Folio: A Decade of Arts and Letters

FOLIO

A Decade of Arts and Letters 1

“It is the joint effort of author and reader, which brings upon the scene that concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind. There is no art except for and by others.�

-Jean Paul Sartre

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[folio] A Decade of Arts and Letters (2008-2017)

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Letter From the Editor

As long as I was at Skidmore College, Folio’s tagline was “Folio: Skidmore’s oldest student literary magazine.” This always struck me as nonsenical, because first we are Skidmore’s only student literary magazine, and second, who gives a fuck if we’re the oldest?

This claim to longevity seemed to me a slightly underhanded grab at artistic legitmacy, not through quality of work but through mere prolonged existence. But as my time at Skidmore and with Folio wound down, I was struck by the sickening torrent of pregraduation nostalgia, as we distributed the last of the 2016-2017 edition, I found myself mindlessly clicking through Folio’s email account. I discovered that extreme disorganization is not a new occurrence in Folio’s leadership and that, in fact, the email account had not been cleared in about a decade. Not long into this email based dérive, I happened upon a batch of accepted submissions from years past. Then it hit me: I had stumbled upon an accidental archive of all of Folio’s work from the past 10 years.

Although I’m still convinced that being the oldest magazine doesn’t mean shit, this edition has shown me how Folio’s history matters. Each year’s editors create not only their year’s magazine but shape those yet to come by teaching and learning from the next generation of editors. When we joined Folio none of us knew how to make a magazine, and only by tapping into the collective knowledge gathered by editor after editor and handed down did we have the faintest clue what we were doing. So I would like to both thank and dedicate this magazine to not just the names listed on the following page, but all those that came before. Folio’s longevity may not always lead to a good magazine and it certainly doesn’t guarantee one but it does represent the perpetuation of an artistic community worth celebrating.

-Jack Schreuer

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The Staff Editors

Amy Milin Jack Schreuer Jeff Dingler

Treasurer

Anastasia Momoh

Faculty Advisor April Bernard

Cover Design Sam Malabre

Editors-in-Chief throughout the decade Jessica Spier (2008-2009) Stefanie Demas (2008-2009) Flannery Shanklin (2009-20010) Kelsey Leach (2009-2010) Jack Ferguson (2010-2011) Michelle Berdela (2010-2011) Nikkitha Bakshani (2011-2012) Emily Cohen (2011-2012) Josh Speers (2012-2014) Jon Lemay (2013-2015) Eliza Dumais (2015-2016) Zach Collins (2015-2016) Chloe Kimberlin (2016-2017) Jack Schreuer (2016-2107) Amy Milin (2017-2018) Jeff Dingler (2017-2018)

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Table of Contents Coelacanth by Katy Augustine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Fragments by Jake Musich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 The Swallows by Clara Moser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Birds by Jack Schreuer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Hermione by Emily Harvey Lacroix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Toughts on April’s Departure by Dana Gervasio . . . . . . . . 28 Mad Red by Chloe Kimberlin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Gala by Ben Profenius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 A Kalashnikov’s Bargain by Anonymous . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Fall by Clara Moser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Insomniac’s Reverie by Alexandra Klausner . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Confessions of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl by E. Sater . . 38 I Appricate the Gesture by Sarah Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41 Summer is slow by Jamie Thomson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Noumenon by Alexandra Chipkin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 The River of Smoke by Jeff Dingler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Lejos by Zoe Coleman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Faial da Terra by Jack Schreuer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 First Encounter by Sam Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 A Nondenominational Dying by Jeff Dingler . . . . . . . . . . 54 6

Dis-inherit: for my brother by Clara Moser . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Aliens by Dante Haughton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Zorah en Jaune by Nicolas Willams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58 The Popcorn Dielectric by Justin Gerard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 A Divine Breakfast by Gill Hurtig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Dial M for Mozzarella by Ramsey Daniels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 ‘Hello Darling by Monica Kessler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Miscarriage: On Aliza Shvarts by Clara Moser . . . . . . . . . 67 The Painter (Las Meninas) by Maria Llona . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 How I Became Me by Jamie Thomson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Fallen Apples by Michele Berdela . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Red— by Henry Coxe. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Gutted by Clara Moser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Cock Fighting by Sam Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 A Wake by Clara Moser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 A Most Odd Friend by Jamie Thomson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Poschiavo, Switzerland by Henry Coxe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

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Coelacanth (2009) Katy Augustine

The horizon is extinguished with ash-stark rain clouds, while fire toasts the dark interior of the earth. Night awaits the crashes and grinding of tectonic plates, and sunlight erupting through the rusting hull of our ghost ship. Sunk under the roll of waves, it descends to the midnight depth encased in seaweed and crustacean death.

In the icy plunge of the ocean, the seabed violently divulges the dread Coelacanth; a gnarled memory of a dinosaur the earth spits up, spotted in iridescent, lustrous blue.

It gnaws through time, voraciously clinging to life, a bedraggled remnant of the cretaceous period. It hoards life; paranoid and cautious.

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Fragments (2015) Jake Musich The hollow bones of the city laid open. Wisteria blistered beneath severe steel arbors. Helios arced west to the sea with steady conscience as slow stalwart bells pealed in their tower, muddying the pilgrim din below.

Repent. Repent. Repent. ∆ This studio is our tabula rasa. White page white sink white walls. And one cheap mirror haloed with ink and paint. The old model bends and the charcoal bends with her. Sweeping arcs join shoulder to thigh, hip to foot, in a pure unfettered dance. Olive skin clarifies firm muscles below. She is verse rippling with sinew, flesh, and bone. Gestures fall like leaves. I pass the briar of her womanhood; dark and furrowed like vineyard soil. The scalloped dimples of her back. Those proud, enduring eyes. I have forgotten myself. I am her skin, the charcoal, and the mirror on the wall.

“Basta!”

I wash my hands in the sink. Black eddies down the drain.

The model strides past, her paisley gown alights behind her. She disappears into the courtyard. I kneel over the drawings on the floor, a levy of marks and stains and streaks—a false mimicry. I cannot create her vitality. The subtleties of the ribs, the strength of her neck, are represented but inertly. Drawn, but without life.

That night I see the old model on the street, clothed in the normalcy of the crowd. Her face is old but smooth. We exchange smiles like secret confessions, but as we pass one another, I realize I’ll never truly see her. ∆ Hips of stone rise before the sea—a beckoning corpse—one cloven peak that swells patiently beneath a cloud of white silt. We ribbon skyward through a wound in the mountain, passing bearded ascetics and cavalcades of men, their faces upturned to the dim blue. The leather scent of their work lies low in shadowy gashes 9

beside the road, the sun browning nose and brow and earth as we bow and wobble over the cleaving heaps of stone.

A sign, Il Limite, stops us. We start on foot. Our path, a mess of rocks and grit, shifts beneath us. The dull rumble of heavy machinery fills our footsteps. After an hour, a final switchback brings into view a great cavern cut into the mountain. Smooth and rectilinear, the tunnel extends in to utter blackness—I imagine the heart of the mountain, a great cold thing that beats once in a human lifetime. I shudder despite the heat. Men and massive trucks pour out of the tunnel, wet with cutting fluid, with drills, levers, and cutting wheels lurching behind them. Trucks pass us laden with white flesh—the infamous marmo—the drivers steady despite the precipice beckoning on either side of the narrow path.

I’m an ant beside the trucks and mote of dust beside the mountain.

We climb further to the mouth of the tunnel.

Born to the woods and the open air, I do not venture under the mountain. Others do, but I’m cowardly, I only stand at the portal and peer down the vast corridor. Figures approaching from the other end, emptiness itself, grow from shadows into men. I meet gazes with a few, but their eyes are as deep and unshaped as the void from which they emerged. They have the same face and reticence as my father—I find myself thanking them as I turn to leave. Grazie mille.

A field of forgotten stone crowns the mouth of the mine.

Jagged blocks of every shape and color, many low and dejected sit beside the road; travertine reds nestle with sulfuric yellows, copper greens, and every tint of white. Cappella dei Principi in the raw. A lost sexual rite, marble flesh left in the sun.

I slip a leather throng under a piece of pure white stone, three by three, oblong and thick in the middle with no obvious cracks. I drape it over my back, bending beneath its weight. Its rough corners dig into me. The tether bites my shoulders with each footstep and a thin, bloody line opens on my shirtfront. The path, now a wave of rolling stones, unsteadies me. My stone fights in final protest. I’m stealing from the mountain (I’m stealing the mountain) and it’s punishing me. But Michelangelo and the Florentines built their city from the flesh of this very mountain! Am I unfit? Unworthy? I’ve yet to try. My lungs are airless dust. “But,” 10

I whisper more to myself than spirit of the valley, “I will make something beautiful out of you.” The trucks and men wind past, their mute thoughts echoing throughout the valley, my promise sealed but unsure. ∆ White flesh cracks under my hands. The hammer is unconscious breath, blow after blow. The legato ritual empties me. The hammer is ceaseless. My back is sturdy. The midday heat covers me with sweat. The unending hammer, the unyielding chisel. The figure suffers within the stone. I will free you. San Lorenzo sings.

Chnkk.

Chnkk.

A marble city. Marble men, women, warriors, priests, kings, boars, stags, trees, roses, and palaces. The marble dead sleep on their cenotaphs. Eyes frozen in dreamless sleep. This pale stone, born in the sea and purified by the earth, is Italian memory. Bitter, it tastes of countless years and countless deaths. Omnipotent like the duende, it mocks us foolish enough to think we can tame it. To be certain, we will become it. Imagine, a thousand civilizations, beliefs, and races forged into stone. A patient reliquary of mankind.

Yet, it crumbles so easily beneath my hands. ∆ The studio floor is harder and colder tonight. Ringed with rasps, flat chisels, and dust, I sit in a pentangle of finishing tools like a crude magician. Smoke wallows like incense. My fingers ache and my back is tight but the work is not done. The Danaid looks down on me with mournful incomplete eyes, her sallow latticework skin reflecting my lamp. She is waiting. Yearning. Countless hours have become the crease of an elbow, a collarbone, and an eyelid; but stone still holds her. My pace has slowed. Each strike is less fierce, less certain.

San Lorenzo sings the day’s last song. Repent, it says.

Long sleep beckons. The long way down, where dreams dwell. I try to press it back, drawing the smoke deep. My head spins. These days I dream only of her, of those unfinished eyes and the overflowing jug. Each night her slender lips become real and opens, she whispers, “You’ve tried. Go, this is my burden.” I try 11

to speak, but my mouth is a spring of brackish water. The more I try—if only to utter an iron “no”—the more she drowns.

I gather a handful of dust and let it fall between my fingers.

It spreads and settles on the tiles. Part of me wants to shave her down to a fine snowy powder, carry her to the sea in my pocket and wade in till the water covers us. We could sleep there on the ocean floor till we become the mountain once more. Maybe, a thousand years from now, a son or daughter might come along and purify us, acquit me. No, no I must burn myself on this pyre of art and leave fertile ash behind. Youth who undertake this journey will need pain and memory as nourishment and footprints in dust to know the path. ∆ If you look east before dusk, you can almost see the river rising from the sandstone slopes of Monte Falterona. It flows from the high vertebrae of the Apennines down into Tuscany, gathering tributaries and strength as it moves; fertile, life-giving force.

But here, at the narrowest shore, the Arno is a tame band of green water, a serpent ribbed by bridges. Bright laughter fills the banks and jetties; skiffs pierce the current; the city sparkles. The river trudges on unawares like a shimmering smudge, lapping and folding on the stone piers, burrowing ever deeper into the valley.

The current is patient, resolute, a pilgrim on the path.

I am still, despite it all. Quiet inside. Far away, and yet near at hand, rosy light floods the cypresses and the gnarled olive trees squatting on the hillsides and burns the churches’ golden domes.

In a mere moment, the last shards disappear behind the hills. The city darkens. The river exhales its endless breath, a sound that fills and carries me into the night. I head for the sea, buoyed by silt and dreams.

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The Swallows (2017) Clara Moser

I. My mother’s voice was a swallow, her mother’s voice was a swallow.

Together they went ringing over the fields and into eaves, pestering the barn animals.

I asked my mother why her voice was a swallow’s but she could only Jug, and Jug, and Jug, her wings beating round my head.

I asked her mother why her voice was a swallow’s but she could only Jug, and Jug, and Jug, her wings beating round my head.

Why do you never speak, I asked, as we bathed in the river and the swans sliced over a still bank– my mother only twittered and trilled, twittered and trilled round my head.

II. There was the beating of wings, the shrill sound of bird call over a red sky and I knew he would try to make a bird of me– my mother’s voice a swallow, her mother’s voice a swallow. who can only twitter and trill, Jug and Jug and Jug– 13

I had heard myself when speaking in the tongue my mother had before and my voice was not a bird’s, my tongue was not a bird’s.

