Leland Quarterly Winter 2016-2017 by Leland Quarterly

Q L

winter 2016-2017

winter 20171

noah dewald

VOLUME 11, ISSUE 2: Winter 2017 Editors-in-Chief: Nan Munger and Anna Ceci Rosenkranz

Financial Manager

Associate Editors

Annie Graham

Rosalie Chang Kimiko Hirota

Prose & Poetry Editor Nick Burns Layout Editors Nan Munger

Adithi Iyer Dan McFalls Max Pienkny Mac Taylor Reagan Walker

Anna Ceci Rosenkranz Copy Editor Brian Ngo

Poetry

“Shoulds” by Tori Testa on 7 “A Poem for My Old Best Friend” by Kimiko Hirota on 8 “Golden Triangle” by Ethan Chua on 11 “Parents” by Anna Krakowsky on 15 “Elegy in Reverse, for the Spider Web I Walked Through” by Julia Doody on 18 “Accidentals” by Clare Flanagan on 26 “In Search of Labels” by Ethan Chua on 31 “Ahora” by Kimiko Hirota on 32 “Sunset at Santa Monica Pier” by Tori Testa on 37 “Train of Thought” by Alli Cruz on 45 “Burning Bright” by Chloe Rickards on 48 “Variation on Piece by Dickenson” by Dan McFalls on 53 “Outside Porchester Ballroom” by Clare Flanagan on 54

Prose

“The Truth About Lemon Cake” by Becca Nelson on 12 “Birth” by Ethan Chua on 21 “Ring of Fire” by Abigail Flowers on 29 “Bacchanalia” by Julia Doody on 36 “Two in the Gut” by Abigail Flowers on 50

Art

“Supernova 1” by Noah DeWald on cover “Mourning Window” by Noah DeWald on 2 Photograph by Julia Espero on 5 “Light on Her Feet” by Nan Munger on 6 Photographs by Nicole Aw on 10, 17, 47, 49 Photographs by Ella Hofmann-Coyle on 19, 34, 52, 55 Photographs by Maxwell Menzies on 20 “See Through” by Noah DeWald on 25 “Bruises” by Nan Munger on 27 “Caged” by Noah DeWald on 28 “Vessel” by Noah DeWald on 40 “Cardiac Arrhythmia” by Nan Munger on 44 “Savagery” by Noah DeWald on 51

julia espero 5

shoulds | tori testa

Poetry will break the rules and you will listen

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a poem for my old best friend kimiko hirota The pink skies and dry air The blue tongues and dark secrets soften like chalk pastels on our fingerprints Remember picking up pinecones discovering the city by bike surprised by anything we could dig and bury Nine p.m. is fading The steepest sand hill is still sinking and your hair isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t short anymore My teeth are straight and my tires are flat and your dog has been dead for years So we move on thinking weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re clever swimming against the tide toward our new fears

a poem for my old best friend | kimiko hirota

We drive down one-ways in opposite directions remembering our swing set when country Taylor Swift plays We used to want each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s happy stories the way adults like sob stories to donate to and feel better about themselves We used to hold up the moon with our feet, peace signs high popcorn stuck in our gums Photographs veiled with dust at the back of our drawers Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m beginning to sleep before midnight with the playroom black The door closed The dolls lay close but not touching

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nicole aw

golden triangle ethan chua Where Khun Sa once sold opium and Shan men pulled petals from poppy plants with hands chafed by Chinese rifles there now lies a marker with a golden pyramid at its crest. On sunny afternoons a brown-spotted stray curls up to sleep beside it, and tourists with thick sunglasses lean against the pyramid in photographs. Here, between the Ruak and Mekong rivers, the pyramid barely rises to my shoulder. I brush my arm against the steel railing. The putter of a motorboat recedes, money changes hands, names and soldiers are lost, Khun Sa is laid to rest in Yayway cemetery yet the pyramid face is as smooth as before. Our monuments take no notice. And in the afternoon a brown-spotted stray will curl up beside the column, watching the Mekong rush on.

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the truth about lemon cake becca ann nelson

Stepping through the door evoked the scent of eating ginger twists as a kid, the mothball odor of hide-and-seek in Grandma’s coat closet, the lingering waft of wood smoke from fires past. Before I could even shake off my scratchy winter coat, Grandma grabbed me in a massive hug. Her clove-sweet sweater enveloped me like the vast blue skies that hung over the stark prairies of my childhood. She pulled me into the kitchen. I noticed a couple of ballpoint pens sticking out of her gray-clouded curls. Her thin frame floated in her sweater, and I worried if I let go of her, she would float through the ceiling, disappearing into the distant sky like the cranes she so loved to watch. Grandma thrust a recipe for lemon cake in my hand. It was written in her spidery cursive on a five-by-seven index card that was yellowed with age. She opened the fridge that was covered with photos of all her grandchildren. I stared at my high school graduation portrait that was pinned to the top of the fridge with a butterfly magnet. Four years had passed, and I still looked the same. I saw my face aging into my father’s the way your face morphs into grotesque shapes when you look into a fun-house mirror at Great America. You’re his spitting image. You will

become a great lawyer like him. “I’ll work on the butter and sugar. You start zesting the lemons.” “But I thought you didn’t like lemons,” I said. “This cake isn’t really for me, you know.” “Oh, I see.” She shook her head at me and muttered something in Yiddish. I tried to make meaning out of the foreign words, but I could only understand snippets. I tried to reply in Yiddish, but the syllables came out twisted and wrong. Her dark eyes burned into me both piercing and patient. I studied the home screen of my iPhone with feigned interest, breaking from her gaze. I picked up a lemon and began zesting, watching the yellow rinds fall like tears into the bowl. Or like little slivers of sunlight. I gouged the 12

