Chanter Literary and Arts Magazine

Fall 2019

(noun): one who sings, or, the part of the bagpipe that plays a melody

Fall 2019 Macalester College Literary and Arts Magazine St. Paul, MN chanter@macalester.edu

Chanter would like to thank the following: All the incredible writers and artists who submitted their work Matt Burgess The Macalester English & Art Departments The Mac Weekly Lovely PFs: Araliya Dooldeniya and Aya Cathey Missing wall in The Mac Weekly office Old Main 001: The Shadow Realm Security guards who don’t ask questions

Cover art: pregnant sisters (linocut), Ruby Elliott Zuckerman

Editor-in-Chief: Ema Erikson Literary Editor: Teddy Holt Associate Literary Editor: Alice Asch Art Editor: Aron Smith-Donovan Associate Art Editor: Lily Duquette Submission Managers: Shine Chin, Asher de Forest

Staff: Cynthia Aguilar Audrey Bentch Cole Galando Rachel Liebherr Xochitl Quiroz Estelle Timar-Wilcox Irene Schulte Libby Sykes Jonah Wexler

Writing •

on helmets and desire 6 Richard Graham My Basement Light Flickers But You Look Beautiful All The Same 7 Jonathan Hauser Cleaning Out the Fridge 8 Lauren Weber Abbie N. Larson Memorial Campsite 9 Anna Švercl Hetzer songbird 10 Maeve Sweeney edith 11 Rachel Warshaw Permian-Triassic Performance-Essay 12 Asher de Forest One Night Band 14 Josh Groven Disappeared 15 Cole Galando We Met In The Middle Of July 16 Lidija Namike Smoke Hour 17 Elyssa Cook Las minas 19 Teresa Padrón Address to the Ohio 20 Dalton Greene SESTINA FOR MY CHOSEN NAME 34 James Hartzer Gringanized II 36 Cynthia Aguilar Tornado Warning 37 Erin Webb Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? 38 Alice Asch Pollution, amongst other things 40 Elyssa Cook man of war 41 Rachel Warshaw Ecological Anxiety 42 Lauren Weber For My Loved Ones 44 Shine Chin On removing the pier from the water 45 Gabriel Fisch TRANS BOY SHAVING 46 James Hartzer in which the half-life is lived 47 Aron Smith-Donovan Love Letter To Driving In The Summer 48 Maija Hecht

Art • yiddish theater dreams 21 Ruby Elliott Zuckerman Garden 22 Maeve Sweeney How to Sleep Through the Night 23 Ema Erikson 43.59.50°S, 170.1.418°E 24 Lianna Goldstein Maestro in the Dark 25 Shaherazade Khan Nemesis, Mimesis 26 Libby Sykes Water-Based Introspection 27 Huong Nguyen Hanabi 28 Shosuke Noma Matrilineal 29 Lidija Namike Squirrel in the Sun 30 Shosuke Noma Kitchen 31 Maeve Sweeney in the goop 32 Rachel Liebherr I do not dance 33 Jennings Mergenthal

on helmets and desire Richard Graham I have read that you should replace your bicycle helmet if you’re ever in an accident, or every few years if you’re not. Many mechanics have told me this also, including the arrestingly beautiful one at the bike shop in Cedar-Riverside who I bought brake cables from recently and then matched with on tinder later that week. I don’t know if they’re increasing or if I’m paying more attention, but lots of news of bike fatalities recently. The other day I dropped my helmet down the stairs and was thinking about how long I’ve had it, how many staircases it’s fallen down & bruises it’s prevented when I’ve gotten away with just road rash. I don’t remember a certain date, so I looked at a label inside to see if it had any information. Do bicycle helmets have expiration dates? Nobody tell Athena, 23, mechanic at the Hub, that my helmet is half as old as I am.

My Basement Light Flickers But You Look Beautiful All The Same

Jonathan Hauser

Across the floor, cat litter skitters. Glimmers like glitter, the critters pitter-patter back up the stairs Broken ping pong paddles in the corner, and tinny sing-song saddle songs that I tried to prevent (I hate country music) Spoke jokes across a pillow partition and smoke cloaked the window. No view of the oak tree in the lawn Simple dimples and some pimples, ample samples of hair conditioner. I think I like it here, with no fear, if even for the briefest moment. Lack of tears and careers and passive-aggressive jeers And the silence is okay for once.

