Madcap Review Issue 2.0

Masthead

Editor in Chief Craig Ledoux Managing Editor Emily Stokes Art Editor Faith Savill Fiction Editor Sarah Kuhn Nonfiction Editor Mary Kay McBrayer Poetry Editor Jeffrey Peterson Readers Chris Antzoulis Brittany Baker Joanna Benjamin

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Table of Contents

Letter from the Editor High Lit Lonesome / Robert Vivian Sizzle Circus / JoKa Mascara Dynasty / Nicole Steinberg Anger Zones / Mahreen Sohail Domestic Folklore / Trista Edwards Smoke Seduction 3 / Eelus Hymn for the Moth / Trista Edwards Tangled Up in You / Beth Cavener Stichter How Many Years in Human Years / Samantha Turk Side Lined / Jenn Blair Death to the Pasture / Nicole Steinberg God of Corn Skypes with God of Trees / Joanna Valente Exit Tunnel / Brian Uhl Sunrise #262 / Allison Boyd For Cassandra / Hannah Keene The Kennedy Rabbi / Janet Gool Hip Cat / Jeannine Jones Euforia / Vivian Calder贸n Bogoslavsky Not a Man / Tim Eberle T. Rextasy / Pernille Smith Larsen The Parties / Elizabeth Acevedo Homo Paleolicus / Agostino Iacurci First Job / Elizabeth Acevedo Out of the Ordinary / thirtythr33 Letter to the Terrified Versions of Myself / Matthew Olzmann Hug You / Mark Gmehling Soft Pants / Elena Passarello Lest You Remember / Marc Joan Pig with Camera / David J. Thompson User / Will Vincent

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Letter from the Editor

Recently, at a punk show, a middle-aged nobody donned a pair of latex gloves, picked up a microphone, and began walking backwards through the audience, clattering into loosely held drinks, lurching, crooning, throwing himself on the floor and dryheaving. He made himself perfect.

When we started Madcap a year ago, we didn’t know what to expect. We wanted to be challenged by the submissions we received, but that necessitated, to some degree, a relinquishing of control. What would happen if we let go and allowed the issue to lead us? Each issue answers that question differently, and we couldn’t be happier. Whether you’re wrapped up in “High Lit Lonesome,” the dizzying, rapturous “dervish essay” by Robert Vivian, or staring awestruck at Mark Gmehling’s incomparable “Hug You,” which is featured as this issue’s cover art, we hope you’ll come to think of Madcap as a sort of haven, a place where everyone can laugh over a few spilled drinks and revel in the experience.

We’re proud to feature, once again, an incredible lineup of internationally recognized contemporary artists, including Beth Cavener Stichter, Eelus, thirtythr33, and Agostino Iacurci, among others. Not to be outdone, the poetry and prose selected for this issue careens from the humorous to the devastating, from the pious to the profane—slices of life bolstered by intent, thrashing around like perfect little disasters. We’re two, by the way, and terribly happy to be here. Thanks for checking in on us. Thanks, also, to all the artists and writers featured in this issue, and to our staff, old and new.

Craig Ledoux Editor in Chief Madcap Review

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High Lit Lonesome Robert Vivian for Osip Mandelstam

Poet is a lover is a thoroughbred racing down the home stretch wild mane flying and poet is a flower is a bird is a flame and windmill spinning clockwise in headlong berserking and poet is a tool shaped like a scalpel is a song of world-drenched words is a decal stuck on yon battered suitcase from Zimbabwe, Rhodesia, Lithuania or the arctic circle and poet is a sigh is a whisper is a shaft of sunlight shining from a partially opened door deep in the night fathoms past sleep where a man moans in a chair rocking back and forth in ecstatic sobs and poet is a wastrel is a thief and crying little girl holding her broken hand like the fey lily of ever after and poet is an earthen pot and cracked windshield in planetary seams of unbearable vision and pennant flicking its tinsel above an almost empty used car lot and poet is a voice is a grave is a speaker of signs and reader of signs poet is a star is a star is a star all by its high lit lonesome out in deepest space, door knob center of blackest nil, and poet is a firmament a galaxy a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray and poet is a fool is a gardener and tender of small animals with a walking stick studded with thorns and poet is a drunk whose apocryphal last words were “I just had my eighteenth martini� and poet is a school desk and hidden notebook whose scrawling have nothing to do with the lesson at hand, nothing to do with A, B, or C or failing grade, nada, no door prize or standardized test or best seller list or any statistical measure and poet is a beggar is a bootlegger is a flyweight boxer who punches like he just wants to dance and poet is a grave on a hill and canted at an angle some might call almost levitational and poet is a look a touch a longing and scent of jasmine on the back of a woman’s neck and poet is a free-fall plunge into great electricity and chemical feeling and incalculable innocence and outlandish presumptions that what he sings of what she sings of is true past all legislation at the crossroads of the first breath and the last and all eternity speaking in you, in me until the deep inner voice cracks and gives way to thunder and lightning and waft of ionized air down a mine shaft where the canary is still singing in the darkness and the flame still flickers, oh, my sweet crushed Osip, may your voice live on forever.

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Sizzle Circus by JoKa

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Mascara Dynasty Nicole Steinberg Ten turncoats corner me with machete acrylics, hissing on their pedestals, rising from the dirt. I should have strived for a more boring life. I'm a Russian princess slash pop star running around a snowy town square in high heels and no pants. This is the look I'm going for. It's a good look.

I'm having a lot of meaningless sex in meaningful places, enjoying the exquisite rinds of insignificant men. Pungent with woe, they pretend not to stare at my thighs. The sun turns its bitch-face to my subjects and their construction paper lives, sets a bunch of shit ablaze.

The way people go nuts when you leave them in the heat, all the scotch tape flying loose.

From every loudspeaker an anthem rings; black hearts and ankles break to the beat. I kiss every forehead I see, my lips creating craters.

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Anger Zones Mahreen Sohail

My aunt has birthed five children, all of whom now have spouses and children of their own. My mother tells me they are coming over for dinner as she cups the bottom of a cucumber in the palm of her hand and peels around the top.

The dark green skin falls snakelike into the kitchen sink along with her sweat.

Flies latch onto the screen outside the kitchen window and buzz at us as she drops the freshly peeled cucumber onto a cutting board and begins to hack it into small pieces.

The two of us try to count the number of guests we are expecting and start to panic when we run out of fingers. Over the past week little pustules have begun to spring up on my hands—probably a reaction to the water, which has seemed a little brown of late. It is highly likely that I will rot away before the guests—we have counted nineteen people so far—arrive. Small hairs curl above my mother’s head in the humidity and Ghafur shuffles into the room. The house constricts around us and my nerves begin to take over the muscles in my mouth.

Ghafur is a small, shifty man and does not foster delight around the home because he has hemorrhoids. When we see the back of his kameez painted bright red and ask him what it is, he says, red paint, though of course we know he is bleeding from the inside out. Soon he will be unable to do the dishes, which, of course, will be hard on all of us.

This is his job; If he becomes incapacitated due to blood loss, who will wash these plates, saucers, cups, bowls, and cutlery after the guests—twenty-three and counting—have left?

The red spot on his kameez grows larger and larger as he stands over the sink, thumbing, clinking, cleaning dishes, the water running over his hands and arms as his shoulders sink lower and the sun moves across the sky. My mother is standing in the middle of an explosion of tomatoes and onions and yoghurt and red meat that bleeds pink over kitchen counters and in pans. My father is still not home from the office, but when he gets home he will take me to the hospital near our house even though I could easily drive myself.

For my diseased hands, my mother tells me.

From the kitchen window I can see the neighboring Uncle up on the terrace of his house, shirtless and sweating, his shalwar swinging around his legs and weights strapped to his flabby arms, his hairy breasts jiggling as he squats up and down. I feel faint looking at him. Heat lies across the two of us like a second skin. Some days I want to swallow entire glaciers. Uncle begins another squat only to dizzy out of sight behind the railing of his terrace. I watch from the window but he doesn’t reappear. Perhaps he has died. I feel solemn and not sad—maybe even a little envious—though only in the way living people are when they have the luxury of imagining themselves dead without actually being dead.

When I tell my mother about the fainting Uncle she shushes me distractedly and tells me we must mind our own business. Why were you looking at him anyway, she asks me, knife in hand, cutting, cutting, cutting. Why don’t you ever help? she says, looking meaningfully at my hands.

I could kill her. There are things all over and around the house that could kill her, like knives, or scorpions that rest under leaves in the rain, or the men with bombs strapped to their chests who have begun to circle our neighborhood, or possibly even my 8

father’s nose. The trick is not to think about it—the killing, not the nose—though the rule applies to both, and instead to focus on something else, anything else, like, for example, the principles of delight and happiness. Perhaps Uncle did not faint but only saw me observing him. Perhaps he crawled back into his house on his hands and knees, trying to hide from my judgmental eyes (which are shaped exactly like my mother’s; the outside corners curve down the side of my face as if they are trying to point at the corners of my mouth (also pointing down)). *** The west windows of our house face outward, past our neighbor’s house, toward the Himalayas. When I was a child, my father went on a seven day trip across four of the peaks, and I remember waking up to him entering the house, shrunken and shaking violently, my mother wrapping him in blankets and sitting him next to the fire, handing him mugs and mugs of tea over the course of the day. Now in his stories, my father has conquered the Himalayas—maybe I dreamt the small, shivery cartoon man. He does not remember being sick when I ask him about it.

Some nights the mountains rain on me in my dreams and I wake up in the morning, muddled and happy, still half-asleep, and safe, under huge chunks of rocks, roots, and trees. *** I hear the door open and my mother stops stirring over the stove to look up as my father appears in the kitchen doorway. His nose is huge: large insects could probably nest there.

His brown suit has creases in it and the front of his collar is yellowing. What’s going on, he says, and my mother, frying and frazzled, tells him about my aunt and her offspring and her offspring’s offspring coming over for dinner. No notice? he asks, and his nose threatens us, but my mother heads him off before he can start on a tirade against her relatives. She needs to go the hospital, my mother says, motioning toward me with a dripping ladle. My father looks at my flaking hands, nods.

We are silent as we drive to the hospital over potted roads, past stooped men and women being beaten by the weather. If he is dead, the man in the neighboring house has been so for an hour and a half by now. The afternoon crawls alongside us in the car. *** The lobby of the hospital doubles as a waiting room. There is a woman standing smackbang in the middle of the long hallway, holding a baby to her neck and a water bottle in her free hand. Every two minutes she shakes her leg and lifts the arm holding the water bottle and pours a little water over the baby’s head. It drips down the motionless infant and wets the front of her kameez as doctors and nurses blur past us. Her dupatta clings to her curves and the security guard sitting in the corner of the doorway caresses his gun and eyes her sleepily. I try not to look and my father leaves to talk to the receptionist. When I walk past the woman with the baby to take one of the seats lining the walls, she turns her head to follow me with her eyes and says, audibly, Cover your neck. Some people look up like weeds thrusting at us in the heat. Her eyes press into me. Cover your neck! she commands again, and I ignore her and sit down and stare determinedly into the corners of the room. Of all the places on the female body it is indeed joyous that this ugly, ungainly woman has discovered this place of longing, the neck.

