Chanter Literary and Arts Magazine - Fall 2022

a n e r h C t

Chanter

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

Fall 2022

Macalester College Literary and Arts Magazine St. Paul, MN chanter@macalester.edu chantermagazine.com

Chanter would like to thank the following:

Our generous alumni donor Professor Matt Burgess Elephants

Justine, for letting us into the Mac Weekly Office Taylor Swift

The most efficient layout weekend in recent memory OSLE and the Chanter Alumni for helping us scramble to success this semester <3

Editor-in-Chief: Zoë Roos Scheuerman

Literary Editor: Nguyễn Trung Kiên

Art Editor: Emma Nguyen

Submission Manager: Charley Eatchel

Staff: Ezekiel Ambrose Cambey

Tim Delventhal Madeline Graf Ian Glejzer

Birdie Keller Colin Massoglia Chloë Moore Marvellous Ogunsola

Jamila Sigal Vasquez

Sex as a Verb 8 Adrien Wright Cricket Jazz 9 Annalise Gallagher PORTRAIT IN YOUR FATHER’S TOO-LARGE 10 Rowan Stephenson SWEAT-STAINED SWEATSHIRT Pharmakon 12 Adrien Wright Ode to Minnesota Winter 13 Anna Šverclová

I Sculpt my Father out of Ice 14 Ashton Rose Scarecrow 16 Zoe Frank

THESE ARE THE THINGS THAT MATTER TO US NOW 17 Chloë Moore M238 ELECTRICAL 18 Lucy McNees CW: sensitive sexual language i’m procrastinating again today 20 Marvellous Ogunsola DREAMING OF AN ORCHARD 21 Rowan Stephenson yoke 22 Tommy Fowler

To Life 23 Marley Craine boy 24 T. Delventhal Pomegranate 40 Anna Devine last spring, a black box 41 Maeve Sweeney Meditations in an Emergency 42 Anna Šverclová Hmong Again 43 Calla Lee

The Price of my Skin Color 44 Anonymous CW: mentions of sexual violence, child abuse Invisible Cities 46 Nguyễn Trung Kiên

An Entirety / What is said through silences 48 Anna Devine not language 49 Lucy McNees February in the Midwest 50 Marley Craine environmental damage 51 Maeve Sweeney

Blind to Her 52 Birdie Keller

This time, there are fireworks 54 Jonas Costa The Way Home 55 Zoë Roos Scheuerman

I am still here 56 Charley Eatchel Art ~

The Cabin 26 Ezekiel Ambrose Cambey Still Life in Blue 27 Inbal Armony Autumn 28 Leah Long soft light 29 Tommy Fowler friends :) 30 Asa Rallings reportedly 31 Kailey Gee carnivore 32 Tommy Fowler

Tyler and Ethan Playing Chess 33 Gabby Simpson the rise of the red sun 34 Kailey Gee Sevilla Market 35 Carmen Quintos

The Plea 36 Ezekiel Ambrose Cambey

On the Sound 37 Leah Long Window Watching 38 Carmen Quintos Ben 39 Inbal Armony

Editor’s Note

Every semester finds ways to be unprecedented. That truth has manifested in many ways this fall, but on this page, I’m especially thinking about the evolutions that Chanter has undergone in the last few months: new leadership, new staff, new COVID guidelines, and, of course, new, gorgeous artworks. Layout weekend is always a rollercoaster. I can’t count the number of times these past few days when I’ve wanted to turn to Teddy to hand off copy edits or defer to him on procedures, only to remember that, wait, I’m the one with the final say now. The current board’s ascendance was a year in the making, but we haven’t been exempt from growing pains. Nevertheless, through this semester’s trials, whether personal, academic, or Chanter-related, I continue to find joy in our weekly gatherings. I couldn’t be more proud of our work this semester or more honored to be entrusted with so many vulnerable, powerful, breathtaking pieces from Mac’s incredibly talented student body. This opening note is also a temporary goodbye Charley and I will be abroad next semester. However, Kiên and Emma will do a fantastic job in the spring, and I can’t wait to see the edition that they put together. In the meantime, without further ado, welcome to the fall 2022 Chanter!