Cleaning Out the Fridge Lauren Weber I’ll try to explain. The bread hosts mold. The milk is rancid. The fish smells like an animal. There are magnets on the door, those stupid poetry pieces. “The bird lacks further education,” reads the only coherent link. I’ll probably eat this food and get sick. My ex-boyfriend always scoffed at my “irrational behavior.” When everyone knew my ex-boyfriend was going to propose, my mother often talked about my appearance. “Don’t think about getting any tattoos,” she would say. “We don’t want to see them in the wedding photos.” Now when I imagine my ex-boyfriend getting down on one knee, I know he would’ve been so easy to topple over in that position. A swift round-house kick to the side of his head and he would’ve tumbled, silver ring popping out of its navy-blue velvet box. My mother takes kickboxing classes. She shows me a new move every time I come over for dinner. I think she has made some of them up, just so she will always have something to teach me. I want to explain. A few years ago, I had more friends. They all fell in love somewhere else and never returned. It’s about growth and rebirth, I guess. Back in the early days of a relationship, they would call me for help dissecting a dull conversation with their new significant other. We discussed how each syllable compressed on the tongue before it was spoken, which phrases could be euphemisms, and how to distinguish between love and infatuation. Now, all my old friends are working office jobs and packing lunches with their partners and popping out kids with a fervor that reminds me of playing Whack-a-Mole. When I left my ex-boyfriend and my friends started to move away, I cooked extravagant dinners for myself: spreads of roasted root vegetables, expensive cheeses, whole slabs of steak. I watched documentaries on my laptop for hours, learning about the inner-workings of murderers and the cuisine of faraway places and the creatures that used to roam the earth. I never knew what I would do with this information, but it felt important. I want to explain. I learned that there used to be insane animals at the bottom of the ocean. They roamed; tentacles splayed out across the sandy floor. Now the animals are gone and we don’t have to be afraid of anything, so we dredge up the sand to make beach volleyball courts. Tall, tanned women sink their toes into it, gripping grains that originated miles below the surface. I know the milk has gone bad, the fish, the bread – all of it has gone to waste. My ex-boyfriend is a biologist, though he claims to be an expert on countless other obscure topics, including my body. I remember what it felt like to sleep next to him, to cringe at his arms like tentacles, squirming and searching. I want to explain. I can clean out the fridge and practice my mother’s kickboxing moves. I can function and be good to myself. I can explain. I’ll remove everything green and fuzzy and growing from the fridge – but I know there are things I can’t see, animals extinct and revived at the bottom of the ocean, between my bed sheets, in the back of the vegetable drawer.

Abbie N. Larson Memorial Campsite Anna Švercl Hetzer We found the circle fenced in evergreen: and convinced ourselves it was the center of the world. We arrived at the very top of the Earth, the curve of the terrain so prominent, a crown atop Her head. Directly above, flaxen rays snagged the corners of our lips and pulled them effortlessly heavenward. Here we realized how expendable our shoes were, wandering sprawl-toed through her olive carpet, and letting the spikes of the flattop blades poke our tender arches, and watching the ants meander on our skin, just to see where in the world they might go.

songbird Maeve Sweeney I cross endless borders I walk, redefining the boundaries of my body over and over again until there can be no mistake as to my endings I hold my staggered form to the trees I move to the river to my resting ground. I know who I am cut off and bleeding— I make my edges clear and it is some kind of death to make it here but you will call me a songbird no longer

edith Rachel Warshaw The highway will swallow you whole, yellow lines distorting to consume you and your boxy white car, the extension of yourself. You drive because you like to pretend you know where you are going. Nothingness stretches like motherhood along the highway as it shudders to birth a different you, bloody, onto the road. Regurgitation hurts more than resurrection, it seems. All that tar and asphalt, (potholes filled in and emptied, a cavity drilled into and left to heal itself), all that pounding—the ache of liminal space—presses down into you, around you, within you: the exoskeleton of your car warps to protect you (small and shrivelled and delicate and oh-so-human). The gray hisses with the heat of the sun. Memories of journeys past and yet to come shiver ahead. The yearning of the mirage! The pining of the oasis! The promise of the solitary path burns with the lie of the lonely turnpike. The eternal spin of the roundabout threatens to ensnare you forever. You drive because you like to pretend the road is the answer and not the question. The highway almost chokes on you and your empty places; you taste like the dirt back home.

