Inscape Fall 2011

I ns c ap e

I ns c ap e a journal of literature and art

Inscape #31.2 Fall 2011 Cover art by Tiana Birrell Typeset in Arnhem and TV Nord

Printed by Brigham Young University Print Services All rights reserved Š 2011 Visit us online at inscape.byu.edu

Inscape is published twice a year as a cooperative effort of the BYU College of Humanities and the Department of English. The contents represent the opinions and beliefs of the authors and not necessarily those of the advisors, Brigham Young University, or its sponsoring institution, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Any questions or comments may be directed to inscapebyu@gmail.com.

Inscape is the inward quality of objects and events as they are perceived by the joined observation and introspection of a poet, who in turn embodies them in unique poetic forms. —Gerard Manley Hopkins

This Issue Fiction Judy James by Jason Zippro / 17 The Studio by Jason Zippro / 81 Tillamook by Kylan Rice / 33 An Outing by Ashley Chipman / 59

Nonfiction Sacred to the Memory of by Scott Russell Morris / 23 The Womb by Daniel Walker / 87 To Fall by Natalie Johansen / 47 The Mermens by Brian Doyle / 11 Fountains by Dallin Bruun / 71 CHEM 352-007 by Bess Hayes / 95

Poetry Teofania by Emily Ho / 92 To My Sister’s Unborn Child by Katie Wade / 68 Homecoming by C. Dylan Bassett / 38 Homecoming 2 by C. Dylan Bassett / 41 The Banana Peelers by C. Dylan Bassett / 14 Bushido by C. Dylan Bassett / 44 Deflagration by Jonathan Garcia / 28 Love Poems Never Start with Periods Because by Jonathan Garcia / 78 Letter to Her Absent Husband by Jason Zippro / 31 At the Pond by Jason Zippro / 42 Sky Burial reviewed by Conner Bassett / 121

Interviews with W. S. Merwin / 111 ; Maureen McLane / 117 ; Neil Aitken / 123 ; and Interview Highlights / 106.

“How can I know what I think till I see what I say?”

—E. M. Forster

Editor’s Note

Sub Rosa, meaning under the rose, was a term used in ancient Rome to mean something happening or done in secret. I learned this phrase my junior year of high school in Mrs. Bean’s creative writing class from Ashley, a girl who would be in every creative writing class I would have at Viewmont High. She had a black, horseshoe nose-ring that looked more like two tufts of hair coming out each nostril. She intrigued me.

“The Romans,” Ashley explained, “would hang dried roses from the ceilings of their secret meetings.” Mrs. Bean loved the phrase, so Ashley and I took a handful of fake roses and hung them from the ceiling panels of our creative writing room. From then on what each person in that class shared would stay in that room. That semester was the first time I felt the intimacy of writing, the nakedness of writing freely.

In the following semesters, I began to write all the time, everywhere. I would write during lunch, while waiting for piano lessons, between homework assignments, and at the dinner table until I was ordered to put the notebooks down. Most of what I wrote was of little consequence, but I noticed that I was beginning to do more than just write—I was beginning to see things. I began noticing little things I had never seen before—the way Sarah’s lips

were thin, the way the maroon carpets of Viewmont were actually a CMYK pattern and not maroon at all, and the way the model’s leotard in my art class caught the light so that a tiny strip of white would highlight each rib when she breathed in. Writing was giving me eyes, and I was writing to discover the sub-rosa within me.

I have learned that so much of understanding comes from writing. So much of discovery comes from writing. There is something about writing that peels you down to the bone, slips you free of your skin and leaves you to meditate on what was there inside of you.

The process of writing is to discover. Frost describes that “it begins in delight and ends in wisdom . . . it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life . . . a momentary stay against confusion. . . . It has an outcome that . . . must be more felt than seen ahead, like prophecy. It must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader.”

The excitement of writing is discovering what you did not know you had inside you, allowing yourself to be delighted again and again by the discoveries; and in turn, the reader will be delighted.

When I left high school, Mrs. Bean gave me Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. In it, Rilke tells a young Franz Kappus that “above all—ask yourself . . . must I write? . . . Build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.” I have found that for many of us, writing has become just such an urge, and that writing is what we turn to, and not just in the crucibles of our lives. Maybe it isn’t the first thing we turn to,

but eventually we find our way to the keyboard, or to the pen and Moleskine. It is a process that has proven cathartic, introspective, and even spiritual for many of us.

I believe that at its most fundamental level, Inscape is a delight and a discovery of what God has given us: our bodies, our imagination, the world around us, and particularly language. Everything that makes us who we are is at the heart of our writing. As we delight in the writing process, we eventually arrive at some clarification of life—discover some sub-rosa, some secret about life.

As we begin discovering and delighting in writing, I think it is important to remember what Rilke says, “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.” And we are the creators of our own lives.

So I hope, more than anything, that Inscape will do more than delight you. I hope it causes that urge within you to write and discover something about your life, something secret you didn’t know you knew.

The Mermens by Brian Doyle

Here are some things we thought were true about members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, which of course we knew not one such person, growing up in a Catholic enclave in New York City where spotting the occasional Lutheran was a weekend sport, and there was rumor of a Jewish temple somewhere in Brooklyn, and one time the brother of a friend had seen a Hindu man on the street, or so he said, but he was not the kind of guy you could totally trust when he said that, and he may well have seen a rodeo rider, or a Mohammedan, as my grandfather used to say. We thought, first of all, that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints were called Mermens, as my grandfather said, so we thought that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints were an aquatic people, for reasons that were murky, considering their long affiliation with Utah, which we didn’t think had an ocean, although perhaps it used to when my grandfather was young, which is when your man Abraham Lincoln was president, as he said. Also we thought heard the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints as Ladder-day Saints, which was puzzling, but not even my grandfather knew what that was all 11

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about; it had something to do with Jacob’s Ladder, he said, which we assumed was a town in Utah. Also we thought that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Ladder-day Saints had to marry someone new every other week, which would lead to a lot of wet towels left on the bathroom floor, wouldn’t it, Brian? as my grandfather said. But marrying more than once was not wholly unknown in our Catholic world; Mrs. Cooney, over to Saint Rita’s Parish, had married Mr. Cooney after the death of her first husband in the war, so she was both a widow and an adult, said my grandfather, who informed me helpfully that as a female adult she was what you would call an adultress. My grandfather was a font of such wisdom.

Also he said that the Mermens had learned about football from the Catholics, who invented it at Notre Dame, and the Mermens were doing pretty well at the game, what with all the kids they have what with all those marriages, said my grandfather, the story is their first kid has to be a bishop or scout leader or something, and the second through fifth kids are trained to football, something like our system, in which a Catholic family produces a priest or a nun, a cop, a teacher, and a soldier or a sailor, after which the rest of the kids can be whatever they want, even Lutherans, in some cases.

Also we thought the Mermens were pretty brave, all things considered, to send their kids two by two, dressed so handsomely in their white shirts and ties, into pagan neighborhoods like ours, why you Catholic kids never dress as well as the Mermens is a mystery and a disappointment to me, said my grandfather, those brave Mermen kids go right into the belly of Catholicism on their bicycles, and even their bicycles are dignified unlike those silly Sting Rays you kids ride, said my grandfather, and those poor Mermen kids must 12

get laughed at or worse all day long, knocking on doors of people who will mostly say vulgar things to them, but they never reply rude as far as I can tell, which you have to admire, you wonder if Catholic kids in the same position would use the foul and vituperative language I have heard you and your brothers use, which I will not tell your mother about if you will be a good boy and go get your grandfather one of those cigars your grandmother has for unknown reasons forbidden in the house. She can be a stern woman, your grandmother, bless her heart, but you cannot hold it against her, because her great-uncle married a Lutheran, you know, and they are a stern and demanding people, given to nailing their opinions on church doors, ruining perfectly good wood. You wouldn’t see the Mermens hammering their opinions on a beautiful door, no, you wouldn’t. Fine people, the Mermens.

Doyle 13

The Banana Peelers

by C. Dylan Bassett See how they work under the scrape of silence.

See their hands— strung with slits and subtle cuts across the fingertips.

See how they unstitch with motherly touch the half-rotten husks without snapping the core.

See how they crush the moon-curved fruit into an iron-purple vat.

See how well the body is removed from its skin, nothing eaten, nothing lost.

See the devotion of movement, the labor of arms hauling heap over heavy heap.

Soon, they’ll mix buttermilk with eggs, flour.

Add heavy cups of sugar, some heat.

To make this bread you must learn to shift weight from one foot to another.

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But to eat this bread you must not think of swollen limbs or the length of days, and you must never think of mouths.

You would rather give the bread back than think of their mouths.

Bassett 15

judy james by Jason Zippro

As the smoke sifted up into the sunset, Judy James sat in her white camisole and watched through her kitchen window at the green hue—the last rays of sun highlighted in the smoke. As the sun slipped completely away, she could see the orange glow flicking out onto the street from 3836 W. Country Drive, just a few homes down. Her back door rapped loudly just as she heard the sirens.

In front of her were small piles of carrot, cubed ham, celery, and sugar peas. She snapped the last sugar pea and slowly got up from her chair, shooing Teacup, her albino Siamese, off of her lap.

Her hip usually ached, but it silently burned now as she stood up.

Six months earlier the surgery had replaced some of her hip bone with surgical steel and screws. Three months later the court ruled against her, leaving her to pay for the surgery that she wouldn’t have needed if she hadn’t jumped at the curb when the car came barreling down the street.

The back door rapped again as she pulled it open and smiled at the two fourteen-year-olds panting on her doorstep. She lifted one slightly arthritic finger to her pursed lips before reaching into her

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black clutch to pull out two crisp one hundred dollar bills. She gave one to each boy, smiled again, and shut the door.

She leaned on the counter on her way back to her spot by the window where she began cutting onions. Outside the neighbors had come out of their homes, and the fire truck was parked in the orange flicker and spilled out yellow sooty men. One ratcheted a thick canvas hose from the side of the truck to the yellow and black face of the hydrant across the street.

She finished dicing the onions and slid the vegetables into a bowl before grabbing the matches. Slowly she worked her way to the back door, out onto the porch, and over to the grill. Next to it were two bottles of lighter fluid and a ragged roll of paper towels.

One bottle was concave and mashed up into itself, and the other, though half empty, was fine. Judy smiled at them and breathed in the sooty air. It smelled like tar and oil.

She picked up the bottle of fluid and dowsed the briquettes before shoving a paper towel into them and lighting it all with a couple of matches. She sat down as they warmed up and watched the twin shafts of smoke—black and white—coming from just a few houses down. It’s burning pretty well, she thought. They were remodeling the garage and that’s where the fire must have started.

It must have started in that garage, where all the sawdust, particleboard, and that new Mazda they owned were. If I had started it that’s where I would have done it, she thought.

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sacred to the memory of by Scott Russell Morris

There hath passed away a glory from the earth.

—William Wordsworth stronghold

“Look out for Squirrels!” the sign on the bulletin board outside the toilets reads. The toilets are situated between trail heads: one trail zigzags up the side of Helvellyn, a mountain already popular in the days Wordsworth and Coleridge frequented it; the other trail winds through Thirlmere Forest, a reserve for the endangered red squirrel. The sign informs me that Thirlmere is “one of their last English strongholds,” and also tells me what I already knew, that the English red squirrel is endangered due to the introduction of the robust American gray squirrels. The gray squirrels were brought to England in 1876 to be part of a zoo, but they were later released, specifically by the 9th Duke of Bedford, President of the Zoological Society, who brought even more squirrels from North America that thrived on his property. But the gray squirrels breed faster than the reds; they eat the same pine cones and hazelnuts and are also able to live on the acorns in the oak forests; and they 23

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carry the squirrelpox disease, which they are immune to but which is terminal for reds.

My group was hiking Helvellyn—we were in the Lake District for a few days to study Romantic poets on a longer trip of literary sightseeing—but I decided that I was going to follow the trail to Thirlmere anyway, and would ditch my group and catch up to them later. But as soon as I got to the trail, another sign informed me that the Thirlmere trail was closed “Due to Essential Tree Felling Work,” and in the not far distance I saw a trail covered with fallen trees and tractors in their midst. It was hard to believe that the squirrels’ preservation would happen best with cutting down their habitat, but I trusted the reserve management’s judgment. I trudged up Helvellyn—trudging not because I was overly sad but because it is a rather steep climb—looking down at the patch of pine that is Thirlmere thinking about the squirrels running through the trees; squirrels unaware that they are practically the last of their kind, unaware that several societies have formed with their well-being in mind, unaware that their nemeses the gray squirrels are slowly, but definitely, encroaching. sacred

Several days prior to the Helvellyn hike my group toured the chapel and churchyard of Ruthewell, where an old stone rood is housed, a rood decorated with the oldest known English poetry, The Dream of the Rood. The cross, dated to about 650 AD, is surrounded by a small country church, built in the 1880s. The ancient stone cross, one of several found throughout England, would originally have been outside a church, but that ancient church has long since 24

vanished and the new one has been raised up to surround its remnants, and the layers of history are visible and tangible. Outside the church, the gravestones lean together, as though whispering.

