EPISODIC
ep•i•sod•ic [adjective] divided into separate or tenuously related parts or sections; loosely connected Some events are larger than others, fleshed with more details, seeming to inspire more intrigue, seeming more fit for a story; but when we focus only on those events we cheat ourselves of the fullness of our own lives. Dig in to the smaller events: those we struggle to title, the experiences we tuck away into the corners, the images we witness and move on from in the same passing instant. There are jewels to be found there. As we collect them, we may find that every day is made up of a series of small, easily-missed beauties and insights threaded together by a common miracle: our lives.
Episodic
Issue 2 Keep Close
Episodic Issue 2 Keep Close Copyright Š April 2013 by Episodic Magazine Artists All rights reserved Founder & Head Editor: Cheyenne Varner Literary Arts Editor: Renia White Visual Arts Editor: Alyson Fraser Cover Design: Cheyenne Varner Cover Photography: Cheyenne Varner Fonts (in order of appearance): Code Light, Goudy Old Style, Great Vibes Episodic Definition: Dictionary.com, LLC Design and Layout: Cheyenne Varner episodicmag.blogspot.com
Portfolios Artists I. Finn Butler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 II. Amaal Said . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 III. Jenny Yu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 IV. Emily Griffin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 V. Casey Liu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 VI. Najma Ismail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Keep Close Artists I. Valerie Onifade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II. Ali Patt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III. Nirvan West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IV. Carter Staub . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . V. Kenny Fame . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VI. Camille Perry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VII. Jnana Hodson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VIII.. Nancy Keeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IX. Vincent Bauters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . X. Bill Vernon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XI. Victoria Wiebe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XII. Wilda Morris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XIII. Frederico Bignami L贸pez de Prado . . . .
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Finn Butler
Butler
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Amaal Said
Said
Losing the Moon He says “stop writing these poems if They’re making you so sad” but you Tell him that you write all of ways that You are lonely and that you haven’t Run out of reasons yet. 1. I drink tea because I am cold and hard inside. 2. I drink tea beacuse I am far too sad to eat. 3. I drink tea to rid myself of this numbness. You are whispering, ‘come, come, Back’ to the moon like A sad lover with the dark Rushing in to fill spaces between organs. You pretend he is the Moon. You ask yourself at night whether you are the emotional poet with her heart staining everything with tears. Or if you are just the poem he will never write because he could never find the right words, and it is much too late to try, because the street lamps have switched themselves off and the stars have been put out to usher in the day. You are always just here, always making these lists, always the sad lover with eyes large and lined deep black, whispering “come back” to a moonless sky.
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Heart-quake One. I kissed his eyelids closed. I wrapped my heart up with his bloodied limbs and bullet holes and let go of myself when I watched them drag his body out of sight, my boys have his face, my body birthed thunderstorm men with running in their blood. Two. The night we got away into the city with streetlamps defying the dim of night, I lost my desert storm boys with their new man-shoulders, their daddy’s dead face greeting them in the mirror, his wild eyes in their sockets. Three. We have been running from the smell of it, the woman gripping her dead lover, pushing her body into his, begging death to reunite them. Everyday is war; everyday is struggle, everyday is loss and each day I watch my babies slip into the city, I watch the concrete swallow them up, I wail. My insides are burning, I am burning and everyday smells like death.
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Said
Top floor of the yellow flats The woman with the cool metal coat hanger in the palm of her hand had burdens of her own that day and no possible way to abort them. When the young girl passes out on the table, there is no one to mop up either of them. The sun will have fallen and the sky will have been flushed of its orange hue, but they are always elsewhere hurting, leaking, drinking too much because the pain was going to engulf her whole, she was sure, they were both so sure, always an unwanted hand attached to a mouth screaming, “you know you want this you dirty whore”. Who will be there to tap foot on that cold concrete floor they’ve both bled on to say, ‘honey, there is nobody here. You will need to wipe all that dirt from under you and keep on walking, even if it’s with a slow limp. All of the lights have been turned off and no one visits here anymore”?
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Home The woman who carries you in her belly walks confident with her hair way past the loud hips that the boys stare at. She remembers the half hour walk to the market, the threads of mango taking up room between her teeth, the women huddled around the street corner sipping tea, their mouths bursting with gossip. She will breathe in that Mogadishu air for the last time before the journey that will rid her of all good breath, staining everything the colour of blood. But you, you were conceived before the madness, before she buried both her parents and ran away from home. You will be the memory that lay asleep in her belly. Do not fear. Your eyes were closed when the men shot their bullets and women like your mother bled into the earth and never got up.