Permian-Triassic Performance-Essay Asher de Forest Excerpt from New Year, a play in progress

(A world map of Permian era Pangea is projected onto the floor, with “Laurasia” and “Gondwana” labeled PLAYWRIGHT enters on all fours, legs sprawled, wearing a toilet-seat headpiece. He rises, standing in the middle of the map.)

PLAYWRIGHT According to paleontologist and professor Kristi Curry Rogers, there was a time before the dinosaurs when, and I quote, “giant amphibians with heads shaped like toilet seats roamed the land.” She said this in Dinosaurs class today, and it’s among the best bits of everyday poetry I’ve heard in a good long while. When I say “a good long while,” I don’t mean hundreds of millions of years, but still… (PLAYWRIGHT removes the headpiece. The map of Pangea fades.) I am no giant amphibian with a head shaped like a toilet seat, and most of my roaming lately is around my small, liberal arts campus, but the moment I heard the phrase, I type-jotted it down and knew I had to work it into something. I am an English major on the Creative Writing track, as well as a Theater and Dance major who isn’t much of a Dancer, but is a nearly lifelong Theaterer, and I want to be a playwright. I also want to keep performing, keep writing in other forms, have kid(s) (with the s in parentheses!) and whirlwind affairs (both romantic and platonic!), make music, live by the sea, host an awards show, and stop chewing my nails. Maybe somewhere in there I’ll finally learn to drive or at least to ride a bike.

(Over the course of the following section, relevant images are projected all around PLAYWRIGHT: e.g. Permian-Triassic Extinction illustrations. The BFG cast photo. Harvey Milk, AIDS

quilt, Auschwitz.)

They say we’re headed towards another mass extinction, and this time we can’t blame volcanoes. This time we set our own Siberian Traps and ran away with the greenhouse. This time we are the volcanoes. They say we have been for a good long while, as well as the toilet seat-headed amphibian land-roaming giants. My first role in a play was a giant. I was a child. Now I am “a grown up,” though only five foot six. The kid who played the BFG was taller than the rest of us supposedly bigger, unfriendly giants. They say we’re headed towards another mass extinction and this time we simultaneously are the cause and will be the victims. There is always something to be said for being both. This is not necessarily a bi joke, although, in preparation for this performance-essay, I did read some capital Q Queer solo performance scripts, and I know I could easily Milk some homo-dino connections if I wanted to. This isn’t the first time I’ve been a member of a group afraid of the coming asteroid. This also applies to the Jews, another Tribe of mine. I am “a grown up,” but I am still younger than the peaks of many of those fears. I am still a child of many of those fears.

(The images fade. PLAYWRIGHT sits on the toilet seat headpiece. Leans in, like he’s sharing a secret.)

I’ve decided to end this performance-essay not with a bang, but with a whimper. I caught up with an ex last night, and it was nice, the way we danced around history, but still laughed at each other’s jokes and spoke in a lot of the same old rhythms. At the end, I decided to be almost sincere, and asked if he wanted to be bros, then decided to be actually sincere, and asked if he wanted to be friends. He said “no,” that he liked the casual acquaintances thing we had going. That he did not want to be my friend. I said “fair.” I’m sure it wasn’t one of my most convincing line readings, but it was at least serviceable improv. A “yes” without an “and” in response to a surprise “no.” I remain disappointed, but it’s not the end of the world.