The newest ones are small, polished, and legible; the oldest are so crumbled and weather-worn that it is impossible to know whose mortal remains molder beneath. Vines cling to one headstone so thickly that only one small arch of stone is visible beneath its leafy shroud.

I read the names on the stones, trying to imagine what their lives must have been like. They were so far and distant, their names meant nothing to me, and when we left the graveyard I had already forgotten the names. What remained in my memory was the phrase “Sacred to the Memory of,� which decorated the tops of several headstones, and I wondered who still held these easily forgotten names sacred. Some of the people in the yard had died within the last fifty years, and I surmised that there were still some older people who would remember them. But I wondered at the oldest of the graves, dating to the late 1800s, and recalled that I had also seen graves in Edinburgh with the same inscription, dating back even further. To whom were these ancient memories still sacred?

It seemed unlikely that these quiet, crumbling remembrances of people who lived in what has always been a small country village would mean anything to anyone anymore. They have stopped being a symbol of sacredness and have become a reminder that eventually we all become just a stranger’s name on stone.

Morris 25

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survival

The day after hiking Helvellyn, my group toured Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount, Wordsworth’s last two homes. Both homes are now museums, and the tour guides and plaques were careful to tell us exactly which chairs Wordsworth had actually sat in, and which were only furniture from the time period. In each museum, the thesis seemed to be no more complex than “He touched this,” an argument so weak I would never have accepted it from any of my writing students.

And yet, the argument is compelling enough for the creation of the Wordsworth Trust, for the hiring of Writers in Residence, for gift shops and memorial plaques, for the building of extra rooms to house the documents, artifacts, and memorabilia that wouldn’t fit neatly into the recreated homes. The lives of those who lived in the homes before and after become a footnote in the tour if they are of interest (De Quincy bought Dove Cottage, and Wordsworth’s own great granddaughter eventually restored Rydal Mount), but those of no connection to the Great Poet himself are entirely forgotten. As interesting as the homes were, and despite the beauty of the replicated gardens, I still couldn’t get the inscriptions on the gravestones out of my head. This man published poems we hold in esteem and so we remember everything about him, enshrining his shoe buckles and a pair of reading glasses believed to be his, and yet those who raised sheep in the country and wrote no words worth remembering have only a crumbling carving to their name.

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tenuous

The past impedes the future, keeps the present from going on, but there will be a time when we look back and remember. Something lasting will fill the sacred memory— the empty space —with a fixity that is measurable and certain.

Fallen castles are now their own museums. Houses that are still lived in as houses. The forests are tumbling; their inhabitants—

How do you keep 2.3 million gray squirrels at bay?

When do we give up.

Morris 27

deflagration

by Jonathan Garcia

The agave piña drinks her last jalisco sunshine from a shot glass of sky.

Then she’s spirited enough to face her fleshing. Sweet shredded pulp funneled into a cask, yeast interred, backfilled with time.

The tequila glass lies no-holds-barred on the counter.

In the cantina, the man crouches into his disheveled sombrero.

Splintered crucifix, tattered peso, the man recalls and breaks drunk into deep navy blue smoke. ¡Ay mi pueblo, mi pueblo!— He fingers through hair inherited from his revolutionary father.

It’s thick, tough enough to make him a rope.

Swarthy, knotted round his neck like a noose.

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At least I can drink to her, the words siphoned out his throat.

Then she son de la negra entrances to a swell of gritos mexicanos summoned memory of seductive colors.

She flairs her red skirt like a wildfire, pellucid destruction, taut thighs of heat, dancing on a stage of austere pride for a people who believe they possess her secrets.

But the agave, she was here before the mexicans.

Before the spanish.

The aztec.

No cherubic flaming sword guarded her then.

No jackass jawbone disturbs her now.

Garcia 29

letter to her absent husband

by Jason Zippro

The pass still full of snow­— the valley’s heavy with a wetness.

The apple tree has bloomed, its white petals pinkly lipping the cold air.

Zippro 31

Tillamook by Kylan Rice

We are proud of our indigenous populations. The Cayuse, Klamath, Chetco, Umpqua, Ahantchuyuk—all belonging to diverse linguistic stocks and defined by the sediment poetry of a salmon’s cycle. We are proud of their names on our valleys, waterfalls, local banks. They are the last, boozed senators of the frontier, of horses without saddles, of ranch trucks and redwood protectorates. They once aimed obsidian through buttoned cavalries—smeared on their cheekbones compounds of mud and resin, hoisted scalps on spears. We likewise hoist their names on the flags of our county seats and public libraries, having assimilated the yearly corn rituals of Modocs, celebrating the rustwater Wasco reservations, naming our sweetest, most cooked-with onions after Northeastern tribes.

There is great, reverent nobility here. There is an Indian population of 0.2%. We uphold visions of traded blankets, hawk-feathers clinging to twice-washed dreads, the famine-angled faces and laconic jawbones.

Wampum, pow-wow, totem.

My father Hart read a lot of Louis L’Amour. He has a bookshelf dedicated entirely to L’Amour’s canon. Certain books are more 33

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worn than others, like routes of blood. They are all from the same publisher, and so there is uniformity in their spines, designs, size, and cut. He sleeps on porches with a hat-brim over his eyes and keeps a tin of tobacco in his back pocket with the cameo of an Indian chief on its lid. He is very proud of the worn back-pocket denim around the tin. It means he is a man set in his ways, settled into good things, old habits, ballads accompanied by only one instrument. This, too, reflected in virile tales told by men with French surnames and paisley patterns.

He told me at a young age that the worst thing a thinking man can do is read more than two books a season. A book is something to be considered, weighed, carried in the glove-compartment of the same pick-up truck a man uses to cross his own fields. Changes in the color of a landscape should be marked in memory by particular sentences, passages, fragments of dialogue. A man must be changed by the end of a book—if not by the book itself, at least by the daily hazards and lunchtime traumas of two or three months, and a drop in temperature. Hart believes in the pace of things. He has made me into an old man, with due consideration paid to the impending. I started smoking Lucky Strikes when I was fourteen, and could bale thirty acres by evening, and often fell asleep rubbing the ridges of callus on my palms, feeling the same pride a man nurtures in the denim imprint of a tobacco tin, or in a name like Klamath.

Hart says that every man has some Indian blood in him out here.

He tells me to carry it proudly, with respect to strange religions, memorized litanies, hand-carved wooden art.

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The family unit falls into ruts of speech, expression, vacation.

Fathers take their sons fishing, in hip-high boots, to cast lines thin and sunlit. They have neat, slung baskets of bait, tackle, hooks, gutting implements. The whiskery flies are elaborate, wrought with trembling, masculine digits like marriage promises. Hart never took me fishing. He said it was a tired hunt, an institution of savage, arrhythmic nostalgia, without the same stealth and guile inherent to shooting a four-point buck with a heavy-duty plastic compound bow, scented and fully camouflaged. He took his children instead to the Tillamook Cheese Factory, one on one, and afterward bought an ice cream cone. The cheese factory was the turning over of an elder lifestyle, a place where cheeses and butters were not churned with the same hands that poured tub water down the long backs of children, felt fruit, hefted bibles. There, no dairy draped in breathing cloth, kept aloft from mice. No rounds of cheese aching with appley firmness on a shelf. It was not a place where people wore calico nor where Thanksgiving was the showmanship of table labors, and you could crouch at the spot where each item originated, and not walk far to get there either. At the cheese factory, the people behind thick glass wore hairnets, masks, jeans. There were vats and overhead piping. Hart showed his children the tidy destruction of a lifestyle. He told me about electric milking machines that jolted milk from great rows of udders. This dovetailed into a lecture on meatpacking, butchery, Upton Sinclair. He wears blue shirts with white stitching. The tobacco smells like mint.

His best friend is an old Indian, who keeps his hair long, like a summer away from home. His voice is cool and quiet, a handful of grain in a dark pantry. At the hood of a truck, they talk about Rice 35

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politics from their day, compare lifestyles, kids. They die at similar rates. I am terrified each time I see insurance companies and grocery stores going up bearing the names of forgotten fishing tribes.

We play billiards on Tuesday nights at the pool hall. There are a few high school-aged kids there. They are Hispanic and they wear their t-shirts the length of gowns, hats still with tags, blue bandannas. They are no good, and they know it, and they laugh when the ball skids wrong, pockets, scratches baldly. I know how we look.

An old man and his middle-aged son. Heavy and with clean, acute strokes, leaning under light that emphasizes the depth and fallow of our furrows.

Hart says to me, “I’ll break.”

We build fences, rabbit hutches, woodsheds, pantry shelves, armoires, bed frames, dressers, piano benches, milking stools, writing desks, doghouses, cupboards, sawhorses. The shorn heat of wood, the wine of cedar musk. The constructions occurring between two men of differing age, irrigation, wars, comedians.

Purposeful measurements with stubby wood pencils, extension cords, overridden knotholes. Hart continues to woodwork. I take him balsa at the clinic. He has a penknife that mewls through the soft, heartless white wood; carves horses, birds at rest—lightweight idols which make me wish for my own children who might treasure the functionality of a grandfather. Hart would take them to the Tillamook Cheese Factory where they would appreciate cheese curds and the destruction of intangibles which bedrock a man’s pride. Their names would have been chosen from a bible, from an obscure region of begats. They would be ten and twelve.

I would not take them to see Hart. Instead, I would tell them the 36

story of the time he got in a fistfight with John Gladney, who got in the newspaper a couple years later for blowing up a post office.

Hart’s memory would flex—ripple in their minds with the silt muscle of trout.

I take him on a drive along the Columbia River. It is Sunday, they let him wear his old clothes, jeans without the tin. There is an oxygen tank between his knees. The river is green and wide, the windows are down, the dark is the summer velvet of blackberry eating. He rides his hand out the window, and it kites on the wind.

We’ll stop and stay at a motel along the way and then finish the drive and spend tomorrow at Chinook Falls where there will be park benches, coal grills, drop-boxes for day-fees. We will drive along ridges, spend an hour watching the bright downward gallop, the day fifteen degrees cooler there, white nearby pines easing as hugely as sick horses. We’ll talk about Louis L’Amour’s autobiography, Dennis Day, Robert Kennedy. How orchards are irrigated in the summer. Techniques of spacing corn. How strange it is to see a modern Indian using a damn cell phone.

He turns up the radio when the talk runs out. Our headlights devour a highway of moths. We skim by fill-up stations, low bars, truck stops and outposts. The light slides but does not die or short terribly against our glass.

The night idles, well-announced and good.

Rice 37

HOMECOMING

by C. Dylan Bassett 1.

As boys, we watched stars— little boxes collecting space 2.

Father, you sent flies to heal.

No more bread in the wind-breadth.

All that honey run dry.

It takes a while for a child to know the noise of his name—

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a language without tone or tongue.

3.

Forgive me, I did not know that then we were dropping little stones where now we must climb to get back home.

Bassett 39

homecoming 2

by C. Dylan Bassett How often now that vague ache lingers the way vultures hunch over a mulch of meat.

We drive home in full dark of it, hurling towards absence: A desert, a plain, an old photo stirring all the things we almost see— proof of what we remember: stars, shadows, glimpses of light. Meanwhile, we groan the loss of what whatever has come and gone of our common country.

Bassett 41

at the pond

by Jason Zippro watching young fish, their glistening milk bodies, I sit on the stone bench, my wife reading Hildegard of Bingen.

I look out across the stretch of sand where a couple, young, in jogging clothes, stop to stretch along the benches.

The girl’s hair clipped back with metal pins.

Her milky skin, and fingers long and slender, hint at the architecture underneath.

If a woman loves her man during intercourse she will have a son.

The girl’s ribbed, longsleeved sweatshirt stops at her wrists. Her eyes and neck—narrow. Grey clavicle sharp under her collar.

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And if she doesn’t love him?

The tendons in the girl’s neck slip up behind her jaw—a sharp line of light in the shadow of her chin.

What are girls born of ?

The girl stretches—white as the fish, smooth as the water.

I don’t know The man holds the girl’s side with one hand, perhaps to feel how hard her hip is.

What is the opposite of love?

They jog away.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

Zippro 43

BUSHIDO

by Dylan Bassett 1.

As boys, we played Samurai-games and ran wild: A clan without horses—chucking chawed-up bark and saw-scored sword like the jaw-bone of an ass.

We wrote down Kendo with rocks and bricks, Yari made from sticks, teeth-crooked Jos. We drew small cuts that stuck in our flesh; marks made dark with blood-promises: Come home alive.

2.

Ranz home early from Iraq, fireworks on the fourth— When we first shot off that bottle-rocket, Ranz ran for the backyard roost.

He said he hid from those familiar sounds, from ghosts and open spaces, said the pitch-dark shed

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was shaded like the place where he waited for the moment to pass.

