a publication of Rowan University’s Master of Arts in Writing
featuring mirrors motherhood myth and modernity
Cover art: “Pilgrims of Apollo” by
B.A. Kocsis
The staff of Glassworks magazine would like to thank Rowan University’s Master of Arts in Writing Program and Rowan University’s Writing Arts Department
Cover Design & Layout: Katie Budris
Glassworks is available both digitally and in print. See our website for details: RowanGlassworks.org
Glassworks accepts literary poetry, fiction, nonfiction, craft essays, art, photography, short video/film & audio. See submission guidelines: RowanGlassworks.org
Glassworks is a publication of Rowan University’s Master of Arts in Writing Graduate Program
Correspondence can be sent to: Glassworks
c/o Katie Budris
Rowan University 260 Victoria Street Glassboro, NJ 08028
Glassworks maintains First North American Serial Rights for publication in our journal and First Electronic Rights for reproduction of works in Glassworks and/or Glassworks-affiliated materials. All other rights remain with the artist.
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Katie Budris
MANAGING EDITOR
Cate Romano
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Ellie Cameron
Aleikza Diaz
Gianna Forgen
Kelli Hughes
Sofia Kolojeski
Emilee McIntyre
Mel Springfield
Coney Zhang
FICTION EDITORS
Qwayonna Josephs
Bethaney Randazzo
BriAnna Sankey
NONFICTION EDITORS
Gianna Forgen
Courtney R. Hall
Kelli Hughes
POETRY EDITORS
Ellie Cameron
Allison D’Arienzo
Sean Wolff
MEDIA EDITORS
Chloe Joy
Emily Langford
Eric Noon
COPY EDITORS
Editing the Literary Journal
Fall 2024 students
glassworks
Fall 2024
Issue TwenTy-nIne
MASTER OF ARTS IN WRITING PROGRAM
ROWAN UNIVERSITY
Issue 29 | Table of ConTenTs
arT
B.a. KocsIs, PIlgrIms oF aPollo | cover
roBB Kunz, growTh | 11
IsaBella roncheTTI, eye II | 20
roBB Kunz, DouBT | 32
IsaBella roncheTTI, selF-PorTraIT II | 40
B.a. KocsIs, sTIll The ancIenT oF Days ? | 45
roBB Kunz, grove | 51
FIcTIon
mary sauer, when ThIs Is all over | 13
maIa coen, allergIc | 36
nonFIcTIon
TasIa celesTe BernIe, how To DrInK To The wolF | 6
emIlIe helmBolD, JennIe | 25
rosIe BaTes, The suBway sanDwIch | 46
PoeTry
Taylor Franson-ThIel, BeholD I, even I, am BrIngIng The FlooD | 3
JosePhIne gawTry, weePIng laurel ThIcKeT | 4
moTher | 5
sameen shaKya, TragIc FIgures oF The FacTory | 12
r.a. allen, call IT DeFlecTIon | 19
anneTTe sIsson, yIelD | 21
JuDITh h. monTgomery, ToDay we DecIDe | 22
emIly lauBham, unrIghTeous aFTernoon | 24
maTThew Johnson, DrIvIng Through wesTern marylanD | 31
zeKe shomler, PerhaPs I am Too amBITIous when PurchasIng
Fresh vegeTaBles | 34
To The nexT casualTy we FInD along The Freeway | 35
JessIca BaJoreK, Funhouse mIrrors | 41
chrIsToPher sTewarT, grIeF | 42
ha KIeT chau, mIDwInTer crIsIs | 43
r.T. casTleBerry, eDucaTIng The war | 44
heaTher BourBeau, ouT From unDer | 52
coho | 53
The sIFTIng | 54
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.
behold I, even I, am brInGInG The flood
Taylor Franson-Thiel
The spring came on like Noah’s flood. A drowning warmth as snow slushed into tidal wave, making a water bed of the earth.
An olive branch, waiting for evaporation, tucked herself back into her bulb, unable to bloom, buried by heavy oceans.
A child making a paper boat—with pairs of animals drawn on the side in shades of green— tried to float it down gutters, quickly realized it was a sea, not a stream. The current held more twigs and silt than cardstock could stand and the beasts of ink dissolved, wiped from the face of the earth. The mushy residue caught against the last standing stop sign was just like our prayers futility trying to erode the mountains
between us and our own dry season. April was supposed to be preparation for new life. Water was supposed to be life.
But the murky flood of melt looks only like a more convincing hell. The child heads for safety inside before the deluge can take more than the ark, which has already been swallowed. At the end of forty days and nights the child still cannot hear the chirp of dove, only the rush of water.
weepInG laurel ThICkeT
Josephine Gawtry
I possess blood. Other people’s blood. I am a bedbug. I am a monster. I am a thicket of weeping laurel.
I have been weeping since the Children’s Crusade. My tears nurse the hares in the wine-dark morning:
My mom doesn’t like it. Mom, if I’ll never forgive you, So be it. I can gratify the wild hares with my tears.
If I am stuffed full, if I am from Sodom, so be it. There were poets from Sodom. There were good people Who died in Sodom.
Thinking about you, Mom, like cabbage thinks about the stew. I blind you like Polyphemus. I wait for you to hurl your rock to sea.
moTher
Josephine Gawtry
I began with my mother as all women begin: I began Catholic and chronically ill. I began with thick eyebrows and skin like a bedsheet, stained and dry, and many people liked to sit on me, many men didn’t think of me, I lived in a brick house, I had no father Just an empty bedroom that felt like a failure. I became certain in my bad decisions: to run for president, rob the bank. I self-flagellated, flagellated others who lived in my skin who would one day make an emergence, pearly and wet. I never thought of those parasitic beings until the day I welcomed them into my home.
how To drInk To The wolf
Tasia Celeste Bernie
“… notice her wasting where wing meets body, from her own unending stillness.”
—Chelsea Conaboy
At the end, the nurse gave me oxygen. For nearly thirty hours I labored in bed; I had been awake forty. If I blinked I dreamed. Behind my eyelids I saw a forest, a moonless sky. Birch trees, slender and white as chalk. The midwife told me to push. I was tired of childbirth. I blinked; again the tall white trunks, scarred black. I wanted to sleep. “You have to push,” said the nurse. The midwife reached up inside of me and pulled the baby out. ~
The following day, in the afternoon, the lactation consultant made her house call. She sat next to me on the sofa. I held the baby on my lap lengthwise, in the seam of my pressed-together thighs. The consultant touched the baby’s tiny purplish feet. This was too intimate, too casually familiar. I found it upsetting.
“What I always say to new mothers about breastfeeding,” she said, “is that babies don’t eat tacos.”
I looked away and pressed shut my eyes to stop myself.
“Just remember,” she continued, “babies eat burgers.”
~
Later, alone, weeping, I braced one palm against the bathroom wall, and braced the other on the curved porcelain sink, lowering myself. In the bedroom, the baby screamed herself hoarse. On the ledge of the plastic bathtub was the peri bottle and a torn-open bag of menstrual pads. After the birth, the nurse had steadied me in the shower with both hands while the water ran over my body, rinsing away the blood. Now, tears rolled down to the corners of my mouth, over the hollow of my throat, between my sore hard breasts. My bladder ached from fullness. The baby had nursed for hours. I could not release. My body clenched. The baby screamed. I gave up. I pulled up my pants, and washed my trembling hands, and took careful small steps back to the bedroom. It was early afternoon. Light spilled pale across the rough floorboards. While I fed the baby, I kept a bowl under the other, unlatched breast, to catch the leakage. Milk flowed steadily into the bowl.
~
That morning, I whispered to my husband, “Can you stay home with me today? I’m really scared.”
He said, “No.”
He left the room. He left the house.
I had not known until then that I did not know him at all.
The next morning, he said, “There’s a blister on her hip. The diapers are too tight.”
I said, “I saw.”
She had a rash around her anus, too. If it was what I used to wash the cloth diapers, I would have to strip them and wash them all again. But when? I had walked around the house the previous afternoon carrying the baby, rocking her while I cried and she screamed, whispering
I let him hold me.
“Try to calm down,” he said. ~
The baby lived on my milk alone. It would be six months before she took her first sip of water. I watched her nurse. Her hungry guppy mouth. Her huffy overtired breathing, how she jerked her lips back and forth across my skin, hunting for the nipple. In the afternoon, I danced her into a sunbeam. And I thought, this is your first sunbeam. This is the first time you have been into the sunlight.
“ In the afternoon, I danced her into a sunbeam. And I thought, this is your first sunbeam. This is the first time you have been into the sunlight. ”
help, help, help, help. Now I carried the baby to the kitchen. She had nursed all night. I had not slept. My husband made himself breakfast and left his dishes piled in the sink and on the counter. The greasy pan on the still-hot stove. The unswept floor. He was leaving for work.
I blinked back tears.
“I feel like you think I’m doing a bad job,” I said.
“I feel like you think I’m doing a bad job,” he said.
I shook my head.
When he reached out to hug me, I flinched.
“Don’t be afraid of me,” he said.
While I watched my husband eat dinner that night, I nursed the baby. I had been thinking about how to explain how overwhelmed I was. Finally, I said, “I just—I just feel like I’m not able to do enough.” The chores. The shopping. Even a nap. He did not look up from his plate.
He said, “If you want to go back to work, I’d be more than happy to stay home.”
