The Literati Quarterly | Fall 2015 | Issue No. 5

THE LITERATI QUARTERLY POETRY, FICTION, ART & MUSIC Issue No. 5 | Fall 2015

The Literati Quarterly Poetry, Fiction, Art & Music Issue No. 5 | Fall 2015

FOUNDER, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Joschua Beres ASSISTANT EDITOR / POETRY EDITOR Jonathan Hobratsch CHIEF FICTION EDITOR Erin Pringle-Toungate ASSISTANT FICTION EDITOR Laura Cowan DIRECTOR OF ART ACQUISITIONS Ethan Ayce Ramirez BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Christopher Cadra

Guest Artist: Tara Snowden

Cover: “Lavinia” - collage on wood, 11” x 14” - 2010

TABLE OF CONTENTS In the Name of Displacement

by Nicolas Hundley 8 Birds of Youth

by Nicolas Hundley 9 What Changes

by Naomi Shihab Nye 10 Abuses of History

by Jack Kaulfus 11 Finding Ashbery: An Essay + Huffington Post Interview

by Jonathan Hobratsch 24 Two Poems

by Ben Mazer 28 Two Poems

by Rob Chalfen 30 When Sarah Goes Missing

by Kate J. Reed 33 Matchbox

by Francesc Parcerisas (trans. Cyrus Cassells) 38 The Sin-Eater

by Francesc Parcerisas (trans. Cyrus Cassells) 40 Imminent

by Clela Reed 42

CONTENTS CONT. The Arnolfini Witness

by Clela Reed 43 Matrioshka

by Joanne Esser 44 Scouring Nikumaroro

by Joanne Esser 45 An Excerpt from The Collected Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne

by Michael Martone 47 Nebi’im

by Quinn Chipley 50 The Cruellest Month

by Joanna Parypinski 51 John Gallaher’s In a Landscape review by Christopher Cadra 53 Michael Goldberg’s True Love Scars review by Christopher Cadra 55 Four Pieces

by Austin Eichelberger 57 Eutopia

by G. J. Jensen 61 An Eye for a Flower: Interview with mixed-media artist, Tara Snowden

By Erin Pringle-Toungate 63

“The Poisoned Garden” - collage on wood, 11” x 14”, 2010

The Literati Quarterly Poetry, Fiction, Art & Music Issue No. 5 | Fall 2015

IN THE NAME OF DISPLACEMENT

by Nicolas Hundley You failed to decode the acronym and so responded with acrimony, indifference, and ultimately gratitude. You puzzled at it, rotated it in the light, languished over it, tested its properties, submerged it in water in the name of displacement. You insulted it, took readings. You agitated it, and beneath the exterior you revealed that it was obscene. Eventually, you placed it on the shelf where it transpired. For years it remained, staring down at you like a souvenir, until, one day, in a certain light, it caught your eye and revealed itself to you. You failed to transcribe your findings, forgot them when you awoke.

8

BIRDS OF YOUTH

by Nicolas Hundley When you leave the bedside of your father, when you quit his chamber, you will find them: the birds of youth. When you walk into the light of the end of days, they will be waiting. When you flee the forensic hills, carrying the insignia for water, clad in hymns; when you exit the tunnel with a sack stuffed with light. When you quit the island and become a stranger to the island, they will be there: the birds of youth.

9

What Changes

by Naomi Shihab Nye

My father’s hopes travel with me years after he died. Someday we will learn how to live. All of us surviving without violence never stop dreaming how to cure it.

What changes? Crossing a small street in Doha Souk, nut shops shuttered, a handkerchief lies crumpled in the street, maroon and white, like one my father had, from Jordan. Perfectly placed in his pocket under his smile, for years.

He would have given it to anyone.

How do we continue all these days?

10

Abuses of History

by Jack Kaulfus

Above Bunny’s ancient Toyota, great black flocks of grackles are on the move. They line the telephone lines along the highway, migrating from one small town parking lot to another. Two hours from home, Bunny pulls off IH35 and into an Exxon station. While the numbers are running on the gas pump, she walks inside the store to use the restroom and looks at the skin on her neck. The washroom smells of antiseptic and menstrual blood. One of the corners of the mirror above the sink has cleaved, revealing the opaque green backing of the glass, and there is a long crack running from one side to the other. Above and below it are the hives that have been rising on her neck. They’re creeping down her shirt.

She buys a pack of cigarettes and a grape Nehi soda at the counter and turns to see a man outside bending over the front bumper of her car.

“Hey,” she shouts from across the parking lot.

The man straightens, and she can see he’s got a pocketknife in his hand, blade extended. In one fluid movement, he folds the blade back and slides the little plastic sheath into the pocket of his jeans. He’s a little older than her, maybe thirty, and there’s either pity or guilt all over his face. She steps between the pumps and looks down at the grill.

“You hit a bird,” he says, pointing at the feather stuck in the grille, flat streaks of wind-dried blood painting the bottom of her fiberglass bumper.

“Just trying to get it off,” he says, bending to pick up the bottle, which has rolled from her feet to his.

Bunny fights a wave of nausea. She turns her back, ashamed he could guess she would not be able to stomach the sight of blood and beak.

The man hands her the soda, which, she thinks numbly, is now probably flat.

It has been ages since she’s traveled the roads from Rockport to LaGrange, and she finds the landscape has sweetened, somehow, in the intervening years. She hasn’t been home since her father’s funeral a few years back. She’s missed the trip - the fields growing grayer against the horizon line, the slow horses searching for winter grass beneath the mesquites.

She fumbles the cap to the Nehi and a fountain of carbonation ends up in her lap.

Bunny half-searches through a stack of CDs for one that doesn’t make her sick, and tries not to think of her mother until she has to.

***

When she arrives at the farmhouse, Bunny tries three different keys on the ring before she finds the one that works the deadbolt. The first floor of the farmhouse is dark and quiet and smells of cedar oil. Bunny figures her mother and aunt to be asleep upstairs. She opens the door to her old bedroom to find that her mother has transformed the room into a pink and white festival of satin and chiffon. There’s a china doll sitting against the bed pillows.

11

No trace of Bunny remains – her decrepit garage sale desk is gone, as are the horse posters and collection of twisted sticks from the creek. She knows she shouldn’t expect things to be the same, but the bedroom feels incriminating. There’s not a trace left of the girl she once was. Bunny kicks her bag out into the hallway and shuts the bedroom door behind her.

Bunny hears the squeak of the recliner and the sound of her aunt on the stairs.

“I didn’t hear you come in,” Sophie says. Her smile is wide and strong, like the rest of her body.

“I missed you,” she mumbles into Sophie’s shoulder. Bunny doesn’t try to disentangle herself from her aunt. In truth, it feels good to be pinned by someone stronger than herself. Sophie pushes Bunny toward the stairs.

“We’ve missed you, too,” she says, “though the place is a lot easier to keep up since the sale.”

Shortly after her father’s death, Bunny’s mother sold the family’s seventy five acres of land – two fields flanked by a fat, healthy creek and a looming, two hundred foot limestone outcrop – to a neighbor who promptly opened the Rockin’ J Dude Ranch and began building state-of-the-art cabins in the back field. Bunny’s mother still lives in the farmhouse – she had it written into the contract that her rent on the house be frozen until the day of her death. ***

Upstairs in the guest bedroom, Bunny’s mom is sleeping. “You know she had them carry her up here after the surgery. Said it gets better light,” Sophie explains. She points to the emergency numbers on the bedside table and tells Bunny that a home health care nurse comes twice a day.

“This is probably a mistake,” says Bunny. Sophie turns around. Bunny can see there is little patience left in her eyes.

“A long overdue mistake, then.”

Bunny looks at her mother, who is slack-jawed and snoring. There is her body, under a flat sheet, bare save for the thick white bandage holding together the bisected belly underneath. “I won’t know what to do,” Bunny says, afraid to be alone with such a body.

Sophie lifts the suitcase easily, her thick freckled forearms visible under a white muslin top. “You’ll be fine. She’ll be fine. I’m only gone until Wednesday.”

Her mother lifts her head and shifts her weight stiffly, eyes still closed. Bunny fights an urge to touch the clean white sheet, to run her fingers up the exposed arm and feel for a heartbeat at the side of her mother’s neck. Instead, she takes a deep breath and announces to the sleeping woman that she will return after she unpacks. ***

She decides to stay in the master bedroom. Back when the room belonged to both her mom and dad, Bunny liked to sneak into their closet and sit among the shoes strewn at the bottom. She’d close herself in and peer through the slats in the doors, waiting for an opportunity to spring at the calves of an unsuspecting parent. Now, from the other side of the room, the closet feels haunted.

She has to pry her eyes from the door, and convince herself that nobody’s watching her from the other side. She sits down at the little desk under the window and looks at the fields rolling down toward the creek.

12

Next to the phone is a yellowing rolodex. The first few cards in the rolodex contain lists of names written in her father’s handwriting – business contacts and hunters who spent more time on her land than their own. She flips through the family friends, her aunts, uncles, and finally comes to the card with her own name at the top. The last address showing is one she left three years ago.

Bunny lifts a thick fountain pen from its brassy executive holder, crosses out the old address, and writes down her new information. She flips the cards back to the front, and then calls her girlfriend.

“I made it,” she says when Gina picks up.

“Mando’s brought pizza,” Gina says, happily. “And Braveheart.” Bunny hears somebody popping the top on a beer.

“Is the dog in there?” she asks.

“Mando, she’s calling you a dog.” Gina’s voice is loud and thin over the line.

Mando takes the phone and tells her he’s brought her fourteen small jobs for next week. Bunny repairs antique jewelry. Mando owns a consignment store, and they do their best to keep one another in business.

“I just cleaned the couch,” Bunny explains. “You keep Luna on the floor, okay?”

“Sure, yeah,” Mando says. Bunny hears the dog hit the hardwoods of her living room.

“I gotta go,” she says. “I miss you guys.”

“Don’t let the country air ruin your lungs,” Mando says. “Busy week next week. Here’s Gina.”

“I love you,” she says to Gina

“How bad is it?” Gina asks. Bunny can tell by the slight echo that she’s shut herself into the bathroom for privacy.

“It’s not that bad.”

“Don’t lie.”

“It’s not that bad.”

Gina lets the line go quiet for a moment. “I love you, too,” she says. ***

Bunny searches for a power cord, plugs in her phone, and then retrieves a paperback from the side pocket. Her mother is awake in the guest room, so she drags Sophie’s gigantic recliner closer to the bed and pours a cup of water. Behind Bunny, there is a cough, and she turns to see her mother’s eyelids flutter. An instant of wild panic flashes across her mother’s face. A few minutes later, her mother blinks groggily and turns her head. “You’re hiving” she says.

“How do you feel?” Bunny asks, glancing down at the bandage.

“Like major organs are missing.”

“Sophie said your nurse’ll be here pretty soon.” Bunny lowers the straw to her mother’s lips and smells the blue black odor of dulled pain.

“I had Sophie call you when I went in for surgery. I only had a few hours to put things in order.”

13

“How could you not know?” Bunny asks.

Bunny hears the door open downstairs

“It started small, like everything,” her mother replies. “You want me to call you every time I’m gassy?

A short slim woman with large hands strides into the room. “Well!” she says brightly. “You must be Bunny!”

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” Bunny says, “I’ll be downstairs.”

On the stairs she hears the nurse opening her bag and saying, “You know, she doesn’t look like a Bunny.”

“She never did,” says her mother. ***

Bunny decides to survey the damage herself, to get it over with. She walks past the abandoned goat pen in the back field and down a worn animal trail to the creek, thinking that the Rockin’ J Dude Ranch idea, while stupid, will probably turn out to be more lucrative than anything her father ever came up with. He didn’t grow up in the country, around animals in fields. He’d been an army brat, and had lived in five countries by the time he married Bunny’s mother at twenty.