Sleep is too silent, he says, Where faces float like shapes of light in photographs, some nights (most nights) those echoes sound imperfectly familiar.

These days he scuttles to a makeshift bed of scrap-wood, trying to think of anything but a Samurai, who upon defeat would rather offer his own head than let a moment pass by when he should die.

Bassett 45

To Fall by Natalie Johansen

Ecuador, said the sticker on my banana. Very few regions in the United States provide weather conducive to banana growing, due to the fact that any temperature under twenty degrees is a death sentence for banana trees, so I’m not surprised that my banana traveled over 3,000 miles to arrive at a local grocery store in Provo, Utah, where I selected a bunch with perfect ripeness. My only connection to Ecuador is this piece of fruit; it’s a very superficial connection, but demonstrates my dependence on tropical regions for tropical fruit. I imagine how nice it would be to combine accommodating weather for tropical fruit with close proximity to family, university, and quality of life. Would it be that impossible?

We send astronauts into orbit, split atoms, and communicate with people across the globe with the stroke of a key, but we can’t seem to find a convenient way to grow bananas in Utah. Greenhouses are always an option, yes, but to build a greenhouse lofty enough to house banana trees would be a tall order. Adam and Eve didn’t have to ship their bananas from Ecuador. The Garden of Eden provided them with a never-ending supply of any kind of fruit imaginable—bananas, mangoes, avocados, etc. So, I ask myself, with all 47

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the fruit available to the pair in the Garden of Eden, what was the fruit that provoked Eve’s fall? Many say it was an apple—I don’t buy that. With all the fruit in the world available in one Garden, why would you fall for an apple? Then again, with ready access to exotic fruits, maybe the wholesome simplicity of an apple would have been attractive. I have also considered the option that the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is a fruit unknown to us; maybe that’s the more probable answer. Either way, Eve fell with the first bite, Adam followed shortly after, and I buy my bananas shipped from Ecuador.

My musings about bananas and Eve and Eden and falling pinballed around my brain, resurfacing one afternoon in my Early American Literature class during a discussion of Charlotte Temple and the tradition of the “fallen woman” novel. Many early novels in both British and American literature followed this tradition, narrating the story of an innocent, sometimes headstrong young woman who falls in love, ignores the advice of parents or other guardians, and throws herself into the powers of a young man who is less interested in marriage than he is in . . . other things. Usually, a marriage doesn’t ever happen, and the young woman is morally lost and abandoned by the man. Pride and Prejudice could have been considered a fallen woman novel if Jane Austen had changed the female protagonist from Elizabeth to Lydia. The title would also be changed, of course, to something like Flirtation and Frills or Diary of a Teenage Hussy. I doubt Diary of a Teenage Hussy would have sold as well or endured as long as Pride and Prejudice, because I don’t know if I or anyone else could sit through three hundred pages of Lydia and Wickham melodrama.

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Man fell as well, right behind Eve in line for mortal life, thus becoming as subject to sin as women are. David from the Bible, for example, started out as a humble boy who trusted in God enough to stand in front of a towering giant with a slingshot. Unfortunately, after he went from humble boy to righteous king, he made the mistake of spying on Bathsheba’s bath time, and consequently turned adulterer and murderer. David’s story, however tragic, doesn’t hold a candle to the story of Judas Iscariot. He walked with the Son of God, saw his miracles, and knew that he was the Savior, yet Judas sold Jesus for thirty pieces of silver—small price for a soul. I can’t comprehend his betrayal; it baffles me, and somehow I want to lessen his sin, believe that perhaps he didn’t know that Jesus was the Messiah, that he believed with the Pharisees and Sadducees that Jesus was a fraud, an imposter. But I can’t dismiss his death, the shame that drove him to the end of a rope. The horror of his fate after death is beyond my comprehension.

Of course, sin isn’t the only consequence of Adam and Eve’s fall to mortality. Humanity is susceptible to measles, meningitis, allergies, arthritis, colds, cancer, and scores of other diseases and disorders—anything and everything from sniffles to seizures. How did Eve feel the first time she caught a cold? The first time her body burned with fever? Did Eve feel the change immediately, with the first bite of the forbidden fruit? Did she understand what it meant?

I wonder how she felt the first time she cut her finger or sliced her foot with a sharp rock—I can see her, watching the blood with fascination as it streams through the gash, then with amazement as it coagulates, clotting as the cells work to close the wound. As metaphorical became physical, falling meant bleeding.

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And sometimes death. *** On August 9, 2009, Nancy Maltez fell from Angels Landing.

Angels Landing is not for the acrophobic. Located in Zion National Park, Angels Landing is a five-mile hike, up and back, to the summit of one of the park’s highest peaks. The trailhead consists of a winding series of switchbacks leading up, up, up to a bare, imposing rock formation laced with chains anchored firmly into the mountainside. The chains make it possible for hikers to ascend to the peak, which provides an aerial view of the most stunning, almost unreal, sandstone canyons and peaks I have ever seen. Castled, imposing cliffs jut out of the ground, towering over and intimidating the surrounding landscape with their majestic display of warm-toned rock. Beyond that, the sagebrushed desert extends into the distant horizon.

Fifty-five-year-old Maltez stumbled from the top of Angels Landing on the north side while hiking with her husband and three children, falling from the vertical sandstone cliff to her death. News reports are brief: she fell at about 8:30 am, searchand-rescue recovered her body before noon, 1,000 feet below her last fatal footfall.

I’ve hiked Angels Landing a couple of times, making my way up the mountain and holding fast to the chains. After the first two miles of unceasing switchbacks and steady incline, I climbed the cliff face, glancing periodically at the drop-off: 800 feet down on one side, 1,200 feet down the other. Now, I look back and think it 50

would have been so easy to fall. When I heard about Maltez’s death, I remembered every unsteady foothold, every loose rock, every potential disaster. I don’t have much daredevil in me—in fact, I have almost no daredevil in me—but there is something about reaching the peak, standing eye to eye with the high-flying fowls, windswept and enchanted with the view from the top of a mountain peak, and appreciating God’s painted canvas of rock. Something about all that makes the danger worth it. Still, the turn of an ankle or the dislodging of a loose rock underfoot could have marked my death.

It all comes down to where your feet land.

Life is a series of trade-offs. You can hope that you made the right decision, found the safest path, picked the right foothold, but you never know when the ground under you will give and you will be falling, falling from Angels Landing with nothing to catch you before you hit bottom.

All this talk of falling from great heights makes me think of the mythological tragedy of Icarus and Daedalus. I see Daedalus in my mind, dragging his son from the sea and cradling him in his arms, hardened wax covering the motionless Icarus’s back, shoulders, and arms. Wings mangled, the wax and feathers molded together in one tangled mess encompassing father and son, weeping. Daedalus had warned his son not to fly too close to the sun, knowing the unforgiving heat would melt the waxen wings he so carefully molded. Ambitious and thoughtless, as young people are, Icarus soared where his father forbade; reality melted his wings and he fell into the sea, smacking the water with crisp, stinging clarity. Just as Icarus was a fallen man, Nancy Maltez is a fallen

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woman—fallen, that is, in a very literal sense. Their fall had nothing to do with disobeying God, and more to do with gravity.

Mankind has been subject to gravity since the beginning. “The beginning” is a little bit of a copout on my part, I suppose. Was gravity always present on Earth, or was it introduced at some point?

Maybe Adam and Eve weren’t subject to gravity in Eden; maybe “the fall” signifies the moment when mankind could literally fall.

Whether or not gravity was always with us is not the point, but it is fascinating to think about. The point is that man has always resisted gravity, resented its unyielding presence. We watch birds, envious of their ability to resist gravity without falling. We mimic birds’ wings and create airplanes to aid us in flying, using gravity to our advantage the way fowls do. We even invent people like Superman, who needs neither engine nor wings to soar through the air. Yet in the end, gravity always has the upper hand. Shoot a bird and it will fall like a rock. Any number of things can go wrong with an airplane—from a gas leak to a bomb to a storm cloud— and down it goes. Even Superman, who man invented, has a weakness. Superman plus kryptonite equals a man who is not so super, or at least not airborne. It seems that even in our imaginations, we cannot create something that can truly defy gravity. We crave the air but fear the fall.

It isn’t falling I fear, but the fierce impact of body and ground, like a speeding car smashing into a wall. The resounding thud echoes in my ears, and I hear the bones shattering like glass. A shuddering shock wave ripples through me as I imagine the impression of body on ground. Disappointment is like the impact after the fall. Hundreds of disappointments haunt us, from health 52

problems to rejection letters to failed relationships. Speaking of failed relationships, I have an issue with the cliché phrase “falling in love.” Falling implies an inevitably painful impact, anywhere as painful as a skinned knee from tripping on a rock to a broken body from falling off a cliff. I suppose “falling in love” works as a description of failed relationships, though, because failure is the skinned knee or broken body, depending on how far the fall was. For me, most of the time falling in love is more like falling in infatuation, which might be a more accurate phrase than falling in love. Less catchy, but more realistic. Take my last relationship for example.

Now that I’ve removed myself from the situation, I can see that by taking a close look at our incompatibilities I probably would have chosen to dodge the brief romance without regret. But let’s face it—we’re all more logical about relationships when we’re not in the middle of one. In the end, relationships that don’t end well are like the “falling” of “falling in love,” when you find yourself on the ground and, picking up your scraped knee and wounded pride, get back up and walk it off. *** What does it even mean to fall? We use it as a metaphor for love and loss of virtue; we blame it for illness and sin, but in the end we don’t even understand the pull of gravity that ties us to the Earth we were born on. The fall of Adam and Eve seemed to only be a metaphorical fall, distancing mortality from God by introducing sin into the world. But maybe the world itself fell, landing in the Milky Way galaxy and becoming the third planet from the sun, Johansen 53

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the hand of gravity hovering over our heads like an ever-present overseer. It seems hard to imagine the Earth literally falling, but it satisfies some sort of curiosity. I question where God is, and how far away from Him we are, and how we ended up between Mars and Venus, and if the fall of Adam and Eve had anything to do with the placement of our planet in the myriad galaxies. Whether or not their fall was a literal fall doesn’t change that we are here, fallen like they were. When I think about all that, I realize how small the Earth really is compared to the endless galaxies in space. I close my eyes and think of everything outside Earth’s atmosphere, how God directs the planets and solar systems and galaxies together like one unfathomably gigantic orchestra, and how Earth plays such an itsy-bitsy role in the symphony. Humans, then, are infinitesimal, minute, trifling. We barely notice the things that go on outside our own little allotment of space, and it takes something falling to Earth, a bright flash and a fiery tail, to capture our attention. Still, these bright flashes spark curiosity, and humans send up satellites and space stations and try to photograph and record and find out something about what lies beyond. But how little we know. We think we are so important, our little struggle with life and gravity.

We fall like Nancy Maltez and crash our airplanes and watch birds and shooting stars and somehow don’t realize how much there is going on outside of our planet, and how infinitesimal we really are compared to—everything else.

Yes, thinking about our role in the universe makes me feel small, but there’s a small part of me that still feels important. God cared enough about us to create this world for us. He allows us to experience births and marriages and deaths, events so monumental to 54

us and yet microscopic in the fabric of time and space. We sit and watch falling stars, which are not really stars at all, and every once in a while, something hits home. And we wonder how our lives can be both paramount and miniscule, if and how God really knows us, and where he is, and how far we fell when Eve took the first bite of the mango, or peach, or whatever fruit it was. In ancient Mayan mythology, the character of “important tree” was played by the cacao tree, which is consequently where chocolate comes from. The Mayans used chocolate for medicinal and religious purposes, and then when explorers found out about the secret of chocolate, they spread it like a wild rumor across the world, taking humanity by storm. And the Eve in all of us women took ahold of chocolate and is still holding fast. We eat chocolate to break our falls from love and give it away as gifts to make each other feel special. So I guess we still use it for medicinal purposes.

Just as we eat chocolate, we watch for falling stars—even they fall victim to gravity’s pull. Falling stars are not really stars at all, which is a bit disillusioning to me. I mean, when you see a shooting star, it’s rather romantic to think that you’re actually witnessing the death of a star, whose last dying breath left a fiery flash on your corneas. A falling star is just a meteor entering Earth’s atmosphere, creating a stream of light visible against the dark canvas of night. Meteors are nothing more than space rocks, kicking around and idly orbiting the sun. When meteors cross the threshold into our atmosphere, frictional heat causes the visible trail of fire, and the meteor is usually burned up on the way down. The meteors that survive the trip and actually hit the ground are called meteorites. Superman himself fell to Earth cradled inside a meteorite, Johansen 55

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miraculously surviving gravity’s fury as the meteor entered Earth’s atmosphere. That was his first encounter with Earth’s gravity, but being nonhuman and entirely fictional, he survived the trip.

A few years back, my friend Allison and I were lying on the trampoline in my parents’ backyard watching a meteor shower.

