Hawaiʻi Review 77: 2012

Hawai‘i Review 77

Winter 2012

L

ﾂｩ 2012 by the Board of Publications, University of Hawai`i at Mﾄ］oa.

All rights revert to the writers and artists upon publication. All requests for reproduction and other propositions should be directed to the writers and artists.

ISSN: 0093-9625

COVER AND CENTER ART: Joshua W. Miles INTERNAL ART: Jared Wickware

Letter from Dear Reader, Issue 77 of Hawai`i Review came together over the last few months during a tumultuous time in Hawai`i, the nation, and the world. As the editors made our final selections, we noticed that many of the pieces chosen for the issue seemed to reflect the uncertainty that comes with being on the brink of large changes, changes that will certainly alter our world and the way we perceive it.

The feelings evoked by this issue’s pieces reminded the editors of our various “coming-of-age” experiences, when the future was simultaneously tantalizing and terrifying. We remembered the challenge presented by personal growth and discovery of who or what can become possible if new pathways are foraged. We felt again the hope and responsibility that attends the decision to grow up.

As you read Issue 77, the editors hope that you will also feel a sense of discovery, of the beginning of a journey with an unknown end. Big changes are afoot here, where we are, and probably also there, where you are. But maybe reading the same journal can remind us that we’re all facing these changes together.

Thanks for reading.

- The Editors at Hawai`i Review

the Editors

Table of

Contents

Mollie Ficek

MacDo

9

Lyn Lifshin

All Afternoon We

Not Thinking It Was So With Yellow Flowers

Moving By Touch

Though Many Poems Have Come Out of Dreams

23 24 25 26

John Sibley Williams

Hall of Records

The Singer

27 29

Peter Kispert

Leave It Behind

31

William Auten

We Would Call It "Hard Zen"

35

Simon Perchik

*

37

Nathan Whiting

Clouds of Milk

38

Juan Carlos Reyes

Parents

39

Lynn Beighley

About Anna

41

Randall Brown

Unreliable

45

John Spaulding

Gypsy Boy

46

David Romanda

Trapping

47

Mark Anthony Cayanan

Seam and Symmetry

Seam and Symmetry

48 49

Joe Baumann

Cleave

51

Kelsey Inouye

In Quiet

71

Chang Ming Yuan

Y

72

Christopher Davis

Elegy for an Alchoholic Old Queen

73

Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrรกn

Waterssong

76

Holly Painter

Boys on the Beach

77

Contents

Table of

Contents (cont.)

Tyler Davis

Body Meditations

79

Kate Kimball

The Armani Suit

81

Jason Peters

Quorum

91

Alex Fabrizio

Decomposition: Llano, Texas

92

Kristi Carter

Cosmovore Surrounded by Husks

Cosmovore, Homo neanderthalensis, and You

94 95

Dave Madden

Little Fingers

99

Elisa Karbin

Yellow Curtains, Parted

Cobbling

118 119

Rich Ives

Alms

121

Dennis Fulgoni

Thunder

131

Artwork: Jared Wickware

This End Up!

Ascent

Cloud Practice

Gathering Place

Dance on Terror

Eagle

Descent

Apparition

Humpback Whale

Postage Due

Walk in the Right Way

Think or Whim

Nani Lē‘ahi, he maka no kahiki

West Eats Meat

8 22 30 34 40 50 70 90 97 98 120 130 147 157

Cover and Center Art: Joshua W. Miles

Contents

This End Up! - Engraving - 8” x 6” - 2005

8

Jared Wickware

MacDo

Mollie Ficek

Picture this: Jimmy with a backwards McDonalds’ cap. Jimmy with one silver earring. Jimmy with a grapefruit rind between his greasy teeth. Picture me: beyond annoyed, beyond unimpressed.

“Try this,” he says. “Your lips go numb.”

“Your brain is numb,” I say.

Jimmy’s found me behind the dumpster, sitting on a curb. Not the most original locale at a fast food joint, the first place any manager would check in search of a missing employee. In fact, I think I saw that exact scene on the training video. But no worries here—Jimmy’s not my manager. He’s just a stoner in my grade at school. We’re sophomores, but I’m pretty sure he did the first grade twice.

“What’re you doing?” he says.

“It’s called reading. It’s called a book.”

Jimmy nods. I’m on break. I have to be on break for at least the next ten minutes, because of the four-hour shift I started this afternoon.

Half over— thank God. I found this spot back here just yesterday. It’s better than the break room anyway, which smells like a locker and is too close to the bathrooms. I’d be in there right now, wishing to catch a glimpse of Nick— my big time, summer long crush, and, oh yeah, my manager— on his way to the freezer, but I tried to sit in there on Wednesday and the sound of the flushing grossed me out. Somehow I thought I’d come out here to get some quiet.

“Where’d you get that anyway?” I say.

“What?”

“That dumb fruit. I know there’s not any in the fridge.”

“Mom.”

“Your mom packs you a lunch to go work at McDonalds?”

“Every day.”

Jimmy’s brown hair falls out below his cap in waves. Above it, he wears the headphones for the drive-thru. Right now no one’s coming. We could see the cars anyway if there were any.

9

“I wish my mom did that. The food here is disgusting.”

I scrape my new black tennis shoes against the pavement. I hate them. They’re almost as ugly as the black pants I had to buy and the sweaty blue shirts for the uniform. I can’t believe they force us to look like this. No wonder they’re always hiring.

“Try this, I’m telling you,” he says. “Rub the skin on your teeth and lips. It’s trippy.” Jimmy holds out a slice of the grapefruit.

“I don’t live with my mom, anyway. I mean, she can’t pack my lunch if she doesn’t even know I work here,” I say, even though it’s a lie.

I told her last week at her new apartment above Headlock’s Hair Salon.

The apartment was obviously decorated in the seventies. My mom has done this thing to brighten the dark wood paneled walls, where she bought all this scene printed fabric— a forest of snowy birch trees, a long blue horizon over a yellow field, a calm ocean— and tacked them up like photographs. They’re all lighter than the wall behind them so I guess it’s a better look, but I can’t tell if they actually brighten the place.

“Do you smoke?” Jimmy says.

“What do you mean?”

“You know, do you smoke?”

He holds up a pack of cigarettes he pulled from the pocket of his black pants. His pants look exactly like mine, but dirtier.

“No.”

“Do you smoke anything else?” he says.

“I don’t smoke weed, if that’s what you mean.”

He laughs. “That’s why you don’t like the food here.”

He lights his cigarette with a match. The back door opens and Nick sticks his head out, most of his hair covered by a hat, but like Jimmy, some spills under the sides. Unlike Jimmy’s mop, Nick’s hair looks freshly washed, like warm, blond laundry. I stand up from the curb, awkwardly at attention.

“We just got slammed up front. Darla, can you clock back in?”

Jimmy nudges me. Nick looks at Jimmy.

“Make sure to wash your hands,” he adds, before ducking back inside.

I shut my book, then glare at Jimmy, who’s poking his lips with the tip of his finger.

“Make sure to wash your hands,” Jimmy says.

I roll my eyes.

10

He offers the fruit to me again, and I take it this time. I quickly suck the pinkish pulp from the middle and squeeze my whole face tight against the bitter taste. I run the rind all along my gums, my tongue, my lips, real fast. It tingles. I smack my lips together.

“It’s weird,” I say.

“Leave the book,” Jimmy says. ***

When I get home, my dad is on his exercise bike and looks abused. His hair is matted to all the parts of his head it still grows, and his light gray shirt is dark gray almost everywhere.

“Your mother called,” he says.

“Shit. I totally forgot.”

He doesn’t scold me for swearing.

“How was work?”

My dad is obsessed with my new job. He keeps saying things like: Hard work never hurt anybody, and It’s the only way to get anywhere you want to go in life. I’ve heard it all. I get it, Dad. Enough is enough.

“It was okay.”

“Keep it up,” he says, and speeds along in the living room.

I shower before I call my mom. I smell like grease all day from this job.

I shower and I can still smell it. I put my shirt and ugly pants and ugly shoes in the garage to air out. I have to work tomorrow morning. I don’t have time to wash anything.

When I finally call, my mom drives to pick me up for supper at her place. I don’t have a car, which would be the reason for the minimum-wage crap job. Well, one of the reasons anyway. Nick’s the other. I didn’t just meet him at McDonalds when I started two weeks ago. I met him at the beginning of the summer, the fourteenth of June to be exact, on a double date with my best friend, Tina, and Nick’s best friend, Brandon, who were seeing each other then. I got this job because of him. Well, not because of him, but because of him. I applied because I knew he worked here. I got hired because I wasn’t brain dead.

My mom doesn’t come inside but honks from the driveway. My father looks out the blinds, irritated and sweaty.

“She can’t come in?” he says.

“I’ll be home later.”

11

When I get in the car, she has the air conditioning on high and her face is all splotchy.

“Sorry I forgot to tell you I worked tonight.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says, but I can tell that it does. She quickly reverses out of the driveway. I see my dad has moved to the doorway. I wave goodbye.

At her place, things are tense. I watch as she reheats spaghetti sauce on the stove and makes a new batch of pasta al dente. I sit at the table. Something about this place isn’t welcoming at all. It’s dark and foreign and the long brown carpet makes the whole place smell strange, like the home of some sad old person with parakeets as pets. It gives me the creeps. But like always, I try to pretend it doesn’t and slowly pick through my spaghetti. Mostly, I just bite the garlic bread and look at the indentations of my teeth. I think I need braces. ***

At the beginning of the summer, only a week after I met Nick, I was sent by my sparring parents to stay with my grandpa— my mom’s dad. They spent the previous six months whispering threats and accusations at each other that they thought I couldn’t hear. I’m not dumb and I’m not deaf. I easily translated their encouragement for time away as: we want to fight in peace and quiet and not have to worry about your feelings when we do it. Let’s just say that I had one home when I left and when I got back, they both kept reminding me that I had two.

Mostly, my grandpa’s was boring. After my grandma died last year, my grandpa became stagnant like the green water pond on the farm, slow and in the same circular patterns each day. He drank a pot of coffee for breakfast, an entire pot. He watched the news in the morning, the afternoon, after supper, and before bed. In between that, he watched Westerns on TV. He paid his bills. He snored a lot. He rarely talked.

The sheds were heavy with neglect and worn by normal weather. The barn floors were thin and creaky from rotting wood and wild animals— mostly rabbits and mice and that, small but destructive all the same.

My grandpa rarely left his house, even to check on little things like the gates or empty tractor trailers around the farm, which I remember him doing long after he retired. He mostly ignored me, or acknowledged my presence as something peripheral, something out of the way

12

of his attention. Maybe he wanted someone beside him while he clicked through the channels on the television. Or maybe my parents gave him the same crappy story they gave me: Darla would love to come spend some time with you. It would be good for her to get away.

I read a lot of books. I tried to write letters, but even that bored me. This was the place my parents sent me so they could split, and they didn’t even consider giving me my own phone to call the outside world or the tiniest shred of hope for Internet access. Tina got to go to theatre camp.

After four weeks of eating a rotation of ham and scalloped potatoes or cheeseburgers paired with bland macaroni and imagining what I could possibly muster to do for a few more painful weeks, my grandpa finally left the house.

Picture this: I’m awakened to the sound of three gunshots. I run out of the house barefoot and into the yard, thinking all the very worst thoughts— he’s finally lost it and I’m going to have to pick up his bleeding body and shove it into the station wagon I don’t even know how to drive and then scream into town, killing the gas pedal all the way to the hospital with him convulsing beside me— or even worse, he’s shot the neighbor or the poor U.S. Postman or anyone, really. Anything. Whatever has happened, it spells clear as day all over the bright summer morning: Goodbye, summer vacation, Hello, psychotherapy.

But instead of any of that, I find my grandpa standing proudly over the crippled body of a fat-bellied raccoon that had been shot directly in the face, its face-guts blown everywhere. I didn’t move or say anything for a moment. I stayed still until I couldn’t hear my heartbeat in my ears anymore.

“I finally got him,” my grandpa said, and then nothing at all.

All I could think was: why did he have to shoot the little thing three different times? After a while, I took my grandpa’s shoulder and led him inside. He washed his hands in the sink with a smile on his face. I left him there and used his old rotary telephone to call my dad and ask to come home. Then I called my mom and said the same thing. ***

My mom clears her barely touched spaghetti then suggests dessert. Her mood seems to be brightening. I’m not done eating mine

13

either, but I quickly agree.

“We could go get a vanilla cone at McDonalds?” she says. My dad said the same thing last week.

“Can we not?”

“We can go someplace else together,” she says. “Anywhere you want.”

It’s been like this ever since I got back. The anywhere-youwants and the whatever-you-needs. It was interesting at first— an experiment in how many times we could make a trip to the mall in one week, and how many new things I could get her to buy for my other “new room.” Now it’s getting old. I don’t even like shopping. And so far, I’ve avoided sleeping over. I think she’s beginning to notice.

I stare at the fabric waves of the ocean scene on the living room wall. On the edge, the design has begun to repeat itself in another tile that the woman at the fabric store didn’t cut completely straight.

“I like that one the best,” I say.

“Me too,” my mother says. She looks like she wants to hug me, but she grabs her purse instead.

We go to Dairy Queen. I get a blizzard with cookie dough. My mom gets a strawberry shake. We eat our desserts in the car and watch people on the sidewalk busy their way to somewhere. We take our time. ***

It’s the next morning and I’m at work at 5:30, rotten stinky clothes and all. I feel like I’m going to die. Jimmy walks in after me. He looks like I feel.

I’m on the grill and have to make eggs. I pour this yellow liquid from a milk carton out into rectangles, and then fold them over onto themselves in threes. People actually pay money for this. Jimmy is on the line this morning. He’s humming a song I don’t recognize. Two girls I don’t know and haven’t worked with are up front taking orders.

I turn the sausage patties over. Flip more eggs. When the fryer beeps, I put frozen hash brown cakes into the basket, submerge them in the yellow oil and click the timer back on. It’s mostly just like this.

When it’s really busy, the place erupts in this dense cloud of sound, like it’s coming from every direction and pressing into you. When it slows, you can hear it first before anything else.

14

After the morning rush, I help set up for lunch even though my shift ends soon. Nick has come for the afternoon hours and he checks the stations, the tills, roams in and out of the fridge, the freezer.

He stops where I’m filling condiments for the lunch line.

“Busy, huh?” I say.

He nods. He fills out some paper.

“It’s really too bad Tina isn’t with Brandon anymore,” I blurt too fast, as if each word is connected to the one before it. I’ve been thinking of how to bring it up since my first shift with Nick when he didn’t mention it— the car ride this summer, their break-up. I don’t want to be too pushy, in case Brandon was real upset about it or something and that’s why he didn’t say anything. But that’s what Tina does, dates a lot and breaks up a lot. She called me up at my grandpa’s a couple times. She told me that after Brandon she started dating a guy named Ty who owned a crotch-rocket. Now she’s seeing someone from Alexandria named David. He’s twenty or twenty-one, just her type.

Nick looks up at me, puzzled.

“I thought they were good together,” I say.

“What are you talking about?”

“You know, Tina, Brandon. They’re not together anymore, right?”

“Make sure to fill the tomatoes, the pickles and the cheese, too,” he says, and walks toward the front of the store. “Remind me who Tina is?”

I fill the cheese. I fill the tomatoes. I don’t bother to remind him about Tina. He walks away before I even can, anyway. I feel weird, like I’m going to cry. How could he not remember? How could he forget? He’s the one who held my hand. He’s the one who said I should get his number from Brandon and give him a call to hang out sometime.

And somehow in the month of my summer prison sentence, away from home so my parents could neatly rip apart my entire life, he’s forgotten everything. I can’t face the pickles. I leave them half-empty. ***

It’s Sunday and I’m sleeping in. My dad wakes me up by nudging me with the cordless and saying there’s a guy named Nick on the other line. I try to clear my throat before saying anything, but my Hello?

15

sounds like a horse talking.

“I really need you to come in today,” he says. “Krissy called in sick.”

I think: who the hell is Krissy? I agree to come in. I don’t know why. Maybe because I want to know for sure he doesn’t remember June fourteenth, want to ask him straight out? Maybe I’d agree to anything this early in the morning.

I pull out my clothes from the dryer, which didn’t run long enough last night so my pants are still damp in the middle. My shirt is all wrinkly. I regret this decision already.

I clock in at work and say hi to Jimmy.

“You’re working again?” I say. “Do you ever have a day off ?”

“Tomorrow, sunshine. Tomorrow I’m free as a bird,” he says.

I smile. He returns to singing a song I don’t know. I think the customers can hear him. I punch into the first till out front and Nick’s there next to me. He thanks me for coming in.

“I knew I could count on you,” he says and touches me on the shoulder. His hand lingers.

I’m so confused. I don’t know how to feel about him anymore, about the summer.

Later on when the sound is a dull quiet, I practice making ice cream cones. All of mine end up looking like a singular blob, no curlicue, and no dollop. I practice and practice. Jimmy gets a few of my mistakes. I eat one myself.

Tina stops by with her mom and her little brother and I give them each a sloppy vanilla cone. Her mom takes her brother into Playland. After a few minutes of leaning over the counter and planning our coming weekend between her parents and my two new homes, I see Nick emerge from the break room.

“Hey, Tina. It’s been too long,” he says.

I look between the two of them, back and forth. He knows her now?

He knows her now, all of a sudden?

“Nick,” she says.

“You look good. Must be hot out.”

She has on a pink tank top. I have on this ugly wrinkled polyester shirt.

Then I watch like in slow motion. Nick gives Tina this up and down look, long up and down. He won’t stop staring right at Tina,

16

right at Tina’s lips licking her dumb vanilla cone, the cone that I gave her. Then he turns to me, as if I’m interrupting their conversation.

“Darla, if you’re looking for something to do, why don’t you start on the dishes?” he says. “I saw there’s a big pile stacked up.”

I know I’m going to be sick. I’m going to scream and barf and cry all at the same time. Instead, I storm away from the counter and back into the fridge, the only place I can think of. It’s cool and I need to cool off. I can’t yell. I can’t cry, can’t puke—not here. I walk through the fridge into the freezer.

Inside the freezer, I find Jimmy.

“What are you doing in here,” I say, almost unable to say it.

He pops something into his mouth then rubs his hands fast together like he’s trying to start a fire. My hair is standing tall off my arms.

I’m breathing fog.

“I froze some grapes this morning. Here, try one. They ooze when you eat them.”

“Grapes?” I say.

“Yeah, frozen grapes.”

I start to laugh, but tears fly out of my eyes instead. I quickly wipe them away. I don’t think he notices. Then I take a grape from the pile in Jimmy’s hand. I put it in my mouth and it is instant ice against my teeth. The insides of the fruit are a chilly relief after their crystallized skin.

“I think I liked the grapefruit better,” I say.

“These are my favorite,” he says. “Especially when I’m high.”

“Are you high right now?”

He makes this motion with his hand, zooms it up in the air with three fingers. I’m pretty sure it means ‘airplane’ in sign language.

I shuffle my feet, and rub my arms.

“About that,” I say, “Maybe we could try it sometime?”

Jimmy pops another grape into his mouth.

“Tomorrow, baby girl. Tomorrow’s our day,” he says and smiles. ***

I call in sick. It’s easy. I’m supposed to work a six-hour shift today but I don’t want to. I don’t fake a cough or a real good excuse at all, just say I’m not coming in and leave it at that. I don’t know if Nick

17

is working today, and I don’t care either. I hope he is. I hope when he calls around to get someone to pick up my shift, he can’t find anyone and there are two school busses at the same time and everyone wants ice cream cones and the machine breaks. I hope it’s a pain in his ass. After I call in sick, I call Jimmy.

He picks me up and we drive out of town, up past the turkey farms that smell already this morning, past the river and out to the old cemetery with white stones sticking out like tall, thin pyramids, gravestones from a long, long time ago. We stay in the car and Jimmy hands me his pipe, which looks like a cigarette. He shows me how to light it.

We smoke it a few times and I don’t know if I’m high or not.

It’s overcast and when we get out to walk around the graves, the sun shines on some of them, making the veins of the marble stand out against the grain. I trace my finger slowly over cuts of names and dates, and think about my grandma’s marker— gray and simple, and what my grandpa’s will look like right next to it. Jimmy smokes cigarettes on the hood of his car.

“How will I know when I feel it?” I say.

“You’ll know,” he says. “You’ll get hungry.”

I join him on the car and look out across the plotted land, the gate, leaves on the trees moving fast in the wind. I feel the first drop of rain land on my arm, cold and quick. Another falls to my knee. Then another.

“Did you know that in Hawaii, McDonalds serves Spam breakfast sandwiches?” he says, like the middle of a conversation we’ve never started.

“Eew!”

“And in Japan, they have a breakfast hot dog.”

“Yeah right.”

“I’m serious.”

“Sick.”

“And in Europe, like all over, they call it MacDo. Not MickieDee’s, you know? MacDo. It sounds European, doesn’t it?”

“MacDo.”

The word sounds strange on my tongue, like there was too much of it and too little room in my mouth. I say it again. The sun disappears and we both look up; it threatens rain.

“Let’s smoke some more,” Jimmy says.

18

We sit in the car and fat rain blots out the windshield, plinks loudly off the roof. The car is full of smoke and I cough hard after inhaling. Jimmy turns the radio on and bangs out a drumbeat on the wheel and the dashboard, then on my arm and leg. It feels different when he touches me, like he leaves the pulse of the music there on my skin when his hand moves away. I can feel something now besides a burning in my chest. Jimmy makes this face where he puffs out his cheeks full of smoke and then releases it like a dragon. I laugh. I can’t stop laughing.

I imagined we’d drive around like this all day, but the rain is so loud. I can’t see through it. I know I can’t go home because my dad expects me to be at McDonalds flipping burgers all day, and we can’t go to Jimmy’s because he’d get sucked into babysitting his little brother for the rest of the afternoon and that’s something I know I can’t handle right now. Plus, I don’t want this to end— this experience, this whole weird experience together. I think of my mom’s new house, and the fabric on the wall.

“I know where we can go,” I say.

“Tell me where you want to go. I’ll get us there.”

He takes one more hit.

“My mom’s place. I have a key.”

I pull it from my purse and show it to Jimmy. It is brand new and it shines silver, even though the sun hides behind the clouds.

We drive back into town, listening to music so loudly I think my eardrums will burst. Jimmy sings along as if he’s by himself in the car, or as if he doesn’t care that I hear him. I sing along too. He drives down Main Street and toward my dad’s place and I’m about to remind him how to get to my mom’s, when all of a sudden he takes a left and then another left and we’re in the McDonalds’ parking lot.

“Jimmy! What the hell are we doing here?” I say and turn down the music.

“I have to check my schedule.”

“I called in sick this morning. What if someone sees me?”

I duck down in the passenger seat.

“Can’t you wait until later or something?”

“We’re already here,” he says. “Babe, just don’t move. I’ll be right back.”

Jimmy rushes out into the rain and I slouch down lower. I think he just called me babe. I think I kind of like that. I peek out Jimmy’s

19

window. He’s parked right next to Nick’s ugly Dodge something-orother. I think about the day before and all the days I’ve worked with Nick since I started. About his blond hair and his manager’s tie. What an asshole. What a colossal waste of my time. I decide to call in sick again tomorrow. I decide to call in sick the next day, too, and every day for the rest of the schedule, and the next schedule if they put me on it. I don’t ever want to see him again. I don’t ever want to put on that disgusting uniform again. Nick can flirt with Tina for all I care, date her even. They can make-out in the McDonalds’ parking lot in his dumb ass car.

I duck down again. A mother with her little girl dash out of the back door and rush to their car. They look happy and wet. It’s been a long time since my mom and I smiled like that, since the two of us looked like the two of them. I watch the rain drops on the windshield break shapes. They plop onto one another, trickle down in separate streams that rejoin others and shed down the pane, as if each drop were made just for me, just for me to see something in its path to read it like the lines on an open palm.

I open the door and don’t bother covering my head. I walk right up to the back of Nick’s car, where the dust of country roads has left a thick film, barely altered by the rain. Dipping my finger into rain drops on the trunk of the car, I trace Tina’s phone number onto his back windshield. It stands out clear against the grime. He’ll see it when he looks in his rear view mirror. That should make it easy.

I hear the back door swing open. My heart falls to my feet and I can barely stand, barely turn around. I do, and thank God, it’s Jimmy.

He’s running through the rain, carrying a bulging McDonalds’ bag and an enormous soda. He’s already chewing fries. He looks at my artwork on the back of Nick’s car.

I look guilty and wet. “It’s not my number.”

“I know,” he says and smiles. “I got your number.”

He scratches the word “asshole” underneath. I’m smiling like I can’t control my lips.

“Get in the car,” he says.

I pour myself into the passenger seat.

“Are there any weird fruits in that bag, or Spam or hot dogs?” I laugh, and feel droplets of water trickle down my back.

“Nope, just real pure all-American cuisine,” he says, and

20

chomps some more fries.

I dig into the fries as he drives out of the lot and towards my mom’s. We get upstairs and it takes me a while, but I fix the key in the door and open it. The room is dark, except for one pane of light beaming down onto the carpet from the window. The clouds have shifted and the sun has returned. I sit in the sun, my clothes and hair drying slowly.