“I thought he was a man of the world,” she’d told Bunny. Over and over, in response to any question regarding the land, the struggling farm. “Handsome, funny, spoke Japanese and gave me a German fairy tale book on our second date.” Her mother, born and raised in a small coastal town she hated, believed the gifts of foreign language to be promising signs of travel and wealth. When her husband bought the seventy five acres a few miles outside of LaGrange and began slowly renovating the farmhouse, she almost divorced him. She left, at least. She got as far as Salt Lake City in a VW bus she’d bought cheap off a dealer in La Grange.

“But by then I was five months gone and showing,” her mother had told her. “He flew up and got me and I never even got to Idaho.” And that’s where the story ended.

A man of the world her father was not. When he traveled, it was to pick up feed or bring home new stock. He bred goats, then Quarter horses, then Dexter cattle. There were always a couple of tiny bulls grazing in the back field, and a feeble corn crop dying of thirst in the front.

Eventually, in response to a poaching problem, her father began leasing the land to a steady stream of hunters who set up themselves up in the woods around the bottom of the limestone mountain, spreading deer corn and bottled doe urine in big circles around their badly camouflaged blinds.

They were big, rangy men who spent the colder nights in the bottom bedrooms of the farmhouse, joining the family for three square meals a day and evenings of cards and dominoes.

His father’s Army friend Miguel would come down from Fort Polk to spend his vacation weeks hunting and fishing on the land, turning his catch into gumbo or Jambalaya. Her mother seemed to welcome the distraction from the tedium, and during the colder months, Bunny often went to sleep with the sounds of their drunken stories drifting up through the wooden floorboards.

There was always a lovely crawfish etouffee on the stove those nights, or a roast in the oven. ***

Bunny fishes around in the weeds by the creek for a bit and finds the trace of an old path.

14

She follows it up along a rocky ridge overlooking the water, and finally comes to a spot covered over in broken mesquite branches and sourspot bushes. Hidden from the farmhouse, she sits down and pulls her knees to her chest. A hazy February sun is beginning to set behind the bare black limbs on the other side of the creek. She wasn’t given to fancy as a child, but there were some things both undeniable and untenable. This land knows her name, and soon she will be lost to it. ***

Back down by the house, Bunny swings the barn doors open and is surprised to find her father’s ancient John Deere with a shiny new baler attached to the back. The rest of the barn is empty, save for a few piles of lumber. She pushes the other door open to let in more light and walks to the corner stall, where her father kept the baby goats who weren’t going to make it on their own. She inhales, hoping for a trace of animal. All she gets is motor oil.

There was a time when she tried to save a kid on her own, in the fall of her thirteenth the year. He’d been left by the rest, unable to stand, heart beating too hard against the shell of his narrow chest. He was a little bigger than a puppy, his front legs misshapen. Sweating beneath the warmth of his body, she carried him back to the barn, speaking quietly, reassuringly, in the manner of her father.

She’d set him down in the brittle hay of the back stall, and started looking for a bottle.

When she couldn’t find the red and yellow nipple immediately, a slow panic began to flutter at the top of her stomach. She lifted reedy blankets and turned over dusty equipment in the falling light, her hands trembling and raw with cold. Every few minutes she returned to the kid to feel his chest, check his beleaguered breathing. Red foam bubbled at his lips. After a while, frantic and shaking, she knelt beside him, pushed handfuls of hay against his body to keep him warm, and ran for the house.

“I’ve got a kid in the barn,” she told her mother, who was standing at the kitchen sink, pouring red wine into a coffee mug. Dan, a red headed hunter who practically lived with them during deer season, looked up from his plate of stew and continued speaking as if nothing had happened. Bunny’s mother sat down across from him and lifted the mug to her lips. “I need the bottle,” Bunny said, raising her voice over Dan’s. “That one with the red and yellow nipple. Do you know where Dad put it?”

“Are you serious?” Her mother never went near the barn.

“He’s going to die if he doesn’t eat,” Bunny said.

“Gonna die anyway,” Dan said quietly, sopping up the last of his stew with a piece of buttered bread.

Bunny shook her head, now frustrated more than panicked, and got halfway up the stairs before she heard her mother say, “He’s not up there. He’s gone to Houston to see about that Alpaca herd.” Dan said something to her mother in a low voice, and Bunny left through the back door to avoid passing them again.

“Hunting season’s OVER!” she yelled back at the house from a safe distance. “GO HOME!”

She returned to the barn, wishing her father knew the way Dan acted when he wasn’t 15

around. Like he owned the place, her mother, her self.

In the barn, she flipped on the inside light, took a deep breath, and made herself concentrate on the colors she needed: Red. Yellow. Red. Yellow. Standing still in the middle of the floor, she forced her eyes to bring each object into focus. She pivoted, slowly. She closed her eyes tight, opened them, and tried again. Her heart slowed. It was just one thing. One thing she could not find.

Bunny walked back to the kid, who was on his side, stiff legged. Red-threaded mucus pooled in the hay beneath his cheek. She knelt and reached to touch him, but stopped. She pushed more hay against his belly and sat back on her heels, hearing the screen door of the house slam behind her. Her mother called. She shut the barn doors, knowing the kid would die sometime during the night. ***

Bunny climbs into the cab of the John Deere and opens the ash tray. It’s been cleaned.

She pulls a pack of Marlboros from her shirt pocket, lights one, and blows smoke into the cracked windshield. When it’s done, she crushes the filter into the ashtray and lights another cigarette, watching the fields fade into darkness. ***

The next morning Bunny is awakened by the thin, terrible sound of the mower. She unfolds herself from the easy chair beside her mother’s bed and stretches. Through the window she can see the John Deere cutting a line across the pasture she used to walk every morning before school. Bunny has coffee ready by the time the nurse arrives. She brings a breakfast tray and stays to watch Trudy take care of her mother.

“It doesn’t even hurt today,” says her mother in a surprised tone, watching the nurse swab.

Her wound has been left open, to drain and heal on its own.

Bunny keeps her eyes on the tray until her mother gasps at a sore spot. Then Bunny looks, and there are layers. Parts of her mother that exist beneath the skin, parts that are not meant to see light.

By the time the bandage is pulled tight again, the coffee is cold. Bunny sits and listens to the easy conversation between her mother and the nurse, watches her mother swallow pills and attempt to readjust herself on the pillows. After the nurse leaves, her mother looks flushed and tired, but alert.

“Give me some of that coffee,” she says, “it’s been ages.”

Bunny hands one of the cups to her mother.

“So it takes stage three to get you back home,” says her mother.

“It takes stage three to get an invitation.”

“You’re letting your hair grow?”

“Nah, just laziness.”

“Your Dad always liked it longer.”

Bunny touches the back of her neck. She wants to say that she thought of him the first time she could pull her hair into a ponytail again. That sometimes she wakes up in the morning, having forgotten he is gone. And that she doesn’t want to feel so lost and angry about the farm, 16

but she can’t begin to imagine a line of strangers trail riding along the creek bed. She doesn’t say anything at all. Her mother nods at the ring on Bunny’s finger.

“How’s Gina?

“Not crazy about moving to MacInaw, but I found a store cheap – jeweler just died.

Gina’s boss is willing to let her work from home, so we’re gonna try it.”

“Backward little coast town,” says her mother, who grew up not far from MacInaw.

“No jobs in the city,” Bunny says. She also wants to be as far as possible from anything resembling the farm.

“Is she coming to visit while you’re here?”

“Here? Mom, there’s a Welcome sign in our driveway. There’s a ropes course in our back field.”

“This is still our house.”

“It’s the Rockin’J Mess Hall,” Bunny says. “They’re just waiting until you kick off before they install a buffet.”

Her mother’s face goes hard. “Your daddy didn’t leave me much choice in the matter, Bunny. Remember that.”

Bunny takes the coffee from her mother’s hands and puts it back on the tray.

“Caffeine’s not good for healing.”

When she returns from the kitchen, Bunny’s mother is dozing in front of a muted episode of Oprah. Bunny sits, opens her book, and watches Oprah give away dreams.

Close to dinner time, Bunny grills a hamburger patty, melts cheese over it, and places a crisp, cold tomato on top. She adds a little pepper and salt, then takes the plate upstairs.

Her mother smiles when she sees the meal, one of her old favorites, and goes strangely soft around the corners of her mouth.

“You want to try to come to the table? Trudy says you need to try to move around every couple of hours.”

“I’m tired.”

Bunny spent her childhood in silent disagreement with her mother, knowing it was useless to argue. “How about you just try sitting up to eat the burger, and you make a decision from there?”

Her mother opens her mouth to disagree, but instead holds up a finger to Bunny’s face. “I see what you did there. Very crafty.”

Bunny helps her mother into a sitting position, and then offers an arm as support while she pulls legs over the side of the bed. Her breath comes quick while her limbs move slowly, and the color has gone from her face.

“Take a break,” Bunny says.

“Now I’m up I might as well try for the table.”

“Three steps, tops,” Bunny says, surprised at how light her mother has become, how brittle her shoulders.

“The bathroom also counts, you know,” says her mother, using her arms to lower herself gingerly into the wooden seat. “Trudy says I’m supposed to be moving around every couple hours. Ha. Trudy’s so full of shit. Never been sick a day in her life. You remember her? Used to be your nurse in elementary school. Long time ago.”

“No,” Bunny says.

17

Her mother takes a small bite of tomato. “I know you’re mad at me.”

“I’m fine.”

“You are, or you’dve been back to see me.”

“I’m really fine.”

“You want me to apologize? I can do that.”

“Apologize for what?” Bunny asks. “For Dan?”

Bunny’s mother swallows and reaches for the iced tea. She takes a long drink, then sets the tea down and meets Bunny’s eyes with curiosity. “Now that’s something new. Why would I apologize about Daniel Sinclair?”

“Is there something else you want to apologize for? Sincerely?”

“God, nothing sincerely. But you need something from me. It’s why you’ve returned on my deathbed, right?” Her mother leans forward, a mawkish smile spreading across her face. “To wrest from me the secrets of an ill-timed marriage, a mistaken pregnancy, a wasted life?”

Instead of answering, Bunny pretends to respond to a text message. ***

The next morning brings a short, violent storm across the north side of the farm. Bunny sips coffee while Trudy changes her mother’s bandages in the next room, watching the rain sweep across the fields. The creek will be full after the rain clears off, and she makes a mental note to see if any of her father’s fishing gear is still in the garage. Three days left, and she and her mother are at a standstill. Her mother answered no questions the rest of the evening prior, so Bunny gave up and went to bed early.

Her idea is not fully formed before she has dialed the number in the rolodex. Bunny is surprised when he answers the phone, and even more surprised to find herself asking Dan if he wants to visit her dying mother. After all these years, she says. Yes. ***

“Well,” says Dan, offering his hand to Bunny at the door, “Been awhile, hadn’t it?” He’s jowly and thick, the tips of his black ropers unscuffed.

“You haven’t changed much,” says Bunny, finding it difficult to return his smile.

“How’s she doin’?”

Bunny steps aside to let him in the house. “Coffee?”

“Everything’s the same,” Dan says, surveying the kitchen and seating himself at the table.

“She upstairs?”

“You hear she sold the place?”

Dan shakes his head. “Yeah, terrible. Happens, though. Couple years back, hadda just about do the same myself.”

“You have land?” Bunny slides a cup of black coffee in front of him but doesn’t offer cream or sugar. She knows his place. There’s an old grain elevator still standing on it.

“Hundred acres.”

“No deer on your land?”

“Crawling, why?”

18

“Well, you hunted this land. Not your own.”

Dan shrugs, looking confused. “Family land gets old. I’ve hunted all over Texas, Oklahoma, Florida even. Besides that, your mom and dad liked company. Think your mom got lonely out here just the three of you. And God knows they needed the money. And the meat. You taking good care of your mama? You here for long?”

