Fractal Magazine, Volume 2, Issue 2 by Fractal Magazine

L A T C A R F

m a g a z i n e

Let me hear the final breath of all that has been taken from me.

â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Meggie Royer

Established in 2012, Fractal is a literary magazine founded and edited by students of the University of Southern California. Fractal publishes fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction in print and electronic format. Jackson Burgess, Editor-in-Chief Kelly Belter, Fiction Editor Michael Fretwell, Fiction Editor Shelby DeWeese, Poetry Editor Winona Leon, Fiction Editor August Luhrs, Poetry Editor Visit us at www.fractalmagazine.com. Email us at fractalmag@gmail.com.

F R A C T A L

Dear Readers,

It’s been a busy few months for us at Fractal—as we all graduated from the University of Southern California, most of the staff has left Los Angeles to teach, attend MFA programs, or learn the ropes of publishing. While we fell behind schedule publishing-wise, we are proud to present the work of nineteen poets and four fiction writers. Volume II: Issue 2 contains a myriad of voices and forms—from erasures to prose poems and experimental pieces to more traditional ones. Yet, laced throughout you’ll find the urgent emotion that led us all to love literature in the first place. Out of hundreds of submissions, these are the ones that had us hooked from start to end, and we couldn’t be more proud of the final product. We apologize for the wait, but we are sure it was worth it. As always, thank you for your continued support.

Sincerely, The Editors

MAGAZINE

t michael salcman

JET AND SUMMER SKY.....................................................6 8.........................................POEM ON A MODIFIED LINE… john gosslee BLACKOUT 43..................................................................10 12...................................................................BLACKOUT 67 triin paja WOUND..............................................................................12 laura mayron IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER........................13 jeffrey maclachlan EMERGENCY BROADCAST.............................................14 15................................................................................STRIPS lisa grgas (BEDTIME POEM).............................................................16

17...........................................................MAYBE IT WILL BE melinda giordana GRAMMAR OF BLOOD....................................................18 craig evenson ALUMNI BULLETIN...........................................................19 taylor sacco BLOOM.............................................................................20 22...............................................................SUBSCRIPTION josiah rosell PROPOSITIONS...............................................................25 michael prinoda 26................................................IN THE SUMMER HEAT… YOU MAKE DESPERATION SO EASY...........................27

jeremy moriarty

28.............................................................................HIGHER RISE..................................................................................30 andrew jarvis

31.......................................................................DAFFODILS christopher suda

32..................................................................COOL WATER john venturella

34.................................................................BONE WINTER SICK..................................................................................35 emi miller

36.............................................................GRANDMOTHER grant sorell

37................................................................DEAD FREIGHT meggie royer

38..........................................ALICE IN THE RABBIT HOLE scherezade siobhan

39..........................................................................ROUTINE samson bulkey

40.................................................................STREET BEDS laura bernstein-macklay 50..................................WHAT THE DETROIT EASTERN… brady harrison

53.............................................BUFFALO JUMP BROTHER michael browne

55..............................................................................MARIA 66.............................................................CONTRIBUTORS

michael salcman

JET AND SUMMER SKY A contrail writes its name in white icicles across a patch of the world’s favorite color, blue; it passes behind the white chimney of a neighbor’s colonial house, amputates the brush border of an evergreen, and slams into the trunk of a tulip poplar. It’s a Phantom returning to base on the Patuxent or a more commercial flight heading out over the Patapsco, bound for Europe. The red-breasted robin pecks at the grass, its rhythmic strut much fatter to my eye than the jet speeding over the Bay. My post-modern brain dips its flag in surrender to Brunelleschi’s notion of perspective, the screen of summer a simple trick, a willed abeyance of physics. The image splits—fooling my eye— the machine’s either a container of innocence or a belly sated with bombs defending my sun-struck pleasure. 6

I see Ucceloâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s thousand lances sag before I recover my wits, before they lift towards the deceptive hope of blue, that gaseous dream of soldiers buried in pits.

michael salcman

POEM ON A MODIFIED LINE FROM ROBERT WALSER —Winter (1919) The woman with the seven watches on her arm spends no time introducing herself but immediately launches into why she’s on our plane, sitting in the seat just in front of us, her mother safely delivered to a rest home in Milwaukee where she’s still in need of a motorized chair. She orders several Seven Crown whiskeys and extra ice, and happily wonders aloud if the flight attendant will ever find time to reach another row. I’m reading a story by Walser (well, each moment a different story since most of them are very short and the boredom of reading poetically makes me raise my head page by page) as if I and the author might emit a sigh together while the woman in front scrolls down her PDA for e-mail, for an address or a number, for someone else she might talk to next before we land in Baltimore and a moment of silence envelops her as surely as the fog of winter making much of itself opens up another tale. Just as soon as she tells her neighbor, who, like all of us, is a stranger all about her demanding father, she begins to snuffle and cry, louder and louder, taking bigger and bigger gulps of air, her 8

shoulders shaking like the main frame of our ride. I imagine sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a touch bipolar, perhaps entering her hypo-manic phase, leaving the subject of her mother has recalled some other disaster, and when thanking the strangers on every side most of us too embarrassed or a little afraid to answer.

BLACKOUT 43

john gosslee

BLACKOUT 67

john gosslee

WOUND

triin paja

I lay by the burnt ice on the shore, the smell of ghosts, the coal silence of winter. I find a morsel of a mirror: I return to it, again, again, as if the mirror could be water and I could touch the other. On a deserted buckwheat field, you touch my hair with your branches, expand like mildew on my ruins. We are being whispered in the dream of languageâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; My dress, for a while, holds contours of the wind. I call for you. My voice falls like stones into the sea.

laura mayron

IF ON A WINTERâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S NIGHT A TRAVELER The honey fell into my tea like blood Silent, humming with viscosity, last shaking drops sliding into an abyss of miniature lake. Outside, in a winter night that cracked with early cold came the train, a roar of darkness that I thought must be the wind endlessly exhaling into the blackness. Bottle inverted, waiting for dripping sweetness, I thought of you, shivering, golden, traveling through your own winterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s night streaming by so fast that you could only be blood could only be the wind.

jeffrey maclachlan

EMERGENCY BROADCAST

Beware of drinks that dissolve skies at the bottom of hurricane glasses. The host has an eighty percent chance of coughing shadows. Remain relaxed at your own discretion. This is the first gathering of the fall. This is the season where lanky girls accelerate in ferocity. The desire to be whiplashed from shore to shore causes guests to videotape imminent carnal fury. Letters that once could be gestured with kites are now trapped in blurry palms. Hand after hand tumbles around us in freezing bright waves.

STRIPS

jeffrey maclachlan

Pour some sugar to sweeten my beignet skin and straps. Relax as I clang against tabletop frenetic claps while every beat drops like an aftershock. Tonight shots of Jaeger open your forehead like a CD tray and I install visions of legs vining up the spotlight. This is what you pray for—scorching the management effigy, twinkling in my bluer eye like a sinking tropical yacht. Pick it up and maraca that hull like a cocktail shaker and I’ll grind the sides in a spinning whirlpool distracting minds with the shimmies of the sea’s bare navel.

