, I am reminded of nothing so much as early female Christian mystics who mortified their flesh in divine rituals of starvation and transcendence. Hair shirts and crowns of thorns have been replaced by precisely divided celery sticks and Hydroxycut, but still the narrator seems to push through the ritual of starvation as a kind of searching. Even in her precise physical accounting of the heavens, there is a search for transcendence. In the book’s early stages, it resists narrative in favor of a series of beautiful, iterating prose poems. One, alone on the page, simply reads: “Mass is the numerical measure of inertia and a fundamental measure of the ma!er in an object.” Gerard’s narrator is trying to reduce her mass, to leave herself, as she says on the next page, with “no part of my body touching any other part.” She is trying to reduce her physical ma!er, but at the same time to take the measure of just how much she might ma!er in the world. Or, perhaps, of what it means to ma!er altogether.

Gerard’s prose circles back on itself as her protagonist struggles to make meaning from ma!er. The same beats reiterate and proliferate across the text. The text feels incantatory, ritualistic, finding meaning in the minute deformations of its repetition. In two stunning pages, Gerard runs through the pa!erns of self-help mantras: “Think about…,” “Tell yourself…,” “I want…” Within the echo chamber of disease, however, these mantras collapse under an ugly weight: “Make a list of every way in which you’re imperfect, I say. Tell yourself that each item is correct.

Make a list of fears. Tell yourself they’re present.” The repetition takes on a satirical edge and inches towards hysteria as it remains trapped in reflexive, endlessly proliferating self-hatred. Binary Star is uninterREVIEW

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ested in moving beyond the crystalline boundaries of its narrator’s mind. It makes for a claustrophobic experience, bringing the reader into uncomfortable sympathy with its (dis)order. It’s a difficult read, and one that resists easy narratives of catharsis and cure, but there’s beauty there, too.

- Anneke Schwob

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Contributors

Spring 2015

V O L U M E 64.3

B I P I N A U R O R A has worked as an economist, an energy analyst, and a systems

analyst. His fiction has appeared in Quarterly West, Epiphany, Harpur Palate, Prism Review, Southern Indiana Review, North Atlantic Review, Quiddity, Puerto del Sol, Southern Humanities Review, Rosebud, The Common, Eclipse, Michigan Quarterly Review, Southwestern Review, Nimrod, Witness, The Cha!ahoochee Review, Western Humanities Review, and Crossborder, and is forthcoming in South Dakota Review.

E D W A R D B L A C K lives in Louisiana. He is an associate professor of English at

Grambling State University.

G A Y L O R D B R E W E R is a professor at Middle Tennessee State University, where

he founded and for more than 20 years edited the journal Poems & Plays.

His most recent books are a ninth collection of poetry, Country of Ghost (Red Hen), and the cookbook-memoir The Poet’s Guide to Food, Drink, & Desire (Stephen F. Austin State UP), both in 2015.

M I K E B R O D I E started photographing in 2004 a#er being given a Polaroid camera.

Four years later, he a!ained his first serious recognition when he received the Baum Award for An Emerging American Photographer for the work he created while traversing the U.S. by freight train. As his work gained notoriety, Brodie pulled away from the expectations of the art market and dove deeply into his passion for diesel engines. He currently lives in West Oakland, California, with his wife Celeste, where he runs an auto repair shop, making his living repairing machinery and cars.

J E S S E D E L O N G teaches poetry and composition at Southern University. His

work has appeared in Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, American Le!ers and Commentary, Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Typo, as well as the anthologies Best New Poets 2011 and Feast: Poetry and Recipes for a Full Seating at Dinner. His chapbooks, Tearings and Other Poems and Earthwards, were released by Curly Head Press.

D A V I D D E N N Y is the author of three poetry collections: Man Overboard (Wipf

& Stock), Fool in the A!ic (Aldrich Press), and Plebeian on the Front Porch (Finishing Line Press). Recent poems have appeared in Ra!le, Spillway, California Quarterly, and Chiron Review, among others. A new short story collection is forthcoming from Shanti Arts in 2015.

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E Z R A D A N F E L D M A N is a writer and a Ph.D. student in English at Cornell

University. His writing charts the borderlands between humans and their creations, where masks and machines, stories and visions, regularly outstrip their inventors. His work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Los Angeles Review, Gertrude, Pank, and other journals.

P A T R I C K R Y A N F R A N K is the author of The Opposite of People, to be published

by Four Way Books in the fall of 2015, and How the Losers Love What’s Lost, which won the 2010 Intro Prize. He was recently a Fulbright Fellow to Iceland, and currently lives in Austin, Texas.

S T U A R T G E L Z E R grew up in West Africa and India and wanted to be an arche-

ologist. Instead he’s been a screenwriter, a film editor (Fallout), and a high school drama teacher, and these days he teaches film in New Mexico and writes mostly novels. Through all those years and careers he’s also been a singer specializing in folk music from the Republic of Georgia. Excerpts from his book-length travel memoir about his adventures in Georgia have appeared in Eclectica and Hippocampus. “Dolls” is an excerpt from his fourth novel, Earthworm, set in a fictional former Soviet republic (not Georgia).

J O H N H A Z A R D , a native of southeastern Ohio, now lives in Birmingham,

Michigan. He has taught at the University of Memphis and more recently, in suburban Detroit, at the Cranbook Schools and Oakland University. His poetry has appeared widely in magazines, including Ploughshares, Poetry, Shenandoah, Slate, and The Ge!ysburg Review.

L . S . K L A T T has produced new poems that have appeared in Volt, Harvard

Review, The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, 32 Poems, Gulf Coast, and The Common. His third collection of poetry, Sunshine Wound, was published by Free Verse Editions (Parlor Press) in 2014. He is the current Poet Laureate Grand Rapids, Michigan.

T E R R A N C E M A N N I N G , J R . is a graduate from Purdue’s MFA program in Cre-

ative Writing (2014). Recently, he received 1st place in the Boulevard Short Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers, The David Nathan Meyerson Prize for Fiction, and Crab Orchard Review’s John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. His work appears or is forthcoming in Boulevard, Witness, Ninth Le!er, Southwest Review, Hunger Mountain, and other magazines, and has been selected as a finalist in such contests as the Cincinnati Review Awards, Colorado Review’s Nelligan Prize, and the American Short Fiction Short Story Award. He lives and writes in Pi!sburgh, PA.

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H A N N A H S T A R R O G E R S grew up in rural Alabama and received her Ph.D. at

Cornell University. She teaches at Columbia University and the University of Virginia. She has received the National Park Service writing residency at Acadia and is currently working on a manuscript, Luck with Animals.

C R A I G S A N D E R S wrote “Circus Money and Bad Precedents” while earning his

BFA in creative writing and BA in political science from Penn State Erie, the Behrend College, a short drive from his hometown of Kane, Pennsylvania.

He is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he serves as co-editor of prose for the literary journal Permafrost. His biggest influence as a writer is Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Free No. 10.” This is his first publication.

C H R I S S I T E M A N lives in Brookline, MA. He holds an MFA from Emerson College

and a JD from Suffolk University Law School. His work is forthcoming, or has recently appeared, in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Salamander, The Transnational, Bearing Witness and The Worcester Review.

K E N N Y W I L L I A M S ’ poems have appeared most recently in Prairie Schooner, Gulf

Coast, the Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and FIELD, and are forthcoming in the South Carolina Review, Third Coast, and New World Writing. He lives and works in Richmond, Virginia, and holds degrees from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and the University of Virginia.

A N R O N G X U is a photographer, filmmaker, and sensitive artist from New York

City’s Chinatown.

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CONTRIBUTORS

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ARTISTS

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