He has the distracted air of men who are not accustomed to being alone with women who aren’t possible conquests. Like he has someplace better to be, someone else worth talking to.

“You never got bored on this land? I remember you being around a lot.”

“Don’t guess so.” Dan sets his cup down and wipes his upper lip with the back of an index finger.

“My mother, she still talks about that time you brought home a baby bobcat.”

“Bobcat? I never found one a those I didn’t kill.”

Bunny stands to retrieve a package of oreos from the freezer, where her mother has always kept them. Eat them just like candy, she’d say, whatever that was supposed to mean.

“That must have been another one of her hunters,” Bunny says. “There were a lot of you.”

Dan waves the plate of cookies away. “What’s this about?” he asks, not quite looking up.

Bunny shrugs and studies his face, which is clean shaven, but only just lately. The skin below his nose is white and tender. His eyes narrow. “What kinda joke is this?” he asks. “Your mama is up there, dying looks like, and you got a bone to pick with me?” Dan shakes his head, his cheeks flushed. “I swear to God.” Dan stands, pushing his chair back. He starts for the stairs.

Bunny slides by him and asks him to stop at the top of the stairs. “Let me tell her you’re here,” she says. He looks disgusted with her, and pushes past to knock gently on her mother’s door.

“She’s asleep,” Bunny whispers as he turns the knob. Panic rises in her throat and she wants to call out, to warn her mother that she’s done something possibly unforgivable. Bunny’s mother is not asleep. She’s reading. When she looks up, her eyes are large and watery behind the magnifying half-glasses. She is surprised, unfocused, until she sees Dan in the doorway.

“Hi, Dolly,” says Dan, his voice soft and melodic with memory or emotion or something else that Bunny can’t name.

Her mother looks from Dan to Bunny, her expression a lot like the one belonging to the man who scraped the dead bird from Bunny’s grille.

“Your Bunny was kind enough to call, said you was feelin’ a little under the weather.”

Dan is still standing in the door, and her mother looks quickly around the room. She sets her jaw, smiles stiffly. She folds her glasses and waves Dan inside.

“Maybe it’s not a good time,” Bunny says. Her mother acts as though she doesn’t hear. She pats the bed and Dan sits.

“You old bastard,” she says, not unkindly.

Bunny shuts the door and sits down on the top stair. She puts her head in her hands.

Dan’s truck keys sit next to his half empty coffee cup on the kitchen table downstairs.

Bunny grabs them and heads outside to the truck, which is parked between the house and 19

the barn. She doesn’t have a plan, past the urge to destroy something. She walks around the truck and opens the driver’s side door. There’s a pouch of Red Man chew wedged between the console and the passenger’s seat, and a small Bowie knife replica sheathed in a leather boot holster. Bunny pulls the knife from its sheath and runs her finger along the back of the blade. It’s shiny. She thinks about slashing Dan’s tires, but realizes he’ll be stuck on the farm. She decides instead to nail his tires so there’ll be a long, slow leak, not necessarily traceable. She settles on that idea, and moving to get out of the cab, she drops the knife. Reflexively, she moves to catch it before it hits the seat, and the tip of the blade catches the soft webbing of skin between her right thumb and index finger. Bunny grabs her right hand with her left. There’s a moment, just before the first drop of blood spatters on the seat, in which Bunny senses a new kind of regret she will feel for the rest of her life. The kind of unsettling loss that won’t leave. It will still be there after the death of her mother, after the sale and renovation of the farmhouse, after the first twenty year old brain-dead pack horse is led down the field and onto the creek trail. She will get older, stronger, and further from the truth of who her parents were behind the doors of the farmhouse, beyond her reach. She’ll forget her father’s face.

She’ll forgive the sale of the land. But she won’t come to live past or without the loss that is just beginning to pull at her back molars. Despite the heady nausea that comes in waves, Bunny sits a full minute in the cab of the truck, watching the blood run down her forearm and onto the seat.

Half an hour later, Dan comes downstairs. Bunny is bandaged and sitting at the table, waiting. Dan pauses at the table and asks what happened to her hand.

“Go away,” Bunny says.

When he tries to get back inside, he starts with a concerned knock which escalates quickly.

Bunny has locked the doors and the old French windows. Dan pounds on the door. He backs up and yells at the upstairs bedrooms that he will call the police and come back with his gun get ready for a phone call from his lawyers.

After he leaves for good, Bunny fills a tumbler with bourbon and takes it out onto the porch to watch the rain’s return. ***

An hour later, Bunny’s phone rings. “Well, I’m not coming down there,” says her mother.

“You will have to come up.”

Bunny sits at the foot of the bed and asks her mother if she has made things worse by coming to see her.

Instead of answering, she asks Bunny if she remembers the time her father took them to the airport to watch the soldiers come home from the Persian Gulf.

“Can we even call people Persian anymore?” her mother asks. “I can never keep up.”

“I think they just call it the Gulf War.”

Miguel was coming home from a year-long tour, and Bunny’s father meant to meet him at the gate with a bottle of Wild Turkey and pack of Marlboros. He said he wanted his girls to come along to give Miguel a proper family welcome because Miguel’s parents had been deported to Mexico and his young wife had left him while he was overseas.

“You wore heels,” Bunny says.

“Miguel was a sweet man, like your Dad.”

Bunny remembers the pristine floors and the smell of hot pretzels by the gate. She’d nev20

er been on a plane. At first it was thrilling to see the soldiers all in the same boots, same hats, same bags upon their shoulders. Their sunglasses – how alike did they have to be? It was like a parade.

But once they fell out of step and into the arms of their families, their faces began changing, melting into hollow-eyed replicas of humanity. Bunny had been confused, and then horrified. Miguel, one of the last ones off the plane, rushed into the arms of her father and buried his face deep in his neck. They embraced for a long time. Spared of the shift in Miguel’s features, Bunny looked gratefully at her mother, who bore the look of a dental patient trying to make it through a lengthy but necessary root canal.

“He always wanted me along,” Bunny’s mother says. “And you, too. It wasn’t like he didn’t love us.”

“Where is he now?”

“It was the late eighties. He died the way those young men usually died then. Your father was hurt, but I was just glad he wasn’t sick, too.”

Bunny takes a deep breath. Before she says anything, her mother holds up one hand.

“Your father and I never had to apologize to each other,” her mother says. “I shouldn’t have to apologize to you.” ***

When Sophie returns to the house the next morning, Bunny is in the kitchen, washing dishes and sweeping the floors.

Sophie blows on her cupped hands. “It’s hot in this house.”

“She told me she was cold, so I turned up the heat. You want some breakfast? She didn’t eat much.”

“Coffee would be nice.” Sophie says, bumping the thermostat down and taking a seat at the parquet table. She swipes a few cookie crumbs into her palm and empties them onto the pile that Bunny has swept up. “I see you are both still alive,” she says.

“Did you know Miguel?” Bunny asks, measuring the coffee.

“Sure, I knew Miguel,” Sophie says, lugging her sack of a purse to the table. She fishes around inside until she finds a pack of Dorals. Bunny casts an anxious look at the ceiling, but her aunt waves it off.

“Stage four,” Sophie says. “Hell, she can smoke if she wants to.”

Bunny helps herself to a cigarette and lights it off the end of her aunt’s. “I called Dan Freeman,” she says. “He came to the house.”

A short laugh escapes Sophie’s throat and turns into a cough. “Oh God, you’re playing to win this one. I wish I could’ve seen the look on your mother’s face!”

“They were miserable here, both of them. All of them.”

“Oh honey, they made their lives what they could. We all do. I hated that old asshole Dan, though. I was glad when she was through with him. Used to get drunk and scream and cry and try to shoot out the stars. Thought he was a poet. Scared the horses to bits.”

“She won’t tell me anything,” Bunny says.

“Really. Seems like you’ve got some new information under your belt these past few days.”

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“I made her mad, that’s why. How could you have kept all of this from me?”

“You were a kid.” Sophie shrugs like Bunny would have done the same thing. “Now you’re an

adult.

She exhales and points her cigarette at her niece. “Bunny, you need to go up there and tell her you’re gonna be okay. Lie if you have to. It’s a family virtue. ***

Bunny does go upstairs, but she doesn’t wake her mother. Instead, she packs quietly in the master bedroom before creeping into her mother’s room. She pulls a clean sheet from the linen closet, unfurls it over her sleeping mother, and tucks it in at the foot of the bed. Then, she folds the note and tents it over the TV remote on the bedside table; her mother will reach for it after she finds her glasses.

Downstairs, Bunny hugs her aunt at the door and thanks her. She tells Sophie she will be back the next weekend.

It took her three tries, but when the words came, finally, they felt pulled from a place as hopeful and green as the field where she’d found the abandoned kid.

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“Maria” - collage on panel - 11” x 14” - 2012

Finding John Ashbery: Essay + Interview

by Jonathan Hobratsch

The Huffington Post originally published the interview that follows this prose during National Poetry Month. The prose that precedes the interview is original for The Literati Quarterly.

John Ashbery is the winner of almost every major poetry award. His latest book Breezeway is now available. This is his 26th collection of poetry. The literary critic Harold Bloom defines our current era of poetry as the “Age of Ashbery.”

1. Finding Ashbery in a Book Nearly every young poet remembers his or her first introduction to John Ashbery. Mine occurred sometime in 2005, while looking for The Songs of Maldoror by the French proto-Surrealist Comte de Lautréamont, at a discount bookstore.

It seemed right that I’d find Ashbery by looking for a French poet, since Ashbery is a Francophile and translator of French poets. The connection was simple; Ashbery had written a book entitled Hotel Lautréamont that I found at that bookstore. Naturally, loving Lautréamont, I had to purchase Ashbery’s book as well. The interior of the book did not disappoint.

What I got from my first glances of Ashbery was language that I both did not understand, but seemed intimately a part of me. While our human nature sometimes opposes what we don’t understand, we occasionally find magic in unknown things. Omni ignotum pro magnifico est, as Tacitus said. The magic with Ashbery remains, even if we manage to find out how the Christmas gifts are deposited under the tree.

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Over time, I achieved my own interpretations of Ashbery’s poems, which may vary from other people’s own readings, as well as vary from the designs of the poet himself. Like Paul of Tarsus, Ashbery seems, in his poems, to declare that his words have become all things to all people. They will find us in any mindset and on any day.

For me, Hotel Lautréamont opened a path to a new way of writing poetry that both strengthened me, but also made me into one of his many satellites trying to break from his gravity, while simultaneously attempting to become much closer to him. The great poets, according to Harold Bloom, will affect the centrifugal and centripetal effect of the late coming poet.

2. Finding Ashbery in New York

In 2008, I moved from Texas to New York City, first meeting the great poet at an AWP event in the great city. He had recently translated the French poems of his friend, Pierre Martory. The convention hall was full. I noticed poets Robert Bly and C. K. Williams behind me. The latter leaned over to ask me if he was in fact at the Ashbery event. Soon, a white-haired figure in a blue sweater, and with bluer eyes, made short steps to an empty chair. After a brief reading and a response to questions, the event was over. Next, people awaited the chance to collect his signature.

On the way to the signing table, both a male admirer and a female admirer kissed him on a cheek. I have not seen such affection towards a writer since then.

From early 2008 to the end of 2012, I met John Ashbery about nine other times, but never talking to him for more than 10 minutes at any given time, including at his book launch for Planisphere. This was held at the residence of fellow poet Tom Healy, whose book, What the Right Hand Knows, is adorned with a collage by John Ashbery.

3. Finding Ashbery in Art One of the last times I saw Mr. Ashbery was at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which was displaying about 15 to 20 of his collages. Like many of his poems, his artwork juxtaposes humor and popular culture into a seemingly structureless environment.