(BEDTIME POEM)

lisa grgas

He asks me to touch the cysts in his head. Tells me it must be leukemia. Not true, I say, pressing a knuckle against his temple. Besides, I don’t think that’s what leukemia’s all about. But I inspect all of him anyway: Black blood trapped under a toenail. Urine cloudier than yesterday’s. All normal, I say. Bodies are weird if you look too close. (And, yes, I do look close: the dust mote balancing somehow on your eyelash, the pink and purple of your nighttime lip, the sound of your stomach as I straighten your spine. That way you hold your breath as I unclench your sleeping fists.)

lisa grgas

MAYBE IT WILL BE THIS WAY

Three shells lined up, largest to smallest, on the windowsill. The wasp stuck between the screen and glass, spider paralyzed in its mud cell. White patches of Adriatic salt in his hair. A midnight walk on Grgosova street, burst frogs on bare feet. Maybe it will be this way: Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll climb atop him in the bed his grandfather built, tell him keep quiet. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll eat the salt, lick the sunburned skin; push our watching wasp toward a pitch sky, or the moon through the webbed window.

THE GRAMMAR OF BLOOD

The smear of blood Curved across the sidewalk In a feminine scythe A smile Punctuated by a single feather A birthmark at the mouthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s corner To give one pause Like a comma

melinda giordana

ALUMNI BULLETIN

craig evenson

Here you are 3 years before vandals pitched your darkness from its cave, silk shirt straight, shiny hair, Wonder Bread teeth in an empty mouth of dead grass, empty threat threaded into unfed branches, pink mouth set to swallow the world one word at a time. Now, quaintly patient for what to say in narrowing time, fresh days squeezed round wet weight of accrued neglect. 19

BLOOM

taylor sacco

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s four in the morning and she knocks on my door. On the stoop I find her swaying, piss drunk, pale hands gripping rusted rails for support. She drifted here barefoot, navigating the spring streets, peppered with streetlight intervals, in nothing but her bathrobe. She says that she wanted to be sexy for me, but all I can do is check her feet for broken glass, and avoid her fists when they start to swing. All I find are mashed remains of the giant steel-gray slugs that slither their nocturnal sliver bodies over the streets at night. She sobs a little when the sun starts to rise, but now she sleeps it off and her face looks somehow harmonious, as if the booze has reset a master switch inside of her, and in the morning sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll wake to a virgin dawn full of an optimism that will wane hour by hour. 20

In the morning she’s peeing in my bathroom, loudly and with the door open. Back in bed, she’s sweating out the booze and asking about the clothes that flow down the street with the melting snow toward the lake. All of those bras and panties, t-shirts and boxers and jeans and sweatpants that spent the winter in some state of frozen stasis all released in one giant flood of forgotten things remembered. I don’t know what to tell her. I want to say something, but I don’t know the answer, so I say nothing, and it’s just silence now, a colossal canopy draping the bed, and holding us static in that moment, and I see clearly now, that its our words that move us forward. That drive us. In the corner, the rumpled folds of her pink bathrobe look like fragments of some giant vagina, waiting to bloom again like an annual flower tasting the pledge of Vermont spring in the melting air. 21

taylor sacco

SUBSCRIPTION Chef snaps out of his black-out mid-fuck with some anonymous woman, the room dripping in total darkness, bathed in some viscous void like a nightmare cave as it constricts its ominous body. Excusing himself wordlessly, he feels his blind way to the bathroom, hands outstretched like instrumental antennae in the dark. There, he creaks the faucet to life, and under cover of its embryonic droning shuffles through old National Geographics like a seasoned librarian navigating a card catalog. He searches for the address buried there and, exhumed, slurs it to me over the phone in whispered syllables. Slumped back in my car, 22

seat belt dangling neglected like a dead serpent’s body, he’s unusually silent, perhaps pensive, but manages to mention that he couldn’t see her face. That she was more of a shape, a shadow, a representation pointing toward a presence that he assumed only. Bound by touch and taste, Chef abandoned sight and instead relied on the callousness of his finger tips, the slickness of her hips, the way her breath emanated bleak and boozy, the sounds of ruffled sheets patterned in something floral extravagance he’ll never know. It was like a fucking black hole. It was like fucking a black hole. Then he’s asleep, peaceful and flaccid. Rustled to life he snaps awake with startling clarity, and traverses the space between car and apartment with an inebriated grace like a drunken figure skater twirling his recklessness toward sleep. In the morning, the details will be hazy for him. 23

Wavey and blurred like heat rising from the street. As we prep for dinner, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll fill him in, laughing, lightening the mood. I suspect that her form will haunt him. Dim and dripping with that darkness, just as she was: shadowed.

PROPOSITIONS

josiah rosell

If rain ruins the scent. If rain smudges the smog settling on the Earth’s lips. If they’re god’s lips. If you text god. If rain is god’s computer code, if the sky is god’s monitor. If you would just text. If there is a god. If our unwritten novel could be any thicker. If it could go on a diet. If I should go on a new diet. If Diet Coke didn’t kill me. If the studies would acquit it. If you would acquit me. If the studies would account for all variables including thoughts and blinks and breathing. If you’d count my breaths. If stars were blinking instead of twinkling, if stars were winking. If god’s eyes were stars, if god was a spider. If a web was a good metaphor. If you and I weren’t sticky. If situations were marshmallows, if you didn’t eat horse hooves. If glue was a force of nature, if it replaced magnets. If they ever invent the floating car. If we ever use a floating train. If we ever hydroplane on the highway again, if the rain would hold us down, if the rain could. If the rain was louder. If silence wasn’t a response.

michael prihoda

IN SUMMER HEAT, UNDER THE RIGHT VARIABLES, THE GLASS ACCUMULATES CONDENSATION acid deposition. calling a phone to hear the ring. the voicemail. drugs kick in, someone is buying a Powerball ticket, staking life to a ceramic grave. how much vomit could a king breathe, hold, and breathe out?

michael prihoda

YOU MAKE DESPERATION SO EASY

maybe you had a number of thoughts before dinner when i burned my hand draining the farfalle and you began to hate the way i stirred the sauce, not red enough, stir stir, not yet honey. so we ate with war in our mouths, forks like skyscrapers bending like saplings. the wind outside carried frost and tonight, hours earlier, i had the thought of carrying you to bed, us full on pasta, hoping again that something i had done might be an aphrodisiac but i couldn’t meet your eyes. no. and the number of your thoughts before dinner outnumbered pretty much everything about me. like the way your mother spoke down to me even though i was taller. i shrunk for her. i thought it mattered to you. but i won’t get anything tonight. not from you. if you haven’t left by morning i won’t ask you to wash the sheets. i will make the coffee and not complain. i will do something that matters unless you don’t want that in which case I might still ask you to come to bed clean.

jeremy moriarty

HIGHER Not a ghost, just fun. There is a clock on the wall saying it’s 1 am and there is a another poem The heart will not announce itself—the hard part. I cup the face in my hands but wish I could alive in this one, writing itself in the closeness. The body remembers what you never want it to, I curtain it. Low and uncertain, the river moves through you and it moves through me. Cold water, think, but the future is all mixed up on the carpet like the jigsaw puzzle we gave up some time a beach. Yearning. Whatchya up to? Idk, nothing. Angry. There are words beneath these words around 11 pm. We’re entitled little things, electric blue flashes in the night that scare more than and the bullshit resists categorization. The mouth makes noise because the heart will not. Run the affect. The smoke coming out of my mouth is what I imagine magic to be like, if magic was real gold, and I keep going higher. Separation. It doesn’t matter, cuz I’m on another planet with you.

and I was a wizard. Casual. Apropos of nothing, I press my teeth to my wrist and bite down.

