Hawaiʻi Review Issue 75: 2011

Hawai‘i Review 75 Winter 2011

Cover Art Front: hyBRIDGE #16, by Peter Chamberlain Back: hyBRIDGE #1, by Peter Chamberlain

© 2011 by the Board of Publications, University of Hawai`i at Mänoa. All rights revert to the writers and artists upon publication. All requests for reproduction and other propositions should be directed to the writers and the artist.

ISSN: 0093-9625

Dear Reader,

Creating Issue 75 of Hawai`i Review has been, of course, a labor of love. Our journal has seen many changes in its almost 40 years of publication – changes in leadership, in focus, in readership, and in vision. With each new change comes a re-dedication to producing an innovative, community-focused journal that speaks from the heart of Hawai`i.

One aspect of the journal that has happily continued is a second year of the Ian MacMillan Writing Contest. Named after one of Hawai`i Review’s most influential mentors and advocates, The Ian MacMillan Writing Contest awards prizes for both poetry and fiction. Please look for this year’s winners in our next edition of the journal, Issue 76. Mahalo to all who submitted their work for consideration this year.

This issue of Hawai`i Review centers (or perhaps decenters) around change. The characters and landscapes in the literature of Issue 75 explore their relationship to change – lives in flux, shifting, transitioning, fluid. We hope you all enjoy this tentative, uncertain, magical space as much as we have.

- The Editors of Hawai`i Review

Contents Gavin McCall Barefoot in the Mainland [7]

Gerardo Mena War Child [11]

Ben Mazer Aloha [19] Amateurs [21]

Derek N. Otsuji The Art of Mango Peeling [37] Urn [38] Tory Adkisson Artifice [45] Husbandry [46] Norah Charles Ghost State [63]

Mark Smith [8] Morna Gourmet [9] The Faiths of Animals Vanessa Hwang Lui [13] Over the Rail

Kaitlin Stainbrook [23] At the 99 Yen Store

Joseph Han [39] Bottles

Ande Davis [47] The Mulvaney Family Parade of Death Norman Lock [71] 5 from Alphabets of Desire & Sorrow: A Book of Imaginary Colophons

Mitchell Untch Camera Obscura [76] A Walk After a Good, Hard Rain [78]

Michael Cuglietta [81] My Wife and My Two Kids

Lynn McGee Manners [87] Yesterday [90]

Anthony Bukoski I Want to Be a Nudist [95]

Simon Perchik [92] * [93] * Jéanpaul Ferro [107] The Last University Students [109] The Sin of Knowledge

John Fenlon Hogan In the Shadows [111] Self-Portrait as Peter Pan’s Shadow [113]

Wendell Mayo [115] Either Way

Andrei Guruianu Psalm for the Children of the Rain [117] Hall of Luminous Things: Passing Through [119] Single White Feather [121]

Emily McLaughlin Twenty-Nine Messages for C: Lucy as Catastrophe [125]

Shantel Grace Writes of Song [146]

Lyn Lifshin [123] Middlebury Poem [124] Rose

Matt Mullins [145] Silent Movie with a Final Scene Inside Your Car

ART: Peter Chamberlain hyBRIDGE and RainForest 2020 Selections [6, 12, 22, 36, 80, 94, 144, 149, 162]

hyBRIDGE #2 Peter Chamberlain

Barefoot in the Mainland Gavin McCall

Her feet are diamonds, big toes bent towards the others, each foot pointing at me as she settles into the couch, resting her feet on my lap with a sigh. Sore from high heels, her feet are more used to being pressed into these diamond shapes than they are to touching a floor, much less dirt and sand and rock, like my feet used to be. My toes curl but they don’t point, the gaps between the big ones shaped like doorknobs and those bent finger-toes, the gaps for slippers – flip-flops, she calls them. My feet are almost as soft as hers, now that they’re used to socks and leather shoes, no more grass, dirt, rocks, sticks or sand to stumble, run, get dirty and clean on, these bent feet so white and soft now I hardly recognize them.

I look back at her pretty diamond feet resting on my lap while she pretends to sleep. Eyes closed, she shifts them like she’s forgotten I’m there, but I know better. I give in, pressing my thumbs into the soft, pale soles. A slight groan from her.

Every inch of her feet is covered with shallow wrinkles like the blue lines of streams on a map of Hilo, mostly-parallel streaks running from mountain to sea, sea to mountain, feeding the rain to the ocean and the ocean back to the rain. I sit and look at her feet, nothing like mine, and for the hundredth time I wonder how long until I’ll return home.

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Morna Gourmet Mark Smith

An invitation from our friend, the chef, to dine upon a delicacy he will himself prepare in the stainless steel and copper of his famous kitchen: a pan roast of exotic songbirds smuggled from the tropics that, when kept in cages and made to listen to the keyboards of their owners, stubbornly refused to sing.

They will be finished at table, chef promises, with a glaze of jelled mango flamed in Dutch Antilles curacao.

Come dinner, as chef serves the entree with a pair of spoons he tells how wonderfully the birds, when waiting to be strangled on the cutting boards, sang for him and all his Caribbean kitchen help who gathered round dabbing at their eyes with the soiled corners of their aprons, the soulful mornas of their lost green world of cherimoyas and volcanoes.

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The Faiths of Animals Mark Smith

Thrushes are idolatrous and sacrifice to griffins. Their offerings are the last wriggling bites of worm as thin as angle hair.

No animal is known to reverence dragons.

Salmon still give thanks to wooly mammoths unaware their God is dead. Garden snakes are fatalists who believe their trinity— eel, catamount and owl—are as doomed as they are at die Gotterdammerung.

For armadillos the holiest of relics are the bones of dinosaurs. Koalas believe their kind were once bustards and are destined to return as pompano.

Spiders are forbidden to make an image of their Creator who is spirit only.

Frustrated, they look for Him in things invisible. Like wind. Or abstract.

Like shadow play. Or fuzzy. Like cairns emerging from a fog. Beavers carve totems in tooth-felled timbers half pileated woodpecker, half frog.

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Quail must compose a homily of worship daily to the households of their many ancestors. Fruit flies have long since abandoned so impossible a practice and simply take communion mornings in the fragrant temples of their new God, Fruit. All snails are atheists, as are goldfish, if kept small in bowls, and most breeds of dogs. Chipmunks pray to housecats sitting sphinxlike, whom they fear. Theirs is a terrible God who devours His children. Rats believe their God has made them in His own image.

To see themselves reflected in the shards of shaving mirrors is an occasion to reflect upon their Maker. Cranes serve many Gods, including partridges, llamas, flood plains and smooth stones.

Mockingbirds worship the Gods of all animals as one God who resembles in effigy the contents of a burst pi単ata.

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War Child Gerardo Mena

-For John “Shooting the Lights Out” Murray, Wounded In Action, October 14th, 2010, Afghanistan

Could you hear the slow hiss of my hands as they turned to shrapnel and smoke, or the sound that my heart made when it collapsed in on itself?

I’m sorry I wasn’t there to save you, or shoot someone in the face, or make fun of you for losing a fight to a bullet, but most of all, for not being the one to save you.

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RainForest 2020 #1 Peter Chamberlain

Over the Rail Vanessa Hwang Lui

Philip continually dreams of the ones he couldn’t save: the pink scarf floating on the water as the body drifts nearby, the fingers with red nail polish relaxing around the railing and disappearing into air, the blue eyes closed in that second of suspension before free fall.

Over the years, he’s developed a feeling about the ones who jump. They are not the ones who walk briskly, heads tucked against the wind. No, they are the ones who walk slowly, with an automated rhythm, caressing the bridge. Some lean and look to the frothy, white-tipped water below. Some—and these are the hardest—close their eyes briefly or cross themselves before suddenly scrambling over the rail. When he sees the last, he begins running. If he’s close enough, he can grab a collar or ankle.

On the worst days, he will be left with an empty coat or glove in his hand. No, on the worst days, he will be yards away, the traffic a dangerous buzzing sea that he cannot cross. On the worst days, he is trapped on the hollow metal shore as a small figure awkwardly pulls himself up on the railing, thrashes for the briefest second on his stomach and then folds into the air and water below.

In his dreams, those that were successful come back and speak to him. I made a mistake, she says, and blood streams down her face. I want to live, he says, but the words can’t come out because his face has bloated so much from the water. The peaceful ones don’t come. The eighty-eight year old widow, her husband’s gold ring loose around her thumb. Did she find him? The man in

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the wetsuit who wedged his note in the metal rafter before making a graceful swing over the bar to the narrow outside ledge. Philip, fifteen feet away, sprinting, saw him fold his arms over his chest and enter the air smiling. Was it all that he had pictured?

Philip knows that it is not the case. This is not a peaceful death. This is not Poseidon wading gracefully into the sea. At sixteen stories above sea level, the water becomes a solid, dark grey wall and the impact hits a person just as hard. The water shears clothes from bodies, and bones splinter on impact.

Philip looks over the rail himself sometimes when there is no one on the bridge and he can relax. He has saved eighteen people in three years. People talk to him. He enters buses and exits with small pieces of a person’s life story tucked into his pocket. In the line at the grocery store, he asks a woman about the melon that she is buying and she starts to cry.

“He used to eat them and I don’t know why I still buy them,” she says.

He put a hand on her arm. “It’s ok,” he says.

There is a lot of power in the ok. He is careful not to say good, which may lead to dangerous self-reflection about how things are, in fact, not good. He does not say that he understands, because his bland days at the office and his nights on the bridge cannot even begin to compare to the life of the father who accidentally ran over his two-year old in the driveway, and who has hooked his elbows over the railing, staring at the cleansing, punishing water below. Philip does not understand. But he offers the ok as a bridge between himself and the other, a verbal rope thrown to a stranger. “It’s ok,” he says, and always believes it.

He means: it is ok to feel this despair. It is ok to want someone to care about you. It is ok to be here, on the edge but still longing for someone to save you, to tuck you in and tell you that it will be

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better.

Philip has been fired from three jobs since starting his patrol on the bridge. The first firing came shortly after Philip witnessed his first suicide. He had seen the woman—small, wrapped in a large blue rain slicker, though it was sunny outside— and she had nodded and smiled back at him. It was only after he had passed her that he heard the quiet wisp of nylon on metal and the terrible silence and then the splash and the silence again.

He had turned around and found that he was alone. She had disappeared into the sea. He had yanked off his coat, looked around-- could he jump in after her and save her? – he had yelled to the empty span of the bridge, he had opened his cell phone, shouting at the operator, he had leaned over the rail and tried to see any movement in the water, any foot or hand or head. In the end, though, the girl left this world the way that she had suspected that she had existed: alone, invisible, anonymous.

The next day, Philip did not go to work. He spent the afternoon on the Internet reading stories: the cancer victim who stole a motorcycle and rode from the hospital to the bridge, the sister who thought that her brother had been shot overseas, the manic-depressive patient who had escaped and walked three miles in his bare feet to the water, leaving small bloodied footprints that ended at Lamp # 22 on the south side. When Philip stopped reading, it was dark and he had not eaten in seven hours. He drove to the bridge and started walking. He approached strangers standing alone, and spoke to them softly. “Are you ok?” was how he began in those early days, and it was enough. A woman, crying, shook her head no. They walked together up and down the bridge until the sky lightened. Three weeks later, there was a small thank you sign taped to the rail, and the letters were streaked with water.

In the beginning, he could not sit in his office knowing that

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there could be someone on the bridge. His second and third firings were like this. He would depart for lunch and not return. He found himself on the bridge in the daytime. There were runners there, office workers in suits, families with children, people with skirts and jeans and zipped-up fleeces, people walking their dogs, young couples, old couples, people drinking coffee. Philip looked for a break in the stream. He looked for stillness in the sea, for the one person that had stopped moving. He looked for tears. He would see a hand with a wedding band gripping the rail. “Do you have a spouse?” he would ask. The head would drop, the eyes would close. “Do you have children?” This would sometimes bring them back from the edge.

At the time of his third firing, he had saved seventeen lives. He had lost six. One was a lithe runner, who had leapt over the bridge without breaking stride. Philip had not seen it until he noticed the crowd forming in the center of the bridge. One was a middle-aged woman that kicked him in the face as she windmilled her arms towards the sea. He had held her tightly and looked into her eyes. He had relaxed his grip—he had relaxed—the two of them nodding in what he had thought was a shared understanding, when she launched upwards and over the rail.

After she died, something broke in Philip. He began floating on the surface of sleep. He could not eat. His mind was filled with the imprints of the unlucky jumpers who had changed their minds and tried to weakly swim before sinking into the sea.

He looked at his tired, destroyed face in the mirror but could not keep himself from the bridge. He began to hear the clear siren call of the metal, water and frigid air.

He found himself there in the middle of the night, staring at the dark sea. Was that a hand waving below? Would the faces of the dead float in a circle, their eaten eyes turned towards him? You

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missed, mouthed one. Too late, too late, cried another. Philip was no longer sure what was his dream and what was real. There was a figure next to him leaning over the railing. He could not speak.

He was vaguely aware of sitting on the bridge floor, of hugging the long cold bars while dangling his feet over the murderous water.

A woman crouched next to him and looked in his eyes.

“Are you ok?” she asked.

She put a hand on his arm.

“I’m not—” he said. One of them, he almost said. But that wasn’t true. He was one of them—he was all of them, all of their losses and pain and loneliness and grief. He carried all of them, had swallowed their stories and absorbed them whole. There were crowds of people that now were on the other side—his childhood friend, passed away from leukemia; his parents, car crash in his freshman year of college; the man who had talked for half an hour of his amputated arm; the widow; the woman in the nylon jogging suit. They all pressed their faces against the clear surface of the water.

“I’ll just sit here, ok?” she said. “I’ll just sit here next to you until you want me to move.” Her eyes were kind.

Philip nodded.

Sitting on the bridge that night, Philip did not know at the time that he was to lose another five over the next two years. He did not know of the man who would return after he had saved him and who would take the day shift, walking in his reflective vest and talking to the others who had lost themselves to despair.

Philip would not know of the many that he would meet, of the stories that would be given to him as gently as a gift.

No, sitting on the bridge that night, Philip thought instead of the sun lifting over another day’s traffic, of the swell of voices and noise rising with the day’s light. The next day would come

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and it would leave and he would be on the bridge. He could not – can not—leave it. The ones he lost call to him from the sea, but so do the ones on the rail. He will carry all of their stories. For Philip does believe in hope and he thinks that they do, too. Those that jump leave behind money and keys to their cars in their glove compartments. They carefully place their cell phones and wallets onto the lamppost ledges where they will not get wet or run over.

And sometimes, on the good days, they will look him in the eye and stretch out their hands and let him pull them back.

END.

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Aloha Ben Mazer

We arrive in Honolulu. The mail carrier expels us on to the tarmac. Coconut palms smile investigating. The vista expands as we emerge from motion. A taxi shuttles us goggling through narrow towering hints and glints of what’s to come. Magic acts of checking in to the hotel are a concealed transformation.

A telephone that watches a pool from the window and waving sweeping palms like a transmission.

Then we are truly here. Alone at last. No one is following.

We shuffle quicker to get a little distance.

Now there is nothing between us and our desire.

The sky is personal. Even the natives might mistake us for people with a purpose.

We move along in shuttering episodes of patience and impatience, waiting for night to fall, we guess. The coconuts grow darker, and something leaves us, identity, inhibition?

It filters out diffusing us in waves where the old calendar confirms a machete, stopping the blood in our ass, flat cold and hard, white flotillas of designer words dying like a fever, over and over.

The sky like a flag unfurls and flaps in darkness like a drunken midnight football.

Everyone’s left. The past regains its grip on the imagination.

The frayed loose ends of wars

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interfere with weddings. A moment’s headline watches like a byword, a foreign detective.

The cream of youth, the best of a generation, gathers in silent reticence and white slacks around the gladiolas at the luau.

Each romantic grove chained to the coast adapts its own periphery, identical to any that drops into oblivion, repetitive branches of mechanical production the salt foam laps in coral depths of darkness, glittering bones that blast forgetfulness.

(A reason to procure and expand casinos.)

A periphery that shrinks numb from sensation, a few words teletext a generation, then shrink like leaves in laughter, shimmering surf exonerating rows of duplex balconies.

Buttering intimacy, esoteric solace of a few logs, a few skittering sparks like fireflies, a goat’s skull.

Like pressed lapels, poker-faced, compare notes and never enter the governor’s palace.

The high bay rows of honeysuckles like a maze, like interlocking patterns each one shows each one how he will pass the coming days and nothing throws the echoed rumours of this paradise out where a hidden anchor glows and knows.

Each lives on maize and coconut milk far from the submarine that hauls its silk and the rich portraitures of empire.

I hear them faintly in the steel guitar, and wait for the horseless carriage of dawn’s fire.

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Amateurs Ben Mazer

Here as elsewhere most are amateurs; secret agreements codify the flowers the test pilot is killed by aviation and the terrain obstructs negotiation irrigation is misunderstood and the first timers subject to the flood the architect’s design is never seen but intersecting spirits stand between the opposing and attracting signs by which men know the mountainous outlines the proud boxer’s rubbed out by the mob and the victorious emit a sob even the greatest lawyers improvise where there is often no room to revise presumptions compartmentalize the rains immersions curve at the dissolving margins the landscaper externalizes purpose which may be met or objects may oppose with a due violence the unstated wish that afterwards the clear signs may astonish.

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hyBRIDGE #4 Peter Chamberlain

At the 99 Yen Store Kaitlin Stainbrook

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Regina “いっらしゃいませ！” I smile and nod in the Japanese clerk’s direction and then march quickly to the back of the cramped store like I know what I’m looking for. Bright packages flash by in my periphery until I’m safely out of sight.

I never know where to look when I step into a store and whoever’s working shouts the standard greeting at me. And they always shout. A person can’t even escape into a 99 Yen store for five minutes without being assaulted by conditioned store clerks. They hear the bell ring above the front door or a brief snatch of the non-muted street sounds from outside and automatically shout out… something-mase. It’s very Pavlovian of them.

I reach the refrigerators and coolers in the back filled with singleserving cups of green tea ice cream and Styrofoam trays lined with half the cast of The Little Mermaid. I pull my purple, striped shirtsleeves down over my hands to shield them from the artificial cold and peer down at the elegant script across the food labels. The Japanese language is beautiful, but empty. I can’t imagine parsing out meaning from what to me look like delicate, though nonsensical scribbles.

The bell at the front clangs and the girl from before shouts again. Pieces of conversation filter over to where I am, but I can’t understand a word. There’s laugher and I know it’s stupid, but I can’t help wondering if they’re laughing at me. I move away from the ice cream and toward the aisle of snack foods.

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Kana “Welcome!”

The foreigner gives me a forced, tight smile in return and disappears into the farthest aisle from me. It’s the first thing they teach you to do – welcome the customer – so of course it’s the first thing I always forget.

It’s nearly one in the morning.

Besides the foreigner and me, the store is empty. Theoretically, Yuuki should be working the register, but he’s leaning against the bike rack in front of the store, smoking a cigarette and “studying” for his TOEFL exam under the glow of the fluorescent pink store sign. Really, he’s just reading an American porn magazine.

I’ve tried telling him that doesn’t count as studying, but he’s not obligated to listen to anything I say.

I don’t mind the late shift.

There’s not much to do, so it forces me to find creative ways to amuse myself.

Last week I measured the area of the entire store with my feet and the week before that I calculated which candy bar in the snack aisle had the most fat per gram. Tonight Yuuki has actually given me something to do: mopping. I haul out the bucket of bleach water while clumsily propping the mop against my shoulder and do a shuffle-walk towards the register.

The front bell goes kin kon and I slosh the sharp-smelling water on my pants, but at least I remember to shout out “welcome.” An all-too familiar voice responds and I reluctantly turn around, hoping Junko doesn’t notice my soaked pant leg. She does and cracks a joke at my expense, but I laugh to disarm her.

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Can you blame me for hating it here?

It’s been a little over a month since I first came to Japan. I hadn’t envisioned mastering Japanese in the first week per se, but I had been pretty good at Spanish in high school. I thought I’d be able to manage and, no offense to Kevin, I figured I’d at least be able to match his level of competency.

I grab a shiny chip bag that has what look like Cheetos pictured on the front with a Japanese woman wearing a headband threatening to take over her head completely. I can actually read that her speech bubble says “delicious.” A huge victory slightly deflated by the knowledge that I’m not able to read one word on a bag of chips.

