The hIsTory of Glassworks
The tradition of glassworking and the history of Rowan University are deeply intertwined. South Jersey was a natural location for glass production—the sandy soil provided the perfect medium, while plentiful oak trees fueled the fires. Glassboro, home of Rowan University, was founded as “Glass Works in the Woods” in 1779. The primacy of artistry, a deep pride in individual craftsmanship, and the willingness to explore and test conventional boundaries to create exciting new work is part of the continuing spirit inspiring Glassworks magazine.
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lessons from a whIppeT on a sprInGTIme walk
Alisha Brown
We are in the same city and I do not think of you.
I move beneath the jacarandas dropping their purple pigtails and the dog walks, and sniffs, and walks, and maybe there is a child exclaiming at his long skinny neck, and perhaps the dog answers with a howl, and I apologize, and the mother laughs or scowls, depending, and under the warming sky we all connect and disconnect this way, brushing our leaves against each other, catching a little, but enough.
For lifetimes, it seems, we have chased each other round and round love’s eclipse only to darken.
You and I, that is.
Although I do not think of you. I walk along the canal, or the footbridge, or through the park, counting the many beaded whites of the jasmine, watching how clever the dog walks, and sniffs, and walks on.
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andaluCía en oCTubre
Alisha Brown
In Andalucía, life moves like a slow, hot shadow dragged by the sun. A car clears its throat. Oye! the men call to each other from their little white villas capped in curves of rusty shale. Oye! the dogs agree, tugging at their ropes like fierce, dry tongues, never tired—just awake or not. Laundry, with its thin banshee sleeves, catches the dust. A bee. I don’t know how I arrived here, but I do know for whom. I let myself touch the lavender. Dare to spend another day tracing olive grove seams like a lover’s face, their language new to my eyes but not my tongue. Hermosas. Hermosas. With a shiver of relief, an orange tree drops two great globes into my palm. Below, there are mountains not even yet touched by the morning. Slow, hot shadows. Peach-tipped peaks. The world is round and open and citrus pours its own sweet sunrise down my chin.
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5
glassworks
CasCade
Cory Firestine
pearl
Evelyn Reynolds
after the Middle English
At this time of year, grief is expected. He hears grain rattling in the fields and thinks what will come next is like a third person in the house, standing in low doorways, watching— so of course he goes to sit in the garden—last warm day, ginger and carnations, chrysanthemums, peonies, thick as twisted paper under kindling, that final sunshine. The perspectives of the dead are not always place-bound. His eye drops, rests in the grass like a pearl under the bench where he falls
asleep. Time appears to him as jewels—this afternoon, ruby; tonight, an opal, liquid, fragile; tomorrow, when he thinks he understands, sapphire the color of wet pavement. When will she reveal herself? A final flowering, her voice annealing this August light into the walls of
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a garden, a city?
A leaf would cut one’s hand. Such a wound would spread. Feel oneself turning brilliant, faceted, sealed into a fruiting jewel—grain once rattling like hooves— now singing in the furrows.
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ComplIne
Evelyn Reynolds
Heaven’s fragments flash in night’s forest—stars’ faces slash, sunlight through hemlocks. As hawk believes wind and, falling, shreds
the sun’s invisible glass, so I entrust this corn-silk, cob-pale husk
to whoever hung weathers’ wood as easily as leaves on humid air, who pulled
the sunflowers, now ten feet tall, now lizardheaded in the dark, from a few
black beads, who knows how my bones lie, comets stretched in flesh.
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Greenhouse horoloGIsT
Evelyn Reynolds
after Jay Hopler
All hands, entranced, I step into an atelier where daisies unfurl veined cogs, where translucent arms terminate in flowers, begonias’ knuckles garnishing sunlight’s progress through the December room. As lantana leaves crackle backward from the watering can, among these miniature trees, these lemon trees, these trees reflecting clemencies, I kneel. I watch them glow
against my wish to wither what might heal. Carried by tiny arthropods,
my gears click toward the inevitable state, but these perpetual trees, these geranium trees, these trees geared with euphony—I oscillate while they remain a stay against my hands’ diseased propensities. So each day ticks around the rosemary’s quartz, and these rose trees, these lily trees, these trees etched outside my time turn me still, rewire me, my hands entranced.
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maIne 4
Anna Maeve
glassworks 10
Laurel Sharon
Imagine the following situation:
You are ten years old and catch sight of your reflection in the window of a fabric store as you and your mother walk by. You are old enough to have a sense of your own body and have compared your body to the bodies of other girls you know. While viewing your reflection you wonder if the tip of your nose is too round, too lumpy, too fat. Perhaps you move your head slightly for a better view. You hope your nose is well-proportioned and you are pretty. Your mother sees you looking at your reflection. “You are as ugly as death,” she says. Although you don’t fully understand death (you have given death some thought—not yours; your mother’s) you do understand you have just been insulted. Which one of the following do you choose?
1. You say nothing, become quietly enraged and later in life have a major depressive disorder.
2. You cry.
3. You vow one day to be a mother and never treat your children the way you were treated.
4. You spit on the ground close to your mother’s feet.
5. None of the above.
Sara chooses #3.
As her life goes on, she feeds a lamb at a children’s zoo, has a Holy Communion, attends prom without a date, graduates from a small and obscure liberal arts college, sells dental supplies (at which she does quite well), and holidays on Mykonos, where she tries not to look at the French girls sunbathing topless. While busy and engaged, she feels her life will only truly begin when she marries and becomes a mother. She has a vow to keep. To that end she dates:
• Brandon: curly black hair, green eyes and lips a bit too large for his face. She cannot decide if he looks sensual or freakish. Brandon is a modern dancer and wants her to attend his performances. He says the company he dances with is avant-garde which seems to mean he often performs in the nude. As a result, stage lighting is very important to him. The nudity embarrasses her. His lack of circumcision repulses her. Intimacy with him is beyond her. She stops attending his performances. Brandon doesn’t notice. She breaks up with him. He doesn’t notice that either.
• Simon: blue eyes and brown wavy hair. His right eye-tooth protrudes. Sara forgives him
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anomaly
the tooth, thinking of her nose. Simon lives an active life. On
Monday evenings, he plays softball with colleagues “to be a team player.” On Tuesday nights, he hits golf balls at a driving range “to gain perspective.” On Wednesday nights, he plays basketball “to catch up” with high school buddies. On Friday nights, he goes to his parents’ home for a family dinner, or a birthday dinner or leaves with the clan “for a weekend of ‘just us’ at Okemo Mountain Resort in Vermont.”
The suite his parents rent at the resort is small and he shares a bed with one of his sisters. He has two. After Okemo, Sara asks Simon why she isn’t a priority. He tells her the fault is hers.
“You’re a critical person without much warmth.”
“Critical?”
“You said sleeping in bed with my sister was ‘unsavory.’” Sara ends the relationship and creates an affirmation for herself. I am a caring person who will make an outstanding mother and wife, which she fervently believes. She writes the affirmation on a 3” x 5” file card which she carries in her purse.
• Oh. Oh. Danny: Greek nose, muscular but not over-built, and tall. Sara is impressed with how confidently he interacts with the bartender. He orders vodkas with cranberry juice, thinking she’d en-
joy something fruity. As they drink, he says, “You’re very pretty,” and notes she has a really cute ass. A second round of drinks and he says, “I love you,” which Sara finds kind of obnoxious. With a third round of drinks, they both have a desperate need to urinate, although no one leaves the table. He says, “Let’s get married and have lots of babies.” He continues to repeat variations of this: “I want to marry you,” “You’re the one,” “…I love babies,” “…best babies ever,” “loads of babies.” By the end of the night, they’re engaged.
Unlike most brides, Sara doesn’t care much about the wedding or her mother’s snide remark. “The gown makes you look sallow.”
“It’s white, mom. How can white make you look sallow?”
She doesn’t care much about the honeymoon, although room service is nice and Danny feeds her a softboiled egg with a spoon. What she does care about is the pregnancy that ensues. She is ecstatic. Danny is even more ecstatic. “I love you so much,” he says.
Weeks later Sara experiences pain. It has never occurred to either one of them that something could go wrong. She miscarries. They are confused.
When speaking with the doctor, Sara finds herself smiling and laughing, although nothing is funny. She glassworks 12
doesn’t understand that she is behaving exactly opposite to how she feels as a way of coping. This is an unconscious process. The doctor responds to her smiles and laughter with smiles and laughter of his own. “Ho, ho, ho,” he says, “the miscarriage is routine. Ho, ho, ho an anomaly with the fetus. Ho, ho, ho, nature’s way.” Danny isn’t smiling or laughing. He demands more of an explanation. “The miscarriage was without complications,” the doctor says, “merely a matter of heavy bleeding.”
“Ho, ho?” says Sara.
“Eight to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage.”
“Statistics are meaningless to us,” says Danny.
“Yet, statistics are on your wife’s side. She’s only 24 years old. Plenty of time for babies.”
“Time isn’t the issue. The baby is,” Sara says.
“What are you talking about?” says the doctor.
“What are you talking about?” says Danny. “When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, my wife always answered, ‘a mother.’”
Sara quickly becomes pregnant again. She miscarries again. This time she has no laughter. “An anomaly with the fetus,” says the doctor.
“We’ve heard that before,” says Danny.
“It’s no less true the second time than the first,” the doctor says.
“Not good enough,” says Danny.
“What are the statistics on two miscarriages in a row?”
“You said statistics were meaningless to you.” No response. “Two percent.” Silence. “Look, this is as frustrating for me as it is for you. Support your wife. Love your wife. That’s the best medicine. She’ll become pregnant again. P.S. All this toxic emotion is not helpful.” The doctor secretly regrets his decision to specialize in reproductive medicine. Why in God’s name didn’t I stick with radiology?
“ When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, my wife always answered ‘a mother.’ ”
“It’s my fault,” says Sara during the car ride back home.
“How do we know it’s not mine?” says Danny reaching for her hand. ~
Sara and Danny agree to be judicious with the frequency they have sex, seeking to fortify Danny’s sperm for the important ovulatory moments. They want a pregnancy fast. There is no pregnancy. Sara tries
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Sharon | Anomaly
reverse psychology and tells herself she could be happy without children, trying to fool her ovaries into thinking she really doesn’t care. When still no pregnancy occurs, she submits to a battery of tests to evaluate her ovulatory hormones and pituitary hormones and ovarian reserve—blood draws and ultrasounds of her uterus from every angle and a hysterosalpingogram. “What’s that?” asks Sara.
“Dye is injected into your uterus to see if your fallopian tubes are blocked.”
“Does it hurt?”
“It shouldn’t.”
When she cries out in pain the nurse says, “Oh, it’s not so bad. Stop acting like a baby.” Sara wonders if the remark is stupid or cruel.
No anomalies are found.
The doctor is stumped. “Any chance of syphilis?” he asks.
Sara and Danny decide to try alternative medicine. Sara has weekly acupuncture sessions, ingests Chinese herbs and tries hypnotherapy, guided visualization and meditation groups. Enlightenment is a potential by-product. Danny, who is an atheist, decides to pray. “Just in case I’m wrong.”
Sara becomes pregnant. She and Danny are ecstatic. “I love you so much,” he says.