I silently waited for him to finish dinner, so I could wash the dishes.
On the topic of babysitters, I overheard him say to the neighbor, “I’m not letting someone else raise my child.”
When I walked into the bedroom that night, he was hovering over something in the closet. His arm flew up and he struck my cat, who was peeing on the floor because the litter box was dirty. The litter box was in the basement, and the stairs were steep and had no handrail. The baby had not napped, and so I had not cleaned the box.
~
That night, the baby woke me to nurse after an hour of light sleep. I leaned back against the wall, sweaty and exhausted. Invisibly my milk entered her body, invisibly the hours that I fed her in the dark spooled out, unwitnessed.
~
A month passed. Little sleep; mastitis twice. A government program provided me with a new electric breast pump in its own zippered nylon tote. I bought a 100-count box of breastmilk storage bags. Each bag, the size of a deck of playing cards, held six ounces of milk and had a double-zipper closure, like a sandwich bag. After each time I pumped, I laid the newly-filled bag on the bottom of the freezer to freeze flat so it could be neatly stacked. If the baby slept, I pumped. The baby nursed all day, and so all day I sat in the bedroom, my back propped against pillows, the baby on a nursing pillow on my lap, a book propped against the baby. Once a week the midwife weighed the baby and said, “Good job,
glassworks 8
Mama.” I felt invisible, a footnote to the milk. “Mama,” the midwife said, naming the thing to ascribe its meaning. I balked at the implicit erasure.
~
“
I felt invisible, a footnote to the milk. ”
The small, flat bags of milk filled the freezer. Every night, I added three more. At the end of each week, I had saved another gallon of breastmilk. The baby would not take a bottle. Why did I pump? They said, pumping encourages increased production, but I was already an overproducer. Did the milk have value? They said, breast is best, and called a mother’s milk, liquid gold. But I think I pumped because the milk I banked, when the same could be said of nothing else, was solely mine, and mine to do with as I pleased. After some months, I received an email, addressed to all the midwife’s recent clients. The subject line read, “Breast Milk Needed.”
~
The father arrived on Saturday morning with an Igloo cooler. I led him into the messy kitchen, ashamed by the squalor. I tried not to look at it. I opened the freezer. I filled his cooler. He stood back politely, quiet. He wore a clean button-down shirt. His hair was damp from showering.
His wife and baby were in separate hospitals. They had LifeFlighted his wife to Seattle; the baby stayed in Portland, in the NICU.
I heard him inhale deeply.
“My god it smells so good in here,” he said.
The house smelled of woodsmoke and warm roasted sweet potato, of butter and cinnamon and brown sugar. My husband had made sweet potato pancakes for breakfast. I managed to nod and say, “Mm-hmm.”
The pancakes made the house smell like a home, but it was not a home. It was barely even a house. There was black mold in the bedroom closet; which was my fault, my husband said, for keeping the room so warm. He slept in the spare room, to avoid being disturbed. The previous week, the door handle to the bedroom I shared with the baby had come off in my hand. I stood in the hall, facing the closed door, stunned. The baby was trapped away from me on the other side. I cried, frantic.
My husband said, “It wouldn’t happen if you didn’t pull it so hard.”
The pancakes had not been for me. There had been no offer, we shared no meals. After my husband ate, he reiterated his disapproval for what I was about to do, for my decision to deprive our baby in order to feed some stranger’s newborn.
I said, “Our daughter is in the ninety-fifth percentile for weight.
She’s not deprived. And she won’t take a bottle.”
He scowled and left the house. He would not be a part of this. I closed the freezer and handed the cooler back to the father. He thanked me profusely.
I looked at his harmless grateful face. His wife and newborn in two separate hospitals.
“Let me know if you need more,” I said.
Before he left, I found a piece of paper and wrote out the recipe for the pancakes. I handed it to him, and said, “Make them for her when she gets home.”
~
Some months later, on a warm summer night, I went for a walk with the baby tucked into a sling across my chest. I walked her through the neighborhood, up to where there were still a few stumpy hundred-year-old fruit trees, gnarled and poorly pruned, a mix of old limbs and slender shoots. ~
I paused in the old orchard and looked up at the clear, darkening sky. In a Greek myth, Hera, wife of Zeus, goddess of marriage and protector of women during childbirth, once awakened from sleep to the feeling of strange wet lips suckling at her breast. She opened her eyes to find her husband feeding his mistress’s baby from her glassworks
Tasia Celeste Bernie | How to Drink to the Wolf
body. Furious, she shoved the baby off her breast, and in doing so, some breastmilk sprayed from her unbound nipple and formed the stars. The Milky Way. Through the silhouetted branches of the cherry tree, I looked up at the pinpricks of starlight. The Greeks saw the stars and thought of Hera’s spilled breastmilk. They looked to the frescoes of heaven, reminded that even goddesses had to put up with this shit.
~
“ The Greeks saw the stars and thought of Hera’s spilled breastmilk. They looked to the frescoes of heaven, reminded that even goddesses had to put up with this shit. ”
The day after I gave birth, I sat on the sofa next to the lactation consultant, with my daughter on my lap. The consultant told me that the most common mistake when breastfeeding is to “taco” the nipple by squeezing its east and west poles. Instead, one should take the entire flesh of the breast in hand, with four fingers underneath and the thumb on top, gripping it as though the whole thing were a
glassworks 10
hamburger about to be pushed into the baby’s open mouth. One must hold it just so, smashing it to compress the bread and patty and cheese and tomato into one mouthful. The idea is to get the whole areola in, not just the tip of the nipple. At the time, I thought it was ridiculous, which it was, and patronizing, which it also was. But it was also one of the only useful pieces of parenting advice I would receive.
~
Standing next to the cherry tree that evening, I made the baby a hamburger. Against the blue background of nightfall, I saw a pair of purplish cherries hanging from a low branch. While the baby nursed, wide-eyed and alert, I lifted the fruit on my fingertips so she could see it. I began to tell her the names of things: Tree. Leaf. Branch. Cherry. The fingernail moon curved gently above us. Moon. The baby kicked her legs. I told the baby her name: Evie; and then, finally, I told her my own.
GrowTh
Robb Kunz
TraGIC fIGures of The faCTory
Sameen Shakya
These are artists you will never know. For they are modern day Warholian images splattered on Pollockian sheets, and the sheets are stained with sweat, the same as a shirt on a hot day walking back from work, worked to death, worked to sweat, working, working, working for half the amount I spent on a drunken college bender pretending to be Lou Reed, writing poems some she didn’t read while they were walking back from work at dusk or dawn, shirt stuck on their back (for the sweat) I will not profane the people in this poem by romanticizing their life, their lives, their wives, their husbands, their children, their heritage, their culture, remembrances, all I will say is one day I walked with them and we went like zombies in a 70s movie to some factory and in they walked and I stopped by the door and I swear I heard Dante
when ThIs Is all over Mary Sauer
On the table my book is open. The same page turned over ten minutes ago, too busy with dinner and thoughts of you to find my eyes on the page. I’ve forgotten the cast iron, and thick smoke is filling the air above the stove when he returns. A sigh and shaking of the head. Then a smile, as he, armed with a mitt, pulls it off the flame to cool before we begin again.
Pushing the book to the side, he deposits a butcher block cutting board in front of me. The butcher block cutting board I made in the shop class I barely passed. Hands me a knife. Reminding me, instructing me on the onions, carrots, and celery. Convincing me of the superiority of uniform pieces, and how they cook more evenly this way.
The olive oil is shining in the bottom and this means the cast iron is ready for my part. We talk while the mirepoix softens. And then, there is sherry and there is steam before we add the tomatoes. The salt. The big basil leaves we won’t bother to chiffonade.
This is the time for visiting. In the reduction, which takes fifteen or twenty minutes. In the setting of two plates across from one another and the opening of the rum which we dilute with ginger beer. It is the time for retelling. Of the
coworker who put in their notice and the woman on the train with the book and the dog. And of how I watched the cars line the street again today, loved ones, waiting and watching for the neighbor to take her last breath.
Who will fill our driveway, I worry. He puts his hand on mine and tells me to slice and butter the bread.
The tomatoes are simmering now and I watch. His hands are steady, and he pushes a well into the red darkness before gently dropping four raw eggs into the sauce to bathe in purgatory. There isn’t much left to the wedge of it, so we drop the rind of the cheese in along with the rest. Cover it. Forget it. For a few minutes of him leaning on the counter, and me leaning into him.
Early start?
His voice startles me and I let go, the curtain falling to conceal the street and the line of cars. I turn to him and smile slightly.
Good morning, he says. His skin is shining with the effort of his morning run.
I say I was just about to get into the shower. It is less conversation and more defense. He says he’ll come with me. Pushing an assortment of bottles to the side, I sit on the ledge in the corner and watch
as he runs fingers through his hair, soap suds trail down his back, his ass, his Achilles’ heel.
Your turn, he says, and I say, it’s a small shower.
He has me, and then he lets the cold air in before wrapping himself in a towel. I’m sitting on the floor, under the water again when he returns, dressed, to dump an assortment of supplements into his palm.
So, he says.
I know the rest. So, I say I have a few new leads I’m going to reach out to before he can continue. I might follow up on two or three emails I sent last week. He is getting ready to leave; he’ll pick up something for dinner.
“
produce into these places.
