Emerson Review Vol. 52

The Emerson Review is an annual literary journal by undergraduate students at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts.

All genres of original, unpublished writing and visual art are considered for publication.

Rights to individual pieces revert back to the original author after publication.

The reading period for the 2023 issue ran from August 1st through February 1st. All submissions are handled anonymously. Materials can be submitted to The Emerson Review through our Online submission manager, http://emersonreview.submittable.com.

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MASTHEAD

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Michelle Moroses

MANGING EDITOR

Gracie Warda

ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR

Arienne Dinh

HEAD FICTION EDITOR

Nina Powers

ASSISTANT FICTION EDITOR

Anna Carson

HEAD POETRY EDITOR

Athena Nassar (Fall)

Annalisa Hansford (Spring)

ASSISTANT POETRY EDITOR

Lily Labella

NONFICTION EDITOR

Caroline Helms

TREASURER

Annalisa Hansford

HEAD DESIGNER

Natalia De Zubiaurre

DESIGN TEAM

Emma Albright

Eden Ornstein

Alyssa Sarkisian

Isabella Chiu

WEB EDITOR

Kinsey Ogden

HEAD SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER

Andy Ambrose

COPYEDITORS

Jordan Sahley

Anna Carson

Benjamin Trageser

READERS

Cari Hurley

Celeste Sanchez Proano

Everly Estelle Orfanedes

Izzy Astuto

Kira Salter-Gurau

Leïssa Romulus

Derek DiTomasso

Ocean Muir

Rachel Gazzara

Sara Valentine

Sisel Gelman

Addie Wallace

Alyssa Laze

Anna Grady

Bronwyn Terry

Bryan Liu

Casey Richards Bradt

Clara Allison

Daisy Macdonald

Melina List

Ella Moaz

Emily Jacobsen

Grace Grandprey

Gyasi Asim

Laura Lucena

Lynn Vecchietti

Meg Carey

Petra Wolf

Liz Fleischer

Will Sacher

1

3

4

5

30 ESCAPE PAINTING

Delta N.A.

31 GRIEF, PORTRAYED BY INSIGNIFICANT ANIMALS OF CHILDHOOD

Sabrina Canepa

38 POST-COVIDA

Michael Thompson

39 SEVERAL UNAIRED EPISODES OF THE HIT TV SHOW WHAT WOULD YOU DO

JP Mayer

50 SOIL TALK

Robin Gow

51 INFINITY

Anton Amit

52 NO HOUSES FOR HOMES OR HOMES FOR HOUSES

Kadazia Allen-Perry

53 MOM SAYS WE DON’T NEED TO WORRY ABOUT RODERICK

Jill Witty

56 ENGENHEIRO DOLABELA

Guilherme Bergamini

57 AMERICAN MUÑECA

Emely Rodriguez

58 LONG LIVE THE QUEENS

Liz Darrell

59 OBSERVATIONS (NO PANTS EDITION)

Melinda Smith

61 IN THE SUNLIGHT, WE BURNED

Tiffany Aurelia

64

/WAITING

Abhijit Sarmah

65 THROUGH THE GLASS OF KNOWLEDGE

Nick Shallow

66 THREE GRACES

Kiera Stuart

67 HEAVENLY BODY

Katey Linskey

ON FINDING A LUMP AT TWENTY NINE POETRY

Bailey Quinn

The first vole skittered across our kitchen at midnight — dark eyes, hunched back, thin tail dragging behind it. A week later the sounds came:

tiny claws scratching at chipboard cabinetry and the edges of my ears. My husband said I was imagining things, so I set traps in the hall by our bed, the shower, our daughter’s room, the yard, and the vanity, and check

every morning until snaps yank me out of bed at two a.m., and I’m feeling around in the dark for a lifeless lump, but it’s hard to find what you can’t see, and my arms and back hurt from all the feeling around before pain gathers in my neck until my hand hits a hard, round shape

evidence.

He tums on the lights and I hand Him the prize

He says it’s nothing more than a dirty sock left He’s right— on the floor. I can’t sleep. He says go to bed, don’t worry. Is he sure? He says sometimes yards have voles, it’s fine. He says if they are here, we just have to hope they don’t chew their way through the baseboards into the house. But they aren’t here. He says it’s just your anxiety. He’s right. Breathe.

A week later, the second vole drags a bag of dusty, orange Cheetos along the baseboards of our living room. I finally call pest control and let them dig up the yard. They find only half-eaten orange peels and broken blossoms beneath our trees and petunias — I scream into the garden.

I was right. I knew they were here. Right?

Pest control says their findings are inconclusive. They say sometimes yards bend to the mercy of summer rains and soft piles of dirt freeze in winter forming dips and valleys. Sometimes. Soil is dense. Sometimes. That looks like voles. Pest control tells me not to worry. The house is most likely clear. The yard’s most likely healthy. They say I’m fine. That can’t be right?

I can’t hear anything over the sound of scratching coming from under the deck where my violets were planted, roots rotten and dying before I clawed them from the ground to stuff them in holes where I swore the voles buried their children.

ON A NIGHT WHEN I DIDN’T WIN THE LOTTERY IN GREEKTOWN

POETRY Truth Thomas

The Eastern Avenue vein we rode kept its pulse of honking, signs over restaurants on Ponca Street kept their vows to blue, white lettering upon them, bright as teeth in Crest commercials— brighter even, than the check engine light in an ‘87 Ford Taurus.

On a night when I didn’t win the lottery in Greektown—all 656 mega millions of it, good cooking still claimed air of this village, firing up hope in our bellies like pilot lights on stoves. Every road to ambrosia leads to a restaurant in Greektown,

and we circled them: Acropolis, Zorba, Ikaros: I tell them, “We are here to look for safe parking—only,” and not to let our nostrils get too happy at what we can’t afford: cheese pie, spinach pie, gyros up the culinary ying-yang, lamb chops,

licking chops, fried calamari... “We are going to Burger King, about a mile up the road,” I tell them, “And then we’ll come back, and maybe one day, claim a table.” But on a night when I didn’t win the lottery in Greektown, I hardly thought of it at all. Old men still played cards in shuffling smiles. Young men still led their dicks on leashes. There was no time to rear view jobs erased like scratch-offs or Thieves in the Temple of city shelter nights. “Beware of Dog” signs still patrolled back alleys.

Buses still stopped to catch their air brake breath. There were no plates to rehash days dodging saw-toothed jaws of un-social services. Homework had to be done. Whopper Jrs. had to be inhaled. Children, disguised as winter coats, still had back seat blankets to dive. “Scooch together tighter than Legos,” I say to them. On a night when I didn’t win the freedom deed in Greektown, “Just one more night,” I say to myself.

In Blue

Tomislav Silipetar

J

POETRY John Muellner

When I was seven I could not be myself. I could not be John because all j’s were huddled under my tongue. I didn’t know how to pull them out. Lost children themselves, the j’s couldn’t rope or coax the fat pink slab away and climb out from my lips. Z’s were easier to find. They jumped for roll call, taking the place of my underdeveloped j’s. In adulthood, my vulnerability leaps for attention, but has gotten me nowhere. Not to New York or the windy city. Not even across the street or to the speakeasy I like in Stillwater. My vulnerability can’t even start the car. What does my vulnerability lack? The fuel? An electric current? The motor itself, or even a pair of running shoes as substitute? Once I was offered the opportunity for a hawk to fly toward me from its trainer’s hand and land on my own, and I declined. The beach was crowded, and I was shy. The falconer spoke Spanish and I was anything but fluent. My friend would have to translate, though from watching others

I already knew: wear the glove, stand a certain distance away, be still. On the school bus, a boy jumped at the chance to shame me. He turned around in his seat to tower over me. What’s your name,

he asked. He asked often, sometimes I remained silent. The space shrunk until I was no bigger than a field mouse. What does vulnerability do when stagnant? Does it cover itself with moss to ignore its own existence?

My own feels more like mold than moss, not so much hiding as it is igniting.

My friend asked if I wanted to host the hawk as we walked near the coast, but I didn’t want to be part of the spectacle. I didn’t want the audience to watch the bird of prey land on an arm that belonged to me.

My arm was no more special than any of the previous volunteers, and yet, I couldn’t cope. Kids ravaged their ice cream, couples admired the ocean, and if I’d said yes, my arm would have been their competition. The boy knew I’d say Zohn, sitting there on the bus, and I knew I’d say it wrong too, a self-awareness that surprised the school’s speech coach. I knew who I was, but couldn’t speak it, so I let the boy hover. Mold, like my vulnerability, loves nothing more than to latch on to a home. It begins in a basement behind boxes of holiday garland and used cans of primer, but it climbs up the wall like a fury of jumping kids blurring the scene with their needs. If I would have volunteered, let the bird perch on my protected hand, I could have been eye-level

with the pulsing chest of the winged beast, the red-flecked feathers

rising and settling. All of that natural power, that life, talons gripping me for stability until the next order was called, and I didn’t want to be seen.

The boy would say, that’s not your name, and in my quiet I would acknowledge that it was true because I didn’t yet know how to raise my tongue.

Crabsticks FICTION

Thomas Lawrance

Colin Knebworth watched the instructional video a third time. He’d never quite got the hang of knotting a tie. He sidled into his specially tailored suit and slipped on eight velcro shoes. He’d experimented with laces for a time, but invariably snipped them to pieces by accident. He gave himself a once-over in the mirror, removed a couple of stubborn barnacles from the wide orange dome of his head (it was nearly time to shed again), and scuttled out for the train.