During the first trimester, she craves orange soda and Danny buys cases which he stacks in the garage. When he pours her a glass, she is
shocked by the bold color. “It’s so orange,” she says. During the second trimester her belly grows, and Danny buys her almond-scented massage oil to protect her skin from stretch marks. At night, he is frightened when she jumps out of bed and makes a sound like a yodel while rubbing her calves. “Leg cramps,” she says. The next day he says, “Problem solved,” in the same tone as if he’d said, “Eureka” after telling her he bought a series of pre-natal massages at a local spa. They cope with fears about the pregnancy by keeping themselves occupied. Sara thinks about dental supplies—Novocaine, toothpaste, drill bits. She sings to herself. She begins to embroider, rigorously cross-stitching endless number of pillows embossed with familiar sayings, “Love Me Love My Dog,” “Your Guess is as Good as Mine,” and “Who Put You in Charge?” Danny whistles. Sara’s body grows and she feels off balance and unwieldy. They both silently note she is past the point in previous pregnancies when she miscarried but say nothing, feeling to mention this fact out loud would bring bad luck. Danny buys her an ergonomic chair for pregnant women that he puts in the backyard. When the weather is nice, she sits in the sun. He looks at her and thinks She is radiant. Sara stockpiles toys for their baby— white teddy bears of the softest plush, a musical lamb, a banana baby glassworks 14
rattle, and for when the baby is older, stacking blocks and trains of only real wood, even an iPad loaded with educational games. Danny whistles. During the third trimester in the seventh month Sara no longer feels the baby move. “He’s dead inside me,” she says. She is right. The umbilical cord has wrapped around the baby’s neck and deprived him of oxygen.
“An anomaly,” the doctor says after the ultrasound. Nobody is laughing.
Sara can wait several weeks for labor to begin naturally or be induced. If she waits, I can pretend the baby is still alive. She cannot pretend he is alive. He sits like a stone in her belly. Danny stays with her throughout labor, holding her hand, although he turns his face away. He is not sure why he does this. Does he not want to see her grief, or does he not want her to see his? He feels
“ Does he not want to see her grief, or does he not want her to see his? ”
Sara asks to hold the baby. “Look, Danny,” she says “He’s not an anomaly. He is perfect.” She does not see his red skin and purple lips.
Danny keeps his face turned away. Not only does he feel like he is inside a very tiny closet alone, he needs to stay there. The closet keeps him safe. Sara kisses the baby on the forehead gently. The nurse cuts a piece of the baby’s hair so she can have a keepsake. Danny will eventually purchase a locket for Sara to keep the hair in. Danny does not purchase the locket on Amazon. The locket is made by an artisan and engraved in a French rococo style. This, however, is in the future. They name the baby Jacob after Danny’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side. They had planned on calling him Jake.
like he is locked in a very tiny closet alone. Sara doesn’t notice. The baby is born. She asks the nurse, “What does he look like?” unsure of what to expect.
“He’s perfect,” the nurse says.
While Sara recovers, which means wailing in the hospital chapel until voiceless and being carried out on a stretcher sedated, Danny signs the death certificate and arranges for the cremation. Danny takes the toys Sara had purchased and gives them away to the Salvation Army. When he leaves the store, he lets the door slam.
The doctor suggests a Pregnancy Loss Support Group. “I never want to see you again,” Sara replies.
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Laurel Sharon | Anomaly
Danny keeps the banana baby rattle, as a keepsake of his own.
He returns to the hospital to retrieve his wife. She looks small in the wheelchair as the nurse rolls her to the electric door. With the baby gone, she is less than half the size she was going in. Everything has been taken out of her. When they arrive home, Danny opens the car door on Sara’s side, helps her out and puts his hand around her waist, shielding her from the neighbors’ views. With
with their well water, but someone else silences them with an intense stare. Eventually, however, the questions begin. As Sara stands in her driveway, about to step into her car a neighbor appears and asks, “What went wrong?”
Another neighbor joins them— not wanting to miss anything—and then another. Sara feels surrounded. She is surrounded.
“Are you going to sue the doctor?”
“Do you plan on trying again?”
her empty arms, Sara feels ashamed. She did not deliver, yet she did deliver, and the contradiction confuses her and makes her feel tearful and weak. For months she cannot walk. Danny carries her. She cannot eat. Danny feeds her. She cannot wash. Danny cleans her. “She is like a baby,” he tells the doctor. Sara slowly recovers.
At first, the neighbors don’t ask any questions and offer only polite smiles or bland conversation about the weather, or gardening tips, or a change of date for recyclable pickup. Someone mentions problems
“ She did not deliver, yet she did deliver, and the contradiction confuses her and makes her feel tearful and weak. For months she cannot walk. Danny carries her. She cannot eat. Danny feeds her. She cannot wash. Danny cleans her. ” glassworks 16
Sara doesn’t know what to say. She is shy, not particularly street smart, with a naivete that despite her recent trauma, lingers around her like a pleasant perfume, even though she vacationed on an island where the women sunbathed topless. Most simply, though, she is a young woman shattered by grief. She doesn’t answer any of the questions until she is asked, “Did you have it buried or cremated?”
“That ‘It’,” she says with a sudden fury, “was my son.”
For a moment there is silence. Somebody’s stomach growls.
“Same thing happened to my cousin.”
“Someone told me about someone who had the same thing happen to her.”
“Definitely.”
“Take one of my kids. I’m sick of them.”
There is laughter—and no more questions.
None of the women speak to Sara again. They find her grief too messy, too intense, possibly contagious to risk any further conversation. If they see her walking down the street, they walk to the other side or avert their eyes or busy themselves with a dog’s leash. They even avoid walking past her home. One woman, Evie, feels shame. She is Sara’s friend and did nothing while Sara was questioned. “It was like she was being fired at with a machine gun,” she tells her husband. She vows to be a better friend.
A year later, Sara is not pregnant. She and Danny find a new fertility doctor who recommends IVF treatments. She and Danny tell each other that IVF is “great” because each time, before the fetus is implanted, it is tested for anomalies. “We’re done with those,” Sara says trying to sound upbeat yet coming across as near hysterical. Sara miscarries each time. When the eighth IVF treatment fails, the doctor recommends they stop.
“No,” says Sara, feeling like the victim of a holdup about to die.
“With our last egg retrieval, we were only able to get one good embryo.”
“We only need one. Just one.”
“Sara…” says Danny walking the line of staying emotionally in control and—what had Sara called him—cold-blooded… callous…a jerkass?”
“Just one. I’m begging you for just one. One baby.” She looks at the doctor, and then at Danny. When there is no response, she looks up trying to find God in the soundproof ceiling panels.
“I can’t give you a baby,” says the doctor sounding genuinely sad.
“Why? Why?”
“With everything we know about fertility, there’s still so much we don’t know.”
“You’re saying nothing. What does that even mean?”
“It means I don’t know why I can’t give you a baby. But I can’t.”
“I’ll sue you. We’ll get another doctor. We’ll go to Mexico.”
“No,” says Danny.
“You’re not saying anything either.”
“I’m saying, ‘No.’”
“What do you mean, ‘No?’”
“We’re done. I’m done,” says Danny.
“No, Danny. No.”
“The doctor’s right. We need to stop. I can be happy without a baby in our lives, can’t you?” Briefly he thinks about adoption
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Laurel
again but knows better than to bring it up.
She reaches into her purse and pulls out the affirmation she has continued to carry and rips the 3” x 5” tattered file card, in half. I am a caring person who will make an outstanding mother and wife.
‘Happy now?” she says to Danny.
That night in bed, Danny tries to hold his wife. She lies there like a dead thing. Danny thinks about the genuine and caring girl shocked by topless bathing he had met years ago; the girl who had a wanted a child so much and wonders if she can still want and if she can, will she want him. He waits. Sara offers to divorce him so he can have children with someone else.
“Oh,” he says.
Yet he waits years for her to say, “I want you,” busying himself with picking up dry cleaning, washing her car and having the interior detailed and shopping for outerwear. When he can’t wait any longer, suffocated almost to the point of extinction by her baby grief, he moves out of their bedroom into the guestroom.
Imagine the following situation. You’re a woman who has tried for years to have a baby and failed. Which of the following do you choose?
1. Your attitude towards life moves from cynical to bitter.
2. You blame yourself, which gives you the illusion of control when
in fact you have none.
3. You register complaints with the AMA against the fertility doctors.
4. You create a vision board.
5. None of the above.
Sara chooses #5.
Danny urges her to see a psychotherapist after seeing her reread an article on babies being stolen from hospitals. She does and explains the miscarriages, the stillbirth, the failed IVF treatments and the passage of time.
“There are other ways to give birth,” the therapist says.
She never goes back.
“He’s an idiot,” she tells Danny.
Soon after her appointment, Sara loses interest in selling dental supplies, considering them lowbrow and common. She decides to “reinvent” herself and becomes interested in all things fashion. She familiarizes herself with designer labels, the “in” color for each new year, sneers at any substitute for real leather. She buys expensive, form-fitting clothing, has her hair balayaged, and chastises the mothers of the neighborhood inside her head as she notes their bad haircuts, yoga pants, oversized shirts they say are retro but are only awful, and bras that lie limp on their chests offering no support. She recommits herself to a professional life and decides to focus on interior design with a glassworks 18
specific expertise in high-end lamps. Her business card reads, “Let There Be Light!” She thinks her choice of slogan timeless and classy. She stops talking about babies. Danny is hopeful. He does not know the pieces from the torn-up file card are tucked into a hidden compartment in her purse.
Sara is invited to a neighborhood luncheon to celebrate the full moon and “the goddess within us all.” She frames the event to Danny as ‘delightful and esoteric.’ Upon arrival she discovers it to be the motherlode of motherhood. Almost deliberately obtuse on any other topic, the women only discuss their children. “Dylan eats food that is exclusively white.” “Skylar is four and has a tutor for art.” “Zak has ADHD. School is so hard for him.”
“
Her business card reads, ‘Let There Be Light!’ She thinks her choice of slogan timeless and classy. She stops talking about babies. ”
A month after the luncheon, Sara invites Evie to her home. She serves crab cakes for lunch on bone china plates with small sterling-silver forks. A 100% beeswax candle, with
a cotton wick burns, filling the house with a honey scent and releasing negative ions that lift pollutants from the air. Sara offers chilled white wine and her expertise on common lighting problems found in the home. Evie is appreciative. Sara points out her new leather sectional and matching leather chair and then tells Evie to look at the mantle above the fireplace. Evie sees photographs: Sara looking glum and Danny smiling in front of a hot air balloon, Danny in the backyard, wearing a party hat embossed with the number “50,” smiling at Wendy, their Labrador Retriever, Danny smiling at a small child (a niece?) with Sara looking at Danny. “Do you see it?” says Sara. Evie doesn’t see it. “You see it don’t you? Don’t you?” Evie continues to look. “It’s a picture … of my son.” Evie sees it, the framed sonogram.
“Yes, I see it, of course.” she says.
Sara picks the framed sonogram up. “This is my son, Jacob Aaron Miller. We call him Jake. He’s a beautiful boy isn’t he?”
Imagine the following situation. Your best friend knows you have tried for years to have children and failed. That you are entering menopause and have become increasingly depressed. You show her a framed
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Laurel Sharon | Anomaly
sonogram from fifteen years ago describing it as a picture of your stillborn son. Which of the following does she choose?
