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The Central Review Spring 2013 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Leigh Jajuga ASSOCIATE EDITORS Courtney Kalmbach Hailee Sattavara Lauren Kellogg Kylee Toliver ASSISTANT EDITORS Hannah Fillmore Tony Wittowski DESIGNERS David Birkam Mariah Prowoznik ADVISERS Neil Hopp Kathy Simon The Central Review is a literary journal publishing prose, poetry, and visual art

by Central Michigan University undergraduate and graduate students.

It is edited and produced once per academic semester under the auspices of the Student Publications Board of Directors.

All submissions are automatically considered in our student writing contest.

One piece from each genre of poetry, prose, and visual art is awarded top honor upon each publication.

The Central Review editing staff made all final decisions.

Send correspondence to: The Central Review, Editor, Student Publications, Moore Hall 436, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, MI 48858 or cmucentralreview@gmail.com Copyright 2013 by Student Publications. First publication rights reserved.

Rights revert to author upon publication.

Central Michigan University Mount Pleasant, Michigan

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Letter from the editor Dearest Readers, I once read that when the day of Edgar Allen Poe’s death occurred, children had hearse rides in Maryland as a way to commemoration. What confusion it must cause passersby to commingle amusement and morbidity. In a way, The Central Review is the exemplary hearse ride. What else do we put to rest besides our words, only for it to temper in the paper overcoat of print, where we lay it down to steep in its own existence? Hopefully one day, young children will honor this edition, making sailors’ hats from the pages while singing about museums filled with secrets, curious about whether or not everything is human.

The first time I submitted my work to The Central Review, I was rejected. This is the literary gambit: rejection. I wanted to write but also let go of the responsibility to carry the weight of my own effort. We’re just as thankful to those who aren’t included in this edition as those we were able to publish. We love getting to know everyone’s work, and if we had a bigger house, we’d give all your works a home. If you don’t see your name in this edition, be persistent. Keep writing and sharing your tenderness and disquietude with us – we like it loud.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this edition. We’re endlessly thankful to our advisers, Neil Hopp and Kathy Simon, who always made themselves available if needed. And, whoever is holding this in your hand, we’re thanking you, too.

Central Michigan University writers have an incredible creative bent and capacity for inventiveness that makes this magazine uncommon as hearse rides.

Love, your biggest fan,

Leigh Jajuga Editor-in-Chief

what’s inside 4 Heather Allen 5 Victor Leon 6,7 Noah Dupes

Fiction prize winner for “The Curious Creature that Cried” 8,9 Gabriel Hall 10,11 Ben Harris 12 Zachary Riddle 13 Nicole Voice 14 Lee Szelag 15,16 Jeremy Ball 17 Sonya Marie Pouncy 18-19 Chelcy Pine 20,21-25 Matt Erspamer

Poetry prize winner for “Trespassing” 26-27 John Priest 3

Calluna vulgaris You called us “wild” because your fires couldn’t contain us, a “symbol of loneliness” because we wandered away from you, hills hugged close to our bodies.

We let flames take us, purple bells shifting through ash.

We heard stories of the sun from mountains— their snow-sprayed tips peeking through dense gray above us— but didn’t believe them.

You wanted us passive like the sheep that graze beside us, but our roots run shallow.

We turned from you and spread, painting mauve streaks through green fields.

Some late afternoons we lay warmed by a wet August wind, trembling as it teases past us.

Your God’s golden fingers comb through clouds as he falls through the sky to a horizon we’ve claimed.

Here in these valleys, we create ourselves.

Heather Allen 4

Heather Allen ran out of time for writing a third person bio and hopes the editors will edit this for her.

Bungee Jumping Bungee Jumping v. 1. Free falling with your eyes open. 2. Letting go esp. of social norms: As in the rush of brushing against the hands of a crush or running a red light.

3. Diving into life’s oceanic freedom, busting through waves in a wooden paddle boat/ Gulping down water like you’ve been sipping dirt for months/Playing with dirt like you’ve been lost at sea for years. 4. Gambling pity for serendipity. Like turning in my psychology paper a week late and getting an “A”/Like when you yelled after crashing my dad’s car/Like when you cried after telling you I was gay after crashing my dad’s car/ And then hugging me/Like fleeing from the ground into something brave.

Victor Leon was born in Mexico, raised in Nashville, and has no idea why he’s in Michigan. He is a double major in psychology and creative writing and soon to be a family studies and human sexuality minor. He doesn’t know how he’ll ever get a job, but he does know that he’s a healer.

Victor Leon 5

send the indian boy with the red shoes sounds like the first line of a cheesy novel or maybe something a blockbuster villain might say before trying to assassinate the hero. the character seems easy enough to imagine— he would probably sport a fez, have a mustache, and carry a machete. shoes made of dyed ostrich would grip motorcycle pegs with a monkey in the sidecar and speed along sandy desert cliffs. his catch phrase would contain the word “naan” as in i’ll flatten you like—. he would always fail to assassinate his target, getting foiled at the last second. this is all i can think about when my filipino friend tells me a customer requested this over the phone. we both laugh as he shuffles his scarlet sneakers.