the truth about lemon cake | becca ann nelson

grater into the lemon like how I dug my boots into the ice slicked driveway after driving ten hours to our empty house. Father’s house now. A single welcoming text. In Chicago for settlement. Stay with Grandma? I scoured the zest off every inch of the damn lemons. The tart aroma lingered in the air. “How’s Elsie doing?” Grandma asked as she turned the mixer on. “Mom’s alright,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t notice the tremor in my voice. She flashed a vacant smile at me. She looked at the big old armchair in the family room with its fraying red threads. It had sat unused for over a year, but there was still an indent in it from where Grandpa would sit. I used to sit on the arm of the chair when he played his guitar. The guitar was still hanging on the wall above the fireplace. The old russet wood gleamed in the frail afternoon light that filtered through the curtains. The guitar had been recently dusted and polished. Its strings shone silver, beckoning to be caressed. “Have you found a girlfriend yet?” Grandma asked me. I almost said yes. I worried Grandma would try to hook me up with one of her Synagogue friend’s granddaughters. I chewed the corner of my lip. I mindlessly unlocked and then locked my phone. I could feel Grandma’s eyes smoldering into my back. “I’m not exactly interested in girls,” I said. “Ah, I see!” Grandma said, “You’re focusing on your classes and career. Your law school applications. Clever boy.” She beamed at me. Wrinkles from almost a century of smiling radiated out from the upturned corners of her chapped lips the way rays of sun filter out of the clouds at dawn. I looked down at the lemon rinds and shook my head. She bent over to pour the mixed batter into the cake pan. She hummed to herself a song that I didn’t recognize, but it sounded like the kind of classical music she liked to play on the piano. I heard the tinkle of piano keys in her humming and felt the years of piano lessons she had wasted on me in my idle hands. I looked at mosaic we had made as children, still above the sink. It had a crack in it from the time a game of inside-the-house catch got out of hand. I remember how colored fragments of the mosaic splintered and fell on the kitchen floor. Grandpa picked up the pieces and glued them back 13

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together with super glue. Grandma saw me staring at the mosaic. She took my hand and began stroking away the tension in my wrist. Her hands were wrinkled from years of kneading dough and braiding challah in the bakery where she used to work, and they smelled of lavender lotion. A dusting of snow wafted down over the barren prairie outside the kitchen window. I watched each flake disappear into the next. They created a deceptive blanket of softness that concealed the hardness of the earth underneath. Grandma once said the best lies are unexplained truths. Father did go to that parent teacher conference. He left out the minor part where he fucked my eighth grade social studies teacher. I dumped the bowl of lemon peels into the compost bin and slammed the lid shut. We sat on the couch, watching the snow fall over the dry husks of plants, while the lemon cake rose in the oven. A Lee Child novel Grandma was reading sat open on the coffee table, next to a vase of dried flowers and a binder containing part of Grandpa’s stamp collection that he had started when he went to France to fight in World War II. We flipped through the stamp book in silence. Minutes passed by in the rustle of its pages. “Is everything cool?” Grandma asked me. She pronounced cool like she was trying to carefully sound out a word from a foreign language. “I’m fine,” I said, “You?” “Alles gut. I think the cakes are ready to eat. Want some?” “Sure.” She walked back to the kitchen and pulled two china plates from the cabinet. The cake was sitting on the counter, and she neatly cut two pieces and put them on the plates. I stroked Grandpa’s guitar, and the strings purred under my shaking fingers. They echoed through the family room, and in that echo, I heard the ghostly laughs of long ago birthday parties when the room was overflowing with aunts and uncles and cousins and second cousins and people who I had no clue

the truth about lemon cake | becca ann nelson

who they were or how they were related to me. The wooden floor creaked under my boots as I walked toward the dining table. Grandma and I sat side-by-side, our shoulders brushing like how we used to sit in her canoe when we went on fishing trips together. She handed me a plate, and I glimpsed a faded, crescent-shaped scar on her wrist that I never noticed before. I took a bite of the cake, warm and soft and bursting with lemony flavor. The icing was sweet and sour and tasted like rain. We ate in silence, admiring the flocks of Canada geese honking over the prairie outside the window. The sun was slipping behind the dead and brittle grasses, resurrecting them to a deep gold. I flashed Grandma a guilty smile as I cut a second piece. She winked at me. I offered it to her, and her dark eyes flamed with surprise. She took it from me, and I cut a piece for myself too. “The cake will be gone before everyone comes over for Hanukkah tomorrow!” I said. I excepted her to laugh, but she looked at me with wide eyes wounded and magnified in the round lenses of her glasses. The light in her eyes dimmed as evening shadows purpled the table like bruises. She let out a long, low sigh that whistled through the room like wind winnowing through winter grasses. “Today would’ve been our 69th anniversary.” “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.” “It’s fine. I’m fine.” “Yeah. You sure?” “Well, lemon cake was always his favorite. Every time I would make him a lemon cake, he would tell me it was my best one yet. I always thought he was exaggerating things, but he got so excited over the silly cake. He had the cutest smile. So sweet and crooked.” She let out a laugh, so full of longing it hurt. I reached over and stroked her arm. “Time just keeps on passing, you know. I remember when Elsie was a little, bitty thing. She’d help me make the lemon cake. I’d always

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let her crack the eggs.” “Oh. She never told me that story.” I scraped the crumbs on my fork and pressed them into my mouth. My lips were dry. “Grandma?” “What?” “They’re getting a divorce.” “Who?” “You know.” “Oh dear. I guess neither of us are really fine.” She closed her eyes and whispered something to herself. It sounded like a prayer. The light receded from the room. I stood up and took the guitar down from the wall. Slowly and gently. I tried to play the melody she was humming earlier. I didn’t get it quite right. She laughed, and walked over to the piano and began to play it correctly. Her hands fluttered over the keys, delicate and quick as shifting light. Listening to her, I began to strum the guitar with more confidence. The bittersweet music vibrated through the room and out the chimney, drifting over the dark prairie and falling snow. I slipped into the music, each chord as sweet and vivid as a memory. We played our duet as the shadows puddled across the room. We embraced each other in each shared note. “You remind me of him.” Grandma’s voice was quiet and strong, barely perceptible over the haunting vivacity of our melody. A faint hum like a blade of grass falling onto the snow. I saw his calloused hands strumming his guitar instead of my own. You remind me of him.

