Murphy Square 2011

Š Augsburg College 2011

EDITORS Editor: Ted Conover Associate Editor: Brianna Olson-Carr Layout Editor/Cover Designer: Sergio Monterrubio

LITERARY ART BOARD Betsy Collins Ted Conover Samantha Guck Daley Konchar Farr Brianna Olson-Carr Bryan Rassat

VISUAL ART BOARD Betsy Collins Rachel Kelly Joel Menk Sergio Monterrubio

FACULTY ADVISOR Cary Waterman

TABLE OF CONTENTS 7 8 11 12 13 14 16 17 18 19 20 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 47 50 51 52 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 70 71 4 Murphy Square

Call to arms –Brianna Olson-Carr PDX mixtape–Elise Estrada The Deer – Steven Saari The Delphinium – Samantha Guck Gay Man Walking – Drew DeGennaro Hot Dogs and Sunsets – Ella Robinson Ice Fishing – Ellery Davis Depression – Ella Robinson October – Elle Thoni It would be time for blooms – Betsy Collins My Mother Loved Turquoise – Judy Johnson Eintou –Mychal Batson Afro Deli – Brianna Olson-Carr Cad – Adam Spanier Pumpkins – Caitlin Walsh Tangled – Rachel Kelly Daily Brushing – Kate Woolever Owl –Maureen Allen Vulture – Maureen Allen Running Out – Sergio Monterrubio Seattle and Spring – Anna Fuller Lightrail #1 –Betsy Collins Faces of Gulu –Sarah Jergenson Daybreak, Prachuap, Thailand –Kate Woolever Kirana – Melissa Herrick Stained Glass Elephante –Aaron Becquer Saying Hello/Crown on the Grave – Betsy Collins Feather –Joel Menk Bamboo – Caitlin Walsh For Keith – Sergio Monterubbio Yellow Chair Small –Nora Dahlberg Untitled – Colin Stanhill Paradise Now – D.E. Green Fur – Elise Estrada I was at Woofstock – Eric Moen Golf Clubs – William Trembly Junior Year – Mychal Batson Insecurity – Ellery Davis Elliot’s Window – Julia Olson I Ain’t Yrr Jemima –Drew DeGennaro Crumble – Kevin Butcher Here’s How it Happened – Eric Moen A Word From Another World – Colin Irvine What Time is It? – Laura Morales A Sunset From the Dock – William Trembly The Casualty Speaks – Dustyn Hessie Switch – Jayne Carlson Catching Delhi on Diwali – Ted Conover Strom Dream – Samantha Guck Sestinas Are Weird – Jayne Carlson

INTRODUCTION For all of our self-prescribed visions of what an education at Augsburg really means for students, there has been nothing more apparent to me than the fact that we are storytellers.

And why not?

Especially as fledgling artists and thinkers, we become products of our environments –and what better environment to inhabit, to observe and soak in with eager minds than the colorful array that is Cedar-Riverside? This neighborhood in which Augsburg has been so neatly plopped is an opportunity to make art. I know that for me, Minneapolis has been what Paris was for Hemmingway: a physical space to be amazed at, to become infatuated with to the point where you have to do something about it. Call me a hopeless sentimental if you wish, but this itch to make art, this virtue of representing our space with pen, paintbrush, chisel or creative suite, this is what we live for.

This year’s Murphy Square is a tribute to our education and the spaces we inhabit as we learn, to our community, to Augsburg and the world around it. Whatever that means to you personally, whether it’s relishing a kraut-laden bratwurst from the greasy kitchen of the Wienery on Cedar, biking along the crowded lanes of the Greenway full of smiling, helmetdonned riders, or lying in the cool grass of Murphy Park with a paperback novel and a cigarette. If your education means walking down the sunny streets of Windhoek, Namibia, practicing your Spanish in a noisy, colorful market in Nicaragua, or snapping pictures of street performers in Prague, I hope you can find evocation in this little book you hold in your hands. Our journal is for everyone to enjoy.

The artists and writers who contributed to this year’s Murphy Square are incredibly diverse. There are fiction writers, poets, spoken word poets, sketchers, photographers, digital artists and painters. We are a wild and different bunch but none of us, I’m sure, is capable of ever stopping. We are zealous and unrelenting in our lust for representing whatever falls into our gaze or into our hands.

So we will never stop, and this book is the product of our endless toiling. Take it in your hands. Feel the texture of its paper and flip through the pages as you wish. Read the poems, the stories; trace each sentence. Consume it. Like our community, it inhabits physical space.

Its lines and images wait for anyone who decides to pick up a copy and experience the writing and art within the leaves, patient, but eager and willing.

Welcome, all, to Murphy Square 2011.

Ted Conover Editor in Chief

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Dear Reader: Welcome to the 36th issue of Murphy Square! Augsburg College has had a literary and arts magazine since 1929, but the magazine has been called Murphy Square only since 1975. The writers and artists in this 2011 issue join all those published over the past 82 years in continuing the tradition of excellence in the arts at Augsburg. Read and enjoy!

Cary Waterman Murphy Square Advisor

Murphy Square would like to congratulate the winners and honorable mention of the 2011 Engman Award for excellence in creative writing: Winners in Fiction: Judy Johnson: “Old Things” Ted Conover: “Dance of the Sharptail” Winners in Creative Non-Fiction: Judy Johnson: “Mother Loved Turquoise” and “Mass for the Dead” Winners in Poetry: Drew DeGenerro: “Gay Man Walking” and “Black Butterflies” Elise Estrada: “Fur” and “Holiday” Sammie Guck: “The Delphinium” Honorable Mention in Fiction: Dustyn Hessie: “Snow in Translation” Marilyn Packel: “We Can Walk Through a Corner” Honorable Mention in Creative Non-Fiction: Eric Moen: “I was at Woofstock” Jayne Carlson: “No Regular Postcard” Honorable Mention in Poetry: Betsy Collins “it would be time for blooms” Jayne Carlson: “Sestinas are Weird” Dustyn Hessie: “Big Words”

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call to arms

Brianna Olson-Carr i have seen the best minds of my generation scribbling on the backs of cardboard boxes and self-proclaimed sustainable paper products. yet i have been crawling through muck to read poetry and fiction and words by peers. it takes visibility (what do you want, an elephant with a hand painted banner?) and first year education (did they not see the elephant?) to produce for use, a work of art. and yet, even with the elephant in the room, thirty seven years is not legacy enough. well, is this enough: one manifesto, handcrafted by two zealous editors one auburn krakken, ready to swallow the establishment six professors of english, armored and ready thirty silent supporters, whose presence was our roaring cheer one hundred and eighty-two english students. do the numbers add up?

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PDX Mix Tape Elise Estrada

You and Mari are twenty-two and went to high school together, but only since last summer have you become friends, during those months of jewels glinting in the scattered nights, sun shining so bright you never took off your oversized, owl-eyed glasses from San Francisco. You go to her place; the little white bungalow of a doll house on 9th and M. You’re planning a road trip up to Portland, past the lush greens of Big Lagoon, through the treacherous terrain of Grants Pass from the 101 to the 5, headed up to Oregon. From your foggy hometown of Eureka, California, it’s over four hundred miles away and you need a soundtrack for endless hours of road, the length of an entire state. In Mari’s tiny room full of records and CDs and tapes, where you have spent so many nights, drinking, dancing, crying and fighting, you mix cocktails. The clink of ice cubes like glass beads, too-sweet cranberry overwhelmed by the bite of vodka. You play records. Mission of Burma, the Replacements, Smog, Redd Kross.

You make this tape to drive up to Portland because you are falling in love. Because you found a lean Sicilian skater who is friends with all your friends, with green eyes and feathered lashes, soft and gentle as a deer. You say good-bye to Mama who was sick with the dark assassin of cancer, but has been getting better, hair growing back brand new, silver swirls and curls that she never had before. You make a mix tape and head north because you are falling in love, because he asked you to come. On a misty morning you start driving. A February day, as the soft sky faded to a violet-blue bruise. The soundtrack for a drive becomes the soundtrack for Portland. For Eureka. For L.A. And everything in between.

If There Is Something Roxy Music With the stiff, posed pin-up girl on the cover, it starts with jangly guitar, almost old country like, but shifts and builds into something hypnotic, narcotic. Layered and unfolding, it blooms like petals as Bryan Ferry sings in an echo, “Takes me right back / when you were young.” Downtown Portland, the City of Roses, pouring rain falls like sheets of glass so thick you can’t see three feet out the windshield. Leaning into the Sicilian, he looks at you with those green deer eyes, his timing humming like a heartbeat—makes you laugh and it feels like freedom, lets you cry and you don’t need to hide.

When I’m With You Flaming Lips The clear sky blossoms with budding stars and he drives down the streets of South East, wet with Oregon rain. The slow turns and soothing tilts of the car almost rock you to sleep.

Back from the misty spray of Multnomah Falls, thirty miles out of town in a boundless sea of green, free from strip malls and gas stations and the soot of city grime. Years later you are reminded of this day, as a picture of that waterfall slams a mean cramp into your chest, stings your eyes with beads of held back tears. But tonight after PBR tallboys, you both listen to the words of an old favorite band, “All that I know is my mind is blown / when I’m with you.” The soft melody building into a crescendo of reverb and feedback. Weeks later when you get home, you show Mama a picture of that day—arms slung around his neck, his toolong hair, punch drunk grin, you popping out bright against the Pacific Northwest ferns, a sweatshirt the cool aqua color of tropical sky. She looks at the picture and starts to cry. “You look so happy,” she says. You say you hope they can meet.

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Be Hit Smog Thinking of all the other men you’ve ever left, and how you don’t want this story to be the same. Low and haunted guitar in a minor key, splash cymbals count out irregular rhythms.

A sardonic voice sings, “Every girl I’ve ever loved has left me / because I wouldn’t do it / Ba-ba bruise ‘em / you’ll never lose ‘em.” The sucker punch of love. The collision of sex. A knock-out-fall-down hit straight to the heart. You’re always walking away without turning back, escaping everything that felt tied down and trapped. But this could be different. He feels like something brand new.

