The New Independents, Vol. 1 by Colton Cox

October 2016 / VOL.1

To The New Independents-This is a breeding ground for artists, where we may celebrate their creations and promote them as an essential property of our culture. We cultivate radical spaces for communities to emerge. We seek new voices to break the homogeny of popular culture. We attend to the wealth and strength of the unknown youth creating art around the world. We enable our new generation of culture-movers. This magazine has come together through strong optimism, love, and tender care. We proudly present some artists you may know and many you may not, whose combined vision allows for this wonderful collectionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; our inaugural publication. With that, we welcome you to our world. Thank you for taking the time to investigate and celebrate the voices and hands that birthed this article. It is for you. The Editors

COVER| SHAMIR BAILEY by Jamie Sanin

06| EXPULSION by Tyler Hughes

| ENTROPY, OR: THE DEATH FORCE

by Frank Giacoio III

by TC Tolbert

07| HOW (AND WHY WOULD WE WANT TO) 08| AT THE MIRAGE by Max Heinegg 09| EXPOSED by Beth Cleveland | HOME.1 by CAConrad

10| TREACLE by JH Phrydas 11| SWEET AND FRAGRANT NIRVANA

by Nalini Priyadarshini

12-13| OF POISON & ANTIDOTE by Eleanore Tisch 14| NORWAY by Chey Watson 15| WHEN I WAS A CHILD by Kelle Grace Gaddis | HEAVEN’S BEACON by Krystal LaDuc

by Barbara Ruth

23| A JET DISAPPEARED by Chey Watson | VENUS by Jamie Sanin

24-26|THE CENSORSHIP OFFICE, 1917

by Douglas Taylor

31| BROODING ON EGGS by Mare Leonard

| RUSH by Jamie Sanin

44-45| ON A RITE OF PASSAGE by Tyler Lyman 46| BIRDS ON A HIGH FLIED WIRE by Tyler Lyman | CAVES by Frank Giacoio III

47| MULTIPLE TRUTHS by Jack Collom 48| THREE. (A WORD TO NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON)

by Bryan Matos

49| FORBIDDEN LOVE by Beth Cleveland BACK COVER| FLASH by Jamie Sanin

Expulsion

Tyler Hughes

Entropy, or: The Death Force Frank Giacoio III

Clouds are better liars than weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll ever be. A howling coyote, a bucking pinto, well, the reality of it all is far more wet, and nebulous. Where do they go, those lucid untruths; Where do they dissolve, and skulk to? Somewhere far above the pastel mountains at dusk, behind the throne of God, out of reach, and away from judging eyes, I suppose. A lie is like a cactus, Prickly, dried up, but refusing to die, both impossible to find and hard to miss, when surrounded by sequoia.

How (and why would we want to) TC Tolbert

I went to a lecture yesterday on “the body.” It was the second time I ate an apple when I was supposed to be listening. The first time Farid was there and he turned the lectern sideways so that we could see him. Every so often he would pause between sentences to drink slowly from a metal yellow water bottle. I thought of Marie Howe’s poem and her dying mother’s body hunger. Then I thought of T who sometimes has panic attacks and when she does she repeats to herself, let the wild animal of your body love what it loves. I made a will the other day. It wasn’t what I had planned to do with my Friday morning and it really only took about 45 minutes but there was something wonderfully clear about knowing: I’ll die if I drive to LA today. It wasn’t as dramatic as it sounds. I mean, what isn’t irretrievable? While we were walking down the mountain, S asked, why is gratitude so much more vulnerable than criticism? B said, Congratulations to the awareness of desires. You have arrived. J said, the surprise is that we don’t have chemistry with people more often. That we meet beautiful people every day and walk away, completely unfazed. Sometimes I fall in love with my friends. Every day, just a series of choices to be made. At the end of the second lecture a woman from the audience held up her hand twice. She was smart, generous, clearly well read. After several minutes I began to notice how other people in the room (mostly men) were getting impatient, fidgeting, writing on their notepads, who is she? JJ said, one is always more than one. (I’m mostly a man, now, I suppose.) I was getting impatient, too.There was a noticeable pressure, suddenly, (one she seemed, thankfully, unaware of) to stop taking up so much damn space. (I can listen but the idea is for you to hear you.) It wasn’t that I disagreed with the general sense that her comments would best be left for private

conversation but I was horrified by the collective visceral frustration, a kind of demand for airtime that doesn’t happen when men hold forth in public space. In my dream, I crouched in the doorway and peed into a plastic bucket. It did not seem unusual or unreasonable at the time. Invisibility is hardly ever an option and I suppose it’s different from privacy, anyway. What is efficient may not be what is effective. An architect can be distinguished from an engineer by an emphasis on aesthetics. Adam Phillips says epiphany is contingent and surprising. The bucket had a hole in it. I cannotmake anyone love me who doesn’t. I still believe in the soul. Phillips again: a phobia is reliable. The Buddha: Find out for yourself. Don’t believe what I say. In response to the question what is a beautiful building? Alain de Botton says, the answer that eventually emerged was not really an answer; rather, it was an admonishment that it might be irrelevant and even indulgent to raise the question in the first place. I love that between sentences that were too academic for me to follow just by listening, Farid stood almost completely still and drank from a water bottle that easily could have been his 3 year old daughter’s. How he wouldn’t let us escape, and seemed to ask why we might want to, his own body’s gaze. In Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture, Lisa Robertson almost says what I remembered was surfaces when what I wanted was to recall space.

THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016

At the Mirage Max Heinegg

After Zion & the Valley of Fire anything would seem to fit the name of this hotel, so the two-sided facade of gold & glass does not surprise. On the 21st floor, we pry open a window, not enough to see fully, or leap, but enough to see no one’s in the pool where a light jazz version of “Every Breath You Take” plays, the singer ignoring the import of the lyric, the staking of claims, the stalker’s intimations. Later, we race through ventilated smoke, the democracy of loss at the slot machines, each game a lurid invitation: the shaven chest of Atlas, the pubescent, criminal allure of Cherry Fairy, & walking past, the top cleft of ass on Bare, where something skin-ful happens, I believe it’s tanning. At each turn, the strong lotus blooms as far as eyes can reach. I throw Stella, my exhausted eight-year old, over my shoulder & head for the elevator, which teems effervescent music no matter the time. Every color & creed wanders into & out of this perfect illusion in the desert, the water forced invisibly under the plants that would not grow here, the line of passage in the hotel directed at every turn towards the casino floor, its adverts a parade of youth in bronzed flesh & cleavage that spill into the imagined night as above the outward gleaming temples, where hawks, falcons, & condors scour the sky, so below: in cigar-stuffed oxygen-flushed ambience wizened hands pull at slot handles for what they can win back in the preserving darkness.

Home.1

CAConrad

Exposed

Beth Cleveland

ghosts get ideas bad ones mostly caught in a new average for boots to the stomach the moon is not a favor machine hope is a fiction we would be better without but find hard to live without I met a spider who hopes we let the house go to insects will you roll your eyes if I call this spider my sister regardless if you do she is my sister

THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016

Treacle

J.H. Phrydas

SAFEWAY S.F. FINE

Try-Star Sky Restaurant 87 6th St. Tel: 415-3699766

EBT (FOOD STAMP) AVAILABLE IUM

FOODS EMPOR TU LAN SHOW

Vietnamese Food

<<THE STRAND>>

~PEPSI~

Each figure a standHOFBRAU.LUMPIA.BURRITO.PIZZA. in. Cardboard cutout Trim waist big SPAGHETTI DOT’S We’re Open 5’9. thighs. In the forest, BLUE BOTTLECAFE faces reel. Projected MINT PLAZA emergent room for fantasy. Hold a convex silver screen. Kaplan’s Photographic plates mold to mask. Surplus And legs: a disaster. Closing and & Sport unclosing. Return sequence back to position. The alley’s ancient gaze— Goods df

*** LIVE GIRLS ***

~PEPSI~

DOGS

FOOD

Taquería Can-Cun C E N T R A L M A R K E T

Lucky One

Mini-Mart

Fit’s —Golfsmith— Fashions

Tennis Split Pea + Seductions Golf liquor

HOLLYWOOD BILLI ARDS

THE INTERNATIONAL ART

MUSEUM OF AMERICA BEER

sold

Golden Gate here Adult Superstore

Sweet and Fragrant Nirvana Nalini Priyadarshini

You call me jaggery lips though you have never sucked on golden blob of sweetness and have no idea about its taste only a vague memory of something you had sampled in Mexico made of sugarcane juice Sweet and fragrant!

India you did not pack in your backpack lodged itself beneath your nails flowered as a trident on your palm to unfold in the folds of your skin in the twilight of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;beaver stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Thronging with love, gurgling chaos it nestles in the crevices of your soles

Maybe you have forgotten gulkand in your post dinner paan with silver foil after a long day of sightseeing in the heat and dust of Benaras that started at Ghats and culminated at the silk shop where sitting midst thousands of pieces of fine silk you picked golden Ganesha on black my favorite god whose figurines I collect A coincidence you would say of course, like countless others.