As a five-foot-tall Macrocheira kaempferi (his friends knew him by the more colloquial—and easier to pronounce—Japanese spider crab), Knebworth was quite used to the occasional glance of intrigue or disgust. His immediate neighbors had grown used to him, and he counted some of them as friends (even if they couldn’t pronounce Macrocheira kaempferi). He raised a claw to one of these friends, a smiley greengrocer stepping out of an apartment block down the street. He lowered his eyes as more hostile elements passed by; certain members of the local church had never warmed to his knobbly presence. Two old women crossed the street to avoid his circumference, and he did his best to appear non-threatening. He hadn’t chosen this place, but he made daily efforts to fit in. Invisible efforts that the nervous church ladies wouldn’t even notice. He tried to walk like the people here, to wave like them, to speak like them. His strange, clicky voice was tempered with a cinematic New Yorker’s lilt.

“Hey, I’m walkin’ here,” he joked to a friendly taxi driver, parked up by the sidewalk. He’d known the driver for years, but had never been able to fit in his cab. The driver smiled and rustled his newspaper.

On account of his spindly width, Knebworth was limited to the more liberal corridors of the subway. He was headed there now, passing, as he did every morning, the seafood place on Water Street. Unfortunately, there were no shortcuts — it was necessary to scuttle past the restaurant every day, to endure that ceaseless waft of calamari and crab sticks. It was a smell that used to give him nightmares, lingering on his clothes and waking him at 4:00 a.m. in a panic, dreaming that his own legs had been baked into meter-long sticks of salty aquameat. He looked away from the gaze of the cook, who was leaning in the doorway with a worrying expression on his face. Knebworth couldn’t help but wonder how profitable his own innards might be.

He alighted the rickety steps to the platform. Strangers stayed well out of his way, but a few familiar faces wished him good morning. A train came rattling in, and Knebworth boarded, heading south. He’d never been north of Brooklyn. He had a job in a back office at the aquarium overlooking Coney Island Beach. He suspected he’d only been given the job because his employers assumed he knew what he was doing. They never outright said, ‘because you’re a crab,’ but there was nothing on his CV to imply that he was capable of administering an aquarium. Nevertheless, he did his best, for the sake of the animals in the tanks. He’d only visited the exhibits once, on his first day. The look in the octopus’s eye told him that the dynamic was off. He stuck to his office after that.

He clamped his claw onto a metal pole; he was too cumbersome to sit down. The train lurched on, and Knebworth teetered, careful not to bump into any of his fellow passengers. People tended to wince at contact with his pebbly exoskeleton.

He spent the day scrolling through spreadsheets. At hometime, he went as usual to the staff stairwell—only to find it closed for repair. The diversion would take him alongside the touchpool, where lobsters and rays and small sharks resided.

He approached the room quietly, and flicked off the lights before entering. Only the glow of the underwater bulbs remained. Inhabitants of the pool cast surreal shadows on the ceiling. Knebworth, briefcase tucked close to his shell, crept along the wall, out of sight. He reached the exit and was ready to leave when he heard a tap on glass. Turning, he realized that a bright blue lobster had been watching him the entire time. It said nothing, but condemned him with its glare. Knebworth left without a word.

He took the subway home, extra dour, and passed the bustling seafood place. Gulls fought over indeterminate marine scraps on the sidewalk. Knebworth averted his tiny eyes.

He had his nightmare again. He woke up and climbed out of the bath, water sloshing on the tiles. He stretched; his shell was getting tight. He’d need to set aside a day for shedding, if he could book one off. But not today. He set out as usual, thinking about the millions of liters of saltwater he needed to order for the aquarium (he always smuggled a bucket home for his bath; the equivalent, he reasoned, of a human taking somebody else’s sandwich from the refrigerator). He scuttled with haste past the seafood place—and then paused, and went back.

He could barely believe his eyestalks. In the window, on display in a grubby tank, was a beautiful Macrocheira kaempferi. She was dozing in the corner. Knebworth looked up and down the street, and then tapped gently on the window. She stirred, and stared back at him with bleary eyes. When she realized that she was not, in fact, looking at her own reflection, but rather a fully clothed spider crab standing on the sidewalk, she jolted upright, banging her dome on the locked lid of the tank.

How did you get out there? she clicked.

“I’ve always been out here,” he said. She stared back at him, dumbstruck. After a moment he understood: she didn’t speak English. He had to remind himself of his language of clicks. I live out here. That must be nice.

Two church ladies crossed the street, whispering to each other. It is.

And then Knebworth glimpsed the seafood cook, moving through the gloom of the restaurant, carrying a rack of shining knives into the kitchen. He looked into the eyes of the imprisoned spider crab.

What’s your name?

She communicated her name (it would be impossible to transcribe in English; an approximation would be Click-Click).

Knebworth thought for a few moments. An idea was growing in his dome—as were its potential consequences. He teetered nervously on his legs. Click-Click stared at him, a vision of hopelessness, and he made a decision. Or rather, some persuasive wraith deep in his conscience made it for him, and he was clicking before he knew what he was saying.

I’m Colin, he said. We’re going to get you out of there.

I was hoping you’d say that.

Give me five minutes, Knebworth clicked. Looking down the street, he saw his subway train pulling in at the platform. He’d never skipped a day before. But then, he’d never met another spider crab before.

As the train disappeared down the line, Knebworth turned and scuttled back in the direction of home. Loosening his tie and kicking off his eight shoes, he stopped at the door of the friendly greengrocer.

“Good morning, Colin,” said the grocer. “What do you need today?”

Knebworth removed his jacket. He looked over the crates of fruit and vegetables, and then up into the face of the grocer. “Your help.”

Click-Click waited in her tank. She faced the street, and was horribly aware of the muffled sounds behind her. A sharpening of blades, the occasional burst of machinery. Only two weeks had passed since her introduction to the universe of machinery. She had been scooped out of Tokyo Bay and packaged away in the dark, lit again only by the smoggy Brooklyn sunrise a fortnight later. Not that she knew any of these place names. To her, it was all just a lot of clicking. She watched the cabs and trucks rumbling back and forth, the humans rushing along the sidewalks, repeatedly kissing their styrofoam cups (presumably objects of worship)—and then she saw one particular human running in her direction, bearing a crate of onions with some urgency. He reached the door and knocked a dozen times. Eventually the cook emerged from the dark, one knife still in his hand.

“What do you want? I didn’t order anything for today.”

“Special offer on onions! Goes very well with crab.” The cheerful visitor gestured in Click-Click’s direction; she shrunk into her corner.

“No, I didn’t order any onions.” The cook began to close the door, but the onion man wedged his foot in the gap. With his crate like a battering ram, he forced the door open.

“Just let me show you,” he insisted, barging into the restaurant. ‘Where is the kitchen? This way?”

The cook, seething, pursued the onion man out of the room. All was silent for a moment.

And then Knebworth was sneaking in through the open door. He was dragging something behind him; Click-Click couldn’t make out what.

“Just stay quiet,” Colin said. He unfastened the lid of her tank and extended a claw, helping her out. She saw now what he’d brought with him: it was an entire exoskeleton, very recently shed. Before resealing the tank, Colin dropped the hollow shell into the water. Sitting there in

the murky water, it almost resembled a live crab. The cook might not notice her absence for hours.

Was that yours? Click-Click said, as Colin guided her out into the street. She looked at him closely; there was an uncomfortable, raw squishiness to his body.

Yes, he said, wincing in the sunlight. Come on, hurry. They heard the remonstrations of the greengrocer behind them; the distraction was outliving its welcome. This way. He led Click-Click down an alleyway.

Are you alright?

I’m fine, Colin said.

Click-Click pulled an abandoned coat and pair of overalls from a dumpster. Together they fashioned a garment that covered most of Colin’s body.

He looked up and down the dank alleyway.

Which way is the sea? She seemed to read his mind.

He could have taken them to Coney Island Beach, but that would’ve meant passing within sight of the aquarium. Instead, for the first time, Colin ventured north. He and Click-Click sat together on a small beach in the shade of Manhattan Bridge, which led, like an imposing timeline, into the angular heart of life and chaos, the great city across the East River.

What are you doing here, then? Click-Click asked. She skipped a pebble out over the water, and it sank in a single splosh.

Colin tossed a stone, and it skimmed in several graceful hops, seeming to travel all the way to the opposite shore. I was brought here, I think. As a pet. I got too big, they released me, and now . . . Well, you saw my tie.

You live here, then. That is to say, you live and work here. This is your home.

I suppose it is, he said. He glanced at her, saw her eight graceful legs trailed in the sand. It’s nice, it really is. Look at this view. An enormous tanker was sailing by, a shotgun blast of gulls hovering in its wake.

I think I must have been taken on one of those, Click-Click said, watching the ship pass by, the distaste evident in her clicks. Is there one that will take me back?

Colin hesitated. I don’t know. In actual fact he did know, from his work at the aquarium. He knew of a regular passage between Manhattan and Tokyo. We can have a look later, but first I was thinking we might . . . make a day of it?

Click-Click shifted in the sand, and, without looking at her, Colin detected in her countenance the unique smile of the spider crab.

He would never have clicked up the courage to do this alone. They

scuttled together through Central Park, ice creams in their claws, ignoring the stares of passers-by. They tried to get tickets for the Empire State Building, but it was booked out. After much teasing and coaxing, Colin eventually managed to get Click-Click onboard a boat for a tour of the bay. They reclined in their plastic seats as the little ferry buzzed past the Statue of Liberty. Colin felt Click-Click latch onto his claw.

Evening encroached as the ferry pulled up to shore. Colin and ClickClick alighted, and drank in a final view of the reddening bay. Ships and tugboats rocked and swayed along the dock. Colin took a deep breath.

