Emerson Review // Spring 2015 // Volume 44

HUS D N BO RLIE A H N C ACO CKSO R A R J A ON IFER HNS NT B N E O N J C E J Z IN ES V ENG HÁVE H M C L A L A IS DR TAVE CHE N A A CHR M R S A T S AME LT AD . CLIF J A N W Z M I L IA NG WILL M RI A Y R Z R OL BE EBH R A EMM

OD

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UN YAM N A FFM O H ARD H C I R

WO HOP

SPRING

2015

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VOLUME

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THE EMERSON REVIEW

SPRING

2015

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VOLUME

44

EXECUTIVE BOARD EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Ashleigh Heaton Allison “Truj” Trujillo MANAGING EDITOR Natalie Hamil FICTION EDITOR Erini Katopodis ASSISTANT FICTION EDITORS Ashley Howard Anna Dodge POETRY EDITOR Aaron Griffin ASSISTANT POETRY EDITOR Elle Chu NONFICTION EDITORS Alexa Costi Hanna Lafferty

READERS Belinda Huang Danielle Landowski J Villalobos Brittany Korn Paige Cober Tara Plocharczyk Sarah Marcantonio Emma Rebholz Emily Hillebrand Lindsey Gonzalez Emily Dunbar Sammi Curran Cass Vogel Lucie Periera Christina Sargent Jordan Goodson Jenna Danoy

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

All genres of original, unpublished writing and visual art will be considered for publication.

The reading period for the 2014 issue runs August 1, 2014 through February 1, 2015. All submissions are handled anonymously. Materials can be submitted to The Emerson Review though our online submission manager, http://emersonreview.submittable.com.

Complete guidelines can be found on our website.

General questions and comments should be sent to submissions.er@gmail.com. http://emersonreview.com Interior, cover, and logo design by the EIC, Allison “Truj” Trujillo. You can find more of her work at http://allisontruj.com.

Printed by The Graphic Group in Burlington, MA. ©2015 The Emerson Review

CONTENTS Blowhole 13 My Mother Counting

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On Last Looking into Grandfather’s

First Edition of Bambi

17

Snaggletooth 19 The Rub

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Redacted 25 Shonen A

27

The Abortionist

35

Four Scenes

37

Matt Lauer is Announcing My

Breakup on The Today Show 39

Godmouth 41 Student Spotlight: Yamuna Hopwood

46

Reassembly

47

Glass

55

Faculty Spotlight: Richard Hoffman

61

An Excerpt from Love & Fury

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BLOWHOLE

VINCENT BARRACO

A blowhole in grandpa’s neck; he spent too much time underwater the pressure of water pushing bone structure to jut out in too many places I don’t know where he’s been his stories rehearsed, cherry-picked so important he doesn’t see how important Was his first infatuation the prettiest shell in the sand was he a coward; was she his best friend has he seen her since the cancer; was he brave with a scalpel to his throat did he know he didn’t have to be Did he dream when they put him under the tow taking him someplace vulnerable and vivid I could believe his blowhole self-inflicted, circular burns car lighter pressed to his neck fog in the morning and oil spills at night how could I think so, this man with my blood I’ve never seen this man cry only push his cuticles back with a knife He tells me how life tried to drown him but not who threw him a line VOLUME 44

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MY MOTHER COUNTING

SANDRA CHAVEZ JOHNSON

She bought a bench on which to rest and watch her irises bloom in spring, seasons my mother spent counting colors (twenty-three) until all were memory. Alongside the lemon tree and the privilege of knowing it’s two lumps of sugar she takes in coffee, again there, my mother watches TV while I pull out her grey hairs. Sácalos. The woman on the set confuses who she is with her dress.

My hair is going gray. Canas— in English, we don’t have a word alone for grey hair. For growing old (alone) standing in front of a mirror, we don’t have a word.

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ON LAST LOOKING INTO GRANDFATHER’S FIRST EDITION OF BAMBI ADAM TAVEL

Your tattered olive spine droops down to graze the fixing hand that comes to stitch it back.

Not mine, that hand, though restless fingers run across Love Ma & Pa 1931 and binding loops of tawny thread gone slack from eighty years of yank and slam and stack by grandsons— one of whom in pencil hazed BABAMLY on your back. I give this grave my shelf, to hide your folios up high beyond the thievery of boys. I sigh at my self-sorry sighs. No snow or slant of winter woods protects the spindly fawn whose mold-spot shadow-sketch precedes page one: by the field he froze, quaking from the gun.

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SNAGGLETOOTH

CHRISTOPHER AMES

Somewhere between the first and second bicuspid, Irene dislodges tiny yellow nuggets of plague and thinks, decay is the smell of neglect. She keeps time by tapping her high heels against the linoleum. The shoes are new, beautiful, uncomfortable. She keeps time by spitting in the sink, thinking proudly, look, no blood. She keeps time on a string wrapped tight around her thumb.

Tonight has gravity. It’s the first night out since the baby, and according

to Irene’s husband Duncan, accounting for traffic, they are already fifteen minutes late. It is 5:30 p.m on a Tuesday, the only time the sitter could book on such short notice. But there is a gentle comfort in this, the freedom to go out and have a drink at 5:30 p.m on a Tuesday. To be wine-drunk and kiss with tongue in the back of a cab. To grab the collar of Duncan’s dogtooth coat and whisper in his ear, I want you to fuck me like a teenager. Then he’d flash that crooked smile of his. The first time she met Duncan she imagined getting to run her tongue across his snaggletooth, and the secret pride she’d feel in gaining access to a tiny imperfection.

In the bathroom, Irene gargles a homemade mouthwash of baking

soda, tea tree oil, and peppermint. She counts backwards from thirty while thinking of all the things that could go wrong: 29, 28, sitter leaves the oven on, 17, 16, baby falls asleep face down, 5, 4, home robbery, natural disaster, act of god. She releases, then repeats. *

Downstairs, Duncan vigorously scrapes a steel wool pad against a hard-

ened coat of chicken grease and thinks, procrastination is the devil’s milk. He slings his tie over his shoulder to keep it from dipping in the sink. The tie is new, handsome, stiff. At first he thought he’d let the pan soak in hot water, but with nothing to do he’s now burning his hands by cleaning in short increments. He keeps time by cracking his knuckles, reminding himself to

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take his iron supplement. He keeps time by checking the expiration dates of the condiments in the refrigerator, tossing the mayonnaise but keeping the horseradish. He keeps time balled-up in the pit of his stomach.

Tonight’s just what we need, Duncan thinks while drumming his fingers

against the face of his watch. To go out and have a drink at 5:45 p.m on a Tuesday. To have a few beers and jokingly slow dance in the restaurant’s parking lot. To grab the hem of Irene’s gingham dress and whisper in her ear, I want to fuck you like a machine. Then she’d turn red. The first time Duncan saw Irene blush he said, “I thought only children did that,” then sang the lyrics to “Sweet Jane” twice in a row. He wanted to be the blood under her skin.

When Duncan found out that Irene missed her period, he was visiting

his mother in Brooklyn. He went down to the basement to find all his childhood toys. After learning his parents sold them years ago, he punched a hole in the drywall, then spent the rest of the night drinking cup after cup of stale coffee in a 24 hour diner. * Stubbing her toe on the front step, the sitter arrives at 6:04 p.m thinking, everything I do is belated. She keeps time by rehearsing her CPR training: airway, breathing, chest compressions. She keeps time by popping her bubblegum in rapid succession. She keeps time as a delicate thing in constant motion: a hummingbird’s heart.

Earlier that day, the sitter was in the back of Bobby Olsen’s 2006 Nissan

Sentra whispering, remember to pull out. Now she’s writing down the restaurant’s phone number on the back of old mail.

“We should be back before 10,” Irene says.

“Take your time.”

After putting the baby to bed, she snoops through Duncan’s files and

drapes herself in all of Irene’s jewelry. In the mirror she thinks, it’s sweet that Irene and Duncan make time for each other. To go out and have a drink at 6:30 p.m on a Tuesday. To talk without the sticky electric hum of the baby monitor.

To play with each other’s feet under the table.

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The sitter places one hand on the baby’s chest to feel its pulse. It is

warm, steady, faint. A tiny kick drum beating out measures of 1, 2 & 1, 2 & 1, 2 & . With her other hand, she checks her phone. A text from Bobby. It reads: “sorry.” * Bobby Olsen drives his 2006 Nissan Sentra 15 mph over the speed limit and thinks, laws are just suggestions. He does not wear a seatbelt. He drives with his left foot perched up on the seat, as if he’s riding a barstool. He keeps time by singing the wrong lyrics to pop 40 radio. He keeps time by eating breath mint after breath mint from a little tin case in the center console. He keeps time as an afterthought.

On Bobby’s first date with the sitter, he took her to a psychic. This

was not his idea. His older sister said it would be romantic, like something from an indie flick. The psychic’s office was located on the third floor of a converted apartment building, right above a public notary and a dumpling house. The place smelled like blown-out candles and garlic bok choy. At first glance, the psychic did not see anything particularly romantic in their future, but when the sitter excused herself to use the bathroom, Bobby slipped the psychic $20. After that, the crystal ball seemed a little clearer.

“I’m starting to see something wonderful.”

“What is it?” asked the sitter.

“The thing you’ve been waiting for.”

“When?”

“In due time.”

“Tonight?”

The psychic paused to meet Bobby’s eye as if to say, it’s gonna cost ya kid.

To that, Bobby winked. Assuming her most clairvoyant posture, the psychic grinned a gap-toothed smile and said, “My child, good things come to those who take.” *

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Things are not going well at the restaurant. The reservation was lost. The bread was stale. The waitress was too attractive. The sound of a crying baby comes from nowhere, everywhere. The pan roasted duck sits stiffly in a bed of warm of jasmine rice, untouched.

Duncan rakes the prongs of his fork across a saucer of oil olive and

balsamic vinegar, then asks if everything is alright.

Staring at the piece of salad caught in his teeth, Irene tries to focus on

her breathing. It’s taking all of her restraint not to crawl across the table and pick it out with her credit card. Instead, she says yes. Separating meat from the bone, Duncan thinks maybe it’s just too late. Folding her hands neatly across her belly, Irene thinks maybe it’s just too soon. They keep time as the silence between them.