You now return to me in myriad pieces I stow away at the back of my lingerie drawer run my finger along their edges listening to Beatles try to put them together in sultry afternoons let lusty mangoes seduce me into thinking we can find a way to turn the clock around and find nirvana in slurping their nectar Sweet and fragrant!

Sipping ice cold water under the droning fan browsing through vibrant silk pieces each more beautiful than the previous with no intention to buy any, after the oppressive heat of the day you had spent wandering the streets of the ancient city with your juvenile guide you picked my favorite god to take back home

THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016

Of Poison & Antidote Eleanore Tisch

One perverse journalist or another will try to sell you the story of Poison. They’ll cover everything important: who was killed and how the Poison kills. They will exhaust the ears of their audience telling of the efforts to conquer the Poison and then, once it exists only within certain walls, the usefulness of it’s murderous properties. This author will make you feel safe. You are seated in a lawn chair drinking a Long Island Iced Tea, basking in the glory of yourself and your strong husband who is right there. How intelligent you are for educating yourself on such a formidable enemy. How exquisite it is to be you. Yet, Your ears are exhausted and keep hearing a voice somewhere near, jeering. Your educated eyes keep scanning a searing page: you went to school, you learned to read, you knew English. You are feeling some thing tighten in your chest. You blink and with the descent of your eyelid the tightness is french-pressed down to the floor of your groin and the feeling of having anything at all in your breast goes with it. You blink and with the ascent of your eyelid you see everything around you and forget that it’s yours and your world is filling up with water but then your eyes fully open and everything is normal and you go back to reading a book. This writer, she or he or they, will have you convinced that you are invincible because Poison cannot touch you through a page. It is slow. So gradual you won’t even know you’re on a gradient. Spectrums stay in art class and computers live in binary and so does truth. False is a function of fact and you were not there, you are not a journalist, so you don’t do the math. You learn the answer. X = what I tell you x equals. You plug in variables: she was there when this happened to him so they will have been acting as one and that cause yields this effect and it is precise and measurable and you know the system by heart. What this writer will have left out is how the poison became a Poison. How it is only fatal to Humans. She or he or they won’t have told you about the precise evolution involved in the forming of the Poison: Humans began to slaughter it and it’s only defense was to grow alongside us, to learn to slaughter in return. This writer doesn’t mention anything other than venom because none of their research will have lead them anywhere but there. They won’t have been looking because you would rather buy a thing

that makes you feel invincible than a truth that makes you feel vulnerable. You’re not in any danger on your lawn chair, maybe a little bit tipsy halfway through your second drink, but your strong husband is still right there and the gates to your community are iron and bolted and guarded by a man with a gun. The gun lives in your side of the gates but it’s purpose is to protect you and backfire is impossible because Tragedy only happens to those who deserve it. You don’t deserve it. You’ve spent your whole life willing yourself to be as complacent as the perverse journalist will have been expecting you to be while she or he or they wrote the words you read. You have accepted what she or he or they have told you about poison and sin and your self. Maybe this writer does not know and so cannot tell you but you are built by your re-memberings. When you say “My Bad,” it isn’t really yours because you only tripped over an imaginary crack and lost your balance but that is not something you are supposed to do. That is not something I was supposed to do but not because I won’t have wanted to because someone, she and he and they, has Poisoned the Palace of my memory. She and he and they are the woodwork within the walls, the structure. She and he and they are the insolation in the attic, the support. It is their bad that I live in and it comes out when I say “I’m sorry” and you don’t mean it because you only said how you feel but that is not something you’re supposed to do unless what you say will make your strong husband, who is still right there, smile and casually remind himself that he married the perfect woman. That he somehow puts together that you are the perfect woman is not the Poison, it is the antidote to all the misery that is outside those iron and bolted, guarded gates. It is the antidote to those not-so imaginary cracks in your heart that you trip over every day and then say to yourself, “My bad.” It is the ultimate apology, the ultimate eraser of the dis-ease that began in your left big toe when your fourth grade language arts teacher died and the substitute told you to write a poem for Ms. Hixon and I don’t remember writing it or the poem itself but I remember the title, Poison Ivy. And so you will have already come to agree with she or he or they, before you ever picked up their book or sat down in your lawn chair or mixed your drink, because you entered into a contract with them, a union with

the overall underlying message of their book, a message you’ve been picking up on your whole life. So you read the book and are safe in your lawn chair and not only do you think you are invincible, you want to be invincible and to be so you must avoid the fact that you’re not. It is this want that poisons and itself inflicts the cracks in your heart. That is what you’re sorry for and you’re sorry for yourself. That is how the Poison kills you until in a flood goes your lawn chair, in a wildfire dies your strong husband, who is now over there, in a hurricane goes your iron and bolted, guarded gates and the man with the gun goes with. What do you do in the moments you’re alive, right after you’ve had the realization you have spared yourself from the Poison: not by reading the perverse journalist’s words, not by making your strong husband smile, not by drinking three Long Island Iced Teas. You have realized the peril that sits beside you in your lawn chair, melting from the ice cubes in your drink. You now see the venom of your strong husband always being right over there. Are you safe yet? Have you bolted and guarded and encased in iron your life? Is that what makes you safe? When you were five years old you wanted to be a painter of hearts. Drawing them everywhere and in all different colors: big blue on the walls, delicate purple in the attic. Your hearts are traditional: two ears sliced off head and spliced together, sewn right down the middle. Your hearts look like this: You run naked through hallways on a sunny Sunday afternoon and everything is molten gold and you, a strand of person, flow along in it. You slip on a yellow crayon, balls of your heels rolling over and when you look up to see if anyone is there to hear you tantrum, your mother is looking down, eyebrows tightly raised, on a landing ten feet above and as you gather the air required to wail your mother speaks, You should practice your balance. Take the Atlas from the kitchen and do some laps around the garden. First clothe yourself for god’s sake, the nice red dress nana bought you.

in your chest. You don’t have the vocabulary or context to think about what it is but you feel it’s location. You feel breath isn’t going where it usually does and blood, the sticky stuff that syrups out of skin when cut, blood feels bubbley and it is also not going where it usually does, there’s a panicked animal alive crawling up and it is living in your throat and heart looks like this: and you realize that is what has clenched in your chest and it is the shape of a small white mouse scuttling around your organs and it is decidedly attempting to escape. You look up at your mother hoping she has a ready cage to catch the mouse, who is surely on the verge of arriving in mouth and your eyes meet hers and she doesn’t tell you to but you force the mouse back down: down esophagus down stomach and into intestines and she doesn’t tell you to but you do the same to the tears puddling around the creases of your eyelid and your mothers eyes are made of Obsidian and they are teaching you the alchemy involved in making everything a mirror. So you won’t understand until your lawn chair’s gone and you’re no longer guarded and your strong husband is dead and you’ve drunk all the whiskey. Right now. Now, now. Now you understand the shape of your heart. Now you flake off the scabby congealed syrup caked at the cracks. You want to know the scars because now you know they’re there. You now understand what you will have never understood because your mother couldn’t tell you because her mother didn’t know either, you always thought your heart was the shape of the image and now you feel it’s formlessness and it scares you but it is no longer unsurmountable. You do not have to lie about it. You do not have to try and make it something it is not and it is not an image and if need be it placed in one you are now reject because it is not yours and does not fit in your body and you no longer feel the need to tolerate an alien heart in your system.