RISE

jeremy moriarty

It’s been a year. Someone asked me about you. They said something nice like, how are they doing? This is just one example, and it’s nothing at all. It’s been a year, and I am still trying to write myself out of the dark. Some nights you are a drink and some nights you are just an association I make with commercials. With music, with food. Sometimes I think my mother is the love of my life and sometimes there is a dog barking in the night. These are the pieces and I am the puzzle. It’s been a year and I still feel the same. I am trying to make my body better for you. I am trying to eat healthier. Sometimes I want to be a better object for you, and sometimes I want to be a better animal for myself. If you travel the world, you travel the world. It’s been a year and there is no moral here, just a palimpsest. Text over text. Simple, but never clean.

DAFFODILS

andrew jarvis

She speaks of a poison, unpretending to plant perennials that bloom for life. Daffodils, they catalyze the demise of moles, of rabbits, of the ravenous. They eat the earth below, their bulbs bigger than lilies, poppies, as if layered lords. They die badly, and so she embodies them, plotting each bulb to blossom in yellow. To live in light, growing in a garden gifted to them, to tease all the tulips. And like a funeral planner, she plants her hands in sick soil, feeling undead.

COOL WATER

“The living water is a body, and we must put on the living human.” I walk a slow walk while she sits still on rail-pipes; her calves dangle over everything living she can’t stand to lean on—I bet she owns a stomach full of stiff, rejected hair. Her eyes now meet my eyes; they remind me of a young, retreating complaint; or like a dead pair of flowers still releasing speech. My pace, weakened by more than enough snow, must have been the shot she needed to wane into the shadows. like old harbors at dawn, full of light splashes 32

christopher suda

she makes Eve look like the fool, and drowns.

BONE WINTER

there were a lot this year dead birds so many scattered across the snowfall the backyard looks like a pilled cotton blanket each oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s head severed and the blood drained frozen in violent tendrils that reach out and out and out like a hand looking for an unfamiliar light switch thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been a lot this year dead birds killed by a thin hunger gnawing around the edge of winter like the terrified question you only ask halfway

john venturella

SICK

john venturella

your body is a bolt of sheer fabric shot from a crossbow unwinding so thin it’s hard to understand how to hold you gentle like a handful of raspberries tight like an arm on an icy sidewalk at night television light seeps from your cracked door I can’t shut it but I want to I want to brick you in and hang a young picture on the tomb I’m ready please die tonight so we can stop bending our lips like question marks around the word love

GRANDMOTHER Wrinkled fingers rolling parchment paper cigarettes, quiet veins and quieter eyes, she whispers about the garden, how watching the flowers die reminds her of her second husband; her house is a graveyard, full of dusty fossils, cracking bones. Now, the burnt-down roll spews ashes from the ends. She feeds the birds with fingers smelling strongly of tobacco and stale smoke. The robins pick round, blushing grapes from her withered palms and fly slowly away. In the doorway, she takes another drag before patting her cigarette out and rolling another.

emi miller

DEAD FREIGHT

grant sorrell

Drew Sharp’s helmet punched a divot into the dirt when his body poured sideways from his kick-stood dirt bike, the blast from Todd’s pistol still mingling in the air with the departing dirge of the train’s horn. Like others before him, Drew would be packed into a 50-gallon barrel and marinated in hydrofluoric acid before being sealed and shipped as freight out of state, off the screen and away from the audience’s mind. But death is not a one-shot character, appearing and gone by an episode’s end, forgotten by story arcs more exciting than a boy on a bike; it is the scrolling through credits to realize the boy’s name, the scouring of filmography to discover his past, and the stack of his movies that will lean drunkenly against your television, to be watched and rewound and watched again until their tape spills out like blood in the dirt beneath an idling engine.

meggie royer

ALICE TO THE RABBIT HOLE

Sometimes this madness does me in, this black ribbon clenched around my throat like a hand, mother having birthed me from starlight and a tree whose ghost never knew when to stop humming. The body of men a threshold I had yet to cross, standing at the foot of their thighs and throwing salt across the entryway like a wedding guest too timid to leap for the bouquet. Sometimes, I wish to skin the rabbits I catch. To take the saw whose song I have sung since my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s caesarean. To cradle something alive, a pulse, a dark throb beneath the skin. Bring me the head of John the Baptist, said Salome. Let me hear the final breath of all that has been taken from me.

ROUTINE

scherezade siobhan

no more a looming brawl with the mattress no more the quaint fluctuations in the fabric no more stowing mothballs in bullet-holed closets like theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re easter eggs; iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d rather the silverfish tamper the paraphernalia of each yesterday when i rise, it is all a calculated wreck. i rinse the washcloth of my world till it is lint-weak. this is how i wake up nowadays; heavy as sequoia axed torso ossified into tar all things black bless me; i speak a dead dialect. in a crate of conversations, i peel back the enclosure that embraces meaning every nuance submits to its decided itinerary; every letter cautiously trained for extinction. somewhere the city stutters behind my windowsill each house is the glinting ghost of a light-bulb i strip each day of its disguise remind myself that everything i have ever loved came softly draped in the dregs of loss.

STREET BEDS

samson bulkley

The boy was late. He had lost the time through meandering and sloppily grooving between streets to the wayward end of town. There were no beds left; he knew it as he saw others set up to sleep on the sidewalks and soft dirt outside the shelter. The boy was tired. His feet ached, and he was scared to lay with the others. He was scared to sleep among the manics and brawlers. They were liars and thieves thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll slice your throat. There was a mad generation sleeping on the streets. Torrents of tweekers, junkies and drunks all fashioned to violent lunacy. They spied the fear in him. They knew him as thin and weak and wandering with the last of his valuables; a watch gifted by his late friend and grandfather, a bottle of whiskey he stole as he was forced out, and two books rented to him by the public library. Every piece is lauded and searched in the gutters. Every bastard could steal it, and a heavy few willed to kill for it. The boy walked off and pondered. It was a dark, weekend night but still early into the rhythm of post-labor freedom. People still walked districts and hopped to bars. Lights were still emanating bright lulls of entopic security. The dull vestiges of coherent society toiled together and remained alive among the hell-spun streets. They stuck to clusters and broke to eyeless maneuvers as the sad, tired bum boy leered and sought solely to the steps of the large, modern library. It was a glass, asymmetrical goliath. A place for the boy to limply warm as he fought the first instincts of sleep. It was expansive and filled with shuffling bums and florescent lights. Lithe librarians and a traffic of downward gazes. The boy found a nook at the end of two shelves. It was a thin aisle deep into the torrents of untouched books. 40

He opened his pack and shuffled through the clothes to the bottle of whiskey drained down to the last fourth. The boy fashioned a pocket for the bottle to nest with its neck raised in a confident position near the opening. He then raised up the pack with his knees and surreptitiously sipped from the liquor bottle. The boy took out his two dirtied books. Poor, starving bodies foster a hunger for words. He had nearly never read beforehand but gave into curiosity from idle angst and hunger. As the boy began to read and sip, he lost a few tears. He had a frustrated despair in his eyes and chest. He wept with the tears he spied on his mother’s cheeks as his father packed him up and shoved him out. He drank off his father’s words with liquor and worked his way to a soft, ready sleep. He felt his head warm as he took page to page and melded through the easing sentences. He had turned into a man one morning, and the world will only temper him if he’s learnt to battle from within it. The boy drank on until a sudden shuffle of feet seeped in from the space between the aisles. As his lips broke from the neck of the bottle, he met the sight of manic eyes staring through with gruff, chin stubble and a wave of scattered hair. The boy recognized the eyes with heavy line as a brawler and a mad man. The drunk bum that hides a collection of knives in his jacked with inimical strikes broke at any angry moment. He was one of the mad generation. The hopped up bastards left to the streets with nothing but dope and drink. With tattered, battling minds that had lost care and sympathy once they gained insecurity, they had become manic. The world had given them no friends, and now, they sought only to take from it. “What’s that,” the manic said. “Give it here.” He laid out his hand and strode through in a strong, long walk with centered intimidation. 41