I don’t know how much the fauxCheetos cost, but I have a 1000 yen bill folded up in my pocket that I borrowed from Kevin last week when I was short money for lunch and now will never have to pay back because we’re no longer dating. No longer Kevin and Regina.

For the past week I’ve mostly been wandering around the nearby neighborhoods. One of the things I actually like about Japan is that every time I step foot out my door I stumble upon something new, like a graveyard or an archery school or a giant badger statue. But seeing what I happen to stumble upon hasn’t always proven to be the best technique, like last week when I saw Kevin and her and they were – I suppress the memory as quick as I could.

Thank you Freud for psychodynamic theory.

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Can you blame me for hating it here?

Junko and I exchange barbs coated with sugar and pleasantries. She’s going into her second year at Waseda University. Didn’t I apply there once upon a time? Yes, but does she remember when we fought over Hiroshi and he dumped her during Silver Week to date me?

I smile and nod at all the right times and lean on the mop. I don’t have much to throw back at her besides old drama, which is the worst part. I want to take my mop and grind it into her smug face. I finally ask her if she needs help finding anything. Junko tells me no, just browsing, and she leaves me standing there, my pant leg dripping.

I can see the foreign girl, but I don’t think she can see me from where she is standing in the snack aisle. She’s staring at a bag of chips like it holds the secrets to all of life’s mysteries. Her bright blond hair is pulled back into a ponytail that sits high on her head and a small part of me wants to tug on it.

I shouldn’t be here. I fight a sudden, wild impulse to run out the door and not stop. I’m twenty years old. It should be me hunched over a book outside a convenience store studying for a college exam. And I mean actually studying, not reading Playboy. When people come in here I let them think I go to the university down the street. I talk about my classes and whether I would recommend the school and what I’m thinking of doing after I graduate. I don’t tell them I failed to get into any university at all.

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…Kevin has never been one of those people who lays everything out on the table. He prefers passive-aggressive tactics to all-out warfare and I like to pretend everything’s rainbow-scented puppies rather than accept that it’s a hard-knock life and move on.

We’d planned to study abroad together since we first started dating freshman year. He’s an East Asian studies major and I’m just a psychology major, so it made sense to go to Japan or China. I could study psych anywhere.

Japan would bring Kevin and me closer to one another.

I decide I need chocolate to further the healing process and pluck a hexagon-shaped box of Koala March cookies off the shelf to add to my snack pile. I don’t hear the Japanese clerk talking anymore, so I slowly walk over to the register.

She’s mopping and I don’t really know how to get her attention other than by awkwardly standing there. The boy who was smoking outside earlier looked like he might work at the store, but he’s nowhere in sight now. She finally notices me. “あ！すみません！長い時間 に待っていますか。” I blink at the fast stream of Japanese. There’s a lilt and a “ka” at the end of her sentence, which means she’s asking me a question. It’s silly, but sometimes I still expect to hear English when people start talking. Her short eyebrows furrow a little, but she quickly figures out that I have nothing to say and abandons the mop to stand behind the register.

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I dunk the end of my mop into the orange bucket full of soapy water and start sweeping the mop head across the floor. Mopping is pretty useless. I’m not really cleaning anything. I’m just pushing water around, killing time until I can go home and kill time there.

I shouldn’t have gambled the way I had. Applying to Waseda and only Waseda? So stupid. I want to go back in time and shake sense into high school me. I knew my test scores weren’t good enough, but still, I thought maybe life would make an exception for me. I should have settled.

When I received my rejection from Waseda, my father didn’t talk to me for two weeks. The only thing to do now is wait to re-take the entrance exam next year. Working here forever or one day becoming somebody’s housewife will not be my life. It just can’t.

I see the foreign girl out of the corner of my eye, but pretend I don’t in order to give myself a few more precious seconds of being me instead of a store clerk automaton. That’s what I hate most about this job: pretending. I force myself to stop mopping and meet her eyes.

“Sorry! You haven’t been waiting there long, have you?”

International students are always coming into the store to buy snacks or beer. Some of them can speak Japanese okay, others couldn’t do it to save their lives. This girl is obviously on the lower end of the spectrum. No big deal, though, because she and I don’t have to converse for me to help her check out. I prop the mop against the nearest shelf and go to the register.

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I slip a little on the wet floor and smile at her sheepishly. She smiles back, revealing teeth that overlap one another. She brushes back her reddish brown hair and deftly rings up the chips and cookies for me. I wonder if that’s what she looks like up close. Saki. Kevin’s dating a girl who shares her name with a drink. It’s like dating someone named Leinenkugel.

Even with the crooked teeth, she’s prettier than me. Is that a terrible thing to think? Probably. Saki is definitely prettier than me, though I try not to look at her when I see her around campus. I don’t think she knows who I am anyway.

The clerk gives me another smile, which I return. I’m like a baby here. I turn around and nearly run into another Japanese girl who I didn’t see standing behind me. She’s taller than most girls I see here and has her hair arranged in a beehive so that she seems even taller.

I murmur an apology to her in Japanese, but she doesn’t respond, which is fine by me. The boy who had been in front of the store earlier steps inside and we have an awkward moment of playing chicken with one another. I manage to bypass him and I’m nearly out the door when the boy tells me in surprisingly confident English that I forgot my bag.

I whirl around, face hot, and meet the girl clerk who’s followed me to the door. She’s carefully handing me my selfpity snacks when the tall Japanese girl behind her makes a sudden movement.

The Japanese clerk shouts as she falls forward toward me and I attempt to catch her, but we both slip in the water

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She steps too quickly across the soapy puddle, but catches herself before she falls. We share smiles. It’s funny how little things can pass through even the thickest of language barriers. Yuuki usually does the register, but he’s still loitering outside and she’s only buying some snacks. I pretend like I know what I’m doing as I punch the keys.

I place her things in a plastic bag.

Junko has returned to stand behind the foreign girl. She raises an eyebrow at me. I really wish Yuuki would get off his lazy butt and get back in here. I glance up at the girl between my bangs. Besides a slightly large nose, she’s quite pretty.

On second glance, she looks like she might start crying. I smile at her again, hoping it’ll look encouraging and not fake.

I watch her bump into Junko. I should have warned the foreign girl a mountain hag was standing beside her, but I didn’t think it would translate.

The foreign girl knows enough Japanese to tell Junko she’s sorry. Junko doesn’t say anything in return, though I know she heard her. The girl scurries away and Junko steps up to the register, though her hands are empty. Yuuki distracts me by shouting something in English to the girl. I forgot to give her the bag.

I fumble for it, ignoring Junko’s gaze as best I can. I step around the register to hand the bag to the girl with both hands and bow, as I’ve been trained to do, when suddenly I stumble forward, arms flailing.

I yell in surprise and try not to fall into the foreign girl, while she reaches out to catch me. We both hit the

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and crash to the ground. “痛い。。。“ The Japanese boy helps me up, apologizing in a jumbled mix of Japanese and English, while the Japanese clerk apologizes and I try to do the same in my own broken Japanese.

The only one not saying sorry is the girl who pushed the clerk.

“How can you be such a bitch?” I snap. I have no idea if she knows what I’m saying, but she can tell I’m not too pleased. “And how dare you push her!

Apologize! Now!” The Japanese boy’s eyes are wide, but the tall girl’s go narrow. “No,” she tells me. “I will not.”

“Yes, you will.” I’ve never done anything like this before, but I feel like a superhero.

I hold my ground and the Japanese boy says something to her. It’s hard to explain, but I need her to apologize. I need to know that I can still be myself here, that I’m not mute. If this were the United States I would never let someone get away with what the tall girl had done.

Finally, she mutters to the female clerk, “ごめん、かんあ。”That’s one word I know in Japanese: sorry. The tall girl pushes past me and marches out of the store. Whatever. I got her to apologize, didn’t I? I grin at the clerk I’ve helped and she smiles quickly at me in return, then goes back to mopping like nothing ever happened. I’ll never understand Japan.

32

ground hard, becoming entangled.

“Ow…” Yuuki hoists her up, leaving me to my own devices. What a gentleman.

We all start apologizing to one another, languages mixing and colliding unintelligibly. My pants are even more soaked now and the foreign girl’s aren’t much better.

Junko’s ears redden, so I know that the foreign girl called her something that wasn’t too polite. I feel my own face get hot as the foreigner continues to yell and make a scene.

No, Junko will not bend to the foreigner’s will. I hate her, but am envious of her stubbornness.

The foreign girl seems to be battling Junko for me, which makes me feel like a little kid.

Yuuki tells Junko that she better do what the foreigner says if she wants to end the embarrassment for all of us. I know the foreigner thinks she’s doing me a favor by helping me, but I hate that it now looks like I need protecting. I wonder if it would be more mortifying to stay here or walk out.

Junko, seeing no other way out, reluctantly tells me she’s sorry, which isn’t true, of course. She leaves and the foreign girl smiles at me like I should be thanking her. I just want to pretend like none of that ever happened, so I flash a weak smile and go back to mopping. I’m livid with everyone, but most of all myself. I put my forehead to the mop handle. What’s wrong with me?

33

“I’m really sorry about her,” the clerk tells me, though I don’t know which girl he’s referring to. “Really sorry,” he adds, this time with a small smile that creates a dimple in his right cheek. “I’m Yuuki.” “Regina.” He pushes his hair out of his eyes. “I go to the college too.”

I smile sincerely and tell him, “I’ll see you around then.” I leave the store, the bell above ringing when I shut the door. Once outside, it feels like all of Japan is waiting for me.

Here I come.

34

Yuuki is talking to the foreigner now.

He’s warming up to start flirting with her at any moment. Predictable. We’re all so predictable. Junko being a witch, Yuuki being a perv, and me. Me being too narrow-minded to consider anything, but Waseda and then getting rejected was painfully predictable.

But there are other schools.

Schools that will take me with the test scores I already have. I don’t have to wait another year for my life to start; it can start now. I let my mop fall.

Here I come.

35

RainForest 2020 #3 Peter Chamberlain

The Art of Mango Peeling Derek N. Otsuji

With an old pocketknife that creaked open and shut on a weary rustcrusted hinge, Grandpa would peel a mango, first making a clean cut beneath the milky stem, then slowly turning the fruit, cupped in his left hand, as he slid the steel blade (the handle held firmly in his right) against the curvature of the fruit, his thumb inching steadily down and around the slowly turning globe until the thick waxy skin unraveled before my eyes (A trick I could never repeat) a spool of autumnal ribbon green red and gold.

37

Urn

Derek N. Otsuji A copper urn no larger than a jar that might have held some buttons or some jam was placed in the family shrine. As a child, it was for me a still object of fear.

I imagined the tiny bones inside curled up tight like a sleeping baby bird.

Gardenias gathered round it, bloomed and died.

And each evening before the evening meal a tiny dollop of rice was served up before it in a tiny gold saucer afloat like a lily on a gold stem.

The child’s name was Hatsuko—three days old.

The second daughter of my grandmother, kept in an infant sleep, clenched like a tiny fist of the grief she bore, the death she keeps.

38

Bottles Joseph Han

My Dad calls me early evening and he sounds out of breath, tells me that I need to come over soon and bring Dave to have a final drink, the important one, before he leaves Hawai‘i.

I look outside from the entrance to our home and my Filipino neighbor is sweeping in the parking lot with her broom made of sticks. I hear the scraping against the gravel, the leaves crunching. There’s a layer of dust covering the screen door and a small moth in the corner by the thin metal bar.

Dave is on his laptop looking for a couch. The fabric on the old one that I’ve always used is tearing, and the holes have gotten bigger to show more of that mustard colored foam.

“Hey Emily, that your stepdad?”

“Yes, my Dad. We’re going over later.”

“So tonight’s the night, huh. A final toast, adios?”

“Bon voyage. But he means it this time.”

I remember that there’s laundry in the dryer so I go outside to cross the parking lot, step over a pile of leaves, and smile at my neighbor coming with a garbage bag. The moth flies around her face and she whacks it away.

Last time we went over Dad promised something better.

Dad held the glass near his chest with a slow twirl, gazing into it as if it were a black hole of blood. He wanted us to take the rest of the bottle home because he said it was delightful, but I knew he was lying. Not enough depth and complexity. He probably thought that for all of them. Even though we were supposed to 39

leave it out in room temperature, it’s still there at the back of the fridge where Dave left it. The laundry isn’t done yet so I go back inside and pour myself a glass of water. I don’t know why but I swirl it and spill some on the floor.

In the drawer near the sink I look for a rag but inside I find a cork, half of it a light purple. In June, Dad gave up on his few retired friends who said they knew where to dine and drink around the island because he was disappointed that they were wrong. He bought a lot of the cheap stuff, and after a while it wasn’t about tasting a lot of bad to know what’s better.

Refinement. Another lie that gave him license to get drunk. He complained about the weather—gets too hot, gets too cold, rains too randomly, Waikiki condo’s too expensive to rent compared to the home he still had in LA. Then he threw the bottle at the wall. After he apologized and after Dave finished yelling at him, I grabbed the cork because I wanted to buy the same bottle so I could drink the whole thing, just to spite him. I clasped it tight in my hand on the way home and I thought I could crush it into powder if I did it long enough. I give it another squeeze and still can’t do it.

While I’m in the shower Dave comes in to take a shit. I take my time washing my face whenever Norman Bates tries to kill me with that smell instead of a knife. Lavender works the best. Up in the ceiling light there’s a little roach or some bug running in circles.

“Hey, you see that up there?”

“You know Emily, your stepdad ages like wine. He gets more bitter every time we go there. Me? I’m a beer guy.”

There’s the occasional crap sound that’s even louder when he pauses.

40

“Yeah you are. You get stale.”

“I see it.”

Dad was so excited when he called last December, and this was around the time Dave was moving in. On the phone he was saying that he saw it as a vacation, a get away, or maybe a place to retire. He said he’s been to places to taste and explore but he has never taken the time to kick back, relax, and enjoy, like in a Corona commercial. Nowhere else to go but paradise.

I didn’t see Dad for a while but he always called on-again-offagain to tell me what he was up to. But maybe he really came because I look so much like mom. The toilet flushes, the water gets hotter, and Dave plays with the light switch.

We get to the parking lot and Dad is already there in the washing area wiping down his rental car. He’s not wearing his usual red-checkered pajama pants but khaki shorts instead. He has a new haircut. We follow him inside the familiar condo and he signs in for our guest-parking stall and then we go upstairs.

Empty bottles line the hallway. White wines on one side, reds on the other, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were ordered by year. They could be runway lights that guide dad to takeoff.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m going to recycle them.”

Four glasses are set on the table in the dining area and the metal tray is still in the middle full of corks. Most of them are from Napa Valley, the last place he drank wine with Mom, and most of them mom had insisted on keeping so they could remember to buy them later. A few are from Tuscany, Sicily, Spain, and France. They really went everywhere together. Those were vacations. Whenever we had dinner and drank wine here, 41

he’d always fish out a cork to negatively compare the night’s selection with that particular one. He must have done that for every single one by now, with us or on his own. He won’t do that tonight.

He brings the one, the Richebourg ’74, holding one side with a towel. He pours starting with mine, then Dave’s, then his, and then the fourth glass and raises it to the light. The maroon looks transparent rather than that deep color it has without the shine.

“What makes you so sure about leaving this time?”

Dave says.

“I’m about sick of this damn island. I don’t know how you folks can stand it. The heat can drive a body nuts. There’s nothing to do around here on this exotic hell hole.”

Dave looks at me and raises his eyebrows. In the windowpanes I see our hazy reflections.

“Well for one thing I thought I could get used to it. But I can’t. And there’s nothing good to eat around here. All the same ol’ shit. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had a deli, a good roast beef sandwich? And don’t even get me started on the...”

“Whine. That’s all you do, Dad,” I say. “Can we please just enjoy tonight? Especially tonight?”

No one says a thing. The carpet by the wall is still stained, but I could tell a lot has been scrubbed out since the last time.

“So I heard from my buddy,” Dave says twirling his glass, “that the more tears a wine has the better the quality it is.” He looks at me, points at the glass, and traces his finger on one of the streams trickling down after the wine settles to the 42

bottom.

I squeeze my knee waiting for his response. “Bullshit.”

Dad twirls his glass. “More tears means more alcohol content.

Doesn’t have anything to do with quality.”

Dave nudges me with his toe under the table. I look for the tears, but I can’t tell if they are a lot or a little.

“I hope you’ll be happy when you move back,” Dave says.

“Yes Dad, I worry about you.”

“It’s not about being happy.” Dad glances at the fourth glass. “It’s about choosing what to value among variety.”

I’m not sure what Dad was like before. For some reason I always imagine him as a bum sleeping on a freight train before he met Mom. I guess it’s that beard he can get sometimes. Then mom sees him and hops on the train to LA, bringing glasses and a bottle to keep them warm at nights. But then she’s gone, the glasses are broken, and Dad has to drink straight from the bottle. I’m not sure if I’m on the same train or maybe another one, or if Dave is keeping me warm.

“Anyway, I’ve been saving this bottle for a long time.”

Dad stands up and his oily forehead shines in the light. “And the thing about something like this, it has to be shared. So with that said, lets have a toast. To value.”

I stop the dull ringing of the glass with my lips. I close my eyes with the first sip and I think of Dad and how I may never see him again. I feel the heat moving down my chest. He taps his glass on the fourth one before taking his sip and holds it in his mouth a while before swallowing, his lips as if he was savoring a kiss. Dad goes to the kitchen and brings back an orange funnel, puts it in the bottle and pours the fourth glass of 43

wine back.

Before Dad gets into the rental car to go to the airport, he hands me a box. I open it and it’s full of corks.

“I can’t take these,” I tell him.

“Honey, of course you can. You have to.” He called Mom “honey” all the time. I only really started calling Uncle Anthony “Dad” after mom passed away. Then I watch him go without all the corks but with just the one inside the rest of that bottle.

He calls me when he gets to LA, tells me how great it is and tells me how he misses me and Dave and Hawai‘i, and then how he had forgotten how bad traffic was over there. He says he’s going to visit Mom’s grave, and I know he’s going to pour her the remainder of the bottle. I don’t know where he’ll go from there, but I expect another call. I don’t know why, but I think of Michael Corleone at the end of The Godfather III, which Dave made me watch, and how he remembers past dances and falls off a chair and dies.

I hang up and stare out the screen door at the entrance.

I get a wet paper towel and wipe off the dust and keep looking outside. There’s a roach crawling across the concrete and I wonder if it came down from the bathroom ceiling light.

“Are the movers here yet, Emily? What are you looking at?”

They pull in the parking lot and two big men come out and carry the couch that Dave ordered. I hold the screen door open, but as they try to get the couch inside it doesn’t fit through the doorway.

44

Artifice Tory Adkisson

As with cave walls & vintage clothing racks, I explored your body first by touch.

Touch, always preceding taste.

After a few months of looking out for each other, we settled into our bric-a-brac like ovenbirds.

You deloused me daily.

You had such a gorgeous way of singing acapella. It seemed percussion & wood would only get in the way.

We kept the earth around us tidy for a little while, until we heard the tin wire unravel, the leaves come unglued, & the eggs tumble, raptured from their nest.

45

Husbandry Tory Adkisson

He pressed his flesh against hers. It was night & I was wandering to the bathroom.

She brayed, set down haunches so he could mount her, baring his teeth as she yelped.

I clung to the doorknob.

In darkness, they never saw me.

I thought he was eating her, that his bite was meant to kill.

Gradually, their bodies succumbed to the fire that seared their backs raw.

I felt the ground swell beneath my feet & scampered back to bed.

In a matter of seconds they shook me awake, led me beneath the kitchen table so we could duck, heads tucked between our legs, waiting for the earth to stop shaking, to understand how painful & useless it is to open up.

46

The Mulvaney

Family

Parade of Death Ande Davis

The Mulvaneys drew stares from the neighbors sitting on their porches or watching out big picture windows.

“What’s going on there, Mulvaney?” Mr. Valentine asked. He’d been poking at a stubborn bed of tulips in his front lawn when the parade approached his property, two down from the Mulvaney house.

“Just a parade,” Mr. Mulvaney said. “Nothing too strange.”

Mr. Valentine watched the twins go past. “Then why’re the Bobbseys in their pajamas?” He pointed at Claudette in her fur coat and rubber dish gloves. “Why’s she dressed like Elizabeth Taylor’s housemaid?”