Noah Dupes 6

Noah Dupes is a junior working toward a degree in creative writing.

He has an obsession with small smushed-face dogs and enjoys wearing sweaters.

Accidental Humanity Inspired by Douglas Adams

If life began as an accidental spaceship crash 4 billion years ago what does that mean for us?

Do we all become like the child whose mother told him condoms don’t work all the time?

Is that the kind of despair that should reside in our hearts, knowing that we weren’t planned?

Or should we accept that life doesn’t need to be planned to be important. We can still be proud to be alive without making up stories about divine design and prophets that taught us all how to get along while still killing in their name.

We can accept that we all came crawling out of the same mud bog with our amphibian bodies gasping for air to inhabit this planet that we all call home.

Noah Dupes 7

The Curious Creature that Cried It was an odd thing, the giant rock hurtling toward us.

It was shaped like a teardrop and it hummed like a car riding over rumble strips on the highway. Many people had evacuated the city, but we stood, watching, on the hill that overlooked everything. This had been our home; all of our memories are here. Where else could we go?

Besides, we were about to discover the mystery behind this stellar object.

As it drew closer, the humming noise increased in volume. It was a sound we had all heard nine months prior, broadcasted on many radio stations. Five months after that, satellites were able to pick up images of the asteroid. It was then we found out the origin of the odd noise. It baffled scientists, who suggested it might be some sort of entity transmitting a message. As it was, this rock was about to crash into the old radio tower, in a field a few miles outside of town.

That tower hadn’t been used since the mid ‘60s. It would send out basic radio messages, like advertisements for cereal brands, and play songs such as Bobby Darin’s “Beyond the Sea.” But they closed that tower down when the town over built a better one. So, here it stood for half a century, and now some space rock has come to answer some radio message that it got, God knows how many years ago.

The rock was moving in an arc toward the tower, but halted when it was somewhere in the range of 80 meters in the air and a football field’s distance away from the tower. At this point, the humming was as loud as a jet. This unprecedented event took us by surprise and we were sure that if there were any scientists watching this, they would be buzzing with excitement at what this could mean. One among us was keen enough to point out how symmetrical the rock appeared to be. It was very smooth and the tail of the teardrop was spiraled like a seashell.

Gabriel Hall Fiction prize winner 8

And then there was movement.

A split formed vertically in the center of the smooth section. The two plates opened like a missile silo. A long, pointed head shaped like a broadhead arrow emerged.

Two bright, glowing orange eyes appeared on either side of the armored cranium. The armor, like the shell, had a charcoal tint to it, as opposed to the salmon color of the creature’s fleshy neck.

Two more appendages squeezed out of the massive shell. They were a wicked pair of lobster claws with the forearms plated for protection. The last things to worm their way out were the creature’s legs, which were most curious—two membranes like tree trunks pushed out near the bottom of the shell. These membranes separated into three wire-like tendrils that ended in long, sharp, spidery fingers.

The creature’s legs were long enough to reach the ground. At first, they had some trouble holding up its massive weight, but we could see that it eventually got acclimated to standing. Its glowing eyes surveyed the new world that it had touched down on. It didn’t know that we were watching, which we were thankful for. The monster lumbered curiously over to the radio tower. It made a noise that sounded like a car’s brakes screeching and waited patiently for a response.

When it didn’t get one, the monster tilted its head as though it was confused. It repeated its cry as though the tower had perhaps not heard it the first time. Still, nothing answered its call. The beast moaned a sound similar to an orca whale’s call. It was a pitiful cry that touched our hearts. This poor thing had traveled an unfathomable distance to come here because of some signal it had received forever ago. And when it finally reached the end of its journey, there was nothing here for it.

Finding great pleasure in the written word, Gabriel Hall lays out the images in his mind on paper for all to read and enjoy as they please.

The creature’s eyes flashed, as though it was angry at being denied a response. With one of its massive claws, the monster reached out and crushed the tower, snapping the rusted metal beams like twigs. We watched as the alien creature walked away from the ruined tower, its head lowered as if it were dejected. We weren’t frightened by its reaction; how could we be? We all knew the pain of rejection. This creature was no monster; it was human in a way.

How could we hate it?

But then, the alien saw the city. It gurgled and scurried with surprising quickness over to the buildings.

The beast seemed delighted, like a small child playing in a playpen. It crumbled buildings like Legos, picked up cars and chucked them like matchboxes, crushed anything that it could get its claws around.

We watched it now, not sure if we should still be understanding or horrified. We wondered where this creature came from. Perhaps it was neighbors with Gigan in the Nebula M. Spacehunter region of space. Or maybe it was a one of the Other Gods that Lovecraft spoke of.