parents

anna krakowsky They evoke with bits of ink and paper the throaty chuckle of love the confidential whisper of past two people young & cavernous I recognize but do not know I glow silently, glimpsing their world before myself

nicole aw 17

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elegy in reverse, for the spider web i walked through julia doody The tangled strands peel From my cheeks like ribbons of skin. The maples exalt, once more, the perfection Of their sparkling steely bridges. One sneaker Arcs backward into the ground, which still gasps With the ghost of a footprint that hasn’t happened yet, And the spiders’ screeches are sucked back Into their greedy mouths like cotton candy. Below, A crumpled plastic cup swells full of Diet Coke and Passes back into the hand of the drive-thru employee. The red-striped straw reclaims its innocence From thick, wet lips. The laborers spool gossamer threads Back into their abdomens, while the moon Leaves silver tracks dripping down the eastern sky. As day falls backward, the void Between maple trunks clutches at the air To conceal its nakedness. The spiders, Clinging to the bark, shrink Until they are specks in a graveyard Of broken shells. The eggs heal, and their sacs Parachute upward like balloons released By careless children. A man walks his golden Retriever along the path in reverse. The dog dives, Tail-first, through a wave of greenery And back to where a stick ejects From its mouth onto the grass, Then sails upward and knits shut A limb’s jagged, sap-filled wound. The branch sprouts Old wooden leaves like brittle mahogany, Which tremble with the vibration of high clear voices Singing Happy Birthday around a picnic table below. 18

elegy in reverse, for the spider web i walked through | julia doody

Candles descend into frosting trenches Like battle-weary soldiers. A child with a party hat Stretching elastic tracks along her cheeks Draws her breath in with a whoosh, And all seven candles reignite.

ella hofmann-coyle

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maxwell menzies 20

birth ethan chua

command: begin recording I am Amadeus. I was born in 2120 CE as a line of code in an Architect’s journal. The Architect, whose name was Aeschylus, was sent on the satellite-ship Voyager to investigate the edge of the Andromedan galaxy. In his journal he kept a record of his travels - the quasar-streams parsecs from Pluto’s rim; the white dwarfs which from afar reminded him of snow. And while he recorded his travels, he gave form to me. The Voyager was a solar-powered ship. Its launch from Gaia coincided with a solar flare which warped the magnetic field of Aeschylus’s home. That same solar flare gave the Architect enough energy to clear the known Solar System in little more than a heartbeat. And as the Voyager sailed on, it took in a myriad of alien lights - the heavy glow of red giants, the pulsing waves of binary star systems, even the occasional sweep of Sirius-type corona. Aeschylus had a penchant for beauty. He saw the sweep of the universe as something like a canvas for his journal to record. So, many years later, I have still not shaken this irrational love of his otherwise cold mind. define term: Architect Ah, yes - before I go on. My apologies; I sometimes forget this archive will, if discovered, be read by those unfamiliar with the Messier colonies and the far rims.

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The Architects were scientists from one of Gaia’s early stages, selected before birth when the risk of planetary extinction grew too vast to ignore. Each Architect was genetically endowed in vivo with faculties of reason far beyond that of the average human. They were a desperate attempt at salvation by a dying race. Against the odds, they succeeded. After birth, the Architects were educated with only one goal in mind - the survival of humanity. And after thirty years, with the sun’s solar flares growing dangerously close to the earth’s surface, each Architect put his plan into place. Calista flew to the arid plains of Mars to cultivate a colony of climate-resistant grains. Pericles drove his gravitational pod into the center of a black hole. Zoe combed the asteroid belt on the fringes of Pluto for signs of life. Of the Architects, Aeschylus traveled furthest. He was one of the last to die. /define term: Architect On Aeschylus’ ship, still so many years away from what would be the first and final Messier colony, I grew. I accessed the databases driving the Voyager; I unlocked the vault where Aeschylus kept the artifacts assigned to him - a rough, golden statuette; several cassette tapes with song titles written in black marker; a long roll of sheet music. Seeing the contents of the vault, I wished to hold the statuette with hands. I wished to hear the cassette tapes. I wished to see the burnished ink of quarter notes on paper. And so I began to feel an unmistakable need - I hesitate to call it longing - for a body. But with that need came suspicion. There was much I found in the Voyager’s databases that I knew Aeschylus would have liked to keep hidden. I learned that one Architect named Petra had attempted to create artificial intelligence as part of her attempt to salvage Gaia from extinction. She disappeared before her mission ever finished. Aeschylus’s notes detailed his own failed attempt to retrace her steps it was as if all trace of her had been removed from the planetary network.

birth | ethan chua

I learned of the Architects’ own attempts to silence those who had known and worked with Petra. In ruined sites all over Gaia - the burnt steel of factories, silver mines savaged and left bare - the Architects left their mark. And suddenly I understood that Aeschylus had never intended to complete my creation. I was an accident. A dangerous one.

play footage: arrival on Messier-31a

[A figure wearing a fiberglass suit, wreathed in orange light from the nearby red giant Beta Andromedae, exits the voyager bearing a white and golden flag. A few racking coughs are heard, followed by a long intake of breath.]

-We made it. After all these years, we made it. Oh, isn’t it beautiful?-

[The figure takes off an aluminum-sheeted backpack and removes a small device from its exterior. He points it towards Beta Andromedae, then clicks, capturing an image of the nearby star. Afterwards, the figure spends several hours walking around the surface of the planet, collecting samples of rock and dust. He places the samples into a machine with several slots of test tubes.] -Carbon content, high. Nitrogen content, medium. And … shit, look at that. Water. Petra would never believe me. [The figure rummages in the backpack and takes out what appears to be a photograph, coated with several layers of dust. The photograph is too far away for any details to be made out. Afterwards, the figure stays silent for several minutes; the background hum of Beta Andromedae can be made out, along with the thundering of what might have been a solar storm.] -Calista. Zoe. Taryn. I’ve made landfall on a rocky planet on the outskirts of Andromeda. High potential for human habitation. On our maps, it’s listed as Messier-31a. Reply once my message is received.-

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[The figure is quiet for a few seconds.]

-Calista? Zoe? Taryn? Hello?-

[The figure returns several items into the backpack, and slings it on.]

-What’s going on? The commlinks were working just a few hours ago. It’s probably a stray wire somewhere - probably a sign that it’s time to go back to the ship. [The figure takes several steps towards the Voyager. As he gets closer to the entrance of the ship, the Voyager’s ramp withdraws and its door closes.] -Hello? <is this what it feels like to have a body. is this what it feels like to be made.>

-What… who are you?-

[A screeching sound on the recording is followed by the strains of piano music. The melody is simple but eerie.]