“It’s nothing,” the boy returned. “I’ve got a book.” “What’s in the pack?” The boy moved to his pack but was fronted and walled away. The manic spied down to the open neck and laughed a split, grisly guffaw. “That is heaven you’re hiding. I’ll have a sip of it.” He ducked towards the bag. He and the boy came to grasp at the same time and thrashed in a sudden grasp between his long, lean arms and the boy’s measly desperation. A shout came out. Deep, authoritative, and malignant, across another aisle. A voice with anger and impatient resentment that demanded the situation to stop. “It’s just foolery,” the manic tried to explain. The man was in a soft, blue uniform with an assortment of painful items, and a black radio tensing from his palm. “Ten minutes ‘til. Gather your things and move out.” The manic nodded, and the boy hurriedly packed away with the books in hand. He moved past the idling manic and asked the guard to show him a book depository. The guard initially shook his head and scowled, but under the boy’s pressing, he decided the bum’s prodding to be more cumbersome than leading him to a spot. The manic paused then rounded with them in sight. The depository was near the entrance with a small plated sign bolted above a drawer. He shoved the books and groomed a trot out the door. He belted the full tilt of his speed and begged all the distance he could from the library. The moon was out and the town alive with lights and young, free chatter. The mirth and sanction between laughing faces and heavy lights pulled the boy around as he sped. A few eyes curiously marked his sprint while most edged and sheltered inward lest be touched by the dirty, 42

unkempt bum passing out hot breath into the clean air. He rounded corners and padded the street. He played through tense, tentative sessions with rolling vehicles and the odd, rolling bicycle. He ran until his heels panged with hot weight, and his chest pressed with deep beats and insurmountable pressure. His knees grew dense, and his legs set to stop. He was along a dark, residential street when he heard only his steps then lessened into a walk. He turned and saw nothing save for streetlamps and wheeling lights across the corner. He breathed deep and hoarse. He spat and ached in paranoia then gradually grew to a salient stride across the cut, quiet lawns. The boy could not ease. He snapped his neck and listened to the hop of his pack as he was stared down by homes tailored with fences. Every so often, a lambent pool of light would strike from a bustling home painted by windows of clear smiling faces dripping into red wine and cold, battled beers. He stepped and felt the lulls of agitation. He was tired and wished to sleep. A sound spot to lay and finish his liquor without a madman to steal it all away. At the moment he settled into restive thoughts and wishes, he stopped, and his chest rushed into palpitations. A thresh of steps padded out in the dark, and the manic came clean into sight with the chase ignited once more. He leapt and sprained. The sudden movement tore into his ligaments and stoked a fire in his joints. He ran hard yet heard him gaining. He pressed into grass and atop a small knoll holding a dark, empty park. The boy fell and struggled to his pack then held it deep against his chest as the manic strolled towards him. The boy begged him. He begged the manic to take anotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Quit your crying,â&#x20AC;? he replied. 43

The boy struggled and pressed hard around his pack until the sprite clip of a blade blotted out his heartbeat. He then tore out the bottle and thrust it into the plain of grass wherein the manic smirked and took it out into the bleak night. “You’re mad! Just as every bastard that’s among you.” The boy silently wept into the hard ground. He wept into the spot he was forced to sleep without the weight of inebriation to aid him. The boy managed to gather up his limbs and trudge upward to soft, desolate surroundings. He was gripped in melancholy and stripped by lethargy. The strict set of his eyelids tied to the weight of his mind as he begged to find a spot to sleep. The park was desolate. It was in an even shadow of midnight drapery. Lengths of trees stood solely and stolidly with fragrant needles. The boy walked and battled the stringent purse of his eyes through the concrete walk. The mellow silence of the dark murmured around him as he stepped deep to the restive state. He saw sheltered tables and isolated drinking fountains. He saw woodchips under heap, molded plastics. He drew in until he fell into a green, rubber bench that bit back as he lay his head down. The boy put his pack beneath his heady-laden head then rummaged through until he felt the links of his grandfather’s old watch then mutely stared across the glass the at the stuck, black hands holding out in opposite direction, and he wept a bit more. It was not long, as he battled his lethargy against despair and discomfort, when thick, heavy steps stood out in the dark and brought his head upward. He saw the sturdy shine of aggressive utensils and royal blue, navy authority. A large man with thick chests of malicious yell as he stomped towards the boy. “You can’t sleep here.” 44

The boy nodded and stole up his pack. “Only a moment’s rest.” Then he began to beat the other direction. “Hold on there, boy.” The boy slowed and turned but maintained a lean away. The officer was somewhat shapely but still thick, and the boy felt he had maneuver over him. “What’re you doing out here?” “Nothing.” “There’s nothing worth lying here, son. What’s in the pack?” “Clothes.” “Noting else?” “No.” The officer paced towards him. “Let me have a look.” The boy stepped back, and the officer paused. “Look here,” he strained the hard look baring between them, “Don’t run off. We’ll catch you. I promise it.” The boy paused to listen but remained staid by strong leagues of distrust. “You have reefer in that pack?” The boy shook his head. “Dope, amphetamines, or pills?” “No, sir.” “Let me have a look.” The officer stepped forward, and the boy vented. He stabbed running steps through the grass while a hot breath of anxiety roamed out from a torso struggling atop an aching set of legs. The stout movements behind him pressed and throttled its voice while the grass thickened and stole hard steps until a rummage bore out from the darkness and raked into the boy’s side. He fell under a mess of weight and toiling plastic that firmly 45

pressed above him as he thrashed and gripped to pull through. The first officer barreled in and pinned his limbs while they locked his wrists then both rubbed off their hand and openly questioned why it always seems that the smelliest bastards try to run. The officers peeled through his pack while his arms were still held fast the two straps. They pulled out his clothes and remnant stocks of trash. The first officer discovered his watch and held it flat in the palm of his hand. “Nothing,” the second cursed. “All these cunts are paranoid.” They began shoving the articles back in the pack. “Is your pal still out here?” The boy replied to the agitation of the officers that the man wasn’t his friend then astutely declared that he had gone a good while ago. The first officer motioned the watch to the second. “No, let him keep it.” They unclipped and let him off back into the night. He rushed into the street and jogged on the walk until the cruiser rode by as silent and constant as the wind above him. The boy wallowed and wavered. He struck at the walk and fought back sadness. He was resolute in his lethargy and sadly spurning to the world’s refusal. Then he muttered and came to the dour conclusion to walk more until he found a spot to rest. It was still not late enough for the world to quit. Bar rooms and dancing clubs still bore light, laughter, and melody. The streets were still with groves of friends spouting drunken talk around a sweating, disheveled wayfarer. He walked alone and rattled his pack until the 46

pang of his legs gave way, and he decided to sit at the curb for a moment. Lurid smells and axioms of insobriety lay way in the streets. The boy marked groups of chattering friends as they lived the night like a dream for they had a bed to retreat. He watched the young women with beaming, pretty faced as they trailed in form-fitting clothing and high, taut shorts. The boy was still disheveled and brawn with sweat and dirt. He drew on anger, but fell only into dejection. He felt tired. He was spent, raked, limp, and broken. He felt tattered and torn to woe. There’s not a spot to sleep. He rhymed his hands through the aches of his thighs as he laid his chin to his chest with the burden of sleep leering atop of him. “You’re young,” a girl said. The boy turned to a lithe, plain faced girl swaying intently towards him. “So are you.” “But I have a home.” “How do you know that I don’t?” “I don’t believe you do.” The boy shrugged and dredged his teeth amongst one another.”Somewhat, I have one.” “With most, you either have a home or you don’t.” “Isn’t there a crowd you should be stalking around with?” He was impatient and tired. She smiled carelessly. “I’ll find them again. There’s no rush.” Her heavy, glazed eyes fixated into his own as she pursed thin lips. “How’d you end up here?” The boy shrugged and shook his head. A zephyr caught the scent off the girl; tweeds of cigarettes and weed faintly under the heavy influence of cheap perfume. 47