And then the virus flew over the ocean in airplanes. We knew it would but tried to believe differently until it was on our doorstep. They were just being cautious, the pizza chain told me. As soon as we found the other side of this, they’d call me. Bring me back on. Emails stacked, one on top of the other in my inbox. Mostly unread. I knew what they said—the new client referred to me by the dermatologist didn’t think now was the time for a rebranding. Pitch freezes. Indefinitely. I’d be their first call when this is all over. Invoiced for $2,300 in March, nothing in April.
When the water runs cold, I step into sweatpants and a t-shirt,
I wonder, does she pull a chair up to the bed, lay her gray-haired head on her frail mother’s legs, and cry while she sleeps? Or is she the asker of the questions of vitals and developments overnight? ”
February 28th, just before the world shut down, I sat down and sifted through my sent folder. Added up all the invoices, my first five-figure month since I started freelancing a few years before. Social media copy for a pizza chain. A website for the new dermatologist one town over. A reported piece on food deserts in our city and the organizations trying to move more
letting my wet hair soak the collar. The French press is lukewarm, so I empty it into a saucepan and turn the knob to five. Car doors are slamming shut, and I wander to the window in our room again. Shift change for the hospice nurse; they meet at the door where the one with tired skin is passing on notes, instructions, while rubbing her eyes. I’ve memorized the faces, given
them names, and the oldest daughter arrives next. I wonder, does she pull a chair up to the bed, lay her grayhaired head on her mother’s frail legs, and cry while she sleeps? Or is she the asker of the questions of vitals and developments overnight? She is the oldest, after all.
Burning. I’ve lost track of time and the coffee has boiled to the bottom. I take a nap instead. ~
We must have danced in our sleep. I wake with the crook of my elbow hooked in the crook of his elbow, a narcoleptic line dance of sorts. Slumber makes us forget where we ended things the day before. How we fought. How we fell asleep during negotiations.
The dance continues when our feet hit the ground. One sink, two hurried sets of teeth to be brushed. He steps forward, then back. His electric shaver drops stubble I’ll wash down with the iridescent suds of my face wash. He dresses, but I move through the motions in my underwear, all of it. Hair cream and sunscreen, cursing and sifting through the drawers for something that fits.
At some point in the dark of the night before he said:
Maybe you need to get out of the house tomorrow. Go see your friend at the coffee shop. Get some work done without distraction. He is talking about you, the distraction. He says he’ll leave some money for
me on the table.
And at some point, I said, sure, okay.
We say goodbye. Our morning coffee facilitates enough remembering to make it uncomfortable. Do I need to stay cold, or can we kiss and pretend it never happened? That he won’t find a way to bring it back to it again around 9-9:30 that night? In the coffee shop, I see my friend. They ask if I’m staying, motioning at my computer bag, and I say, no I have so much to do at home.
On the sidewalk, someone left remnants of their last night. Chili cheese and something, in a red and white paper boat, and I step around it, wrinkling my nose. A near-trip, I right myself but look back over my shoulder, instinctively, for another glance to be sure I didn’t put my foot in it.
Ever since I was a child, I see familiar faces everywhere I go. The girl I adored in grade school, but with stronger cheekbones and a different gait. John, who abused me mercilessly for the six months I worked as the assistant manager to his powertrip, but this one’s a blonde and has blue eyes. There’s always the double take, and then—No, just an uncanny resemblance.
And that’s how it is today. Except, maybe, it really is you. No, I know better. Shaking
the image out of my head, I see I’m mistaken.
I hurry home, and I see the blue sedan on the curb. This means, I think, it isn’t over yet. What I feel is reminiscent of relief, which surprises me, because I know death is inevitable. I had only hoped that it wouldn’t be today. I move my chair to the window, write up seven emails in twenty minutes, schedule them to send at random times throughout the day, and close my laptop. In the freezer, I find brown bananas and stale walnuts. What does it matter? Everything tastes stale when you’re grieving. I add extra cinnamon to the recipe and set a timer. Climb into bed, close my eyes, and think of you. Imagine you called me first when the scans came back with dark shadows all over. Asked me to get on the next flight, and I did. So quickly, I forgot my toothbrush and you laughed a little, saying there are extras under the bathroom sink.
The son answers the door, and I push the warm banana bread into his hands. I’m so sorry, I say. And he says, thank you, and covers his eyes with his hands.
At home he makes Pad Thai for dinner and I watch. He asks me if I had any luck today or found any new leads, and I say I sent several emails. Then I say, maybe I should reach out to my mother. Wouldn’t it be nice to have family around?
Family, yes, he says. But not yours or mine.
Maybe it wasn’t as bad as we remember it, I suggest. He says he thinks I’ve forgotten how poorly they treated him. ~
Holding my hands in yours, I look down and see the veins in your translucent skin. I look down and see the bruise from the IV. I look down and watch your fingernails grow. There is sunlight warming my skin, but you say you are tired. I hurry the sun to set with a gentle nod of my head, as if to say, off you go now. First, a gray pickup truck pulls up to the curb. Then a red wagon, a white sedan. Mini-vans, Jeeps, midsized SUVs. A Range Rover.
I say, who are all of these people? You say, they’ve come to meet you. You say, when this is all over, someone will need to make the cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning, hide the eggs for the children on Easter after mass.
Don’t say that, I admonish you. But we both know you will not get better and I know I will happily step in and fill in the gaps you are leaving behind. We both know about belonging and how I haven’t for so long.
I wake just after 4 a.m.
When he wakes, it is nearly time for the second rise. Measuring cups and butter wrappers scatter the island. His face falls when he picks up the French press, which I’ve emptied twice over, so I start more water in the kettle before beginning
on the dishes he’s begun to gather from all corners of the kitchen.
Looks like you’ve been busy, he says and asks what’s for breakfast. I say the cinnamon rolls are for the neighbors, but I’ll drop some toast and poach a few eggs. Hand him an avocado to mash with salt and lemon.
At the door, there is a new face, a face wrapped up in silver curls. Behind her, there are so many more, some I’ve named, some I haven’t. I say it is still hot on the bottom. I say I don’t mind bringing them in, leaving them on the counter. I notice the plates, hand washed and left on a towel to dry from the night before, resting next to the sink. I am still, and I can see the two sides to this decision. I shouldn’t, so I step toward the door, then turn back and take hold of a plate. Open a drawer, then the next to the left, and find a fork. Plunge it into the rolls, which pull apart with ease. I am pushing breakfast into the hands of confused faces. Into the calloused palms of the son, I say I just want to be helpful. Into the deep maroon fingernails of the youngest daughter, I say, I have lost someone too. To the oldest daughter, I say, you should eat something. My skin is warming, I am on fire, and I leave wordlessly as soon as I’m certain there is a plate for each face in the room.
~
When he gets home from work the next day, he sets my empty
casserole dish on the counter, and it lands loudly. A kraft paper envelope sits at the bottom.
This was on the front porch, he says as he walks away. Five minutes later, he is back again, in gym shorts and a stark white tee.
When this is all over, I say, we should have them over for dinner. One of his eyebrows lifts slightly, and I pull a box of my mother’s recipes from the spice cabinet. My fingertips file through it until I find one for chicken soup with from-scratch noodles. I tell him I think you will love it. He reminds me we’ve never met.
“ My skin is warming, I am on fire, and I leave wordlessly as soon as I’m certain there is a plate for each face in the room. ”
He doesn’t say goodbye when he leaves for his run.
Beautyberry holds onto a robin on the front of the card. Inside, in the trembling cursive of old age, Thank You.
~
Lost touch with reality. Those were the words he says on the
phone on the other side of the door to his mother. The mother who only calls to celebrate a birth or to report on a death. Someone is dying, but she doesn’t know about you. Early in the morning, they find me. Standing over your bed, calling you mother. Holding your hand. Breathing in and out with the chime of the monitor. The muscle of your heart beating, my lungs taking in the air you exhale. Edging into the room nervously, the oldest daughter, the one I named Lisa, says, can we help you?
I say, I was only there to say goodbye. Try to tell them about you, how you visited me in my dreams. About the promise of a place at the table, on the floor next to the fire on Christmas morning.
I think it’s time for you to leave now, the son says.
Someone must have crossed the street, knocked on our front door until they woke him. He is there to take me home. His lips set thin and angry. He says, what’s wrong with you? And nothing more. He doesn’t understand. Takes me by the arm, leads me out the front door, and across the street to the driveway, still empty. Up the stairs, overgrown as they are with shrubs. A minor inconvenience now heightened to a major transgression in his rage. Goddamn bushes, he says, pulling me into the grass, pulling me into the house, to the left, and down the hall. Pushes me down on the bed and says, don’t
leave this room. Slams the door, heavy footsteps, and then, Hello? I’m sorry to wake you. Something’s wrong.
I was sleepwalking, I say through the door. But we both know it isn’t true. For days now, casually slipping it into conversation. What was going on over there? Mentioning the want to belong, the deep longing I felt for what they had, and the cars lining the street.
It isn’t enough, you and me, and that is where it all started. The glancing out the window, the gifts brought, unwanted, uninvited, to the front door. Then the hours in bed, chasing the storyline of a life I’d never live. Falling in and out of sleep, begging my brain to bring it back, the dream of me belonging with you. Starting to lose track of what was and wasn’t. Maybe it was sleepwalking, maybe it was daydreaming. Consciousness the deciding factor of my guilt.