The artist himself struck me as well, as he seemed to greet every one of his collages as if they were colleagues. He faced each piece directly and then went on to the next piece. It seemed to be a sign of respect, as if they somehow became a friend in their creation.

4. Finding Ashbery in Emails For April Poetry Month of this year, I emailed several poets for prospective interviews to be published for the The Huffington Post. I was elated that he was one of several volunteers.

I was pleased to tell him about my history of finding him through books, in New York 25

and at the art gallery. I even had a chance to introduce him briefly to Paulin Gagne, an eccentric 19th century French poet who he was amazed he had never heard about.

The mixture of interview and aside conversation was a pleasure, and without further ado, I reprint The Huffington Post April Poetry Month interview with John Ashbery here. Enjoy and buy Breezeway soon. *** Your first book, Turandot and Other Poems, was published in 1953. You have a new book, Breezeway: New Poems, coming out in a couple of months. That’s an impressive 63-year span of literary activity. How has American poetry changed most since Turandot was published?

In answer to your first question, not only am I startled to have racked up a “63-year span of literary activity,” I would probably have doubted I’d even live to the age of 63 back then. How do I think American poetry has changed most since Turandot?

Not to sound vain, but it does seem that some of the formal and mental experimentation I began to develop then has left a mark on American poetry. I mean, the sestina (as spoken by different characters in a play) the pantoum, and “vacations from rational exposition.”

Your sestina, “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” and your pantoum, “Hotel Lautréamont,” are the first two examples of these forms that I think of when recalling your work. They’re marvelous poems. Did you start writing pantoums, sestinas and villanelles before or after you began studying French literature?

I wrote my first sestina, “The Painter,” when I was still an undergraduate at Harvard. I believe the form was suggested by Auden’s “Hearing of Harvests Rotting in the Valleys” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “A Miracle for Breakfast.” The pantoum idea I got from reading one in a literary magazine by a contemporary Irish poet named, I think, Claire MacAllister. I think it might have been called “Pantoum for Morning.”

It was the first pantoum I ever read and the last one for many years. You mentioned villanelles. I’ve just checked and found a poem called “Villanelle” in Hotel Lautréamont that is not a villanelle, and a true villanelle that is called “Real Time” in Chinese Whispers. I don’t think that I felt very at ease with the form, which is no doubt why I didn’t write any more. Some restraints are more comfortable than others.

Which poets influenced you the most when you were an emerging poet?

Probably early Auden, Dylan Thomas, Joan Murray, Wallace Stevens, Jean Garrigue and Ruth Herschberger.

Can you describe your writing process?

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My writing process consists of sitting around my apartment in the afternoon, wondering if it’s gotten too late to do any writing. Around 4 or 5 I make myself a cup of tea, which I sip while reading poetry. After a while I either start to write or call it quits for the day. Usually I listen to some contemporary classical music while this is going on. I usually do it several times a month (say 10?) if other things don’t intervene.

Would you say that any of your poems are heavily influenced by music?

Yes, I would say that all of my poetry is influenced by music. It’s the music of the mind that excites me, and that I somehow seem (or try to) to replicate with words. I almost always listen to music from my record collection while I’m writing. Lately it’s been mostly modern stuff--20th and 21st century program music, if you will. Some of the composers I like are Elliott Carter, Ben Johnston, Christopher Tignor (a former student of mine at Bard College who is now a promising young musician and composer) and Franco Donatoni.

Who are some of the most promising young (about 40 or younger) poets that you have read in the last few years?

I happen to know a number of young poets and try to keep abreast of their work. Some of them I’ve been reading lately are: Adam Fitzgerald, Emily Skillings, Nicolas Hundley, Farnoosh Fathi and Emily Pettit.

Breezeway will be available for the literate masses in May. Can we expect a new book from you in 2016? 2017?

I hope so, but I will be 88 in July and am never sure of the future’s being there. I continue to write poetry. I’ve been working on collages quite a bit, and will have a show of them in June alongside filmmaker Guy Maddin at the Tibor de Nagy gallery in New York.

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Two Poems

by Ben Mazer Lowell reading Eliot in Adams House, the sessile thrust of drying combinations, found much to pray for in a little mouse, canoeing past the generator stations, the bric-a-brac of sunlight on a duck, incipient smiles on Plato’s-cave-like walls of hyacinths brushed by the currents’ suck, the keeper of the armour in the halls storms gather over, clouds grown thick with time, and revolution standing at the door, the lovers’ chatter that resembles rhyme, bratwurst and lager on the pennine moor; but we were not that way who stood enjambed in questioning stances, struggling to read maps to find the college dowager, the damned who drank our milk like pennies from her paps, or ordered bloodshed, bright upon the snow, or tears like alphabets to rain on brick, no matter what way April’s lovers go, alcove-huddled, quick, the truly sick.

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by Ben Mazer

A wedding in the house of Frankenstein.

A thousand tapers rising to the ceiling.

Victor tells his bride what’s yours is mine.

Dressed in white satin she is most appealing.

The maids are standing waiting in a row, and drink champagne as they are bid to do by the old patriarch, who straightens a flower petal before he go to think dynastic thoughts, as men incline to.

Some thought the devil planted in his head an aeon ago, somewhere alive and breathing, wings homeward to upset the marriage bed, and wreak hell’s havoc till the town is seething.

How could philosophy assert a rift in happiness that any man would treasure, grown independent of his eccentric leisure, stinging the early promise of his gift?

How could he give life to one as one, and not as twain or twin, before his time, and not expect this out of wedlock son the sacred bridal chamber wall to climb?

The monster must be chased to the old mill.

Parade of doom, ten thousand burning torches.

The evil shall be purged by good men’s will.

The creature thinks, parental absence scorches.

While Victor thinks, I’ve killed the thing I love, displeased my mentor, and the lord above.

I doubt he’ll be returning to his books.

I cried myself, but gave no dirty looks.

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Two Poems

by Rob Chalfen We toss and turn within the enterprise the harbormaster has a savage throat calls out the tendrils of the storm to each indifferent boat and we underneath it all hear nothing but the pounding of our hate against the gunnels of our gray flotilla as we thrash against our fate The fire-moon unfolds in silence above the wracking spray and clouds with messages unfurl their luminous banners against the dark and empty skies Salvation has been ionized a symphony of winds elides along the cliff a broken structure falls inside the air the gods have fled to their summer palaces and taken leave of their senses and the New York Times

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by Rob Chalfen 1908 Is the world any better off for having captured these ghosts?

Who now argues aesthetics into the night?

Collapsing into the hell-pit of obscurantism and all the usual apologetics in the play of personality against a velvet backdrop of cognac and cheap cigars They get loud in their insistent logic pounding spitting pointing – it’s all quite amusing until dawn wipes clean the board and nothing is decided well anyway we enjoyed ourselves – I remember something about Idealism, Futurism, Purism and the Czar but you’re always asking for trouble when you bring politics into it, I guess, but how can you not?

Now I don’t dare to part the drapes, the rising sun is far too hot

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“Migration” - collage on panel - 12” x 16” - 2012

When Sarah Goes Missing

by Kate J. Reed “Do you want to see me break a move?” Adelaide asked June. She tried to sit still.

Papa had said: we can sit outside if you can be calm. But her mind flashed images of the kids in the Disney shows she and Aunt June had just watched. Princesses glided and squirrels bounced on tiny feet and she had to glide and bounce, too. There was one cloud in the sky, red leaves in the street and brown marigolds in the planter outside—she saw the coffee lady, the one mama always talked to for a long time—plant them last time she was here. She wanted to crush those dried flowers in her hands and sprinkle them in her juice. They might be magic.

Adelaide wanted those flowers so she descended from the chair, carefully, with more precision than June had ever seen in a child—in an adult yes, but children have that sense of recklessness which most learn, after a series of broken bones and broken minds and other broken things, to abandon for a safer, more calculated approach. It seemed to June that Adelaide had already shed that recklessness. June noticed a little boy who was three—maybe four—look at Addie with his chin tilted down and eyes wide open. He wanted to play and she was surprised when Addie showed little interest. Then she wondered where that phrase “break a move” had come from; it must have been the movie although she couldn’t place the scene. June looked at Adelaide, hoping her children, too, would be so beautiful, and then at her brother-in-law Eugene who had a large nose and a full head of thick, straight, salt and peppered hair. He was taking small annoying sips of coffee and reading The New York Times.

She smiled when he looked at her and he smiled, too, because he was glad for June stepping in to take care of his daughter, allowing for this short moment to be only a man who sits at a coffee shop and reads the newspaper and nothing more. More than that, he was glad to have a witness to Sarah because no matter how many times he told the family how Sarah would get and how she would leave and all the ways he could not stop her, you could never know until you were there. And June had been there. He could feel Adelaide begging his attention but knew she was momentarily satisfied with June’s. Eugene looked at the smooth skin around June’s eyes and remembered meeting her when she was only eight and he was the man who was going to marry Sarah, her crazy older sister—only then crazy was an endearing synonym for fun, spontaneous, not a euphemism for something dark and unnameable. June was the only one in the family who didn’t realize it was not exactly an occasion for celebration when your twenty-one year old mentally unstable daughter/sister marries a thirty-five year old man in a rock band two months after meeting each other. Despite fearing that June was in the midst of an inevitable and gradual transformation into yet another judgmental female figure in Sarah’s life, Eugene had often been grateful for her.

June noticed the weeds in the planters and had an urge to pull them but the flowers didn’t look too healthy and she thought that the planters might look better if she pulled the flowers and left the weeds. She thought of the planter box in her new apartment and wondered what flowers were best suited for San Francisco’s wet climate. She held a Grace Paley book in her hands—a recommendation from Eugene that she wanted to be interested in. When she looked at Eugene, she did not see rock star—instead, a patient father, a tired husband who called to say he was sitting in the waiting room at the hospital, another trip that

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started with Sarah locking herself in the bathroom and razors and blood or pills and ended with Sarah in the same outfit and same three days of living in a small, isolated room. June remembered their wedding in a friend’s house, Sarah wearing black and having hairy armpits and their mother saying that she would someday regret wearing black and having hairy armpits but Sarah had reached thirty-six and still didn’t regret it and to that their mother said “Hmpf.” June smiled back at Eugene because they were there together while neither of them knew where their sister/wife/mother was and they all had been in love with her and had hated her and wanted to be her and said yes to her and had never said no.

Adelaide jumped softly, like the princesses, but her shoes were big and made big sounds when they hit the ground, not like the small little princess feet, and when she hit the ground hard, one, two, three times she forgot about her feet and felt her body bend and move like water and she didn’t think of her next move, and sometimes when her and Mama danced it was like they were doing the same moves and that was the best dancing but most the time Mama could only be in bed. So she could dance and talk and run for June or Eugene and she wished they would always dance with her or at least always watch her dance.

June watched as bees jutted around Addie; Eugene ignored his little girl. Adelaide saw the bees and saw that they were dancing like she was. Quick movements from point to point and she copied them. Copycat. Mom hated copycat and once grabbed her face and cried STOP and they both cried until they both said Sorry and were holding each other and holding each other’s faces and saying Sorry, Sorry. But the bees weren’t dancing for each other, they were dancing around her pop bottle and so she stopped and watched them. She was very close and not afraid. They hovered. She could see their hairy legs and pointy butts—she was that close. Her eyes were whispering. Without warning, one dove into her pop bottle and she looked up at June looking surprised at what the bee had just done. June was watching Adelaide and thinking about how nice it was to be quiet and have a child around to be loud and happy and have a break from being the one who was loud and happy.