Big Sky The Kinks Sixties garage rock blends with simple harmonies to make a song you never want to hear again. Back from Portland, this tape is still in your car, playing in loops—like a mantra, like a memory. You are in bed, sticky in dirty clothes, from a night spent on the hard carpet of hospital floor, after bringing Mama to the cruel, fluorescent glare of the ER. You have barely fallen into the tangled mess of sheets when you get a call to “Come back, hurry, she’s almost gone.” Driving through the deep and endless night, it is this song that comes on halfway to the hospital and when you hear the words they sing—“One day we’ll be free / but when I feel that the world is too much for me / I think of Big Sky and nothing matters much to me”—a moment is born that becomes tattooed onto the deepest part of your worn out heart.

Good to Me & Cigarettes and Coffee Otis Redding Months later, an interminable night like all the others—crying in your sleep, haunted with grief, so late it’s early and the night sky is bleeding out its blues—the Sicilian lies with you in the faded dark, still but for breath and he doesn’t have to say a word. His presence is the softest sway of an ocean rocking you to sleep. He has come down from Portland, to Eureka, and you ask him “Please can you stay?” After the endless hours not asleep and not awake, the stereo sounds. Slow, almost mournful horns swell with a gentle guitar strum.

“I don’t know what you got baby / but you’re so good to me.” It drifts and slips so easily into the next song, still with the plaintive harmonies, they could be one and the same. “It’s so early in the morning / about a quarter till three / and my heart cries out, love at last I have found you / since I’ve met you / baby since I’ve met you.” He stays, leaving Portland.

Because you ask him and because it’s what he wants. One of the many threads that will bind your lives, from woven tapestries to tangled knots.

Gimme Danger Iggy and the Stooges In a metallic melody, the lead guitar swells into a primal beat. The throbbing, haunted rhythm drumming loops into your brain. It’s two years later and you threw it all away, drove down the endless stretch of California to the feral streets of L.A. Off the 5 onto Sunset Blvd, evening traffic stuttering, slow moving and choked, surrounded by the buzzing hum of static on the street. With the fog of smog, packs of untamed teenagers blocking the block, rich hipsters staring into the blue glow of phones, a spare-changing mess of a man—stinging the eyes with the smell gas station vodka—this city is wild with heat, bursting with breath. Pulsing, raw. An anatomical heart, saturated with all the life and death of flowing blood from an unstaunched wound. “Gimme danger / little stranger and I’ll feel your disease / there’s nothing left alive / just a pair of glassy eyes.” Your brain falls numb. The soft fuzz of relief.

Pluming pirouettes and arabesques of drugs in your blood. “There’s nothing in my dreams / but some ugly memories / hits me like the ocean breeze.” You threw it all away, left the 9 Murphy Square

green grace of deer eyes and the forest rains of the Pacific Northwest. You threw it all away.

For what? For these savage nights and broken days, to live and die on the streets of L.A. Old Flame Arcade Fire Foot stomps open into a wheeze of accordion, as the guitar beats out notes like it could play a piano. A melancholic howl—“You knew in five minutes / and I knew in a sentence. A thrum of violin rises to the sweep of the chorus: So why do we go through all of this again? / Your eyes are fluttering / such pretty wings / a moth flyin’ into me / same old flame again / it never ends.” The cover of the album uses the fine lines of a turquoise pen, the intricate motif of stained glass patterns, Victorian scrawl. The Sicilian used to draw for you like that, delicately tangled hearts and skulls and flowers with your name. They sit in a box, covered and avoided, dodged like a bad street full of trespassing memories. Because after you left— all the calls he never answered, all the messages he never returned. And then after days and weeks and months, after you’ve gotten used to this rupture of the heart, this empty space, sloppily patched and plugged, a letter comes and he says, “Will you come back home?” For so long that was all you wanted to hear. But still. You freeze. Where do you stay, where do you go? Do you stay? Or do you go?

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The Deer

Steven Saari Fading hope in silent snow.

Mourning doe, the eye set stone.

Balance dawn with moving on.

Covered fawn, the frozen gone.

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The Delphinium Samantha Guck

Towering out of a thin necked vase, the second day. inside the water level lowers and is fringed with murk like a pond behind the glass and above the blooms tower crushed purple and a bleeding blue exploding stars tapering to the tadpole buds that press together tightly and wait you said by afternoon petals would begin to swoon and fall the counter coated with the damp and silky plumes but that was yesterday and here we are today: the telephone, the closed doors that lead to windows of sunlight, and me and the cut stems on the counter that live on like a brave sick aunt with a fragile strength that I am afraid to touch.

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GAY MAN WALKING Drew DeGennaro You wore your testis like a badge around the thighs your cock was a gun used for doggy style sex I hate crimes the kind that kill faggots like maggots please ask, do tell yell it loud and proud I wear women’s underpants weep and slow dance and sing show tunes please hate me because my balls have not dropped on Hiroshima forgive me crimes let me live like real boys do take us out of concentration camps so we can stretch our legs

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Hot Dogs and Sunsets Ella Robinson

As her toes wiggled deeper into the earth, soft and damp, she wondered whether or not he’d come looking for her. The meadow she was standing at the edge of didn’t look particularly appealing, overgrown weeds scattered amongst dead grass, an abandoned red Schwinn bicycle left on its side in the middle of the clearing. But when the sun was setting beyond the surrounding oak trees it was almost beautiful and she liked standing at the edge of it and imagining all of the people who had stood in the same spot watching the same sunset before her.

It was a quarter of a mile from their house to the clearing, and once he got off work she knew he’d figure out where she was. She didn’t have much time on her own, and she was determined to enjoy it. Her stomach stuck out awkwardly, out of place on her normally thin frame. The elastic sewn into the waistband of her pants had done wonders, but the Guns N’ Roses T-shirt she insisted on wearing even though it was now three sizes too small failed to cover her ever-growing abdomen. Clumsily, she lowered herself to the ground with one hand cradling her stomach and the other feeling blindly for balance behind her. She let out a low puff of air, blowing her cheeks out.

“What do you think, baby?” she cooed softly, “This is where Momma goes to think.”

She idly picked a stray daisy and tucked it behind her ear. She heard the crunch of distant footsteps on dry leaves. Shading her eyes from the fading sunlight, Annabelle stretched out her legs and sighed. She stayed very still as a hornet buzzed a few feet away, holding her breath.

“Thought you’d be here,” her soon-to-be husband announced from behind her, the footsteps growing louder. A few moments later he stopped beside her and crouched down with his hands on his knees. When she didn’t answer he didn’t seem to mind.

“Sarah wants to know if we’re going to the memorial service tonight.”

She picked another daisy, with more force this time, and didn’t look at him.

“Jake would have wanted us to go---” She stiffened and glared at him, resentment written clearly in both her expression and the way she seemed to curl away from him.

“You don’t know the first thing about what Jake would have wanted,” she snapped, dropping the daisy and pushing herself awkwardly to her feet. He rose with her, reaching out a hand to help her. She swatted it away forcefully.

“Don’t touch me.”

Slipping into her flip-flops she ignored a little kick from the baby and started marching along the path that led back to their trailer, Frank following close behind, her flip flops thwacking a steady thump-thump-thump against the ground beneath them.

“Belle, wait----” She ripped off a branch that was hanging in the middle of the trail, throwing it over her shoulder. Frank caught it and threw it aside.

“I’m only trying to help, Belle. Jake was my friend too.”

Annabelle let out a small hiccup of resentment, “He wasn’t my friend Frank, he was my fiancé.”

“Yes, he was. And now I’m your fiancé. So why don’t we start acting engaged, for once?”

She fell silent, angrily pushing away every branch that was unfortunate enough to fall into her path. The sun was setting quickly, and the mosquitoes were almost unbearable. She 14 Murphy Square

heard Frank swatting at them behind her.

“I’m sorry,” Annabelle finally said, turning around to throw him a quick, strained smile, “what time is the memorial?”

“Eight,” he answered as their trailer came into view ahead of them, “Your mother said she’d come if we did and Sarah offered to give the three of us a ride.”

She nodded as she climbed the steps into their mobile, opening the door and letting it slam shut before Frank could slip in behind her. He sighed.

“How long are you going to punish me for coming home when Jake didn’t?”

Pulling her T-shirt up over her head, she moved to the other end of the trailer and dropped it into the small laundry hamper that she and Frank shared. Rifling through their shared closet, she pulled out a black, shapeless dress and slipped into it before kicking off her kakis. She gathered her hair into a loose ponytail, leaving two strands to frame the sides of her face.

“I don’t want to talk about this. Do you want hamburgers or hot dogs for dinner?”

“I think they’ll have food at the memorial.”

“I’ll make hot dogs, they don’t take as long to cook. What do you think about corn?”

“Belle, you don’t need to make anything. They’ll have food at the memorial.”

“They never have good food at those kinds of things. Somebody always brings casserole and I don’t like casserole. Plus, it’s at eight. Who eats at eight?”

“I’m sure somebody will bring something other than casserole.”

“Better safe than sorry,” she sing- songed, “I’m going to make two hot dogs and if you don’t want one I’ll eat both.”

Shaking his head, he moved to zip up her dress, planting a chaste kiss on the nape of her neck when he was done. Annabelle ignored the gesture, instead feigning a deep concentration as she opened the refrigerator. He sat on the edge of the bed, watching her get out a bag of hotdogs and take it outside to their grill-- ignoring him as she had nearly every day since she’d agreed to marry him.

As the screen door slammed shut, she let out a breath that she didn’t realize she’d been holding and held the bag of hot dogs perhaps a little bit too tight as she gritted her teeth.

First came the charcoal, then the lighter fluid, then the match.

She hated lighting fires ever since she’d found out how Jake died, but the thought of spending another minute in the trailer with Frank made her queasy, so here she was, lighting a fire. As the flames licked the metal grate she felt another small kick from the baby, as if it hated the fire, too. She wondered if it would be able to tell that Frank wasn’t its real father.

Jake’s term in Iraq would have been over by now. If his Humvee hadn’t driven over that land mine, he’d be standing in front of this grill, heating it up for her. Frank had been home on leave when it happened, and after two months he’d asked Annabelle to marry him. She said yes, knowing that the baby needed a father.

As the grill heated up she tore at the hot dog packaging with her teeth and grabbed a pair of tongs that hung on the side of the grill. She stole a glance at the trailer, where she heard Frank talking quietly to someone on the phone. She winced at the soft hiss that the meat made as she placed it over the coals.