1. She tells you that you are crazy and gets the hell out of your house as fast as she can.
2. She doesn’t say anything but thinks you are crazy.
3. She wonders if there’s anything else to eat besides the crab cakes.
4. She feels empathic towards your childlessness and menopause (she’s having some hot sweats herself).
5. None of the above.
She chooses #4.
“Beautiful,” Evie says to Sara. “He’s a beautiful boy.”
“Beautiful,” says Sara smiling at the picture, “and he’s perfect.
“Perfect,” says Evie.
“I want to throw a luncheon, the biggest the neighborhood has ever seen, where I can show off my child—and do all the talking. Not a word or a cackle, even a moan. I want silence, complete and absolute from all the guests and then I’ll say, ‘I gave birth to a stillborn baby. His name was Jake. I held him in my arms and called him, ‘my precious boy.’ I was his mother.’”
“You are his mother.”
“I am a mother,” says Sara. “Perfect,” says Evie. “Perfect.” glassworks 20
self-porTraIT: ashamed
21
Shannon Kernaghan
glassworks
load-sheddInG
Sayantika Mandal
People in my town still call it load-shedding, when the world plunged into darkness every summer evening. We waited on the terrace
For the night breeze, sweat gathered in the folds of my skin as my father Showed me the stars, balls of gases burning or perhaps, already dead.
The darkness lingered for an hour or two, or even more. My mother asked me to finish my homework before the darkness began.
Wikipedia says it’s common in developing countries. Our power utilities must shed the load to run. Anybody with power must shed
The load to run. The British shed the burden by carving apart our land, like hacking off limbs, and did not look behind. They found
Coal on the river bed that runs by my town. And knew to unearth it. Even the trains here are named Black Diamond and Coalfield.
A tribal man climbs down the shafts, baskets full of black rise up. His pickaxe splinters the crust, black dust enters his nose.
Soot fills the porous sacs of his lungs, bronchi and alveoli. He coughs and dies. His son continues the legacy, he can’t shed
The load, he has no power. He stands there, inside the earth our henchman, for we must scoop out the bowels of the planet,
Like hungry vultures, to devour the carcasses of ancient trees. Smoke belches from the roast pit of fossilized plant-bodies turning Turbines. Amber glow of sodium vapor floods the streets of night. Perhaps being plunged into the darkness is what we deserve,
What we were meant for. To be lurking bat-like in caves, where Dripping water from damp ceilings reminds us of melting ice,
A whisper echoes on those wet walls, hearkening a new World, saying, Let there be Dark.
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Gold-plaTed
Angela Townsend
It started with my new name. Social Security considers it my old name. I knew it was unprecedented, familiar syllables to the contrary. I was no longer a maiden. I was not slinking into Goodwill to see if I could take back my donation.
I was not reaching over my shoulder to squeeze my father’s fingertips. I wasn’t putting my hands on my hips to dance a jig on my exhusband’s letters. I was as new as forty-year-old innocence. I would be “Angela Townsend” for the first time.
The State of Pennsylvania would agree in a matter of months, but I had a holy haste. I had been misidentified for five years.
My boss joined the conspiracy to eradicate the wrong name. Soon our website showed no evidence that “Angela Hartley” had ever been here. It was Townsend the Development Director, Townsend on annual reports and blogs, Townsend planting petunias all over the village.
Still, I needed the right name on the marquee. I needed to birth my own byline.
I needed an eight-inch piece of acrylic with begonias and a ladylike font.
If you need something solid to represent something more solid,
artists are angels with smocks and 3-D printers. I scoured Etsy for wall hangings. I smiled at gentle stationers who would watercolor my letterhead. But I didn’t sigh the new relief of home until I found Salih.
Somewhere in central Turkey, Salih sits with stacks of Lucite. His vendor profile picture is a tiny marble, a handsome man with the smile of an unguarded moment. I wonder if it was taken at a wedding.
I wonder how Salih started making nameplates, screen-printed in twenty fonts and thirty designs. There are sunflowers and pansies, executive borders and gold foil. They are always 55% off.
I would wonder how I walked into Salih’s shop, except that I know the Holy Spirit too well to miss wings disguised as coincidence. Search results sent me a hundred options. I clicked the smiling man for a reason.
For $18.99, I could have “Angela Townsend, Development Director” in ladylike curlicue, a brick for rebuilding. Perennial flowers applauded along the edges. “Merry Christmas to me,” I whispered, confirming my choice.
In an hour, I had an email. “Ms. Townsend, I am delighted to receive your order! Thank you for entrusting me with this important item. Please review this proof.
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I will make the adjustments until you are delighted!”
He had used my favorite word twice. I wondered if anyone had scolded him for flowery language. I wondered if I should tell him why this was an important item.
“It’s perfect, and I am delighted!”
“My day is made!” Salih responded promptly. “It will be in your hands very soon.”
“ Still, I needed the right name on the marquee. I needed to birth my own byline. ”
It arrived in a week. It was a piece of plastic. It was illuminated, iridescent. I held it at a hundred angles to see where the light came from. I stopped wondering. I picked it up every day.
I answered timid questions about my divorce by holding up the begonias. “It’s a beautiful thing,” I reassured visitors and clients and volunteers and colleagues. “The whole thing is a beautiful thing. It’s spring.”
It was December, and everyone understood. “Ohhhhhhh.”
“Dear Angela Townsend!” Salih emailed me. “I hope I am not inconveniencing you, but if you are delighted with my work, may I trouble you to write a review?”
“I’m sorry it took me so long!”
I wrote him four paragraphs. I wrote to Etsy, “please promote this shop.”
My mother had begun writing poetry. History holds up its hand like a policeman here, reminding me that my mother wrote poetry for twenty years. This was new. She was silent sackcloth as long as I’d been hooded in “Hartley.” When spring came, inkwells bloomed. Her poetry was unprecedented. Her words hung tapestries and family crests on my clean brick walls.
Her desk was lacking begonias. I wrote to Salih.
“This one is even more important,” I explained. “It may sound silly, but I have called my mother ‘Mamalula’ forever. She saw me through a difficult time. I want to thank her.”
I wondered why I was telling a Turkish smiling man all this. I continued.
“She doesn’t know how special she is. She doesn’t know she’s the greatest poet I know. I want her nameplate to say, ‘Mamalula: Poet, Hero, Beloved.’”
“You have made me cry!” Salih sighed across the sea. “I am incredibly honored! We will delight Mamalula!”
We did. And I told Etsy that Salih is the epitome of everything good. And we continued.
My shy sister needed to know that she was “Jenny: Glorious, Gentle, Cherished.” My boss needed acrylic evidence that he was “Jonathan:
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Heart and Soul of Tabby’s Place.” My best friend needed sunflowers, botanical bravery, to proclaim her “Heidi: Anam Cara Always.”
Salih styled them all, exclamationpointing suggestions. “Jonathan is very important!” he recognized. “We can include cats! You can send me photos, or I will find enchanting cats!”
We lofted enchanting cats back and forth across the Atlantic. “I love cats!” Salih noted, although I already knew.
Each nameplate came in a pink cardboard box, printed, “Love is everything, everything is love.”
I peppered Etsy with pleas to put Salih on the home page, just once. “He is everything good about Etsy. He is everything good about this world.”
“You fill your people with joy!” Salih informed me.
“That’s the goal.” I had come to answer his emails the instant they arrived. “I want everyone to have a glowing treasure that tells them who they are.”
“You make my work feel very important!”
“You make everyone’s name look as important as it is!”
I wondered if Salih had covered his neighborhood with nameplates, friends and relatives and grocers all proud owners of Lucite love blocks. I wondered if anyone else took my liberties with titles. I realized I didn’t know how to pronounce the name
of the man who treasured mine like newborns.
“Salih, how do you pronounce your name?”
“No one asks me this question!” I swear the smile in his picture widened. “It is Sahh-LEE. Now please confirm how you pronounce your ‘Angela’! I know two Angelas, but perhaps yours is new to me?”
Perhaps the day will come when “Angela Townsend” is not new to me. It will never cease to be delightful. And if I run out of people upon whom to bestow nameplates, I will pursue new friendships for this explicit purpose.
Townsend | Gold-Plated glassworks 25
Angela
To forGeT so muCh hIsTory, aGaIn
Milla Kuiper
History will remember us as the first Christian nation, those people some other people tried to kill off one time, little more. Our constellations lost to recent history, distorted and forgotten by poor translation into Russian during the Soviet years, our language near lost to the diaspora.
When my grandmother dies I may never again hear a spoken sentence in my native tongue: I’ve forgotten it myself. Roiling under the surface, it lays in wait to be called to glory or forgotten.
What can lift the lid, what can release the tension? Only apathy or revolution, but we are too in love to simmer down in apathy and too small for revolution.
So we will boil and sink like a volcanic eruption underwater too late and far far below deep little more.
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save IT for laTer
Milla Kuiper
A game of refrigerator roulette
at Grandma’s house, my brother blindly selects a bottle of whipped cream, checks the expiration date: two summers ago. I snag chocolate syrup from June 2004 Grandma probably didn’t know existed. That’s older than me! He digs out a can of pickles. Aw, only last August.
This game has been going for a couple years now, a wonder we haven’t reached the end, but today is the final cleaning if we can help it. She always told us she kept the food because she didn’t know who it belonged to and didn’t want to throw away something important.
But deep in the fridge museum we unmask fear of not-enough, not generosity. We find where the fear came from, too. I brush my hands off, tired of looking. If only we could throw away a closet skeleton with every expired condiment. But Grandma is too embarrassed to read the expiration dates anymore, and the skeletons line up all the way past Lebanon.
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self-porTraIT: unburdened
Shannon Kernaghan
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Trash
David Brinson
I move to a new city for a new job. I am working for a company contracted by the military. The job came with an NDA so I can’t go into any detail about the city or the job. What I will say: this city is filled with trash. It is as if the entire population never received the anti-littering lesson. Condoms and tissues crawl across the ground like tumbleweeds. Plastic bags, caught in tree branches, look like grey ulcers against the rich green of leaves. I am like, yuck. I am like, someone has to do something about this. I go to the park with a pair of heavy-duty work gloves and a trash bag. My NPR podcast keeps me company. I pick up trash for three straight weekends. My back hates me. Park-goers assume I work for the city and hand me their empties. My efforts don’t even make a dent. I come back and there is more trash than before. If I just had a group of people and some coordination, then maybe we could get on top of the problem. I don’t know anyone in this city though. I find a group online.
COMMUNITY SERVICE - WEEKEND LITTER COLLECTION - SATURDAY MORNINGS. I think, why not?
A group of fifteen people meet at a highway rest stop, parking their cars, buying a drink from the convenience store, and then congregating
by the grassy ditch on the side of the highway. The person in charge hands out vests and graspers and buckets. I am giddy to have proper equipment. The volunteers gather around in a circle and say their name and why they’re here.
Willow hit her husband.
Wyatt defrauded the IRS.
Todd hazed a pledge too far.
Gary violated a restraining order.
Betsy-Jean slashed her boyfriend’s tires after he cheated on her.
Bree drank too much and then drove.
Andrew smoked too much and then drove.