So when he came down in the beating of wings I faced the God in his eyes and

laughed with my head thrown back and the swallows swooping.

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Birds

Jack Schreuer (2016-2017)

In time we will write odes to the birds, and sing to them as they have sung to us, but now they face the siege of bullet, and plane, and smog.

For when we crane our necks to the sky, we’re jealous of how close they fly to the gods, without the dripping of wax and plummeting into the sea.

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Hermione (2009)

Emily Harvey Lacroix

I. Clotho They say my mother’s face launched a thousand ships; it launched a thousand funerals too. They say Zeus courted Leda in the form of a swan and she laid two pearl-white eggs, from which my mother and her siblings emerged. They say my mother’s beauty strikes men dumb. They say my grandfather Tindereas forced all twelve bickering suitors to swear an oath of protection for whoever received the bride, and Sparta rejoiced at taking the most beautiful woman in the world for her queen. They say my parents spent five happy years together. But then they say the goddess of love promised my mother to Paris without a thought, just to win Eris’ golden apple, because goddesses can do such things. They say my mother walked to the boat without any of the silks or jewels she so cherished. And they say that twelve years later she lured my father back, saved herself from his vengeful, searching blade, by baring her cream-perfect breasts to him. No one will ever forget her name.

They do not blame her, but these things do not matter to me.

I was four when she sailed away. She patted my head without looking down and descended to Paris’ ship, blind-folded by cupid’s arrow. I heard her playing her little silver flute for him as the waves slapped against the docks.

My father raged, face as red as his hair. He is still that sort of Spartan.

I tried not to cry and waited for her to realize she’d forgotten me.

Then I waited with my father for the winds of war without understanding why. We left Sparta for Argos, to summon my mother’s former suitors, all great kings and heroes now, to fulfill their promise and aid in her recovery. While the men made their great plans for war, Iphigenia, Electra, and I played tag in the gardens. Though Electra and I were both quite young, Iphigenia 16

was almost nine, and shouldn’t have had the freedom to run anymore, but the women had little time to mind us while they gossiped about the approaching war. One warm, still day, Agamemnon called my cousin from the garden. Neither her sister nor I saw Iphigenia again. All the men sailed away to war; my father left me in the care of my aunt Clytemnestra, despite her mad grief.

Clytemnestra is dead now, killed by her son Orestes for killing her husband for killing her little daughter to appease the winds.

When my parents returned, more than twelve long years later, after the fall of Troy, my mother didn’t deign to look at me.

Neither of them embraced me. She followed my father up to the palace, azure eyes downcast but dancing.

I watched them walk away and saw myself in them both. I have his Spartan strength and her delicacy of features. Her fair hair tinged with his rust. I’d forgotten how much I looked like her, or perhaps I’d been too young and never known. I thought they’d turn and ask me to join them.

Finally I lifted my trailing silks and chased them up the hill.

II. Lachesis “Daughter.” My father greets me gruffly when I hurry to answer his summons. “At last you have become a woman.”

He sits just in front of the otherwise empty throne of Argos, not controlling—he is not king—but suggesting. I search for my mother, but she is not in the room. I try to hide my trembling hands, lowering my searching eyes in deference as I must. I want to look into my father’s face, study his features, and see what’s changed, or what I must remember wrong. I want to ask him if he missed me, or thought of me during the war, but he doesn’t invite me to speak.

“It is high time you were married,” he continues.

No preamble. No apology. “Yes, Father.” I know that at nearly seventeen I’m over-ripe for marriage, but I enjoy freedom. Suddenly, I can’t control the urge and ask, “Who?” because he wouldn’t have posed the question—it’s not a question—without choosing a man.

His eyes narrow. “Your cousin Orestes.”

“Father, he’s…” I trail off. I’m not permitted to protest or argue, only to accept, with joy. I lower my eyes and train them on the 17

empty throne instead of my sire—empty because Orestes lies abed mad in guilt for killing his mother to avenge his father.

His face might soften, but I cannot see clearly since I cannot raise my eyes to him. “I have already spoken to the groom. Everything is arranged.”

I wonder if what he says is true. Only Electra can make any sense of her brother, but she could never help me. And my father’s just come home! Of course, I do not say anything. I’m not allowed.

“I will commission your loutrophoroi and the women can organize the feasts,” he adds and motions me out. Before I go, he’s already turned his back to me. During our interview, he doesn’t once smile. x x x x A week later, I sit on the floor, piling my most prized possessions into a box to seal and give away. I pack my set of knuckle bones, my doll, and all my short childhood chitrons. Tonight we feast and celebrate. Tomorrow morning I’ll process through Argos and back to the palace, since father and groom live in the same place, and take the ritual bath with water poured from the loutrophoroi. In the evening, we’ll be married and Orestes will take me to his chambers. Then the day after tomorrow, we feast again and the deed is done. A woman wed, I answer to a new master.

The loutrophori is a hurried work, rushed like my whole wedding. The tall vase that will carry the water for my ceremonial bath looks meant for another couple. In the picture, Orestes stands much too high above my head and his arms are too muscular. My hair lacks the frizzy curl. The one thing the artist did get right is our clothes. We’re both pictured decked in jewels and fine silks to show the wealth of our families. In the picture he clutches my wrist, the true act of husbandly possession.

I cannot imagine Orestes as my husband. I think of my cousin as a brother, or at least I did, until the madness took him. He said Apollo ordered him to avenge his father’s murder by killing his mother; Apollo antagonized him for inaction, but now the Furies torment him for his crime against his own blood. I’m sick to death of revenge and I do not understand how the gods can demand it. Clytemnestra was by no means a perfect guardian for me or any of her children, but I think she loved us the best she could 18

while grieving her sacrificed daughter. She probably loved Orestes more than the father he avenged ever did. At least I know that though Clytemnestra didn’t love her husband, if not for the war, they would have lived contentedly enough.

I try not to think of unveiling myself to Orestes, or lying with him the day after tomorrow. It makes my skin crawl. Will he even know me on my wedding day? A stray tear leaks down my cheek. I brush it away with the back of my hand and set out across the palace compounds to see Orestes. After all, mad or not, today is the last I can speak my mind to him. x x x x “How is he?” I ask Electra from the doorway of Orestes’ chambers.

She raises her brown eyes to me with a tiny shrug. I see it more in her face than her shoulders. After waiting for her to beckon me in, I step through the threshold on my own.

Orestes lies on his couch, tangled in sweaty cloths. He moansand holds his head in his hands. Sometimes he slaps himself or claws at his face like a flea-ridden dog. When he scratches himself, Electra takes his hands even if all her meager strength can do his keep his fingers from his eyes. When he’s calm and whimpering, she sits by his side and tends the scratches or strokes his matted hair.

He was proud once, handsome, heroic, and strong. I could have done my duty and accepted him as a good husband. I look to Electra and find her sly gaze on me. “We’re to be married,” I tell her.

“I know,” she says, and wipes sweat off her brother’s forehead.

We stare into each other’s pupils. I always thought Electra and I should have been friends, since we grew up together, raised by her mother, and her just a year younger than me. Though she never seemed to blame me for being my mother’s daughter, I think she thought Iphigenia’s death was my fault. I blink first.

“Did my father really talk to him?” I ask.

“Does it matter? We have no king in Argos, no father, but yours.”

I’m about to apologize, but Orestes groans and heaves himself over on his side. His red-rimmed eyes pass through me without 19

seeing. “Electra, water,” he rasps.

She pours from an ewer and holds the cup to his lips.

Electra leaves to refill the ewer; my betrothed finally looks at me.

“Orestes, it’s Hermione. Do you know me?” I kneel before him and offer my hand, hoping to give him comfort. His eyes roam my face. “We’re to be married…”

His fingers close around my throat. “Do you see the blood?” he demands, standing and pulling me roughly to my feet. “It’s flowing down your face. Oh, the blood of guilt!”

“Orestes!” I pant as his grip tightens. “Orestes…Hermione.

We used…to play together…”

He hurls me onto the disheveled couch. I rub my throat and suck sweet air while he screams in no language known to man. He’s talking to the Furies, the whirling spirits of vengeance in his head.

I try to sit up, but he turns back and towers over me. “Absolve me,” he orders. “Absolve me!”

“Only the gods…Only the gods can absolve, but I can forgive…”

His face twists into a horrible sneer; he must know what I think of the gods. “Absolve me with your blood!”

He dives down on top of me and slams me back into the couch. His great weight is almost worse than his hands on my throat. I’m twisting and fighting and shouting, but nothing stops the hand pulling my hair or the fist pummeling my shoulders. I glimpse strands of my hair clenched in his hand, but I never felt him pull them away.

“Orestes, my brother, stop.” I hear Electra’s painfully calm voice, and he stills. Her hand hovers on his shoulder and somehow she pulls him up and off me.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, “I did not think…I was trying...”

“Go,” she says, already laying her brother back in his bed.

“Go, I’ll calm him.”

I flee. A sister, she’s the only one who could fill the role of wife to my mad husband. I will not marry him. x x x x When I told my father of Orestes’ madness, he told me the wedding proceedings could not be stopped. When I cried that I 20

would not marry a mad man and showed him my bruises, my father smacked my face and dismissed me. My mother told me that on their wedding nights all men are mad in some way or other, and Orestes was a better man than most.

So I sit at my betrothal feast between my father and my husband’s empty chair, eating little and wearing more veils than decency requires to shield my purpled face. Throughout the hall, guests make merry, and I can forgive them, because my wedding has become a feast to celebrate those few who finally returned from the war. I wish it were no more than that.

My father stands and raises his goblet. “To my daughter Hermione and her husband Orestes,” he yells, swaying a little on his feet. His cheeks shine red. “The groom’s not feeling his best,” he jokes, and to my surprise, almost everyone laughs. Electra would set her mouth in a line, but of course she’s with her brother.

“An understatement so I hear, your majesty,” booms a deep voice I don’t recognize. A little shiver cascades down my spine at the sound. “One that would offend the gods.”

My father’s eyes dart around the crowded hall. His skin looks very pale against his flaming hair.

“Did the mighty King Menelaus think he could forget his promise? If I’d known you meant to marry off my bride, I’d have come straight here and not stopped home in Eprius.” A dark, massive warrior steps into the center of the hall, dressed for battle despite the festive occasion. A strange sort of power radiates from him. I imagine he could crush my throat in one hand. “I didn’t forget your promise,” the warrior murmurs.

His last, quiet statement silences the party’s cacophony.

“Hermione, go to your chambers,” my father says and dismisses me. He waves to the servants and they start herding the guests out. Since my father seriously entertains his interruption, the stranger’s words must be true. My father notices me lingering and waves his hand again, staring at the warrior the whole time.

I stand to obey, but try to see more of the stranger through my heavy veils. I wish to know all I can of this man claiming prior betrothal. He seems, at least, sane. I cannot quench the surge of hope in my stomach. I make my exit as slowly as I can to hear their conversation, or at least the start.

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“Neoptolemus,” my father addresses him as the room clears.

“Call me Pyrrhus! We are friends after all, comrades.”

“You cannot expect me to honor foolish words in the heat of battle.”

“I should be glad the winds brought me here before you married my bride to another. I never realized why you raced home from Troy ahead of me,” the warrior laughs.

As the sound echoes, I remember his name: Neoptolemus, feared son of Achilles. He is the one they say killed Priam, king of Tory, by bludgeoning him with the body of his infant grandson until both elder and heir lay still. My father meant to marry me to such a man? I stop at the door, alone listening to the two men.

“Do you, King of Sparta, claim to have been driven temporarily mad by fighting? You, a Spartan, try to excuse yourself for battle fever? Are not the Spartans the only warriors who are always cool and logical? Spare me, Menelaus.”

My father says something I cannot hear.

“Before we squabble, let me see the girl,” Neoptolemus argues. “Maybe she’s deformed or cross-eyed or barren, and you just wish to trick me.”

“She will be wed and unveiled to Orestes tomorrow,” my father insists.

“Let me see her.” I’ve never heard anyone, much less a younger man, command my father. “You gave me first rights years ago, and those I will keep.”

“Hermione!”

I freeze and slowly turn to face him. If not for his rage at the warrior, he might well strike me for disobeying.

“Come here,” he orders.

I so wish for the father of my hazy memories: the man who bounced me on his knee, who tousled my curls, who sang. I take one cautious step back towards the high table. I see nothing of him in this harsh master.

“Stop.” Neoptolemus’ command rings through the room. My feet cannot help but obey even though I’m betraying my father.

“Menelaus, I’ll speak to her myself. Alone.”