She saw the rest of her life stretching out before her, all the thinly-veiled disgust and suppressed repulsion; saw how it would slowly eat away at their makeshift family until there was nothing good left between them. She saw all the small fights and annoyances build up into something ugly, something that would eventually tear them apart. She saw it, and she wondered whether the alternative would be worse—scrounging for cash on her own, trying to be both a mother and a father; sleep walking through life with exhaustion hovering over her, threatening to destroy everything she’d worked so hard to create.

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Ice Fishing Ellery Davis

Usually, the needle is inserted into the inside of the elbow, which houses a hub of major circulatory intersections, close to the surface of the skin. This time, I remembered to ask the nurse if he wouldn’t mind putting the IV in my forearm instead, not wanting a bent elbow to lose the battle to a straight needle yet again.

Jeff the nurse lost the vein, like some people lose their place while reading. The surface revealed no leads, false or otherwise. Mere millimeters underneath, my vein dodged his needle like reverse magnetization, Jeff’s eyes shifting across my forearm with an urgency that his voice didn’t betray as the drip of blood dwindled and stopped in the vacuum tube.

The surface of my skin has decided to frame the turbulence that occurred under the surface. There is a frozen pool of purple and yellow that looks like a morbid tattoo. It has already begun to melt.

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Depression Ella Robinson

Underneath the covers In the middle of the day, Light filtering through the fabric As you trace the stitches, And blink slowly Breathing in and out In a steady rhythm, With your cat curled up On a pillow beside you.

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October Elle Thoni

You are no Christmas angel, your halo is woolen and woven with cigarette smoke.

Your shoulders too, once mantels of sunlight now gesture dismally toward your weeping wings.

What dust! It clings so stiff and solemn to your Blues-man boots, the dust of death, of those who have walked that ground before us.

Autumn arrives, mid-funeral expecting to be fed by every tree. My own boots scratch against their offerings, green and gold, reminding me that change is the natural way of things. I walk on, ghosting down the Franklin Avenue, seeing bicyclists pass like glass-blown ornaments.

There is a light on in the upstairs window and the shape of a child staring out at me. I ask his forgiveness: babe, please forgive me. We are not dead, we are only dreaming about death. To you, it may look as though the world is ending – but it’s just the season we’re passing through. * * * * * I saw a child with a light on in the upstairs window and thought that I saw an angel. But which one was the angel – the child or the light?

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it would be time for blooms Betsy Collins

it would be time for blooms after melted snow found its way down tinyspaces in wood and dirt and ice began to crack beneath the skater’s skates. doldrums frozen space in time of time and wrenching twisting (freeing) of the feet in such slushyslushasslush could be to trickle on to doormats of the home and sprinkle into stains inside wood floors for you are banished once again to the outside (sideout) (hideout) to stumble through the puddles that swallow whole so you can get to know the trees of root and tangle in the world between (the seasons) of preservation and of rebirth and you can finally rest in the sticky goo of earth.

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My mother loved turquoise Judy Johnson

It was an odd thing to remember just as my friend Carol pressed her thick brass necklace into my hand while we were having lunch.

“I want you to have this,” Carol said. “I was sitting in church this morning and my mother said ‘Give this to your little friend over there. I want her to have it.’”

“I can’t take this,” I answered back. “It’s too much.”

“No,” she said. “I want you to have it, and I always do what my mother tells me, even if she’s dead.”

Maybe it was the mention of the word “mother” that brought this sweeping back into my mind. Maybe it was because Carol was an artist, much like my mother, and had bright eyes and colorful clothing. But when Carol placed the intricate patterned necklace on my palm, I felt the density of the metal; my hand sank from the weight. And I remembered.

We lived in New Mexico for a few years, back in the late 50’s. Mom fell in love with the landscape, the red plateaus against a deep blue sky. She traded bland Scandinavian cuisine for spicy salsas and stuffed chili peppers. She loved the adobe houses with great cedar beams. She was fascinated with the Indian culture and people. And she developed an obsession with turquoise jewelry. She was so taken with the artistry and color that in a moment of rare indulgence, she bought several turquoise squash blossom necklaces.

They were designed by a friend, a silver smith, who folded the heavy silver into delicate leaves that wrapped around the large polished stones. The massive necklaces resembled intricate vines or ancient cave paintings straddling from shoulder to shoulder. Each necklace weighed over a pound. Tiny imprints along the silver edges formed a geometric pattern outlining the turquoise. The stone’s hues ranged from the color of a robin’s egg to the saturated blue of twilight. My mother said the stone captured the sky, stretching from mountain to mountain, sometimes broken by feathery clouds or jet streams.

“Always look for the natural veins in the stone,” she would say. “Then you know it is real, and not that fake powder stuff.”

When Mom placed one of the squash blossom necklaces in my hands, it was heavy and cold. I ran my finger along the silver, black tarnish nestled in the crevasses. I felt the soft stone, and the slight indentation along a sand-colored vein. She watched me feel the necklace, become familiar with it. Then she took it back, as if she couldn’t bear to watch it rest in another’s hand. “For safe keeping,” she always said as she packed it away.

My mother never wore the squash blossom necklaces, but kept them in a Red Wing shoebox on the top shelf of her closet, wrapped in felt. She said they gave her a headache, pulled too much on her neck. She had smaller turquoise necklaces for special events, and she had a large oval turquoise ring she wore every day until arthritis finally made her take it off. But the squash blossoms stayed out of reach, unseen, in a cardboard shoebox. My sisters and I were considered too young to be responsible for them, even when we reached our middle ages.

“When I die, you girls can each have a necklace. They are your inheritance,” she would tell my sisters and me every time we brought up the subject.

The waitress brought Carol and me more coffee.

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“My mother got this necklace from an art museum in New York, when she was young,” Carol continued. “She loved art. It was based on a medieval design from some monastery I think.”

I turned the brass necklace over in my hand. The cross was surrounded by a thick border and three smaller crosses. The simple motif of curved lines and scrolls gave the appearance of hand etching. The chain was thick, and appeared woven, like rope. It rested in my open palm, the brass reflecting the morning light.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “But really, I can’t take it. It’s a gift from your mother.”

“My mother always wanted me to have the tea set, but I didn’t want to polish it. I said it was too much work to keep up. But she insisted and gave it to me anyway. And after she was dead, I was sitting in the dining room one day, polishing it carefully, and she came and sat right next to me. I looked at her and said, ‘See, I’m taking care of it.’ She smiled at me and then she just disappeared.”

“Have you seen her since?” I asked.

“Not often,” Carol continued. “Not until this morning. She was very specific that you should have this necklace.” We sipped our coffees, both lost for a moment, thinking about our mothers.

“I can picture my mother,” said Carol. “Catherine was her name, sitting on the porch looking over the smoky valley in North Carolina.”

Carol talked more about her memories of Carolina, her eyes half closed as she pictured the mist settling over the hills, the snow melting as it touched the dogwoods and small streams. Carol resembled my mother when she closed her eyes while thinking of her beloved desert landscape, especially on harsh Minnesota winter nights.

I can imagine that she took the box down, and carefully held each squash blossom necklace, ran her finger along the smooth stones, tracing the veins, feeling the weight of the pure silver in her hands. She would close her eyes and imagine the mountains, the red walls lit by the setting sun, the sky dropping to a deeper indigo blue and then black, filled with a thousand stars.

Tears fell down my face as I thumbed the metal. “Thank you. I don’t know what to say.”

“I know you lost your mother recently. Maybe this is from my mother to your mother.”

“If you, or Catherine, ever change your mind,” I said. “Just let me know. I would give it back if you want it again.”

But I did not want to give it back. I was struck by the generosity of her mother, and Carol’s openness to following her direction. My mother was generous in many things, in countless ways. But I never understood why the necklaces always remained in the hidden box, even today. Perhaps they were too precious to be in our care. Since her death, no one has dared to go in her closet and open the box, and feel the blue pieces of sky. For it would mean she was really gone.

I thanked Carol for her gift, one I will wear often. The heavy brass necklace will always remind me of her, Catherine and my mother. I will feel the weight of it in my hand, run my finger along the intricate pattern, and close my eyes to picture all the scenes, all the faces that will come to mind. A place holder, until I touch the turquoise squash blossoms again.

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Eintou: 1968 Summer Olympics Mychal Batson

fists up proud warriors on top of the world they stand heads angled toward the ground as if to look down on all who said never Look up

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The afro deli

Brianna Olson-Carr crunching up riverside, caked ice and salt fight on the bottoms of my boots, my legs wobble under underwear, under-armor, uncoordinated legwarmers. slip fall catch. fall catch slip. the dance of winter in minnesota, the dance of sweaty hands inside mittens gripping stop signs and hot breath. colors fade away with october, exceptthe afro deli. the lime green savior of squinting wind chills and minor famine. the picture-window frames warm smiles and steaming meats. the roasting lamb rotates beckoning lettuce, tomato, onions, tzatziki sauce, embraced by pita: the gyro. mittens are shed, hats and coats are placed aside to bask in the sunlight orange of the afro deli. a bright beacon in the fog of january.

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Cad

Adam Spanier

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PUMPKINS

Caitlin Walsh

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Tangled

Rachel Kelly

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Daily Brushing Kate Woolever

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owl

Maureen Allen 28 Murphy Square

vulture

Maureen Allen

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RUNNING OUT

Sergio Monterrubio

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SEATTLE AND SPRING Anna Fuller

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Lightrail #1 Betsy Collins 32 Murphy Square

Faces of Gulu Sarah Jergenson

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Daybreak, Prachuap, Thailand Kate Woolever

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Kirana

Melissa Herrick

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Stained Glass Elephante Aaron Becquer

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Saying Hello/Crown on the Grave Betsy Collins

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Feather Joel Menk

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Bamboo

Caitlin Walsh

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For Keith

Sergio Monterubbio

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Yellow Chair Small Nora Dahlberg

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Untitled

Colin Stanhill O Earth, Ur-reality, Mirthful and melancholy, all, Come into me as I do you, all-ways, Comingling consciousness with coming, going, lingering.

So what if I’m a vessel – A confluence of forces?

Imagination and will my tools, A pitcher shaped by its contents’ characters.

Yet you say I’m wearing a woman’s hat.