One Night Band Josh Groven At first, there are three girls Trying to scream louder than a Canadian punk band who’s never been This far south, Hair/body lookin’ greasy, thrusting picks without much stance Screaming in some loud, empty, malnourished dance There’s rifts between the riffs and I can feel how stiff, your strings are, on my, spine Up and, down like a jammed Congo line A man, with tufts of hair and a belly like the marsh’s Biggest Bubble Blubbers and claps! HeyheY! He says, I liked that one: real good, real hard But Then, you spot the hair, strewn across a blue sheet with buttons tied around his neck A smile, whiter, than the creamy tank top that sticks to his chest, You know his dagger cuts both ways so there’s a knot in your head’s Edge, the drummer has the melting hair of lava-whipped ice cream The guitarist, smirks, like a boy who wrote a dirty joke in his Classics dissertation You know they just, graduated, so they’re the right age, for you and when he shakes your hand, you feel his lips, smooth Running through your tendons, you know, this is the first, and most likely The last, time, you’ll ever be, this close, so you hold On, with each buttered utterance and overcooked compliment, Pan Of pancakes spill from the oven the morning after, he’s still, ripped apart, in bed His hair, bounced like a stallion’s first ride, so you thought it might be nice to cook him something because you know the band’s back on the road soon so you thought you could provide— You’re back at the bar, sleeve relieved and, back at your side Your sight flickers to his eyes, but it’s over You nod, you smile, and you fade away, back to a soggy burger and a dimly lit corner It’s time for their set, and for you, to repay that deep, dark, debt For, every time you screamed In your car, alone 14

Disappeared Cole Galando Yours was not the violent severing of life from life but instead the greeting of a quiet absence realized when you returned home and found his chair empty his breakfast unfinished They had the good sense to knock and enter as guests careful to keep your things unbroken and kind enough to gift you in his place an invitation to dance amongst ghosts and a scream always to be left just behind the tongue

We Met In The Middle Of July Lidija Namike I think about you and I think about how I don’t know you but I do know you but only in the way that you know someone when you don’t really know them They were plummeting toward the earth, the raindrops creating a mirror on the road in front of us as if indifferent to our presence. Four lines outstretched, reaching towards us, as the stoplights shone red, reflected. It was peaceful and quiet and the air was a jelly with seeds of potential scattered within it. You would play a song before I was ready, which is good, because I never know when I am ready, in fact my problem is that I usually think I am ready before I am and I don’t realize that I am not when I am not yet I meant to write about you that night. And the night after, and the few days after that as well. There were so many things I wanted to say, to remember, to create from that night, but here I am a week and a half later with your being still being in my head, under my skin, in every corner of San Francisco when I passed by the old, rowed homes. You’re still here. But am I there? With you? A ghost on the corner beneath the stop sign, waiting until the other cars pass by and your front door opens. A goodbye wave, but was it for good? I saw you in the eyes of my brother as he passed out on the bathroom floor, unable to move, pale, and gasping for breath. I didn’t tell you how I worried. He is okay now, and has to walk by himself since I am gone.

Smoke Hour Elyssa Cook after Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” The sky was purple an hour ago, pink and dusted before that, it lit bright orange like God flicked on a lighter on the horizon. It’s out, now. So I light the candles, the incense, the cigarette, old gum wrappers, the pipe. And the smoke twists up toward the red blinking fire alarm, out through the open window, down Grand toward the lights on rooftops, treetops, streetlights, electric signs. Twists out toward Minneapolis, o, smoky night, the moon rots in the sky and I rot here, on a gray-brown sofa permeated with smoke and I do not feel like me. I watched my friends shut the door this Saturday and every Saturday before that since September, walking out into the night air and first, Ash asked, “Should I go to the party?” and I asked, “Do you want to go the party?” “Yes.” “Then yes.”

I lay on the couch and read and smoke in an anhedonic dream haze. Spotify on my cell phone drones, “Am I here? Of course I am, yes...” I feel a bone-deep ache that is a bone-deep ache that is more than a bone-deep ache… Nobody’s here— Only smoke, that floats blue in the orange candlelight searching for a breath, a breeze, an open window. It sniffs at my lips, checking for breath, and finding none, it slithers to the window… Slinks outward toward the lights.

Las minas Teresa Padrón flujo flows like a river lost souls streaked with the ink of their unsought stories floodlight tides sparkle sprinkle liqui-solid styx smelling like the depths of hell green Banks marred with sulfur ocher-tinged light flooding the particulated sky particular smell stings weeping eyes as ground weeps for the wound marred gashes, pits, burning as the mountain cut away to dig down Into the groundless underground work grounded in dollar one million tons a day for the next seventy years with copper-zinc-silver-gold-turquoise with heavy metal souls shiver sulfuric acid diluted but too strong for the pipes the ten-headed successor awakens Swallowing, spewing flujos fluidos to seep into the heart bowels and cantankerous souls Cáncer sanguinario sulfurico stripping, seething storming Sonora five years gone and people are in lead straightjackets and copper lungs