Click-Click? he said, clicks wavering. That ship, there. It goes to Tokyo. There are tanks onboard, for transporting marine life.

Really? She was clearly so pleased that she didn’t think to question Colin’s sudden knowledge. He felt the acid of shame in his belly. How big are the tanks?

Big enough, why? She looked at him hopefully. Oh . . . Colin gazed out across the bay at the bright bustle of Manhattan.

Click-Click followed his gaze, and then put a claw on his knee. I understand, she said. You live here.

He managed a watery smile, and nodded softly. Activity was increasing at the gangway of the Japan-bound vessel. Sailors bounded up the steps. Colin approached, claw-in-claw with Click-Click, and negotiated with the crew. It was a research ship, visiting the aquarium on scientific business, and they were happy to return a stolen spider crab to Japan.

“And what about you?” the captain said to Colin. “Are you going home as well?”

Colin watched Click-Click ascend the gangplank, and then thought of the greengrocer who had assisted in her escape, of his little apartment, of the friends who couldn’t pronounce Macrocheira kaempferi. The ship shrank toward the horizon, and Colin watched from the dock until all he could see was a microscopic green light.

It was perhaps a month later that the seafood place on Water Street was shut down. An anonymous complainant identified a host of violations in the kitchen, and the inspectors came down hard. At the same time, animals began to disappear from the aquarium at Coney Island. For weeks the mystery tantalized readers of the New York Post, and theories multiplied after the sighting of a bright blue lobster family out in the bay. Shortly after this spate of disappearances, it

was reported that aquarium employee Colin Knebworth resigned by mutual agreement, but walked straight into a new role at a greengrocer’s shop just down the street from his home.

A Softer Side

Erica Catherine Matthews

RAW POETRY Rebecca Neary

i want to be raw.

i want to pull my eyeballs out, and dip them in a glass of cool water.

i want to slowly, and gently, remove my spine and work over the vertebrae, cracking one knot at a time.

i want to scrape just the top layer of skin off of my body, until i’m smooth, shiny, and pink.

i want to cut the dead ends of each individual strand of hair on my head by my own hand. it means something more to be done by yourself, for yourself.

a cut of meat prepared by a chef means something more when the calf was killed from their own pasture.

i am the chef.

i am the calf.

i am a stone plucked from my own yard begging to be tumbled, to be scratched, to be polished. desperate to be rubbed raw.

CHARLES RIVER REFLECTION I

Mark Richards

THE CARP FICTION

Maya

Mahony

In the chilly flagstone kitchen, my grandfather bent over the sink. In which, resplendent and furious, thrashed the object of his fascination: a carp. But would it be The Carp? The Magical Carp, lauded in legend? The Carp, for which Opa had compelled me to rise at dawn every morning of that godforsaken autumn. The two of us donning frankly hideous woolen coats and struggling up and down the Danube Canal and the Wienfluss River in a rickety old rowboat called The Isabella, after my grandmother, who would have disapproved of such endeavors?

“Open wide,” Opa admonished the carp, and proceeded to, dare I say, fish around, in the creature’s gaping maw. Soon enough, he withdrew his hand, avoiding the gnashing teeth, and, with a heavy sigh, said, to me this time, “No golden ring.”

Suppressing an oath (much of the work of middle-class young women in Vienna involved suppressing oaths), I unclasped the little leather-bound ledger, uncapped my pen, and wrote in my best handwriting on a blank page: November 13, 1935. Caught a carp in the Wienfluss near the Schonbrunn. The fish is about thirty centimeters long and ten centimeters wide, rainbow scales, wriggling quite vigorously. No golden ring. Not The Carp.

Back when he was a dentist, my grandfather had used the ledger to record appointment times and patient notes. These days, it contained a log of our fruitless searches, recorded by me, since Opa’s hands shook too much to write well.

Opa slopped the carp back into its bucket and went outside to return the unfortunate creature to the river. At the beginning of our search, I had cooked all our catches, but at this stage, we were so sick of the taste of carp that we returned them to the water. Now that

the huge, thrashing fish had gone, my cowardly kitten, Kugel, rose, stretching, from her place by the stove and wound like a gray scarf around my ankles. I capped the pen, set the ledger on the table, and allowed myself a small sigh. I wondered if Opa would remember my fourteenth birthday.

It was a Saturday, and since there was no school, I had no excuse to leave the apartment. We did not go to synagogue or otherwise observe the Sabbath since Oma Isabella had passed. I worked quietly through my chores for the morning. Kept the stove going. Made the beds. Dusted the bookcases and the radio. Opa claimed he had taken me in to find me a shitach, or marriage-match, in the big city, and one of my sisters had whispered it was to relieve my parents of a mouth to feed; I suspected he just wanted me for the housework. I longed to go out. I wanted to wander around the square with my best friend Karina, chattering away with our arms linked. Karina was exuberant, a little reckless: she had turned my time in Vienna into a grand adventure. Perhaps we would even catch a glimpse of a certain dark-haired young vegetable seller in the market. I had been sighing over him for months. But I started the laundry.

I squatted on the kitchen flagstones, scrubbing one of Opa’s shirts against the washboard in the metal tub, my fingers turning pink in the warm water, and remembered Oma Isabella, expounding over the laundry with a clothespin waggling in her mouth like a man’s cigar. In my childhood visits, her hearty laugh had warmed these rooms. She had been a tall, stout woman, with a blue house dress and a head full of stories: fairy tales, interpretations of Talmud, gossip about the neighbors, and minutely-recollected anecdotes about each of her children and grandchildren. I used to beg her for the story of my own birth (according to her, I had come into the world howling, with a full head of hair, and my little fists clenched), but now I wished I had asked her more about her own girlhood. What had she thought of the world when she was my age? She would have told me, had I asked; Oma Isabella was not one to keep her opinions to herself. But she had coughed herself to death; cancer of the lungs, the doctors said; and now it was too late.

I hung the laundry in the back courtyard to dry. Kugel followed me,

practicing her pouncing. She could pounce very bravely as long as the object in question was a shriveled leaf. I tried to perch a clothespin in my mouth but it tasted dull and splintery. I went inside to prepare lunch.

By the time Opa and I had finished eating lunch, the morning’s fog had melted away. The Danube gleamed bright as a wedding band through the kitchen window.

“Opa, may I—”

“One moment, Freeda. Will you just clean the counters before you go?”

I flounced to my feet and started scrubbing the kitchen counters with a vengeance. Karina didn’t have to scrub the kitchen; her family hired a maid. No matter how much I scrubbed, a faint fishy aroma still lingered. Opa sat at the table, examining his hands. I stole resentful glances at him. Opa’s shoulders were bent in their worn blue coat; his square chin sagged slightly with age, his soft white hair puffed out like thistledown from beneath his yarmulke. He dragged me every morning on these hopeless river searches, and for what? The vague promise of wealth, if we did find The Carp? Although I had grown up in a poor, ramshackle farmhouse, and saw clearly the value of money, I thought searching for The Carp was about as smart a way to get it as betting on a lame horse. Besides, I doubted any amount of money could cure Opa of what ailed him. He missed his wife. But would he listen to me? Oh no, I was just a girl, here to silently scrub his kitchen. A knock.

Opa rose stiffly, hobbled to the door, and opened it wide.

Karina stood there, beaming, clutching a small red box, her blonde hair wrapped in braids around her head.

“You’re right on time,” said Opa, smiling at her. I tossed down the cleaning rag. Opa had invited Karina over?

“Happy birthday, Freeda!” sang Karina, pink-cheeked from the cold, careening toward me with the box outstretched. “Open it, open it!”

Inside the red box was a delicate golden bracelet with a heart-shaped charm.

“I thought you could wear it to your dance tonight!”

“It’s perfect! I love it!”

Karina helped fasten the bracelet around my left wrist. The metal was cool against my skin. When I turned my wrist, the charm flashed, catching stove-light.

“Why don’t you come with me tonight?” I begged, taking Karina’s hands. “It would be so much more bearable with you.”

Karina looked down at the kitchen floor. “I told you last time, my father won’t let me.”

“Why not?”

Her hands twitched in mine.

“Freeda,” said Opa, and his voice held a warning. But I didn’t listen. “Why not?”

“Because he doesn’t want me to mingle with Jewish boys,” said Karina, very quietly, her face twisted in shame.

“Oh.” I released her hands. Before I had left home in the country, some neighbor boys had been painting “Dirty Jews” in pig blood on the farmhouse door when my mother ran out, screaming, rolling pin in hand, and scared them away. But I had thought things were better in Vienna.

“Enough of this,” said Opa. “It’s your birthday, Freeda. We’re here to celebrate. Sit, sit, girls.”

We sat. Opa approached the breadbox. He swung open the hinged lid and retrieved, with trembling hands, one of Oma Isabella’s best blue and white porcelain plates, on which perched a small cake. The cake was frosted in glossy dark chocolate, and decorated with yellow spun-sugar roses. Bakery-bought! A luxury.

Opa pressed fourteen candles into the frosting, lit them, and set the whole blazing confection before me on the table.

“Thank you!” I said.

“Wish carefully, Freeda, dear. And remember to close your eyes.”

Something about his tone made me curious. I did not close my eyes completely upon uttering my wish. Instead, I peered out from between the dark lines of my eyelashes. Karina looked a little worried, biting her lip, the candlelight illuminating the fine golden hair frizzing out of her braids. Opa looked afraid, almost desperate.

I thought of my dark-haired vegetable-seller, his shy smile, his kind eyes.

I blew out the candles.

I was fourteen years old.