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Said
Child (before) soldier Birthing ritual Could not bring back my baby With blood on his hands.
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Jenny Yu
Yu
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Yu
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Yu
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Emily Griffin
Griffin
Aspen Bark and Marble Grass sighs with metallictongued frost and aspen trees wilt beneath the weight of November’s sorry eyes. The leaves, clutched fists, hold words around a lover’s leaking heart while graciousness is left in the debris of confessions shouted into a broken hill. Veins shake harder. Knuckles won’t crack. Eyes flick and panic cannot be forgotten. Repression is a defense mechanism not a toolbox. The frozen grass is no confessional it is a tombstone. My skeletal hands could resurrect clairvoyance between the dead logs and stunted lies. Someone wails ‘trust me’ into the woolen gray clouds. Someone forgot to knit them into a sweater for the rain. This grove is stark white but the aspens have poor posture. We only see stains on bed sheets. The trees turn to mirrors when wind freezes at your hips.
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Streetcar Yawning 1. Morning: 6am plays hide-and-seek with nighttime, but eventually sneaks through the porch door to disguise itself behind darkness while the sky remains censored out. It peeks from within hazy clouds, caught out of character. We are left feeling halfway badly for it. 2. As the day becomes defined, the air and space that gently hold our bones become fuzzy. That little bit of light kisses toward the sky: discomfort yawns. It stretches into consciousness and translates from some kind of ocean, foam ing at the lips, to some kind of shallow, breeding anxiety that wakes in the wrinkles of bus riders’ faces. 3. I passed so many cigarette filters; I wish they were garden seeds. Cold coffee waters broken shoelaces and two-week gum. Wishes die. Eyelashes from overly rubbed eyes are caught in the branches of backpack straps. 4. There are boys in valet uniforms on the street. Their name tags all say ‘Eric’ but they don’t recognize my face through the window. I don’t mind. 5. Our breath mists our hands shake and we crave cigarettes for breakfast like a midnight snack on the corner, leaning against the stop sign, drunk for lack of sleep, for desperation, for emptiness, for blatant existential exhaustion with the exception of the lights. 6. The bright in these bulbs reminds me to breathe, ignoring the pressure of morning, six am.
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Griffin
Sometimes there are too many people so I swallow the sky with gulps of sticky tar. I snap mirrors to thousands and paint my eyelids with their dust. Sometimes my blood powers subways and every streetlamp. I tell the sun when to set and will let the leaves die when the time comes. Sometimes there are too many concrete sidewalk squares so I fill each crack in the buildings with potting soil. I lock my door but sometimes there are broken bobby pins leftover in the hall. Sometimes I stretch the streets and build ladders to the sun but the rungs always crumble. I light the world with a Bic and sip from the ceramic.
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Moss Kisses The fog mists atop your body like thick, wet smoke it tastes like moss kisses. You take a deep drag, hold tight but dissolve pure, the way you sometimes dissolve in shower steam on the mirror. Your chewed-up fingernails coat these oak trees I’m still waiting for your torn cuticles to curlicue my shoulder blades. There are bugs in the river. They are dressed up like seven-year-old figure skaters. The leaves were never given a job description and have begun to hate quilting the moon after they’ve gone dead. I whisper for them to remember patience and belong in that powdered-sugar sky instead.
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Griffin
The Way Emotions are Not The Same as Decisions Dear distance and phone calls, I electrocuted myself yesterday and couldn’t stop laughing birds are brave with an odd sense of humor. The mountains were scary, not gorgeous but my terror was pretty. Dear distance, that was after twenty-four miles on the road and half a dozen phone calls. Dear distance and postage stamps Envelopes are paper cuts and boxes are expensive good thing I don’t fit in either. Wait Wait Wait Let the expectations return to sender. Dear distance just let me go home.