The conversation ebbed and flowed as we watched the meteors fall, leaping gracefully across the sky like a ballerina performing a grand jeté. The meteor shower eventually died down and we began to drift off, still talking, until a bright falling star—the brightest one I’ve ever seen—shot across the sky close to the western horizon. Usually falling stars burn out in less than a second, but this one seemed to linger for several seconds, and after the initial gasp of surprise, it left us speechless and wondering if somewhere a large chunk of rock was hurled like a curveball into the waiting ground. It was like God was playing baseball, and this was the foul ball, the one that got away.

If falling meteors are like baseballs, it’s a good thing God doesn’t choose to play games with bigger balls very often. Scientists say that around 65.5 million years ago, a Herculean asteroid hit the Earth, killing ninety percent of life, including the dinosaurs. The impact apparently hurled debris like missiles into the sky, exploding and creating a burst of heat the equivalent of ten noonday suns.

The devastation was supposedly so massive, so consuming, that sulfuric clouds blocked the sun’s rays for a decade. ***

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But asteroids and Armageddon-esque destruction are a little too cosmic for me to think about all the time, and there’s a certain point where I have to lay aside my thoughts of Adam and Eve and the reverberating effects of their fall to return to the beautifully mundane occurrences of everyday life. So I’m content to savor my chocolate-covered banana from Ecuador and watch the meteors fall, miles away from me, and I’m content to keep them that far.

There’s enough falling here on Earth to go around.

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An Outing by Ashley Chipman

Nellie studied the multiplying age spots on the back of her hand. The coffee and auburn spots decorated her opaque skin in every place she could see. She considered those splotches to be unique, individual badges of honor symbolizing her journey through life. Some of the younger women (and even some of the men) at Easton Cottage spent small fortunes on creams that promised to contain vanishing qualities that would erase any signs of the pesky brown spots that seemed to multiply and spread like fungus. Nellie liked the spots. She liked to play “connect the dots” and find pictures embedded and buried in her own skin. Sometimes the pictures jumped out of her head—a kite, a water bottle, a small mouse begging for cheese, two eyes looking back at her—and other times she would sit and have to search for a good time before she could find a new picture. That was the rule with the game: she had to find a new picture every time she played.

The skin on her hands hung softly off her spindly bones and comically clashed with the “Strawberry Margarita”-colored fingernails that had been painted the previous day. Nellie brought 59

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the nails close to her clouded eyes and thought of the other colors the beautician had suggested—“Pearly White,” “Gossamer Gray,” “Foggy Peach”—and tenderly felt the smooth surface of each violently pink nail. Both her skin and the nails were smooth to the touch, but while the nails were slippery and uniform in nature, her skin was translucent and had a quiet texture that reminded Nellie of the lamb’s ears that her mother had grown in their home garden. The plant had always looked like a light frost had fallen and covered the leaves that were shaped like miniature lamb’s ears. Her hand resembled that icy-looking plant only in its soft texture. The skin on the hand was aged and had lost all of its elasticity. If Nellie pushed the skin in any which-way, the skin would sag in the direction she pushed and then would slowly creep back to its assumed position. She examined the other hand and saw how the skin hugged the thin needle that had been thrust into it and how the skin fell in ripples around the needle. The skin embraced the clear tube, and Nellie supposed she could see the faint line of the needle beneath her translucent skin. She looked up at the dripping liquid coming from the clear bag above her head. The liquid seemed a sour-milk color and Nellie wished (not for the first time) that they had not made the bag and tube clear.

Soon someone would come in and give her fluid food—the color of liquid skin—through the feeding tube that had been inserted into her stomach and Nellie cringed at the thought.

She didn’t like imagining that food could enter her body in some way other than through her mouth. Nellie still remembered when the doctor told her the cancer had spread to her 60

vocal cords and that surgery would be crucial. He informed her that, after surgery, she would never be able to eat or talk ever again because her throat would be too tender. It had been necessary to remove her vocal cords. Nellie could only make little chirping sounds if she tried to speak as air swished through her throat. She liked to sit in her room and chirp to herself, picking out little tunes more familiar to her in years past. Sometimes the doctor would let her drink liquids when he felt it was safe, and Nellie loved the sensation of tossing back some juice or milk and feeling the cold fluids rush straight down into her stomach, chilling her insides. She looked forward to those rare “drink days.”

Easton Cottage was a nice little place with a long, rich history and an even longer waiting list. Nellie was well taken care of there and enjoyed the company of the other residents. Some of the residents had a hard time at Easton Cottage because they felt they were just sitting around, wasting away, waiting to die.

Nellie didn’t like such thoughts. Getting old just felt like a light dust settling over her and sometimes it felt like all she had to do was to brush herself off a bit and she would become youthful again. Or at least more youthful than she was now. Other times old age reminded her of a mirror getting foggy after a shower.

A light film settles over you, and life becomes just a little more blurry than it was before.

Nellie was not done living her life. Even though she couldn’t talk, she still had plenty left to say and do. First things first—she had to remove that needle from her hand. She gritted her gums together and pinched the needle with the tips of her rosy nails.

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Like anyone, she disliked needles, but she slipped the needle out as determinedly as if it were an unwanted sliver invading her skin. Nellie edged toward her door and peeked down the hallway. Satisfied that it was quiet outside (the residents were probably taking their second afternoon nap), she shrank back into her room and bolted the door. Darting to her bedroom (as quick as an old woman of 86 years can dart), she went to her old cedar jewelry box, clipped on a pair of polished pearl earrings, and fastened on her blue beaded chain to her reading glasses around her neck. She slipped on her apricot Mary Janes and fastened on a light matching sweater over her floral cotton dress. Nellie placed a small white hat over her wooly white hair, stuck a long pin though it, and pulled a dainty tulle veil over her face. She slipped an empty, oversized embroidered bag onto her slender arm. Lastly, she fished out a set of pearly dentures waiting for her in a hand-painted ceramic mug filled with fluoride next to the sink in her bathroom. Nellie positioned the pearly whites on her gums, sucked the remaining spittle out from where the teeth and her gums met, and set her face in a position of determination. Eyebrows and mouth firmly straight, she checked the mirror to level her hat.

Tottering over to the light switch, Nellie surveyed the tiny apartment one last time and flicked the light off. If anyone came by, they would assume she was napping, and Nellie gave herself three to four hours before anyone came looking for her or before the nurse came to attach her feeding bag. She allowed herself a small smile and moved towards the living room window, opening the shutters and unlatching the window. The 62

well-maintained window easily glided open, thanks to the thick oil Nellie had asked maintenance to apply to it so that she could let a breeze in every once in awhile. She used her velvet doilyencrusted footstool to boost herself up through the window and let out a small twitter of joy for being so fortunate as to have been given a first-floor apartment. She strode down the street, her destination tattooed in her mind.

She had set up the time and meeting place weeks ago and had spent the past week planning her escape and anticipating this very moment. It had finally come, and so far things had gone just as she had planned. Nellie could feel her pulse through her temples, and the smile widened across her face. Her lips remained closed over her teeth and the smile snuck to one side of her face, hiding from the other side. A tiny breeze stirred the few leaves that had fallen, and Nellie went out of her way to step on the crunchiest ones, clutching the empty bag to her side.

Turning the last corner, Nellie saw the object of her expedition. It was a tiny gingerbread of a house that would have appeared quaint had it not been for the forced, startling pink color that enveloped the home. A froofy pink, the color of lipstick tweens wear when they want to start wearing makeup but only have the unusual mosh-poshes of violent purples, blues, reds, and pinks they get as party favors. It was just as the woman had described, and Nellie’s heart leapt into her empty throat at the sight of it. Resolve and teeth set firmly in place, Nellie doddered up to the front door, pink nails gripping the decorative bag in front of her body. Nellie had always thought it rude to ring the doorbell (so demanding and impersonal!), so she Chipman 63

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drummed evenly upon the wooden door that was the color of a fresh sunburn.

Nellie nervously sucked the gathering moisture under her dentures to the back of her hollow throat as she heard brisk footsteps coming from the other side of the door. The door opened and an airy, breathless young woman stood before Nellie dressed in a cotton dress as violently pink as the house.

At first, all Nellie could focus on was the woman’s face, as the rest of her body blended rather oddly, yet uniformly, with the rest of the house. The woman had long, butter-colored, creamy hair that gushed down to her elbows, and she wore no makeup on her clear, heart-shaped face. Her giant green eyes remained fixed on Nellie’s own cloudy-blue ones, and a soothing smile slid across the young woman’s face. She took Nellie by the hand and led her along the porch to the side of the house. Nellie’s wily smile grew as she noticed the woman’s nails that were the exact same color as the house. It reminded Nellie of the color of the pink conversation hearts that are sold by the thousands every Valentine’s Day. The woman showed Nellie to a small shoebox sitting on a rocking chair covered with pink lace and a matching pink silk cushion. Silently the shoebox was transferred into Nellie’s empty bag, and a tight hug was exchanged. The woman gave one last squeeze to Nellie’s hand, and the two departed from each other.

Nellie’s steps down the sidewalk were painfully controlled and deliberate. It was an aggravating and wonderful walk as she willed herself to keep from sprinting down the way. She had to concentrate on each step, making it seem normal and regular.

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She held the bag gently in front of her, both arms surrounding it in a hug. Nellie’s eyes focused on the path in front of her, and her thoughts focused on the shoebox nestled in her bag. The smile inched from one side to the other, unsure of which side it wanted to be on. It attempted to conceal itself by shrinking, but the wide eyes and heightened eyebrows gave it away. Little chirps escaped from Nellie’s miniature smile as giggles rose up inside her.

Soon enough, she found herself back in front of her open window, and she fetched a small rotting log she had hidden away behind another tree the prior week in anticipation of this moment. Using the log as a boost, Nellie tipped herself back into her darkened room, one hand clutching the window frame and the other embracing the bag to her chest. As soon as she got back in her apartment, she latched the window and surveyed the apartment for intruders. She forced herself to calmly remove and replace the sweater and hat, all the while never removing the bag from her chest (a difficult feat to say the least).

An unexpected collection of chirps gushed from her, and she finally could not contain herself. Nellie rushed to her velvet chair soaked in doilies, removed the shoebox from the bag, and placed it on the matching footstool. Twittering gently to herself, she lifted the top off and drew out a month-old kitten. The kitten was as white as Nellie’s hair and had large blue eyes that surveyed Nellie curiously. Nellie lifted the kitten close to her eyes and investigated the kitten, her kitten, tenderly. The kitten looked out of place in Nellie’s old hands. Nellie could see the veins through her spotted hands and compared them with the Chipman 65

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kitten’s pure, unblemished fur. She stroked the creature with one steady finger and watched as the little thing curled up in her lap. A small purr came from inside the kitten that sounded like a marble rolling down a hallway. Nellie pulled her legs under her up on the couch and joined in the kitten’s purrs with her own gentle warbles.

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To my Sister’s Unborn Child

by Katie Wade If you come, come quietly. Sounds of partial sunlight, fall, leaves slipping.

Be mindful of the space you’ve left, no longer an ally.

Let her cry. There is a sting in the splitting of worlds, a heartbeat she protected with her thick skin, two hands running up and down, searching for the shape of you.

The world of separation: you, floating through reeds in a wicker basket, a hollow mother who has never met the Pharaoh, nights, breathing her isolation.

She feels you holding on.

It is the tonic she needs, involuntary desertion.

The idea will soothe her in those last moments when you leave, curious of the world.

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She will miss these days most.

The two of you by the window, your warm cheeks, eyes folded shut, the timid prayers of your palms still cradled inside her.

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Fountains by Dallin Bruun

BYU’s Harold B. Lee Library has 31 drinking fountains, one for every 322 daily patrons. The library was originally built in 1962, then added upon in ’74, and again in ’97, which is why the fountain collection consists of three distinct periods.

Super Old Fountains

It appears the original 1962 five-level library was designed to accommodate three fountains on every floor: one next to the bathrooms, and one at each end of that same hallway. This pattern repeats on all floors except the third, the ground level, which has been extensively modified from the original design.

In 1906, a plumber named Luther Haws noticed the “unsanitary though typical” practice of sharing drinking cups among school children. He invented and patented the “Drinking Faucet” in 1911, and his company Haws Corporation sold 15 models to BYU in 1962.

Only four of those original 15 still exist, preserved because they were fortunately placed in low traffic areas. If you’d like to view one of these Haws relics, I would recommend the Fountain of Beauty 71

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located on the second level in the maps section (See Map B). The Fountain of Beauty, as I have named it, best illustrates the 1962 wing’s painstaking practice of tiling a colorful frame around each of the 15 drinking fountains installed that year. The tiles are 3/8s of an inch on each side, and come in khaki, burnt orange, and moss green. The Fountain of Beauty is a venerable white ‘62 Haws, framed by moss green tile.

I found the Fountain of Beauty in the summer of 2003, studying for my first class at BYU—accounting. The university must have been short on cash, or conducting a bizarre social experiment that year, because they allowed average local students to enroll on a trial basis. I was both average and local. And, to be perfectly truthful, my mother enrolled me.