John drove recklessly.
Tasha fled a car accident.
I realize this is court-mandated community service. When they come to me in the circle, I stumble, say, hi, my name is Yami, I’m just here to volunteer.
They say, sure you are, sweetheart, you can tell us the truth.
I explain my thing about hating trash.
They say, there is no point in being ashamed, we’re all in the same boat.
With our graspers, we wrangle neon-green straws, stubby cigarette butts, strips of aluminum foil, water-logged grocery bags, paper plates, plastic bottles, bottle caps, fast food wrappers. Cars honk at us
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29
as they pass. The heat increases as the day wakes up. We fill our buckets like we’re picking blueberries from bushes, except we are never tempted to plop our finds in our mouths. At the end, everyone collectively loses their mind when I don’t have the overseer sign a timesheet. They stick out their bottom lips at me like I’m a cute baby they’re passing on the sidewalk. Now, they believe me.
It is one in the afternoon. We are all tired and thirsty. I quickly organize drinks at a nearby bar. If someone has to be the organizer, I will the organizer. I lure them in with the promise of buying their first round of the night. A faint smell of trash and sweat follows us. I’ve been to the bar once before—I drank two beers alone, played “Your Love” on the jukebox three times, and talked to no one. When I moved to the city, item number one on my checklist was “Find Bar to Be Regular At.” Next item on the list: “Find Friends to Be Regulars With.” The group talks about their families and their jobs. I can’t talk about my family because I don’t have one. I can’t talk about my job because I signed an NDA. This means I listen more than I talk. This means people like to confide in me.
I watch how much I drink so I can drive later. Others do not watch how much they drink. Many of them have already had licenses revoked for driving under the influence. Many of them have breathalyzers hooked up
to their starters. I volunteer to drive people home. They laugh at me and ask me if I’m going for sainthood. Five of them pour themselves into my small sedan. They thank me the whole way. I explain that I like to give people rides as a way of repaying all the rides I bummed as a high schooler with no car. Eventually, I will learn to just say, you’re welcome. People don’t need to know every little thought you have. Sometimes a nice thing can just be a nice thing. I stop at their homes and let them jump out and they wave goodbye to me like I’m their school bus driver. I see the different homes of my new friends. Some are ashamed, will apologize for their shitty apartment even though I’m not going inside. Some will insist on contributing gas money and leave a ten-dollar bill in the backseat for me to find later. The last person to be dropped off, alone in the car with me, will always feel an overwhelming responsibility to make conversation. This is a law of the universe. Tonight, it is Briscoe, a thirty-three-year-old recovering drug addict who endangered his child (that was as much as he would share). He asks if I have ever questioned my existence.
I say, for sure.
He says, if someone as put together as you still questions their existence, what hope do any of us have?
Earlier that day, Briscoe and I tagteamed a large Ikea box that had glassworks 30
blown out of the back of someone’s truck. The cardboard had been too long and unruly for one person to carry themselves. Together, we had managed just fine.
He asks, have you ever done drugs?
I say, yes, some, not since I took my new job, I stopped because they drug test me.
He asks, how does one do drugs and then stop doing drugs? How does one deny themselves a feeling that good?
“ People don’t need to know every little thought you have. Sometimes a nice thing can just be a nice thing. ”
I say, I don’t know.
Picking up trash might look simple until you’ve done it for hours and hours. Chess is just moving pieces around until you understand an opening move. Tennis is just hitting a ball over a net until you understand the difference between a punch volley and a drop volley. There’s a certain angle in which you can pick up trash without causing any unnecessary back strain. Cellophane, notoriously difficult to coax into your trash bucket, requires a grasp maneuver and a bucket tilt that can
only be mastered with practice. I live for these moments, when a skill or a subject—it can be painting, it can be gardening, it can be baking bread, it can be Egyptology—opens up its complexities to me like a flower. If I’m addicted to anything, it’s that feeling.
Our group becomes regulars at the bar! The bartender memorizes our orders. I discover that Rebecca, who assaulted a woman on the bus, is a trivia genius. She carries us to a win on US History night. Miya calls girls Babe and guys Buster. Miya calls Sam, who urinated in public and goes by they/them pronouns, Boo. On the week of my birthday Briscoe and Wyatt (the dads of the group), buy me a cake and sing to me. They even remember that my favorite kind of cake is ice cream cake, and not the good ones from Baskin Robins that are part sponge cake, but the cheap Carvel ones, all ice cream and frosting, that you can buy at the grocery store.
I could get paid to be the Community Service overseer, then I would be the one signing everyone’s sheets. But, my contract at work prohibits me from taking a second job. It’s just as well. I think if I was the person in charge, the dynamics of the group would shift too much. People might associate
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David Brinson | Trash
me with their boss. People might unconsciously link me with their harping mother who won’t let them go to a party until they’ve done all their chores. I keep picking up trash for free.
It may seem silly to you, but what else am I going to do with my weekends? Sit at home depressed? I would never have met Alisha, who was caught breaking and entering into the house of the family she used to babysit for. I would never have found out that Betsy-Jean owns a chinchilla named Chunky. I would never have met Briscoe, who sees the world unlike anyone else I’ve ever met.
One Saturday, while we roam the streets for litter, Briscoe passes the time by asking, what would you do if you didn’t have your big secret job?
a detective, I’m good at puzzles, I think I’d be good at solving crimes.
I think to myself, Briscoe would be a good detective, because he always spots things about people I hadn’t noticed. I tell Briscoe that I think he would be a good detective, because he always spots things about people I hadn’t noticed. I’m trying not to withhold compliments anymore. If I like someone’s jacket or their laugh, I just tell them.
Sometimes, a person in our group achieves their number of required hours and we celebrate at the bar. If you eavesdropped on our revelry, you might think that the person is getting out of a mental hospital or a gulag. Man, the others say, lucky bastard, maybe someday that will be me. Just you wait, my time is almost up. Imma be leaving this place someday
“ I live for these moments, when a skill or a subject— it can be painting, it can be gardening, it can be baking bread, it can be Egyptology—opens up its complexities to me like a flower. If I’m addicted to anything, it’s that feeling. ”
I say, I would be a night man at a hotel.
He says, a night man?
I say, the guy who sits at the desk all night, hotels are cool to me, I like the vibes, you know?
He says, I always wanted to be
real soon, and then I’m going to be sleeping in on Saturdays, and then I’m really going to get my life in order, you’ll see.
Once someone leaves, we never talk about them again. People always say they will keep in touch and glassworks 32
then they don’t. People always say it’s so hard to keep in touch, life and everything getting in the way, but my best friend Ana and I live in different time zones, and we find a way. She will send me a picture of the pancake she made for breakfast and say, look at this perfect pancake. And I will text back and say, oh my god, that is a perfect pancake, I would like to marry that pancake. And she will say, right? Keeping in contact with someone isn’t that hard. You just have to send them pictures of pancakes and books you think they will enjoy and videos of small dogs trying to carry big sticks.
Everyone from my original group left. Even Mallory, who pled guilty to extorting a former boyfriend, had finished her mandatory sixty weeks. Even Briscoe. The new group is just as kind and chatty and delightful, but when we finish at one o’clock, they do not want to go to a bar and get to know each other. They want to go home and warm up leftovers and play with their kids and hug their wives and call their mothers and watch an episode of the show they’re binging. Google conducted a study with the objective of determining what makes for a productive, cohesive team. Their conclusion: it’s impossible to calculate. Humans are too unpredictable. Too many variables. One group of ten people might not mesh, but another group of ten people might be able to accomplish anything they set their
mind to. As I drink alone, I comfort myself with the knowledge that Google, who knows all and sees all, can’t even make sense of us.
You tell me, where would you like our story to end? There are so many options! It could end when I get promoted to a position that requires another NDA and another security clearance and traveling for work, which means no more weekends of trash collecting. A text from Briscoe of a baby and a dog napping together with the unprompted question, what is your stance on stoplights? Or, how about when Briscoe never makes a move on me and I never make a move on him, but we still adore one another? How about when I attend his son’s little league games and he cat-sits for me when I’m out of town? What if I end back at the beginning, on that first day, when everyone in the group sees how full my bucket is and suddenly wants to make a game of who can collect the most litter, everyone giggling and scrambling and fighting over pieces of garbage like children on Easter?
Look at us, Briscoe says, a bunch of trash picking up trash.
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David
Brinson | Trash
dyInG drawl
Devon Neal
The way you taught me to speak was with a crooked mouth, sour vowels twanging like the strings of banjo and steel guitar on the radio. I’d protest, “ain’t ain’t a word,” but we’d drive to town for biscuits and sausage and I would join you singing I’s into A’s, chugging U’s deep into our bellies, G’s slipping off suffix slopes. Years later, on a holiday visit, you felt like a glove with too few fingers until I heard your I’s tightening, your language more upright, refined, serifs wisping as you sat smoking on grandma’s front porch, your accent disappearing like smoke from your cigarette.
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The manGrove Tree
Shin Watanabe
your hands wing above the city structures twist and pierce the clouds i duck as they flutter down nails and all i’m afraid of falling through
the butterflies and i spend our summer obeying the leaves stop / closed / winding road
on the coast roots screw into seabed they search for plastic as i ramble the shore ask:
how many times have the waves washed your toes their armistice in angelfish pattern?
i gather torn roots from the sands slip through grove to city
i found you there knotted ball of vine and root you sag on a side someone had tried to cut you down and given up
butterflies sip your sap and i rub their wings between my fingers paint my eyelids with their powder blink the dry blink
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maIne 3
Anna Maeve
glassworks 36
femInIsTs on mars
Caroline Miller
I want to start a feminist society on Mars where every little girl has an astronaut Barbie Doll and names her Sally, after Sally Ride.
I want to come back down to Earth for class reunions and say I live on Mars now, and what are you going to do about it?
Where there’s almost no air, where it’s freezing, where we are all shapeless and metallic in our spacesuits and everything is solar-powered and we learn to love this barren dust that offers nothing, the way we have always loved
copper star clusters, this haze of luminous matter only imagined: red planet, war planet, blood planet, we know what it means to live here.
Here we do not start in a garden but grow it ourselves, slowly, inch-by-inch inside terrariums the size of football stadiums.
I want the women out here to be whatever they want and nobody is allowed to say shit about it. Lilac and speed of light, ultraviolet a thing so much itself you can’t even see it.
Let there be that light, from our beginning. We’re starting all the way over.
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paddlInG In The pandemIC
Jeanne Emmons
Spring comes on anyway, ignoring human ills. Isolation isn’t a thing the cottonwood trees care about. Even the undersides of leaves, silver on silver, swivel and flashdance in the breeze.
While last year’s cattails rattle in the shallows, I can see how the green tongues of slender new shoots rise from the water to swallow the April light. The Russian olive tenders
its dusty fingers to the air, and the willow bends over its own reflection, forms with its twin a hoop, an open tunnel I want to follow. Look, how yellow catkins graze the lake’s skin,
how it shivers at the kiss, splayed out and bare. The bank is undercut, and from the sod the hairs of roots tangle naked in the air while I look on, sequestered, frocked, and shod.
I want to leave the cloister, embrace the body of the world. With the slow breathless paddling of my canoe I stroke and skim the water. But spring recoils from any human meddling.