Whatever it was, we wanted to know how to stop it from destroying our lives. Was Godzilla going to come and throw it back into space? Or perhaps Gamera would fly in and guard us. The odd truth was that we didn’t want it dead, not after the emotional pain that we had witnessed coming from this thing. This curious creature that cried was our problem, and we had no idea how to handle it.

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J.s Bach is Alive and Well and I don’t mean in our hearts and minds or anything like that. I mean I saw him, powdered wig and parka, clear as a quarter note in the checkout line of a Detroit CVS. He was short on change.

There were at least fifteen people behind him, sighing while he dug through his dark pockets, his wide German cheeks growing redder every second. The cashier leaned over the counter, tapping her fingers, while the other voices grew, a crescendo of counterpoint, impatient at the holdup.

I felt something brewing inside me.

The more he fumbled, the angrier I became, until finally I jumped forward and smacked the change he needed on the counter and shouted, You idiots! Don’t you know who this is?

The great grandfather of all musicians, The quintessential baroque composer, master of the fugue, of contrapuntal bliss?

Everything stopped. The cashier stared at me, absent, smacking her gum. Even the maestro looked embarrassed. Standing there, I felt a silence greater than anything I had ever felt before grow out of me.

It enveloped us all.

Ben Harris Ben Harris wants to graduate.

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When Ethel Rosenberg came to town she had already been dead for half a century.

She showed up anyway—wholly uninvited, and left an unfortunate ghostly paper trail the length of a McCarthy blacklist. I was sixteen when she floated into my room, just old enough to know who she was, just young enough to be scared of what she might say. Her hat, a white sunbonnet, something to be worn to a church service in the summertime.

But it was winter, and when she took it off to curtsy like she had nothing to hide, all I could do was stare. It was dark, the snow was beating hard flakes against the window and I didn’t want to wake my mom.

So finally I whispered What? What do you want?

Didn’t they treat you alright in Sing Sing?

Then she started to cry – silently, thank God, but I wasn’t finished with her. I was young and virile, and here was a woman in front of me who didn’t want to fuck, didn’t even want to talk. She just wanted to cry. I couldn’t even cry when my dog died, so all I knew was how to get more vicious. Did it hurt? I asked, Did your husband scream when they fried him like an old pickle? Did you?

She started picking up the papers she’d brought with her and ripping them in half, sobbing like a mouse the whole time. I was sure she was tearing diagrams, stolen secrets: stuff I’d have to be shot for even glancing at.

When she finished, she stood huffing for a long time before she finally spoke.

Do you see what happens? she asked. Now I am nothing.

Ben Harris 11

These words

Zachary Riddle 12

taste like orange pulp strung with a sour flavor that i cannot stand. you dangle a forkful into your mouth and your eyelids mash together and reopen with candor. your lips curl into a smile that proves and disproves my orchard all at once as you stare at the cratefuls of oranges on the back porch.

Zachary Riddle is a sophomore at Central Michigan University, majoring in English literature with a creative writing concentration.

Though he spends most of his time buried in words, he often finds himself wandering in nature and playing video games.

Blue Voice I come from happenstance, the first daughter of a rock ‘n’ roll momma on a peridot hot summer morning.

Hugged by a Woodstock-wishing papa preaching rhythm and blues. Smitten by the smell of fresh baked bread, light reflected off newly fallen rain, and afraid of what may be hiding with the white plastic hangers in the closet, of fluorescent lights bouncing off naked white walls, the smell of chicken noodle soup, nudity, and worms.

I come from a dead end in lake country, gills hidden by turtlenecks, glow-in-the-dark arms and legs licked by fish. I believe the stories of who my folks were: fumes from hairspray, dried stiff from heat, scratched vinyl on the stereo, beer belly glistened with hard earned, guitar strumming sweat on a midsummer night.

I come from music and makeup.

I come from the temperate Michigan summer, hanging from Orion’s hip.

Nicole Voice Nicole Voice thinks that if this writing thing doesn’t pan out, she can always audition for SNL.

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Whispering When I left you, I surprised everyone except our new apartment. I confided in laundry piles, frying pans, and place mats. I hummed to ferns how your kisses became freezing.

I hushed to the chaise how your touch became glacial.

I turned the home against you before you even knew I wasn’t coming back to bed.

Lee Szelag Lee Szelag is graduating this May and will work for cute shoes, bubble wrap and cheese. Her parents are very proud.

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Rebound Date (based on actual events)

When I get crabby, she said at Red Lobster, all I need’s for you to get on your knees and stick your face between my legs.

I cut my fingers cracking crab legs, I said, my head spinning in white wine, stomach teeming with cheese biscuits.

Makes that pain go away like a hit on my pipe. I feel waves in my legs that go up to my head ‘til I die a little bit.

My ex-girlfriend liked to jog at night.

Said she got a runner’s high.

Must have been good because she ran away.