And I say, “F!ck !ff n!rr!w fr!!k, This is Maybeamerica Bastion of bastards Home to No One Haven only of cummings (anyone) and goings (everhow)””””””””” Whatever that means_

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PARADISE NOW D.E. Green

there is no other Eden never was just the blossoms blasted wasted turning toward the light and away toward death and darkness and decay he turns to her takes the fruit she proffers it is the only sustenance an old man sleeps on the street an old woman dozes in the park this is Eden here now – the sagging skin the lost thought – the past on the tip of the tongue without savor without consciousness we live on death batten on it the bodies are buried here we return to the scene of the crime each day live there our bodies are dying now just so much blood and dust this is Eden there is no other

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Fur

Elise Estrada I walk alone, down roads that haven’t been named travel unmapped states swim endless lakes.

Say out loud what others can’t.

I walk through the hunting plains stare at the sun, a pack of one.

There was a moment (fast as feathers) when I felt shame in what is true But now I do not deny: I am a wild animal inside.

And although I love so loyal it leaves blood in the street and though I defend the cub with feral claws and naked teeth, I will never walk down any aisle dressed all in white to become a wife.

I wear sunsets and blood-orange red and I have burned the wedding bed.

I walk this path unresigned, without hesitance and unrefined.

And I will never take another man’s name or wear a ring.

I will never be tame.

I walk this world without a home, for I am not rug or door or glass.

I am tooth and blood and bone I live today no future, no past.

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I was at Woofstock Eric Moen

In sixth grade I left the crew-cut behind and let my hair grow long. In the shadow of the Woodstock generation, I listened to their music in my worn out Levi’s. With my roundish glasses and long blond hair, my rebellion remained family-friendly; less Led Zeppelin and more John Denver.

Retiring from my paper route pizza delivery existence, I slid into bars underage. My instrument case was my ticket in. But identity became more difficult to find as all around me silk shirts and platform shoes replaced leather fringe and moccasins. My eclectic, schizophrenic seventies gave way to exhausted eighties. My hippie dreams proved no more realistic than my cousin’s spaceman dreams or my father’s cowboy dreams. Decades later, mired in my grown-up reality, I could only watch my own teen-age son, as he followed his dream of playing at an outdoor music festival.

My Buick traced the southern curve of Lake Calhoun, with old voices singing from its old speakers about peace and love that seemed like just a fantasy. The blue sky sunlight glinting off the waves slipped in through my open eyes and illuminated my brain. Suddenly I was once again stardust, I was golden, with visions of swirling tie-dyed dancers beckoning me to a celebration of peace and music . . .

Red tail lights ahead forced my screeching reflex. The festival crowd had clogged the road into Linden Hills. In 1969, the road in to the Woodstock music festival was so jammed that people just abandoned their cars and continued toward the event on foot. There was no need for me to take such extreme measures. A few cars ahead of me, a young driver’s third parallel-parking attempt finally succeeded (it all depends on angles . . . on geometry).

Inching my way into the Linden Hills neighborhood, looking to lose my wheels and feel the freedom of my feet, I had to venture several blocks beyond the festival to find a parking spot.

I stepped from the Buick and saw a couple proudly parading their dog down the street.

Was that a tie-dyed t-shirt the mutt was wearing? This pampered pup was joyfully carrying a full-size teddy bear in his mouth. A bear that any human child would be proud to hold, if it hadn’t been torn by sharp teeth in a tug of war. As I glanced toward the sidewalk I realized a stroller being pushed by proud parents contained not a child, but two Yorkshire terriers. I rubbed my eyes and looked again, noticing more pets on the periphery - a kaleidoscope of canines. I heard faint barking off in the distance. Not from a lonesome fenced-in backyard somewhere, but collective barking. A conversation. Interaction. Why were so many dogs coming to see my son play?

Entering the festival grounds, I saw tent displays promoting dog-walking services, dog-trainers, even apparel advertised as “fun and stylish dog-wear.” Did you know that a “pooper-scooper” can be not only a device, but an occupation? Little dogs without the self awareness to know that they shouldn’t butt in front of big powerful dogs were lapping up and spilling water from dog-dishes placed all over the blacktopped parking lot. But the big dogs were “cool” with it. That’s just the kind of groovy day this was. Growling, barking or spreading bad vibes of any kind was not cool today, and pets and people were all coming together to dig the sunshine.

At the original Woodstock music festival, a half a million people gathered in upstate New York for what was billed as “Three Days of Peace and Music” and they defined a generation. Forty one years later I find myself in the middle of “Woofstock - a day of leash, love and celebration.” My son was playing a dog festival. He had been preparing a blend of his 45 Murphy Square

own compositions and classics, picturing himself playing for people, not pets.

I headed toward the stage to find him. A folk singing couple, all denim and snow white hair, sat behind microphones on the parking lot stage. As the woman spoke, I could hear only her kindness. Her words were washed away by the wind. When their singing began, hints broke above the audible threshold that their song lyrics had been reworked to refer to pet dogs. An occasional cat was thrown into the songs, in the interest of fairness and equality. I laid some applause on them, catching the man’s eye, receiving his knowing nod as he strummed on.

I continued to scan the crowd, looking for my son. Something was rhythmically beating on my leg, just below the knee. It was a thick, strong, wagging tail. The rhythm stopped as the dog sat down . . . right on my foot. Warm fur against the bare top of my flip-flopped foot was both soothing and unpleasant. The dog’s companion took no notice, engrossed in an animated conversation with a runway-thin, spiky-haired woman attached to a Pomeranian. When the folk duo finished, my furry friend thankfully gave them a standing ovation, releasing me at last.

Taking the microphone, the master of ceremonies sheepishly told the audience that he hoped the rock music wouldn’t bother the canine ears in the crowd. He was sensitive to the idea that an amplified guitar might sound different to a greyhound than to her gray-bearded hippie host, or that a Dylanesque harmonica may produce some frequencies beyond the spectrum of human hearing. Bob always caused us to suspect this, didn’t he?

It had been so many years since I felt the exhilaration of those moments in the wings, and mounting the stage to a roar, or even a smattering of applause. I watched my boy, with his blend of confidence and self-consciousness, emerge from the shadows. As he brought his lips to the microphone the wind robbed the PA system of its power. He triumphantly said what sounded like “Hmrrh. Wephfr Cofflsh Schwindt.” Well, at least half of the crowd didn’t understand English anyway, with the exception of certain key phrases, like “go out?” or “want a treat?”

He began to sing, and the voice that was so effective in saturating our living room, or open mike night at the coffeehouse, was no match for the rising wind. Surrounded by indifferent Afghan Hounds, exhausted Basset Hounds, charming Collies, and wiggling Dachshunds, I fixed my eyes on the young man that all these pets and people ignored. These purebreds had their own egos to contend with. One dirty gray mixed breed, more knowing of the ways of the world, cocked his head at an angle. This may have been his first harmonica experience.

A dark gray wall of weather approached and fat raindrops split the crowd into its individual elements. With leashes pulling this way and that, the festival dissolved. From beneath the weathered wood overhang of the barbecue shack, I watched the festival fade away.

As he ran fast through the raindrops trying to protect the precious contents of his guitar case, my son caught my eye. In that fleeting split second I saw only satisfaction, not regret. The experience was not what he had expected, but his smile showed he knew something. Now he knows . . . as I have known.

I smile at the good fortune of this day, reminded that the best memories are not from triumphs, but the unexpected - the dog shows. People will listen as my son’s tale begins: “I played at Woofstock.”

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Golf Clubs

William Trembly A boy stood by the edge of a hospital bed. Everything he saw was white. White people, white hair, white sheets, white floors, white walls, white lights—very white lights.

The kind of lights that turn your skin an eerie shade of blue and make you look sick even if you’re not the one lying in that bed. The boy’s skin had that bluish white tint. His name was Danny, and at 14 years old, he’d never seen anyone die. His father stood behind him and placed a hand firmly on his scrawny shoulder. Danny glanced up at the man with his dark mustache and thinning brown hair, both of which were dotted with countless gray specks.

The two stood silently by the edge of the bed watching the unconscious old man.

Grandpa opened his eyes just barely and swallowed. He looked up at the father’s face and then down to the boy’s dirty-blonde hair and young, smooth features. The old man opened his mouth to say something, but no sound came. He closed his eyes hard and tried again.

The boy and his father leaned forward and strained their ears to hear the whisper of a faint Hello.

“Hi, Dad,” said the man. “Anything we can do for you?”

Grandpa raised a hand to his mouth and made a smacking motion with his lips. The man reached into his pocket, pulled out a tube of Chapstick, uncapped it and rubbed the stick on the old man’s lips. Grandpa closed his eyes and nodded his head lightly moving his lips in what looked like Thank you.

A doctor tapped lightly on the door. “John?” he asked. “Could I talk to you?”

The boy’s father walked out the door leaving Danny and Grandpa alone together.

Danny didn’t know what to say. He stood quietly with his hands on the edge of the bed for a couple minutes staring down at his grubby black canvas shoes with not-so-white rubber toecaps.

Then Danny felt the touch of a hand on his own. He raised his eyes a little and saw a hand on top of his, and he looked up to see his grandfather looking at him. Their eyes met, and the boy noticed a glistening trail roll down the old man’s tan, unshaven cheek.

The boy’s eyes stung and turned into glistening puddles, and a fiery stone swelled up in his throat. Neither the boy nor the old man said a word. The two remained in uncompromising silence as tears trickled down both of their faces. *** Two days later, Danny sat in a rental car as his father sped along the flat, smooth roads of Phoenix. They pulled into the parking lot of a hospice where Grandpa had been transferred at the doctor’s recommendation. John popped open the trunk and grabbed a bag of old, worn golf clubs.

The two passed a nurse on their way to Grandpa’s room who told them they were in luck because Grandpa was probably still awake after his meal. They opened the door and walked in. Danny looked around realizing this room was nothing like the hospital grandpa was in before. The bed was adjustable like that in the ICU, but the hospice lacked the computers, monitors, and vast amounts of other medical technology that beeps and hums incessantly. There was a television mounted near the ceiling, and four padded maroon chairs set along the wall. The blinds were open and yellow sunlight gave everything a much warmer feel. Absolute silence pervaded the building. John set down the clubs with a jingle that broke the silence and reminded Danny of oversized car keys. Grandpa opened his eyes slowly and looked around.

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“Hey Dad,” John said hopefully. “We brought your golf clubs.”

Grandpa’s eyes swept over the bag in the corner, but it was obvious he had no interest in these objects he had spent so much of his life using. John had hoped that this simple gesture might bring a simple smile to the old man’s face, but that hope quickly faded and his shoulders shrugged.

“How are you doing, Grandpa?” asked Danny.