Call IT defleCTIon
R.A. Allen
For quite a while we tried to figure out what was going on. It wasn’t sleepwalking; we weren’t on autopilot or cruise control.
Some things were changing, larval, pupal. Chrysalis had a more hopeful connotation.
We were freighted with anxiety. We could have blamed a coronavirus, or heartsickness— any number of things… fascism, authoritarianism, whatever else ends in -ism, democracy gone wild, topless and drunk on Bourbon Street, spitting flame.
To help explain it to our friends and families, we used a foam rubber manicule.
eye II
Isabella Ronchetti
yIeld
Annette Sisson
I wait to pull into traffic, head pivoting, eyes keen. My four-year-old chides me for turning too quickly, insists I’m racing. In the lane ahead a school bus stops, starts—how will I surrender these mornings? My son counts trucks from the backseat window, tears off his coat at daycare, thrusts it in the cubby, arms around my neck, scurries away. Soon he will climb onto a bus, the steps too tall for his small legs, its driver like my family’s neighbor, the farmer who picked me up at 6 a.m. Frosty glass, me three seats back, him a large, quiet man, soft gaze. I feared him for the sheer size of his hands, ache in his voice—a daughter dead at twenty, yanked away in a car crash. I watched him work the levers of the bus, pale eyes scanning windows, oversized mirrors, his life a litany of carrying, yielding—even careful drivers might be blind-sided. Now the crocuses bloom before winter has melted. My son and I marvel at the cold earth, tiny ruptures of gold. We could have buried these bulbs close to the house, nestled under the eaves, or planted them in the sun-drenched hill sloping sharp into the street, but chose the gradual incline, veins of early light tapering into day, into swarms of pulsing traffic.
Today we deCIde
Judith H. Montgomery
for Phil
Dark-lit on the oncologist’s bright screen, four shadows still fish their way inside your scarred abdomen. The surgeon’s blade-edge has pierced you again, again. Poison brews have soaked every cell with fire. But today we say stop. We say enough. Today we turn our backs on the glass infusion room, its slung chemicals. Refuse the metal gurney, the sterile instruments swaddled in blue paper. Instead I like to imagine us standing side by side at a vast Olympic pool— you in your black trunks, I in my faded red suit. Not at the lull end, its tiptoe concrete steps. No, it’s the full deep for us. Perhaps your doctors might huddle, observe from afar. The specialist murmur of palliative care when we pause at the tempting slick lip where water glimmers. At the endless far end, an exit sign flickers red, reflecting echo and ripple. . . . We could turn back. You could re-thread your bruised arms into that swallowing gown. Nurses could retrieve bitter drips. Surgeons sharpen scalpels, nod to the readied anesthesiologists. All could resume.
glassworks 22
Enough. This time we choose the shimmering pool. My hand seeks yours.
We step in. Float.
unrIGhTeous afTernoon Emily Laubham
I flee this body, a house left abandoned for an hour, to hunt
with cats who have no home, vacate to the space between mushroom gills and honeycomb, shelter inside hollow trees.
When I return, someone else’s shoes are in the hall, their dirty dishes in the sink. My absence rang a bell and they came calling, changelings who named this house their own for one unrighteous afternoon. I am learning to stay,
prick a finger, eat a lemon, circle my perimeter with salt. If lights still flicker, fine. Food goes missing? Fine. I was only ever nesting for a season. I trust what’s mine; for now, I fill it.
They can have this house when I’m done.
JennIe
Emilie Helmbold
14-years-old
I sit in my bedroom alone and watch my alarm clock closely. I’m counting down the minutes until the clock strikes midnight. When the short and long clock hands reach twelve, it will be nine days until my fifteenth birthday. That’s the day when I’ll have lived longer than my sister. My parents have been acting strange all day, as if they’re watching the shadow of my sister disappear. Although I can’t tell anyone, I hope the remnants of my sister disappear at midnight. I imagine it will be like being released from a curse where I’m forced to always exist in the shadow of someone I can never live up to. For my fifteenth birthday, I want to be my own person.
~
12-years-old
I’m sitting in seventh-grade art class, sketching a rough outline of the sculpture I hope to make out of papier-mâché while my friends talk about their siblings. My friend, Sarah, asks me if I have any siblings because I never talk about them. I have two options: tell my friends I have a sister who died or lie to them. Every time I’ve told people that my sister died, I’ve been met with an expression of both shock and pity, along with a quick change in subject. I’m an only child, I tell them. I keep up
this lie for months. I feel guilty for erasing my sister from my life.
24-years-old
During my first semester of grad school, I seek the help of a psychiatrist for my anxiety. I sit through a three-hour evaluation over Zoom where a woman I’d never met in person asks me to rank 250 or so questions on a scale of “never” to “always.” We meet the next week in the same Zoom room to review my diagnosis, where she diagnoses me with Complex PTSD. My first thought is that the psychiatrist is wrong. I look up the definition online after the appointment. Complex PTSD is defined by the Cleveland Clinic as:
… a mental health condition that can develop if you experience chronic (long-term) trauma. It involves stress responses, such as: Anxiety. Having flashbacks or nightmares. Avoiding situations, places and other things related to the traumatic event. Heightened emotional responses, such as impulsivity or aggressiveness. Persistent difficulties in sustaining relationships.
After I decide to seek long-term treatment for Complex PTSD, my therapist explains that there are studies that show that trauma can be
passed from parents to their children through the miracle of genetics. ~
Negative 4-years-old
In 1994, my sister and two of her friends are killed in an accident when an elderly woman runs a stop sign on an otherwise deserted country road. Although the accident occurs nearly four years before I’m born, this is where my story begins; because if my sister were still alive, then I wouldn’t be. My parents only want one child. ~
9-years-old
My mother decides that I need to begin an after-school activity. My parents desperately want me to find a sport I like. Instead, I find that I’m miserably inept at cheerleading, gymnastics, swimming, and softball. I quit all of them. I’m happy sitting at my desk and writing stories about mysteries and faraway lands.
Desperate to send me someplace where I can spend time with other kids my age, my mother sends me to auditions for the town’s annual production of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. I get cast in the chorus, and for once I’m excited to be doing something other than writing at my desk by myself.
My mother never misses an opportunity to tell me that my sister also acted, but she played parts with lines and names. I didn’t have a single line. I didn’t even have a name; I was just Chorus Leopard 2.
She doesn’t stop talking about how Jennie played Principal McGee in Grease until the last show of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe closes.
3-years-old
I’m just old enough to form memories of my own when my mother takes me into my sister’s bedroom. Seven years after the accident, she still has a room in my parent’s home. All of her belongings lay there just as she left them as if one day she’ll return like nothing ever happened. I remember a dollhouse sitting on top of an armoire. I can tell my mother still comes into this room because the dollhouse is carefully dusted. The dollhouse is prettier than any of the cars and trains that lie precariously around my playroom. I ask my mother if I can play with my dollhouse. When you’re older, she says. She’s afraid that I might break the dollhouse irreparably. The miniature house is filled with intricate spindles that line the three stairwells, thin stained-glass windows, and delicate furniture. My parents consider my sister’s belongings to be artifacts— something to be preserved and treasured. A few months later when we pack up the house and move across the country, our belongings are sorted into three piles: give, store, keep. None of my sister’s belongings go into the give pile. ~
4-years-old
After my parents unpack the glassworks
storage unit where all our store belongings are kept and move everything into our new home, my mother gives me an American Girl Doll. The doll’s name is Samantha, the historic doll whose story is set in the Victorian era. I’ve been engrossed in the American Girl Doll catalog that arrived in the mail for the last several weeks. The catalog advertises a collection of dolls that are designed to look just like you. Samantha doesn’t look like me; she has straight, brown hair and chestnut eyes. My mother explains that my grandparents gave the doll to my sister as a gift because Samantha looked just like her. When I insist that I want a doll that looks like me, my mother tells me not to be a spoiled brat.
“ My parents consider my sister’s belongings to be artifacts—something to be preserved and treasured. ”
Negative 8-months-old
When my mother finds out she’s pregnant, she already knows what my name will be. My name will be Emily because the poems of Emily Dickinson help her survive the excruciating hours that turn to
days that turn to years after my sister’s death. Emily will be spelled with an –ie in honor of my sister, Jennie. Years later, I’ll ask my mother what my name would’ve been if I’d been a boy. She replies, I always knew you’d be another girl. The emphasis is on another.
13-years-old
My aunt and uncle come to stay with us for a week. I lose track of the number of times they accidentally call me Jennie. By the end of the second day, they stop apologizing. They assume that I must be used to being called her name by now.
6-years-old
On Christmas morning, I sit on the pilling, baby-blue carpet in my grandpa’s living room. I open a handful of gifts that have my name printed on the gift tags; every box contains tiny, carefully constructed furniture for the dollhouse that I’m allowed to play with now that I’m older.
My grandpa is sitting in his recliner and beckons me to come over to him with jerking forceful motions. Since his stroke last year, he’s been struggling to speak. I walk over to him but don’t know what to say. Slowly, he mouths the words, I love you, Jennie. I never remember him
calling me by my own name.