I ain’t an addict ‘cause I stopped for a week, back before Jason went to jail and I still did nails at that Asian place by the pawn shop.

She probably pawned the ring I gave her.

Probably bought a bike to ride to that guy she met at that filthy outdoor concert.

You’re paying tonight, right, ‘cause I need baby formula and cigarettes, and I don’t get money ‘til the first of the month.

Melissa never let me pay for meals, she thought she was a feminist and didn’t like my patriarchal paradigms.

Your big words are making me crabby, and I could use a hit or two of dope, so get the check; let’s go feel good.

Let’s leave, maybe catch a movie.

I think we have real chemistry.

Jeremy Ball outsourced this bio to a bio-writing firm that emphasizes bio-writing speed over bio-writing quality. He doesn’t like many things. He’s got a beard.

Jeremy Ball 15

Eulogy We’re here today to celebrate the life of your father’s aunt’s husband.

The man whose birthday cards were never late and often contained five dollars.

The man who resembled Joe Biden in your mind’s eye, but actually looks more like an embalmed Bob Barker.

He will be missed.

For it is written in the Book of Job, “Nothing lasts forever but the Earth and sky, ashes to ashes, dusk to dusk to dawn, and so forth, it’s all over now, baby blue.”

Terrance (that’s the name of the old guy up there in the upholstered box) knows you’re not listening. He sees you texting your girlfriend, telling her you can’t wait for Thirsty Thursday and dollar pints and karaoke at O’Flanagan’s, how you can’t wait to get home, since these pews hurt your ass-bone.

Terrance is dreadfully sorry to interrupt your Tuesday mid-afternoon with this final bit of perfunctory and boring business; he really doesn’t want to be here either.

Let us pray.

Jeremy Ball 16

Meniscus after A. Van Jordan

Meniscus (m nis k s) n. 1 crescent or crescent shaped thing. cradle of waning moon. polynomial of blood. 2 curved upper surface of a column of liquid. this test tube of blood is failing its test. 3 cartilage in the knee acting to absorb shock—what can absorb the shock of your child dying?—when it tears, there will be great pain and limited motion. 4 a lens, concave on one side and convex on the other. the image is magnified, real and inverted: contour of the mother bending to lift her silent child. see how even the light bows. hear the machines hush. 5 in plane geometry, these arcs hold a covenant: her mother will not leave her side. the women of Mosque Number 1 will not leave the lobby. school friends will not loose their hands. still, their iron will will not be adequate, will succumb to a tear-stained sinusoidal end. 6 sickle shape of a cutting tool cutting. 7 e

e

Sonya Marie Pouncy Sonya Marie Pouncy is a degreed mechanical engineer. She currently works in the arena of building energy management. Poetry keeps her sane.

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PIG NOSE Drop to crooked rooftop, walnuts split and roll exposing pig noses. They spit green on cracked boards of our front porch, free from the leaning tree all brown at its roots like my father, who sits all nails-bit and cigarette-lit, picking at chipped wrinkles of picnic table.

Between river and the tree are grass patches where our fort used to be.

My mother saunters down to murky water that shrinks with each season. How they once laughed when it grew inches with the months of her stomach, shoreline swelling up to the porch.— Now dry, it swallows them whole.

My mother stubbing her toe on each dull pulp hidden between blades of grass and he can still see it: how we’d put those broken walnuts up to our noses and squeal like piglets—dimples pressed with green ink and stink, stained fingertips dragging across the white of their walls—all that bedroom paint still covered in our mistakes.

Chelcy Pine 18

Chelcy loves talking about nothing because its the only thing she knows anything about.

Lisa Frank is her spirit animal.

IGNIS FATUUS

(definition: 1. a phosphorescent light that hovers or flits over swampy ground at night, possibly caused by spontaneous combustion of gasses emitted by rotting organic matter. 2. a deceptive hope. see also: jack-o’-lantern.)

We sat, a patch of pumpkins plump behind un-carved faces, orange carriage walls round as Cinderella’s tears.— Come October, the streets are littered with glass slippers.

Cut from Michigan vine, we hold tight under toothed knife, stranger’s slice to our dome where we remove our hat, welcome them in.

We all want to know Love on a first-name basis

so we keep a straight face through handfuls of gut and slime, triangle eyes and gummy grin.

When the stranger grips the last anatomic vessel, we begin to rot. Lopsided on stoops as passersby gawk at what burns inside—

the property of sticky fingers that toss our roasted hearts between teeth and swallow the crunch.

By the end of fall, we are smashed against pavement by goblins too proud to uproot their masks.

We find each other in the pits of dumpsters stuck with shards of glass, covered in a mass of porous garbage bags— our guts leak back into each yawning cavity.

Chelcy Pine 19

Cruel I wanted to write a cruel poem about you, but all I can see is the way you would slowly waken, move closer and lean into me.