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THE RUB JENNIFER JACKSON BERRY

The man last night was a rubber, his palm like sandpaper across my back after our date. There can be intimacy in whittling, but not that. I think I might be pretty. I wonder what I’ll do to deserve sage honey and word jumbles Sunday morning next to a cup of tea— double straw in a coke bottle image of love I want to find, but haven’t. My father was conceived in a circus tent. My grandparents heeled bottle caps into the ground and thrust against each other on the makeshift tent floor, cold under feet and asses the whole month-long hunting trip. There’s always talk of the one that got away. I hunt straddling planes. I thought I found love at a junior high dance. Suppose there was time travel. Suppose I waltzed from sweaty gym to wedding chapel. Suppose I could get to him. I can’t, and no one is coming for me tonight. There’s not much difference between a circus and a church, just the lengths of the beards. I smear honey on every offering and always use a scope. That’s from a hunting manual, and he is suspended in that memory, dancing.

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REDACTED LIZ CLIFT

I met the man who would rape me at a fundraiser carnival, where I worked the ring toss. He was with a mutual friend, who wasn’t really my friend at all, just someone I barely knew from the local winery, and the man who would rape me, I learned later that night, would be sleeping in his truck. I invited him to crash at my place. The mutual friend had found someone to hook up with. Bitch, the man who’d rape me would mutter, later, while we cuddled in my bed, just cuddled nothing more, and I always want to say that though I know it’s not supposed to matter. Of course, that was before he raped me and maybe should have been a warning sign. The next day, he left for Portland and we texted some, but mostly we didn’t, and I couldn’t help but feel disappointment cocoon in my chest. And six months passed before he came back through town, and when he came back, we walked my dog to where the horses lived and scratched their velvet noses. It was Easter Sunday and my fingers were stained with dye, and that night the one word that was supposed to matter didn’t; he performed his own type of crucifixion (rape) then told me about the woman who’d rejected him at the National Park, where he’d worked all winter, someone who he’d liked who told him to back off when he said he liked her, why do women do that he’d asked, and then he talked about my roommate’s breasts, and how cute she was, and I curled on my side, my back to him, trembling, silent, (shocked) and waited for morning while thinking about ways to kill myself, for anything that would feel like a flutter of hope.

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SHONEN A

RACHEL HENG

Bamoidoki, today my father caned me.

I am sorry to hear that.

He found the cat.

You said you buried it.

He was planting a new orange tree. How stupid— oranges don’t grow

in this climate.

Do not disrespect your father.

Of course. I am sorry, Bamoidoki.

Why the burial?

I don’t know. When I was done, I wanted to keep it somewhere close by.

I understand.

When can I move on to real targets?

Continue practicing. It is too early. *

Son, your father and I have decided to get you a private tutor. It will be

expensive, but we think it is for the best.

Yes mother.

Did you hear what I said?

Today at school, Mrs. Yami said that I was very good at math.

Please, not now, Seito.

She thinks that I will top the cohort in the finals this year, even though

I barely study or go in for extra classes. She says I am truly gifted.

If you don’t stop this nonsense, you’ll never get any better.

In fact, she thinks I will one day become a world famous mathemati-

cian. I will be hounded by governments all over the world to join their top secret space programs, because only I will be able to crack the code that will unleash complete devastation on their enemies.

Why do you have to be like this?

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*

Today, I practiced on toads.

Good.

They were sitting out by the pond, fat and shiny. It looked as if they

might burst out of their skins. They looked like balloons stretched tight over. . .something.

Something?

I had to find out what was inside.

Curiosity is a virtue.

So I lined them up next to each other, in one straight line.

How very tidy.

When I pedalled forward on my bike, only one hopped away. I

thought the rest would go pop, like balloons, but there was only a kind of squish. It was boring.

You are too easily bored, Seito.

Don’t say things like that, Bamoidoki; you sound like my mother.

Anyway, I got off my bike and chased the one that hopped away. I caught it just as it reached the pond. It kept trying to jump into the water, jerking forward again and again. It was at least ten minutes that we stayed like this.

Patience is also a virtue.

That leg felt so small in my hand. I knew I could snap it with the

slightest motion. At the same time, I could feel how easy it would be to part my finger and thumb. Set it free.

But you did not.

When I got bored, I picked it up and brought it close to my face,

close enough to smell. I did with my hands what I had done with my wheels before.

Let me guess— it was boring?

It was different this time. I could see its eyes starting to pop out.

I could feel its legs kicking against my arms, scratching my wrists and drawing blood. I could taste its slimy, cold skin.

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I see.

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THE EMERSON REVIEW

The other frogs— they were just things that went squish. They were

already dead. This one was alive.

You are learning.

It was like I knew him. I felt— I felt that—

That you only really know something when you have turned it inside

out.

Do you think everyone has someone like you inside of them,

Bamoidoki?

I only know what is inside of you, Seito. *

Who’s your friend, Seito?

This is Keiko. Keiko, this is my mother.

It’s very nice to meet you, ma’am. I’ve heard so much about you.

Ah? My son never tells me about his friends. Sometimes I feel like I

know nothing about his life.

Don’t exaggerate, mother. Keiko, don’t listen to her, she likes to ex-

aggerate.

That’s funny! He talks about you all the time. My mother this, my

mother that. It’s very sweet. Most boys aren’t that sweet.

That’s very kind. So how did you two become friends?

We sit together in art class. Keiko helped me with painting.

He was painting people’s lips blue, instead of red! People’s lips aren’t

blue, everyone knows they’re red.

How nice of you, Keiko. I suppose he forgot. Seito can be quite

forgetful sometimes.

I am not forgetful.

Silly, of course you are! Who knows what goes on inside that head of

yours?

I’m glad my son has you as a friend. So what are you two up to this

afternoon?

Nothing.

What do you mean, nothing? We’re going to the arcade! Seito’s

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teaching me how to play a racing game.

Oh, dear. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be out shopping with

your girlfriends? Seito, you really shouldn’t be bullying Keiko like this.

You don’t understand anything. She’s not that kind of girl. Keiko

likes arcade games.

Don’t worry. Once we’re done, I get to pick what we do next! *

Seito, come inside and sing with us!

I told you, I don’t like karaoke.

Why not? You are so weird sometimes! Everyone likes karaoke.

How do you know?

What?

I mean, Keiko, how do you know what everyone likes?

I don’t know. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like karaoke. I guess

I’ve never met anyone like you.

There must be some people who don’t like karaoke.

You’re right, there must be. I’ve never thought of it before.

Why are you smiling at me like that?

Am I? I guess I’m just happy.

I see.

Come on, do you want to come inside? Everyone’s waiting!

No.

Okay then.

You’re not going back in?

I’ll stay here with you.

Won’t you be bored?

No, I like sitting here.

Don’t you want to sing?

You don’t. I won’t make you. *

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You have not been practicing, Seito.

Oh, Bamoidoki.

Busy?

I’ve been seeing Keiko a lot. She’s teaching me how to sing.

Keiko. That’s a pretty name.

She’s not very pretty herself. Too chubby. But I like her anyway.

And you are learning how to sing?

Yes. Keiko has a karaoke machine at her house. She says I’m improv-

ing every day.

And are you?

Keiko’s a good friend.

Am I not your friend?

That is not what I would call you, Bamoidoki.

What is a friend, Seito?

I don’t really know. Someone you like and who likes you.

I see. How do you know Keiko likes you?

She seems to. She is always smiling.

How do you know what she feels? Don’t you want to find out?

Of course, why do you think I spend so much time with her? But

I’ve also been busy with extra math classes. I’m finally getting better at algebra.

You are a mathematical genius. We’ve always known that.

Well—

Your talents are unquestionable. Merely underappreciated by the

masses.

Bamoidoki, I’m really bad at math. It’s okay. Keiko says it’s okay. Ev-

eryone’s good at some things and bad at others. We can always improve.

We can always improve. Keiko said that, did she?

She’s very hardworking. You know, she’s bad at biology, but she

doesn’t give up.

How touching.

We study together after school every day now.

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Diligence is a virtue.

Why are you always talking about virtues?

You said she was chubby?

She has really fat, white cheeks. It’s cute. I make fun of her for look-

ing like a hamster.

Or a balloon, maybe?

Yes! Or a balloon. She looks as round as a balloon sometimes.

A round, blown up balloon.

That’s funny, Bamoidoki. She’d find that funny, I think.

Will you tell her that she looks like a balloon?

Yes, I’ll tell her tomorrow.

Or I could tell her myself.

You?

Yes. I’d like to meet her. Keiko.

I don’t think that would be a good idea.

We could go right now. You could ride your bike there.

I don’t need my bike, she lives just down the street.

Oh yes, you don’t need your bike. It’s better when you use your

hands.

What?

Didn’t you say you wanted to get to know her better? Find out what’s

inside?

I didn’t say that.

Of course you did. Remember what else you said?

What did I say?

Your mother was right— you’re a forgetful boy. Luckily, you have

me. I remember everything.

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I’m not forgetful.

Silly, who knows what goes on inside that head of yours?

Stop it. You don’t know anything.

The other ones— they were just things that went squish.

I didn’t say that.

This one— this one was alive.

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THE EMERSON REVIEW

No. No, it’s different now. Keiko’s my friend now.

Yes, but why is she always smiling? Don’t you want to know why?

She’s just a happy person. She likes me.

If you don’t want to know, that’s fine. But I think I know why.

Why?

Oh, never mind.

Tell me.

She’s just a happy person, after all.

Please, Bamoidoki.

Do I think everyone has someone like me inside of them?

You said you only knew what was inside of me.

Yes. It is just a hypothesis, after all.

What is? That she has someone else inside of her?

Perhaps.

Someone like you?

I couldn’t possibly know.

Who do you think it is?

I don’t know, Seito. Who do you think it is?

I think there is only one way to find out.

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THE ABORTIONIST CHARLIE BONDHUS

This is the womb, shaped like a bell jar and just as soundless.

The cohering tissue cannot speak, nor can the factory-pressed organs sing, even as the cells dance their self-replicating tango in a darkened room. My curette cuts the darkness, scraping the uterine wall— edges of a jar containing a conglomeration which dances between human and not-yet, soundless compendium of thin skin, soft organs, a body as fleeting and insubstantial as speech.

What has been vacuumed out does not speak.

It simply lies, shapeless, a dark red doppelgänger, uncanny and organic.

This is a problem that could fit into a jar, the kind of trouble that is small, soundless, easily removed by the crisp dance of cannula, curette, forceps. In the evening I dance with my wife at the hospital benefit, not speaking about my work or the aspirator’s hiss, which sounds less like machine and more like threat. The lights darken and we waltz past faces blurry as specimen jars filled with formaldehyde and magnified organs,

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while a five-piece band plays as a single organism.

“Do no harm” is a dance through shadows, and each step is jarring.

I say that a woman’s body is a holy enormity, speaking to my wife from the other side of the bed; it is dark and I touch her soundless belly. When the phone rings at 3 a.m. the receiver is soundless, and then a frenzied voice calls me murderer, organ-thief, names her name, threatens my life. I get up, passing through dark rooms, to the kitchen, where the stove light dances on the linoleum. “A woman’s body is a holy enormity.” I speak to nobody in particular, my sleep-scratched voice abrasive, jarring.

