Chanter Literary and Arts Magazine — Spring 2019 by Chanter Literary Magazine

Chanter Literary Chanter Literary and ArtsMagazine Magazine Fall 2015

Spring 2019

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

Spring 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 The absolute deluge of artists who submitted in the last 48 hours Gumby Allegedly James Logan, titan of the tartan industry Chanter live-tweets, follow @magazinechanter

Editor-in-Chief: Claire Grace Literary Editor: Miriam Moore-Keish Associate Literary Editor: Maya Crowl-Kinney Art Editor: Ema Erikson Associate Art Editor: Maria Bodansky Submission Managers: Shine Chin, Asher de Forest Publications Liaison: Teddy Holt

Staff: Cynthia Aguilar Alice Asch Audrey Bentch Elizabeth Cain Lily Duquette Cole Galando Liv Gigliotti Rachel Leibher Krysta Limin Xochitl Quiroz Kaila Righi Sophia Schlesinger Courtney Sedillo Aron Smith-Donovan Hannah Staats Estelle Timar-Wilcox

Writing •

Editor’s Note 7 Claire Grace October 8 Maeve Sweeney Immigrant’s Kaddish 9 Jen Katz Head in a Microwave 10 Lauren Weber Electrolysis 12 Anonymous In December, I Dreamt of Fire Every Night 13 Claire Grace iowa III 14 Kyra Lickfelt Beeba 15 Lucy Shenk St. Mary’s Bay 17 Celia Johnson Feverland 18 Teddy Holt Voice 31 Estelle Timar-Wilcox Halleloo 32 Asher de Forest Reverberation 34 Shine Chin Bourbon 35 Adelaide Gaughran-Bedell Echo Bay, Cohasset 36 Maija Hecht Hair, Sweat, Mucus, Fat 37 Eric Fong escape plan, version four 39 Aron Smith-Donovan I’m dreaming of a giant muddy underground river... 40 Diana Stone Home 41 Adele McLees the hair salon is only thing holding me together 43 Alice Asch Sow 44 Maya Crowl-Kinney

Art • Bird 19 Maddy Kenard 3PM to 3AM 20 Brooke Sapper Seperate Entities (5) 21 Richard Graham in the event of the rapture this vehicle will be unmanned 22 Phoebe Mol Synodic 23 Ema Erikson Flying Out of LaGuardia, My Medication Bottles Were... 24 Ruby Elliot Zuckerman Barber Shop on Mid-Levels 25 Maeve Sweeney Friendly Handshake 26 Clara Grayson, Chloë McWhirt Portrait of Karanja 27 Naomi Klaila Self-portrait with Bronchitis 28 Clara Grayson Tranquility 29 Mai Xor Vang Three Graces, One Pair of Stilts, 30 Lidija Namike

Cover art: daydream (digital), Mariah Sitler

Editor’s Note In last year’s Editor’s Note, Chanter’s outgoing Editor-in-Chief emphasized the powerful way art acts as a resistance to the everexhausting and unsettling world around us. This remains absolutely true, as does the recognition that these are difficult times to be a young artist. To write another page about these truths, however, sounds exhausting, so I selfishly want to use this space to say thank you to the Chanter staff, submitters and readers for being such a light for all these years. Over four years, Chanter has remained one of my favorite parts of every week, every semester, every year. The community of people I have found in this staff is the best kind of weird. They’re funny, they force us to spend far more of our budget on food than I ever plan for, and they’re smart in so many amazing ways. During my time on Chanter, I have read thousands of incredible pieces of writing and seen hundreds of stunning visual art pieces by Macalester students that display exactly the kind of resistance art is and should be, but I feel even more grateful for the way I have seen Chanter celebrate such resistance with joy and love. I am so proud of our efforts during my year as Editor-inChief to feature more writing and especially more visual art, the outreach we have done to include more Macalester students’ work in Chanter than ever before, and the care that I have seen the staff take in discussing submitted work that is often difficult, personal, and in conversation with or resistance to so many of the scary things happening in our world. I am most proud, though, of the love our staff members have for one another that I have seen more this year than ever before. In my final months at Macalester, I find myself more sentimental than I ever have been for all of the people around me, and to use this page to do anything less than memorialize what a wonderful group of people I’ve come to know through Chanter would leave me feeling that I haven’t loved this group of people loudly enough. To everyone who submitted their writing and art and who is featured in this issue of Chanter: The work you are doing is breathtaking and world-changing. And to the Chanter Staff: You mean the world to me. Thank you for your light and for your work. Eat a plate of spaghetti on me next semester (And don’t forget to slap the bag). Claire Grace Editor-in-Chief, 2018-2019 7