In this town, we hide our most prized possessions—like our bodies and our health —so people don’t steal them from us. We pretend to be sick all the time and are therefore 9

less alarmed when we actually become sick. I rub the palm of my hand over the side of my neck and the security guard glances from me to the woman. The infant moans in her arms, stretching taller from her neck. She turns away from me, repulsed. I can understand wanting to blow these things up. The doctor is too busy to look at my hands today so we drive home.

My hands are steaks in my lap, large and untended.

On the way back, my father peers intently over the steering wheel at the curving road.

How many people are coming again?

Twenty-five, I say, maybe more. *** At home, my mother purses her mouth at my hands, and my father walks past her into the house. We need bananas for the fruit chaat, I’ve run out of bananas. He ignores her and walks into their bedroom, pulling at the buttons of his collar, his nose shrinking.

The man on the terrace has been dead now for three hours, and in that time my mother has cooked a meal for twenty-six people, maybe more. She is armed with two brooms, which are swinging from her hands, the ends of the spindly twigs scraping against the marble floors. Ghafur, she says to his red back, and he turns to us, his eyes bloodshot, his arms still soapy. For a second, it looks like my mother will cry and I feel my throat close up against something hard and rotting. I’ll do it, I volunteer. Behind my mother, by the sink, I see Ghafur’s shoulders slump a little in relief.

She hands me a broom without looking at me, and we begin to attack the house with it. It hasn’t rained in what feels like years. A hard ache begins at my knees and travels up my spine to the back of my head. When I’m done I scrape all the dust and grime into a dustpan and throw it out onto the peels of fruit sizzling in the trash can.

Bananas, my mother says again, to herself. The quiet in the house is broken by the sound of running water and the sound of silence from the bedroom. My father is asleep, or dead. I imagine saying this to my mother. Mind your own business, she replies, and continues trying to reach for the black on the ceiling fans. Her back is thin and arched as she works her way up the two-step ladder and lunges with the broom at the wings of the fan.

All those years ago when my father came home from his trek and my mother poured cups of tea for him, I think she wanted him to die. She covered him in blankets and nudged him closer to the fire. Her mouth became pinched like a small, curving snake in the hot, orange bedroom. *** I’ll take him to the hospital, I tell my mother, gently now, because I love her and the lower half of Ghafur’s kameez is completely soaked. And I’ll bring back the bananas. She nods, defeated and tired. You should go shower, I add.

In the next house, they have probably discovered the body by now, burnt and crisp and scary like a platter of freedom. They have asked the two security guards who sit by the gate of the house to carry it down to one of the rooms. Now his family is probably leaning over it, calm and hard and panicking like melting metal rods. ***

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I lay out plastic tarp over the back seat of the car and lead a swaying Ghafur to it. His face is brown and sweaty, unshaven. Both of us are embarrassed by his pain. It drags at the car’s engine as I drive.

I park at the hospital for the second time today and turn to watch him get out.

People point. The clouds hover over us and the sun sets. The red on his shirt floods their consciences and mine. They think he is a victim and who is to say he is not. I wonder if the woman with the baby has left by now. I’ll come back and get you, I say to him, not sure that I will. There are hearses in the street behind me. Shining black cars like insects with pincers heading to a feast. My father thinks patriotism is a terrible thing. He thinks you can prevent great tragedies by dismantling buildings and places exactly when they begin to intertwine with your organs. *** The streetlights are working when I drive back home with the bananas, so I can see it clearly from a long way away. It is a small dog, white, standing by the side of the road, next to grass so tall and thick that if the dog moved a little to the left it would be enveloped immediately. The cicadas have begun their nightly mourning for the rain. The heat pulses against my brain and the dog comes closer.

At home, my mother should have showered by now and my father is probably awake. The food has been cooked and the table laid. The summer stretches ahead of us: long, hazy, and endless.

The dog’s underbelly is brown and its tail is a short, happy stump. I press down on the accelerator and thump into it. Before I hit it, I can see the dog begin to move its head toward the grass, but by then it is too late. The car crunches against its back legs and even the cicadas fall silent at the sound of the mewling. I stop the car and get out and watch its open mouth make high-pitched whines as it lies splashed horizontally against the concrete. One of its back legs is completely broken and its white fur is matted with blood and mud. It is an animal, a bitch, I tell myself, but I want so badly to fix something that I get down on my knees and run my swollen hands over its belly. Its mouth is covered with spittle, and when I try and place my arms around it to lift it off the concrete it begins to cry with renewed intensity. When I stand with it in my arms, one of its legs dangles at a right angle to its body which is warm and wet as if someone has heated a sack of yoghurt and placed it, oozing, onto me.

I set it on the back seat of the car, onto the tarp already stained by Ghafur. When I get home the dog has stopped making noise, but its stomach is still rising and falling, and spit continues to gather around its muzzle. In the dark, it looks like the dog’s teeth are curving into its mouth. I ring the doorbell repeatedly until my mother opens the door. She is beaming for her guests, but her smile freezes when she sees me, blood soaked, my finger still on the hard nub of the doorbell. What happened? Her voice is high, higher, highest, and my father is behind her—wearing a freshly ironed shirt and pants with middle creases that could cut open the world.

Are you hurt? Her voice is quiet and raw and my father moves past her to grab onto my upper arms to shake me. No, I say, it’s the dog. I ran into one. My voice is smooth in the night to match their outfits and their faces. They are both gleaming for their guests despite the tragedies taking place around us. Behind them I can smell the house: spices and cheap air freshener. Every light is on.

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I lead them to the parked car, taking care to walk calmly ahead of them, my head high. They peer into the windows to look at the now dead dog. For a second, the sight chips away at my mother’s smile like an ice pick, and I think of this morning when she almost cried, but then she turns back to me. I relax when I see how angry she is. It calms the pulsing in my head. Go shower, she hisses. There are cars turning into our street, their headlights reaching our house and then beaming into it. They have begun to turn toward our gate. Get in the house, quick, says my father behind her. Both of them are stricken and old as if they have run long marathons without water and will fall to the ground from exhaustion any second now. They sway by the car window, side by side, blocking my view of the dog.

I walk to my bedroom, ahead of the clamor of voices beginning to rise outside the house. I get in the shower with my clothes on and stay there long after the water runs clear. When I descend back down the stairs in new, dry clothes, I see that ten small boys and girls, five couples, as well as my aunt and an assortment of servants and nannies, have crowded themselves into our drawing room. They rise as one to welcome me and I start at the beginning.

I go from adult to adult, offering up my cheek. The children hover by their parents’ sides, buzzing with a strange, reckless energy, their straining eyes searching the room. The dog rots into my soul but our guests are unsuspecting and polite. They are waiting for me to reach them so they can congratulate me for all the great things I will surely be accomplishing in the future.

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Domestic Folklore Trista Edwards

It is not that you believe in making the sign of X whenever a black cat crosses, your finger stuttering the air like a stone across a pond, anointing our path for safe passage. Nor is it the ritual cheers, the knock of glass to table before your lips.

It is that I uphold liturgies even after you’ve left.

Even before that, when we were dying in our own hands, scouring the day for any sign of good luck, we could not help the rapture, a rotting sweetness, of our invented superstitions.

Looting motel Bibles. Never telling the truth.

So yesterday, when a book told me do not sing before breakfast, or you will cry at night, I thought of the last morning we woke together.

The graze against the cast iron skillet we seasoned, buried then unburied in the backyard, your stilted kiss, a burn rosing my finger. Your impatience with the bees.

No amount of sugar would take away the sting.

One you suffered shortly after mine. Now, I waste no time capturing the lightning bugs, one between my fingers under a rolling pressure until its thorax and abdomen are two. And with its last bleating light, I chalk fluorescence above the bed.

One glowing body at a time, just like you taught me.

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Smoke Seduction 3 by Eelus

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Hymn for the Moth Trista Edwards Stop fence sitting and give up God, you once said.

Now, you write every month just to let me know that you never stopped lying.

When you told me about the other women I wanted to believe in God, ache with forgiveness.

Maybe this is a test, one that will keep us all from burning, so we can remain beautiful.

But I didn’t say that. I said our prayers for us, I lit an arrow, blew out the flame, lit it again. Somewhere this is happening to somebody else. Somewhere a choir rises to sing Hallelujah. But here, it is midnight and I have nothing to believe in except the steady bleat of moths against the window screen. They want to get at light. They want to bruise with belief. Who can blame them?

It was funny then that you began to collect Bibles, stolen from motel dressers. Crimson covered, inscribed with dates of theft.

You gave them sanctuary, religion stacked in our corners until you’d forgotten why you lifted them in the first place.

Now, your new lover hides them under the dust ruffle. As they dimple the underside of the mattress, disrupting your sleep, you wonder if this is what belief feels like. Hard, punishing, a remembrance of me.

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Tangled Up in You by Beth Cavener Stichter with Alessandro Gallo

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How Many Years in Human Years Samantha Turk I wonder if relationships age the same way that I do, or you do. Say I am twentyfour years old. And you are twenty-six years old. And we are six months old. A baby. Not newborn, but still limp limbed. Still toothless. Still incontinent and crying all the time.

Dear little bubbles blooming at the mouth. When will it learn to walk, to talk, to eat solids, tie its shoelaces? Dot its I’s and cross its T’s and toot its horn and mind its manners and pat its back and say its name. Will it make us proud make us angry make us laugh make us hope to god we’re the right sort of people to bring it up in this crazy world we live in? Would we give it the shirt off our backs the cream of the crop the sheep in the meadow the cow in the corn the air we breathe the time of day?

When it grows up (if it grows up) will it ask us, Who do you think you are? Why am I here? How did I get here? Can I have a few bucks?

Will it ask, Which of you do I look like more? Do I look like you? Do I look like you? Do I look like either one of you?

I wonder what it would look like in its adolescence, let’s say. Crotchety hormonal blossomings into the adult it will (maybe) become. Will its body start to change, like your body changed, and my body changed? Will we be unable to track the difference day by day, but realize, one day, that it looks altogether new? We might say, But you’ll always be my baby.

We might say, All of a sudden, everything was the same.

It will start learning things about ecology, igneous rocks, the Wars of the Roses, and pop culture. We will remind it to have eight glasses of water, eight hours of sleep, one apple, and a kiss on each cheek, the way the French do it. We will think the French might know some things we weren’t brought up with as Americans. Will it say, Would you please back off? Will we say, I want to, but I can’t. Or, I want to, but I shouldn’t. Or, I don’t want to.

We won’t compare it to those of our friends, or the ones of famous people. We will try to imbue it with a healthy sense of its own self-worth, give it some independence.