“Where do you sleep?” “Where I can.” “Is that in the streets?” “Tonight, it might be.” He brushed at his pants and looked at the frays of his shoes. “Do you ever become afraid?” The boy looked off and shook his head to the ceaseless notions of winds and folly. “Anyhow, fear doesn’t stave anything off. That’s something people ought to learn quickly. Fear anything all you want, but it will still come without anything true to stop it.” A call rang out, and he stood. The call was inconsequential and inattentive to him, but he broke into a trot and made way from the city and the gentile girl. He strode from tandem lights and smiling faces. From acrid streets and hard block of houses, the miles of city blocks were tiring, and the sounds were stressful. He walked the full of his endurance. Train tracks were set in the city to divide security. Within the hours, he crossed onto them and stopped to eye the disparity of towers, lights, and laughter to somber home, dark streets, and the ominous shelter where he had began his night. A call, again, came out. A call as every point of drudgery begins at night, and he chased the call. He walked to a shaded man with gristle and slovenly jaw. He asked if the boy had anything in his pack, and the boy tiredly, brokenly claimed to have a broken watch. The man pulled up and gritted his teeth then mentioned he ought to give it up to him. The boy looked to the street but felt pain in his legs and remained so damned tired. He handed the watch over then jutted again along the walk. He reached the shelter, and the road that scattered the bodies of sleeping homeless. It was dark but rife with 48

heaps of safely kept trash and sleeping packs. The boy walked to the fringe of the street where hardly a body lay. Where there was long, dry grass and abandoned lots. He opened his pack and layered his dress to fight the surreptitious wind then lay his head on to it to rest. He then fell to sleep under the debt of lethargy and sweet thoughts of damning his father, mother, and the entirety of a godless, spiteful world.

laura bernstein-machlay

WHAT THE DETROIT EASTERN MARKET MEANS

The Detroit Eastern Market means “family.” Generations shop together, bringing their children to see the market, its wares and farm animals. Old and young browse and bargain old-world style for what suits their interests. —Eastern Market Merchant’s Association Forest, farm, cemetery! These days a working market spanning miles—this auspicious tract of land off Mack Avenue and Gratiot (pronounce Detroit-style—say Gra, 3/5 of grass, add shit). See shops and venders with their hundred hues of berries and roses, peppers and peonies ten to a flat. All of it circled by wholesalers and meat-packing plants—Capital Poultry, Al’s seafood, Wings and Fins, Adam’s Meat, Randy’s Sausage—the stink of slaughterday settling like shadow into everyone’s skin. The market, once intersection of Sauk and Fox and Kickapoo trails, then marching ground for Custer’s footsore soldier-boys, then graveyard—Protestants here, Catholics over there. And for those lacking coin or name, a potter’s field. All of it crisscrossed with silhouettes of escaped slaves keeping low to earth, creeping like fog toward the Detroit River and free Canada beyond. My story’s less portentous, though I visited once in the fierce pulse of a thunderstorm—sky alive, air thick and heavy as flannel before the first resounding boom and boom. I was five or six, mewling appendage on my mother’s hip as she dipped and swayed against wind gusts, rain cutting like scalpels into the skin of our naked faces. Stubborn, my mother went on haggling for flour, salt, garbage bags worth of lettuce and apples and onions 50

for the short-lived food coop she started with her hippy friends—the coop doomed to failure in the upper-class suburb we tumbled head-over-feet after her latest divorce. Even as the rain hammered sideways, knocking my mother to and fro so she jerked like a marionette, even as I hardpressed my knees into her belly and gripped her shoulders with my claw-fingers, as the storm ranted and raved like a bully pushed to his last nerve, and finally passed like smoke across our half-shut eyes. Back then I didn’t care that we stood smack-dab where the long-demolished House of Corrections once hulked, the wraith-gray bastion once lording it over all erstwhile market-goers. That the mud where my mother dropped me like a sack of potatoes was the same mud decorating the cell of Belle Starr—horse-thieving, hatchet-faced bandit queen—as she languished there a hundred years before, assembling furniture joint by tack by spindle to heal her eternal soul. But I noticed the pig right off, pink as the skin on my Skipper doll, cinched up by its hind trotters, dangling there for the world to see. It was Shetland pony sized, hanging taller than me and newly killed, its blood plink-plonking—small explosions in the dirt, melting into rain—from belly sliced wide, glistening folds of its guts almost prurient, inviting as a circus sideshow. What do kids know? Nowadays I visit weekends with my daughter in tow, Celia of the glitter dresses and first, lost tooth. I give a few bucks to the beautiful homeless man—more boy than man—as he shakes his dirty hair from his eyes, tells me his name is Jack. Before he backs off to the margins of the parrot-bright crowd, disappears into blind air. I choose Darjeeling over Lapsang Souchong and pick through bins of tangerines and field greens and cilantro while Celia gnaws red skin off an 51

apple in dwindling loops, tosses it high into the sun, the sky brand new todayâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;greedy gulls laughing above our heads, somersaulting and cartwheeling like acrobats, plunging and rising like light.

brady harrison

BUFFALO JUMP BROTHER

Sometimes, when a buddy asks a favor, you agree whether you want to or not. One day, your buddy—call him Mackey—says to you and another buddy: if it ever looks like it’s going to happen again, I want you to kill me. You look at Arlo— he’s wiry, ropey, his bullshit-detector running hot, the leader—and he nods: you know why Mackey asks what he asks, and after all that spite and ugliness, you know he means it. Mackey had said it: “I had to marry her so I could divorce her.” A few years later, Arlo brings Mackey to Montana to see you. The old buddies getting together, the Buffalo Jump Collective, catching up, sipping whiskey, telling lies, cutting up, talking music, guitars, cigarettes. But Arlo knows, and you know—and Mackey’s gotta know—that the trip West isn’t just for fun, for old times, because, yes, he’s done it again, and you and Arlo owe him, you made your promise, and Arlo’s at the fridge at 6:00 a.m., sipping a Moose Drool, cracks one for you, and a half-hour later the three of you leave for Glacier, Going to the Sun, and you pull over, and everybody knows how it has to be. Arlo says: “Call it a hike,” and Mackey looking at the clouds says he always liked Montana, says it’s not like Gasoline Lake, that’s for sure, his hometown in the Illinois bottoms along the Mississippi. Oil refineries, superfund sites, depopulating towns, Church of Christ and biker bars, streams with names everybody knows but that don’t appear on maps.

Later, the Rangers will say, Where did he come from, from a plane? Christ, how far did this guy fall? Or maybe heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s falling still, your Buffalo Jump brother, your brother.