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Casey Liu
Liu
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Butler
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Najma Ismail
Ismail
you are more thighs more soft more light kisses where mouth meets coffee mug now and i cannot understand why you no longer fold in front of mirrors like tired mothers and i am not sure why your eyes have made peace with the sea these days. perhaps it has something to do with the way your knees become the earth at 2 in the morning. limbs facing the ka’bah, you are finding love only in worshiping the Creator of Love, the Pure One, the Guide. He is okay with your hurt tonight. and every night. you have noticed the kinder you are to your own skin, how despite the stretching, the scars, the melanin, the more your ribcage becomes a home for flowers. you plant smiles onto the faces of strangers and they thank you for the colour. we are all looking for acceptance of self. take pride in flesh that has managed to hold all of you for this long. hasn’t it been so many moons? i could go on, you know. but i think i should stop now. my head is heavy and i need some rest. there was a death earlier, and the janaza was a somber one. it was a little girl and what if i had a little girl, would i be a good mama? you think too much. here, here is the bed and here is my chest. let me hold you.
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i come from a long line of women. my cousin’s husband beat her until she was a bleeding sky. soldiers raped mariam, they stabbed at her breasts, inserted rifles along with their manhoods and laughed at her cries. ubax fell in love, like her name she smells of flowers. my grandmother opened her doors to the hungry, the whole city knew her for her kindness. healing balm for the broken hearted, grandma’s whole life was a constant sadaqah. my aunt married a governor who was able to provide for nine children, she painted her lips a deep maroon for twenty years. when the war broke out, my aunt and her nine children closed their eyes to the dead bodies that lay like garbage at their feet to walk for two days to the north, to the promise of europe, of safety, of refugee from what was once home now ruins. my aunt gave birth the third night to a baby girl she named after my mama. my mama tasted many oceans. filled her belongings in many rooms, shed her skeleton a thousand times. not one sigh, not one murmur of complaint all these tired years. my mama is a strong woman. the strength both calm and storm. i visit relatives and the countless aunts and uncles the East knows, all say i look like mama. to love women is to build a planet, i will tell my son this until it is a recurring dream, a breath, a belief. i will tell my son this, and so will his father.
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Ismail
hi. i like your eyes. your smile too. i like little kids who hold moons in their teeth and give you flowers in the shape of palms. in the morning i look in the mirror and lately i am okay with what i see. a head of curls you could get lost in, dyed red like fire. a fire is alight in me. it is a warm light and it is melting away the cold, inside. inside my head there is a dream where a man tore wings off of a bird but the bird has my mouth and my mouth is bleeding but the man is still stabbing and stealing and when i wake up there are wounds like an open sky across my back. i like the sunset but one time a girl that smelled of lemon trees whole body looked like a sunset but reminded me of a war. pieces aren’t as bad as they seem and broken can always become a repaired thing, as long as there is lots of glue and lots of love and patient limbs. i am most at home with you. i can fight things like storm and skin, but you keep me safe from the monsters that hide beneath my bed. they said when i grow up they’d run but they never left. hi, i think it hurts here.
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shame has a funny way of working itself into your mouth, into your eyes. when someone tells you enough times that you do not exist, that your name is not worth the extra tongue muscle or your skin is a sin or your vagina is a sin or your religion is a sin sometimes the fight transforms into shame and shame has a funny, funny way of working itself into your body until you wear it like an apology i am sorry for this, and this, and this, and this is what they want you to give so you give it and there are courses you learn in universities that teach you the terms and origins of this universal wilting and they discuss it in lecture halls and large conferences but i know nothing of terminology and textbooks only my own hands and her hair and his back and there is a great unlearning in years of embedding self loathing into bones that all a body feels is breaking but she is telling me her mirror was kinder today and he is telling me his fist is only kneading dough to feed his mama today and i am yelling until my voice is hoarse today and shame has a funny, funny way of working itself into your mouth, into your eyes, but what they didn’t tell you is you have always held the light it isn’t getting smaller you are getting bigger you are expanding you are whole and you are a revolution you are a revolution you are a revolution
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Ismail
i can’t be around girls like you he whispers it. fear clenching at his gut hands trembling from the weight of it. girls like you, they bring empty homes with them and ask me to fill the spaces. but you are all space and i am all man who doesn’t have the time to bring in new furniture and paint the walls and i am sorry but i cannot offer my voice to echo from here and you won’t be nestled in the crook of me in the morning. there are easier women out there, women i won’t have to watch my tongue around won’t have to check for the bending of bone women with easier laughs than yours that i can find company in and valleys of hips and thighs and stomach and you are nothing but cowering and covered in slashes and stretch marks that you hide like a secret, like your eyes, what, what do you expect me to do? to love you?