It isn’t done, but my father does not protest. I think he’s afraid. Neoptolemus strides toward me, a man anyone can fear.

22

His steps stretch longer than two of mine. The earth seems to grow smaller as he approaches. I dart out of the hall.

Around the corner, he catches my wrist. I twist to get away.

“Enough,” he commands and pulls me to him.

My breasts press against his chest. I try to stand still but my legs tremble.

“You are not quite seventeen?” he asks. He loosens his grip, letting me step back.

I nod, surprised by his gentler tone.

“Good. Take off your veil.”

I daren’t disobey. Since he still holds my wrist, I clumsily pull my veils off with one hand. They flutter to the floor.

His face betrays nothing. It’s like stone. I study his face while his fingers study mine, but his chiseled jaw and dark eyes do not distract me from his calloused thumb trailing over my cheekbones.

The caress makes me shiver. I’ve never been touched by a man at all, except my father, long ago.

“Stop…please,” I plead.

The exploring hand slides down to the nape of my neck. I close my eyes as he slips the fabric of my gown over my shoulder.

This time, his touch stings; I remember the bruises.

“Who did this to you?” he demands.

I open my eyes and raise my chin. “He didn’t mean it…It’s not his fault…”

“Who?” “Orestes.” His face clouds. “He’s mad; he didn’t mean it.”

Neoptolemus releases my wrist and circles me. Every time he walks behind me, I feel like I might swoon; I dare not turn around, but I cannot bear the lion at my vulnerable back. “Do you wish to marry Orestes who did this to you?” he finally asks.

I shake my head. No. “You are lovely, Hermione. Many men would want you.” He stops behind me, fingers light in my hair. I feel him smell my hair, then his warm breath on my neck. “It would be silly to waste tomorrow’s wedding feast.”

I force myself to stand perfectly still. I will not let my legs tremble. I know full well that no girl makes her own marriage, nor does she break her father’s arrangements. But I will not go to Or23

estes and bare my body for his madness. If he were not mad, I could suffer marrying a cousin so like a brother. I could do my duty then.

But now, if I can just turn around and whisper my agreement, I can take my fate into my own hands, just for a moment. I can choose.

Neoptolemus is a perfect stranger, but he’s sane. He knows who I am. He seems, against the odds, to want me. And if I do not escape now, my father will marry me to mad Orestes tomorrow.

I turn to face Neoptolemus and scrutinize him again. Sane is safer than not, and for a husband, stranger better than brother.

My wedding to Neoptolemus is quiet and hasty. We use the loutrophori hurriedly prepared for my wedding to Orestes, but at least better suited for my wedding to Neoptolemus. He fits the figure of the tall, strong warrior. Next to him, I look and feel like a child, just as the loutrophori depicts, as it’s supposed to be. My husband holds my wrist through the whole ceremony, not just to drag me away at the end. After the wedding, he leads me through the streets to his ship with incredible tenderness. We’ll spend the night sailing, reaching Eprius in three days time.

“You’re beautiful,” he whispers as he undresses me by candlelight that flickers with the ships’ undulations. He stands behind me fully clothed, hands light on my goose-pimpled shoulders. “You do your mother proud. You have her power about you.”

His words should not make me angry. I swallow the first retort that comes to my tongue, that I don’t want to be anything like her, not even her honored image. My looks are the only legacy of her I have. I can’t find any of her sway over destiny in myself, if she even had any power at all. I press my lips together to keep from dishonoring myself and my heritage. My marriage frees me from my father’s family and delivers me to my husband’s. I needn’t remember or care about my father yelling that I’ve betrayed his word or dishonored him. I try to be proud of my beauty for my husband’s sake.

Neoptolemus loosens my hair from its coils, weaving his fingers through the strands close to my tingling scalp. His mouth brushes the top of my head. “I would not have you afraid, Hermione,” he murmurs.

I turn to face him, wrapping my arms around my nakedness as best I can. “Neoptolemus, my lord, I…” 24

He presses a finger to my lips, then raises my chin and kisses me. I gasp. “Call me Pyrrhus,” he murmurs against my mouth.

“Pyrrhus,” I whisper back, forgetting all but obedience.

My husband gathers me into his arms against his chest, pressing my head to his shoulder. I take comfort in the concealment of his robe, though I know he must feel the heavy thud of my heart. His palms travel the planes of my back, down over my back side, and around my thighs. The touch simultaneously increases my fears and comforts me.

He smiles against my ear and pulls my hands inside his loosened robe. He lowers my fingers to parts of men I’ve only seen in statuary while he strokes my breasts. He encourages my blushing exploration as he gentles me.

But the seduction cannot last forever. At long last, he lays me down and thrusts inside. There is horrible pain and my blood staining the sheets, but he kisses my cheeks and eyelids to comfort me as best he can. x x x x I’m still sore and wincing from three nights of learning to make love when we arrive at his house in Eprius. The marriage bed is not pleasant, but I trust my husband. In his embrace, I feel his undivided attention. He honors me with more respect and tenderness then most men give their wives. Eprius, he tells me, will be my domain.

Then I meet Andromaque. She’s about my mother’s age and beautiful. Her hair shines like dark spun gold and she blooms despite her grief. Andromaque was Hector’s wife. Neoptolemus’ father Achilles killed her husband; Neoptolemus killed her infant son and his grandfather. Now, she is my husband’s concubine, taken from Troy. Her belly swells with his child.

“This is Andromaque,” my husband says, nodding his head at her. “She is yours to command, wife.” He treats her like a servant, placing me in control of her too.

We are left alone together, the women of the house. We sit down to our sewing. I don’t know what to say. I cannot command this elder woman with prior claim to my husband despite my supposed power as his wife. I didn’t expect her, but maybe my father did when he tried to rush my marriage to mad Orestes.

25

“You’re her daughter?” Andromaque whispers, hands busy at her loom. “You have her nose and her chin.”

She underscores the resemblance. I hear sadness, but I can’t tell if there’s blame in her voice. I expect blame. “I barely knew her,” I counter.

“I see.”

“She left when I was a child and she barely spoke to me when she came back,” I try to keep the anger from my voice. I cannot blame this frosty creature for disliking the woman who destroyed her world. “You probably knew her more than I.” Color spreads over Andromaque’s high cheekbones. “Spare me your jealousy. I wish I had not.”

I want to cry. “She was my mother,” I whisper. For the first time, I’m the woman of the house. I married, as I must. I finally have achieved some status and power, at least as much as a woman can have, and this woman will haunt me. And she was here, was his, languished in his arms happily or not, before me.

“Forgive me,” she murmurs, lowering her eyes. “I cannot always control my grief.”

I study my sewing. We do not speak. x x x x While Andromaque moans in childbirth, I morn my flat stomach and steel myself outside her chamber. I should be inside, helping, cooling her forehead with damp cloths as the lady of the house. It is a duty I cannot do when I envy even her pain. I watch the midwife leave the chamber to report to Neoptolemus. She brushes past me without giving the news, but her beaming smile says enough.

Neoptolemus joins me in the corridor. He takes my hand and squeezes my fingers. “You should celebrate the birth of my son.”

“Not my son.”

“Hermione,” he chides, as if this jealousy is petty. He tells me again and again that he does not care for Andromaque as he cares for me, but he seeks her at night whether I lie with him or not.

“He’s not my son,” I wail, trying to keep my composure.

“You are my wife.” He rounds on me and takes my mouth with a ferocity that drives me back against the wall. Punishing.

“Know your place.”

26

“I know it, my lord,” I mutter. I hate the coldness in his eyes.

I hate myself for giving into the chimera of jealousy that sparks his anger.

His face softens and he strokes my cheek. “I leave for Thebes tomorrow. I would not have you angry with me.”

“Another battle?” I ask. Regardless of my jealousy, I don’t want to be alone in the world without him. I despair to think of losing him and what little of the world I know.

“Yes.” He studies my expression; I think he takes pleasure in my worries. “Orestes will fight. He is well now.”

I nod. “Apollo absolved him of his crimes and called the Furies off. They say he had no choice in his actions, so the gods forgave him.” I’ve not seen Orestes since the day before our wedding was supposed to occur. I do not wish to see him again. For all my husband’s harshness, I made him my master. “You will come to me tonight?”

I almost expect him to make a comment about Andromaque, or my usual ambivalence. I could do without the physical duty, but I need that time where, for someone, I’m the only person in the world.

Neoptolemus kisses my forehead, nods, and brushes my lips with his. Then he smiles and goes to see Andromaque and his son.

III. Atropos I thought I had made a choice. I thought I chose my future. I tried. I thought I avoided turning into someone like her.

Three years later, while I awaited my husband’s return from war, Orestes came and ordered me home with him. He killed Neoptolemus, murder or not, in battle. According to the world of men, this is fair and just. I hung my head and followed him back to Argos, abandoning Andromaque to the vicious mercy of some other master. I did not want to go, to leave her or my husband’s memory. Orestes claims his prior betrothal to take me to wife and I am not permitted to disobey. Now sane, he is mild mannered, without any of Neoptolemus’ severity, but in the marriage bed, he barely looks at me.

I bore Orestes two healthy sons who grew into great warriors. But I am glad our only daughter died before she could walk.

27

Thoughts on April’s Departure (2010) Dana Gervasio

I My idea of meditation was to begin by naming waves, then dubbing Oceans, until the salty curls, irked, would throw the shells of something clamped upon the sand.

But I did not expect ever to pry its case apart.

II I don’t remember our conversation, only that it whirled like propellers, perpetual and blurring.

Whatever was said joined the hum of locomotion and spoke of leaving.

III I said, “It’s only a temporary thing,” as if we had another option.

You said you’d call from the airport.

IV Like Hiroshige’s eddies, clear-edged fingers fringe the waves.

The tea-water boils from what it was.

The tide collapses on itself. It sighs.

It rolls towards broken earth. It sighs.

28

Mad Red (2017) Chloe Kimberlin

The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally... She had been given something infinitely precious.

—Virginia Woolf The memories are perverse, belonging to a past self; I am no rightful owner.

(A quality which could only exist between women, between women just grown up…)

When every redhead makes me remember those fast, mad days, I feel perverse.

(A presentiment of something that was bound to part them...)

A sampling from my pirated treasure trove: your favorite song—Folsom Prison Blues; the peachy tint of your nipples; the way you hung clothing on your bed frame, how the long velvet dresses sometimes brushed our ankles; your bedside lamp with no shade; the number of drinks—red wine a bashful crescent above your lip— after which you’d sob, scream, hit the floor and wail like a wounded coyote; the sudden power that bloomed between us, frightening and enormous; the true feminine mystique: how I wanted to worship you, sacrificial and transcendent; the nightmares; the murmurs and thrashing; your mother’s knock on the door.

(In those days she was completely reckless…Absurd, she was— 29

very absurd.)

I have no right to remember these coveted details, or feel any thrill at their intimacy.

They were given to someone I no longer recognize.

I have no right to nod, smile, to feel those memories shining a spotlight, releasing all those mad birds to flock around that mad love, a lightbulb, glaring and burning without a shade.

30

Gala (2015)

Ben Profenius

Last night I took a tumble down red carpeted stairs in a golden gala room, holding a pee-wee rifle and entangled up with a dumpy girl who said in rapid succession three times, “I love you.”

She was the drunken progeny of the gala collective, generals who all wore uniforms dated to the turn of the century, all stood eight feet tall, soft, bald, and shaped like eggs.

They pulled her tongue from my mouth, and put it in their pockets, sewed the slit in her dress so she was trapped in a velvet cocoon, then escorting me down a grand hall filled with doors with lion’s paws for knobs, I heard sounds of hell, burst shells, screams and propellers.

The door that hid these sounds opened up, and together in unison the generals asked me, “Does this war suit you well?

If not, we have others.”

31

A Kalashnikov’s Bargain (2017) Anonymous

I had always found beauty in thick white smoke until the 62CS riot gases filled my lungs and almost choked me to death. The sound of sprayed bullets had always excited me, until the 39mm cartridge penetrated my best friend’s chest. I had always enjoyed running in public parks, until we secretly buried martyrs under swing sets, because the government did not allow the funeral to reach the cemetery.

The Syrian government had not only blocked the road to the cemetery, it had also blocked the road to life outside the boundaries that the secret police had drawn. The propaganda that the government had shoved into our brains since the 1970s had castrated our ability to dream about a society in which we could choose our own destiny. The brutality of the regime had painfully taught us that if we ever dared to dream, our visions would be soon covered by the white smoke of 62-CS gases and punctured by 39mm Kalashnikov Bullets.

I was as familiar with a Kalashnikovs’ open fire as I was with the call for prayer that erupted out of the mosque five times a day.