Lurching about in a soundless, shuffling dance, I reorganize shelves, thinking about my wife, my work. Nothing speaks but darkness. Nothing listens but the unscrewed ears of jars.

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FOUR SCENES

AM RINGWALT

1 I find you wine-filled, bruised, pissing in a forest. You tell me about punching your father, your fist in the wall.

About buffalos and lilac fields and mansions in Michigan.

We speak of death: my grandmother finding her son limp in the evening light. Maybe she carried him through the Grand Canyon, we say. Maybe she danced with closed eyes in his empty bedroom. Slow sway, catastrophic loss.

2 My brother is born in the late 90s. My grandmother visits from California— we name him after her dead son.

There have always been connections: the way my brother tried to die in our family home in Michigan. The way I see him in dreams holding a knife and wearing hospital cotton. His name like a curse— stopped heart, body slack. My brother, a hologram on the moon. Some desert set on fire.

3 You’re pissing in my bathroom on the Fourth of July, the power out. We drink cheap vodka out of my grandmother’s glasses.

There’s blue silk on the bed, my tan button-down with buffalo embroidery on the floor. You take off your clothes, your body warm. When I move on top of you the silk underneath us feels like water. I pretend to swim, that you’re a spirit flooding through the lake. I fall out of bed, bruise on wood floor, sing for my shin cut open.

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4 The day before my brother is hospitalized, I have a dream.

You and I go to California, drink honey and wine, eat a loaf of bread. We wade in the sea and you come into me, say you want to drown in lilac. That I could be a garden.

Then, my brother calls me, says he’s hurt. If I don’t come home in time it’s my fault. His voice metallic, already a haunt.

My lungs flooded with honey.

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MATT LAUER IS ANNOUNCING MY BREAKUP ON THE TODAY SHOW EMMA REBHOLZ

It starts with a fanfare, regal but familiar, just like the faces that grace the living room every morning— our extended broadcasting family.

From NBC News, this is Today, live from studio 1A in Rockefeller Plaza.

Matt Lauer does not give a shit about my grieving period.

He’s smiling, I catch him doing it, but it’s gone in an instant.

He has been doing this for so long that he can snap right into it, take everything that happened off-screen, and just forget about it.

I want to ask him how he does it, how he turns off that smile to say “good morning” the exact same way

every day.

He touches his tie, cobalt blue, one like my dad might wear.

I want to ask him where he got it, want to stall him, want try anything to delay the inevitable, just like he’s about to tell me I already did, but he jumps right into the headline.

Recent Breakup Leaves Girl Lonely and Insecure.

Witnesses Report Mascara Stains and Sad Indie Music.

Text Message Reads as Follows: I just don’t think I can do this anymore I want to tell him that there are more important things for him to be

reporting about.

That contrary to popular belief, this breakup is not the end of the world,

but he doesn’t hear me.

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In a way, I’m thankful that he’s laying out the cold, hard facts.

Two years ended with twenty three text messages, one oversized winter jacket, and no slow dances.

It’s just a laundry list.

He’s only reporting a body count, but there are no heroes or villains in this story.

No one is trying to take a side.

Matt Lauer is just reading the headline.

He doesn’t want to know why it took me a week to tell my friends and another to tell my parents.

He doesn’t want to know why I had to break CDs in half and clear notes out my drawers.

It’s just a laundry list.

Twenty three text messages, one oversized winter jacket, and three trash bags cleared out of my room.

Matt Lauer is a lot like you.

He has been doing this for so long that he can snap right into it.

He forgets everything that happened off-screen, and says “good morning” the exact same way every day.

I want to ask you how you do it.

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GODMOUTH

WILLIAM JAMES

Some part of you knows you were meant for this— to peel yourself open, a too-ripe orange splitting apart & spilling the sun of your insides out.

You’re shivering, overflowing with light until your eyes threaten to burst.

Songbirds sit poised at the edge of your throat. Seeking permission to fly.

You belong here, yet you quake in heavy boots. Head bowed in reverence.

Feeling every pair of eyes before you peering with the glare of a cruel king.

You have no expectation of mercy, believe there is no ally to be found here. Step forward, stand before the jury & recognize your brilliance— you have already conquered a monster more fearsome than your mortality.

You have earned this audience, the court now stands ready to hear your petition.

Swallow the apologies. Better yet, unlatch the cage you keep them in, swing open the gate, set free the cords that tie down your shout. They serve no

purpose now.

Full-throat your roar. You are holy, every utterance a psalm unto itself.

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FACULTY STUDENT SPOTLIGHTS

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT: YAMUNA HOPWOOD Yamuna Hopwood is a writer, tree killer, and aspiring nice person. She graduated from Emerson in December 2014, and now works at an ad agency in downtown Boston where she continues to write and kill trees, only now at a desk, in adherence to a business casual dress code. In her free time she drinks gin and tonic, reads flash fiction, and sits on her couch in yoga pants, trying to convince herself into actually going to yoga. If you like, you can reach her at yamuna@mac.com.

REASSEMBLY YAMUNA HOPWOOD

I want to feel hungry the same way Wes feels hungry when he swivels up to the host stand with an earthquake in his hands. I like him best shaky, when his eyes begin to stutter. When he’s rubbed raw and ruined. Chewing through sugar-free gum by the packful. On nights like this, he forgets the soup specials. He smashes trays of margaritas he doesn’t replace, and spills half-smoked boxes of cigarettes across the host stand when I ask him if he’s going to be okay.

“I’m just peachy,” he says, stumbling back into the dining room. “I just

need five minutes first.” And the pack comes out again.

I know it isn’t his fault. It’s the heat in them. The smoke in them. He

says they followed him here from a junior high bathroom stall in Fort Lauderdale where, eight years ago, he bought two Camels and a matchbox with his weekly allowance.

I have never needed anything the way Wes needs his cigarettes. I

wouldn’t know how to start. Or how to feel the things he feels. They send him blazing down highways to the nearest gas station. They drag him out the back door during half-a-day shifts.

Wes spends most of his time asking me for smoke breaks. And since

all I want is for people to like me, I spend most of my time giving into him.

When he’s hungry enough, Wes will tell me just about anything. The two of us work doubles when a snowstorm hits in January. The schools close.

The trains stop. And the restaurant puts us in a hotel inside the shopping mall. Two to a room. For half a week, we play poker with the bus boys for tips, but once Wes runs out of cigarettes, he can’t sit still anymore. So, he tells me his life story floating up and down escalators. I tell him mine, but he won’t listen. He’s too nervous not to talk. His hands shake when he stops, even just to catch his breath. And I give in because I have to. I nod. I laugh. I listen. And I speak when it makes sense to, but I can’t help

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but wonder what it would take, to hear my life story. If I’d have to shake as hard as he does.

When they clear the streets the following afternoon, I go home and

Wes reassembles himself inside the convenience store next to The Cheesecake Factory. “See you,” says Wes, on his way out the door. I wave, but secretly, I want to go with him. I’d give a lot, to be honest, to be as hungry as him. To shiver in the back alley behind the restaurant with Wes. To make eye contact with him in a cloud of smoke and to know that, for now, we are both okay.

And you could say it’s a bad idea. I’ve seen enough commercials to

know that. Black lungs next to pink lungs. A celebrity off the silver screen with a hole in his throat. I sometimes wonder, however, if addiction might be worth it. I mean, it’s something you can count on. It certainly gets you noticed. It can even give you a personality at a house party, where nobody knows you, and nobody tries. Just find the back door— most likely through the kitchen— squeeze onto the porch, bum a lighter, and there you are.

I light them carefully. Drop the wrapper in a peace sign. Join the con-

versation. Laugh when I’m supposed to withdraw into myself and suck in, and in, and in, until I go dizzy and cough it out onto the grass below. If anyone asks, I say I’m getting over a cold, but the truth is, I can’t take it. It doesn’t matter how many packs I convince myself into. I still feel on edge.

I still feel as in control as I was in the first place.

Sometimes, I even channel Wes. I take deep breaths. I let my shoul-

ders fall back, but I feel no cleaner crushing ash into a saucer. I don’t tell Wes I’ve tried to start. He wouldn’t understand. He’d tell me I’m crazy.

He’d go behind the restaurant for a smoke break or two, and he’d refuse to listen to my side of the story because our conversations have nothing to do with me.

I wonder if, perhaps, you have to want to be an addict. You’ve got to

give it permission. Invite it in. Pour it a coffee. Or perhaps, it’s a mindset I’m too anxious to afford. But Wes— he does it right. He comes back a different person. He straightens my shirt collars. He pushes hair behind my ear. He sings Jay-Z over the classical music played on repeat during dinner hours.

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“Just let go or something,” he tells me, time and time again, from

across the host stand. But he doesn’t tell me what to do with my hands once they’re free.

Grace tells me that too, every Friday night at seven, when she wings out my eyeliner on the living room ottoman. “Don’t think tonight, Yamuna,” she says, pulling at my eyelid. “Don’t think about anything. Don’t even try.”

I never know quite what she means, but when she passes me her flask

I swallow it anyway. I have always been her little corruption. Grace introduced me to Bacardi on the first night of college, and then spent the next three semesters taking me to MIT frat houses, hoping, maybe, if I drank enough, I’d learn to get out of my head for once.

The whole point is to lose yourself. That’s the first rule of house par-

ties. That’s why you see bulging school backpacks crossing the subway tracks and shivering packs of underdressed college girls, walking up and down unfamiliar neighborhoods in the dark, with Google Maps to their chests. They almost look nostalgic, like a dizzied, unsupervised version of trick-or-treating that happens on rotation, every weekend past ten.

There are three of us altogether, walking up Glennville in triangle

formation. Grace scans her phone for addresses, just in case she decides to leave early this time while I trail behind her with Hannah, who wonders aloud how drunk she is now, and how drunk she wants to be before the night is over. We chug back vodka filled water bottles like Pixy Stix, looking for the right street, the right house, the right end. I feel cold and outside myself, dressed in a face picked up from online makeup tutorials. I cup my ears to listen for the pulsing of some amateur DJ playing Top 40 remixes. We always find our way eventually.

It’s on the third floor of a weedy building that looks vaguely familiar,

and I stop feeling important once I take off my coat. Grace says it doesn’t matter who you are at parties like this one. It’s who you’re pretending to be. It’s how well you pull it off. It’s how many shots it takes to get there.