We will stop taking it out, dressing it up, slipping notes in its lunchbox, tucking in its shirt, fetching crust from the corners of its eyes with a flat fingernail, keepsaking its shorn curls. We’ll let it explore its own sexuality, get familiar with its own body, its arms and legs, its backbone, shoulder blades, hips, underarms, body hair, mouth. We’ll say, Don’t be embarrassed. It’s natural. It’s who you are and we love you. When it makes mistakes, it will be ok. It’s the only way to learn, we’ll tell it. We’ll set it loose, let it get into scrapes and tight spaces and nooks and crannies and rocks and hard places and sticky messes. We don’t want to be overbearing. But after it slinks out, bare and bloodsucked, if it lets us, we’ll hold it close and kiss it and say, You really scared me. You really could have gotten hurt. I’m glad you’re ok.

And later, when it gets old, will we look at its crow’s feet and sunspots and varicose veins and be able to say, You know something, you aged well. We might even say, And how!

Maybe it will have done it without cosmetic enhancements, plastic surgery, or artificial preservatives.

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But I wonder if relationships age according to the same years as human years. Or is it more like dog years, or cat years—as in one human year equals seven dog years. I’ve read that elephant years mean pretty much the same thing as human years. If we are six months old, how old is that in human years?

And if six months old is exactly six months old—nursing milk from a breast, little fists in the air, making gurgle sounds—it doesn’t have to say a word.

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Side Lined Jenn Blair There you go, mother cooed, spooning two little bacon blobs from a can of beans into the garbage as if she were feeding a baby.

Each of my letters to God grows more terrible.

Brief.

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Death to the Pasture Nicole Steinberg Once my home borough was a farm and I was a spoonful of potting soil waiting to bend around steel rod roots of indoor plumbing. My father was a tree that grew in Brooklyn, packing a heavy suitcase of sap; my mother a mare, gnashing on damp ends of lit matches, showing off a secondhand tiara of teeth.

They broke, like all things do and sure will, even the sun. Wheat fields twitched as we entered, fellow hiccups caught in the cosmos' throat.

No trust in gods, not even the benevolent ones. Trauma was never a big surprise.

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God of Corn Skypes with God of Trees Joanna Valente * A man calls you, keeps saying he can't hear.

Reception is bad in a place surrounded by trees.

You cross the street on 6th Ave without looking & a man calls out for you & you say you are no one's mother. A baby elephant is on Bedford taking photos in a crowd that is big & in this crowd you are small & everyone knows it. Right now, you are five blocks apart & several avenues away from a man in a corn field that is made of polyurethane grass—watching women have the best orgasms of their lives while jay-walking the space between two human faces—a vacuum where poems go to die. * You say I grow toward the sun but it's the only way I can be aloof while humans turn to empty warehouses—vessels for my boredom. Like TV, I watch as they turn earth into useless matter—I’d rather destroy cancer with plague than blessing. Once I wished to be a mother—tending rain to roses, seeds to corn— millions of years later, humans are naming their dogs because the only thing worse than death is desire. All humans desire something else when they are alone—I will waste their lives for them. All men must die.

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Exit Tunnel by Brian Uhl

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Sunrise #262 Allison Boyd The moon vine’s second flower has wilted significantly. I break its stalk, place it in water, hide it in the shadows under the bed. Lost love is a useless motif. The drops from the faucet are fat. I’ll water everything by grief.

I take the coffee to the parlor. Orange light pours in from the street, muted blue from the sky. No one else lives here—there is no one to tighten my breath against. I tighten my breath against myself, against notions and images. I must be ever-unloading, everawaiting, ever-adjusting, ever-constructing.

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For Cassandra Hannah Keene here i am, calling for you [a believer in

]

this body. this basket. mouthed door a gap. (i told you so) only harvests so much fruit. hindsight: this is now a burnt orchard winter. a siblyl must rely on the future and speak. this door must open only to the turn of the past. the fortune must be in this basket, this body. cassandra, i am a maker of yesteryears’ prophet

i am on the arctic flower drift beach–– it is all amber, those morals encased in sand a mouthful of this: keep my teeth from letting out. synched tongue in tone—word for word our lips touch lips, those of our keeper. o, Apollo— you shaking scared sparrow, all toneless and condemned. eat all the fruit in our arms—silver guilt and ready. each grape picked for you, each pomegranate broken before your feet. a lie gives a lie a bed to sleep in. this moon is rising backward and i am awake, my basket empty, my tongue swollen shut.

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o, Cassandra! this responsibility this artifact an empty room in my arms, that flowered beach thawing in golden ruin.

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The Kennedy Rabbi Janet Gool for my father The man loitering around the synagogue looked like a bum. He told my sister that he was the rabbi for the Kennedys and that he was hungry. My sister, trained by our parents to be hospitable, brought the Kennedy rabbi home for dinner.

I was alone in the house, practicing the violin, when Nancy arrived with her guest.

“Be careful, this guy is nuts,” she whispered to me, then left for the library to pick up some books for her American history paper.

Greenbelt, Maryland was hot and humid in early September. The guest, dressed in layers of sweater, jackets, and vests, looked hot and sweaty. I brought him a glass of iced tea and some pretzels I found in the pantry.

“Is that the Bach violin sonata in g minor you’re trying to play?” the man asked me. He stood so close I could see the dangling threads on the sleeves of his coat. His sunken cheeks were almost hidden under his tangled grey beard. The only part of him that looked clean and new were the whites of his eyes. He looked at the music on the stand.

“The Fugue? This is chutzpah!”

I had started on the Fugue, but my sense of timing was thrown off by the odd juxtaposition of the dirty, raggedy man and his obvious knowledge of music. My playing sped up; my fingers got all tangled up in the chords.

“Stop, stop!” the man yelled at me. “Let me show you how…” He reached out to take the violin from my hands.

“I think I’d better put it away,” I stuttered. How could I handle the instrument again after those dirty hands and gritty nails had touched it? I laid the violin and bow gently in their case, shut it, and leaned it against the wall.

My mother returned a few minutes later and was appalled to find a strange man in the house with her twelve-year-old daughter. She took me by the elbow into the kitchen.

“Did that man touch you?” she asked, in a barely audible whisper.

“No!” I answered. “He’s hungry, that’s all.”

I didn’t tell her that he had tried to touch the violin—I was ashamed to tell her that he had criticized my playing.

Mom relaxed; the worry lines that had appeared on her usually calm face vanished. She tied a flowered apron over her clean, pressed skirt and blouse and set about cooking a company dinner.

26

I was putting a fresh tablecloth on the dining room table when Nancy rushed in with an armful of books. She put them down and dragged out the stepladder so she could reach the Wedgwood dishes that were stored in the top cabinet.

“Better not use those,” Mom told her. “Stick with the everyday dishes.”

Mom made her specialty: Hungarian goulash with poppy seed noodles and a big tossed salad. Dad sat at the head of the table. He had removed his jacket and loosened his tie. His face was pink from the heat, and a little of the pink showed through his thinning hair. Before mom brought in the food he took off his glasses, polished them with his napkin, and replaced them on his nose. Mom tried to make small talk with the guest. She asked him where he was from, but the Kennedy rabbi would not provide a straight answer. He traveled so much, he told us, that he was no longer from anywhere.

“Well,” said Mom, still trying to engage the guest in ordinary conversation, “you must have seen some interesting things in your travels.”

“This is true,” he said. “I once spent Shabbos in a town in Mississippi—the name doesn’t come to me right now. The shul was in an old plantation house, very pretty, with a big porch running around it. After davening, the ladies’ auxiliary had a Kiddush in the social hall—in the basement. Pickled herring, schnapps, like a Kiddush anywhere. And then I noticed two big metal rings attached to the wall. And so I ask the president of the congregation, ‘What are these?’ and you know what he tells me? Do you?”

No one answered him.

“So I’ll tell you what he told me. Those rings were used to hold down disobedient slaves while they were whipped.”

Dad ate his goulash, meticulously cutting the meat into small pieces, piercing them with his fork, and lifting them up to his mouth. He wiped his mouth with his napkin, sealing his lips. Mom chased a piece of tomato around her salad bowl. I joined in the silence.

Nancy, responsible for the man’s presence at our dinner table, attempted to restart the conversation. She patted her curly hair, which had turned frizzy in the summer humidity, with both hands. Her long, skinny legs bumped into mine under the table.

“You told me you’re the rabbi to the Kennedys…”

“This is a well-known fact,” he answered. “I was the rabbi to John and Jacqueline, and to John’s father, Joseph Kennedy.”

“But why would the Kennedys need a rabbi?” I asked. “They’re Catholic.”

The man stroked his beard a minute. “You’ve learned a little Pirkei Avos?” he asked me.

“Sure,” I told him. “We study it every summer in shul.”

“Then you’ll remember it says, ‘Make yourself a rabbi?’”

I nodded.

“If a silly child who plays the violin like a howling cat knows that a person needs to make himself a rabbi, don’t you think that a brilliant leader like Kennedy would know that as well?”

“That’s, that’s…” I said, at a loss for words and gravely wounded.

Dad gave our guest that look of his, over the top of his glasses.

“There’s no call to insult my children,” he said. I beamed at Dad. No stranger could insult my violin playing with my father at my side.

27

“I meant no harm,” the rabbi answered, “I just wanted to add a little dvar torah to the meal, Mr. Weintraub, that is all.”

Mom busied herself, passing around salad and noodles, urging everyone to take a second serving. But Dad was not to be pacified so easily.

“That’s Doctor Weintraub, not mister.”

“What kind of doctor? Surgeon, heart specialist?”

“Family doctor,” said Dad. “Well, tell me Mr. Family Doctor, what do you think about this?” The man removed his left shoe, and then his sock. A terrible stink went up around the table. He hobbled over to Dad’s end of the table and held up his left foot so that it was almost level with Dad’s dinner plate.

“You’re missing some toes there, pal,” said Dad. “You diabetic?”

“It’s a lot more complicated than that,” said the guest. He thrust the sock into his jacket pocket, slipped his bare foot into his shoe, and returned to his place at the table.

Years later, remembering the story, Nancy and I had different recollections of the foot. I remembered gangrene in the toes, and I distinctly saw a few maggots crawling in and out of the mess. Nancy remembered his foot as “just gross”, but then, she went on to become a librarian, while I became a nurse.

Nancy and I looked at one another in disbelief. We had never seen a guest in our home behave so badly. Mom was doing her best as a hostess, but Dad’s voice had acquired an angry undertone we seldom heard.

“Would you help me clear the dinner plates, Bill?” Mom stared at Dad when she asked him for help. This was most unusual. Our father never served food or cleared the table, but this time he got up from his chair and carried the salad bowl into the kitchen where Nancy and I could hear him conferring with Mom. Mom and Dad returned from the kitchen with a strawberry-rhubarb pie and coffee. The guest removed a packet of Pall Malls from his pocket, lit up, and began smoking. I looked from Mom to Dad, wondering who would speak up first.

“We, umm, don’t usually smoke at the table here,” Mom said.

The guest took two additional long draws on his cigarette.

“My wife just asked you to put that cigarette out,” said Dad. The rabbi jabbed his cigarette into the saucer. (At this point in the story, my mother always added, “I was so relieved that I wasn’t using the Wedgwood dishes.”)