At my approach, the sunning turtle launches himself from the fallen tree. A heron rises and rows away toward the high branches. The red-winged blackbird, wary, eyes me,
its claws clutching the tip of a swaying reed. To escape me, a muskrat churns a wake, narrow and silent. A pair of geese let out a screed of honks as I round the bend. They overtake
glassworks 38
my quiet craft, and flank me even as I steer a wide distance from their nest in the grass. I pass a man fishing. We nod and veer away, risking not one word unmasked.
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self-porTraIT: vIndICTIve
Shannon Kernaghan
glassworks 40
have you GoT The moon safe?
Sarah Harley
Have you got the moon safe?
Please, tie those strings a little tighter. This loaf, push it down further the light is crushing it such a baguette golden brown and so white inside you don’t see every day nowadays.
–Denise Levertov
The dusty road ran along the edge of the primordial marsh where the cattails grew tall on slender tapering stalks. Small outlines of birds perched on the highest grasses. Sandpipers darted overhead with stiff curved wings. Inside my pocket was a stale piece of bread my mother gave me to feed to the wild chickens. They pecked and scratched the ground outside the abandoned barn house: mottled browns, speckled blacks, vivid reds. My older sister carried me on a piggy-back ride. We were five and seven. My father walked in front. The moon hung low in the sky, appearing redder and larger before falling into the marsh.
“Where does the moon go?”
I asked my father. But he was lost in thoughts of wild things. He couldn’t live without wild things like winds and sunsets. ~
One winter day, my father suffered a fatal heart attack, often referred to as a ‘widow-maker,’ while
he was driving to work. The name was ill-fitting as my mother had already died eight years earlier when I was thirteen.
A long night moon took a high trajectory across the sky. I was twenty-one.
My son was raised in my grief, in an environment marked by my fears about the world’s safety, a place where people drove to work and never returned. He held only a handful of memories of his grandfather: the sound of an apple bitten to its core, being lifted high into the air, a fall onto a stone step where my father’s arms swiftly came to his rescue.
“Mummy! Bampa put the stars on!” he called out one night as we walked back to the small apartment on Belleview Street. He was three. My father had been gone for a few months. The first frantic period of mourning had passed, ebbing into a dull quiet ache.
We did have a beautiful view. The branches of leafy Paper Birch trees almost touched the windows. His child bed was tucked against the wall in the sunroom, the green teddy bear named Edward leaned against the pillow. A thin piece of opaque material separated our sleeping spaces. I liked keeping him close, just behind the curtain that floated in the breeze through the window.
glassworks 41
I wanted to give him everything.
I stuck glow-in-the dark stars on the ceiling of all his childhood bedrooms, standing on a chair to peel them off just before we moved and sticking them back up before nightfall. There was no moon in the imaginary night sky of his bedroom. I wished for him to have a moon, always full, radiant, and luminous, present even in its moments of growing smaller before it vanished.
He slept under a moonless sky. I had surely failed.
I started to carry an imaginary moon everywhere with me, folded up inside a string bag, hoping it wouldn’t be crushed by a loaf of bread or a bag of clementines.
One day, I packed up the moon, stuffing it deep inside the bag we carried.
“Mummy! Look at the moon!” my son cried out when he saw it. The moon, sublime and full, shone across his face.
I wanted to give him everything, even the things I could not.
I was a single parent, without a car, a husband, and a house, just a one-bedroom 1913 apartment, with wooden floors and a view across a pretty street.
A few months after my father died, we moved into his house. My son and I lived on the third floor while I rented out three other rooms to friends, still barely able to pay the mortgage. He played on a soft carpet in a small room, through the window
you could see the changing colors of the oak and maple trees.
At the age of four, my son and I walked everywhere, from my father’s house to a line of shops and cafes about a mile away. We always crossed East Newberry Boulevard, a 150-feet-wide street, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted to connect Lake Park and Riverside Park. The boulevard stretched twelve blocks from Lake Michigan in the east to the Milwaukee River in the west. Hundred-year-old elms formed a canopy over the road.
The paths in the woods along the river were lit up with elegant wrought iron lamps that filtered a pretty light through the trees. At dusk, you could see the moon low in the sky behind the branches.
On the way home, we stopped at the place my son named “Berry Grass Field” although it wasn’t a field at all. It was a wide grassy median where the snow was piled high by the plows in deep winter.
As winter waned, a pink sky was followed by the warmth of air on skin.
In the spring, it became a dream only a child could recognize: yellow dappled sunlight through a peak in the clouds, the rustling leaves of the trees, shadows long and defined, cast in soft evening light.
“Mummy, we’re here,” my son cried out with joy when we reached the spot, as if it was a real glassworks 42
destination. I always guarded the treasure of his imagination.
Berry Grass Field marked the halfway point between home and any other location. I loved the way our journeys were punctuated.
We stopped in the shade of the trees to have an impromptu picnic: a peach, a plum, or an apricot; bites of a tiny, sweet fruit tart he’d been given in the bakery. A jar of Nutella was opened.
“ The moon, sublime and full, shone across his face. I wanted to give him everything, even the things I could not. ”
The picnics evoked the memories of childhood holidays in France, back when we were a complete family, when I was a child before my mother died from cancer and my brother died from a fall, before my father died on his way to work.
I peeled away the silver foil and helped my son to unwrap segments of Laughing Cow Cheese and ripped apart chunks of a warm baguette, golden brown and white inside.
“Mummy! Let’s have triangle cheese!”
I didn’t want to be anywhere else but there. I felt a boundless moment of belonging.
Inside the bag, the moon reached a peak of illumination. I wanted to give it to my son, but it was somehow beyond my reach. Night was gathering around us. ~
Winter came early the year after my father died. In the dark of the moon, the early frost killed fruit buds and blossoms. Only the frost in the light of the moon did not kill.
My son turned five then six. We walked everywhere, gathering pinecones and brightlycolored crimson and golden leaves. Our walks were mapped into memory. I taught him how to read and how to ride a bicycle, how to swim and how to find the North Star and the Little Dipper. Each night, I read him stories to nurture his inner world, to tend the kind of solitude you can go home to.
I wanted to give him everything, especially the wild things. But each year, the moon began to fade a little more.
My son turned seven then eight. Over time, the moon inside the bag grew a little crumpled. One night, I tried to iron it to make it flat but the edges grew singed. My son stood in the doorway, anger emanating from his small frame.
“What are you doing to the moon?”
Sarah Harley | Have You Got the Moon Safe?
glassworks 43
I folded the moon and handed it to him. He stormed off to his bedroom and slammed the door, the moon swinging under his arm. I had surely failed.
I tried to give him everything. Even the things I did not possess.
When I tiptoed in to say goodnight, I saw he had tried to tape the moon above his bed, but its light was weakening. By the next morning, the moon had fallen behind his bed.
My son turned nine then ten.
I took the moon back, without asking. It was pale and faint. I held it close to me but the further away it seemed to feel, as if it was drifting, higher and higher into a starless sky. I folded it up and hid it inside a cupboard drawer with the hopes that the moon could rest there and become brighter.
My son turned eleven then twelve. An ungovernable distance grew. We moved to a house with its own garden in the shade of a tall tree. We started to argue about the whereabouts of the moon and whether or not it was even real. I sat with my head in my hands at a table in the small kitchen at the back of the house.
Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Closed doors, sometimes slamming like the ones in my childhood house. The moon went missing. At night, I lay on my bed trying to imagine the moon on the ceiling of my bedroom. The dark night shimmered around its edges. I tried to put my
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thoughts and worries to sleep. I tried to let go of thinking. A dark shadow took the moon’s place.
Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. My son left home.
At night, I opened the window to let the moon come back. I had read that the moon never uses the door, only the window.
I tried to wait for a new moon, knowing I had to learn to be patient and understand gradualness. I knew it would appear slowly.
I waited for all the moons: Snow Moon. Pink Moon. Strawberry Moon. Cold Moon. I waited in a fullness of my own waiting until I felt I was the moon, bright and full and luminous. I felt its presence as a thin sliver of light inside me. ~
“ I waited in a fullness of my own waiting until I felt I was the moon, bright and full and luminous. I felt its presence as a thin sliver of light inside me. ”
Many years later, my son and I walked down a street from long ago. We chatted about the picnics and laughed about Berry Grass Field.
I watched as he deftly tightened
the strings to secure the moon he had in his possession.
“What are you doing with the moon?” I whispered.
“Don’t worry. I have the moon safe. I’m going to put it back. You cannot live without wild things.”
And just then, as he let go of the strings, the moon rose high into the sky above us, brilliant and complete.
We talked about the other side of the moon, the one you can never see, just an illusion as the moon is in synchronous rotation with Earth.
I carried a loaf, golden brown and white within.
Sarah Harley | Have You Got the Moon Safe? glassworks 45
dream flowers
Katie Hughbanks
glassworks 46
glassworks 47
nuIsanCe bleedInG
K Anand Gall
Nuisance bleeding, a common potential complication of anticoagulant or antiplatelet drug therapy, is a medical term referring to minor bleeding and bruising that does not require medical attention.
Not henna that stains my skin now, but bruises too tender for tongues, the marks not a script we can read but a clock. Skin keeps time: Rust-red hours fade into purple days and yellow-brown weeks.
My husband nurses each one with hot packs of tamarind paste and turmeric powder pressed into soft cotton cloth.
He bandages the finger I cut chopping onions, dresses it each hour for the seven it takes for the thin and watery pudding of my blood to set.
Were you petting the cats again? he teases, when a new rupture radiates across the back of my hand. He kisses the contusion and I love him for making light.
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Fine for us to joke at home— we know what’s going on. We know that every morning I swallow pills that strip my blood of platelets until it is skinny and hungry, too slippery for sticky clots.
But outside the house, the water aerobics ladies pause shallow conversations when he and I enter the pool. In the locker room, they towel their hair and sneak sidelong glances at my mottled skin. They feign light voices when they ask, Where is your husband from again?
Outside the house, my physical therapist asks me if my Indian husband expects me to be a subservient wife.
Outside the house, I’ve started wearing long sleeves and pants.
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There, and noT There
Jenn Powers
Not everyone is granted closure.
But he’s there, like the crimson leaves shivering at the corner of my eye. There, like a carving in the bark of a hemlock tree. There, like a leaf skidding across the pavement.
But he’s not there, on the smoky wind.
Not there, in anyone’s memory one hundred years from now.
Not there, on the line.
They say it’s usually someone you know, hiding behind happy, yellow flowers.
Like the forsythias in spring, the dandelions in summer, and the goldenrods in fall.
I wonder if there’s an inkling of empathy sleeping somewhere deep inside the twisted mind.
I wonder if there’s a fleck of gold in the heart of someone who could cut, rip, and slice flesh.
How does it feel to leave these thoughts here with you?
Out in the open like an unstitched gash.
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paIsley
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Cory Firestine
They fall To earTh
Gerry Rodriguez
On the afternoon the meteorite struck the orange grove, Lily was opening her laptop. She was unaware of the object that caused her apartment floor to shake the bed on which she sat, the Dollar Tree picture frames rattling against the gray walls, the windows quivering beneath the blue blackout curtains. For less than a second, the entire world in which Lily existed vibrated, pulling her from her curated routine of staring at the spinning fan on her ceiling, inhaling and exhaling with great concentration, and addressing the concerns of introductory English students from the comfort of her bed with only the headache-inducing glow of the laptop screen to illuminate the dark bedroom. Rinse and repeat. Today, however, she was interrupted by the disconcerting movement of a planet that was only supposed to creep at a lethargic pace before all became still once again.