“Just having a little fun, Mr. Valentine,” Mrs. Mulvaney said.

“Looks like.”

“Boys, stay on the sidewalk.” She ran to catch Thomas and Kevin, who were alternately treading too close to the street and the neighbors’ flowerbeds.

47

Claudette stopped and looked up at Mr. Valentine. “It’s a funeral. We’re burying Marbles.”

“Marbles don’t die. They’re made of glass.”

“No, stupid. Marbles is our hamster.”

Mr. Valentine started to call down the sidewalk to Mrs. Mulvaney, who was wrestling with her two young boys in the Giordanos’ driveway next door, and tell her to watch her daughter’s nasty habit of mouthing off to elders, but Claudette interrupted him.

“Your flowers are dead,” she said, “because Mrs. Valentine puts weed killer on them. A lot of it.”

He stooped and poked at his wilted tulips. “What do you know?” he grumbled. His wife always yelled at him about his muddy fingers, told him that one day she’d have a lilac bush growing out of her because he forgot to wash up before bed.

“Scram,” he said.

That morning, four of the seven Mulvaney children, as

well as Mr. Mulvaney, had passed by the hamster’s cage—set on top of the bureau in the living room—before Claudette, the youngest, noticed Marbles wasn’t moving. His little pink hamster feet jolted out from his fuzzy brown body, stiff and supine on the cage floor, next to his wheel in the spot where the cedar shavings and shredded newspaper had been scuttled away to his nest inside an empty paper cup toppled on its side.

“Marbles is dead,” Claudette called down the hallway.

Heads popped out of doorways like sideways prairie dogs.

“Are you sure? He’s not just sleeping?” Mrs. Mulvaney asked from the furthest doorway. Claudette stalked off to the dining room while mumbling to herself that she knew what 48

a dead hamster looked like. Mrs. Mulvaney cinched the belt on her robe and walked down the hallway to see the cage for herself. The hamster was dead.

The parade was Veronica’s idea. She brought it up with the family gathered around the cage in the living room to see the body.

“Told you,” Claudette said as Mrs. Mulvaney lifted Marbles from the cedar bedding.

Mr. Mulvaney smirked until he caught Mrs. Mulvaney’s glare. They’d been fighting, again, not an hour before, and now wasn’t the time to renew it. Not in front of the children.

“That’s no way to talk to your mother,” he said, keeping a laugh suppressed just beneath the surface of his voice.

“Melissa and I think we should have a parade,” Veronica said. She and Melissa were twins—the two oldest Mulvaney children. Melissa rarely spoke; Veronica usually did all the talking for them. Melissa was actually quite dull as far as people go. The Mulvaneys all agreed Veronica got the lion’s share of the personality in the womb.

“A parade sounds fun. Like they do in New Orleans— jazz and dancing,” Mr. Mulvaney said. “I think I have some old zydeco records in the basement.”

“No, no, no.” Melissa shook her head and waved her arms. “We hate jazz. No, what we were thinking is a death parade.”

She wanted each person to dress up how they wanted to die, and they’d march past all the houses down the street and end up at the park where they would bury Marbles.

Mr. Mulvaney fidgeted with the bag in his hand, which he intended to fling into the trash with the dead hamster inside.

49

He tried to figure out a reason not to have his family tromping through the streets, costumed, in the middle of June. It was one thing to prance around the house to “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and quite another to take the insanity of his family public.

Claudette jumped around the living room. “I know what I’m going to be,” she shouted, then raced down the hall to her room. Veronica smiled and pulled Melissa by the arm to their room and closed the door.

They were dressed within an hour and out the door.

Six of the Mulvaney children marched along the sidewalk in costume, with their parents tagging along toward the park.

Oliver led the way. Marbles belonged to Oliver, the third of seven Mulvaney children. He’d banked his allowance for four months and mowed lawns for a summer to save up enough to buy a ferret. That was the deal he’d struck with his parents— Mrs. Mulvaney would tolerate a rodent in the house as long as she or Mr. Mulvaney didn’t have to pay for it, feed and water it, or clean its cage. When they got to the pet store and learned the ferrets were sold out, Oliver bought a hamster and used the rest of the money for a skateboard. Of course, Mrs. Mulvaney eventually ended up caring for the hamster herself, a fact she had brought up that very morning in an argument with her husband, an argument that had been raging for the past yearand-a-half.

Oliver wore a camouflage jacket punctuated front and back with several bullet-sized holes, fake blood applied around each one and running down to the hem. Under his arm, he carried one of Claudette’s old shoeboxes with TANK written in large marker letters on all sides, even the bottom. Tank was 50

the name Oliver had given the hamster while still at the pet store. He said he would train the first-ever guard hamster. He would teach Tank to growl at intruders, bite thieves, keep his little brothers out of his stuff. Later, while the family watched him pack sunflower seeds into his cheeks, Mrs. Mulvaney commented that he looked like he was carrying marbles in his mouth. Everyone in the house took to calling him Marbles except Oliver, who, for a year afterward, insisted his name was Tank. After a year, calling him Tank simply became a calm and persistent protest against the rest of his family. By that point, he’d given up on the training and lost most of his interest in both the hamster and the skateboard bought with his summer money.

Next came Mr. Mulvaney, necktie knotted like a noose around his neck and draped over his shoulder. Veronica and Melissa followed, wearing their pajamas. Nobody noticed the red marker lines poking out from under Melissa’s shirt cuffs as she silently trundled along—not even Veronica, busy talking to Claudette behind her. Claudette wore the fake fur coat she’d gotten from her grandmother the previous Christmas, with pink dish gloves and pink galoshes, and drew whiskers on her cheeks with her sisters’ eyeliner. She was a dead hamster.

“You’re just looking to piss me off?” Mrs. Mulvaney had said when her daughter emerged from her room. Claudette pretended to burrow around on the carpet and puffed out her cheeks like she’d packed them full of food. After spending most of the past hour fighting with her husband, Mrs. Mulvaney gave up the hamster fight. Her costume was a construction paper heart, torn in half and taped to her shirt.

The two younger boys wove between the rest of the 51

family, their arms stretched in front of them, each with a red blanket tied around his neck. They were Superman. They misunderstood.

Hannah Mulvaney wouldn’t do it. She absolutely refused to partake in such a morbid, macabre, mortifying spectacle. That was how she put it to her father when he came into her room to ask why she wasn’t joining the parade. She was the fourth of the seven children, but acted much older than she actually was. At the time, she was embroiled in a challenge set forth by her mother to read the dictionary over the summer— that morning, she had been reading M.

“I know, it’s sick,” her father said, “but we need to do it.” He stood and watched Hannah read for a full minute before he silently turned and walked down the hallway. In the living room, Mrs. Mulvaney looked at him expectantly. He shook his head, and herded the children out the door.

“Hannah’s not coming?” Veronica said.

“It’s her costume,” Claudette said. “She wants to die alone.”

Hannah watched her parents, brothers, and sisters disappear around the house on the corner, heading toward the park two blocks down, then she laid her dictionary on the floor next to her bed and went to her parents’ room. The two rooms shared a wall, so late at night she could hear the battles her parents waged when they thought everyone was asleep. Her parents tried to keep their voices down, but Hannah could still hear the words as if they were inside her closet. Through the wall, she found out her grandmother was currently undergoing last-ditch chemotherapy treatments that weren’t working and 52

would soon be joining the ranks of Marbles the hamster.

For the past year-and-a-half, their fights tended to revolve around their marriage. Her parents’ latest fight had happened just the night before.

“What do you mean, time apart? Do you want a divorce?” Mrs. Mulvaney said.

Mr. Mulvaney said something too low for Hannah to hear it clearly, but she understood when her mother said, “How can I keep it down, when you sit there and say you want to leave your family? What kind of man—?” Hannah heard rustling, then footsteps stomping across the room.

“Why?” Mrs. Mulvaney said. “What’s your reason?”

“This isn’t a fucking reason?” Mr. Mulvaney shouted.

Hannah looked to see if the shouting had awakened Claudette, but she was still asleep, sucking on the middle two fingers of her right hand.

“We have seven children. Seven,” Mrs. Mulvaney said.

“Exactly. Seven. Christ, I’m suffocating.”

Hannah heard crying and then murmuring she couldn’t understand, and she soon found herself crying as well. She wanted to swing open the door to her parents’ room and start punching her father in every sensitive place she could find on his body. How could he think to leave? How could anyone just forget his responsibility to eight other people?

At first, she tried to talk to her family about what she’d heard, but didn’t get far. Hannah never got more than a couple words into a conversation with Veronica before they inevitably ended up talking about Christmas lights or Tim Burton movies.

Melissa was a bore. Oliver shoved Hannah out of his room and slammed the door as soon as she walked in. She couldn’t bring 53

herself to talk to her younger siblings. She resigned herself to sitting in the dark and listening to her parents fight. There was a point a few months ago when it seemed all the fighting had ended, that divorce was no longer on the table. They had stopped arguing for a week before Hannah realized that her mother had been spending that time sleeping on the couch. That Saturday morning she walked out to the living room to see her mother stretched out across the cushions, still sleeping. Mrs. Mulvaney stirred awake to see Hannah staring, face scrunched and red, deep furrows in her forehead. That night she went back to sleeping in her bed and the arguments resumed.

The window in her parents’ room looked out into the backyard, the dirt-crusted playhouse along the back fence and the graveyard of broken toys clustered in one corner of the yard, a tangle of weeds coiling through bent bicycle wheels and punching through the panels of deflated balls. She didn’t play in the yard as much as her brothers and sisters did. Mostly, she shut the door to her room and read while everyone else forgot about her. Claudette was right, in a way. If Hannah could choose how to die, it would be alone. She’d live alone if legally allowed. She used to envy Marbles in his little cage—sure, it kept him in, but more importantly, it kept everyone else out.

For some time, she’d wanted to come into her parents’ room and find clues about why they were fighting. They fought about everything, but her father couldn’t possibly be thinking of leaving over burnt waffles or Marbles’s piss-soaked cage lining. There had to be some hidden affair like she’d read about in novels, or maybe Oliver—of course it would be Oliver—had done something terrible to drive them apart. The clues would be in this room. She would find them before her family came back 54

and figure out a plan to save them all.

The clouds had been gathering all day. By the time the Mulvaneys had reached the park, the sky was overcast and the wind had picked up. The family gathered under a tree just beyond the picnic shelter and Mr. Mulvaney started digging a hole.

“Make sure it’s deep enough that the dogs won’t dig it up,” Mrs. Mulvaney said.

“Gross,” Claudette said. “I don’t want to think of dogs tossing around the dead hamster. What if they played tug-of-war with it?” She lifted the box lid and peeked in. “What if his guts splattered all over the dogs? Like, it’s a poodle and the kidney and the stomach and stuff get knotted up in its hair?”

Mrs. Mulvaney turned her attention to the other children.

“Boys, quit running around and come back over here.”

“They’re fine,” Mr. Mulvaney said.

She shot him a dirty look and sat down at a picnic table.

The humidity had been rising to the point where the wind did nothing to cool her. It was hot and sticky and felt like rain.

“Shit,” she said, standing quickly. “I forgot to turn off the oven.” She took off across the park before anyone could reply.

She knew, of course, that nobody had used the oven that day, and even if they had, it was a brand new electric oven that posed no real risk of damaging anything. She simply wanted to go home, lie down. As much as she loved her family, there were times—like when Claudette was being extra snotty, or the boys were trying to kill each other, or when her husband was being an absolute prick—she needed to be home and pretend they didn’t exist. She kicked off her shoes inside the front door and headed toward her bedroom. The door to Hannah and 55

Claudette’s room was closed. Hannah must have been inside sleeping or reading. She crept into her room and quietly shut herself in.

With the window cracked, she could hear the breeze rattling the leaves outside in spastic fits. Lying on top of the bedclothes, Mrs. Mulvaney could appreciate the percussive outbursts for what was missing—the clamor of a houseful of children all needing something with the urgency of the dying.

She reached into the drawer of her nightstand and pulled out her wooden jewelry box, then dumped all the contents onto the bed next to her. The box had a false bottom, inside of which she kept a couple joints. She opened both windows fully and lit one.

She smoked in the warm breeze blowing into the room and let the tingling of the smoke seep from her lungs into her brain. The jewelry box smelled of lemons from the furniture polish she used, and the odor became so intensely clear that, as she lay on her bed, she had the distinct impression of floating down a meandering river on top of a lemon meringue pie. She felt light, the inside of her eyelids comfortably fuzzy, like a chenille throw. She was perfectly willing to let the current carry her down and away, the wind reach across and fondle her skin. Then she heard a sneeze. She sat upright and the surge of adrenaline rushed the fuzziness from her eyes. They must be coming home. She looked out the window, but couldn’t see any of her family parading down the street in their silly costumes.

She stood to peek out the window, trying to wave the smoke and the smell outside with wild movements of her arms.

If her family were to walk in and see her now, they would think she was trying to perform the butterfly stroke up the wall.

Another sneeze and all her movements froze.

56

It came from behind her.

A stifled cough. Was that under the bed?

She pulled one of her husband’s golf clubs from his bag in the closet and stooped next to the bed. Using the handle end, she rattled it around underneath the dust ruffle as if she were stirring a large sideways vat of something until she heard a girl’s voice grunt. Hannah scurried out from under the foot of the bed and stood up.

“You frightened the shit out of me,” Mrs. Mulvaney said.

“Is that the smell?” Hannah said.

“Out.” Mrs. Mulvaney pointed to the door and followed Hannah into the living room.

“What are you doing home?”

Mrs. Mulvaney sat on the couch, Hannah in the window seat. “I thought I left the oven on.”

Hannah regarded her mother for a long moment, surveying her glassy eyes and red face, then turned to watch out the window. “Are we going to have to do another one of these parades for Grandma?” she said.

“No, don’t be ridicu—” Mrs. Mulvaney paused. “How do you know about Grandma?”

The bushes at the end of the driveway swayed as the wind picked up. To Hannah, they seemed to be shaking their heads, telling her No. Don’t. “I don’t remember,” she said.

“Maybe Veronica. Or Dad.”

“Your grandmother would shit a cow if she thought we’d do one of these stupid parades for her. Absolutely shit a cow.”

Mrs. Mulvaney laughed to herself and let her gaze get lost in the curtains. “Not even a cow. A bull. She’d shit a bull. One that 57

would come tearing right for me and gore out my eyes. That’s your grandmother—go right for the fucking eyes.”

“Don’t swear in front of your children,” Hannah said.

“Sorry, Mom.” Mrs. Mulvaney stared intently at the pattern in the curtains, little peaks forming mountains, forming arrows that pointed her gaze to the ceiling, to the darkening clouds, to the stratosphere, and the satellites beyond, and the worlds beyond those. “I didn’t mean it. Sorry, Mom,” she said.

Mrs. Mulvaney continued to sink further into the couch cushions, not registering anything in the room, the two halves of the paper heart she’d attached to her shirt hanging off by the masking tape.

“Do you want to die of a broken heart?” Hannah said.

Mrs. Mulvaney rocked her head back and forth slowly for a moment before speaking. “It’s supposed to be a heart attack.”

“It looks like a broken heart.”

“It might be. Who knows? Everyone dies of a broken heart eventually.”

Hannah looked to the bushes, which were still shaking, telling her not to say a word, then she turned to her mother. “Is that going to happen when Dad leaves?”

Mrs. Mulvaney forced her gaze down to her daughter, the creases on Hannah’s face sinking into her skin like bottomless gorges. She seemed to be imploding, her forehead ground zero. She looked undeniably old and frail, reminding Mrs. Mulvaney of how far beyond her years her daughter usually behaved, a seventy-four-year-old woman forced to live as an eleven-year-old girl.

“That’s not going to happen,” she said. She held her 58

arms wide and Hannah moved from the window seat onto the couch. Mrs. Mulvaney stroked her hair and rested her cheek on her daughter’s head. She could feel her warmth against Hannah’s, combining to create a blazing furnace.

“I can hear you,” Hannah said. “At night. You argue and he says he’s going to leave.”

“He’s not leaving,” Mrs. Mulvaney said. If he left, she thought, then they would have another parade. She could bury their marriage in a box, maybe her little jewelry box, and they’d all dress in their best broken hearts.

The rain started falling as Mr. Mulvaney patted down the dirt over Marbles’s grave. The funeral had been embarrassing and irreverent, and having to parade back through the neighborhood in an oncoming thunderstorm only made his feelings about the afternoon darken. He corralled the two younger boys finally and got them ready for the return trek home, and now Claudette was lying next to the hamster grave, pretending to be dead.

“There’s no time for this,” he said to her, gesturing Veronica and Oliver to start heading toward the house with the rest of the children. He walked to where Claudette lay and stood over her, saying her name in increasingly higher decibels, never eliciting so much as a flinch from her.

“Your mother isn’t here. No reason to pretend. Nobody to annoy, except me.” Still, she didn’t move. The rain continued to amplify around them, and still she didn’t move. He toyed with the idea, however briefly, of leaving her lying in the park, in the rain, until she decided she’d had enough and walked on home. There was no way his wife would have let him in the 59

house without all the children, and he wasn’t entirely sure how long Claudette would continue her games. She could be more stubborn than anyone he knew, his wife included. His wife had refused to let him leave the marriage until he could give her one good reason. He had stayed this long even though everyone in the house was slowly dying, every beat of their hearts getting weaker and weaker. He needed out before he wasted away, too.

He picked Claudette up and swung her limply over his shoulder, striding home as quickly as possible. Her fur coat promptly became soaked and matted, making her heavier by the minute. Mr. Mulvaney continued to lecture her as he walked.

“You need to stop taking your frustrations with your mother out on me.”

No response.

“You’re too old to be pulling these kinds of stunts.”

Still nothing.

Mr. Valentine stood behind his screen door as they passed his house. “That one fall asleep on you?” he shouted across his lawn. From the sidewalk, Mr. Mulvaney barely heard him over the pounding rain.

“She’s just horsing around, having a good time.”

“At least you’ve got one under control. And the smartmouth to boot. The rest’ll have to learn to stay out of my flowerbed.” Mr. Valentine closed his door.

Mr. Mulvaney looked at the flowerbed, at the flooded shoeprints crisscrossing the mud that he knew belonged to Kevin or Thomas, at the larger ones from Oliver that cut a straight angle across and toward their house. He sunk his own sneaker into a corner that had been untouched and watched the water fill it as he stepped away. “I’m leaving. I’m moving out 60

on all of you. Today. This afternoon,” he said to Claudette as they turned onto their front walk.

She didn’t stir one bit.

He walked in the front door and dropped her on the loveseat. “She’s your problem,” he told Mrs. Mulvaney and went to the bedroom. Mrs. Mulvaney, still high, or at the fringes of being high, followed him down the hall, yelling at him about putting Claudette’s wet coat on the furniture. Hannah went to her own room.

Claudette wasn’t pretending. She lay on the couch growing colder and colder as her coat created a giant wet spot in the fabric. Her feet in their little pink galoshes rested on one arm of the loveseat. One arm trailed off the side of the couch, her fingers in the pink dish gloves grazing the carpet. Nobody could have been more surprised than she had been when her heart stopped. Everything went black and was gone. In fact, nobody else was surprised. Nobody knew.

In spite of Claudette dead on the sofa, the afternoon at the Mulvaney house continued at a chaotic pace, with Mr. and Mrs. Mulvaney shouting as he packed suitcases full of clothes.

The children fluttered from room to room, trying to figure out what was happening, what was going to happen.

“They’re getting a divorce,” Hannah said. Oliver and Veronica shook their heads and offered up other theories.

Veronica said they were fighting about Claudette, if they should sell her or give her to an orphanage. Oliver said they were fighting about Veronica’s stupid parade, starting an argument and eventually a fistfight between the two.

“Is it okay to change out of my pajamas now?” Melissa 61

asked. Hannah nodded.

When Mr. Mulvaney emerged from the bedroom with a suitcase in each hand, the children watched him down the hallway and out the door.

END

62

Ghost State Norah Charles

That morning, snow came. Before dawn there was only the interminable rain, and the sky seemed to hang all the way to the street outside the apartment building. Then, through the dark, snow started, each flake icy and hard, like buckshot.

White pellets stacked on the sill outside the living room window. Even those touching the glass remained frozen and perfectly spherical. Cash’s breath made a film on the pane and was immediately erased once he leaned back in his chair.