Zoë Roos Scheuerman Editor-in-Chief 2022–2023

Sex as a Verb Adrien Wright

Sexing chickens is an art form in the places where it gets quiet at night. In some cool field I am sure there is a world-mean woman in big boots who can lift up feathers tender like a guitarist and move them through loud markets faster than you can ask what kind. When night water kisses the morning by its grass it is whispering about the taste of this, dropping feathers mottled with clearish blood. The children, not long out of the hen’s rock-womb, will sustain worlds they have no choice because of what was written under the honey-soft fuzz this woman has tightened to them under star battlements — they will grow life in the stone or by the flesh — and the world will move on in the morning, eating, writing epitaphs.

Cricket Jazz

Annalise

Gallagher

Friday comes around and my Father tickles my genes with a sneaky feather

I sneeze and I laugh, cracking open boozy brains like walnut shells Here, my friend!

Am I allowed to call you that yet?

I know your brother’s middle name, but Who do you want to be?

but you laugh and you howl and The drawbridge is coming down over the Mississippi

my veins, the red lazy river. a liquid horizon cooking organs to stew suddenly! there are colors that exist inside this room stuffed with sweaty air and smiling faces and crunchy salt rocks We slap our knees with rubber fish How silly!

My heart doesn’t feel so heavy with all of these arms wrapping around me like a present

We slur our silly syllables and I ask you about your mother braid together the strands of yarn in your pocket and ignore the secrets that stick to these walls when our eyes do not meet on the street tomorrow but I will remind you of the tales at this time again next Friday

See you then, Friend…

PORTRAIT IN YOUR FATHER’S TOO-LARGE SWEAT-STAINED SWEATSHRT

Rowan Stephenson

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth — A.R. Ammons

The goosebumps on your bare legs in the lavender glow of evening, the shine of a thousand leaflamps in your pupils…

The gap in the hedge growing slowly closed, the side yard filled with only the purple blossoms: iris, hyacinth, lavender…

Next door, a yardful of flamebright orange poppies stretch the length of the drive, lighting up the street…

The sycamore reaching its many arms, sighing, to the sky, arcing parabolically down towards the streetcorner…

Afterglow atop the distant white mountain ranges of clouds like nectar bursting from mintleaves between your teeth…

As though in a dream you walk through a bountiful garden, ripe blackberries erupting with blood throwing themselves at you…

Mourning doves like watchful moons, glowing like distant light — houses on the coast, weave the trees and space between together…

Your stained white sneakers, worn out soles, your quiet smiling in the slow blue blur… the sweating of grassblades…

The plum in your pocket, dewy condensation gleaming on its skin like rain in Detroit in December, like deep clearness…

And, what else to call it, the wanting, matchbox of slumbering fire, the dog sleeping curled up on the porch, dreaming…

There is sadness in the garden, in the evening, wanting down among the grassblades, up between the clouds…

There are insects in the grass, there are ants, there are worms in the dirt, there are tiny snails with silver filmy trails…

There are mourning doves unseen between branches, there is sadness, there is mint on the back of your tongue…

In your belly, in your ribs, in the grass, in the petals, beyond the clouds: pollen, moonlight, wanting, ants…

The teeth in your smile, the sad in your bones, the dirt in the earth, the flowers in the dirt, the ants on the stems…

There are trains on tracks all night long… leaf on the stem, juice in the leaf… rain in clouds… far out, dream garden, heliopause — Goodnight, they sing, goodnight?

Pharmakon Adrien Wright

There is a moment the halved grapefruit on our counter is still edible and a moment it is not. It passes this line lightly, with dancer’s feet, like the deer with the same milkyslow look in its eyes approaching and leaving the impact.