That night, after the Sabbath had officially ended, there was a dance at the Jewish and Refugee Social Club, of which my grandfather was

an active member. Although Vienna had many wealthy Jewish families, the Social Club was held in a large, dim basement, in an unassuming beige building in Leopoldstadt, with an unmarked door. I did not, at that point, fully understand the need for secrecy. I only felt a slight resentment at the dimness, the lack of wallpaper, the smoke that curled up from men’s pipes and lingered by the ceiling. These dances were a monthly ordeal.

I stood alone by the wall like the country bumpkin I was, my long skirt and old-fashioned, much-darned blouse hiding any scant charms my body may have possessed. No boys looked at me or asked me to dance. No girls came up and said, “Oh, is that a new bracelet?” I wished Karina were there.

I didn’t dare leave early, because my mother always demanded a lengthy examination of these dances in my letters home. I lurked by the piano, wishing I knew how to play. At least if you were playing, people might think you were choosing not to dance.

Meanwhile, on the far side of the room, at the round wooden tables where the older people smoked and played cards and debated Midrash and Zionism and politics, Opa tipped his head to the ceiling and laughed a warm, raucous laugh. I was glad to hear him laughing. He hardly laughed at home, not since Oma Isabella died. Still, it was a bit depressing to be less popular than my grandfather.

I edged closer to the older people, straining to hear their conversation over the music and the joyful stomp of dancing shoes.

They were speaking in a mixture of languages: German, Yiddish, Hungarian, French. I even heard some Esperanto. I could only understand snatches.

“There won’t be another war,” said an old man in a felt hat. “It’s called the Great War for a reason. It was the war to end all wars.”

“Don’t be stupid,” snapped a blonde woman in a fur coat. “You all are living in a dream here in Vienna. If you’d come from Germany like us, you’d know. The German people are seething at the treaty. This imbecile they’ve elected—”

“He’s many things but he’s not an imbecile,” someone out of my line of sight said. “He’s an evil genius, that’s what I think. He knows what the people want in times of economic crisis. They want a scapegoat.”

“This is why I’ve been telling you all,” said an earnest, bespectacled man, “we’ve got to emigrate to Palestine. It’s not just Germany. The fascists are in power here. Only when we have our own land will we—”

“Would you give it a rest?” said the man in the felt hat. “We can’t go

three minutes without—”

“When I find The Carp,” interrupted Opa, “we will all be safe.” There was laughter again, but this time it had an edge. I could tell it was at Opa’s expense, and, though I had my own doubts about The Carp, I found myself bristling.

“Oh, you and your old wives’ tales, Stefan,” said a man in a fraying jacket. I was working up the nerve to dive into the conversation, defend my Opa’s honor, and also refute the accusation that tales told by old wives were invalid (who among us had not learned from the stories of our grandmothers?), when someone tapped my shoulder. I turned around, back toward the dance floor.

My heart lurched out of my chest.

Standing there, skinny and freckled, with his hands shoved in his trouser pockets, and his Adam’s apple bobbing, was my dark-haired vegetable-seller.

“You’re Jewish?” I said, startled, by means of greeting. He nodded.

“It’s just—I’ve never seen you here before.”

“Haven’t been before.” His accent was entirely Viennese. For some reason, perhaps because he sold vegetables, I had always imagined him speaking in a country accent, like mine.

“Oh.”

I seemed to have forgotten how to speak. There was a terrible, very long, pause. This was it. I would never think of anything to say. I would never dance with a boy. Never fall in love.

Never marry. Never leave my grandfather’s apartment.

Then, at last, inspiration: “I’m Freeda,” I said.

“Mathias,” he said. “Want to dance?”

Thank God.

I carefully raised my left hand and placed it on his shoulder. His white shirt was thin; I could feel the warmth of his skin through it. My right hand, he took in his. His palm was larger than mine, a bit sweaty. Neither of us could dance. We stumbled around, treading on each other’s shoes and giggling nervously. I felt as warm and effervescent as the time Karina and I had stolen a bottle of her father’s wine and drank it on her balcony, singing nonsense songs. Mathias twirled me out and back into his arms. I looked up at him. He was smiling that same bashful smile that made me go jelly-kneed at the market. I wondered if this was all happening because of my birthday wish.

I couldn’t sleep that night. The air was cold and my body buzzed. I missed Mathias’ warm hand in mine. I even missed Karina, though I had seen her that afternoon; I felt I was careening into someplace unknown, while she stayed golden-haired and safe. War. Scapegoat.

Fascists.

Hail fell, rattling against the walls. Soon the river-ice would arrive. First a delicate feathering on the surface of the Danube, then hard, thick, warbled like old window panes, and we would no longer be able to go out in The Isabella, hunting for The Carp.

I turned over so many times that Kugel gave up her usual spot on my quilt and leapt off the bed, meowing her disapproval. I wrapped my quilt around myself and stepped out of my bedroom, into the kitchen. The coal in the stove had burned down to embers like small glowing molars. Kugel gazed at them, her irises dancing orange.

In the dimness, I just barely saw my grandfather. He sat at the table, thumbing through his ledger, though surely he couldn’t read it in this light.

“Opa?”

He startled. “Freeda! What are you doing up?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Sit, sit.”

My chair shrieked against the flagstones. I sat. Opa set down the ledger.

“I saw you dancing tonight,” he said. I felt myself blush. “Is he a nice young man?”

“I think so. I mean, I’ve only just met him.”

“Jewish?”

“Yes.”

“Good, good.” He sounded distracted.

“Opa, The Carp grants three wishes, doesn’t she?”

“Of course.”

“What would you wish for?”

“We will find The Carp together, Freeda. So I will make one wish. You will make one. And the third, we will leave. It does not pay to be greedy. You know the old tale.”

I did know the tale. Oma Isabella used to tell it on winter evenings,

whenever she was cooking gefilte fish. Long ago, a poor fisherman caught The Carp in the Danube River. The Carp begged to be freed, and, startled to hear a fish speak, the fisherman released her. In gratitude, The Carp granted the fisherman three wishes. The fisherman returned home and consulted his wife about what to wish for. The wife wanted fine clothing. So they got fine clothing. Then the wife wanted a fine house. So they got a fine house. Then the wife became greedy. She told her husband to ask The Carp for everything. The Carp said she could not give them everything. In fury, the wife took off her golden wedding ring, cast it in the water, and left her husband. The Carp swallowed the wedding ring and swam away. Neither the fisherman nor his wife ever got their third wish.

Having grown up with very little, I had always found the ending of this story highly unsatisfying. It was sad, and abrupt, and what was all this meshugas about the wife being greedy? It was, I thought, a tale crafted to keep the poor content with their lot.

“I’ll get a wish?”

“Of course, Freeda. You didn’t think I’d wake you at dawn for months for nothing?”

I had thought so, but didn’t say as much. “So what will you wish for?”

“Protection,” he said. “For the Jews of Austria. And you?”

“I don’t know. Could she... Could she bring Oma Isabella back?”

Opa was quiet for a bit. Hail sprayed like diamonds against the dark window panes, in which floated our dim and watery reflections.

He cleared his throat. “No, my dear. No magic is that strong.”

In that case, I would wish for the same thing as my grandfather. All these months, I had thought him a stubborn old man, obsessively seeking distraction from his grief. But really, he wanted protection for our people.

I could tell Opa wanted to be alone. I gathered my quilt around me and scraped back my chair.

“Will you come with me tomorrow morning?” said Opa. He had never asked before, only commanded. His voice held a note of pleading. “We’re running out of time.”

Did he mean because of the encroaching river-ice? Or because of what the old folks had talked about at the Social Club?

“I’ll come,” I said.

The morning dawned clear and cold. Hailstones large as babies’ fists glittered in the gutters. I pulled my hood up high and prayed Mathias wasn’t nearby to see me in my ugly woolen coat.

Opa climbed into The Isabella first, and I pushed the boat out, then clambered in. I did the rowing. My arms were strong by now, my hands callused.

The surface of the Danube was calm. My oars skulled ripples through it, making the tree-reflections quake.

Though his hands shook, Opa could still cast a fishing line. It looped out, a thin silver flash against the gray sky, then fell into the water. I rested the oars in their locks, blew on my numb fingers to warm them. On past mornings, I had hummed a little tune, closed my eyes, let my thoughts drift to the things I longed for: a mug of steaming coffee with milk, a day at the Prater funfair with Karina, a visit from my mother, a certain dark-haired boy. This morning I scanned the water, vigilant, searching for a sign: a ripple, an eddy, the flash of a scale.

Opa and I didn’t speak. We waited.

New York Cowboys

David Carter

Camping in a ghost town in Utah

POETRY

Matthew Wallenstein

Crickets’ legs rubbing, making sounds like teeth clinking on the rim of a bottle. The night keeps spreading, spilling from it, spreading like the wet center

of your body, moving outward, over me. A body swallowing a body, like feet releasing from the earth then pushing deep into it.

Escape Painting

Delta N.A.

GRIEF, PORTRAYED BY INSIGNIFICANT ANIMALS OF CHILDHOOD

FICTION

Sabrina Canepa

When we were bored, we used to swat flies with our horseback riding crops.

At first, it was out of annoyance. We’d sit—me and the other girls who worked on the ranch—in the haystacks between chores, when the sun was too high, too direct, to work under it and aim for flies.

But then it became some sort of game. We’d time each other, how many kills we could get in a minute, a competition for the only blue Gatorade or to sit in the makeshift throne we made out of grass hay bales, the most comfortable bales.

The flies had always been there, barely alive and swarming during early spring and then fat with manure and blood by midsummer. They were dead once the first chill of late fall hit, but we massacred them by the dozens every day until then.