Lily closed her laptop and turned, placing her bare feet on the brown carpet. She tiptoed out of the bedroom and into the living room where she rested her knees on the itchy loveseat and leaned over, barely touching the curtains as she lifted a single blind to look out the window. The courtyard was oddly empty for a congested apartment
complex, but Lily watched as the stray gray tabby, whom she called Jasper, jumped onto the bricks beneath the window and purred, rubbing his body against the black solar screen. Lily exhaled, comforted by Jasper’s presence. She shook her head. What she felt must have been a neighbor slamming a door, a consequence of the thin walls connecting each small apartment. Still, as Lily crept through the dark apartment, an uneasiness followed her footsteps. She could not discard a concern that the unusual movement had been something grim. But this was a common reaction for Lily who had often been told that her pessimism played tricks on her mind and had been given the task in recent years to try to regard life with more optimism, a task that garnered little success.
In the bedroom, Lily sat on the bed once again. She found the deep crevice that had shaped itself to her body after years of comfort. She opened her laptop, once again, and quickly opened a webpage where she typed in her credentials to clock into work for the second time today. She opened the portal for incoming assignments and clicked on the oldest message which read:
My prof says my last paper didn’t have a thesis. Does this one?
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I don’t even know what a thesis is!
Thx.
A PDF file was attached to the message. Lily opened the file which revealed an untitled essay just shy of three pages. Confused, she clicked back to the message where she hoped she had missed an attachment for instructions regarding the assignment. There were none. Biting her inner cheek, Lily returned to the essay where she began highlighting and attaching notes that would later be evaluated for usefulness by her manager at the end of the semester. ~
Having clocked out for the day, the laptop was charging on a wobbly nightstand, and Lily was lying on her side in the same spot on the bed, practicing her inhaling and exhaling. The door to the apartment opened and closed. Lily listened as a woman sighed and locked the door and then the deadbolt. The woman’s heels clicked across the living room tile, and she yelped when she ran into something in the dark on the way to the bedroom. At the doorway, the woman stopped and cursed under her breath. Trying to move without a sound, the woman moved across the carpet before spreading her body onto the bed and then slipping beneath the quilt that hid Lily’s body. Lily’s back was to the woman, and she waited, tense, until the woman placed her hand on her back. An arm wrapped itself around Lily’s body, holding her firm. Together,
the women inhaled and exhaled in the dark until Lily found the strength to turn her body and place her hand on the silhouetted face of Mav.
Mav whispered, “Did you eat today?”
“No,” said Lily.
Mav tensed but exhaled quickly. “Can I turn on the light?”
“Just the lamp.” And then Lily added as an afterthought, “Please.”
Mav unhooked her arms from Lily’s body and threw off the quilt while she rose from the bed. She kicked off her shoes as she walked across the bedroom and turned on a standing lamp next to the closet.
“I brought pad thai,” Mav said.
“Mmmm…” Lily hummed.
“Do you want to get out of bed?”
“How about dinner in bed?”
Mav paused. She watched Lily, assessing her mood. “We’ve had dinner in bed all week. I don’t think it’s the quirky adventure you think it is.”
Lily looked down at the quilt where she concentrated on picking at a loose thread in a seam. “We’ll eat in the kitchen tomorrow. I promise.”
Mav bit her lip. She opened her mouth, briefly, and then shut it. “Okay,” she said as she turned and began to walk out of the room. “The table is covered in junk anyway. I should probably take care of that tomorrow.” Mav’s voice trailed off as she reached the kitchen.
Lily sat up in the bed, picking at stray strands of her black hair
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that had been cut by Mav into a sloppy pixie a few months before because Lily could not be bothered to brush it any longer. The pixie was currently in the process of growing into an unattractive mullet which Lily lacked the confidence to pull off due to her insecurities regarding trends. Lily sulked. She was angry with herself for suggesting dinner in bed again. She would get out of bed tomorrow. She would eat at the table with Mav. She would even clean off the table while Mav was at work. Tomorrow would be better.
Mav returned to the bedroom with a plastic bag while Lily continued to make silent promises to herself. Mav placed the bag on the bed and pulled out a large container of pad thai and two packages of utensils. She placed the pad thai on the plastic bag and handed one of the utensil packages to Lily.
Mav already had her utensils opened and was opening the container of food when Lily said, “It was a meteorite.”
Mav paused without looking at Lily. She held a plastic fork over a piece of chicken. “I know,” she finally answered, and then she stabbed the chicken with her fork and took a bite.
“It was so close. The whole apartment shook.”
“Some reports said it didn’t even hit the ground.”
“Some reports said that, but some
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people found pieces of it in an orange grove.”
“Three miles away.”
“That’s not very far when you think about it.”
“And it hasn’t been confirmed that what was found was from a meteorite.”
“It hasn’t been confirmed that it wasn’t from a meteorite.”
Mav paused, choosing her words carefully before speaking. “Even if what they found in the orange grove was from a meteorite, it would just be a fragment. Meteorites begin breaking apart when they enter the Earth’s atmosphere.”
“ She would get out of bed tomorrow. She would eat at the table with Mav. She would even clean off the table while Mav was at work. Tomorrow would be better. ”
“But don’t you see how that’s worse? All of these fragments plummeting to Earth at incredible speeds, scattering everywhere. Any single piece could’ve killed someone.” Lily wondered how Mav couldn’t understand the severity of this event.
“All that matters is that nobody got hurt.”
“But somebody could’ve gotten hurt. A fragment could’ve landed on someone’s house.”
“But it didn’t.”
“But it could’ve.”
Mav stopped picking through the noodles where she had been searching for bean sprouts. She didn’t look at Lily when she asked, “Why are we arguing about this?”
“We’re not arguing. I just think it’s crazy. Don’t you think it’s crazy?”
“Of course it’s crazy; it’s a meteorite. You should eat.”
Lily dug her fork into the noodles and shoved them into her mouth. She grabbed her phone as she chewed and began typing. “Do you have any idea what the speed of a meteorite is entering the Earth’s atmosphere?” Lily said, ignoring her food, once again.
Mav dropped her fork on the bed and placed her fingers on her temples. “Lily, I’m a paralegal, not a scientist.”
“I’ve been doing some research—”
“Googling isn’t exactly the same thing as research—”
“You know what I mean…”
“—and before you say anything I don’t want to know the speed at which meteorites plummet to Earth.” Mav’s voice was beginning to gain a high-pitched staccato rhythm. Lily paused. She could see that she was pushing Mav to her
limit. “Fine,” she said, halfheartedly returning to her noodles.
A few minutes later Lily continued, “But it turns out meteorites hitting Earth isn’t even rare. It happens all the time. And no one even talks about it!”
“I guess it’s not a big deal then.”
“It would be a big deal if someone died.”
This time Mav stared at Lily. Her brown eyes drilled into Lily’s brain and forced Lily to make eye contact with her. “And when is the last time someone was killed by a meteorite?” Mav asked.
“Someone was killed in 1888—”
“Okay. Stop ‘researching.’ Stop looking at the news. Just put down your phone, and eat something. Please.” Mav spoke with the firmness of a parent scolding a child.
Lily looked at Mav. She could tell she was serious. With extreme strength, Lily locked the phone without closing the article she had planned to quote. She placed the phone on the bed and began to eat, aware the Mav had put her fork down and was watching Lily, probably counting every bite. ~
The open laptop sat on top of Lily’s lap. The bedroom door was closed, and the room was lit by the single lamp on the corner
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of the room. Lily sat in silence, staring at the woman on the screen who had been waiting for her to speak.
Lily watched the minutes on the corner of her computer screen slowly count down the remaining time of the session. She avoided the woman’s composed stare that compelled her to make eye contact. Finally, the woman spoke. “Lily, do you trust me?”
Lily felt her eyes snap back to the woman’s attention. She watched as Sophie, again, waited for an answer. Lily knew that Sophie’s hand rested on a notepad that was not visible on the screen, and she imagined Sophie tapping the pad with a pen, itching to compile more notes about Lily’s eccentric state of mind.
“Yes,” Lily finally whispered. It was an easy lie. Over the years Lily had developed the habit of giving people the answer she believed they wanted to hear.
“Do you believe that I genuinely care about you?” Sophie asked.
“Yes,” Lily whispered again.
Sophie squinted her eyes and nodded. Lily imagined that she could detect the muscles in Sophie’s arm moving, writing something on her notepad.
“How are you feeling?”
Sophie asked.
“Fine,” Lily said.
Sophie tilted her head. “How would you define the word ‘fine’?”
“I guess I just feel the same way I always do.”
“And you would define your usual feelings as fine?”
“I guess so.”
Sophie paused. She sucked on her lips, creating a thin line. “It’s okay to not feel secure. And it’s okay to tell someone when you’re not feeling well.”
“I’m fine,” Lily repeated.
Sophie nodded. This time she glanced down, and Lily knew for certain that Sophie was writing on the notepad. Sophie spoke without looking up from her notes. “Is it possible that you have lived so long not feeling your best that you don’t remember what it feels like to be at peace?”
Lily shook her head. “You mean to feel normal.”
This time Sophie looked directly through the screen and into Lily’s eyes. “How would you define normal?”
Lily hated this game. Every answer was acknowledged with another question. She could feel herself shutting down. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“Okay. What would you like to talk about instead?”
Another question. Lily took a deep breath and exhaled loudly. “I don’t know.” “How about this? Can you tell me what you did yesterday?”
“I worked,” Lily answered. Another silence followed.
Sophie waited for Lily to elaborate, but Lily was in no mood glassworks 56
to cooperate. “Anything else?”
Sophie asked.
“No,” Lily stated with finality.
“Have you given any thought to my suggestion about going outside for brief periods of time? You don’t need to go for a walk. You don’t need to get in a car. But what would happen if you stepped outside for however little time you desired? The only expectation would be that you do this every single day. What would happen if you gave yourself
“I don’t know,” Lily’s voice cracked. She tried to inhale, but her chest felt tight. Her lungs shuddered as they tried to release air that had not yet filled them. Lily pursed her lips into a small circle, making soft blowing sounds close to a whistle. Her thumb picked at the skin on her nail more aggressively.
“Lily, can you tell me what’s going on in your mind right now? What are you feeling?”
“ Is it possible that you have lived so long not feeling your best that you don’t remember what it feels like to be at peace? ”
the task to check the mail every day? You would walk outside, check the mailbox, and then walk back to your apartment and go inside. That’s it.”
“I thought about it,” Lily said honestly.
Sophie raised her eyebrows and nodded her head. “You considered it. That’s a start. Now, what about acting on this idea?”
“I don’t know.” Lily looked down at her hands. She picked at a piece of skin along the side of her nail.
Sophie’s voice reached out to Lily, begging her to stay present in the conversation. “What do you think will happen to you if you go outside to check the mail?”
“It’s just… I used to think my apartment was the safest place. Like, if I didn’t leave my apartment, nothing bad could happen to me.”