Dad fixed his gaze on the guest. “Time we leave for the bus station, pal.”

Dad returned about an hour later, went straight into the bathroom and washed his hands as if he were getting ready to perform surgery.

“Well, what happened?” asked Mom. Dad told us that the guest was silent during the ride to the station. When they arrived, my father asked the ticket seller when the bus left.

“The clerk told me, ‘That depends, sir. Where would you like to go?’”

“And I said to the clerk, ‘I’d like a one-way ticket for wherever the next bus is heading.’”

After that, the Kennedy rabbi lost his stink and maggots and rudeness; he evolved into one of the stories that our family loves to tell when we have guests. The Time Nancy Brought the Kennedy Rabbi to Dinner joined The Time Dad Went to the Barber Shop and Left the Baby in the Crib, or The Time Isaac Stern Borrowed Mom’s Violin Bow. We 28

entertained people with the story of the Kennedy Rabbi while Dad served cocktails before Thanksgiving dinner or while lounging on the patio with watermelon and iced tea on a summer evening.

For twenty years the Kennedy Rabbi was nothing more than a story. Meanwhile, Nancy and I graduated from high school, and Nancy went off to New England for college. I was rejected by Juilliard, the only place I had ever wanted to study.

In retrospect, I realize that my violin teacher, Mrs. Lanten, had warned me. But I ignored her suggestions to apply to other colleges or to think of what I might do other than playing the violin. Mom, usually so level-headed, lost her judgment when it came to music. She was entranced with everything connected to Juilliard—the school seal on the envelope that contained the application forms, the little card explaining which subway station was nearest the school, and even the complicated process of arranging an audition.

She was waiting for me on a straight-backed chair in the hall outside the audition room, which I fled after playing the opening of the Bach violin sonata in g minor.

“I hope you’re not planning to affront us any further,” the woman judge had said, as the two men on either side of her smirked.

Mom tried to encourage me during the train ride home to Maryland.

“There is always Peabody,” she said, “or Curtis.” She thought I was too humiliated by my audition at Juilliard to apply anywhere else, but that was only part of it.

Mrs. Lanten had hinted to me, of course, but the only one to speak in complete honesty about my playing had been the Kennedy rabbi. At night I dreamed about the Juilliard audition, only the woman judge had turned into the rabbi and whispered, “Like a howling cat,” over and over.

I didn’t apply to any other music programs. Instead, I took a year off and worked in my father’s office. The nurse taught me to weigh patients and take their blood pressure and temperature.

The next year I left for North Carolina and entered nursing school.

I learned to like nursing and even married a doctor. I worked for twelve years in a state mental hospital in North Carolina while he finished medical school and completed a residency.

My violin was stored in the back of my closet. From time to time, when no one else was home, I would take it out and play—the pressure of the violin on my neck like the caress of a secret lover. But I never played the Bach sonata in g minor again.

Then we moved back to Maryland, and I landed a position as head nurse of a geropsychiatric unit at Jewish Convalescent and Hospital. I was happy to give up my psychotic, often violent patients and exchange them for elderly people with depression or dementia. The ward in Jewish Convalescent was carpeted, and the walls decorated with Chagall posters—so different from the worn linoleum and chipped walls at the state hospital. The smell was different too; it was a smell of ripe bananas and baby lotion rather than the acrid stink of cigarette smoke and stale cigarette butts.

Dr. Goldberg, the medical director of the ward, called me into his office one morning and told me that he was admitting a rather unusual patient. The State of New Jersey was sending him, and would foot the bill. Immediately suspicious, I asked why the State of New Jersey would pay for hospitalization in a private facility in Maryland.

“He needs a kosher facility,” Dr. Goldberg explained.

“And there aren’t any kosher nursing homes in New Jersey?”

29

Dr. Goldberg tipped back in his chair. “He’s kind of an unusual guy. He grew up in a Hassidic family in Brooklyn. Apparently he was a musical prodigy and won a full scholarship to Juilliard to study violin. But then he had a schizophrenic break. Now he travels around the country, telling people he was the rabbi for the Kennedys.”

“And he has a few amputated toes,” I added.

I was not happy about the prospect of meeting the Kennedy rabbi again. The information Dr. Goldberg had given me should have made me feel some empathy for the man who would soon be my patient, but all I could think of was that he had won a scholarship to Juilliard, while I had not even been allowed to finish my audition.

The Kennedy rabbi was admitted to Jewish Convalescent and Hospital three days later. The people in New Jersey had done their best to clean him up. He was shaved and his fingernails were trimmed. He wore a bright yellow t-shirt with a picture of a pizza on the front and the legend “Nick’s Pizzas and Gyros” on the back. His black pants were too big for him and the belt bunched up at the waist. The nursing assistant slipped off his worn canvas sneakers so I could have a look at his feet. There were no toes remaining on his left foot, and the little toe on his right foot was beginning to rot.

I restrained myself for the first few days of his hospitalization. On the fourth day, after the practical nurse had finished bandaging his feet, I wheeled him back to his room.

“Do you remember visiting Greenbelt, Maryland, about twenty years ago?” I asked him. “A family invited you for dinner.”

“Yeah, I remember. They had goulash.”

“That’s my family,” I told him.

“Your father bought me a one-way ticket and put me on a bus,” he said.

“We didn’t have a guest bedroom,” I answered.

From that moment on I had no peace from the Kennedy rabbi.

“Your mother’s goulash tastes like shit,” he yelled.

“Your father’s a quack!” he added. But the worst was, “Thinks she can play the Bach sonata… ha, ha, ha!”

I was beginning to miss the amenities of a state mental hospital—the isolation room, the four-point restraints. I had no way of protecting myself from the rabbi’s ugly insults and curses. When I complained to Dr. Goldberg and asked him if he could increase the rabbi’s medication, or sedate him, or anything, he said, “It was very unprofessional of you to tell this patient about his connection with your family. You’ll have to work it out with him.”

We had a sing-a-long later that afternoon. All the patients and staff on the unit gathered in the day-room. Patty Levin, the music therapist, banged out an accompaniment on her electric organ.

“Let’s start with everyone’s favorite,” she said, and began to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” The patients adored it. We sang the song twice. The second time around, just as everyone joined in a rousing chorus of, “For it’s one, two, three strikes…” the Kennedy rabbi hit me.

For an elderly, sick man, he was pretty strong. We were in a corner of the dayroom when he stood up from his wheelchair and swung his right fist into my jaw hard enough that I staggered back a few steps before regaining my balance.

The hospital administration made a big deal about my injury. The chief medical officer examined me and sent me for an x-ray. We filled out incident reports. The head 30

of manpower telephoned me at home to see if I was okay. The director of nursing sent me flowers.

The next day the rabbi was on a bus, this time with a male nurse as an escort, heading back to New Jersey.

When I returned to work, Dr. Goldberg asked me into his office.

“What exactly happened that day?” he asked me. “Whatever made that patient hit you like that?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea,” I told him. “He came after me, totally out of the blue.”

Dr. Goldberg looked at me like he didn’t believe me.

And with good reason. When Patty announced that we would all be singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” a second time, I had leaned down and whispered into the rabbi’s ear, “This is the only music you’re ever going to hear. Forget about Bach from now on.”

It hurt, when he hit me. It hurt more than I admitted. But it was a small price to pay for getting him sent back to New Jersey. The Kennedy rabbi had insulted my playing for the last time.

31

Hip Cat Jeannine Jones from Memory Jones, a memoir in progress.

Hip Cat walked in. She was wearing suitably flashy “ghetto-inspired” clothes that were at odds with the unlimited amounts of cash and credit she carried in her faux fur purse. I was digging for change in every orifice of my “Chocolate Soup” bag, already out of style when I bought it in 1989. I really wanted a cappuccino but I only had 63 cents.

The CoffeeHäus was in a dingy basement under one of the older dorms. Peeling linoleum, ratty furniture, and vagina-inspired art by a senior with no sense of humor filled the space. 2 lonely lamps lit the entire place with un-shaded 100-watt bulbs. Stark lighting and shocking art was meant to be conversation sparking, I suppose. I wasn’t up to the challenge. I couldn’t think of anything to say to anyone about crudely made, fanged vaginas.

Hip Cat sat down alone with her green tea and a book. She was in her element, the shadows and light playing on her face, reflecting the depth of character I imagined residing in her 93-ounce body. I knew I looked stupid and desperate sitting alone. Why didn’t she? Why didn’t I think to bring a book as a prop? Stupid. Looking casually unafraid, Hip Cat opened her dog-eared copy of The Bell Jar. Instantly—like a magnet— Adonis walked over to Hip Cat and sat down.

“Hey.” His milk-chocolate honey voice floated across the room.

“Hey.” Adonis pushed the book up to read the cover.

“Awesome.”

“Changed my life.”

“I hear that.”

“Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.”

“Go fuck yourself, Nietzsche.”

Drowned in the din of Hip Cat’s musical laughter, I compared my Gap jeans with her perfectly flared and torn designer bell-bottoms. The bitter taste of jealousy flooded my mouth. I was sucking on one of my Lincoln-head pennies. I had never read The Bell Jar or contemplated suicide à la Plath—head in the oven and all that. My mother had been a philosophy minor—why hadn’t she told me hot guys love philosophers? Who was I kidding?

Hip Cat had four million perfectly placed mini clips in her bleach-blonde, darkrooted, spiky hair. I dreamed of 20-inch waists and double-A bras—a body that boys like Adonis jokingly pick up and swing through the air. I wanted to be model-skinny enough to shop in the Junior’s department, while still indulging in my daily bag of Doritos. I wanted to be heroin-chic, without actually having to shoot heroin because of the troubling side effects—uncontrollable addiction coupled with poor impulse control (like thinking it was a good idea to rob a 7-Eleven or a sketchy check-cashing place in order to get my next fix). Worst-case scenario—if I had to—I decided I would shoot heroin between my 32

toes so no one would know. Forget it. My mom would know with her psychic laser vision. Nightmare.

Adonis was smiling at me.

He was probably wondering who the hell I was and how I got into the CoffeeHäus without actually being a student of the college. I spit the penny into my palm—a line of drool connecting it to my mouth. I smiled and sucked the drool back in. Then Hip Cat’s elegant fingers brushed his bicep and the moment was gone.

Guys like Adonis breeze through college like a pleasant puff of air, depositing unfortunate hearts (mine included) by the wayside. These fashionably svelte guys rarely emote anything above a suspicious twinkle. It’s frustrating—when I laugh I almost always turn red and find myself in the middle of a snot and/or saliva disaster. I don’t know if Adonis ever laughed—I never saw it. As I watched him licking his crushedberry-red lips I wondered if his chiseled jaw limited laugh-like movement. Do people that hot and mysterious just happen or does it take work? Adonis was a Freshman like me. Had he arrived here—Athena-like, sprung from Zeus’ brow—a fully formed cool guy? Or did his mom still buy his clothes for him? Did his lack of emotion hide nailbiting self-consciousness? All I wanted was to be his girlfriend so I could borrow his tshirts and smile knowingly when the other girls raised their eyebrows—insinuating lastnight’s sexcapades. I had never even seen a guy naked. I would practice not smiling.