Jimmy dumps out the bag on the carpet like it contains stacks of bills from a bank heist.

“We have robbed the dollar menu,” I say and almost spit out my bite of my too-big burger.

Jimmy loses a spray of Coke across the carpet.

“It’s good, right?” he says.

My mouth is too full to do anything but nod. I wipe a smear of ketchup off my face and devour more fries. We eat until we finish everything, the entire monster bag. I suck down Coke like I’m in the desert and will never drink again. And then we lay down, holding our stomachs and looking up at the ceiling.

“I like the one with the trees,” he says. He points to the fabric square pinned on the far wall.

“I like them all,” I say. And I do.

Picture the two of us: We lie in the sun, the McDonald’s wrappers abandoned beside us, everything eaten, every last fry. I play with the carpet, the long lush brown carpet, and it feels so soft against my skin. Like it might feel if it weren’t the carpet but Jimmy’s hair. I’m still running my fingers through the carpet like the mane of the tamest of lions when Jimmy takes my hand in his hand. He doesn’t move, just reaches over and takes mine in his. He holds it, real soft, real gentle and we lay there for a long time, just like that.

•

21

Ascent - Engraving - 5” x 8” - 1971

22

Jared Wickware

All Afternoon We Lyn Lifshin read Lorca by five snow blurred the glass. February. I leaned against those chill panes.

Gypsies burned through the snow with apples You in the other room I was thinking don’t let this be some warmth I can move near and never know

23

Not Thinking It Was So With Yellow Flowers Lyn Lifshin At night I dreamed that same dream, the one full of muscles and thighs that aren’t you.

Later the fear came back crossing into Mexico tho at first when I woke up I thought it wasn’t true the air was so bright and yellow flowers were falling from the pepper tree like suns

24

Moving By Touch Lyn Lifshin

that afternoon an unreal amber light 4 o’clock the quietness of oil February blue bowls full of oranges we were spreading honey, butter on new bread our skin nearly touching Even the dark wood glowed

25

Though Many Poems Have Come Out of Dreams Lyn Lifshin

last night, for the first time, Dylan Thomas walked right out of a poem into a dream. He was cherubic, a babyface, asexual so it didn't seem like a pass when he started nuzzling me like a cat pressing her nose into my skin, wanting to be petted and combed. Childlike, Dylan might have been dressed in a young boy's shorts, dark curls, darker than in his photographs, but I had no doubt it was him. He whispered Welsh into my neck and I felt goose bumps as if his breath was his poems making me tingle. Everything started melting.

I'd loved him for so long on the sheet of the page but now, to have him all over me, his verbs and fur and something I know I didn't imagine. He wasn't tall, his lips never far from some part of my body, soft little leeches, flesh magnets so cuddly anything you could imagine happening easily could and did

26

Hall of Records John Sibley Williams These names, so like mine, announce a life one moment, breathe death the next— often simultaneously.

Insular letters wrap together, grind temporarily into meaning, then detach again, forever.

The gray drawers groan from the unchecked expanse of vocabulary.

My hands are busy.

I tear from a blue label its context, replace it with another's name, another's island universe, and rewrite the history of creation.

Somewhere that is not here a body suddenly rolls its sealed eyes up and tastes the sky.

So much is misplaced by the lightest touch!

Somewhere else a woman has lost her fingerprint, has forgotten the name of her son. * To study the transparent enormity of Susan or James is a conversation all its own.

In this insistently communal life, to write one's name

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on even a dark-ringed barroom napkin opens dialog with a mouth that never closes.

In 2000 years, there won't be a bone left over, perhaps not even this hall, this city, but someone will always exist to file the past in its place. * Derelict prayers rise uncertainly from row upon endless row.

Pliable steel crops.

Whispers of sunlight coagulate in the rafters.

What the voiceless are requesting is the sole property of their paper gods.

I don’t ask which or why, simply waft from my face the odor of lost expectation.

O to be lost again!

To not know where dust gathers first. * Refold me next, please, into a perfect origami rose for the unplanted paper garden just beneath this other garden so resplendently anonymous.

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The Singer

John Sibley Williams It arrives, the hinge of the song, almost nothing but the need to pry word from wound, expunge the infinite from a lungful of the moment, and when it’s over, tell me when from this side of the closed door, with regret ankle-deep and nothing but silence and what suffices for now, tell me, when everyone listening has gone even yourself and the rest of night, will you still suffer how best to express the language of the void through this brief history of your body?

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Cloud Practice - Engraving - 6" x 4" - 2003

30

Jared Wickware

Leave It Behind Peter Kispert

I was walking through the backwoods, past trees sugared with morning snow, when the rifle fired its rounds into the basement ceiling. I was just back from the war, had left old ammunition near the furnace. Kara was sleeping in the guest room. Calm down, I said when I got home, limp turkey under my arm. She wouldn’t come down the second floor stairs. She thought I was having another episode.

We’d been together for three years. Her friend got my attention leaving anonymous notes in my cubicle where we worked. When I met Kara, life made sense in a cold, real way. I was twenty-three, new to women who knew what they wanted. I felt my life moving forward.

I felt her moving alongside me. I felt responsible for her safety and happiness, things I would learn to shatter like clay targets.

Show me your hands, she said when I tried to call her down.

She leaned over the balcony railing. She wasn’t crying. It was another lapse of mistrust.

I raised my hands like a criminal caught mid-felony, a little red with blood from the bird but otherwise normal. Soft. The hands she’d held for years.

Kara sat on the bed while I washed up, readied the bird for freezing. She finally came down the stairs with a sigh.

Turkey? she asked.

Yeah, I said. For tomorrow night.

She nodded. I walked downstairs to a soft hissing. Pipes drizzled a dark fluid beneath the dryer. A bullet hemmed a hole through her two drying dresses. I had known this would happen, that a war isn’t just something that happens but something that happens to our lives, to us. ***

One-day two years back, Kara left me a string of notes that lead to her car. We kissed and drove to her home together. We

31

watched a comedy on her worn leather couch. We were warming up to each other, shared secrets over wine. Blankets furled over both our laps, a quiet cat on her thigh.

She said she liked army men. I don’t know why, she’d said.

Your turn.

I told her I was thinking about it, that I’d always wanted to.

Which wasn’t true. As I said it I felt the words land heavily, in a way I didn’t expect.

Don’t be a moron, she told me with a smile and polished off her Merlot.

The conversation was a hiccup from our normal talking material: her neighbors’ Chihuahua, our insufferable coworkers, mysterious clicking noises beneath her sink I couldn’t fix. We were both serious and attempting seriousness. The conversation ended soon after.

So when I left for Camp Striker, Baghdad, I told myself it wasn’t a surprise.

I told myself doing this to make her like me was reasonable because I wasn’t her ideal guy. I had thin arms and short legs. I wanted to be the guy to build her a mahogany porch, our kids a tree house. But when I arrived, I realized. The war wasn’t just a string of impromptu midnight fires, babies and dogs in bushes: it was gunfire and navigating minefields, two years of thinking about her at three AM, writing down inside jokes, notes I’d lose along the way. Chihuahwhat? and Green light! and Miss you.

When I finally arrived back, everything was the same, really, except for that nagging feeling that it wasn’t. ***

Fucking put that away, she said when I got home. You’re gonna hurt somebody.

She’d been promoted, was dating another guy. But she tried for me again, because she was that kind of girl. She knew what she wanted, and apparently, that was still me. We moved in together, a tentative measure.

So I stowed it all away in a box downstairs: bullets, guns, badges, vests.

She said, Get rid of your uniform. She said, Stop talking

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barracks at the dinner table. We were new to this. We were trying, trying, trying. The rent wasn’t helping. I flinched when she dropped a soup ladle.

Three weeks passed. The remnants of our old relationship became a residue, something blurred in our peripheries.

When I scored and skinned the bird for dinner, I found the bullet in its brown-feathered chest. I excised it with a butter knife, placed it on the counter. She looked at it, sure of something, then turned and walked upstairs.

When I returned with three quail the next day, she was gone.

She’d left a trail of small, yellow notes that lead to the garbage bin.

Leave it behind, the last note said. She’d replaced a fresh liner. I called her, got voicemail. I walked outside, gun in hand. I freshly pumped its magazine. I shot into the sky until it was dark and bruised, until I wasn’t sure whether sensation was fading or finally, finally arriving.

•

33

Gathering Place - Engraving - 9” x 12” - 2009

34

Jared Wickware

We Would Call It "Hard Zen" William Auten

1.

How quiet it would be to slowly wait in the rain or the snow or the intolerable heat for the master to ask if reaching enlightenment would be worth cutting off your thumbs and giving them to him. At the gate, your painted pony nudges your shoulder.

The temple is magenta unfurling into the cobalt-grey sky.

2.

There are no more angels in this city. Television towers and overwrought bridges.

The malls are filled with yesterday’s promises.

You can see the nipples of an actress when the courtroom has adjourned. We are asking the wrong questions. It is not a time of drought or for believing in maps.

3.

I wanted to know the limits of my own life.

I think its filaments fit perfectly in a pouch that you would have seen in a western. Imagine me riding through town, practically lost, tumbleweeds rolling in front of what was the general store.

There was a small apothecary in the back,

35

where anything vital could be delivered.

4.

But I like the ending, too, suitable for someone who goes to the ocean with nothing in particular in mind.

The joke ends its version of humour at the boardwalk. The salty air is thick enough to carry home a sense of what you were today at various moments.

Collage is such a word, but only true when the fibers are pressed.

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*

Simon Perchik You approach from above expect the sun at your back, the sink blinded by spray the way every stream is born knowing how scrapes bottom till its stones ignite explode into oceans then islands broken apart for the skies still following a rain that’s not here –you’re used to this –the same cracked cup rinsed till its glaze cools and it’s safe to dry your arms the floor, the walls.

37

Clouds of Milk Nathan Whiting

A silver tree coughs on an emerald sky.

Ruby clouds drop yellow streaks on mud beside a purple river.

Made of oyster shells, I rattle as I run.

A child, I want to see day fail to discover night. Mother won't let me grin. Red vultures approach. Will my new friend, met on Friday, vanish at bedtime?

Octopus arms walk on a broken path painted black. Our house wriggles lilac windows to keep me outdoors.

Arms reach and cling. I bite them and they coil. Doors rattle. Brass pigs enjoy the clatter. Mother licks ice in me and helps it melt, her shiver a game.

Our rules dangle from spider webs ripe in the air and easy to weave.

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Parents

Juan Carlos Reyes they remind me, as occasionally as their workdays culminate in numbing commutes home, you used to have a job that paid for mortgages groceries and a dog, and I remind them, yea but I almost also drove my car off a highway until I ran out of gas, and because thoughts scurry past them sometimes, my stares to relent go unmet, and so they add, so you don’t miss the steady salary of a knotted tie and what ever happened to that, and they don’t scold, their questions modest though unexpected, like whispers from across an engraved noisy clunky table and so I lean forward, make sure I’ve understood what I think I’ve heard, and I gaze into my rice, and I shrug, What’s to say, and my dad smiles because these are really only the obsessive concerns between mother and son laid bare and so we eat our meal, and my dad, his mouth full, repeats how much he loves his duck soup, and the Vietnamese gentleman returns to our booth, tells us again how glad he is to see them back at his restaurant, This here’s our son, my dad says, This here’s my restaurant, the owner says, and though it seems so, not a word was lost in translation

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Dance on Terror - Engraving - 5” x 3” - 2004

40

Jared Wickware

About Anna Lynn Beighley

She looks like Anna so I hate her. I know she’s not Anna, can’t be Anna, and yet I look at her closely and inspect her Anna-ness. I wonder what she thinks, seeing me, a Kansas hayseed in an oil-stained blue work shirt, my mouth a fly trap as I gawk at her like she is painted blue. I study her face and keep her outside the door, not inviting her in. Behind her the sky is dark with storm clouds.

I don’t know how long this goes on. Her similarity to Anna is so remarkable that I’m felled by it and it isn’t until I notice her height, she’s quite a bit shorter than Anna, that I shake my head and close my mouth and say, “You’re Karen.” She nods. Yes, this must be Karen Carter. Here to start her new management job at DRL, I remind myself, here at the door of my Bed and Breakfast on the edge of Kansas City. Here to be more comfortable than at the airport Hilton as she looks for a place to live. Here to stay for a month.

But damn, she looks so much like fucking Anna. My fists are clenched so tightly that my ragged fingernails press sharply into my palms. I try to push Anna out of my mind; I swallow, trying to digest my anger. I know I’m being rude, but I barely care. This B&B was Anna’s idea, and it’s dying anyway without her to nurse it along. The B&B has become a sickly calf with no mother, no, an abandoned baby. Mother’s out there somewhere, but she doesn’t give a shit.

Karen stands patiently, silently, even as the wind buffets her. She said in the e-mail that she’s deaf, but somehow I didn’t think that would mean she wouldn’t speak. Or couldn’t? I don’t know. My buddy Earl is practically deaf, but he bellows all the time. So I wonder why Karen doesn’t speak. Anna always talks and talks. I tally it, another difference.

Karen’s quiet, Anna chatters. But I notice that her body is very much like Anna’s. Smallish breasts. Long waist. Wide hips. God, how is it possible for her to look so much like Anna? And her face, the same big brown eyes and the same long, thin, sharp nose, the same soft mouth. They even share the same straight blonde hair, only Karen’s is neatly pulled back

41

professionally I suppose. The wind has released some strands that whip around her face. Wouldn’t do for the businesswoman’s hair to flow gently around her shoulders, to make it easy for me to twist it through my fingers as I roughly pull her mouth to mine.

I’m short with Karen as I take her around the house. It’s dark now, and glancing out a window I see that the storm has moved over us. I hear the rain hitting the roof hard. It might be hail. We go to the kitchen, and I point at the basement door. I’m so obnoxious that I mouth at her “TOR NAY DOE” and “WEHHH THUR” like she’s retarded. I know she’s insulted. She has that tight look around her lips that Anna would get, so I know I’ve pissed her off and part of me feels really good about that. But there’s another difference. Karen’s eyes won’t meet mine. She just looks tired. Anna would stare at me with a go to hell look. Damn Anna, damn her for leaving me.

I head up the wooden stairs and when I glance back, I see Karen following me, her fingers tracing a ridge in the ornate banister. I brush her off by showing her to her room. I thrust her key at her. She mouths “thank you” at me without sound. I close her door behind me.

Fuck you, Anna, I think.

I’m alone again, but I’m so angry. How will I spend a month with this inferior copy of Anna? I tromp down the stairs to the old fridge to get a beer for breakfast. Everything in the house suddenly resonates Anna. The fifties era fridge with the curved edges. Ices up all the time but we bought it because Anna loved it. The yellow curtains in the kitchen, Anna’s kitchen. Her collection of chicken knick-knacks I feel like smashing. I walk out and head for the door. I have to leave Anna’s house right now. I pass the living room’s pastel colors, the girlie fabrics, the soft lighting from the sixty watt bulbs Anna insisted on. A hundred watts is too harsh, she said. Keep it soft and romantic. Maybe I think it’s time for more light to be shed on things. I could change the bulbs for higher wattages, but I’m worried about the old wiring in this ancient farmhouse. And damn her, she’s right, the softer light hides the hard edges. More shadows, though. Always more shadows.

And right now I notice lots of shadows, more than I expected this early in the day. I open the front door and look out. Clouds droop everywhere. The wind parts my hair, balloons my shirt, and I don’t like the look of the sky. It really is tornado weather. But I can’t go back in the house, not with her there. She’ll be coming back downstairs and go-

42

ing to her office but maybe she’ll need something from me first. I can’t see her again. Not right now.

I march out back to the tin building where the pickup is parked.

I decide to work on it, give it the tune up and oil change it needs. I work, finding one more thing that needs to be done, and one more thing, and one more. A couple hours of this and I’m surprised to hear the wind, even feel it slithering through the gaps in the metal walls. I’m hungry and thirsty and she must be long gone now. I’m outside and I look up and the clouds are marshmallows in firelight. The winds urge me to the back door. It isn’t until I’m in, door closed with the lantern lit, that I remember Anna. And then Karen. I think about Karen, and I know she can’t be here. I open the fridge and use the lantern to find a beer. While I’m twisting off the cap, I hear something strange. It’s faint, chugchugchugchugchug. That’s a tornado, I know that sound.

I’m so calm right now. I sit at the table. I sip my beer, the lantern in front of me flickering. The light is soft, throwing shadows everywhere. I can see the shadow of my own hand as I pick up my beer.

It’s now a house of shadows, but also of noise, a house of vibrations.

One of Anna’s chicken dishes falls. My arms sprout goose bumps, and I fight the desire to leap from my chair. It’s time. I know it is. I stand with the lantern, deliberate and slow. I move to the basement door. My hand turns the knob, the door opening easily. I think for a moment of Anna and her fear of storms. I remember so many times clinging to Anna in the basement. Scared Anna, Anna who ran away from me, Anna who is gone but whose doppelganger returned today to torment me.

I stand at the basement door, half in, and half out. I hear the roar of the tornado, and I see it between the curtains, now light grey in the gloom, there it is. The noise grows and the dark shaft of the storm never deviates from my view but just gets larger.

I think enough, I think Anna, no Karen is safe somewhere else.

I think it’s time for me to go in and close the door. I turn my back on the thrusting cloud, I turn my back and take my lantern and pull the door shut. Safe, I’m safe now. I remember how many times I said that to Anna, “You’re safe now, love.” Our house is old and strong and must have been through hundreds of tornadoes. This one is no different. I’m here, I’m safe and I’m alone.

My hand is still on the doorknob. I think for a moment, feel

43

it twist, and hold it tighter. I think I hear something different than the roar of the storm and feel something pounding against the door. I can’t let the storm in. I don’t know what is going on out there,a but here I was always safe. Here Anna and I were always safe. I keep the door pulled shut. I fight the storm, the winds that try to open the door. I hear scraping and something else, a sound like dogs howling. It’s an animal noise, not a wind noise and suddenly I think, “what if it’s Anna?”

I open the door and reach out. Hands clutch my arm and cling to me. I pull Anna towards me, I pull her into the safety of our basement, and I lean over to hold her, to gently kiss her forehead, to tell her we are safe. And Karen looks at me, confused.

I shut the door, and I gently lead her down into the basement, one arm around her shoulders, the other in front of us with the lantern.

We sit together in the corner, and I tell her all about Anna.

END

•

44

Unreliable Randall Brown

The therapist reminded me of Miss Sullivan, my fourth grade teacher, the way she sneered when she’d call me in front of the class.

“This,” she’d announce, “was the reason we won’t be winning any handwriting ribbons.”

Everyone called me “This” that year.

It wasn’t so bad, the nickname, having one. Better than being this ghost who haunted halls. Mostly better. I’m not sure they were handwriting ribbons. Medals probably.

She wore this sneer right before she fell, not Miss Sullivan, but you know, that therapist— on the platform. I don’t think it had anything to do with my handwriting. Maybe it did.

She looked, as she fell, like Amy Krause, this girl I’d stood in front of in that fourth grade class, super smart. Such pity she had for me. Amy Krause told me Miss Sullivan’s “This” had no antecedent. I nodded as if I understood. I do that too much.

I could see the therapist from the subway train, the train she had me riding back and forth, again and again, until I habituated to the panic of riding a subway train. She was standing on the platform, not waving, just watching and waiting, and I was thinking all these thoughts, as I always am, and she had promised, over and over, that thoughts didn’t harm anyone, only actions did.

So the thoughts came, like subway trains and school and all the other things I as forced to accept and find a way to live with: What if I acted upon them? What if I couldn’t stop myself ? What if I didn’t act upon it but was supposed to? What if I started screaming? What if I pounded on the glass and broke out? What if I ran out and pushed her right off that platform?

And then she fell. Nothing happened to her, just some scrapes and dirt. On the way back to the office, she said it was one crazy coincidence. What are the odds? And I told her that was a funny thing to say since she was always calculating odds— like the 176,000 times my chest has been tight and nothing has happened— so I should see that it was a silly thing to worry about.

Back in her office, she asked me if I had any questions for her. I looked at those red marks covering her knees and shins and forearms.

I had lots of questions, I told her. Like how one kid could ruin an entire class’s chance at a trophy.

•

45

Gypsy Boy

John Spaulding Hiking along the sewer trail near the dump among dead refrigerators & hospital bandages, crankcase oil & red sneakers you could find Mrs. Hornby’s broken automatic bayonet revolver or maybe an electronic belt for “languishing libido” conditions sometimes you could find foreign stamps in the post office trash but when the gypsies came through our factory town I found the boy with the knife who had a fire inside him could change the color of his eyes swim across the third branch of the White River underwater while I held & smelled his clothes in Wilsons’ Wood he taught me how to jerk off & carried a rubber in his pocket but I wanted to taste his tan skin walk around inside him find something there to take home & keep forever, like a piece of God.

46

Trapping

David Romanda the boy who’s long been a man dreams of fox trapping with papa he’d forgotten the whispery hush of thick fallen snow forgotten the way bright blood stains that snow he’d forgotten papa picking up a broken fox saying there is beauty

47

Seam and Symmetry Mark Anthony Cayanan

Something about the light hitting you wrong, I tell him as he puts on his shirt. He is inside-out. Through the window, everyday moves through itself, and it is scandalous. I rub my eyes, and he knows I wait.

After everything,

he begins,

he gets on the plane, puts his feet up on the empty seat next to him.

Who is he, who was responsible. I pull out fresh socks from a drawer. Here, I say.

This city is dirt under your nails, is rickshaw, is sweat stains. The city is: Swallow. He hops on a cab, gives the name of his hotel, and is taken to a temple. The driver repeats a single word—Here here here. He thinks the driver means, Pay. But this is a minor misunderstanding. How will it be of use to us.

There’s more, he says. I want to say, The air is heavy with—but why should I insist.

At the night market, he shadows a woman with a basket of fabrics on her head, follows the pungent trail of shrimp paste, gets his foot trampled on by a cart selling bread that smells of warm earth. He goes back to the hotel, a part of him now purple, the swelling a form of grace:

Finally, a symbol, a thing I can take apart.

He takes pictures of roofs from his balcony, and in this new light their sharp finials are warnings. Of course, he leans on the balustrade, and of course, something happens.

Is this what you mean for me to know, I ask. I hand him his coat because this is the point when he lets me find out. Maybe there is lemongrass in the air; maybe the door is just as ambient.

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Seam and Symmetry Mark Anthony Cayanan

In the middle of the restaurant, he takes his coat off and proceeds to eat it. He begins with the right sleeve, wool tasting of turpentine, which tastes like sepia. Let your tongue travel over the memory of the one you loved first and best, and you would have come close.

That’s not how it happened,

he explains much later, his thumb kneading my palm. My hand ravels, ribbons. I wish for something; it is urgent.

That’s not how it tastes.

He is about to chew the lining of the breast pocket—

cured meat over charcoal; it can make the dead disappear—

when the head waiter rushes in from the pantry to give him a tablecloth, newly starched and eager. Along its hem, embroidered flowers the color of a desired sky.

Not this,

he tells everyone willing to listen. The diners have turned away from their meals, the food has grown cold, the wine is vinegar. A woman starts nibbling at her husband’s paisley tie.

I can’t swallow something my body can’t contain.

He brushes my hair out of his face, the intention behind it a corridor in which objects overrun, some of them covered in white cloth, some in their original packaging, some held together by glue.

When I move, the stacks unsettle.

In the real story, I didn’t say a word. I tried to speak, but the sun lodged in my throat and held back the sound.

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Eagle - Engraving - 4.5” x 6” - 1978

50

Jared Wickware

Cleave

Joe Baumann

“Honestly, Clarissa,” Selena Shankman said with a strand of yarn in her right hand and weaving loom in her left. “I just don’t understand how you can do that.”

Clarissa sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the old television set, perpetually on but muted, and the only noise aside from her mother’s voice was the ticking grandfather clock in the corner of the room. She was bent over the photograph in her hand, gauging where she should start cutting. “Do what, Mama?”

“Destroy those pictures, cutting them up like that.”

“I’m not destroying them,” Clarissa said. She cut through the matte photo, following the outline of Jeffrey’s torso and turning the picture in the jaws of the scissors, using his armpit as the pivot point.

“I’m making new pictures, taking the best parts of them and putting them together. It’s for Ms. Proctor’s class.”

“Hmph.” Selena compressed her lips together in a thin flat line. She curled one strand of yarn over the back beam. “Elaina Proctor shouldn’t be teaching, not at your school, not anywhere.”

“She’s smart, Mama. And those things people say about her aren’t true.”

“You don’t know that now do you, Clarissa?” She looped the yarn through. “And anyone that thinks you can just cut up pictures, just take whatever, you know, whatever parts you want and forget the rest, well, I just don’t think you can do that.”

Clarissa stopped cutting and looked back at her mother.

“Please don’t.”

“I’m just saying,” Selena said, looking toward the television.

“You can’t just ignore all the other stuff.”

Clarissa dropped the photograph and scissors, uncurled her legs and let out an angry huff. Standing and placing a hand on her stomach, she walked past her mother and down the hall to her bedroom. Selena was still unused to not hearing the door slam, and she smiled.

