As artists, we’re programmed to create what we know by turning knowledge into something honest. As viewers, we look for meaning in the margins of a page, in the lines of a poem. We attempt to peer through the artist’s lens into their little realities, hoping their artistic vision will somehow compute.
We look at the arcs and curves of a piece and ponder its purpose, trying to untangle its complexities until we reach some sort of understanding. We decipher a poet’s allusions and metaphors like the cracking of a code until we’ve collected enough data to relate.
We wonder if the colors and shapes of a piece represent the seasons of childhood; bold, bright figures eager to be remembered. Art may take us back in time, to the moment we drew shapes in the sand or saw the glow of a computer screen for the first time, the digital lines and grids of our internal worlds only a click or scroll away.
Through art and writing, we find pieces of ourselves warped and wrapped into a configuration of where we came from, the tangible objects we once loved, and the abstract memories of our past.
So, clear all your tabs.
Ctrl + Alt + Delete all notions of your existing reality.
Click the restart button on your creative mind as you venture into the depths of our pages and the stories hidden within them. Extend the boundaries of your imagination and pay attention to what these works evoke in you. Let the work here transcend your physical reality and suck you into a time capsule; one only you can define.
While flipping through volume 56 of Nova Literary-Arts Magazine, we encourage you to let your mind run wild in the unique shapes, hues, and lines of our issue. We hope it takes you down a winding path you’ve long since traveled and compels you to see the world through its three-dimensional display.
Skylar Hatch
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Drawing I // Veronica Gallego Fleites
// Maya Osaka
//
Sadoff
Because You Died [Center Panel] // Jordan Aldrich
Grendel // Kelli Weldon
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The Gravedigger's Spiritual // Rick Bursky
Writhe // Meg Neal
Orpheus and the Lyre // Suhjung Kim
Prometheus' Fire // Suhjung Kim
Confessional // Paul Lindholdt
The Patron Saint // Simon Lane
Ten Easy Pieces // G.W. McClary
En Toi Je Te Regarde // Ernest Williamson
Mother Nature's Resilience // Ava Weaver
Untitled // Rachel Coyne
Porch of His Cabin // Ken Been
// Briana Sosa-Trejo
Drawing // Rohan Buettel
Dedication // Dominic Blanco
Boxers // Veronica Gallego Fleites
Take Five // Mary Morris
Pollera // Giselle Carasquilla
The Polygraph Spiritual // Rick Bursky
The Aspiring Gigolo Spiritual // Rick Bursky
Mantis // Simon Lane
// Kenneth Pobo
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Title
His Pig Wilbur // Kelli Crockett
Pale Nymphs // Megan Denese Mealor
Two Days Before Mom Died // Elizabeth Rosell
Untitled // Katherine Pacheco
The Anthros [Yellow] // Celia Castaldo
Rummage // Richard Stimac
Untitled // Richard Nuzzo
When the Circus Leaves Town // Jade Silva
The Great Blue Heron // Veronica Gallego Fleites
Dodo // Taylor Colson
I Will Burn While I Shine // Michael Amatulli
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Scrutiny // Tori Haynes
Treetop and Saliva Tuber // Paul Lindholdt
staff coughs.mp3 thunder storm.mp3
Antipoem -1 // Philip Brunetti
Fresh Profit // Marc Kennedy
Toward Things Sunk // Celia Castaldo
thinking about immortality // Rowan Tate
The Art of Closeness // Mary Morris
Dishwashing Dreams // Meg Neal
my mother, faulted // Maya Osaka
Dad's Wisdom // Martha Patterson
Figure Drawing I
Veronica Gallego Fleites
unearthed
Maya Osaka
In late July, you unfurled my fingers and set into my palm a stray fossil you scoured the earth for— the tailend of a fish, body cleaved in half, head and heart lost to the striped sediment of the butte. You shuffled through limestone fragments, hands neatly parting sagebrush and wiping stone, searching for the rest of our ancient formation. Do you remember how I stood there, thumb tracing first the slender spine, then the remnants of spiked fin? I imagined how it would feel to be pressed into the earth, to feel the weight of my back collapse under a lakebed, compressed until mineralized and turned rich brown with carbon. How many millions of years until someone like us parts the long-limbed grass and places my crushed hip into a sweat-dampened palm, silenced in the wake of my stilled form? You are by my side again, touching the fossil in my hand.
You tell me that these are the earth’s memories. All I could say to you was I can see them.
NKDA
Martha Stallman
When Lacey called me from the emergency room in Jackson, I didn’t feel sadness or fear or anything else but coldblooded satisfaction. Fuck you, Kurt. She called me first. Then I locked the front door of Gopher’s Quik Stop and ran back to my room and grabbed my pillow, my towel, my cherry ChapStick, a lighter, the quart of banana rum (nearly full, stolen from my mother) I had hidden beneath my bed roll, a copy of National Enquirer, and seventeen dollars, mostly in change. I wrote “Closed due to gas leak” on a paper bag and stuck it to the front door with a wad of spearmint gum that had lost its flavor.
The route to the hospital takes you past the university. While I was sitting at a red light, one of those twitchy sign-twirling guys started working the line of cars, graceless as a plane crash. He was drumming up business for the University Oaks apartments - I could hear him pitching the car in the next lane over like an auctioneer.
“Hey-there-pretty-lady-Coed-Special-fifty-dollars-off-your-firstmonth’s-rent-and-deposit-for-pretty-girls-at-University-Oaks-apart—” and that was as far as he got before her window slid up. The guy gave me a cursory glance and moved on to the car behind me. I could hear him starting back up again just as the light changed - “Hey-there-pretty-lady” - and it got stuck in my head like a bird call. Hey there, pretty lady. Hey there, pretty lady
Lacey was already out front by the ambulance bay, swaying on her feet next to a patient-looking nurse. When I pulled up, she leaned over on the nurse and took her shoe off and shook it. A penny fell out.
“What in the world?” Lacey said. “I mean, truly.”
“Everything for a reason,” said the nurse.
I got out and put my pillow in the passenger seat. “Hey there, pretty lady. I brought something to cover up with, too,” I said as the nurse walked her over. “In case you get cold.”
“Truly,” Lacey said as the nurse set her gently in the passenger seat. “Thank y’all so much for everything.” She hugged her, burying her face in the nurse’s belly.
“God don’t give us nothing we can’t handle, baby,” the nurse said, already looking back at the hospital. It must get boring, telling the same lies, day in and day out. Once it heals up, no one will be able to tell and It’s such a little shot, you won’t even feel it! and God don’t give us nothing we can’t handle. Right.
The nurse produced a clipboard from somewhere and bade me sign. “You take care of your sister, now,” she said, and I nodded. Lacey and I had, one giddy night deep in freshman year, each sliced our palms with stolen steak knives and closed our hands together. “Heather,” Lacey said. “We’re sisters, now. Now and forever.” Then I ran to the bathroom because even a little blood gave me the pukes.
“I will,” I said, handing the clipboard back. “You can count on me.” The nurse smiled, legal liability now safely transferred. Lacey had left tiny wet skidmarks of mascara on her scrubs, but she didn’t seem to mind. I like nurses. They don’t flinch when they see my face.
“Pull over once we get out of the parking lot,” Lacey said just as soon as I closed my door. “Mama wants to drive.”
“What happened?” I said, steering us away from the hospital. The car I drove that day was my first, a 1988 white Crown Victoria one of my mother’s boyfriends had picked up at auction and left in our front lawn along with us. It smelled like sweat and cheeseburgers. It smelled like power. People feared me in that car. Everyone slowed down when they saw me coming.
“You look fine,” I said. The traffic in front of us parted like hair.
“I told them I was having a miscarriage,” Lacey said.
“What?” I tried not to shout. “It said ‘97% effective!’ on the front!” We had gone to the drugstore together. I had stolen the condoms for her while she flirted with the old man behind the counter, stuffing the box into the front pocket of my jeans and pulling my shirt down over it. Then, after we left the store, I sat down without thinking and the box corners poked red welts into my thigh that looked exactly like rat bites.
“Nah,” she said. “It’s just my period.” She cranked down her window and put her hand out to ride the wind. “They think I’m crayyyyy-zee.” She laughed. “They gave me a couple Valium.”
“Ok,” I said. I looked at her hand as it bobbed up and down on the current. She was wearing two hospital bracelets, one white and one red. “What’s the red one for?”
She looked at it. “It says Allergy Alert.”
“What are you allergic to?”
“I’m not,” she said. “He wrote NKDA on it. The hell?”
“Nude kangaroos dance accordingly,” I said.
“That’s stupid. You can do better.”
“Nanny kicks doltish adoptee,” I said.
“Better.”
“New kids dig anus.”
She laughed. “It’s true! Didn’t that one turn out to be gay?”
“Which one?”
“The gay looking one.”
I hadn’t asked Lacey where she wanted to go, just drifted unthinking towards her house. But once we got close enough for her to realize, Lacey said, “Nope, no way. I can’t let that bitch see me like this, she’ll shit.” ‘That bitch’ was her mother. Lacey was 18 but she was still in high school. I was 17 but I had already dropped out. I could let bitches see me however I pleased.
“Where do you want to go?” I said.
“Pull over,” she said again. “Let mama drive.” I pulled over.
“First,” Lacey said as she got behind the wheel. “We need smokes. Most truly we need them. Then-” She took a folded piece of paper from her pocket and handed it to me. “To the drug store.”
I unfolded it but the writing was a black tangle. “What is it?” I said.
“Something to help with my anxiety, he said.” She waggled her eyebrows.
“Yeah, but what is it?”
“Don’t know. Guess we’ll find out when we get there.”
When I was 10, a dog bit my lower lip in two.
Peaches was my mother’s dog, a Schnauzer, and when he got ahold of my lip he shook his head back and forth as though we were arguing about whose turn it was to do the dishes. Not mine! No, no, no, no! He got some vein that bled all over the place as I gagged and ripped the right corner of my mouth open half an inch wider than it was. “Half an inch exactly!” said my cousin Levitt when they came up for Christmas that year and he took a ruler to my scar first chance he could, openly fascinated by it the moment he and my uncle and aunt came bounce-rolling through the front door like noisy tumbleweeds, wrapped more in the cold than his scarf. Normally, that kind of
thing would piss me off to spectacular heights, but Levitt wasn’t trying to be an asshole, I know for a fact - he’s just slow.
In the end, the lip healed crooked, like asphalt buckled by the heat. And the ripped right corner stayed ripped, so that even with my mouth closed you could see a keyhole’s worth of crooked tooth and gum. A doctor could have fixed it, had I ever been taken to one.
“Well, I told you not to kiss him on the mouth,” my mother said, and laughed at me. “Now you know why.” I blushed from shame, which only made my lip bleed more. Never kiss dogs, asshole.
Lacey dropped the prescription off inside the Eckerd’s Drugs and picked us up a pack of cigarettes and two bottles of Mountain Dew while I sat in the car, thinking. About? About whether this was a good time to propose being roommates again, to see if she’d maybe thought better of the eyerolling Yeah, right laughter she’d answered me with the first time. I couldn’t legally sign a lease without a parent’s permission yet, but she could. I couldn’t flash a wink and a smile to the greasy apartment manager at that cute little complex by the university and get us fifty bucks off our first month’s rent (and deposit!), but she could. “Why would I do that?” she’d said that day at lunch when I told her I had to get out now - NOW, goddamn it! - and begged her to get a place with me. She wasn’t trying to be mean, just honest: her mother could be kind of a bitch sometimes, but she didn’t charge rent. “I’m sure you can find a place,” Lacey said, then gasped. “You can sleep in your car!” The idea delighted her, I could tell. A real life homeless person. It made me something like a celebrity. “You can shower here at school, and keep your poop in a bucket!” she said, eyes wide.
“I wasn’t planning on keeping it,” I said. I could sleep in the car, but it was damn cold at night, and you have to keep moving around - more than two nights in any one place and folks are guaranteed to notice, at least around here. “You sure you don’t want to get a swinging bachelor pad with me?” I’d asked, and she gave a sort of nervous giggle and looked away. “You’ll be fine,” she said to the empty seat beside her. No one’s knife digs more aptly. Of course, the “more” is silent.
Lacey handed me the bottles of Mountain Dew and I opened them both and poured a few swallows of each out onto the crumbling chunks of
parking lot heaped on the ground beside us. There was a big sign that said PARDON OUR DUST WHILE WE RE-PAVE by the front door, nearly mildewed to unreadability because it had been there for three years.