New Fountains

In 1997 the library nearly doubled its drinking fountain collection in the state-of-the-art subterraneous wing. Two brands were 72

included, Sunroc (77%) and Elkay (23%). I’m not a fan of the new Sunroc line—they tend to over arc, missing their splash spine and spattering water on you.

Case #19 (a.k.a the Sunroc Tsunami) is the taller of a pair of fountains on the east wall of the periodicals section on Level 2. Its arc is so powerful it splashes patrons in the face. For a good laugh, I suggest finding a nearby vantage point.

I probably shouldn’t be here observing freshmen getting splashed; I should have graduated six years ago. I blame it on an Intro to Humanities class my second semester. “Education should be holistic.” “Universities are vocational factories.” And so forth.

I actually walked into the counseling office to switch my major to “everything.” It wasn’t an option.

Golden Age Fountains

Harold B. Lee Library’s Golden Age of Drinking Fountains was the 1974 addition. Even though the five-story project doubled the library’s square footage, only five drinking fountains were installed, one on each floor. These five drinking fountains were made by Hasley Taylor Corp, but three have been replaced with Elkay, and the one on the fourth floor is in disrepair.

That leaves the library’s rarest—and most excellent—drinking fountain on the fifth floor, 1974 wing. It’s one of only three Bruun 73

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fountains to receive temperature rating of “extra cold,” and one of two awarded the coveted “delicious taste” rating. But what makes this Hasley Taylor so special is that it’s equipped with twin jets which collide and form a large-barrel water arc, allowing maximum thirst satisfaction.

I tried quitting school once; I enrolled in what I called “The University of Barnes & Noble.” I made a goal to finish 10 books.

I barely got through Moby Dick before realizing school wasn’t so bad. It’s like a drinking fountain of knowledge, just push the button and open your brain.

So I came back. It feels like a million years ago. Luckily, even though I’m roughly 30% older than everyone around me, I still blend in. But it probably won’t be long before some department or software finds me and says, “Let someone else have a turn! You’re holding up the line!”

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love poems never start with periods because*

by Jonathan Garcia At Barnes and Noble I met a geology book Period who felt it was his disquieting duty to end things, the way a boulder breaks a shovel— Another Period, from a trailer instruction manual, saw himself more as a ball hitch, sentenced to aging taskheavy constant under the weight of words— Then, skimming a road atlas at Jiffy Lube, I overheard Periods boasting of their travel credentials; soon they were surrounded by a gang of parentheses saying they were only mere odometer reset knobs, cleared at the push of a button— In the New York Times, one agitated young Palestinian Period threw demonstrations at the Israelis like rocks, the fullness of his intent to reclaim his homeland with a form of reverse erosion, stoning goliath stones back to where they once were—

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Finally, as I read the classifieds, a low-income Period complained to me that his unmarried status translated into astronomical withholdings from his paycheck, noting that the families of ellipses are the only punctuation marks to get tax breaks— I told him the only surefire way out of sweeping Wal-Mart’s floors was a degree or a lover— Last I heard, he’s studying English to teach high school grammar and at nights he dances over at the Azucar Morena Salsa Club, slowly caramelized in the heat of Maribel’s question mark curves— Puerto Rican she! Exclamation pointing him, beckoning him inkfresh off the page— *Whispering in her ear, he promises to love her with all the syntactic beauty in the world but a Period—

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the studio by Jason Zippro

A few days after the funeral, his wife read one of the leather notebooks he always wrote in. There it was in black ink, as if the world condensed itself into just a few sentences and it all made sense.

She had been crying, and since before the funeral she had been flipping through the hundreds of books, journals, drawings, and files in his studio, thousands of memories all stored away in ink.

He had been collecting things for years and even though he wasn’t old, he wasn’t young either.

“Fifty is just barely over half-way,” he said only a few weeks before.

His two daughters attended a college only a few hours away.

They had always done well, and in secondary school on the days that they received their report cards he would look at them and always say, “Good job, but what did you learn?” He never expected them to tell him what they learned, but he asked so they understood what he thought of grades and about who they were. Those evenings they would leave the torn envelopes with their grade papers on the counter and go together to the grocery store and buy cold cereal and whole milk. One box for each of them. Then they 81

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would go home and eat cereal late into the night and watch a movie. “Cereal Parties,” he used to call them.

Cereal was a Christmas thing; normally it came with your stocking, along with a toothbrush, and a chocolate letter. But it also came on grade days and sometimes on the hottest evenings of the summer, when the cold milk was refreshing. On those hot summer days, all four of them would sit on the back porch until the sun set, late into the evening.

He sometimes helped his wife make their daughters’ lunches for school. They could tell whose sandwich he had made and which she had. One day when they pulled out their bananas, each one had their own name carved into the skin, brown and thin. After that they always had messages engraved into their banana skins.

Sometimes it was just a line, others were whole poems, and other times he would leave them reminders for after school activities or weekend plans.

When they were in elementary school he would peel their bananas for them. Once he asked, “Did you know God put diamonds in the bananas?”

“Diamonds?”

“Yes. Look.”

He held the peeled banana up to the light and close to their faces.

“Do you see the teeny little sparkles all over the banana?”

At first they didn’t see them, but he made them look harder, and when they saw the glistening moisture on the pale, spongy flesh, they giggled.

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“You see? All those little sparkles? Every time you eat a banana you are eating God’s diamonds.”

They laughed, ate their bananas, and thought they were eating diamonds. Now, years later they still think about God’s diamonds when they eat bananas.

He didn’t talk very much. Mostly he was in his studio writing.

Sometimes they believed that he loved his notebooks more than he loved them. Once, during lunch, after he had been locked up in his studio for the entire morning, they asked him if he loved them more than his notebooks. He smiled sadly, finished his sandwich, and hugged them both. He walked back to his studio and never closed its door again.

“In college he talked more,” his wife told the daughters, “he talked and talked and when we married he stopped talking and began writing.”

“He loves me, but just with fewer words,” she thought, and the words were usually whispered or written with delicate touches and soft tremors.

“In college he talked more. After we got married he wrote more often, and when each of you were born he cried,” she continued.

“He cried and when he wasn’t holding you, or my hand, he was holding his notebooks, writing. Always writing. He grew more quiet at your births too, at your first step, and on your first day of school.”

“He grew more quiet when we went to college too,” one of his daughters said.

“Yes” her mother agreed, “but he loved me more intensely too.”

Zippro 83

Inscape

One Sunday when they were in high school he came out of his studio mid-morning while they were eating breakfast. He leaned down over the counter, propped himself on his elbows on the opposite side of the island, and smiled at them. He asked them if they liked the name Beatrice. They looked at him with confused faces, said no, and returned to eating their toast. He asked them again but this time pronouncing her name in Italian. They smiled and looked at their father inquisitively. He smiled back and told them a story about Dante, a man who had fallen in love with a Beatrice.

Dante loved her so much that he made himself sick over her. One day, eighteen years after he had first seen her, she died. Dante was so sick with grief that he curled up in his room and almost died from starvation and sorrow.

“Dante finally recovered and wrote the story years later in a collection of poems he called The New Life. We know about Beatrice because he wrote about her. He immortalized her without her ever knowing it.”

He told his daughters that Dante had become one of the greatest poets in Italian history for another story he had written about a dream in which he descended through hell and climbed a mountain before Beatrice appeared to him and led him up into heaven.

“La Donna Scala, Lady of the Stairs, a personal angel who helps men come to God, but only if they admire her from a distance,” he explained. “He wrote to understand what happened and we read what he left to know we’re not alone.”

He reached out his hands and cupped each of their chins in his palms, smiled, then kissed his wife, and walked back to his studio.

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At the funeral they had said many things about him. But none of that mattered to his wife. She loved him and after they had talked about him, she noticed she didn’t love him any more than she had before the service had started. She had sat on the front pew holding one of his black covered notebooks the entire service, reading it. She didn’t remember much of the service or the burial or the reception afterward, but she remembered other things, like the few words that he loved her with, and how they were only whispers and letters and pages now.

The funeral had gone smoothly, and now that it was over his wife felt that dark absence beginning to expand inside of her. She closed the notebook she was holding as her eyelids grew heavy.

Eyes half-closed and cheeks taut from the dried tears, she breathed heavily on the couch.

A couple weeks later, after her daughters returned to school and the neighbors stopped coming, she sat on the white tile of his studio staring at the bright walls bathed in sunlight coming in from the large open window that was most of the eastern wall. The bookshelves were mostly empty now. All but a few notebooks and loose papers that shuffled in the early September breeze had been packed away. She reached down beside her and picked up one of the leather-covered journals and held it to her chest.

“We write to know who we are,” she muttered, staring off into the washboard-patterned shadows of the shelves. She pulled the notebook closer and felt her heart beating against it. She breathed the warm air in slowly. The walls slowly changed colors—orange than pink and finally a brilliant red—as she continued to sit on the cool, milky tile. Soon she slipped to her side, and placing her head on the soft leather of the journal, she fell asleep.

Zippro 85

The Womb by Daniel Walker

The average temperature of the female womb is 98 degrees Fahrenheit, which degree scale was named after the Polish and German and Dutch physicist and engineer Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit who in 1686 caused his mother to go into labor in Danzig, Poland, before communicating his express opinion that he possess tri-nationality, thus causing his mother to quickly traverse the German countryside—including both the Elbe and Rhine rivers—so that (as I imagine it) he could actually be born somewhere in Kerkrade, the Netherlands, which city existed at the time as a part of, of all things, the Spanish Empire, and from where he emigrated to begin experimenting with alcohol, glass blowing, and mercury, which led him to eventually propose the philosophy of a temperature scale in 1724, just 12 years before his death in 1736 for which a certain Swedish astronomer, Anders Celsius, was desperately waiting, perhaps due in part to some slight insecurities and jealousies caused by what must have been for him a very lonely, mono-national existence and also in order that, perhaps as a strictly secondary reason, he might—only 2 years before his own death in 1744—propose a completely new scale at which 87

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water freezes at 0 degrees and which he must have thought to be vastly superior to Fahrenheit’s, but with which an Irishman—one William Thomson—would disagree (though perhaps not because of reasons of nationality) and so propose yet another scale in 1848 which was an attempt to reconcile his qualms with absolute zero (which I’m sure he’s settled by now with his absolute death in 1907) and, in a startling turn of events, was actually named after him by other scientists instead of being so named while admiring himself and his many accomplishments in front of a mirror, as I would imagine was a frequent scenario for his predecessors, though I’m sure this was not for a lack of mirrors since he (William) was said to be a Baron in which case I probably should have addressed him as “Lord William,” this being the proper title at the time in Ireland for people abounding in potatoes, such as engineers, and for people named William, as was the case (though I think without the potatoes) with William John Macquorn Rankine of Scotland who didn’t even wait for his Irish counterpart to kick off before proposing the Rankine scale in 1859 which no one really uses, which I think a just consequence for William’s obvious attempt to overshadow another William and fellow engineer for the reason of potatoes, but I also think poor William got little attention because there were many other important things going on in 1859, one of which was the birth of William Fredrick Rigby, Jr., who left Mrs. Mary Clark’s 98-degree Fahrenheit (36.67 degrees Celsius; 309.82 kelvins; and 557.67 degrees Rankine) womb to be aptly named after his father, William Fredrick Rigby Sr., who had renounced his own mother’s womb 26 years before as the first child of his father, William (this fifth William adding substantial 88

evidence to the Rankine’s apparent William complex for which I’m sure he received frequent, albeit posthumous, criticisms from William Lord Kelvin who actually outlived him by 35 years, probably because of his potatoes) Atkin Howarth who abandoned his respective womb (the word “womb” actually being of unknown origins) in 1816, a mere 46 years before the birth of little Jr. William’s brother, George, whose son’s daughter’s son (not named William) married a lovely woman (whose paternal grandfather, believe it or not, is named William) whose womb I vacated on the evening of the 25th of April in 1986, exactly 300 years (minus 29 days) after the birth of Mr. Fahrenheit, with whom I share a name and according to whose scale I experienced a temperature drop of about 30 degrees on the night in question, which has justifiably caused me to remain screaming for the last 25 years.

Walker 89

teofanía

by Emily Ho The air was silver trash and yellow flowers, candles from el dia de los muertos still burning, the skinny voices of the boys in the alley below: Ai, mami! Don’t we look like mangos in a tree?

Take our picture too— Other photographs include: Crucifix fixed to a city bus dash, Ribbed horses in sombreros (out of focus), Cactus Christmas lights ushering out the last days, Coyotes crying like children in darkness, And two photographs I did not take— Coming in off cobbled street, the discoteca is wagging, doggerel, losing body to beat, to sweat, to heat and I nearly miss her— dancing and crying and looking at me.

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I don’t know if I should ignore her, or pinch her elbow and smile; if there’s some bearing in dancing beside her, we moving like mackerel at school, like an echo, a recitation—on earth as it is in heaven.

I turn to leave when some pìnto hombre pinches my elbow, coughs like the clack of a door closed with unsteady hands, —yo soy Dìos.