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illustration by
Cheyenne Varner
Editor’s Note There are many ways to say it. There are many ways not to say it and still let it be heard. Let it be known. It makes me think about my parents. How after years of begging my mother to please let me re-paint the awful cupcake-yellow walls of my bedroom, she decides to cave a few months before my college graduation. When you come home, she says, we’ll paint your walls white like you want them. I’m grateful for the green light, but also aware of the motive. To paint I must be home. To paint takes time. To paint—that keeps me around. It’s like her way of saying, “Don’t stray.” It makes me think about the younger me. The little girl with careless curls, chicken legs (my uncle’s affectionate term for skinniness) and Bambi eyes. Her freckles are still on my face. The rouge of her cheeks is the same rouge of mine. We even share some of the same desires: good books to read and time to just lie in bed reading them. But every year I depart a little more from her and she from me. Every once in a while I pull her out in a picture to tell her, “Stay here.” It makes me think about words. About the expression, “on the tip of my tongue.” How when I’m in the shower or in the car or drifting to sleep, sometimes little bits and pieces of stories pull out of the gaps of my subconsciousness and begin to weave together. Knowing it will be some time before I find paper and pen, or an open word document, I beg of them, “Just wait...” It’s all different, and it’s all the same. It’s the many ways we say and don’t say, “Keep close.” Cheyenne Varner
Cheyenne Varner is an undergraduate student on the U.S. East Coast pursuing a self-made degree in Educational Activism through the Arts. She writes poetry, short stories and novels in her free time. As a writer herself, she finds facilitating and organizing others’ creative works both a joy and an honor.
Episodic
Valerie Onifade I saw my spirit human today. long faced and long limbed white man on the train. He sat with his legs open fixed his collar, twisted his wrist, and looked around a lot like he was lost. Ankle resting on knee; snapping his gum not because he didn’t know better but because he wanted to. This was a man whose every movement was unapologetic and invited a voyeur gaze who looked everyone on that train in the eye not at all scared to take up space for that 5 minute ride.
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Ali Patt
Friday Nights, Spent Staring At Your Ceiling We lay down to let the stars feed on us, narrow pillars of light coming at our bodies in their millions. We saw performances play out before us as they magnetised each other and converged, rushed like white water rapids against the endless background, an outside sky for the inside us. We watched with children’s eyes, awe-filled and darting from side to side, making countless wishes because it seemed every star was shooting. We caught the ones that fell on our tongues, and spat them back up to the heavens, letting them take our names with them. Our laughter followed, silver the Northern Lights had nothing on our private planetarium.
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The Red Thread Of Fate Is What Brought You To My Bed Smokey bar blues and sheets and you and me. Somewhere in the background the clock ticks on, but we don’t feel time pass us bywe’re too wrapped up in the hearts of each other and that red thread of fate that brought us together
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Nirvan West
December 3rd I remember summer mornings where you would wake up before me and let me sleep for a little while before gently nudging me awake. I was up, my hair matted and my eyes heavy, but grateful to be next to you. I would make us breakfast from whatever was in the cabinet: sometimes eggs, or waffles, or pancakes. It wasn’t always good (I’m sure the potatoes were under-cooked more than once) but you always told me it was delicious, regardless. I thought it was strange that you didn’t like cheese in your eggs. No vegetables, no cheese, just fluffy, yellow and scrambled. I remember making apple pancakes out of a mix I found near the back of the pantry and watching you eat them silently next to me as I spooned cereal into my mouth. You were always beautiful, but something about the morning light made your eyes shine a little brighter than usual. Your front bangs were tied back off of your face with the band that never left my right wrist. Most days I wake up and expect you next to me. My dreams are of another place and another time, one much happier than this one, one I’ll never get back. But I have the summer where I loved you and I think you loved me too; where nothing mattered but train schedules and the inevitable end that kept me up long after you fell asleep, the reason my eyes were still heavy in the mornings you awoke with that beautiful light in your eyes and you gently nudged me awake.