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Jeffrey’s arm, clad in a checked button-down shirt in the photo, curled up from the floor and beckoned toward the hallway. ***

On the first day of school, Elaina Proctor wore a yellow kimono over tight black yoga pants and a matching tank top. She tied her unwashed hair in a loose bun.

The money to renew her post-doctoral fellowship in Tuscaloosa that Elaina had been promised would be available had fallen through at the last minute. That was, at least, the official story. She knew the rumors that had been circulating about her in floating whispers and furtive looks.

Now, disgruntled and refusing to adhere to the faculty dress policy, she was stuck in a part time job in Bunset, Alabama, teaching three basic art classes, including a first period scrapbooking class, filled, she decided the moment they started flopping down in their seats, with kids with no ambitions and no one to expect any ambitions from them.

Elaina wasted no time placing names with faces. Archie Rutherford? Here. Gina Santos? Here. Clarissa Shankman? Here. She passed out the syllabus, and as she read the course description she looked up. Only one girl, in the front row, was reading along as she recited the list of required assignments: progress checks, two papers, one on the scrapbook making process, one on your work as an artist, and the final product.

“That,” she said, “is where all of your work will come together, and the full picture of who you are, what your art says about you, will emerge.”

Elaina watched, sitting behind the wide wooden table at the front of the room as students filed out at the end of the period. She was appalled: a desk in an art classroom. She would never need that, she told the janitor, and could he please remove it. But the desk was bolted to the floor. Everything in this town, she thought, was bolted to something else. ***

The boxes towered on the shelves before Clarissa, a wall of peaceful colors built of rectangles and squares. Promises of early detection, the greatest reliability, and clearest reading leapt out at her in

52

large block letters. Clarissa tried to focus, eyes darting from price tag to price tag. “Which one do I get?”

“I dunno,” Marnie said, scratching the eczema on her doughy right arm. “Why would I know? Maybe this one.” She grabbed a box and turned it over in her hand.

Clarissa had been too nervous to tell Jeffrey, so she found Marnie in the locker room after gym class instead. Marnie had been leaning over her gym bag in her flesh-toned sports bra that was three shades darker than her skin. The nylon dug into her back, whitish flesh squished up along its underside.

“No way, Clarissa. Are you sure?”

Clarissa hadn’t been sure. Why else would she ask Marnie to come with her to the store?

“We have to go across town, to the CVS on Burton Street,” she said.

“Why? That’s so far.”

“I don’t want anyone to recognize me, Marnie.”

“Oh. Right.”

The box in Marnie’s hand was a light pastel rectangle. “It says it’s like ninety-nine percent accurate.”

“They all say that, Marnie.” Clarissa frowned. “It’s fifteen bucks.”

“Isn’t it worth being sure?” She shook her head. “What if it’s positive?”

Clarissa felt tears welling in her eyes. She looked toward the ceiling like her mother had taught her.

“I don’t know,” she said, wiping her lower eyelids. “I don’t want to think about it yet. What about this one? It’s only ten dollars.

Why are these things so expensive?”

“Do you even know how to use one of these?” Marnie crinkled her nose, reading the back of the box as she held it close to her face like a magnifying glass. “Eww, you have to pee on it. What if you pee on yourself, like miss or something and get some on your hand?”

Clarissa glared. “I’m not too worried about that.”

“God, I would be.” Marnie set the box back on the shelf. “I mean that’s pretty gross.”

Clarissa shrugged and turned around, walking down the aisle toward the front of the store. “I think I have other things to worry about, Marnie.”

Marnie jogged to catch up with Clarissa. “Want me to go into

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the bathroom with you while you, you know, do it?”

“No, Marnie. I don’t really see how you can help.”

“Moral support, Clarissa. I thought you could, you know, maybe use some.”

They reached the checkout counter. The teenage boy standing there looked down at the box, and Clarissa watched as his face reddened. After paying she started toward the bathroom.

“You sure you don’t want me to come with you?” Marnie yelled from near the front of the store.

Clarissa shook her head and kept walking. The lights above her buzzed like a beehive. ***

“Art,” Elaina said, pacing back and forth in front of the first row of tables, “is the external expression of one’s interior.” She shrugged her left shoulder, adjusting the weight of the serape on her frame. One of her undergrads had given it to her. No one in this dusty Alabama classroom with a pottery wheel in the back corner covered in a permanent film of crusty clay would ever show the sort of promise that Erin had. Elaina fiddled with one of the serape’s fringed knots that ran down each side.

Her students were staring every which way, only the petite blond girl at the center table in the front looked at her. For three weeks Elaina had watched them from her desk in the front of the room as they sketched out pages for their books and read articles about aesthetics that were too bulky and contained too much complex language for them to have to read at home. She showed them slides of Picasso and explained the difference between Monet and Manet, but all they wanted to do was bedazzle pieces of thick paper or draw large bubble letters with thin-tipped permanent markers.

“If nothing else,” she said, “you must capture the things that matter the most to you.”

Elaina looked around the room of sleepy-eyed students, avoiding the gaze of the girl in front. The way the girl seemed not to blink, her eyes following Elaina whenever she paced back in forth while she lectured, unsettled her.

She splayed her palms out against the table where the girl sat.

Next to her, a round brunette leaned back when Elaina pressed her weight against the table.

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“For homework due Monday. Three pages about what matters to you, and how you’ll express it in your scrapbook. Typed.” She heard the ruffling of papers and groans. Elaina slammed her right palm against the table. The girls in front of her flinched. “You think scrapbooks are nothing.” She scanned the room. “A hobby. Easy. Glue and photographs. They’re not nothing. They’re art. And in this classroom, art is serious. It’s painful. It’s difficult.” The image of Erin Halladay tried to claw its way up into her brain, but Elaina suppressed it, turning to look out the window. ***

Clarissa twitched and sat upright before she was fully awake, rubbing her eyes. The grandfather clock ticked away in the living room, the clicking noise amplified at night when she laid in bed and stared up at the ceiling. She didn’t have a good night’s sleep in weeks, not since her mother, enraged that Clarissa and Jeffrey had done that under her roof, had taken a screwdriver and pulled her daughter’s bedroom door off its hinges.

“Why— Mama, I don’t understand why.” Clarissa had ventured toward the gaping hole of a doorway while her mother stood in the hallway admiring her work.

“Because I trusted you, Clarissa. I thought I’d taught you right.”

Clarissa tried to speak. “But Mama, I didn’t mean to—”

Selena turned to Clarissa, pointing at her with the screwdriver.

“Don’t, Clarissa. Don’t. I thought I knew who you were, that you were smarter than this. That you respected yourself, and me, enough not to be so stupid and selfish.”

Clarissa had frowned and watched as her mother stomped past her, threw herself into her rocking chair, and picked up the loom; she’d been starting a tea cozy. Leaning against the wall opposite her room, Clarissa stood there and stared at the gap leading into her bedroom, a dark, looming hole ready to swallow her up. ***

While Elaina was grading papers, Nina Portier, the principal, knocked on the art room door and asked Elaina to come to her office.

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When they sat down, Ms. Portier crossed her fingers and thumped her hands down on her desk.

“Elaina, I need to talk to you about the courses you’ve proposed for the spring.” She unhooked her hands and lifted a piece of paper from a manila folder in front of her. “Three Dimensional Interpretation, Renaissance Art History, Impressionist Painting Survey? You know I can’t list these.”

“What’s wrong with my courses? I submitted syllabi. I’ve taught them before. I even included the full semester’s schedule for them.”

Elaina stared at Ms. Portier, but focused on her earrings: someone had painted round little blocks to look like child-faced cherubs.

“I know you have, and I’m sure you’re qualified.” Ms. Portier let out a deep sigh like wind flapping a shutter and set down the paper, resuming her hooked-fingers posture. Her nails were painted a light indigo.

“Here’s the thing. This isn’t Tuscaloosa, where the kids you’re teaching want to be there and want to learn this stuff. None of these kids know what impressionist painting is. Half of them probably can’t spell renaissance.”

“I’ll teach them what impressionism is. I’ll write renaissance on the board, for God’s sake.”

“Bottom line is, Elaina, these kids just don’t care what the Renaissance is, or how it’s relevant to them. They want to make scrapbooks and draw. Art’s supposed to be something they do for fun. These courses,” she picked up a stapled packet of papers, “…they’re not the things students care about. They want to make things, not learn about who used to make them. They don’t even know how to read a syllabus on their own. How many of your students have forgotten to turn in assignments because they didn’t think to look on the syllabus to see what was due when?”

Elaina bit her lip.

“How many of them actually pay attention when you try to teach them anything that they can’t actually do?”

Elaina exhaled, her shoulders slumping.

“Look, I appreciate what you want to do here, Elaina, I really do.”

Elaina narrowed her eyes and straightened her back. She wasn’t listening. She focused on the cherubs dangling from Nina’s ears.

“I was just like you when I started here.” She leaned forward and started telling Elaina about being an English teacher and the grand ideas she had, how innovative she could be. A glazed look came over her face, and she looked past Elaina, who resisted the urge to turn and follow

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Nina’s gaze.

Instead, she narrowed her eyes and stole a glance at the principal’s ears. With Ms. Portier closer to her, Elaina could see the cherubs in detail: they were kneeling with hands folded in prayer. What, she wondered, could angels possibly need to pray for? ***

Clarissa was hunched over her table in the art room, using a ruler to mark inches on a page of her scrapbook. When Ms. Proctor began speaking, Clarissa stopped and looked up.

“Remember,” she said, poising her fingers in front of her and aiming them at her students as she spoke, “…to think about not just what you include but also what you don’t.”

Clarissa flipped to the first page in her binder.

“The choices you make about what not to cement to memory speak more about you than what you choose to include. Where does your book begin? Why there?” Clarissa shut her eyes while Ms. Proctor talked, listening to the strength and assurance that she spoke with.

The knowing and certainty in her voice latched on to Clarissa and dug deep into her, shaking her with its booming, concrete confidence.

A photograph of Clarissa and Marnie was centered on the first page of Clarissa’s binder. They wore matching t-shirts, arms around one another on their first day of high school. She looked down at it and let a small smile creep across her face that she knew was so different from the tooth-filled grin in the picture.

Clarissa watched Ms. Proctor pace back and forth, hoping that she would glance down at her scrapbook and acknowledge that Clarissa was working ahead of schedule. But Ms. Proctor kept speaking.

“What about what comes before the beginning? When does your scrapbook end? Why? Why not another day, another memory?”

Clarissa counted the pages she had left: six blank white sheets of heavy cardboard paper. She looked up at Ms. Proctor, who was standing in front of her table, looking out the room’s line of windows.

“By the end of the scrapbook, we should know what happens next, right after the book concludes.”

Clarissa leaned forward and stared at Ms. Proctor, who had started pacing again.

“If you’ve told your story well, we’ll know what comes next.”

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***

Selena heard the door open and watched Clarissa toss her book bag on the floor and maneuver out of her shoes, pressing one foot on the heel of the other to pry them off without having to bend down and unlace them. Neither of them spoke, and Clarissa walking past Selena’s chair, nestled near the hallway leading to the bedrooms, while Selena just kept her hands moving. She didn’t look at them, didn’t think about Clarissa just lying on her bed and staring at the ceiling or whispering to Marnie over the phone.

Instead, she thought of her own mother, sitting in front of a large weaving loom in the corner of her bedroom. She remembered the loom, its wood stained reddish brown, two large exes forming the outer frame with rectangular beams crossing in between, a complex structure of wood and screws. From the bottom cross beam closest to the bench extended six planks of wood, no more than two inches wide and equally spaced, that reached up and attached to a beam in the center that hung lowest, directly in the middle of the crossing outer beams.

Selena remembered the day she stood there watching her mother plying yarn as if she were plucking a harp. Her mother paused and looked at her, patting the space between her legs and beckoning Selena to come sit before the loom. She hesitated in the doorway: though her mother had shown her nearly five years ago how to work on a small cardboard hand loom, she had forbidden Selena to touch the large loom in her bedroom, the one Selena’s father had built for his wife for their first anniversary. Selena had learned to use a cardboard loom, a circle loom, and a can loom. She had even mastered finger weaving, developing enough dexterity to not need a pencil to keep the threads from slipping out of place. Every time she’s conquered something new, Selena would find her mother and demonstrate her skill while her mother smiled and nodded. She had wanted to ask her mother to show her how to weave on the large loom, but had always been too afraid to ask, worrying that she would break it and devastate her mother.

After a moment, Selena had crossed the room and plopped into the space in front of her mother. She had not sat so close to her mother in years, and her warm breath on the back of Selena’s neck was soothing like a hot towel. When her mother grabbed each of her hands and moved them as though Selena were a doll, she was sur-

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prised by how dry and cold they were.

And then her mother started to teach her. She showed her how to tie the warp threads to the loom, guiding her hands as she pulled the thread tight, telling Selena to make sure the yarn was tense and taut enough to pluck like a guitar string. Without that tension, the pattern wouldn’t stay even and would end up sloppy, she told her.

For several hours they sat there, her mother moving Selena like she was a marionette, showing her how to create a shed, then the trick of putting a piece of toilet paper in the shed to keep the warp threads even when you started the actual weaving. The real work, her mother told her, came before the weaving itself.

After a while, Selena felt the weight of her mother’s hands lighten. They worked in silence, Selena moving her hands and fingers without thought like a piano player who knows which keys to press without looking. Instead of guiding her, her mother became a shadow, her hands hovering above Selena’s as she worked. Eventually her mother pulled her hands back and sat watching Selena weave.

Selena had stopped and turned to look at her mother. Neither had spoken, and after a moment her mother’s hands took up their position above Selena’s again, and they wove as one, the slick condensation of her mother’s breathing collecting on Selena’s neck and ears.

The grandfather clock ticked, and Selena looked up from her seat and checked the time. She was almost done with this new project: a wool cap, a soft forest green color. Selena looked down at it lying across her lap. She was unsure how large to make it. ***

Elaina had grown tired of reading her students’ papers, so she did what she had for the last several nights: poured a glass of wine, pulled down the bound copy of her dissertation from its place on her bookshelf, and, flipping to the page where her bookmark poked out at the top, continued reading. The voice in the typed pages was enthusiastic, connected to art in a way she hardly recognized anymore, a distant voice that was a whisper drowned out by the one she heard in the classroom each day, spewing out clichés and tired maxims about creativity and originality.

Stroking the fringes of her serape, the smooth thread falling through her fingers, she thought of Erin Halladay. The girl had double majored in fiber arts and art history and wanted to write an under-

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graduate honors thesis on Victorian hairpieces. On the day Elaina was putting the last of her art history books into a box, Erin popped her head in Elaina’s office door and knocked, brown hair forming curtains around her face.

“Dr. Proctor?”

“Erin.” Elaina smiled with as much warmth as she could muster, then quickly forced her mouth into a frown. “You probably shouldn’t be here.”

“I know. I’m sorry. No one’s around, really.” Erin moved into the office. Her hands were behind her back.

“What can I do for you?” Elaina finally asked when too many silent beats had passed.

“I, well, I just wanted to say goodbye is all.”

Elaina dropped the book she was holding into the box. “Oh. Well.”

Erin moved further into the office, no more than a foot or two from Elaina. “I mean, you really, I really admire your work. You don’t know how much you’ve meant—how much you’ve helped me.”

Elaina looked away. “You’re a brilliant young woman, Erin. I didn’t have to do much.”

“But you did. Your class on Renaissance art, it changed my life. And—well—you know how sorry I am about—” “Erin.”

“Sorry. I know, I know. Look, I know it doesn’t mean much, but I wanted to give you—something.”

She pulled a puff of folded gold fabric from behind her back.

Elaina could see fringed ends poking out. “I was going to use it in my show next year, but I wanted you to have it.” Erin held it out toward Elaina, who stood there looking at the folded mass. The fabric was smooth, not quite shiny when in the light, but it didn’t absorb light in the dull, matted way that felt would have.

“It’s a serape,” Erin said, as Elaina took the pile and began unfolding it, holding the two ends between her fingers and allowing it to billow downward. She shook it out like a freshly laundered sheet.

“It’s gorgeous.” The pattern on the serape was slight, and if a person didn’t look carefully enough, he or she might think the fabric was all the same color, but a pattern of waves, two tones— a gold and a goldenrod, perhaps— twirled along the garment. “You dyed it brilliantly. Nice subtlety, careful undertone.”

“I thought about using it as the focal piece of the show.” Erin

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had started backing toward the door, hands behind her back again.

“But I’d rather have you have it.”

Elaina felt herself pulling the serape toward her chest. When she finally looked up from the garment, Erin’s body was in the doorframe. “Good luck next year, Erin. And if you want a letter of recommendation—”

“Really? That would be— thanks, Dr. Proctor.” Then, after a moment of silence: “Do you know what you’re going to do now?”

Erin’s voice was tiny, a whisper.

Elaina sighed and looked toward the box of books. “A school in Bunset needs an art instructor. It’s only part time, but jobs are hard to come by.”

The corners of Erin’s lips curled up. “Yeah, I’m sure. Well, thanks, Dr. Proctor. Again. I know I shouldn’t, but— well, please keep in touch.”

Erin turned and left before Elaina could say anything. She stared at the empty space where Erin had stood and wondered if that doorway would ever be filled again. ***

“He doesn’t look that freaked out,” Marnie said, popping a carrot stick into her mouth. “He’s laughing and stuff. You did tell him, right? About taking three tests?”

“Yeah, I told him.” Clarissa rolled her eyes and looked past Marnie. Ms. Proctor was standing by the cafeteria door, tapping her foot, arms crossed over one another, the sleeves of her shirt drawn up past her elbows.

“If I were him,” Marnie continued, speaking through the crunch of her carrot, “I would be totally freaked out.”

Clarissa sighed. “Can we not talk about this? You never talk about anything else.”

Marnie shrugged. “Sorry.” She picked up another carrot stick, sloughed it through the pool of ranch dressing on her tray and shoved the whole thing in her mouth. “Do his parents know?”

“Marnie.” Clarissa watched as Ms. Proctor stared at her watch.

“Yes, they know.”

“They must be totally freaked out too.”

Clarissa thought of her mother, the dull, drained look on her face when she’d told her, Clarissa’s own face covered in salty tears.

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When she’d run into the bathroom after her mother started screaming, she looked bloated and swollen in the mirror, red as if she’d been slapped over and over.

“I guess,” she said, watching as Ms. Proctor ignored two football players that were shoving each other as they walked past her. “What are they supposed to do?”

“I dunno. He just looks, you know, so calm about everything. I bet your mom never wants to see him again.”

Clarissa dropped her spoon onto her tray. “My mom is— can we just drop it?”

“Yeah, sure. Sorry.” Marnie was lifting another carrot to her mouth when a glob of dressing fell onto her t-shirt. She didn’t notice and Clarissa didn’t say anything, her gaze fixed on Ms. Proctor.

“What are you staring at?”

“Huh?”

Marnie twisted in her seat, following Clarissa’s gaze. “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing. Just thinking.”

“About what you’re gonna do?”

Clarissa glanced at Marnie, stopping herself from sneering.

“About what I’m going to work on in scrapbook tomorrow.”

“Oh.” Marnie rolled her eyes. “That class is so boring. I’m glad it’s almost over. Sorry, I know you love it, but Ms. Proctor is so mean.”

“She’s not mean, she’s smart. She’s a good teacher.”

“She’s too smart. Do you even understand the stuff she talks about?”

Clarissa crossed her arms. “At least I listen.”

“I don’t see why. It’s not like it really matters.”

“It matters, Marnie. She’s not like Mrs. Alexander who’s too senile to notice when you ditch English. Ms. Proctor actually knows stuff.”

“She doesn’t seem like it.”

“Just because you don’t understand doesn’t mean she doesn’t.”

“She doesn’t even want to teach us, you know that, right? This is like a last resort thing for her.”

“That’s not true, Marnie.” She felt saliva collecting at the side of her lips because she spoke so quickly. “Just leave her alone.”

“Jeez, sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“You’re just wrong about Ms. Proctor, that’s all.” Clarissa glanced over Marnie’s shoulder. Ms. Proctor was no longer standing in her spot against the door. Clarissa looked around the room, wondering

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where she’d gone, but she couldn’t find her amongst the din of the cafeteria. ***

Selena was watching Clarissa eat an after-school snack at the living room table. She had bought a new sofa just a week before, unable to look at the leather one where her husband had cantilevered over after his massive heart attack. He’d been barely three years older than Selena.

While she watched Clarissa, she wove with a new circular loom that she’d made just two days before. Her daughter’s ponytails bobbed when she giggled at the silent television, a glob of jelly dribbling down her chin.

Selena set her weaving materials down in her lap. “Clarissa, sweetheart.”

Her daughter turned her head in one snapping motion, and for a moment Selena looked directly into her eyes and saw the eyes that had been on her dead husband’s face.

Clarissa had yet to ask about where her father was. She probably thought he was just gone on another one of his long trips and would be back in a few days with stories of driving down long stretches of Colorado and Nevada highway in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler.

Selena looked down at the loom with string draped over the cardboard. “Clarissa, would you like to learn how to weave like Mommy?” She held up the loom and yarn.

Clarissa shrugged her shoulders and took a bite from her sandwich. “Okay.”

Selena beckoned for Clarissa to leave her post behind the couch and motioned for her to sit in front of the rocking chair.

“This is a circular loom,” she said, holding the cardboard out to Clarissa, who reached out and plucked it from her mother’s hand.

“I use this to make your hats.”

Selena watched while Clarissa turned the loom over in her hands and fiddled with the yarn like a kitten, giggling and flicking the ends that dangled from the edge of the cardboard.

“This kind is a little too hard for you, I think,” Selena said, leaning and grabbing a rectangular loom from the end table next to her. “Let’s start with this.”

Selena threaded some yarn from the spool and began weaving,

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explaining the technique as she went along. Clarissa’s eyes followed, but her fingers kept fiddling with the yarn sticking out of the circular loom. Her mother tried to hold her daughter’s attention, but the little girl in front of her was lost in the contraption in her hand. ***

Elaina had the door to the art room propped open. The janitor had cranked up the heat against her objections, and the room was soupy despite the temperature in the low fifties outside. She was leafing through scrapbooks, the final products of her woeful students.

Glue seeped out of every page: from the backs of photos whose edges had already begun to curl upward, through the tiny holes in the centers of flashy ruby sequins, from behind foam letters, forming white shadowy backdrops. It flaked off on her fingers when she ran her hands over the bumpy words in the books, and she brushed it off on the tabletop.

Sighing and turning the page, Elaina felt an unsure desperation: despite her years of evaluating students’ work, she had no idea what to look for in these scrapbooks— cohesion, a narrative arc, and minimal amounts of sloppy gluemanship? She knew her standards had to change, but she didn’t know what to change them to, much less how to change them.

She heard a light tap on the door and looked up.

“Ms. Proctor?”

Elaina recognized her: the girl who actually paid attention during first period.

“Yes? Come in.”

The girl smiled and stepped into the room. “I know school’s out and everything.” She glanced down at the stack of binders next to Elaina’s desk. “Oh, you’re busy.”

Elaina shut the scrapbook in front of her. “It’s fine. What can I do for you, Miss—”

“Shankman. Clarissa Shankman. I’m in—was in—your scrapbooking class. I sat there.” She pointed to the empty table in the middle of the front row.

Elaina looked the girl over: she was wearing a loose, white blouse with ruffles and a lacy design on top. The curve of the girl’s stomach protruded over the hem of her jeans, as though the denim was a size too small.

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“Yes, of course.”

Clarissa stood there, shifting her weight. She didn’t look directly at Elaina. “Well, I just wanted to say I really enjoyed your class. You taught me a lot.”

“It’s good you learned something.”

“Oh, I learned a lot. All about storytelling in your scrapbook, I hadn’t ever thought of that. What you’re losing when you remake a story and all that.”

Elaina sat up straight, a look of realization on her face. “Shankman, you said? Was your mother—”

“Yes, that was her.” Clarissa looked down at her feet. “The one who complained at parent-teacher night about having us tear up our photos.”

Elaina crossed her arms and leaned back in her seat.

“Sorry about that. She just doesn’t like the idea of destroying things, you know.”

“Uh huh.”

Clarissa stepped closer to her. “I tried to explain to her that I wasn’t destroying anything, but she— well, she just doesn’t understand.”

Elaina raised an eyebrow.

“She weaves. Lots of stuff. Everything, actually. If you can make it out of fabric, she makes it. She’s got a big loom in her bedroom.”

“And you weave, too?”

Clarissa shook her head and looked out the window. “No. She tried to teach me, but I just can’t do it.”

“It’s a very intricate art. Difficult and delicate. It requires precision and a very skilled hand.”

Clarissa frowned. “I’ve tried, I really have. I’m not sure why I can’t get it. She’s tried lots of times to teach me. Not in a while, though.”

“Well, it’s very complex work.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment. Elaina looked toward the window, and the parking lot was half-empty. Abandoned, almost.

Finally she said, “I’m sorry, did you have a question?”

“I did, well, sort of a question. I’m signed up for your visual arts class in the spring.”

“I’m glad you’ve got such an interest in art.” Elaina leaned forward again, adjusting the open flap of her kimono, avoiding Clarissa’s gaze.