Ho 93

CHEM 352-007

HAYES BESS

ESSAYS 801-867-5309

Entry Date:07 DEC 07 Time: 18:12

Instructor: JACOBSON (01160) Test # : 5 Employee #: BITSY Please keep this sheet on your desk at all times.

Upon completing your test, staple this sheet to the front of your test booklet and return all materials to the Grading Table. You may use the space below for notes, comments, or scratch paper.

Please Turn Your Cell Phone Off! Dear Graders, I did not study for this exam. I was not so inclined. I must say it was rather liberating. I think one’s fifth year is a fabulous time to finally fail a class. I’m quite excited. As I haven’t really written much on the test by way of answers, I’d appreciate any feedback on the clarity and comprehensibility of my writing, if you feel so inclined.

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Inscape I. Nomenclature. Provide correct IUPAC names for the following (2 points each):

It amuses me that people are afraid to look at each other in the testing center. I think that most people like to look at strangers, but are embarrassed to be caught doing so. I have a bad habit of taking clandestine photos of strangers in airports with my cell phone.

Doing so gives me a slight thrill. It’s nosy and inappropriate. It’s too bad cell phones aren’t allowed in here. Other than the obvious reasons, maybe it’s good they’re not. I never feel so uncomfortably naked as I do when the object of my view catches me staring. In the testing center this situation is complicated by the nature of its purpose. Here students aren’t just afraid of offending the people they look at, but of getting in trouble with the proctors. They fear that the proctors will accuse them of cheating, more than they fear being outed for staring at the pretty faces around them. The proctors, therefore, are the only people in the room students feel safe looking at. And, come on, they’re practically begging us to turn our eyes towards them, as they walk slowly, systematically up and down the aisles, with their hands clasped behind their backs, monitoring the desks as they pass. And we do stare at them, these safe objects of gaze, almost as if their systematic movement will stimulate our brains and memory.

But tonight I’m feeling defiant and want to stare at the other people taking tests instead of taking my own. The boy next to me has a new pack of Bic mechanical pencils on his desk, along with a calculator, a granola bar wrapper, and glasses. Students don’t just study and prepare for the content of a class before taking an exam.

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We must also ready our rituals: buying a pack of pencils; preparing a lunch or dinner for long-haul exams. What we bring with us into the testing center is probably the closest thing most students get to creating an emergency 72-hour kit. All anxieties and situations must be prepared for: hunger, running out of ink/lead/ eraser, batteries going dead, even a runny nose (tissues are not to be overlooked! I had a bloody nose during my last midterm, but I was prepared with ample tissues). The non-scholastic preparations for taking a test are essential and quite impressive.

This semester I’ve experimented with not preparing, with living in a state of general unpreparedness. This has happened on many levels—chemistry is merely a piece of the whole. I think this is my way of saying I’ve become dysfunctional. I’m trying to make it sound intentional, rather than what it actually feels like—like I’ve suddenly lost control, lost autonomy of my life and actions. My friend was tested this week for mental stability. She learned she is not sound. I believe experiences we had this summer messed us up. The fallout is that she goes to counseling and I come to the testing center to take an organic chemistry midterm, but instead end up naming my problems in an essay rather than naming benzene rings with functional groups in correct IUPAC nomenclature.

II. Mechanisms. Provide mechanisms for the following reactions. Use curved arrow notation and be as detailed as possible (10 pts total):

I’m not sure how this happened—perhaps the stress of sleeping (and not sleeping, as the case may be) in London train stations, Hayes 97

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Irish airports, German hostels with black sheets and flames painted on the walls, Danish night buses, and Belgian park benches had something to do with it. Perhaps it was the trauma of returning to the US, where, after becoming so dependent on the company of a few specific people, I lost their constant, wanted, and needed companionship that has altered me so.

And yet I’m not so much altered as alternatively directed. I believe, or television and first-hand reports have convinced me, that many college students suffer from imbalances between their social lives and schoolwork, imbalances that equalize with experience and time. I used to think I was fairly balanced, as I did well in school. But maybe I was calculating this based on a model assigning all good value to studying, and hardly any to social activities. I used to spend hours fastidiously writing out and memorizing flash cards and studying for chemistry. I wouldn’t say I was happy to do so, but I was resolute in my resignation to forego conversations with friends and trips home to Salt Lake on Sundays for family dinner. But I’m not anymore.

My previous study habits have come completely undone since I went to Europe this summer, where I studied in England and afterward traveled around with a few friends. I learned and fell in love with new means of experience and being; with sleeping on grassy hummocks overlooking the cliffy Cornwall sea; with creating a tin whistler ensemble and playing on top of Scafell Pike; with walking across the winding, windy moor during a rainstorm in order to locate the structural remains of the building that inspired Wuthering Heights; with descending the stairs beneath the Millennium Bridge to the rocky bed of the Thames, to throw rocks 98

of grievances and frustrations into that wide, brown London landmark; with swimming in the icy teal Connemara sea, combing my goose-flesh arms and fingers through the spaghetti-like seaweed; with finding a location on a map and planning and booking an assortment of planes, trains, and automobiles to get there.

A seemingly innocuous trip to England, which I expanded to the continent and extended over a month, has metastasized, has turned into an impassable distraction—a longed for and idealized bliss. My previous reality—the one I’ve since returned to—can no longer pretend to satiate my scholastic and social cravings. I’ve now experienced something entirely different—more intense, challenging, involved, chaotic, reckless, irresponsible, and exhausting than my previous normalcy. Returning home has been cruel, impossible, a travesty of growing up and realizing responsibility and desire for true desires.

I used to love chemistry. That’s changed too. I’m not sure what happened. I’m still convinced I like it, though maybe this is unfounded. I no longer go to lecture and make beautiful and precise copies of the mechanisms drawn on the board, pleased with my understanding. I now sit there and fester. It irritates me when the professor asks us how happy the electrons are. This simplification offends me, and I resent that we’re told to identify the emotions of personified electrons instead of learning how to recognize their stability and tendencies in various circumstances. The professor’s mantra is: “How happy are they? Not happy, Bob.” Granted, sometimes the answer is “Happy, Bob.” I’m not sure where Bob came from. The professor explained it once. Some movie perhaps? I’m irritated with Bob and his ubiquitous presence in this class. Poor Hayes 99

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Bob, I’m blaming him for problems that are undoubtedly much more complex. But even acknowledging that doesn’t change the simple fact that in this class I’m not happy, Bob. III. Synthesis and Reactivity. Provide products for the following reactions. Indicate stereochemistry where appropriate (3 points each):

Before my last chemistry midterm, I sat on the grass outside the JFSB. My chemistry lecture notes were open before me, but I was writing in my journal. I was experiencing a new realization of self.

I had just called my mom, frustrated and demoralized, because I was once again unprepared for the test I had to take. I was overwhelmed with school and a newly founded, social interest, and chemistry was suffering most. My mom told me that chemistry wasn’t worth it; this could be my trial run. She told me not to beat myself up about it. My three months in Europe with my journal always with me taught me to depend upon the contemplative writing process to understand myself. So, after speaking with my mom, I felt so relieved that naturally my only option was to go to my journal and try to understand the meaning behind the feeling.

My feelings were terrifying and almost unwanted. But acknowledging them freed my soul and created such immense joy within me that I knew the probability of its truth was tremendous: I do not want to be a doctor. For years now I have been laboring (quite literally when taking classes like chemistry) under the conclusion (delusion?) I made when I was ten years old that I did want to be a doctor. It’s terrifying to let that go, because I’m left with unknowns. I 100

don’t know anymore what easily defined profession I want to go into, what I should study in graduate school.

I hate being around the pre-med students in my classes who talk about letters of recommendation and MCAT preparation and scores in a demonstrable and calculating, almost conniving way.

I’ve always been convinced that school and education should be about the love of learning and not about the grade. I’m hardly a shining example of this ideal, but in my hypocrisy I still believe it and hold it as the model of educational excellence. Therefore, in my opinion, it’s absolutely shameful to openly admit that your goal for studying is to get grades worthy of dental or medical school, or the only reason you’re doing research is so you can add it to your long and impressive resume. And even when I feel the same way, why admit it? It might become true overall. Disgraceful! I’m envious because, as dishonorably grade grubbing future medical professionals may be, they have it so easy. Choose profession: medicine. Choose schools. Choose specialty. Choose among job offers.

People always need a doctor. As a naturally overanxious being, I considered the gold-trimmed path to medical school a delightfully simple answer to any problem life had to offer.

But the day’s present to me was revealing the discontent with my self-declared path in life. Instead of stethoscopes and white coats, I want to join Montaigne, William Hazlitt, Virginia Woolf, and essays—if not professionally, then symbolically by reading their works and the works of other essayists. Words. Oh! Such, such were the joys and peace inspired by this honest yet worrying realization—and I’m being sincere, not ironic, as George Orwell was when he used the phrase to title his essay.

Hayes 101

Inscape

Since then my chemistry book has merely weighted my bag as my class attendance and motivation, already unhappily low, plummeted into annihilation. My mom asked if she was a bad mother for encouraging her daughter to do what makes her happy, because in this case it meant utterly dismissing a class, not to mention my plan of becoming a doctor. I smile as I remember this question, because in the testing center on this rainy Friday night I am content, pleased even, to sit here “taking a test,” because I’m doing what I love—writing—exploring my thoughts through words. I wonder how happy the people around me are, up here in the music room on the top floor, listening to Pachelbel’s Canon in D. They’re mostly hunched and tight. Many legs are shaking. They’re breathing deeply. Every few minutes someone starts punching mechanically, impatiently at a calculator. Many are making quick, full-body adjustments in their seats. Perhaps the new arrangement will help them remember what they’ve learned in class. The boy in front of me occasionally shakes his fist, “Yes! You can do this, you know this,” at another successfully solved problem. His papers are covered with immense tic-tac-toe games, matrices of Xs, Os, and Is. The music to Anne of Green Gables starts to play. Of about forty people in the room, only five or so are female. I doubt the boys taking their chemistry, engineering, and math tests have the same images in their heads that are in mine of Gilbert Blithe saying “I’m sorry, Anne,” or of Diana Berry’s younger sister saying through pudgy lips, “Did you know Gilbert Blithe is dying?” I smile as I look around the room and consider the appeal of the anxious,

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occupied faces around me and remember Anne and Gilbert’s longawaited romance on the bridge. A chemical reaction of a different sort.

Yes, I am content, pleased, at peace, happy even. Those around me? Have they also realized a deep and clarifying truth? How happy are they? For some reason the shaking legs and nervously clicking pencils make me think they’re not as happy as I am, Bob.

Hayes 103

Interview Highlights

It’s said that Gertrude Stein wrote every morning from four in the morning until ten. I, myself, am not a poet of will. There are definite benefits in scheduled writing, in spending time everyday with poetry. But certain kinds of irregularity are good for a poet, for a person. I think there is value in spontaneity, in opening your mind to new environments, atmospheres, and times of day. Also, I think that one learns to tolerate silences. I think that if a poem is not happening, it’s just not happening. The world doesn’t need new poems in general. I believe that poems can be ferociously beautiful objects, and I would love to write lots of them, but I do not have the privilege of legislating when they will happen.

—Maureen McLane A professor of mine said something that I really liked. He said, “every line begins in a place of certainty, and ends in one of uncertainty.” When you break a line and then return to the beginning of the next line, you want that sense of stepping out into the unknown, and then the sense of surprise when you’ve arrived at some place you didn’t quite expect. I think

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that’s a key part—to always do that stitching back and forth.

—Neil Aitkin If I had to break down Tibetan Buddhism it would be, “we’re all gonna die, so let’s be kind to each other.” That just seems like a really wonderful philosophy. But then when you really think about it, we don’t really get that, and we do everything we can not to confront it, especially in this culture— plastic surgery, staying young forever, all of that. It’s all death-denial stuff. So indigenous cultures and non-American cultures still seem a little closer to that natural disposal process.

—Dana Levin Get out of your room. You know, not to be rude, but get your butt out of your room and seize it. There are unbelievable people. There are geniuses, people with brilliance all around, young, and old.

There’s concerts, films, plays. The opportunity for epiphany and awakening and laughter are unbelievably prevalent on a college campus.

I love the sensory apparatus of writing. Even typing is a beautiful cadence of music to me—you know when you are really banging away, when you are really into it. There is a cool sound to it. I can still hear my father typing away furiously. Bang! And he would hit the return—the typewriter return. There was a sort of music to it. If I were a musician, I would try to write something like a choral, write a piece that was based on that.

—Brian Doyle 108

Creative impulse is not something that you could speak about in terms of responsibility because you can’t say that you have to be responsibly creative because you’re talking about something that just occurs. You know, you can’t design creativity. But the exercise itself, that’s where you can begin to consider the creation of the work and its distribution.