She looked at Eugene, who was still not looking at his daughter and did not hear her when she whispered into the side of the bottle, “You crazy little bees” and June was thankful for being able to be quiet around Eugene and she was thankful for last night when he was calm while Sarah screamed those accusations that hadn’t been there moments earlier—that he was leaving her and that June, herself, was leaving her. She tried to say, I’m not leaving Sarah, I’ll stay Sarah but she learned from watching Eugene that she didn’t know how to love Sarah and even though it should have made her sad it made her angry and when Sarah finally left she said What now? Do we call the police? Do we look for her? Until Eugene taught her about the waiting. And they waited at home and waited while they slept, then when the sun came up they went to the coffee shop and waited. Eugene and June sat and watched Adelaide as she whispered to the bees, now somewhat louder, to “Git out of there! Little bees!” as she kicked the leg of the table and the pop bottle spun on its base while the three of them watched it, waiting for it to spill or even itself out.

With the pop bottle teetering, Eugene went back to the world news. He ruffled his newspaper and June thought that is one thing she liked about newspapers. It was a romantic sound and she was thinking of that when Adelaide climbed on her lap and they watched the pop bottle settle flat on the patio table. Adelaide put her small hand on her face and looked into June’s face and felt herself fall in love in the way that reminded her of being a little girl and falling in love with Sarah. And she remembered being a little girl and feeling Sarah’s love.

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How it was bright and solid and paralyzing.

“Don’t you have a friend in Afghanistan right now, June? Isn’t she Afghani?” Eugene liked to talk about politics even though he knew June didn’t have anything to contribute; he knew she would at least pretend to be interested. Sometimes he wanted to assign her things to read so that he would have someone to discuss things with, someone who was not a child.

June thought that maybe this time Eugene was trying to spark up a meaningful conversation, a conversation that she would most likely know only bits and pieces about and would feel rather silly toward the end of. Who read as many papers as Eugene? She’d never met anyone who did. She hoped whoever ended up loving her would not also love newspapers.

“She is Afghan but she doesn’t exactly go in and out. You know. She was born during the Soviet occupation and went to India when she was 5 or something. But so, India. She’s in India right now.” June wondered if Eugene caught her correction—Afghan, not Afghani.

She couldn’t help but feel proud of this small piece of knowledge that she obtained through a friendship, not a newspaper.

“There was a wedding that was bombed in Afghanistan,” said Eugene.

June wondered why Eugene wanted to know everything terrible that happened around the world. There was too much to know, she wanted to say. She wanted to suggest that maybe he should stick to two papers and a couple internet sources and call it good, because as long as he looked to know everything terrible, he would find more and more, and it wouldn’t make any difference. There would still be so much he didn’t know. June wondered if her sister listened to all these terrible things at the dinner table. June finally said, “That’s terrible. I didn’t hear about that.”

Adelaide now shouted at the bees and Eugene and June laughed as she yelled, “Git out! NOW!” and they laughed harder, Eugene with crinkled eyes, and June was glad Eugene could see this, even though there was a horrible thing happening in Afghanistan.

“I want my pop. June. June. Papa. I want my pop.” Adelaide didn’t really see what was so funny. To her, it was rude of the bee to be drinking her pop and it was probably going to die drinking it the way it was flailing and she wanted to be the one to drink it because she was the one who would live and so she crawled up on her papa’s lap and looked at his coffee, wanting a drink.

“It’s coffee, Addie.” Eugene said.

“That’s okay.” Adelaide grabbed it and tasted it and even though she hated it she said, “Mmmmmmm,” because she didn’t want everyone to say I told you so because that was everyone’s favorite thing to say to her.

“Do you want some of my juice?” June said and Addie looked at Eugene, as if for permission, which June thought was funny. Eugene was not the sort of father who gave permission. He was the sort of father who believed in children being children and finding out who they were and not ever saying “no” because it damaged their spirit. He believed in ignoring. Adelaide always had writing all over her body. Tiny circles were her favorite thing to draw and on her body was her favorite place. June wondered if she’d let her own children be so wild. Eugene smiled and Addie went to June.

Juice came out of the sides of Addie’s mouth and she gave a satisfied “Ahhhhhh” and a smack of the lips when she was done. She looked at Papa and he was reading his paper again but June was laughing and it made her laugh, too. June thought she was funny. She 35

wanted to follow June around, making scary monster faces and laughing , June holding her and picking her up and putting her down and talking to her and asking her questions and June laughing at her and June laughing with her and her making June laugh. She decided to make up a song and dance for her: “Wanna have me make up a song and I’ll be dancing too like in the movie? It’s fun!”

“Yeah! Let’s do it.” June leaned in because she wanted Addie to feel what she remembered feeling as a child, that she was everything.

Adelaide rolled her little hips and sang sometimes soft and sometimes loud. She seemed to put an emphasis on the rhyming words and Eugene wondered if the fact that she understood that rhyming words sound better in a song than non-rhyming words meant she was some sort of a genius. Or if it was something normal. Adelaide’s oldest sister was a prodigy on the guitar: at age nine she knew every Beatles song in English and German, left handed on a left handed guitar and left handed upside down on a right handed guitar. Addie’s other sister was seven and could speak three languages, thanks to some natural ability and her multiculturally aware San Francisco school. She also had a sharper sense of comedic timing than any child Eugene had ever met. He was always watching Adelaide and waiting for her talent to emerge—dissecting small sentences and monitoring motor skills—hoping she would develop a less dangerous one than her mother’s charm and influence, which was a fear that did not keep him up at night, but often grabbed hold of him unannounced, in the middle of the happiest days.

June saw tiny movements in Adelaide that were just like Sarah’s and remembered watching Sarah sing “Nights in White Satin” at karaoke when June turned twenty-one. June did not sing that night because she could never compare with her sister and she found a relief in that and happily faded into the background and let her sister be the one to be charming and happy. She remembered a sort of fear watching her sing...Nights in white satin, Never reaching the end, Letters I’ve written, Never meaning to send...and even June’s friends who maybe had never heard the song recognized her power and June did, too, and at the end of the night everyone loved her and wanted to be her. Even June forgot about those ugly things that rested in the middle of Sarah—the momentum that swung her from one side of the pendulum to the other, to places that our self-preservation stops us from going.

“Well I guess we should head home now,” Eugene said, “Grab your bag, Addie.”

“Grab your boob!” Addie and June and Eugene laughed together as they gathered up to leave and the things about waiting is that if you do it long enough, often enough—as Eugene had done—you forget what is waiting or not waiting for you.

It was only six blocks to Eugene and Sarah’s house and for four of those six blocks they walked in silence, Addie sometimes stopping to look at a flower or crack in the sidewalk or a dried up worm. They waited patiently while she did this because Eugene didn’t believe in rushing children out of being children.

“Papa hates this,” Adelaide said, picking up a dandelion that had dried and was ready to spread its seeds around. Eugene wondered if they were close enough to their house that if Addie blew, those seeds would find their way to his yard. Would Sarah be waiting in the yard or in the house and if she was what would he feel. He would not ask Why or What like he used to do, because it didn’t matter either way. One doesn’t talk about why a mouse chews holes in cereal boxes.

June looked and said, “Make a wish and then blow all those little pieces off.” She 36

watched Adelaide close her eyes and say, “I wish...I had a million babies...and I was their mama,” and June looked at Eugene, he looked at June, and they laughed. It wasn’t a bitter laugh or an ironic laugh, it was a real goofy laugh because Adelaide was the strangest of children.

“I wish I had a million babies and there’s a bowl of spiders under my beeedddddd... I wish I had a new pop and grape and a new cake everywherrre...and a mother and a barbie and a monster in the kitchenn....who had no hair....” June noticed Addie looking around to see if anyone was watching her and they all were and Eugene laughed and June danced a little while she sang and that made Addie smile and sing more.

Somewhere in Addie’s words and June’s reserved dancing and Eugene’s laughter they forgot that they were on a trip to a coffee shop to be distracted, they forgot their worry and when they remembered it, it no longer seemed like their worry—it was a dark red balloon, too big and slick to hold onto and when it started to float away no one reached out to catch it.

A tall and beautiful old woman with a long grey hair and a long black skirt walked by and said, “Hope this weather holds out,” and Eugene said Yes and June said Me too but holds out for what they didn’t know. They continued to walk home.

June watched the woman walk away and she saw the three of them as the woman might have and what she saw was complete. She didn’t think of the complicated parts yet but of the rustling of the morning paper and Adelaide’s hand on her cheek and she looked at Eugene who kept smiling and his body still felt like it was laughing. He thought of the family in Afghanistan and also wondered if Sarah would have been smoking, and when he tried to imagine her, he couldn’t see her face clearly, couldn’t picture her anywhere that they hadn’t already been before and he saw June’s face smiling at him and it was a face that was easy to see and easy to remember because it was the same every time he saw it.

Adelaide sang and thought of how when she danced with Mama everyone in the family watched and then everyone all danced together, her sisters and Papa and maybe June would, too. She walked very slowly, looking at June to see if she saw her and looking at her flower stem with all the little pieces broken off and did not think she was everything or a princess and she saw the bees buzzing around a yard of white dandelions and she dropped her stem to get more flowers to bring home to Mama and she’d have to be very careful so that they wouldn’t all blow away before they got home.

Matchbox

by Francesc Parcerisas (trans. Cyrus Cassells) Keep this souvenir, when your sense of the past blurs, just as you might salvage something cluttering the attic.

Don’t toss out this matchbox of wood and paper.

Once an insect’s dreaded prison, a coffin desecrated for some secret treasure, now the matchbox pries open memory’s greedy bars, proffers the present’s misted coins.

If you strike the box with phosphorescent fingers, maybe you’ll re-ignite the smell of sweltering summer nights when you set the matches dancing— like miniature Siamese twins: consumed by a fiery passion more fleeting as flame than as ash.

The matches were never a mere magic trick, you realize, and grant them an existence akin to yours, linked to the human condition.

It can’t possibly trip you up— the little wood and paper box full of matches the fire crumpled.

They’re war-withered hands, burnt swords able to remind you someday --as the last brief light burns down to your fingernail, snatching the tip 38

with a human fury— that they also spark the burner’s blue flame that warms up the milk of the little boy marching off to school.

The Sin-Eater

by Francesc Parcerisas (trans. Cyrus Cassells) It’s the radiance of human piety— this light you envision as a tempest-tossed sea’s black water.

On this old, drowsy night-time ship, out of a tale of seamen, officers, and sails rent by raging wind, there’s a grim, leprous lip in egregious misery under the covers, harrowing as new silence in a house, that seems, from our vantage, on the verge of collapse.

Please open, in wistful fashion, this window begging for release: “When a villager died, they’d place on the corpse’s heart a bit a bread for the sin-eater to devour the dead’s countless sins.”

Devour then, this language opening a long-lost gaze at a blood-hued uniform.

The blood belonging to girls with stained thighs is a synonym for what the runaway human rag carried in his arms— blood the color of a motionless tongue.

These bits of bread the dead proffer impassively are the shadows that project your counterfeit payment.

Run, like the sin-eater, deadset on fleeing in the rain, gripping in your hand blood-tainted glasses, 40

while you yourself grow flooded with fear.

There’s always a night for booting someone out of the house, for spitting on a fugitive, for lobbing rocks at the scurrying outcast who has gorged on another’s sins.

We’re all guilty, while the low-on-the totem beggar wanders, a fly-by-night refugee— blameless, free at last, till he’s back to wail in still another grief-stricken house: lamb of God washing away the world’s sins . . .

* based on a passage in Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander

41

Imminent

By Clela Reed

The skeleton woman in Kroger selects rice.

And after surreptitious shock, I decide she looks familiar.

It’s as though a body from one of those grainy photos we saw at Dachau (twisted limbs in massive graves — all bones and knobby joints shrouded in leathery skin, skulls with missing jaws— like dusty roots and stones returning to the earth) has risen, dressed in short skirt and knit top, combed thin hair, dabbed color on sharp cheeks and vacant mouth, and rattled out to do the shopping, to intersect my path here in the bounty of organic grains.