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December 13th You were always the careful type, not one to take too many chances. Your overbearing mother probably had something to do with it, but you were worried about breaking the rules, upsetting the status quo. When I asked you to join me on the roof in the middle of November you were predictably hesitant. Getting up there in and of itself was quite an ordeal: I would have to press my legs up against the sides of a tiny chute in the music room and edge myself up onto the teetering wooden walkways that sat dusty and seldom used above the third floor. From there, I’d follow the swinging walkways for a while until I found the correct hobbit-sized door to crawl through and emerge halfway up a stone staircase, the daylight shining down onto me. I would emerge in a janitor’s area, filled with decrepit ladders and splintered brooms, the floor littered with cigarette butts. There were two doors: one at the top of the stairs that led directly to the roof and one at the bottom where you waited for me to quietly turn the handle and lead you inside. My guitar was hanging off of your back: on my birthday you had promised to let me hear you sing (with the pre-requisite that I provided musical accompaniment). I took you by the hand and led you up the stairs and into the crisp November air. The view from the roof was impressive. Our high school sat atop a tall hill, and from the highest point on the roof you could see for miles in all directions, even the ornate architecture of City Hall. We sat on the gravel-streaked ground with our legs crossed and I began to play my guitar, waiting for your mouth to move, for melody to spring forth from you. Your voice was beautiful, but I already knew that it would be. We stayed up there for long time and I listened. Your voice filled in all of the tiny cracks in me. I lost myself and forgot everything but you and me and the simple fingerings of the first position chords my hands formed over and over again. And before I realized it was getting dark and I was shivering. You kissed me and felt my teeth chattering against your chapped lips: then you took my hand and led me inside to keep me from catching cold. I wrapped you in my arms and traced over every detail in my mind, made sure never to forget any of it.
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Carter Staub
On What My Father Did. 1. We finally flew home without him— Our dog had peed on the plane flight, so we smelled her urine all the way home from the Philadelphia airport. Finally home, it smelled stale from a month of disuse— I peeled back the unmoved duvet, slipped into the bed a straight jacket. Sleep came, surprisingly. I don’t remember what I dreamed. 2. When the leaves fell outside, my dad usually raked them up. It was a process; I had done it before and it was hell. Raking wet leaves onto big blue blankets, carrying the blankets to the burn pile, repeat. It rained the week my father was coming to visit, and we worked two nights, raking those leaves in the rain, clomping around in mud. The neighbors looked out their windows at my mother crying, a rake in her hand— at her glaring at me, missing my dad who would usually do all this shit for her. Who was doing all this shit now, for us for me, in San Antonio.
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3. When he came home every few weekends, we cleared our schedules, we did our homework before, we scrubbed the house and the yard and the damn dog and my brother. When he came, it was a reception, us all hugging and kissing and mom crying. The two would take walks, go out to dinner, lock their room— and we would sit downstairs on the couch in silence, waiting for them to tell us what to do.
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Telling My Father About Philadelphia. Where will you be staying with him? My father wanted to know at the dinner table— at a nice Italian place in Culpeper. My sister looked at me, sorry she pulled her lips back, tucked them neatly with each other, folded one on top of the other. My mother was reading the menu, staring through her borrowed glasses mouthing Italian words— A hotel. I said small, thinking at my mother, wanting her across the table. She did not look at me, so I looked at him, with my eyebrows way up but not trying to make them go up so high, like I would do as a child, when I had done something wrong and had known; his hand high in the air, ready to come down again. He didn’t talk the rest of dinner and drove us home drunk.
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Kenny Fame
RONDEAU: SUNLIGHT BEGAN DANCING WITH THE FULLEST OF HIPS Hollow sounds of the tunnel, broke through glass-shattering loud, squeel and screech, braking noises. Train is now pulling into downtown’s Whitehall Station. / She stands with her. One hand holding hers--the other straphanging. Movements more fluid than, dimea-dance girls, back in the Twenties; hollow sounds of.. conductor, alerts train is trapped between, Dekalb & Union. Faces become trapped in anger, until the train began to move. After an hour, eyes open, into booby traps; unwittingly hollow sounds of...