For as long as he could remember, it had never snowed on his wife Lorraine’s birthday. If she’d been alive, she would have thrown a fit. She always called herself a spring bird because her birthday heralded the true end of winter, even up north, where the Indiana cold could drag into early May. Like a bird come up from Mexico, I am she always told him. Cash guessed he’d be able to see his breath inside the apartment within an hour.

The night before he’d been sure that today, May eighteen, would be the day, although it might extend into nighttime. His long-standing headache had finally broken, and now he was only weak, and all of his bodily functions seemed to hum as one. Eleven days had passed since he’d eaten, and by all accounts, the moment should have come to him already.

Three weeks earlier, on a Tuesday afternoon, he’d 63

thought about calling the shuttle for a ride to the grocery store because he only had half a stick of butter left, and the milk was running low. He nearly rose to call the service because he didn’t want to forget that he needed groceries, even though the butter stick would have reminded him later. Instead he thought about how many times he’d taken the shuttle to the grocer over the last six years that he’d lived in the apartment on Ashley. He thought about the preternatural silence of the shuttle, how the driver barely spoke to him and how the driver always changed but his grocery list was always the same: frozen peas, whole milk, can of coffee, chuck roast, short bread cookies, bismuth, aspirin, bananas, saltines, potatoes, onion for frying, butter, black tea, rye bread and orange juice. He thought about this list and its steadfast ability to please him and felt suddenly unmoved. There were small joys that came with the grocery list: the thrill of breaking the seal on the can of coffee and the scent of onions frying, too. But it occurred to him that afternoon that those joys were infinitesimal and silly and that the grocery list and the trip to Ace’s Supermarket had become the outermost perimeter of a life that had reached its physical limit. He looked at the coffee can on the counter and felt a jolt of disgust. Then he flicked a bread crumb off the table and onto the linoleum. He could not remember the last time any one of the shuttle drivers had spoken to him beyond the tiny pleasantries that were required of them to keep their jobs. Hi, Mr. Warren. Going to Ace’s? Of course he was.

Once he’d made up his mind, he ate what was left of the bananas and roast that day, and each day after he ate enough, but not too much, until eleven days ago when he had twentytwo tea bags and three cookies left. At around 6 p.m. he boiled 64

water, let the bag steep strong and put the three cookies on a plate. He carried them to the table and sat down. For a moment he felt alarmed that he hadn’t saved the meat, which would have lasted longer in his stomach. He remembered Lorraine’s family grace. For the blessings we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen. Afterward, he washed and dried his dishes and unplugged the refrigerator.

Now the physical pangs of hunger had long passed and were replaced by a watchfulness he could not remember ever feeling before in his lifetime. Thoughts of Louisiana, Lorraine’s home state, plagued him day and night. For everything, he could not remember where the place stood, east or west of Texas, and there were no maps buried in the apartment to help him find his way.

Lorraine had always told him there was a cemetery in Shreveport where he should send her body to be buried if she died before him, but he hadn’t listened to her. Instead, he kept her remains in a tin urn in the kitchen cupboard, right beside the coffee can. In the three decades that had elapsed since her death, he often felt her asking him why he’d not done exactly as she’d told him to do. Cash is a selfish man, like all men he could hear her say. He knew the time had long passed to make good on her wishes, but he believed that if he could remember where Shreveport was, he could forgive himself of his selfishness before passing.

His initial intention was to bury her at St. Patrick’s so he could be close to her, but the church refused to allow it. She liked to swear and gossip about the neighbors, yet she was pious and inscrutable in her own way, and he believed she deserved a Catholic burial like her father and her father’s father. Lorraine 65

never talked about home, but she often told him, “I’m not going back until daddy gives up the ghost, that son-of-a-bitch, but I’ll be damned if Louisiana is not the best place to lay a body down.” After three days of arguing with St. Patrick’s, Cash decided to cremate her and had kept her in the cupboard ever since.

Since the day her body came back, Cash had stored every photo he had of her in a box that he never opened. To see Lorraine’s face was to look into a well with no bottom. That morning though, he knew it would be the last time he could see her as she had been, and he’d pulled the box from the closet in his bedroom. Now he steadied it on his lap, ran a finger beneath the yellowed tape and slid the lid onto the floor.

The box contained only a handful of pictures, all of them face down. Somewhere he’d heard that the dead preferred their photos to be turned downward, that it freed them to move to the endpoint of their purgatories, unimpaired. He overturned a photo of her lying on the beach of Lake Michigan, and a current ran through the left side of his head. If a person had told him in 1975 that he would still feel sick when he saw her picture thirty years later, he wouldn’t have believed it. Rattled, maybe. Sick, no. But it was true; looking at her face, he felt like his old body was rolling away at sea.

Staring at her face in those photographs, he seemed to remember everything about her at once, and she was all around him again like a specter. He remembered she liked her tea with four spoons of sugar, and she had curly brown hair. He recalled something strange about her tooth brushing habits. Baking soda and witch hazel. Her ankles. The way she looked stricken by grief whenever she prayed. He even thought he could hear her 66

voice saying Cash? Cash? like they were both in the dark, and she couldn’t see him.

He flipped through the photos and found another, 1974, when she was six months pregnant with the last one. She seemed a woman possessed by joy, a being inhabited by the spirit of something beyond her. Only two weeks later, that baby would be dead just like the others that had come before it.

In 1960, after only three dates, she had agreed to marry Cash. She declared that her single wish in the world was to be a mother and that anything Cash did would be eclipsed by the joy her children would give her. She told him all of this with alacrity the day before their wedding, and at first it made him angry because every man wants to be needed. Then he realized that every woman he’d ever known had loved her children more than her husband.

Prior to his marriage to Lorraine, Cash thought it would be easy to make a baby because his whole life he’d been warned not to do it. He imagined it would be as simple as heating a can of soup. After the wedding, in two month’s time, she was pregnant, and he believed his life would progress the way all lives did: matrimony, children, retirement.

Five months into the pregnancy, he came home one night from his shift at Faber Ironworks to find her in the bathtub with a stillborn wrapped in a hand towel.

“Let me have it,” he’d said, taking the baby away. She screamed and bit his hand until it bled.

He knew he should have done something, but he did not know what to do, so he just tried harder. Three more miscarriages, all in bad places: a shopping mall, the movie theater and once at the train station before she was set to ride 67

back to Louisiana for her son-of-a-bitch father’s long-awaited funeral.

One night Cash came to bed drunk and suggested they do it like the people in pornographic novels. When she refused to have it any other way than God’s way, he said, “Well, maybe you don’t get it at all then. You can’t get pregnant without me.”

“What I am doing is civilized!” she said. “Maybe it’s you, Cash. Maybe you’re fucked up in the dick.” But they both knew that was not true.

Cash pushed himself up from the chair by the window and stumbled into the kitchen. The cupboards were bare except for a box of black tea bags and a cluster of stains from phantom canned goods. The urn was tarnished and looked abused from sitting in the cupboard for so long. He licked his thumb and tried to polish the tin, but it only left a smeared fingerprint across the metal.

The day his wife died floated through his mind like a grain of dirt across his eye. It was a Thursday. He’d left her the way he always did before work: coiled beneath the bedspread with a pillow on top of her head. He’d stopped saying goodbye a long time before. She told him to leave her alone in the morning; she needed all the sleep she could get. She said she felt her body wanted to become as still as a snail. He had no idea how long she slept, and he never asked. But many nights, when he came home after work, she was still in her housecoat, and the house looked like it was frozen in time.

The cold was a stiff blanket wrapping itself around him in the kitchen, and he could see his breath cloud in front of his mouth when he exhaled. There was a fluttering in his chest that lifted and twitched when he thought of her, like a body about 68

to take flight. He clutched the urn beneath his arm and walked back toward the bedroom, running his left hand along the wall.

He stopped at the threshold and steadied himself against the door jamb before entering the room.

The bed was already made. It irritated him that he had to rumple it again after working so hard that morning to tuck in the sheet while it was still dark. He walked to the bedside, and a garbage truck groaned behind the apartment building. Snow on Lorraine’s birthday. There were too many things he couldn’t account for. He did not understand the weather, nor could he remember the location of Louisiana. He lifted the bedding and slid between the sheets, fully clothed. Then he tucked the urn in next to his side like an infant.

That day, he’d come home to an empty house. She’d made the bed and left a note on the kitchen table: Cash, going to Albertina’s. Yours, L. He’d cracked a beer and watched the White Sox game.

Then it was late, and he sat in the twilight and thought of her walking home in the dark, so he put on his shoes and washed his face to go out. The phone rang, and he answered it.

A policeman spoke his name and asked him if he knew Lorraine Anne Bouvier Warren of 1534 Lincolnshire Lane. “Yes,” he said. “I know her.” She’d jumped off the bridge on Illinois Avenue and drowned in a bend of the St. Jo. Cash shut his eyes. When he tried to open them, they would not open, even though his mind pushed the lids open from within. He felt his head filling with water, and he was floating in the bed like a man on a raft.

Now he could hear Lorraine speaking to him. I was a spring baby. I shook off the cold in 1935, and I will forever 69

shake off the cold like a bird come up from Mexico heralding the springtime. Do you hear me, Cash? When I come, winter loses itself to the springtime.

He asked himself again, where was Louisiana? On the left or right side of Texas? It was a boot-shaped state like Italy, but he kept thinking it extended into Mexico, that the Mississippi flooded on the left side of Texas and separated the whole state from Mexico with its body of water.

Lorraine said Cash, do you hear me? Like a bird come up from Mexico, heralding the springtime I said, Cash.

She spoke, but the whole time, Louisiana only hovered somewhere south of him, like a ghost state.

END

70

5 from Alphabets of Desire & Sorrow:

A Book of Imaginary Colophons

Norman Lock

Alphabet of Shards Having cut with deliberation into the hillside so that stone stairs might take flight to a belvedere overlooking the Arno where his wife would sit and gaze entranced by a plain receding in pear trees and plum, Dario Russo renounced the prospect for what an amphora shard (nicked up into morning by his shovel’s trenchant blade) evoked: vivid recollections of olives pressed into wounded light poured into an Etruscan jar, which on an evening in the second century before Christ was dashed against a four-columned temple porch by a Roman legionnaire. Staggered by visions contained in this fragment of unearthed terra cotta (painted in black outline with what might have been a bird), Russo deduced the destruction of Etruria, the circus of Nero, the monster Caligula, and Alaric, king of the Visigoths. Wife forgotten, Russo later wrote with an alphabet of shards, legible to none but him, his murderous history.

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2nd Alphabet of Leaves Condemned by the leaves (amulets of copper and gold), their august reign at an end beneath the now impoverished trees – Else Sund forgot all other alphabets but theirs and, like one in thrall, nightly drew their iterations in chalk, each nearer to what she unknowingly sought: the order and ceremony of the world antecedent to this one. Her labor brought neither contentment nor knowledge of a vanished age that might have requited her for loneliness. Had she kept to the lake, its water stained by steeping cedars past all possibility of fathoming, and not strayed beneath the heraldic and hypnotic oaks, she would have escaped the doom of an irrevocable future that, like a death sentence unsealed, could not – no matter how great her anguish – be appealed.

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Alphabet of Ruins After the revolt at Naxos, time was as the stillness of the sea’s having fallen away or of a Persian sail emptied of wind. The engine of events lay forgotten beneath Mt. Zas, its wheels given to rot and silence, while the bones of the Minotaur gleamed in the elemental mind’s phosphor. The cracked floor in the god’s temple where blueweed thrust into a sun without nuance and stones pulled down from the city’s ancient walls – these were the atoms of Philoxenus’s thought, assembled among the broken columns into odes on the wreckage of time.

Composed of an alphabet resembling in its fragmentary shapes the ruins where he walked, his bleak songs would not survive Philoxenus, who in his lifetime blessed the gods for his fortunate birth on an island becalmed between history’s tumultuous winds.

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2nd Alphabet of Stones Thought for him was a bedrock of forms quarried during thirty years of hard and patient labor where the North Sea heaved up broken slates onto a town that seemed, by a scarcely ending winter, roofed in rock the color of its mirthless houses. He spoke a language inhospitable to flowers as did they all on that Frisian island. Throats and mouths were better shaped for dirges; hands, for coarse, imperishable stuff.

So is a mind veined with common ore unable to escape the grave. And so it was that Albrecht Hartmann’s Treatise on the Irreducible Cause contained not a particle of ecstasy or love that, like the saxifrage said to crack rocks, flowers in the midst of annihilation.

The letters of the alphabet of which his thought was constituted were stones – his words, a wall of masonry immuring him.

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Alphabet of Falling Stars That light, heaven’s fiery dust, seen through the branches of an olive tree on one of Athen’s limestone hills – she would have missed it, had her eyes that moment closed in ecstasy or, open, been eclipsed by the shadow of the herdsman rampant above her.

But she did see: the moment had been assembled by chance or providence to give her that glimpse of fire dropping in silence toward the blackened sea.

Illiterate shepherdess whose name has not come down to us, she would make thereafter the sign of those falling stars (the Perseid shower, named for the children begat by Perseus on Andromeda) in the Attic dust to tell, as insouciant youth yielded to bitter age, of joy – incandescent and brief.

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Camera Obscura Mitchell Untch

There are many moons and yet I see only one.

A splattering of stars sparkle like broken pieces of china trying to pattern themselves together, blue and green stems, veins on my Grandmother’s hands interweaving.

She holds them in her lap, stares into bright lights.

I read somewhere you can live your life over again if you choose, or at least parts of it, in your head.

I wonder what she is reliving, what she is thinking if at all.

Sometimes her eyes flutter and I see a small break in her mouth.

Photographs by the bed wade in the dark.

The window becomes a mirror that sees both ways.

Looking out has always been easier I say to myself, though there are fences everywhere. Take a bite.

I only have to look back as far as yesterday to see her shadow bent on the wall, the ribbon of her body in the chair, around her, the room taking up the slack, her favorite blouse papered on her body.

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Steam from the showerhead diffuses everything, a pandemonium of light dazzles through curtains.

My face becomes electric as a razor.

Yesterday, I lay on the front lawn, looked upward.

It was the same as the day before and I was changing shape under it, the way grief changes you when it can no longer leave the body.

Next door, the dog is barking.

He doesn’t understand why birds can fly.

I pick up a book I’ve been reading, one I’ve never read in college: Thomas Hardy in the dimness: Jude, almost touching love.

Its pages are yellow. The clouds overhead, bright as the lights in the classroom, as the hospital, as the sheets, the pillow, as the fluorescent tubes, the shunt, the wrist bone.

A breeze thumbs a page.

Trees whisper in the distance.

You can begin anywhere, but where?

77

A Walk After a

Good, Hard Rain Mitchell Untch

I like to take long walks around the neighborhood, especially after a rain, or a few days of rain, when the streets are slick, someone sounds like their trying to peel off their nylons, and the flowers look like they could burst out laughing at any moment.

I like the dogs that don’t seem to mind the still wet ground slipping beneath their soft padded feet, like the one I saw the other day limping along, its owner blowing cigarette smoke like a locomotive into the crisp morning air, zippered in her sealskin jeans, the buttons on her spotted leopard coat fastened all the way to the top.

I even seem to think more clearly as I walk past the Birds of Paradise, moisture dripping from their beaks, or the ivy, a small green pond sprinkled with diamonds.

I like the sunlight and the cold air and the leaves that radiate 78

as though they had just been born.

The other day, after it rained for an hour straight, I walked to the corner liquor store to pick up some cream for my coffee and even my hair seemed more alive, lustrous.

And the slight wind that there was didn’t bother me as I skimmed past the cold stone houses and the fireplaces that burned and the ashes that flickered like butterflies zigzagging their way up to the clouds.

I liked them. The clouds. Satin pillows.

I also like the way cars look after a good hard rain.

How they glisten parked along the street: jewels in a black velvet casing; Or how windows reflect everything back to the world, back to the clear blue sky, reverting everything back to the way the world really is, or was, the color of blue before Adam learned to drive, before air pollution, mass transit, and fatal trips to the moon, that historical hum of regret in the air, only translucent.

I can hear water plunk through the leaves of the trees like a child lightly tapping the keys of a piano, quarter notes slipping through the branches.

I like the sound of something that hangs in the air, opens, makes little rivers to drink from.

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hyBRIDGE #5 Peter Chamberlain

My Wife and My Two Kids

Michael Cuglietta

It’s well after midnight. Darlene is sleeping soundly in the bedroom. Her rest is well deserved. The kids ran her ragged from the moment she woke up till the moment she laid her head down on the pillow. I’m wide-awake in the living room, eating a frozen pizza and searching for something to watch on TV. Most nights, I stay up till one or two in the morning. I watch Sports Center. I eat junk food. I usually pass out on the couch.

Darlene wakes up before the sun has even had a chance to rise. She shakes me. I’m heavy with sleep. It takes everything I’ve got to peel myself off the couch.

She gets the kids out of bed. She serves us breakfast.

While we eat she sips coffee and searches the freezer. The hunt for missing food has become a morning routine.

“You ate an entire pizza last night?” She slams the freezer shut. She digs the empty pizza box out of the trashcan and plops it down in the center of the table. I wish she wouldn’t do this in front of the children.

“Leave me alone,” I plead as I pour myself a big bowl of Shredded Wheat.

“This has to stop. Remember what the doctor said? If you don’t lose weight soon you’ll have a heart attack.”

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Sometimes it feels like all she does is nag. I don’t blame her. I’ve gained seventy-six pounds since our wedding day. If only I could get to bed at a decent hour. I’d be able to wake up early and go to the gym.

“That pizza was supposed to be our dinner tonight.” She gets so stressed sometimes. “We don’t have the money right now to buy another.” She runs to our bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

“Eat your cereal,” I say to the kids. They’re on the brink of tears, but they hold it in.

I bury my face in my bowl. I am dead tired. I wish I could turn my cereal into a giant bowl of beer. I’d drive in and drink my way out.

I used to bring home a six-pack every night. Darlene put a stop to that. She said there was no money for beer. The kids are growing out of their clothes. Mark needs to go to the dentist.

Nikki needs a new winter coat.

Sometimes I’ll drink a couple of quarts of malt liquor on my way home from work. I sit in my car in the abandoned K-Mart parking lot. I listen to a mix tape I made back in high school. I drink. Malt liquor tastes awful. I can barely bring myself to swallow but it only cost a dollar-fifty a quart.

“Darlene.” She’s locked herself in the bedroom. “Open the door, Darlene. I’m gonna be late for work.” I hold my ear to the door. I can hear her getting off the bed. A moment later I hear the door unlock.

Her face is red. She’s been crying.

“Do you know where my white dress shirt is?” I ask.

“What’s the point?”

“What’s the point?” I raise my voice. “I need to go to 82

work. That’s what’s the point.”

“What’s the point?” She snaps. “You haven’t made a sale in weeks.”

“I told you I have a lot of quotes out there. Things are about to break. I can feel it.”

“That’s what you always say.” She’s packing herself into a tight pair of blue jeans. I’m not attracted to her. Not the way I used to be.

“It’s the way this business works,” I say. “You spend a couple of weeks getting quotes out there and then you spend a couple of weeks closing them down. It’s the way this business works.”

“Don’t you tell me the way this business works.” She’s tying my tie for me. She insists on tying my ties. She says I couldn’t tie a straight knot if my life depended on it. “My family has been in this business for decades. I know how this business works.”

I never should’ve gone to work for her father. I didn’t want to. I tried to make it on my own.

“I’m going to be late.” I sit down on the edge of the bed to put my shoes on.

The kids race into our room. They have soggy Cheerios stuck in their hair. Nikki has a large milk stain on the front of her pajama top. They climb into our bed and begin jumping.

“What are you doing?” Darlene asks.

“I’m trying to put on my shoes but these damn kids are making it impossible. Stop jumping,” I raise my voice. They settle down.

“No, I mean what are you doing putting on your brown shoes with those pants? Brown does not match those pants.”

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“Jesus Christ,” I shout. I throw my brown shoes across the room. They make a dent in the drywall. The kids start crying. Their little faces wrinkle up. Tiny tears stream down. I grab my black shoes and storm out of the house barefoot.

I play my mix tape loud as I speed down our block. It’s the same mix tape I used to listen to back in high school before baseball games. It’s filled with angry, hip-hop music. I swear it used to put an extra five miles on my fastball.