I start with half of Hannah’s beer, and then take shots of whatever

they have in the kitchen. The second rule is to drink until you don’t want to leave, so I pour myself a cupful of Jungle Juice off a table and watch the

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room fall into an alcoholic blur. Things are looser when I’m drunk. People start dancing in the living room. I should probably be doing something.

Hannah and Grace have disappeared in the crowd at this point. I

could call them, but I doubt they’re still checking their phones. I look around for anyone I might know, for friends of friends, or even friends of friends of friends, but the longer I look, the vaguer faces start to become and soon, I don’t recognize anyone enough to know the right way to wave them over.

Instead, I find a faded denim couch in the corner of the room and

slump into it, although I’m carrying a drink and I don’t know if the people here have policies against drinking on the living room furniture. If this couch is meant to be sat on, or hooked up on, or thrown up on. if I’m making people feel uncomfortable that I’m here and not talking. If I should be talking to anyone. If I should reconsider curls next time.

Grace gets angry when I turn inwards like this. “You never want to

meet anyone,” she says, grabbing me by the arm to introduce me to people. She turns me into a five-year-old at parties, I’ve noticed. I become her obligation. I become the kind of person who needs to be kept entertained.

“This is Jen, my roommate,” she says quickly before dashing off into

another section of the crowd, and I wonder if they wonder why I’m here, or if I should be. They are four different people, but I can already tell that they are more sophisticated than I am. They layer flannels well and can throw “fuck” around without sounding crass. Even drunk, I know that my stories won’t be interesting enough for them— not that I mind them at all.

They’re nice enough as far as people go. They ask all the right ques-

tions about my major and so on, but I stop short at five minutes because I can’t handle the idea that I might be in the way somehow. I make up some excuse about needing to find someone, and feel the circle reclose behind me as I stumble back into the same old denim couch, breaking down the anatomy of every footstep I make, while people couple off in the middle of the room.

The girls here are loose-limbed and feel drunker than they really are.

They shoot across the floor like rubber bands in tube dresses, to the beat of a song that most people like. I don’t know who I think I am to think I’m

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different from them, to think all eyes must peel towards me like the over magnified side of a vanity mirror. But I must be different to feel the way I do. If I were like them I’d be dancing too, wrapping my arms around the shoulders of some boy I would never meet again and slurring through a fake name I made up on the subway.

I keep to my side for what feels like half an hour, texting Hannah, who

left an hour ago in her boyfriend’s car. Then I hear a crash in the kitchen and people start cursing.

“Who smashed the keg?” someone says, across the room away. I get

up to investigate, and find Grace running down the hall, drenched in beer.

I run after her. She’s ripping posters off the walls of someone’s unlocked bedroom because the second rule to weekends is to take souvenirs.

“You want to leave, don’t you?” she asks when she sees me in the door-

way. She stuffs the posters into her backpack alongside a couple of beers she must’ve stolen off counter tops.

“Well, yeah,” I say, shaken. The beer is gone now, and people behind

us start drifting out of the apartment in twos. I don’t know why she wants to stay. There’s nothing else to take here.

Grace looks at me. “Okay,” she sighs. “Just give me five minutes.”

I don’t know who she needs to talk to, but I assume that it’s import-

ant, and wait for her outside, relieved that it’s over. Grace emerges fifteen minutes later, trying to shove a fifth of Smirnoff into her already bulging leather bag. She laughs when I tell her what happened to the keg stand.

“Who gives a fuck?” she says, stumbling into the middle of the road to

catch a taxi with her arms stretched out.

I reek of vodka and follow her home, swept up in what might’ve hap-

pened if only I’d worn something different.

Wes is the only server left on rotation when the manager says I can leave for the night. An Indian family dozes over tapas in the back, and a crumbling old widow with a German accent is stationed at the bar, sucking on the olive from her third martini. Otherwise, the restaurant is completely empty.

Before she leaves, the lunch host says to me, “Wes is going crazy this time.”

He’s been standing at the window since his eleven o’clock lunch shift.

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“But Wes is always crazy,” I laugh, shaking my head, though I don’t

quite believe it when I do.

I can’t tell if he’s trying to ignore me. It’s hard not to think so, con-

sidering that he usually spends at least half his shift at the host stand with me, but I walk over anyway, after changing into street clothes inside the handicapped bathroom. I pretend to sign out at the server station behind him, although really, I’ve been off the clock for ten minutes now. I hear an intake of breath when I pad up to the station. I wonder what could possibly have gone wrong since our last shift together.

But when Wes turns around, it’s clear that something has happened,

and it has nothing to do with me, or his job, or his weekend. He starts to describe some public service announcement he keeps on seeing on Fox News, starring one of those aging country singers with a hole in his throat.

He strums mildly at a guitar and sings something about the good old days in a Southern drawl, before collapsing into a hacking fit. His wife gives him a glass of water and a message fills the screen in ominous Helvetica print.

“And I get it,” he says. I’ve never seen him like this. “I know, that

could be me in fifty, sixty years. But do you know what I do when it’s over and the show restarts? I go to the 7-11 across the street to buy a pack of whatever this guy’s probably been smoking. Then, I go home and watch TV until the commercial plays again, and I fall asleep with burn holes all over my fucking couch.”

I have never seen him so crazed. His hair is long and wild, and blue

circles surface under his eyes. But his hands are steady. His eyes meet mine and I’m worried I might be looking at him too much for someone who isn’t close enough to really care.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“Of course not,” he says, and this shakes me because this Chris is the

one who is always okay. He makes friends with the clerks at the 7-11 and smells like a home with a burning oven. I keep waiting for a half-smoked pack to topple out of his apron like most days, but they don’t because they’re clenched between his tight white knuckles.

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I want to ask him what is wrong with him, but the answer, I know, is all

too simple. But he doesn’t try to hide the cigarettes. He doesn’t toss them under a stack of well-arranged menus, the way he usually does, or tuck them in the lap of his deep apron pockets. Chris just keeps them there, sweating through the cardboard in the heart of his hand. He does not talk to me when the receipt is printed. He does not stagger out the back door for a five-minute smoke. Eventually, those cigarettes are going to cut right through his tight white knuckles. Eventually, something will happen and he will have to let go.

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GLASS

YAMUNA HOPWOOD

OCTOBER 2012

We are lost on a side street in what must be downtown Boston while his friends buy a gram off a senior from Berklee. I want to talk to you, he says, I want to talk to you tonight, but more so, I know he wants to follow them.

Last week, he showed me the folded yellow list that he keeps in his pocket, of the twenty-nine new strains he tried over the summer. Bubblegum Kush, Jack Herer, Blue Dream: they sound like velvet-cushioned nightclubs, the kind I probably wouldn’t get into, and I keep thinking if I were cooler, he might’ve brought me along.

Instead, we stumble through the dark between a Whole Foods and what

looks like a nursing home. I ask him what he wants to talk to me about, but he doesn’t seem to remember, and he catches me by my left wrist because he is thirteen inches taller than me and there is a lot of bending and contorting that has to happen just to hold hands and make small talk the way couples do when they know they are couples.

We tell people we work together, even though it’s been nine months

since we left our seasonal jobs at the Newbury store where we first met assembling mannequin limbs inside an empty dressing room for eight dollars an hour and half-off new merchandise.

The store felt new and unadjusted, but after exchanging names, I re-

member Austin reciting slam poetry over a box of left arms. Using one to tap beats across the hardwood floor, he sang “You might be the prettiest pedestrian, ever” while I sat there with a box of left hands in my lap thinking, I have never been so interested in getting to know someone before.

Yet, Austin has become indigestible to me. It doesn’t matter what I do

either; it seems like I am destined to keep running into him. We meet inadvertently, every two or three months, in damp rooms in damp parties, or through mutual friends. We are convenient to each other, Austin and I. The first time we kissed, we were on lunch break, in his dorm room. We were lis-

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tening to a song he’d just written about a girl I’d never met, living in a place I’d never been to before, and though I like to think that it meant something, sometimes I wonder if for him, kissing was just something to do.

We’re quiet for two people who’ve known each other so long. Even now,

ten months in, our conversations end in fragments. We half-start sentences, then we put them away. We check the time, and then we check it again, four minutes later. Then, Austin tells me the story he always tells me: the night freshman year, he took shots of whiskey on the roof of the Prudential Center in the early hours of the morning, tipping each glass off the ledge when he was finished. I ask him, like always, if anyone got hurt down below. “I don’t know,” he laughs, “I hope not.”

I put my hands into my pockets.

We are still pacing through Back Bay when his friends finally call. I can tell because he is the kind of musician who records his own ringtones and I hear his voice muffle through the heart of his pocket. He picks it up and says “Hola,” then pulls me down the street by the arm, his boots knocking against the cobblestone sidewalks. We aren’t lost, it turns out, we just had no place to go, and within minutes, we are arranged off his friend’s veranda, in pool chairs.

Introductions are made (Jaz, Yamuna, Ben, Yamuna) but we forget each

other’s names within the next ten minutes. I like him better when he is with his friends. With them, he speaks in song quotes and absolutely naht’s. He talks about his band and the make of his guitar, and he doesn’t look at me much because he doesn’t think he has to.

I almost feel more comfortable knowing he isn’t paying attention and

though I fold my arms in a knot for half an hour, Austin kisses me hard in the alleyway, next to Ben’s studio apartment and asks me out on a dinner date through a White Widow smoke ring.

I realize I don’t know what his intentions are. “Sure,” I say. “Why not?”

I say, trying not to look at him, trying not to assume too much.

And yet, two nights later, I am up the road, waiting. I call his phone. I

look around. I count from one to one thousand in front of the restaurant he suggested and, with shivery arms inside a dress I had to borrow I am

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convinced of his death, or a subway collision because I don’t want to find out I am wrong about him.

I make my excuses for Austin on the inbound train home. I tell myself

that he misremembered the date and the time, or that his grandparents are dead and he had to fly home. I tell myself, he never asked me to dinner at all, or that when he said seven-thirty, he meant Pacific Standard Time.

MARCH 2013

The dreams start six months later. It is dark. I am outside his friend’s studio apartment and Austin is sleepwalking down the cobblestone streets in a button down shirt that is lined with glass drawers. Even turned around, I can see through the glass onto the empty street in front of him. I call his name once, but he doesn’t seem to hear me, so I run after him. He turns when I touch his shoulder and, trying not to kiss him, I sweep my fingers softly over the white glass knobs.

When he doesn’t stir, I tug one wide open and listen to the glass drawer

thrust cleanly into space, open and empty, hoping for something, searching for something. I try the same with the second, but there is nothing there either, and soon I am pulling out drawer after drawer, tossing each one behind my shoulder as I search. I hear each drawer shatter onto the pavement behind me.