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Camille Perry
halfmoon please don’t go stay here with me and answer the universe electric lilt the lullabies of unkempt corners in wrinkled sheets statue quotation mark with me while we answer the world content you painted poems on my sun-stained eyelids again
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Jnana Hodson
IN THE PASSAGE she could scream on the Yankee Cannonball jostled about even before reaching the rails, mind you, a real estate transaction crowded with unannounced players, a two-state bankruptcy with a federal judge and nothing quite in place, yet, the midair suspense running six months before they’d really hit, maybe this is no way to begin a marriage, but you deal with the tickets you have they’d uncover nothing that’s ever simple but still once they were off the platform, the whole house jerked skyward and then plunged the first three or four big grades it’s amazing she still has her thumb or the chimney didn’t ignite or the roof blow away even in a modest family-run amusement park like this a wooden coaster runs out and back from the drip line caught up in this twister, he wasn’t much good at anchoring family squirrels thrive, after all, largely solo apart from the mating chase or bout though they’ll sleep six or seven together yet repeated delays that autumn allowed little rest and precluded burying nuts as well as his lady’s daffodil and iris bulbs et cetera packed away what they could, hoping they could cobble a nest
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SPLATTER out of the eventual flurry of papers not all that surprisingly conjoined to the heaviest snowfall so they dealt with their particulars, receiving the keys in a flurry of papers to turn, yes, to twist a washbasin’s porcelain handle split dark red globes from a nearly severed thumb, a homecoming omen all the same, “happy birthday, Sweetheart” like the kid’s trip to Canobie Lake, a big celebratory splash after the thaw, of course rather than nuts or cannonballs salting their property
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Episodic Nancy Keeling
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Vincent Bauters
No One has Perfected the Art of Saying Goodbye We are not hell. But we are eating slowly. Deciding between heavy mountains or endless ocean. We choose pure refugee nihilism and move like gray radio music in and out of these bedrooms. Leave clothes on the wooden floors. We are what we remember. Painting the same portraits over and over, until our faces are total smears. Ending our conversations with 60 mile per hour car rides. Not quite looking each other in the eyes. A masterpiece leaves everyone speechless.
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The Opposite of Flying It depends on what you mean by partner. After all, I went back to her. Neck deep in certainty. I was subtracting reality from expectation. I was living in the difference. Parachuting through the rainstorm. We wanted to hear a little more of the same thunder. In the story of what really happened, I was a face half painted against the canvas on her easel. Across the room she tried to resuscitate frozen stars. Looking at me intently, as if her eyes then would be her eyes forever. Now I confuse the lighting of a candle with the ringing of a telephone. I give into the vice of waiting. At night I can sleep, but I don’t want to.
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Poem for K Your name whispers secrecy. It flat lines in linen gowns then spits back to life like a birthday candle. The sound of your name is like the growl of an avalanche in the distance. Like snow that blows back up into the sky. Your name in handwriting Looks like a diagram of a heart attack. A clotting of blood and the inevitable denial of trauma. Your name gets to me sometimes.
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Episodic
Bill Vernon
Playing By Ear
I heard my father at once as I came in, but my hands were numb from dragging 43 newspapers tied on a sled four miles on my route through slushy snow. My feet were so wet and cold, I stripped off my socks and stepped into some wooly slippers. I passed the laundry tub and stopped in the den’s doorway to see him. I put my hands under my armpits and squeezed, heating my fingers and watching. He was sitting on the edge of the piano bench, pounding the keys. He was staring where the sheet music ought to be, looking down when he played, pecking away with one or two fingers. He played a long string of notes. The melody was familiar, but I couldn’t place the song. I’d tried myself to learn to play songs by ear. What happened to me was I’d lose touch with everything else. There’d just be something in my head and the sounds I played. My mind was busy matching the notes outside and inside, and remembering. There’d be total silence until my fingernails clicked on the ivory and the wire inside the piano box boomed. I do mean boom. In this lower level of our house, when nothing like a radio or TV was on, when the solitude of our valley was so complete, each note could sound like a gong. After I mastered a sequence of notes, I’d modulate how I hit the keys so the booming would change into something more pleasant. Something almost beautiful. Then I’d feel as if I were pulling something perfect from my mind and creating it in the world. That’s what my father was doing. From what he played I felt what he thought. He was contented, peaceful, reaching for something more beautiful than I’d ever been able to achieve. He could actually play the piano. I couldn’t. “You okay, Champ?” He’d noticed me. “Oh, yeah.” My hands were still under my armpits so I pulled the frigid digits loose. “I’m just warming up.” “Me too. Sit down.” He scooted over to the far side of the bench and patted the side by me. I sat. He started playing with a flourish, then burst into “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.” The melody turned into something so pure, it lifted my spirit the way a breeze lifts a kite. I looked up at him. His eyes were closed. He was seeing his fingers hit the keys in his mind as well as hearing the notes. His eyes opened and swiveled down to me. “Come on and sing.” So I did. It was windy outside, it was snowing again and getting colder, freezing everything, but that was just the dull background. Our voices merged with the piano. The whole house disappeared. The clocks on the walls were ticking, but we couldn’t hear them. We were gliding on time like a boat on a river.