At my cousin’s wedding, I fired more than three magazines into the air in commemortion. I also witnessed fire exchanges between Fatah and Hamas on the streets of our camp. But on April 22, 2011, the sound of the Kalashnikov was different. Very different.

April 22, 2011. A Friday. Khaled Bakrawi, Ahmad Alkousa, Oday Tameem, and I were nervously waiting for the Imam to finish his Friday preaching. I always wanted the Imam to finish early, because I wanted to go back home and enjoy the big meal of the week. But on April 22, 2011, I was not thinking about food. I was waiting to break through the wall of fear that had surrounded me since birth. My friends and I were waiting to partake in one of the first protests against the Syrian government in Damascus.

We were not exactly sure how things would end up. But we knew pretty damn well that it would not go smoothly. The Imam 32

finished his speech and started the prayer. We were a few words away from the end of Friday’s rituals and a few seconds from the start of the protest. I was scared. I felt bile in my stomach, dizziness in my head, and unsteadiness in my knees.

“Alhamdullah.” The Imam ended the prayer. Khaled stood up and shouted, “Thepeople want to topple the regime.” This was a cry that had already been used by protestersin other Arab Spring countries. I took a few more minutes to talk to Allah because I knew that there was a good chance that this Friday prayer could be my last. Nevertheless, I didnot ask Allah for forgiveness, but I asked him to bless my family with patience if anything“went wrong.”

The sound of protesters that surrounded Khaled in the mosque’s plaza became louder and louder. I finished my prayer. I stood up, keens shaking, joined the crowed, andshouted with my parched throat: “The people want to topple the regime.” I felt liberatedfrom fear.

Yes, I was scared. But in Arabic, to be scared is not the same as to be afraid. We were scared because we were taking action. We were not afraid of takingaction.

My scared feeling turned out to be neither misplaced nor irrational. A fewminutes later, a queue of black armored trucks arrived. The first soldier who got out of thetrucks started spraying bullets in the air from his Kalashnikov, while tear gas bombs filledthe air, followed by angry riot officers armed with batons. The Kalashnikov sounded different than it had at my cousin’s wedding.

It did not sound more terrifying, not exactly. The police were not targeting us, at least not yet. But the Kalashnikov sounded more threatening, not to our lives, but to our dreams and our future.

The Kalashnikov was telling us: if we wanted to walk in Damascus’ historic alleys without fearing snipers and check points, we had to accept that politics was not a topic of conversation.

The Kalashnikov was telling us: if we wanted to enjoy the jasmine smelling air of Damascus, not choke to death from chemical weapons, we had to give up our right to rule ourselves. The Kalashnikov was telling us: if we wanted to wake up in the morning to the sound of birds, not to the explosion of barrels, we ought not ask questions. The Kalashnikov was giving us an ultimatum: either 33

peace sponsored by authoritarianism or warfare for demanding freedom. *** Saratoga Springs, NY 2014. After a long night full of laughter (and drinking) with my new friends, I went back to my room. I was half-high, half-sober. It was 2a.m., and I was checking my Facebook feeds. The Syrian Revolution in Damascus page had posted a new album of photos of the dead whose identities were unknown.

The pictures had been taken by a soldier in the Syrian military and were leaked from a high security prison called 215.

Some of the faces in the pictures wore smiles. Some other faces were completely smashed from torture. All of them had a number on their forehead. At first, I was sad. But soon enough, I started mindlessly clicking the arrow on the right side. There were hundreds and hundreds of pictures.

Wait. Who was in the photo I had just passed? Go back. I slowly moved the mouse to the arrow on the left side. I was afraid to press that button. Reluctantly clicked. It was Ahmad Alkousa.

My hand left the mouse and quickly covered my mouth. Ahmad had been a handsome blue-eyed young man. In the photo, he had an incomplete, messy and long beard. His face, let me say, had looked better in real life than it did in that picture.

I was sad for Ahmad, but my first instinct was: who else?

My right hand remained on my mouth. My left hand reached for the mouse. Moved the mouse to the right arrow. Click.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Wait. That is Oday Tameem. Fuck.

Who else?

Click faster, and faster and faster.... Look for distorted familiar faces. *** Albany’s International Airport, March 16, 2015, the fourth anniversary of the Syrian civil war.

Sitting by the large glass windows, I was reading a report titled “The Syrian Conflict in Numbers.” According to this report, 34

560,000 had died. 70% of Syrians were displaced. 80% of children were out of school. 75% of the population was living in poverty.

The boarding call interrupted my thoughts. *** After me, Khaled, who is buried in a public park, was the luckiest of all of us. Hewas only shot in the chest and did not die under torture. Or maybe, I am the least lucky, because I had to see the rest of them die and my country burn.

35

Fall (2017)

Clara Moser

I wanted to stay in the falling light of the sun that seemed to cackle in a coming blue; in the cold smell of smoke and frost that crept over brambles and hillsides.

I was small. I didn’t know what dying looked like except that this death with its golds and reds so much like fire felt the way beauty sounded.

She was holding me and we were talking in a language she had taught me.

Its sounds and rhythms I had trouble working into a swell rising in my throat.

There were no more crickets, there was only the murmur of distant voices, heard in echoes over water as the sun hushed and the air became violet-blue.

As we fell into total darkness I asked to stay and see; although I was crying and could no longer make out her face in the dark and the moon was out with his sharp sickle cleaving into the night sky.

36

Insomniac’s Reverie (2009) Alexandra Klausner

I dare not gaze at the red blinking eyes of my bedside clock.

Instead I count the number of times I press my cheek to the cool side of the pillow.

I shift focus to my white stucco ceiling.

It looks like whipped cream.

If I open my mouth maybe it will drip onto my tongue.

I cannot dream— but exhaustion breathes stale life into the furniture of my tiny candy wrapper, dirty laundry, old test, cluttered room.

In the darkness my wooden desk is a haunted castle tower.

I pretend my flap-jawed heater Is the sound of a moat inviting me in, never letting me out.

My puffy coat becomes a black hole on my wall.

I imagine getting sucked in.

There’d be no trace of me just my body’s brief warm indent— curled up in my sand-colored sheets like a fossilized snail.

37

Confessions of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl Emily Sater (2017)

April

To be, or not to be… To exist or not to exist. To literally be.

To die, to sleep… to sleep, perchance to dream…To wake, to live?

Is sleep death and death sleep?

The absence of sleep feels more like heaven than my dreams. Pure exuberance. Pure ecstasy. Blood turning to gold. A final understanding with such certainty. True transcendence. I was the perfect microcosm; the perfect speck of dust or glitter in the macrocosm of the universe, the cosmos.

Perfect harmony and warmth. Another messiah born. A line of royalty? No, a line of angels, living on earth in the heavens.

January a motorcycle – winding as you POp your ears. Further up -- diagonally – he goes. You feel like you’re gonna fall backwards down the bench. I’m Alice, Falling – warmth in your hair – fingers in your hair – warmth in your fingers – your hair. but hush bright light as you’re sitting out in the night. Looking down to your room, you see an orb of warmth.

Your light. Candle fright. Don’t burn up room, you wish.

Fuck look up man, you hiss. It burns to see technological light in the night. You see stars and you’re awed, you see stars and they’re flawed. Planes are not mars; you saw no stars. Warmth in your toes, your girlfriend’s pink socks on your toes. But her nose, that small nose… her blue, flowered cargoes. Alice – 38

falling down the sand hill. Alice - taking a hypnotic pill. As you swallow your cherry lolliPOp spit, you saw stars. oh, you wish.

February Deep, knowing, glassy eyes that remind me of my girlfriend’s eyes, well let me clarify, my ex-girlfriend’s eyes.

Bitch.

Empty silences and empty brains. I’m more invested in his purple velvet couch than I am his words.

I rub my hands against it. Back and forth feeling the change of grain. Sticky, sweaty palms. The sun is glaring at me. I furrow my brow and try to endure. No longer can I; I make a visor with my hand.

He notices.

He says something and lowers the shades.

January Assaults shatter out of my mouth as I look down at you sitting on the floor in your underwear, like a child.

I look up and I see my face, painted and starring back at me. On each wall and even on the floor is my face.

I have no control over my mouth as it yells and shouts.

All I want him to do is hear. To wake up and listen.

My glass house is shattering and a little girl in a blue dress runs out chasing a rabbit.

I am the girl. She is the rabbit. But I run circles around her and I cannot pause.

I come home to what I think is a game. I run around the house finding clues that have not been left for me.

My imagination leads me out back, up the stairs onto the outlook. They bring me soup and take me back downstairs.

They feed me bite after bite of chocolate pudding. I swallow the pill they hand me, close my eyes and grab each hand I can reach.

39

And soon‌ Alice fell back down.

August Remembering in an office chair, wooden and stiff Lines on a cotton bed sheet, tracing the outline of your leg.

Down into the well I fell – Into an existence of empty energy; A nothingness felt through vacancy of thought.

The bed became empty too All the lines disappeared and my place lost.

I am nothing and nothing am.

40

I Appricate the Gesture (2010) Sarah Phillips

I. Your eyes are like wolves and my blood gets thick like paste when you look at me.

Have you ever given yourself up to anything?

Everyone does ugly things and seeing you I run upstairs feel

thudthudthud in my thighs.

You follow, pressing me into coals burning in the bath and milk spills out my mouth against my fresh bubbling sores. Pink yellow gray. Sores.

I forgot to fight.

II. my tongue dribbles words and words when I see your face. your dark thick face. (now mostly so you’ll see my teeth) was I ever right to put you first? you gave me lists of reasons why standing out in cold cures depression and I let you pick me apart like a matryoshka doll and I painted my face to match your lumberjack self I want to tell you you can’t escape your disgusting resplendence and I won’t ever dream of sliding a knife through your foot.

41

Summer is slow (2013) Jamie Thomson

My porch is a very good place to make friends in the summer, casually consuming beer or rum if you please neighbors leaning out of windows like beanstalks in the sun cars whizzing around, busy bees chasing pollen from the clouds.

The family next door is baking lasagna a bicycle is locked to a fence and I am seated here on my porch reveling in the flawless machinery of everyday existence.

Will you not smile with me today?

For even the termites stop to listen to the music of aimless chatter ears perked like chickens feeding pausing, trying to decipher what it is that I love so much.

This is my porch, you see and I will share with you my temple of peeling paint and rusted railings if you will but stay this evening with me.

42

Noumenon (2013) Alexandra Chipkin

I hear there is a pocket of air—a stillness— in the second chamber doing nothing until it pops.

I saw once under a microscope in a rat splayed and displayed liquid layers lapping up the void that once endured.

If I look, alive, it dies.

Not seeing, though, it bursts the same.

Neither rooted nor purposeful, fluid nor bound.

The empty filling up my core.

43

The River of Smoke (2017) Jeff Dingler

With gambled desires and days, Dezzie breathes the river of smoke through her nostrils, and passes the happy glass my way.

Resins of dreams and doubts disturb this street-lit night. In the endless alley below, there is the stench of another boy shot without a word.

And from this floating window there is no way to say how humanity squirms, except in the gathered steam that makes the center glow.

“We may be city, outta luck and broke,” Dezzie coughs dead fire, “but for the saints and sinners, we all swim in the river of smoke.”

44

Lejos (2017)

Zoe Coleman

I murmur buenos días to the new families as they enter the air-conditioned room. They peer hesitantly at me, noticing my blonde hair and pale skin that seem out of place amid their dark bodies. They are fleeing their homes in Honduras or Guatemala or El Salvador, and to them I am just another American in a bright volunteer shirt, watching. The adults sip watery coffee while the children drink bright blue Gatorade from Styrofoam cups, crowding around the plastic tables of the comedor. I smile at their tired faces, trying to show sympathy, wanting to distinguish myself from the rough, burly Border Patrol officers who dropped them off here, at this small church in McAllen, Texas, on the border of Mexico.

A woman at the far table sits alone, hunched over, her swollen eyes staring vacantly at the fried potatoes, juevos con frijoles, and pan dulce on the plate in front of her. Her clothing hangs on her youthful body, the soiled fabric enveloping her small breasts and slim frame—she looks fragile. The woman’s nails are painted pretty pink, like mine, but I can see the ring on her finger when it catches the fluorescent light. I try not to notice the tears rolling quietly down her cheeks, or the fact that she looks my age. On the woman’s right, her small daughter holds her hand, tracing delicate circles around the knuckles over and over, like a paint brush on a dark canvas of skin.