The wide-headed crops with short handles worked best. More

control, more surface area. Dressage whips were too long and thin, wobbled in the air as they crashed towards a temporarily still fly.

I was a decent killer.

But the aftermath of it all. We left the exploded bodies, the dismembered legs, the blood.

Remember, these were just flies.

The hay barn we sat in was made of old wood, stained from storms and grime older than all of us combined. The blood soaked in all too easily; the flies’ black bent legs were covered in dust by the end of the day, blended with the fibrous wood as if a piece of the original design.

I don’t talk to those girls much anymore, but the barn still stands there. It’s been scraped of hay and whatever else we left on the ground. It’s reached landmark status. People used that barn for so long that the government intervened, said that’s enough humans inside, then boarded everything up and put a too-new chain link gate around it. Like it was a crime scene.

And maybe that’s what attracted the other flies all those years ago. For every fly we killed, twenty, thirty, forty more swarmed us. I can’t tell whether the flies who arrived after were mourning or not, bloodthirsty or not, but I know that they were more frantic in their movement, less willing to hover. To let us rest.

I used to sit in the backyard of my uncle’s house as everyone drank and mingled with other family members. He had a willow tree and an

overgrown rock garden that led to a pond. The water was murky and lined with slick algae, but I could still see the orange-spotted koi fish twisting and turning beneath the surface.

I mostly just watched them, but I stuck my hands in a few times: wanting to touch, wanting to grab and hold in a way that followed me well into adulthood. But the fish always scattered, the broken surface warping their retreating figures into something messy and disorienting. I’d wait until the water settled and the koi resumed their choreographed-looking movement before walking back inside. It felt wrong to leave them scattered like that, like the harmony was shattered, like I broke something expensive and not just the reflective water.

Koi grow to the size of their enclosure. This worked for my uncle. The only purpose his fish served was aesthetic: something for guests to marvel at before they entered his three-level, marble-saturated home. He kept them at a medium size, so that they were impressive, but not huge, something to move past. They were below pets, more akin to the crystal bookends or mahogany grand piano he kept in the living room. He found that everything’s value matched its price tag.

But then the fish disappeared one by one; the water wasn’t deep enough for them to evade neighborhood raccoons.

“They scream,” my uncle told me as he grilled burgers and vegetable skewers. I watched a koi’s scale pattern fade from orange to white to black then back again.

“What?” I asked once I processed his words.

“They scream,” he repeated, “when the raccoons pull them out of the water.”

He flipped a burger. Scales blurred.

“It’s like a fucking buffet every other night; the raccoons rip them apart slowly and the noises the fish make wake me up,” my uncle continued.

I could tell we were both stuck on different parts of his story.

Him: on losing sleep. Me: on fish screaming. On imagining the sounds they made, how high pitched, why their vocal chords served an evolutionary purpose. To the raccoons coming back every night because the koi were easy prey despite the noise. Maybe the koi’s sound was some sort of warning signal for nearby prey: this isn’t safe, find somewhere dark.

And rabbits would run back into their holes, fish would sink into sediment, bats would swarm, as they do.

And somewhere inside my uncle would be awake, would be annoyed, wouldn’t get up.

I was always the type of person to look away from roadkill. To avoid eye contact with death, with bodies stretched across intersections, the insides of something left in the open.

The remains of bigger animals never seemed real. They were often off on the winding streets that not many people traveled, their bodies

moved to the side of the road to allow safe passage for cars.

Sometimes the roadside animals weren’t killed by tires or windshields. They were coyotes with a bullet in them discarded to public land.

People didn’t like animals they didn’t raise wandering around their property.

It was the squirrels, however, that made me stare. Because I’d seen countless squirrels get hit, not recover. I’d hit them myself by accident, twice. They were never alone.

The end of their life always involved some sort of chase, a kind of game, with another squirrel or two.

The squirrels who didn’t get hit always went back, always checked on their friend. As if the flattened rodent would rise again, would say, “You’re it.”

Coyotes where I’m from hunt in the sun. This is to say: coyotes where I’m from are comfortable, have evolved to walk among neighborhood dogs and pick their meals from family farms.

Like my family’s chickens.

At night, the chickens stayed in a coop with fencing and room to nest inside. But during the day, they were free to roam, free to get picked off by local coyotes, one by one. There wasn’t much we could do.

Or maybe there was.

We could’ve kept the chickens inside. But what kind of life was that?

I’m here, asking what kind of life that was.

This is about things killing other things. And isn’t that still some type of murder?

Eventually, the flock thinned out to one chicken, a hen, who had black- and gray-marbled feathers and was the meanest of all the chickens. The nicest was the first to go, as these things are.

Coyotes always left some feathers, so we knew which chicken was gone before we did a head count. It was my first experience with death, really, and how I learned that death wasn’t always the absence of something, but rather the presence of something else. Like tarantulas.

For a while, my family’s yard was a collection of the grotesque. Because as the chickens disappeared, different animals appeared. I hadn’t known tarantulas were native to our yard, that the chickens had feasted on them and snakes and sometimes lizards until the chickens were gone and the pests were present and I was too scared to go outside.

My family didn’t eat our chickens. They were there to provide eggs for a couple years then to live out their lives, if they had a chance.

With every new crop of chicks, I’d sit in the enclosed part of the coop with them, taking turns picking each one up so they’d grow used to touch, to my presence.

But the chickens always preferred each other. At least, until there was only one left.

I don’t know much about chicken anatomy, but I know that the last hen could crow, could scream as if she was a rooster. I don’t know much

about chicken psychology, but I know that the chicken missed something, either the presence or the affection of the other chickens. I don’t know much about chicken communication, but I know she was trying to tell me something as she followed me around, making noises that I’d never heard come from a bird, or from any animal. I don’t know much about grief, but I know that the chicken forgot everything about herself in her loneliness.

Post-Covidia

Michael Thompson

Several Unaired Episodes of the Hit TV Show What Would You Do FICTION JP Mayer

What Would You Do is a reality TV show starring John Quiñones. On the show, hidden cameras record actors doing bad things to each other in public. Everyday people are expected to intervene. If they do, John Quiñones praises them. If they don’t, he yells at them. I have been caught by the show’s hidden cameras fifty-seven times. They have not aired any of the episodes.

Okay, so it was October, and I was walking to the grocery store to get sultanas and active dry yeast because I had been watching Bake Off again, and as I’m walking there, this dumb kid fell off his bike. And it was so sudden, too—like he was biking slow, all meticulous, eyes on the sidewalk right in front of him, then out of nowhere—bam. Just smack flat on the pavement. I laughed a little bit. And like, I get it. It wasn’t a great look on my part, I get that, but here’s the thing: he looked just like that kid from the Charlie Brown Christmas special—the one with the orange shirt and the buzzcut, who dances by shrugging over and over? You know the one. It was wild. And like, I haven’t watched the Charlie Brown Christmas special in some time, so it’s

not like I was primed to see that little buzzcut weirdo in every twelveyear-old that rode by on the street.

But anyway, he fell off his bike and I laughed, and John Quiñones popped up out of a bush and told me I was a bad person.

#4

I used my blinker to change lanes on the highway. I was heading home from my partner’s house in Southborough—it was a forty-fiveminute drive, and it was 3:00 a.m., and I was the only one on the road, but I used my blinker to change lanes. It was instinct more than anything else.

I clicked it on, shifted lanes, and then, right behind me, a pair of headlights flashed on, and I could just make out John Quiñones driving this silver minivan, cameraman in the passenger seat. I saw him flash me a thumbs-up in my rearview mirror. He tailgated me for a little while after that, and I missed my exit.

#8

I snuck a roll of Thin Mints into a movie theater. I’d kept them in my freezer up until I left the house, and they were still icy in my jacket pocket. I had them in that inner pocket that jackets sometimes have. The pens, gum, and cigarettes pocket. I just had the Thin Mints in mine, giving me frostbite on my right nipple.

I took my seat, right in the middle of the theater. It was a Thursday 5:00 p.m. showing of some movie where Ben Affleck plays a detective who has autism, which is a real genre of movies that exists—like the only way we can respect autistic people as a society is if they’re master detectives or brilliant doctors or some shit like that. I’m in the middle of the theater pretty much by myself. Just me in the middle, some teenagers in the back row, and this one guy sitting right in the front row. And it’s like, buddy, what are you doing down there? It’s weird. And I’m curious, so I tried to get a better look at him—tried to see what his deal was—and as I was looking, I took my sleeve of Thin Mints out of my jacket.

As soon as I did, the screen cut out. Right in the middle of the trailer for Fast and Furious 12: The Apotheosis of Dominic Toretto, the screen cut out, and I saw my own face up there instead of Dwayne Johnson’s— and the camera panned out a bit, revealing John Quiñones in the

seat behind me, that smug fucking look on his face. He lowered a microphone to my lips. He asked what gave me the right.

I saw someone cut in line at the Point Café. He was rude about it, too. He had a Bluetooth earpiece. I remember thinking, Now this guy’s got to be an actor. People like that don’t exist outside of Lifetime movies— waving their hands up and down and going on and on about “the figures” and “the New York deal.” Those aren’t real things people say to each other.

“I need it Friday afternoon at the latest,” he yelled. One hand pressed that dumb fucking piece of plastic further into his ear canal. The other grabbed the coffee that I had ordered, that the barista was handing to me. He threw a five-dollar bill at her. I didn’t do anything about it. I didn’t see John Quiñones anywhere.

It was December. It was snowy and icy, and I saw a man crossing the street. I’d been watching him for a little while, actually. And like, I don’t mean that in a creepy way. I mean, yeah, okay, it sounds creepy when you say that you were watching someone for a while, but just put yourself in my shoes.