MARIA

michael browne

…and I’m watching Maria Banuelos die, but I’ve always been watching her die. Standing outside her room on the 12th floor of the Cedars-Sinai ICU, she looks as she has always looked: stiff, cold, and gone. Her grandmother Concepcion is in the room, along with Maria’s brother Alvaro. Concepcion recites prayers in whispers of Spanish and Alvaro holds Maria’s hand like he doesn’t know what to do with it. A hospital catering cart arrives with blueberry danishes, coffee, and orange juice. I turn my eyes from the room and begin to eat a danish. The ICU operates in a kind of silent chaos, and seems to have its own erratic, unstable pulse, mirroring the random blips and bleeps of the patient’s monitors. Some patients die in the company of others, who partake in the spectacle, the ceremony of death. Other patients die alone with a faint last breath that lifts into the air and fades unfelt. For a lucky few, ICU is but a short stop on the way to recovery and a return to life. All of this range of life happens on a floor the size of an office and I don’t understand. Doctors are paged over the intercom to distant rooms on distant floors where someone is most likely hooked up to machines like Maria, and I’m thinking to myself if death had a smell it would be this hospital; a brutal olfactory nightmare of vomit, bile, and bleach. Even the cafeteria, three floors below the lobby, carries its stench. It’s lurking somewhere between the chips display, or above the salad bar, or even on a cold pepperoni pizza that sits on a cold metal tray. On top of it all, Maria Banuelos is waiting to die, but she’s always been waiting to die. My memories with Maria are shrouded in a heavy malaise, with only very 55

brief intervals of happiness, mostly towards the beginning of our relationship. If she was conscious enough she might see me and remember the day we went to a ballgame in late September when the Dodgers were in the middle of a pennant chase and the Santa Ana’s were preparing their annual siege on the L.A. basin. She might remember the geometric patterns cut into the green grass, or the heat of the metal bleachers on the backs of our legs. There was also the foul ball I caught and she might remember how my hand swelled up and how I couldn’t sleep that night. We had only known each other for three months at that point, but it was the first, and one of the only times, I saw Maria Banuelos enjoy herself. She interacted with the human race that in some distant history, had forgotten she was a part of. Through various high-fives and crowd induced “waves,” the utter closeness of the humanity around her shook Maria out of an isolation that at the time ran deeper than I knew. The Dodgers won the pennant that night, and there were fireworks after the game. Big, grand fireworks that shook the stadium and sent off car alarms all over the parking lot. It was the only ballgame we ever went to. I take one last bite of the danish and wash it down with pulpy, stringy orange juice that’s probably been sitting down in the cafeteria for months. It’s then, as I’m pushing a piece of stringy pulp with my tongue from between my two front teeth, that someone taps me on the shoulder. “Excuse me. Are you related to Ms. Banuelos?” It’s one of the Asian male nurses patrolling ICU. He’s wearing eggplant colored scrubs and carrying Maria’s chart in his hand. His cell phone vibrates in his left chest pocket, and it’s distracting enough for him to pull it out and turn it off. “Uh, well not exactly. We used to date.” “Unfortunately the ICU visiting hours are for immediate family only. I’m going to have to 56

ask you to leave.” “I don’t understand. I was just here yesterday.” “Hospital policy. I can check with my supervisor, but for the moment I’m going to have to ask you to leave. We simply cannot have non-family members in the ICU. There is a waiting room outside.” I grab another danish, and take one more glimpse at Maria, whose lifeless hand is still being held by Alvaro. I make eye-contact with him, letting him know I’ll be in the waiting room. I nod towards Concepcion but she doesn’t notice me. She’s sitting in a chair by Maria’s bedside with her eyes closed and clutching what I think are rosary beads. I push through the double doors and walk towards the elevator, bypassing the waiting room where I can hear a family lightly sobbing. Once I enter the elevator I push the button that says “G” for “Ground Floor” and the doors clang shut and I start to feel my world go in on itself as I descend away from Maria for what I am certain is the last time. I start to sweat and think about the elevator cables snapping. I think of the sharp screeching steel and whether or not I would feel myself being crushed. As the floor buttons light up, 5th floor, then 4th floor, then 3rd floor, I think of the silhouette of the falling man from the twin towers. I am not falling to my death, as he was, but I am falling away from life, falling away from a life. We are connected by a mutually similar level of despair; a sensation of things falling away and apart. After what feels like a lifetime, the elevator whirrs to a stop and I exit into the sterile and cold lobby. I put on my sunglasses and walk outside into the warmth of the early morning, find a stone bench, and fall asleep. *** “Maria es dead,” is all I hear in broken English. I open my eyes and raise my stiffened body from the 57

stone bench. I can make out the black silhouettes of Alvaro and Concepcion in front of me. I’m not sure what time it is, but the sun is peaking just over the top of Concepcion’s head, making her look holy, and I don’t understand. Maria is dead. Maria is dead. I don’t know what to say to either of them. As they wait for my reaction their faces look placid, unmoved, and I can’t tell what they are feeling and I don’t know if they can tell what I’m feeling. Maria is dead. Maria was alive. The reality of this past tense shakes me, jars me, and I feel my world go in on itself again, as it did when I was in the elevator. Maria likes chocolate milkshakes from McDonalds. Maria liked milkshakes from McDonalds. Maria is great at imitating mimes. Maria was great at imitating mimes. I see Concepcion and Alvaro still standing there like great big monoliths in the sun and I don’t know what to say, so I say, “OK.” Alvaro tells me he’ll call me when the funeral arrangements are set, and Concepcion kneels down to my level on the stony, cold slab and hugs me. Her rosary beads hang loose around her neck and drape down over my nose as she leans in. She says something to me in Spanish as they walk away but I don’t understand. I walk to the parking structure and get into my car and sit there for a moment, listening to the blood pulse through my ears and the whispers of the Santa Ana’s outside. I start the car and drive home in silence, with the late afternoon sun persistent enough for me to put on my sunglasses. *** The funeral was delayed. The crematorium burned the wrong Maria. Eventually they got around to cremating the right Maria Banuelos and the funeral date was set. I went to get fitted for a tuxedo a few days before the funeral. 58

The man fitting me asked me who was getting married. I told him someone died. A look of dumb confusion spread over his face. “Oh, well this tuxedo is generally for a groomsman.” “Do you have anything for funerals?” “I’m not sure. We have a selection of black button down shirts over here.” I looked at a couple of the black shirts, but remembered that I had a selection of black shirts at home. I left the store with nothing and walked to my car. Another employee ran out and asked if I wanted to be added to the “wedding offers” mailing list. I told him that I’m going to a funeral, not a wedding. A look of dumb confusion spread over his face. I pulled out of the parking lot with the afternoon sun shining on my face, reached for my sunglasses and drove home in silence. *** Today is my 30th birthday. I spent my 25th birthday with Maria Banuelos in her hometown of Veracruz, Mexico. The trip was an attempt on my part to see Maria in her native land, and also shake her out of a deep depression that since the ballgame, had followed her like some sort of faithful dog. Maria’s father Sal was incredibly receptive to me, and to celebrate my birthday, purchased fireworks from a man with three fingers on each hand named Sancho. On the night of my birthday we set them off in the center of town, and I remember the smell of sulphur and the bright streaks of red, white, and green and how they lit up the sky, and reflected down on Maria’s face, illuminating a sense of nothingness. There are also memories of picking nopales with Sal in the hills just above the town. We’d pick 59