“Well, I’ll probably be out of school for a while near the end of the semester. I’m not really sure when, exactly. I mean, I know when I’m

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supposed to be out, but my doctor said that it’s not a guarantee, so I can’t plan too carefully for— anyway, I was wondering if maybe you could tell me what assignments we’re going to have, and maybe I can start over break and be ahead, so being out won’t hurt my grade?”

Elaina propped her elbow on the desk and set her chin in the palm of her hand, knowing the schedule was somewhere on her desk at home. “I haven’t really thought about what we’re doing in that class yet, so I’m afraid I can’t help you too much.”

Clarissa’s shoulders slumped. “Oh. I see. Well, thanks anyway.”

She started backing toward the door. “Oh, Ms. Proctor?”

Elaina had opened the scrapbook again. “Yes?”

“Do you think I could have my scrapbook back after break?”

Elaina nodded. “Of course.”

“Thanks.”

Elaina watched her leave, staring at the door for a moment after the girl had disappeared and her footsteps, the only noise echoing down the empty hall faded away. She felt a chill despite the hot air pumping through the nearby vent. Reaching back, she pulled her serape from its place on the chair and draped it over her shoulders, and went back to work, trying to ignore the image in her head of Clarissa Shankman walking by herself down the hallway. ***

The grandfather clock ticked, Selena weaved, and Clarissa drew a gentle arc across the top of a page in her sketchbook. She wasn’t sure what she was drawing, but Ms. Proctor had said that it was okay not to be sure of where you were going when you started.

Despite Selena’s resistance, Clarissa had set up an easel in the living room in the corner furthest from her mother’s rocking chair, next to the grandfather clock. Clarissa didn’t think much about what she was doing, filling the page with cascading lines that crisscrossed in every direction, creating small and large squares, diamonds, bent rectangles of space throughout the page. She didn’t know how she would fill them, whether she would shade them in, create smaller boxes and shapes within the larger ones, or just doodle designs in some of the spaces and leave the others blank, creating a pattern within the larger pattern. She was without direction or sense of purpose, just drawing for the sake of it, not relying on some bigger picture to guide her choices.

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She’d just finished her first painting, which wasn’t due until the third week of school. It sat drying on the easel: a black, white, and gray vase with three rigid tulips poking out.

When she needed to stretch and massage the small of her back, Clarissa flipped the cover of her sketchpad over and set the book on the coffee table and stood up. “Mama,” she said, “will you tell me what you think of my painting?”

Her mother nodded but didn’t look up. Clarissa frowned and stepped to the easel, lifting the canvas, touching the petals— she had filled them in last with a swirled gray color— and when no smudges streaked her fingertips, she turned the canvas around.

“What do you think?”

“Hmm.”

Clarissa felt the weight of the canvas slip down in her fingers a few inches. “You barely looked at it.”

“It’s black and white.”

“I know. What’s wrong with that?”

“Who wants to look at flowers with no color? That’s not realistic.”

“It’s not supposed to be. And I think white’s supposed to be every color being reflected back, and black is every color being absorbed.”

“And I suppose Ms. Proctor taught you that.”

Clarissa felt the painting sliding over her stomach. Everything, she thought, was slipping around, sliding away. “She did. She’s a good teacher, I’ve told you that. I’ve learned a lot.”

Selena stopped weaving and looked at her daughter. The painting blocked her view of Clarissa’s torso.

“That woman doesn’t care about you, Clarissa. She cares about a paycheck. A paycheck she’s lucky to be getting.”

Clarissa dropped the painting to the floor. Her toes had begun to curl together, clamping against one another. “That isn’t true.”

“And how would you know, Clarissa? You have no idea who she is, and she has no idea who you are. Does she even know your name?”

“Why does that matter?”

“Because it does. Because if she doesn’t even care to know your name, how can she know what you can and can’t do?”

Everything tore apart: Clarissa screamed at her mother that she didn’t have any idea who Clarissa was either, and Selena screamed

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back. Did Clarissa ever stop to think about her actions and what they meant to other people?

And Clarissa yelled wanting to know what that had to do with anything, that she knew her mother would never forgive her. All the while her mother’s hands kept moving, and when Clarissa looked down at them she slammed her foot on the floor and yelled again about the weaving, the damned weaving, and that her mother must have hated her ever since it had become clear that Clarissa would never weave like she did and how offended she must be because Clarissa was okay with that and maybe, just maybe, damn it, she liked learning from Elaina Proctor a lot more than her stupid mother.

And then the screaming stopped when Clarissa said that, and the two stared at one another, Selena gripping her loom and yarn like a weapon, Clarissa’s hands planted on the underside of her stomach like she was holding up a heavy grocery bag.

The painting, which had been leaning against Clarissa’s shins, tipped over, the black-and-white vase staring at the ceiling while the grandfather clock ticked on. ***

Clarissa sat on her bed, leaning back on her arms and staring toward the dark cavity that was the doorway. She drew her hand across her white sweater, feeling the bump of her belly button, a pronounced knob along the dome of her flesh. She laid back, placing her other hand on her stomach, feeling for any tiny movements.

She dragged her easel into her room and set it at the end of her bed, and didn’t show her mother a drawing for three weeks, didn’t mention what she was painting. Clarissa had turned in the black and white painting early, asked Ms. Proctor what she should do next, but her teacher said she didn’t know, that she hadn’t planned that far. Creeping doubts had started shoving their way into her head, but she shoved back and wouldn’t let them in. So Clarissa sat in her room, throwing color onto canvas after canvas, hoping to find answers amongst the blues and greens and reds and yellows she blended together but nothing spoke to her.

Clarissa glanced at the alarm clock next to her bed. Her mother would bring her a tray of food soon: a sandwich, probably something plain like turkey and cheese, and a few carrot sticks along with her vitamins. This far along, Selena insisted that Clarissa take

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the pills despite their chalky taste and Clarissa’s difficulty swallowing them. Her mother’s deliveries were the only times they communicated anymore.

When Selena walked in, the wooden tray in hand, Clarissa sat up and flopped backward, turning to prop herself up on her pillows.

“What were you doing, Clarissa?”

Clarissa sighed. “Nothing. Just thinking.”

“Oh.” Selena set down the tray and turned to leave.

“Mama.”

“Yes?” Selena turned around quickly, hands cupped together just below her stomach.

Clarissa looked toward the blank easel. She couldn’t think of anything new to draw, not even a place to start, a line to get her going.

“Never mind.”

Selena slumped and she wrung her hands tighter. “Okay. Let me know when you’re done.”

Clarissa nodded, looking down at the plate of food. She heard her mother start to leave again. “Mama,” she said, looking up.

“Yeah, sweetie.” Selena’s back was to her daughter.

A moment passed. In a whisper that Selena had to struggle to hear, Clarissa said, “Do you want me to keep it?”

They had not talked about what was to come. The question plagued Clarissa, but in the four months since she told her mother, she never asked. The space between her bed and her mother seemed so expansive.

Selena stared into the hallway. No photographs lined the walls, even though they were perfect and blank and fresh, the ideal place for mementos. Years ago, before her husband’s death, family photos dotted the wall, her and Mitchell and Clarissa all connected in some way, hands on knees or slung over shoulders. But now the space was so empty, so white and sharp and painful.

Selena reached up one hand and held onto her daughter’s door where half of a hinge was attached, her other hand loose at her side, fingers wiggling. She didn’t know what to do with it.

She held onto that hinge, unsure of where to sway. She felt the cool metal in her hand and turned to face her daughter. What to do with her hands, she wondered.

She opened her mouth to speak.

•

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Descent - Engraving - 5” x 15” - 1972

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Jared Wickware

In Quiet

Kelsey Inouye You have never had tea this thick: deep asparagus, the consistency of paint, coating the interior of a lacquered tea bowl. It feels like paste on your tongue, and tastes bitter, it tastes green. They call it koicha, “thick tea,” reserved for hours-long tea ceremonies when you sit seiza on glossy tatami mats, back straight and limbs poised.

It is the gracefulness you like. The discipline. You’ve always envied the slim-bodied girls that stretch on the dance floor, perform pirouettes and perfect pointed-toe leaps, fingers positioned just so. The confidence required of thin tights and mirrored rooms. Sometimes, as you ladle steaming water into ceramic bowls, or listen to the particular sound of cold water colliding with hot, you imagine yourself, beautiful.

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Y

Chang Ming Yuan You love ‘Y’, not because it’s the first letter In your family name, but because it’s like A horn, which the water buffalo in your Native village uses to fight against injustice Or, because it’s like a twig, where a crow Can come down to perch, a cicada can sing Towards the setting sun as loud as it wants to More important, it's like a real reed deeply rooted At the bank of the Nile, something you can bend Into a whistle or hit a drum with; in pronouncing it You can get all the answers you need, besides You can make it into a heart-felt catapult And shoot at a snakehead or sparrow, as long As it is within the range of your boyhood

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Elegy for an Alchoholic Old Queen Christopher Davis

Oh my travel agent, you probably were just a situational acquaintance, yet I felt sad as you died, on a Wednesday, on a crunchy, costly, hospice room bed, your collapsed cheeks that fake bright bronze of tanning lotion, your corny tresses, dyed blond,

ludicrously, defiantly, that very day, the day you "passed away," snaking across the white, blubbery pillow, your eyes flat, still, your mouth a hole you can't keep trying to fill now.

I looked down at your clear plastic wristband and it told me you were when I'm sixty four,

a little older than I'd guessed, nobody needing you, nobody feeding you, except, to my greedy shock, your brand new best friend, your bipolar hair dresser, your primary care giver, your sole beneficiary.

Grabbing your delicate wrist, a squirrel bouncing along the amber-

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leafed limb of whatever variety of tree that was, out there, I told you I love you.

Not. * The ultimate hello dolly regular, you always drank half-price, understanding being, triple tipping.

I was tripping when you told me, bluntly, you had months (well, weeks) to live.

You wept: your whole life, you had felt crucified, renting from your Christian mother,

unable to "come out" till she kicked off; then, you seized the day, enjoyed champagne, "like Churchill,"

every evening. Old fashioneds, manhattans, slow comfortable screws against

the wall. I bowed into your yellow Lacoste golf shirt,

pushed my pounding head, through the tough little crocodile right above your heart,

toward your liver, my brain a station wagon stuffed with screaming kids spinning wildly

on river ice,

cracking. * At your memorial, the minister got the kind of cancer wrong, bemoaned the scourge of lymphoma, mentioned the tenants of "our" theology,

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though nobody there believed

a word of it, no, not the air traffic controller, not the buyer's agent, and certainly not him, the man of cloth himself, who, plastered, pressures his friends for blowjobs.

A disc jockey balanced a small green airplane gin bottle on the marble urn holding your ashes.

(I wonder whether, in silvery dawns, that emerald glows?)

Afterwards, stumbling among the cold gray cement materials of the parking deck, I couldn't find my Toyota Camry, so, pressing the black button in our keychain, I made my baby honk, honk, his sobbing echoing, incessantly, like the voice of that old witch inside the room across the hall from yours, barking, "Becky, Becky, Becky, Becky, Becky,"

until I saw them, the red brake lights, blinking, and,

with my thumb, I pressed again, shut that fucking honking up, the penultimate sounds of your rough croak, your words, "Can't do much about dying,"

fading from living memory.

Slowly.

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Waterssong

Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán Dipping inside the boat, I push/pull water to, away, from me, towards shore; the channel changes, current, boat pushed right/left, up/down, forward and back. The boat is moved—forward. You move forward.

Moving in something moving, you are. More than air, earth, you feel in water the motion, know its, your liquidity, how things are not solid.

More aware of the elements, you are, on, in water, than on land. This wet orb hurtling through space, spinning, thousands-thousands of miles an hour, yet, everything-everything seems still. You are not still in water, water still moving in, on, all around you. Rocked back and forth, you bob, float; move against the motion, with the motion; inside it, you. Glide. You cross the other side crosses you. You cross over.

You arrive; are the arrival. The land arrives, greets, as do the waters, part—there are different waters, waters in the waters, weaving, cleaving. How one water envelopes another, one body another. You know this now. There are waters weaving, cleaving—inside you—singing in your body.

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Boys on the Beach Holly Painter

Five hours in a gutless summer wonder like a Boys' Brigade bus parading us north as we bitch about the sticky-black leather back seat, treacle-thick heat lazy fly fizzing, concussing on the glass, herds of cattle startled, grazing in the grass, rheumy eyes see us onward, heaving past banks draped daintily in darker green, radiata pines with chewed up trim, interim toothpick piles, onward, to gaptooth smiles from local boys GO sign-twirlers in roadworks crews, onward, cruising out to sea that salt-soup sloshing flat, washing in at Coopers Beach where nighttime nudes, post-coitally subdued, can hear the dogged ache of foreign waves collapsing without heed for our clingfilm summer, humidity stew, my heartbeat pulsing heat and I know it's this hair, Greek boy statue ring of curls, cool in museum marble, maybe, but not in Greece and not here in the flesh, dribbled sweat double vision blur: bronze boys in a sandstorm kaleidoscope, slick symmetry down the beach on a brace of boogie boards, Styrofoam smack against the sea.

Floating palaces, moon moored chariots for suntanned sultans, seen here in foam-sewn ruffles like the leaders of the first gasping heat of dusky demigods to reach us from some South American beach where our Chilean doubles, Pacific palindromes, spoon, innocent in the surf, wrapped tight like salty cocoons, then climb atop buoys for a westward squint to the scouts they sent to find us out here alone but twin-hearted already, underwater and yet able to hear the plunging gurgles of the other. A single surge sets off the scene: the Grecian boatman tumbles, sand-scraped, jumbled, just a boy child of crepe paper lungs drugged by the heat of the midday sun, dragged under, deadly thunder inundating my ears until I'm grabbed up and lugged onto the beach

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a bit limp at first, limbs slack, neck flaccid like the beached baby hammerheads fisherman sometimes find here staring down PĹ?hutukawa pipecleaners dusting the shore, inert with wide-eyed horror only two meters short of the breathable sea low-cut tidal tease, the ragged blue I now cough free, clumsy heat tarting up my cheeks as I lean into the numbness of a boy flecked with ocean grit and breathing still in squalls, beach towel drawn around our skinnyboy shoulders, a hero against the battering sea, he holds me to his chest, despite the heat.

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Body Meditations Tyler Davis

The story of lungs: trees fed by continual wind.

Balloons neither empty nor full.

Belly stretches white, open— the knife-tip only a gasp away.

Red sand through the hourglass trickles wrinkles, compression of spine, slackening neck. Almost undetectable reluctance of the cardiac tissue to keep on Dawn finds your stomach coiled against frost, a reptile in wait.

If you were the yellow swab of bird in a cage of ribs, would you chirrup from lung-top or peck into flesh?

New parents fight over clipping the baby’s fingernails.

Tendrils of vein and bone, flailing.

Your lips part, sleeping.

A way in.

Cells make up cities.

They gather around disaster— swell scenes, crowd forward, puff up around jagged, split, What part of you still believes violation is impossible?

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Lingering dark strands hang, the last fall leaves clutching.

When was the last time someone wiped your ass?

Just reached down, parted cheeks, swiped you clean as the day where you run in a pack, your entire skeleton borne almost easily, almost aloft.

Through water, through air, the toes move.

Strain away from each other, wish for old webbing.

The sound of group sleep breathing like some great sighing bear.

Hush, hush—when you stir, I row you back into sleep.

Eyelids shudder, freeze.

Muscles like the inside of sectioned orange.

Shiny packets, ready to squirt.

One light forgotten in the center of your dark body. Fluorescence spills, buzzes, pricks, beats on.

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Here and Now #1-3, Panel 1 - Oil and Acrylic on Canvas

Joshua W. Miles

Red Lara and Philadendron, Panel 1 - Laquer and Ceramics on Birch Joshua W. Miles

Red Lara and Philadendron, Panel 3 - Laquer and Ceramics on Birch Joshua W. Miles

Fire and Ice 4_5_6, Panel 2 - Laquer and Ceramics on Live Oak Joshua W. Miles

Fire and Ice 4_5_6, Panel 3 - Laquer and Ceramics on Live Oak Joshua W. Miles

Fire, Ice and Philadendron #1_2_3, Panel 3 - Laquer and Ceramics on Live Oak Joshua W. Miles

Fire, Ice and Philadendron #4_5_6, Panel 2 - Laquer and Ceramics on Live Oak Joshua W. Miles

Here and Now #2 - Oil and Acrylic on Canvas

Joshua W. Miles

The Armani Suit Kate Kimball

The funny thing is—it doesn’t even look like James.

It’s what James would want to be, but nothing he was at all.

It needs his smirk, his humor, the smell of coffee that lingered on his breath, his hint of cologne, the quietness with which he touched me.

Tentative. As though he was trying to make a reservation.

And this?

It’s regal, black, pressed, neat. It’s the perfect picture of how James would want to look for our fourteenth anniversary. James hunched a little when he stood. I got sick of the fight that would happen after I suggested he straighten up. The silver hook of the hanger could be James’ head. He usually tightened his jaw and had a solid, cold intensity that showed up in his blue eyes that were almost too large for his face. When he put his hands in his pockets, he tapped his feet whenever he stood for a period of time. When we walked together, and I slipped my arm through his, he would try to pull away, but then he gave in and let me have that moment of romance.

There are many ways to celebrate an anniversary in Brindisi.

James knows them all. Earlier, he whispered them to me.

The plastic dry cleaning bag hurts the suit’s body— the sheath making it so it can’t breathe.

James says to pull it off.

James says to exhume your body.

I tear the bag, stuffing it into the bathroom wastebasket, shooing the hornet from the sink. The suit seems to breathe, sway under the fan. I touch the lapels, running my hands down the smooth fabric, and smell the chest. It doesn’t smell like James. I pull out the pockets, look for any sign of him.

James isn’t here.

I know. You’re still upset.

I didn’t forget about you. Not exactly. You see, it was a rather hectic year, and you were much safer at the cleaners. In fact, like Mr.

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MiChinglese said earlier, you were lucky they held onto you that long.

I know. It was a year and I shouldn’t have forgotten. You were nine thousand three hundred and twenty-five dollars, plus tax. James left the receipt in the drawer.

That’s the beginning of your story.

James and I have one. We met in a public library off of the UCLA campus, when I was studying in America, trying to master English and rid myself of the accent of my father. James, strangely cheap at the time, had been tearing pages out of a book. I begged him to stop. It was painful watching those pictures tear, the broken words on the pages. I paid for the book, and he later tried to buy me coffee, but was a quarter short. Instead, I bought him a cappuccino and a cone and we talked for five hours straight until the owner told us he was closing. At the table, I remembered the old Italian proverb of my father, A tavola nessuno diventa vecchio. At the table no one grows old.

James hated aging. He begged me to stop celebrating his birthday four years ago and complained when we went to Spain for our tenth anniversary. He didn’t see the point of sending my brother, Dominic, money for his college graduation from Stanford, years ago.

He had slumped down in the sofa, ran his hand through his messy hair and groaned. Again, Alana? I thought we just went through this.

And the funny thing is— we had. Every month was a birthday or a baby christening or a graduation or a death or an anniversary. I still have the calendar here, you see, in the drawer of the bureau, tracking how things grow old.

Now, James says to make my mother’s favorite dish, bucatani all’amatriciana, for dinner. He says he likes it, too— pork jowl, pecorino Romano cheese, tomato sauce, olive oil. Last night, James smelled the containers and then passed them to me. Everywhere I go James has been before.

What tie should you wear?

The one my father gave James two Christmases ago?

I don’t think navy would go. Red?

I know— the tie I bought James on his last birthday. It’s almost silver, blue lines stitched in the formation of squares.

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I take my time tying the knot. Even though I’ve knotted James’ ties thousands of times, I still have a hard time getting the right knot— and now, when I have no idea what I’m doing and almost drop the tie, the knot comes together around the silver hanger. Perfect. James says so, anyway.

You still seem uneasy, and when I touch your shoulder, you seem to pull away. The room fills with a silence that hurts my head. I listen for the sounds of the wind and the sea.

Do you want something to drink?

Whenever I start something, there has to be coffee and bread.

The coffee steams it up, the bread makes it last. Black coffee, grainy, like diesel fuel, hunks of bread torn from the homemade loaf that I bake every Saturday. James once said it reminded him of his mother. He knew how to slice the loaf into these perfect thin pieces and spread the marmalade that my brother’s wife, Celia, gave us in a bottled jar every Christmas.

There isn’t much. Water. A little orange juice. A year ago, after James left, I emptied every bottle of alcohol I had in the house until it burned and burned, ran clear into the drain, the smell stinging my eyes. I uncorked the bottles of valpolicella and watched the red liquid bleed from the bottle into the sink. I took my cigarettes and broke their bodies in half and replaced my cartons with Crayolas. I would roll the colors in between my two fingers to calm my nerves. Periwinkle blue was my favorite. Sage green worked too.

I tried to color James’ Chagall.

“The Dream” still hangs in the front room, one of the original prints. Fifty-thousand dollars, reds and blues, psychedelic. It looks like the sea.

I went through our closets.

The suit wasn’t here. James says you were lucky you weren’t here.

I threw the designer labels out the window, threw the metal hangers in the corner where they clanged against the wall, and left a few indentations in the paint. The dresses floated like ghosts, dancing in the wind. The pointy-toed heels bounced when they hit the sand. The ties seemed to form miniature parachutes, landing softly in the bushes. I don’t know where they all ended up. Perhaps Dominic picked them up and took them home, or gave them to a second-hand

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store. I still find threads of the clothing, pieces of fabric, reds and blues, torn pieces of my Italians—Dolce & Gabbana, Missoni, Oscar de la Renta, Roberto Cavalli, Versace—twisted in the wisteria.

It was a time to be free, a time to release, a time to dream, that time— a year ago.

And James did want you.

He wanted you to make him feel like a better man. And you did, for a while. He wore you during a presentation at a conference of business owners, investors, and hotel managers. He spilled red wine on your left lapel during intermission, and pushed a woman’s hand off of your second button after I walked up behind him.

He wore you when he went to the Cathedral of St. Basil and cried because of its beauty. He wore you when he bought the fiftythousand dollar Chagall, bidding at an auction for the first time. After, he put his hands in your pockets and felt completely full.

He wore you when he went to the plaza and threw breadcrumbs to the pigeons, and later gave coins to children to toss into the fountain.

Make a wish. But you can never tell anyone or it won’t come true, he said.

Those wishes, unsaid, filled the space between us.

Were they wishes? Or were they secrets?

Do you know?

The space was thick cotton, blocking anything from entering. It filled everything we touched. It still fills our house, intertwining with the wisteria, lining the grains of wood on the floorboards, coming through the window with the sun’s soft glow. A year ago, it was a day like this—a gorgeous day, a golden day—when James went through every room of our home and shot all five television screens until the glass drifted like violent confetti and put his .44 into his mouth, and felt his bone crack like the screens.

That morning, James said he had a headache.

I saw the thin red line seep under the bathroom door when the polizia broke it down. Back then, the silence filled my ears; I hadn’t heard the clues. That red line fit into the beliefs our Italian neighbors had about Americans whose roots began on Italian soil.

The minute I returned home, I knew I would never belong. Already, my color had been altered.

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What colored us was what we could not live without. It was that aesthetic of perfection, of complete and surreal solace. The beach, the light breeze that stroked the strands of my hair, tangling them, the green hills of olive bushes. White sand rubbing against the heels of my feet, caught between the leather of my shoes. The coulee below my third floor bedroom, the long grass dancing in the night storms.

The wisteria growing around the side of the house, twisting along the drain pipes.

Remember that?

Those images were what colored us.

Or they were what colored me.

Now the sun is golden; the wisteria glistens around the drainpipes.

And James is right— everything looks brighter in the fall. All around is the smell of salt, the signs of fish. The boats look like a watercolor, bobbing on the sea, casting nets. The echoes of sailors calling to each other sound like the hum of the fan in my bedroom. And even with the intensity of the waves and the sounds of the sea, knowing that nothing stops moving, everything seems still and quiet.

It was funny one year ago, being in Brindisi, and receiving sympathy card after sympathy card about James. I could be staring at the sun and have my head kicked in and that would be brightness— that would be hope. The cards were purple and white. They felt heavy between my fingers.

James said to throw them away.

We don’t need the money.

Everything I’ve touch, he has handled before.

You have forgotten the many months you hung in the closet.

You have forgotten the smell of the sea coming through the bedroom window, touching your crumpled body after James had left you in the middle of the bedroom, not bothering to hang you after use. You have forgotten James, wiping the dust of flour on your sleeve after he helped with the bread. Later, I brushed the dust of flour from his arms before tracing the outline of his veins, trying to map my way home.

Today, he wanted to celebrate at home.

We should toast and eat bucatini all’amatriciana for dinner

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and talk with fake Italian accents, as mine has been washed away. You should touch my face the way James did, but much softer, and whisper into my ear all the things about me that you could never live without.

Later, we should dance outside on the patio and watch the dimming lights of fishing boats off the coast and remember all the things that we moved here for.

James didn’t sleep.

He said he stopped trying to.

After we moved here almost three years ago, James watched the news all night long, and would drift to sleep between Connie Chung and Larry King. Our conversations went away from ourselves and instead turned to current events, what was going on in Sudan, the increase of AIDS in Africa, Hong Kong being returned to the Chinese.