Matt Erspamer Matt Erspamer is an avid nacho fan. He enjoys writing and watching the occasional movie.Â

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There He Was

It was not my fault this time, I swear. I was filling my glass halfway with water, set it to the left of the sink, and was extending my right hand to the mirror cabinet, just like every other day. There was one more in the bottle, and if Jack hadn’t slammed the door and made me jump right as I popped the lid off, I very well may have taken it. As it stands, my final pill is down the drain, and the realizations have slowly started pouring in. Dr. J and I had planned for me to run out of pills on Wednesdays so that structure could be maintained and order kept intact. If I called the pharmacy at 9:03 a.m., right as I walked into work, then it would be ready that night for either Jack or me to pick up and I would not miss a cycle.

“It’s very important you don’t miss a cycle,” Dr. J had said. “It’s very important that you keep with the schedule and keep this in your system.”

I replied,“So, it’s OK if I forget a day here and there?” because I’m still a ball-breaker, even when I’m in therapy.

Most of my journal entries had been uninteresting ever since I started his cleanse. It’s impossible to make I feel nothing and I think I’ll cook chicken again for dinner even though we’ve had it three days in a row and Jack keeps sighing louder and louder come alive on the page.

Jack didn’t need to keep a journal. He was fine, allegedly. Every morning he set his alarm for 7:05 because it made him feel like he was sleeping in if he went five minutes past the hour. He would shave, he would shower, he would hum “Video Killed the Radio Star” or “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and he would get dressed. Then came coffee and a granola bar, and off he went by 8:05.

As you can probably tell, we are equally mundane, Jack and I. I’m so much smarter though, especially when I am not shackled to medication. If only he’d see how much more attuned to the world I am, how much more observant. Just the other day, I noticed he never seems to know his way around.

He doesn’t know how to navigate the world or how to move

Matt Erspamer 21

in it. Each step is like a question mark, and yet, his confidence is boundless. This used to attract me, make me quiver with anticipation every time his fist gave a police knock on my meager apartment door.

We’d go off to the movies, usually some Jason Statham thing because that’s how Jack sees himself. His knock is louder than his bite, though, especially nowadays. A thick fog of mellow had gradually permeated our relationship, and it led to resentment and this unbearable weight inside me, just above my heart, pressing, then piercing with each inhale.

At first, he calmed me down, helped me control it in ways I never thought possible. There he was in 2008, saying exactly the right thing while we both waited at the Starbucks counter. It was a particularly nasty November day for me; I was imagining the one-two punch of Thanksmas, my family’s ghoulish holiday fusion brought on by my economic (and mental) inability to come home more than once a year.

Jack had somehow cheered me up, though. He’d made fun of my “psychotically specific” drink order (a grande half-skinny, half one-percent quad shot latte) while he waited for his toasted bagel and sipped his house blend. When the barista shouted my name, he said in an obnoxious, but endearing, fashion,“Now I only need your number!”

Once we were together, I stopped my anxious inner monologue of complaints and grievances. It seemed as if I’d overcome an invisible obstacle that I didn’t know was there. I stopped scratching invisible sores in an angry frenzy on solitary Friday nights, and, for a while, there were no more weekends where the heaviness of the world kept me pinned in bed.

Back to our rituals, though. Today was Sunday, our day of rest and phone calls. Jack called his mother; me, my sister in California. At first, planning around the time difference was exciting; it was a task, something I could pour myself into solving, if only for a minute.

“Let’s see, if 9 a.m. there is 11 here, is that right Erica? Yes, that’s what I thought. OK, well, that works for me because I run at around 9:30 on weekends, get back around 10:30 and shower.

Oh, I see. Yes, the end of my jog is the beginning of yours … don’t tell mom, I can’t stand to hear her ‘Two Bodies, One Soul’ monologue again. Well, let’s see, by the time your 11 arrives, it’s my 1, which is usually when I …”

We settled on her 4 p.m., which is my 6 p.m. Sundays we have 22

late dinner, usually around 7 p.m., usually chicken and pasta.

My talks with Erica revolve around her kids, which sounds boring, but is a welcomed escape. How great to be enveloped in someone else’s mediocrity, if only for 30 minutes every Sunday before dinner.

Jack felt the same way. His mother was an escape from Illinois, though she and his late father are responsible for keeping him here in this nothing. He had similar fun trying to set up a time with her in her retirement commune in New Mexico. They settled on my 9:30 jog, which, of course, gave them plenty of time to grade my performance as a spouse.

I know his rotten little secret about him and his mother, though. Listening to Jack transition from phone call back to reality was the key to understanding him, maybe the key to understanding anyone. Whenever he hung up the phone with his mother, he immediately spewed all the little details about their talk that he hated.

“Why can’t I ever tell her about my week without her critiquing the missteps?” he said. I never responded to him.

It was like he was questioning an abyss.“I told her I reheated leftovers for lunch, she sighs at me using the microwave.”