A month later, he falls asleep in his recliner. My father gets a call the next morning that his father stopped breathing in his sleep, the box of cashews that my parents bought him for Christmas still rests on his lap. At his funeral a few days later, I watch my aunts and my mom cry in the front pews of the rural church he attended for nearly sixty years. I don’t cry. I don’t know how to mourn someone who never understood the difference between me and my sister who’s been dead for ten years.
what to say. I look back down at the checkerboard, jump his black checker, and put it with the rest of my pile, pretending as if I didn’t say anything at all.
10-years-old
I don’t like my father’s hometown, with its inescapable specter of grief that seems to cast a shadow over my parents’ faces as we pass the “Welcome to the Village of Millington” sign on the outskirts of town. My parents lived on the same road as my father’s parents for sixteen years, only moving when
“ I don’t know how to mourn someone who never understood the difference between me and my sister who’s been dead for ten years. ”
7-years-old
My father and I are playing a game of checkers at the dining room table. I’m about to jump one of his last remaining black checkers when my dad says, Look out the window, Jennie. There’s a deer right outside! My eyes dart up, but I don’t look out the window. I look into his eyes and tell him that my name isn’t Jennie. He’s startled by the anger in my voice as if he expects that I’d just accept being called by the wrong name for my entire life. As if not wanting to be called Jennie is offensive to her memory. He doesn’t know
I was three so that I didn’t have to grow up in a community that already knew too much about the loss that my family endured.
I like family reunions even less than I like my father’s hometown. At the last reunion I attended, I came across three elderly women sitting at the dining room table because the late July sun beating down on the front lawn was too nauseating for them to sit under the tall oaks with the rest of the family. I didn’t know if these women were the matriarchs of the family, but their large glasses and nearly transparent skin made
them appear older than anyone else by several decades. Usually, my parents would keep me close to them around my extended family so they could make a point of introducing me to the older family members before they had a chance to say, you’re Jennie, right? That day, my parents sent me inside to get a sandwich by myself.
One of the women turned to me and said, you must be Nan and Dale’s daughter. I nodded, I was so close to the platter of cold cuts and cheeses on the kitchen island that they taunted me. I could tell they didn’t know my name, and they regretted saying anything to me in the first place. They stared at one another over the metal rims of their bug-eyed glasses and dared the others to speak first. Jennie? One of them guessed. I told them my name was Emilie. Before they could stumble through a half-hearted apology, I was over by the cold cuts preparing a ham sandwich. I quickly made my way out of the kitchen and back to my parents without another word. ~
17-years-old
Seven years after my encounter with those women who probably weren’t even alive any longer, my dad pulls into a Taco Bell parking lot about halfway between my hometown and my father’s hometown because he decides that we should eat lunch before the reunion just in case Joann decided to buy those
shit store-brand cheese slices for the sandwich platter again.
As I sit in the booth in the lobby of the Taco Bell that feels uncomfortably sticky on my bare arms while we wait for my mother to finish eating, my father looks me up and down and says, you really don’t look like your sister much anymore at all. My mother looks up from her taco and slowly nods in agreement.
It’s as if my parents finally see me for the first time. They see that my hair has always been curly, that my eyes have always been livid (a term I learned for blue-grey), and that my figure is significantly more delicate than hers. They don’t look at me and see the shape of my face and my smile as a reminder of a girl I’ll never meet, unable to escape the dull ache of a loss that I’ll never understand. At this moment, my parents see a different person entirely. They begin to see me.
19-years-old
It’s the summer my parents sell my childhood home when I notice a box in the closet at my family’s cabin that reads Jennie’s Stuff. I’m staying at the cabin alone, meaning I can take the box out and examine its contents without being disturbed by either of my parents giving me the same careful warnings I’ve
Emilie
Helmbold |
Jennie
heard thousands of times: be careful with that. Put that back. You don’t need to look in there.
I take apart the box meticulously, making sure that I remember the order of its contents so I can put everything back in the same spot where I found it. In the middle of the box, I find a notebook with a picture of a grey tabby cat on its cover. Scrawled within the cover page in my mom’s handwriting are the words: To our dear Jennie on her 12th Christmas. May you have many wonderful things to write about in this journal. Love always, Mom & Dad. Christmas 1991. I flipped through the pages and heard my sister’s voice for the first time.
July 30, 1992
Even though the theatre workshop caused its share of problems, and I got stuck with a stupid character, I already miss it.
July 31, 1992
Tomorrow is the Helmbold Family Reunion at our house. (Oh thrill.) Once again my mom is going around in an annoying frenzy to get the house clean, as usual I just want to get it all over with.
August 13, 1992
I don’t know if I can stand my parents for another five years! I’m thirteen in 13 days, and they won’t let me go to the teen dance … either they’re ignorant or they don’t trust me for some reason …
June 12, 1993
My mom and I haven’t been getting along too well lately. They don’t think I help out enough or happily enough. I don’t really feel unloved, just underappreciated. No matter how unhappy I am, I usually do whatever it is anyway. But do I ever hear a word of thanks or a hint of gratitude? No! Instead I hear about how badly I did it! (Attitude, speed, correctness, ect.) Maybe I’m just sick of my life as a whole. Shyness, boredom, location, people, and many others. Geez! If this keeps up too much longer, I’ll probably end up on the brink of suicide. But lets hope not. I don’t want my already bad problems to grow.
For the first time, I begin to see Jennie as a real person. She’s no longer the perfect daughter I’ve always expected myself to live up to. She isn’t only the faded apparition of a daughter my parents lost, she’s a sister. Throughout her journal, she wrote about her experiences as a teenager, littered with complicated emotions and intense feelings. I could see how she struggled with my parents in the same ways that I did. And, although we’re separated by death, I begin to feel a connection to her.
A rich cloud of smoke is kicked up by a tractor, Mowing down a cornfield in the countryside, Sprinkling sandy and chalky soil into the face of a cow, Who is contorting its snot to release a sneeze, But despite the tickling, never does.
At night, the Moon’s beam, skirting through the drifting overcast, Shines a flashing light on Antietam soldiers, Resting after the day’s war; Human bones unbottle corks of liquor with skeleton teeth And play cards by the campfire.
The old man on the mountain Kicks pebbles from other centuries down the road-cut faults; Every flick and patter of a pellet atop the roof and hood of passing cars Is a reminder of the long life on these hills, Infused and ripe to tear the road and Stateline asunder, but gracefully spares us.
Robb Kunz
perhaps I am Too ambITIous when
purChasInG fresh veGeTables
Zeke Shomler
It’s turning white with mold and oozing, the English cucumber in the crisper drawer; it’s leaking from its plastic onto browning lettuce and facing death with certainty, blending one thing into everything else. I almost made salad three different times this week but changed my mind. I’m more permeable than a dripping vegetable.
What is it about the light that makes me hold my breath? What is it about the sound of the refrigerator that pins me to the ground?
I put the cucumber into a trash bag scented with artificial mint and cover up my shame with other remnants of my appetite. Along the length of the cucumber there is a plastic seam. Along the length of my body there is a perfect place to wound.
Is this life, the softened thing I held in my hand? I’m less impermanent and more imprecise. I wipe clean the acrylic drawer with soap. It’s possible I am too ambitious when purchasing fresh vegetables or perhaps I need to face expiration with eyes wide open, hum the dull hum of the refrigerator, verdant ooze slipping in between my fingers with the same shallow logic as blood.
glassworks 34
To The nexT CasualTy we fInd alonG The freeway
Zeke Shomler
I am sure that like most other victims, you’ve already met your killer. Real life can be so beautiful, you know. You can lie on the embankment for a long long time and the fireweed will grow right there alongside you. Perhaps death will be just like that: laying prostrate on a bed of weedy wild grasses and listening to the whooshing zooms of travelling bodies. I know I cannot save you so I crawl into the indent left by your flesh and listen for the soft boom of the music. And the force of the wind compels the grasses to their knees.
allerGIC
Maia Coen
She started crying then, this small animal, pink and fresh in my arms. We had thought she wouldn’t cry for a moment and the room had felt so awfully quiet. But then she had opened her mouth and wailed. She looked right at me as if to say, do not worry, I am here. I felt relief for an instant then moved along to the critical issue at hand. We would need to get her ready for adoption right away, it would not do to have a girl in the family since I was allergic. A pity really, she wasn’t a boy, we had both been looking forward to another baby in the house. Our son had just turned three and he was at that stage in life where he was no longer a baby in his mannerisms nor his looks. We loved him of course, but how I longed for the early days of soft tummies and cries only a mother could appreciate. As they get older, they realize you are not the only people on the planet who are capable of caring for them and providing them what they want. They learn that Grandma, and nannies, and perhaps the next-door neighbor are just as capable of fixing them lunch or giving them sweets. Sometimes even better than mom and dad for they learn others are much more gullible when confronted with the wide eyes of a child asking for dessert before lunch time. It was a
certain kind of pain to watch your baby realize mother’s milk was no longer necessary and see them move on to more solid things, like bananas and kindergarten. Yes, another baby would have been nice. But alas, the baby was a girl and we needed to begin the necessary arrangements. How unfortunate that the mother was allergic the nurse had muttered, shaking her head.