I don’t exactly know what I’m looking for, but I know it isn’t there:

just his blood and bones and organs, and even with his drawers removed, he doesn’t look any different. He doesn’t notice what I’ve done and all around me, in the empty city, there are glistening piles of shattered glass.

His shirt buttons roll through the cracks in the cobblestone, and though I want to shout his name, I don’t want him to know what I’ve been looking for. I don’t want him to know what after more than a year, I still haven’t managed to find.

APRIL 2013

It is a quarter before nine when I see Austin for the first time. If I weren’t collecting menus he might’ve noticed me first. He is wearing a t-shirt, not a button down this time, and his hair is gelled differently, but otherwise, he

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is the same, and although he is just one person, he feels like three thousand.

My heart leaps through my chest when he joins a party of eighteen at the back of the restaurant, sitting directly in front of the American flag the managers put over the hole when we reopened the restaurant. It flutters lightly at his neck in the evening breeze. From the host stand, I watch Austin wave to his friends, and then take a long gulp of water. I wonder things about him.

I wonder if he smokes, or if he stopped the way he wanted to, back in

October, when he packed six bowls a day. I wonder if he still plays my song in school concerts, or if he still tells the same stories he told me.

I try to pass Austin’s table as often as I can. I go to the bathroom four

times within the span of an hour and I make obvious conversation with the waiters nearby. I take the long way to the kitchen when changing the trash bags. I fill their waters, take their menus, and bump into their chairs, but he doesn’t react. He is calm. His voice is candlelit, and when the manager tells me I can leave for the night, I pack up my bags, change my clothes inside the handicapped bathroom, and decide on impulse, to leave through the back door of the restaurant.

APRIL 15TH

Walter, on the waitlist, tells me something is wrong. Of course, her name isn’t Walter, but her husband’s is, and she is just one of Walter’s party of three. The other two: her husband and her eight-year-old daughter are sitting on plush chairs, playing Sudoku in the corner. Walter asks me: “What the hell was that noise we just heard?”

It was a soft thump from here, in the crowded California Pizza Kitchen

edging the Prudential Mall, as if someone had sunk into bed very loudly. I tell her, “It’s thunder. You know, Boston weather” and she brightens because people trust people wearing uniforms. I watch her return to the chair with her family. Walter says something to her husband, also Walter, and they laugh together shortly, making plans to buy umbrellas.

I continue drawing faces in the margins of the waitlist in front of me.

I think about the weather. I think about the exams I have due next week. I take a drink of water, I rearrange the bun in my hair. I am falling into the

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sleepy rhythm of things I have to do after my shift when a loud thud fills the room, followed by the sound of smashed glass and intakes of breath.

This sound is real, I want to tell Walter in the corner. Then, I look be-

hind me and the windowpane next to the restrooms has shattered because some woman just jumped through the window with a fire extinguisher under her arm. The other hostess pulls me by the shoulder. “Look,” she says. I look. Walter looks and the whole restaurant feels the wind of three thousand people, all throwing themselves down the pair of escalators in bright blue jackets and running shoes.

They are screaming, stampeding, fast-breathed people carrying back-

packs, shopping bags, and children in their arms. There is no end to them, no purpose. I don’t know what to do. Customers charge out of the restaurant: table-by-table, family-by-family and, in just three minutes, the news is on, the dining room is empty, and the waiters are all curled around the TV on barstools. Everyone is calling, so I call my parents, but hang up because I have nothing to say to the house machine. Once people have been notified, I ask the waiters what to do, but they don’t know what to do. They are not prepared for the impromptu. They just sit there and hear things too big to fully understand, and I want to run down that escalator, but I don’t know where to go.

There should be drills for this, I think, the way there are for most natural

disasters. There are fire drills and earthquake drills. In elementary school, students line up behind their classmates and stand in football fields for ten minutes. Later on, they learn how to hide under their desks and put their arms over their heads in case the ceiling falls down. In junior high, we were even taught to make barricades with our desks in front of the classroom door, in case a gunner was nearby and we needed to hide. Real life, on the other hand, is much less organized.

Outside, on the balcony, a bloody, pink-cardiganed woman wobbles to

her feet. She is surrounded by loose change and unfiled receipts, and she stares shakily at the hole in the glass behind her. Her eyes water, but do not break. She pushes her hair behind her ear. Everyone is watching and after gathering her things into a shopping bag from Louis Vuitton, she runs off the balcony and joins the mob of three thousand people, all thrashing on

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the sidewalks with hands to their ears. “Where do we go?” they keep asking.

“Where the hell are we supposed to go?”

I used to wake up early on Saturday mornings to watch old cartoons

on the living room ottoman, and I saw bank robbers run through windows every day, to escape. There, the glass silhouetted around their hats and suits and guns. Their cartoon bodies were inked into the bank windows, so police could hunt them right down and put handcuffs to their backs— but this is not the way glass happens, as it turns out. People aren’t what they are shaped. Instead, they spider into veins. Their bodies split and swell and splinter against the pane, and in a messy collision of glass against skin, no one will remember the five-foot-three woman with a jagged silhouette who smashes a restaurant windowpane on an April afternoon. She will not be caught. She will not be known, and to the waiters asking waiters, what drove her into the window like that, they will not get their answers. The afternoon will stand by itself, like a rhetorical question.

California Pizza Kitchen reopens the following Sunday. The dishes have been washed. The food put away, and the bussers have swept up the residue glass from the balcony. The glass will be repaired in a couple days, but in the meantime, an American flag is hung in front of it. No one pays close attention to it. No one wants to think about it. People consume themselves with soup specials and tapas. They want to talk about the springtime and the pizza and their weekend plans. They tuck Monday afternoon under their long sleeves and jackets. They put it to bed. They swallow it down and they try not to look at the armored cars parked outside, wrapped in yellow tape, next to the newsroom trucks.

People say this strip of the city is now under federal control. People have

to walk around it. It isn’t Boston anymore, and when the afternoon turns slow, I look at the back window and stare. I could run through that hole if I wanted to, is my first thought. I could jump right through that hole and I wouldn’t be in Boston anymore.

Outside, I feel the crunch of residue glass below my feet. The air smells like smoke and I make my way around the restaurant balcony, like other

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waiters do from time to time until I hit his table, take a breath, and hope he sees me one last time. But when the barking of dogs throws me off, I turn around and realize I am not supposed to be here. Yellow tape winds around the waist of my jeans and cop cars still circle the streets below. “Shit,” I say in a voice loud enough to ink through the hole in the broken windowpane.

Austin turns. His friends turn. He has noticed me. I’ve won, and yet

there is no way to know him anymore than I do now. I can’t simply explain what I’ve just done. I can’t just ask him about a night far past its expiration date of mattering. He lifts his mouth to speak, but says nothing. I hear nothing, and all I can do is walk underneath the tape, behind the cop cars, and back home through a street in what must be downtown Boston.

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FACULTY SPOTLIGHT: RICHARD HOFFMAN Richard Hoffman is author, most recently, of the memoir Love & Fury, which was a finalist for the New England Book Award from the New England Independent Booksellers Association. He is also author of the celebrated Half the House: a Memoir, just reissued in a new 20th Anniversary Edition, with an introduction by Louise DeSalvo. His poetry collections are Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the 2008 Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club; andEmblem. A fiction writer as well, his Interference & Other Stories was published in 2009. A past Chair of PEN New England, he is Senior Writer in Residence at Emerson College.

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AN EXCERPT FROM LOVE & FURY RICHARD HOFFMAN

“What the hell is Henry doing?” Joe asks me.

My cousin Margaret’s husband is walking all around my father’s casket,

shooting pictures. At one point, leaning over the bier, he stumbles, recovers, knocks a flower from a bouquet. He tries to stand on the padded kneeler to get a little more height so he can take a shot looking down at my father’s face but thinks better of it.

“He just got a new camera.”

Earlier, in the hall, I’d seen him down on one knee, taking a shot of the

placard on an easel with my father’s name. Across the hall someone else’s name in an elegant script. Henry showed me a picture he’d taken of the outside of the funeral home. “The trick with digital is to try all different settings.

You don’t have to worry about using up film. And you want to shoot from as many angles as you can. Look, look here, with the digital zoom I can zoom in even after I’ve taken the picture.”

“He wants to shoot from different angles,” I tell my brother.

“Yeah, but what the hell is he doing?”

Joe and I are standing next to each other off to the side of where the

folding chairs are arranged for the mourners who have just begun arriving.

My son Robert has joined us and stands to my right. Kathi and Veronica are in the first row of chairs with D, only days past his first birthday, on Veronica’s lap. It is a moment of calm after all the necessary inanities about caskets and vaults, talk of waterproofing, of warranties and reinforcements so the grave will not cave in, of how many limos will roll slowly through the streets to the cemetery, all our delusional begrudging the earth what it rightfully owns.

Shoulder to shoulder with my brother, I am thinking about our different

engagements with our father. For decades mine was long-distance, made of

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phone calls, holiday visits, and scripted versions of my life usually more true than not but always wary and defensive. My brother, on the other hand, lived all those years in that dark house, the curtains drawn, our father in his chair sinking ever deeper into an irascible depression. Somehow, for his psychic survival, Joe managed to distance himself as surely as I had by remaining hundreds of miles away. And yet we loved the man, each of us.

Standing there, the brother who left, next to the brother who stayed,

I find myself wondering where it is written that a son must be dutiful and obedient, must sacrifice himself for his father’s love, its expression withheld and replaced by a promise, an assurance that is unfelt and unseen?

Above my father in the casket, a crucifix hangs midair, suspended by

invisible wire, as if presiding over the arrangements of flowers and the gathering mourners.

Only weeks before, as we sat before his gigantic television, my father

had made his wishes known. He pressed the mute button on the remote. “I hope it will be okay with you and your brother, but I’ve decided not to have a funeral Mass in the church.”

“Okay? You know me. I think 99% of religions give all the others a

bad name.” He gave me a disgusted look as if to say that this was no time to be cute.

“I just don’t want to be a hypocrite. I stopped going to Mass a long time

ago. I think Joe still goes, maybe Christmas and Easter, so he might feel strongly about it…”

“It doesn’t matter to me.”

“Well then, unless your brother objects, I’d just as soon have the

priest just come over to the funeral home and say a rosary or something.”

He jabbed the remote at the TV and Sports Central drowned out any further talk.

In the dream I had the night before the funeral, I had written the story

of my life, and my father, like a circus strongman tearing a phone book, ripped it in half, then in half again, and yet again until he scattered the pieces to the wind like confetti. He was calm, not enraged, undisturbed,

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as if to say, “So, what else have you got?” The dream was too transparent, even to me, asleep, to be a nightmare so I didn’t feel terror, only a kind of resignation, a sigh: Oh, not again. I even wondered, in the dream, why I gave him the story to read, knowing what he would likely do. But who was this dream father, really? Surely not the man who worked to bend his desires to his obligations; who sacrificed, loved, grieved, and survived; not the man who, confronted with his failures, determined to set things right; not the man who we were grieving here today.