“Told me it’d be about ten minutes,” Lacey said. She felt under her seat for the quart. I held out the sodas, she topped them off, then lit two cigarettes and stuck mine into my mouth for me. “Kurt’s fucking Kayla Merton,” she sighed, and took her soda from me.
“No!” I said. “Are you sure?” Kurt was Lacey’s boyfriend, a beefy redhead who played both football and baseball and claimed to know three kinds of karate. He was in FFA and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and he had given the same speech - Jesus On The Field - at each one’s convention last year. Every 4th of July, he and his friends caught a bunch of frogs and taped Black Cats to their backs; they called it Rocket Toad. He was functionally illiterate and he worked at the Sonic, the fanciest restaurant in town. He called me Harelip to my face. Half the girls in school were in love with him.
“He told me so,” Lacey said. She tilted her head back and blew smoke straight up in the air like a volcano. “Last night,” she went on. “He called me from her house to tell me. I could hear her giggling in the background. He said he prayed on it. I guess Jesus likes her better.” She took a drink. “Truly, I could kill that bitch with my hands.” She took another drink. “He said she gives better head.”
“She’s fat,” I said. “She probably just thinks it’s food.”
Lacey smiled. She lay down across the seats so that her head was in my lap. “God, I don’t want to go home,” she said to my chin. “The bitch is going to shit bricks. She just loves Mister Kurt.” I rested my soda bottle on her forehead. “I should have left home years ago!” she cried, like she was on her deathbed. “I should have got emancipated like you did!” That’s what I’d told her I’d done when I moved into the back room of the Quik Stop. It was too embarrassing to say my mother let me go without a fight.
“You can stay with me tonight if you want,” I said. “Gopher’s over in Vicksburg for three more days.” He’d hired me and let me stay in the back room specifically so that he’d have more freedom to gamble on the riverboats there. When I went in to apply as a cashier, he’d walked around me slowly, as if I were a cow or a slave. He said “You look strong and ugly, girl,” and then, before I could get mad, “That’s good! Strong to restock inventory, ugly to keep you honest so
you won’t steal it.” When he laughed, I could see every one of his orange teeth.
“A sleepover!” Lacey said. “Oh, truly, I would love that. We haven’t done that in a million years.” She sat up and spit her cigarette out the window like a sunflower seed. She reached for mine but I turned my head away. “Come on!” she said. “I want to go in and get snacks!”
“Let me finish,” I said. If we were roommates, we’d have a sleepover every night, I didn’t say, because I didn’t want to remind her that Kurt wouldn’t be taking her out every night any more, but my heart was a butterfly. The bitch just loves Mister Kurt, so she’d probably drive Lacey crazy with her complaints in record time. Drive her crazy and drive her out of the house.
“Come on, come on, come on!” Lacey said.
“Here,” I said, and tossed her the National Enquirer. “Read you some stories.”
“Ooh, mama got stories?” She flipped the pages. “Di tries to kill Charles with shotgun! O.J.’s outrageous video!”
“Some lady says George Clooney’s the best lover she ever had,” I said. “I believe it.”
“’The E.R. doc loves a sexy romp in the Jacuzzi.’”
“How do you ‘romp’ in a Jacuzzi?”
“How did Di get a shotgun? Aren’t those illegal in England? Maybe Di should go over to O.J.’s house. He’ll teach her not to miss.” She threw the paper out the window. “Come on,” she said. “Mama wants chocolate.”
The candy aisle in Eckerd’s was the biggest aisle in the store, solid walls of sugar, ceiling-high and wrapped in colors that changed with the seasons: orange and black, red and green, now pastel. I pocketed a few peanut butter eggs. Lacey slid a white chocolate cross down the front of my jeans.
“You talk to Jesus,” she said, smoothing my shirt back down over my waist. “Tell him nobody gives better head than me.”
“Kurt’s a shit. He doesn’t deserve you,” I said, and meant it.
Lacey’s name came over the intercom. Your prescription is ready.
She clapped her hands. “Eeee!” she said, and skipped away. I leaned over and looked down the aisle to the front. The old man was reading Popular Mechanics. I tossed a package of Peeps down the front of my shirt.
Lacey came back and put her arm through mine. “Party time,” she whispered. She held up the sack from the pharmacy for me to see. I read the blue slip stapled to the front: Alprazolam.
The old man looked up as we skipped past, arm in arm. Lacey waved the
little white sack at him and the pills rattled. He smiled at Lacey. He looked at me and looked away like usual.
“You girls have a good day, now,” he said.
“We will,” we sang together.
I met Lacey in 7th grade; we had art and gym together.
In gym, I sat in the bleachers pretending to do homework while the other girls did calisthenics. Coach didn’t know just what had happened to my face – no one did – but like most people, he seemed to assume it only the most visible one out of a whole basket of physical defects I’d probably been born with. My face hurt people, and that made me feel powerful and disgusting all at once. I was The Beast before Beauty, and nobody knew quite what to do with me until whenever my magical transformation back to humanity happened. A magical transformation no one could predict the date or time for, obviously (it being magical and all), but one we all expected and hoped for whenever my dumb ugly face was on display. Most of all me.
“Hey. I think your vase came out great.”
I looked up. Lacey was standing over me.
In Art we’d made “decorative vases,” cleaned-out food jars we lined with clippings from the big pile of old magazines Miss Hatcher had collected from various people and dumpsters. I lined my own jar with cigarette ads and photos of Dennis Rodman in his wedding dress. Walking slowly through class to judge our efforts, Miss Hatcher stopped and made a big dramatic sigh before she even looked at mine, like she just knew it was going to test her. “And what is the point of this?” she said when she saw it.
“He’s alive with pleasure, ma’am,” I said.
Now standing over me in the bleachers, Lacey picked it up from the floor where I’d set it next to me and said, “This is a pickle jar, right? You can still smell it. Like pee, but better.” She stuck her face in the mouth of the jar and breathed in deep. “You know B vitamins?” she said. “They make your pee smell like cereal.” She was pretty, prettier than any girl at school. Prettier than I ever would have been, for sure.
“Beer makes your pee smell like beer,” I said. I didn’t take vitamins.
“Lacey!” Coach yelled from the field. “What are you doing up there?”
“It’s okay,” I yelled back. “She’s helping me.”
“Four for you, three for me,” Lacey said, telling me how to dole out the alprazolam. “I am driving.”
“That leaves us eight for tonight,” I said. I put my four on the dash and dropped three pills into her outstretched hand, then put the rest in my pocket. It was late afternoon. Her hospital bracelets caught the light and gave it back.
“Nun killings defy authorities,” I said.
“Ooh, that’s a good one. Sounds like a headline.”
“Nimble knife, deadly aim.” I washed my pills down with what was left in my bottle.
“Better. I truly want that one in my yearbook,” Lacey said. We were cruising down 51 where the gas stations and trailer parks gave way to trash woods. “Think you could hide a body out here?”
“No doubt,” I said, as we drove past a trailer park named Hevan‘s Gate (spelling in our town was largely phonetic). The best parties were always in trailer parks because there was always some trailer no one was living in and you could pop the lock with a nail file. People would pile in with candles and flashlights, a boombox. The bedrooms were reserved for fucking, but you could piss anywhere else as long as it didn’t hit someone. I could always get in because I could always bring liquor, and that was a lesson I’d learned young and never forgot: You make friends with liquor. I should embroider it on a pillow.
“You know, rent on those trailers can’t be much,” Lacey said.
“Between two hundred and three,” I said. “I couldn’t afford one on my own.” I’d gone through every park in town and then door to door to anyone with a couch, then anyone with a tool shed they had room in. “I could even put up in the dog house, ma’am,” I’d said to Lacey’s mother while she shook her head. “Scraps likes me.” Scraps was a boxer, a sweet dog.
“When I graduate in May, why don’t we get one together?” Lacey said now, and my heart sang. “I’ll be going to full time at the Shoney’s anyway, and you can still work at the Quik Stop even if you don’t live there, right?”
I caught my breath. “Lacey, you mean it?” For the past four months I’d been eating cold meat from cans for dinner, washing myself in the women’s restroom sink after close. “Truly?”
“Truly,” she said. “Just you and me. Fuck Mister Kurt.” Lacey and Kurt were planning to move in together after graduation, she had told me a few weeks ago.
I hugged her. She swung the car around in a wide slow arc.
“Come on, baby, ” she said to the top of my head. “Mama wants tots.”
I was stuck in a lean. Lacey was still upright, but hunched up over the steering wheel like a grandma. We were going about 30, and as the cars ahead saw us in their rearview and slowed down, Lacey slowed us down in turn until the crawling line of cars looked like the laziest funeral procession ever.
We rolled up into our usual slot at the Sonic and parked. I reached under the driver’s seat for what was left of the quart.
Lacey turned to me. “Tots,” she said.
“You’re in the driver’s seat,” I said. “You gotta say it to them.”
She turned. “Tots!” she said.
“Put the window down.”
She put the window down. “Tots?”
I laid myself across her and put my thumb on the intercom button. “Come on, mama, just one more time.”
Lacey took a deep breath. “TOTS! GIVE ME TOTS!”
“And a Route 44 cherry limeade,” I stage-whispered to her.
“Hello?” said the voice on the intercom. “May I help you?”
“TAHHHHHHHTS. GIVE ME TAHHHHHHTS!”
“And a Route 44 cherry limeade, please,” I said into the intercom. “Lacey?,” the intercom croaked.
“KURT, YOU CHICKENFUCKING BITCHFACE, BRING ME TOTS!”
“Lacey, you can’t come here-”
“Kurt,” she said. “I’m hungry. I’ve come here for food. Heather is thirsty. She’s come here for drink. Refresh us and we’ll be on our way. Otherwise I tell Kayla you got a blowjob from Brandy Wabash at the Christmas trailer party.”
Lacey had passed out early at the party from codeine and Bud Light, and woken up in the dark back bedroom to see Kurt sitting at the foot of the bed, moaning. When she pulled herself up enough to smack him on the back of the head, the shadow girl at his feet ran over to the window and jumped out. Days later, Kurt finally admitted it was Brandy; she’d been after him for months. He knew Brandy and Kayla already hated each other anyway since The Great 8th Grade Debate Debacle (Kayla had deliberately lost them Regionals so a team from another school with a boy she liked on it could win), so it’s not like they would compare notes.
“Okay,” he said now. “Just chill out. What size?”
“Huge,” Lacey said. “Fill me a drink cup with tots.”
Kurt was silent. “He’ll do it,” she told me.
I peeled myself off her and leaned my face against my open window. Things were blooming everywhere – honeysuckle, mimosa – and their perfume crowded the air alongside the smell of food and oil. It was like a bouquet of flowers stuck in a coffee can of bacon grease.
I heard a sound like Velcro pulling apart and I turned back to Lacey. She had her hands inside her pants. “Oh, sweetie,” she whispered. “You might want to look away for this. It’s truly about time to give Mister Kurt his present.”
“That is so considerate of you,” I said. “But I’m sure whatever it is will be fine.” That was true, because suddenly everything was fine. Gopher surely had called the Quik Stop to check up on me, and that was fine. When he got no answer, he would’ve called a friend to go over and find the gas leak sign, and that was fine, too. He would probably fire me, but so what? It would all be fine! I could find another shitty job. I could sleep in the Crown Vic until Lacey’s graduation day. Life had been hell, but now the gates of hevan had openedwith Lacey I could get a real place, start having a real life. Everything was swell. Everything was great.
Lacey smiled at me with such love. Then she stretched open the waist of her sweatpants and carefully pulled out her maxi pad. It was huge and unsubtle - it must have been the one they gave her at the hospital. The pad was soaked and slick with blood, plum jelly clumps quivering on top.
“You sure you’re okay?” Lacey said
“Oh yeah,” I said. “No problem.” I folded up the towel I’d brought with me that morning and handed it to her.
“Ooh, good idea,” She said, and stuck it down her pants.
Kurt was walking towards us, a giant cup in each hand. Lacey set the pad in her lap, gently.
“I don’t want no trouble out of you, Lacey,” Kurt said. The light was unkind to his red hair and huge white biceps; he looked like an anabolic clown. “I’ll pay for this myself, you and Harelip just go on. I told you it’s over. Jesus has a different path for me and for you too.” He paused, considering the majesty, then said, “You just pray on it, and stay the fuck away from me and Kayla, ok?”