Like raspberries the last moment before rot, angrysweet and starting to sludge, I hold my own hand as I practice translation. I want a life lifelike bent over laid out twisting light with the play of red on the asphalt

Ode to Minnesota Winter

Anna Šverclová

God bless black ice; it’s the best excuse to run a red light. Toe-tapping the break just to look like I tried, I practice the ope, sorry! hand as I bash my face into somebody’s bumper. Winter roads are like Mario Kart in real life, except all the banana peels are invisible and if you die you become a road hazard. What an absurd season: polar vortex, eyelashes glued shut with frost, the very real threat of losing a limb. My dad says it makes us stronger. We learn to laugh at the dead and the dying nerves in our feet turning blue. The leaky window is one of many villains in this story that always ends in spring. We become creative heroes, oven open, cardboard over windows, snowbanks carved into playgrounds or extended freezer space. We grow prideful of our cold, scoff the Californians shivering in December. You don’t know cold ‘till you’ve seen January. And we freeze with coats open just to prove we are hearty, like the third puff pass you insist you’re not high yet, stalactites frozen mid-drip to your mouth. The best part about winter is watching everyone try to look cool in a snowsuit and balaclava. It’s comforting never to be the only one with hat hair and scarf-face, boot squeak down a linoleum hallway, slow motion instant-replay of a man falling with his coffee over and over again on the same ice patch, if there’s anything I can love about winter, it is how it strips us to our most red, ugly, and angry. Big fat snot icicles dangling from my lip. I wake up cursing the cotton sky like a scrooge, can you believe we all hate all at the same damn time? We sing in the great choir of goddamns. Goddamn fucking shit. Goddamn frozen limb. Goddamn fucking ice in my boot. Goddamn dead car battery. Goddamn biting wind.

I Sculpt my Father out of Ice

Ashton Rose

I pick up my die grinder, the same his hands once held, and begin cutting, shaving off the edges. I move toward the center, create roughly the shape of a human head.

I’d seen blocks like this, many times before, in his workshop. A place made of alien tools and metal walls, and always so cold, like the telephone poles in winter. Most days the sign hung on the door: “Do not disturb” My sneaking entry was a betrayal to rival his.

A new bit now, smaller, capable of more precise cuts: the curve of a hairline, jutting ears, the silhouette of a man created in ice.

The first time he caught me, watching silently while he worked, his tongs clattered to the floor, his face the only spot of red in the cold room. His words were loud, his hands rough, and as he slammed the door onto mine, I screamed. My scar the first of many chips into my surface.

I replace the die grinder with a pick. This work needs to be done by my hands. First stroke hesitant, soft, the crack a whisper.

Then another, harder, louder, whittling away at the ice. Forming dips and curves, new valleys in the grief of our relationship, and now my hands don’t want to stop, like this is what they were made to do, what I was made to be.

He taught me the difference between a flat chisel and an ice pick, his hands red from the cold. “Why don’t you wear gloves, daddy?” I like to feel my work.

As I transform the ice into the harsh lines of his face, I am calm. Silent, as he was when he worked. I bring in sandpaper, smooth out the curves and gently scrub away the anger, the violence, the grief.

Finished, I step back. My fingers are cold, lips numb, sensation long abandoned. I set down the tools that were once his, in this cold room that was once his, and in the sculpture’s reflective eyes, I see the young, scared boy that was once his.

I leave the door open when I exit, cranking the thermostat up to 90 before I get in my car, and drive toward the dying warmth of the evening sun.

Scarecrow

Zoe Frank

If I could see anything beyond the garden shears in my belt It would be their blades skinning my nails

Down to the cuticles

So that when soaked in cold water they may grow back as vapor and produce rain of fontanel. Then, animated by the wet in the rye the grounds borne to this drought of July Might bud.

THESE ARE THE THINGS THAT MATTER TO US NOW

Chloë Moore

behold the stillness of the afternoon the emptiness in the absence of busyfolk, and the whispering of the breeze, and the stillness of the ephemeral, cinereous sky

but hark! the red is screaming from the trees the gold is clamoring for your attention and the green is heaving its dying breath as the chlorophyll leaches away into time immemorial

these are the things that matter to us now history says, this is how it always has been but we, in all our glittering, self-obsessed newness, say we can be better than this

these are the things that matter to us now, our melancholy autumns and our future uproarious springs the breaking of corner store bread and the silence of ivy-covered brick

i do not know the different types of matter but i know the motes of dust in the shaft of library afternoon sun take up space and i know fingers intertwined and the sound of you existing in the next room over are the impactful things today, the future love poem i’m planning to write

M238 ELECTRICAL

Lucy McNees

is what I walked by when I remembered what summer camp felt like

I hope you don’t see the young in me I hope you feel it like imprints on your thighs when you’re sitting on cement steps waiting for the bus skin scrunched on the rocks and jean shorts

My past won’t keep me from my best but my present might and I would never plagiarize but if you say you don’t drink or smoke I won’t either, and I’ll tell myself it’s for my own good / it probably is that way I’ll be able to see myself clearly in the mirror after you leave I’ll be able to flip myself off and like the way my ring covers my knuckle

is what I walked by when I thought about when swear words were new. we knew we were cursed: like you were the first student to say fuck but it didn’t sound like a word until I was nineteen and he was inside me and all I could think was fuck.