The other families talk quietly around the girl and her mother. I catch fragments of these conversations, the Spanish words slipping smoothly over one another like water over rocks. A woman with a drawn face tells the teenaged boy next to her about the six days she and her son spent in a freezing cell, un congelador, after being detained at the border. Across from them a man gently holds his infant son, trying to feed the child pieces of mushed banana as he talks into a cell phone—maybe speaking to a doctor, maybe to his wife—his phrases short and choppy and urgent. In the corner a family huddles close together, their eyes closed, their 45

hands folded over beaded rosaries, muttering in unison just loudly enough for me to hear the words gracias a Dios spoken in prayer.

A boy in a Ronaldo jersey climbs clumsily onto the table in front of me, his tiny hands struggling to hold up his oversized jeans as he reaches for the plate of food yelling mis tortillas triumphantly in squeaky, perfect Spanish before erupting into giggles. A few of the adults smile approvingly.

But the small girl continues to draw circles on her mother’s hand, her bony knees drawn up to her chin, watching silently. She is quieter than the other children I have met, more timid than Adriana who vaulted onto my lap in her sparkly princess dress singing galletas quiero yo until I snuck her another cookie, winking dramatically at our shared our secret, or Samuel who made goofy faces at me, his tongue sticking out through his chapped lips. I want to ask this girl what her favorite color is, or just her name, to distract her from the weary faces of the immigrants who continue to shuffle in, their papers clutched tightly in their hands, their shoes missing laces, their steps monitored by the thick plastic GPS bands around their ankles, marking them as unwanted, ilegal. I wonder if the girl notices the one that encircles her mother’s ankle. I wonder if she knows what it means.

“Han terminado?” I ask them, gesturing at their untouched plates of food. The woman nods and stands, reaching for their faded green backpack. The thick straps are worn from use, the fabric dusty and frayed from days and weeks of traveling across la frontera, away from home. I do not know how they got here, or if they are alone, but I cannot bring myself to ask. I am scared I will hear a story like the ones I have heard from the woman who held her son’s hand for three days as they walked through the scorched desert, or from little Pablito, who crossed with his sister, their two small bodies squeezed together in the dark bed of the coyotes truck, or from the pregnant 18-year-old who was beaten and kidnapped by sequestadores in Vera Cruz and arrived at the church bruised and alone.

I look down at the girl, admiring her small white sandals with ladybug buckles, her blue dress with pale butterflies fluttering around the hem, her thin beaded bracelet dangling on her wrist. Her black hair is dirty, pulled into a long braid, the way I 46

wore my hair as a child. I used to watch my mother in the mirror, enjoying the feeling of her calloused fingers caressing my scalp as she separated my hair into three sections and carefully wove them back together every morning. I imagine the girl sitting with her mother at a train station, or riding some bus north, their blue tickets clutched in the girl’s hands, their green backpack at her feet, her mother braiding her hair, calmly, methodically. I know it is a hopeful image—an unrealistic idea of their journey—but I hold on to this fragile connection as we walk together in silence.

The mother sets the bag down on the folding chair. A stuffed rabbit falls from the side pocket, landing lightly on the cement.

The brown fur is matted and clumped, the ears hang limply, and the glass eyeballs are scratched and dull. Gently, I pick it up and offer it back to the girl, remembering the way I held my stuffed animals as a child, the soft fur familiar and comforting against my body. The girl cradles the rabbit in her spindly arms, rocking it slowly back and forth, cooing tenderly to it like a mother to a baby. The mother looks at me and smiles for the first time, inviting me to share this intimate moment. I glance down at the cracked pavement to avoid her gaze, clenching my toes inside my shoes, stumbling through my Spanish as I explain that they must throw everything they have brought with them away.

The mother unzips the bag, pulling out unmatched socks, a brown fleece, a blue shirt with a smiling flower on the front, a used tube of toothpaste, a bottle of perfume in the shape of a honeybee. She gives her daughter one last spray of the sugary scent, in the hollow pocket between her collarbones. The girl smiles at the familiar smell, the way I used to when I wore my mother’s scarves that always smelled like thick coffee and lavender. Every morning I would run down the carpeted steps, wrapping myself in the woven fabric before climbing onto her lap, burrowing between her arms, curling into her body like baby returned to the womb. She always made me feel safe. My mother who taught me to swim, holding my body in her hands on the surface of the water, who stroked my back when I could not stop coughing, patiently waiting for the asthma to subside, who sang me sweet lullabies every night before bed, teaching me to harmonize until we could sing them together. My mother who still hugs me against her lavender-coffee 47

body when I come home, reminding me that I am young and safe and loved.

And suddenly I feel exposed, embarrassed, guilty. I look away as the mother places the glass honeybee in the deep black trashcan.

Contaminado. Contaminated. I say the word out loud in an attempt to explain myself, to justify the empty green backpack abandoned on the cement, but my voice sounds sharp and menacing. This is what the law calls these items, these memories people carry with them, these small fragments of home they must leave at the border. Every day I watch the black bags pile up in the rusty dumpster, until they are hauled away and forgotten.

Contaminado the mother repeats quietly, rolling the word around on her tongue like a pill she cannot swallow, trying to dull the sharp edges, to suck some hint of hope from the five small syllables. As her voice fades into the silence, I notice the brown belt she still clutches in her hand. The silver buckle is scratched, the leather supple and worn, stamped with three neat letters. JLM. Es de mi esposo, she explains softly, running her thin, calloused thumb over her husband’s initials. No sé donde está... She hands me the belt, looking away. It is not a gesture of trust, but a motion of defeat.

The girl grips her mother’s hand more tightly, then looks right at me for the first time, confused. She does not understand the rules of the church, the Texas law, la ley de inmigracion that requires her mother to throw away this last piece of their family.

In her eyes I am merely a reinforcement of the fence that stretches across the barren Texas landscape, dividing her life, separating her from home. I wonder if she notices my young face and quavering voice, or if I seem just like the men in dull green uniforms who took away her father. I remind myself that those men shoot people, they taze children, they apprehend and deport families with an authority I do not have, one that keeps us separate. But they are doing their job, just like me. Does she know we are trying to protect people?

And in that moment, in the small, sticky courtyard behind the brick church, I want to tell the girl that I am scared too. I want to describe the way I used to draw letters in the palm of my mother’s hands—simple, secret words only she could feel. I want to tell 48

her about the stuffed horse I sleep with every night even though I am twenty— it still comforts me. I want to explain how I wear my dad’s oversized sweater in the winter, the blue fabric hanging to my knees—a reminder of him and of home.

The woman drapes her arm protectively around her daughter so that I am standing alone, facing them. The girl presses herself against her mother’s body, searching for safety in her familiar embrace, her eyes darting from my face to her mother’s to the belt in my hand. I think back to the crayon drawing little Carlitos made of me yesterday, my hands represented by large purple circles, my long fingers jutting out like spokes on a wheel, too large for my small stick body. Is this how the girl sees me now? Quickly, silently, I wrap the belt around the immigration papers and hand them back to the mother.

49

Faial da Terra (2017) Jack Schreuer

Music wafts from the church whose door has no handle, so the boy knocks a giant’s knock, and glances over his shoulder to ensure the ancient, broken glass holds no more spirits.

Not until a village dog breaks the night’s soft choir of music and wave, is he torn from his reverence and dissipates into the tight winding streets, while the birds break into their sinister cooing to cover his retreat.

50

First Encounter (2016) Sam Brown

Semiconscious under the covers of my bed, I could hear the white-hot intensity of my mother’s voice from downstairs as she yelled at my father. My eyes split open as sunlight from the early morning poured into my room.

I can’t remember the exact words I heard, but it was something like, “You’re going to be late for work! What the fuck are you going to do about this?”

My father’s response was along the lines of, “I don’t know.”

I heard the front door slam and my mother’s car rev up in the driveway. A silence penetrated the deep corners of our home as the sound of her engine vanished around the block.

Untwining myself from my blankets, I rose and walked out of my bedroom to the window above the staircase that faced our backyard. Standing at the edge of our swimming pool was my father dressed in full work attire with his back turned to the house.

He was staring at the water—not at his reflection, but rather at a tarpaulin cover which had collapsed into the pool forming a listless abstraction of folds and crevices that whirled recklessly around a black oval spot in its center. Someone must have hurled a boulder into our pool during the middle of the night, I thought. I had a notion that my mother threw it in, but it looked too heavy for her thin arms to carry.

I waited breathlessly for my father to move, believing with every inch of my childish heart that he would just fall forward like a ragdoll. Nothing looks quite as ominous as a full grown man hunching over a suburban swimming pool while wearing loafers and a tie.

He began pacing the edge, circumambulating the body of water where the black nucleus held still. His movements were slow and deliberate like some kind of jungle cat. Then, crouching on all fours, he reached out over the water and grabbed an edge of the tarpaulin. After giving a heave he released the matting from the 51

pool where the black object still rested near the center, languidly floating, but never quite emerging to the surface. My father remained crouched, staring down at it before making a decisive maneuver back into the house. I darted into my room, quietly closing the door behind me. I heard him enter his room, and there was silence for a brief moment before I heard his door reopen and the backdoor close. I approached the window once more, and saw my father, but not in his business suit. He instead wore a pair of bright orange bathing trunks. Standing at the pool’s edge, he placed down his glasses and strapped my pink goggles over his face. Then, as if possessed by a swan, he dove into the pool towards its center. All I could see of his figure was a pale, shapeless splotch suspended beneath the water. He swam towards the black spot, and their bodies conjoined. My father embraced the object, curling it up in his long arms, while ripping it out of abstraction towards the surface of the pool. His head was first to rise. He deeply inhaled the air of the sunny morning, and lifted from the water the body of our neighbor’s sixteen year old Labrador Retriever.

I felt my body clench as my father heaved the dog out of the pool, lying it in a patch grass in our yard. Grabbing a towel from the rack, he dried himself off and walked back inside. Horrified, I ran into my room. I buried my face in a pillowand wept with the terrible sense of guilt that my swimming pool had murdered an innocent animal. I envisioned the old dog walking from my neighbor’s yard to ours in the dead of night. I could see him strolling across the tarpaulin and lying down to take a nap before the world collapsed, swallowing him whole.

My father left for work and, with my mother’s car still out of the driveway, I was alone. I cried in bed for a short while, but after having worn myself out I decided to walk downstairs and through the backdoor. Lying in the grass beside the pool was the soaking wet animal. From far away he looked like a shadow on the ground, but as I walked closer his black fur began to materialize. It looked as if at any moment his chest would rise and continue breathing.

I crouched at his side waiting for him to twitch like dogs do while they’re dreaming, but he remained motionless in the freshly cut grass as the soil began to cling to his belly and a family of ants climbed the unknown forest of his wooly back. I sat before him 52

bleary-eyed, raw and red—determined, in some unclear way, to see what would happen.

53

A Nondenominational Dying (2017) Jeff Dingler

It was a nondenominational dying.

“Then again, aren’t they all?” Dad used to say.

In his last years he’d gone delusional, spent hours staring into a blank TV, seeing who’d blink first, himself or the great static unknowable that swallows us all.

Or perhaps he was trying to hear the nanoscopic humming of something more, some binary buried in the quantum knit-work, and always this cosmic silence as if god really is spying, silently, ferociously spying on the common dust of our lives.

And still in the middle of the night, we monologue to ourselves as if ghosts or concerned gods were listening.

You think by now these spirits would’ve slipped up and burped or passed some gas as they went traveling through this plasm of existence— a footprint, hand mark or skid-mark somewhere.

Maybe even a tooth or tongue spat back from this spasm of the past.

But after all these years, god’s humor has become a very wry thing.

Everyone gets mad about the wordless dying.

Even my father drew himself gravely to the floor and rose some mumbled, disfigured prayer.

With one hand we bury the dead and 54

with the other we call up heaven to ask if she’s hiring.

All these fleshes of faith kept shivering about the lying in the dirt and the expiring.

They ask, pray, plead and re-ask the air: “All these years, money spent, love spent, what was it after?”

My dear child, if there were a god, don’t you think we’d hear its laughter?

55

Dis-inherit: for my brother. (2017) Clara Moser

in dark waters where the universe sees its image distort my body became my brother’s body and then again, mine his breasts were my breasts we both bore the scars red and crude under our nipples.

I cried for loss of them, he loosened to become an endless pull away from the moon I drew so close to, whose image I tossed in and under he turned from and fell into the rift– So our body, his body, the body became a word un-coupled, a word with a memory whose root turned in dark braids of seaweed below us.

56

Aliens (20017)

Dante Haughton

They too know God And fear the existence of the Martian For they stalk the red planet with their swollen glass And cry “beast” at the drop of water Their sweat rolling down the surface of a lens, They cry “beast” and prove its presence with a point t0wards the lake And who says its not us To venture beyond the shadow of your rock To claim the land ours to reap the fruits of the Martian’s crop To spot a figure in the fog of our ignorance and cry “beast” with the mane of a machine and the beak of a cannon I watch the plague swallow the gem in all its redness Its glow matched by the spark of a pointed finger Till the planet is white and bare A dim star drifts past the scope of a Martian The Martian cries “beast”

57

Zorah en Jaune (2010) Nicholas Williams

He pours his gin and looks to her—so blue.