I scan the lower shelves, moving quietly away from the skeleton woman on sturdy legs that quaver.

For no one so wasted can live.

Any moment she may collapse into a clattering heap—a small spill on aisle five.

Within, the organs are surrendering; the starving heart is nearly beaten.

No matter the cause of mind or flesh, the result: extermination.

Death stalks the skeleton woman, a hovering presence at her pointed elbow, vigilant as a friend.

Yet leaving with my fat bags of food, I overhear the check-out girl, “And how are you tonight?

Did you find everything you need?”

And the skeleton woman replies, “Fine, thank you. Yes.” 42

The Arnolfini Witness

By Clela Reed

—after Jan van Eyck’s painting, The Arnolfini Marriage I had to leave just now; the little dog and I will take the garden air.

Cool—uncomplicated. Yes, much better here.

The portrait nears completion—mercifully.

I dare not complain; no friendly gesture, that, but my role has not been easy.

Daily sessions (though I come and go)— endless, quiet posing in that warm room.

And in our nostrils the smell of oranges and damp velvet, paint and fear.

She is so young.

Pale eyes stare not at him but at his hand, the one my friend says will rest in hers as token, promise, bond.

But this groom does not seem glad of it.

Proud, yes, but is that set jaw and narrow glance reassuring?

Does my artist friend (who guides his brushes with the eye of observation God, himself, must envy) find the tincture of the heart, the texture of the soul as the sound of his strokes on the panel and the couple’s quiet breathing fill the room?

43

MATRIOSHKA

by Joanne Esser

You open in the middle; little bodies emerge

from your big body: daughter from

mother, from grandmother,

from the first

mother. This is how you have always been.

So many layers to the center untwist

one by one until the tiniest doll,

almost too small to hold,

is released.

My daughter opens you, one wooden body

at a time, on the flowered rug.

As her small hands work,

she talks of her great-grandmother’s papery skin, her tired eyes, somehow knowing her frail body lying in a nursing home bed

is already hollow. “They will put her body

in a hole in the ground; they

will cover her with soil,”

my daughter says.

In her hands, your smallest halves open; out pops your tiniest doll,

like a wooden seed.

My daughter scoops it up quick, remembers to catch it before it is lost in the thick carpet roses.

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SCOURING NIKUMARORO

by Joanne Esser “Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn’t be done.”

-Amelia Earhart Every tiny fragment found makes their hearts spin.

They’ve been here before, following the last signals, compass numbers, lost bones, hope for touch DNA from bits of a knife blade.

They’ve sought the truth since 1937, these scholars and obsessives, traced the aviatrix to this place: southeast end of a remote Pacific island where doubters swear the Electra crashed and sank.

Dense scaevola frutescens guards the site, a perfect hiding place for human bones perhaps carried away by giant coconut crabs after they demolished all of her remains.

Could she have landed on the fringing reef ?

It’s surely flat enough at low tide.

A last distress call mentions rising water.

A hero doesn’t crash; she holds out to the end.

Convinced Amelia and Fred were survivors, castaways, (their ring of fire scar, remnants of a shoe, that pocket knife blade beaten apart), these seekers tell the story no one can quite prove.

Her mystique, grown larger in disappearance, calls them even now to speculate, conduct pig bone experiments, send an underwater probe over a thousand feet down the reef ’s slope.

After her first barnstormer airplane ride, Amelia said, “As soon as I left the ground, I knew I myself had to fly.” And their continuing quest, too, compels them, inexplicable and true.

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“Measured” - collage on panel - 9” x 12”, 2011

An Excerpt from The Collected Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne

by Michael Martone

R A l S E

1914. The Great War begins in Europe. There, it quickly becomes evident that the utter devastation meted out by modern weaponry will be so pervasive as to lay desolate the great rose gardens of Europe. 1915. That spring, hybridists of all the Major Powers meet secretly in Switzerland to discuss the creation of a grand refuge for the flower far from the lethal battlefields and the now newly aerially bombed cities. Meanwhile, half a world away in Philadelphia, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, is engaged by rose enthusiast, George C. Thomas, later Captain Thomas of the United States Army Air Service, to initiate a campaign of public awareness and fund raising for the creation of such a botanical refuge in one of the far western states. Art Smith takes to the air after adapting his sky writing mechanism to produce a deep red effluent, imploring the curious onlookers to cultivate the most beloved bloom.

47

R o S E S

Smith and Thomas also modified Smith’s aeroplane to carry a cargo of rose petals, an apparatus mostly constructed of a netted hamper that when agitated proceeded to expel the petals. During a prolonged sweeping turn along the Schuylkill, Smith released his delicate cargo, creating, what was reported at the time, a crimson signature of flowers, a blood red cloud curtain evocative of the noble carnage being spilled on the denuded plains of France and Belgium. The flowering trees along the river were in bloom, and the remnants of the raining rose petals clung to the native blossoms for days later until they too fell to the ground mixed with the now blown and spent native display.

48

r

o

s

e

s

Upon his return to the United States after his first successful tour of Japan in 1916, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, took to the air once more. His severe injury—a broken femur, sustained in the spectacular crack-up at Sapporo—was on the mend. He headed east, on several missions, one of which was to resuscitate the neglected drive to establish a sanctuary for rose propagation far from the botanical gardens of war-torn Europe1. Again, he flew to Philadelphia to assist George Thomas in his campaign. This time he composed a message that extended the length of the Delaware River waterway, the airy letters drifting as they dissipated in the prevailing breeze decaying over the far reaches of the New Jersey shore. Once more, Smith followed, in the wake of the desiccating inscription, with an infusion of iridescent petals that drew a shimmering curtain in front of the setting sun. The petals were so buoyant and the drafts of air that day so stirring that the shower Smith unleashed seemed to levitate instead of falling. Stalling, it continued to rain down through the gloaming, giving Smith enough time to land his aeroplane on the Jersey waterfront and enjoy the sparkling drizzle of fragrant confetti. Unbeknownst to Art Smith that day his craft served as an unwitting vector for an insidious invader. Concealed within the precipitation of roses was a stealthy stowaway transported from Japan, its eponymous beetle, Popillia japonica, that copper-colored clumsy flyer discovered and scientifically confirmed a few months after Art Smith’s departure by a Rutgers entomologist in a Riverton, New Jersey, florist’s greenhouse. ___________________

1

J’ A R R l V E

In the spring of 1918, the rose cultivars began arriving in Portland, Oregon, soon to be known as the “City of Roses.” The site of The International Rose Test Garden would grow to over four acres of terraced plots and sculptured beds. There would be nearly 10,000 plants and 600 varieties represented including the Rosa kordesii Rupert Brooke, named for the poet who died on his way to Gallipoli and is buried on the Greek island of Skyros. Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, a long-standing proponent of the rose refuge was transporting a bare root Rupert Brooke start with him as he installed the evocative message, above, in the dirty weather over Portland.

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Nebi’im

by Quinn Chipley From a slatted bench in Washington Park a sage Tiresias I’d never met beckoned me with a look and a crooked grin. He shook a finger bent in a hook to catch my eye, cooed in tune with the bubbled notes from a hundred swelling pigeon throats.

“Let me tell you all about dying, young friend. It’s all about. That’s all. That’s what it’s all about. Just learn to live with it.”

Then he clapped and cracked cackles to erupt the flock into fluttered grey, circled swirls before gliding down for more struts and pecks.

50

The Cruellest Month

by Joanna Parypinski Don’t be fooled by these eggshell spring days, fragile as a glass mosquito and lonely as bony branches bare from winter’s breath. In a timid grass-scented breeze, we try to stay awake through dusk, or like fat caterpillars cocoon ourselves into butterflies where we flit in and out of shade.

How soon the nightingale shakes off her feathers, and the cheshire moon casts her pearly grin on fleeting orange light. That’s when buds turn to beetles, leftover leaves crumble like ash, dew crystallizes into ice.

You are charcoal, the night sky shines in each of your starry teardrops.

It’s not your fault, don’t cry— Nobody told you that at any moment, spring can look back at winter and turn to salt.

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“The Cloud of Forgetting” - collage on panel, 11” x 14”, 2012

Review of John Gallaher’s In a Landscape

by Christopher Cadra

In a Landscape. By John Gallaher, BOA Editions, Ltd., 2014. ISBN: 978-1-938160-50-9, 128 pgs.

Possessing a freewheeling style that combines autobiography, humor, and even Neil Young, Gallaher can juggle the heavy and the light, can switch topics mid-poem without causing the reader to scratch his or her head, and can do all this while holding the poem together. Reading Gallaher can be compared to being lured into a whisper with the promise of a confession and getting a joke instead. After the laughter dies down, however, you may get the promised confession as well. The work can be conversational, intimate; in fact, I was reminded of something Harold Bloom said about Walt Whitman as I read Gallaher. “In his poem, ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,’ he all but literally reaches out to you and hugs you.” Now, I’m not totally sure if Gallaher meant to reach out and hug me at any point in In a Landscape, but he surely at least reached out his hand for a shake.

John Gallaher begins his book with two quotes, one from John Cage, one from John Ashbery. I need not share the quotes here to drive home the fact that the influence of both artists is clear in Gallaher’s work, Ashbery especially, if only because it’s easier to detect the influence of another poet. The Ashberian influence, however, is a purely positive one; i.e., it isn’t an overwhelming influence that causes one to ask which poet they’re reading, or to consider Gallaher an imitator of any sort. No. Gallaher writes his own poetry with his own voice, and this is clear, or should be clear, to the reader after reading the first poem in the collection.

Gallaher talks about being adopted more than once throughout the work, and in various ways (by 53

that I mean he doesn’t bring up his adoption for any one particular reason throughout, and at different mentions of the fact, he treats the fact itself with varying degrees of depth, detail, brevity, and levity). He also brings up a shooting spree perpetrated by a co-worker (a shooting spree one can Google and find results about right now). But he also talks about his family, and most other things one might expect in a rather autobiographical work. In some of the more lighthearted, humorous parts of the work, he writes about how he’s not quite as adept with Roman numerals as he once was (though the poems are titled, in order, using Roman numerals). He mentions the “mathematical distribution” of the vowels (A bcd E fgh I jklmn O pqrst U vwxyz (3, 3, 5, 5, 5)). He mentions, in poem XXXI, how, “Whenever I see the Roman numeral XXX / I think of pornography,” and asks a rhetorical question, “Probably many people do?”

I can’t explain why, but it came as no big surprise that two of the three blurbs on the back of my copy of In a Landscape come from musicians (Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips, and Eef Barzelay of Clem Snide).

In his book, The Poem’s Heartbeat, Alfred Corn, after a comparison, concludes, “[…] the differences between poetry and music outweigh the similarities.” He also states, “[…] it is really misleading to use ‘musical’ as a term of praise in poetry.” I agree with both of Mr. Corn’s points, so let me refrain from calling Gallaher’s poetry musical, and let me instead say, like the music of his aforementioned musician fans, it’s got heart.

John Gallaher is an assistant professor of English at Northwest Missouri State University, and co-editor of The Laurel Review. He is the author or co-author of five poetry collections. He was awarded the 2005 Levis Poetry Prize for his second book, The Little Book of Guesses. His poetry has been published in literary journals and magazines including Boston Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Field, The Literati Quarterly, jubilat, The Journal, Ploughshares, and in anthologies, such as The Best American Poetry 2008.

Review of Michael Goldberg’s True Love Scars

by Christopher Cadra

True Love Scars. By Michael Goldberg, Neumu Press, 2014. ISBN: 978-1-499656268, 255 pgs.