It was upon the discovery of this habit two or three years ago that I stopped trusting him, stopped believing he was capable of sincerity. I had been on the other end of that phone before, asking him to check to see if we had butter. He was sweetly nonchalant about it, but I could just picture once he clicked “end:”“Can’t he let me watch the James Bond marathon without asking me to inventory the goddamn fridge?”

He was so unrelentingly passive aggressive and two-faced that I could no longer confide in him. And so, those old pre-Jack feelings had slowly returned, only now he was incorporated into them. Beneath my contentedness simmered that familiar pool of disquiet. I wanted to glue his dick to his navel. I wanted to smash him in the head with his iPad, watching to see if he mourned the shattered screen more than his bleeding eye sockets. In my heart, I knew that I still loved him unequivocally, but the urge to crack, bruise and beat him was just as strong, just as genuine.

The worst part was the waiting. I’m always there first; he knows how conscious of time I am. It gives him a rush to walk up to a table where someone has been sitting for 35 minutes, alphabetizing the wine list. There he was in 2009, the first of

many times he would show up late for our dinner reservations.

He made an excuse, using the unholy combination of work and traffic, and I had believed it because I was still in the process of knowing him.

At least then, the time together was a rush, even if he was tardy. Now, our dinner dates always felt like solitary confinement, and then, when he got there, we were cellmates imprisoned by ritual. We fucked sometimes, but lately as seldom as jailbirds.

It’s healthy for every relationship to have its moments of discontent, or so I’m told. He probably has similar quips with me, maybe even a violent impulse or two. His sighs, when I do my yoga workout, could register on the Richter Scale. He probably wanted to throw me down on the floor, press down on my heaving chest with his bear claw and hold me there until I knew in every twitching muscle that he was in control. That’s all it would take; I would be bested. This had happened several times when we were dating; playfully at first, until I saw an animal tinge in his eye that let on to something more. Romance was a segue to domination, co-domination. .::.

We weren’t like this before. It was as if he was slowly poisoning me, and I him. Instead of a child, we birthed a hatred that was crippling us. It’s all I thought about. Reading my New Yorker in bed that night, roughly 14 hours since he slammed the door and unhinged my day, I thought about how much I wanted him next to me, incapacitated and weak. I imagined him in his study, crouched over some unknown paperwork that I couldn’t be trusted with. His fan whirring above his head, right above the desk. It helped him concentrate. It could easily fall; it could easily land on his head and crush it.

I had no such weakness like this. His death fantasies about me, if there even were any, would be far fetched and completely implausible. Would someone poison my coffee? Cut the brakes in my Volvo? No, that is whimsy violence, far too calculated for my husband. Mine, though, is conceivable.

The next day, when I got home from work, I turned on the pine green fan in our bedroom and laid under it. For 20 minutes, I watched it spin slowly and consistently, until I was in a trance. It became too easy to trace one blade round and round and round in endless circles, so I turned it higher until it was maxed out. All became a blur, each blade

indistinguishable, flowing together like days and months and years. The highest setting made it wobble, as if it could come loose at any second. I didn’t care, though. Let it. Let it crush my ribs and let him find me laying here. I bet he’d rearrange his study the next week. A part of me likes to think he’d grieve me at least that long before redecorating.

This fan would not fall, though, it was sturdy. We had paid extra for one that went with the earth tone of the room.

The salesperson said it was almost top of the line: I always liked it when people like that can be honest. Imagine if they advertised it that way, though: “A color to match pretty much every suburban style! Almost top of the line!” Jack’s fan was not even on the line, thankfully. As I recall,“Any damn fan would do,” because he “just wanted to go.” The blades looked like they were made of cardboard, and then painted that awful industrial tan to waft a little more soullessness around the room. It had a sturdy center though, which is all that I really needed. Careful plotting was required; a plan, some caution and a screwdriver.

I would unscrew the fan, not completely, but enough so that with a little time and the flick of the “on” switch, it would come loose and fall. If he didn’t die, I could care for him, feed him soup in the hospital, feed him whatever soup I wanted him to have. I would press my hand on his chest, until he squirmed and knew that it was me now.

When he got home, I was still laying there, smiling. That night at dinner, after he had come home and I had jumped off the floor and switched the fan back to “low,” he informed me that he got a promotion.

“So, Dave brings me into his office, and he has me sit. He clearly sees I’m sweating. With recent cutbacks, how could I not?!

Real prick, Dave,” he says, and wouldn’t he know.“Anyway, he goes on and on about how he’s being relocated to Chicago, and the bigger cheeses want someone with real chutzpah leading this branch through the downsizing. And then, he says they want it to be me.”

He goes on for a mini-eternity, sparing me no grueling detail about the conversation. Somehow, he and Dave ended up talking about their favorite “West Wing” episodes, because, apparently, they weren’t boring enough. He told me this new position would start immediately, which meant the end of the week.