The old man closed his eyes and nodded his head slowly as if meditating upon the answer, but the door opened and Billy’s aunt, Kathy, walked in.

“Hi John, Hi Danny,” she said, hugging the boy. “It’s wonderful that you’re here. Oh, and you brought Dad’s clubs. Did you see that, Dad? They brought your clubs.”

Grandpa ignored the clubs again. Instead he looked up at John and made a clumsy motion with his hand.

“You thirsty?” John asked.

Grandpa nodded. Yes. “What do you want to drink?”

Grandpa closed his eyes and moved his lips, but nothing came out.

“Pepsi?” John asked.

Grandpa shook his head. No. “Mountain Dew?” Grandpa opened his eyes and nodded. Yes. Aunt Kathy interrupted, “The doctor says he shouldn’t drink carbona—“ But John shot her a vicious look and she stopped. “Here Danny,” he said reaching into his wallet. “Go get me and your grandpa a Mountain Dew and whatever you want from the vending machine.”

Danny grabbed the bills out of his father’s hand and bustled out the door. He found the vending machine and looked at his choices. Sprite, Coke, Diet Coke, Mr. Pibb… No Mountain Dew? Shoot. Danny thought to himself. Think, Danny, think. He put the bills into the machine and got a couple Sprites and a Coke instead.

He brought them back into the room and poured a Sprite into a plastic cup with a straw. Grandpa closed his eyes and the bubbly liquid rushed up the clear tube.

“How’s the Mountain Dew, Dad?” John asked.

Grandpa shook his head. It’s not Mountain Dew. “They didn’t have any in the vending machine. All they had was Sprite,” Danny said.

Grandpa smiled and nodded his head. Thank you.

After a while, John bent over to give his father a hug. “Listen Dad, it’s Sunday today.

We’re coming back on Thursday, okay? Don’t you go anywhere ‘til we get back.”

Grandpa nodded and raised his arms to give Danny a hug. “Goodbye,” the old man whispered in Danny’s ear.

“Bye, Grandpa,” Danny replied, smiling at the old man. *** The boy and his father drove to the airport and flew back to Minneapolis without saying much of anything. Danny sat in his window-seat staring out at wispy clouds in the distance and then his gaze shifted down to the ground miles below. There was nothing down there that looked like anything. All that could be made out were shapes, lines, and specks of color.

There were no people down there, no cars, and no noise, just silence. If anyone on the plane was making noise, it was completely drowned out by the constant overwhelming hum of the jet engines. Silence, Danny thought to himself. That’s what death is, silence forever, silence in your head and in your eyes. The humming engines vibrated gently, and staring out the window at the 48 Murphy Square

inanimate shapes, Danny soon felt his senses silenced. Exhausted from his stressful days in Phoenix, he slept the remainder of the flight.

They picked up their luggage from the baggage claim and drove home. A light was flashing indicating they had missed calls and John picked up the phone to check their voicemail.

He listened intently and his eyes met those of his son at his son. Danny almost didn’t need to be told the bad news, but he had to hear it anyways. John hung up the phone and said, “That was your aunt. She says Grandpa went into a coma right after we left.” *** The days went by without any news from Aunt Kathy. She said she’d call if Grandpa woke, but according to the doctors, that wasn’t likely. When they got to the hospice, the building was as quiet as ever. Each footstep echoed, and Danny cursed his feet for making so much noise. Aunt Kathy was in the room reading, and Grandpa still had not woken from his four straight days of coma. Kathy stood to greet them and said hello giving Danny a side-hug.

John put his hand on his Danny’s back and guided him to the edge of the bed. The room was so quiet that the old man’s faintest breath was as loud as a hurricane wind. Nobody else made a sound, and carefully, John knelt down beside his father. He reached up and took the elder man’s hand in his own. Then he spoke: “Dad, we came back. I promised you we would come back and here we are.” There was a strange tone in John’s voice that Danny hadn’t heard before; each word was labored and the pitch was lower, throatier than usual. “Wake up, Daddy. We came to see you.”

The old man’s slow, rhythmic breathing continued, and Danny suddenly realized how numb his face felt. A pool of tears blurred his vision, and he blinked hard forcing them out of his eyes so that the water burst and flowed down his face and over the curves of his lips. He wiped away the tears and looked up realizing Grandpa’s eyes were slowly opening.

“Oh my God,” said Aunt Kathy.

John squeezed his dad’s hand and reached around his son’s waist to pull him in closer.

Danny followed the old man’s eyes as he looked around the room. He saw them skip over the golf clubs in the corner of the room and stop on Kathy. Then his eyes rested on Danny momentarily before coming to a rest on John’s face. His lips moved, but no sound came out.

I love you. Then his eyes moved and rested on nothing for a moment and he took one more breath.

The room was quite for a long time. The dead silence almost overbearing, but then there was a strange noise, unfamiliar to Danny. Not sure what it was, he looked at his father and saw the man’s thinning brown hair. John’s head was bent forward, his one arm squeezed even tighter around Danny’s waist, and still he hadn’t let go of Grandpa’s hand. Danny saw his father’s shoulders convulse, and then he realized what the sound was—for the first time in his life, Danny heard his father cry.

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Junior Year Mychal Batson

Perpetually pushed into pushing pencil Stencils Cookie cut clones We are Strive far, they tell me, but by far I’ve underachieved Under-conceived my future Wasted my past Many places I’ve passed without stopping Aimlessly walking while getting chased by faces all too familiar Underclassmen gawking The underclass hawking up phlegm Under my feet Well in front of them, rather, Terrified because these faces are beginning to look more like me I stagger Words blur as I read with absurd verve what knowledge hawkers mistake for art Yet I’m partial to what artists choose to embark on At least that’s until the sparks gone Defused by prophesizing professors and criticizing critics Who inhibit what an artist may exhibit as self expression Our economy feeds off our depression Pop a pill and your poison tasting leads to a vacation away from The reality they’ve built for you Poor you But rich them Enrich dimwitted college kids with 1500 dollar an hour nap times Three years and I’ve actually gotten dumber Relapse time to an earlier point before adulthood sets in Before time itself felt like a rope my necks in Before leisure time became stressin’ Because, obviously, there may have been something more constructive to do.

Like . . .

Learn.

Vexing this concept of life and quality And how they intertwine false expectations of sublime happiness Could use some divine help But I’m blind to the good in that ‘cause I was whipped by hypocrites Stripped of this . . .

This passion that I’ve been asking to have revived And it’s not until I’m off task that I realize I have quite a few things to evaluate.

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Insecurity Ellery Davis

Stands outside of my house The twilight bruises his face The buttons on his jacket are tiny mirrors His cufflinks are Gordian knots I pull the string that closes the blinds As his fingernail taps on the glass.

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Elliot’s Window Julia Olson

An icy draft wound its way through Elliot’s window and into his small apartment. It rustled the watercolors pinned to his wall and they rattled as it passed over them. He could get up and shut the window, he thought. Or he could burrow into his shabby orange comforter and attempt to drown out the noisy wind. He threw his covers up over his head and wrapped his thin, white arms around his ribcage. The threadbare blanket did nothing to drown out the noise of the flapping papers, let alone keep out the crisp morning air. He groaned into his spongy pillow and rolled off the bed. The springs in the mattress groaned in unison.

Elliot went to the window, and lingered close to the pane in order to survey the ground below. Fall had come all too quickly this year, he thought, as he watched red and brown leaves waltz across the courtyard that separated the two sections of his apartment building.

Winter’s breath was in the air, and every time it whispered to the maple outside his window the tree would shiver off a few more leaves. The wind rattled the windowpane in its frame.

Elliot stared through the frosted glass; it looked like rain.

His mother had wanted to furnish his entire apartment, from a matching cherry bedroom set to full length, sunshine yellow curtains for his dirty kitchen windows. He gave her the kitchen, but that was it. No funky, modern sofas or chairs. No wall sconces, no votives.

Instead he had a top of the line mixer, which he never used, and an expensive French press that looked out of place on the hideous Formica countertop. All these things were things that Martha Stewart recommended on her show, which his mother watched religiously. Since he was a boy, his mother had made time each day to watch Martha Stewart make knick knacks, plan cocktail parties, or share pointless anecdotes with the audience while nonchalantly preparing a flawless five course meal. Those were his mother’s favorite episodes.

“It’s like you’re right there in Martha Stewart’s own kitchen,” she would say just before turning back to the screen to fawn over a close up shot of a golden crusted apple pie.

Once, when Elliot was in high school, his mother attempted to follow Martha Stewart’s recipe for a Christmas cocktail. Elliot found her, standing over a large silver pitcher, crying and gulping straight from the bottle of vodka that belonged in her Christmas drink. Something went wrong, cherry juice was forgotten, a substitution of Kool-Aid had failed. He tried to console her, but his statement that it was October and not even time for Christmas cocktails missed its mark and made her cry even harder. She recovered well enough, and the next day she was right back in her favorite chair with a martini in one hand and the remote in the other, laughing along with the audience at Martha’s monologue.

One long beam of setting sunshine reached over the skyline and pointed at Elliot through his window, which he pushed open to receive the last light. The maple in the courtyard glowed a brilliant red against the sunset, the branches reached upward like a skeletal hand begging at the sky. Elliot saw a young girl push a boy into a pile of leaves in the courtyard below. The boy pulled the girl down with him and they rolled around on the ground like animals. Elliot heard their laughter from his window; he saw the moisture from their breath hanging in the air. Occasionally the boy would stop just long enough to steal a kiss from the girl, and then they would both collapse back into the pile and continue to roll amongst the leaves. They must live in the building, he thought, but he never saw them. Although most of the apartments were occupied, Elliot felt as if he lived in the building alone. The few people 52 Murphy Square

he saw through his window scurried by, preoccupied, distracted. He passed other tenants in the narrow hallway outside his door, but they always seemed to look just beyond him. He wanted to live around people that knew him, people that noticed him. He hated his apartment but he hated that he couldn’t tell his mother even more. He began pacing. If he could move back in with his parents he could save her from her television, from her beloved Martha Stewart, from her crying over Christmas cocktails. If he could only tell her. But in his mother’s mind a normal twenty three year old should live on his own, not with his parents.

A normal kid doesn’t want to move home. He wants poker nights; he wants a girlfriend.

Elliot had a girlfriend once, although it didn’t last very long. Her name was Maggie and every time she laughed her blue eyes sparkled like morning sunshine. He had taken her home to meet his parents, but Elliot had known something was wrong as soon as they got in the door. From the kitchen Elliot and the girl could hear his father shouting.