“Nothing bad. Like what?”
Lily didn’t answer; she was too busy trying to suck air into her lungs.
“What might happen to you, Lily?” Sophie pressed.
“Just…I don’t know. A car accident or a mugging or assault… sinkholes… bridges collapsing…” Lily groaned. She placed her head in her palms and began rocking back and forth. She knew she wasn’t making any sense.
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“Yes, those are all scary things,” Sophie assured her.
Lily looked up, and her tears poured down her cheeks. Her thumb rubbed the piece of skin on her nail. “But then I started thinking about house fires and gas leaks and hurricanes that can tear the roofs off of houses or uproot trees that can fall on roofs that can cave in… I don’t know.”
“Go on. I’m listening.”
Lily continued at a fast pace. Her words were pouring from her mouth while she panted. “And now there are meteorites falling from the sky, and it’s not even a freak accident; it happens all the time. I don’t even feel safe in my apartment anymore. What am I doing here? What do I do?”
The skin ripped open, and a drop of blood peeked out of the corner of the nail. Lily’s breathing slowed until it found a familiar pattern. Lily could feel Sophie watching her, patiently giving her the time that she needed to compose herself. When Lily looked up, she saw Sophie’s unsmiling expression, waiting for the right moment to respond with the obligatory next question. She hated that she could never determine what Sophie was thinking.
Sophie finally filled the silence. “If your apartment isn’t safe, then why do you still feel the need to stay in it?”
Mav came home from work. She had attempted to force herself from the tub and make her way to her familiar bed placement so as not to alarm Mav, but she had lacked the strength to move her muscles from the perceived safety of the tiled walls. Now, she sat frozen, listening to Mav’s footsteps pace the small apartment as she searched for Lily.
“Lily?” Mav called.
Lily remained silent, choked by embarrassment.
“Lily?” Mav called again. Her voice was tense. Lily imagined what Mav might be thinking. Did Lily have a breakthrough? Did she finally step outside? Maybe Lily had gone for a walk. Lily knew that Mav would begin with optimistic theories, but she would soon be plagued by more likely scenarios. What if Lily had packed her bags and left? Where would she go? And, finally, the most urgent thought that would weigh on Mav’s mind, what if Lily was hurt, or worse?
Lily felt guilty for not calling out to Mav. She knew she was torturing her, and she constricted her chest, determined to make a sound, even if it was nothing more than a cry. The only sound to escape her throat was her soft breathing that came in focused and steady beats.
Lily was sitting huddled in a ball on the floor of the bathtub when
“Lily!” Mav was beginning to sound desperate. There were very few places for Lily to hide in the one bedroom apartment.
Mav’s feet moved slowly across glassworks 58
~
the floor as she walked to the bathroom, afraid to confront what she would find inside. Mav’s hand tapped the partially closed door. Lily braced herself as the door opened, and then she forced herself to lift her head to look at Mav’s face. Mav’s eyes were wide as she stared at Lily. Her lips trembled as her mouth searched for words, and she raised a hand to cover her mouth to stop the movement. She knelt down to the floor, reaching out a hand as if trying to show a scared animal that she could be trusted.
“I don’t know how to help you,” Mav whispered. “Tell me what to do.”
Lily’s voice shook as she spoke. “How am I supposed to live in a world where meteorites can just fall from the sky? Can just fall on this apartment? How can I live in a world that can end before I can even exhale the breath I’ve been holding in my chest for the last year?”
Mav shook her head, maintaining eye contact with Lily. She spoke slowly and clearly. “A meteorite isn’t going to fall on you.”
“It fell right next to the apartment.”
“It fell three miles away from the apartment.”
“It might as well have fallen right here. Out of all of the places in the entire world, it fell three miles away from our apartment.”
Mav took a shaky breath. “I can’t protect you from natural
disasters and meteors falling from the sky.”
“They called it a meteorite.” Lily knew the semantics of the word were irrelevant, but somehow remaining consistent made the danger more real which she could use to justify her distress.
Mav had put down her hand and was sitting on the bathroom rug, hugging her knees to her chest in a tableaux that mirrored Lily’s own posture. “You’re so scared all the time, and I just don’t understand it.”
“I’m not scared all the time,” Lily snapped.
Mav’s eyes widened, and she raised her hands as if to defend herself. “It was a bad choice of words.”
“Have you seen the news?”
Mav sighed and relaxed her hands. “Yes, I’ve seen the news. The world is scary. You’re scared. I’m scared. I think most people are scared. But you don’t stop living your life because bad things happen.”
“Catastrophes happen.”
Mav was shaking her head again, cradling it in her hands. “Not as often as you make it seem.”
“People die in car accidents every day.”
“I don’t understand how we went from freak meteors—”
“Meteorites.”
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“—Meteorites. What even is the difference?”
“I don’t know, but that’s what the news called it.”
“I don’t care! How did we go from meteorites falling from the sky to car accidents?” Mav was yelling. Lily could see the cracks that were slowly breaking her down, but Mav was a fighter.
“I’m trying to make a point!” Lily yelled back. “You’re making it seem like bad things hardly ever happen!”
open your laptop and do some work in the dark doesn’t mean that you’re okay.”
“I’m sick,” Lily whispered.
“I know you’re sick. That’s why I’m still here taking care of you. But at what point do my actions become those of an enabler?”
“You’re not an enabler.”
Mav nodded her head and looked at the ceiling. “But I am. And I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I’m not going to force you to do some-
“ In situations of vulnerability, Lily was overwhelmed by a deafening noise inside of her brain that warned her of impending peril, a noise that immediately drowned out any word that dared try to reach her lips. ”
“I’m not trying to make it seem like that. I’m just saying that bad things can’t always be avoided, so what’s the point of holing up in this apartment?”
“Bad things can’t always be avoided, but you can minimize the chances of them happening to you.”
“But, Lily, you’re not living.”
“Yes, I am! I have a job. I’m productive.”
“You’re sitting in a bathtub!” Mav closed her eyes and pressed her hands together, holding them to her mouth as if she was about to pray. Maybe she was. Finally, she placed her hands on her forehead and exhaled loudly. “Just because you
thing that makes you uncomfortable because I love you, and I understand that you’re sick. But whatever this is that we’re doing isn’t working. You’re right in front of me, and I’m watching you disappear. I can see it, but I can’t stop it. And it feels like it’s my fault, like I missed something or I did something wrong at some point that caused a shift and made things worse.” Mav gasped as she choked on tears and snot. “I just don’t know what’s happening, and I don’t know how to fix it.”
“I’m not something that needs to be fixed.”
“I know that; that’s not what I mean.” Mav took a long pause and glassworks 60
then crawled to the edge of the bathtub. She placed her hands on Lily’s arms and slowly stood. “Come here. Out of the tub.”
Mav hooked her fingers under Lily’s arms and lifted. Encouraged by Mav’s touch, Lily slowly stood and moved one leg out of the tub, placing her foot on the rug. She followed with her other leg. Mav moved her hands to cradle Lily’s face. She pulled Lily close and buried her face in Lily’s neck. Lily could smell Mav’s perfume, like fresh linen and peonies. She wanted to push Mav away, cover herself so that Mav’s face wasn’t caressing her unwashed body. But she couldn’t move away. Without Mav’s touch, there was no way Lily would be unable to stand on her own.
“How did we get here?” Mav whispered into Lily’s hair.
“Where?” Lily asked.
“How did we get here?” Mav repeated.
Lily could feel the pain bound inside of Mav’s body. She could recall every missed holiday with Mav by her side while parents’ and siblings’ calls were immediately sent to voicemail. She could feel the isolation that was creeping under Mav’s skin and anchoring her to the stained carpet. The desolation was braiding her bones with the roots that had grown through the floor and spread like a strong oak tree no longer able to be uprooted.
Mav finally broke the silence.
“I don’t know how to protect you. I want to protect you. I want to shield you from every bad thing that could ever happen. I want to be able to comfort you. I want you to let me comfort you. But I can’t do those things. I love you, and I’m losing you. Please, I’m begging you to just stay with me. Please…”
Mav was on her knees hugging Lily at the waist, whispering through the salty tears that leaked into her mouth. Lily’s heart broke. She knew that Mav’s pain was for her. Mav loved her, and she was being forced to take on the role of a caretaker, a role that she did not want yet never appeared to resent. Lily knew that Mav lacked the skills to cope with her needs, yet she did her best, googling coping mechanisms for anxiety when she thought Lily was asleep. She knew that Mav had secretly been attending therapy sessions for herself. And she knew that Mav viewed Lily’s further decline into isolation as a reflection of her own lack of capabilities despite her rational thoughts reassuring her that she was only human and Lily’s pain was not her fault. Mav’s actions had been initiated out of love and desperation, and as much as Mav thought she was careful in hiding her quest to save Lily, she underestimated Lily’s naturally observant nature,
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a quality that likely led to Lily’s fears in the first place.
Lily felt guilty for finally breaking down Mav’s stoic exterior, but she was also envious of Mav’s vulnerability. The defenseless position in which one had to expose their deepest fears caused Lily to immediately shut down as she was someone who went to great lengths to ensure that she would never be in a position of danger. In situations of vulnerability, Lily was overwhelmed by a deafening noise inside of her brain that warned her of impending peril, a noise that drowned out any words that dared try to reach her lips. She watched Mav release her emotions in a tidal wave which left her panting but weightless. Lily wondered what that must feel like.
“I can’t stop it,” Lily finally spoke. “It wasn’t triggered by an event. Sometimes I wish that it was an event, something that I could pinpoint and confront and work on, but it’s not; it’s just always been there, churning in my stomach, fondling my throat. It exists without a cause. It has continued to grow, and it no longer fits inside of my body.”
Mav was quiet. She held Lily tight against her chest as if she might be taken by a strong gust of wind. When she finally pulled her body away, she kept her hands on Lily’s face. Mav tilted her head and smiled. “Can I give you a shower?” she asked.
Lily took in a ragged breath. When she exhaled, the tears came in long,
deep sobs vibrating in her gut. And while Lily wept, Mav kissed each tear before it fell. ~
Lily lay in bed and listened to Mav’s soft breathing. She stared at the ceiling, forcing her eyes to adjust to the dark. Mav’s arm snaked its way around Lily’s as she rolled over in her sleep. Lily turned and tried to make out the lines of Mav’s silhouette mere inches from her face. She wondered if she would ever be able to sleep as peacefully as this. Lily stared at the ceiling again and shifted her legs that ached and twitched under the quilt. She tried to keep her upper body still, afraid to disturb Mav, but forcing her muscles into submission only made her more restless. Finally, Lily sat up in the bed. The bedroom, suddenly, felt like it was contracting around her. She gasped. There was not enough oxygen for her in here.
Lily swung her legs over the bed and stood up quickly. The sudden movement caused her to feel lightheaded, and she had to place a hand on the edge of the bed to steady herself. When the pulse slowed in her brain, her legs began to move. Lily didn’t know where her legs were taking her, but she didn’t fight them. She walked through the bedroom and into the living room in her bare feet. At the front door, her hands found the deadbolt and unlatched it. Muscle memory. Her fingers twisted the lock on the doorknob for Lily, and unable or unwilling to stop it, a glassworks 62
hand hugged the knob and turned it. An unfamiliar wet heat slapped Lily in the face. Beads of sweat traced her lip and the backs of her knees as she stood in the open doorway. Lily paused, uncertain. Then, one of her legs moved, and she moved one foot from the cold tile, placing it on the warm cement outside. Her other foot followed. Standing on the doorstep, Lily froze. The warm wind wrapped her like a blanket, pushing her gently forward. She listened to the chattering of the leaves in the trees. She saw the fans of the palm trees that towered above her; they appeared to be waving at her, greeting her.