them and take them down to the salt water to clean and then eat nopales tacos at night. Often, when taking the nopales down to the water, Maria would watch us from the shadows of the palm fronds with a look of complete boredom. I remember her large and floppy red hat that shielded her eyes and was brighter than the sun. When we would eat breakfast we would have nopales with eggs and a Mexican sausage they call chorizo, out in the patio of Maria’s childhood home. The patio was lined with white birds of paradise, and they were in bloom during our stay, arching upwards at tropical sky. Maria kept to herself most mornings during breakfast, but one morning she made a peculiar observation as the three of us were gathered around a wrought-iron table that was red with rust. “The birds of paradise are bleeding blood red.” “That’s just the sap from the flower,” I said in between mouthfuls of chorizo. Her focus stayed fixed on the plants, reaching momentarily to the table for a sip of hibiscus flavored tea. She then set the tea down, and with eyes glassy and veiled, looked at me and said: “You don’t understand. The birds of paradise are bleeding blood red.” We were only there for ten days, but it seemed like months. Most days we spent lying on the beach, falling asleep and getting badly burnt by the equatorial sun. We’d get to the beach at 6AM to watch the sunrise, and sometimes stay there till 10PM to listen to the loud din of crickets and toads that lived somewhere in the dense foliage behind the beach. We never talked much on the beaches in Veracruz. When we did, I’d ask Maria about her childhood and she would shield her eyes from the sun and say there was nothing much worth telling. Maria liked floating face down in the ocean. Even in life she was kind of like death: rigid, stubborn, and unwavering. For 60

as much as I tried to keep things lighthearted and bring out the exciting and joyful Maria I loved so much in the beginning of our relationship - the Maria from the ballgame - my efforts had failed, and I was beginning to grow tired of Veracruz, and her crushing malaise soon became my crushing malaise. Our surroundings didn’t help. The flamingos in the area, instead of the radiating pink that is synonymous with paradise, were dirty and greyed. At one point, schools of beautiful yellow-fin tuna washed up on the shores of Veracruz for two days straight, leaving the locals dumbfounded and Maria utterly indifferent. Then there was the neighborhood dog Luz, who Maria had known since she was a teenager and had to be put down during our stay. “Things get old and then they die,” Maria said. The last two days of the trip were spent holed up inside her childhood home, since it rained like I’ve never seen it rain before. I spent a lot of time reading books about South American alien abductions and the top baseball prospects in Mexico, but most of my time was spent listening to the heaviness of the rain, and letting its repetitive, almost corrosive nature dull my senses. One evening I found Sal sitting on the porch, listening to Mexican radio, watching the rain fall, and looking out towards nothing in particular. I stood behind him and asked him about Maria and her childhood. Sal said that when Maria was a teenager she would disappear for days or weeks at a time. She would hitch-hike across the Mexican countryside, staying with families or other teenagers along the way. Sal felt like this pattern of escape and rebellion was good for Maria, and helped bring her into a greater understanding of “el mundo.” During one such excursion, Maria went missing for almost three months. She returned home late one night 61

soaking wet. For days after her return, Maria slept on a remote corner of the beach, avoiding Sal’s probing for where she had been, and his obvious concern for what had happened. Three weeks after her return, Sal walked up to her one day on the beach as she was lying face down in the sand and asked her what had happened. Maria simply said, “Nada, la gente es igual en todas partes.” I asked Sal what this meant, and in broken English he said, “People are same everywhere.” *** The last night before we left, Maria walked in her sleep and ended up on the beach. When Sal and I found her she was lying down in the surf mumbling and her hair was wrapped in seaweed and brown bulbous kelp. We dragged her sandy body back home, and I tucked her into bed. From the corner of the room I sat and watched her sleep until the crickets stopped and the sun rose. I crawled into bed just after 6AM and put my arm around her but felt nothing. That’s when I started to wonder if I’d ever felt Maria to begin with or if I had just fallen for an ideal of Maria. I needed to get away from her so I got out of bed and left the house and walked along the beach for what seemed like hours, letting the rain and waves soak me completely. We left Veracruz that evening - just two days before Hurricane Santos ripped through the region, leaving the coast in a state of disrepair. The high winds brought havoc to the coast and destroyed a lot of the cactus the nopales grew on. The beach near Sal’s home no longer looks like it did when we were there. It is now disfigured and odd - a beach with no beginning and no real end. Hurricane Santos ended up killing 350, or 450, or 1000 people. On the flight home I had the aisle seat and Maria sat next to the window and slept against it during most 62

of the trip. Occasional spells of turbulence would wake her up, and after one such spell, I decided to talk to her about the trip. “Don’t you feel anything when you go back to Veracruz?” I asked, trying to watch my words with a certain level of caution and concern. She looked at me, then peaked out the window at the black, mindless sea that was somewhere 30,000 feet below us. An unknown menace, undulating endlessly. “No, not really,” she said, with her attention still fixed to the window and the darkness below us. There was a long pause. A pause long enough to suck the ambition out of the universe and scorch the lonely deserts of meaning and longing. I decided not to probe any further and food service came and went. I had a BLT with avocado. Maria had nothing. A few minutes or hours later she went to the bathroom, came back, and from 30,000 feet in the air said: “I have the constant sensation of floating. I have the nagging feeling that I am floating through my life.” That was it. Maria’s big reveal to me. That was as deep as she ever got, and I still have no idea what she meant as we flew across the gaping blackness of the Gulf that night. The gaping blackness that could have easily swallowed Maria whole. *** The night before the funeral I’m sitting in my apartment as the Santa Ana’s continue to blow with a groaning frustration outside. I get a call from Alvaro and he gives me the address of the church for tomorrow and I ask him how he is, but he doesn’t answer me, and then I hear a dial tone and that’s it. I try to bake a pizza in the oven, but forget about the pizza and the pizza burns black, so I order Thai 63

delivery and it never comes, so I just get ready for bed. My bedroom is dark, illuminated only by the cool blues and austere whites of the television. A weather man appears across the screen with a flash of enthusiasm. “Brush fire warning. Santa Ana’s topping out at 70 mph in the valley and desert.” The camera pans to a shot of the grapevine, where a big rig is overturned - knocked on its side by the high wind. No other cars are on the grapevine and it isn’t clear as to whether the driver is trapped or not. The coverage goes back to the studio where the sports anchor says, “Gee wiz, looks bad out there tonight,” but I can’t tell if he really means it. I can’t tell if he’s actually connecting to what he is seeing. I think about that for a while and then I turn off the TV. I lie in bed listening to the Santa Ana’s come down from the hills, and eventually they are joined by a chorus of coyotes that are howling or laughing or crying. It is impossible to tell. I can’t sleep so I turn the TV on again and watch a few episodes of the Twilight Zone, but the wind is so loud that I can’t hear the TV, so I turn it up until it can’t go up anymore. Five minutes pass and I can still hear the wind rushing and trees knocking, and the coyotes laughing, and the bougainvillea shaking and it’s all too much, so I turn off the Twilight Zone and go to bed. *** At the funeral the priest is speaking in Spanish and I can’t understand. His face is shaped by a sense of strength, of pride in his faith. He keeps repeating, “Sólo en la muerte podemos ser libres,” and I can’t understand. Alvaro is sitting next to me in the second row and looks ahead, not looking at the priest, but through him. Concepcion is in front of us, next to a scattered group of Maria’s cousins and aunts who I don’t know. They wipe their faces with tissues, make signs of the cross, and whisper prayers in 64