October Maeve Sweeney and I think no, the music doesn’t do much lightboxes in January snow on Thanksgiving bundled up and lying on the floor trying to find something that works it stays quiet like rain, in October I’m burning with the leaves coming up to the final act of letting go I never know when it’s going to hit hearing trains in the night where no train tracks are laying under the storm crawling in the constant search for warmth, for your hands for your mouth doing my best to make homes out of warm places I never wanted to burden anyone especially in this weather, when it’s hard enough already I took the grief out of my body stuffed it into the pillowcases stored it around the room, in jewelry and sweaters I’ve hid it in secret places and I’m trying to tell you it’s still here 8

Immigrant’s Kaddish Jen Katz My father and uncle have their dead brothers’ names. I never knew until I was nineteen. Old enough then to join the secret keepers, my aunt showed me a quilt: golden names stitched on red silk, and dangling, sinewy crimson strings: a jagged gash where a mother’s grief left two gaps. L’dor vador, from generation to generation, from shtetl to slum to suburb, we take our parents’ pain and fold it neatly for when we flee. We learn to guard it fiercely, a precious heirloom never spoken of above a whisper. We inherit dark eyes, wide smiles, lips lacking words for the truth. Exalted and adored and praised and feared is Adonai: God of a family’s silent grief.

Head in a Microwave Lauren Weber You stick your head in the microwave just to see if it fits. When you remove yourself, you see a man next to you in the breakroom. You love him. He is wearing a royal blue shirt, off by one button. He holds a plastic TV dinner––a mac and cheese meal. He raises the cardboard packaging to his face and squints at the directions. Never before have you found someone so accepting of the world you live in––the one ravaged by fruit juices and nut butters and orange powdery snacks. Your heart is beating very quickly. The microwave cries out. His hand jerks forward to retrieve his meal. You grab his wrist, hand wrapping only halfway around his wooden arm. He looks to your hand, then his TV dinner growing cold and congealed, and finally to you – you! At a time when his face could be stuffed with the instant gratification of melted cheese, he instead looks at you. And you are yet to determine how much gratification you provide. He removes your hand and retreats to his desk. He does not love you. This is fine. You stick your head back in the microwave, sniffing what will soon be inside of him. With your brain in that little white box, cheek against the glass plate, your heart never returns to its normal pace. The next morning, you run out of your apartment. You board the bus and pull out a half-melted tupperware, squirreling breakfast from your backpack as the old brick buildings ascend into steel frames and stadiums. Your mother says eating out of melted tupperware will give you cancer. She is the umbrella over every instance in your life. A woman sits next to you, frowns at your eating on the bus. She raises her eyebrows and you know you have seen her before. You will see her tomorrow, too. You think back to university, where it seemed like every word spoken, every raised hand, could be the last time a person would see you. But then you all showed up the next day, and the day following. You once took a class where every assignment required you to argue whether or not a figure in history was a pirate. You argued that every single one of them was––that piracy was not character, but nature. You jump off the bus, knowing that you will soon walk up twelve floors, down a row of cubicles, and see the man you love. You do not know his name, but guess it is something like Nick or James or John. You approach John’s desk and ask if he is ready for lunch. He stabs at his keyboard, fingers stiff as frozen fish sticks. He asks you to wait five minutes, so you walk to the bathroom. You are staring into the mirror, wondering why exactly he is agreeing to get lunch with you. You think it could be your appearance. Your face can curl into pleasant expressions, but only when you work for it. Your body is rounder than other women 10