Sitting in my ultra-cool wobbly chair, scavenged from a condemned high school, I pondered my problem. I didn’t have enough adjectives to describe me. Popular people seemed to have a lot of adjectives. Sarcastic. Apathetic. Dry. Great Roots. Very Thin.

This went for the guys too. I grieved for the bulky football jocks that had no place in this rock and roll eyeliner world. Adjectives. I had tall, but that usually applied to men.

Great smile—but we all know that’s a nice way of saying ugly. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t ugly. I just didn’t wear tight denim and bikini tops with sequins, or ‘vintage’ baby Gap dresses. I couldn’t afford their version of ‘pretty.’ Besides, the cool people didn’t smile; they all had a deep-seated, knowing look in their blue-shadowed eyes. I was perpetually without the right accessories. Where did one go to purchase inexpensive faux fur?

It was cool to furnish the student hangout with secondhand garbage as long as the secondhand garbage you wore had been made to look that way by your favorite New York designer. I bought all my own clothes secondhand. Forty-five dollars a week on work-study doesn’t stretch very far. By all rights I should have been cool—I was from New York City, I went to the FAME High School, and the holes in my jeans were made by actual wear, complete with the weird brownish age stains that magically appeared one day when I took them out of the dryer for the 100 th time. I wondered if any of these people had ever bent down, perhaps to pick up an innocently dropped pencil, and had the back of their jeans rip open, not at the seam, but horizontally across their butt cheek— because the fabric had worn bare—nightmarishly revealing equally-worn granny-style underpants. Take a good look, hot guys!

Adonis was now sitting by himself, staring into space, overwhelmed by deep and important thoughts. I frantically scanned the room—this was my chance. Hip Cat was standing next to a crucified vagina made out of papier-mâché, whispering to one of her 33

girlfriends. I began hallucinating—visualizing alternate realities where I actually got the guts to walk over and start up a conversation with Adonis. My hallucinations were boring—no Top Gun inspired lovemaking—I imagined Adonis waving me over and saying my name before I had to introduce myself.

Instead, Skiz came over to talk to me. A nickel and dime pot dealer, Skiz wasn’t chic enough to hang out with the heroin dealers or well-dressed enough to associate with the ones who sold coke. But on the barometer of cool, Skiz was still higher up than me.

It was the shoes. Some people can pull off tatty, lo-top Converse with pot leaves drawn on the rubber toe. “‘S’up. Iz-bop in the doo-chang?”

“Hi Skiz.”

“Soo-doo, eh?”

“No. I only have 63 cents. I want a cappuccino.”

“Neh...Spotty, yey?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

As Skiz wandered off to buy me a cappuccino, I sunk deeper into my depression.

My friends didn’t even speak English. Skiz was the kind of guy who was cool enough that he didn’t have to talk to anyone. He could sit alone in a room and the magical magnetism of marijuana would draw people to him like bees to honey. He also had that heavy-pot-smoker low sex drive thing that made him easy to talk to. Conversation was just conversation—no threatening movements toward any form of making-out or (god forbid) sex that I wanted desperately but was afraid of failing miserably at. Skiz didn’t have to talk to me, and I wondered why he bothered. I wanted to escape back to my dorm room—the odds being that my crazy, Bible-toting roommate was out at a revival or something. But Skiz was buying me a cappuccino and I had to wait.

I needed more adjectives. As I pondered this problem, Hip Cat’s sultry voice floated across the void.

“Her hair is the color of the crayon nobody uses.”

What did that mean? What an awful thing to say. Was she talking about me? I remembered my coveted 74-color Crayola box with the built-in sharpener. Was this poor girl’s hair shit brown or yellow-green? I am an excellent judge of Crayola crayons. I know which colors always maintain their machine-made point. Destined to live inbetween the worn down stubs of silver, gold, brick red, and white. Standing tall and alone. Pristine and ugly.

34

Euforia by Vivian Calder贸n Bogoslavsky

35

Not a Man Tim Eberle I don’t know how to use a grill, and I am not a man.

The realization washed over me quickly as I stared down, helpless to the point of impotency, at the sextet of frozen burger patties lying mockingly on the grill before me.

Not only were the burgers not being cooked—they actually appeared to be cooling the surface of the grill as their pathetic droplets of sun-melted-meat-water fell onto the waytoo-big (or maybe too small?) pile of charcoal briquettes strewn haphazardly in the basin below. My eyes darted nervously behind the lenses of my thick-rimmed designer glasses as my brain searched desperately for some point of reference it could translate into a semblance of direct action. Instead, it only unearthed new questions. (Is this even the kind of grill that uses charcoal briquettes? Should I not have thrown a lit match in there?

Did I just break this thing? What do all of these dials do? Is this thing on the side a propane tank? What the hell is propane anyway, and can it, like, leak into shit if I don’t use it correctly? Is there any way that I can ask someone for help without suffering the palpable humiliation of being forced to say the words unlit charcoal briquettes out loud?)

How did I end up in charge of the grill, anyway? Shouldn’t somebody’s father be doing this? Or, better yet, somebody’s uncle? Somebody unapologetically apron-clad, drinking a Bud Light, holding a spatula with big, calloused man-hands that look like they could actually build something—something solid and strong and made out of wood or brick or steel? The last thing I built was a fucking accent table from fucking Pottery Barn, and it fell apart because tightening the screws with that tiny metal screwdriver thing hurt my fingers too much. When it comes time to volunteer to make the burgers at the Labor Day Barbecue, the guy who hurt himself assembling the mid-sized end-table should keep his baby smooth hands inside the pockets of the probably-too-tight-red-linen-pants that he’s wearing for the day’s festivities.

I was not ready. I hadn’t learned enough. Yet there I stood, the grill cooling, my bluff called, the ghosts of my ancestors looking on in anticipation. I felt the unmistakable sensation of my legs growing inside of my already-probably-too-tight-red-linen-pants. A button popped off and a seam pulled apart—it was all too clear what was happening. I was, openly and irrevocably, too big for my britches.

Taking the reins of the grill is so much more than the simple act of fire-lighting and beef-flippery it may seem, on the surface, to be. It is an assertion of primacy and a declaration of manhood—at least among the males of the species (women appear to have evolved, as a gender, beyond the constructs of meat-based power dynamics). It is the raising of the Conch Shell on “Lord of the Flies” Island, relegating all other men to the collective role of Piggy. (Lord of the Flies was a novel about having a complicated and unresolved relationship with your father that you spend a lifetime unsuccessfully negotiating your way through, right?) It is something primal, something embedded deep within the Y-chromosome, dating back to that first Labor Day when two cavemen gathered in front of the fire-pit to stare deeply into the burning embers and not talk about 36

their feelings. (Lesser-known fact: It was actually such a Neanderthal grilling session that gave rise to the now-ubiquitous phrase “You the man.” Grunted Caveman Ralph to Caveman Bob, a brontosaurus tenderloin roasting slowly away on the spit: “You make fire. You cook meat. You the man.”)

You spend your entire life in silent anticipation of the moment when it will be your turn to assume the role of Guy-In-Charge-Of-The-Grill, for the moment when it will be you walking around the backyard, unapologetically apron-clad, a Changing Of The Guard effectuated through the simple alchemy of pairing a point-of-the-finger with that time-worn, monosyllabic incantation: “Cheese?” The moment when it will be you handing your father a perfectly cooked hamburger, Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” reaching a gut-wrenching crescendo somewhere just beyond the horizon as you excuse yourself to go around back and have good fucking cry. This was my moment. This was my grill. And I didn’t even know how to turn it on.

“Hey,” I finally called out, my suddenly-pubescent voice cracking like Peter Brady singing “Time To Change.” “Can someone take over the grill for a second? I’m getting a work call.” Never mind the fact that it was a national holiday in late August, that it was eight o’clock at night, and that my obviously-not-ringing-phone was clearly sitting out on the picnic table with Jason Mraz Pandora blasting away at full volume. The plan wasn’t to stick around to answer follow-up questions. The plan was to hand off the spatula like a limp baton in a relay-race-of-sadness and head out into the night, awash in the unique brand of shame that accompanies being born with one of the five or six great Uncle-Names in the American lexicon, and having subsequently squandered that birthright. (“Uncle Tim.” That would have been nice.) Because an Uncle who can’t grill isn’t really an uncle. An uncle who can’t grill is just that weird guy at your bar mitzvah.

(Actually, the opposite of a bar mitzvah. Is there a Jewish rite of passage where manhood is not bestowed but publically taken away?)

But no one came over to take ownership of the extinguished-Olympic-Torch-of-aspatula that I held out in front of me. Instead, I was met with a series of awkwardly averted gazes, unintelligible mumblings, and the sight of six people simultaneously faking work calls on their non-Outlook-compliant iPhones. As it was to turn out, there were no Uncles on that Upper East Side roof deck that fateful evening. (Which is not to say that there weren’t people there who had nephews and nieces. Just no one who could claim, in good conscience, to be an Uncle in anything other than the most literal sense of that word.)

We were not Uncles. We were six friends who had decided to play grown-up, and we had flown too close to the sun.

There we were, ranging in age from late twenties to early thirties, conventionally successful, well-employed, well-adjusted—not one of us capable of cooking a burger over an open flame. Whatever it was that we thought we had accomplished up to that point, whoever it was we thought we saw when we looked into our mirrors that morning —one thing was now abundantly clear: somewhere, along the way, we had failed to 37

become men. The kind of men who ate lunch out of metal pails while sitting on an iron beam hanging thousands of feet above New York City. Men who left home at the age of seventeen to join the Merchant-fucking-Marine. (which I think has something to do with fighting killer whales, but now that I say it out loud sounds wrong…) Men who grew up in the parts of Brooklyn where you played stickball in the street with nothing but a giant splinter and a baseball-sized rock.

(I live in Brooklyn. But I live in Brooklyn Heights, down by The Promenade, on a street named after a fruit. It isn’t the same thing.)

There we stood, helpless to the point of impotency, our hands tucked into the pockets of our probably-too-tight-pastel-linen-pants. Out of the darkness a voice quietly asked, “Is this even the kind of grill that uses charcoal briquettes?” Someone covertly typed “Barbecue. How?” into the search bar of the YouTube app on his non-Outlookcompliant iPhone. Avoiding eye contact we debated the merits of “just having salad.”

Somewhere, all of our fathers were looking on in disappointment. Somewhere, all of our Uncles were asking for their bar mitzvah money back.

38

T. Rextasy Pernille Smith Larsen For Marc Bolan (1947 – 1977) I wanted to be you, your friend, your lover.

It was romance and dreams, not merely sex, you sold.

The ladyman with eyes rimmed in black kohl, two-note riffs, and nursery rhymes, who discovered the fun of glitter on guys, ties on girls.

In 10th grade, the boys dry-humped the classroom desks, shouted Faggot at glimpses of tenderness.