Lily took a deep breath, and closed her eyes. Dirt and freshly mowed grass filled her nostrils. She reached for the doorknob and closed the door. Slowly, she opened her eyes and began to walk, letting her muscles guide her. She stepped on a rock and gasped but continued to force her feet forward. In the middle of the courtyard, Lily stopped. She looked up at the sky, pinpointing a handful of stars, the only stars strong enough to shine through the bright streetlights. She considered lying on the ground and searching for meteorites but decided there would be time for that later, maybe tomorrow night.
The apartment complex was mostly empty. Most of the windows were dark, concealing sleeping neighbors. Only a few windows contained light
revealing neighbors who were night owls or maybe afraid of the dark. A door slammed, and Lily saw a man in an upper story apartment sprint down metal stairs in an EMT uniform. He didn’t look in Lily’s direction as he turned around a red bricked corner where he disappeared into the carport.
Lily looked back at her apartment. A soft light peered through a crack in the blinds. Mav was watching her. Lily waited as the slit in the blind disappeared and Mav stepped out of the door. Mav walked along the sidewalk, barely resisting a run. As she approached Lily, her feet slowed to a cautious pace. Her sandals barely made a sound as they grazed the sidewalk. Mav reached a hand forward and then quickly placed it back by her side. Any sudden movement might scare Lily away.
The women stared at one another. Their minds were exhausted of words. Lily turned and began to walk along the sidewalk again, away from the apartment. Mav followed. She matched her pace to Lily, and the two women walked side by side. They did not hold hands. They did not speak. But they walked.
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Gerry Rodriguez | They Fall to Earth
waTer needles
Katie Hughbanks glassworks 64
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aCrImonIous
Cara Losier Chanoine
Today I told you I was thinking of joining a cult and you said
“That’s ridiculous. You don’t know how to play croquet.”
Tomorrow
I think I’ll promenade through the business district in goldfish skin underpants with your necktie wrapped across my breasts. Your boss will say
“Did you see that appalling ensemble that Julianne was wearing this morning?” From behind grey newsprint, you’ll ask “Who’s Julianne?”
You scrape your leftover lasagna into the trash while I’m elbow deep in dishwater, and I tell you I put arsenic in the coffee because it smells like almonds.
“Did you let the dog back in?”
you ask.
I tell you that we’ve never had a dog.
On Friday, I think I’ll lobotomize you with a pair of pinking shears. I bet you won’t even wake up. Then, when I tell you that I’m leaving, you won’t say anything at all.
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afTer The hurrICane
Matthew J. Andrews
We drain the bathtub and drive south, dodging debris along the coast until we reach the bottom tip and find a pile of stones and a plaque that says America goes no further than here, and we stand on the cliff and stare at the waves, frothy with adrenaline, the ocean endless in its pacing, and think about falling and how the body would dissolve before it ever touched another’s skin, how the island itself is a body slowly swallowed by water, how birth is the beginning of life, but also death, how neither mean anything to the earth, its bubbling lava, its knife-sharp waves, its rocks that scuffle and scrape, its darkening clouds, its demon winds, but we don’t fall, of course, we hold out our hands to each other and we grip them tight, fingers braided together as the persistent breeze ripples our hair.
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arT
Cory Firestine (Earthen Wolf Designs) is a writer and visual artist from Atlanta, Georgia. His artworks, while often abstract, focus on depicting movement and energy. He serves as assistant editor and manages special projects for Unbound Edition Press.
Katie Hughbanks is a writer, photographer, and teacher whose photography has been recognized internationally, including two honors from the London Photo Festival. Her photos appear in various publications, including in Peatsmoke Journal, In Parentheses, L’Esprit Literary Review, New Feathers Anthology, Azahares, MAYDAY, Moonday Mag, and Black Fork Review. Her poetry chapbook, Blackbird Songs, was published by Prolific Press in 2019, and her short story collection, (It’s Time), will be released by Finishing Line Press in June 2024. She teaches English and creative writing in Louisville, Kentucky.
Shannon Kernaghan creates visual art from Alberta, Canada. Kernaghan’s passion is storytelling in all forms—she also writes poetry, fiction and everything between. You can learn more at: http://shannonkernaghan.com/mixed-media
Anna Maeve is a thirty-something jill-of-all-trades living in New Zealand. Learn more at: http://annamaeve.com
fICTIon
David Brinson is a graduate of Boston University’s MFA program, where he received the Saul Bellow Fiction Prize. He has previously taught at both Berklee College of Music and Boston University. You can find his other published work here: https://davidbrinson.wixsite.com/portfolio
Gerry Rodriguez is a poet and playwright from Mission, Texas. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and works as a Lecturer in English Composition and glassworks 68
Rhetoric. She is the founder of the Rio Grande Valley Playwrights Circle. Her play, If I Could Turn Back Time, was selected as a winner for the Long Beach Playhouse’s New Works Festival where it received a staged reading. Her published work has appeared in Southwestern American Literature, Chaotic Merge Magazine, decomp journal, and others.
Laurel Sharon has been awarded Honorary Mention in Writer’s Digest 2023 Fiction Contest and was a finalist in the Marguerite McGlinn Fiction Contest. She has been published in the Madison Review, Portrait of New England and other literary magazines. Laurel has a Certificate in Creative Writing from Fairfield University.
nonfICTIon
Sarah Harley is originally from the UK. She works at Milwaukee High School of the Arts where she supports her refugee students in telling their own stories. Sarah holds a BA in Comparative Literature and French, as well as an MA in Foreign Language and Literature. Her essays have appeared in Halfway Down the Stairs, Idle Ink, The Thieving Magpie, Quail Bell Magazine, and elsewhere. You can find her online here: https://www.sarahharley888.com
Angela Townsend is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Paris Lit Up, The Penn Review, The Razor, Still Point Arts Quarterly, and The Westchester Review, among others. She is a 2023 Best Spiritual Literature nominee. Angie has lived with Type 1 diabetes for thirty-three years, laughs with her poet mother every morning, and loves life affectionately. She lives just outside Philadelphia with two merry cats. Follow her on Instagram @fullyalivebythegrace
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poeTry
Matthew J. Andrews is a private investigator and writer. He is the author of the chapbook I Close My Eyes and I Almost Remember, and his poetry has appeared in Rust + Moth, Pithead Chapel, and EcoTheo Review, among others.
Alisha Brown is a poet and traveller born on Kamilaroi land in Australia. She won the 2022 Joyce Parkes Women’s Writing Prize and placed second in the Judith Rodriguez Open Section of the 2021 Woorilla Poetry Prize. You can find her work in Westerly, Griffith Review, and the Australian Poetry Anthology, among others. You can find her on Instagram @alishalouisebrown
Jeanne Emmons has published four collections of poetry: The Red Canoe (Finishing Line Press); The Glove of the World, winner of the Backwaters Press Reader’s Choice Award; Baseball Nights and DDT (Pecan Grove Press), and Rootbound, winner of the New Rivers Press Minnesota Voices Competition. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Scholar, Carolina Quarterly, Louisiana Literature, Poet Lore; Prairie Schooner, River Styx, South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review, Xavier Review, and many other journals. She lives on a lake in South Dakota with her husband and cat.
K Anand Gall (she/her) is a recent graduate of Miami University’s MFA program and also holds an MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. The former Editor-in-Chief for OxMag, K’s work has appeared recently in voidspace, Thin Air Magazine, The Journal, and Rooted 2: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction. She is the 2023 Academy of American Poets Betty Jane Abrahams Memorial Poetry Prize winner, a 2022 finalist in The Arkansas International C.D. Wright Emerging Poet’s Prize and 2022 Midwest Writing Center’s Foster-Stahl Chapbook Series finalist. When not writing, she facilitates guided nature hikes for chickens. It’s a thing. Find her on the socials @kanandgall or at: http://kanandgall.com
Milla Kuiper is a young writer with a deep love for learning about random nonsense. Her recent fascinations are forgotten constellations, glassworks 70
rococo fashion, and Victorian body snatching. She wants to be an author, but her backup plan is to live barefoot in the woods as a cryptid and be a general nuisance. If you like her work, you can also find her in the Academy of the Heart and Mind and the Driftwood Creative Arts Journals, or on Instagram @thebotchedpotion
Cara Losier Chanoine is a New England writer and college professor. Her most recent poetry collection, Philosopher Kings, was released by Silver Bow Publishing in January 2023. Her creative work as most recently appeared in Reedy Branch Review, Book of Matches, and The Lake.
Sayantika Mandal is an Indian writer. She completed her MFA from the University of San Francisco and is pursuing her PhD in English (creative writing) from the University of Georgia. Her writing has appeared in Short, Vigorous Roots: A Contemporary Flash Fiction Collection of Migrant Voices, The Citron Review, Indian Literature, Cerebration, The Times of India, and others.
Caroline Miller is a poet and essayist who writes about art, landscapes, and feminism. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Wyoming, and her work has previously appeared in West Trade Review, Pidgeonholes, Gordon Square Review, and elsewhere.
Devon Neal (he/him) is a Kentucky-based poet whose work has appeared in many publications, including HAD, Livina Press, The Storms, and The Bombay Lit Mag, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. He currently lives in Bardstown, Kentucky with his wife and three children.
Jenn Powers is a writer and artist from New England. She resides in New York and is currently working on a mystery thriller. She has work published or forthcoming in over seventy literary journals, including Spillway, CutBank, Witness, Gemini, Lunch Ticket, and Prime Number. Her work has been anthologized with Running Wild Press, Kasva Press, and Scribes Valley Publishing, and she’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. She’s also a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Binghamton University. For more information, visit: http://jennpowers.com
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Evelyn Reynolds, originally from Oklahoma, holds an MFA in poetry and a PhD in medieval English literature from Indiana University. Her poems have appeared in Kairos, New England Review, and Midwest Review, among others. She writes to try to find “a frame within a frame, / a lozenge of impeccable clarity” (Amy Clampitt).
Shin Watanabe was born in Gainesville, Florida and has lived in New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Nevada. He studied philosophy at the University of Minnesota and received an MFA in poetry at the University of Las Vegas. Shin is currently a PhD candidate in English with a creative dissertation in poetry at Binghamton University. His poetry has appeared previously in the Colorado Review, I-70 Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, and others.
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ConTrIbuTors
Art
Cory Firestine
Katie Hughbanks
Shannon Kernaghan
Anna Maeve
Fiction
David Brinson
Laurel Sharon
Gerry Rodriguez
nonFiction
Sarah Harley
Angela Townsend
Poetry
Matthew J. Andrews
Alisha Brown
Cara Losier Chanoine
Jeanne Emmons
K Anand Gall
Milla Kuiper
Sayantika Mandal
Caroline Miller
Devon Neal
Jenn Powers
Evelyn Reynolds
Shin Watanabe