your age, and your mother has told you some men like this. You can’t say for sure. After it has been distorted for so long, perceptions of your body are unreliable, unstable, laughable. “You have three choices,” you say to James, sitting across from him on a bench. “The Moon, Mars, or Saturn. Where do you go?” “I’m not sure. I haven’t thought about this before.” He stops short of an answer, struggling to cut a slice of the cheese you brought. “Okay, well, you don’t have to answer. I would go to the Moon. I like that I’ve looked at it every night. Feels close and faraway at the same time. Do you have siblings?” “Yeah, twin sisters.” “Do you like them?” “Of course,” he says, as if holding familial angst is unthinkable. “They’re my sisters.” “So? Some people love their sisters so much they marry them. And other people hate them so much they kill them in their sleep. Blood relation doesn’t mean a thing. Especially to pirates.” Nick frowns. Digs the knife into the cheese for another slice. He doesn’t know what to say, because yet again, you have said it all. Like sticking your head into another microwave and running onstage with it, the white box jostling around your head. Look at me – look at me! You watch as he struggles with the remaining chunk of cheese, the size of his finger. Your mother told you to never stare at men, to never feel provoked. James moves the blade down. Now you feel your sprinting heart and know this is provocation. It does not matter whether he spits words at you or stays silent, frowning. You hear his thoughts running down your hair, your arms, the underwire of your bra. Even if you choose him, he is still the same as the rest––a pirate, through and through. Your heart jumps and you push yourself to your feet, standing on the park bench. John is startled and the blade slips again. It is on top of his ring finger. A nibble of his flesh sits on the fragment of cheese, covered in blood. He breathes heavily, like you’ve thrown your microwave head against his broad chest. You wrap his finger in a slice of bread to soak up the blood, and wave down a bus headed in the vague direction of the hospital. You pay his fare and send him off, without sentiment. Sitting next to what remains of his finger, you tear off pieces of bread and throw them to the pigeons. Your heart remains at a sprint, though you know you are no longer in love with a nameless man. You imagine your heart has nothing to do with love, but that this strange beating is just part of your body: a malfunctioning drum, a bag of popcorn kernels pounding awake in the microwave. 11

Electrolysis Anonymous We are, as humans, you know, just a collection of sparks fizzling. Fuck it, you know? I study physics or maybe I’m lying or maybe it’s chemistry, Touch me? No, sorry, that was just a synapse talking. I - you - we’re - just series of broken Parts, discrete, derivative, pieces that sum - approximate - a self. Sorry, I mean I love you? Wait, well, I mean, if you took out my nervous system, Shucked my skin like a cornhusk, it could still shock. No, literally, I’m sorry, can I start again? There are two ions that exist, uh, in a brain cell Sodium calcium half a grain of salt and a bit of crushed up bone But it’s all that makes me feel? And when I touch you or - well - sorry - yeah - it’s like a sugar rush, sorry, defibrillation - electrolytes I lost running here - I - no, I mean, sorry, Kiss me?

In December, I Dreamt of Fire Every Night Claire Grace My mother lights her bedroom door on fire, strikes matches and lays them on her windowsills. I stand outside the room and say nothing. Her cat screeches and it does not resemble a sound of the living. I wake thinking I have sobbed, but my face is dry. Outside the window, the neighbor sweeps ash off her porch into the grass. * My best friend and I are kidnapped. I find an escape and she sets it ablaze. She stares right at me while it burns and I say nothing. * I lick ash off my fingertips. Work cinder into my hair. Gather matches and ignite sheet corners as I sit on the floor beside my mother’s bed. The next morning, she thinks she must have burned the sheets herself, but she can’t reason why. * I am five and my mother is locking up her cigarettes and ashtray, every lighter and candle in the house. She swallows the tiny key and squeezes aloe vera into my palms. * Last night I was twenty-one and burning. Turning to ash in my mother’s white bed. She said nothing and I said nothing. It is still this quiet in the morning. 13

iowa III Kyra Lickfelt there’s something in the Soil, zweifellos my Blood, the Blood of the Kornwölfe, the Feldgeister, that irrigation system Breath like Smoke in the Night hissing at Children in farmhouse Beds, inhale the Kindheitsträume, exhale the Iowa that has taken permanent Root in my Mind, a perennial Fascination tracking black Dirt on the Carpet (zieh deine Schuhe aus, mädchen) shucking husks of Heimweh, crop-circled multiple Choice do you: a. taste the Earth in handfuls, b. dip your Toes in pothole lakes, fingers in petroleum Tanks, c. follow the Train Tracks west, or d. stop asking why; i hear the Roggensau rooting around back. it’s Time to go inside