Unveiled, undone.

The orient hums outside of his atelier, his fingers dripping deep navy to the canvas.

He bleeds her knees—a muddy rouge, her gown washing away the Moroccan stripes.

Southern light drowns the flowers of the wallpaper, and her outline cuts and blurs like the Tangiers coastline.

Turquois calms as he compacts her face in blackened slits, her eyes and eyebrows, thin lips.

Dotted lines pull down, until golden yellows erupt, filling her curved gown, her hands still.

I only paint the difference between things, he assures.

Unable to hold the smoke inside of her, it fills the room.

These walls are like bodies, so heavy.

58

The Popcorn Dielectric (2017) Justin Gerard

Olivia in the window mirror Stands next to the stoves.

Her red pajamas and bare feet Near the floor are actually Dish towels. I am alone.

I hold the poem in my mind, “The Popcorn Dielectric.” She Eats popcorn, though she was getting Ice water tonight.

Dielectric? The word rings true, But I don’t know what it means.

59

A Divine Breakfast (2017) Gill Hurtig

God peered at me on my breakfast plate today; His eyes were eggs, sunny-side-up.

We had a staring contest. I lost because eggs cannot blink, And because I am not God. His mouth was a strip of bacon and I became jealous.

I wish my mouth were bacon, so that I could always taste its flavor.

But that would not happen because too much bacon is bad for me, And because I am not God. His nose was a sausage link, which I did not understand; Why would God always want to smell sausage?

But I cannot say what God likes to smell because I am not God’s nose, And because I am not God. Today my dog was hit by a car.

I think it is because I ate God this morning.

But what was I supposed to do?

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

60

Dial M for Mozzarella (2016) Ramsey Daniels

Our story begins at tiny Slidmore College in Sarasota Springs, New York, where on the 15th of September our young hero Ramsey was engaged in a collegiate tradition almost as old as textbooks and hazing; he was getting some dorm room dick. He was tired and kind of hungry, but he was doing his best to ride the waves like that one-armed surfer who was still pretty good at it.

As he usually did during times like this, he let his mind wander – What would he make for dinner tonight? What would it be like to grow up as a Redneck? Would his true nature have shone through?

What happens if you go to one of those shows where there is a ‘suggested donation,’ but you don’t give anything? – when suddenly he heard what could only be interpreted as evil cackles coming through the walls.

Ramsey hopped off of the bed, shivering and naked, and pressed his ear to the thin plaster wall. He heard the unmistakable words: “Soon enough, D-hall will burn!” The cackling started up again, louder than before. Ramsey ripped his head off of the wall, grabbed his underwear and pants off the floor, and dressed in a panic.

“I need to go,” he told his partner, still posed in a compromising position on the bed.

“But I-“ he began to protest. Ramsey pressed a finger against his mouth.

“Shh. You don’t need to say it. I feel the same way.”

“I was gonna say I didn’t finish.”

“I know,” said Ramsey, buttoning his button fly. “Same.”

He headed towards the door. At the threshold, he spun back around. “Who is your suite mate?”

“That curly-haired blonde kid. George Michael.”

Ramsey closed the door and ran down the hallway, back to his apartment, where he holed up in his room and began to figure 61

out how he would save the world from George Michael.

He awoke the next morning at 6:55 AM and dashed to the dining hall. He had an idea; the only challenge would be getting into D-hall without a meal plan. This would be a challenge in the same way that it was a challenge for him to maintain his 4.0 GPA; in that, it wasn’t a challenge.

Ramsey breached the threshold of the dining hall and the smell of mozzarella sticks hit him like a brick; he was home. He grabbed himself a spare neon orange worker’s hat and followed the scent of the mozz sticks to the diner. “Yo!” he whispered to the girl dumping them into the deep fryer. “Have you seen George Michael?”

She looked at him like he was stupid. “You mean him?” she asked, gesturing her head forward. Ramsey spun and immediately made eye contact with George Michael. It was as if George had been waiting for him; he sat, stoic, on a chair directly across from the counter, with a smirk on his pale, pimply face. Then he stood up, grabbed his backpack and plate, and headed around the corner.

Ramsey rushed through the kitchen and turned the corner into the dish room. He walked up to the enormous metallic expanse of the Accumulator, the sinister machine that collected dirty trays from the students on the outside and brought them back to the workers in the dish room.

He stepped up to the Accumulator and tried to peek through the small gaps between each piece of metal to glimpse the students on the outside. He saw a North Face jacket and a flash of jewelry.

Then he smelled it before he saw it: a half-eaten Mozzarella stick coming around the corner of the Accumulator. A shiver ran down his spine. He looked back through the crack and saw a flash of curly blonde hair. Ramsey was about to head for the exit, confront George Michael and get this thing resolved in time for the 5 PM ice cream sundae bar when three more plates rounded the corner of the Accumulator. There was no food, just three words spelled out in ketchup with impeccable handwriting. ‘Snitches,’ read the first.

‘Get,’ the second. ‘Stitches.’

Our hero is a brave man, I cannot stress this enough. He didn’t look away once during The Hurt Locker. He asks for ‘a cup for water’ at Chipotle and fills it with lemonade. But even the 62

bravest among us could not face such a horror as a threat spelled out in ketchup, that delicious condiment that has the unfortunate quality of looking so much like blood. And with such impeccable handwriting! I struggle to get any ketchup out of those maddening glass Heinz bottles; someone who can use that bottle to spell out words in precise Times New Roman characters is to be feared, mark my words.

In any case, Ramsey panicked – he swerved away from the Accumulator and speed walked towards the nearest exit, fearing he would be sick. He made it as far as the pizza station before he felt a hand, gentle but firm, settle on his shoulder.

“Hold on a sec,” said the hand. Ramsey spun around and locked eyes with the most beautiful human male he’d ever seen.

His jaw dropped. His feet lifted off from the floor, and his eyes rolled back in his head. Mozzarella sticks floated through the air, popping and sizzling like fireworks. He grabbed one, took a joyous bite, and then landed back on Earth and opened his eyes. “What’s up?” he asked.

The dude ran one hand through his wavy golden hair, bit his lower lip and asked, “Do you work here? ‘Cuz I’m a supervisor and I don’t usually see you during this shift.”

“Oh, no, I’m just here on a tour.”

“Then why are you wearing a workers hat?” asked the guy.

“When in Rome…” said Ramsey.

The Greek God in front of him broke out in laughter.

“I’m Leonardo,” he offered his hand.

“Ramsey,” said Ramsey.

“Look, I know you snuck in here to eat but since you’re here, I’m gonna put you to work for a bit.”

“I’m your man,” said Ramsey, unmistakably winking. Of his many strengths, subtlety was his least strong.

Leonardo walked him over to the deep fryer.

At this point I’m sure you’re wondering – “But what about George Michael? What about saving the campus from imminent danger? What kind of a hero is this?”

Before you jump to conclusions, I urge you to ask yourself a few questions, such as “Have you ever met someone so attractive that you couldn’t control yourself? Have you ever looked into 63

someone’s eyes and known, without a doubt, that they were the one? Have you ever been in close proximity to a deep fryer and noticed how it’s kind of an aphrodisiac?” If you answered ‘Yes’ to any of these questions, or even if you didn’t, please suspend judgment.

As you can imagine, things took their natural course, and soon Ramsey and Leonardo were making horrible sexual puns involving the various food stations in D-hall. “I want to take you to the Global Café and show you all 7 continents,” whispered Leonardo. Ramsey swooned.

“I want to take you to the sundae bar and give you all the toppings,” he whispered back.

“That would be nice,” whispered Leonardo, “but each person is only allowed two toppings.” Ramsey gave Leonardo his best deer eyes.

“I guess I could make an exception,” Leonardo smiled.

Ramsey grabbed the counter to steady himself.

Something scandalous happened next involving a walk-in cooler, a substantial pile of asparagus, and our protagonist and his chiseled lover. But I do want set two things straight. First, all greens are cooked before they are served to the student body, thereby killing off any germs. Secondly, although this doesn’t sound like the beginning of a lasting romance, it was. Love grows even in low temperatures. I don’t want you to think that Ramsey was only attracted to Leonardo because of his high level of access to restricted foods; that was just the icing on the cake.

Anyway, Ramsey and Leonardo left the walk-in cooler fifteen minutes later. Suddenly, Ramsey saw a flash of curly blonde hair out of the corner of his eye and remembered that he was in the middle of saving his community and becoming a legend.

Ramsey dashed out of the kitchen and out into the student seating. There was George Michael, sitting in the same seat as earlier, eating a mozzarella stick. It is hard to defeat your enemy when you have so much in common with them, but Ramsey would try his best.

George Michael moved his left hand towards his backpack, staring straight ahead of him, and began to slowly pull out a chunky, black object…

Ramsey bolted over to George Michael, grabbed the object 64

out of his hand, sprinted back towards the Diner, and tossed it into the deep fryer in a perfect arch. The sinister black oil bubbled as it effortlessly dismantled a ticking time bomb.

“That,” he told Leonardo and the dozen or so stunned spectators, “was a bomb.” The crowd was about to burst into applause when a voice shouted back from across the hall: “NO, it wasn’t.” A dozen heads spun around to face an enraged man with curly blonde hair. “It was a calculator. What the FUCK?” “HAHA!” shouted Ramsey. “HAHA! Tell that to the police you dumb motherfucker!”

The crowd had swelled to 30. Silently, they watched as George Michael stood up and slowly lifted the tray out of the deep fryer. At the bottom sat an oily, sizzling TI-84.

I know you are tiring of me saying this, but please, I beg of you, suspend your harsh judgment of our pure-hearted protagonist. Whom among us has not been caught up in visions of glory and heroism? Show me the person who has never jumped to false conclusions, who has never been paranoid. Moreover, show me the person who can think clearly after fifteen minutes of mindblowing sex in a walk-in cooler. Show me him, and I will allow you to pass judgment on poor Ramsey. Until then, let us not criticize him. At least he tried. At least he did something; he went out of his way to save lives.

Will our young hero be able to redeem himself after his disgraceful mistake? Did George Michael actually mean that ‘D-hall will burn!’ or was he simply talking about the rectal sensation that occurs after Taco Tuesday? Was ‘Snitches Get Stitches’ an actual threat, or was it written by some student in a Vineyard Vines polo and salmon-colored shorts attempting to hide his pampered upbringing and feign street credibility? Will Ramsey’s passionate D-hall romance with Leonardo continue, and will the FDA ever catch them? Unfortunately, this is where I must leave you, my friends. But you can figure it out: chew it over, digest it, and decide for yourself.

65

‘

Hello Darling (2013) Monica Kessler

Hand over hand I pluck our rope from Kentucky in a scramble to tighten its slack Before your end—frayed and mangled and chewed raw— Could fall to the ground As you so often told me it had to.

And I’ve had to watch you regress, Ashamed as you tuck bits of yourself away, (Hoping to unearth them later as your memories grow vague and lapse over) And I assume myself deaf When I can’t hear your wonderful insanity Tucked between each Peculiar pair Of words.

You’ve made but a drunkard’s progress, Sliding from room to room, Elegant with your trail of red wine Sloshed and drizzled behind you To blanket those footprints Until your eyes creak open the next afternoon And you begin to howl, Hung over from toppling over memories Your eclipse had betrayed, And recalling your wrinkled drawings And cement days You covered with your slow singing That is hardly heard In Kentucky.

66

Miscarriage: On Aliza Shvarts (2017) Clara Moser

To mis

carry: to carry wrongly Her body a conveyor belt of please and no feeding and rejecting with a turkey baster in the shared dorm bathroom amidst bottles of shampoo and face-wash She wronged us, used her body exactly as they wanted her to.

Filled and emptied it like a vessel she rested in for only an hour upon quiet seas that may have roiled below or held a mute current.

She tells me, I don’t know if there was ever a person , if I ever really

carried someone.

All the same I am punished for willing and then refusing to hold.

They called me “avant-garde asshole” But wasn’t it ultimately 67

mine?

After having someone else play God so long couldn’t I

have a go at it?