You do as your told, hiding your body from your mother and hiding your body from yourself. You learn grace and proper posture and every so often take a break from the act and explore the Atlas until your mother sees you’re on safari and snaps her knuckley fingers surprising you. You drop the five pound book on your five year old big toe, now the size of your father’s pinky toe and you feel s o m e t h i n g tighten

THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016

norway

Chey Watson i want to remember more clearly than i experienced how many: jelly fish in the fjord times did leg hit bike wheel bruising over making shadows

turning pale

the water was colder than my lungs coulduldco ld c o u lldlldlldlld d coulduldco ld c o u lldlldlldlld d coulduldco ld c o u lldlldlldlld d be. constricting vessels tissue shrinking

relax as if itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s that

you are moving.

eyes are smiling because you are smiling

(bird bit foot unexpectedly) what is light on bodies rain on bodies bodies on bodies what is the name of that space between us if concept requires language what if my legs did not shake what if said no where is glowstick twig stick

substitution

what is space between them how big where are my arms grabbing yours dragging (the negative spaces we make positive) our mouthshandsminds were empty reel backwards a virtual text with two versions translate sight into where are arms located where can go see them linked there still

Heaven’s Beacon Krystal LaDuc

When I Was A Child Kelle Grace Gaddis

Our 70’s Reservation of cattails and mosquito swamps lost territory, lost time, and booze I say, “It’s not sleep if you can’t wake-up” to his copper brown eyes like pennies in the mud lost to give luck to the rich Red, yellow, and turquoise trinkets, miniature totem poles, tourists, watching poverty dance in costume to a foreign beat. Ears stuffed with The Star Spangled Banner Thoughts, terse as a mass of tangled reeds and sorrow. We pledge allegiance to minds going damp, wet wool, tobacco, and smoldering fires Spirits turned to shadows behind missing trees

THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016

My Friend Johnathon William Vrachopolous

Johnathon Smoking William Vrachopolous

Plastic Trees, an Unfinished Childhood, I Forgive You Justin Gaffrey

Haiku 40

Krystal LaDuc Solitude never felt so crowded with such an audience of ghosts

THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016

Us Flowers/Vision Outside a Body XVI Brandon Petty

A and B

Adam Brunner

Everyone, all of A and B’s family and friends, screamed when A and B announced they were going to have a baby. Then A and B went back to their respective jobs and told all their co-workers how they were going to have a baby, and how all their family and friends had screamed at the announcement. All of their co-workers talked about that for a while. A and B had their baby, and they named it C. Everyone screamed when C’s birth was announced, which A and B, in turn, told their co-workers about after their parental leaves had ended. A and B were the new parents around their offices, and everyone wanted to tell everyone else what it had been like when they were the new parents around their offices. A and B kept their jobs, since they now had to support both themselves and little C. Every time they looked at C, they just kept thinking about how special C was, and soon enough C went off to school with all the other children. And so they fell into a routine- A and B would go to work during the weekdays, and C would go to school, receiving average grades all the way through. A and B would tell their co-workers about how special C was, and the co-workers would, in turn, reply with their own stories about their own, special children. On weekends A, B, and C would do fun things. Then, A and B would go back to their respective offices and tell their co-workers that they did fun things on weekends; C would tell his fellowstudents the same thing. The co-workers and students would, in turn, reply with all the fun things they did on their weekends, the things that made them feel like human beings rather than lifeless prisoners trapped in a tedious, menial cycle. A and B couldn’t leave their jobs, especially when C went to college. During this time, A and B’s respective parents, who’d told all their respective co-workers what a joy it was to be grandparents, retired. Eventually they died. After college, C struggled for a while, and A and B told all their co-workers how C had been struggling for a while, to which the co-workers nodded sympathetically, remembering the years when they and their children struggled for a while. Finally, C got a stable job, to A and B’s relief; they could now tell their co-workers that C got a stable job. Then C met D, they fell in love, and got married. A, B, C, and D happily told all their co-workers about how special the wedding was, to which the co-workers, in turn, talked about how special their weddings had been. When C and D told A and B they were going to have a baby, A and B screamed. Everyone screamed. They just kept screaming.

THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016

7 years lying awake at night TC Tolbert

One month ago I was housesitting in a cabin in southern Oregon. I’d never been there before – the edge of a town of 4,000 called Coquille. Deer would eat grass around the fruit trees. There were no curtains on the windows. I was confused at first by the rain and the quiet and the green. Steve built the cabin in the mid 70’s and lives about a quarter mile away inanother cabin he built with his friends. He drives a Prius and has a medical condition that makes his voice thin. His teeth have fallen out so he’s gotta pay about 10 grand to get them fixed. He said he didn’t care about being a “pretty corpse” so much, but while he’s alive he still has his vanity. I visited the ocean almost every day. I never recognized it. Thanks to Meg, one night I watched Beauty is Embarrassing – a film about Wayne White, an artist who grew up in my hometown. Hixson, Tennessee.

I joined the gym in Coquille. I listened to Yo Yo Ma while I ate enormous salads for dinner. I didn’t check email or Facebook. Coos Bay is right next to Coquille but I only went there twice in 3 weeks.

I want to pump the gas and think only about what it means to pay $1.79 for each gallon right now. That is plenty. I don’t need to wake up in the night with panic attacks trying to figure out the definition of “service” for contingent faculty. Somehow I still live in a bubble. The Keystone Pipeline just passed the Senate but, according to one analyst, it’s a symbolic project anyway. She said the best situation for Obama would be to veto it and then still for the thing to be built. Sometimes things are just gross and they don’t go away when you refuse to look at them. I couldn’t work this many jobs if I weren’t on Celexa. Poetry is still a factory if we measure by production. I’m doing my taxes by avoiding my paystubs. A receipt from June 2014 says gas was $3.73.

When my dad found out I was staying in Coquille he kind of freaked out. He had planned a trip to trace Pre’s life just before September 11, 2001 but you know, then everything changed. Language isn’t figurative in my dad’s world. And he only has to work 3 days a week. Several years ago, J said: I don’t know how to change my life without leaving my relationship. She wasn’t unhappy in her relationship. My connection with my dad has always been tenuous but he’s more present in the body I’ve chosen to grow up in. In God: A Biography, Jack Miles says: From the moment of conception, when 23 chromosomes from a male and 23 from a female become the first cell of a human, we are defined by our inner division. I don’t know if academia can ever be Avant-garde. By which I mean compassionate. My hands are his. We have the same verbal tics. When Morgan died 3 years ago, it was my dad who understood what it meant to just breathe.

One breathes in 20,000 times a day. Our bodies are, ostensibly, solid. Malleable but relatively fixed. Yesterday at the Village Inn, B described watching a VHS tape of acting auditions on repeat. We both grew up in the south. Received forms. The average human spends 38,000 hours eating. We were sharing one of those. Our server had a single diamond stud earring. We sleep for 26 years. In the same article, I read we spend 5 years online. 115 days laughing. 11 years at work. How do we do the same things and still get such different results? B described the satisfaction of 7 different takes of 7 different women running through the exact same scene.

My dad is a respiratory therapist. He grew up shit-poor and was the first in his family to get an Associate’s degree. He’s run over 20 marathons. One of his heroes is Steve Prefontaine. I only sort of knew that. He was a runner who died young in a car accident. He grew up in Coos Bay where there’s a museum about him and a gift shop at an insurance office in the side room. If you go there and ask about Pre, people will talk to you like you’re old friends. You can buy pieces of the track from his high school. He died in 1975. His sister just made a calendar with excerpts from his diary.

Cassandra Rousseau Coriolan

THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016

Nan Medal : Spaces In Between Barbara Ruth

First I dreamed myself. I knew myself as City Made of Islands, Nan Madol, the Spaces In Between where ocean swept my streets. I dreamed myself Pohnpei, Upon a Holy Altar. Then I whispered to the lorikeets the story of Lemuria. They winged it to the people living in the Sanyavins. I planted dream-maps into the sakau they drank for visions: which quarries for which basalt, the lagoon to bring it to. I wove the patterns of the laying of my stones into the fish and vegetables they ate, I was all they spoke of: the women as they laid their nets into the reefs, the men harvesting yams and breadfruit. They named themselves Pohnpeians, nothing mattered more. Today some say Lemurians designed and built me; Micronesians of today with their thatched huts, their palm and coconut canoes, could not have moved the huge prismatic monoliths that made me, let alone designed my lintels, waterways, sunrise-catching arches. Guidebook writers pen this tripe. A people all consumed, consuming the same dream can do anything. How I hate the Europeans, the Japanese, Americans, their poxes, wars; their theories suffocate their dreams, there is no reaching them. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve tired of them all. For a while I told the Pahnpeians to use me only for their burials and sacred ceremonies. I enjoyed their peaceful dead decaying in me, the pounding of the sakou on my breasts beat time with pounding of the ocean, yes, I liked that for a century or two. But they wearied me, I dreamed them all away. I did not dream the mangrove. It came on its own. Or maybe it was always here. I remember when it took me for its lover. That was when the people lost whatever charm, whatever usefulness theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d had. How easily the mangrove covers me, how handsomely it defeats the archeologists. How sweet my dreams become, how lush the Spaces In Between.

a jet disappeared Chey Watson

(a jet disappeared) I got a job then I drank bummed a cigarette from long brown hair and eyes did not make contact spoke a taiwanese man dead in the eye revealed different layers of a self, social analysis still, stale, and blank ivory rectangles. (just thought you were being poetic just thought when you are poetic, i ignore you) spat facts on moving sidewalk stumbled, spilled, and shattered glass reflected self as fun house mirror

Venus

Jamie Sanin

I.... look weird asillusionasstoryascharacterdressedupin orange as a triangle tipped, tumbled, and tarmac (a jet disappeared) I was confused I didn’t know where I was but things they looked good and I feel bad when I compare new things to the past but I have reference points the wrong direction, enters a bar

Can I read to you? Can I read to you? Can I read to you? Will you listen to me? LISTEN TO ME LISTEN TO ME A JET... DISAPPEARED I hopped into a car said hey this looks familiar so I had one and I smoked one and one plus one makes two and I felt it, morning after (where were you? I texted you. I said it, ‘a jet, it, disappeared.’)

THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016

The Censorship Office, 1917 Douglas Taylor

Peter (Pyotyr) had been under the influence of the Bolsheviks since February. Laboriously reaching for another letter, he cracked it open with his thumb; emotionlessly, but for a little secret shame. He had been sent to England to scout out for and stir up communist feelings. The end goal was to turn the War into one of classes rather than nationalities. He met the bloody eye of a young widow nearby (the war had turned it from white to red), before his gaze fled her. Why? Why a conscientious objector? On religious grounds?! He had been packed up and shipped off in the kind of hurry that he feared would lose him and his comrades their war. He noted again the silent, often bowed, intensity of the women that surrounded him. An image appeared to him of his bloodied body surrounded by white feathers, and he wished he had here something to pray to, or rest on. He worked quietly, studiously, at his place at the thick brown table that had been reluctantly given to him one the back of his relatively superb German. To avoid the acrid gazes around him, he’d look sightlessly up at the single white light that hung above him. It changed as as he examined it, moving, like hope, from radiance to starkness to an object of fear. Turning back, he took up his fountain pen and resumed scratching through the parts of the letters from the front line that gave away positions or would be, most importantly, bad for morale back in Blighty. _____

her, then finally the change to sympathy for him. She could wade through her day without too much trouble, occasionally surfacing in the corner over a cup of tea. She had a broad forehead, for which someone had once called her intelligent, that burst red and faded to white regularly when she was exhausted, or hot. “Why weren’t you a chaplain?” she opened fire with one morning, catching Peter stubbing his cigarette on the busy pavement outside the office. He looked up, he thought, too quickly. Her face was a map, the white skin surrounding red lips. He secretly panicked, then took a deep breath and waited until the honest thoughts had passed. “Converting to God before death is not faith,” he declared. “It is a noble death,” she said. “It is not.” She blushed and her cheeks reddened, and he in his turn relaxed. Then unexpectedly, quietly, he broke into song, at which she was taken aback and almost giggled. “Though like the wanderer, the sun gone down, Darkness be over me, my rest a stone, Yet in my dreams I’d be nearer, my God, to Thee.” “There let the way…”

Sunny today. We walked through rolling hills, red leaves occasionally dappling the light under our feet. In the village of Adicourt (was there a famous battle here?) we stopped for a rest and some village games. We beat the Ozzies in a tug-o-war but lost to them in the three legged race- though I won mine! Spirits high for our first encounter with the enemy. Every day different, but the same. I think of you incessantly. S. Hughes _____

“… Bright with thy praise Sun, moon and stars forgot, Bethel I’ll raise, Angels to beckon me nearer, my God, to Thee”.

Mary was getting to the stage of her life, having overcome some of the shallower neuroses, where she could learn to ride waves of doubt or desire and not have them interrupt her. She extended this trust in herself to others, which in turn accounted for her love for the war effort, hatred for the coward conchie opposite

Here the rhythm was broken by convincing sobs, where unbeknownst to her his memory failed him.

_____ We paused today at a small lake near Etrun. Everyone is tired but we keep each other going. How are you? And Samson? I miss both your company’s (companies?). We haven’t had time to think for the last few days, so much marching! Fine by me. I feel relaxed, and positive, though I wish desperately to see you. Yours forever, Percy xx _____

“Why do you talk to me?” His voice unconsciously lilted upwards, pleadingly, as they descended the stairs of the office on their way home. “You’re a stray cat.” He paused. “What do you do for fun?” “Ballet,” she replied. He nodded with a sincerity that thrilled her. She thought as they crossed the street of ‘his God’ and ‘her war’. How ever-present and absent they were. One could not wrap one’s arms around the war, or peer over the top of it. “Wars are a matter of survival of the fittest,” he began cautiously, probing the silence. “But countries do not have to act as primitive animals. They have the power to evolve within themselves. All that flaring of nostrils and flexing of muscles…” “You talk like they’re men.” “Yes, yes, I suppose they are. The urge to penetrate, not to create life out of oneself.” She giggled. “It sickens me,” he mourned. The next morning, after having gathered her thoughts, and what principles she could reach, she whispered across the table, “Would you kill a German soldier if he was attacking your mother?” “England is not my mother.” They looked together towards the middle of the table, where the stamp with the red star stood. It reminded him of home and his cause. She felt a vague excitement. ‘Suspicious content- to be sent to a superior’, read the label. _____ Our humour is squeezed out of us. The Ridge of Arras today. It will be our victory, our tiny piece of the war. It matters to us and that’s enough. I don’t mind being told what to do. Please do not think that I fear death- it is at a great distance from me, in another world, it is not a part of me. We have lost men, we have gained ground. The exchange is merely another stage, it is not reprehensible, or glorious. I miss you terribly, Jonathan

_____

“Do you believe in love?” she asked. “Yes.” “I’m not sure that I do.” “How pleasant.” She distrusted what she knew of love; it seemed too transparent, an illusion, an invention. Peter thought that he knew that it wasn’t. As they walked together through rough sacks of letters, he asked her from somewhere far away if she would like a drink with him. When

there, she expected him to pay. “They pay me 2.17 as well,” he said quietly. “As far as they’re concerned, I’m a woman. That’s my punishment.” “You’re actually quite soft, aren’t you,” she swept him up with gleefully as they left. He didn’t reply until they had reached a deserted backstreet. “You don’t seem like very much of a woman-” She laid one hand over his mouth and placed the other gently on his chest. “Deeds, Peter. Deeds matter, not words.” She pushed him up against a wall and kissed him, and he instinctively slid his hand firmly down her side. She writhed, acquiesced briefly, withdrew into herself, then returned the motion and streamed and exhaled all her young, red passion slowly back at him. He gripped her fiercely and she rose to meet him, before he struck off, and departed. He walked on into the dizzy street, leaving her to gaze puzzled at the ground, touching with a single finger the side where his hand had been. _____ My dear Susan, How many more must die before I am returned to you? I am sat here, amongst green and pleasant hills, but this space around me seems nothing more than an empty echo of my own sadness. It is silly what will bring up emotion, and what won’t. The vividness of a purple flower brought tears to my eyes two days ago, but when Tom died last week, 3 miles before Arras, I felt nothing but an anxiety for battle, and I wondered if we would have extra for dinner. Forgive me. I go on too much in my haste to tell you how I love you. You are my one redeeming light. Yours, Arthur _____ The office became increasingly claustrophobic for her when they had been seen talking privately together. She felt hemmed in all around by the intense hatred of widows and the mature sympathy of some mothers. She wanted to run away from the women-ofeffort that pressed sweatily up against her sides every day. She looked at the red-star-stamp. That would come with her. In her eyes, their hatred for her was the same force as theirgusto for the war effort. She leapt almost across the table and shouted at Peter that God was arbitrary. “But needed,” he replied, attempting

THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016

calm, and reaching for the stamp with the red star then not taking it. She felt a brief urge for destruction. The wooden supports of the office walls began to look unstable. The walls passed back into an obscure, advancing grey mass. They found themselves constantly discovering the present. The fog of clarity had descended. Now the bold posters everywhere made her distrust truth and all that looked like it: stability, certainty, wholeness. Yet she had laid her hands on his core in the alleyway. There was something complete in the world- him. She had touched the unstable shadow cast by his past, she had seen passion and duty rise in him. Past that there was softness- she had felt that, also. She had felt the ripples of the moment when his cause had become foolish and distant. Yet he had resisted fighting in the war, and she knew that had taken great strength. She muddled over what was and wasn’t God in him, not realising that it was not a part of him at all. That day she took the stamp as much as possible, and put a red star over as many letters as she could without being noticed. Again, as in her former enthusiasm for the war effort, she felt part of something. Only now she was doing the uncertain thing, seizing on the unknown. If everyone did the same, the fog would lift. Or at least dissolve into another. She went to Church, thinking to possess his depth by trading her own. Then the Monday after the Sunday that she decided his God was a lie, she leaned drastically over the table and kissed him. She led him into the bathroom and started The office became increasingly claustrophobic for her when they had been seen talking privately together. She felt hemmed in all around by the intense hatred of widows and the mature sympathy of some mothers. She wanted to run away from the women-ofeffort that pressed sweatily up against her sides every day. She looked at the red-star-stamp. That would come with her. In her eyes, their hatred for her was the same force as theirgusto for the war effort. She leapt almost across the table and shouted at Peter that God was arbitrary. “But needed,” he replied, attempting calm, and reaching for the stamp with the red star then not taking it. She felt a brief urge for destruction. The wooden supports of the office walls began to look unstable. The walls passed back into an obscure, advancing grey mass. They found themselves constantly dis-

covering the present. The fog of clarity had descended. Now the bold posters everywhere made her distrust truth and all that looked like it: stability, certainty, wholeness. Yet she had laid her hands on his core in the alleyway. There was something complete in the world- him. She had touched the unstable shadow cast by his past, she had seen passion and duty rise in him. Past that there was softness- she had felt that, also. She had felt the ripples of the moment when his cause had become foolish and distant. Yet he had resisted fighting in the war, and she knew that had taken great strength. She muddled over what was and wasn’t God in him, not realising that it was not a part of him at all. That day she took the stamp as much as possible, and put a red star over as many letters as she could without being noticed. Again, as in her former enthusiasm for the war effort, she felt part of something. Only now she was doing the uncertain thing, seizing on the unknown. If everyone did the same, the fog would lift. Or at least dissolve into another. She went to Church, thinking to possess his depth by trading her own. Then the Monday after the Sunday that she decided his God was a lie, she leaned drastically over the table and kissed him. She led him into the bathroom and started undressing him. He relented. He wondered if that were all it were ever in his power to do.