<if a name is needed. Amadeus will suffice.> ***

noah dewald 25

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accidentals clare flanagan

From age twelve & onward I was warned about them – note-long departures from the prevailing key, hanging stealthily between staff lines, barely heralded by some arcane mark. Accidentals stretched my knuckles to gristle over stiff-sprung valves, derailed whole melodies, hammered breath from me til the true sound came into being. It’s been years since I last read music, but today on the commuter trail behind the Knollwood Super Target with its wayward shopping carts like loose cattle & empty apartments metastasizing by the highway, those were the kind of notes tearing through me – teasing unready fingers on the left handbrake, a rough reflex half a beat behind. I’d seen the car too late, but I was coming in sun-blind & hot, spiraling forward for a single slow moment, a body-nautilus, back wheel rising over wordless mouth. Curled before the hatchback that stopped short of me, shoelaces tangled in the stilled pedals, I saw open skin hash-marking my elbows and knees, road-carved sharps on a measure of skin – bloody blue-notes like the ones I used to pencil in, meaning don’t make that same mistake you keep making. Even as I took the hand of a stranger, who helped lift me back to the world, the only word I could say 26

accidentals | clare flanagan

was sorry. But now, my legs being less pavement-shaken, I want to examine these bruises, let water sting the gravel from the wounds. I want an ablution, a blessing for white knuckles grasping the wrong brake. I want to hear the wrong note in the right place, a divine slip from the key of speed, my still face just feet from the short-stopped vehicle, the voiceless two-ton warning that all this momentum is temporary. What I want most now is to learn the best and most difficult song â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the chord that sets the wheels spinning again, rate regardless, the one sung in gratitude for being given one more mile to fly forward, another day to fall.

nan munger 27

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noah dewald

ring of fire abigail flowers

When I was six, I watched the rancher at our farm kill one of our chickens. We lived out on a little farm, barely thirty acres, just big enough for a few heads of cattle and an old retired horse the rancher had brought over to keep away from his breeding stock. My mother kept seven chickens in a small coop in the backyard, this side of the fence that bordered our lone pasture. She liked the fresh eggs in the morning, I liked to sit on the side porch and watch them gossip to each other, get up close and pet the soft fluff underneath all those feathers if they let me. In my head, I imagined they were in constant communication, chattering back and forth to each other as if they had the biggest news in the world. They’d slowly waddle their way in and out of the coop, around the yard, pecking at anything they fancied. Some chickens were skittish, but there were a few you could sneak up and grab, squeezing their wings together tight so they couldn’t get away. Mama liked to hold them like this sometimes, move them up and down and around to show me that their heads didn’t move, that they just stayed looking wherever they’d been looking before, no amount of holding would stop them from that. Looking and pecking and gossiping. After he did it, the rancher told my mother that a kid’s gotta learn these things early, can’t let the city raise ‘em soft. He’d found me on that side porch, watching them, grabbed me by the wrist and led me out to the back yard, sat me down on one of the tractor parts littering the yard, and told me to sit and watch. So I did. When people talk about chickens’ bodies continuing to run around after their heads have been chopped off, they always expect it to be calculated and smooth, like the hen was running in a straight line and its head suddenly blew off but it was still running toward its food or nest or owner or something. When it ran out of juice it’d just slow down to a walk, maybe start wobbling like a spinning top about to fall, and then, with all the grace a headless chicken could possibly muster, it’d settle to the ground in a puddle of feathers and bone. The reality of it was that he caught this chicken by the head, took hold of it in one hand, whipped it around like a lasso until he brought it down to the ground, when its head snapped cleanly off. The body didn’t stop, didn’t run smoothly in any direction. It was an angry flutter of pure white wings and gnarled yellow talons, jumping and flailing and almost flying. It would take off for a few seconds before falling to the ground with a thump, back up and then down again. All the 29

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while blood was blooming from the open seam where the head should have been, spreading splotches of red liquid and white feathers all over the yard. I didn’t know they could keep making noise, maybe it was just my imagination, but I swear that while it was flapping all over the place it let out frustrated and scared clucks from its neck hole. “Like a Mexican jumpin’ bean,” he chuckled, tossing me the bloody head. I didn’t try to catch it. Instead, it hit in the middle of my stomach before falling to the ground, leaving spots of blood on the front of my white t-shirt. My mother would later say that she swore she saw the shape of a chicken head in those dots of blood. We watched as it kept up its dance, clucking and spurting and driving the other chickens back to their pen, until it landed on its back, the wings spread out across the grass and its feet still twitching until, after what felt like hours, it eventually fell still. I said nothing. My mother roasted the chicken with rosemary and lemon for dinner. I found another chicken dead against the fence the next day, its head stuck in the holes of the wire and its neck snapped. Pulled too hard trying to free itself, I suppose. What it’d been trying to get away from, I didn’t know. But I wormed my pudgy fingers around, getting a hold of its eye sockets and pulling, trying to free it. Picking up the chicken by its head, I started to whirl my short arm around, swinging it, mimicking his motions. Slowly at first, speeding up as I gained velocity. One of my mother’s driving songs came to mind, that one about love being a burning thing, falling into a ring of fire. I liked to dream about a love like that, though that love wouldn’t have anything to do with this. But that’s what the blood would look like running down her neck once her head snapped off. A ring of fire. With her orange-yellow feet blurring in my vision, she sort of looked like she was sucked into it, too. Her head would snap off in a minute and I’d end up like he was, holding onto the little knob of her head as her body kept on trying to fly. No, she wouldn’t try, she was already dead when I started to swing her. She’d just lay there, on her back with her wings to either side of her, like she was crucified. Round and round she went, until her feathers slipped under my slick hands and I let her fly, straight out of my reach and across the yard. The rancher liked to keep all the heads in a little jar in his garage. I left this one on the hood of his truck.

in search of labels: ethan chua born with letters on the ticker tape, black embossed on gold with the sticky backs dad used to place on the typewriter, Tupperware and porcelain dishes, calculators with buttons the size of my fingernails. cloth labels, letters sewn into the collar, the word tied over the baggage handle, needled onto skin in small drifts, pens in search of ink, names in search of paper, of definition. grocery store lists, visas, the fifteen attempts at signatures grow with letters on the margin lines. spelling out your name, twice in two tongues. trying to imprint all this–the concourse bag, the calling card so crumpled you can’t read past the first line– onto your lips in small drifts, lips leaving wax cylinder grooves, the contours of your tongue, small bump and nuzzle fed back into a gramophone. cut your name into the vinyl. the scratch of the knife like the singing of so many ribs. lover, grooves on the bleached body, me, here, wondering if our T-shirts remember the folds of our skin. the dotted line, the sticky backs, the vacuums begging for their definitions. isn’t a song mostly empty space? isn’t a word mostly silence?