Address to the Ohio Dalton Greene My life has always straddled you from “it’s a boy” on one side to “welcome home” on the other and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to separate myself from you as long as I live. But maybe that’s not a bad thing because I’ve always sort of liked what they said about rivers and how you can never step in the same one twice. I want to learn the way you can always change every second every day without ever losing the something that makes you what you truly are. Time isn’t as kind to me and I feel like each flood each dry spell leaves me altered in some lasting way. But I remain hopeful that maybe I’ll come to find my own version of that something too. Maybe some of you flows in my veins.

yiddish theater dreams screenprint Ruby Elliott Zuckerman

Garden black & white 35mm film camera Maeve Sweeney

How to Sleep Through the Night oil pastel Ema Erikson

43.59.50°S, 170.1.418°E photography Lianna Goldstein

Maestro in the Dark pencil on paper Shaherazade Khan

Nemesis, Mimesis marker on paper Libby Sykes

Water-Based Introspection water and gouache on cold-press paper Huong Nguyen

Hanabi photography Shosuke Noma

Matrilineal pen and sharpie Lidija Namike

Squirrel in the Sun photography Shosuke Noma

Kitchen black & white 35mm film camera Maeve Sweeney

in the goop mixed media Rachel Liebherr

I do not dance digital collage Jennings Mergenthal

SESTINA FOR MY CHOSEN NAME James Hartzer As is custom, my mother gave me my first names. Out of the womb I came, holding saints. In this way, she made us both holy, even with my freshly mottled skin and her screwed up face. My father stood nearby, likely silent, a brooding king. If my father was truly a king, he would praise my long list of names, all of my titles I now accumulate like faces, like medals, linking all these saints. He would press a crown to my skin. He would still think me holy. My weekly shot of testosterone isn’t water, but it is holy. I spent eighteen years a princess, never dreamt I could be a king. Once, I was hairless, a maiden of fairest skin, now I have thick new hair down my legs, scarred new skin, new names. I don’t know if it’s sacrilegious to abandon my saints, but I do know we don’t always recognize my face. I pass by a mirror and can’t believe it’s my face. I thought recognition was supposed to be holy. I’m transgender and have no patron saint. I’m transgender and no one ever said I could be a king, but me and this king have the same first name. I see him in a history book, its dust clings to my skin. My mother grew my skin, my father gave me his face, my mother dreamt up my names, 34

somewhere a priest called me holy, until I wasn’t. Until I call out the king, the pope, each and every saint, I don’t know what it takes to become a saint, but I doubt letting a needle through my skin in the name of self love will make them look me in the face or build me a temple worthy of a king. I think I should reject their notion of holy. The bible is just a book. A birth certificate is just a list of names I would rather skin and swallow my new name, let it burn the king and all his holy, until each saint knows my new face.

Gringanized II Cynthia Aguilar I’ve stopped pronouncing my words right and buried myself under your Americanisms. Sometimes you try dropping a little Spanish when I’m around and call me like my grandmother does, but my name crunches through your teeth like a mouthful of crickets. At least you’re trying, my mother would say. But when you speak, it’s cultured and all I feel is so ethnic. Not that it’s your fault. It’s just the last time you heard someone speak Spanish you said you could understand the women that you thought were trying to have a secret talk. But sometimes it’s nice to speak in the language your mother does.

Tornado Warning Erin Webb It’s late—that I know you wake me with a gentle hand and scoop me, blanket, stuffed giraffe and all, out of bed. It’s the pink blanket only tonight the one Grandma edged in ribbon the soft fleece of it mixes with the hug of your arms. I can hear it now, the urgent warning of the sirens quiet through the tightly shut windows mixed with the shrieking wind and a backdrop to the thunder I can feel in my chest. I bounce in your arms down the stairs, land with a thump on the fold-out couch next to everyone else. You wander around checking the foam blocks on the windows: no glass shards in your basement! and I fall asleep to the sound of the weather channel on the old TV, but you stay up a while longer just to be safe.

Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio? Alice Asch When Helen was eighteen, she’d had a number of ideas about who she’d be after she graduated college. She’d have fallen in love, for one thing. She’d have built an impressive portfolio of creative writing. She’d stop chewing the strings of her sweatshirts when she was anxious, she’d have excellent time management skills, and she’d clip her toenails regularly. Presently, though, she was merely a more tired, more in-debt version of her eighteen-year-old self, and had dated approximately .5 boys. Cecil was a handsome redhead in her philosophy class, whom she’d only agreed to go out with because he’d told her that her comment about Plato being a misogynist was “quite insightful.” Flattered by this, she’d watched him slurp spaghetti alfredo and talk exclusively about himself and his aspirations to write the economics column for the New York Times while they sat in a definitively third rate Italian restaurant. The thrilling English major occupations (publishing intern, researcher’s assistant) she’d imagined herself holding were nonexistent. Instead, her job as a summer camp counselor mostly consisted of serving stale pizza to whiny elementary schoolers. That particular day, a blazingly hot one in late June, a seven-year-old with a bowl cut, Justin, had started shoving crumbles of black soccer turf into the mouth of Jacob, a shy six-year-old, because he’d cheated by grabbing the ball. Five other campers stood by and did nothing. When Helen got there, Jacob was gagging so severely that she had to carry him inside. She knelt on the cool porcelain tiles of the public school bathroom and rubbed Jacob’s back while he wept and vomited, the tears strung across his cheeks like beads. Currently, Helen was in her car outside of her older sister Paige’s apartment, waiting to take her to dinner. Paige had a well-paying position as a legal clerk, and somehow her toenails always looked flawless. That evening, Paige wore a lavender denim jacket and a sequined emerald scarf. She hopped into the passenger seat and immediately launched into a rant about her coworker Cindy, who refused to shut up about how soft the noses of her two pet cats were. Helen didn’t feel much like talking, so she was grateful for Paige’s rambling. Eventually, when she had exhausted her list of Cindy anecdotes, they listened to a Simon and Garfunkel CD. The song “Mrs. Robinson” came on. Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson? Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away Helen remembered reading an interview with Paul Simon where he’d said he thought of DiMaggio as an American hero. “Genuine heroes are in short supply,” he’d proclaimed, and Helen had found this endearing, the notion that a baseball player could be a country’s moral compass. To her surprise, she started to cry, quickly transitioning into full-blown sobbing, complete with hiccuping and jagged little double-inhalations. She turned onto a side street and parked next to a patch

of pavement where a kid had scrawled a hopscotch course in orange chalk. Paige unbuckled her seatbelt, leaned over, and rested her head against Helen’s shoulder. Helen could feel the sequins from the scarf scratch her neck. After a few minutes, Paige whispered, “You do know that I’m not actually going to quit my job because of Cindy, right? That was a joke.” Helen laughed so hard she started crying again, and Paige dug into the stylish but too-small pockets of her jean jacket and handed her a tissue. “I’m touched by your concern for my welfare,” Paige continued, as if they had been in the middle of a normal conversation and Helen was not almost choking on her own snot. “But I’m gonna tough it out and stay at my place of employment, so there’s really nothing to worry about, and—” “I know, Paige. I know. The last verse of the song just—I don’t even know. I’m probably just tired.” “I think we should go to Wendy’s. I think I should drive and we should go to Wendy’s and you should get that baked potato with chili that you like and the chocolate and vanilla swirl milkshake and then you will feel better.” “Okay.” *** Once they were sitting in a greasy booth and twirling fries around in the little paper cups of ketchup, Helen told her sister about Jacob. “So I guess the Joe DiMaggio line… just got to me, for some reason. I read an interview with Paul Simon—” “Where he said that genuine heroes are in short supply,” Paige finished for her. “Yeah. But I’m not sure exactly what that has to do with Jacob.” “I think it’s pretty obvious.” “What is?” “That you don’t know what to do with your life and now kids, freaking seven-year-olds who are supposed to be the only innocent people left in the world, are pushing dirt up each other’s throats and it hurts you. Of course it hurts you. But you’ve realized that Paul Simon feels the same way. And that makes it the slightest bit better.” She took a bite of her hamburger. “God, Helen, and you call yourself an English major. Can’t even successfully interpret a song lyric. It’s a wonder you ever got through college.” “Jesus, Paige. You’re right.” Helen watched her sister pull out a crumpled wad of bills from her pocket. “I’ll get this,” Paige said, tossing them on the table. “Keep the change. My place is out of your way and we’re close to Mom and Dad’s house so you should head home. I’ll take the bus.” “You’re very intelligent, you know,” Helen told her. “I mean, coming from you that’s not much of a compliment, since you don’t set the bar too high, but thanks.” “Go to hell.” She blew some milkshake spittle at Paige out of her straw. “Same to you, Joe.” On her way out, Paige ran her fingers lightly across the top of Helen’s head. 39