“It’s NOT normal, Samantha.”

“It’s normal. He’s just quiet, you know that.” Ice cubes clinked against glass.

“He’s quiet because you stuffed him in his room with paintbrushes and folk records. You gave him useless distractions, and now he doesn’t know how to do anything real!”

“Those things helped him to grow, Gunther.”

“Into what? He’s still your baby. This is all he knows and that’s exactly what you want!”

The kitchen door slammed. Elliot and the girl stood in the foyer. He was too embarrassed to look at her, so he stared at the ceramic tiles under his feet until he heard her slip out the door behind him.

The boy and girl in the courtyard vanished, and Elliot found himself staring once again at the red maple tree. He lit a cigarette and walked to his easel. He had been working on something, some great idea he had come up with on a sleepless night. Now he realized it was nothing but a few smeared lines which he had painted with his fingers. He threw the canvas on the ground, loaded up the easel with a fresh one, and began to paint the tree that had captured his gaze. After a deep drag from his cigarette he dipped his brush into the ruby red painted he had mixed to match the fiery leaves. He moved his brush across the canvas a few times, then lifted it from the surface and twirled it in his fingers. He already hated it.

He went back to the window and lightly tapped his paintbrush on the sill as he peered out. It was later now, the sun had been absent for several hours. He knew it was late because all the action in the courtyard had ceased save for the scraps of leaves that were tossed around by the late fall wind. He exhaled a long stream of smoke from his pursed lips. It lingered before the window, wrapping around his face like a shroud.

Elliot tried to please his mother, tried to live a life that matched her description of “normal.” Normal kids graduate high school and then go to college. College had been a disaster for Elliot. He had wanted to share stories of high school pranks and championship football games like the rest of his classmates, even if he had to make them up, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t fit, and after three months he dropped out and moved home. His mother had greeted him at the door with a lit cigarette wedged between her fingers.

“Elliot.” Smoke trailed out of her nose.

“When did you start smoking, mom?”

“I’ve always been an on-again-off-again-smoker, you know that.” Elliot knew that wasn’t true. There was tension between them but it wasn’t negative. They were each doing something secret, for her it was smoking, for Elliot it was leaving school. They were both withholding information from one another and they each knew it.

He wasn’t sure how much time passed while he stood at the window. His cigarette burned all the way to the filter as he drifted in and out of thought, dwelling on the failed leaf paint53 Murphy Square

ing, his mother, and the velvety darkness of the cold night that had settled upon the city.

Suddenly a light turned on in an apartment across the courtyard. The introduction of light, of another life form, was unsettling. He assumed that he was entirely alone with the sleeping city. Now his eyes were drawn towards the square of light and he waited for whatever sign of life that had turned it on to appear.

Then he saw her, the creature that came with the light. Her back was turned to the window but he could see she had long black hair that matched the midnight sky. She turned to face the window, but Elliot was too far away to make out any defining feature other than that she was naked. He pressed his face against the cold window, the courtyard seemed to stretch out before him, growing longer, distancing him from the girl and from the bright beam of light she had brought into the night. His vision became cloudy, the world was hazy.

His ears started to buzz and beads of sweat formed on his upper lip. It was as if he was going to faint. He’d never felt more cognizant that he did at that moment. The room began to swirl around him. It was a good dizziness that came with the spinning, although he had a feeling that at any moment the entire situation could sour and he would be sick rather than exhilarated. The sound of rushing wind filled his ears and he forgot where he was. The square of light across the courtyard turned to blackness and Elliot plummeted from his euphoria into the reality of the dark night. Who was she? He did his best to commit her figure to memory.

He stared for a long time, willing her to come back.

Elliot lit a cigarette, inhaled, and knocked the ash from the tip onto the windowsill.

The papery flakes scattered in the chilly night wind that snuck in through his closed window. He wanted to know more about the strange girl who had just appeared to him. Maybe she had been looking for him. Elliot felt as if she had made herself known to him on purpose.

She obviously meant to spark his interest; after all it was she who had presented her naked body to him. He decided to paint the outline of the figure in the window.

His paintbrush was drawn to the canvas like a magnet. Something had taken over him. As he whisked the brush across the page he imagined what it would be like to meet her.

He would be sitting in the courtyard beneath the blazing maple when she would spot him, although he wouldn’t notice her. She would leave her apartment, perhaps feigning an errand to run. She would lightly kick through the piles of leaves lining the sidewalk as she approached him, coyly attempting to steal his attention away from the ground, or the cigarette in his hand, or the leaves. He would hear her footsteps but he would assume they were the steps of a stranger bustling by. The footsteps would stop right in front of him although the girl would remain silent. Slowly Elliot would lift his gaze, noticing her small red boots, then her thick gray tights, then her lacy black dress hidden beneath a coat three sizes too big for her. She would smile at him, maybe she would even laugh. Her laugh would be light, but it would float all around him like fresh snowflakes on the winter breeze.

Elliot dropped the paintbrush into his brush box and stepped back to look at his creation. It was missing a lot, but it was a start. He needed to see her again, needed to fill the empty spaces on the canvas with the details of her body. Patience. The girl would show herself to him again, and then he would be able to add whatever she required so that she could come alive on the easel.

He went back to the window and jammed his cigarette into the ashtray on the sill.

The window across the courtyard was still dark. He pressed his nose against the glass and searched the darkness, looking for any sort of detail of the room behind the window. Nothing. A siren roared across the city, and a gust of wind shook his windows violently. He closed his eyes and recalled the girl, her curve, her hair. Again sweat began to form on his lip and his dizzy head floated upward, away from his body, away from his apartment. His ears 54 Murphy Square

burned and his heartbeat echoed through his skull.

The wind slapped the window pane and Elliot’s eyes flew open. A cruel gust had shaken him off his cloud and back to his thin, icy window. The inky night seeped crept through the glass toward him, a murky tide, never ebbing, inching closer, swelling higher, quietly threatening to engulf Elliot completely and then swallow him whole. A single clock ticked away the early morning minutes, counting down the last strange hours of the aging purple darkness before the sun would come to resurrect daylight from night’s tomb.

55 Murphy Square

I AIN’T YRRR JEMIMA Drew DeGennaro

Back in those days when Tyrone & Memphis would jump the tracks ridin’ trains long the river whites used blacks for bullet practice these times be a changin’ the laundry hangin’ in the wind with colors wavin’ down the great Mississippi like them truck stop peddlers that be stealin’ fruit from the backyards of beggars we have traveled this road to be free took it long in the night lit by fire along dusty tracks we built our sweat & blood into bricks that stand tall above the walls of race forever

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CRUMBLE

Kevin Butcher Wings of birds swing feverishly As cars blaze carelessly by.

Tires burn into asphalt As foots press the pedal to the floor, fearlessly.

The wind rips grass from roots And the sun scolds crops once crushed, Turning color…to dust, By boots that bind dirt encrusted foots.

Belt buckles reflect scorching light Into frantically flying birds’ sight.

They crash into the ground, beak over chicken feet, As dry grass blades cut into left wing then right.

Warm rocks become featureless faces As the sun races away.

The evening’s spotlight illuminates exactly How being alone tastes.

Fools gold sparkles dully in the sky Offering false hope to those who lie Beneath. Just lying there, only to stare, Watching the world slowly crumble.

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Here’s how it happened: Eric Moen

Here’s how it happened: We got so tired.

We got so tired that we couldn’t keep our eyes open.

Couldn’t keep our eyes open to see across the kitchen table.

To see, across the kitchen table, the one we love so much.

The one we love so much and married seven years ago.

Married seven years ago, filled with hopes and dreams.

Filled with hopes and dreams, not imagining the possibility of failure.

Imagining the possibility of failure we fell silent.

We fell silent to avoid the conversation.

To avoid the conversation we’ve had so many times.

We’ve had so many times together, swept the bad times under the rug.

Swept the bad times under the rug until a mountain sat beneath our home.

A mountain sat beneath our home and each morning we would climb it.

Each morning we would climb it, but then we got too tired.

Then we got too tired.

That’s how it happened.

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A WORD FROM ANOTHER WORLD Coline Irvine A Word Already A word floated Like a haunted sheet From her wide room Big enough for bunk-beds Across the dark, hard-wood hall And deep into our dreams.

Or did it fly Bat-like Blind but deliberate An arrow ripping into ripe melon?

We stopped breathing And surfaced from sleep To listen.

Remember?

When she was four And we were young But done, already Old. Remember?

The word, her word Pushed its way into your Mind, and mine But not ours Not then In your business boardroom, maybe, Or your luncheon of suits and boots And heels and handshakes Our girl Bare legs, pink shirt, soft hands Appears

Plant the first step and Before I become young again Our girl Is there, sleepy, smiling up at me A mirage I surfaced You Surfaced We wondered, waiting She had said Something Clearly Confidently To a friend In her sleep Then, She said Nothing And slept, Soundly, It seemed In the dark In the other room In another world With her friends And, already Without us And we, We breathed again Together For now

At the edge of my return Into the woods I lean into my shoulder straps 59 Murphy Square

What time is it?

Laura Morales

Busy banners sautĂŠing swords, Rush hour of steel elephants, Your deep voice in a hive of honey bees, A storm of unsteady impatience,

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In dissonance with the cooling glass.

A Sunset from the Dock William Trembly

The red sun Sparkles at the crest of each wrinkle in the lake A cedar dock Faded gray and coarse against the soft skin under my knees Cool water Licks at the back of my ankles and dances between my toes Tender air Whispers through my hair, caresses my face An aluminum canoe Approaches, gliding through the water Slender wooden paddles Rhythmically slipping into darkness and pulling out Splash Splash Splash Ageless trees Across the water, silhouettes against the reddening skyline A silver fish Surfaces, a splash and ripples of water extend in infinite rings The buried sun Hidden, finally gone to rest beyond the horizon A motorboat Rumbles in the night sky, an unseen disturbance The aluminum canoe Departed, nearly out of sight, a black speck on the blue water Those slender wooden paddles Unheard in the distance. Seen. Still they push through the water and pull out again Splash Splash Splash

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The Casualty Speaks Dustyn Hessie

Put me on the ground where the surface is a busy skirmish of blood burgeoning on evil faces.

Nothing will replace this madness not even grief.

There are no compliments where the bombs have fallen, just evidence.