In my daydream, I adorned their faces with swirls— blue moons on foreheads, silver cheekbone treble clefs— and the boys all wanted my glam arabesques.

I hung my puffed-out pinstripes on my gangly frame— no mint-green satin, no pink boutonniere— even still, I was marked fair game: bull dyke, weirdo. But your songs spurred me: Fuck the jeers.

Ladyman, your licks are lovely. Their joy and magic I refuse to relate to anything tragic.

39

The Parties, 1993 Elizabeth Acevedo tio hector loves the parties. the ones that start after 10 pm and last until la madrugada—tio is a man made for dawn, shiny shirts, and dance shoes. sometimes mami lets you go to parties with tio and his sons. dresses you in hoop skirts and bows and reminds you to act right. you usually throw a tantrum around 2 am— either flustered by the stream of strangers pinching your cheek, or hungry, craving sleep and tired of hide-and-seek; you never last as late as the other kids. tio hector always gets annoyed. his accent slurring he tells you to stop being a baby, grow up, eli. you don’t cry when you hide underneath the coats on the hostess’s bed. you are quiet when tio comes in and kisses a woman not his wife, dances her softly around the room. you barely breathe when you hear noises you’ve only heard when papi watches late night tv. and when tio finds you under his fur and carries you to his brown chevrolet he doesn’t say a word. and when everyone else in the car dozes, you don’t tell how close tio hector drove to the guardrails.

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Homo Paleolicus by Agostino Iacurci

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First Job Elizabeth Acevedo I rise with the bread.

Sleepy-eyed and yawning walk the four blocks, clock in and clean the windows.

Forgot to lock the door.

Put the day-old bagels near the front of the display.

Sweep. Wash the counters.

Check the register.

Forgot to lock the door.

By the time I hear the welcome chime the bum already has his dick in a fist, stroking.

Miguel, baking scones in the back, hears me scream.

Laughs as he runs the man off.

Why your hands shakin’, girl?

I forgot to lock the door.

And so I mop. Greet customers.

Percolate coffee. Warm bread.

Smile.

Pretend the girl inside of me isn’t just a small roach always waiting for a boot to fall.

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Out of the Ordinary by thirtythr33

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Letter to The Terrified Versions of Myself Matthew Olzmann I often find myself writing to the terrified versions of myself.

—Ocean Vuong That mole on your back? It could be a tumor.

That shortness of breath? It could be tumor.

The parakeet's cage, the telescope lens, the wheel and the spokes—this too, all of it, anywhere, could be a flaw in the body, an exit sign, a minivan that swerves into oncoming traffic.

The beating like wings inside your chest?

Could be wings. Could blow a hole through you and fly like wind into the wind.

If it's any comfort, I'm here to tell you those fears are understandable.

Consider the Naegleria fowleri, an amoeba that feeds on the human brain. It lives in fresh water, and look—there's a river behind your house.

You might die. Or you might not. Not every fear leads to death. Fear could guide you to a rented room, a bottle of rum, a revolver, a TV that doesn't work.

There are some things I will never tell you.

You might walk into the forest and become lost, walk into the mountains and become lost, walk into the desert and long to become lost but instead keep finding your way back to a life where your are always afraid.

Imagine a storm at sea. You're out there, flung over the port-side rail of a commercial fishing trawler.

The Atlantic surges and shrieks around you.

You drift for as long as you can.

In the morning, there is sunlight, shadows on the water.

Why now? you ask. Those shadows— the helicopters above, the bull shark below.

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Hug You by Mark Gmehling

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Soft Pants Elena Passarello One of the catalogues calls them soft pants and sells them near the towels and the loafers, but I’ve seen them in other catalogues, called by words with many more syllables.

Other vendors call the pants women’s names, the fancy kind. The names you’d see curlicued on luggage tags at the airport valet. You don’t have to remind me that these are the same pants. But I am drawn to them only when they are called soft pants and I have become fearful of how this renames me.

If I order the soft pants, there will no doubt be a great shifting of my own tectonics. Like I will only be good for reaching over the lip of a single-serving bathtub (while clad in my soft pants). And after the bath, I will dry myself off as best I can and squish over to the party, where the all the other women wear the harder pants, and they will watch me like I’m shoplifting.

They will drive their hard pants to the party cloakroom to confab and I will stand in the hall, damp-pantsed and not really blaming them. They are right to be proud of their arduous pants, which they spell with stabby z’s and squeezy vowels and pronounce as evil things that echo behind them, scrawled across the back pockets of their not-wet not-softpants. They will never give the pants up because hardness helps us all.

I don’t know what made me want for pants to be soft with me. It was not always like this. But there is now in me some craving for names like gentle contracts. I need pants that say Come, in a voice like mashed potatoes. Don’t you think it’s time to get dressed?

At the end of the party a young man spoke to us in a pair of anonymous shorts. He just stood, at ease, with his flat face, and let our questions mist him so very lightly that he was soon shining, glazed like a hot cruller, as if we could pull him open and breathe in the easy smell of his interior, and all the women smiled and stretched forward in a way that, no matter what they called their pants, was like kneeling.

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And then it was time for my question and I was kneeling too and rolling out my face like dough and looking for the wet footprints that could show me the door, and my thumbs were dug into my waistband as I opened my soft mouth, and, despite my pants, it all still felt so difficult.

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Lest You Remember Marc Joan

What is a memory? What is this thing, as ephemeral as a key fob’s whereabouts and as enduring as a brutal childhood? Is it the predisposition of certain neurons to fire in a certain sequence? A discrete and repeatable distribution of electrical activity? No more than a specific—but malleable and often temporary —spatiotemporal distribution of chemicals? How are memories kept and lost in the soft, wet tissues of the brain? How do we form, store, and protect these integral parts of our being? And how can we ‘forget’ something, only to have it recalled many years later, involuntarily, perhaps at the bidding of a song or a scent?

These questions are fundamental to the nature of Self, for each person’s identity is fused to, if not identical to, a unique set of recollections. With different memories, we would be different people; hence, the nature of memory is a mystery at the core of ‘human-being.’ A riddle wrapped, no doubt, in mysterious molecular signals, and buried, perhaps, in the hidden neurons of the hippocampus—itself a component of that enigmatic, primitive part of the nervous system called the ‘palaeomammalian brain.’ But knowing the location of the answer is not the same as knowing the answer, particularly when the location is a nugget of wet tissue containing a few billion neurons.

Yes indeed, when we study the brain, we see the brain attempting to understand itself. Sometimes I ask myself if this is even theoretically possible. Can a hammer nail itself down? It could be that our efforts are futile, in the sense that full understanding of the molecular basis of human cognition may be forever elusive. Nevertheless, in our lab, here at the Cambridge Unit for Advanced Cognitive Science (CUACS), we are probing this enigma. Does that make us more fools than angels? Well, there’d be few fools as clever. In any case, we think we are close to answering this most critical of mysteries. For we can now implant memories.

Yes: we can implant memories.

You’d have to work in the field to know how daring, how unprecedented the concept held in that statement is. I can almost hear the screams of protest from the research community, the resentment of puny minds overtaken by greatness! Listen: we can give a rat the ability to unerringly navigate a maze it has never seen. Is this not the same as implanting a memory? Unconvinced? Then consider our technique.

We take a rat, and allow it to become familiar with a maze in which some food is cached. It is not an easy maze; there are no cues to trigger left or right turns; the rat simply has to know the way. We help it learn, of course; for example, although only one route delivers rewards, others lead to degrees of discomfort, perhaps pain. And after a while, the rat becomes entrained. It finds its way to the reward quickly and unerringly, with no hesitation or false turns. In other words, it has developed a memory of the maze.

But what does that mean, to ‘develop a memory?’ Evidently, something has changed in its brain; something is there that previously was not. And for many years, that was all one could say about the entrainment process; somehow, 48

something has changed, and the maze can be navigated. But science will progress, and for some time now, by scanning specific types and locations of brain activity before and after entrainment, we at CUACS have been able to locate this memory, this specific, entrainment-related change. Yes, physically locate it, and define it as a precise set of IF/THEN-type neuronal firing sequences that can be recorded as digital data. This is an extraordinary advance in itself; it is like the first recordings of an unknown syntax. Nevertheless, this step, while necessary, was insufficient to satisfy our ambitions.

For we next asked ourselves this: having defined a specific memory in terms of neuro-electrical tendencies in a particular region, what if the same tendencies are provided to a different brain? Will not a different brain with the same firing predispositions, in the same anatomical-functional location, have the same memory?

Obviously, we addressed this question by direct experiment; such a question cannot be posed without its answer being pursued. So, we recorded the specific mazememories—the location-specific neuronal firing patterns—from entrained rats. We then imprinted these neuro-electrical tendencies onto equivalent regions of the brains of naïve rats: rats that have never seen the maze. And the results are compelling. All memory recipients—all of them—find the food significantly more quickly than the controls. Furthermore, some memory recipients, maybe 15%, find the food reward immediately, without any wrong turns whatsoever. What information could we be transferring other than memory? The experimental results permit no other conclusion. The data are unambiguous. Therefore, I say again: we can implant memories.

As you would expect from CUACS, this result is the first of its kind. And we are very proud of what we have achieved. Refining the technique from its first application in nematodes to the relative complexity of the rat brain was the labor of years. The method is a little abstruse, but mainly involves attention to predispositions in neural pathways linked to the hippocampus. Recordings are made using a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging and one or two other techniques. The imprinting of memories in the naïve brain is done using a system of our own invention, which we are not going to disclose prior to publication. The spectacular success of this method, its reliability and reproducibility, took even the ego of its inventor by surprise. But using it is not without risk; it requires a delicate and highly skilled hand. You have to be careful. Especially with vertebrates. Yes, there’s less room for error in the higher organisms. If you use the wrong settings, you over-write the autonomic nervous system. In other words, all the neural signals that tell the body to keep breathing and pumping blood and digesting—they all cease. Because you’ve replaced them, these instructions for survival, with the memory of a maze. The memory recipient’s lungs and heart just stop. We had a few dead rats, I can tell you, before we figured out where we were going wrong. It got embarrassing. But that’s all done and dusted now. We’re lucky to have a post-doc, Jon Adams, who’s been with us from the start of this project. He can really make the machine sing and the neurons dance. We’d be in a mess if he ever left; it could take years to rebuild that kind of expertise.

So the technology, the technique, is well-understood, albeit subtle and difficult. The principle has been well and truly proven. The real issue at present is 49

that we have no idea of the subjective experience of the rats. What is it like to have another’s memory? Is it recognizably exogenous? Or is it just like your own? If it is now ‘your’ memory, how deep is your experience of it? I mean, is it just factual (this was my teddy), or does it carry the complex mixture of emotions attached to a real memory? This was my Teddy, to whom I went when all was black in my childish world, and who soaked up my tears; and I loved him. In the former case, we transfer dry knowledge; in the latter, we provide something that drags at the soul and pulls at the heart. But which is it? We just don’t know. That’s why we are going into humans. Unofficially, that is; there’s no ethical approval for this experiment. In fact, it’s illegal. But it’s just too interesting not to do.