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S p r i n g 2 013
At The Wheel
Dad drove with his window open to air out the car. It didn’t work very well with a lit Camel between the index and middle fingers of his right hand. He’d sweep the burning stick off the steering wheel to punctuate his words in front of the windshield, swirling smoke before us like a priest chanting over incense during benediction. He talked a lot as we rode, but I understood so little, he might as well have spoken in Latin. His left elbow stuck out the window, and with that hand he waved. When people didn’t wave back, he’d honk to get their attention. Were they close friends? “No.” He’d shrug. “Each one is somebody. Everybody’s your neighbor.” Radios were luxuries. We didn’t have one. Our green Hudson was a broken-in demo with 18,000 miles when he’d bought it from a dealer he insured. Its windshield wipers squeaked, scraping the glass even when wet, a noise that made me shiver the way I did at the sound of chalk dragged over a blackboard. Despite that and the wind roar at the window, the interior could vibrate like a loud record player. I’d inhale the second hand smoke without notice and lean toward my father, who’d belt out something I knew like “ She’ll be Coming ‘Round The Mountain.” When I’d join in, our vision would narrow onto the nearly empty road ahead. Outside our windows the world swept past as we sang.
70
Episodic
Victoria Wiebe
you outgrew me like an old pair of shoes or a hobby forgotten, the descent from the daily use was gradual soon hours of our days spent together fractioned off to once a week visitations more for old times’ sake than much else i became your past tense as you had become my present i love(d) you, unfortunate but true you outgrew me as i was growing in to you
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S p r i n g 2 013
Wilda Morris
A Night in Dad’s Hospital Room The nurse turns the heat up so high I can hardly breathe. An ambulance pulls up to the emergency entrance, siren shrieking. Somewhere a monitor pours out beeps, pauses, then starts again. Dad’s oxygen humidifier bubbles. The medicine cart squeaks down the hall. In a nearby room, a toilet is flushed. A bed pan hits the floor. The cough in the next bed on the other side of the curtain resembles a death rattle. I strain to hear my father’s shallow breath.
72
Episodic
Frederico Bignami López de Prado
Brief Notes on Ghosts I. Your ghost is everywhere but so am I. II. You’ve become the dust left by crazed arachnids in my yard. III. There’s this void in the distance spinning violently eating our lives. IV. The suffocating smell of your letters burning; not enough to leave me breathless. V. Your ghost is nowhere to be seen and so am I.
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S p r i n g 2 013
Observations on The Air I. formless creatures singing me the National Anthem; a life of paper cuts and microwaved coffee. tombstones of living acrobats the roof of an indoor cemetery. II. broken electronic devices swinging birds with vicious vices my brothers, your brothers, our hands; black fingernails, opaque eyes purple days and clever lies. heavy clouds of aluminum coca-足cola rain drops tides of artificial blood from our lithium foreheads. Ah, the downpour, the downpour the wind the rivers the wind small days and slow hours little faces dripping ink. Ah, the days and days my minutes wasted, my waste of words and arms and aluminum and lithium and eyelids: misled, misled.