Lacey held her braceleted arm up. “You see these, Kurt? You know where I spent this morning?”
“Are those hospital bracelets? What were you in the hospital for?”
“I was in the hospital,” she said, with exaggerated dignity, “losing our baby.”
Kurt stared.
“I was about to tell you when you called last night,” she said. “I thought you would be happy. When you told me about Kayla, I got so upset that I had a miscarriage.”
His mouth fell open, a perfect O. “What the fuck?” he said. “You sure?”
“See for yourself,” Lacey said, and she cradled the maxi pad into her hand and then slammed it into his chest. She ground it in hard and let go; it fell away from him and dropped to the ground with a splat. I giggled. Kurt looked down at his shirt in dumb amazement.
“We’ll take these,” Lacey said, taking the cups from his hands. “And you can keep that. Maybe Kayla can rinse it out and use it.”
“Thanks for the limeade, Kurt,” I said, topping it off with some of the emergency vodka my mother had kept in the glove box. The way vodka burns is usually too much for me, but this was an occasion.
“And thanks for the tots!” Lacey said. She pulled out and drove away. Kurt stood there looking for all the world like someone in a horror movie, a lousy actor who’s been shot but forgets to fall down.
Gopher’s was the last place in town I wanted to work, not because Gopher was gross (though he was) or because he stocked live bait (though he did) but because my mother had gone into Gopher’s drunk one night and tried to buy beer and failed. I was with her. She couldn’t count her money right, and as she kept scooping more and more of it out of her pocket –sweaty wadded dollar bills and coins mixed with garbage and gum – she pissed herself right there in the store. I tried to use the edge of my sneaker to push the puddle under the counter but it just kept coming. Gopher saw it and screamed at her and swatted her out with a broom like she was a cur dog. He told everyone in town about it; there were a few places banned her just on his word. This was before what happened to my face happened.
“Oh, truly,” Lacey said. “We are going to have the hottest fucking trailer in town.” She coasted us around back of the store. Gopher didn’t like me using up a space in the front. Even though he wasn’t here, the habit stuck.
“We can get a TV and a satellite dish,” I said. “I’ll cook us dinner every night.”
“We’ll have the best parties, and Mister Kurt’s not invited.”
“Never,” I said. “He’ll never set foot in our trailer and he’ll die of jealousy.” I let myself picture it, then I let us in the store. Lacey duck-walked to the bathroom; she still had the towel. The light on the answering machine was flashing. “He’s worthless,” I shouted over the flush of the toilet. I felt warm and boneless. “You’re beautiful,” I yelled. “You’ll get a guy so much better like that.” I tried to snap my fingers but they only made a soft dry sound.
“I love him, Heather,” Lacey said. She came out and stood in front of the drink cooler. We regarded each other. “Truly I’ve never felt this way about anyone before. But it’s over.” She sighed. “Trust broken can never be mended, not even with love as a glue.”
“General Hospital?”
She shook her head. “Days. The bitch got me watching it over the summer.” She slid the door to the cooler open. “Mama wants a beer.”
Gopher’d offered me the back room right when he hired me, I didn’t even have to ask. He’d given me a key and the army surplus bedroll I’d slept on since. “I hold no grudge against you, girl,” he’d told me. “Life don’t often deal us a fair hand. I’m glad to help you out, but listen: that till comes up one nickel short, or stuff starts coming up missing, you are gone, won’t be no question.”
“Grab me one, too,” I said to Lacey. “Come on out back with me. Let’s have us a party.”
We laid ourselves on the hood of the Crown Vic, heads against the windshield, and drank and smoked and ate cold tots as the first few stars came stuttering on.
“Here,” I said. I lit a cigarette and placed it between her middle and ring fingers. “That way you won’t drop it if you fall asleep. My mom taught me.”
“Thanks,” Lacey said. “You ever talk to her?”
“Not since I moved out.” After I left the Christmas party, I went to the Waffle House way up on 55 to get a pack of cigarettes out of their machine before I came home. I drove around a while, trying to sober up, but I just felt sicker and sicker. When I let myself in the front door, my mother was on the couch in her underwear, in the dark. She was watching a Magic Bullet infomercial. When I flipped on the light, she squinted at me for a minute, then smiled. “Party night, eh? Having a good time, just like your old mom?”
Some sound was coming from the front of the store. Lacey and I looked
at each other, dumbfounded. The sound took on meaning, but slowly.
“Somebody’s knocking,” Lacey said.
“You think it’s your mom looking for you?” I asked. “I hear they do that sometimes.”
“Lacey!” It was Kurt.
“Even better,” I said.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get rid of him.” Lacey jumped down and ran around front.
I wasn’t worried. It was a beautiful night to be out, the air warm and sweet and thick as a blanket. I could hear the frogs singing in all directions. “I would never tape a firecracker to you,” I said.
The sky was black by the time Lacey came back, flushed and sweaty.
“Oh my God, Heather,” she said. “He wants to get back together! He dumped Kayla!”
“What?”
She nodded. “He says that the baby was proof Jesus wants us to be together. He says when school’s done, he wants to get married!”
“But there was no baby,” I said, and she clapped her hand over my mouth hard enough to hurt.
“That’s not important,” Lacey whispered savagely. “What’s important is that he figured out he loves me instead of that stupid cow and he let her know it.”
“But,” I said, muffled. “What about our trailer?”
She took her hand away. She opened her mouth and closed it without speaking. She walked away a few steps, then came back.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, you’re right. We have made plans.” She punched her palm.
“It’s ok,” I said, drowning.
“No. You’re my best friend and Kurt’s a dumbass.” She looked off toward the road. “We can figure this out. There’s no reason we can’t figure this out.”
“Really,” I said and hated how small my voice sounded. “It’s ok. I’ll be ok.”
“Just let me go talk to him,” Lacey said. “Let me take him into your room and talk. This is all going to work out great, you’ll see. Give mama a few of those pills.”
I pulled them out of my pocket and tried to pour them all into her hand but she stopped me. “Just a few,” she said gently. “The rest are for you.” She kissed my forehead. “This is going to be great, you’ll see.”
“Yeah,” I said. I gave her my keys. She bounded away. I lay down and looked at the sky. At the corner of my vision I could see the light in my room come on and then, after a few minutes, go dark. Lacey did not come back.
“‘You know, the dark lets us see each other like Jesus sees us,’” I quoted to the singing frogs. “‘In the dark, you could be beautiful.’” I had come in the trailer’s back bedroom to check on Lacey, to make sure she was still turned on her side so she wouldn’t choke on her own vomit, and no one had messed with her, including Kurt. He was sitting in the dark at the foot of the bed; when he spoke, I jumped. “It’s true, Heather,” he’d said. Not Harelip - Heather. “In this light you look good. I bet you feel good, too. I bet you feel even better than a regular girl.” The whole time I was doing it, I was rehearsing in my head: It was dark, I was drunk, I didn’t know it was Kurt. It was dark, I was drunk, I didn’t know it was Kurt.
Behind Gopher’s, the air was turning cooler; soon it would be time to curl up in the backseat and sleep. I put the last of the pills into my mouth and dry swallowed. The light in my room stayed off. Lacey stayed gone. The frogs had stopped singing.
“Needles knit dog afghans,” I said, but that was stupid. I could do better. “Never know dearest admirer.” Better.
Untitled
Lily Sadoff
Untitled
Lily Sadoff
from the back of a pickup truck after a fire simulation,
reminded of what it’s like to have a tacit future
Matthew Daddona
On the way home the lieutenants were talking about an aided case
some kid they had to cut down from a tree and his dad, after the fact, saying did you get all of him?
I can feel pieces of me scattering everywhere I choose not to look, scared of what I’ll find.
Osprey-turned-telephone-pole climber, tree-rappelling avoider of fate. My mind wanders seeking the busy.
We’re learning to respond in seconds to an emergency
that could take a lifetime to untangle, maybe a few.
Who has the patience, the time?
Some climb and some go on climbing. You’re not supposed to discuss first and last names—you go on speaking to the dead as if you’re speaking about them. At night the trees languor in rapt silence lucky to have survived another century.
an entryway or an exit
Rowan Tate
how do you explain blood to a man, the blood it takes to make a person, that you spend a life stomaching as it leaks out of you in dark hot stains until one day it begins to clot and make a face, a face you will feed, a mouth that will bite you and say your name back to you, an organ outside of you walking away from you, an object that bleeds your blood, another mind, a red song, how do you explain all the bodies yours can make, all the eyes that could be fished out of you from this wet place inside of you filled with flesh where life dies and a whole generation slips out slick between your legs—the beginning and the end of wars, a stranger you have been nursing and carrying all of your life, how do you explain blood to a man.
Because You Died [Center Panel]
Jordan Aldrich
The Vase
Sarah Bultot
she would not call it that it is a Guinness glass on the windowsill with two-week old supermarket flowers losing vigour
the morning sun shaped by tree branches drawing moving shadows caressing her neck patient and contemplative lover the autumn sunset slow and orange through the window shapes of an argument hover around the flowers escape a book thrown across the room only a few petals lost screams of anger but no broken glass
waking from her sun-kissed trance twisting the plastic around her wrist name — date of birth — gender admission and release date (same) she looks out and the flowers
follow her gaze to where they came from where they grew only to be cut put into temporary displayed limbo if she knew it was coming she would have laid on the grass let nature soak up the life she was losing no waste let the yarrow stanch the wound of loss
the moon’s reflection in his pleading eyes is grey and the silence overwhelms him the book is still open on the floor three more petals orange brown he wanted it he wanted this future she was afraid he wanted it more than he wanted her the stained sheets wet with tears now and the dying flowers thrown away the glass clean back in the cupboard
Untitled
Ever Templeton
Untitled
Ever Templeton
Asexual
Shauri Cherie
Different is the same as odd (or maybe weird, with the connotation of freak) is the same as desireless (or is that undesirable?) is the same as emotionless is the same as alien, robotic, inhuman is the same as mentally ill is the same as dying alone is the same as broken (or is that unfixable?) is the same as You just haven’t met the one spoken by your grandmother at the dinner table without so much as a glance is the same as Maybe your hormones are off or You’ll change your mind said by your roommate while texting her boyfriend is the same as Maybe a good dick can fix you by a smirking boy who corners you in the hall is the same as I don’t understand and I don’t want to
Draw Me A Letter
Horia Pop
Scratch the Itch
Cadaver
remedy
Rowan Tate
i improvise a body, sewing together the dark fish who ate the night out of the blood of the women before me. their lungs and stomachs, which i’ve inherited, which i knead and mold into fingers, the flat of a palm, tendons, the delicate wiring of worlds. skin grows back so many histories later in the shade of the people we loved. in the grooves of mortality, nouns multiply and divide, bear children who wear your april brown eyes into new hemispheres. whoever gave me my breast and my belly had her own bad dreams but they are better now. yam makes the liver less skittish. i dry dandelion root and nettles for tea to remember the shape my grandmother took. when you hold my hand, you hold so many others.
After Grendel
Kelli Weldon
Even after Grendel there was light on the leaves every morning there were sounds ringing in Geats’ ears. Every evening there were bright guiding stars. There were little lives crawling up out of the earth, carrying crumbs, keeping little dwellings, and the world still turned. Even then, with Heorot burning beneath the trees and above them, the ground stayed, the sky stayed.
The Anthros [Blue]
Celia Castaldo
Weighing Anchor
Lauro Palomba
On Tuesday nights the yacht club gathered white sails hailing white sails in the bay elegance and grace all that mattered bows aligned, flotilla skimmed away
Delighted nodding on the shore we chatted beauty, envied means wished altered fortune, cited lore cast ourselves in dashing scenes
Their boat was grand, hull peacock blue marked out in the receding line befriending wind to tack her due she leaned, she gleamed, she fared so fine
One weekend long she bobbed at anchor though on deck neither was seen police launch motored to flank her found bodies seemly as once they’d been
Bikini Season
Piper Allison
The Gravedigger’s Spiritual
Rick Bursky
The moon is shivering tonight. Trees are hammered deeper into the dirt. I’m rearranging the night’s shadows. I feel the dust under my fingernails. I was once knee-deep in oblivion, Dizziness and nose bleeds, the soul
Attempts its escape, and then the cool Night and I stopped saying we can do this Together because we’re no longer. Now God won’t shake my hand
If there aren’t blisters on my heart, No talk about the blisters on my hand. The flashing red lights of my eyes
Are finally dead and I don’t care
If a mother puts her hand over A child’s eyes when I pass. Eventually, everyone returns To the wretchedness of crawling. Tonight, even the bats keep to themselves And another black duck dies in an owl’s claws.