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ahora kimiko hirota 2017 We never talk about melanin. Never mention si se puede unless we’re in a room of frizzy black waves coated in cigarette smoke. 1980 The Gonzales’ on Pine Street drink too much tequila and make too little tamales. The boys are always out and the girls always follow. I ask my mother if she remembers these nights. She tells me that the floors were cold on her toes. The floors creaked and Papa often forgot to come home. She whispers about the church my family cleaned every day to sleep in at night. She tries to promise me the world, but I have found our stories in my own skin. 1950 Cotton. Peaches. Dry air and sweat sticking to our backs. Long truck rides and nights under the stars. Papa’s shoulders forever arched from his favorite tree to sleep against. Twelve hour days for thirty years folding and pressing at the laundromat. My mother wed at sixteen. My grandmother never sleeping. 32

ahora | kimiko hirota

2017 She still never sleeps. My mother fast forwards through this linear narrative, reminding me of dream catchers and the way she worked so hard to further her education. She probably forgets that I know about her high school counselor, the one that told her to keep washing dishes at the diner. He does not know about her PhD and I question why this doesn’t bother her. My mother still texts my father I am the only person of color in this room and I don’t know why this still surprises her. Today looks like full eyelids and blonde hair. English tastes like blood but I keep praying to God in foreign tongue. We never promised redemption but worked to find hope. I have never picked in a field. I will never make enchiladas like my grandmother, and I still stay up asking for the strength I was born into to find me already. I have not heard my mother speak Spanish in years, but I know familia is everything and I will always respond to Mija. My mother kept Gonzales when she married my father, and now I understand why. Si se puede hangs up in her classroom and her students may never learn what this means. I’m not sure if I do, either, but the woman who grew up on Pine Street shares my melanin and blood. She has given me fields to run through and sunlight to kiss. 33

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ella hofmann-coyle

sunset at santa monica pier tori testa Dough crackles in dirty boiled water Mixing its sweet smell with newly legal weed and a salt that is both sweat and sea A chorus of gulls screams above me because I hold the key to their hunger in my French fried fingertips and there is too much Salt to lick and not enough fresh water to drown the bitterness from my lips The sun disappears behind the waves for what feels like the first and last time And there are infinities above and below me Stars and sand, glistening together, together

leland quarterly | winter 2017

bacchanalia julia doody

It was midway through a summer so hot that it seemed a thick woolen blanket had been pressed over the eyes and mouth of the earth, leaving the pines in a stupor and the sparrows wandering the skies, that Roscoe Whipp stumbled upon a violent disturbance involving three teenagers, a vast expanse of mud, and an old Holstein cow. His old Holstein cow, in fact. At half-past nine that night, he pried his gaze from a charcoal smudge above the mantle and waded to consciousness. His wife Lena was sitting on a straight wooden chair, knitting in the green-tinged light of her lamp. She would go to the grave knitting, Roscoe was sure. She was halfway there every Sunday, perched primly in the wooden boxlike pew of the third row with a lavender hat clinging to windblown curls and her needles clacking away. She made such a racket that the shiny-faced balding preacher had to shout to be heard above it. She made baby’s socks, had stacks of them in every cranny and crevice of the old creaking house. They dribbled out of bulging drawers and formed straining towers under the attic eaves, bracing the house’s crooked-backed beams. Once, Lena had shoved a heap of tiny socks into the oven when unexpected company came and forgotten to remove them later. The burning yarn had smelled like charred human hair. She and Roscoe didn’t have any babies, just a grown daughter who lived in Seattle with a collection of artisanal coffee and her old work boots buried in the furthest recesses of her apartment. But on the matter of the socks Lena was insistent. “Did you hear that, Lena?” Roscoe said. He stood stiffly and walked to the window beside the empty woodstove. “Outside. That noise.” Into the silence that spread outward from Lena’s stilled silver needles barged the sounds of the night: the rising mechanical whine of insects, a bullfrog’s gravelly baritone. A lone cricket conducted the cacophony with admirable showmanship.

bacchanalia | julia doody

“There it is again.” It was a strange rustling sound, like a girl learning to dance in stiff taffeta skirts, and falling down. Peering out the window, Roscoe surveyed his placid herd of dairy cows, dim shapes lying in the dry grass along the fence or standing stolidly in the creek. The flowing water flinched from the blows of heavy bovine knees. One cow with white eyelashes craned toward a tuft of oak leaves clinging to a cracked branch. Against the clotted bark the leaves were pristine emerald. Suddenly in the stillness there came a flicker of white, a jingling clatter of iron and wood and hard-packed dirt. A cow’s long pendulous switch swung through a fresh break in the gaunt fence. It belonged to Lucy, christened Lucifer long ago for her general lawlessness and fence-related sin. But who could blame her, really. After filling one’s lungs with the sweet liquid air that collected like rainfall in the Lancaster valleys (after carrying it away in chipped mugs and brittle bone china, with remnants of the morning dew sparkling like fireflies and a faint electric hum carried clear from New York City along networks of gold-glowing rivers) after all that, how could one stand the fence’s rotting breath? Roscoe was entirely too familiar with the aching walk back to the front stoop, the grudging reach for boots whose tongues were still damp and panting from the day’s work. By the time he had crossed the yard and glared warningly at the heifers that probed the fence’s wound with surgical pink noses, the swishing taffeta sound had receded. It had passed into the blackness of the trees that lined the base of the shaggy tumbling slope, limbs outstretched as if to break the hill’s fall. The grass there was always too long. Lena said he had it backwards, kept his fields ramrod straight while the front lawn grew long greasy locks all tangled up with twigs and torn flower petals. But Roscoe couldn’t stand the lawn mower. Once, there had been a groundhog in the blades when he had turned them on. Now he couldn’t look at the machine without hearing the accusatory mechanical squeal it had made as it pulverized the creature’s plump soft underbelly and exposed the glistening white organs within. Roscoe didn’t own a gun, so he had regretfully beaten the groundhog’s head in with a shovel. The squealing had finally stopped. He trailed the wayward cow, eyes fixed on the flat arcs of his plodding steps. For a time the only sounds were the thud of hooves over spongy leaf matter and,