Pollution, amongst other things Elyssa Cook I had a dream that the circles under my eyes began to dissolve the bridge of my nose and my cheekbones so that my face melted away and dripped down the hollows where my cheeks used to be like tears, like acid rain. My trash bin overflowed onto the carpet, cans rolled into the sea. They gutted me like so many fish, found plastic and metal where plastic and metal should not be. After I’m dead and even my bones are the dust and sand, what will be left but the tailor’s goose and the screws? There is no more air, only smoke and Febreze and the holes burning open in my lungs.

man of war Rachel Warshaw and the LORD said: “AM I GIVING YOU TERRORS? do I make you feel SMALL?” and the LORD said: “ARE YOU QUESTIONING WHO YOU ARE? do I make you feel ALONE?” and the LORD said: “AM I NOT GLORIOUS? do I make you feel ASHAMED?” and the LORD said: “LOOK HOW I STRETCH TO OVERFLOW THE BOUNDARIES OF THE HORIZON. LOOK! HOW MIGHTY MY ARM, HOW RIGHTEOUS MY FIST, HOW MULTITUDINOUS MY EVERYTHINGS ARE! swallow your sorrows and spit them up at my feet, for I am many, and you are none.” and the LORD said: “who are you, to imagine yourself me? you are merely my mirror. or perhaps my progeny, in which case, you must not stop at dreaming, you must become greater than my many, for you are none, and that is more terrifying, by my word, it is. Glory in the nothing you are, as you will be more, by far.” 41

Ecological Anxiety Lauren Weber My mother walks along the river with me in the morning, where the salmon once spawned. She cries when she misses them. She speaks something about the tyranny of time. When we get back, I wash dishes until the skin on my fingers flakes off. My sister sends a text to tell us all she is pregnant. I hear my father cough in the next room. He has read the text and choked. My mother rushes in. Pounds his back with the stiff heel of her hand. I continue, scrubbing each drop of reused water from the plastic plates. My father is going to be fine, my sister, my mother—we all do things wrong sometimes. We live up north now, in a town with one single dirt road. It’s the kind of place that would’ve been built in war as a secret. We have neighbors, somewhere. I’m sure we have passed each other on the road, in the grocery stores stocked with unnamed canned goods, at the water pump that pushes deeper into the earth with each extraction. People keep to themselves these days. We’ve been here for two years. We used to have a house in a suburb. It was a calm, pastel color, like we were always celebrating Easter or some other made-up holiday. My father bought the house when he was twenty and my mother was nineteen. She was pregnant with my older sister and my father had been offered a job in the growing city next door, the one with all the headquarters and public transit and high rises. My father still speaks of what the highway used to be like during his commute to work. The hours of traffic he would sit in, switching back and forth between radio stations so he could listen to two songs at once. He’s the only one who really remembers what it was like before—before the heat expanded and contracted the miles and miles of asphalt, cracking into new valleys and hills, gaping faults, a landscape of reverse engineering. Soon, the yards in our old neighborhood—all plastered with that grassy monoculture that demanded fertilizer and mowing and caskets full of water—began to dry up. The grass fell limp in the pounding sunlight. The sun stared back at us always, insistent as the computer screens we once sat in front of. Each yard became its own dust bowl, dissolving away in the day, dust slamming against the windows as soon as it got dark. The windstorms convinced me that night didn’t exist anymore. The earth was 42