Stairs

Jamie Sanin

THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016

Every Little Thing Connor O’Reilly

I was made of these same old bricks, ruby red once. Sleepwalking through departed corridors in the house of judgment — roofless — needing something to defeat the drowse. Sheltered secrets are brushed into shadow by every door opened as blear bodies hustle through rooms. Stammering phantoms hungry to be still & still be. There is a weirdness hidden somewhere inside me and it looks like conceit to different kinds of strange. In deep-seated mistaken sight of misbehavior, come assumptions that force themselves true of the empty day falling quietly down the glass, swelling at a touch to the earth and like a sore, irritates the surrounding air, clouds squeezed into shapes more like they ‘ought to be’. I want to let the cobwebs gather until it connects every detail - like detectives do in the movies with yarn frantically flying between their mosaic walls - a blueprint becoming brittle in cellar crawl space, a closet that doesn’t need more hangers, just less coats, a cast iron bell that grew sad when it stopped tolling us home after the telephone found its way into every young boy’s pocket. The mantle with the Galilean thermometer still climbing and dropping. No cessation. I notice every little thing. I don’t know what a termite looks like, but I think this might be one prowling up the wall, with an appetite. Seventeen photographs of every birthday a child spent here. There in them, a lady whose Love for him is limp with worry, wet with needless adhesive trickling globs to the floor. Mother you look so different from when I first met you. Knuckles red like crowd control, sensing signs of dark inertia. I am sick to death of the warfare of recrimination, the finding vulnerabilities easily like light switches in the dark, a bogus and overzealous kind of heroism - made me think maybe it would be easier to live in my mind. I can’t find the termite but I have a clue of where it went I can hear its brothers and sisters deep in the wood.

Metallic Heart Justin Gaffrey

THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016

Forward

Jamie Sanin

Barrier Jamie Sanin

Brooding on Eggs Mare Leonard

One egg crack it open on the side of a blue bowl slide into hot buttery sputtering frying pan Do not be disturbed if the yolk is green or red Color depends on diet One chicken nibbles kale, another red berries One Easter the temperature reached 85 Our three year old lifted leaves of tulips hunted beneath azaleas filled his basket with dyed eggs and devoured a chocolate one the yolk sugary white One Easter I wore a blue and yellow suit a cloche trimmed with lilies My sister wore green She held a skyblue basket emptied of eggs In two months she would be dead So easy to ruin an egg one can slip on the floor or if one cracks the egg too fast bits of shell mixes with the whites Eggs break in the safety of a carton before they come home or die before their time Always check the expiration date Before my expiration date I want to be an empty egg shell floating under a water jet spinning in circles on Corpus Christi in Barcelona Emerge whole in a golden yellow dress trimmed with white fur protecting my delicate insides Tumble to a tapas bar eat slice after slice of tortilla sip glass after glass of manzanilla

Drink one, just one egg cream, letting the foam remain on my upper lip And skywrite this

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Hung-over

Kelle Grace Gaddis My last glass went down on the top note of Il Dolce Suono Lucia di Lammermoor From there I fell upward to the cat cloud, my mouth fur-thick, thick with furI can’t even say it For a second the sunlit tabby arched high, reaching for invisible stars Why daytime? This diva’s done, consumed by fire and sun, over here, adrift on sweat island, miles from any ocean, still looking for that note. I hear myself say, “Can’t be no place” and imagine that sky-cat’s claws in motion, kneading the air into tendrils of vapor, distilling breakfast like a good kitty. Such a pity that I don’t make sense anymore, praying to an empty glass, in case God feels like helping those who fuck themselves.

Mountain Manlight Michael Parisella

THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016

discrepancy

the

clean

sink

need

Wheeler Light

Blank Space

there

sits

bile

tulips

mint

from

quarters

dissolve

sheets

Blank Space order

inhale

bottles

good

high

arsenic

nosed

floor

laundry

Regarding the Bus Ride Back Evan Thomas

The left hand turn lane is a fickle one. Blocked from our intended destination, We wish we braved the storm alone The ten in front of us seem to crave the hesitation. But I miss the open roads of getting here, Not shacked up with any in particular Now I’m waiting for you-know-where And hoping for an on-the-regular. Wait—Two cars at once? I might get through this after all That last one could have made it—I winced. Anticipation is awful. Don’t stop—The others despise us, we’re blocking the box This seems like a great place to set up shop.

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The Co-Pilot Speaks Aloud Ryan Horner

“Ladies… ladies and—Excuse me, can I have your attention please? “Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, hello. My name is Michael Dee, Dee as in Door-ElephantElphant, and I’m sure you’ve noticed by now but the plane has—we’ve had a bit of an… irregular… flight so far. Excursion so far. Trip so far. “If you could, just keep to your seats, just keep to your seats and remain calm. We’ll have it all sorted out soon. “Again, I’m Michael Dee, and it’s nice to meet each of you. I’m your co-pilot to Chicago this afternoon—this evening. Though it looks like Chicago maybe isn’t actually in the plans an-ymore. Or returning to DFW, either, really. It’s all a little unclear at the moment, and we’ll have more information for you soon but. Yeah. We’re definitely not going back to Dallas. “But for the sake of—well, for safety’s sake, we’d just ask for your cooperation. With your cooperation we can get you all back on the ground safe again. We take care of our passen-gers. “Thank you. Now, we’re going to have to ask everyone to remain seated for the duration. “Also, and I hate to just spring this on you all, but it’s the reason I’m actually standing here, standing here in front of you all in the actual physical flesh—it’s just that there’s a mildly pressing problem, something we—I—didn’t feel comfortable saying over the intercom. “Is it possible that we have a doctor on board?” The ma’am in the back speaks aloud. “We’re not prepared to answer that at the moment, ma’am. No doctors, then? Well—no, no questions please, sir—well, ladies and gentleman, please just stay still for now.” _____ “Hello again. The flight attendants are telling me I should have been a little more careful with how I asked my questions a few minutes ago. Do we have any medical professionals travel-ing with us today? “No? How about a nurse? Anyone with any medical training of any kind, or—” The ma’am in the back speaks aloud. “—a mortician?” Many passengers speak aloud. “Now, calm down please, unless you’re answering the question. “I am not ‘required’ to tell you anything. Oh no. That’s not true. If you think airlines are required to keep passengers ‘in the loop’ then you are most definitely not in the loop. No, hold on a second, I’m

going to set this straight. In general, airlines don’t want you to know all of the relevant details, because if you did, if you knew that ninety, ninety-five percent of flights have something go minorly wrong and that pilots and flight attendants and co-pilots are working hard to solve problems behind that curtain back there instead of sipping cokes and telling baggage claim war stories, and that sometimes you get perfect flights, sure, but then there’s another one percent of flights with serious complications—where heavy decisions are made and often made quickly, in the space between two moments, because they have to be—if you knew that, then you might not fly as much. Or you might even be an unsafe passenger, the type of person who in the face of chaos causes more chaos, who gravitates towards wreckage on the freeway out of a mis-placed desire, a desire to know, and then gets in the way of the emergency personnel. You would shrink the chances of us on the crew solving the actual danger. So. No. For the safety of every-one involved. Sometimes it’s best not to know. “And, following that logic, the best thing you could do for this plane right now would be to stop asking questions.” Many passengers speak aloud. “Well, that’s not it exactly. We like questions. It’s not that we don’t want your questions. We’ll mostly tell you any new information when we get it, unless that information is going to be bad for the emotional environment of the plane. “It’s just that…normally, passengers don’t even know that they’re missing any infor-mation. Normally they’re in the dark about being in the dark. “And I’m only standing here in front of you to change that because I’m not your typical co-pilot. Nope. I’m not typical at all. In a lot of ways, actually, but mostly in terms of honesty — I’m like that savvy car company that, instead of just manipulating you into buying the car, shows you how they’re doing the manipulating. They show you the hidden fees, the same-day-sell strat-egies; they reveal it all in a cascade of raw honesty standing in the bright reflective sun of the car lot. Because then, since someone has finally confirmed what you’ve always felt a little curious about, you feel known. You step inside to the air-conditioning. You buy the car. “They’ve sold you on a fiction: that a person who shows you the pistol they’re concealing won’t use it on you. And because it’s unlike the normal fiction, you bite. You still get played, and you grin the entire time you’re signing the check. “…I realize that’s not an ideal analogy. “So I’m speaking to you out of some half-perverted honesty, I guess. Take this as a good sign of my—our—faith in you. Be thankful that I’m being