It’s December, and you’re heading to the bookstore to buy your dad some book about World War II, or maybe baseball statistics because it’s almost Christmas, and you forgot to get him anything and you have no idea what he likes, because he’s your dad, and your dad doesn’t say what he likes. Your dad doesn’t talk about himself. But he does seem like the kind of guy who would like books about World War II or baseball statistics a whole lot, so that seems like your best bet.

But you’re me, right? And you’re depressed and cold, and it’s almost Christmas, which always sucks because you hate the Eagles, and one of the only Christmas songs they play on the radio is “Please Come Home for Christmas,” but the thing is, you actually like that song. You like it a lot. So you have a crisis every Christmas, like, wait a second, do I actually like the Eagles? So that’s a whole thing.

So it’s cold, and it’s December, and you’re thinking about the Eagles,

having a little crisis, when suddenly you see this guy crossing the street, and he’s doing it in the most endearing way you’ve ever seen somebody cross the street. He’s wearing an oversized peacoat and a long purple scarf, and he has a paper coffee cup in one hand, gripped tightly against the wind. He’s trudging through the snow, walking in dramatic stutters across the ice, alternately holding his arms scrunched up to his chest, and then flailing them about for balance, spilling his coffee all over the place. And like, there’s not that much ice, so this all seems kind of unnecessary, but before you really have a chance to think about it—about the ratio of ice on the ground to the melodrama of this guy’s every step—he slips, right at the curb in front of you, and you—me you catch him. You—me—suddenly find yourself holding this very silly man whom you’ve been staring at for some time now. And you’re holding him holding him. Like you’re so close. Feel-his-breath-on-yourface, see-the-snow-in-his-scruff levels of close. It’s a real little rom-com moment.

And you say, “Are you okay?” and this guy—he smiles, nods, and he pulls off his mask, and it’s John fucking Quiñones.

#31

I met Jenny at the coffee shop on Hope. It was May, and she was telling the barista about her final project for her fine arts program. She said that she had synesthesia, and she was working on a series of paintings inspired by the aura of Harrison Ford’s voice. I told her that I met him once. I bussed his table back when I worked at Hemingway’s, which was where all the Upper East Side parents would take their kids whenever they visited for family weekend. I told her that he had ordered the lobster roll and a craft beer. She nodded knowingly. We started dating, me and Jenny. We dated for months. And it was so surprising, too, because I’d kind of given up on love. Like, I’d had my big, long relationship, and it had ended terribly, and I’d sort of fallen into that mindset of, like. Okay. I’ve experienced love. I’ve experienced falling out of love. Time to cross those off the list and move on with my life. Maybe try jet skiing. But Jenny was surprising. She knew a lot about plays—about the history of plays and theater across the world—and I was interested in hearing about it, not because I liked theater, but because it was Jenny telling me about it. Something about her voice—I don’t know. I have nothing original to say about it. But I did love her. I told her that, even before she told me, and I meant it.

It was about three and a half months into our relationship—we were sitting at a bar, and she got so excited telling me about developments in affordably filming Broadway shows. She gestured when she talked, and she gestured a lot whenever she got excited, and that night she got so excited that she knocked my drink all over me—spilled it all over my pants—and instead of trying to sop it up with the napkin that was right in front of her, she pulled a tiny grocery receipt out of her bag and tried using that. Just patting me with this tiny slip of paper. And then at a certain point it clicked in her head, I think, just how absurd she looked, and she stopped, and her own laughter brought her kneeling to the floor. It brought us both to the floor, right there with the dust bunnies, hairballs, and bottlecaps. I said “I love you,” and she said, “I love you too,” and that was that.

About three months after that I got the text from my ex. The big one. They wanted to see me, they said. I think they’d gotten into a fight with their boyfriend or something—I don’t know. I remember I was sitting on my couch, and Jenny was in the kitchen making refried beans, and my phone buzzed again.

“I miss you,” it said.

“I miss you too,” I replied. I wasn’t really thinking. I did miss them, in the way that you miss a person who you’ve known for so long and haven’t seen in a while—the same way, I think, that you might miss a childhood home. Even after the kitchen was remodeled, and a new family had moved in—a family that put up weird art all over the walls and had kind-of-questionable takes on vaccines—still, it was familiar, that home. And you didn’t want to live there anymore. That would be weird. But maybe you’d visit once or twice for a barbeque. Use the pool. Drive by one night, and point and say, “I used to live there” to the person sitting in the passenger seat. And they’d nod and pretend to be interested, before going back to sleep, because it’s been a long day, and they just want to go home.

So basically, no, I don’t think I missed them, and I don’t think they really missed me. But we told each other we did. And the second I tapped the little blue send button, the boom mic swerved out from the tiny gap between the couch and the wall, and John Quiñones popped out of the TV console, knocking over photographs of my family and sending my DVD copy of Space Jam skittering across the hardwood. He stood up straight, putting his arm around Jenny’s shoulders as she came back into the living room. They both frowned at me and shook their heads.

These all happened in the same day, and I don’t remember very much of it. I’d gone for a walk by the river to clear my head. I remember feeding the ducks bread. I remember a group of teenagers at a picnic table, spooning flour into plastic bags. I remember walking by Buddy Cianci’s house and someone looking at me through a gap in the curtains. The window was open, and it said, “Thank god he doesn’t have a dog.”

I remember a lot of people running up to me and talking to me, but I didn’t listen to them. Any one of them could have been John Quiñones, or none of them, or probably every single one of them.

#45

And then of course Dad died.

I had to eulogize him at the funeral. One thing they don’t tell you about public speaking is that it’s even harder when your dad’s dead. When you have to say, out loud, to a roomful of people you know (and even more that you don’t), “My dad is dead,” and all those people stare back at you—they’re all thinking, That guy’s dad is dead.

They’re thinking, I wonder what he has to say about it, that can make us all feel a little bit better.

I took three shots of Fireball before the eulogy. I went up to the podium after my sister, who gave this long beautiful spiel about how Dad was always there for her, how he supported her through her divorce, when she was struggling badly with her depression and had to take care of Charlie—Charlie, who was only a few months old then—all on her own. For a eulogy, it was a real fucking bummer, to be honest. But I went up after her. And for the first time, I looked at my dad’s body—like, really looked at it. They’d put him in a tie, which he would have hated. He always said that—that after he retired, he’d never wear a tie again, and I remember thinking, Well, fuck. Sorry, Dad, because now he had to float around forever as a ghost wearing a tie. And it was ugly, too. Purple and beige—like where the fuck do you even find a purple-and-beige tie? I reached out to take it off, but I stopped myself when I remembered all the eyes on me. It probably looked very dramatic—this silent jackass reaching toward his dad’s

corpse, then pulling away. Very Hamlet.

I spent about a minute just staring at that ugly tie before I even got to his face, and that’s what did me in. His mouth was ever, ever so slightly open, and his teeth were stained gray from the formaldehyde. And the sliver of his tongue between them—

I threw up. Right there, right into the casket. I buckled over. Probably killed the mood—I heard a lot of gasps and saw a lot of people I didn’t know standing up. That’s the other thing about funerals: there are always more people you don’t know than people you do. And it’s like, who are you people? This is Dad’s funeral we’re talking about. Dad, whose favorite hobby was sitting on the couch after work and watching Frasier reruns. Sometimes I think there are people who just go to random funerals. Who just bask in all the grief to make themselves feel better about their lives. People thinking, Well, I might be divorced and unemployed and live in a shitty studio apartment, but at least I’m not as fucked up as that kid, who just puked next to the decaying corpse of his father. That’s what it is, I bet. Lots of those people.

So I puked, and my mom ran up to me, put an arm around my shoulders, and led me to a back room. I remember because it was the first time I heard her stop crying.

She sat me there, in this fluorescent-lit back room of the funeral parlor, which is never a good place to be. As places go, the back room of a funeral parlor is just about on par with the dentist or the DMV, and just a couple of notches above the podium beside your dad’s corpse. But now I was settled at a folding table with a box of stale, half-eaten donuts in front of me, and Mom went to grab me a bottle of water. There was a water cooler right there next to the door, but no cups. I remember that. That annoyed her, that there were no cups, but at least now she had a task. She looked determined, like if she could just find me a water bottle, the world would be okay again, and Dad wouldn’t be dead, and I wouldn’t have thrown up right in front of the hungry eyes of a hundred grieving relatives and in-laws and funeral parlor employees.

So she went to get me a bottle of water, and the second she left I knew I wasn’t alone. And lo and behold—John Quiñones was sitting on a folding chair in the corner, elbows propped on his knees, head propped in his hands. He was wearing a black suit, which was nice of him. That he had dressed for the occasion. I nodded. He nodded back. We didn’t say anything. I could see he’d been crying.

I screened texts from my friends. I quit my job, and I lied on my resume to get a better one. A poet asked me if I wanted to trip acid with him after reading at a speakeasy. He’d performed for about an hour—this long slam poem that compared the homelessness epidemic in Providence to the song “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman. It was hard to pay attention. The speakeasy was in the back room of a sex shop—which, don’t get me wrong, is definitely top ten for me, in terms of kinds of back rooms I’ve been in—but there wasn’t any air conditioning, and only one tiny window in the corner that was all sealed up. I was sweating. Everyone was sweating, and the folding chairs they’d put out were the kind with fabric on the seats and backs, so everyone’s sweat was getting all sopped up into the chairs, like a sort of reverse sponge bath.