Beeba Lucy Shenk Seven years ago I saw my grandmother’s vagina. She was pulling up her tights and not wearing any underwear to my grandfather’s—her ex-husband’s—funeral. In October 2018, I buried her wearing hot pink underwear under a black dress; almost as good as none, right Beeba? Beeba wore lipstick every day; every visit began and ended with all of us wiping lipstick marks off our cheeks. She made chocolate chip cookies and hamentashen and always mailed them to us in plastic cottage cheese containers. She made golden challahs and perfectly fluffy matzo balls. After the Tree of Life shooting, many of my Jewish friends shared a drawing, “Things I Love About Being Jewish”: Latke smell, sitting shiva, laughing during dayeinu, Yiddish, emphasis on dialogue and questions. We arrived at the synagogue early to check mics, count chairs, move water pitchers, hug the rabbi. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see the blue and white flag with a Jewish star in the middle, but I actually had to look twice. Before losing her words, Beeba wrote down the story of her parents. “Dad loved Mother from the start and she loved my Dad. They were into this twosome thick and thin.” Josh had it bound and printed into a hardcover book: Bebe and the Rabbi. A woman from outside Paris and a Rabbi in Corpus Christi, Texas. She writes in the book that her father was ordained as a rabbi in Israel in the 30s. Her best friend Janie told me she wouldn’t have wanted that Israeli flag at the funeral, but I wonder what she really thought. I can’t help myself, I love the festival of lights; I love watching the candles burn down, I love feeling their warmth on my face as I light them on a Friday night or during Hannukah. My Episcopalian grandparents have tiny candlesticks, and told me they were using Hannukah candles in them. I laughed when they blew them out before the candles had even sunk halfway. 15

The drugs were what stopped her heart, in the end. After weeks of her breathing slowing, slowing, even stopping for a full minute at a time, the nurses pushed a final dose of morphine, her chest rose and fell and then gave in. A sign of someone very close to death is when they stop urinating, and usually they’re gone 24-48 hours later, but she hadn’t peed since Saturday, and the time of death was 3:30 in the morning on a Wednesday. I wonder what “peeing” even was for her in those last weeks. Did she have a catheter? Did she pee into her pants and sheets? Did the nurses spend most hours cleaning up after her? Did she wear a diaper? We had sat around the dinner table days earlier, talking about when we would have killed her if we could. Josh talked about some writer who rented a house on the Oregon coast, surrounded himself with friends, took some pills and went away. “That’s how I wanna go,” he said. Dad said we would all be better off if we could have killed her a week ago, after she had really stopped talking and was probably brain dead. She hadn’t been herself for months before that—my parents held each other crying all summer, and my mom wrote poems: “Everything I Learned About Beauty I Learned From Joanne.” But for weeks leading up to her death, Dad or someone would call and say, “Today’s the day.” A few hours later, “tonight’s the night.” To me, she died every day for two weeks, over and over and over again. It was no surprise to hear Dad’s voice at 9am on a Wednesday. “This is the call,” he said. Beeba’s mother, Bebe, loved red, and the last time Beeba saw her, Bebe was dressed completely in red. Every time Beeba saw a red cardinal, she said, “There’s my mom.” We would sit in the breakfast room (“bret-fus” in her Texan enunciation) and watch the red cardinals come to the bird feeder. I could always tell which car was hers, the one with the red cardinal on the license plate. The last time I saw Beeba, I told her I was dating a woman. In the words she had left, she told me a story from her childhood. While others pointed and stared at a gay couple on the sidewalk, Bebe walked straight by them without blinking. 16

St. Mary’s Bay Celia Johnson Under the birch Sunburnt limbs Aching For sweet laughter, Another sip of blueberry beer Hesitantly, one-by-one, Leaping One, two, three tiptoed strides, Into cool, iron-tinged water And an umber haze The girls’ heads emerge from the black bay Cheeks, rosy and sun-stained Wide eyes and dark strings of hair The boys’ feet scramble up the craggy stones Sinew, blisters and bug bites Goosebumps and electric howls Star-soaked August Surrounding Warm bodies, slow breaths Lonesome silhouettes of drifting loons Crying, Fading slowly into sky and water

Feverland Teddy Holt It’s not really real, your desert, but this is. You found him this morning. Right at the heart of your nothingness, half-bone already from the ants. Had to scare an angel off him with your rifle. It had already taken his eyes, so you can’t close them, but you can see a wedding ring and you twist it off the bone and put it in his withering mouth. You hope nobody loved him anymore; they’re not ever going to get him back now. You sling your rifle across your back and pull him to his feet. He shudders back to movement and lifts his face to the sky, swallows, and keens, plaintive and lasting. You catch the wedding ring as it passes through his nonexistent stomach. So much for it reminding him who he was. Even with your one eye, you can tell this one’s well on his way to angelhood. You leave him stumbling around for the birds.