Things are ending, he said.

I told him they were beginning.

He said the world was a Chagall painting—a psychedelic mess of reds and blues—a canvas that was well demented and complacent like “The Dream.”

Remember me begging him?

James heard whispered voices, wrote their words out on scraps of paper, and compared them with what he found in the newspaper. At night, he ran his hands over my neck, brushed my lips with his fingers. I smelled the newsprint and thought of how he was always imprinting me with those foreign stories.

In the morning, he circled his arm around me and told me he could forget.

He knew how to smile when he spent years thinking about killing himself.

The suit looks like the body I buried. No head. Just a body, a clenched hand, and a handful of teeth. The retinas were gone, the skull had exploded—a piece behind the toilet, a sliver in the bathtub, pieces fallen on the tiled floor. The brain had hemorrhaged and looked like the abstract canvases we walked past on our twelfth anniversary to the Louvre.

Mrs. Madsen, he didn’t feel anything. This happened so fast, he couldn’t have, the coroner had said.

You’re here, empty, hanging and indifferent.

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No matter what I did for James, I couldn’t plug those holes.

Love, sacrifice, sentiment, vacations, exercise, psychiatric help— nothing worked. Later, I worked and invested our money. Later, I tried to change: talk more, be in control, tell everything and show nothing.

I have nothing left to give.

James knows I was always empty.

James says to stop thinking about that.

It doesn’t do any good.

When I die, I want to be buried at sea, James had said on our wedding night. My body would travel the world and experience it all.

I flicked my cigarette over the veranda, watched the ash fall lightly to the balcony below.

“You might live forever,” I had told him. “You never know.”

He had laughed, drank bourbon on ice, and ran his forefinger along the edge of the glass. You’ve never thought about death, have you?

Later in the shower, he took those words back. He pulled me to him under the spout, the beat of water over my head, and I listened to the beat of his chest. I am, I am, I am, I am.

I’ll always be here, Alana. I’ll stay for you, he said.

Bills piled up that he forgot to pay, and then he started investing, and the market changed. I watched the stacks of envelopes, unopened and filled with his fear. We need to think together, he said.

Later, he took those words back too. I ran the business, invested in more hotels, moved us next to my father.

My father had said I had forgotten his language.

He said I needed to find my way back.

Last summer, my father wore his beige hat and pointed at the sun. “Do you even remember what I taught you?” I didn’t. That was years ago when I was a girl. He picked up the stones from the garden, white and misshapen, and ran them underneath his forefinger. “You put these in a circle, remember? Use a tree branch to make the sundial?” That was always the beginning of our conversations— how to keep track of time in order to move forward.

My father mowed our lawn, and when he finished, he dipped his hand into the cut grass and lifted it to his nose. “Smells green,” he would say, and then pass it to me. “Not everything is red and blue.”

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James felt fires that weren’t real. When he touched me, he became the clothing I wore, the pain I buried my secrets inside.

I’m here now, James says.

Everywhere I go he has been before.

Now, I pull you close to me.

You’re my fear, but not the worse thing that can happen.

I unbutton your jacket and slide my arms into your sleeves, cool against my bare arms. I touch your lapels. I button the buttons over my thin shirt. The fabric smells of the cleaners, of the plastic bag, thick and silent, not of James, never of James.

I go through that traditional moment here on my anniversary, wearing part of Armani—James’ nine thousand three hundred and twenty-five dollar suit. I want to tell it about being scared, but the words won’t form. They are thick cotton sounds, whispers, stuffed in my mouth. I can’t cry, but I can taste the salt where my tears would have been. I breathe in the clean smell, but think of the salt of my vomit after seeing James’ body a year ago, the smell of decay filling every room in my house.

I feel your weight constricting upon me under the folds of fabric. I touch your pants lightly before removing my pajamas and put you on. Your waist is a little too small, and your legs are much too long. I drown in your sheen, feel the caress of your luxury. I slip the tie over my neck, feel it over my chest, and think of its noose.

Outside the bedroom window, the moon shines along the sea and reflects the dark waves. I can’t move, the fabric hurts my arms, and I hear the echoes of the CNN newscasters, the Italian news programs announcing problems in parliament.

Your legs almost trip me as I walk downstairs, the light reflecting your sheen.

James says, Anima mio, dimmi un segreto. My soul, tell me your secrets.

Instead I tell him nothing.

I feel the cool sand under my feet as I walk to the shore. I step into the edge of the water slowly, looking at the lights of fishing boats casting nets through the night.

It has always been beautiful here.

The sand scratches my feet as I wade into the water and listen to the hum of night. I stand there; unbuttoning the pants slowly, care-

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fully pulling them off as I wade into the water, I tread the sea. I watch the water thrash the suit back and forth. I pull the tie off of my neck; throw it as far as I can. It is my arrow.

As I carefully undo the buttons of your jacket, touch your pockets tenderly, I know that this is not real. I watch the nine thousand three hundred and twenty-five dollar shell ride the waves, a shadow of James, which has enveloped my own quiet pain. The arms circle and form an awkward circle, a sundial in the evening light. I know how to tell the time, the direction and where the suit is taking me. Inside it, though, I could be lost and never return. Direction is funny like that. I watch the waves for a while, treading the water, and feel the pull on my own legs. I think about going inside to an empty hanger on the canopy, silver like the wet body floating in the sea.

•

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Apparition - Engraving - 6” x 8” - 2011

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Jared Wickware

Quorum Jason Peters

The tide chart said the tide is ebbing.

Quick, let me touch your thigh, here on these rocks, while there’s time.

Arch in the trough of a wave, that mangy gull can hold court over our proceedings and the sea.

On the ocean floor, a parliament of weeds puts forth a motion: that nothing is beyond the surface of their sky.

The winds blow away the fog.

The moon pulls on the sea, inch by inch, at night, for hours.

All these debates are endless and never put the question: what lies beyond surfaces and depths, how you came to be here beside me.

The gull’s eye is discerning and black, glossing all it doesn’t know— mindful of its gullet, it scours the shallows for the little fishes, then flies for the breakwater on Snug Harbor.

It trails a prop plane down the beach.

A long, blue banner stretches overhead: Mew’s Tavern Appletini Now Available.

A plaintive bark for the pilot, a gray tail, a slight shift and glint of light, the sun against a silver belly.

The slow, blissful loss of altitude.

The slap of waves against wings.

The ebbing tide, the wordless, pulling question.

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Decomposition: Llano, Texas Alex Fabrizio

The rats are dismantling the old house exponentially. He half-recalls that once they were only three sleeping bodies, small and curled around each other. He made a pen for them on the slatted bedroom floor and found that he liked hearing them at night: their teeth, the rustle of them as they fucked and fought. The house had been so quiet then—the bedroom worst of all—his bed half-empty until once he let them crawl in his sheets. They made high chittering sounds, licked the small hairs on his face. He liked the sour smell their saliva left on his skin, liked their hot breath. When the first babies came, he made a bigger pen, and then another, and the house grew a skin of chicken wire. One by one, they became mothers and fathers. In the bedroom they've dug holes in the mattress, made room inside the coils and cotton to nest the small wriggling hairless infants he'd once shuddered at. Twice a day, he feeds them, scattering buckets of corn. They flood the house, spilling out of the holes they've made, crawling over him, soft claws making shallow pink trails in his skin. The bedroom dresser drawers his wife had filled now house whole colonies, rose sachets ripped by small quick teeth, potpourri spilling over their piss and fur. He barely recalls that once

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he and his wife had painted each room; once he'd pressed a gouge to dark wood and made each dining room chair. Now the baseboards they nailed in together are gnawed. The bedroom furniture is kindling on the floor, his wife's small white nightgown threaded into nests. The house is coming unmoored around him. He or the bedroom they shared once is shaking. He closes his eyes and small noses press in. He wants it: the house, the unmaking.

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Cosmovore Surrounded by Husks Kristi Carter

The dead gourd makes no noise when I shake it. No maraca rattle.

Just a damp thud on hold—a nothing.

I break it open with my thumbs.

It fissures down the middle like a crack in the skull, a scar down the navel.

Inside, the flesh is dry but there's a knot of green rising out of its grey umbilicus.

If only that were how it went with everything. That in death the body simply folds into a new life.

The flesh flakes off in my mouth— toxic, I know, to eat or to breathe its dust.

But no one else was eating or breathing and winter has hung its hooded cap all over the pines in the back yard.

They will flourish because they are sterile.

I scoop out the grey and green sprout and place the husks at the trunk of a pine.

The cones all seem to point inward now, a halo of anticipation.

I put one in my mouth and it fills me with the same dust of the old, reborn gourd.

These guarded things are only hues apart: bitter, then bitter and dark.

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Cosmovore, Homo neanderthalensis, and You Kristi Carter

This was the day it shouldn't have started: I was alone—characteristically— in the Neanderthal wing.

I remember reading that the females were discovered to be stronger than the males.

You approached me, territorial.

Hard to believe, isn't it?

As if you were privileging me with expertise.

Then, you were taking too long with the Archaeopteryx so I pulled up my skirt to show you I meant business.

You took it as a challenge.

All afternoon, you bent me over the back of your couch and once dusk choked the room closed, you flipped me on my back but kept one hand over my face.

The rest of us, a distant percussion like the thrum of a prey's pulse or the shattering of many empty wine glasses.

This was the choice I made, not to swallow your hand and the frail arm that followed

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up to your crooked sneer.

Even then, at the peak of love, you were looking down your fist at me, an item in a long list of things to try and cross off.

If I could say what beauty is it wouldn't be us, sifting together as the night fell. We were so quiet then, even though alone.

I wish I had cried out, or torn out your groin like a dog turned on its owner.

Until you told me I couldn't, I never wanted to bear your child. The female stronger than the male, they invoked but would not explain— do you understand now?

The Neanderthal woman looks over her shoulder, wide-eyed, curled around something weak.

Don't mistake aware for afraid— don't think that because she doesn't bare her teeth she doesn't have them.

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Humpback Whale - 8.75” x 4.5” - 1979

Jared Wickware

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Postage Due - Engraving - 4” x 3” - 2007

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Jared Wickware

Little Fingers Dave Madden

1.

Even given all the stuff that happened, I’ve never blamed Joyce. Joyce was this hilarious, angry lady who wore flats every day and was much smaller than me and had just permanent greeny eye bags, but she liked my organizing talents and my work ethic and smoked cigarettes with me and only me after lunch. Joyce kept everything running. She would have told me to get over it, and I think by now I have.

I remember when she hired me, stealing me from the team that put together the WQED Pittsburgh Community Calendar visuals and setting me up in the production room to help control the look of Dig In with Calvin Woolfe, the cooking show she’d already brought to the top of our ratings after just one season. I started on a Friday morning and she sat me in my cubicle and stood in my entryway and raised her voice. “Okay, Ginny,” she said. We were almost at eye-level to each other. “The show needs better captions. Show me what you got on Monday.” She turned around and there was her office, where the door got shut and I didn’t see her the rest of the day.

I ignored David all weekend to find the look I wanted, staying inside glued to the tube for inspiration, and Sunday evening just before prime time this commercial came on TNN for Nose Better, and the captions like “Non-Greasy” and “Moisturized” and “Penetrating Vapors” scrolled in from the top right corner and landed in the lower middle of the screen. But skewed, on the diagonal. The captions’ tone was a muted pink. The words were in a serif font, like in books. Everything about it was counterintuitive. Mr. Davidson was my graphic design teacher at Carnegie Mellon, and because American eyes moved naturally left to right he’d shout in class for us to guide the eye—“GUIDE THE EYE!”—while we sliced poster board with our X-ACTOs. The captions in the Nose Better commercial, it was like throwing words at people’s faces. Our show was hosted by a man with a restaurant downtown named The Bay and Howl, and to

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me captions like those would be the perfect match for Chef Calvin’s extreme personality.

Monday morning I showed Joyce my sketches and explained the whole concept. “No way in hell are we putting anything on a diagonal,” she said.

I asked if maybe we could still sweep them in from right to left.

“No way in hell. Just put the captions on the screen, Ginny.”

I got to keep the serif font, though. That much she gave me. *** Episodes got taped Thursdays and were broadcast Sundays. I’d been there almost a week before I got to meet Calvin Woolfe, who shook my hand and told me to call him “just Chef Cal.” We were standing by his hand-rinsing sink. Calvin Woolfe was in costume. He’d arrived in costume, actually, a pressed milkwhite chef ’s jacket buttoned to the throat and this blooming pair of zebra-striped pants. No hat. He stood as tall as a soda machine in front of me, and the blacks and greys and whites of his hair all seemed to be fighting each other., and I couldn’t help notice that the forearms exposed under his jacket’s rolled-up sleeves were dark and furry like the backs of exotic bugs. Nathaniel, the production assistant in charge of Calvin Woolfe’s needs, was nibbling on the rounded edge of his clipboard and prancing about on his tippy-toes in impatience since he needed to go over Calvin’s lines. But I needed to keep the man around for a little while, so I asked him if he had any pets.

“I’ve got pet peeves,” he said.

Those arms were folded up across his chest and he was bowing over a little to speak, I imagine, more intimately toward me. But then Calvin turned to his assistant before I could ask any more questions. “I need lip balm and cigarettes.”

Nathaniel flew off as though punted into the shadows of the studio, and Calvin strolled after him. “Gina?” he called out. “A pleasure.”

I didn’t mind that he fucked up my name. People are hard of hearing sometimes. I was a professional woman now with her own phone extension and I had a job to do. During taping, I’d sit on a squeaky rolling stool in the production booth with Joyce, waiting for her to give me the camera cues. It was button-punching work,

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mostly—the only, like, “uplifting” part coming from those rare times I could let go of my drama enough to just merge with Joyce’s whole person, so that when she, staring savagely at her monitors with those headphones Princess Leia’d around her gorgeous hair, called out to get ready for camera two, camera two in three, two, camera two now, I was already there. Had been there forever it felt like, my right index finger poised over camera two’s little green button.

Taping ended around three and Joyce’s “That’s a wrap, people” always also meant for the workday. It was a reward every week and I took the extra time to walk home, even on cold days. The building which housed WQED’s TV-radio-print empire was right on the residential edge of Oakland, right where the neighborhood got tony, and these were the homes I’d have to walk past to get to Bloomfield, where David and I shared a rowhouse. I always took my time, slowing to a drunkard’s shuffle past the mansions corralled like enormous beasts behind wrought iron that lined that stretch of Fifth Avenue.

They were older than all of us put together. They had names and circular drives that ran underneath carports near the kitchen. It’s where we’d tell the pizza guy to come, I knew. By the time I got to our dinky brick thing it was usually past six p.m. Maybe I’d stop in a shop or two, or grab a slice at Angelo’s. Every time, David would ask if taping went late, and every single time I would say yes.

It became a routine, but I’ve always liked routines. Fridays I wrote and printed all the captions for the previous day’s episode. The names of the idiots who worked the cameras and lit the set, people like Nathaniel, took no time at all. The hard part was listing the ingredients for Calvin Woolfe’s recipes. That first episode I worked on, he made a chicken fricassee and I watched the tape with Post-Its on my desk, jotting 1 whl chx 3-4lb, 1 yll O chpd, 1 red pep chpd, 1 grn pep chpd. But once all the chopped food was thrown together and Calvin made the gravy, the ingredients became lazy and curious stabs at flavor. “Let’s toss in some cumin,” he said, “and a little bit of coriander. And you know what folks what the heck throw in all the cayenne pepper you want. But hey, be careful.” He pointed at us, his audience.

“This ain’t baby food!” I rewound and replayed, looking to see how much was “some” and whether “some” was more or less than “a little bit.” How much cayenne pepper was how much I wanted? I rewound and replayed. I heard Calvin Woolfe say “baby food!” thirteen times,

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watched him grin like a blackjack winner thirteen times, felt pinned down and accused by thirteen Calvin-Woolfe index fingers pointing right between my eyes. Then I went to ask Joyce.

“Vince just guessed when he did it,” she said. “Print whatever makes sense.”

I chuckled. “Oh, sure. What do I know about cooking?”

“About as much as I do. Go ask Nathaniel, if you need to.”

“Do you have Chef Cal’s contact info?” I asked.

Joyce grabbed the alarm clock off her desk and held it up in my direction, and she clicked one of her painted fingernails against the front plastic of it. 11:33. “I need those captions in twenty-seven minutes, Ginny. How many minutes?”

“Twenty-seven, ma’am.”

“You have twenty-seven minutes to figure it out for yourself.” *** At home one night, I had David quiz me.

“We don’t even have cumin,” he said. “What would we do with cumin?”

“Just use whatever.” I sat the kitchen table with my back to him, smoking a cigarette and trying not to peek. “Use sugar or even coffee. But don’t let me see you!”

I heard him rifle through the utensil drawer. In the other room, the TV had been turned off and the lights throughout the house were dark. Sometimes I tried to look at our house from the street while I and David were living inside. I gave us see-through walls, like a dollhouse. I made up stories about the figures that lived there.

Are they happy, these two? Let’s watch what they do next.

“So ... what?” David said. “You want me to just hand you some?”

“Put it in a bowl. I’ll guess how much it is.”

“I thought we talked about never bringing work home,” he said.

Back then, I felt that David was holding me away from something I almost had in my grasping hands. I’ve always been a look-forwarder. Here I was with this just great new job, and here he was bringing up old college promises I could barely remember making.

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“Did I agree to that?” I asked.

“Ginny, I don’t want to do this,” he said and walked out into the darkness of the house. Quitter. I quizzed myself, using my fingers to pull from the coffee can whatever I thought a tablespoon was, whatever an eighth of a teaspoon could possibly be. I tried to do a cup but it wasn’t even a whole single fistful. It was more like four fists.

Proud, I told Joyce all about it the next day.

“Wonderful, Ginny,” she said, shining her desk’s nameplate with the elbow of her cardigan. “But the only people who copy these recipes down are old-folks-homers dying in front of their sets. No TVwatcher has a reason to cook stewed lamb for eight.”

She was Joyce, she knew her demographics. But still I took the job of recreating those recipes seriously. What other proper document existed? Calvin Woolfe hadn’t written a cookbook. The Internet wasn’t around yet. The hundreds of tapes that filled the shelves in WQED’s basement were the only testament to Calvin Woolfe’s artistry, was how I thought of it, and I was like his Moses, maybe, etching him into stone. *** One Thursday I knocked on the greenroom door wearing jeans and some old T-shirt. “It’s open,” Calvin yelled. I pushed my way in. He was there with Nathaniel, who sat bent up at the makeup table with his legs crossed, eating noodles from a carton. The room was small and flooded by low fluorescents. It had no windows. Cigarette smoke fell over my face as I walked in.

“What can I do for you?” Calvin said, stripped to the waist in those zebra pants he always wore. A clear glass ashtray rested on his paunch like a diamond on some velvety pillow.

I smiled, bashful in his unbashfulness. I asked if he could maybe be more exact on the show. With the ingredients.

“You have a problem with my cooking?” he asked.

Nathaniel held his chopsticks in the air like a little set of rabbit ears.

“No, no!” I said. “It’s just that I never know exactly what quantities to put in. For the captions?”

Calvin Woolfe stared at me for a moment, smoking.

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“On the screen?”

“Gina, this is cooking,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette. “It’s not your math homework.” Then he stood, and in that tiny room he took up so much of the space that no matter how I moved my arm I felt it would land somewhere on his body.

“Chef Cal?” Nathaniel said, appearing suddenly between us.

He was holding up Calvin’s chef ’s jacket. “Time to get dressed.”

“It was real nice talking with you,” Calvin said, shrugging both big shoulders into his clothes.

I took him to mean the measurements didn’t matter and taught myself how to read him, keeping my eyes on Calvin's hammy hands as they dipped knives into slabs of butter or drizzled oil from a cruet. It was easy to pretend that everything he said into the camera he said to me. After all, I got him first, every week. By the time the rest of Pittsburgh saw Chef Cal cook, my eyes had been all over him, and my captions had been properly placed on the screen like a fence, corralling the man in that TV kitchen I knew from real life.

2.

And then a lot of things happened very quickly. This was, if I remember, around the six-week mark. Monday morning I saw Calvin Woolfe walk into Joyce’s office, and Calvin never showed on Mondays. Minutes later, they walked out of Joyce’s office. Joyce dipped her head into my cubicle. “Can you join us in the conference room for a minute?”

In the conference room I was introduced to Nicole Slayton, head of communications for WQED. We shook hands. Her skirt’s hem hung close to her privates, and she kept her hair short, too. It sat on her head like a bunch of dead kelp. When she offered her hand to Calvin he pressed his lips to it, and we all sat down around the table. WQED wanted to publish Calvin’s first cookbook, culled from two seasons of Dig In with Calvin Woolfe, and this meeting, Nicole explained, was to get everyone’s head together. “Joyce, let’s start with you,” she said. “Any ideas?”

“Call Rebecca over at the magazine and get her to start running a column every month with one of Cal’s recipes,” she said. “And maybe some kitchen tips. We need to build an audience first.”

Nicole scribbled some words in her leatherbound notebook.

“That’s a fantastic idea.”

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“Let’s talk cover,” Calvin said. “Is it going to be a picture of my food, or do you want it to be a picture of me?”

Calvin started grinning all up at Nicole and she leered in and grinned back and it was like they were going to make out right there in front of poor Joyce. “Whatever you’re comfortable with,” Nicole said.

“Oh I’m comfortable with whatever you’re comfortable with.”

“What’s my involvement in this book?” I asked. I tried to look everyone in the eye, like conspiratorially. “I mean, where’s Nathaniel?”

Nicole explained that I was to help cull recipes. “We figured the easiest way to generate copy would be to go to the episodes, take from the ingredients lists. That way, there’s also some consistency.”

I saw the whole spring laid out for me, the hours I’d spend with headphones in a screening room with a legal pad on my lap.

Alone. I’d need to become a writer. I’d have to translate Calvin Woolfe’s reckless on-screen actions into careful on-paper instructions. He prepared four dishes each episode and we shot twenty-four episodes a season. That made 192 recipes I’d be responsible for, and I didn’t know then what I know now. Wouldn’t Calvin Woolfe have to help me? I imagined late Thursday afternoons over coffee and my notes. I imagined small, intimate tables tucked in the corners of bars, away from all those display windows up front.

“But surely,” I said to Nicole Slayton’s face, “Chef Cal has recipes I should borrow from?”

“To be honest, Gina, I don’t really write much down,” Calvin Woolfe said to me.

“Jesus, Cal, her name’s Ginny,” Joyce said. “You just heard it a few seconds ago.”

“But that’s short for Gina, right?” I watched him wiggle a finger in his ear.

Nicole laughed like this was a joke and gave us, gave me, a three-month deadline. “Let’s make this book great, everyone,” she said and the meeting was over. What a ditz, I thought and watched Calvin hold the door open for Nicole. As she passed through he shook his head once and it was clear he was looking at her flat ass. He followed after her. I had to completely grab the doorknob and pull it all the way open again for Joyce.

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*** I spent extra hours on Tuesday and Thursday digging through the archives, finding the typewritten transcripts we were required by law to provide the deaf or VCRless in order to cull the instructions on how long to stick things in the oven, or when to add new vegetables to the pot. My job became joining my professional voice with Calvin’s enthusiastic one. He said, “What you want to do is take that pie crust and just toss the thing on there. Just throw it right on. Let it be sloppy.

Get messy, people! It’s a pot pie, not a wedding cake!” and I wrote, Lay crust over bowl. It’s O.K. if it looks uneven. Lots of times the work got boring. It was hard to spend time with a man whose food I never got to eat, and one night about halfway through the fourth episode of the first season I realized that I’d in fact never eaten a single dish made from Calvin Woolfe’s hands. Maybe a bite of the leftovers at the end of a taping, but we mostly left that food for the crew. And so that night I got home just after five and told David we should go out for dinner.

“All right,” he said, wiping his small hands on a rag. “I could use a break.” We were down in the basement where David did all his refinishing work. Over in the corner I could see that the previous day’s rainfall had leaked in and formed a puddle on the floor, but I was too excited to let it get to me.

I suggested the Bay and Howl.

“That’ll be expensive,” David said. “Will that guy give you a discount do you think?”

“I’m not going to ask him for a discount, David. Are you serious?”

“All right, all right. Let me go change.”

“Oh, you look fine,” I said. “Let’s just go now before the rush gets there.”

“I’ve got stains on my pants,” he said.

I told him no one was going to notice.

The Bay and Howl was dark inside, like a den, with tables you could tell were heavy and a thick carpet underfoot I felt I could lie down and curl up on if I wanted to. And I really wanted to. We were sat right next to a big fish aquarium, and through its bluey glass I could see the doors to the kitchen waver like a mirage.

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David took forever to decide on anything. “What’s pesto?” he asked. “Is it sweet?”

“Just order it,” I said. “This is like some kind of adventure, right?”

He only said he guessed so, but I knew it was. When the waiter brought us a basket of pencil-thin breadsticks, which David began chomping on, I asked him whether Calvin was going to be making our dinners.

“Chef Cal has a personal investment in every dish that leaves his kitchen,” the boy said.

And I just clapped my hands then. “Oh, how righteous!”

David snapped another breadstick in half. “Don’t you see this guy, like, every week?”