So we’re all sitting there, sweating and miserable, and this fucking guy was going on and on, rhyming Bezos with pesos at one point—and of course, he wasn’t sweating at all. He was wearing a sweater and corduroy pants and one of those thin, puffy fashion scarves, but he was completely dry. It was bizarre. But you have to support the arts and small businesses, so, like, what are you gonna do?

After an hour, this guy finally finishes his Tracy Chapmanhomelessness epic poem, and I finally went to the bar to get another drink. It was twelve dollars, and it didn’t even come with a cherry in it, or a little umbrella, so you could tell right away it was a speakeasy drink. And I was still drenched with sweat, but at least now I was also drinking. Huge improvement.

After a while, the poet came up to me. I was on my third Sazerac (but at this place they were called “Romeos” on the cocktail menu, which was weird because, like, who the fuck was Romeo, but anyway). This poet came up to me and said, “Thanks for coming tonight.”

“Of course. The arts.”

“What?”

“Supporting the arts.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

The Edison bulbs behind the bar were dim, but I could still see right away the outline of the microphone taped under this guy’s shirt. I’d already clocked a hidden camera, too, shaped like a bottle and plainly labeled “VODKA,” tucked behind the Svedkas. I’d already clocked,

too, the top of the mic guy’s head—the mic guy ducking under the bar right in front of me, waiting to pop out at my first slip-up. I had trained myself to look for these things.

“Look,” he said. “I don’t normally do this, but you seem super chill.” That’s what he said—super chill—like an undercover cop. He got close, whispered, “I always drop acid after a reading. Want to join tonight?” His breath smelled like cigarettes and his teeth reminded me of my dead dad’s.

I’d tried LSD once before with my buddy Zed, right after the whole mess with Jenny. I thought it would be a good way for me to process everything that had happened, but instead I just spent hours staring at myself in the bathroom mirror, and a few more hours after that sobbing into a bottle of shampoo.

I put down my drink. I played along. I said, “Yes.”

I said, “I would love to drop acid with you, a stranger, on this Tuesday evening.” I leaned really close to him when I said it, so the mic would catch every word. He subtly nodded to a potted plant across the room.

But that wasn’t the end of it. He took my hand, led me outside behind the bar, pulled the tabs out of his wallet. It was windy, and my sweat-drenched clothes clung to my skin, wrinkled up at all the joints. He tilted his head. “Wait,” he said. “Wait, this isn’t right,” and I thought, here it comes, but he just put his hands on my shoulders, shuffled me a foot to the left, turned me forty-five degrees. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s it.”

He took the tabs out of their little plastic bag, split them apart.

I said, “The production value is high for this one.”

And he said, “What?”

And I said, “Never mind.”

He held a tab out and told me to open my mouth. I played along. The attention to detail was something else. They’d even printed little rainbow donuts on the paper as blotter art.

“Ready?”

“Oh, yeah. For sure,” I said, and then he kissed me, which was annoying, but I played along. His mouth tasted like eggs, and he pushed me back against the wall of the alley—against the bricks. I think he was trying to be Very Romantic, but it just kind of scraped up my shoulder blades and left a me-shaped silhouette of sweat on the red bricks. And then he smiled, this small sexy-adjacent smile that just looked silly, because he clearly thought he was the shit, but his

mouth was so tiny, so he just looked like a smug mouse. I opened my mouth to make a joke about hooking up in the alley behind a sex shop, but before I could say anything he put the tab on my tongue, which was probably for the best anyway because the joke hadn’t gotten any farther than its pre-production stage. But anyway, he kept his finger in my mouth for a second too long, and I had no idea what to do with that, so I just licked it. I never know what to do when people put their fingers in my mouth. His fingers tasted like cloves and cinnamon, like he’d just rubbed off a Christmas tree. The tab tasted like nothing at all.

When we went back inside—I’d expected the speakeasy to be empty. I’d expected John Quiñones to be standing behind the bar polishing a glass with a white rag and clicking his tongue at me, like he does. I’d expected cameras and microphones tracking my drunk steps, panning across the room as I stumbled up to the bar, vaulted over, and tackled John Quiñones to the carpet—the carpet stained with years of bar juices and dropped olives. I’d expected cameras on me—one left, one right, one above—filming me from every angle as I shook John Quiñones’s shoulders and begged him to leave me alone. Shook his shoulders and begged him, only for the mask to fall off his face— because no, it would never be so easy. And the real John Quiñones would step up behind me and ask me why I had tackled him, why I had resorted to violence. He’d click his tongue.

But the bar was the same as we’d left it. My Sazerac—my “Romeo”—was right where I’d left it, the condensation from the ice pooling on the counter. I’d left my coat and wallet there, too. No one had taken them.

“You okay?” the poet asked.

I nodded and took my seat. The employees were folding up the sweaty chairs, and some prick was being an absolute ass to his date, bragging about his job in New York. I remember wondering if it was the same guy who cut in line at the Point Café, who took my coffee. I remember the chairs squelched as the bar employees folded them up.

The poet sat next to me, leaned way too close to my earlobe, and whispered, “It won’t kick in for a bit.” He squeezed my thigh. He smiled. He said, “I gotta take a piss,” and I wondered if that was code—if that was the signal for John Quiñones to come rushing out. But nothing happened. When he stood up, I could no longer see the outline of the microphone under his shirt.

I dream about him, sometimes. Not the poet. John Quiñones. I dream of helping an elderly woman load her groceries into her trunk, and John Quiñones popping up from behind her sedan. He smiles at me. He asks me why I decided to help the woman with her groceries when it would have been so much easier to do nothing. I shrug. He says, “You’re a good person.”

And I say, “Say that again.”

And he says, “You’re a good person,” and I kiss him on the mouth. I hold him in my arms.

I dream that he takes me to a movie, and dinner after, and the conversation is stimulating. He surprises me—the way he can hold my attention, the way he knows so much about random things. He says, “Did you know every curling stone used in the Olympics is made on the same island off the coast of Scotland?”

And I shake my head. “I didn’t know that,” I say. “Could you tell me more?”

I help an older gentleman at the table beside us with his coat, and John Quiñones bites his bottom lip. I laugh at all the waitress’s jokes, and I address her by her name. “Thank you, Kate,” I say when she takes our menus. “Kate,” I say at the end of the meal, “that was absolutely lovely.” She hands me the check, and I tip her 30 percent, and John Quiñones fucks me right there on the table. The cameras are on us the whole time. One left, one right, one above. “Get a good zoom on the face,” John Quiñones says, and I don’t know if he means his or mine or both. It doesn’t matter. It’s not usable footage. But the cameras—they’re on us the whole time.

soil talk

POETRY Robin Gow

turn me now, it is not yet winter & there are still grasshopper songs to be eaten with a fork. the river you gave me is dull now & i want another one. i need love in handfuls & pitfalls. plummets & heaps. i do not want love in tomorrows & someday-we-wills. give me the garden. the tomatoes & the tubers. thrust your fingers into everything soft. i do not want to be alone as the rain comes to make promises of every bean that will come & necklace me. i bury the trumpet. you could kiss every single leaf. shovel. trowel. spoon.

Infinity

Anton Amit

no houses for homes or homes for houses

Kadazia Allen-Perry

Mom Says We Don’t Need To Worry About Roderick

FICTION Jill Witty

Last Saturday, Roderick practiced death by lying face-up in a waterless tub, dressed in his Spiderman pajama bottoms and misbuttoned flannel shirt, clutching his Dog Man book in one hand and Poppy’s old baseball trophy in the other. On Sunday, he placed the barrel of a water gun in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and slumped motionless in his chair, water dribbling from the corner of his lips, until Mom announced that water guns were for outside play only.

When we visited Poppy in the hospital, Roderick snuck him a vanilla milkshake, his favorite, and Poppy took one sip, smiled, and closed his eyes. He looked thinner and whiter than the old Poppy. Mom put the shake on the little table. I offered Roderick a sip but he shook his head no way. Mom held Poppy’s hand, but he didn’t open his eyes. There was a dish of pills like jellybeans, and maybe we should have woken Poppy to make him take them. Before we left, Mom threw the shake away, which seemed like a waste. I would have drunk it.

Mom’s always saying things aren’t as scary once you try them, so we should try, try, try. Try eating the roasted Brussels sprouts, even though their burnt edges looked like the leftovers of a bonfire in Poppy’s field. Try climbing the lowest level of the rope pyramid, which wobbled like the frame of Poppy’s old tobacco barn. Try playing baseball in the eights’ and nines’ league, even though Poppy once got hit by a baseball and said it was a Christmas miracle he didn’t die from it.

After the cancer got him, the funeral people dressed Poppy up in a white uniform with ribbons and a star and two medals around his neck and a Bible in one hand. He looked plastic, like they’d made a doll out

of him. Poppy’s eyebrows moved around a lot in life but in death they looked like caterpillars, the prickly, poisonous kind. I wasn’t scared to see him but Roderick hid his eyes behind his fingers.

Yesterday, at Roderick’s first baseball practice, he swung and missed eleven times in a row. “Good try!” Mom said, every time. On the twelfth swing the ball struck him in the chest. It must have been harder and heavier than it looked because Mom sped all the way to the hospital, and next I saw him he was in a paper gown. He wondered out loud if he would be dead soon and thought maybe if he closed his eyes for a long time he would see Poppy. The doctor listened to his heart and Roderick asked if there’d been a Christmas miracle. The doctor said he was a scientist, and it was barely spring yet, but an inch to the right and Roderick would’ve been a goner. Roderick wasn’t hungry for a vanilla milkshake, and maybe for the first time ever, neither was I.