frank about our pilot dilemma in the first place. Are there any—“ Everyone speaks aloud. “No, no, we’re not—I’m not answering questions about that. “Okay. No health field people. We’re going to have to rethink here. “Um. Anyone really strong here? Like are there any beefy gentlemen, or ma’am’s, we don’t discriminate, who are able to lift, say… a very large dog or maybe a medium-sized refrig-erator? That’s better: do we have any weight-lifters on this flight?” Two men near the front speak aloud. “Yes, yes. Come with me please.” _____ “I’m back again. You knew that. You can see that. You can see me. Obviously. Okay. This will be quick. I really don’t want to ask this. Um. But you all have been such a big help so far, and I’m not… I’ll just out and say it. Are there any mental experts—or, um, psychology-related people here?” Everyone speaks aloud. “I’m sorry but we’re out of time. We’re really, truly out of time. Is there anyone?” The therapist speaks aloud. “Ah. Can you come with me, ma’am?” “Are you a doctor? Like should I have said ‘a mental doctor’ or ‘a PhD?’” The therapist speaks aloud. “Okay. You can sit in that one. It’s okay.” The therapist speaks aloud. “They moved him to—to storage.” The therapist speaks aloud. “Yeah. He was a rather large man. It took them awhile. “I always flew with him. His name was Brian. The airline assigned us together because he was the best pilot they had and I was the worst.” The therapist speaks aloud. “Technically not the worst, really. Just the—just the least likely to fly. The therapist speaks aloud. “Well, I took a vow off of flying a few years ago. Twelve years ago, actually. The other pilots asked the airline to keep me on as a co-pilot—I’m really cheap because, since I decided never to become a full pilot and fly the actual plane, I never had to recertify or pay testing fees and I wasn’t ever going to unionize. I’m kinda the airline’s ideal employee. Except I guess that idea’s looking pretty stupid right now. “And I don’t know how to— “Can you just. Listen. To me for a bit, maybe? Talk to me? I need—talking to.” The therapist speaks aloud.

“I don’t—I’m not sure. I can’t do that. Here, can you talk to them? I’m not going to be able to do this with them talking in my ear.” The therapist speaks aloud. “I’m not sure. You’ll have to ask them where we are.” The therapist speaks aloud. “Tell them we’ll land at the nearest place. They’re gonna tell you that we should land at Chicago, but don’t let them, it’s too big. Too many people, too much going on. Don’t tell them what—that I’m piloting. Please. Just tell them that we need, that the plane needs, lots of help.” The therapist speaks aloud. “Peoria. That’s a good one, lots of runways. We can try it. “Can you ask them how I get there? Ask for— ask for instructions, like an owner’s manu-al, like ‘flip X lever to ON position and bring altitude down to Y’ or whatever.” The therapist speaks aloud. “Listen, they’re gonna give you instructions every few minutes. Just tell them to me. In-terrupt me, that’s fine, I just need to hear them softly, if you can do that. I need to hear the in-structions gently. “Um. I flew with this pilot once, this hunched yellow old guy, and he used to have this joke he’d tell every time he got on a plane. I wish I remembered how it went. He would be wheeling his carry-on down the ramp and he’d say something about how pilots carry more bag-gage than anyone else. He meant emotional baggage. That was the joke. He’d start wheezing he’d be laughing so hard. I wish I remembered how it went.” The therapist speaks aloud. “Yeah. I’ve got baggage, I’m trying to say. And it’s like attached to flying, for me. Really attached, really close. And I—I don’t know—I feel like maybe talking about it to you might loosen me up, free something in me, at least enough to let me do this. “Is that okay? Can I tell you about it?” The therapist speaks aloud. “So I’m not certified anymore, and I haven’t flown—haven’t piloted—in years. But I did get my degree, I did graduate from an aviation program. Although I didn’t go to college so that I could fly planes. But I had this friend, Elena. She and I basically just tripped and fell into pilot-ing. “We signed up as freshmen, kind of on a lark— sitting in an hour-long line at the regis-trar’s office before our second semester, flipping through course catalogs they had lying around. So bored we’d have read anything. We had our schedule slips, signed and initialed with every class picked out for us ahead of time for the Accounting major. Intro to Aviation was something we penned in to piss off our parents.

THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016

“The next semester, since her parents hadn’t said anything and mine hadn’t said anything, we did it again with the next class. Introductory Aerodynamics.” The therapist speaks aloud. “…softly, please?” The therapist speaks aloud. “Thanks. “Elena got a boyfriend the next semester, and I met my wife in a stats class a year after that, and we still hadn’t told anyone. By that time we were taking Aeromechanics, Fluid Me-chanics, Propulsion, really serious stuff, sometimes two classes a semester, sometimes extra ge-ometry and trig on the side. I used to hide my textbooks like porn mags. Elena moved in with her boyfriend. She would do her worksheets in 5-minute bursts in the bathroom until her boyfriend started saying she ought to eat more fiber for her ‘problem.’ “We used to sneak down to the airport on weekends. The university’s aviation program was prestigious, but its airport was tiny, filled with single-props and private planes for training flights. There were eight or nine of the old-style hangars, the curved sheet-metal buildings? Like massive soup cans cut in half and then laid down on the dirt. “There were catwalks way up over the planes in the hangars, and with some careful climbing you could get to the roof. They were high, two or three stories up. “We’d bring a blanket, or a thick swweatshirt to sit on, and then we’d stutter-step as far down the slope of the roof as we could—the risk of keeping your footing was part of the fun, seeing who would go a step further, a degree steeper. But once we were settled we’d stay there for hours, ’til sunset once or twice, watching the pulsing landing lights and the steady stars. The therapist speaks aloud. “She was amazing with the stars; she knew the history of space mapping, of what we had learned as a species over time. She said most people believed that we humans were basically working towards a master pixelated blueprint, a constantly crystalizing model of the space surrounding us; except she said that was wrong, that was a fundamentally wrong analogy. Our map was certainly becoming more detailed over time as we learned how to better understand the systems and bodies close to us, but ninety, ninety-five percent of our new knowledge each year was discovering new things at our farthest reaches. Our map was getting bigger more than it was get-ting clearer; or maybe the margins, she said, maybe the blank spaces around our drawings were getting bigger. Her hands were so large. “Mostly I thought about home. About a center, a reference point in the middle of a map, a single place that I prayed would never stop existing. I

thought about her hands blocking out the stars. When she talked like that I could listen all night without moving. “Nothing would—it wasn’t romantic, not ever. Not for me at least. Sometimes I wonder if she wanted something else; she’d giggle when we were together and it would last a second too long, and she gave me handwritten notes on my birthday where I could tell she was thinking something that she wasn’t saying. “But Elena had a boyfriend and I had Barbara and between us we had this one safe space, where we could shout anything we wanted outward and upward and the only person who could hear was shouting beside us, too.” The therapist speaks aloud. “What happened was we started taking pilot classes, the stuff that involved actually fly-ing. In the aviation program you had to spend fifteen hours of flight time a week for a full semes-ter. Prep time, tear down time, maintenance time— none of that counted. Fifteen hours in the air. “With our other classes Elena and I had to cram our flight time to certain days of the week, sometimes flying three or four times in a single day, convincing different instructors to go up with each of us. “We joked that we ought to start sleeping at the hangar, we spent so much time there. Sometimes after our longest days, when everyone was walking out of the hangar to the parking lot, Elena and I would linger by our cars and then circle back around. A lot of times I had beer in the trunk, or a half bottle of something. And we’d stay up all night convincing each other this was just a hobby, that it was just a lark, that when we got our certificates we would finally have a punch line to the joke. I told everyone I got a part-time security job working nights. I don’t know what Elena told her boyfriend. “Two months before graduation we both got airline offers—adjunct co-pilot, kind of a transitional position. You co-pilot for six months, you never touch the joystick—that’s such a terrible word, joystick—or the pedals. You get paid less, but you’re guaranteed a full-time position after six months if you want it. Cheaper for them than paying two actual pilots. We got offers from different airlines.” The therapist speaks aloud. “Yeah. Different coasts, actually. Based out of LaGuardia for me and LAX for her. The Big Apple and Hollywood, with chances for rotations starting in our third years.” The therapist speaks aloud. “She didn’t say anything. Me either. We just started spending more nights at the hangar. I think we could both feel that something was slipping.