—Barry Lopez I am convinced that poetry existed even before language. Take, for example, seeing a picture in the New York Times of an Iraqi woman who is standing with her mouth open over her dead husband’s body. What is she doing? You know what she is doing. She is standing with her mouth wide open, and you know what is coming out of it. It is a long, unintelligible cry of pain and grief. It is something inexpressible. Strong feelings cannot be expressed. And yet you know what it is. You don’t know how you know it, but you do.

Two weeks after the world trade centers were destroyed, the bookstores could not keep poetry stocked on the shelves. That was the only thing people wanted to read. People didn’t know why they wanted to read poetry. Why was that? Because poetry was attempting to say something that could not be said, and people understood it. That is what I mean by “the unknowable.” This is why we must learn to listen. When we scream out of pain or joy, we don’t know what we are doing. We don’t really understand why we do certain things. We just do them.

—W. S. Merwin

Interview Highlights 109

W. S. Merwin Interview

Inscape: Much of your poetry concerns itself with not knowing and with listening to the unknowable. How does a poet cultivate that ability to listen?

W. S. Merwin: We must want to listen. In reality, we already know

how to listen. Children know how to listen—it’s an ability that we are all born with. Before we can speak we can listen, listening comes before speaking and even before seeing. This is something that we share with the animal world. The animal world is very good at listening.

The things that stand in opposition to listening are social assumptions, by which I mean the assumptions or expectations of the culture. For example, I have always been very suspicious of the digital world. I think the digital world is deaf—there is no sound there.

There is no sound in texting or Twitter or computers. You know, I think there is a lot of talent in the younger poets, but there is no voice. When I read younger poets I always ask, “Where is the voice?” This lack of individual voice, I think, comes from spending too much time with computers and electronics in general. If you 111

Inscape

spend too much time with computers, then you hinder your ability to connect with the sounds of the natural world. Think of what poetry is trying to accomplish. Technology is so different, so contrary to purposes of poetry and poetic language. I would suggest that younger poets spend less time with electronics.

You ask about not knowing. I am convinced that poetry existed even before language. Take, for example, seeing a picture in the New York Times of an Iraqi woman who is standing with her mouth open over her dead husband’s body. What is she doing? You know what she is doing. She is standing with her mouth wide open, and you know what is coming out of it. It is a long, unintelligible cry of pain and grief. It is something inexpressible. Strong feelings cannot be expressed. And yet you know what it is. You don’t know how you know it, but you do. This is the basic difference between poetry and prose. These are not the same even though they use the same words. Prose is about information, and it is relatively recent.

It’s very practical and we need it and we use it and it has value in our life, but when you read poetry it’s not just information, it’s something else. Poetry begins at the same origin of language—an attempt to say something that cannot be expressed. Two weeks after the world trade centers were destroyed, the bookstores could not keep poetry stocked on the shelves. That was the only thing people wanted to read. People didn’t know why they wanted to read poetry. Why was that? Because poetry was attempting to say something that could not be said, and people understood it. That is what I mean by “the unknowable.” This is why we must learn to listen. When we scream out of pain or joy, we don’t know what we 112

are doing. We don’t really understand why we do certain things.

We just do them. Why do birds fly south in the winter? We say instinct, but we don’t really know what that means. When you ride a bicycle, you don’t think about riding a bicycle, you just ride. You don’t know how to ride. You just do it. If you start to think about it too much, you’ll fall off. The unknowable is not some strange dimension or knowledge of the afterlife; it is something we all have carried with us since birth, something that we should value as much as we value memory. This is a part of the self and we cannot avoid it, although society will never encourage us to pay attention to it. If we do not cherish this primal instinct then we will be lost in life and in poetry.

Inscape: Your poetry has evolved in form and subject matter over

the years. Can you comment on this?

WSM: Well, for one thing, with age, my outlook on life has changed.

And with my change in subject matter, my form has changed also.

The form must match the content. Also, there are neoclassical ways of writing poetry and they should not be ignored or put down because they are quite wonderful. Read old poems out loud, read as much as you can. Each poem and each word is unique because they only occur once. And one of the great things about poetry is that is never stays the same, it is always evolving, always changing. And the poet has the authority to change the poetry, to change the form at any time. Not only can poetry change, but also should change. The poet should be tuned in to the world, to his or her surroundings and environment. The poet should watch and observe Merwin Interview 113

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everything and not let a moment pass by wasted. If a poet is paying attention to the world, to language, and to that innate sense of the unknown, then he or she will be able to evolve with time.

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Dr. Maureen McLane Interview

Inscape: What kinds of things inspire you to write a poem?

Maureen mclane: That’s a great, though complicated question.

I realize that I am inspired by something when I have a particular feeling. Maybe a sense of awe or wonder, maybe a phrase, a rhythm, or a musical sentence that will begin to float around in my mind. Certain events trigger certain phrases, with which I become absolutely obsessed. These phrases then turn over and over again in the mental chatter of my mind, the mental chatter we all live in.

I begin to feel more alive and musical, and I become more generative. Many of the seeds of my inspiration, or my poems, come in the very act of writing. I have a bunch of notebooks that contain jumbles and jumbles of random phrases, such as an overheard conversation, something plainly journalistic, or maybe a dream I had. There are also poems to be found in the simple act of sitting down to write. Stimulation from other people’s work also inspires me to further conversation. Or there are other times when I become irritated by something someone else has written. All of this inspires more writing.

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Inscape Inscape: Sting once said that inspiration strikes every day at 9 o’clock. Do you write poetry according to a schedule? Do you ever begin to write without any direction or knowledge of where you want to go? mm: Absolutely. I am amazed to find how some poets are able to write according to a strict schedule. It’s said that Gertrude Stein, for example, wrote every morning from four in the morning until ten everyday. I, myself, am not a poet of will. There are definite benefits in scheduled writing, in spending time everyday with poetry. But certain kinds of irregularity are good for a poet, for a person. I think there is value in spontaneity, in opening your mind to new environments, atmospheres, and times of day. Also, I think that one learns to tolerate silences. I think that if a poem is not happening, it’s just not happening. The world doesn’t need new poems in general. I believe that poems can be ferociously beautiful objects, and I would love to write lots of them, but I do not have the privilege of legislating when they will happen. William Carlos Williams once said that the most important thing about writing is not the writing itself, it’s being in the position to write. There is something honorable to be said about what writers are doing when they are not writing. So much of their time is spent getting the groceries, feeding the pet, doing homework, and all the while their subconscious mind is working, moving towards something worth writing.

Inscape: At what point do you feel at peace with something you have written? At what point do you feel ready to publish?

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MM: I know something is alive when I am endlessly revising it in my head. If I can repeat something to myself, then I know it is nearing its final form. If the poem compels me and continues to surprise me after each reading, then I know that perhaps the time has come to let it go into the world. I begin to sense this kind of inner feeling of alignment. I often draft and redraft in a notebook and then type the poem on a computer to make sure that the poem feels right in various places. I often find that things I assumed to be separate are a part of the same macro plan. Sometimes I spend months or even years writing the same poem without realizing that it is the same poem, and I continue working until I find the one that fits.

Inscape: Lastly, what kind of advice do you have for younger

writers?

MM: Read maniacally, and read people born before 1900. English is a huge sea. One should take the measure of the sea. This is not to say that the measure of the English language will appear in your work, but one should be equipped with language that is deep, and rich in form and sound. If you are a writer, words are your medium. Know your medium. You must know words the way a painter knows color. Young writers now will obviously have his or her passions and dedications to certain contemporary writers. The young writer should know where contemporary writers came from. The present is built on the past. For a young writer to know where literature is going, he or she must know the past. The newest stuff often comes through unforeseeable conjunctions. For example, I may find myself thinking, “Yes, that weird Victorian novel has some McLane Interview 119

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technique or language that I would like to use. Or that Chaucer poem has a kind of rhythm that I want to mimic.� Young writers are getting tons of advice from writing cohorts or instructors to read contemporary writing. My counter advice would be to go out there and explore the strange literature of the past, read against your own grain, test your tastes, read something that is not to your liking. See if there is anything that you can find, explore and bring to new light.

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Neil Aitken Interview

Inscape: It seems obvious to me that your poetry is strongly an-

chored with a sense of place. Could you talk about place and what part it serves or should serve in a poem?

Neil aitken: Margaret Atwood famously said that all Canadian lit-

erature revolves around weather and place. And I think that it is kind of inescapable that when you come from a country and spend enough time in a country where the land does dominate the field of vision, a sense of place does occupy much of what you write about.

But I also take some inspiration from a book by Frances A. Yates on the art of memory, where she talks about the history of mnemonics and systems of memory, and links these very closely to place. She talks about the fact that, classically, one moved through a place and identified elements of speech or whatever you were memorizing with certain landmarks or icons as you traveled through a space.

And so I think when you’re writing poetry, place is a part of that— we move through a space in a poem and there are landmarks within that and sometimes they’re anchored in our own physical geographies, and sometimes they’re anchored in more of an emotional topography that we’ve arrived at. One of my former professors talked 123

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about our own interior mythological landscape, and that in some way there are certain things or landmarks that we return to, and I think that any poem is an exploration of some aspect or some part of that larger place that is within us, but at the same time, exists in our memory as a place we’re trying to get back to.

Inscape: The reading of poetry is something that fascinates me,

and I’m curious if you could talk about your reading style, and how you went about obtaining that style.

NA: I don’t know if I’ve consciously sat down and said, “here’s my reading style.” I think if I take cues for how I read, it’s that I don’t want it to be overly dramatic and I don’t want it to be overperformed, but I do think that there is an obligation as a writer to present your work in the best light possible, to enunciate as clearly as possible, and so I try to take that as part of the cue. I grew up listening to my father read us every Christmas Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Whales, and I loved the sound of poetry, and I loved the sound of well-constructed language. Whenever I read, or even when I write, I’m listening to the poem as it unfolds, so I think I try to capture that when I’m reading—that sense that the poem is unfolding before the audience and even the poet as it’s going along. I’ve learned not to rush and I’ve learned that it’s important to have a bigger voice, but not a gigantic voice.

Inscape: So you would say that the verbal aspect, the performance

part of the poem, is a part of your writing process?

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NA: Definitely, definitely. When I was doing my MFA, one of my teachers asked us each to write a kind of manifesto or statement of one’s aesthetic and I realized that I didn’t really know how to describe it as one thing, so I ended up writing three, in an attempt to synthesize the different aspects. But one of the things that came out of it is that I really do believe that for me, writing is an act of invocation—that you write, and the act of writing then invokes the next thing that’s going to happen . . . you know, you invoke and you also evoke it, and so those things are simultaneously happening. Sometimes, when I’m writing, if I’m stuck I just start with the line I’m on and I read it again, or I start at the beginning of the poem and I read the whole thing out loud and the question is always “what comes next?” Then I’ll read it with the new part, and if it makes sense, if it stays together, I’ll keep it. If it surprises me, I’ll definitely keep it. If it seems too predictable, I’ll usually dispose of it and move on. But I’m always demanding something surprising from each line, and hopefully this keeps the poem as interesting and engaging and transformative as possible, so that it doesn’t seem like a static thing, so that there’s always a sense of surprise or turn. A professor of mine said something that I really liked. He said that “every line begins in a place of certainty, and ends in one of uncertainty,” and when you do that line break and return to the beginning of the next line, you want that sense of stepping out into the unknown, and then the sense of surprise when you arrive at some place you didn’t quite expect. I think that’s a key part—to always do that stitching back and forth.

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Inscape INSCAPE: As an artist, I am curious as to what came first: your painting or your writing?

NA: Well . . . that’s a really tough question. I think the writing probably came first. I painted through high school and then had to make the very difficult economic decision that it was too expensive to continue with artwork with the budget I was on. I have not returned to painting and drawing as much. Photography is kind of a newer interest. And I find myself interested in that, but not to the extent that I’ve invested in a very fancy camera—more in the terms of trying to pay attention to composition and taking shots. I’ll play with that a little bit, but that’s mainly what I’m doing.

Inscape: Do you feel like the writing led you to painting or vice versa; do you feel that they’re related?

NA: I definitely feel like they are related. I definitely think in a very

visual fashion; images really do crowd in as I’m writing. I just want to work with the image and have it unfold. So I think they’re intermixed; I don’t know that there’s a way to separate them. Even if you don’t paint, you can still be struck by an image, and it can lead to the writing of a poem. So the ekphrastic impulse is constant, and you become obsessed with certain ideas—not even ideas—certain moments, you know, fragments of an image will kind of haunt you.

I think if you read the book [The Lost Country of Sight], you’ll find that certain things are doing that; like I can’t escape them so they show up again and again in a different way.

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Inscape: Another [question] I love to ask writers is whether or not you have any quirks, or bad habits, or superstitions that manifest themselves in your writing process?

NA: Well, I can say off the top of my head that I am a terrible procrastinator. There are times when I’ll go long stretches without writing. And I’ve learned that’s okay, that sometimes you do need to take a break. And I’ll also write fragments but I won’t write the whole thing right away, or I’ll sketch it out and come back to it later. I think the other thing I do frequently is, as I was saying earlier, read the poem out loud as I’m composing—in the middle of it; and then I’ll listen to it, and then I’ll wait and hear what the next thing is. So it drives the next poem, it drives the next thing.