“He’s very busy in the studio,” I said and explained all the new work I had to do in preparation for the cookbook.

“You never mentioned any cookbook,” he said.

I tried to fill him in, but it’s like, at the end of the workday the last thing I wanted to do was talk about work.

“You have to write all these recipes yourself ?” he said. “They paying you extra?”

“That’s not the point,” I said and listened instead to that great rumble of polite conversation and knives on dinner plates. Our food came and it was delicious. “Can you tell Calvin Woolfe that we said so?” I asked the waiter as he cleared our plates. “And we’d like to pay our compliments directly?” The boy nodded and took off for the busing station. Then David distracted me and I didn’t see where he went after that.

“Let’s just go home, okay?” he said. “I want to finish that dresser tonight.”

“Why don’t you go to the bathroom?” I told David. “I bet a place like this has the newspaper framed on the wall. Go check.”

And suddenly we were arguing, right in front of a stuffed bear.

On its hind legs! David kept saying things about purpose—his purpose in life and the purpose of marriage in life. It all got a little confused, I thought, and I told him so.

“Don’t tell me I’m confused, Ginny,” he said.

“I didn’t say you were confused I said—”

“And don’t throw semantic arguments at me,” he said. “You

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can’t run from this problem. I am unhappy with this marriage and you are, too.”

“Oh, now who’s putting words in whose mouth?”

“You work late. You spend hours every weekend shopping.

You sit alone in that kitchen because you’d rather do anything than spend time with me. And maybe I’m the same way with my projects in the basement, but isn’t that a sign? All those promises we made in college. Remember? All the things we said we’d never become?”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, and as he kept ranting I found a little cockleshell at the bottom of the aquarium and slid myself underneath it.

“You’re not even listening to me,” David said.

I kept my voice at a whisper. “I can’t believe you’re bringing all this up right now. Right here around all these people.”

“I want to go see a therapist.”

“Then go,” I said.

“I want us to go.”

And I said no way was I going to spend money on some shrink to tell me what I was feeling.

And he said he couldn’t be with somebody who couldn’t even try to be with somebody.

And then he was gone from the table.

Oh, David. In college you named a robot after me, even though all it did was scuttle clumsily over low debris. It was enough to make me fall for you, back then. But then right after we got married you turned all serious and became this strange burden in the house.

The only things we talked about were home improvement and vacation planning. We weren’t even thirty! Since when did sharing our lives together mean giving them up completely? Isn’t there a way for two people to get too close?

I sat there for the next hour, undisturbed. Where else was I going to go? No one came to refill my glass of water, so I kept my eyes fixed on the surfboard-shaped window between the restaurant and the kitchen, waiting for Calvin Woolfe to walk past. I didn’t see him until after the restaurant closed. His bimbo hostess pointed at my table, and through his aquarium’s glass Calvin looked over at me like a frightened little fish. But then he smiled once he recognized me, and he came over to the table.

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“You’ve been waiting all this time,” he said.

“The food was so good, Calvin.”

He said that was kind and asked if I wanted to see the kitchen.

I jumped right out of my chair. He showed me the walk-in cooler and the place where all the knives were kept, and the hook outside his office where he hung his chef ’s hat. There was no one else around. I told him of my plan to get a taste of his food so I could write about it better. I said I wanted to try all his dishes. He invited me into his office and closed the door behind me. I suppose this was what I’d waited all night for, but I’m not one of those slutty girls who sleeps her way to the top. That was never my intention. But when he put his enormous hands on those problem spots at my waist, I didn’t make any kind of protest. It was like being held by a sycamore tree. It was nice, at first. There were new hands in new places and new smells of new skin and all that sexy stuff. But then he kind of threw me on his desk and my head banged against his Rolodex, which really hurt. “Fuck yeah, whore,” he said, but I wasn’t sure I heard him right. Fuck there more?

I felt his fist in my hair, and he pulled and kept talking. “Yeah bitch, my little bitch.” And, “Get on that horsecock, get the fuck on it.” And suddenly I wasn’t having a good time.

“You don’t have to be a shit about it,” I said, coughing, trying to get comfortable.

And suddenly I’d fallen onto the floor.

“You think I need some cunt telling me how to fuck her?” he said. I started gathering my clothes. “Little girl, you hang around my restaurant all night, you take what I fucking give you.”

“I only wanted—”

“Get the fuck. Out of my office.”

All punctuated like that. I had to walk back to the house by myself that night through some neighborhoods I avoided even in the light of day. I could have been raped, or murdered. When I got home the lights in the living room were still lit, and I found some lies inside me to tell David about what happened. Those spring rolls didn’t sit right and I had to walk into three separate Eckerds before I found some medicine that cost less than the five dollars I had in my pocket. But I didn’t find David in the living room when I walked in, and I didn’t find him in bed, either. I couldn’t find him anywhere in the house, actually. I fell asleep on my own.

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3.

The season ended in June, and by that time I’d finished every damn recipe and sent them to Nicole. It was out of my hands now. The book ran quickly through the printing process, to be out in time of WQED's end-of-the-summer pledge drive. In the meantime, work on the show was scarce and unstructured, and Joyce and I spent the summer taking long lunches in Oakland or even the South Side, when we felt adventurous. I don’t live there anymore, Pittsburgh, but when I did it felt as though I was stuck in some gigantic rut, like physically.

We lived in a place where all the winds and water in the sky collided and sat moodily amid the hills. What I mean is, a Pittsburgher sees more grey skies than blue, and so when, in the summer usually, the sun would come out everyone wanted to just eat it up. Like we were all walking trees, reaching our limbs up high above us.

One afternoon, Joyce and I were taking the long way back to work after an al fresco lunch on South Craig. She’d been talking about the Dig In column that had been running in the magazine for four or five months at that point. “They got a letter from some old kook,” she said. “Says all the recipes taste terrible.”

“I haven’t tried them,” I said. We were both walking up Flagstaff Hill where couples young and old lay close on bright-colored blankets, and all the pale boys had their shirts off, as though in contest with one another.

“This guy claims his spaghetti Bolognese was swimming in sauce.”

“Wasn’t it swimming in sauce on the show?” I asked, trying to remember. “I don’t know why Calvin can’t write them down himself.”

“The man can’t even read, Ginny,” she said. “We can’t expect him to write a thank you note, much less a whole magazine column.”

I thought she was kidding. I laughed because I thought she was just kidding.

“Of course I have no proof of this, so you’ll keep your mouth shut about it.”

“Oh, my god! How do you know?” I asked, my hand covering that mouth, practicing.

“He won’t use cue cards,” she said. “Nathaniel handles all the paperwork.”

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Such secrets! At that moment it was like Joyce had given me the best gift on my bridal registry, a new fridge or something.

“Wow,” I said. “Did he never even try to learn? I mean, who’s illiterate these days?

“Ginny?” she said. “Who cares? The point is: I don’t want any more letters about failed recipes.”

I told her maybe there was a typo somewhere, but what I wanted to tell her was that no way could it have been my fault. I’d worked hard to make sure all the things Calvin Woolfe did with food and his hands became something anybody could follow, word for word. My words. But Joyce liked action not excuses, so I nodded instead, like I understood what she was talking about. And we walked silently past spots on Carnegie Mellon’s campus where I saw younger, nicer versions of David and myself drifting in and out of distant memories.

Back at the office, Joyce had an envelope on her desk—small and squarish and white. It could have fit into her pocket.

“Ah,” she said. “An invitation to the book release.”

But I hadn’t gotten one!

“Calm down, Cinderella,” she said, reading my face like a cue card. “You can come with me.” *** The party was held in the restaurant at the top of the USX Tower, about a thousand feet up in the air. Joyce said she’d meet me there.

As I stepped off the elevator I couldn’t find anyone left in charge of gatecrashers, so I walked right in. The place was nice but ugly— salmon-colored walls and a kind of sea-foam green tint to the patterned carpet. I felt like I was standing at the bottom of a bowl of unripe vegetables.

Joyce was nowhere in sight, and Calvin was surrounded by a crowd of snobs, with leggy Nicole from communications glued to him. Unprofessionally, I thought. I found the buffet table by the north wall of windows and I filled my plate with what I recognized as Calvin’s recipes. Mini spinach-mushroom quiches. Chicken satay skewers. Grilled eggplant rolls. I wanted to check whether I could see my house from here, but it was nighttime and through the windows

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all I saw were blips of streetlights peeking through the trees, my own searching face reflected dimly back at me. I felt like the tallest woman in Pittsburgh, some giant that the National Guard had to come in and take care of. David was out there somewhere, maybe. Incommunicado as they said in the movies. I tried not to get melodramatic about it, but what was he waiting for? All my messages left with his secretary had gone unreturned.

Nathaniel walked past with a copy of the book in his hand, and I saw he was wearing the exact same terra cotta blazer I was, which made me feel as ugly as the restaurant. So I resolved to leave and pick up a whole pizza at Angelo’s, but as I turned to go Joyce was right there with an empty glass in her hand. “Have you tried the food?” she asked.

I’d been enjoying the chicken satay, but the peanut sauce wasn’t very good. “I just can’t taste the peanuts.” I said, and it was true. It was like dipping chicken into a sticky broth made from more chicken.

“Everything sucks,” she said. “Pardon my French.”

“Who’s catering the party?” I wondered. I saw over Joyce’s low head that Nathaniel and Calvin were huddled by the restrooms, flipping quickly through the pages of the cookbook as though it were some porno mag one of them had found. Except their eyes weren’t hornily wide open. They were thin and irritated.

“This place is so ugly,” Joyce said. Was she drunk?

And that’s when Calvin came over with Nathaniel in tow. I watched them stomp through the crowd with their arms swinging, like two toughs storming into a saloon. “A quarter-cup of peanuts?”

Calvin said. “A teaspoon of sugar? A tablespoon of cilantro? Where’d you get these measurements?”

“From the show,” I said. I remembered the episode perfectly. It was the one he’d filmed after telling me that cooking wasn’t math. I’d watched him prepare the peanut sauce at least three times, live and on tape. “You chopped the peanuts and threw in a whole handful,” I said, as though he wasn’t there.

“A whole handful?” he said and he grabbed my hand, holding the fist of it in his own fist. And then he brought our hands into the airspace between us.

It looked like a big fish swallowing a little one.

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“We trusted you with Calvin’s recipes,” Nathaniel said. “We trusted you.”

The partygoers were starting to look our way, I could tell.

Joyce wouldn’t come in and defend me for some reason.

“My name wasn’t even included in the book!” I said, looking at Joyce. “I wasn’t even given any credit.”

“And it’s a fucking shame,” Calvin said. “You think I want my name attached to this? These aren’t my recipes.”

And that was true. They weren’t. They were my recipes. Calvin was just a face. I could have done everything he’d wanted. I could have lain my body down on the floor at his every prompting. I could have cut off all my hair for him and he’d still have treated me like a burden.

It was like long ago he’d planned out this life for himself, this minicelebrity he was now starting to enjoy in town, and that plan didn’t include anyone else. I wondered how Nathaniel put up with it, and it was only then as I left the party that I felt sorry for the boy. *** I spent most of Saturday in bed, and Sunday in the paper I read all about the book release party in the society column. All the hyphenated names in boldface, once again mine nowhere to be found. I was there, though, buried in polite allusion. “A moment early on when Chef Cal let loose that fiery spirit he’s known for all around town didn’t put a damper on this sky-high fête. And the food? Tres délicieux!” Which was kind, unlike the review of the book itself that ran with a headline—“Woolfe ‘Digs’ Own Grave with Howl-worthy Book”—I had to admit was clever. Calvin would have appreciated it, if it weren’t the bane of his career.

I resolved to make things better and spent that Sunday evening skipping TV and going through my copy of Dig In recipe-byrecipe, underlining the measurements I’d probably guessed at. I kept thinking of his fist, Calvin’s, shaking my own fist in front of my face. It was, from what I could tell, between one and one-third and one and one-half times the size of mine, and I thought if we could perform that same operation on the ingredients we could release a second edition, maybe with photographs to make it more attractive.

I came in Monday with a whole timeframe planned out in

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a notebook. I felt it was very professional and that Joyce would be proud, but Joyce wasn’t in her office when I walked in. I thought maybe she was having a pee, and I sat down and checked my phone messages. But I didn’t have any messages. And then Nicole Slayton was standing behind me with Mike from HR and Don Mooney, the president of WQED, who wore a deep blue suit and stood about two mes side-by-side. He was smiling so kindly that I was confused at first when I heard Mike tell me to pack up all my things. That I had to leave the building because I was no longer employed by the company.

“We’re sorry, Virginia, but this cookbook fiasco’s set the company back a few dollars,” Nicole said.

“Eighty thousand dollars,” Mr. Mooney said. “And I don’t need to tell you that for a nonprofit weathering the storm of a recession that’s suicide money.”

The weird thing was that I didn’t even cry, and I always cry when people gang up on me. *** It was months before they put out their own second edition. Not a word of my own work got into it. Like I said, I never blamed Joyce.

And I could never even find a single fault with that woman. If hard pressed maybe I’d point to the silly way she put her makeup on her face. She wore enough mascara that it caked up her eyelashes like the sticky teeth of some over-lubed sprocket. It gave her a dark, somber look that maybe wasn’t her best option.

I’d never written a letter to the editor before. People who did always came across to me as tired old coots who had nothing in life except a chance to get the last word in. That man who wrote in about how awful my recipes were, for instance. Didn’t he have anything better to do? But when I got home from work I got some paper from David’s office and sat down at his desk. It was the first time I’d stepped foot in the room since he left. Why David needed an office I never understood, but here were all the things about himself he loved. That ancient Selectric he wrote all his college papers on. A steel T-square.

A Kennywood mug: DAVID. The brown leather chair I once found on some South Side curb. The only light in the room came from a lamp on the desk I sat at and it felt exactly like being at the very back

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end of some cave. If I had swirled around in his chair, I wouldn’t have been able to see the front wall, but I knew what was there. I could close my eyes and see the framed photograph of me from sophomore year lying on the grass in the quad, my sweatshirt having ridden up a bit to show the outie I had back then. And my hair? A stupid, sticky mess of hairspray. I’d done so much work over the years to make it nice and natural looking but did he ever think to take a new picture?

The whole wall was like some kind of shrine to this older version of me. The thinner version. It took me years to come around to it, but this was the problem with our relationship. He liked me way more than I ever could. We were the world’s worst match.

My letter was ten pages long, but by the time I typed it up and did some cutting I got it down to two, double-spaced. I signed it in pen and folded it into an envelope and drove it right down to the offices of the Post-Gazette and set it at the security desk. That was at eleven-thirty. I was in bed by twelve. *** That’s probably the end of my story. It took me a long time to find another job, and an even longer time to find another husband. The Post-Gazette, though, was quick and printed my letter that Friday, and though I checked each day no letters in response to mine ever followed. I thought maybe Calvin Woolfe would have something to add.

I thought he’d want the last word. Even if he couldn’t read the letter, I’m sure he’d have Nathaniel read it for him.

Sometime on Saturday, I was in the kitchen adding salt to a pan of onions and garlic when I heard the doorbell. I didn’t want to disturb my cooking. In the previous week I’d tried to get outside and get some sun, and I took out a ton of money from savings and spent it all at the grocery store, stocking up the pantry, buying produce I’d never tried before, breads that didn’t come sealed in a plastic bag.

Maybe I’d been trying to avoid dealing with the heavy envelope that had come in the mail, marked with the letterhead of David’s lawyer, but every day I’d stood around the kitchen making whatever I felt like making on the stove. I had one rule: no cookbooks. Lots of what I ended up with was awful. I remember boiling a lambchop before slicing it into a stir-fry. I just tossed it out and tried something else, what

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did I care? When the doorbell rang I didn’t even know what I was going to do with my sautéed onions and garlic—oh, I had all the terms down—but I knew I was going to add either mushrooms or broccoli rabe and as I was trying to decide the doorbell rang again and then again. I said, “Okay!” and shut off the heat.

It was Nathaniel, leaning against the outside stooprail with a copy of Friday’s newspaper in his hands.

“Bravo, Ginny,” he said. “Fucking great letter.”

“Oh, what do you want?” I said. He was drunk, and it wasn’t even noon!

“I want Chef Cal’s cookbook back!” He shouted this and I thought I heard it reverberate off the houses across from me, so I ushered him inside and asked if I could get him some coffee.

“I was the true author of that cookbook,” he said, reading from my letter. “The idea behind the dishes might be Mr. Woolfe’s, but the recipes themselves are my own. If they have any faults, they’re my fault.

A little too late, don’t you think?”

“I thought I should set the record straight,” I said. “I didn’t want people to think Calvin was a bad chef.”

Nathaniel flopped down on the sofa, putting his shoes up on the armrest. “People know he’s a great chef.”

“I was just sorry about everything that happened,” I said. “It wasn’t even really my fault.”

He closed his eyes and rubbed fiercely at them with his fists.

“I know you think of me as some petty faggot, Ginny.”

“I don’t!”

“You do, and that’s fine. I don’t care what you think of me.

But you don’t know anything. It’s clear in your stupid letter. You’re not the author of the book, okay? You were just some conduit. A set of little fingers. And you’ve destroyed Calvin’s whole career. And because he’s my mentor you’ve destroyed me.”

I told him about my plan for a revised version.

“Who cares?” he said, rolling over on his side. Was he going to take a nap? “You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” he said. “Even deodorant commercials are smarter than you.”

And here I grabbed his two feet and pulled him onto the floor. “I’m not going to let you talk to me like that in my house, Nathaniel. This is my house!”

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“All right, all right,” he said, heading toward the door.

“Why have you been drinking this early?” I asked.

“They fired me, too,” he said. “They said my relationship to Calvin had become unprofessional.”

This was sad, really, because Nathaniel was so dedicated, and I told him I thought so.

“Well, now we’ve both been fucked, haven’t we?” he said.

At the door he dropped the paper and told me to keep it, which I did, even though I’d already put five copies up in David’s office.

“What’s that smell?” he asked, sniffing at the air like a dog.

I told him what I was making.

“You a cook,” he said with a snort. “That’s rich.”

And maybe it was.

•

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Yellow Curtains, Parted Elisa Karbin

Without a body, a window is a plot, blue-grave furrow of parted sky— the lamplight knits the cobblestone, a bouquet of teeth loose underfoot.

Blue and graven, a furrow of parted sky moves steady as sinking ship, white-capped bouquet of teeth loose underfoot— a vessel of almost-ghosts, dressed for dinner.

Sinking steady, white-capped and nameless companions in heavy skirts and pearls, drink in the spectral salt of buoys dressed for dinner.

Who are these strangers in the deep, tethered and bound in heavy skirts, mouthing pearls and silt to the shell-pressed ear. Brush against the strangers in the deep, tethered to a billowed palm of soot, a shadow of the earth-pressed ear, brush up towards the lamplight knitting the cobblestone, the billowed palm of soot. A shadow without a body is a window, is a plot.

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Cobbling

Elisa Karbin The art of preservation decrees a cool, dry place. The dark palm of a cellar, clapboard clutch of the pantry. Here, apples and apricots, peaches and pears are the smooth-skinned ingots of winter jams, waxing a red gold scatter. Anoint them from basin to jar, pluck seed and stone stew the core, skim the skin, save the flesh for sweetness and add it to the dark pot, a waiting mouth. Omit the need for the exotic tooth of spice, pass over the gnawing want for sugar. This keeping is pure as a wooden spoon, a hunger.

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Walk in the Right Way - Engraving - 8” x 10” - 2010

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Jared Wickware

Alms

Rich Ives 1. Invitation This could be damage at the door. This could be pain qualified to take you to more pain, where I’ll water it down with injury and drink it.

I’m not depressed, merely unlocked. Come in, come in, said the big bad wolf, and I ate the pain for him, and I was him in his experience and his tasting and in his bed with his hairy welcome and teeth.

I aim my hunger at the oven and squeeze what I can into the doughy center where I feel too much and find people who love me exploding beneath the crust of my dense pastry. I make a noise with my mouth that says Enter and the oven door falls open and invites me, and every hole in the buttery skin welcomes more flaky marching and oxygen armies, lifting.

I have to take it out now, this delicate morsel, and offer it to someone without pain, someone with a loving grandmother and a basket of apples, someone who hasn’t tasted intimacy . . .

2. Consideration Because I’ve walked all the way to the publication, and no fame left me there, I’ve imagined my brain’s boney hardhat shining in the graveyard long after the planted building that’s no longer building has fallen apart.

I wonder what I should do and a leaf gives me a map, its coordinates defining the way you smelled during an argument, so easily moonsoaked that a billow of bright mind stain might suddenly arrive at you or the persistence of your faintest breeze among the panic grass.

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3. The Stones Don’t Take It Upon Themselves

. . . but don’t weep for the close stones. Don’t take apart their excuses.

Next time someone asks, tell them you’re glad they ran out of questions. (One day the election ran itself dry, voted for an assortment of mutinies.)

You can still look every direction slowly enough to find yourself, the way an insect can sting you for invading an invisible nest.

4. Killing the Ants If your view of the dead is not theirs, don’t explain. You told them the story of the beginning all the way up to the ending, which disappeared. This frightened them.

Here’s the story they discarded: One man was not the only moment. They replaced him with a pebble.

If you can find one good idea in an oyster, don’t get caught holding it like an election. Pretend you have chosen to gather the sunlight. Dust off the water.

Fill yourself with emptiness, and you shall appreciate departures.

I am not an ordinary pebble, says the ordinary pebble. You don’t have to listen to hear this.

The emptiness stays, and you are measured by how you choose to contain it, but the pebble wishes to reject the pebble although the best he can do is balance against himself.

5. Paternal Considerations My dad had to say things about other people in order to be happy with himself. He couldn’t say things about himself. It seemed as if he didn’t really exist. He was a recording device and he prided himself on getting things accurate. I didn’t understand for a long time that those things weren’t accurate. I thought it was like a stone. If you picked it

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up and gave it to somebody, it was the same stone.

My father had a blowtorch. I was afraid to light it. One day I lit it, and I burned up a frog. I didn’t like what I had done, but I had done it because I wanted to know if I could do it. I could do it. That was too bad, but I thought of it again whenever anyone tried to bully me.

They didn’t know what to do about the way I looked at them. They could see that something besides fear was going on in me. One of them told me that later. I didn’t know why they backed off and I never burned another frog.

6. The Migration of Horses Loose-jointed horses, trotting along like sailors, trusted the descending land would bring them to ships, so there was somewhere novel to change them for only a day or two and spit them out, a deep color only nature could invent and a question about understanding the journey.

Wherever you’re going isn’t there until you get there. Horses understand this and are helped by forgetting.

A ship isn’t a dream, but a dream collects them. Horses can feel this in the wooden pretense. Horses can become people without standing.

People without standing can become nature.

7. North Dakota Embraced by the dogdark, nearly ill with it and drifting among little brown bruisers of acorn patter spat to the fat cobbles by yesterday’s wind, Jackson watched the wide hillside’s improbable lake, its blue rolled round as if qualifying for its place as abdomen before descending to bright river legs, top and bottom now made from the same cloth, but the middle a conservative sigh, smooth and deeply round like a sixteenth century aristocrat’s privileged belly.

That morning walked me farther away, up to north where Jackson’s lubadub saunter squatted between hill pigs and Celia’s corn-quilt grew the exhausted

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happy blue of a child’s toy among her dappled fishing dreams, uninterrupted by fish. I continue cutting darkness now and stacking it lengthwise until its weight sinks in and floats the welcoming marsh just a little higher, and you can smell that damp horizon rising.

Tomorrow won’t argue more than 1954 or step out of the space between histories here, nor fear darker behaviors among the golden stems. Ren Norrick lives among them on the wrong side of a brick, sealing what happened in the pumphouse with Celia. It would have been a crime to Jackson or a joke to the hired hand, who took a little trouble for himself and told it proud as Norway or green Oslo cheese. He filched from a smitten maiden still alter-rung.

(Following my collection of my ordinary error, late becomes early.)

8. Instructions for Departure Count on it but count on it not guessing what you are guessing, stuck for a whole night in a vertical passage that led to the day you were released. Dinner in a flesh restaurant.

9. Arrival Because I’m also watching you become me, I’m watching a cat chasing a tiny electric car. I’m buying fluoride toothpaste to save my weakening enamel, so I can eat whatever I want. Leaving the drugstore, I’m asked if I’m having a nice day by a man who clearly doesn’t have much and must want some. I recognize the man inside him and hurry past the one outside. I’m leaving behind excess baggage and a clothing allowance. I’m launching the appropriate vehicle. I’m maintaining the intention and cutting ties. I’m maneuvering.

10. Productivity a) It was hard happy work, and I gave it away, knowing the hole it filled would stay empty. I wanted to jump in there, and I wanted to know I could jump again, and that was wrong but got results, and for a mo-

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ment I was sure of another moment that probably didn’t exist, and then I thought, The end is always the most unlikely color, as if it weren’t the end at all, and it isn’t, until we forget. That’s something we can’t know that I just told you, and most likely, you already knew it. b) I didn’t want to save the flower. I only wanted to experience the beauty of its death. c) As if a dog could say There there and pet me and remove dissatisfaction like a splinter. The note comes down from the kind of sky I used to live with. I guess it must be a leaf, but it says you have to go away when you’re done, so I’m still not done, but someone is, so I take that person out of my foot and continue.