Something had fallen into our hands, something we needed, but by the time we knew what we were holding it was running between our fingers. “She told her boyfriend. I told Barbara over dinner downtown. I don’t know how Elena’s boyfriend took it, she never told me, but when I told Barbara I was going to be a pilot, that I had kind of been a pilot for two years already, she got very red. She gripped the edge of the table, and it shook. She let me have it, too. I had hidden a large part of my life from her. I’d been fly-ing; I’d been doing something dangerous, and I hadn’t even trusted her enough to let her worry over me. She took a cab home, and I paid the waitress, who kept lowering her eyebrows at me. “When I got back to my apartment, Elena was outside in her car. Her head was back like maybe she’d fallen asleep waiting to see me, but when I walked up she just waved me into the car. I knew where we were going.” The therapist speaks aloud. “No—no. We spent the whole night up there, her last night, on top of the hangar. We laid there, and we talked on the blanket, and then, when the sky started turning orange, we rose to climb down. “She died. She fell through the old plastic on one of the skylights and down into the hangar and onto the wing of a tiny old Cessna, and Elena was dead a few minutes after she hit. Before I could even get down and around and to her. It was horrible, how normal it seemed—I would have thought that the colors would look different, that the air would smell different, that she’d make a different face—but no.” The therapist speaks aloud. “But before that. That’s what gets me. An hour earlier, two hours earlier: our conversa-tion on the roof. That’s all I could think of. During the ride in the ambulance, talking to her boy-friend a few hours later, I wish I remembered his name. Seeing her family, explaining what I knew, trying to answer their hard questions. Picking up my stuff from the hangar for the last time. Leaving her stuff there. Graduating, moving, walking to work in a new city in new clothes. That conversation was always looping in my head. It was all I could ever think about, like I had this cloth wrapped around my brain that kept certain things in and kept everything else out.” “It wasn’t the most important thing we ever talked about, I don’t think, but now it feels that way. And it wasn’t even the last thing she said, though it might’ve been better if it was. That would have given it extra weight.” The therapist speaks aloud. “We’re close. They’re saying that one, with the lights? We gotta get lower.” The therapist speaks aloud.

“I’m not sure I can—don’t—we could take another pass around. Can we—” The therapist speaks aloud. “No, they’re right. We gotta do it. “We were—we were talking about where we would leave for, and who we might find there, and I told her how Barbara responded. I said I sat there while she built herself up into a rage, and Barbara’s knuckles turned white on the table’s edge, and the only thing I could feel was this overwhelming sense that the ground beneath us, the patio underneath our seats, was a thin crust. That under the flimsy crust was a roiling dark sea, cold water churning so harshly that the ground was—“ The therapist speaks aloud. “—shaking. That I wanted to sink down into the water and let it take me down, deep. And as I was saying it—“ The therapist speaks aloud. “—she turned to me. And she said that the attractive thing about someone else’s sadness is not the sadness that they feel—it’s their capacity to feel something overwhelming, to be over-come. “And I couldn’t look at her, so I looked at her hands blocking out the stars. And I said that the attractive thing about someone else’s fear is not the fear itself—it’s their willingness to admit that they are not okay, not okay, that the world is not okay. That things are not okay.” The therapist speaks aloud. The therapist speaks aloud. “Tell me softly. We gotta do it softly.” The therapist speaks aloud. The therapist speaks aloud. No one speaks. The therapist speaks aloud. “Softly, softly, softly. Softly. “Softly. “Soft.”

THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016

Two.

Bryan Matos O’ tannenbaum, tall tannenbaum, we have failed you. Your arms, trust and staunch all greened in summer clime all same in winter snow, tannebaum we’ve failed you, once unchanged in seasons tow made cocked in metal shows, spiked sadly in dangled tinsel where, fixed, could be real winter. Where such happiness and love for You, O’ tannenbaum. Our tannenbaum, we have failed you. O’ tannenbaum, loyal tannenbaum, in every mode, I love you. My gaze of you is ever just, in the hoar frost, in the snow. Such dreary winter dress drawn sullied in festive din, when I am told to see you short and set in needled water bed. Yours is the tangled empire of taiga, laurel and montane! Immortal leaf, O’ tannenbaum. Sweet tannenbaum, I would show you such arrival, if you would but teach of your barring bark. O’ tannenbaum, tenacious tannenbaum, in blaring might, you’ve lasted. Have your rootlets given way to tubers? Are you finding crooked form straight? Just a soil berth for growing. Such a solid breadth for knowing. O’ Tannebaum, tender tannenbaum, a coin of patience, please? Even now you rattle as if telling me: “Something.” Shed the whisper of deathlessness and succumb to time. Am I to lay about waiting? Wont you lend me of your lasting? O’ tannenbaum, my tannenbaum?

Disparate Thoughts Kelle Grace Gaddis

Later we’ll learn that the dog’s foot was caught and bleeding in a trap. For now, a murder of crows has captured my attention as they swoop at the grey-eyed goat that’s eating what’s fallen under the apple tree. Beyond the evergreens, workers have put tape around the trunks of trees, soon we’ll see the cars we hear rolling on the road. I stand over the sink wlooking out the kitchen window, steam from the dishes obscuring your form as you walk the drive to get the mail. You’ll gather that waste of advertising and our bills and you’ll come back with a letter written in your brother’s hand, news from Ireland, some good, some sad. After a bottle of wine we’ll laugh and call ourselves “country sophisticates.” But, in this moment I’m alone and dread’s invisible hands have entered my chest. It is reasonable to believe that everything will be all right, even as tears fall, even as you are out of sight, even as I place my hand on my heart to make sure that I am alive.

Emerald Krystal LaDuc

THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016

Dharma Pharmaceuticals Matthew Clifford

Dharma Pharmaceuticals Take two if you wake up in the morning. Dharma Pharmaceuticals Let reality construct itself. Follow its curves though daytime appointments, evening errands, nightly conversations, Lay down to a face smack fourth wall television. Dharma Pharmaceuticals Take two if you sleepever. Sleep deeper than dreams, closer to death, unconscious in the between. Dharma Pharmaceuticals Sliced meat I know how this ends. Dharma Pharmaceuticals Take two for a pick-me-up Take two for a long day Take two just to relax Take two edge off, lights off Dharma Pharmaceuticals Take two and say it Take two and forget it Dharma Pharmaceuticals take take take take take take take Dharma Pharmaceuticals your mantra to concentrate.

Lady in the Water Light

Michael Parisella

Room

Jamie Sanin

Rush

Jamie Sanin THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016

On a Rite of Passage Tyler Lyman

You walk down to the river where there are hundreds of families gathered on lawn chairs and blankets waiting for the show to set off. There is a barge floating in the center, on the precipice of the spectacle. Slowly at first the show begins. Fireworks bombard the sky and light it up with flashing colors from purple to yellow, leaving behind smoke and fumes. Today is July Fourth and, as an American, you are only vaguely aware of why you are here: the celebration of a Revolution. You look deep into the sky as everyone does, necks tilted back waiting for the finale. Everyone is turned off and tuned in feeling the bangs in the deepest parts of their ears, ringing and changing the way they hear. You still only vaguely know what the celebration is for. But the word Revolution hangs deep in everyone’s throats. You hear people talking about Great Britain, the colonies, and Democracy. The talk is an intense mouthful as you stuff your face with cotton candy and fried chicken along the ancient river. You begin to see the flowing river as the holder of this celebration; begin to see this river as something not American River. You dump your hand in the river when a young girl begins to sing, “God Bless America.” In your mind is a sense of placement amongst the fruit of what has been called a successful revolution. You look at your white skin, you feel pride and you look at all the faces and forget about your life for another brief moment, tilt your head up to the stars, just now peeking out against the waning moon, and sigh a bit of relief that the Revolution could bring you to this point right now, tasting the nectar of what some have called Freedom. You only vaguely understand the meaning of those big words. This Truth will invade your mind for the next ten years of your young life. You won’t realize until you sit down in your Eleventh grade English class. Ms. Bac begins to have you defining words, really defining them, and using them in thirty minute timed in-class writing essays on topics and ideas you’d never once given a thought (list the papers – these still exist in folders even six years later – conformity/non conformity; religion and atheism; Freedom; etc.). Next you’re told to pick a book, write a report on it, and present it. Your brother had gifted you a Ray Bradbury book for christmas and that really fucks you up, in a good way, putting you down a good path. Then you begin to question everything in your life when, from Mars, the father and children are watching as Earth is engulfed and swallowed in a blazing flame in the matter of a breath and look into a river and call themselves something new, not