It’s ten minutes till nine. There’s no way I’ll be able to make it to work on time. Darlene’s father is going to call me into his office.

“Late for work again.” He’ll put his feet up on his desk, the cocky bastard. “You would think a guy with a family to support would show up to work early, not late.”

I’ll hang my head and apologize. I’ll tell him about all the deals I have lined up. “They’re about to close. I can feel it.”

I’ll lie.

“You better make something happen, soon. I can’t afford to lend you any more money.”

I drive to Dunkin’ Donuts. It’s a few miles out of the way but, fuck it. I’m already late. I order a large iced mocha, two glazed donuts, and a double chocolate chip muffin. I take the food out to my car.

I finish both donuts before I notice a small boy in the backseat of a BMW parked next to me. He’s smiling and waving. I swallow a big bite of donut and smile back.

His father is in the front seat. He’s eating an energy bar and drinking a small coffee. He’s thin and well dressed.

He looks like he should be in one of those coffee commercials they’re always running on TV, the ones where the wife comes 84

into the bedroom with a steaming cup of coffee for her husband.

He’s in a deep sleep under a freshly laundered set of white satin sheets. His head is sunken into an oversized pillow. The pillows are so soft in those commercials.

The smell of coffee wakes him up. He’s fresh and ready to greet a new day. His wife plants a big kiss right on his lips before handing him his coffee. Just as he’s taking his first sip his kids come running into the room. They jump into the bed with their parents. They all embrace and give each other little kisses, as they get ready for another perfect day.

I start in on the double chocolate chip muffin. The man next to me is playing peek-a-boo with his son in the rearview mirror. The boy is laughing with his whole body, kicking his feet, waving his arms and throwing his head back.

My cell phone rings. It’s Darlene’s father. It’s almost 9:30. I ignore the call as I take a large sip of my iced mocha. A few minutes later Darlene calls. Whenever her father can’t get a hold of me he calls her.

I haven’t paid the mortgage in six months. Darlene has no idea. I told the mortgage company to forward all correspondence to the office. I get a dozen late notices a month.

They’re threatening to foreclose.

After I finish the muffin I put the car in reverse and begin to back out. I take a sip of the iced mocha as I turn the wheel. I lift the cup by the lid and the damn thing gives out on me. It’s a little better than half full. It spills all over the place. It ruins my only white dress shirt. Darlene’s mother gave it to me for Christmas last year.

I put the car in park and get out. I’m covered in cold chocolate coffee and muffin crumbs. I look into the car and 85

realize my cell phone was on my lap when I spilled the coffee.

I see it sitting on the driver’s seat, soaked. There’s liquid in the screen and it won’t turn on. All my clients have the number to my cell phone. All those quotes I have out there, if one of them calls me back they won’t be able to get through.

The man in the BMW rolls down his window.

“Everything okay, buddy?” He asks. There’s genuine concern in his voice.

“Yeah,” I say, defeated.

“You sure?”

He has a calming presence. I want to climb into his passenger’s seat. I want him to tell me all about his life. I want to know about his wife. I want to know about his son. I want to know where he works. How can he afford such a nice car? How does he find the time to stay in such good shape? I feel a small tear roll down my cheek.

“Take care of yourself.” He rolls up his window and backs out of the parking spot.

I look into the back seat as he pulls away. His little boy has a Thomas the Engine toy. When I was a kid my father used to take me down to the railroad crossing to see the trains pass.

We would sit in the car for what seemed like hours, talking baseball and waiting for the trains. Those are some of the best memories I have of my father. I used to get so excited when I saw those trains racing by.

The boy holds on tightly to his Thomas train with one hand. With the other he points at the stain on my shirt and laughs. The kid couldn’t have been more than a couple of years old and I swear he was laughing at me.

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Manners Lynn McGee

Thunder made sliding doors rattle.

Lightning turned the trees white, rain raced us inside— she who was youngest, she who was always last, she was our sacrifice.

The glass sliding door raced toward her in its silver track, raced toward her gentle, amphibious fingers, bit down through its own rubber molding, bit down on her gentle, amphibious fingers, the fingers of her who was youngest, who was always last.

Of course we meant no harm, we who were older, limbs intact, and who were faster; who were afraid of the messes we made, held accountable for stains.

We put her hand in a bowl and the water turned red.

Our mother was always home then.

Our mother who was always home opened the knot of our sister’s hand and swathed that hand in towels. ordered us into the car, and the rain tried to stop us, stop-lights held us, the hospital dark, hallways a block long and another block—then the room we’d been searching for, humming with light.

The off-duty surgeon’s hands shook.

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Capillaries shattered and bloomed beneath the soil of his swollen cheeks.

He stitched black thread in and out, in and out.

She who was injured, screamed, and her screams unwound down the dark hallway; her screams hooked the dough of our stomachs, her screams unwound and hooked our stomachs and stuck in our throats.

We huddled together, cried into our sleeves.

Our youngest sister cradled the white gauze mitten disguising the shape of her hand, and we dreaded the shape of her hand, we who huddled in the back seat, our limbs intact.

No one talked on the ride home, or when we got home, not our mother who was always home, sweeping lizards from the kitchen, jamming the broom’s jagged bristles into corners.

She who was youngest waded bravely into the ocean.

She who was always last learned to hold her bandaged hand above the waves, and every Sunday night, we with limbs intact were sent to bed, she who was youngest lifted to the bathroom counter, she who was our sacrifice positioned under hot lights, our parents unwinding the misshapen white mitten.

Ashes drifted down from the mountain.

Ashes blackened our lanai and curled like sunburned skin.

Ashes drifted down from the mountain, and we who had grown even taller were sent outside with stalks of sugarcane.

The sweet juice silenced us.

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Insects chewed through bunches of bananas.

It rained every day, and we who were older learned to stop before we raced into a house.

We learned to stop, untie our shoes, and leave them lined up at the door.

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Yesterday Lynn McGee

A few months after 9-11, I walked the stunned avenues of Manhattan, plywood bandages slapped over plate glass for one block, then another, lone chain store hunkered down as if pinning large prey, lashing its tail, shiny god of retail hissing Take it, Take all you want— I kept walking, and watching the Pantone-perfect blue, untrustworthy sky, relieved to see 14th Street just ahead, friendly green globe of the subway heralding descent, ramp sloping to the white-tiled tunnel linking Seventh Avenue with Sixth as I set the stride I’ve learned to use in winter, staying close, but keeping space—till, midway through, there he was, guitar case open, dollars crumpled on purple velvet, the tunnel’s familiar song man perched on a fold-up stool, hard fingers, 90

blackened nails strumming Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away— his voice multiplying as a man to my right joined in, pace steady; a few, and then more people wearily belting out the lyrics, voices hitting the low ceiling, cupping the crowd, singers marching in sync—There’s a shadow hanging over me—tunnel reverberating, shoulders brushing, as usual, but I’m feeling it now, that alliance—Oh yesterday came suddenly.

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*

Simon Perchik A ritual spray –two fingers dripping from a small cup to pull it closer –you need more emptiness though it’s the leaves squeezing their prey underwater the way your fever feeds on shoreline and foam from an enormous moon leaving the sea still naked –drop by drop what’s left is struggling on the floor kept wet for its cry swallowed whole as driftwood scented with night after night.

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*

Simon Perchik You dust the way this nail half iron, half boundary stone and though the frame is wood it takes this rag to heart covers it with little flowers still yellowing –look it’s just an old photograph –the real thing is the glass not yet amber and her arms still move, are reaching out to dry –she is facing you smiling, holding you closer and closer, coming down wrapped in a damp cloth each year softer, used to your hand over hand loosening her dress letting it fall off the wall as sleeves and emptiness.

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RainForest 2020 #6 Peter Chamberlain

I Want to Be a Nudist Anthony Bukoski

When Ralph Edwards introduces celebrities on “This Is Your Life,” his TV show, he says “Dinah Shore” or “Dick Van Dyke, you were born in a small town in—” Maybe it’s Upstate New York, Fargo, North Dakota, or Rolla, Missouri.

Mr. Edwards offers the celebrity clues about the people from his past waiting backstage. When a guest walks out surprising the star, tears fall, especially from me and Ma, who’s sitting beside me on the couch in the TV room.

If I was on the show this night in 1964, Mr. Edwards would say to me, “Al Bronkowski, on the last afternoon of Infantry Training Regiment, Camp Pendleton, California, the training instructor made your platoon do 200 push-ups in the Santa Ana winds before letting you board the buses to L.A. for the trip home on leave. Your Western Airlines flight stopped in Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Denver before landing in Minneapolis. After a three-hour wait for your girlfriend, who was supposed to get you in her father’s car, you gave up and took the Greyhound bus to Superior, Wisconsin. Now you’re back in California waiting to ship out to Okinawa. This is your life, Alphonse Bronkowski.” This is my life all right, Mr. Edwards.

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It is November. I’m waiting for Elkins, who took the bus to L.A. with me on weekend liberty from Camp Pendleton.

When I’m not thinking about “This Is Your Life,” I stare at “Ten Days in a Nudist Camp” on the movie screen and watch men walk to the bathroom of this theater. I imagine they stand in the bathroom and smoke and talk. Unsure about joining them, I’ll wait till the movie ends, then hope the place is empty so I can splash water on my face to wake up.

In the nudie movie, six sun worshippers bounce a volleyball back and forth. A voice that sounds like my Uncle Vic’s back home explains the joy of naked living. “See how sun-filled frolic suits these volleyball-playing lovelies? Partners anyone?” It’s warm in the theater, which is why Elkins and I came in from the freezing city. I’m alone now, no Elkins. Seeing naked bodies on the screen, I want to be in a sunny place. I want to splash in a swimming pool. But the lady nudists are on the screen, and I’m sitting in one of the hard seats in the audience.

Making my jacket a pillow, I try sleeping. I think if I was on “This Is Your Life” Ralph Edwards would say, “Alphonse Bronkowski, you were born in the small northern town of Superior, Wisconsin, in l945. Your mother taught school before she married. Your dad worked at the flour mill. You could’ve played baseball at the state college in town if Cynthia, your girlfriend, had only quit talking about marriage. Instead of getting stuck with her, you enlisted in the Marines. This and that have happened since. Your main regret is you’re lonely.” If I was on TV, who’d come from the bathroom right now--or from behind the maroon stage curtain to surprise me? My father?

My girlfriend? My brother with his two-year-old son Eddie Bronkowski? Would the show’s host be surprised?

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Camp Pendleton is sixty-five miles away. After tonight, I’ll board an early bus to the base to catch up on Elkins’ adventures. Knowing I’ll be safe in a few hours and with no one sitting nearby, I remove the flannel shirt Cynthia gave me.

It’s too warm for a shirt, too warm for a T-shirt, too warm for clothes in a nudie theater.

Mr. Edwards, Mr. Ralph Edwards, television host, I’d like to tell you something. Maybe later you can tell me something. Last week Lance Corporal Freddie Wilson charged us three bucks to come to a party. We listened to Junior Walker records and drank. Wilson was celebrating his promotion. In two weeks we were sailing to Okinawa on the USNS Barrett.

At his place we ate potato chips, drank all the wine we wanted until his wife threw us out, and I stumbled into a tattoo shop.

Drawings were taped to the walls in sick yellow light. “Death before Dishonor,” one read. It had a downward-pointing dagger.

Another had a Marine Corps bulldog with a World War I helmet, strap around his chin, and a spiked leather collar. I was too drunk to see clearly.

The tattoo artist smoked a Pall Mall. A meat sandwich with wilted lettuce lay beside the ink and needles. I thought of my girlfriend, thought of a better tattoo to get than one of a heart with her name on it.

“Spell it out for me,” the tattoo man had said, putting out his cigarette. “I do more than the pictures on the walls. When I start, keep your arm still.”

“Draw Jesus on the cross,” I said to him before I passed out. I was dreaming of Cynthia when I felt him dab my arm with cotton. “We’re done. That’s eighteen bucks you owe me.

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Sounds like quite a gal,” he said, turning off the neon sign for the night.

“Which way to Camp Pendleton?” I asked, still drunk.

“It’s raining. The way you repeated her name sounds like you love her. I drew what you told me. She gives you trouble, come back in.”

“Who?” “Cynthia. She’s trouble,” the tattoo man said.

How would he know? I wondered. There was no reason for trouble from her. No reason for the world to spin out of control. No reason to freeze in the rain of southern California.

No reason she hasn’t written me since I left Superior. This was my life, not the tattoo man’s, I thought before remembering how, when I was home, Cynthia’d told me she wasn’t sure we should keep going out.

I got tattooed on a dismal night in Oceanside. A week later, I’m in a movie house in the middle of Los Angeles. When we got here, it was turning dark. Our drill instructors said there was nothing in L.A. but steers and queers. “Which are you?” they asked. We avoided Pershing Square, queer central. We bought a hamburger. We peeked in a place where the sign read “Ten Cents A Dance,” and you paid a girl to waltz. Where’s Elkins? Three hours earlier in the movie house I’d told him I was catching a bus back to base.

“It’s one a.m.,” he said.

“What are those guys doing up front?” I asked.

“Figure it out. Maybe they’re in love.” He reminded me it was our last Saturday stateside. “Do what you want, Al,” he said. “I’m not going back to Pendleton before I have to.”

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“I’ll see you,” I told him. I walked around. It was freezing. I returned to the movie an hour later. The man at the ticket window said, “I don’t recognize you. You gotta pay the $1.10 for a ticket to find your friend.” He pursed his lips. He blew a kiss.

But Elkins was gone. It was 2:15 a.m. Was he in the bathroom? Who’d go there but a lonely man looking for conversation? Maybe Elkins was lonely. Maybe Elkins was sitting in the dark on the other side of the theater. Maybe he was waiting outside, or he was paying a taxi dancer at the Dime-ADance place to waltz away his loneliness.

At three a.m., “Ten Days in a Nudist Camp” starts. This, “Naked Venus,” and “Blonde and Beautiful” will run tonight, tomorrow, and next week. For twenty-five minutes, I’ve sat half-naked. I want to be naked. I want to be a nudist. Hardly anyone is here. My favorite blonde is on screen cutting a melon.

I’ve seen the movie. The voice is saying, “Sun-worshippers love fresh air. Here come more girls. See them wave. Come on, it’s time for swimming. Bring the melon, Gretchen.”

I like how Gretchen walks—long, bare legs; buttocks red from sitting at the picnic table; breasts hidden by the muskmelon she cups in her hands. When I was home on leave, I talked my girlfriend into going to the Tower Theater to see “Private Sexatery.” Cyn wanted to please me before I went overseas. What did I ever give her? I’d once loaned her a Magic Marker to write my name on her sweatshirt. I’d rewrapped a box and given her perfume my sister didn’t want. She gave me the shirt I was wearing when I came in here. Now I’ve removed my pants, my underpants. In high school we studied mythology.

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If I was in a movie, it’d be called “Naked Adonis.” I have nothing on.

Mr. Edwards, Mr. Ralph Edwards, last week I asked Elkins, “What does my tattoo look like?”

“Like someone wrote ‘Jesus,’” he said. Elkins pushed my civvies out of the way when he climbed from the upper bunk. “It’s sure sore,” I told him. “When I mentioned getting a tattoo to Ma, she said, ‘Don’t ruin the body the Lord’s given you.’”

“Your arm’s beautiful,” Elkins said. “The colored parts are swollen. Your body’s not so precious now, I guess. If you’re going to throw up, get to the head.”

I made it before the wine came up. Kneeling on the tile floor, I saw rays of sunlight streaming from the tattoo of a blue cross on Calvary. “Jesus,” I said. “‘One sip of Arriba and you too will hear the beat-beatbeat of the bongos,’” Elkins said when I came back to the bunk.

“In Pittsburgh where I live, the bums prefer Thunderbird. Say the Thunderbird wine jingle. Humor me. I like when you say it.

It reminds me of home.”

“Not till I sleep this off.”

I must have groaned later because he said, “Here’s a letter for you. Say the jingle and I’ll read it to you.”

“My eyes hurt. What time is it, Elkins? Is it morning?

Who’s the letter from?”

“Your dad in Superior. Postmarked November 18. It’s 5:30 in the afternoon.”

“Read it.”

“Say the jingle.”

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“Read the letter.”

“Say the jingle or I’m not reading it.”

“Then will you leave me alone, asshole?”

“I’ll leave you alone, asshole,” he said. “‘What’s the word?’” “‘Thunderbird.’” “‘What’s the price?’” “‘Thirty thrice.’” “‘What’s the action?’” “‘Satisfaction!’” “‘Let’s go get some.’”

“Now you’re cookin’,” Elkins said.

Dear Alphonse,

Your cousin ‘Teenie’ loaned me her heat lamp

when I hurt my back. I couldn’t shovel snow

from the house out to the alley. The city plow

left a big pile of snow back there. We went

a week worrying about a coal delivery. The coal

man from Fagerlin Fuel couldn’t bring his truck

in. Everything’s a mess—my sore back, the coal

gone. You know how bitter the weather gets after

it snows. We could have used your help here.

Love,

Ma and Dad” “Does he mention Cynthia?” I asked. “I’m going hasta la bye-bye to Okinawa. Why wouldn’t she write me? Why’m I asking you? Do you have a girlfriend? I’ve never heard you talk about women or have a beer or get drunk.”

“Ain’t old enough.”

“I feel like shit.”

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“Tijuana’s off-limits this close to us sailing. If we missed ship’s movement, we’re AWOL. We’d never get out of Tijuana.

There’s still Los Angeles we could go to. I got sixteen bucks,” Elkins said. “Stay here if you want to. Hang around the barracks like a numbnuts. Just shut up about your girlfriend.”

If I were on TV, who would Mr. Edwards bring out next in the old, downtown theater? My grade school nun?

My ma’s rosary sodality group? If Elkins gets off the bus in Newport Beach or Redondo Beach to look at the ocean, he’ll freeze. When I called Cynthia long distance last week, no one answered. I bet Elkins has started his trip to the base. With the stops the bus makes, it takes two and a half hours to go sixtyfive miles down the Pacific Coast Highway.

Alone, a hard-assed Leatherneck fresh out of boot camp, I wait for daylight. Gretchen is as blond as Cynthia. If I squint and imagine them, Gretchen becomes Cynthia. When I open my eyes, Cynthia is Gretchen on screen. I’m dying of loneliness, my girlfriend hasn’t written, and I sit playing with myself.

Maybe Elkins hasn’t gone.

Hearing something, I cover my lap with the jacket. A man sits near. With the empty seats in the place, why does he choose this one? A minute ago, I was thinking of my girlfriend.

Now I feel cold air from outside. When a moviegoer comes in feeling his way to a seat, he has to adjust his eyes to the blue skies and the big breasts. This distracts others from the lecture on sun-filled, naturist living. After a sigh or a whispered love word, the twelve or thirteen men in here return to what they were doing. What is he whispering? I can’t concentrate. When I turn around, he asks, “Are you Herbert?”

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Retrieving a beach ball, Gretchen tosses it in the pool.

“No,” I say. I try to make Gretchen Cynthia again. I’m startled when his fingertip traces the outline of the cross on my arm. “This has to do with Herbert,” he says. “We were to meet.

I’m Joey. I’m from Turlock. What brings you in? I like movies.

It looks like you want to be a nudist.”

Wondering if I’m dreaming or have a fever, I feel my face and forehead. When he asks if he can hold my jacket, I say, “No, I’ll hold it.” I put it with the rest of my clothes on the seat. When he asks, do I have an extra cigarette, I say, “Maybe.”

When he asks, do I like sitting like this, I say “I’m Naked Adonis.”

It’s dark in here and late. Thankfully, Ma won’t see the tattoo till my overseas tour is done, maybe not then if I wear a sweater. When I return stateside late next winter, half of my three-year hitch will be through. I’ll be a lance corporal like Wilson. I’ll stop home en route to my next duty station.

At 3:45 a.m., November 26, this is my naked life as a naturist. My dream’s come true. As I think of Ma saying, “Don’t defile your body,” the man touches my leg. “Do you know Herbert?” he asks. “Are you sure you don’t?” He motions to me. I gather my clothes.

The place is larger than the Palace Theater in Superior, the Norshor Theater in Duluth. This is Hollywoodland. “Protect me,” I say to the Lord.

In the bathroom, the sink drips. The toilet runs. The middle-aged man wears saddle shoes and a suede jacket. “I’m not Herbert,” he says as we step into the stall. The ticketwindow fellow peers in. “No pass outs, remember,” he says seeing me.