11. Possibly the King In one version of the wronged king, the king once was the queen, and he forgets he isn’t really a man because sometimes what you lose is the sense of loss that gave you value. Happiness knotted to failure keeps the necessary shirttail dirty beneath the jaunty trousers.

Don’t find me now because I’m unable to say when I want something I can’t have.

After immigration came lacrosse and other misunderstood borrowing techniques unsuited for life in a desert land. The one native sound was attached with small twigs because some participants preferred it to shouting, and it came from outside the rules. We still wonder why the bird’s mouth grows smaller before it learns to sing.

You held the king up to the light and did not see through him. In the empty part you placed exactly the same emptiness. You didn’t have to tell him about it. You didn’t have to leave. He was in a glass of wine for a while, and you sipped him. Your thinking did not become his thinking or the wine’s, so he let you sip a while longer. When the bottle was empty, there was a message in it. It was not the message either

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of you expected, which you, therefore, expected to please him. Having learned only what goes on in the required darkness, he didn’t spill.

In a second version, no one believed the queen, who was convinced the music was silent but still music. The queen’s discovery might have been held responsible for a nervous celebration involving previous native thinkers. According to the king’s illegitimate sister, the queen was the king’s mother, and she had studied philosophy to understand this.

Like many of the king’s friends, the king filled his glass house with the stuffed bodies of creatures he had shot, and the king began thinking about how he would visit the friends instead of inviting them over for the obligatory confessional glass of exquisite wine, as had been done in the past, and after a while, the king wondered why he had not noticed how easily, even from the street, as if he were a stranger, he could tell how much useless difficulty the friends had collected behind the glass walls of their living space, and he thought of telling them what a waste it was. The friends had noticed the change in the king and began bringing their exquisite wine to the king’s house, the one the king seldom visited because it was not protected adequately from intruders. The friends wanted the king to relax and listen to something that concerned them. The king thought about how relieved he was that he wouldn’t have to tell them how much unnecessary stress they seemed to be living with and ask them why their walls were made of glass.

And the king’s friends told him he should relocate, if only to force the abandonment of the clutter the past had accumulated in his increasing anxieties. When the king laughed and told them he had been thinking of saying something similar, the friends smiled indulgently and assured the king that even strangers could see through certain enclosures, which could turn them into friends, if they didn’t resist change. The king sorted the litter of his past into stacks, according to how valuable the discoveries were that each had led him to. The king waved occasionally from his new arrangement while the friends pointed and talked and thought about what kind of wine to take along to their next happy victim.

In the king’s basket the heads can be deceptive. Eventually a melodic storm appears to ferry many former questioners to where they become the notes previously described as blossoms, but along the way

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the blossoms are mounted on pikes and appear to be examples of inappropriately emergent behavior. In all but the most recent versions, the king does not end unless he is allowed to start over. This is actually the only way in which the king has been wronged. The one thing the king most longs for cannot be given. His death will arrive instead by the back door, as if the king were to be poisoned by the desire most carefully withheld and love most deeply the achievement of his absence.

12. Premature Conclusions Once upon a stone, there was a time when a bird sat, and the bird was upon the stone and the stone was upon the thoughts of a man who was upon the earth. The man’s life was not orderly, as might be expected of a man with a stone upon his thoughts. He had a treefull of daydreams. He gathered opinions upon the lawn and sorted them and stacked them upon the stone, but they were all his opinions, so they wilted and greeted the wind a bit too easily. They went on about their hidden intentions.

13. Delusional In my study, I spin the globe, just to see what it’s like to feel responsible for what will happen anyway.

I knew there was nothing out there, so I turned on the flashlight. I wanted to see the depths of my correctness.

14. Autobiography of the Absence I cut apart a dollhouse made to match the house I lived in. I put each of the smaller rooms in their larger rooms. I put things in one room to see if they would appear in the other. Soon, each room has a pair of scissors, and I cannot remember which ones I placed there.

I cut apart the arms and legs of the chairs and try to decide which ones should be for reaching and which ones should be for running away. It’s not till I finish that I realize there is nowhere to run to and the arms and legs begin running from one room to another. I help

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them because I am a nice person. I help them because I want to know how they will achieve their goals. Sometimes I forget which room I am in. Sometimes it seems as if the rooms are in me. Soon there are no rooms left without running in them.

I put cages in the rooms, and I tempt the arms and legs into the cages with artificial arms and legs. I don’t understand why the arms and legs think the artificial ones are better, but they do, and they imitate them.

They think I cannot tell the difference. They think I cannot resist the cages.

When the arms and legs have become so successful at their deception that only I can tell the difference I try to forget what I know, and I sew them together in different combinations to see which combination works best. I try three arms and a leg. I try all arms. I try combinations of more than four. If the results are too awkward I cut some away. The arms and legs are so intent on the success of their pretense that they do not cry out when I cut them. I work quickly so that they can hide the blood when I move on. I let them have their lie.

When the arms and legs have adjusted to their new ways of moving, I let them explore the garden. Nothing has been planted in the garden, but grass and weeds still grow there, and the arms and legs seem content with this. They even get playful and roll around in the greenness.

Some of them try to leap about, and I find this amusing. I laugh and shake hands with a foot, wrap myself in a couple of arms, put shoes on some hands and guide them around the garden on a leash.

You need to name what you are doing or no one will join you, so I call it Allowances, I call it Favoritism, I call it Relativism. No one comes.

I try naming it again. I call it Insider Trading, I call it Ennui, I call it Bolshevism. Now the people that don’t believe what I am saying come to argue. The hands enjoy this, but the legs are bored and cannot gesture as effectively as the hands without attacking or departing.

Now only those who have settled into voyeurism remain. I call them to me to distribute jackets and warm skirts. They are uncomfortable with this. They put them on and leave. The arms and legs would cry if they could. I distract them with bubblegum and erasers. Pretty soon I am the only one left and the house is filled with mice, so I put myself

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back together again and try to decide if I can live with what I have done. Certainly, the house is big enough, but the rooms inside the rooms, well, they’re just too full of inadequate thought patterns. I can no longer even attach the thoughts to the heads and torsos. They seem to think the arms and legs are only there for their amusement, and this seems to disturb the arms and legs. Are you still here? Am I the only one who sees the potential for breakfast in this?

15. Conclusions Concerning Your Relation to the Events in Question I yelled and clapped my hands, but neither the rabbits nor the crows nor the child seemed to hear me.

Another man walked by very slowly. He was hunched over and wearing very little clothing, all of it dusty. His long white beard trembled with every step he took. His skin had the pallor I associated with the sensitive belly of an eel not exactly gray, but not healthy looking either. He stared intently in front of himself, as if he could not move forward without great concentration. He did not seem to know I was there and would not look at me.

After a while I began to try to remember how I had heard about the pilgrimage, and I could not remember this. I watched a large white owl catch something on the road that screamed. I could hear the two crows fly off, but I couldn’t see them in the enveloping darkness.

I stayed there a long time. The man with the vegetables took pity on me and gave me food and water as he traveled back and forth on the road and listened to me tell of my pilgrimage.

Perhaps I am still there. You might like some vegetables.

•

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Think or Whim - Engraving - 6” x 4” - 2006

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Jared Wickware

Thunder

Dennis Fulgoni

Three Sundays in a row, bikers park in the cul-de-sac behind our apartment complex in South Pasadena—revving engines, laughing, cursing. Backfire explodes up Fair Oaks Ave, echoes like M-80s off our window.

Sandy cradles our son in the middle of the living room. His eyes are like the black sides of Othello disks, the pupils nearly eclipsing the irises. He clutches the collar of her blouse with little hands. “I can’t take it anymore,” she says.

“Try to relax,” I say, although my pinky twitches like a caught fish.

I lean back on the futon and read the paper. It’s difficult to concentrate, but there’s a feature in the travel section of The Los Angeles Times about Chile, a place I’ve always wanted to go. A panoramic photograph with blue hills shrouded in mist. For a moment I’m there—wind on my face, sun on my back, gravel under my boots. I hike into the hills and disappear.

I wrote a poem about Chile once. It landed in a small literary journal. No payment, just copies. Still.

Sandy jostles Ene up and down on her hip. She’s in-sync with the sounds of the engines: boom, jostle, boom, jostle, boom.

“Sit down,” I say. “You’re scaring him.”

“Maybe if you’d get off your butt and do something about it.”

Sandy moves closer to the window. She does this cautiously, as if she were peering over the railing of a tall bridge. She narrows her eyes, cocks her jaw. It’s a look she has more and more lately. Instinct says stay clear. But we live in a single apartment—living room crowded with futon and crib, small kitchen with zero counter space, even smaller bath (shower, no tub)—and there’s really nowhere to go.

“They’re having a picnic down there,” she says.

I watch her over the top of the paper.

“Blankets under the jacarandas.”

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We’d thought about having picnics under those jacarandas.

But with the kid and packing everything up, it just seems like too much trouble. The trees are amazing though. Fair Oaks is lined with them. In spring, they produce purple flowers so opulent they look photo-shopped. The trunks are gnarled and dark. Woody pods hang from the branches. I used to sit at the kitchen table and stare at them while I waited for poetic inspiration. They never inspired much, but they were a nice distraction.

“They’re eating sandwiches,” Sandy says, her voice sharp.

Cleary sandwiches are the last straw.

She walks into the kitchen and stands by the table. It has a white mountain of student essays—setting as character in To Kill a Mockingbird—I’ve neglected all weekend. Whenever I sit down to grade, or write something of my own, Ene goes wild. It’s nearly impossible to concentrate.

Sandy shuffles around the kitchen and tries to stay in motion.

Sometimes this helps. She gathers the baby blanket over Ene’s head.

He squirms like an insect trying to escape a cocoon. He tilts his head back and wails.

“We should call the police,” Sandy says. She kisses Ene on the forehead, then pulls him closer, the fat on her arms bunching. “It’s okay, baby,” she whispers.

She isn’t going to call the police and neither am I. We called them a few months back when we first moved in, because a Russian couple in the unit downstairs got into a knock-down fight—screaming, breaking, the unmistakable sound of fist to flesh. The police showed up after the fight and the tires on my Kia were slashed the next morning. I missed a day of work over it, and was out two hundred dollars.

The revving and backfire grow louder. A wrecking ball pounds the walls. Sandy still paces, still bounces. Ene’s a delicate child, spooks easily. Even in the womb he seemed frightened. In each ultrasound, right up to the ninth month, he crossed his arms over his face so that we couldn’t make out his features. He was just a faceless apparition haunting the hollow pit of my wife’s uterus back then. Now he’s live and loud, ceaselessly hot and howling. Two, three, four o’clock in the morning, he’s up and kicking, screaming.

Sandy stops pacing. “Take him,” she says. “I’m tired.”

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Rather than hand Ene over, she sets him in the crib. It sits a few feet from the futon. As with everything in our apartment, the crib is over-large like one of those lion cages at the circus. Ene stares at me, his face scrunched like a pug. I brace myself for one of his ear-piercing wails. He lets loose and it’s worse than I expected: a hot wire dances in my ear and my brain bursts into flames. I stand up and walk over to the crib.

“Hey,” I say. “Hey, Ene. Bene. Penne. Touché. ” I pat his head.

He begins kicking his feet on the floor of the crib. The crib shakes, and I grip the railing till the veins in my hands jump out.

I walk across the living room and look out the window—a bird’s eye view from our second story apartment—to see the bikers for myself. I did the same thing the last two Sundays, but this time they’ve camped even closer to our building, and I have a better view.

There’s nothing special about them: black shiny helmets, leather jackets, torn jeans. Two men, two women. One guy is tall with a blonde ponytail. He’s holding a bottle of beer. He stands legs apart, cocksure.

The leader. He tilts the bottle back and takes a long pull. It’s not even noon, and I know this means trouble. Everything on the other guy is short—legs, arms, hair. He has tattoos all over his arms. He’s the one making all the noise. He revs his engine, turns it off, fiddles with it a bit, and revs it again. Even the way he sits on the bike—back arched, boot playing at the chrome gearshift, chin raised in defiance—screams dickhead. He’s wearing silver sunglasses that wrap around his face. He looks like a bug.

One of the women is heroin-addict skinny and has sleek red hair long as a peacock’s tail. She wears a T-shirt with block lettering I can’t read from up here. The other woman has jet-black hair and skin like bleached linen. She appears pretty, but I can’t tell from this distance.

It’s hard to believe the bikers have chosen our neighborhood.

South Pasadena is a small suburb with craftsman houses and a few apartment complexes. Just a few blocks east in San Marino, sits some of the most expensive real estate in Los Angeles County. The floats from the Rose Parade slide right down our street on their way to the Rose Bowl in the weeks just before New Year’s. There’s a Starbucks down the street, and a Kinko’s copy where I mail off my poems to literary journals every month and photocopy my lesson plans.

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Not exactly biker territory.

It’s not the best neighborhood I’ve ever lived in—I grew up on Hill Drive in Eagle Rock where most of the houses were three stories and the streets were wide enough for touch football games with my friends—but it’s not the worst, either. Before we married, Sandy and I lived in a loft in Downtown Los Angeles. Runaway teenagers fell asleep on the sidewalk outside our window, and the air, for some unknown reason, always smelled like burnt flesh. I was taking seminars in poetry back then, writing so much my hand would cramp, and I seldom noticed. With Sandy’s pregnancy we decided some changes were in order. We needed a better neighborhood. I needed a more stable occupation.

I stand at the window another minute and watch the bikers.

Sandy wants me go down to the cul-de-sac and tell the bikers to leave.

I’ve seen the documentaries on the Hell’s Angels, the spilled blood and broken bones; they can deliver some serious hurt.

As if it might solve something, I drop the blinds, and the sound is startling. Rattle snake in the bushes. The light in the room dims. Ene stops crying, a moment of reprieve. Sandy walks over, stands beside me, and takes my hand. The gesture surprises me, although I don’t let on. It feels nice to touch her. Her hand is deep and warm, and for a minute I’m back at the café we walked to after our first night together, four years ago: Sunday morning, light cutting through the window, warm coffee in our hands. Floating.

We watch the darkened window together for a time. Having our view of the bikers blocked makes their noises seem louder. I’m reminded of Carlos, a student of mine who’s blind, and how he can always identify me outside of class—in the lunch area, say, or in front of the school—by the sound of my voice.

One of the bikers yells, “You’re goddamn right!” The engine backfires again, and Sandy squeezes my hand so hard my knuckles crack.

Ene starts up again. Then his tears turn into spasms of coughing. After a time, he goes quiet and just sits there, blinking at us.

Sandy and I move over to the futon and sit down. She leans into me. I put my arms around her waist. It’s amazing how much weight she’s gained since the pregnancy. Her body is soft, nearly gelatinous. I try not to notice and certainly never say anything, but

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compared to photographs taken only two years ago—Sandy, wearing a skimpy silver dress in Vegas, holding up the two thousand dollar winnings of a royal flush on video poker, in a tie-dyed halter top with tan midriff flashing while riding her beach cruiser along the crowded paths at Malibu—she’s almost unrecognizable. She nuzzles her head into my shoulder. My whole body begins to relax.

I lift my hand, look at my finger. It’s steady and still. A little wetness seeps onto my shoulder, and I realize Sandy’s crying. I try to remember the last time I held her while she cried, but can’t. I feel annoyed by her tears, and want to move past them, get back to that floating feeling.

“It’ll be fine,” I say.

“No it won’t.”

“They’ll leave soon.”

“They’ll be back.”

“They’re not breaking the law.”

“Noise pollution isn’t against the law?”

I run my hand along her arm, try to soothe her. “Let’s put on the TV for noise.”

“I don’t want to watch TV.”

“Let’s just get the hell out of here then, go to the mall or something.”

“Ene’s exhausted. I’m exhausted. This is our home. We shouldn’t we have to leave.”

“Tell me what you want then.”

“Quiet. Peace and quiet.”

“I want that, too.”

“Do you?”

“You think I like this?” I point to the window.

Sandy inches away from me on the futon. “You must not hate it the way I do. Or else. . .”

“Or else what?”

“Never mind.”

I look over at Ene’s crib. He reaches up and wraps his fat little fingers around the bars.

“Sunday morning,” Sandy says, wiping her eyes on her T-shirt.

“The day of rest. What the hell’s wrong with people?”

I certainly don’t know what’s wrong with people. I don’t even

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know what’s wrong with me. Why can’t I be the kind of guy to go down and tell the bikers to leave? Why do I have to consider things from every angle? Why can’t I just act?

Sandy puts her head in her hands and cries some more and then suddenly she’s not crying but laughing. Her laughter is enormous, fills the room like a bright idea.

She used to do the same thing when she was pregnant: laugh and then cry, cry and then laugh. The unpredictability of her emotions during the pregnancy frightened me, although I never let on that it did.

“What’s so funny?” I say, hoping to focus on the laughter, force it to the top.

“Nothing.”

I give her arm a squeeze. “Tell me.”

“I can’t stop thinking about this stupid thing that happened at work one time.”

I hadn’t heard a story about Sandy’s work in quite a while. I used to love them.

“Come on,” I say, anxious for the distraction.

“I don’t feel like telling stories.”

I lean in, lay my hand on her knee.

“All right. Barbie doll heads,” Sandy says, laughing harder.

“Barbie doll heads?”

“This guy came in to the E.R. once with Barbie doll heads in his stomach.”

The story is vaguely familiar, like she’s told it before. But even if it’s a repeat, it’s a relief to be focusing on something remote and humorous.

“He swallowed them, obviously,” Sandy says, looking me square in the eye. Her eyes are moist and filmy from the crying. “And do you know why? Sex.”

“Sex?” The word comes out of my mouth quick. It used to seep out slowly, the elongation of that middle vowel. Now it’s all about the consonants, the sharp edges, the staccato.

“He liked to masturbate as he passed them. Said it was like giving birth.”

“Fuck,” I say, and just like that, we’re both nearly doubled over with laughter.

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“Only a man would equate childbirth and orgasm,” Sandy says. “He was wearing a Harley shirt. That’s what made me think of it, I guess.”

Our laughter has made Ene happy too; he flashes a fleshy, toothless grin. His eyes are wide and happy, and I feel happy for him.

I’m about to walk across the room and pick him up and bring him back over to the futon. But then I remember something, and I feel almost embarrassed saying it.

“Grey’s Anatomy!”

“What?” Sandy stops laughing, pushes the hair back from her eyes.

“I saw that on an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, honey, like six months ago.”

“What are you talking about?” Sandy says. “That’s my story!”

I’m about to tell her that it could happen to anyone, the lines between media and reality fusing in phantasmagoric mayhem these days; or that maybe somebody else from her work has a girlfriend or boyfriend that writes for TV and indeed it was her story that I saw on television; hell every strange bit of trivia seems to be gobbled up and regurgitated quicker than you can say copyright these days. But before I can say any of that, the Harleys start up again—Crack! Crack!

Crack!—and Ene falls back; he looks jolted, as if he’s just been blessed on the forehead by some crazy evangelical minister at a tent revival.

Sandy stands and moves across the room. She lifts Ene into her arms.

“I’ll go tell those bastards to leave myself !” she says, and I know as soon as she says it that I can’t let it happen.

“All right, all right,” I say. “I’ll do it.”

Now that I’ve said it out loud, there’s no turning back. My pinky starts twitching again, and I grind my teeth.

“Forget it,” Sandy says.

“I said I’ll do it.” I pace the apartment now, although I don’t have a baby in my arms, and I realize I must look pretty ridiculous.

She watches me for a while. “Don’t get into a fight or anything. Don’t get hurt. Just ask them to leave politely.”

“Okay,” I say, trying to imagine how that’s going to go down.

I stand up and grab my coat from the closet. I hold onto the sleeve for a moment, gripping it, before I take it off the hanger and

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put it on. It’s a very short walk to the front door.

Outside, a March wind grabs at my face and it’s nothing at all like how I imagine the Chilean wind will be. Last month, Los Angeles county broke the all-time record for rain, the L.A. River so swollen homeless people were washed from its banks. Now, it’s as if everything is gasping for breath after a near drown, the plants and flowers like giant open mouths. A few cars roll by on Fair Oaks, but the city seems strangely barren. A stray plastic bag catches in the breeze, inflating and collapsing like a jellyfish.

I walk down the front steps and shuffle toward the cul-de-sac.

I didn’t think it possible, but the biker’s engines are louder out here.

Sonic booms. Stay calm, I tell myself. It’s something you have to learn as a teacher: kids smell fear. I was so frightened on my first day that I pretended I was Al Pacino in Scarface. All machismo and bravado.

Pathetic, but it worked. So now I’m hiking through the hills of Chile, backpack full of journals and pens. I’m the great travel writer off on adventure, and the Harley engines are thunder behind a distant turquoise mountain.

As I approach the corner and see the jacarandas, I understand why the bikers chose our cul-de-sac to have their picnic: many of the purple flowers have fallen to the ground, carpeting the sidewalk. The little dead end street is the end of the rainbow. I don’t understand the bikers’ insistence on revving their engines every five seconds. It’s a chronic, lonely cry: I exist, I exist. I turn the corner and all their noises rush at me: Blam! Wrecking ball! Blam! Laughter! Blam! No shit? I hate them. I turn up the collar of my coat, glance at my shoes. They each have a pale blue stripe on the side that looks like a guppy fish.

Sandy bought them for me when I complained the dress shoes I wore to work were giving me blisters. They’re comfortable and sensible, but not suited for confrontation.

The tall guy, the leader, stands in the shade of one of the trees.

He’s got that aura about him I’ve read some generals in the wars have, the ones who take all kinds of crazy risks—standing up with bullets whizzing past them—because they just know they aren’t going to be shot. He stands about 6’3’’ and has hard, knobby looking muscles. He locks eyes with me for a moment, then seems disinterested and looks away. I watch his profile as he takes a sip from his bottle, a hefty sip. I wonder how many he’s had.

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Shorty is still squatting on his bike, revving the engine. He’s got a square jaw like a boxer, and tattoos not just on his arms but on his neck as well. His bike is painted cadmium red and mango flames blaze along the gas tank. The chrome handlebars are so clean and shiny they could double as mirrors. Up close the revving engine is even more visceral; it vibrates the ground under my feet, popping noises crack my eardrums. I want to reach up and plug my ears, it’s that loud, but I stop myself. Shorty leans back on his bike and wipes at his forehead with a gloved hand. He cocks his head, takes me in behind the sunglasses.

I turn away, stare at the other bike, Leader’s, I imagine. It’s parked along the curb: metallic purple, an insignia of a wild boar with handlebars for tusks. Beneath the boar, written in Old English-style letters are the words, Iron Pigs. There’s not a speck of dirt on either bike, and I can’t help feeling a bit of admiration for things kept so pristine. I’ve always liked motorcycles, just not the people who ride them.

Heroin Addict is reclining on the grass with her face up to the sun. I see now the writing on her shirt says, “Bring it On!” Her red hair is so long the ends rest on the grass. Hottie is standing in the street eating a sandwich. She slips the last of the French roll into her mouth and licks her fingers one at a time. My eyes linger. Is she being flirtatious? Mocking me? I can’t tell. Her hair is black as a cocktail dress. She wears a pair of tight Levi’s and a purple leather halter top that does its job. She watches me a moment, offers a smile, and I feel the sense of relief that a friendly gesture from a beautiful woman can bring.

Either of the bikers could kick my ass—maybe even Heroin Addict, and it’s little consolation that in a slam poetry competition I could wipe the floor with them.

“Hello, all,” I say, trying to sound casual and friendly. But Shorty keeps revving his engine—I can almost see sound waves in the air, blurring everything like heat—and nobody can hear me. The tattoos on his arms are an intricate matrix of spider webs. There’s so many of them that his arms look diseased. The tattoo on his neck is a playing card, the ace of spades, and when he leans over to adjust something on the engine, I notice he has a leather case clipped to his belt, a knife case. My skin crawls.

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I wave and take a half step forward. Stop. Keep my eyes on that knife case.

Hottie moves forward too. She bends over, grabs a fallen Jacaranda flower from the sidewalk, spins it around with her fingers, the way kids do with sparklers on the Fourth of July, and tucks it behind her ear. The purple petals brush her cheek. She’s even paler up close, tracing paper held up to a light.

I think of Sandy, how she hides herself with a towel when she gets out of the shower.

“Excuse me,” I say, raising my voice. “May I speak with you guys moment?”

Shorty seems to hear me this time. He gives the engine one more rev, then turns it off. It sputters to a stop and the street goes quiet. Previously shrouded sounds rush out: the whisper of the jacaranda leaves in the wind, the distant beeping of a utility vehicle in reverse, and the shuffle of my tennis shoes as I shift my weight.

“What’s up, man?” Leader asks, pointing the tip of his bottle in my direction. The label is yellow, familiar. It isn’t a beer. It’s a root beer.

The brown bottle drips with condensation.

“I live there,” I say, pointing at our apartment complex. I’ve never seen it from this angle, and it’s even uglier from the side: beige stucco, faded green paint peeling from the trim, the rain gutter hanging limp and ineffective from the wall. The window to our apartment is still closed, the blinds still drawn. I give thanks for that.

“It’s Sunday,” I say, “and my wife and baby are upstairs trying to rest.”