Throw a pillow in my grave and I’ll spend eternity sleeping
In damp socks and mud-soaked boots — a new form of joy to look forward to.
Writhe
Meg Neal
Orpheus and the Lyre
Suhjung Kim
Prometheus' Fire
Suhjung Kim
Confessional
Paul Lindholdt
My harelip creased me, deemed me to be dunce-capped and cockeyed, a grown man groaning, a Mardi Gras distortion of my sober self.
I skulked backyards, jimmied hinges, severed cabbage heads, scooped up shoats. I snatched hens from nests, made chaos in coops.
Lunar breadfruit drooped from trees. Safe at home I beheaded the hens, stuck and bled the shoats then followed the bells to church.
The Patron Saint of Autonomous Perversion
Simon Lane
Ten Easy Pieces
G.W. McClary
The truth is, I’m not even an art student. Sure, I thought it might help if I had that magical B.A. after my name, but I always heard that you couldn’t go to school to be an artist, and I listened. I wasn’t even an artist really, aside from what I planned to do. Of course, I made the odd mediocre painting or sculpture in high school, but if that’s the criteria for greatness, then may the god of art strike me dead. I didn’t give a damn. I wasn’t an artist, but I aimed to become one.
I’m not going to bore you with my day job. Suffice it to say it was long and arduous, as far removed from my ideal occupation as yours probably is. But who knows, maybe you lucked out and actually like what you do, but I’ve never seen a smiling mechanic, nor a jovial ice cream vendor, for that matter. I might tell you later, if it becomes relevant, but on to my first piece.
The stage was set. Grant, my assistant and confidant, in his best clothes, a maroon button-up and slacks, his trusty scuffed Oxfords, stood as professionally as he could next to the front door of my apartment, which lay invitingly open. Next to him, on a small fold-up table, sat the agreement for the participants to sign, giving me the right to film and display their likeness, as well as the instructions.
1. roast me irl
you have 30 minutes to look through my things, after which you will have one minute to insult me no limits
duration: 2 hours
I stood naked (for that is the standard for performance art, isn’t it?) square in the center of the living room. I sought to take up as little space as possible, hoping to grow even smaller with each new string of verbal abuse. Perhaps by the end, I’d become microscopic.
By the time the performance began, and the cameras started rolling, my living room was empty, save for my minimal nude form. Grant and I had cleared it out some time earlier. I waited nearly fifteen minutes before the first participant, a well-groomed man who looked to be in his late thirties, arrived, during which time I stood still and silent, wondering how long I was willing to wait before abandoning the project. I’d made an ad on Craigslist and a few social media posts about the event. I was hoping for a decent turnout.
“This is where they’re shooting an art project?” the man asked Grant, who stared ahead at the street, ignoring him. “Okay,” he said, voicing the awkwardness. I stared ahead as he read the instructions and signed the
agreement. Within, I was doing a happy dance, but without, I kept my blank reserve. It was on.
He stepped through the door and studied me for a few moments, his eyes lingering on my unkempt pubic hair and exposed breasts. He seemed to realize he was on camera and wandered off to my bedroom, where I could only listen as he rummaged noisily through my things. After what felt like a long stretch of time, he emerged. Later, after watching the footage, I saw that he was hard in his pants. He looked at me with both desire and disgust.
“No tits,” he spat, and walked briskly out the door. Thus was the first participant.
It was almost another twenty minutes before the next ones arrived. To my inward glee, it was a carload of people, two men and two women, all college age. Perfect, I thought. They read and signed as the man had done before them and entered my apartment. As my eyes were fixed straight ahead, I could only get peripheral glances at them. One of the men waved his hand in front of my eyes to stifled giggles, and they headed for my bedroom.
I listened as they looked over my things.
“Jesus, it’s a mess in here,” someone said.
“Ooh, I think I found her journal,” one of the young women said.
“Diary. For girls, it’s diary,” one of the young men corrected her.
“Oh god,” the other woman said.
“So a man can’t keep a diary?” the other man asked. The women clucked in agreement. I heard one of them leafing through the pages of my notebook.
“It says here, some girls were bullying her online, and I quote, ‘They kept blowing up my phone with nudes of me that had gotten around.’ Look at this. She even printed out the photos and pasted them in.”
“Gross,” one of the men said.
“No, I get it,” said the woman who found the notebook. “She’s taking back ownership of her body.” I heard one or maybe more of the pages being torn out.
“Well consider me re-taking ownership,” the grossed-out man said.
“That’s fucked up,” one of the women said, as they suppressed their laughter.
The incident she was referring to was actually my primary inspiration for this, my first piece. Like many before me, I had carelessly sent out some revealing selfies that quickly made their rounds to what seemed to be everyone at my school. Even the professors seemed to eye me with a sheen of disgust.
I was teased relentlessly for being a “slut,” but only over text and online, which, as you well know, was incredibly hypocritical. All of us were sending nudes. Mine just got leaked.
None of them had the courage to taunt me in person. Thus, the impetus of my performance. I thought if I gave people the chance to vent their frustrations to a stranger’s face, a rare privilege unless you have a penchant for fisticuffs, or at minimum a shouting match, that I might spare some hapless soul from weathering some misplaced ire under the pseudoanonymous psychic armor of the internet. Of course, I didn’t reveal any of this when I exhibited the piece. I wanted as much ambiguity as possible.
“Hm, you’re a little fatter since you sent those photos.”
“Craig,” one of the women said in a scolding tone.
“What, isn’t that the point? She wants us to insult her.”
“No one wants to be insulted.”
“Not true. What about all those guys with humiliation fetishes.”
“Someone seems a little too familiar.”
“Okay, let’s rein it in. Who’s going next?”
They all thought for several moments.
“Slut,” one of the women said.
“That’s good, dig up that trauma.”
“You think we can make her cry?”
“She’d probably hate herself for it.”
“Your apartment is small and shitty, just like your taste.”
“You’re not very pretty.”
“Your boobs are asymmetrical.”
“Jesus, when was the last time you shaved that thing?”
While they were lobbing their little grenades of derision, Grant took his cue, slammed the door shut, and cut the lights. A gunshot blasted from somewhere in the room. Some of them screamed as they all dropped to the floor, save for Grant and I, who remained standing. Grant flipped on the lights.
“Thus ends the performance,” he said. Nervous laughter leaked out of them. As I took a few steps toward them, they panicked and ran out, just as Grant was opening the door.
The expressions on their faces as the shot rang out (a recording played through my sound system) and they dropped to the floor was, for me, the highlight of the performance. I saw at once fear and rage, mania and doubt. Perhaps they wondered if they were ready to die with their chosen company. It was all there on their contorted faces. I thought it was a success. I admit it was a bit (okay, maybe very) derivative of Marina Abramovic’s
Rhythm 0, but I was a fledgling performance artist. I needed a known foundation on which to ground my work. I posted the footage on social media, adorning it with various hashtags. It gained a bit of traction, enough for me to draw a larger crowd for my next piece.
My next performance was a bit edgier, though still relatively harmless. The instructions read as follows.
2. deep web irl (mask required; not provided) you must choose a weapon you must leave a different way than you came in duration: two hours
As before, Grant stood outside the front door so the participants could sign and read the instructions. In the living room sat a small fold-up table which contained various toy guns and mock bottles of poison, the real versions of which were available in vast supply on the dark web. The light in my bedroom had been replaced with a low-watt red bulb. A sign above the door said, “Kill Room.” Inside, I sat, bound to a chair by my wrists and ankles, my mouth gagged, the classic kidnapped pose.
The first participant, a man in his mid-twenties wearing an N95 mask, smacked me lightly on the cheek, grinned sheepishly, dumped the fake poison over my head, and walked out. Next, a couple, a man and woman with Homer and Marge Simpson masks respectively, held their fake guns to my head and dragged me around the room, threatening to topple the chair. They left me facing a corner and unloaded their plastic weaponry into the back of my head, execution style. The man mocked reloading and emptied a final clip into me before they departed.
Someone entered the room. I couldn’t yet see them, situated as I was in the corner. I felt hands passing through my hair as they lowered me backward and gently down, tipping the chair back until it rested on the floor, my eyes on the ceiling. It was an older woman wearing a kaiju mask. She squatted over me, lowered her pants and underwear, and urinated on me, the briny liquid filling my bellybutton and spilling down onto the floor. She landed a gob of spit square in the center of my navel and mocked breaking my neck. She shushed me and left.
I spent the rest of the performance on my back, as none of the participants dared to come near me. It ended after two hours, and Grant helped me up and out of the chair. It was a simple matter of cleaning up the spill, though I must have taken three showers that night.
Since I couldn’t witness the participants leaving, I watched the footage to see how they managed it. Some of them left out the living room window, others clambered out the tiny window in the bathroom. None of them had crashed through the wall, Kool-Aid Man style, as I had secretly hoped.
3. i am your paintbrush use me to decorate the canvas as you please duration: one hour
It was my answer to the growing craze of digital and AI-generated art. I stood before a blank six square foot canvas which hung on the wall, flush with the floor. On a nearby table sat gallons of each of the primary colors topped with pumps, with a stack of plastic cups to hold the paint, as well as a palette knife, should it be needed for mixing.
The public made a mess of my body and the canvas. They coated my torso and pressed me against the beckoning white, smearing my impression on its virgin surface. At one point, several of them lifted me, dipped my hair in the paint, and dragged me through the air, creating a stippled border of red along the bottom of our painting. There were handprints, face prints, breast prints, knee prints, all muddled and competing on the canvas for supremacy. One of the bolder participants, an older man with wild silver hair, dabbed my pubic hair with an aquamarine mix of blue and green and pressed my crotch onto our mural. It had a sponge-like effect. A participant nicked my thigh with the palette knife and dipped my finger into the blood, with a few hushed gasps from the audience. Guiding my finger along the canvas, he wrote, I wrote, we wrote, “Is this art?”
Toward the end of the performance, someone dipped my finger in their cup of paint and lit it with a pocket lighter. The acrylic caught flame, and they guided my hand to the edge of the canvas, where the fire began to lick hungrily upward, spreading quickly. Grant rushed over and tore down the canvas, stamping out the blaze as smoke filled the space. Several of the participants joined him.
“That’s it,” he said, panting, a gleaming layer of sweat on his forehead, “It’s over. Go home.” The crowd milled out, looking not unsatisfied. I was furious.
“Why did you stop it?”
“What, and let your apartment burn down?”
“It would have been better than that let-down. I told you never to intervene.”
“You didn’t say anything about a life-or-death situation.”
“Who says it was life or death? The fire spreading would have been a thrilling conclusion. Just picture it. Fire trucks, news reporters, maybe an arson conviction.”
“You’re losing it, Shelly.”
“I’m losing it? You broke our agreement. You’ve lost it.” I fired Grant as my assistant. I was on my own.
Grant and I had met at a middling liberal arts college. We were both studying performance, but I only lasted a semester. We managed to strike up a bond at the time, skeptical as we were of everything. We wanted to push boundaries, not recite Shakespeare. Nevertheless, he continued with his studies, while also agreeing to assist me with my latest projects. I was sad to lose him, but I v I had to be firm in my resolve. I couldn’t have an assistant tampering with the process.
No sooner had I ditched my unwanted interloper than I received a DM from a prominent and notoriously eccentric performance artist, Mayelle Beauchamp. She was a fairly well-known figure in the art world, known for her grotesque and overtly feminist usage of bodily fluids in her pieces, even if she wasn’t still considered a “gala darling,” as the art critics had declared herwhen her career began to take off. It was rumored that she became pregnant just so she could implement breast milk in her work. I’d watched a few interviews and seen some footage of her performances. She was certainly on my radar.
“love your work. meet me at Highland Coffee?” her DM read. It was about a five-minute drive away. How does she know where I am? I thought. I left my ponderings for the short drive and hastily replied, agreeing to the meeting, sure to bring along my meager portfolio, as well as the instructions for my next project. I arrived five minutes early. She was nearly fifteen minutes late, arriving alone in a sleek hunter green sports car.