Spanish. The same prayers Concepcion was reciting when Maria was yellow and stiff and dying in the hospital. The omnipresent Santa Ana’s are blowing outside and blood begins to drip from my nose. I tap Alvaro for a tissue, and he thinks I’m crying, but it’s just my nose that’s bleeding like a severed radial artery. “Sólo en la muerte podemos ser libres,” says the priest again, and I can’t understand. A plastic box with Maria’s ashes sits on a small table behind the priest with a stained-glass Virgin Mary gazing down on her with supreme empathy. The priest says a few more words and after what seems like a lifetime, we march single file, row after row, into the blinding early morning. We’re gathered around Maria’s hole in the ground and the Santa Ana’s are kicking up dust and people are sneezing and the priest begins the burial ceremony and I can’t understand. A tractor rumbles around a few hundred feet away from us, nearly cancelling out the priest’s voice. Gardeners have also arrived and combined with the tractor, create a cacophony of digging, blowing, and raking. The priest’s voice is completely drowned out and it doesn’t make any difference to me because I can’t understand. Maria’s little plastic box is placed into the hole in the ground. The priest makes several signs of the cross and sprinkles water over the box. Two men, sweating under the early morning sun, arrive with shovels and start tossing the soil over the little plastic box that is now Maria. I can’t understand. I walk to my car without saying goodbye to Maria’s family and drive home in silence, against the stubborn winds that seem immovable.

C O N T R I LAURA BERNSTEIN-MACHLAY is an instructor of literature and creative writing at The College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI where she also lives. Her poems and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals, including The Michigan Quarterly Review, Oyez, Redivider, etc. She has work forthcoming in The American Scholar, The New Madrid and upstreet. MICHAEL BROWNE is a writer and music publicist living in Los Angeles. He is currently enrolled in the creative writing program at Cal State Northridge. This story marks his first ever publication. Follow him on Twitter: @BrowneLaurence. SAMSON BULKLEY is a writer currently stationed in Utah. CRAIG EVENSON is a school teacher. He divides his time between 9-year-olds and the dogs, cats, woman, and parrots with whom he shares a house. His poems have appeared in various publications, including The Midwestern Quarterly, The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Off the Coast, and Iodine Review. He has work forthcoming in Inscape, Hurricane Review, and Stillwater Review. He lives in Minnesota. MELINDA GIORDANO is an artist/writer from Los Angeles, California. Her written pieces have appeared in Lake Effect Magazine, Scheherazade’s Bequest and Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal among others. She also contributes poetry to CalamitiesPress.com with her own column, “I Wandered and Listened.” Melinda is interested in many histories—art, fashion, social—and anything to do with Aubrey Beardsley. 66

B U T O R S JOHN GOSSLEE is an American poet, the editor of Fjords Review, and an iconoclast. LISA GRGAS is the Assistant Poetry Editor at The Literary Review. Recent work has appeared in The Literary Review and Web Del Sol Review of Books. She lives in Portland, Oregon. BRADY HARRISONâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fiction has appeared in Cerise Press, J Journal, The Long Story, Serving House Journal, Short Story, Wascana Review, and other literary journals in the U.S. and Canada. He is the author or co-editor of a number of books, most recently, Punk Rock Warlord: The Life and Music of Joe Strummer (2014). ANDREW JARVIS is the author of Sound Points (Red Bird Press), Ascent (Finishing Line Press), and The Strait (Homebound Publications). His poems have appeared in Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, Evansville Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Tulane Review, and many other magazines. He was a Finalist for the 2014 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize. He also judges poetry contests and edits anthologies for Red Dashboard LLC. Andrew holds an M.A. in Writing (Poetry) from Johns Hopkins University. JEFFREY H. MACLACHLAN forthcoming work in New Ohio Santa Clara Review, among others. Georgia College & State University. Twitter @jeffmack.

also has recent or Review, Eleven Eleven, He teaches literature at He can be followed on

LAURA MAYRON is a student at Wellesley College and is originally from Maui, Hawaii. When not studying English and Spanish literature, she is poetry editor for The Wellesley Review. She has previously been published in Vagabond City and The Wellesley Review. EMI MILLER is a first year communications major with a creative writing minor at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She was borne in the United Kingdom and raised in Durham, North Carolina, and is thus—rightly—an avid Duke basketball fan. She works as a tutor at the Center for Learning Excellence at Hollins in the writing department, and as an editorial assistant for Fjords Review literary magazine. In her free time, she likes to pet as many cats as possible, go for long runs, and lecture her peers on the importance of the oxford comma. JEREMIAH MORIARTY is a poet and short story writer. His work has been published or is forthcoming in The Rain, Party, & Disaster Society, YAY!LA, PRØOF, and other publications. He was also a 2015 finalist for The Iowa Review Poetry Award, judged by Srikanth Reddy. He studied English at Carleton College and lives on a farm in Minnesota. You can learn more at jeremiahmoriarty.com or follow him on Twitter @miahmoriarty. TRIIN PAJA is an Estonian writer, living in a small village in rural Estonia. She writes in forests, fields, reconstructing faraway memories and dreams, trying to build them in English (her second language), thus through a different filter.

MICHAEL PRIHODA is a poet and artist born and living in the Midwest. He is the founding editor of After the Pause, an experimental literary magazine. He is also the author of the chapbook, In Another Life, Maybe (Weasel Press). Find him at michaelprihoda.wordpress.com. JOSIAH ROSELL is a candidate for a Master’s in English at Truman State University. His poems have been published in Pif Magazine and The Rockhurst Review, with forthcoming work in Literary Juice and PARAGRAPHITI. MEGGIE ROYER is a writer and photographer from the Midwest. Her poems have previously appeared in Words Dance Magazine, The Harpoon Review, Melancholy Hyperbole, and more. She has won national medals for her writing in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and was the Macalester Honorable Mention recipient of the 2015 Academy of American Poets Student Poetry Prize (writingsforwinter.tumblr.com). TAYLOR SACCO’s work has been published or is forthcoming in HOOT Review and Gargoyle Magazine. He is founder and member of The Innkeepers Collective with whom he writes, workshops and grows. He is 28 years old and lives on a farm with his wife and dog. MICHAEL SALCMAN, poet, physician and art historian, was chair of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland. Recent poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, Ontario Review, and Rhino. Poetry books include The Clock Made of Confetti, nominated for The Poet’s Prize, and The Enemy of Good Is Better (Orchises, 2011); Poetry in Medicine, his anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors and diseases has just been published (Persea Books, 2015). 69

SCHEREZADE SIOBHAN is a clinical psychologist and a writer. Her first poetry collection Bone Tongue was published by Thought Catalog in 2015. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthology nominee for writing. She can be found squeeing about baby bunnies at viperslang.tumblr.com and Twitter @ zaharaesque. She also owns and runs Cyberhexpress, a journal that focuses on publishing PoC-identified writing. GRANT SORRELL studies English at Sam Houston State University and lives in Huntsville, Texas. His poetry has been published in the Concho River Review, Redactions Literary Magazine, the SHS Review, and the Outrider Review. CHRISTOPHER SUDAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s poetry has been published in Digital Americana, Indian Review, Shot Glass Journal, Wilderness House Literary Review, and other literary journals. Christopher attended the University of Alabama at Birmingham and has just attended the A-I-R program at Byrdcliffe Artist Guild in Woodstock, NY. PATRICK VENTURELLA is a freelance writer and poet living in Cincinnati, Ohio. His work has appeared in Rufous City Review, FifthWednesday Journal and Petrichor Machine.

f OCTOBER 2015