And yet that same man could be a monster, a wanton agent of psychic

destruction. My brother told me a story once that should have made me angry on his behalf but only chilled me to the bone and left me grateful once again that I left home when I did. Joe had been working in those days for the local chapter of The Nature Conservancy, and he’d been asked to give a talk on the preservation of a waterway in a neighboring township. Our father had been watching TV of course and, surfing channels, discovered my brother’s presentation on the local station.

“Hey, you never told me you were going to be on my television!” He

said while my brother was hanging up his jacket. “I sat here and thought, this is a damn good speech. This guy sounds like he really knows what he’s talking about!”

“Thanks. Thanks a lot,” Joe said, a little wary. “Glad you thought so.”

“You know, it’s too bad the way you look. People would pay more atten-

tion to what you say if you just weren’t so fuckin’ ugly.”

“What did you do?” I asked Joe.

“I went upstairs to my room. What the hell else could I do?”

I could see him, anger shaking him, pulling himself up the bannister,

climbing the stairs deliberately, and closing, not slamming, his bedroom door. I’d witnessed our father shaming him before, many times. And I hadn’t done a damn thing.

Another time, when my brother was dating a young Korean woman,

he mused, resigned, “What am I going to do, bring her home so he can ask her, ‘Now, just what kind of a gook are you exactly?’” I wanted to say that he could move out, but somehow, for some reason I can’t understand, that wasn’t true.

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Once I told a therapist that it seemed to me my father must have given me

my sense of myself as competent and resilient. I was thinking of my mother’s unworldliness and insecurity. He asked me if it wasn’t more likely that my father had not succeeded in taking that confidence away from me. Now I have come to think that I made my escape before he could do that, before he could finish the job.

My brother and I, of course, each had our own relationship to our

father. We’re talking here about love, after all, not sociology. Grief has always seemed to me to be love made briefly visible, like a crackling tree of lightning forking across the night sky. But that glimpse of love’s ramifying light, all its meanings in a single instant, vanishes, and all you’re left with is the knowledge that more things are connected to one another and in more eccentric and surprising ways than you can possibly trace. Maybe in his way this is what Henry is trying to capture. Maybe it is what I was doing staring at my father naked on a rusty gurney.

Maybe I am trying to fix that lightning, or at least the memory of it,

here in words.

Arrangements of flowers surround the casket, and there is no other way

to approach, to come close to my father this last time, except to kneel. And so I kneel beneath that molded figure of agony twisted in the same pose as a billion others, stamped out like so many pennies, and I am shaking like a man with Parkinsons, wanting to feel something coherent and simple and untangled. I can’t.

I stare at my father’s hands that fed me and struck me, teaching me

gratitude and terror. I recall a time he threw me against a wall so hard my head snapped back and I lost consciousness, coming to with a touch of nausea and a taste in the back of my throat like nothing else. And then my father shone his flashlight in my eyes to watch my pupils respond, his hand steadying my chin — “Keep still, damn it!” — his look as if searching in my soul for something. “You’ll be okay,” he said, switching off the light.

Entwined in his fingers, a rosary. Who had requested that? I feel an invi-

tation to anger on his behalf; what did his being Catholic ever afford him but shame? And yet it doesn’t matter. It’s a bit of tribal superstition, a vestige of Catholic exceptionalism, packing off the deceased with the means to prove

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he was of the one true church, but it would no doubt comfort some of the people who’d come and, other than me, it was likely to offend no one.

I want to reach into the casket and touch his hands but I know how icy

they will be. His left is crossed over his right, his thumb perfectly the shape of mine, at precisely the same angle to the rest of the hand. And suddenly I want to thank my father for my thumb. It clearly came from him, or through him, and science would say it is the most important tool he left me, more important than his whole red metal box of tools with its trays and drawers, its wrench with a socket for every occasion, its place for everything and everything in its place. But this is not just any thumb, no. It’s plain as day to me that whatever my mother left me of all that I am, this thumb came from him: same shape; same angle, exactly; same size relative to my hand. I don’t mean to suggest that my father’s thumb was odd or remarkable, only that I, his firstborn son, know the lineaments, texture, movements of that thumb that I could never mistake for another. I probably watched that thumb holding a baby bottle in the middle of my first ferocious hungers when, as my mother told me, he walked the floor with me night after colicky night. Buckling buckles, tying my shoes, cutting up my food. And, some furious years later, pressing on my Adams apple, his hand around my neck. And telling me to hit the road. I know that thumb.

This thumb.

Then Henry’s kneeling next to me. “Here, look at this one,” he says, and

he shows me the screen of his camera where I am in focus, kneeling there, my father’s face a little blurry in the background. He understands the look I give him: “Sorry. I’ll leave you alone.” Then he whispers, “I’ll save this one for you. This is a good one.” As Henry leaves, my father’s face seems a comment, a bemused, “Yup. That’s Henry.”

I’m still trembling, not yet ready to rise. I feel certain there is something

here I am supposed to understand. I want to mourn my father, mourn him and be done with it, mourn him and be done with him. But the contradictions pull at me, twist me. I am grateful and outraged, sorrowful and relieved. The judgments, the recriminations, the guilt, the anger all get in my way. And the questions. I am still trying to know him, still asking who he was, unable to make even my own experience of him cohere.

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Or maybe this is just my reluctance to let him go. Who, after all, has a

continuous sensible experience of oneself ? It’s more like a passage we must make through the dark, underground, with a miner’s lamp on our helmets: at any given moment we can only see a little part of where we are.

I have to admit he was more comfortable with his many contradictions

than I am with mine. I am always trying to make sense, doing a kind of corrective surgery on myself. Is this striving for coherence a disguise for narcissism? I hear my father’s voice, “What, are you bucking for sainthood?” I was a kid in Catholic school when he first made that crack. I don’t remember the occasion, but I recall thinking why not? What else is worth aiming for? Now I hear a world-weary wisdom in his remark and a warning against a certain spiritual arrogance.

My father was raised in a German family, in a Prussian culture in fact,

the son of a coal miner and an Irish Catholic daughter of The Great Hunger. He grew up in the Great Depression, left school for the army, and when the war was over, he married my mother and attempted to begin a life that would make some sense, that would be orderly and satisfying and good. For a few years it was. I was born first, then my brother Bobby. Soon Bobby was sick. Joe was born. Mike was born. Bobby and Mike were diagnosed with muscular dystrophy. Life became hardship, the daily struggle against despair and cynicism. That struggle never seemed to take place in any kind of way he could articulate. He had no vocabulary except the harsh Catholicism he was raised with and which he walked away from (farther after each death, for which it offered him neither comfort nor consolation) so that by the end of his life he was left shuffling 14 kinds of pills to try to manage his moods, his digestion, his energy, his appetite, his sleep. It was all he could do to survive. Why insist on coherence with courage in such supply? My father does not have to be understood, or even be understandable, for me to have loved him all my life and to love him still.

And to remain furious with him.

Why is it that when I let the anger kick in the tears finally come? Some-

body says to me, “Come on, come on. They want to get this show on the road.” It can’t have been my father. My father is dead. I did hear it though, complete with his impatience, right in the middle of my head.

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And as I rise from the kneeler, glancing up at the crucifix, I cross myself

before I know what I’m doing, my body reminding me it doesn’t need my permission to remember.

When I return and stand between my brother and my son, Robert

touches me on the shoulder, and I need my handkerchief. I’ve just about got things back under control when I feel my grandson D collide with my leg and wrap his arms around it tight. When I look down at him, at his one year old face, I see empathy, spontaneous, instinctual. I pick him up and kiss him and he squirms to go back to Veronica.

The undertaker directs the people who have been filing in, sitting in

folding chairs. Joined by some who have been waiting in the hall, they form a line to pay their last respects to my father, and then to express their sorrow to my brother and me, and to Kathi and the kids. Singly or in twos, they make their way to the bier and kneel a few moments. Some of them look at my father’s face, some of them cross themselves as they rise.

At first I was surprised at how few of my father’s old pals were at his

funeral. I thought I might see Eddie who ran the news stand at Sixth and Turner streets where I picked up my bundle of evening newspapers for my afternoon route; rows and rows of colorful magazines, and newspapers not only from out of town, but from several countries represented in the immigrant population of the city. There were publications in Spanish, German, Polish, Greek. I thought that Eddie must be very smart to be able to read all those different languages, but my father set me straight. “Don’t be fooled.

He only sells those things. He don’t read them. Eddie’s an old fighter. I’d be careful of him. He’s a good guy but a little punchy.” And I remember there was a section close to the cash register where the magazines were covered in brown paper.

Or Tooty, the groundskeeper at Irving Street Park where the infield was

smooth and level as a clay tennis court and the outfield was like a putting green.

Or Schmidty, assistant coach of my father’s American Legion team for

which I’d been the bat boy.

But of course, it dawned on me, they were all dead. My father, with his

many griefs, who had buried two sons and his wife, who had been angry,

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abidingly angry every day of his life, who had lived to know his grandchildren and meet his great-grandson, had survived them. I felt a foolish momentary pride I knew better than to take to heart.

My father preferred the company of men. He felt that he understood

men. In fact, it would have been impossible for him, in his time and place, class and circumstance, to have ever been friends with a woman. My own coming-of-age coincided with the rise of second-wave feminism, and my friendships with women have been a crucial part of my life. Once I mentioned to my father that I was having dinner with my friend Suzanne, a fellow writer, and frowning he asked, “Does Kathi know about this?”

Most of the people who approach us to express sympathy are strangers

to me. My brother Joe knows a good number of them, but many are people my father worked with in the years after I left Allentown.

Will, as close to my father as either of his sons, is here from Michigan.

He gives my hand a squeeze, looks down, shakes his head. “You were right.

Remember what you told me on the phone? The world is different now.”

Will once told me that my father found me a mystery. “How’s a kid leave home a quarterback and come back a poet?” Will, with his PhD in Literature, must have seemed to my father the only person he could ask such a question. He didn’t say how he’d answered.

There’s a large open area between the bier and the rows of chairs, and

D is racing back and forth across it, Veronica running behind, scooping him up, putting him back down, redirecting him as much as possible. She has been crying, her eyes red, a wad of tissues in her hand, but she has to laugh despite that. So do several other of the mourners. Now D, dressed in a suit with a clip-on tie, pants big enough for his diaper, decides to run in a circle.