23

“The end of the week!” I blurted out with feigned interest while swallowing a mouthful of grilled salmon (sometimes we run out of chicken).

“Yeah, end of the week,” he replied mid-chew. “Is that … OK?” “Just so soon is all. I expected it to happen more in slow motion, I guess.”

“Nah, they amped up the speed on mine. Out of necessity, I guess.”

Well isn’t that just great. You’re necessary now. Maybe Dave will come visit you in the hospital; maybe he’d shrug, sigh and say how you would’ve been great at the job, while your jaw tries to mouth the words “help” as I motion him out and say you’re “exhausted.”

This new job was good for him and for us, at least on the surface, of course. Like I said, it was a firm job, the kind with the names on the door. Still, he was being moved to a key researching position, with pay that was more than halfway to six figures. Don’t forget the best part, though: long hours, the kind where I’d start to suspect infidelity if he weren’t so simple.

Yes, this was good. I did not work such overtime in my paper-pushing Nowhereland. I made spreadsheets and finance reports, and, sometimes, private journal entries during lunch.

This was not a company where things were done for any tangible purpose; this was the kind of job Dr. J said would,“be best for now.” It was a consulting firm bathed in bureaucracy, a career deathtrap that a recent graduate who hates trying, but loves paying off debt, would be happy to have.

Jack’s ambition was the only thing about him that dwarfed me, except, of course, his size and strength. I didn’t need this job anymore, though. It had been six years since graduation and I barely had a dent in my loans. Still, now I could abandon my post while he kept the finances afloat with his “career.” He would love that; creating a more traditional dynamic. He’d relish in the opportunity to have me at home putting myself into a charity until I was broken and bored enough to want to adopt a kid.

There he was in 2010, clutching my left hand under the table at dinner while he told his parents not that he was gay, but that we were in love, that one day we might have kids. It was his need for my presence that both completed and trapped me; I’d never be co-dependent with another person again.

But why did it have to be him?

Moments from our life together swirled around my head 24

the rest of the night, and my one-word responses to him would be noticeable if he weren’t so enthralled by the things he was saying. I don’t even think he noticed how unmedicated I was.

My left hand shook as I filled up my third glass of water at dinner, and he just kept going on and on about Dave and the firm and how this new job would let me stay home for a little while, really dig into therapy and “get all the way better, yeah?”

I’m not the one with so much self-loathing. I’m not so insecure that I need to establish, before we even get married, that I will need my own space. He had insisted on a room of his own, even going so far as to admit it was a selfish demand, but one that was very important to him.

“My parents always respected that I needed my own space to just kind of be isolated,” he’d said with a skin-deep self-awareness. Jack’s attempts at self-analysis did nothing but showcase his lack of interest in himself. He had told me while we were dating, when we were confessing “weird habits” that he was “kind of a germaphobe.” When we moved in together, I realized that either was another lie or that he was the first germaphobe to have never cleaned a kitchen. To this day, I spend two and a half hours every Saturday thoroughly scrubbing the counter and the crusty dishes that accumulate like all his misrepresentations. This Saturday, I would not be doing any cleaning.

Thinking about his future accident thrust me back into the thick fog of the every day. For every ounce of warmth I once felt, there was a bitter aftertaste of cruelty when I remembered our nastiest moments. I wasn’t better or worse for loving, just different. There he was in 2011, in the midst of insulting me in front of my family at their house outside of Cleveland. He lashed out at my lack of adventurousness; how I didn’t feel like “going into the city” with him to get out of my parents’ admittedly dusty, unbearable sauna of a living room.

“You’re acting just like your mother right now,” he’d said to me in the kitchen where she couldn’t hear him; just like his mother would have done.“Sitting somewhere, being bored and anxious, when we could go do something fun.”

I raised my voice then. I never really did that. Before I knew it, I was screaming, and then I was throwing dirty dishes from the sink, alternating between glass and plastic, hitting him with a couple of them. This was our ugliest moment; the kind of fight that relationships of any kind can’t endure more than once

or twice. My parents had just stood watching, baffled that their son could make such noise. When it was all done, mom quietly went to get a broom to sweep up the glass and dad quietly suggested that maybe a motel would be best.

This was how I became acquainted with Dr. J, though I do not concede that it was my breaking point. It was a culmination of all the moments that didn’t end like this that built up, whizzing around my head in unstoppable frenzy. .::.

It has been 41 hours since Jack slammed the door, and when I close my eyes in bed, all I see is the fan. This is the time, I think. Jack has been gone at the bar for two hours, celebrating his promotion with who’s left of his fellow employees. He’d invited me but I told him I wasn’t feeling well, which is never a lie when I say it, even though I have gone out with him feeling much queasier than this. This was a night to be in bed away from things, though, as so many are. For the past few days, a spider has slowly built a web in the lower left hand corner of our bedroom window. Its world is so delicate, and yet so selfcontained. Where once I was looking through the glass, now I was conscious of it.