She wore a simple black dress, with a matching wide-brimmed hat. A beauty mark of mascara dotted her right cheek, perhaps a bit too far from her mouth. She looked to me like a morbid umbrella sticking out of a martini at some bar in the underworld. I imagined her as a bartender, saying in her thick French accent, “Zees one’s on ze house.” She greeted me with not so much a smile as a mechanical extension of her lips toward her lean cheeks, which hugged her small and pointy cheekbones. I glanced at the gaunt washboard of her chest, which rested in the deep cut of her dress. She looked as if she had just come from a wake. She could be either twenty-five or somewhere in her fifties. Still standing, she extended her gloved hand. I stood to meet her.
The walls of the coffee shop were various shades of blue. A young female barista bobbed behind the Formica countertop, which held handmade baked goodies displayed grandly in their plastic cubbies. A subdued pop song played from the speakers, upbeat, feminine.
“Mayelle Beauchamp,” she said, placing her hand in mine. It felt a bit cold through the fabric.
“Yes, of course,” I said, “I’ve followed your work for some time. Sorry, I’m Shelly.” She let out a slight harrumph and we shuffled over to the counter. She ordered a chai latte with cayenne pepper, and I got an iced coffee. I may have been an aspiring artist, but I had no qualms about getting
my caffeine fix like a basic bitch. We were silent as we waited for our drinks. Finally, the barista slid them across to us.
“Have a great day,” she said mechanically, turning to the next customer. Beauchamp and I sat in low comfortable chairs, huddled around a table that held an incomplete chessboard in the corner.
“Zees last project of yours,” she said, with that distinctly European distaste for small talk, “Eez step back for you. Too safe, too derivative. But your first two? Zey showed promise. Particularly the second.” She eyed me with a knowing look.
“Oh, um, thank you?” I said, honored that she was so familiar with my work. And then it dawned on me. The older woman in the kaiju mask who had relieved herself and spat on me. Of course it was Beauchamp. The hair was a dead giveaway. But how had she heard about me so soon? My mind was spinning.
“I would like for us to perform togezzehr.” Her eyes were fixed on me as she let the silence hang like a body from a tree.
“Did you have anything in mind?” I asked her, as I felt she should take the lead.
“I s’ought you might have some, ‘ow you say, reveries spinning in zat mind of yours?”
“Actually, yes,” I said, showing her the instructions for my next performance.
“Eez good. But eez just one performer,” she said, after studying the page for a few moments.
“Yes, but maybe we could modify it somehow?”
“Yes, modify.” She seemed to savor the word. “Does this mean we are,” she paused and searched among the ether as her eyes drifted over the ceiling, “Collaborating?” She extended her hand, now free of the glove. I could see her age in her knuckles as we shook. We modified the performance to include a second artist over our drinks.
“Shelly, I was s’inking, per’aps you and I could live togezzehr? I have project in mind.”
“What kind of project?”
“Well, you see, when two women live in the same space, the menstrual cycle, it syncs up.”
“You want us to menstruate at the same time?”
“Precisely.” She wanted us to free-bleed in zero gravity. “Zat way, we are much closer to the moon.” I looked it up later, and it turned out the whole cycle syncing thing is a myth. Maybe she was just lonely and needed a housemate.
Either way, I declined her offer, although we did reach a compromise for our next performance.
“I see, eez too long term for you. Excusez moi,” she said, reaching into her purse and pulling out her cellphone. She dialed a number and had a brief conversation in French, then hung up.
“I have rented ze apartment above you and made an arrangement wis your landlord. Z’ere will be much construction, but you can stay ‘ere for a few days.” She passed me a business card for a swanky hotel at the southern edge of the city, The Indigo Inn & Suites. “You should get what you need before zey begin.” It turned out her seemingly endless supply of money came in handy. That and she worked fast.
Beauchamp and I stood, unadorned, in the center of the simple white space, with our backs to each other. We interlocked our elbows. Gradually, the floor beneath us began to separate. Our feet drifted further and further apart as the gap between us widened, our backs arching to maintain our bond at the arms. When the gap became too wide, we slipped and plummeted down a single story, landing in the audience. They cushioned our fall and lowered us gently to the floor, still interlocked. We stood, our backs to each other, and released our arms, collapsing to the ground. Out went the lights.
“We use your trick of cutting ze lights. Performance is over,” Beauchamp said as we brainstormed over our drinks during our first meeting.
“But it’s so short,” I said.
“Endurance is not everything, mon cherie. Sometimes a bit of brevity is called for? Besides, you are new sensation, I am, how you say, noteworthy?
It will be hit. Much room for interpretation.”
The performance was panned as heavy-handed and pedantic, yet here and there were a few brave souls who supported our vision. I savored the irony of an online article that championed our anti-internet message. The public wasn’t exactly clamoring for more, but there were enigmatic whispers about “Beauchamp’s new protégé.” We planned our next duo performance. We needed something less concrete. Since Beauchamp now lived in the apartment above me, every once in a while she would open up her floor, my ceiling, and we would workshop our next piece. It felt like being on-call. I did my best to have an idea at the ready. I was adjusting quickly to the strange new world I found myself in.
5. popcorn messages
artist 1 will utter a word artist 2 will answer with another one member of the audience will contribute a third and so on
duration: as long as it takes
Beauchamp and I decided beforehand that I would serve as artist 1, per the instructions. “Age before beauty,” she’d said. I contributed the first word.
“This.”
“Consumption,” Beauchamp said, clearly steering us into gloomy territory.
There was a pause, until a reluctant sounding audience member spoke out.
“Has.”
“Taken,” I said, continuing the cycle.
“Everything,” Beauchamp said.
“But!” an audience member shouted. Stifled laughter among the crowd.
“We.”
“Have,” Beauchamp said. I could feel her glaring at me, side-eye.
“Enough,” an audience member added.
“To.”
“Pick.”
“Up.”
“What.”
“Is.”
“Left.”
One of the monitors in the space lit to life, displaying the performance thus far. We listened as our strange utterance played back to us. After the feed ended, we formed another statement in the same fashion, the same length as the first, this time with Beauchamp to start.
“Once.”
“I.”
“Had.”
“A.”
“Little.”
“Friend”
“I.”
“Called.”
“Sorrow.”
“We.”
“Played.”
“And.”
“Sang.”
“And.”
“Prayed.”
Once the second playback had ceased, Beauchamp and I rose and faced each other. We stood with a hair’s breadth between our noses and shouted each of the two statements, I, the first, and she, the second, at the same time and directly into each other’s face. We collapsed. Applause trickled from the crowd. Thus ended our second duo performance, but things soon grew strained between Beauchamp and I.
“But what do body fluids have to do with the internet?” I asked her, emboldened enough to challenge her a bit.
“Zey have everys’ing to do wees eet. Do you not see?”
“I just thought sex and porn was too obvious.”
“Ah, but you must shake zees western notion of ze body fluid as sexual. And to ignore ze sex altogezzehr? Ze public, zey will s’ink you are ‘iding. Are you, how you say, the asexual?”
“No, I just… I’ll give it some thought.”
6. blood, sweat, and tears duration: 30 minutes
Beauchamp and I sat across from each other, seated at a small table. Before us sat a matching set of an onion and a razor blade. The heat was cranked. We stared into each other’s eyes as the sweat poured off of us, down the catch beneath our seats and into small clear plastic cups. Once a small amount of sweat had accumulated in the cups, we reached down and brought them to the table. We each sliced our onions with the razor blades and held them under our eyes, catching the tears in our cups to intermingle with the sweat. We placed our cups on the table, and each made a small incision on our opposite forearm with the razor blade. We let the blood trickle into our cups, the droplets swirling and dissipating.
“Salud,” we said at once, leaning across the table and interlocking arms like a newlywed couple sipping champagne, and downed each other’s cup. The taste was not unlike tomato juice. She must have a healthy diet, I thought.
We both slumped slowly down to the table, resting our heads on our folded arms like students asleep in class. The crowd erupted. Beauchamp stood and spoke to them, to my surprise, blood trickling down her arm.
“Zees ees our last performance as a duo. Merci,” and then only loud enough for me to hear, she said cryptically, “All s’ings in s’rees.” With that, she departed the space, her assistant throwing a robe around her shoulders and applying gauze to her wound.
Her announcement came as a shock, but it made sense in retrospect. I was sure she wanted to get back to Paris, as I was unwilling to travel and succumb to the whim of her ambitions. We’d collaborated on an intriguing set of pieces, in my estimation, and I was satisfied. Beauchamp informed me via email that the lease on the apartment above me was good for the rest of the year and she granted me access to it as a parting gift. It was sure to be useful.
I reached back out to Grant, who had surely been keeping up with my recent endeavors. He iced me out for a few days, but eventually messaged me back. We planned a series of three duo pieces, a sister set to my works with Beauchamp.
7. regressing/redressing duration: 30 minutes
Grant and I stood in the center of the space. One by one, articles of clothing were lowered down to us on hooks, which we donned in turn until we were fully dressed. We then removed each piece of clothing, arranging it in a human shape about an arm’s length away on the floor. We lowered our bodies down to match the shape of the clothes, rose, and repeated the process until we were at opposite ends of the space. We then retraced our steps back to the center, where our clothes were lifted back up by the hooks.
8. til commerce
duration: until the final purchase
The audience was situated on a raised platform. Grant and I wore only top hats.
“Fifty dollars,” I said, pointing at an audience member.
“Seventy-five,” Grant retorted. I waved my hand dismissively and bid on another participant, while Grant’s latest purchase was escorted out of the space.
“Two fifty,” I said, pointing out a portly man near the middle of the crowd. It took some time for the others to shuffle aside and make my target known. Grant waved the man off and we resumed our bidding war until all the audience members had been escorted out. Despite the lack of an audience, we bowed.
9. concept speed-dating pick a ‘nametag’ from the bowl act out your name to the best of your ability you may not use words you may not touch the others, or the artists duration: 30 minutes
Near the entrance to the performance space sat a fishbowl atop a barstool. It was filled with various ‘nametags.’ I use air quotes, because they weren’t proper names, but rather, concepts. For example, “Hunger,” “Power,” “Devotion,” etc.
I wore “Love” and Grant wore “Surrender.” We picked our names at random, just as the participants. We stood in the center as they filed in. Grant retreated into the corner. I traipsed around like a butterfly and mocked hugging the audience members, planting light faux kisses on their cheeks. “Ambition” tried to coax Grant from the corner. “Grace” pirouetted around the space. “Danger” was careening off the walls as the others cleared the way. The gentle clutter of noise, footsteps clacking, a shoulder thudding against the wall, the slight brushing of clothing created a pleasing, almost ASMR-like atmosphere when I played back the footage.
After our third duo piece, Grant said knowingly, “I guess this is goodbye for now.” He understood that I wanted to maintain the thematic use of threes in my work, and our time as a pair had ended. I set to preparing my final performance.
10. instant messenger
On the table before me was a single black marker and a strip of white paper. The first participant in line approached me, uncapped the marker, and wrote the letter H on the top of my right hand. They capped the marker, placed it back on the table, and returned to their seat. On and on until they formed the following sentence.
The line of letters snaked up my arm, across my chest, down my torso, across the small of my back, and down my leg. Using mirrors that had been added to the space, I copied the string of letters onto the paper, using the same marker whose tip had wended its way around my body. I felt like a work of art, an exhibition, a statement, as I wrote out the charmingly sensical phrase. I displayed the completed transcription to the audience, balled up the strip of paper, and swallowed it. I bowed to light applause.
“This will be my final performance,” I announced to the crowd. I bowed again and made my leave of the space. There would be no second and third ‘final solo pieces’ from me; I chose to leave them on a cliffhanger. I announced my retirement soon after. It would be my final piece. Enough dawdling about. I was going back to art school after all, soon to become a legend. Maybe I’d see Grant around.
En Toi Je Te Regarde
Ernest Williamson III
Mother Nature’s Resilience
Ava Weaver
Untitled
Rachel Coyne
The Old Man on the Porch of His Cabin
Ken Been
Pass away this road son offa my property outa my woods make your way and vanish from sight jes’ head away now be gone into somewheres else afar from this place you've suddenly stopped by–
Get on down that path... I reckon you'll find pickin’s berries and such strange surprises I s’pose as you breathe–an easy passage for most.
Or yonder path, now that I consider further... get on with ya now the stream will jest alongside your way just take good note ‘case you see what's not.
Ha...
I’ve heard of beggars with long trippin’ limbs that twist y’up and dancers that arise in the hot chute of a fire.