Smart kid. Smart kids know what fuck means before they do it. Stupid kids don’t say fuck because it used to mean rape No one gives a fuck.

M238 ELECTRICAL

is what I walked by when I realized I’m old enough to rub my own stomach when I’m sick

running my fingers through electrical cords like they’re willow leaves like I could climb their branches right into the outlet until I’m your power source until I’m your power source until I’m your power source and you’re not mine until I power trip /

I’m over my ability to get up in the morning it means I eat too early it means I see people in the mirror / ghosts of me in the mirror it means I get shit done / but won’t stay up late to do attractive shit

so when I do, I drink.

Just by the river. Just while staring at the rings on his knuckles. Just while scraping dry dirt off of rocks. My stomach hurts, and there are ghosts of me in the mirror.

i’m procrastinating again today Marvellous Ogunsola

behemoth task: unapproachable, impossible, and undoable. i just know no matter how much i’ll nibble, i won’t chew enough to make a dent.

so i rationalize and propose and reschedule and i will never do enough to succeed so why even try hoops can be jumped through, not deadlines.

i hate stasis and sweat vapors and slow shivers in remembrance of the impossible task suffocating me senseless.

now i’m a statue, oh little meerkat observing the clock ticking brainstorming the ways my life will end. in broken promises and shed tears

and an empty basement houses only my yearbook photos and the way i held my friends and laughed to future toasts is ash. unforgiving task. laziness abounds

like the stills of my long-winded fantasies of change. five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes, i stall. i waste away. time is racing.

no one stops. ugh! no solidarity, no warmth or safety, no reassurance.

i wait and wait and wait until slayful yawn sets in, sleep calls to me and i surely must answer.

DREAMING OF AN ORCHARD Rowan Stephenson

This is a love poem — you can tell by all the fruit. Pears inching into golden ripeness, sunny oranges, dusky plums, apples exploding like hand grenades. In wide fields of granite and marble they soften, sweeten, give in to time. From the table watches a glass of water, a being of tiny bubbles and angles of light. And what are you but refraction? You say there’s an orchard, somewhere, where the fruit sweetens forever, the laden boughs always bending earthward under the weight of their fattening burden, where yellow-belted wasps never orbit the carcasses of sweet rotting windfalls. Where the bright grey sky folds itself forever into the rolling verdigris spine of the horizon and the fish in the pond swims forever in silent golden circles beneath the water’s dark surface. And now night falls and the moon, wrinkled and milk-pale, grows into the sky like an apple blossom becoming an apple. The fruit, still scattered all around like debris, is sketched now in black and white, highlights of mother-of-pearl, luminous silver outlines, and silent snow falls, beyond, on the woundless sleeping world.

yoke

Tommy Fowler

counting the hollow frames of red blue tracings wincing, you nullify, but still dont feel better like im somehow to blame. in my head its a game, reclaimed from my mother and my dad (so why am i chasing? im not a debtor). breathing is easy when im not seething, blood not rising in the back of my throat like im having a stroke with your arm as my yoke. back in my own room, im biting and teething, the youth is now returned.

i can feel it happening again in the curves along my spine. ill never grow into a man, i wont become like my brother. ill take that path if theres no other, its all i think i can.

i am not obsessed: in your home im still a guest, your lifes not entwined. can i know youre really mine? is it in the way you speak to me? make me feel like somebody.

tuck me away instead of finding things to say, i know that you arent good for it so i wont ask you to stay, dont tell you to swallow cause ill always spit, you made your bed now lay in it.

To

Life

Marley Craine

At Grandpa Toby’s funeral

I read from the textbook, not the Torah to keep up with my grades, to keep myself from crying.