Bird photography Maddy Kenard

3PM to 3AM embroidery thread on cotton Brooke Sapper

Seperate Entities (5) digital photograph Richard Graham

in the event of the rapture this vehicle will be unmanned pen Phoebe Mol

Synodic digital Ema Erikson

Flying Out of LaGuardia, My Medication Bottles Were My Only Form of ID screenprint Ruby Elliot Zuckerman 24

Barber Shop on Mid-Levels scanned film negative Maeve Sweeney

Friendly Handshake ink on linen paper Clara Grayson and Chloë McWhirt

Portrait of Karanja colored pencil on paper Naomi Klaila

Self-portrait with Bronchitis oil on wood panel Clara Grayson

Tranquility charcoal drawing Mai Xor Vang

Three Graces, One Pair of Stilts, oil on canvas Lily Freemond

Voice Estelle Timar-Wilcox I spit words like pebbles, forcing them up my throat and rattling them across my teeth until they cascade and skid on the cold tile floor, settle in the corners and collect dust. It runs in the family, I think; we are born with stones on our tongues. My brother hovers silently at the stove, his voice rattling the rocks only to offer me breakfast. How I wish I could turn a phrase like my brother turns a pancake–– golden brown on each side, a melts-in-your-mouth taste of warm snow, kitchen sunlight

Halleloo Asher de Forest At first, I threw this essay together like I was Shangela, tasked with constructing an outfit on season two, or three, or the third All Stars season of Rupaul’s Drag Race. I have too many ideas. Attention Deficit Disorder. A brain full of useless Drag Race trivia. Shangela was the first queen my brother and I watched get eliminated on RuPaul’s Drag Race. Season two, episode one. This was back when seasons two and three were streaming on Netflix. I was in junior high. Season five was the first season we watched as it happened. We watched our hometown queen, Jinkx Monsoon, win. The day before, I came out to my dad. My new drag name: Bi Boy. The day of, but afterwards, I went on a walk with my mom. Sunny and spring. We walked one way, and I didn’t tell her. We were passing the Google campus on the way back when I did. My new drag name: Both Ways. I remember where I was when I told my dad too. A drive. Early evening. The stop light facing the sign for the movie theater down the street from my house. We watched Family Guy when we got back home. Stewie and Brian travelled to different universes. I don’t watch Family Guy much anymore, but I liked it a lot in eighth grade. Not as much as Drag Race. This is one way to transition in an essay. Sonique became the first queen to come out as trans on the show. Season two, episode twelve. My brother and I watched Shangela return for season three. We rooted for her. And again on All Stars 3 after BenDeLaCreme sent herself home. We were rooting for DeLa first, because she was best. Also because she’s a hometown queen. Somewhere, there’s a picture 32

of us. Blurry and dark. iPod Touch camera. She’s tall and beautiful. I’m all smiles. Shangela is short and beautiful, but she’s never been the best fashion designer. In the first lip sync of season three, battling against Madonna impersonator Venus De Lite, her outfit was literally falling apart. Another iconically terrible fashion moment comes from Kennedy Davenport. Her outfit was supposed to be a phoenix rising from the ashes, but she looked like a burnt horse in a chicken suit. Season seven, episode six. Here are some ways to write an essay. Slap fabric memories on Google doc mannequins. Tear it all to pieces on any one of the brain’s runways. Then, learn to sew these memory shreds, these scraps of young, twenty-first century queer. My youth. My queer, twenty-first century youth. In the twentieth century, Judy Garland died and then Stonewall happened. Sometimes a queen gets sent home on Drag Race and I think we’ll get another Stonewall. I think about Pulse a lot. I think about Shangela coming back to Drag Race. The many semitriumphant returns. I think of my semi-triumphs. I think of myself as something short of a phoenix. A little burnt. A little chicken. Rising.