“ It was a certain kind of pain to watch your baby realize mother’s milk was no longer necessary and see them move on to more solid things, like bananas and kindergarten. ”
We logged on to childfinder.com right at the hospital, me in a hospital gown and still sore from the ordeal of pushing another person out of my body. All that work for nothing and my nose had begun to run immediately. My husband had said, this just won’t do. It was a lengthy but important process; the new family
would of course want to know everything they could about their new child. We answered questions about our family’s medical history, some breast cancer in grandmothers, a diabetic aunt, and the most unpleasant of them all, hereditary allergy to girls. We made sure to specify that women above the age of eighteen no longer triggered the allergic reaction, but it was certainly something to be aware of. Things would not be easy for this little girl. She herself would likely develop the allergy as she aged and be required to take antihistamines just to visit her friends’ houses. And don’t get me started about school, when I was in elementary school my teachers had to place me with groups of only boys and even still, I carried a pouch of tissues with me chronically. Luckily as the allergy has become more common lawmakers have mitigated the issue by having special schools for all boys that allow only two girls to join each classroom, successfully managing those unlucky enough to have been born with the allergy. It would be much less of a headache for the future mother of this little girl than it was for my own mother. I sometimes wondered what compelled my mother to keep me all those years ago. I couldn’t imagine having to live day in and day out with such terrible allergies. Having only held the baby once before returning her to the hospital NICU, this was solidified for me. I simply could not
live my life bogged down by a constant runny nose and bleary eyes, no matter how cute she might be. I refused to sacrifice my own health, allergies having been proven to weaken the immune system and overall quality of life. And by no means was I to become “tissue girl” again as a grown woman, those days were over. I managed now by avoiding indoor spaces with young girls, choosing the park over the bowling alley. Our son seemed happy enough, especially since we had decided to hire a nanny who was not allergic to take him to the places I had to avoid when his father was at work. Primarily places like indoor jungle gyms and movie theaters, the former already crawling with grubby little girl allergens. These were places I now refused to take him. I had tried once or twice when he was younger and had such an adverse reaction I couldn’t stop sneezing for days, every surface seemed to bother me as I watched little girls not only grab on to everything in sight but also to drool and sneeze on it. It made my nose itch just thinking about it. And thus, we hired Sadie. She was a nice college girl and our son liked her, so whenever he gave me that dismayed look that I, his mother, could not take him to the movies I would remind him that he had Sadie to do those things with him. We had chosen a nanny who was a girl in the hopes that he would get more female socialization since his glassworks 37
mother could frequently not provide. The nanny’s sole purpose was to take him away from the house. We continued to fill out our profile for the baby, tackling the section on the sort of parents we wished her to go to. I imagined her in a big house with large windows she could stare out as she took her first steps. I could see her grabbing onto the window ledge and pulling herself up, the greatest feat she had yet attempted, and then a smile. But really, I only wanted her to have parents that loved her, ones that would not spank her but knew when to give her a time out. Ones who would grin from ear to ear whenever she giggled and smiled at them. Who would rejoice at her first words and her second and third. I also wanted financial stability for her, parents who had enough to clothe and feed her but also to buy her a Barbie or a Lego set occasionally. Not too often though, I wouldn’t want her being spoiled. Middle class would be totally acceptable, even on the poorer side as long as they could surprise her with toys and candy and experiences every once in a while. My husband suggested we include political affiliation; we wouldn’t want her going to a home where they would not be accepting for who she was or who she loved later in her life. I could see her then, fifteen years old bringing her first girlfriend home for dinner with a timid expression on her face. The question in her eyes,
would they approve? With any luck we would manage to pick parents who would smile at her and say, honey we love you no matter what. I shook my head, but what was I thinking? There wasn’t time for sentimentality. I chalked it up to baby hormones and moved on.
The section on behavior was mostly left blank. What did we know of her? Just that she was late to cry. So perhaps she would be pensive, patient, curious. She had waited, first taking in her surroundings, sensing my arms around her. She had waited as if to say she was not quite ready yet, but she would be soon after just a moment of contemplation. So, I wrote this down, specifying that it was simply a guess based on my first few seconds with her. Otherwise, I didn’t know anything about her disposition, I suppose that was the risk of adopting a newborn like this, you’re never sure what you might end up with. I left the ‘other’ comment section blank, having already covered the necessary requirements for adoption.
The comments came flooding in as soon as I posted the advertisement. This city it seemed was full of eager parents searching for a daughter. This brought a smile to my lips; it would not be hard to find a home for her. The knowledge that she would be adopted quickly brought me solace, this whole ordeal would shortly be over. She would be just as happy with her new family as glassworks
she would have been with us. Over the next two days we sifted through applications and narrowed it down to two families. One of them was a husband and wife who both worked in finance, so we knew they would be able to take care of her financially, but I worried they may not have enough time for her. The other couple were both artists, the husband an art professor and the wife a moderately successful romance author. They would provide a life of creativity and curiosity for her, but I feared finances could be tight. My husband and I discussed these issues, but he quickly reminded me of my first impressions of the little girl, contemplative and curious, there really was no question who we should choose. We reached out to the professor and the writer and told them the good news. They laughed and the woman cried and thanked me. I nodded into the phone and said I was happy to make this happen for them.
Once we had made our choice, I went to visit her. She was so small, all bundled up and sleeping off the meal she had been fed. Her eyes flickered beneath her eyelids, and I imagined she was dreaming of something beautiful. But what does an infant dream of when they have never experienced the world? I reached down to hold her hand. It was soft, unmarked, not yet hardened by things like crawling and holding pencils. My mind quickly wandered, and I began to wonder about what
my husband might make for dinner that night. I would need to get back to the gym right away if I were to work off the baby weight. It had been easy with my son, but I had heard girls were harder to shake. I gave her a little pat on the head and told her she would be just fine with her new family, and I thought to myself she would only be a memory I would soon forget.
self-porTraIT II
Isabella Ronchetti
funhouse mIrrors
Jessica Bajorek
after “Facing It” by
Yusef Komunyakaa
Sometimes the mirror takes the voice of Grandmother, says, Boys won’t like you if you’re a fat girl, and the room drops into twelve again when thinner was a promise paid for in skipped dinners and my father in a body bag, the numbness a blaring neon sign saying, Enter at your own risk. Every round of a corner a tick-down, a smile from a mother.
In the tunnel of Pretty Worship, a boy tells you he loves the size two. Caricature faces crawl out at every bend, hail their taunts like red rubber balls of not pretty enough, a could be prettier if, weighed against skinny until the ghost of a body can fit through the gap.
Falling out the other side of twenty is kaleidoscope daze. An almost believing in stained glass where a godlight lays kisses to body in careful golden patterns, but the ripples in the wall change, and I slip into the mirror again at twenty-two. Here, a girl can lose forty pounds in two years and still look the same.
Twenty-four: the bottom of a slide
An exit, I think. No.
Just more glass.
GrIef
Christopher Stewart
My brother wept on the patio in guttural heaves like something dredged from an oil-slicked sea. At dusk and into the night the neighbors must have heard, turned in their beds with the racket of it, though too shaken with knowing their own loss to protest.
He wept. And wept. While I sat in my mother’s recliner sipping rye whiskey and envy for one who could grieve so wholly with his entire body a grieving so complete, so intact, unbridled by her kind moments, unbroken by her cruel ones, so many saved for him my jaw tears into an ice cube as I see him and I as boys, running in the hope that someone would come looking.
I cannot fathom it, though I try. For him, for his crying in the dark, these flashes of memory I fumble with like a glass slipping from my hand, falling to the floor in a hundred jagged pieces.
mIdwInTer CrIsIs
Ha Kiet Chau
I cannot draft another poem about love, cannot sleep through the bombings, the killings.
Gruesome massacre. Terror exploding in our faces. Fathers frantic. Sons and daughters missing.
Beneath rubble, a whimper, a meow, then the slow agony of silence.
Snow is pink, blood-stained. This cruel, sick winter burn, when will it end?
At midnight, the day after Christmas, my neighbors and I carry our softest instruments down to the street corner on Bancroft near an old church.
We form a pyramid, a prayer. My harp touches her guitar touches his ukulele.
We pluck melodies, delicate as the scattering of dandelions, ease the stress of grieving mothers kneeling on soiled graves, wailing the names of children who they’ve lost to the ugliness of war as if that might somehow bring them back.
Our song is a river of chrysanthemums pouring into ruined lands, cities, countries, healing those who cannot sleep, those who lie awake in the dark anticipating sunrise.
eduCaTInG The war
R.T. Castleberry
Moon smeared in a dusty sky, cadaver dogs hunt the hillsides. Through a heat holiday-death anniversaries random as a news chyron, I teach a chapter from the new border anarchist; I talk summer to my wife. She clips stories of the coming desolation, plans our packing and the exile airplane tickets. Raising future arguments, I work from my desk, lesson folder filled with messages of compromise, of historical cowardice and complicity. Like punctuation in conversation, a Medevac clears the treeline. War rolls like a ghost car siren.
sTIll The anCIenT of days ?
B.A. Kocsis
The subway sandwICh
Rosie Bates
The task, Dad said, was to finish the Subway sandwich by the time we got to Winthrop, a small town that sits at the entrance to the eastern side of the North Cascade mountains in Washington state. After rock climbing outside for the first time earlier that summer, I’d finally started to share in Dad’s passion for the sport, eagerly anticipating weekends spent in the mountains. On this trip, we were both excited to escape to the east side, where we could ignore the impending months of winter rain on the western side of the state, what the end of October signifies in the Pacific Northwest.