I sat Shiva at a dorm desk, chair tipped back, feet resting on the baseboard heater, singed. I ate dining hall kugel, took the matzah by the toaster, choked on falafel fried deep enough to dry out any semblance of home. I said l’chaim with a mug of flat coke and eight dollar vodka, bought with a fake id.

I lit a joint, not a Shiva candle with a (half-) Jewish boy underneath a tree and it was so cold I couldn’t flick the lighter so I let him kiss me until I was too hot and then told him to leave. Alone, overheated, I wondered:

Do we still say l’chaim — do we still toast to life — after it’s already been lost?

boy

T. Delventhal

swordferns waving like sylvan capes where they grew abundantly in gullies that ran down to the gentle creek child trespassers, dried moss on your nape

Douglas Firs shooting straight into the wispy matter dreamily dense compressing sound masquerading rural lands as industrial centres of an isle you once visited imperious facades and the spacious insides holding the treasures of the world even all the trinkets stolen from our forests

your appearance is that of an accomplice pale yellow-hair, ruffled bedhead but we lived out our imaginations within the groves forming an impenetrable fortress

around your home, so the mundane couldn’t intrude, just you and your powerhouse brothers younger, behaved like spoiled peregrines

thrashing about in this occidental (James Cook) treehouse under the smell of heat-blasted pine needles carpeting the ground where you mulled, ruminative oldest

when your father yelled a giant of a man who reeked full of Hitchcock and Stratego and Risk partitioning the world but this was only my romanticism

your strange tranquil eyes sallow in the doldrums, lurking as a page in the depths of a Cornish castle. A quaint image, befitting but false you belong in the garden clearing with two apple trees

the eyes below, veins like a continent fissured by purple blue. Never have your chickens by the garden now overgrown been sent to the butcher’s all at once

you were a misplant, that’s all you never played out your adventures at Hadrian’s wall but among dripping green mosses and old man’s beard it’s only fitting that you never told me when you left

for Denmark

Still Life in Blue pastel Inbal Armony

reportedly collage

Kailey Gee

Tyler and Ethan Playing Chess ink

Gabby Simpson

Kailey Gee

the rise of the red sun collage

Sevilla Market acrylic Carmen Quintos

Ezekiel Ambrose Cambey

Ben pastel Inbal Armony

Pomegranate

Anna Devine

Lips and legs parted the dress, and prayer, both lift softly into the wind.

Guilt absolved Fever absorbed

And wrinkles in the sheets, wrinkles near your eyes, and on your nose.

you make me docile, unassuming, a warm caramel cloud, translucence, swallows static shards my hands my eyes my lips pretending stained from pomegranates my hands dirty everything I swore that if I stood on the frozen ground sticky evidence of places touched. for long enough, the heat from my body would start to melt it and resuscitate the dead grass

last spring, a black box

Maeve Sweeney

it was the dissonance, I think that pulled me down the dressing up, the smoothing over of my face and my voice there is nothing to see here

I reach for something, anything to hold onto and find only glass broken, but it hasn’t cut anyone yet

I will only beg if you ask me to it says, if you are very careful, I won’t make you bleed

Meditations in an Emergency

Anna Šverclová

after Cameron Awkward-Rich

She calls, and it is an emergency. The window, the garbage, the girl in the wall. They are all always emergencies. I walk through the world, cup to the door. I try not to listen. I listen until listening is an emergency. I have a dream in which I was never alone. She holds me and I don’t have to be five to cry. I have ears open as hallways. Hands she knows well. We walk with our palms pressed and our shadows just behind. We make trails in new snow down paths we’ve already worn. We build a house with no ghosts.

Hmong Again

Calla Lee

History heard our name again, love for Hmong so high — but did they see the blood of men, the ones they left behind. Yellow nights of raging guns, the wails of children scream — burning flames they wished away, our lives within the steam.

History heard our name again, love for Hmong so high — but did they feel the breaths we took, the ones they left to die. Memory of leaking marrow and narrow lows of soot — families running, unbecoming, glass and stones barefoot.

History heard our name again, gleaming golden glory — but what about the loves we lost, who will tell our stories?