Tomorrow I’ll practice death with him. We’ll cover our heads with shower caps and turn the bedroom air conditioner to max, and we won’t eat all day except for a box of jellybeans. When Mom tucks us in, she’ll smooth our hair and wish us sweet dreams before kissing our frozen faces.

Engenheiro Dolabela

Guilherme Bergamini

American Muñeca POETRY

Emely Rodriguez

Brown and beautiful, I repeated in my head as I encircled you, Josefina. Red pen promises: I’ll have you with this circle. How I wanted to see your face on Christmas, post-gifts. Instead I saw Nicki—

American Girl Doll of the year. Expensive, my mouth tasted over and over as I twitched a smile to Mama who I know dropped more than I had wanted so that I could have the latest muñeca; I was ungrateful.

I gulped down questions I couldn’t phrase. Stupid, I thought. To have wanted you, Josefina, when no one wants the brown girl.

Long Live the Queens

Liz Darrell

Observations (No Pants Edition)

NONFICTION

Melinda Smith

Ipark, go into the building, then run back to my car, remembering the text from the doctor’s office about mandatory masks. I kick myself for the tiny hesitancy to wear a mask because it makes me look old. I’m self-conscious about the wrinkles around my eyes, despite the fact that in my mind I am one of those women who says I don’t care how old I am, I am just happy to have this gift of life.

I put on the mask and wait for the elevator. The light for the lobby floor is lit, but the doors take forever to open. I step in and hold the door for an older man. Although, now that I think about it, who knows? Maybe he’s twenty and just has eye wrinkles? No, he’s older. It’s not just his skin and his gray hair. It’s the way he presses the button for the second floor and, when it doesn’t light up, chuckles and says “guess you have to press it like a man.”

Being one who both understands the difficulty of changing with the times but is also a little obstinate, I say, “or like a girl. I hit pretty hard.” I smile, the social construct that says this is a joke, not a threat to hit you, but who can see under this mask? All my smile does is bring out the damn eye wrinkles. He says nothing. Punk kid, he’s probably thinking.

The waiting room at the gynecologist tries so hard for zen. They all do. Lavender walls with butterflies-and-or-birds. This one has a statue of a mother with her child. She looks at me with her lack of eye wrinkles and says, see? Isn’t all this worth it? The miracle of children. I tell her I’ll keep that in mind when I’m on the exam table in stirrups.

Linda Ronstadt is playing in the exam room. You’re No Good. Her voice is so damn smooth. More calming than butterflies-slash-birds. The assistant takes my blood pressure, which is—no surprise—high. I’m just nervous, I say, apologizing to this woman who isn’t asking for an explanation. What could make me nervous? Is it the fact that I’m here because maybe erratic periods mean fibroids or early menopause? Or maybe it’s because in a moment I’ll be asked to undress only from the waist down (which is definitely not a good look, especially because I leave my socks on. Why do they keep these offices so cold?). Or maybe I’m nervous because I’ll have to prop my legs up and scooch down.

Farther, farther, scoot your wide open crotch right up to my face, yes, like I’m going to wear you like a hat. Farther. What is he, going spelunking?

Smooth Criminal plays. Did they ever figure out what happened to Annie? Seems irresponsible to just sing about it. Never mind, here comes the doctor. And because I’m socialized as a woman, I immediately begin apologizing for even being there. It’s probably nothing, I’m being silly, you know, the whole works. To his credit, my doctor is great. Easy going, never makes me feel weird (and that’s something, given the whole spelunking thing).

He agrees there’s likely nothing wrong but offers to perform an ultrasound to be sure (he probably mistakes the extensive network of crow’s feet around my eyes as worry lines and doesn’t want me to have a heart attack). He puts on his climbing gear and head lamp. He squirts gel onto the ultrasound wand as looking for some hot stuff blasts from the speakers. Really, Becky up front needs to curate the playlist a little better. Her Pandora is getting cheeky. And oh my god how did I not even see that box pun a mile away?

Wow that ultrasound gel is cold. I wish my crotch could wear socks. “There,” he says, pointing to various blobs that look like other various blobs. “Your ovaries look normal.” I suppress any offense. Normal, I remind myself, is a good thing when a doctor says it. Put the overachieving away for god’s sake. Then I start to wonder. How can he even tell what’s what? It’s like trying to find shapes in TV static. I imagine a room full of med school students staring up at a screen during a lecture. The professor asks what they see. The students squint like they’re looking at one of those images that suddenly become 3D out of nowhere. A couple of them see Jesus. Then the professor teaches them which blobs are good and which are cause for concern. I apologize a few more times for existing, then put on my pants.

Mr. Old Fashioned isn’t in the elevator when I leave. I walk, squishy underwear and all, to the car. How much gel do they need to use, anyway? I keep my mask on and I look in the mirror. Yep, I’m 75 from the nose up. But who cares? My uterus is normal! I turn on the radio and drive home to Gloria Estefan.

In the Sunlight, We Burned

POETRY

Tiffany Aurelia

Late November 1980: a series of anti-Chinese racial riots occurred throughout cities in Central Java.

November and a girl tongues out a verse from her grandmother’s tattered church book.

Kneads the hymns between her fingers, each verse soft and motherless like a wound.

Tuhan, they witnessed another execution last morning.

Two palms pressed on both eyes but no veil can veil the cries. It stings the city with a heaviness that soaks

their fists raw, leaves them to dredge torn uniforms out of every corner of sky.

Rocks hurled. Torn flags. City screaming out, out, out.

The boy taking shelter in the bakery, closes his eyes as a bottle of thrown Arak cracks open its shell.

I want to see the ocean in heaven, he thinks, as the flame buries his skin in wavelets of mandarin.

The house, still warm with stripped belongings. Everywhere, children learning the meaning of their skin.

Jeering mobs. Wildfires unearthed in the war years.

Fruit store kneeling into the asphalt — its owner’s legs peeking out and soaking in an estuary of jambu pulp.

Cheeks pressed against the attic like hands in prayer

but later, someone traces the outline of a face in the ash.

City shattering: a song exhaled for the last time.

Tuhan, the man is on fire, flames cleaving the air into lunar-red shards. Limbs lifted to the ancestors

because no one wants to die alone.

His screams forever calloused in all the living eyes. After. Unpronounceable.

translations — Bahasa Indonesia

Tuhan — translates to ‘God’

Arak — an Indonesian alcohol made of fermented coconut sap. This line references the mass molotov cocktails thrown during the riots.

jambu — a tropical fruit commonly found in Java (also known as ‘Wax Apple’)

অপেক্ষা/Waiting POETRY Abhijit Sarmah

Since the late 1970s, thousands of Assamese youths have joined numerous insurgent groups active in the northeast region of India. Their family members and loved ones still wait for their return.

mother waited for four weeks three months two solstices until the rainbow of my appetite dribbled into her burnt cooker of rice, now I am the frozen birches hunched against every sprawling town, the swish of damp December wind, unimagined like our hunger for a tomorrow garbed in pink leaves on our long way home. by the Ichamati, I imagine immortality and touch the wet prints of evenings more elaborate than oblivion, which reminds me

guilt is mostly concocted, an old father hobbles home with deep burns on his back tonight, and

the slow sobs of a widowed sister cough through an empty askew dyke—

If they push too far, tell them we are the first butterflies of monsoon floating through the crimson of a wet July or a moonstruck garden of lassoed coneflowers reeling and spilling, from end to end, long enough to wrap the giant moon—

as long as you try, this is the closest you can get to some old-world style truths,

to us, we are named lucky, we carry our people through the fissures

of the meanest red and languages they do not speak. we are the setting desires of the dark season, demonstrations on the wild drives of time. back home, my lover still cross-stitches kabans on her gero and sings about the time I came to the river side of her village. Who am I to tell her to not wait by the Subansiri or prepare talisman every Bohag for

an endless battle? My people sing to me from a place where we don’t number the dead, from where the world is an alien whisper. Every day they glue their ears to the river and wait.

Kaban: songs of lamentation sung by the people of Mishing tribe in Northeast India;

Gero: a type of cloth that is wrapped round the waist or chest by Mishing women;

Subansiri: a trans-Himalayan river and a tributary of the Brahmaputra River;

Bohag: spring, the first month of the Assamese year.

Through the Glass of Knowledge

Nick Shallow

Three Graces

Kiera Stuart

Heavenly Body POETRY

Katey Linskey

A friend in high school invented an alternative to crunches. Lying

on our backs, we held basketballs above our heads & dropped them

onto our stomachs—over and over to induce contractions. At first,

we flinched in anticipation. Evolutionary protection, no match

for girlhood with all its ingenuity. Back then, I thought: pain is just a path

away from the undesirable. I ignored the root of the word desire: to long for,

from the French word desirer. Softened from the Latin version,

to demand or expect something, de sidre, from the stars—

a heavenly body. A small demand, an obedient body. We started slowly, twenty repetitions. I exhaled & learned to expect a bruise.

FEATURING

TOMISLAV SILIPETAR

ERICA CATHERINE MATTHEWS

MARK RICHARDS

DAVID CARTER

DELTA N.A.

MICHAEL THOMPSON

ANTON AMIT

KADAZIA ALLEN-PERRY

GUILHERME BERGAMINI

LIZ DARRELL

NICK SHALLOW

KIERA STUART

KATEY LINSKEY

ABHIJIT SARMAH

TIFFANY AURELIA

MELINDA SMITH

EMELY RODRIGUEZ

JILL WITTY

ROBIN GOW

SABRINA CANEPA

MATTHEW WALLENSTEIN

MAYA MAHONY

REBECCA NEARY

THOMAS LAWRANCE

JOHN MUELLNER

TRUTH THOMAS

BAILEY QUINN