In the first chapter of True Love Scars, the first entry of a trilogy, we are introduced to Michael, the protagonist, and two important themes that appear throughout the book: music and conflict. The book is prefaced with some Dylan lyrics from “Vision of Johanna.” The lyrics work into the story itself, and they do so because they work into the protagonist’s life, his thoughts. The author, Goldberg, creates a sort of soundtrack for the book that begins with the preface and keeps on going until the very last page.

Also in the first chapter, we meet a character named Lord Jim, who wears a Black Sabbath t-shirt. Michael isn’t a big fan of Sabbath, and the clash of the 60’s and the 70’s begins right there, first chapter, off the bat. These sorts of conflicts, inner and outer, appear throughout the book, and they’re handled so deftly that you hardly notice they’re occurring, you rather just feel or sense them. Goldberg is so fluid with his prose and storytelling that the book’s plot feels less like a plot and more like a ride.

Unlike most protagonists in coming of age tales, Michael is cool. He’s cool from the getgo. Often, the protagonist in a coming of age tale is weak, uncool, etc., and throughout the story becomes cool. Or sometimes, he’s so cool that he’s unable to get along with anyone including or excluding himself. Not here, though. Michael Stein is a pretty cool guy with friends and girlfriends. This is delightful, in my opinion, because coming of age stories often seem to be formulaic and seeking empathy from the reader as the result of the protagonist being some sort of outcast. I suppose there’s a bit 55

of that here and there, and Michael certainly goes off the deep end for a period, but really, like a Beat novel, the protagonist is just telling you his no bullshit, here’s-howit-happened story.

While reading, I was sometimes reminded of Nabokov, if only due to the use of allusion (though coinages, sporadic use of French, etc., help as well). In Nabokov’s case, however, allusion feels like it’s used as a barometer of literary intelligence. In Goldberg’s case, allusion feels more like a barometer of hip-shit intelligence. Captain Beefheart shows up on the same page as F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the two are treated with equal respect. Despite the allusion, though, the book feels and reads, to me, more like a split between a Beat novel and a French New Wave film than anything Nabokov wrote.

Tying one of the big themes of the book (music) to the allusion thing is what I refer to as the novel’s “soundtrack”. One of the things books lack that movies have is, of course, a soundtrack. Goldberg, however, manages to, mostly through quotes and allusion, work a soundtrack into the prose, into the story, the book itself. If you know your shit regarding the music of that time (Dylan and the Stones, especially, but many others too), there’s going to be music playing in your head as you read almost every page. For example, at a Stones concert, Michael describes himself as “torn and frayed,” which is a Stones song off the classic Exile on Main St. When I read this, I couldn’t help but hear that song. Just a page later, music is used in a different way.

Michael’s girl at the time, his lost love, Sweet Sarah, wants to leave, and Michael says, “They’re playing ‘Under My Thumb.’ Don’t you wanna stay for that?” She doesn’t.

Michael thinks a lot of chicks would’ve. The play here being that Sarah isn’t under Michael’s thumb, and not even a Stones concert can change that.

The closest comparison to Goldberg’s use of music that I can really think of is Martin Scorsese’s use of music in his films. It’s never just about the artist, or the song, or the lyric. It’s always about everything. It’s about the moment, the perfect fit. It always feels necessary, like everything in the book, and though at first the book feels like it might spontaneously combust, after the first chapter, you realize you’re in good hands, you learn to trust Goldberg, and once that happens, the book becomes hard to put down.

Michael Goldberg was an Associate Editor and a Senior Writer for Rolling Stone magazine. His writing has appeared in various other magazines. In 1994, he founded Addicted To Noise (ATN), a website that wields enough influence to cause Newsweek to call Goldberg an “Internet visionary.”

True Love Scars is the first novel in Goldberg’s Freak Scene Dream Trilogy.

56

On the Effects of Recurrent Stimuli

by Austin Eichelberger

Every time Amy catches a fleeting whiff of Melissa’s scent in the now-silent apartment over the days then weeks then months after their last blistering fight—as she finally changes the pillowcases, or discovers a battered Red Hot Chili Peppers t-shirt she’s pretty sure she told Melissa must have been lost, pushes aside beaten biology texts and notebooks to collect the towels crumpled at the bottom of her bedroom closet—Amy sees a cloud of molecules rising, vibrating, turning, coming together to make Melissa’s round face, her crooked smile, her thick arms reaching out to Amy, beckoning her closer.

57

Measuring Entropy

by Austin Eichelberger

Nathan will sometimes, without warning or reason, perfectly recall a specific someone from his boyhood—a pear-shaped man with thick glasses and a deep voice, a scientist-cum-librarian who led Nathan’s middle school field trip around the NASA Headquarters Library—explaining that a telescope essentially makes your eyes bigger while bringing things closer, magnifying the pupil and the amount of light it can absorb and thus revealing things one could never see before. When Nathan returned home from that field trip—scuffing his feet up the sidewalk to his grey brick apartment building—his mother was staring silently out a kitchen window, coats were missing from the hallway closet, and in his bedroom Nathan found a note in an unsealed envelope assuring him that his father would “be back to visit soon.” When Nathan remembers it all now—walking those marbled corridors of scientific data, the pitch of excitement in the librarian’s voice, finding his mother holding the same cup of cold coffee and staring out the same window the next morning—Nathan imagines himself aiming his old Amateur Astronaut telescope at his father in the days before, the lenses warping his pupils larger and larger—diameters increasing exponentially, opening up big enough to fit a man inside and simultaneously pushing his vision closer, past fine lines around his father’s eyes, a hint of stubble about to emerge, inside and through the minute weave of his sport coat—Nathan’s vision getting him so near so fast that he makes contact, goes right down into and through the skin, deeper and deeper—finding beneath his father’s calloused outermost layers the sacred warmth of an atrium, ventricle, aorta—until, finally, tiny implosions fuse atomic connections so strong that his father would have had no choice but to take Nathan along when he left.

58

Photos of My Mother Found in Her Attic

by Austin Eichelberger

Her and Dad laughing at their wedding—the one where her head is tipped back and her eyes are closed as they dance, her veil like a pale cloud around her; one taken after my first JV lacrosse game—which we lost—her face painted and eyes glittering despite my mope; her at the old kitchen table, fuming with her head in her hands, followed by a series of ten photos of her coming around—a surefire tactic of my dad’s when she was really, truly angry: “She never frowns in front of a photographer”—finally stifling laughter as she reaches to take the camera from Dad’s hands; one of her in high school, radiant in sepia tones, her skin brighter and tighter than I ever saw, her face prettier and younger than I ever thought she could have been; Halloween the year I turned 7 and my brother 10, a pumpkin and a ninja respectively, our cheeks pressed hard into hers as she holds me on one side and Jeremy on the other, already the worry of her sons growing up showing in her face; a stray Polaroid with burned edges showing what must be her at a costume party before Jeremy was born—dark eyeliner and a sneer on her lips, laughter and a gleam of alcohol in her blue-blue eyes, an arm around a woman I’ve never seen; in the hospital beside Grandpa’s prone figure, amid the machines and dull lighting, her elbows on her knees and hands clasped tight together before her mouth, her sister trying to fake a smile behind her; standing in the garden at our old house, Jeremy clutching her thigh and hiding behind her as she blocks sun from her eyes with one hand and rests the other on her swollen belly; onstage in her college years—before she married Dad and dropped out—dressed as some Shakespearean heroine: arms wide and feet firmly planted, face uplifted toward the light and caught in wild, confident expression of her lines; struggling to handle a tipping armful of wrapped gifts with a sincerely horrified expression as Jeremy and I—probably 4 and 7—look to be screaming with laughter in the foreground; asleep, curled around my toddler body as I fiercely clasp my teddy bear and shudder in feverish sleep; a black-and-white the size of a credit card, one corner creased and folded: she’s a child, five maybe, her hand outstretched in a joyful wave as Pepaw holds her on his hip and they smile and squint under a bright sun—suddenly I can feel the decades between that picture and my dad, my brother and I, can see the other side of countless decisions and opportunities and accidents, and it’s like the bottom drops out of my stomach as I picture some other guy proposing before Dad saw her in that play, or her slipping through the ice at that pond where she’d skate at night as a girl, or a single driver running a red light before she could realize what was happening—but in the young, smiling eyes before me glints some secret knowledge, some intuition, that I only now see to be true.

59

Who She Sees When She Pictures Herself

by Austin Eichelberger

When she was a child and would pitch a fit or really wanted something, her dad used to laugh and tell her that he wished she could see herself looking so silly, so unlike the nice girl he knew had just been there, had been right there, and now whenever her mind has a moment to wander—even just a second—she imagines the way she looks: pushing her dirty blonde hair behind her ear in the hallway just outside her office door, cleaning her rectangular glasses over a sink in the black-tiled bathroom of a restaurant, or maybe crossing a windy street just after the lighted sign has turned to Don’t Walk; in her mind though, she always embellishes, sees herself as more-than-human: leaning on the sink brushing her teeth as a female gladiator with flaming hair and magma skin, or maybe floating through her kitchen in a sheath of dreamy mists like where galaxies are born, or perhaps as a Hindu nāgī, one of the snake-women from an illustrated childhood book of hers— swimming in silk and jewels, writhing always between enchanting and venomous—as she watches herself move grandly through her surroundings; in this way she approaches family and strangers, hotels and boardrooms and bedrooms and airports, held always close and warm by the idea—’the fact, really,’ she smirks to herself—that underneath her skin and behind her everyday life exist worlds that others could never even imagine.

60

Eutopia

by G. J. Jensen “I firmly believe this path, controlling ourselves and at the same time respecting the individual, will be the way to save humanity from themselves.” Prophet Number 2 (Voluntarily Remained Unnamed)

EweGene looked up from his shovel. The two-deaded lamb hadn’t lived long outside of its mother. All that was left was a scattering and patting down of dirt, and to slaughter the mother that begot the dead creature, so she wouldn’t create anything that would live to create again. He dreaded having to tell his parents about Lily. Who he should not have named. Lily, the two-deaded lamb, sharing an eye and a jaw, but four new, soft, flappy ears to show where she should have been divided. His parents would demand a purge. Of themselves and of their stock. EweGene felt the pang of loss at not remembering to plant a seed where Lily was now laying, under what would be green grass again. No marker or mourning fruit. Just dirt and hidden shame. He wanted to sky to press down on him, push him into the dirt. It remained wide open, hollow in its hallowed feel. Using the shovel in the earth, he knelt down one knee at a time, pushing the shovel aside, sitting in the circle that was a crater that was of late an animal rite of passage, patting and pushing dirt, until it felt right to him, until that spot felt as empty as the sky. Then he picked up the shovel and walked to the pen, switching out the shovel for the sledgehammer. The weight of it always put a pit in his stomach.

The mother sheep, head already down on the ground, received her end in one blow, one mighty sound matching the sick feeling growing in EweGene. Tossing the sledgehammer out of the pen, the other sheep started to cry, mill, and then settle, seeing the weapon fly out and away, low to the ground, then dust up on landing. Picking up the body, he carried this late mother into the slaughter stable. Afterbirth still drying in the sun behind them, her animal mind scattered in the opposite direction.

“EweGene, was it necessary to slaughter today? I thought it was shearing day.”

He shook his head, bowed low over his dinner plate. A few peas still swam in the brown gravy he couldn’t bring himself to mop up with the coarse bread, though they were straining to join on the plate, a sponge seeking moist relief, not caring how. He pulled his slice off the plate and ate it dry before allowing himself to drink anymore water.

“What ever happened to that pregnant sheep?” His mother clanked dishes around, scraping the cooling remains off as she went.

He finished off the entire glass before answering. How to tell…“Well, she passed away during birth.”

“And the lamb?” She turned to face him, drying her hands on her apron.

“Passed away inside her, I’m afraid.”