The Price of my Skin Color Anonymous

“Flogging. Whipping. Belt. Whatever you call it, this beating, this punishment, is as much a part of our inheritance, our legacy, our culture, as any bowl of acorn mush, any wild salmon filet, pilillis fried and dipped in cinnamon and sugar, cactus fruit in a basket. More than anything else we brought with us out of the missions, we carry the violence we were given along with baptism, confession, last rites.” — Deborah A. Miranda, Bad Indians

I’ve always said that being Asian American is a curse. Your body belongs to your parents.

Always

How dare you leave them and live your own life? You don’t know the sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice that they have given you for you for you

My mother sexually harrassed me for years

My father keeps saying I deserve to be dead

I love them I hate them I love them

I hate them I love them I hate them

My parents claim they loved my grandparents more than anything They would die for them, oh yes But then why are their scars so visible?

Centuries ago the British told our women they were whores And now my mom yells at me that I am fast and a slut

For getting my period at age 10 And not 12 like the other girls.

My dad explicitly describes a scene of me selling myself on the street When I wear shorts. But then they came here With no papers Bearing New York winters With no heat With only rats On their bed and A room full of mold. My dad works 13 hours a day as a Taxi driver. My mom has been Here for 26 years and She can still barely speak English

Who wouldn’t be jealous of me?

I have a nice room in a fancy college Access to strawberries even

In the winter

Hot water, A future with Paid sick leave No extended family leeching off me And the luxury of getting a job I like.

I have to admit the hatred gets to me too. After years of dodging beatings

I am easy to startle.

I have a hatred of middle-class white people Whose parents speak their language. The only things I love in the world

Are cats because my parents made me Lose my faith in humanity a long time ago.

Even then

I love them I hate them I love them

My dad and mom beat me because They are tired of the world.

My dad and mom beat me because The white man took the wealth from their country And now it’s been years since they can afford a plane ticket back. Years of watching relatives die from afar While they can’t understand the English their children speak. My dad and mom beat me because They are trapped in a box of poverty and hopelessness.

My parents can’t control whether they make rent or not But they can control me.

Would I be weird for saying I Miss them

Even though my mom yells at the cashiers at Walmart And my dad steals money from me?

So I go back home Bathe in their affections Eat the delicious food Until they are mad. And I’m tossed around like a ragdoll I remember once my dad yanked on my hair Like I was a yo-yo Pulling my head back and forth. I remember once my mom threw her phone at me Smacking my face And brandished a knife.

My parents lived through the war of independence Where there’re many babies born of rape Where girls were married off at the age of 12. My grandpa was kidnapped three times. My grandma was permanently stunted by the many famines.

My dad’s house burned down and with it the information on when he was born.

This pain is my inheritance. This pain is how my ancestors deal with things. This pain is why I hate myself

This pain is an endless cycle, Chasing me down.

This is why I say white people are kinder, Better parents.

This is why I say the non-American way is not Always the better way.

This is why I say that regarding my parents, “It’s complicated.”

Because we have become the monsters They have made us out to be.

Invisible Cities

Nguyễn Trung Kiên

Inspired by Italo Calvino

My skin is marked by Helios’ beating My feet have lost their steps Shall the great wooden gates, be so kind as to Open And let this wanderer in

On cobblestone, I strolled, my satchels filled With coins and parchments and gems Among horses and wagons And barrels and hope Even scholars are merchants here

Men on horsebacks, women in silks Shall we make a trade, sir I have but a faded map An empty stomach, a drained flask And from my travels, plenty a tales

Of the “to be continued…” variety For I need not be beheaded in the morn Or perhaps a story About a princess Who has herself a story to tell

She said, I’ll tell it if you would listen I’ll trade you for a bed well made On top of a tower Whose spire reaches heaven I’m sure it’ll be worth the trade

In a land like this, perhaps faraway

A time that once might have been And with that I’ll weave

A tapestry in words Of a man who likes to tell tales

On his words dance familiar figures Of princes, and queens, and bards They trot on thoughts Take flight in memories And divert the course of dreams

Soon Helios shall stir the men and women

With empty pockets, wondering Where’s the storyteller Who left with the moon Leaving only their tales behind

An Entirety / What is said through silences

Anna Devine

I’m sorry, We say, While holding onto the notion that we are both good people.