The Man has spoken.

And the Man will have his war.

Women will dress up tonight they’ll fight too.

They’ll cover their body and face in sand and send their children to school before they leave to keep our nation’s bullet in its atomic embrace of death.

The Women have spoken.

They will not cry.

Poor people from our forgotten concrete slums will find that final desperate grasp of ash.

They will storm their dry indifferent feet up the sudden chain-of-command and pay their bills; their children will not starve tonight.

They will sleep not knowing Dad and Mom. Dad and Mom may die tonight And burn in their children’s imaginations.

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Switch

Jayne Carlson no teeth

to new teeth

to old teeth

to false teeth. On. stroller

to strolling

to walker

to wheelchair. On. hairless to hairy

to no hair

just about anywhere. On. empty mind to spongy mind

to wise mind

to leaking mind. On. vulnerable

to capable

to powerful

to feeble. On. child

to adult

to parent

to dependent. On. breathing

to breathing

to breathing‌

to silence.

Off.

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Catching Delhi on Diwali Ted Conover

I sling my suitcase on the hard guesthouse bed and make sure the door is shut and bolted.

Firecrackers burst and pop outside the filthy screen on the poorly installed sliding door, crooked on its hinges so that it has to be chained shut. Even inside hotel rooms Delhi smells of smoke –the haze. Ripping through my backpack I grasp my folded and refolded notebook with a perfect bind –so that I could break it—in my eager hands. I look down at my chickenscratch notes from the last month, starting from page one. I always must start from page one, to see what I have there; my worst fear is that an idea gets buried in an unread notebook. My scribbles are chaotic, with arrows and x’s, loops, exclamation points, stars. The deeper I go the more violent the notes become, with whole sentences crossed out, some so fervently that the pen had gone through the paper. The good sentences get an asterisk; the bad ones get the axe. Impatient, I flip faster, taking pages two to three at a time until I halt on a page two thirds through the composition notebook. On the night train from Mumbai, which I’d taken to Delhi the night before, I had written a haiku: My India like Spilled paint on white pages reach Colors not known of

Under the poem I had drawn a clear line delineating a change on the paper and in my conciseness. Below it is a reminder, a command: in large letters and with a box around it: The Gaze. Under it is clean blank space. Pristine, virgin paper.

I begin to write.

I must be the only man sitting alone in his room in this moment in all of Delhi.

Outside, the chaotic celebrations of Diwali, the Hindu new year, are exploding with deafening fireworks and the shrill of Hindi music. Happy 2067! The winding alleys outside my hotel are a never-ending labyrinth of colorful hanging lights that reflect off of pools of fetid water and dull concrete instead of white snow like Christmas lights.

There in the street are rawboned spice merchants, staring T ikka-men, errant vendors selling bananas and strings of marigold flowers, crooked beggars sporting wooden staffs and silver pails full of single Rupee coins, inexplicably large groups of men with the same haircut squatting together, chewing paan and spitting onto the squalid street, beautiful young women in veils carrying their babies in tied up blankets flung over their backs, laughing rickshaw drivers for once not arguing the price of a fare, lethargic cows lying in piles of garbage, screaming children darting through the melee, lighting firecrackers.

The pen falls to the ground and I gasp. Ah! My hand seizes and cramps from gripping the ballpoint too hard. Stretch it out –Stretch it out.

I take a deep breath and for the first time look around my hotel room. It is small and surprisingly clean. No sign of cockroaches. Even a balcony past the filthy screen door. Have to check it out to have a smoke later. Look under the bed, no bedbugs, I hope. That girl from 64 Murphy Square

Wisconsin on the night train had warned me of that. Francesca. We’d met on the crowded, dingy platform of the Mumbai train station.

“Watch my bag while I go pee, will you?” was the first thing she’d said to me.

“You know where to find me.”

After her breasts and her culturally insensitive tight leggings, the first thing I noticed had been those red bumps on her skin. Poor girl. Cute, too. Big smile with those plump lips and wide eyes, mousy brown hair. But she wore her bedbug bites that covered her arms and legs like badges. She hadn’t been back from the toilet for five minutes before she was telling me about how much her crotch itched, where the bedbugs had congregated in greater numbers.

“Dirty, infested sheets at a cheap guesthouse are to blame. The bad ones never change their bedding,” she said as we boarded the train. “Watch out for those.”

It was sexy, the way she’d said it without laughing, smiling though, and looking at me out of the corners of her eyes. We talked about our travel plans. What to see. We compared Lonely Planets and flirted by exchanging college stories –keggers at old houses and hallucinogens in the quad. American education. She was on her way to Manali. Along with her bites, she showed me her callused hands and feet, crusty and weathered like pieces of dried mango. Before I knew what I was doing I was rubbing her hands in mine, feeling the hard, scaly skin on my fingers. She was a true traveler –one who didn’t need shoes or hand lotion.

She belonged in India. The wild expatriate with hands and feet made of leather. Cracked.

Her green eyes got even sweeter after we’d shared that hash cigarette in between the train cars, near the bathroom. We made fun of the improvised squatter toilet as we smoked. The thing was simply a hole in the floor of the train, hanging over the edge of the tracks –a toilet bowl of rushing gravel and railway.

“Wouldn’t want to fall into that toilet,” she said as she as she blew smoke through her nose, India rushing by us in the humid, hazy night. We laughed so hard that she dropped the J as she tried to pass it to me. Something had happened after the spicy, Himachal Pradesh hash, made from cannabis grown in the foothills of the Himalayas, worked on our brains, and suddenly we couldn’t stop staring at each other there on the platform between cars. She led me back into the train, to my cot in the sleeper car. She knew right where it was. We would have ripped the damp clothing from each other’s backs like savages, but the curtains on the cot would not close all the way and our feet, though mine not as crusty as hers, stuck out into the aisle. Not to mention we were sharing the car with a family of Bangladeshis with six children. So instead, we read Rushdie to each other out loud, trading the Midnight’s Children and my headlamp back and forth all night, whispering the words into each other’s ears and scratching her bedbug bites together. I traced them with my fingers and counted them. I got to 73 before I gave up the charade.

“Four hands are so much better than two,” she whispered, laughing quietly as I scratched the nape of her neck with my fingers and teeth.

We’d promised to meet in Calcutta in a week. I could write about her… Francesca….

Focus, man! The night train is its own story. It will be written. But tonight is Diwali in Delhi, in one of the most densely populated parts of the old part of town. I need to get it down. This is why I had come.

With luck I could catch it. But how could I possibly give a voice to this most sprawling, noisy and polluted city –this most unhinged city in the world? I give up for a time and fish through my backpack again to find my cigarettes, my pack of Suryas, the local brand. I smack them against my palm to pack them, and walk out toward the balcony. Unlocking the chain with my key and pushing open the reluctant screen door, reveals the panorama of My India. There, on the small jut of crumbling concrete sits a plastic chair with a good 65 Murphy Square

centimeter of grime and dust covering its once white frame. A most fitting place to sit and contemplate this place.

I pick up my notebook, take out a book of matches and strike one, lighting the Surya in my lips. Breath in and out to collect my thoughts.

“When in a pinch, always describe your setting in great detail,” I hear my writing professor say back in some stuffy classroom. It seemed such an easy thing to say to a class full of oh-so-eager-to-please college freshmen. My professor, so confident in his corduroy blazer, red Converse shoes and spectacles, a pen perched behind his ear; but here on this balcony, the right adjectives are eluding me. Maybe India is out of my grasp. But, what the hell, I’ll abide Prof Fielding. Drawing a line between my taxi ride account and empty paper below it, I begin again.

From my seat I overlook a small ravine filled with Bodhi trees and garbage. What’s beyond it is a complete mystery to me. A heavy mist of pollution covers all of Delhi like a cancer causing pall. It has been dark all day, no sunlight able to penetrate through the shroud. Ironic that Diwali is dubbed “the festival of lights.” Though the smog blocks out the sun’s rays, the pollution veil has done nothing for the stifling temperature and humidity; and though it is a November night, my shirt is soaked. It makes no sense to me and my dull existence.

Quickly, I draw a star next to this thought in my journal.

Below, packs of dogs roam the enormous garbage piles that cover the entire ravine behind the guesthouse. Huge bats, garbage bats, fly much too close to my face, and then back down over the refuse mountains. Diwali fireworks continue to make me jump in fright every so often. They light up the smoggy night.

More in tune with the words, those tight, little English sentences, step by step, I begin to recount the events of that night and my observations so far. Remember. The Gaze.

The pen touches again the paper.

India has a story in every inch of its existence. Each tableau seen through a cloudy taxi window could be a chapter in a book ten thousand pages long. The sultry Ganjetic plain, with its hordes of people working, singing, begging, building, cooking, bantering, thinking, and going about their chaotic, daily lives that are vested in ancient human practice and modern innovation simultaneously, like the Giorgio Armani emporium swiftly erected next to the weathered Shiva temple; this life on the Indic peninsula seems somehow more essential than the tame, pretention filled, watered down humanity of America and Europe.

“India is perhaps the most human of all places on this earth.”

I mumble this astonished conclusion on the way to my hotel from the airport.

My taxi driver almost drives off the road every time he casually lights another handrolled cigarette called a bidi that he snakes out of his shirt pocket. Not at all looking at the road and going 50 kilometers over the posted speed limit, the Indian cabby, in a perpetual coughing fit from each newly lit bidi (which smell distinctly like hash as they continue to burn), decidedly straddles two lanes on the thronged highway, then jerks to drive in the middle of two different lanes for no apparent reason. Other cars honk at him to move over while they too ignore the clear boundaries between lanes.

To drive in a straight line and slow down while doing two things at once would be 66 Murphy Square

a damned shame and a bore for the driver, I’m sure. One would think that traffic wouldn’ t be so bad on Diwali, since most employees have the day off. They should be with their friends, drinking Kingfisher ale and singing along with blaring Hindi music.

But, with money to be made and a world to inherit, Indians seem busy no matter the occasion.

As the taxi screeches to a halt at a stop light, the driver yelling out the window in rapid Hindustani as if his insults will magically make the forty cars in front of him disappear, the grungy French hippie I am sharing the taxi with says in heavily accented English, “zis is crazy, is it not? I love India!” His words come out like he’s discovered a cure for cancer. The sour-smelling Frenchman’s overexcitement can only mean he is getting the authentic, third world adventure he hoped for back in Paris ennuyeux.