She tsk’ed, turned her head, and went back to clearing any surface she could find. “No doubt killing her in the process. Did you complete the birth and dismember the aborted lamb?”

EweGene turned to look her in the eyes, grimaced at her comfortable tone, nodding in agreement.

“Good, we wouldn’t want to eat that kind of tainted meat.

Stick your hands in the fire. Burn that blood off.”

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EweGene looked down at his scarred hands, cleaner from the bread and wiping them on his pants. He pushed his plate away, pushed himself away from the table. Standing and turning, the warmth was a sun-dial around, clocking his motion. Hot against his face, barely felt on his skin roughed to the elbows, he watched the fire while he rolled his sleeves up.

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An Eye for a Flower: Interview with mixed-media artist, Tara Snowden

By Erin Pringle-Toungate The art for the cover and throughout the pages of this issue of LQ is by Vashon, Washington artist, Tara Snowden, who works with scissors and glue, not computer programs, to create surreal paper worlds out of the images we see every day in magazines. The following interview took place over email, about Snowden’s work. Enjoy.

You’re a crossover artist, moving from ballet to a different sort of visual art. How does ballet inform this art?

Tara Snowden, self-portrait

In dance there is a desire or need to express emotion, and to invoke strong emotion in others. So there is that commonality between ballet dancing and making images for me. I often feel my art falls short of expressing what I want it to, as if it’s missing a key element, such as music,

or text; I do rather wish it had a more performative quality, and can get very depressed after shows because not enough has happened. I wouldn’t be able to make images without music; the artists Sigur Ros and William Basinski were constant companions in the making of these particular pieces, as was Marilynne Robinson’s book Housekeeping, which I quoted from liberally in lieu of an artist statement for a gallery show of these images. I literally immerse myself in books, and words, and music, and I couldn’t make a thing without either.

Do you still dance?

I don’t dance, but I need to. People have said this. But my knees are shoddy, so I’ll be a sad sight at aging-ladies ballet class for certain.

I’ve always enjoyed the dark-vivid lighting that you use in your work. Can you talk about your lighting decision?

I don’t think I make lighting decisions, now I’m going to start thinking about that! I make decisions based almost entirely on line, form and color, and how things flow into each other; I’m often very preoccupied with making things work, making an image that is evocative.

The fairytale aspects of your work seem pivotal to each piece, how each piece is like another folk heroine from a story that feels familiar, dark, cautionary. Are you making fairy tales 63

with your scissors or are you taking apart fairy tales? Or do you not think of folk/fairy tales while you work?

I think more about mythology, spirituality and symbols than fairy tales because that’s more familiar terrain for me. They could be seen as psychological portraits, and in this they may have a parallel with fairy tales?

A recurring theme in your work is the female body altered. To take a woman who is familiar from the generic fashion shots we are used to seeing but then modifying her body and her environment. I guess it’s a defamiliarization. What interests you about the fashion model?

I think a great model is a true artist, becoming herself a work of art that is expressive and imaginative.

There are also incredible artists in the fashion world, the late great designer Alexander McQueen is a huge inspiration to me; designer Miuccia Prada is incredible with color and form; and the photographers, stylists, and people who shape great fashion photography are true artists as well - and I am grateful to all of them for the images they provide.

How would you describe the climate right now as an artist?

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I’m so outside the official world of art, and rarely even identify myself as an artist, that I couldn’t say. It does seem to me that as a culture we are becoming less educated, and this is clearly leading to hard times for all types of artists, particularly writers.

The female body is central to your work. Are you reinventing the nude? Reacting to the gaze?

Rethinking dissection? How do you think about the women you put on front of our eyes?

The images can be read as psychological self-portraits and portraits, and as idealogical statements that express my belief in the interpenetration of nature, mind and body; they are my feeble attempt to erase the division we make between our bodies and thoughts and the world around us. I take as my inspiration the writers Paul Shepard (Nature and Madness) and David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous). To roughly paraphrase Paul Shepard, the flower created the human eye so it could be seen. I work with images of women because there is so much more creativity of expression allowed to women in popular imagery, and perhaps, because I am a woman, and therefore it easier for me to express myself through them. I never think I’m taking them apart, I am enhancing them, or making them more emotionally interesting.

For a while you owned an art gallery in Vashon, what did you find most surprising about the experience? What do you miss most?

The most surprising thing was: how depressing it could be - how little art people bought, how little I wanted to “sell” in the sense of persuading people - and how much this made me want to drink gin. I miss the artists, and helping them show their work, in particular ordering the work on the walls in the gallery so that, to me anyway, it looked the best that it could.

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What do you most enjoy about the creation process?

I’m actually a very undisciplined and insecure artist, a recipe for low output and even less exposure. That aside, I love the feeling of allowing something that is not me to move through me, when I get to the place of non-thinking and something rather unexpected and sort of neat happens that I cannot for certain lay claim to.

Who are three not well-known artists who are doing interesting work right now and what appeals to you most about their work?

Claire Morgan and Tara Donovan are unequivocally two of my favorite working artists. I’m not a writer, so I can’t begin to convey the staggering beauty of their work, so let’s all Google them, yes, and seek out their shows. I also love the artist Darren Waterston, a deeply spiritual, technically gifted, and sublime painter.

When did you decide that you were a visual artist? Was there a moment?

I don’t think I’ve decided that yet. I’m not a good judge of these things. I would love to be an artist, I wish there was an official way that one could know for certain if they were or were not an artist. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s all in the making.

LQ

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“Grace Under Water” - collage on panel, 8” x 10”, 2011

Contributors ROB CHALFEN’s poems, a new phenomenon in the universe, have in rapid succession been accepted for publication this year in The Battersea Review, Fulcrum and The Ocean State Review. He is working on a first book manuscript, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

QUINN CHIPLEY hails from Memphis, Tennessee, but has lived in Louisville, Kentucky with his now-legal spouse, Leo, for more years than either vanity or discretion would permit divulging. Chipley holds the B.A. degree from Rice University, Houston, Texas, the M.Div. from Southeastern Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, and some letters from the University of Louisville: the M.A. in psychology, the M.D. from the medical school, and the Ph.D. in Humanities. That last effort has burdened the world with yet another dissertation, William Faulkner and Alcoholism: Distilling Facts and Fictions.

As hobby, Chipley loves languages better than he has mastered them. As obligation, Chipley is owned by four cats who tolerate his annoying writing-habit as long as it does not interfere with the regular purchase and distribution of their food. To the end of a paycheck and their meals, he coordinates mental health services for student on the Health Sciences Center campus of the University of Louisville. When the cats are not looking, Chipley abuses words and exasperates real poets, among whom Julie Marie Wade has been a kind and patient guide since the onset of his obsession with poems in 2010. The online journal, Sawmill, an organ of Typecast Publishing, presented two of his mercifully-short efforts in Volume 3, July, 2011.

AUSTIN EICHELBERGER completed an MA in Fiction at Longwood University in May 2009. Since then, Eichelberger has taught various English and writing courses at the university level, and worked as a book seller, freelance journalist, tutor, editor and proofreader, along with a few less literary positions; Eichelberger also co-founded the online literary and art journal SPACES. Eichelberger’s work has appeared in anthologies and journals including Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, Cease, Cows, Gone Lawn, Extract(s) and Eclectic Flash, among others.

JOANNE ESSER writes poetry and nonfiction in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She has also been a teacher of young children for over thirty years. She earned an MFA from Hamline University and published a chapbook of poems, I Have Always Wanted Lightning, with Finishing Line Press in 2012. Her work has appeared in Slant, Under the Sun, Water~Stone Review and The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, among other places.

NICOLAS HUNDLEY’s first book, The Revolver in the Hive, won the 2012 Poets Out Loud Editor’s Prize and was published by Fordham University Press in 2013. His poems have appeared in FIELD, Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, New Orleans Review, Gulf Coast, Verse, POOL, LIT, Conduit, Salt Hill and other publications.

G. J. JENSEN is a writer of shorts and novels.

JACK KAULFUS is a teacher and writer of weird literary fiction. Their stories have been published in Heavy Feather Review, A cappella Zoo, and Barrelhouse online, as well as other journals. Jack lives in Austin, Texas. Website: jackaulfus.com MICHAEL MARTONE teaches at The Program in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama, where he has been teaching since 1996. He is the author of more than a dozen books. He has previously taught at

the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and has taught at Iowa State University, Harvard University and Syracuse University. He has won two NEA Fellowships and an AWP award for Creative Nonfiction.

BEN MAZER’s collections of poems include Poems (Pen & Anvil Press, 2010), New Poems (Pen & Anvil Press), January 2008 (Dark Sky Books, 2010), and The Glass Piano (forthcoming in October from MadHat Press). He is the editor of The Collected Poems of John Crowe Ransom, published this spring by the Un-Gyve Press. He edits The Battersea Review, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE is the author of several collections of poetry for both adults and children. Her most notable collections include Yellow Glove (1986, Far Corner Books), Fuel (1998, BOA Editions Ltd.), and 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002, Greenwillow Books). In 1997, Habibi (Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing), Nye’s first young-adult novel, was published.

In addition to the NSK Prize, Nye has won many awards for her work, including four Pushcart Prizes, two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards, and the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award. Nye was also a Guggenheim Fellow in 1997 and was a finalist for the National Book Award for 19 Varieties of Gazelle. She won the Robert Creeley Award in 2013.

JOANNA PARYPINSKI is a writer whose work inhabits the dark spaces of the psyche. Her published work includes short stories, poetry, and a novel. She received her MFA from Chapman University and currently teaches college English. Find more at her website, joannaparypinski.com.

FRANCESC PARCERISAS, born in 1944, is the author of fourteen volumes of poetry, including Still Life with Children, Triumph of the Present, and The Golden Age, is considered the premier Catalan poet of his generation—a “miracle generation” of poets who came of age as Franco’s public banning of the Catalan language came to an end. He is also a masterly, award-winning translator of an impressive array of significant international writers, including Joseph Conrad, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing, Katherine Mansfield, Joyce Carol Oates, Cesare Pavese, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, Rimbaud, Susan Sontag, William Styron, and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. Among his numerous translations from French, Italian, and English into Catalan, he is most famous in Catalonia for his translation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

His presented work is translated by CYRUS CASSELLS author of six books of poetry: The Mud Actor, Soul Make a Path through Shouting, Beautiful Signor, More Than Peace and Cypresses, The Crossed-Out Swastika, and The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, which is forthcoming. Among his honors are a Lannan Literary Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is a Professor of English at Texas State University.

CLELA REED is the author of two books of poetry: Dancing on the Rim (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2009) and The Hero of the Revolution Serves Us Tea (Negative Capability Press, 2014) and two poetry chapbooks: Bloodline (Evening Street Press, 2009) and Of Root and Sky (Pudding House Publications, 2010). She has had poems published in The Cortland Review, The Atlanta Review, Caesura Literary Magazine, Colere Journal, The Kennesaw Review, Storysouth Journal, Clapboard House Literary Journal, and others. She recently returned from Peace Corps service in Romania (2010-2011) during which time she wrote weekly in a blog, www.clelainromania.blogspot.com.

KATE J. REED lives, teaches and writes in Spokane, WA with her husband, son and wicked cat. Her fiction has appeared in The Copper Nickel and various online journal. She blogs at spokaneisgood.weebly.com.

TARA SNOWDEN is a self-taught visual artist with a background in classical ballet. She currently resides on Vashon Island in the state of Washington. Her work can be seen in part as personal psychological portraits that reflect and meditate on death and beauty, the confluence of erotic and religious experience, and our relationship to nature. The collages are created entirely by hand, using images from books and magazines, scissors and wallpaper paste. No computers or printers are used at any point in the image-making process. Her work has shown at Gallery 070, Ignition Gallery and Hinge Gallery, Vashon.

Embrace.

LQ