OK, let me be honest. It is not just scientific curiosity that motivates us. This kind of work could make somebody’s career. You can be set up for life, just by being in the right place at the right time. Look at Watson and Crick, and their work on DNA. They received a Nobel Prize for that, and unending fame. Permanent seats in the first-class carriage of the gravy train. But would either of them be described as a genius? Hardly. Life rolled the dice, and their numbers came up. Don’t get me wrong, they did well; they seized the opportunity, and not everybody would have done that. But there are cleverer and harder-working people who have no Nobel Prize. That’s for sure. Some of them don’t even have a job. Equally, there are some Nobel recipients who are less deserving still than Watson and Crick. That’s life.

There’s no logic to it. There’s no fairness or rationale. It’s just a numbers game. All you can do is work hard, and try to be in the right place at the right time. And in terms of medical research, the neurophysiology of the human mind is the place to be right now. There’s a Prize for Medicine at stake here, I’m sure of it, and I want it. It will be the first Nobel to come out of CUACS research. That’s why it’s so frustrating that the regulators won’t approve our first-in-man study. Typical shortsighted, sour-grapes reaction. Sometimes I think I’d rather be in China. There’s none of that ethical approval nonsense there. No stuffed-shirt establishment to appease. In China, if there’s the money to do it, it gets done. End of. UK science needs to learn from that before it gets overtaken. Well, I’m not going to let my research be hampered by pompous jobsworthies. I’m proceeding without approval.

All the great scientists have cut corners, taken risks, and tested hypotheses on themselves. It’s a fine tradition, from Newton on. And I am proud to be a part of it.

So we’re going into man. Tonight. Now that it’s gone 9 PM, and everyone else has clocked off. Yes, it’s a bit late in the day, and I’m starting to slow down a bit, but people in biomedical research work long hours. You have to. If you don’t do something pretty special in your current three-year contract, you don’t get another one. It’s brutal; three years of cutting-edge molecular biology can match a lifetime of telesales and gardening jobs. That’s partly why I’m taking this risk. If it comes off, I’ll never have to beg for a new contract or worry about grant funding again.

But it’s totally illegal. That’s why we have to do this after hours. We’d be immediately sacked if anyone found out. Although I suspect that the CUACS Directorate would be less concerned about the illegality, per se, than by the attendant bad publicity. They’ve had enough scandals in recent times, and would be infuriated by further transgressions of regulatory guidelines and laws. So I am not

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just putting my head on the block; I am also handing a sharpened axe to a vindictive executioner.

This knowledge contributes to the hammering of my pulse; my career has reached an inflection point. Either I fly, or I crash and burn. But the squirting adrenalin and sweating is also a response to the very real risks of the procedure itself. Sure, we’ve done it in rats. But going from rats to man is a big step. We think it will be OK. It ought to be. But, frankly, we don’t know. The memory uploading procedure is not an issue, of course. Nobody’s brain gets altered in that step; it’s like leaving a voicemail. And it doesn’t require as much skill as the imprinting step.

That’s why Jon is OK with me recording his test memory. It can’t go wrong. The idea is that Jon memorizes a simple picture, one that I haven’t seen, but one that I will recognize. A shape rather than a squiggle. I then record the changes in his temporal lobe predispositions that have occurred as a consequence of memorizing said picture. In other words, I will scan specific changes in a specific region of his brain; changes that represent his memory of the picture. That part of the operation is risk-free. It’s no more of a big deal than spitting into a cup. It’s the next bit that is difficult—the part where we swap roles, and I become the subject—where Jon implants his recorded memory into my brain.

You might think that it would be easier to do in a man than a rat. After all, the target is so much bigger; and the subject is co-operative. But co-operation is not an issue, for, like the rat, the human subject is immobilized; in particular, the skull is anchored in a retention cage. This is a semicircle of pale metal that sits over the head and is itself immovably attached to the bench on which the subject is lying.

Small titanium screws penetrate the semicircle and are rotated along their thread, through the skin, finding shallow anchorage in the bone. The cage makes movement from the neck up utterly impossible; so the subject can’t not co-operate, or rather, it makes no difference whether he does or he doesn’t. And, with belt and braces philosophy, the rest of the body is also restrained. Of course, the object is only the safety of the subject, but it’s uncomfortable being tied to a bench under a crown of silver thorns. And targeting precise neuroanatomical regions is not the issue either.

The brain may be hidden behind its bony shell, but its anatomy holds no secrets for us. Furthermore, our computer-guided neural imprinter has nanometer precision.

We could write the entire text of Hamlet on the head of a pin, and still leave enough room for a brace of angels to dance.

No, the issues are not targeting or co-operation, but complexity. A human brain is much more complicated than a rat’s. The neurons are more interconnected at more levels and in more ways. And some neurons may be multifunctional; so by altering a memory synapse you might also, who knows, subtly alter numerical ability. More dangerous still is the prospect that what we believe to be just a depository for a specific memory is actually far more fundamental. In this case, the experiment could, for example, completely wipe my short-term memory. Life would be impossible. I would not understand my present; I would exist in a bubble of confusion, reaching always for an unattainable past. That permanently, unimaginably crippled existence would be the result of a small miscalculation, just a small one. A larger one, one that wiped out the functions of, say, the medulla oblongata—which controls functions such as breathing and heart rate—would just 51

stop my brain, and with it, the rest of me—heart, lungs, bowels, everything. Just like the first few rats.

So yes, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. We’ve tried to manage the risks, but management is not the same as elimination. Even the restraining bench, with its straps and retention cage, like something from a Victorian nightmare, doesn’t remove all risk. But I’ve seen Jon at work; he can perform the most delicate of operations. I have complete confidence in him. And he is pretty damn sure of himself too. After all, he was originally going to implant the memories into his own wife. Yes, Liz was going to be the memory recipient, but she’s not here. Apparently she’s left him—gone back to Australia. Which would explain why Jon has been looking a bit grim and harassed all week, losing his rag over the smallest things. I know those two had a very, er, passionate relationship, so I’m not too surprised at the outcome. Anyway, it’s her loss, and my gain. I’ll be able to write the paper from a personal, directly experiential perspective, which will have so much more impact.

Yes, I’ll be giving the keynote talk at every neurobiological conference for the next five years. Here comes the gravy train. I can almost hear it.

That’s what I keep thinking of as I take the neuronal imprinter readings. Jon is lying inside the machine’s tunnel, holding a white A4 envelope. I can’t see him, of course—I stay out of the room when the machine is on—but I know he has the envelope containing the test picture. I look at the readings on the computer screen, a 3-D representation of the transient de- and re-polarizations of Jon’s memories. I flip it around, and look at it from different angles. The detail is good: a nice clean recording, almost beautiful, a pattern of sorts. Actually, more like a sculpture, a delicate sculpture, spun from the stuff of dreams and captured in a frozen instant.

“OK,” I say, through the intercom, “I’ve got the base readings; you can memorize the picture now.”

There’s no answer; suddenly, for no good reason, I’m worried.

“Jon?” I say. “Can you hear me? You can open the envelope now.”

“Alright!” he snaps back at me. “I heard you the first bloody time.”

Moody sod, I think. But I don’t say anything; I just don’t care. I’ll put up with Jon in exchange for a ticket on the gravy train, for sure. I look at Jon’s readings on the monitor. The machine is focusing on a particular region that is exhibiting discrete, regular changes. There it is, I think, just the ticket. I give the statistics software a few minutes to remove background noise from the signal. Then, when I’m sure we’ve got the cleanest data we can, I turn the machine off and call Jon in.

We look at the readings together. The changes are located where we would expect them to be, based on our knowledge of the neuroanatomical location of human memory. The data also look somewhat similar to the rat recordings, which is encouraging. However, there are some differences too. The rat firing patterns were very discrete and defined: crisp readings, with clear-cut edges. Jon’s are a bit more diffuse. But you’d kind of expect that; humans are more complex than rats. It’s a minor variation, and I’m happy to proceed.

However, to my surprise, Jon seems a bit equivocal. A muscle in his jaw is clenching, on and off, on and off.

“You sure about this?” he growls. “It looks different from the rat data. Looks a bit messy, like it’s got multiple cross-overs.”

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That’s the thing about post-docs. They’re at this awkward stage: beyond PhD, but not yet lecturers. You have to be tolerant.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “The human brain has multiple connections allowing complex cross-talk. The pattern is as I would expect.”

This isn’t quite true, but it serves as a timely reminder to Jon: I’m the junior lecturer, not you. Know your place, chum.

Jon shrugs.

“It’s your brain,” he says, in his charmless way.

Too right, I think; my brain, and my gravy train. But Jon still looks tense and worried. I guess the momentous nature of what we are about to achieve has finally sunk in. I get on the restraining bench before he can start to raise any more objections.

“Come on,” I say breezily. “Get on with it.”

And he does, sullen as ever. He restrains my body first, before immobilizing my head. The muscle in his jaw is still going tic, tic, tic. The immobilizing straps are made of the kind of fabric—like heavy-duty canvas—that they use on rucksacks; the same design of plastic buckles, too. He pulls them tight, one across my shins, another across my thighs; others over my waist and chest, and smaller ones for wrists and biceps. I try to wriggle, and find I can’t move. I breathe deeply, fighting the claustrophobia. Jon looks at me sullenly, almost hostile.

“Why do you keep saying that, anyway?” he snarls.

I didn’t realize I had been saying anything.

“Saying what?” I ask.

“Gravy train, gravy train. Over and over.” He looks at me. “What do you mean by it? What’s the matter with you?”

He places the retention cage over my forehead and tightens the nuts that hold it to the bench.

“Sorry,” I say. “I’ll shut up.”

“Yes, do,” said Jon. “It’s bloody annoying.”

He inserts the titanium screws through the retention cage framework. There are ten of them. Two above each ear, two at each temple, and two in the center of the forehead. He tightens them until they are touching the skin. Then he pauses and looks at me. There’s something eating him; I can see more of the whites of his eyes than usual.

“This is the fun bit,” I say.

Jon doesn’t answer, just stares at me. It’s getting creepy, but then he seems to come to a decision, and nods. And he starts tightening the screws. I feel the thread biting into the bone, ten points of almost unendurable pressure. I just didn’t think it would hurt this much. The train had better be extraordinarily luxurious, when it turns up. Jon dabs at my face with something, and then holds it up. A bloody tissue.

“Gravy,” he says. “Yum, yum.”

One corner of his mouth is lifted up in a sardonic half-smile. I should have known he would enjoy this bit, the sadist. I ignore him and focus on the extra monitor, which we’ve set above the bench so I can see it from the retention cage. I can see the scan of my brain activity on the screen. This reassures me and helps me control the rising panic induced by immobilization. A tracery of green and red—my 53

fears, my hopes and desires, strung out in false colors on the computer screen. They are beautiful. On the bottom left of the screen is the status window. It gives the message ‘Awaiting input’ over and over. Jon must be about to trigger the imprinting process. What’s taking him so long? Any minute now, surely. OK, he’s started. I hear the processor cooling fans going into overdrive, and on the screen the window changes to ‘Inputting...’ No sensation, at least nothing that I can feel over the pain of the screws cutting into my skull. This had better work.