Shorty’s hand goes to the case. He holds it there, caresses the leather.

Heroin Addict says, “Spit it out.”

“It’s only 10 a.m., guys,” I say, my voice breaking. “My little boy, Ene’s his name, gets spooked from the sound of your bikes.

Could you maybe leave? Or at the least keep it down?”

“What kind of name is Ene?” Heroin Addict says, shaking her head.

I think about my son’s name. It’s a palindrome. I like the simple beauty of it, the vowel-consonant-vowel. When I was researching possible baby names, I came across it as being derived from my own name, although the connection seems tenuous now, and I can’t

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really articulate the lineage.

“It’s a derivation of my name.” I watch the bikers. “You know, his name is taken from mine.”

“We know what derivation means,” Leader says, and I wince.

“Strange name for a boy. Don’t other kids pick on him?”

“He’s fourteen months old,” I say.

“They will,” Shorty says, grinning.

He runs his hand along the gas tank. A jacaranda flower sticks to the flames. He peels it off, but a tiny piece of purple petal remains.

The flames look hot enough to curl the soft purple flesh into oily ash.

He unbuttons the leather case and pulls out a buck knife. It’s about four inches long, maybe not as long as I’d feared, but there’s enough steel there to end a life. Very delicately, like slicing garlic, he scrapes off the flower petal. He takes pleasure in working the knife, twisting it ever so slightly with his thick wrists. He snaps it shut, grins at me, and slips it back inside the case.

“Ene,” Hottie says. “I like it. It’s musical.”

I appreciate the compliment, especially from her, but the knife has seized my attention.

“So you want us to leave?” Leader asks.

“I’m trying to grade papers.” I’m rambling but I can’t stop.

“I’ve got a stack like this high.” I hold my hand out at waist level.

“You’re a teacher?” Shorty says. His voice is a rock grinder, three packs a day, no doubt, and I can’t help but imagine all the teachers he must have pissed off during his short academic run.

“We mostly want to relax,” I say.

“We’d like to relax, too,” Heroin Addict says. “We’ve got jobs too you know.”

“I know,” I say, looking down, losing steam.

“Listen, Buddy,” Shorty says, employing a reasonable tone.

“I’m working on my bike here. We’re having a little lunch. We’ll leave when we’re done. It’s not like we’re breaking the law.”

“Noise pollution isn’t against the law?” I feel the hypocrisy of the words as they slip past my lips.

“You call this noise pollution?” Shorty says. He turns the key, and the engine starts up again. He revs it, revs it, and revs it, each time holding the throttle down a little longer: PAP! PAAP! PAAAPPITIE PAP!

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I look at the apartment complex. The blinds are up, and Sandy is standing in plain view holding Ene. Their faces are small and out of focus, but I sense their unease, which turns my own unease to fear.

I turn back around. Shorty is revving away, grinning like a jackal. “Shut it off !” I yell.

“Can’t hear you.”

I take a jerky step forward. “Shut it off !”

“Or what?” Shorty twists the throttle: PAAAAAAAAP!

“Shut the fucking bike!”

Instead he flips up the kickstand, backs the bike away from the curb, and starts riding around the cul-de-sac. He does skillful figure eights in the street, revving the engine, laughing, sometimes dipping his bike so low it seems he’s going to scrape his knees on the pavement.

I hate to admit it, but he’s good with the bike. He doesn’t even seem to be moving the handlebars. The bike is like a professional surfer’s board. It glides in the direction he wants without him really trying or thinking about it. He keeps on laughing, like this is the funniest thing in the world, doing figure eights in a cul-de-sac with a frustrated school teacher on the sidelines, watching. I can’t hear the laughter, only see his mouth wide open, his Adam’s apple moving up and down.

Leader steps into the street and waves his hands. “Kill it!”

Shorty parks the bike along the curb without hesitation. Idling, his Harley sounds like a panting Saint Bernard. Shorty’s demeanor seems completely changed, his face serious now. He gives me a hateful look and bites at his lower lip. He gets off his bike, takes a quick step toward me. He only comes up to my shoulders, but his body is thick as a tree stump. I watch the leather case on his belt, his hands, and his eyes.

“Who the fuck do you think you are?” he says.

“Just leave.” My voice is low now, quivering, a schoolboy’s voice.

“I asked you a question.”

The other bikers stand around with their arms crossed, staring.

Shorty’s eyes are hazel with specks of green. Sunlight glints off his thin lashes. Who am I? It’s not a bad question. But the only answer that comes to mind is: Fucked if I know!

“I live there!” I shout, pointing at the apartment complex.

“There! There! There! You’re making too much fucking noise! My baby is about to have an aneurysm! My wife wants to jump out the window!

Leave!” I point at the jacaranda trees. “These are our trees, not yours!

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Ours! So get on your scooters and leave us in peace!”

Shorty takes another step forward. I brace myself. His hand is reaching for the leather case, and I see it all happening before it does.

The knife: cold, sharp blade slipping between ribs and cracking bone, blood gushing thick as syrup. I step back, wobbling a little. Shorty reaches out, places a hand on my chest. His hands are huge and heavy like stones. I try to step back further, my heels are against the edge of the curb, and there’s nowhere to go.

“Boo!” he says, and pushes me backward. The push is minor, but I’m off balance and fall flat on my ass. Pain shoots through my spine, but it’s nothing compared to the flush of my face. I wait for him to pounce on me, hope for any other outcome. Shorty laughs.

“Fucking teachers,” he says.

Then he’s on his bike again, Heroin Addict straddling the seat behind him, her skinny hands on his waist. He takes one last look at me—hate replaced by pity—and then says to the Leader, “We’ll be at Hooters.”

He revs the engine one last time and takes off, tires squealing.

I put my head in my hands. My body is shaking.

“Shit, man,” Leader says, trying to hold back a laugh.

I stand but I’m unsteady. I glance up at the apartment window, afraid they’re still watching me. The blinds slowly lower and pretty soon the window is shrouded again. I stare at the blank white slate the blinds make in the window like the empty whiteboards at school in the rooms nobody uses; I want to run off somewhere, seek shelter, and hide away.

“Fuck,” I say, wobbling a little.

Leader takes me by the arm. “You okay, Man?” he says, moving towards his bike. “Sit down a minute. You don’t look well.”

I lean against the seat of his bike. It’s warm from the sun.

“You’re not going to have a heart attack or anything?” Hottie says.

I catch my breath, shaking my head. “Your friend is a little high strung.”

Leader raises his eyebrows.

I run my hand along the chrome handlebars of the Harley and then caress the purple gas tank. “Nice bike,” I say, meaning it. The power I feel just touching it surprises me.

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“Get on,” Leader says.

When I just stare at him, he says, “Go ahead.”

I start to protest but then think what the fuck and climb on.

The seat dips down low. It takes a moment for me to get comfortable. I wiggle my ass around a bit—it’s sore from the fall—and slip my feet in the little leather stirrups. Like this, I’m so comfortable I can imagine cruising for hours on end. I place my hand on the throttle. The rubber is like dough: soft, malleable, almost form fitting.

In the headlight’s chrome casing, I see a tiny image of my face and Hottie to the left, Leader watching me.

“Pretty brave of you to come out here,” Hottie says.

“My family was going crazy.”

“Sorry about Todd,” Leader says.

“His name is Todd?” I ask, a frat boy name. I think of those tattoos.

“He gets a little worked up when we ride. Otherwise, he’s a damn nice guy.”

“He doesn’t happen to have a Barbie Doll collection?”

“Don’t be rude,” Hottie tells me.

“Sorry. Inside joke,” I say, staring at my hand on the throttle. I realize I’m gripping it pretty tightly, so I relax my finers, settle back in the seat.

“I’m Marcella,” Hottie says. “And this is Steve.”

“Dean,” I say, and shake their hands.

“What do you teach, Dean?” Steve asks.

“English.”

“My worst subject.”

“What do you do?” I ask him.

“Seismology.”

“Earthquakes?”

“At Cal Tech.”

I study Steve’s face. “I’ve seen you on TV,” I say. “You’re the earthquake guy.”

“Mostly I do calculations. When our PR gal is out of town, I’ll fill in.”

“Wow,” I say, looking around. Everything seems sharp and clear, like when a fever lifts. “So is the big one coming?”

“The big one is always coming,” Steve says.

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“And you?” I ask Marcella. “How do you spend the hours between bike rides?”

“Accounting.”

“Earthquakes and taxes, the two certainties,” I say.

“If you live in L.A.,” Steve says.

“So you guys just do this on the weekends?”

“It’s how we blow steam,” Marcella says.

“It’s sure working for Todd,” I say.

“He’s our mechanic,” Leader says. “He rides with us when he’s not working at his shop. I don’t think he really hates teachers or anything. Damn nice guy once you get to know him. Works magic with an engine.”

I settle further back into the seat and feel great relief knowing these are respectable people. Hell, Steve and Marcella have better jobs than I do. I grip the throttle, twist it silently a few times, my fingers strong and steady on the rubber.

“Want to give it a whirl?” Steve asks.

“Serious?”

“Start it up, Man,” he says, nodding to the keys in the ignition.

“Just turn it?” I say.

“Yeah, Man, just turn it. Keep your hand on the brake, okay, and leave it in neutral.” He puts his hand around Marcella’s waist and she moves in and lays her head on his shoulder. It’s a natural, tender gesture, and I’m jealous watching it.

I turn the key and the bike jumps to life. The rumble moves through the seat and up my spine and down my arms. It’s a giant vibration that rattles and shakes me to the core. Strangely, the engine isn’t so loud when you’re on it and not so annoying. I’m guessing Steve is right about Todd’s magic because the hum of the engine is steady and sure.

I turn the throttle a couple of times, feel the high octane potential of the mechanical beast. It would be so easy to fold up the kickstand and pull the bike away from the curb. I doubt Steve would even stop me.

The apartment window is still shrouded by the blinds. Open the blinds, Sandy, I think, open them! I want her to see me on the bike talking to Steve and Marcella. But the blinds don’t open, so I close my eyes and imagine what it would be like to barrel down the highway, weaving in and out of traffic and hitting the open road. There would be another town, another city, state after state. Maybe even Chile? Who knows?

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Either way, it’s always a new sky. I take a deep breath and open my eyes.

“Take it around the block if you want, Man,” Steve says.

“No thanks.”

“You sure?” Marcella asks. “Once you try it, you might be hooked.”

“I’m sure,” I say. “But thank you.” I turn off the engine and step off the bike.

“Thanks, guys. Really, you have no idea.”

“No worries, Man.”

“Stay for a while, if you want,” I say, waving my hand around as if I own the cul-de-sac.

“We will,” Steve says, “If we feel like it.”

“Right,” I say, and walk quickly back onto the sidewalk through the fallen purple flowers and down the cul-de-sac. I lift my hand and slap at one of the dark, gnarled branches.

I take the steps to my apartment two at a time. When I open the front door, Sandy rushes over. “Thank God you’re okay,” she says.

“I thought he was going to kill you.”

I brush past her with a smile, lift Ene from the crib. He’s quiet now, his face still streaked with tears. He looks at me like he’s never seen me before. I drop to my knees, and then spin him around so he’s lying on my back, his little arms thrown over my shoulders and around my neck. I begin to crawl around the living room. Slowly at first, then faster, and I make the noises of the engines: “VROOOOOOOMM!!!! VROOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!” I’m practically shouting. Ene begins crying, softly at first, and then at a pitch so high it rivals my own.

“What are you doing?” Sandy says. “Stop it! Please, you’re scaring Ene.”

I go faster.

“Dean, for Christ’s sake!” she shouts.

I make a sharp turn and double back the way I came, heading right for Sandy.

I hope Ene has the sense to hold on.

•

146

Nani Lē‘ahi, he maka no kahiki - Engraving - 18” x 12” - 2005 Jared Wickware

147

Contributors' Notes WILLIAM AUTEN's work has appeared in Drunken Boat, failbetter, Hayden Ferry’s Review, Nimrod, Notre Dame Review, Sugar House Review, Terrain, and other publications. More can be found at www.williamauten.com.

JOE BAUMANN is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he serves as Editor-inChief of the Southwestern Review. His work has appeared in The Couchella Review, Flashquake, and others, and is forthcoming in Emerge Literary Journal.

LYNN BEIGHLEY is a fiction writer stuck in a technical book writer’s body. Her stories often involve deeply flawed characters and the unsatisfying meshing of the virtual and actual world.

She has an MFA in Creative Writing and currently has 13 books published. You can find her on Twitter as @lynnbeighley.

Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán is the author of Antes y después del Bronx: Lenapehoking (New American Press) and the editor of an international queer Indigenous issue of Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought. Winner of an Editors’ Choice Award from Bamboo Ridge, he has completed a second poetry manuscript, South Bronx Breathing Lessons. He is finishing Yerbabuena/Mala yerba, All My Roots Need Rain: mixed-blood poetry & prose.

RANDALL BROWN is on the faculty of Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. He has been published widely, both online and in print, and blogs regularly at FlashFiction.Net. He is also the founder and managing editor of Matter Press and its Journal of Compressed Creative Arts.

KRISTI CARTER has poems published or forthcoming in Foothill: a journal of poetry, Artichoke Haircut, 42 Magazine, CALYX Journal, and Hawaii Review. She is originally from the foothills of North Carolina. She currently lives in Nebraska.

MARK ANTHONY CAYANAN is from the Philippines, where he teaches writing and literature at the Ateneo de Manila University. He is the Associate Editor (literary section) of Kritika Kultura, a journal of literary/cultural and language studies, as well as one of the editors of the Kritika Kultura Anthology of New Philippine Writing in English (2011). He is cited as a young “poet of note” in The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English (2009). At present, he is working toward an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He is the author of the poetry book Narcissus (AdMU Press, 2011).

CHRISTOPHER DAVIS is the author of three books of poetry, the most recent being A History of the Only War, and is currently working on a fourth collection, to be titled Oath. New poems also appear in Court Green, Denver Quarterly, American Literary Review, Portland Review, Interim, and other journals.

TYLER DAVIS is a Minneapolis poet. She was educated at Smith College, where she interned at the Poetry Center and was awarded the Elizabeth Babcock Poetry Prize. This is her first publication.

ALEX FABRIZIO is an MFA candidate in poetry at The Ohio State University, where she serves as managing editor for The Journal. Her work has most recently appeared in West Branch, Subtropics, The Los Angeles Review, and many other excellent journals.

MOLLIE FICEK hails from the Midwest – the land of hot dish and high winds. She lives in Boise, Idaho, after recently completing her MFA at Boise State University. She has work published in New Ohio Review, and is currently writing her first novel.

DENNIS FULGONI has been published in The Colorado Review, Quarterly West, New Stories from the Southwest, Parting Gifts, The Citron Review, and others. He lives with his wife and

children in Los Angeles. He holds an MFA in fiction writing from Antioch University.

KELSEY INOUYE is a first-year law student at William S. Richardson School of Law. RICH IVES is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander and the 2012 winner of the Creative Nonfiction Prize from Thin Air magazine. The Spring 2011 Bitter Oleander contains a feature including an interview and 18 of his hybrid works.

ELISA KARBIN's scholarly and creative works can be found, or are forthcoming, in Miranda Literary Magazine, Right Hand Pointing, Barnwood Press, and The Lily Lit Review, amongst others. A native of Chicagoland, she is currently living and studying in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she is an MA candidate in Creative Writing and the web editor of cream city review. She has a cat.

KATE KIMBALL received her MFA from Virginia Tech. Her work has appeared in Weber, Ellipsis, Kestrel, Barely South Review, and Arcadia, among others. She lives in Salt Lake City.

PETER KISPERT’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Slice Magazine, The Emerson Review, Sou’wester, South Dakota Review, Gargoyle, and elsewhere. He is an editorial intern with Narrative Magazine and The Adirondack Review. Visit him at www.peterkispert.com.

LYN LIFSHIN’s Another Woman Who Looks Like Me was published by Black Sparrow at David Godine, October, 2006. Also out in 2006 is her prize-winning book about the famous, short lived, beautiful race horse, Ruffian – The Licorice Daughter: My Year with Ruffian, from Texas Review Press. Lifshin’s other recent books include Before it’s Light, published in the winter of 1999-2000 by Black Sparrow Press, following their publication of Cold Comfort in 1997, and 92 Rapple from Coatism;

Lost in the Fog and Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness; and Light at the End, the Jesus Poems, Katrina, and Ballet Madonnas. For other books, bio, and photographs, see her web site: www.lynlifshin. com. Persephone was published by Red Hen, and Texas Review published Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness. Most recent books: Ballroom; All the Poets (Mostly) Who Have Touched Me, Living and Dead, All True, Especially the Lies; and just out, Knife Edge & Absinthe: The Tango Poems. In spring 2012, NYQ Books will publish A Girl Goes Into the Woods. Also just published: For the Roses, poems after Joni Mitchell.

DAVE MADDEN is the author of The Authentic Animal: Inside the Odd and Obsessive World of Taxidermy. His shorter work has appeared in Lo-Ball Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Tampa Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Alabama and co-edits The Cupboard, a quarterly pamphlet of creative prose.

HOLLY PAINTER is a poet, novelist, and copy-editor. She recently returned to the US after six years in New Zealand. Holly is currently working on a novel set in Antarctica and a book of poems about the fifty most awkward words in the English language. She is also a poet-for-hire, writing mostly love poems on behalf of besotted people around the world. (See www.adoptapoet.wordpress.com.) Finally, Holly is a volunteer at 826michigan, a tutoring and creative writing non-profit for kids.

SIMON PERCHIK is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.

For more information, including free e-books, his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities� and a complete bibliography, please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.

JASON PETERS is a Jacob K Javits Fellow in writing and rhetoric at the University of Rhode Island. He earned an MFA from Emerson College in Boston. He is managing editor of the Ocean State Review and he lives in Providence.

DAVID ROMANDA lives in Kawasaki City, Japan. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Gargoyle Magazine, The Main Street Rag, The New York Quarterly, and PANK. JUAN CARLOS REYES is originally from Guayaquil, Ecuador.

He is a past PEN USA Emerging Voices Rosenthal Fellow, and his stories, poems and essays have appeared in Arcadia, Black Warrior Review, Blue Stem, and The Busy Signal. He holds a Mathematics degree from New York University, and he currently teaches creative writing, literature, and composition at The University of Alabama. He’s recently finished work on his first novel, A Summer’s Lynching.

JOHN SPAULDING's work has appeared in more than forty periodicals, including The Atlantic, Rattle, Nimrod, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, APR, The Iowa Review, The Canadian Forum, Boston Review, The Southern Review, Hunger Mountain, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other places. His published poetry titles include: The White Train (Louisiana State University Press), The Roses of Starvation (Riverstone), Hospital (Finishing Line Press) and Walking in Stone (Wesleyan). He was awarded the first Norma Millay Fellowship, and he has been a Walt Whitman Award finalist, as well as a winner of the National Poetry Series. His articles, "Poetry and the Media" and "The Popularity of Poetry," appeared in the Journal of Popular Culture and Popular Culture Review, respectively. After practicing as a clinical psychologist for twenty years, he now teaches writing at Pima College in Tucson, Arizona.

NATHAN WHITING’s poetry has appeared in many publications including the Denver Quarterly, Texas Review, Hanging Loose, Best American Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly. Also a dancer, he has performed with companies in the United States and Japan.

JOHN SIBLEY WILLIAMS is the author of six chapbooks, winner of the HEART Poetry Award, and finalist for the

Pushcart, Rumi, and The Pinch Poetry Prizes. He has served as Acquisitions Manager of Ooligan Press and publicist for various presses and authors, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing and MA in Book Publishing. A few previous publishing credits include: Inkwell, Bryant Literary Review, Cream City Review, The Chaffin Journal, The Evansville Review, RHINO, Rosebud, and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

CHANG MING YUAN, 4-time Pushcart nominee and author of Allen Qing Yuan, grew up in a remote Chinese village, holds a PhD in English, and currently works as a private tutor in Vancouver; his poetry appears in nearly 580 literary publications across 22 countries, including Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry (2009, 2012), BestNewPoems Online, Cortland Review and Exquisite Corpse.

Artist Statement - Joshua W. Miles Cover and Center Art

Aloha,

I invite you to experience Hawai`i in a whole new way that brings together the beauty of the ocean tides and tide pools, the explosive action of the volcano and the endless serenity of the cambium layers in koa (wood). The lacquer, wood and canvas art seen here expresses my love of the Islands that I hope to share with those who appreciate the beauty and technique involved.

Lacquer and Porcelain on Wood: The inspiration for this series is movement of light and water. Imagine its 5:30am. Kailua beach, Lanikai tide pools. As you sit on the lava rocks, just the pads of your toes touch the calm glass surface of the water. The sun has not yet hit the horizon but, you can still see the clarity of the pools. Then the symphony begins. As the light starts to make its way across the pools, the tiny planktons and Dinoflagellates begin to glow. First blue, then as the sun rises, red, purple, and green.

Now you can see the tides in the early light. The gentle flow of the water, between the rocks and pools begin to come to life. The coral lights up like flowing lava below your feet. You cannot help but to stare in deeper and deeper, as the light dances about in harmony with the tides. It is like Fire and Ice. My Tides, My Jazz, My Paintings.

The Technique: I was raised a ceramics artist and production potter. My love of plastic materials runs deep primarily, because of my father and mother. I have always had a profound love of wood working and the ancient art of lacquer painting. My mother a Ceramics artist and painter, my father a bio chemist and wood worker. The trick has always been to combine the three. Clay loves fire, wood burns, lacquer explodes. After many years of play, (and a few scars) I have found a way to bring them together.

It all starts with the wood. I search for the piece that has movement, depth, and light. Once it hits the studio it is transformed with many stains that I create in my lab. As each coat goes down, the wood comes alive. When satisfied with the results, it is left to dry for one month.

Now the porcelain and fire is added. I find the grain and the flow in each piece first. Then, map out the surface for the layers to follow. I mask these areas with a refractory resistant fiber and high temperature tape. The porcelain is poured into the gaps wet. After a bit of torching to dry the layer, more colors of porcelain are added, each with a different shrink rate and melting temperature. This usually takes a few days. When dry, I bring in the torches and begin slowly melting the layers together, as they burn into the surface of the wood.

Too fast, they fry, to slow it pops off the piece. (Needless to say the mortality rate is high for such work.) After cool down, the masking is peeled away to reveal the inlayed results. Shaving and planing of the high points makes the surface smooth again.

Finally the lacquer work begins. I make the lacquer colors in the lab, one by one. Each is mixed with metallic oxides to give the illusion of depth and scale. Layer by layer, they are either sprayed or brushed into the surface. Each layer must be sanded and polished before the next can be applied. Two days between each. The process takes between 6-9 months to complete before final polishing can take place.

In some cases, over 100 coats are applied before the depth I want is achieved. In order to achieve the identical look and feel of the tide pools, the water, and the light, each step must be perfect. No skimping will suffice.

Although this is only part of the technical aspects involved, I am proud of what I have created. The work should always speak for itself.

The “HOW� is rarely necessary. I do believe that I am the only one who does this work. The technique is my own creation.

Thank you for your time and enjoy.

Joshua W. Miles

Artist Statement - Jared Wickware Internal Art

Born in New York City, Jared Wickware is a printmaker who spent twenty-six years as an Illustrator and Graphic Artist with the US Navy. Jared began engraving forty years ago while a student at California College of Arts & Crafts in Oakland. He has exhibited locally and internationally, and is in the collections of Doris Duke Foundation, Honolulu Museum of Arts, and the Hawai`i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. Jared is among the very few and foremost artists practicing engraving today. He has served as President for the Honolulu Printmakers, and was the featured “Gift Print Artist” for the Honolulu Printmakers Annual Exhibition in 2011. Jared teaches engraving to students of printmaking, as well as general art classes for “Wounded Warriors” at the Art Museum school. He and his wife Connie, a HS art teacher, have one son, Charles, who is also an artist, and a Naval Aviator.

West Eats Meat - Engraving - 5" x 7" - 2005

Jared Wickware

About the Journal Hawai`i Review is a publication of the Board of Publications of the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. 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, Ka Leo, the U.H.M. Board of Publications, and the U.H.M. English Department.

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If you enjoy our journal, please subscribe. Domestic rates: one issue - $12.50; one year (2 issues) - $25; two years (4 issues) - $50.

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 http://www.kaleo.org/hawaii_review or email us at hawaiireview@gmail.com for more information. © 2012 by the Board of Publications, University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. 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 artists.

ISSN: 0093-9625 COVER AND CENTER ART: Joshua W. Miles INTERNAL ART: Jared Wickware

Hawai`i Review Editor-in-Chief: Rachel Wolf Managing Editor: Joseph Han Poetry Editor: Kelsey Amos Design Editor: Christina Lugo Visual Editor: Scot Lycan Readers Lurlyn Brown Sofi Cleveland Kara Crail Kati Erwin Gizelle Gajelonia Quincy Greenheck Ted Hebert Emilie Howlett Sam Ikehara Kristofer Koishigawa Huston Ladner Ryan McKinley Kara McManus Sarah Medeiros Noah Perales-Estoesta Nelson Rivera Dave Scrivner Helen Takeuchi Paige Takeya Maile Thomas Lynn Young Trevor Zakov