I imagine your childhood but I do not ask you about it. I couldn’t bear it. So at least one part of you remains a mystery to me, so I can keep something withheld, so I can’t say that we gave all of each other to each other.

I’m sorry, We say, While holding onto the notion that we are both good people.

I imagine your childhood but I do not ask you about it. I couldn’t bear it. So at least one part of you remains a mystery to me, so I can keep something withheld, so I can’t say that we gave all of each other to each other.

not language

Lucy McNees

energy source :::: anatomy

where do you get yours from? nah,

I don’t need that. I don’t need it I don’t need yours I have mine even if it’s empty.

I get mine from telling you I’ve got it from dangly earrings and cuffing my jeans and covering my cracked knuckles with rings

I think chapped lips are attractive.

I like looking at you when my brain is high on caffeine and imagine gently peeling off the light flakes of dry skin with my teeth.

I don’t think you realize you’re breathing my air. My ego’s incredible this morning. Makes me want to dive between cars in a hot parking lot makes me want to chew on splintering maple wood and slap street signs.

Remember when we took pictures?

cold air and short skirts that compromised my thighs but if kicking the air vent under the desk makes your skin shake and slouching in your chair rearranges your organs sit up and cross your legs.

I can’t please everybody but I can hold on with my shoulder blades and kick my leg up onto the table until I look like I’m ready to let you fuck me right out of this chair

If we taught kids to write without reading they’d probably have more of their own words they’d probably feel more truthfully no one deserves to have to describe why their stomach hurts no one should have to describe their feelings with words it’s blood and stomach knots, not language.

February in the Midwest Marley Craine

I. Saint Paul

The periphery of winter might be worse than the depths of it, like riding a train through the in-betweens of two cities and seeing the worst of both. It’s a suffocating time of year, when there’s winter but no snow. I’m in a holding pattern, waiting for spring, or at least for a fresh layer of ice to stifle the cold. I plug along. The sun’s out, it’s not so bad, I say to my chapped knuckles and brittle hair, and to my parents as I try to smooth their furrowed brows. Ice shatters. Every time the wind wails so hard it dips below zero, I think it can’t get worse, and then the sun sets and it does.

II. Chicago

The wake of her father’s death is the worst time in her life, or at least we hope so. Winter wails there, too. Her classes are all on loss, as if she needs to learn to lose. Too many people sent flowers. (I sent bread.)

She plugs along. The ten-day forecast still shows clouds, she says to her bleeding knuckles, and to her mother, home alone now, whose brow she cannot smooth. This city’s wind won’t rest and the sun hasn’t been out in months.

environmental damage

Maeve Sweeney

following the movement of my hunger I construct magic tricks to get myself out inevitably and invariably lost in time, I wander the headlights long as they pass by me cars moving across the road like gun shy horses skittish of fireworks, of sudden movement, of my own body trailing after them still pulling at the rope, still looking under the long black top hat but no one is free till the dog is, pining, whining, hiding out back waiting for everyone to leave or to fall asleep and someone inside waits for me to come clean

Blind to Her Birdie Keller

It was a warm summer day when she grew from seed and soil, pushing skyward through dark earth to greet the sun. Around her was endless expanse: plains and grass and whistling wind. With little else to do, she began to walk.

She passed through fields and forests, rivers and dells, and saw all kinds of creatures: bear and beaver, sapling and sprout. They held her dear, greeted her as a sister or daughter or lover. A family, these beings of the world.

But the more she walked, the more things changed. Smoke tainted the air. Skies clouded. Stars weakened. Family grew sparse. Deep in the gut that had been grown of peat and sunshine, she felt that something was wrong. Finally, when her heart ached, when she had not seen a friend in a dozen miles or more, she stopped. Before her sprawled a town, only it was not like the tangled reach of roots that ache for life. It was uniform. It was straight lines. Boredom and dust. The air tasted of death, but she was curious, and so she entered.

Within the town was a strange thing — a new kind of creature, with shattered smiles and the sickly smell of metal, cloying and sickly. When their skin brushed against hers, she recoiled from the slick of sweat.

And perhaps strangest of all, none saw her. They did not feel, did not see, walked through her. But despite festering disgust, she was not angry, for she saw in these people a desperate need.