Reverberation Shine Chin Sitting in the middle of a kindergarten classroom in Rome, I stare blankly at the teacher gesturing towards the board. She draws out exotic symbols and spouts incoherent noises while locals gibber all around me. My mind can’t sort through the mess. Instead, it drifts back to the bustling Seoul marketplace and weaves between the sea of ajummas on its way to soak at the old mogyoktang with my mom. I hum the theme song to my former daycare’s favorite show, Dooly. “Shine?” I’m snapped back into the present by a word I finally recognize. The room is silent as the teacher waits for my response. The kids fix their unforgiving gaze on me. Their mouths stay shut, but I know what they’re saying. “넌 여기있을 사람 아니야.” *** Five years later, I am back within the buzz of my native language, but my pronunciation alienates me. “외국인,” they accuse me. “Way-kuk-een,” I am forced to affirm. My mother tongue is not my own. It belongs to the chorus of laughter that catches each of my verbal fumbles. The choir sings slang-filled verses that I cannot follow. I try to pay what I can for assimilation, but all I can afford are two defective tongues. A well-worn question rings in my head: “Where are you from?” I no longer know. The stares of my fellow citizens recite a familiar line. “You should not be here.”

Bourbon Adelaide Gaughran-Bedell I am the pink-tied pigtail type of young when I first learn That golden liquid swishes wonderfully on its way off the table: Clutched, in a calloused hand and goes like clink swish clunk as it’s put back down I am polka-dotted leggings under a jean skirt when I first learn How to swish that golden liquid up through thin lips, How to feel it burn; feel it travel down my throat Even at the age of polka dots (blue and red, this time) I’m good at pretending to like this fire. I am pimply and shouldn’t be wearing a training bra anymore— when it all comes back up: On the blue tiled floor of my bathroom pink-poison; retched into the sink And around me, the air is heavy with sugar sweet secrets, whispered, from; throats still burning with fire. Mom’s hands are soft, like the liquid in her glass: seltzer, always. Sometimes a little cranberry juice; effervescent bubbles, dancing their way to freedom Pop pop pop pop popping Like the sunny-champagne she just turned down. I was nail-biting, paper-writing when I learned That Xanax on its own will not kill you, only when paired with pink poison, golden water, or a glass of sunny-champagne Only when paired with seven weeks in-and-out-of-rehab, and moving to California. Dad’s hands are still dark and calloused, his eyes are hard, and it will never not be beautiful The way golden liquid hits the dark and sandpaper-smooth wood clink swish clunk. 35

Echo Bay, Cohasset Maija Hecht Long drive. Jumping out of the car, first thing. Running start. Down the hill into the water. Wading to my thighs. Bare pale toes, sinking. In the sand, brown. Glittering in the sun. Light playing beneath water. Cold and clear from melting snow. Walking down the shore, searching for what morning washes up. Moonlike-spiral shells. White, small. Piled up to dry beneath the bird berry tree, pressed into sandcastle turrets. Press too hard. Crumble to dust, mix with berry-blood. Stained my fingers. Water-warming, summer longer. My sister and I. We wade deeper. Sink into a swim. Enveloping eardrums. Drowns out the winds through the reeds. Current rushing like an endless exhale. Blood in my ears, keeping time. Louder, how long to hold my breath. Clams burrowed into the reed-bed. Slipped-pink between valves. Distrust our bodies, shifting the current. Sucked shut. Sometimes we pry them open. Test the strength of our raisin-fingers. They put up a fight. After, we realize they’re dead. Washing up open. Legs splayed on the sand, rubbing salt between my toes. I wonder if it smells like the ocean. Table salt and skin. Blood mixing in from the leeches. We pull them off. Leave them squirming in the sun. Lined up with the clam shells. Violet-pearl. Bleached iridescent, sharp. Wire-gold hair floating around. My ears, cupped close to the shell. Listening for the ocean. Eyes squinting closed. “The snails,” my sister says. Sand and freckles on her shoulders. “I can hear them whispering.”