A good smudgin’ from their coals you’re apt t’get as if big doin’s are in the fixin’ you’ll say I’ll be that ol’ feller wasn't tellin’ no tale if it ends up lookin’ like a map to your headin’.
Or maybe just maybe I've got this all wrong... you got me thinkin’ son what if away is the passin’ and we arrive already the death be known
then cross back through it headin’ gone to the cleave of ‘tween that midnight tip where nobody's sure after leadin’ an idiot life of promises to keep.
No matter how ya have it in your head time you get yourself outta this neck jes keep your feet movin’ while there's daylight son and travel on by me real quick for the long go’ll be miles and miles a pretty good undertakin’ before droppin’ off from sight bes’ be on your way straight through ‘til the exchange a pretty good trampin` a ways before ya sleep.
What Lies Ahead
Briana Sosa-Trejo
Drawing
Rohan Buettel
If I could draw like Matisse I would capture you in a single fluid line and draw nothing else for nothing else would interest me
But it’s a good thing I can’t draw Matisse, Picasso or Whiteley could express your outer beauty in a line, yet still fail to limn the delicate tracery of your being
Dedication
Dominic Blanco
Surely, She asked You to do it since Your smile is bashful. But because You’re a good Kid, a good Son, with a future I know nothing of what You will become, You do it: The top half of Your body out the sunroof, cars honking, People waving & cheering, Your graduate cap steady despite all that wind. So don’t be embarrassed, the world on this noisy street recognizes what You’ve accomplished. And if You’re anything like Me, (& we are more alike than not) You won’t see the value in such a thing. That is, until suddenly, just now, I do.
Boxers
Veronica Gallego Fleites
Take Five
Mary Morris
—after the Dave Brubeck Quartet
In Amman, Jordan, three women smoke shisha from a balcony.
Five musicians appear from the jazz festival. A dialogue begins with a piano in five-four time.
Enter whisk and marching rudiments from that drum, piano rhythm, intoxicating saxophone, a woman— her voice scatting—all together, generating music so intimate, it’s like being in love.
Dave Brubeck has returned from the dead. Hundreds of people leave the street, gather on these wide steps at the University of Petra.
Taxi drivers from Palestine abandon their cars to join us. Music unites all into one language.
Take five, take five on your busy day. To find someone. To notice. To believe in the world as us.
Pollera
Giselle Carrasquilla
The Polygraph Spiritual
Rick Bursky
Your dishonesty gave me goosebumps in a way
The truth never could. But if we’re going to talk About truth let’s not forget to mention Arcadia Where meanness was glorious and crucifixion Was sport; imagine a squirrel nailed to a cross, Now replace the squirrel with a man. When it comes down to the nitty-gritty ... I don’t know who’s supposed to pray to who — That used to be important, but that was a long time ago. I don’t believe a single page, sentence, or word Was encouraged by You. Have You ever even read A bible? Every question is a test. Every answer Comes with the stink of fear.
No one’s ever distinguished between A bible’s scrupulousness and modern forms of advertising. According to the instruction manuals
The definition of perspiration remains the same Regardless of the language. One of us owes the other An explanation, let’s flip a coin. The only things remaining In my stomach are a chunk of charcoal, twigs, and dirty water. Between my mouth and tomorrow there is a lot to say. But truth is always a beggar, and I’m tired of begging. The last time I began to tell this story
Someone yawned, someone knelt to tie a shoelace, And there was a loud crash ... cars colliding Or thunder. I’m close to swearing to something.
The Aspiring Gigolo Spiritual
Rick Bursky
When I first opened my mouth to say this A squadron of crows flew out ... was trying
To explain that there are repercussions to everything. For instance, to win a bet I kept my left eye Closed for eleven days. Now it never blinks. I was going to say ... each Sunday night God sends someone to put their hand Inside my mouth and sand my tongue — My reason for never apologizing, assuming I had something to apologize for in the first place. I learned to say what a woman wants to hear, Turned that want into something that could be confused With a prayer. Heaven is this world’s attic, Skeletons stacked to the ceiling like chords of wood. Each day at noon the dead are wont to parade. A Grand Marshal is chosen by drawing A name from a battered combat boot —
That’s a loose translation from the Coptic text In the Gnostic Gospels. This is what the living do With the dead. Living is a repercussion To something kept from us. The first lyric Every dead man sings after dying ... What’s love got to do, got to do with it ...
To choose your place in the parade, write Your own obituary — that might be what this is. All the women I’ve ever known Will throw flowers as I march by.
Mantis
Simon Lane
Philly Interlude
Kenneth Pobo
I wander to the Liberty Bell, because it’s famous and I like famous people, famous things
since I’m unknown, nondescript, a paper bag anyone could put their lunch in. One of my
favorite possessions is a Bette Davis autograph I won on eBay. Even faded fame calls me.
Outside the Betsy Ross house, an older man picks me up. We walk back to my apartment
where he tells me about West Point, Nebraska, nondescript too. Dusk pinks
Chestnut Street until the moon Uber pulls up outside my building and takes him away.
The Fragility of Memory: Emory’s Gavel
Kelli Crockett
The Fragility of Memory: His Pig Wilbur
Kelli Crockett
Pale Nymphs
Megan Denese Mealor
I spent that last stretch of our daylily summer taking in mobile art activated by air currents, human libraries of luminary catacombs and mummified friars, shelves of status symbols whose corpse flower families stopped doting on their aristocratic arsenic bones long ago.
And where did your epic poem take you?
To which boil of rubbled, rotting oceans concealing carved helmeted sea nymphs and gun decks, boiler decks, sweep decks, mothballed graveyards with no coffin sprays, rogue flashbacks to scrap-hungry storms incited by Huracan, Mayan god of wind?
If only one sunflower, one dahlia, one marigold, could hold enough ransom for a leafhopper, whose candy-striped wings perch like roofs atop their sharpshooting backs as they hopperburn all moonless underthings, even raspberries bursting with starlight.
Two Days Before Mom
Died
Elizabeth Rosell
She was laying in the bed
out of surgery
blood running from her mouth as she smiles figuring out who I was.
Untitled
Katherine Pacheco
The Anthros [Yellow]
Celia Castaldo
Rummage
Richard Stimac
Parish ladies set up their booths each fall in the church basement, with both new and old for trade: outdated children’s clothes; or gold glittered pinecones; an ornamental ball of hardened popcorn; a hand-knit yarn shawl with Mary’s face; a fruitcake in the mold of crucified Christ; if they were still sold, indulgences, too. No suburban mall stores such goods. But everything’s not for sale, is it? I’d like to think it’s not, but know someone, somewhere, is trying to sell love, delivered, by air, from heaven above. With the world’s gaud, we all try to avail ourselves of value before the first snow.
Untitled
Richard Nuzzo
When the Circus Leaves
Town Jade Silva
all that’s left is dirt, holes bored, hollow rain pungent soles one rusty shovel five men shallow grave breathing, heaving trunk sweeping floors of thrown peanuts. before dropping, it grabbed the sky from itself, i swear
kids gawked and cried. they asked why gray anger in their dreams she charges treason with her body still bleeding on its side.
took the whole town to heave five holy tons, masters feigned anger, packed caravans, left
ears peeking still-warm ground, a hat
her head weight tugged down around the bend, a trumpet, heartsick holes, all that’s left when the circus leaves town.
The Great Blue Heron
Veronica Gallego Fleites
Dodo
Taylor Colson
I Will Burn While I Shine
Michael Amatulli
EDITOR’S NOTE: Mr. Amatulli attached the following to his submission, which is an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir. It is included here for context.
I have lived this story for sixty years. I have touched the places, smelled the air of the cities in which I’ve crumbled. This work depicts a nightmare journey that delves into a subculture of homelessness, drug addiction, crime, incarceration and mental health. It describes the family dysfunction and violence from the point of view of an immigrant Italian family, and an irreconcilable father-son relationship.
The story begins in a southern Italian village and then to Toronto, where my family struggles to secure a place in the new world, and where I rebel against the values of the old. At the age of fifteen I’m sent to my birth village with the hope that I will be ‘saved’; but instead I wrestle with acceptance by the villagers, and with my identity as a Canadian in southern Italy.
I run away to Florence and become addicted to heroin. I return to Toronto and am immersed in homelessness, and crack and fentanyl dependency. I am forced into a forty-year epic that moves across Ontario as I serve penitentiary sentences and seek recovery and a normal way of life.
Some character’s names have been changed to protect their identities; but everything else about which I’ve written is factual. I have lived every instance and detail; all of the events depicted are real.
Michael Amatulli November 3, 2024
The following morning I rose from between two parked vehicles, still high from my near-overdose. I slowly walked in the direction of the train station and the paid underground bathrooms. Vincenzo had confided that he was leaving for Sicily after the feast of Santa Reparata
and would most likely not return. I found him at the top of some ancient steps that stopped before a door which hadn’t opened in half a millennia, and where we usually fixed first thing in the morning. It was nearby an old leather goods market, across the street from Vincenzo’s persione. We entered his room and squared away the cash from the kilogram of hash we’d sold, according to our agreement, and did one last smash together. I buckled after my fix and Vincenzo helped me to a chair. He sat with me for some time, to make certain I didn’t go under again. When I came-to an hour later he was gone, no sign in the pensione that he’d been there, except for the bloodied syringe that sat in the empty ashtray. I thought it was time I called my mother, and when I finally did, I received news that prompted me to leave for Grumo right away.
I arrived home to my father’s usual indifference and my mother’s fervency, and Maria’s love. Ang was a mature fourteen, with a good head on his shoulders and quite responsible for one so young. He was in fact the opposite of Pino and me. He worked as a helper in an electronics shop, repairing small appliances and such. A person of few words, we exchanged pleasantries and within minutes he was back to whatever he was doing before I had arrived. No one, however, suspected anything unusual about me, though it was the early days of my addiction and my parents had not as yet learned the signs: my changing demeanor, mood swings and strict impatience, and the jewelry that mysteriously disappeared from time to time. As far as my family was concerned I was just an irresponsible teenager that was often depressed. I was on a savage path; a full-on heroin addict. It was late-afternoon Monday and I had enough heroin to last me until Tuesday. I was scheduled to begin a year of mandatory military service in Pesaro on Thursday 2000 hours.
I cut my hair to specification in the shop at the bottom of nonna Rosa’s building and returned home immediately, ducking through side streets so as not to be seen by those to whom I owed money. I remained in bed all of Wednesday, tossing and turning with the discomfort of a leper. By Thursday, I was full-on dope-sick. Everything had a bad smell to it, like when you cook fish and smell it for days in your apartment. Except this was more like what you’d
smell inside of a pharmacy, or a hospital, medicinal-like. I sweated profusely and cold chills raised goosebumps all over my body, my mind growing darker with thoughts of suicide, or of robbing a pharmacy. Instead, I visited the doctor at the hospital again. He looked at me and immediately understood what I needed. My pupils were the size of marbles and I could barely stand. The doctor simply said, ‘morfina?’ I tried smiling, but only managed to screw my face into a look of wild bewilderment and nodded yes. In a dark, quiet spot at the train station I fixed the morphine and savored the sweet relief you feel the very moment heroin withdrawal leaves you, like coming in from the numbing cold, to a roaring, transformative and all-embracing fire. The antidote to the poison was the poison itself.
The military base of the 28th Infantry Regiment Pavia in the city of Pesaro was quiet on the evening of November 12, 1983. I was escorted to the barracks and assigned a bed and locker. Our unit comprised mostly newbies who stood awkwardly by their bunks, making small talk and acclimating to their new surroundings. An inherent skill that addicts possess is to recognize their own kind, like a pack or pride, sniffing-out signs of drug-abuse like dope-detectives: pinned pupils, constant and excessive scratching, nodding mid-sentence, and non-stop incoherent ramblings if they were high; or runny noses, pupils like targets, and debilitating lethargy if they weren’t.
I scouted two heroin addicts; the group had doubled by the following afternoon. We spent most of the next day acquainting ourselves with the base layout and schedule, and were then given a leave-ofabsence for the rest of the evening. The pack headed straight for Piazza Del Popolo in Pesaro’s historical center, where we located a heroin dealer. We were all flush with the dope-sickness. We pooled our money together and scored enough junk to straighten us all out. We slowly made our way back to the base, stopping first at a brightly-lit bar just outside the base’s ramparts. The regiment’s flag flapped in the wind, its gold crown looking proud and regal. Inside the bar we rambled on a little too much and nodded when we should have been rambling on. The officers kept to themselves and commanded authority, while we spine sat or stood or leaned against the bar, not caring about much else but our junk-groove.