68

The Painter (Las Meninas) (2017) Maria Llona

I I crack the door open slowly, quiet like a mouse. I know I shouldn’t be doing this, but that makes it better. I am Sherlock Holmes, the world’s best detective. Solving the mystery of the Mystery Women. Just like I thought, there they are! From where I am, he covers everything except her head, but her face is pretty, like a girl from a magazine or a TV star. Which makes sense, since no one ugly is ever in a drawing. The drawing looks nothing like her though. Thick MagicMarker- black lines for her body, nothing for her face. His paintings don’t make any sense to me, and I’m sorry but there’s nothing pretty about them. There’s too many colours and shapes like unfinished monsters. She’s too pretty for that. And there’s no way she’s comfortable, bent on the bed like the Egyptian sphinxes I’d learned about in class, facing the window.

She turns around and I gasp. This is it, I’ve been caught. But she doesn’t say anything, and her smile only gets bigger. He tuts at her and she looks back, but not before winking. I shut the door and fall against it, heart beating fast. Eight years old might still be little, but I know what a wink means: A secret! The thought of it makes my stomach turn, so I tell myself not all secrets are bad.

Mommy doesn’t tell Daddy when we get McDonalds after school. And he didn’t tell her when we watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit, even though she said I wasn’t old enough. But who is this a secret from? Daddy’s right here. And Mommy has to know, there’s a reason she told me to stay away from their room. Of course she knows. Secrets are fun but families don’t keep secrets.

The excitement disappears.

I go to the kitchen to look for milk for my knotted tummy.

When I walk past the bathroom the door is locked. I hear something underneath the sound of the shower, but I don’t stop to listen.

69

II Her sleeve is smeared bright red like the jam she’d put on my toast. It’s weird, Mommy is the cleanest person I know. I point out the stain and she laughs, but it’s a nervous laugh, like it stings.

“I’ll be right back, honey,” and it’s quiet in the kitchen. I reach over the table to grab the sugar, only managing to knock it over. My eyes close against the smash, but it stays quiet. When I open them he’s standing in front of me, smiling, sugar in hand.

“Good morning, Daddy.”

“Easy there, minha Menina.” A nickname I don’t understand.

Not pretty like Cupcake or Sweetheart. Just a word in a language I don’t speak. It brings back memories of Madrid, standing in front of a painting the size of an elephant. Daddy saying “That’s you.”

“Which one?”

“All of them.” Which made about as much sense as the nickname itself. “Where’s your mother?”

“Upstairs, she got jam on her shirt.” He frowns, which is also weird. Daddy is the messiest person in the world, always covered in paint.

“Don’t worry, it comes off with dish soap. It happens to me all the time.” He smiles.

I like it when he looks at me like that, like I’m the only sunflower left in the world. After that look comes a big hug and words sweet like ice-cream.

“What is it, Daddy, is there something on my face?” Even though I know there’s not. “Just your face, Aggie. Just the most beautiful face in the world.” Now I’m smiling. He picks me up and pulls me close. It’s warm and he only puts me down when Mommy walks back into the room. She’s wearing a different shirt but it has jam on it too, darker, almost like chocolate. Maybe we’re out of dish soap.

“Everything under control?” Daddy’s voice is always different when he talks to other people, more like Jafar than Aladdin.

“Yes Ricardo, everything is fine.”

III I sit on my balcony, watching the street. It’s almost midnight, far past my bedtime. I hear the door open and she walks onto the 70

street, followed by Daddy. She’s even prettier in the moonlight. If I don’t breathe, I can hear their voices.

“Same time Wednesday?” he asks.

“Can’t we do this any earlier?” Is it past her bedtime too?

“You know I can’t.” He sounds tired. Maybe he needs a bedtime too.

She whispers something too quiet to hear but now she looks angry. Not as pretty anymore.

dad.”

IV “Do you miss them?” “Miss who, baby?” “Your mom, your

“Oh. Of course I miss them, sweetheart. But sometimes you give up one thing to have another. I have you. And you’re all I’ve ever wanted.” She brushes through my hair slowly. It’s different from how Daddy does it. She starts at the top, trying to go through all the knots at once. But carefully, so it doesn’t hurt.

“I don’t understand, don’t they miss you too?”

“Honestly, I’m not sure. It stopped mattering. I made a choice.” “But why?”

“Someday you’ll get it, but you don’t have to worry about it now. All you have to know is how important you are. You’re the light of my life, Aggie.” She tickles my neck and whispers into my ear. “You have eyes like nightfall and hair like sunshine. You’re the smell of fresh snow and the sound of the wind. You’re the whole wide world.” I giggle.

She starts to braid. Whispering under her breath: over, under, over, repeat. “You’re my whole world.”

V I keep my eyes shut tight, then relax them, biting the inside of my cheek to avoid smiling.

Daddy shifts my weight in his arms, grunts. “Shh, don’t wake her up. It’s late.”

“She’s too old for this, and too heavy.” His voice crackles around the words, his accent heavier when he’s tired.

I breathe like I’m whispering, counting to eight between each breath. “She’s twelve, she gets to be carried to bed for a little 71

longer.”

I smile and snuggle into him. If I was asleep, this would be a good dream.

“You know, I didn’t have anything like this growing up.” He sounds like a sad smile. “I didn’t either, really.”

“Of course you did. You couldn’t understand.” She sighs. “Do you ever miss it.”

“Brazil?”

“Mhm.” “There’s nothing there to miss.”

VI The laundry machine has gone from eating socks to eating shirts. I find this out as I look for a top, blue and ruffly. Perfect for my first middle school Picture Day. But the dryer has eaten it for lunch. I crouch below it to search and in the corner of my eye I see a flash of sunshine. I reach between the machines to grab it. It’s a scrap of lacy fabric, pale like buttermilk. Underwear, if it can even be called that. With a little bow on the top, like a tiny present.

They look like the kind of panties Sarah would wear, but everyone knows how she is. I turn them around in my hand and over the tag is printed “Anna.” It’s written in sharpie, the handwriting curvier than my Mom’s on my sweaters.

“Did you find it?” As she walks into the bathroom I shove them in my pocket. This isn’t something my Mom should have to look at.

“No, I think it’s gone for good.”

“Sorry, baby, we can go to the mall tomorrow to try to find something like it.” “Awesome. Can we get some new underwear too? All of mine are getting old.”

VII “I saw your portrait, it’s good. You’re good.” It’s not and I’m not. Art has always been his thing. Something I understood in theory but couldn’t do in practice. When had he forgotten that about me? There was a time when everything he said was exactly right. At fourteen, that’s long gone. He can feel it too, the distance between us.

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pose.

“Thanks, Dad.” A woman walks past me into the room. A new model, I sup-

“If you want to, maybe…” He’s nervous. It’s strange, he’s a confident speaker. “Maybe you could come watch. Watch me draw her.” It’s a weird request. Something I’ve always wanted to do but never thought I’d be allowed to. He can tell I think so, he thinks it too. Still, I miss him. So I say yes.

He introduces us: “Margarita, this is Jenny.” She has a unique face, with wide lips and eyes like raindrops.

She slides off the robe and saunters to the bed. Then lays down spread-eagle, on the side I know is my Mom’s. There’s an opulence in her nudity, in her marble-like skin. It’s the first body I’ve ever really looked at besides mine. There’s no point of comparison. I can’t see a hair on her. She’s more statue than human. I sit on the floor opposite her, where I can watch her, my dad and his hand on the paper.

His age shows, in his mottled skin and thinning hair. He’d had me too late. Last month he turned sixty-four. What does he look like to her? Like an old man, probably. He’s old enough to be her father. The thought settles in my stomach like lead. Then I can’t watch him and I can’t watch her, so I watch the drawing. I watch the arch of her foot connect to the curve of her calf, it climbs up her thigh and cinches at her hip. Time slows to a lull.

When I look up he’s looking at me. Looking at me while he draws, outlining the curve of her breast.

“What is it, Dad?” “You’re beautiful, Aggie.”

VIII The crying pulls me to the bathroom. They’re not the freshman tears of late. This is different, desperate. The doorknob’s stiff but when I pull hard it gives.

She’s sitting on the toilet, pants still around her waist, face hidden in her hands. “Mom? Are you ok?”

When she looks up her eyes are bloodshot. I can’t remember the last time I saw her cry.

“Is it Dad? Is he ok?” She snorts. A confusing kind of sound, 73

meant to mean many things at once. Her eyes are wild, like a hurt animal.

“Mommy?” My voice shivers, I haven’t called her that in years.

I drop to the floor and pull her to my chest. She cries harder.

Loose, wet sobs that shake us both. She’s so small against me. I’m not sure when I grew bigger than her. It’s like holding a tiny bird, all thin bones and feathery hair.

I go to hold her hands but she flinches, so I cradle them against my chest. In fear of someone walking in, I reach out and lock the door behind us. This doesn’t feel like something anyone else should see. The thought is followed by guilt. Was that my excuse every time I walked past the crying, separated only by the locked bathroom door?

“It’s all going to be okay?” But it comes out like a question.

IX I press my ear to their bedroom door. What I hear is familiar. It sounds like a room in a house on Holland Drive, the night of Clara’s Sweet Sixteen party. Sean Baker on top of me, my eyes over his shoulder on the framed poster of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, which he’d told me his mom had bought for him before describing it as “inspiring.” These are sounds I’ve heard before but didn’t understand. Whimpers and the slap of skin against skin.

I wish it was my mother in the room but I know it’s not. She’s back in the car. Neither of us should be here. We’re both meant to be at the hairdresser, but she forgot her phone and asked me to get it. Told me twice it was downstairs. The noise pulled me upstairs from the kitchen.

My chest aches, expanding with heat as thing start to make sense. Her crying and sadness. Her hatred for his art. Her insistence on leaving the house. As I move to leave I hear one last thing, a noise I’d never imagined I’d hear from his mouth. My knowledge of Portuguese now vast enough to understand when he groans out “Sim, minha Menina.” It’s been years since I’ve heard that word, about as long ago as it’s been since I stopped calling him Daddy.

Now even Dad makes me nauseous. Something like a cramp flowers low on my stomach. The nausea gets worse.

I walk back to the car and give her the phone. I don’t say 74

anything, she doesn’t need to hear what she already knows.

X I hear them from my room. They’re so loud, I could have heard them from the street.

“Oh fuck you. I gave you everything, and it wasn’t enough.

You still want more. Well shit, there’s nothing left! I gave up everything for you.”

“You can’t say that. You wanted it. You wanted to leave, to write. You hated them, and I was your way out. You don’t get to be such a child about this” “I was a child!” I can picture her rage, radiating from her like heat. He towers over a foot taller than her. But it doesn’t matter.

She’s titanic in her fury.

“You wanted to-.”

“I had no idea what I wanted! And you didn’t care! You- You just used me and fucked me like one of those whores.”

“Look I’m- I’m trying here, but I can’t if you wont listen.”

“I’m tired of listening, I’m tired of your bullshit trying. I’m tired of you. I hate you. God I hate you so much. You’re the worst mistake I’ve ever made. And I regret it all.”

“What is wrong with you. How can you say that? We have a daughter.”

“Don’t talk to me about her. She’s my whole life. What’s wrong with me? What the fuck is wrong with you. I see the way you look at her. She’s grown so pretty, don’t you think? It makes sense too, you always liked them young.” Her words drip with acid, they fall on the hardwood and sizzle.

I hear his hand slice through the air. “Fucking do it.”

But the slap never comes.

“You’re a coward. She knows it too.”

XI The silence pulls me to the bathroom. It’s a new type of silence, that tugs and leads. In my stomach I know something is wrong. Everything is too still. I pull hard at the door but it’s unlocked.

Relief blooms in my chest at the empty bathroom. But the 75

bath in running, and when I take a step forward my toes feel wet.

Dipped in reddish water. The pipe must be broken again, the rust spreading through the system. It smells like rust, sharp and acrid.

I walk towards the tub. The sound echoes when my knees hit the floor.

She’s staring back at me, unseeing. Her face is distorted underneath the water. She shifts with the ripples like a mirage.

The dress she wore for my graduation spills around her, no longer white. I’m thirteen again, back at the Tate, looking at Everett’s Ophelia. I ask my mother why Ophelia smiled if she was drowning. I see the strange smile on her face in place of an answer.

Where Ophelia’s arms were above the water, hers lie at her sides, palms facing up. Blood seeps from the cuts, creeps through the water like smoke.

When I reach into the bathtub it overflows further and the water laps at me, soaking through my pajamas, spilling into my mouth. It tastes like iron, like rare steak. The water is cold and she’s cold and I’ve never been this cold. I grip her chest and pull her close to mine in the hope of a heartbeat but it’s dead quiet. Her head hangs limp against my shoulder, teeth clicking with every gasp. There’s too much air and I’m full of vomit. I hear screaming, but my mom’s mouth stays shut.

What is it like to run out of blood? Do other things leak out with it? It seems so slow and I don’t get where the line is, when you’ve suddenly lost too much too fast. Last spring I fell down the stairs and split my eyebrow. It bled for hours but I can’t remember the sensation of the bleeding, only the pain of the cut. So maybe it doesn’t hurt at all.