There it is! I get it just after the status window changes to ‘Input complete.’

We have made history! At least, I think we have. Time to analyze the data. Does my implanted memory correspond with Jon’s memorized picture? I try to recall what I first grasped. It is just imagery, in fact a confusion of images. Strongest are a plate, knife, and fork. Jon is standing over me now, looking down. He looks scared.

“Are you OK? What did you see?”

I try to smile, but I am almost hyperventilating.

“I think it worked,” I gasp. “Plate, knife, and fork? On a table?”

Jon holds up his picture. Plate, knife, and fork! Success! He grins, relieved.

But there’s something different about the picture. Or rather, different about my memory. This is interesting. We should note this down. Perhaps memories are modulated by the recipient. Because I ‘remember’ a large kitchen knife with a serrated edge, not a table knife. And it’s not a simple, stylized picture that I see. It’s an image of a table. It’s the table in Jon’s kitchen, I know it is. I’ve never been there, but I remember it. And my knife has blood on it. And on my plate, I see it clearly, Liz’s severed head. Dear God, Jon, what have you done?

I am still trapped in the retention cage. I cannot move. Jon looks down at me. As our eyes meet, I see that he knows what I remember. And we share also the knowledge of what he is about to do, what he now must do. He goes to the machine.

I cannot see him, but I know what those sounds mean. He is altering the settings, and aiming the field at my medulla oblongata.

I see my thoughts lit up on the screen, a beautiful filigree of electrical pulses, my soul’s glowing outline.

Input complete.

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Pig with Camera by anonymous artist Photo by David J. Thompson

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User Will Vincent

plugged in and boneless I am in the distortion ray the pink divide I am sorry I just broke the Internet I was plugging Iago’s first complaint into the old machines I wanted to know evil the hyperlink shaded violet when the browser froze and Want died a half-formed bird in my stomach

it was all tentacle porn forward-slashed clouds bracketed moon when the dead kids on Facebook were finally buried at sea the horizon gone behind a million bees

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//// YouTube blasts its final video a 10 hour clip of a woodpecker hammering its beak into glass my flesh gone blue in its light as spheres ripple whales sing rains freeze my father drools out of me his murmurs disjoint from mine become angular rhythm slotted out for logic my father answers the echo Is it A/V to phono or A/V to mini-phono? unstacking the reel cans wants to film the old projections he will send me the DVD //// I fall out of my father out of the ray into a pixel sea

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the Internet is angry a titan in its last seize its jaws open me I’m force-fed the lust of the first fish with legs injected with intelligent pus worms click for openings in my skull I’ve got it bad and I swell pieces of me reach and devour impose balance a thousand miles of I decimates every block in Mountain View designers prod avatars blink out bloggers huddle cold push each other into my pores PageRank algorithms and infinitesimal calculus tattooed across their chests HTML chains recited raw from the hole’s lip they circle and grunt my body 58

a flesh wave a serpent pushing ranges //// my father is back from his office he’s caught the infection too sprinting over my colossal form hacking through trunks of hair

bad back and knocked knees revamped propelled on modded hard-drive fans chips pour out of his joints rail-thin he leaps my streams my mercurial sweat my heart splits and multiplies inside me pieces of heart breed like sick mice they sprout arachnid legs stink like discarded gas scuttle and cut 59

my father hunts them spears the screeching organs with a sign post torn from the street he tumbles lunges and spills the blood they stole from me //// my father rips me open with the violent side of a hammer he digs swims through me chokes the last infected heart I am now called Sag a god deflated a wet rag suffocating the land my jugular a spent river a burning geyser an error

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Contributors

Elizabeth Acevedo holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Maryland. She is a CantoMundo Fellow and a member of the 2013 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop.

Jenn Blair has published in Berkley Poetry Review, Adirondack Review, South Carolina Review, and Tulane Review among others. Her chapbook “The Sheep Stealer” is forthcoming from Hyacinth Girl Press. She is from Yakima, WA. Vivian Calderón Bogoslavsky is a Colombian native born to Argentinian parents. She holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology with a minor in history and a postgraduate degree in Journalism from Universidad of Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. She has studied art for over 13 years with an art master, Carlos Orrea, and has studied in Florence, Italy. Today she is studying Fine Arts & Design in the USA. Vivian has shown her work in both individual and collective shows in Colombia and the USA. She has been published in multiple books, magazines, and webpages, and has received multiple awards.

Allison Boyd lives in Tennessee, where she teaches gifted students and improvises new squash recipes. She once spent a year watching sunrises. Allison's writing has appeared in The Penwood Review, Nibble, and Eunoia Review.

Beth Cavener Stichter is a sculptor whose creations—articulated through animal and human forms—explore psychological themes that have been decontextualized and stripped of rationalization. “Tangled Up in You” was made in collaboration with Alessandro Gallo, the artist’s husband, who was responsible for the surface design and tattooing of the 22-foot Anaconda featured in the piece. Stichter’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo shows around the country, and was featured on the cover of Hi-Fructose Volume 26. More of her work may be found at http://www.followtheblackrabbit.com/.

Tim Eberle is a Brooklyn, NY based writer and performer whose writing has appeared in, among other publications, DNA Info, Splitsider, Jewish Life Television, Heeb Magazine, and Jewlicious.com. He is a frequent performer at the Magnet Theater, the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, and the People’s Improv Theater, all in New York City.

He is the author of the character-driven stage shows “No Breaks,” “Standing Reason,” and “Sad Men and the People Who Love Them.”

Trista Edwards is a poet living in Denton, Texas. She is the co-director of Kraken Reading Series and currently serves as Reviews Editor at American Literary Review. Her poems are published or forthcoming in The Journal, 32 Poems, Birmingham Poetry Review, Sou’wester, and elsewhere.

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Eelus is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in Brighton, UK. Known for his street art, posters, and paper art, Eelus sold his first hand-drawn posters to classmates for chocolate money. Since then he’s built an international reputation, taking part in the famed 2008 Cans Festival and exhibiting his art in London, Paris, Los Angeles, and New York. His artwork may be found at eelus.com.

Mark Gmehling began writing graffiti in 1988, then dove into street art, financing the guerrilla fight with freelance illustration and animation while exhibiting his work worldwide. He still enjoys painting murals—the bigger the better. His art may be found at http://markgmehling.weebly.com/.

Janet Gool grew up in Greenbelt, Maryland, and now lives in Beit Shemesh, Israel. Her writing has appeared in Creative Non-Fiction and received an honorable mention from Glimmer Train.

Agostino Iacurci is an Italian artist currently based in Rome. His murals employ original figures and bright colors that, together, create an essential language enhanced by multiple layers of translation. His work spans the threshold between innocence and artifice, sincerity and catastrophe, creating a magnetic tension that defines our very existence.

More of Agostino’s work may be found at http://www.agostinoiacurci.com/category/works/.

Marc Joan spent the early part of his life in eccentric schools in Asia and England, and the early part of his career in biomedical research and development, mainly in Europe.

His writing, which at present focuses on the short story, draws on these experiences, and often touches upon philosophical points raised by medical research. He lives in England with his family.

JoKa is a Philadelphia-based artist whose work depicts a skewed sense of reality that elicits, alternately, laughter and discomfort. JoKa employs hyper-pointillism in his work, spending hours dotting his canvases with a toothpick as a form of meditative practice. He often skews and distorts his figures, obscuring faces and presenting the viewer with depersonalized, symbolic versions of humanity that, though markedly different from our own, are also disarmingly familiar. More of his work may be found at http://dotjoka.com/gallery/.

Jeannine Jones is a writer living in New York City. She has written, directed, and produced theater and film in New York City for the past 18 years and is a founding member of Dora Mae Productions (www.doramae.com). She is currently working on her memoir, Memory Jones. Her work has recently been published by XOJane.com and The Southampton Review. She received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her M.A. in Comparative Literature and History from SUNY Stony Brook.

Hannah Keene is a Colorado native now living and working in Illinois. She is currently a Masters of Fine Art in Writing student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her 62

written and performance work is an alchemical reaction between myth, landscape, and trauma.

Matthew Olzmann is the author of Mezzanines (Alice James Books 2013), which was selected for the Kundiman Prize. His poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review and elsewhere. Currently, he is a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing in the undergraduate writing program at Warren Wilson College.

Elena Passarello is the author of LET ME CLEAR MY THROAT, a collection of essays on the human voice. Elena lives in Corvallis, Oregon, where she teaches in Oregon State University’s MFA program. As you read this, she’s probably working on her second book, a bestiary of celebrity animals.

Pernille Smith Larsen splits her time between North Carolina and Denmark, which means she’s either suffering from the absence of kettle corn or Danish remoulade. She is currently pursuing her MFA in poetry at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

She has been published in Hartskill Review.

Mahreen Sohail has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in Unsaid. She lives and works in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Nicole Steinberg is the author of Getting Lucky (Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2013) and two chapbooks released in 2014: Undressing from dancing girl press and Clever Little Gang, winner of the Furniture Press 4X4 Chapbook Award. Her other publications include Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens (SUNY Press, 2011) and Birds of Tokyo (dancing girl press, 2011). She's the founder of the EARSHOT reading series, based in Brooklyn, NY, and she lives in Philadelphia. thirtythr33 was born in central Germany in 1980 and came into contact with graffiti when he was about 16. Graffiti writing and characters, along with a lot of contemporary comics, have fascinated him ever since and have became a steady part of life.

After completing university with a degree in computer/media science in 2010, he discovered screenprinting in 2013 as an excellent medium to carry his ideas and as a new (and more accepted) way of creating.

David J. Thompson is a former prep school teacher and coach. His poems and photos have appeared in a number of print and online journals. His interests include jazz and minor league baseball.

Samantha Turk is the Assistant Fiction Editor of No Tokens, a journal of literature and art. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence, and hangs her hat in Upper Manhattan. This is her first publication.

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Brian Uhl was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. Upon reaching his late twenties he migrated to various cities along the West Coast before finally settling in Portland, Oregon. There he hikes, bikes, cooks, draws and generally zones out into his own world.

Joanna Valente received her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Previous work has appeared in The Paris-American, El Aleph Press, The Atlas Review, La Fovea, The Destroyer, and Thrush Poetry Journal, among others. In 2011, she received the American Society of Poets Prize. She currently edits Yes, Poetry, which she founded in 2010, and writes and edits for Luna Luna Magazine. She is the author of Sirs & Madams, published by Aldrich Press.

Will Vincent's poems and articles have appeared in Scout, HTML Giant, The Iowa Review, El Aleph, The Boiler, Scythe, and elsewhere. He co-wrote the script for the film New Year, displayed at 11 Rivington in Manhattan. He lives in Oakland, CA. Robert Vivian is the author of four novels and two books of meditative essays. He's currently working on a collection of dervish essays.

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