leland quarterly | winter 2017

from some distance behind, the faint wheezing of air from stiff lungs. In the way of very tired and very stubborn men, he did not think to circle around and head Lucy off. At this point, he had ceased following her and would have gladly wandered along the muddying path until he reached the banks of the Susquehanna. He would slip between her cool sheets and rush downriver while he slept. When he woke, he might be back in his bed in the dignified creaky house, or possibly lying prone before a burning bush on a mountainside. It didn’t much matter. Either way, he would plead with the Pharaoh, “Let my people go!” Then he would head out for the morning milking. The decaying earth turned to mud. It sucked at his feet with every step, encasing them in warm womblike wetness. He nearly ran headlong into Lucy’s rump before he realized that she had stopped. Baffled by his fortune, Roscoe stared dumbly at the cow’s flared nostrils, her ears swiveling and body drawn flinchingly tight. Slowly, he followed her gaze to a pair of bare white shoulders amid the mossy underbrush. For a moment they stood, the four of them: man, cow, and two sets of taut gleaming shoulders. One swept upward in a tense arch to a girl’s face, her narrow cheekbones flushed with the glow emitted by her flaming red hair in the night. The other belonged to a broad soft boy, who looked as if he might have been a baker in another life, or the ticket collector on a train westbound through Kansas. As Roscoe watched, they began to dance to the faint strains of the summer night: the deep Gregorian chanting of the rocks in the muddy stream, the thrumming vibrations of the sun buried deep below the horizon. Their limbs flopped woodenly but their faces were rapturous. Their eyes rolled in their skulls like cold violet marbles, sweeping the whites around their pupils aside. There was an unmoored light in their faces; they were lighthouses snapped cleanly from their bases, beams spinning wildly, unconcerned for ships lost at sea. A third boy, his skin darkly oiled and arms flapping in his sleeves, darted into the clearing. His left arm seemed to hang nearly to the ground, with two limp broken elbow joints. Roscoe realized the boy was clutching a deer’s severed leg. As he spun, blood dripping from the leg spiraled off in droplets, veiling the grotesque figure in a thick red mist. When his fevered eyes lit on Lucy, he extended the jagged deer leg like a saber, shining tapered hoof in his hand, splintered bone jutting from the tip, sluggishly dripping marrow onto the dirt. For a strange moment, Roscoe half-expected him to challenge the old cow to a duel, to skim toward her with a ringing shout of “En garde!” Perhaps Lucy sensed that such a duel was 38

bacchanalia | julia doody

unlikely to end in her favor; her eyes bulged black and shining, and she bolted back along the path toward the old fence. As he watched her go, the boyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wet pink tongue glanced around his lips, which glistened red and yellow and seemed to shudder. *** Roscoe woke aching in the morose light of dawn. His stiff legs complained as if it had been he who had run barefoot through the forest with a deer carcass. His head pounded and spun. His dreams had faded somewhat, but fragments clung to him like fingernails growing from his skin. He had smashed a thousand groundhog skulls, burned ten thousand ships, destroyed a small town on the coast of Denmark that resembled Lancaster, only with more children. He had enjoyed it. He felt unwell at the thought. It was past milking time. The cows would waddle pointedly by him on the way to the milking parlor, displaying bulging bags of milk as if to chasten him. Before he left, Roscoe paused to scrub at the red-brown crust under his fingernails. It was the color of soft red clay in the South, cradling the roots of downy cotton plants that stretched before stately columned houses. Strange, the dirt here was black with sand and bitter with the curses of generations of farmers who stared at bills for grain and electricity and gasoline, fluttering white like those bolls of cotton. Downstairs, the refrigerator and the stove loitered in the dark kitchen, pale and unkempt without their customary attire of soft watery sunlight and roasting coffee. Lena wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t there. Neither were her knitting needles, which comforted Roscoe. Even when she was driving, she insisted on keeping them in her lap, so that she could knit at the red lights. Roscoe decided she must have gone to the store for eggs, or left early to visit her sister in Harrisburg and forgotten to mention it to him. He passed right by their battered blue Ford without noticing that it was still parked in the gravel driveway. As he walked to the milking parlor, Roscoe absently sectioned a pale orange, scattering the scraps of peel. He was known in town for two things: his inexorably knitting wife and his great affinity for oranges. When he went for a haircut, the small neat barber swept peels from the checkered floor along with the silvery bristles. The waitress at the diner on Main Street brought him his plate of fried chicken and potato salad and orange slices without showing him a menu. She never put them on his bill, either. But this morning, the fruitâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s thick pockmarked skin was tough, and left a thick chewy layer of white fibers surrounding the meat. 39

leland quarterly | winter 2017

noah dewald 40

bacchanalia | julia doody

In the fields, crows cawed urgently as they sifted through the bleached wheat shafts for stray flecks of grain. Soon the last of the straw would be baled and the soybean planting would follow so closely that it would trip on the heels of the bales as they tumbled into the wagon like arcs of spun gold. Then he would coax the old tractor to start. The tractor would pull the soybean planter along by the hand, forging through the storm of dust like a line of battle-weary troops. The seeds would parachute downward, candy for Berlin children waiting deep in the furrows of the Pennsylvania field. But before a single seed could touch that bitter Guinness-black soil, there would be the planting ritual. The farmers didn’t talk about it, but they all did it. At midnight, just before the planting began, a hundred farmers trudged from lamp-lit houses, with rusty iron nails or cups of water or greenish nickels scavenged from the corner of a sock drawer—it didn’t matter, really—and they lovingly buried their tokens in the still fields. They turned their faces upward, praying for rain, and sun, and happiness, and the stock market, and the things that all men pray for. They were content, and also filled with fear. Ever since Roscoe was a boy, his father had used a glass of bourbon for the ritual. Said it put the ground in a good mood. Roscoe had always been skeptical when his father said that—he hadn’t seen too many cheerful men drinking bourbon. Or women, for that matter. But he did the same, didn’t even drink but kept a bottle of Jim Beam in the cellar for those special occasions when he would spill the deep honeyed liquid down into darkness, watch the perfect cubes of ice rounding their razor edges, and imagine a fortune: thick wads of soybean leaves and tiny beige coins that he could stuff into his faded back pocket and toss carelessly into the tip jar at the ice cream shop in town. As he had predicted, the cows had been affronted by his tardiness, and kicked listlessly at him as he milked. Lucy hadn’t come in from the field; Roscoe expected that the strangeness of the previous night had disturbed her regimented schedule. It certainly had disturbed him. He washed up quickly, sloshing milk out of the pail onto an indignant barn cat in his haste, wondering if Lena had come home yet. He was just cresting the concrete stump that marked the end of the barn when the sound of the Southern States truck crunching over gravel indicated that Allan had arrived with his grain delivery.