He seems to have just figured out, or is delighting in the fact, that if he runs in a circle away from his mother and she stays put he will soon come back to her. Every time he slams back into her she picks him up and kisses him.

The next time he takes off, Veronica gets down on one knee, ready to receive him when he comes back, but D takes that as a new wrinkle in the game: he teases her and then runs off in another direction, out into the hall where his mother chases after him. Except for a few stern souls, people are smiling, wiping their eyes, blowing their noses perhaps, but then smiling.

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“I’m Bill Dolan. Your dad got me a job driving a mower in the parks in

the summers when I was home from college. I’d sometimes see him around.

He was one of the good guys.” I recognize Dolan as a guy I knew in high school. He was a senior who played varsity football when I was on the freshman team so he doesn’t remember me.

My cousin Don, here with his young family, shakes my hand. I re-

call my aunt Marietta’s chagrin when he became a Jehovah’s Witness.

“There’s no Christmas or nothing,” she complained. “I can’t even make him a birthday cake!”

“Wow. Donnie. It’s been a long time.” I know the weight he carries: a

father, my uncle Pete, who drank himself to death, and I feel the urge to connect with him somehow. “We should get together sometime. Some other time, I mean.” But I know as I say it that it won’t happen. He gives me his card. He owns a car dealership. “I’ll shoot you an email,” I tell him.

A man is shaking Joe’s hand next to me, and I hear him say “...a long

time ago, at the Boys’ Club.” A short, stout, African-American man, hair going to gray, he steps up to me, takes my hand in both of his, says, “I’m sorry for your loss,” and moves away. I am staring after him, wondering, when a soft clear voice says, “Richard.”

She is standing in front of me, radiant and tall although she must be in

her eighties. She takes my hand. “I’m Mrs. McFadden.”

“Of course,” I manage to say, “Yes, yes of course,” though history has

just now rung me like a bell. She is my childhood friend Patrick’s mother.

Patrick was the oldest of, I believe, eleven or twelve kids. I remember only two of his siblings, Rosemary, and Timmy, probably because they were old enough to play with us. I remember the house always smelled of ammonia from a diaper pail, which after five minutes you didn’t notice anymore, and Mrs. McFadden was almost continuously pregnant, with one child on her hip and another by the hand as she calmly answered our questions or told us what she wanted Patrick and me to pick up for her at the corner store. My other friends’ mothers were tolerant, at least if it was raining; otherwise they chased us outside to play. Mrs. McFadden seemed happy I was there. I don’t think I ever knew what Mr. McFadden did, but I remember that when there were nine McFadden kids, my father declared that now there were enough

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for a baseball team. A couple of years later he said there were enough for a football team. Once, when I was in high school, my father asked me what Patrick’s father did, and I shrugged. I didn’t care much about things like that, and in those days I didn’t care much for my father. “Well he’s got eleven kids,” my father said, “so I know one thing he’s doing for shit-sure!”

“This is my son Robert.” She smiles broadly. “And that’s my daugh-

ter, Veronica, whose been chasing my grandson around here. And my wife Kathi’s there in the first row.” She looks back at Robert, “He looks like his mother,” she says to me. “Do people tell you that, Robert? That you look like your mother?”

I haven’t seen this woman for decades; I might pass her on the street

without stopping, but now I feel an affection so vast it summons another place and time. I am in the old neighborhood, in St. Francis of Assisi Parish, North Ninth Street running uptown to the public library and department stores and in the other direction ending in three glorious sledding hills declining to the freight siding and scrap metal yards of Sumner Avenue.

Across town my uncle is under another chassis at Mack Trucks, welding; my mother is taking her tuna casserole from the oven, checking to see if she has time to run to Woodring’s grocery where big Jim in his butcher’s apron would write down what she spent in a thick ledger — “put it on the bill” — my mother would say to him — but no, the boys will be traipsing in wanting something to eat in 15 or 20 minutes, so she can ask me to go for her then; aunt Helen is in between customers at the diner, smoking in back and wondering if she might take off her shoes to ease her swollen feet or if she’d better not because she wouldn’t be able to get them on again; the public-school kids are already out, a half-hour earlier than us; along the south side of town trout see the surface of the Little Lehigh dimple with the first drops of rain. Mrs. Dries’s Doberman paces back and forth, pissed off that nobody has come by to terrify by snarling on his hind legs at the gate; traffic on Seventh Street circles the city’s Soldiers and Sailors monument, Nike, goddess of victory atop a ninety foot marble pillar; my father is working at the brewery, grabbing longnecked bottles of beer by the top, four at a time, off the conveyor belt — six times per case — laughing with his coworker Stanley; a few guys, out of work, are playing basketball at the Salvation

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Army court where if you drive through the key and fall into the heavy doors you might go through and right down the steps; my grandmother starts out on her walk, six blocks from her apartment to our house in time to help my mother set the table; at my desk I’m watching the clock which is next to the crucifix and above the 26 letters of the alphabet; Johnny Pacheco is of course in trouble again and the nun has him by the ear but he is grinning at us as she drags him away; the Royal laundry truck Ronnie’s father drives backs up to the platform for its final load of the day; the birds gather on wires above Freihofer’s bakery, in winter for the warmth coming out of the stacks from the ovens, and all year round for whatever crumbs might become available.

“Are you still on Ninth Street?”

“Oh yes.”

“How is the neighborhood?”

“Oh, it’s about the same. All the old people are gone, but the new neigh-

bors are nice. There are lots of children. Everyone speaks Spanish though, and I don’t understand a word they say. Well, it’s lovely to see you, Richard; I’m very sorry for your loss.”

My cousin Margaret approaches me. She has her purse open, and I think

she is going to offer me a tissue, but she takes out a compact. “I figured I should ask you first. Would it be okay if I just put a little rouge on him? They left him looking awfully pale.” I dissuade her. She leans in closer, a look of aggravation on her face, and whispers, “Did they let you pick out a casket?”

“Why? You don’t like it?” She pats my hand, dabs at her eyes, and

moves away.

When all of the people are seated, the priest enters. Joe knows him. Fa-

ther Marty, his name is. Already I feel the tone is off; it is a solemn occasion, after all, a man’s funeral, even if he preferred that things be kept simple.

Father Marty seemed to bop in, bouncing on the balls of his feet, rubbing his hands together as if he were about to organize a picnic. He makes a brief stop at the bier, kneeling for a moment to whisper a prayer; he crosses himself as he rises. He comes forward and intones a blessing, crossing the air in front of him. “In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit. Only a scattering of people respond “Amen.”

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He’s trying. I have some sympathy for him. He didn’t know my father.

He’s sticking to the tried and true, to generalities he must have been taught in his coursework in pastoral care. He is facing a motley flock here: in addition to my Catholic cousins — varying from devout to lapsed — the room includes many Lutherans, at least one Buddhist, two Jehovah’s Witnesses, several Jews, a Unitarian, and a number of atheists. If he is aware of this fact, he’s not letting it impede his ministrations.

When I was a young altar boy, sometimes the priest would come into

our classroom, sixth or seventh grade, whisper something to the nun, and she would point to me and to one of the other altar boys, maybe Patrick, maybe Peter. And we would join Father Walters in the hall where he would explain that there was to be a funeral Mass this afternoon and that we had been chosen to serve. I remember my first time, carrying a candle around the casket as the priest, just behind me, swung the censor — chingchingching... chingchingching... — and I heard the weeping, a wail here and there, and saw the wet red faces of the mourners and could not completely keep from crying myself. I can remember the scratchy rayon of my black cassock on my cheek as I tried to wipe away a tear. But I came to see, as I served at more funerals, a certain purity in the faces of the grieving, a concentration of emotion, something so sincere that I felt deeply reassured. It was like seeing straight into a white light, the acetyline center of the soul, where all the colors meet, fuse, and transcend distinctions. Later on, at the funerals of my own family members, I found this reassurance again, that we are all connected by grief to everyone else in the human web: a net, after all, is made of crosses. But there’s not sufficient comfort in transcendent understandings. We grieve, we mourn; we do not shrug. To survive the death of a loved one is to have withstood, somehow, all the sorrow of our species passing through us in a particular moment, like a dense speck of negative light, one of those imploded stars astronomers tell us change the universe forever.

I can hear D in the hall, crying because his mother has picked him up,

restraining him a bit, maybe to keep him from toddling into the funeral across the hall, but in my present state of mind I hear him grieving, too, complaining of the weight on him, the burdens he never asked for tumbling down the generations, his early and wordless apprehension of the way

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things are. I hear confusion and defiance; I hear the demand for an explanation, the need for comfort.

There is one more opportunity to approach the bier before the undertaker closes the casket. Only a few people do. Veronica approaches and kneels there for a moment, crying, and D runs across the open space to her. She sniffs, wipes her eyes, and picks him up, then continues to kneel another moment while he stares, sucking his thumb. Does he, can he, recall the weekend three months before, when he and my father met? Veronica rises and turns, and D twists in her arms to point at his great-grandfather with his wet thumb. He blurts a syllable, a cry, a sound almost a word.

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EXECUTIVE STAFF ASHLEIGH HEATON graduated from Emerson College in December 2014 as a Writing, Literature, and Publishing major. She spends a lot of time thinking about the future of books, digital media, and her houses (Ravenclaw and Tyrell). She now lives in New York City and is on the hunt to find a decent Tex Mex joint— if you know one, please let her know.

ALLISON “TRUJ” TRUJILLO is a designer, poet, and senior at Emerson College. She is Editor-in-Chief of this magazine, Slam Master of the Emerson Poetry Project, and author of the chapbooks Minimum-Wage Paleontologist and My Relationship Compatibility with You Based on Our Astrological Signs. Her hobbies include tweeting about crying @AllisonTruj, throwing home-made black bean burgers into the existential abyss, and meticulously updating her website, http://allisontruj.com. She designed this book. You should definitely hire her.

NATALIE HAMIL is a first semester senior Writing, Literature, and Publishing student, with an extra side of publishing. Other than being the managing editor for The Emerson Review, Natalie also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Generic (a genre-fiction-only literary magazine), Vice President of Undergraduate Students for Publishing, Head Editor for Wilde Press, Copy Writer for The Emersonian, and (currently) interns for three different companies. She enjoys eating and sleeping, which are her only free-time activities, pretty much. Check her out on Twitter at @natthereader.

ERINI KATOPODIS is a super Greek-looking poet, short fiction author and sophomore at Emerson College. She is Fiction Editor for this magazine as well as a reader for Concrete and Gauge, and a DJ on

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her show Soul Kitchen on WECB. In her spare time she loves singing blues, reading trashy sci fi, and bringing back Lou Reed from the dead. That last one is still a work in progress, though.