I was fitted for fatigues in the morning and our entire company stood outside in the encampment, performing drills and snapping-to at some sergeant’s command. We were organized into platoons and we marched and tried this new thing or that new thing and then I heard names being called-out by a sott’Ufficiale.
“Amatulli, vieni con me, forza!”
I followed him to the hospital unit and stood in line and waited to undergo a complete physical. The doctor looked me up and down and saw the tracks on my arms, including the fresh needle mark where I’d fixed the night before. Heroin addiction in Italy had reached crisis levels; the good doctor had seen this too often. We made brief eyecontact and a bible’s worth of understanding passed between us. He understood the trajectory my life would likely take as a heroin addict. But I saw none of the likely scenarios, and whether out of ignorance, or from just plain old not giving a shit, it mattered not because when I was high, nothing bothered me anyway.
The following morning a group of addicts travelled by train to a military hospital located in Rome, where more tests were conducted. They confirmed it was in fact heroin I’d taken.
“You’ll be given a medical discharge,” said an officer when my name was finally called. “You’ll be given a train ticket back to wherever you’re from. But first you’ll go to a detox. You will be officially discharged from there.”
“I’d rather stay. Can I stay? I’ll volunteer for Iran, or is it Iraq? Italy has peace troops there, no?” I said this without any hesitation. I was afraid of returning home after only three days of service. “What do I tell my parents?”
“Tell them we found traces of blood in your urine, if you can’t tell the truth.” The officer said this mechanically, like he’d told the lie to countless other charges before me, themselves equally anxious about having to face their dishonor. The plan was simply to lie. Well, this I could do.
Scrutiny
Tori Haynes
Treetop and Saliva Tuber
Paul Lindholdt
“Probability of orgasm has been related to facial asymmetry.” – J. R. Voshell
That means the old phrenologists are clapping in their crypts, having a last blast. The gap-toothed Wife of Bath cackles, the lecher in her stirred to vindication by a pamphlet.
The saint with drooping nose and wee ears celebrates his secret life. The stroke victim, right cheek a’sag, came on too strong for his own good. No one knows the thunderous lava cone that’s building in the walleyed kindergarten teacher’s heart.
Erratic synapses, high blood halting thought, the insulin-dependents tremble above their custards, knowing as they do how passions flash from treetop and saliva tuber. Moaning magicians of glands and jangled nerve ends slick the ticklish tip.
Picasso’s sleeping woman in Le Rêve, phallus topping her bent head, sports six fingers on one long hand, all eleven of those digits active in her lap.
Toward Things Sunk in the Deep Earth and Dark Shadow
Celia Castaldo
pensando en la inmortalidad del cangrejo (thinking about the immortality of the crab)
Rowan Tate
to lay in the dirt long enough that the ants think i’m part of the earth, like the ahuehuete squatting near water, their toes boring into peat and beargrass. my god, the sun that chars my cheek is 170,000 years old. i am not dark like my mother. my body feels borrowed, machetona, skittish and flaco. to eat manzanilla. to let the insects bite. to watch skin open and grow back. air has no age, like the part of us outside time that stays the same age at which we became conscious. sometimes i realize my body is one continuous tube that things go into and come out of, i am a flute.
The Art of Closeness
Mary Morris
Near Istanbul, dolphins were seen again crossing the Bosphorus while feral boar wandered through pandemic Barcelona snorting at the feet of Gaudí’s Cathedral.
Rushing in from glade, herds of goats grazed through city parks in Wales.
Sing them back—the shy shore birds on Venice’s Treporti Peninsula, the monarch, junco, and honeybee.
Yes, praise the bees, buzzing with a force not heard since first we heard of their vanishing.
Dishwashing Dreams
Meg Neal
my mother, faulted
Maya Osaka
I see my mother’s cheekbones in the mountainside. It is in one spot on the Blue Ridge Parkway, rounding a sloping corner where the basalt and granite has been peeled from the cliff face. In the fissures, the plane of her bone, a continental collision. The crest of it, folded and faulted, tucked into the orbital opening of her eye. Three weeks ago, driving past this spot, we fought over how much of these mountains belong to me. I say none, that they reject me, she says they are a part of me. Still, down the Parkway, where these cliffs become her, we reach the continental divide– an invisible boundary cutting through the mountain range, marking the flow of water– and I feel that I am being pulled out to sea. First, by the current of the Catawba; then, the Wateree. East, to the Atlantic. Out, into the valleys. Beyond, in the marshland, the ridgeline at the horizon softens. I cannot see the mountainside.
Dad’s Wisdom
Martha Patterson
My Southern Dad – educated, Blue-eyed, tall and strongly-built, Came from a Tennessee farm, where He stoked fires and shot squirrels.
Humorous Dad – on a tough day I’m remembering his wise advice, And his pipe smoke, and his thrift, And I miss his gentle wisdom now,
Like, “Any thankless job is better for Its people,” or, “Everyone looks Pretty good when they’re only 20.” (He was aging, with some regret.)
My father saved his money, and Never cheated on his taxes, and Bought used cars to replace the old Ones -- in life was modesty defined.
Being Southern made him rather Mild-mannered, and when he met The novelist Eudora Welty, she said “I just knew you’re from the South!”
Beginning of the End
Angelina Uy
Art Contributors
Jordan Aldrich
Jordan Aldrich is an emerging artist with a passion for both illustration and fine arts. Working primarily in digital painting, print media, watercolor, and colored pencil, she is currently pursuing a BFA at UNC Charlotte. Jordan’s work spans from lighthearted illustrations to sophisticated pieces that explore themes of identity and grief.
Piper Allison
Piper Allison is an artist who expresses herself through painting. The stroke of a paintbrush allows her to express her sexuality and experiences on a canvas. Growing up in the small town of the Outer Banks, creating works of anything other than the beach was out of the norm. Her work is an artistic approach to the importance of expressing yourself even when it’s uncomfortable.
Giselle Carrasquilla
Giselle Carrasquilla is a Charlotte-based designer who discovered her passion for art at a young age. She is currently studying graphic design at UNC Charlotte and has worked in the print production industry for two years. Her artwork has been featured in multiple magazines and exhibitions including the Scholastic Gold Key show at the Mint Museum Uptown and the Congressional Art Competition at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art.
Cadaver
Cadaver is a UNC Charlotte Alumni now living in Morganton, North Carolina. She earned her Bachelor’s in Fine Art back in 2018. From her home studio, she creates paintings, block prints, and other artwork primarily featuring rabbits. Her most prominent body of work is the “Red Series,” and rabbits her most prominent motif. They are an ironic fertility symbol referring to the artist’s struggle to conceive children.
Celia Castaldo
Celia Castaldo is an interdisciplinary sculptural artist whose work spans cast metal, ceramics, and fibers. Castaldo is based in Charlotte and is pursuing a BFA in 3D Interdisciplinary Studies and a BA in Art History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where they will graduate in May 2025. Their deep engagement with and passion for art history informs and enriches their practice, drawing inspiration from a wide range of artistic movements and periods. These influences include prehistoric art, ukiyo-e prints, mid century surrealism, Art Nouveau, Neo-Dada, Fluxus, and the Ashcan School, to name a few.
Taylor Colson
Taylor was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. She is inspired by both the old and the new, and has a very strong relationship with nature and conservation. With a traditional background, she uses her degree in Graphic Design to help mix traditional art visual work to the modern medium and technology.
Rachel Coyne
Rachel Coyne is a writer and painter from Lindstrom, Minnesota.
Collage Cll
Collage
Notepad
Collage
Kelli Crockett
Kelli Crockett is a Charlotte-based multimedia artist and a recent alumnus of UNC Charlotte. A Painting and Digital Media BFA, Crockett was a College Honors student and minored in Art History. Her work focuses on the unreality of human emotions, the persistence of identity, and the fallacy of memory. Crockett has exhibited in Goodyear Arts, the Mint Museum, UNCC galleries, A4UC charity auctions, and more. Her ambitious BFA exhibition, a twenty-two painting collection titled The Fragility of Memory, was displayed in several exhibits throughout Charlotte. She is now an AP Art History and Ceramics teacher at Ardrey Kell High School and is maintaining her professional art practice, developing a new body of work, completing commissions, and volunteering in the community
Veronica Gallego Fleites
Veronic Gallego Fleites is a student at UNC Charlotte.
Tori Haynes
Tori Haynes is a North Carolina artist who is pursuing their BFA in Illustration at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Tori graduated high school from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts’ visual art program where they developed a love for visual storytelling. Their work often portrays unsetting imagery that reflects on identity and religion, as they grew up queer in a religious household. In the future, they hope to become a concept artist and receive their MFA in Illustration at the Savannah College of Art and Design.
Marc Kennedy
Marc Kennedy is a multi-medium artist/musician from Burlington NC.
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Under the name The Thick Un’s, he developed a unique digital art style by putting together everyday images into a new, and compelling approach to visual storytelling. Under the name Crumb Catcher, he’s been writing songs, and fronting the band as the singer/guitarist. The funky, garage punk outfit play live regularly.
Under the name Ethereal Alias he has an eclectic synthpop recording project and a budding line of merch as well.
Together these projects comprise different facets of Marc’s creative world.
Suhjung Kim
Carey Suhjung Kim is a budding artist from Seoul, South Korea. She takes inspiration from the intersection of ancient mythology, games, and contemporary art, and depicts images that are both enigmatic and thought-provoking. When not poring over detailed brushstrokes on canvas, Carey spends time taking leisurely walks by the Han River and staying up late to finish her precalculus homework.
Simon Lane
Simon Lane is a multimedia artist interested in identity and human consciousness. They often draw on a cast of palimpsestic characters and archetypes to explore these ideas. Lane is currently pursuing a degree in photography at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Meg Neal
Meg Neal is currently a senior at UNC Charlotte and is pursuing a BFA in Graphic Design. Her work focuses on organic shapes, nature, abstract imagery, and cool tones. As a graphic designer and an artist she brings skills from both fields into all of her work, her art informs her graphic design work and vice versa. While she mainly works in digital mediums such as photography or digital illustration, she also works with physical mediums such as ink or paint.
The
Richard Nuzzo
Richard Nuzzo is a graduate of UNC Charlotte with a passion for photography. Originally from Rocky Point, North Carolina, Richard’s work captures the beauty in both ordinary and extraordinary moments, drawing inspiration from diverse environments and experiences. His photography reflects a deep appreciation for the art of storytelling through visual imagery.
Katherine Pacheco
Katherine Pacheco attends UNC Charlotte. Majoring in Digital Media, she is a first generation college student and a Hispanic woman. Born and raised in Troutman, North Carolina, she has always appreciated the art in her life and hopes to have big accomplishments. Transferring to UNC Charlotte has helped her broaden her perspective and make connections with other students who are in the same field.
Horia Pop
Horia Pop was born in Romania in 1984. He is an author, a filmmaker and a photographer. His poetry, short stories and photography can be seen in various reviews in the US and elsewhere. He shoots in black and white, leans close to asceticism and closer to strangeness
Lily Sadoff
Lily Sadoff is a third year art student at UNC Charlotte. She is pursuing a BFA with a concentration in photography. She is interested in portraiture, although she has done many types of photography. Sadoff enjoys fashion and music, which heavily influences her work. After graduation, she hopes to work as a creative director or photographer for a company or magazine.
Briana Sosa-Trejo
Briana Sosa-Trejo is currently a student at UNCC studying English and Math. They are a self taught artist that works in all sorts of mediums, but they particularly love graphite and acrylic. They grew up in a small town in the mountains of Western North Carolina, but their roots lie in Mexico. Their Hispanic culture, surroundings, and experiences have influenced everything they create
Ever Templeton
Ever Templeton is an emerging artist from Western North Carolina. She is currently finishing her BFA at UNC Charlotte. Her main mediums are photography and painting, but she is known for exploring and experimenting with many other modes of expression. She particularly enjoys film photography, especially testing expired film and working with old restored cameras. She hopes through her work that viewers are encouraged to notice things that are happening around them constantly, and realize just how magical the forgotten can be.