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The paint flakes on the wall above the sink. The waste basket’s full. The theater is very old. I bet people used this bathroom during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, and Boris Karloff probably appeared on this screen or on this stage. “I was in the Navy,” Joey says. “They call me ‘Spike.’ I teach high school algebra in Turlock.”

I shut my eyes when he kneels. I hope daybreak comes.

“Don’t talk,” I say to him and to Ma when she tells me “God’s holy body is not to be marred by man.” I repeat it, “God’s holy body is not to be marred--,” repeat it to Uncle Vic narrating the movie, to my girlfriend Cynthia, to Harold Lloyd, to Fatty Arbuckle, Erroll Flynn, Jeff Chandler. I wonder what Okinawa is like. I hear the sink dripping, the toilet running, the sound of laughter as Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Bela Lugosi, and Randolph Scott take the stage. This is the old days in downtown Los Angeles. “Dear Jesus,” I say to the man, who says it back. “Dear Jesus. Dear Jesus.”

I wonder if this is the time on Ralph Edwards’ TV show when the most important guest enters. He wouldn’t come from the bathroom. I’m here. I’d see him. What if he walked from behind the stage curtain, looked around, found my seat empty?

What if the last guest is Private Don Elkins?

“Better put something on. You walked down the aisle naked,” Joey says. He looks excited. His night is just starting.

“Do you know Herbert at all?” he asks. “Am I mistaken?

Herbert said to meet him here tonight, the twenty sixth.”

On the way up the aisle, he keeps telling me this. “I’m Joey Conway. I live on North Denoir in Turlock, California,” he says. “Turlock means ‘Dry lake.’” He is considerate of lonely men. He whispers to me as though I’ll go to see him. People 104

stare at Joey. I think of shoveling snow. If I was home, I’d shovel till I made a path for the coal truck to drive on. I think of Cynthia. I’ll plead with her not to leave. All the way up the aisle, I think of her. But my joy in life is gone. A traveler, I’m not sure where I am or where I’m going after this, but it’s not to Turlock. Joey’s asking others, “Are you Herbert?”

When I push open the lobby door, leaving the dreary movie theater, Elkins stands at the ticket window. “Don’t pay him. Don’t, Elkins. I’m here. I’m okay. Don’t come in looking for me. Let’s go,” I say, almost yelling to protect him from the monster movie inside. “This is my life, Elkins. You wouldn’t want to be a part of it.”

But Elkins has purchased a ticket. When I ask him where he’s been, he says he’s been out walking in the City of Night. When I tell him I’ve been waiting for him, he wonders why I’m not wearing my jacket and shirt, only my T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “What’s happened?” he asks.

“It’s hot inside,” I say, wondering whether he wants to be the next celebrity on the show. When Elkins and I walk out of the lobby, standing freezing and uncertain beneath the marquee lights, we begin arguing. He’s angry with me for leaving him earlier. The man in the ticket window, who knows what I’ve been doing in the bathroom, says he’ll end the argument. “Here,” he says, throwing us a kiss, “I’ll give you a refund if you come inside to meet some people after ‘Naked Venus.’”

But what could that lead to, Ralph Edwards? Tell me, am I right to take the bus and leave with Elkins? Tell me, should I accept the refund and inform Elkins I’ll meet him later in the barracks? Tell me what guests I’m still to meet on “This Is Your 105

Life.” Will Herbert be one of them? Tell me. Tell me. It’s my life. I’m Naked Adonis. You’re Ralph Edwards. You’re the host of the program. You know everything. Tell me again before my mother’s tears begin to fall, Who is the next surprise? What does he know about Naked Adonis?

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The Last University Students

Jéanpaul Ferro

They were driving to Florida, because all losers in life always end up in the same state of denial, fired from their jobs, their jobs that got sent elsewhere, even their rent money was gone, and now the impending winter was too much to bear— those white dreamscapes of snowy hills lost in a past life where childhood dreams still lived, so they went off and got stuck in their own blizzard somewhere down in Virginia, white everywhere—even the motel television had only 27 channels of loving white, the bed sheets had this bourbon stain right where they lie naked in each other’s arms, snow against the windows, body against body, only the steam from the bathroom in between them, he goes to lick the red diamonds where her thighs meet, she kisses all of his anguish through her silent rage, 107

black before them, black all the way behind them, he tells her to dream of a palm lined street, she can only think of her childhood neighborhood church, her priest—every second of him living and dying from behind her, soon their hotel bed shakes them out into the cold, where they lie in a field like two wounded deer run off the highway, the apricot sky swirling, drunk, up above them, Florida a million miles away, this new world of theirs too damaged to go into, every numbness ebbing through them, swelling, wrists aching, sinews stretching, a plan for escape?—but it’s dead now; yesterday just a yellow word on a black book jacket set against a blue script—a new marketing genius for Internet suicide; soon the snow drifts burying them under a clean white coat, lasting up until springtime and on into the summer, into the dimensions beyond that, into delicate memory— something perfect, frozen, silent, all the potential that you and I used to possess: an America that only the dead know now.

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The Sin of Knowledge Jéanpaul Ferro

Down in the subway we said goodbye to our concubines, Bobby and I trying to outrun the Aquarians who were being chased by the evangelicals anyway, when I got caught I said: please don’t ask me any questions: I don’t know anything; For the next month I hid in my apartment in Minneapolis, they have great blue lakes in Minnesota, Lake Vermilion being the most beautiful place for a sunset; pretty soon my white fingers were waving in retreat, I had run out of all the best flavors of my ice cream, I began to run around the country trying to avoid my own voodoo doll, At night I would get a room with Leonard Cohen, a bottle of whiskey, and my fondest memories of you—

the three inseparable deities, tied to the table that was tied to my back; 109

after awhile I didn’t know what I was running from, because the danger didn’t seem all that dangerous, don’t you remember this? someone said; never forget, said someone else; when I saw my own reflection in the mirror across from me right at the bar I knew I had to clean up my head, but when I tried to go vote they were already packing up the polls, because I wasn’t on either side, you might not come back alive, someone else finally said to me, but I didn’t care; and I went out and found Bobby, and we called up our girls and met them back down in the subway over at the 7 line.

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In the Shadows John Fenlon Hogan

After Caravaggio’s “The Calling of Saint Matthew”

Oblivious of the beaming light, Levi son of Alphaeus sits with IRS agents, trying to shirk this higher calling, reluctant to enter seminary or evangelize, eager only to record levies, skim personal profits.

Of two colleagues, one remains unaffected and diligent, engrossed in April’s moieties, embezzling tariffs without shame, back-seat counting bearing witness to that timeless adage No honor among thieves.

The other’s a too-long GS-11, a regular at Sunday Mass —Cafeteria Catholic— hand gestured in a Surely, my Lord, not I?

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simultaneously fulfillment and exoneration.

Reclining against his shoulder, a young boy, faithless, fancies he sees through it all.

Indiscernible to the men at the table, Christ and Uncle Sam compete for recruits as they stand in the shadows, arms extended like fishing poles, fingers curved as if tensioned by nibbled lines.

Christ casts in the deeper waters, Uncle Sam trolls in the shallows attempting to hook the brooding dropout in the foreground. Uncle Sam’s I Want You he sees, with omnia pro Patria mea beating in his heart, ringing in his ears, urging him to be all he can be.

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Self-Portrait as

Peter Pan’s Shadow John Fenlon Hogan

Here is me: chopped, limp on the window sill,

a flimsy lack of light deemed superfluous second skin; Here is me: tucked tight as a honey bun,

a cowboy’s bedroll, tidied away in this dresser

fit for lesser garments; Here is me: full of happy thoughts trying

to fight off the darkness I am,

I am nearly enveloped by; Here is me: shadow more than shade,

a waylaid via negativa,

a present absence, too, in reverse.

There he is: a not quite right presence

without an absence latched on,

an anchor of existence; There he is: equally stripped of gaiety

& mischief, his seen-through 113

ineffectiveness ghostly, wraith-like; There he is: lacking happy thoughts,

weighted for the first time by a memory of loss & the want of longing; There he is: wondering at this moist lacrimation,

learning the difference between

swashbuckling & nebbishness.

Here is me: comatose from a lack of light,

like a creased cape after my unfolding, lubricated

in vain by bar soap; Me: threaded by Wendy’s needle,

& after years of research we know

shadows do feel; We: stepping back into each other

like a split drop of water reforming itself; We: blithe & borne aloft

by warm thoughts & thimbles,

good & evil & in between.

We: assured once more of looking

over our shoulders, of seeing me,

no space between.

114

Either Way Wendell Mayo

The grass fire had gotten into bushes, so he climbed back down the paper birch tree and began to shag apart burning branches and stomp them. Robbie started crying and he slapped him, told him to go home, said if he told anyone he’d kill him, and then he was left alone stomping on burning grasses with his tennis shoes until the soles began to melt. He removed his shirt and swung it at the ground over and over until he had the fire out, until all that remained was a burned-out hull of black grass surrounded by scorched bushes and the blackened paper birch in the middle, tattered caterpillar tents flapping from its branches like rotted sails of a ghost ship.

He sat down on the ashes, waited, eyes flooding with tears, but he wasn’t crying; he just sat there, eyes burning, thinking over and over how amazing it was that he’d started something so small--a tiny flame at one end of a match--and how it had nearly gotten far beyond his abilities to control it.

The question was how to cover up the destruction. He hid his melted sneakers, said he’d lost them, was grounded about a week. When his incarceration ended, he was again released into the world, snuck to the painters’ truck parked at his apartments, and stole a brush and can of paint. He took them to the woods where he’d set the fire and dug up the hunting knife he’d stolen from Robbie’s old man and buried by the paper birch tree. With 115

it, he pried the lid off the paint, then climbed into the paper birch with the brush and can. He began with the top branches, painting them white, and worked his way down the tree to its trunk.

He painted the entire tree white.

A couple weeks later someone must have discovered the tree because there was a fire truck up there. He was scared about what he’d done, and then in the newspaper a photo appeared of the white tree and the ground scorched all around it. In the paper, people were interviewed about the white tree. One man said it was obviously a ghastly and barren tree of knowledge standing in the ashes of Eden. Another woman said it was the work of some religious fanatic who’d burned the bushes and blackened the earth to resemble an atomic blast, then painted the tree white as a warning that the end of the world was near; the paper said it was some sort of Armageddon tree.

Either way, he was relieved. No one would ever think to blame it on him.

116

Psalm for the

Children of the Rain Andrei Guruianu

The water gathers in ruts down the middle of a one-way street.

There are children ankle deep in the mud deciding on the new rules of the game. In the kitchen God hangs in balance between a chipped pot and the carved wooden ladle. Grandmother uses the unknown to explain the unknown and everything has an answer, which goes without saying. When she falls asleep she lays across her chest the heavy book of her hand.

The children are still out there playing. They are a sentence that ends in a question mark whose answer makes for good food and good politics. Feet in the mud, water covered, clouded.

The good light that is never planned. It falls on the perfect nose and the sky colored eye on an ordinary day in the city of your dreams. It goes unnoticed and sleeps beneath a curb with the vagabonds and the shimmer of stars. Childhood love, where did you go when I wasn’t looking? It’s been years, it’s been a whole life of befores and afters, a gallery of pictures on the walls of the loveless.

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Our small obsessions wear us down into sand where before there was nothing but stone. Into almost nothing at all. We become scattered, we become notes tacked to a wall, boxes of love letters gone yellow and musty unanswered in a basement cupboard. Next to the spoons, the hand-me-down dishes. The book of my grandmother’s hand is full of such stories, of mud and blood and of women who were no good by the color scheme of their bedrooms and from the way they held a child in their arms.

God has forgotten about them she would say. God has forgotten about the children getting dirty. Teach them to stay out of the water, teach them to come in when the road is too deep to cross.

118

Hall of Luminous Things:

Passing Through

Andrei Guruianu

The stage is vacant save for the plywood musicians. An old couple weaves through the tango of another time, another place, somewhere on the fringes of a nation of dreams, by the distant shore, inside the summer of the young.

During Sunday afternoons, the whitewashed matinees, when all remember what it felt like to believe a star is born just for you.

Some bright cosmic promise out of reach with your name on it.

And when it died, as all promises do in the end, there was still a wish to be made. A not-yet-bitter maybe.

The old man holds his woman by the arm as they move down the aisle. There is no music now. There never was. They’ve been waiting for the right song for years, in and out of clubs, cafes, the odd parlor with the scratched, still spinning record player. There were songs, yes. They didn’t always fit.

The plywood orchestra is ready to take its place. The maestro is done winding his watch. He sets it for another time and another 119

place, somewhere in the wrinkle of a vintage-rose horizon, by the distant, naked shore, inside the summer of the lost. Lost—as everyone who comes here. As anyone who’s ever listened to the blues along a riverbank, who’s known the loneliness of holding hands under a table as the band begins to play.

Sunday evenings, walking home, small flourishes of light and those who’ve figured out a way to dance to the sound of it.

To grab it by the arm and swing it around once in a while. No song, no stage, no more pretend. With the moon winding down, unalterable, as he opens the gate and follows her in, down the narrow path to the door lined with plywood musicians, all nails and splinters, tethered to the stars.

120

Single White Feather Andrei Guruianu

—with thanks to Alex Mosner

I woke up seeking a perfect, elusive violet. Instead they gave me your light waist, its almost not there seed—the voice of tomorrow promising perfume and more promises. When I say your name my lips are stained with the passion of time and its hollow bride, the cotton moon upon my tongue.

In your thigh I placed compassion and a daisy for spilled innocence that leaves no mark upon the stone. I kissed its fingers and the bones of its shoulders until I became thirsty and dry. A single drop of dew upon a feather! It’s all I ask— this white feather floating in a cobweb as I stare out the window and the vicious kiss of dawn upon the windowsill. No spider, no bird, the aftermath of last night’s loneliness. Today my eyes are wrapped in the desert of a graveyard of familiar names trailing in a slow procession at our heels. They are restless strangers, crossed out and added back in through the years—among them I don’t recognize my own home and the bread of another life I should have lived grown stale in the cupboard. They do not speak. They wait for better weather.

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If you scoop out a heart that’s all you will find—an open balcony of the soul beaten by the sun and rain, the blood of sleep working its way through chimneys and treetops, the cosmopolitan rooftops overseeing the wounded, tired angels of mourning.

A single drop, trembling in fear then, it’s all I ask—I’ll take that much and be grateful—these fragments of sorrow dreaming of old photographs and limitless nights when the violins weep like birds in a cage and we call them beautiful. I am lost in a poverty of emotion. It has the smell of bad cigarettes and cheap anything alone at a table for two. Simple—irrational— as love and the lack of it—which no one should endure—not here—not among roses and lilies and fair weather friends.

122

Middlebury Poem Lyn Lifshin

Milky summer nights, the men stay waiting, First National Corner where the traffic light used to be, wait as they have all June evenings of their lives.

Lilac moss and lily of the valley sprout in the cooling air as Miss Damon, never late for thirty years, hurries to unlock the library, still hoping for a sudden man to spring tall from the locked dark of mysterious card catalogues to come brightening her long dusty shelves.

And halfway to dark boys with vacation bicycles whistle flat stones over the bridge, longing for secret places where rocks are blossoming girls with damp thighs.

Then nine o’clock falls thick on lonely books and all the unclaimed fingers and as men move home through bluemetal light, the Congregational Church bells ringing as always four minutes late, the first hayload of summer rumbles through town and all the people shut their eyes dreaming a wish

123

Rose

Lyn Lifshin when it’s behind my knees you’d have to fall to the floor, lower your whole body like horses in a field to smell it. White Rose, Bulgarian rose. I think of sheets I’ve left my scent in as if to stake a claim for someone who could never care for anything alive.

This Bulgarian rose, spicy, pungent, rose as my 16th birthday party dress, rose lips, nipples. If you won’t fall to your knees, at least, please, nuzzle like those horses, these roses, somewhere

124

Twenty-Nine Messages for C: Lucy As Catastrophe

Emily McLaughlin Lucy booked a new commercial - Dr. Scholl’s and they will shoot her from the ankle down. I told her a foot on TV was better than none of her on TV, but really, I’m just glad she’s out of our house. Who am I to judge a Dr. Scholl’s ad? I buy footpads at the drugstore in multi-packs. The commercial auditions are Lucy’s idea, not her agent’s. She won’t give up on herself. Everything lately is Lucy’s idea out here in Silver Lake - including her comeback. She’s moving to Australia on Sunday, to film this cable show, unless I convince her to stay. * Her casting company called late last night and this morning she was out by four. I barely heard her tip-toe out like the tide, her brakes unzip our right angle drive. She’s stuck with that swamp green Lexus through its gradations, the one we shoveled out of salted ice in Bolton Valley. When she left, I sponged stray powder off our pedestal sink and ate a banana to coat my stomach for my flu shot appointment. * The reason Lucy left you in Vermont, C, was she was dying to die in a film. She was supposed to work in Australia back then, 125

that straight-to-video horror threequel her father arranged, until she got recast. See, in Hollywood, you do need talent. Then you also need an agent, two minor roles, and an immortal ego to bank a living. She told me in Australia the contrast between land and water was vivid. She could view her life as precise as an incision. Her skin’s kept that shade of golden retriever so when she’s strolling ahead of me through a crowd in Venice, I always know where she is. On Sunday, it’ll be like she’s returning her tan to its continent. Me, my wrists still turn pink with sunburn through the car windows. I used to like watching her smack up against the sanctuary walls of her own talent, scavenge together her career contained within them. She doesn’t fit the part for gorgeous, or quirky, she’s just pretty, skinny, and flawless. It wasn’t enough until now. * You know how Lucy has to live in a neighborhood that makes her feel like a pioneer. Our house is one of these stucco pillboxes around East LA her father keeps in his pocket for investment. Her parents have one up in Ojai, too, where we meditate dyhana-style on sand cliffs even though I think we’re just remembering song lyrics with our eyes closed while our horses get saddled. The real estate in Silver Lake is spiking, now that actors bag hilltop property next door in Los Feliz.

We offer more thrift boutiques and offbeat diners than Beverly Hills. When she’s in Australia, she wants me to watch her parents’ bungalow, open the bills, water the plants. That was our original arrangement. It was only supposed to last as long as a stomachache. Now, I’m still waiting up for her to get off a Dr. Scholl’s set and we don’t even get our periods on the same week of the month anymore. Lucy’s dad told me fifteen hundred 126

people move to LA a day. They must jam them into manholes under the sidewalk. Everyone I’ve met stays until extinction. * It’s not like we were renegades. You could’ve come with us, hunted fame. You didn’t have to rent our rooms to snowboarders. You think I followed Lucy because I wanted to be like her with all her money, but I would’ve followed you home to our rusty town, to our mothers who blow-dry wet lettuce for their salads and form conga lines around their kitchens, singing how crazy our fathers make them. * The flu shot preservatives are making me nauseous. I’m allergic to gluten, soy, and anesthesia. I left my doctor a message after my appointment to tell him I lived, but he, like you, C, still hasn’t called me back. In Bolton Valley, the tourists sneezed all over our chairlifts but I never even thought about the germs behind the cough. I thought I’d like the person coughing to quit it. The studio I work for orders the shots in bulk and you can go in an hour late. My nurse this morning had green eye shadow dragged through her creases. Her nametag said Ann Cindy.

She looked more like a Cindy, with her face machéd up like a piñata. Isn’t that funny, the way people look more like their middle names? I asked Ann Cindy to check the ingredient label for wheat protein. She reminded me of that cosmetologist friend of your mom’s who used to visit on Fridays. I handed her my bad arm, the one that tore off my scapula when you and Seth watched me tumble down the ski slope but just went home to straddle each other. The muscle droops out the shoulder through the fingertip like wet tissue paper. * 127

So Lucy leaves for Australia again this Sunday for twentyfour episodes. When she returns next year and I’ve vacated, our friendship will be residue. If she meets a guy she’ll stay through next summer. She’ll call and say, he’s fringe, Heather, if I haven’t moved out. Fringe is one of those new words she’s using. Last night, when I got home, she pointed at the stars from our patio and said the atmosphere has skin. The sky was different shades of purple and I was thinking of my shot already – I said it’s full of rash. She said, That’s scat. The wind pulled us into it. I always feel more comfortable in outside air. Lately, I want to untie the laces through her and empty her loose pebbles.