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Artist Bios Finn Butler is an 18 year-old writer, singer, and general thing-maker living in London, UK. She hopes to begin a degree in music in September 2013. Further adventures in writing can be found at her poetry blog, greater-reality.tumblr.com. Amaal Said is 17 years old and in her first year of sixth form. She lives in London and can probably be found with her head in a book in her spare time. She is especially addicted to tea and pretty notebooks, even when she doesn’t need them. You can find more of her work at amaalsdrifting.tumblr.com and her Blogspot Page. Jenny Yu is an illustrator residing in Long Beach, California. She doesn’t have any pinpointed message she wants to convey with her art (she is still figuring it out, or wondering if it’s something that should be figured out). All she knows is this: she wants to create meaning and emotion through her art, and for people to be able feel that pulse of meaning and thoughtfulness, even for a fleeting second. She wants to capture pensiveness, growth, and unrefined emotion and share it with others, and for others to do the same. Emily Griffin spends her time drinking coffee, writing, and watching the rain in Portland, Oregon after having watched the sun beat down in Denver, Colorado for three years. Her life goals include finding a wounded fox in the woods and nursing it back to health, owning a coffee shop with an independent movie theater, becoming an editor, and starting a zine. Anis Mojgani’s work makes her want to create. She reads food blogs because she pretends she is learning how to cook. Casey Liu is a full-time photographer, part-time shop owner, free-time musician, and all-time dreamer. Born and raised in Hawaii, it is undeniable that the islands and her love for light have influenced her work. She has currently taken an indefinite amount of time off from school to travel the world, document life, and breathe. Her goal is for her photography to reverberate the very same fullness of joy that she experiences daily. You can find more of her work at CaseyLiu.com. Najma Ismail was born and raised with intertwined cultures and traditions that led her to becoming thoroughly expressive and aware of life. She is innately a poet with a perpetual smile, and enjoys life changing and thought provoking poems that inspire people to think, to recreate, to heal. Najma tries to radiate love and peace to everyone. She is a habitual lover and believes in laughter. Hailing from Somalia, her only wish is to see all the joyful and hopeful symptoms of the world in full bloom. Valerie Onifade is from Nigeria and currently resides in Maryland. She attends Howard
University, and is a freshman pursuing a Psychology major. She is infatuated with Jean Michel Basquiat, Subway Veggie pizza, and dubstep. Ali Patt is a Londoner with a lot of spare time and therefore spends most of her days writing or thinking of things she would like to do but never doing them. She hopes to study History Of Art, Design and Film as she is a lover of all things creative. She finds inspiration in wine, and the faces of people she loves or has loved. More of her work can be found at ululantes.tumblr.com. Nirvan West is an 18 year old Temple University freshman who enjoys poetry and the company of animals. He is commonly found surrounded by his books and his cats. Keep up with Nirvan on his tumblr page: newspapersocks.tumblr.com. Carter Staub is an undergraduate student, currently pursuing an honors degree in English Literature, as well as minors in Business Administration and Creative Writing. She is an avid fan of poetry, both reading and writing it, and always has a cup of tea by her side. When not pursuing her literary passions, she loves trying new foods and making some of her own. Kenny Fame is an African-American / GLBTQ poet who was born in Paterson, New Jersey; but he currently calls the village of Harlem in NYC his home. He was a recent graduate of Cave Canem’s 2011 & 2012 Poetry Conversations Workshop classes. He was the winner of “The Tenth National Black Writers Conference Award for Poetry.” Camille Perry comes from the mountains of the Big Sky State, but, drawn by the allure of food carts, “the dream of the 90s”, and weirdos like herself, has crept nearer the coast and found a home in Portland, OR. Long, long ago she realized that she would always be a starving artist and never considered any other way to be. She writes to stay alive amidst the buzzing behind her eyes. Jnana Hodson’s Harbor of Grace, a chapbook of prose poems, was published in the summer of 2012 by Fowlpox Press. He blogs at Jnana’s Red Barn (jnanahodson.net). Nancy Keeling’s photography has been widely published and exhibited in two Texas museums. She also authored a volume of poetry Estrogen Power. Vincent Bauters teaches literature, composition, and creative writing at a public high school in the Chicago area. Like everybody else, he gets by: writing poetry and tying his shoes. His poems have previously appeared in The Analecta and Merge Journal. Additional poems, concert reviews and brainstorms can be found at: bauters.wordpress.com. Bill Vernon’s poems, short stories and non-fiction have appeared in four poetry chap-
books, anthologies and journals such as Appalachian Story, Hippocampus Review, Yankee, Albany Review, Cincinnati Review, Blue Unicorn, The Archer, Grasslands Review, Poetry Ohio: Special Issue of the Cornfield Review, The Runner, Hemlocks and Balsams, and Passages North. Five Star Mysteries published his novel Old Town in 2005. Victoria Wiebe was born and raised in Ontario, Canada. Since before she can remember, she had a great interest in all things literature, some of her earliest memories dating back to writing short plays for her friends to perform. She soon advanced to larger works, writing novel-length manuscripts by the time she was twelve. Victoria’s novels, Continuum and The Lonely Hearts, were published by Kid Pub Press. She is currently working on a third, unrelated novel and has recently begun seriously pursuing her longtime love for poetry. To keep up with all her literary endeavours, be sure to like her Facebook Page. Wilda Morris regrets not having taken any courses in English or Literature in college, because she has since become addicted to poetry. Her poetry blog at wildamorris.blogspot. com provides a monthly contest for other poets. Born and raised in Brazil, Frederico Bignami López de Prado writes both in Portuguese, his mother language, and English. He has never had any formal education in English language, but has grown up surrounded by it.