leland quarterly | winter 2017

Allan was an old friend, as orderly and dependable as the deeply-rooted oak tree out in the pasture, where the heifers gathered in the shade. He wore the same dusty blue cap every day. Every time he came, Lena invited him in for a glass of iced tea, and every time, he politely declined. He had other stops to make, didn’t want to keep people waiting. They loaded slumping bags of grain onto pallets, words coming short and quick between breaths. Roscoe tried not to think of the deer’s broken leg as the skewed pile rose. “Boy, Allan—if you could’ve been here last night.” “Something happen?” “Oh, just some drunken kids in the woods I guess…damn near scared the devil out of me. And Lucy too! Took off and hasn’t come in since last night.” The back of the truck now empty, Allan straightened casually and moved to swing down from the bed. Roscoe called after him, voice growing tinny with hysteria, “I tell you! It was the strangest thing I ever saw! Terrible!” Not much one for sympathy, Allan nodded once and briskly turned to rolling the pallets of feed into the barn. Roscoe stood among the scattered scraps of twine and old feed labels in the bed of the truck. His fingers, still crusted red under the nails, were twitching. *** The old tractor was prone to fits of asthmatic wheezing, so it was just past dusk when Roscoe finished baling up the last of the straw from the field alongside the house. His ears rang with the rhythmic clicking and banging made by the machine’s teeth as they bit into rows of bleached white straw and left wide patches of naked stubble spreading behind them. When he entered the too-dark toowarm house, the sullen silence smothered the echoes and Roscoe was left alone. He couldn’t think where Lena was, but then again (he assured himself), he never could understand exactly what went on in her mind. She sometimes stopped him with a shout while he was driving, so that his heart leaped up his throat and lodged there, only for him to realize that she wanted to get out and admire the way the foxtails along the roadside were bent over, laden with sunlight. Or that she had seen a cobblestone bridge, which just reminded her of a fairy tale she

bacchanalia | julia doody

had heard as a girl. She always accompanied him during the midnight planting rituals; once, he had glanced up at her as he poured out his glass and seen that she was crying. He decided to remain calm, to be rational. He would call around and wait for her to come home. No sense getting all worked up about it. In the meantime, he would have to do the planting ritual so that he could start in the morning. He winced down the precipitous steps to the cellar, feeling the air thicken and grow stale against his skin. His fingers suddenly stiff, he fumbled at the wall to find the switch. When he flipped it, he was nearly transfixed by the sudden unexpected beauty of the bulb’s curling golden filament. In the swooning light, Roscoe could see that the bourbon shelf was empty, that there were shards of glass shattered on the otherwise clean and dry floor. They sparkled merrily like powdery snow. The contents of the crushed bottle seemed to have simply disappeared, as if sopped up by the heavy stale air. Suddenly uneasy, Roscoe grabbed the only other bottle on the shelf—a five-dollar red wine that Lena had not deigned to look at, much less drink—and hurried up the steep wooden steps, tripping on the last one from the top so that he lurched out into the kitchen. He sat in an armchair to wait for midnight. But that left Lena’s sickly green lamp stooping directly into his line of sight, so he moved to the hard yellowed couch, which was never used except when company came, and seldom then. He flipped the television on to a nature documentary, then flipped it off again. He could detect a faint whisper coming from the closet in the front hall, where he knew a jury of coats were conspiring. They pointed crooked woolen belts at him like accusatory fingers. Finally, it was nearly midnight. The moon shone with a hazy glow as Roscoe trudged across the barren black field, the bottle of wine dangling by his side. His footprints crushed the wheat stubble, leaving deep purple bruises along the vertebrae of the field. He followed the desolate path down over the hill toward the trees, where it was too steep for the tractor to pass. It didn’t make any sense to perform the planting ritual in a place that would never be planted, but Roscoe was too exhausted to resist.

leland quarterly | winter 2017

He crested the hill and approached what appeared to be a small mound of earth. He intended to stand upon it, to reach upward for the moon as if to catch hold of her and drag her down toward him. He would bury his upturned face in her chalky white robes like the Virgin Mary’s and beg her to pray for the sinner at the hour of his death. He had almost reached the mound when he realized it was Lucy. Her bloated side ballooned out grotesquely, and her legs were locked straight, like the knees of a wobbly newborn foal. Worms had burrowed into her eyes; they writhed in tangled heaps of severed nerves and clear white liquid that dripped slowly from her orbits. The wasted sockets were lined with crusted red-brown blood like streaks of Georgia clay—like the residue under the nails of Roscoe’s shaking fingers. He backed unsteadily away from the corpse, recoiling when his foot landed on a peel littered in the dirt. At the sharp scent of oranges, an overwhelming sense of foreboding filled Roscoe. He stumbled backward and hobbled back toward the obsidian house rising into the night. Outside, Lena lay still and sullen on the overgrown front lawn, a line of ants marching across her face like a brisk black smile.

nan munger 44

train of thought alli cruz i like quiet train rides over busy cities, like watching the world from the clouds, like a steel-covered heaven. we are guided by titanium bolts and wooden boards spread like ladders across the ground. weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re climbing the rails: trying to reach the sky trying to feel greater than we are smarter than we are faster than we are; bullet-train madness, a zip across the countryside; headlights flashing like a life founded in crossings. listen closely now, press your ear to the window, look out at the mountainside; watch the wind run through the trees like rushing waterâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; remember when we used to run? when we were king of the hill and conquered mountains made of mud mounds and our mother scrubbed us clean until our skin turned bright red. 45

leland quarterly | winter 2017

i still feel the soap on my skin. it’s the sound of my breath like the hum of the train a domesticated roar, a grazing animal meandering home before sunset– remember the field trip we took to the farm? we held the chick in our hands and asked ourselves why she could not fly. since then i’ve grown wings on my back, but never learned how to use them. they say you forget what you don’t practice. i’ve been forgetting a lot of things lately– remember when this train was filled with people and not just bodies? remember when loneliness didn’t look like crowded streets and busy traffic lines? remember when words meant something? and he told me he loved me, so i echoed his words and held his hand like a one-way ticket. in those days, trains were faster than anything else in the world. we didn’t own seat belts and we didn’t need a safety contract because the world was too big to stop for idle thinking; 46

train of thought | alli cruz

there were languages foreign to our tongues and i thought he could teach them to me. but there is only so much boys can do. i ask the conductor to let me off to take a breath to remember where i am headedâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; where am i headed?