Hair, Sweat, Mucus, Fat Eric Fong hair There are three places where I grow hair best. The first is my scalp. The second is below my navel. The third is right around my asshole, where hair springs up like wheat along the Nile. I can’t remember when I first noticed, but it was probably in the basement shower, a couple years ago––ninth grade? In that cramped, old shower, I soaped down my then-scrawny ass and felt the ends of wiry hairs in the body wash. I froze, shocked––the water streaming the sudsy wisps, revealing skin and body; no puberty video, book or article had prepared me for ass hair. After that shower, I spent ten minutes twisting in front of the mirror, bunching muscle and stomach fat, turning my ass, trying to see what I had felt. I spent another ten minutes––still naked–– googling “ass hair,” wondering how to shave or wax it all. I’ve spent the years since ignoring it. sweat Exercise sweat is fine. I go to the gym on Fridays, when Macalester Mixed Martial Arts has open sparring. We lay black wrestling mats across a small dance studio and fight bouts or wrestle. Joe, the club president, (aka Pretty Boy Joe––a skinny junior with a decent goatee who’s taller and lighter than I am, and by far the best fighter there), shows newcomers basic punches, kicks, and submissions. Sweating there feels like I’ve earned something. Taking off sweaty boxing gloves and shin pads, the weight and coolness of a damp t-shirt––that’s normal. What isn’t normal: “Yes, Eric?” Heat pours down my body as if on command, as if professor Halverson had caught me by surprise. He hadn’t––I had my hand up. I even knew what I wanted to say, had rehearsed it in my head a few times. “The orthogonal projection of B onto the subspace of A is... given when you put x-hat into the projection matrix, right?” “Well, yes, but not quite…” My armpits get damp after one question––my body is throwing every alarm, triggering every stress response, but my brain knows I’m fine. What’s worse is how stress sweat stinks especially 37

bad––and that I get sweaty about how sweaty I get, how I get sweaty when I’m panicking, until my underarms get dark and wet stains bloom under my arms and over my fluttering heart. I don’t want to smell bad––I’m not that kind of man––I know how to shower, how to take care of myself. mucus My mind keeps coming back to one September night, sophomore year, when the cafeteria spun at a snail’s pace. I don’t remember what I ate; dinner was tasteless, and sat on my plate in a pale, lumpy heap. My nose felt ten pounds heavier than normal. Goo dribbled out of my nose, oozing through day-old stubble. From my table, I kept staring at the clock––the big one, hanging from the edge of the second floor. I’d tuned out the conversation my tablemates, Jen and Hannah, were having (“are pile and heap synonyms?”). My head was elsewhere––tilted up and to the right, facing the clock, watching the clock hands crawl over their numbers with my mouth opened slightly. The crowd of people in front of me were just out of view. Conversational buzz and clanks of silverware faded just beneath my awareness. There was me, the clock and my nose. I grabbed a napkin. I had to try to clear my nose. I honked into my makeshift Kleenex and felt a massive booger unstick itself from deep inside my nose. I unfolded the tissue and studied the mammoth strip of slime, hardened snot and blood––first gave me awe, then shock, and then a weird disgust at my boyish wonder. Who fawns over their own booger? I rumpled the napkin, made the two minute trek across the bustling cafeteria floor, and composted it. fat

I have love handles, and when I look at them in the mirror late at night I want to peel them off like wet duct tape, feel the tug and give of skin tearing like cloth, the strips of fat swing in my hands, let the wounds gape––ooze, through a forest of leg hair.

escape plan, version four Aron Smith-Donovan the chapel smells like your dentist office: smooth and sterile and a little like broken jaws. there’s a humming, too, something indescribable, it rattles through your skin and peels away against your bones you cannot pull teeth in this chapel, or maybe you can, as long as no one is looking, as long as we pretend you are not. but you can pray at the dentist, certainly, you can hope to the highest being you know that you will leave intact and the pulpit is full of drills again, if you open your mouth it is only a dull whine that you can produce; there are tall men here who know your insides. keep pliers in your suit, and then if you can get every tooth before the last hymn you can go home, lay down, and let the blood fill the empty places until you find the strength to sleep.