Occasionally there will be lines that I’ll end up cutting that I’ll use to start the next poem, and then I’ll cut lines from that poem. So there are a few lines that never actually end up staying in, which have led to poems. They’re kind of like sourdough; you plant them there in these poems and spawn wonderful poems, but they’re never the poem itself.

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An Elegy Becomes a Psalm: Dana Levin’s Sky Burial A Book Review by Conner Bassett

Levin, Dana. Sky Burial. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2011. 69 pp. $16.00 Like a graveyard, Sky Burial is crowded with a haunting silence.

Dana Levin’s language approximates the uneasiness of death, while divulging its gruesome details. Indeed, Levin’s own mythology of death is informed by Tibetan Buddhist burial rites, Aztec sacrifice rituals, and the death of her own parents and sister: The father died and then the mother died.

And you were so addicted to not feeling them, you told no one about the clap

inside— around the vena cava.

The work of Sky Burial suggests that the utility of art is found in its ability to cultivate a degree of discomfort within the reader.

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In this collection, a boy lights the bodies of dead animals on fire, human sacrifices are made to obtuse gods, the living-dead haunt dark corridors, and graveyards become a place of exploration. Such phenomenological details remove all cultural assumption and presumed expectations about living and dying. The discomfort we feel while reading Levin allows us to, as Buddhism preaches, abandon whatever it is we think we know in order to perceive new possibilities concerning our existence.

Levin rejects the need for meaning or logic in poetry. Instead, her poetic language creates its own kind of reality, in which we are forced to recognize the inextricability of death. Reading Levin’s poetry we find ourselves wandering through elaborate and haunting mazes, falling through trapdoors, discovering hidden corridors, and feeling our way through what seems like endless rooms of images both disturbing and breathtaking. Levin’s poetry is moving from place to unexpected place.

Levin often creates an experience by employing imagery and language that is valued for its emotional weight rather than its accessibility. In “Ghosts that Need Reminding,” Levin draws upon images according to their ghost-like impression. The result is a series of haunting objects that engage the reader in a lonely experience: Through shattered glass and sheeted furniture, chicken wire and piled dishes, sheared-off doors stacked five to a wall, you’re walking like cripples. Toward a dirty window, obstructed by stacks of chairs.

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And once you move them, one by one, palm circles through the grime and cup your hands round your faces, . . .

Levin adopts surrealistic and otherworldly imagery to reinvent our current, actual situation of mortality. Such imagery opens our consciousness to new, otherwise inaccessible influences. We as readers experience something that is simultaneously strange and familiar—something new and yet recognizable. Levin entertains this conundrum by de-familiarizing the commonplace.

Silence takes precedence in Levin’s work. The space between lines and sentences is laden with uncertainty and contemplation.

This technique often demands much of the reader, for Levin’s poetry frequently consists of lengthy meditations that lack cohesiveness yet bear the evidence of struggle and loss: Because

You believe in your skin, you must

elect the knife.

Peel the hair, the scalp-skin down.

Bow to the first bearing crown.

—

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The hook because he pulls (others to salvation) The noose because he binds (to the perfect wisdom) The lance, because he pierces false theories Intestines draped over his twenty-fourth arm to explain our essential situation.

These lines are wounded with the witness of death. Levin thus challenges us to face our “essential situation” or the palpability of losing not only our life, but also our identity. However, this is not your typical live-this-day-like-it-was-your-last storyline. Instead, Levin asks us to consider our response to death, mourning, and rebirth.

In this sense, Levin turns the process of grievance into a thing of serious beauty. Her elegy becomes a psalm.

If Levin’s poetics drive us toward an encounter with death, then I should also note that she accomplishes this goal on multiple levels. On one hand her poetry is full of emotionally charged language: You were anchored in the shallow boat. by his faceless weight— And on the green shore you could see their vapored

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reside, how they could smell it, those two: if you slit your wrists you could make them speak On the other hand, Levin’s tone is intellectually stimulating and psychologically difficult: I’d been waiting to know if it’s alright to live.

An accessional symbol on every level, the symbol book said.

Body of Ra. Solar victory. If you can believe in the book

of symbols.

This complexity of discourse lends Levin’s poetry both to a multiplicity of interpretation and to a depth of communication. Her language is rooted in the subtle tension of intellectually understanding the reality of death, and yet refusing to accept it emotionally.

In this way Levin highlights our emotional immaturity in the face of mortality. Additionally, her tense dialogue both creates a reality and reveals an inner world—her language both mimics her own experience and invents an experience for the reader. The outer reality of death is revealed by way of an inner reality.

Any clamor for location or paraphrasability in poetry is almost entirely dismissed in Sky Burial. Levin’s goal is to isolate. Her poetry strives to uproot the reader, placing him or her in a frightening landscape, where death is the “unshakable lens” through which Bassett 133

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all things are seen. Much of Levin’s poetry addresses the reader directly. This way, Levin invites us into her mental landscape.

Consequently, her poems do more than articulate an imaginary world, but rather, they allow us to experience that world for ourselves. Levin immediately removes herself from the poem as a means to a more collective exploration of consciousness. We see this in her poem, “Cathartes Aura”: That one must put color

to the lips of the dead—

file them in the ground under a name—

Smash the skull.

For the eaters, who will bear the used body away.

Levin slowly undoes us until we stand face to face with our own humanity; then, she abandons us so that we must grapple with that humanity individually. Her poetry yields a kind of frightening wisdom that, although often painful to read, is absolutely worth knowing.

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Contributors C. Dylan Bassett is studying Russian and comparative literature. He has

published over thirty poems, and various articles about the nomenclature and methodology of tutoring. He is an avid ultramarathon runner and plays on the BYU men’s soccer team.

Dallin Bruun says this is a true story: In the essay I refer to a humanities

class which I took in the fall of 2003. The next semester I enrolled in my required writing class, and the final project was an essay which I titled ‘Majoring in Everything.’ My professor encouraged me to submit it to BYU’s creative writing magazine Inscape. I did and was rejected. I revised, submitted and was rejected in ’04, ’05, ’06, ’07, ’08, ’09, ’10.

“Fountains” is the 9th version of that essay.

Ashley Chipman is a proud southern Californian from Tustin, CA. She is studying English and trying to decide what to do with it. Her best friends include the sun, her blue beach cruiser (named “BikeFriend”), bonfires, the beach, Augustana, and vanilla yogurt.

Brian Doyle is not the Brian Doyle who is Canada’s legendary young-adult novelist, or the Brian Doyle who played second base for the evil, satanic Yankees in the 1978 World Series, or the Brian Doyle who is a beloved Australian comedian, or Brian Doyle the astrophysicist who wrote On the Curvature of Space, or either of the Brian Doyles who once faced each other as goalkeepers in a college hockey game, isn’t that amazing? He was a visiting writer at BYU this past fall, and is the author most recently of Bin Laden’s Bald Spot & Other Stories.

Jonathan Garcia is an American studies major set to graduate in December 2012. Thereafter, he will study law. Born in Provo, Utah, he grew up in Highland, thirty minutes north. Regrettably, he has traveled only once to his parents’ native country, El Salvador. There he first tasted sugar-cane Coca-Cola and met fourteen ninety-sevenths of his extended

family. Among his favorite authors are John Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy, Gabriel García Márquez, and Ayn Rand. He enjoys writing poetry, Café Rio pork burritos, and conversations with beautiful women. Most importantly, he is proud to be twelve months sober from Facebook.

Bess Hayes is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at BYU. She enjoys

brussels sprouts and bull terriers, not together. She grew up in Salt Lake and has an undergraduate degree in German literature, though prefers German bread. She is monitoring the decomposition of a small bird corpse under a rosebush in her front yard.

Emily Ho is a mother to two crazy toddlers. She grew up in Utah and loves

the desert, but also loves the ocean and so will live in Pupukea and snark at the rest of you not living in Pupukea posthaste. That’s her five year plan—snarking and ocean-siding. Feel free to drop in anytime five years from now.

Natalie Johansen is currently in BYU’s creative writing MFA program. She

is an essayist and a lover of cats, chocolate, and warm weather.

Kylan Rice, poet by day, writer of fiction by night, hails from Southern Oregon. This is his second time publishing in Inscape, and his first time publishing fiction. He has won various poetry competitions, including a second place prize in the 2011 Hart-Larson Poetry Contest. He enjoys writing about sound and families.

Scott Russell Morris is a guy who likes to write and take pictures. He will

soon be graduating from BYU with an MFA in creative nonfiction. Scott’s creative work has previously appeared in Inscape and The Prick of the Spindle.

Katie Wade is working on an MFA at Brigham Young University mostly so

she can get out of the basement of the JFSB and hang out on the fourth floor with the cool kids. She hates when people try to tell her she doesn’t have red hair or green eyes. She’s 22. She knows what colors she is. She has a giant crush on her hometown, Santa Clara, Utah, and writes poetry only with the high hopes of impressing a certain volleyball player she knows.

Daniel Walker is a senior studying political science and plans to enroll in grad school next fall. His research includes nongovernmental markets and experimental methodologies. Inspirations for this piece include his wonderful friends and family, especially his mother who, as is shown, was kind enough to give birth to him.

Jason Zippro is Italian-American. His mother is a native of Turin, Italy, and his father is from Farmington, Utah. He has always been interested in art and writing—painting and poetry specifically. He hopes to retire early and spend his time being with his family, writing, starting businesses, and serving in the Church. He is a husband, a poet, and an entrepreneur.

Artwork Cover p. 10 p. 16 p. 19 p. 20 p. 21 p. 22 p. 30 p. 32 p. 40 p. 46 p. 58 p. 67 p. 70 p. 77 p. 80 p. 86 p. 90 p. 91 p. 94 p. 104–5 p. 110 p. 115 p. 116 p. 121 p. 122 p. 128 p. 135 p. 136 p. 140

Place and Line by Tiana Birrell.

Memory by Tiana Birrell.

Afternoon by Carolyn Carter.

Lake 4 by Carolyn Carter.

Lake 3 by Carolyn Carter.

Lake 2 by Carolyn Carter.

Lake 1 by Carolyn Carter.

Deer Creek by Carolyn Carter.

Bird on Wire by Carolyn Carter.

Bay by Carolyn Carter.

Psychological Shelters by Tiana Birrell.

Nomad 3 by Tiana Birrell.

Rock Canyon Route by Liz Crowe.

Bike Doodle by Tucker Johnson.

Creation Fulfilled, Illuminated Autumn by Olivia Bowen.

Intaglio by Tiana Birrell.

Nomad 1 by Tiana Birrell.

Morning Flowers by Carolyn Carter.

7 by Courtney Schramm.

Nomad 4 by Tiana Birrell.

[Untitled] by Tucker Johnson.

Paris by Carolyn Carter.

Under the Pressure by Rebecca Kharel.

Weathered By Yellow by Rebecca Kharel.

Time to Come Home (full) by Alyssa Roth.

Time to Come Home (close up) by Alyssa Roth.

Vatican by Carolyn Carter.

Shadowed by Courtney Schramm..

Discovery by Nathan Davis.

Nomad 2 by Tiana Birrell.

Editors

Chief Assistant Assistant Fiction Poetry Nonfiction Art Faculty Advisor

Jason Aldo Zippro Conner Bassett Jessica Anderson Shannon Williams Kylan Rice Bentley Snow Carolyn Carter Patrick Madden

Staff

Ari Alius Kathryn Brinton Sarah Brutsch Kevin Cook Tyler Corbridge Summer Ellison Melissa Felli

Bess Hayes Brandon Healy Carly Huchendorf Maren Larson Krista Rawson Christian Richter Tracee Tibbitts

Acknowledgments

Your hands and mine would not be holding this book were it not for the many hands—seen and unseeen—that have reached out to lift and help us during the creation of this journal. We extend our appreciation to Tiana Birrell for her willingness to provide her artwork for the cover of this issue. Our very profund gratitude for Brian Doyle, who let us publish his piece “The Mermens” in this issue, and for W.S. Merwin, Neil Aitken, and Maureen McLane, who spoke with us at length about writing and allowed us to grace our pages with their insights. We wish to thank Dana Levin, Brian Doyle, and Barry Lopez for their selected insights on writing as well. Our deepest thanks to our friend and faculty adivsor, Patrick Madden. He offered his wisdom, his humor, and the occasional Rush lyric in the production of this journal. A special thanks to John Bennion, who let us use his indispensable office while he was in London. Many thanks to our talented and dedicated editors and staff members. Another thanks to all those who have contributed their words and art to this issue—if it weren’t for them, Inscape wouldn’t be possible. Above all we thank the divine hand that has guided us all along in bringing this issue to life.

And finally, thank you, reader. Without you, there wouldn’t be any point in creating this journal. Thank you for reading.

Inscape Read online at inscape.byu.edu

View submission guidelines at inscape.byu.edu