Laughing with the hippie in the backseat, I smile at him and bob my head from side to side in agreement the way Indians do as the light turns green and we almost run down three or four more motorbikes.

On the modest (to use a rather weak adjective) balcony outside my cheap room, I light another Surya, hoping that the acrid smoke and nicotine will stimulate my brain and vanquish my misgivings and my writer’s block.

“Wish they had hash in them like the driver’s cigarettes, maybe then I could write a decent narrative,” I say to myself, vexed. “Should have asked Francesca for some of hers.”

Licking my lips, I hold the cigarette butt on my mouth and examine the meager notes in my journal, grasping it with both hands. Is it fair to make assumptions about a five thousand year old civilization from a half hour cab ride? Will I be like Conrad describing dark limbs flailing in the jungle? Am I somehow a colonial force, an agent of cold Western rationalization and capitalism? Am I a fucking imperialist with my thoughts scrawled in black ink? A firecracker bursts just feet from my balcony and I drop my notebook in alarm. Some of the screaming children from the alley somehow made their way onto an adjacent balcony and fired the colorful flares in my direction, obviously taking no heed to my presence. Laughing, they disappear into the foggy night.

Dissatisfied with the words appearing on paper, I take a moment to think. I’m missing something. It’s not fantastic enough, not romantic enough. With India, readers will expect something out of this world, something metaphysical. Somewhere there must be a scene that could provide me my masterpiece. Finding no epiphany inducing metaphors in the works on the balcony, in dismay, I decide to go out into the world outside my room to try and find some dinner. I need some inspiration, and food will make me think. How could I capture any sort of authenticity alone in a dingy hotel room, anyway? I have to experience the real India out that door. Though the cab ride proved enough for my French hippie friend an hour ago to proclaim his love for this place, I decide in that moment that I need more substance than a dozen or so near fatal car accidents. Maybe I’ll have an epiphany over a plate of roti, rice and dahl. Maybe I’ll even get to eat with my hands! With a few mouthfuls of food, I’ll know what this place is all about. I’ll be able to catch Delhi with a few pages of deft prose. Really, it’s impossible to write good prose on an empty stomach. So, in control of my destiny, I grab my key, my journal, a ballpoint pen and a couple of hundred Rupee notes, which I stuff in my front pocket, stick another Surya in my lips and head out the door.

I fight my way through the crowd in the narrow alleyway. Though I normally would have been mobbed by vendors selling everything from beetle nut to bootlegged Stephen Spielberg films, Diwali’s celebrations block my potential pocket book from view. I go mostly unnoticed through the alley. After half an hour of looking for a restaurant that will have me, since 67 Murphy Square

every place selling food is hosting a private party, I finally find a place to eat. “Sherpa’s Delight,” a Tibetan restaurant beckons me inside. Luckily for me, Tibetans celebrate their New Year, Losar, in March. I finish my cigarette, throw it into the concrete gutter and go inside.

Timidly poking my head inside the door reveals a small room with six or so plastic tables, all empty except for one. At the only occupied table sits three young Tibetan men playing cards and smoking. They glance at me, turn down the stereo, which is playing “Hotel California” by The Eagles, and motion for me to sit at one of the tables, just not theirs. One turns up the volume on the stereo while belting, “Livin’ it up at the Hotel California!” along with the song. Sitting in a plastic chair and muttering about having no idea where I was, I pick up a menu without looking at it. I consider making my protagonist a Tibetan like the three guys playing cards. Perhaps I could write about “Exile in India,” or “From Shangri-La to the World.” That could be interesting.

After scanning the menu for a minute or so, seeing no roti or dahl, I look over at the card game, which had grown fairly boisterous while I scanned my menu. I presumed one of the card-playing Tibetans to be a waiter of sorts. Sure enough, one notices me, lays down his cards, and walks over.

“I’ll have the chicken momos,” I say, pointing to the item on the menu in case he doesn’t speak English.

“Steamed or fried? They’re loads better steamed. But that’s just my opinion,” says my waiter in perfect English.

“Steamed, then,” I reply, trying to disguise my disappointment at having been easily understood.

The waiter nods his head and walks away singing “Life in the fast lane, guaranteed to loooose your mind!” along with The Eagles.

I sit disheartened at my table. You’re supposed to have to work to order food in India. It’s supposed to be a challenge. You’re supposed to have to practically go back to the sweltering, unhygienic kitchen and show the cook what ingredients to make your food with. Your waiter is supposed to totally fuck up your order and bring you something not even on the menu.

You’re supposed to have to argue at the register that you did not order seven masala teas so there’s no way you’re paying for them. There aren’t supposed to be napkins or a bathroom, and if you’ve got things right, there should be disease-ridden mice darting around the dirt floor.

Not only was there a tray of napkins on my table, a bathroom down the hall, and no mice to speak of, my waiter understood my order to a T; he even gave a helpful suggestion. That was far too easy for this really to be India.

“Maybe the cook won’t wash his hands and I’ll get food poisoning,” I mutter to myself.

After fifteen minutes of spying on the Tibetans playing cards in the corner, I hear a bell “ding!” and out come my steaming momos.

“Tu-chuh-che!” I say to my waiter as he puts down my food, which, according to the guide book I was hiding under the table, means “thank you” in Tibetan.

“Welcome,” he says, turning around and walking back to the card game.

Trying not to stare after him (and wishing he’d said something back in Tibetan), I tuck in to my momos. Dipping one into the red chili sauce that came with them, I stuff one into my mouth. Boiling hot chicken juices burst in my closed mouth and I grunt with pain.

“Too hot to handle?” one Tibetan yells from behind his cards.

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I chuckle with him, but the wound has been opened. My pride reels in that plastic chair.

After I finish my momos, I get up to pay, thinking I’d try and find my authentic India somewhere else. As I walk to the register, a different Tibetan gets up from the card game to meet me.

“Sixty Rupees,” he says, leaning on the counter beside the register. I give him a hundred note, praying that he won’t have exact change and he’ll have to break up the poker game to get forty rupees, or at least give me two crumpled, torn, unusable twenty Rupee notes.

“You American?” he asks, swiftly handing me two crisp twenties.

“Yeah,” I had tried to look as un-American as I could, taking an unnecessarily long time to eat my momos (though I had to wait five more minutes for them to cool), not ordering a Coke, and not asking the Tibetans if they could serenely meditate for me while I snapped pictures on a disposable camera. “How could you tell?”

“Your accent,” said the Tibetan, “and the fact that Americans have to eat their food cold.

You know, my brother is American. He lives in Virginia. Can’t stand that Barack Obama.

Taxes and all. He voted for Mccain and Palin. That Palin chick is actually kind of hot, don’t you think?”

I stand stunned, blindsided by American politics in my dashed dreamland.

“I’m more of a Michelle Obama guy. She’s got a great body,” I say in numbed words, much less enthusiastic than I would have been had I said it to a frat-boy –blame it on being out of my element.

Walking through narrow alleyways and the chaotic Diwali celebrations back to my hotel isn’t nearly as surreal and incredible as it was when I first got out of the taxi, starry-eyed and full of muse. I even let one my crisp twenties peak out of my back pocket in hopes of getting pick-pocketed. A fast pursuit of a thief through dark doorways and seedy staircases could make for a memorable anecdote. But alas, I have all my rupees as I stroll into the hotel lobby.

In my bleak room, I stare at my composition notebook again, hoping something evocative and profound will appear. Though before dinner I was despondent, at least I had been romantic. Now, throwing my notes to the floor, I’m simply cynical. Here I am in Delhi on Diwali and it’s been a perfectly normal evening except for the constant explosions and the fact that I smoked too many cigarettes.

“India is perhaps the most human of all places on this earth.”

As a last resort, a final gasp for inspiration, my veritable ninth life of writing my Mystical Indian Story, I root around in my backpack and find my unread copy of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, which I’d bought at the Delhi airport in hopes of seeking an India-writer to mentor me with story. There, on the very first page of the introduction, my eyes fall on a passage as if the words had reached out and grabbed my power of sight: “Which one of all the thousand conflicting tongues, races, nationalities and peoples between Khaibar Pass and Ceylon do you mean? There is no such thing as the natives of India…”

Overcome with my unmet expectations –a place bereft of whining sitars, popping tablas and laughing, bearded gurus –the loss of My India –I decide not to write the Great Indian Account after all. What kind of reader could possibly enjoy something so completely ordinary?

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Storm Dream Samantha Guck

the wet sidewalks in this cooler morning give proof to the lightning of the night before as I lay heavy and warm pinned in the moment by my awakedness with the rotating fan pushing the hot air around the room and the blinds flickering from the breath of the open window witching, shifting and melting into each other with all the confusion of a convincing dream - was I dreaming when the light flashed at my eyelids each time I would endeavor to close them?

A rapid, silent pulse that I never could be sure was real and though the puddles in this morning seem to suggest that I was right in that flashing, lagging heat I never even once heard the sigh of rain.

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Sestinas are Weird Jayne Carlson

The assignment was to write a type of poem called a sestina.

Some say it’s just weird, while others like its predetermined form.

Some like to play with the words and try to make them sing.

But how on earth could you sing, let alone write, something so silly, it’s child’s play, really. This strange poem called a sestina is nothing but formfitting words and that just gets weird.

What a crazy stilted format, and the weird notion that a poem doesn’t have to sing, it just needs a solid form.

And so the question is, can you write a sestina?

Or would you rather play at finding some other game to play, a game that’s not so weird as writing a sestina.

Perhaps you’d rather sing or even just write or maybe sculpt a form, a form that doesn’t have to con-form to some silly word play.

Maybe you’d rather write a Sonnet, it’s not so weird, or a song that you could sing, anything but one of these God-forsaken sestinas.

I love the sestina, it’s got good form, it makes me want to sing and play, because it’s really weird and I really, really like to write.

So take a siesta before you write your sestina, so you have energy to play with this odd form. Its inventor surely must have been weird or maybe just liked to sing, or better yet, to write.

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MURPHY SQUARE WOULD LIKE TO THANK: All supporters of the student referendum All writers and artists who submitted their work.

Augsburg College English Department Augsburg College Art Department Printing Enterprises Inc. Stephen Geffre Kristy Johnson Glenna Lewis - Augsburg Fortress Our advisor, Cary Waterman Back Illustration: Global Community - Sergio Monterrubio, Digital Illustration (2010).

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