I’m dreaming of a giant muddy underground river Born of the last little trickles of the Guadalupe Diana Stone There’s a disease out here in Texas It’s killing the trees in masses They shrivel up and die, fall over and lie on the ground Just a bundle of sticks waiting to catch fire sticks by the dozen, fenced in and sick lying naked on yellowed grass warm lumpy fields traced with twigs the dead lie beside the dying but really they’re all the same some lying down, some trapped upright in wires forming fences against their own spanning, circling for miles And there’s no such thing as unity when there’s a fence ‘round fucking everything and the flames can’t wait to jump because they can’t see the difference And the fire wants to burn all the way down to the muddy trickles beneath the ground because we thought they were safe in wetness but this fire follows no physics And this fire, it follows us instead to our destination in the middle of nowhere, Texas past an arboreal graveyard where we are only where we don’t want to be And while it chases us wild it leaves that fence stronger in its wake pushes us apart, makes wires hot we inch apart and it shoves us the rest of the way but we don’t let distance be a fence

(at least not yet) 40

Home Adele McLees I. Summer days are soles of small feet on carpet, outside wind that stirs and so wakens something deep within, that roars like the cars that speed through heat and don’t feel it. I don’t either, happily slouched in sofa. False cool combs my hair, not the humid air that coaxes flowers into a blossom, christens souls as they walk through. Yet I sometimes swear that the wind sends whispers through the wall—come, rise from the couch and learn from flowers’ art to thrive in the cracks in concrete; join me in splendor. So I stand and walk to the window, search through glass for flowers blooming from asphalt. Fight the evening’s weight that gathers on eyelids. Lose. (My dreams are of blossoms.) II. Mom made us get rid of the couch, said it reminded her too much of his last days but what she was forgetting was that his last days were all I ever had of him and now we have begun to yell and the walls have begun to whisper. of the horizon where reality greets disillusionment with a smirk and the two become so close that the rising twilight muddles them and then darkness overcomes, steals your sight of any line that separated and life becomes existence and even when you see the sun rise, see the horizon return and think it’ll be something beautiful, it turns out to be nothing more than a line between dirt and sky, and you reach for rays but your fingers feel only streaming moonshine (somewhere out of sight, the moon is laughing). I move into the kitchen, Mom follows, and the walls still whisper but my voice is too hoarse to yell and all that ekes from my throat is a sob so Mom puts her hand on my back and I don’t look at her but I see the spots where her tears have birthed new eyes in the wooden table and finally the walls have ceased their whispers. 41

III. It will never cease to amaze me just how sadness weaves its way in between the heartstrings, pulls till life hums only tunes foreign, forces home to become house. Home still clings to Mom, and her gentle whispers: skyward gazing busy girl, see our dogs at play, and let their sparks set ablaze your passion— precious hope preaches. That gaze pleads, and maybe it holds out truth, and maybe Destiny has arrived to take me into life, to build my abode with asters, beauty celestial tethered to Earth, mine. So I step outside, and the humid air does christen.

the hair salon is the only thing holding me together Alice Asch it’s the fifth hour that really does it, i think. five hours of eraser flakes, pens clicking, highlighters running yellow rivers, voices dancing in earbuds, faces painted on screens. alone time, fun until it’s not. skin hunger is a real problem, the article says. we need physical contact to survive. skin hunger, as if our hands are just dry mouths, drooling for lunch. i tap the keyboard of the library computer and wonder how many other fingers i must be tapping, what pizza grease and lotioned skin and press-on nails i’m touching through all these degrees of separation, what cheeks they thumbed and teeth they pulled. on the second floor i see two people kiss, giggle, backpacks still on, between the bookshelves. i imagine they used the keyboard right before me and i wonder if this is the closest i’ll ever get to feeling important. i hear my roommate cough in the middle of the night and smell her shampoo the next morning. she keeps a toy ballerina on her bookshelf. it is comforting, somehow, even though we rarely talk. strange, all this accidental intimacy: the graze of hands as the cashier pushes bills into my palm, the clap on the back from a friend of a friend, the nudges on the crowded train. my hairdresser pushes a strand behind my ear and i close my eyes and don’t know if i am paying her to wash and straighten or for the reminder of what it is to be touched gently. the barista calls my name and i fantasize mine is the only one she will remember that day. she gives me my hot chocolate and her smile is blue lipstick, a crescent of dark sky, and i hold the cup for too long before i remember to drink it, tracing the place where her hand was. 43

Sow Maya Crowl-Kinney I cut my fingers carrying a refrigerator, and watched the blood irrigate the furrows of my palm. Hydrogen peroxide, Neosporin, bandaids. I am from the Midwest, with sweet corn calluses and sun-cracked lips. I am rain-soaked soil eyes, pockmarked pothole skin. My mother taught me to tend my fields lovingly.

Chanter Literary Chanter Literary and ArtsMagazine Magazine Fall 2015

Spring 2019