In a way, this trip also represented another kind of escape, perhaps the kind that runs parallel to avoidance and last-ditch efforts—the roots of it, ephemeral, slippery like rain, and moss, and wind. In those terms, escape might be reductive. Maybe this trip was a desperate attempt to reconnect with a dormant part of me, a part that still desperately wanted to live, and climb—unencumbered— across seas of vertical granite.
But now, with the burden of having to eat sitting squarely in my consciousness—the sandwich sitting between us in the center console— tension hung in the car like a shadowy raincloud ready to burst.
~
Dad navigated through the stoplights of town, eventually merging onto the highway headed northeast, and I resorted dutifully to my trained response to these structured mealtimes: directing every ounce of my cognitive reserve toward not-eating—quelling the instinctual impulse to feed my body.
“ Maybe this trip was a desperate attempt to connect with a dormant part of me, a part that still desperately wanted to live, and climb— unencumbered—across seas of vertical granite. ”
Whether in the car, at school, at the dining room table, or in front of the TV…this is what eating had become for me: a task, an assignment—planned and monitored. I had just turned sixteen, and yet, surrounding mealtimes, my parents supervised me as if I were five again, scheduling meals, snacks, what I ate when I was at school, what I
ate when I came home. You can’t do [insert anything], until you finish your meal. They required that I finish everything on my plate before leaving the table, which rarely happened, so I’d sit there for hours. My stubbornness almost always outlasted theirs.
~
On the trip to Winthrop, we listened to Huck Finn on tape. When I entered high school, Dad had taken to reading (sometimes rereading) all the books I was assigned for my English classes which, I suppose, was a nice way to ensure we would have something to talk about amid my teenage angst. As Dad focused on the road, I slouched into the passenger seat of the minivan and let the words of Jim and Huck distract my mind from my growling stomach.
We’d driven these winding roads before. He’d been dragging my sister and me into the mountains before we could walk. The routine, always the same: predawn weekend wakeups, Isabella and I passed out in the back seat, and 710 Kiro Sports Radio! (or whatever else was on at that hour) playing in the background—the nostalgic drawl of talk radio still lulls me to sleep. He knew that what awaited us in the mountains would be worth our groggy objections to being woken up before the sun. My younger sister, Isabella, didn’t take to climbing like I had. She said she was afraid of heights, but I also made it clear in terms that older
siblings sometimes do, that climbing was my thing. So when I started to climb, the car rides were just Dad and I.
This time, I was fully awake, no groggy objections—carefully watching the road. But even though I was watching it, I wasn’t thinking about the road, or noticing the twisting and turning of the concrete, our way cleared by blasted sections of rock. I was thinking about that Subway sandwich and ways in which I could avoid eating it. Since summiting Slippery Slab Tower with Dad—my first outdoor climbing trip—over the summer, I’d lost nearly a quarter of my body weight and was actively restricting how much I ate. In desperation for fuel to keep me alive, my body was responding with its own form of control: steadily salvaging scraps from my withering muscles to keep me alive. ~
“Why don’t you have another bite of that sandwich?” Dad said, breaking the silence and my concentration.
His tone reflected as much contempt as despair for the role he had willingly, or unwillingly, taken on. I cringed at the way these words rolled off his tongue: Why don’t you. Both passively suggestive and authoritatively imposing, he seemed annoyed that he even had to ask.
He is disappointed, I thought. I was disappointed. I was disappointing him. It would’ve been better, I thought, if glassworks 47
he just forced me to eat. If he just yelled at me. I wanted him to yell at me. I wanted him to look at me and say, Rosie, eat that fucking sandwich or else I am turning this car around and we aren’t going to climb.
He never yelled on this trip. That would come later, in late November, when we’d enter the yelling phase of the eating disorder.
He was tired. I was tired, and I knew that I had to finish this sandwich if I wanted to climb. So, in this moment, he had more control, and I hated that. I absorbed his words, his tone. The tone that wanted so badly to tell me how sad he was. I grew angrier. I looked at him with disdain, and then down at the six-inch Subway sandwich that sat between us with even more disdain.
“Okay.”
I reached down and grabbed the sandwich: turkey, lettuce, and tomato. Six inches of sustenance on a low-fat, whole-wheat bun. No cheese, no condiments.
I peeled back the paper wrapper and took the smallest bite I could.
He sighed. “How about you eat a little more, Rosie.” His voice quivered as he spoke. How about you eat.... That tone. I cringed, again.
I looked at him, scowling, the sandwich hovering at my lips. “No.”
As much as I wanted to take the biggest bite possible, I didn’t. I chewed, deliberately—savoring and regretting—each bite. I swallowed, rewrapped the sandwich,
and dropped it back into the center console.
Dad gave a tired smile and said, “Thanks, Rosie.”
I replied, “Yeah, whatever,” and turned my head back to the road, returning my attention to not-eating.
~
I’ll eat a bite when we pass the next mile-marker, I think to myself—we pass the next mile-marker—I can make it one more, I think.
I’ll eat a bite when we pass the next mile-marker—we pass the next mile-marker—I can make it one more. I’ll eat a bite when we pass the next mile-marker—we pass the next mile-marker—I can make it one more. I’ll eat a bite when we pass the next mile-marker—we pass the next mile-marker—I can make it one more.
~
This process would repeat for the next four hours: mile-marker, how about you, no, okay, mile-markermile-marker, how about you, no, Rosie, no, mile-marker, Jim, Huck, Rosie, Mac, the rolling hills, concreteblasted highway, mile-marker, how about, okay, how about some more, no, Rosie, no, Rosie, no, no, NO! Okay. Okay.
~
I finished the sandwich, timed perfectly so that it was gone just as we pulled into Winthrop, the late-October sun setting low behind the mountains. Four hours for a six-inch sub. There was a kind of perfection to that, I thought.
~
The next morning, Dad and I drove out to the cliff, a crag named “Fun Rock.” The oak trees slowly shedding their spring coat, while the evergreens stood in stark contrast, green and full against their bare counterparts. We got out of the car and walked to the wall. My empty stomach asked for more food. I ignored it. At the base I stood next to Dad, shivering, bare bones like the skeleton of the oak to his warm evergreen body. A wispy hair had begun to grow on my arms, and neck—indicative of someone nearing a dangerous weight threshold.
“ . . . in that moment, I was free. I was listening to my body. I loved what it could do for me. ”
I put my shoes on, tied into the climbing rope, and began to climb. As I moved, my body felt light, and strong—like no other feeling I’d experienced climbing before. Power extended from my calloused fingertips to my curled-up toes. Counter to the opinions of my family at the time, this unexpected sense of control supported instincts that were slowly undoing me, reinforcing the voice in my head that said, “See Rosie, all of your training and restricting is paying off for this feeling, this power.”
Regardless of how my eating disorder’s voice would reinforce its agenda in the days and months to come, in that moment, I was free. I was listening to my body. I loved what it could do for me. As I felt the power of this lightness, I experienced a more resonant and lasting feeling: freedom from the energy I had been using the past four months to resist food and reject the image of my body. I was accepting myself, seeing, feeling, being myself exactly as I was. This would be the last time I would climb outside for almost a year, but feeling this new freedom not based in shame and suffering, stayed with me, and in many ways, kept me alive when I was admitted to the hospital later that year. Perhaps this is why I came to believe that climbing saved my life. In a way, I reduced this trip to the symbol of autonomy, and called upon its image: pine needles, cool mountain air, wind tickling wispy hairs whenever my mind wandered from the sterility of the creme colored hospital walls.
As I climbed, the words of Twain ran through my head. Huck ran away from his fated life. He was free on the river, “It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about
Rosie Bates | The Subway Sandwich
whether they was made or only just happened.”
~
At the end of the day, I sat on top of the cliff, my body shivering in the fall breeze. I slowly ran my fingers through the crispy brown pine needles that had gathered at the cliff’s edge, tempting the wind to blow them off. I dangled my feet off the edge, just like Huck and Jim on the raft, tempting the wind to blow me off.
~
After we finished climbing, Dad and I drove nearly the length of a forest road that followed the Chewuch River. A fire had destroyed the forest we were driving through a few years before, the charred Douglas firs and lodgepole pines were all that remained. Four fire-
fighters had been killed battling this fire when their only escape route, this road, was cut off by flames. I felt a strange urge to drive to the spot where they had died. Perhaps I was comforted knowing our path wouldn’t be cut off and we could turn around at any point. We picked up where we had left off on the tape. I was exhausted; I hadn’t felt this type of fatigue before. I could barely lift my head from where it fell naturally on the headrest. Twain’s words drowned out the hum of the engine, the growling of my stomach, Dad’s occasional sigh.
Grove
Robb Kunz
ouT from under
Heather Bourbeau
Worms, expelled, writhe on the running track, seek dirt as my feet freed find their rhythm again.
Hail rests on redwood debris. The scent of rose mixes with pine. Seagulls pass over powerlines, a plane glides east.
Camelia blossoms still pink, freshly blanket a bench, Unaware, in their persistent flush, that they have died.
In the gutter, a browned stub of a Christmas tree. In the sidewalk, a half-eaten pizza. Wet cheese, watered sauce. On the grass, a Target box half-torn.
The ground is soft with saturation, and I wonder what happens to those we have buried when six feet seems so shallow as the floodwaters rise.