In the distance I heard Dave and Carr enticing their dates inside their house. They claimed they had a view of the Pacific if you looked for long enough from their terrace. They live down our hill and used to climb up in the evenings for a beer. Lucy would float candles in the tub, make the bathroom intimate. They were the only thing I looked forward to – not Dave and Carr, there was nothing special about them. I looked forward to plain company. Some nights, we undid our bikini tops in their hot tub. Carr works for LA Ink and Lucy let him draw maps of Europe all over her arms until her skin dissolved into her veins. They’d sprinkle Percocets in the water like Alka Seltzer and we’d skim the surface with our tongues as it fizzed.

Or we’d bump into them down at the Cha Cha Lounge and we’d all creep up our road together. Once, Lucy kept walking with Carr until she walked home alone in the morning. Lucy played up her buzz, let the current take her. I fought it the whole time I re-ordered drinks, until I woke up sweating. The next night, we watched Carr gyrate against a girl with bangs. The musty bar drained the flavor out of my drink. The scotch tasted like smoke 128

and the smoke tasted like scotch. Lucy stayed as indifferent as a precious fossil. She wears her Dartmouth drop-out status like a charm to men and that usually keeps them buying at least the next round. Me, I still know when a guys’ really checking out the girl to my right. “Carr shined me,” she said to me later.

She told me I never feel bad for her because she’s rich. “He’s just so LA,” I said. Anyway, Lucy thinks they’re all fanatic Scientologists. I said, “That hipster girl’s a poser. She’s as bisexual as a plant.” Lucy said, “Let’s call C. I miss C right now.”

The next week she made me drive her for a personality test and dianetics seminar at the Scientology center and the week after that Carr called for a ride when their cars were all stolen off our street. “Really? A Geo?” Her laugh illuminated our house. * What I’m trying to tell you, C, is this: Picture us driving through Bolton Valley, speeding past frothed roofs under the line of pine trees. Lucy’s in the backseat singing her eyes out, I’m watching for black ice, listening to the radio for deals on cruises. You’re subtracting calories from your meals all week in case Seth takes you out for Italian on Saturday. We are still you and me, when you moved back north after Community. When you and Lucy baked a birthday cake, ate half and barfed it up before you sang to me. We’re aching to stay in marble-bread hills, scrubbing vacation homes until Clorox stinks like incense, ringing up hot chocolates, deciding if we’re addicts or just pleasure seekers or women in our twenties. * Maybe you’d like it here in Silver Lake. In the dark, cottages cluster around the reservoir like skiers up on the fire in the lodge. Everything is mosaic. The lights shimmer as if someone 129

threw a handful of glitter across the mountain. Guitar music twinkles. The smog swirls in SOS patterns, and when the air goes bitter it’s like when we sailed on inner tubes through the snowguns at night, before season opening. From a plane, Silver Lake appears as a porcelain village you can plug in, while in their attics, the hippies search boxes for something new to wear to the Mexican grill. * Lucy’s good at fitting into the retro scene just enough without converting. You know how red wine gives you wine mouth?

She gets vegetable mouth from all her greens. She paints the lenses of her sunglasses with nail polish. She untangles her hair with a claw, C, she dries it out on the windowsill with her shells, and loops her burlap two-piece around our door knob with a wind chime. Recycled materials, she tells me, are in. I’m still a vegan – I have no need to recycle, of all the animals I’ve spared. When she joined a group for fostering dogs I walked around in my fur stole. “I’m sure the fox would be honored to spend the rest of his life with me,” I said. She laughed and we drove straight to the Dime on Fairfax. At the Sunset Junction, she gave a homeless man a twenty and the wine in her plastic cup. He started whimpering and dribbled on her lap. She rolled the window up. “He’s litrally crying,” she said, excavating the glove compartment for napkins. I can’t stand the way she pronounces literally. “I blew six hundred on this vintage dress,” she whispered. I said, “That’s dog food for a year.”

I suppose a roommate relationship is not far off from a romantic one except a lover has got a latchkey to your body. After a few years, there’s nowhere left to store all your good selves and bad selves and you both carry this weapon 130

with the safety off, the power to demoralize the other with an observation. * You’d be surprised there’s no grass or monster boardwalks here, palm tree slides from clouds to dorsal fins, dusty piers, homeowners sudsing their convertibles with a hose. That’s Santa Barbara, Laguna, and maybe like your dad’s condo complex in Florida. People flee those beach towns after they’ve had enough seafoam. In LA, they dry out like seaglass, collected on the pavement. * I’m a locations scout for a TV show. I pick the bars for cop showdowns and waterfalls for sex scenes. It’s union work and I’m head of the department. I spend the day skimming Sepulveda or calling the assistant director, who’s usually enchanting but married and all leather up close. It’s not even that their wives look like their mothers, but that they have no ambitions, not even to be mothers. I doubt their love lives involve “Take Four!” or “Give me attitude!” I could just hear my dad whistling in my head, “If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife,” when the wives showed up in windpants with their nannies.

Young and old people in locations are trying to break into the creative jobs or make it in the movies, waiting for someone to get fired or cry-baby it back to their high school sweetheart in Iowa. Me, I like my position, although it’s as dead-end as the casting department, and even less respected.

Three USC grads blaze around with me in a caravan with clipboards of 405 exits to drive to next. If we’re back from a scout we swing by the dub stage, or if they’re still shooting in 131

the studio, we eat the craft service and drink at the set bar they stock with beer in real life. The make-up ladies in there love to gossip. We like to psychoanalyze the veteran directors who sexually harass us because they think a woman is created to feel desired. On the worst day of pre-production, the showrunner rides in our van for the tech scout. With all men around, he talks about me to my face as a way to not let me into the conversation. One time, he caught me pulling into the lot with a towel turban still in my hair. I try to hate him, but he gets me every year when he comes in on the day of our holiday party with a festive shirt, and can’t decide between tucked or untucked, as if he respects us. The parties are really for the below the line crew. The above the line don’t tell us what they do on weekends. And I know he would’ve laughed if he saw the masterpiece I once skinny-dipped all over Rancho Cucamonga, scotch taped that bad boy to every storefront: Dear Storeowners of Rancho Cucamonga: Because your neighborhood is the epitome of what our screenwriter has described in caps as “the last hole in earth you’d want to live,” we have decided to use your main street to film the showdown between our hero and the demon who has inhabited his father’s body. Please follow the detour.

Most of our viewers are middle-aged Christian women in Middle America, waiting for demons and angels and for the characters to take their shirts off. Anyway, you can watch my name when the credits roll on Channel Five at nine. Wednesday.

Lucy says her Dr. Scholl’s commercial will air spot on the same network. * I’m checking my flu shot injection for tenderness. A dull throb’s 132

rippling in the muscle like water off a dock. I actually didn’t go into the studio today. The banana cannonballed through me with the fever and I took two Ativans and called in sick. * Lucy still sleeps in free t-shirts you win at fundraisers. I guess those are the things big money buys - you can hang around in left-over pajamas and not feel like a poor person. I see the way she looks at her interpretation of herself in the mirror – am I a unicorn or an anteater? My free rent also makes me her chauffeur. At night, the city seems to stare at me like an eye.

The sign outside every place says Cocktails, so you don’t know how to say where you were the next day. The neon letters drop off like leaves when the bulbs fry out. Sometimes, the singer on the radio is simultaneously performing at the place we’re driving past. I fantasize about writing a perfume billboard into a TV drama. The twisting roads, one car wide, remind me of our old shortcuts in Bolton Valley, how the overhangs are more dangerous than you think, when other cars don’t slow at the bends. Lucy says, “The police let us drive home from yoga. That impairs your senses like a bar.” “Not smell,” I said.

“You’re so broken, Heath,” she said. “Seriously, you have more power over your heart than a guy.” During the day, out in Malibu, we park on the shoulder of the PCH, right under the metal nets holding in cascading rock. I like the bars on the seacliffs with appetizer menus. Lucy knows all the security codes of the empty mansions on the private beach. From my striped chair, I see sunlight like EKG frequency lines inside my lids until they flat line.

My parents once brought me here on vacation when I was young. You were down at your dad’s in Florida then.

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I wanted to be a lifeguard. I wanted the view of mint waves from tower five. There was my tap-dancing queen mother in her sunblocked nose, my father a frying pan, a stranger’s son dumping a bucket of sand on his face, miming suffocation. I thought, my parents will lie back into the creaking earth one day and ferment. I didn’t take the course for my lifeguard certification and now I’d drown like a fern with my arm so weak. What I mean is, living inside the world’s perception of immortal stars at first was cathartic. Scientologists, Catholics, celebrities. We’ll all practically sauté ourselves to last and last and last. * A guy I was dating couldn’t wrangle my shirt off over my bad arm. He knew I had to be up for an early call time and I pretended work was always the priority, and I wouldn’t go all pathetic on him. I’m a disfigured tree, a legend men can bring up to a girl who demands sensitivity. Maybe it’d be easier to wear the sling sometimes, like my doctor suggested, but I’m a natural at disguise. I keep my hand in my pocket a lot. It might be easier to be an amputee. No one would ask me to open a jar.

And, as I told that date of mine, who I wished had gelatin eyes that could kill me - I can only fasten my bra if it’s a front hook.

“Sure,” he nodded, “Like a stroke.” He was so Midwestern.

“Hey,” he said, “Do you think Lucy could get me a job on set?

I’m trying to get my union days in.” Then he helped himself to a handful of my ass.

“Would you rather be her? Do you want to be her?” my mother said, when I called her from traffic in the morning crying. I wasn’t as lonely as uneasy. Why was I living in a house with the back terrace a masochistic plummet to your 134

death? With all the houses built so close together into cliffs like a Greek Island without the Greek people and the clotheslines, in a state that could slide or shake off the rest of the country? How is the life I was born with the only life I can return to? A bedroom, a hot dinner, my parents desperately wanting me to be happy. * On weekends, Dave and Carr strap their boards to their roof and drive to Mammoth. They say the trails are wide like Vail, there’s nowhere to ski off terrain. There are no birch trunks to snag your face on. Snow feels warm when you bury yourself in it as a blanket. I moved here with Lucy because there’s no snow.

There’s also no other place with celebrities on reality shows who are interested in dating girls like us in designer clothes. Our friends in the Cooper building can order Chloe wholesale and expensive diet pills from a Chinese medicine man. “Would you ever put on make-up and get dressed up if you couldn’t stare in the mirror first?” Lucy said, on our way to meet the guys at the Griffith Music Fest. Dave used to be the Baywatch boy and wanted Lucy’s father to get him a job on his pilot. * I’m trying to stay hydrated. I’m out of coconut water. I’m taking more Ativan and fish oil and magnesium and scrubbing Lucy’s dishes. She learned to clean a pot probably the same way she learned to wipe herself, missing key places. When the mountains burn themselves once a year, ash soaks the air and I bathe the plants. Lucy’s waiting for this philodendron from her ex-boyfriend to die. Those things survive like grandmas. But I’m getting off track. We sent you a postcard in Vermont when we got here and it was returned. We thought you’d hang it on 135

your bathroom mirror. I thought about sending it to Florida, to your dad’s. The first year, we slept with the skylights open, as if you might jump in from a ski lift in the stars with your suitcase.

We talk about you still, like you’re in the basement folding laundry, clearing out the acid reflux in your throat after dinner. * A psychic at the Grove mall stopped me. She looked like a gypsy roaming by the jumping fountain. In the winter, the Grove shoots fake snow but I can’t find the guns. Here’s what I was telling myself, what Lucy always tells me, when the psychic intercepted: Try not to be sarcastic. Try to swing your arm. The psychic told me I leaked inner energy. The make-up lady at work had the same woman stop her among the street performers on the Promenade. I couldn’t imagine her doing anything but applying make-up but apparently on the inside we’re both exploding like comets. * I know I’m hypersensitive but it was you who wanted to rescue my mitten off the maintenance trail. I still try to think about the accident because I don’t want to deal with repression. Seth said it was fine when the mitten went down, when he struggled to keep the safety bar up. You said, “I’ll go with you. You think everything’s worse than it is,” as we looked down. “She’s so crazy,” Seth muttered to you, “You’re not gonna, Florida.” He knew I was doomed, the moment I dug my poles in and went.

After my car accident in middle school, I thought I was done with injuries until maybe my thirties. Then Lucy screamed, “Heather! Seth won’t let us!” We were all professional skiers but you were the best. Where the trail turned rock cliff, I tried to pop my skis off. You didn’t see I was going to climb back 136

up, but one of my tips crossed. My scream was like a harp string ripping. You weren’t long gone, like the ozone layer.

You watched from the top. The ice was so thick I felt like I was sledding down a sculpture. With the first yank, I thought I’d lost the whole arm. I saw blood basking on the rock like a mural, like someone had been taken out to the mountain and shot.

I heard the grind of the chairlift, the wind biting off ends of words. I heard children giggling like in a ghost movie. I heard bells and the hiss of frost.

You know and you don’t want to know this, but who can I say this to but you, C? I pictured Lucy outside the lodge, smoking up on the picnic table with your brother, her ski pants bib unbuckled, shucking off her lift ticket sticker. She used to string the wires from her ceiling with horseshoes. After I didn’t come down, Lucy went to get the ski patrol. I always wonder who saw me naked when they sliced my snowsuit open. Now I don’t believe voices with my eyes closed. How could you not come after me? Seth had his snowmobile. Lifeguards don’t abandon each other. You didn’t even come to visit me with Lucy after my operation to see my shoulder bashed into an inside out wishbone. Seth told you it was my fault for dropping my mitten off the lift, that I was a fatalist. What’s funny is, I liked Seth at first. I liked when he baked up the gondola. Who doesn’t mind having a man around who spends some money on his ski suits?

I get that it’s tough to break up with someone who’s never been broken up with, but you guys only talked to me when he wanted my painkillers. I know he told you that I made stuff up, that I brought things on myself. It’s not hard to become the things people accuse you of. Look at the flu. We break skin and shoot virus in our arm like dope, legitimize the epidemic.

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* Before I forget, do you ever see the bartenders at the Big Foot Lodge? Remember the singer who played the flute in her tap shoes? Remember how they didn’t believe we graduated college? In college even if you didn’t like a person there was never a possibility of not seeing him again. Now, you won’t know anyone at a bar unless you call him ahead. I’m getting distracted. I’m even worse when I call an automated menu. I have to redial five times before I remember to press pound. * I’m whispering, Lucy will be clattering up the stairs now. This is what I should have told her last night on the patio. I ran into Seth on our tech scout yesterday all the way out in San Bernadino, the toughest location I’ve handled. Our scene bleeds onto a methadone clinic property and we need to set up the trailers by six A.M. so we don’t go over budget. The director of the program won’t let his patients wait on the main street for their medication. The line snakes down the back parking lot, the space we rented. When we were working out the details, I spotted Seth. He had a fade in his hair with steps and his face looked tarnished. He said to the director, “What’s up, Boss?” He was holding hands with a Puerto Rican girl, she had the reign of a teen-ager. They were there for their flu shots. The sight of him brushed up on something gloomy in me. They were watching from the horizon of the parking lot like funerals. * I’ve carried you with me all the way here, your reflection draped like a bandana on the back of my eyes. They say you see yourselves in other people and judge yourself against what you see or something but that’s stupid. I just feel you swishing 138

around in my blood. When I board planes, I imagine passengers’ faces wincing under oxygen masks and choose the businessman who I feel most comfortable crashing with, like if my parents die, I picture receiving the phone call with you in walking distance. * # * Sorry for hanging up, I thought Lucy was here. We used to cook recipes, chicken with lemon, syrup drizzled on ricotta cheese for dessert. Recipes are easier to double than split. I used to drive her to Kabbalah class - only a small percent of reality can be determined by the senses, the emotional reaction is the enemy, not the cause. Sometimes we’d stop by AA, which meets in the attic of a bar on Sunset Boulevard, next door to the Roxy.

Maybe it’s better if you’re from here. Maybe it’s only like this for young people. There are classes for mental and physical hybrid conditioning. Malas are pretty, quartz bracelets fight radioactivity. There are restaurants from every country in every price range and it’s exhilarating to study the energy beaming off perfect faces, to see if the second look is as powerful as the first impression, even if washing your hands in the bathroom next to a star conditions you like a Pavlov dog to wonder if you can stand to live in your own looks or not, especially since this is the best they’ll ever be. Even with contacts the color of rain. Stars are born stars and they know it as soon as they can think thoughts. They name their babies after the countries they pretend they’re saving. Their kids could make up a picnic: Sky, Apple, Lake. But I like to try the things they do with their hair. A fishtail braid across the scalp, 139

a string around my forehead. And there’s always a group of Mexican construction workers here, in a better mood than you, guiding you into your parallel parking spot. If your show goes into syndication, it’s a way to leave footprints across the next century. * I waited yesterday outside the clinic for Seth. We couldn’t believe the chances. Then last night, I met him halfway in Atwood Village at a hookah lounge we once used for an indoor location. Seth brought the girl. She gave me a cough drop. Seth told me she moved with him all the way out from Connecticut.

The air felt brittle. Passing headlights took the black out of the night along with them. They charge twenty dollars at the door to keep out the riff-raff but I knew the bouncer erasing a crossword.

We sat in a booth in the back with velvet curtains Seth pulled shut. On my show, we filmed the demon shape shifting into the heroine as she inhaled the smoke. “Not so Beverly Hills 90210, right?” Seth said. “No one here knows no one else.” As he dug around his skin for pouches that hadn’t been punctured, he said, “You want, Florida?” like all this time, he thinks we’re the same girl. The needle looked so simple, like a utensil, like you could slip it into your silverware drawer. He tapped his vein and pressed the plunger. The girl drank her drink like it was full of sunbeams. I wanted to feel sensation in my bad arm, feel the rush of it falling off my body and yell “Timber!” He didn’t seem like such a bastard. Slick Seth, Slick Seth, we’d chant during his races. This was the first time I thought that he wasn’t doing all that great either.

I felt we were hovering over Uranus in that booth. We 140

were the only ones out there. Could this be it? The moment I gave up? Maybe depressed people have got it made. They can face death, relieved. Wanting, now wanting takes balls. “Takes eggs,” as Lucy would say.

“I need fresh air,” I said. I wanted to hold my body in a ball and roll down a hill like a child until all the discomfort spun out of my ears. “It’s like you’re in labor with heaven,” the girl said. “Boom.” Her voice was creepier than a cello. * What I want is good things for people. For Lucy, I want selfawareness. For myself, I want to live through my flu shot. For you, I want you to be able to forgive yourself. * Lucy’s home now. I’m in my room with the clock radio up.

“Look at you, Heath.” She slunk in without knocking. “Are you praying?” I sat up off my forearms. “You’re crying? You’re crying.”

“I have a fever,” I said. The thermometer plopped out of my mouth. I still sleep in my gym clothes so in the morning there’s just no excuse. She slid her soft hand over my eyes like a paw. “Why do you do these things to yourself, Heath?” she said, shaking my tears off her hand like a cobweb. I hate when she uses these goody-goody phrases her therapist provides her to parade her assertiveness.

“It’s just my flu shot.” I showed her the scab on my bicep. She poked at the band-aid like she found it in the pool.

“Don’t touch it,” I said.

Her breath bulged like a volcano. “Your forehead is sweating.” Her father’s new show premieres tonight and she wanted to watch it together. She even bought me taro frozen 141

yogurt. Usually she hates the way my stomach lets me skip dinner.

“When I had the chicken pox my aunt brought me a canary,” I said. “I just thought of that.”

“My going away party is tomorrow. You can’t be sick!”

Her hair was a jungle and the makeup peeled off a pimple cluster on her chin. It felt like I was sitting down inside myself.

I stood. “We can go to Cedars Sinai. They’ll put me on an IV.” They’ll also pack relaxants into it if I ask the nurse, is what I was really thinking. Lucy can order an upgrade to the special wing for celebrities, like a hotel suite, and she’ll be great at soliciting empathy in the waiting room. And I don’t care anymore about being ridiculous. I’ve tried Scientology, I’ve practiced emotional restriction. You can fall into vortexes in LA without a native anchor like Lucy. “Yes,” she said. “I can drive you to Cedars Sinai!” like we had just rolled doubles.