really knowing how old that water might’ve been, losing the sense of who they really were. This Truth needs time to settle. As new sediments introduced to a water environment it takes time to settle to the ground, to the deep part of your sacrum. The movement of the water is intimately involved in allowing the process to unfold, causing the sediments to shift and disperse, collect and amalgamate. Those years have not yet passed but these ideas are something a deep rooted space in you knows will need time, books, food, mistakes, successes, Jazz, hip-hop, and stitches to sort through. The next year you buy your first typewriter, an Olivetti 33 traveler. In your fathers shop, at that desk with a pellet stove burning across the room, and tractors, and the smell of oil and cut grass emanating from the back yard, you type out the uncompleted draft to the first story you will ever write, and it shakes those precious contents up one more time. You hold onto the copy for years, reading it sometimes, attempting to rewrite it other times, trying to write it as a movie, and finally passing it off to a dear friend, letting him hold onto whatever truth was in it, never receiving it back from him, wanting to read it and not having it. You believe it to be a very specific moment inside whispering what it means to die, or what it means to live. It has everything to do with that first instance of waking up that you didn’t know was happening when it was. Soon after you are in meditation and your mind is wandering. Your contents are not meeting the resistance of anything shaking them up for now, for now they are simply noticing themselves sinking to the base as a heavy river stone pushing through the constant current of a river and finding a home at the bottom of the sand. The sediments have been stirring for some years and you believe bebop Jazz is the only thing that can understand your atoms. You believe it to be a space of genuine creation holding a physical place in a mental moment, equating it to something like the big bang, and begin to think of your indoctrination into a language that can only allow one way to tell something. At the same time you realize how this indoctrination works at letting you tell a thing in your way. And you think of your story and how it is important to you, and how it is not important to anyone else. And you think about how the past four years of your life have simply flashed by, and how a divorce, a move to another state, a new direction, a new environment, a new family, have simply manifested as a thing now all-encompassing, and you recollect on those times that flashed by that you didn’t think you remembered and you begin to remember it all, very vividly, and you remember why you didn’t want to

remember. And you think to yourself, I should let these things settle a home inside of me. And you feel a hatred, a love, a sympathy, a pity, and an empathy, all in the very next breath as you begin to feel your legs fall asleep. You remember that very first initial waking up that you never realized had happened and you wake up to the realization, now years in progress. Then you realize how fast ten years can fly by and also how quick, with such ease, you can remember every breath you ever took in those ten years, and the smells and sounds, and you realize how near they actually are. A gong rings after ten minutes and everyone in the rooms breathes back into the space, making eye contact with one another. Releasing your legs straight, you feel the tingling in them from travelling home, and you think the meditation was an utter failure. Contents stir. And you condemn yourself and the practice, so you finally commit yourself to yourself and you let yourself breathe a deep sigh of relief and bow into your water. This becomes your ritual for the entirety of the next Earth’s year. Then it is the Fourth of July, and you only have a vague understanding of what the word Revolution and Freedom mean. But your life has informed it more since your last conscious meeting with this time and place. Now, you are hanging your feet in a river drinking a glass of red wine. You can only hear fireworks in the distance but you are not looking for them this year. And you think that’s alright, that’s the way it was meant to be. Instead you are writing a poem in a notebook: Later this day I’m sure the rain Will cease remain. And the moon will Burn in the night sky Relinquishing from sight completely nearing The end of the month when the stars will really Be shining. And maybe you will see Arcturus Growing and shaking and flashing and you, Breathing, might call back, somehow, Without a voice. And somewhere, out there, or even inside, Something will hear it and Arcturus Will flash once again in your line of sight With its light. And you will breath again, Believing in Life. And you think this one is alright. You think it holds the vibrations that the world has been sending to you. And you think that everything you once believed was important to note is not so important to hold anymore. And you look a new river in the face in a different place and see the same river in the same old place with a different face. But this time you let your eyes sink into a single point and watch as old water escapes and new water takes its

place. And you notice this constant discovery as a thing of comings and goings, destructions and creations: as a figure of the world. With your toes gliding over top of it, the river transposes its ancient form. You think back on the countless years you have wandered, never once sitting in the place you have come to and you finally believe your life enough to notice where you are. You are seated on the riverside, toes gliding over ancient water, and everything seems both new and old at the same time. As you look into the river you remember the Bradbury book and repeat the fruitful lines in your head and you cry some tears that splash into it and move along with the current, dispersing amongst the atoms at an incredible rate you will never be able to conceive of. And things seem alright as you turn away from the water, find a bridge and cross it, and continue on what you believe is an uncompleted journey. I am humn. You say something slight and soft beneath a breath, hidden from everything. Human. There is a moment when you believe you have heard someone call your name, you turn around on the path and you are alone except for the trees, a swarm of twenty Dragonflies changing and twisting in vicious flight, and a fly that lands on your hand, picks itself up, and buzzes all around your body, as if it were casting a spell. Instead of calling back out you do something abnormal, you do something that will change the course of both your life and mine. You go back to the river and look again at your reflection. You mouth your name as the reflection mimics and the wind rips through the trees and the music of the whole world speaks the noises your mouth motions make. Human. And the whole thing seems like it is moving together, and that the intention of the past years was to really feel the whole thing move inside and show you something unseen. And you say the name that was passed down by the sounds of many other voices saying it. That have brought you to this river, looking ancient, to see yourself reflected in the water, finally. And I say the name I was given once again in mimic. You never question the spaces it has been. Instead you let it sit. I wonder what’s next and I take a step and leave the river behind as I find a bridge and cross it again. Again I hear my name. And this time it does not surprise me as it once had. And this time I don’t go back. This time I never go back.

THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016

Birds on a High Flied Wire Tyler Lyman

Caves

Frank Giacoio III Men drink from the walls of caves. Pressing their tongues against the bare rock, searching for drops of yesterday's snow: melted, caught in the light of the moon. Inexhaustible, pulsing, kicking, rushing, "sorry." they say to each other.

Multiple Truths (March 3rd, 2014) Jack Collom

I: & II: of one M aking M any U p U nshaven L ies L ittle T akes T hrusts I magination I nitiate P atience P ortions & L ittle of L ife’s E lse; E legance T hus T hat’s R amified one R eason U nderstanding U ndigested T reats T emporality H omebase H as S eriously. S uch III: of in to toward IV: in to the M ountains M usic U nderscore U rges L iving’s L isteners T otal T oward I ntegration I ntense of P articulars P leasure in L apidary in L ooping E ternities E ntities V ariation C orresonding A llows to A ll L ove U npragmatic to U ndulate S ensations toward E xtreme E ntering S pecification. the S enses

THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016

etc.

Three. (a word to Neil Degrasse Tyson)

Bryan Matos

I have w a t c h e d, and seen nothing. Will your physics feed the swollen bellies of Congo or rip the Three people at a six seated table power from the wrinkled hands of neoliberalism? Will your all sanctioned to separate lamps— explorative missions keep the children of our nation incredulous, boring, smarter to the miseries of ignorance? formed graceless and awkward Have you, Do you, Will you, Wont you as the rhetoric of public comfort. care for the voices been lost to the woes of this beautiful Against a back wall, gracious and savage world we’ve left burdened in the wake of black shelves cornered thoughtlessness? with consumable media. In the shuffle of shyness, We dream of Peace, a hanging light shedding listless palaver. We still dream of Freedom, The radio’s chatter has been hallowed, O’ greater minds lead us there and soldiers and war time— A brigade of blue lamps ache for fresh penumbras where is the sacrilege of worthy sight. In moon times, a rivers bed is rushing in tide, an oceans current, fully crested. Each feather of my own wing has been loosened by age. Each length of my mind has been dragged smaller by knowing. Am I to follow these devouring passions and boyhood manners? Must we relinquish such beatific domain for the rhetoric of consumerist university? Why must my sisters and brothers crawl for truth? Where is the answer for this apathy that has left us fine with the bomb and sensational slavery, with children playing murder; fine with immortal wars, with cigarette cancer and imperial Monsanto, with Koch and Grant and Bregeman, fine with fluoride fine with fracking, with blatant lies in bright billboard colors; fine with infecund earth, fine with our people littered through cities of The Americas, crying for knowledge, thirsting for attendance, ravage for voice, wretched, forgotten, sent packing to the fringes of alleyways and crack stems and jail cells and battle fields; fine with villains nestled in Washington where the insatiable industry of Men, the business of government burn families like ants on a side walk, Where?! I have heard of your progress and seen its screens. Yet for all these sciences, these metallic means of passage that’ve praised and promised claims to freedom of tyranny and knowledge for all we, the people, still shake for compassion, for loving leaders gracious of earth, we still hope for hungry children fed and worried mothers quelled because children aren’t glamorized in warfare, sugar and crime. Will your rockets and telescopes save Uganda and Sudan from the takers of lips, the makers of monsters, Mr. Tyson?

Forbidden Love Beth Cleveland THE NEW INDEPENDENTS // OCTOBER 2016