Coho
Heather Bourbeau
She remembered the smell first of pine and peeling cedar before the sound of fallen leaves, autumnal shedding padding
steps she would walk to the river to watch the salmon spawn and die, a beautiful ballet of sex and death, the wreckage a banquet for bears, the silence of humans amid rushing water, birds, wind, the rustling of animals unseen, fish leaping, longing,
the warmth of sun through trees leaving dappled tan lines, the taste of long-soured raspberries plucked fresh, staining her hands,
the feel of rocks cool and wet and the ecstasy pulsing through her before she understood or learned to feel shame.
The sIfTInG
Heather Bourbeau
A red moon waits to rise, as we move from sand to silt to sail, and my fingers dance through river, glassy and green. Cool water, thick algae, small fish, remnants of reeds.
We glide past banks, where you and I, once young, swam and sought shade, held frogs in our palms, ignored dirt and dust and swallowed heat.
Here my soul was first met, there my thirst first quenched.
I cup handfuls slowly, welcome the wet, leave moss on my skin. My head turns to breathe in a fading sun, to hear the nets of fishermen, the songs of thrushes.
Lulled and languid, I no longer remember the need for sweet upon my tongue, for cloth against my skin. It will only be later when my feet feel earth,
when the stretch of string is taut and trembling and your breath is but a ghost, that I will want this moment to never end.
B.A. Kocsis is an Australian collage artist and poet whose work has been published in Liminal Spaces Magazine, The Oakland Review, and is forthicoming in Tofu Ink Arts Press. Kocsis served in the Royal Australian Infantry. He holds a BA from the University of Queensland and a Master of Teaching from the Queensland University of Technology. Instagram: @b.a.kocsis Website: brendenkocsis.com
Robb Kunz hails from Teton Valley, Idaho. He received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Idaho. He currently teaches writing at Utah State University and is the Art and Design Faculty Advisor of Sink Hollow: An Undergraduate Literary Journal. His art has been published in Peatsmoke Journal, Fauxmoir, Hole in the Head Review, and Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine. His art is upcoming in Closed Eye Open.
Isabella Ronchetti is an Italian-American visual artist, graphic designer and mountaineer. She holds a BA in graphic design from NABA (Milan, Italy) and is currently an MFA candidate at New York Academy of Art. Drawing from dreams, philosophy, and mythological archetypes, Isabella’s work explores the human psyche through a surrealist figurative lens. Whether in pencil, collage, oil paint, or InDesign, Isabella’s practice is united by a delineated visual language that evokes a quasi visceral tactility. Her work can be found in galleries, literary magazines, and on billboards across Europe and the US.
fICTIon
Maia Coen is an MFA in fiction candidate at Colorado State University and an instructor of College Composition. Her work has been published in The Greyrock Review and Rising Phoenix Press. She aims to write stories with characters in all their emotional messiness and hopes readers see their humanity as much as she does.
Mary Sauer is a writer and mother from Kansas City. Her work has been published by The Washington Post, Popula, and ARC Poetry Magazine.
She’s also the Managing Editor of Salt Tooth Press and an MFA student at University of Missouri-Kansas City.
nonfICTIon
Rosie Bates, originally from Seattle, moved to Fresno in 2020 and earned her MFA in Creative Writing with a nonfiction focus at Fresno State in 2023. If she isn’t writing or hanging out with her cat, you will likely find her rock climbing in Yosemite. Her essays about climbing have appeared in Alpinist Magazine and Sport Literate.
Tasia Celeste Bernie is an essayist and the curator of the Portland Restaurant Genealogy Project. She prefers to eat dessert first. Find her on Substack at: tasiaceleste.substack.com
Emilie Helmbold is an MFA candidate at Western Michigan University. She is a lifelong Michigan resident, a setting that has inspired much of her creative work. Her work has appeared in The Raven Review, Small Town Anthology, and The New Twenties Magazine. Her plays have been produced onstage at the University of Michigan and the Kennedy Center Regional New Play Project.
poeTry
R.A. Allen’s poetry has appeared in the New York Quarterly, RHINO, The Penn Review, Lotus-Eaters, B O D Y, The Los Angeles Review, Cloudbank, Mobius, and others. He’s been anthologized in Celestial Musings and nominated for a Best of the Net and two Pushcarts. His fiction has been published in The Literary Review, The Barcelona Review, PANK, and Best American Mystery Stories 2010. He lives in Memphis on the Mississippi River. bodyliterature.com/2020/02/17/r-a-allen
Jessica Bajorek is a Connecticut poet currently residing in Oregon. She recently graduated with her MFA from Oregon State University. Her work centers themes of grief and transformation through filters
of distortion, the uncanny, and the natural world. She was the previous Poetry Editor of 45th Parallel and served as a judge for the Malone University Writer’s Prize, the Weaver Undergraduate Poetry Award, and Hofsta University’s Inaugural Poetry Contest. Her work has appeared in Narrateur, Reflections on Caring, and The Marbled Sigh, and is upcoming at Quillkeeper’s Press. When she is not writing, you can find Jessica by the Willamette River reading and enjoying a cup of coffee.
Heather Bourbeau’s award-winning poetry and fiction have appeared in The Irish Times, The Kenyon Review, Meridian, and The Stockholm Review of Literature. Her writings are part of the Special Collections at the James Joyce Library, University College Dublin and have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. She has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia. Her latest poetry collection, Monarch (Cornerstone Press, 2023), examines overlooked histories from the US West.
R.T. Castleberry, a Pushcart Prize nominee, has work in Sangam, Gyroscope Review, San Pedro River Review, Silk Road, and StepAway. Internationally, he’s had poetry published in Canada, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, France, New Zealand, Portugal, the Philippines, India, and Antarctica. His poetry has appeared in the anthologies: You Can Hear the Ocean: An Anthology of Classic and Current Poetry, TimeSlice, The Weight of Addition, and Level Land: Poetry For and About the I35 Corridor.
Taylor Franson-Thiel is a Pushcart nominated poet from Utah, now based in Fairfax, Virginia. She received her MA in creative writing from Utah State University and is pursuing an MFA at George Mason University. Her debut collection, Bone Valley Hymnal, is forthcoming in 2025 from ELJ Editions. She is an editorial reader for Poetry Daily, the Assistant Poetry Editor for phoebe and the Editor-in-Chief of BRAWL. She can be found at: taylorfranson-thiel.com
Josephine Gawtry is a poet from Southern Virginia. She is currently an MFA candidate at Colorado State University, where she is an Associate Editor for Colorado Review. She has work forthcoming or appearing in Gigantic Sequins, Beaver Magazine, and elsewhere. She has a three-legged rabbit named Cabbage.
Matthew Johnson is the author of the poetry collections Shadow Folks and Soul Songs (Kelsay Books), Far from New York State (NYQ Press), and the recently released chapbook, Too Short to Box with God (Finishing Line Press). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The African American Review, Front Porch Review, London Magazine, Obsidian Magazine, Roanoke Review, and elsewhere. Recipient of Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominations, he is Managing Editor of The Portrait of New England and Poetry Editor of The Twin Bill. More at: matthewjohnsonpoetry.com
Ha Kiet Chau is the author of two poetry collections: Eleven Miles to June (Green Writers Press, 2021) and Woman Come Undone (Mouthfeel Press, 2014). Her writings have appeared in Ploughshares, Asia Literary Review, New Madrid, Empty House Press, and Columbia College Literary Review. Her YA novel in verse, Darling Winter, is forthcoming in 2024. She is currently the Poetry Editor of Fourteen Hills, San Francisco State University’s literary magazine. Find Ha on Instagram: @sweetpoeticsoo
Emily Laubham is a writer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her short stories and poetry have appeared in publications including Contrary Magazine, Red Rock Literary Review, Ping-Pong Literary Magazine, Menacing Hedge, Autumn Sky Poetry, Anti-heroin Chic, Scapegoat Review, and Hyacinth Review. She was recently published as a contributor in the poetry anthology A Critique of the Gods.
Judith H. Montgomery’s first collection, Passion, received the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her prize-winning narrative medicine chapbook, Mercy (2019) was followed by The Ferry Keeper, which received the 2024 Grayson Books Chapbook Prize.
Sameen Shakya is a poet, storyteller, and wordsmith whose works have been published in various indie magazines. Born and raised in Kathmandu, Nepal, he moved to the United States in 2015 to pursue writing. He earned a BA in Creative Writing from St. Cloud State University and traveled the country for a couple of years to gain a more informal education. He returned to Kathmandu in 2022 and is currently based there.
Annette Sisson lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Her poems appear in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rust & Moth, Lascaux Review, and many other journals. A number of her poems have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her second book, Winter Sharp with Apples, is forthcoming from Terrapin Books in October 2024.
Zeke Shomler is an MA/MFA candidate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His work has appeared in Folio, Sierra Nevada Review, Bicoastal Review, and elsewhere.
Christopher Stewart is the author of What Came After (The Calliope Group) and co-author of The Walmart Republic with Quraysh Ali Lansana (Mongrel Empire Press). His poems have recently appeared or will appear in Midwest Quarterly, Bryant Literary Review, Oakwood, The Perch, Connecticut River Review, and others. He was 2023 finalist for the Iowa Review Award and a 2024 Merit Award winner in the Atlanta Review International Poetry Competition.