always clawing itself awake, ceasing to rest. It was around this time that I stopped sleeping and my parents started looking for somewhere else to live. It had been a week since my father paid off the house, since we really believed we could own something as independent and unruly as a piece of land. But even my father realized we couldn’t remain for long. When we left, packing our bikes with clothing and food and gallons of water, my father cried and said nothing. Migration. That’s what my mother started to call it. “We’re birds moving north,” she would say, a feeble explanation of our homelessness. “I’m a heron,” she said, flapping her arms and skipping her feet. “What kind of bird are you?” The birds were gone, had been for a while. I was not a bird. I was a woman confused by my own lonely ecology. At this point, I hadn’t slept in weeks. My head throbbed every time my eyes focused but I was antsy, impatient. During this migration, my parents slept in the ratty tent they found in our old garage. I walked through the surrounding woods in the night, searching for a tree to climb. Lying on the highest branch, I stared straight up at the sky and knew something was wrong with me. It wasn’t just everything around us revolting, but it was me, too. My sister followed me up an old oak one night. I was splayed out on the branch, body mimicking the formation of the tree, while my sister sat with her back against the trunk. “This is not your fault,” she said to me as I stared at up at the sky. “It is your body’s response to living within uncertainty.” I found two stars next to each other and named them after us all. My sister tried to tell me that the thoughts controlling my body were natural and uncontrollable, like everything else we had witnessed. My mother and I will always walk in the mornings until we can’t anymore. My father will work out in the garden, desperately flipping the soil and stirring in the remaining bits of compost in an attempt to grow something that reminds him of what it means to eat. My sister, wherever she is now, will grow and swell with new life—pushing us forward. We will all encounter what we have been discussing and debating for years, experiencing the days like the highways we once drove, stretching and circling, wretched and routine. 43

For My Loved Ones Shine Chin Everyone got a funeral all in black and lots of flowers with family standing at the helm greeting those close and distant sharing bundles of tissues commemorating a life with tears and eulogies I got a funeral all in white and lots of nectar with friends sitting in the mast flipping off vague acquaintances passing around raffle tickets celebrating my life by recounting dumb-shit-I-did I got gone but remember my mediocre being and chuckle at the happenstance that Shine had a fatal trip in the dark until they unleash the swarm of attack pigeons ‘cuz you can’t be too happy at a funeral.

On removing the pier from the water Gabriel Fisch Sunlight sloshing uphill starts to cool Dragon breath buttermilk mingles with stars Rust leaves on the water swirling to pool Mosquito bite scabs beginning to scar Switched winds draw golden boys down to the shore Pallbearers sludge laying summer to rest The pier, Summer’s coffin, in our hands starts to bore Hoist up now, on three, water up to our chests Sleep well now, sweet summer, and gold in my hair Sleep well skinny dipping, silver pools on your skin Sleep well cicada sirens, your song in the air Drunk bicycle singing adds to the din Alas, the winds have switched And with them comes silence

TRANS BOY SHAVING James Hartzer I shave once weekly now, an increase from when it took a month for hair to prickle along my jaw. This regular outcome once just a simple, gentle, slow trickle. When I say I shave weekly, I mean drag a razor down my skin: clip, cut, trim, scrape back. Regular strokes, wiping with a rag. Hairs, like bugs’ legs, fall with my mouth agape. I do this to keep the skin taut and tight, the better to keep the blade from clipping. As they fall, I’m reminded, a birthright is not usually pulled from gripping tight to a story, or dream. December will mark three years I’ve done this dismember: Remove the shadow and scrub, a ripping of hair, mix of brown and ginger, not quite my father’s or my brother’s, a slipping of genetic promise. Here, a stagefright. Still not sure I’m allowed to hold a shape I’ve made for myself. In a sleeping bag, somewhere, my old face lies, caught on the tape of a silent film. My skin waves white flag. My blood tastes of testosterone and nickel. I pay for this excuse of a beard, succumb to the swipe and slice of a sickle. Another week passes, as I become. 46

in which the half-life is lived Aron Smith-Donovan today in the front yard a slinky, caterpillar, black-white-yellow too big for his britches, too wide for his skin, unzips not-flesh where his spine isn’t. and he is braver than I was, builds his own prison with thick walls, no-doors-no-keys a burrowing sort of spirit, cicada-mimic, hope and dark and waiting slow, and he never returns. the summer weans and he is not mourned, but south of birthright, roosts on firs, his brothers will whisper his name and be blessed.

Love Letter To Driving In The Summer Maija Hecht

Chanter Literary and Arts Magazine

Fall 2019