Angelina Uy
Angelina Blaise Uy is a sophomore at UNC Charlotte pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a concentration in Illustration and working as both an Illustrator for the Niner Times and freelance gigs. Angelina relies on art’s narrative capabilities to connect with a larger audience. Her current work aims to express her relationship with faith and femininity, retelling biblical narratives and portraying experiences of objectification, sexualization, and abuse.
Ernest Williamson III
Ernest Williamson III is an artist living in Tennessee. His artwork has appeared in numerous journals including New England Review, Fourteen Hills, Columbia Journal, and Penn Review. His poetry has appeared in over 200 journals including Roanoke Review, Pinyon Review, and Poetry Life and Times.
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Literature Contributors
Michael Amatulli
Michael Amatulli’s writing captures the essence of his experiences, and his work is concerned with struggle and the human condition. Michael’s characters embody the trauma of his lifestyle and speak with a voice at once authentic and bold. Amatulli’s truth is laid bare for the reader to experience.
Ken Been
Ken Been’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in numerous journals internationally. In addition to poetry, he has written speeches, scripts for live television and much more. However, he has left that type of writing behind and devotes his words to poetry. He is from Detroit.
Dominic Blanco
Dom Blanco is Cuban American writer originally from Miami, Florida, now based in Chicago, Illinois. He holds a BA in Philosophy from DePaul University and an MFA from Randolph College. His poetry has appeared in various publications, including The Brooklyn Review, Rappahannock Review, New Feathers Anthology, Novus Literary Arts Journal, Inverted Syntax, Cathexis Northwest Press, and The Allegory Ridge Anthology. He is the recipient of generous support from the Nancy Craig Blackburn Program.
Philip Brunetti
Philip Brunetti writes innovative fiction and poetry and much of his work has been published in various online or paper literary magazines including The Boiler, The Wax Paper, and Identity Theory. His debut novel Newer Testaments, published in 2020 by Atmosphere Press, has been described in The Independent Book Review as ‘an innovative existential novel told through hallucinatory poetics’ and is available for purchase at https://www.philipbrunetti.com.
Rohan Buettel
Rohan Buettel lives in Canberra, Australia. His haiku appear in various Australian and international journals (including Presence, Cattails and The Heron’s Nest). His longer poetry appears in numerous journals, including Rattle, The Goodlife Review, Rappahannock Review, Passengers Journal, Reed Magazine, Meanjin, Meniscus and Quadrant.
Sarah Bultot
Sarah Bultot is a recent graduate in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews and an aspiring screenwriter. She primarily writes about gardens as personal and social spaces, as cyclical places of nurturing and inevitable loss.
Rick Bursky
Rick Bursky is a Los Angeles poet who often writes while smoking a cigar, and sometimes sips Bourbon as part of the process. Bursky also teaches poetry for The Writer’s Program at UCLA Extension.
Shauri Cherie
Shauri Cherie occasionally writes poetry and nonfiction when she isn’t within the literary femurs and ulnas of Exposed Bone. She is easily excited by travel, curry, and stingrays, and she’s surprisingly feral at concerts. Stars, the ocean, and the places she’s visited frequent her writing; she enjoys imagery more than just about anything else. Her work can be found in Trace Fossils Review, Sink Hollow, Midnight Chem, and others.
Matthew Daddona
Matthew Daddona is an Academy of American Poets-prize winner and the author of the collection House of Sound. His first novel, The Longitude of Grief, was published in May 2025. He has published poetry, prose, and journalism in dozens of publications and currently works full-time as a ghostwriter. When he’s not ‘ghosting,’ he also volunteers as a firefighter, shucks oysters at a seaside shack, and sits on the board of his local library.
Paul Lindholdt
Paul Lindholdt is professor of English at Eastern Washington University, where he teaches American literature, environmental humanities, and poetry. His writing has been recognized by the Academy of American Poets, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Washington Center for the Book. His latest book is Interrogating Travel: Guidance from a Reluctant Tourist (Louisiana State University Press, 2023). Find him online at https://inside.ewu.edu/plindholdt/.
Megan Denese Mealor
Megan Denese Mealor resides in Jacksonville, Florida with her husband, son, and three cats. Nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize as well as the 2023 Best of the Net, her writing has been featured in hundreds of literary journals worldwide. She has also authored three poetry collections: “Bipolar Lexicon” (Unsolicited Press, 2018); “Blatherskite” (Clare Songbirds Publishing House, 2019); and “A Mourning Dove’s Wishbone” (Cyberwit, 2022). A lifelong survivor of bipolar disorder, Megan is a vocal advocate for promoting mental health healing through the arts.
G.W. McClary
The author is a native of Ohio. He has his B.A. in English literature, and his stories are appearing in several magazines, much to his delight. His collection of Japanese novels in translation is his most prized possession.
Mary Morris
Mary Morris’s poems have appeared in North American Review, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Prairie Schooner. She is the author of four books of poetry. A recipient of the Rita Dove Award and Western Humanities Review Poetry Prize, she has been invited to read her poems at the Library of Congress, which aired on NPR. Kwame Dawes selected her work for American Life in Poetry from the Poetry Foundation.
Maya Osaka
Maya Osaka is a fourth-year student at UNC Charlotte pursuing majors in English and Philosophy, as well as a minor in Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies. Although a lover of writing at large, she is particularly drawn to ecopoetics and all things nature writing.
Laura Palomba
Laura Palomba taught ESL and has done stints as a freelance journalist and speechwriter.
Martha Patterson
Martha Patterson’s 27-story collection “Small Acts of Magic” was published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. Her work has also been published in more than 20 anthologies and journals, and her plays have been produced in 21 states and eight countries. She has two degrees in Theatre, from Mount Holyoke College and Emerson College, and lives in Boston, Massachusetts. She loves being surrounded by her books, radio, and laptop.
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Kenneth Pobo
Kenneth Pobo (he/him) is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press) and Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers). His work has appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Amsterdam Quarterly, Nimrod, Mudfish, Hawaii Review, and elsewhere.
Elizabeth Rosell
Elizabeth Rosell lives in Northern Ontario, Canada, with her cat Belle. She has spent her life working in the non-profit field, inspired by her own mental health issues with borderline personality disorder. Elizabeth has been published in Amsterdam Quarterly, The Amphibian, The Argyle, and Yale’s The Perch. When not writing, she spends her spare time crafting and baking.
Jade Silva
Jade Silva, born and raised in Hawai’i, will soon graduate with a B.A. in English from the University of Hawai’i at Hilo. Her work has been featured in Assignment Magazine, Ulu Review, Kanilehua Magazine, and Anuenue Review. She enjoys crocheting scarves and writing for her school’s newspaper.
Martha Stallman
Pushcart prize nominee Martha Stallman’s work has appeared in The James Joyce Quarterly, Joyce Studies Annual, The Offing, Electric Literature, and Playboy. She lives and writes in Austin, Texas.
Richard Stimac
Richard Stimac has published a poetry book Bricolage (Spartan Press), two poetry chapbooks, and one flash fiction chapbook. In his work, Richard explores time and memory through the landscape and humanscape of the St. Louis region.
Rowan Tate
Rowan Tate is a Romanian multimedia artist (poet, essayist, composer, visual artist) probing the roles of identity, memory, reality, and history in narrative.
Kelli Weldon
Kelli Weldon was born in Louisiana and now resides in Texas. Find her poetry in Black Moon Magazine, Boats Against The Current, Duck Duck Mongoose Magazine, Eclectica Magazine, Frost Meadow Review, Remington Review, and Rewrite The Stars Review.
Thank You
Contributors Thank you for choosing Nova as the home for your work! We hope everyone loves your submissions as much as we do.
Kelly Merges, Jodorrian Taylor, and Justin Paprocki
Thank you for your devotion and dedication to Nova and Student Niner Media. We can not thank you enough for the guidance and support you’ve continued to give our student leaders!
Laurie Cuddy
Thank you for sending us our updated budget sheets and staying on top of all things numbers. We’d lose count without you!
Bianca Fruscello and Theron Vreeland
Thank you to our Student Niner Media office assistants for your printer expertise, paper trimmer ninjutsu, guidance for our million questions, and most of all, your friendship.
iTek Graphics Thank you for your commitment and diligence to making our dreams real and tangible! You have been a loyal partner to us for years.
Popp Martin Student Union Art Gallery Thank you for bringing our contributors’ work off the page and into our lives.
Building and Environmental Services Staff Thank you for your continued support in keeping our office space and workplace pristine.
Family, Friends, and Loved Ones Thank you for not sending a missing persons request when we disappeared into the office for weeks at a time — and thank you for making us the people that we are.
The Charlotte Community Thank you for trading, hoarding, and reading Nova every spring semester. We hope this issue is extra special to you.
Nova N
MEET THE STAFF
Zachary
Jenkins Associate Editor
Skylar Hatch Editor in Chief
Skylar Hatch is a senior studying English with two minors in Technical & Professional Writing and Journalism. Skylar spends her time writing songs on her guitar, drinking coffee on her back porch, reading, journaling, and studying at local coffee shops with her friends. She is happiest when she’s listening to Fleetwood Mac’s Live 1977 Rumours album… specifically on a cool, autumn morning. Add her @skyghatch on Instagram.
Zachary Jenkins is a junior honors student studying English and Computer Science. He has worked at Nova for three consecutive issues as a content editor and as associate editor. His writing can be found in several journals and he is the recipient of the North Carolina short fiction prize. He is currently at work on his thesis American Tableaux, which is expected to be in print this coming spring. He is a constant presence in the Student Niner Media offices: phantom-like and incorporeal, he wanders about, Raspberry Celsius in hand, muttering to himself.
Matthew Caskey Editor
Layne Worley Lead Designer
Layne Worley is a senior Graphic Design and Photography student at UNC Charlotte. In the few hours a week they’re not on campus, you can find Layne vegging out with his cats and a good (or bad) horror movie, or slamming at a local show. You can see their other exploits on Instagram @dirtgh0ul.
Matthew Caskey is a first-year graduate student studying English with a concentration in Creative Writing. When he’s not propping his feet up and doing nothing for hours at a time, he enjoys playing puzzle games, hiking, trying new soda flavors, and writing six-page papers two hours before they’re due. Currently, he’s working on the prospectus for his novel, a work which will either someday be published or incinerated.
Alyssa Fowler
Editor
Alyssa is a second-year student studying Political Science and English with a minor in Legal Studies. As a content editor, Alyssa is able to channel her love of writing and reading to review submissions. In the future, Alyssa hopes to use the skills that she has developed to continue her own writing career and one day, publish a novel. She is excited to be a member of the 2024-2025 Nova team and is excited to see the magazine’s development.
Ben Stadler Designer
Jennie Keophaphone Designer
Jennie Keophaphone is a senior majoring in graphic design and minoring in interactive programming. When she’s not hanging out with friends she partakes in retail therapy, playing cookie run kingdom, and photography. You may also find her adding to her notes app that lists over 100 restaurant recommendations. You can add her on instagram at @jenniej.ne.
Ben Stadler is in his second year in the Graphic Design program. Working at Nova has given him great insight into the iterative design process, while also allowing him to flex creative muscles that classes don’t explore. He’s a big fan of obscure music. He’s working through a backlog of single-player games. He likes taking pictures and old video cameras. You can find him playing with those at @ben.stadler on Instagram.
Jonathan Revoir Website Manager
Alex Schauble Promotions Coordinator
Jonathan Revoir is a senior studying Computer Science with a concentration in Data Science. When Jonathan isn’t hiding out in a small tunnel he constructed under the desks in the Nova office, you can find him idling around campus in search of a free drink from the Red Bull truck. He also enjoys listening to hyper-pop, playing video games, and theorizing about what he would do if he were a horse. You can reach him on Instagram @jonathan_revoir.
Alex Schauble is a junior at UNC Charlotte studying graphic design. She has always been interested in the arts, and can’t see herself doing anything else. Alex has been with Nova for two years now. Her sophomore year she was a volunteer on the design team, and she is now a promotions coordinator. In her free time, Alex likes to sing and play piano, play video games, and hang out with her friends. You can follow her on Instagram @alex.schauble or check out her portfolio by going to https://alexschauble.myportfolio.com/
Mayah Clark Volunteer
Mayah Clark is a junior honors Anthropology student minoring in Art History. It is her second year volunteering for the Nova promotions team. Mayah is working on an Honors thesis in skeletal anthropology and ethics of anthropology. She can be seen aimlessly wandering around campus with headphones blasting. You can also find her on Instagram @throughmayahseyes.