Maybe it’s like exhaling, smooth and soothing. Maybe dying isn’t as bad as it seems. It has to be cold, but even a body full of blood isn’t enough to keep me warm today.

The fog is low, the wind vicious and I hate it all for making me wish the priest would hurry.My mother never believed in God, this God who would condemn her for her choice, but no one seems to care.

The hole in the ground is chasmic, far too big for a woman her size. She hadn’t wanted this either. She often joked about being frozen after death, like Walt Disney. She’d counter-quote Robert 76

Frost and say that if her life couldn’t end in ice, she wanted it to end in fire. She always hated the idea of worms getting at her body.

That, as well, no one seemed to care about.

When it’s my turn to speak the speech dries in my mouth.

I’ve been thinking about it for years. But it’s a speech for a warm day, meant to be spoken far in the future. A speech to be given with my father long in the ground. When I try to start, I don’t remember it anymore.

I search my mind for the verses she’d recited to me in the place of nursery rhymes. Those come easily. When I open my mouth Emily Dickinson speaks.

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And Mourners to and fro…”

When I get to “And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing then -” my voice cracks, and the poem ends in a stutter. She’d always loved Emily Dickinson, truly believed she was the world’s greatest poet. I always found her works daunting, like things better left unsaid. Now I wished I’d listened.

When I finish talking they start lowering the casket. I stand next to Ricardo. He pulls me close, and rests his head on mine. I feel his tears on my scalp. They do little to cool my anger, but I press closer. His hand on my waist moves to my hip, and lower. I don’t pull away until it’s time to toss a handful of dirt on the coffin.

The gravestone reads Virginia Wagner / Daughter, Mother, Wife / 1981-2017. Underneath it: “Do not go gentle into that good night,” a poem she’d always hated.

When he walks into the room I follow him, unsure about where to go, not wanting to bealone.

It’s all set up, an empty canvas on the stand, paintbrushes next to it. It makes sense that he be with one of them while she died.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in this room. It used to be a place of mystery and wonder. An Ithaca, an unreachable goal. Now it’s just too warm, the air stale from lack of circulation.

I touch the bed, it feels cold and foreign. Likely how it felt to my mother. I’m bloated with salty tears, like I’ve swallowed an ocean.

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I look back at the canvas, then between it and Ricardo. In his eyes is a question. This is the longest time we’ve spent together in years. Maybe I’ve gone crazy too, as something unquestionably insane now feels unavoidable. I nod. He picks up a paintbrush. I move to take off all the black I’d worn to the funeral.

My coat falls to the ground like an oil spill, spreads around my feet like a grave. I shift my weight unto my heels and hope to sink. I shed my dress and stockings. They’re followed by everything else.

I lie on the bed. I curl my body tight, knees pressed to my chest, like I’m going to sleep. I look at my father. Neither of us are breathing. The air feels dirty. It thickens and congeals. He slices through it with the brush, dipping it in paint.

I see myself in the mirror across the room and I’m back in junior year AP Art History, studying Goya’s The Nude Maja. I argue with the teacher about the lack of importance of anything but the body in nude portraits, about the falsity of the faces. I claim they’re an expression the painter picks, brushing it over the model’s own discomfort.

When the brush stops moving I get up. My body creaks from lack of use. The distance between the bed and Ricardo is vast. No more light is coming through the window. There’s no knowing the hour. I look at the painting.

It’s different from any of his other work. There are no bold strokes or excesses of colour. The skin looks like skin. Before it’d always been charcoal, but this is oil. I’ve been watching him paint my whole life and I never knew he could do realism. Maybe he’s more like Velasquez than I ever believed. As though to punctuate my thoughts, written on the top right corner of the painting: “La Menina.” (“That’s you.” “Which one?” “All of them.”)

And it makes sense. On the canvas I’m all of them. My namesake: Margarita Teresa, and all the girls around her. Anna, Jenny and the models whose names I never knew. I’m my mother, what’s left of her. If I look hard enough, I can see myself. My face feels wet and when the tears start falling they spread the paint, deforming a kneecap, concaving a wrist. I let them fall until we’re all gone, only a mess of colour left.

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“Aggie.” But I can’t look anymore.

I walk out of the room and close the door behind me, quiet as a mouse.

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How I Became Me (2012) Jamie Thomson

I took off my pants, and rolled in fields and hay and the highway contemplated life as a beetle disconnected from connection.

Wandered in euphoric awe the shutter left open, collecting light and moons and visions, only to be washed clean by a mighty river left with nothing but notions and guts and driftwood.

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Fallen Apples (2009) Michele Berdela

The sun’s reddish rays Stagger across the winding concrete Reflecting off the raw grass Covered with hints of brown, orange, marigold Leaves crinkled, sautÊed in the sun Burnt, with frazzled edges Only faint remnants of the buds The fresh green birth of spring Now herded by the gentle, cool wind Only to settle for a short while Like the memories that too Have faded with the green That died with him That she sealed away in the coffin The memories - that if she encounters, She kicks away Like a bruised, fallen apple In her path

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Red— (2017) Henry Coxe

eared slider covered in slime, at the bottom of the haunted tank.

Algae scums up the glass; a layer of ectoplasm

pollutes sea-green debris in a fog; Turtle in the thick of his ghost, which churns with worm ends feces and filth. I cry for a bit, feeling culpable.

It seems natural and right to show grief, to show I have the decency but it’s not honest.

At least, not completely.

Truthfully, I cope with relief—

that awful pond-bottom smell gone at last.

“Red” looks like a stone while I scrub away the shell-rot with a toothbrush. I can’t discern what is gone from this dead

turtle, posed stiff in my hand.

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Gutted (2017) Clara Moser

I. Gutted under a florescent moon that yellowed white tissue spilling viscous as glue blood stained the cutting board gills shivered then hushed cornea went hazy the room swirled blue to black as I left my body on the cutting board watched the children dislodge my eyeballs pelt them against cupboards squeeze them between thumb and forefinger I tried to remember the blade it had been 83

so swift it was imperceptible the hook that brought me swinging, lip first into the airstream water trickling down my scales their hands found me at the bottom of the bucket circling and circling terrified of still water.

II. Caught him in a rainstorm.

That’s when Dad said’s the best time for fishing.

Out on the front dock in my purple rain boots with the flowers.

The rod arched like my cat’s back when she’s scared.

He swung into my bucket hook in mouth and something glad glimmered in my chest.

Cutting him 84

open on the wood board he twitched his tail then was the stillest still I’ve ever seen.

I wondered where he’d left to.

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Cock Fighting (2015) Sam Brown

Jamail had spent the past two hours writhing over his threadbare mattress. His eyes, transfixed and well adjusted to the dark, followed the splintering cracks of paint across his ceiling. He sat up running a hand through his dark hair and stared longingly at his bedroom door.

Down the narrow hallway of his brick house, Jamail passed his daughter’s room glancing inward toward the back of a girl turned to her side. Her body was still under the covers, yet whether she was asleep remained ambiguous to Jamail as he exited through a back door to a small patch of dirt and weeds next to an old makeshift shed. Inside were three chickens, each in separate cages. He crouched before the bird to the far right and lit a lantern. As the flame started to catch, Jamail saw that the chicken’s eyes were wide open and fully awake. He examined its shiny black feathers and brawny beak. It seemed to stare back, examining Jamail with the same curious intensity. The chicken’s eyes were wide and its pupils dilated as if beholding some strange and horrible creature. Jamail delicately stood up and opened the metal latches to its cage.

The next morning, Jamail drove his broken sedan as his daughter sat in the backseat next to his chicken in its cage. Jamail’s daughter gazed passively out the window towards the brick houses reminiscent of her own before turning to the rooster whose head was straight and fixated on the front windshield. She didn’t try to pet the bird or call any attention to the fact that she was looking at it. However, the chicken’s eye was placed in a strange way on the side of its head. Even though it was facing forward, the bird stared directly at Jamail’s daughter.

Jamail parked his car in a back alley and gently extracted the cage. He entered an unmarked door followed by his daughter.

Inside was a dim hallway lit by floodlights lining the ceiling. The girl remained behind her father’s shadow peering at the chicken who stood up and began shaking its feathers. There was a subtle 86

uproar coming from the end of the hallway as her father opened a door to a room full of sweaty men and women circled in tiered seating around a makeshift dirt ring. Jamail stared ahead while instructing his daughter to find a seat. Without nodding, she walked towards a group of women.

Jamail turned to watch her for a brief moment until the chicken let out a gurgled squawk. The bird was lively and roaming around its cage. He set it down at the edge of the ring next to a large man with a bushy mustache. The man looked Jamail over and inquired about the bird. Jamail, at first unaware that the man was addressing him, replied that he had spent a lot of money to acquire it and he hopes that the gamble will be worth it. The large man chuckled and told Jamail that it looks like a strong bird. The two stared off into the center of the small ring before Jamail asked the man if he put any money down on the fight yet. The man grinned and told Jamail that he doesn’t gamble and that he came simply to watch.

Jamail’s daughter sat quietly with the other women as they conversed in adult tones. She fidgeted away at the dirt floor with her hand, drawing little circles and blowing them away. One of the women pinched her shoulder and told her not to make a mess of herself.

She watched her father and another skinny man pull their chickens out by the neck. The man’s rooster writhed in his grip, but her father’s bird was complacent. The two men jabbed them together in an effort to instigate as their feathers rose. They placed the birds at opposite ends of the ring and the crowd’s excitement began to grow. The chickens did not immediately confront each other. Instead, they aimlessly milled around the ring. Two birds stood idly as a throng of spectators jeered. After a few anxious moments, Jamail’s bird began to spread its black wings as the crowd rose to their feet blocking Jamail’s daughter’s view. What followed were the howls of two chickens drowning in a sea of cheers.

After several minutes the crowd erupted and settled down with relief. In the center of the ring Jamail held his unscathed chicken in his arms with a wide grin. In the corner of the arena was the other bird; its body limp on the floor, buried beneath a blanket of feathers as a cloud of dirt began to settle. Jamail’s 87

daughter could just make out its beak which was splintered off of its face and leaking out a puddle of blood. Her father raised his chicken in the air. From across the ring, the bird stared directly into her eyes.

That night, Jamail found himself staring back at his ceiling.

He got out of bed and stepped into the kitchen where he drank a glass of milk. He sat at his table staring into the empty glass for a few moments before deciding to head back to bed. As he stood up, he glanced out the window to his rickety shed.

In the shed, Jamail lit a lantern. Once again he found his prized bird awake. Its glossy feathers glimmered in the candle light. Its pupil stiffened at the sight of the weary man. Jamail crouched over the bird and opened its cage.

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A Wake (2017) Clara Moser

Sick as in unwell, once well, no longer well.

Well as in water, as in drink.

Tin bucket ricketing against stone in a lonely clamor towards a cold bottom.

Water as in drink, the drink, blue drink vast and bound-less reflecting sky’s petulant moods moving across in waves lapping against skin swallowed by drink, by ocean wading in the wake wake as in “abstinence from sleep, watching,” absent of sleep, absent but awake holding wake by a body inert and lost watching for what could come in the night to wake the quiet and drag you by the ankles in to the dark away from

sickness, back to well the body hung like a salted and dry woke fish

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A Most Odd Friend (2013) Jamie Thomson

He’s just the old man in the window and even though nobody knows he exists he still has a silhouette.

It’s funny how fragile we are, or at least it’s amusing to me.

And if he were smoking I would see the rings in black from my living room across the street.

When I look back his window is black and it’s unclear whether he turned off his lamp or something else clicked on to cancel out his glow.

Years pass like rainclouds across the ceiling of the aquarium I live in, slowly sending bubbles to the surface: letters to people I once knew.

I am a lizard and I blend in well enough to pass as a branch or a rock when someone walks past me and stares into the stones of my eyes that swirl like sand at the beach when the tide shifts.

If I close my eyes tonight, I’ll be sucked from my bed.

And where will I go?

I think the old man knows.

I will ask him tomorrow.

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Poschiavo, Switzerland (2017) Henry Coxe

We painted watercolors, like children, while the sun peered over snow-skirted peaks and we were playful together in the grass, lying in the lively green to watch the valley sway.

In the evenings, we went back to our wood stove, drew a chuckling bath which splashed on the floor, and after all the bubbles had gone and we were dry, stepped out and absorbed the beryl-blue sky.

Everything we needed was there among the log piles and the crackers with honey and the jugs of green tea I would risk the ins and outs of any jagged roads to nest in our tidy knot of stone cottages once more.

It made the green hills laugh with relief that we arrived, and we, as we laughed in the alps, hoped they would always be our home.

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