At the far side of the town, past buildings and graves of trees, she found a boy. He was small and slight. Loose clothes. Young. He leaned against the side of a bubbling fountain, looking in, and at first he did not see her. He stirred the water with a finger, ripples spreading out. Everything in the town was clamoring noise, but this boy was quiet.

Her sun-fed heart compelled her, looked at him and whispered help, whispered fix, whispered save. She touched his shoulder.

He felt her.

He looked up. “Hello,” he said.

She would show him her world, and he would be saved. She was certain.

And so, beginning that day, she taught the boy things, and he was eager to learn. Every morning they met at a garden, a hill, a forest, a stream. And she showed him the song of the birds, the laughter of the creek, the caress of pebbles beneath his feet. He listened. He placed his hands beside hers, followed her gaze with his own.

“It’s pretty,” he said, his eyes full of it all.

Yes.

But at the end of every day, the same question fell from him. “What is it for?” A child’s way of saying, What can it do for me, and in this she saw the toxins of the town.

See the stars gather?

Hear the otter’s laugh?

See how you must learn to love?

What is it for?

As leaves fell and seasons died, she began to lose hope. The boy grew and every day became colder, his eyes reflecting his people. Every day, it was a little harder for him to see.

One morning, years from the moment they had met, the boy sat with her beside a fire. The sun was weak. The night had been long and cold. He took her hands.

“I don’t think I will be able to see you tomorrow,” he said.

Oh.

“I don’t think I learned what I was supposed to.”

You didn’t.

He paused then, his hands holding hers tighter even as his gaze slid around her edges like they grew fuzzy. Was he thinking of all their sunlit mornings? His hands clutched hers, weak. He was weak.

Rage flared in her gut and she wondered at the strength of it, a blaze burning cold.

It didn’t matter, the things he remembered now. His memories of her would soon fade to nothing. He would wake the next day, and he would go to school, and he would go to work, and eventually he would die, and there would be no one to see her.

In a day, or a moment, or a second, he would be blind to her.

She pulled her hands away and stood. Ignored his pleas. What is it for, indeed. Let him find the answer without her. See what it was to be alone.

She would walk on.

This time, there are fireworks Jonas Costa

You show up unannounced at my mindless doorstep as you’ve done on my birthday, at that sleepover, in my afternoons of boredom. Knock? There is no knocking. You, criminal, trespass like I am nobody’s land. Making me confused with my usual buttons, you build questions out of expositions. Solution: Solution? You take over, meander among my cells. I push you away. “Just breathe.” One. Two. Three. Forty. Five thousand. Six million, in and out. In and out. Again, you don’t go. You don’t go because I let you stay. You look like someone I know and I can’t turn my face away from what’s already so familiar. Hold my hand and take me to the world I don’t want to go. No. Not today. Not here. Not when there are still fireworks.

The Way Home

Zoë Roos Scheuerman

I have no love left for you. You are the stumble created by a typo.

You are burnt, weak coffee on a Monday morning. You are warm urine in a public swimming pool. There is nothing else to be said about us.

Such revelations always come in the spring. Then comes the drive down, down, down to where the trees are crosses. In the end, I stand in the storm and drink the rain.

I am still here Charley Eatchel

after Mai Der Vang

My hometown smells like summer-hot tar

Crackles with midwestern thunderstorms

Khaki-clad complacency and hot dish

An iron road carves through every corner

Rocking children to sleep with backbeat lullabies

Of whistles and sirens and jet engines

A nighttime howl answered by packs of queer teenagers

Roving empty parking lots and gas stations

Moments claimed for them and theirs

Bloody palms pressed to the pavement, saying thank you

This is every suburbia

Every too-big too-small Levittown

With farmers’ fields falling to new development

Rough gravel memories paved smooth

This cradled, middle-class beginning

Stepping-stone of every nowhere

A place to grow out of and shed like old skin

But I am still here, drinking in the sunset of yet-to-be

Crooning closing time, semisonic, with the beating hearts beside me

Off-kilter chords whose echoes sound like home

We are still here

Foreheads pressed together in the dampened grass

With goodbyes that mean for now

Carrying cracked stones in our pockets

So we’ll always find our way back