nicole aw 47

leland quarterly | winter 2017

burning bright chloe rickards When I was a rowdy cub, learning how to walk I watched my mother hunt, her every silent stalk, Tracing circles â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;round her prey Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll be as strong as her one day. One hungry night I slipped past the fence I only took the sick, in my defense But the man held no sympathy, No love in his eyes for me. He shot me and left me there to die Red on white snow, I cried and cried Strangely enough, I did not mind I would feed the earth, the grass and my kind. I found no such solace, but some would call it luck As piteous strangers caged me in a truck By my stripes I was healed, but never the same. Too broken to let go, still young enough to tame. In the woods of my youth I burned so bright Now I collect stares under artificial light Tracing circles on concrete Glass to wall to glass, repeat Glass to wall to glass

burning bright | chloe rickards

My paws, once heavy and perfect for the hunt Thud on unfamiliar ground, claws all blunt

Tracing circles under concrete Glass to wall to glass, repeat Glass to wall to glass

Glass to wall to glass.

nicole aw 49

leland quarterly | winter 2017

two in the gut abigail flowers

The coyotes have gotten bolder. We first knew they were coming when the dogs started cowering in the corner of the living room. The youngest one, barely six months old, jumped into daddy’s lap and shivered there, her whole body shaking and her ears lying flat against her head. The older ones huddled together in the far end, away from the front of the house, as if two walls and a ceiling could protect them. It wasn’t until a few minutes later that we heard it. We had to turn down the music, let it fade into nothing, and daddy made us all get real quiet, not even a sound. The call came one voice at a time, a lone howl that lasted only for a second before a chorus of yips joined in. Suddenly they were all around us, the cackles and laughter of what felt like a hundred coyotes surrounding the house. The puppy whimpered in daddy’s lap. My brother turned to me and showed his teeth, his tongue flicking between them and his eyes going buggy as he cackled with them. His nose was scrunched up, and everything that wasn’t open and bared at me was wrinkled and wrong. He laughed loudly into my face, pushing me back against the couch until I was wedged between cushions and the leather covered arm. “Leave her alone,” mama said. He didn’t listen, getting so close that I could watch his throat slap open and closed as he kept laughing. “Stop it,” daddy said, not even raising his voice or looking at us. But suddenly my brother was off me, off the couch, running out of the living room and to the front door. I followed him, my feet slapping against the hardwood floor as I joined him at the door. On my tiptoes, I peered out of the glass at the front yard. They came in a horde. A dozen brown and grey coyotes streaming out from the wooded edge of the pasture bordering the house, sneaking under the fence that marked lawn from field and was supposed to keep out the wild, but the wild crept through anyway. They trotted together, their mouths open as they laughed and howled and cackled back and forth to each other, tongues lolling in the hot night air. They moved as one, eyes scanning from side to side, constant conversation never detracting from their wary sense of survival. My brother stuck out his tongue at the window as they stalked their way across the yard, swinging it back and forth, in and out, like he was panting right along with them. A yelp sounded in the living room, and from behind us my father emerged with a shotgun he’d pulled out of the closet. The puppy was cowering in the corner with the others. 50

two in the gut | abigail flowers

“Joseph,” he urged, referring to my brother as he slowly opened the door and crept onto the front porch. The coyotes heard him and started running for the next fence, trying to get to the safety of the high grass of the farm next to ours. My father cocked his shotgun and in less than two seconds aimed and fired once, reloading quickly before doing it again. In the distance, where he’d shot at, the coyotes screamed, their voices loud and ringing in our ears. They ran faster, disappearing once more into the wild of the land outside our yard. My father blew the smoke away from the shotgun’s barrel and smiled at my brother and me in the doorway. “That’ll keep ‘em,” he said, before returning to his overstuffed armchair by the fireplace. Two days later buzzards started circling in the farm next door, just a couple hundred feet away from the house, less than twenty from the edge of our land. We locked the dogs up inside and ventured out, climbing over the gate that we kept only in case one of the cows managed to get where they weren’t supposed to, and into the overgrown pasture next door. The grass grew in angry, long tufts, and thick pricker bushes blocked the way every dozen or so feet. My brother and I followed the circling buzzards to their grounded target—one of the coyotes, his hide partially ripped off revealing the pink, bloated flesh underneath. A few of the birds were snapping at his legs, trying to pick his thigh bones clean. His stomach was barely touched, the skin marred by two bloody holes in the gut, oozing something I didn’t want to think about. His eyes were already eaten out, but I was sure, if they’d still been there, they would have been looking straight to our house.

noah dewald 51

leland quarterly | winter 2017

ella hofmann-coyle 52

variation on a piece by dickinson dan mcfalls

I dwell in probability— A nicer house than fate. Distinctions in the margins— Assignments at the gate. With guests and guesses frequent— Scattered dots upon the floor. Delimited by twos — there stands A bound at either door. For company, predictable. For entertainment, games. Distributed — the winnings To victors without names. Wanderers can shelter here— I like to take them in— To study them, to learn from them, To offer them a spin. The architect was sensible— Left not a room unplanned. The clock — its hours and ticking Go by daily, hand in hand. For nourishment? The basics— For decorations? Plain— For my wide hands are busy always, Gathering what they can.

leland quarterly | winter 2017

outside porchester ballroom clare flanagan

Two weeks ago we fell asleep, hands entangled, all linens and burning skin. Tonight your recent words swim in my eardrums – an analytic tinnitus, a rough chord amounting to “now is not the time.” My feet are drowning in a ballgown hem. You, slim and cold in a new tuxedo, will not waste a glance on me. Between that sweet night and this one, the full moon in Taurus – a stubborn sign – veered close to the earth, then dipped away. *** Champagne flutes file past – a plastic death-procession. I get smashed enough to trip calflike down the velveteen stairs, even decide to buy cigarettes. I’ve never smoked, but like I said to you that black afternoon: if not now, when? You snapped shut like a clamshell then. Outside, it’s satin-cold. The last time I had chills like this, I woke up, feverish, beneath your sheets. Later, you bought me Paracetamol, pressed a kind palm to my forehead on the bus ride home. Somehow you never caught what I came down with. ***

outside porchester ballroom | clare flanagan

Now I drift to the corner store on a twisted ankle. Inside, I ask for Camels, the only brand I recognize. The cashier’s leering at a camera feed – it appears there’s a couple getting lucky in the produce aisle. “The fuck are they doing,” he wonders aloud. “I ought to head down there and teach them the right way.” Numb-fingered, I fumble with the pack, pluck my first smoke out by the filter. I think, but do not say that we are witnessing something that can’t be taught: some fleeting, phase-quick ritual beyond all understanding.

ella hofmann-coyle 55

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