ASHLEY ANNE HOWARD is a sophomore BFA fiction focus in the WLP department at Emerson. Her interests include writing, editing, music, cats, and Wes Anderson films. Upon graduation in 2017, she hopes to pursue a career in fiction editing. She is currently an Editorial Intern at Ploughshares Journal and has had a short story published in The Underground literary journal. She created her website, scribbliacs.com, in 2013 as a platform for sharing her thoughts and experiences in the world of writing. More than anything, she is so excited to see the newest issue of Emerson Review!

AARON GRIFFIN is a poet, artist, and BFA candidate at Emerson College. He’s the Poetry Editor of this magazine and the President of Emerson’s GSA EAGLE. When he’s not slaving away over a hot espresso-machine at the local Starbucks, Aaron enjoys reading, writing, and spending too much time playing Super Smash Bros. Follow him on twitter @agriff1993 for news about his upcoming work and/ or feminist rants about comic books.

ELLE (YUGI) CHU is a WLP sophomore at Emerson College in constant search of the things that are quirky, unearthly, and almost too much. Originally a poetry concentration, she is testing the waters of fiction. Recent works have been inspired by incredibly personal experiences such as the re-emergence of the haiku, not being able to play the harmonica, and the death of her strawberry plant.

ALEXA COSTI is recent graduate of Emerson College. While attending Emerson as a Writing, Literature, and Publishing major, she served as Nonfiction Editor of The Emerson Review, Managing Editor of Concrete Literary Magazine, and spent three years working on The

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EVVY Awards. Currently, she works as a proofreader and fills the rest of her time blogging for Bakepedia.com, freelancing, and trying to grasp the concept of cooking a balanced meal.

HANNA LAFFERTY is a senior Writing, Literature and Publishing major at Emerson College and Emerson Review’s Nonfiction Editor. In her spare time, she enjoys fantastical anecdotes and true-life fiction.

Assistant Fiction Editor ANNA DODGE is a sophomore Writing, Literature, and Publishing major at Emerson College. Originally from the San Francisco Bay area, she enjoys reading, listening to NPR, working on jigsaw puzzles, and being sedentary.

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READING STAFF SARAH MARCANTONIO is a writer and sophomore at Emerson College. She is a reader of this magazine and is currently studying abroad at Emerson’s Kasteel Well in The Netherlands. Her hobbies include crying over cheese and bread in Europe and watching bad TV shows that her film student friends judge her for.

CHRISTINA SARGENT is a freshman at Emerson College, aspiring screenwriter, amateur poet, and map-enthusiast. She is a reader and copyeditor of this magazine. In her spare time, Christina enjoys crafting intricate to-do lists, watching the same ten movies repeatedly, and routinely checking her twitter (@ChristinaS04) until the day Lorde follows her back.

SAMMI CURRAN is a prose writer and dabbling poet. Her hobbies include drinking abnormal amounts of Earl Grey tea and making cat noises. She can consistently be seen in a state of nervousness to hear back from the numerous literary magazines she submits to.

Whenever she experiences these stressful moments, she simply listens to poetry recited by the angelic and soon-to-be-her-husband Tom Hiddleston. Sammi also adores animals, notably dogs, otters, hedgehogs, and kiwis.

BELINDA HUANG is a sophomore Writing Literature and Publishing student at Emerson College with a special interest in the positive effects of literacy education and sushi, both separately and in conjunction. On campus, she is Managing Editor for Gauge Magazine and Section Editor for Emertainment Monthly; off campus, she insists on looking both ways at the crosswalk even when the light is green.

Her dream is to successfully grow a lemon tree.

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EMILY DUNBAR is a writer and jokester in her second year at Emerson College. In a thinly-veiled plot to spend more time in front of a screen, she dabbles in on-campus television production and aspires to write for TV when she grows up. She enjoys participating in international scavenger hunts, reminiscing about the “glory days,” and drinking way too much milk--seriously, her friends are getting worried.

LINDSEY GONZALEZ is a writer and sophomore at Emerson College. She is a reading staff member for this magazine, writer for Your Magazine, and blogger for Five Cent Sound’s website. Her hobbies include collecting an unnecessary amount of socks, eating an unhealthy amount of Ben & Jerry’s, and dancing to an unusual amount Sean Paul. Please date her.

CASS VOGEL is a directing major, writer, and sophomore at Emerson College. She is a reader for this magazine, Managing Editor of The Emerson Eye literary and visual arts magazine, film set junkie, and Walgreens princess. In her spare time you can find her eating granola, sprinting up a mountain, and consuming any and all content containing Matthew McConaughey.

PAIGE COBER is a Writing, Literature, and Publishing major who grew up just outside of New York City, between a prison, train station, and a cemetery. Now going to school in Boston, she enjoys iced coffee, sleeping, and copious amounts of TV. DANIELLE LANDOWSKI is an avocado enthusiast and freshman Writing, Literature, and Publishing student at Emerson College. She writes poetry and casually dabbles in tattoo design. Other interests include aggessively being from Michigan, hiking around said state, and missing Zayn Malik.

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EMMA REBHOLZ is a freshman Writing, Literature, and Publishing major who has a strong aversion to pants..

J. VILLALOBOS is a Chicana poet and audio/visual artist from Denver, Colorado. She is the author of the chapbook M and other Poems. Her work has received honorable mention from Emerson College’s senior writing awards where she graduated with a B.F.A in Writing, Literature, and Publishing in 2014. Her other interests include feminist theory, pop music, and film. You can find J. Villalobos’s writing and other illuminated thoughts on art and culture at JVillalobosPoetry.tumblr.com. Her forthcoming book of poems, Low Violence, is due Fall 2015.

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CONTRIBUTORS CHRIS AMES is a writer who also draws. He lives and works in San Francisco. You can follow him at chrisames.net.

VINCENT BARRACO is a sophomore working towards his BFA in creative writing at Bowling Green State University. Japanese, philosophy, and trying new restaurants are his other interests. His prose has been featured in Zaum Press. This is his first poetry publication.

CHARLIE BONDHUS’s second poetry book, All the Heat We Could Carry, won the 2013 Main Street Rag Award and the Publishing Triangle’s 2014 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His work appears or is set to appear in numerous journals, including Poetry, The Gay & Lesbian Review, CounterPunch, The Alabama Literary Review, and Midwest Quarterly. He is the poetry editor at The Good Men Project (goodmenproject.com).

LIZ N. CLIFT holds a MFA in Creative Writing from Iowa State University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Passages North, Hobart, and others. She lives in Colorado.

RACHEL HENG grew up in Singapore, studied in New York and works in London. This is her first publication in print.

JENNIFER JACKSON BERRY is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications, 2014) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, Harpur Palate, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among

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others. She is an Assistant Editor for WomenArts Quarterly Journal and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

WILLIAM JAMES writes poems and listens to punk rock— not always in that order. He’s an editor at Drunk In A Midnight Choir whose poems have appeared or are forthcoming in places with names like NightBlock, Split Lip, Harpoon Review, and Noble Gas Quarterly, among others. His first full length collection Rebel Hearts & Restless Ghosts is forthcoming from Timber Mouse Publishing.

California native SANDRA CHÁVEZ JOHNSON holds an MFA from New England College. She has served as managing editor and production editor for SPECS Journal out of Rollins College. Sandra, with her husband and two children, now calls Orlando, Florida home.

EMMA REBHOLZ is a freshman Writing, Literature, and Publishing major at Emerson College. Like her favorite cat mug, she can be described as having “excellent design, delicate details, exquisite shapes, and pleasant feelings.” Her poetry can also be found on Voicemail Poems (www.voicemailpoems.org).

AM RINGWALT is a writer and musician (Anne Malin) from Racine, Wisconsin. Her words appear or are forthcoming in Vinyl, Souvenir, Whole Beast Rag and DUM DUM Zine: Punks and Scholars. Like Cleopatra, Ringwalt’s debut poetry chapbook, was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2014. In 2013, Ringwalt was named a semi-finalist in the U.S. Presidential Scholars in the Arts program via YoungArts.

ADAM TAVEL recently won the Permafrost Book Prize for his collection Plash & Levitation, which will be published by the University of Alaska Press in early 2015. He is also the author of The Fawn Abyss

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(Salmon Poetry, forthcoming) and the chapbook Red Flag Up (Kattywompus 2013). Tavel won the 2010 Robert Frost Award and his recent poems appear or will soon appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Massachusetts Review, The Journal, Quarterly West, Passages North, Southern Indiana Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others.

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SPOTLIGHTS RICHARD HOFFMAN is author, most recently, of the memoir Love & Fury, which was a finalist for the New England Book Award from the New England Independent Booksellers Association. He is also author of the celebrated Half the House: a Memoir, just reissued in a new 20th Anniversary Edition, with an introduction by Louise DeSalvo. His poetry collections are Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the 2008 Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club; andEmblem. A fiction writer as well, his Interference & Other Stories was published in 2009. A past Chair of PEN New England, he is Senior Writer in Residence at Emerson College.

YAMUNA HOPWOOD is a writer, tree killer, and aspiring nice person. She graduated from Emerson in December 2014, and now works at an ad agency in downtown Boston where she continues to write and kill trees, only now at a desk, in adherence to a business casual dress code. In her free time she drinks gin and tonic, reads flash fiction, and sits on her couch in yoga pants, trying to convince herself into actually going to yoga.

If you like, you can reach her at yamuna@mac.com.

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ABOUT THE OCTOPUS AN EXTRA LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

The Emerson Review has never really been associated with a “brand.” Therefore, when Ashleigh Heaton and I first took the reigns as Editors-in-Chief, we decided that a revamp was in order. The only thing we knew was that we wanted EmRev to be associated with an animal mascot, and that we couldn’t use a jellyfish (as much as we wanted to) out of respect for another wonderful literary magazine you should check out, Jellyfish. We both loved Octopods (Octopi? Octopusses?) for their grace, and more importantly their legs: since we, as the Emerson Review, are one of the only magazines on campus with one singular staff that vote on poetry, nonfiction, fiction, visual art, and other genres, we knew that one beautiful animal with multiple legs spoke well to our multi-talented, multi-layered, multi-employable staff. It’s also a fun throwback to a cover of the Emerson Review from 1974, where a huge octopus dominates the cover. This book, in its design, hopes to exude that. Thank you for reading it.

Allison “Truj” Trujillo Editor-in-Chief

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COLOPHON The fonts used in the issue of The Emerson Review are Baskerville and Avenir. Baskerville was designed in 1757 by John Baskerville and revived in 1917 by Bruce Rogers. Avenir was designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1988, and is regarded as a more humanist version of geometric typefaces.

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