These headaches always got me to see things like this more closely; that spider setting traps outside my window, it was either a sign or an omen. It’s often difficult for me to tell if time is egging me on or cautioning me.

I decided to act. Normally, it was hard to get out of bed when I felt like this, but now the weight in my chest seemed to give me a sense of purpose. He instills such trust in me to leave his study unlocked; why even have a room of your own if you’re not going to lock it? Jack had laid claim to this room like it was going to be a crypt of all his deep dark secrets, and though I felt a hand in the cookie jar, guilt rose in my throat as I slowly turned the handle. The only thing that happened was the door creaked slightly and then opened.

His distinct stylistic imprint was everywhere in this space; a framed “Double Indemnity” poster stared at the wall behind his desk, where a picture of him graduating from the University of Illinois was framed by the window, side-by-side with his diploma. The air was slightly thicker with his musk mixing with the dust he refused to Swiffer. Perched directly above his desk in a decidedly asymmetrical fashion was his fan, just waiting to swirl more dust around the room with his

next command. I found his laughable tool kit in the cabinet directly beneath the embracing lovers on the poster, and grabbed both of the screwdrivers out of it, knowing that surely one of them would fit.

As I stood stationary in his space, nearing hour 42, I entered an undeniable upper phase. I climbed atop his desk, my feet right next to a black-and-white wedding photo I barely recognized anymore. There we were in 2012, making it official, more than a year after it had been made legal and it was no longer trendy. We had both agreed it would be best, giving the wedding industry time to fizzle its gay legalization boom prices a little.

I rarely let myself dwell on our good times anymore, but there was that penultimate kiss at our small ceremony by Lake Michigan, barely out of winter but not quite spring. My parents were right to the left of the photographer, who was my cousin that we were giving business. They were both crying, because of course I was watching everyone out of the corner of my eye, instead of being there with just Jack.

The right screwdriver (Phillips head?) was fairly useless in my hands, and balance proved difficult with nothing to grasp but the restless fan blades. There were four screws affixed to the base, two pairs on opposite ends. I steadily loosened one on each side. I could see the mess of wires protruding from the ceiling as the metallic center jerked down slightly. The fan was holding, for now. I didn’t dare flip it on and risk premature detonation. I crouched on my knees slightly so that I wouldn’t break through the floor as I jumped off. My left hand knocked our wedding photo onto the floor as I made my way from desk wood to floorboards, and I didn’t bother to pick it up.

Looking back up at the fan, screwdriver still in hand, I knew that was it. The fan may not fall the first time; in fact, it might last quite a while. He could be well into his new job before one day he brings work home, pulls the chain to start up the fan and finds that, suddenly, it no longer matters.

It was laid to rest, even though I was still on an uncontainable high. I returned the screwdrivers to their place and shut the door silently on my way out, though I don’t know why. As I returned to the confines of my bed, thoughts of when and how it would fall whirled around and around. Now all I could do was wait for him.

25

THE ALBUM OF WORST MOMENTS A man photographs himself at his worst moments: when he goes mad in his miserable bed, when he is stumbling drunk, jailed, and afraid. He documents each terrified wrinkle, dark circle, missed appointment. When he speaks without thinking, he takes x-rays of his teeth. He collects each picture in a heavy album, which he locks in a drawer in his childhood bedroom. The hands of the clock spin backward, he is a child again. He is safe. He is happy. He marches around the house with a false mustache and a three-cornered hat. He is the captain of an English galleon, on an expedition for lost gold: full sails, the fife and drum corps resound from the deck. When the ship comes to port in an exotic land, he disembarks confidently. On the beach is a chest covered in sand. The key is in his pocket.

He unlocks the drawer and discovers the album of worst moments. The boy flips through the pages—recognizes himself: red-faced and swollen, alone. Dark clouds gather on the horizon. The crew is waiting for him. He puts the album back in the drawer and turns the key. He drags his feet back to the ship, knowing the voyage home will be impossible to bear.

John Priest   *poetry prize winner 26

John Priest was just wondeirng if you could please crawl out of your window. Wait, no that is dumb. Let me find a different Dylan allusion.

TRESPASSING At night, the security guard whistles and twirls his baton in the corridors of the Museum of Extraordinary Secrets.

The snap of his polished black shoes against the marble floor echoes down the hall. The dim installations are the desk drawer memories of time, transient wishes, fevered visions, impossible mistakes. He finds me on the fourth floor admiring a rose passed between two strangers in a brief moment in Washington Square. “Hey you,” he says, “you’re not supposed to be in here.” “Am I not?” I ask, “I don’t mean to cause trouble.” “No,” he says, “this is the Museum of Extraordinary Secrets. No one is allowed in but me, the guard. That’s the nature of the place.”

“I’m sorry,” I tell him, “I’ll see myself out. This rose is so perfectly red, I couldn’t help but look.” “I know,” he says.

“That’s why I took the job.”

John Priest 27

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