Cedars Sinai in Beverly Hills Adjacent is my destination. It is someplace. It is a place I can go to next. * Lucy has the Lexus running in the driveway. She didn’t even use the bathroom first. I’m zipping up my toiletry case like a pair of twenty-fours. I’m so sad, C. We all move back and forth across the country and start over, work on ourselves, but tell me, where’s the progress? I’m talking around corners, but I’m trying to say this directly. This is a friendship. There are distances, but no breakups, you friend a friend for life. It’s a connection. This is a Kabbalah theory, really. * Lucy’s bleeping the horn. Just tell us to come back and we will.

Call me on Saturday morning, on this line, our home phone. Her 142

flight leaves for Australia Sunday. I’ll pretend I’m blow-drying my hair. I’ll let Lucy pick up. Just don’t tell me, C, that I made our life up. * This I remember clear as a flood: Before your brother and his girls and all of our nicknames shared our kitchen like family on weekends. Before we didn’t need anyone but each other to cut through the world in front of us like hornets. Before I ripped my shoulder.

Before all this I woke one night in a fugue, to the crunch of you snapping your boots into your bindings, heading for the trees bent under the red moon. From the deck, I watched a set of sparrows sip the puddle of an icicle like runaways from the king of migration. I watched the snow settle on your bare skin.

You were only wearing my string bikini that you borrowed that last summer. You could have been break dancing in a strobe light, doing the mashed potato. I shouted from the deck to come back in, that you’d go blue on the inside, and you called, in a clogged-up voice: “I’m fine! I’m not trying to kill myself, Heather!” Then your skis hit the snowmobile trail with a splash and you were lost in the dark, the echo of your voice leading your body through a galaxy, like you were an ancestor of yourself, and for so long, Cassandra, I believed you.

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hyBRIDGE #6 Peter Chamberlain

Silent Movie with a Final Scene

Inside Your Car Matt Mullins

Luminous and framed in a dissolving instant We’re set to fall apart before these torn seats Throw pancake looks against what levered light Piles through the apertures of overexposed Streets imprisoned and revealed inside an art Directed sunrise illuminating the stilted dialogue In our scripted exchange cut to time. And again The washed-out black and white lie of this Rehearsed embrace rises as we rise beyond steering The act of our being the truths we need to peel away Skins of character thrown aside when shooting Such a scene as keeps even the wan Grip, the stoned Best Boy leaning toward the cranked foreshadows Born stretched beneath our pressed-glass daguerreotype Pause. Those blurred subtitles spelling out complications The promise of this climax dangled from the razed Lip of the zebra striped clapper, that toothless alligator Mouth piping the live organ soundtrack to whatever Direction we lack, the tickets to denouement we’re not Afforded in a story that falls somewhere between Our fading in and our fading out.

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Writes of Song Shantel Grace

Flies buzz in morning’s light. I turn on my side, in my childhood bedroom, and listen to the sound of their wings.

Sunlight drinks me in and I feel thirsty. The book lay on my dresser, a pen lost in an avalanche of thin cotton, and outside the window, the weather; I feel fog on my wrists. The windows might as well have been painted grey—the last words I read the night before, they come to me now, and seem just as honest as if I had written them.

Bricks hang from my eyelids; I drift.

There is a wedding; I am neither the bride nor a guest. The music is not of my time, but I listen as if I know the words.

I came to these mountains as a girl, in hopes of finding relief from what stole my mother’s lungs from her; a half dozen handkerchiefs a day with blood; no! That is the book, not my own words. I came to these mountains as a young woman, in hopes of finding what stole my mother’s hand from her; a white farmhouse, a lie about what lies beneath it, a promise of three stories and a fine dining room and a fence around a yard, which remains green, like poem.

He kisses my neck, not the groom nor a guest, nor a hero. Not a man named Nathan or Steve, not a name that sounds like the 146

others. He comes to me, his face is my face, his tongue feels like my tongue and the kiss is irrelevant. What I know is that I am not in a dream, but I am colored like a dream.

Bricks fall from my eyes and I hear flies again. I’ve married poem.

First darkness, then rain. There was not moonlight. Poem and I drove into the black, trusting our horse not to fall over the rocky ledge. Montana is where I loved poem. There were no naked bodies, just music; unclothed words. We were unplayed, our sentences stripped. We were B-sides. We held hands and that was enough; my red shirt, poem’s brown eyes, the way poem pushed my hair behind my ear and touched the back of my neck with quiet.

Poem said goodbye and I said nothing. I watched poem release itself into the snow.

There is a division, a separation; I grieve for the music. There is a warfare of conscience. My eyes see the wings, now. I hear nothing but fog. I am unplayed, and music is still.

I sit on the bed. I stand on my childhood desk, knowing my dreams exaggerate. This, my stage now, I focus my attention on a hand mirror. I am dazzled by light, the walls command me. A glass case in the center of my room is filled with bones, blue glow, and books. I am an animated corpse who never fully became herself, and the book is poem, and fog is song, and pen is stage.

147

I smell dried corn, old wood, falling water. Beams of atmosphere fill my lungs before I sing, and then I see poem, again. Poem’s eyelashes, the hair on poem’s arms, they are the desert, the peg of poem’s chair whittled in dust. These notes are not of my mouth. I feel my cheeks rise and my throat open; I sing with my gut, instead of my nose. Poem sweats through poem’s shirt, the smell is of wet pottery.

My fingers cut the strings wound around metal pegs on a wooden tool, and with some disappointment, I watch the sun indicate the afternoon and I pray it turns evening, slowly. Poem would’ve long since eaten. The bass line is too low to listen.

We sit together quietly, me and poem, and I pull melody through poem’s body with the needle I’ve saved. I hear clocks ticking and knuckles knocking on a box. We are a childless couple, retaining an air of romance as the barren often do. Our courting was never brought to a close. Sweet partners. There is nothing remarkable about our ease until it ends, in three-four time.

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RainForest 2020 #4 Peter Chamberlain

Contributors’ Notes TORY ADKISSON lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at The Ohio State University, and serves as poetry editor of The Journal. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in West Branch Wired, CutBank, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Cream City Review.

ANTHONY BUKOSKI lives in Superior, Wisconsin. His story “Mrs. Burbul,” which appeared in Hawai`i Review in 1992, was subsequently translated into Polish and published in Arcana (Krakow). He is the author of five short-story collections.

NORAH CHARLES writes fiction, poetry and memoir in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, Colorado. Prior to finding her way to the American West, she spent six years in Kona, Hawai`i, where she wrote for Hawai`i Island Journal, a bi-weekly newspaper. Norah is the recipient of a Thompson Award for Western American Writing in memoir and was recently published in Seeding the Snow, a journal celebrating the Midwestern landscape. When she’s not writing, she enjoys walking, biking, eating and spending time with her husband and two cats.

MICHAEL CUGLIETTA is a writer living in Orlando, FL. Most recently, his work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review. He can be reached at cuges57@yahoo.com.

ANDE DAVIS teaches English at Eastern Oklahoma State

College. He lives in Wilburton with his wife and neurotic pets. His fiction and poetry has recently appeared in cream city review, South Dakota Review, Chiron Review, PANK, and Chaffey Review.

JÉANPAUL FERRO: An 8-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Jéanpaul Ferro’s work has appeared on National Public Radio, Contemporary American Voices, Columbia Review, Emerson Review, Connecticut Review, Portland Monthly, Arts & Understanding Magazine, The Providence Journal, Saltsburg Review, Hawai`i Review, Danforth Review, and others. He is the author of All The Good Promises (Plowman Press, 1994), Becoming X (BlazeVox Books, 2008), You Know Too Much About Flying Saucers (Thumbscrew Press, 2009), Hemispheres (Maverick Duck Press, 2009) Essendo Morti – Being Dead (Goldfish Press, 2009), nominated for the 2010 Griffin Prize in Poetry; and Jazz (Honest Publishing, 2011), nominated for both the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize and the 2012 Griffin Prize in Poetry. He is represented by the Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency. Website: www.jeanpaulferro. com. * E-mail: jeanpaulferro@netzero.net.

SHANTEL GRACE is currently an MA candidate at the University of Hawai`i. She works as the managing editor for the Honolulu Weekly, and her creative works (fiction, creative non-fiction and songwriting) have been published in All Things Girl, Starbucks, Yahoo!, iTunes, Nokia, The Truth About Kate, Sony Tree, questionablynerdygoodness.com, Rhapsody, P.L.A.Y., and feministblogs.org, among others.

She has released six full-length albums and two chapbooks.

ANDREI GURUIANU is the author of three collections of poetry: And Nothing Was Sacred Anymore (March Street Press, 2009), Front Porch World View (Main Street Rag, 2009), Days When I Saw the Horizon Bleed (FootHills Publishing, 2006); also author of the chapbooks Anamnesis (Fin-

ishing Line Press, 2010), Exile (Big Table Publishing, 2010), and It Was Like That Once (Pudding House, 2008). He holds a doctorate in English from Binghamton University and is the founder and executive editor of the literary journal The Broome Review (www.thebroomereview.com). From 2009 to 2010 he served as the Broome County, NY Poet Laureate.

More at www.andreiguruianu.com.

JOSEPH HAN is an undergraduate in English at UH Mānoa.

He hopes to pursue an M.A., teach sometime, and also aspires to continually labor in writing and fail better. This is his first publication.

JOHN FENLON HOGAN studies at Columbia University where he edits Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. Additionally, he writes and edits articles about financial advisors for AdviceIQ. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Washington Times, Morningstar, Davey’s Poetry Daily, and elsewhere.

VANESSA HWANG LUI has an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College.

LYN LIFSHIN: Recent books from Lyn Lifshin: The Licorice Daughter: My Year With Ruffian (Texas Review Press), Another Woman Who Looks Like Me, from Black Sparrow at Godine., following Cold Comfort and Before It’s Light, Desire and 92 Rapple. She has over 120 books & edited 4 anthologies. Also out recently: Nutley Pond, Persephone, Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness, Lost in the Fog, Light at the End, Jesus Poems and Ballet Madonnas, Katrina, Lost Horses, Chiffon, and Ballroom. And just out: All the Poets Who Have Touched Me, Living and Dead. All True: Especially the Lies. Her web site is www.lynlifshin.com.

NORMAN LOCK has written novels and short fiction as

well as stage, radio and screen plays. He is a recipient of the Aga Kahn Prize given by The Paris Review, prose fellowships from the New Jersey and the Pennsylvania Councils on the Arts and, in 2011, a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His latest works of fiction are Shadowplay (Ellipsis Press), The King of Sweden (Ravenna Press), and Pieces for Small Orchestra & Other Fictions (Spuyten Duyvil).

WENDELL MAYO is author of three books of fiction: Centaur of the North (Arte Público); B. Horror and Other Stories (Livingston); and a novel-in-stories, In Lithuanian Wood (White Pine), also published in Lithuanian translation as Vilko Valanda (Mintis Press, Vilnius). His stories have appeared widely in Yale Review, Harvard Review, Mä noa, Missouri Review, Threepenny Review, Chicago Review, and others. He teaches creative writing at Bowling Green State University.

BEN MAZER’s most recent collections of poems are Poems (Pen & Anvil Press, 2010) and January 2008 (Dark Sky Books, 2010). He is the editor of Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Harvard University Press, 2010) and,

by Landis Everson, Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005 (Graywolf Press, 2006, winner of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Foundation). He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is a contributing editor to Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics, and is currently preparing a critical edition of the poems of John Crowe Ransom.

GAVIN McCALL grew up on a farm on the Big Island of Hawai`i, but he now writes and teaches out of Fresno, California, where he’s pursuing an MFA in creative writing. The literary magazines that have published his work include: Hawai`i Review, Boston Literary Magazine, Nimble, Lesser Flamingo, Paradigm, Six Sentences, Long Story Short, Hawai`i Pacific Re-

view, Flashquake, Off Course, Nanoism and Bamboo Ridge, in order of appearance. He enjoys books, movies, exercise, beer and the outdoors, though only rarely in that order.

LYNN McGEE’s poems are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, 2 Bridges Review, and Blue Stem, and appear in current issues of Tilt-a-Whirl, Big City Lit and The New Guard,one a finalist and one a semi-finalist in that magazine’s contest judged by Donald Hall. Currently her poem, “The U.S. Invades Iraq on American TV” is a finalist in the War Poetry Contest of Winning Writers.com, http://www.winningwriters. com/contests/war/wa_pastwinners.php, TBA Nov. 15. Her poetry chapbook, Bonanza, won the Slapering Hol national manuscript contest, she received a MacDowell fellowship and earned an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University.

EMILY McLAUGHLIN recently received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won the Meijer PostGraduate Fellowship; Hopwood Awards for her short fiction, novel, essays, and play; the Chamberlain Award in Creative Writing; and the Farrar Prize in Playwriting. She has worked in television as a screenwriter for Warner Brothers and as a script consultant for ABC. She currently teaches writing at the University of Michigan.

GERARDO MENA is a decorated Iraqi Freedom veteran. He spent six years in Special Operations with the Reconnaissance Marines and was awarded a Navy Achievement Medal with a V for Valor for multiple acts of bravery. He won the “2010 War Poetry Contest” sponsored by Winningwriters and was selected to be in the “Best New Poets 2011” anthology. He has piecess published or forthcoming in Diagram, New Mexico Poetry Review, Nashville Review, Chautauqua, and the Barely South Review, among others. He is very excited to be a part of the Hawai’i Review family. For more information, go to www. gerardomena.com.

MATT MULLINS is a writer, musician, experimental filmmaker and multimedia artist. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Mid American Review, Pleiades, Hunger Mountain, Harpur Palate, Descant, Hobart, and a number of other print and online literary journals. His recent works of interactive/ digital literature can be found at lit-digital.com. Three Ways of the Saw, his collection of short stories, is forthcoming from Atticus Books in 2012.

DEREK OTSUJI: I teach English at Honolulu Community College and work at Otsuji Farms, a family-run farmer’s market, on the weekends. My work is forthcoming or has appeared in Atlanta Review, descant, DUCTS, Eclectica, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Inscape, Kaimana: Literary Arts Hawai`i, The MacGuffin, The Midwest Quarterly, The Monarch Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Sierra Nevada Review, Verdad, and Word Riot. I won first place in the Eisteddfod Crown Competition; and I have studied writing with the late Welsh poet Leslie Norris.

SIMON PERCHIK is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. For more information, including his essay, “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” and a complete bibliography, please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.

MARK SMITH’s poetry has recently appeared in New Letters and Pleiades and, in a generous selection, in The Spoon River Poetry Review where he was featured as its annual poet. His novel, The Death of the Detective, an NBA finalist, has been republished by the Northwestern University Press. He now lives in DeLand, FL. KAITLIN STAINBROOK is a recent graduate of Beloit College where she earned her B.A. in creative writing and minors in East Asian studies and journalism. During her time

at Beloit College, she studied abroad in Japan and England and hopes to return to both countries one day. “At the 99 Yen Store” won the 2011 Beloit College Mackey Prize for writing and her short story, “Signs,” is forthcoming in the Tomo anthology from Stone Bridge Press in spring 2012. This is her first publication.

MITCHELL UNTCH is an emerging writer and has been published or is pending publication in The Monadnock Anthology (On Memory): Nimrod Intl.; Out of Our; The Aurorean; The Los Angeles Review; Jabberwock Review; The James Dickey Review; The Wisconsin Review; The Beloit Poetry Journal; Blood Orange; The Coachella Review; Kestrel and Confrontation, among many others. Mitchell Untch studies with poet, Carol Frost. Contact Jaenote@roadrunner.com.

About the Artist PETER CHAMBERLAIN has been involved in university teaching full time and working in various forms of intermedia since 1977. He taught sculpture, electronic arts, and contemporary art history and criticism at Elmira College in central NY for 15 years. In 1991 he moved to O`ahu to design and implement Electronic Arts courses at the University of Hawai`i at Mänoa where he is currently teaching courses that address video, sound, installation, and their combined applications.

Chamberlain’s solid backgrounds in the areas of sculpture, music, and electronic media culminate in the production of hybridized works that metaphorically reflect and question unlikely juxtapositions of cultural, natural, and technological elements.

A focus on complex compositional processes culminating in activation of open ended structures has always been a common thread throughout his diverse working formats.

He has exhibited or performed intermedia work throughout the continental US, in Vancouver and Toronto, Canada, in Mexico City, in Essen and Munich, W.Germany, Tasmania and Melbourne, Australia, Indonesia, Seoul, Korea, and in Hawai`i.

During the past decade he has reestablished himself as a musician and producer, working with MOKAKI, a group of “rapidly aging activist poets, artists, and musicians”. Recently he has also increased his explorations in various modes of digital image manipulation.

Contact Peter Chamberlain:

peterchamberlain.net (personal site) mokakilounge.org (downloadable activist music and spoken word) public.me.com/pcchamberlain (downloadable music and images)

hyBRIDGE Peter Chamberlain

Artist’s Statement about art and the series: In my mindset, ART is a verb. I make objects, systems and devices, yet always focus on the making. I refer to exhibited work as Aesthetic Surplus; the leftovers from the act of making. Certainly these resultant objects can be provocative to observe, yet their essence or soul or magic resides within the relationships between the maker and the technical and conceptual processes employed during their making...occasionally transferred to the viewer. hyBRIDGE merges the words hybrid and bridge and refers to this series of digital prints that began with a traditional mortise and tenon covered bridge my brother Bob designed and constructed on his property in rural Upstate NY. I lent a hand in the construction and took a couple casual photos of it. The photos were then digitized and complexly manipulated, and then printed. Conceptually, the result is a 2D quasi-photographic representation of a 3D structure that does not exist, yet whose elements are directly and literally derived from the original physical structure. It was an surprising and unintended consequence that the resulting imagery seems to suggest Polynesian forms.

RainForest 2020 Peter Chamberlain

Artist’s Statement about the series: These images originated as 5 sculptures. . .3 made in 1973 of cast and milled lucite and heavy chain (16” plumb bobs), and 2 made in 1993 here in Hawai`i of found dumpster objects, rubber, and bamboo. I digitized the rotting slides, heavily modulated them in Photoshop, and came up with surreal quasicubist landscape close-ups. Ironically, these lovely images may also elicit references to an impending post-natural forest composed of plastic, rubber, and metal. In another framing, “It is a testament to Surreality itself that something so concrete, yet inevitably ephemeral can be reborn into an entirely different configuration. In this way, the sculptures live on, albeit in a different molecular stratum. These images capture a slideshow of the life of the sculptures, a reflection of the very essence of their making” (Marjorie Kaye, director, CaladanGallery.com).

About the Hawai`i Review Staff Editor-in-Chief Rachel Wolf Content Editor Kelsey Inouye Visual Editor Scot Lycan Poetry Editor Lynn Young Copy Editor Trevor Zakov Readers Amalia Bueno Gizelle Gajelonia Jaimie Gusman Joseph Han Kristofer Koishigawa

About the Journal Hawai`i Review is a publication of the Board of Publications of the University of Hawai`i at Mänoa. It reflects only the views of its editors and contributors, who are soley responsible for its content. Hawai`i Review, a member of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, is indexed by the Humanities International Index, the Index of American Periodical Verse, Writer’s Market, and Poet’s Market.

Administrative and Technical Support Jay Hartwell, Robert Reilly, Sandy Matsui, Sammy Khamis, the U.H. English Department, and U.H.M. Board of Publications.

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Subscriptions will be mailed at bookrate. Address all subscription requests to: Hawai`i Review, 2445 Campus Road, Hemenway Hall 107, Honolulu, HI 96822. Advertising rates available upon request. Visit www.hawaiireview.org or email us at hawaiireview@gmail.com for more information.

hyBRIDGE #9 Peter Chamberlain

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Issue 74 Contributors Rita Ariyoshi Janelle Brin Madison Caine Brittingham Jamison Crabtree Nandini Dhar Nathan Graziano Kathryn Elisa Ionata Joan Kincaid Lyn Lifshin Tyler McMahon A. Molotkov Martin Ott Craig Santos Perez Jay Stuart Silverman Elahzar Rao Mark Thiel Meg Tuite Roberta Winters Corey Wakeling

Issue 73 Contributors Philip Asaph Kathleen Boyle Dr. Paul Coleman Craig Cotter John DeBon Greg Evason Peter Forman Lowell Jaeger Arthur Winfield Knight D. Kühiö Monica Keawe Kaluakini Lee Christina Low John McKernan Faisal Siddiqui Jade Sunouchi Lee A. Tonouchi David Wagoner Mikhail Yeryomin (with J. Kates)